On this day in History:
On January 23, 1968, the USS Pueblo, a Navy intelligence vessel, was engaged in a routine surveillance of the North Korean coast when it was intercepted by North Korean patrol boats. According to U.S. reports, the Pueblo was in international waters almost 16 miles from shore, but the North Koreans turned their guns on the lightly armed vessel and demanded its surrender. The Americans attempted to escape, and the North Koreans opened fire, wounding the commander and two others. With capture inevitable, the Americans stalled for time, destroying the classified information aboard while taking further fire. Several more crew members were wounded.
...
On December 23, 1968, exactly 11 months after the Pueblo‘s capture, U.S. and North Korean negotiators reached a settlement to resolve the crisis. Under the settlement’s terms, the United States admitted the ship’s intrusion into North Korean territory, apologized for the action, and pledged to cease any future such action. That day, the surviving 82 crewmen walked one by one across the “Bridge of No Return” at Panmunjom to freedom in South Korea. They were hailed as heroes and returned home to the United States in time for Christmas.
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/uss-pueblo-captured
The USS Pueblo remains the second oldest commissioned ship in the US Navy and it unfortunately remains in Pyongyang, north Korea as a "museum."
Quotes of the Day:
“In the history of the human race, those periods which later appeared as great have been the periods when the men and the women belonging to them had transcended their differences that divided them and had recognized in their membership in the human race a common bond.”
- Haile Selassie, Ethiopian Statesman
“Wise people have an inward sense of what is beautiful and the highest wisdom is to trust this intuition and be guided by it. “
- Aristotle
“Every time we turn our heads the other way when we see the law flouted, when we tolerate what we know to be wrong, when we close our eyes and ears to the corrupt because we are too busy or too frightened, when fail to speak up and speak out, we strike a blow against freedom and decency and justice.”
- Robert F. Kennedy
1. Open Source Intelligence and Uncovering Secrets Hidden in Plain Sight
2. Opinion | Meet the Nuclear Sleuths Shaking Up U.S. Spycraft
3. UK Intelligence Agency Targets China’s United Front
4. Special Forces Train to Kill "Freedom Fighters" with "Liberty" Flags
5. China sits and watches as Russia moves on Ukraine
6. Biden must act now to better arm Ukraine. Here’s what that should look like.
7. A Year of Unforced Errors for Biden in the Middle East
8. Abu Dhabi attack shows talking to Iran is futile
9. FDD | Lawmakers Underscore the Importance of a Plan for Continuity of the Economy
10.U.S.-China Detente Would Pose Its Own Dangers
11. Report puts spotlight on PLA units deployed in South China Sea
12. The Digital Sleuths Exposing Russia’s Military Buildup Near Ukraine
13. China's Covid Victory Over America Turns Out to Be Pyrrhic
14. How Chinese propaganda films became watchable
15. The Army's 'universal vaccine' aims to end all COVID pandemics
16. What the Joe Rogan podcast controversy says about the online misinformation ecosystem
17. Opinion | Biden must show that the U.S. stands ready to support Ukraine, militarily if necessary by Michael Vickers
1. Open Source Intelligence and Uncovering Secrets Hidden in Plain Sight
As you can probably tell from my daily dispatches, I am a great believer in open source information in support of all source intelligence.
Conclusion:
The IC’s core mission is stealing secrets—that will never change. But now is the time for a decisive push to make OSINT an essential intelligence discipline. Open source data living on an unclassified cloud is how we will identify the next pandemic, predict the next outbreak of hostilities, or stop the next disinformation campaign. OSCAR is coming to help.
Open Source Intelligence and Uncovering Secrets Hidden in Plain Sight
Emily Harding is deputy director and senior fellow with the International Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). She joined CSIS from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI), where she was deputy staff director. While working for SSCI, she led the Committee’s multiyear investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 elections. She oversaw the activities of 18 intelligence agencies and led SSCI staff in drafting legislation, conducting oversight of the intelligence community, and developing their expertise in intelligence community matters. She began her career as a leadership analyst at CIA.
OPINION — The intelligence community (IC) has long struggled with the idea of Open Source intelligence, or OSINT. For the last 80 years, it has attempted in fits and starts to incorporate public information in intelligence analysis, never finding the right fit for the collection or the tradecraft. But today, effectively averting strategic surprise means uncovering secrets hidden in plain sight and using IC talent to sort and process them. To get there, we must engage in a radical rework of both the concept of Open Source intelligence and the tools the IC uses to exploit it.
Intelligence agencies were created to discover what adversaries attempt to hide. Generations of leaders thought it best to preserve the IC’s exquisite capabilities for high-risk clandestine and covert operations. They assumed that what policymakers needed from open source, they would get from the Washington Post or cable news.
Remaining stuck in the old model ignores three critical developments in data and analysis. First, the type and quantity of information available in the open domain has expanded dramatically. Analysts can find the VKontakte feed of a Russian operative and the photos a tourist posted on Twitter of that operative visiting, for example, a Cathedral, though decidedly not on vacation. Companies such as Planet, Maxar, and HawkEye 360 have stretched capably into orbit—territory that once belonged only to wealthy nation-states—and provide comprehensive satellite coverage of the planet. All this data is created for commercial or personal use, but it has vast, largely untapped intelligence potential.
Second, unclassified, scalable cloud can house and provide the platform to process all this data in a way the IC has never been able to replicate on internal systems. In the past, the IC has attempted to drag unclassified data onto classified networks, which is slow, expensive, and limited. Continuous upgrades to cloud security and near-infinite scalability mean the IC can ingest data and process it with ease.
Listen to The Cipher Brief’s Open Source Report Podcast – a weekday open source collection of the stories impacting national security with your hosts Brad Christian and Suzanne Kelly. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.
The third critical development is the crux of the revolution: AI/ML tools to process the data. Industry is already gleaning astonishing insights from a combination of publicly available information and AI/ML tools. Today, machines can read, see, write, and think in limited ways. Personal digital assistants such as Siri, Alexa, and Cortana can read and respond to emails, suggest grammar and substantive changes, and sort important emails from spam. Image-recognition algorithms can be trained to identify cats on YouTube or Chinese naval vessels “seen” by unmanned aerial vehicles over the South China Sea. The intelligence community could adapt these tools to comb through images, articles, and reports; build a structured database; and classify the data into categories created by analysts or by the machine itself. Further, unclassified cloud can host commercially-available tools, rather than force existing AI/ML applications to run the molasses-soaked obstacle course of security regulations for approval to work on the high side.
These three critical developments together build a future right out of science-fiction. In the next few years, every intelligence professional can have Iron Man’s JARVIS on their screen, saving hundreds of hours of work a year for nearly every IC employee. We should conceptualize this IC version of JARVIS as “OSCAR”: Open Source, Cloud-based, AI/ML-enabled Reporting.
Our report, “Move over, JARVIS, meet OSCAR,” includes actionable recommendations on how to get from here to a future where OSCAR is real. For example, the IC should embed its security professionals with cloud providers for a short tour to learn about unclassified cloud’s security features. The IC, in conjunction with Congress, should conduct a zero-based review for the software acquisition process. Part of that review should be shifting from statements of work to statements of objectives, which would focus on the needed outcome and allow more vendor innovation. A new policy should force explicit accounting for decisions to build in-house rather than buy software; agencies should have to prove their build is obviously better than commercial offerings based on performance, cost, efficiency, and security. Furthermore, agencies should involve analysts, operators, and support staff in acquisition decisions to ensure a close link between need and purchases. Finally, the IC should retrain acquisition officers on the blistering speed of buying cycles for emerging tech, emphasizing the need to find flexibility in software acquisition contracts.
The IC’s core mission is stealing secrets—that will never change. But now is the time for a decisive push to make OSINT an essential intelligence discipline. Open source data living on an unclassified cloud is how we will identify the next pandemic, predict the next outbreak of hostilities, or stop the next disinformation campaign. OSCAR is coming to help.
Listen to The Cipher Brief’s Open Source Report Podcast – a weekday open source collection of the stories impacting national security with your hosts Brad Christian and Suzanne Kelly. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.
Read more expert-driven national security insights, perspective and analysis in The Cipher Brief
Emily Harding is deputy director and senior fellow with the International Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). She joined CSIS from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI), where she was deputy staff director. While working for SSCI, she led the Committee’s multiyear investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 elections. She oversaw the activities of 18 intelligence agencies and led SSCI staff in drafting legislation, conducting oversight of the intelligence community, and developing their expertise in intelligence community matters. She began her career as a leadership analyst at CIA.
2. Opinion | Meet the Nuclear Sleuths Shaking Up U.S. Spycraft
Yes, the Karber/Georgetown anecdote is a cautionary tale. But we should not use that to discount the importance of open source information.
Conclusion:
The open-source revolution offers tremendous promise for detecting nuclear threats. But peril always rides shotgun with promise. For the CIA and the other 17 agencies of the U.S. intelligence community, this is a moment of reckoning. Secrets once conferred a huge advantage, but increasingly, that advantage belongs to open-source information. To succeed, spy agencies will need to operate differently: giving open-source intelligence much greater focus and attention, harnessing new technologies and tradecraft to improve their own collection and analysis, and understanding that open-source intelligence isn’t just intelligence. It’s an entirely new ecosystem of players with their own motives, capabilities, dynamics and — importantly — weaknesses.
Opinion | Meet the Nuclear Sleuths Shaking Up U.S. Spycraft
Magazine
Opinion | Meet the Nuclear Sleuths Shaking Up U.S. Spycraft
Armed with Internet connections rather than security clearances, scholars, hobbyists and conspiracy peddlers are forcing intelligence agencies to rethink how they do business.
A 1981 Defense Department rendering of the Navstar GPS satellite network. The proliferation of commercial satellites has been key in the expansion of open-source intelligence. | National Archives
Opinion by AMY ZEGART
01/19/2022 04:30 AM EST
In 2011, a former Pentagon strategist named Phillip Karber who was teaching at Georgetown University asked his students to study the Chinese tunnel system known as the “underground great wall.” The tunnel’s existence was well-known, but its purpose was not. Karber’s students turned to commercial imagery, blogs, military journals, even a fictional Chinese television drama to get answers. They concluded the tunnels were probably being used to hide 3,000 nuclear weapons. This was an astronomical number, about 10 times higher than declassified intelligence estimates and other forecasts of China’s nuclear arsenal.
The shocking findings were featured in the Washington Post, circulated among top officials in the Pentagon, and led to a congressional hearing. They were also incorrect.
Experts quickly found egregious errors in the study. A Harvard researcher found that Karber’s students based the 3,000 weapon number on an American intelligence projection from the 1960s, assumed it was accurate, and then just kept adding weapons at a constant rate of growth. Apparently, they did not take seriously more recent declassified intelligence estimates that China probably had no more than 200 to 300 warheads. And Karber’s estimates for the amount of plutonium needed for the weapons were based on sketchy sources using even sketchier ones: The study cited Chinese blog posts that were based on a plagiarized grad school essay from 1996, which in turn relied on a single anonymous post on the site Usenet. The plutonium sourcing was “so wildly incompetent as to invite laughter,” wrote nonproliferation expert Jeffrey Lewis.
This is the radical new world of open-source intelligence — where crises move faster, information is everywhere and anyone can play. Intelligence isn’t just for governments anymore, thanks to three major trends over the past several years: the proliferation of commercial satellites, the explosion of Internet connectivity and open-source information available online, and advances in automated analytics like machine learning. These changes have touched every part of the intelligence landscape. In particular, they’ve given rise to a host of non-governmental detectives who track some of the most serious and secret dangers of all: nuclear weapons.
The world of open-source nuclear sleuthing is wide open to anyone with an Internet connection. It draws people with a grab bag of backgrounds, capabilities, motives and incentives — from hobbyists to physicists, truth seekers to conspiracy peddlers, profiteers, volunteers and everyone in between. Many are former government officials with years in the field, but others are amateurs with little or no experience. There are no formal training programs, ethical guidelines or quality control processes. And errors can go viral; nobody loses their job for making a mistake.
The open-source revolution has been lauded for disrupting and democratizing the secretive world of intelligence. There is no doubt that open-source intelligence is invaluable and that spy agencies must find new ways of harnessing its insights. But the news is not all good. Citizen-detectives also generate risks. From the most obvious risk of getting it wrong, to harder-to-see downsides like derailing diplomatic negotiations by publicly revealing sensitive findings, the U.S. intelligence community needs to pay attention to the potential dangers of open-source intelligence as it adapts its spycraft to the digital age.
Tracking nuclear threats used to be a superpower business, because much of it was done from space and governments were the only ones with the know-how and money to build sophisticated satellites. Today, the commercial satellite industry offers low-cost eyes in the sky to anyone who wants them. Already, 3,000 active satellites orbit the earth; according to some estimates, by 2030, there will be 100,000. While spy satellites still have greater technical capabilities, commercial satellites are narrowing the gap, with resolutions that have improved 900 percent from just 15 years ago. And more satellites mean the same location can be viewed multiple times a day to detect small changes over time, giving a dynamic view of unfolding threats.
Connectivity is changing the spy business, too, turning everyday citizens into intelligence producers, collectors and analysts — whether they know it or not. Each day, millions of people photograph and videotape the world around them to share online. Apps track all sorts of data, including the bars we visit and the places we jog. Community data sharing sites like OpenStreetMap allow users to post their GPS coordinates from their phones. These capabilities offer new clues and tools for non-governmental nuclear sleuths, who can synthesize bits of information to reveal more than anyone imagined was possible.
Technology is also transforming analysis. Downloadable 3D modeling applications make it easy for citizen-sleuths to imagine faraway places with remarkable accuracy. And increases in computing power and available data have spawned machine learning techniques that can analyze massive quantities of imagery or other data at machine speed. For those analyzing nuclear threats, machine learning can help detect changes over time at known missile sites or suspect facilities. In 2017, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency asked researchers at the University of Missouri to develop machine learning tools to see how fast and accurately they could identify surface-to-air missile sites over a huge area in Southwest China. The team developed a deep learning neural network (essentially, a collection of algorithms working together) and used only commercially available satellite imagery with 1-meter resolution. Both the computer and the human team correctly identified 90 percent of the missile sites. But the computer completed the job 80 times faster than humans, taking just 42 minutes to scan an area of approximately 90,000 square kilometers (about three-quarters the size of North Korea).
All of these developments have given rise to an ecosystem of nuclear sleuths that looks very different from the classified world of intelligence agencies. Open-source researchers include academic experts and employees of large multinational corporations that do business around the globe or smaller firms that operate satellites. Others are just private individuals who enjoy scouring the web and sharing their findings with like-minded hobbyists. And some intend to deceive.
This is the Wild West compared to the classified world. In spy agencies, participation requires security clearances and adherence to strict government policies. Analysts come with narrower backgrounds but higher average skill levels. They work inside cumbersome bureaucracies, but have access to training and quality control. While motives in the open-source world vary, in the government the mission is generally uniform: giving policymakers decision advantage. One ecosystem is more open, diffuse, diverse and faster-moving. The other is more closed, tailored, trained and operates much more slowly.
On the positive side, citizen-sleuths provide more hands on deck, helping intelligence officials and policymakers identify fake claims, verify treaty compliance and monitor ongoing nuclear-related activities. They can show that what looks like an ominous nuclear development by an adversarial nation is actually nothing to worry about. For example, open-source researchers demonstrated that a cylindrical foundation in Iran that might have indicated the beginnings of a nuclear reactor was actually a hotel under construction, and that an Israeli television report supposedly showing an Iranian missile launch pad big enough to send a nuclear weapon to the United States was just a massive elevator that resembled a rocket in a blurry image.
Non-governmental nuclear sleuths can also do the opposite: surface clandestine developments that might not otherwise be discovered. In 2012, my Stanford colleagues Siegfried Hecker and Frank Pabian determined the locations of North Korea’s first two nuclear tests using commercial imagery and publicly available seismological information — assessments that proved highly accurate when North Korea revealed the test locations six years later.
Another example came in July 2020 in Iran, when a fire started during the middle of the night with flames so bright, a weather satellite picked them up from space. Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization initially downplayed the fire as a mere “incident” involving an “industrial shed” under construction. The agency even released a photo showing a scorched building with minor damage.
Unconvinced, David Albright and Fabian Hinz, researchers at two different NGOs, began hunting. Using geolocation tools, commercial satellite imagery and other data, each separately concluded the Iranians were lying. The shed was actually a nuclear centrifuge assembly building at Natanz, Iran’s main enrichment facility. The fire was large, almost certainly produced by an explosion, and possibly the result of sabotage.
Albright and Hinz took to Twitter. By 8:00 a.m., the Associated Press was running their analysis. By mid-afternoon, the New York Times was too. By nightfall, as mounting evidence pointed to the possibility of Israeli sabotage, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was asked about it in a press conference. “I don’t address these issues,” he curtly replied.
The entire incident unfolded in a single day. Neither Albright nor Hinz worked in government or held security clearances. The intelligence was collected, analyzed and disseminated without anyone inside America’s sprawling spy agencies. And because it was all unclassified — the researchers didn’t have to worry about protecting intelligence sources and methods — it could be shared, drawing public attention to Iran’s cover-up and forcing questions about Israel’s role.
Because of its many successes, and the appealing notion of democratizing the search for truth, open-source intelligence is frequently discussed with a kind of breathy optimism. “The people’s panopticon: Open-source intelligence comes of age,” declared the Aug. 7, 2021 cover story of The Economist. Bellingcat, the fascinating organization of global volunteer detectives best known for uncovering Russian dirty deeds and Syrian atrocities, personifies this hopeful view of intelligence-for-global-good. Its founder, Eliot Higgins, describes Bellingcat as “an intelligence agency for the people,” an “open community of amateurs on a collaborative hunt for evidence.”
Yet the open-source ecosystem brings risks that are significant and often neglected. Open-source intelligence is easy to get wrong because good analysis takes training. Interpreting satellite imagery, for example, requires considerable skill and experience to know how shapes, shadows, textures and angles can distort or delineate objects seen from directly overhead. And for all the celebration of organizations like Bellingcat, there are other open-source organizations that traffic in shoddy analysis and pet theories, play fast and loose with evidence, and inject errors into the policy debate — sometimes inadvertently, sometimes deliberately.
In 2001, respected British journalist Gwynne Roberts ran a bombshell story in the Sunday Times reporting that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had secretly tested a nuclear weapon back in 1989. Roberts’ three-year investigation began late one night in northern Iraq, when a mysterious visitor calling himself Leone came to Roberts’ hotel room, offering sketches of bomb designs, a photograph of a warhead he claimed Iraq had bought from Russia and details of Saddam’s WMD program. Leone even gave the exact time and location of the alleged nuclear test: Sept. 19, 1989, at 10:30 a.m., at an underground site 150 kilometers southwest of Baghdad.
To report out the tip, Roberts went high-tech, buying commercial satellite images of the test site before and after the claimed date and having them analyzed by Professor Bhupendra Jasani of King’s College London. Jasani’s analysis found all sorts of evidence confirming Leone’s claim, including a wide tunnel running under a lake, exactly as Leone had described, and a railway line with roads leading to a huge rectangular structure — a shaft entrance. Jasani also found evidence of an unusually sensitive military zone, an army base with 40 buildings. “If you wanted to hide something, I guess this is exactly what you would do,” the professor said.
All of it turned out to be wrong, even the smoking gun satellite imagery. Frank Pabian, former chief inspector for the International Atomic Energy Agency in Iraq and one of the Stanford researchers who would later discover the North Korean test site, reviewed the satellite images and found no evidence the area had ever been used to conduct an underground test. The tunnel was actually an agricultural area served by a natural spring. The rail lines were a dual-lane highway. The large rectangular structure was an irrigated field, and the military zone was actually just two conventional ammunitions storage facilities and some typical storage bunkers. Pabian and forensic seismologist Terry Wallace also found extensive seismological evidence that further discredited the Sunday Times story.
Still, Roberts’ investigation appeared on BBC, where a write-up can still be found online, uncorrected — years after additional evidence showed conclusively that Saddam tried but never succeeded in developing a nuclear bomb. Leone and his motives remain a mystery.
That’s just the honest mistakes. The non-governmental intelligence ecosystem also increases the risks of deliberate deception. In fact, it’s already happened. In 2015, an Iranian dissident group calling itself the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) tried to derail international negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program by claiming that a company named Matiran was housing a secret nuclear facility in its Tehran office basement. NCRI’s evidence included satellite imagery of the secret facility as well as photographs of its hallways and a large lead-lined door to prevent radiation leakage.
Within a week, Jeffrey Lewis’ team at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies showed that all of this evidence was fabricated, including photographs of the lead door — which turned out to be copied from an online promotional photograph of a warehouse that had nothing to do with illicit nuclear activities. Matiran was a real company, all right, but it wasn’t building nuclear weapons in its basement. It specialized in making secure documents like national identification cards. In this case, expert open-source detectives were able to detect the hoax. But the fake imagery could just as well have deceived other sleuths working quickly, lacking specialized training, and primed to see satellite imagery and other publicly available data as evidence of the truth hiding in plain sight.
Matiran was a relatively low-tech deception operation. The rise of social media and advances in artificial intelligence are making deception easier to pull off and harder to detect. Russia’s interference in the 2016 American presidential election included widespread use of phony social media accounts, sowing divisions and seeking to tilt the outcome of the election. Meanwhile, advances in artificial intelligence have given rise to “deepfakes,” or digitally manipulated audio, photographs and videos that are highly realistic and difficult to authenticate. Deepfake application tools online are now widely available and so simple to use, high school students with no coding background can create convincing forgeries.
It isn’t hard to see how these technologies could be used to manipulate people eagerly searching the Internet for evidence of clandestine nuclear activities. Using cheap satellite imagery, deepfakes and weaponized social media, foreign governments — or their proxies, or just individuals looking to make trouble — will be able to inject convincing false information and narratives into the public debate. Imagine a deepfake video depicting a foreign leader secretly discussing a nuclear weapons program with his inner circle. Although the leader issues vehement denials, doubt lingers — because seeing has always been believing and nobody can be completely sure whether the video is real or fake.
Even truthful information can be dangerous in the open-source world — making adversaries wise to weaknesses in their camouflage and concealment techniques, or making crises harder to manage for diplomats and officials. In 2016, Dave Schmerler, another researcher at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, was able to measure the size of North Korea’s first nuclear device (called a “disco ball”) and locate the building where it was photographed by using objects in the room as telltale markers. The next North Korean photo of a warhead was taken in a completely white room with nothing to measure. Whether Schmerler’s research prompted the change is impossible to know. But in the world of intelligence, any time new monitoring methods are revealed, countermeasures are likely to follow, making future monitoring more difficult. Short-term intelligence gains revealed by well-meaning private citizens could unwittingly generate far greater losses in the long term.
Revealing accurate information can also escalate international crises by forcing action too soon and making it harder for each side to walk away with a win. In moments of crisis and sensitive negotiations, policymakers rely on useful fictions to buy time and save face, giving one or both sides a way out. When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, the CIA began arming the Afghan Mujahideen. The Soviets knew it, and the Americans knew the Soviets knew. But the fiction kept a proxy war from becoming a superpower war with the potential for nuclear escalation. Fig leaves can be useful.
But the more third parties generate transparency, the harder it is for leaders to wield these useful fictions to manage conflict. Imagine a Cuban missile crisis unfolding today. An open-source sleuth discovers the Soviet nuclear buildup by analyzing commercial satellite imagery and tweets about it. Now both President Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev are backed against the wall, publicly. The pressure is intense for both to take forceful action.
The two key ingredients to resolving the actual Cuban missile crisis in 1962 weren’t speed and openness — which is what open-source intelligence provides — but time to think and secrecy to compromise. Kennedy and his advisers had 13 days to weigh their options. Their declassified deliberations show that had Kennedy been forced to decide immediately, he would have opted for an air strike that could well have led to nuclear war. Secrecy, too, proved pivotal, giving Kennedy and Khrushchev room to compromise and ultimately resolving the crisis with a missile trade so closely held, nobody knew about it for the next two decades. It’s easy to imagine how well-meaning “fact-checking” in real time by non-governmental nuclear sleuths could have derailed that agreement, escalating a superpower standoff already teetering on the brink of global nuclear war.
The open-source revolution offers tremendous promise for detecting nuclear threats. But peril always rides shotgun with promise. For the CIA and the other 17 agencies of the U.S. intelligence community, this is a moment of reckoning. Secrets once conferred a huge advantage, but increasingly, that advantage belongs to open-source information. To succeed, spy agencies will need to operate differently: giving open-source intelligence much greater focus and attention, harnessing new technologies and tradecraft to improve their own collection and analysis, and understanding that open-source intelligence isn’t just intelligence. It’s an entirely new ecosystem of players with their own motives, capabilities, dynamics and — importantly — weaknesses.
3. UK Intelligence Agency Targets China’s United Front
Good for the UK. I think we have to go public in pushing back against the United Front Department (UFD) because the public is one of the most target audiences and the most important target for undermining political systems in democratic counties. (and of course domestic political issues are easily exploited by the UFD and in some cases those domestic issues do not even need any help from the UFD).
Excerpts:
With formidable obstacles standing in the way of tough political action, the intelligence services seem to have decided to speed up the process of exposing China by taking matters into their own hands, with the support of the speaker of the Parliament. The press were delighted to have another scandal to fill their pages, alongside the “partygate” saga, which might unseat the British prime minister.
UK Intelligence Agency Targets China’s United Front
Spymasters in the U.K. and other countries are going public in their push against CCP influence.
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The intelligence services of the British government harnessed the power of the media to try to protect the state from Chinese interference.
In an almost unprecedented move, MI5 – the agency focused on counterintelligence within the U.K. – chose to call out an alleged Chinese spy, whom it said has been making payments to politicians.
The warning about Christine Ching Kui Lee, a solicitor who runs a law firm in London, was accompanied by her photograph, which ensured that her face appeared prominently across websites and social media, even though she was not arrested nor charged with any crime. Excited journalists jumped in to add new twists to the story. The next day the papers were filled with a great deal of comment and analysis – alongside plenty of hearsay and speculation.
A key allegation is that Lee donated 420,000 British pounds ($572,000) to a senior Labor member of parliament, Barry Gardiner, who employed her son, Daniel Wilkes, as a member of his parliamentary staff.
MI5 warned that anyone contacted by Lee “should be mindful of her affiliation with the Chinese state and remit to advance the CCP’s agenda in UK politics.”
The warning was issued in the form of an alert which was sent by MI5 to the speaker of the House of Commons, Lindsay Hoyle, who chose to forward it to all MPs – ensuring immediate press attention.
In his memo, Hoyle said: “I am writing now to draw your attention to the attached Interference Alert issued by the Security Service, MI5, about the activities of an individual, Christine Lee, who has been engaged in political inference activity on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party, engaging with members of parliament and associated political entities, including the former APPG (All Party Parliament Group) Chinese In Britain.”
Hoyle said Lee’s donations were made in a covert way in order to mask the origins of the payments. “This is clearly unacceptable behaviour and steps are being taken to ensure it ceases,” he added.
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The Chinese embassy in London said in a statement that China did not interfere in the internal affairs of other countries. In Beijing, foreign ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said China has “no need” to engage in “so-called interference activities.”
“Perhaps, some people, after seeing too many James Bond movies, are imagining links where there is none. It is deeply irresponsible to make unfounded sensational remarks based on subjective conjecture,” Wang said.
Gardiner – the MP at the center of the scandal – said he was “angry and distressed” that he was targeted and insisted the donations were used to fund research and did not benefit him personally.
However, some journalists uncovered examples of Gardiner’s pro-Chinese position on sensitive issues, including his support for Chinese investment in Britain’s nuclear power industry.
The Times newspaper also revealed that Christine Lee spoke up publicly in favor of the Chinese Communist Party’s clampdown on the pro-democracy demonstrations in Hong Kong. The newspaper added that she was involved in a fundraising event for the British Conservative Party, which is led by beleaguered Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
“This case underlines the fact that China poses a serious and insidious threat to our democracy and we must ask our politicians, academics and journalists to be vigilant of CCP effort to buy influence and other forms of infiltration,” Steve Tsang, the director of the SOAS China Institute at the University of London, told The Diplomat.
Tsang added, “China’s efforts to influence Western democracies have focused on cultivating members of parliament, especially where a new arrival or a leading figure in an opposition party looks as though may be on track to become a minister of state at a later stage.”
Similar efforts by the Chinese government to gain influence have been uncovered in Australia.
“While all the facts are still out, this case has echoes of similar episodes in Australia: donations to political parties and politicians from Chinese citizens and CCP-associated Australian citizens with the intention of generating pro-China statements and policy positions,” noted Dr. Bates Gill, professor of security studies at Macquarie University in Sydney.
“However, Australia and the UK are not alone in this. The United Front Work Department is actively cultivating politicians and opinion-shapers around the world,” said Gill, who is also a senior associate fellow with the Royal United Services Institute in London.
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In the United States, intelligence agencies have been taking an increasingly high-profile position on China. In 2018, the U.S. Justice Department unveiled its “China Initiative,” meant to counter thefts of trade secrets and other forms of economic espionage conducted by – or for the benefit of – the Chinese government. FBI Director Christopher Wray said that the bureau was opening a new China-related counterintelligence case about every 10 hours.
“Beginning under President Trump and continuing under President Biden, the United States has launched a highly public all-of-government effort to push back on Chinese influence and espionage activities,” Gill said. “This has included sharp scrutiny of university research programs, the closure of the PRC consulate in Houston, and – as in the UK – designating Chinese media outlets as agents of the PRC.”
In 2020, the U.K. government expelled three Chinese citizens who had been working in Britain on journalists’ visas, claiming that they had been involved in espionage.
Those expulsions were conducted discreetly but since then, spymasters from the U.K.’s intelligence services appear to have been encouraged by their well-resourced U.S. counterparts in becoming more public when voicing their concerns about China.
In December 2021, Richard Moore, the head of MI6, said that the rise of China was the single greatest priority of his foreign intelligence agency. He claimed that Beijing was conducting espionage activities against the U.K., with a focus on government and people involved in the technology sector.
Moore also said that Chinese state agents “monitor and attempt to exercise influence over the Chinese diaspora.”
According to Tsang of SOAS, “Under Xi Jinping, China now demands members of the Chinese diaspora to be loyal to mother China.” But he cautioned that “it would be wrong to see a Communist Party agent in every ethnic Chinese, as most overseas Chinese ignore Xi and support democracy. I fear a backlash against them will enable the Communist Party to recruit agents.”
In the United States, for example, the China Initiative has come under fire as a race-based witch hunt, subjecting ethnic Chinese researchers to a drawn-out legal ordeal based on little evidence. In the first case to go to trial, a judge acquitted the defendant of all charges, and the DOJ recently dropped charges in another highly publicized case against a scientist based at MIT. A letter signed by 177 members of the faculty at Stanford University urged the DOJ to “terminate the China Initiative,” warning that “it is harming the United States’ research and technology competitiveness and it is fueling biases that, in turn, raise concerns about racial profiling.”
Gill also warned against alienating ethnic Chinese. “In my view, members of the Chinese diaspora are more often the targets of CCP influence activities and in that sense [they] know better than most how to resist the pressure,” he said.
In terms of press coverage of U.K. politics, another scandal has taken precedence over accusations against Christine Lee and MI5’s concerns about Chinese influence.
The media is transfixed by Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s attempts to cover-up parties held at his official residence, 10 Downing Street, during the coronavirus lockdown. After weeks of bad publicity, there is now an open revolt within the Conservative party. Several members have called on Johnson to resign and one former supporter has defected to the opposition Labor side.
The turmoil will inevitably delay Parliament from agreeing on complex legislation relating to the role of lobbyists, or a reform of the Official Secrets Act to make it easier to prosecute foreign spies.
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With formidable obstacles standing in the way of tough political action, the intelligence services seem to have decided to speed up the process of exposing China by taking matters into their own hands, with the support of the speaker of the Parliament. The press were delighted to have another scandal to fill their pages, alongside the “partygate” saga, which might unseat the British prime minister.
4. Special Forces Train to Kill "Freedom Fighters" with "Liberty" Flags
The ignorance of one of the US Army's longest training traditions is astounding but not surprising. I am sure no amount of education will change the candidate's mind as the truth will not support his agenda. But he needs to be properly informed.
Special Forces Train to Kill "Freedom Fighters" with "Liberty" Flags
U.S. Special Forces candidates participate in Robin Sage training exercise.
The U.S. Army this month is conducting another round of a regular exercise designed to prepare Special Forces candidates. But is it, in reality, intended to prepare military personnel to crush a homegrown resistance to tyrannical government?
The “guerrilla warfare exercise” in North Carolina trains troops to combat “freedom fighters” in a scenario that resembles a Civil War in America more than a foreign conflict.
The “unconventional warfare exercise” is taking place from January 22 to February 4 on privately owned land in a remote, unknown location.
“Called Robin Sage, the exercise serves as a final test for Special Forces Qualification Course training and it places candidates in a politically unstable country known as Pineland,” the Charlotte Observer reported.
“These military members act as realistic opposing forces and guerrilla freedom fighters, also known as Pineland resistance movement,” said the U.S. Army John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center.
The Army provided the media with information about the exercise to avoid civilians confusing the sounds of the drill with actual terror attacks or warfare, as has happened before.
“It will be realistic enough to include the sounds of gunfire (blanks) and flares,” the center said.
Writer Chis Menahan notes that a similar Robin Sage exercise in 2019 showed resistance fighters displaying a flag that says “liberty.”
“They could tell these soldiers they’re battling the Chinese, Russians, Iranians, North Koreans or other foreign enemies but instead they have them training to kill ‘freedom fighters’ with ‘Liberty’ flags,” Menahan writes.
“To add realism of the exercise, civilian volunteers throughout the state act as role players. Participation by these volunteers is crucial to the success of this training, and past trainees attest to the realism they add to the exercise,” the Kennedy Special Warfare Center added.
The fictional Pineland covers 25 counties in North and South Carolina: Alamance, Anson, Bladen, Brunswick, Cabarrus, Chatham, Columbus, Cumberland, Davidson, Guilford, Harnett, Hoke, Lee, Montgomery, Moore, New Hanover, Randolph, Richmond, Robeson, Rowan, Sampson, Scotland, Stanly, Union, and Wake.
While it should be noted that Robin Sage is not new, but has been around for decades, recent events raise the question: Is the training’s true purpose to prepare troops for the possibility of having to shoot fellow Americans?
Such a dark ulterior motive would go hand-in-hand with the rhetoric currently being used by Democrats, the media, and the executive branch under Joe Biden.
Earlier this month, the Justice Department created a new “specialized unit focused on domestic terrorism” in response to an “elevated” threat from supposed extremists in the U.S.
Assistant Attorney General Matthew Olsen, testifying just days after the nation observed the one-year anniversary of the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, said the number of FBI investigations into suspected domestic violent extremists has more than doubled since the spring of 2020.
“We have seen a growing threat from those who are motivated by racial animus, as well as those who ascribe to extremist anti-government and anti-authority ideologies,” Olsen said.
The events of January 6, 2021 have been used as grounds to build a powerful narrative under which Republicans, conservatives, and supporters of President Trump are not only “terrorists,” but fascists and authoritarians who intend to destroy “democracy” in America.
The “domestic terrorist” label has even been applied to parents of school-age children who have tried to make their voices heard at school board meetings. As The New American reported, Attorney General Merrick Garland issued a memorandum directing the FBI to collaborate with federal, state, and local law enforcement to probe and potentially prosecute parents for “harassing,” “intimidating,” and “making threats of violence” against school-board members.
The DOJ also encouraged the public to report the “threats” to the FBI’s National Threat Operations Center (NTOC).
There’s another side to the Left’s narrative that Trump supporters, even those who weren’t at the Capitol on January 6, are “insurrectionists.” Democrats hope to use that label to disqualify their political opponents from holding public office on grounds of the 14th Amendment, which reads:
“No person shall … hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any state, who, having previously taken an oath … to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same.”
If the Left achieves its aims, they’ll not only neuter the right politically, but be empowered to wipe off resistance at gunpoint.
Luis Miguel
Luis Miguel is a writer whose journalistic endeavors shed light on the Deep State, globalism, and the enemies of freedom. Follow his exploits on Facebook, Twitter, and Parler at @LuisMiguelUS. Contact at luisantoniomiguel.com.
5. China sits and watches as Russia moves on Ukraine
Excerpts:
In a little more than a decade, Russia broke up Georgia, stopped the jasmine revolution in Syria and secured its naval base there, annexed Crimea, sent troops to Libya and Africa, supported Armenia against Azerbaijan, and “took over” Kazakhstan. This can’t go on forever.
Europe is getting scared, including Germany, which had been willing to appease. If Ukraine falls, the Baltics and Poland are next, and Germany goes back to being on the frontline.
On the other hand, if Beijing supports Moscow in handling NATO, it doesn’t necessarily mean Russia will reciprocate in the near future. There are mutual suspicions, and the diverging interests in the face of Ukraine show the deep fissures in the “alliance.”
China can afford to sit back and watch, but Putin’s Russia might be overstretching. Reawakening NATO in the West and giving China cold feet brings Russia back to the strategic isolation it evaded for two decades.
In about twenty years American hyper-activism in Central Asia and the Middle East progressively irked many supportive allies. Now, the whole Eurasian game is changing and Russia and China may have different priorities here.
China sits and watches as Russia moves on Ukraine
If Russia is concentrated on Europe it could leave more room for China to consolidate power in Asia
The geopolitical continuity of the Eurasian continent is millennia old. It harks back to Indo-Europeans spreading to Europe and South Asia, from the Eurasian heartland to the Huns, the Turks, and the Mongols roaming around the huge landmass following their strategic goals.
It is a constant pattern, until recently when the Soviets stoked fire in Asia—in the 1950s war in Korea and only a little later in the war in Vietnam, first against the French then against the Americans—to distract the West from the main theater in Europe.
Perhaps the same is happening now with Ukraine.
Will China get entangled in a low- or high-intensity war in Ukraine along with Russia? Would Russia support China if it decided to move on Taiwan or in the South China Sea? Would the two countries coordinate parallel attacks on Taiwan by China and Ukraine by Russia to divert American attention?
Ties between Russia and China are not easy or straightforward. China, for centuries, has been wary of strategic threats coming from the north. Invasions or just pressure from the northern nomadic and semi-nomadic populations have been a main concern since the establishment of agricultural societies in the Yellow River basin.
Since its westward drive in the 18th century, Russia has been pushing against the power in Beijing, and after the fall of the USSR, has been worried that semi-deserted Siberia could be taken over by dynamic and overpopulated China from the south.
They fought one last border war in the early 1970s, and in 1979, when China attacked Vietnam, Moscow supported Hanoi.
Still, the two countries know each other well, have an old tradition of mutual dealings, and felt drawn together by the separate pressures coming from the United States and its allies to the east and west in the past decade.
Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin pose for a family photo at the 11th BRICS leaders summit in Brasilia, Brazil, in 2019. Photo: Sputnik / Ramil Sitdikov
Moreover, despite all its old concerns about Russia, China is buying over US$400 billion of gas from Russia, brought in through new pipelines. The agreement didn’t go forward for years because the two sides were haggling over the price. Then it became a strategic move.
China started feeling that the American navy could cut off its maritime routes, so the Russian supply lines became strategically very important. This gas deal, of course, works both ways. It is vital for Russia, too, especially if the Russian-European pipeline Nord Stream 2 doesn’t come to full fruition because of the growing attrition in Europe.
This month, Russia “regained control” over Kazakhstan, which was improving ties with the US. Therefore, it solved a problem for Beijing, worried that Kazakhstan could become a base for destabilization in Xinjiang.
On the other hand, Beijing may be watching how the situation in Ukraine is playing out. If the US shows weakness there, Beijing might get the message that America is not willing to draw a line with Russia and maybe not even with China.
On the other hand, if the US or the West gets bogged down in a conflict in Ukraine, then Beijing may think that Washington is distracted from the Asian front.
Different Asias
Furthermore, if Russia is concentrated on Europe, this leaves more room in Asia for China. Still, Russia’s agenda in Asia is specific. Greater Russian involvement in Central Asia means less breathing space for China, although Beijing botched many Central Asian moves.
Moscow has traditionally good ties with Hanoi and New Delhi, both Beijing’s adversaries, who have recently grown closer to Japan, Australia, and America.
These may not be the only differences.
Russia wants to push NATO as far back as it can to recover an old Soviet space, but China has little to do with this. Russian actions are reviving NATO, which was almost a zombie-like institution. It could be a necessary price for Moscow, but for Beijing?
Why should it align itself against NATO, when there are Europeans who were previously reluctant to engage against China but could become more eager if they see China siding with Russia? Then bringing back from the dead a military alliance that could also be used against China, when it was in slumber until a few months ago, is not good news for China.
The Russian troops around Ukraine are facing a distracted Europe that was still dreaming of becoming a giant Switzerland, independent but neutral, until a few weeks ago.
A Russian soldier takes aim along the Ukrainian border. Photo: Facebook
In a little more than a decade, Russia broke up Georgia, stopped the jasmine revolution in Syria and secured its naval base there, annexed Crimea, sent troops to Libya and Africa, supported Armenia against Azerbaijan, and “took over” Kazakhstan. This can’t go on forever.
Europe is getting scared, including Germany, which had been willing to appease. If Ukraine falls, the Baltics and Poland are next, and Germany goes back to being on the frontline.
On the other hand, if Beijing supports Moscow in handling NATO, it doesn’t necessarily mean Russia will reciprocate in the near future. There are mutual suspicions, and the diverging interests in the face of Ukraine show the deep fissures in the “alliance.”
China can afford to sit back and watch, but Putin’s Russia might be overstretching. Reawakening NATO in the West and giving China cold feet brings Russia back to the strategic isolation it evaded for two decades.
In about twenty years American hyper-activism in Central Asia and the Middle East progressively irked many supportive allies. Now, the whole Eurasian game is changing and Russia and China may have different priorities here.
This story first appeared on the Settimana News website and is republished with permission. To see the original, please click here.
6. Biden must act now to better arm Ukraine. Here’s what that should look like.
Excerpts:
Putin should see American and other NATO cargo aircraft landing every few hours, offloading defensive weapons that will make any new invasion of Ukraine increasingly costly. These flights should stop only when Russian troops temporarily deployed near Ukraine’s borders return to their permanent garrisons.
Beyond weapons, Washington should also provide Ukraine with actionable battlefield intelligence, something the United States did not do following Russia’s 2014 aggression against Ukraine. In addition to enabling Ukrainian forces respond more quickly to a Russian offensive, such intelligence could also help Ukrainians disperse ahead of incoming air or missile strikes, as Dara Massicot of the think tank Rand has noted.
She also rightly argues that Washington should consult with Kyiv “on dispersal plans for Ukrainian air defenses” and on “hardening plans for other critical facilities,” which “will almost certainly be primary and early targets for Russian strikes.”
An authoritarian bully is threatening a beleaguered democracy. Fundamental democratic principles and national security interests are on the line. In a joint op-ed in 2014, the top Democrat and Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee called on the Obama administration to provide “weapons to help Ukraine’s troops defend their nation.” That was the right bipartisan policy then, and it is the right bipartisan policy now.
Momentum is building again in Congress to help Kyiv better defend itself in light of Putin’s impending potential invasion of Ukraine. Let’s hope President Biden listens and acts — fast.
Biden must act now to better arm Ukraine. Here’s what that should look like.
Hoping to prevent a Russian offensive, U.S. President Joe Biden has tried offering Moscow a diplomatic offramp while warning that a renewed Russian invasion would trigger harsh Western sanctions, a strengthened force posture on NATO’s eastern flank and a dramatic increase in U.S. defense assistance to Ukraine. That assistance could include support for a potential Ukrainian insurgency against Russian occupation forces.
Unfortunately, these warnings alone may well fail to deter Putin. Moscow has gone to considerable lengths to reduce the Russian economy’s vulnerability to sanctions. Putin likely expects that Western countries will forgo their toughest sanctions options if push comes to shove, fearing blowback on their own economies, and Moscow will surely seek to play on divisions within the trans-Atlantic alliance to weaken the Western response. Putin may also bet that Biden’s expressed desire to focus on other issues, such as China and the climate, will eventually impel the administration to seek an accommodation with Russia.
Moscow may further calculate that it can accomplish its political aims without a prolonged and costly occupation, instead using standoff strikes and a limited ground operation to force Kyiv to accept Russian suzerainty, and that similar military options would be more costly in the future.
In short, Putin may conclude that the long-term strategic benefits outweigh the costs and risks and that the time is ripe for action.
Some may ask why Americans should care. To be clear, a large-scale Russian offensive would spell disaster not only for Ukraine and Europe but for U.S. interests and credibility as well. It could be the largest military action in Europe since World War II, potentially killing thousands of Ukrainians, destabilizing Europe by sending millions more flooding westward, and harming the global economy as energy prices surge and markets react to a war in Europe.
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“We’re now at a stage where Russia could at any point launch an attack in Ukraine,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Tuesday.
An unstable Europe forced to contend with an aggressive and revisionist Russia will be less capable of joining the United States in addressing other major international challenges, such as the increasingly aggressive behavior of China.
More broadly, supporting Ukraine is about defending the post-war rules-based order in Europe that has been so beneficial to Americans and our European allies.
Putin has paired his troop buildup with demands that Washington and its allies accede to a Russian sphere of influence over neighboring countries, including by forswearing potential Ukrainian membership in NATO. Moscow’s efforts represent a direct challenge to the core principles underlying the existing security order in Europe, which Putin seeks to replace with a might-makes-right model whereby Russia is free to bully its smaller neighbors. Such a system would render Europe — home to top U.S. allies and trading partners — less secure, less prosperous and less free.
Moreover, advocates for an increased U.S. focus on China and the Indo-Pacific region should be extremely concerned that a weak U.S. response in Ukraine could undermine efforts to deter Chinese aggression against Taiwan or elsewhere. The time and resources the U.S. would be forced to spend on security challenges in Europe is an important reminder that it is cheaper to deter aggression than deal with its aftermath.
So what’s to be done?
The first step is to recognize that time may be running out. The situation around Ukraine is growing increasingly dire. Russian forces continue to flow toward Ukraine, including into neighboring Belarus, adding to the roughly 125,000 troops already perched on Ukraine’s borders and in illegally occupied Crimea and Donbas. Meanwhile, Moscow has begun withdrawing diplomatic personnel and their families from Ukraine, and U.S. and Ukrainian intelligence warn that Russia is laying the groundwork for potential false-flag attacks that Moscow could use as a pretext to attack Ukraine. The White House warns that Russian forces are now prepared to attack “at any point,” and that the offensive could begin between mid-January and mid-February.
Second, the Biden administration should do now what it should have done in November when indications of an invasion emerged: Move with a sense of urgency to provide Kyiv with additional defensive weapons and other support. The goal should be to help Ukrainian forces survive Russia’s initial air and missile assault, and to make clear to Putin that Russian forces would suffer major losses during an invasion and potential follow-on occupation.
Following pressure from Congress, the Biden administration reportedly has authorized America’s Baltic allies to rush U.S.-made weapons such as Javelin anti-tank missiles and Stinger man-portable air defense systems to Ukraine. The administration itself will begin shipping $200 million worth of Javelins, ammunition, medical supplies and other materiel to Ukraine in the coming days and weeks.
Unfortunately, the administration has dragged its feet, losing valuable time. The $200 million aid package lingered on the president’s desk for weeks over the administration’s fears of “provoking” Russia.
Much like with the Obama administration in 2014, Biden’s hesitation stems from a desire to avoid provoking Putin, based on a misdiagnosis of how the Kremlin leader views concessions. Biden should fully reject that flawed approach and take urgent steps to better arm Ukraine now — before the invasion occurs. Admittedly, some of these efforts will take time, but there are opportunities to expedite delivery.
To help Ukrainian forces defend against low-flying Russian aircraft, Washington should look to provide Kyiv with additional man-portable air defense systems — U.S.-made Stingers or perhaps Grom systems from Poland — as well as counter-UAV capabilities.
Assistance should also include armed drones, long-range counter-artillery radars, electronic warfare capabilities, anti-ship capabilities, and anti-tank and naval mines, for example. The U.S. Harpoon and U.K. Brimstone systems are potential candidates.
If the United States is unable or unwilling to provide these capabilities, Washington should unambiguously signal support for allies to do so and should facilitate their efforts. In addition, Washington and its allies should help ensure Ukraine’s armed forces have sufficient ammunition, including by providing access to U.S. and NATO stockpiles in Europe as needed. And all equipment originally destined for Afghan forces should be immediately diverted to the Ukrainian military.
Putin should see American and other NATO cargo aircraft landing every few hours, offloading defensive weapons that will make any new invasion of Ukraine increasingly costly. These flights should stop only when Russian troops temporarily deployed near Ukraine’s borders return to their permanent garrisons.
Beyond weapons, Washington should also provide Ukraine with actionable battlefield intelligence, something the United States did not do following Russia’s 2014 aggression against Ukraine. In addition to enabling Ukrainian forces respond more quickly to a Russian offensive, such intelligence could also help Ukrainians disperse ahead of incoming air or missile strikes, as Dara Massicot of the think tank Rand has noted.
She also rightly argues that Washington should consult with Kyiv “on dispersal plans for Ukrainian air defenses” and on “hardening plans for other critical facilities,” which “will almost certainly be primary and early targets for Russian strikes.”
An authoritarian bully is threatening a beleaguered democracy. Fundamental democratic principles and national security interests are on the line. In a joint op-ed in 2014, the top Democrat and Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee called on the Obama administration to provide “weapons to help Ukraine’s troops defend their nation.” That was the right bipartisan policy then, and it is the right bipartisan policy now.
Momentum is building again in Congress to help Kyiv better defend itself in light of Putin’s impending potential invasion of Ukraine. Let’s hope President Biden listens and acts — fast.
Bradley Bowman is the senior director of the Center on Military and Political Power at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, where John Hardie is a research analyst and Jack Sullivan is a research associate.
7. A Year of Unforced Errors for Biden in the Middle East
A Year of Unforced Errors for Biden in the Middle East
Neo-isolationist trends raise troubling questions about the future of the U.S. commitment to order in the region.
(Photograph by Win McNamee/Getty Images.)
One year into his presidency, Joe Biden endeavors to pivot away from the Middle East. The Middle East simply won’t let him. Like his predecessors, the president continues to struggle with the right approach to this important and perilous region. To date, many of Biden’s approaches have amounted to unforced errors. A number of them are likely to haunt him.
Afghanistan: Though the country is not technically not part of the Middle East, Biden’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan last year continues to impact how states in that region view America’s role in their neighborhood. The botched sequencing of the withdrawal was the primary focus (removing military assets before political assets). But the fact that the U.S. described the Taliban terrorist group as a “partner” in its retreat sent shockwaves around the world. Moreover, the Arab states and Israel cannot help but note that a ragtag, untrained army forced a superpower to flee under duress. Admittedly, the Taliban had help from state sponsors (notably Pakistan and Iran). However, the neo-isolationist trends in American politics that ultimately justified the embarrassing and unceremonious end to this American war effort raises troubling questions about the future of the U.S. commitment to the order it established in the Middle East. It’s also worth remembering that the defeat of the Soviet army at the hands of the mujahedeen in 1989 inspired Osama bin Laden (and his Palestinian partner Abdullah Azzam) to leverage the Islamist fighters (who believed that theirs was a divine victory) to create the al-Qaeda terrorist network. Whether we witness a resurgence in Islamist terrorism as a result of Biden’s Afghanistan disaster remains to be seen.
Iran: In the wake of the Afghanistan debacle, the region is nervously watching as the White House signals its intent to completely capitulate to the clerical regime in Tehran at the negotiating table in Vienna. The administration’s determined effort to rejoin the deeply flawed nuclear agreement of 2015 at any cost has yielded too much leverage to the world’s most prolific state sponsor of terrorism. While the negotiations have not yet concluded, it appears that the regime will walk away having legitimized a number of its alarming advances toward a nuclear weapon, with the Biden administration demanding fewer restrictions and granting tens of billions of dollars in sanctions relief as remuneration for a weaker deal. The White House is aware of the terrible optics. The concerns are even more acute in light of the fact that most of Iran’s nuclear expansion occurred after Biden’s election. This was the result of Biden’s decision to reverse “maximum pressure” to what can only be described as “maximum deference.” Rumors are now swirling that the White House has sought out a high-priced public relations firm to handle the fallout. In the meantime, officials are doing their best to blame the Trump administration for whatever terrible deal is reached, citing Trump’s hasty exit from the nuclear accord in 2018. Try as they may, whatever deal is struck will be Biden’s to own. Right now, the chances are high that Iran pockets American concessions and still makes a dash for a bomb.
Saudi Arabia: In the early days of the Biden administration, the White House took a series of steps to deliberately alienate Riyadh. Biden pulled support for the Saudi-led war against the Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen, delisted the group as a foreign terrorist organization, and then released information implicating crown prince Mohammed Bin Salman (MBS) in the brutal murder of Jamal Khashoggi at the hands of Saudi operatives in 2018. These moves were all counterproductive. The Saudis are leading the only military effort to halt the dangerous Houthi advances in Yemen. The group is undeniably a terrorist group, as evidenced by a subsequent sanctions imposed by this administration on individual leaders of the Houthis. And while the Saudis should be lambasted for Khashoggi’s killing, the information released about MBS was not new; it was an obsequious nod to the “progressive” wing of the Democratic Party that has labored to vilify Saudi Arabia. All three moves only served to drive a wedge between Riyadh and Washington. The Houthis continue to sow terror throughout the region, with a recent drone attack on the UAE capital of Abu Dhabi. Meanwhile, by deliberately injecting tensions into its relationship with Riyadh, the White House has squandered an opportunity to broker a valuable normalization agreement between Saudi Arabia and Israel. Given Saudi Arabia’s status as guardian of the two holiest sites in Islam, such an agreement would almost certainly inspire others in the Arab and Muslim worlds to follow suit.
Israel: The Israelis were truly thankful for Biden’s support during the Gaza War in May 2021. Biden blocked efforts to vilify the Israelis at the United Nations, and delivered the right messages at home to support Israel’s operations against Iran-backed Hezbollah. However, two days before the conflict ended, Biden’s rhetoric shifted dramatically. He blamed Israel for not bringing about a swifter end to the conflict, even though he knew an Egyptian-brokered ceasefire was imminent. Once again, Biden was trying to score points with the hard left of his party. Since then, with a change in government in Israel, the administration has worked hard to build a solid foundation with new Prime Minister Naftali Bennett. However, the lack of American resolve to remain engaged in the region, coupled with the looming Iran nuclear deal, leave many Israeli questions unanswered about the reliability of its most important ally.
Competing with China: Amid all of this, the administration has placed significant pressure on Israel to dial back on its commerce with Beijing. Specifically, the White House wants Israel to halt the sale of technology that could be exploited by the Chinese for military purposes. Israel has taken significant steps to do exactly that. But the administration is not holding the rest of the Middle East to the same standards. The foreign ministers of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, and Bahrain, and the secretary-general of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) all visited China recently for talks designed to take trade and security cooperation to the next level. The Biden White House has not mounted a meaningful response. Nor has it done anything to disrupt the 25-year strategic partnership worth $400 billion between Iran and China, signed in March of last year. If anything, the sanctions relief that the White House seeks to offer Tehran in the Vienna negotiations will only boost the value of this pact.
Global crises loom: China is eyeing an invasion of Taiwan. Russia has amassed troops around Ukraine. North Korean missiles are flying. A lack of American deterrence (the credible threat of a military response), as conveyed by the Biden White House, has likely contributed to these crises. Strong American leadership in response to these crises could help convey a sense of calm in other regions, such as the Middle East. A lack of American leadership will only lead to further destabilization. How the Biden administration tackles these challenges in 2022 could have immense consequences for his presidency, not to mention the political and military trajectory of the broader Middle East.
8. Abu Dhabi attack shows talking to Iran is futile
Excerpts:
This is probably what happened in the attack on the UAE: Iranian agents in Yemen commanded the attack and operated the drones, the Houthis took credit.
Another possible Iranian motive behind the attack on Abu Dhabi could have been the humiliation that Tehran suffered after a number of mysterious bombings hit the country over the weekend. In retaliation, Iran decided to drag the UAE into the conflict, despite Abu Dhabi’s efforts to stay out and maintain good neighbourly ties with Tehran.
Tehran has a long history of losing friends. The regime’s decision to turn on the UAE at such a moment might be one that the Islamic republic will come to regret in the future.
Abu Dhabi attack shows talking to Iran is futile | Hussain Abdul-Hussain | AW
The regime’s decision to turn on the UAE at such a moment might be one that the Islamic republic will come to regret in the future.
Thursday 20/01/2022
When the UAE held talks with the Iranian regime last month, things appeared to go as well as could be expected. National Security Advisor Sheikh Tahnoun bin Zayed landed in Iran on December 6 and invited President Ebrahim Raisi to visit Abu Dhabi next month.
But instead of returning the goodwill, Iran’s militia in Yemen, the Houthis, responded this week with an attack on civilian targets in the UAE’s capital. The strikes, which included the use of weaponised drones, targeted a fuel storage depot, killing three people and injuring six more. The attacks also caused a fire near Abu Dhabi airport.
Tehran’s about face from dialogue to drone warfare proves that President Joe Biden, with his mantra that “only talking” to Iran can bring regional stability, is terribly wrong. Like most other rogue states, the only diplomacy that works with Iran is the old-fashioned version described by President Theodore Roosevelt as “speak softly and carry a big stick.”
Emirati dialogue with Tehran did not protect the UAE from Houthi attacks because Iran views global affairs as a zero sum game that has no place for neutral players or gray areas. In its showdown with America and Israel, Tehran wants governments in the region to pick sides and suffer consequences if they go against Iran.
Cognisant of the escalating tension between Iran and Israel, and aware that its growing peace with the Jewish state might be seen as closing the door on Iran, Abu Dhabi sent Sheikh Tahnoun to Iran with a clear message: the UAE plans to sit out any possible military confrontation between Israel and Iran. While Abu Dhabi might have favourites, it will keep its choices to itself and will not give either side a hand.
Iran seemingly approved of the UAE’s message and tried to use the trip as a photo opportunity to signal to other regional capitals that Tehran is the new sheriff in town and that other Gulf governments must court and befriend the regime.
Iranian antagonism towards the UAE, however, might not only be about regional politics.
The successful Emirati model is the antithesis of the Islamist government that Iran preaches. In the UAE, peace, meritocracy and a knowledge economy have given millions of Emiratis and expatriate residents the opportunity to live, thrive and prosper. On the contrary, the Iranian model is about war, killing, coercion and religious fundamentalism. In the Iranian model, there is no place for countries that want to live and let live.
Tehran, therefore, wanted to remind the UAE that while its model is successful, it is also vulnerable to wars. And because Tehran is gifted in starting conflicts and spreading destruction, it wants the UAE to know that Abu Dhabi must take Tehran’s side against Washington, or suffer the consequences.
The weakness of the Biden administration has aggravated the problem. Biden’s ideological and unrealistic foreign policy has invited Iran to bully its neighbours, a behavior that Tehran never dared to show after the Donald Trump administration killed the Iranian commander Qassem Soleimani.
Evidence substantiating the argument that Tehran ordered the strike against the UAE is the technology used in the attack: Initial reports suggest Iranian-made explosive drones and possibly ballistic missiles. Pro-Iran militias are rarely allowed to operate such technology without Iranian supervision, or at least permission.
Past behaviour of the pro-Iran militias gives further clues on how the Iranian chain of command works. In Lebanon, for example, Iran’s Hezbollah enjoys full independence on domestic policies. But when it comes to regional conflagrations, Iran calls the shots.
During the early years of the Syrian war, Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah repeatedly denied that the conflict was taking place. Sources close to the party’s leadership said that the pro-Iran militia planned to sit out the war. Iran, however, ordered Hezbollah in.
Like in Lebanon, also in Iraq, Tehran has often overruled its proteges on regional issues. On domestic issues, Iran lets its militias decide their moves.
When militias need support, Iran is usually happy to oblige, like in the explosive drone attack that targeted Prime Minister Mustafa Al-Kadhimi in Baghdad. Only two airports offered the airstrip required for the drones to take off. One is in southern Iran, the other on the Iraqi border with Syria. Both bases are controlled by the Iranian regime, yet the attack was claimed by the pro-Iran militias.
This is probably what happened in the attack on the UAE: Iranian agents in Yemen commanded the attack and operated the drones, the Houthis took credit.
Another possible Iranian motive behind the attack on Abu Dhabi could have been the humiliation that Tehran suffered after a number of mysterious bombings hit the country over the weekend. In retaliation, Iran decided to drag the UAE into the conflict, despite Abu Dhabi’s efforts to stay out and maintain good neighbourly ties with Tehran.
Tehran has a long history of losing friends. The regime’s decision to turn on the UAE at such a moment might be one that the Islamic republic will come to regret in the future.
9. FDD | Lawmakers Underscore the Importance of a Plan for Continuity of the Economy
Excerpts:
The federal government must identify ways in which it can support, not inhibit, these other stakeholders to prevent and respond to threats. The administration should focus on providing national-level perspective and, where needed, funding to enable effective joint action among private and public entities.
A cyberattack can occur at any time, making it imperative for the president to act without further delay. The clock is ticking.
FDD | Lawmakers Underscore the Importance of a Plan for Continuity of the Economy
fdd.org · by Samantha Ravich CCTI Chairman · January 21, 2022
January 21, 2022 | Policy Brief
In two separate letters last month, members of Congress urged President Joe Biden to develop a strategy for creating and implementing a Continuity of the Economy (COTE) plan, which would aim to ensure the renewal of the U.S. economy following a significant cyberattack. However, while Section 9603 of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021 gave the administration two years to devise a strategy for developing this plan, a year has already passed and the president has yet to act.
The letters — one from Sen. Angus King (I-ME) and Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI), who serve as co-chairs of the Cyberspace Solarium Commission (CSC), and the other from Rep. Andrew Garbarino (R-NY), who serves as ranking member of the Cybersecurity Subcommittee of the House Homeland Security Committee — question the Biden administration on this lack of progress.
The Gallagher-King letter notes that “the key to resilience” is the ability “to restart [the U.S. economy] rapidly, and the only way to restart rapidly is to have a clear plan in place.” Garbarino expressed his frustration that “no visible action has been taken” in beginning the COTE planning process.
The Gallagher-King letter mirrors the recommendations of the CSC, which has long emphasized national resilience as a critical plank in the framework of layered cyber deterrence. The ability to quickly recover from cyberattacks against U.S. economic and military power will help deter U.S. adversaries from launching them. A COTE plan also tells “our adversaries that we, as a society, will survive to defeat them with speed and agility if they launch a major cyberattack against us,” the CSC wrote in its flagship March 2020 report.
Both letters stress the immediate need to assign a U.S. agency to lead this critical task. In particular, the lawmakers identify the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency due to its connectivity to the private sector. Over 85 percent of U.S. critical infrastructure is privately owned, meaning that the cyber resilience at the heart of a COTE plan is dependent on public-private collaboration.
Much of the work to implement the details of a COTE plan will thus occur at the state and local level. The federal government should leverage systems and programs already in place instead of working toward developing a new plan on its own. The U.S. government has unique intelligence capabilities to understand current threats, but private companies and state and local governments better understand the specific needs of their regions. They are in the best position to prioritize resources that ensure the continuity of the economy after a large-scale, cross-sector cyberattack.
The federal government must identify ways in which it can support, not inhibit, these other stakeholders to prevent and respond to threats. The administration should focus on providing national-level perspective and, where needed, funding to enable effective joint action among private and public entities.
A cyberattack can occur at any time, making it imperative for the president to act without further delay. The clock is ticking.
Dr. Samantha F. Ravich serves as chair of the Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation (CCTI) at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), where Cara Cancelmo is a program analyst. For more analysis from the authors and CCTI, please subscribe HERE. Follow FDD on Twitter @FDD and @FDD_CCTI. FDD is a Washington, DC-based, nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
fdd.org · by Samantha Ravich CCTI Chairman · January 21, 2022
10. U.S.-China Detente Would Pose Its Own Dangers
Excerpts:
Washington and its allies can redefine collective security commitment to include nonmilitary domains such as cyberattacks and economic coercion. Chinese aggressions in the so-called gray zone are designed to test the resolve of collective defense. In particular, trade coercion and supply chain disruptions, if are not explicitly covered in the security treaties, could weaken the basis of collective security in an era when economy and security are inexorably intertwined. China has repeatedly shown its willingness to use such tools. Responses to these threats do not have to be military, either—proportional, targeted measures would prevent unconventional conflicts from spiraling out of control, as would expressly including these in security treaties. As with traditional military threats, deterrence functions when there is a solid assumption of reciprocity.
China on its part should not pursue hegemony over Asia by weakening U.S. alliances. China’s Zhou Enlai, who spearheaded the Japan-China Joint Communique in 1972, accepted the U.S.-Japan alliance, including its coverage of Taiwan; he believed a U.S. presence was an impediment to the resurgence of Japan’s militarism. Beijing should realize that its neighbors will not accept its version of the Asian order, which will likely resemble a mix of traditional Asian suzerainty and the 19th-century Concert of Europe—a hierarchical structure that overshadows sovereign equality, and where nationalism and liberalism are squashed for the sake of stability.
U.S.-China Detente Would Pose Its Own Dangers
Beijing’s neighbors are ready to take steps to protect themselves.
By Taehwa Hong, a research assistant at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.
There’s been a lot of attention paid to the danger of intensifying U.S.-China competition, and to ways to reduce tensions. However, a poorly executed detente presents its own risks to international security, creating an unstable situation in East Asia that could spiral into its own disaster.
Right now, both domestic U.S. and international opposition to Chinese aggression seemingly preclude a detente, but the possibility is still there. If the escalating tension in the Taiwan Strait and South China Sea lead to a crisis that falls short of a military conflict and is resolved without a clear and definitive settlement, the chances of a U.S.-China detente, mirroring the U.S.-Soviet detente after the Cuban missile crisis, will grow. The possibility of war can—rightly—scare both sides, but this may also not lead to a stable peace.
Already the economic costs of confrontation and technological decoupling are pushing business and political leaders to advocate a modus operandi of defusing the tension. Other areas of possible cooperation might drive a push for de-escalation. A majority of Americans and allied populations, especially in Europe, consider climate change a top national security threat—and there are regular calls for compromise with China to address this issue. America’s current mood of isolation and retrenchment adds to the possibility of detente.
There’s been a lot of attention paid to the danger of intensifying U.S.-China competition, and to ways to reduce tensions. However, a poorly executed detente presents its own risks to international security, creating an unstable situation in East Asia that could spiral into its own disaster.
Right now, both domestic U.S. and international opposition to Chinese aggression seemingly preclude a detente, but the possibility is still there. If the escalating tension in the Taiwan Strait and South China Sea lead to a crisis that falls short of a military conflict and is resolved without a clear and definitive settlement, the chances of a U.S.-China detente, mirroring the U.S.-Soviet detente after the Cuban missile crisis, will grow. The possibility of war can—rightly—scare both sides, but this may also not lead to a stable peace.
Already the economic costs of confrontation and technological decoupling are pushing business and political leaders to advocate a modus operandi of defusing the tension. Other areas of possible cooperation might drive a push for de-escalation. A majority of Americans and allied populations, especially in Europe, consider climate change a top national security threat—and there are regular calls for compromise with China to address this issue. America’s current mood of isolation and retrenchment adds to the possibility of detente.
It’s not difficult to imagine what this could look like on the U.S. side. Washington and Beijing could agree on an informal division of influence within the so-called first island chain along the eastern edge of Asia. The United States could reduce troops in the region or revise alliance treaties to limit the scope of security guarantees, and such decisions could coincide with the host country’s domestic political situation, as demonstrated by the threatened termination of the Visiting Forces Agreement with the Philippines in 2020. The join initiatives of Japan, India, Australia, and the United States—known together as the Quad—could be restricted to nonmilitary dimensions.
Whatever the specifics, the perception of the detente would be shaped by China’s own concessions, such as toning down its rhetoric against Taiwan or reducing its military presence in the South China Sea. But, realistically, none of Beijing’s offers will alter its position as the dominant regional power relative to its neighbors. Without a fundamental shift in either China’s aspirations or capability, a premature detente could well be perceived by allies as a quasi-abandonment of the region. And unlike the United States, there are commitments—like revanchism over Taiwan—that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) simply cannot surrender without risking domestic political crisis. Washington’s regional commitments, however long-standing, would be much easier to abandon politically.
Despite the common notion that East Asia is Washington’s priority theater, the fear of abandonment remains tangible. During the Trump administration’s negotiations with North Korea, South Korea and Japan were anxious that a grand bargain—where North Korea dismantled its intercontinental ballistic missiles targeting the U.S. mainland and some nuclear weapons in return for reduced U.S. presence in the peninsula—could entail their abandonment.
A perceived U.S. withdrawal could trigger a wave of ultranationalism, precipitating an arms race, potentially even a nuclear one. Given China’s and its neighbors’ incompatible ideologies, coupled with Beijing’s authoritarian vision for the regional order, East Asian countries are likely to balance against, rather than bandwagon with, China.
Calls for nuclear armament are already growing in South Korea, especially among conservatives. Japan’s postwar Peace Constitution will likely be untenable in the context of perceived U.S. withdrawal.
Analysts often point to the economic interdependence between China and its neighbors. However, growing anti-China sentiment across the region could align the foreign-policy elite and the population’s drive for large-scale armament, even at its economic costs. The trade conflict between South Korea and Japan in 2019, resulting from a wave of intense nationalism, demonstrates how such sentiments might overwhelm economic rationales, especially when combined with a sense of existential threat from China.
Granted, the original U.S.-China detente in the 1970s had exactly the opposite effect. It produced thaws across the Bamboo Curtain in East Asia. In 1972, the two Koreas produced the “July 4th North-South Joint Statement,” the first of its kind. China and Japan normalized diplomatic relations the same year. However, the situation is dramatically different today.
In 1972, South Korean President Park Chung-hee temporarily abandoned his anti-communist hard line for inter-Korean reconciliation, primarily because he feared a total U.S. withdrawal. He was concerned that not playing along with Washington’s peace initiatives could accelerate withdrawal of U.S. forces from South Korea. He also sought to use the nominal thaw to buy time to prepare South Korea, then an impoverished nation, against a potential North Korean invasion. Lastly, Park hoped to strengthen the legitimacy of his regime, a military dictatorship, by adopting his leftist political rivals’ dovish position on inter-Korean affairs.
From the onset of the 1950s, Japanese elites sought reconciliation with China. Domestic business interests, along with growing socialist voices, favored improved relations with China so much that by the 1970s, even the conservative Liberal Democratic Party campaigned on pledges for reconciliation. Most importantly, Beijing at the time had neither the intent nor the capacity to pursue unrivaled hegemony in the region, particularly in the presence of the Soviet Union—its biggest perceived threat. China was even willing to push aside territorial contentions and Japan’s wartime atrocities for diplomatic normalization. In fact, Japanese Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka concluded that normalizing relations with Beijing provided a “stronger security guarantee than having an Asian NATO.”
In 2022, however, the landscapes have changed radically. Seoul is ready to boost its already expanding military programs in the event of a U.S. withdrawal. The tensions in the Taiwan Strait and South China Sea constantly remind the South Korean foreign-policy establishment of two cold truths: that they could get trapped into an unwanted conflict and that South Korea might not be a strategic priority in the broader competition between the great powers. Now one of the world’s largest economies, Seoul is likely to engage in independent military buildup.
Domestic South Korean politics is also moving in the opposite direction than in 1972. It is telling that the outgoing Moon Jae-in administration faces piercing criticisms for a supposedly supine stance toward Beijing. Some conservatives advocate requesting Washington redeploy tactical nuclear weapons—which were removed in 1991 as the Cold War drew to a close—to the peninsula to elicit Beijing’s cooperation in denuclearizing North Korea. Former U.S. President Donald Trump’s tenure has already created a rare consensus among conservatives and progressives that a strong national military should bolster the South Korean-U.S. alliance, rather than excessively relying on Washington. A further sign of U.S. retrenchment or abandonment is highly likely to kick-start discussions of weapons development, particularly after the May 2021 termination of the U.S.-South Korea Ballistic Missile Range Guidelines that prohibited Seoul’s acquisition of missiles over a range of greater than 800 kilometers (about 500 miles).
Japan has maintained surprisingly strong ties with China despite its role in the Quad and the U.S.-led alliance system. Economic interdependence is at the crux of the relations; belying calls for Western decoupling from China, Japanese companies such as Toyota are adding major investments there. Despite the hawkish factions within their cabinets and party, both former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and his successor Yoshihide Suga, who has also since left office, pursued a warm policy toward China. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, Abe had invited Xi Jinping for his first visit to Japan as the CCP’s general secretary. However in the face of increasingly aggressive China, Japan is intensifying cooperation with India and Vietnam, including a potential trilateral forum in the Indo-Pacific.
In August 2021, Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party held a 2+2 meeting with Taiwan’s Democratic Progressive Party, infuriating Beijing. Japan has been the most vocal Asian country in criticizing China’s actions in Xinjiang and Hong Kong. Ultimately, a warm China policy is strictly conditioned upon the premise that the U.S.-Japan alliance remains intact, an indispensable precondition for the 1972 normalization. A U.S.-China detente in which Japan felt betrayed would reshape Tokyo’s calculations. Having already expanded its defense budget beyond the informal guideline of 1 percent of GDP, Japan is likely to embark on a more assertive, if not military, move at the sign of a dangerous U.S.-China compromise.
Unlike Europe, which has promoted arms control—at least locally—since the end of World War II, Asia is traditionally unfamiliar with collective arms control. In fact, China’s neighbors have records of mobilizing their economies for national security interests. The miracle of South Korea’s economic success stemmed from a focus on heavy industry, initially intended to foster the defense industry to boost its military against North Korea.
Hostile China-Russian relations, the pillar of the original detente, has been replaced with a close partnership bordering on an outright alliance. In 2022, China’s neighbors perceive substantial Chinese threats to their territorial integrity. Chinese advances in the Yellow Sea, along with its saber-rattling over the uninhabited islands known as the Senkakus in Japan and the Diaoyu in China, suggest the security fear is far from hypothetical. A report compiled by the Republic of Korea Army in March 2020 singled out the People’s Liberation Army Northern Command as the largest security threat to the peninsula. Then-Japanese Deputy Prime Minister Taro Aso asserted last year that “Okinawa could be next” after China’s bid to take over Taiwan. A poorly managed U.S.-China detente in 2022 would likely generate intense security competition.
This is not to say that Washington and Beijing should push for a military clash. Rather, the United States should ensure that its allies’ interests and concerns are reflected in any agreements signed with China. For example, signing comprehensive trade agreements with China when steel and aluminum tariffs on U.S. allies are in place could send the wrong message. Ceasing joint military exercises without consultation with allies—as Trump did after his summit with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un in 2018—would amplify fears of Washington’s intent.
Accommodating Beijing’s technological influence in such areas as 5G mobile infrastructure, as advocated by some business interests both in the United States and across Asia, will in the long term render U.S. allies hostage to weaponized dependence. Washington has previously signed deals with adversaries that disregard its allies’ interests; it defied Israel and Gulf partners’ protests to sign the Iran nuclear deal in 2015, and it ignored Indian and European concerns when signing the Doha agreement with the Taliban in 2020. This should not be the case when dealing with China.
U.S. allies should enhance cooperation among themselves, including with partners that lack a formal security treaty with Washington, and built interoperable forces. In particular, South Korea and Japan should strengthen ties not only to anchor the United States’ presence in the region but also to devise a security structure that can cushion any adverse impact of a U.S.-China compromise that does not reflect their interests. Washington should proactively mediate between the two allies over the historical issues that have caused bitterness between Seoul and Tokyo, preventing them from pursuing urgent geopolitical cooperation.
Washington and its allies can redefine collective security commitment to include nonmilitary domains such as cyberattacks and economic coercion. Chinese aggressions in the so-called gray zone are designed to test the resolve of collective defense. In particular, trade coercion and supply chain disruptions, if are not explicitly covered in the security treaties, could weaken the basis of collective security in an era when economy and security are inexorably intertwined. China has repeatedly shown its willingness to use such tools. Responses to these threats do not have to be military, either—proportional, targeted measures would prevent unconventional conflicts from spiraling out of control, as would expressly including these in security treaties. As with traditional military threats, deterrence functions when there is a solid assumption of reciprocity.
China on its part should not pursue hegemony over Asia by weakening U.S. alliances. China’s Zhou Enlai, who spearheaded the Japan-China Joint Communique in 1972, accepted the U.S.-Japan alliance, including its coverage of Taiwan; he believed a U.S. presence was an impediment to the resurgence of Japan’s militarism. Beijing should realize that its neighbors will not accept its version of the Asian order, which will likely resemble a mix of traditional Asian suzerainty and the 19th-century Concert of Europe—a hierarchical structure that overshadows sovereign equality, and where nationalism and liberalism are squashed for the sake of stability.
11. Report puts spotlight on PLA units deployed in South China Sea
Excerpts:
The 33-page report provides up-to-date and comprehensive research on China’s solid military presence on the islands and features in the South China Sea.
Zachary Haver, China defense analyst at Recorded Future and the author of the report, said it took him almost four months of dedicated research using a diverse set of open-source materials to complete the report.
“The biggest difficulty was identifying the PLA units,” he said, “as the Chinese authorities are usually very careful about protecting their identities, especially in sensitive areas like the South China Sea.”
China began fundamentally reorganizing the PLA around 2015, according to Haver, and deployed a significant number of new forces to the South China Sea over the past decade.
“Moving forward, the PLA will likely continue building its capacity to carry out combat operations in the South China Sea, surveil foreign ships and aircraft operating in the region, and perform joint rights defense and rescue operations with China’s maritime law enforcement and maritime militia forces,” the report concludes.
Report puts spotlight on PLA units deployed in South China Sea
The Chinese military occupies the entire Paracels archipelago and at least seven features in the Spratlys.
New units of People’s Liberation Army have been established and existing ones upgraded over the past decade to man outposts in the South China Sea, leaving China’s military better positioned to project power in the region, according to a new report.
It identifies and analyzes nine specific PLA units, mostly in the Paracel Islands that China calls Xisha, giving details of their duties, facilities and assets.
China claims sovereignty over most of the South China Sea and has been engaged in territorial disputes with several neighboring countries.
Military duties
The Chinese military occupies the entire Paracels archipelago and at least seven features in the Spratlys, with the number of troops stationed there estimated at more than 10,000, according to the report.
The PLA units “are responsible for defending China’s outposts in the Spratly Islands and Paracel Islands,” it says, listing duties such as “operating radar installations, ensuring airfield support for aviation forces, training and commanding maritime militia forces, implementing engineering projects, supporting the launch and orbital management of spacecraft, and providing air defense.”
These army units also “actively participate in military-civil fusion programs, including engaging in joint operations and exercises with civilian forces, drafting regulations with civilian authorities, and coordinating the construction and use of physical infrastructure with civilian entities.”
With the main focus on the protection of China’s maritime and territorial claims, the units have received sizable funding and grown rapidly over the past decade.
“In recent years, the PLA has generally played a background role in China’s strategy to consolidate control over the South China Sea, providing a deterrent cover for frontline maritime law enforcement and maritime militia operations,” the report says.
But thanks to the development efforts, it is now much “better situated to defend China’s maritime and territorial claims… project power within and beyond the first island chain, control access to vital sea lines of communication… or engage the United States in a conflict over the status of Taiwan.”
The 33-page report provides up-to-date and comprehensive research on China’s solid military presence on the islands and features in the South China Sea.
Zachary Haver, China defense analyst at Recorded Future and the author of the report, said it took him almost four months of dedicated research using a diverse set of open-source materials to complete the report.
“The biggest difficulty was identifying the PLA units,” he said, “as the Chinese authorities are usually very careful about protecting their identities, especially in sensitive areas like the South China Sea.”
China began fundamentally reorganizing the PLA around 2015, according to Haver, and deployed a significant number of new forces to the South China Sea over the past decade.
“Moving forward, the PLA will likely continue building its capacity to carry out combat operations in the South China Sea, surveil foreign ships and aircraft operating in the region, and perform joint rights defense and rescue operations with China’s maritime law enforcement and maritime militia forces,” the report concludes.
12. The Digital Sleuths Exposing Russia’s Military Buildup Near Ukraine
More open source information.
Excerpts:
In May 2020, Putin signed a decree that forbids Russian soldiers from carrying smartphones while on duty, a direct response to the huge embarrassment Moscow suffered after hundreds of posts by troops active in the military campaigns in eastern Ukraine in 2014 and 2015.
But analysts at CIT remain upbeat about the prospects of keeping track of Russia’s troop movements as the risk of an escalation continues to rise.
“Since the beginning of January, a whole wave of videos and social media posts has surfaced showing that troops are moving,” CIT founder Ruslan Leviev told Current Time. “And local residents, for whom this is unusual, are of course documenting it all.”
But Leviev, a long-time open-source investigator who has riled Russian authorities and reported being attacked near his home in Moscow by unknown assailants in 2019, warns that the scale of Russia’s buildup does not bode well.
“Russia tried to justify itself, saying these are just exercises,” he said of the deployments to Belarus. “But experience shows that exercises can easily turn directly into real military operations.
The Digital Sleuths Exposing Russia’s Military Buildup Near Ukraine
(RFE/RL) — As Russia has moved tens of thousands of troops toward its border with Ukraine in recent months, hinted of an armed response if NATO does not acquiesce to its demands, and announced large military exercises in Belarus, the sheer scale of its mobilization has been hard for Moscow to downplay or deny.
The reason: Unlike in decades past, experts say the surveillance tools available today make it impossible for a modern army to stage a major logistical operation without alerting the global community. And often, the alarm bells are rung by a network of dedicated sleuths who are first to unearth evidence on the ground.
When Russia announced the joint exercises on the territory of its staunch ally Belarus this month, it was analysts from the Conflict Intelligence Team (CIT), an open-source investigative outlet, that filled in the gaps left by a lack of clarity from Moscow, revealing credible estimates that some 8,000 to 15,000 troops were involved and placing the West further on edge.
“Many soldiers and their relatives are writing in social media that they’re being sent to Belarus for training,” Kirill Mikhailov, a CIT analyst, told Current Time on January 19. “The fact that those forces will now be added is a pretty serious sign.”
An investigation by CIT and RFE/RL’s Russian Service, published this week, provided further evidence of movement of Russian forces westward across the country, toward Belarus and Ukraine.
Information of this sort is crucial for Western governments preparing a possible response to any invasion Russia may stage in coming months. And CIT is not the only outfit helping them piece things together. Amateur sleuths and open-source investigators working for private organizations and NGOs are tracking Russia’s mobilization 24/7, trawling social media platforms and compiling commercial satellite imagery to deliver evidence about what’s going on.
One of these invaluable sources is Maxar Technologies, a commercial satellite and imaging company that has exposed Russia’s growing buildup on its border with Ukraine and in Crimea. Since late November, it has supplied the world’s leading outlets with images attesting to a Russian buildup that Moscow can no longer plausibly deny.
Increasingly Untenable Denials
When Russia sent forces to seize control of Crimea from Ukraine in February 2014, its actions were accompanied by repeated denials — including from President Vladimir Putin — that the so-called “little green men” patrolling Ukrainian Army bases on the Black Sea peninsula are actually regular Russian troops.
Later, when it fomented an armed uprising by Moscow-backed separatist forces in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, it came down to journalists operating on the ground to supply evidence that the troops and equipment sent to shore up the insurgency came from Russia.
Fast forward eight years and the quality of satellite imagery, as well as the ubiquity of revealing social media posts, means such denials have become increasingly untenable and it has become far easier for Western analysts and digital activists to debunk them.
And while the use of open-source intelligence is by no means new, the price of acquiring satellite and flight-tracking data has plummeted in recent years, markedly expanding the number of citizens who can gain access to such information and publish what they find online.
What they find, very often, is precious video evidence showing the movement of Russian troops and equipment from the country’s remote Far East westward to the border with Ukraine and now also to Belarus, which announced the joint exercises that are slated to begin on February 9.
The investigation by CIT and RFE/RL’s Russian Service used an analysis of Russian-language social media posts to shed light on the scale and nature of Moscow’s military mobilization and spotlight concerns voiced by the relatives of troops headed westward for deployment in Belarus and on Russia’s borders with Ukraine.
The investigation, based in part on reactions to numerous posts on the video-sharing platform TikTok by people who appear to be Russian soldiers as well as exchanges with friends and relatives who authored some of the comments, added crucial evidence of the Russian military buildup as negotiations between Russia and the West continue to yield no breakthrough.
The Job Is Becoming Harder
The accuracy of information dug up by many independent sleuths and amplified by mainstream media allows such private analysts to be “roughly on the same page” as the U.S. intelligence community, said former CIA analyst Jeffrey Edmonds.
“It’s impressive how close someone can be on the outside,” Edmonds, now at the CNA Corp think-tank, told The Wall Street Journal earlier this month.
But their job is becoming harder. Analysts say that Russia has become more skilled in obscuring its activities since its operations in 2014 and its more recent military buildup in the spring of 2021, deploying tactics such as painting over Russian flags on vehicles and removing their license plates so as to hide their origins.
In May 2020, Putin signed a decree that forbids Russian soldiers from carrying smartphones while on duty, a direct response to the huge embarrassment Moscow suffered after hundreds of posts by troops active in the military campaigns in eastern Ukraine in 2014 and 2015.
But analysts at CIT remain upbeat about the prospects of keeping track of Russia’s troop movements as the risk of an escalation continues to rise.
“Since the beginning of January, a whole wave of videos and social media posts has surfaced showing that troops are moving,” CIT founder Ruslan Leviev told Current Time. “And local residents, for whom this is unusual, are of course documenting it all.”
But Leviev, a long-time open-source investigator who has riled Russian authorities and reported being attacked near his home in Moscow by unknown assailants in 2019, warns that the scale of Russia’s buildup does not bode well.
“Russia tried to justify itself, saying these are just exercises,” he said of the deployments to Belarus. “But experience shows that exercises can easily turn directly into real military operations.
Aleksei Aleksandrov, Dariya Ali-zade, and Ksenia Sokolyanskaya of Current Time contributed to this report
13. China's Covid Victory Over America Turns Out to Be Pyrrhic
China's Covid Victory Over America Turns Out to Be Pyrrhic
The pandemic has revealed Americans to be tacit Social Darwinists, while trapping the Chinese in a vast Panopticon.
Authoritarian regimes tend to boast about themselves and denigrate their rivals. President Xi Jinping’s China is no exception. “As the Covid-19 epidemic takes away hundreds of lives every day in the U.S.,” wrote Hu Xijin, the former editor-in-chief of the Global Times, on Jan. 14, “that country’s propaganda machinery is engaging in vicious smears against China’s dynamic zero-case policy of epidemic prevention … Think about it. More than 800,000 Americans died from Covid-19 in the U.S. Behind these numbers, how many sad and desperate stories are there?”
“The experience and facts of the past two years,” wrote Guo Yan in the Economic Daily five days later, “have shown that China's general strategy of ‘foreign defense against imported [cases] and domestic defense against breakouts’ and the general policy of ‘dynamic clearing’ are the Covid prevention policies best suited to China's own national conditions on top of being beneficial to the world … It is the inaction and chaotic actions of some policy makers that have caused the American people to fall into the epidemic crisis time and time again.”
Might the Chinese be right? As we reach the second anniversary of the Covid pandemic, perhaps the most surprising thing is how many Americans have lost their lives compared to how few have perished in China. How are we to explain this astonishing divergence?
The simple answer is that, despite being the source of the virus that caused the pandemic, the Chinese managed containment very successfully, while the U.S. bungled everything from testing to mask-wearing to quarantining.
Some people go even further, arguing (as does Chinese Communist Party propaganda) that the difference in death tolls illustrates the superiority of China’s political system over America’s corrupt and self-indulgent democracy. However, I have never bought this second argument. And I am no longer satisfied with the first.
We now have a U.S. death toll of between (depending on your source) 860,000 and 883,000 deaths due to Covid, the 20th-highest mortality relative to population globally. Actual mortality is running at 19% above the expected figure (compared with 5% in Canada). We are heading for a million deaths by May. According to the Economist, we may already be there.
True, in relative terms — deaths per million — U.S. mortality is not the worst in the world (it ranks 19th). In terms of excess mortality, too, the U.S. has fared better than a number of Latin American and Eastern European countries. The puzzle remains that on paper — according to the Global Health Index published in 2019 — the U.S. was better prepared for a pandemic than any other country.
Even more remarkable is how few Chinese the new coronavirus has killed: Fewer than 5,000, meaning a death rate three orders of magnitude smaller than the U.S. rate. Considering that the pandemic originated in Wuhan, this is an astonishing achievement. Of course, skepticism is always warranted where Chinese statistics are concerned. But even the Economist’s estimates, which suggest that there may have been significantly higher excess mortality in China, point to a far lower relative death toll than in the U.S.
Two things explain the remarkably high mortality the U.S. has suffered in this pandemic. First, the American public health bureaucracy failed utterly. Initially, when we knew very little except that it was contagious and dangerous, the relevant agencies were staggeringly complacent when they should have been frantically testing, tracing and isolating.
Then, in March 2020, the official mind flipped from complacency to panic, partly on the basis of a paper by the British epidemiologist Neil Ferguson (no relation), who argued that we had to lock people in their homes until vaccines were available or 2.2 million Americans would die.
As it became clear that this approach would wreck the global economy, the public health officials resorted to improvisation, alternately tightening and loosening restrictions on economic and social life in a reactive and mostly ineffective way. Masks were at first dismissed as unnecessary, then became mandatory even in some outdoor locations, where they served no purpose.
When some skeptical scientists challenged the wisdom of lockdowns, the public health establishment was dismissive. The Great Barrington Declaration, published in October 2020 by Harvard’s Martin Kulldorff, Oxford’s Sunetra Gupta and Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya, offered a persuasive critique of blanket pandemic lockdowns, arguing instead for “focused protection” of vulnerable groups such as the elderly or those with medical conditions.
“This proposal from the three fringe epidemiologists … seems to be getting a lot of attention,” Francis Collins, head of the National Institutes of Health, emailed Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases. “There needs to be a quick and devastating published take down of its premises ... Is it underway?”
Now that we have vaccines with high efficacy and a variant that causes mild flu-like symptoms in most vaccinated people, the official mind remains wedded to its playbook — in the parts of the U.S. where most people are vaccinated, such as northern California, where I live. Educational institutions have reverted to remote learning (an oxymoron, as everyone knows); masks are ubiquitous, even outdoors; a host of petty regulations persist.
Meanwhile, in the states with significant numbers of unvaccinated and vulnerable people, almost no precautions are taken. Consequently, the intensive care units are filling up once again. I make this the fifth wave of Covid in the U.S., and already mortality relative to population is higher than in South Africa, Denmark and the U.K., where the omicron variant struck sooner.
Yet there is a second reason for the relatively high American mortality during the pandemic, which has to do with public attitudes and behavior. I have come to the conclusion, after observing my fellow Americans for two years that — whatever our public health officials may tell us, and whatever some of us may say — in practice and in aggregate we are a nation of Social Darwinists.
Social Darwinism is a contentious term, I know, but its history is illuminating. A century ago, the ideas that came to be summed up as Social Darwinism by historians such as Richard Hofstadter were not limited to a far-right lunatic fringe. They derived from the writings of some of the era’s pre-eminent proponents of social progress.
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Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) was the English philosopher who did most to import ideas derived from Charles Darwin and other evolutionary theorists (notably Jean-Baptiste Lamarck) into the study of contemporary human societies. In works such as “First Principles” (1862), “Principles of Biology” (1864) and “The Man Versus the State” (1884), Spencer sought to discern universal laws of evolution.
One of his key contentions was that most social interventions by government were harmful, no matter how well-intentioned, because they interfered with the natural laws of evolution, which were the main driver of progress.
Some Social Darwinists went even further, arguing that infectious disease had a role to play in promoting the survival of the fittest. Franz Ignaz Pruner, a German physician, anthropologist and racial theorist, wrote “The Global Cholera Pandemic and Nature’s Police” (1851), based partly on his observations in Egypt. Wherever Europeans and Americans established colonies in the tropics, officials would periodically muse that the terrifyingly high mortality rates arising from disease — and of course from poor sanitation and malnutrition — must, like famines in India, be part of some providential design.
It was a relatively short step from Social Darwinism to eugenics — the theory popularized by Francis Galton, Karl Pearson and others that government should actively promote the reproduction of the “fit” and limit the reproduction of the “unfit.”
It is easy to forget today how influential such notions were a century ago, when they appealed almost as much to progressives as to proto-fascists. Chicago sociologist and reformer Charles Henderson opposed immigration of the “unfit,” proposed that the “feebleminded and degenerate” be banished to rural labor colonies and sterilized to “prevent their propagation of defects and thus the perpetuation of their misery in their offspring.”
As Spencer had made clear, it was a guiding principle of Social Darwinism that public-health legislation “defeats its own end” and “favours the multiplication of those worst fitted for existence, and, by consequence, hinders the multiplication of those best fitted for existence.”
In “Social Statics,” he used language echoed today by American libertarians:
If … it is the duty of the state to protect the health of its subjects, it is its duty to see that all the conditions of health are fulfilled by them. Shall this duty be consistently discharged? If so, the legislature must enact a national dietary: prescribe so many meals a day for each individual; fix the quantities and qualities of food, both for men and women; state the proportion of fluids, when to be taken, and of what kind; specify the amount of exercise, and define its character; describe the clothing to be employed … and to enforce these regulations it must employ a sufficiency of duly-qualified officials, empowered to direct every one’s domestic arrangements.
Like many of today’s critics of the public-health agencies, Spencer argued that the medical profession and bureaucrats were actuated by self-interest rather than altruism and had an “unmistakable wish to establish an organized, tax-supported class, charged with the health of men’s bodies, as the clergy are charged with the health of their souls.”
Reading “Social Statics” today, you see how completely Spencer lost the argument. As we enter the third year of the Covid pandemic, the public-health clergy have established themselves in precisely the kind of well-paid positions of power that Spencer foresaw, leaving a motley array of lockdown skeptics and anti-vaxxers to rehash his old arguments.
I have tended to steer clear of the lockdown skeptics and to heap opprobrium on the anti-vaxxers. But what we really see in both cases is a kind of revival of Social Darwinism that extends beyond the militant opponents of lockdowns and vaccines to include the many millions of Americans who over the past two years have simply flouted the pandemic rules. Ignoring the prescriptions of an intrusive nanny state, or complying with them so carelessly as to render them ineffective, they have tacitly given free rein to the principle of the survival of the fittest.
Compared with Western Europeans and especially with East Asians, Americans have a remarkably high tolerance of excess mortality, especially when it is heavily concentrated in politically underrepresented social groups. The same is true with respect to the relatively high death toll from firearms that Americans tolerate, not forgetting the staggering mortality caused by opioid overdoses in the past decade, which has no parallel in any developed country.
Now contrast the American experience of the pandemic with the Chinese. If Americans resemble modern-day Social Darwinists, the People’s Republic is a utilitarian Panopticon worthy of the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s idealized penitentiary of the late-18th century, which relied on prisoners’ uncertainty about whether they were under observation to incentivize good behavior.
No country has more effectively used non-pharmaceutical restrictions on social and economic life to control the spread of SARS-CoV-2 than China. True, these restrictions were widely imitated, as in New Zealand. But the reason they were more effective in China than elsewhere is precisely that the Communist Party’s system of surveillance creates what Bentham called “the sentiment of a sort of invisible omnipresence.”
And yet there turns out to be a catch, in the form of a new and much more infectious variant of the virus. In omicron, Xi Jinping’s Panopticon faces a new and ghastly challenge. Not only does the Chinese population have essentially no natural immunity from previous infections, thanks to the Zero-Covid strategy; the inferior Chinese-made vaccines also offer little protection against omicron. As a consequence, China must impose tighter restrictions than ever before.
Currently, over 20 million people are under some form of lockdown in half a dozen cities, notably Xian and Tianjin, because small numbers of people tested positive. Traditional Lunar New Year celebrations are being restricted. The Beijing Winter Olympics will take place with almost no foreign spectators. The volume of international flights to China has been reduced by more than 90%.
In some ways, China’s reversion to being a closed society is of a piece with Xi’s attempt to revive other aspects of Maoism: his reassertion of the Communist Party’s dominance over the private sector, his call for more egalitarian social outcomes, his intolerance of domestic dissent and ethnic minorities, his readiness to threaten war. But it is not at all clear how any of this helps the Chinese economy grow sufficiently fast to overtake that of the U.S.
By contrast, the American propensity to ignore (or at least honor mainly in the breach) the bureaucracy’s rules and regulations — combined with the opening of the fiscal and monetary floodgates — has meant that paradoxically, the public health disaster of the pandemic has been accompanied by an economic recovery so red-hot that U.S. inflation has jumped to a rate not seen since 1982.
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In the eyes of today’s Western public health experts, none of this makes sense. Neil Ferguson gave an interview last year in which he described how he and his fellow scientific advisors to the British government realized that they might be able to copy the Chinese strategy for containing Covid. “People’s sense of what is possible in terms of control changed quite dramatically between January and March [2020],” he recalled. “They [i.e., the Chinese] claimed to have flattened the curve. I was sceptical at first. … But as the data accrued it became clear it was an effective policy.”
The question was: Could the West copy China’s lockdown? “It’s a communist one-party state, we said. We couldn’t get away with it in Europe, we thought,” said Ferguson. “And then Italy did it. And we realized we could.”
It continues to puzzle me that so many smart people were convinced that the People’s Republic of China should be the role model for a free society faced with a pandemic (as opposed to the East Asian democracies like South Korea and Taiwan that have contained the virus with minimal lockdowns). But that was the road we attempted to go down, inflicting immense economic disruption until we realized that it was unsustainable — that not even Ferguson (or, it turns out, the government he was advising) could adhere to a system of universal house arrest, much less don’t-tread-on-me Americans.
In the U.S. today, Covid has become as much a bureaucratic as a medical condition. Having had omicron in December, I and my family remain subject to a plethora of rules that make absolutely no sense, as we can neither catch nor transmit the virus again so soon after having been infected. I pointlessly wear a mask at meetings and on planes. I pointlessly submit to regular Covid tests. I pointlessly fill out online forms attesting to my children’s health.
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Perhaps at some point this year a new variant — Pi, Rho, Sigma, take your pick — will emerge that I can catch and that will give me and others something more than a mild cold. But until that time comes, I shall feel a sense of individualist resentment — that I now realize is very American — about the whole dysfunctional edifice of rules and regulations. When (if?) they are finally swept away, I shall rejoice.
And, if the Chinese Panopticon finally loses control of Chinese virus in this, the third plague year, I’ll recall that, in the history of struggles between rival empires, the fitness that determines survival is seldom correlated with a state’s power over the individual — or its propensity to boast.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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14. How Chinese propaganda films became watchable
Excerpts:
It is not just Hollywood; flicks from anywhere foreign are being squeezed out (see chart). Only 11% of films released in 2021 were imported. Political tensions have stymied the release of movies from India, South Korea and Japan.
A boom in genuinely popular patriotic television shows is also under way. A 23-part series called “Min Ning Town”, chronicling the party’s poverty-alleviation programme, scored 9.2 out of 10 on Douban, outranking “The Queen’s Gambit”, a Netflix series about chess. The “Age of Awakening”, about the founding of the party, made with the support of propaganda organs, was another of the most popular television shows in 2021, scoring 9.3 on Douban among almost 400,000 voters. Many viewers were surprised by the quality of such “red thematic” dramas, as the genre is known.
Wherever there is culture, the party is getting more involved, especially if there is a chance to win the loyalty of the young. In November, a few weeks after a Chinese team won the world championship for League of Legends, a video game, one of its members, Ming Kai, joined the party. Official podcasts, such as a recent series on party history, now sound as well produced as their viral American rivals. And the party is getting into LARPing—“live action role-playing”—in which enthusiasts don costumes and act out scripts in a fantasy world. People in China spent an estimated $2.7bn on the fad in 2021. Authorities are promoting patriotic scripts about the Sino-Japanese war instead of the usual murder mysteries. Never has party propaganda been so frighteningly attractive.
How Chinese propaganda films became watchable
Patriotic blockbusters are so entertaining people willingly buy tickets
Jan 22nd 2022
IN 2021, THE year after China overtook America to become the world’s largest film market, “The Battle at Lake Changjin” became the highest-grossing film in Chinese history, and the second-highest of the year worldwide. It made over $900m, just behind “Spider-Man: No Way Home”.
The eponymous battle took place in 1950 during the Korean war and saw Mao Zedong’s army inflict a heavy defeat on America. The film, which was directed by Chen Kaige, a leading light of the “fifth generation” of film-makers who sprang to global prominence in the 1980s, has been especially popular among young Chinese. Social-media users have posted gushing reviews. Fans posted videos of themselves eating frozen potatoes and fried flour, like the soldiers in the film, in tribute to the hardships of that generation.
But the film is important for another reason. It was made in close co-operation with the Communist Party’s propaganda organs. All films in China must pass party censors, but until recently, it has been market-driven comedies and dramas that have been most popular. Films specifically aimed at drumming up support for the party have been notable for their dullness. In 2009 “The Founding of a Republic” was the first of a trilogy released for the 60th anniversary of the founding of Communist China. It was such a flop that Douban, a film-rating website, disabled voting. Now, after a decade of collaborating with serious film-makers, the party has worked out how to make propaganda more like entertainment that people actually want to watch.
The government still corrals audiences and limits choice. In 2021, to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the party, it ordered every cinema in the country to schedule at least two screenings each week of films that are “patriotic” (and which, as usual, conflate patriotism with support for the party). Full houses were ensured by bringing in officials and party members and by discounting ticket prices, according to a policy directive. For “The Battle at Lake Changjin”, schools booked out cinemas for their pupils. A Chinese journalist famous for his investigations into official corruption was detained after he criticised it.
But such measures are now needed less. Patriotic films and television shows, known in Chinese as zhu xuanlu—“main-melody” films—often score hundreds of thousands of high ratings on Douban. A nationalistic flick from 2017, “Wolf Warrior 2”, ranked higher than two-thirds of other action films. Almost half of all viewers of the 45 new “main-melody” television shows in the first ten months of 2021 were aged 18-24, says Endata, a research firm.
The party wants to build on these successes. In November the China Film Administration, which determines whether, when and how a film is released, published a new five-year plan for 2021-25. China will become a “strong film power” by routinely releasing “masterpieces that manifest Chinese spirit, values, power and aesthetics”, it said. This will require the country to release “ten major films” each year that are “critically acclaimed and popular” and 50 that make 100m yuan ($16m) or more. Domestic films should account for over 55% of total annual box-office receipts.
This should be easy. Local titles accounted for 89% of releases in 2021, according to Dengta, an online-ticketing platform. The country, which had just 2,600 screens in 2005, now has 82,000 (twice as many as America, where the number has not grown for a decade). So patriotic films are likely to grow in number.
Historical films generated around 15% of ticket sales in 2020 and 2021, up from 1-2% in the preceding several years, according to Dengta. Main-melody films dominated discussions in forums at both the Beijing and Shanghai International Film Festivals in 2021. Government support seems bottomless. “The Battle at Lake Changjin”, like many such flicks, was subsidised out of a special fund that takes 5% of national box-office revenues and redistributes them to domestically made films.
The casting of some of China’s most famous film stars, spanning several generations, helps. Many of the most popular young actors and musicians also serve as faces of the party. Jackson Yee, who starred in “The Battle at Lake Changjin”, is one of China’s hottest celebrities. Originally a boy-band member, he has the sort of androgynous appeal the party has, in other contexts, recently condemned as “abnormal”. But he is also a standing-committee member of the national student union, which is controlled by the Communist Youth League, a branch of the party. A hashtag promoting Mr Yee’s role in “The Battle at Lake Changjin” has been viewed almost 13bn times on Weibo, a microblog.
To clear the way for flag-waving local fare, China keeps out most American films. A quota system allows up to 34 Hollywood movies to be screened in theatres each year. In 2021 only 19 were permitted. Worsening tensions between America and China, coupled with the pandemic, which has made China more insular, may explain the reduction. The authorities often hold up foreign blockbusters for months to help a domestic rival sell more tickets.
Films from Marvel Studios, owned by Disney, have had a particularly rough time. No Marvel titles were approved in 2021, no matter how hard they tried to avoid upsetting censors. Not even “Shang-chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings”, a superhero film set in China, made it. The party may have punished Marvel after nationalist trolls dug up remarks that were critical of China, made by the film’s Chinese-born star, Simu Liu. The same happened with Chloé Zhao, the Beijing-born director of “Eternals”, whose previous film, “Nomad land”, was banned as a result.
It is not just Hollywood; flicks from anywhere foreign are being squeezed out (see chart). Only 11% of films released in 2021 were imported. Political tensions have stymied the release of movies from India, South Korea and Japan.
A boom in genuinely popular patriotic television shows is also under way. A 23-part series called “Min Ning Town”, chronicling the party’s poverty-alleviation programme, scored 9.2 out of 10 on Douban, outranking “The Queen’s Gambit”, a Netflix series about chess. The “Age of Awakening”, about the founding of the party, made with the support of propaganda organs, was another of the most popular television shows in 2021, scoring 9.3 on Douban among almost 400,000 voters. Many viewers were surprised by the quality of such “red thematic” dramas, as the genre is known.
Wherever there is culture, the party is getting more involved, especially if there is a chance to win the loyalty of the young. In November, a few weeks after a Chinese team won the world championship for League of Legends, a video game, one of its members, Ming Kai, joined the party. Official podcasts, such as a recent series on party history, now sound as well produced as their viral American rivals. And the party is getting into LARPing—“live action role-playing”—in which enthusiasts don costumes and act out scripts in a fantasy world. People in China spent an estimated $2.7bn on the fad in 2021. Authorities are promoting patriotic scripts about the Sino-Japanese war instead of the usual murder mysteries. Never has party propaganda been so frighteningly attractive. ■
This article appeared in the China section of the print edition under the headline "How propaganda became watchable"
15. The Army's 'universal vaccine' aims to end all COVID pandemics
If this comes to fruition this could be a Walter Reed level of contribution to global health.
The Army's 'universal vaccine' aims to end all COVID pandemics
Effective in early trials, an Army vaccine could protect against all coronaviruses. Learn how it works and when it could be available.
Jan. 22, 2022 10:30 a.m. PT
The Army's COVID vaccine entered clinical trials in March 2021.
Sgt. Tanis Kilgore/US Army
For the most up-to-date news and information about the coronavirus pandemic, visit the WHO and CDC websites.
The rise of the COVID-19 omicron variant and resultant spike in COVID-19 cases have redefined the meaning of "fully vaccinated." Many experts are now talking about yearly COVID booster shots or variant-specific vaccines. But what if there were a universal coronavirus vaccine that protected against omicron and all new COVID-19 variants? The US Army now has that goal in sight.
The Army recently announced that its pan-coronavirus vaccine, the spike ferritin nanoparticle COVID-19 vaccine (aka SpFN) had completed Phase 1 of human trials with positive results. Dr. Kayvon Modjarrad, director of infectious diseases at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research (WRAIR) and co-inventor of SpFN, told Defense One, "We're testing our vaccine against all the different variants, including omicron," the strain causing breakthrough infections even in people who have received booster shots.
SpFN still needs to undergo Phase 2 and 3 human trials, though, to test its efficacy and safety in comparison to current treatments, Modjarrad said.
We'll share what we know about pan-coronavirus vaccines and the Army's COVID-19 vaccine, including how it works and when it could become available.
Why do we need a pan-coronavirus vaccine?
White House Chief Medical Adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci recently touted the importance of a universal vaccine to protect against all COVID variants. In an interview with NBC, Fauci said a universal COVID vaccine "would mean that the initial vaccination would cover all of these little variants, so you wouldn't have to worry."
"We want a pan-coronavirus vaccine so that you have it on the shelf to respond to the next viral pandemic," Fauci said. "Ultimately, you want to get a vaccine that covers everything."
What is the US Army COVID vaccine?
The three COVID-19 vaccines authorized right now for use in the US take two approaches to preventing infection: The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines use mRNA to build up immunity, while the Johnson & Johnson vaccine uses a harmless rhinovirus to train the body's immune system to respond to COVID.
The Spike Ferritin Nanoparticle COVID-19 vaccine, or SpFN, takes a third approach, using a harmless portion of the COVID-19 virus to spur the body's defenses against COVID.
SpFN also has less restrictive storage and handling requirements than the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines, allowing it to be used in a wider variety of situations. It can be stored between 36 and 46 degrees Fahrenheit for up to six months and at room temperature for up to one month, according to military scientists. Pfizer's vaccine requires an ultracold freezer (between minus 112 and minus 76 degrees F) for shipment and storage and is only stable for 31 days when stored in a refrigerator.
The Army's vaccine has been tested with two shots, 28 days apart, and also with a third shot after six months.
How does the Army vaccine work against COVID-19 and other coronaviruses?
The vaccines from Moderna, Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson all target the specific virus -- SARS-CoV-2 -- that causes COVID-19. But Army scientists designed their vaccine to protect against future strains of COVID as well as other coronaviruses.
The Army's SpFN vaccine is shaped like a soccer ball with 24 faces. Scientists can attach the spikes of multiple coronavirus strains to each of the different faces, allowing them to customize the vaccine for any new COVID variants that arise.
"The accelerating emergence of human coronaviruses throughout the past two decades and the rise of SARS-CoV-2 variants, including most recently omicron, underscore the continued need for next-generation preemptive vaccines that confer broad protection against coronavirus diseases," Modjarrad said in a December statement. "Our strategy has been to develop a 'pan-coronavirus' vaccine technology that could potentially offer safe, effective and durable protection against multiple coronavirus strains and species."
When will the Army's COVID vaccine be available?
No date has been set. SpFN successfully completed animal testing and wrapped Phase 1 of human trials in December, but it must still complete Phases 2 and 3 of human testing, when its safety and efficacy is compared to current vaccine options.
Normally, completing all three phases can take up to five years, but the urgency of the COVID-19 pandemic is speeding up the process. The Moderna, Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson vaccines, for example, were tested, reviewed and authorized by the Food and Drug Administration over the course of one year.
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What happens next with the Army SpFN vaccine?
After data from the Phase 1 human trials is collected, analyzed and published, Phase 2 and 3 trials will begin. There is very little information so far on when or how those trials will proceed or if the phases will overlap.
To follow the progress of the Army vaccine trials, visit the SpFN COVID-19 Vaccine Tracker provided by the US Army Medical Research and Development Command.
The information contained in this article is for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended as health or medical advice. Always consult a physician or other qualified health provider regarding any questions you may have about a medical condition or health objectives.
16. What the Joe Rogan podcast controversy says about the online misinformation ecosystem
Is this one of the greatest purveyors of disinformation in America today?
What the Joe Rogan podcast controversy says about the online misinformation ecosystem
NPR · by Shannon Bond · January 21, 2022
Joe Rogan, the comedian, TV commentator and podcaster, reacts during an Ultimate Fighting Championship event in May 2020. Douglas P. DeFelice/Getty Images
An open letter urging Spotify to crack down on COVID-19 misinformation has gained the signatures of more than a thousand doctors, scientists and health professionals spurred by growing concerns over anti-vaccine rhetoric on the audio app's hit podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience.
The medical and scientific experts slammed Rogan's track record of airing false claims about the coronavirus pandemic, vaccines and unproven treatments, calling it "a sociological issue of devastating proportions." Spotify, they say, has enabled him.
While audio apps so far have escaped the scrutiny that has befallen social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, the pressure on Spotify illustrates how podcasts have emerged as an influential source of misinformation.
In a December episode of his podcast, Rogan interviewed Dr. Robert Malone, a scientist who worked on early research into the mRNA technology behind top COVID-19 vaccines, but who is now critical of the mRNA vaccines.
Malone made baseless and disproven claims, including falsely stating that getting vaccinated puts people who already have had COVID-19 at higher risk.
The episode immediately raised alarm bells for Katrine Wallace, an epidemiologist at the University of Illinois Chicago's School of Public Health, who signed the letter. She is part of a community of experts who debunk medical misinformation on social media, and she says she received hundreds of messages from followers about Rogan's Malone interview.
"Their friends and family were sending it to them as evidence that the vaccines are dangerous and that they shouldn't get it," she said. "It provides a sense of false balance, like there's two sides to the scientific evidence when, really, there is not. The overwhelming evidence is that the vaccines are safe and that they're effective."
Rogan's reach worries health experts
Wallace was particularly worried because Rogan, a stand-up comedian and TV personality, has such a big audience. While Spotify does not disclose how many people listen, his show ranked as the platform's most popular podcast globally for the last two years. And he's worth a lot to the company: In 2020, he signed an exclusive licensing deal with Spotify reportedly worth $100 million.
"We are in a global health emergency, and streaming platforms like Spotify that provide content to the public have a responsibility not to add to the problem," Wallace said.
It wasn't the first time Rogan or his guests have floated dubious or outright false information about the pandemic. He has claimed young and healthy people don't need COVID-19 vaccines. He has promoted taking ivermectin as a treatment, which the Food and Drug Administration has warned against.
Wallace and the other letter signers are not asking Spotify to kick Rogan off its platform. But they want the company to be more transparent about its rules, do more to moderate misinformation and make it easier to flag these kinds of baseless claims.
Spotify declined to comment to NPR. It has previously said it bans "dangerous false, deceptive, or misleading content about COVID-19 that may cause offline harm and/or pose a direct threat to public health."
The company says it has taken down 20,000 podcast episodes for breaking that policy since the start of the pandemic. It has also taken down other episodes of Rogan's show, including an interview with conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. But Rogan's Malone interview is still available.
Last year, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek told Axios that the company does not take responsibility for what Rogan or his guests say. He compared the podcaster to "really well-paid rappers" on Spotify, saying, "We don't dictate what they're putting in their songs, either."
Rogan did not respond to NPR's request for comment.
Researchers say scrutiny of podcasts is overdue
Misinformation researchers say it was only a matter of time until the spotlight turned to podcasts.
"Wherever you have users generating content, you're going to have all of the same content moderation issues and controversies that you have in any other space," said Evelyn Douek, a research fellow at Columbia University's Knight First Amendment Institute.
So why haven't podcasts gotten the same kind of attention as social networks?
For one thing, it's a fragmented medium. Podcasts exist across lots of different platforms and apps.
Douek says it's also harder to ferret out falsehoods and hate speech in podcasts compared with posts written on Facebook and Twitter.
But audio can be a powerful way to spread misinformation because of all the qualities that make the format so compelling to listeners, said Valerie Wirtschafter, a senior data analyst at the Brookings Institution.
"The podcaster is in your ear," she said. "It's a really unique relationship in that respect, and so the podcaster gains a level of authority and a level of credibility among listeners."
Wirtschafter says as more people become aware of how misinformation spreads online, audio deserves the same scrutiny as social media.
She has studied how the "Big Lie" that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump spread on political podcasts in the lead-up to the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. She found that half the episodes of the most popular shows released between Election Day and Jan. 6, 2021, contained misleading or false claims about voter fraud and election integrity.
"We're not talking about fringe ideas," she said. "These are the most popular podcasts in the United States."
NPR · by Shannon Bond · January 21, 2022
17. Opinion | Biden must show that the U.S. stands ready to support Ukraine, militarily if necessary by Michael Vickers
Conclusion:
If Putin succeeds in conquering Ukraine and the United States does not respond forcefully, the Biden presidency will surely be limited to one term. Putin will score an even greater victory if Donald Trump is returned to the Oval Office in 2025. The United States will lose even more if Xi Jinping takes a cue from Putin and invades Taiwan.
The Biden administration has sought a “stable and predictable relationship” with Russia. What it has received in return is the prospect of a Russian-instigated major war in Europe with far-reaching strategic consequences.
Opinion | Biden must show that the U.S. stands ready to support Ukraine, militarily if necessary
Michael G. Vickers, a former Special Forces officer and CIA operations officer, served as assistant secretary of defense for special operations, low-intensity conflict and interdependent capabilities (2007-2011) and undersecretary of defense for intelligence (2011-2015).
Deterrence and escalation dominance — two core ideas in strategic theory — explain why Vladimir Putin will likely soon launch a large-scale invasion of Ukraine aimed at toppling the democratic government in Kyiv.
Deterrence — convincing an adversary that he cannot achieve his objectives through military action — works through two processes: denial and punishment. The likelihood that an adversary will be denied his objectives can prevent an attack. The likelihood that aggression’s costs will become prohibitive also strengthens deterrence.
In early December, President Biden took deterrence by denial off the table by declaring that the United States would not use direct military force to counter a Russian invasion of Ukraine. That was a big green light for the Russian president, just as suggesting that Korea was outside our defense perimeter had been a green light for Kim Il Sung to invade South Korea in 1950. During a news conference on Wednesday, the president said that a “minor incursion” by Russian forces into Ukraine might not prompt a severe response from Washington and its allies. (On Thursday, the White House attempted to backtrack on his remarks, stating that any Russian invasion of Ukraine would be met with a “severe and coordinated economic response.”)
Escalation dominance is a situation in which one side possesses the means to ensure its ultimate victory. The more than 100,000 troops Russia has positioned along Ukraine’s borders, and perhaps double that number on the way, and the open threat of expanding the conflict with strategic strikes on Western territory, all serve to convince Putin that he has escalation dominance over Ukraine, the United States and its European allies.
While we, to be sure, don’t want a war with Russia, it is equally true that Putin doesn’t want a war with us. He does only what he has been led to believe he can get away with.
Moving U.S. combat aircraft and ships forward to Europe would add considerably to Putin’s uncertainty about his forces’ ability to conquer Ukraine and quite possibly change his strategic calculus. U.S. air power is superior to Russia’s, and it would substantially bolster the fighting spirit and capabilities of Ukraine’s armed forces. Such an action could well deter the conflict in the first place and undermine Putin’s confidence that he had escalation dominance. It is not too late.
U.S. intelligence must also work with their Ukrainian counterparts to counter Russian active measures — the Russian term for covert action — aimed at toppling the Zelensky government. That might be Putin’s preferred course of action.
Unequivocal statements from Germany that Russia will be cut off from the international financial system, and that the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline will be terminated if Russia invades Ukraine, would also weaken Putin’s confidence that he has escalation dominance.
If deterrence by denial doesn’t work and Russia invades and topples the government in Kyiv, U.S. strategy should shift to deterrence by punishment. Punishing Russia will bolster future deterrence.
Western sanctions, which thus far have not deterred Russia, should be aimed at cutting Russia off from the international financial system and economy. German resolve to terminate the Nord Stream 2 pipeline from Russia will be critical.
Even the toughest sanctions, however, won’t be enough. The United States should also support Ukrainian resistance to Russian occupation and a Russia-installed government with lethal means, to include advanced anti-armor and anti-air weapons. We drove the Russians out of Afghanistan during the 1980s using similar means, and we can drive them out of Ukraine should they invade and occupy the country. We should also support the resistance to Alexander Lukashenko in Belarus, which will significantly expand Putin’s territorial control problem and increase the cost of his invasion. As part of this strategy, Poland should also open its borders to Belarusian refugees. Finally, we should employ cyber and other covert means to undermine Putin’s rule in Russia. It’s past time to give Putin a taste of his own medicine.
If Putin succeeds in conquering Ukraine and the United States does not respond forcefully, the Biden presidency will surely be limited to one term. Putin will score an even greater victory if Donald Trump is returned to the Oval Office in 2025. The United States will lose even more if Xi Jinping takes a cue from Putin and invades Taiwan.
The Biden administration has sought a “stable and predictable relationship” with Russia. What it has received in return is the prospect of a Russian-instigated major war in Europe with far-reaching strategic consequences.
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.
