Quotes of the Day:
“It is depressing to have to point out, yet again, that there is a distinction between having the legal right to say something & having the moral right not to be held accountable for what you say. Being asked to apologise for saying something unconscionable is not the same as being stripped of the legal right to say it. It’s really not very f-cking complicated. Cry “free speech” in such contexts, you are demanding the right to speak any bilge you wish without apology or fear of comeback. You are demanding not legal rights but an end to debate about and criticism of what you say. When did bigotry get so needy?”
- China Miéville
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- Joseph Wood Krutch
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- Abraham Flexner
1. Guest Post: Dr. Frank Hoffman on “Conceptualizing Integrated Deterrence”
2. U.S. Details Costs of a Russian Invasion of Ukraine
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8. A Look at Putin Through the Soviet Lens
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15. Analysis | What Putin wants in Ukraine
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18. Eisenhower’s Cagey Counsel on Waging War Still Works
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20. Opinion | Biden’s biggest worry: Can democracy prove it is worth saving?
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1. Guest Post: Dr. Frank Hoffman on “Conceptualizing Integrated Deterrence”
Another excellent and important thought piece from Frank Hoffman. This is the most comprehensive discussion of integrated deterrence I have read
My bias toward the importance of unconventional warfare is obvious as I highlight these excerpts. My simple construct is nuclear deterrence, conventional deterrence and unconventional deterrence.
I quibble with one point. Unconventional warfare occurs across the spectrum of conflict and not just on the left side of the spectrum. It is often an important adjunct during major conventional war. I would submit that even after nuclear war, if there are any survivors, unconventional warfare will still be conducted.
But my quibble aside, this is an important contribution to the intellectual rigor we need to apply to the concept of integrated deterrence.
Excerpts:
One way of conceiving of deterrence is functionally, across the major forms of warfare. This is depicted in figure 1, and shows a continuum of warfare from unconventional, through conventional means, to strategic deterrence against states with nuclear weapons. The unconventional component is often overlooked, ironically given the prevalence of so-called gray zone activities in the past decade. Deterring insidious, malign and adversarial activity short of war is needed as well. This element would help include other indirect approaches including subversion or political warfare.
In addition to including conventional forces, the concept includes a category for strategic deterrence assets (space, warning systems, missile defenses, nuclear strike platforms and munitions). Given that Russia and China have strategic cultures that emphasize political warfare and indirect methods, such a construct would consciously highlight responses required against the full range of threats. It would also better align U.S. thinking with countries like Russia that do not draw a rigid line between conventional and strategic deterrence.
Guest Post: Dr. Frank Hoffman on “Conceptualizing Integrated Deterrence”
Today’s post is by Dr. Frank Hoffman, my friend of many years (and one of the smartest people I know!), who discusses the concept of “integrated deterrence.” If you aren’t sure you know what that means, now is the time to get up to speed as we likely will see it in the soon-to-be released National Defense Strategy (NDS) due to replace the current version issued in 2018.
This development is no small matter. As Frank notes, the “Pentagon’s leadership has signaled a distinctive shift in language if not focus [from the 2018 NDS] with Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin’s public remarks stressing ‘integrated deterrence’.”
Frank’s essay is a great tool for helping us analyze the theory. He explains that his “brief concept paper lays out and evaluates some options on how to think about Integrated Deterrence.” In sharing his thoughts with us, Frank points out some of the concerns about “integrated deterrence” including one I share, that is, the danger that the concept will become a reason to “undermine a robust military budget.”
Besides clearly and concisely discussing “integrated deterrence” in a way everyone can understand, Frank very usefully provides a list of questions (tough ones!) that the concept needs to answer. I urge you to read this analysis from one of the nation’s foremost strategists as there is a lot (everything?) at stake for America’s defense enterprise as the U.S. navigates a dangerous world.
Conceptualizing Integrated Deterrence
by Frank Hoffman
The Pentagon will soon revise its primary strategic guidance, updating the 2018 National Defense Strategy (NDS) issued by the Trump Administration in January 2018. That document will require a reconsideration of the strategic environment to reflect external challenges such as China’s continued military modernization and sustained confrontation. It will also have to reflect a broader conception of national security concerns of what is hoped to be a “post-covid America” and the priorities of the Biden Administration’s policies.
Like its predecessor, the new NDS will have to be nested in the grand strategy produced by the White House which has already issued its initial guidance and is already operationalizing its world view which relies upon traditional concepts of American statecraft and liberal internationalism.
The Pentagon’s leadership has signaled a distinctive shift in language if not focus with Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin’s public remarks stressing “integrated deterrence.” In General Austin’s words, integrated deterrence “is the right mix of technology, operational concepts and capabilities—all woven together and networked in a way that is credible, flexible and so formidable that it will give any adversary pause.” He went on to flesh out a multi-dimensional composition, describing it as “multidomain, spans numerous geographic areas of responsibility, is united with allies and partners, and is fortified by all instruments of national power. The Undersecretary of Policy, Dr. Colin Kahl, expanded on this, saying that it will “inform almost everything that we do.”
The Department’s new concept has drawn some early criticism. Some perceive it as another Pentagon buzzword, and a distraction from the ongoing strategic competition between the United States and a revisionist China. Some members of Congress, like Representative Mike Gallagher, fear that the concept is designed to undermine a robust military budget that restores U.S. dominance. This argument was echoed by retired General Tom Spoehr who contended that “history has also has proven that non-military tools, such as economic sanctions or diplomatic condemnation, have limited utility in deterring a determined adversary from instigating conflict.”
This brief concept paper lays out and evaluates some options on how to think about Integrated Deterrence. This is an important concept for framing the Defense Department’s major contributions to the next national security strategy. Deterrence could be a useful framing mechanism for defense policy, especially in force design and perhaps in making distinctive tradeoffs in modernization.
The Department has a long intellectual exposure and historical experience with deterrence. But the United States faces multiple challengers, with a broadening array of destabilizing modes of conflict and disruptive technologies that will challenge traditional approaches to the problem of deterrence.
Deterrence has always been a deceptively simple concept: to convince an adversary that the anticipated benefits of an aggressive move will not be obtained, and that the perceived costs will be much greater than any possible gain. Denial of success, and/or the imposition of costs are considered the two fundamental elements. It is an exercise in interactive perception management that presumes clarity about the character of the geostrategic contest, and rationality in an opponent’s decision-making process. Deterrence is a perception about credibility and capability, and presumes a thorough understanding of competitors and their thresholds and decision calculus.
U.S. practice often conceptualizes deterrence into silos of conventional and ‘strategic’ or nuclear systems. Disruptive changes in technology may challenge traditional thinking and require new tools, models and metaphors. The changes in the demands placed on deterrence have forced strategists to consider new tools and metaphors.
One productive concept relates to “wormhole escalation” by the noted strategic theorist and policy analyst Rebecca Hersman of CSIS. She envisions numerous “wormhole” escalation scenarios, in which decision makers make a step and come out in a world they hardly anticipated much less shaped. These are holes which “may suddenly open in the fabric of deterrence through which competing states could inadvertently enter and suddenly traverse between sub-conventional and strategic levels of conflict in accelerated and decidedly non-linear ways.”
Deterring What and Whom?
China has its own ideas of what integrated deterrence looks like, which we should consider in our own calculus. China does not necessarily share American conclusions on nuclear escalation, which should influence U.S. actions. Given the CCP’s stated objective of reunification with Taiwan, and its associated coercive efforts targeting Taiwan, the topic of deterring aggression there has risen to the fore recently.
As the Department’s formal assessment of China’s modernization noted, “Cross-Strait deterrence is in a period of dangerous uncertainty. Improvements in China’s military capabilities have fundamentally transformed the strategic environment and weakened the military dimension of cross-Strait deterrence.” Evidence of further weakening of deterrence may be seen from the recent Chinese test of a hypersonic missile.
Russia, which is also modernizing its military and operating it more assertively, has its own conception of its national interest and its preferred future. “Russian strategic culture emphasizes cost imposition over denial for deterrence purposes, believing in forms of calibrated damage as a vehicle by which to manage escalation,” according to one excellent study. That culture is remarkably consistent and predictable, for those who study it. Concerns over the security of Ukraine are very high at present.
Moscow has exercised a longstanding playbook of destabilizing activities to undermine NATO and its partners short of direct violence. Yet, its military capabilities cannot be ignored. Figuring out what Putin wants, and how to deflect his most malign activities garners much attention these days. Additionally, a comprehensive understanding of our competitors, appear more than warranted, it’s a necessity if we seek to comprehend what deters and what escalates. The idea that the adversary’s perception is what matters is too often overlooked regarding deterrence. Moscow’s longstanding ability to combine political, informational, and military coercion in hybrid conflicts is hard to deter. It would be a mistake to dismiss Russia as a declining irritant or mere source of disruption.
U.S. policy makers may have to broaden their thinking and toolbox beyond the canonical option set of deterrence by denial or cost imposition. Those options tend to operationalize the challenge to specific scenarios, rather than the more strategic and systemic competition. For that reason, Secretary Austin’s initiative appears to be both strategically holistic and on target. However, there are different ways to conceptualize the components to deterrence and the contributors. The rest of this paper examines several options.
Whole Spectrum Deterrence
One way of conceiving of deterrence is functionally, across the major forms of warfare. This is depicted in figure 1, and shows a continuum of warfare from unconventional, through conventional means, to strategic deterrence against states with nuclear weapons. The unconventional component is often overlooked, ironically given the prevalence of so-called gray zone activities in the past decade. Deterring insidious, malign and adversarial activity short of war is needed as well. This element would help include other indirect approaches including subversion or political warfare.
In addition to including conventional forces, the concept includes a category for strategic deterrence assets (space, warning systems, missile defenses, nuclear strike platforms and munitions). Given that Russia and China have strategic cultures that emphasize political warfare and indirect methods, such a construct would consciously highlight responses required against the full range of threats. It would also better align U.S. thinking with countries like Russia that do not draw a rigid line between conventional and strategic deterrence.
The value of recognizing the continuum is that it reminds policy makers about the full range of threats/challenges from competitors. It answers the question: deterrence of what? However, this construct is narrow as it is limited to thinking solely in terms of modes of warfare from a military lens. But it does force the policy and planning community to address the overlaps of modalities short of armed conflict, as well as the need to understand how adversaries look at strategic and non-strategic weapons. The next NDS should avoid the perception, often ascribed to the 2018 NDS, that the United States needs to focus solely on high-intensity combat.
It also offers a construct that incorporates the long deferred nuclear modernization into its larger strategy and resource allocation.
Options for Integrated Deterrence
Option 1. Whole of Government Capacity
Another conception is more whole of government orientation. This perspective incorporates the role of diplomacy, engagement in international organizations, and development programs as well as more traditional military components. It also includes homeland security, domestic cyber security, critical infrastructure protection, and disaster response.
The joint warfighting element in this concept would have to include Service warfighting capabilities, overall force design, strategic systems, and any necessary joint enablers such as command and control, ISR, space platforms, etc. In addition to explicitly bringing conventional joint force levels and readiness into the equation, it includes strategic deterrence.
This option provides a broader conception of deterrence than traditional U.S. military. It supports the Secretary’s conclusion that “Integrated deterrence rests on integrated networks among our capabilities, our operations, and our allies.” But it offers a larger conception of defense by incorporating the “offensive” potential of diplomacy and economic development, and the defensive value of the Department of Homeland Security. The United Kingdom incorporated development in its most recent national strategic review, The Integrated Review of July 2021.
Advantages/Disadvantages. This option underscores the importance of nuclear modernization in addition to conventional “warfighting readiness.” The long deferred modernization of U.S. strategic assets presents a growing risk that is exacerbated by China’s departure from a minimalist deterrence posture. This option includes elements of the U.S. interagency community, consistent with Mr. Austin’s speeches. The major disadvantage is that it fails to recognize the role of the existing alliance architecture, and the benefits of collective security.
Option 2. Comprehensive Military Deterrence
A third option for consideration is a comprehensive concept that is frames the military contribution to a deterrent architecture. The option includes strategic and conventional military components. Additionally, it incorporates national command and control systems and missile defense. It additionally includes an element for the Defense Department’s contribution to the defense of the homeland. This construct is depicted in Figure 3.
This construct is narrower than the concept the Secretary presented, it is more defense-centric than “whole of government.” This conception provides greater focus for the Department’s leadership to invest in military capabilities that make the greatest contribution to deterrence.
Advantages/Disadvantages. This option includes national C2 or information/cyber resilience as a major component. The impact of space and cyberspace vulnerabilities is one of the great uncertainties of the strategic environment. This construct would facilitate the Defense Department striving to generate and integrate strategic and conventional modes of deterrence. While this is a defense enterprise-centric perspective, this can be considered appropriate and an advantage for NDS, as long as it is remains consistent with the NSS.
This option provides focus for a robust form of deterrence against comprehensive challengers that have strategic capabilities, and addresses both offensive and defense requirements. The explicit separation of missile defense raises a key question. Will the United States remain committed to expensive and incremental improvements in missile defense, and where does this fit in priorities for Integrated Deterrence?
Option 3. Collective Security Deterrence
A more international construct for integrated deterrence is depicted in Figure 4. This option includes alliance force size (capacity) and their degree of modernization (capabilities). Such a framework gives ample consideration for the contributions made by our allies and partners around the globe. This is something China can only aspire to presently.
Recent studies suggest that European hard power remains limited and that a focused effort is required. While chided for years for underinvesting, recent reports from the European Defense Agency shows real progress with 19 EU states increasing their overall defense spending in 2020. But spending more is not necessarily the only measure, and greater collaboration is needed. Moreover, to be truly integrated, the United States will need to consult further with its allies on the use of strategic capabilities as well.
This model also accounts for basing posture, geography, and the time/distance challenges inherent in protecting our friends. Given the role of forward deployed forces and their bases as a critical element of U.S. power projection, this posture is a contributing factor. This option also includes the sustainment of a robust and resilient industrial base, which supports the defense innovation eco-system with agile development and production, but which also supports rapid and responsive support to the warfighter in protracted conflicts.
Advantages/Disadvantages. This option is useful due to the inclusion of allied capabilities and capacity. It also includes the critical enablers, including ISR and space based warning. It also incorporates the longer-term contribution of the defense industrial base, a source of competitive advantage and to deterrence over the long haul. The industrial base is necessary to sustain U.S. readiness in potentially protracted conflict. The ability to continually sustain theater forces, in the face of attrition, supports deterrence against major competitors.
The Next Suite of Strategies
Given the purported degradation in the competitive edge of the U.S. military, an emphasis on deterrence against regional aggression in the Indo-Pacific region is an appropriate centerpiece for the next NDS. But the concept must be intellectually defensible, and constructive in terms of focusing resources and promoting its implementation. It should not be an empty vessel that means all things to all people. Strategic discipline, maximizing scarce resources to prioritized policy aims, should be hallmark for the next NDS.
Of the constructs presented here, the Whole of Government model offers a concept that may be best suited as part of an updated National Security Strategy. It seeks to ensure that all instruments of national power are harnessed to improving stability and maximizing the attainment of success in the larger strategic competition. That competition is arguably more about economics, trade practices, and the science/technology ecosystem.
“Comprehensive Military Deterrence” focuses on Pentagon forces, yet it overlooks the international and coalition dimensions. It seems better suited for focusing DoD on its principal mission, but Option 3 is broader and aligns best for managing the Indo-Pacific region’s ongoing security competition.
The brief overview here generated ideas about the components of Integrated Deterrence, but many questions remain. The fleshed out concept, anticipated to be the centerpiece of the 2022 National Defense Strategy, will have to answer numerous questions:
- How does Integrated Deterrence influence the significant investment pending in U.S nuclear modernization? Does it decrease or alter them?
- Does it alter U.S. declaratory policy on first use?
- How does Integrated Deterrence address the strategic stability challenges posed by disruptive technologies like cyber, space-based weapons, and hypervelocity missiles? Does it limit “wormholes” or allow us to better maneuver through them???
- Where do international norms and law impact deterrence, positively or negatively?
- What are the immediate implications for key allies in Asia, as well as European allies and partners? What do they do to align in the near term with this?
- What is the role of allies in U.S. plans for Integrated Deterrence across theaters? What assumptions about coalition cohesion and capacity are implied?
- How does Integrated Deterrence influence forward deployed force posture?
- Does Integrated Deterrence influence the mix of conventional and strategic capabilities, and how? Where is the biggest payoff for deterrence? How does it impact joint force design and development priorities?
- How does China react to this renewed focus on deterrence? Does the PRC’s leadership sense that it increases their vulnerability and their security dilemma, or does it merely matches their own thinking?
- What synergies does this concept promote in conventional force design, and what does integration mean for Joint Force Development in terms of priorities? Where is the biggest payoff for deterrence?
A good degree of uncertainty surrounds deterrence today as new technologies and cross-domain capabilities have not been demonstrated. Furthermore, policy makers have precious little experience in crafting an integrated deterrence approach, or in managing crises with such capabilities, and little understanding of all the risks involved, particularly the firebreaks or fusion between nuclear, strategic, and conventional capabilities. We should be prudent given these uncertainties.
Ultimately the perception of national power behind our deterrent is based on what the National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan called America’s “reservoirs of strength” at home. This would include our economic vitality, research base, and critical infrastructure. The National Security Strategy should focus on that to satisfy Sir Lawrence Freedman’s definition of strategy as, “getting more out of a situation than the starting balance of power would suggest. It is the art of creating power.” Creating that power is the traditional focus for grand strategy.
Conclusion
The central problem of the ongoing competition is a perceived erosion of America’s deterrence, which invites opportunistic adventuresome that is inimical to U.S. core interests. The security of our Nation and the stability of the international order depends on restoring that deterrence.
There are immediate concerns for regional deterrence as Russia masses its armed forces near Ukraine’s border, and China continues to challenge Taiwan’s security. Disruptive technologies may soon be fielded that undercut longstanding assumptions about strategic stability. With these concerns in mind, the 2022 defense strategy should focus on promoting deterrence as the principal (but not sole) task for the Department of Defense.
Since what we are currently doing is apparently not working, more of the same or an incremental increase is insufficient. We need some creative concepts. The United States still retains substantial structural and cultural advantages that will continue to preserve its competitive edge. As Secretary Austin noted, the United States has a unique advantage in generating and implementing innovative capabilities. This advantage allows “us to weave together cutting-edge technology, operational concepts, and state-of-the-art capabilities.”
Integrated Deterrence will have to build upon these unique American strengths and do so quickly to establish this extended concept against determined competition.
Notes
F. G. Hoffman, “National Security in the Post-Pandemic Era,” Orbis, Vol. 65, no. 1 (Winter 2021), 17–45.
The White House, Interim National Security Strategic Guidance (Washington, DC, 2021), 9 at
Kahl quoted in Jim Garamone,”Concept of Integrated Deterrence Will be Key to NDS,” DoD News, December 8, 2021, at https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/2866963/concept-of-integrated-deterrence-will-be-key-to-national-defense-strategy-dod-o/
Harlan Ullman, “Integrated deterrence’ must be a strategy, not a slogan,” UPI.com, November 12, 2021, at https://www.upi.com/Voices/2021/10/20/Harlan-Ullman-integrated-deterrence-defense-lloyd-austin/3151634653636/?spt=su&or=btn_tw
Michael Gallagher, “Pentagon’s Deterrence Strategy Ignores Hard Earned Lessons about Balance of Power,” Washington Post, September 29, 2021. At
For a comprehensive look at competition see Thomas F. Lynch, III., ed., Strategic Assessment 2020: Into an Era of Great Power Competition (Washington, DC: NDU Press, 2020).
Stacie Pettyjohn and Becca Wasser and Jennie Matuschak, “Risky Business, Future Strategy and Force Options,” Washington, DC, Center for New American Security, 2021. At
Austin Long, Deterrence; from Cold War to Long War: Lessons from Six Decades of RAND Research, Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2008. At Michael J. Mazarr, Arthur Chan, Alyssa Demus, Bryan Frederick, Alireza Nader, Stephanie Pezard, Julia A. Thompson, and Elina Treyger, What Deters and Why: Exploring Requirements for Effective Deterrence of Interstate Aggression (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2018), at https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR2451.html
Michael J. Mazarr, “Understanding Deterrence,” Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2018.
Thomas Schelling, Arms and Influence (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1966).
Michael Horowitz and Paul Scharre, “AI and International Stability: Risks and Confidence-Building Measures,” Washington, DC, Center for a New American Security, January 21, 2021. At
Rebecca Hersman, “Wormhole Escalation in the New Nuclear Age,” Texas National Security Review, Vol. 3, no. 2 (Autumn 2020), 91–109.
Hersman, 94.
Michael S. Chase and Arthur Chan, China’s Evolving Approach to “Integrated Strategic Deterrence,” Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2016, at https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR1366.html; Denny Blasko, “Peace Through Strength: Deterrence in Chinese Military Doctrine, War on the Rocks, March 15, 2017, Dean Cheng, “An Overview of Chinese Thinking About Deterrence,” in Frans Osinga and Tim Sweijs, eds., Netherlands Annual Review of Military Studies 2020 (The Hague, NL: Asser Press, 2020).
Fiona S. Cunningham and M. Taylor Fravel, “Dangerous Confidence? Chinese Views on Nuclear Escalation,” International Security Vol. 44, no. 2 (2019), 61–109.
Department of Defense, Chinese Military Power report, Washington, DC Defense Intelligence Agency, 2020; U.S. China Economic and Security Commission, Annual Report 2021. On cross-strait deterrence, see the Commission’s report, at. Congressional Research Service, China Naval Modernization: Implications for U.S. Navy Capabilities—Background and Issues for Congress, Washington, DC, October 7, 2021.
Keith Crane, Olga Oliker and Brian Nichiporuk, Trends in Russia’s Armed Forces: An Overview of Budgets and Capabilities (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2019). At Defense Intelligence Agency, Russian Military Power, Washington, DC: Department of Defense, 2021; Samuel Bendett, Mathieu Boulegue, and Richard Connolly, Advanced Military Technology in Russia: Capabilities and Implications, London: Royal Institute of International Affairs, September 2021.
For an outstanding depiction of Russian strategic culture see Kier Giles, Moscow Rules, What Drives Russia to Confront the West (Washington, DC; Brookings Institution, 2019).
Bettina Renz, Russia’s Military Revival (London: Polity, 2018). See also Andrew Radin, Lynn E. Davies, Edward Geist, Eugeniu Han, Dara Massicot, Matthew Povlock, Clint Reach, Scott Boston, Samuel Charap, William Mackenzie, Katya Migacheva, Trevor Johnston and Austin Long, The Future of the Russian Military: Russia’s Ground Combat Capabilities and Implications for US-Russia Competition (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2019). At https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR3099
Stephen Flanagan, Jan Osburg, Anika Binnendijk, Marta Kepe and Andrew Radin. Deterring Russian Aggression in the Baltic States through Resilience and Resistance (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2019), at https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR2779; Stephanie Pezard and Ashley L. Rhoades, “What Provokes Putin’s Russia? Deterring Without Unintended Escalation,” (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2020), at https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE338.html; Dan Fried, John Herbst, and Alexander Vershbow, “How to Deter Russia Now,” Atlantic Council, blog, November 23, 2021, at https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/how-to-deter-russia-now/; Keir Giles, “What Deters Russia: Enduring principles for responding to Moscow,” Chatham House, 23 September 2021, at https://www.chathamhouse.org/2021/09/what-deters-russia.
Robert Jervis, “Deterrence and Perception,” International Security, Vol. 7, no. 3 (Winter 1982/1983), 3-30. At
Andrew Radin, Hybrid Warfare in the Baltics: Threats and Potential Responses. Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2017), at https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR1577; Michael Kofman and Andrea Kendall-Taylor, “The Myth of Russian Decline: Why Moscow Will Be a Persistent Power,” Foreign Affairs (November/December 2021).
Jeffrey Mankoff, “Russia in the Era of Great Power Competition,” The Washington Quarterly, Vol. 44, no. 3 (2021), 107–125, at DOI: 10.1080/0163660X.2021.1970905.
Luis Simon, “Between punishment and denial: Uncertainty, flexibility, and U.S. military strategy toward China,” Contemporary Security Policy, Vol. 4 no. 3 (2020), 361-384, at
Michael J. Mazarr, Joe Cherevitch, Jeffrey Hornung, and Stephanie Pezard, “What Deters and Why: Applying a Framework to Assess Deterrence of Gray Zone Aggression,” Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2018.
Linda Robinson, Todd C. Helmus, Raphael S. Cohen, Alireza Nader, Andrew Radin, Madeline Magnuson and Katya Migacheva, Modern Political Warfare: Current Practices and Possible Responses. Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2018. At
Ben Connable, Jason H. Campbell and Dan Madden, Stretching and Exploiting Thresholds for High-Order War: How Russia, China and Iran are Eroding American Influence Using Time-Tested Measures Short of War, Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2016, at https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR1003 Raphael Cohen and Andrew Radin, Russia’s Hostile Measures in Europe: Understanding the Threat. Santa Monica, CA: RAND, RR-1793-A, 2019. At https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR1793
Admiral Charles A Richard, US Navy, Statement of Commander United States Strategic Command Before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Washington, DC, 13 February 2020. See also Rebecca Hersman, “U.S. Nuclear Warhead Modernization and ‘New’ Nuclear Weapons,” Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and International Studies, December 10, 2020, at https://www.csis.org/analysis/us-nuclear-warhead-modernization-and-new-nuclear-weapons
Austin remarks at INDO-PAC Command Change of Command, op. cit.
Martin Libicki, Cyberdeterrence and Cyberwar, Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2009. At Vince Manzo, “Deterrence and Escalation in Cross-Domain Operations: Where Do Space and Cyberspace Fit?” Strategic Forum, No. 272, Washington, DC: National Defense University, Institute for National Strategic Studies, December 2011. Joseph Nye, and S. Joseph, “Deterrence and Dissuasion in Cyberspace,” International Security, Vol. 41, no. 3, 2017; R. Slayton, “What Is the Cyber Offense-Defense Balance? Conceptions, Causes, and Assessment,” International Security, Vol. 41, no. 3 (2017), 72–109.
Laura Grego, “The Next Fifty Years of Nuclear Proliferation,” Occasional Paper of the Institute for International Science & Technology Policy, IISTP-WP-2021-20, ed., Sharon Squassoni, February 2021. See
Stephan Fruehling and Andrew O’Neil, “Making Indo-Pacific Alliances Fit for Deterrence,” The Strategist, Australian Strategic Policy Institute, December 21, 2021, at
Renanah M. Joyce and Becca Wasser, “All About Access: Solving America’s Force Posture Puzzle,” The Washington Quarterly, Vol. 44, no.3 (2021), 45-67, at DOI:10.1080/0163660X.2021.1970335.
Rebecca K.C. Hersman and Reja Younis, The Adversary Gets a Vote: Advanced Situational Awareness and Implications for Integrated Deterrence in an Era of Great Power Competition, Washington, DC, Center for Strategic and International Studies, September 2021. See also James Lewis, “Rethinking Deterrence,” Washington, DC: CSIS, May 2016, at https://csis-website-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/170713_Deterrence_Stability_0.pdf ?lz1HlfsfMcQGYSynMnhACGXI2PDjEm0p
Cathal Nolan, The Allure of Battle: A History of How Wars have been Won and Lost (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).
Darryl Cotte, “Global Posture Review recommends few changes to U.S. military stance,” UPI, November 29, 2021,
Paul Bernstein and Austin Long, “Multi-Domain Deterrence: Some Framing Considerations,” in Brad Roberts, ed., Getting the Multi-Domain Challenge Right, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (December, 2021), 6–7.
Lawrence Freedman, Strategy, A History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), xii.
Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, “The Age of Strategic Instability: How Novel Technologies Disrupt the Nuclear Balance,” Foreign Affairs.com, July 21, 2020, at https://www.foreignaffairs.com/
About the author:
Dr. Francis G. Hoffman holds an appointment as a Distinguished Research Fellow at the Institute for National Strategic Studies, National Defense University in Washington, DC. He is a retired Marine officer with Senior Executive Service-level political posts in the Pentagon, and last served there as a strategic advisor to the Secretary of Defense and a member of the task force that produced the 2018 National Defense Strategy. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton Business School and earned his Ph.D. from King’s College London.
His most recent book is Mars Adapting: Military Change During War (Naval Institute Press 2021).
Disclaimers
The views expressed herein are those of the author. They do not necessarily represent those of the Department of Defense or any other governmental or non-governmental agency.
The views expressed by guest authors do not necessarily reflect the views of the Center on Law, Ethics and National Security, or Duke University.
Remember what we like to say on Lawfire®: gather the facts, examine the law, evaluate the arguments – and then decide for yourself!
2. U.S. Details Costs of a Russian Invasion of Ukraine
Excerpts:
Lt. Col. Anton Semelroth, a Defense Department spokesman, noted in December that the United States had already committed over $2.5 billion in security assistance to Ukraine since 2014, including $450 million in 2021 alone. Over the past three months, it has delivered 180 Javelin missiles, two patrol boats, ammunition for grenade launchers, machine guns, secure radios, medical equipment and other items that U.S. officials describe as defensive in nature.
But the planning cell is considering more lethal weaponry, such as antiaircraft weapons.
After visiting Ukraine last month, Representative Seth Moulton, Democrat of Massachusetts and a former Marine officer, said that in his view, “We need to make any incursion by Russia more painful — Day 1 painful, not six months from now painful.”
“We have a short window to take decisive action to deter Putin from a serious invasion,” Mr. Moulton said in an interview. “I worry our current deterrent tactics are responding to an invasion rather than preventing it.”
One option likely to be discussed at NATO this coming week is a plan to increase, possibly by several thousand, the number of troops stationed in the Baltics and in Southeast Europe.
On Friday, Mr. Blinken again warned that if the Russians invade, NATO would deploy more forces along the borders between NATO nations and Russian-controlled territory.
U.S. Details Costs of a Russian Invasion of Ukraine
Jan. 8, 2022
The Biden administration and its allies are developing new possible sanctions ahead of a series of meetings to defuse the crisis with Moscow.
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Ukrainian soldiers at a combat position in Luhansk, Ukraine, on Tuesday. Diplomatic talks between the United States and Russia are scheduled for Monday in Geneva.Credit...Maksim Levin/Reuters
Jan. 8, 2022
WASHINGTON — The Biden administration and its allies are assembling a punishing set of financial, technology and military sanctions against Russia that they say would go into effect within hours of an invasion of Ukraine, hoping to make clear to President Vladimir V. Putin the high cost he would pay if he sends troops across the border.
In interviews, officials described details of those plans for the first time, just ahead of a series of diplomatic negotiations to defuse the crisis with Moscow, one of the most perilous moments in Europe since the end of the Cold War. The talks begin on Monday in Geneva and then move across Europe.
The plans the United States has discussed with allies in recent days include cutting off Russia’s largest financial institutions from global transactions, imposing an embargo on American-made or American-designed technology needed for defense-related and consumer industries, and arming insurgents in Ukraine who would conduct what would amount to a guerrilla war against a Russian military occupation, if it comes to that.
Such moves are rarely telegraphed in advance. But with the negotiations looming — and the fate of Europe’s post-Cold War borders and NATO’s military presence on the continent at stake — President Biden’s advisers say they are trying to signal to Mr. Putin exactly what he would face, at home and abroad, in hopes of influencing his decisions in coming weeks.
The talks on Monday will be led by the deputy secretary of state, Wendy R. Sherman, an experienced diplomat who negotiated the 2015 nuclear agreement with Iran. Russian officials are expected to press their demands for “security guarantees,” including prohibiting the deployment of any missiles in Europe that could strike Russia and the placement of weaponry or troops in former Soviet states that joined NATO after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Mr. Putin is also demanding an end to NATO expansion, including a promise that Ukraine could never join the nuclear alliance. While the Biden administration has said it is willing to discuss all Russian security concerns — and has a long list of its own — the demands amount to a dismantling of the security architecture of Europe built after the Soviet Union’s collapse.
Deputy Secretary of State Wendy R. Sherman will lead the bilateral talks, where Russian officials are expected to push for “security guarantees.”Credit...Pool photo by Andrew Harnik
On Wednesday, members of the NATO alliance will meet with Russia in Brussels. The next day in Vienna, Ukrainian officials will also be at the table, for the first time, for talks at the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. But with 57 members, that group is so large that few expect serious negotiations.
American diplomats worry that after the whirlwind week, the Russians could declare that their security concerns are not being met — and use the failure of talks as a justification for military action. “No one should be surprised if Russia instigates a provocation or incident,” Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said on Friday, and “then tries to use it to justify military intervention, hoping that by the time the world realizes the ruse, it’ll be too late.”
This time, he said, “we’ve been clear with Russia about what it will face if it continues on this path, including economic measures that we haven’t used before — massive consequences.”
That warning, however, is an unspoken acknowledgment that the Obama administration’s response in 2014, when Mr. Putin last invaded parts of Ukraine, was too tentative and mild. At that time, Mr. Putin surprised the world by annexing Crimea and fueling a grinding proxy war in eastern Ukraine. Now, American officials say they are trying to learn from their past mistakes.
An internal review of those actions, conducted by the White House in recent weeks, concluded that while Obama-era sanctions damaged Russia’s economy and led to a sell-off of its currency, they failed at their central strategic objective: to cause so much pain that Mr. Putin would be forced to withdraw. Nearly eight years later, Russia still holds Crimea and has ignored most of the diplomatic commitments it made in the negotiations that followed, known as the Minsk accords.
Those sanctions started with actions against some smaller Russian banks and individuals directly involved in the invasion. Virtually all of the sanctions — and additional measures imposed after Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and after the SolarWinds cyberattack in 2020 that sabotaged computer programs used by the federal government and American companies — remain in place. But there is scant evidence that they have deterred Mr. Putin, who began building up forces near the Ukrainian border just as Mr. Biden announced his response to SolarWinds last spring.
When asked recently whether he could point to any evidence that the Russians were deterred by recent sanctions, a senior aide to Mr. Biden paused a moment and then said, “No, none.”
The Kremlin in Moscow. American diplomats are concerned that Russia could use the failure of diplomatic talks to justify military action against Ukraine.Credit...Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times
Rather than start with moves against small banks and on-the-ground military commanders, officials said, the new sanctions would be directed at cutting off the largest Russian financial institutions that depend on global financial transfers. The plan was described by one official as a “high-impact, quick-action response that we did not pursue in 2014.”
The officials declined to say whether the United States was prepared to cut Russia off from the SWIFT system, which executes global financial transactions between more than 1,100 banks in 200 countries. But European officials say they have discussed that possibility — something most major European powers had declined to consider until recently, for fear that Russia might retaliate by attempting to cut off gas and oil flows in the winter, even briefly.
Understand Russia’s Relationship With the West
The tension between the regions is growing and Russian President Vladimir Putin is increasingly willing to take geopolitical risks and assert his demands.
The SWIFT cutoff has been used against Iran with some success. But Cynthia Roberts, a professor of political science at Hunter College, noted that Russia had learned a lot about “global sanctions-proofing,” and she expressed doubt that the country would suffer as much as American officials contend if it were disconnected from SWIFT.
“They would definitely take a big hit,” she said at a seminar held this past week by the Center for the National Interest. But she noted that Russia had stockpiled hundreds of billions in gold and dollar reserves and that the Bank of China had joined Russia’s own domestic version of SWIFT. That raises the possibility that Russia and China, as part of their expanding partnership, might join forces to help Moscow evade the West’s action.
The bottom line, she said, is that “sanctions have a very poor coercive track record.”
The technology sanctions would target some of Mr. Putin’s favored industries — particularly aerospace and arms, which are major producers of revenue for the Russian government. The focus would be on Russian-built fighter aircraft, antiaircraft systems, antisatellite systems, space systems and emerging technologies where Russia is hoping to make gains, like artificial intelligence and quantum computing.
Similar export controls have been surprisingly effective against China’s leading producer of cellphones, Huawei, which for a while was among the top providers of smartphones to the world. That part of its business has all but collapsed in the past year because it cannot obtain advanced chips. But the Russian economy bears little resemblance to China’s, and it is not clear that it is equally vulnerable to an embargo of semiconductors and other microelectronics that are critical to Chinese manufacturing.
There are other options under consideration that go well beyond merely banning the sale of computer chips. In one additional step, according to American officials, the Commerce Department could issue a ruling that would essentially ban the export of any consumer goods to Russia — from cellphones and laptop computers to refrigerators and washing machines — that contain American-made or American-designed electronics. That would apply not only to American makers, but also to European, South Korean and other foreign manufacturers that use American chips or software.
Unlike China, Russia does not make many of these products — and the effects on consumers could be broad.
But a senior European official said there was still a debate about whether the Russian people would blame Mr. Putin, or the United States and its allies, for their inability to buy the goods.
While the Commerce and Treasury Departments work on sanctions that would maximize America’s advantages over Russia, the Pentagon is developing plans that have echoes of the proxy wars of the 1960s and ’70s.
Understand the Escalating Tensions Over Ukraine
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Ominous warnings. Russia called the strike a destabilizing act that violated the cease-fire agreement, raising fears of a new intervention in Ukraine that could draw the United States and Europe into a new phase of the conflict.
The Kremlin’s position. President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, who has increasingly portrayed NATO’s eastward expansion as an existential threat to his country, said that Moscow’s military buildup was a response to Ukraine’s deepening partnership with the alliance.
To underscore the potential pain for Russia, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark A. Milley, spoke with his Russian counterpart two weeks ago and delivered a stark message: Yes, he said, you could invade Ukraine and probably roll over the Ukrainian military, which stands little chance of repelling a far larger, better armed Russian force.
But the swift victory would be followed, General Milley told Gen. Valery Gerasimov, by a bloody insurgency, similar to the one that led to the Soviet retreat from Afghanistan more than three decades ago, according to officials familiar with the discussion.
General Milley did not detail to General Gerasimov the planning underway in Washington to support an insurgency, a so-called “porcupine strategy” to make invading Ukraine hard for the Russians to swallow. That includes the advance positioning of arms for Ukrainian insurgents, probably including Stinger antiaircraft missiles, that could be used against Russian forces.
Ukrainian soldiers with Javelin missiles at a parade in Kyiv in 2018. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark A. Milley, has conceded that Russia could probably roll over the Ukrainian military.Credit...Sergey Dolzhenko/EPA, via Shutterstock
More than a month ago, Mr. Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, created a new interagency planning cell to examine a range of contingencies if Mr. Putin goes ahead with an invasion. The cell, which reports directly to Mr. Sullivan, includes representatives from the National Security Council, the intelligence agencies and the Departments of Defense, State, Treasury, Energy and Homeland Security.
The cell is attempting to tailor responses to the many types of attacks that could unfold in the next few weeks, from cyberattacks aimed at crippling Ukraine’s electric grid and pipelines to the seizure of small or large amounts of territory.
Intelligence officials said recently that they thought the least likely possibility was a full-scale invasion in which the Russians try to take the capital, Kyiv. Many of the assessments, however, have explored more incremental moves by Mr. Putin, which could include seizing a bit more land in the Donbas region, where war has ground into a stalemate, or a land bridge to Crimea.
Several officials familiar with the planning say the administration is looking at European nations that could provide more aid to support Ukrainian forces before any conflict, as well as in the initial stages of a Russian invasion.
Lt. Col. Anton Semelroth, a Defense Department spokesman, noted in December that the United States had already committed over $2.5 billion in security assistance to Ukraine since 2014, including $450 million in 2021 alone. Over the past three months, it has delivered 180 Javelin missiles, two patrol boats, ammunition for grenade launchers, machine guns, secure radios, medical equipment and other items that U.S. officials describe as defensive in nature.
But the planning cell is considering more lethal weaponry, such as antiaircraft weapons.
After visiting Ukraine last month, Representative Seth Moulton, Democrat of Massachusetts and a former Marine officer, said that in his view, “We need to make any incursion by Russia more painful — Day 1 painful, not six months from now painful.”
“We have a short window to take decisive action to deter Putin from a serious invasion,” Mr. Moulton said in an interview. “I worry our current deterrent tactics are responding to an invasion rather than preventing it.”
One option likely to be discussed at NATO this coming week is a plan to increase, possibly by several thousand, the number of troops stationed in the Baltics and in Southeast Europe.
On Friday, Mr. Blinken again warned that if the Russians invade, NATO would deploy more forces along the borders between NATO nations and Russian-controlled territory.
3. Disruption, Dismay, Dissent: Americans Grapple With Omicron’s Rise
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So far, hospitalizations have increased at a much slower pace than cases. But the number of coronavirus patients is still growing rapidly, to about 134,000 nationwide, up from about 67,000 a month ago. In many cities, doctors say, a smaller proportion of Covid patients are landing in intensive care units or requiring mechanical ventilation, but the sheer number of patients is raising alarms.
Deaths, which are a lagging indicator, have not yet increased as significantly. About 1,500 deaths from Covid-19 are being announced every day in the United States. It could be weeks, officials said, before they will know whether the Omicron variant will result in another large wave of deaths in the United States, where more than 830,000 people have died from the coronavirus.
Andrew Noymer, a public health professor at the University of California, Irvine, said that the Omicron variant has been “legitimately complicated” for many Americans to comprehend, since it clearly differs from previous variants.
“Omicron is milder than Delta, but it’s more transmissible,” he said. “It’s changing two things at once.”
Disruption, Dismay, Dissent: Americans Grapple With Omicron’s Rise
Covid testing in New Orleans on Wednesday.Credit...Emily Kask for The New York Times
The variant is spreading fast. For some, it is causing milder illness. But its distinct qualities have left Americans making a new set of calculations.
Covid testing in New Orleans on Wednesday.Credit...Emily Kask for The New York Times
By
- Jan. 9, 2022, 5:00 a.m. ET
CHICAGO — With infection rates mounting, the Omicron variant has ushered in a new and disorienting phase of the pandemic, leaving Americans frustrated and dismayed that the basic elements they thought they understood about the coronavirus are shifting faster than ever.
There were reasons for heightened concern and reasons for consolation: Omicron is more transmissible than previous variants, yet it appears to cause milder symptoms in many people. Hospitalizations have soared to new highs in some states, but “incidental patients” — people who test positive for Covid-19 after being admitted for another reason — make up close to half of their cases in some hospitals.
Public health officials, in response to the new variant, have halved the recommended isolation period for people with positive tests to five days from 10 days, while also suggesting people upgrade their masks from cloth to medical-grade when possible.
“Omicron has turned, quickly, into something that is just different,” said Dr. Allison Arwady, Chicago’s top health official.
Amid shifting federal public health guidance and the new and distinct variant, President Biden’s own former transition team has called on the president to adopt an entirely new domestic pandemic strategy geared to the “new normal” of living with the virus indefinitely, not to wiping it out.
And Americans, confronted with these new sets of facts, warnings and advisories, have responded with a mix of confusion, vigilance and indifference. Left mainly to navigate it all on their own, they must sort through an array of uncertain risks — ride a bus? visit friends? eat inside? — hour by hour.
Hospitalizations have soared, but officials said it could be weeks before they will know whether the Omicron variant results in another large wave of deaths in the country. Credit...Scott McIntyre for The New York Times
Many people wonder whether they should keep their children home from school or cancel vacations and dinners out. They scramble for at-home antigen tests or appointments for sophisticated P.C.R. tests and are discarding cloth masks in favor of KN95s and N95s. In some cities, they have returned to wearing masks even outside, and are ordering grocery deliveries or stocking up on supplies to avoid trips for the days ahead.
Others have shrugged off the rising cases, focusing on the encouraging fact that some people who are infected with the Omicron variant suffer little more than a cough and runny nose — if they show symptoms at all.
While some places have maintained limits like restrictions on indoor dining for the unvaccinated, there is little appetite for broad shutdowns. A restaurateur in Austin, Texas, said that customers were out and about, eager to gather in groups.
“It’s obvious: People are over it,” said Daniel Brooks, 45, who owns two restaurants in Austin.
For the most part, American life has not locked down in the latest wave — businesses remain open and schools are largely in session in person — yet this variant has brought significant disruptions to daily life and threatens to bring still more.
Police officers, paramedics and firefighters have been sidelined with the virus, affecting response times in some cities. Across the country, millions of Americans have been sick at home in recent days, igniting debates over testing and safety measures in schools and alarming officials who told the public in blunt terms this past week that they were running dangerously low on hospital beds and health care workers.
“I suspect just about everybody in the state now either has just had Covid, has it today or knows somebody who does,” Gov. John Bel Edwards of Louisiana said. “There has never been more of the disease in our state.”
Lines for Covid testing stretched around the block at a Baltimore County Health Department site in late December. Credit...Al Drago for The New York Times
Omicron emerged in southern Africa in late November, and by Christmas it was the dominant variant in the United States, Britain and parts of continental Europe, including Denmark and Portugal, which have some of the highest vaccination rates in the world.
The record-high caseloads fueled by Omicron have produced their own form of chaos globally, sidelining millions of workers with infections, prompting shortages of test kits and forcing many governments to reimpose social restrictions. Spain, Greece and Italy ordered their citizens to return to wearing masks outdoors; the Netherlands retreated into full lockdown.
The variant is now battering nearly every corner of the world. India, bracing for a tidal wave of infections with only half its population vaccinated, has set up makeshift Covid wards in convention halls. In Argentina recently, the test positivity rate rose to a staggering 30 percent.
But with signs that the wave of Omicron in South Africa is receding, without bringing a huge new surge of deaths, many countries have moved to a strategy of living with the virus, opting to keep businesses and schools open rather than risk the economic havoc of more lockdowns.
Health officials in the United States, weary from two years of repeating similar pleas to the public, have tried to emphasize that the Omicron variant is like no other phase of the pandemic.
Daily case reports have roughly quintupled over the last month as Omicron has taken hold. About 650,000 new cases are being identified each day, more than twice as many as at last winter’s peak — a number that is certainly an undercount, since it does not include many results from at-home antigen tests.
The intensive care unit at Western Reserve Hospital in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio. In many cities, doctors say, a smaller percentage of Covid patients are landing in ICUs or requiring mechanical ventilation, but the sheer number of patients is raising alarms. Credit...Shannon Stapleton/Reuters
So far, hospitalizations have increased at a much slower pace than cases. But the number of coronavirus patients is still growing rapidly, to about 134,000 nationwide, up from about 67,000 a month ago. In many cities, doctors say, a smaller proportion of Covid patients are landing in intensive care units or requiring mechanical ventilation, but the sheer number of patients is raising alarms.
Deaths, which are a lagging indicator, have not yet increased as significantly. About 1,500 deaths from Covid-19 are being announced every day in the United States. It could be weeks, officials said, before they will know whether the Omicron variant will result in another large wave of deaths in the United States, where more than 830,000 people have died from the coronavirus.
Andrew Noymer, a public health professor at the University of California, Irvine, said that the Omicron variant has been “legitimately complicated” for many Americans to comprehend, since it clearly differs from previous variants.
“Omicron is milder than Delta, but it’s more transmissible,” he said. “It’s changing two things at once.”
Shifting advice on isolation and quarantines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has also left Americans with questions about the seriousness of the variant. Many employers, acting on guidance from public health officials, have encouraged sick workers to return to their jobs after only five days, even without a test showing that they are negative for the virus.
“The confusion is compounded,” said Dr. Gill Wright, the city health director in Nashville. “People are saying, this is supposed to get really bad, but we can go back to work quicker?”
The Coronavirus Pandemic: Key Things to Know
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In rural Michigan, people with coronavirus symptoms have arrived at hospitals in recent weeks repeating the conventional wisdom that once you have had Covid, you are unlikely to contract it again quickly.
“A lot of them say, ‘It can’t be Covid, I just had it a few months ago,” said Dr. Mark Hamed, an emergency room physician in Sandusky, Mich. “Lo and behold, they test positive.”
Roughly 62 percent of Americans are fully vaccinated, a number that has barely budged in recent weeks. Even fully vaccinated and boosted individuals have become infected with the Omicron variant, though health officials say that their infections appear less severe than in the unvaccinated.
Covid vaccinations at the Searcy Medical Center of the Delta Health Center network in Cleveland, Miss. Roughly 62 percent of Americans are fully vaccinated, a number that has barely budged in recent weeks. Credit...Rory Doyle for The New York Times
Across the country, record numbers of public employees have been off the job as a result of surging coronavirus infections, leaving officials scrambling to reassure residents that if they call 911, someone will show up — if a little later than normal.
In Dallas, 204 of the roughly 2,100 employees of the city’s fire and rescue department were in quarantine on Thursday because of positive Covid-19 tests — the most since the beginning of the pandemic, according to Jason Evans, the department’s spokesman. He said that approximately one-quarter of the department’s total positive tests since March 2020 were from the last two weeks.
Los Angeles city officials said at a news conference on Thursday that almost 300 firefighters were off duty because of the virus, the most the department had seen at any one time. Jeff Cretan, a spokesman for Mayor London Breed of San Francisco, said that 140 employees of the fire department and 188 employees of the city police department had tested positive or were out because of quarantine protocols; so were 110 workers at the city’s transit agency.
Schools and colleges were facing the uncertainty of whether to conduct classes in person or virtually, sometimes while balancing competing arguments from parents, teachers and students.
In Chicago last week, the powerful teachers union and Mayor Lori Lightfoot clashed over coronavirus safety and testing in a dispute that has closed schools for several days in the nation’s third-largest school district.
Chicago Public Schools were closed last week after Mayor Lori Lightfoot and the teachers’ union could not come to an agreement on school safety and pandemic precautions.Credit...Lyndon French for The New York Times
At Rhodes College, a small liberal arts school in Memphis, officials announced over the holiday break that the start of in-person classes was being delayed two weeks — a disappointment for students exasperated with online classes and eager for the kind of college experience they had hoped for.
“Every semester, it feels like we’re almost back to normal and then it gets revoked one more time,” said John Howell, a senior political economy and philosophy major starting his final semester. “It feels like every routine is going to be broken and you should just expect that.”
Bishop James Dixon, the senior pastor at the Community of Faith Church in Houston, said that he and his fellow church leaders have found themselves struggling to strike the right balance as Omicron spreads.
“No one has a set answer,” he said. “It’s trial and error. It’s trepidatious. And we’re supposed to be people of faith and make a decision and take a direction.”
Mr. Dixon said the virus had caused a scare among many congregants because they know so many people now who have gotten it.
“Things are better than they were,” he said, “but simultaneously they’re worse than they were because numbers are soaring.”
Shashank Bengali contributed reporting from London, Jill Cowan from Los Angeles, J. David Goodman from Houston, Rick Rojas from Nashville and Mitch Smith from Chicago.
4. Left Out of High-Level Talks, Ukraine Tries Other Diplomatic Channels
Whenever I read these reports where we are holding talks about a country or group and that country or group is not participating I wonder if we understand the perception of such a narrative.
I am sure there is some diplomatic logic to which I am not privy as the rationale for doing so but I cannot help but wonder who actions such as this help support adversary narratives about perceived US imperialist-like actions. Sometimes we walk right into our adversaries' information and influence campaigns.
Left Out of High-Level Talks, Ukraine Tries Other Diplomatic Channels
While the United States and NATO speak with Russia this week, the Ukrainian government has been sidelined and is instead quietly pursuing separate negotiations with Moscow.
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Ukrainian reservists during exercises last month near Kyiv, the capital.Credit...Sergey Dolzhenko/EPA, via Shutterstock
By
Jan. 9, 2022, 5:00 a.m. ET
KYIV, Ukraine — Peace negotiations are usually thought to involve two sides brought together by a mediator trying to tease out possible compromises, far from the anger and destruction of the battlefield.
But talks starting in Geneva Monday on the eight-year-old war in Ukraine are different. The conflict — and an overtly threatened Russian invasion that the talks are intended to forestall — may be in Ukraine. But Ukraine will be missing from two of the three negotiating sessions scheduled for this week.
The absence of any concrete role for Ukraine in the talks has clearly unnerved the government in Kyiv. Fearing the talks will yield little or nothing, and with President Biden’s statement that the United States would not intervene militarily if Russia invades, Ukraine has quietly pursued its own negotiating track with Moscow.
The current crisis began last month, when Russia massed more than 100,000 troops along its borders with Ukraine and demanded wide-ranging — and, to Western analysts, impossible — concessions from the United States and NATO on matters of European security.
Those were laid out in two draft treaties proposed by Moscow that the government in Kyiv — because it is not a member of the alliance — has no say over. President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia subsequently threatened to launch an invasion of Ukraine if the talks on its proposals should fail.
In effect, that made Ukraine “the hostage,” of Russia, said Kostiantyn Yelisieiev, a former Ukrainian ambassador to the European Union.
President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has threatened an invasion of Ukraine if the talks on his country’s proposals fail.Credit...Yuri Kochetkov/EPA, via Shutterstock
Moscow’s sidelining of Ukraine and its demand for direct talks with the United States and NATO were intentional, Mr. Yelisieiev said.
One of Russia’s key demands is that NATO exclude any possibility of Ukraine’s membership in the alliance — NATO has already rejected that — and halt all military cooperation with the country. Russia also requested that the alliance halt all military activities throughout Eastern Europe and Central Asia.
“The issues concern all of Europe, including Ukraine, but Putin suggests discussions between Russia and the United States,” Mr. Yelisieiev said. “Russia in this way made an announcement of a sphere of influence. ‘You leave us the former Soviet space and do what you want elsewhere.’”
A Ukrainian delegation will take part in the third of the three rounds of talks, scheduled for Thursday in Vienna under the auspices of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. The United States has said it is coordinating closely with the authorities in Kyiv.
“No decisions about Ukraine without Ukraine,” the Ukrainian foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, posted on Twitter last week, noting he will also meet with NATO officials in Brussels. “Part of a wide diplomatic effort to deter further Russian aggression.”
The current threat follows eight years of low-level conflict. Russia intervened militarily in Ukraine in 2014, annexing the Crimean Peninsula and fomenting separatist uprisings in two eastern provinces, leading to the deaths of about 13,000 people.
Given the stakes for Ukraine, the government of President Volodymyr Zelensky has decided not to rely wholly on the U.S.-led negotiations. Mr. Zelensky announced a separate, Ukrainian diplomatic initiative with Russia in late December, the specifics of which were later published in the Russian newspaper Kommersant.
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine announced a separate Ukrainian diplomatic initiative with Russia in late December.
The 10-point Ukrainian plan, which is bound to be highly contentious in Ukraine, begins with three confidence-building steps — a cease-fire, an exchange of prisoners and the opening of crossing points for civilians on the front line in the eastern Ukraine war — then moves to political issues. The first point, the cease-fire, has already been implemented.
The political matters involve direct talks between Mr. Zelensky and Mr. Putin and a final point, No. 10, under which the Ukrainian government would submit to Parliament laws granting self-rule to separatist areas and devolving some powers to these areas, according to Kommersant.
Understand Russia’s Relationship With the West
The tension between the regions is growing and Russian President Vladimir Putin is increasingly willing to take geopolitical risks and assert his demands.
In the Russian interpretation, these laws would grant its proxies in eastern Ukraine veto power over foreign policy decisions by the central government, including NATO membership for Ukraine, potentially satisfying enough of Russia’s request to forestall a catastrophic war in Ukraine.
Western diplomats say the proposed laws leave wiggle room for interpretation, and that Mr. Zelensky is unlikely to grant Moscow veto power over future NATO membership. The proposal says nothing about the aspiration for NATO membership written into Ukraine’s Constitution and has seemingly stalled after the cease-fire, announced on Dec. 22.
Russian troops during exercises in the Rostov region of Russia, near the border with Ukraine.Credit...Associated Press
Like so many other diplomatic efforts to end the war, this one is given little chance of success by most analysts, but it could serve other purposes. Ukraine can do “nothing” in diplomacy but wait for the possible outbreak of violence, said Oleksandr Danylyuk, a former secretary of the Ukrainian Security Council. “This is why Putin is doing this. It’s his goal to show that Ukraine cannot do anything.”
And the negotiating effort could have one lasting effect: Mr. Zelensky’s apparent willingness to negotiate over autonomy for the separatist regions and any hint of accepting neutrality between the West and Russia could cause a firestorm in Ukrainian politics.
To date, none of the diplomatic talks with Russia, whether with the United States or Ukraine, have slowed the stream of ominous statements from Russian officials that diplomats and analysts worry could be used to justify military action or prepare the Russian population for a war.
In July, Mr. Putin published an article arguing that Russia and Ukraine are essentially the same country, with a shared history and culture, suggesting a reason for unification.
The threats became more focused in August after the American withdrawal from Afghanistan, when senior Russian security officials publicly taunted Ukraine that it, too, could soon lose the United States as a protector.
“The country is headed toward collapse, and the White House at a certain moment won’t even remember about its supporters in Kyiv,” Nikolai Patrushev, the secretary of Russia’s Security Council, told Izvestia newspaper soon after the fall of Kabul.
In December, Mr. Putin, speaking to a gathering of generals and security officials, said Moscow might resort to “military-technical” means if Western nations “continue the obviously aggressive stance.”
President Biden speaking by phone with Mr. Zelensky in December. While supporting Ukraine, Mr. Biden has ruled out U.S. military intervention. Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times
A deputy foreign minister for Russia, Aleksandr Grushko, more explicitly linked a threat of Russian military force to a breakdown in the talks.
“The Europeans must also think about whether they want to avoid making their continent the scene of a military confrontation,” Mr. Grushko said. “They have a choice. Either take seriously what is put on the table or face a military-technical alternative.”
Echoing American claims used to justify the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Russian defense minister, Sergei K. Shoigu, claimed without providing evidence that Moscow had intelligence showing that American mercenaries had brought an “unidentified chemical component” into Ukraine.
Pro-Kremlin commentators have cheered the Kremlin’s tough stance as a Russian nationalist triumph.
One newspaper compared Moscow favorably to a gangster character in a Russian movie who, “raising his heavy fist and looking into the eyes of his interlocutor, gently asks again: Where is your strength America?”
5. Opinion | U.S. experts offer a sensible strategy for living with covid. Biden should listen.
Excerpts:
To reach the new normal, they envision continued reliance on vaccines and vaccine mandates. They envision annual shots tailored to strains and urge accelerated efforts to develop a universal coronavirus vaccine, one shot that would hit all variants. They call for an electronic vaccine platform to replace the paper cards, and they suggest that no-cost, convenient outpatient treatments for covid be made widely available for anyone testing positive. They also point out that trust in public health institutions needs to be rebuilt after two bruising years of crisis.
It should not be difficult for the president or Congress to see the need for these changes. The investment will be well worth it if the result is to take covid from being a dire emergency to just another manageable malady.
Opinion | U.S. experts offer a sensible strategy for living with covid. Biden should listen.
Quite understandably, the coronavirus pandemic at first was a dire emergency. But it can’t be one forever. The crisis will have to shift to a manageable health threat without massive disruption and overwhelming anxiety. President Biden has been fighting the virus as an emergency in his first year, but a shift must come before too long.
Sound advice on how to do this has been provided by six public health and medical experts who took part in his presidential transition. They have published three articles in the Journal of the American Medical Association saying that covid “is here to stay” and the nation needs a strategy for a “new normal.” This is a marked shift from the message Mr. Biden delivered in his early months in office, promising to tamp down the virus with vaccines. But it was clear even before the delta and omicron waves that the pandemic would not screech to a halt. Last summer, several prominent public health experts warned, in an article titled “The Forever Virus,” that covid “is not going away.” They were right then, and the subsequent articles sketch out a road map for necessary systemic changes.
High on their list is to build a genuine public health data infrastructure, after two years of stress on the fragmented, imprecise system. They propose widespread access to low-cost diagnostic testing, accompanied by a comprehensive system for reporting all viral respiratory illnesses to a central location. The experts also call for three new systems for getting ahead of potential viral and bacterial illnesses. One would be a nationwide environmental monitoring network keeping an eye on wastewater and air sampling, providing early warning of a potential outbreak. Another is a genomic surveillance system — a kind of public health radar — that would spot emerging virus variants and new pathogen dangers. A third idea is to establish real-time digital surveillance of vaccinated individuals (with an opt-out) to track adverse effects and waning immunity, so the United States would not have to rely on Britain and Israel for such data. The experts also lay out important initiatives to improve ventilation and filtering and upgrade face masks.
To reach the new normal, they envision continued reliance on vaccines and vaccine mandates. They envision annual shots tailored to strains and urge accelerated efforts to develop a universal coronavirus vaccine, one shot that would hit all variants. They call for an electronic vaccine platform to replace the paper cards, and they suggest that no-cost, convenient outpatient treatments for covid be made widely available for anyone testing positive. They also point out that trust in public health institutions needs to be rebuilt after two bruising years of crisis.
It should not be difficult for the president or Congress to see the need for these changes. The investment will be well worth it if the result is to take covid from being a dire emergency to just another manageable malady.
6. Opinion: It’s time to let go of the culture war over the virus and stand up for normalcy
Excerpts:
My point, though, is political. If Biden is going to beat the pandemic rather than be undone by it, he is going to have to acknowledge the new reality, which is that our public policy is way too weighted toward a bunch of people who made the wrong choice.
Biden said as much in remarks at the White House Tuesday, addressing his comments to the unvaccinated. That’s fine.
But it’s his own Democratic constituencies — teachers unions, local governments, ultra-leftist Trump haters who refuse to let go of the culture war over the virus — who would continue to hold the country hostage to what now is a manageable public health risk. In Montgomery County, a group of parents and teachers who want to close the schools issued a call this week for children to stay home in protest.
Biden needs to take these people on and steer his party toward a more sensible course.
Often, presidents and their aides get sucked into the 24-hour maelstrom of running the country, and they forget why we hired them in the first place.
Opinion: It’s time to let go of the culture war over the virus and stand up for normalcy
The Washington Post · by Matt BaiContributing columnist |AddFollowToday at 1:19 p.m. EST · January 7, 2022
Democrats, who nominally control Washington, are about to face a reckoning on covid-19.
At some point soon, they’re going to have to start treating the coronavirus not as the uncontrollable public health crisis it used to be, but as the public policy crisis it has now become.
This isn’t just semantics. Public health is an overriding concern in public policy; when the people are in grave danger, it’s the primary job of governments to keep them safe. But in normal times, health risks have to be balanced against other vital governing priorities — economics, education, individual liberties.
President Donald Trump faced an acute public health crisis. History will judge him to have done a pretty horrid job with it, unless you think refusing to take precautions and stoking divisions while people die qualifies as solid leadership.
But Trump’s administration did achieve something important: Vaccines came fast, and they were remarkably effective.
And so, even as the new variant sends cases spiking, President Biden faces a very different situation from his predecessor. The country now is basically divided into three groups.
The largest group is the fully vaccinated. For most of us, the new variant is a serious nuisance, like an especially virile flu, but not much more than that. It’s unpleasant (I know, because I have it), but if this were the version of covid that hit everyone who got infected in 2020, no school or business would have closed.
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The second group is the immune-compromised, even if they are vaccinated — including people with underlying conditions and the elderly. The risk to them remains high, and the extra care they have to take can be isolating. But that’s the case with every contagion, including the flu. We don’t reorder the society around it.
The third group is, of course, the unvaccinated. (I’m not including children under 5, who are still not eligible for a coronavirus vaccine.) They’ve now had a year to absorb all the warnings and weigh all the arguments. They’ve seen high-profile vaccine deniers — talk show hosts, Trumpian candidates — needlessly dying from a virus they chose to exploit.
At this point, the unvaccinated are like unrepentant smokers. We’ve spent decades telling them they might get lung cancer. We’ve plastered warnings everywhere.
But you know what? All of us get to make our own idiotic choices — that’s the American way.
We don’t shut down the highway just because a bunch of yahoos are riding their motorcycles without helmets. And thanks to the new antiviral drugs, the risks even to the unvaccinated might soon be less lethal than that.
Sure, you can argue that the virus still overwhelms hospitals and is costing us a ton of money. But that’s a capacity problem, not an existential crisis. You don’t solve technical shortages by shuttering schools and keeping nurses at home with draconian quarantine policies.
I should note the obvious, which is that I’m no doctor. (For that expertise, you should read my colleague Leana S. Wen.) And yes, some breakthrough infections can be serious, unlike mine, and it will be a while before we can really assess the virus’s long-term dangers.
My point, though, is political. If Biden is going to beat the pandemic rather than be undone by it, he is going to have to acknowledge the new reality, which is that our public policy is way too weighted toward a bunch of people who made the wrong choice.
Biden said as much in remarks at the White House Tuesday, addressing his comments to the unvaccinated. That’s fine.
But it’s his own Democratic constituencies — teachers unions, local governments, ultra-leftist Trump haters who refuse to let go of the culture war over the virus — who would continue to hold the country hostage to what now is a manageable public health risk. In Montgomery County, a group of parents and teachers who want to close the schools issued a call this week for children to stay home in protest.
Biden needs to take these people on and steer his party toward a more sensible course.
Often, presidents and their aides get sucked into the 24-hour maelstrom of running the country, and they forget why we hired them in the first place.
Biden isn’t president because we expected him to eradicate covid. He’s president because he promised a return to normalcy.
He spent most of his first year pretending to be the second coming of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and if he’s not careful, he’ll spend most of the second presiding over a new wave of lockdowns that will destroy his party.
It’s time to say that the unvaccinated get to make their own dumb choices, and for the rest of us, this is no longer the kind of public health crisis that should derail our schooling and our jobs.
That’s good public policy — and good politics, too.
The Washington Post · by Matt BaiContributing columnist |AddFollowToday at 1:19 p.m. EST · January 7, 2022
7. Iran Navy Port Emerges as Key to Alleged Weapons Smuggling to Yemen, U.N. Report Says
Iran Navy Port Emerges as Key to Alleged Weapons Smuggling to Yemen, U.N. Report Says
Thousands of weapons seized by the U.S. along supply routes for Yemen’s Houthis likely originated from Jask in Iran’s southeast, according to a draft report
WSJ · by Benoit Faucon and Dion Nissenbaum
The draft report prepared by a U.N. Security Council panel of experts on Yemen said small wooden boats and overland transport were used in attempts to smuggle weapons made in Russia, China and Iran along routes to Yemen that the U.S. has tried for years to shut down. The boats left from the Iranian port of Jask on the Sea of Oman, the U.N. report said, citing interviews with the boat’s Yemeni crews and data from navigational instruments found on board.
Iran has diplomatically supported the Houthis in their conflict in Yemen and abroad against targets in Saudi Arabia and the Red Sea, but has long denied providing the group with arms.
Iran’s mission at the U.N. said Iran doesn’t interfere in the conflict in Yemen, as a matter of policy. “Iran has not sold, exported, or transferred any arms, ammunition, or related equipment to Yemen in contravention of Security Council resolutions,” the Iranian mission said in an emailed statement.
Once an obscure port that exported fruits and vegetables to Oman, Jask is a small town in Iran’s southeast that has grown in significance in the past decade. In 2008, it started hosting a naval base, and an oil-export terminal opened there last year.
U.S. officials said Jask has been used as a departure point for Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps for some time, but the U.N. report provides the first detailed evidence about specific arms shipments tied to the port.
Yemeni Houthis’ ability to obtain smuggled weapons has helped give the group the upper hand in a seven-year civil war, the report said, despite the intervention of Saudi Arabia and an Arab coalition that has used air power to pound rebel positions. The Houthis control Yemen’s capital, San’a, and its major port, Hodeidah, and are closing in on the oil-rich city of Marib.
Nasr al-Din Amir, deputy chief of the Houthis’ ministry of information, said the U.N. panel of experts on Yemen wasn’t neutral, and called Iran smuggling weapons into the country “an illusion.” He said an air and sea blockade didn’t allow necessities into Yemen, “let alone the alleged weapons.”
”Seaports and airports are shut, so how can these alleged weapons can reach us?” Mr. Amir said.
The U.N. panel’s findings—part of a broader sanctions report on Yemen reviewed by The Wall Street Journal—provide a rare detailed view into Iran’s alleged support for armed groups across the Middle East. The issue has loomed over talks in Vienna to revive an international deal to limit Tehran’s nuclear program, with Israel and some Persian Gulf states calling for more limits on Iran’s support for militias.
The U.S. military has tried for years, with varying degrees of success, to choke off the flow of weapons heading to the Houthis. Deliveries of weapons to the Houthis is a violation of a U.N. arms embargo imposed on the rebel group since 2015.
The U.N. panel closely examined two shipments confiscated by the U.S. Navy in 2021 and one by Saudi Arabia in 2020, all of which the report said likely originated in Jask.
A small wooden vessel known as a dhow was intercepted south of Pakistan in the Arabian Sea by the U.S. Navy in May 2021 after leaving Jask, the report said. The boat contained 2,556 assault rifles, and 292 general-purpose machine guns and sniper rifles made in China around 2017, the report said, as well as another 164 machine guns and 194 rocket launchers consistent with those produced in Iran.
The ship also held telescopic sights made in Belarus. Minsk told the U.N. that the equipment was delivered to the Iranian armed forces between 2016 and 2018. The Belarus mission at the U.N. didn’t respond to a request for comment. Other weapons seized had initially come from Russia and Bulgaria.
“The mix of the weapons indicates a common pattern of supply, likely from government stocks, involving dhows in the Arabian Sea, which transport weapons to Yemen and Somalia,” the report said. It added that thermal weapon sights seized in June 2021 at a crossing between Oman and Yemen had also been manufactured by an Iranian-Chinese partnership.
The U.N. panel said it couldn’t say whom the seized weapons were intended for, but the location of the seizures—which also include the Gulf of Aden and Pakistani and Somali waters—have been previously described by the U.S. as transit routes for Iranian deliveries to the Houthis.
In February 2021, a wooden boat loaded with weapons, manned by a Yemeni crew, was seized by the U.S. as it was about to transfer its cargo to another small vessel near Somalia, the U.N. report said. The vessel carried 3,752 assault rifles that likely came from Iran, based on their technical characteristics, along with hundreds of other weapons such as machine guns and rocket launchers, the report said.
Iran’s mission at the U.N. said information on the alleged transfer of arms from Iran was generally provided by “regional states” involved in the conflict or by the U.S., “whose decadeslong hostile policies toward Iran is well-known to all.” Iran noted the U.N. had specified it couldn’t “independently verify this [received] information” in the case of the U.S. seizure that took place near Somalia.
Last month, the U.S. Navy said it seized 8,700 weapons in 2021, including 1,400 AK-47 assault rifles and 226,600 rounds of ammunition from a fishing boat with five Yemeni crewmen that America said came from Iran in December.
Ned Price, a State Department spokesman, said the December seizure was “another example of how malign Iranian activity is prolonging the war in Yemen,” where U.N. and U.S. efforts to broker a cease-fire have repeatedly failed. Mr. Price said smuggled weapons were helping the Houthis in their push to seize Marib, a strategic Yemeni city on the border with Saudi Arabia.
“Iran has developed a multitude of ways to deliver weapons to Yemen and has never stopped,” said a senior U.S. official. “Every time we make some new seizures, Iran finds a new way to move weapons.”
WSJ · by Benoit Faucon and Dion Nissenbaum
8. A Look at Putin Through the Soviet Lens
Excerpts:
If Mr. Putin is hell-bent on incorporating Eastern Ukraine into the Russian Federation, he has the military capability to do so. But Mr. Radchenko sees some space for optimism. “I feel that Putin is an opportunist,” he says. “If he is an opportunist, then it’s likely that he can be convinced, with the proper inducement and proper application of sticks and carrots, to pursue a different policy. But you also have to then consider what to give him, and how to give it, in order not to potentially encourage further encroachment and further aggression.”
He thinks “freezing the situation on Donbas probably would be everyone’s preferred solution at this stage, because the alternative is unfreezing it and we don’t want to unfreeze it at this moment, because this would mean war. That is why advice would be, both to Kyiv and in fact to Moscow, to try to find some sort of compromise solution. And that, of course, means avoiding by all means a renewal of military hostilities on the actual line separating the two sides in Donbas.”
He returns to his unlikely Soviet-era model: “The Berlin Wall was not a very nice outcome, obviously. It was a brutal symbol of the Cold War, and people died trying to cross it, seeking freedom in the West.” But at least it came down peacefully decades later.
A Look at Putin Through the Soviet Lens
The Ukraine situation reminds this Cold War historian of the Berlin crisis of 1958-61.
At the same time, Mr. Putin has stepped up repression inside Russia’s borders. Last month Russia’s Supreme Court ordered the liquidation of human-rights group International Memorial, which documents Soviet-era crimes. The government also detained associates of imprisoned opposition leader Alexei Navalny. Independent media are finding it increasingly difficult to operate.
“Society is becoming more scared. The consequences seem to be more dire,” Cold War historian Sergey Radchenko, a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, tells me in an interview by video. “The opposition leaders have either been in jail, or killed, or have been exiled, or fled overseas. Putin is becoming obviously more repressive and more desperate to hold onto power while not seeing a clear exit for himself.”
With Mr. Putin seeking to upend the U.S.-led world order, Mr. Radchenko, 41, faults some of his peers for “a degree of triumphalism.” “Cold War historians focus on the Cold War—started in 1945, finished in 1991,” he says. In the aftermath, they saw it as “a struggle of two ideologies. Communism was defeated, therefore everybody lives happily thereafter. But what they, I think, fail to appreciate is that a lot of the underpinning elements of Soviet behavior that were there during the Soviet times and in Russian times before that . . . those elements remained.”
For one thing, the Russian government today seems no more open about its decision making than its Soviet predecessor. “[Putin] claims that he’s receiving information from different sources,” Mr. Radchenko says. “Where does he really receive information? Is it the intelligence services? What kind of information is he receiving? Is he a victim of his own delusions?”
Yet an important dynamic has changed. “Russia is actually pretty open when it comes to archival sources,” Mr. Radchenko says. “Not in every area—they’ve shut down Memorial, for example.” But “there has been considerable declassification and opening on Putin’s watch in the last four or five years. It’s been quite amazing. What you have now is an absolute avalanche of materials on Soviet leaders.”
As a result, more may be known about Nikita Khrushchev’s thinking than Mr. Putin’s. Frustrating as this is for Western policy makers, Mr. Radchenko sees “massive continuities” between the actions of the Soviet Union and today’s Russian Federation. His own deep dive into the minds of Soviet leaders is helpful for understanding Mr. Putin’s behavior.
Consider the Berlin crisis (1958-61). Khrushchev perceived the balance of power shifting as the Soviet nuclear arsenal grew, and he believed he could bluff away some of his country’s foreign-policy dilemmas. “He would say, ‘OK, we’ll squeeze the Americans out of Berlin.’ Obviously Berlin was a big sore point for Khrushchev, much as Ukraine is for Putin today,” Mr. Radchenko says. “He presented an ultimatum to the Americans—that you have to sign a peace treaty with Germany, paving the way to a withdrawal from Berlin. And if you don’t, he implied, then the Soviet Union would sign a separate peace treaty with East Germany, and they’ll kick the U.S. out of Berlin.”
The archives show that Khrushchev “thought that the Americans were unlikely to go to war over Berlin, and he made the calculation that it was a 95% chance that they would not go to war,” Mr. Radchenko continues. Still, that was a 5% chance of “an absolutely destructive, suicidal war. And that was too much for him. So he decided to back down and quietly wind down the whole Berlin thing by building a Berlin Wall.”
Today Mr. Putin seeks an agreement that would limit the size and activities of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, effectively restoring Russian dominion over much of Central and Eastern Europe—a nonstarter for Washington and the alliance’s leadership. “I’m not trying to suggest that Putin is Khrushchev or Khrushchev is Putin,” Mr. Radchenko says. “What I’m saying is that Putin cannot be blind to this general perception—that’s not just in Russia but around the world—that there’s a changing correlation of forces.”
The historian cites America’s “absolutely horrendous withdrawal from Afghanistan” and its “preoccupation with China” as signs U.S. leaders “don’t have the guts to do much about Europe.” Like Khrushchev, Mr. Putin could be trying his luck to see what he can come up with. “He’s obviously hoping to avoid a war and get his way, including his so-called security guarantees, . . . and then sell that to the Russian public as a great victory for great strategist, Vladimir Putin.” Such are the stakes at next week’s U.S.-Russia talks in Geneva.
Mr. Radchenko was born in the Soviet Union near the Chinese border and grew up on the island of Sakhalin in the northern Pacific. Life in the far-eastern outpost was so dull—“just lots of ice fishing, really”—that Mr. Radchenko would “tune into Japanese radio and just listen for hours, thinking: What are they saying?”
As teenager in the 1990s he came to America “thanks to U.S. taxpayers.” He took part in the Future Leaders Exchange Program, which “allowed young Russians to go to the United States in order to see the virtues of democracy and hopefully come back and transform Russia into a free and democratic society. It didn’t quite work out.” (One alumna of the program is now editor in chief of the Russian state-controlled RT television network.)
But America won over Mr. Radchenko. Studying in Texas, he was at first “quite dazed” by its freedom and prosperity. “What matters to me is that I live in a democratic, free, open society,” he says. “I value freedom, and I value democracy, and I value the ability to speak your mind.” He later studied in Hong Kong and England, where he earned a doctorate in international history at the London School of Economics. He worked in Mongolia, China and the U.K. before settling at Johns Hopkins.
He describes his work as a historian as “trying to understand, fundamentally, motivations for human actions,” especially in international relations. He describes one of Moscow’s paramount motivations: “Throughout the Cold War, Soviet leaders wanted to obtain recognition of their greatness,” he says. “They felt an acute deficit of legitimacy, domestic legitimacy. Of course this was helped by the fact that the Soviet Union, the Soviet leaders, had no other sources of legitimacy, in terms of free and fair elections that could allow them to claim legitimacy for domestic purposes.”
The Soviets sought to be recognized as revolutionary leaders but also America’s co-equal: “If Americans recognized them, recognized their greatness, therefore that really would make them great, and that legitimized them for their domestic purposes.” Mr. Putin craves the same recognition today, but “the question for Putin is: What does he want to be recognized as?” It’s too late for Russia to become an American partner, but standing up to NATO “legitimizes Putin in his own eyes and for the purposes of domestic political narratives.”
Mr. Putin also is preoccupied with his place in the pantheon of Russian leaders. “He himself is trying to understand his role in history. And that is why he keeps turning to history, and that is why he writes historical articles,” Mr. Radchenko says, referring to the Russian leader’s published writings on World War II and Ukrainian-Russian relations. “Why would you do that? This is crazy. Historians do that. He’s not supposed to be doing that. But that’s because he’s trying to understand himself what it is that he did for Russia.
“And unfortunately, it’s a pretty short list. Because if you look at the list, it’s repression, stagnating economy, lots and lots of bad things. So he’s trying to portray himself as potentially somebody who is restoring Russia as some kind of a regional actor, and that potentially includes regional integration. So he is developing close relations with some of the former Soviet republics, countries like Kazakhstan,” where Mr. Putin likely hopes his role in putting down protests will strengthen ties with the regime. “He is obviously hoping that his relationship with Belarus will eventually lead to some kind of integration between Russia and Belarus.”
Which brings us back to Ukraine, crown jewel of former Soviet republics. “Early in his tenure, Ukraine was central to Putin’s integrationist vision for Eurasia. And it didn’t work out, largely because of his own actions after he annexed Crimea and after he oversaw the invasion of Eastern Ukraine,” Mr. Radchenko says. “His articles about Ukraine, or his various statements about Ukraine being an artificial nation, can be viewed as almost a cry of the soul—as in: ‘Look, why are things going in that direction? They’re supposed to go in a different direction. What can I do now to fix the situation?’ ”
Mr. Putin turns 70 this year. “Is he thinking that, for his legacy to really stick as the gatherer of the Russian lands, would he have to annex half of Ukraine?” Mr. Radchenko asks. “That’s a big question. He obviously has helped himself to Crimea, and obviously there’s a war that’s going on—has been going on for seven years in Donbas. But the question is: Is that enough for Putin? Is he looking for something beyond that?”
Mr. Radchenko doesn’t claim to know the answer. “As a historian, I never take a clear-cut view. Because I say, well look, historically, it’s always some shades of gray,” he says. “To completely appease Russia, that doesn’t work. Or you completely stand strong and cause a war or something, that also doesn’t work. So the answer I think is finding the middle ground”—an outcome that avoids catastrophe even if it’s morally unsatisfying.
“Although the world does not recognize Russian annexation of Crimea, the fact is that Crimea is in Russian hands,” he says. “It’s inconceivable in any near future or medium-term future that Crimea will somehow be renounced by Russia and return to Ukraine.” As for Eastern Ukraine, “Is it likely that Russia is going to leave Donbas or whatever parts it’s holding on to, and sort of abandon it? I don’t think this is a likely proposition. So the menu to choose from is conflict, renewed warfare or some kind of negotiated solution.”
If Mr. Putin is hell-bent on incorporating Eastern Ukraine into the Russian Federation, he has the military capability to do so. But Mr. Radchenko sees some space for optimism. “I feel that Putin is an opportunist,” he says. “If he is an opportunist, then it’s likely that he can be convinced, with the proper inducement and proper application of sticks and carrots, to pursue a different policy. But you also have to then consider what to give him, and how to give it, in order not to potentially encourage further encroachment and further aggression.”
He thinks “freezing the situation on Donbas probably would be everyone’s preferred solution at this stage, because the alternative is unfreezing it and we don’t want to unfreeze it at this moment, because this would mean war. That is why advice would be, both to Kyiv and in fact to Moscow, to try to find some sort of compromise solution. And that, of course, means avoiding by all means a renewal of military hostilities on the actual line separating the two sides in Donbas.”
He returns to his unlikely Soviet-era model: “The Berlin Wall was not a very nice outcome, obviously. It was a brutal symbol of the Cold War, and people died trying to cross it, seeking freedom in the West.” But at least it came down peacefully decades later.
Mr. O’Neal is a Europe-based editorial page writer for the Journal.
9. Cyber Command announces partnership with 84 universities
Cyber Command announces partnership with 84 universities
U.S. Cyber Command announced it will partner with 84 universities across 34 states this year as part of a program to build up the nation’s cybersecurity workforce and familiarize students with military cyber programs. Pictured: Gen. Paul Nakasone, U.S. Cyber Commander commander and National Security Agency director. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
U.S. Cyber Command announced it will partner with 84 universities across 34 states this year as part of a program to build up the nation’s cybersecurity workforce and familiarize students with military cyber programs.
The partnership, part of the agency’s Academic Engagement Network, will give students at the university access to guest lecturers from U.S. CyberCom officials, non-public webinars about “pressing technical problems and non-technical problems” in cyberspace and other communications about changes in the cyber domain from the military agency.
According to an announcement, U.S. Cyber Command Executive Director David Frederick held a virtual meeting with representatives from the schools on Thursday to provide details on specific programs and plans that will be offered over the next nine months. The engagements will be structured around four lines of effort that will “serve as an investment in creating a robust and accessible pool of qualified cyber professionals, including future workforce issues, applied cyber research, applied analytics and strategic issues.
“Cyber Command’s goal for the AEN is to strengthen our relationships and communication with these participating institutions,” Frederick said in a statement. “This will improve and sustain our efforts to meet cyberspace educational requirements and workforce needs.”
The participating universities were not named; SC Media has contacted U.S. Cyber Command’s media office for a full list of the partners, and is awaiting a response. Of the 84 partners, CyberCom said 69 are universities, 13 are community colleges, nine are minority serving institutions and four are military war and staff colleges.
To be eligible for a partnership, schools must offer accredited two-year, four-year or post-graduate degree programs around cybersecurity and offer specialization or courses in computer science, cyber related engineering, cyber law, intelligence, applied analytics and other subjects with a nexus to cybersecurity.
Cyber Command officials plan to offer additional details on the program and partnerships in a follow-on briefing in the near future.
The latest defense authorization bill, which was signed into law by President Joe Biden last month, gives the commander of U.S. Cyber Command new authorities to stand up personnel management programs to “facilitate the recruitment of eminent experts in computer science, data science, engineering, mathematics and computer network exploitation.” It also mandated that DoD develop a pilot program that would train hiring offices at the Pentagon in how to attract and retain technical talent.
10. Russian troops deploy to Mali’s Timbuktu after French exit
Excerpts:
The decision came amid mounting political instability in Mali, where Colonel Assimi Goita carried out two coups in less than a year before being sworn in as the country’s interim president. The military-dominated government initially committed to holding elections by the end of February 2022, but has now proposed a transition period lasting between six months and five years.
The reports over the Wagner deployment in recent months has further strained already tense ties between the French government and the coup makers. The rising tensions have also come at a time when anti-French sentiment has become widely popular among Malians who accuse Paris of failing to contain the escalating violence and pursuing a hidden agenda.
The French military already has shut down its bases further north in Kidal and Tessalit but is maintaining its presence in Gao near a volatile border region where operations have been concentrated in recent years.
Russian troops deploy to Mali’s Timbuktu after French exit
Army spokesperson says the Russian soldiers are in the northern city to train Malian troops.
Mali’s army spokesperson has said Russian soldiers have deployed to the northern city of Timbuktu to train Malian forces at a base vacated by French troops last month amid persistent insecurity in a country where large swaths of territory are out of the government’s control.
The Malian government said late last year that “Russian trainers” had arrived in the country, but Bamako and Moscow have so far provided few details on the deployment, including on how many soldiers are involved or the Russian troops’ precise mission.
On December 23, a group of Western countries led by former colonial power France, which in 2013 intervened militarily to help push back advancing armed groups that threatened to seize the whole of Mali, sharply criticised what they said was the deployment of Russian mercenaries working for the controversial Wagner Group.
Mali’s government has denied this, saying the Russian troops are in the country as part of a bilateral agreement.
“We had new acquisitions of planes and equipment from them [the Russians],” the Mali army spokesperson told Reuters on Thursday. “It costs a lot less to train us on site than for us to go over there … What is the harm?”
He did not say how many Russians had been sent to Timbuktu.
Residents told Reuters that uniformed Russian men were seen driving around town but could not say how many there were.
The Russian forces’ arrival in Mali follows deployments to several other African hotspots, part of what analysts say is an attempt by Moscow to recover influence on the continent after a long absence following the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991.
Mali has been plagued by a conflict that began as a separatist movement in the north of the country in 2012, but devolved into a multitude of armed groups jockeying for control in the central and northern regions.
Fighting has spread to neighbouring countries, including Burkina Faso and Niger, with the deteriorating security situation in the region unleashing an acute humanitarian crisis.
The withdrawal of French troops from Timbuktu, a city they helped to recapture from al-Qaeda fighters in 2013, is part of a significant drawdown of a previously 5,000-strong task force in West Africa’s Sahel region. The French government said it would refocus its military efforts on neutralising rebel operations, and strengthening and training local armies.
The decision came amid mounting political instability in Mali, where Colonel Assimi Goita carried out two coups in less than a year before being sworn in as the country’s interim president. The military-dominated government initially committed to holding elections by the end of February 2022, but has now proposed a transition period lasting between six months and five years.
The reports over the Wagner deployment in recent months has further strained already tense ties between the French government and the coup makers. The rising tensions have also come at a time when anti-French sentiment has become widely popular among Malians who accuse Paris of failing to contain the escalating violence and pursuing a hidden agenda.
The French military already has shut down its bases further north in Kidal and Tessalit but is maintaining its presence in Gao near a volatile border region where operations have been concentrated in recent years.
11. Japan PM says U.S. military bases to impose tighter COVID-19 controls
Japan PM says U.S. military bases to impose tighter COVID-19 controls
Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida speaks before the media at his official residence as an extraordinary Diet session was closed, in Tokyo, Japan December 21, 2021. Yoshikazu Tsuno/Pool via REUTERS
TOKYO, Jan 9 (Reuters) - The United States has agreed to impose stricter COVID-19 measures at its military bases in Japan, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said on Sunday, amid concerns that outbreaks at bases have fuelled infection in local communities.
"We have agreed with the United States in principle that unnecessary outings should be controlled and prohibited, and we are discussing specifics now," Kishida said during a debating programme at public broadcaster NHK.
Japan reintroduced coronavirus restrictions in three regions that host U.S. military bases, the first such emergency controls since September. Governors of the regions requested the tougher measures after seeing a surge in cases driven by the Omicron variant. read more
Kishida said Japan had urged the United State to address the concerns at a virtual meeting of their foreign and defence ministers on Friday and other occasions. read more
Japan halted the entry of almost all foreign travellers in late November after the World Health Organization listed Omicron as a variant of concern. But the U.S. military moves staff in and out under a separate testing and quarantine regime. read more
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Reporting by Yoshifumi Takemoto; Editing by Lincoln Feast.
12. 20 Years of US Torture – and Counting
Excerpt:
“This report lays out a comprehensive assessment of the many unconscionable costs of US torture and illegal detentions and renditions of Muslims over the past 20 years since 9/11,” said Stephanie Savell, co-director of the Costs of War Project. “This is a moral failure of epic proportions, a stain on the nation’s human rights record, a strategic blunder, and an abhorrent perpetuation of Islamophobia and racism.”
20 Years of US Torture – and Counting
Global Costs of Unlawful Detention and Interrogation Post-9/11
The first foreign Muslim men imprisoned by the US military at the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, in the so-called “global war on terror.” Since January 2002, the US has held nearly 800 men and boys at Guantánamo. Of the 39 who currently remain, 27 have never been charged. © 2002 Shane McCoy/Greg Mathieson/Mai/Getty Images
(New York) – Twenty years after Guantánamo Bay detention operations commenced on January 11, 2002, a new report assesses the massive costs of US unlawful transfers, secret detention, and torture after the September 11, 2001, attacks. The report, from the Costs of War Project at Brown University’s Watson Institute and Human Rights Watch, outlines how these abuses trample on the rights of victims and suspects, create a burden to US taxpayers, and damage counterterrorism efforts worldwide, ultimately jeopardizing universal human rights protections for everyone.
January 9, 2022
The Costs of Unlawful US Detentions and Interrogations Post-9/11
“Around the world, Guantánamo remains one of the most enduring symbols of the injustice, abuse, and disregard for the rule of law that the US unleashed in response to the 9/11 attacks,” said Letta Tayler, an associate Crisis and Conflict director at Human Rights Watch and the report’s co-author. “The US government’s reliance on deeply flawed military commissions, along with other due process failures, has not only violated the rights of the men held at Guantánamo. It also has deprived survivors of the September 11 attacks and families of the dead of their right to justice.”
The report notes that:
- The US has held no one accountable for the CIA orchestrating a system of undisclosed “black sites” throughout the world in which it secretly detained at least 119 Muslim men and tortured at least 39.
- The US has largely resisted accountability for abuses at its military prisons in Afghanistan and Iraq, where it detained thousands of Muslims including several women and boys, and at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
- The US military is still detaining 39 Muslim men at Guantánamo, 27 of them without criminal charges, and judicial proceedings are so flawed that none of the five 9/11 suspects have been brought to trial. The prisoners are among at least 780 foreign Muslim men and boys whom the US has held at Guantánamo since January 11, 2002.
- The US has spent more than $5.48 trillion on the “War on Terror” including $540 million a year just to detain prisoners at Guantánamo.
- While unlawful US detentions have gradually ebbed, civilian deaths and injuries from US-led strikes in the “War on Terror” skyrocketed under Presidents Barack Obama and Donald J. Trump, also without accountability.
The “extraordinary renditions” (unlawful transfers from one country to another), secret detentions, and torture have damaged the international human rights system, Tayler and her co-author, Elisa Epstein, said. By committing abuses with impunity, the US has made it easier for countries such as Russia, Egypt, and China to criticize Washington and deflect international condemnation of their own human rights violations.
US counterterrorism partners have replicated the Guantánamo model by detaining thousands of people in dire conditions in Iraq, northeast Syria, Nigeria, Egypt, and elsewhere for alleged terrorism offenses. Those detained, often without charge or trial, include civil society members, suspects’ relatives, and children who are victims of armed groups.
The report also cites instances in which unlawful rendition and detention and torture have undermined US security goals. The Islamic State (ISIS) and other armed groups have used US abuses as a propaganda tool to lure recruits and bolster their narrative that Washington and its Western allies are waging a crusade against Muslims.
The authors call on the Biden administration to close the Guantánamo prison and enact significant legal and policy reforms to end further abuses. Reforms should include far greater transparency about crimes that US forces committed and accountability at the highest levels, as well as robust efforts to address religious, racial, and ethnic bias in counterterrorism efforts.
“This report lays out a comprehensive assessment of the many unconscionable costs of US torture and illegal detentions and renditions of Muslims over the past 20 years since 9/11,” said Stephanie Savell, co-director of the Costs of War Project. “This is a moral failure of epic proportions, a stain on the nation’s human rights record, a strategic blunder, and an abhorrent perpetuation of Islamophobia and racism.”
This report is the latest resource from the Costs of War project, housed at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. The project was launched by a group of scholars and experts to document the costs of the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere.
13. Army Testing Drones for Medical Logistics
I think UAS can play a vital role in many logistics operations. Yes, everyone wants tem for ISR and precision strike but I think we need to make an investment in UAS for logistics as well.
Army Testing Drones for Medical Logistics
ROBOTICS AND AUTONOMOUS SYSTEMS
1/7/2022
L3Harris image
The Army is testing drones and autonomous technology that could deliver life-saving medical supplies to the battlefield.
During test flights held at Fort Pickett, Virginia, in August, Pittsburgh-based Near Earth Autonomy integrated its autonomous flight systems onto an L3Harris-built FVR-90 hybrid vertical take-off and landing unmanned aerial vehicle. The flights demonstrated how the drone could be used to send supplies back and forth across hundreds of miles, the companies said.
During the demonstrations, the FVR-90 and Near Earth’s systems underwent multiple scenarios to test how they could deliver supplies. Near Earth’s sensors were able to find unobstructed areas for the drone to land, according to a news release. When landing wasn’t possible, the supply pods were dropped from a low altitude or released higher up via parachutes, it said.
Research began after military personnel expressed interest in the technology, said Nathan Fisher, chief of the medical robotic and autonomous systems division at the Army’s Telemedicine and Advanced Technology Research Center.
“They really had this desire to use UAVs as a more efficient way to resupply operational units that are kind of far forward in the field at austere environments,” Fisher said.
The autonomy systems built by Near Earth allow the unmanned aircraft to fly to designated coordinates and scan the environment using onboard sensors to determine the optimal supply delivery location, said Sanjiv Singh, the company’s CEO.
Along with the ability for vertical launch and recovery, the FVR-90 can carry a payload of up to 20 pounds inside delivery pods, said Peter Blocker, director of tactical UAS at L3Harris. This includes refrigerated pods of blood or other lightweight medical supplies.
The platform is able to fly for up to 16 hours, according to L3Harris. Additionally, the drone can travel approximately 50 miles, or even farther with a larger antenna, Blocker said.
“That’s the part that’s just amazing — being able to fly this out, say 40 or 50 miles away from wherever your supply is, and dropping it,” he said.
Researchers hope the technology will also help reduce the amount of blood wasted during operations.
“Blood is really a commodity,” Fisher said. While medics usually carry blood with them for transfusions, it’s difficult to return unused blood to banks before they go bad, he added.
With a long-endurance drone, medics could send blood either back to the blood bank or even to another medic who needs it, Singh noted.
Fisher said the Army is now looking for feedback from medics, but noted that the goal is to expand the drone’s use to non-medical logistics as well.
14. Opinion | The West has enabled Putin long enough. It is time to stop.
Just say no to appeasement.
Excerpts:
Now, as U.S. and NATO leaders prepare for next week’s talks with Kremlin officials over Putin’s proposed Yalta-style security arrangement in Europe, we hear familiar Western arguments for yet more appeasement. They range from outlandish suggestions to expel the Baltic countries from NATO to the much more troubling call by the German chancellor for a “new start” in relations with Putin.
We know how appeasement ends. The 20th century has provided ample illustration of that, and without exception. Thankfully, there are still voices in Western politics willing to stand on principle — as, for example, the authors of a recent congressional proposal to withdraw U.S. recognition of Putin if he illegally extends his rule beyond 2024. That initiative sent shockwaves through official Moscow.
Vladimir Bukovsky, the famed Russian dissident of the communist era, once noted that too many Western politicians put their desire to fry bacon on Soviet gas above their self-professed values. Fortunately for Bukovsky’s generation, not everyone did. One can only hope that there are still enough leaders in the free world today who are willing to put principle over bacon.
Opinion | The West has enabled Putin long enough. It is time to stop.
The Washington Post · by Vladimir Kara-MurzaGlobal Opinions contributor Today at 10:18 a.m. EST · January 7, 2022
The Kremlin has an old habit of using the Christmas holidays to bury bad news. Moves that would normally get worldwide attention — such as arresting opposition leader Boris Nemtsov or sentencing prominent regime critic Mikhail Khodorkovsky — were purposefully pushed to the last days of December, when most Western parliamentarians, diplomats and media figures are offline and out of reach and public attention is focused elsewhere.
This past holiday season showcased that tradition once again, except that this time, Vladimir Putin’s regime broke its own record, squeezing months’ worth of repression into a single week.
Two of Russia’s most respected human rights groups — Memorial International, which documents atrocities committed by the Soviet regime, and the Memorial Human Rights Center, which chronicles present-day repression — were shut down at the request of Putin’s prosecutor general. One high-profile political prisoner, Yuri Dmitriev, had his sentence extended from 13 to 15 years; another, Andrei Pivovarov, was denied his appeal to move his hearing from a remote (and journalist-free) location. A prominent opposition lawmaker in Siberia associated with jailed Putin rival Alexei Navalny was indicted on an “extremism” charge that could get her 12 years in prison. The justice ministry issued its latest batch of “foreign agent” designations, slapping the label on a new group of pro-democracy figures, including Russia’s best-known satirical writer, Viktor Shenderovich. Meanwhile, a senior lawmaker from Putin’s party suggested that it is time to start stripping Kremlin opponents of Russian citizenship — as was done to dissidents in the Soviet Union.
And all this in just five days leading up to New Year’s Eve.
If the speed and intensity of Putin’s new wave of repression are surprising, the trajectory is not. As history shows, systems such as Putin’s will continue down the ever-accelerating spiral of internal repression and external aggression until — and unless — they encounter resistance.
That the Kremlin does not (for now) meet organized resistance from its own citizens is hardly surprising given Putin’s two-decade war on Russian society — a war that has included annihilation of independent media and competitive elections, state-driven murders and large-scale political imprisonment, and a brutal crackdown on civic activism and public demonstrations. One day, when the demand for change in Russian society reaches a critical point, none of these barriers will be able to stem the tide. Putin’s falling approval numbers and Russians’ growing fatigue with his geopolitical gambles show the trend clearly, but we are not there yet. As the unfolding events in Kazakhstan demonstrate, political upheavals can begin suddenly.
What is more surprising — indeed, shocking — is the willingness of Western democracies to act as accomplices to Putin, providing him not only with much-needed international acceptance but also with a lifeline in the form of access to Western financial systems — a lifeline the Kremlin uses to challenge the West’s own interests.
Unlike other dictatorships that are shunned by the free world — such as Nicolás Maduro’s in Venezuela or Alexander Lukashenko’s in Belarus — Putin’s kleptocracy is intimately integrated into the global system. His close confidants hold some of the most prized Western real estate, own top English football clubs and get passports from NATO countries. Private Russian assets stashed abroad are estimated to exceed $1 trillion, with much of this wealth likely linked to Putin himself. Inexplicably, the Biden administration has failed to make a single Russia-related designation under the Magnitsky Act, a law intended to seek accountability for human rights abuses by Putin’s officials.
A less-known but perhaps more poignant example was given by Dmitry Muratov, the crusading Russian newspaper editor and Nobel Peace laureate, at last month’s award ceremony in Oslo. Facing a room of Western dignitaries and diplomats, he reminded them that, formally speaking, Navalny was imprisoned by the Kremlin on the basis of a complaint by a French cosmetics company. Yet another small element of Western complicity in Putin’s crimes.
Now, as U.S. and NATO leaders prepare for next week’s talks with Kremlin officials over Putin’s proposed Yalta-style security arrangement in Europe, we hear familiar Western arguments for yet more appeasement. They range from outlandish suggestions to expel the Baltic countries from NATO to the much more troubling call by the German chancellor for a “new start” in relations with Putin.
We know how appeasement ends. The 20th century has provided ample illustration of that, and without exception. Thankfully, there are still voices in Western politics willing to stand on principle — as, for example, the authors of a recent congressional proposal to withdraw U.S. recognition of Putin if he illegally extends his rule beyond 2024. That initiative sent shockwaves through official Moscow.
Vladimir Bukovsky, the famed Russian dissident of the communist era, once noted that too many Western politicians put their desire to fry bacon on Soviet gas above their self-professed values. Fortunately for Bukovsky’s generation, not everyone did. One can only hope that there are still enough leaders in the free world today who are willing to put principle over bacon.
The Washington Post · by Vladimir Kara-MurzaGlobal Opinions contributor Today at 10:18 a.m. EST · January 7, 2022
15. Analysis | What Putin wants in Ukraine
Excerpts:
“Russia needs to come out of this crisis with some kind of victory; it needs some kind of concession from the U.S. or NATO,” Lohsen told me. “Limiting military deployments near Russian borders could be sufficient, but I’m not sure if that’s going to be enough. This could very well be a pretext” for aggression.
But Putin has also succeeded in something else too: Raising the price for Western support in Ukraine. Even if Russian boots never march on Kyiv, the continuing threat of an invasion could yet compel Washington and the E.U. to tread more lightly there, and concede a measure of Russian influence, whether the Ukrainians like it or not.
“The conversation has shifted from how to resolve this crisis in Ukraine to how we prevent a war in Europe,” Lohsen told me. “I think the terms are much broader now, and I think whatever happens, Ukraine will end up a worse position than before.”
Analysis | What Putin wants in Ukraine
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On the fertile plains of Ukraine, the resurgent echoes of a Cold War with Russia is in danger of becoming a killer frost. Washington is sounding the alarm over Russian President Vladimir Putin’s troops massed at the border, and a potential strike against the western-gazing government in Kyiv. As the stakes soar to the risk of war in Europe, one question is at the heart of the crisis: What does Putin really want?
The possibilities are myriad and — especially for the hopes of an independent, thriving and democratic Ukraine — range from bad to worse. To force the West into broad security concessions in Eastern Europe? To effectively eliminate any future path to NATO membership, and long-term security, for what remains of Ukraine? To formalize the grip of Russian-backed separatists in Ukraine’s Donbas region, invaded by Moscow’s “little green men” in 2014 and stuck in a near-constant state of armed conflict ever since? Or is Putin really intent on flying the Russian flag over Kyiv’s Maidan Square to complete his vision of Ukraine as a fundamental part of the Russian state?
Long-brewing concerns over Russian designs in Ukraine, which had calmed following a similar crisis last spring, have leaped back into the public eye in recent weeks as U.S. officials warned that intelligence signaled the growing risk of a Russian invasion. President Biden has ruled out one core Putin demand — a gurantee that Ukraine will never join the NATO alliance. But Putin has already succeeded in at least one thing: making the West pay attention.
In their most recent call, my colleagues reported, Putin countered that any new sanctions from the Ukraine crisis would trigger “a complete rupture of relations” between Moscow and Washington.
The intervention of Russian troops in Kazakhstan on the request of its pro-Kremlin government following the eruption of broad protests may yet influence the Kremlin’s military calculus or timing in Ukraine. On the back of the violent quashing of dissent in Belarus, the uprising in Kazakhstan underscores the challenges facing Russia in maintaining is sphere of influence.
But the challenge now is to game Putin’s bigger strategy in Ukraine.
In a captivating piece in the Atlantic, Anne Applebaum writes of two schools of thought in Kyiv. “The skeptical school essentially thinks this whole situation might be a huge bluff: The Russians have deliberately set out to ‘scare the Americans,’ ” she said, “in order to create pressure on Ukraine to change its constitution as the Russians would like, or to put Putin at the center of international attention, or to reestablish a Russian sphere of influence inside old Soviet borders.”
For them, Putin’s goal seems to have “chalked up some wins” by focusing the attention of the White House and NATO not on the Ukraine crisis per se, but on Russia’s attempts to force the West to engage it over trumped-up claims of Western aggression.
Back in Kyiv, Applebaum said the pessimists fear this: “If Putin believes that Ukraine must be destroyed sooner or later; if he believes that historical wrongs must be righted; even if he just wants to gain back some of the popularity he has lost to covid, corruption, and a poor economy, then he might have reasons to think that this is a good moment to do it.”
The United States is a house divided. The E.U. is pandemic-weary and distracted. What better moment could Putin get?
A better assessment of Russian motives and goals could be the most useful takeaway from the high-stakes meetings in Europe next week.
“I think Putin wants a couple of things out of the crisis he has created, one of which is a settlement of the [conflict in eastern Ukraine] on Russian terms, with heavy autonomy for the Donbas region,” Defense Priorities Policy Director Benjamin H. Friedman told Today’s WorldView this week. “And secondly, he wants the U.S. to take the lead of saying no NATO in Ukraine, and no Ukraine in NATO.”
Andrew Lohsen, a Russia expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told me he expects the talks to start off strong in the bilateral with the Russians and Americans, before losing steam when the forum shifts to NATO. Moscow would be making the point that it feels Washington is the decider, and thus, wants to deal directly with the White House.
The question is not only whether Biden may ultimately budge on some sort of pledge to Putin on Ukraine, but how much Washington is willing to discuss a broader revamp of the security paradigm in Europe. Putin, though, has generated so much buzz over the crisis at home that he may have gone too far to simply back down now. If he gets no concessions, he has various options. They could include missile strikes, cyberattacks, a broader intervention in Donbas or, as some fear, a full on invasion.
“Russia needs to come out of this crisis with some kind of victory; it needs some kind of concession from the U.S. or NATO,” Lohsen told me. “Limiting military deployments near Russian borders could be sufficient, but I’m not sure if that’s going to be enough. This could very well be a pretext” for aggression.
But Putin has also succeeded in something else too: Raising the price for Western support in Ukraine. Even if Russian boots never march on Kyiv, the continuing threat of an invasion could yet compel Washington and the E.U. to tread more lightly there, and concede a measure of Russian influence, whether the Ukrainians like it or not.
“The conversation has shifted from how to resolve this crisis in Ukraine to how we prevent a war in Europe,” Lohsen told me. “I think the terms are much broader now, and I think whatever happens, Ukraine will end up a worse position than before.”
Read more:
16. Common Office Desk Phone Could Be Leaking Info to Chinese Government, Report Alleges
Give new meaning to the old way we used to answer phone calls: "This is Name... this line's not secure."
Common Office Desk Phone Could Be Leaking Info to Chinese Government, Report Alleges
Phones by Yealink have been observed sending encrypted messages to Chinese servers three times a day.
A major Chinese phone maker could be putting U.S. consumers, companies, and even national security data at risk, and a U.S. senator wants to know what the Commerce Department is going to do about it.
In a Sept. 28 letter obtained by Defense One, Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., described a report that “raises serious concerns about the security of audio-visual equipment produced and sold into the U.S. by Chinese firms such as Yealink.”
Yealink doesn’t have the name recognition of the controversial Chinese telecom giant Huawei, but its phones are widely installed across the United States, including in government agencies. In September, Yealink and Verizon announced plans to sell “the nation’s first 4G/LTE cellular desk phone.”
In the letter, Van Hollen asked Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo whether her agency is aware of the report by Chain Security, a Virginia-based company that analyzes electronics for security. He asked whether she considers its analysis credible, and if so, what she wants Commerce to do about it.
Many of the security issues raised in the report are similar to those that the U.S. government has had for years about Huawei. In essence, there are a number of big—but possibly unintentional—security flaws that an adversary could use to steal data. But with the Yealink T54W phone in particular, there are also some concerning features that are clearly built in on purpose.
The report pointed to the Yealink software that connects each phone to the local network. Called the device management platform, or DMP, it allows users to make calls from their PCs and network administrators to manage the phones. But it also allows Yealink to secretly record those phone calls and even track what websites the users are visiting.
“We observed that if the phone is being managed by the device management platform, and if the user’s PC is connected to the phone in order to access a local area network, it's collecting information about what you're surfing” on your computer, said Chain Security CEO Jeff Stern. “The method of using the desktop IP phone such as the Yealink phone as an Ethernet switch to connect the PC to the local area network is a common business practice. The administrator on that platform can also initiate a call recording without the user's knowledge…What they do is they issue a command to the phone to record the calls.”
Stern clarified that “this feature is intended for use by an enterprise customer's employee or representative. However, every system has a Superuser Administrator, or SYSADMIN. In these types of systems, the SYSADMIN typically has access to everything. Some modern systems, especially after Snowden, deny this capability to the SYSADMIN. But we need to assume that this is not the case here and that the Yealink DMP SYSADMIN is in China.”
Chain Security’s report notes that Yealink’s service agreement requires users to accept China’s laws, while “a related set of service terms allows the active monitoring of users when required by the ‘national interest’ (this means the national interest of China).”
Stern also noted that the phone also doesn’t use digital certificates to prevent unauthorized changes to its software. That makes it far easier for attackers to compromise the data on the phone and potentially even the entire network it’s connected to, without attribution to Yealink. “Without some sort of monitor watching what's going on on the phone you wouldn't know this firmware is on there and it can do anything you want in terms of surveilling your network and the subnet. The scenario we worry about with a device like this is that it will surveil your network and then exfiltrate…essentially your network architecture or your network implementation.”
The lack of a firmware signature requirement isn’t exactly unheard of. Stern called it an “old mistake.” But he said, “There's no reason that old mistakes like this should continue to be there. Like, this is bad.”
A Verizon spokesperson said Yealink’s DMP “has been built to meet the custom requirements of Verizon” and that the customization was related to “security; feature management exposure to the devices through the DMP; firmware management and remote diagnostics."
That response left Stern with more questions. “Who is doing the firmware customization? Does [Verizon] have a license to modify the source code of the firmware? Does [Verizon] plan to do penetration testing on the firmware before releasing it to their users? Does [Verizon] do source code security analysis on all firmware that it receives from Yealink?”
Stern also found that the phone exchanges encrypted messages with a Chinese-based cloud server, Alibaba Cloud, multiple times a day. You cannot program the phone not to do that. To stop it, you have to go to the enterprise’s network router and prohibit the exchange. But if you didn’t know that the phone was doing it in the first place, there’s little that you can do to stop it.
There’s also a specialized microprocessor unit from a Chinese chip maker called Rockchip. Of course, Chinese chips are in all sorts of devices and security experts can test most of them for bugs. But this one hasn’t gone through that same testing because, says Stern, Rockchip designed it specifically for Yealink. “This one is clearly a specialized product, based on the model number developed for Yealink and there's no documented vulnerabilities to mitigate against. Except there are vulnerabilities, right? Because everything has vulnerabilities. It's just no one is reporting on it because it’s a specialized chip,” he said.
That doesn’t mean that something is wrong with the chip, exactly, but it hasn’t received the same sort of scrutiny that other, more widely distributed components do receive.
One telecom industry expert who is familiar with the report, but did not help write it and has no affiliation with Chain Security, described the firm as reputable. The expert didn’t endorse or dispute any of the report’s findings but said that the language in Yealink’s service agreement alone was enough to warrant a review by the government. “The fact that you [meaning Yealink] are bound by Chinese law, that is something the government needs to know.”
If the Commerce Department investigates the report’s concerns and finds them valid, Yealink might find themselves on a path similar to that of Huawei, placed on a list of untrustworthy technologies that government customers are not allowed to purchase. The industry expert said there was no set process or timeline for such determinations to occur.
Stern said he believed that Yealink phones were in government offices, since the government market for IP phones is roughly $300 million, by his analysis, and Yealink is one of the top ten providers. A web search shows Yealink manuals uploaded for reference to the websites of many local, state, and federal agencies.
Van Hollen’s office didn’t provide any additional detail on why they had sent the letter to the Commerce Department. A Van Hollen spokesperson said that “the letter really speaks for itself — the Senator is simply seeking more information.”
On Dec. 28, the Commerce Department responded to Van Hollen in a separate letter obtained by Defense One. “We take these matters seriously,” wrote Wynn W. Coggins, Acting Chief Financial Officer and Assistant Secretary for Administration. “The Department of Commerce shares your concerns about the security of the Information and Communications Technology and Services (ICTS) supply chain and the threats to that supply chain posed by our foreign adversaries and is actively working to address those concerns.”
Yealink did not respond to a request for comment on this story.
17. Six Things Veterans Can Do to Strengthen Our Democracy
Given the anti-vax factions I am sure they will not take kindly to the use of inoculation even in this context. (note sarcasm)
But I stand with this very good advice.
Six Things Veterans Can Do to Strengthen Our Democracy
Work to inoculate our communities against disinformation, increase civil participation, and collaborate to build our nation’s vital institutions.
By WILLIAM BRANIFF, JOE PLENZLER and ANIL NATHAN
As a group, veterans and military families exhibit many characteristics that tend to ward off political extremism: a strong sense of patriotism, higher involvement in civic engagement and volunteering, ties to a broad and diverse community of their fellow veterans, and a venerated status among other citizens. But, as we saw with the disproportionate number of veterans who participated in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, those same characteristics can be exploited by extremist groups and manipulated by mis- and disinformation.
Many of us who proudly served our nation in uniform have responded to the attack with efforts to keep domestic extremists and hostile foreign actors from recruiting our fellow veterans to extremism and violence. We are trying to inoculate our communities against disinformation, increase civil literacy and participation, and foster creativity and collaboration in strengthening our nation’s vital democratic institutions.
Here are six things veterans can do today to help in this important work:
Take pride in our service and remind our fellow citizens our democracy is worth preserving. As military members, we all took an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States and that obligation doesn’t end when we take off the uniform for the last time. As veterans, it is our duty to stand with our fellow citizens and serve our communities once again. We must share the word that America is strongest when we are united in our commitment to compromise, civic debate and boisterous self-government, and call out those who are sowing division and tearing at the fabric of our society. They are doing our nation’s enemies’ work for them.
Remind our fellow veterans that our loyalty is to the United States of America and that this loyalty should remain above any person or political party. In the military, we learned an ethos of team before self and as veterans we should continue to place our communities first. Veterans are more likely to be leaders within their community, state, and nation, and we must lead by example, doing what’s best for all Americans. We can help heal divisions within our communities and bring people together to help solve our nation’s problems.
Stand up for the equality and dignity of all Americans. In today’s hyper partisan political environment, it’s easy to demonize those who hold different values than we do. When we do, we give power to those who benefit from keeping Americans divided. In the military, we were taught to treat every soldier, sailor, airman, and Marine with dignity and respect, and we should demand the same for all our fellow citizens as veterans. We should remind our friends and families that the person on the other side of the issue isn’t “the enemy,” but rather a fellow American with important perspectives, experiences, merits and flaws, just like us, with whom we have more in common than not.
Hold ourselves and all public servants to the highest of moral, ethical, and professional standards. With great power and authority comes great responsibility, and we should demand that those who represent us in our legislatures and capitals comport themselves with the dignity expected of those who hold offices. By holding public servants to high standards, we bolster confidence in the institutions that serve as pillars of American democracy. This principle extends beyond elected officials to our free press and the rule of law.
Use our voices, votes, and the respect we have earned from our fellow citizens to support peaceful transfers of power. Our great experiment in democracy has long held a tradition of peaceful transitions of power from one administration to the next and we must ensure that continues. Political violence must always be denounced and we must urge restraint and work to lower the temperature in politics. It is our duty as veterans to continue to protect representative government and our fellow citizens, and one of the best ways we can do that is by helping to educate our fellow Americans in civics and volunteering to work the polls to increase public faith in our elections.
Help protect the truth. We’ve all heard the saying that a lie travels halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its boots. In the age of the internet, those lies can travel at the speed of light and reach billions of people. In an age of information overload, truth still matters. By taking personal responsibility for the truthfulness of the information we consume, produce and share, we can shore up the middle ground—the place where people come to think critically, debate civically, and solve our nation’s problems. Due to the esteem veterans carry in American society and their active engagement in community-building initiatives nationally, veterans are well placed to promote civic culture. Where civic culture is strong and truth is respected, Americans will reject the bankrupt narratives of disinformation campaigns and violent extremist movements.
Our nation faces many challenges, from ending the COVID-19 pandemic to inflation to navigating foreign relations with China, Russia, and Iran. While the future is always uncertain, we remain steadfast in our love of this country and in our support for our 246-year-old experiment in democracy. We have fought to defend this country around the world, and we are calling on veterans to commit to these six actions and sign the Veterans Code of Conduct at www.veterancode.org, and to learn more at www.wetheveterans.us.
William Braniff is the Director of the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) and a board member of We the Veterans, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization created by veterans and military family members, united for democracy and committed to building a more perfect union.
Joe Plenzler is a Marine Corps veteran and board member of We the Veterans.
Anil Nathan is an Air Force veteran and co-director of We the Veterans.
This op-ed was co-signed by Ellen Gustafson, Navy spouse and co-director of We the Veterans; Christa Sperling, Air Force veteran and board member of We the Veterans; and Ben Keiser, Marine Corps veteran and board member of We the Veterans.
18. Eisenhower’s Cagey Counsel on Waging War Still Works
I think I read this as an undergraduate. I am now inspired to re-read this.
Conclusion:
Reading Crusade in Europe nearly 75 years after it was written reminds us that as president Eisenhower ended the Korean War, refused to send American troops to Indochina to help the French with their colonial war, and declined to join Britain and France in seizing control of the Suez Canal in 1956. Eisenhower’s idea of containing the Soviet Union, much like that of George Kennan in his famous 1947 essay “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” included pursuing the cold war on a variety of fronts but stopping short of getting America trapped into conflicts that went nowhere. The kinds of interventions that in recent years have bogged down American troops in Afghanistan and Iraq are exactly the kinds of interventions Eisenhower knew to avoid.
Eisenhower’s Cagey Counsel on Waging War Still Works
The re-issue of Eisenhower’s memoir about his tenure as supreme commander in Europe during World War II is still plainspoken and relevant.
Topical Press Agency/Getty
When in 1948 General Dwight Eisenhower, freshly retired from the Army, published Crusade in Europe, his memoir of his leadership of the Allied forces in Europe in World War II, he could count on a vast American audience hungry for details about a war they had experienced either as combatants or civilians on the home front. Eisenhower had a natural bestseller on his hands.
The new paperback edition of Crusade in Europe that Vintage has just re-issued won’t generate 1948-level sales. But those reading Crusade in Europe for the first time will be fascinated with what they find.
Eisenhower offers more than a clear account of how America and the Allies achieved victory in Europe over Germany. He provides perspective on how America can function today as a global power without getting sucked into unwinnable wars.
For Eisenhower, the chance to write Crusade in Europe was, as his biographer Michael Korda has pointed out, an opportunity to earn the kind of money he could never make as a career officer. After capital gains, Eisenhower was left with nearly $500,000 from Crusade in Europe, a sum equal to over $5 million today. Doubleday, his publisher, did equally well. Crusade in Europe sold over a million copies in the United States and was published in 22 foreign-language editions.
Eisenhower did not churn out a slapdash memoir, nor did he use Crusade in Europe as a vehicle for settling scores with military rivals. He took advantage of the files and diaries that he had kept over the years, and he prepared himself for writing by rereading Ulysses Grant’s Personal Memoirs, which he admired for “their lack of pretension.” The result was a memoir that not only sold well but earned praise for its prose. As Drew Middleton, The New York Times war correspondent in Europe from 1939 to V-E Day, noted in his 1948 review of Crusade in Europe, it has a clarity that “raises the book to the first rank of war memoirs.”
Eisenhower’s title for his memoir comes from the message he sent on the eve of D-Day: “Soldiers, Sailors, and Airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force: You are about to embark upon a great crusade toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty loving people everywhere march with you.”
Crusade in Europe revolves around the decisions Eisenhower made in order to conclude the war with Germany as swiftly as possible while keeping civilian and military losses as low as possible. It was a difficult balancing act. Eisenhower not only had to deal with a seasoned German army that had been fighting years before America entered the war. He also had to deal with difficult generals on his own side. There was no avoiding confrontations with Britain’s Bernard Montgomery, who thought he should be ground commander of the Allied forces, or with George Patton, Eisenhower’s fellow West Pointer, who in the midst of the war created a scandal by slapping a shell-shocked soldier who he thought was guilty of cowardice.
In Crusade in Europe, Eisenhower plays down as a “splendid joke” President Harry Truman’s offer to help him if he wanted to pursue the presidency in 1948, but what makes Crusade in Europe so engaging now is the way it looks into the future. Eisenhower had no doubt that America and Russia would be bitter rivals after the war. “The compelling necessities of the moment leave us no alternative,” he wrote of America’s relations with the Soviet Union, “in terms of adequate military preparedness.”
At the same time, Eisenhower was willing to acknowledge the limits of American military power. In Crusade in Europe, he talks about the fact that during the war American troops never reached Berlin in time to establish control of the city before the Russians got there, as many hoped they would. Eisenhower has an unapologetic explanation for why he never pursued this objective. He notes that when American forces might have made a move on Berlin, they were still on the Rhine, hundreds of miles from Berlin, while the Russians were firmly established on the Oder River just 30 miles outside the city.
Had America tried to beat the Russians to Berlin, two things would have happened, Eisenhower argues. The Russians would have reached the city before America got there, and American divisions not driving toward Berlin would have been immobilized by a lack of supplies. “This I felt to be more than unwise; it was stupid,” Eisenhower writes of the idea that he should have moved heaven and earth to beat the Russians to Berlin.
“Eisenhower’s idea of containing the Soviet Union stopped short of getting America trapped into conflicts that went nowhere. ”
Crusade in Europe makes clear that for Eisenhower such restraint was the better part of valor. In the conclusion of his account, it is not his military triumphs that Eisenhower chooses to emphasize but his belief that “rigid concepts of national sovereignty” no longer make sense.
Reading Crusade in Europe nearly 75 years after it was written reminds us that as president Eisenhower ended the Korean War, refused to send American troops to Indochina to help the French with their colonial war, and declined to join Britain and France in seizing control of the Suez Canal in 1956. Eisenhower’s idea of containing the Soviet Union, much like that of George Kennan in his famous 1947 essay “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” included pursuing the cold war on a variety of fronts but stopping short of getting America trapped into conflicts that went nowhere. The kinds of interventions that in recent years have bogged down American troops in Afghanistan and Iraq are exactly the kinds of interventions Eisenhower knew to avoid.
Nicolaus Mills is professor of literature and American studies at Sarah Lawrence College and author of Winning the Peace: The Marshall Plan and America’s Coming of Age as a Superpower.
Handout
19. Iran sanctions 51 Americans for 2020 Soleimani killing
Some prominent military personnel on this (CJCS and Cdrs of CENTCOM, SOCOM, NSA, AFSOC and JSOC among others).
Iran sanctions 51 Americans for 2020 Soleimani killing
A crowd gathers during commemorations marking the second anniversary of the killing of top Iranian Cmdr. Qasem Soleimani and Iraqi Cmdr. Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis on Jan. 8. Photo: Hussein Faleh/AFP via Getty Images
Iran on Saturday sanctioned more than 50 U.S. officials over the 2020 assassination of Qasem Soleimani, one of the regime's most powerful military figures.
The big picture: The additional sanctions announced by the Iranian Foreign Ministry on Saturday come after the second anniversary of the Jan. 3, 2020, drone strike that killed Soleimani, the commander of Iran's regional network of proxies and international intelligence and terror operations.
- Those on the list include: Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Central Command chief Kenneth McKenzie, as well as other Pentagon officials and commanders overseeing U.S. bases across the region.
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A year ago, Iran imposed similar sanctions on former President Trump, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and eight others.
Of note: The sanctions are more of a symbolic step as the Americans don't hold any assets in Iran for authorities to seize.
Axios · by Kierra Frazier
20. Opinion | Biden’s biggest worry: Can democracy prove it is worth saving?
Opinion | Biden’s biggest worry: Can democracy prove it is worth saving?
Deputy Editorial Page Editor and Columnist
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January 7, 2022 at 6:24 p.m. EST
There was a new tone in President Biden’s speech on the anniversary of the Jan. 6 riot in which a violent mob of Trump supporters sought to overturn the results of a legitimate presidential election. More forcefully than he had before, the current president took to task the man he had defeated for inciting cultlike followers to trash the U.S. Capitol, with deadly consequences.
Donald Trump and those he stoked with his “web of lies” that the 2020 election was stolen from him “held a dagger at the throat of America — at American democracy,” Biden said. His 25-minute address was the muscular pushback that so many Democrats have been waiting to hear from Biden, who has generally — and wisely, in my view — preferred to ignore the predecessor he refers to as “the former guy."
What really preoccupies the president, however, was summed up in a quieter passage that came near the end of the speech, one that didn’t get as much notice. If there is a sweeping premise that defines what Biden views as the greatest challenge of his presidency, it is that the United States must disprove a growing cynicism about democracy itself — not just in this country, but around the world. Amid deep political polarization and an undermining of norms, the processes have become so messy and fraught that people are losing faith that democratic systems are still capable of functioning and of delivering results.
“Look, folks, now it’s up to all of us — to ‘We the People’ — to stand for the rule of law, to preserve the flame of democracy, to keep the promise of America alive. That promise is at risk, targeted by the forces that value brute strength over the sanctity of democracy, fear over hope, personal gain over public good. Make no mistake about it: We’re living at an inflection point in history,” Biden said.
“Both at home and abroad, we’re engaged anew in a struggle between democracy and autocracy, between the aspirations of the many and the greed of the few, between the people’s right of self-determination and the self-seeking autocrat,” he continued. “From China to Russia and beyond, they’re betting that democracy’s days are numbered. They’ve actually told me democracy is too slow, too bogged down by division to succeed in today’s rapidly changing, complicated world. And they’re betting — they’re betting America will become more like them and less like us.”
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This fear that democracy is eroding, leaving a vacuum to be filled by authoritarianism, took root with Biden well before the siege of the Capitol. When he was running for president, he often spoke of a book, published in 2018, that had left a deep impression on him — “How Democracies Die,” by Harvard government professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt.
The president returns to the subject often, not just in the context of the assaults on democratic norms and institutions that escalated during the Trump era but also as he argues for the passage of his ambitious domestic agenda. Last June, for instance, when bipartisan negotiators reached agreement on a framework for a roughly $1 trillion infrastructure package, he declared that it was about far more than roads and bridges and faster broadband: “This agreement signals to the world that we can function, deliver and do significant things. ... It also signals to ourselves and to the world that American democracy can deliver.”
He made much the same point in December as he opened a virtual gathering of representatives of more than 100 countries that the White House billed as a “Summit for Democracy.” Biden warned of “dissatisfaction of people all around the world with democratic governments that they feel are failing to deliver for their needs. In my view, this is the defining challenge of our time.”
It is also the defining challenge of the Biden presidency. Though Trump accelerated the crumbling of the guardrails that have protected democratic institutions — and so opened the way to the Jan. 6 attack — the problem did not begin with him. And while the system was strong enough to hold, the forces that have undermined it have not subsided. In marking the horrors of that day a year ago, Biden was right to remind us to keep our gaze high and our faces turned forward. The rest of the world is looking to this country as a test of whether democracy is worth salvaging.
21. The Power of Reclaiming My Asian Name
The Power of
Reclaiming My
Asian Name
Like many Asian Americans, I have long spurned my full name. A wave of racism made me say: No more.
This past spring, at the height of violence against Asians and Asian Americans during the pandemic, my husband and I chose to eat dinner at a Vietnamese restaurant near where we live in South Florida — in a show of solidarity with our community. As we finished our beef noodle soup and paid the check, a White man, who was sitting with his family at the table next to us, started mocking the accents of our waiter and the cook, loud enough for the entire room to hear. Besides the staff, we were the only people of Asian descent in the establishment.
As a Chinese American journalist who had been covering the recent anti-Asian attacks, I was all too familiar with the scenario and how it could easily escalate into violence. I had recently interviewed 61-year-old Noel Quintana, whose face was slashed cheek-to-cheek with a box knife while he was on his way to work on the New York subway. Another victim I spoke to, Iona Cheng, was tackled to the ground as she delivered a Christmas gift near Oakland’s Jack London Square — not far from where I used to hang out with friends growing up in the Bay Area.
After my stories published, I was accosted online, with racist tweets and emails. To protect myself, I started wearing sunglasses in public often, to obscure my race. I became a bit of a recluse, not wanting to leave the apartment. One person I had interviewed recommended that I carry a personal alarm.
The Vietnamese meal was one of my first ventures out since the start of the pandemic. As this man continued his ridicule for what felt like 10 minutes, nobody in the packed restaurant reacted. Our tables were separated only by makeshift partitions made of blinds tacked onto a clothing rack for social distancing. My husband, who is also Chinese, stood up and glared at the man. My personal alarm was in my purse, ready to emit a high-pitched sound with a touch of a button. The man shut up, and then I bolted for the parking lot.
As had been the case so many times in my life — when I was repeatedly asked where I was from or told to go back there — I avoided conflict at all costs. Like many immigrants, I had long believed that the nail that sticks up gets hammered down.
When my husband caught up to me before I reached the car, he asked me to stop running. “We need to stand up and stand tall,” he said. “We need to be proud of who we are and look people in the eye.” This was coming from a man who had suffered countless bouts of racism after immigrating from Hong Kong to Florida during high school. At age 14, his barber nicknamed him “Charlie,” off the Vietnam War-era racial slur.
I was born in the United States, but I was very much caught between two cultures. In my traditional immigrant family, I learned Mandarin first. Then, starting in kindergarten, I had to take English-as-a-second-language classes and speech therapy, and had a rough time fitting in. So, I became a journalist with hopes of squashing stereotypes. But while I was proactively calling out racism in my stories, I wasn’t doing the same in my personal life — not even with my own name.
For my community, names are potent symbols that can encompass the dynamics on display that day in South Florida: bigotry, shame, fear, but also pride. Whether they are learning English as a second language or bringing lunches to school that smell “rotten,” plenty of Asian Americans find that their full name is just one more way they stick out. And so, many assimilate through changing or adjusting their given names. I was no exception: Over the years, I’d essentially erased the middle two words of the name on my birth certificate: Marian Chia-Ming Liu.
The conversation outside that restaurant with my husband — coupled with my experience covering the increase in anti-Asian sentiments and violence — made me realize I needed to stop hiding. And my name, I decided, was a good place to start.
Chinese names are incredibly purposeful. Many of them, explains Nancy Yao Maasbach, president of the Museum of Chinese in America in New York, are made up of three characters steeped with meaning. First up is the family name, known as the last name in many Western cultures and similarly taken from the father’s side. This is followed by a name that is shared with your generation, often paternal cousins. Finally, there is the person’s individual name. These names literally show not only our ties to family and history, but how we put them first. So, my full Chinese name is Liu Chia-Ming.
As part of being ashamed of my name, I’ve never corrected how English speakers pronounce my last name, and further concealed my identity by introducing myself as the Anglicized “loo.” (A snarky reader once emailed me to criticize a concert review I wrote as a music critic but first said my last name reminded him of the bathroom.) It’s actually pronounced “LEE-ō” (柳) and means “willow tree.” My mom’s maiden name is Ling (林), meaning “forest,” and together with my dad’s last name they represent a beautiful partnership.
The middle character is one I share with all my first cousins on my father’s side. It comes from a poem that dates back to the Qin dynasty, 221 B.C. Each generation takes the next word. Other cultures that use pictographs in their languages, like Japanese and Korean, says Maasbach, also use poems in their names. While it’s spelled out as “Chia” in English, it’s pronounced more like “Jiā” (家) and means “home” — which is particularly significant to me as a journalist who has moved across the country and world for work.
Lastly, my individual name — like a first name in English — is Ming (明). (The same character as former NBA player Yao Ming’s name.) Combined with the middle character, the name is rather masculine; my grandfather didn’t want me to be the kind of woman who needed a man to depend on. One side of the character is a sun and the other the moon. Together, the character means “bright,” and next to my grandfather’s name, Tsong (聪明), the resulting phrase means “smart.”
My parents also gave me “Marian” as my first name, separate from my individual Chinese name, out of American custom. “Because everybody has English names,” says my mom. It is derived from both the first letter of my individual name, Ming, and the Christian Mary.
Maasbach says Chinese American names symbolize not only our roots, but often point to our journey to America. When visitors come into the Museum of Chinese in America, she can within a few minutes place them — based on how their names are spelled in English, whether they are Anglicized and what Chinese characters are used — in a range of possible immigration periods.
Doug Chan, president of the Chinese Historical Society of America, notes that “while the stories about Chinese last names speak to us about the immigration experience, the first names of Chinese Americans tell another story about the inner journey that our families, and each of us as individuals, have traveled within U.S. society.” For the first name, he says, “the choice reflects not only more deliberation but also the idea of assimilation.”
Many Asian immigrants end up adopting or being assigned Anglicized names to fit in. “The experience is very common but very under-researched,” says clinical psychologist Ranjana Srinivasan, linking it to the “model minority myth” that Asians are successful immigrants even if faced with obstacles. She changed her own Indian name several times to “be more pronounceable,” experimenting with Rita, Jay and even Rah Rah. After realizing she was “trying to meet the needs of White culture” in college, she went back to Ranjana, which is of Hindu religious origin and means “delightful.”
Now she works with Asian patients on similar struggles. In 2019, she published a qualitative study for Columbia University on name-based microaggressions within the South Asian American population. The study found that while some patients felt proud to be unique and carry their family’s legacy, others felt that their names were the most inconvenient part of their lives — one that meant they “never get to seamlessly join a company or participate in a meeting, because it’s always a battle.” The name struggle can also lead to depression and anxiety, says Srinivasan, because of “mixed feelings about their own culture and belongingness in your own skin.” This, she adds, is “the price you pay for being American.”
Her study was published before the spike in anti-Asian violence during the pandemic. The FBI found that in 2020, hate crimes against Asian people jumped 73 percent. According to a Pew Research Center study conducted in April 2021, one-third of Asian Americans fear threats and physical attacks. “The pandemic has made Asians in America, even those who are native-born citizens, acutely aware that they are perpetual foreigners in the eyes of some of their neighbors and even friends,” says Frank Wu, president of City University of New York’s Queens College and author of “Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White.”
Yet lately Srinivasan has also seen that “people are recognizing the importance of representation and holding one’s culture as an important part of who they are.” After the names of the victims of the Atlanta spa shootings were released in March of last year, there was a movement on social media to not only say their names but to also pronounce them correctly. The Asian American Journalists Association even released a pronunciation guide.
Maasbach also noticed this trend. “My dad gave us all names to make it easier to get Western names just to fit in more” — but now, she says, it’s more about “respecting the names for what they are, so we’ve definitely seen a shift in people owning those [Asian] names.”
My mom, like many in the community, had the sad experience of being renamed by teachers for their convenience. “That’s just how things were done if you planned to study abroad,” she says. Her Chinese name is Wan In, but she was renamed “Wanda” by an American professor in her dentistry program “because it was easier for them to remember you.”
Newer generations of immigrants are not entertaining a name change at all. In 2020, Vietnamese student Phuc Bui Diem Nguyen pushed back when a college professor asked her to Anglicize her name because it reminded him of an insult in English. Screenshots of the email exchange trended on Twitter. And in 2017, after tags with East Asian names were torn off doors at Columbia University dorms, Chinese students got together and made a video explaining what their names meant.
The author. (Bill O’Leary/The Washington Post)
“I think changing names to ‘blend in’ or in exchange for not being attacked or bullied, first of all, doesn’t work,” says Huhe Yan, who was part of the group of Columbia students who produced the video and is now a management consultant in Hong Kong. “Racism against Asians in the U.S. is not going to stop with everyone changing their names to Jason and Mary. What will make a difference is for Asians to have a seat at the table, be in positions of power, be visible.”
Campaigns like My Name, My Identity in the San Francisco Bay area are starting to pop up, where educators, parents, community members and students take a pledge to pronounce students’ names correctly and honor their backgrounds. Yee Wan, who spearheads the program, which launched in 2016, hopes to create a better sense of belonging in schools than she experienced when she immigrated at 17 — and her ESL teacher renamed her “Winnie.”
This past year, we had our first big-budget cinematic Asian superhero in Marvel Studios’ “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.” Not only was the protagonist’s name Chinese, but the name of the Chinese Canadian actor, Simu Liu, wasn’t Anglicized either. (Shang-Chi went by “Shaun” while in hiding in the United States.) In the movie, Shang-Chi’s father explains why Chinese names are important, saying, “Names are sacred. They connect us not only to ourselves, but everyone who came before.”
The burden shouldn’t be on our community to change, says Srinivasan, but on the wider culture to accept who we are. “We’ve done tons of work to make sure we acclimated,” she says. “And so now it’s their turn.”
After I ran away from that dreadful restaurant incident, my husband challenged me to reclaim my name as a way to be proud of who I am. He further dared me to drop my American name in lieu of my Chinese one. But that doesn’t tell my whole story either. Instead I’m going to start by telling folks I have a Chinese name and how to properly pronounce my last name.
So let me reintroduce myself: My full name and complete byline is Marian Chia-Ming Liu. Chia is pronounced with a J, like Jiā. Liu like Leo. And yes, it includes all four words. I’m proud of it all, because it represents my complete self, Asian and American.
About this story
Marian Chia-Ming Liu is an Operations Editor at The Washington Post, where she manages digital operations for the Metro section. She contributes to The Post’s newsletter on race and identity, About US, covering topics from the attacks on the Asian community to Korean pop music.
Illustrations and calligraphy by Sally Deng. Design and art direction by Clare Ramirez.
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.
