Quotes of the Day:
"There is no greater impediment to the advancement of knowledge than the ambiguity of words."
- Thomas Reid
"Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing."
- Benjamin Franklin
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
- Buckminster Fuller
1. Biden’s Gray-Zone Gaffe Highlights a Real Dilemma
2. THE PLIGHT OF THE GREEN BERET: Why Special Forces is still losing most of its junior leaders and its survivors are forced to contend with a cultural crisis.
3. Putin, Ukraine, and the Failure of Western Elites
4. Ukraine crisis a warning for Asian nations fearful of China's rise
5. The Day After Russia Attacks
6. Joint Statement on the January 11, 14, and 17 Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’s Ballistic Missile Launch
7. FDD | Congress Delivers Bipartisan Warning to Biden on Syria Policy
8. Invade Russia, Iran And North Korea — With Connectivity
9. Biden saves Iran from itself
10. A Dam in Syria Was on a ‘No-Strike’ List. The U.S. Bombed It Anyway.
11. Opinion | The Beijing Olympics has become an exercise in genocide denial
12. What foreign ambassadors really think about Biden’s first year
13. Totalitarian Paranoia Run Amok: Pandemics, Lockdowns And Martial Law – OpEd
1. Biden’s Gray-Zone Gaffe Highlights a Real Dilemma
Conclusion:
Telling the world that no such agreement exists was an unwise move by Biden, but nobody would suggest it’s news to Russia. The answer can only be for NATO member states and their partners to decide what’s going to constitute their threshold. If it’s not going to be an armed attack, including a serious cyber attack, what’s it going to be? Then they need to keep reminding the world what the new threshold is and the magnitude of the response it’s going to trigger. If they do so, it may just convince attack-minded countries that an attack will bring more cost than benefit. Deterrence begins long before the prospective punishment.
Biden’s Gray-Zone Gaffe Highlights a Real Dilemma
U.S. President Joe Biden answers questions during a news conference in the East Room of the White House on January 19, 2022. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Image
It’s high time for NATO and its member governments to define what kinds of aggression short of war require a unified response.
January 20, 2022 04:29 PM ET
Senior Fellow, AEI
This week, President Biden inadvertently highlighted a defender’s dilemma: no country or alliance has yet mustered an effective strategy for responding to gray-zone aggression, which can range from disinformation campaigns to weaponization of migrants to tools aggressors might yet think up. Yes, drawing attention to this dilemma was unnecessary—but its existence requires urgent attention.
It was one day short of the celebratory first anniversary of his presidency that Biden was asked yet again about a potential Russian attack on Ukraine. Ordinarily, politicians answer such questions with vague threats of serious repercussions; indeed, Biden has done so many times. This time, too, he vowed that Putin would pay a "serious and dear price" for invading Ukraine. Then he went on: "What you're going to see is that Russia will be held accountable if it invades and it depends on what it does. It's one thing if it's a minor incursion, and then we end up having to fight about what to do and not do etc."
Biden alone knows why he decided to lay bare NATO’s weakness in such eye-catching fashion, and White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki hurriedly sent out a statement to “clarify” the U.S. stance. If any Russian military forces move across the border to Ukraine, Psaki said, America and allies will respond swiftly and severely. She added: “The Russians have an extensive playbook of aggression short of military action, including cyberattacks and paramilitary tactics. And [Biden] affirmed today that those acts of Russian aggression will be met with a decisive, reciprocal, and united response.”
That’s not exactly what the president said, of course. On the contrary, he said that in cases of aggression below the threshold of armed conflict, NATO’s member states disagree about how to respond. Indeed, many of the individual governments of NATO member states would be internally divided on the matter.
To be sure, it may seem common sense that a “minor incursion”—featuring, say, a few people dressed as Ukrainian police officers who take possession of a police station in the border area—should somehow be countered. But by whom? Would it be a task for law enforcement? The Ukrainian armed forces? The U.S. military and other NATO forces? And if Ukraine and its international friends decided that such an activity warranted a military response, what about other activities below the threshold of armed conflict? Is moving a border just a tiny bit, what Georgians call borderization, a casus belli, or is the loss of a few meters of land simply an annoyance? China, meanwhile, can keep punishing countries it wishes to harm by surreptitiously suspending imports, and no military arsenal can frighten it into refraining from such outrageous behavior.
It would be ridiculous to punish economic coercion with military means, you say. If one decides, though, that some activities below the threshold of war warrant a military response, that involves setting a new threshold. In my book The Defender’s Dilemma, I propose that loss of life could be such a threshold; remember that cyber attacks on hospitals, for example, can claim lives. (In 2019, NATO added “serious cyber attacks” to its causes to invoke Article 5, but what constitutes a serious cyber attack? An attack on an assisted-living facility that claims the lives of 10 extremely elderly residents? 100? A knockout of a country’s grid?)
Today, though, no alternative threshold exists. Some NATO member states such as Latvia are developing partial total-defense models that prepare the public for troubles below the threshold of war. Were mysterious police officers to turn up in a remote Latvian location, it’s likely that high-schoolers recently trained in societal resilience would spot something unusual and report the coordinates to the government. But for unified NATO action to take place in response to gray-zone aggression, member states have to agree in advance on what constitutes the threshold that will trigger a response. They would then be able to communicate their agreement to the outside world so that Russia, China, and any other hostile-minded regimes would know to expect a coordinated response. Ideally, such deterrence messaging would change their cost-benefit calculus and they’d refrain from the aggression.
Telling the world that no such agreement exists was an unwise move by Biden, but nobody would suggest it’s news to Russia. The answer can only be for NATO member states and their partners to decide what’s going to constitute their threshold. If it’s not going to be an armed attack, including a serious cyber attack, what’s it going to be? Then they need to keep reminding the world what the new threshold is and the magnitude of the response it’s going to trigger. If they do so, it may just convince attack-minded countries that an attack will bring more cost than benefit. Deterrence begins long before the prospective punishment.
2. THE PLIGHT OF THE GREEN BERET: Why Special Forces is still losing most of its junior leaders and its survivors are forced to contend with a cultural crisis.
It breaks my heart to read and publish this essay but hopefully it will generate necessary reflection and discussion.
THE PLIGHT OF THE GREEN BERET: Why Special Forces is still losing most of its junior leaders and its survivors are forced to contend with a cultural crisis. | Small Wars Journal
Thu, 01/20/2022 - 9:06pm
THE PLIGHT OF THE GREEN BERET:
Why special forces is still losing most of its junior leaders and its survivors are forced to contend with a cultural crisis.
Disclaimer: This paper is meant to generate awareness and discussions across Special Operations as a call to action to a critical issue currently affecting the Special Operations community and culture. This is especially affecting Special Forces and can be tied to officer and leader management. I love the Regiment and want it to be successful as it is my home. There are many other issues in the Regiment, just like any other organization, but if we cannot get the leadership culture and environment right, changes will be less impactful and short lived. If you are a senior leader reading this, this paper is for you. If you are a junior NCO or an officer in SOF, this paper is for you. What it is not is an effort to write the perfect paper. The proof comes when deeply concerned leadership across the Regiment realize they cannot answer the question of why the culture is suffering or why officer and NCO retention is so low. This paper serves as a reflection of why we must push recruiting so hard because we cannot hold onto good people that are respected by their subordinates. The real proof comes when they ask their junior officers and NCOs if the issues brought up in this exposition are true and then make meaningful change.
Currently over 50% of our best and brightest Special Forces Captains are leaving the Army and the shadow of huge morale issues continues to haunt the Special Forces Regiment. Many factors are considered as to why: including intense deployment schedules, no deployment potential, stress on families, limited command opportunities once promoted, and the promise of a more lucrative civilian career. Each of those reasons have traditionally had merit, but a glaring deficiency underpinning this is a flawed system that manifests itself in how we select and promote Special Forces (SF) officers.
To become a Special Forces captain is a gamble. The qualification course to get there is one of the longest and most rigorous qualification courses that demands prospective officers to risk their entire careers in the dream of becoming a Green Beret. In the Army officer community, it is well-known that if an officer should fail in the course, they will likely not be successful by Human Resources Command (HRC) standards. Due to the tight promotion timeline for an Army officer, losing even a year in the Special Forces Qualification Course (SFQC) would place them at a distinct disadvantage amongst their peers. The officer will be extremely vulnerable by failing to have the evaluations needed to be competitive for the next grade as the officer loses that years’ worth of evaluations and would potentially need to spend additional time in another branch’s career course. Those few that do succeed and don the Beret, enter into the ranks of an elite Special Forces Regiment (Regiment). But all is not greener on the other side of the fence. A strange phenomenon is occurring at an ever-increasing rate. Over 50% of SF officers are getting out of the Regiment. Given the hardship, the risk, and defying the odds, what is compelling over half of SF officers to not just look for a way out of Special Forces, but the military as a whole? And why are enlisted Soldiers following suit? This is a question that is being asked at all levels of the Regiment as well as other Special Operations elements with a selection process.
As I observed many of my fellow Special Forces officers resign, the obvious question to me was, “Why?” What was so compelling that after just one or two years in the Regiment, just under half-way through a normal 20-year Army career, they would just quit it all? There is a large percentage of the officer population at this point in their careers that choose to get out for reasons which typically include personal and family reasons, they have been offered a better job with better benefits, or they recognize that promotion potential is low and make the decision to pursue other opportunities. My Company Commander, Battalion Commander and Group Commander have all asked the same question. However, when I engaged my fellow Captains to determine if the above were the possible reasons, it was apparent that was not the case. Additionally, when equipped with HRC data, it was even more evident that there is a more consistent factor amongst those choosing to leave the Regiment and military service.
After discussing this at great length, additional puzzling occurrences were discovered, including a Lieutenant Colonel who deferred taking Battalion Command. It turns out that it was not just Captains who were leaving the Regiment. Field grade officers, many of whom that have invested their lives and careers into the Regiment, were resigning their commission, retiring, or turning down key command positions. Majors were electing to take non-traditional career paths that would lead them back into the conventional Army which is likely to result in limited or no promotion potential in SF. Captains chose to go Warrant Officer or resign their commission rather than become a Major. Another concern also became evident as it was not officers at risk of non-promotion or choosing to leave the service for the typically stated reasons.
In the last two years, SF officers have seen a 90 percent promotion rate for those officers that participate in their respective board. During these two years, only one Most Qualified (MQ) evaluation out of their last 5 was necessary for those selected for promotion. With one of the highest promotion rates of any branch, why would any officer choose to retire or resign? In 2019, a SF HRC newsletter was released (Human Resource Command , 2019) which featured an article where more than half of the captains in the 09’, 10’, and 11’ year groups were interviewed. The data and comments contained within the article were disturbing, including a clear indictment of the Regiment. Of those 53% that responded to the survey, 47% disagreed with remaining on active duty citing “low interest in 18A MAJ jobs” as the number one reason cited, followed closely by a “frustration w/bureaucracy.” Additional individual comments that were highlighted included, “the majority of field grades above me do not impress me or inspire confidence, their risk aversion and careerism is not worthy of the SOF lineage. I do not want to be like them, and I would be embarrassed introducing them as my boss to my out-of-army friends.” “The lack of talent management in the regiment is criminal and I believe it’s driving out our best and brightest. I have seen multiple peers ripped from their teams with zero warning and sent to a school or battalion that they never wanted to go to.” “Spoken values do not match command implemented values.” (Human Resource Command , 2019, p. 7)
One of the more intrinsic questions was “is the SF Regiment retaining your highest-quality peers for future service as SF battalion commanders and beyond?” Surprisingly, not one single respondent answered, “absolutely yes”, a mere 7% answered “probably yes”, followed by 9% that did not comment at all and 84% answered either “no” or “absolutely no” (Human Resource Command , 2019, p. 11). I was shocked that HRC published these findings, but it gave me hope that we as a community could do the honest, hard work to look introspectively and identify issues so we could address them.
While I considered whether to stay in as a YG 12 Captain going into my RA ACC Major Promotion Selection Board, I inquired with numerous peers as to why they were electing to forego the promotion board. As I heard their stories, I also talked with Officers in Civil Affairs, Psychological Operations, and basic branches in the regular Army. They all provided consistent and similar answers. What it boiled down to was a perception that the promotion system is severely flawed, in essence, “Ducks pick ducks.” Commanders have shown a proclivity to pick and promote people like themselves. In the military, this produces an effect where officers of a certain background or type will naturally draw commonality with others of similar experiences and philosophies, resulting in their selection over other more qualified candidates. That is how a culture is shaped. Over time, a certain type of officer dominates the command structure, skewing leadership in that direction, and losing people that do not fit into that particular mold, regardless of actual skills and abilities. A 2018 Rand study on selection of Army General Officers (GOs) (Rand Corporation, 2018) found there was an overwhelming sensitivity to pick prospective GOs that had the same background as the GOs making the selections. This same practice is commonplace at all levels of the Army. While picking prospective leaders like existing leaders is not necessarily a bad thing, in SF, a no fail environment, the intensely competitive and political environment leads to what is often referred to as a “knife fight.” Those officers who desire promotion are then often faced with a difficult decision: continue in a system they know is flawed or find a way out. Many have remained in the system, planning to gain rank to make fundamental changes, but over time, the inertia of the system leads them into the quagmire, leading them to become like those officers they had despised. The current environment is highly competitive and political where few will get the chance to lead a company or later, a battalion command. MAJs only get 1 year to prove their mettle and continue on the CSL, with maybe 3-4 coming back as BCs. This perpetuates the zero-defect mentality. One misstep or mistake that they cannot control can quickly sideline 13 years of service with little opportunity to fight back. With this at the forefront of most MAJs minds, it can affect their command climate and willingness to take any risk and reduce support to their team leaders.
Sadly, this system leads to company and battalion command teams that strip away authority and the ability of Captains and Majors to accomplish everyday tasks. A Special Forces Operational Detachment Alpha (SFOD-A) commander on deployment as a Ground Force Commander, leading diverse multi-national elements in combat, has the authority to direct any asset or service member that is in the sky or on the ground with dozens of lives on the line. It is not even questioned. However, in garrison, these same leaders have reduced or no command authority. They cannot approve a leave form, perform Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) duties, command-refer a team member in need, move someone off the team when they are unsuitable, or sign a risk assessment for a range. Yet, Regular Army Captains have all of those authorities. Does that make any sense? SF Captains have all the responsibility and accountability in sensitive environments that is beyond that of their regular Army counterparts but none of the authority. In business circles, that is a well-known recipe for a toxic culture that is destined to ultimately fail. Soldiers who worked so hard to become Green Berets are made cogs in a wheel, where their intelligence, resourcefulness, discipline, and persistence is constantly stifled by a command structure of micro-management and risk aversion.
This current system also leads to underhanded actions including milking connections, spreading unfounded rumors about other leaders, and being a “yes man.” Officers with the courage to say “No” are too often left behind. The “Yes men” incorrectly perceived as team players are rewarded, while the resourceful and highly functional leaders who hold themselves, their troops, and their leaders accountable and say “no” are punished. This is reinforced by survivorship bias, a logical error that focuses its attention on the people that made it through the system, overlooking those that did not. The survivors in SF know that the system is flawed but because they made it, it becomes the model of success to be followed and mimicked by all who want to continue in this Regiment. For many officers and enlisted, this is their life, who they are, and how they feed their families. Whether they are successful or survivors, they have sacrificed much of their youth, health, time with their family, and many have had to fight in a system that they could not change by themselves. What Majors are asked to do is hellish and even if they aspire to take care of their Soldiers, their hands are tied. I was told by a Company Commander, part of the “In-Crowd” and a “duck,” that to be successful in SF you needed three things: 1) 10% Skill, 2) 39% Networking, and 3) 51% Luck/timing. Taking care of ones’ team was not even mentioned. No unit can truly succeed if leadership does not engage with Soldiers by a lack of choice or a lack of saying “no” and making time for that engagement. In any human endeavor, employee engagement is the key to success. That commander was not a “bad” person, simply a man who learned to do what the current system asked of him. That commander needed to be a “yes man” and the result was that taking good care of his Soldiers’ family time and personal needs was less of a priority as he was squarely focused on everything else the higher echelon demanded.
There is also another factor. Name plate management. Certain officers, upon showing up to group and prior to serving a day on a team, are already being groomed. They have a different standard than other lesser-known officers and senior raters and raters have their favorites whether by their choice or influenced by someone above them. They spend more time with them, providing mentorship and guidance, while minimal time is spent with lesser favored officers. Too often, the only interaction a senior rater might have with a lesser-known team leader during a whole year is just one-hour watching a team’s pre-mission training full mission profile, after which he will then decide that officer’s future with an evaluation report. There is no objective, comprehensive evaluation of an officer’s capability or potential, it ends up too often being a popularity contest, and selecting the next “duck.” Research shows that the best goal is “Mastery” or capability of the skill. That becomes a “Pass-Fail” assessment. You are either capable, or not. In mastery, everyone can win, and helping each other be successful helps everyone. It encourages genuine team cohesiveness and support. In SF, the criteria are more akin to how good of a “duck” one can be or hoping other teams do worse so yours can look better. That is not unique to the military, but human nature. But it alienates the best and brightest, where it feels like the “ass kissers” and “politicians” get the promotions, and the truly skilled and capable officers who spend time with their team, cultivating esprit-de-corps and expertise, get left out.
Many officers in my cohort who saw that they were not particularly political or did not want to pick up a knife for the fight, could not tolerate being that type of officer to become “successful.” They chose to leave the service rather than compromising their values and morals to get ahead. Officers that take care of their troops, recognizing them as their most valuable resource, feel that they do not have a home in the Regiment. Officers and Non-Commissioned Officers have seen too many “successful” leaders treat their human resources like cogs in a wheel, ignoring climate surveys and feedback from their troops. What message does it send when a commander who obviously does not care for his troops, is called out in climate surveys, and nothing happens. Or worse, he is promoted and will come back to serve as your company or battalion commander. What an effective way to create resentment and unmotivated performance at all levels of the organization. Watching incompetent leaders “fail up” guts morale.
Empathy. Few people wake up each morning wanting to be a leader that no one respects or disregards taking care of his/her people. Having accurate empathy for one’s people is key to functional relationships but is not compatible with our current system. I have heard some leaders stress that some “evil” may have to be done to get to a position where you can change the culture. However, the inertia of going along with the dysfunctional values of the current system most always wins out, with the officer rationalizing why s/he let go of their original values. We become like who we associate with. The group values are much stronger influencers than one individuals. Colin Powell also discussed this phenomenon, saying that one of his greatest frustrations was realizing the authority to change things and make them better always resided at the next higher level. Those that stay will survive, perpetuate the system, and it will continue as all bureaucracies do. You must change the underlying system if you want to change the current personnel and cultural issues in the Regiment.
If the Regiment can admit it has an issue, the next question is how we fix the problem. Research is clear that employees that feel appreciated, respected, and valued enjoy their jobs, are inventive, resourceful, loyal, competent, and go above and beyond. All the “feel good” moves of mandatory fun, meaningless awards, pay raises, and other token “rewards” have little real value, and are usually held in contempt as superficial and phony ways to pretend to care about one’s troops. They may look good on paper but are actually destructive. These transparent, superficial actions do not build the relationships so critical to high performing teams. The key is building genuine relationships within SF teams, companies, battalions, groups, and the Regiment. Keys to solid relationships are things like true empathy, genuineness, and unconditional positive regard. This is shown by firm, fair, consistent, and caring interpersonal actions and leadership. These are the skills and qualities that need to be assessed, tested and evaluated. A focus on continued development of leaders with psychologists and leadership professional development is critical and should be a part of training as an on-going requirement and added to our shoot-move-communicate-first aide-PT core skills. Add “leads” in front of those core skills and develop the Mission Essential Skills Task list to implement it. Learning MDMP or how to work in the JIIM environment does not directly teach you how to evaluate and test your leadership or develop others as a deliberate skill set. An ongoing system of objective external evaluation is also necessary to evaluate mastery and cure some of the nepotism. In Ranger Regiment, the Ranger Assessment and Selection Program continues to evaluate the individual potential and leadership skills of both officers and NCOs as they progress in rank ensuring they are prepared to assume the next higher level of responsibility. This should be implemented into SF to keep us all honest and prepared. Leadership should also consider giving ODA commanders authority to actually manage their teams like their peers in the military. Micro-management that destroys ingenuity and resourcefulness needs to be stifled. Leadership works best by selecting quality people, then helping them succeed. External evaluations, mastery, and objective performance needs to be valued and captured in OERs. Truly effective leaders are servants to their people, rewarding their skills and talent. I would like to highlight the current efforts of HRC: the deferment option allows captains the opportunity to move back a year which helps give them more time on detachments and opportunities for evaluations before going into their primary zone for their Major PSB. They have started pilot programs which allow SOF officers to go to other positions in the force or VTIP to other branches. Other efforts like merit-based promotion IAW Title 10 U.S.C. Section 616(g) (3) are based on performance and not time in grade to push those chosen officers up on the promotion list. Another, the Battalion Commanders Assessment Program promises to select only those who are ready to lead a battalion. These are great initiatives but will only address a small percentage of issues and not make cultural change. None of them address the primary issue of a system that allows only a certain type of officer and leader to survive in the Regiment.
When you have dedicated your life to the Regiment and the military, it can be hard to see its flaws for what they are. The current culture and system will continue until a conscious, deliberate effort is made to empower junior leaders, have meaningful engagements, and start to value the contributions and mastery of more than just a few leaders who fought hard and sacrificed much to survive. If we all want the Regiment to succeed and truly be an organization of our finest men and women to confront the enemies of our great Nation, we owe it to ourselves to understand and confront our flaws. This problem will require leadership at all levels to confront the system they fought to succeed in. The stakes are high and if we do not get our culture and systems right, we will continue to lose its best and brightest.
This content has been reviewed by the Special Forces Public Affairs Office but does not represent the view of the Special Forces Regiment, the U.S. Army, or the Department of Defense. The views expressed are those of this author and on behalf of numerous concerned officers and NCOs.
References
Human Resource Command . (2019). Branch Update. Human Resources Command Special Forces, 12.
Rand Corporation. (2018). Raising the Flag. Santa Monica, CA: Rand Corporation.
About the Author(s)
CPT Paul Schneider, a Special Forces Commander with over 10 years of service with multiple deployments in combat, Southern Command, and Pacific Command.
3. Putin, Ukraine, and the Failure of Western Elites
Excerpts:
Moreover, what does short-term economic pain matter when compared to the benefits of bringing Kyiv to heel with military force? For Putin, humiliating Ukraine with a “shock and awe” offensive would reduce Kyiv to Moscow’s vassal, thereby showing NATO to be impotent, while bringing down the curtains on American global hegemony. This would halt any further NATO expansion while showing Russia to still be a great power demanding respect, plus reuniting historic Rus for Holy Orthodoxy, thereby guaranteeing that Putin someday will be remembered by the Russian Orthodox Church forever as Saint Vladimir the Great.
(If you think I’m joking here, I’m not – and the less we ponder the complete collapse of American global power if any Russian attack on Ukraine happens to coincide with a Chinese move on Taiwan, or even an Iranian effort to shut the Strait of Hormuz, perhaps the better.)
Vladimir Putin has placed himself in a corner by making diplomatic demands of NATO that the Alliance cannot deliver, while publicly requiring a pro-Russian solution to the Ukraine crisis. The military option is the only one the Kremlin has left if it feels it must triumph here, unconditionally. The time for decision is imminent. Putin cannot keep his best military units deployed in the field, in tents in the middle of winter, indefinitely, while the frozen ground of Ukraine in February is better for military operations than the mud of April. If major war is coming to Ukraine again, as seems increasingly likely, it will come soon.
Joe Biden and NATO have placed themselves in a corner over Ukraine too, one of their own making. The happy assumptions of the 1990s are now a distant memory. History indeed did not end, and Putin is revealing many sunny WEIRD beliefs to be ill-fitted to current geopolitical realities. Putin’s broader aim with the Ukraine crisis isn’t about Kyiv, it’s about showing NATO’s impotence while revealing America’s paralysis and decadence. The strongman in the Kremlin wants to end the post-Cold War era on terms more favorable to Russia than the last three decades have been. No matter what happens next, Vladimir Putin is in the driver’s seat with the Ukraine crisis. Kyiv, Washington, and Brussels are responding to Moscow’s moves. Putin’s next one may well determine the fate of Europe and beyond for decades to come.
(As an aside I wonder why all the pundits leave out north Korea as a spoiler especially when something takes place in Ukraine or Taiwan? - yes my bias is showing)
Putin, Ukraine, and the Failure of Western Elites
Our foreign policy elites are mystified and unsure how to respond as Vladimir Putin is about to do what he has talked about doing for years
Europe is approaching its greatest crisis since the end of the Cold War three decades ago. Russian President Vladimir Putin has moved a large portion of his military to the borders of Ukraine and appears to be almost ready to unleash a major, multi-axis attack on his neighbor. According to Ukrainian intelligence, something like 130,000 Russian troops have marshalled on their country’s frontiers, ready to strike. More than 60 Russian Battalion Tactical Groups are deployed on or near Ukraine’s borders, in the south, east, and now the north.
The appearance of several Russian BTGs in Belarus, some arriving from the Eastern Military District (i.e. Siberia), ostensibly for joint exercises with Belarusian forces, has particularly unnerved Western observers, since any attack into Ukraine from the north would likely result in the fall of the capital Kyiv to the Russians rather quickly. In military terms, the Ukrainians are outmatched by Putin’s forces. In the event of war, Russia would dominate Ukrainian airspace while the Russian Navy would control access to Ukraine’s Black Sea coast. In terms of ground combat, despite progress in recent years, Ukraine’s brigades remain broadly outclassed by the Russians, and no number of last-minute arms shipments by NATO can change the fundamental equation here. While Putin would be foolish to get bogged down in any protracted campaign in Ukraine, with the prospect of urban combat and guerrilla-type resistance, any short-term “shock and awe” offensive by the Russian military seems likely to enjoy success.
The Kremlin’s political rhetoric has matched its aggressive military moves. Moscow has rudely brushed away NATO efforts to reach a compromise on Ukraine, while last week a top Russian diplomat dismissed negotiations with the brusque comment, “If we don't hear a constructive response to our proposals within a reasonable time frame and an aggressive line of behavior towards Russia continues, we will be forced to draw appropriate conclusions and take all necessary measures to ensure strategic balance and eliminate unacceptable threats to our national security,” adding ominously: “Russia is a peace-loving country. But we do not need peace at any cost. The need to obtain these legally formalized security guarantees for us is unconditional.”
Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov sounded similar when he bluntly stated, “We have run out of patience,” meaning that NATO won’t agree to Moscow’s demands that the Alliance withdraw its offer of membership to Ukraine while granting the Kremlin a veto on NATO military deployments anywhere near Russia. The former point might be possible, at least in theory, given the painful reality that NATO never really meant for Kyiv and Tbilisi to join the Alliance, yet NATO will never give Moscow a say in what it does with its own military forces. Diplomatic possibilities are, if not entirely exhausted, nearly so. A venerable Kremlin joke has it that “Those who do not want to listen to Lavrov will have to deal with Shoigu,” the latter being Russia’s defense minister, which doesn’t sound very amusing to Ukraine right now.
Hence yesterday’s admission by the Biden White House that the Ukraine crisis represents an “extremely dangerous situation” where “We believe we're now at a stage where Russia could at any point launch an attack on Ukraine,” in the words of press secretary Jen Psaki. The U.S. Intelligence Community assesses that the Kremlin may launch major combat operations against Ukraine at any time, perhaps employing a “false flag” attack on Russian forces as casus belli, a prospect which is unsurprising to anyone acquainted with recent history. In 1999, when Putin was transitioning from heading the Federal Security Service, the powerful FSB, to running the Kremlin, Chechen jihadists attacked Russia, led by a famous fighter who happened to be an agent of Russian military intelligence or GRU, while shadowy terrorists blew up several apartment buildings around Moscow, killing more than 300 civilians – attacks which the FSB, or elements thereof, seemed to have a hand in. These bloody activities gave Putin an excuse to restart the Chechen war, which Russia eventually won, so the notion that similar dirty tricks might be employed against Ukraine hardly seems far-fetched.
The response of Western foreign policy elites to the Ukraine crisis has been underwhelming, to be charitable. Confronted by the prospect of renewed Russian aggression against Ukraine, Western security mavens seem to have no idea what to do. Pleading with Moscow to be reasonable, buttressed by the usual diplomatic junkets, sharing Spotify playlists, gently explaining to the Kremlin how unreasonable their demands are…none of it has worked. Moscow hasn’t backed down an inch, indeed Russian rhetoric towards NATO has only grown more belligerent the longer Western supplications have continued.
A CNN analyst gave the game away yesterday by stating, “‘I really don't know where this all came from,’ is a phrase I have heard Western officials sigh multiple times over the past months” regarding the Moscow-manufactured Ukraine crisis.
How is that possible? Putin waged a hot war of aggression against Ukraine in 2014-15, starting with Russia’s theft of Crimea by GRU’s Little Green Men, followed by the seizure of a good-sized chunk of Ukraine’s southeast by the Russian military. That conflict has ever entirely faded out, and Moscow’s de facto holding on to pieces of Ukraine means that country will never be allowed to enter NATO. Given the recent past, and the not-entirely-frozen conflict in Donetsk and Luhansk, how on earth can anybody be surprised that Putin might attack Ukraine again?
Moreover, the Kremlin strongman has been admirably forthright about his aims regarding Ukraine. For years, Putin’s public statements have indicated that he does not consider Russia’s neighbor to be a bona fide country, rather an extension of Russia, no more than a “region,” while his comments last summer, including a detailed pseudo-historical tract complete with Orthodox mysticism expounding Putin’s view that Russia and Ukraine are inextricably linked, left no doubt to anyone paying attention that the Kremlin was prepared to act by any means necessary to keep Kyiv far away from NATO and the West.
The signs have been there 15 years, flashing brightly. Putin’s anger at NATO and especially the United States over Alliance expansion into the post-Soviet space burst into the public domain at the Munich Security Conference in early 2007 where the Russian leader unleashed a broadside aimed at the West. Putin’s fiery speech attacked NATO expansion, accusing the Alliance of putting “its frontline forces on our borders,” criticizing America’s “unipolar” dominance over the world, while condemning Washington’s “almost uncontained hyper use of force in international relations.”
Disappointed Western experts noted that Putin sounded rather angry, while he rejected American global hegemony, also considering NATO expansion to be a direct threat to Russia. Two months later, “somebody” shut out the lights in Tallinn with a massive cyberattack on Estonia, which happened to coincide with pro-Russian riots there. The next year, Putin unleashed a brief, painful war on Georgia which cemented de facto Kremlin occupation of one-fifth of Georgian territory, thus ensuring that Tbilisi cannot enter NATO. The George W. Bush administration, mired in losing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, paid insufficient attention to Moscow’s aggression. Western experts acted shocked by Putin’s brazen behavior then moved on to more pressing matters.
A rising tide of Kremlin anger against the West was impossible to miss in Moscow’s conduct and rhetoric unless you wanted to. During the 2012 U.S. presidential race, Republican nominee Mitt Romney was mocked by President Barack Obama for suggesting that Russia represented America’s “biggest geopolitical threat.” Hip Obama castigated the square Romney with the acidic quip, “the 1980s are now calling for their foreign policy back, because the Cold War’s been over for 20 years.”
In September 2013, Putin made his feelings towards the West transparent in his speech to the Valdai Club in Moscow, including the reminder, “Russia’s sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity are unconditional. These are red lines no one is allowed to cross,” while casting Russia’s rising conflict with the West in spiritual as much as political terms. Putin portrayed himself and his regime as conservatives trying to protect Russia from the West’s progressive cultural pollution. As he stated:
Another serious challenge to Russia's identity is linked to events taking place in the world. Here there are both foreign policy and moral aspects. We can see how many of the Euro-Atlantic countries are actually rejecting their roots, including the Christian values that constitute the basis of Western civilization. They are denying moral principles and all traditional identities: national, cultural, religious and even sexual. They are implementing policies that equate large families with same-sex partnerships, belief in God with the belief in Satan.
Putin’s describing the postmodern West as the enemies of God, in league with the Devil, got less attention abroad than it merited, no doubt in part because Western elites are highly secular and feel uncomfortable discussing religious matters of any kind. Western experts, however, could not ignore it when, at virtually the same time as Putin’s unleashed his Valdai Club speech, Obama abandoned his own “red line” in Syria, offering a needless gift to Moscow. It’s never a good idea to show weakness towards a career Chekist, and the Kremlin took Obama’s move as a green light elsewhere, as I predicted at the time, with a colleague. Just a few months later, Putin unleashed his aggressive war against Ukraine, of which the current crisis is merely an extension. Again, Western experts acted shocked and disappointed by such brazen Russian smash-and-grab behavior.
Why on earth such “experts” are surprised, in 2022, after a decade-and a-half of Putin’s angry rhetoric aimed at the West, followed by his repeated acts of aggression against Russia’s neighbors, constitutes an important question. Answering it is relatively simple if you possess the fortitude to face depressing answers.
The painful truth is that the foreign policy mavens who are driving American diplomacy right now are largely the same cast of characters who failed to stop (or even understand) Putin during the two terms of the Obama administration. These are all book-smart people with impressive degrees on the wall, yet who understand little about how the world really works. They came of age during the post-Cold War period of unchallenged American hegemony, when foreign policy gurus assured them that “soft power” was the wave of the future and major wars were no more. Their European equivalents are, if anything, even less reality-based, as witnessed by the unilateral disarmament of most of European NATO since the 1990s. At the Cold War’s end, the West German Army possessed a dozen active divisions with 36 brigades and some 50 tank battalions; today the Bundeswehr has three divisions (on paper) with 7.5 brigades and six tank battalions (until recently, just four). Who needs tanks when the toughest issue you ever expect to confront is tidying up agricultural subsidies in Brussels?
To such elites, all of whom fall on the spectrum of Western Educated Industrialized Rich and Democratic, WEIRD for short, Putin represents an atavism whose motivations they cannot understand. The Kremlin strongman adheres to a distinctly throwback view of international relations where the use of force is normal, and countries protect their national interests unapologetically, with all the instruments of national power. Putin’s wholehearted embrace of religiously-infused nationalism, which boasts a venerable history in Russia, leaves WEIRDs befuddled yet has real resonance among average Russians. Western doubts that the former KGB man has “a personal relationship with Jesus Christ” miss the point, but then the West has never understood Russian Orthodoxy very well. No matter what Putin really believes, his public embrace of religiously-grounded national conservatism provides his regime with an ideological anchor, one which happens to view Ukraine’s subservience to Russia as a spiritual as well as geostrategic necessity.
President Joe Biden and other Western leaders have assured the Kremlin that, while NATO will not fight for Ukraine, since it’s not an Alliance member, any renewed Russian aggression there will be met with severe economic sanctions on Moscow, a prospect that cannot be edifying for Putin and his oligarch allies. Experts have noticed that Russians are dissatisfied with the state of the underperforming Russian economy already, while there is no popular groundswell of support for waging war on Ukraine. Let it be noted that there were no popular calls for recent Russian military adventures – Georgia, Ukraine, Syria – yet that proved no break on Putin’s actions.
Moreover, what does short-term economic pain matter when compared to the benefits of bringing Kyiv to heel with military force? For Putin, humiliating Ukraine with a “shock and awe” offensive would reduce Kyiv to Moscow’s vassal, thereby showing NATO to be impotent, while bringing down the curtains on American global hegemony. This would halt any further NATO expansion while showing Russia to still be a great power demanding respect, plus reuniting historic Rus for Holy Orthodoxy, thereby guaranteeing that Putin someday will be remembered by the Russian Orthodox Church forever as Saint Vladimir the Great.
(If you think I’m joking here, I’m not – and the less we ponder the complete collapse of American global power if any Russian attack on Ukraine happens to coincide with a Chinese move on Taiwan, or even an Iranian effort to shut the Strait of Hormuz, perhaps the better.)
Vladimir Putin has placed himself in a corner by making diplomatic demands of NATO that the Alliance cannot deliver, while publicly requiring a pro-Russian solution to the Ukraine crisis. The military option is the only one the Kremlin has left if it feels it must triumph here, unconditionally. The time for decision is imminent. Putin cannot keep his best military units deployed in the field, in tents in the middle of winter, indefinitely, while the frozen ground of Ukraine in February is better for military operations than the mud of April. If major war is coming to Ukraine again, as seems increasingly likely, it will come soon.
Joe Biden and NATO have placed themselves in a corner over Ukraine too, one of their own making. The happy assumptions of the 1990s are now a distant memory. History indeed did not end, and Putin is revealing many sunny WEIRD beliefs to be ill-fitted to current geopolitical realities. Putin’s broader aim with the Ukraine crisis isn’t about Kyiv, it’s about showing NATO’s impotence while revealing America’s paralysis and decadence. The strongman in the Kremlin wants to end the post-Cold War era on terms more favorable to Russia than the last three decades have been. No matter what happens next, Vladimir Putin is in the driver’s seat with the Ukraine crisis. Kyiv, Washington, and Brussels are responding to Moscow’s moves. Putin’s next one may well determine the fate of Europe and beyond for decades to come.
4. Ukraine crisis a warning for Asian nations fearful of China's rise
Strategic reassurance and strategic resolve. Can we demonstrate it.The author thinks we may not.
Excerpts:
And so, if Asian countries want to avoid a Ukrainian future in which they fall into the trap of becoming pawns in the emerging Sino-U.S. great game, two things need to happen.
First, they need to strengthen their security relationships with their neighbors, who are far more likely to be concerned by the region's changing geopolitics than more remote partners. The recently announced security cooperation agreement between Japan and Australia is a first step in this process, but there remains an urgent need for a regional collective defense organization.
Second, they must bolster their military capabilities. For all the noise about increasing defense budgets, the reality is that too many Asian countries underinvest in their militaries. This, in turn, increases their reliance on distant and less reliable powers. But a strong military is the basis for all deterrence and countries without such capabilities are playing a very dangerous game -- one which they are likely to lose.
Ukraine crisis a warning for Asian nations fearful of China's rise
The West may not be the reliable military partner that many hope
William Bratton
January 13, 2022 17:00 JST
William Bratton is author of "China's Rise, Asia's Decline." He was previously head of equity research, Asia-Pacific, at HSBC.
Recent years have provided numerous examples of the contracting limits of the West's power and influence. But the current tensions between Russia and Ukraine represent the biggest test of how Western countries will respond to attempts to roll back their influence by revanchist states.
It is not just that these events are unfolding on Europe's doorstep, nor that Ukraine is a nascent democracy being threatened by an authoritarian neighbor -- something that Western countries have committed to preventing. But more importantly, how the situation develops will have implications for Asian countries looking to the West for support against a more assertive China. And so far, the omens do not look at all promising.
The European response to the current tensions, for example, has been ineffectual. This reflects the continent's reliance on Russian gas as well as prolonged underinvestment in its militaries. Few European countries have the muscle to contribute to Ukraine's defense and those that do, such as Britain and France, do not have the appetite.
European countries are, however, not alone in shying away from a confrontation with Russia or contributing to a defensive strategy of denial. It is now clear that the U.S. is reluctant to do anything more than threaten "severe" sanctions against Russia should it further breach Ukraine's territorial integrity.
This emphasis on nonmilitary deterrence is in line with the more isolationist framework adopted by Biden's administration after the Afghanistan debacle. High-cost and high-risk military operations are only to be used when necessary to protect the U.S.'s vital interests. Large-scale interventions to remake distant countries, enforce international law or protect nascent democracies such as Ukraine against authoritarian aggressive states, are now part of history rather than a component of the future.
But this emphasis on economic sanctions and international condemnation to control aggressive states is debatable at best and lazy at worst. They may be low-cost tools, but they are generally ineffective at securing desired outcomes. Persistent Russian irredentism is proof of this; it is still alive and kicking despite the sanctions imposed after its 2008 war with Georgia and its 2014 annexation of Crimea.
It is entirely possible, of course, that Russia is bluffing, or that a compromise will emerge. But the relief will be temporary. Russia's desire to be seen as an important power makes it sensitive to any threats to its actual or perceived sphere of influence, as currently being demonstrated in Kazakhstan. The Ukrainian situation, therefore, is not going to disappear. And when it escalates, Ukraine will find itself fighting alone with no direct Western support.
All this has implications for Asia. First, there is a growing disconnect between Western rhetoric, relative capabilities and geopolitical realities. We are now in a world of Orwellian doublespeak where what is said is not what is happening nor what will be done. Robustly defending Ukraine, for example, apparently means sitting down with the aggressor to discuss its wants and seek a compromise rather than trying to actively deny Russian objectives.
Some will argue that talking is always preferable, especially with a nuclear-armed and militarily capable Russia. But this argument is equally applicable to China. Furthermore, despite all the rhetoric, it is impossible to escape the simple conclusion that Ukraine fails to tick the "vital" box for the U.S. or Europe, and that they are simply not that invested in its future.
Extended to Asia, while Taiwan's technological prowess may be fundamental to U.S. national security, at least for the time being, relatively minor Asian countries such as the Philippines are right to question whether Western countries would be willing to incur losses to protect their territorial integrity.
Second, the West's preferred foreign policy tool, economic sanctions, is being undermined by the shifting global economy. Its use is predicated on an aging and almost imperial view of the world underpinned by Western, or American, economic hegemony. But as this hegemony is eroded, as it will be with China's rise, so will the effectiveness of economic sanctions.
We have already seen examples where the West's attempts to exert economic leverage have been negated by Chinese largesse. But the bigger risk is that the continued reliance on sanctions as a foreign policy tool will force countries and corporations to start picking sides. This could actually diminish the West's relative influence, especially in Asia, given China's far greater economic importance.
The last implication for Asia is the realization that Western countries may not be the reliable military partners that many in Asia hope.
Even if the Ukrainian situation is defused, it is abundantly clear that the West had no appetite to use its military capabilities to deter Russian aggression. As such, the notion that Western powers will always seek to defend their ideals is fraudulent. They are instead driven by naked self-interest and perceived risk, especially when dealing with a peer rival. Their commitment to Asian partners should, therefore, never be viewed as permanent but will always be subject to the vagaries of domestic politics.
And so, if Asian countries want to avoid a Ukrainian future in which they fall into the trap of becoming pawns in the emerging Sino-U.S. great game, two things need to happen.
First, they need to strengthen their security relationships with their neighbors, who are far more likely to be concerned by the region's changing geopolitics than more remote partners. The recently announced security cooperation agreement between Japan and Australia is a first step in this process, but there remains an urgent need for a regional collective defense organization.
Second, they must bolster their military capabilities. For all the noise about increasing defense budgets, the reality is that too many Asian countries underinvest in their militaries. This, in turn, increases their reliance on distant and less reliable powers. But a strong military is the basis for all deterrence and countries without such capabilities are playing a very dangerous game -- one which they are likely to lose.
5. The Day After Russia Attacks
Another ominous warning.
Excerpts:
The world is on the brink of the largest military offensive in Europe since World War II. Considering the existing interests of the major political stakeholders, the United States, Ukraine, and Russia are unlikely to significantly alter their current approaches to the situation. Washington has no desire to employ hard power to deter Russia, and it will not back down on principles or values that it has espoused for decades. In Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelensky’s standing is already precarious given his declining approval ratings, his failure to implement a bilateral plan for de-escalation with Russia, middling faith in his ability to lead during a time of war, his focus on prosecuting former President Petro Poroshenko on suspicion of treason, a roiling dispute with the oligarch Rinat Akhmetov, and his downplaying of the current Russian threat. For Zelensky, capitulation to Russia would be tantamount to political suicide. And even if Washington or Kyiv did change its stance, there is still no guarantee that Moscow would be satisfied and de-escalate.
The moment a war starts, the geopolitical landscape will become significantly more challenging for U.S. national security. Washington should assume the worst and plan accordingly, leveraging all elements of its power to protect U.S. interests. The Biden administration must maintain a delicate balance: avoiding a one-on-one military confrontation with Russia while punishing Russia for creating this harsh new reality. Right now, no task is more important.
The Day After Russia Attacks
What War in Ukraine Would Look Like—and How America Should Respond
January 21, 2022
Foreign Affairs · by Alexander Vindman and Dominic Cruz Bustillos · January 21, 2022
Despite a flurry of meetings in recent weeks, the United States, NATO, Ukraine, and Russia have not moved any closer to a diplomatic solution or a reduction of tensions on the Ukrainian-Russian border. Although Russia has not completely abandoned diplomatic pretenses, the chasm between Russian and Western expectations has been laid bare. Russian officials have made clear that they are not interested in proposals focused solely on strategic stability or on military exercises, or even on a moratorium on NATO membership for Ukraine. Russian President Vladimir Putin seeks nothing short of the complete dismantling of Europe’s post–Cold War security architecture and a rollback of fundamental international agreements governing states’ rights to self-determination—an outcome the United States and its partners and allies will never accept.
Meanwhile, despite assurances that Russia has no plans to “invade” Ukraine—the Russian military has been occupying Ukraine’s territory and fighting a war on Ukrainian soil since 2014—the military buildup along the Ukrainian-Russian border has continued unabated. Most recently, military equipment from Russia’s Eastern Military District has been moving westward while attack and transport helicopters as well as support units have been moving into place for a full-scale offensive. Russia also justified a military buildup north of Ukraine by announcing that it will stage joint military exercises with Belarus that will run through February 20. Russian forces are already being concentrated near the southern and southeastern borders with Ukraine. Additional steps remain before an operation will commence, but the live-fire drills and exercises that are currently taking place and the arrival of logistics units are indicative of a force preparing for action.
Earlier this week, U.S. President Joe Biden predicted that Putin would ultimately decide on some form of invasion or incursion. “Do I think he’ll test the West, test the United States and NATO, as significantly as he can? Yes, I think he will,” the president said at a press conference. “My guess is he will move in,” Biden added.
A major military conflict in Ukraine would be a catastrophe. It is an outcome that no one should crave. But it is now a likelihood for which the United States must prepare.
WHAT HAPPENS NOW?
Presuming that diplomacy fails, there are three scenarios that could play out. Which one comes to pass will depend in large part on how Putin decides he can best achieve his ultimate goals: crippling Ukrainian military capabilities, sowing turmoil in the Ukrainian government, and, ultimately, turning Ukraine into a failed state—an outcome that Putin seeks because it would bring an end to the threat of Ukraine as an intractable adversary and increasingly serious security challenge. Putin loathes the prospect of a thriving and prosperous democratic model in the cradle of East Slavic civilization, a development that could provide Russian citizens with an increasingly palatable and inspiring framework for a democratic transition in their own country. Faced with declining influence and control over Ukrainian domestic and foreign policy, the Kremlin can achieve its objectives only with military force.
The first scenario would involve a coercive diplomatic resolution to the present crisis. Russia could move to formally recognize or annex the occupied Donbas region of eastern Ukraine. The Communist Party of the Russian Federation has already taken the step of introducing a bill to the Russian State Duma that would recognize the separatist statelets in the Donbas in a manner similar to the way Russia recognized Abkhazia and South Ossetia, two breakaway regions in Georgia. This would allow the Kremlin to avoid further military escalation yet still come away with a “win.” The Russian leadership might also hope to goad Ukraine into a miscalculation similar to the one made in 2008 by Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, who chose to fight Russian-backed separatists in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, thereby providing the Kremlin with a pretext for additional military action and plausible deniability for any culpability.
On their own, however, such moves would not represent gains for Russia; they would merely further calcify the status quo, and Russia would forfeit the potential to insert a pro-Kremlin “fifth column” into Ukrainian domestic politics. If Putin chooses this course, then the United States and NATO may still respond with additional deployments along NATO’s eastern flank, which would bring about the kind of security dilemma that the Kremlin wants to avoid.
A second scenario would involve a limited Russian offensive, with limited airpower, to seize additional territory in eastern Ukraine and in the Donbas, perhaps as an extension of recognition or full annexation. In this scenario, Russia would seize Mariupol, a major Ukrainian port on the Sea of Azov, as well as Kharkiv, a major city with symbolic importance as the interwar capital of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Russia could also attempt a more ambitious, expanded version of this offensive by conducting a pincer move from the east and south with land, air, and sea power. From the south, Russia could establish a “land bridge” connecting Crimea to Russia’s mainland. It could also launch an amphibious operation to seize Odessa, Ukraine’s most important port, and then push toward Russian forces already stationed in Transnistria, a breakaway region of Moldova.
A major military conflict in Ukraine would be a catastrophe.
Such a move would deprive Ukraine of vital economic ports along its southern coast, render Ukraine landlocked, and resolve Russia’s long-standing logistical problems with providing supplies, including water, to Crimea. This would be an enormous operation requiring all the forces Russia has assembled in Crimea and along Ukraine’s eastern and northern borders. This would also require seizing and holding contested terrain. Russia would be forced to engage in a costly effort to occupy major Ukrainian cities, exposing its forces to difficult urban warfare, a protracted military campaign, and a costly insurgency. Moreover, seizing and holding terrain for a long-term occupation would weaken Ukraine, but would not result in a failed state.
Therefore, the third and most likely outcome is a full-scale Russian offensive employing land, air, and sea power on all axes of attack. In this scenario, Russia would establish air and naval superiority as quickly as possible. Some Russian ground forces would then advance toward Kharkiv and Sumy in the northeast, and others now based in Crimea and the Donbas would advance from the south and east respectively. Meanwhile, Russian forces in Belarus could directly threaten Kyiv, thereby pinning down Ukrainian forces that might otherwise move to reinforce the east and south. These forces could advance on Kyiv to hasten the Ukrainian government’s capitulation.
A long-term occupation would be unlikely in this scenario. Storming and pacifying major cities would entail a level of urban warfare and additional casualties that the Russian military probably wishes to avoid. Russian forces would be more likely to capture and hold territory to establish and protect supply lines and then withdraw after obtaining a favorable diplomatic settlement or inflicting sufficient damage. Ukraine and the West would then be left to pick up the pieces. This operation would focus on punitive strikes on the Ukrainian government, the military, critical infrastructure, and places important to Ukrainians’ national identity and morale. Russia would aim its bombs, rockets, artillery, cruise missiles, and short-range ballistic missiles at targets such as the presidential palace, presidential administrative buildings, the Verkhovna Rada (Ukraine’s legislature), the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the Ministry of Defense, the Ukrainian Security Service headquarters, and Maidan Nezalezhnosti (the central square in Kyiv and the site of multiple pro-democracy revolutions), among other notable decision-making organs and landmarks. Cyberattacks would hit critical infrastructure, such as Ukraine’s power grid, which could further paralyze the Ukrainian state. Russia would also prioritize the destruction of Ukrainian arms manufacturers. By eliminating Ukraine’s capacity to develop and produce Neptune cruise missiles, Sapsan missile systems, and Hrim-2 short-range ballistic missiles, Russia could remove the prospective threat of conventional deterrence from Ukraine in the immediate future.
The ground and sea offensive would be designed to encircle and obliterate Ukraine’s armed forces, hold only necessary critical terrain, and use airpower and long-range firepower to achieve Russia’s military and political aims. These strikes would inflict tens of thousands of casualties and trigger a humanitarian catastrophe, inducing chaos within the civilian and military chains of command and possibly decapitating the Ukrainian leadership. If all went according to Russia’s plan, the attacks would cripple the Ukrainian government, military, and economic infrastructure—all important steps toward the goal of rendering Ukraine a failed state.
AN UNPRECEDENTED RESPONSE
Regardless of whether Russia opts for a more limited incursion or a broader attack, the consequences it faces from the United States and its allies and partners must be unprecedented, as the Biden administration has previously warned they would be. U.S. Senator Robert Menendez, Democrat of New Jersey and the chair of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, has already introduced a bill—the Defending Ukraine Sovereignty Act of 2022—that resembles a wish list for advocates of Ukrainian sovereignty. It includes provisions for the use of the Department of Defense lease authority and the Special Defense Acquisition Fund to support Ukraine; additional loans to support Ukraine’s military; enhanced Ukrainian defensive capabilities; increased support for U.S.-Ukrainian military exchange programs; additional assistance for combating disinformation in Ukraine; the public disclosure of ill-gotten assets belonging to Putin and members of his inner circle; sanctions on Russian state officials who participate in or aid an attack on Ukraine; sanctions on Russian financial institutions; sanctions requiring the disconnection of major Russian financial institutions from financial messaging services such as SWIFT; a prohibition on transactions involving Russia’s sovereign debt; a review of sanctions on Nord Stream 2; and sanctions on the Russian energy and mining sectors. Although the bill provides potential waivers in several instances and an exception for the importation of goods, its passage would still represent a bold step toward defending Ukraine.
The Biden administration has already signaled its backing for Menendez’s bill. Biden should take one step further and shepherd it through the Senate and the House, maneuvering carefully to ensure that these critical measures do not become another casualty of partisan bickering. Biden got off to a good start with a recent meeting on Ukraine with senators from both parties. To further ease partisan divides, Democratic senators should consider adding elements to the Menendez bill from a competing bill introduced by Jim Risch, Republican of Idaho and the ranking member of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.
Traditionally, there has been strong bipartisan support for Ukraine. But the Kremlin believes that a lack of U.S. internal cohesion will undermine Washington’s capacity for a strong response. Congress must not lend credence to that belief. The potency of Menendez’s bill comes not only from its substance but also in the signal it would send about overwhelming bipartisan support for Ukraine.
The administration should also follow through on sanctions targeting exports of advanced U.S. technology (such as semiconductors and microchips) to Russia, a measure that could adversely impact the Russian aerospace and arms industries. Additionally, either Congress or the Biden administration must move beyond merely disclosing the assets held by Putin’s inner circle to directly targeting those assets, starting with sanctions on 35 individuals previously recommended by the Russian dissident Alexei Navalny. Putting pressure on the key oligarchs surrounding Putin will be as important as sanctioning the officials who will be directly involved in military actions—if not more so.
The world is on the brink of the largest military offensive in Europe since World War II.
Some might question the effectiveness of sanctions as tools for deterrence or behavioral change. Indeed, with $630 billion in international reserves, increased indigenization of critical industries, a favorable energy market, and alternatives to SWIFT in the form of the domestic Russian System for Transfer of Financial Messages and the Chinese Cross-Border Interbank Payment System, Russia may be able to weather the storm. Such concerns, however, overlook the fact that sanctions will still impose costs and weaken the Kremlin’s networks of malign influence. As it stands, the threat of sanctions has already had an adverse effect on the Russian stock market.
That said, without transatlantic unity and cooperation from the EU, sanctions will be far less meaningful and effective—and Washington’s European allies are wary of the potential for sanctions to harm their own economies. Based on Biden’s comments during his recent press conference, it appears that Washington may be struggling to marshal a unified response to Russian aggression, particularly in the case of cyberattacks, nonmilitary, or paramilitary actions. French President Emmanuel Macron has already undermined the image of a united front by calling for the EU to conduct its own dialogue with Russia. Meanwhile, Germany has refused to export arms to Ukraine and has failed to provide a definitive position on delaying or canceling approval of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline that would bring Russian gas to Europe.
Russia may cut off its energy supplies to Europe, which would exacerbate the existing European energy crisis and threaten transatlantic unity. The energy crisis already led the United States to send additional liquified natural gas to EU countries last December. Europe may be forced to seek out alternative energy sources on a short timetable in order to avoid domestic repercussions. To the extent possible, Washington should assist its European allies and partners in closing the energy gap with strategic reserves of oil and gas.
Other countries worry that disconnecting Russian financial institutions from SWIFT would create blowback for the European economy, and since SWIFT is beholden to Belgian and European law, Washington must rely to some extent on European acquiescence to enforce any Russian cutoff. The United States could attempt to force European countries to play along, as it did in 2012, when it pushed to cut Iran off from SWIFT. But at the risk of fracturing transatlantic unity, Washington may be unwilling to coerce its allies.
STEP IT UP
On the military front, if it is not already doing so, the United States can aid the Ukrainian government’s response to Russian operations by sharing strategic, operational, and even tactical intelligence in real time. The United States should also follow the United Kingdom’s example and send airlifts with lethal aid in advance of a Russian offensive. Washington should provide Ukraine with small arms, ammunition, equipment, and large quantities of man-portable air-defense systems, as well as more advanced systems, including Patriot antiair missiles and Harpoon antiship missiles. Critics of this approach may argue that the delivery of these systems would provide a pretext for the Kremlin to preemptively launch its assault. But if Russian military action is already a given, there would no longer be a reason not to act.
Although these more advanced systems will not be delivered in time to ensure proper training and integration to achieve full operational capability, some of the systems can still be deployed with initial operational capability. They will not alter the balance of military power between Ukraine and Russia, but they would impose additional costs on Russian invaders and contribute to deterrence when paired with other actions. The United States should also continue to expedite the approval process for transfers of U.S.-made weaponry to Ukraine, as it recently did for Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Additionally, in the unlikely event of a prolonged occupation and insurgency, the Biden administration should support Ukrainian insurgents.
Washington should assume the worst and plan accordingly.
Washington should also deploy additional forces and military equipment to reassure and aid its European allies. Memories of Soviet and Russian domination remain fresh in the countries on NATO’s eastern flank, and they will not sit idly by. The United States must reassure them that it has their backs, as guaranteed by Article 5 of the NATO Charter. Otherwise, in response to a perceived existential threat, they might rush military and humanitarian aid to their borders over the objections of Washington and western European governments. This would surely raise the risk of an expanded conflagration. At a minimum, countries such as Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia will likely increase their own defenses while appealing to the United States to expand its Enhanced Forward Presence missions, the multinational, battalion-size battle groups that NATO stations in its most vulnerable member states. To further bolster the alliance, Washington should consider raising the possibility of Finnish and Swedish membership in NATO, if either country wishes to join in the aftermath of further Russian military aggression in Ukraine. The recent dialogue between Biden and the president of Finland should continue, and Biden should have similar discussions with Swedish officials. This may yet influence Russia’s calculus for launching an offensive.
As a final step, in conjunction with international humanitarian organizations, the United States and its European allies and partners must establish humanitarian corridors with the resources and personnel to protect refugees. Tens of thousands—if not hundreds of thousands or even millions—may flee the conflict, either as internally displaced persons within Ukraine or as refugees in neighboring countries. The United States, the United Kingdom, and the EU should accommodate this influx of asylum seekers and refugees with emergency special immigrant visas of the kind made available to Afghans fleeing the Taliban takeover of their country last summer. NATO members will need to share the burden imposed by this influx; the countries of the alliance’s eastern flank cannot be expected to act alone.
TIME TO PREPARE
Although the Biden administration has handled the process of faux negotiations with Russia admirably, the ultimate outcome will still be the partial result of missed opportunities. Washington has put itself in a position in which, short of threatening military escalation, deterrence will probably fail. The options for deterrence today are significantly worse than they were last year, last month, or even last week. The U.S. commitment to peace and diplomatic resolutions during this time has been commendable, but in focusing on diplomacy without a commensurate emphasis on hard-power tools, the Biden administration missed an opportunity to head off a crisis on Europe’s eastern flank. In hindsight, a more forceful response to the military buildup that Russia carried out on its border with Ukraine last April could have led to preemptive force-posture changes and the introduction of lethal aid to Ukraine, which might have had a greater impact on altering the Kremlin’s calculus for a military-technical solution. By waiting until the last moment for the kind of sweeping responses currently under consideration, Washington must now confront Russia with a limited ability to deter and coerce.
The world is on the brink of the largest military offensive in Europe since World War II. Considering the existing interests of the major political stakeholders, the United States, Ukraine, and Russia are unlikely to significantly alter their current approaches to the situation. Washington has no desire to employ hard power to deter Russia, and it will not back down on principles or values that it has espoused for decades. In Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelensky’s standing is already precarious given his declining approval ratings, his failure to implement a bilateral plan for de-escalation with Russia, middling faith in his ability to lead during a time of war, his focus on prosecuting former President Petro Poroshenko on suspicion of treason, a roiling dispute with the oligarch Rinat Akhmetov, and his downplaying of the current Russian threat. For Zelensky, capitulation to Russia would be tantamount to political suicide. And even if Washington or Kyiv did change its stance, there is still no guarantee that Moscow would be satisfied and de-escalate.
The moment a war starts, the geopolitical landscape will become significantly more challenging for U.S. national security. Washington should assume the worst and plan accordingly, leveraging all elements of its power to protect U.S. interests. The Biden administration must maintain a delicate balance: avoiding a one-on-one military confrontation with Russia while punishing Russia for creating this harsh new reality. Right now, no task is more important.
Foreign Affairs · by Alexander Vindman and Dominic Cruz Bustillos · January 21, 2022
6. Joint Statement on the January 11, 14, and 17 Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’s Ballistic Missile Launch
This is the best we could since the UN Security Council would not issue a statement. Note the names of the countries below (as well as the ones noticeably absent).
We must remember that one of the foundational pillars of the US policy toward north Korea is full implementation of all relevant UN Security Council resolutions.
Joint Statement on the January 11, 14, and 17 Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’s Ballistic Missile Launch
United States Mission to the United Nations
New York, New York
January 20, 2022
Joint Statement on the January 11, 14, and 17 Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’s Ballistic Missile Launch
The following is a joint statement as delivered by Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield, U.S. Representative to the United Nations, on behalf of Albania, Brazil, France, Ireland, Japan, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
It was only last week that we stood at this podium to condemn the DPRK’s ballistic missile launch of January 5. The regime has conducted three additional ballistic missile launches since then, on January 11, January 14, and January 17 local time.
The DPRK has announced that it conducted the launches on four occasions in the last two weeks. The DPRK itself published photos that confirm the launch of ballistic missiles following all four launch events. And we know that DPRK missile launches that use ballistic missile technology violate Security Council resolutions.
These facts should not be in dispute. The DPRK’s unlawful behavior is a threat to international peace and security. These launches demonstrate the regime’s determination to pursue weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missile programs at all costs, including at the expense of its own people.
Albania, Brazil, France, Ireland, Japan, United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, and the United States call on our fellow Council members to be unified in condemning the DPRK for its acts in violation of UN Security Council resolutions. It is this unity, in speech and action, that has helped in the past bring the DPRK to the negotiating table and could advance stability for the region and international community.
We urge the 1718 Committee to proactively support implementation of the Security Council resolutions addressing the DPRK. This includes sanctions designations for those contributing to the DPRK’s unlawful weapons programs, like those the United States proposed last week.
We also call on all Member States to implement Security Council resolutions, to which the Security Council unanimously agreed, and which calls on the DPRK to abandon its weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missile programs in a complete, verifiable, and irreversible manner. It is extremely important that Member States take the necessary steps to implement the sanctions in their jurisdictions, or risk providing a blank check for the DPRK regime to advance its weapons program.
We will continue to speak out against the DPRK’s destabilizing actions as affronts to regional and international peace and stability. We call on the DPRK to cease these unlawful actions and return to dialogue. We stand ready to support a meaningful return to engagement and diplomacy without preconditions. And we reaffirm our commitment to achieving lasting peace and stability in the region, and to the complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, in accordance with relevant Security Council resolutions.
###
7. FDD | Congress Delivers Bipartisan Warning to Biden on Syria Policy
Conclusion:
Finally, Congress should consider revising the Caesar Act to expand sanctions against the Assad regime, its financiers, and its other supporters while limiting the discretion the executive branch now enjoys in the law’s implementation. If the White House refuses to put human rights at the center of U.S. policy toward Syria, then Congress should.
FDD | Congress Delivers Bipartisan Warning to Biden on Syria Policy
fdd.org · by David Adesnik Senior Fellow and Director of Research · January 20, 2022
The chairmen and ranking members of the House and Senate committees on foreign relations sent a letter last week to President Joe Biden warning him that “[t]acit approval of formal diplomatic engagement with the Syrian regime sets a dangerous precedent for authoritarians who seek to commit similar crimes against humanity.” The White House signaled last summer that it would not stand in the way of Syria’s diplomatic rehabilitation in the Arab world, yet congressional leaders rarely raised any public concern about Biden’s policy before this letter.
In late 2019, bipartisan majorities in both houses of Congress passed the Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act, a sanctions law designed to deepen the isolation of the Bashar al-Assad regime, with an emphasis on deterring support for Assad from entities outside Syria. During its final year in office, the Trump administration enforced the Caesar Act vigorously, eliciting broad support on Capitol Hill.
Early in its tenure, the Biden administration pledged to “put human rights at the center of U.S. foreign policy.” On multiple occasions, the administration warned Arab governments that the Caesar Act was the law of the land, so enforcement would be firm. Yet in August 2021, the administration approved of Syrian participation in a regional energy deal likely to generate substantial revenue, in cash or in kind, for the Assad regime. This signal from Washington led Syria’s neighbors to initiate high-level engagements with Damascus in September.
In response to media coverage of its reversal, the administration insisted that its policy toward Syria had not changed, since Washington itself would neither lift sanctions nor pursue normalization with Assad. Yet Secretary of State Antony Blinken and other senior officials have carefully avoided saying that they would take any action to stop other countries from rehabilitating the Assad regime.
Last October, the leaders of the bipartisan Friends of Syria Caucus in the House of Representatives publicly condemned normalization with Assad, while some senior Republicans expressed disappointment with the policies of U.S. partners in the Arab League. These instances aside, congressional opposition was minimal until last week’s letter from the chairmen and ranking members.
In their letter to Biden, Senators Robert Menendez (D-NJ) and James Risch (R-ID) and Representatives Gregory Meeks (D-NY) and Michael McCaul (R-TX) advise the president, “Your administration should consider consequences for any nation that seeks to rehabilitate the Assad regime.” This is good advice. The main advocates of engagement have been U.S. partners, principally Jordan, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates. Washington exercises substantial influence in their capitals, so Amman, Cairo, and Abu Dhabi would likely heed an American warning. While the United Arab Emirates has pushed for normalization for several years, neither Cairo nor Amman made any significant moves until the Biden administration gave them a subtle green light.
Despite challenging the White House, the bipartisan letter did not mention the regional energy deal in which Syria is participating thanks to the Biden administration’s approval. Negotiations surrounding the energy deal are the primary vehicle for Assad’s reintegration into Arab diplomacy, so normalization will likely continue for as long as Washington approves of Syrian participation. If the White House does not heed this warning from the Hill, the letter’s authors should assert that they interpret the deal as a clear violation of the Caesar Act. This may be sufficient to deter participation by Egypt, whose petroleum minister expressed concerns about his government’s exposure to sanctions. Without Cairo’s participation, the deal’s natural gas component would no longer be viable.
Finally, Congress should consider revising the Caesar Act to expand sanctions against the Assad regime, its financiers, and its other supporters while limiting the discretion the executive branch now enjoys in the law’s implementation. If the White House refuses to put human rights at the center of U.S. policy toward Syria, then Congress should.
David Adesnik is research director and a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), where he contributes to FDD’s Center on Economic and Financial Power (CEFP). For more analysis from David and CEFP, please subscribe HERE. Follow David on Twitter @adesnik. Follow FDD on Twitter @FDD and @FDD_CEFP. FDD is a Washington, DC-based, nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
fdd.org · by David Adesnik Senior Fellow and Director of Research · January 20, 2022
8. Invade Russia, Iran And North Korea — With Connectivity
We have to learn to lead with influence. Connectivity AND content. But we must never forget that actions speak louder than words. We should remember this simple construct:
1. What we say we stand for
2. What we say we are doing
3. What we are actually doing
- what we are really doing is the actual message.
(we should evaluate the actions of all our national instruments of power against this construct - State's Global Engagement Center should be evaluating this on a daily basis to ensure our actions provide the intended message).
Excerpts.
As with the Obama administration after Bush’s tenure, Biden’s team sees itself as the reinstated guardians of global freedom. But make no mistake that friend and foe alike are less than impressed with Biden’s big talk and small action. The Biden administration’s democracy summit hardly made Iran, Russia and North Korea quiver.
Such gatherings do nothing to undermine China’s long-term strategic embrace of dangerous regimes. Passive pursuit of modest diplomatic aims represents little more than a stale status quo while time slips away. Even worse, hostility will only rise as proxy skirmishes break out and Iran, North Korea and Russia all augment their already formidable cyber-hacking capabilities. With Western firms frozen out of the Iranian market, China-based Huawei is the frontrunner to construct Iran’s 5G network and is already underway with North Korea’s. U.S. sanctions cannot stop these developments. On the contrary, isolated countries have no choice but to turn to China, elevating its influence in the geopolitical marketplace.
“If the West is serious about not ceding any more ground, it needs to offer real alternatives.”
As I have observed from my travels in all three countries, Iran, Russia and North Korea are societies with enormous gaps between the regime and the people. Diplomatic openness helps blow that gap apart even further. The West can’t demonstrate its appeal to more than 80 million mostly young Iranians by closing off their access to it — it would be better to give them a choice. In countries where elections don’t matter, the most important right is the opportunity to vote with one’s feet.
Russia, Iran and North Korea are also nationalistic states whose proud identity can be weaponized against Chinese neo-mercantilism. They are in China’s orbit, but don’t want to be its exclusive satellites. They all seek sovereign, rather than colonial, futures.
This is why offering enhanced connectivity to these states is not a Hail Mary, but common sense. If given the chance, they will cleverly seek to multi-align and hedge against excessive dependence on China. The West, then, should not hold what could be multifaceted relations hostage to a single issue. Russia, Iran and North Korea do not want to become anything other than fuller versions of their sovereign selves. They will not become like us, but engagement can minimize their harm to us.
Invade Russia, Iran And North Korea — With Connectivity | NOEMA
Credits
Parag Khanna is the founder and managing partner of FutureMap, a data and scenario-based strategic advisory firm. His latest book is “Move: The Forces Uprooting Us.”
“Frozen conflicts” never really are. Rising tensions in the Balkans and flare-ups in the Caucasus are among the numerous reminders today that until contested terrain is settled, it remains very much unsettled. Furthermore, Iran, North Korea and Russia are increasingly strategic tiles on the geopolitical chessboard. China has been backing these rogue authoritarian regimes for many years, thwarting American sanctions and rendering Western pressure inert.
In none of these cases does the U.S. have decisive leverage or the appetite for direct military confrontation. Washington therefore needs a plan to deal with pariah states while it can still sway them or build coalitions to shape their behavior. It’s time for a new approach: radical connectivity.
Iran: Once Bitten, Twice Shy — Third Time A Charm?
Iran’s isolation from the international community has now lasted over four decades since its 1979 revolution. Western regime-change efforts dating to the 1953 coup have only emboldened its theocratic leaders, and its newest hardline president, Ebrahim Raisi, isn’t one to fold. Since the Trump administration’s withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) framework and “maximum pressure” sanctions campaign, the country’s stockpile of enriched uranium has grown — demonstrating how, perversely, the longer sanctions are in place, the less likely it becomes that Iran can be swayed.
Indeed, Iran’s strategic position has enabled it to sow instability across the Gulf region from Lebanon and Yemen to the Strait of Hormuz. Furthermore, the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan has been read by many in Tehran as a sign of weakness. In October, a U.S. Navy destroyer looked on as Iranian commandos seized an oil tanker in the Gulf of Oman.
Iran is a populous, young, energy rich nation at the crossroads of Eurasian and oceanic trade routes. But absent a change in the country’s diplomatic leanings, its growing role as a bridgehead for Chinese and Russian interests is all but certain. Iranian oil exports to China are soaring. Beijing and Tehran also recently inked a 25-year, $40 billion agreement as part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Clearly, when the cat’s away, the mice come out to play.
“China has been thwarting American sanctions and rendering Western pressure inert.”
Yet there is alternative momentum to build on. The U.S. pullback from Afghanistan has changed the Gulf states’ calculations. Saudi Arabia and Iran have had several rounds of talks, and last month Saudi Arabia issued visas for three Iranian diplomats to take up posts in the kingdom. Iranian officials have also been on a charm offensive with Abu Dhabi. Russia is moving ahead with plans to convene a regional security conference to bring all the region’s powers — including Israel and Iran — under one tent.
Recent International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) negotiations in Vienna signal that the country may consider a return to the Nuclear Deal with JCPOA nations. But even if it does, this laborious diplomatic process is unlikely to yield fruit unless Iran is given what it wants. Perhaps, then, that’s precisely what the West should do.
The key shift is to separate rather than link the nuclear and economic tracks. Iran is unlikely to agree to the JCPOA’s “Additional Protocol” that provides for IAEA inspections of civilian nuclear facilities to ascertain if nuclear fuel is being diverted to its weapons program. And there is good reason to doubt the efficacy of such safeguards, which experts have described as “obsolete.” Furthermore, Iran will only sign a deal that doesn’t include “snapback” clauses requiring universal sanctions compliance of UN members in the event that Iran resumes significant uranium enrichment.
But lifting sanctions doesn’t mean giving up on monitoring or obstructing the country’s nuclear program. Where a diplomatic solution cannot be found, credible military options remain available — interdicting illicit Iranian trade, for example, or even targeted strikes or hacks of Iranian military facilities. The country’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps can still be treated as a rogue actor and be directly confronted in its attempts to secure sensitive military technology. This would be real “maximum pressure,” well justified as preventive action. After all, Iran may choose to violate its commitments to the Non-Proliferation Treaty — especially if it withdraws from it, as it has threatened to do.
Engagement and hedging can go hand in hand. Israel has watched as the same countries it has reconciled with, partially in the name of confronting Iran — Saudi Arabia and the UAE — now reconcile with its mortal enemy. Yet Israel’s overwhelming priority is Iran’s nuclear program, and it would gladly continue covert operations to prevent it. Indeed, Israel and the UAE are jointly developing unmanned anti-submarine vessels that could counter Iran in the Gulf waters.
“Engagement and hedging can go hand in hand.”
This stratagem has the added benefit of opening the mostly young Iranian population to greater exchange with their Arab neighbors and the West. I vividly recall an entire week of my visit to Tehran spent primarily with youth, who impressed me with their plucky ability to navigate around oppression. In no other country I have visited has the gap between regime and public been so yawning: The ordinary Iranians I met viewed their own regime with far greater suspicion than they do the West.
Under a connectivity strategy, quality investment in Iran would rise, oil prices would sink and Chinese influence would be diluted. New commercial and social — and eventually political — power centers could eventually arise in Iran, challenging a theocracy that would no longer have a “Great Satan” to rail against.
Iran’s regime wants sanctions lifted and it wants the bomb. A new strategy can give it the former while still preventing the latter. It can also empower constituencies vested in global integration to challenge the current regime from within. The Biden administration is soberly aware that sanctions won’t upend Iran’s regime, so long as Russia, China, Turkey and other countries provide it with lifelines. A grand bargain with Iran is hardly assured, but shaking things up would be a wiser course than a nuclear Iran permanently allied with China and Russia.
North Korea: Getting The Sequencing Right
Much more so than Iran, North Korea is almost entirely dependent on China for its economic sustenance, though COVID-19 has made the country’s already acute destitution even more severe. It recently reopened its border rail link with China (where satellite images suggest exports have bypassed UN sanctions). But with trade and tourism heavily restricted due to the ongoing pandemic, such moves amount to a placebo. North Korea’s recent hypersonic missile tests can also be read as a cry for help — but from a regime that faces little risk of collapse, no matter how hard one might wish for it.
The Trump administration’s charm offensive on the Kim regime, including summits in Singapore and Hanoi, failed to take at face value the logical sequence of steps that could lead to a more productive dynamic with North Korea. Pyongyang — and other relevant Asian capitals, not least Seoul — accept that Kim will not give up nuclear weapons before a formal declaration of the end of the Korean War and the launch of talks toward peaceful reunification. Washington should understand this, too.
“Concrete steps toward a peace treaty could be made conditional on material demilitarization of the border.”
Recently, China and Russia have been pushing for North Korean sanctions relief at the UN on humanitarian grounds, but by now Kim must have realized that neither country cares to deliver the modernization he craves. As with Iran, the U.S. could turn the tables by agreeing to lift sanctions and push for normalization. This has been the approach that successive governments in Seoul have wished for, as well, because they see the North as an intractable challenge best dealt with through de-escalation and engagement.
But engagement doesn’t mean appeasement. Concrete steps toward a peace treaty could be made conditional on material demilitarization of the border. Other mutual confidence-building measures could include lifting sanctions on North Korean officials and establishing liaison offices and embassies — but all of these steps must be contingent on improvements in human rights. In a nearly famine-stricken country, such steps amount to more than mere gestures.
On my visit to the Hermit Kingdom a decade ago, I had to hand over my mobile phone, which was wrapped in a plastic bag (along with my passport), only to be returned after a week’s unoffensive behavior. I met a mid-level executive from Egypt’s Orascom telecom, which was installing the country’s 3G mobile network (which was subsequently, and unsurprisingly, nationalized just as the company sought to expatriate its profits).
Today the country is awash in mobile phones, and ordinary North Koreans can, at great risk, access K-Pop and “Squid Game.” Even as the government surveils all through its new telecom giant, KoryoLink, it is losing its information monopoly. Despite having far less access to the world, the North Koreans I met were not brainwashed. One mother at a crafts fair lamented that her son was selected to participate in the spectacular Mass Games propaganda events, as he would be held back in school; she’d rather he do his math homework. Those we spoke with expressed a desire for exchange with the South.
South Korea knows precisely how to invest in the North, having participated in special economic zones such as the Kaesong Industrial Complex on their border. Expanding this manufacturing activity would not only be a cost-competitive way to boost Korean industry and exports, but further investments in the country’s mineral and agricultural sectors would also enhance the peninsula’s self-sufficiency.
North Korea is a declared, if unrecognized, nuclear power. The U.S. is rightly cynical about the Kim regime’s intentions, but serious negotiations are preferable to enabling it to become a fully-fledged nuclear power with ICBMs aimed at American soil. The question for the U.S., Japan and allied powers, then, is whether North Korea remains a hostile state, hostage to China and Russia, or whether it can be peacefully reunited with South Korea to produce another important counterweight to China in a region wary of its rise.
Russia: Toward Constructive Deterrence
Russia’s covert seizure of Crimea in 2014 shocked the world, but its current overt troop movements on the Ukrainian border and in the Black Sea remind that Russian ambitions extend beyond tactical gains. Its grand strategy seeks nothing less than establishing and codifying territorial shifts from the Baltics through the Caucasus and sowing dissent within and between Western nations. Russia’s aggressive naval patrols stretch from the Baltic Sea and Mediterranean to the Sea of Japan, and its interventions have shaped the local power balance in Libya and Syria. From poisoning opposition figures to hacking foreign governments and invading neighbors, nothing is off the table for Putin’s Russia — despite years of sanctions that have collapsed the ruble’s value and cost the economy $350 billion of lost economic growth.
Russia is economically robust and technologically capable enough to have become more self-reliant in key sectors. In this sense, sanctions led to sharper focus toward essential goals. At the same time, with oil and gas prices rebounding and both Europe and China dependent on Russian hydrocarbon exports, Russia can continue to finance its geopolitical adventurism. The Biden administration scuttled sanctions on German companies involved in the controversial Nord Stream 2 pipeline as a nod to Germany’s former chancellor, Angela Merkel, but it inevitably benefits Russia’s gas behemoth as well. Meanwhile, Russia and China are moving toward opening a second major gas pipeline southward from Siberia, further deepening the Sino-Russian embrace.
Russia has been playing its weak hand strongly, converging with China on arms deals, energy trade, and Belt and Road infrastructure projects, while opportunistically poking at the West — for example, by ferrying Arab and Afghan migrants to the Baltic borders. Along the way, climate change has accelerated Russia’s quest to be the leading Arctic power — with sizable military and especially naval assets dedicated to the region — and an agricultural powerhouse. In 2021, Russia was the world’s top wheat exporter.
But COVID and climate change may also change Russia’s future circumstances in ways that create opportunities for the West. Despite being the first country to have developed a COVID vaccine (Sputnik V), Russia’s vaccination rate still hovers around 50%. Far more grim are the country’s COVID mortality figures, which, at an estimated 600,000 coronavirus-related deaths, are by far the highest in Europe.
In 2020, Russia lost more people to various maladies or emigration than it had in the previous 15 years. Putin has publicly confessed that the country’s precipitous population decline “haunts” him. It also desperately lacks the resources to adapt to a hotter climate, with parts of Siberia warming 2.5 times faster than the rest of the world and the permafrost that covers 65% of Russia’s territory rapidly thawing. In 2021, Siberia’s nearly 200 forest fires were bigger than those in the entire rest of the world combined.
“Russia will need assistance to confront its demographic and ecological reckoning.”
The U.S. and Europe should consider several approaches to working with Russia today that set the stage for easing post-Putin Russia out of its fatal embrace of China. Already weary of inviting in more Chinese workers and investors, Russia has sought to lure Russian-speaking Uzbeks and others from former Soviet states into its economy, and it is considering inviting more Indian agricultural workers into the country. In late 2019, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was the chief guest at the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok. As frameworks such as the Quad develop to bring like-minded states together, a common Russia strategy should be high on the agenda.
Russia will also need assistance to confront its demographic and ecological reckoning. Perhaps the only way that is palatable to both Europe and Russia would be greater freedom of movement for Russians who seek to study and work in the EU. While European governments use visa restrictions as a source of leverage on Russia, they actually need Russian tourists and students to rejuvenate their hospitality and education sectors. Meanwhile, less politicized people-to-people ties might attract more Europeans to work and invest in Russia, stimulating its economy, raising its productivity and perhaps leading to higher intermarriage and birth rates.
Across Russia’s Far East, I’ve met officials and administrators who want to recruit construction workers, farmers and students from other Asian countries, even suggesting that Russian universities should start teaching in English to compete for Asian talent. This is the pragmatic way that Russians who actually govern the vast country think about its future, rather than the xenophobic vitriol one hears from the Kremlin.
After their early December call, Biden stated that he would convene key NATO allies to discuss accommodating Russia’s concerns. One option is to take NATO membership for Ukraine off the table — but only if Russia withdraws troops from the border and does something to quiet pro-Russian rebels in eastern Ukraine. If it does not, the West can and should ramp up arms sales to Ukraine, including anti-tank missiles, patrol boats and drones.
As with Iran and North Korea, the West must confront Russia at every turn to deter its military forays. But that does not mean it cannot seek constructive engagement in areas where Russia might prefer Western partnerships to Chinese ones. The alternative is an increasingly united Russian and Chinese front.
A Grand Strategy Of Connectivity
China’s grand strategy is as much about advancing its connectivity as modernizing its military. Its checkbook diplomacy thwarts Western soft power at every turn. If the West is serious about not ceding any more ground, it needs to offer real alternatives. As the U.S. girds for a new Cold War with China, its strategy must resemble that era’s: winning countries over through incentives ranging from trade and investment to immigration and education. China puts its money where its mouth is. The West must do the same.
As with the Obama administration after Bush’s tenure, Biden’s team sees itself as the reinstated guardians of global freedom. But make no mistake that friend and foe alike are less than impressed with Biden’s big talk and small action. The Biden administration’s democracy summit hardly made Iran, Russia and North Korea quiver.
Such gatherings do nothing to undermine China’s long-term strategic embrace of dangerous regimes. Passive pursuit of modest diplomatic aims represents little more than a stale status quo while time slips away. Even worse, hostility will only rise as proxy skirmishes break out and Iran, North Korea and Russia all augment their already formidable cyber-hacking capabilities. With Western firms frozen out of the Iranian market, China-based Huawei is the frontrunner to construct Iran’s 5G network and is already underway with North Korea’s. U.S. sanctions cannot stop these developments. On the contrary, isolated countries have no choice but to turn to China, elevating its influence in the geopolitical marketplace.
“If the West is serious about not ceding any more ground, it needs to offer real alternatives.”
As I have observed from my travels in all three countries, Iran, Russia and North Korea are societies with enormous gaps between the regime and the people. Diplomatic openness helps blow that gap apart even further. The West can’t demonstrate its appeal to more than 80 million mostly young Iranians by closing off their access to it — it would be better to give them a choice. In countries where elections don’t matter, the most important right is the opportunity to vote with one’s feet.
Russia, Iran and North Korea are also nationalistic states whose proud identity can be weaponized against Chinese neo-mercantilism. They are in China’s orbit, but don’t want to be its exclusive satellites. They all seek sovereign, rather than colonial, futures.
This is why offering enhanced connectivity to these states is not a Hail Mary, but common sense. If given the chance, they will cleverly seek to multi-align and hedge against excessive dependence on China. The West, then, should not hold what could be multifaceted relations hostage to a single issue. Russia, Iran and North Korea do not want to become anything other than fuller versions of their sovereign selves. They will not become like us, but engagement can minimize their harm to us.
9. Biden saves Iran from itself
Ouch!
Conclusion:
Never has a U.S. president given up so much leverage so quickly for absolutely zero gain. To borrow a football analogy, Biden started his presidency with Iran backed up against its own goal line, and he deliberately allowed the regime to march all the way to America’s red zone, the threshold of nuclear weapons.
The president made a bet one year ago that abandoning maximum pressure in favor of maximum deference would somehow induce the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism that pledges “Death to America” to make concessions. He lost that bet. And every time he doubles down on that bet instead of admitting his mistake, he loses again.
Biden came into office and implemented a new Iran policy. He owns its failure.
Biden saves Iran from itself
President Joe Biden came into office pledging to rejoin the 2015 Iran nuclear deal quickly and then negotiate a follow-on agreement to address the deal’s many flaws. A year later, he’s laying the groundwork for an even worse deal that would pour billions of dollars into Iran’s terror infrastructure and leave the regime on the threshold of attaining nuclear weapons. Try as his administration might to pass the blame, one man alone is responsible for this catastrophic policy failure: Joe Biden.
It’s startling to review just how much leverage the president has squandered practically overnight.
At the end of 2020, Tehran had just $4 billion in accessible foreign exchange reserves, with a balance-of-payments crisis looming. Iranians blamed the mullahs for the nation's economic woes, protesting in waves throughout the country. The head of the United Nations’s nuclear watchdog agency was investigating Iran for concealing undeclared nuclear sites, materials, and activities — with a referral to the U.N. Security Council for noncompliance with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty possibly just months away. The Islamic Republic was also still reeling from the loss of its terror mastermind, Qassem Soleimani, and the father of its nuclear weapons program, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh.
From Biden’s first day in office, Iran began testing the new president. Days before Biden’s inauguration, Iran started producing 20% enriched uranium, a major escalation from the low-enriched uranium it produced in response to the Trump administration’s maximum pressure campaign. In the weeks that followed, Tehran-directed terror groups in Iraq attacked U.S. forces and interests, leaving a U.S. contractor dead. Soon, reports emerged of Iranian oil exports to China skyrocketing. Iranian leaders needed to gauge Biden’s willingness to enforce sanctions.
With Iran refusing to cooperate with the U.N.’s investigation into its clandestine nuclear work and the regime’s overt enrichment expanding, Biden had a perfect opening to push back and set down some lines to contain Iranian mischief. Instead, the president pressed U.S. allies to pull back any censure resolution at the March meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency board. The message to Tehran: America doesn’t care if you’re hiding nuclear sites and materials, nor does it care about your compliance with global nonproliferation agreements.
Iran’s response was predictable. The regime cut back U.N. access to its declared nuclear sites, produced uranium metal, a key component of nuclear weapons, and increased its enrichment purity level to 60% — dangerously close to weapons-grade. Considering Tehran’s failure to cooperate with the IAEA’s investigation, the obvious course of action presented itself: Refer the matter to the Security Council and restore U.N. sanctions on Iran. But in June, September, and November, Biden opted against any action that could provoke Iran at the IAEA’s quarterly board meetings.
Biden made other poor choices as well. He chose not to respond militarily to the March death of a U.S. contractor in Iraq. He chose not to respond militarily for months thereafter despite continuous drone and rocket attacks targeting U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria. And the two times he authorized a U.S. military response, he directed fire at non-Iranian personnel or installations rather than targeting the Revolutionary Guard commanders orchestrating the attacks.
Biden also gave a green light to Iranian adventurism in the region, a large source of chaos, instability, and deadly violence. In Yemen, Biden ended U.S. military support for a Saudi-led campaign against the Iran-backed Houthis and rescinded the group’s designation as a foreign terrorist organization. On Tehran’s orders, the Houthis responded by increasing missile and drone attacks against Saudi and Emirati citizens. In other words, Iran responded to Biden’s concession with more violence against U.S. allies. How did Biden respond to this pattern? By rewarding it. The administration removed American missile defense from the Saudi kingdom, which invited more Houthi attacks. In mid-January, a combined drone, ballistic missile, and cruise missile attack on Abu Dhabi left at least three people dead.
If the supreme leader had any doubt left about whether he could establish Iran as a nuclear weapons threshold state without fearing a U.S. military response, Biden’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, looking the other way as the Taliban marched on Kabul, sealed his calculus.
All the while, Biden let Iran’s economy stabilize. He suspended sanctions, which gave the regime access to billions of dollars more in frozen funds. And he refused to crack down as China increased its imports of Iranian oil. As Tehran’s regional violence increased and its nuclear transgressions continued unabated, Washington essentially helped the mullahs avoid a financial crisis.
Never has a U.S. president given up so much leverage so quickly for absolutely zero gain. To borrow a football analogy, Biden started his presidency with Iran backed up against its own goal line, and he deliberately allowed the regime to march all the way to America’s red zone, the threshold of nuclear weapons.
The president made a bet one year ago that abandoning maximum pressure in favor of maximum deference would somehow induce the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism that pledges “Death to America” to make concessions. He lost that bet. And every time he doubles down on that bet instead of admitting his mistake, he loses again.
Biden came into office and implemented a new Iran policy. He owns its failure.
Richard Goldberg is a senior adviser at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He served on Capitol Hill, on the U.S. National Security Council, as the chief of staff for Illinois’s governor, and as a Navy Reserve intelligence officer. Follow him on Twitter @rich_goldberg.
10. A Dam in Syria Was on a ‘No-Strike’ List. The U.S. Bombed It Anyway.
Another incredible report. (and I do not mean that in a positive way). I am trying hard to understand what the rest of the story could be.
A Dam in Syria Was on a ‘No-Strike’ List. The U.S. Bombed It Anyway.
A worker at the Tabqa Dam in 2017.
A military report warned that striking the giant structure could cause tens of thousands of deaths.
A worker at the Tabqa Dam in 2017.
By Azmat Khan and
Near the height of the war against the Islamic State in Syria, a sudden riot of explosions rocked the country’s largest dam, a towering, 18-story structure on the Euphrates River that held back a 25-mile-long reservoir above a valley where hundreds of thousands of people lived.
The Tabqa Dam was a strategic linchpin and the Islamic State controlled it. The explosions on March 26, 2017, knocked dam workers to the ground and everything went dark. Witnesses say one bomb punched down five floors. A fire spread, and crucial equipment failed. The mighty flow of the Euphrates River suddenly had no way through, the reservoir began to rise, and local authorities used loudspeakers to warn people downstream to flee.
The Islamic State, the Syrian government and Russia blamed the United States, but the dam was on the U.S. military’s “no-strike list” of protected civilian sites and the commander of the U.S. offensive at the time, then-Lt. Gen. Stephen J. Townsend, said allegations of U.S. involvement were based on “crazy reporting.”
“The Tabqa Dam is not a coalition target,” he declared emphatically two days after the blasts.
In fact, members of a top secret U.S. Special Operations unit called Task Force 9 had struck the dam using some of the largest conventional bombs in the U.S. arsenal, including at least one BLU-109 bunker-buster bomb designed to destroy thick concrete structures, according to two former senior officials. And they had done it despite a military report warning not to bomb the dam, because the damage could cause a flood that might kill tens of thousands of civilians.
By The New York Times
Given the dam’s protected status, the decision to strike it would normally have been made high up the chain of command. But the former officials said the task force used a procedural shortcut reserved for emergencies, allowing it to launch the attack without clearance.
Later, three workers who had rushed to the dam to prevent a disaster were killed in a different coalition airstrike, according to dam workers.
An image published by the Islamic State’s news agency on the day of the bombing in 2017.Credit...Aamaq News Agency, via Associated Press
The two former officials, who spoke on the condition that they not be named because they were not authorized to discuss the strikes, said some officers overseeing the air war viewed the task force’s actions as reckless.
The revelation of Task Force 9’s role in the dam attack follows a pattern described by The New York Times: The unit routinely circumvented the rigorous airstrike approval process and hit Islamic State targets in Syria in a way that repeatedly put civilians at risk.
Even with careful planning, hitting a dam with such large bombs would likely have been seen by top leaders as unacceptably dangerous, said Scott F. Murray, a retired Air Force colonel, who planned airstrikes during air campaigns in Iraq, Afghanistan and Kosovo.
“Using a 2,000-pound bomb against a restricted target like a dam is extremely difficult and should have never been done on the fly,” he said. “Worst case, those munitions could have absolutely caused the dam to fail.”
After the strikes, dam workers stumbled on an ominous piece of good fortune: Five floors deep in the dam’s control tower, an American BLU-109 bunker-buster lay on its side, scorched but intact — a dud. If it had exploded, experts say, the whole dam might have failed.
The Tabqa Dam in 2018. Civilian no-strike sites were used as weapons depots, command centers, and fighting positions by the Islamic State.Credit...Ivor Prickett for The New York Times
In response to questions from The Times, U.S. Central Command, which oversaw the air war in Syria, acknowledged dropping three 2,000-pound bombs, but denied targeting the dam or sidestepping procedures. A spokesman said that the bombs hit only the towers attached to the dam, not the dam itself, and while top leaders had not been notified beforehand, limited strikes on the towers had been preapproved by the command.
“Analysis had confirmed that strikes on the towers attached to the dam were not considered likely to cause structural damage to the Tabqa Dam itself,” Capt. Bill Urban, the chief spokesman for the command, said in the statement. Noting that the dam did not collapse, he added, “That analysis has proved accurate.”
“The mission, and the strikes that enabled it, helped return control of the intact Tabqa Dam to the people of Northeast Syria and prevented ISIS from weaponizing it,” Captain Urban said. “Had they been allowed to do so, our assessments at the time predicted that they would have inflicted further suffering on the people of Syria.”
But the two former officials, who were directly involved in the air war at the time, and Syrian witnesses interviewed by The Times, said the situation was far more dire than the U.S. military publicly claimed.
Critical equipment lay in ruins and the dam stopped functioning entirely. The reservoir quickly rose 50 feet and nearly spilled over the dam, which engineers said would have been catastrophic. The situation grew so desperate that authorities at dams upstream in Turkey cut water flow into Syria to buy time, and sworn enemies in the yearslong conflict — the Islamic State, the Syrian government, Syrian Defense Forces and the United States — called a rare emergency cease-fire so civilian engineers could race to avert a disaster.
Engineers who worked at the dam, who did not want to be identified because they feared reprisal, said it was only through quick work, much of it made at gunpoint as opposing forces looked on, that the dam and the people living downstream of it were saved.
“The destruction would have been unimaginable,” a former director at the dam said. “The number of casualties would have exceeded the number of Syrians who have died throughout the war.”
In March 2017, when the United States and an international coalition launched an offensive to take the region back, seizing the dam was a priority.
A Ready-Made Fortress
The United States went into the war against the Islamic State in 2014 with targeting rules intended to protect civilians and spare critical infrastructure. Striking a dam, or other key civilian sites on the coalition’s “no-strike list,” required elaborate vetting and the approval of senior leaders.
But the Islamic State sought to exploit those rules, using civilian no-strike sites as weapons depots, command centers and fighting positions. That included the Tabqa Dam.
The task force’s solution to this problem too often was to set aside the rules intended to protect civilians, current and former military personnel said.
Soon, the task force was justifying the vast majority of its airstrikes using emergency self-defense procedures intended to save troops in life-threatening situations, even when no troops were in danger. That allowed it to quickly hit targets — including no-strike sites — that would have otherwise been off limits.
Perhaps no single incident shows the brazen use of self-defense rules and the potentially devastating costs more than the strike on the Tabqa Dam.
At the start of the war, the United States saw the dam as a key to victory. The Soviet-designed structure of earth and concrete stood 30 miles upstream from the Islamic State’s self-proclaimed capital, Raqqa, and whoever controlled the dam effectively controlled the city.
Rebel groups captured the dam in 2013, and the Islamic State took control during its violent expansion in 2014. For the next several years, the militants kept a small garrison in the dam’s towers, where the thick concrete walls and sweeping view created a ready-made fortress.
But it also remained a vital piece of civilian infrastructure. Workers at the dam continued to produce electricity for much of the region and regulate water for vast stretches of irrigated farmland.
In March 2017, when the United States and an international coalition launched an offensive to take the region from the Islamic State, they knew they would have to seize the dam to prevent the enemy from intentionally flooding allied forces downstream.
Syrian Democratic Forces at the dam two days after the bombing.
Task Force 9 was in charge of the ground offensive and had been devising ways to take the dam for months before the strike, according to one former official. The task force ordered a report from specialized engineers in the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Defense Resources and Infrastructure office to assess what size of bombs could safely be used in an attack.
The agency soon came back with a clear recommendation: Do not strike the dam.
In a presentation that ran about four pages, according to the two former officials, the engineers said small weapons like Hellfire missiles, which have 20-pound warheads, could be used on the earthen sections of the dam, but it was unsafe to use any bombs or missiles, no matter the size, on the concrete structures that controlled the flow of water.
The former officials said the report warned that a strike could cause a critical malfunction and a devastating flood that could kill tens of thousands of people. The findings echoed a United Nations report from January 2017, which stated that if attacks on the dam caused it to fail, communities for more than 100 miles downstream would be flooded.
The military report was completed several weeks before the strike and sent to the task force, one former official said. But in the final week of March 2017, a team of task force operators on the ground decided to strike the dam anyway, using some of the biggest conventional bombs available.
A United Nations report from January 2017 stated that if attacks on the dam caused it to fail, it would flood communities downstream.Credit...Rodi Said/Reuters
2,000-Pound Bombs
It is unclear what spurred the task force attack on March 26.
At the time, the U.S.-led coalition controlled the north shore of the reservoir and the Islamic State controlled the south. The two sides had been in a standoff for weeks.
Captain Urban said that U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces tried to take control of the dam and came under fire from enemy fighters, taking “heavy casualties.” Then the coalition struck the dam.
Dam workers said they saw no heavy fighting or casualties that day before the bombs hit.
What is clear is that Task Force 9 operators called in a self-defense strike, which meant they did not have to seek permission from the chain of command.
A military report obtained through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit shows the operators contacted a B-52 bomber circling high overhead and requested an immediate airstrike on three targets. But the report makes no mention of enemy forces firing or heavy casualties. Instead, it says the operators requested the strikes for “terrain denial.”
The two former officials said the terrain denial request suggested that allied forces were not in danger of being overrun by enemy fighters, and that the task force’s goal was likely to preemptively destroy fighting positions in the towers.
Critical equipment was in ruins and the dam stopped functioning entirely.
Launching that type of offensive strike under self-defense rules was a stunning departure from how the air war was supposed to work, the officials said.
Just a few weeks later, when the United States decided to disable a canal system near Raqqa, the strikes had to be approved by a military targeting board in what one former official called “an exhaustively detailed” process.
None of that happened with the dam, he said.
A senior Defense Department official disputed that the task force overstepped its authority by striking without informing top leaders. The official said the strikes were conducted “within approved guidance” set by the commander of the campaign against the Islamic State, General Townsend. Because of that, the official said, there was “no requirement that the commander be informed beforehand.”
First, the B-52 dropped bombs set to explode in the air above the targets to avoid damaging the structures, the senior military official said. But when those failed to dislodge the enemy fighters, the task force called for the bomber to drop three 2,000-pound bombs, including at least one bunker-buster, this time set to explode when they hit the concrete.
Days later, Islamic State fighters fled, sabotaging the dam’s already inoperable turbines as they retreated, according to engineers.
Satellite imagery from after the attack shows gaping holes in the roofs of both towers, a crater in the concrete of the dam next to the head-gates, and a fire in one of the power station buildings. Less obvious, but more serious, was the damage inside.
A coalition missile penetrated five stories of the dam’s north tower. Two missiles on the southern tower penetrated three floors down.Credit...Azmat Khan/The New York Times
An Unusual Truce
Two workers were at the dam that day. One of them, an electrical engineer, recalled Islamic State fighters positioned in the northern tower as usual that day, but no fighting underway when they went into the dam to work on the cooling system.
Hours later, a shuddering series of booms knocked them to the floor. The room filled with smoke. The engineer found his way out into the sunlight through a normally locked door that had been blown open.
He froze when he saw the broad wings of an American B-52 against the clear blue sky.
Fearing that he would be mistaken for an enemy fighter, the engineer ducked back into the smoldering tower. The strikes had punched a jagged skylight through several stories. He looked up and saw fire coming from the main control room, which had been hit by the airstrike.
The dominoes of a potential disaster were now in motion. Damage to the control room caused water pumps to seize. Flooding then short-circuited electrical equipment. With no power to run crucial machinery, water couldn’t pass through the dam, the reservoir crept higher. There was a crane that could raise the emergency floodgate, but it, too, had been damaged by fighting.
But the engineer knew if they could find a way to get the crane working, they might be able to open the floodgates.
He hid inside until he saw the B-52 fly away and then found a motorcycle. Though he had never driven one before, he sped as fast as he could to the house where the dam manager lived, and explained what had happened.
A worker in the dam’s turbine hall a year after the bombing.Credit...Ivor Prickett for The New York Times
Engineers in Islamic State territory called their former colleagues in the Syrian government, who then contacted allies in the Russian military for help.
A few hours after the strike, a special desk phone reserved for directed communications between the United States and Russia started ringing in a busy operations center in Qatar. When a coalition officer picked up, a Russian officer on the other end warned U.S. airstrikes had caused serious damage to the dam and there was no time to waste, according to a coalition official.
Less than 24 hours after the strikes, American-backed forces, Russian and Syrian officials and the Islamic State coordinated a pause in hostilities. A team of 16 workers — some from the Islamic State, some from the Syrian government, some from American allies — drove to the site, according to the engineer, who was with the group.
They worked furiously as the water rose. The distrust and tension were so thick that at points fighters shot into the air. They succeeded in repairing the crane, which eventually allowed the floodgates to open, saving the dam.
An image published by the Islamic State’s news agency the day of the bombing.Credit...Aamaq News Agency, via Associated Press
Another Strike
A short time later, General Townsend denied the dam was a target and said, “When strikes occur on military targets, at or near the dam, we use noncratering munitions to avoid unnecessary damage to the facility.”
But in the days after the strike, officers working for the coalition air war saw Islamic State images of the unexploded bunker buster and tried to figure out what had really happened, one official said. Every U.S. airstrike is supposed to be immediately reported to the operations center, but Task Force 9 had not reported the dam strikes. That made them hard to trace, said one former official who searched for the records. He said a team was only able to piece together what the task force had done by reviewing logs from the B-52.
At the air operations center, senior officials were shocked to learn how the top secret operators had bypassed safeguards and used heavy weapons, according to one of the former officials, who reviewed the operation.
No disciplinary action was taken against the task force, the officials said. The secret unit continued to strike targets using the same types of self-defense justifications it had used on the dam.
While the dam was still being repaired, the task force sent a drone over the community next to the dam. As the drone circled, three of the civilian workers who had rushed to save the dam finished their work and piled into a small van and headed back toward their homes.
More than a mile away from the dam, the van was hit by a coalition airstrike, according to workers. A mechanical engineer, a technician and a Syrian Red Crescent worker were killed. The deaths were reported widely in Syrian media sources online, but because the reports got the location of the attack wrong, the U.S. military searched for strikes near the dam and determined the allegation was “noncredible.” The civilian deaths have never been officially acknowledged.
The United States continued to strike targets and its allies soon took control of the region.
The control room of the Tabqa Dam.Credit...Ivor Prickett for The New York Times
John Ismay contributed reporting.
11. Opinion | The Beijing Olympics has become an exercise in genocide denial
I guess Chamath Palihapitiya said the quiet part out loud. Tone deaf? Shameful?
Opinion | The Beijing Olympics has become an exercise in genocide denial
It’s one thing to stay silent about mass atrocities. It’s quite another thing to actively help the oppressors whitewash their crimes. The Winter Olympics beginning next month in China, where the government is committing a genocide against Uyghur Muslims, is turning all of its partners into atrocity deniers before our eyes.
The International Olympic Committee (IOC), which consistently stands with the Chinese government against anyone who speaks up against its human rights violations, insists that the Games are strictly apolitical. But that has never really been the case. Before the 1936 Berlin Games, African American runner Jesse Owens spoke out against the persecution of minorities inside Germany (while he still faced personal racial discrimination at home). By winning four gold medals, he was later said to have “single-handedly crushed Hitler’s myth of Aryan supremacy.”
This year, the Olympics are again being held in a country where mass atrocities against minorities are ongoing. Elisha Wiesel, the son of Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel, told me that every person and organization connected to the Beijing Olympics has a responsibility to avoid complicity in Beijing’s efforts to cover up its barbaric treatment of the Uyghurs. He will echo this call in a speech at a United Nations Holocaust remembrance event next week.
“We must all speak out,” Wiesel told me. “I hope that the corporations which are broadcasting and sponsoring these Olympics — more specifically, the men and women of conscience who work at these corporations — will do whatever they can to back away from the credibility they bestow on a regime whose actions deserve global condemnation.”
Tragically, this week saw several examples of prominent figures and institutions doing exactly the opposite. On Monday, tech billionaire and part-owner of the Golden State Warriors basketball team Chamath Palihapitiya casually asserted during a human rights discussion on his podcast that “nobody cares about what’s happening to the Uyghurs.” He dismissed any claims to the contrary as “virtue-signaling” and described public calls for support of the Uyghurs as “deplorable.”
Beijing has been working hard to pressure any foreigners to shut up about human rights when talking about the Olympics. When it comes to Olympic athletes, that includes direct threats. In a news conference this week, a top Beijing Organizing Committee official said, “Any behavior or speech that is against the Olympic spirit, especially against the Chinese laws and regulations, are also subject to certain punishment.”
On Tuesday, the nonprofit research organization Citizen Lab released a report revealing that the Chinese government has mandated that all Olympics athletes download a “health monitoring” app that is riddled with security vulnerabilities that puts their data and conversations at risk. What’s worse, the app allows users to report “politically sensitive” content; it even includes a “censorship keyword list.” This means any athletes, coaches or journalists who mention Xinjiang or the Uyghurs while in Beijing could find themselves in hot water.
The IOC predictably came to Beijing’s defense. This follows the IOC’s efforts to produce videos used in Chinese propaganda to address concerns about missing tennis star Peng Shuai and the IOC’s refusal to even meet with groups raising awareness about Uyghur forced labor. Bipartisan frustration on Capitol Hill with the IOC’s efforts to help the Chinese government shut down dissent — rather than hold Beijing to account — has reached a boiling point.
A group of eight U.S. House members led by Tom Malinowski (D-N.J.) released a statement on Thursday calling on the IOC to condemn the Chinese officials’ remarks and explain how it plans to protect foreign athletes and journalists if Chinese authorities try to make good on their threats. Reps. Michael Waltz (R-Fla.) and Jennifer Wexton (D-Va.) introduced a bill this week that would remove the IOC’s federal tax-exempt status.
“The corporate partners for the 2022 Genocide Olympics should be ashamed to be associated with the IOC and the [Chinese Communist Party’s] propaganda ploy,” Waltz said.
So far, the corporations don’t seem ashamed at all. Google and Apple put the Chinese government’s flawed app in their app stores without disclosing the risks to users. The Warriors organization distanced itself from Palihapitiya’s comments, but neither he nor the team mentioned the Uyghurs in their subsequent statements. By both action and inaction, they are helping the Chinese government cover up its repression, mainly because it is in their financial interest, said Michael Sobolik, a fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council.
“When your bottom line depends on a genocidal regime, you become a de facto apologist for a genocide,” he said. “The only difference between Chamath, the IOC and companies like Apple is the degree of how brazen they are.”
It may seem expedient now to claim “nobody cares” about the Uyghur genocide. But the actions of the athletes, companies and international organizations at the 2022 Beijing Olympics will be remembered for generations, as they were after the Games in 1936. Each of them — and each of us — must think hard about which side of history we want to be on.
12. What foreign ambassadors really think about Biden’s first year
What foreign ambassadors really think about Biden’s first year
By RYAN HEATH, ALEXANDER WARD and NAHAL TOOSI
01/20/2022 02:38 PM EST
Pick up the phone, they say: “We're talking about 10 f---ing minutes of your time.”
President Joe Biden speaks in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on the White House Campus in Washington, Friday, Jan. 14, 2022. | Andrew Harnik/AP Photo
01/20/2022 02:38 PM EST
When Donald Trump was at the helm, America’s allies were deeply critical of his administration's foreign policies. On the plus side, the freewheeling White House gave them wide-ranging access to top officials.
After one year with President Joe Biden in charge, friendly nations say they’re much happier with U.S. foreign policy, but they’re frustrated by the lack of high-level access and plodding decision-making.
In particular, many feel shut out of the national security policy process — but hope efforts to deter another Russian invasion of Ukraine could mark a turning point.
POLITICO spoke with 19 ambassadors and senior embassy staff serving in Washington, D.C., and hailing from Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America, the Middle East and the Pacific. In nearly unanimous fashion, they described an administration that is more organized and process-driven than the previous one.
While fewer diplomats now have tweet notifications set for White House accounts, the rub is that they feel left out by an administration that takes pains to say it’s deliberate and consultative.
“At the end of the day, what are we talking about? We're talking about 10 fucking minutes of your time,” said one ambassador from a European Union country. “The thing is [Russian Foreign Minister Sergey] Lavrov, he will travel to our country and he will sit down with our guys for an hour, hour and a half. It’s not that we believe everything that Mr. Lavrov says, but if he gives an hour of his time, you will listen to him, you will get his spin.”
But for many large European countries, there’s been a noticeable improvement in the Biden administration’s engagement since the Afghanistan debacle: “They coordinate quite closely, it’s quite successful,” said one ambassador. In fact, more powerful regional countries tend to receive a lot of attention from Biden’s team. “I’ve been spoiled,” said one ambassador from Asia. “More or less, we can have immediate communication.”
The ambassador added that America’s domestic problems and the pandemic limit how much time and energy the administration can spend with all who want attention. “There must be some frustration on the part of smaller countries, but that’s a reflection of the political realities that exist here.”
Officials from smaller nations, mainly in Europe, are getting that message. As one ambassador said of the State Department protocol office: “They’ve done zero. They will say it’s because of Covid, yeah, but guys: come on.”
Others complained the administration isn’t reading them into important decisions, like what was on the table during U.S.-Russia negotiations over Ukraine last week. One official said their government is only getting readouts from public NATO statements.
“We are in some kind of gray zone. We don’t know what they’re saying about us,” the official asserted, adding that “we never felt so insecure as we do now,” and suggesting that other smaller governments in Europe feel the same.
Jens Stoltenberg, NATO’s secretary general, said he is “very grateful” for how the U.S. has worked with NATO “both before the bilateral talks with Russia in Geneva, but also afterwards.” “Deputy Secretary [of State] Wendy Sherman has spent so much time with NATO allies consulting closely,” he added.
For some European countries outside the alliance, that emphasis on close NATO consultation is what stings so badly. “Jake [Sullivan] and Amanda [Sloat] are choosing to communicate through NATO,” complained one European official, referring to the national security adviser and NSC Europe director, respectively.
But EU Ambassador Stavros Lambrinidis lauded the Biden team for “taking the drama out of the relationship,” and noted that “when you bring skin to the game: they listen.”
Speaking on condition of anonymity to allow these foreign officials to speak freely, however, the majority of ambassadors POLITICO spoke with said the Biden administration operates at odds with the president’s well-earned reputation as an empathetic schmoozer.
Top officials, from Joe Biden on down, don’t call often enough or issue the invitations diplomats have come to expect from a friendly White House.
While major regional players such as Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Australia and Japan see Biden and other top officials at major summits, often several months pass in between phone calls. “He should pick up the phone a bit more often,” said one ambassador from a G-7 country.
Smaller countries, meanwhile, are stuck behind a veil of bureaucracy and technocracy, their officials told POLITICO. “This is an administration that says constantly ‘Europe, Europe, Europe’ and what they really mean is Berlin and Paris. And that's all,” said one European ambassador from a midsize country.
A deputy ambassador from Africa said he appreciates that “Biden added back respect into dealings with other countries," and is starting to deliver his global Covid pledges. But he also can't overlook that "there were complications: leaving Africa without vaccines for months, it was frustrating," including only having midlevel administration officials to contact about any concerns. “We have access, but the truth is the heads of countries are still not talking [with the president]." An Africa-U.S. summit is planned later in 2022.
The White House stands by its approach. “President Biden made it a top priority to revitalize our relationships and restore trust in our leadership, and we have worked hard over the past year to do so. We are proud to work alongside like-minded allies and partners on the full range of our priorities and continue to believe that many of our greatest opportunities for progress come from cooperation,” National Security Council spokesperson Emily Horne said.
The NSC also pointed POLITICO to the administration’s success in multilateral forums, including signing up 110 countries to a Global Methane Pledge, steering an effort among 136 countries toward an agreement on a global minimum corporate tax rate, and hosting a Covid vaccine summit.
But for an administration that has called threats to democracy a top diplomatic and national security priority, and which hosted the Summit for Democracy in December, several foreign officials dumped on Biden’s crisis management diplomacy: “They’re definitely underperforming for now,” said one European ambassador.
Permanent catch-up mode
Managing dozens of allies and a few wily adversaries is bound to overfill any diary. Yet POLITICO heard a range of examples from ambassadors about how their first contact on an issue — and sometimes their first contact with the Biden administration, period — came only when the White House needed something.
Spain — the EU’s fourth-biggest power — got its first call from Biden on Aug. 21, after Kabul fell to the Taliban and as the United States was looking for places to temporarily house Afghan evacuees. Until then, all Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez could manage was a corridor walk with Biden during a June NATO summit.
For others, the first call came regarding Huawei’s role in their 5G networks. “If we only get a phone call the day you want us to kick the Chinese out of our 5G network — which under our law is extremely complicated, and we are a country of laws — then how do we do that?” asked one puzzled European ambassador.
Asian governments, predictably, are grateful that successive administrations are spending more time on their region. One Asian ambassador praised the Biden team’s outreach to Indo-Pacific countries, including under the Quad framework, which includes India, Japan, Australia and the United States.
The administration recognizes the need to strengthen ties to China’s neighbors as it faces off on multiple fronts with Beijing, the ambassador said, but is hamstrung by the lack of a trade agenda for the region. Trump withdrew from a Pacific trade deal his predecessor championed, and 15 nations including China pushed ahead with a separate Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership.
“The chief of protocol: I’ve never seen the guy,” said one ambassador.
It’s the face time, stupid
While every ambassador wants to maximize meetings and calls with administration officials, there’s also a U.S. strategic interest: face-to-face engagement could offer dividends when it comes to allies aligning with the U.S. on Russia and China policy.
“If you take your microphone and go on any European street and ask them how much they perceive China as a threat, or about freedom in the South China Sea, they will be like, ‘What the fuck are you talking about?’” said one ambassador. “You need to do some convincing, you have to really work through this.”
Another ambassador told POLITICO that their head of state wanted to sit down for dinner with Biden. The White House, preferring not to expose the president to risk during a pandemic and fearing bad optics of dining in close quarters while he tells Americans to socially distance, told the embassy a meal wasn’t possible.
It’s a missed opportunity, said another ambassador: “We could do it with face masks: these are triple vaccinated people who can get tested the same morning. There are ways to do this, right?”
One sign of the sensitivity around face-to-face engagement is the ministerial gushing when it does happen. “I really appreciate the effort you’ve done in the middle of this Omicron crisis in which contacts are very complicated,” said José Manuel Albares, Spain’s foreign minister, after a meeting with Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Tuesday — as if the administration had only just learned about social distancing.
In the growing competition between democracy and autocracy, allies may have little choice to work with the United States on its schedule and rhythm. But if there’s a lesson from the first year of Biden’s promise that “America’s Back,” it’s that smaller allies feel overlooked, and feel it deeper still when they can’t get anyone to pick up the phone.
In the words of the European ambassador with the potty mouth: “Sometimes an investment of a little bit of time gets you a lot of goodwill.”
13. Totalitarian Paranoia Run Amok: Pandemics, Lockdowns And Martial Law – OpEd
For all the conspiracy theorists. Robin Sage, Jade Helm. All threats to America.
Totalitarian Paranoia Run Amok: Pandemics, Lockdowns And Martial Law – OpEd
By John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead
Once upon a time, there was a government so paranoid about its hold on power that it treated everyone and everything as a threat and a reason to expand its powers. Unfortunately, the citizens of this nation believed everything they were told by their government, and they suffered for it.
When terrorists attacked the country, and the government passed massive laws aimed at paving the way for a surveillance state, the people believed it was done merely to keep them safe. The few who disagreed were labeled traitors.
When the government waged costly preemptive wars on foreign countries, insisting it was necessary to protect the nation, the citizens believed it. And when the government brought the weapons and tactics of war home to use against the populace, claiming it was just a way to recycle old equipment, the people believed that too. The few who disagreed were labeled unpatriotic.
When the government spied on its own citizens, claiming they were looking for terrorists hiding among them, the people believed it. And when the government began tracking the citizenry’s movements, monitoring their spending, snooping on their social media, and surveying them about their habits—supposedly in an effort to make their lives more efficient—the people believed that, too. The few who disagreed were labeled paranoid.
When the government allowed private companies to take over the prison industry and agreed to keep the jails full, justifying it as a cost-saving measure, the people believed them. And when the government started arresting and jailing people for minor infractions, claiming the only way to keep communities safe was to be tough on crime, the people believed that too. The few who disagreed were labeled soft on crime.
When the government hired crisis actors to take part in disaster drills, never alerting the public to which “disasters” were staged, the people genuinely believed they were under attack. And when the government insisted it needed greater powers to prevent such attacks from happening again, the people believed that too. The few who disagreed were told to shut up or leave the country.
When the government started carrying out covert military drills around the country, insisting it was necessary to train the troops for foreign combat, most of the people believed them. The few who disagreed, fearing that perhaps all was not what it seemed, were shouted down as conspiracy theorists and quacks.
When government leaders locked down the nation, claiming it was the only way to prevent an unknown virus from sickening the populace, the people believed them and complied with the mandates and quarantines. The few who resisted or voiced skepticism about the government’s edicts were denounced as selfish and dangerous and silenced on social media.
When the government expanded its war on terrorism to include domestic terrorists, the people believed that only violent extremists would be targeted. Little did they know that anyone who criticizes the government can be considered an extremist.
By the time the government began using nationalized police and the military to routinely lockdown the nation, the citizenry had become so acclimated to such states of emergency that they barely even noticed the prison walls that had grown up around them.
Now every fable has a moral, and the moral of this story is to beware of anyone who urges you to ignore your better instincts and blindly trust that the government has your best interests at heart.
In other words, if it looks like trouble and it smells like trouble, you can bet there’s trouble afoot.
Unfortunately, the government has fully succeeded in recalibrating our general distaste for anything that smacks too overtly of tyranny.
After all, like the proverbial boiling frogs, the government has been gradually acclimating us to the specter of a police state for years now: Militarized police. Riot squads. Camouflage gear. Black uniforms. Armored vehicles. Mass arrests. Pepper spray. Tear gas. Batons. Strip searches. Surveillance cameras. Kevlar vests. Drones. Lethal weapons. Less-than-lethal weapons unleashed with deadly force. Rubber bullets. Water cannons. Stun grenades. Arrests of journalists. Crowd control tactics. Intimidation tactics. Brutality.
This is how you prepare a populace to accept a police state willingly, even gratefully.
You don’t scare them by making dramatic changes. Rather, you acclimate them slowly to their prison walls. Persuade the citizenry that their prison walls are merely intended to keep them safe and danger out. Desensitize them to violence, acclimate them to a military presence in their communities, and persuade them that only a militarized government can alter the seemingly hopeless trajectory of the nation.
It’s happening already.
The sight of police clad in body armor and gas masks, wielding semiautomatic rifles and escorting an armored vehicle through a crowded street, a scene likened to “a military patrol through a hostile city,” no longer causes alarm among the general populace.
We’ve allowed ourselves to be acclimated to the occasional lockdown of government buildings, military drills in small towns so that special operations forces can get “realistic military training” in “hostile” territory, and Live Active Shooter Drill training exercises, carried out at schools, in shopping malls, and on public transit, which can and do fool law enforcement officials, students, teachers and bystanders into thinking it’s a real crisis.
Still, you can’t say we weren’t warned.
Back in 2008, an Army War College report revealed that “widespread civil violence inside the United States would force the defense establishment to reorient priorities in extremis to defend basic domestic order and human security.” The 44-page report went on to warn that potential causes for such civil unrest could include another terrorist attack, “unforeseen economic collapse, loss of functioning political and legal order, purposeful domestic resistance or insurgency, pervasive public health emergencies, and catastrophic natural and human disasters.”
Rounding out this profit-driven campaign to turn American citizens into enemy combatants (and America into a battlefield) is a technology sector that has been colluding with the government to create a Big Brother that is all-knowing, all-seeing and inescapable. It’s not just the drones, fusion centers, license plate readers, stingray devices and the NSA that you have to worry about. You’re also being tracked by the black boxes in your cars, your cell phone, smart devices in your home, grocery loyalty cards, social media accounts, credit cards, streaming services such as Netflix, Amazon, and e-book reader accounts.
In the latest “unconventional warfare exercise,” dubbed “Robin Sage,” special forces soldiers will battle seasoned “freedom fighters” in a “realistic” guerrilla war across two dozen North Carolina counties.
Robin Sage follows on the heels of other such military drills, including Jade Helm, which involved U.S. Army Special Operations Command, the Navy Seals, Air Force Special Operations, Marine Special Operations Command, Marine Expeditionary Units, the 82nd Airborne Division, and other interagency partners.
The training, known as Realistic Military Training (RMT) because it will be conducted outside of federal property, are carried out on both public and private land, with locations marked as “hostile territory,” permissive, uncertain (leaning friendly), or uncertain (leaning hostile).
This is psychological warfare at its most sophisticated.
Add these military exercises onto the list of other troubling developments that have taken place over the past 30 years or more, and suddenly, the overall picture seems that much more sinister: the expansion of the military industrial complex and its influence in Washington DC, the rampant surveillance, the corporate-funded elections and revolving door between lobbyists and elected officials, the militarized police, the loss of our freedoms, the injustice of the courts, the privatized prisons, the school lockdowns, the roadside strip searches, the military drills on domestic soil, the fusion centers and the simultaneous fusing of every branch of law enforcement (federal, state and local), the stockpiling of ammunition by various government agencies, the active shooter drills that are indistinguishable from actual crises, the economy flirting with near collapse, the growing social unrest, the socio-psychological experiments being carried out by government agencies, etc.
And then you have the government’s Machiavellian schemes for unleashing all manner of dangers on an unsuspecting populace, then demanding additional powers in order to protect “we the people” from the threats. Almost every national security threat that the government has claimed greater powers in order to fight—all the while undermining the liberties of the American citizenry—has been manufactured in one way or another by the government.
What we’ve seen play out before us is more than mere totalitarian paranoia run amok.
What has unfolded over the past few years has been a test to see how well “we the people” have assimilated the government’s lessons in compliance, fear and police state tactics; a test to see how quickly “we the people” will march in lockstep with the government’s dictates, no questions asked; and a test to see how little resistance “we the people” will offer up to the government’s power grabs when made in the name of national security.
Most critically of all, this has been a test to see whether the Constitution—and our commitment to the principles enshrined in the Bill of Rights—could survive a national crisis and true state of emergency.
We have failed the test abysmally.
We have also made it way too easy for a government that has been working hard to destabilize to lockdown the nation.
Mark my words, there’s trouble brewing.
The training video is only five minutes long, but it says a lot about the government’s mindset, the way its views the citizenry, and the so-called “problems” that the government must be prepared to address in the near future through the use of martial law.
Even more troubling, however, is what this military video doesn’t say about the Constitution, about the rights of the citizenry, and about the dangers of locking down the nation and using the military to address political and social problems.
The training video anticipates that all hell will break loose by 2030—that’s barely eight short years away—but we’re already witnessing a breakdown of society on virtually every front.
The danger signs are screaming out a message
The government is anticipating trouble (read: civil unrest), which is code for anything that challenges the government’s authority, wealth and power.
What they’re really talking about is martial law, packaged as a well-meaning and overriding concern for the nation’s security.
The chilling five-minute training video, obtained by The Intercept through a FOIA request and made available online, paints an ominous picture of the future—a future the military is preparing for—bedeviled by “criminal networks,” “substandard infrastructure,” “religious and ethnic tensions,” “impoverishment, slums,” “open landfills, over-burdened sewers,” a “growing mass of unemployed,” and an urban landscape in which the prosperous economic elite must be protected from the impoverishment of the have nots.
And then comes the kicker. Three-and-a-half minutes into the Pentagon’s dystopian vision of “a world of Robert Kaplan-esque urban hellscapes—brutal and anarchic supercities filled with gangs of youth-gone-wild, a restive underclass, criminal syndicates, and bands of malicious hackers,” the ominous voice of the narrator speaks of a need to “drain the swamps.”
The government wants to use the military to drain the swamps of futuristic urban American cities of “noncombatants and engage the remaining adversaries in high intensity conflict within.” And who are these noncombatants, a military term that refers to civilians who are not engaged in fighting? They are, according to the Pentagon, “adversaries.” They are “threats.”
They are the “enemy.”
They are people who don’t support the government, people who live in fast-growing urban communities, people who may be less well-off economically than the government and corporate elite, people who engage in protests, people who are unemployed, people who engage in crime (in keeping with the government’s fast-growing, overly broad definition of what constitutes a crime).
In other words, in the eyes of the U.S. military, noncombatants are American citizens a.k.a. domestic extremists a.k.a. enemy combatants who must be identified, targeted, detained, contained and, if necessary, eliminated.
In the future imagined by the Pentagon, any walls and prisons that are built will be used to protect the societal elite—the haves—from the have-nots.
If you haven’t figured it out already, we the people are the have-nots.
Suddenly, the events of recent years begin to make sense: the invasive surveillance, the extremism reports, the civil unrest, the protests, the shootings, the bombings, the military exercises and active shooter drills, the color-coded alerts and threat assessments, the fusion centers, the transformation of local police into extensions of the military, the distribution of military equipment and weapons to local police forces, the government databases containing the names of dissidents and potential troublemakers.
The government is systematically locking down the nation and shifting us into martial law.
This is how you prepare a populace to accept a police state willingly, even gratefully.
As Nazi Field Marshal Hermann Goering remarked during the Nuremberg trials:
It is always a simple matter to drag people along whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. This is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country.
It does indeed work the same in every country.
It’s time to wake up and stop being deceived by government propaganda.
Mind you, by “government,” I’m not referring to the highly partisan, two-party bureaucracy of the Republicans and Democrats.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, I’m referring to “government” with a capital “G,” the entrenched Deep State that is unaffected by elections, unaltered by populist movements, and has set itself beyond the reach of the law. I’m referring to the corporatized, militarized, entrenched bureaucracy that is fully operational and staffed by unelected officials who are, in essence, running the country and calling the shots in Washington DC, no matter who sits in the White House.
Be warned: in the future envisioned by the government, we will not be viewed as Republicans or Democrats. Rather, “we the people” will all be enemies of the state.
V/R
David Maxwell
Senior Fellow
Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Phone: 202-573-8647
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
