Quotes of the Day:

"There is a higher form of patriotism than nationalism, and the higher form is not limited by the boundaries of one's country; but by a duty, to mankind to safeguard the trust of civilization."

- Oscar Solomon Straus

"Censorship reflects a society's lack of confidence in itself." 

- Potter Stewart

"The measure of success is not whether you have a tough problem to deal with, but whether or not it is the same problem you had last year." 

- John Foster Dulles

1. CNN visited the exposed tunnel shaft near Al-Shifa Hospital. Here’s what we saw

2. China calls for ‘urgent’ action on Gaza as Muslim majority nations arrive in Beijing

3. How the US strikes a balance in responding to attacks on its forces

4. Ukrainians accuse Russia of kidnapping, indoctrinating Ukrainian children

5. With the world's eyes on Gaza, attacks are on the rise in the West Bank, which faces its own war

6. China’s rise is reversing

7.Australia Accuses China of Injuring Naval Divers With Sonar Pulses

8. Israel says soldier executed, foreign hostages held at Gaza's Shifa hospital

9. Hamas has unleashed the West's monsters

10. U.S.-China Summit: Did Joe Biden Get Anything from Xi?

11. Why Americans feel gloomy about the economy despite falling inflation and low unemployment

12. Hamas Claims Ceasefire, Hostage Release to Start Tomorrow; Israel Denies: ‘Not True’

13. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights at Seventy-Five

14. Defense Secretary Austin Makes Unannounced Ukraine Visit, Assures Kyiv of Continued Support Against Russia

15. A Misleading Metaphor: The Nuclear “Arms Race”

16. China’s Heavy Economic Legacy of State Ownership and Central Planning

17. The War That Remade the Middle East

18. Vietnam veterans explain why people don't want to join military

19. Is the U.S. Ready for War?

20. The Era of Total U.S. Submarine Dominance Over China Is Ending

1. CNN visited the exposed tunnel shaft near Al-Shifa Hospital. Here’s what we saw

Video and photos at the link: https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/20/middleeast/gaza-tunnel-shaft-al-shifa-hospital-intl-hnk

CNN visited the exposed tunnel shaft near Al-Shifa Hospital. Here’s what we saw

cnn.com · by Oren Liebermann · November 20, 2023

Gaza City CNN —

Even in the darkness, the utter devastation in northern Gaza is clear as day. The empty shells of buildings, illuminated by the last shreds of light, lurch out of the landscape on the dirt roads across the Gaza Strip. At night, the only signs of life are the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) vehicles that rumble the landscape, tightening the military’s grip on the northern sector.

On Saturday night, we traveled with the IDF into Gaza to see the newly exposed tunnel shaft discovered at the compound of Al-Shifa Hospital, the enclave’s largest medical facility.

After crossing the border fence at around 9:00 in the evening, our convoy of Humvees turned off its lights, relying on night vision goggles to traverse the Gaza Strip. We would spend the next six hours inside Gaza, much of that time spent getting back and forth from the tunnel shaft.

Along our path, virtually every building bore the scars of wartime damage. Many structures were destroyed entirely, while others were hardly recognizable as anything more than twisted metal. If there was life here, it had long since departed. Residents had either moved south or been killed during six weeks of war.

Soon after crossing the border into Gaza, the convoy of Humvees turned off its lights and traveled in darkness.

Our first stop was a location on the beach where the IDF had set up a staging area. From there, we moved into armored personnel carriers with several other reporters for the last kilometer to the hospital. The only view outside came through a night-vision screen. But even in black and white, the level of destruction was shocking.

Inside Gaza City, the skeletal remains of apartment towers and high-rise buildings packed the otherwise vacant city streets. Even if we could speak to Palestinians while embedded with the IDF, there was no one around to talk to.

CNN reported from inside Gaza under IDF media escort at all times. As a condition for journalists to join this embed, media outlets had to submit footage filmed in Gaza to the Israeli military for review and agreed not to reveal sensitive locations and soldiers’ identities. CNN retained editorial control over the final report.

As we stepped out of the armored vehicle, we were enveloped by utter darkness. We were only allowed to use our red lights to navigate to a nearby building, where we waited until Israeli forces already on the ground secured the area. The tunnel shaft was very close by, but it was entirely exposed.

The commander in charge of our group, Lt. Col. Tom said this tunnel is significantly larger than others he had seen before. “This is a big tunnel,” he said. “I have encountered tunnels — in 2014 in [Operation] Protective Edge, I was a company commander — and this tunnel is an order of magnitude bigger than a standard tunnel.”

We had expected to hear fighting once we entered Gaza City itself. Instead, we heard almost complete silence. Only once during our roughly 45 minutes at the hospital did we hear the distant sound of small arms fire, and it was impossible to tell how far away it was in the midst of an urban environment. The rest of the time, the silence made the darkness feel even more oppressive.

The only view of the destruction in Gaza was through a small night vision monitor in an armored personnel carrier.

It was nearing midnight as we walked the last few feet to the exposed tunnel shaft. The IDF had promised “concrete evidence” that Hamas was using the hospital complex above ground as cover for what it called terror infrastructure underneath, including a command and control hub.

Several days earlier, the IDF had released what it said was the first batch of evidence, which included weapons and ammunition they said they found inside the hospital itself. But the pictures were a far cry from proving that Hamas had a facility underneath, and a CNN investigation found that some of the guns had been moved around.

The discovery of the tunnel shaft the next day was more compelling, showing an entrance to something underground. But even then, it was unclear what it was or how far down it went. This is what everyone has been trying to understand.

Standing on the edge of the tunnel shaft, it was apparent that the structure itself was substantial. At the top, the remains of a ladder hung over the lip of the opening. In the center of the round shaft, a center pole looked like a hub for a spiral staircase. The shaft itself extended down farther than we could see, especially in the meager light of our headlamps.

Video released by the IDF from inside the shaft showed what we could not see from the top of the opening. The video shows a spiral staircase leading down into a concrete tunnel. The IDF said the tunnel shaft extends downwards approximately 10 meters and the tunnel runs for 55 meters. At its end stands a metal door with a small window.

“We need to demolish the underground facility that we found,” said IDF spokesperson Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari. “I think the leadership of Hamas is in great pressure because we found this facility, and we are now going to demolish it. It’s going to take us time. We’re going to do it safely, but we’re going to do it.”

It is arguably the most compelling evidence thus far that the IDF has offered that there may be a network of tunnels below the hospital. It does not establish without a doubt that there is a command center under Gaza’s largest hospital, but it is clear that there is a tunnel down below. Seeing what connects to that tunnel is absolutely critical.

IDF claims video shows hostages in Al-Shifa hospital

For Israel, the stakes could not be higher. Israel has publicly asserted for weeks, if not years, that Hamas has built terror infrastructure below the hospital. The ability to continue to prosecute the war in the face of mounting international criticism depends to a large extent on Israel being able to prove this point.

Hamas has repeatedly denied that there is a network of tunnels below Shifa hospital. Health officials who have spoken with CNN have said the same, insisting it is only a medical facility.

As is so rarely the case in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, this answer truly is black and white. Either there is an underground series of tunnels below the hospital. Or there is not.

cnn.com · by Oren Liebermann · November 20, 2023

2. China calls for ‘urgent’ action on Gaza as Muslim majority nations arrive in Beijing

​Excerpts:

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi welcomed counterparts from Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, the Palestinian National Authority, and Indonesia, as well as the head of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation for a two-day visit to the Chinese capital, the start of the delegation’s expected tour of several world capitals.

...

The gathering in Beijing comes as sources tell CNN that a possible deal to secure the release of some hostages held by Hamas and a several days pause in fighting may be in sight, following weeks of negotiations between the United States, Israel and the militant group, mediated by Gulf state Qatar.

Beijing has been at odds with Washington – an Israeli ally and long a major power broker in the region – over their approach to the conflict, including when it comes to an immediate ceasefire, which Washington does not support. Beijing has also criticized Israel’s retaliation and failed to condemn Hamas or name the group in its statements, sparking backlash from Israeli officials.

“Israel should stop its collective punishment on the people of Gaza, and open up a humanitarian corridor as soon as possible to prevent a humanitarian crisis of a larger scale from taking place,” Wang was cited as telling the delegation during the talks, according to a readout from China’s Foreign Ministry.

Israel has staunchly defended its actions as rooting out terrorism following a “barbaric invasion” and has rejected any ceasefire without the return of hostages.

China calls for ‘urgent’ action on Gaza as Muslim majority nations arrive in Beijing

By Simone McCarthy and Wayne Chang, CNN

 5 minute read 

Updated 5:17 AM EST, Mon November 20, 2023

cnn.com · by Simone McCarthy · November 20, 2023

China's Foreign Minister Wang Yi with representatives from Muslim-majority nations at the Diaoyutai State Guest House in Beijing on November 20.

Hong Kong CNN —

The world must “must act urgently” to stem the conflict in Gaza, China’s top diplomat said Monday during a meeting with officials from Arab and Muslim majority nations, as Beijing steps up its efforts to play a role in establishing ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas conflict.

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi welcomed counterparts from Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, the Palestinian National Authority, and Indonesia, as well as the head of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation for a two-day visit to the Chinese capital, the start of the delegation’s expected tour of several world capitals.

“The international community must act urgently, taking effective measures to prevent this tragedy from spreading. China firmly stands with justice and fairness in this conflict,” Wang told the visiting leaders in opening remarks ahead of talks, where he reiterated China’s call for an immediate ceasefire.

Visiting ministers voiced their own strong calls for an end to the conflict, with Saudi Arabian Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud saying: “The message is clear: the war must stop immediately, we must move to a ceasefire immediately, and relief materials and aid must enter immediately.”

Countries represented in the delegation hoped to cooperate with China and “all countries” that are “responsible and appreciate the seriousness of the situation,” he said.

Israel has launched weeks of bombardment and ground operations in the Hamas-ruled enclave of Gaza following a deadly attack on its territory by the group on October 7. More than 200 hostages were taken in that attack, according to the Israel Defense Forces.

The gathering in Beijing comes as sources tell CNN that a possible deal to secure the release of some hostages held by Hamas and a several days pause in fighting may be in sight, following weeks of negotiations between the United States, Israel and the militant group, mediated by Gulf state Qatar.

Beijing has been at odds with Washington – an Israeli ally and long a major power broker in the region – over their approach to the conflict, including when it comes to an immediate ceasefire, which Washington does not support. Beijing has also criticized Israel’s retaliation and failed to condemn Hamas or name the group in its statements, sparking backlash from Israeli officials.

“Israel should stop its collective punishment on the people of Gaza, and open up a humanitarian corridor as soon as possible to prevent a humanitarian crisis of a larger scale from taking place,” Wang was cited as telling the delegation during the talks, according to a readout from China’s Foreign Ministry.

Israel has staunchly defended its actions as rooting out terrorism following a “barbaric invasion” and has rejected any ceasefire without the return of hostages.

China’s push for peace

China has been attempting to play an active role in finding a solution to the conflict as it seeks to expand its position as a major global power.

Beijing dispatched a peace envoy for a multi-country tour of the region last month and has acted as a strong voice pushing for an immediate ceasefire at the United Nations, including the Security Council, where China now holds the rotating presidency.

China’s special envoy is on a Middle East mission. Peace is just part of the picture

Last week the UN body passed its first resolution on the conflict, which called for the immediate release of all hostages held by Hamas and for extended humanitarian corridors throughout the enclave to protect civilians. The US and the United Kingdom abstained, citing the resolution’s failure to condemn Hamas.

“For reasons known to all, in particular, the repeated and persistent obstruction of a permanent member of the Council, this resolution at present can only serve as a first step based on minimum consensus,” Chinese Ambassador Zhang Jun said following the vote, in an apparent veiled jab at the US.

In his comments Monday in Beijing, Saudi Arabia’s minister commended the Security Council’s decision, under China’s leadership.

The conflict has also given China an opportunity to bolster its already strengthening ties with a number of countries across the Arab world — a region where observers say it hopes to drive a wedge between the US and the countries with which it has long-standing ties.

“We have always firmly defended the legitimate rights and interests of Arab and Muslim countries, and have always firmly supported the Palestinian people’s efforts to restore their legitimate national rights and interests,” Wang told the visiting delegation.

Engaging major players?

Immediate ceasefire and longer-term peace were also key topics during a roughly 10-day tour in the Middle East last month from China’s special envoy for the region, Zhai Jun, who visited Egypt, Qatar, the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Jordan, according to China’s Foreign Ministry.

Last week the envoy visited and met with officials in Turkey and Bahrain, where Zhai also discussed the “regional situation” with representatives from Singapore, the US and Europe on the sidelines of an international conference.

So far there have been no apparent concrete outcomes from the diplomacy.

Zhai’s itinerary thus far has also not included stops in Israel, Palestinian-controlled territories, or Iran, per information released by China’s Foreign Ministry. Wang spoke with Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen on the phone last month. It’s not clear if China has been in contact with Hamas officials during the latest conflict.

Visiting officials in Beijing this week include Palestinian Foreign Minister Riyad al-Maliki of the West Bank-based Palestinian National Authority.

China earlier this month dispatched the head of its Foreign Ministry’s West Asian and North African affairs department to Iran, where the conflict was part of discussions, according to a post on the department’s WeChat social media account.

Iran is a longtime backer of both Hamas and Lebanon-based Hezbollah.

During hours-long talks between Chinese leader Xi Jinping and US President Joe Biden in California last week, Biden encouraged Xi to use China’s leverage with Iran to warn against a wider regional escalation, a senior US official told CNN.

In the talks, Foreign Minister Wang Yi said they’d already held discussions with the Iranians on the topic, the senior official said.

Biden also made clear to Xi that he viewed Hamas as separate from the Palestinians. The US views Hamas as a terrorist organization that has perpetuated the suffering of Palestinian people, and has upheld Israel’s right to retaliate against the group.

Beijing has not referred to Hamas in its statements, but instead frames the current situation as a Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

CNN’s Xiaofei Xu, Martin Goillandeau, Mengchen Zhang and Sophie Jeong contributed to this report.

cnn.com · by Simone McCarthy · November 20, 2023

3. How the US strikes a balance in responding to attacks on its forces

Excerpts:

In response to the attacks, the U.S. has walked a delicate line. The U.S. military has struck back just three times as the Biden administration balances efforts to deter the militants without triggering a broader Middle East conflict.

...

The bulk of the attacks on bases and facilities have been with one-way suicide drones or rockets, and in most cases there were no injuries and only minor damage. A significant number of the injuries, particularly the traumatic brain injuries, were in the initial attacks between Oct. 17 and 21 at al-Asad air base in Iraq and al-Tanf. One U.S. contractor suffered a cardiac arrest and died while seeking shelter from a possible drone attack.

...

But the U.S. military response to the attacks on its forces has been minimal. On Oct. 27, U.S. fighter jets struck two weapons and ammunition storage sites in eastern Syria near Boukamal that were used by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Iranian-backed groups. On Nov. 8, fighter jets dropped bombs on an IRGC weapons storage facility near Maysulun in Deir el-Zour. And on Nov. 12, U.S. airstrikes targeted a training facility and a safe house in the Bulbul district of Mayadin. U.S. officials said IRGC-related personnel were there and likely struck, but provided no details.

There are concerns within the administration that more substantial retaliation could escalate the violence and trigger more deadly attacks. The Pentagon says the strikes have degraded the group’s military stockpiles and made the sites unusable.

But critics argue that the U.S. response pales in comparison with the 60 attacks and American injuries, and — more importantly — has obviously failed to deter the groups.

How the US strikes a balance in responding to attacks on its forces

militarytimes.com · by Lolita Baldor · November 19, 2023

WASHINGTON — Iranian-backed militants in Iraq and Syria have long battled with U.S. and coalition forces, launching sporadic attacks against bases in the region where troops are deployed to fight Islamic State group insurgents.

But since Oct. 17, as civilian deaths in Israel’s war against Hamas began to skyrocket, there has been a dramatic spike in attacks by Iran’s proxies, operating under the umbrella name of the Islamic Resistance in Iraq.

While most of the more than five dozen attacks have been largely ineffective, at least 60 U.S. personnel have reported minor injuries. Most often those have been traumatic brain injuries from the explosions, and all troops have returned to duty, according to the Pentagon.

In response to the attacks, the U.S. has walked a delicate line. The U.S. military has struck back just three times as the Biden administration balances efforts to deter the militants without triggering a broader Middle East conflict.

A look at the attacks and the U.S. response:

Attacks — when, where, why

According to the Pentagon, Iranian-backed militants have launched 61 attacks on bases and facilities housing U.S. personnel in Iraq and Syria since Oct. 17. Of those, 29 have been in Iraq and 32 in Syria.

The U.S. has about 2,000 U.S. forces in Iraq, under an agreement with the Baghdad government, and about 900 in Syria, mainly to counter IS but also using the al-Tanf garrison farther south to keep tabs on Iranian proxies moving weapons across the border.

The latest jump in attacks began 10 days after Hamas’ Oct. 7 incursion into Israel, where at least 1,200 people were killed. Israel’s blistering military response has killed thousands of civilians trapped in Gaza and fueled threats of retaliation by a range of Iran-backed groups, including Hezbollah in Lebanon, Yemen-based Houthis, and militants in Iraq and Syria. Those threats escalated after an Oct. 17 blast at a Gaza hospital killed hundreds of civilians. Hamas blamed Israel for the explosion, but Israel has denied it, and both Israeli and U.S. officials have blamed it on a missile misfire by Islamic Jihad.

The bulk of the attacks on bases and facilities have been with one-way suicide drones or rockets, and in most cases there were no injuries and only minor damage. A significant number of the injuries, particularly the traumatic brain injuries, were in the initial attacks between Oct. 17 and 21 at al-Asad air base in Iraq and al-Tanf. One U.S. contractor suffered a cardiac arrest and died while seeking shelter from a possible drone attack.

Who are these groups?

With a power vacuum and years of civil conflict following the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, militias grew and multiplied in Iraq, some supported by Iran. A decade later, as the Islamic State extremist group swept across Iraq, a number of Iran-backed militias came together under the Popular Mobilization Forces umbrella group and fought IS.

The groups included the Asaib Ahl al-Haq, the Badr Brigades and Kataeb Hezbollah, or Hezbollah Brigades — a separate group from the Lebanese Hezbollah. A number of the Iraqi militias also operate in Syria, where Iran supports the government of Bashar Assad against opposition groups in the uprising-turned-civil-war that began in 2011.

After the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war, a group of the Iran-backed factions branded itself under the new Islamic Resistance in Iraq name, and began the latest spate of attacks on bases housing U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria.

The attacks put Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani in a difficult position. While he came to power with the Iranian-backed groups’ support, he also wants continued good relations with the U.S. and has backed the ongoing presence of American troops in his country.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, in a meeting with al-Sudani this month, warned of consequences if Iranian-backed militias continued to attack U.S. facilities in Iraq and Syria. Al-Sudani then traveled to Tehran and met with Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, a meeting U.S. officials suggested was a positive development.

An official with one of the Iranian-backed militias said al-Sudani put “great pressure” on the militias not to carry out attacks during Blinken’s visit. In return, he said, al-Sudani promised to push the Americans not to retaliate aggressively against militias that have carried out the strikes. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment publicly.

Proportional or not enough?

Since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, the Biden administration has moved warships, fighter jets, air defense systems and more troops into the Middle East in a campaign to discourage militant groups from widening the conflict.

But the U.S. military response to the attacks on its forces has been minimal. On Oct. 27, U.S. fighter jets struck two weapons and ammunition storage sites in eastern Syria near Boukamal that were used by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Iranian-backed groups. On Nov. 8, fighter jets dropped bombs on an IRGC weapons storage facility near Maysulun in Deir el-Zour. And on Nov. 12, U.S. airstrikes targeted a training facility and a safe house in the Bulbul district of Mayadin. U.S. officials said IRGC-related personnel were there and likely struck, but provided no details.

There are concerns within the administration that more substantial retaliation could escalate the violence and trigger more deadly attacks. The Pentagon says the strikes have degraded the group’s military stockpiles and made the sites unusable.

But critics argue that the U.S. response pales in comparison with the 60 attacks and American injuries, and — more importantly — has obviously failed to deter the groups.

Iraq government sensitivities

Though nearly half of the attacks have been on U.S. bases in Iraq, the U.S. has conducted retaliatory airstrikes only against locations in Syria.

The Pentagon defends the strike decisions by saying the U.S. is hitting Iranian Revolutionary Guard sites, which has a more direct impact on Tehran. Officials say the goal is to pressure Iran to tell the militia groups to stop the attacks. They also say the sites are chosen because they are weapons warehouses and logistical hubs used by the Iran-linked militias, and taking them out erodes the insurgents’ attack capabilities.

A key reason the U.S. is concentrating on Syria, however, is that the U.S. doesn’t want to risk alienating the Iraqi government by striking within its borders — potentially killing or wounding Iraqis.

In early January 2020, the U.S. launched an airstrike in Baghdad, killing Gen. Qassim Soleimani, the head of Iran’s elite Quds Force, and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, deputy commander of Iran-backed militias in Iraq. The strike frayed relations with the Iraqi government and spawned demands for the withdrawal of all U.S. forces from the country.

The U.S. considers its presence in Iraq as critical to the fight against IS, its ability to support forces in Syria and its ongoing influence in the region. Military leaders have worked to restore good relations with Baghdad, including providing ongoing support for Iraqi forces.

Associated Press writer Qassim Abdul-Zahra in Baghdad contributed to this report.

4. Ukrainians accuse Russia of kidnapping, indoctrinating Ukrainian children

Video at the link: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ukrainians-accuse-russia-of-abducting-indoctrinating-children-60-minutes-transcript/?utm

Ukrainians accuse Russia of kidnapping, indoctrinating Ukrainian children

BY CECILIA VEGA

NOVEMBER 19, 2023 / 7:54 PM EST / CBS NEWS

CBS News · by Cecilia Vega

It's impossible for Ukrainian families to shield their children from the constant violence of Russia's war… but tonight we will tell you about a lesser known and perhaps more sinister danger they face… the Russian abduction of Ukrainian children. In the chaos of war, exact numbers are hard to come by. Officially, the Ukrainian government has documented more than 19,000 children taken by Russia, but told us they worry the actual number could be closer to 300,000 children. The International Criminal Court has charged Russian President Vladimir Putin and his commissioner for children's rights with the war crimes of unlawful deportation and transfer of children. This summer we followed one Ukrainian grandmother on an undercover mission, deep into enemy territory, to find her grandson before he completely disappeared.

Polina packed what little she could and caught a 20-hour train from Poland to Kyiv to meet with a nonprofit called "Save Ukraine"… they promised to help her find 9-year-old Nikita. She traveled light but carried the weight of a grandmother's worry.

Polina (translated): He means everything to me – he is my air, my sky, my water. I live for him, he's my life. I love him very much.

Polina - who asked us not to use her last name - is in the process of filing for guardianship of her grandson. She left Ukraine so she could work to support Nikita, who has special needs.

Polina (translated): The Russian Federation stole him. They abducted him.

Polina said her grandson was taken 60 Minutes

Cecilia Vega: Did the Russians ask anyone for permission to move Nikita? Did they tell anyone they were moving him?

Polina (translated): No, they didn't tell anyone anything. They simply removed him and hid him.

Last October, Nikita was living in a boarding school for disabled children when the Russian authorities ordered all 86 kids there to be transferred deeper into Russian-controlled territory.

Polina (translated): I came home after work, I opened Instagram and there was a picture of my child– Nikita. With a caption, Russia is taking children.

Polina says the Russians played a cruel game of hide and seek - moving Nikita at least three times in eight months - including to an orphanage in Russia.

Cecilia Vega: What were those eight months like for you?

Polina (translated): Really bad, really bad. I wouldn't sleep at night. I didn't want to go to work, I didn't even want to live because I had no one to live for. And then I found this website, Save Ukraine, on Facebook. And I called them.

The phones never seem to stop ringing at the Save Ukraine headquarters in Kyiv.

So far, they've rescued more than 200 kids, from kindergarteners to teenagers.

We met the founder, Mykola Kuleba, at one of Save Ukraine's shelters for reunited families.

Cecilia Vega: How long do the families stay here?

Mykola Kuleba: Up to three months.

Kuleba served as Ukraine's presidential commissioner for children's rights for nearly eight years.

Mykola Kuleba at a shelter 60 Minutes

Now, he runs these secret rescue missions, which rely on an underground network of safe houses and volunteers… including Russians who oppose the war.

Mykola Kuleba: I can't tell you how many organization involved and volunteers.

Cecilia Vega: Dozens?

Mykola Kuleba: Maybe hundreds.

Cecilia Vega: Hundreds. Is there one piece of advice that every mother must know before she starts this journey?

Mykola Kuleba: We explaining them that Russians will intimidate you. They will be doing everything to stop you, to provoke you. That's why you should focus on your child. Your goal is to take your child and not be afraid.

But it's hard not to be afraid. These women have to travel alone while the men stay behind to fight. Just before the mothers leave, they get a safety briefing where they learn how to craft cover stories for when, inevitably, they are interrogated by Russian forces.

When they return, their stories become evidence that save Ukraine sends to the International Criminal Court.

Russia's goal, Kuelba says, is to steal the Ukrainian kids' future by erasing their past.

Mykola Kuleba: Their plans to destroy Ukrainian identity. They brainwash them, indoctrinate them, Russify them. They have special classes for Ukrainian children when they teach them what is the Russian empire, what future they can have in Russia 'cause about Ukraine, it's only bad things.

Cecilia Vega: What risk do these children pose to Russia if they come back home into Ukraine?

Mykola Kuleba: Every child is a war crime witness.

Cecilia Vega: Every child is a war crime witness.

Mykola Kuleba: Every child. Yeah. Every child.

Vlad Rudenko was 16 when he was taken last October. He says armed men showed up at his door while his mother, Tetiana Bodak was out.

Vlad Rudenko (translated): They told me 'you need to pack your things.' I said, 'I will call my mom.' They said, 'don't bother- you are coming with us anyway.'

Cecilia Vega with Tetiana Bodak and Vlad Rudenko 60 Minutes

After that, Vlad says he was ordered to board a bus – part of a 16-vehicle convoy full of kids that drove to a camp in Russian-controlled Crimea.

Moscow claims it's evacuating kids from the fighting in eastern and southern Ukraine.

But we've learned Russia often pressures poor Ukrainian parents to send their children to schools and these camps, where the kids spend their days with Russian children. Images of happy kids are the propaganda Russia wants the world to see.

But, several Ukrainian kids told us what happens in these camps is less about recreation and more about indoctrination…they are told repeated lies – like "Ukraine lost the war" and "their parents don't want them."

Vlad secretly sent his mother this video and said speaking Ukrainian, talking about Ukraine or even wearing Ukraine's colors was forbidden.

Every morning, at a camp like this, Vlad told us the Ukrainian children were forced to sing the Russian national anthem. Vlad refused to fall in line. One night, he decided to take down the Russian flag.

Cecilia Vega: And then what happened?

Vlad Rudenko (translated): They came over and told me to pack up. They said we're going to the detention ward. So, we went to the ward and I said, I'm not staying here, I'll break everything in here. They told me, we'll call a psychiatric hospital for you then. But in the end, they locked me up anyway in the detention ward for five days.

Cecilia Vega: You were in isolation for five days?

Vlad Rudenko (translated): Yes. One more day and I probably would have hanged myself.

Cecilia Vega: Tetiana, what do you think when you hear that?

Tetiana Bodak (translated): I can't… I just can't find the words because there's a lot of things he didn't tell me. And maybe I am scared to find out something that I'd better not know.

By the time Tetiana rescued Vlad with Save Ukraine's help, she had lost eight months with her son.

Cecilia Vega: Did he look different to you?

Tetiana Bodak 60 Minutes

Tetiana Bodak (translated): Yes. I remember he left as a kid, but then when I met him again, I saw a man with an adult vision of life. His eyes just gave him up.

Polina couldn't risk losing any more time with Nikita. The night before she left, she gathered gifts for her grandson.

This bus station was as far as our cameras could go… but nine days in, she managed to call while we were with the Save Ukraine team. A translator relayed her harrowing trip.

Translator: I was moving there in a car throughout that minefield. There was a heavy smell of dead bodies there.

What Polina couldn't tell us over the phone was that she and Save Ukraine hatched a plan to get past a border checkpoint near the school in occupied territory where Nikita was held: she pretended to be an aid worker. Her driver recorded as she walked into the building.

Polina (translated): The director asked me, how did you get here? I told him, I'm a volunteer. I came here from Poland and brought you some humanitarian aid. I needed to say something, to be able to see Nikita and figure out a way to get him out of there. This was the only way to do it.

And then she finally identified herself as Nikita's grandmother and gave the school director a Ukrainian document authorizing her to take Nikita home. He refused.

Polina (translated): The director said to me, he's mine. I am his guardian. And I said, but I am his grandmother. You have no right because he has a biological grandmother who will take him back. This is my child.

Last year, Vladimir Putin changed the law to make it easier for some Ukrainian children to receive Russian citizenship, allowing them to be adopted by Russian families. And Putin's top deputy in charge of children's rights – Maria lvova-Belova – posted these videos of what she described as Ukrainian orphans with their adoptive parents.

lvova-Helova-- herself says she adopted a 15-year-old Ukrainian boy from the occupied city of Mariupol.

Polina showed us the documents that led her to believe Nikita was also about to be adopted.

Cecilia Vega: So, this is the Ukrainian birth certificate: born in Ukraine, Ukrainian child. And this is what Russia made – what does this say?

Polina (translated): It says that he is a citizen of the Russian Federation.

Cecilia Vega: It's almost hard for me to get my head around this. Your grandson is a Ukrainian citizen, and you're telling me, you believe the Russians were on the verge of giving him to a Russian family, of adopting him out to another family.

Polina: Yes, yes.

She says the school called her Ukrainian documentation fake and demanded a DNA test. They kept Polina waiting for the results.

For 70 days, she refused to back down…

Until finally, Polina was led into a room where she heard this:

Nikita (in reunion video): "Babushka!"

There to personally oversee the reunion- Maria lvova-Belova. Russian cameras recorded as the accused war criminal handed Nikita gifts.

Polina and Nikita were reunited with the help of Save Ukraine 60 Minutes

She also made them an offer:

Polina (translated): Lvova-Belova said to me, would you like to stay with us in the Russian Federation maybe? We will give you some money. We will give you a car.

Cecilia Vega: They tried to get you to stay with Nikita?

Polina (translated): Yes, yes. I said: I don't need anything. I have everything.

Maria lvova-Belova insists Russia does not put Ukrainian children up for adoption and that it makes every effort to return them. On social media, she called Polina and Nikita's reunion a joy and wished them a quote "happy life."

Finally reunited-- Polina and Nikita began the long trip back to safety, driving day and night for a week.

We were with the Save Ukraine team when they arrived in Poland.

They plan to live here until the war is over.

Cecilia Vega: What do you wanna do with your grandmother now?

Nikita told me he wants to play toys with her.

And with a smile, he proudly said: this is mother, my grandmother.

Produced by Nichole Marks. Associate producer, John Gallen. Broadcast associate, Katie Jahns. Edited by Sean Kelly.

Cecilia Vega is an Emmy Award-winning journalist and "60 Minutes" correspondent who joined the CBS newsmagazine in 2023.

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CBS News · by Cecilia Vega

5. With the world's eyes on Gaza, attacks are on the rise in the West Bank, which faces its own war

What if Hezbollah attacks in the north? Could Israel face a three front war in Gaza, the West Bank, and from the north from Lebanon?

With the world's eyes on Gaza, attacks are on the rise in the West Bank, which faces its own war

AP · November 20, 2023

QUSRA, West Bank (AP) — When Israeli warplanes swooped over the Gaza Strip following Hamas militants’ deadly attack on southern Israel, Palestinians say a different kind of war took hold in the occupied West Bank.

Overnight, the territory was closed off. Towns were raided, curfews imposed, teenagers arrested, detainees beaten, and villages stormed by Jewish vigilantes.

With the world’s attention on Gaza and the humanitarian crisis there, the violence of war has also erupted in the West Bank. Israeli settler attacks have surged at an unprecedented rate, according to the United Nations. The escalation has spread fear, deepened despair, and robbed Palestinians of their livelihoods, their homes and, in some cases, their lives.

“Our lives are hell,” said Sabri Boum, a 52-year-old farmer who fortified his windows with metal grills last week to protect his children from settlers he said threw stun grenades in Qaryout, a northern village. “It’s like I’m in a prison.”

The flashpoint Palestinian town of Hawara, once a bustling hub of commerce along the West Bank's main highway, is seen as deserted after the Israeli military closed shops and banned Palestinian vehicles from the main road in the wake of Palestinian militant attacks and settler violence in the town, Sunday, Nov. 12, 2023. (AP Photo/Mahmoud Illean)

Israeli soldiers on patrol in the flashpoint Palestinian town of Hawara, which has wholly emptied after the Israeli military closed shops and banned Palestinian vehicles from the main road in the wake of Palestinian militant attacks and settler violence in the town, Sunday, Nov. 12, 2023. (AP Photo/Mahmoud Illean)

In six weeks, settlers have killed nine Palestinians, said Palestinian health authorities. They’ve destroyed 3,000-plus olive trees during the crucial harvest season, said Palestinian Authority official Ghassan Daghlas, wiping out what for some were inheritances passed through generations. And they’ve harassed herding communities, forcing over 900 people to abandon 15 hamlets they long called home, the U.N. said.

When asked about settler attacks, the Israeli army said only that it aims to defuse conflict and troops “are required to act” if Israel citizens violate the law. The army didn’t respond to requests for comment on specific incidents.

U.S. President Biden and other administration officials have repeatedly condemned settler violence, even as they defended the Israeli campaign in Gaza.

“It has to stop,” Biden said last month. “They have to be held accountable.”

That hasn’t happened, according to Israeli rights group Yesh Din. Since Oct. 7, one settler has been arrested — over an olive farmer’s death — and was released five days later, the group said. Two other settlers were placed in preventive detention without charge, it said.

Naomi Kahn, of advocacy group Regavim, which lobbies for settler interests, argued that settler attacks weren’t nearly as widespread as rights groups report because it’s a broad category including self-defense, anti-Palestinian graffiti and other nonviolent provocations.

“The entire Israeli system works not only to stamp out this violence but to prevent it,” she said.

Before the Hamas assault, 2023 already was the deadliest year for Palestinians in the West Bank in over two decades, with 250 Palestinians killed by Israeli fire, most during military operations.

Over these six weeks of war, Israeli security forces have killed another 206 Palestinians, the Palestinian Health Ministry said, the result of a rise in army raids backed by airstrikes and Palestinian militant attacks. In the deadliest West Bank raid since the second Palestinian intifada, or uprising, of the 2000s, Israeli forces killed 14 Palestinians in the Jenin refugee camp Nov. 9, most of them militants.

While for years settlers enjoyed the support of the Israeli government, they now have vocal proponents at the highest levels of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition. This month, Netanyahu appointed Zvi Sukkot, a settler temporarily banned from the West Bank in 2012 over alleged assaults targeting Palestinians and Israeli forces, to lead the subcommittee on West Bank issues in parliament.

Palestinians who’ve endured hardships of Israeli military rule, in its 57th year, say this war has left them more vulnerable than ever.

“We’ve become scared of tomorrow,” said Abdelazim Wadi, 50, whose brother and nephew were fatally shot by settlers, according to health authorities.

Conflict has long been part of daily life here, but Palestinians say the war has unleashed a new wave of provocations, disrupting even their grim routine.

THE SETTLERS IN FATIGUES

Israel captured the West Bank, east Jerusalem and Gaza in the 1967 Mideast war. Settlers claim the West Bank as their biblical birthright. Most of the international community considers the settlements, home to 700,000 Israelis, illegal. Israel considers the West Bank disputed land, and says the settlements’ fate should be decided in negotiations. International law says the military, as the occupying power, must protect Palestinian civilians.

Palestinians say that in nearly six decades of occupation, Israeli soldiers often failed to protect them from settler attacks or even joined in.

Since the war’s start, the line between settlers and soldiers has blurred further.

Israel’s wartime mobilization of 300,000-plus reservists included the call-up of settlers for duty and put many in charge of policing their own communities. The military said in some cases, reservists who live in settlements replaced regular West Bank battalions deployed in the war.

Tom Kleiner, a reservist guarding Beit El, a religious settlement near the Palestinian city of Ramallah, said the Oct. 7 Hamas attack’s brutality cemented his conviction that Palestinians are determined to “murder us.”

“We don’t kill Arabs without any reason,” he said. “We kill them because they’re trying to kill us.”

Rights groups say uniforms and assault rifles have inflated settlers’ sense of impunity.

“Imagine that the military supposed to protect you is now made of settlers committing violence against you,” said Ori Givati, of Breaking the Silence, a whistleblower group of former Israeli soldiers.

Bashar al-Qaryoute, a medic from the Palestinian village of Qaryout, said residents from the nearby settlement Shilo, now wearing fatigues, have blocked all but one road out. He said they smashed Qaryout’s water pipeline, forcing residents to truck in water at triple the price.

“They were the ones always burning olive trees and creating problems,” al-Qaryoute said. “Now they’re in charge.”

THE CURFEW

“Close it!” a soldier barked at Imad Abu Shamsiyya when he met the young man’s eyes through his open window. Then, he pointed his rifle.

Over 52 years, Abu Shamsiyya has witnessed crises strike the heart of Hebron, the only place in which Jewish settlers live amid local residents, not in separate communities.

He thought life in the maze of barbed wire and security cameras couldn’t get worse. Then came the war.

“This terror, these pressures,” he said, “are unlike before.”

The Israeli military has barred 750 families in Hebron’s Old City — where some 700 radical Jewish settlers live among 34,000 Palestinians under heavy military protection — from stepping outside except for one hour in the morning and one in the evening on Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursday, said residents and Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem.

Schools have closed. Work has stopped. Sick people have moved in with relatives in the Palestinian-controlled part of town. Israeli settlers often roam at night, taunting Palestinians trapped indoors, according to footage published by B’Tselem.

Checkpoints instill dread. Soldiers who in the past just glanced at Abu Shamsiyya’s ID now search his phone and social media. They pat him down, he said, gawking and cursing.

“Hebron is a blatant microcosm of how Israel is exerting control over the Palestinians population,” said Dror Sadot, of B’Tselem.

The Israeli military didn’t respond to a request for comment on the curfew.

THE SETTLER RAID

The grinding of a bulldozer’s gears. The crack of a gun. With a glance, parents let each other know the drill: Grab the children, lock the doors, keep away from windows.

Palestinians say settlers storm the northern village of Qusra almost daily, covering olive orchards in cement and dousing cars and homes in gasoline.

On Oct. 11, settlers tore through dusty streets, shooting at families in their homes. Within minutes, three Palestinian men were dead.

Israeli forces sent to disperse armed settlers and Palestinian stone-throwers fired into the crowd, killing a fourth villager, Palestinian officials said.

The next day, settlers heeded social-media calls to ambush a funeral procession the village coordinated with the army. They cut off roads and sprayed bullets at mourners who sprang from cars and sprinted through fields, attendees said.

Ibrahim Wadi, a 62-year-old chemist, and his 26-year-old son Ahmed, a lawyer, were killed. The funeral for four became one for six.

Settlers’ online posts rejoicing at the deaths, shared with The Associated Press, stung Ibrahim’s brother, Abdelazim, almost as much as the loss.

“The mind breaks down, it stops comprehending,” he said.

THE GHOST TOWN

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said Israel should “wipe out” Palestinian town Hawara after a gunman killed two Israeli brothers in February, sending hundreds of settlers on a deadly rampage.

Another far-right religious lawmaker, Zvika Fogel, said he wanted to see the commercial hub “closed, incinerated.”

Today, Hawara resembles a ghost town.

The army shuttered shops “to maintain public order” after Palestinian militant attacks, it said. Abandoned dogs roam among vandalized storefronts. Posters with a Talmudic justification for killing Palestinians adorn road blocks: “Rise and kill first.”

From the war’s start, much of the West Bank’s main north-south highway has been closed to Palestinians, said anti-settlement watchdog Peace Now. Commutes that took 10 to 20 minutes now take hourslong detours on dangerous dirt roads.

The restrictions, said Palestinian politician Mustafa Barghouti, “have divided the West Bank into 224 ghettos separated by closed checkpoints.”

The 160,000 Palestinian laborers who passed those checkpoints to work in Israel and Israeli settlements before Oct. 7 lost their coveted permits overnight, said Israel’s defense agency overseeing Palestinian civil matters. The agency allowed 8,000 essential workers to return to factories and hospitals earlier this month. There’s no word on when the rest can.

“My grandfather relies on me, and now I have nothing,” said Ahmed, a 27-year-old from Hebron who lost his barista job in Haifa, Israel. He declined to give his last name for fear of reprisals.

“The pressure is building. We expect the West Bank to explode if nothing changes.”

THE OLIVE HARVEST

Palestinians wait all year for the autumn moment that olives turn from green to black. The two-month harvest is a beloved ritual and income boost.

Violence has marred the season. Soldiers and settlers blocked villagers from reaching orchards and used bulldozers to remove gnarled roots of centuries-old trees, they say.

Hafeeda al-Khatib, an 80-year-old farmer in Qaryout, said soldiers shot in the air and dragged her from her land when they caught her picking olives last week. It’s the first year she can remember not having enough to make oil.

In a letter to Netanyahu this month, Smotrich called for a ban on Palestinians harvesting olives near Israeli settlements to reduce friction.

Palestinians say settlers’ efforts have done the opposite.

“They’ve declared war on me,” said Mahmoud Hassan, a 63-year-old farmer in Khirbet Sara, a northern community. He said reservist settlers have surrounded it. If he ventures 100 meters (yards) to his grove, he said, soldiers standing sentry scream or fire into the air. He needs permission to leave home and return.

“There is no room anymore for talking to them or negotiating,” he said.

The military said it “thoroughly reviewed” reports of violence against Palestinians and their property. “Disciplinary actions are implemented accordingly,” it said, without elaborating.

THE EVACUATION

Rights groups say the goal of settler violence is to clear Palestinians from land they claim for a future state, making room for Jewish settlements to expand.

The Bedouin hamlet of Wadi al-Seeq was pushed to its breaking point by three detained Palestinians’ ordeal over nine hours Oct. 12. The harrowing accounts were first reported by Israel’s Haaretz daily. Weeks of vigilante violence had already forced 10 families to flee when masked settlers in army uniforms barreled through that day, slamming a Bedouin resident and two Palestinian activists onto the ground and shoving them into pickups, villagers said.

One of the activists, 46-year-old Mohammed Matar, told AP they were bound, beaten, blindfolded, stripped to their underwear and burned by cigarettes.

Matar said reservist settlers urinated on him, penetrated him anally with a stick, and screamed at him to leave and go to Jordan.

When released, Matar left. So did Wadi al-Seeq’s 30 remaining families. They took their sheep to the creases of the hills east of Ramallah and abandoned everything else.

The Israeli military said it fired the commander in charge and was investigating.

Matar said that to move on, he needs Israel to hold someone accountable.

“I’d be satisfied with the bare minimum,” he said, “the tiniest shred of justice.”

___

Find AP’s full coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/israel-hamas-war

AP · November 20, 2023

6. China’s rise is reversing

Excerpts:

In nominal dollar terms, China’s GDP is on track to decline in 2023, for the first time since a large devaluation of the renminbi in 1994. Given the constraints to real GDP growth, in the coming years Beijing can only regain global share with a spike in inflation or in the value of the renminbi — but neither is likely. China is one of the few economies suffering from deflation, and it also faces a debt-fuelled property bust, which typically leads to a devaluation of the local currency.

Investors are pulling money out of China at a record pace, adding to pressure on the renminbi. Foreigners cut investment in Chinese factories and other projects by $12bn in the third quarter — the first such drop since records began. Locals, who often flee a troubled market before foreigners do, are leaving too. Chinese investors are making outward investments at an unusually rapid pace and prowling the world for real estate deals.

China’s President Xi Jinping has in the past expressed supreme confidence that history is shifting in his country’s favour, and nothing can stop its rise. His meetings with Joe Biden and US chief executives at last week’s summit in San Francisco did hint at moderation, or at least a recognition that China still needs foreign business partners. But almost no matter what Xi does, his nation’s share in the global economy is likely to decline for the foreseeable future. It’s a post-China world now.

China’s rise is reversing

Financial Times · by Ruchir Sharma · November 19, 2023

The writer is chair of Rockefeller International

In a historic turn, China’s rise as an economic superpower is reversing. The biggest global story of the past half century may be over.

After stagnating under Mao Zedong in the 1960s and 70s, China opened to the world in the 1980s — and took off in subsequent decades. Its share of the global economy rose nearly tenfold from below 2 per cent in 1990 to 18.4 per cent in 2021. No nation had ever risen so far, so fast.

Then the reversal began. In 2022, China’s share of the world economy shrank a bit. This year it will shrink more significantly, to 17 per cent. That two-year drop of 1.4 per cent is the largest since the 1960s.

These numbers are in “nominal” dollar terms — unadjusted for inflation — the measure that most accurately captures a nation’s relative economic strength. China aims to reclaim the imperial status it held from the 16th to early 19th centuries, when its share of world economic output peaked at one-third, but that goal may be slipping out of reach.

China’s decline could reorder the world. Since the 1990s, the country’s share of global GDP grew mainly at the expense of Europe and Japan, which have seen their shares hold more or less steady over the past two years. The gap left by China has been filled mainly by the US and by other emerging nations.

To put this in perspective, the world economy is expected to grow by $8tn in 2022 and 2023 to $105tn. China will account for none of that gain, the US will account for 45 per cent, and other emerging nations for 50 per cent. Half the gain for emerging nations will come from just five of these countries: India, Indonesia, Mexico, Brazil and Poland. That is a striking sign of possible power shifts to come.

Moreover, China’s slipping share of world GDP in nominal terms is not based on independent or foreign sources. The nominal figures are published as part of their official GDP data. So China’s rise is reversing by Beijing’s own account.

One reason this has gone largely unnoticed is that most analysts focus on real GDP growth, which is inflation-adjusted. And by adjusting creatively for inflation, Beijing has long managed to report that real growth is steadily hitting its official target, now around 5 per cent. This in turn appears to confirm, every quarter, the official story that “the east is rising.” But China’s real long-term potential growth rate — the sum of new workers entering the labour force and output per worker — is now more like 2.5 per cent.

The ongoing baby bust in China has already lowered its share of the world working age population from a peak of 24 per cent to 19 per cent, and it is expected to fall to 10 per cent over the next 35 years. With a shrinking share of the world’s workers, a smaller share of growth is almost certain.

Further, over the past decade, China’s government has grown more meddlesome, and its debts are historically high for a developing country. These forces are slowing growth in productivity, measured as output per worker. This combination — fewer workers, and anaemic growth in output per worker — will make it difficult in the extreme for China to start winning back share in the global economy.

In nominal dollar terms, China’s GDP is on track to decline in 2023, for the first time since a large devaluation of the renminbi in 1994. Given the constraints to real GDP growth, in the coming years Beijing can only regain global share with a spike in inflation or in the value of the renminbi — but neither is likely. China is one of the few economies suffering from deflation, and it also faces a debt-fuelled property bust, which typically leads to a devaluation of the local currency.

Investors are pulling money out of China at a record pace, adding to pressure on the renminbi. Foreigners cut investment in Chinese factories and other projects by $12bn in the third quarter — the first such drop since records began. Locals, who often flee a troubled market before foreigners do, are leaving too. Chinese investors are making outward investments at an unusually rapid pace and prowling the world for real estate deals.

China’s President Xi Jinping has in the past expressed supreme confidence that history is shifting in his country’s favour, and nothing can stop its rise. His meetings with Joe Biden and US chief executives at last week’s summit in San Francisco did hint at moderation, or at least a recognition that China still needs foreign business partners. But almost no matter what Xi does, his nation’s share in the global economy is likely to decline for the foreseeable future. It’s a post-China world now.

Financial Times · by Ruchir Sharma · November 19, 2023

7. Australia Accuses China of Injuring Naval Divers With Sonar Pulses

Australia Accuses China of Injuring Naval Divers With Sonar Pulses

Chinese destroyer ignored requests to stay clear of effort to remove fishing nets from Australian frigate’s propellers, defense minister says

https://www.wsj.com/world/australia-accuses-china-of-injuring-naval-divers-with-sonar-pulses-b1927121?utm

By David Winning

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Nov. 17, 2023 8:43 pm ET

The Australian frigate HMAS Toowoomba was involved in the incident between China and Australian this past week. PHOTO: CAROLINE CHIA/REUTERS

SYDNEY—Australia accused the Chinese navy of injuring some of its divers with sonar pulses during an operation near Japan, reigniting tensions between a key U.S. ally and Beijing just days after their leaders met to stabilize ties.

The Australian divers were attempting to remove fishing nets from the propellers of HMAS Toowoomba, a long-range frigate, on Tuesday when they were targeted by a sonar from a Chinese naval destroyer, said Australia’s acting Prime Minister Richard Marles.

The Australian navy twice told the destroyer that it would send divers down and asked it to stay clear, Marles said on Saturday. Still, the Chinese ship moved closer after acknowledging the Australian request, and used a hull-mounted sonar that led the divers to exit from the water.

“This is unsafe and unprofessional conduct,” said Marles, who is also Australia’s defense minister.

The divers from HMAS Toowoomba, which was in international waters inside of Japan’s Exclusive Economic Zone en route to one of the country’s ports, sustained minor injuries that Australian officials believe were caused by the sonar pulses.

The Chinese Embassy in Australia didn’t respond to a request for comment.

The Chinese Embassy in Canberra, Australia, didn’t respond to requests for comment about the incident involving Australian divers working on the HMAS Toowoomba. PHOTO: ROHAN THOMSON/BLOOMBERG NEWS

Western officials are concerned about China’s more aggressive posture toward their defense forces conducting maritime surveillance and other activities in the Indo-Pacific region. Beijing has, in turn, accused the U.S. of spying on China, including by using patrol aircraft over the South China Sea. China claims almost all of the resource-rich South China Sea, which is also an important trade route.

Western defense officials say encounters are becoming more dangerous. In December, the U.S. accused a Chinese jet fighter of flying within 20 feet of a U.S. reconnaissance plane over the South China Sea. Beijing said the U.S. plane veered suddenly toward the jet.

Australian officials have also reacted angrily to some Chinese maneuvers, which they say are unnecessarily aggressive and put lives at risk. In February last year, Australia accused the Chinese navy of shining a military-graded laser at a surveillance plane flying over its territorial waters.

The latest flashpoint happened as HMAS Toowoomba was conducting operations in support of United Nations sanctions enforcement, Marles said.

“Defense has for decades undertaken maritime surveillance activities in the region and does so in accordance with international law, exercising the right to freedom of navigation and overflight in international waters and airspace,” he said.

China and Australia have been taking steps to repair ties after a two-year standoff that was triggered by former Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s call for an international investigation into the origins of Covid-19. At the height of the dispute, China had imposed restrictions on several Australian imports, including coal and wine, and its officials were refusing to take calls from their Australian counterparts.

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has sought to restore those links with China while also strengthening the country’s military alliance with the U.S. In recent months, China has lifted many trade restrictions, released an Australian journalist whom it had detained on suspicion of disclosing state secrets and restarted ministerial meetings.

Those efforts culminated in Albanese making a four-day visit to China this month, which included a meeting with President Xi Jinping. “The relationship with China is important,” Albanese said on Friday. “One in four of Australia’s jobs depends on trade.”

Write to David Winning at david.winning@wsj.com

8. Israel says soldier executed, foreign hostages held at Gaza's Shifa hospital

This is necessary to counter Hama but it will never be enough to counter Hamas' success so far in influence operations. Too many people's minds are made up by the accusations against Israel that few will have their mind's changed by evidence presented by Israel.

Israel says soldier executed, foreign hostages held at Gaza's Shifa hospital

Reuters · by Dan Williams

JERUSALEM, Nov 19 (Reuters) - Israel stepped up accusations of Hamas abuses at the Gaza Strip's biggest hospital on Sunday, saying a captive soldier had been executed and two foreign hostages held at a site that has been a focus of its devastating six-week-old offensive.

At one point a shelter for tens of thousands of Palestinian war refugees, Al Shifa Hospital has been evacuating patients and staff since Israeli troops swept in last week on what they called a mission to root out hidden Hamas facilities.

Israel is also searching for some 240 people Hamas kidnapped to Gaza after an Oct. 7 cross-border assault that sparked the war.

One of these was a 19-year-old Israeli army conscript, Noa Marciano, whose body was recovered near Shifa last week. Hamas said she died in an Israeli air strike and issued a video that appeared to show her corpse, unmarked except for a head wound.

The Israeli military said a forensic examination found she had sustained non-life-threatening injuries from such a strike.

"According to intelligence information - solid intelligence information - Noa was taken by Hamas terrorists inside the walls of Shifa hospital. There, she was murdered by a Hamas terrorist," chief spokesperson Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari said.

He did not elaborate.

In his televised briefing, Hagari said Hamas gunmen had also brought a Nepalese and a Thai, among foreign workers seized in the Oct. 7 raid, to Shifa. He did not name the two hostages.

CCTV video aired by Hagari appeared to show a group of men frog-marching an individual into a hospital, to the surprise of medical staff. A second clip showed an injured man on a gurney. Another man nearby, in civilian clothes, had an assault rifle.

Hamas did not immediately comment on Hagari's statements. The Palestinian Islamist group, which runs Gaza, has previously said it took some hostages to hospitals for treatment.

Separately on Sunday, the Israeli military published video of what it described as a tunnel, running 55 metres in length and dug by Palestinians 10 metres under the Shifa compound.

While acknowledging that it has a network of hundreds of kilometres of secret tunnels, bunkers and access shafts throughout the Palestinian enclave, Hamas has denied that these are located in civilian infrastructure like hospitals.

The video showed a narrow passage with arched concrete roofing, ending at what the military, in a statement, described as a blast-proof door.

The statement did not say what might be beyond the door. The tunnel had been accessed through a shaft discovered in a shed within the Shifa compound that contained munitions, it said. A second video showed an outdoor shaft-opening in the compound.

Mounir El Barsh, the Gaza health ministry director, dismissed the Israeli statement on the tunnel as a "pure lie".

"They have been at the hospital for eight days ... and yet they haven't found anything," he told Al Jazeera television.

Writing by Dan Williams; Editing by David Holmes and Alex Richardson

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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Reuters · by Dan Williams

9. Hamas has unleashed the West's monsters

The use of history, religion, philosophy, and literature to understand the evil that is taking place in Gaza caused by Hama.

Hamas has unleashed the West's monsters

Civilisation will never escape the descendants of Cain

BY JACOB HOWLAND

unherd.com · by Jacob Howland · November 20, 2023

Jacob Howland is Provost and Director of the Intellectual Foundations Program at UATX, commonly known as the University of Austin. His latest book is Glaucon's Fate: History, Myth, and Character in Plato's Republic (Paul Dry Books, 2018).

We live in an apocalyptic moment, when something truly hideous, long hidden just beneath the surface of everyday life, is breaking forth from the ground. The torture, rape, massacre, and kidnapping of roughly 1,200 Israelis on October 7 was only the beginning of this revelation. In the West, Hamas’s butchery has unleashed eruptions of antisemitism and massive, increasingly violent displays of support for the terrorists. Like some mythical monster that periodically emerges from hibernation to slaughter far and wide, the rough beast, it seems, is just stretching its legs. And we are only beginning to take its measure.

It’s important to understand the sheer evil that now threatens us. Hamas has been called “barbaric”, but that is hardly a sufficient description of its primitive savagery. The Greeks called non-Greeks barbaroi because their words sounded like babble to their ears: “bar bar bar.” Barbarians ranged from the slavish inhabitants of large, sophisticated, highly stratified societies (Persians, Egyptians) to fiercely spirited, independent tribes (the forest-dwelling Northerners that the Romans called Germani). None of these peoples based their identity on the struggle against a hated Other whose total elimination, to be achieved at any cost, was their sole reason for existence. None embraced the complete destruction of body and spirit — including their own as well — that the Nazis called Vernichtung: “negation”. None, in other words, were pure enemies of civilisation.

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But jihadis are. Civilisation is the sum of cultural and social conditions that make for flourishing lives and communities. Jihadism is a death cult. In a recent podcast, Sam Harris reminds us of the Taliban jihadists who, in 2014, murdered 132 Muslim children at a school in Peshawar and burned a teacher alive in front of her students. A supporter of the Pakistani Taliban said of the dead children: “We did not end their lives. We gave them new ones in Paradise…. They will be rewarded for their martyrdom. After all, we also martyr ourselves with them.”

These words are themselves apocalyptic. From the perspective of Islamic fundamentalism, there is no human being who does not deserve to die. Muslims will go to Paradise; non-Muslims will burn in Hell. Death is a blessing for true believers, divine justice for apostates and infidels. Choosing a martyr’s moral and physical self-destruction thus legitimises the deaths of everyone one can possibly kill. Murder-suicide on this grand scale is the ultimate form of religious totalitarianism, the complete control of the lives of others.

This mentality explains a lot, including the abject misery of the Gazans — a people who, pressed beneath the heavy machinery of organised death-worship, are twisted with moral scoliosis. Is it any wonder that Hamas has stolen tens of millions of dollars in humanitarian aid for military purposes? Or that it hides weapons and hostages in hospitals using sick and injured Gazans and new-born babies as human shields? Or that it blocked evacuation routes and confiscated the car keys of civilians who wanted to cross the Wadi Gaza, as the IDF urged them to do, in order to flee Israeli military action in the northern part of the territory?

Hamas’s strategy is to maximise civilian deaths in order to stimulate worldwide opprobrium of Israel, and, if possible, open up more military fronts of Iranian proxies in Lebanon and Syria. As Harris says, Hamas is “eager to martyr all Palestinians for the pleasure of killing Jews”.

But if Hamas, Isis, and other jihadis are not barbarians, what are they? This question takes us back to remotest antiquity, when very ancient peoples struggled to master the dark depths of the human psyche, and to establish the handful of “Thou shalt nots” on which all civilisation is based.

Weirdly, the most primitive tribal impulses are today expressed by means of the latest digital technology. There is a recording of a phone call that a Hamas terrorist made to his parents on October 7. The audio captures a human drama as old as recorded history: a son seeks approval from his parents for his prowess in battle. But there is something deeply twisted about their conversation. “Hi Dad!” the son shouts. “I’m talking to you from [kibbutz] Mefalsim. Open my ‎WhatsApp now, and you’ll see all those killed. Look how many I killed with my own hands! Your son killed Jews! … Dad, I’m talking to you from a Jewish woman’s phone. I killed her, and I killed her husband. I killed ten with my own hands! Dad, ten with my own hands!” The whole time, his father is repeating “Allah hu Akbar!” A little later, the young man says “Mom, your son is a hero!”

In Homer’s Iliad, the Trojan Hector imagines the day his son, still a toddler, “comes home from battle bearing the bloody gear / of the mortal enemy he has killed in war— / a joy to his mother’s heart”. But the battle he envisions is armed combat against trained warriors, not a surprise terror attack on innocent families. The Hamas murderer claims the status of a hero, but his deeds belie his words. His perspective has no Greek analogue. It is pre-Homeric.

It is also pre-Abrahamic. In Genesis 22, God tells Abraham to take his son Isaac, the child of Sarah, up Mount Moriah to be sacrificed. Isaac embodies the entirety of Abraham’s hopes, as it is with Isaac’s descendants that God has established his eternal covenant. Abraham dutifully binds Isaac and draws his knife so that he may cut his throat, drain his blood, and burn his corpse. An angel stays his hand at the last moment, and he learns that the Almighty does not want human sacrifice.

Herein lies the basic problem: Islamists never got the message. That’s why they regard murder-suicide as a sacrament. When the Hamas jihadi’s brother tells him to come back, he replies “What do you mean come back? There’s no going back. It is either death or victory! My mother gave birth to me for the religion.” In other words, she gave birth to him so that he might advance the cause of indiscriminate death.

Why does Islam remain fertile ground for such insanity? The Bible suggests that fraternal conflict is at the root of the problem. When Abraham’s wife Sarah could not conceive, she instructed him to impregnate their Egyptian slave girl, Hagar. But when Hagar became pregnant with Ishmael, Sarah harassed her and she fled. An angel told her that her child “will be a wild ass of a man— / his hand against all, the hand of all against him”. Hagar then returned to Abraham and Sarah, but after Isaac was born, Sarah drove her and Ishmael out of their camp.

The angel’s prophecy makes sense in hindsight. An outcast twice over, Ishmael must bear considerable ill-will toward Isaac — the son favoured not only by his father and stepmother, but by God. This is important, because Muslims regard Ishmael to be the ancestor of Arab tribes, and of Muhammad in particular. Islamic tradition furthermore holds that the Jews falsified the Hebrew Scriptures, and many Muslims believe it was Ishmael, not Isaac, who was Abraham’s favoured son. These facts, too, suggest fraternal resentment.

The story of fraternal enmity and rancour is one of the earliest in the Bible, and a recurring theme in Genesis (think of Esau and Jacob, or Joseph and his brothers). It first appears immediately after the exile from Eden. Cain is incensed that God favours Abel’s sacrificial offering. Turning a deaf ear to God, who urges him not to sin, he murders his younger brother. Exiled by God, he becomes “a restless wanderer on the earth” who is nevertheless protected by the Lord’s own mark. That means he and his descendants will be with us forever. If we are to come to grips with the revenant monster that announced itself, yet again, on October 7, we must acknowledge this fundamental fact.

No one has thought more deeply about what Cain’s story means than the anonymous author of Beowulf, an epic poem that explores the open wound of the outcast brother. Heorot, the great mead-hall built by Hrothgar, king of the Shielding Danes, is a place of light, warmth and decorous ritual: generous mead-pouring and gift-giving. A microcosm of civilised existence, Heorot “stands at the horizon, on its high ground”, a Nordic city on the hill “meant to be a wonder of the world forever”. But the monster Grendel prowls the low, cold bogs outside until, berserk with anger, he splinters Heorot’s doors and wreaks bloody horror.

What ails Grendel? A “corpse-maker mongering death” in his repeated night-raids, he descends from “Cain’s clan”. For this wild branch of the sons of Adam, split off from the main human trunk by primal sin, the house of civilisation is an unbearable reproach. In Beowulf, resentment and envy are fevers of the mind that inflame and disfigure the body, twisting it into a sullen slouch. Outlawed by God, cast out by men, barred from hall and feast to gorge on envy and resentment, Cain’s clan — “ogres and elves and evil phantoms / and the giants too who strove with God”— are grotesque figurations of poisonous passions, the fermentation of the bitter fruit of exile.

Beowulf soberly acknowledges the disconcerting fact that we who dwell in the house of civilisation can neither make peace with, nor be rid of, the descendants of Cain. The eponymous hero slays Grendel and his mother and rules his people, the Geats, for 50 good years. But Beowulf finally succumbs to the poisonous bite of a flame-belching dragon, accidentally awakened after many centuries, that emerges from its subterranean lair to waste Geatish farms, homesteads, forts, and earthworks with great sprays of “molten venom”. The hero’s death spells doom for the Geats. At the poem’s end, a grieving woman unleashes “a wild litany / of nightmare and lament: her nation invaded, / enemies on the rampage, bodies in piles, / slavery and abasement”. Order and decency, peace and security, are only as solid as the ground they stand on.

The woman’s nightmare is a dark prophecy for our age, which has few heroes but plenty of monsters. Some parade daily on the streets of major Western cities, surrounded by mobs of ignorant, confused people. We face the same challenges Beowulf confronts, but with none of the poem’s clarity or resolve. Many of us can no longer tell good from evil, or hate from love. Under these circumstances, how long can our house, the increasingly divided house of the civilised world, remain standing?

unherd.com · by Jacob Howland · November 20, 2023

10. U.S.-China Summit: Did Joe Biden Get Anything from Xi?

"Peaceful co-existence." I guess every time we hear that we should remember how it has been used in the past.

Excerpts;

In his own remarks, Xi Jinping insisted that China wishes to “coexist peacefully” with the United States. Like his other commitments, his pronouncement about “peaceful co-existence” should be taken with more than a grain of salt. After all, during the 1950s, Nikita Khrushchev repeatedly employed the term—first articulated in 1917 by Leon Trotsky, the Bolshevik Commissar for Foreign Affairs. Khrushchev even published an article in Foreign Affairs entitled “Peaceful Co-existence.”

That article appeared in 1959. Three years later, this seeming apostle of peaceful co-existence instigated the Cuban Missile Crisis that nearly sparked a nuclear conflict with the United States. It is a lesson that those who deal with Xi Jin Ping should be careful not to forget.

U.S.-China Summit: Did Joe Biden Get Anything from Xi?

There was far less to the Biden-Xi APEC meeting than either man was willing to acknowledge.

The National Interest · by Dov S. Zakheim · November 17, 2023

President Joe Biden was, in that quaint British expression, “cock-a-hoop” over what he considered a successful summit meeting with China’s Xi Jinping. Biden claimed that the two men had made “real progress” in their discussions. He highlighted various agreements that he had reached with his Chinese counterpart, notably a restoration of contacts between the two nations’ militaries and Xi’s apparent readiness to curb the export of precursor chemicals for the killer drug fentanyl. The two delegations also agreed to establish a dialogue on artificial intelligence to expand exchanges in education, business, and culture and increase the number of flights between their countries. Biden also sought to demonstrate his toughness by labeling his counterpart a dictator.

Biden may have been basking in the afterglow of the meeting, but it is unclear how much he actually accomplished. Xi did not give way at all on the Taiwan issue, nor did he indicate that China would cut back on its aggressive behavior in the East and South China Seas. Nor did he pledge to lessen his material support for Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

The administration emphasized the importance of renewing high-level military-to-military communications. Yet, it is noteworthy China did not honor a similar agreement that then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Joe Dunford and his counterpart General Fang Fenghui reached in August 2017 to “improve communication between their militaries and reduce chances of miscalculations.” Indeed, it was hardly more than a year later that a Chinese destroyer overtook the U.S. Navy destroyer Decatur and forced it to turn starboard to avoid a collision with the oncoming ship. Even if military contacts are renewed at levels similar to those of 2017, there is no guarantee that China will stop its harassment of American ships and planes conducting freedom of navigation operations in the South China Sea, which Beijing continues to claim are its territorial waters.

China’s promises to impose curbs on fentanyl precursors may prove similarly meaningless. After all, as Biden himself pointed out after his meeting with Xi, Beijing had reached an agreement with Washington, effective May 1, 2019, to reduce the amount of fentanyl that it shipped directly to the United States. But as he also acknowledged, “in the years since that time, the challenge has evolved from finished fentanyl to fentanyl chemical ingredients and…pill presses, which are being shipped without controls.” Surely, the Chinese knew that, in effect, they were implementing a workaround to the 2019 agreement. There is no reason to believe they might not find another workaround to this latest understanding between the two leaders.

Many observers have noted that his country’s economic slowdown compelled Xi to ratchet down tensions with the United States and seek some degree of accommodation with Washington to encourage more investment in China. After all, China’s predicted growth rate of 5 percent is more of a wish than a reality. It is, at best, more likely to reach 4.5 percent. Both figures are a far cry from the double-digit growth that China enjoyed for many years. Thus, American investment would significantly contribute to China’s economic expansion. To that end, Xi met with American business leaders, radiating what could only be described as a charm offensive.

Charming or not, however, Xi is unlikely to spur more investment in China. Indeed, the process of American disinvestment continues apace. More and more firms are choosing to expand their East Asian presence; they are building plants in Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, and the Philippines. These firms worry that despite the thaw that Biden and Xi seemingly have engendered, it is not at all clear that Xi’s movement away from the economics of Deng Xiaoping and his emphasis on state-owned enterprises will sustain what previously was a healthy climate for corporate American investment. Moreover, should Donald Trump return to office, America might find itself in a trade war that could result in Beijing forcing American firms to sell their facilities at fire sale prices. It is also noteworthy that Chinese firms are themselves building plants in Southeast Asia, perhaps seeking to sidestep a trade war that a second Trump presidency could well initiate.

In his own remarks, Xi Jinping insisted that China wishes to “coexist peacefully” with the United States. Like his other commitments, his pronouncement about “peaceful co-existence” should be taken with more than a grain of salt. After all, during the 1950s, Nikita Khrushchev repeatedly employed the term—first articulated in 1917 by Leon Trotsky, the Bolshevik Commissar for Foreign Affairs. Khrushchev even published an article in Foreign Affairs entitled “Peaceful Co-existence.”

That article appeared in 1959. Three years later, this seeming apostle of peaceful co-existence instigated the Cuban Missile Crisis that nearly sparked a nuclear conflict with the United States. It is a lesson that those who deal with Xi Jin Ping should be careful not to forget.

Dov S. Zakheim is Vice Chairman of the Foreign Policy Research Institute, a Senior Advisor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and a member of The National Interest Advisory Board. He is a former Under Secretary of Defense and Deputy Under Secretary of Defense.

Image: Shuterstock.com.

The National Interest · by Dov S. Zakheim · November 17, 2023

11. Why Americans feel gloomy about the economy despite falling inflation and low unemployment

I wonder if I can make this broad statement: negative informaiton operaitons wins. Bad news and negative thoughts, ideas, and actions are more effective than positive infromation. Can I make that broad claim?

Why Americans feel gloomy about the economy despite falling inflation and low unemployment

AP · by CHRISTOPHER RUGABER · November 19, 2023

WASHINGTON (AP) — Inflation has reached its lowest point in 2 1/2 years. The unemployment rate has stayed below 4% for the longest stretch since the 1960s. And the U.S. economy has repeatedly defied predictions of a coming recession. Yet according to a raft of polls and surveys, most Americans hold a glum view of the economy.

The disparity has led to befuddlement, exasperation and curiosity on social media and in opinion columns.

Last week, the government reported that consumer prices didn’t rise at all from September to October, the latest sign that inflation is steadily cooling from the heights of last year. A separate report showed that while Americans slowed their retail purchases in October from the previous month’s brisk pace, they’re still spending enough to drive economic growth.

Even so, according to a poll last month by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, about three-quarters of respondents described the economy as poor. Two-thirds said their expenses have risen. Only one-quarter said their income has.

The disconnect poses a political challenge for President Joe Biden as he gears up for his re-election campaign. Polls consistently show that most Americans disapprove of Biden’s handling of the economy.

Many factors lie behind the disconnect, but economists increasingly point to one in particular: The lingering financial and psychological effects of the worst bout of inflation in four decades. Despite the steady cooling of inflation over the past year, many goods and services are still far pricier than they were just three years ago. Inflation — the rate at which costs are increasing — is slowing. But most prices are high and still rising.

Lisa Cook, a member of the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors, captured this dynamic in recent remarks at Duke University.

“Most Americans,” Cook said, “are not just looking for disinflation” — a slowdown in price increases. “They’re looking for deflation. They want these prices to be back where they were before the pandemic. ... I hear that from my family.”

That’s particularly true for some of the goods and services that Americans pay for most frequently: Bread, beef and other groceries, apartment rents and utilities. Every week or month, consumers are reminded of how far those prices have risen.

Deflation — a widespread drop in prices — typically makes people and companies reluctant to spend and therefore isn’t desirable. Instead, economists say, the goal is for wages to rise faster than prices so that consumers still come out ahead.

How inflation-adjusted incomes have fared since the pandemic is a complicated question, because it’s difficult for just one metric to capture the experiences of roughly 160 million Americans.

Adjusted for inflation, median weekly earnings — those in the middle of the income distribution — have risen at just a 0.2% annual rate from the final three months of 2019 through the second quarter of this year, according to calculations by Wendy Edelberg, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. That meager gain has left many Americans feeling that they have made little financial progress.

For Katherine Charles, a 40-year old single mother in Tampa, Florida, inflation’s slowdown hasn’t made it easier to make ends meet. Her rent jumped 15% in May. Over the summer, to keep her electricity bill down, Charles kept the air conditioning off during the day despite Tampa’s blistering hot weather .

She has felt the need to cut back on groceries, even though, she said, her 16-year old son and 10-year old daughter “are at the age they are eating everything in front of them.”

“My son loves red meat,” Charles said. “We cannot any longer afford it the way we used to. The economy’s not getting better for nobody, especially not for me.”

Charles, a call center representative with a company that handles customer service for the Medicare and Affordable Care Act health plans, received a raise to $18.21 an hour two years ago. But it wasn’t much of an increase. She doesn’t even remember how large it was.

This month, Charles took part in a one-day strike against her employer, Maximus. She and her co-workers are seeking higher wages and more affordable health insurance. Charles’ two children are on Medicaid, she said, because Maximus’ health insurance is too expensive.

Eileen Cassidy Rivera, a spokeswoman for Maximus, said that a recent survey of its 40,000 employees found that three-quarters of those who responded said “they would recommend Maximus as a great place to work.”

“During the past five years, we have increased compensation, reduced out-of-pocket health care expenses and improved the work environment,” Rivera added.

Rising prices have been a key driver of a wave of strikes and other forms of labor activism this year, with unions representing autoworkers, Teamsters and airline pilots winning sizable pay increases.

Other factors also play a role in why many people are still unhappy with the economy. Political partisanship is one of them. With Biden occupying the White House, Republicans are far more likely than Democrats to characterize the economy as poor, according to the University of Michigan’s monthly survey of consumer sentiment.

Karen Dynan, a Harvard economist who served in both the George W. Bush and Obama administrations, noted that distinct swings in economic sentiment occur after a new president is inaugurated, with voters from the party opposed to the president quickly switching to a more negative view.

“The partisan divide is stronger than it was before,” she said. “Partly because the country is more polarized.”

Even so, many Americans, like Charles, are still feeling the pain of inflation. The national average price of a gallon of milk reached $3.93 in October, up 23% since February 2020, just before the pandemic struck. A pound of ground beef, at $5.35, is 33% higher than it was then. Average gas prices, despite a steep decline from a year ago, are still 53% higher at $3.78 a gallon, on average.

All those increases have far outpaced the rise in overall prices, which are up nearly 19% over the same period.

Edelberg said the jump in prices for items that people typically buy most often helps explain why many people are disgruntled about the economy — even as Americans have remained confident enough to keep spending at a healthy pace.

“Their purchasing power overall,” Edelberg said, “is doing pretty well.”

Yet broad national data doesn’t capture the experiences of everyday Americans, many of whom haven’t seen their wages keep up with prices.

“In real terms, most people are probably pretty close to where they were pre-pandemic,” said Brad Hershbein, a senior economist at the Upjohn Institute. “But there are a lot of exceptions.”

Lower-income Americans, for example, have generally received the largest percentage wage gains since the pandemic. Fierce competition for front-line workers at restaurants, hotels, retailers and entertainment venues forced companies to provide significant pay hikes.

But poorer people typically face a higher inflation rate, according to economic research, because they spend a greater proportion of their income on such volatile expenses as food, gas and rent — items that have absorbed some of the biggest price spikes.

“At the lower end of the income distribution, people got somewhat higher pay raises,” said Anthony Murphy, a senior economic policy advisor at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. “But I don’t think it compensates them for the fact that inflation was so much higher. They’re consuming a different bundle of goods than the average.”

Census Bureau surveys that Murphy and his colleague Aparna Jayashankar have studied show that nearly half of Americans say they’re “very stressed” by inflation, little changed from a year earlier, even though inflation has tumbled since last year.

Even for people whose incomes have kept pace with prices, research has long found that people hate inflation more intently than its economic impact would suggest. Most people do not expect their pay to keep up with rising prices. Even if it does, the higher pay may come with a time lag.

“They’re obsessing over the fact that the prices they pay for the things that are very salient — gas, food, grocery store prices, rent — those things still seem elevated, even though they’re not increasing as rapidly as they were,” Hershbein said.

“If everyone had lost a job,” he said, “we’d be focused on that.”

AP · by CHRISTOPHER RUGABER · November 19, 2023

12. Hamas Claims Ceasefire, Hostage Release to Start Tomorrow; Israel Denies: ‘Not True’

It does not appear this will come to pass, at least today.

Hamas Claims Ceasefire, Hostage Release to Start Tomorrow; Israel Denies: ‘Not True’

A senior Israeli official told Israeli media 'there is no conclusion on a truce tomorrow, regardless of the deal'

Published 11/19/23 04:57 PM ET|Updated 13 hr ago

Zachary Rogers

themessenger.com · November 19, 2023

A source from the terror group Hamas has claimed that a ceasefire in Gaza will begin on Monday, but several Israeli sources are contesting that information.

AlGhad TV reports that the Hamas source claimed on Sunday that “calm will begin tomorrow, Monday, at 11 a.m.” while citing a “detainee exchange deal.”

View post on Twitter

However, a nationwide Israeli radio network operated by the Israel Defense Forces named “Galei Tzahal” or “Army Radio,” says that a source “in the War Cabinet” has said that there is “no conclusion on a ceasefire tomorrow at 11.”

Additionally, the chief national correspondent for Israel’s Channel 11 News, Amichai Stein, cited Israeli officials who said that the ceasefire claim from Hamas was “not true.” Israel’s N12 News also reported that a senior Israeli official said “There is no conclusion on a truce tomorrow, regardless of the deal.”

View post on Twitter

Hamas’ reported claim of a ceasefire comes after a tentative five-day ceasefire deal was reportedly reached between Israel and the terror group and then later denied.

The Washington Post reported on Saturday that the United States helped broker a provisional agreement that would help free 50 hostages from Gaza but White House National Security Council spokesperson Adrienne Watson later said the deal hasn’t been reached “yet.”

People search buildings destroyed during airstrikes on November 18, 2023 in Khan Yunis, Gaza.Photo by Ahmad Hasaballah/Getty Images

“We have not reached a deal yet, but we continue to work hard to get to a deal,” Watson said in a post on X late Saturday night.

Israel was attacked by Hamas terrorists on October 7, which resulted in 1,200 of Israelis killed, and over 200 kidnapped and taken hostage into Gaza. In retaliation, Israel has been launching strikes on Gaza, which has resulted in thousands of Palestinians being killed or injured.

Lawmakers and protesters have been calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, not only to rescue hostages but to help increase and provide much-needed humanitarian aid to the area.

themessenger.com · November 19, 2023

13. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights at Seventy-Five

Excerpts:

All well and good, one might say, but what’s the point? Many people, after all, see the contestation of human rights and their uneven compliance as undermining the idea that they, or their moral underpinnings, could be universal.

This is a serious mistake. Although counter-intuitive, the disagreement present in drafting the UDHR by a diverse group of multinational and multicultural representatives supports the link between human nature and this standard of justice. So long, that is, that they manage to settle on a shared conception of justice.

How could this be the case?

Recall above how the optimal way to interrogate our moral capacity is not by asking questions about politics or other high-level social concepts, as these recruit more cognitive activity than we are interested in. Rather, we seek to clear up the distortions that cloud the moral capacity by pinpointing moral judgments made in suitably reflective conditions. Hot takes and emotionally charged judgments will not suffice.

However, the best way to clear up these distortions cannot be to withdraw into abstract reflection. Instead, through argument and disagreement, discourse between sufficiently diverse individuals recruits this cognitive mechanism in navigating disputes and settling as many tensions as possible. The resultant agreement will, ideally, give observers the clearest view into the moral capacity’s central properties as can reasonably be expected.

While far from ideal, the drafting of the UDHR took on this character. In a reassessment of the debates that drove its drafting, Joe Hoover recalled that “one is struck by how long the drafters spent suggesting, debating, and revising individual articles.” Indeed, in her study of the drafting process, Mary Ann Glendon noted: “It is unlikely that any other political document in history has ever drawn from such diverse sources, or received the same worldwide, sustained considerations and scrutiny as the Declaration underwent over its two years of preparation.”'

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights at Seventy-Five

 The Universal Declaration will soon turn seventy-five, but its significance as a reflection of human moral psychology remains underappreciated. The realities of international relations need not contradict a natural basis for universal human rights norms.

The National Interest · by Vincent J. Carchidi · November 19, 2023

On December 10, the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) will reach its three-quarters of a century milestone. Adopted on the same day by the UN General Assembly in 1948, the document enshrines fundamental civil, political, social, economic, and cultural rights. Its preamble begins with a “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family,” followed by thirty articles detailing these rights.

The UDHR provided what scholars Margaret Keck and Kathyrn Sikkink call a “common language” for later transnational human rights activism. In Seyla Benhabib’s words, it serves as “the closest document in our world to international public law.” Jack Donnelly similarly observed that the UDHR sets “the basic parameters of the meaning of “human rights” in contemporary international relations,” marking its foundational status.

Yet, the promise of universal human rights is threatened from all sides. As we approach the UDHR’s seventy-fifth anniversary, the Russian invasion of Ukraine—inclusive of alleged Russian war crimes, including torture, rape, and the systematic abduction of Ukrainian children—will soon mark two full years of large-scale conflict. The October 7 attack by Hamas on Israel, furthermore, echoes this brutality in gut-wrenching ways, while Israel’s retaliation in Gaza has moved rapidly from a desire for revenge to an Israeli airstrike on a refugee camp in Jabalya. For over a decade, an intensifying feeling of hopelessness and pessimism has pervaded the cause of human rights from Egypt to China and even the United States.

The intellectual environment increasingly reflects this downcast perspective. The New York Times—just weeks before the Hamas attack—reported on an uptick in public doubt among think tank analysts, economists, and diplomats that there truly is a universal set of values that underpin international human rights norms and laws. These doubts come on the backs of speculations and assertions that the “liberal” or “rules-based” international order founded in part upon these values is fraying. The tumult of world politics and the perceived shift in the global distribution of power appear to undermine the universalist idea. Readers of the National Interest will intuitively recognize that existing debates over whether the international system underwent “great transformations” in the post-World War II era have intensified.

What are we to make of these claims and characterizations? Are universal human rights a bankrupt idea? Are the values that underpin such rights a mere illusion?

An idea in cognitive science—in the modern study of the architecture of the human mind—challenges these doubts: the values undergirding human rights, it indicates, are rooted in human nature. More specifically, the character of moral psychology is such that human rights are its optimal expression—not inevitable social constructs but the result of distilling shared cognitive resources into a social and political idea.

Quiet work done in cognitive science provides reason to believe that human beings possess a cognitive system responsible for the distinctive moral qualities of human life. This system provides the building blocks of human rights, with such rights representing the clearest view of this capacity to date.

The compliance—or lack thereof—of organizations, governments, and other actors with human rights is not, in this view, the proper metric to gauge the accuracy of the idea of human rights. Instead, we should look to those conditions in which our moral cognition has been put to the most sincere, rigorous, and sustained test by a representative sampling of humanity.

The drafting of the UDHR fits these conditions. On its seventy-fifth anniversary, we should reflect on its significance to human nature and international human rights. From this, we take away a central lesson about the future of human rights: that they always have existed in a conflicted world; the point, especially if one wishes to rescue them, is to understand why.

Universal Morality?

This idea in cognitive science—“Universal Moral Grammar”—sounds like a lofty one, exactly the loftiness with which some proponents of universal human rights have become disillusioned. However, Research in this domain started with exactly zero connections to international conventions like the UDHR. It instead operates on an apolitical, scientific, and bland assumption: that the study of moral cognition should proceed in the same way as other aspects of human biology. If we are prepared to assume that capacities like vision or hearing occupy distinctive roles within the human mind, why would we forgo this assumption in the study of moral cognition? Put another way, why would our capacity to hear be “grown” biologically, but our ability to morally evaluate be “learned” through culture?

We are attuned to inflate differences between individuals or groups given the importance of morality in human social life; not only do we conflate morality per se with cultural practices, but we also perceive moral diversity in a way that we would not with other cognitive mechanisms—it is akin to viewing near- and far-sighted individuals in possession of two, radically distinct visual systems. Few would accept this. The argument here is that morality is fundamentally no different.

This assumption is “boring” because we do not get excited by visual or auditory judgments. Morality is thought of differently—its role in human life is fundamental to organizing institutions, distributing resources, and interacting with one another. It is both commonplace and, at times, visceral. As philosopher and legal scholar Matthias Mahlmann puts it, there is a “mental space that has a normative dimension…a specific mental domain of morality….” Morality, as a human cognitive characteristic, exists.

The evidence is all around us. Virtually everyone in possession of the basic facts has a moral reaction to the October 7 Hamas attack and the subsequent Israeli response. Indeed, these moral judgments often feel as if they exist more in the gut and the heart than in the intellect—perhaps feeling more like facts than preferences. Individuals differ in their moral approval of these actions, but this does not detract from the normative dimension of their responses.

How individuals acquire this moral sense cannot be reduced merely to cultural particularities. As philosopher Susan Dwyer recognized, individuals do not learn the structure of moral dilemmas—the morally salient aspects of people, actions, and objects interacting with one another—but instead intuit it. We intuitively frame the world in normative terms.

Moreover, the various qualities individuals infer from or impose on moral dilemmas are not explicitly learned during development. Many scenarios involve interactions between people that can have multiple possible outcomes. Yet when tested, both adults and young children infer a “presumption of innocence,” or a good intention, from those performing the actions—despite not being told such intentions are present. (One can find this presumption embodied in Article 11 of the UDHR.) Humans may also possess an “acute sensitivity” to the legally defined actions constituting harmful battery “as a property of the human mind,” as legal scholar John Mikhail argues.

Relatedly, social psychologist Daniel Sznycer and legal researcher Carlton Patrick find experimental evidence indicating that criminal law originates, in part, in an innate “valuation grammar” of the mind, finding that “multiple types of lay justice intuitions vary in lockstep” across cultures and over long periods of time with respect to criminal legislation. Finally, and more broadly, International Relations scholar David Traven articulates connections between cognitive moral architecture and the laws and norms of war, arguing they “are a by-product of an evolved cognitive system in a changing contextual environment.”

Research such as this goes to show, as Sydney Levine, Alan Leslie, and Mikhail note, that how we cognize morality goes beyond “heuristics and biases.”

There is a complexity to our moral judgments that is frequently underappreciated—something the philosopher John Rawls observed in a substantive analogy to Noam Chomsky’s work on linguistics in his classic A Theory of Justice. There is an informational gulf between only the content of our moral judgments and the ability to morally evaluate that cannot be traced back to moral education or culture.

The outlines of an explanation for this remarkable ability thus posits that human beings are naturally endowed with a cognitive mechanism that is principally grown, not learned.

Recognizing even this requires a tricky distancing from ordinary life: we cannot simply pick our favorite examples of moral good or evil and move from there to understand morality. Nor can we ask individuals their opinions on social and political issues (e.g., “Do you approve or disapprove of the United States’ support for Israel?”). We cannot even begin with cliché ethical taxonomic categories, like the ethic of “community” contrasted with the ethic of “individualism.” These all unintentionally recruit far more cognitive action than is desired in the study of moral cognition.

The goal, as Mikhail puts it with a reference to Rawls, is to pinpoint those moral judgments that allow our moral capacity “to be displayed without distortion,” namely, those judgments made under conditions of sincere, rigorous, and sustained deliberation among culturally diverse individuals.

From Moral Cognition to Human Rights

All well and good, one might say, but what’s the point? Many people, after all, see the contestation of human rights and their uneven compliance as undermining the idea that they, or their moral underpinnings, could be universal.

This is a serious mistake. Although counter-intuitive, the disagreement present in drafting the UDHR by a diverse group of multinational and multicultural representatives supports the link between human nature and this standard of justice. So long, that is, that they manage to settle on a shared conception of justice.

How could this be the case?

Recall above how the optimal way to interrogate our moral capacity is not by asking questions about politics or other high-level social concepts, as these recruit more cognitive activity than we are interested in. Rather, we seek to clear up the distortions that cloud the moral capacity by pinpointing moral judgments made in suitably reflective conditions. Hot takes and emotionally charged judgments will not suffice.

However, the best way to clear up these distortions cannot be to withdraw into abstract reflection. Instead, through argument and disagreement, discourse between sufficiently diverse individuals recruits this cognitive mechanism in navigating disputes and settling as many tensions as possible. The resultant agreement will, ideally, give observers the clearest view into the moral capacity’s central properties as can reasonably be expected.

While far from ideal, the drafting of the UDHR took on this character. In a reassessment of the debates that drove its drafting, Joe Hoover recalled that “one is struck by how long the drafters spent suggesting, debating, and revising individual articles.” Indeed, in her study of the drafting process, Mary Ann Glendon noted: “It is unlikely that any other political document in history has ever drawn from such diverse sources, or received the same worldwide, sustained considerations and scrutiny as the Declaration underwent over its two years of preparation.”

These debates were largely sincere. According to Micheline Ishay: “Despite philosophical and political rivalries between these great minds [Peng Chun Chang, Charles Malik, and René Cassin], each human rights commissioner understood what was at stake, and all responded to their historical call by transcending personal and philosophical differences.” These individuals, among others like Eleanor Roosevelt and remarkable participation from sprawling groups and individuals, leveraged the “brief time” of relative goodwill between the United States and the USSR following World War II to draft the document.

What emerged from these debates is a “highly specific list of fundamental human rights.” As legal scholar Michael Perry observed, the contents of the UDHR “represent values—that is, valued states of affairs—to be achieved.” The mere existence of this list of fundamental human rights is, in Mikhail’s view, “remarkable” and indicates that morality is more constrained by the human mind than is commonly believed. Given this cognitive constraint, the agreement resulting from the drafting process—embodied by the eventual UDHR taken up in 1948—has an overlooked conceptual significance.

The beauty of this research program is simple but counterintuitive: Universal Moral Grammar does not deny the existence of moral diversity but “is largely predicted on the existence of diversity and is directed to understanding and explaining it…The key concept…is constrained diversity.” From this constrained diversity, and through an intentional hammering out of moral problems, the conceptual significance emerges of the UDHR as a document capturing—more clearly than any other—our moral nature.

Universal Human Rights in a Conflicted World

The UDHR’s seventy-fifth anniversary will occur in a conflicted world. Yet, even after seven decades of marking this document’s unlikely creation, its significance to human nature has been severely underappreciated.

To be sure, scholarly studies of the UDHR focusing on the anti-colonial movements of the first half of the twentieth century and the collapse of empires, the ideational influences stretching back decades or centuries through political activism and religious traditions, the re-definition of “human” in the early twentieth century, and the distribution of power across states each have their places.

Yet, these approaches neglect a simple but urgent question: how on earth do individuals make the moral judgments that underpin the rights enshrined within the UDHR? The failure to ask this question across a broad range of disciplinary traditions—and the implicit failure to recognize that this is a question not of political science but of cognitive science—has led to the UDHR’s underappreciated status.

There is no contradiction, to be sure, between the realist idea that the world is anarchic, populated by self-interested states, and lacking—at least in prominent variants—anything that can plausibly be called a “rules-based order” and the idea that human moral cognition provides the basis for—and is best represented by—universal human rights norms as enshrined in the UDHR. The problem is that too many International Relations scholars have implicitly subsumed a psychology of moral judgment into their theories, thereby conflating a lack of compliance with international human rights law with the intellectual foundations of human rights.

The fact is that assumptions about human nature matter for how we understand human rights. Human rights activism that detaches itself from human nature, especially in liberal-democratic societies, may hamper itself. The key is to realize that none of what has been said here must be surprising if one adopts a cognitive science perspective—one simply needs to be willing to recognize that moral or cultural diversity is not the silver bullet against the idea of universal human rights that they think it is.

Echoing Matthias Mahlmann’s conclusion based on his recent major contribution to moral cognition and human rights, to think of human rights as spontaneous beliefs that must be supported everywhere, at all times, to hold weight is a mistake. Human rights result from humanity’s struggle with social organization and represent the clearest view of our innate moral capacity and its social manifestations. The implementation and maintenance of universal human rights take work. The UDHR and International human rights norms have always existed in a conflicted world—now is the time to understand why.

Vincent J. Carchidi is an analyst working in technology, defense, and international affairs. He has an interdisciplinary background in cognitive science and philosophy. His work has appeared in outlets including the Human Rights Review, AI & Society, War on the Rocks, Defense One, National Interest, The Geopolitics Magazine, and Military Strategy Magazine, among others.

Image: FDR Library and Museum.

The National Interest · by Vincent J. Carchidi · November 19, 2023

14. Defense Secretary Austin Makes Unannounced Ukraine Visit, Assures Kyiv of Continued Support Against Russia

Defense Secretary Austin Makes Unannounced Ukraine Visit, Assures Kyiv of Continued Support Against Russia

The defense secretary will meet with Ukrainian leadership for high-level talks

Published 11/20/23 06:44 AM ET|Updated 42 min ago

Eva Surovell

themessenger.com · November 20, 2023

U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin on Monday traveled to Kyiv, Ukraine, for a surprise trip, where the defense secretary plans to underscore U.S. support for Ukraine and discuss a long-term vision for its future as the country continues to fend off a Russian invasion.

"The United States will continue to stand with Ukraine in their fight for freedom against Russia's aggression, both now and into the future," Austin said in a post on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.

The Defense Department said in a statement that the defense secretary will meet with Ukrainian leadership for high-level talks focusing on bolstering the strageic partnership between the U.S. and Ukraine.

Austin will meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Defense Minister Rustem Umerov and chief of staff Gen. Valery Zaluzhny.

View post on Twitter

The trip marks the secretary of defense's second trip to Kyiv and comes as lawmakers debate sending additional aid to Ukraine.

As the world has turned its attention to Gaza, where Israel continues to battle Hamas after the militant group's surprise attack in October, Ukrainians have signaled fear that limited resources and less attention could weaken the country's defenses against Russia.

themessenger.com · November 20, 2023

15. A Misleading Metaphor: The Nuclear “Arms Race”

Conclusion:

The concept of an “arms race” has no common definition and misleads as a metaphor meant to describe state behavior. Those who have studied the U.S.-Soviet nuclear arms competition during the Cold War, what proponents of the action-reaction theory hold up as the ultimate example of a senseless arms race, found little evidence of a tight linkage between the two defense establishments. Evidence post–Cold War, especially among the United States, Russia, and China, demonstrates further the action-reaction model has little predictive or analytical value. Instead of a mindless “arms race,” policymakers and the general public should think of U.S.-Russian-Chinese interactions as battles for advantage, with each side positioning itself according to its own unique values and capabilities — a process the U.S. government should seek to understand better through informed analysis.

The “arms race” is a simplistic metaphor that leads to an ahistorical conclusion: U.S. restraint can stop China’s and Russia’s nuclear expansion. This was true neither during the Cold War nor after. The United States should instead recognize that China and Russia may indeed react to U.S. actions, but not in the mechanical “action-reaction” way generally predicted by those who fear an “arms race.” Instead, each state has its own reasons for building its arsenal, and limiting U.S. programs based on the specter of an “arms race” is unwise at best and dangerous at worst.

A Misleading Metaphor: The Nuclear “Arms Race” - War on the Rocks

MATTHEW COSTLOW, ROBERT PETERS, AND KYLE BALZER

warontherocks.com · by Matthew Costlow · November 20, 2023

There is an emerging threat to the United States that will “endanger everyone,” one that can cause “escalation and misunderstandings” and even increase “the risk of a crisis or conflict that might turn nuclear.” No, these descriptors are not about Russia’s latest doomsday nuclear weapon or China’s provocative military behavior toward its neighbors. Instead, these are the purported consequences of a three-way nuclear “arms race” that some analysts believe the United States is about to ignite.

The Joseph R. Biden administration is currently considering whether and how to adapt the U.S. nuclear posture to China’s rapid nuclear buildup and Russia’s steady increase in its regional nonstrategic nuclear weapons. There is an emerging bipartisan consensus among longtime U.S. nuclear policy officials that the United States will need to adjust and potentially increase its nuclear forces in response to growing threats. Critics believe that such recommendations will increase nuclear dangers, and they frequently employ a metaphor to illustrate how: an “arms race.”

This “arms race” metaphor, however, does far more harm than good in explaining a poorly understood dynamic. It is a simplistic disfigurement of a complicated reality. If policymakers are led to believe that the United States is creating an endless action-reaction loop between itself and China and Russia, not only will members of Congress be unable to see the threat environment as it actually is, but they also may be afraid to make any necessary adjustments to U.S. forces to reinforce deterrence.

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We believe that the debate about an arms race can be improved by recognizing four key realities. First, scholars cannot agree to a common definition of an “arms race,” and they acknowledge the metaphor is a poor descriptor. Second, the most informed Cold War studies on the U.S.-Soviet arms competition failed to find a tight action-reaction linkage. Third, there is abundant evidence today that the United States is not the primary driver of China’s and Russia’s nuclear buildups. Fourth, U.S. officials should do a better job of explaining the internal drivers for China’s and Russia’s nuclear procurement decisions.

Specifically, the U.S. government should commission a major study of Cold War and post–Cold War Chinese and Russian defense procurement to assess whether the United States — as it did with the Soviet Union — may be severely misjudging the intent and underestimating the capabilities of its adversaries. The United States can reduce the risk of making the same mistake again by reversing the Biden administration’s decision to remove the “hedging” role for nuclear weapons and preparing for the possibility that China’s leaders, much like their Soviet Cold War predecessors, will not be satisfied with nuclear parity.

The “Arms Race” — A Meaningless Metaphor

For as many times as analysts invoke the specter of an “arms race,” one would think there is a commonly understood definition; there is not. Scholars have written whole books without defining the term because it is so troublesome to differentiate from the regular retirement and modernization dynamic that every military undergoes. Indeed, a respected scholar of strategy, Colin Gray, looked back on 25 years of study by others in the field, including his own widely used 1971 definition of an “arms race,” and concluded that the term cannot be “defined usefully” or “shown to ‘work’ in ways and to ends distinct from other conditions of strategic rivalry.” In short, if one cannot clearly define how an “arms race” looks substantially different from how a state would act during just another day in the anarchic international environment, then there is little basis for establishing a causal link to political tensions, escalation, and war.

Of course, this is not to say there is no “action-reaction” between states. Proponents of the “action-reaction” theory only err when they claim this is the dominant factor for defense decisions. The theory posits that states will seek to improve their security, but even their precautionary investments in military capabilities will appear aggressive to their opponents, who in turn make their own precautionary investments, thus beginning a dangerous cycle. But defense procurement is not an endless tit-for-tat process. States arm themselves in manners and for reasons unique to their strategic culture. The most obvious example is China’s decades-long commitment to a “minimum deterrence” nuclear force posture in spite of the far larger U.S. and Soviet nuclear arsenals throughout the Cold War. Similarly, the size and makeup of the Soviet nuclear arsenal was largely driven by forces unique to its strategic culture — mainly, a weak political leadership exerting little control over its most powerful defense procurement organization, the Military Industrial Commission. As post–Cold War interviews with Soviet officials revealed, the “primary cause of the USSR’s arms buildup” was the commission’s efforts “to ensure stable weapons development and production processes.”

Beyond the definitional and conceptual difficulties, the metaphor of a “race” has particular connotations that have little relation to the real world, but that are easily exploited by activists: a sense of single-mindedness in a sprint against an enemy, no regard for cost, endless, and wasteful. This metaphor is pernicious because it assumes any adjustment in the U.S. nuclear force posture could be the spark for a sprint to extinction, but as U.S. nuclear procurement plans make clear, “sprint” is not the term that should come to mind. For example, the U.S. Air Force will spend over a decade simply developing, not producing, the new nuclear-armed cruise missile, while the U.S. Navy will have spent 25 years developing and producing the planned number of Columbia-class ballistic missile submarines when the final one deploys in the 2040s. The National Nuclear Security Administration will not be able to produce 80 plutonium pits — the cores of nuclear weapons — per year until the 2030s, a far cry from the thousands the United States could produce annually during the Cold War. A “race” this is not.

Studying the Arms Race — Lessons Going Unlearned

Setting aside the difficulty in defining an “arms race,” eminent scholars and practitioners have investigated the analytic utility of the “arms race” metaphor in describing procurement decisions. Indeed, as a point of departure, analysts should draw from three studies conducted during the Cold War — two highly classified and the other from open source material. All were motivated by growing concerns that the action-reaction model had contributed to deeply flawed U.S. strategic arms policy.

In the late 1960s, Fritz Ermarth and Thomas W. Wolfe conducted a classified RAND study of Soviet-American interactions. Completed in 1973, their careful assessment of historical trends revealed an episodic and sluggish relationship. Moreover, when direct reactions did materialize, the authors concluded that “the range and character of responses over time have been so broad and varied that no general theory or model of interaction covers them satisfactorily.”

The following year, Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger commissioned a history of the strategic arms competition, an exhaustive effort that dragged on until 1981. After slogging through a vast and highly classified database, the authors discovered that the interaction process was neither imitative nor tightly coupled. Responses were, in fact, more selective and far slower, shaped by peculiar strategic cultures, organizational preferences, and irreducible budgetary and technological constraints.

These studies confirmed Albert Wohlstetter’s contention, arrived at from publicly available data in 1974, that greater-than-expected estimates had not compelled American planners to dramatically overreact to Soviet initiatives. With Soviet missile building having blown past U.S. force levels, which had leveled off in part to encourage Soviet reciprocal restraint, Wohlstetter categorically rejected “talk of a ‘race’ between parties moving in quite different directions.”

The upshot: the Cold War rivals built distinctive nuclear arsenals for reasons that transcended the external threat environment. A suite of inputs, most notably clashing national deterrence practices, generated asymmetric strategic forces. In the 1970s, the Soviet Union augmented its dense strategic air defense with an array of massive land-based missiles — a comprehensive posture for warfighting and regime survival. The United States, on the other hand, had drawn down its defenses and depended on markedly smaller land and seaborne missiles.

Though Soviet planners eventually accepted nuclear deterrence, its form departed sharply from American theories of strategic stability and mutual vulnerability. The Soviets considered stability a one-way street; that is, a function of Soviet strategic superiority that flowed from enormous war-survival and war-fighting programs. Reality, then, conformed to neither the image of superpowers “jogging in tandem on a treadmill to nowhere,” nor arms controllers’ enduring hope that moderation could induce Soviet cooperation.

Concerns that the Soviets would exploit their missiles to enter the global power-projection business motivated the above analytic histories. Unwarranted fear of arms racing, these analysts contended, would tranquilize American efforts to stabilize a shifting nuclear balance. As Defense Secretary Harold Brown, who confronted the ramifications of unrequited restraint in the late 1970s, famously quipped: “When we build, they build. When we cut, they build.” And Schlesinger, himself a harsh critic of the action-reaction model, detested that an unwillingness to adequately hedge and modernize forces had saddled the United States with “a counterforce plan without counterforce weapons.” Both defense secretaries believed an accurate diagnosis of the interaction process was the first step toward resetting arms policy for long-term competition.

Indeed, both Schlesinger and Brown oversaw the U.S. policy of détente with the Soviet Union, a gradual improvement in bilateral political relations, which refutes another often-claimed but rarely demonstrated assertion: that arms races will lead to worsened political relations, and by extension, nuclear reductions will lead to improved relations. This is a simplistic framing. For instance, during the period of détente, the Soviet nuclear arsenal reportedly grew significantly, but bilateral relations still improved. Today, U.S. political relations with Russia and China are very poor, despite vastly reduced U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals.

Improved political relations, a near-prerequisite for arms control agreements, can thus develop independently of a perceived “arms race.” Going one step further, even when political relations are poor and there are no negotiated agreements, the “arms race” does not proceed unchecked, at least among some states. As Cold War scholar William Van Cleave noted, “We should remind ourselves that in the democratic states of the West there is always [emphasis original] arms control, even without negotiated agreements. Arms are controlled and limited by the West’s traditional values, by its political and budgeting processes, and by the influence of the media and of public opinion.”

The enduring lessons of the Cold War and immediate post–Cold War therefore risk going unlearned: the composition and size of a state’s nuclear arsenal are generally not tightly coupled or imitative of its adversary’s, nor is the health of political relations determined by the changes in nuclear stockpile sizes. Nor is the presence or absence of binding arms control agreements a reliable gauge of danger.

Today Is No Different

Critics may contend that the Cold War dynamic is different than the one facing the United States today, but contemporary events still show little evidence of a tightly coupled action-reaction process — and certainly not one driven by the United States.

At face value, there is some degree of symmetry between the American and Russian strategic arsenals. Both have around 1,550 strategic nuclear weapons deployed on a triad of bombers, intercontinental-range missiles, and ballistic missile submarines. However, a closer look reveals distinct differences that deviate from what an “action-reaction” theory might predict.

Within the intercontinental-range nuclear forces, Russia deploys most of its weapons on intercontinental ballistic missiles, while the United States favors its ballistic missile submarine force as the “heaviest” leg of the triad. There are yet more stark differences between the nonstrategic nuclear arsenals of the two countries. While the United States reportedly has around 200 nuclear gravity bombs, Russia maintains around 2,000 nonstrategic nuclear weapons across dozens of different delivery systems. These nonstrategic weapons include more exotic systems such as nuclear mines, nuclear surface-to-air missiles, and even nuclear torpedoes.

While some of the diversification of the Russian nonstrategic nuclear arsenal has taken place in recent years, the asymmetry with the size of the American arsenal has persisted for decades. Indeed, the United States has been content letting the gap in size and diversification between the two arsenals persist since at least the end of the Cold War — an action leading to inaction, as it were. The United States has not followed Russia’s lead in its drive for nuclear-powered cruise missiles, nuclear-armed torpedoes of intercontinental range, and a host of other specific weapon types. The difference between the two states could not be more stark as demonstrated by the raging debate over a potential modest expansion of U.S. nonstrategic nuclear capabilities in the form of a nuclear-armed sea-launched cruise missile.

Looking to another Eurasian major power, China was long satisfied with maintaining a minimal nuclear deterrent for over half a century — not following the size or diversity of the U.S. or Soviet nuclear arsenals. Beijing’s long-standing minimal nuclear deterrent alone should be a powerful argument against “action-reaction” as the defining determinant of nuclear behavior.

In recent years, however, U.S. intelligence revealed that China is engaged upon a breathtaking nuclear expansion. This raises the obvious question: Why, after more than half a century of being satisfied with a minimal nuclear deterrent — even during the darkest periods of the Cold War — is China growing its arsenal? And why is it doing so during a time when the Biden administration seeks nuclear reductions with Russia and a multilateral arms control treaty with China?

Action-reaction theory would posit that China is building up from its relatively low nuclear force levels to at least parity with the United States, but the theory cannot explain why it is only doing so now. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the U.S. nuclear stockpile has shrunk in number by over 80 percent. The U.S. nuclear modernization program of record is mostly a one-for-one replacement of capabilities through the 2040s, and the Biden administration has shown no appetite for expanding U.S. homeland missile defenses. And yet, until recently, China maintained its relatively small nuclear force size — against the prediction of action-reaction theory. This argues for factors internal to Beijing. A sudden change in China’s nuclear requirements as directed by leader Xi Jinping explains the rapid and massive expansion of its nuclear forces far better than any incremental action — or, better stated, inaction — of the United States. At the very least, U.S. nuclear restraint has not led to Chinese restraint — in fact, it is a case of inaction-action.

If Not “Arms Race” — Then What?

As shown, “arms race” is not an accurate description of how states decide on the proper size and composition of their nuclear arsenals. While other actors’ arsenals are a factor in their decision calculus, they are far from being deterministic. Policymakers and activists should therefore stop using the term “arms race” and recognize that states make defense procurement decisions based on dozens of different factors. That said, the worry about increased numbers of nuclear arms leading to a greater likelihood of war will remain, for a variety of reasons, which must be examined and understood.

Think tanks can make some important open source contributions, but policymakers and defense officials would benefit from high-quality studies that include both classified and unclassified assessments, incorporating both qualitative and quantitative methods. The better U.S. officials and the American public understand why China and Russia act like they do, the better they can formulate U.S. defense policy.

To this end, we recommend the Office of Net Assessment, in conjunction with the Office of the Secretary of Defense Historical Office, commission a follow-on report to the 1981 “History of the Strategic Arms Competition” study referenced above. This new analysis should begin with the year 1973 (where the previous study of that same name stopped its analysis) and proceed to the present, utilizing the full range of classified and unclassified information. Like its Cold War forerunners, the study would diagnose long-term trends — perhaps revealing glaring asymmetries in what the great powers value most in their respective strategic arsenals. Ideally, the study would reveal behavioral predispositions that the United States can exploit for a better understanding of what China’s and Russia’s enduring strengths and weaknesses are.

It would also shed light on China’s and Russia’s approach to nuclear deterrence, and, most importantly, it would give the United States an idea of the underlying dynamics that shape nuclear competition and force posture. Indeed, given the stresses posed by a world in which the United States faces two peer nuclear actors (as will almost assuredly be the case in the 2030s), it is nearly impossible to have a long-term modernization plan that enables the United States to have a credible deterrent posture, based in part on a larger and more diverse strategic and nonstrategic nuclear arsenal, without having conducted such analysis. Unlike the classified Cold War studies, this study’s main conclusions should be unclassified and available to the public so that the factors that inform U.S. nuclear decision-making can be done in as transparent a manner as feasible.

U.S. officials should also add “hedging” back into the stated roles for U.S. nuclear weapons. The 2022 Nuclear Posture Review removed the “hedge” role from the U.S. nuclear arsenal to signal that the United States was reducing the role of nuclear weapons in its national security architecture. But, when the nuclear threat environment is becoming vastly more complicated, and mistakes in setting nuclear deterrence requirements more costly, “hedging” to overcome adverse events has become more important than ever — especially given the decades-long lead times associated with developing and fielding nuclear capabilities.

Finally, given the inaction-action nature of much of the U.S.-China nuclear relationship, U.S. officials should recalibrate their expectations about China’s nuclear breakout. Given the history of U.S. officials expecting the Soviet Union to stop building its nuclear forces when it reached nuclear parity (and being surprised they did not), it is better to seriously examine the implications for U.S. security if China’s intentions, like the Soviets’, are not mere parity. Given that China is not satisfied with parity in any other area, the United States should not assume that the nuclear dimension is different, given the obvious recent about-face in Chinese nuclear force sizing policy.

Conclusion

The concept of an “arms race” has no common definition and misleads as a metaphor meant to describe state behavior. Those who have studied the U.S.-Soviet nuclear arms competition during the Cold War, what proponents of the action-reaction theory hold up as the ultimate example of a senseless arms race, found little evidence of a tight linkage between the two defense establishments. Evidence post–Cold War, especially among the United States, Russia, and China, demonstrates further the action-reaction model has little predictive or analytical value. Instead of a mindless “arms race,” policymakers and the general public should think of U.S.-Russian-Chinese interactions as battles for advantage, with each side positioning itself according to its own unique values and capabilities — a process the U.S. government should seek to understand better through informed analysis.

The “arms race” is a simplistic metaphor that leads to an ahistorical conclusion: U.S. restraint can stop China’s and Russia’s nuclear expansion. This was true neither during the Cold War nor after. The United States should instead recognize that China and Russia may indeed react to U.S. actions, but not in the mechanical “action-reaction” way generally predicted by those who fear an “arms race.” Instead, each state has its own reasons for building its arsenal, and limiting U.S. programs based on the specter of an “arms race” is unwise at best and dangerous at worst.

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Matthew R. Costlow is a senior analyst at the National Institute for Public Policy. He is a Ph.D. candidate at George Mason University and served as a special assistant in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, Nuclear and Missile Defense Policy.

Robert Peters is the Nuclear Deterrence and Missile Defense Fellow at the Heritage Foundation. He served in various positions within the Department of Defense over a 17-year career, to include in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, National Defense University, and the Defense Threat Reduction Agency.

Kyle Balzer is a Jeane Kirkpatrick fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the America in the World Consortium and received his Ph.D. in history from Ohio University.

The views expressed in this article are our own and do not represent those of any organization with which we are or have been affiliated.

Image: Photo by Lt. Jennifer Bowman

Uncategorized

warontherocks.com · by Matthew Costlow · November 20, 2023

16. China’s Heavy Economic Legacy of State Ownership and Central Planning

Excerpts:

The ongoing growth stagnation is poised to persist due to the Chinese leadership’s hesitancy in implementing substantial reforms within the state sector. Their insistence on a prescriptive industrial policy further stifles innovation.

As this stagnation persists, Chinese leaders, concerned about domestic instability and potential unrest, might increasingly adopt a confrontational stance toward the United States, potentially heightening the prospects of a “Cold War” scenario between the two nations. One bellwether is the recent actions taken by U.S. President Joe Biden to curtail sensitive exports to China, which, in response, prompted China to impose bans on rare mineral exports.

The legacy of central planning consequently evokes a sense of déjà vu, resembling the Cold War dynamic between a communist and a capitalist bloc. However, this scenario diverges from the historical Soviet-U.S. Cold War due to the existing economic interdependence between the United States and China. The intensification of the new cold war could disrupt this interdependence through trade conflicts and superpower struggles.

With both sides endeavoring to forge their distinct blocs by pressuring allies to pick sides, today’s economic interdependence will be challenged, carrying substantial cost for all.

China’s Heavy Economic Legacy of State Ownership and Central Planning

thediplomat.com

Waning productivity and declining growth in China cannot be explained by the pandemic or even demographic shifts. It is also the consequence of an unfinished reform agenda.

By Itzhak Goldberg

November 18, 2023

Credit: Depositphotos

The ongoing tensions between China and the United States underscore the importance of delving deeply into the causes of the former’s stagnating economic growth. Yet the literature concerning China’s economic growth frequently draws comparisons with Japan and other market economies in East Asia, neglecting China’s history as a centrally planned economy with widespread state ownership.

A different comparative approach is worth considering: drawing parallels with the transition from communism to capitalism in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.

As someone whose career at the World Bank revolved around the transition of ex-communist economies, I have seen how difficult it is to advance the restructuring of large state-owned enterprises, and how the state-owned sector’s legacy in ex-communist countries hinders sustained economic growth.

Admittedly, there are stark differences in context: In China, the emergence of new private enterprises and substantial foreign direct investment brought about spectacular growth between 1978 and 2008. In Russia, the concentration of ownership by the state, and particularly at the hands of oligarchs, is an “important cause of Russia’s economy having been nearly stagnant since 2009 and completely stagnant since 2014.” Notwithstanding the dissimilarities, a comparison between China and post-communist countries is instructive, particularly when exploring state ownership.

State Ownership Reform in China

The waning productivity and subsequent growth decline in China since 2008 should not be attributed solely to transient factors, such as the aftermath of the global financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic, or even to demographic shifts. It is also the consequence of an unfinished reform agenda.

The share of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in China’s GDP is about 25 percent. Since 2008, the flagging economic performance of SOEs has weighed down China’s growth trajectory. Unlike the significant reforms of the 1980s and 1990s, the last two decades have been marked by a “reform fatigue” that hindered Chinese leaders from pursuing much-needed policy measures – perhaps due to a concern that privatizing or dissolving state institutions might trigger a collapse akin to that of the formerly Communist countries in the 1990s.

The results of Chinese policy measures aimed at reforming state enterprises have varied significantly since the 1980s, due to the state’s fluctuating and gradually diminishing prioritization of the issue. Results range from the relatively successful reforms championed by Zhu Rongji between 1998 and 2003 to the near-complete failures of the past decade.

China’s SOE restructuring strategy employs instruments that have proven to be ineffective in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union: (1) corporatization (transformation of SOEs into Joint-Stock Companies (JSCs); (2) top-down mergers of SOEs, orchestrated by public officials rather than business executives; (3) debt-to-equity swaps involving state equity infusion to offset company debts; and (4) the establishment of mixed ownership arrangements with private partners assuming minority stakes.

These measures have faltered whenever attempted in former Communist nations. Such policies serve as a fig leaf and cover up opposition to privatization.

By point of illustration, as a World Bank representative during the 1990s, I interacted with the general director of a failing Russian SOE targeted for restructuring. His proposed alternative was to merge with a profitable SOE, and, when faced with the World Bank team’s argument that the merger wouldn’t enhance incentives for efficiency for either company, his compromise was to transform the SOE into a JSC. He was eager to sell only a small stake, no more than 25 percent, and maintain full control of the company. It remained unclear who would be willing to buy a minority stake in a failing company that could not be restructured by a minority stake investor. Ultimately, the effective remedies were the sale of controlling stakes in enterprises to private investors, bankruptcy liquidation, and the divestiture of assets.

What are the current prospects then for Chinese reform or restructuring? One solution would be selling a controlling stake in large enterprises. Since this solution runs the risk of domination by oligarchs, the Chinese leadership would probably insist on selecting bidders who are acceptable to the Communist Party.

Another solution for companies would be divestiture: splitting the companies between profitable parts, which could be sold, and loss-making parts that the state would continue to subsidize until their eventual closure. The profitable parts could be offered to domestic or foreign investors, to the extent they are not technologically sensitive. Sale to foreign investors is problematic in view of the indigenous orientation of the current authorities.

The remaining option is liquidation of these enterprises, similarly to what was done in China in the 1980s and ‘90s. In today’s political context, the party is not willing to take this risk.

Central Planning, Industrial Policy, and Subsidies

A growing system of subsidies stemming from the legacy of central planning is yet another factor contributing to the slowdown in China’s growth. Under President Xi Jinping’s leadership, state-driven industrial policy has increasingly replaced market-oriented economic reforms. In May 2015, for example, China’s State Council launched the “Made in China 2025 Program,” outlining desired breakthroughs in 10 priority sectors, including advanced information technology.

State subsidies have fostered an uneven playing field, not only between private and state-owned enterprises but also between entities aligned with local, provincial, and national government and those that are not. Local banks are often reluctant to approve loans to private firms, unless these entities possess personal affiliations with relevant government officials. Decisions regarding subsidy allocation typically rest with individual government officials, rather than being subjected to review by peer assessors and expert panels, as is common in industrialized nations.

Remarkably, over 90 percent of listed companies in China have received government subsidies. Analyzing Chinese firm-level data spanning 2001 to 2011, Philipp Boeing and Bettina Peters reveal that ill-utilized research and development subsidies, diverted for non-research purposes, accounted for 53 percent of the total R&D subsidy volume. Another recent study showed that China’s “progressively prescriptive industrial policies may have yielded limited results in promoting productivity.”

In a 2016 address to the European Economic Association, Fabrizio Zilibotti emphasized that China had exhausted the benefits of growth driven by investment and must transition toward growth led by innovation. However, significant R&D subsidies go to waste, failing to reach the most capable and innovative firms. “Simply allocating funds to firms for R&D endeavors… falls short of fostering innovation-led growth,” Zilibotti concluded.

Implications

The ongoing growth stagnation is poised to persist due to the Chinese leadership’s hesitancy in implementing substantial reforms within the state sector. Their insistence on a prescriptive industrial policy further stifles innovation.

As this stagnation persists, Chinese leaders, concerned about domestic instability and potential unrest, might increasingly adopt a confrontational stance toward the United States, potentially heightening the prospects of a “Cold War” scenario between the two nations. One bellwether is the recent actions taken by U.S. President Joe Biden to curtail sensitive exports to China, which, in response, prompted China to impose bans on rare mineral exports.

The legacy of central planning consequently evokes a sense of déjà vu, resembling the Cold War dynamic between a communist and a capitalist bloc. However, this scenario diverges from the historical Soviet-U.S. Cold War due to the existing economic interdependence between the United States and China. The intensification of the new cold war could disrupt this interdependence through trade conflicts and superpower struggles.

With both sides endeavoring to forge their distinct blocs by pressuring allies to pick sides, today’s economic interdependence will be challenged, carrying substantial cost for all.

The ongoing tensions between China and the United States underscore the importance of delving deeply into the causes of the former’s stagnating economic growth. Yet the literature concerning China’s economic growth frequently draws comparisons with Japan and other market economies in East Asia, neglecting China’s history as a centrally planned economy with widespread state ownership.

A different comparative approach is worth considering: drawing parallels with the transition from communism to capitalism in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.

As someone whose career at the World Bank revolved around the transition of ex-communist economies, I have seen how difficult it is to advance the restructuring of large state-owned enterprises, and how the state-owned sector’s legacy in ex-communist countries hinders sustained economic growth.

Admittedly, there are stark differences in context: In China, the emergence of new private enterprises and substantial foreign direct investment brought about spectacular growth between 1978 and 2008. In Russia, the concentration of ownership by the state, and particularly at the hands of oligarchs, is an “important cause of Russia’s economy having been nearly stagnant since 2009 and completely stagnant since 2014.” Notwithstanding the dissimilarities, a comparison between China and post-communist countries is instructive, particularly when exploring state ownership.

State Ownership Reform in China

The waning productivity and subsequent growth decline in China since 2008 should not be attributed solely to transient factors, such as the aftermath of the global financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic, or even to demographic shifts. It is also the consequence of an unfinished reform agenda.

The share of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in China’s GDP is about 25 percent. Since 2008, the flagging economic performance of SOEs has weighed down China’s growth trajectory. Unlike the significant reforms of the 1980s and 1990s, the last two decades have been marked by a “reform fatigue” that hindered Chinese leaders from pursuing much-needed policy measures – perhaps due to a concern that privatizing or dissolving state institutions might trigger a collapse akin to that of the formerly Communist countries in the 1990s.

The results of Chinese policy measures aimed at reforming state enterprises have varied significantly since the 1980s, due to the state’s fluctuating and gradually diminishing prioritization of the issue. Results range from the relatively successful reforms championed by Zhu Rongji between 1998 and 2003 to the near-complete failures of the past decade.

China’s SOE restructuring strategy employs instruments that have proven to be ineffective in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union: (1) corporatization (transformation of SOEs into Joint-Stock Companies (JSCs); (2) top-down mergers of SOEs, orchestrated by public officials rather than business executives; (3) debt-to-equity swaps involving state equity infusion to offset company debts; and (4) the establishment of mixed ownership arrangements with private partners assuming minority stakes.

These measures have faltered whenever attempted in former Communist nations. Such policies serve as a fig leaf and cover up opposition to privatization.

By point of illustration, as a World Bank representative during the 1990s, I interacted with the general director of a failing Russian SOE targeted for restructuring. His proposed alternative was to merge with a profitable SOE, and, when faced with the World Bank team’s argument that the merger wouldn’t enhance incentives for efficiency for either company, his compromise was to transform the SOE into a JSC. He was eager to sell only a small stake, no more than 25 percent, and maintain full control of the company. It remained unclear who would be willing to buy a minority stake in a failing company that could not be restructured by a minority stake investor. Ultimately, the effective remedies were the sale of controlling stakes in enterprises to private investors, bankruptcy liquidation, and the divestiture of assets.

What are the current prospects then for Chinese reform or restructuring? One solution would be selling a controlling stake in large enterprises. Since this solution runs the risk of domination by oligarchs, the Chinese leadership would probably insist on selecting bidders who are acceptable to the Communist Party.

Another solution for companies would be divestiture: splitting the companies between profitable parts, which could be sold, and loss-making parts that the state would continue to subsidize until their eventual closure. The profitable parts could be offered to domestic or foreign investors, to the extent they are not technologically sensitive. Sale to foreign investors is problematic in view of the indigenous orientation of the current authorities.

The remaining option is liquidation of these enterprises, similarly to what was done in China in the 1980s and ‘90s. In today’s political context, the party is not willing to take this risk.

Central Planning, Industrial Policy, and Subsidies

A growing system of subsidies stemming from the legacy of central planning is yet another factor contributing to the slowdown in China’s growth. Under President Xi Jinping’s leadership, state-driven industrial policy has increasingly replaced market-oriented economic reforms. In May 2015, for example, China’s State Council launched the “Made in China 2025 Program,” outlining desired breakthroughs in 10 priority sectors, including advanced information technology.

State subsidies have fostered an uneven playing field, not only between private and state-owned enterprises but also between entities aligned with local, provincial, and national government and those that are not. Local banks are often reluctant to approve loans to private firms, unless these entities possess personal affiliations with relevant government officials. Decisions regarding subsidy allocation typically rest with individual government officials, rather than being subjected to review by peer assessors and expert panels, as is common in industrialized nations.

Remarkably, over 90 percent of listed companies in China have received government subsidies. Analyzing Chinese firm-level data spanning 2001 to 2011, Philipp Boeing and Bettina Peters reveal that ill-utilized research and development subsidies, diverted for non-research purposes, accounted for 53 percent of the total R&D subsidy volume. Another recent study showed that China’s “progressively prescriptive industrial policies may have yielded limited results in promoting productivity.”

In a 2016 address to the European Economic Association, Fabrizio Zilibotti emphasized that China had exhausted the benefits of growth driven by investment and must transition toward growth led by innovation. However, significant R&D subsidies go to waste, failing to reach the most capable and innovative firms. “Simply allocating funds to firms for R&D endeavors… falls short of fostering innovation-led growth,” Zilibotti concluded.

Implications

The ongoing growth stagnation is poised to persist due to the Chinese leadership’s hesitancy in implementing substantial reforms within the state sector. Their insistence on a prescriptive industrial policy further stifles innovation.

As this stagnation persists, Chinese leaders, concerned about domestic instability and potential unrest, might increasingly adopt a confrontational stance toward the United States, potentially heightening the prospects of a “Cold War” scenario between the two nations. One bellwether is the recent actions taken by U.S. President Joe Biden to curtail sensitive exports to China, which, in response, prompted China to impose bans on rare mineral exports.

The legacy of central planning consequently evokes a sense of déjà vu, resembling the Cold War dynamic between a communist and a capitalist bloc. However, this scenario diverges from the historical Soviet-U.S. Cold War due to the existing economic interdependence between the United States and China. The intensification of the new cold war could disrupt this interdependence through trade conflicts and superpower struggles.

With both sides endeavoring to forge their distinct blocs by pressuring allies to pick sides, today’s economic interdependence will be challenged, carrying substantial cost for all.

Authors

Guest Author

Itzhak Goldberg

Itzhak Goldberg is a fellow at the Center for Social and Economic Research (CASE), Warsaw, Poland. He is a former World Bank official who worked and published on the transition from communism to capitalism from 1990 to 2015.

thediplomat.com

17. The War That Remade the Middle East

Excerpts:

No matter what Washington does, there will be resistance to its Middle East vision. Iran will remain hostile to Israel and the United States. Saudi Arabia’s Gulf neighbors will never be pleased about the kingdom’s dominance. Israel and Turkey will also calculate what it means for Saudi Arabia to amass so much power and what the United States’ commitment to the Saudis means for their interests. They will react accordingly, and likely in ways Washington cannot expect.

But although all these countries will want more power, what they want most of all is to preserve the stability of their regimes. They want to subscribe to a vision that ends local conflicts, fosters economic growth, and otherwise reduces domestic pressure. If a U.S.-Saudi pact delivers, they will ultimately accept it.

Yet to make this bargain work, the United States will need to persuade Israel to stop engaging in what many see as the collective punishment of Palestinian civilians. Washington must tackle the plight of the Palestinians more broadly, instead of ignoring their cause, by helping create a credible pathway to a future Palestinian state. Washington’s bargain must contend with the challenge that Iran presents by freezing its nuclear program and constraining its network of regional clients, both through deterrence and by taking steps to reduce tensions. And the United States must create a trade corridor that helps cultivate the Middle East’s economies. Only then will the region be stable—and only then will Washington be free of its present responsibilities.

The War That Remade the Middle East

How Washington Can Stabilize a Transformed Region

By Maria Fantappie and Vali Nasr

November 20, 2023

Foreign Affairs · by Maria Fantappie and Vali Nasr · November 20, 2023

Before October 7, 2023, it seemed as if the United States’ vision for the Middle East was finally coming to fruition. Washington had arrived at an implicit understanding with Tehran about its nuclear program, in which the Islamic Republic of Iran effectively paused further development in exchange for limited financial relief. The United States was working on a defense pact with Saudi Arabia, which would in turn lead the kingdom to normalize its relations with Israel. And Washington had announced plans for an ambitious trade corridor connecting India to Europe through the Middle East to offset China’s rising influence in the region.

There were obstacles, of course. Tensions between Tehran and Washington, although lower than in the past, remained high. Israel’s avowedly right-wing government was busy expanding settlements in the West Bank, prompting anger from Palestinians. But U.S. officials did not see Iran as a spoiler; it had, after all, recently restored ties with various Arab governments. And Arab states had already normalized relations with Israel, even though Israel was not making meaningful concessions to the Palestinians.

Then Hamas attacked Israel, throwing the region into turmoil and upending the United States’ vision. The militant group’s expansive assault from the Gaza Strip—in which its fighters broke through a high-tech border wall, rampaged across southern Israeli towns, killed roughly 1,200 people, and took more than 240 hostages—made it clear that the Middle East is still a deeply explosive region. The attack prompted a ferocious military response by Israel that created a humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, with large numbers of dead and displaced Palestinians, and raised the risk of a wider regional war. The plight of the Palestinians is again front and center, and an Israeli-Saudi deal is infeasible. Given that Iranian support accounts for Hamas’s resilience and military abilities, Iran’s own regional military capabilities now seem quite powerful. Tehran also seems newly assertive. Although not keen on a broader conflict, Iran has still basked in Hamas’s show of force and, since then, upped the ante as Israel exchanged fire with the Lebanese militia Hezbollah and as other Iranian-backed groups lobbed rockets at U.S. troops.

The influence of the United States still looms large over the Middle East. But its support for Israel’s war has decidedly compromised its credibility in the region. (That support has also damaged Washington’s standing in the global South more broadly, especially as Israel’s claim of self-defense turned into collective punishment of Palestinian civilians.) This means the United States will have to craft a new strategy for the Middle East, one that contends with the realities it has long ignored. Washington, for example, can no longer neglect the Palestinian issue. In fact, it will have to make resolving that conflict the centerpiece of its endeavors. It will simply be impossible for the United States to tackle other questions in the region, including the future of Arab-Israeli ties, until there is a credible path to a viable future Palestinian state.

Washington must also address Tehran’s rising power, which has rattled the Middle East. If the United States wants to bring peace to the region, it must find new ways to constrain Iran and its proxies. Just as important, the United States must reduce their desire to challenge the regional order. It will especially need a new deal that halts Iran’s march to achieve the capability to make nuclear weapons.

To achieve these aims, the United States does not have to discard all that it has worked for. In fact, it can—and should—build on elements of the order it previously envisioned. In particular, Washington must anchor its new plan for the region in its partnership with Saudi Arabia, which has working relations with Iran, Israel, and the entire Arab world. Riyadh can use its expansive influence to help revive Israeli-Palestinian negotiations and help the United States strike a nuclear agreement with Iran. And together, Riyadh and Washington can create the Middle Eastern economic corridor the United States needs to balance against China.

This new grand bargain will not be as straightforward as the deal the United States was negotiating before October 7. It will not begin with Israeli-Saudi normalization, and it will not end with an Arab-Israeli alliance against Iran. But unlike past agreements, this new framework is achievable. And if done right, it will lower regional tensions and establish lasting peace.

WISHFUL THINKING

It is easy to see why the United States believed it could step back from the Middle East. The Arab-Israeli conflict appeared to be ending, even if the Israeli-Palestinian conflict dragged on. Iran had struck an effective bargain with the United States to limit the advancement of its nuclear program and had normalized ties with Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries. The region seemed to be taking care of itself, freeing Washington to focus on Asia and Europe.

But Washington had overestimated the stability of that situation, and it had underestimated the forces arrayed against it. U.S. President Joe Biden, for example, appears to have given little thought to how he would earn Senate approval for a defense treaty with Saudi Arabia, even though the treaty could entail providing the kingdom with advanced weaponry and civilian nuclear infrastructure. The United States also wrongly assumed that other Middle Eastern countries would not protest as it boosted Riyadh’s quest for regional hegemony. Washington figured that Tehran, for example, was too eager to normalize ties with Arab states and too busy with domestic unrest to interfere with U.S. plans. In reality, of course, Iran was continuing to strengthen and nurture its armed proxies.

But Washington’s biggest miscalculation was thinking it could ignore the Palestinian issue. Its tentative agreement with the Saudis, for example, was premised on the assumption that Riyadh could normalize ties with Israel and not prompt widespread backlash, even though it was unlikely that any deal would involve major concessions to the Palestinians. The United States did know that, despite the promise of de-escalation, the shadow war between Iran and Israel continued to simmer. But it did not foresee that war converging with the Palestinian issue, and to devastating effect.

As October 7 showed, Washington’s beliefs about the Middle East were completely incorrect. And yet so far, the United States has not updated its thinking. Instead of pushing for a limited military campaign that might salvage Israel’s reputation, Washington’s overarching response to the war in Gaza has been nearly unequivocal support for a brutal military assault. The result has been both anti-Israeli and anti-American outrage across the Middle East. Jordanian King Abdullah II and his wife, Queen Rania Al Abdullah, for example, have publicly condemned the Israeli military campaign, criticized American support for it, and made it clear that in this war, Jordan does not stand with the West. Both Jordan and Bahrain have recalled their ambassadors to Israel and frozen diplomatic ties. When U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Arab leaders held a meeting in Amman in November, they could not even produce a perfunctory joint communiqué.

Washington’s beliefs about the Middle East were completely incorrect.

The United States has tried to compensate for its pro-Israel position by supporting pauses in the fighting to get humanitarian aid into Gaza. It has also cooperated with the government of Qatar, which has close ties to Hamas, to secure the release of hostages. And Washington has lobbied to have the Palestinian Authority govern Gaza at the end of the war, instead of subjecting it to a prolonged Israeli occupation.

But these modest steps are unlikely to stabilize the region. In fact, they are doing the opposite: creating a vacuum that the Arab world’s other actors will use to advance their own interests. Israel has made destroying Hamas its immediate goal, but without U.S. pressure, it will also look to convince its citizens and the region of its invincibility by dealing incalculable damage to Gaza to deter potential adversaries. Egypt, Jordan, and the Palestinian Authority will want to minimize internal and external threats to their power, so they will try to make sure any postwar diplomacy suits their economic interests and bolsters their regional standing. Gulf countries, too, will use the conflict to vie for influence. Qatar is already leveraging its relationship with Hamas to make itself into an indispensable regional player—one with more influence than both Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Turkey, meanwhile, wants to find a role in resolving the conflict so it can get Washington to sell it F-16 fighter jets and back away from supporting the Kurds in Syria.

But the state that has already gained the most from the war is Iran. The resurrection of the Palestinian issue has focused regional attention once again on the Levant. The “axis of resistance” that Iran leads, which in addition to Hamas and Hezbollah includes the Assad regime, Shiite militias in both Iraq and Syria, and the Houthis in Yemen, has shown it can change the direction of Middle East politics, escalating and de-escalating regional conflicts at will. By offering unwavering support for Hamas, Iran has also bolstered its image as the defender of the Palestinians, increasing its popularity across the Middle East. And Tehran is balancing its support for Hamas with its burgeoning relations with the Arab world to fully embed itself in regional politics. Shortly after the Hamas attacks, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi spoke on the phone with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman for the first time since the states renewed their ties in March 2023. Raisi then traveled to Riyadh in November at the prince’s invitation to attend what participants named the Joint Arab-Islamic Extraordinary Summit. Tehran has taken the idea of an Arab-Israeli axis to contain Iran and turned it on its head.

Together, these trends are driving the region toward a wider conflict. The deepening distrust of the United States, the country’s inability to lead the region to stability, and the lack of any common vision to rally around are driving different states to pursue their own short-term interests, increasingly guided by pressure from the streets and fears of a wider war. These divergent interests are prolonging the region’s crisis and increasing the chance of unintended escalation. To avoid the worst, Washington will have to revisit its core assumptions, renew its commitment to the Middle East, and lay out a fresh vision for the region.

DEAL OR NO DEAL

Washington’s most urgent task is ending the war in Gaza. As long as Israel is attacking the territory and killing civilians there and the United States is doing little to rein in its ally, governments and people in Arab countries will be too furious to follow the United States’ lead. As a result, U.S. officials must press Israel to cease waging a war on Hamas that collectively punishes civilians—as of November 16, fighting in Gaza has killed over 11,000 Palestinians and denied the territory access to food, water, and medicine. Washington must make Israel stop using unrestrained violence in Gaza and pressure it to instead pursue a peaceful, political solution to the decades-long Palestinian issue.

Once the fighting ends, Washington can begin looking forward. As it does so, it will need to take a sober view. But it does not need to throw away everything it had worked toward before October 7. The United States should still base its strategy on striking a grand bargain with Saudi Arabia. Although Riyadh may not normalize ties with Israel any time soon, it is still one of the few governments in the region that remains on good terms with every country in the Middle East and North Africa. It even has cordial, if informal, relations with Israel. It is a key broker in the region.

If anything, the war in Gaza could boost Saudi Arabia’s primacy by giving it a chance to stabilize the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Joint Arab-Islamic Extraordinary Summit, which included leaders from across the Arab world, in addition to Iran and Turkey, was a first step in this direction. Unlike Egypt, Jordan, or the other states that usually mediate between Israel and its adversaries, Saudi Arabia has the credibility and regional relations needed to help strike a real peace deal. To do so, Saudi Arabia would work with Iran and Turkey, the main powerbrokers in the Arab world, as well as with Israel via the United States, to arrive at a broad framework for an Israeli-Palestinian peace process with the aim of creating a Palestinian state. Then, Saudi Arabia and its partners would work to build an overarching framework for regional security that must include rules and redlines broadly agreed to by all sides. Only an agreement like this would ensure lasting peace on Israel’s borders, close the door to radical forces among Palestinians, contain the shadow war between Iran and Israel, and reign in Tehran’s axis of resistance.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken meeting with Saudi Arabia’s defense minister in Washington, D.C., November 2023

Julia Nikhinson / Reuters

The Saudis will be reluctant to own the Palestinian issue. But Saudi Arabia’s interests rest in regional peace and security. Its grand economic vision cannot unfold if there is lasting crisis in the region. Riyadh also continues to covet regional leadership and recognition as a great power on the world stage, something that requires American support and could therefore prompt Riyadh to heed U.S. calls to broker a peace agreement.

To help Saudi Arabia, the United States would have to offer Riyadh diplomatic support to pursue broad-based diplomacy, including giving the government permission to seek Iranian acquiescence on a deal to resolve the Palestinian issue. Washington will have to corral its other Arab allies to support Riyadh, as well. And the United States must pursue the defense pact that was on the table with Riyadh before October 7. But it can no longer demand immediate recognition of Israel as a precondition. Instead, the United States should ask that Saudi Arabia lead the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Normalized ties with Israel could then be the outcome of the process.

As it puts forward a peace proposal for Israel and the Palestinian territories, Saudi Arabia will have to prove it can consult with Gulf neighbors and better take into account their ambitions, as well as their security concerns—which it did not do before October 7. Doing so could require that Riyadh use diplomatic energy it might be reluctant to spend. But if it succeedsat helping ease the path to an Israeli-Palestinian agreement and achieving greater regional security, Saudi Arabia would acquire the diplomatic gravitas it craves. A defense pact with the United States, meanwhile, would provide the kingdom with the military capabilities it needs to solidify its status as the Middle East’s premier economic and political actor.

CONSTRAIN, DON’T CONTAIN

Solving the Palestinian issue is essential to creating a stable Middle East. But it is not the only challenge facing the region. As part of any grand bargain, Washington will need to lower tensions with Iran and use its deal with Riyadh to constrain the country’s ambitions. And by itself, a deal with Riyadh risks doing the exact opposite.

There are many reasons Iran might respond poorly to a U.S.-Saudi agreement. The scale and quality of weapons that would begin to flow from the United States to Saudi Arabia, for example, will alarm Tehran. It will also see a Saudi civilian nuclear program as inherently aggressive, no matter how many restrictions Washington puts on it. Iran would also worry that a U.S.-Saudi defense treaty would lead to an expanded American military presence in the Middle East. Tehran might therefore respond to a U.S.-Saudi deal by escalating its own weapons manufacturing, launching more proxy attacks, and advancing its nuclear program. (Egypt, Turkey, and the UAE might start to seek nuclear capabilities, as well.)

If Israel and Saudi Arabia eventually normalize relations, Israel might even establish a direct military and intelligence presence in the Gulf, one that could be protected by the U.S.-Saudi defense treaty. For Iran, such an outcome would be a nightmare. Tehran would no longer be able to deter Saudi military cooperation with Israel by having its proxies attack Saudi troops or oil refineries, since doing so would provoke a direct confrontation with Washington.

Washington’s biggest miscalculation was thinking it could ignore the Palestinian issue.

Fortunately for Iran, Riyadh does not want to end its détente with Tehran, which has been a boon for the country. Since Saudi Arabia restarted ties with Iran, the Iranian-backed Houthis in Yemen have stopped attacking Saudi territory. Together, Riyadh and Tehran have established a stable cease-fire in Yemen after years of brutal warfare. Now, Yemen’s parties are making progress toward a permanent agreement. This newfound security has made it easier for Saudi Arabia to pursue its lofty economic goals by removing the threat of Houthi missile attacks on Saudi refineries and other infrastructure. As a result, Riyadh no longer seems to share Israel’s vision for a joint military and intelligence axis to roll back Iran’s regional influence. In fact, since March, Iran and Saudi Arabia have worked to fully normalize relations by opening embassies, easing travel between their countries, and establishing cultural exchanges. Iran had already established full relations with Kuwait and the UAE in 2022. It is in talks with Egypt and Jordan to restore ties with those countries, as well.

A U.S.-Saudi defense pact will still be a concern for Tehran. But it is less likely to react adversely to one that does not affect its diplomatic and economic relations with Riyadh and the rest of the Gulf, and that does not set up a regional security arrangement aimed at degrading its power. By engaging Iran in bilateral and regional issues as it pursues a grand bargain with the United States, Saudi Arabia can minimize Iranian resistance to a U.S. deal and even find ways to secure Tehran’s consent for a new regional order.

Washington may not approve of Riyadh’s efforts to keep Tehran on board by using diplomatic concessions and economic benefits. Iran is one of the United States’ principal adversaries, and it is Israel’s main enemy. But the United States cannot stop the normalization of ties between Iran and its Arab neighbors. As Iran’s axis of resistance has grown stronger, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and the UAE have all decided that Tehran must be integrated into the region to keep themselves safe. They have decided that they can better protect their security if they engage Iran and if Tehran has a vested interest in bilateral ties with them.

Nor should the United States try to stop normalization. If the Arab world’s approach is successful, it will serve American interests by de-escalating regional tensions, freeing the United States to focus on Asia and Europe. The United States should therefore use the Middle East’s new order to cage Iran’s ambitions, instead of trying in vain to create an anti-Tehran alliance. To do so, Washington should encourage Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states to deepen their diplomatic and economic engagement with Iran in order to secure Tehran’s acquiescence to a permanent settlement for the Palestinian issue and de-escalation in the Levant. A solution for the Palestinians will be difficult to arrive at without at least tacit Iranian agreement—and any deal will be far more resilient with it. Such a solution would also deny Iran the ability to exploit the issue, cost radical Palestinian voices their influence, and provide political space to the Arab world to establish better ties with Israel.

BACK FROM THE BRINK

There is one issue that Israel, the United States, and most Arab countries still agree on: Iran’s nuclear program. They all believe that the program’s continued expansion is one of the most destabilizing developments in the Middle East. As Tehran gets closer to producing nuclear weapons, Israel might step up its covert attacks on Iran. If Tehran appears to be on the cusp of nuclearization, Israel could attack the country outright—an act that could quickly draw the United States into a direct conflict. Should Riyadh and Washington sign a defense treaty, Saudi Arabia might also become a party to any war. That war would then unfold in the Levant, as well as the Gulf, with devastating consequences for both regions and for the global economy.

Iran and the United States have tried, and failed, to strike a new nuclear accord since Biden took office at the beginning of 2021. And at first, the October 7 attacks might seem to make a new agreement virtually impossible to reach. But Tehran and Washington had worked carefully to de-escalate before October 7, and their quiet agreement has largely held steady. The informal nuclear deal, for example, appears to remain in effect. Iran’s proxies launched rockets at American bases, but there is little indication that either side wants to fight the other—those attacks are more designed to show support for Gaza and to warn the United States against scuttling the informal deal than to do real damage. Washington’s own sporadic strikes are similarly about posturing, carried out to appease domestic audiences agitating for a response to the Iranian attacks. For Washington, escalation with Iran would divert military and diplomatic resources away from its competition with Beijing and Moscow. Iran’s leaders, meanwhile, do not want to risk a conflict that could devastate their economy—and possibly bring down their regime.

Demonstrating in support of Palestinians in Gaza, Amman, Jordan, November 2023

Jehad Shelbak / Reuters

This relative calm will likely hold at least until the U.S. presidential elections in November 2024. But the possible return to office of former U.S. President Donald Trump means Tehran and Washington do not have much time to strike a new agreement. Even if Biden is reelected, the two states must resolve their nuclear standoff before October 2025, when the ability of any signatory to reinstate UN-approved sanctions under the 2015 nuclear deal (which Trump withdrew from) expires. If the United States and its European allies do not reinstate the UN sanctions before then, they may never be able to implement them again; China and Russia will likely veto any future restrictions, which must pass through the UN Security Council. But if the West does opt to reimpose these restrictions, Iran has warned that it will leave the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty—a very public precursor to building a weapon—precipitating a major international crisis. Washington and its allies, then, want a new agreement before they make up their minds.

To create a new deal, Iran and the United States should pick up where they left off in Vienna in August 2022: the last time the two countries held nuclear talks. Despite the fighting in Gaza, their objectives remain the same. The United States wants to limit the amount and purity of uranium Iran can enrich—thereby extending the time Tehran needs to produce enough fissile material to make a nuclear weapon—and to ensure that Iran’s nuclear program is subject to rigorous international monitoring. Iran, for its part, still needs relief from crippling economic sanctions.

But unlike in 2022, the United States should closely coordinate its nuclear talks with Saudi Arabia’s own efforts to reduce tensions with Iran. The two are, after all, linked. Success in nuclear talks that reduce tensions between Iran and the United States will help Saudi talks achieve the same with Iran; success in talks between Riyadh and Tehran, meanwhile, will give Iran more reason to trust a nuclear deal with the United States, particularly if such talks are encouraged by Washington. And the United States will have to ensure that any nuclear deal it makes with Saudi Arabia contains limits and restrictions that resemble the agreement it strikes with Iran. Otherwise, the two states could enter an escalatory spiral, as whichever state is granted inferior nuclear capabilities will work hard to catch up.

CATCHING UP

In the near term, Washington’s Middle East strategy must focus on ending the war in Gaza and finding a path to regional stability. But in the long term, the United States needs to look beyond just Iran and the Palestinians. Its Middle East policies must also contend with Beijing: Washington’s chief international competitor.

China’s economic presence in the Middle East has grown markedly over the past decade. The country relies heavily on the Gulf for its energy supplies, and it has used the Gulf as a gateway for its expanding trade and investment networks in Africa. China has, in turn, offered Saudi Arabia and the UAE access to knowledge—for example, about the technologies underlying green energy—that they cannot procure in the West, helping spearhead development in the Gulf. China has also made substantial direct financial investments in the Gulf, especially within Saudi Arabia. Under Chinese President Xi Jinping, this commercial relationship has been folded into China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Xi has made fostering these ties part of his response to Washington’s efforts to constrain Beijing.

The United States has taken note of China’s expanding relationship with Middle Eastern states. It paid especially close attention when Xi helped mediate the rapprochement between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Washington believes that China wants to use its economic influence in the Middle East to become a political and security power in the region. The U.S.-Saudi defense treaty is a response: a way of arresting Riyadh’s drift into China’s orbit. Washington’s plans for a trade corridor through the Middle East are also designed to undermine Beijing’s scheme. Such a corridor would benefit the region economically, but its primary purpose is to counter the Belt and Road Initiative by anchoring the region’s economic future to India and Europe. The corridor would also bind the UAE and Saudi Arabia to Israel and integrate Israel’s economy into that of the Middle East.

The Biden administration’s most urgent task is ending the war in Gaza.

Beijing has responded warily to Washington’s proposals. When the United States talked about creating an Indian–Middle Eastern–European economic corridor, China reacted by saying it would welcome the corridor provided it did not become a “geopolitical tool,” which is, of course, exactly what the United States intends it to be. It would divide the Middle East between those that are part of the economic corridor and those that are not: an exclusionary system that runs counter to China’s regional vision. And Beijing knows the Biden administration’s push for Israeli-Saudi normalization is an attempt to match China’s own success with the Iranians and the Saudis. China is not yet in a position to foil the United States’ plans, but there are no signs it will slow its economic engagement with the region. In the current geopolitical vacuum, that engagement will continue to expand and deepen.

Saudi Arabia does not want to choose between China and the United States. But just like Israel and the Palestinian territories, Riyadh may still agree to Washington’s plans because they would bolster Riyadh’s great-power ambitions by strengthening its regional position and expanding its economic influence. These plans would improve the economies of other regional states, as well. As a result, Arab countries that might otherwise be hostile to a Saudi-centered Middle East could go along with the United States’ proposals. If they do, the result would be greater stability both within Middle Eastern countries and between them.

But to increase the likelihood that every state will buy into its proposed order, the United States may have to do more than make sure its system delivers widespread prosperity. The United States must also subscribe to a vision for Middle East security that does not divide the region into camps but makes room for all actors. That requires the United States to let the countries in its envisioned economic corridor join other economic arrangements, as well. It also requires a grand bargain to promote the security of Israel, other Arab states, and even Iran. Such security can be, in part, offered through a new nuclear deal and a regional accord between Iran and Saudi Arabia. But the United States should consider making regional pacts beyond the one it concludes with Saudi Arabia. These pacts could extend U.S. security guarantees to other states, but they must also come with restraints and redlines. Washington cannot simply continue supplying weapons to regional allies, as it did before October 7. Instead of promoting stability, this policy encouraged a regional arms race and war.

MAKING PEACE

No matter what Washington does, there will be resistance to its Middle East vision. Iran will remain hostile to Israel and the United States. Saudi Arabia’s Gulf neighbors will never be pleased about the kingdom’s dominance. Israel and Turkey will also calculate what it means for Saudi Arabia to amass so much power and what the United States’ commitment to the Saudis means for their interests. They will react accordingly, and likely in ways Washington cannot expect.

But although all these countries will want more power, what they want most of all is to preserve the stability of their regimes. They want to subscribe to a vision that ends local conflicts, fosters economic growth, and otherwise reduces domestic pressure. If a U.S.-Saudi pact delivers, they will ultimately accept it.

Yet to make this bargain work, the United States will need to persuade Israel to stop engaging in what many see as the collective punishment of Palestinian civilians. Washington must tackle the plight of the Palestinians more broadly, instead of ignoring their cause, by helping create a credible pathway to a future Palestinian state. Washington’s bargain must contend with the challenge that Iran presents by freezing its nuclear program and constraining its network of regional clients, both through deterrence and by taking steps to reduce tensions. And the United States must create a trade corridor that helps cultivate the Middle East’s economies. Only then will the region be stable—and only then will Washington be free of its present responsibilities.

• MARIA FANTAPPIE is head of the Mediterranean, Middle East, and Africa Program at Istituto Affari Internazionali in Rome.
• VALI NASR is Majid Khadduri Professor of International Affairs and Middle East Studies at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. He was Senior Adviser to the U.S. Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan between 2009 and 2011.
• MORE BY MARIA FANTAPPIEMORE BY VALI NASR

Foreign Affairs · by Maria Fantappie and Vali Nasr · November 20, 2023

18. Vietnam veterans explain why people don't want to join military

Some very discouraging stories.

Vietnam veterans explain why people don't want to join military

Newsweek · by Aleks Phillips · November 18, 2023

"I have two children, they are now 38 and 37. There is no way either of them would go in the military," John Jones, a medical corpsman in the 1st battalion, 69th Armored Regiment of the 4th Infantry Division in the Vietnam War, told Newsweek.

"They came to their own conclusions," he added. "I've never talked to my children or my wife about what really happened over there—and I took them back to Vietnam; we went to the firebases where I was and we still didn't really talk about it." He said he has discouraged others from joining.

Several major branches of the U.S. military are currently missing their recruitment targets by thousands of new sign-ups. A recent poll suggested a majority of American adults would not be willing to serve were the nation to enter a major conflict.

When Newsweek published a report on the situation last week, experts painted a complex picture of why people were seemingly less tempted by a career in the military: a new generation with a different outlook; a tight jobs market; and unhelpful depictions of the armed forces in mass and social media.

A Vietnam War veteran wipes rain water from the name of a soldier from his unit on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial on Memorial Day, May 29, 2023, in Washington, D.C. One who spoke to Newsweek suggested the treatment of veterans had dissuaded people from military service. Samuel Corum/Getty Images

But this wasn't the whole picture, and since then, several Vietnam War veterans, including Jones, reached out to give their view of why the military was struggling to recruit.

Jones, and another who was happy to be interviewed, spoke of a negative view of veterans putting others off joining the armed forces, and the treatment of veterans that has pushed them to deter others from signing up.

That is not to say their opinions are necessarily held by a majority of veterans: in late 2021, a Military Family Advisory Network survey of 8,638 people found 63 percent of active-duty troops, veterans and their families would still recommend a military career—though this had slipped significantly from 74.5 percent two years prior.

Stigma of Service

"You have this fundamental problem that there is a definite negative stigma associated with military service," Jones said. "We try to gloss it over with Veterans Day, and 'thank you for your service' and all that. But underneath that is sort of the opposite, that you're a troubled individual," which in some cases could make it difficult to get a job.

He noted that when he returned from service in 1969, "no hippie spit on me at San Francisco airport," which he described as "a metaphor, invented by Hollywood."

Hollywood was one element of the media blamed by military recruiters for perpetuating an image of military service as being caught up in perilous situations followed by a physically and mentally troubled life as a veteran.

Jones said there were a few war movies that "get my blood pressure up" because "at the end of each movie, the principal characters commit suicide because of the terrible trauma that they experienced."

Another veteran, who asked not to be named, spoke of the negative publicity of the military from seemingly constant advertising about veterans who had been physically affected through their service, without the armed forces offering an alternative view.

"These kids every day are seeing the ads about Camp Lejeune and the health issues and the contaminated water," he said, referencing the North Carolina base where contamination led to those serving there between 1953 and 1987 developing severe health conditions. "And they're seeing the ads for the [Disabled American Veterans] with these poor men who served and they don't have an arm or a leg or something."

Jones recognized that there were severe physical and mental health concerns among veterans—some 24 kill themselves every day—who he said should be treated accordingly, but argued many had not seen the combat conditions that caused post-traumatic stress disorder in some of his compatriots.

"I didn't go to a bar and drink and meet my buddies and any of that crap," he said. "I just put it behind me and moved on. That's a key thing, if you're going to not have post-traumatic stress disorder, is get busy and do something else."

But engaging yourself in a different career can be difficult when a stigma around service remains. Jones recalled being introduced to a woman planning a trip to Vietnam by his wife. "She looked at me and she said, 'But you don't look like a Vietnam War veteran.'"

"What she was saying is she had this stereotypical image of what a Vietnam veteran is supposed to look like," he explained. "Somebody who rides around on motorcycles, is grossly overweight, drinks all the time and has a wild look in his eye."

Wasted Sacrifice

Jones was stationed at Landing Zone Schueller near An Khe for five months; of the men he served with, he said 20 were killed while he was there, while hundreds were wounded and one in four contracted malaria. The area was also defoliated with Agent Orange, a chemical herbicide sprayed by the U.S. which has since caused major health problems for those exposed, though Jones said it "fortunately" has had no effect on him.

Forty years on, the other veteran who spoke to Newsweek cited another withdrawal from a lengthy conflict, this time in Afghanistan, as a source of unhappiness among veterans. "I know people who have served over there who are just absolutely depressed [at] how the U.S. exited, leaving the translators who helped them," many of whom were killed when the Taliban took charge, he said.

The former Navy serviceman said he and others he meets at his American Legion Hall view the departure from Afghanistan and the drawn-out war in Ukraine as signs "our leadership is just totally incompetent," and asked: "Would you want to get into a profession or take a job where coming out of it you've got a chance of joining a million totally disabled?"

He added: "My kids and anybody who has any common sense or intelligence is not going to sign up for the military."

John Jones, a medical corpsman in Dak Po, Vietnam, in October 1968. Courtesy

However, he noted that during his service, he had lived "a pretty cush life" as a line officer in the U.S. Navy, which began with touring the Mediterranean and Caribbean before being sent to Vietnam to courier ammunition. "Some people really got screwed by being in the military," he said. "But I'm one of the lucky ones."

When asked to comment, a Department of Defense spokesperson told Newsweek it "values the dedicated service and sacrifice of every veteran and understand the concerns some may have" and said its "greatest strategic asset is our people, and we will always pursue options to enhance how we take care of our service members and their families."

They added they would continue to work with the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) to "support our transitioning service member and veteran population, while also engaging them in our efforts to recruit the future force."

'The Government Itself Does Not Come Through'

While the Navy veteran had his MBA paid for him by the military when he returned from service, like many, he receives medical from the VA and went on to have a successful career in the automobile industry, others have not been as fortunate.

Jones said his friend, fellow Vietnam veteran Irv Harper, took his own life while in the Yukon in 2009. Harper, he explained, contracted malaria in Vietnam, but when he approached the VA, he was told it had lost his medical records and would have to prove he contracted the disease while in active service, which he couldn't. "He never went back," Jones said.

He cited it as one instance of what he described as "broken promises," adding that sometimes "the government itself does not come through."

Jones has had his own 14-year-long legal battle after being discriminated against by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which a Merit Systems Protection Board in 2010 found "violated regulations relating to veterans' preference," which gives ex-service people first dibs on federal jobs, after turning him down for a job because he was a veteran.

Following his time in the military, Jones said he spent around seven years as an administrator of nursing homes across southeastern America before working in a hospital in Saudi Arabia. The court found that while the CDC had discriminated against him based on his veteran status, he was ultimately not qualified for the role.

Jones said he was offered a $100,000 settlement by the CDC in 2016, but has yet to receive the money. "If I knew it was going to end like this, I would have emigrated to another country," he remarked, but said he had stayed as he held out hope that the federal agency would heed the court order.

Newsweek reached out to the CDC via email for comment on Thursday.

Newsweek · by Aleks Phillips · November 18, 2023

19. Is the U.S. Ready for War?

Excerpts:

But what about using commercial technology for warfare? “In 30 years of consolidation of the defense industry, there have only been three companies that have broken through at the department with a big splash. Elon Musk with SpaceX, and by extension Starlink. 

Palantir with Peter Thiel. And Anduril with Palmer Luckey. It should not take an iconoclastic billionaire willing to break China at the Pentagon. The department should be a lot more open to commercial off-the-shelf solutions.”

I reminded him that many engineers threatened to quit Google if they worked on artificial intelligence to help drones identify targets. “Unfortunately, the rot you see that has infested campuses over the last month with pro-Hamas rallies also extends in some cases to their engineering and their computer science departments. There’s no question about that.”

Has the U.S. lost its will? “We can have the weaponry and ships and aircraft, but if our adversaries don’t think we’re willing to use them, to defend ourselves and stop them, they don’t do much good.” In the Middle East, if “Joe Biden is not going to respond, and if he’s going to be shooting empty warehouses in eastern Syria, as opposed to blowing up IRGC barracks outside of Tehran—if I’m Xi Jinping sitting in Beijing, and I see that, it makes me think.”

Will we be ready for a China-Taiwan conflict? “You don’t have to be read into classified programs or have all that much imagination to realize that those drones you see swarming around Super Bowls or opening ceremonies might be pretty effective against Chinese ships or Chinese landing craft, if you could rapidly convert them into military usage.”

Is the U.S. Ready for War?

It always comes down to men killing their enemies in the mud, says Sen. Tom Cotton.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/is-the-u-s-ready-for-war-military-weapons-warfare-ukraine-middle-east-asia-tom-cotton-5c9032e8?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

By Andy Kessler

Follow

Nov. 19, 2023 1:52 pm ET

A Ukrainian serviceman beside a vehicle carrying a Starlink satellite internet system near the frontline in the Donetsk region, Ukraine, Feb. 27. PHOTO: LISI NIESNER/REUTERS

Ukraine’s troops are using both old-fashioned heavy artillery and commercial products such as drones with grenades attached to them, directed via Starlink’s satellite internet service. Hamas terrorists used motorcycles and paragliders. Israeli soldiers use sophisticated Iron Dome antimissile systems and, to close off tunnels, “sponge bombs” that work like spray foam sealant from 

Is the U.S. ready for that kind of war? To find out, I met with Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton—a former platoon leader with the 101st Airborne Division in Iraq who now sits on the Armed Services Committee. “I still don’t think the Defense Department is doing enough to adapt quickly,” he said. Current wars have exposed the Pentagon’s “brittleness and lack of resiliency, and that’s in part going back to the drawdown during the Clinton era.”

“Different wars require different kinds of weapons,” he said. “You just look at three conflicts or potential conflicts. In Ukraine, you have heavy mechanized land warfare, and Hamas, you have intense urban combat. And in Taiwan, if it came to that, you would have a largely maritime conflict. Hamas doesn’t have tanks. So Israel doesn’t need Javelins.”

“Necessity is the mother of invention. And Ukrainians are very resourceful,” he continued. “The problem with the Soviet Union was not only that it was communist, but also that it was Russian. Ukraine exposes the fanciful thinking of many political leaders here and in Europe who believed that threats from Russia ended with the Cold War.”

But are we buying the right stuff? F-35 Lightning II fighter jets do amazing things, but don’t we need more adaptable weapons? “Machine guns can do a pretty effective job against paragliders,” Mr. Cotton says. “In Congress, when people think about technology as it applies to security, they think too much about whiz-bang keystroke warriors, that somehow you’re going to win wars just with cyber attacks or with hashtags.” He shakes his head. “It always gets down to men under arms in the mud on the ground killing their enemies until their enemies submit to their will.”

“The department needs to do a better job of that kind of thing. There’s still going to be a significant need for traditional battlefield technology for tanks and armored personnel carriers and munitions, for fighter squadrons, for new stealth bombers. The technology that matters most is technology that enables the soldiers who are out in front of the spear and makes it safer for them.” Mr. Cotton reminded me of the military adage invoking D-Day: “When the ramp drops, the bulls— stops.”

Then I sensed frustration. “It’s like pulling teeth to get the DOD to focus on what’s needed to fight and win the wars. Ukraine is a reminder that that kind of warfare has not vanished from the earth. There’s still going to be battlefields. There’s still going to be the infantry in the army that have to close with and destroy the enemy, to fire and maneuver as opposed to big brains sitting back in Washington, D.C., clacking away on keyboards and all of a sudden, you compel a nation to submit to your will.”

I nodded and said I agreed. Mr. Cotton quickly jumped in: “There was a lot of people who don’t agree with you and me, just to be clear, like mostly Democrats.”

But what about using commercial technology for warfare? “In 30 years of consolidation of the defense industry, there have only been three companies that have broken through at the department with a big splash. Elon Musk with SpaceX, and by extension Starlink. 

Palantir with Peter Thiel. And Anduril with Palmer Luckey. It should not take an iconoclastic billionaire willing to break China at the Pentagon. The department should be a lot more open to commercial off-the-shelf solutions.”I reminded him that many engineers threatened to quit Google if they worked on artificial intelligence to help drones identify targets. “Unfortunately, the rot you see that has infested campuses over the last month with pro-Hamas rallies also extends in some cases to their engineering and their computer science departments. There’s no question about that.”

Has the U.S. lost its will? “We can have the weaponry and ships and aircraft, but if our adversaries don’t think we’re willing to use them, to defend ourselves and stop them, they don’t do much good.” In the Middle East, if “Joe Biden is not going to respond, and if he’s going to be shooting empty warehouses in eastern Syria, as opposed to blowing up IRGC barracks outside of Tehran—if I’m Xi Jinping sitting in Beijing, and I see that, it makes me think.”

Will we be ready for a China-Taiwan conflict? “You don’t have to be read into classified programs or have all that much imagination to realize that those drones you see swarming around Super Bowls or opening ceremonies might be pretty effective against Chinese ships or Chinese landing craft, if you could rapidly convert them into military usage.”

Write to kessler@wsj.com.

20. The Era of Total U.S. Submarine Dominance Over China Is Ending

A defining element of my childhood is my dad working at Electric Boat in Groton, going to see the submarine launches, and school field trips to the New London submarine base (which is probably why I went into the Army because I could not imagine living the hard life of a submariner living int hose cramped and difficult confines).

It pains me to read this because submarines are arguably one of our most important strategic assets that truly make the US a superpower.

Photos and images at the link https://www.wsj.com/world/china/us-submarine-dominance-shift-china-8db10a0d?mod=hp_lead_pos8

1. WORLD
2. 
   
3. CHINA

The Era of Total U.S. Submarine Dominance Over China Is Ending

New Chinese submarines and sensors to catch U.S. subs will alter the balance of power

A Chinese nuclear-powered submarine took part in a 2019 naval parade off the eastern port city of Qingdao. PHOTO: JASON LEE/REUTERS

By Alastair GaleFollow

Updated Nov. 20, 2023 12:00 am ET

For decades, the U.S. hasn’t had to worry much about China’s submarines. They were noisy and easy to track. The Chinese military, meanwhile, struggled to detect America’s ultraquiet submarines.

Now, China is narrowing one of the biggest gaps separating the U.S. and Chinese militaries as it makes advances in its submarine technology and undersea detection capabilities, with major implications for American military planning for a potential conflict over Taiwan.

Early this year, China put to sea a nuclear-powered attack submarine with a pump-jet propulsion system instead of a propeller, satellite imagery showed. It was the first time noise-reducing technology used on the latest American submarines had been seen on a Chinese submarine.

A few months earlier, satellite images of China’s manufacturing base for nuclear-powered submarines in the northeastern city of Huludao showed hull sections laid out in the complex that were larger than the hull of any existing Chinese submarine. A second modern construction hall at the plant was finished in 2021, indicating plans to boost output.

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China is working to modernize its ballistic missile submarine fleet after decades of falling behind the U.S. as it looks to strengthen its nuclear deterrence capabilities. WSJ compares the submarine fleets and the technology of their missiles.

At the same time, the western Pacific is becoming more treacherous for U.S. submarines. Beijing has built or nearly finished several underwater sensor networks, known as the “Underwater Great Wall,” in the South China Sea and other regions around the Chinese coast. The networks give it a much better ability to detect enemy submarines, according to Chinese military and academic texts.

The People’s Liberation Army, as China’s military is known, is getting better at finding enemy submarines by adding patrol aircraft and helicopters that pick up sonar information from buoys in the sea. Most of China’s navy now has the ability to deploy underwater listening devices called hydrophones on cables trailing ships or submarines.

In August, China conducted a submarine-hunting exercise lasting more than 40 hours in the South China Sea, involving dozens of Y-8 anti-submarine patrol aircraft. A few weeks earlier, the Chinese and Russian navies conducted a joint anti-submarine warfare exercise in the Bering Sea, off the coast of Alaska.

The developments mean the era of unchallenged dominance of the U.S. under the seas around China is ending.

China’s manufacturing plant and main bases for nuclear-powered submarines

Capacity to build

at least two submarines

simultaneously

RUSSIA

New

construction hall

MONGOLIA

Bohai

production plant

CHINA

Capacity for 10 submarines

Capacity

for 12

submarines

Dock

INDIA

Dock

Submarine

Yulin

bases

Submarine

500 miles

THAILAND

500 km

Note: Dock capacities are for areas shown in image, not full bases.

Sources: Planet Labs PBC (images), Preligens (image analysis)

Peter Champelli and Carl Churchill/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

In recent years, China has also rapidly expanded its surface fleet. It now exceeds the U.S. fleet by number of ships, although China’s ships are generally smaller and less sophisticated. In response, a larger percentage of the U.S. Navy has been deployed to the Pacific, including some of America’s most advanced ships and aircraft. The U.S. has also increased the tempo of naval operations in the region and deepened coordination and training with allied fleets, such as Japan.

The U.S. also needs new strategies below the waves to face a more potent adversary, said Christopher Carlson, a former U.S. Navy officer. The U.S. needs far more resources, such as patrol aircraft and attack submarines, to locate, track and potentially target a new generation of quieter Chinese submarines, he said.

“The implications for the U.S. and our Pacific allies will be profound,” he said.

Simulations of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan conducted by American military analysts often assume U.S. submarines would try to sink ships in the attacking Chinese fleet. The destruction of Chinese ships could help blunt the invasion and enable Taiwan to better defend itself, some of the simulations show, but a greater threat to U.S. submarines would complicate that task. 

Even getting close to the Taiwan Strait might become more precarious. China’s nuclear-powered attack submarines could be assigned to a hunter-killer role seeking U.S. and allied submarines to the east of Taiwan, said Brent Sadler, a former U.S. submarine officer who is now senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a think tank based in Washington, D.C.

Hard to hunt

An indication of the rising stakes in countering China’s submarine fleet came in March, when Gen. Anthony Cotton, head of U.S. Strategic Command, said during a congressional hearing that China had deployed new missiles on its ballistic-missile submarines that could hit targets deep inside the U.S. while remaining close to China.

Keeping track of these Chinese submarines is one of the primary roles of the U.S. Navy and its attack submarines in the Asia-Pacific region.

One book published by a former PLA officer in 2020 suggests new Chinese attack submarines will have their engines mounted on shock-absorbing rafts to better damp vibrations. China is working on other quieting technology for submarines, such as new hull materials and more-efficient nuclear reactors for propulsion, academic research papers show.

Based on the available information, Carlson, the former U.S. Navy officer, anticipates the new Chinese submarines will be as quiet as Russian Akula I-class attack submarines commissioned from the 1990s—a series still in service today that marked a leap forward in stealth and speed from previous Russian submarines.

“Finding a boat this quiet is going to be really hard,” he said. 

Submarine-launched missiles rolled through Beijing during a 2019 parade. PHOTO: MARK SCHIEFELBEIN/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Much of China’s current submarine technology comes from reverse-engineering diesel-electric submarines bought from Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Closer military ties between Moscow and Beijing in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have spurred concerns that Russia may be willing to share some of its advanced submarine technology with China, but there have been no clear indications of such transfers.

To be sure, a new generation of Chinese nuclear-powered submarines is years away from active duty, and significant progress in the program isn’t guaranteed. Submarines often go through several prototype stages over a period of years before final designs are reached.

The new attack submarine launched by China this year could be a test model that isn’t intended for deployment. Entire projects can be scrapped for technical, economic or political reasons. The U.S. Seawolf-class submarine program was dropped in 1995 because of high costs.

There is also little chance that China will catch up with the U.S. in submarine technology soon. The latest U.S. Virginia-class attack submarines and the planned Columbia-class ballistic-missile submarines are a generation ahead of China’s capabilities in terms of noise-reduction technology, propulsion, weapons systems and other areas, military analysts say.

Nuclear-powered attack submarines

U.S.

Virginia-class (Version 5)

China

Shang-class (Type 093A)

Entered service: 2004

Top Speed: +29 mph*

Crew: 132

Length: 377 feet

Entered service: 2006

Top Speed: 35 mph

Crew: Around 100

Length: 351 feet

Propeller

Pump-jet

propulsion

system

Virginia Payload Module (each able to launch seven Tomahawk missiles)

Four torpedo tubes

Anti-ship

missiles,

torpedoes

Virginia Payload Tubes (each able to launch six Tomahawk missiles)

*Over 25 knots (28.8 mph). Exact speed not available.

Note: The Virginia Payload Module is a planned component for future submarines.

Source: U.S. Navy (U.S.); Naval-Technology.com (China)

Peter Champelli/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

But China doesn’t necessarily need to match U.S. capabilities. By making submarines that are much harder to detect and producing them at scale, it can stretch the resources used by the U.S. military to keep track of them. And any war would likely be fought in China’s backyard, the area it knows best.

To patrol the region, the U.S. rotates squadrons of P-8 aircraft through a base in Okinawa, Japan. One recently retired U.S. anti-submarine warfare officer said that a lack of American anti-submarine patrol aircraft based permanently in the Asia-Pacific region would be a handicap.

“We know where their subs are now,” he said. “But continuing to do so depends on having the assets to keep track of them.”

The fast-attack submarine USS Connecticut visits a U.S. base at Yokosuka, Japan. PHOTO: MCC BRETT COTE/ASSOCIATED PRESS

China’s ‘Underwater Great Wall’

In 2017, the Chinese government approved plans to build sensor networks over five years in the South China Sea and East China Sea, where Taiwan is located, to monitor the regions in real time.

China’s underwater sensor networks echo the Sound Surveillance System, or Sosus, developed by the U.S. during the Cold War to detect Soviet nuclear submarines through a network of hydrophones fixed to the sea floor.

A few years ago, China also placed listening devices on the seabed near the island of Guam, home to a major American submarine base.

The growth of Chinese underwater sensor networks means U.S. submarines can no longer rely solely on their stealth capabilities to avoid detection in the South China Sea and other areas close to the Chinese mainland, said Bryan Clark, a former naval officer who is now a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, a think tank based in Washington, D.C.

Clark said the U.S. needs a new strategy to confuse or suppress China’s undersea sensors, by deploying unmanned submersible craft that can jam the surveillance systems, act as decoys or destroy sensors.

China is under pressure to improve its sub-hunting capabilities as the U.S. works with allies to boost its undersea advantage. In 2021, the U.S. and U.K. said they would help Australia build its first nuclear-powered submarines.

The new Australian submarines aren’t expected to be deployed until the 2040s, so as a stopgap measure, the U.S. agreed this year to sell as many as five U.S. Virginia-class nuclear-powered attack submarines to Australia in the 2030s. The U.S. also pledged to rotate attack submarines through a base in western Australia by 2027 to help its military gain proficiency in maintaining nuclear submarines. 

A Chinese government spokesman said in March the plans to boost Australia’s capabilities would lead “down the path of error and danger.”

USS North Carolina, a Virginia-class submarine, docks in Western Australia. PHOTO: TONY MCDONOUGH/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

U.S. behind schedule

China’s recent advances have also highlighted a shortfall the U.S. is facing in its own submarine fleet. The Navy has started moving more submarines to the Asia-Pacific region and says it needs 66 nuclear-powered attack submarines to meet global missions. The U.S. has 67 nuclear-powered submarines, but only 49 of those are attack submarines, a result of a decline in construction after the end of the Cold War.  

Its fleet of attack submarines is forecast to decline to 46 boats by 2030 as older submarines are retired, before recovering to 50 in 2036 if an annual construction rate of two submarines can be reached, up from the current rate of 1.2. In the Navy’s most optimistic scenario, it would have 66 attack submarines in 2049.

China currently has six nuclear-powered attack submarines. Carlson, the former U.S. Navy officer, predicts that once China has settled on new designs it could triple the current U.S. annual production rate. In its annual assessment of the Chinese military published this month, the Pentagon forecast China would have a total fleet of 80 attack and ballistic-missile submarines by 2035, up from 60 at the end of last year.

Submarine fleets, U.S. vs. China

Nuclear

Diesel-electric

China

U.S.

67 total

60 total

Ballistic missile

Attack

Guided missile

Source: U.S. Navy (U.S. fleet); Pentagon China Military Power Report 2023 (Chinese fleet)

Peter Champelli/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

China’s main base for nuclear-powered submarines is on the southern island of Hainan. To accommodate more submarines, China added two new piers at the base this year, on top of four existing piers. Two submarines can dock at each pier.

Hainan is at the northern edge of the South China Sea, a maritime region where China has built military bases on artificial islands and has some of its most extensive surveillance systems, both above and below the sea surface.

Sadler, the former U.S. submarine officer, said China’s development of more advanced submarines added to the likelihood of a military showdown with the U.S. this decade.

“Regardless, the U.S. submarine force will certainly be in greater demand than ever before across the wider Pacific,” he said, “and with narrowing margins of advantage over its chief adversary.”

Write to Alastair Gale at alastair.gale@wsj.com

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com