Quotes of the Day:
"A new year is a gift, a small piece of infinity, to do with as we will."
-Jean Hersey
"Tomorrow is the first blank page of a 365 page book.
Write a good one."
- Brad Paisley
"Paymasters come in only two sizes: one sort shows you where the book says that you can't have what you've got coming to you; he second sort digs through the book until he finds a paragraph that lets you have what you need even if you don't rate it."
- Robert Heinlein - The Door into Summer
1. Russia test-fires new hypersonic Tsirkon missiles from frigate, submarine
2. Did the Pentagon's Global Posture Review Disappoint?
3. Russia, China beating US in ‘gray-zone’ warfare
4. Biden, Putin Warn of Danger to Relations if Crisis Over Ukraine Escalates
5. Dollar’s year of living dangerously awaits
6. Give Your Money. Give Your Time. Don’t Tell Anyone. by Arthur C. Brooks
7. What Putin Learned From the Soviet Collapse
8. The Biden Administration And The Future Of ‘No First Use’ – Analysis
9. Myanmar Junta Orders Judges to Ignore Correspondence From International Courts
10. Stop Starving Afghanistan
11. ‘Done deal’: Philippines allocates funds to buy India’s BrahMos missile system
12. Parents selling children shows desperation of Afghanistan
13. Department of Defense Releases Tools to Mitigate the Threat of the Omicron Variant of Coronavirus Disease 2019
14. Bad Idea: Relying on “Integrated Deterrence” Instead of Building Sufficient U.S. Military Power
15. A Year In, Biden’s China Policy Looks a Lot Like Trump’s
16. War, Coup, and Famine: 6 Global Conflicts to Watch Out For in 2022
17. Marines say they're being 'crushed' over vaccine refusal: 'A political purge'
18. America’s Militarist Drift in the Indo-Pacific
19. Army SOF to continue work in Pacific, Eastern Europe in 2022
20. A truly 'patriotic education' requires critical analysis of US history
1. Russia test-fires new hypersonic Tsirkon missiles from frigate, submarine
As an exclamation point for the Biden-Putin phone call?
Russia test-fires new hypersonic Tsirkon missiles from frigate, submarine
Russian President Vladimir Putin attends a meeting with Kazakh former President Nursultan Nazarbayev on the sidelines of an informal annual summit of heads of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) in Strelna on the outskirts of Saint Petersburg, Russia December 28, 2021. Sputnik/Evgeny Biyatov/Kremlin via REUTERS/File Photo
MOSCOW, Dec 31 (Reuters) - Russia test-fired around 10 new Tsirkon (Zircon) hypersonic cruise missiles from a frigate and two more from a submarine, Interfax news agency said on Friday citing northern fleet.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has lauded the weapon as part of a new generation of unrivalled arms systems.
Putin has called a missile test, conducted last week, "a big event in the country's life", adding that this was "a substantial step" in increasing Russia's defence capabilities.
Some Western experts have questioned how advanced Russia's new generation of weapons is, while recognising that the combination of speed, manoeuvrability and altitude of hypersonic missiles makes them difficult to track and intercept.
Putin announced an array of new hypersonic weapons in 2018 in one of his most bellicose speeches in years, saying they could hit almost any point in the world and evade a U.S.-built missile shield.
Reporting by Vladimir Soldatkin, Editing by Louise Heavens
2. Did the Pentagon's Global Posture Review Disappoint?
I am pleased that there do not appear to be any withdrawals from our overseas stationed forces. But I think it is unfair to criticize the lack of repositionsing of them particularly in the Asia-Pacific. Host nations have a vote on what happens on their sovereign territory.
But I do not think we can make a complete analysis until we have a new NDS. Then we can compare the strategy and the global force posture to support it.
Did the Pentagon's Global Posture Review Disappoint?
The review has come under fire from critics who maintain that the Pentagon has failed to make the tough strategic choices necessary to put the military on the path to a sustainable global footing.
Here's What You Need to Remember: A press statement released on Monday announced the review’s conclusion, the Defense Department said that the “review directs additional cooperation with allies and partners to advance initiatives that contribute to regional stability and deter potential Chinese military aggression and threats from North Korea.”
The Department of Defense has announced the completion of its Global Posture Review. The full review will not be made available to the public, said Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Mara Karlin, citing security concerns relating to classified materials.
The study did not call for any major shifts in U.S. military strategy. Instead, it reaffirmed prior defense commitments and policy decisions made by the Biden administration. “[The Indo-Pacific] is the priority theater. China is the pacing challenge for the department,” the senior defense official reportedly said during a Monday briefing. “I think you’ll see a strong commitment in the forthcoming NDS [National Defense Strategy] as well that will guide further posture enhancements.”
A press statement released on Monday announced the review’s conclusion, the Defense Department said that the “review directs additional cooperation with allies and partners to advance initiatives that contribute to regional stability and deter potential Chinese military aggression and threats from North Korea.” Karlin noted that the Biden administration continues to “remain concerned” about North Korea’s “problematic and irresponsible behavior,” adding that this issue will be a “robust topic of dialogue” during Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s upcoming visit to Seoul. The Pentagon statement called for rotational aircraft deployments in Australia, as well as “enhancing infrastructure in Australia and the Pacific Islands.”
The review reportedly stresses the need to continue the U.S. military presence in Germany, with the Biden administration poised to rescind former President Donald Trump’s cap of twenty-five thousand active-duty force cap in that country. Austin said in April that the Pentagon seeks to station an Army Multi-Domain Task Force and a Theater Fires Command, totaling five hundred personnel, in Germany.
The review has come under fire from critics who maintain that the Pentagon has failed to make the tough strategic choices necessary to put the military on the path to a sustainable global footing. The Quincy Institute’s Kelley Beaucar Vlahos characterized the review as little more than an affirmation of the status quo, with the Pentagon seemingly doubling down on maintaining the U.S. military footprint in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. “So far as we can tell (the entire product won’t be released to the public), the results of the Global Posture Review range from unimaginative to pitiful,” wrote defense expert and foreign affairs columnist Daniel DePetris. “For those who strongly believe that the military is overstretched, performing too many tasks, and guided by an ingrained assumption that American primacy in a multipolar world is still appropriate, this was a disappointment.”
Mark Episkopos is a national security reporter for the National Interest.
Image: U.S. Army, Flickr.
3. Russia, China beating US in ‘gray-zone’ warfare
More from Erik Prince.
We need a superior form of political warfare: An American way of political warfare. PMCs have value and their place but they cannot lead a political warfare strategy or conduct an irregular warfare campaign. These are inherently governmental functions. But PMCs can provide appropriate tactical support from logistics to operations. Yes, the Flying Tigers is a great example of American imagination and creativity. But let's not glorify mercenaries of the modern era with false equivalencies to historical examples.
Russia, China beating US in ‘gray-zone’ warfare
Blackwater founder argues that America needs unconventional hybrid strategies to obviate big wars, and addresses the morality of the mercenary
Few are more familiar with the private military contractor, or PMC, sector than Blackwater founder Erik Prince.
Despite his strong advocacy of private, rather than national militaries, and his passionate criticism of US defeats in recent campaigns – – Prince considers himself a US patriot.
Given this, he is concerned about America’s eroding capabilities in unconventional conflict – capabilities that could, feasibly, contain combat before it spirals up to the state-versus-state level.
While the CIA effectively managed proxy wars in the 1970s and1980s using non-state assets, Prince reckons America’s competitors are now more effective players on the global gray-zone chessboard than is the US.
Pawns in the game include such usefully deniable assets as Moscow’s non-flagged soldiers, active in Crimea, Ukraine, Syria and elsewhere, and Beijing’s “Maritime Militia,” active in the South and East China Seas.
“The Chinese and the Russians have been using a hybrid capability to constantly up the amount of pressure that they can exert and the influence they can garner, while still falling just below the threshold of response by the United States,” he said. “That’s an effective use of hybrid capability and until the United States gets smarter and more synched to respond to those things, that model of foreign policy will, I think, continue to be exploited by [Russian President Vladimir] Putin and the Chinese Communist Party.”
Blackwater founder Erik Prince. Photo: Erik Prince
From Russia, without love
The most high-profile of current Russian PMCs is engaged in this “below-the-threshold” activity.
Wagner Group – or Gruppa Wagnera, named after the fighting name of its Russian founder and, in turn, the composer of many martial operas, Richard Wagner – “can effectively extend the reach of Russian state-directed foreign policy while operating as a commercial entity. They’re really not a direct arm of the government,” Prince said.
Wagner is one of the most shadowy and dangerous PMCs on earth. Reporters who have attempted to cover it have met grim fates, and for human rights abuses.
Prince reckons the firm is effective and wide-ranging, both geographically and operationally.
Citing Wagner presence in both north and sub-Saharan Africa, Prince said, “they provide a spectrum of services.” While a useful cloud of opacity shrouds their sponsorship and direction, they operate in resource-rich locations.
“The Wagner guys are performing as a resource-seeking company. I don’t know that they have any state sponsorship per se, they might have some government contracts here and there,” Prince said. “But when they go to the Central African Republic, or they go to Mozambique, or they go to Syria, they are seeking hydrocarbons, they’re seeking gold, they’re seeking minerals.”
It is strongly alleged by media that Wagner has also been engaged in the coal-rich, Russian-speaking Donbass republics that have broken away from Kiev’s governance. It was a potential resource grab in Syria that led to the biggest news storm ever to break over Wagner.
That happened when the PMC, highly unusually, raised its head above the threshold – triggering a kinetic US response.
In February 2018, a battlegroup of pro-Damascus forces, complete with armor and artillery, and led or manned by – reports are contradictory – Wagner contractors, advanced on an oil field near Khasham, on the Euphrates. The area was held by Syrian Democratic Forces, backed by the United States. In the clash that followed, rolling US air strikes decimated the attackers. The number of Russian contractors killed is unknown; estimates range from the tens to the hundreds.
“They were going after an oilfield which had been producing up to 400,000 barrels a day. They wanted to capture that oil production and sell it,” Prince alleged. “There were some US Special Operations Force guys at that base, and they weren’t leaving. They hammered the hell out of them.”
That rare clash has not been repeated. However, Western-facing operations originating from the Russian domain are not limited to Wagner’s warriors – and these cloudier activities are exerting a far greater dollar price.
“When you look at the ransomware attacks that continue to plague the United States, and the West, about 60% of those are traced back to actual IP addresses in Russia,” he said.
Prince, who likes to reach back into history, seizes on to a parallel.
“Effectively, Russia is behaving as the old mythical pirate port of Tortuga, where the pirates would come back for re-provisioning,” he said. “You have ransomware gangs operating from there, that are garnering tens of millions of dollars of earnings by plaguing the West.”
Arguing that “the West has been slow on the uptake in terms of defending itself and in preventing those kinds of very real, very expensive attacks,” he cited successful breaches of cyber security on energy pipelines and beef processors: “The litany is long and continual.”
But are these hybrid war operations? Or simply cyber criminals at work? Prince concedes that much is opaque.
“These kinds of cyber ransomware attacks in some cases are maybe sponsored or encouraged by a state, but in many cases, it’s just criminals operating in a truly ungoverned gray area,” he admitted.
Even so, the military risks are real and the US Armed Forces may not be handling them effectively.
In a high-profile resignation in September, the US Air Force’s first-ever software chief, Nicolas Chaillan quit. , he was frustrated with bureaucratic inefficiencies and silos dividing different areas of the armed forces.
‘He said, ‘Well, we are losing, we have lost, we’re not going anywhere, and I’m quitting,’” Prince said. “That was a pretty amazing statement.”
Transitioning that learning from the military to the private sector, Prince added, “Large organizations have to be on their game, and they depend on the private sector. They’re not going to depend on the government.”
While Prince is wary about labeling cyber security firms PMCs, when it comes to offensive use of cyber capabilities he – like many Americans – points the finger across the Pacific.
Russia-backed separatist fighters in Ukraine. There is considerable opacity about the identify, origin, leadership and payment of many of these unflagged troops. Photo: US Mission to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe
Chinese strengths …
“China is another one that’s been very, very offensive and effective with their cyber attacks to steal intellectual property from defense contractors,” he said. He adds, “Or, really, any tech.”
While US industries have long bewailed Chinese theft of IP, Chaillan, after his resignation from his US Air Force position, warned Americans that China is winning the AI race – a race whose ramifications extend beyond the industrial space and into the security arena. Chaillan told Forbes that the convergence of physical and virtual “is the next defense battle ground for the US and especially China in the next 10 years.”
China has been successful not just at capturing tech, but also capturing terrain – notably in the South China Sea. There a deniable, PMC-style force has, Prince alleges, been operating with extreme effectiveness: China’s
While Beijing may ostensibly say, “’That’s just a fishing fleet!’ the reality is, it’s very much under the control of the CCP, or the PLA,” Prince said of allegedly state-controlled fishing fleets, which deploy to sensitive waters. “They’ve used that to seize and occupy islands belonging to the Philippines and I think that’s a trial run for what they would do to some of the smaller Taiwanese islands – to see what the threshold of responses from the United States is going to be.”
He warns that this kind of force is exactly what the Pentagon’s conventional assets – notably, its nuclear submarine, naval aviation-centric blue-ocean fleet – are unprepared to respond to.
“Is the US going to send an aircraft carrier in to try to retake an island that was garrisoned by 100 Taiwanese soldiers?” he asked. “Probably not! So China advances their places, their chess pieces on the map.”
And he claims that it is US ineffectiveness, rather than simply Chinese aggression, that is at play in contested Asia waters.
Prince, in 2014, founded and listed Frontier Services Group, a security, aviation, and logistics company partially owned by CITIC Group, a Beijing-owned fund. That offered him the opportunity to travel in, and meet senior executives, in various sectors across China.
One of those was the CEO of a state-owned enterprise in the harbor and dredging sector that had been engaged in Beijing’s build-up on disputed reefs and islands in the South China Sea.
“He said it had never been part of [Beijing’s] strategic plan or even wish-list to build those islands,” Prince recalled. “But they found the Barack Obama administration to be so easy, so vapid on the matter, that they just went for it.”Once the assets were in hand, any pretense of non-state intervention was ditched.
“They promised, ‘Well, they’re just commercial and we’re not going to militarize them,’” Prince said. “Of course, now they’re militarized with radars, and missiles and aircraft and all the rest.”
The fait accompli represents a major – and bloodless – strategic win for China.
ASEAN is virtually toothless, while American counters have been largely restricted to “freedom of navigation” operations – which do nothing to challenge actual occupation/ownership of the bases.
Prince is scathing about American failures to formulate proportionate responses. This inability at creative, below-the-radar counters is particularly problematic given the flashpoint status of the Taiwan Strait.
“Unless the United States gets more innovative in their own options to push back hard, in an unconventional way that does not involve an aircraft carrier and the risks that it takes to escalate into a nuclear war, then that kind of salami slicing will continue aggressively,” he said.
Yet while Beijing may have been effective at operating offensively in the cyberspace and the South China Sea, Prince sees defensive vulnerabilities emerging as China expands its global reach.
A Japanese Coast Guard vessel chases a Chinese fishing boat near the disputed Senkaku/Diaoyutai Islands in November 2011. It is widely alleged that Beijing is weaponizing fishing fleets for strategic ends in disputed waters. Photo: AFP /Japan Coast Guard / Jiji Press
… Chinese weaknesses
With Beijing’s Belt-and-Road initiative spanning multiple unstable regions in Africa, South Asia and elsewhere, the problem arises of physically securing assets and personnel. In this area of operations, Beijing is hampered both by its lack of long experience in overseas ventures and its bureaucratic modus operandi.
“I would say I’m not overwhelmed, or impressed by their [security] capability at all,” Prince said. “It continues to be a huge vulnerability for them.”
One problem seen in BRI activities on distant shores is overt Sinicization.
“I would say it’s an operational paradigm deficiency,” he said. “They take everything with them from China: When they build a mine, or an oilfield project or something, they take the laborers, the cook, the guy who cuts hair. And so it really enrages the locals, because they’re not getting the employment, their crops aren’t getting purchased.”
In this, he offers some rare praise for Western practice.
“One thing the West has had to do a good job at, is community relations,” he said. “Because, you know, that Western company not only has to answer to shareholders, but other civil society groups that monitor if they’re not being a good citizen.”
Prince’s observation is that African countries are “reaching out for Western development and Western capital.” But, he says, “The Chinese do ‘black bag’ diplomacy very well – and they will pay off the senior officials in a country, and load up the debt on that country.”
Prince – like other critics of Chinese BRI activities – thinks hostility is mounting. “These are very, very sensitive areas, right, and this is causing some local resentment,” he said.
In Pakistan, 14 Chinese have been killed – one bomb blast, one gun attack – and protection appears inadequate.
“They hire some of the normal Western guard services that have local affiliates in those countries,” he said. “And in a lot of cases they’re trying to develop Chinese guard services.”
The latter are problematic as the habitual rules of engagement that work within the Chinese domestic environment will not transition to the more lawless frontier spaces that BRI traverses.
“The idea of Chinese guard services being armed is a very alien concept: They are literally gun shy,” Prince said. Citing policing practices in China, he said, “One guy can carry the pistol, the other guy has to carry the magazine, and they have to call back to headquarters to ask permission to hand the magazine to the guy with the gun. This is in the middle of a shootout!”
He warns that Beijing may collide with the same problem that led to Western defeat in Afghanistan: Over-reliance on corrupt local players.
“A lot of [Chinese security efforts are] almost government-to-government; these deals that they make depend on local military forces,” he said. “When you are making that deal, it is with a military force that doesn’t really exist – because the men are not paid on time, they have barely any training, there’s no accountability for the weapons – so it’s no wonder that at the first sign of any kind of real attack, those guys run, and then you’re left with an unguarded asset that you’ve spent billions of dollars on.”
Afghan security personnel and militia fighting against Taliban stand guard in Enjil district of Herat province on July 30, 2021. Photo: AFP / Hoshang Hashimi
The morality of the mercenary
While he discussed Chinese, Russian and US capabilities, Prince declined to discuss the broader competitive landscape of the PMC sector.
“Basically, so what you’re asking me is to give market intelligence to all my competitors, right?” he asked, laughing.” Pretty much for free?”
It is a field in flux, but unquestionably, there was a time when the sector was swimming in cash.
In 1997, Prince founded Blackwater, which would go on to become arguably the leading PMC in the West after the US waded into a two-front, long war against Islamic terrorists and local insurgents in both Iraq and Afghanistan in the 2000s.
In those physically dusty and morally fuzzy struggles, Washington wielded a professional military that was smaller in manpower terms than the conscript forces that had fought the Korean and Vietnam Wars. However, it also controlled the treasury of the world’s richest economy.
To fill the gaps of its over-stretched military, Washington outsourced services, ranging from personal security to ration delivery, to Blackwater and multiple competitors. That supposedly freed up the public sector military to do the fighting – albeit with questionable strategies.
While that struggle was underway the dollars flowed in, in tranches of tens of millions, to the private sector.
Blackwater would guard US diplomats and diplomatic compounds in Iraq – and in the US, even deployed rescue teams during Hurricane Katrina. But it won notoriety when a group of contractors were killed in Fallujah in 2004, leading to a costly battle in the city being fought by US Marines. Infamy followed in 2007 when Blackwater contractors killed 14 Iraqi civilians, raising questions over the ethics and accountabilities of PMC use – questions which remain unanswered.
Though profit-seeking military forces may be as old as conflict, they have likely never faced as many legal and ethical questions as they do today. On the moral questions hanging over the sector, Prince is florid.
“Take cancer,” he said. “Doctors have to do difficult things, like cutting out cancer, and radiation, and chemotherapy. And we thank them for trying to heal a bad situation.”
He extended his argument to conflict geographies, citing the deployment of South African PMC Executive Outcomes to Sierra Leone to take on the hyper-violent Revolutionary United Front, or RUF, militia, in 1995.
“They were not even driven by jihad, there were just criminal gangs who had perfected ‘long sleeve’ or ‘short sleeve’ amputations, or locking people in churches and burning them,” Prince said.
Having suffered such depredations, local civilians cheered arriving contractors.
“You know what? If they want to call us mercenaries for doing that – fine! I wear that title with pride!” Prince said. “And those credentialed senior military officers and so-called defense experts typing on their computers, throwing scorn on people who solve problems like this – well! I’d say they should go interview the people that have been rescued from that kind of affliction.”
He reaches back into history to offer one more example of a PMC that fought in the greatest war in history, with US government backing, and won the plaudits of perhaps the most iconic figure in that struggle.
“Since this is the Asia Times, I think it’s appropriate to point out the most famous, and some of the most effective, private military contractors of the last century,” he said.
The “Central Aircraft Manufacturing Company” was manned by American PMCs who deployed to Nationalist China, which lacked air assets, eight months before the United States officially joined the war against Japan in December 1941. Its personnel came from US uniformed services; they joined under an executive order signed by President Franklin Roosevelt.
Once battle commenced, the CAMC became known as The Flying Tigers. “They racked up kill ratios that were lauded even by Winston Churchill,” Prince said.
The unit represents “a recent and very practical application where a national power could not do something – because of politics, in this case,” Prince said. In the absence of national response, the Flying Tigers, “did a hell of a good thing.”
To read the full, unedited text of Prince’s interview with Asia Times,
While many consider modern PMCs to be dangerous and unaccounantable ‘dogs of war,’ Erik Prince likes to compare them to the World War II ‘Flying Tigers – contracted US airmen who fought for Nationalist China before the US declared war upon imperial Japan. Photo: Sino-American Aviation Heritage Foundation
4. Biden, Putin Warn of Danger to Relations if Crisis Over Ukraine Escalates
Excerpts:
Dara Massicot, a Rand Corp expert on the Russian military, said that Russia’s troop deployments have left the Kremlin with a range of diplomatic and military options as it seeks to pry concessions from Washington and NATO.
“They are creating this artificial sense of urgency. A lot of their demands are years old. They are using military force to underscore the point. They are trying to set the pace for negotiations and force concessions,” she said. “It is almost like Ukraine is the hostage.”
Biden, Putin Warn of Danger to Relations if Crisis Over Ukraine Escalates
Moscow has built up troops near Ukraine and issued demands to NATO and the U.S.
WSJ · by Michael R. Gordon and Thomas Grove
Mr. Putin countered that such action would lead to a dangerous rupture in ties between the two countries, a Putin foreign-policy aide said.
“Our president immediately responded, saying that if the West decides ultimately under whatever conditions to introduce such unprecedented sanctions, it could lead to the total breakdown in relations between our countries,” Yuri Ushakov told reporters.
Thursday’s call came at what a senior Biden administration official described as a “moment of crisis” over Ukraine. Mr. Putin requested the call, giving him a chance to speak directly with Mr. Biden before their negotiators meet for a series of talks next month. It was the second time they talked about Ukraine this month, the previous being a two-hour call on Dec. 7.
Since the fall, Mr. Putin has ordered troops to mass near Ukraine in what U.S. and European officials say could be a prelude to an invasion. In doing so, Mr. Putin is trying to force the U.S. and its allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to address Moscow’s objections to the military alliance’s ties with Ukraine, Georgia and other former Soviet states, the current and former officials said.
Both sides described the tone of Thursday’s discussion as serious and substantive. The senior U.S. official, however, said that Washington continues to monitor the deployment of Russian forces in Crimea and near Ukraine.
During the call, the U.S. official said, Mr. Biden outlined two paths that Mr. Putin faces: one of de-escalation and diplomacy, and another in which Russia takes military action against its Ukrainian neighbor and encounters a serious response from the West.
That, Mr. Biden and top officials have said, would include stringent economic sanctions, stepped up military aid to Ukraine and a reinforced U.S. military presence along NATO’s eastern flank near Russia. The Kremlin’s sharp reaction to the warning of sanctions was seen by some U.S. officials as an indication that Moscow appears to be taking that threat seriously.
Mr. Biden has rebuffed Russian demands that the U.S. call a halt to NATO’s eastward expansion and rule out potential membership for Ukraine, a position the U.S. official repeated Thursday.
“Our position is very clear,” the official said. “These are decisions to be made by sovereign countries, obviously in consultation with the alliance and not for others to determine.”
Mr. Putin sparked the current crisis, current and former U.S. officials said, with his troop deployments and demands for security guarantees that would prevent the eastward expansion of NATO and deny membership in the alliance to parts of the former Soviet Union.
“It’s almost as if Putin and the Kremlin were saying: ‘Wait a minute, we’re a nuclear superpower, pay attention to us,’” said Angela Stent, a Brookings Institution fellow and former U.S. national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia. “Key Western players have been distracted, and Putin took the initiative and, in essence, created a crisis where there wasn’t a crisis in order to secure concessions from the West.”
Russia’s foreign ministry this month posted two proposed accords that would redefine European security on its website—a draft treaty with the U.S. and one with NATO nations—after handing them to a senior State Department official. The treaty was released in English and Russian versions and came complete with signature blocks for the two sides.
“You should give us guarantees,” Mr. Putin said on Dec. 23 at his annual press conference. “Now!”
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In the call Thursday, Mr. Putin argued that the U.S. would be acting much the same if Russia was deploying weapons near the U.S. border, Mr. Ushakov said.
Mr. Biden said that the U.S. had no intention of deploying offensive missiles in Ukraine that could strike Russia, Mr. Ushakov added.
A White House official said Mr. Biden made clear that the U.S. was providing only defensive security assistance to Ukraine and wasn’t deploying offensive weapons that can strike Russia. “This was not a new commitment. It was a restatement of our current policy,” the White House official said.
The military assistance the U.S. has provided to Ukraine so far consists of antitank weapons, counter-battery radars, patrols boats and battlefield systems.
Mr. Biden had tried to plot a different relationship with his Russian counterpart. Before his first summit meeting with Mr. Putin in June, Biden administration officials made clear that they were seeking predictable and stable ties with Moscow.
Though the two leaders didn’t resolve major issues at their summit, they expressed interest in maintaining a working relationship and reiterated the formula codified by former President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” That theme, Mr. Ushakov said, also came up in the Thursday call.
Mr. Putin, however, hasn’t been satisfied with the status quo in Europe, which he has said presents a long-term threat to Russian security, and he saw an opportunity to press longstanding demands for a sphere of influence along his country’s periphery.
Though NATO said in 2008 that Ukraine and Georgia would one day be members, the alliance wasn’t moving to fulfill that vow. Russia had annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, and the war between Kyiv and Russian-backed separatists simmered on at a low level.
Moscow has grown increasingly concerned that Ukraine was moving toward the West and perhaps eventual NATO membership. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was cracking down on pro-Russian politicians and media inside his country, giving the Kremlin less leverage on Ukraine’s internal politics.
Ukraine’s military, meanwhile, has by increments been acquiring Western weapons systems and training from NATO members, though it remains far less capable than Russia’s forces.
Dara Massicot, a Rand Corp expert on the Russian military, said that Russia’s troop deployments have left the Kremlin with a range of diplomatic and military options as it seeks to pry concessions from Washington and NATO.
“They are creating this artificial sense of urgency. A lot of their demands are years old. They are using military force to underscore the point. They are trying to set the pace for negotiations and force concessions,” she said. “It is almost like Ukraine is the hostage.”
—Alan Cullison and Nonna Fomenko contributed to this article.
WSJ · by Michael R. Gordon and Thomas Grove
5. Dollar’s year of living dangerously awaits
I will continue to worry about threats to the dollar as the reserve currency. If we lose the reserved currency our economy will collapse and we will not be able to fund our national security apparatus. This could be the major US national security threat.
Excerpts:
True, the dollar’s value versus gold has been falling for more than a decade now. That’s a product of ultraloose Federal Reserve policies flooding the globe with record liquidity. Now, even as the Fed moves to tighten the credit spigot a bit, other monetary powers are pivoting to gold.
The reason is growing concerns that the dollar’s reserve-currency days are over, or at best numbered.
The 30-year bookmark has become a hallmark of 2021. China’s economic growth recently dropped to the lowest levels in three decades. US inflation and Japan’s Nikkei Stock Average both surged to the highest levels since the early 1990s. But the 30-year metric that might matter most is central banks shifting from dollars to gold.
Dollar’s year of living dangerously awaits
The greenback is heading into a precarious year of uncertainty, volatility and moments of existential dread
Central banks around the globe are ending 2021 with the highest gold holdings in 31 years.
Yet the real story as monetary authorities recalibrate foreign-exchange reserve holdings is how the US dollar is on the losing end of these shifts. And in the year ahead, this trend could become a systemic problem.
True, the dollar’s value versus gold has been falling for more than a decade now. That’s a product of ultraloose Federal Reserve policies flooding the globe with record liquidity. Now, even as the Fed moves to tighten the credit spigot a bit, other monetary powers are pivoting to gold.
The reason is growing concerns that the dollar’s reserve-currency days are over, or at best numbered.
The 30-year bookmark has become a hallmark of 2021. China’s economic growth recently dropped to the lowest levels in three decades. US inflation and Japan’s Nikkei Stock Average both surged to the highest levels since the early 1990s. But the 30-year metric that might matter most is central banks shifting from dollars to gold.
According to the World Gold Council, central bank stockpiles of the yellow metal have now increased by more than 4,500 tons over the past decade. At the end of September, such reserves totaled 36,000 tons, a level not seen since 1990.
Might all hell break loose for the dollar in 2022?
Most analysts agree the next couple of months could be kind to the dollar. The Fed’s shift toward tighter policy coincides with the People’s Bank of China pivoting toward monetary loosening.
Investment strategist Manpreet Gill at Standard Chartered Bank speaks for many when he says: “We think the dollar has room for strength at the start of the year.”
But there are at least five headwinds facing the dollar in 2022. And five reasons to worry economist Stephen Roach’s belief that “the dollar’s crash is only just beginning” are looking less hyperbolic by the day. As Roach, former chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia, asks: “Why in the world would you own dollar debt?”
Stephen Roach, the former chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia. Photo: WikiCommons
Five reasons to worry
Let’s count the ways.
One: Fiscal excess runs amok. Donald Trump’s 2017-2021 presidency accelerated the surge in US debt journey toward the $30 trillion mark. President Joe Biden’s infrastructure and social-spending plans come just as US inflation skyrockets. That’s putting upward pressure on US Treasury yields.
Since the 2008 Lehman Brother crisis, global investors have become accustomed to ultralow US yields. One could say, in fact, that markets came to take dollar risks for granted. Yet US Treasury rates tend to be a one-way bet – until they’re suddenly not. As concerns about Washington’s runaway debt collide with surging inflation and a Covid-19 explosion sure to slam the economy, that moment could be soon.
Two: Stock froth is getting irrationally exuberant. It was exactly 25 years ago this month that then-Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan used these words to send a shot across the bow of stock bulls. The equity bubbles of the mid-1990s were a mere fraction of where asset markets are heading into 2022.
For many years, James Glassman and Kevin Hassett wore egg on their faces for writing “Dow 36,000” back in 1999. Yet 22 years and one pandemic later, that’s where the Dow Jones Industrial Average is ending the year. What these dreamers missed was the need for untold trillions of dollars of cash from the Fed, European Central Bank and Bank of Japan to make it happen.
Far from a milestone, the nosebleed heights US equities are at is a warning sign of trouble to come. If the Delta variant of Covid-19 didn’t slam the economy, Omicron is surely about to get the job done. Even with the US facing stagflation and the specter of fresh lockdowns, economist Edward Yardeni calculates the S&P500 is trading 22% above future earnings. Irrational indeed.
Three: the yuan has the momentum. Since June 2020, the yuan has risen more than 10% versus the dollar. It bellied Trump’s claims that China was artificially depressing exchange rates. On his way out the door in late 2020, Trump left Beijing off the US Treasury’s “currency manipulator” list, adding Vietnam instead.
Yet the move by central banks to pivot away from the dollar comes just as Chinese President Xi Jinping’s effort to internationalize the yuan gains traction.
Not everyone agrees with billionaire hedge fund manager Ray Dalio’s belief the yuan will replace the dollar sooner than conventional market wisdom believes. But the Bridgewater Associates founder makes a plausible case that the changing of the guard many pundits hope would never happen may be afoot.
Four: the digital future is now. As Fed Chairman Jerome Powell experiments with tapering and rate hikes, PBOC Governor Yi Gang’s team is about to roll out a digital currency, the first by a major monetary authority.
China’s first-mover advantage matters when it comes to rewriting the future of money. By February, when Beijing hosts the Winter Olympics, the PBOC hopes to have an “e-yuan” ready for circulation. The US, Europe and Japan are lagging far behind.
The more a digital yuan gains global acceptance, the more Xi’s ambitions to increase China’s role in global finance and trade comes to fruition. And the more Washington, Frankfurt and Tokyo will find themselves playing catch-up. And investors – and central banks – might increase their yuan holdings.
Five: America’s bankers call their loans. The cornerstone holders of Washington’s ginormous debt are all in Asia, especially Japan and China. Asia’s top 10 holders are sitting on about $3.5 trillion of US Treasury debt just as inflation surges the most in decades.
Fed Chairman Jerome Powell. Photo: WikiCommons
Questions over Treasury holdings
Reserve currency status is indeed an “exorbitant privilege,” as one-time French finance minister Valery Giscard d’Estaing famously said. With it, though, comes urgent responsibility. Now that inflation is perking up, the Fed needs to ensure it’s getting ahead of things. Otherwise, Washington’s Asian bankers might dump Treasury holdings en masse.
The Fed does have options, says Columbia University economist Willem Buiter. “Simply put,” he says, “the additional federal fiscal deficits must be monetized.”
Buiter notes that in general Team Powell “has done a great job so far” expanding its balance sheet by 70% from March 2020 to January 2021 – from $4.2 trillion to more than $7.4 trillion. The Fed, though, “now must prepare to buy up the federal debt issued by the Treasury to fund its latest fiscal ambitions,” Buiter says.
All told, though, the dollar is heading into a rather precarious year of uncertainty, volatility and more than a few moments of existential dread.
6. Give Your Money. Give Your Time. Don’t Tell Anyone. by Arthur C. Brooks
Thoughts for the New Year.
Give Your Money. Give Your Time. Don’t Tell Anyone.
You can find deep, lasting happiness in a good deed that no one knows you did.
” is a weekly column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness. Click here to listen to his new podcast series on all things happiness, How to Build a Happy Life.
The end of the year isn’t just the holiday season; it’s also charity season. Estimates of charitable giving indicate that at least 20 percent of all gifts are made in December, when our holiday love for humankind conveniently converges with the end of the tax year.
Giving is never a one-way transaction. Donating publicly to a prominent charity might bolster your reputation. Sending a gift to a friend or family member who’s struggling strengthens your relationship, and increases the chances that you’ll get help the next time you need it. At the very least, you might get a thank-you, which feels good.
But if you really want to reap the benefits of giving to others, you need to forgo all these perks. Sure, the thanks, admiration, or praise might give you a quick hit of pleasure. But you’ll get deeper, lasting happiness from a good deed that no one knows you did.
As hard as giving is at times, the fact that it raises our well-being is hardly a new finding. Voluntary giving is one of the fastest and most reliable ways to improve your mood; making it part of your lifestyle can have long-term effects on your life satisfaction. Giving charitably has been shown to stimulate brain activity associated with pleasure and reward. The correlation goes the other way too: In one experiment, artificially raising gift-givers’ blood-oxytocin levels made them 48 percent more generous.
To some thinkers, though, the happiness you derive from giving is meaningless compared with the virtue you create. Maimonides, a Sephardic sage born in Córdoba, Spain, in the 12th century, taught that charity existed on eight levels, arranged by order of virtue. The top level was creating opportunity for others through investment or a job offer. Just below this, however, was “double-blind” charity: giving when you do not know the recipient, and the recipient does not know you. That gift is almost as virtuous if you know who’ll receive it, but not vice versa. Any situation in which the recipient knows the donor’s identity fell lower on the list.
In other words, for Maimonides, private giving was superior to public giving. And because philosophers of his age, influenced by Aristotle and Plato, saw happiness as defined by virtue, you might say Maimonides’s ladder of giving was an assertion that private giving brought more authentic happiness than its public counterpart.
One modern study on the matter shows that Maimonides was right, at least sometimes. Writing in the International Journal of Research in Marketing in 2015, two scholars undertook experiments to see whether publicized or unpublicized donations to charitable causes brought more happiness to the donor. They found that among people with “high moral identity”—people who strongly base their self-definition on their moral values—unpublicized gifts brought roughly 16 percent greater happiness than publicized gifts. For those on the other end of the moral-identity spectrum, there was no significant happiness difference.
The researchers hypothesized that one reason for the difference may be that publicized gifts, in enhancing the donor’s reputation in the eyes of others, can make a self-reflective donor doubt her own motivations, extinguishing the warm glow. This is a secular version of the biblical injunction “Be careful not to practice your righteousness in front of others to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven.”
The implications of all of this are pretty obvious: The many causes asking for your support right now are offering you a quick and easy way to buy some happiness. Take it. But do so privately, or even anonymously. And follow these two tips to make sure your giving really will make you happier:
1. Give more than money.
Cold, hard cash is almost certainly not the only resource you value and can share. Giving away your expertise, energy, and affection can provide large happiness benefits too; for example, researchers have found that volunteering directly improves happiness across cultures and countries. Of course, volunteering anonymously is harder than secretly giving away money. At the very least, however, you can refrain from bragging about it on social media.
Volunteering might even make you more likely to give money, and get happier by doing so. My colleague David Van Slyke and I found in 2005 that, on average, a volunteer can be expected to give $4,000 more in monetary donations each year than a non-volunteer. If you can afford it, volunteer and donate, and don’t take credit for the latter.
2. Use your giving to express yourself.
“Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also,” the scripture teaches. Self-expression is a driver of happiness; the more our work allows us to self-express, for example, the happier we tend to be. Furthermore, researchers have shown that granting people an opportunity for even a little bit of self-expression by offering them a choice (for example, by asking whether they prefer cats or dogs) increases generosity.
If you want to boost both your giving and the happiness it brings, you should look for causes that truly express your values and sentiments, and pass on those that don’t. With roughly 1.54 million nonprofit organizations and at least 331,000 houses of worship, the U.S. alone has plenty to choose from. No studies have looked specifically at self-expression through anonymous giving, but there is no reason to believe that it would not be beneficial too, especially if it reinforces your own values to yourself. Moral self-identity is crucial for well-being.
By now, you might have picked up on a loose thread in the idea that anonymous giving is the surest way to happiness through charity: If you know the connection, your happiness-seeking motive—like the reputation enhancement from public giving—could theoretically eviscerate the purity of giving, and thus wipe out the well-being effect. In other words, have I ruined charity for you by writing this column, kind of like explaining the sleight of hand behind a card trick?
Good news: Even when you know the secret, it still works. As my colleague Michael Norton and his co-authors have shown in their research, “becoming aware of the emotional benefits of prosocial spending [does] not undermine its impact on happiness.” Generosity truly is a win-win.
7. What Putin Learned From the Soviet Collapse
Excerpts:
The long-term economic challenges confronting Russian leaders today are serious, but they are not deterministic of Russia’s future. Throughout Russia’s history as a great power, its per capita incomes have been substantially lower than those of its principal rivals, and it has rarely possessed the broad-based technological capabilities of its peers. Yet Russia’s security-oriented leaders have consistently managed to muster sufficient military power from a relatively backward economy to more than hold their own on the international stage. Russia’s small share of global GDP may make it appear an economic dwarf (especially when using market exchange rates), but these metrics are deceptive, speaking more to economic influence than actual state capacity or a state’s potential to sustain competitions. Russia’s ability to mobilize resources remains substantial and historically enduring.
Those expecting a repeat of the 1980s must recall that zastoi itself did not doom the Soviet system. Economic stagnation prompted Gorbachev to undertake broad systemic reforms, which set off a chain of events that substantially contributed to the Soviet Union’s collapse. However, that outcome was the result of a confluence of events, ideas, and material influences, but most notably the choices made by Soviet elites. Despite slow economic growth, Russia’s present-day leadership favors gradual adjustment of its existing economic approaches over radical reform. Furthermore, it has studiously avoided the kinds of systemic reforms that might undermine the regime’s foundation, its ability to arbitrate among elites, or its capacity to manage change.
Today, Russia’s economic malaise is also far less relevant to Moscow’s ability to pursue its interests overseas or to shape global affairs than it was in the context of the Cold War. Because global politics have changed, and Washington’s main competitor is Beijing, the economic stagnation Moscow currently faces is unlikely to result in a zero-sum decline in power the way it did for the Soviet Union during the latter part of the Cold War. In fact, with the United States locked in a confrontation with China, Russia may find that in spite of a weak economy, it has increasing room to maneuver—and growing rather than declining influence on the global stage. In setting assumptions and expectations about the strategic environment, Washington should ask itself a basic question: After years of economic stagnation, is Russia an easier problem to manage today than ten years ago? If the answer is decidedly negative, then why would said stagnation dramatically ease this geopolitical burden in the coming decade?
What Putin Learned From the Soviet Collapse
To Preserve Its Global Ambitions, Russia Is Managing Its Economic Limits
December 29, 2021
Foreign Affairs · by Richard Connolly and Michael Kofman · December 29, 2021
When the Soviet Union dissolved 30 years ago this month, on December 25, 1991, its end followed decades of economic dysfunction. Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, hoping to implement reforms, referred to the 1970s and 1980s as zastoi, the era of stagnation. Yet though he recognized the problem, Gorbachev couldn’t save the ailing socialist system. Indeed, his failed attempt at systematic reform ultimately led to the Soviet Union’s collapse.
On the surface, Russia’s economy appears similarly dysfunctional today. Per capita incomes have not improved over the past decade. Russia’s share of global output has declined since 2008. And large sectors of the economy remain technologically backward or in desperate need of modernization. The general economic state could once again be described as “stagnation.”
Yet Russian President Vladimir Putin and his government are unlikely to suffer the same fate as their Soviet forebears. Just as Communist Party leaders in Beijing have studied Soviet history in an effort to avert its repetition, so have leaders in the Kremlin. They have learned the lessons of failed Soviet attempts to reverse decline in the 1970s and 1980s, and many key attributes of the Russian economy and Russian economic policy reflect a desire to avoid repeating the Soviet experience under Gorbachev. As the Russian economist Sergei Guriev recently remarked, “Russia’s macroeconomic policy is much more conservative, inflation is under control, there are large reserves, a balanced budget and no external debt,” and as a market economy Russia is “much more efficient and resilient” than the Soviet Union.
To be sure, Russia still struggles to find an economic model capable of generating continued growth and reduced dependency on resource exports. That said, Moscow has managed to fortify itself for a sustained competition with the United States. Rather than a major weakness, the economy represents a durable part of Putin’s strategy for ensuring regime stability, maintaining continuity, and weathering Western-imposed sanctions.
LESSONS OF THE LATE SOVIET ERA
Russian policymakers have drawn lessons from the tumult of the late Soviet experience, as well as the economic disruptions of the 1990s. Oil market crashes in 1986 and 1997 inflicted enormous budgetary shocks upon the Soviet Union and the fledgling Russian Federation. Among policymakers in Moscow, these shocks generated deep-seated fears of the impact that resource market volatility can exert on the financial stability of export-dependent economies.
The creation of new stabilization funds, shortly after Putin’s accession to the presidency in 2000, was a direct response to these anxieties. These funds allowed Russia to accumulate reserves from export earnings that would help it weather the macroeconomic effects of oil price shocks and declining export revenues. Despite a significant drop in oil prices from the highs of the latter years of the first decade of this century, and an economic recession in 2014 and 2015, Moscow has successfully rebuilt its foreign exchange reserves, and in holdings that are less vulnerable to future U.S. sanctions. Consequently, Russia has both adapted to much lower oil prices and built in shock absorbers that make dependency on energy exports much less of a vulnerability.
Despite Russia’s malaise, its policymakers have learned from Soviet leaders’ bungled attempts to manage stagnation.
Under Putin, Russia has also sought to reduce its dependence on imports. Here, too, policy thinking was shaped by the experiences of the late Soviet era, when a chronic failure to produce adequate volumes of strategically vital goods—including consumer staples such as grain as well as high-technology machinery—led the country to rely heavily on imports, increasing its dependence on revenues from oil exports. When the 1986 oil shock hit, one in three loaves of Soviet bread was produced using imported grain.
Russia’s leadership has also absorbed the lesson that financial weakness curtails a country’s freedom of action on the international stage. In the late 1980s, Gorbachev faced limited options when confronted by tumult in the Warsaw Pact and the prospect of German unification. Leading states in the Warsaw Pact were heavily indebted to the West, while Moscow was constrained in its ability to prop up the faltering economies of these satellite communist regimes. Attaining German financial support was also a factor in Soviet acquiescence to German unification.
Subsequently, Russia was, in the eyes of most in Moscow, ignored on foreign policy matters throughout the 1990s. It was a great power in name only. Once Russia’s leadership paid back the country’s debts and reduced the state’s dependence on external finance, it began to restore the country’s global position.
MANAGING STAGNATION
Despite superficial similarities, particularly to the Brezhnev and Andropov periods, in practice the Kremlin today faces the world with an economic system quite different from that which hindered the ambitions of its late-Soviet-era predecessors. And despite Russia’s economic malaise, the policymakers who oversee this system have learned from the Soviet leadership’s bungled attempts to manage socioeconomic stagnation. Several key differences have emerged.
Consider food production. The Soviet Union possessed one of the most inefficient agricultural systems in human history. By the 1980s, a large proportion of the Soviet budget was devoted to subsidizing food production. The Soviet Union was full of paradoxes: a leading producer of agricultural equipment, yet at the same time the world’s largest importer of food, placing huge pressure on the country’s budget and necessitating enormous sales of oil to finance the bulging food import bill. By contrast, Russia today is the world’s largest wheat exporter and is close to becoming a net food exporter as well. Although still dominated by the state, the Russian economy is far more market-based and far less inefficient in vital sectors compared with the Soviet economy.
The Russian leadership is also keen to avoid the profligate military spending of its predecessors. Estimates of Soviet military expenditure vary, but most contemporary analysts place the Soviet defense burden at somewhere between 15 and 25 percent of annual output. Military spending on this scale often left other economic sectors starved of resources. Today, Russia’s overall defense burden is lower than five percent of GDP. This level of military expenditure has been demonstrably sustainable under conditions of low growth and unlikely to bring Moscow to economic ruin. More important, it is not a significant driver of internal economic inefficiencies, nor does it starve other sectors of resources as the Soviet defense burden did.
In addition to the massive military burden borne by the Soviet Union, the country’s leadership funded a hugely expensive foreign policy, competing for leadership of the socialist world with China and against the capitalist world led by the United States. Moscow propped up living standards in Eastern Europe and subsidized client states around the world. In practice, Russia has no such commitments today. Compared with the Soviet foreign policy overstretch of the 1970s, Moscow’s current engagements and relationships overseas are far less costly, and many are more business-driven. Russian elites today are interested not in competitions over ideology but in opportunities for material gains. Russia has focused more on global status than on global leadership and has kept its vital interests closer to home, focusing on neighboring states and in the former Soviet space.
Finally, the Soviet economy in the 1980s faced a systemic crisis in part because of its integration with global oil and grain markets, with the Soviet collapse vividly demonstrating how exposure to international market forces carries risks for economic security. Policymakers in Moscow today are only too aware of these risks, especially since hydrocarbons continue to account for an overwhelmingly large proportion of Russia’s exports (though the economy itself is much more diverse). Ensuring the economic security of the country while managing the risks of integration with the global economy is a crucial component of Moscow’s wider strategy to enhance its sovereignty and independence. Moscow has learned that it must play an active role in key global markets such as oil to shape the external environment to its advantage. At the same time, Russian leaders have buttressed the system to reduce exposure to economic coercive instruments that countries such as the United States wield by virtue of their position and structural influence in the global economy.
CHRONIC ECONOMIC MALADIES
Three interrelated problems confront Russia’s economy today. First, at around 20 percent of GDP, the level of investment is too low to generate broad-based economic modernization. Russia’s leaders openly acknowledge that investment levels of 25 to 30 percent of GDP would need to be sustained over a period of decades for it to become a high-income, technologically competitive country. Second, owing to a host of chronic maladies such as low investment, pervasive rent seeking among patronage networks, and inefficient state-dominated enterprises, the annual rate of economic growth is, at 0.8 percent since 2013, lower than the global average of around three percent. This means that Russia’s share of global economic output is declining and leads to the third problem: declining living standards. Real disposable incomes are now lower than they were a decade ago.
However, owing to a conservative approach to macroeconomic management, these weaknesses do not pose an existential threat to Russia’s leadership. Russia proved adaptable and resilient during the 2008 financial crisis, the more recent 2014–15 recession, and again during 2020’s COVID-19 pandemic–induced global recession. For all its faults, Russia’s policy elite has built a system that is able to weather oil price shocks, recessions, and sanctions better than at any time in the past. When oil prices collapsed in 1986, the Soviet leadership was forced to run huge budget deficits, print money (which caused inflation), and borrow huge sums from international creditors. In 2020, Russia ran a budget deficit of 3.5 percent (half that of European countries) financed almost entirely from its own considerable resources. These domestic resources have also helped Russia adapt to many of the challenges it has faced since Western sanctions were imposed in 2014.
The long-term economic challenges confronting Russian leaders today are serious, but they are not deterministic of Russia’s future. Throughout Russia’s history as a great power, its per capita incomes have been substantially lower than those of its principal rivals, and it has rarely possessed the broad-based technological capabilities of its peers. Yet Russia’s security-oriented leaders have consistently managed to muster sufficient military power from a relatively backward economy to more than hold their own on the international stage. Russia’s small share of global GDP may make it appear an economic dwarf (especially when using market exchange rates), but these metrics are deceptive, speaking more to economic influence than actual state capacity or a state’s potential to sustain competitions. Russia’s ability to mobilize resources remains substantial and historically enduring.
Those expecting a repeat of the 1980s must recall that zastoi itself did not doom the Soviet system. Economic stagnation prompted Gorbachev to undertake broad systemic reforms, which set off a chain of events that substantially contributed to the Soviet Union’s collapse. However, that outcome was the result of a confluence of events, ideas, and material influences, but most notably the choices made by Soviet elites. Despite slow economic growth, Russia’s present-day leadership favors gradual adjustment of its existing economic approaches over radical reform. Furthermore, it has studiously avoided the kinds of systemic reforms that might undermine the regime’s foundation, its ability to arbitrate among elites, or its capacity to manage change.
Today, Russia’s economic malaise is also far less relevant to Moscow’s ability to pursue its interests overseas or to shape global affairs than it was in the context of the Cold War. Because global politics have changed, and Washington’s main competitor is Beijing, the economic stagnation Moscow currently faces is unlikely to result in a zero-sum decline in power the way it did for the Soviet Union during the latter part of the Cold War. In fact, with the United States locked in a confrontation with China, Russia may find that in spite of a weak economy, it has increasing room to maneuver—and growing rather than declining influence on the global stage. In setting assumptions and expectations about the strategic environment, Washington should ask itself a basic question: After years of economic stagnation, is Russia an easier problem to manage today than ten years ago? If the answer is decidedly negative, then why would said stagnation dramatically ease this geopolitical burden in the coming decade?
Foreign Affairs · by Richard Connolly and Michael Kofman · December 29, 2021
8. The Biden Administration And The Future Of ‘No First Use’ – Analysis
This could be one (of many) of the most important strategic decisions of 2022.
Excerpts:
Considering the emerging trend, it can be easily predicted that the US is not going to adopt the NFU notwithstanding the legislation for the purpose introduced by some Democrat Congress members and the open letters sent to Japan or the US politicians. The Administration is also not going to adopt the narrowly or broadly defined ‘sole purpose’. Predominantly, the US policy making community sees ‘sole purpose’ as a sophisticated version of NFU. Some new phrases may be coined and a few new measures may be taken to convey the message that steps towards reducing nuclear risks have been taken. Such recommendatory measures14 are appearing on the websites of different think tanks.
To mitigate apprehensions of its allies, the US ought to exercise Expanded Multilateral Option. If a NFU treaty is concluded and all the nuclear weapon countries become parties to it, this could be an ideal situation. Otherwise, it should approach Russia and other nuclear weapon countries for developing an understanding on NFU, and have an arrangement similar to 1925 Protocol for the Prohibition of the Use in War of Asphyxiating, Poisonous or Other Gases, and of Bacteriological Methods of Warfare, popularly known as the 1925 Geneva Protocol. The allies of US may feel less threatened if a universal protocol exists. As for the use of nuclear weapons against an advanced conventional weapon or chemical or biological attack, it is a remote possibility. It would be better if US allies and opponents of NFU realise this soon.
The Biden Administration And The Future Of ‘No First Use’ – Analysis
eurasiareview.com · by Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA) · December 31, 2021
By Rajiv Nayan*
Will the United States (US) adopt the No First Use (NFU) policy? Those who had followed the Presidential/election campaign of Joe Biden and who generally read the formal and rhetorical statements of the leaders as truth, seemed optimistic. However, a closer scrutiny matched with the harsher reality or dynamics of the world politics and security is required. Biden made statements in favour of NFU during his Presidential elections and even before. He said during the campaign that the US should be pushing for NFU. In this context, he had put special emphasis on no use of nuclear-laden ICBMs (Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles). Biden, in general, expressed his views on it while discussing no exchange of nuclear weapons in the world. He underscored that a policy of NFU could be a step in that direction. He repeatedly talked about nuclear reduction.
After assuming Presidency, Biden seemingly wanted to translate his old personal NFU principles into the US policy, and possibly, as part of its nuclear doctrine. The ideas of nuclear arms control, nuclear security and nuclear disarmament kept featuring in several US official statements and joint statements issued with other countries.1 Even though nuclear arms control as an instrument of nuclear and strategic stability was underlined on many occasions when Russia–US bilateral relationship was discussed2, yet NFU has hardly become a key component of strategic or nuclear stability in the US–Russia partnership.
Admittedly, the 16 June 2021 US–Russia Presidential Joint Statement on Strategic Stability did acknowledge, “Today, we reaffirm the principle that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.”3 The joint statement also underscored the significance of “ensuring predictability in the strategic sphere”, and one of the tools envisaged was diminishing “the threat of nuclear war”.4
Media reports and writings published by Western think tanks inform that in the run-up to the new Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), Biden has tried to do an exercise on NFU as well. Through NPR, it seems, he wants to change the American approach to the use of nuclear weapons. The US government has officially stated on NPR and consultation of allies for it.5 Although no official statement has come regarding the exercise on NFU in the NPR, yet indications coming through the media reports and think tanks tell the world that allies are being consulted on the possible adoption of the NFU policy.
Why is the Biden Administration consulting its allies for its national policy or NPR? It is doing so because of its commitment to preserve a united nuclear alliance and for maintaining its credibility at least in the near future. Biden’s entire campaign was centered on restoring the American leadership in the multilateral settings, including in security matters. The US is supposed to have meticulous consultations with its NATO partners on nuclear and arms control issues. The Administration noted: “We have declared our nuclear deterrents to the defence of [North Atlantic Treaty Organisation] NATO and as long as there are nuclear weapons, NATO will remain a nuclear alliance. Our NATO Allies and partners will always be able to count on us, even as they continue to strengthen their own national forces.”6
The quiet exercise seemingly has not only resulted in some nervous response from the allies who share liberal or security values with the US but has also triggered debate within the policy community of the US and other Western countries on NFU, though this debate has been going on in a subdued manner for a long period. The allies were apparently sent a set of questionnaire to respond. Quite interestingly, even Chinese media like the Global Times7 also joined the debate and reacted to Western media reports.
The Chinese media’s reaction tells a complex story about the unique position of the US in the world. It is one of the two countries which have been possessing more than 90 per cent of the declared arsenals of the world, and a decision about how to use nuclear weapons may have an extraordinary impact on global nuclear thinking and behaviour. China and its media are well aware of America’s hegemonic position even if the unipolar moment for the US is overlooked. China may be a challenger to the US but to influence and shape the world order, China understands that it has to undertake complex entanglement with the American decision-making process, possibly accepting the hierarchy in the global order.
The responses, reactions and debate on NFU have brought to light several issues, some of which are lingering on for decades, some have been discussed in the recent past and others are reflection of the new issues and challenges tossed by the contemporary reality. The status-quoists argue for distancing from the policy of NFU, the arms control and disarmament group favour adopting the NFU, and some contend and predict a middle path in the form of either fundamental purpose or existential threats instead of NFU. In fact, inclusion of nuclear deterrence as the ‘sole purpose’ of nuclear weapons has been an old issue. Earlier the phrase ‘sole purpose’ was considered the middle path and it became quite intense in the run up to 2010 NPR. The Obama Administration somehow found an innovative way to skirt the issue.
The much talked about Financial Times report8 informed that the US allies had objected to the adoption of NFU. The report named some of the allies who opposed the NFU. These were: Australia, Germany, France, the UK and Japan. The basic contention of the allies apparently was that the change of the posture may “undermine long-established deterrence strategies aimed at Russia and China”.9 There is a fear that the adoption of NFU may lead to nuclearisation by the US allies such as Japan and South Korea. Undoubtedly, this fear does not have much basis because the adoption of NFU does not mean the withdrawal of nuclear protection umbrella or extended deterrence.
Some opponents maintain that the NFU is disturbing the allies but American adversaries may yet not find the posture credible.10 Some of the allies apprehend large-scale conventional strike, which they feel may be deterred only by ambiguity regarding the use of nuclear weapons. This will lead to a lose-lose situation for the US. The reports indicate that the US allies expect some kind of pre-emptive nuclear strike from the US, which will not happen if the US adopts NFU. The US nuclear weapons policy to deter large-scale conventional and biological and chemical attacks to reassure its allies and partners does not mean the pre-emptive nuclear strike.
Some argue that China is fast increasing its nuclear arsenals (about 1,000 by 2030) as the 2021 Pentagon report notes, and the US, under START treaty, is limiting its deployable nuclear warheads to 1,50011, which could lead to a difficult security situation. The argument goes that the adoption of NFU or sole purpose will weaken nuclear deterrence as China will consider it a sign of weakness of the US. In such a situation it is believed that instead of reciprocating,12 China will be emboldened. The basic argument is that the removal of strategic ambiguity through NFU will dismantle American nuclear deterrence.
Proponents of NFU argue that by embracing it, the US will steer the world to a low risk, if not ‘no risk’ zone. It may reduce the chance of miscalculation and wrong signalling. NFU is also considered an effective tool to constrain a President like Trump in the future.13 Democrats and a section of the Republican Party dread a future scenario in which a President like Trump has nuclear briefcase and button.
It is assumed that the US NFU policy will set an example for the world, and others may also be forced to imitate. The world will not have to encounter the danger of escalation to a level of nuclear exchange. The common refrain is that despite tall claims of its adversaries, the US has conventional superiority. It can achieve its strategic objectives without provoking any possibility of nuclear escalation. Advocates of NFU claim that the reduction of salience of the use of nuclear weapons may eventually result in realising the redundancy of nuclear weapons and the virtue of nuclear disarmament.
Considering the emerging trend, it can be easily predicted that the US is not going to adopt the NFU notwithstanding the legislation for the purpose introduced by some Democrat Congress members and the open letters sent to Japan or the US politicians. The Administration is also not going to adopt the narrowly or broadly defined ‘sole purpose’. Predominantly, the US policy making community sees ‘sole purpose’ as a sophisticated version of NFU. Some new phrases may be coined and a few new measures may be taken to convey the message that steps towards reducing nuclear risks have been taken. Such recommendatory measures14 are appearing on the websites of different think tanks.
To mitigate apprehensions of its allies, the US ought to exercise Expanded Multilateral Option. If a NFU treaty is concluded and all the nuclear weapon countries become parties to it, this could be an ideal situation. Otherwise, it should approach Russia and other nuclear weapon countries for developing an understanding on NFU, and have an arrangement similar to 1925 Protocol for the Prohibition of the Use in War of Asphyxiating, Poisonous or Other Gases, and of Bacteriological Methods of Warfare, popularly known as the 1925 Geneva Protocol. The allies of US may feel less threatened if a universal protocol exists. As for the use of nuclear weapons against an advanced conventional weapon or chemical or biological attack, it is a remote possibility. It would be better if US allies and opponents of NFU realise this soon.
Views expressed are of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Manohar Parrrikar IDSA or of the Government of India.
*About the author: Rajiv Nayan is Senior Research Associate at the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, New Delhi.
-
2.“Remarks by President Biden on Russia”, The White House, 15 April 2021; “Remarks by President Biden at the 2021 Virtual Munich Security Conference”, The White House, 19 February 2021; “Remarks by President Biden on America’s Place in the World”, The White House, 4 February 2021.
-
3.“U.S.-Russia Presidential Joint Statement on Strategic Stability”, The White House, 16 June 2021.
- 4.Ibid.
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5.David Vergun, “Official Says Input from Allies on Nuclear Posture Review to be Important”, U.S. Department of Defense, 11 June 2021.
-
6.“The New Atlantic Charter”, The White House, 10 June 2021.
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7.“US Should Announce ‘No First Use of Nuclear Weapons,’ With No Strings Attached: Global Times Editorial”, Global Times, 31 October 2021.
-
8.“Allies Lobby Biden to Prevent Shift to ‘No First Use’ of Nuclear Arms”, Financial Times, 29 October 2021.
- 9.Ibid.
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10.“US Nuclear Arms Shift Could Raise Risk of Inadvertent Conflict”, Financial Times, 14 November 2021.
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11.“Letter: ‘Sole Purpose’ Arms Stance Ignores China’s Build Up”, Financial Times, 16 November 2021.
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12.“U.S. Nuclear Declaratory Policy and the Future of Extended Deterrence”, The Heritage Foundation, 7 December 2021.
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13.Van Jackson, “Time for US Nuclear Strategy to Embrace No-First-Use Policy”, Financial Review, 4 June 2021.
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14.Robert Einhorn, “No First Use of Nuclear Weapons is Still a Bridge Too Far, But Biden Can Make Progress Toward That Goal”, Foreign Policy, October 2021.
eurasiareview.com · by Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA) · December 31, 2021
9. Myanmar Junta Orders Judges to Ignore Correspondence From International Courts
The international community must not let this stand. It must act against the junta.
Myanmar Junta Orders Judges to Ignore Correspondence From International Courts
A leaked memo offers some insight into how the military administration views the advancing criminal cases against its top leaders.
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Yesterday, a report emerged that Myanmar’s military junta has ordered its judicial system to refuse any notifications issued by international courts seeking to prosecute senior members of the coup government. The news was broken by the local media outlet Myanmar Now yesterday, citing a leaked memo penned by Tun Tun Oo, a former general who has been appointed the junta’s chief justice.
According to Myanmar Now, the order, issued earlier this week, instructs staff to ignore any warrant or summons sent by the International Criminal Court (ICC), which in 2019 opened a case against regime leaders for genocide in connection with the army’s treatment of the Muslim Rohingya minority. It also told officials not to accept any communications from the Argentinian Federal Court, which last month ruled that it could investigate allegations of war crimes committed by the Myanmar military against the country’s Rohingya minority, following a request from the United Kingdom-based Burmese Rohingya Organisation.
Since the February coup, human rights activists and legal advocates have been busily gathering evidence of war crimes and other atrocities committed by the military junta, in the hope that they might provide evidence for future trials. According to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, the junta has killed at least 1,382 people since the coup, and is employing increasingly savage tactics in a bid to quash the broad-based and rising armed opposition to the coup.
Earlier this month, the Myanmar Accountability Project (MAP) announced that it had submitted evidence to ICC, accusing coup leader Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, of committing crimes against humanity by ordering the “widespread and systematic use of torture.” According to the MAP’s Director Chris Gunness, “The prospects of a conviction are good and we believe that grounds for issuing an arrest warrant against Min Aung Hlaing are overwhelming.”
The coup has also added impetus to long-standing efforts to bring the military top brass to justice for a range of violent atrocities committed across the decades. According to the advocacy group Fortify Rights, the Myanmar armed forces have “forcibly displaced millions of ethnic civilians, razed thousands of ethnic villages, and raped, tortured, killed, and imprisoned untold numbers of people, young and old.” It is also responsible “for committing genocide and crimes against humanity” against Rohingya Muslims in western Myanmar during a series of brutal “clearance operations” in 2016 and 2017.
Such efforts have received the backing of the country’s opposition National Unity Government (NUG), which brings together ousted members of the National League for Democracy (NLD) administration with ethnic minority and civil society representatives. In August, the NUG announced that it had lodged a declaration with the ICC accepting the court’s jurisdiction with respect to all international crimes in Myanmar since 2002. (This came despite the NLD administration’s previous rejection of the ICC’s decision to investigate genocide charges against Myanmar’s military and civilian leaders.)
Previously, since Myanmar was not a party to the agreement, the ICC was restricted to investigating crimes against the Rohingya carried out on the territory of Bangladesh, which is a state party to the Rome Statue that established the court.
In shining a light on the military regime’s internal communications regarding possible international prosecutions, the Myanmar Now report helps illuminate the junta’s views of such efforts, and possibly offers hints of senior leaders’ fear that they might end up on the stand.
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But by revealing the junta’s unsurprising opposition to international prosecutions, it also raises a much-contested question that often lurks behind such efforts: whether the threat of prosecutions, either at the ICC or in another international venue, are more or less likely to force repressive leaders or governments to turn away from their chosen path.
While these advancing criminal cases open up the prospect of long-delayed justice for the Myanmar military’s countless victims, it seems as like as not that the sense of siege produced by the ongoing proceedings will lead the military to redouble its efforts to prevail, whatever the human cost.
Sebastian Strangio
Sebastian Strangio is Southeast Asia Editor at The Diplomat.
10. Stop Starving Afghanistan
Excerpts:
Such emergency relief is not enough. In the short term, Afghans need not just bags of flour but also a viable currency, access to U.S. dollars, and trade financing to supply food for their bazaars. The UN is working on a system for getting Afghan cash to humanitarian agencies and easing the shortages of paper currency in local banks, but this is just a partial solution to the bigger problem of paralysis in the banking sector. The U.S. government should immediately allow Afghanistan’s central bank to do business with the outside world and should signal that it hopes to return the frozen funds to the central bank once the Taliban respect existing Afghan laws that constrain the use of reserves. A phased return of frozen reserves, released in tranches on a trial basis, could easily be audited and monitored.
Emergency relief is not enough.
None of this will happen quickly. The central bank’s assets could remain tangled for years in legal and political tripwires. U.S. policy still prohibits a single penny from going to civil servants in the Taliban government, and removing this prohibition would involve tiptoeing into a political minefield: Western taxpayers might not object to stipends for Afghan teachers, but it’s unclear how they would feel about paying for infrastructure projects. In the meantime, the United States and other donors should answer the UN’s appeal for a mammoth-sized humanitarian response.
It may be easier to write big checks for humanitarians instead of addressing the economic roots of the Afghan crisis. The checks must not be blank, however. Sending billions of dollars into territory ruled by an armed group carries serious risks, and history shows that militants always try to steal aid and extort humanitarian workers. As the UN Security Council debates the upcoming mandate renewal for the UN mission, created two decades ago to support a government in Kabul that no longer exists, it should emphasize the important role the UN can still play in coordinating international civilian efforts. This should include a senior UN official empowered by donors and supported by experts on the ground, who speaks with the Taliban daily to make sure that aid gets delivered to the people who need it and not into the Taliban’s pockets.
These negotiations will require years of slogging. UN officials had initial successes in some parts of Afghanistan in recent months as they persuaded Taliban officials to reopen girls’ secondary schools, but countless similar conversations will be required as the Taliban’s hardline views collide with global goals. In some ways, this might be the best punishment for the Taliban: allowing them to endure the humble task of governing a poor country, suffering the banalities of paperwork and meetings with donors. The Taliban deserve worse, but that does not matter. After generations of suffering, the Afghan people deserve better.
Stop Starving Afghanistan
Why the West Should Release Its Economic Chokehold
During years of talks in Qatar’s glittering hotels, U.S. diplomats warned the Taliban of grim scenarios if the insurgents failed to negotiate peace in Afghanistan. The message was stark: do not seize Kabul at gunpoint, because if you do, your regime will face the brunt of economic isolation, leaving your country penniless. This was not an empty threat. After the Taliban ignored the warnings and charged ahead to victory in August 2021, Western governments responded by halting development aid, freezing state assets, crippling the banks, and allowing sanctions to hamstring the private sector. The resulting economic crisis has pushed more than half of all Afghans toward starvation.
It is reasonable for Western officials to feel justified about exiling the Taliban regime to the economic wilderness. Still, it is a mistake. Even if such a punishment were suitable for the Taliban’s many crimes, isolating Afghanistan is self-defeating and antithetical to Western aims. A more realistic approach would be to work with the new Taliban government for the sake of delivering basic state services, a policy based on calculations of today’s geopolitical interests rather than past wrongs.
The United States and its allies should ease their restrictions and get to work helping revive the Afghan economy. Doing so would reinforce regional stability, stem the drug trade, and reduce the likelihood of another migration crisis. Saving millions of Afghans from destitution might also redeem U.S. prestige after its chaotic withdrawal. The unavoidable side effect would be some degree of assistance for the Taliban regime, but such tradeoffs are a hallmark of realpolitik. Lord Palmerston was correct that nations should have “no perpetual enemies,” even if the British statesman never imagined the policy challenges of dealing with Islamist militants who captured a whole country.
THE UNWISE WEST
Many dreamed of peace in Afghanistan, but few expected it would be such a nightmare. Economists hoped for a “ predicting that the end of the deadliest conflict in the world, which was killing tens of thousands of Afghans each year, might lift the fortunes of the suffering population. Not so. Hunger and poverty following the Taliban’s takeover seem poised to kill more Afghans this winter alone than all the violence did during the past two decades. The scale of the disaster is unthinkably large: 23 million people face acute food insecurity, and one million children risk dying from malnutrition. With Afghanistan having sunk into the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, nobody was surprised when the United Nations requested $4.5 billion for urgent needs in 2022, the largest ever such appeal.
The proximate cause of the downward spiral is not the recurrent droughts, nor the Taliban’s predictable lack of skills for running a modern state, nor the inevitable shock that occurs when a war economy grinds to a halt. Those are significant factors, but the main reason for devastation is the West’s chokehold on the economy. Western politicians fear the criticism that might result from going easy on the Taliban, so they give two contradictory directions on Afghanistan: send aid to avoid calamity, but do not allow any material support for the new government. The results are bizarre. Western officials try to rebuild the banking sector while insisting that the Afghan central bank should remain blocked from the global financial system and deprived of its assets. Thousands of tons of food get delivered to starving people even as economic restrictions make people hungry. Western diplomats push the Taliban to allow girls’ education while their own governments cut off education funding.
Sanctions are having especially perverse effects. The United States and other sanctioning entities have decided to allow pre-existing sanctions on the Taliban to become de facto sanctions on the Afghan government, thereby penalizing the entire population. The United States and the UN Security Council made some small exceptions to allow the sending of humanitarian aid, but they have maintained restrictions on broad categories of economic activity. Businesses are left in the dark about what exactly is permitted, making international banks and suppliers nervous about transactions involving Afghanistan. In turn, local businesses cannot get money out of their bank accounts and make the import deals on which the country depends for food, medicine, and other essentials.
Hunger and poverty seem poised to kill more Afghans this winter than violence did during the past two decades.
This policy is not just a waste of aid dollars—it also undermines Western interests. The consequences are already visible in the growing number of migrants fleeing across borders. In October alone, an estimated 300,000 people left for Iran. Many of these refugees are waiting for spring to thaw the mountain passes into Turkey, so they can travel on to Europe. Soon, Afghanistan’s growing economic crisis will feed the illegal drug trade. Experts predict that Afghan farmers will expand illegal drug production as the economy collapses, churning out methamphetamines in addition to their usual crops of opium and hashish. The profits of this shadow economy benefit the Taliban the most. The burdens of social breakdown, by contrast, fall most heavily on Afghan women and other vulnerable members of society.
Rather than hurting the Taliban, Western donors are undermining the governmental institutions they spent billions of dollars establishing in Afghanistan. The best parts of the West’s mixed legacy in the country—gains in literacy, reductions in maternal mortality—could slip away. In that sense, Afghanistan is not just another miserable country with despotic leaders. Washington and its allies set up the fragile Afghan state that is now crumbling, and the countries that deployed troops to Afghanistan are implicated in the repercussions that will follow. If going soft on the Taliban would result in some bad press or opportunistic political criticism, these downsides would be nothing compared with a man-made famine.
The regional effects of state failure in Afghanistan are hard to predict, but it could threaten the stability of Pakistan, Iran, and Central Asian states, as Afghan civil wars have a history of spilling over borders. Some of these countries spent decades undermining Western policy. And in the case of Pakistan in particular, there will surely be Western officials who will look at the country as it suffers from the consequences of backing the Taliban and feel nothing but schadenfreude. Still, in European capitals, there is a growing nervousness about the effects of Afghanistan’s collapse rippling across the Mediterranean.
DOING RIGHT
A better option would be to work with the Taliban-controlled state to preserve its basic functions: health care, education, central banking, electricity provision, and social programs. Some of the solutions are cheap, even free, and could be implemented immediately. For example, the United States and the UN could clarify that sanctions apply to listed Taliban members and not the Afghan government, a quick and costless way of unburdening the economy. Other measures would be expensive and take years of persistent effort but still represent the most frugal way to slow Afghanistan’s tailspin.
The main responsibility rests with the United States. It remains a major donor, holds the Afghan central bank’s frozen assets, maintains the most consequential sanctions regime, and influences the international financial institutions that have abandoned Afghanistan. Washington should exercise its clout at the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and Asian Development Bank to get these institutions working again in the country. A template for such engagement already exists in parts of Yemen held by Houthi rebels. There, even though the Houthis control all the ministries, development funds flow to civil servants in the public sector, with safeguards to prevent Houthi bosses from getting their hands on the money or interfering with aid programs.
Steps in this direction have already started, with the World Bank releasing some of the $1.5 billion in unspent funds in the Afghanistan Reconstruction Trust Fund, the largest pool of donations for the previous government. The unfrozen money, however, has been allocated only to health funding and food assistance, which are less controversial because they get delivered not by the Afghan government but by UN agencies and nongovernmental organizations.
Such emergency relief is not enough. In the short term, Afghans need not just bags of flour but also a viable currency, access to U.S. dollars, and trade financing to supply food for their bazaars. The UN is working on a system for getting Afghan cash to humanitarian agencies and easing the shortages of paper currency in local banks, but this is just a partial solution to the bigger problem of paralysis in the banking sector. The U.S. government should immediately allow Afghanistan’s central bank to do business with the outside world and should signal that it hopes to return the frozen funds to the central bank once the Taliban respect existing Afghan laws that constrain the use of reserves. A phased return of frozen reserves, released in tranches on a trial basis, could easily be audited and monitored.
Emergency relief is not enough.
None of this will happen quickly. The central bank’s assets could remain tangled for years in legal and political tripwires. U.S. policy still prohibits a single penny from going to civil servants in the Taliban government, and removing this prohibition would involve tiptoeing into a political minefield: Western taxpayers might not object to stipends for Afghan teachers, but it’s unclear how they would feel about paying for infrastructure projects. In the meantime, the United States and other donors should answer the UN’s appeal for a mammoth-sized humanitarian response.
It may be easier to write big checks for humanitarians instead of addressing the economic roots of the Afghan crisis. The checks must not be blank, however. Sending billions of dollars into territory ruled by an armed group carries serious risks, and history shows that militants always try to steal aid and extort humanitarian workers. As the UN Security Council debates the upcoming mandate renewal for the UN mission, created two decades ago to support a government in Kabul that no longer exists, it should emphasize the important role the UN can still play in coordinating international civilian efforts. This should include a senior UN official empowered by donors and supported by experts on the ground, who speaks with the Taliban daily to make sure that aid gets delivered to the people who need it and not into the Taliban’s pockets.
These negotiations will require years of slogging. UN officials had initial successes in some parts of Afghanistan in recent months as they persuaded Taliban officials to reopen girls’ secondary schools, but countless similar conversations will be required as the Taliban’s hardline views collide with global goals. In some ways, this might be the best punishment for the Taliban: allowing them to endure the humble task of governing a poor country, suffering the banalities of paperwork and meetings with donors. The Taliban deserve worse, but that does not matter. After generations of suffering, the Afghan people deserve better.
11. ‘Done deal’: Philippines allocates funds to buy India’s BrahMos missile system
Excerpts:
Hindustan Times had first reported in December 2019 that the Philippines was set to become the first country to buy the BrahMos missile system. Both sides were keen on signing a deal during a proposed visit by President Rodrigo Duterte early in 2021, but the plan fell through because of the widespread disruptions caused by the pandemic.
The Philippine Army’s first Land Based Missile System Battery also has plans to acquire the BrahMos. Russian officials have said India and Russia are working to gradually increase the range of the BrahMos and begin exporting the missile to third countries.
The Philippines zeroed in on the BrahMos after extensive trials and much of the negotiations have revolved around the cost of the system. India had offered a $100-million line of credit to the Philippines for defence purchases.
India has been in talks with several Southeast Asian countries, including Thailand, Indonesia and Vietnam, in recent years to sell them land and sea-based versions of the BrahMos. New Delhi has set an ambitious target of achieving defence exports worth $5 billion by 2025.
‘Done deal’: Philippines allocates funds to buy India’s BrahMos missile system
NEW DELHI: The Philippines is set to become the first foreign customer for the BrahMos cruise missile system jointly developed by India and Russia, with the government in Manila recently allocating 2.8 billion pesos ($55.5 million) for initial funding for the weapon system.
The process for the acquisition of the medium-range supersonic cruise missile by the Philippines armed forces suffered a setback because of the Covid-19 pandemic but is now back on track, people familiar with the matter said on condition of anonymity.
According to the website of the Philippines’ department of budget management, two “special allotment release orders” worth 1.3 billion pesos and 1.535 billion pesos were issued on December 27 to cover the initial funding requirements for the “Shore-Based Anti-Ship Missile System Acquisition Project” of the Philippine Navy.
The people cited above confirmed this allocation was for the BrahMos missile system. They added that a team from the Philippine Navy visited the production unit of BrahMos Aerospace in Hyderabad earlier this month as part of the acquisition process.
The BrahMos Integration Complex in Hyderabad is responsible for integration of mechanical systems and assembling electronic systems. Various sub-systems fabricated in other centres in India and Russia are integrated and checked at this complex.
“It is a done deal and there will be further developments early next year,” one of the people cited above said.
The Philippines armed forces are implementing a revised modernisation programme and a contract for two corvettes was signed by the navy with South Korea’s Hyundai Heavy Industries on December 28. The Philippines also plans to sign contracts for 36 Black Hawk helicopters and six offshore patrol vessels in 2022.
The department of budget management also made substantial allocation this month to cover the initial funding requirements for the acquisition of utility helicopters by the Philippine Air Force and fast boats for the navy.
On March 2, India and the Philippines signed an “implementing arrangement” to facilitate government-to-government deals on military hardware and equipment, including the BrahMos missile, which has a range of 290 km and can carry a 200-kg warhead.
Filipino defence secretary Delfin Lorenzana, who witnessed the signing ceremony, was quoted by the media as saying at the time that Philippines is buying the BrahMos missile. Lorenzana said the agreement would serve as a guide for the two sides on policies and procedures in defence procurement.
Hindustan Times had first reported in December 2019 that the Philippines was set to become the first country to buy the BrahMos missile system. Both sides were keen on signing a deal during a proposed visit by President Rodrigo Duterte early in 2021, but the plan fell through because of the widespread disruptions caused by the pandemic.
The Philippine Army’s first Land Based Missile System Battery also has plans to acquire the BrahMos. Russian officials have said India and Russia are working to gradually increase the range of the BrahMos and begin exporting the missile to third countries.
The Philippines zeroed in on the BrahMos after extensive trials and much of the negotiations have revolved around the cost of the system. India had offered a $100-million line of credit to the Philippines for defence purchases.
India has been in talks with several Southeast Asian countries, including Thailand, Indonesia and Vietnam, in recent years to sell them land and sea-based versions of the BrahMos. New Delhi has set an ambitious target of achieving defence exports worth $5 billion by 2025.
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Rezaul H Laskar heads the Foreign Affairs desk at Hindustan Times. His interests include movies and music. ...view detail
12. Parents selling children shows desperation of Afghanistan
Unimaginable tragedy on so many levels.
Parents selling children shows desperation of Afghanistan | AP News
AP · by ELENA BECATOROS · December 31, 2021
SHEDAI CAMP, Afghanistan (AP) — In a sprawling settlement of mud brick huts in western Afghanistan housing people displaced by drought and war, a woman is fighting to save her daughter.
Aziz Gul’s husband sold the 10-year-old girl into marriage without telling his wife, taking a down-payment so he could feed his family of five children. Without that money, he told her, they would all starve. He had to sacrifice one to save the rest.
Many of Afghanistan’s growing number of destitute people are making desperate decisions such as these as their nation spirals into a vortex of poverty.
The aid-dependent country’s economy was already teetering when the Taliban seized power in mid-August amid a chaotic withdrawal of U.S. and NATO troops. The international community froze Afghanistan’s assets abroad and halted all funding, unwilling to work with a Taliban government given its reputation for brutality during its previous rule 20 years ago.
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The consequences have been devastating for a country battered by four decades of war, a punishing drought and the coronavirus pandemic. Legions of state employees, including doctors, haven’t been paid in months. Malnutrition and poverty stalk the most vulnerable, and aid groups say more than half the population faces acute food shortages.
“Day by day, the situation is deteriorating in this country, and especially children are suffering,” said Asuntha Charles, national director of the World Vision aid organization in Afghanistan, which runs a health clinic for displaced people just outside the western city of Herat.
“Today I have been heartbroken to see that the families are willing to sell their children to feed other family members,” Charles said. “So it’s the right time for the humanitarian community to stand up and stay with the people of Afghanistan.”
Arranging marriages for very young girls is a frequent practice throughout the region. The groom’s family - often distant relatives - pays money to seal the deal, and the child usually stays with her own parents until she is at least around 15 or 16. Yet with many unable to afford even basic food, some say they’d allow prospective grooms to take very young girls or are even trying to sell their sons.
But Gul, unusually in this deeply patriarchal, male-dominated society, is resisting. Married off herself at 15, she says she would kill herself if her daughter, Qandi Gul, is forcibly taken away.
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Gul remembers well the moment she found out her husband had sold Qandi. For around two months, the family had been able to eat. Eventually, she asked her husband where the money came from, and he told her.
“My heart stopped beating. I wished I could have died at that time, but maybe God didn’t want me to die,” Gul said. Qandi sat close to her mother, her hazel eyes peering shyly from beneath her sky-blue headscarf. “Each time I remember that night...I die and come back to life. It was so difficult.”
She asked her husband why he did it.
“He said he wanted to sell one and save the others. ‘You all would have died this way,’ (he said.) I told him, ‘Dying was much better than what you have done.’”
Gul rallied her community, telling her brother and village elders that her husband had sold her child behind her back. They supported her, and with their help she secured a “divorce” for her child, but only on condition she repays the 100,000 afghanis (about $1,000) that her husband received.
It’s money she doesn’t have. Her husband fled, possibly fearing Gul might denounce him to the authorities. The Taliban government recently announced a ban on forcing women into marriage or using women and girls as exchange tokens to settle disputes.
The family of the prospective groom, a man of around 21 or 22, has already tried several times to claim the girl, she says. She is not sure how long she can fend them off.
“I am just so desperate. If I can’t provide money to pay these people and can’t keep my daughter by my side, I have said that I will kill myself,” Gul said. “But then I think about the other children. What will happen to them? Who will feed them?” Her eldest is 12, her youngest - her sixth - just two months.
Now alone, Gul leaves the children with her elderly mother while she goes to work in people’s homes. Her 12-year-old son works picking saffron after school. It’s barely enough to keep them fed, and the saffron season is short, only a few weeks in the fall.
“We don’t have anything,” Gul said.
In another part of the same camp, father-of-four Hamid Abdullah was also selling his young daughters into arranged marriages, desperate for money to treat his chronically ill wife, pregnant with their fifth child.
Abdullah borrowed money to pay for his wife’s treatments and can’t pay it back, he said. So three years ago, he received a down-payment for his eldest daughter Hoshran, now 7, in an arranged marriage to an 18-year-old in their native Badghis province. He’s now looking for someone to buy his second daughter, 6-year-old Nazia.
“We don’t have food to eat,” Abdullah explained, adding he also had to buy medicine for his wife, who soon would need more treatment. “She needs another surgery, I don’t have one afghani to pay for the doctor.”
The family that bought Hoshran is waiting until she is older before the full amount is settled, he explained.
But he needs money now for food and treatments, so he is trying to arrange a marriage for Nazia for about 20,000-30,000 afghani ($200-$300).
“What should we do? We have to do it, we have no other option,” said his wife, Bibi Jan. “When we made the decision, it was like someone had taken away a body part from me.”
In the neighboring province of Badghis, another displaced family is considering selling their son, 8-year-old Salahuddin.
His mother, Guldasta, said that after days with nothing to eat, she told her husband to take the boy to the bazaar and sell him to bring food for the others.
“I don’t want to sell my son, but I have to,” the 35-year-old said. “No mother can do this to her child, but when you have no other choice, you have to make a decision against your will.”
Salahuddin blinked and looked on silently. Surrounded by some of his seven brothers and sisters, his lip quivered slightly.
His father, Shakir, who is blind in one eye and has kidney problems, said the children had been crying for days from hunger. Twice, he said, he decided to take the boy to the bazaar and twice he faltered, unable to go through with it. “But now I think I have no other choice than to sell him.”
Buying of boys is believed to be less common than girls, and when it does take place, it appears to be cases of infant boys bought by families who don’t have any sons. In her despair, Guldasta thought perhaps such a family would want an 8-year-old.
The desperation of millions is clear as more and more people face hunger. By the end of the year, some 3.2 million children under 5 years old are expected to suffer from acute malnutrition, according to the U.N.
Nazia is one of them. The 4-year-old lay listlessly in her mother’s arms after visiting the World Vision health clinic.
Two years ago, Nazia was a plump toddler, her mother Fatima said. Now, her emaciated limbs are just skin covering bone. Her little heart beats visibly beneath her ribcage.
“The prices are high. Flour is expensive, cooking oil is expensive, everything is expensive,” Fatima said. “All day she is asking me to give her meat, yogurt and fruit. We don’t have anything, and we don’t have money to buy it for her.”
Charles, World Vision’s national director for Afghanistan, said humanitarian aid funds are desperately needed.
“I’m happy to see the pledges are made,” she said. But the pledges “shouldn’t stay as promises, they have to be seen as reality on the ground.”
____
Abdul Qahar Afghan in Shedai Camp, Afghanistan and Rahim Faiez in Islamabad, Pakistan contributed.
___
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AP · by ELENA BECATOROS · December 31, 2021
13. Department of Defense Releases Tools to Mitigate the Threat of the Omicron Variant of Coronavirus Disease 2019
Department of Defense Releases Tools to Mitigate the Threat of the Omicron Variant of Coronavirus Disease 2019 in the Department of Defense and Updated Force Health Protection Guidance (Supplement 15) Revision 3 - Department of Defense Guidance for Coronavirus Disease 2019 Laboratory Testing Service
Recently, the Department of Defense released two updated memorandums in an effort to increase safety against COVID-19. The memorandums are titled “Tools to Mitigate the Threat of the Omicron Variant of Coronavirus Disease 2019 in the Department of Defense” and “Updated Force Health Protection Guidance (Supplement 15) Revision 3 - Department of Defense Guidance for Coronavirus Disease 2019 Laboratory Testing Services.”
The first memorandum provides an update on tools to mitigate the threat of the Omicron variant of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in the DoD, which evidence suggests is more transmissible than other COVID-19 variants. While the Omicron variant's characteristics may differ from other variants, the tools referenced within the memo have successfully been used throughout the pandemic, such as masking, physical distancing, teleworking, testing, and vaccination. These tools remain effective and must be continuously implemented.
Per the memo, installation commanders should be prepared to rapidly increase Health Protection Condition (HPCON) levels if Omicron case counts rise. The HPCON framework attachment provides a mechanism by which to increase or decrease the use of non-pharmaceutical measures, such as physical distancing, depending on local surrounding community case counts.
The Department also released Force Health Protection Guidance (Supplement 15) Revision 3 - Department of Defense Guidance for Coronavirus Disease 2019 Laboratory Testing Services. The revised memorandum updates previous DoD Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) laboratory testing guidance. The force health protection (FHP) supplement provides guidance on COVID-19 testing for eligible persons suspected of having contracted COVID-19, and applies Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) testing guidance in the DoD context.
The memo states that DoD Components will continue to employ clinical diagnostic testing in accordance with the updated guidance. The guidance also supports the DoD surveillance strategy for the COVID-19 pandemic response with complementary health surveillance activities, screening, asymptomatic testing, and sentinel screening testing surveillance consistent with applicable law.
Specifically stated, health care providers will use their clinical judgment and awareness of laboratory testing resource availability, and will work closely with local and installation public health authorities or Public Health Emergency officers, to guide COVID-l9 diagnostic testing.
The memorandum for Updated Force Health Protection Guidance (Supplement 15) Revision 3 - Department of Defense Guidance for Coronavirus Disease 2019 Laboratory Testing Services can be found here.
The memorandum for Tools to Mitigate the Threat of the Omicron Variant of Coronavirus Disease 2019 in the Department of Defense can be found here.
14. Bad Idea: Relying on “Integrated Deterrence” Instead of Building Sufficient U.S. Military Power
With no disrespect to LTG Spoehr but perhaps DOD should consider this an evaluation from Napoleon's corporal. If he is questioning integrated defense then DOD must have some "splainin" to do.
I personally like the concept though I think of it as a holistic and integrated approach across three deterrent "disciplines:" nuclear deterrence, conventional deterrence, and unconventional deterrence that requires a national level approach and the use of all appropriate instruments of power acting in concert to deter adversaries.
But I do agree with LTG (RET) Spoehr in that deterrence must rest on a foundation of sufficient military power (both capability and the will to employ it).
Bad Idea: Relying on “Integrated Deterrence” Instead of Building Sufficient U.S. Military Power
Dec 30th, 2021 5 min read
Director, Center for National Defense
Thomas W. Spoehr conducts and supervises research on national defense matters.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
While at first blush, the idea sounds attractive, policymakers should view this notion with caution.
While the U.S. should employ all tools available, the most certain means of deterring conflict is to build sufficient military power in concert with our allies.
Using the idea of integrated deterrence in lieu of building sufficient U.S. military power is a Bad Idea in National Security.
This summer, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin debuted the term “Integrated Deterrence” to describe the Biden administration’s proposed new concept to avert military aggression. Austin described integrated deterrence as being able to draw on the capabilities of not just the military, but on “federal agencies, partner nations and allies, as well.” He summarized the approach as “using every military and non-military tool in lock-step with allies and partners.”
While at first blush, the idea sounds attractive, policymakers should view this notion with caution. On the one hand, using all elements of national power to deter conflict has been a consistent approach of U.S. national strategy. But history has also has proven that non-military tools, such as economic sanctions or diplomatic condemnation, have limited utility in deterring a determined adversary from instigating conflict. While the U.S. should employ all tools available, the most certain means of deterring conflict is to build sufficient military power in concert with our allies. This effectively sows doubt in the minds of our adversaries as to whether they can achieve their objectives by force.
A critically important subject is how the United States goes about deterring its adversaries. Among the many definitions of deterrence, a simple one is to “prevent an enemy power [from] taking the decision to use armed force.” After the defense of the homeland, deterring military action by either China or Russia is arguably the most vital task of a U.S. national defense strategy. It is thus extraordinarily important to devise the most effective and reliable deterrence strategies.
A common mistake in considering how to deter an adversary is to adopt a U.S. perspective as opposed to placing yourself in the position of your adversary. President Lyndon Johnson started Operation Rolling Thunder, the sustained bombing of North Vietnam in 1965, under the assumption that no leader would allow their country to suffer such consequences. Such a conclusion reflected a valid assumption from the perspective of U.S. policymakers, but Hanoi and the Vietcong remained undeterred.
To some degree, the Biden administration’s concept for integrated deterrence calls falls into the trap of viewing security issues from the U.S. perspective by counting non-military tools such as economic sanctions, international condemnation, or perhaps legal penalties as useful in bolstering traditional military means. While these techniques could contribute to an overall deterrence posture, there is an implicit danger in relying on these means to persuade an adversary of the folly of military aggression—particularly if that dependence is used as justification to restrict the investments necessary for building sufficient U.S. military power.
Certainly, America’s two primary potential adversaries, China, and Russia, pay little heed to non-military sanctions. Russia knew it would face both broad censure and economic sanctions after both its 2008 invasion of Georgia and its 2014 invasion of Ukraine, but still carried on with its strategy. Similarly, President Putin’s decision to use nerve gas in attempts to assassinate political enemies seemed unconstrained by any worries about reaction from the United Nations or any other international body. Finally, in mid-November a Russian direct ascent anti-satellite missile destroyed a satellite in orbit, creating a debris field of over 1,500 pieces posing a lethal hazard for other satellites or spacecraft in orbit. We can only conclude Moscow does not worry about its global reputation.
Similarly, China seems untroubled by the international consequences of its aggressions. When the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea ruled in 2016 that China’s claims in the South China Sea were unlawful, Beijing dismissed the ruling as “nothing more than a piece of waste paper.” China responded with similar indifference in the face of international concern over its persecution of Uyghurs or illegal crack-downs in Hong Kong.
To some degree, the belief that non-military tools would deter China and Russia reflects a U.S. bias towards international relations, a perspective that places great value on international reputation and acceptance. China and Russia enjoy no similar burdens.
Because it has proven impossible to predict the impact of non-military tools such as economic sanctions or diplomatic condemnation on autocratic adversaries’ decision-making processes, it would be unwise to place any reliance on such techniques.
Indeed, at its heart, deterrence is a military function. Only salient military power and the demonstrated will to employ it have the ability to create doubt in the mind of an adversary that they can accomplish their objectives at an acceptable cost. Whereas non-military tools can be unreliable, military outcomes can be effectively predicted based on the correlation of a force structure and posture that holds the promise of denying an adversary their objectives (also known as deterrence by denial).
As opposed to deterring by punishment—the technique employed by President Johnson with Operation Rolling Thunder in Vietnam and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt with his imposition of an oil embargo on the Japanese just before World War II—deterring by denial (of objectives) has long been recognized as the sine non qua in dissuading an opponent. In the early 20th century, Great Britain didn’t keep Germany in check through the threat of sanctions; it was their powerful Navy that dissuaded aggression.
In addition to employing non-military tools, the Pentagon’s articulations of integrated deterrence place great importance on allies. Certainly, allies can contribute to a favorable correlation of forces, and in the case of deterring China and Russia, the U.S. should expend every effort to forge strong partnerships. But such efforts must be tempered with the reality of the limits of what allies can contribute. Many nations in NATO or the Indo-Pacific would be hard-pressed to procure and maintain even one squadron of 5th generation fighter aircraft. Many are constrained by internal politics or economic issues. In fact, most NATO nations are failing to meet the two percent of GDP metric for defense spending.
Should the United States use all elements of national power and allied contributions to deter aggression? Certainly, this approach should be employed at the national level and articulated in the National Security Strategy. But, to develop an effective deterrence posture, the U.S. Defense Department must avoid reliance on non-military tools or unrealistic expectations from our allies. Instead, the Pentagon should narrowly focus its efforts and the National Defense Strategy on the development of the appropriate elements of military power in sufficient quantities in order to deny an adversary their objectives. Using the idea of integrated deterrence in lieu of building sufficient U.S. military power is a Bad Idea in National Security.
This piece originally appeared in Defense 360, A Project of the Center for Strategic and International Studies on 12/3/21
15. A Year In, Biden’s China Policy Looks a Lot Like Trump’s
A Year In, Biden’s China Policy Looks a Lot Like Trump’s
The administration has toned down the anti-China rhetoric, but it has maintained and expanded economic sanctions—and plans a “diplomatic boycott” of the Olympics.
Wired · by Jennifer Conrad · December 30, 2021
Officially, Treasury added SenseTime to its Chinese Military-Industrial Complex (CMIC) list, created under a different name in November 2020 by then president Trump. In June, President Biden removed some companies from the list, added others, and expanded its scope to include Chinese companies selling surveillance technology. On December 16, eight companies were added to the blacklist, including dronemaker DJI and facial-recognition firm Megvii.
The moves show how, despite toned-down rhetoric, Biden has largely maintained Trump’s policies toward China. In some cases, the administration even built on Trump’s signature measures, while paring back policies considered legally vulnerable and increasing the emphasis on human rights.
In September, Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou boarded a chartered Air China flight from Vancouver to Shenzhen, where she was greeted with roses and a flag-waving crowd. Meng, the daughter of company founder Ren Zhengfei, had been held in Canada for three years at the request of US authorities, who accused her of helping Huawei evade sanctions on Iran. Meng entered into a deferred prosecution agreement with the Justice Department, allowing her to return home in exchange for admitting some wrongdoing—and removing a major sticking point in US-China relations.
But the Biden administration has tightened other restrictions on Huawei. Trump had put the Chinese company on a list that generally prevents US companies from doing business with it. US companies must apply for a special license to sell software or components such as microchips to Huawei and others on the list. In March, the Biden administration made it harder for American companies to get those licenses. Several months later, Huawei spun off the smartphone division Honor, so that devices sold outside of China could once again use Google’s Android operating system and other software.
“I don’t see a lot of daylight between the two administrations on national security,” says Nazak Nikakhtar, a former Commerce Department official under Trump.
To a large extent, Biden is penned in because he needs to avoid sparking World War III while not looking “soft” when the US public and Congress hold increasingly negative views of China. And China’s more authoritarian turn under President Xi Jinping—particularly rolling back democracy in Hong Kong and oppressing its Muslim populations—have made it more difficult to reset the relationship. Biden recently said the US would not send any government officials to the Winter Olympics in Beijing in February.
“I don’t see a lot of daylight between the two administrations on national security.”
Nazak Nikakhtar, Trump-era Commerce Department official
But analysts say Biden has not offered a distinct China policy, except to say the two countries are competitors. “It’s very hard for the Biden administration to move in a high-profile, public, or fast way, because of the political space that’s so narrow on things related to China,” says Susan Thornton, a career diplomat who was responsible for China policy in the late Obama and early Trump administrations.
Thornton says it’s hard to discern the policy behind the bans and restrictions on Chinese company. The Biden administration has said it isn’t trying to contain China, but “if that’s the case, I really don’t understand what we’re doing,” she adds. And it’s a hard case to make when Trump-era tariffs remain in place, and the list of Chinese companies facing trade and investment restrictions continues to grow.
In his first year in office, Trump fired the first shots of a trade war, placing new tariffs on Chinese goods. By 2020, efforts had spiraled across the federal bureaucracy—at least 210 public actions aimed at China according to numbers compiled by Axios—from tightened visa restrictions to ramped up sanctions and export controls.
Under Trump, agencies such as Commerce and the US Trade Representative developed novel interpretations of their mandates to restrict trade with China. Those measures included barring US companies from selling to certain Chinese companies; imposing export restrictions to sanction people and companies for stealing intellectual property, hacking, and human rights violations; and subjecting companies in third countries to American export controls if their products contain American components or IP.
The Biden administration has largely left Trump’s designations on the books and added its own, if not always with the same volume. In Trump’s final year, 184 Chinese people and companies were added to Commerce’s Entity List; as of mid-December, Biden had added 43. Neither Commerce nor Treasury responded to multiple requests for comment.
The sanctions lists maintained by Treasury prohibit US citizens or companies—and in some cases, foreign banks that do business with US financial institutions—from having any business relationship with the targeted people or companies, and they freeze assets held in US banks. Hong Kong chief executive Carrie Lam said that after she was added to the Specially Designated Nationals list in August 2020, she resorted to stockpiling cash because no bank would do business with her. This year, the Biden administration added roughly as many people and companies to the list as Trump did last year.
Many Trump-era tariffs also remain in place, even as critics argue that US households and firms pay for the tariffs, contributing to inflation. US trade representative Katherine Tai has said that the US will build on existing tariffs until China honors commitments it made before the pandemic to purchase US goods. Companies can petition for exemptions, but a September analysis by the Congressional Research Service shows that most requests are rejected.
Another signature Trump effort, the Department of Justice’s China Initiative, launched in November 2018, with the stated aim of countering economic espionage and national security threats coming from China. The program has faced increasing criticism for its overly broad targeting of Chinese academics and Chinese-Americans, but there are few signs that Biden plans to roll it back.
In July 2020, FBI director Christopher Wray said the bureau was opening a new China-related counterintelligence case about every 10 hours. An FBI spokesperson said those numbers are the most recent publicly available statistics, and referred other questions about the China Initiative to the Justice Department, which did not respond to requests for updated information.
An analysis by MIT Technology Review earlier this month indicates activity may have slowed, but hasn’t stopped, under Biden. The analysis identified 77 cases tied to the China Initiative, including six since the start of 2021. Only about a quarter of the people charged under the initiative so far have been convicted, and many of the cases have little to do with the stated security and economic aims. Instead, many charges involve “academic integrity” concerns, specifically researchers who failed to properly disclose affiliations on forms, the analysis found.
This July, visa fraud charges were dropped against four Chinese researchers who were accused of lying about their work for the People’s Liberation Army, a case that was cited when the US ordered China to close its Houston consulate in July 2020. That consulate remains shuttered, as does the American consulate in Chengdu, which China ordered closed in reciprocity.
More Great WIRED Stories
Wired · by Condé Nast · December 30, 2021
16. War, Coup, and Famine: 6 Global Conflicts to Watch Out For in 2022
A gloomy forecast (that unfortunately I do not think this is complete).
War, Coup, and Famine: 6 Global Conflicts to Watch Out For in 2022
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A Third World War, originating (yet again) in Europe? A famine in Afghanistan? Or a war in the Asia-Pacific between the world's two richest countries?
Whether it's wars, coups, or famines, the year 2021 was a tumultuous one for many nations across the face of the earth, the effects of which will reverberate throughout 2022.
There are, however, six such crises, which upon further escalation, may have devastating national, regional, or even global effects. They are not concentrated in one continent, nor are they characterised by one specific factor. We take you through each of them.
Famine in Afghanistan
A war-torn Afghanistan is in the midst of a humanitarian catastrophe. In 2022, not only do the Afghan people face widespread famine during the upcoming winter, but the economic cost of the collapse of the country's banking system, in the words of the UNDP, "would be colossal."
As United States President Joe Biden withdrew American troops from the country, the Taliban emerged victorious from a war that lasted two whole decades, thereby resurrecting the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan that once existed between 1996 and 2001.
The rights and liberties of many groups of people are under threat, such as the Shiites, whom the Taliban regime has vowed to protect from the barbaric terrorist attacks carried out by the Islamic State – Khorasan Province (ISKP), an offshoot of ISIS.
Women, however, are facing the most immediate loss to their liberties, the most recent one being a ban on travelling long distances unless accompanied by a close male guardian.
Education and employment for women are now a distant dream, despite the Taliban promising otherwise to the international community.
The United Nations has announced that it will launch a fundraising drive for $4.4 billion to provide food, shelter, and other basic amenities to the Afghan people.
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WWIII Over Ukraine?
Nothing is quiet on the eastern front.
If a war erupts next year, it would most likely be centred around Ukraine, a small country in Eastern Europe led by Volodymyr Zelensky that refuses to be bullied by Vladimir Putin's Russia.
US intelligence has issued multiple warnings that the Russians are intending to launch a multi-front offensive as early as 2022 that could see a deployment of up to 1,75,000 soldiers.
Having already taken de facto control of the Crimean peninsula, and the eastern region of Donbas (the administrative units of Donetsk and Luhansk) since 2014, Putin clearly has an expansionist agenda concerning Ukraine.
(Photo: iStock)
The justification being provided by Russia's supreme leader is that he cannot, for the sake of his country's security, allow the eastward expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization vis-à-vis Ukraine, something which the European Union and the US categorically deny doing in the first place.
Putin's critics, however, both domestic and international, claim that he is trying to deflect attention from his government's shambolic handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, with Russia witnessing more than a thousand COVID deaths per day for quite some time.
US President Joe Biden has promised to send troops to aid NATO's eastern forces, and has threatened to impose severe economic sanctions on Moscow.
Will the sanctions deter the Russians? Can talks prevail? Or are we rapidly moving towards an apocalyptic war that could break out as early as 2022?
Will China Invade Taiwan?
If a world war doesn't break out over Ukraine, the risk of that happening elsewhere doesn't cease to exist, such as in the Asia-Pacific.
China's supreme leader Xi Jinping has continued to employ an aggressive and hostile policy towards Taiwan in what seems to be an essential component of China's "Great Rejuvenation Project."
While a majority of Taiwanese people feel that they belong to a de facto independent nation that is separate from Mainland China, the latter (especially its administration, the Communist Party of China) vehemently disagrees, accusing the island of being nothing more than a breakaway province.
A few months ago, China sent around 150 aircraft over Taiwan's air defence zone in a show of force that has led experts and analysts to remark that the likelihood of war in 2022 is higher than ever.
The US policy on the cross-strait dispute has, for most of history, sided with Taiwan.
President Joe Biden has repeatedly announced that his administration will stand with Taiwan's democracy, which is currently being governed by Tsai Ing-wen.
Taiwan was also invited to Biden's Summit for Democracy, a conference "to renew democracy at home and confront autocracies abroad", even as US arms sales to Taiwan continue speedily.
With the US firmly by Taiwan's side, any military action initiated by the Chinese will inevitably draw in the Americans in what could blow up to be a devastating conflict between the world's two largest economies.
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Myanmar's Future in the Balance
As pro-democracy protests refuse to subside in Myanmar, the Burmese military – the Tatmadaw – continues its brutal crackdown on peaceful protesters.
The country witnessed one of the most shocking coup d'états of 2021 in the month of February, when the civilian government led by State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi was overthrown and members of her party – the National League for Democracy (NLD) – along with her, were detained.
Despite a Burmese court halving Suu Kyi's initial four-year prison sentence on charges ranging from violation of COVID regulations to mishandling of secret information that could aid an enemy, the Burmese people are not backing down.
Thousands, including children, have been murdered by the Tatmadaw, and more than 10,000 have been beaten up or arrested.
The military is showing no interest in reinstallation of democracy.
As we go into 2022, Myanmar has a precarious future ahead. Will international coercion lead to the restoration of the country's democracy and the release of the controversial Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi?
Or is Myanmar backpedaling to the days during which it was ruled by an authoritative military junta?
An End to War in Ethiopia?
Even as we get reports of the Tigrayan rebels retreating, the ethnic civil war in Ethiopia that has been raging for more than a year seems far from over.
Abiy Ahmed, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning prime minister, has been leading the Ethiopian National Defense Force from the front in the battlefield.
He is also accused of presiding over the mass murder and rape of Tigrayans by the ENDF troops, and of executing a blockade of medical and supplies aid into the Tigray region, a policy that has created the conditions for a famine that could impact millions of people.
International calls for peace and ceasefires have been ignored by the belligerents, more so by the Ahmed regime.
The US has stated that "there is no military solution" to the civil war, while the UN and Secretary-General Antonio Guterres have called for a swift end to hostilities.
With millions on the brink of starvation and in dire need of medical aid, only time will tell whether the retreat by the Tigray People's Liberation Front will lead to a de-escalation in the war.
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Civil-Military Rule in Sudan
Despite the restoration of civil-military rule in Sudan after the October coup that temporarily ousted Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok, pro-democracy protests continue to rock the Northeast African country.
After the deposition of Omar al-Bashir in 2018, the dictator who had ruled Sudan for almost three decades, power-sharing arrangements were made between the military and the pro-democracy movement to form a collective head of state called the Sovereign Council of Sudan, which would consist of both military and civilian members.
The military, however, overthrew the civil-military government a few weeks ago and detained Hamdok and members of his cabinet, leading to widespread protests that were responded to with utmost brutality.
Finally, on 21 November, Hamdok was reinstated as the prime minister but both civil-military tensions and pro-democracy protests continue to persist.
Will an uneasy peace prevail, or will Sudan plunge into yet another civil war in 2022?
(At The Quint, we are answerable only to our audience. Play an active role in shaping our journalism by becoming a member. Because the truth is worth it.)
17. Marines say they're being 'crushed' over vaccine refusal: 'A political purge'
Or they could choose to follow orders. And of course the question is if they were to remain, what other orders might they refuse to obey?
Marines say they're being 'crushed' over vaccine refusal: 'A political purge'
Fox News contributor Dakota Meyer discusses the vaccine deadline, which took effect on November 28.
NEWYou can now listen to Fox News articles!
EXCLUSIVE: U.S. Marines are being "crushed" by President Biden’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate as thousands face dismissal for their continued refusal to get the shot, several active-duty Marines told Fox News Digital.
To date, 169 Marines have been discharged for refusing the vaccine, and thousands more face the same fate after the Department of Defense’s mandate on all active-duty service members went into effect for the Marine Corps on Nov. 28.
Marines are allowed to apply for a religious exemption, but so far not a single application regarding the COVID-19 vaccine, or any vaccine for that matter, has been approved, a Marine Corps spokesman told Fox News.
United States Marines queue to receive the Moderna coronavirus vaccine at Camp Hansen on April 28, 2021, in Kin, Japan. (Getty Images)
Several Marines who refuse to get the shot were granted anonymity by Fox News Digital, so they could speak freely. They said they are witnessing a "political purge" by the Biden administration that is forcing out the military’s "best and brightest" over deeply held beliefs they say are protected by the First Amendment.
"There’s something fundamentally wrong at this point with our nation’s leadership," said a major with more than 17 years of active service. "We are facing an unconstitutional edict that I think is very targeted as a political purge, taking out some of the best and brightest soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines and guardians from the Space Force."
A lieutenant colonel with more than 19 years of active service said it appears that the military, specifically the Marine Corps, is discharging service members "as fast as they can and as brutally as they can, damaging every Marine as much as they can on the way out."
"The one message I got from the colonel above me was: ‘Tread very carefully, this is political, you will be crushed like an ant.’ And he told me that because he cares about me," the lieutenant colonel said. "Do I want to continue serving in an institution that crushes people for bringing up reasonable points in defending their faith?"
One master sergeant said it seems that "the louder I speak the tighter the screws are turned against me."
"When you’re expected to behave a certain way and to obey certain rules and follow certain processes, and then to see on the other end that that’s not a two-way street, that’s a violation of my morals that I can’t stand by and not speak out about," the master sergeant said.
The Marines who spoke with Fox News said they were on the receiving end of a "blanket" denial of religious exemptions, with their applications being rejected without consideration. Eight separate letters of denial provided to Fox News were nearly identical, citing "military readiness" as the primary reason for rejection.
"I saw one package from a sergeant who had attached, like, 30 pages of material to substantiate why his belief was sincere, under no lawful obligation to do so," the master sergeant said. "And then to have this as a response with no individual inquiry and just a generalized assertion of governmental interest is insulting."
"On the religious side, this is absolutely a travesty what’s happening," one chief warrant officer said. "People are getting blanket denials, they’re not addressing the individual concerns or beliefs of Marines who are submitting for religious accommodations, and I think that’s just horribly wrong. I honestly believe that they’re not really reading the packages."
A United States Marine receives the Moderna coronavirus vaccine at Camp Foster on April 28, 2021 in Ginowan, Japan. (Carl Court/Getty Images)
Another lieutenant colonel, who said she leads an 800-strong support group for service members who oppose the vaccine, said, "Everyone else pretty much has a voice except the military, because we are not authorized to speak out in opposition to our leadership."
"I’ve talked to so many different service members," she said. "Just recently, one of the corporals in the group was absolutely distraught because one of his friends who also declined the shot recently just killed himself."
"This is an absolute travesty," she continued, choking back tears. "And I’m telling you, I am so upset about this. My heart is breaking for these people."
Marine Corps spokesman Capt. Ryan Bruce told Fox News that as of Thursday, 3,080 of the 3,192 requests for religious accommodation concerning the COVID-19 vaccine mandate had been processed and zero had been approved, adding that "no religious accommodations have been approved for any other vaccine in the past seven years."
Despite the Marines’ claims to Fox News, the Corps spokesman said that the process for evaluating requests for religious exemptions has been done on a case-by-case basis "to ensure Marines receive due consideration." That process, he said, includes an evaluation by a three-member Religious Accommodation Review Board, as well as by health services and legal.
President Biden removes his face mask as he arrives to speak in the South Court Auditorium on the White House campus Oct. 14, 2021, in Washington. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
There has also been a debate about what will happen with the thousands of service members who continue to refuse the shot. While they all face separation from the military, a provision added by Republicans to the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act, which Congress passed less than two weeks ago, requires service members discharged for vaccine refusal to receive either an honorable or general discharge.
Bruce said that if the sole basis for separation is vaccine refusal, "the least favorable characterization of service that may be approved is General (under honorable conditions)." Such a designation means that an individual’s military service was satisfactory, but did not deserve the highest level of discharge. He said that 169 Marines have been separated from the Marine Corps for vaccine refusal so far, but he could not say how many have been separated with that designation.
The first lieutenant colonel said that even a general discharge under honorable conditions results in the loss of G. I. Bill education benefits for the individual member and their dependents.
United States Marine Corp Gunnery Sergeant talks with US Navy medical officers about issues surrounding the coronavirus vaccine, at Camp Foster on April 28, 2021, in Ginowan, Japan. (Carl Court/Getty Images)
Of the more than 180,000 active-duty Marines, approximately 5%, or 9,000, are considered unvaccinated by the Corps. Bruce told Fox News, however, that the number includes service members who are either currently exempt, are waiting for religious exemptions, or are new recruits who have yet to be entered into the reporting system, and that not all have necessarily "refused" the vaccine.
The Corps’ most recent weekly newsletter last week said COVID-19 is a "readiness" issue, because the "speed with which the disease transmits among individuals has increased risk to our Marines and the Marine Corps’ mission."
When asked what effect losing thousands of members might have on Corps readiness, Bruce said, "The Marine Corps will be ready to answer the nation’s call if needed."
And while the Marine vaccination rate is the lowest among the military services, compared to 96-98% among the Army, Navy and Air Force, only two Marines have died from COVID-19 to date, Bruce said.
Which has many Marines asking, is it worth it?
"My son, my cousins, they will not be signing up for service," the major said. "You talk about the generational damage that was caused during Vietnam and how we treated our veterans there, this will be significantly worse."
He added that with the current tensions in Russia, Ukraine and China, the military is sacrificing in readiness by purging thousands of able-bodied men and woman ahead of a "World War III scenario."
"This is the American equivalent of Roman decimation," added the master sergeant.
"I’ve never had such a moral objection to anything in my life," the chief warrant officer said. "I have a lot of pride in my service in the Marine Corps and I just don’t like where it’s going."
"I want to stay in," he added. "I have the potential to go beyond 20 years and I would love to do that if given the opportunity."
Earlier this month, California Rep. Darrell Issa led a group of Republicans in sending a letter to Biden saying he was committing a "grave mistake" in enforcing his military vaccine mandate. Last week, the congressman joined a group of nearly 50 Republican lawmakers in filing an amicus brief in support of a lawsuit by 35 SEALs and other Navy personnel who are seeking religious exemptions to the vaccine.
In this Sept. 26, 2019, file photo, former Republican congressman Darrell Issa speaks during a news conference in El Cajon, Calif. (AP)
The Navy reported last week that zero of 2,844 active duty requests for a religious exemption to the COVID-19 vaccine had been approved.
Issa spokesman Jonathan Wilcox told Fox News roughly 45,000 active duty members across the military, the equivalent of 45 battalions, face dismissal over the mandate.
"I think that this White House and this president are declaring a rhetorical war on what they call the unvaccinated, and they’re catching the military in that same rhetorical battle," Wilcox said. "They are determined to fire, remove and I think ruin those who are challenging their mandate."
"This would be the most grievous injury that a commander-in-chief has imposed in his command, I think, in the history of this country," he added.
18. America’s Militarist Drift in the Indo-Pacific
Van Jackson, a former mid-level defense official during the Obama administration, is not completely happy with the Biden military strategy.
America’s Militarist Drift in the Indo-Pacific
The Biden administration has returned a sense of normalcy to Asia policy. Unfortunately, that includes continuing a military-first approach to Asia.
The Biden administration has returned a sense of normalcy to Asia policy. Unfortunately, that includes continuing a military-first approach to Asia.
United States President Joe Biden speaks in the virtual meeting of ASEAN’s East Asia Summit, Wednesday, Oct. 27, 2021.
Credit: Brunei ASEAN Summit via AP
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Four years of the Trump administration left Asia’s governing elites with a hangover. Many hoped that President Joe Biden would be the cure. On the eve of Biden taking office, pundits widely expected he would restore competence, rhetorical restraint, and a sense of normalcy in Asia policy. Twelve months later, the Biden administration has done precisely that, replacing Trump’s grievance politics and erraticism with a steady decency and respect toward allies and partners.
The problem, however, is that Biden and his staff have also lived up to other expectations: That the United States would promote Asia’s militarization with the vague aim of “countering” China, give the Pentagon a blank check on defense posture and military spending, show ambivalence about international trade, exhibit contradictions in democracy promotion, fail to do anything about a nuclear North Korea, and pursue an internally conflicted China policy that defaulted to competition.
In these respects too, U.S. Asia policy has proven predictable, which is more problematic than reassuring. The totality of the Biden administration’s words and deeds in the region amount to little more than residual inertia from Trump’s military-first approach to Asia plus a modest revival of the Obama era pivot to Asia, which sought to preserve an American hegemony that no longer exists in the region.
The absence of anything that might pass for coherent design or a Biden doctrine is glaring. Put differently, U.S. statecraft in 2021 has become behaviorally consistent, but conceptually schizophrenic. Given the political constraints Biden faces at home and the ideological disposition of his staff, it could hardly be otherwise.
While U.S. policy toward the Indo-Pacific in 2021 showed much greater continuity than change in moving from Trump to Biden, the changes are mostly a boon for near-term stability and perceptions of America as a responsible “Pacific Power.”
Biden has turned down the volume on diplomacy and turned up its frequency. Despite the constraints of the pandemic, for example, the leaders of both Japan and South Korea were granted presidential summits, and the administration has quietly worked out cost-sharing arrangements with both allies – a major source of alliance friction in the Trump era. It has also avoided saber-rattling toward either China or North Korea, in contrast with the Trump administration’s race-baiting jingoism toward the former and gratuitous threats of nuclear annihilation toward the latter.
Stylistic differences aside, the most striking thing about Biden’s Asia policy is how much it resembles Trump’s on all the issues that matter over the long term.
Authors
Guest Author
Van Jackson
Van Jackson, Ph.D., is a specialist in Asian foreign policy and U.S. national security who formerly served in the Pentagon under the Obama administration. He is the author of the forthcoming book “Pacific Power Paradox: American Statecraft and the Fate of the Asian Peace” as well as two earlier books on North Korea.
19. Army SOF to continue work in Pacific, Eastern Europe in 2022
Excerpts:
“Our allies and partners here in the [Pacific] are in this conflict space [with China] right now,” said Lt. Col. Erik Davis, the battalion’s former commander, in a podcast. “They’re having to assert their sovereignty and reassert their sovereignty as China pushes everywhere it can in the South China Sea and the East China Sea.”
Special operations planners in the Pacific are also looking at whether they can implement portions of the Resistance Operating Concept in 2022 and beyond. The ROC is a framework for building up the capacity of friendly countries to mount an effective civil and military resistance if they were to face invasion and occupation from a hostile great power. It incorporates Special Forces, psychological operations and civil affairs.
The resistance operating concept is helping inform Army special operators as they focus on great power competition.
The ROC is already driving a lot of Army SOF’s training and planning in Europe, though, where 2021 saw numerous exercises aimed at building the resistance capabilities of countries like Georgia — which, though located in the Caucasus region of Asia, falls under U.S. European Command’s responsibility. EUCOM also has a forward-deployed Special Forces unit — 1st Battalion, 10th Special Forces Group — in Germany.
Army SOF to continue work in Pacific, Eastern Europe in 2022
Even as tensions rise across the world, 2022 will find the Army’s top troops at work in Eastern Europe and Asia.
Much of their work in the Pacific is centered around preparing partner forces for potential conflict with China.
The world learned in October that small numbers of Special Forces troops have been training Taiwan’s security forces for more than a decade, in addition to their other work across the region. The Army’s 1st Special Forces Group also maintains a forward-deployed battalion on Okinawa, which is just over 400 miles away from Taiwan.
“Our allies and partners here in the [Pacific] are in this conflict space [with China] right now,” said Lt. Col. Erik Davis, the battalion’s former commander, in a podcast. “They’re having to assert their sovereignty and reassert their sovereignty as China pushes everywhere it can in the South China Sea and the East China Sea.”
Special operations planners in the Pacific are also looking at whether they can implement portions of the Resistance Operating Concept in 2022 and beyond. The ROC is a framework for building up the capacity of friendly countries to mount an effective civil and military resistance if they were to face invasion and occupation from a hostile great power. It incorporates Special Forces, psychological operations and civil affairs.
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The resistance operating concept is helping inform Army special operators as they focus on great power competition.
The ROC is already driving a lot of Army SOF’s training and planning in Europe, though, where 2021 saw numerous exercises aimed at building the resistance capabilities of countries like Georgia — which, though located in the Caucasus region of Asia, falls under U.S. European Command’s responsibility. EUCOM also has a forward-deployed Special Forces unit — 1st Battalion, 10th Special Forces Group — in Germany.
Partner forces in Eastern Europe have had their unconventional warfare and hybrid warfare skills put to the test recently, too.
Western nations condemned Belarus, an Eastern European dictatorship closely aligned with Russia, for weaponizing migrants at its borders with European Union and NATO countries and trying to overwhelm border forces.
And although a potential Russian invasion of Ukraine is unlikely to trigger a direct military response from the U.S. or NATO, retaliatory sanctions against Russia and Belarus could further inflame tensions in the region.
Davis Winkie is a staff reporter covering the Army. He originally joined Military Times as a reporting intern in 2020. Before journalism, Davis worked as a military historian. He is also a human resources officer in the Army National Guard.
20. A truly 'patriotic education' requires critical analysis of US history
A provocative essay worth pandering after an objective read.
A truly 'patriotic education' requires critical analysis of US history
The Hill · by Walter C. Stern, opinion contributor · December 30, 2021
As Republicans continue their attacks on the teaching of “divisive concepts,” they have trained their sights on timeworn targets: universities, professors and schools of education.
Since critical race theory is far more nuanced and has far less influence on the nation’s decentralized K–12 curricula than Vance suggests, Americans could simply ignore the right’s attempt to capitalize on voters’ anxieties about their children’s education. But to ignore the charge means missing an opportunity.
The need to cultivate teachers and students who are brave — and patriotic — enough to think critically about the nation’s past could not be more urgent. Without independent thinkers who care enough about the nation’s well-being to wrestle with, rather than retreat from, its complex history, the country is ill-prepared to tackle current and future challenges. A society, after all, can’t solve problems whose existence it refuses to acknowledge.
That’s why Americans must reclaim patriotic education from the right. Universities have a key role to play here. Universities can train teachers who are uniquely positioned to do exactly what Republicans say they want to do: develop patriotic citizens. I know, because it’s how I and countless other professors teach.
I’m a historian whose published work explores how school policies institutionalized white supremacy. Vance probably had people like me in mind when he recently celebrated Richard Nixon’s proclamation that “the professors are the enemy.” He and other Republicans might also shudder to learn that my colleagues and I teach a course on the History of American Education to more than 200 students each year, a significant portion of whom are future teachers. In fact, unlike many teacher certification programs, my university requires prospective teachers to take our course or another like it.
On the first day of class, I clarify that history is not simply what happened in the past; it is a debate about how and why events unfolded in the ways that they did and the consequences of those events. Specifically, I emphasize that history involves the interpretation of the past based upon factual evidence.
I discourage students from relying strictly on my lectures as the source for their evidence-based interpretations of the past. Instead, I ask them to weigh the interpretations they encounter in lectures and assigned readings alongside firsthand accounts from educators, reformers, parents and students.
Throughout the semester, students grapple with the educational visions of luminaries such as Thomas Jefferson, Horace Mann, Frederick Douglass, and John Dewey. They also encounter the educational aspirations of lesser-known figures such as Priscilla Mason, who chastised “despotic man” for denying equal opportunity to women in her 1793 graduation speech at the Young Ladies Academy of Philadelphia; Peter Pitchlynn, the inaugural superintendent of the public school system that the Choctaw Nation established in 1842; and Septima Clark, a Black public school teacher and activist from South Carolina who profoundly influenced the Civil Rights Movement.
When students consider these sources, I encourage them to pay as much attention to the questions that they raise as they do to the answers they appear to provide.
The best classes end with more questions than answers: When does governmental power over education preserve liberty, and when does it suppress liberty? Why have some emphasized the university’s responsibility to prepare students for jobs, while others, such as W.E.B. Du Bois, emphasized its capacity “to be the organ of that fine adjustment between real life and the growing knowledge of life?” What is the purpose of education, and how can people in a democratic society determine the ends it should serve as well as the means for achieving those ends?
Do I put my fingers on the scale? Absolutely. I make sure students know that the Civil War was about slavery, that the land the United States seized from Indigenous people provided the financial basis for state school funds and that state-sponsored segregation and exclusion undermined educational opportunity in the South, North, and West.
I have no interest in indoctrinating students. I instead want to provide them with a factual basis for interpreting what diverse Americans wanted from education at different moments in time, who got what they wanted, who didn’t and why.
Republicans such as Vance want professors and K–12 teachers to provide “honest, patriotic accounts of American history.” In the spirit of Mason, Dewey and Clark, who valued independent thought and the critical appraisal of the relationship between the nation’s practices and professed values, I aim to do just that. I hope my students go on to teach a similarly honest and patriotic version of American history in their K–12 classrooms.
Unfortunately, Republicans who oppose the teaching of “divisive concepts” have little interest in illuminating minds. They want, in Vance’s own words, “to force” schools to provide uncritical exaltations of the nation’s past.
Such an approach is neither honest nor patriotic. It is authoritarian, and it would prepare students to follow rather than lead, to obey rather than think for themselves and to ignore all that might make America great.
Walter C. Stern is an assistant professor of educational policy studies and history at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He is the author of “Race and Education in New Orleans: Creating the Segregated City, 1764–1960.”
The Hill · by Walter C. Stern, opinion contributor · December 30, 2021
V/R
David Maxwell
Senior Fellow
Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Phone: 202-573-8647
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
