Quotes of the Day:
"O beautiful for heroes proved
In liberating strife,
Who more than self their country love
And mercy more than life."
– America the Beautiful
"Heroes never die. They live on in the hearts and minds of those who would follow in their footsteps."
– Emily Potter
""I have long believed that sacrifice is the pinnacle of patriotism.""
– Bob Riley
1. do we understand enemies? reflection on Memorial Day by Cynthia Watson
2. A Memorial for Those We Lost in the Long Wars by Douglas Ollivant
3. Memorial Day: ‘Make It Matter’ by Mark Hertling
4. ‘Never Been Done Before’: A True Investigation of a Failed American War
5. The high-speed X-plane that could revolutionize warfare
6. Biden Administration Presses Allies Not to Confront Iran on Nuclear Program
7. AI Is Driving ‘the Next Industrial Revolution.’ Wall Street Is Cashing In.
8. The New Theory of Ukrainian Victory Is the Same as the Old
9. An “America First” World – What Trump’s Return Might Mean for Global Order By Hal Brands
10. Memorial Day 2024: A soldier’s extraordinary speech on a somber day | Analysis
11. Low percentage of Americans in military is "deeply problematic as a democracy," Rep. Pat Ryan says
12. China preparing armada of ferries to invade Taiwan
13. Ukrainian strike on Russian nuclear radar system causes alarm in West
14. US remains a ‘true believer’ in Asean, say top Biden diplomats
15. Despite fatigue and setbacks, 'Ukrainians mobilized on the front have no intention of laying down their arms'
16. Book Review: ‘The Art of Diplomacy,’ by Stuart E. Eizenstat
17. CT-based Colt's Manufacturing awarded $57 million contract for Army weapons
18. Myanmar’s Surprising Rebels Deserve a Shot
19. An Ominous Precedent for the Left’s Politicization of the Military
1. do we understand enemies? reflection on Memorial Day by Cynthia Watson
An important reflection for today from one of my many mentors.
Not in her bio below, Dr Cynthia Watson is a professor emeritus from the National War College and one of our national experts in national security.
do we understand enemies?
reflection on Memorial Day
https://cynthiawatson.substack.com/p/do-we-understand-enemies?utm=
CYNTHIA WATSON
MAY 27, 2024
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I asked my husband whether he wanted to go over to the Academy grounds with me this weekend as I wanted to photograph the lush green of the late spring. He demurred because he has been writing rather intensely this week so I headed off late morning.
Your Naval Academy is a fixture within Annapolis as the grounds, built on landfill (thus subject to seawater rising but that is a different column), form the eastern boundary of the town as Spa Creek merges with the Severn River which then empties into the Chesapeake just south of Annapolis.
Looking along the edge of the grounds, I got a terrific view of a full harbour (I refer to it as the outer Annapolis Harbour since it’s outside of the bridge across Spa Creek) yesterday. A new ‘pirate’ boat to take kids around the harbour showed the commercial success that the town has even for youngster.
I walked by the Levy Chapel, an elegant, modern structure for Jewish midshipmen. The spring buds in that area were long gone but the architecture reminded me that the Academy is a place of change mirroring the remainder of America (as it should be): when Uriah Levy served as the first Jewish commodore in the nineteenth century, the idea of a dedicated Jewish house of worship was impossible on Academy grounds yet through efforts across the generations, it opened in 2005. Levy earned respect from many for not flogging those on his ship.
From there, I walked towards the main Chapel, a grand dome which underwent major cleaning several years ago to reveal its majesty. The grounds en route were largely empty except for small groups of tourists. The Midshipmen I did see were engaged in P.T., or physical training, of some sort since the physical fitness demands remain a major obstacle for many hoping to enter military service in this era of Oreos and Doritos. It was a splendid morning to be out.
I walked further north towards the bridge crossing one of the smaller creeks running through the campus. There is a lovely wooden bridge that I enjoy walking because it seems to quaint in the middle of this campus focusing on such high tech challenges which wood probably doesn’t solve.
On the other side of the bridge, I actually reached my intended destination. In truth, I had to visit Senator McCain this Memorial Day weekend.
I never met him nor did I vote for him. But John McCain, contrary to all of the hate-mongering against him since 2015, was a remarkable man. Son and grandson of four star admirals, McCain majored in partying and demerits when a student here, graduating fifth from the bottom of the Brigade of Midshipmen in 1958. Yet he became a naval aviator before a Republican Representative, then Senator from Arizona.
McCain was remarkable for two particular reasons to me. One was genuine patriotism. Not just that he served in the military, something so uncommon that it merits mention today. John McCain became a prisoner of war with significant injuries when the North Vietnamese downed his A-4E Skyhawk in October 1967. McCain had fractures to both arms and a leg before his ‘rescuers’ attacked his shoulder with a rifle to inflict further excruciating pain. Vietnamese authorities tortured McCain (and his fellow captives) over the more than five years he was held.
Whatever John McCain’s many failings, documented in books praising and demeaning him, he refused offers to leave Hanoi because his father was in charge of U.S. Pacific Command. The prisoner McCain refused to abandon those with less lofty names or connections. He endured beatings rather than renege on the Code of conduct which prohibits military personnel from accepting easier treatment than their peers. That choice alone made John McCain a patriot above others yet today is mocked as if everyone takes the easier route. McCain, released with 108 other PoWs in 1973, suffered for his country because he refused to abandon those who held with him. He was not my definition of a sucker.
I also went to see John McCain for another reason yesterday.
His burial site on the grounds of the Academy is next to his best friend, Charles Larson. A fellow classmate in 1958, Chuck Larson was McCain’s father’s successor several times removed as Commander of U.S. Pacific Command. I never knew Larson either but had heard long before either man’s death that they had requested adjacent spots in the cemetary.
Chuck Larson and John McCain tell an invaluable tale for 2024, however, that I wanted to highlight. Larson’s last prominence before his 2014 passing was as Kathleen Kennedy Townsend’s unsuccessful Democratic running mate for Maryland Lieutenant Governor in 2002. Larson also supported Howard Dean in the 2004 presidential campaign, serving as a foreign policy advisor to the Vermont Democrat.
John McCain and Chuck Larson, two incredibly successful graduates and citizens, did not allow their friendship to deteriorate into personal animosity based on partisan affiliation. Remarkable today is the depth of hatred emanating from one’s voting preferences while these two men, having weathered far greater challenges than the overwhelming majority of us, retained their mutual respect, affection, and ultimate decision to accept their final resting spots next to one another. What a tribute to America so lacking in our current environment. I had to see it again as a sign of hope for our future.
John McCain was one of thousands of Americans who attended this Academy and the millions who served our nation both proudly and honourably. He chose not to leave behind the ‘little people’ who had none of the prominent outs he could have taken. He was not perfect nor did I agree with some of his policy prescriptions. But his overall behaviour was as patriotic and honourable as anyone I can think of on the political scene today. We should on Memorial Day celebrate his commitment to this country—like the millions who have given their all for us. Death is ultimate; there is no coming back for any of them.
I walked back to my car, thinking of those who serve us and have given so much. I can’t speak for any of you but I can thank each and every one of them because we are so lucky. We cannot take that for granted by judging folks on their political affiliations rather than behaviour or commitment to protect all Americans.
I stopped at a shop nearby on the way home. I did not snap a picture, because I was in a rush, but a car near mine had a bumper sticker full of serendipity: The other party is not the enemy. No, it’s not. John McCain and Chuck Larson understood enemies but do all of us?
Who are you remembering this day? Who embodies your understanding of patriotism and why? I genuinely want to hear from you.
Thank you for your time. Please circulate this column if you find it of value. Thank you to the subscribers who motivate me to write daily.
We are the luckiest people in the world because of those who have given their all. Be well and be safe. FIN
Cynthia Watson
@cynthiawatson14 links
Generating measured, civil discourse on things big and small that matter to us. Far more interested in ‘why’ and in questions than simple answers.
2. A Memorial for Those We Lost in the Long Wars by Douglas Ollivant
A Memorial for Those We Lost in the Long Wars
The burden of the wars that followed September 11 fell to a select group.
thedispatch.com · by Douglas Ollivant · May 27, 2024
Visiting Arlington National Cemetery on Memorial Day involves navigating a large crowd. Americans (and doubtless a few foreigners) of all ages and demographics clear security, pass through the visitor’s center, and enter the cemetery.
The vast majority of the crowd—at least 90 percent, in my estimation—continues past the center and walks up the hill to where the Tomb of the Unknowns stands majestic (along with other attractions—the Lee House and Kennedy’s eternal flame). The Unknowns is probably the best place in the cemetery to pay generic honor to America’s fallen. To borrow much better prose than my own, “It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.”
Todd L. Bryant: January 14, 1980-October 31, 2003
But a much smaller contingent chooses a different path. Usually in small groups, with plenty of spacing in contrast to the mass throng continuing up the hill, they take a left turn, walk across the generally flat ground and go through several road junctions before taking a second left turn, to a place on the right called Section 60. These persons are here to pay their respects in a much more personal manner—to be slightly irreverent, retail not wholesale.
Section 60 can be described as an accidental memorial. It is not as if someone planned a place where the hallowed dead of the “long wars” in Iraq and Afghanistan would be laid to rest. This was just bureaucratic inertia—Section 60 happened to be the place that, bluntly, had vacancies. As the number of war dead increased, Section 60 became the area in which such graves claimed a majority stake, “occupied by force,” in military terms. Other honored servicemembers are sprinkled throughout—passed from accident, disease, or age but entitled by service to placement in Arlington—but the war dead claimed primacy of place by raw numbers.
A decade or so ago, Section 60 looked like a pilgrimage site and trended distinctly younger. The past few years, the crowds have been smaller. We are aging, memory is fading, arguably wounds have healed as much as they ever will.
James M. Goins: December 6, 1980-August 15, 2004
Activities vary widely. Some will spend much of the day in and around Section 60. Others will come to kneel or sit by a particular headstone for a few moments, then depart. The density of visitors varies with both time of day and weather, but in general it is a steady stream from early to late. Or at least such has been my experience whenever I arrive.
Thankfully—but also in a sense, lamentably—emotions have been tamed by the passage of years. We can, or should, remember the haunting photos of young widows and fiancées lying prostrate, as if to get closer to their late husband (or now never husband-to-be) through proximity. There are very few such displays these days. Some kneeling, lots of sitting, plenty of praying. But no deep, unassuageable grief.
There is something powerful about the proximity. While Washington’s nearby National Mall has deep, symbolic power, what happens in Section 60 at Arlington is different. As the saying goes, the residents of Section 60 are not yet truly dead because they are still remembered. And we go there to be present with the last physical link—or one of the last physical links—to these memories. Even if all that remains is “a few stray atoms brought back to the elements.”
Christopher J Sullivan: September 2, 1975-January 18, 2005
Of course, not all our recent dead lie in Arlington. The cemetery at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point has an overweighted sample (the dead there outnumber the living), and others rest in cemeteries both national and private across the country. Families far from the capital understandably wish to inter their fallen close to home. But while this is, again, fitting and proper, without in any way diminishing the heroism of these servicemembers, the power of what they represent is diluted by the disbursement. Section 60 concentrates and distills all that.
There is an entire cohort—mostly, though not exclusively, those in uniform and their loved ones—for whom the events of 9/11 shifted the course of their lives forever. This was not a moment that was shared broadly, or at least not for more than a year or so. This is not anyone’s fault. As more than one commentator has observed, the demand made on the American people after 9/11 was to “go shopping.” For most Americans, the decades following 9/11 were defined by the 2008 financial crisis and the long bull market that followed. The wars that followed that fateful day were not universally experienced as such by the vast majority.
Laura M Walker: June 16, 1981-August 18, 2005
The burden instead fell on a select group: primarily servicemembers and their families, of course, after the victims and families of 9/11 itself. But it also fell on an elite—if you will—of military and development civilians who worked alongside and/or supported the “warfighters.” Nor should one forget the journalists who covered and often shared the dangers—and in a few tragic cases, the costs.
Interestingly, the visitors to Section 60 are, in my experience, almost evenly divided between men and women, despite the fact that the fallen are overwhelmingly male. While the public consciousness absorbs the stories of the women more deeply—Shannon Kent, Laura Walker, Ashley White—the hard numbers tell another story. More than 97.5 percent of the Iraq and Afghanistan war fatalities have been men. Of course, for every fallen male soldier there is a mother and often a wife or fiancé or girlfriend, just as for the women there are husbands and fathers. So while the parity makes sense, it is still notable, the brothers of the fallen mixing with the women who mourn them.
Paul J Finken: July 31, 1966-November 2, 2006
I go to Arlington only on Memorial Day, so I’m not certain what the “traffic” looks like on other days. And frankly, I’m not sure my friends there would still want me visiting at all anymore—I removed my “memorial bracelet” years ago on similar suspicions. It has been years, after all. Decades, in a growing number of cases. Would they want me to continue making this observance? Would they tell me I should be moving on and not be haunted by their deaths? I’ll assume they wouldn’t begrudge me a short drop-by on the holiday.
The limited circle of those who visit—and are generally near enough to visit—does occasionally, and perversely, make the holiday a reunion of sorts. I’ve never not run into a random acquaintance from the Long Wars, even though I tend not to stay very long. These encounters are usually interesting, sometimes awkward—contrary to popular opinion, not all of us involved in the Long Wars are friends. But nonetheless, shared loss tends to paper things over.
Andrew R. Weiss: Mar 14, 1979-May 3, 2007
Barring illness, I’ll again be on that minor pilgrimage to Section 60 again. Perhaps at some point the murmurings that it’s been long enough will grow loud enough for me to listen. To leave the dead to their own quiet whispers … as they wait for us—we gathered observants on this day—to one day join them.
But not this year.
Douglas Ollivant
Douglas Ollivant is a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI) and a former director for Iraq at the National Security Council. He is a retired Army officer and a veteran of the 2004 battles of Najaf Cemetery and Second Fallujah.
thedispatch.com · by Douglas Ollivant · May 27, 2024
3. Memorial Day: ‘Make It Matter’ by Mark Hertling
Memorial Day: ‘Make It Matter’
A yearly ritual helps me reflect on the loss of my comrades and the meaning of their sacrifice.
MARK HERTLING
MAY 24, 2024
thebulwark.com · by Mark Hertling
A United States flag between grave markers at the Normandy American Cemetery near Colleville-sur-Mer on Sunday, June 2, 2019, a few days before the 75th anniversary of D-Day. (Photo by Artur Widak/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
THE FILM BEGINS WITH AN OLDER MAN walking through a peaceful cemetery. Keeping a few steps ahead of his family, he searches for someone’s grave marker. We see his intense concentration and feel his suppressed anxiety: He knows he is about to face something he has been carrying with him for decades. Finally, he reaches a white cross inscribed with the name he has been looking for. He collapses, overwhelmed.
With a jump-cut that takes us into his memories, the scene shifts to the hell that is war.
Helmeted men are packed into boats en route to a well-defended beach. Some are praying, others vomiting as the waves roll the hull. They’re all thinking of home, of loved ones, of danger, of mortality. As the door of the landing craft drops and the human cargo is dispensed, most of the men are unable to dodge the bullets waiting for them.
It is the most emotionally charged first 27 minutes of any movie ever made.
This opening is followed by scenes that evoke camaraderie, bravery, cowardice, leadership, and so many other virtues and foibles that soldiers experience in war. It is all part of the brilliant 1998 film Saving Private Ryan.
(Courtesy DreamWorks Pictures and Paramount Pictures)
I watch it every year during the afternoon on Memorial Day. I usually like to be alone because I don’t like others to disrupt my thoughts or see my emotions.
The competing opening scenes of peace and terror are within a short walk of each other. The immaculately kept Normandy American Cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer—where the old man walks at the beginning of the film, and where 9,388 soldiers, sailors, airmen, uniformed women, and war correspondents have been laid to rest since June 1944—is on a cliff. Down below, those landscapes of brutal violence, Omaha and Utah beaches, have become places of deep personal reflection amid the sound of lapping waves. These sites are sacred ground.
This year, many nonagenarian and a few centenarian veterans will commemorate the eightieth anniversary of the day of those landings—the “four score” remembrance of their generation. They will mourn the loss of those who didn’t come home with them and, even in their late years, they will still recall their comrades’ names.
And those they remember will remain forever young.
I THINK OF THESE REAL-LIFE VETERANS as I anticipate my Memorial Day ritual of reflecting on their fictionalized counterparts. The characters in Steven Spielberg’s movie—Private Jackson, the sniper; Technician Fourth Grade Wade, the medic; Private First Class Reiben, the smartass from Brooklyn; Private Caparzo, the burly soldier with the smile and the continuous wisecracks; Technical Sergeant Horvath; and, of course, Tom Hanks’s Captain John Miller—are fascinating to me, and even a bit eerie, for how they remind me of soldiers I have known and served alongside during multiple deployments. Only the names are different.
It’s been less than “one score” for me, and I still easily remember my soldiers’ faces, their unique personalities. Private Jonathan Falaniko, the young engineer who was the son of one of our command sergeant majors. Private Rey Cuervo, a Mexican immigrant who could be found studying for his citizenship test whenever he wasn’t on patrol. Specialist Michelle Witmer, a military policewoman, who was killed in a small arms attack. Second Lieutenant Lennie Cowherd III, who had been a friend to our son when they were at West Point together. Captain Rowdy Inman—also a West Point graduate—who was adored by his cavalry troopers. And, of course, Command Sergeant Major Eric Cooke, who was killed on Christmas Eve 2003 while patrolling with his men.
All of them would be much older today, had they returned home with us. When I watch the movie each year, I often replace the faces of Captain Miller’s small squad with those of the soldiers I served alongside. And after the movie ends, I go outside—alone, as the sun is beginning to set—to offer a bourbon toast to those men and women who will never grow old.
At the end of Saving Private Ryan, with his mission completed and his death drawing near, Captain Miller pulls Ryan close and whispers, “Earn this.” For my money, it’s the best line ever spoken—except one.
During one of my combat tours, when I was an assistant division commander to my friend and mentor General Marty Dempsey, he suggested at a soldier’s memorial service that we all should “make it matter.” He was calling us to consider the excruciating loss of each of our soldiers, and to commit to living a life worthy of everything they sacrificed.
That expression—“Make it matter”—is engraved on a small wooden box I keep on my desk. The box contains 253 pictures of those who didn’t come home with us. Because I can’t walk through all the cemeteries across our country where those young soldiers now rest, I spend a bit of time looking through the pictures after I toast their memory. I wonder where they would be today if they had lived, what they would be doing, how their families might have grown.
(Photo courtesy of the author.)
And then, I think of what the much older James Francis Ryan says to his surprised wife at the end of Saving Private Ryan.
“Tell me I have led a good life,” Ryan whispers to her. “Tell me I’m a good man.”
During a time of divisions, of deep resentments and confusion in our country and across the world, I also want to know if I’m a good man—to know if I’ve lived a life worthy of the sacrifice of so many throughout our history.
We must earn it. We must make it matter. On this Memorial Day, and on every day of the year.
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thebulwark.com · by Mark Hertling
4. ‘Never Been Done Before’: A True Investigation of a Failed American War
Will they be able to explain the whole story?
Excerpts:
In their first joint interview since the launch of the Afghanistan War Commission, co-chairs and veteran Afghan policy thinkers Shamila Chaudhary and Colin Jackson discussed their move into an active new phase, including interviewing the diplomats, generals and politicians who shaped the war.
Their goal? To determine just what went wrong in the 20-year conflict.
“No one will look like an unblemished hero, and nobody will look like a complete scapegoat,” Jackson said. “But the key is to be unflinching.”
‘Never Been Done Before’: A True Investigation of a Failed American War
By NAHAL TOOSI
05/26/2024 07:00 AM EDT
Politico
The Afghanistan War Commission’s probe is getting very real.
Afghans gather on a roadside near the military part of the airport in Kabul on Aug. 20, 2021, hoping to flee from the country after the Taliban's military takeover of Afghanistan. | Wakil Kohsar/AFP via Getty Images
05/26/2024 07:00 AM EDT
Nahal Toosi is POLITICO’s senior foreign affairs correspondent. She has reported on war, genocide and political chaos in a career that has taken her around the world. Her reported column, Compass, delves into the decision-making of the global national security and foreign policy establishment — and the fallout that comes from it.
If you played a role in Afghanistan policy over the past few decades, be prepared for a call.
In their first joint interview since the launch of the Afghanistan War Commission, co-chairs and veteran Afghan policy thinkers Shamila Chaudhary and Colin Jackson discussed their move into an active new phase, including interviewing the diplomats, generals and politicians who shaped the war.
Their goal? To determine just what went wrong in the 20-year conflict.
“No one will look like an unblemished hero, and nobody will look like a complete scapegoat,” Jackson said. “But the key is to be unflinching.”
The commission was established with bipartisan congressional support after the chaotic U.S. withdrawal in August 2021, but it’s obvious the seeds of failure were planted long before that. Chaudhary and Jackson are now tasked with developing a major, multipart report on how such mistakes can be avoided in the future.
Jackson is an academic, a military veteran and a former Defense Department official. Chaudhary is a former White House and State Department official. Both worked on Afghanistan policy during their years in the federal government, adding to their strong desire to understand why things fell apart.
In the interview, they discussed everything from talking to the Taliban to whether November’s presidential election could upend their work. And while they told POLITICO Magazine that they weren’t focused on ascribing blame, they acknowledged there’s plenty to spread around.
The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Your commission launched its work roughly a year ago. Where are you at now?
Jackson: We’re at the end of the building the team, sort of midway into the genuine research part of the project. The nature of commissions is it takes some time to assemble the right team. We’re going to end up having a team of close to 50 people on the professional staff.
Chaudhary: The research and analysis stage allows us to do all the important pickaxe work that commissions do, which is put out requests for information and documents to the different executive branch agencies, to develop our extensive timeline of the war, and the decisions and the inflection points that we want to analyze in the course of our project. And then to also build our extensive list of people that worked on the war that we want to interview.
How granular is the timeline going to be? Am I going to be able to climb up and down it?
Chaudhary: So there’s the early part of the war, which was heavily focused on counterterrorism. During the Obama administration, we saw a surge, both military and civilian, and that needs to be documented. Then the latter part of the war which involved these intense discussions about negotiations. All of these themes were present throughout, but they got more complex over time, and we all have our own little sliver of it.
What’s really important about this project is that we’re able to put them all together into one overarching narrative that no one has ever seen before. What’s so critical about getting this right is producing quite a historic project and report for not just policymakers but for the American public and a global audience.
Your three key goals are to write an official history of the U.S. engagement in Afghanistan; lay out lessons learned from the experience; and make recommendations that could include changes in government process and structures. How will you ensure that people in power listen to you and follow through on your ideas?
Jackson: The imperative behind the entire project is learning. The experience of Afghanistan over 20 years is in the rearview mirror. The question is what can we make of it to improve the performance of a future generation in some unknown, future U.S. involvement abroad? We can’t guarantee the reaction of the U.S. government to this, but we can control the quality, depth, seriousness, rigorousness of the study that we produce.
Chaudhary: We believe just by virtue of existing, this project has impact. This has never been done before in relation to any other previous conflict or war. No other commission has been given this much time, this large of a scope, and this much independence and authority to do the work on such an intense issue in our foreign policy — and in recent memory. People are still kind of processing these issues. So I think that impact will be there, and it will speak for itself.
I know you’re trying to avoid making your report about laying blame. But let’s talk about blame.
I find it highly amusing when the Defense Department tries to blame the withdrawal chaos on the State Department, as if the Pentagon played no role in the Afghan army’s failures, or when members of Congress act like they had nothing to do with making it so hard to get visas for Afghan interpreters. Or when the CIA pretends it’s invisible in all this.
If you don’t assign blame here, there, maybe everywhere, then how will anyone be held responsible? And shouldn’t people and institutions be held responsible?
Jackson: My guess is that we will see flattering and unflattering portrayals of different institutions and agencies over this 20-year span. No one will look like an unblemished hero, and nobody will look like a complete scapegoat. But the key is to be unflinching, to pursue the truth as best we can understand it and lay it out to an informed general audience so that they can come to the conclusions that are appropriate.
Chaudhary: I think that we can draw a throughline throughout the conflict, in that there was a very limited approach at one point of the war, which then evolved into a whole of government approach. The dissonance amongst the agencies — that’s important for our work. We need to understand where the different U.S. stakeholders are coming from.
How does your work compare to the 9/11 Commission?
Jackson: We’ve been in active discussions with the 9/11 Commission, with the folks who were involved in that team on the professional side. And we’re doing our best to sort of extract what they learned from that process. They were the first to point out that the scope we had been given was considerably more challenging in many ways than looking at a single episode and looking to the left and right of it, which is what the 9/11 Commission did.
Chaudhary: The accessibility of the 9/11 Commission report is something that we want to reflect in our outputs, not just in the final report, but also how we engage with stakeholders throughout the process. A lot of people have read the 9/11 Commission report; it’s studied in high schools and colleges and universities.
It almost won the National Book Award.
Chaudhary: That’s right. The other critical aspect of the 9/11 Commission’s work that applies to us is how they objectively represent the perspectives of foreigners in their work. They do an excellent job of outlining interests and motivations of people and states and governments that a lot of Americans don’t know anything about.
What about Afghans? How can and will they play a role in your work? Because there’s no direct Afghan representation on the commission itself from what I can tell.
Chaudhary: Representation of multiple perspectives is really important for our work, in particular the Afghan perspectives and the Afghan experiences of the war. We’ve done several things to meet this need. We’ve hired a senior adviser for Afghan outreach. We are planning several outreach events and private engagement opportunities that will help educate us on the Afghan experience.
Several of our commissioners have lived and worked in Afghanistan for long periods of time, have published on these issues and are world-renowned experts. As we continue to do these engagements, we will meet more people and individuals who will inform our work.
Are you going to talk to the Taliban?
Chaudhary: That is under consideration, at the right time. Obviously, we want to talk about everyone that is part of the story of the war.
They were kind of a big part of the story of the war.
Jackson: The question of sort of timing on that is a relevant one, but we’re certainly open in principle as we are talking to all sorts of actors in the story.
The Pakistanis?
Jackson: Absolutely.
Chaudhary: Congress has asked us to look at the Pakistanis. They’ve asked us to look at the foreign interlocutors, other governments. We are willing to talk to everyone who is involved in the U.S. decision-making and the impact of that, and so whoever is involved in that we will have to consider that.
Jackson: We would be telling half the story, one hand clapping, if all we did was look at U.S. government plans in isolation.
On a technical level, some of these groups involved are designated terrorist organizations in one fashion or another. Can you nonetheless engage with them?
Jackson: Any engagement with groups like the Taliban is complicated. We see this in the story of the Afghan War, the United States government came up with ways of interacting with challenging groups and audiences. My guess is that something similar is at least in the realm of the feasible for the commission.
American politics are far more polarized than the post-9/11 years. How are you going to ensure that your work is not distorted by partisanship or that partisans won’t try to weaponize your work, including along the way?
Jackson: The payoff of this project, if done the right way, will not occur in the here and now, it won’t occur in this political season. It will be a future generation of professionals in the U.S. government who are applying insights that hopefully derive in this 20-year experience. So I think to become too narrowly focused on what will be inevitably polarizing sorts of attitudes in this year would be to miss the larger point here. If learning is the imperative, the political tensions of the present are decidedly secondary in our view.
Chaudhary: Our commissioners were appointed in a bipartisan manner from all the relevant committees, but as actors and agents of the commission, we are nonpartisan and we’ve built a nonpartisan professional staff and we’ve established bylaws to guide our work and to protect minority views and to protect that nonpartisan nature of our work. The history of this commission when it gets written, it will show that it came into existence because of bipartisan support.
A lot of folks ask us, “What happens if Trump wins the election? What happens to your work?” Our work is going to stay the same. We are persistent in our mandate. We are going to keep pursuing our goal of looking for answers and explanations of the war.
If I’m a government employee who played a role in Afghan policy in the past three decades, how could I be affected by your ongoing work? Will I get called in for an interview? Can I say no?
Jackson: We’ve been engaged in discussions with past and current decision makers in all branches of government, and I think those conversations will likely continue in various ways. There’s no way for us to fully understand the conflict — the decisions that were made, the alternatives that were considered — without canvassing the people who were involved.
So the bottom line for government employees is, “Yes, I could get called in.”
Chaudhary: The legislation is worded that we are to analyze U.S. decision-making, the individuals and the institutions that were involved in that. We will begin to delineate a process by which we identify who we want to talk to. It would be hard to interview everyone at every level that was involved. And so, depending on how we define decision-making, and which decisions we actually look at, that will determine who we speak with.
How do you expect and want U.S. military veterans to play a role in your work?
Jackson: There is no audience more interested in our work at some level than the veteran community — they’re intensely interested, and there is a hunger for accountability, understanding and the like. I think the way we ultimately get at that is by laying out for them the logic of the war in these key decisions.
I’m a veteran of the Afghanistan war. I served in uniform there in 2011. I have a son who’s an infantry officer now. I have a deep personal, visceral interest both in understanding the conflict in its totality and better arming my son and his comrades with a level of understanding that will ideally make them better.
Chaudhary: We’ve hired several professional staff who are also veterans of the war in Afghanistan and are guiding our extensive outreach. One of the reasons I took this project on was that I felt like I didn’t actually get exposed enough to the perspectives of veterans and Afghans as I was doing the important work of diplomacy from Washington.
What’s been the hardest part so far?
Jackson: Probably the hardest part and the greatest opportunity is the scope. It will be illuminating to take a look at how these parts fit together.
Chaudhary: I see the high level of expectations for our work from the different communities that participated in the war as one of the biggest challenges, but it’s also an opportunity for us to do good work together in a collaborative way that we weren’t able to do during war time.
The other challenge which is also an opportunity is the deep emotion and visceral response that looking at the war in Afghanistan elicits from people. That I see as something very organic and not to be ignored. And how we address emotion and empathy and moral injury through a policy project is a very challenging situation, but I see it as something that we should boldly take on because our country deserves this. Americans deserve it.
Jackson: If we do our work well, it will be foundational.
What’s a question you wish I had asked?
Jackson: You talk about key decisions — what key decisions?
I think the hardest part of the project will probably be narrowing even that set of key decisions to a manageable number. Clearly, there are ones that stand out in the popular understanding of the word, but there may also be ones that we discover in the process of inquiry where we say, “This was a critical inflection point in which there were opportunities to act differently. Why did we choose as we did? If we had chosen differently, what would that have done?”
And a key decision might be something like the decision to surge troops or go into peace talks or decisions about how to build the Afghan army.
Jackson: Or the organization of the Afghan government at the Bonn conference. We’re going to identify a series of sort of critical decisions or critical program decisions that were made.
We’re also going to say, okay, across all these strands of government, which were the large things and look to both the left and right of those decisions. What alternatives were considered? Why did we choose as we did? We’ll look at implementation of those decisions, and then a reaction of actors in Afghanistan and around Afghanistan.
Do you ever wake up and think, “Oh boy, what did I get myself into?”
Chaudhary: This is an incredible project to work on. I feel like all of the work that we all did, inside and outside government, deserves this chapter in the story now, because if we didn’t have this opportunity, it would remain unfinished.
Jackson: The best problem in the world is a job that’s sufficiently challenging that keeps you engaged all the time. And no matter how challenging the day-to-day stuff is, you’ve got this sort of North Star in that the American public deserves a full understanding and accounting of this intervention.
POLITICO
Politico
5. The high-speed X-plane that could revolutionize warfare
Humans are more important than hardware. But imagine what this hardware can do for humans. (though I am not sure we should be overusing "revolutionize")
The high-speed X-plane that could revolutionize warfare
Newsweek · by Martha McHardy · May 23, 2024
Boeing and its research subsidiary Aurora Flight Sciences have unveiled a new high-speed X-plane that could revolutionize warfare.
Aurora told Newsweek the X-plane, which combines the agility of Vertical Take-Off and Landing (VTOL) aircraft with the speed of a 747 jet, is "game-changing."
"Through our X-plane concept for the DARPA SPRINT program, we aim to demonstrate technologies that will enable the game-changing combination of high-speed flight with the ability to take off and land in austere environments," Larry Wirsing, vice president of aircraft development at Aurora Flight Sciences, said.
The aircraft will not be used in the field but instead will be used to test technologies for military aircraft used for Special Forces missions. The aim is to improve aircraft speed and the ability of the planes to take off from unconventional runways.
Aurora added that such technologies will allow aircraft to cruise at 400 to 450 knots (460 to 518 miles per hour) at relevant altitudes, hover in austere environments, and land in tight spaces.
The new Aurora X-plane. The aircraft could revolutionize warcraft, allowing military planes to cruise at 450 knots and land in tight spaces. The new Aurora X-plane. The aircraft could revolutionize warcraft, allowing military planes to cruise at 450 knots and land in tight spaces. Aurora Flight Sciences
Speed and agility will prove particularly useful in Special Operations Forces missions, the company said.
"Aurora and Boeing bring relevant expertise in blended-wing-body platforms, high-speed VTOL configurations, and military aircraft development," said Larry Wirsing, vice president of aircraft development at Aurora Flight Sciences. "The DARPA SPRINT program is an exciting opportunity to continue our history of advancing technology demonstrator programs that enable new capabilities for the U.S. military."
The X-plane features a sleek composite exterior and a low-drag, blended-wing body.
Aurora said three lift fans have been incorporated into the wings to enable vertical flight. These are also equipped with integrated covers that ensure a smooth transition from vertical to horizontal flight.
The company said the aircraft is also capable of super-short takeoffs and landings, as well as conventional takeoffs and touchdowns, and can carry 5,000 pounds and travel up to 450 knots (518 mph).
The new X-plane is set to be remotely piloted during testing to reduce risk. However, Aurora has said that a crew could be featured in future tests over the next 12 months, with the aim of the first flight taking place in 36 months.
This isn't the only X-plane Aurora is working on for the U.S. military. The company is also creating an X-65 plane with the purpose of demonstrating the feasibility of Active Flow Control. AFC utilizes bursts of air rather than moving flight control surfaces on the exterior of the wings and tail to control its flight.
"AFC may deliver benefits in areas such as aerodynamics, weight, and mechanical complexity," Aurora said.
"X-65 has the potential to change the future of aircraft design," Kevin Uleck, CRANE program director at Aurora, added.
Aurora expects to launch the full-scale 7,000-pound X-65 demonstrator, which can fly at 467 knots (537 mph), by summer 2025.
Newsweek · by Martha McHardy · May 23, 2024
6. Biden Administration Presses Allies Not to Confront Iran on Nuclear Program
So is this a win for Iran's political warfare strategy - get your enemy to protect and advocate for you?
Biden Administration Presses Allies Not to Confront Iran on Nuclear Program
U.S. is arguing against an effort by Britain and France to censure Iran at the IAEA’s member state board
https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/u-s-opposes-european-plan-to-censure-iran-over-nuclear-work-85ad7fc6?mod=hp_lead_pos3
By Laurence Norman
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May 27, 2024 2:00 am ET
Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei viewed a model of a nuclear facility in Tehran in 2023. PHOTO: OFFICE OF THE IRANIAN SUPREME LEADER/WANA/REUTERS
BERLIN—The Biden administration is pressing European allies to back off plans to rebuke Iran for advances in its nuclear program as it seeks to keep tensions with Tehran from escalating before the autumn’s U.S. presidential election, according to diplomats involved in discussions.
The U.S. is arguing against an effort by Britain and France to censure Iran at the International Atomic Energy Agency’s member state board in early June, the diplomats said. The U.S. has pressed a number of other countries to abstain in a censure vote, saying that is what Washington will do, they said.
U.S. officials deny lobbying against a resolution.
The differences are emerging as Western officials’ concerns have deepened about Iran’s nuclear activities. Iran has enough highly enriched fissile material for three nuclear weapons, according to IAEA data.
Some U.S. officials say they fear Iran could be more volatile as the country moves toward elections for a new leader after the death of President Ebrahim Raisi in a helicopter crash earlier this month. The Biden administration has long said it is seeking a diplomatic solution on Iran’s nuclear program.
European diplomats have warned that failure to take action would undermine the authority of the IAEA, which polices nonproliferation of nuclear weapons. They say it also weakens the credibility of Western pressure on Iran. And they are frustrated over what they see as U.S. efforts to undermine their approach.
A U.S. official said Washington is “tightly coordinated” with its European partners ahead of the IAEA board meeting next month: “Any speculation about decisions is premature.”
“We are increasing pressure on Iran through sanctions and international isolation,” the official added, citing measures taken by the Group of Seven advanced democracies after an Iranian missile and drone attack on Israel last month.
A second U.S. official said it was “totally false” that Washington is aiming to avoid disruption with Iran before the U.S. elections.
Iran’s Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant, as seen from a fishing village in the southern part of the country. PHOTO: ROUZBEH FOULADI/ZUMA PRESS
The IAEA board last passed a resolution rebuking Iran in November 2022. U.S. and European officials in Vienna have repeatedly warned since then that they would take action if Tehran didn’t rein in its nuclear advances and step up cooperation with the agency.
At the heart of the dispute are ongoing concerns in some European countries, particularly France and Britain, that Washington lacks a strategy for dealing with Iran’s nuclear advances. European diplomats have said that the Biden administration appears unwilling to either pursue a serious diplomatic effort with Iran or take punitive actions against Tehran’s nuclear transgressions.
The Europeans were strong supporters of the 2015 nuclear deal, which lifted most international sanctions on Iran in exchange for tight but temporary restrictions on Iran’s nuclear work. Europe sought to preserve the accord after the Trump administration exited it in 2018.
The Biden administration set revival of the nuclear agreement as a top foreign policy goal when it took office. But talks collapsed in August 2022 when Iran hardened its demands. Since then, U.S. officials have sought to contain tensions with Iran.
U.S. officials argue that Europe could do more to increase pressure on Iran, including cutting off Iranian banks that work on the continent and listing Iran’s elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terror group. They note they have coordinated sanctions efforts with Europe against Iran over its missile and drone transfers.
Washington has its own strategy for raising pressure on Iran over its nuclear activities, which includes asking the IAEA to prepare a comprehensive report setting out everything it knows about Iran’s failure to cooperate.
While a report would have no automatic consequences, a similar effort in 2011 focused international attention on Tehran’s nuclear buildup, generating momentum for international sanctions on Iran.
U.S. officials say if Iran doesn’t change direction, such a report could build the case for a snapback of international sanctions lifted under the nuclear deal, which is an option that expires in October 2025. European officials say they have been told Washington is considering asking the agency to present such a report after U.S. elections in November but has no immediate plans to request it.
Iran is already effectively a threshold nuclear state, and there are growing Western worries it could seek to become a nuclear-weapon state.
In addition to accumulating highly enriched uranium, Iranian officials have suggested Tehran has mastered the process of building a nuclear weapon. Others have suggested that Tehran could reverse Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s ban on weapons of mass destruction.
Iran insists its nuclear program is for civilian purposes. The U.S. intelligence community and the IAEA say they have no evidence that Tehran is building a nuclear weapon. Tehran started expanding its nuclear program after the U.S. pulled out of the nuclear deal.
Iran has reduced the IAEA’s oversight of its nuclear program and for years stonewalled an agency probe into undeclared nuclear material found in recent years in Iran.
A censure resolution at the IAEA Board can open the way to pushing Iran’s alleged noncompliance on nuclear issues to the U.N. Security Council for an international response.
The United Nations Security Council held a meeting on nuclear disarmament and nonproliferation in March. PHOTO: XIE E/ZUMA PRESS
France’s ambassador to the U.N. at the Security Council’s March meeting. PHOTO: EDUARDO MUNOZ ALVAREZ/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Tehran has repeatedly escalated its nuclear program or taken fresh action to limit inspectors’ access in recent years when it has come under Western pressure over its nuclear program at the IAEA meetings. Last year, after facing verbal criticism at the board, it banned a number of experienced European inspectors from the country.
The U.S. fears a repeat of those kinds of steps if a censure motion goes through.
The administration is also skeptical that a formal rebuke will achieve anything. Even if Iran’s nuclear work is eventually pushed up to the U.N. Security Council, it would likely be doomed there. Russia and China, who hold veto power at the U.N., would almost certainly veto any attempt to sanction Tehran for its activities.
This time, British and French officials have told Washington they want to press ahead with a censure resolution, saying it was time to draw a line, according to people involved in discussions.
Whether the Europeans actually would do that is unclear. If they proposed a censure motion that failed, it would be a major diplomatic coup for Tehran, suggesting Western pressure on Iran was crumbling.
The U.S. has pushed against a censure resolution at the IAEA ahead of other recent board meetings, but past disagreements over how to handle Iran’s nuclear work have largely stayed between Washington and the Europeans.
However, at the last board meeting in March, Washington’s ambassador to the IAEA, Laura Holgate, warned that Iranian noncooperation with the agency couldn’t be allowed to continue.
“Iran’s level of cooperation with the agency remains unacceptable,” she said at the last meeting of the IAEA board. “The board must be prepared to take further action should Iran’s cooperation not improve dramatically.”
Laura Holgate, the U.S. ambassador to the IAEA, in Vienna in 2022. PHOTO: JOE KLAMAR/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
Earlier this month, IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi traveled to Iran to try to improve cooperation, calling for Tehran to take concrete deliverable steps before the June board meeting to show its good intention. No such steps have been taken, and diplomats in Vienna say they don’t immediately expect any.
In a bid to contain flashpoints, U.S. officials earlier this month held their first discussions since January with Iranian officials in Oman. The indirect talks, which involved Omani officials going back and forth between the sides, touched on regional and nuclear issues, according to people briefed on discussions.
Mark Dubowitz, chief executive officer of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said a censure resolution would help set out a record of Iranian noncompliance that could ultimately lead to a snapback of international sanctions.
Kelsey Davenport, director for nonproliferation policy at the Arms Control Association, said a censure was overdue but that it should be tied with a diplomatic effort to rein in Iran’s nuclear program for sanctions relief.
“The board needs to send a message to Iran that there are consequences for stonewalling,” she said. “But it needs to be part of a broader strategy. The goal should be pressuring and incentivizing Iran to cooperate with the IAEA and expand their access.”
Michael R. Gordon contributed to this article
Write to Laurence Norman at laurence.norman@wsj.com
7. AI Is Driving ‘the Next Industrial Revolution.’ Wall Street Is Cashing In.
Graphics/charts at the link.
AI Is Driving ‘the Next Industrial Revolution.’ Wall Street Is Cashing In.
Old-school stocks in the utilities, energy and materials sectors are outpacing the wider market
https://www.wsj.com/finance/stocks/ai-is-driving-the-next-industrial-revolution-wall-street-is-cashing-in-8cc1b28f?mod=hp_lead_pos2
By Charley Grant
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May 27, 2024 5:30 am ET
Nvidia shares have become a barometer for AI-capability demand. PHOTO: BRENDAN MCDERMID/REUTERS
Demand for artificial intelligence is still booming, a year after the phenomenon first took Wall Street by storm. Far beyond the tech sector, investors are finding winners in old-school pick-and-shovel stocks.
Deep-pocketed companies are investing heavily in AI technology, which has meant a windfall for chip makers such as Nvidia NVDA 2.57%increase; green up pointing triangle and a host of businesses—such as suppliers of power, labor and raw materials—to operate their products.
Wall Street is taking notice. The utilities sector of the S&P 500 has returned 15% over the past three months, topping all other corners of the index. Energy and materials stocks have outperformed the broader market, which has advanced 4.2% over that period. Share prices are surging for industrial firms that stand to benefit from data-center expansion and renovation.
Nvidia’s earnings report last week showed that demand for AI capabilities is only gaining steam. The company booked $26 billion in sales for its latest quarter, more than triple the total from a year earlier. The graphics-chip manufacturer’s stock is trading at record levels, more than doubling this year.
“The next Industrial Revolution has begun,” with businesses and countries converting existing data centers into “AI factories,” Chief Executive Jensen Huang said on an investor call.
Big-tech companies such as Microsoft and Meta Platforms are spending billions on Nvidia’s chips and related infrastructure to build out their own AI capabilities. The government could be joining in: A bipartisan Senate group recommended tens of billions of dollars in new federal spending related to AI in the years ahead.
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WSJ’s Asa Fitch breaks down how Nvidia reached its $2 trillion market cap—and why AI is fueling the company’s rapid growth. Photo illustration: Jordan Kranse
“That is where the investable opportunities are,” said Lauren Goodwin, economist and chief market strategist at New York Life Investments. “It’s data-center builders and operators, power and utilities.”
Data center executives have said that surging demand means longer delivery times for essential equipment such as backup generators and cooling systems.
“We have seen a broadening out of the AI trade. It’s no longer dependent on just one stock,” said Nadia Lovell, senior U.S. equity strategist, global wealth management at UBS. “Chips are foundational, but they’re not the whole house.”
The Global X U.S. Infrastructure Development ETF has returned 13% this year, outpacing the S&P 500’s 11% advance.
Shares of Vertiv Holdings, which makes equipment that powers and cools data centers, have more than doubled this year. The company said new orders grew 60% from a year earlier in the first quarter. Wall Street analysts had expected about 15% growth and have revised their profit forecasts sharply higher for the years to come.
“Though still in its early stages, AI is quickly becoming a pervasive theme across our end markets,“ Vertiv CEO Giordano Albertazzi said last month.
Eaton, a company that makes power-management equipment, has advanced 42% this year. Johnson Controls, which manufactures electronic systems for commercial buildings, is up 28%.
Infrastructure stocks could get a further boost if the Federal Reserve cuts interest rates later this year, as many investors expect. Investors will be watching Friday’s release of the personal-consumption expenditures index, the Fed’s preferred inflation gauge, for clues about the path forward on rates.
The rally has left shares trading well above their long-term averages. Eaton trades at 31 times its expected earnings over the next 12 months, while Vertiv trades at 40 times. The S&P 500’s multiple is 21 times.
The unfolding spending boom means high valuations for industrial firms are less of a risk than usual, according to Joseph Ghio, an analyst at Williams Jones Wealth Management. “These companies are less cyclical than they used to be,” he said, adding that he thinks Eaton can nearly double its profit over the next five years.
His firm owns shares of Eaton and Quanta Services, which supplies skilled labor to power companies, on behalf of clients. Quanta stock is up 31% this year.
Write to Charley Grant at charles.grant@wsj.com
8. The New Theory of Ukrainian Victory Is the Same as the Old
Thi is in response to the Foreign Affairs essay from Andriy Zagorodnyuk and Eliot A. Cohen a week ago. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/ukraine/theory-victory-ukraine
Conclusion from the essay below:
Western leaders are long overdue in articulating a coherent theory of victory—one that grapples with the trade-offs and limitations confronting Kiev and its backers rather than sweeping them aside in pursuit of maximalist battlefield objectives that are increasingly detached from realities on the ground. This does not mean resigning oneself to Ukraine’s unconditional surrender. Yet it will require policymakers to acknowledge that there is no viable pathway to Russia’s unconditional defeat and to shape their thinking around war termination accordingly. It is not too late to end the war on terms that guarantee Ukraine’s sovereignty while advancing U.S. interests. The West still has substantial leverage on and off the battlefield, but the key to wielding this influence effectively is to finally abandon a zero-sum framing of victory that has prevented leaders from repairing to a more pragmatic, strategically nimble approach.
The New Theory of Ukrainian Victory Is the Same as the Old
Unconditional defeat of Russia, no matter how it is framed, is a fantasy.
Mark Episkopos
May 26, 2024
12:05 AM
The American Conservative · by The American Conservative · May 26, 2024
Andriy Zagorodnyuk, Ukraine’s former defense minister, and Eliot Cohen, Arleigh Burke Chair in Strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, accurately diagnose a central ailment of the West’s Ukraine policy in a new Foreign Affairs op-ed: The Biden administration and its European counterparts have failed to articulate their endgame for this war. Three years into the conflict, Western planning continues to be strategically backwards—aiding Kiev has become an end in itself, divorced from a coherent strategy for bringing the war to a close.
But the “theory of victory” presented by Zagorodnyuk and Cohen to replace the strategic malaise in which the west finds itself is, remarkably, even more dangerous and ill-conceived than the status quo. The authors call on the White House to come out in full-throated support of Kiev’s war aims: namely, ejecting all Russian forces from Ukraine’s 1991 borders including Crimea, subjecting Russian officials to war crimes tribunals, extracting reparations from Moscow, and providing Ukraine with “long-term security arrangements.” Put differently, the West must commit itself to nothing short of Russia’s total and unconditional battlefield defeat.
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How is Ukraine, with its battered military, collapsing demography, and an economy entirely reliant on Western cash infusions, to accomplish this lofty task? By doing more of the same, but on a larger scale. Zagorodnyuk and Cohen prescribe more conscription even as polling shows a plurality of Ukrainian men say they are not prepared to fight; more strikes on infrastructure inside Russian territory despite no indication that such attacks have made a dent in Russia’s energy production or military output; renewed counter-offensives despite the abysmal and horribly costly failure of last year’s attempt; new sanctions notwithstanding Russia’s continued economic growth despite being the world’s most sanctioned country; and threatening Russia’s control over Crimea with ideas about “air superiority” that bear no semblance to the war’s current dynamics and likely trajectory.
Here it is revealed that the authors’ “theory of victory” is really just a rehash of older policy ideas that are already being pursued by the West, even if not with the intensity that Zagorodnyuk and Cohen would prefer. This is the medieval leech doctor’s theory of victory. The problem is not that the underlying treatment doesn’t work, proclaims the physician as his patient wheezes and gasps, barely clinging on to life, but that he hasn’t used enough leeches. Naturally, all of his colleagues—working, as they are, under the same wrongheaded assumptions—agree.
The individual policies proposed by the authors have long been discredited. I’ve written an essay on the failure of Russia sanctions and its broader implications for U.S. policy in these very pages. My colleagues George Beebe and Anatol Lieven have demonstrated in studious detail that not only is there no viable military path to victory in Ukraine, but there is every reason to assume that Russia’s latent advantages in manpower and firepower will further compound and Ukraine’s position will continue to deteriorate in coming weeks and months.
Cohen and Zagorodnyuk concede that Russia’s position is much stronger today than it was in the spring of 2022, but insist—partly relying on unfounded, grossly optimistic assessments of Russian losses and tactics—that Russia faces crippling materiel disadvantages and is chronically unable to take large swathes of Ukrainian territory. In fact, as noted by U.S. Army Gen. Christopher Cavoli, NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe, Russia’s military is substantially larger today than it was at the start of the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. It has also earned valuable battlefield experience that can only come from the trial and error inherent to waging years of grueling, high-intensity warfare, and rallied its military-industrial base to markedly outpace the West in artillery round production. Russian forces are not rapidly advancing in the east and southeast because Russia’s strategy is not to seize large swathes of Ukrainian land or to besiege its major cities, but to attrit Ukrainian forces slowly by leveraging its firepower advantage to grind them down at multiple points along the lines of contact.
It is true that Ukrainian forces have inflicted substantial losses on Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, but this war will not be decided at sea, and there is no way to translate these successes into meaningful gains against Russian forces on the ground. Destroying the Kerch Strait Bridge connecting Crimea to the Russian mainland—while it would be a symbolic coup for Ukraine and a psychological blow to Moscow—would have a minimal impact on the Russian military’s ability to sustain its logistics in Ukraine, a fact acknowledged by the White House.
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Underpinning the authors’ flawed policy proposals is a deeper underlying conviction in the West’s superiority: “In this war, resources, funds, and technology all overwhelmingly favor the West… Russia simply lacks the military power to defeat a Western-backed Ukraine, and so its only hope lies in manipulating Western concerns,” they write.
The West is orders of magnitude wealthier than Russia, but the past three years have shown that this wealth disparity cannot be easily or quickly converted into the concrete military capabilities that Ukraine needs to defeat Russian forces on the battlefield. The West cannot conjure up the manpower reserves necessary to continue waging this war for years to come short of directly intervening in it. Despite its massive latent wealth, the U.S. currently lacks the production output needed to sustain Ukraine’s shell usage rate in the short to medium term, replenish its own depleted stocks, and maintain commitments to other partners in the Middle East and Asia-Pacific. Developing a defense-industrial base robust enough to take on all of these tasks will likely take years, time that Kiev does not have.
Western leaders are long overdue in articulating a coherent theory of victory—one that grapples with the trade-offs and limitations confronting Kiev and its backers rather than sweeping them aside in pursuit of maximalist battlefield objectives that are increasingly detached from realities on the ground. This does not mean resigning oneself to Ukraine’s unconditional surrender. Yet it will require policymakers to acknowledge that there is no viable pathway to Russia’s unconditional defeat and to shape their thinking around war termination accordingly. It is not too late to end the war on terms that guarantee Ukraine’s sovereignty while advancing U.S. interests. The West still has substantial leverage on and off the battlefield, but the key to wielding this influence effectively is to finally abandon a zero-sum framing of victory that has prevented leaders from repairing to a more pragmatic, strategically nimble approach.
The American Conservative · by The American Conservative · May 26, 2024
9. An “America First” World – What Trump’s Return Might Mean for Global Order By Hal Brands
A long but important read that will probably have no impact on the "true believers"
An ominous conclusion:
The allure, and the tragedy, of “America first” is that a superpower’s good fortune will shield it—temporarily—from the consequences of its own bad decision-making. In time, the United States, too, would rue the rise of an “America first” world—but only after so many other countries had come to rue it first.
An “America First” World
What Trump’s Return Might Mean for Global Order
May 27, 2024
Foreign Affairs · by The Eurasian Century: Hot Wars, Cold Wars, and the Making of the Modern World · May 27, 2024
What would become of the world if the United States became a normal great power? This isn’t to ask what would happen if the United States retreated into outright isolationism. It’s simply to ask what would happen if the country behaved in the same narrowly self-interested, frequently exploitive way as many great powers throughout history—if it rejected the idea that it has a special responsibility to shape a liberal order that benefits the wider world. That would be an epic departure from 80 years of American strategy. But it’s not an outlandish prospect anymore.
In 2016, Donald Trump won the presidency on an “America first” platform. He sought a United States that would be mighty but aloof, one that would maximize its advantages while minimizing its entanglements. Indeed, the defining feature of Trump’s worldview is his belief that the United States has no obligation to pursue anything larger than its own self-interest, narrowly construed. Today, Trump is again vying for the presidency, as his legion of foreign policy followers within the Republican Party grows. Meanwhile, fatigue with key aspects of American globalism has become a bipartisan affair. Sooner or later, under Trump or another president, the world could face a superpower that consistently puts “America first.”
That version of the United States wouldn’t be a global dropout. On some issues, it might be more aggressive than before. But it would also be far less concerned with defending global norms, providing public goods, and protecting distant allies. Its foreign policy would become less principled, more zero-sum. Most broadly, this version of the United States would wield outsized power absent any outsized ethos of responsibility—so it would decline to bear unequal burdens in pursuit of the real but diffuse benefits the liberal order provides.
The results would not be pretty. A more normal U.S. foreign policy would produce a world that would also be more normal—that is, more vicious and chaotic. An “America first” world could be fatal for Ukraine and other states vulnerable to autocratic aggression. It would release the disorder U.S. hegemony has long contained.
Yet the United States itself might not do so badly—at least for a while—in a world where raw power matters more because the liberal order has been gutted. And even if things really fell apart, Americans would be the last ones to notice. “America first” is so seductive because it reflects a basic truth. The United States would ultimately suffer in a more anarchic world—but between now and then, everyone else would pay the greater price.
A DIFFERENT SORT OF SUPERPOWER
All countries pursue their interests, but not all countries define those interests the same way. The concept of national interest traditionally emphasized the protection of one’s territory, population, wealth, and influence. Since World War II, however, most American leaders and elites have rejected the notion that it should be a normal country acting in normal way. After all, the war had demonstrated how the normal rhythms of international affairs could plunge humanity, and even a distant United States, into horror. It had thereby discredited the original “America First” movement, made up of opponents of U.S. intervention in World War II—and made clear that the world’s mightiest country must radically enlarge its view of what its interests entailed.
The resulting project was unprecedented in scope. It involved forging alliances that circled the globe and protected countries thousands of miles away, rebuilding devastated countries and creating a thriving free world economy, and cultivating democracy in distant lands. Not least, it meant abjuring the policies of conquest and naked exploitation that other great powers had so commonly pursued, and instead defending norms—nonaggression, self-determination, freedom of the commons—that would offer humanity a more peaceful and cooperative path. The United States was now assuming “the responsibility which God Almighty intended,” President Harry Truman declared in 1949, “for the welfare of the world in generations to come.”
This language of “responsibility” was revealing. American policymakers never doubted that their country would benefit from living in a healthier world. But creating that world required Washington to calculate issues of self-interest in a remarkably capacious way. No prior definition of national interest had required the world’s most secure, invulnerable country to risk nuclear war over territories on distant continents, or to rebuild former enemies as industrial dynamos and economic competitors. And no prior definition of national interest required making dramatically unequal contributions to the common security so one’s allies could deliberately underspend on their own defense.
“I see the advantages to the Western world,” President John Kennedy griped, in the early 1960s, of one such arrangement—Washington’s role in stabilizing and lubricating the international economy. “But what is the national, narrow advantage” for the United States? U.S. policy only made sense if one believed that the pursuit of national, narrow advantage had previously consigned the world to carnage—so Washington must create a larger international climate that benefited Americans by benefiting like-minded peoples around the globe. “The pattern of leadership,” Secretary of State Dean Acheson had explained in 1952, “is a pattern of responsibility.” Americans must “take no narrow view of our interests but . . . conceive of them in a broad and understanding way.”
RISE AND SHINE
One doesn’t have to think that everything has been wonderful since 1945 to recognize that history changed fundamentally once this “pattern of responsibility” began to animate American statecraft. Growth exploded and living standards soared—first in the West, and then globally—in the climate of security and economic cooperation that U.S. leadership fostered. War persisted, but great-power war and outright territorial conquest became artifacts of an earlier, darker age. Democracy flourished in the West and radiated outward. The U.S. security blanket smothered the embers that had recently set western Europe and East Asia alight, allowing one-time enemies to reconcile and turning those regions into relative oases of prosperity and peace. Humanity never had it so good, and the United States stood at the center of a liberal order that gradually expanded to cover much of the globe.
Yet Americans were never entirely sold on the idea that they should maintain this order indefinitely. As the Cold War began, the U.S. diplomat George Kennan doubted that Americans were up to the task of global leadership. As that conflict ended, with a stunning Western victory, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Jeane Kirkpatrick wrote that the United States could now become “a normal country in a normal time.”
Kirkpatrick was right that there was no precedent in the first 150 years of American history for the commitments the country had undertaken since 1945. These abnormal commitments had emerged from profoundly abnormal circumstances. American leaders had believed that they must pursue an audaciously global foreign policy because a world left to its own devices had just suffered two cataclysmic crackups in a generation—and the onset of the Cold War threatened a third. They could do so because World War II left the United States with roughly as much economic and military heft as all the other powers combined. This combination of strength and fear transformed U.S. policy. But nowhere is it written that Washington must forever persist in this project as the conditions that produced it fade into the past. And today, there are indications Washington won’t keep doing it indefinitely.
Creating a healthier world required Washington to calculate issues of self-interest in a remarkably capacious way.
The last three U.S. presidents have all aspired to escape the Middle East. As military threats multiply, the Pentagon is struggling to uphold stability in all three key theaters of Eurasia at once. Protectionism is surging; both major parties disdain the major trade deals Washington once used to drive the global economy forward. In late 2023 and early 2024, it took an agonizing six months of delay for Congress to approve life-giving aid for Ukraine. And nowhere is this new mood more palpable than in Trump’s vision of “America first.”
That phrase has obvious echoes of the 1930s, which is why Trump is often called an isolationist. But he isn’t one, and neither were the original “isolationists.” The America Firsters of the 1930s favored U.S. dominance of the Western Hemisphere and supported a strong defense in a dangerous world. What they opposed was the idea that Washington should be responsible for upholding a larger global order, or that it should pick fights with countries that—whatever their crimes—weren’t directly menacing the United States itself.
The crucial link between Trump and this earlier America First movement is that he wants to take the country back to a more conventional view of its interests abroad. Trump has questioned why the United States should risk sparking World War III for the sake of defending small states in Europe or Asia. He has been skeptical of supporting Ukraine against Russia and defending Taiwan from a Chinese assault. (Contrary to what some analysts argue, there isn’t an Indo-Pacific exception in Trump’s version of “America first.”) Trump bemoans the costs and belittles the benefits of U.S. alliances; he bristles at the asymmetries of a global economy Washington has long overseen. He evinces little interest in supporting democracy or protecting important if intangible norms such as nonaggression.
To be sure, under Trump, the United States was hardly a passive superpower. As his trade war with China, ratcheting up of tensions with Iran and North Korea, and economic dustups with U.S. allies between demonstrated, Trump does believe Washington should throw its weight around when its interests are at stake. He just doesn’t believe those interests include the liberal order U.S. power has long sustained.
AMERICA UNBOUND
“America first” never got a full test during Trump’s presidency, thanks to the obstruction of more mainstream advisers, the opposition of Republican internationalists in Congress, and the indiscipline of Trump himself. Yet the first two factors could be less salient if Trump retakes the White House, given his growing ideological sway in the GOP and the care he will take to surround himself with acolytes this time around. And regardless of whether Trump wins in November, his ideas are increasingly central to the U.S. debate. So it’s worth imagining the contours and consequences of an “America first” agenda, consistently applied.
One element of this strategy would be a deglobalized defense. The United States might maintain unmatched military strength. It might invest more heavily in missile defense, cyber-capabilities, and other tools to protect the homeland. It might hit back hard when adversaries attacked its citizens or challenged its sovereignty. Yet Washington wouldn’t keep defending distant states whose survival wasn’t obviously critical to American security or keep providing public goods that were mostly consumed by others. Why should the United States risk war with Russia over Ukraine and the Baltic states, or with China over semi-submerged rocks in the South China Sea? Why must the Pentagon protect Chinese trade with Europe from Houthi attacks? A normal country wouldn’t.
A more normal United States would also be a more reticent ally. Great powers haven’t always viewed alliances as sacred; the history of alliance politics is full of disappointments and double-crosses. At the very least, then, Washington would treat its alliances less as strategic blood oaths than as bargains perpetually ripe for renegotiation. In exchange for continued protection, it might demand much higher defense spending from the Europeans or oil production from the Saudis. Or maybe Washington would simply quit its alliances, leaving Eurasia to the Eurasians—and counting on the United States’s geographic isolation, ability to control its maritime approaches, and nuclear arsenal to keep aggressors away.
Continentalism might thus displace globalism. Even a more restrained United States would strive to dominate the Western Hemisphere. This would become more important as Washington gave up the ability to manage Eurasia’s security affairs. So “America first” would feature a reenergized Monroe Doctrine: U.S. retrenchment from Old World outposts would presage intensified and perhaps heavier-handed efforts to safeguard American influence in the New World, and to prevent rivals from gaining a foothold there.
A more normal United States would also be a more reticent ally.
Economically, an “America first” strategy would feature protectionism and predation. The United States would remain engaged in the global economy. But it would seek to dramatically rebalance the burdens and benefits of that involvement. There would be no more tolerating asymmetric discrimination by trade partners, even democratic allies. Washington would, rather, wield its unmatched power to wring greater benefits out of key relationships. Just as Trump pummeled China and the European Union with tariffs, the United States would get more coercive with allies and adversaries alike. The United States could afford to pull its punches when it accounted for half of global production, the thinking goes, but a more economically competitive world would require a bare-knuckle response.
Not least, the United States would pull back from the liberal aspects of the liberal order. If Trump’s first term is any guide, the United States would invest less in promoting democracy and human rights in faraway, seemingly inhospitable places. It would become more likely to cut explicitly transactional deals with undemocratic regimes. Under a second Trump administration, the United States might even become a model for illiberal behavior, as aspiring strongmen overseas imitated the tactics of the aspiring strongman in the White House. Washington could also deemphasize international law and international organizations, in hopes of loosening the constraints—legal or institutional—the liberal order sometimes placed on American power.
What would all this mean for U.S. relations with rival powers? An “America first” strategy might entail persistent friction with China, especially over trade. Where autocratic aggression impinged directly on U.S. security and prosperity—Iranian attacks that killed American citizens or a Chinese bid that choked off the flow of advanced semiconductors from Taiwan—the tensions could be sharp indeed. Yet a U.S. policy that downgraded liberal values would be reassuring to illiberal leaders, and Washington would be less inclined to confront Beijing, Moscow, or Tehran over violations of international norms or the coercion of small states thousands of miles from American shores. A certain accommodation of autocrats would fit naturally within this foreign policy. Any remaining conflict would be more a matter of traditional great-power rivalry—large, ambitious states clashing for wealth and influence—than something flowing from the American defense of an endangered liberal order.
In fact, the United States would still be a very great power in this scenario. Even if Washington focused only on maintaining primacy in the Western Hemisphere, it would have a sphere of influence larger than any other. In some areas, the United States would seek unilateral advantage less abashedly than before. A less exceptional United States might be less present and more predatory—a combination that could remake the wider world.
POWER WITHOUT PURPOSE?
Critics of “America first” have warned that it would be devastating to global stability, and they’re probably right. The history of world politics before 1945 doesn’t give much hope that things will somehow sort themselves out. American leadership caged the demons—the programs of global expansion, the fratricidal fights within vital regions, the mutually immiserating protectionism, the threat of autocratic ascendancy—that tormented the world before.
Today, the United States is less powerful, relative to its competitors, than it was in 1945 or 1991. But American power still underpins what order the world enjoys. Just ask Ukraine, which would have been crushed by Russia without the arms, intelligence, and money Washington provided. Or ask the European countries clinging to NATO for protection against the Russian threat. In Asia, there is no coalition that can check Chinese power without U.S. participation. In the Middle East, recent events serve as a reminder that only the United States has the ability to defend vital sea-lanes and coordinate a regional defense against Iranian attacks.
This won’t change any time soon. Advocates of restraint may hope that American retrenchment will compel like-minded countries to step forward. But today—as Russia and China churn out arms and too many European and Asian democracies struggle to field minimally capable militaries—it seems a safer bet that the vacuum created by American retrenchment would be filled by the world’s most aggressive states.
In all likelihood, “America first” would be a disaster for frontline states—beginning but not ending with Ukraine—which would lose the support of the superpower that has bolstered them against aggressors next door. It would invite surging instability in global hotspots such as eastern Europe or the South China Sea, where autocratic powers confront weaker rivals. Norms that many people take for granted—the ability of commerce to traverse the seas unhindered, or the idea that conquest is inadmissible—could erode with shocking speed. Countries that have been able to cooperate under American protection might start eyeing one another more suspiciously once again. As disorder deepens, countries throughout Eurasia might arm themselves to the teeth, including with nuclear weapons, to ensure their survival. Or perhaps predation would simply run rampant as American retrenchment reduced the price on malign behavior.
Meanwhile, the global travails of democracy would worsen, particularly where fragile democracies coped with pressure exerted by powerful autocracies nearby. Mercantilism and protectionism might surge as the United States quit defending a positive-sum global economy—or even the relatively cooperative free-world economy the Biden administration has emphasized. States might scramble to lock up resources and markets if they no longer counted on the United States to sustain an open economic and maritime order. It took extraordinary U.S. commitment to turn the state of nature into Pax Americana. The return trip won’t be pleasant.
A WORLD OF REGRET
For the United States itself, though, it might not be so bad. The great irony of post-1945 foreign policy is that the country that created the liberal order is the country that least needs it. After all, the United States remains the world’s strongest actor. It has unrivaled geographic blessings and economic advantages. In a world rendered more anarchic by its policy choices, Washington might do okay, for a time.
The erosion of security around the Eurasian periphery would undo decades of geopolitical progress, but it wouldn’t immediately endanger the physical safety of the United States. In the 1930s, most Americans didn’t want to die for Danzig; in the 2020s, how many would really mind if Narva fell? Likewise, the return of territorial conquest would be tragic for smaller, vulnerable states, but it wouldn’t immediately inconvenience a superpower with nuclear weapons and oceanic moats.
The United States could also ride out the fragmentation of the international economy far better than most countries. Its unmatched power would give it tremendous leverage if commerce turned cutthroat—and its enormous resource endowments, vast internal market, and relatively modest trade dependence would leave it comparatively well suited for a protectionist world.
The United States wouldn’t exactly thrive in this scenario: turbulence that disrupted Middle Eastern oil flows or semiconductor shipments from Taiwan, could create global economic havoc that would not leave Americans unscathed. But perversely, such chaos might still benefit the United States in relative terms, because other countries would fare so much worse.
American power still underpins what order the world enjoys.
Countries in Europe and East Asia would find themselves compelled to make huge new investments in defense, while also contending with resurgent rivalries that might tear their regions apart. The collapse of security in the sea-lanes of the Middle East would primarily affect the European and Asian countries that depended on those trade routes most. Even Washington’s chief rival, China, would suffer tremendous damage if the liberal order collapsed, because—Chinese President Xi Jinping’s drive for self-reliance notwithstanding—it relied so heavily on foreign inputs and export markets.
Eventually, of course, the United States would pay a higher price. If China were someday able to dominate East Asia after American retrenchment, it might gain the power to coerce the United States economically and diplomatically, even if it could never invade militarily. The proliferation of Chinese influence in regions around the world could gradually give Beijing powerful geopolitical and geoeconomic advantages, rendering the United States insecure even within its hemispheric fortress. In the meantime, the international economic friction created by protectionism and chaos would drag down American growth, which could exacerbate social and political conflicts at home. And if democracy receded overseas and powerful autocracies advanced, autocratic voices within the United States might be empowered—as indeed happened in the 1930s.
In the ugliest scenario—but one that historians would immediately recognize—the United States would ultimately decide that the collapse of global order did require it to reengage, but from a significantly worse position, once matters within Eurasia had spun out of control. Yet it might take quite a while for this to happen. When the United States pulled back after World War I, it took a generation for the world to unravel so completely that Washington felt compelled to reengage. Until disaster struck, and the balance of power collapsed in Europe and Asia simultaneously, cascading disorder convinced most Americans to stay out of global affairs, rather than get back in. The same characteristics that insulate the United States from the deterioration of world order in the near term mean that Washington can wait a long time until that deterioration becomes intolerable.
The allure, and the tragedy, of “America first” is that a superpower’s good fortune will shield it—temporarily—from the consequences of its own bad decision-making. In time, the United States, too, would rue the rise of an “America first” world—but only after so many other countries had come to rue it first.
Foreign Affairs · by The Eurasian Century: Hot Wars, Cold Wars, and the Making of the Modern World · May 27, 2024
10. Memorial Day 2024: A soldier’s extraordinary speech on a somber day | Analysis
We all know someone who did not make it home. Let us never forget them and their sacrifice.
Excerpt:
According to Mauldin, Truscott said “he hoped anybody here through any mistake of his would forgive him..."
Memorial Day 2024: A soldier’s extraordinary speech on a somber day | Analysis
https://www.masslive.com/politics/2024/05/memorial-day-2024-a-soldiers-extraordinary-speech-on-a-somber-day-pop-politics.html
- Published: May. 26, 2024, 6:00 a.m.
A part of the memorial wall at the Staten Island Vietnam Veterans Memorial Park in West Brighton. (Staten Island Advance/Joseph Ostapiuk)
By John L. Micek | jmicek@masslive.com
Good Sunday morning, everyone.
As you get ready to throw burgers on the grill for this long holiday weekend, it seemed like a good idea to pause for a moment to remember the meaning of the day that we’re all going to commemorate on Monday.
Unlike Veterans’ Day, a holiday to thank veterans and to pay tribute to the contributions of those who served, Memorial Day is a more somber occasion to honor those who died in service to the nation.
And on Memorial Day 1945, Lt. Gen. Lucian Truscott Jr., commander of the U.S. Fifth Army, delivered what may well be the most moving and iconic of all addresses, according to the Pennsylvania Capital-Star.
On that day, instead of addressing the crowd at the Sicily-Rome American Cemetery in Nettuno, Italy, Truscott turned his back on the audience and delivered an extraordinary apology to the roughly 20,000 American soldiers who were buried there, Doyle Hodges, of the website War on the Rocks, wrote in a piece published on Memorial Day 2021.
Unfortunately, there is neither a transcript nor a recording of Truscott’s speech, not even among his official papers at the George C. Marshall Research Library in Virginia, historian Nicolaus Mills wrote for CNN in 2015.
The accounts we do have come from journalists. The famed combat cartoonist Bill Mauldin called it “the most moving gesture I ever saw,” according to Hodges.
So what did Truscott say? Here’s the part to ponder:
According to Mauldin, Truscott said “he hoped anybody here through any mistake of his would forgive him, but he realized that was asking a hell of a lot under the circumstances. … He would not speak about the glorious dead because he didn’t see much glory in getting killed if you were in your late teens or early twenties. He promised that if in the future he ran into anybody, especially old men, who thought death in battle was glorious, he would straighten them out. He said he thought that was the least he could do.”
Separately, the legendary war correspondent Ernie Pyle reflected on the circumstances that had plucked ordinary men from their homes and brought them halfway across the planet to fight in a war that changed the world.
“‘I couldn’t help but feel the immensity of the catastrophe that has put men all over the world, millions of us, moving in machinelike precision throughout long foreign nights — men who should be comfortably asleep in their own warm beds at home,’” Pyle wrote, according to biographer James Tobin in ‘Ernie Pyle’s War: America’s Witness to World War II.’
“War makes strange giant creatures out of us little men who inhabit the Earth,” Pyle wrote, according to Tobin.
Like so many of the people he wrote about, never made it home either. He died on April 18, 1944, after a Japanese machine gun bullet pierced his left temple, the Associated Press reported at the time.
From Truscott’s apology to the dead to Pyle’s recollection, we’re offered vivid reminders that so many Americans have given so much to give us this democratic, pluralistic nation where there’s room for everyone — no matter their race, their ethnicity, their gender (or no gender at all), whom they love or the deity they do or don’t worship.
If you’re honoring someone who never made it home this Memorial Day Monday, may their memory be a blessing.
11. Low percentage of Americans in military is "deeply problematic as a democracy," Rep. Pat Ryan says
The entire transcript with interviews of Rep Pat Ryan and Rep Mike Waltz are pasted below this article.
As we all know from our history our founding fathers wrote into the Constitution that the US would sustain a navy but would only raise an army in time of need. Would they consider a low percentage of Americans in the military "deeply problematic as a democracy?"
Low percentage of Americans in military is "deeply problematic as a democracy," Rep. Pat Ryan says
CBS News · by Kaia Hubbard
Washington — Rep. Pat Ryan said Sunday that he sees the divide between the small share of Americans — less than 1% — who are active-duty service members in the U.S. military and the rest of the country as "deeply problematic as a democracy."
"When you lose touch between those that are fighting our wars and their families and everyone else, that's something so essential that we have to figure out how to bring folks together, and get more folks serving," Ryan said on "Face the Nation" ahead of Memorial Day.
Ryan, a veteran, said he and his colleagues in Congress have worked to prioritize recruiting within an annual defense bill, citing challenges among each branch of the military with recruiting numbers.
"We've been pushing and a bunch of directions to say that is not acceptable to the Department of Defense," Ryan said. "And, and we're starting to see the numbers come up."
But for the New York Democrat, he said "the most powerful thing" he's done in Congress is participate in a tradition of hand-washing the Vietnam Veterans Memorial to mark Memorial Day. The bipartisan effort was started by Rep. Mike Waltz, who also appeared on "Face the Nation" on Sunday.
Reps. Pat Ryan and Mike Waltz on "Face the Nation," May 26, 2024. CBS News
Waltz, a Florida Republican who is also a veteran, said of the tradition that it's "important for the American people" to see the lawmakers of various backgrounds "honoring our forefathers" together, despite their differences.
"I saw the acrimony and the in-fighting and I said, you know, let's get a group of veterans together," Waltz said, explaining how the tradition got its start. "People who really have skin in the game."
Ryan and Waltz touted working to increase the number of veterans in Congress, saying they're hoping to get more people who have served in the military or perfromed national service to represent Americans.
And Waltz noted that when it comes to serving the country, "service doesn't just have to be in the military."
"One of the things that we're both adamant and advocates of is getting us back to national service as a country," Waltz said. "That doesn't necessarily have to be in uniform, but it could be with the national park, inner-city tutoring, elderly care. But how do we get young people out in an environment where they're learning leadership, discipline, followership, serving a cause bigger than themselves and with fellow Americans who may not look or come from the same backgrounds as them."
Waltz suggested that the government incentivize service, proposing that young people could perform a year of service after graduation and receive a benefit.
"I think we need to rethink service as a country," he added.
Kaia Hubbard is a politics reporter for CBS News Digital, based in Washington, D.C.
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CBS News · by Kaia Hubbard
Transcript: Reps. Pat Ryan and Mike Waltz on "Face the Nation," May 26, 2024
CBS News
The following is a transcript of an interview with Reps. Pat Ryan, Democrat of New York, and Mike Waltz, Republican of Florida, on "Face the Nation" that aired on May 26, 2024.
MARGARET BRENNAN: So Congressman Waltz, more than 3 million people including 58 thousand Americans died in the Vietnam war. When you came up with this idea back in 2019, what, what was your inspiration?
REP. MIKE WALTZ: Well, I actually came across, a-a colleague that was a Vietnam veteran himself. And he just told me that he was going that morning to go wash the wall. I said, wash the wall. He said, yeah, the park service, before all of the vet visitors come on Memorial Day, they literally clean the wall because people have fingerprints on them, they want to touch the- the marble or bird droppings, what have you. And, and I said, can I join you? Absolutely. And there was just a group of Vietnam veterans, volunteers on their own time, down here helping the park service. That was years ago. And then once I got elected, you know, and I saw the acrimony and the- the end fighting and I said, you know, let's, let's get a group of veterans together. People who really have skin in the game. I think that's important for the American people to see. To see us honoring our forefathers, to see us where Democrat, Republican, black, white, brown, none of that matters. It just matters that we're all Americans, we're all veterans. And we're honoring those that came before us. And it's turned into a bit of a tradition now.
MARGARET BRENNAN: And exactly, bipartisanship is sort of rare these days, or at least, an effort to be bipartisan. What made you come out, Congressman?
REP. PAT RYAN: So this is my second year doing this. I'm a freshman, and this is the most powerful thing I've done in Congress, truly. Very- it's very emotional and it's- it's positive. I mean, there's so many divisive forces, and so to get together with fellow veterans, all services, all generations, and just actually do something with your hands that improves the world, that honors our veterans, that prepares this memorial for hundreds of thousands of Americans that are gonna come here this weekend. It's- it's really- it's an honor. And again, I think it's important to show, as Mike said, the American people that there are people trying to bridge this divide that we have right now. And I, and I thank Mike for organizing this because it's- it's, I think it's been special for all of us.
MARGARET BRENNAN: So you deployed to Afghanistan–
REP. PAT RYAN: I did two Iraq deployments.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Two- two Iraq deployments.
REP. PAT RYAN: Yeah.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Who are you thinking of this Memorial day weekend?
REP. PAT RYAN: Well, I think, Mike and I both have on these Memorial bracelets that- that we wear every day. So, but, but this weekend obviously is particularly important. I- I think about actually one of my soldiers who I brought home from my first 12 month deployment and then tragically succumbed to the- the invisible wounds of war and took his own life, Sergeant Keith Nowicki. And I think it's important we talk about that too. Because now we have more post 9/11 veterans that have taken their own lives post-service than gave their lives during service. And that's something else that we're working on together.
REP. MIKE WALTZ: Yeah. I- I think of my uncle who is a Vietnam helicopter pilot, Greg Waltz. He survived, but he's told me about the people that are on this wall. And even though he survived, to this day, unfortunately he's very bitter about how he was treated when they came home, and how badly they were treated when he came home. And I think this is the least we can do to come and honor them and keep their story alive. But I also think about Matt Pucino, one of my green Berets that-that I lost who volunteered to go on point every mission and eventually was killed by an IED, and as a commander, bringing my green Berets home is my responsibility. This is something that I will always live with, commander's guilt or survivor's guilt is very real.
[PLANE INTERRUPTION]
MARGAERT BRENNAN: I'm sorry. I just wanna make sure we don't step on that because it's important.
REP. MIKE WALTZ: That's okay.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Tell me about Matt.
REP. MIKE WALTZ: So, Sergeant Matt Pucino was one of my Green Berets that we lost in Afghanistan. He volunteered to go on point every single mission, and eventually a trip wire IED killed him. I think about him, I think about his family and- and I have to say, I think Pat would agree with me. You know, survivor's guilt is a very real thing. Why him and not me? He was my responsibility, as were the other Green Berets that I didn't bring home. And I just tell myself, I look in the mirror every time- every morning before I go into the Capital and tell myself to be worthy, you know, be worthy of that sacrifice, and our charge I think as leaders, as elected leaders is to comport ourselves in a way that's worthy of their sacrifice in- in front of the American people.
MARGARET BRENNAN: You mentioned that stunning statistic, what 7,000 service members died in the war since 9/11, but it's 6,000 veterans every single year, since 2001 who have succumbed to suicide. Do you think that the government and American taxpayers are doing enough to address this?
REP. PAT RYAN: We're not doing enough. We don't have the urgency. It- it needs to be a national problem. It needs to be a problem that every American recognizes as theirs, because these are the- the small percentage of the American people who have put their life on the line and- and ultimately given their life. It's such a small percentage. It's about 1%--
MARGARET BRENNAN: --Right--
REP. PAT RYAN: --Of the American population and there's just too much of a disconnect. I actually think that's a big part of the reason why we see people coming home from service and feeling alone, even surrounded in their hometowns, feeling alone because they can't relate. And so there's so many aspects to solving it, but it- it- it can't- the government has to do a whole lot more. We in Congress have to do a whole lot more, but the whole country has to do more. The whole country has to come into Memorial Day weekend, and yes, you can celebrate, but please take a moment and think about the names on this wall, the names on your local hometown memorial, the names on the memorial bracelets of the veterans that you see, ask them about it, ask them to tell you those stories and, and we should be sharing those stories.
REP. MIKE WALTZ: You know, I would just say from the government perspective, you know, the VA's budget has gone from about $90 billion in 2000 to almost triple that with the same results. And that's not necessarily a knock on the VA, but I think we have to start talking about this problem and thinking about it differently. I want the providers to have the full menu, not just drugs or another appointment, but a full menu of service dogs, of therapeutics, of hyperbaric chambers, even hallucinogenics and other kind of non-traditional therapies. They should have everything at their disposal, number one. And number two, I don't think government can solve this. This is a societal problem. This is going to be solved in churches and communities and neighbors and families that I think need to be more deliberate in reaching out to veterans. They know that they're- that are struggling.
MARGARET BRENNAN: So you're working on legislation together to try to expand healthcare coverage for the children of veterans until age 26. Do you have any pledge from leadership to actually move this anytime soon?
REP. MIKE WALTZ: Well, I think- Pat's bill, I'll defer to you.
REP. PAT RYAN: But so this is a bill, by the way, that's been going on. We've been having this fight in this country for longer than both of our time in Congress, I believe. This is something I actually picked up from the representative who I- two people before me who served my district. And this is a bill to make sure that the children and family members of military folks have the same healthcare coverage as other Americans. That's it. It's- it's- it's actually just getting them to the same level of coverage under the Affordable Care Act, for TRICARE. And the reality is- is that it costs some money to do the right thing to make sure these- these young people have coverage. And because of that, we have not been able to move it through. So we've been working together with this Caucus of bipartisan military veterans to apply pressure. Because if we don't apply that pressure, if we don't shine the spotlight on this problem, it will get sort of stuck in the dysfunction of the Congress right now. And it's just too important, I mean--
REP. MIKE WALTZ: The- yeah, the Caucus is the For Country Caucus of veterans, both sides of the aisle, Republican and Democrat. And we- we're working, I think, I want to say to get that into the defense bill.
REP. PAT RYAN: Yeah.
REP. MIKE WALTZ: But the issue is getting it paid for underneath the caps that were agreed to last year. But I do think eventually we will get this through. Legislating is a little bit like, I don't know, like football, sometimes. You run up the middle and it's three yards and a cloud of dust. But I- I do think we'll get it through. At the end of the day, it's becoming a recruiting and retention problem when service members can't have their kids covered.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Yeah.
REP. MIKE WALTZ: Right? And so if they're looking at other alternatives or getting out or getting other types of coverage for their kids, then that's becoming an issue for the Pentagon. We're working with them to make it a priority and working with leadership to make it a priority and get it paid for.
(00:17:05)
REP. PAT RYAN: I mean, it's hundreds of thousands of military service members and their families right now in this country that don't have the same healthcare coverage as other Americans. That is outrageous.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Yeah.
REP. PAT RYAN: And yet again, it- it- it gets stuck in the- the typical excuse making. And especially for folks, I think, that are served and are mission oriented and outcome oriented. It's incredibly frustrating when you- when you hear those things and you get the same excuses. So I'm encouraged and appreciate Mike's partnership on this, because it's gonna take us breaking this current mode of legislation to solve these kind of problems.
MARGARET BRENNAN: You also have some other areas of bipartisan agreement. Congressman, I heard you yesterday- I heard you pressing Secretary Blinken on getting more visas and helping some of those Afghan allies who fought on the battlefield alongside the United States. He pushed right back at you and said, "Congress, extend this program past 2026, give me more visas." Why isn't that getting done?
REP. MIKE WALTZ: We had a measure in the defense bill that we were working on just last night to increase the number. My issue with Secretary Blinken is regardless of the overall cap, they're still three years on only processing a thousand a month. That may sound like a lot, 12,000 a year, but we still have 150,000 to get out. So do the math, what I was asking Secretary--
MARGARET BRENNAN: --150,000 Afghan allies of the United States--
REP. MIKE WALTZ: --Afghan, SIVs that stood and fought with us, were willing to die with us fighting extremism, that we have a sacred promise to get out and are being hunted down right now by the Taliban. Twelve years is not acceptable. That's the amount of time at the current pace to get them out, literally as the Taliban are hunting them down. That's my issue.
(PLANE NOISE BREAK)
MARGARET BRENNAN: All right, I wanna pick up on that.
MARGARET BRENNAN: We are in an election year, which means politics get even sillier. How are you going to be able to lift the number of visas to get some of those Afghans who fought alongside the United States into this country when immigration is such a hot button issue?
REP. MIKE WALTZ: Well, look, if there is anybody who deserves to be here, legally, it- are- it's the SIVs, the interpreters, the Afghans that were willing to die for us, for our common values in fighting for our freedom and protecting the homeland from another terrorist attack. So, this has been a bipartisan issue. I don't think it's going to be an issue. It'll be in the next defense bill. But again, regardless of the number--
MARGARET BRENNAN: --The number? Eighty, what there are 80,000 or more--
REP. MIKE WALTZ: --Right--
MARGARET BRENNAN: --You're gonna get that through?
(REP. MIKE WALTZ: But they're only processing now 12,000 a year and these are people that were already in the system. And it's not as though they're kind of hanging out, maybe in not the greatest conditions. They're literally in hiding. They are being executed, tortured and murdered by the Taliban simply for working with the United States. I had the brother of one of my interpreters, who we got out. The Taliban hunted down his brother and his cousin. They drug him behind a truck through the village to death to send a message, "Don't you ever work with America again." That's happening right now as we speak and taking 12 years to honor our promise is just simply unacceptable.
MARGARET BRENNAN: But you both believe that this will get done in the coming year, because the program expires 2026.
REP. MIKE WALTZ: Yeah. I'm confident.
REP. PAT RYAN: And this has been something that, again, this For Country caucus has really been focused on for several years now. And you know, to your question and your point, Margaret, we have to figure out to both apply pressure on something that's existential to our values, I think our American values of keeping faith with our allies, but also turn down the temperature and remove these things that should not be partisan. That should not be divisive. Remove them from this really toxic rhetoric that's starting to dominate,you know, so much of at least the- the media coverage of, of Congress. I mean last night we were up till very late in a very productive, mostly boring,defense bill markup that happens once a year. And you know, the American people should see more of that. We disagreed on principle on policy and then we came together and actually had a standing ovation, late last night.
REP. MIKE WALTZ: And the bill came out what- 59 to one?
REP. PAT RYAN: Yeah.
REP. MIKE WALTZ: Something along those lines that never happens anymore. And there, there are going to be contentious issues. I think the Afghanistan withdrawal, and how that was conducted, is going to be a campaign issue. We are going to highlight that failure on this administration, certainly from my perspective in a campaign year, but at the same time we can work to still honor our promises to our, to- to the Afghans, and press the administration to do the right thing.
MARGARET BRENNAN: So to that point, I know you were up in New York with Donald Trump in his, court case there. Can you get Mr. Trump to support your effort here? Because that would make a difference wouldn't it? In getting other Republicans on board?
REP. MIKE WALTZ: Oh, he is not only of- we introduced and had some of our Afghan allies with him. We've had the 13 Abbey Gate gold star families with him. He's promised them directly to release all the tapes, all the transcripts, all the emails, just full transparency so that they have some closure. They still to this day have questions about how their service member died, why they were in the position that they were in, and what have you. So I- I'm confident he'll be completely supportive. Not only transparency for them, but honoring our promises to our allies.
MARGARET BRENNAN: But on the visas? Will he bring those Afghans to America?
REP. MIKE WALTZ: -- And on the visas too? That's right. That's right--
MARGARET BRENNAN: -- Because you know--
REP. MIKE WALTZ: That's legal-- I mean that is legal immigration. And- and if you talk about anyone who is- this isn't just some kind of lottery as our current system is. These were people that were willing to fight and die for America. Absolutely we'll honor those promises and I'm confident he will as well.
MARGARET BRENNAN: For both of you, neither of the two presidential candidates have served in uniform Biden received five draft deferments from Vietnam. Trump, five draft deferments as well. What do you think your past service does for your thinking? Why do you think it's important for leadership?
REP. PAT RYAN: We're it's essential to have people that have been on the receiving end of foreign policy at the table, especially with, with the 50- 58,000 names behind us to keep in mind that every one of these decisions has tremendous human consequences for the service members, for their families. And there's not enough of that right now. Both in the presidential candidates and in Congress, I mean we're- we're working to get more military veterans and others who've done real national service--
MARGARET BRENNAN: Why do you think the number serving is so low? When it's less than 1% of the population is active duty.
REP. PAT RYAN: Yes. In Congress, at least we're getting, the number up closer to 20%--
REP. MIKE WALTZ: -- We've increased it, for the first time in 40 years.
REP. PAT RYAN: -- Yeah--
REP. MIKE WALTZ: -- Just this last- this congressional cycle.
REP. PAT RYAN: But in terms of the divide between 99% of Americans who aren't serving and the 1%, that is deeply problematic as a democracy. When you lose touch between those that are fighting our wars and their families and everyone else. That's something so essential that we have to figure out how to bring folks together, and- and get more folks serving. So that's again- another thing that- that we're focused on. A lot of the work we did last night on the defense bill is recruiting. Every service has been challenged on recruiting numbers and we've been pushing and a bunch of directions to say that is not acceptable to the Department of Defense. And, and we're starting to see the numbers come up
REP. MIKE WALTZ: And- and service doesn't just have to be in the military. And one of the things that we're both, adamant and advocates of is getting us back to national service as a country. That's not a draft. That doesn't necessarily have to be in uniform, but it could be with the national park, inner-city tutoring, elderly care. But how do we get young people out in an environment where they're learning leadership, discipline, followership, serving a cause bigger than themselves and with fellow Americans who may not look or come from the same backgrounds as them. I think there's ways we can incentivize that. You know, people here are talking about just giving away college or just eliminating debt. Well, how about the American taxpayer gets something in exchange for that in terms of service, you graduate high school, you go serve a year or two, maybe it's FEMA, maybe it's the- the Peace Corps and then you get- get some type of benefit. So I think we need to rethink service as a- as a country and also in the= in the defense bill, we've expanded junior ROTC in high schools where you get those positive male and female role models. You get those life skills, you get those leadership and- and in teamwork skills. I think that will make a difference in the vast majority of the expansion of junior ROTC in high schools will happen in minority- minority, majority high schools where we've had the most problems with recruiting.
MARGARET BRENNAN: I was looking at a Pentagon study that said one in four active duty service members suffer from food insecurity. And then within that subset, it were- over 120,000 dealing with extreme food insecurity. How is that possible in America right now?
REP. PAT RYAN: It's a disgrace. We have soldiers. I have this in my unit when we were deployed overseas in combat, their families were home on food stamps using SNAP benefits. So one of the things we've done the last several years is raise baseline pay significantly--
REP. MIKE WALTZ: -- For the most junior--
REP. PAT RYAN:-- for the most junior soldiers who are the most left behind right now. Raise housing, basic allowance for housing, VAH, housing costs across the country are so high. So bringing up housing and- and the quality of life in- in barracks, thinking about all the elements of a family's cost. Like that's why this healthcare bill is so important, because health insurance is such a driver of- of that pressure. So again, if the American people knew you had people putting their life on the line for the country, not able to put food on the table, we have to wake people up and stop focusing- I mean, some of the, with respect to our colleagues, some of the- the tenor and the tone is disgraceful. When you think about the urgency of just that problem, we just talked about, we've gotta come together. We have to, it- it is so we--
REP. MIKE WALTZ: -- These are serious issues and we need- we need serious thoughtful approaches?
MARGARET BRENNAN: Can you change the tone? I mean, we were hearing about concern about political violence, not just threats to lawmakers and to your staff, but concerns about political violence in America, particularly in this election year. Can you change the tone?
REP. MIKE WALTZ: I think that, you know, our governments comprised of the people and their backgrounds that- that come to it. And you know, we were- we were talking about that in the 70- 75% of the Congress, Senate and the House, were vets. By 20- by 2018, 2020, when I came in, it was down to 15%. We've been recruiting both sides of the aisle, more veterans to say, hey, you're not done just because you came overseas, your country needs you. We've increased that number back up to 22- and I think it's going to- 22%. And I think it's going to keep going higher. People with real skin in the game- just a few years ago, Margaret, we could have been in the same platoon together, willing to die together. No one cares on that helicopter in the middle of the night, what political party you're in. Right? Then we could come together and try to fix these problems.
MARGARET BRENNAN: President Biden's addressing the graduating class at West Point. What do you think he needs to say to those young men and women?
REP. MIKE WALTZ: Well, President Biden, of course, is going to honor these young men and women who are willing to step up and- and devote their lives to service. But I hope- also hope he sends a message out to our adversaries and to our enemies. Iran is on the march. We're seeing an unholy alliance between China and Russia. We frankly have our allies that are not doing enough in- in our view to contribute to Ukraine and to 2% of their national defense, right now only 11 of 31 NATO allies are- are- are contributing with World War II- World War III on their doorstep. If they're not gonna do it now, when are they? So our adversaries, our enemies need to respect and to fear us, that is how deterrence works and keeps the peace. And those officers need to know that they are going to be the best trained, best equipped and best led military in the world with unprecedented threats that they're facing. But I- I really pray that we see a strong message from Biden right now because deterrence is crumbling around the world.
MARGARET BRENNAN: But are you comfortable then with how Donald Trump speaks about veterans?
REP. MIKE WALTZ: Absolutely. He loves our veterans. And our veterans love him--
MARGARET BRENNAN: --What John Kelly has said. He heard him say--
REP. MIKE WALTZ: --I mean- I, like I said, I've seen him with Gold Star families. He was only supposed to spend 30 minutes to an hour with him. He ended up spending six hours with him, meeting with each one individually, talking to them collectively. Then said, come on, let's have dinner, closed down the restaurant. I had two of the Gold Star mothers come up to me afterwards and say--
MARGARET BRENNAN: --These are family members of people killed in Afghanistan?
REP. MIKE WALTZ: This is the best thing that had happened to them since they'd lost their loved ones at Abbey Gate in Afghanistan. I mean, that's the- that's the man I've seen behind the scenes, hugging them, consoling them and saying, what do you need, what questions do you still have? We'll get the answers. That's- that's the man I've seen. And- and I think that's the, you know, someone that we need to have as a Commander in Chief.
MARGARET BRENNAN: We'll see in election year. We got to break this down because of the rain. I know. All right. Thank you.
CBS News
12. China preparing armada of ferries to invade Taiwan
Excerpts:
Chinese state media has touted these efforts for years, regularly hailing the participation of ferries in cross-sea landing drills, with broadcaster CCTV praising the 135-metre Bang Chui Dao after it “joined the army” for military exercises in 2019, or the 164-metre Bohai Pearl in 2021, which Global Times said would make a good addition for “transporting troops on a large scale in amphibious landing missions,” citing an anonymous Chinese military expert.
Another Chinese shipping news service gushed over the Chang Da Long, a civilian ferry which is large enough to carry enough heavy tanks and other vehicles to fill two mechanised infantry battalions, writing that it is “dressed in a civilian shell, but it has a military heart!”.
Tom Shugart, an analyst at the Center for a New American Security think tank, estimated in 2022 that China’s civilian vessels could dramatically increase the tonnage of military material that can be moved by its existing military amphibious assault craft, giving it capacity to transport about 300,000 troops and their vehicles across the Taiwan strait in about 10 days.
China preparing armada of ferries to invade Taiwan
Yahoo · by The TelegraphMay 26, 2024 at 3:25 AM·4 min read365Link Copied
China is preparing an armada of ferries and civilian vessels to invade Taiwan as Beijing steps up its pressure campaign against the island nation.
While the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) lacks the numbers of amphibious landing craft needed to stage the sort of invasion seen during the D-Day landings, it could bridge the gap with civilian vessels, including dozens of gigantic roll-on, roll-off ferries that can each carry hundreds of armoured vehicles.
“Amphibious landings under fire are among the most difficult of military manoeuvres,” said Ray Powell, the director of SeaLight, a Stanford University project focused on grey zone activities in the South China Sea.
Civilian ferries “would normally be poor choices for such a mission” but could be used to transport troops en masse across the Taiwan strait after its coastal defences are destroyed, or to overwhelm the island’s military “with sheer mass,” he said.
Beijing launched two days of military drills in the waters around Taiwan on Thursday in what it said was a “strong punishment” for “separatist acts” after a fiery inauguration address in Taipei earlier this week by Lai Ching-te, who was sworn in as president for a four-year term.
It was the third set of exercises encircling the island in the past two years.
“We urge China to exercise self-restraint and stop undermining peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait and beyond,” Taiwan’s ministry of foreign affairs said.
China regards democratic Taiwan as part of its territory and has vowed to bring the island under its control, possibly by force, and US intelligence believes that Xi Jinping has ordered the PLA to be ready to take the island by 2027.
In the meantime, Taipei has had to react to a campaign of so-called “grey zone” activities including frequent cyber-attacks, regular incursions by military jets in its airspace, and harassment by Chinese vessels in its waters.
Taiwan’s military is vastly smaller than China’s, but it is protected by formidable mountainous terrain — and the treacherous 110-mile Taiwan Strait.
The Chinese navy already has the world’s biggest surface fleet, and it has also built dozens of dual-use vessels capable of acting during peacetime and in war.
A decade ago, Beijing issued technical guidelines for shipbuilders that would enable many of its civilian vessels to be suitable for military uses and is believed to have integrated its ferries, tankers and container ships within its military command structure, according to a report from the US Naval War College’s China Maritime Studies Institute.
Ferries ‘join the army’
Chinese state media has touted these efforts for years, regularly hailing the participation of ferries in cross-sea landing drills, with broadcaster CCTV praising the 135-metre Bang Chui Dao after it “joined the army” for military exercises in 2019, or the 164-metre Bohai Pearl in 2021, which Global Times said would make a good addition for “transporting troops on a large scale in amphibious landing missions,” citing an anonymous Chinese military expert.
Another Chinese shipping news service gushed over the Chang Da Long, a civilian ferry which is large enough to carry enough heavy tanks and other vehicles to fill two mechanised infantry battalions, writing that it is “dressed in a civilian shell, but it has a military heart!”.
Tom Shugart, an analyst at the Center for a New American Security think tank, estimated in 2022 that China’s civilian vessels could dramatically increase the tonnage of military material that can be moved by its existing military amphibious assault craft, giving it capacity to transport about 300,000 troops and their vehicles across the Taiwan strait in about 10 days.
“Both the Taiwanese and American intelligence communities should start watching China’s key civilian shipping in the same way they watch its naval vessels,” he wrote at the time.
While the idea of passenger ferries being kitted out to use in a conflict zone might sound unusual, it reflects the degree to which China’s private sector is enmeshed with the ruling communist party and the military policy of the government in Beijing.
It also makes planning a defence much more complex, analysts said.
“Civilian ferries are part of the broader Chinese concept of military-civil fusion, one in which civilian assets and capabilities are an inherent part of a whole of nation effort in national security,” said Alessio Patalano, professor of war and strategy in East Asia at the Department of War Studies, King’s College London.
“Including these assets represents a significant complicating factor in those who need to think about how to meet the challenge of their use.”
But though it may be hard to tell whether a passenger ferry’s movements are part of a build-up for war, China’s broader intentions are clear, he added.
“There is nothing concealed about the Chinese military build-up,” he added.
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Yahoo · by The TelegraphMay 26, 2024 at 3:25 AM·4 min read365Link Copied
13. Ukrainian strike on Russian nuclear radar system causes alarm in West
Image and video at the link: https://www.yahoo.com/news/ukrainian-strike-russian-nuclear-radar-163845828.html
Ukrainian strike on Russian nuclear radar system causes alarm in West
Yahoo · by James KilnerMay 26, 2024 at 9:38 AM·3 min read600Link Copied
A Ukrainian drone strike on a Russian radar station that can track nuclear missiles has sparked alarm in the West.
Kyiv hit the Armavir radar station in the Krasnodar border region on May 23, damaging the state-of-the-art facility, which provides conventional air-defence as well as forming part of Moscow’s nuclear warning system.
Ukrainian officials confirmed on Saturday that their forces had carried out the strike, saying the facility monitors airspace over the country and occupied Crimea.
The radar station has reportedly been able to track long-range Atacms missiles, delivered by the US to Ukraine earlier this year.
Mauro Gilli, a senior researcher at the Centre for Security Studies at ETH Zurich, said the drone strike had been a tactical success because it will force Russia to redeploy air defence systems and it also put down a marker that no Russian military site was untouchable.
“We can debate the effectiveness and merit but strategically there is logic,” he said.
Other Western analysts, though, were more hesitant and said that Ukraine should avoid striking Russia’s nuclear infrastructure.
“Not a wise decision on the part of Ukraine,” said Hans Kristensen, a nuclear arsenal expert at the Federation of American Scientists. “Bombers and military sites in general are different because they’re used to attack Ukraine.”
Thord Are Iversen, a Norwegian military analyst, said striking a part of Russia’s nuclear-warning system was “not a particularly good idea… especially in times of tension.”
“It’s in everyone’s best interest that Russia’s ballistic missile warning system works well,” he said.
One of Russia’s most modern radar systems, the Kremlin has deployed 10 Voronezh class installations along the Russian border. Each has a range of around 4,000 miles and can track 500 objects simultaneously.
Russia has yet to comment on the alleged attack, but it fits a pattern of intensified Ukrainian drone strikes this year on targets deep inside Russia, including oil refineries and transport hubs.
The strike came shortly after Moscow began tactical nuclear missile exercises in its Southern Military District.
Olaf Scholz has pointedly refused to deliver Germany’s long-range Taurus missiles to Ukraine, saying he fears potential nuclear escalation.
The US has so far not relented to Ukrainian requests that it be allowed to use Western weapons in cross-border strikes.
Frustrated Ukrainian military commanders said they had to watch as Russia built up forces across the border in a de facto harbour area that they were not allowed to strike.
Since then, Russian forces have captured several villages and pounded Kharkiv with missiles fired from launch sites and warplanes inside Russia.
Britain has already given permission to Ukraine to use its missiles to strike Russia and now pressure is building on the White House to follow.
Antony Blinken, the US Secretary of State, is reportedly in favour of the change and this weekend Jens Stoltenberg, the Nato Secretary General, told the Economist that it was time to “lift some of the restrictions”.
Ukraine and its Nato allies still need to be cautious, said Fabian Hoffmann, a missile technology doctoral research fellow at the University of Oslo, because some US officials and some of Ukraine’s European allies will view the radar strike as reckless.
“I have some concerns about how politically wise this decision was, as it may have negative repercussions for Ukraine down the road in terms of targeting restrictions,” he said.
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Yahoo · by James KilnerMay 26, 2024 at 9:38 AM·3 min read600Link Copied
14. US remains a ‘true believer’ in Asean, say top Biden diplomats
Excerpts;
Does that mean that Asean is no longer a priority?
Both officials dismissed the idea. They said Mr Biden had given ample proof of his commitment to Asean by placing it at the heart of his signature Indo-Pacific strategy that was launched in 2022.
“There, in black and white, is the President’s statement that Asean and this region are central to everything we do,” said Mr Kritenbrink. “We firmly believe that much of the history of the 21st century is going to be written in this region.”
The diplomats also pointed out that the US remains by far the largest investor in South-east Asia, and trade between the US and the region is worth more than US$500 billion (S$675 billion). This creates more than 600,000 jobs in the US and more than a million jobs in South-east Asia.
And Mr Biden had moved to appoint Mr Abraham as the US ambassador to Asean, filling a post that had been vacant for more than five years.
Analysts, on the other hand, note that Mr Biden has looked past Asean to beef up bilateral relations, ramping up its ties with the Philippines and Vietnam, for example.
He has also actively pursued minilateral frameworks like the Quad (US, India, Japan and Australia) and Aukus (US, Britain and Australia), which do not include Asean members. This undermines Asean’s centrality in regional architecture, according to some analysts.
US remains a ‘true believer’ in Asean, say top Biden diplomats
straitstimes.com · by Bhagyashree Garekar · May 26, 2024
WASHINGTON - Top Biden officials are attesting to a “tremendous momentum” in ties with Asean even as the White House remains preoccupied with geopolitical crises and a closely contested presidential election less than six months away.
There is some unhappiness in regional capitals that the Israel-Palestine war and Washington’s ratcheting rivalry with China is diffusing focus on ties with Asean.
In an exclusive interview with The Straits Times, President Joe Biden’s top diplomat on East Asia, Assistant Secretary of State Daniel Kritenbrink, and US ambassador to Asean Yohannes Abraham forcefully pushed back at that perception.
“It’s simply not true that we’ve in any way reduced our engagement,” said Mr Kritenbrink.
“By every metric, we are getting into Asean at unprecedented levels. We think there’s tremendous momentum here,” he added, pointing out that the Biden administration had demonstrated its faith in Asean in a number of ways, including upgrading ties to a comprehensive strategic partnership in 2022.
Mr Biden also showed up for key Asean meetings in Phnom Penh and hosted the Asean leaders to a historic US-Asean special summit at the White House that year.
But in the following year, Mr Biden skipped the annual Asean summit in Jakarta and sent Vice-President Kamala Harris instead.
And in 2024, when current Asean chair Laos hosts the meetings in October, the presidential election will be just a few weeks away, with Mr Biden in the final throes of campaigning.
Likewise, there is no word on whether Asean leaders will get a repeat invite to the White House in 2024.
Does that mean that Asean is no longer a priority?
Both officials dismissed the idea. They said Mr Biden had given ample proof of his commitment to Asean by placing it at the heart of his signature Indo-Pacific strategy that was launched in 2022.
“There, in black and white, is the President’s statement that Asean and this region are central to everything we do,” said Mr Kritenbrink. “We firmly believe that much of the history of the 21st century is going to be written in this region.”
The diplomats also pointed out that the US remains by far the largest investor in South-east Asia, and trade between the US and the region is worth more than US$500 billion (S$675 billion). This creates more than 600,000 jobs in the US and more than a million jobs in South-east Asia.
And Mr Biden had moved to appoint Mr Abraham as the US ambassador to Asean, filling a post that had been vacant for more than five years.
Analysts, on the other hand, note that Mr Biden has looked past Asean to beef up bilateral relations, ramping up its ties with the Philippines and Vietnam, for example.
He has also actively pursued minilateral frameworks like the Quad (US, India, Japan and Australia) and Aukus (US, Britain and Australia), which do not include Asean members. This undermines Asean’s centrality in regional architecture, according to some analysts.
US Assistant Secretary Daniel Kritenbrink dismissed the idea that Asean is no longer a priority to the US. PHOTO: US EMBASSY SINGAPORE
Mr Abraham disagreed. “The fact that we have an unprecedented expansion of engagement with Asean and we’ve got great bilateral relationships in South-east Asia are not mutually exclusive, they are mutually reinforcing,” he said.
“We don’t see the region, including South-east Asia, in binary terms,” said Mr Kritenbrink. “We are true believers in Asean and in its potential. Candidly speaking, Asean centrality is the reality of the region, Asean is the region’s only real formal architecture,” he said.
Nevertheless, the administration faces some criticism that it still has no robust economic strategy for the region. And that its increasingly strident rivalry with China unsettles Asean nations, all of which count China as their top trading partner. Asean’s trade with China stood at about US$975 billion in 2022.
Mr Abraham countered that the US and Asean were collaborating to solve a wide spectrum of issues, ranging from health security to the climate crisis to the digital economy.
Some of these topics were in discussion on May 24 when Mr Kritenbrink met senior Asean officials for the 36th round of the annual US-Asean Dialogue in Washington that he co-chaired with Indonesian Ministry of Foreign Affairs director-general for Asean Cooperation Sidharto Reza Suryodipuro.
A new area for exploration is artificial intelligence, Mr Abraham said. “We want to work in partnership with Asean on practical applications, on how AI plays in the digital economy and how that manifests in the digital economy framework agreement negotiations,” he said.
AI, he pointed out, has broad applications across the four components of the upgraded US-Asean partnership – connectivity, economic cooperation, maritime cooperation and sustainable development goals.
Scope for economic cooperation has also been boosted by Mr Biden’s 2022 initiative, the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity (IPEF), which seeks to promote sustainable, competitive and fair economic growth through pillars focused on trade, supply chains, clean energy and taxation. Seven Asean members are part of the 14-nation framework.
Agreements on three of the framework’s four pillars – supply chain, clean energy and anti-corruption – have already been reached.
But the trade pillar is a point of contention. It provides no additional trade access to the US, a key demand for the trade-driven South-east Asian economies. And it faces stiff resistance from the progressive wing of Mr Biden’s own Democratic Party.
But Mr Kritenbrink said work continues on the trade pillar, adding that the progress on the IPEF had been significant and ground-breaking.
“We’re grappling with the most important cutting-edge sectors of the 21st-century economy. And negotiating our approaches to those sectors for the first time,” he said.
straitstimes.com · by Bhagyashree Garekar · May 26, 2024
15. Despite fatigue and setbacks, 'Ukrainians mobilized on the front have no intention of laying down their arms'
A view from France.
Despite fatigue and setbacks, 'Ukrainians mobilized on the front have no intention of laying down their arms'
After returning from Ukraine, where he has been covering the conflict since the start of the Russian invasion, Le Monde journalist Emmanuel Grynszpan answered reader questions in an online chat.
By Emmanuel Grynszpan
Published yesterday at 7:37 pm (Paris) 7 min read
Lire en français
Le Monde · by Emmanuel Grynszpan
Ukrainian soldiers patrol in Orikhiv, Zaporizhzhia region, after a massive Russian strike, May 20, 2024. STRINGER / REUTERS
Emmanuel Grynszpan, a journalist with Le Monde's international desk, spent two weeks in Ukraine with photographer Laurent Van der Stockt. They went to the Donbas, more precisely the Donetsk region; first to Pokrovsk and the surrounding area, then to Kramatorsk and its vicinity. They headed for Kharkiv as soon as they learned that a new front had been opened by the Russians, on May 10. Then, on May 11, they moved on to Vovchansk, a town almost on the Russian border, which has been heavily shelled and is now partially occupied by the Russians. The Russian army had already occupied this town for six months in 2022. Upon his return from Ukraine, Grynszpan answered reader questions in an online chat with Le Monde on Friday, May 24. Here is a summary of his responses:
Worried: From Paris, it seems like the Ukrainian resistance is collapsing in the face of the Russian offensive. As someone who has been there, can you tell us if it's really that bad for Ukraine?
There's no collapse on the Ukrainian side, but daily Russian attacks on a front stretching over 500 kilometers. In some places, the Russians are advancing but without making any breakthroughs and without really being able to upset the Ukrainian army, which is withdrawing and sometimes attempting counterattacks. The Russians have undoubtedly had the advantage for several months, thanks to their substantial numerical advantage, both in technical and human terms.
The risk of a Russian breakthrough is real, and the situation could deteriorate for Ukraine. Military analysts predict very difficult months ahead until the end of the summer. The arrival of new waves of Western military aid and fresh Ukrainian troops (currently in training) could turn the tide in Ukraine's favor this autumn.
Michel: On the front, can you see that weapons and ammunition are starting to arrive in significant quantities?
I noticed the opposite, namely, general complaints about the lack of artillery, missiles and anti-aircraft defenses. After constantly referring to this problem, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky did an about-face on May 16, declaring, "No brigade is complaining about lack of ammunition."
Once again, that's not what I heard. But, of course, I haven't spoken to all the brigades. I've since heard that one mechanized brigade received tank shells. Open-source experts still observe a fire ratio (the number of shells fired by the Russians compared to the Ukrainians) extremely unfavorable to the latter (from 8/1 to 15/1). As such, I conclude that Zelensky's statements do not correspond to the reality on the ground.
Read more
Anon: How is morale among the troops? Do they think victory is still possible?
Troop morale is generally low, and soldiers are disillusioned. They don't understand why the promises of shells made several months ago have not materialized, nor why fresh troops have not arrived.
Many soldiers are furious to see that the rear is not sufficiently mobilized, and some are beginning to develop various theories. Some were dreaming of demobilization after two or even three years' service but the new mobilization law says nothing about this. This is demoralizing for some soldiers. Soldiers on the front line are extremely tired because, lacking sufficient reserves, they are sometimes unable to rotate to the rear.
In contrast, I haven't heard any soldiers calling for an end to the war and concessions to the Russians. This position undoubtedly exists, but it seems to me that the vast majority of Ukrainians mobilized on the front have no intention of laying down their arms.
Read more
Colonel Sanders: There's been a lot of talk about Ukrainian soldiers being trained by Westerners, particularly abroad, in preparation for the big offensive in the summer of 2023. Have these soldiers been sent to the front or are they being kept in reserve for the next big offensive?
I don't think the Ukrainians have any significant reserves of foreign-trained soldiers. I've met many fighters who have completed training courses in North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) countries, and the response is almost unanimous: NATO trainers "train for yesterday's war, not the one we're fighting." They're generally disappointed because these tactical training courses take no account whatsoever of the central factor: drones. Reconnaissance drones, FPV (suicide) drones, attack drones, which completely change the game in assaults, defense, refueling, movement and evacuation. Only one officer told me that his training had helped him in logistical matters.
Read more Subscribers only War in Ukraine: The battle of the killer drones
Aurélien: Are there still foreign soldiers in the International Legion of Territorial Defense of Ukraine?
Yes, and in other units. They are generally used for support, for one-off operations. I met some of them again last week. What do they represent in the larger body of Ukrainian soldiers? Not very much. There are a few hundred of them, from all countries, and their numbers seem to be decreasing rather than increasing. Their presence motivates the Ukrainians.
Rotsaka: Do the changes at the head of the Russian army indicate that the results of the Kharkiv offensive are not as great as Russian official propaganda suggests?
It is not related to the Kharkiv offensive, which, although it has not progressed since May 20, has achieved at least two objectives: Forcing the Ukrainians to thin out some units in the Donbas to plug the gaps north of Kharkiv, and causing great concern about the extension of the front, for example, in the Sumy region.
Read more Subscribers only Several top Russian army officials arrested in recent crackdown
Tom: Recently, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, was talking about the possibility of sending troops to Ukraine. Have these rumors reached Ukrainian soldiers?
I've heard a lot of questions on this subject. On the whole, Ukrainian soldiers don't put much faith in it, but it remains a hypothesis that they appreciate, if only because the French stance has become more resolute toward Russia.
Read more
Helico: How is it that the Russian army has not yet managed to break through the Ukrainian defense lines, which have no air force and no ammunition? How are they still able to withstand the onslaught of Russian resources?
Quantity and mass are important, but they don't decide everything. The Ukrainians are not short of ammunition for firearms. They make extensive use of combat drones (even though they also have fewer of these than the Russians). These drones are very effective in defense, breaking up assaults. The Ukrainian army remains composed of highly determined soldiers, who are well-trained and using tried-and-tested tactics. On the Russian side, tactics remain fairly predictable, although some new strategies were used north of Kharkiv. The Russian army is clearly not capable of creating breaches in the Ukrainian defense, let alone exploiting them. For the time being.
Komplexe: Do Ukrainians indeed see a strategy from their leadership that favors preserving human lives at the expense of territory, unlike the Russians, or is it merely talk?
Because of the serious human deficit on the Ukrainian side, the high command often opts for retreats if the position is too costly to protect. This is what I've heard from brigade and battalion commanders. However, there are still commanders trained in Soviet times who are less frugal with men. The contrast between the Ukrainian and Russian armies seems to be very marked in this respect.
Olivier: There's a lot of discussion at the moment about authorizing Ukraine to strike Russian territory (regrouping of soldiers, command centers and ammunition stockpiles) with Western weapons. Is the inability to do so a major source of frustration for the soldiers you met?
There is total incomprehension on the Ukrainian side, sometimes raising doubts about Western leaders' real intentions.
Vince: We don't hear much more about the delivery of the F-16 fighter aircraft. Are the Ukrainians looking forward to them?
Davide: Could the arrival of Western-supplied F-16s be a game-changer in this war?
Military experts often rule out the idea of a game-changing weapon (Wunderwaffe, German for "miracle weapon"). The F-16s are due to become operational in Ukrainian skies in early summer. Their main role will be to protect Ukrainian airspace by deterring Russian fighters and bombers, shooting down drones and missiles, and possibly destroying enemy radars. There are doubts about their offensive capability, to prepare or support a ground offensive.
I've heard Ukrainian military personnel calling for F-16s so that "the Russians stop terrorizing us with their glide bombs," dropped by bombers and capable of destroying the strongest fortifications.
Read more
JB: Have you noticed the emergence of new politicized currents within the Ukrainian army? I'm thinking in particular of veterans removed from the front, the wounded and their families. Do they still have faith in their country's governance?
I haven't seen this, but it's likely that faith in the country's governance will erode over time, given that everyone is now well aware that a rapid and favorable outcome for Ukraine is highly unlikely. Russian propaganda, which is very active through social media, is using devious means to demoralize the population. Not everyone is happy with the Zelensky administration's political decisions, and corruption scandals continue to surface. However, the political opposition represented in parliament remains discreet.
Bag: Can we already assess General Syrsky's performance? Does the army or the country miss General Zaluzhny?
I'm not a sociologist, and I'm basing my opinion on 20 or so recent interviews with servicemen. Oleksandr Syrsky is clearly less popular than Valery Zaluzhny. Some (a minority) feel that Oleksandr Syrsky has introduced more discipline into the army's workings, and better coordination. Many feel that he is a conveyor belt for political power and does not sufficiently defend the army's interests vis-à-vis the rest of the country, particularly on the crucial issue of mobilization.
Read more
Lauriane: Is there any glimmer of hope in the prevailing gloom?
Military analysts were even more pessimistic at the start of 2024. The fact that the Ukrainian army is holding its own against a much more powerful army with a huge numerical advantage is good news in itself. If Western aid were more substantial, and the Ukrainian authorities better managed the mobilization problem, the situation on the front could turn around in Kyiv's favor. 2025 could be very different. However, hoping for a rapid end to the conflict, with a return to the 1991 borders, seems totally unrealistic today.
Emmanuel Grynszpan
Translation of an original article published in French on lemonde.fr; the publisher may only be liable for the French version.
Le Monde · by Emmanuel Grynszpan
16. Book Review: ‘The Art of Diplomacy,’ by Stuart E. Eizenstat
Excerpts:
He even tries to bring the book up-to-date by adding quick (and insightful) thoughts on the Gaza crisis. He appends some of them to a chapter in which he hails the success of the Trump administration’s brokerage of a package of deals between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan. This agreement (known as the Abraham Accords) has, he writes, “transformed Israel’s position in the Middle East and the future of the peace process, integrating Israel in the region for the first time.” Immediately after this, in a short section on the Hamas atrocities of Oct. 7, he writes that “Israel’s response has impeded its further integration in the region.” These terrible events make his overly optimistic conclusions about the efficacy of constricted bargains less persuasive.
Being sharp on the mechanics of negotiations but hazy on the wider political environments is perhaps an occupational hazard of Eizenstat’s search for a notion of depoliticized diplomacy. The mechanics matter but, as the horrific events in Israel and Gaza remind us, deal-making is not an art that can be practiced successfully in isolation from much larger political and moral imperatives. As much as the United States has been engaged in defusing bombs with skill and courage, it has also been involved in dropping them. A more reflective and supple account of U.S. diplomacy would pay much more attention to the complex and sometimes tragically contradictory relationship between those two activities.
Book Review: ‘The Art of Diplomacy,’ by Stuart E. Eizenstat - The New York Times
nytimes.com · by Fintan O’Toole · May 26, 2024
Nonfiction
Man, the Last 50 Years or So Have Been a Wild Time for Statecraft
Stuart E. Eizenstat has served half a dozen U.S. presidents and made a lot of friends. In “The Art of Diplomacy,” he lays out some of their teachable moments.
Henry Kissinger and Hillary Clinton at the State Department during an interview with Charlie Rose in 2011.Credit…Alex Brandon/Associated Press
By Fintan O’Toole
Fintan O’Toole is a columnist at The Irish Times and the author of “Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain.”
May 26, 2024, 5:02 a.m. ET
THE ART OF DIPLOMACY: How American Negotiators Reached Historic Agreements That Changed the World, by Stuart E. Eizenstat
When I was growing up in Catholic Ireland, books on moral and theological matters carried, near their title pages, a mark of approval from a local bishop and the phrase “nihil obstat” — a fancy Latin way of saying “all clear.” Stuart E. Eizenstat’s book on the major episodes of American diplomacy over the last half-century — from the opening of China to the invasion of Gaza — comes with nihil obstats from the secular equivalent of an entire conclave of cardinals.
It has a posthumous foreword by one former secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, and a preface by another, James A. Baker III. It carries gushing blurbs from one former U.S. president (Bill Clinton), three former prime ministers (the United Kingdom’s Tony Blair, Ireland’s Bertie Ahern and Israel’s Ehud Olmert), a galaxy of international luminaries and two further luminaries of U.S. diplomacy, Hillary Clinton and John Bolton. All of them have also been interviewed for their insights.
The improbable conjunction of those last two names — Bolton served in the administration of Donald Trump, who was, among other things, Clinton’s nemesis — is typical of “The Art of Diplomacy.” Kissinger and Baker were Republicans; Eizenstat himself served in senior positions in the Democratic administrations of Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton.
The book therefore harks back to an ideal of U.S. diplomacy as a nonpartisan arena, an essentially technocratic endeavor. Eizenstat is unhappy “when diplomacy is politicized” and he hopes to promote a “vision of bipartisan U.S. leadership.” Yet, if there was ever a time when it was possible to imagine an unpoliticized diplomacy, it is surely long gone. Eizenstat acknowledges, for example, that tackling climate change “will be a supreme test” of America’s global leadership. Whether that test is met depends utterly on which party is in power.
The folly of trying to avoid partisanship is obvious even in Kissinger’s foreword. He provides a brutal summary of his own longstanding intellectual position: In foreign policy, actions do not express “a notion of justice” but are “based on a conception of interests.” This is a false dichotomy. Any sane foreign policy must stem from an understanding that, in a radically interdependent world, global justice is also a vital national interest. The fair regulation of trade, the upholding of international laws against aggression and the abuse of human rights, the rational management of migration and saving human life on the planet are not foreign to the immediate well-being of Americans.
Those imperatives spring from collective values, which is to say from politics. It is especially odd that Eizenstat, who in addition to serving under Carter is the author of “President Carter: The White House Years,” mostly evades the obvious clash between the worldview set out by Kissinger in the foreword and that of his former boss, who insisted as president that U.S. foreign policy “is rooted in our moral values,” except to say that Carter’s election victory “signaled a shift away from Kissinger’s realpolitik.”
In a hagiographic opening chapter on Kissinger himself, Eizenstat writes that he “presided over some of the greatest triumphs of America’s foreign policy, as well as some of its tragic failures.” The triumphs — especially the opening of diplomatic relations with China and the making of peace between Egypt and Israel — are recounted in vivid and engrossing detail. The tragedies are swept under the thin carpet of an endnote: “For example, Kissinger’s support for Latin American dictators with egregious human rights policies; the massive, deadly, destabilizing bombing of Cambodia; continuing the Vietnam War,” and the “support for the Indonesian dictator Suharto’s invasion of East Timor.”
Millions of lives are encompassed in this endnote, and this is what makes “The Art of Diplomacy” such a frustrating book. It presents itself, in Kissinger’s words, as “a framework for conducting diplomacy.” It is actually something much narrower — a set of case studies of the conduct of specific international negotiations that reads like an extended syllabus for aspiring ambassadors. We hear about the careful dismantling of the Soviet Union around 1990 (it was important never to get Mikhail Gorbachev “to a place where he had to say no”) and the less careful dismantling of the Taliban in Afghanistan after 9/11. (Military gestures, such as an invasion, don’t make sense unless they are accompanied by “proper national security goals.”)
These studies are often fascinating and, based as they are on extensive interviews with participants like former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and the former C.I.A. director Leon Panetta, they contain a great deal of useful research material.
By far the most interesting of them is Eizenstat’s firsthand account of his time negotiating with Swiss, German and Austrian authorities and commercial institutions to secure reparations and restitution for Holocaust survivors. In the 1990s, Eizenstat navigated pathways of compromise between “an unruly fractious group of class-action lawyers,” a “recalcitrant, unrepentant and uncooperative Swiss government” and the needs of victims. His account of these talks is animated by moral passion and gripping enough to make one wish he had written a more personal — and indeed a more political — book.
Of Eizenstat’s case studies, the one I know best is the negotiation of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, which ended the long period of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland known as the Troubles. While his description of the deal-making is broadly accurate, his grasp of the political context is weak. Discrimination against Catholics in Northern Ireland, though systematic, was emphatically not “a form of apartheid in all but name.” It is also positively insulting to suggest that John Hume’s relentlessly pacific Social Democratic and Labour Party had a “violent fringe.” (Eizenstat seems to be confusing the S.D.L.P. with the I.R.A.’s former political wing, Sinn Fein.)
Bizarrely, he further claims that Irish American politicians, including Senator Edward Kennedy, “weighed in against U.S. involvement” in the peace process. As one of his own endnotes seems to acknowledge, the precise opposite happened. Perhaps, in trying to span such a range of situations, from Vietnam and the former Yugoslavia to Angola and Afghanistan, Eizenstat has simply spread himself too thin.
He even tries to bring the book up-to-date by adding quick (and insightful) thoughts on the Gaza crisis. He appends some of them to a chapter in which he hails the success of the Trump administration’s brokerage of a package of deals between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan. This agreement (known as the Abraham Accords) has, he writes, “transformed Israel’s position in the Middle East and the future of the peace process, integrating Israel in the region for the first time.” Immediately after this, in a short section on the Hamas atrocities of Oct. 7, he writes that “Israel’s response has impeded its further integration in the region.” These terrible events make his overly optimistic conclusions about the efficacy of constricted bargains less persuasive.
Being sharp on the mechanics of negotiations but hazy on the wider political environments is perhaps an occupational hazard of Eizenstat’s search for a notion of depoliticized diplomacy. The mechanics matter but, as the horrific events in Israel and Gaza remind us, deal-making is not an art that can be practiced successfully in isolation from much larger political and moral imperatives. As much as the United States has been engaged in defusing bombs with skill and courage, it has also been involved in dropping them. A more reflective and supple account of U.S. diplomacy would pay much more attention to the complex and sometimes tragically contradictory relationship between those two activities.
THE ART OF DIPLOMACY: How American Negotiators Reached Historic Agreements That Changed the World | By Stuart E. Eizenstat | Rowman & Littlefield | 491 pp. | $35
See more on: Democratic Party, Republican Party, Bill Clinton, Henry A. Kissinger, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Israel-Hamas War News
nytimes.com · by Fintan O’Toole · May 26, 2024
17. CT-based Colt's Manufacturing awarded $57 million contract for Army weapons
CT-based Colt's Manufacturing awarded $57 million contract for Army weapons
americanmilitarynews.com · by Liese Klein - New Haven Register · May 26, 2024
The U.S. Army has awarded West Hartford-based manufacturer Colt’s Manufacturing Co. a $57.2 contract for M4 and M4A1 carbines, according to the U.S. Department of Defense Website.
The contract, awarded on May 16, is scheduled to be completed by Sept. 18, with the location of the work yet to be determined. The Army Contracting Command in Newark, N.J., awarded the contract.
Carbines, or long guns with shortened barrels, are used in military settings by troops including special operations soldiers and paratroopers. Colt developed the M4 platform in the 1980s and has since introduced the M5 and other carbine models.
A Czech company, Česká Zbrojovka Group SE, bought Colt in 2021 for $220 million in cash and 1.1 million shares of its stock. The parent company did not respond to requests for comment on the new contract.
Czech President Petr Pavel visited the West Hartford plant last year, highlighting the gunmaker’s symbolic and economic importance. Colt sales were up 50 percent since the acquisition and the West Hartford location employed 340 people, company officials said at the time.
Colt’s Manufacturing has secured several major Army deals in recent years, including a $26.7 million contract awarded on May 1 for M4A1 carbines, suppressors, and flash suppressors, with the work to be done in West Hartford. “Fiscal 2024 Foreign Military Sales (Israel) funds in the amount of $26,675,000 were obligated at the time of the award,” reads the announcement on the Defense Department website.
The Army awarded Colt’s Manufacturing a $41.9 million foreign military sales contract for M4 and M4A1 carbines in 2019, and two domestic carbine contracts for $88.6 million and $57.7 million in 2018.
Colt’s gun sales to Israel drew protest to the company’s West Hartford headquarters at 545 New Park Ave. last November, with picketers denouncing Israel’s actions in Gaza and demanding that Colt stop doing business with the country.
Colt’s Manufacturing Co. is the modern incarnation of the pioneering firearms maker founded by Samuel Colt in Hartford in 1855. The historic Colt factory complex south of downtown Hartford has been redeveloped into housing and office space.
___
(c) 2024 the New Haven Register
Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
americanmilitarynews.com · by Liese Klein - New Haven Register · May 26, 2024
18. Myanmar’s Surprising Rebels Deserve a Shot
Excerpt:
At the same time, it is clear that the West’s standard tools of sanctions and humanitarian aid will not be enough to change the course of this conflict. The junta retains significant military capability and has shown no qualms about using it, leveling rebel towns with airstrikes as punishment after attacks. Resistance groups need weapons and other resources, as well as significant political support, to preserve their gains and maintain their cohesion.
Will we support the resistance?
Myanmar’s Surprising Rebels Deserve a Shot
Anti-junta groups are gaining ground, but their recent cohesion may fray without outside assistance.
May 26, 2024 at 4:00 PM EDT
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-05-26/myanmar-s-armed-rebels-deserve-west-s-help-against-junta?sref=hhjZtX76
By Ruth Pollard
Ruth Pollard is a Bloomberg Opinion Managing Editor. Previously she was South and Southeast Asia government team leader at Bloomberg News and Middle East correspondent for the Sydney Morning Herald.
Myanmar’s generals have controlled the country for 53 of its 76 years as a modern state. While the pro-democracy forces elected in 2015 could not hold onto power peacefully, they now have a realistic chance of regaining it by force. The country’s neighbors, and a cautious West, should help them.
The military, which overthrew a civilian government led by former Nobel Prizewinner Aung San Suu Kyi in 2021, has in recent months lost control of vast swathes of territory and key border posts to resistance groups. The rebels now control important infrastructure projects, including Chinese-funded oil and gas pipelines and much of the 1,400-kilometer (870-mile) highway that runs from the northeastern Indian state of Manipur through Myanmar to Mae Sot in Thailand.
Buoyed by mass defections from the army, the swelling ranks of resistance groups are cooperating in ways that have surprised longtime Myanmar watchers. A significant number of ethnic armed organizations are aligning themselves with the shadow National Unity Government, founded by elected members of parliament who escaped after the coup.
As the more established militias have been doing since the 1960s, rebel units have begun delivering social services in areas they control, governing millions of people and laying the foundations for what a federal democratic Myanmar could look like. They are providing everything from humanitarian assistance to police and judicial services, schools, health clinics, and garbage collection.
At the same time, it is clear that the West’s standard tools of sanctions and humanitarian aid will not be enough to change the course of this conflict. The junta retains significant military capability and has shown no qualms about using it, leveling rebel towns with airstrikes as punishment after attacks. Resistance groups need weapons and other resources, as well as significant political support, to preserve their gains and maintain their cohesion.
This should be the cue for the international community to step up support for the NUG, which operates in exile with an office in Washington, as well as some of the more established ethnic armies and the resistance groups formed after the coup. While Western governments may be reluctant to arm the rebels, they can support efforts to build a parallel state by strengthening these emerging political authorities and community-based organizations, as Myanmar expert Morten Pedersen has written for the Lowy Institute.
Even that will be tricky for risk-averse governments and donors more used to working with states, not armed organizations. They will need to identify groups that share values the West can support — those that want to create inclusive, civilian-led structures and who respect human rights and international humanitarian law. They will also need to ensure these groups are interested in building a federal Myanmar, not just cementing control over the areas they hold.
India, China and Thailand — Myanmar’s three biggest neighbors — will also require sensitive handling. China is the most influential outside player in this conflict, engaging with both the junta and the Three Brotherhood Alliance of ethnic armies in the north and west which have led the recent, groundbreaking offensive against the military. The groups — the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army, the Ta’ang National Liberation Army and the Arakan Army — have signaled support for the NUG.
A Beijing-brokered ceasefire in the north in January was a good first step, but it appears to have been an isolated move aimed at containing the fighting in Shan state rather than an attempt to bring an overall resolution to the crisis. China, which has no interest in dealing with a disintegrating Myanmar on its border, can do more. So can India, which has seen the war spill over its frontier into Manipur.
How complex this task will be was underscored by reports this month that the Arakan Army has been targeting the Rohingya Muslim minority in Myanmar’s west with large-scale arson attacks and coordinated killings. This follows the crimes against humanity and genocide committed against the Rohingya by the military in 2016 and 2017 that forced 750,000 refugees to flee to neighboring Bangladesh. (Those events are now the subject of an investigation by the International Criminal Court and proceedings at the International Court of Justice under the Genocide Convention.)
Nor is the junta likely to give up easily. As Pedersen notes, the military is not as close to collapse as some optimists say. To win this civil war and build a new state, the resistance will ultimately have to take the capital, Naypyitaw, which the army will defend with all the heavy weaponry at its disposal. The status quo — where the military keeps losing ground, especially along the country’s borders, but maintains control of the capital and the major commercial centers of Yangon and Mandalay — could continue for years.
Nevertheless, the conflict has reached an inflection point. The world could stand by and wait until the country is truly burning. Or it could act now to help rebuild civil society and strengthen the capacity of local groups to work with each other to determine Myanmar’s future.
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This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Ruth Pollard is a Bloomberg Opinion Managing Editor. Previously she was South and Southeast Asia government team leader at Bloomberg News and Middle East correspondent for the Sydney Morning Herald.
19. An Ominous Precedent for the Left’s Politicization of the Military
It pains me to read these kinds of essays. But they are out there influencing people.
An Ominous Precedent for the Left’s Politicization of the Military
Soldiers from the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne Division walk out at dusk to a transport plane bound for Europe at Fort Bragg, N.C., February 14, 2022.(Jonathan Drake/Reuters)
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By JACOB HORNSTEIN
May 26, 2024 6:30 AM
https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/05/an-ominous-precedent-for-the-lefts-politicization-of-the-military/
This isn’t the first time in history a left-wing elite has tried to drive conservatives out of the armed forces. France saw something similar — with dire consequences.
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The American military is in crisis. Recruitment is down overall, impairing readiness. Lack of interest from conservative demographics is driving much of the decline. Within the ranks, the departure of right-leaning officers and servicemen put off by vaccine mandates and left-wing political trainings has shifted the military’s composition left at the expense of service quality.
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These are unique challenges. But they are not unprecedented. In fact, they closely parallel an event little-known in America: the conspiracy of the Left in France’s Third Republic to decatholicize the country’s military. This effort had disastrous consequences — consequences we could learn something from today.
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Under the Third Republic, France was extremely polarized between republican Left and monarchist Right. While the Left dominated among intellectuals and eventually most of French society, the military remained a bastion of religion and conservative thought.
This orientation was never tolerable for the Left, but republicans lacked the power to act. Military promotions were theoretically apolitical, and the best officers tended to be from conservative Catholic families. Thus, despite a slew of left-wing victories after 1877, the military’s right-leaning culture persisted.
The Dreyfus Affair provided impetus for a change. When Jewish military officer Alfred Dreyfus was accused of spying for Germany, leftist intellectuals proved his innocence. Because senior military officers faked evidence for political and antisemitic reasons, the affair damaged the military’s credibility. The military’s staunch anti-Dreyfusardism convinced republican elites that the military’s conservativism reflected counterrevolutionary attitudes that threatened the republic.
To “republicanize” the military, the French government recruited a network of Masons to secretly develop a card system on military officers, in what historians call “the Affair of the Cards.” While officers with republican tendencies were promoted, officers deemed politically unreliable were held back. Criteria were often arbitrary. Factors as minute as regularly attending Mass could cripple an officer’s career.
The American military has never developed a popular perception for being politicized in the way that the French military in the late 19th century did. But there are still similarities between the two situations. For example, the American military has also traditionally drawn from a more conservative base than the country overall. Many service members come from “military families.” There are also strong parallels in each institution’s perception on the left. Left-leaning media outlets have long faulted the military on grounds of alleged widespread racism, sexism, violations of church-state separation, and even rape culture.
À la the Dreyfus Affair, protests in summer 2020 after George Floyd’s death and January 6 marked a turning point for the relationship between the military and the Left. Eliminating supposed grievances that — we were told — had been tacitly accepted became a moral imperative. President Biden’s Day One Executive Order 13985 mandated diversity and inclusion training for all federal employees, including the military. Vaccine mandates led to the discharge of more than 8,000 active-duty service members.
These actions had an effect that was soon hard to ignore. By September 2021, Foreign Affairs was running headlines on “Why Conservatives Turned on the U.S. Military.” In 2022, the Army, Navy, and Air Force all missed their recruiting goals by as much as 25 percent, leading an Army official to state that “there’s a level of prestige in parts of conservative America with service that has degraded.”
Is it fair to characterize this as an analogue to the “Affair of the Cards?” Certainly. While in neither case were officers openly punished or rewarded for their beliefs, in both cases the previously apolitical military became politicized, shifting the composition of the military leftward. And in both cases, the shift was induced by cultural watersheds.
The Dreyfus Affair convinced French republican elites that the French military was a hotbed of reactionary sentiment that threatened the republic. The events of 2020 and 2021 convinced the Democratic elite that bigoted tendencies in the military posed an existential threat. Fifteen Democratic senators wrote in 2021 that “white supremacy” in the military “threaten[ed] to rupture civil-military safeguards.”
In some senses, the comparison is imperfect because the current effort looks worse. The Affair of the Cards was secret until its discovery. But today’s effort at rooting out political wrong-think in the military has been overt. We know from leaked trainings that service members are being encouraged to adopt left-wing cultural practices such as avoiding gendered language. Senior officers are setting quotas for the demographics of military officers.
The Dreyfusard Left could point to genuine reactionary sentiment in the military as justification for its efforts. For example, many military officers did hold the French republic in contempt. But there is no legitimate basis for allegations of systemic white supremacy in the U.S. military. Surveys have found that veterans are no more likely to support extremist groups than the American public is. Further proof of this came when defense secretary Lloyd Austin’s decision to launch a military-wide “stand down” to combat extremism was contradicted by a DOD-commissioned study that found no evidence of disproportionate military extremism.
Politicization is bad in itself. Its national-security implications are also troubling. By definition, when one prioritizes anything other than quality, an inferior product results. France learned this in 1914, when generals promoted by the Affair of the Cards were disproportionately represented among those fired for incompetence in the opening months of World War I. Americans should hope that we don’t have to face a similar reckoning. We can avoid, or at least mitigate, such a fate only if the left-wing politicization of the military ends now.
De Oppresso Liber,
David Maxwell
Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy
Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation
Editor, Small Wars Journal
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
Phone: 202-573-8647
email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com
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