Quotes of the Day:
"For those looking for security, be forewarned that there's nothing more insecure than a political promise."
- Harry Browne (June 17, 1933 – March 1, 2006) was an American libertarian best-selling writer, politician, and free-market investment analyst.
"To improve is to change, so to be perfect is to have changed often."
- Winston Churchill
Expose yourself to your deepest fear. After that, fear has no power, and fear of freedom shrinks and vanishes. You are free.
- Jim Morrison
1. Biden Administration Foreign Policy Tracker: February
2. Taiwan Can't Wait - What America Must Do To Prevent a Successful Chinese Invasion
3. Putin accuses U.S. of trying to lure Russia into war
4. Russia Confronts Ukraine With Upgraded Military Rebuilt After Soviet Collapse
5. FBI Director Wray says scale of Chinese spying in the U.S. 'blew me away'
6. Chandran Nair on White Privilege in International Relations
7. Ukrainians building up resistance in case Russia attacks
8. Keeping Pace in the Gray Zone: Recommendations for the U.S. Intelligence Community
9. If Putin wins, it’s not only Ukraine that loses
10. U.S. Sends Top Security Official to Help NATO Brace for Russian Cyberattacks
11. When Redlines Fail - The Promise and Peril of Public Threats
12. Ukraine: China’s Burning Bridge to Europe?
13. Secret air defense system downs Houthi ballistic missile
14. Read the Books That Schools Want to Ban
15. Ukrainian democracy is under threat — why every American should care
16. What happened to the drone war?
17. Olympics poll: A diplomatic boycott is fine, but sponsors’ withdrawal would be better
18. Thousands Of Russian Intellectuals, Activists Urge Kremlin To Avoid 'Immoral' War With Ukraine
19. Another Flotilla Of Russian Warships Is About To Enter The English Channel
20. Why Americans should care about the Russia-Ukraine standoff
21. The fractured diplomacy of countering terrorism
22. The US and NATO must act forcefully against Russian aggression
1. Biden Administration Foreign Policy Tracker: February
February 1, 2022 | FDD Tracker: January 12, 2022-February 1, 2022
Biden Administration Foreign Policy Tracker: February
Trend Overview
Edited by David Adesnik and John Hardie
Welcome back to the Biden Administration Foreign Policy Tracker. Once a month, we ask FDD’s experts and scholars to assess the administration’s foreign policy. They provide trendlines of very positive, positive, neutral, negative, or very negative for the areas they watch.
“America is back,” Biden said last February, shortly after taking office. But America’s comeback is not going according to plan.
Trending Positive
Trending Neutral
Trending Negative
Trending Very Negative
2. Taiwan Can't Wait - What America Must Do To Prevent a Successful Chinese Invasion
A conventional approach. Just a passing mention of SOF based on reports of the recent training on Taiwan. Even the "asymmetric" recommendations are for conventional capabilities and platforms. If we want integrated deterrence we should include unconventional deterrence and implementation of a Taiwan unique resistance operating concept. I think people are confused about the resistance operating concept and its potential contribution to deterrence. People focus on guerrilla warfare after an invasion occurs. There are two issues with this. A well publicized influence campaign demonstrating a strong resistance potential before the invasion may contribute to deterrence by providing costly dilemmas for invading forces and their ability to occupy Taiwan. And for those who do focus on guerrilla warfare they should know that it is best to invest in developing the capabilities before deterrence fails and there is an invasion. There needs to be a thorough preparation of the unconventional warfare environment during pre-hostilities to support deterrence, and if deterrence fails, actual resistance operations.
Then of course there is the entire influence domain and cyber that needs to be addressed. Taiwan is doing important work here and the US may be able to provide additional advice and assistance in helping to develop resilience among the population to Chinese malign activities trying to subvert the Taiwan political system.
Excerpts:
At the same time, the United States must significantly step up its training of Taiwanese military forces. Building on recent media reports that special operations forces and Marines have been training partner forces in Taiwan, the Pentagon should expand that mission to both enhance the capabilities of Taiwanese forces and send an unmistakable signal to China. It should also regularly send senior U.S. military leaders to Taiwan—not only to engage with their Taiwanese counterparts but also to observe the country’s military preparedness and gain a firsthand understanding of the topography in which any future invasion is likely to play out. Washington should also expand National Guard partnerships with Taiwanese forces and send battalion- or brigade-sized units to the island in regular rotations, as the National Guard does with dozens of other partner nations.
Most important, the Pentagon should build new operational planning structures for the defense of Taiwan that include both Australia and Japan. To do this, it should reestablish Joint Task Force 519, which provided mobile command and control for crisis response in Northeast Asia, under Indo-Pacific Command to lead contingency planning in the region. It also should reestablish U.S.-Taiwan Defense Command, the bilateral military command that was created in the mid-1950s to defend against a possible mainland invasion and that was in operation until the U.S. recognition of the People’s Republic of China in 1979.
Such an explicit U.S. defense commitment to Taiwan will require a shift in U.S. policy, but it would open the door to more effective military-to-military cooperation. In earlier decades, U.S. policymakers could rely on the long-standing policy of strategic ambiguity with China about Taiwan, a policy that ostensibly discouraged China from interfering in Taiwan and dissuaded Taiwan from taking unilateral action to disrupt the status quo. Today, however, it is Beijing that is poised to take unilateral action in the Taiwan Strait, and strategic silence from Washington encourages such intentions by creating doubts about the strength of U.S. resolve to defend the island.
Taiwan Can't Wait
What America Must Do To Prevent a Successful Chinese Invasion
February 1, 2022
In March 2021, Admiral Philip S. Davidson, then the commander of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, informed Congress that China could invade Taiwan within the next six years. In October, Taiwanese Defense Minister Chiu Kuo-cheng gave an even shorter timeline, asserting that China would be capable of a “full-scale invasion” by 2025. And in Foreign Affairs last summer, Oriana Skylar Mastro, an expert on the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), warned that “there have been disturbing signals that Beijing is reconsidering its peaceful approach and contemplating armed unification.”
Despite the growing warnings, the U.S. Department of Defense is inadequately prepared for a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. Consider the U.S. Navy, the service with the most critical role in the Indo-Pacific. The Trump administration’s plan for naval modernization, Battle Force 2045, was based on the assumption that the navy could wait until the mid-2040s to reach its optimal size. Under President Joe Biden, even that plan has been shelved, with the navy now significantly stepping back from its long-held goal of maintaining a fleet of 355 ships. And expected cuts in next year’s defense budget will likely further shrink the size of the fleet.
Meanwhile, U.S. and allied bases in the Pacific have not been upgraded. Congress has not yet funded a badly needed air and missile defense system on Guam, which houses an air and naval base that would be on the frontlines of any conflict over Taiwan. And at bases across the region, stockpiles of precision-guided munitions are insufficient to support a prolonged conflict.
At present, the United States is on track to lose a war over Taiwan. Yet it is not too late to change course. With the targeted redirection of existing and readily obtainable military resources, effective planning, and the leveraging of crucial alliances, the United States has the capacity to prevent and, if necessary, to win a war over Taiwan as soon as the middle of this decade. Rather than betting on the restraint of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) or on technology that will not be ready for more than a decade, Congress and the executive branch must implement a new Pacific defense strategy now. As my colleague on the House Armed Services Committee, Democratic Representative Elaine Luria of Virginia, has argued, instead of Battle Force 2045, the United States needs Battle Force 2025.
A Crucial Line of Defense
Although the Taiwan Strait may seem far from the United States, the Indo-Pacific, which would be the broader theater of any conflict with China, is home to numerous U.S. territories and possessions. These include American Samoa, Guam, and the Northern Mariana Islands plus a number of other small islands and atolls under U.S. control. Together with allied countries in the region such as Australia and Japan, these U.S. holdings constitute a crucial line of defense against China and provide the United States with the ability to more effectively deny the PLA the capacity to operate across broad swaths of the Pacific in wartime. In theory, the U.S. territories and possessions should play a critical role in supplementing the current posture of U.S. forces in the region, which are largely concentrated in a small number of hubs in Alaska, Hawaii, Japan, and Korea.
Despite their strategic importance, however, Washington has not effectively employed these Pacific footholds. In many of them, there is no U.S. military infrastructure at all. The Pentagon should immediately review how these islands could contribute to the defense of the Pacific and undertake any environmental remediation and construction required for optimal use by U.S. forces. If there is a piece of land in the Pacific under the American flag, it needs to be able to host small teams of Marines equipped with ground-based missiles, maintain expeditionary airfields, and support advanced surveillance and reconnaissance systems. It should also be able to serve as a logistics hub for naval, air, or other U.S. military operations. In addition expanding and spreading military resources around the region will also make it more difficult for the PLA to counter U.S. forces in any conflict by incorporating dispersal and deception into the profile of the United States’ Indo-Pacific Command.
Washington should also immediately take steps to strengthen ties with the Federated States of Micronesia, the Republic of the Marshall Islands, and the Republic of Palau—the three Pacific island countries that maintain alliances with the United States under a Compact of Free Association. With each of these countries, the United States should seek to permanently extend respective agreements and to establish new U.S. bases in exchange for expanded economic assistance.
Defending Guam, which is just 1,700 miles from Taiwan, is particularly important. It has a deep-water port, munitions and fuel stores, and a critical airfield, and it is home to more than 150,000 U.S. citizens. Yet at present, the island is vulnerable to strikes by a new generation of Chinese cruise and ballistic missiles, including one that defense experts have called the “Guam Killer.” For years, Indo-Pacific Command’s top request to Congress has been to fund a state-of-the-art air and missile defense for Guam known as the “Guam Defense System.” But building up the island’s strategic defenses should also include expanded runway repair and air control capabilities, reinforced facilities for ammunition storage and command-and-control centers, and new security systems to prevent espionage or sabotage operations.
The Pentagon must also enhance its joint base arrangements with U.S. allies. The United States should work with the United Kingdom, for example, to upgrade the base on the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia by adding missile defense capabilities that would allow it to better contribute to a Taiwan conflict and act as a hub for a long-range bomber and surveillance presence in the “Indo” part of the Indo-Pacific. Building on the recent AUKUS agreement with Australia and the United Kingdom, the Pentagon should bolster its cooperation with the Royal Australian Air Force at Base Darwin and Base Tindal in Australia’s Northern Territory. These bases should stockpile munitions to serve U.S. forces operating in the region. And Washington should also seek expanded access in the Philippines, including at Subic Bay. Situated just a few hundred miles from Taiwan across the Luzon Strait, the Philippines would be an essential U.S. partner in any potential conflict. Although the administration of President Rodrigo Duterte seems unlikely to embrace hosting U.S. missiles on Philippine territory, negotiating with Duterte’s successor should top the U.S. government’s Indo-Pacific priority list.
Finally, the United States should expand Japan’s air defenses by upgrading systems on the USS Shiloh, the USS Vella Gulf, and the USS Monterey—all cruisers with ballistic missile defense capabilities that are scheduled for retirement in fiscal year 2022. Given the high costs of a full modernization, a more economical option might be to provide them with limited upgrades that allow the ships to provide air defense protection while remaining in port in Japan.
Harnessing the Hardware We Have
Upgrading bases will do much to provide the foundation of a stronger U.S. presence in the Pacific, but it will not be sufficient to give the United States a military edge in a conflict with China over Taiwan. If a conflict breaks out in the next few years, the United States will go to war with the military it has today, not the one defense planners and technologists envision for tomorrow. As such, Washington cannot afford to retire or cut critical conventional equipment and weapons in the hope that unproven future technologies will replace them. It will need to make the most of the military hardware it already has.
In its May 2021 budget, the navy proposed retiring 15 ships, including seven cruisers, and buying only eight. But some of the ships slated for retirement could instead play a critical role by providing air defense for carrier strike groups. With modest updates, some of the cruisers could also serve as stationary air defense assets in Guam or Japan. The United States could augment these ships by purchasing and positioning vertical launch system missile cells independently ashore or on moored platforms to add air defense capacity.
The United States also has an opportunity to upgrade its conventional missile arsenal in the Pacific. In recent years, the PLA has developed a growing arsenal of “anti-access/area-denial” technologies, including long-range missiles and sensors designed to prevent U.S. and allied forces from operating across broad swaths of the Pacific in the event of a conflict. The Trump administration’s 2019 withdrawal from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, however, has created an opportunity to counter these efforts with relatively inexpensive conventional ground-launched missiles. One promising way to do this is through what the defense expert Thomas Karako has called “containerized launchers,” in which missiles and launchers are camouflaged in cargo containers for easy dispersion and concealment.
In a near-term war, Washington will have to make the most of technologies it already has.
The Pentagon should also focus on buying and modifying weapons systems that enhance the military’s ability to see or strike Chinese forces. A good example is the P-8 Poseidon antisubmarine aircraft, which the navy plans to stop buying. As the aviation journalist Tyler Rogoway has argued, with modest adjustments, the P-8 could serve as an affordable aircraft for delivering a wide array of weapons, including Long Range Anti-Ship Missiles. In addition, the Pentagon should make greater use of existing sonar systems such as the Transformational Reliable Acoustic Path System, which can passively detect submarine activity from the ocean floor along critical passageways such as the Luzon Strait.
Another relatively simple step would be to acquire “bolt-on” sonar surveillance kits for leased commercial vessels, which could deploy to the South China Sea to augment the U.S. Navy’s limited fleet of submarine-detecting oceanic surveillance ships. The Pentagon should also buy specially equipped MQ-9B unmanned aircraft to deploy and monitor antisubmarine sonobuoy fields—a task currently performed by P-8s—which would allow the military’s P-8s to focus on deploying weapons against submarines or enemy ships. The United States can also complicate the PLA’s antisubmarine strategy by deploying more unmanned underwater vehicles as decoy submarines.
The Pentagon will need to plan ahead in order to avoid the bottlenecks in munitions production that have emerged in some recent conflicts. For example, during the 2011 NATO campaign against the Libyan dictator Muammar al-Qaddafi, European militaries ran low on precision-guided munitions. On any given missile system, roughly 30 percent of the material requires lead times on restocking that may run beyond a year. To shorten this timeline, the Defense Department could use the Defense Production Act to direct industry to prioritize the delivery of materials for defense contracts. But a more simple approach would be to place advanced orders on long-lead items, such as propellants and explosives, and stockpile them until they are needed. The Pentagon could start by purchasing two extra sets of long-lead components for every set of missiles it orders. This would allow the Defense Department to call on two years’ worth of inventory of long-lead material within one year of deciding to access its surge stockpile.
Even with more materials, though, persistently small orders, driven by budgetary pressures, have made the munitions supply chain brittle. The Pentagon should require companies to model maximum production rates to see where supply chain failures may occur and use Defense Production Act funds to help manufacturers build surge capacity. Although they may sit dormant during peacetime, these additional assembly lines could make a difference in a protracted war. Congress should also draft “break glass in case of Taiwan emergency” authorities that allow industry to bypass test processes that can add to the delay in fielding munitions.
An End to Ambiguity
The only short war for Taiwan would be a quick Chinese victory. Consequently, U.S. defense planners must prepare both Taiwanese and U.S. forces for a long war. For close to two decades, U.S. national security leaders have been advising their Taiwanese counterparts to focus on acquiring low-cost “asymmetric” defenses, such as antiship missiles, mobile air defense systems, mines, and unmanned aircraft rather than on far more costly submarines, tanks, and fighter jets. Washington needs to help Taipei invest in more of these asymmetric weapons, which will maximize the difficulty of an amphibious invasion. The United States can start by offering up to $3 billion annually in military financing, assistance that should be made contingent on Taiwan increasing its own limited defense budget and investment in these types of capabilities.
At the same time, the United States must significantly step up its training of Taiwanese military forces. Building on recent media reports that special operations forces and Marines have been training partner forces in Taiwan, the Pentagon should expand that mission to both enhance the capabilities of Taiwanese forces and send an unmistakable signal to China. It should also regularly send senior U.S. military leaders to Taiwan—not only to engage with their Taiwanese counterparts but also to observe the country’s military preparedness and gain a firsthand understanding of the topography in which any future invasion is likely to play out. Washington should also expand National Guard partnerships with Taiwanese forces and send battalion- or brigade-sized units to the island in regular rotations, as the National Guard does with dozens of other partner nations.
Most important, the Pentagon should build new operational planning structures for the defense of Taiwan that include both Australia and Japan. To do this, it should reestablish Joint Task Force 519, which provided mobile command and control for crisis response in Northeast Asia, under Indo-Pacific Command to lead contingency planning in the region. It also should reestablish U.S.-Taiwan Defense Command, the bilateral military command that was created in the mid-1950s to defend against a possible mainland invasion and that was in operation until the U.S. recognition of the People’s Republic of China in 1979.
An explicit commitment to Taiwan will end doubts about U.S. resolve to defend the island.
Such an explicit U.S. defense commitment to Taiwan will require a shift in U.S. policy, but it would open the door to more effective military-to-military cooperation. In earlier decades, U.S. policymakers could rely on the long-standing policy of strategic ambiguity with China about Taiwan, a policy that ostensibly discouraged China from interfering in Taiwan and dissuaded Taiwan from taking unilateral action to disrupt the status quo. Today, however, it is Beijing that is poised to take unilateral action in the Taiwan Strait, and strategic silence from Washington encourages such intentions by creating doubts about the strength of U.S. resolve to defend the island.
Although an unambiguous U.S. commitment to defend Taiwan may itself be insufficient to deter a PLA invasion, it would at the very least reduce the odds of war through Chinese miscalculation. Congress can take the lead on this front by passing the Taiwan Invasion Prevention Act. First introduced in 2020, the bill would not only end the policy of strategic ambiguity but also provide a standing authorization for use of military force to defend Taiwan in the event of a Chinese invasion.
A Fulcrum of the Free World
For the United States, acting swiftly to build Battle Force 2025 will not be easy. The Pentagon is inclined to inertia. Left to its own devices, it will tend to limit itself to making marginal improvements under existing constraints. Fortunately, though, Congress has a say. Charged with a constitutional obligation to provide for the common defense, members of Congress can inject a sense of urgency into the Department of Defense before it is too late. Doing so will require difficult tradeoffs and public support. Naturally, many Americans will wonder why it is worth making defense commitments that could draw the United States into a new war—let alone a war with a nuclear-armed adversary to defend a small and distant nation. Political leaders in both parties need a good answer to this legitimate concern. The answer has at least three parts.
First, by allowing the PLA to take control of Taiwan, the United States would be giving China a new way to wage economic warfare on Americans, as well as people in Europe and many other parts of the world. As the linchpin of the production of semiconductors, Taiwan plays a crucial role in the global digital economy. Taiwanese semiconductors today power tens of millions of consumer devices, vehicles, and high-end military systems. Over the past three decades, as American semiconductor companies have eliminated capital-intensive production facilities known as fabs, U.S. reliance on Taiwan for its new and emerging technologies has become ever greater. And since mainland China already hosts a growing number of fabs, it could acquire a dangerous monopoly of the world’s semiconductor supply. According to an analysis for the U.S. Air Force Office of Commercial and Economic Analysis by Rick Switzer, a former Air Force senior foreign policy advisor, if China conquered Taiwan, it would control nearly 80 percent of global semiconductor production. This would allow the CCP to use the supply of semiconductors to gain coercive leverage over any company, nation, or military that criticizes its human rights abuses, its predatory economic practices, or its destruction of the environment or that otherwise challenges its power and reach.
Second, the reality of Taiwan’s geographic position in the Pacific means that what happens there will not stay there. The island lies at the fulcrum of the so-called first island chain off the Asian mainland, islands that include both Japan and the Philippines. Like a World War I trench, this geography forms a critical defense perimeter that in the event of war could help prevent Chinese forces from attempting a more expansive campaign that could threaten Hawaii, Guam, and Australia. Moreover, Japan and the Philippines are U.S. allies. If Taiwan were to fall, U.S. defense obligations to Japan and the Philippines would continue, but their execution would become far more difficult. Failing to defend Taiwan would threaten Washington’s most important allies in Asia as well as its own territory in the Pacific, including more than 1.5 million Americans in Hawaii and Guam.
Third, if the United States fails to stand with its democratic allies when they are threatened by an authoritarian adversary, then it will seriously undermine its own credibility and influence. Failing to defend an existing democracy from the world’s foremost authoritarian power would lead to the end of the United States’ superpower status and the corresponding guarantees of prosperity, freedom, and human rights that have come with it. The CCP is pursuing a global strategy to displace the United States as the leader of the international system, replacing the U.S.-led liberal order with one that favors CCP client states and authoritarian values. If the United States abandons Taiwan, a prosperous democracy of 24 million people, Beijing would be able to seize upon this failure to promote the “inevitability” of the Chinese model. In the near term, it could allow China to Finlandize neighboring states—forcing them into a position of accommodating Chinese power to avoid being the target of Chinese aggression. In the long term, China could use its expanding reach to undermine democracy worldwide.
Such a fate is not inevitable, but until now, the United States has made it more likely by taking a complacent approach to the defense of Taiwan. By building Battle Force 2025, the United States and its allies can deter and if necessary defeat a Chinese invasion in the near term without disrupting the United States’ long-term defense investments and without depending on magical future technologies or budgetary miracles. Armed with a sense of urgency, the United States can defend Taiwan and, in the process, defend the free world.
3. Putin accuses U.S. of trying to lure Russia into war
Classic. Right out of Gerasimov's playbook.
Russian New Generation Warfare and the Future of War:
As a result, it follows that the main guidelines for developing Russian military capabilities by 2020 are:
i. From direct destruction to direct influence;
ii. from direct annihilation of the opponent to its inner decay;
iii. from a war with weapons and technology to a culture war;
iv. from a war with conventional forces to specially prepared forces and commercial irregular groupings;
v. from the traditional (3D) battleground to information/psychological warfare and war of perceptions;
vi. from direct clash to contactless war;
vii. from a superficial and compartmented war to a total war, including the enemy’s internal side and base;
viii. from war in the physical environment to a war in the human consciousness and in cyberspace;
ix. from symmetric to asymmetric warfare by a combination of political, economic, information, technological, and ecological campaigns;
x. From war in a defined period of time to a state of permanent war as the natural condition in national life.
Thus, the Russian view of modern warfare is based on the idea that the main battlespace is the mind and, as a result, new-generation wars are to be dominated by information and psychological warfare, in order to achieve superiority in troops and weapons control, morally and psychologically depressing the enemy’s armed forces personnel and civil population. The main objective is to reduce the necessity for deploying hard military power to the minimum necessary, making the opponent’s military and civil population support the attacker to the detriment of their own government and country. It is interesting to note the notion of permanent war, since it denotes a permanent enemy. In the current geopolitical structure, the clear enemy is Western civilization, its values, culture, political system, and ideology.
Putin accuses U.S. of trying to lure Russia into war
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- Summary
- U.S. says Russia must pull back troops
- 'Are we supposed to go to war with NATO?' asks Putin
- Moscow wants West to respect 1999 security charter
KYIV/MOSCOW, Feb 1 (Reuters) - Russian President Vladimir Putin accused the West on Tuesday of deliberately creating a scenario designed to lure it into war and ignoring Russia's security concerns over Ukraine.
In his first direct public comments on the crisis for nearly six weeks, a defiant Putin showed no sign of backing down from security demands that the West has called non-starters and a possible excuse to launch an invasion, which Moscow denies.
"It's already clear now ... that fundamental Russian concerns were ignored," Putin said at a news conference with the visiting prime minister of Hungary, one of several NATO leaders trying to intercede with him as the crisis has intensified.
Putin described a potential future scenario in which Ukraine was admitted to NATO and then attempted to recapture the Crimea peninsula, territory Russia seized in 2014.
"Let's imagine Ukraine is a NATO member and starts these military operations. Are we supposed to go to war with the NATO bloc? Has anyone given that any thought? Apparently not," he said.
Russia has massed more than 100,000 troops on the Ukrainian border and Western countries say they fear Putin may be planning to invade.
Russia denies this but has said it could take unspecified military action unless its security demands are met. Western countries say any invasion would bring sanctions on Moscow.
The Kremlin wants the West to respect a 1999 agreement that no country can strengthen its own security at the expense of others, which it considers at the heart of the crisis, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said.
He raised the charter signed in Istanbul by members of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which includes the United States and Canada, during a call with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
Lavrov said Blinken accepted the need to discuss the matter further whilst a U.S. account of the call focused on the need for Moscow to pull back.
"If President Putin truly does not intend war or regime change, the Secretary told Foreign Minister Lavrov then this is the time to pull back troops and heavy weaponry and engage in a serious discussion," a senior State Department official told reporters.
The U.S. is willing to discuss giving the Kremlin a way to verify the absence of Tomahawk cruise missiles at NATO bases in Romania and Poland, if Russia shares similar information about missiles on certain Russian bases, Bloomberg reported.
The White House and State Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment but a source familiar with the situation said the United States has only offered to have talks on a variety of Russia's concerns, such as arms control issues in the appropriate forums.
'INSTRUMENT'
1/5
A view shows Russian BMP-3 infantry fighting vehicles during drills held by the armed forces of the Southern Military District at the Kadamovsky range in the Rostov region, Russia January 27, 2022. REUTERS/Sergey Pivovarov
Putin had not spoken publicly about the Ukraine crisis since Dec. 23, leaving ambiguity about his personal position while diplomats from Russia and the West have been engaged in repeated rounds of talks.
His remarks on Tuesday reflected a world view in which Russia needs to defend itself from an aggressive and hostile United States. Washington is not primarily concerned with Ukraine's security, but with containing Russia, Putin said.
"In this sense, Ukraine itself is just an instrument to achieve this goal," he said.
"This can be done in different ways, by drawing us into some kind of armed conflict and, with the help of their allies in Europe, forcing the introduction against us of those harsh sanctions they are talking about now in the U.S."
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who has often sparred with Western European leaders over democracy in his own country, said he believed after his talks with Putin that there was room for a compromise.
"I got convinced today that the existing differences in positions can be bridged and it is possible to sign an agreement that would guarantee peace, guarantee Russia's security and is acceptable for NATO member states as well," Orban said.
GUN TO UKRAINE'S HEAD
As Western countries rush to show solidarity with Ukraine, the U.S. urged Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro to cancel a visit with Putin in Russia, a source told Reuters.
On Tuesday, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson met President Volodymyr Zelenskiy in Kyiv and accused Putin of holding a gun to Ukraine's head to demand changes to the security architecture in Europe.
"It is vital that Russia steps back and chooses a path of diplomacy," Johnson said. "And I believe that is still possible. We are keen to engage in dialogue, of course we are, but we have the sanctions ready, we're providing military support and we will also intensify our economic cooperation."
Johnson said any Russian invasion of Ukraine would lead to a military and humanitarian disaster.
"There are 200,000 men and women under arms in Ukraine, they will put up a very, very fierce and bloody resistance," he said. "I think that parents, mothers in Russia should reflect on that fact and I hope very much that President Putin steps back from the path of conflict and that we engage in dialogue."
Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, also visiting Kyiv, said Poland would help Ukraine with gas and arms supplies, as well as humanitarian and economic aid.
"Living close to a neighbour like Russia, we have the feeling of living at the foot of a volcano," said Morawiecki.
Zelenskiy, who has repeatedly played down the prospect of an imminent invasion, signed a decree to boost his armed forces by 100,000 troops over three years. He urged lawmakers to stay calm and avoid panic.
The troop increase was "not because we will soon have a war ... but so that soon and in the future there will be peace in Ukraine," Zelenskiy said.
Reporting by Natalia Zinets and Vladimir Soldatkin; Additional reporting by Matthias Williams and Gabriela Baczynska in Kyiv, Tom Balmforth and Alexander Tanas in Moscow, Krisztina Than in Budapest, Mark Trevelyan, William James and Guy Faulconbridge in London, Simon Lewis, Steve Holland, Eric Beech and Humeyra Pamuk in Washington, Kanishka Singh in Bengaluru and Gabriel Stargardter in Rio De Janeiro; Writing by Peter Graff and Costas Pitas; Editing by Mark Trevelyan, Mark Heinrich and Grant McCool
4. Russia Confronts Ukraine With Upgraded Military Rebuilt After Soviet Collapse
Russia Confronts Ukraine With Upgraded Military Rebuilt After Soviet Collapse
Vladimir Putin has largely transformed the country’s forces left depleted and demoralized after the breakup of the U.S.S.R. as part of his goal to reassert Russia on the world stage
By Ann M. Simmons
Feb. 1, 2022 11:33 am ET
“The situation has turned around,” President Putin told journalists in December 2020. “Russia has one of the most efficient armies in the world.”
The revamped military is a critical tool in Mr. Putin’s efforts to return from the humiliation of the Soviet collapse and reassert Russia on the world stage. It has allowed Moscow to wield influence in the Middle East and Africa and maintain the Kremlin’s sway in what it regards as Moscow’s sphere of influence over former Soviet republics.
The Russian president justifies the huge troop buildup on Ukraine’s border as a valid response to what he says are threats from NATO and Western powers to Russia’s national security.
The armed forces Mr. Putin inherited when he came to power in 2000 were dejected, bankrupt and starved of adequate hardware.
In 2006, the Russian leader said that not a single new ship had been built between 1996 and 2000. Troops carried out military exercises on maps, the navy never left the docks and the air force never got to fly, he told the country’s Federal Assembly.
The shortcomings were evident in 1999 when Moscow launched a campaign against separatist Islamist forces in Chechnya. The military needed at least 65,000 soldiers to put it down, Mr. Putin told the assembly. But there were only 55,000 combat-ready troops in the entire army of 1.4 million servicemen, he said. It took the Russian military 5½ years to crush the rebellion.
Russian soldiers in the early 2000s in Chechnya, where they fought separatist Islamist forces.
Photo: ALEXANDER NEMENOV/AFP/Getty Images
Mr. Putin reduced the number of divisions and improved training for conscripts and professional soldiers, including equipping bases with swimming pools, gyms, obstacle courses, shooting ranges—“everything that a real soldier needs,” according to Oleg Matveychev, a professor at the state-run Financial University in Moscow and co-author of a 2019 report by a group of Russian scholars assessing Mr. Putin’s leadership.
Under a plan introduced in 2008, Russia made investments into nuclear weaponry and aerospace technology, areas Mr. Putin set out as primary objectives. With state coffers bolstered by income from soaring oil prices, pay for service personnel increased and military education focused more on science and technology. More soldiers were recruited to join the military as a profession, and the nation’s compulsory military service was reduced to one year from two.
An exhibition on World War II at the museum in Reutov.
Photo: Arthur Bondar for The Wall Street Journal
“We should not tempt anyone with our weakness,” Mr. Putin wrote in an article for the state newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta in 2012. “That is why we will under no circumstances give up the potential of strategic deterrence and will strengthen it.”
Russia has a highly skilled military, “especially given the ability to conduct large-scale ground operations, which only very few armed forces are capable of,” said Mikhail Barabanov, a military expert of the Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies, a private Moscow-based think tank. “And Russia’s armed forces are nuclear and the only ones on the planet capable of destroying U.S. and NATO [capabilities],” he said.
In 2018, Mr. Putin unveiled the Avangard hypersonic strategic missile that he boasted could breach U.S. defenses. Other new weapons in Russia’s arsenal include modernized Tu-95MS strategic missile-carrying bombers; submarines armed with ballistic rockets; and S-400 anti-aircraft missile systems, an aerial shield that Russia claims can detect the latest stealth aircraft and launch missiles at intercepted targets at a distance of 400 kilometers, or about 250 miles. It can also be deployed against ground targets.
Last year, Russia’s armed forces received more than 5,000 new and modernized weapons, military and special hardware, the defense ministry said. In addition to rocket carriers and anti-missile systems, the procurement included 900 armored combat vehicles, as well as scores of air and naval vessels, it said.
Opinion polls show that the army is now the most respected institution in Russian society, and Russian defense minister Sergei Shoigu one the country’s most popular senior government officials.
Gaps remain, and Russian air force and navy capabilities fall far short of the U.S. and China’s military, say Western military experts.
Moscow’s defense budget is far lower than those of the U.S. and China. In 2020, Russia spent $62 billion on the military, while the U.S. spent $778 billion and China spent $252.3 billion, according to World Bank data. Military spending was 14.5% of Russia’s federal budget and 3% of gross domestic product in 2021, according to official Russian data. U.S. defense spending is about 11% of the federal budget and 3.2% of GDP.
While the goal of Russia’s 2008 revamp was to fully professionalize the armed forces, around a third of personnel are short-term conscripts.
A military parade in St. Petersburg in May.
Photo: Maksim Konstantinov/Zuma Press
“One year is not enough to train raw recruits into competent operators of sophisticated military equipment,” said Henry Boyd, a London-based research fellow for defense and military analysis at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, an authority on global security, political risk and military conflict.
Today Russia’s military has just over a million service personnel, compared with 2.91 million service members and civilians in U.S. forces. Some Western analysts argue that the Russians still lack adequate combat-ready forces, making large-scale deployments more challenging.
Corruption also remains endemic in the defense industry, and the most sophisticated equipment sometimes ends up not being produced and delivered for service on time, other analysts said.
Still, Russia’s “equipment might not be the best in the world, but there’s enough of it at a good enough quality and at a good enough quantity to enable them to actually act” in a way they couldn’t have in the 1990s, Mr. Boyd said.
Russia has enhanced its broader strategy by using cyberwarfare, propaganda and political pressure against perceived enemies. In recent years, suspected Russian state-backed hackers have launched a string of increasingly sophisticated and ever more brazen online intrusions, demonstrating how cyber operations have become a key plank in Russia’s confrontation with the West and its allies.
Today, the U.S. trails Russia in the development of intercontinental range hypersonic missiles, which travel faster than the speed of sound. Russia also has more tanks, rocket projectors, self-propelled gun vehicles and towed artillery than any other country, according to Global Firepower, a statistics-based website tracking the defense-related information of 140 nations.
Russian T-72B3 main battle tanks during combat exercises in the Rostov region near the Ukraine border in January.
Photo: SERGEY PIVOVAROV/REUTERS
In 2014, Mr. Putin sent forces into Ukraine to seize the Crimean Peninsula and then threw support behind pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine, although the Kremlin has long denied it has a presence there.
As part of a Moscow-brokered peace deal between Armenia and Azerbaijan in 2020, Russia agreed to deploy around 2,000 troops to the region for at least five years, giving it leverage over both countries. Last month, Russian paratroopers flooded into Kazakhstan to help shore up the embattled government.
Farther afield, Russian state defense contractor Rostec trained Venezuelan troops and advised on securing arms contracts until Russia withdrew key advisers in 2019. And the Kremlin has consolidated its military presence in Syria, where its air power and military technical support were decisive in President Bashar al-Assad’s victory in his country’s civil war.
Pedestrians in Reutov near the Meteorite monument and NPO Mashinostroyenia building.
Photo: Arthur Bondar for The Wall Street Journal
In Reutov, a town so secret during the Soviet era that it never appeared on a map, the missile manufacturer, now known as the Military Industrial Corporation NPO Mashinostroyenia, is once again a leader in the production of space technology and combat rockets, including the Avangard hypersonic strategic missile.
A towering monument to a Soviet-era Meteorite cruise missile stands in a small park near a museum where an exhibition extols the company’s accomplishments.
Over the years, NPO Mashinostroyenia has developed more than 25 missile and rocket-space systems. It manufactures the Bastion-P Russian mobile coastal defense missile system currently deployed in Crimea and Kaliningrad, a Russian enclave sandwiched between NATO members Poland and Lithuania. It also has a joint venture with India to create BrahMos supersonic cruise missiles that can be launched from submarines, ships, aircraft or land.
5. FBI Director Wray says scale of Chinese spying in the U.S. 'blew me away'
That is quite a number of cases.
FBI Director Wray says scale of Chinese spying in the U.S. 'blew me away'
The FBI opens a new China-related counterintelligence investigation every 12 hours on average, and it now has over 2,000 such cases.
Wray has become the U.S. government’s most outspoken critic of the Chinese government’s spying. In an exclusive NBC News interview, he said the sheer scale of Chinese efforts to steal American technology shocked him when he became FBI director in 2017.
“This one blew me away. And I’m not the kind of guy that uses words like ‘blown away’ easily," he said.
Wray said the FBI is opening a new China related counter-intelligence investigation on average every 12 hours, with over 2,000 such cases currently ongoing.
“There is no country that presents a broader, more severe threat to our innovation, our ideas and our economic security than China does,” he said.
In a speech Monday at the Reagan Library in California, Wray warned that China’s economic espionage has reached a new level, “more brazen, more damaging than ever before.”
The Chinese government has repeatedly insisted that it doesn’t steal U.S. business secrets. But the FBI has accused Chinese spies of targeting a wide range of American innovations — including Covid vaccines, computer chips, nuclear power plants, wind turbines and smart phones, for example.
Last November a Chinese intelligence officer, Xu Yanjun, was convicted of trying to steal closely guarded technology developed by GE aviation for making jet engine fan blades from composite materials. Investigators said he helped hackers in China get access to company computers and tried to persuade a GE engineer to travel to China.
GE alerted the FBI, and the engineer was given altered documents to let the scheme play out so investigators could build a criminal case. He faces a maximum sentence of 15 years in prison.
Sometimes a company’s technology is stolen by planting spies inside company, the FBI said. But other cases involve theft committed remotely through computer intrusions. And when it comes to that method, Wray said, China has no equal.
"The scale of their hacking program, and the amount of personal and corporate data that their hackers have stolen, is greater than every other country combined,” he said in the interview.
Wray has long accused China of using pressure tactics to block criticism from dissidents and members of the immigrant community in the United States, which he said amounts to Chinese officials exporting their oppressive tactics.
"China may be the first country to combine that kind of authoritarian ambition with cutting-edge technical capability. It’s like the surveillance nightmare of East Germany combined with the tech of Silicon Valley,” Wray said.
Wray cited the example of Zhihao Kong, who was a graduate student at Purdue University in Indiana in 2020 when he publicly praised student protesters who were killed in 1989 at Tiananmen Square. After doing so, Kong said China’s Ministry of State Security visited his parents in China to warn them about his activism.
Wray emphasized that the source of the trouble is China’s leaders, not its citizens.
“I’m referring not to the Chinese people, not to people of Chinese descent or heritage," he said. "What we’re talking about here is the Chinese government and the Chinese Communist Party.”
Some Asian-American groups have accused the Justice Department and the FBI of overreaching, especially with a Trump-era national security program called the China Initiative, created to address Chinese economic espionage in universities and research institutions. The groups say federal agents too often go after academic researchers for paperwork offenses that have no effect on national security.
Last month, the Justice Department dropped its case against a mechanical engineering professor at MIT, Gang Chen, after the federal government determined that he had no obligation to declare Chinese affiliations when submitting grant proposals, such as being an adviser to the Chinese Scholarship Council and a review expert for China’s National Natural Science Foundation.
FBI officials, while acknowledging some missteps, said the bureau’s focus is on efforts to steal from American companies, not on academia.
“We don’t investigate based on race, or ethnicity, or constitutionally protected activity,” Wray said. “In fact, in many cases, Chinese Americans are some of the people most victimized by the Chinese government’s tactics that we’re describing.”
While other nations, including North Korea, Russia and Iran, have carried out sustained attacks on American computer networks, Wray said China stands in a class by itself.
“There’s just no other country that presents a broader threat to our ideas, innovation and economic security than China.”
6. Chandran Nair on White Privilege in International Relations
A provocative interview with the author of a very provocative book.
Excerpts:
As we have all seen there is a price to be paid for imposing different standards on other countries and using approaches that rely on power and punishment. Afghanistan is a classic example and the use of the Taliban as the bogeyman and the liberation of Afghan women as a fig leaf to justify an illegal invasion is part of this insincere and failed approach. Not everyone who takes up arms to fight an invader who represents a different religious and militaristic state, is a terrorist, a Taliban member, an Islamic fundamentalist, or an oppressor of women and girls opposed to education. We can support reform, but it is the height of arrogance to assume that entire nations need adjustment from the West in order to become better and modern.
We have repeatedly seen the failures of attempting to do so – from the colonial period (take Myanmar, which now has the world’s longest running civil war because the British first colonized, divided, and attempted to “civilize” them) through to the Cold War (the strife in Vietnam, where new mothers still have traces of the chemical “Agent Orange” in their breastmilk with no apology from the U.S.), and more recently, the war on terror (with nearly 1 million casualties and Afghanistan left in disarray).
The presumption that all positive social changes are spawned in the West and must be spread to the rest of the world is a White supremacist’s point of view. Social movements exist within countries and move at their own cultural pace with discussions that are appropriate for them – this is what Western nations must provide allowance for given their continuing penchant for interference and domination.
The West must move beyond weaponizing social causes to further the belief in the moral superiority of the West while diminishing the social values, political structures, and cultural norms of other countries.
Chandran Nair on White Privilege in International Relations
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Discussion of White supremacy and White privilege have risen to the forefront of global conversations, as “Black Lives Matter” has been picked up as a rallying cry around the world. Yet in the current world order, steeped in colonialist heritage and born in the immediate aftermath of World War II, the assumption of White supremacy continues to guide decision-making in both conscious and subconscious ways.
Chandran Nair explores the role White privilege plays in international relations – from great power diplomacy to cultural exchanges – in his new book, “Dismantling Global White Privilege: Equity for a Post-Western World.” Below, Nair, who is also the founder of the Global Institute for Tomorrow, an independent think tank based in Hong Kong, discusses some key takeaways from his book.
Your book begins with an exploration of White privilege in geopolitics. In that vein, I’d like to ask for your thoughts on the AUKUS alliance, which was announced after the book was finalized, so is not addressed in the text. In many aspects, it reflects the themes you raise in the book, yet even the most vocal critics of AUKUS tended to focus their objections on other points (for example, nuclear non-proliferation).
AUKUS is an excellent case study of White privilege in the global systems that shape our world and what constitutes foreign policy within the West. It can be summed up as preserving might and control across the world through the containment of the legitimate rights of other countries to rise and even assert themselves on the international stage. This is a right which the West believes is its sole prerogative and masked in narratives about upholding the rules-based order and therefore global peace and prosperity. But the world does not buy it anymore and AUKUS has sent troubling reminders across Asian capitals of the outdated and imperial mindsets of its three partners, and the power of the Anglo-Saxon tribe for three main reasons.
First, AUKUS is a slap in the face to Japan and India, which previously joined the U.S. and Australia to counter China in the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, known as the Quad. To them and other Asian nations, it should hopefully be the final reminder that there is no power-sharing with old imperial Western powers and they will always be viewed as second tier friends of convenience.
Second, it is a reminder that the West pulls off geopolitical moves like this because it harbors an anachronistic sense of superiority over others and retains privileges from its colonial exploits and setting up the “international rules-based system,” which it seeks to often credit for the peace, prosperity, and interconnectedness we see today. This lends Western nations the carefully crafted moral high ground, which they extensively leverage in attempts to convince the world that their actions are justified because their worldview is righteous – despite having committed centuries of atrocities in the drive to colonize and dominate the world.
The final reminder concerns the West’s inability to deal with contests to its power. The fundamental thing to question about AUKUS is the assumption that China is a country which needs to be “constrained.” Why is this? The fears of the West are not the fears of the rest of the world. Yes, China can be accused of some aggressive behaviors, but it hasn’t committed the atrocities that Western nations have – it hasn’t invaded any countries (unlike the U.S.), started any wars, or sanctioned other nations resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands. The reason is that for the first time in two to three hundred years, the West is having to deal with the rise of a world power, and a non-Caucasian one furthermore, that can challenge the status quo.
What is ironic is that the West asks the rest of the world to support it in containing China, being oblivious to the fact that the world has been under the Western yoke for so long. Not everyone in the world shares the West’s view of China or for that matter supports its aggressive and destructive approach to relations with Iran and North Korea. Global diplomacy needs a new approach and it cannot be one where the West, led by the U.S., in its arrogance believes it has to take the lead.
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I’d like to address the issue of “countering China” or the “China challenge” more directly. You write: “At the global level [White privilege] is seen in the actions of the U.S. and its Western allies to contain the rise of other economies such as China.” This ties into a theme often raised by China’s defenders, that U.S. criticism of China is imbued with racism. There is a central truth to this, but there are also real problems within China, eloquently spoken and written about by Chinese citizens themselves (including those belonging to marginalized ethnic groups like Tibetans and Uyghurs, as well as the Han majority). How can we address the issue of racism in U.S. foreign policy without going to the other extreme: claiming that any criticism of China is inherently racist?
I agree that it is a central truth that racism exists in U.S. foreign policy – and given its role as the global superpower as well as its reckless track record of “all options are on the table” diplomacy and using them destructively against non-White populations. But this hard truth is rarely acknowledged in international commentary. Calling for recognition of this does not mean this conversation exists solely at the extremes, i.e. saying that all criticisms of China are racist.
In fact, moderate conversation is precisely what is needed, because at the moment it is severely lacking. No one is saying that China has no internal problems – it absolutely does, just like all countries. After all the subjugation of minorities in the U.S. is centuries old but no other country seeks to intervene in its domestic affairs nor does the international community feel it can call for sanctions against the U.S. because of its war crimes in the Middle East.
But the real question is: Why is China made public enemy number one by the West and why must its peaceful rise be “countered”? Countering the globally destructive military expansion of the U.S. was never the subject of an international discourse let alone within the media in the West. Why are China’s internal issues so frequently conflated to a failing of its entire governance system and even its culture? Are the rest of the world to really believe that Western politicians care about Chinese people or Muslims for that matter?
So why does commentary of this nature proliferate on a daily basis? That is the question that needs to be asked and the book argues that it has roots in racial superiority, which in turn is tethered to the need to maintain economic hegemony. And the irony is that the so-called free media in the West has aligned itself with Western governments in this cause, which is telling as it reveals the racial nature of the so-called need to constrain China.
There is so much else happening in China that is worthy of headline news. President Xi Jinping announced last year that China successfully uplifted up to 800 million people from poverty alleviation, but this is hardly discussed, when it is in fact one of the greatest human achievements of the last few hundred years.
By focusing solely on specific criticisms, Western commentators are betraying their racism and also nurturing racism against an entire people – and completely being oblivious to it by masking it with geopolitical interests. This is responsible for the surge of attacks against people of Chinese origin in the U.S.
This is dishonest and immoral because the rise in anti-China rhetoric we are seeing is so clearly linked to the preservation of Western power. And because of the West’s premier position in the global ranking and the power of its global media, the whole world is subject to the projection of the West’s moral high ground, which masks its deeply held racist views. Constant judgements of “we know best” is the height of superiority rooted in a sense of racial superiority.
You devote a chapter to the role of White privilege in sports, and the Olympics is a good example – the brainchild of a Frenchman based on an interpretation of ancient Greek traditions, now become the premier international sports competition. Yet, at the same time, despite steep opposition and anger against China hosting the 2022 Games from many in the United States and Europe, the IOC has refused to budge. What’s your take on this dynamic, where the inherent Western-centric nature of the Olympics – and especially the Winter Olympics – is being overruled by the IOC itself?
The position taken by the IOC should be normal behavior and is the right one. The point is that a group of countries from the Anglosphere are once again using their sense of privilege to hurt a rising non-Western power. The same occurred during the Beijing Summer Olympics in 2008. It’s true that the Olympics are a Western invention but the fact that to this day it is controlled by Western institutions and people who inevitably make rules to favor the West (as I argue in the book) should be questioned and exposed.
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In the 21st century, with all the grand posturing about social progress, inclusion, and diversity, it is high time the West understands the Olympics is for the whole world, not just for the West. The opinions of Western countries should not carry more weight in an international body than the combined opinion of over a hundred others, the global majority.
With regard to the Beijing Winter Olympics it is not necessarily the case that the IOC’s actions are simply motivated by “doing the right thing,” or are somehow more aligned with China or the West. Simply put, it’s a business decision to keep the games going. The IOC knows that acting on the performative demands of a small but powerful cabal of Western nations will result in China withdrawing from future Olympics, will be unfair to all the athletes, anger many countries and sponsors. Lose China and you lose one of the largest sports markets in the world. The global brands – the largest of which are Western and who have large commercial interests at stake in the games proceeding and in China as a market – will not let that happen.
Another chapter deals powerfully with the harmful impact of Western dominance in pop culture, from music to television and film. Do you see the mainstreaming in the West, particularly the United States, of Korean alternatives – whether BTS or “Squid Game” – as a promising sign? Or is the “Korean wave” itself a product of Westernization, as you argue for Bollywood?
Yes and no. Yes, because there clearly is a new wave of culture that is spreading from East to West in ways that doesn’t really occur besides some Japanese entertainment – and these are melding with modern, youth culture in the West to create something entirely new. Indeed, having views of Korean culture through the Korean lens (rather than Western interpretations) may very well be helpful in spreading cultural awareness.
But there are three reasons why it’s not as promising as one might hope.
First, Korean entertainment is a small – albeit bright – star amidst the sea of Western media that dominates screens the world over. After all, if you look at the various lists of “most highly paid musicians and actors,” they are invariably Western (mainly American, exporting cultural norms that are in many ways damaging to other cultures but not even considered as such in the West) with only Korea-based BTS ever gracing these lists.
Second, the rise of “Squid Game” and other Netflix-based TV series are often at the invitation and economic interest of Netflix – so the choice is a Western economic decision (this is less true of K-Pop) – and reinforces a point in the book that global recognition, whether in movies, music, literature, or fashion, can only be achieved through Western channels and driven by its economic interests. And what that ensures is that one needs to produce goods and services that appeal to the lowest common denominator of Western sensibilities, meaning you have to be Western enough in your outlook even in the creative industry. Be too Black, too Indian, or too Muslim and you are out.
Lastly, it is undeniable that Korean culture is deeply imbued with Westernization, which is perhaps a contributing factor to its success in reaching Western audiences. Very little of what is exported from and is successful in the West in terms of music has roots in traditional Korean culture. After all, many of the stars of Korean’s entertainment scene feel compelled to carve their faces and lighten their skin in an attempt to look more White: Seoul is the plastic surgery capital of the world, with over one in three young women going under the knife, including for operations for both men and women to artificially create a “double-eyelid look,” i.e. the rejection of their Asiatic epicanthic fold in favor of Caucasian eyelids.
One stumbling block for efforts to fight against White privilege, particularly in the music, film, and fashion industries, is that many leaders speaking out against Western norms and ideals in these fields are in fact using that argument as a shield for their own homegrown misogyny. I am thinking in particular of the Taliban, but there are other, less-extreme examples across Asia – for example, the argument that China’s homegrown feminist movement is too “Western.” How can non-Western countries fight against the assumed supremacy of Western (White) cultural products without falling into the trap of allowing their own governments to be the final judge of what is “acceptable” traditional culture – which usually results in restrictions on self-expression for marginalized groups, like women, the LGBTQ community, or ethnic minorities?
This is an important question, because it goes to the heart of everything we have been discussing. It is about the supposedly “universal standards” that have been set by the West. If these standards are not being met in other countries, then the assumption is that these countries are morally beneath the West, not modern, or, as a worst-case scenario, require intervention – this is what weaponizing universal standards looks like.
While it is of course the case that criteria such as International Human Rights are the gold standard in how each country should treat its citizens, it is not the case that there is just one route to reach these standards, nor of interpreting them in different cultural contexts.
Yet, if anyone outside of the West speaks out against the use of Western-originated universal standards, they are quickly branded as human rights abusers. This occurs despite the fact that Western countries host their fair share of people with different interpretations on rights – just take a look at the U.S. and its recent abortion debate.
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Additionally, the issue is not solely about governments deciding what is acceptable. It is a common mistake to assume that standards within a non-Western country that don’t align with Western standards are somehow being enforced by morally bankrupt people in leadership positions, and there is no denying that there are many of them. It is this line of thinking that enables White Savior Syndrome: “we must save the people of country X from their evil leaders.” This was the same attitude of the colonialists and the missionaries who accompanied them. Civilizing the natives was the rallying call to camouflage the intentions to rape and plunder.
Citizens of nations around the world who have experienced colonization and exploitation are well aware of these tactics; they have not forgotten, just like Black people in the U.S. Western governments and white savior organizations need to be aware that these issues are much more complex than their simplistic analysis: It’s about people having their own ideas and values embedded at a personal and cultural level, and having the freedom and agency to believe in these things, even if they are at odds with Western standards.
Of course, oppressive governments and traditions exist and they need to be changed. But this is the struggle within and those of us who are willing to join them need to do so in ways that are appropriate and helpful. These are not issues that only the West is concerned about, as is often portrayed, further reinforcing the view that other cultures and people are backward and less caring, which in itself is a racist position. Cooperation and support must be steeped in deep understanding and devoid of the Western “holier than thou” approach which often sets things back, but at the same is convenient for the West in terms of its desire to continue to pontificate and occupy the higher moral ground globally.
As we have all seen there is a price to be paid for imposing different standards on other countries and using approaches that rely on power and punishment. Afghanistan is a classic example and the use of the Taliban as the bogeyman and the liberation of Afghan women as a fig leaf to justify an illegal invasion is part of this insincere and failed approach. Not everyone who takes up arms to fight an invader who represents a different religious and militaristic state, is a terrorist, a Taliban member, an Islamic fundamentalist, or an oppressor of women and girls opposed to education. We can support reform, but it is the height of arrogance to assume that entire nations need adjustment from the West in order to become better and modern.
We have repeatedly seen the failures of attempting to do so – from the colonial period (take Myanmar, which now has the world’s longest running civil war because the British first colonized, divided, and attempted to “civilize” them) through to the Cold War (the strife in Vietnam, where new mothers still have traces of the chemical “Agent Orange” in their breastmilk with no apology from the U.S.), and more recently, the war on terror (with nearly 1 million casualties and Afghanistan left in disarray).
The presumption that all positive social changes are spawned in the West and must be spread to the rest of the world is a White supremacist’s point of view. Social movements exist within countries and move at their own cultural pace with discussions that are appropriate for them – this is what Western nations must provide allowance for given their continuing penchant for interference and domination.
The West must move beyond weaponizing social causes to further the belief in the moral superiority of the West while diminishing the social values, political structures, and cultural norms of other countries.
7. Ukrainians building up resistance in case Russia attacks
Unconventional deterrence. Resistance operating concept. I will continue to beat the horse.
Ukrainians building up resistance in case Russia attacks
The table tennis coach, the chaplain’s wife, the dentist and the firebrand nationalist have little in common except a desire to defend their hometown and a sometimes halting effort to speak Ukrainian instead of Russian.
The situation in Kharkiv, just 25 miles from some of the tens of thousands of Russian troops massed at the border of Ukraine, feels particularly perilous. Ukraine’s second-largest city is one of its industrial centers and includes two factories that restore old Soviet-era tanks or build new ones.
“This city has to be protected,” said Viktoria Balesina, who teaches table tennis to teenagers and dyes her cropped hair deep purple at the crown. “We need to do something, not to panic and fall on our knees. We do not want this.”
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Balesina recalls being pressured to attend pro-Russia rallies during the protest movement that swept Ukraine after Russia attacked in 2014 — a year that utterly changed her life. A lifelong Russian speaker born and raised in Kharkiv, she switched to Ukrainian. Then she joined a group of a dozen or so women who meet weekly in an office building for community defense instruction.
Now her Ukrainian is near-fluent, though she still periodically grasps at words, and she can reload a sub-machine gun almost comfortably.
This wasn’t the life she expected at age 55, but she’s accepted it as necessary. Plenty of people in her social circle sympathize with Russia, but they’re not what drives her today.
“I am going to protect the city not for those people but for the women I’m training with,” she said.
Members of a Ukrainian far-right group train in Kharkiv, Ukraine, Saturday, Jan. 29, 2022. The situation in Kharkiv, just 40 kilometers (25 miles) from some of the tens of thousands of Russian troops massed at the border of Ukraine, feels particularly perilous. If Russia invades, some of Kharkiv's 1 million plus people say they stand ready to abandon their civilian lives and wage a guerilla campaign against one of the world's greatest military powers. They expect many Ukrainians will do the same. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)
Among her group is Svetlana Putilina, whose husband is a Muslim chaplain in the Ukrainian military. With grim determination and not a hint of panic, the 50-year-old has orchestrated emergency plans for her family and for her unit: Who will take the children to safety outside the city? Who will accompany elderly parents and grandparents to one of the hundreds of mapped bomb shelters? How will the resistance women deploy?
“If it is possible and our government gives out weapons, we will take them and defend our city,” said the mother of three and grandmother of three more. If not, she at least has one of her husband’s service weapons at home, and she now knows how to use it.
Russians deny responding to US
The Kremlin is seeking legally binding guarantees from the U.S. and NATO that Ukraine will never join the bloc, deployment of NATO weapons near Russian borders will be halted and the alliance’s forces will be rolled back from Eastern Europe.
The demands, rejected by NATO and the U.S. as nonstarters, come amid fears that Russia might invade Ukraine, stoked the buildup of an estimated 100,000 Russian troops near Ukraine’s borders. Talks between Russia and the West have so far failed to yield any progress.
Washington has provided Moscow with a written response to the demands, and on Monday three Biden administration officials said that the Russian government sent a written response to the U.S. proposals. A State Department official has declined to offer details about the document, saying it “would be unproductive to negotiate in public” and that they would leave it up to Russia to discuss the counterproposal.
But Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Grushko on Tuesday told Russia’s state RIA Novosti news agency that this was “not true.”
The agency also cited an unnamed senior diplomat in the Russian Foreign Ministry as saying that Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov sent a message to his Western colleagues, including U.S. State Secretary Antony Blinken about “the principle of indivisibility of security,” but it wasn’t a response to Washington’s proposals.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters Tuesday that there has been “confusion” and said that Russia’s response to the U.S. proposals is still in the works. What was passed on to Western officials “were other considerations, on a somewhat different issue,” Peskov said.
Dental clinic becomes emergency shelter
Elsewhere in Kharkiv, Dr. Oleksandr Dikalo dragged two creaky exam chairs into a labyrinthine basement and refilled yellow jerrycans with fresh water. The public dental clinic he runs is on the ground floor of a 16-story apartment building, and the warren of underground rooms is listed as an emergency shelter for the hundreds of residents.
Dikalo knows how to handle weapons as well, from his days as a soldier in the Soviet Army when he was stationed in East Germany. His wife works as a doctor at Kharkiv’s emergency hospital and regularly tends to Ukrainian soldiers wounded at the front.
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“If God forbid something happens, we must stand and protect our city. We must stand hand to hand against the aggressor,” Dikalo said. At 60 he’s too old to join the civil defense units forming across the country, but he’s ready to act to keep Kharkiv from falling.
A guerrilla war fought by dentists, coaches and housewives defending a hometown of a thousand basement shelters would be a nightmare for Russian military planners, according to both analysts and U.S. intelligence officials.
“The Russians want to destroy Ukraine’s combat forces. They don’t want to be in a position where they have to occupy ground, where they have to deal with civilians, where they have to deal with an insurgency,” said James Sherr, an analyst of Russian military strategy who testified last week before a British parliamentary committee.
There are growing calls in Washington for the CIA and the Pentagon to support a potential Ukrainian insurgency. While Russia’s forces are larger and more powerful than Ukraine’s, an insurgency supported by U.S.-funded arms and training could deter a full-scale invasion.
Polling of ordinary Ukrainians reviewed by intelligence agencies has strongly indicated there would be an active resistance in the event of an invasion, according to two people familiar with the matter who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive information. A spokesperson for the intelligence community declined to comment.
In this photo provided by the Russian Defense Ministry Press Service on Tuesday, Jan. 25, 2022, a Russian soldier attends a military exercising at the Golovenki training ground in the Moscow region, Russia. (Russian Defense Ministry Press Service via AP)
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said recently that any escalation could hinge on Kharkiv. The city is also the base for Yevheniy Murayev, identified by British intelligence as the person Russia was considering installing as president.
“Kharkiv has over 1 million citizens,” Zelenskyy told The Washington Post. “It’s not going to be just an occupation; it’s going to be the beginning of a large-scale war.”
That is precisely what Anton Dotsenko fears. At 18, he was front and center in the wave of protests that brought down the pro-Russia government in 2014. Now he’s a 24-year-old tech worker, and he’s had enough upheaval.
“When people are calm and prosperous, and everything is fine, they don’t dance very well. But when everything’s bad, that’s when they party hard, like it’s the last time,” Dotsenko said during a smoke break outside a pulsing Kharkiv nightclub. “This is a stupid war, and I think this could all be resolved diplomatically. The last thing I would like to do is give my life, to give my valuable life, for something pointless.”
The young people dancing inside would say the same, he declared in Russian: “If the war starts, everyone will run away.”
This is what one nationalist youth group hopes to prevent. They meet weekly in an abandoned construction site, masked and clad in black as they practice maneuvers. The men who join that group or the government-run units have already shown themselves to be up for the challenge to come, said one of the trainers, who identified himself by the nom de guerre Pulsar.
“Kharkiv is my home and as a native the most important city for me to protect. Kharkiv is also a front-line city, which is economically and strategically important,” he said, adding that many people in the city are “ready to protect their own until the end,” as are many Ukrainians.
The same sentiment rings out among Ukrainians in the capital, Kyiv, and in the far west, in Lviv.
“Both our generation and our children are ready to defend themselves. This will not be an easy war,” said Maryna Tseluiko, a 40-year-old baker who signed up as a reservist with her 18-year-old daughter in Kyiv. “Ukrainians have a rich tradition of guerrilla warfare. We don’t want to fight Russians. It’s the Russians who are fighting us.”
Lori Hinnant reported from Paris. Associated Press writers Yuras Karmanau in Kyiv, and Nomaan Merchant in Washington, contributed to this report.
8. Keeping Pace in the Gray Zone: Recommendations for the U.S. Intelligence Community
Excerpts:
Moreover, robust, diverse intelligence-policy collaboration will ideally help avoid the worst of outcomes, such as groupthink, cognitive bias, warning fatigue, politicization, or outright intelligence failure. The National Security Council cannot realistically be sustained as the primary vehicle for ensuring ongoing, transparent dialogue across all stakeholders. If issues, like Chinese influence in Latin America, play out gradually according to the logic of a “salami slicing” strategy, then building additional venues to track complex threats over time — and setting shared thresholds for when higher-level warning or policy decisions need to be delivered — can augment existing processes and facilitate more effective policy and intelligence relations.
Although no amount of modernization can completely lift the ambiguity that blankets the gray zone, improving and diversifying the technology, expertise, and collaborative tools available to intelligence officers will enhance their ability to manage the complexity and uncertainty of the modern gray zone.
Keeping Pace in the Gray Zone: Recommendations for the U.S. Intelligence Community - War on the Rocks
“I think what you’re going to see is that Russia will be held accountable if it invades. And it depends on what it does. It’s one thing if it’s a minor incursion and then we end up having a fight about what to do and not do, et cetera.” Those words from President Joe Biden set off a firestorm from Washington to Kyiv, as critics — including Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky — worried about the repercussions of the United States and NATO distinguishing between an invasion and a minor incursion when deciding how to respond to Russian aggression. Clean-up efforts tried to “clarify” the comments by hurriedly resetting messaging back to vague threats of serious repercussions. However, the president’s words had already revealed the unmistakable challenge that is managing interstate conflict with actors who are increasingly capable of operating near, or beneath, the threshold of traditional armed war.
The way that states advance their interests in this so-called “gray zone” has continued to grow in importance to warfighters and policymakers. Recent events along the Ukrainian-Russian border are only the latest in a long list of international incidents and ongoing campaigns that could be characterized as gray zone activity. Correspondingly, there is a rapidly expanding body of work describing what the gray zone is, why states choose to operate in it, and how to defend against such actions. Namely, aggressors in the gray zone mix political, economic, information, and military tools to advance their interests while presenting opposing policymakers with unsavory escalation dilemmas.
Less studied, however, are the specific challenges that gray zone campaigns pose to intelligence officers. Certainly, the “gray zone” is nothing new for intelligence — it does, after all, encompass cornerstones of the intelligence business: disinformation, denial and deception, and covert action. Nevertheless, managing the contemporary gray zone means contending with how the development and proliferation of emerging and disruptive technologies is rapidly transforming it. As we recently wrote, technology is accelerating the speed, sophistication, and spread of gray zone activities globally, uniquely challenging the fundamental functions of intelligence agencies to detect and understand threats. This includes the ability to identify and attribute indicators of hostile activities as they emerge (detect) and to contextualize them within a broader understanding of an actor’s strategy and intentions (understand).
Ideally, these functions should be simultaneous and mutually reinforcing. That is, information collected will inform strategic insights in real-time, and those insights will enable better-informed analysis and collection. However, if you imagine this detect-understand relationship as a wheel, the volume, speed, and complexity of modern gray zone activities act as friction. The wheel slows as threat indicators become increasingly subtle and ambiguous. In terms of real world consequences, this may mean missing a short decision window to intervene during the early stages of an economic, information, or cyber campaign. If intelligence agencies are to accelerate the wheel to keep pace with gray zone threats, a series of technical, organizational, and cultural intelligence reforms are in order.
In support of efforts to address these pressing challenges, we recently undertook an eight-month research project studying intelligence in the gray zone. After interviewing dozens of experts — including several current and former intelligence officials — and conducting a structured workshop in late 2021, we formulated several recommendations for the U.S. intelligence community to develop the tools, organizational structure, and culture capable of both detecting and understanding gray zone activities. While our research primarily focused on how the United States should modernize its intelligence mission for this era, we nevertheless believe these findings and recommendations have broad applicability for other nations facing similar gray zone challenges.
Creating a Gray Zone Lingua Franca
Admittedly, the “gray zone” is an imperfect term. Its most basic definition as everything between peace and war means it encompasses an exceptionally broad spectrum of activities, ranging from the indistinguishable to the outright brazen. At the same time, identifying when an activity should be characterized as in or out of the gray zone is not necessarily straightforward. After how many Facebook posts (or election cycles) is Russian misinformation so commonplace so as to be downgraded from a gray zone activity to one of routine statecraft? As the nature of both statecraft and warfare evolves, the gray zone goalposts are constantly moving.
That is not to say that definitions are not important. On the contrary, a clear and consistent vocabulary to describe activities conducted within (or on the fringes of) the gray zone is necessary to efforts to identify, aggregate, and measure such activity using standardized methodologies. The alternative is a gray zone Tower of Babel, where varying terminology between intelligence agencies, the private sector, allies, and academia undermines efforts to unify analysis; allocate scarce resources; and develop effective, risk-informed policy.
To establish a gray zone lingua franca, we recommend that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence leverage existing processes, including the National Intelligence Priorities Framework, to develop consistent terminology for categorizing and defining categories and types of gray zone behavior. Through the National Intelligence Priorities Framework, this typology can be integrated across global intelligence collection and analytic priorities and requirements.
We are clear-eyed about the level of effort such an undertaking would require. Interagency, multidisciplinary attempts to codify standardized threat definitions can be, to put it mildly, challenging. Moreover, unifying the language we use to describe activities that are often designed to evade clear categorization (and that may materialize very differently depending on the actor, domain, and location) will not be easy. Thankfully, the proposed unification is not without precedent. For example, the MITRE Adversarial Tactics, Techniques, and Common Knowledge (ATT&CK) framework has emerged as a standard lexicon for capturing the exceptionally diverse and continuously evolving range of computer network intrusion techniques. In an arena defined by blurred lines, clear guidance on how to describe gray zone threats and the levels of risk they pose will be crucial to collecting, analyzing, and communicating intelligence information.
Detecting Gray Zone Threats
Today, intelligence officers are overwhelmed by data. Global data generation increased more than 30 times over the past decade and, by 2025, it is projected to double again to 181 zettabytes. To put this number in perspective, a common external hard drive is approximately a 1/2 inch tall and stores one terabyte of data, equivalent to about 75 million pages of text. The number of these hard drives needed to store the world’s data in 2025 would pile from the Earth to the moon and back three times.
Unable to contend with the data challenge, intelligence analysts may struggle to identify what information is relevant or may fail to deliver fully informed judgments. Gray zone threats are particularly tricky because they often manifest as otherwise routine diplomatic, economic, or commercial behavior. And even if an intelligence officer knows what to look for, they may not know where to look. In the 21st century, much attention has rightfully shifted to the data commercial remote sensors, social media, public records, and cyber forensics produce as potentially valuable sources of intelligence information. In the future, this diversity of data will continue to grow, led by the further development of smart cities, the Internet of Things, and smartphones.
Institutionalizing means to widely distribute knowledge of new, unique, and valuable data is necessary to contend with gray zone threats that may manifest across any number of domains. To this end, we recommend that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence sponsor an intelligence community-wide collaborative open-source intelligence data catalog. Unlike other intelligence disciplines or specific lines of collection, no single intelligence agency owns open-source. For this reason, it is a discipline uniquely suited to catalyze increased collaboration and analytic integration across the 18 members of the U.S. intelligence community. The proposed catalog would serve as a centralized warehouse of datasets, facilitating rapid discovery of information organized at the functional, country, regional, and global levels.
Representation of a hypothetical open-source intelligence data catalogue, with datasets organized into categories and accompanying community-generated analytic perspectives. (Source: CSIS International Security Program)
Historically, assessing the objectivity and reliability of foreign broadcast media outlets has been a key element of open-source analysis. Building on this legacy, the proposed catalog would be overlaid with collaborative tools, allowing analysts to contribute their perspectives on data quality, reliability, and timeliness. As an example, the availability and reliability of public records may vary substantially from one country to another. Therefore, when looking for certain categories of data (e.g., business registrations) across multiple countries, such information could vary depending on what data is available, where it is generated, how it is captured, and who has access to it. A dataset that is recognized for its reliability and integrity would be credited as such in the catalog. Another that is known to be inaccurate, perhaps due to concerns about the reliability of the source, would be flagged accordingly. These judgments will help intelligence officers properly assess the reliability of different open-source datasets and will draw upon insights from forward-deployed, in-country personnel familiar with the host government, politics, and culture, as well as headquarters analysts responsible for conducting global-level analysis.
Expanding the Intelligence Universe
Instead, the U.S. intelligence community should seize the advantages of an expanding intelligence universe by reinvigorating efforts to incorporate a broader range of perspectives into forecasting and warning. The U.S. government has evaluated various geopolitical prediction and forecasting platforms for more than 20 years. However, the concept is most mature within the United Kingdom through its platform Cosmic Bazaar, which integrates forecasting predictions from a wide range of government and trusted non-government experts. The potential utility of these crowd-sourced platforms will only grow as the quality and detail of data available to non-government analysts grow. If there is consensus that open-source intelligence will be a disruptor going forward, then the people and organizations analyzing this data — academia, non-governmental organizations, and the private sector — need to be enlisted as partners. Efforts to broaden and diversify intelligence work are not exclusively about improving the accuracy of specific analysis or predictions. In many circumstances, the value of collaboration can simply be the opportunity to share innovative analytic approaches with others. Toward this end, there is tremendous utility in collaboration that opens pathways for intelligence analysts to think about old problems in new ways.
Organization and Culture: The Bedrock of Modernization
Overall, the U.S. intelligence community should bolster efforts to empower and incentivize innovation and digital transformation. This includes sustaining efforts to recruit and retain diverse, digitally literate intelligence officers who can inject new techniques and expertise into the intelligence community. However, as in any case of institutional modernization, technology alone is not enough.
Defending against threats in the gray zone also requires new approaches to the relationship between intelligence and policy. This includes closely evaluating what types of intelligence products can most effectively support complex policy deliberations and decision-making under deep uncertainty. One study of American analytic culture highlighted how so-called “current intelligence” production, such as for the President’s Daily Brief, has become “all consuming,” leaving little space for analysts to conduct long-term, complex warning analysis. The late Robert Jervis shared similar skepticism in his studies of intelligence failure, noting that articles in the President’s Daily Brief often left “no space for background and perspective, let alone analysis of alternative possibilities.”
We highlight these criticisms not to disparage intelligence support to policymakers. Indeed, the struggle to remain relevant is an age-old dilemma for intelligence agencies, and — as long as consumers value a product — intelligence analysts should continue to produce it. Nevertheless, as Cynthia Grabo wrote 50 years ago, “Warning does not emerge from a compilation of facts.” Capturing the nuance of gray zone threats in particular requires a shift in intelligence toward more complex analysis. It also requires new paradigms to facilitate more meaningful dialogue between intelligence and policy stakeholders. One useful avenue to improve these relationships would be the establishment of ad hoc working groups to facilitate greater interaction between mid-level intelligence officers and policymakers.
Intelligence — particularly warning intelligence — does not always serve a useful role in decision-making. Intelligence agencies, for their part, are often blamed for continually predicting crises, perceived by some as a cynical effort to evade accusations of intelligence failure. Joseph de Rivera suggested that part of the problem was that the necessary “filters” to make sense of intelligence in support of policy needed to be delegated to “persons nearer the source of intelligence.” The proposed working groups are intended to serve this function as an additional “filter” for the exchange of intelligence and policy information.
We envision these groups ultimately augmenting — not supplanting — existing National Security Council-led interagency policy deliberations. Despite established processes for discussing policy at progressively higher levels, many of the intelligence and policy officers who inform decisions up to the Principals Committee-level would benefit from the ongoing exchange of both intelligence and policy insights.
The proposed groups would be crucial in accelerating the wheel that is the detect-understand cycle. Neither intelligence officers nor their policy counterparts have all the answers, but constant interaction between these two elements can inject better, more comprehensive insights into the relationships between various gray zone activities. For example, it is no secret that Chinese foreign investment in Latin America has significantly increased over the past two decades. However, despite knowledge of activities across diplomatic, economic, and military channels implicating multiple countries in this trend, concern appears to have peaked only recently. In fact, it appears possibly too late, as U.S. Southern Command’s 2021 posture statement describes a situation with few available options to reverse the trend.
The proposed mid-level groups would be charged with working through the long-term, dynamic, and complex security challenges exemplified by this case. By working across agencies, portfolios, and responsibilities, the working groups could be well-poised to connect disparate activities across space, time, and domains — all in the pursuit of a coherent understanding of where an adversary’s strategy is headed.
Moreover, robust, diverse intelligence-policy collaboration will ideally help avoid the worst of outcomes, such as groupthink, cognitive bias, warning fatigue, politicization, or outright intelligence failure. The National Security Council cannot realistically be sustained as the primary vehicle for ensuring ongoing, transparent dialogue across all stakeholders. If issues, like Chinese influence in Latin America, play out gradually according to the logic of a “salami slicing” strategy, then building additional venues to track complex threats over time — and setting shared thresholds for when higher-level warning or policy decisions need to be delivered — can augment existing processes and facilitate more effective policy and intelligence relations.
Although no amount of modernization can completely lift the ambiguity that blankets the gray zone, improving and diversifying the technology, expertise, and collaborative tools available to intelligence officers will enhance their ability to manage the complexity and uncertainty of the modern gray zone.
Jake Harrington is an intelligence fellow with the International Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, D.C. Riley McCabe is a research assistant with the CSIS International Security Program. This article is adapted from their recent research assessing the future of intelligence in the gray zone, published in “Detect and Understand: Modernizing Intelligence for the Gray Zone.”
9. If Putin wins, it’s not only Ukraine that loses
Excerpts:
Some analysts posit that Mr. Putin has gone too far to back off. Not necessarily. He can boast that he proved yet again that Russia is a power to reckon with; that he revealed the disunity within NATO and the EU (with Germany the weakest link); that he has miles to go — and worlds to conquer — before he sleeps. His most important political rivals can contradict him — but only from their prison cells.
There’s another scenario I want to outline today. Mr. Putin could decide to do what President Biden inadvertently advised: Stage a “minor incursion.” In 2008, he didn’t seize all of Georgia. He chipped off two provinces, Abkhazia and South Ossetia. As noted, six years later, he sliced Crimea from Ukraine.
He could send in enough muscle to sever embattled Donbas from Ukraine. Maybe add a little more strategic territory (a land bridge to Crimea?) before agreeing to a ceasefire. Maybe, he’d escalate hybrid warfare to coerce a pledge from Kyiv not to attempt to join or even cooperate with NATO. Perhaps he could utilize his KGB skills to arrange for the installation of a more pliable Ukrainian government — like that in Belarus.
American and European policymakers are setting precedents and teaching lessons. The rulers of China, Iran and North Korea are taking notes. The foundational rules of the international order will either be reinforced or undermined. The consequences will extend far beyond the borders of Ukraine and deep into the future.
If Putin wins, it’s not only Ukraine that loses
OPINION:
Unless your name is Vladimir Putin, you don’t know whether Russian troops are going to invade Ukraine. And even if your name is Vladimir Putin, you may be uncertain. It’s an autocrat’s prerogative to change his mind.
The Old Russia Hands in think tanks and universities are providing contradictory analyses. That must confuse policymakers.
I first visited Russia more than a half-century ago. A few years later I went to college with the current Russian president. Seriously: I was an exchange student at Leningrad State University (Rah! Rah!) while he was studying there. But no, we didn’t hang out and drink brewskis.
What strikes me as the most common misunderstanding right now: claims that Mr. Putin is only acting defensively, that he fears NATO.
NATO has never been aggressive. By far the most powerful military in NATO is America’s, but it’s obvious that Washington wants to avoid armed conflict at all costs, as most recently demonstrated by the capitulation in Afghanistan.
Mr. Putin does oppose Ukraine joining NATO, but that was already an impossibility for the foreseeable future. Decisions on NATO enlargement must be by “unanimous agreement.” Can you imagine Germany agreeing to admit Ukraine?
So, why not issue an official statement declaring that Ukraine will be permanently banned from the club as Mr. Putin has demanded? First, because that would whet his appetite for additional concessions. Second, because, we believe (don’t we?) that citizens of democracies should be free to make their own decisions, including whether to join mutual defense pacts if they fear a neighbor. Who might that neighbor be?
Here’s what I think is really going on: Mr. Putin views himself as Russia’s modern emperor. His mission: To restore Russia’s ancient empire — to put it back together again after its great fall in the Cold War. In 2005, he called the breakup of the Soviet Union the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.”
The proper title for a Russian emperor: “czar of all the Russias.” That implies not just today’s Russia which stretches across 11 times zones, but also Belarus (or White Russia) and Ukraine (sometimes known as Little Russia).
Mr. Putin insists that Russians and Ukrainians are “one people — a single whole,” and that the Ukrainian nation is an artificial creation.
Russians and Ukrainians do share common roots. But the “international community” is supposed to have principles. Among them: the right to self-determination and a prohibition on using military force to erase established borders.
Also: In 1994, Ukraine, America, Britain and Russia signed the Budapest Memorandum. In exchange for giving up its nuclear weapons, Ukraine received a commitment that there would be no “threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine.”
If Mr. Putin, with American and British acquiescence, demonstrates that such agreements are worthless — as Beijing did by violating its 1984 accord with Britain on Hong Kong — the rule of law erodes and the law of the jungle advances.
A significant irony: Mr. Putin’s actions over recent years have served to strengthen Ukrainian patriotism. Many Ukrainians were outraged by his seizure of Crimea in 2014 and have been antagonized since by his perpetuation of an armed separatist conflict in eastern Ukraine, the Donbas, and his persistent cyberattacks.
Of course, the roots of Ukrainian identity go deeper. Stalin, furious at Ukrainians for resisting Communist collectivization of agriculture in the 1930s, created a famine in which millions perished. The Holodomor (from the Ukrainian words for hunger and extermination) has been recognized by many countries as a genocide. Small wonder that many Ukrainians are dead set against Kremlin rule.
The U.S. and Europe should have done more to deter Mr. Putin since 2014. But there is still time to send Ukrainians additional lethal military aid, such as Javelin and Stinger missiles, so they can better defend themselves. They are not asking us to do the job for them.
A prediction: Mr. Putin will not start a war during the Olympics, which take place in the People’s Republic of China, Feb. 4-20. He has too much respect for — and fear of — Chinese President Xi Jinping.
If Mr. Putin does unleash the dogs of war, the sanctions should be massive — including cutting Russian banks off from the global economic system.
Some analysts posit that Mr. Putin has gone too far to back off. Not necessarily. He can boast that he proved yet again that Russia is a power to reckon with; that he revealed the disunity within NATO and the EU (with Germany the weakest link); that he has miles to go — and worlds to conquer — before he sleeps. His most important political rivals can contradict him — but only from their prison cells.
There’s another scenario I want to outline today. Mr. Putin could decide to do what President Biden inadvertently advised: Stage a “minor incursion.” In 2008, he didn’t seize all of Georgia. He chipped off two provinces, Abkhazia and South Ossetia. As noted, six years later, he sliced Crimea from Ukraine.
He could send in enough muscle to sever embattled Donbas from Ukraine. Maybe add a little more strategic territory (a land bridge to Crimea?) before agreeing to a ceasefire. Maybe, he’d escalate hybrid warfare to coerce a pledge from Kyiv not to attempt to join or even cooperate with NATO. Perhaps he could utilize his KGB skills to arrange for the installation of a more pliable Ukrainian government — like that in Belarus.
American and European policymakers are setting precedents and teaching lessons. The rulers of China, Iran and North Korea are taking notes. The foundational rules of the international order will either be reinforced or undermined. The consequences will extend far beyond the borders of Ukraine and deep into the future.
• Clifford D. May is founder and president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a columnist for the Washington Times.
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10. U.S. Sends Top Security Official to Help NATO Brace for Russian Cyberattacks
Excerpts:
Some of the cyberattack techniques that Russia has perfected in Ukraine have been used in the United States. Actions that Russia took to influence the 2014 Ukrainian election became the model for election interference in 2016. Four years ago, the Department of Homeland Security warned that Russia had targeted American and European nuclear power plants and water and electric systems with malware that could potentially paralyze them; the United States responded in kind.
But the Russians have never pulled off a major disruptive attack on the United States; even the Colonial Pipeline attack, which led to long gasoline lines last year, was a criminal ransomware case gone bad. U.S. intelligence officials doubt that Mr. Putin will launch direct, disruptive attacks on American infrastructure and believe that he will avoid a direct confrontation with the United States.
“The last thing they’ll want to do is escalate a conflict with the United States in the midst of trying to fight a war with Ukraine,” Dmitri Alperovitch, a founder of Silverado Policy Accelerator, a think tank, and the former chief technology officer of the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, noted recently.
American officials say they agree. But that is a prediction, they note, not a guarantee. Two weeks ago, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency issued a warning to American companies to be on the lookout for telltale signs of Russian-created malware, and last week, Britain did the same.
U.S. Sends Top Security Official to Help NATO Brace for Russian Cyberattacks
Intelligence assessments suggest that a Russian invasion of Ukraine would most likely be preceded by cyberattacks on Ukraine’s electric grid, its communications systems and its government.
The trip by Anne Neuberger, the White House’s top cybersecurity official, is largely focused on how to coordinate a NATO response should Russia attack Ukraine’s power grid or communications systems.Credit...Sarahbeth Maney/The New York Times
By
Feb. 1, 2022
WASHINGTON — The White House dispatched its top cybersecurity official to NATO on Tuesday in what it described as a mission to prepare allies to deter, and perhaps disrupt, Russian cyberattacks on Ukraine, and to brace for the possibility that sanctions on Moscow could lead to a wave of retaliatory cyberattacks on Europe and the United States.
The visit by the official, Anne Neuberger, the deputy national security adviser for cyber and emerging technology, underscored recent intelligence assessments that an invasion of Ukraine would almost certainly be preceded by renewed cyberattacks on Ukraine’s electric grid, its communications systems and its government ministries.
All of those systems have been Russian targets in the past six years. Ukraine has often been President Vladimir V. Putin’s testing ground for Russia’s arsenal of cyberweapons.
“We have been warning for weeks and months, both publicly and privately, that cyberattacks could be part of a broad-based Russian effort to destabilize and further invade Ukraine,” the White House said in a statement announcing Ms. Neuberger’s arrival at NATO headquarters in Brussels. After speaking with the North Atlantic Council, NATO’s main policy body, she will go on to Poland, where she will meet with Baltic officials responsible for cyberdefense.
Ms. Neuberger will tell NATO members that over the last few years they have witnessed a lot of cyberskirmishes, but no cyberwar. She will say, according to a White House statement, “that the kinds of disruptive or destructive cyberactions possible during a conflict are different in scope, kind and sophistication from the types of incidents we have seen during peacetime.”
The U.S. government has been quietly sending teams into Ukraine in recent weeks to help shore up the country’s defenses, and it is preparing to do the same with NATO countries on the alliance’s eastern flank. But those experts are reporting back to Washington that there is relatively little they can do to fundamentally harden Ukraine’s networks in a few weeks.
Understand Russia’s Relationship With the West
The tension between the regions is growing and Russian President Vladimir Putin is increasingly willing to take geopolitical risks and assert his demands.
Ukraine poses some unique cyberdefense challenges. The electric grid is still connected to Russia’s own electric supply network, a huge vulnerability that Ukrainian officials vowed to fix after attacks that turned out the lights in 2015 and 2016. Those incidents were later blamed on Russian hackers, though it was never clear if they were working at the government’s behest.
Ukraine is scheduled to conduct some long-planned experiments in coming weeks that involve disconnecting from Russian electric supply networks and linking to other European power grids. But the effort is preliminary, and American officials doubt it will be of much help in any near-term confrontation with Russia.
There are also concerns about how easy it would be to shutter the Ukrainian internet and communications throughout the country. A blog post this week from the Atlantic Council noted that by slicing a single undersea cable in the Kerch Strait that was installed in 2014 by Russia’s state-owned telecommunications company, Russia could disrupt much of Ukraine’s internet traffic — but at the cost of also cutting off Crimea and other Russian-speaking territory.
“It could create panic in the rest of Ukraine and limit the international community’s visibility into further Russian actions,” wrote Justin Sherman, a fellow at the Cyber Statecraft Initiative at the Atlantic Council. Such an action would echo a move taken by Russia when it annexed Crimea nearly eight years ago and would be “well in line with the Kremlin’s willingness to accept some costs to invade and forcibly exert control over Ukraine.”
Many of these scenarios have been mapped out by United States Cyber Command and the National Security Agency, and they have been part of war game exercises overseen by the White House.
Ms. Neuberger’s trip is largely focused on how to coordinate a NATO response should Russia again attack parts of the power grid in Ukraine or take out communications in an effort to destabilize the government of President Volodymyr Zelensky. One senior administration official noted recently that American intelligence assessments suggested that “getting a friendly government in place is Putin’s first objective,” and if he could accomplish that without occupying the country and sparking an insurgency, “that would be his best option.”
The official spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk about American assessments of Mr. Putin’s next moves.
Ukraine is scheduled to conduct some long-planned experiments in coming weeks that involve disconnecting from Russian electric supply networks and linking to other European power grids.Credit...Brendan Hoffman for The New York Times
If Russia conducts cyberattacks on Ukraine that are not connected to a traditional military invasion, American officials acknowledge it is uncertain whether Europe would agree to invoke the sanctions that the United States has promised would follow a ground assault. As President Biden himself acknowledged in a news conference two weeks ago, the allies are divided on what kind of sanctions or other steps would be triggered by an action that falls short of a full-fledged invasion.
When the White House tried to explain what Mr. Biden meant when he questioned how the West would respond to a “minor incursion” into Ukrainian territory, the White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, suggested in a statement that he had “cyberattacks and paramilitary tactics” in mind, which fall short of traditional military attacks. Still, she said that “those acts of Russian aggression will be met with a decisive, reciprocal and united response.”
But Mr. Biden’s comments highlighted the reality that NATO and the European Union have never acted in concert in responding to a broad cyberattack. When Russia was blamed for the SolarWinds supply chain attack in late 2020 and early 2021, which affected the U.S. government and hundreds of global firms, only Washington announced significant sanctions. And Mr. Biden himself pulled back from warnings during the transition to the presidency that he would authorize a counter cyberattack.
“I chose to be proportionate,” he said last year when he imposed the sanctions. “The United States is not looking to kick off a cycle of escalation and conflict with Russia. We want a stable, predictable relationship.”
Mr. Biden’s staff has since all but abandoned hope of stability and predictability with Mr. Putin. The administration is quickly returning to strategies of deterrence while mapping out what kind of efforts the United States could engage in to disrupt Russian cyberoperations without triggering direct conflict with Moscow. That is where Ms. Neuberger’s trip fits in; she worked on both defensive and offensive operations when she served at the National Security Agency.
Some of the cyberattack techniques that Russia has perfected in Ukraine have been used in the United States. Actions that Russia took to influence the 2014 Ukrainian election became the model for election interference in 2016. Four years ago, the Department of Homeland Security warned that Russia had targeted American and European nuclear power plants and water and electric systems with malware that could potentially paralyze them; the United States responded in kind.
But the Russians have never pulled off a major disruptive attack on the United States; even the Colonial Pipeline attack, which led to long gasoline lines last year, was a criminal ransomware case gone bad. U.S. intelligence officials doubt that Mr. Putin will launch direct, disruptive attacks on American infrastructure and believe that he will avoid a direct confrontation with the United States.
“The last thing they’ll want to do is escalate a conflict with the United States in the midst of trying to fight a war with Ukraine,” Dmitri Alperovitch, a founder of Silverado Policy Accelerator, a think tank, and the former chief technology officer of the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, noted recently.
American officials say they agree. But that is a prediction, they note, not a guarantee. Two weeks ago, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency issued a warning to American companies to be on the lookout for telltale signs of Russian-created malware, and last week, Britain did the same.
11. When Redlines Fail - The Promise and Peril of Public Threats
Conclusion:
In the end, setting redlines is neither wisdom nor folly. Given the lack of appealing alternatives, Washington will inevitably need to use this tactic to bargain with and deter adversaries. But it need not do so under false assumptions. The reputational risk of walking back from a redline is not as great as many fear. Nor are the strongest redlines—or those that are trumpeted with brash language and swagger—the most effective. Such threats risk provoking more than they coerce and establishing credibility at the price of assurance. To be effective, redlines should be carefully calibrated to convey U.S. demands, provide necessary assurances, and avoid provoking their targets. Whether the United States is dealing with China, Iran, or Russia, striking the right balance will be the key to success.
When Redlines Fail
The Promise and Peril of Public Threats
February 2, 2022
With Russia massing troops on its border with Ukraine and apparently readying for an invasion, U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration has faced persistent questions about its redlines in that conflict. Senior U.S. officials have avoided spelling out exactly how much Russian aggression is too much, but they have stated clearly that a military invasion would trigger “massive” economic consequences for Moscow.
Washington faces similarly difficult questions about its redlines vis-à-vis other rising or revisionist powers. As the military balance of power between China and Taiwan shifts in China’s favor, some have called on the Biden administration to end the long-standing U.S. policy of strategic ambiguity and clearly commit to defending Taiwan in the event of a Chinese invasion. And in the Middle East, Iran is quietly getting closer to being able to build a nuclear weapon as hopes for a new deal with the United States hang in the balance, raising the question of whether Washington should draw a new redline on uranium enrichment.
In each of these cases, one potential downside of communicating well-defined limits to a U.S. adversary is clear: the adversary can simply ignore them, forcing the United States to follow through on its threats or else look weak and unreliable. Critics of redlines often cite President Barack Obama’s failure to enforce his redline against President Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons in Syria as an example of why the tactic is bad policy. The episode dented the Obama administration’s credibility, they argue; some have even gone as far as arguing that it emboldened Russia to invade Ukraine in 2014. Retired General Jim Jones, who served as Obama’s first national security adviser, later characterized the Syria redline as a “colossal mistake.”
But potential embarrassment is not the only—or even the most important—problem. Redlines are often self-defeating for strategic and psychological reasons: public threats can provoke targets to resist or retaliate instead of backing down. Furthermore, overly aggressive threats in defense of redlines can reduce the incentive for U.S. adversaries to comply; the targets of redlines must believe that conceding will produce better outcomes than resisting. Washington too often undermines assurances of this type by overselling its threats, convincing adversaries that they will reap no reward from heeding its redlines.
Yet abandoning redlines altogether is not the answer. Washington cannot simply sit back and wait for hostile countries to behave in ways that harm U.S. interests. Rather, U.S. policymakers must understand that assurances matter as much as threats and that carefully calibrated redlines are almost always better than strident, dogmatic, and bluntly worded ones.
REPUTATIONAL RISK?
The United States struggles to use redlines effectively in part because it often has less at stake than its adversaries. Moscow cares more about Ukraine than Washington does. China values Taiwan more than the United States ever will. Such asymmetry in interests partly explains why leaders often struggle to make their redlines credible.
To overcome this disadvantage, leaders sometimes pursue credibility by making threats in crystal clear language or announcing them in high-profile settings. But doing so puts leaders in a bind. If the redline fails, they must choose between two bad outcomes: back down publicly or risk being drawn into a cycle of escalation—perhaps even into an unwanted war.
Redlines—and threats more generally—fail more often than they succeed.
It is for this reason that critics of redlines most often argue that they risk damaging a country’s global reputation. On balance, however, concerns about widespread reputational costs from backing down are overblown. As the political scientist Daryl Press has argued, leaders assess the credibility of their adversaries not by their past actions but by their present interests in a given crisis. For this reason, most leaders of NATO countries perceive Russia’s threat to invade Ukraine as credible even though Russia has mobilized troops along the Ukrainian border before without invading. Similarly, during the Cold War, the United States took seriously Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s 1961 ultimatum on the status of West Berlin even though he had backed down from a similar ultimatum in 1958. It is difficult to think of a country that backed down from a redline and was therefore unable to make credible threats.
Rather than damaging a state’s overall reputation, decisions to back away from redlines provide information about a state’s specific interests. Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan revealed that he was unwilling to remain in the country indefinitely to prevent a Taliban takeover, but it said little about whether he or his successors would fight to defend Taiwan if China invaded the island. Obama’s decision not to attack the Assad regime after it violated his redline in 2013 similarly revealed something about his willingness to punish the use of chemical weapons, but it is farfetched to blame this decision for Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine. A few airstrikes in Syria would not have changed Russian President Vladimir Putin’s calculus.
THREATS AND PROVOCATIONS
But even though redlines pose less of a reputational risk than is widely believed, they pose more of another kind of risk. Redlines don’t merely threaten—they provoke.
Confronted with public threats, leaders immediately gain new reasons to do the opposite of what their adversaries demand. It is not just those issuing redlines who risk embarrassment from not following through. The targets of such policies have at least as much at stake, and they prefer not to look weak by capitulating. Indeed, targets sometimes retaliate against redlines, including by setting redlines of their own. When Putin demanded that NATO commit to excluding Ukraine from joining the alliance, Biden responded by threatening Putin with sanctions “like none he’s ever seen.” Washington should not be surprised when its redlines provoke similar reactions.
Redlines elicit psychological responses from their targets that undermine their own chances of success. Leaders, like other people, value their autonomy. They bristle at manipulation and coercion. One way to preserve a sense of autonomy is to do exactly what has been prohibited. It is no surprise that when leaders are backed into a corner by foreign demands, they often fail to dispassionately weigh the costs and benefits of complying. Anger and indignation are normal human responses to unwelcome coercion.
Redlines don’t merely threaten—they provoke.
Consider what happens every time China reasserts its expansive claims to the South China Sea—which, if accepted by Washington, would prohibit U.S. warships from operating in what the United States and the rest of the world regard as international waters. Far from complying, the United States responds with new freedom-of-navigation operations in the area. Washington must understand that its redlines have the same effect on Beijing. Every time it sends warships through the South China Sea or sells arms to Taiwan, China responds with its own demonstrations of power and authority. Even aggressive U.S. rhetoric meant to deter Chinese violations of Taiwanese airspace might in fact be prompting more violations rather than fewer. For strategic and psychological reasons, redlines tend to provoke the very actions that they seek to deter.
CREDIBLE ASSURANCES
But even redlines that are credible and do not provoke their targets sometimes fail to achieve their intended result. Consider, for example, that Putin has convinced the leaders of NATO countries that he is willing and able to invade Ukraine, but he has nevertheless failed to obtain the commitment that he seeks from the alliance to halt its eastward expansion. Russia’s core problem is not issuing credible threats but rather making credible assurances. If NATO leaders agreed to take Ukrainian membership off the table, they could not be sure that Russia would not use similar threats in the future to make new demands. Successful redlines must come with credible promises that complying will not result in costs being imposed anyway—or in greater demands in the future.
U.S. policymakers would be wise to consider this as they craft their own redlines to constrain Russia. Imposing sanctions on Moscow before it attacks Ukraine would be a mistake. Washington should instead create the strongest possible incentive for Putin to stand down by making clear that U.S. sanctions will be maximized if Russia invades and minimized if it does not. Biden has all but ruled out a U.S. military intervention in Ukraine, but threatening sanctions is futile if the Kremlin expects them regardless of what it does.
The lack of credible assurances poses an even greater impediment to restoring the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran or reaching a new one. U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw from the 2015 accord and impose sanctions on Iran even though the Islamic Republic had complied with the terms of the deal has understandably eroded Tehran’s faith in American promises, prompting it to make the impractical demand that Biden bind his successors to any new deal.
If Iran’s experience after complying with American redlines was bad, other countries that have made nonproliferation bargains with Washington—ostensibly the success stories of nonproliferation redlines—have fared even worse. After the Gulf War, Saddam Hussein agreed to give up Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, including its nuclear program, in exchange for peace. He kept his end of the deal. But 12 years later, the United States invaded Iraq under false claims that Saddam still had such weapons. In 2003, the Libyan dictator Muammar al-Qaddafi relinquished Libya’s nuclear program in exchange for promises of progress toward normalized relations with the United States. He, too, abided by the deal. Eight years later, the United States joined a NATO mission that overthrew Qaddafi and led directly to his brutal death. Most telling of all, Ukraine returned to Russia the nuclear weapons it had inherited when the Soviet Union collapsed as part of a 1994 agreement that committed Moscow to “refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine.” Russia has not kept that promise.
Offering credible assurances is surprisingly difficult. Doing so often requires easing pressure on a bitter adversary. A new deal with Iran would require a credible promise of sanctions relief, but critics of this diplomatic approach prefer to use sanctions to weaken the Iranian regime instead of as leverage to prevent nuclear proliferation. One reason it is hard to make assurances credible is that the same policies that increase the credibility of threats often undermine the credibility of assurances. The United States can demonstrate its readiness to enforce a redline by convincing Tehran that it is willing to impose the harshest possible sanctions or by imposing additional sanctions now. But that approach could make it harder to lift sanctions once a deal is made, heightening Tehran’s fears that it will face sanctions no matter what it does. In other words, threatening the strongest possible sanctions against Iran may strengthen U.S. redlines, but even the most credible threats won’t matter if Iran believes that Washington is determined to impose (or retain) sanctions regardless of what concessions Tehran makes.
In the end, setting redlines is neither wisdom nor folly. Given the lack of appealing alternatives, Washington will inevitably need to use this tactic to bargain with and deter adversaries. But it need not do so under false assumptions. The reputational risk of walking back from a redline is not as great as many fear. Nor are the strongest redlines—or those that are trumpeted with brash language and swagger—the most effective. Such threats risk provoking more than they coerce and establishing credibility at the price of assurance. To be effective, redlines should be carefully calibrated to convey U.S. demands, provide necessary assurances, and avoid provoking their targets. Whether the United States is dealing with China, Iran, or Russia, striking the right balance will be the key to success.
12. Ukraine: China’s Burning Bridge to Europe?
Excerpts:
With Russia poised to intervene in Ukraine, observers speculate that Chinese leaders will watch U.S. and European reactions closely, as an indication of their likely support for another non-allied partner of even greater interest to China, namely Taiwan. Although the possibility of a two-front threat emerging with potentially coordinated action by Russia in Ukraine and China in Taiwan looms large in the strategic thinking of U.S. military planners, there is little evidence to support this. China has been ratcheting up pressure on Taiwan for some months, and for longstanding reasons with no connection to Ukraine.
Moreover, China is unlikely to tie its core interest in what it calls the reunification of Taiwan to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s opaque maneuvering in Ukraine. In 2014 Russia’s takeover of Crimea put China in a difficult position. A longstanding advocate of territorial integrity, China opted to abstain on the U.N. Security Council resolution condemning Russia’s action. China has never officially recognized the Russian annexation and Chinese high-level officials are barred from traveling to Crimea, though some investments have proceeded under the radar, with minimal publicity.
As China prepares to host the Winter Olympics, fearing COVID-19 outbreaks and contending with international opprobrium over the incarceration of more than 1 million Uyghurs, the last thing Chinese leaders want is a Russian invasion of Ukraine to take the limelight. Chinese officials have denied that Xi Jinping said as much to Putin, but the Russian president himself is no doubt aware of the importance of timing, since the 2014 takeover of Crimea took place just after Russia hosted the winter games in Sochi.
Ukraine: China’s Burning Bridge to Europe?
China’s BRI and agricultural needs led Beijing to seek partnership with Ukraine. Now Russia’s military build-up has complicated those calculations.
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As the world monitors Russia’s military buildup on the Ukrainian border, the actions of China, Russia’s strategic partner, are worth watching as well. China has been Ukraine’s top trade partner since 2020 and views Ukraine as a critical entrepôt for its Belt and Road Initiative ambitions. Agricultural exports from Ukraine have also become important for China in the wake of the China-U.S. trade war, yet Chinese officials have supported Russia – or at least have felt obliged to do so – up to a point. In a January 27 phone call with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi stated that Russia’s “legitimate concerns” needed to be addressed, though he urged all parties to remain calm and avoid inflaming tensions.
When Xi Jinping launched the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in 2013, Ukraine acquired new importance as a transit hub and market for Chinese goods. Unlike Russia, China saw Ukraine’s 2017 trade agreement with the EU as an opportunity for the BRI. A BRI trade and investment center opened in Kyiv in 2018 and Chinese companies have been investing in Ukraine’s ports. COFCO, China’s state-owned agribusiness giant, invested $50 million in Mariupol – now a frontline city in Donetsk province, which has been besieged by pro-Russia separatists since 2014 – to triple its agricultural transshipment capacity. Chinese companies also have been involved in projects to dredge the Ukrainian ports of Yuzhny (north of Odessa) and Chernomorsk (south of Odessa).
Chinese companies also see opportunities in Ukraine’s energy sector, including renewables (solar and wind) and nuclear power. Ukraine hopes to become self-sufficient in uranium and there have been discussions with the China Development Bank about Chinese investment in this sector. China imports nearly all of the uranium it uses. Interestingly, after the Russian takeover of Crimea, China began assisting Ukraine to retrofit its power plants to utilize Ukrainian coal instead of Russian gas.
This may change as Ukraine’s economic options narrow. On June 30 of last year Ukraine and China signed an intergovernmental agreement to promote joint cooperation in infrastructure development. Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky enthusiastically proclaimed that Ukraine could become China’s bridge to Europe, as China’s BRI dovetails with Ukraine’s “Big Construction“ initiative. The infrastructure agreement raised alarm bells among some observers who noted that just before its signing, Ukraine withdrew its signature on a United Nations Human Rights Council document demanding an independent investigation of China’s treatment of the Uyghurs. The Chinese government allegedly threatened to withhold deliveries of 500,000 vaccine doses unless Ukraine unsigned the document (although China denies this). With the disbursement of a $5 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund stalled over good governance requirements, Ukraine also may have borrowed as much as $1 billion – 12 percent of the country’s total budget deficit in 2020 – from China to finance road construction projects, leading to questions about Ukraine’s potential for economic dependence on China.
China’s infrastructure and military investments complicate Western ties to Ukraine. Ukraine supplies a variety of military equipment to China, including turbofan engines for aircraft, diesel engines for tanks, and gas turbines for air-to-air missiles. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, a Macau-based company purchased Ukraine’s Varyag aircraft carrier at the bargain basement price of $20 million, after claiming it would never be used for military purposes. The vessel, later renamed the Liaoning, was later refurbished and ultimately would provide a shortcut for China’s People’s Liberation Army Navy to own its first aircraft carrier.
With tensions rising in China-U.S. relations, American officials have sought to limit China’s military investments in Ukraine in recent years. During the Trump administration, National Security Advisor John Bolton traveled to Ukraine to prevent Beijing Skyrizon Aviation, a Chinese company, from acquiring a controlling stake in Motor Sich, a major manufacturer of engines and aircraft, which provided technology to Russia prior to its takeover of Crimea in 2014. After the U.S. imposed sanctions on Skyrizon, Motor Sich followed suit. With U.S. pressure continuing under President Joe Biden, Ukraine ultimately returned Motor Sich to state ownership, halting the sale of its assets to China.
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With Russia poised to intervene in Ukraine, observers speculate that Chinese leaders will watch U.S. and European reactions closely, as an indication of their likely support for another non-allied partner of even greater interest to China, namely Taiwan. Although the possibility of a two-front threat emerging with potentially coordinated action by Russia in Ukraine and China in Taiwan looms large in the strategic thinking of U.S. military planners, there is little evidence to support this. China has been ratcheting up pressure on Taiwan for some months, and for longstanding reasons with no connection to Ukraine.
Moreover, China is unlikely to tie its core interest in what it calls the reunification of Taiwan to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s opaque maneuvering in Ukraine. In 2014 Russia’s takeover of Crimea put China in a difficult position. A longstanding advocate of territorial integrity, China opted to abstain on the U.N. Security Council resolution condemning Russia’s action. China has never officially recognized the Russian annexation and Chinese high-level officials are barred from traveling to Crimea, though some investments have proceeded under the radar, with minimal publicity.
As China prepares to host the Winter Olympics, fearing COVID-19 outbreaks and contending with international opprobrium over the incarceration of more than 1 million Uyghurs, the last thing Chinese leaders want is a Russian invasion of Ukraine to take the limelight. Chinese officials have denied that Xi Jinping said as much to Putin, but the Russian president himself is no doubt aware of the importance of timing, since the 2014 takeover of Crimea took place just after Russia hosted the winter games in Sochi.
13. Secret air defense system downs Houthi ballistic missile
Very interesting on many levels - Was the israeli leader deliberately targeted during the visit? If so who is behind the operation? Did the Israelis employ its system to protect its leader? Did it have intelligence that there was a credible threat? Or would they have deployed the system simply a prudent seld defense measure?
Conclusion:
So while there is no concrete proof yet, it may be that Israel went to great lengths to protect its president and the diplomatic mission he undertook. Indeed, following the attack, Israel announced it would engage in discussions with the UAE for air defense systems, including Iron Dome.
Secret air defense system downs Houthi ballistic missile
Missile shot at Dubai on January 30 was more likely taken out by Israel’s Barak ER or Spyder than a US Patriot
FEBRUARY 2, 2022
During Israeli President Isaac Herzog’s visit to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) on January 30, Houthi rebel forces in Yemen provocatively launched a ballistic missile at Dubai. US armed forces fired Patriot missiles at the incoming missile but apparently did not hit it.
Pentagon press secretary John Kirby later said it was Emirati surface-to-air missiles that actually engaged the targets. Initial reports said the Emiratis operated a South Korean system but the South Korean sale was only signed in January.
The UAE does have the Russian Pantsir-s1s medium-range air defense system. The UAE also has Patriot and THAAD, but if these were used to knock out the Houthi missile that would have been stated as in the past.
Similarly, if it was the Pantsir that took out the Houthi missile, it would have given bragging rights to the Russians. The UAE also has a short-range Skyknight system that is produced in-country. The SkyKnight missile system is a key component of Rheinmetall’s Skynex air defense system.
However, speculate for a moment on the possibility that it was an Israeli system operating undercover. The visit of Israel’s president was a major diplomatic event in a place squeezed between a hostile Iran and its belligerent Houthi proxy force in Yemen.
The potential security nightmare might reasonably have prompted Israel to send its own force to protect President Herzog in Dubai. Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett had, in fact, offered the UAE “security and intelligence support” after an earlier attack.
That base also hosts the US Air Force 380th Air Expeditionary Wing, home to approximately 2,000 American military and civilian-military personnel operating fighter and surveillance aircraft including AWACS and UAVs.
The Barak 8 launcher. Photo: WikiCommons
A spate of attacks
It was the third time in recent weeks that US troops were forced into their bunkers. On January 17, the Houthis hit a fuel depot in Abu Dhabi, killing three people.
On January 24, there was a missile attack on Al-Dhafra, after which US Central Command reported that American and UAE armed forces “combined successfully” and “prevented both missiles from impacting the base.”
The most recent attack, likely by a Zulfiqar or Dezful missile, was intercepted by an Emirati air defense system. These are solid fuel rockets evolved from the Iranian Fateh-110 which are built in Iran with parts supplied by China.
Newer versions have extended the projectile’s range and improved its guidance systems. Iran ships them partially disassembled to Yemen where technicians, most likely Iranians, reassemble them and set up launch platforms.
It is unclear whether the US or the Emiratis fired first at the Houthi missile but it is clear that the two air defense systems were not coordinated. That would make sense if the Emirati system was secretly deployed.
Many of the top Israeli air defense systems, ranging from Iron Dome, David’s Sling and Arrow, were co-developed with the US. For Israel to export any of these systems, US export licenses would be needed and – so far as is known – none have been issued.
This leaves only two other major Israeli air defense systems, namely Spyder and Barak, that could be exported, as they are entirely based on indigenous technology.
A missile from the Israeli Iron Dome system is launched to intercept a missile coming from the Gaza strip. Photo: WikiCommons
‘Ballistic targets’
Iskandar is a short-range ballistic missile with a speed of about Mach 5.9 – putting it at the low end of a hypersonic missile. IAI’s CEO Boaz Levy says the Barak Extended Range (Barak ER) system, which has a range of about 150 kilometers, was designed “in particular against ballistic targets.”
However, the export of Israel’s core air defense systems presents a problem for Israel because it wants to protect the integrity of its deterrent. In fact, elements of Israel’s security establishment were opposed to a potential sale of Iron Dome to the UAE because many of the components and much of the software are interchangeable with higher-end systems.
This is not so much the case with Barak or Spyder, neither of which is considered part of Israel’s increasingly integrated air defense system.
It would thus make sense that it was a Barak ER that knocked out the Houthi-fired missile as IAI and Israel’s Defense Ministry tested the system extensively against ballistic targets for just this kind of mission.
So while there is no concrete proof yet, it may be that Israel went to great lengths to protect its president and the diplomatic mission he undertook. Indeed, following the attack, Israel announced it would engage in discussions with the UAE for air defense systems, including Iron Dome.
14. Read the Books That Schools Want to Ban
No one has ever been on the right side of history in calling for banned books.
Some quotes:
“If this nation is to be wise as well as strong, if we are to achieve our destiny, then we need more new ideas for more wise men reading more good books in more public libraries. These libraries should be open to all—except the censor. We must know all the facts and hear all the alternatives and listen to all the criticisms. Let us welcome controversial books and controversial authors. For the Bill of Rights is the guardian of our security as well as our liberty.
[Response to questionnaire in Saturday Review, October 29 1960]”
― John F. Kennedy
“If there's one American belief I hold above all others, it's that those who would set themselves up in judgment on matters of what is "right" and what is "best" should be given no rest; that they should have to defend their behavior most stringently. ... As a nation, we've been through too many fights to preserve our rights of free thought to let them go just because some prude with a highlighter doesn't approve of them."
[Bangor Daily News, Guest Column of March 20, 1992]”
― Stephen King
“The important task of literature is to free man, not to censor him, and that is why Puritanism was the most destructive and evil force which ever oppressed people and their literature: it created hypocrisy, perversion, fears, sterility.”
“Something will be offensive to someone in every book, so you've got to fight it.”
― Judy Blume
“I hate it that Americans are taught to fear some books and some ideas as though they were diseases.”
― Kurt Vonnegut
“A dangerous book will always be in danger from those it threatens with the demand that they question their assumptions. They'd rather hang on to the assumptions and ban the book.”
“The fact is that censorship always defeats its own purpose, for it creates, in the end, the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion. In the long run it will create a generation incapable of appreciating the difference between independence of thought and subservience.”
― Henry Steele Commager
“...people burn books, and that they ban books is, in a way, a good sign. It's a good sign because it means books have power. When people burn books, it's because they're afraid of what's inside them...”
Read the Books That Schools Want to Ban
These 14 titles have been under attack for doing exactly what literature is supposed to do.
Book banning is back. Texas State Representative Matt Krause recently put more than 800 books on a watch list, many of them dealing with race and LGBTQ issues. Then an Oklahoma state senator filed a bill to ban books that address “sexual perversion,” among other things, from school libraries. The school board of McMinn County, Tennessee, just banned Maus, Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize–winning graphic memoir about the Holocaust. Officials said that they didn’t object to teaching about genocide, but that the book’s profanity, nudity, violence, and depiction of suicide made it “too adult-oriented for use in our schools.”
No one has yet figured out how to depict the Holocaust without ugliness, for the very obvious reason that it was one of the greatest crimes in human history. Maus details the cruelties that Spiegelman’s father witnessed during World War II, including in Auschwitz, as well as the pair’s complicated relationship after the war. Some nudity shows Jews—depicted in the book as mice (their German oppressors are drawn as cats)—stripped naked before their murder. Hiding these images from children purposefully ignores the mechanized gruesomeness of the Holocaust. And Maus’s removal isn’t a side effect of an otherwise neutral attempt to keep classrooms wholesome. As I wrote in December, getting rid of books that spotlight bigotry is the goal.
Books have been the targets of bans in America for more than a century. Maus is not the first, or the last, casualty of an ideology that, in the name of protecting children, leaves them ignorant of the world as it often is. The following 14 books employ difficult, sometimes upsetting imagery to tell complicated stories. That approach has made them some of the most frequently challenged, or outright banned, books in America’s schools; it also makes them perfect examples of what literature is supposed to do. Please consider buying them for the students in your life, and for yourselves.
Atwood’s popular dystopian story turns the United States into a Christian theocracy called Gilead, where fertile women are stripped of their name and impregnated against their will. Its sexual violence and criticism of religion have made it ripe for challenges in schools. The original book, its adaptation into a graphic novel, and its sequel, The Testaments, were pulled from circulation, then quickly restored, in a Kansas school district in November.
Morrison’s first novel, The Bluest Eye, has shown up multiple times on the American Library Association’s annual list of challenged books. The classic, which kicked off Morrison’s Nobel Prize–winning career, follows Pecola Breedlove, a Black girl with a tragic family history and a deep desire to have blue eyes. In January, The Bluest Eye was removed from a Missouri school district’s libraries to keep children away from painful scenes of sexual abuse and incest—which in Morrison’s hands become illustrations of the insidious psychological damage that racism deals to her characters.
This Coretta Scott King Award winner, like many of Myers’s novels, follows a young Black protagonist. In this story, 17-year-old Richie Perry leaves Harlem for Vietnam, where he faces the horror and banality of war. As with Myers’s 1999 book Monster, some have deemed it too violent and profane for students.
Newman’s 1989 picture book broke ground by depicting exactly what its title says. A young girl named Heather has two lesbian mothers and realizes in the story that her family is different from her schoolmates’ families. She learns why she doesn’t have a father, and that there are many different kinds of families. Newman’s story might feel anodyne today, but the furor it caused in the 1990s, when it was the ninth-most-challenged book of the decade, hasn’t abated: Heather was taken off the shelves in a Pennsylvania school district in December.
The truth of the Holocaust is both abstracted and explicitly rendered in the graphic memoir Maus, which was banned in a Tennessee county last month by a unanimous vote. Spiegelman draws his Jewish family and protagonists as mice, Germans as cats, and Poles as pigs, but this style doesn’t fully blunt the hideousness of the victims’ suffering. Some of the topics that got the book banned, such as Spiegelman’s mother’s suicide, are essential to rendering the effects of the war. Without them, it would be a different story entirely.
Speak, by Laurie Halse Anderson
Pullman’s award-winning fantasy trilogy is populated with talking armored polar bears, soul-sucking specters, and translucent angels. But ultimately, it’s about a war on adolescence. The story’s villains, all affiliated with an allegorical version of the Catholic Church, are motivated by a perverse desire to keep children innocent—even by essentially lobotomizing them. In contrast, the heroes celebrate knowledge and fight to overthrow the religious hierarchy threatening their world. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the books were criticized for their supposed anti-Christian themes and plotlines involving witchcraft.
The teenagers at Green’s Alabama boarding school drink, smoke, swear, and fumble their way through life. Those actions have made the novel controversial for more than a decade. Green, whose later book The Fault in Our Stars was hugely popular, has repeatedly defended it—including what he calls its intentionally “massively unerotic” oral-sex scene.
This epistolary book by the famed Atlantic writer reflects on racism’s long shadow. Coates’s frank assessment of the effect of centuries of racial violence on contemporary Black Americans has been attacked in some schools. Between the World and Me and Coates’s We Were Eight Years in Power are also included on Representative Krause’s list of books that “might make students feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress because of their race or sex.”
Thomas’s debut young-adult novel was a best seller and was quickly adapted into a film. Starr, a Black teenager, witnesses a white police officer kill her friend at a traffic stop. While navigating her grief, she gradually becomes a public advocate for racial justice. The Hate U Give has been challenged for its profanity and depiction of drug dealing, but most vigorously for its thematic connection to the Black Lives Matter movement. A South Carolina police union objected to its inclusion on a high-school reading list, calling it “almost an indoctrination of distrust of police.”
Through illustrations and tender writing, this graphic memoir follows the nonbinary author’s journey of self-discovery. Its exploration of sexuality and gender, especially in illustrations depicting oral sex, made its inclusion in school libraries a prime target for criticism last year.
Machado’s captivating, experimental memoir details her abusive relationship with another woman, and her eventual escape from it. At a March 2021 school-board meeting in Leander, Texas, a parent read a sex scene from the book aloud and held up a pink dildo as part of an effort to demand its removal from a book club. In December, the district removed the book permanently from Leander schools.
The essays in this collection take apart and examine Black masculinity, queer sexuality, and Johnson’s own life. The book has been removed from school libraries in multiple states and lambasted as “sexually explicit,” which the author called “disingenuous for multiple reasons.”
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15. Ukrainian democracy is under threat — why every American should care
Excerpts:
In the last century, twice we were able to pull Europe back from the brink of fascism. Arguably, twice we engaged too late and a greater price was paid than perhaps could have been. Now is the time for us to be united against tyranny and to support our allies and Ukraine to preserve and protect democracy around the world. The cost of acting now is far less than the cost the Free World will face if Putin succeeds.
Putin is counting on us to think of the Ukrainian people as “Far away people about which we know nothing,” as Neville Chamberlain once notoriously said. Putin is counting on us believing that his naked aggression will go unchecked and unnoticed.
But he’s wrong. We know what’s at stake.
Ukrainian democracy is under threat — why every American should care
The Hill · by Reps. Chrissy Houlahan (D-Pa.) and Mark Green (R-Tenn.), opinion contributors · February 1, 2022
The world is watching Moscow, and what we see is Vladimir Putin moving more than one hundred thousand troops to the Ukrainian border to surround Ukraine on all sides. He is simultaneously conducting disinformation campaigns and orchestrating other subversive aggressions towards the people of Ukraine. This is not normal in the 21st century, but it is not unfamiliar to us — we both served in uniform during the Cold War.
In many ways we have seen this before, but rarely at this scale and global threat level.
As military veterans and now members of both the House Foreign Affairs and Armed Services Committees, we are acutely aware of the importance of defending our national interests and protecting the democratic values we hold so dearly.
We both entered the Congress in the same year: 2019. Since that time, our nation has endured a lot. Combatting the pandemic, keeping our schools open, supporting small businesses, fixing supply chains, addressing inflation, and rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure are all top of mind.
But even in the midst of everything we are dealing with at home right now, we write today with joint resolve, from a Republican and a Democrat, with a simple message: Ukraine matters.
This past week, we joined a bipartisan group of our colleagues on a congressional delegation (CODEL) to Belgium and Ukraine. In Brussels, we met with our transatlantic partners to reaffirm and further strengthen our commitments to NATO and our European allies. We found a unified and resolved Europe. It was our time in Kyiv, however, that has united us across party lines to lift up the voices of the Ukrainian people.
Over hundreds of years, many Eastern European countries have been invaded and oppressed by various despotic and authoritarian powers. Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania. Most Americans will never step foot in these countries. But for more than a century, we have joined with our European allies to combat the global threat of fascism, supporting these countries, and creating one of the most important peace-keeping alliances in human history.
Today, we watch as that progress is threatened. If there’s one thing we have learned in recent history, it is that just because something is happening an ocean away does not mean that it will not impact us. We know this because of recent painful lessons on pandemics, supply chains and global financial markets.
So let us say it again, united, Democrat and Republican: What happens in Ukraine matters.
Only President Putin knows his plans. If it’s a full-scale invasion, the destruction could be unlike anything we’ve experienced since World War II. We cannot let his actions go unanswered. If we do, we risk the lives and livelihoods of our allies across the globe.
And you can bet that President Xi Jinping in China is watching our resolve as well.
To our communities in Tennessee, Pennsylvania, and all Americans who are uncertain about our role in the defense of the Ukrainian people, we say this: we must do all that we can, short of putting American boots on the ground in Ukraine, to help them fight for their freedom. Like Americans, Ukrainians are strong-willed and dedicated to the ideals of liberty and democratic rule — we cannot leave them behind.
It’s during difficult times like these that we must band together, and band together we have. President Putin’s actions have united NATO, the European Union, and the U.S. Congress. Putin has managed to single handedly accomplish what has been so elusive to grasp for us as Americans recently: unity.
In the last century, twice we were able to pull Europe back from the brink of fascism. Arguably, twice we engaged too late and a greater price was paid than perhaps could have been. Now is the time for us to be united against tyranny and to support our allies and Ukraine to preserve and protect democracy around the world. The cost of acting now is far less than the cost the Free World will face if Putin succeeds.
Putin is counting on us to think of the Ukrainian people as “Far away people about which we know nothing,” as Neville Chamberlain once notoriously said. Putin is counting on us believing that his naked aggression will go unchecked and unnoticed.
But he’s wrong. We know what’s at stake.
Chrissy Houlahan represents the 6th District of Pennsylvania. She earned her engineering degree from Stanford with an ROTC scholarship that launched her service in the U.S. Air Force. After graduating from Stanford, Chrissy spent three years on Air Force active duty at Hanscom Air Force Base working on air and space defense technologies. She left active duty in 1991 and served in the Air Force Reserves before separating from the service in 2004 as a captain. Mark Green is a physician and combat veteran of Afghanistan and Iraq. He interviewed Saddam Hussein for six hours on the night of his capture. He serves on the House Armed Services and Foreign Affairs Committees.
The Hill · by Reps. Chrissy Houlahan (D-Pa.) and Mark Green (R-Tenn.), opinion contributors · February 1, 2022
16. What happened to the drone war?
Conclusion:
Not long ago, drone warfare was seen as a symbol of almost unparalleled American power and technological prowess: It was the means by which the U.S. went after its enemies in the world’s least governed places, often minimizing the risk to its own soldiers. Today, the tide has turned. If the U.S. does soon return to the widespread use of drone warfare, it will no longer be alone.
What happened to the drone war?
The Biden administration says it’s fighting terrorism with fewer “boots on the ground”; why is it also using fewer drones in the air?
Global Security Reporter
On the day after the last U.S. troops left Afghanistan, President Joe Biden assured the country that “we can strike terrorists and targets without American boots on the ground — or very few, if needed.” Biden was describing what the U.S. has called “over the horizon” — a hazily defined strategy to strike targets without putting U.S. troops in harm’s way.
When it comes to fighting war without soldiers, the weaponized drone has been an essential tool — perhaps the most iconic weapon in the United States’ post-9/11 war on terrorism. Given Biden’s pledge that over-the-horizon counterterrorism operations would continue around the world, it would be reasonable to expect that drone use would have continued — or become even more common. In fact, the opposite has happened. The U.S. has stopped bombing Afghanistan entirely since the withdrawal, and strikes are down dramatically in other theaters as well. The long-standing practice of American drones regularly raining missiles on suspected terrorists and unfortunate civilians has ended — at least for now. One might suspect that this drop-off was the result of growing public criticism of the drone war and recent revelations about the civilian casualties it has caused. But the decline predates the revelations; it’s a trend that began several years ago.
Hear more from Joshua Keating about this story:
What happened to the drone war? Why, in the new over-the-horizon era, are drones being used so rarely? And what are the implications of a world in which dozens of nations now have the deadly capability — and are using it more often, not less?
The drop-off
The United States’ first drone strike came on the first day of the U.S. war in Afghanistan — Oct. 7, 2001 — when a CIA Predator drone fired a Hellfire missile near Kandahar, narrowly missing Taliban leader Mullah Omar. The escalation that followed was swift and steep. In the two decades since, the U.S. has used weaponized drones thousands of times as part of air campaigns in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria and Yemen.
Since Biden took office, there have been just 39 declared U.S. strikes (including air, drone and ground operations) in Iraq and Syria. In Somalia, nine strikes have been carried out under Biden compared with 276 under Donald Trump. The Biden administration has ordered only two reported strikes in Yemen and none in Pakistan, once ground zero of the American drone war. (There were 122 strikes in 2010.)
Overall, U.S. airstrikes (including both drones and manned strikes) were down 42 percent in 2021 from the year before — falling from 1,459 to 852. That may still seem like a lot, but consider that there were nearly 13,000 strikes in 2016, when the war against ISIS was at its height.
To the extent this development has received any media coverage, observers have tended to credit the Biden administration. In fact, the decline began earlier. “The bulk of what’s being discussed is the result of trends began under the Trump administration, although I wouldn’t really frame it as the result of Trump’s specific policy decisions, as the way the wars are going,” David Sterman, a senior policy analyst at New America, told Grid.
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According to the monitoring site Airwars, March 2019 was the last month when the U.S.-led coalition launched more than 100 air and artillery strikes in Iraq and Syria. (There were 389.) Not coincidentally, this was the month that the last remnants of ISIS’s “caliphate” fell. After that, the tempo of strikes fell dramatically; in all of 2020, there were only 201. Similarly, in Yemen, the number of airstrikes peaked at 131 in 2017, according to New America. In 2020, there were only four. In Pakistan, the steep drop-off in drone strikes began even earlier, in the second half of the Obama presidency.
According to Sterman, “the one exception that I definitely would acknowledge and think is clearly something to do with Biden is Somalia, where there was a high pace of strikes under Trump. Biden just completely paused it.” The Biden administration did carry out at least four strikes against al-Shabaab militants in Somalia in the summer of 2021, but there’s been no sign of a return to the pace of strikes under Trump.
Bombing less — or less to bomb?
There are signs that while the drop-off predates his presidency, Biden is listening to the drone war’s critics.
Shortly after taking office, Biden quietly imposed limits on drone strikes and commando raids outside of declared war zones like Afghanistan and Syria. The CIA and military now must obtain White House permission for strikes in Yemen and Somalia, among other theaters of counterterror operations. (Under Trump, commanders had been allowed to make their own decisions on strikes in those countries.) Biden also ordered a review of U.S. targeting policy. Several analysts I spoke with suggested commanders may be reluctant to order strikes until the new guidelines are in place.
But the overall drop-off may be driven less by White House policy than by changes on the battlefield. In short, there may be fewer strikes because there are fewer targets.
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The original al-Qaeda, the group that carried out the 9/11 attacks, is a shell of its former self and hasn’t been linked to an attack against the U.S. in years. ISIS at one point threatened to redraw the map of the Middle East, but since 2019, it has largely been driven underground. This isn’t to say that there still aren’t violent Islamist militant groups operating around the world — there are likely even more of them than there were in 2001 — but the vast majority are focused on local grievances and enemies rather than what Osama bin Laden once called the “far enemy”: the United States.
In the specific case of Afghanistan, Robert Grenier, former CIA head of counterterrorism and a Grid contributor, points out that drone strikes there and across the border in Pakistan were always less about counterterrorism per se than about preventing attacks against NATO and Afghan forces: “With the drawdown of U.S. and NATO troops, there was a commensurate drop in the number of attacks against them, and a similar drop in drone operations designed to protect them.”
Now that the U.S.-backed Afghan government has fallen to the Taliban, Grenier said “the current administration is focused on maintaining an over-the-horizon capability, rather than a pattern of actual over-the-horizon strikes. As of now, militants of various stripes in Afghanistan, to include those who are ISIS affiliated, do not appear to be much focused on Americans.”
As for Biden’s over-the-horizon pledge, it may have been a bit optimistic, especially when it comes to the effective and accurate deployment of drones. “Anybody who’s been involved in targeting will tell you that over-the-horizon is not easy,” Luke Hartig, former senior director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council, told Grid. “Afghanistan is kind of the worst of all worlds. You have no U.S. presence on the ground. It’s hard to get intelligence that would feed your strikes. And you have no basing rights nearby, meaning that your strike aircraft have to transit really long distances to get there.”
The human toll
Just two days before Biden spoke to the country about the new over-the-horizon approach, the dangers of that approach were demonstrated in stark and horrific terms by a U.S. strike in Kabul, Afghanistan, that killed 10 civilians, including seven children. Pentagon leaders have subsequently acknowledged that multiple errors were made in the events leading up to the strike. No U.S. troops have been punished.
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Tragic as it was, the Aug. 29 strike was not all that unusual. Over the course of the two-decade-long war against jihadism, American airstrikes have hit hospitals, weddings and multiple other civilian targets. The New York Times has released a multipart investigation into U.S. strikes in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, finding that they almost certainly caused far more than the 1,417 civilian deaths the Pentagon acknowledges, and were often based on faulty intelligence or poor targeting practice. Lawmakers are taking notice: On Jan. 20, a group of 11 Democratic senators and 39 House members published a letter, referring to both the Kabul strike and the Times’ reporting, calling on the Biden administration to “review and overhaul U.S. counterterrorism policy,” arguing that “the status quo will continue to undermine counterterrorism objectives, produce significant human and strategic costs, and erode the rule of law and the United States’ image abroad.” In January, responding to the criticism, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin issued a directive ordering the military to take a series of steps to prevent harm to civilians.
The precipitous drop in drone strikes does not seem to be the direct result of any of these events. Again, numbers were trending downward under Trump, and the Biden administration’s targeting review began prior to the Kabul strike or the Times series. But the influence of this run of bad press and scrutiny is undeniable. Drones have always been a controversial tool; the military, CIA and multiple administrations have argued that the risks are worth the reward if strikes prevent or disrupt attacks against U.S. troops or the U.S. itself. That case is harder to make today.
Is the pause permanent?
It’s not hard to imagine circumstances under which the U.S. returns to the frequent use of drone strikes. In the past few weeks, U.S.-backed Kurdish forces spent nearly a week fighting to recapture a prison in northeastern Syria that had been taken over by ISIS fighters; in Mali, a U.S. service member — part of a small American contingent assisting French counterterrorism efforts — was injured in a mortar attack that killed a French soldier; and according to the Washington Post, an MQ-9 Reaper drone operated by the U.S. military provided targeting information for a French military operation in Mali in October. Escalations on these and other myriad fronts are possible.
The legal basis for much of the U.S. war on terror, the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) against terrorism, remains in place. The AUMF has been invoked to justify at least 41 military operations in 19 countries, often against groups that didn’t even exist when Congress passed it, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. In essence, it continues to offer presidents and commanders wide legal latitude to order counterterrorism strikes — drone strikes, more often than not — across the globe.
“As long as you have those underlying legal authorities in place, there’s nothing to stop a future administration from discarding Biden’s policy framework and using the authorities as broadly as they can interpret them,” Brian Finucane, a former State Department legal adviser on counterterrorism issues now with the International Crisis Group, told Grid.
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At some point, Biden or a future president could decide that a terrorist threat to Americans or American allies somewhere in the world demands a return to large-scale drone strikes.
Hartig suspects the pressure to do so will arise sooner or later. “We built this apparatus to conduct targeted strikes, and it’s had a number of really big wins,” he said. “And so, there’s always going to be an imperative to let it do the mission it was designed to do.”
A world of drones
The U.S. once had a monopoly on drone technology and was far and away the lead perpetrator of drone strikes. Increasingly, drones are proliferating, and the U.S. military is itself a target. An attempted attack by two armed drones — they were shot down — on U.S. forces at the Ain al-Asad air base outside Baghdad on Jan. 5 was the latest in a slew of such attacks, which the U.S. often blames on Iran-backed Shiite militia groups. According to U.S. officials, Iran began supplying its proxies in Iraq with drones shortly after the Trump administration’s targeted killing of Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani in 2020. U.S. and Russian forces in Syria have come under fire from unmanned aircraft as well. The actual drones used in these attacks range from sophisticated long-range aircraft to cheap remote-controlled models modified to carry explosives, but they all make clear that drone warfare has been globalized.
The U.S. military is now making significant investments in anti-drone countermeasures — ways to shoot them down or disrupt their communications — but given how easily and cheaply simple armed drones can be deployed, U.S. Centcom Commander Gen. Frank McKenzie acknowledged in a recent interview with the Financial Times that “right now, generally, the advantage lies with the attackers.”
Not long ago, drone warfare was seen as a symbol of almost unparalleled American power and technological prowess: It was the means by which the U.S. went after its enemies in the world’s least governed places, often minimizing the risk to its own soldiers. Today, the tide has turned. If the U.S. does soon return to the widespread use of drone warfare, it will no longer be alone.
17. Olympics poll: A diplomatic boycott is fine, but sponsors’ withdrawal would be better
Hmmm... how did 2018 work out for north and South Korea. I am not sure I would use that as an example.
The Grid/Morning Consult poll did find support for the notion that the Olympic Games can bridge divides between nations. A majority of those questioned — by 55 percent to 22 percent — agreed with that statement.
Indeed, while this may or may not be what the respondents had in mind, the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Games were the scene of a landmark ice-breaking in the relationship between North Korea and South Korea — President Moon Jae-in shaking hands with the sister of dictator Kim Jong Un. It was the first time in the six decades since the Korean War that a member of the North Korean dynasty had visited the South, and it paved the way for an eventual summit between Moon and Kim.
For all the tensions that continue to surround the Olympics — China’s rights record, the recent controversy over Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai, the initial criticism of Tokyo officials for pressing ahead with last summer’s games in the midst of the pandemic — the poll found broad support for the Olympic Games as an institution. Sixty-five percent had a favorable impression of the Olympics, against 20 percent who did not; an even larger majority (79-10) said the tradition of the Games should continue.
That may give some comfort to the IOC, and the Games’ hosts, with one caveat: Only 50 percent of respondents said they plan to watch the Beijing Games. Sponsors will be disappointed to hear that.
Olympics poll: A diplomatic boycott is fine, but sponsors’ withdrawal would be better
Before the Beijing Winter Olympics, a Grid/Morning Consult poll looks at how Americans view China, the Games, and the mixing of politics and sport.
Global Editor
Sport and politics shouldn’t mix — but when it comes to boycotting the Beijing Olympics for political reasons, better for companies and advertisers to do so than athletes or diplomats.
Those are among the findings in a Grid/Morning Consult poll of American attitudes toward the Olympic Games — a survey that looked at sport, diplomacy, the U.S.-China relationship and the upcoming Winter Games in Beijing.
Hear more from Tom Nagorski about this story:
Following a U.S.-led diplomatic boycott of the Games over a range of Chinese government policies, governments and corporations have been pressured to do more to protest China’s behavior. While poll respondents agreed by a 72-12 margin with the statement that sports and politics should not mix, there was support for the U.S. decision to keep its official diplomatic delegation away from the Beijing Games. Fifty percent were in favor; only 18 percent opposed the boycott.
That view reflects broad antipathy toward China; 66 percent of respondents said they viewed China unfavorably, while only 15 percent said they had a favorable impression. And only 28 percent agreed that it had been “appropriate” to select China to host the Games. The leading driver of these views was China’s human rights record — cited by 71 percent of those polled — far ahead of economic and political concerns.
The poll findings mirror bipartisan sentiment in Washington, where criticism of China has focused on its treatment of the Uyghur population in Xinjiang, its encroachment on civil liberties in Hong Kong and its attitudes toward human rights more broadly.
“The American public is broadly supportive of a diplomatic boycott of the 2022 Beijing Olympics, with support driven more by Americans’ concerns over China’s human rights track record than broader concerns linked to economic and military competition between China and the U.S.,” said Jason I. McMann, head of geopolitical risk analysis at Morning Consult.
In terms of what Olympics-related actions might actually influence Chinese government behavior, a corporate pullback was the most popular choice. Fifty-four percent said that companies should withdraw their sponsorship of the Games — a measure that respondents felt would be more effective than the diplomatic boycott. Morning Consult’s McMann added that the results suggest that companies who don’t pull their advertising could face headwinds among consumers.
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The headwinds may come, but global Olympic sponsors have decided — unanimously — to stick with their commitments to the Beijing Games. The top 13 sponsors of the Beijing Games have contracts with the International Olympic Committee totaling more than $1 billion. Despite pressure from rights organizations and members of Congress, the leading American corporate sponsors of the Games — including Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble and Visa (“official credit card of the Olympic Games”) are keeping their support intact. Foreign-based corporate sponsors have made the same decision.
Several companies have cited sponsorship agreements with the IOC that cover multiple Olympics, the implication being that dropping out of the Beijing Games would violate those long-term deals. Sponsors have no doubt factored in the almost unmatched value of an event that reaches billions of viewers around the world and the risk of upsetting their image inside China. Indeed, Chinese consumers have recently boycotted Western companies for protesting conditions in China. (H&M said it lost $74 million as a result of such a boycott, following its own decision to ban cotton produced in Xinjiang.)
“The space to please both sides has evaporated,” Center for Strategic and International Studies scholar Jude Blanchette recently told the New York Times. “When choosing who to upset, it’s either a bad week or two of press in the U.S. versus a very real and justified fear that you’ll lose market access in China.”
Athletes and sports fans have long argued against the intrusion of politics into the Games, but the intermingling of politics and Olympic sport has a long history. And political tensions have often played out on the Olympic stage.
The 1968 Mexico City Games are perhaps best remembered for a moment when politics came to the medal stand; American sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos took to the podium after the 200-meter race (they won gold and bronze, respectively) and raised their fists in solidarity with what was then known as the Black Solidarity Movement. The 1980 and 1984 Olympics saw politically motivated boycotts by the U.S. (of the Moscow games) and the Soviets (of the subsequent Los Angeles Olympics). Perhaps no global sporting event carried political baggage to match the Games of the 11th Summer Olympics in Berlin in 1936, which Adolf Hitler turned into a showcase for his Nazi Party and ideals of racial supremacy.
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The Grid/Morning Consult poll did find support for the notion that the Olympic Games can bridge divides between nations. A majority of those questioned — by 55 percent to 22 percent — agreed with that statement.
Indeed, while this may or may not be what the respondents had in mind, the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Games were the scene of a landmark ice-breaking in the relationship between North Korea and South Korea — President Moon Jae-in shaking hands with the sister of dictator Kim Jong Un. It was the first time in the six decades since the Korean War that a member of the North Korean dynasty had visited the South, and it paved the way for an eventual summit between Moon and Kim.
For all the tensions that continue to surround the Olympics — China’s rights record, the recent controversy over Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai, the initial criticism of Tokyo officials for pressing ahead with last summer’s games in the midst of the pandemic — the poll found broad support for the Olympic Games as an institution. Sixty-five percent had a favorable impression of the Olympics, against 20 percent who did not; an even larger majority (79-10) said the tradition of the Games should continue.
That may give some comfort to the IOC, and the Games’ hosts, with one caveat: Only 50 percent of respondents said they plan to watch the Beijing Games. Sponsors will be disappointed to hear that.
18. Thousands Of Russian Intellectuals, Activists Urge Kremlin To Avoid 'Immoral' War With Ukraine
An excellent example of the good work done by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. This is factual news that is not likely reported in Russia but the Russian people need to know this.
Thousands Of Russian Intellectuals, Activists Urge Kremlin To Avoid 'Immoral' War With Ukraine
February 01, 2022 08:50 GMT
A Russian soldier fires a howitzer during drills at the Kuzminsky range in the southern Rostov region on January 26.
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Thousands Of Russian Intellectuals, Activists Urge Kremlin To Avoid 'Immoral' War With Ukraine
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More than 2,000 Russian intellectuals, including prominent rights activists, have urged the Kremlin to avoid starting an "immoral, irresponsible, and criminal" war against Ukraine amid global concerns that Moscow may be on the verge of launching a wide-scale invasion of its western neighbor.
A statement from the Congress of Russian Intellectuals was made public over the weekend as Russia continued its buildup of troops -- now estimated at well over 100,000 -- near the Ukrainian border.
"The flow of disturbing information about a possible Russian invasion of Ukraine is intensifying," the statement said.
"Russia does not need a war with Ukraine and the West. Nobody is threatening us, nobody is attacking us. The policy based on promoting the idea of such a war is immoral, irresponsible, and criminal, and cannot be implemented on behalf of Russia's peoples. Such a war cannot have either legal or moral goals.... Russian citizens are actually becoming hostages of a criminal adventurism into which Russia's foreign policy is being turned," it added.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov are due to discuss the Ukraine crisis by phone on February 1, while British Prime Minister Boris Johnson will travel to Kyiv to hold talks with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy as world leaders look to avoid the outbreak of a military conflict.
Russia has denied the troop buildup is a prelude to any invasion.
However, Russian President Vladimir Putin has demanded a guarantee that NATO won't allow Ukraine's future membership. Moscow has subsequently suggested it won't tolerate NATO troops and infrastructure in places like Romania, Bulgaria, and Georgia.
19. Another Flotilla Of Russian Warships Is About To Enter The English Channel
Another Flotilla Of Russian Warships Is About To Enter The English Channel
The latest Russian vessels slated to pass through the English Channel are headed for live-firing drills off the coast of Ireland.
A group of Russian Navy warships from that service’s Northern Fleet is poised to enter the English Channel, ahead of their planned participation in a controversial series of live-fire drills scheduled off the southwest coast of Ireland. The vessels, centered around three warships, will not be the first from the Russian Navy to pass through the Channel in recent weeks, having been preceded by the six amphibious warfare ships that left the Baltic Sea last month before entering the Mediterranean Sea, as well as a pair of Steregushchiy class corvettes from the Baltic Fleet that apparently entered the Atlantic via the Channel today.
Publicly available maritime tracking data shows the position of one of the Northern Fleet support vessels in the latest flotilla, the ship in question being the replenishment oiler Vyazma, which has its Automatic Identification System (AIS) transponder on and, as of today, was underway in the North Sea, off the east coast of England, apparently preparing to enter the Channel.
www.marinetraffic.com
The location of the replenishment oiler Vyazma, as of 10.00 PM Coordinated Universal Time, today.
Forsvaret
The Russian Navy rescue tug SB-406.
Forsvaret
Slava class cruiser Marshal Ustinov.
The Northern Fleet flotilla had previously entered the Barents Sea on January 22 and was met the following day off the coast of Finnmark by the Norwegian Coast Guard offshore patrol vessel Andenes. From here, the flotilla made only slow progress, hampered by poor weather, with storms and high waves, and then entered the Norwegian Sea on January 25. While transiting between the Barents Sea and the Norwegian Sea, the flotilla was shadowed by a Royal Norwegian Air Force P-3C Orion maritime patrol aircraft, which took the following photographs, and the photo at the top of this story.
Responsibility for tracking flotilla was then apparently passed on to Denmark, which sent the Iver Huitfeldt class frigate HDMS Peter Willemoes, currently part of NATO Standing Maritime Group 1, to shadow the Russian vessels. At one stage, based on maritime tracking data, it appeared that the Danish warship was effectively in the path of the Russian flotilla. However, it should be noted that the accuracy of this kind of publicly available data can be imprecise, meaning it’s possible that the NATO and Russian vessels remained at a safe distance from each other throughout. As far as is known, neither side made any formal complaint about the activities of the other.
The final destination of the flotilla is understood to be in the Irish Economic Exclusion Zone (EEZ) around 150 miles off the southwest coast of that country, but outside Ireland’s territorial waters. Here, a live-fire exercise is planned to take place between February 5 and 8. These exercises have been variously described as artillery firing drills or ‘rocket firing,’ although Russian officials have not confirmed whether or not missiles will be launched.
These drills are part of a much larger series of exercises that the Russian Navy is planning, with the involvement of all four fleets, and approximately 140 surface combatants and supply ships.
While there is nothing to suggest these exercises are tied in any way to a potential new Russian military intervention in Ukraine, as has been widely feared in the last few months, there is concern that at least some of the vessels involved in European portions of the drill could ultimately be headed to the Black Sea, which would put them in an ideal position to support a possible move against Ukraine.
This is especially the case for the six amphibious warfare ships that are now underway in the Mediterranean, having also transited via the English Channel. Previously, three of these vessels had been the cause of some alarm in the Baltic, resulting in Sweden bolstering its troop numbers and armor on the strategically important island of Gotland. Again, there is no firm evidence that these ships are headed for the Black Sea, although it’s clear that they could play a significant role in a potential amphibious operation against objectives in the south of Ukraine.
As for the Northern Fleet flotilla now expected to pass through the Channel, these could eventually head further south and end up in the Mediterranean, too.
In the meantime, Irish and Russian officials have delivered a succession of statements relating to the upcoming live-fire drills.
In a briefing to the press, Russia’s Ambassador to Ireland, Yury Filatov, stated that there is “no grounds for concern” and dismissed media attention about the maneuvers as part of an “ongoing propaganda campaign by the US and its NATO allies” directed against Russia.
“This is not in any way a threat to Ireland or anybody else. No harm is intended, no problem is expected,” Filatov said.
Meanwhile, Ireland’s Minister for Foreign Affairs Simon Coveney said the Russian drills were “not welcome.”
At one point, Irish fishermen had said they planned to peacefully disrupt the Russian Navy war games, which will be taking place in lucrative fishing grounds, using a fleet of up to 60 trawlers. Now, after talks held in Dublin, a buffer zone will be used for the firing campaign, ensuring a distance of 37 to 49 miles is maintained between Russian and Irish vessels. This still needs to be signed off by the Russian government, however.
Video of a previous Northern Fleet live-fire exercise, dating from 2017:
20. Why Americans should care about the Russia-Ukraine standoff
We need more reporting like this from across the media and interviews with US government officials. Every foriegn policy and national security issue should include a question of how does this affect Americans and why should Americans care about this issue?
Why Americans should care about the Russia-Ukraine standoff
NPR · by Mary Louise Kelly · February 1, 2022
A Ukrainian military forces serviceman gets out of a tank parked in a base near Klugino-Bashkirivka village in the Kharkiv region on Monday. Sergey Bobok/AFP via Getty Images
The standoff between Ukraine and Russia is about more than just those two countries. It's about global security and an attempt to "rewrite rules on which the world is based," says Ukraine's minister of foreign affairs.
And he adds that's precisely why Americans should care.
Dmytro Kuleba estimates that Russia has between 100,000 and 130,000 troops amassed at Ukraine's border and is capable of mounting an invasion at short notice.
Ukraine and the United States are threatening crippling sanctions if it does. Russian President Vladimir Putin is demanding that Ukraine never be allowed to join NATO.
While military forces are marshaling on both sides of the border, diplomatic efforts continue in an effort to defuse the situation.
President Biden told reporters Monday that the United States was engaged in "nonstop diplomacy" but added that "we are ready no matter what happens."
At a tense meeting of the U.N. Security Council on Monday, representatives for Russia, Ukraine and the United States traded barbs but didn't come to any agreement on a path forward.
Kuleba said Ukrainian officials have been busy preparing against any invasion but have deliberately gone about it quietly to avoid sparking panic in the country and hurting the economy.
Still, he said, the threat was real. And it went beyond just Ukraine's own interests.
Ukraine's Minister of Foreign Affairs Dmytro Kuleba says the country is defending the current world order. Claire Harbage/NPR
"If Russia succeeds here in Ukraine, that will send a clear message to everyone who wants to rewrite rules on which the world is based, that this is possible," he told NPR. "That the United States and the democratic coalition led by the United States are incapable to maintain the current world order. That they are weak. And if you behave in a bold, aggressive way, you will eventually succeed."
"So, for all Americans, all I can say is that Ukraine is fighting this war for eight years. We have never requested American boots here on the ground. We always said we are fighting this war. This is our land. These are our people.
"We don't need your boots on the ground, but help us to fight this war diplomatically, militarily. And we will defend the current world order led by the United States and other democratic countries in this part of the world."
It's a sentiment echoed by two visiting U.S. congressmen — Gregory Meeks, D-N.Y., and Mark Green, R-Tenn. — who are both members of the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee and are in Kyiv, Ukraine's capital.
When asked last week what they would tell their constituents back home about America's interest in the conflict, Meeks got straight to the point.
"Democracy is at stake," he told NPR. "If we allow Vladimir Putin to come into a sovereign territory and threaten its democracy or take its democracy, then we are allowing others to do the same, which in turn, reverberates on us. ... We've got to unite with one message to say that's not going to happen."
Green agreed, adding that the United States was compelled to "work to a diplomatic solution here as quickly and as effectively as we can."
Civilians hold wooden replicas of Kalashnikov rifles as they take part in a training session at an abandoned factory in the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv on Sunday. Sergei Supinsky/AFP via Getty Images
As for how likely an invasion was, Kuleba said the Russian troop buildup was happening slowly and steadily, but there were "no indicators that they are ready to launch an offensive operation."
At the U.N. Security Council meeting on Monday, Russia's representative Vassily Nebenzia also denied there were any plans to invade and that Russian troops in Belarus were there only for regular exercises.
The comments were met with skepticism from others in attendance, including the U.K.'s deputy representative to the U.N., James Kariuki, who noted similar claims were made in 2014 before Russia annexed Crimea.
For his part, Ukraine's Kuleba says he still sees room for diplomacy and that warnings of an imminent invasion had circled for months without any action yet.
"When the first messages or the first alert was made about the potential Russian military operation against Ukraine last autumn, we were initially told that it may happen [at] the end of the year," he said. "Then the updated intel information was about January. Now we are on the last day of January, and the only conclusion we can draw is that diplomacy works."
NPR · by Mary Louise Kelly · February 1, 2022
21. The fractured diplomacy of countering terrorism
Questions with no satisfying answers.
The fractured diplomacy of countering terrorism | ORF
What are the gains that diplomacy on counter-terrorism, resolutions of the UN Security Council and other such multilateral instruments bring to the table?
August 2021 changed many a narrative when it comes to the entire ideation behind the United States (US)’s “war on terror” — a counterterrorism blueprint devised by Washington DC that the world rallied behind in the aftermath of 9/11. Fast-forward 20 years later, and the Taliban walked back into Kabul, and today, one way or another, the world is divided on how to deal with the militant group regaining control over Afghanistan.
In January, India assumed the chair of the Security Council Counter-Terrorism Committee of the United Nations (UN). The seat gives India a great podium to highlight the cross-border terrorism it has faced over the decades, much of which has been highlighted repeatedly as a state policy act of Pakistan. However, these views have mostly fallen on deaf years as Islamabad itself became a critical “ally” for the US in its war against al-Qaeda. This, even though al-Qaeda chief and architect of 9/11, Osama Bin Laden, was found and killed by the US in Abbottabad, Pakistan, a stone’s throw away from the country’s military establishment.
All these crisis points have found debate in multilateral forums such as the UN, however, instances of diplomatic breakthroughs to either end or come to a viable solution to such conflicts have been far and few.
Many geopolitical flashpoints, where terror and militant groups have found their feet ultimately struggle from one common denominator, contrarian political and geopolitical policies, whether from a regional or international point of view. All these crisis points have found debate in multilateral forums such as the UN, however, instances of diplomatic breakthroughs to either end or come to a viable solution to such conflicts have been far and few. For example, the UN itself has been unable to settle upon a definition of “terrorism” that is agreed upon by all member states. That famous saying that often echoes around UN headquarters, “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter”, remains a stumbling block when it comes to any encompassing “global” pushback against the very fundamentals of terrorism. In fact, UN officials themselves have said that what constitutes a terror group remains an undeciphered aspect of diplomacy against these threats.
However, it is not just the UN where diplomacy of terrorism has often been used as a tool to stifle or support geopolitical rivalries, instead of rallying a common global narrative. For example, the recent attack by Houthi militants against the United Arab Emirates brought back the long-running conflict in Yemen to centre-stage, where two power blocks of West Asia, a Saudi-led Gulf alliance on one side and Iran-backed Houthi militants on the other have wreaked havoc on the people of Yemen. In February 2021, the US removed the Houthis from their terror designation list. The reason behind the delisting was given as a “recognition of the dire humanitarian situation in Yemen”. Another, perhaps unmentioned reason, was also to show intent to Iran that some concessions were on offer if Tehran was to return to the nuclear deal that the US unceremoniously exited in 2018 under the presidency of Donald Trump. Fast-forward to today, and the US is once again threatening to return the Houthis back to their terror listing as the group expands its attacks.
Another example of geopolitics meeting the realpolitik of counterterror diplomacy was the removal of the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM) by the US in November 2020, as tensions between Beijing and Washington DC escalated over the former’s human rights record, particularly on the issue of its Uyghur Muslim minorities and their suppression in the Xinjiang province.
China’s dealings with the Taliban revolve around the latter’s commitments to stamp out the ETIM threat.
China criticised the decision, adding that the US “has an ugly two-faced approach toward terrorist organizations”. ETIM itself, known to be largely defunct today, has been known to have links to al-Qaeda. However, it was almost never a homogenous group, and emitted from a small number of Uyghur’s who came to Afghanistan during the Taliban’s rule in 1998 with the intent to launch a religious war against the Chinese state. Even today, China’s dealings with the Taliban revolve around the latter’s commitments to stamp out the ETIM threat. As Professor Sean R Roberts, author of The War on the Uyghurs has said, the listing and de-listing of ETIM were “complicated and political” to begin with.
Finally, the question that arises here is: What are the gains that diplomacy on counter-terrorism, resolutions of the UN Security Council and other such multilateral instruments bring to the table? Kinetic actions against terror groups have shown mixed results. Does the diplomacy of listing, delisting, definitions and so on help curb terrorism, terror groups and violence launched by them? Geographically, regional diplomacy between warring political ideas and actors may be a more suited strategy. This begs the question: Where does it leave international, multilateral diplomacy when it comes to countering terrorism? Gains made by the “international community” on this front remain largely philosophical, strategically, and tactically, regional diplomacy is where successes in counterterrorism may ultimately reside.
22. The US and NATO must act forcefully against Russian aggression
Excerpts:
But the aggression is already occurring — it started in 2014 with the seizure of Crimea and invasion of Eastern Ukraine. The weak U.S. and Western response then has provoked Moscow to continue, and to escalate its aggression, and the absence of a firm, clear Western posture now will invite further aggression.
As for the argument that playing the sanctions card now will dissipate its effectiveness, there is no reason a package of significant economic sanctions cannot be imposed while holding in reserve the most severe and devastating economic and financial actions.
A new version of the legislation is pending. Biden should support it and immediately impose major sanctions on Russia, while threatening even more punishing measures if Western warnings are unheeded.
Washington also should lead an urgent NATO review of its military capabilities to directly defend Ukraine as a security partner and serious NATO aspirant. Finally, NATO should invite Russia to ensure its own security and Europe’s by itself moving to qualify for NATO membership.
The US and NATO must act forcefully against Russian aggression
The Hill · by Joseph Bosco, opinion contributor · February 1, 2022
President Biden’s confusing signals are undermining some of his administration’s good work on countering Russia’s threats to Ukraine. For better or worse, he also may be confusing Vladimir Putin regarding U.S. intentions.
While acknowledging that Russia’s intentions to change European borders by military force recall the dark days of World War II and the Cold War, Biden initially said, “The idea that the United States is going to unilaterally use force to confront Russia invading Ukraine is not in the cards right now.”
But the president failed to offer to lead a multinational security effort to defend against a Russian threat that clearly extends beyond Ukraine and ultimately endangers all of Europe and U.S. national interests. Western reluctance to confront aggression early on, before it gains a foothold and builds momentum, was the most critical of the fatal mistakes of the 1930s that led to the Nazi rampage across Europe.
Biden noted that Ukraine, as a nonmember of NATO, is not automatically entitled to Article 5 protection — which is precisely why Ukraine, Georgia and other Russian neighbors avidly seek that security guarantee, and why Moscow vehemently opposes it. Putin wants no impediments to his revanchist ambition to reconstitute the former Soviet Union, whose demise he has called “the greatest geostrategic tragedy of the 20th century.”
Putin has exploited NATO’s exclusive reliance on formal membership as a ceiling, rather than a floor. for direct security measures against external threats to European security. It encouraged him to invade Georgia in 2008 and Crimea and Eastern Ukraine in 2014, without incurring unacceptable costs to Russia. Today’s actions against the rest of Ukraine, including plans to overthrow its democratically-elected government, are simply the next phase in Putin’s master plan to dominate large swaths of Europe, every bit as malign and methodical as Adolf Hitler’s grand strategy.
The United States and NATO should consider adopting an “Article 5-plus” approach that would extend protection to nations that have applied to join NATO, are making serious efforts to qualify, and are targeted by Russia for that reason. Aspiring to join NATO should not be a suicide mission for a nation during the period that its qualifications are under consideration.
The moral, and even legal, case to offer direct U.S. and NATO security support for Ukraine is especially strong, given the circumstances of its independence after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. During the Cold War, Moscow stationed hundreds of nuclear weapons on Ukrainian territory. Kiev agreed to return these nuclear weapons to Russia in exchange for security guarantees from Russia and the West. In 1994, Russia, the United States, and the United Kingdom executed the Budapest Memorandum, a security guarantee of Ukraine’s territorial integrity and political independence.
Moscow subsequently dismissed the agreement as non-binding because it was made with an earlier, Russian-dominated Ukrainian government. The West has tacitly accepted that invalid position, and the agreement was not invoked by the Obama-Biden administration when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014.
The perception of the Biden administration as weak — especially after the chaotic abandonment of Afghanistan — has emboldened Putin to accelerate his planned moves on Ukraine, and against NATO by demanding a permanent ban on Ukraine’s membership.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken has surprised Putin and impressed many Americans with his skillful and unflinching response to the crude threats from Putin and his foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov. Unfortunately, Biden keeps saying things that complicate the clear message that Blinken and NATO are trying to send Putin — that his demand for NATO to close its door to Ukraine (and Georgia and other aspirants) is a nonstarter and that the West will unequivocally support Ukraine’s resistance.
At a rare news conference two weeks ago, Biden was asked how the U.S. would respond if Putin ignored the West’s warnings. He said the response would be dictated by how seriously Russia violated Ukraine’s sovereignty: “I think what you’re going to see is that Russia will be held accountable if it invades, and it depends on what it does. It’s one thing if it’s a minor incursion and we [NATO] end up having to fight about what to do and not to do.”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky felt compelled to respond to Biden’s comment: “We want to remind the great powers that there are no minor incursions and small nations.”
Zelensky did not mention Russia’s earlier and ongoing aggression against Ukraine. Blinken and his colleagues consistently have made it a point to warn against a “further” Russian invasion of Ukraine. Biden subsequently clarified that “any” new Russian border crossing would trigger a U.S. and NATO response. But the damage may have been done, and Putin may have decided he knows Biden’s instincts regarding Ukraine.
Putin seemed to convey to Biden that he is preparing for a much larger project, stationing Russian troops in Belarus and along Ukraine’s border in positions that would enable a large-scale invasion from three sides. Moscow also has expanded its naval forces threatening Ukraine.
Last month, the Biden administration opposed a Senate bill that would have required imposing economic sanctions now, rather than waiting for Russia to invade. The argument against it was that it might provoke the very aggression the West seeks to avoid, and that it would prematurely expend the leverage to deter further aggression.
But the aggression is already occurring — it started in 2014 with the seizure of Crimea and invasion of Eastern Ukraine. The weak U.S. and Western response then has provoked Moscow to continue, and to escalate its aggression, and the absence of a firm, clear Western posture now will invite further aggression.
As for the argument that playing the sanctions card now will dissipate its effectiveness, there is no reason a package of significant economic sanctions cannot be imposed while holding in reserve the most severe and devastating economic and financial actions.
A new version of the legislation is pending. Biden should support it and immediately impose major sanctions on Russia, while threatening even more punishing measures if Western warnings are unheeded.
Washington also should lead an urgent NATO review of its military capabilities to directly defend Ukraine as a security partner and serious NATO aspirant. Finally, NATO should invite Russia to ensure its own security and Europe’s by itself moving to qualify for NATO membership.
Joseph Bosco served as China country director for the secretary of Defense from 2005 to 2006 and as Asia-Pacific director of humanitarian assistance and disaster relief from 2009 to 2010. He is a nonresident fellow at the Institute for Corean-American Studies and a member of the advisory board of the Global Taiwan Institute. Follow him on Twitter @BoscoJosephA.
The Hill · by Joseph Bosco, opinion contributor · February 1, 2022
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.
