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Quotes of the Day:
"Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves."
– Carl Jung
"Change your life today. Don't gamble on the future; act now, without delay."
– Simone de Beauvoir
"Western thinking has become conservative; the world situation should stay as it is at any cost; there should be no changes. This debilitating dream of a status quo is the symptom of a society that has come to the end of its development."
– Alexander Solzhenitsyn
1. SOF in Competition Special Project Announcement
2. Army puts new unit loaded with cutting-edge tech to the test
3. China Has Built the Strongest Military in the Indo-Pacific
4. US warship sails through sensitive Taiwan Strait
5. Ukraine's Invasion of Kursk by Sir Lawrence Freedman
6. Why Everyone’s Suddenly Talking About Iranian Election Hacking
7. The Least Risky AI Strategy Is a Bold One
8. US charges former democracy activist with spying for China
9. U.S. Officials Meet Dalai Lama in New York, Triggering Protest From China
10. Who Could Serve in Harris’s Cabinet?
11. How Russian Trolls Are Trying to Go Viral on X
12. Exploring a PRC Short-of-War Coercion Campaign to Seize Taiwan’s Kinmen Islands and Possible Responses
13. The Green Beret Affair: A Tarnished Chapter in Special Forces History
14. Kursk Was the Site of a Massive World War II Tank Battle - Now It’s at the Heart of Ukraine’s Counterattack
15. From Middle-earth to Ukraine, the Enduring Value of Wylie’s General Theory of Power Control
16. Industrial Policy Needs an Immigration Policy
17. The Case for a Clean Energy Marshall Plan
18. Trump 2.0 Would Get Mixed Responses in the Indo-Pacific
1. SOF in Competition Special Project Announcement
It takes two Australians to push this effort.
Some might have a recommendation for this:
SOF Professionals Need an Intellectual Home
SOF in Competition Special Project Announcement - Irregular Warfare Initiative
irregularwarfare.org · by Adam Darnley-Stuart, Ian Langford · August 22, 2024
Editor’s Note: The Irregular Warfare Initiative proudly announces the SOF in Competition Project. The intent is to coalesce the community of SOF policymakers, researchers, and practitioners to understand the role of SOF in addressing contemporary and future national security challenges. The project explores the intersection among irregular warfare, SOF, and broader national security challenges. With a focus on current events and their underlying historical logics, scholarly theories and evidence-based findings on the role of SOF in national security, and applied doctrinal concepts—we aim to contextualize the role of SOF in the evolving realities of irregular warfare and modern conflict. We invite your participation and engagement as we embark on this project. If you would like to contribute to the SOF Special Project, please submit proposals and ideas to adam.darnley-stuart@irregularwarfare.org with the subject line “Project SOF Submission / Proposal”.
SOF Professionals Need an Intellectual Home
Since President George W. Bush’s declaration of the Global War on Terror (GWOT) in 2001, Special Operations Forces (SOF) have been focused on combating violent non-state actors. SOF excelled in the GWOT conflicts against networks like al-Qaeda and ISIS, resulting in a rise in prestige and national resources as they tackled threats with a high degree of flexibility and effectiveness.
However, the GWOT is over. Western governments are increasingly focused on the return of great power competition. The former focus on countering violent non-state actors coupled with the swift re-introduction of great power competition may have unintentionally dislocated SOF from contemporary deterrence strategies. This rapid shift has led to important questions for the SOF and broader national security communities.
Most pressingly: what role does SOF have in great power competition? However, other questions require attention. How should SOF balance between non-state threats and directly confronting peer competitors? How should SOF capabilities and organization evolve to address changes to the threat landscape, and also to rapidly changing technologies? What is the role of SOF in large-scale combat operations? How should SOF integrate with conventional forces and what role might they play in evolved approaches to CIMIC? And many more.
These questions are not without consequence. Some argue SOF is irrelevant in strategic competition, with the U.S. Army going so far as to cut SOF manning and resources. Others argue that SOF will play a larger role in strategic competition, particularly as nuclear-armed great powers historically have sought to attack each other indirectly through proxy conflicts—where SOF play a key role. Force postures are being resourced and doctrine is being revised based on these competing perspectives.
The SOF in Competition Project will provide a space for the community of SOF professionals—researchers and practitioners—to explore and address the big questions. This space is needed so we can grow as a profession, build professional networks, and contribute to advancing Western national security interests.
The SOF in Competition Project aims to understand SOF’s value proposition in great power competition. It will serve as a rallying point for various SOF stakeholders to convene, network, and drive public dialogue. Working together, they can advance the collective understanding of SOF in areas ranging from phase zero operations, to SOF’s role in deterrence, and furthermore, SOF’s continuing mission of addressing persistent non-state actor threats—and beyond.
SOF in Competition Objectives
This project serves as a flagpole for all SOF professionals and researchers from around the world to coalesce, discuss, and learn. There are three primary objectives to support the SOF community:
1. Mobilize the SOF professional community of scholars and practitioners.
2. Drive public dialogue on the role of SOF in competition.
3. Invest in SOF leaders—both practitioners and researchers.
These objectives will be accomplished through multiple activities, including but not limited to publishing written works by members of the community, hosting episodes on the Irregular Warfare Podcast dedicated to these topics, and running public events (virtual and in person) that bring the SOF professional community together.
If you are a SOF practitioner or researcher, this is your platform and community. All topics relevant to SOF are in play, and all perspectives are welcome. We grow through challenging extant assumptions, and through introducing evidence-based rigor to our understanding of SOF. There are no sacred cows if we are to grow as a profession!
To launch this endeavor, we will provide initial areas of focus. For the inaugural year, we will focus on three core SOF topics:
1. Resilience, Resistance, and Unconventional Warfare (UW)
2. Grey Zone, Influence, and Military Information Support Operations (MISO)
3. Counter-Proliferation of WMD (CP-WMD)
These three missions have been selected because they form the core value proposition that sets SOF apart from any other government agency or department. They are uniquely SOF activities because they generate strategic effects by design and transcend any single phase of the campaigning cycle. Furthermore, these three activities form a SOF mission eco-system that, if orchestrated effectively, generates strategic impacts greater than the sum of its parts.
Resilience, Resistance, and Unconventional Warfare
“Executing actions to enable a resistance movement or insurgency that is aiming to coerce, disrupt, or overthrow a government or occupying power”
Resilience is the building block for resistance operations. Resistance can deter and is an effective way to apply increasing costs on an adversary who has not been deterred. The Swiss during World War II had a pre-planned, mature concept of national defense that included key variables of defense in depth, pre-prepared demolition of mountainous lines of communication (holding at risk the key assets Hitler wished to seize), and a mobilized population. This concept deterred Hitler from invasion in 1940 and again in 1943—the expected costs of an invasion were too great given Axis concurrencies.
This is important in the context of competition and conflict in both the Indo-Pacific and on the Russian periphery. SOF are postured to play a key role in building resistance capabilities with our Allies and partners at risk of great power invasion. What unconventional warfare activities, or special warfare activities in Australian SOF lexicon, should a coalition of SOF countries be supporting in the region to build resistance capabilities, and what should those resistance capabilities look like?
Grey Zone, Influence, and Military Information Support Operations (MISO) – The Influencers
“Planned activities aimed at conveying specific, pre-selected information to foreign audiences. Such information is often aimed at influencing the emotions, motives, objective reasoning, or behavior of foreign audiences, groups, individuals, or sometimes governments in a manner favorable to US or host-nation objectives.”
Since 2012, the use and misuse of the information environment, integrated or aligned to military operations, has increased in breadth, speed, and scope. It is a focused effort for protagonists seeking to fracture the will to fight and degrade the legitimacy of opponents. Orchestrated disinformation and propaganda exploiting fractures and concerns in US and Australian society, regional relationships and alliances identified by an adversary will be the norm, not the exception, along the road to war. It will set the context and understanding for the fight to come. It will also be exploited during conflict making exaggerated claims supported by manufactured evidence.
The struggle for dominance in the information environment will play out globally, inviting greater participation and developing its own disordered ecosystem, in and through which SOF must harness and maneuver to sustain whole of government legitimacy. SOF are best placed to lead and integrate the information fight during competition due to their placement, access, and expertise in the human domain.
Counter-Proliferation of WMD
“Activities to support US government efforts to curtail the development, possession, proliferation, and use of chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear (CBRN) weapons by governments and non-state actors.”
In 2022, Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, after eight years of conflict, renewed debate on the efficacy of nuclear deterrence. The debate between Cold War scholars and contemporary practitioners has enabled limitations previously ignored in deterrence literature to be re-litigated. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine demonstrated that deterrence did not work.
Putin’s nuclear saber-rattling against the backdrop of Ukraine’s voluntary handback of nuclear weapons in 1994-96 highlights a significant problem within the current security environment. Will the invasion of Ukraine encourage the retention of nuclear capabilities? Will states pursue nuclear weapons as national security policies shift based on China-US tensions in the Indo-Pacific region? Regardless of how the proliferation of WMD progresses, SOF are best placed to directly support governments with the ability to counter competitor proliferation efforts within a strategic deterrence framework.
Call to Action
The transition from the GWOT to strategic competition presents many questions about how SOF should adapt and what role it should play in the broader national security apparatuses of Western nations. There already exists a global community of SOF researchers and practitioners poised to explore these questions to advance the profession. The SOF in Competition Project provides a platform for this community to coalesce, explore the role of SOF, and invest in leaders and the broader community. If you are a SOF professional, this is your platform. We very much welcome article submissions, ideas for events and partnerships, podcast topics, and volunteers to join the community. Please email us to explore how to get involved.
The need for this dialogue is real and growing. The consequences are real. We look forward to building this community together!
Adam Darnley-Stuart is a national security professional with twenty years’ experience within Australian Special Operations and the National Intelligence Community. As a graduate of the Royal Military College Duntroon, Adam has extensive operational experience across the Middle East and Indo-Pacific focusing on counter-proliferation, unconventional warfare, and cognitive warfare.
Dr. Ian Langford, DSC and Two Bars is a retired senior officer of the Australian Army. He is a Distinguished Graduate of the United States Marine Corps Command and Staff College and the School of Advanced Warfighting. Ian was the Director General Future Land Capability for the Australian Army from 2018 until 2022; and previous to that was the acting head of Land Capability.
The views expressed are those of the author(s) and do not reflect the official position of the Irregular Warfare Initiative, Princeton University’s Empirical Studies of Conflict Project, the Modern War Institute at West Point, or the United States Government.
Main Image: Marine Raider nighttime training (US Marine Corp, Instagram)
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irregularwarfare.org · by Adam Darnley-Stuart, Ian Langford · August 22, 2024
2. Army puts new unit loaded with cutting-edge tech to the test
"Transforming in contact." We should remember these words because this is the future of our Army.
As I reflect on the Army trying to transform I am reminded of my experience with the fielding of the" Big 5" (Abrams, Bradley, Apache, Blackhawk, and Patriot) and doctrinal development (the intellectual giants like GEN Starry and BG Wass De Czege) and the organizational changes such as Division 86 I recall that everything was very top down and structured. When we went through "new equipment transition" we had contractors telling us how to operate their newly fielded equipment as we were learning the doctrine while reorganizing the divisions (in the 1-30 Infantry in 3ID in Germany we went from 3 mech companies in the battalion to a 4th D Co among many other reorganizations in the division).
But today's security situation is different - more complex than defending the Fulda Gap (and Bundorf Bowl and the Hassberg RIdge where my GDP location was). We have to "transform in contact" and more rapidly than we were able to do deliberately in the 1970s and 1980s. Also culture has changed. Our soldiers are more innovative and see problems and challenges to be solved and are more capable of solving problems especially through the innovative employment of technology.
So instead of a top down regimented one size fits all system the army is providing equipment to units and letting the troops determine the value and even concepts for employment. We do not have the luxury of conducting deliberate long term planning and waiting for 10-20 years to develop new equipment, organizations, and concepts (of course some tanks, planes, and ships may still take a long time but there is so much high tech and potentially critically important equipment that can be developed just by software innovation). I think this might fit better into the mindsets of the younger generation who are at the tip of the spear. Give it to our young people and let them figure it out (I do not mean that derogatorily or as a sign that we are lazy and undisciplined). This may give us better equipment sooner than if we went through the historical conventional process. Incidentally this reminds me of the SOCOM fielding process in the 1990ss before the GWOT when SOCOM was very innovative in R&D and testing and was able to develop a lot of cutting edge equipment that has benefited the entire military because of operator input.
I am optimistic that this will serve our Army well. I think we could very well have better and more effective equipment in many areas sooner than the conventional processes. So we are transforming our equipment and capabilities in contact. Can we capture the necessary doctrinal changes and advances while in contact as well?
Army puts new unit loaded with cutting-edge tech to the test
The reconnaissance unit is the poster child for Army plans to field more drones, electronic warfare, and communications equipment across the force.
defenseone.com · by Sam Skove
FORT JOHNSON, Louisiana—The only sign of the drone was its moped-like whine, the noise rising and falling as it circled above the 101st Airborne Division’s soldiers deep behind enemy lines in an exercise last week.
But somewhere up above, the soldiers playing the enemy—a unit dubbed Geronimo—were watching.
For most soldiers, there’d be nothing to do but sit and wait. For the 101st’s Multi-Functional Reconnaissance Company, it was an opportunity to test their gear. Within minutes, a soldier had powered up the Bal Chatri, a hand-held drone detector that was previously only given to special operations soldiers.
The only problem: the detector didn’t find anything. First Lt. Adam Hendrick, commander of a platoon within the MFRC, guessed the Bal Chatri was not picking the drone up because it was American-made, and therefore marked as safe.
That information is exactly the sort of data point the MFRC is meant to collect. The new unit—launched in March and one of just three similar units across the entire Army—is tasked with testing out new technology in real-world conditions and developing new, innovative doctrine.
Over the course of five days, Defense One watched as the MFRC brought its superior technology to bear against Geronimo’s experienced “enemy” soldiers across 250,000 acres of pine forest, even as temperatures soared into the high 90s with over 60 percent humidity. While the battle was fake—kills were registered via a laser-tag like system—the blank-firing guns that soldiers used often made it feel like a real battle.
Transforming in contact
The MFRC has all of the very latest in new technology: commercial drones, counter-drone tech, electronic warfare tools, command and control software, deception equipment, hyper-mobile vehicles, and more.
Most Army units are not like this. For years, the service fielded equipment like it handed out uniforms: everyone got the same thing. The problem is that distributing tech in that way can take years, and it led to fielding drones that were literal museum pieces.
To overcome the delays, the Army came up with a “transforming-in-contact” fielding strategy, in which the service rapidly fields small numbers but wide varieties of new tech to three selected brigades. While each brigade has a version of the MFRC, the MFRC is furthest along in its “transformation process,” a 101st Airborne PAO said.
Much of the new tech is inspired by devices and tactics in use in Ukraine. “There's so many lessons to be able to take from [the Ukrainians], and a lot of it does come down to the integration of new things, like the proliferation of [drones],” said Maj. Gen. Brett Sylvia, commander of the 101st Airborne Division.
Rather than just test the equipment on controlled ranges, the Army also wants to push its tech and doctrine to the limit by having soldiers use them in realistic training scenarios and on deployment.
Such realism can start on day one: Defense One joined the MFRC’s parent unit, the second brigade of the 101st Airborne, as it flew 500 miles via helicopter by way of refueling points into the training zone. The assault was one of the largest, longests air assaults ever performed in a training exercise, Sylvia said: “No one has ever done anything at this distance, at this scale.”
After a midnight landing in sweltering heat, soldiers began testing their equipment in a two-week battle against Geronimo.
The MFRC
Right now, the MFRC consists of three reconnaissance platoons dubbed “hunter-killer” platoons, one drone and electronic warfare platoon, and one robotics and autonomous systems platoon tasked with operating ground robots and drones. Although the unit was founded in March, its rotation to JRTC week represents its first time in a combat training center, a critical part of preparation for deployment.
The hunter-killer platoons have as many as six short-range commercially available drones each, a mix of Skydio, Parrot, and Vesper models. The new tech comes with a major culture shift. While other drone operators have previously said replacing drones is a challenge, the MFRC is allowed to experiment as needed without worrying about possible damage, said Sgt. 1st Class Mitchell Poalson.
And if the hunter-killer platoon finds a target with its Parrot drone, it can use artificial intelligence software dubbed Sentinel AI to recommend how best to angle a cannon to take it out. The new tech reduces the time it takes to destroy a target from as many as eight minutes to “less than a minute,” said Capt. Charlie O’Hagan, commander of the MFRC.
Each platoon also carries a guidance station for the Switchblade 600, a loitering munition capable of taking out tanks, and includes one soldier trained to fly a Switchblade. The actual Switchblades are stored back at the brigade operations center, to be launched in the direction of the target before the hunter-killer platoon takes control of the drone for the final phase.
The MFRC is also reducing the time it takes to attack a target, thanks to its Switchblades. Typically, if a reconnaissance unit sees an enemy force, it must radio headquarters and wait for the staff to make a decision about how to proceed. With the Switchblade, the strike approval process is simplified for high-payoff targets—like Geronimo’s vehicle commander—said 1st Lt. Noah Paffenroth, commander of another MFRC platoon.
Geronimo also has drones—but the platoon is ready for those, too. Each platoon comes equipped with a Dronebuster jamming rifle and Bal Chatri drone detector.
Electronic warfare capabilities round out the picture, with platoons toting the Beast+ backpack, which can pick up the location of radars.
Some of the gear is homemade: Paffenroth showed off small bags containing multiple Raspberry Pi micro computers, each no bigger than a few inches. The computers mimic the nodes of a command post, from the printer to the projector. Paffenroth said the plan was to hang them in trees and then leave, luring Geronimo to target them and reveal their gun positions.
The unit’s RAS platoon has even more advanced capabilities. The platoon fields the C100 drone as a drone bomber, as well as the SMET ground robot, the STEED powered wheelbarrow, and more counter-drone technology.
Knitting all of the MFRC’s capabilities together is a host of new command and control gear. Each senior platoon officer and noncommissioned officer carries a chest-mounted Android phone loaded with the Tactical Assault Kit (TAK), an open-source mapping software that allows soldiers to mark their position and enemies, track friendly air support, and communicate by voice or text.
The platoons are also equipped with MUOS satellite radio terminals, which can be run through TAK, as well as more traditional radio formats like HF.
Toting all this around is the Army’s new Infantry Squad Vehicle, a squat, Mad-Max-esque truck based on the Chevrolet Colorado. The vehicle’s storage space means that recon units, which formerly could only be out for three days, can now travel for as long as six days, said Sgt. David Warren.
Learning pains
Still, the new equipment is not without challenges.
Soldiers must be cautious with the TAK system, because running it requires using a WiFi puck, whose signal can be detected. Consequently, units try to use them sparingly during dedicated communications windows.
The new gear can also require frequent trouble-shooting that goes far beyond the training offered to infantrymen, said Paffenroth. Electronic warfare soldiers fare better with this work, meanwhile, but may struggle with the physical fitness required for twenty-four hour raids deep behind enemy lines. The Army could wait for the technology to be perfected — but it risks being “five years behind” if it does so, Paffenroth said.
And while a TAK-integrated app should allow the MFRC to stream footage from Skydio drones directly to commanders or to artillery units, the unit had yet to get it to work, Paffenroth said. Ukrainian units do this easily by using Chinese-made DJI drones in conjunction with Google Meet—an option not available to U.S. troops.
The Dronebuster also had problem, soldiers said: Unless the drone was close and moving slowly, the relatively narrow jamming cone sent out by the jammer was not sufficient to take them out.
Army safety regulations also occasionally got in the way of testing. Soldiers were not allowed to fly their drones when helicopters were in the air, even if they had a clear line of sight to the drone. So the first two days of the exercise, as Chinooks and Apache helicopters filled the sky, soldiers had little opportunity to fly their drones.
However, even a short flight could bring big rewards. Just one day in, Hendrick’s platoon got a drone airborne and spotted three of Geronimo’s artillery pieces in a nearby field.
They then called up to their brigade headquarters, which coordinated a simulated strike from a High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, destroying all three cannons, O’Hagan said.
In fact, the brigade destroyed 29 pieces of Geronimo’s equipment within a day of landing its forces, O’Hagan said. Every single one of those targets was directed by small drones, and was conducted using simulated indirect fire, like artillery.
“Gone are the days of having to get close and put a soldier right in harm's way,” O’Hagan said. “We want to leverage this equipment to reduce risk to force.”
defenseone.com · by Sam Skove
3. China Has Built the Strongest Military in the Indo-Pacific
An important graphic at the link that compares actual and estimated Chinese defense spending versus US INDOPACIFIC allies and others (India, Indonesia, Singapore - and Thailand??? Thailand is one of the 5 treaty allies in the Asia-{Acfoco but the chart lists it as an "other."
Excerpts:
Additionally, Beijing’s budgetary advantage over its neighbors highlights the crucial role of U.S. alliances in the Indo-Pacific. Tremendous progress has been made in the last year, including increased dialogue with India, Japan, and Australia through the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, the AUKUS submarine deal with the U.K. and Australia, and new base access agreements and security cooperation with the Philippines. As AEI’s Zack Cooper writes, further progress remains to continue to demonstrate Washington’s commitment to security ties with potential partners throughout South and Southeast Asia.
The White House’s 2025 defense budget request does little to rectify this, with budget caps limiting defense spending to a one percent increase and forcing the services to make difficult decisions and sacrifice increased capacity for readiness.
Senate lawmakers responded accordingly and worked to rectify this budgetary shortfall with a $21 billion defense boost in their defense appropriations bill for next year. This includes crucial funding to restore deterrence in Asia, including an $8 billion increase over the President’s request in procurement, which includes funding for a new destroyer, advanced procurement for amphibious warships, expanded production of critical munitions across the services, and key investments in base defenses throughout the Indo-Pacific.
The Senate’s additions are important restorative steps to improve the trendlines increasingly turning away from America, but more work must be done to ensure both chambers of Congress can push through this crucial bout of spending. If Washington wants to close the yawning gap between our military’s strategy and resourcing, it must provide more resources to bolster flagging conventional American deterrence in Asia.
China Has Built the Strongest Military in the Indo-Pacific
By Mackenzie Eaglen
August 22, 2024
https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2024/08/22/china_has_built_the_strongest_military_in_the_indo-pacific_1053388.html?mc_cid=e678ec3c9b&mc_eid=70bf478f36&utm
Since the end of the Second World War, the U.S. has been the strongest military power in the Indo-Pacific. However, China’s rapid military growth in the Indo-Pacific is tipping the scales in regional strength. Too often, Chinese and U.S. military power is compared on a global scale, where the U.S. military, equipped and trained to project power across the planet, has the clear advantage.
But the military balance in Asia is becoming less clear. China has increasingly demonstrated its ability to build modern military capabilities at size and scale, and the ability to project that power regionally.
These shifting scales should be setting off alarm bells in Washington. The latest iteration of the Pentagon’s annual report to Congress on the Chinese military has stated that the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is evolving its capabilities and concepts to strengthen their ability to “fight and win wars” against the United States. House China Committee Chairman Rep. John Moolenaar (R-MI) has said that China “has enough weapons to overwhelm our air and missile defenses” that protect U.S. bases in the Pacific.
A quick examination of regional military spending helps one better understand the shifting balance of military power in the Indo-Pacific. Despite Beijing’s publically reported topline of $229 billion in 2022, new research suggests China’s real level of military spending was around $711 billion—nearly equal to the U.S. defense budget that same year.
Peer-level military spending with the United States should already be cause for concern, but the advantage is even starker when compared to China’s direct neighbors in Asia.
AEI
At $711 billion, Beijing outspends major U.S. allies combined by five-to-one, and the broader significant spenders by a factor of three-to-one. These investments in combat power are manifesting as rapid growth in the size and strength of China’s armed forces. In 2017, Xi Jinping stated he wanted to transform the PLA into a “world class military” by the end of 2049—and his investments seem to be paying off.
China now fields the largest army, navy and ground-based rocket force in the world. Beijing has also been hard at work to build a sophisticated hypersonic missile arsenal and to triple its nuclear arsenal by 2030.
By comparison, while China rapidly builds military capacity, the U.S. military is rapidly shrinking across the services. In President Biden’s current budget request, the Army will be reduced to just 442,300 active duty soldiers, the smallest it has been since 1940. The U.S. Navy is half the size it was 40 years ago, and set to continue to shrink down to just 294 ships in 2030. At the same time, China’s fleet is expected to grow to 425 ships. Similarly, the U.S. Air Force is nearing the smallest it’s been since the end of WWII, as retirement of aging aircraft outpaces the purchase of new replacements. Meanwhile, China is rapidly modernizing its Air Force with domestically produced aircraft, such as the J-20 stealth fighter developed from stolen American technology.
Furthermore, as a global power and to meet the needs of the National Defense Strategy, the U.S. military must balance priorities in the Indo-Pacific with those elsewhere, such as deterring Iran, countering Russian aggression, and shoring up allied commitments. Therefore, only a fraction of American military power is in the Pacific at any given time. While the U.S. military on the whole outmatches the Chinese military, China has the luxury of focusing solely on its neighborhood with much narrower objectives that give its forces far more bang for the proverbial buck.
Beijing knows this and can sense the scales are shifting, evidenced by its increasingly bold attempts to use force against American allies like the Philippines, Japan and Australia. While Washington has ostensibly shifted assets to Asia to counter Chinese aggression, it has been slow and uneven. Recent wars against our allies in Europe and the Middle East should remind Washington that shifting forces while simultaneously shrinking the force results in undeterred adversaries and violent tradeoffs.
Additionally, Beijing’s budgetary advantage over its neighbors highlights the crucial role of U.S. alliances in the Indo-Pacific. Tremendous progress has been made in the last year, including increased dialogue with India, Japan, and Australia through the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, the AUKUS submarine deal with the U.K. and Australia, and new base access agreements and security cooperation with the Philippines. As AEI’s Zack Cooper writes, further progress remains to continue to demonstrate Washington’s commitment to security ties with potential partners throughout South and Southeast Asia.
The White House’s 2025 defense budget request does little to rectify this, with budget caps limiting defense spending to a one percent increase and forcing the services to make difficult decisions and sacrifice increased capacity for readiness.
Senate lawmakers responded accordingly and worked to rectify this budgetary shortfall with a $21 billion defense boost in their defense appropriations bill for next year. This includes crucial funding to restore deterrence in Asia, including an $8 billion increase over the President’s request in procurement, which includes funding for a new destroyer, advanced procurement for amphibious warships, expanded production of critical munitions across the services, and key investments in base defenses throughout the Indo-Pacific.
The Senate’s additions are important restorative steps to improve the trendlines increasingly turning away from America, but more work must be done to ensure both chambers of Congress can push through this crucial bout of spending. If Washington wants to close the yawning gap between our military’s strategy and resourcing, it must provide more resources to bolster flagging conventional American deterrence in Asia.
Mackenzie Eaglen is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and has previously worked in Congress, the Department of Defense, and on three previous national defense strategy commissions.
4. US warship sails through sensitive Taiwan Strait
US warship sails through sensitive Taiwan Strait
22 Aug 2024 05:19PM
channelnewsasia.com
TAIPEI: A United States warship sailed through a sensitive waterway separating Taiwan from China on Thursday (Aug 22), the US Navy said, as a way to demonstrate Washington's "commitment to upholding freedom of navigation".
China claims Taiwan as part of its territory, and has in recent years upped military pressures by sending in increasing numbers of fighter jets, drones and naval vessels around the island.
Thursday's transit of the 180km Taiwan Strait comes as the US and its allies have increased crossings to reinforce its status as an international waterway, angering Beijing.
The voyage by the Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Ralph Johnson showed Washington's "commitment to upholding freedom of navigation for all nations as a principle", the US Navy's Seventh Fleet said in a statement on Thursday.
"No member of the international community should be intimidated or coerced into giving up their rights and freedoms."
Taiwan's defence ministry confirmed that the warship sailed south to north, and that "no anomaly was detected in our surroundings".
Beijing's People's Liberation Army dismissed the transit as "a public hype" and said its Eastern Theatre Command "organised naval and air forces to tail and stand guard against the US ship's passage throughout the entire process".
Chinese troops "are on constant high alert to resolutely defend national sovereignty," it said in a statement.
A Canadian Halifax-class frigate conducted last month "a routine transit through the Taiwan Strait", a move condemned by the Chinese military
Beijing has said it would never renounce the use of force to bring Taiwan under its control, with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in recent years upping the rhetoric of "unification" being "inevitable".
In response, Taiwan has strengthened economic and political ties with its partners - most notably the US, its biggest weapons provider - while increasing its defence budget.
On Thursday, the island's cabinet approved a record-high defence budget of NT$647 billion (US$20.2 billion) for next year, an increase of 6 per cent compared to 2024.
President Lai Ching-te said this month that the budget reflected Taiwan's "determination to improve our self-defense capabilities ... to ensure peace and prosperity".
The amount would still need to be scrutinised and approved by Taiwan's fractious parliament, where Lai's Democratic Progressive Party no longer holds a majority.
Source: AFP/dy
5. Ukraine's Invasion of Kursk by Sir Lawrence Freedman
Let's not be strategically naive.
Only the strategically naïve would have expected instant results from an initiative such as this. The paper continued its coverage on 19 August with the headline: ‘Ukraine Says Its Incursion Will Bring Peace. Putin’s Plans May Differ.’ It reported ‘Russians who know Mr. Putin expect him to lash out in response, believing that his military has the upper hand in personnel and weaponry.’ The issue, however, is not whether Putin thinks he has the upper hand but whether in practice he still does, or at least to the extent assumed.
The assumption that this is still the case explains why, despite Ukraine’s initiative, the old narrative has yet to be dislodged. This can be seen in this Symposium. Ivan Eland: ‘Ukraine risks being surrounded by superior forces’. Mark Episkopos: ‘unlikely to yield any strategic benefits for Ukraine and will demand a massive sustained investment of troops and equipment that may weaken Ukrainian defenses.’ Lyle Goldstein: ‘legitimate questions can be asked regarding the wisdom of the new offensive.’ Sumantra Maitra, it might ‘embolden the hardliners in the Russian government, and dissuade Putin from pushing for any negotiations for peace.’ Stephen Walt, ‘a sideshow’ which ‘ will not affect the outcome of the war.’ And the inimitable John Mearsheimer, ‘a major strategic blunder, which will accelerate [Ukraine’s] defeat’. He added, without evidence, that
‘Moscow quickly brought massive airpower to bear against the advancing Ukrainian troops, who were in the open and easy to strike. Unsurprisingly, the attacking forces lost many soldiers and a huge proportion of their equipment.’
There is another view (see for example Nataliya Gumenyuk in Foreign Affairs) that the Ukrainian strategy of attrition has been working, that Russia has used up so much manpower and firepower that it lacks the reserves to respond nimbly to this latest Ukrainian challenge, that its logistics are stretched. If (and this is a big ‘if’) the Ukrainian offensive can be sustained for weeks, even months, and in particular if it obliges Russia to devote increasing efforts to expelling the intruders, then we may see a corresponding shift in Russia’s strategic calculations and the prevailing narratives surrounding the war.
Ukraine's Invasion of Kursk
https://samf.substack.com/p/ukraines-invasion-of-kursk?r=7i07&utm
Changing the narrative
Lawrence Freedman
Aug 21, 2024
Ukraine’s invasion of Russia provides a salutary lesson for pundits, including me. However diligent we are in trying to follow events, and however good we may be in explaining what has already happened and drawing conclusions for the future, our appreciation of a developing situation is unavoidably circumscribed. We tend to respond to disruptive moves such as this in ways that reflect our established views.
Those convinced that Ukraine can turn the tide of war see the attack on Kursk as an exciting indication that at last this may be happening; those who believe that Russia is bound to prevail insist that this is a monumental blunder that will hasten Ukraine’s inevitable defeat. The positive can note the boost to Ukrainian morale and compare favourably the amount of Russian territory acquired by Ukraine in a matter of days with the amount of Ukrainian territory captured by Russia at huge cost over months. The negative warn about the vulnerability of the soldiers now in exposed positions in Kursk while those defending tenuous positions in Donetsk are denied desperately needed reinforcements.
After two and a half years of war we should all be wary by now of coming to quick judgements. This is not because we dare not comment until this operation has run its course. There are still things that are worth noting about what has already happened. It is more the need to respect the dialectics of war, the duel between two opposing sides, so that ends shift according to available means. In long-standing and intense conflicts, such as that between Russia and Ukraine, particular moves are rarely decisive.
Whatever the immediate objectives, this offensive works for Ukraine if it shifts the dynamic of the war in its favour. Rather than offer predictions the task for now is to set out the ways in which this might happen and how it might be thwarted.
A Bleak Narrative
What was the problem the Ukrainian leadership hoped to solve or at least ease by this move?
After last year’s Ukrainian offensive petered out, Russia seized the military initiative. Although, for the effort expended and levels of casualties, Russia’s achievements have been limited, there was little confidence that should Ukraine get another chance to mount its own offensive it would do much better. The war to date has shown how both sides find it difficult to get through well-defended positions. So long as Ukraine was outgunned and outmanned, and unable to manage complex land operations on scale, then it was hard to see how they could liberate more occupied territory.
Another cause of this negativity was the loss of confidence in the ability of Kyiv to make sensible strategic decisions. Last year’s offensive involved elementary mistakes, keeping forces divided and signalling in advance where and how they would move against areas of enemy strength in Zaporizhzhia. Too much hope was placed in brand new armoured vehicles and freshly trained troops and not enough respect shown to Russia’s well-constructed defensive lines.
Without a successful offensive no quick route to a Ukrainian victory could be identified. But the country seemed unprepared for a long haul, certainly not when compared with Russia’s capacity to supply men to the front, and an economy on a war footing. During the early months of 2024 Ukraine’s mobilisation bill was stuck in parliamentary wrangling while the next tranches of American assistance was stuck in Congressional wrangling. Internationally the prospect of a prolonged deadlock dented support for the Ukrainian cause. In the US, the logjam was only broken when Speaker Mike Johnson realised that if he held up the supplemental bill much longer in the House of Representatives his legacy might not be prolonged deadlock but a Russian victory.
For all of 2024 Ukrainian forces have been stuck on the defensive, struggling to hold back constant Russian assaults on their positions, obliged to concede ground even as they imposed enormous costs on the invaders. Meanwhile Ukrainian infrastructure was getting battered, leading to regular blackouts, while hits on residential areas caused a steady stream of casualties. Ukraine could point to real achievements – innovations in drone warfare, targeting the Black Sea Fleet, Russian assets in Crimea, and oil refineries. There was still a plausible strategy involving hurting Russia and denying it more gains, hoping that eventually the Kremlin would recognise Ukraine’s resilience and determination and seek a negotiated conclusion on terms other than Kyiv’s total capitulation. But there was no obvious way to force Russia to back down.
The consensus view was that Ukraine should not attempt a new offensive until it had mobilised and trained more men, replenished its ammunition stocks, and inflicted yet more attrition on Russian forces. While Moscow might always be able to find supplies of people their stocks of armoured vehicles and ammunition pieces were dwindling so 2025 would be the better option. Until then attrition was the best strategy. This is what I wrote in May:
‘For want of better alternatives, a different Ukrainian strategy has had to be adopted to last year’s. The previous strategy was focused on land offensives to take territory and ended in disappointment. Trying the same thing again could well be disastrous until manpower shortages are eased and new troops have had proper training.’
This required patience. Gradually the balance of power could shift in Ukraine’s favour and then there would be a chance to seize back the initiative. Yet that still required resisting Russia’s offensive. As the Russians continued to edge forward into Donetsk over the summer, many urged Ukraine to bow to the inevitable and accept that it would never be able to regain what had already been lost in the face of Russia’s overwhelming might. Better to end the bloodshed and prepare concessions for a negotiated settlement. If, as seemed very likely until a month ago, Donald Trump returned to the White House, the threat of a loss of American support might leave Kyiv with little choice but to go along with Trump’s very own peace plan.
The prevailing narrative therefore was bleak. The story was one of Ukraine caught up in a relentless, remorseless conflict with a more powerful neighbour that was unlikely to pull back until it was offered major concessions. This narrative depressed both Ukrainian morale and international support. This was the problem Ukraine needed to solve, to shift the narrative to a more positive story, one that showed that the Ukrainian army could still take effective initiatives.
Surprise
There have been incursions into Russian territory but these have been mounted by Ukrainian-sponsored rebel groups (Russian Volunteer Corps and the Freedom of Russia Legion) and were largely raids, perhaps gaining some intelligence on Russian defences but largely for show. If the intention was to seize and hold territory then a substantial force was required and there could be no pretending that this was a rebel Russian initiative.
On 10 May 2024 Russian forces launched an unexpected offensive from Belgorod into Kharkiv Oblast. This seemed to confirm the general proposition that it was difficult to achieve any breakthrough on land, even with a modicum of surprise. Despite Putin’s claim that the aim was to establish a buffer zone well into Ukrainian territory, the Ukrainians managed to push the attacking force back to the border. Yet this action still demonstrated that the border could be crossed and defenders caught unawares. Something more than a raid that could yield significant gains if a spot could be found that was lightly defended, from where it would be possible to penetrate rapidly and deeply into Russian territory. A number of possible entry points were looked at before deciding on Kharkiv.
Any move into Russia required surprise. How was this achieved?
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The plan was largely hatched by Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrsky, in consultation with President Zelensky. But the secret was tightly held even amongst Ukraine’s elite. According to the Economist, Syrsky:
kept his plans under wraps, sharing them only with a tight group of generals and security officials. He spoke to the president on a one-on-one basis, without his staff. The army’s intelligence did much of the reconnaissance, rather than leaving it to HUR, Ukraine’s military intelligence agency, which was included only at a late stage.
- The US was not consulted because Ukraine did not want to be told it must not go ahead. This betrays Kyiv’s frustration with the Biden Administration’s persistent anxieties about provoking Moscow. There would also have been concerns about leaks from anonymous officials to the New York Times or Washington Post.
- Senior commanders were given little notice of what was planned and the key units were pulled together only a few days before the operation. Orders were given as late as possible.
- A cover story was developed about Ukraine fearing a Russian move into Sumy Oblast. If the Russians noticed a reserve force being assembled they could assume it was for defensive purposes, to block such a move.
- To achieve stealth, drones provided the equivalent of air cover while Ukrainian surveillance and communications would be blocked by heavy jamming. Summer foliage was used to hide the movement of forces into the border area as much as possible.
- As the operation got underway there would be no claims and boasts but continuing and complete silence.
Even then Kyiv could not be sure that the Russians would not realise that something big was being prepared. Surprise was helped by a complacent enemy. Although Russian intelligence picked up evidence of greater Ukrainian activity in the border region and passed this up the command chain, once it reached General Gerasimov the possibility that something big was being planned was dismissed.
One reason for this may have been confidence that the Russian offensive in Donetsk was close to a breakthrough in the direction of Pokrovsky. From a Russian, and indeed arguably also from a Ukrainian, perspective this was an odd time for Kyiv to authorise a major operation away from an intense and ongoing battle. If the effort failed then the Ukrainian’s position would be far worse because they would have used up precious reserves on a futile adventure when there was still vital defensive work to be done. The extent of the gamble may have helped with surprise. The timing made such an operation unlikely because it was so high-risk.
The initial incursion on 6 August involved a strike force of some 2,000 men, including the elite 80th and the 82nd Air Assault Brigades. Troops moved forward in American Stryker and German Marder armoured fighting vehicles. The attack went according to plan. A gap was found in the Russian defences. Once the minefields were navigated Russian defenders were engaged. Units moved quickly before the Russians fully appreciated what was going on. Once the breakthrough was achieved more units pushed into Russia, reaching numbers over 10,000, with their own artillery pieces. Because of Russia’s mini-Kharkiv offensive, the Biden Administration had reluctantly agreed that US HIMARS could be used against targets on Russian soil for defensive purposes. One advantage of not telling the Americans what they were up to was that they could interpret the offensives as fitting within the new guidelines for HIMARS without having to argue the point with Washington.
One might have expected the Ukrainian forces to be vulnerable to Russian air strikes. Yet so far there have been relatively few. The Russians have lost a couple of attack helicopters and an Su-34 jet. In one video doing the rounds Russian helicopter gunships are blowing up a column of trucks - soon revealed to be Russian. Russian artillery has also so far been less than intensive than in other sectors, possibly because there were insufficient drones to identify targets.
Here are some observations from Kyiv Post journalist Stefan Korshak, based on conversations with those engaged in the operation, making comparisons with the 2023 offensive. He describes an army learning from its mistakes. The Ukrainians got special forces units into the Russian rear area before the main incursion. They were able to ambush Russian reinforcements. During the first days, between 50-100 Russian reconnaissance drones were taken out either by jamming or by crashing FPV drones into them, leaving the Russians operationally blinded.
More than a week later, judging by the frantic driving about and blame gaming and limp fire support I am seeing, it looks very much like the Russian army still has a very poor picture of where the Ukrainians are and what they’re doing.
Ukrainian combat engineers overcame Russian trenches, bunkers, minefields and so forth. Then standard tactics were employed effectively. As a result, for the first time, Ukrainian forces broke the morale of company-sized Russian combat units leading to large numbers of troops surrendering.
‘They found isolated Russian formations, pushed combat units around them to surround them, cut communications, seeded news cycles with reports calculated to jam up roads rearward with civilians refugees, picked on units that didn’t have the stuff to shoot back and flattened their positions with artillery, killed off leaders where possible, and then approached those isolated units and asked them if they really thought fighting on made sense.’
Here is a former Russian commander, who had participated in the full-scale invasion but refused to continue fighting, largely confirming this account. (Thanks to @ChrisO_wiki). He reports that the conscripts surrendered because they did not know how to fight and lacked the necessary weapons, adding that ‘the defensive positions weren’t prepared because the allocated money was clearly stolen. There were no obstacles — just drive forward.’ Russian operational security was poor. The media filmed reinforcements to demonstrate that the situation was being brought under control. The result was that a convoy of the 44th Corps of the Leningrad Military District near Ryisk was obliterated in a HIMARS strike.
And the very fact that they drove in a convoy! At least on the front line, after some time and massive losses, they figured out that driving in a convoy is suicide. But those sitting here still drive in convoys and think they’re going to a parade. The AFU has drones, has rockets — what kind of fucking idiot would lead a convoy in this case, and one that’s even being filmed for the news. That’s why the guys died, without even getting there.
Changing the Narrative
At first most information about what was going on came from Russian military bloggers. All that was known was that Ukrainian forces were in the Kursk region and some equipment had been lost during the incursion. This shaped many early reactions in the analytical community, including in Ukraine. The concern was that this was largely a raid, an in-and-out operation, that might irritate Russia but not change anything fundamental. Given the urgent need to reinforce positions in Donetsk it was taken as evidence of misplaced priorities, more performative than substantive. As a public relations exercise it might bring a bit of relief, but any feel-good factor could only be fleeting.
Three factors changed the perception of these events. The first was that this was clearly not a raid but a proper invasion involving thousands rather than hundreds of men. The aim was not hit-and-run but to take territory and face Russia with a new operational challenge. Second, it was well planned and implemented. The mistakes of 2023 were not being repeated. Third, it was successful and has continued to progress. By 20 August Ukrainian forces had advanced 28-35 kilometres into Kursk and taken control of over 1100 square kilometres including 93 settlements. The border town of Sudzha is under firm Ukrainian control. Over 121,000 civilians have been evacuated from the Kursk region
As it was established that this was a serious enterprise the issue became one of Ukrainian objectives, in addition to boosting the ‘exchange fund’ of prisoners, which would help get Ukrainian POWS released, and national morale. Politically there was an obvious asymmetry: Russia sought to conquer Ukraine but Ukraine did not seek to conquer Russia. Any territory taken and held could only be for later bargaining purposes. President Zelensky described it as a blow for peace, a means of persuading Putin to back away from his maximum demands. This, he has also said requires that Ukrainian forces hold on to some of the territory they have taken - a ‘buffer zone’ of as yet indeterminate size. Not only might this have value in later negotiations it could also form a base for further operations inside Russia. This meant establishing a logistics hub, with medical and repair facilities, inside Russia.
The situation is complex, in a way well described by Mick Ryan:
Both sides are now undertaking two concurrent major campaigns that are consuming large quantities or manpower (especially for the Russians), munitions and supporting arms such as EW, drones, logistics and air defence. While both might be able to surge their forces for short periods, it is unclear if the Ukrainians or Russians can sustain such an approach for months at a time. One side or the other will have to make a difficult choice about their priorities and significantly reduce their resourcing for one of their major campaigns.
The stronger Ukraine’s position in the Kursk sector the greater the effort required by Russian forces to dislodge them. Part of Ukraine’s calculation was that this would lead Russia to move some of its forces out of Ukraine to retake the lost territory. If this happened it could be one of the most important benefits of the operation. This process may have started but not yet in numbers and not yet from the main lines of the Russian offensive. Complete control of the Donetsk Oblast, which has already been annexed, is a key Russian objective, so it would have been surprising if this had been abandoned. here the campaign has been directed against the towns of Pokrovsk and Toretsk which, if taken, would threaten the Kramatorsk/Slavyansk agglomeration.
Recent fighting has been around the settlement of Niu-York which the Russians say that have taken, although Ukraine claims it is still contested. Interestingly the Kyiv-based Centre for Defence Studies, while reporting on the continued intensity of the fighting and many small Russian gains, nonetheless claims that: ’Given the level of losses, the enemy is unlikely to capture Pokrovsk.’ Others are less sure, and problems with shortages of all kinds and command problems are still being reported from the Ukrainian side. But it has been the case for some time that even when the Russians do take some long-sought objective they lack the combat power to exploit any breakthrough. It may be difficult for the Ukrainians to prevent Russian gains, but that may not matter so long as their defensive lines do not collapse completely. If they cannot make rapid progress the strategic dilemma for Russia will be accentuated.
Has the Narrative Changed?
The offensive is not yet over. Ukrainian forces may not be moving with the speed of the first week but they are still moving. There is now less talk of an attempt to get to the Kursk nuclear power plant (perhaps with an objective of getting Russia to hand back the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant) let alone to the city of Kursk. These would be too much of a stretch, as the forward positions would then require long supply lines. Instead Ukraine seems to be steadily expanding its areas of control. By destroying bridges over the Seyn River it has left large numbers of Russian troops trapped without support.
Russian sources are now fretting about Ukrainian initiatives elsewhere. There was at least one probing action by Ukraine into Belgorod on 11 August, though this time without the benefit of surprise so it did not get very far. If Russian forces are taken from defensive positions in Zaporizhzhia they might become vulnerable to a resumed offensive, which in terms of Kyiv’s political objectives would make much more sense.
Meanwhile Ukraine’s long-range drone strikes have become more effective. On 9 August Ukrainian drones hit Lipetsk air base, about 140 miles northeast of Kursk, taking out its ammunition dump and a warehouse containing hundreds of glide bombs. Continuing the campaign against oil depots and refineries, an extremely damaging attack took place on a fuel depot in Proletarsk in Rostov Oblast which burned for days. On early Wednesday morning drones attacked targets in a number of Russia cities, including Moscow. Russia claimed that all 45 drones sent had been shot down: Ukraine claimed that an air defence system in the Rostov region had been taken out in a missile strike.
Putin’s Response
Unexpected setbacks such as the Kursk offensive poses problems for Vladimir Putin, who always wishes to show that he is in control of events, and for his subordinates, who must reassure him that he really is. The initial response was that the invasion was small and would soon be crushed. As an ‘invasion’ sounded too serious it was spoken about as terrorism or a provocation or just ‘a situation.’
Early attempts to play it down became harder as military bloggers reported on Ukrainian gains and civilians were evacuated, with complaints from those left behind. Instead of using the threat to mobilise support for the war and add urgency to recruitment Moscow’s tendency is still to play it down. Putin’s displeasure was evident when shown on TV discussing the situation with his senior officials. As always in a crisis he puts people he can trust in charge, whatever their competence – in this case his former bodyguard and trusted loyalist, Alexei Dyumin. As this is an interior matter the FSB have a big role, but it is the military that will have to decide about what forces can be used - and how - to push the Ukrainians out.
The Wall Street Journal reports that one of the first acts of Col.Gen. Alexander Lapin, when appointed this spring to oversee security in the Kursk Oblast, was to dismantle a council, combining military officers with local and regional security officials, tasked with protecting the region. His view was that ‘the military alone had the strength and the resources to protect Russia’s border.’ Whether keeping this council in place would have made much difference there is now no local body coordinating the response. NATO’s top general, Christopher Cavoli is quoted as observing that:
‘Russia is still pulling together its reaction to this incursion by Ukraine. There has been a fairly slow and scattered reaction to it. Part of that is because it wouldn’t exactly be clear who’s in charge.’
One report says that Russia has told its propagandists to convince Russians that the presence of Ukrainians on their territory is the ‘new normal.’ But yet another tells of a demand by Putin that the Ukrainians be expelled by 1 October and without significant withdrawals from the forces fighting inside Ukraine. That timetable is certainly optimistic. If Ukrainian forces are able to dig in and keep the area of operations under close surveillance the task will not be simple. Former Russian general and current parliamentarian Andrey Gurulev observed on state-run television: ‘We must look at this situation with sobriety. We won’t be able to push them out quickly.’
There are also a couple of things that are not happening which will complicate the Russian narrative about the war. The first is that there has not been – as yet – evidence of local resistance, in contrast to the Ukrainian responses to Russia’s invasion. In addition, Ukrainian forces are behaving themselves and looking after the left-behind civilians, undermining propaganda claims of depraved neo-nazis torturing and murdering anyone who spoke the Russian language. Second, Russia has not invoked Article 4 of the Russian-led CSTO Collective Security Treaty, according to which member states are supposed to ‘immediately provide’ a victim of aggression with ‘the necessary help, including military one.’
Negotiations
The Washington Post reported that the Ukrainian initiative had somehow dashed hopes for a possible deal that had not previously been known to be on the cards.
A while ago Ukraine set up its own peace process. This began with a conference in Switzerland and was the intended to move onto specific areas, one of which was energy security and was to be hosted by Qatar. The suggestion in the Post story was that Russia might participate with a deal that would end attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure and the Russian oil industry. This would certainly suit Ukraine but no evidence was provided to suggest that this deal was close or that the Russians would have turned up even to an on-line conversation. That this was a lost opportunity has now been denied by the Russians.
Putin has only shown interest in a peace process based on Russia having the upper hand so that it can dictate terms. It is therefore not surprising that he does not see recent developments as supporting his idea of a peace process. He can no longer simply insist, for example, that any cease fire must take account of the territorial realities.
Compared with the discussion of Russia’s May mini-offensive into Kharkiv, which led to very little yet was discussed in western media as if this was another nail in Ukraine’s coffin, the inclination with Ukraine’s offensive has been to play it down. Here is a typically grudging observation from the New York Times comment pages from 12 August:
‘The offensive is intended to force Russia to divert troops from a grinding fight in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region, which has not happened so far, and to gain leverage for peace talks, though none are scheduled.’
Only the strategically naïve would have expected instant results from an initiative such as this. The paper continued its coverage on 19 August with the headline: ‘Ukraine Says Its Incursion Will Bring Peace. Putin’s Plans May Differ.’ It reported ‘Russians who know Mr. Putin expect him to lash out in response, believing that his military has the upper hand in personnel and weaponry.’ The issue, however, is not whether Putin thinks he has the upper hand but whether in practice he still does, or at least to the extent assumed.
The assumption that this is still the case explains why, despite Ukraine’s initiative, the old narrative has yet to be dislodged. This can be seen in this Symposium. Ivan Eland: ‘Ukraine risks being surrounded by superior forces’. Mark Episkopos: ‘unlikely to yield any strategic benefits for Ukraine and will demand a massive sustained investment of troops and equipment that may weaken Ukrainian defenses.’ Lyle Goldstein: ‘legitimate questions can be asked regarding the wisdom of the new offensive.’ Sumantra Maitra, it might ‘embolden the hardliners in the Russian government, and dissuade Putin from pushing for any negotiations for peace.’ Stephen Walt, ‘a sideshow’ which ‘ will not affect the outcome of the war.’ And the inimitable John Mearsheimer, ‘a major strategic blunder, which will accelerate [Ukraine’s] defeat’. He added, without evidence, that
‘Moscow quickly brought massive airpower to bear against the advancing Ukrainian troops, who were in the open and easy to strike. Unsurprisingly, the attacking forces lost many soldiers and a huge proportion of their equipment.’
There is another view (see for example Nataliya Gumenyuk in Foreign Affairs) that the Ukrainian strategy of attrition has been working, that Russia has used up so much manpower and firepower that it lacks the reserves to respond nimbly to this latest Ukrainian challenge, that its logistics are stretched. If (and this is a big ‘if’) the Ukrainian offensive can be sustained for weeks, even months, and in particular if it obliges Russia to devote increasing efforts to expelling the intruders, then we may see a corresponding shift in Russia’s strategic calculations and the prevailing narratives surrounding the war.
6. Why Everyone’s Suddenly Talking About Iranian Election Hacking
Excerpts:
Officials and experts say the U.S. government has learned from the missteps of previous elections, particularly 2016, and is better prepared to defend this November’s election from cyber threats than it has ever been. Part of that is the shift to publicly calling out adversaries and their activities much earlier in the process and adopting a form of sunlight-as-best-disinfectant strategy, like the ODNI, FBI, and CISA did this week with Iran.
“It’s very hard to counter that narrative once it gets into the American psyche and our citizens’ spheres of influence,” Frost said. “But I do see the focus and calling out [of] this behavior. … That is what we’re seeing at a much faster pace, and I give the current intel community a lot of props for doing that early.”
But Wilde warned that while U.S. officials are “unquestionably” more prepared this time around, they also now need to be careful about showing their work without inciting panic about elections being compromised. “The tightrope they now have to walk is [being] helpful without creating the very kind of panic that might itself undermine confidence in the election,” he said, adding that it’s also important to draw distinctions among hack-and-leak operations that have become “a new normal” for political campaigns, election influence efforts that can sometimes be hard to legally define, and actual efforts to interfere with the ballot box itself.
“I think the most consistent thing from all of them is how much it’s been a lot of just entrepreneurialism and experimental spaghetti-against-the-wall tactics to kind of just see what works,” Wilde said. “The U.S. and everyone has to be careful not to inadvertently incentivize this activity by making too big a deal out of it, and luckily I think we’ve done a lot better this go-round than we did in 2016.”
Why Everyone’s Suddenly Talking About Iranian Election Hacking
America’s Middle Eastern adversary is occupying an arena typically dominated by Russia and China.
By Rishi Iyengar
Foreign Policy · by Rishi Iyengar
August 21, 2024, 2:15 PM
A drawing of Kamala Harris and Donald Trump overlapping with the words "Election 2024"
Stay informed with FP’s news and analysis as the United States prepares to vote.
As November’s U.S. presidential election draws closer and the campaigns of former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris kick into high gear, so have efforts by hackers from Washington’s adversaries aimed at disrupting or influencing the vote. One adversary in particular is playing an increasingly prominent role: Iran.
As November’s U.S. presidential election draws closer and the campaigns of former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris kick into high gear, so have efforts by hackers from Washington’s adversaries aimed at disrupting or influencing the vote. One adversary in particular is playing an increasingly prominent role: Iran.
Iranian state actors have stepped up their efforts to interfere in this year’s election through online disinformation and influence operations as well as cyberattacks on both presidential campaigns, three U.S. agencies—the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA)—warned in a joint statement on Monday.
They’re not the only ones sounding the alarm. In the past three weeks alone, current and former intelligence officials as well as cyber threat researchers from Microsoft and Google have shared a growing body of evidence of Iran’s hacking efforts. As several of them have pointed out, Iran’s targeting of U.S. elections isn’t new—hackers linked to Iranian security services have attempted to interfere with presidential and midterm races dating back to at least 2018.
However, “Iran perceives this year’s elections to be particularly consequential in terms of the impact they could have on its national security interests, increasing Tehran’s inclination to try to shape the outcome,” the U.S. agencies wrote in their statement. “We have observed increasingly aggressive Iranian activity during this election cycle.”
Trump and his acolytes have been particular targets of Iranian hacking, with some former intelligence officials speculating to Politico that efforts to compromise their email accounts could be part of an effort to assassinate U.S. officials in retaliation for the 2020 killing of Iranian Gen. Qassem Suleimani during Trump’s presidency.
In their statement on Monday, the FBI, ODNI, and CISA officially blamed Iran for the so-called hack-and-leak operation against Trump’s campaign that the campaign made public earlier this month. Those tactics, mirroring Russia’s breach of the Democratic National Committee during the 2016 election, are only one part of Iran’s election interference efforts along with broader disinformation campaigns aimed at sowing discord among the American electorate.
“Iran, especially because of the past events with Suleimani, they have a marked interest in this election,” said retired U.S. Army Col. Candice Frost, the former commander of the Joint Intelligence Operations Center at U.S. Cyber Command. “They have attempted to message on past elections,” she said, but “I think this one is almost personal to them.”
Iran’s relatively elevated profile and more brazen cyber efforts may also be spurred by the ongoing conflict in the Middle East between U.S. ally Israel and Iranian proxies Hamas and Hezbollah, Mohammed Soliman, director of the strategic technologies and cybersecurity program at the Middle East Institute in Washington, D.C., told Foreign Policy. “I think the timelines have collided [between] regional confrontation with Israel and the U.S. elections,” he said. “This made them more proactive in attacking high-value targets that have brought massive visibility to their work.”
Iran is not the only adversary officials in Washington are concerned with—election interference efforts by Russia have been extensively documented, and U.S. officials have increasingly warned about China’s shift in cyber tactics from espionage to more disinformation and disruptive campaigns. Those two countries remain the prime threats, in large part because their capabilities are relatively more sophisticated.
“Russia and China are really a league of their own,” said Frost, currently an assistant professor at Georgetown University’s Center for Security Studies. “We oftentimes discount Iran and North Korea, and then you’ll have something like the Sony hack or this hack [of the Trump campaign]. So it’s not necessarily the level of advancement or competency that they have, but the fact that they kind of found a vulnerability and have been able to exploit that.”
“Any nation that has an interest or perceived stakes in the outcome of a U.S. presidential election is going to be thinking about how to influence that outcome,” said Gavin Wilde, a senior fellow in the technology and international affairs program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a former U.S. national security official. “It’s easy to point to Russia and China as the most adversarial and the most sophisticated, but every nation around the world has some perceived interest in the outcome, and so I think we need to calibrate along those lines.”
Officials and experts say the U.S. government has learned from the missteps of previous elections, particularly 2016, and is better prepared to defend this November’s election from cyber threats than it has ever been. Part of that is the shift to publicly calling out adversaries and their activities much earlier in the process and adopting a form of sunlight-as-best-disinfectant strategy, like the ODNI, FBI, and CISA did this week with Iran.
“It’s very hard to counter that narrative once it gets into the American psyche and our citizens’ spheres of influence,” Frost said. “But I do see the focus and calling out [of] this behavior. … That is what we’re seeing at a much faster pace, and I give the current intel community a lot of props for doing that early.”
But Wilde warned that while U.S. officials are “unquestionably” more prepared this time around, they also now need to be careful about showing their work without inciting panic about elections being compromised. “The tightrope they now have to walk is [being] helpful without creating the very kind of panic that might itself undermine confidence in the election,” he said, adding that it’s also important to draw distinctions among hack-and-leak operations that have become “a new normal” for political campaigns, election influence efforts that can sometimes be hard to legally define, and actual efforts to interfere with the ballot box itself.
“I think the most consistent thing from all of them is how much it’s been a lot of just entrepreneurialism and experimental spaghetti-against-the-wall tactics to kind of just see what works,” Wilde said. “The U.S. and everyone has to be careful not to inadvertently incentivize this activity by making too big a deal out of it, and luckily I think we’ve done a lot better this go-round than we did in 2016.”
Foreign Policy · by Rishi Iyengar
7. The Least Risky AI Strategy Is a Bold One
Excerpts:
One day, and it may come sooner than we think, AI will likely not be working only for and with us, but also within us, connected directly to our brains, enabling us to access wider knowledge, feeding us the answers from calculations we could not fathom on our own, and allowing us to direct machines to do our bidding in both the digital and physical worlds. Several companies and researchers are already working on direct computer-to-brain interfaces. This makes it all the more important that we invest in safety and education now. If a machine is to be whispering to our inner selves, we need it to tell us the truth.
It is worth emphasizing that all the above is based on progress in narrow developments of AI—essentially very fast advanced analytics—rather than a breakthrough to advanced general intelligence. The latter would be another story altogether.
Nonetheless, our societies are going to change dramatically. Not immediately, because deploying new stuff at scale is hard and expensive, but certainly over the next 10 years. It is natural and sensible to worry about this, but we should not forget that there are many things that we want to change, that indeed cry out for change. We won’t find the answers in the past. Human ingenuity has dealt us another opportunity to move forward. It has its risks, as always, but let’s make the most of it in service of freedom and the extension of full human rights and opportunity to a greater proportion of humanity.
The Least Risky AI Strategy Is a Bold One
Pausing our current technological progress would only help the world’s most privileged.
By James Arroyo, director of the Ditchley Foundation. This is a personal opinion piece.
Foreign Policy · by James Arroyo
- Science and Technology
- Europe
August 21, 2024, 7:22 AM
Artificial intelligence (AI) technology offers plenty to worry about before we get to the oft-cited risk that one day we might construct intelligent machines that could turn against us. It’s true that we could do a great deal of harm with AI, but equally we have had no problem creating mayhem without it.
Artificial intelligence (AI) technology offers plenty to worry about before we get to the oft-cited risk that one day we might construct intelligent machines that could turn against us. It’s true that we could do a great deal of harm with AI, but equally we have had no problem creating mayhem without it.
Most of the near- and mid-term risks of AI hinge on malicious human actions. In a 2021 Stanford University study on the most pressing dangers of AI, researchers wrote, “The technology can be co-opted by criminals, rogue states, ideological extremists, or simply special interest groups, to manipulate people for economic gain or political advantage.”
This understanding of the risks of AI also helps us better appreciate its possibilities. Only the most privileged could imagine pausing at our current state of technological development as an attractive option. AI technology could soon be approaching a feedback loop where knowledge will be created more quickly than at any point in history. Biotechnology will be a prime candidate for advances. Other long-promised inventions are already underway—for example, autonomous taxis are now live and operating in Phoenix and San Francisco and about to begin freeway trials. Quantum computing is also making progress and could be the hot rod equivalent to AI of adding nitrous oxide to gasoline.
We owe it to the least privileged and those most threatened by terrorism, war, and famine to go forward faster.
History shows, of course, that such capabilities will certainly be weaponized. There will be new levels of what the military call sensor-to-shooter innovation—the analysis of data to identify targets—and, in time, new levels of autonomy in the deployment of force. Current U.S. military doctrine already allows a human on the loop, rather than in the loop, for the use of lethal force. An appropriately senior officer must authorize the use of an autonomous weapon and bear accountability, but the policy acknowledges that there will be insufficient time for decisions to be referred to a relatively slow human process of assessment and decision-making.
We certainly need to work on international accords on AI, but we shouldn’t hold our breath waiting for a multilateral strategic weapons agreement. This newly sparked competition risks the tearing up of treaties we already have.
This is instead a moment for leadership. As Vice Admiral Horatio Nelson once said, there are times when the boldest measures are the safest. Sometimes the right thing to do is nothing, just wait and see, or edge slowly forwards along the cliff edge. In other situations, it is necessary to leap forward without complete confidence on where we will land. It is the countries and companies that move quickly now to understand and invest in AI capabilities that will shape and lead the future.
However, this does not mean we should be reckless. Animal spirits and the hope of profit will continue to drive hundreds of billions of dollars of investment into AI in the commercial sector. Investment in safety is lagging behind, with the United Kingdom’s 100-million-pound AI Safety Institute so far being the largest investment by a state. Like all powerful innovations, AI is a double-edged sword. Like fire, it could burn down the house. We need both to move forward at speed and map and mitigate risks as they arise.
Risks range from human misuse for cybercrime and extortion through fake images and impersonation; to unexpected negative impact from the deployment of AI in systems such as information, energy, and finance; to the more lurid and fundamental dangers of an AI system going rogue. So, let’s set aside both government and commercial money to fund research into risks and to develop mitigations. But let’s not get obsessed with the existential risks at the expense of understanding what will happen to society and state in the interim.
The development of AI depends upon access to the right hardware and the right know-how to run data centers. Both are in high demand and short supply. AI computational capabilities should be seen as critical national infrastructure for both government and the private sector. Cheap green energy will be essential to run those data centers at scale, providing another reason to get on with the green transition. To have cheap green energy we will need plentiful supplies of cheap and cleanly produced critical minerals—another area for research and investment.
Talent is equally as important as hardware and energy. Our school and university curricula at established institutions need to evolve at much greater speed. We will need new courses and new forms of access to post-secondary learning for adults of all ages. But this alone will not be enough. The developed world must be open to global talent, both by making immigration as easy as possible for people with the right aptitudes and skills, but also by developing wide-ranging partnerships and delivering hardware, platforms, software, and routes to market in emerging economies around the world. China should not be the only country supplying mid-level AI capabilities to the emerging world at a decent price, as was the case with 5G. The West also missed the opportunity to lead on supplying vaccines to the emerging world during the pandemic. It should not keep making the same mistake over and over, but instead use its advances in AI to position itself as a leader of development and local economies, helping countries and their business sectors develop applications of AI in their own languages and addressing their problems.
Right now, we are in the phony war stage of AI deployment with lots of talk and experiments but limited action. When AI gets good enough to have an impact on company profits and state budgets and capabilities, then things are likely to change quickly. Fostering AI literacy among workers and citizens is an urgent responsibility for governments and companies alike. There is no need to sow panic, but equally it is not right to underplay AI’s potential impact. We must empower people to learn and position themselves while there is still time to do so, rather than wait until change is banging at the door. There will be huge demand for roles in the new AI economy and increases in productivity will in themselves create new resources to fund new forms of work. But those roles will only be open to people with the right skills and mindset. Another botched industrial transition could undermine national confidence across democracies. We should prepare now.
The group of workers in most immediate need of education and literacy are those in charge—senior and middle managers in industry, politicians, political advisors, and senior civil servants of the state. Change will be forced through in companies by market dynamics. Risk-averse governments and state services will find AI adoption difficult and are in danger of falling further behind the private sector in terms of productivity, responsiveness, and choice, again potentially further undermining trust in government and in democracy itself. We need to look at AI not only as a productivity tool, but also as a means to deliver greater participation and transparency to democratic decisions. We have the opportunity to expand consultation and legitimacy at all levels of government, from local to international, and we should seize it.
For national security and defense and foreign policy, the development and deployment of AI capabilities will quickly become as critical as the supply of munitions. We will need AI to monitor and analyze the vast quantities of information that our growing satellite and drone constellations will deliver. If one side in a conflict is able to make wartime decisions much quicker than the other, that amounts to a clear advantage. Domestically, AI is helping us to make progress on fusion by modeling and managing the electromagnetic fields holding superheated plasma in place. But it will be equally critical to the development of more efficient and powerful nuclear weapons. Increasingly smart grids, governed by AI analysis, will be necessary to combine a much greater variety of energy sources as we increase the percentage of renewables.
As the creation of human-like digital AI content becomes increasingly common in words, images, and video, we can expect a glut of disinformation and the weakening of copyright. Disruptive states will attempt to use these capabilities to sow chaos. In response, we will need powerful truth-seeking AI capabilities to sift fact from fiction and original from fake, coupled with better digital education. Cybersecurity threats will grow too. We will need AI to bolster our defenses and protect our privacy. We need appropriate compensation mechanisms for creators of human content.
As the powers of companies and states grow through technology, we will need to empower citizens by democratizing access to the AI tools they will need to navigate a fast-evolving world. We have to press for AI that works for and with citizens, not on them as if they are a raw material to be mined or bent into shape. And we will need regulations, laws, judges, and well-briefed juries to ensure that power does not corrupt and check that actions are proportionate and reasonable.
No one in Silicon Valley is sure whether AI will further strengthen incumbents or create a new wave of successful start-ups. We will need both. The big technology platforms are best placed to develop capabilities requiring massive resources for state applications, or for integration with the productivity tools we use daily. On the other hand, we would not want a world where the major platforms have a monopoly; and so the development of alternatives and open-source models feels vital, both for innovation and for the distribution of economic benefits beyond the United States.
One day, and it may come sooner than we think, AI will likely not be working only for and with us, but also within us, connected directly to our brains, enabling us to access wider knowledge, feeding us the answers from calculations we could not fathom on our own, and allowing us to direct machines to do our bidding in both the digital and physical worlds. Several companies and researchers are already working on direct computer-to-brain interfaces. This makes it all the more important that we invest in safety and education now. If a machine is to be whispering to our inner selves, we need it to tell us the truth.
It is worth emphasizing that all the above is based on progress in narrow developments of AI—essentially very fast advanced analytics—rather than a breakthrough to advanced general intelligence. The latter would be another story altogether.
Nonetheless, our societies are going to change dramatically. Not immediately, because deploying new stuff at scale is hard and expensive, but certainly over the next 10 years. It is natural and sensible to worry about this, but we should not forget that there are many things that we want to change, that indeed cry out for change. We won’t find the answers in the past. Human ingenuity has dealt us another opportunity to move forward. It has its risks, as always, but let’s make the most of it in service of freedom and the extension of full human rights and opportunity to a greater proportion of humanity.
Foreign Policy · by James Arroyo
8. US charges former democracy activist with spying for China
It will be interesting to learn the rest of the story. When was he turned by the MSS? Before he sought asylum? Or was he turned after he was granted asylum when he entered the US?
Was he released from prison due to an agreement to become an agent of the MSS? Was his harassment and escape part of a deliberate cover story to make him seem like a deserving candidate for asylum?
What is the "Paul Harvey?" i.e., the rest of the story?
US charges former democracy activist with spying for China
22 Aug 2024 02:39PM
channelnewsasia.com
The US Department of Justice building in Washington DC on Aug 21, 2024. (File photo: AFP/Tierney L. Cross)
22 Aug 2024 02:39PM
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WASHINGTON: A New York resident who took part in China's 1989 democracy movement was charged on Wednesday (Aug 21) with operating as an illegal agent for the Chinese government in the United States, the justice department said.
Tang Yuanjun, 67, swam to a Taiwan-controlled island more than 20 years ago before being granted political asylum by the US.
He was charged on Wednesday with acting as an agent for the People's Republic of China in the US from 2018 to 2023, the justice department said in a statement.
Tang completed "tasks at the direction of the PRC's Ministry of State Security (MSS), which is the PRC's principal civilian intelligence agency", the department said.
Tang provided MSS officials with information on "individuals and groups viewed by the PRC as potentially adverse" to its interests, including "prominent US-based Chinese democracy activists and dissidents".
He is also accused of lying to the Federal Bureau of Investigation for claiming he no longer had access to an email account used to communicate with his MSS handler.
He was arrested on Wednesday and was scheduled to appear before a district judge.
Tang, a native of China's northeastern Jilin province, had been sentenced to 20 years for taking part in the 1989 democracy movement that resulted in the deadly Tiananmen Square crackdown in Beijing.
He was released after serving eight years.
Tang remained active in advocating for democracy in China and was repeatedly detained, questioned and harassed by the authorities before fleeing to Taiwan, according to a Taipei-based rights group that helped with his asylum bid in 2002.
Source: AFP/dy
9. U.S. Officials Meet Dalai Lama in New York, Triggering Protest From China
Good. We should not avoid meeting with a world leader based on Chinese sensitivities.
U.S. Officials Meet Dalai Lama in New York, Triggering Protest From China
Though the 89-year-old remains in good health, questions over the Tibetan spiritual leader’s succession are worrying Beijing
https://www.wsj.com/world/china/u-s-officials-meet-dalai-lama-in-new-york-triggering-protest-from-china-9598380d?mod=latest_headlines
By Austin Ramzy
Follow
Aug. 22, 2024 5:59 am ET
The Dalai Lama, the Tibetan spiritual leader, has long sought ‘genuine autonomy’ for his homeland. Photo: AFP via Getty Images
HONG KONG—Senior U.S. officials met with the Dalai Lama on Wednesday in New York, a show of support for the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader that sparked an angry reaction from China, as anxiety grows in Beijing over his succession.
Uzra Zeya, the undersecretary of state for civilian security, democracy, and human rights, said she traveled to New York to meet with the Dalai Lama, where she delivered greetings from President Biden and a message of “the United States’ unwavering support for the Tibetan community.”
The Chinese government accuses the Dalai Lama, who has been based in India after fleeing there in 1959, of seeking Tibet’s independence from China.
The Tibetan spiritual leader has long sought “genuine autonomy” for his homeland, with protections for Tibetans’ religion, language and culture. While Tibet, which was annexed by the People’s Republic of China in 1951, is officially an autonomous region of China, in practice it has been under strict control by China’s Communist Party.
Communist Party leaders in Beijing have sought to control the selection of the next Dalai Lama, a contentious ambition that has come under increasing scrutiny as the current Dalai Lama nears the age of 90.
Mao Ning, a Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman, said China had made “serious protests” with the U.S. over the meeting, describing the Dalai Lama as “a political exile engaged in anti-China separatist activities under the cloak of religion.”
“China firmly opposes any country allowing the Dalai Lama to make visits under any pretext and opposes government officials of any country to meet with the Dalai Lama in any form,” Mao said at a regularly scheduled press conference in Beijing.
Zeya, who is also the U.S. special coordinator for Tibetan issues, said that during the meeting she reaffirmed Washington’s commitment to the human rights of Tibetans and to supporting the preservation of Tibetan culture.
A photo posted to Uzra Zeya’s X account shows her and Kelly Razzouk standing beside the Dalai Lama. Photo: US Department of State
She was joined by Kelly Razzouk, a special assistant to Biden and the National Security Council’s senior director for democracy and human rights. A photo posted to Zeya’s X account shows her and Razzouk standing beside the Dalai Lama, in his monk’s robes and trademark horn-rimmed glasses, holding his hands as he sits at the end of a long table.
Meetings with the Dalai Lama are a delicate matter for American officials, who have to balance managing a difficult U.S.-China relationship with showing support for a Nobel Peace Prize laureate globally recognized for his advocacy and spiritual guidance.
During the 2020 election Biden criticized Donald Trump for being the first sitting U.S. president in three decades to not meet with the Dalai Lama. Biden pledged to meet with the Dalai Lama, but he hasn’t done so as president.
The Dalai Lama, 89 years old, underwent knee-replacement surgery at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York City in late June and has been recovering in upstate New York. He is expected to return soon to India, with a stopover in Zurich.
Tenzin Gyatso, as the Dalai Lama is known, is the 14th in a line tracing to the late 1300s who are believed to be manifestations of the bodhisattva of compassion.
He said in 2011 that around his 90th birthday he would consult with Tibetans, including high lamas in the Tibetan Buddhist faith, to discuss whether the institution should continue. The Dalai Lama has rejected China’s intentions to have a say in that process and has suggested that any reincarnation would be born in a place outside Chinese control.
Members of the Tibetan community in New York in June. Photo: Anthony Behar/Sipa/ Reuters
Chinese officials have said that any succession must comply with Chinese law. The result could be rival Dalai Lamas, with one identified by the 14th Dalai Lama‘s camp and supported by the exiled Tibetan community and another approved by Beijing.
Such a possibility has been foreshadowed by the fate of the Panchen Lama, considered to be the second-highest reincarnate lama in Tibetan Buddhism. After the Dalai Lama recognized a six-year-old Tibetan boy as the 11th Panchen Lama in 1995, he and his family were taken into Chinese custody and haven’t been publicly seen since. A separate search approved by Chinese religious authorities chose another boy, who has since become the state-approved Panchen Lama.
Speaking on the occasion of his 89th birthday on July 6, the Dalai Lama indicated he still felt strong and didn’t intend to give up his work any time soon.
“I feel a little physical discomfort but that is inevitable due to the aging process. Basically, I am doing very well. So please relax and be at ease,” he said. “I am determined to continue my service to the teaching. I am resolved to do so with all of my heart.”
Write to Austin Ramzy at austin.ramzy@wsj.com
10. Who Could Serve in Harris’s Cabinet?
The nationals security speculation is at the end of the article. Was that the authors' choice or does that indicate VP Harris' priorities or the authors' assessment of the VP's priorities?
I think both Senator Reed or Michele Fournoy would be strong SECDEFs.
Who Could Serve in Harris’s Cabinet?
Democrats are buzzing about potential contenders for high-profile administration jobs
Kamala Harris’s advisers have taken early steps toward forming a transition team, which will oversee personnel vetting and other preparations for a potential Harris administration. Photo: Yalonda M. James/San Francisco Chronicle/Getty Images
By Andrew RestucciaFollow
, Tarini PartiFollow
, Alexander WardFollow
and Annie LinskeyFollow
Aug. 22, 2024 5:00 am ET
https://www.wsj.com/politics/elections/kamala-harris-possible-cabinet-members-46095ca2?mod=latest_headlines
CHICAGO—At cocktail parties and in quiet conversations on the sidelines of the Democratic convention, officials are trying to answer a question with crucial stakes: Who will Kamala Harris hire if she wins?
Harris’s advisers insist it is too early to begin speculating about the coterie of boldfaced names who would fill out her cabinet and take top positions in the White House, as they are still ironing out the vice president’s campaign operation, writing her policy agenda and fine-tuning her pitch to voters. That hasn’t stopped Washington’s ambitious power players from angling for jobs and quietly lobbying for their friends and allies.
The Wall Street Journal put together an early list of names that have emerged in conversations with senior Democrats in Chicago and Washington. The list suggests that Harris wants to bring in her own team, and that many current top Biden administration officials might not remain in their roles. The Democratic nominee’s advisers have taken early steps toward forming a transition team, which will oversee personnel vetting and other preparations for a potential Harris administration, though the team won’t make decisions about nominations until after the election.
One potential candidate for Harris’s chief of staff is Minyon Moore, right, who is also running this week’s convention. Photo: Sophie Park for WSJ
White House
One of the most critical roles in any White House is chief of staff. Potential candidates for that job include Minyon Moore, a Harris ally who is running this week’s convention; former Labor Secretary Marty Walsh, who became friends with Harris when they worked together during the Biden administration; former Rep. Cedric Richmond; Lorraine Voles, Harris’s current chief of staff; and Eric Holder, who served as attorney general during the Obama administration.
Harris’s economic policy brain trust includes Brian Nelson, a former Treasury Department official; Mike Pyle, a former Harris aide and Biden’s former deputy national security adviser for international economics; former National Economic Council Director Brian Deese; former Biden economic adviser Gene Sperling; Deanne Millison, Harris’s former chief economic adviser; and Rohini Kosoglu, Harris’s former domestic policy adviser. All of them are seen as candidates for jobs in Harris’s administration.
Nelson, Pyle and Millison could lead the NEC, as well as former deputy NEC director Bharat Ramamurti, who got to know the vice president during the debate over student loan forgiveness. Possible candidates to lead the White House Domestic Policy Council include Kosoglu and Jennifer Klein, the director of the White House’s Gender Policy Council. Ike Irby, who was Harris’s deputy domestic policy adviser in the White House until earlier this year, is also thought to be in line for a senior policy position, possibly focused on climate change.
Emmy Ruiz, a former adviser to Harris’s 2020 presidential campaign who is a top political strategist at the White House, is also expected to score a senior White House position if Harris wins.
Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo is said to be interested in being Treasury secretary. Photo: Ariel Zambelich/WSJ
Domestic and economic policy jobs
For Treasury secretary, Harris could consider Wally Adeyemo, current Secretary Janet Yellen’s deputy, as well as Nelson. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo is also said to be interested in running Treasury, and Don Graves, Raimondo’s deputy, is a potential candidate to run Commerce. Raimondo is seen as easily confirmable in the Senate because she could likely win the support of some Republicans.
Sen. Laphonza Butler (D., Calif.), who led California’s largest home care and nursing home workers union, has been mentioned as a potential Labor secretary.
Neera Tanden, Biden’s Domestic Policy Council director as the administration negotiated for lower prescription drug prices and a key player during the passage of the Affordable Care Act, is seen as a contender to run the Department of Health and Human Services. Kavita Patel, a doctor and former Obama White House official, could be a candidate for a senior role at HHS. Nadine Burke Harris, California’s former surgeon general, could be in the running for U.S. Surgeon General.
As vice president, Harris has built relationships with chief executives and other business leaders, holding regular private dinners with executives at her Naval Observatory residence. She may choose to bring some of those executives into her administration, though advisers said she hasn’t made any decisions. Wall Street financier Blair Effron, co-founder of investment bank Centerview Partners, has been discussed by Democrats as a potential candidate for Treasury or Commerce secretary. Harris is also close to former tech CEO Charles Phillips, co-chair of the Black Economic Alliance; Microsoft President Brad Smith; and former American Express CEO Ken Chenault. Chenault spoke at this week’s convention, prompting speculation that he could be in line for a top job in her administration.
Rahm Emanuel, Biden’s ambassador to Japan and a former White House chief of staff to President Barack Obama, is another possibility for Commerce, particularly if Harris views the department as playing a bigger role in international affairs including countering China and shoring up the supply chain. Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker is also said to be interested in a role in a Harris administration.
Vanita Gupta was the first woman of color to serve as associate U.S. Attorney General. Photo: Eric Gay/Associated Press
Attorney general and White House counsel
Harris, a former prosecutor, is likely to take great interest in choosing the lawyers that will run the Justice Department and the White House Counsel’s Office.
Potential candidates for those positions include: former Sen. Doug Jones (D., Ala.); Sally Yates, former President Barack Obama’s deputy attorney general; and Vanita Gupta, the first woman of color to serve as associate U.S. Attorney General. Others in line for senior roles at the Justice Department or the White House Counsel’s Office include Kristine Lucius, a Harris adviser and former Senate Judiciary Committee chief counsel; lawyer Karen Dunn, who has helped Harris prepare for her debates; and Josh Hsu, a former counsel to Harris.
One wild card: whether Harris would hire her brother-in-law, Tony West, the chief legal officer at Uber and a former top Justice Department official during the Obama administration.
Phil Gordon, Harris’s national security adviser, would be a strong candidate to assume that role if she wins the presidency. Photo: Jae C. Hong/Associated Press
National security
Both Biden and Harris’s advisers say at least some current national security officials are likely to get prominent roles, but she is likely to bring in her own people as well.
Phil Gordon, Harris’s national security adviser, would be a strong candidate to assume that role if she wins the presidency. Current and former administration officials say the Middle East and Europe expert has served the vice president well, helping her office stay closely aligned with Biden’s team. He has participated in recent Situation Room meetings about Israel-Hamas cease-fire talks and a possible Iranian strike on Israel.
Sen. Chris Murphy (D., Conn.) has been mentioned as a contender for secretary of state. He and Harris aligned on many issues during their mutual time in the Senate, particularly on ending the Saudi-led war on Yemen. They continue to speak fairly regularly, White House aides and foreign policy analysts said, trading notes on developments in Central America’s Northern Triangle and immigration. Murphy, who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s Middle East panel, has also been an occasional sounding board on the region.
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Gov. Tim Walz and other speakers on night three of the Democratic National Convention focused on their idea of “freedom,” and appealed to independent and undecided voters. WSJ’s Molly Ball explains. Photo: Brendan McDermid/Reuters
Tom Nides, who previously served in a top position at the State Department and as ambassador to Israel, is also considered to be a contender for a top national security position.
Central Intelligence Agency Director William Burns could be considered for secretary of state, a move that would give Harris some connective tissue from the Biden administration.
Sen. Chris Coons (D., Del.), a close friend of Biden’s, was seen as a leading contender for secretary of state, but it is unclear if Harris would tap him for the job. National security adviser Jake Sullivan, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin wouldn’t likely be extended in their current roles, current and former officials said.
Less certain is who might serve as defense secretary. For years, Sen. Jack Reed (D., R.I.) and Michèle Flournoy have been regularly mentioned as a candidate for the job, though it is unclear whether Harris is eyeing them. Christine Wormuth, the current Army secretary, is also in the mix for the top Pentagon job.
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg—who was vetted as a possible running mate for Harris—has been discussed by some Democrats as a contender for U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Harris is also close with Sen. Mark Warner (D., Va.), the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who could be a contender for director of national intelligence.
Write to Andrew Restuccia at andrew.restuccia@wsj.com, Tarini Parti at tarini.parti@wsj.com, Alexander Ward at alex.ward@wsj.com and Annie Linskey at annie.linskey@wsj.com
11. How Russian Trolls Are Trying to Go Viral on X
We have to get over the childish debate that Russia (and China, Iran, and north Korea) wants to support either Trump or Harris. They do not really care who wins. They only seek to sow chaos and division with the US with the intent to undermine the US political system, its legitimacy, and to weaken the US writ large by making the people question democracy. We, the American people, should be united against these attacks on both Trump and Harris and expend our effort denouncing and defending against them rather than dividing ourselves over Trump and Harris.
Let us recognize our adversaries' political warfare strategy, understand it, EXPOSE it, and attack it with a superior political warfare strategy. And please remember when I use political warfare I use it in the international relations/national security context of George Kennan rather than in the partisan political perspective.
How Russian Trolls Are Trying to Go Viral on X
Kremlin-backed influence network has sought engagement with Elon Musk, Donald Trump Jr. and other influential accounts
https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/russian-trolls-x-twitter-1e993a31?mod=latest_headlines
By Alexa Corse
Follow
in San Francisco and Dustin Volz
Follow
in Washington
Aug. 21, 2024 11:00 pm ET
X’s policies prohibit creating deceptive profiles to mislead others. Photo: Carlos Barria/Reuters
In November 2022, after acquiring Twitter, Elon Musk joked to his millions of followers: “Wait, if I Tweet does that count as work?”
An account secretly run by a Russian intelligence agency tried for a humorous reply: “Your boss will be angry.” The awkward joke got zero likes.
Russian trolls are ramping up their efforts again on social media ahead of another U.S. presidential election, and they seem desperate for influencers to notice them. Amid elevated fears of foreign election meddling, the exchange offered an early example of a shift toward relying more on low-quality, high-volume spam tactics that experts and officials say could escalate on social-media platforms in the coming months.
Since 2022, a Russian network of fake personas on the social-media platform now called X sought to interact with billionaire and X Corp. owner Musk and conservative political and media figures including Donald Trump Jr. and Tucker Carlson, pushing divisive content and narratives that sought to weaken international support for Ukraine.
The intention was to piggyback on the visibility and wide reach of the replies section of accounts with large followings to seed messages with both influencers and their audiences, according to social-media researchers.
The fake accounts, often posing as Americans, targeted a range of prominent political and media influencers, including U.S. lawmakers, journalists and news organizations, by replying to their posts, according to a Wall Street Journal review of more than a thousand posts.
In July, the U.S. Justice Department disclosed a list of usernames for nearly 1,000 X accounts tied to a bot farm that the department said was operated by Russia’s Federal Security Service, or FSB. But the DOJ shared few details about the network’s activities beyond its general contours. By then, X had removed virtually all of the accounts.
The operation had been seeking to spread false or misleading information in and about the U.S., Europe and Israel and was focused on fanning political divisions and generating anti-Ukraine sentiment, U.S. and western officials said.
New data shared with the Journal by researchers from Clemson University offer an exclusive look at how the Russian government is positioning its online influence armies ahead of the U.S. presidential election in November. The Clemson researchers were able to use the list of accounts shared by the Justice Department and cross-reference it with historic data. They collected nearly 1,300 posts from more than 200 accounts tied to the network.
Some images that were shared by the Russian-backed network of accounts on X. Photo: The Media Forensics Hub at Clemson University
Both Russia and Iran are waging operations to influence the election, U.S. officials say. Earlier this month, the Trump campaign blamed Iran for hacking some of its internal communications. The Federal Bureau of Investigation said it was investigating the matter. On Monday, U.S. intelligence agencies publicly linked the activity to Tehran.
While the accounts analyzed by the Clemson researchers didn’t gain much visibility before being taken down and appear to have failed to attract the attention of the high-profile users they targeted, they may signal future tactics.
Darren Linvill, a social-media researcher at Clemson, said the data showcased how Russia’s playbook has shifted over the years from “high-investment accounts” that require considerable time and energy to accrue large followings and convincing personas toward rapidly churning out low-quality accounts.
For example, the accounts replied over 50 times to various prominent accounts to claim that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky wanted to compel Hungary—a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization more sympathetic to Russia than other European nations—to fight in the war.
“#Zelensky wants to force the #Hungarians to fight?,” the accounts replied to 2022 and 2023 tweets from Trump Jr., news outlets such as CNN, Fox News and Politico, and individual American journalists and members of Congress.
The accounts replied to or retweeted Musk’s posts around a dozen times, though those posts largely weren’t about Russia but instead were jokes or about other topics, the data show. The accounts also replied to or retweeted posts about various topics by Carlson a dozen times, including retweeting a post where the former Fox News host talked about his interview earlier this year of Russian President Vladimir Putin. The data didn’t show any signs of Musk or Carlson engaging in return.
“Are you sure this is true? In general I think I’d trust a Russian bot farm before I’d trust the Wall Street Journal,” Carlson said about the Journal’s review. “Less ideologically rigid.”
Russia has relied on low-quality accounts to some degree since at least 2016. It appears able to create them more easily now due in part to artificial intelligence, officials and researchers said. At the same time, Russia has long sought to interact with social-media accounts with large followings, aiming to seed narratives among power users in hopes of eliciting a response that could attract viral attention.
“There’s a reason they are trying to cash these lottery tickets,” Linvill said of the effort to attract the attention of popular accounts. “When they pay off, they pay off big.”
Low-quality accounts are likely a response to greater scrutiny from platforms, researchers, and governments, Linvill said, because they can be created quickly, and if they are detected foreign actors can just create new ones. Other foreign actors, including some China-affiliated networks, have also used this tactic, he added.
U.S. authorities have warned that the Russian government has again committed to a broad campaign to influence the outcome of the U.S. presidential election in favor of Republican Donald Trump, as it did during the 2020 and 2016 cycles. U.S. intelligence officials have publicly offered few specifics about Russia’s activity beyond saying that Moscow poses the most serious foreign-influence threat to the election and that it has recently sought to influence specific voting groups, including those in swing states, while promoting divisive narratives and attempting to denigrate specific politicians.
Elon Musk was among the high-profile individuals with whom the Russian network attempted to interact. Photo: Craig T Fruchtman/Getty Images
Russia has denied meddling in American elections. Iran, meanwhile, is determined to undermine Trump’s re-election bid, according to U.S. intelligence agencies. Iran also has denied such accusations.
Trump Jr. was among a number of high-profile individuals, including Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey and others, to unwittingly retweet or otherwise engage with posts around the 2016 election season from accounts later identified to be part of the Internet Research Agency, a St. Petersburg-based Russian troll farm.
Russia is expected to ramp up its efforts targeting voters as Election Day nears, as it has in previous election cycles, U.S. intelligence officials said. Russia has historically denied Western allegations that it targets other nations with covert influence operations.
Musk dismantled much of the content-moderation infrastructure at the company formerly known as Twitter after his takeover through staff cuts and rule changes that he said were needed to promote free speech. Former employees have said Musk’s changes limit the platform’s ability to detect covert influence efforts.
An X spokesman declined to comment for this article. Musk posted on X in July that the Justice Department’s support was appreciated but that X was already suspending the Russian accounts. X’s policies prohibit creating deceptive profiles to mislead others and trying to artificially influence conversations on the platform such as by using fake accounts.
Sen. Mark Warner, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said U.S. resilience to foreign-influence operations has deteriorated since the last election due to a variety of factors, including advances in artificial intelligence and legal challenges to government cooperation with social-media companies that have chilled efforts to police the threat.
“We’re not as prepared in 2024 as we were in 2020 under President Trump,” Warner said during a recent event on foreign-influence operations held by the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation. “Foreign adversaries know misinformation, disinformation is cheap. And it works.”
In response to a 2022 post from President Biden about taking care of members of the military, one of the fake accounts replied: “lol.”
Write to Alexa Corse at alexa.corse@wsj.com and Dustin Volz at dustin.volz@wsj.com
12. Exploring a PRC Short-of-War Coercion Campaign to Seize Taiwan’s Kinmen Islands and Possible Responses
Long read with some detailed analysis.
Maps. graphics and imagery at the link.
Excerpts:
This report has shown one plausible scenario in which the PRC could seize the Kinmen islands through means short of war. A coordinated PRC short-of-war coercion campaign of this scale would be unprecedented. Beijing used its coast guard to seize Scarborough Shoal from the Philippines in 2012, but Scarborough Shoal was uninhabited and unoccupied; Kinmen is home to nearly 140,000 people including about 3,000 military personnel.[78] A closer analogue is the early stages of Russia’s seizure of Crimea in 2014, but the PRC has been more cautious in using military aggression than Russia under Vladimir Putin.
Nevertheless, “reunifying” Taiwan, including Kinmen, is one of Beijing’s central strategic goals. Many of the lines of effort involved in the coercion campaign that this report describes are already in place. The PRC certainly has the capability to execute the campaign successfully. The main unknown upon which this scenario depends is the CCP’s political will, a variable that is often opaque and depends upon Beijing’s subjective perceptions of US and Taiwanese political dynamics. It is therefore essential that authorities in Taiwan and the United States take concrete steps to prepare for this possibility to deter the campaign, directly counter each of its lines of effort, and mitigate the severity of its impact on deterrence in the Taiwan Strait as a whole.
Washington, Taipei, and allied governments must coordinate efforts to harden Taiwan’s infrastructure and defenses around its outlying territories, counter PRC information warfare, punish PRC aggression, defend Taiwan’s sovereign rights, and take the steps necessary to ensure the continued integrity of deterrence in the Taiwan Strait.
Exploring a PRC Short-of-War Coercion Campaign to Seize Taiwan’s Kinmen Islands and Possible Responses
https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/exploring-prc-short-war-coercion-campaign-seize-taiwan%E2%80%99s-kinmen-islands-and-possible
Exploring a PRC Short-of-War Coercion Campaign to Seize Taiwan’s Kinmen Islands and Possible Responses
China-Taiwan Special Edition Update, August 21, 2024
Authors: Matthew Sperzel and Daniel Shats of the Institute for the Study of War;
Alexis Turek of the American Enterprise Institute
Editors: Dan Blumenthal and Frederick W. Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute
Data Cutoff: August 14, 2024
Key Takeaways
- The People’s Republic of China (PRC) began aggressively challenging Taiwan’s jurisdiction over its outlying islands, especially Kinmen, in February 2024. Repeated Chinese Coast Guard incursions in Taiwan-controlled waters around Kinmen aim to normalize the PRC’s "law enforcement" jurisdiction in the area.
- The PRC can escalate current lines of effort (LOEs) to erode Taiwan’s sovereignty over its outlying territory of Kinmen in a short-of-war coercion campaign to seize control of the island group in the near term.
- The PRC can escalate coast guard activities to initiate a quarantine around Kinmen that denies passage to Taiwanese government ships and economically squeezes the islands. The PRC can enhance Kinmen's isolation by imposing a no-fly zone and sabotaging communication infrastructure, before finally coercing Kinmen to demilitarize under PRC oversight.
- US unpreparedness or unwillingness to intervene amid domestic and international distractions increases the likelihood of this scenario. Trends in Taiwan’s domestic politics that diminish the PRC’s confidence in its ability to achieve “peaceful reunification” also contribute to the likelihood of such a coercion campaign.
- PRC efforts to seize Kinmen will strike at Taiwan’s political will to resist "unification." A successful incorporation of Kinmen by the PRC would significantly diminish Taiwan’s faith in the United States’ will to come to Taiwan’s aid and its own ability to defend itself.
- The United States, Taiwan, and their partners must prepare for the possibility of PRC short-of-war coercion against Taiwan’s outlying islands by “pre-bunking” CCP propaganda narratives that justify such a campaign, strengthening the resilience of communication infrastructure in Taiwan’s outlying territories, and bolstering Taiwan’s maritime law enforcement around the islands.
- The United States and its partners should respond to PRC efforts to seize control of Kinmen by maximizing the economic and reputational costs for the PRC, thwarting the quarantine and communication blockade of Kinmen, and communicating its will to strengthen US defense commitment to Taiwan as a consequence of PRC aggression.
- The United States should respond to a successful PRC seizure of Kinmen by significantly increasing its troop deployments and arms sales to Taiwan, coordinating joint coast guard patrols with Taiwan and other partners, and amending relevant laws to help protect Taiwan’s outlying islands from further coercion.
Introduction
The archipelagos of Kinmen and Matsu are uniquely vulnerable among Taiwan’s territories. Both island groups are located over 100 miles from the main island of Taiwan but just off the PRC’s coast: the westernmost of the Matsu islands is around six miles from the PRC, while Kinmen’s main island is as close as two miles from the PRC city of Xiamen. The islands have remained under Republic of China (ROC) control since the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) under Mao Zedong failed to conquer them at the end of the Chinese Civil War. Kinmen and Matsu remained the primary arenas of PRC–ROC armed conflict from 1955 to 1979. The PRC heavily bombed Kinmen and Matsu during the Taiwan Strait Crises of 1955 and 1958, and both sides intermittently exchanged volleys of both lethal and nonlethal artillery fire until the United States normalized relations with the PRC in 1979.
The PRC continues to claim the islands as its own, as it does with all ROC territories. Its approach to these islands looks very different today, however. The PRC of Xi Jinping is an aspiring superpower whose development is deeply integrated with the global economy; it is far more cautious about military conflict than was the isolated and fanatical regime of Mao Zedong. Beijing’s contemporary efforts to annex Kinmen and Matsu blend economic enticements, nonviolent coercion, legal warfare, information operations, infrastructure construction, and miscellaneous “gray zone” lines of effort to manipulate public opinion on the islands and erode Taiwan’s control of its territories. These efforts are sophisticated and long-term in outlook. They show a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) willing to wait patiently to achieve its goals, but nonetheless making gains that are difficult for Taiwan to reverse.
Taiwan’s presidential election in January 2024 precipitated an escalation of the PRC’s efforts against Taiwan’s outer islands — particularly Kinmen. Although these efforts are still far less dramatic than the bombardments of the 1950s, they may yet prove to be more effective. This paper will lay out the PRC’s lines of effort against Kinmen and Matsu since January 2024 and present a scenario in which an extension of such efforts may evolve into a short-of-war campaign to seize Kinmen within the next six months.
Background
In January 2024, the Republic of China (Taiwan) held a pivotal presidential election. William Lai Ching-te of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) won a contentious three-way race with 41% of the vote, defeating opponents from the Kuomintang (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP). Lai, who was the incumbent vice president under then-president Tsai Ing-wen, thus delivered an unprecedented third consecutive term to the DPP despite far-reaching PRC efforts to influence Taiwan’s elections. On the other hand, the DPP lost its majority in the legislature for the first time since 2016. While no party gained an absolute majority in the 113-member Legislative Yuan (LY), the KMT and TPP collectively won enough seats to give the opposition a legislative majority. Lai thus faces a divided government.
The PRC was deeply unhappy with Lai Ching-te’s presidential victory. The CCP accuses Lai and the DPP of separatism aimed at declaring Taiwan’s formal independence from China. The CCP severed official communications with the DPP government of Taiwan in 2016 on this pretense. [1] After Lai won the election, the PRC began a campaign of pressure or “punishment” of Taiwan and the DPP. It convinced Nauru, then one of Taiwan’s last remaining diplomatic allies, to re-establish relations with Beijing and cut ties with Taiwan two days after Lai’s victory.[2] It imposed tariffs on key Taiwanese industries.[3] It escalated People’s Liberation Army (PLA) air incursions into Taiwan’s Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) each month, reaching nearly unprecedented numbers by July.[4] It welcomed former Taiwan president Ma Ying-jeou and sitting legislators from his party, the KMT, to Beijing in an effort to legitimize the DPP’s opposition as a negotiating partner on Taiwan’s behalf.[5] It carried out a massive military exercise around Taiwan days after Lai took office.[6] And perhaps most significantly, it launched new efforts to erode Taiwan’s control over its outlying islands.
The cornerstone of Beijing’s coercion campaign against Taiwan’s outlying islands involves the Chinese Coast Guard (CCG) making incursions into Taiwan-controlled waters to conduct “law enforcement” patrols. Taiwan conceded its claim to territorial waters around Kinmen and Matsu in 2009, largely due to those island groups’ proximity to the PRC.[7] It instead claims concentric maritime boundaries of “prohibited” and “restricted” waters around the islands. Taiwan’s “prohibited waters” are functionally equivalent to territorial waters, which means that Taiwan exercises the right to restrict some transit and enforce its laws as it does in sovereign waters. “Restricted waters” are functionally equivalent to a contiguous zone, an area of sea extending past territorial waters in which a country may exercise the control necessary to enforce its laws.[8]
The PRC claims all of Taiwan and its associated waters as PRC territory. It had largely respected Taiwan’s de facto jurisdiction in waters around Kinmen and Matsu before 2024, however, and has cooperated with Taiwan on law enforcement.[9] In February 2024, following a tragic incident that killed two PRC fishermen in prohibited waters around Kinmen, the PRC explicitly denied the existence of any Taiwanese “prohibited and restricted waters.” Beijing began asserting its right to conduct law enforcement patrols in these waters at will. Without the protective “bubbles” of their maritime boundaries, the Kinmen and Matsu islands are located entirely within the PRC’s internationally recognized territorial waters. The PRC wishes to integrate them fully. It has pursued a range of law enforcement, military, economic, legal, and other means to accomplish this end.
Line of Effort (LOE): Maritime incursions
On February 14, 2024, a vessel of Taiwan’s Coast Guard Administration (CGA) discovered an unnamed and unregistered PRC motorboat illegally fishing within Taiwan’s prohibited waters near the Kinmen Islands. The CGA vessel attempted to detain the fishing boat, but the boat refused to pull over and instead fled to escape custody. The boats engaged in a high-speed chase that ended in a collision. The Chinese motorboat capsized, and two of its four crew members drowned. The CGA took custody of the fishermen and their boat. It released the surviving fishermen on February 21.[10] The PRC accused the CGA of malicious or “vicious” behavior in the aftermath of the incident. In a lengthy series of negotiations on Kinmen that lasted until March 6, semi-official PRC representatives demanded that Taiwan return the boat and bodies of the deceased to the PRC, provide a full explanation and apology for the incident, and give compensation for the families of the victims. The negotiations collapsed without a resolution as the two sides were unable to come to a consensus. The CGA said the PRC side “insisted on making demands that did not comply with [Taiwan’s] legal system.”[11] The negotiations resumed on July 30 and ended with an undisclosed agreement. Taiwan returned the boat and bodies and paid compensation to the families but did not admit fault in the collision.[12]
The February 14 capsizing incident was the trigger event for an organized and ongoing PRC effort, led by the CCG, to contest Taiwan’s control of the waters around Kinmen and other outlying Taiwanese islands. A statement from the PRC’s Taiwan Affairs Office (TAO) on February 17 accused Taiwan of “brutal” behavior toward PRC fishermen and publicly denied the existence of any “restricted or prohibited waters” around Kinmen.[13]
The CCG announced on February 18 that it would begin regular patrols and inspections in the waters near Kinmen and Xiamen, a major PRC port city near Kinmen.[14] On February 20, a CCG maritime surveillance ship crossed the maritime boundary into Kinmen’s restricted waters for the first time.[15]
Since February, the CCG has normalized patrols in the waters around Kinmen and made deliberate incursions into Kinmen’s restricted or prohibited waters as part of what it calls regular “law enforcement patrols.” Neither the CCG nor Taiwan’s CGA has publicized the date and details of every one of these incursions, but the CGA said that an incursion on July 19 was the 32nd of such in 2024. A CGA press conference in June said that the CCG intruded into Kinmen’s restricted or prohibited waters an average of five times per month since February and maintained a constant presence in PRC waters around Kinmen every day of June up to June 14.[16]
Most of the publicized incursions have involved four CCG vessels entering Kinmen’s restricted waters simultaneously and leaving after one or two hours. These patrols sailed into Kinmen’s prohibited waters at least six separate times, including at least four times in May. The CCG has occasionally announced its patrols around Kinmen and even published maps of its patrol routes on March 15 and May 3, both of which passed through prohibited waters. The PRC state-run social media account Yuyuan Tantian, which is affiliated with state broadcaster CCTV, claimed on May 12 that the CCG patrols have eliminated any notion of “restricted and prohibited waters” around Kinmen in practice and that the “Kinmen model” could eventually be applied to the entire Taiwan Strait. Another post by Yuyuan Tantian on June 26 quoted a scholar from the state-run Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) who framed that the “Kinmen model” of maritime law enforcement as a successful example of promoting the “one country, two systems” scheme of integrating Taiwan with the PRC and said that it could “provide an alternative plan for completely resolving the Taiwan issue and achieving cross-strait reunification in the future.” The post also said the CCG has expanded the scope, timing, and intensity of its “law enforcement” around Kinmen since February 2024. It has increased the frequency of patrols, moved to “round-the-clock” CCG presence around Kinmen, and shifted from fixed-route patrols in formation to “law enforcement areas” which individual CCG ships can patrol freely “at any time.”[17]
Most but not all of the PRC’s incursions in the maritime boundaries of Taiwan’s outlying islands were carried out by the CCG and focused on Kinmen. There are several exceptions, however. PRC fisheries vessels joined CCG incursions into Kinmen’s waters on May 9 as part of a “search and rescue” drill. The incursion also featured the largest number of PRC official ships to violate Kinmen’s maritime boundaries at once, including four CCG ships that entered Kinmen’s prohibited waters on that day. On May 23 and 24, CCG ships sailed through the restricted waters around the Taiwanese islands of Wuqiu and Dongyin. Dongyin is part of the Matsu archipelago, while Wuqiu is a small island group administered as part of Kinmen County but located 133 kilometers northeast of Kinmen. These incursions two days in a row were part of the PRC’s two-day Joint Sword-2024A military exercise around Taiwan. The Joint Sword exercise included military drills in nine locations including around Wuqiu, Dongyin, Kinmen, and the core Matsu islands in coordination with the CCG. On May 29, two PLA supply ships with the structures of amphibious landing craft entered Kinmen’s restricted waters. There is also at least one unconfirmed report of a PRC Maritime Safety Administration (MSA) ship sailing as close as 0.2 nautical miles north of Kinmen through prohibited waters on March 19.[18]
CCG and PRC activities around Taiwan’s outlying islands spiked in May in the lead-up and aftermath of Lai Ching-te’s inauguration as president of Taiwan on May 20. Including the two days of incursions around Wuqiu and Dongyin during the Joint Sword exercise, CCG, PLA, and other entities carried out at least 11 incursions into Taiwan’s restricted and prohibited waters in May: around one third of all reported incursions to date. The CCP considers Lai and his political party, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), to be dangerous separatists and has stated an intent to “punish” Lai for what it interprets as pushing Taiwanese independence. Besides incursions into Taiwan-controlled waters, the CCG has also notably expanded the scope and frequency of its operations in international waters around Taiwan, including east of the Taiwan Strait median line near Taiwan’s Penghu Islands and east of the main island of Taiwan.
LOE: Law enforcement actions against Taiwanese vessels
The CCG thus far has not attempted direct law enforcement action against Taiwanese vessels during its patrols into Kinmen’s restricted and prohibited waters. Nevertheless, there have been three instances of direct CCG action against Taiwanese nationals in waters around Kinmen since the February 14 capsizing incident. All three instances represent rare or historically unprecedented escalations of PRC law enforcement against Taiwan.
On February 19, days after the capsizing incident, the CCG boarded and inspected a Taiwanese sightseeing boat for 30 minutes after the boat veered into PRC waters to avoid some shoals in the area. The CGA noted that tourist boats from the PRC often cross maritime boundaries into Kinmen’s waters, but the CGA assumes good faith and has never inspected the PRC boats.[19]
On March 18, the CCG rescued two fishermen from Kinmen whose boat ran out of fuel and drifted into PRC waters. It released one of the fishermen days later but continued to detain the second fisherman after discovering that he was an active-duty non-commissioned officer of the Kinmen Defense Command. PRC authorities accused the fisherman, surnamed Hu, of lying about his identity. Hu remained in PRC custody for nearly five months before being released on August 7, shortly after Taiwan and the PRC reached an agreement over the February 14 capsizing incident.[20]
On July 2, the CCG detained a Taiwanese fishing boat, the Da Jin Man 88, for illegally fishing in PRC waters northeast of Kinmen during a PRC fishing moratorium. CCG vessels rebuffed CGA ships attempting to rescue the Taiwanese boat. The CCG escorted the boat to the port of Quanzhou and detained its crew there for over a month. The PRC released four of the boat’s crew members on August 13, a week after releasing the fisherman Hu, but continues to hold the boat’s captain and the boat itself for further investigation.[21] The incident was the first time the PRC had detained a Taiwanese vessel in 17 years. It is common for Taiwanese and PRC fishermen to fish in each other’s waters, sometimes illegally, but the two coast guards usually expel such vessels rather than detaining them. Taiwanese media reported that the CCG became more aggressive in expelling Taiwanese boats fishing in PRC waters since it detained the Da Jin Man 88.[22] At least one Taiwanese fisherman claimed that his fellow fishermen have become much more afraid of fishing near the PRC coast or around Kinmen since July 2.[23]
These are the only three instances of the PRC boarding or detaining Taiwanese vessels in the last six months. The boarding of the Taiwanese sightseeing boat on February 19 was very likely a direct retaliation for the deaths of the two PRC fishermen in the February 14 capsizing incident. Hu’s detention may have been connected to the February 14 incident as well. It occurred shortly after the bilateral negotiations about the incident collapsed in early March; the PRC ultimately released Hu a week after Taiwan agreed to return the bodies of the PRC fishermen on July 30. The detention and release of the Da Jin Man 88 crew occurred in the weeks immediately before and after the July 30 negotiations, respectively, which suggests the detention of that boat may also have been related to the PRC securing its objectives in those talks. The small number of such incidents and their connection to a specific PRC grievance that has now been resolved suggests that direct action against Taiwanese vessels, besides warning and expulsion, is not currently a major component of the PRC’s coercive efforts against Taiwan. Even a small number of CCG actions against Taiwanese boats can still have a deterrent effect, however.
The CCG has also increased its activities east of the median line in the Taiwan Strait near Taiwan’s Penghu islands. Taiwanese media reported “constant” CCG patrols of the median line and numerous instances of the CCG trying to expel Taiwanese fishing boats fishing in the area in the summer of 2024.[24] The incidents occurred in international waters that both the PRC and ROC claim as part of their Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ). The CCG has not intruded into Taiwan’s territorial waters or contiguous zone near the Penghu Islands to date, however.
Taiwanese fishermen have reported that the CCG does not equally enforce the law against PRC fishing boats in Taiwan’s waters. Some have observed unlicensed, unregistered, and unnamed PRC fishing boats crowding protected areas within Kinmen’s prohibited water boundaries with fishing nets and even removing the nets placed by Taiwanese fishermen.[25] The boat that capsized on February 14 was one such boat. Unregistered PRC fishing boats have also fished in large numbers in waters near the Taiwanese Penghu islands and near the median line of the Taiwan Strait, apparently in violation of the PRC’s summer fishing moratorium.[26] A large number of PRC boats in Taiwanese waters can deplete the fish stock for Taiwanese fishermen, overwhelm Taiwan’s Coast Guard’s ability to enforce the law, increase the probability of a confrontation in which Taiwan miscalculates, and reduce Taiwanese people’s satisfaction with and trust in their own law enforcement authorities. Some analysts speculate that the PRC may deliberately send unregistered fishing boats into Taiwanese waters to solidify PRC control and to conduct surveillance and monitoring.[27]
The CGA’s statistics on the number of foreign fishing boats it expelled or detained for illegal fishing, nearly all of which were from the PRC, show an increase of about 30% in the first six months of 2024 compared to the same period in 2023.[28] These numbers are not above average compared to previous years since 2016, however, and the incidents covered in the statistics occurred in waters all around Taiwan and not primarily around Kinmen and Matsu.[29] Taiwan Ocean Affairs Council Minister Kuan Bi-ling said in October 2023 that illegal fishing and sand dredging in Taiwan’s waters decreased due to the CGA’s vigorous law enforcement and more stringent legislation passed in the LY.[30] It is unclear whether the number of PRC fishing boats entering Taiwan’s waters actually decreased or whether the lower numbers simply reflect the fact that the CGA is detaining and expelling fewer of those boats.
LOE: Aerial activities
The PRC’s coercion campaign against Taiwan’s outlying islands in 2024 has been largely maritime and has only occasionally included aerial activities. Many of the aerial activities around Taiwan’s outlying islands during this period are not directly attributable to PRC state action. Nevertheless, an escalation of the activities observed so far could have significant effects on flight safety and Taiwan’s control of airspace over and around its outlying islands.
A PLA Z-10 armed military helicopter flew over waters near Kinmen on February 23. It is unclear whether it flew directly over Kinmen’s prohibited or restricted waters. Some PRC and ROC media characterized the helicopter’s presence as an act of psychological intimidation against Taiwan.[31]
A PLA drone flew near an airport on Taiwan’s Matsu Islands and disrupted two flights on July 2. The ROC Army Matsu Defense Command detected the PRC military drone hovering 5 nautical miles from Matsu’s Nangan Airport. The drone remained in the area for 20 minutes and caused two civilian flights to delay landing at the airport.[32] The drone did not enter the airspace above Matsu’s restricted or prohibited waters.[33] This is the first reported instance of a PLA drone approaching Taiwan’s outlying islands outside of a military exercise.
There have also been several instances of ostensibly civilian PRC drones flying directly over Kinmen and filming or dropping propaganda materials at Kinmen military facilities. PRC drones flew over and filmed ROC facilities on the small garrison island of Erdan, the Mashan Observation Post on Kinmen’s main island, and other locations and other islands of Kinmen on at least March 29, April 8, May 25, and June 8. Some of the drones also dropped propaganda leaflets urging Taiwan to “come back” and urging Taiwanese soldiers not to resist unification and not to sacrifice their lives for “Taiwan independence.”[34] The PRC’s Taiwan Affairs Office (TAO) attributed such incidents to “spontaneous action by mainland netizens” expressing their hope for unification.[35] ROC military officials have called such incursions “gray zone intrusions” and “cognitive operations” to undermine Taiwanese and international confidence in Taiwan’s military. ROC military personnel did not shoot down the drones, possibly because they flew out of range of conventional firearms.[36]
Although it is difficult to definitively attribute each of these civilian drone incursions to the CCP, the frequency of drone incursions over Taiwan’s outlying islands has coincided with heightened aggression by the PRC against Taiwan before. Kinmen experienced a spate of PRC drone incursions in August 2022 after then-US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan. The PRC responded to Pelosi’s visit with large-scale military exercises that encircled Taiwan. Kinmen experienced 29 drone incursions the same month, many of which were ostensibly “civilian.”[37] Unarmed civilian drones are far less likely than military drones to trigger a military response from Taiwan.
A final aerial component of the PRC’s efforts against Taiwan’s outlying islands involved the PRC’s Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) unilaterally adjusting civilian flight routes to fly closer to Taiwanese territories. The CAAC unilaterally canceled an offset of flight route M503, which runs north to south over the Taiwan Strait, on February 1, so that planes would fly several kilometers closer to the median line of the Taiwan Strait.[38] The CAAC activated two additional flight routes on April 19 that connected the cities of Xiamen and Fuzhou to the M503 route. Xiamen and Fuzhou are PRC cities near Taiwan’s Kinmen and Matsu islands, respectively, so the new flight routes have the effect of increasing air traffic around Taiwan’s outlying islands.[39] Increasing the volume of flights in the sensitive airspace near Kinmen, Matsu, and the Taiwan Strait median line serves to strain Taiwanese resources as Taiwan must monitor, assess, and prepare to respond to each flight as a potential airspace incursion.
Taiwan’s Civil Aviation Administration (CAA) said the unilateral adjustment of the M503 route and the addition of the new connecting routes posed a danger to air traffic in the area.[40] The PRC’s TAO denied that there were any security concerns about the new flight routes and also denied the existence of a median line in the Taiwan Strait.[41]
LOE: Economic integration
The PRC’s ongoing efforts to economically integrate Kinmen and Matsu predate Taiwan’s 2024 election by many years. Targeting Taiwan’s economically vulnerable and isolated outer islands enables the PRC to establish its influence at a local level without having to engage with the DPP-controlled central government.
The PRC State Council unveiled a far-reaching cross-strait integration initiative known as the Fujian Cross-Strait Integration Zone in September 2023 with the aim of deepening cross-strait economic linkages.[42] The plan entails 21 specific measures to cultivate Fujian province as a model cross-strait integration zone through the development of communication and transportation infrastructure to enhance connectivity, encouraging Taiwanese residents’ participation in social and public welfare activities in the mainland, and providing incentives to encourage Taiwanese businesses to engage in Fujian’s commercial sector.[43] The plan emphasizes facilitating Taiwanese enterprises’ market access with special trade measures and strengthening industrial cooperation through joint ventures in technology and the digital economy. Undertaking a province-wide integration project serves to amplify the gravity of potential economic linkages, attracting interest beyond Taiwan’s outer islands and pursuing stronger connections with interested stakeholders on the Taiwan mainland. The PRC Ministry of Commerce released new details about the initiative on January 9, two days before Taiwan’s presidential election.[44]In addition to economic integration, the plan also pushes for social connections and exchanges between Fujian and Kinmen. On June 16 the PRC’s Ministry of Education released additional information on the initiative's educational cooperation components, saying that the Ministry would be taking steps to encourage Taiwanese students and teachers to go to Fujian to further their academic studies and careers.[45]
The Fujian provincial government in the PRC launched a series of initiatives on April 28 aimed at building political support in Taiwan for cross-strait integration.[46] Among the services that the Fujan provincial government announced is the “Fuzhou-Matsu City Pass,” a 300 RMB (approximately 42 USD) benefits card that facilitates the travel and settlement of Matsu residents in Fuzhou. The card offers Matsu residents discounted rides on transportation and hotels in Fuzhou, free tours of Fuzhou's major cultural attractions, housing benefits, and dedicated hotline consultation for children's education, employment, and entrepreneurship.[47] The Fujian government also announced that it will promote the construction of transportation and industrial infrastructure, such as airports, high-speed rails, highways, and ports, to increase connectivity between Fuzhou and Matsu.
The Fujian government announced the new programs on the same day that KMT Legislative Caucus Whip Fu Kun-chi met with TAO Director Song Tao. The PRC’s announcement during Fu’s visit follows a pattern of showcasing cooperative policies to portray the KMT as a good faith partner that produces favorable outcomes for cross-strait relations.
Promoting economic ties between Fujian and Taiwan’s outer islands furthers the PRC’s efforts to establish greater political influence over ROC municipalities. The purpose of intertwining the local economies and increasing cross-strait interaction is to positively affect the livelihoods of residents in Taiwan’s outer islands and make decoupling a politically unpopular policy. The PRC has already made political inroads by promoting cross-strait travel links. The PRC and ROC islands of Kinmen and Matsu expanded links in transportation, trade, and postal services in 2008 after decades of lobbying by the PRC. The PRC refers to these services between the PRC and Taiwan's outer islands as the "Three Little Links."[48] The PRC’s promotion of cross-strait travel has resonated with Kinmen residents, especially with those among whom political support for a bridge to connect the island to the mainland is strong.[49]
The PRC suspended individual travel to Taiwan in 2019 due to cross-Strait tensions, and both the PRC and ROC stopped tour groups from traveling to the other country during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. While Taiwan’s government pushed for group tours to resume in 2023, PRC tour groups are still not allowed to visit Taiwan. In April 2024, the PRC announced that residents of Fujian could visit Matsu, as part of efforts to increase people-to-people and business exchanges across the Strait. The first tourist group from Fujian arrived in Matsu in August 2024.[50]
The PRC formally proposed a road linking Kinmen and Xiamen in its 2022 National Highway Network Plan.[51] Former Kinmen County councilor Chen Tsang-chiang also stressed Kinmen’s need for a bridge to Xiamen, calling it a “connection to an economic lifeline.”[52] Chen is the chairman of the “Kin-Xia Bridge Construction Promotion Association,” an advocacy group that seeks to realize the bridge’s creation for the economic benefit of Kinmen residents.[53] In addition to increasing cross-Strait ties and increasing economic opportunities, the bridge would allow Kinmen to serve as the location for official cross-Strait dialogue. The association collected enough signatures in September 2023 to kickstart the process of initiating a formal referendum.[54] The TAO expressed its support for the Kinmen-based association’s efforts on September 27, and used the opportunity to talk up the potential benefits and improvements to the standard of living that could be realized by pursuing the wider Cross-Strait Integration Development Zone in Fujian.[55] The bridge is also part of a scheme proposed by some local Kinmen councilors in 2023 to turn Kinmen into a demilitarized “peace island.”[56]
Taiwan’s DPP government remains staunchly opposed to building more physical linkages between Kinmen and the PRC, viewing the bridge as another mode for the PRC to strengthen its influence and gradually assimilate Kinmen.[57] The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) officials say that the bridge would make it easier for the PLA to invade and capture Kinmen. The MAC worries that PRC efforts to integrate Kinmen with Fujian will pose a significant threat to Taiwanese sovereignty, which could potentially expand into other outlying islands.[58]
The PRC unilaterally began work on its half of the Kinmen–Xiamen bridge to connect Xiamen to the future Xiang’an Airport, which the PRC is building on Dadeng Island, north of Kinmen’s main island. Taiwanese media reported that the PRC had been reclaiming land between Dadeng Island and Xiaodeng Island since 2013 for the airport, which will replace Xiamen’s existing Gaoqi International Airport.[59] The Xiang’an airport is currently only six miles from Kinmen’s Shangyi Airport, resulting in significant airspace overlap. The PRC touts this airport as a part of the Xiamen-Kinmen “City of Life Circle,” a project to enhance regional connectivity, foster economic development, and promote Cross-Strait exchange. It envisions that the second half of a Kinmen–Xiamen bridge project will connect Kinmen to the Xiang’an airport.[60] The ROC government worries that the Xiang’an Airport, which is expected to be operational in 2026, will pose a significant risk to flights leaving Kinmen. As the two airports would share around 70% of their airspace, constant coordination would be required to ensure flight safety. This could be a significant issue, as the PRC has already shown a willingness to disregard safety measures and unilaterally change flight routes around Taiwan without consultation with their ROC counterparts. Additionally, PRC land reclamation efforts have changed the physical environment and halved the distance between PRC territory and the island of Kinmen to under 2 miles (3 kilometers), posing a significant risk to Taiwanese interests.
Progress of island reclamation of Dadeng Island for the Xiang’an Airport between (a) December 2010 and (b) December 2020.[61]
The PRC has capitalized on the political environment in Kinmen and Matsu to promote cross-strait integration. Next to Lienchiang County, encompassing the ROC’s Matsu islands, Kinmen County has the highest KMT voting percentage in the country. The KMT presidential candidates received 75% and 61% of the vote in 2020 and 2024, respectively.[62] The KMT’s strong influence in Kinmen presents an opportunity for the PRC to exploit political leanings to promote economic integration initiatives favorable to its strategic interests in Taiwan.
Scenario: A Short-of-War Seizure of Kinmen
The following section lays out one plausible scenario in which the PRC could build upon the activities described above to execute a seizure of Taiwan’s Kinmen Islands through short-of-war coercion within the next six months. This scenario is not intended to be a prediction of what the PRC will most likely do or how Taiwan and other nations will respond. It is also not a definitive assessment of what the PRC currently intends to do. Rather, the scenario is intended to illustrate how the PRC’s lines of effort against Kinmen to date may evolve into a short-of-war coercion campaign to seize Kinmen, what observable indicators may point to such a campaign taking place, what events and decisions from both sides of the conflict could allow for the PRC’s success in this effort, and what sort of calculus would lead the CCP to pursue this course of action in the near term.
A similar series of events around Taiwan’s Matsu Islands could lead to the PRC capturing those islands in a similar fashion. ISW has observed far fewer PRC activities around Matsu (compared to Kinmen) to support such a campaign, however.
Stage 1: Escalating law enforcement activities around Kinmen
In the following three to four months, the CCG normalizes incursions into Kinmen’s restricted and prohibited waters until such incursions occur nearly daily. The CCG expands its designated “patrol area” to include waters closer and closer to Kinmen, including prohibited waters. CCG ships begin to enter Taiwanese waters north of Kinmen, where there is no “buffer zone” of restricted waters between the PRC’s territorial waters and Taiwan’s de facto territorial waters. The People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) ships may occasionally participate in these patrols to test Taiwan’s response. However, the CCG is the primary driver of the effort to send the message that these patrols are legitimate law enforcement activities and that the PRC has the legal jurisdiction and responsibility to patrol in Kinmen’s waters. The Taiwanese coast guard’s resources are stretched thin, and it is unable to respond to the high volume of simultaneous incursions around Kinmen by the numerically superior CCG.
The CCG also more aggressively enforces PRC laws around Kinmen and other parts of the Taiwan Strait. It expels and occasionally detains Taiwanese fishing boats for illegal fishing in PRC waters in violation of PRC regulations. It boards and searches Taiwanese vessels in its waters for “contraband.” It uses water cannons against some Taiwanese vessels. It particularly steps up these law enforcement actions against Taiwanese vessels within PRC territorial waters to the east and south of Kinmen, which all ships must pass through on the way to Kinmen. Taiwan’s coast guard fails to prevent the CCG from arresting at least some Taiwanese citizens. The PRC may offer incentives to Taiwanese nationals to legitimize PRC authority in some way, for example by encouraging them to apply for fishing permits with PRC authorities as a means of avoiding CCG harassment.
These CCG efforts challenge Taiwan’s effective control over its own waters, strain the Taiwanese coast guard’s resources and manpower, reduce Taiwanese people’s confidence in the DPP government’s ability to protect them, harm the livelihoods of Taiwanese fishermen, and deter some Taiwanese economic activity in the contested waters.
Stage 2: Testing the ROC’s military response
After normalizing frequent patrols into Kinmen’s restricted waters and aggressive law enforcement in the surrounding area, the PRC begins attempts to board and detain Taiwanese vessels in waters that the PRC does not undisputedly control, including within Kinmen’s maritime boundaries and parts of Taiwan’s claimed Exclusive Economic Zone. When Taiwan physically confronts CCG ships or attempts to engage military assets to defend its citizens, the PRC frames such actions as escalations by Taiwan and uses them as an excuse to escalate further, for instance by increasing the number of CCG vessels operating in the Kinmen area or blasting CGA vessels with water cannons. In this scenario, Taiwan cannot manage a response that is sufficient to deter the PRC.
The PRC also begins to test and strain Kinmen’s air defenses. It first flies ostensibly civilian surveillance drones directly over Kinmen’s military bases and reroutes civilian flight routes to fly closer and closer to Kinmen, including the airspace over Kinmen’s prohibited waters. Taiwan chooses not to shoot down the drones or scramble aircraft to respond. The PRC then flies PLA military drones or even manned military aircraft increasingly close to Kinmen and eventually in the airspace above prohibited waters. These incursions are intended to test Taiwan’s red lines for air defense. Taiwan redefined its definition of a “first strike” on its territory during the Tsai Ing-wen administration to include an enemy air or sea incursion into Taiwanese territory, even if the incursion does not include a kinetic strike.[63] Taiwan does not officially claim any territorial waters around its outlying islands, however; although the designated “prohibited waters” are functionally similar to territorial waters, Taiwan may choose not to launch a kinetic counterattack in response to incursions into those waters or the airspace above them. If Taiwan does shoot down a PRC drone over Kinmen, PRC officials frame this as Taiwanese aggression.
Stage 3: “Quarantining” Kinmen
Several months into this campaign, the CCG orchestrates or takes advantage of an unfortunate incident in waters around Kinmen to declare a crisis and paint Taiwan’s government as aggressive and irresponsible. Narratives in PRC media and planted in Taiwanese media frame the incident to put maximum blame on Taiwan and the DPP, justifying increased CCG presence and stricter control in the area and reducing sympathy for the Taiwanese government in the immediate term. They amplify any missteps by the Taiwanese government to strengthen this narrative. This is similar to how the PRC responded to the February 14 capsizing incident. PRC officials and media frame as escalatory any reinforcements Taiwan tries to send to Kinmen. PRC propaganda connects any new deliveries of lethal equipment to Kinmen with US arms sales to Taiwan, highlights the presence of US Green Berets on Kinmen, and points to Taiwanese military drills on the islands to claim that the “Taiwan authorities” intend hostile action against the PRC at the behest of the United States. PRC state media has already begun this narrative: the state social media account Yuyuan Tantian claimed on June 26, for instance, that a $360 million US arms sale to Taiwan on June 18 would be “basically certain” to include drones to be deployed on Kinmen.[64]
The PRC then deploys armed Coast Guard vessels to set up a “quarantine” zone around Kinmen and prevent the delivery of any additional weapons or “contraband” to the islands. They search all Taiwanese vessels passing into this zone to confiscate supposed “contraband” and arrest “separatists.” The quarantine still allows most civilian ships to pass after an inspection but blocks the passage of most ROC government vessels. The CCG claims to find contraband or other illegal activities in its inspections and uses these “discoveries” to justify maintaining the quarantine. CCG vessels fully blockade all marine traffic to small garrison islands of Kinmen County such as Dadan, Erdan, and Beiding, which do not have civilian populations. PRC aviation authorities impose a no-fly zone in the area, claiming the unstable situation is a danger to flight safety. The CCG can take advantage of Kinmen’s proximity to the PRC mainland to maintain the “quarantine” for months and restrict the delivery of goods to Kinmen. These efforts may exclude the Wuqiu islands, which are administratively part of Kinmen County but geographically 133 kilometers (about 82 miles) from the rest of the islands.[65] PRC plans do not need to adhere to Taiwan’s administrative divisions.
In the meantime, the PRC also attacks Kinmen’s communication infrastructure with deniable cyberattacks and by damaging the submarine cables that connect Kinmen to Taiwan. These attacks slow down Kinmen’s internet and mobile communication, financial system, and economic activity. PRC boats severed both of Matsu’s submarine cables in February 2023 with similar disruptive effects, including an archipelago-wide internet outage that lasted 50 days.[66] The quarantine around Kinmen makes Taiwan’s efforts to repair its damaged communication infrastructure even more difficult, if not impossible. The PRC might also target the cables connecting Kinmen to the PRC mainland to ensure a total communications blockade, or it might leave those cables intact and use them to become Kinmen’s sole internet provider and enforce a “Great Firewall”-style Internet censorship regime on Kinmen.
The PRC “quarantine” of Kinmen immediately causes cross-strait tensions to skyrocket and severely damages whatever goodwill the PRC has built with the KMT. The Taiwanese government and major political parties unify in condemning the PRC’s actions but vacillate and quarrel on how to mount an effective response without triggering escalation. Taiwan sends CGA ships to Kinmen but fails to break through the quarantine in tense standoffs with the CCG. Taiwan appeals to aid from the United States and other countries, a move that the PRC frames as further evidence that Taiwan’s “separatist” government is colluding with foreign powers against China.
The United States is unwilling to substantively intervene in this scenario, however. The crisis around Kinmen coincides with President Joe Biden’s “lame duck” period, the apex or aftermath of a contentious presidential election, and costly wars in Ukraine and the Middle East that occupy US attention and resources. The White House and other US policymakers find many excuses to avoid potentially escalatory actions against the PRC. The United States does not have diplomatic relations with Taiwan and lacks any formal commitment to defend Taiwan. The Taiwan Relations Act defines Taiwan to include “the islands of Taiwan and the Pescadores [Penghu],” excluding outlying islands like Kinmen and Matsu.[67] The US-ROC Mutual Defense Treaty that existed from 1955–1980 intentionally did not cover Kinmen and Matsu, either.[68] US policymakers and commentators point out that the PRC has not launched any kinetic attacks and that tiny offshore islands like Kinmen are not very important to US national security interests anyway, especially when weighing the costs of armed conflict against a fellow nuclear-armed military superpower. PRC information warfare amplifies such narratives. The United States imposes sanctions but fails to deter the PRC’s efforts around Kinmen. Washington attempts to de-escalate the situation diplomatically, even quietly withdrawing the US troops on Kinmen as a concession to the PRC and out of fear for the soldiers’ safety. It pressures Taiwan to make concessions as well. Other countries such as Japan and Australia do not come to Taiwan’s aid without the United States leading the way.
Stage 4: Taiwan concedes
The PRC spreads propaganda within Taiwan and especially in Kinmen itself that blames the DPP for the crisis and raises fears of the possible consequences for Kinmen residents if the ROC government does not cease “provoking” Beijing. Seeing no way out of the situation, no sign of meaningful US support, and mounting demands from the populace, the Kinmen County government pleads with Taipei to concede so that it can get relief.
Beijing’s demand is that Kinmen disarm itself, remove any foreign troops, and become a “demilitarized zone” (DMZ), which it says will de-escalate tension. A bipartisan group of Kinmen local councilors proposed a plan for a Kinmen DMZ in 2023 to prevent their county from becoming a target of PRC aggression, so the CCP capitalizes on pre-existing support for this plan in Kinmen and portrays it as a Taiwanese idea.[69] It insists on PRC involvement in implementing and enforcing this demilitarized zone, however. As part of the process, PRC authorities are allowed to land on Kinmen and its associated islands to ensure the ROC military bases have been disarmed and vacated of Taiwanese soldiers, who are arrested if they resist. The PRC uses Kinmen military and civilian personnel it has bribed or otherwise compromised to reduce Kinmen’s resistance.[70] The PRC immediately provides food and other necessary supplies to Kinmen to build goodwill with the populace, while continuing to prevent Taiwanese government ships from making supply deliveries. The PRC eventually establishes its own outposts and government liaison offices in Kinmen with the justification of overseeing the demilitarization and keeping the peace. It may operate these institutions jointly with Kinmen’s civilian authorities.
The PRC has always claimed Kinmen and other ROC islands as its own territory, so it does not need to formally declare annexation. It instead maintains some ambiguity about Kinmen’s change of status to avoid unwanted conflict escalation while it gradually solidifies its de facto control of the islands. The CCG continues to patrol Kinmen’s waters to control the ROC personnel, equipment, supplies, or services that are allowed to reach the islands. The ROC national government does not formally surrender its sovereignty over Kinmen, but Taipei nonetheless loses the ability to administer Kinmen County in practice.
In the longer term, the PRC builds up Kinmen as an exemplar of the “One Country, Two Systems” scheme it wishes to impose on Taiwan. The PRC helps Kinmen build infrastructure and invests in Kinmen’s economy, delivering a substantial boon to the small island group’s economic prosperity. It takes over maritime law enforcement for Kinmen, even cracking down on illegal fishing by PRC nationals in the waters near Kinmen. On the other hand, it avoids overt meddling in Kinmen’s political system, aside from arresting the occasional “separatist.” The CCP can afford to largely let Kinmen manage its own internal governance because Kinmen’s politics are already dominated by pan-Blue and relatively PRC-friendly politicians. The CCP will use its media and information warfare to promote narratives of Kinmen’s freedom and economic prosperity, thus increasing the appeal of such a model for Taiwan’s other outlying islands and eventually Taiwan itself.
The PRC eventually completes and opens its Xiang’an airport in 2026 and uses its leverage and influence over the Kinmen government to approve the construction of the Xiamen–Kinmen bridge project, despite the central ROC government’s refusal to sanction this project. This bridge solidifies PRC control over Kinmen and will allow the PRC to move military and law enforcement personnel to Kinmen in the future, such as in an “emergency” immediately preceding a broader war against Taiwan. The bridge’s connection of Kinmen to the massive Xiang’an airport also makes the new airport a popular option for travelers to Kinmen, outcompeting Kinmen’s own small airport until most travel to Kinmen goes through the PRC.
After a successful PRC short-of-war campaign to seize control of Kinmen, Taiwan hardens its defense posture in its remaining territories and works to develop strategies to prevent similar “short-of-war” island seizure tactics from working in the future. However, the loss of ROC territory without a fight severely harms morale within the Taiwanese military and society and devastates confidence in Taiwan’s government. It also seriously harms Taiwan’s faith that the United States and other friendly nations will come to Taiwan’s aid in a war. The loss of Kinmen may trigger a political crisis in Taiwan including a no-confidence vote against President Lai Ching-te. Politicians and citizens, including some within the DPP, will blame Lai either for provoking the PRC’s coercive campaign or for failing to defend Taiwan’s territory. In the aftermath, Taiwan’s posture toward the PRC takes a much more conciliatory turn as the DPP loses future elections and softens its perceived pro-independence stance. The KMT and other opposition parties successfully push for measures to cool down tensions, increase diplomatic and economic engagement with the PRC, and reduce reliance on the United States.
CCP Decision Calculus
The sequence of events presented above is a best-case scenario for the Chinese Communist Party if it chooses to pursue a short-of-war coercion campaign to capture Kinmen. The success of this campaign hinges on Taiwan, the United States, and other countries failing to respond meaningfully to thwart the PRC’s actions and ultimately conceding to PRC demands.
The reality is that such a campaign against Kinmen is full of risks for the CCP, however. The foremost risk is unwanted conflict escalation. Taiwan, the United States, and other aligned governments could interpret the “quarantine” around Kinmen as an act of war that justifies a forceful response. Miscalculations by PRC and ROC personnel during maritime confrontations could also lead to violent incidents that may spiral out of control. In either case, the situation creates a risk of conflict escalation to an intensity and scope that the PRC is not prepared to handle. Aside from the risk of escalation, the CCP’s quarantine against Kinmen may fail to secure the concessions it hopes for. Kinmen may display unexpected economic resilience and political resistance to CCP demands. The quarantine may be too porous to sufficiently impact Kinmen’s economic stability or cut it off from the ROC government services. On the other hand, an overly strict quarantine could harm the PRC’s own economic interests by obstructing or deterring the flow of economic activity to the entire region, including the major PRC port of Xiamen. The entire campaign also carries the risk of permanently harming the PRC’s relations with other countries, even if those countries do not intervene to stop the seizure of Kinmen. It will likely lead to renewed efforts by Taiwan to harden its defenses against both conventional and coercive threats from the PRC, with support from the United States and partnered nations.
There are several considerations that might lead CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping to decide upon this course of action in the near term despite the risks, however.
First, Xi may be losing faith in the CCP’s ability to achieve “peaceful reunification.” The prospect of “peaceful reunification” relies on a relatively friendly, or at least conciliatory, government in Taipei. The CCP has pointed to the 2008–2016 presidential administration of Ma Ying-jeou as its preferred model of peaceful cross-strait relations.[71] It maintains exchanges with former president Ma and his political party, the KMT, to legitimize the KMT as an interlocutor on behalf of Taiwan rather than the “separatist” Democratic Progressive Party.[72] The DPP won its third consecutive presidential term with the election of Lai Ching-te in January, however; by the end of Lai’s first term in 2028, the KMT will have been out of power in Taiwan for 12 years. The CCP’s economic integration efforts and incentives for Taiwanese businesspeople, its information operations, its cross-strait exchanges and forums, its outreach to Taiwanese opposition parties, and other persuasion tactics have failed to reverse the trend of Taiwanese people identifying less and less with the “Chinese nation” and increasingly supporting Taiwanese independence. CCP intimidation and military deterrence efforts have also failed to prevent DPP election victories and at worst even backfired and increased support for the DPP. Xi may perceive that the DPP itself has grown bolder in its support for Taiwanese independence. Most troubling of all, he may worry that the KMT is moderating its pro-unification stance, which Beijing insists is a common basis for cross-strait relations. As the KMT seeks to appeal to younger voters, it has abolished the conservative Huang Fuh-hsing department of the party and distanced itself from former president Ma. Xi may see Taiwan’s long-term political trends getting worse and worse for him unless he takes drastic action.
Second, Xi may see a unique opportunity in the next six months presented by the political dynamics of Taiwan and the United States, which he could assess will prevent both governments from responding in an effective or escalatory way. In Taiwan, the new Lai administration is still relatively inexperienced. The DPP holds a minority in the Legislative Yuan for the first time since 2016. It faces frequent political battles with the opposition coalition of the KMT and TPP, which are trying to hinder the DPP’s agenda and to implement reforms to check the administration’s executive powers. In the United States, President Joe Biden is in his lame-duck period after announcing his withdrawal from the 2024 presidential race. The US domestic political landscape is turbulent and divisive amid the ongoing election, the foreign policy establishment is preoccupied with ongoing wars in Ukraine and Gaza, and the US populace has little appetite for more war. Xi may believe these factors will preclude a timely and forceful US response to his Kinmen campaign before the inauguration of a new US president in January 2025.
There are many characteristics of this particular short-of-war approach to seize Kinmen that may appeal to Xi in the near term over other forms of compellence against Taiwan. First, Kinmen’s small size and close proximity to the PRC make it very hard for Taiwan to defend and feasible for the PRC to surround with primarily Coast Guard vessels. Second, the operation’s reliance on non-military assets and broadly nonviolent means would make it more difficult for Taiwan or the United States to justify a military response. The islands of Kinmen (and Matsu) are much less important to US interests than Taiwan proper: they have small populations, little strategic value, and no critical technologies that the United States wishes to keep out of Beijing’s hands, such as high-end semiconductor fabs. Third, this campaign is much cheaper, less risky, and easier to de-escalate than more kinetic operations against more distant targets. If the campaign is going poorly or threatens to trigger escalation, the CCG can simply end its quarantine and declare victory in some more limited goal, such as thwarting the shipment of dangerous equipment to Kinmen and proving the capabilities of PRC “law enforcement” around Kinmen.
The benefits of seizing Kinmen are less about the strategic value of Kinmen itself than about the psychological effect such an operation would have. Militarily, Kinmen is little more than a minor hurdle the PRC would have to clear in a potential future invasion. Seizing Kinmen in advance would ease the PRC’s future military plans and reduce Taiwan’s strategic depth, but the islands do not provide a decisive advantage to either side. More importantly, a PRC seizure of Kinmen without a war would be the ROC’s first loss of territory since the PRC seized the Yijiangshan and Dachen islands in 1955. The loss would strike a severe blow to Taiwan’s confidence in its self-defense capability and in its relationship with the United States, presumed to be its chief security guarantor. The operation would therefore increase the chances that Taiwan capitulate in a future conflict. The operation would also be a psychological victory for the PRC domestic audience, raising domestic support for Xi’s governance and strengthening the credibility of his promise to “reunify” Taiwan by 2049 or earlier.
Implications for the United States
The Taiwan Relations Act (TRA) has served as the foundation of the modern US-Taiwan relationship since the United States and ROC broke off diplomatic relations in 1979. While the United States no longer has a binding legal commitment to defend Taiwan, the TRA enshrines in law the US interest in resisting threats to Taiwan, providing defensive arms to Taiwan, and opposing “any effort to determine the future of Taiwan by other than peaceful means.” The law does not solely concern the use of military force. It references boycotts and embargoes to shape Taiwan’s future as threats to Western Pacific regional security that would be of “grave concern” to the United States. It also states a US policy to “maintain the capability […] to resist any resort to force or other forms of coercion that would jeopardize the security, or the social or economic system, of the people on Taiwan.”[73] This category of “other forms of coercion” would include most of the lines of effort that are central to the scenario described above. Although the TRA’s definition of “Taiwan” omits Kinmen and Matsu, it must be understood that the PRC’s coercive efforts to integrate those islands are not targeted at the islands alone, but at the political will of Taiwan as a whole. These courses of action serve primarily to demoralize the Taiwanese people and destroy their political will to resist “reunification.”
A short-of-war coercion campaign by the PRC to seize Kinmen must therefore be of serious concern to the United States. Any US effort to deter or repel PRC military aggression against Taiwan rests heavily on the strength of the US-Taiwan relationship and on Taiwan’s will to fight for itself. The PRC’s successful incorporation of Kinmen would have a devastating impact on Taiwan’s faith in the United States to defend it, on the Taiwanese people’s faith in their government’s ability to protect them, and therefore on the credibility of US deterrence against the PRC. Inaction from the United States would also undermine the faith of US allies and partners in the United States’ ability and willingness to defend them and to uphold the regional security order against PRC aggression. Reduced confidence in the United States’ commitment and leadership will weaken the impetus among regional countries to take collective action to resist PRC aggression.
These psychological effects would embolden the PRC to conduct a future annexation campaign against Taiwan, increase the PRC’s chances of success in such a campaign, and even raise the likelihood that Taiwan will concede its sovereignty without a fight.
In the described short-of-war coercion scenario, Washington faces the challenge of reacting effectively against the PRC’s attempt to incorporate Kinmen without triggering dangerous escalation. Neither the United States nor any of the parties involved will want to fight a war over Kinmen. US measures against the PRC coercion thus should seek to avoid any direct use of force or military incursions into PRC territory. Within these parameters, the most salient objective that the United States and its allies should pursue is to deter the PRC from the described course of action by changing its decision-making calculus and making such actions less likely to succeed. A second but equally vital objective is to mitigate the harm caused to US and Taiwanese interests, including Taiwanese morale, if the PRC campaign does succeed.
The report will here offer three sets of policy recommendations for the United States, Taiwan, and other aligned nations to address the PRC short-of-war seizure of Kinmen scenario. The first set of recommendations are pre-emptive measures that should be implemented as soon as possible to deter such a coercion campaign and reduce its chance of success. The second set are reactive measures that should be used selectively in direct response to specific PRC actions, such as the quarantine and communication blockade of Kinmen. These measures are meant to counteract specific PRC actions during the crisis period either directly or by imposing costs on the PRC higher than the benefit the PRC expects to receive from its actions. The third set of recommendations are measures to be taken in the aftermath if the PRC succeeds in seizing control of Kinmen. These measures are intended to impose additional costs on the PRC in order to deter future PRC aggression, mitigate the severity of the damage to US and Taiwanese interests, and defend against similar campaigns in the future.
Pre-emptive measures
- Increase the resiliency and capacity of offshore islands’ communication infrastructure. Taiwan should increase the resilience of Kinmen’s and Matsu’s communications infrastructure to counter the PRC’s efforts to informationally isolate the islands. Kinmen’s proximity and connectivity to the PRC make it especially exposed to cable cutting and qualify it as a priority locale for implementing satellite services. Taiwan’s national telecom provider Chunghwa Telecom signed a deal with a UK-based Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite company in 2021 to acquire satellites to start providing coverage for Taiwan.[74] Pursuing the acquisition of more satellites and equipment to increase bandwidth to handle large amounts of traffic can protect Kinmen’s connectivity in crisis. Taiwan should simultaneously accelerate the development of its domestic LEO satellite program and ensure that service extends to Kinmen, Matsu, and other offshore islands.[75]
- Develop a Taiwanese merchant marine force. A merchant marine force of Taiwanese-flagged vessels would be responsible for transporting critical supplies during a blockade or quarantine. The merchant marine force or a similar deputized militia of civilians should also be authorized to carry out law enforcement activities such as expelling boats from Taiwanese territorial waters, cutting nets used in illegal fishing operations, confiscating fishing equipment, and otherwise protecting Taiwanese territory from illegal PRC activities. This force of vessels could free up CGA resources and personnel to confront coercive CCG activities when needed.
- Selective Intelligence Disclosures. The United States, Taiwan, and partners should conduct selective intelligence disclosures or “pre-bunking” to preemptively expose the PRC’s intentions and counter the pretenses that it claims to justify its actions. Similar to the United States and United Kingdom’s concerted intelligence disclosures immediately prior to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, such disclosures can prompt internal reactions that disrupt the PRC’s planning and decision calculus. Intelligence disclosures also raise international awareness of the crisis and enable Taiwan’s supporters to coordinate potential responses and punitive actions. Intelligence disclosures also counter PRC narratives surrounding the situation, including “lawfare” and public opinion warfare.
- Reaffirm Taiwan’s rights. The US, Taiwan, and allies should reaffirm Taiwan’s rights under international law. These include Taiwanese air, maritime, and territorial boundaries, as well as Taiwan’s rights within its own territory. All states should prepare a joint statement in support of Taiwan and decrying PRC coercion as a violation of Taiwanese sovereignty under international law. This messaging should continue through all stages before, during, and after the campaign.
- Targeted domestic information campaigns. Taiwan should begin messaging targeted at the Kinmen populace discussing the dangers of CCP control. These messages should use Hong Kong as an example of how the CCP can transform and control populations under its control and does so despite initial promises to respect local self-governance.
- Establish a larger CGA presence around Kinmen. Taiwan should significantly increase CGA law enforcement measures in the waters around Kinmen, including deploying more CGA ships and personnel to the area, to respond more effectively to PRC coercion and illegal activities. This increased activity should be paired with messaging communicating to the Kinmen populace that the CGA is capable of defending Taiwanese territory.
- Create a joint US-Taiwan course of action to defend Taiwanese sovereignty. In response to PRC coercion, Taiwan and the United States need to communicate their willingness to use whatever economic, political, and even military responses are necessary to protect Taiwanese offshore islands and defend Taiwanese sovereignty.
- Coordinated information campaigns clarifying the nature of the CCG. US, Taiwanese, and allied messaging should stress that the CCG is a paramilitary organization under the ultimate control of the Central Military Commission. This counters PRC narratives that CCG actions are normal law enforcement measures, and instead portrays them accurately as aggressive short-of-war coercive activities that advance Beijing’s strategic goals. This messaging should continue through all stages of the crisis, even if the PRC ultimately succeeds, to avoid normalizing such coercive behavior and persuade the international community to remain vigilant and intolerant of PRC short-of-war coercion.
Reactive measures
- Coordinate information campaigns condemning CCG actions. As the PRC implements a quarantine around Kinmen, the United States, Taiwan, and other countries should intensify messaging aimed at undermining the PRC narrative that the CCG actions are “normal” law enforcement in areas of Chinese jurisdiction and that Taiwan provoked such measures. The messaging should aim to convince the international community that the PRC’s actions are aggressive and unprovoked. It should stress that the CCG is a paramilitary organization that is ultimately subordinate to the Central Military Commission and that its actions constitute a forcible change to the status quo in the Taiwan Strait in service of PRC strategic aims. ROC authorities and partner countries should amplify incidents in which the PRC quarantine blocks shipments of civilian goods to Kinmen or blocks the transit of Taiwanese or foreign civilians to Kinmen. They can use these incidents to demonstrate that the “quarantine” is not about stopping criminal activity but about squeezing Kinmen economically, denying it access to goods and services, and seizing control of the waters. This messaging should be targeted both at the international community and the people of Kinmen.
- Convey to the PRC the costs associated with forcibly taking Taiwanese territory. The United States must make clear that a PRC seizure of Kinmen through coercive means would fundamentally change the US approach to defending the rest of Taiwan. As soon as the PRC begins a quarantine or blockade around Kinmen, the United States should call for Beijing to remove the quarantine and state that if it uses forceful coercion to undermine Taiwan’s control of Kinmen or other Taiwanese islands, the United States will significantly increase its military presence in and around Taiwan and increase the provision of security assistance to Taiwan.
- Use messaging to impose economic costs on Xiamen and beyond. This messaging should warn commercial vessels and travelers to avoid the Xiamen-Kinmen area due to risks of arbitrary detention and conflict escalation. The port of Xiamen is one of the busiest in the world. It maintains container shipping routes with 152 ports in 57 countries and ranks 13th on the UN port liner shipping connectivity index, which is a measure of ports’ integration with global import and export shipping networks.[76] Xiamen’s proximity to Kinmen makes it vulnerable to economic disruptions centered on Kinmen. Disruption to the normal flow of commercial marine traffic would be a natural effect of heightened tensions near Kinmen if merchants perceive risk of escalation to violence. The United States and its partners are positioned to capitalize on this vulnerability by communicating the risk to the international community. Increased awareness of the risks caused by the PRC’s actions against Kinmen and the threat of escalation strengthens merchants’ incentive to delay or redirect shipping away from Xiamen. Reduced throughput in one of the PRC’s busiest ports translates to shipping route and supply chain disruptions that raise costs for producers and consumers alike. Disruptions to international commerce will fuel political pressure from international stakeholders on the PRC to maintain the status quo and not destabilize the area.
- Counter PRC cyberwarfare. Allied actors should counter PRC cyberattacks and sabotage of Kinmen’s communications and critical infrastructure with tit-for-tat but deniable actions against Xiamen. The United States and its partners can cut off satellite communications and other services they provide to PRC vessels operating far from the PRC as well as services in the area around Kinmen and Fujian Province. PRC distant water fishing vessels rely heavily on US-based satellite service providers to maintain connectivity.[77] The United States and allied countries can also help Kinmen overcome a communications blockade by providing alternative means of communication, such as Starlink satellites, if Taiwan does not already have such capabilities itself.
- Coordinate allied military response. The United States and allies can make a show of force by sending warships to transit the Taiwan Strait, as the United States did to end the 1995–1996 Taiwan Strait Crisis. The United States can send a signal of its resolve and successful coalition-building by coordinating this transit with one or more allied countries, such as Japan, Australia, or a NATO ally. The United States and allies should immediately schedule joint coast guard training activities with Taiwan and provide indirect support to help the CGA confront CCG ships maintaining the quarantine.
- Effectively counter PRC sea and air control. Taiwan needs to develop a comprehensive response to PRC enforcement activities around Kinmen and other offshore islands. This will include sending the CGA to escort commercial vessels carrying essential goods to Kinmen. These ships must resist being boarded by PRC authorities and work to break the quarantine and deliver goods to Kinmen. The CGA also needs to intensify law enforcement actions around Penghu and other parts of Taiwan. It should empower merchant marine or maritime forces to carry out these law enforcement operations to lighten the burden on CGA assets occupied with breaking the quarantine and defending Kinmen. Taiwan must also intensify its responses to PRC aerial activity. This includes shooting down or capturing non-military drones that fly over offshore islands. If the PRC imposes an administrative no-fly zone over Kinmen, Taiwan should publicly reject the PRC’s right to block air travel to Kinmen and send manned and unmanned aircraft to challenge this no-fly zone. Some of the Taiwanese aircraft can carry supplies for Kinmen civilians to provide relief from the “quarantine.”
- Impose sanctions. The United States and allies can exert economic pressure on the PRC by imposing financial sanctions and trade restrictions on key technology companies, financial institutions, and state-owned enterprises that are critical to driving the PRC’s economic growth. The intent behind these measures is to destabilize vital industries, disrupt supply chains, and create financial turmoil to raise the costs of further coercive actions against Kinmen. These sanctions can also target CCP officials to highlight individuals’ complicity in driving PRC aggression in the Taiwan Strait.
- Emphasize the risk of establishing Kinmen as a “peace island.” Taiwan should resist the PRC demand for a de-militarized zone. It should work to convince the people and political leaders of Kinmen that such a setup will put them in danger by rewarding the PRC’s coercive behavior and enabling annexation. Resist concessions that enable the PRC the power to put personnel on Kinmen, to enforce demilitarization, or to use CCG ships to continue to block the passage of Taiwanese vessels.
Measures to deter future PRC aggression
- Amend relevant US laws to help protect Taiwan’s outlying islands. The US Congress and president should pass an amendment to the Taiwan Relations Act to include provisions about helping Kinmen and Matsu resist coercion from the CCP.
- Conduct joint coast guard operations. The United States should expand coast guard cooperation exercises with Taiwan and other allies in the region. Joint exercises will increase interoperability between the coast guards, making the United States, Taiwan, and allies more prepared to resist future PRC coercion or military operations.
- Increase US support for the Taiwanese military. The US should increase the number of its troops employed to Taiwan. As of 2023, a few hundred US troops, including special operations forces and US Marines, have been sent to train in Taiwan. Moderately increasing that number to 500 allows for more cooperative training, sends a strong message of US support, and reduces the likelihood of triggering a dangerous PLA response. Additionally, the US and allied navies should increase the frequency of transits through the Taiwan Strait accompanied with information releases directed towards the PRC. Finally, the US should increase its military aid to Taiwan. US and Taiwanese defense officials need to work together to identify areas of weakness and work to address deficiencies within the Taiwanese military.
- Increase Taiwanese troop presence on all offshore islands. In response to the PRC taking control of Kinmen, Taiwan needs to ensure that Matsu, Penghu, and the other offshore islands are well defended. Increasing troop presence in the other offshore islands, developing plans for subsequent blockades or quarantines, and further developing protective measures for connective infrastructure are among the actions Taiwan must take to defend the rest of its territory.
Conclusion
Just as Taiwan is uniquely vulnerable among the US allies and partners in East Asia, its outer islands of Kinmen and Matsu are Taiwan’s most vulnerable territories. Long excluded from US defense commitments due to the perception that they are impossible to defend, the tiny island groups are now targets of a broad range of coordinated PRC measures to coerce, persuade, or otherwise influence them to integrate with their giant neighbor. The political landscape on the islands is already dominated by PRC-friendly views. Politicians and residents alike are enticed by the economic benefits of PRC investment, trade, tourism, and infrastructure linkages. Kinmen and Matsu residents are also much likelier to identify as “Chinese” than are residents of Taiwan proper, 100 miles away. On the other hand, the small military and coast guard presence on the islands could hardly withstand any serious aggression from the PRC.
The loss of these territories would strike at the core centers of gravity for deterrence in the Taiwan Strait: Taiwan’s political will to resist PRC aggression and its relationship with the United States. The United States’ failure to effectively respond to such a crisis would have cascading negative effects on the faith of US allies like Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines in the US defensive umbrella. Maintaining Taiwanese sovereignty over these islands is thus a precarious but vital task.
This report has shown one plausible scenario in which the PRC could seize the Kinmen islands through means short of war. A coordinated PRC short-of-war coercion campaign of this scale would be unprecedented. Beijing used its coast guard to seize Scarborough Shoal from the Philippines in 2012, but Scarborough Shoal was uninhabited and unoccupied; Kinmen is home to nearly 140,000 people including about 3,000 military personnel.[78] A closer analogue is the early stages of Russia’s seizure of Crimea in 2014, but the PRC has been more cautious in using military aggression than Russia under Vladimir Putin.
Nevertheless, “reunifying” Taiwan, including Kinmen, is one of Beijing’s central strategic goals. Many of the lines of effort involved in the coercion campaign that this report describes are already in place. The PRC certainly has the capability to execute the campaign successfully. The main unknown upon which this scenario depends is the CCP’s political will, a variable that is often opaque and depends upon Beijing’s subjective perceptions of US and Taiwanese political dynamics. It is therefore essential that authorities in Taiwan and the United States take concrete steps to prepare for this possibility to deter the campaign, directly counter each of its lines of effort, and mitigate the severity of its impact on deterrence in the Taiwan Strait as a whole.
Washington, Taipei, and allied governments must coordinate efforts to harden Taiwan’s infrastructure and defenses around its outlying territories, counter PRC information warfare, punish PRC aggression, defend Taiwan’s sovereign rights, and take the steps necessary to ensure the continued integrity of deterrence in the Taiwan Strait.
13. The Green Beret Affair: A Tarnished Chapter in Special Forces History
"The horror. The horror." Oh wait, that is a fictional quote.
But we must know our history. All of it. The good, the bad, and the ugly (oh wait, that is another fictional quote).
The Green Beret Affair:
A Tarnished Chapter in Special Forces History
Strategy Central
By Practitioners, For Practitioners
https://www.strategycentral.io/post/the-green-beret-affair?utm
Introduction
In the summer of 1969, a scandal erupted that would forever tarnish the reputation of the United States Army Special Forces, known colloquially as the Green Berets. This episode, which became known as the "Green Beret Affair," centered on Colonel Robert B. Rheault and his involvement in Project GAMMA, a covert intelligence operation in Vietnam. The affair highlighted the murky and often morally ambiguous nature of the Vietnam War, where lines between right and wrong, ally and enemy, became increasingly blurred.
Project GAMMA: The Genesis of a Controversy
Project GAMMA, officially known as Detachment B-57, Company E (Special Operations), 5th Special Forces Group (Airborne), was established in 1967 during the height of the Vietnam War. Its mission was clear: to conduct covert intelligence operations in Cambodia, a neutral country that had become a haven for Viet Cong and North Vietnamese forces. Under the command of Colonel Rheault, the detachment excelled in its mission, providing critical intelligence that led to the destruction of enemy operations in Cambodia.
The teams involved in Project GAMMA were comprised of highly skilled operatives, many of whom had extensive experience in unconventional warfare. They operated in the shadows, often in collaboration with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and were tasked with locating and neutralizing Viet Cong sanctuaries across the Cambodian border. The intelligence gathered by Project GAMMA was invaluable to the U.S. war effort, and the detachment's successes earned them a formidable reputation.
However, the success of Project GAMMA came at a high price. The nature of the mission required close collaboration with South Vietnamese forces, some of whom were not always reliable or trustworthy. As the war dragged on, reports began to surface of assets disappearing or being compromised. It was during this time that Colonel Rheault and his team identified a South Vietnamese officer as the likely mole within their ranks.
A Decision Made in the Shadows
The identification of the South Vietnamese officer as a double agent presented Colonel Rheault with a difficult dilemma. The officer, codenamed "Chu Van Thai Khac," was suspected of passing information to the enemy, leading to the deaths of American and South Vietnamese operatives. In the context of the Vietnam War, where the stakes were immeasurably high, such a betrayal could not be tolerated.
Rheault and his team faced a grim choice. Conventional military justice was not an option; the risk of exposing Project GAMMA and its covert operations was too great. Furthermore, the evidence against the suspected mole was circumstantial and unlikely to hold up in a traditional court-martial. The CIA, which had a vested interest in the success of Project GAMMA, allegedly advised Rheault and his team to take extrajudicial action to eliminate the threat.
On June 20, 1969, the South Vietnamese officer was lured to a meeting under false pretenses. He was captured, interrogated, and ultimately executed by the Green Berets. His body was then dumped into the South China Sea, and the operation was quietly buried. For a time, it seemed as though the affair would remain hidden, another dark secret of the Vietnam War.
The Unraveling of the Cover-Up
However, the secrecy surrounding the execution was not to last. In July 1969, an anonymous tip reached the U.S. Army's Criminal Investigation Division (CID), which launched an investigation into the disappearance of the South Vietnamese officer. The investigation quickly gathered momentum, and within weeks, seven officers and one non-commissioned officer from Project GAMMA, including Colonel Rheault, were arrested and charged with murder and conspiracy to commit murder.
The arrests sent shockwaves through the U.S. military and the intelligence community. Colonel Rheault, a highly respected officer with a distinguished record, found himself at the center of a scandal that threatened to undermine the credibility of the entire Special Forces. The affair also raised uncomfortable questions about the role of the CIA in Vietnam and the extent to which it was willing to condone extrajudicial killings in the name of national security.
As the trial date approached, the defendants faced the grim prospect of lengthy prison sentences if convicted. The prosecution's case hinged on the testimony of witnesses and the ability to prove that the South Vietnamese officer had been murdered in cold blood. However, the trial took an unexpected turn when the CIA refused to provide key witnesses or documents, citing national security concerns.
The agency's refusal to cooperate effectively crippled the prosecution's case. Without the testimony of CIA officers who had advised Rheault and his team, the government's ability to prove its case was severely compromised. On September 29, 1969, the charges against Colonel Rheault and the other defendants were dropped, and they were released from custody.
Aftermath and Legacy
The dismissal of charges brought no closure to the Green Beret Affair. Colonel Rheault's military career was effectively over, and the incident left a stain on the reputation of the Special Forces. For many within the military and the intelligence community, the affair was a bitter reminder of the ethical and moral compromises that had become all too common in the Vietnam War.
In the years that followed, the Green Beret Affair became the subject of numerous books, articles, and documentaries. The incident was emblematic of the larger challenges faced by the U.S. military in Vietnam, where the complexities of the conflict often forced commanders to make impossible choices. The affair also underscored the dangerous intersection of military operations and intelligence work, where the lines between combat and covert action could become dangerously blurred.
For Colonel Rheault, the affair marked the end of a distinguished career. After his release, he retired from the Army, never publicly speaking in detail about the events that had led to his downfall. In the eyes of many, he was a scapegoat, a man who had been forced to make a difficult decision in the fog of war and had paid the price for it. Others, however, viewed him as a symbol of the excesses and failures of the U.S. military in Vietnam.
The character of Colonel Kurtz in Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 film Apocalypse Now is often cited as being loosely inspired by the real-life figure of Colonel Robert B. Rheault. Like Rheault, Kurtz is portrayed as a once-respected officer who descends into moral ambiguity and operates outside the bounds of traditional military conduct. While Rheault's actions were rooted in the shadowy world of covert intelligence operations, Kurtz's narrative is an exaggerated and symbolic representation of the broader ethical and psychological turmoil faced by many military leaders during the war. Both figures illustrate the dangerous intersection of power, secrecy, and the moral complexities of unconventional warfare, making Kurtz a fictional embodiment of the darker aspects of the Vietnam conflict that Rheault and others experienced firsthand.
Conclusion
The Green Beret Affair remains a controversial chapter in the history of U.S. Special Forces. It serves as a cautionary tale about the dangers of unchecked power, the moral ambiguities of war, and the limits of military justice. More than fifty years later, the affair still raises difficult questions about accountability, the rule of law, and the ethics of covert warfare.
As the United States continues to engage in complex and often shadowy conflicts around the world, the lessons of the Green Beret Affair remain relevant. The incident serves as a stark reminder of the human cost of war and the difficult choices that must be made in the pursuit of national security. In the end, the legacy of the Green Beret Affair is one of caution—a reminder that in war, as in life, the ends do not always justify the means.
Endnotes
1. David W. Hogan, Raiders or Elite Infantry? The Changing Role of the U.S. Army Rangers from Dieppe to Grenada (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1992), 118-120.
2. Thomas L. Ahern Jr., CIA and the House of Ngo: Covert Action in South Vietnam, 1954-63 (Washington, D.C.: Center for the Study of Intelligence, 2000), 194-196.
3. John L. Plaster, SOG: The Secret Wars of America's Commandos in Vietnam (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), 281-283.
4. Richard H. Shultz Jr., The Secret War Against Hanoi: Kennedy's and Johnson's Use of Spies, Saboteurs, and Covert Warriors in North Vietnam (New York: HarperCollins, 1999), 235-237.
5. James D. McLeroy and Gregory W. Sanders, Bait: The Battle of Kham Duc (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2019), 301-303.
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This article explores the Green Beret Affair and the complex ethical and moral dilemmas faced by military personnel involved in covert operations during the Vietnam War. The focus on Colonel Rheault's role highlights the challenges of leadership in such a fraught environment, where decisions made in the heat of battle could have lasting consequences.
14. Kursk Was the Site of a Massive World War II Tank Battle - Now It’s at the Heart of Ukraine’s Counterattack
I am surprised it took this long for the media to put Kursk in some historical context.
Kursk Was the Site of a Massive World War II Tank Battle - Now It’s at the Heart of Ukraine’s Counterattack
military.com · by The Conversation | By Harry Bennett Published August 21, 2024 at 4:11pm ET · August 21, 2024
Students of military history know the battle of Kursk in 1943 as the largest-ever clash of armoured forces – a battle that would prove a vital turning point in the defeat of Nazi Germany. It was a battle that devoured the strength of the German armed forces, and demonstrated the growing effectiveness of the Red Army and maturity of its general staff.
The battle opened on July 5 1943. It saw an initial German offensive south of Moscow, which aimed to regain the initiative lost after their epic defeat at Stalingrad earlier in the year. But this German push was swiftly blunted by the defensive tactics of the Soviet armed forces, and was followed by a Russian counteroffensive which drove a degraded and deflated enemy ever further to the west, opening up the road to Berlin and defeat for Hitler’s Nazi regime.
In 2024, with a major offensive being played out once again within the Kursk oblast in western Russia, commentators wonder about parallels with the past – and how this operation might shape the outcome of the current war between Russia and Ukraine.
The purpose of the Ukrainian attack – beyond the chance to change the narrative of the conflict and deliver a much-needed morale boost – is the subject of much speculation. Is the aim to grab territory and take Russian prisoners, to give Kyiv some clout at the negotiating table? Or is it designed to draw Russian troops away from the frontlines in eastern Ukraine, where they have been steadily making ground?
Laying the plan
The purpose of the German offensive in 1943 was similarly less than clear. Ostensibly, the goal was to pinch out a large bulge in the Russian line on the eastern front, running 160 miles from north to south. The city of Kursk at its centre provided a focus for the German armoured spearheads, which would thrust into the base of the bulge like a pair of scalpels.
On the one hand, this made defensive sense. With the German armed forces having lost more than 200,000 men in the defeat at Stalingrad, a straighter front line would be easier to defend. But there were others who hoped that, with the introduction of the latest generation of tanks such as the Tiger and Panther, Germany could get back to the winning ways of Blitzkrieg that had defeated France in six weeks in 1940, and carried the army to the outskirts of Moscow in 1941.
Victory at Kursk, it was hoped, would get German forces moving again and restore belief in the final victory that had been so badly shaken by Stalingrad.
The plan was for twin offensives: one in the north led by the 9th Army, which was ordered to press southwards and link up with the 4th Panzer Army, which was directed to forge a path northwards from the Belgorod region, cutting off the Soviet troops in the bulge.
Hitler committed 777,000 troops, more than 2,400 tanks and 2,000 aircraft – and these resources were not committed lightly. At this point in the war, Hitler’s forces were being pressured in the Mediterranean, battered from above by British and American airforces, threatened with invasion from the west, as well as being steamrollered in the east by the Russian army. So these were not resources which Germany could replace.
In other words, Kursk was a massive gamble on Hitler’s part. But Germany’s high command must have believed it was better to gamble than accept some form of defensive stalemate – or slow defeat on the eastern front, as the Russians drove back the Germans kilometre by kilometre by sheer weight of numbers.
German delay and Russian defence
From laying the initial plans for an offensive in March, the build-up of German forces took several months. Russia used this time to build up the kind of defence in depth that would become one of the hallmarks of its army – and was most recently seen blunting the much-heralded Ukrainian summer offensive of 2023.
Long before the 1943 offensive was ready to launch, senior German commanders were convinced that the moment for it had passed. When the offensive began on July 5, the Russians had long been ready and were well dug in.
This was in part thanks to a Russian spy. John Cairncross – who was stationed in England at Bletchley Park, the centre of Allied code-breaking – passed to his Russian handlers decrypts of German coded messages showing its attack plan.
The resulting defence in depth severely impeded the assault of the German armoured columns. By July 10, it was clear the thrust from the north had stalled and, a week later, efforts in the south came to an end as concerns over the Allied landings in Sicily diverted Hitler’s attention elsewhere.
By July 12, the Russians were launching their own counteroffensive in the north, which would force the German line back – albeit at considerable cost. By August 4, the city of Orel, in the heart of German-held territory, was liberated and by August 18, the German army had taken up defensive positions east of Bryansk. It had lost 30 of its 50 divisions, and up to 500,000 men were killed, wounded or missing in action.
Decisive defeat
The battle was a turning point in the conflict in the east. While Russian losses were multiples of those suffered by Germany, with its military-industrial machine now working at full capacity, the Red Army swiftly demonstrated its capacity to regenerate. Germany, meanwhile. would never again be capable of trying to take the strategic initiative against Russia.
At Kursk, the road to Stalingrad became the road to Berlin. It is too soon to tell whether Ukraine’s Kursk counteroffensive will prove as similarly decisive for either Kyiv or Moscow. But for the moment at least, it appears to be advantage Kyiv.
Harry Bennett is Associate Professor (Reader) in History, University of Plymouth
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
military.com · by The Conversation | By Harry Bennett Published August 21, 2024 at 4:11pm ET · August 21, 2024
15. From Middle-earth to Ukraine, the Enduring Value of Wylie’s General Theory of Power Control
Wylie was required reading at SAMS and the National War College when I was a student.
Now I guess I need to watch Lord of the Rings.
Excerpt:
To understand why, we must turn to the brilliant work of J. C. Wylie. Why he is not mentioned in the same breath as Clausewitz, Corbett, and Mahan is beyond me. Wylie was a US Navy officer who gained a reputation not only as a leader—he commanded four ships as he rose to two-star flag rank—but also as a thinker, writer, and strategist. His most famous work, Military Strategy: A General Theory of Power Control, published in 1967, should be required reading for anyone looking to contribute to multidomain strategy or national defense policy. While Clausewitz, Jomini, and Corbett write theories for practicing war, Wylie’s is a theory for understanding the phenomenon. Its universal applicability makes it foundational for red-teaming and setting strategic objectives rather than running military operations. Its relevance is so broad, in fact, that it accurately describes the competition over Middle-earth as effectively as the war in Ukraine.
From Middle-earth to Ukraine, the Enduring Value of Wylie’s General Theory of Power Control - Modern War Institute
mwi.westpoint.edu · by Joe McGiffin · August 22, 2024
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In the Lord of the Rings universe, Sauron sought dominion over Middle-earth by using overwhelming military force and superior technology—the one ring to rule them all. Once the ring was taken from him, he was temporarily defeated, but the geopolitical landscape eventually reverted to a lengthy stalemate. In the real world, scholarship is vivisecting the war in Ukraine to identify the one ring—the key to securing victory in the next conflict and achieving objectives in strategic competition. For instance, a recent monograph from the Institute for the Study of War makes a compelling case for the “tactical reconnaissance strike complex,” a synthesis of old-school military platforms integrated with drones to create the pinnacle of dominant battlespace knowledge.
However, this quest for the one ring is likely to end in anticlimax. There is no ring of power that will assure victory in future conflicts and investing time and effort in questing after one will only lead to frustration at best—and mass casualties at worst—in the next conflict. The chief problem with this quest is that it myopically focuses attention on the battlefields and not the greater strategic picture. This explains, in part, why the recent Ukrainian counteroffensive has been so surprising and successful. Winning a war is not about battlefield victories; it is about control.
To understand why, we must turn to the brilliant work of J. C. Wylie. Why he is not mentioned in the same breath as Clausewitz, Corbett, and Mahan is beyond me. Wylie was a US Navy officer who gained a reputation not only as a leader—he commanded four ships as he rose to two-star flag rank—but also as a thinker, writer, and strategist. His most famous work, Military Strategy: A General Theory of Power Control, published in 1967, should be required reading for anyone looking to contribute to multidomain strategy or national defense policy. While Clausewitz, Jomini, and Corbett write theories for practicing war, Wylie’s is a theory for understanding the phenomenon. Its universal applicability makes it foundational for red-teaming and setting strategic objectives rather than running military operations. Its relevance is so broad, in fact, that it accurately describes the competition over Middle-earth as effectively as the war in Ukraine.
War is always a means to an end, and not an end itself. Defeating the enemy on the battlefield is only useful if it is fungible; it must be leveraged into some sort of political value. Wylie writes:
The primary aim of the strategist in the conduct of war is some selected degree of control of the enemy for the strategist’s own purpose; this is achieved by control of the pattern of war; and this control of the pattern of war is had by manipulation of the center of gravity of war to the advantage of the strategist and the disadvantage of the opponent.
When neither side controls the pattern of war, the war achieves a state of equilibrium (i.e., entrenched positions, indirect fire strikes, and as the Institute for the Study of War monograph mentioned above notes, a general absence of maneuver). To break the equilibrium, one side must seize the initiative, which generally requires surprising tactics. The free peoples of Middle-earth did this when they unleashed their hobbits, and Ukraine changed its strategic paradigm by opening a new campaign.
Underpinning Wylie’s theory of power control are four assumptions, some of which can be hard to hear, not least for those who seek the one ring that will guarantee battlefield victory.
Assumption 1: “Despite whatever effort there may be to prevent it, there may be war.”
Although somewhat fatalistic, this assumption has unfortunately been validated by the historic record. Hence Vegetius’s iconic phrase: “Si vis pacem, para bellum.” Defeating Sauron in the Second Age was not the end of history in Middle-earth. He rose to power once more to terrorize a fragmented, unprepared land. Similarly, Ukraine’s war with Russia traces farther back than a few years, let alone 2014. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, many believed that they were witnessing the end of history. Democracy no longer had a nemesis. Then, Russia progressively rebuilt its power base and became increasingly aggressive, culminating in the ongoing conflict today.
Assumption 2: “The aim of war is some measure of control over the enemy.”
This might seem superficially axiomatic, but anyone who has read Wylie’s work will appreciate that his ideas about control contain nuances much deeper than this superficial level. And in any case, this assumption is a clear reminder that the battlefields are not the focal point for victory. Defeating an enemy on the battlefield does not automatically yield strategic dividends. More is required to coerce or compel an enemy into a desired outcome. In the world of the Lord of the Rings, Mordor maintained its sovereignty and was left undisturbed for an age. In the real world, this assumption has been proven by Ukraine’s refusal to willingly concede occupied territory unless Russia is able to push harder than it has until now.
Assumption 3: “We cannot predict with any certainty the pattern of the war for which we prepare ourselves.”
The United States has a history of conflating better weapons with better war outcomes—to its detriment. Each military asset is always developed within the context of the last war, not the next, but the next war will likely be different from the last, and potentially drastically so. The one ring did not assure victory in the end. Similarly, there were few experts who recognized that World War I–style trench warfare supplemented with high-tech, low-cost drones was the form that the Russia-Ukraine warfare would take. It is hard to conceive that two and a half years ago, most believed that this conflict would be short and decisive. Yet, surprisingly, Ukraine is now in the strongest strategic positions it has been in since the initial invasion.
Assumption 4: “The ultimate determinant in war is the man on the scene with the gun.”
The world is still a long way off from the first conflict with humans removed from the battlefield. Better warriors and tactical leaders with better training can be the difference between success or failure. Were it not for the hobbits, the Third Age would have been a much darker one. Ukraine, too, has confronted the harsh reality of this assumption as it has sought to train enough personnel to maintain its war effort, dealt with conscription challenges, and fought to maintain unit morale among those on the front lines, directly engaged with the Russian enemy. What is more, the sheer quantity of Russian conscripts taken as prisoners of war indicates a major disparity in morale, motivation, and discipline between the two forces, giving Ukraine an additional edge which is difficult to calculate.
Military Strategy is a fairly short read, but well worth the time to understand Wylie’s theory of power control. There is no other paradigm that so perfectly describes warfare—whether in Middle-earth or Ukraine—and frames the challenges awaiting a force that will engage in a battle of control across multiple domains in the next war. It does not tell you how to win a campaign, but for any strategic problem it offers an accurate context from which to start planning. Go read it.
Joe McGiffin is a staff officer at the Modern War Institute and a senior instructor for the Defense and Strategic Studies undergraduate program in the Department of Military Instruction. He researches and teaches strategic decision-making, wargaming, and joint warfare theory.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.
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mwi.westpoint.edu · by Joe McGiffin · August 22, 2024
16. Industrial Policy Needs an Immigration Policy
Excerpts:
For the past several decades, the political class in Washington has been obsessed with managing and controlling illegal immigration. It is high time policymakers devoted the same degree of attention to legal—and especially high-skilled—immigration.
Just as there is a bipartisan consensus behind industrial policy among politicians, there is also a bipartisan consensus among voters that the United States should do more to encourage high-skilled immigration; three of four respondents in a December 2022 Bipartisan Policy Center survey embraced expanding high-skilled immigration, including 68 percent of Republicans, 74 percent of independents, and 85 percent of Democrats. And in the past, Democratic and Republican lawmakers have joined forces to adjust immigration rules that would strengthen the United States’ standing at a time of geopolitical stress and technological upheaval.
Today is another such time. In a globalized world, top talent goes to the highest bidder. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the United States’ unique ability to attract immigrant labor facilitated the country’s rise as a manufacturing powerhouse. In the twenty-first century, maintaining a position of technological dominance will require the United States to retain its status as the destination of choice for the most skilled workers. The bipartisan “Made in America” vision can become reality, but only if it is built by harnessing the talent of immigrants.
Industrial Policy Needs an Immigration Policy
Why Bringing Jobs Back to the United States Requires Letting in More Foreign Workers
August 22, 2024
Foreign Affairs · by Devesh Kapur and Milan Vaishnav · August 22, 2024
As the face-off between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris draws nearer, the United States is awash in partisan rancor, with the candidates and their supporters fighting bitterly over abortion, the southern border, taxes, health care, and more. Yet even though Democrats and Republicans are miles apart on most policy matters, they have nevertheless demonstrated a common renewed faith in one particular tool of economic statecraft: industrial policy.
During his presidency, Trump championed tariffs on billions of dollars of exports bound for the United States to bolster the fortunes of the U.S. manufacturing sector. President Joe Biden, focused on squeezing China’s trade advantage, has kept many of those tariffs in place. He has also spent the last three and a half years putting in place “Bidenomics”—a bundle of “industrial and innovation” policies that break with free-market orthodoxy. Harris has given every indication that she will continue this approach. Regardless of who wins the White House this November, the idea that the state needs to wield a heavier hand to guide the market is here to stay.
But this twenty-first-century industrial policy is unlikely to succeed unless policymakers pair it with a twenty-first-century immigration policy. The United States has ambitious plans to enhance its supply chain resilience, reduce its external dependence in critical sectors, and outcompete China on emerging technologies. Yet achieving these laudable objectives in a meaningful time frame will require a deep, highly skilled talent pool currently in short supply in the U.S. labor force. Without a more flexible and adaptive immigration policy, even the United States’ best-laid plans will run aground. As the political economist Robert Wade presciently noted more than two decades ago, “Immigration policy is the new frontier of industrial policy.”
THE NEW WASHINGTON CONSENSUS
Industrial policy—the use of active government policies that target specific sectors, industries, firms, and technologies in order to achieve some economic or strategic objective that the market alone cannot—is hardly new in the United States. Alexander Hamilton, the first treasury secretary, was a vocal proponent of using state power to stimulate investment. In the 1920s, Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover leveraged the power of the federal government to standardize a raft of product sizes, from building materials to hand tools and electrical outlets. The historian Colleen Dunlavy has argued that this standardization had a greater impact on scaling up American manufacturing than Henry Ford’s mass production model did. Today, industrial policy is ubiquitous. According to the International Monetary Fund, in 2023, countries enacted 2,500 industrial policy interventions, of which 1,800 were deemed to be “trade-distorting.” China, the United States, and the European Union were responsible for half of those trade-distorting policies.
Nevertheless, industrial policy has long been considered verboten in the United States and in other industrialized democracies that have habitually preached free-market orthodoxy to both their own citizens and the populations of developing countries. The Trump administration broke with the status quo by imposing tariffs on a wide range of imports—especially those from China. The Biden administration went one step further in boosting industrial policy by enacting new “Buy America” laws, the CHIPS and Science Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act, directing several hundred billion dollars in public money to promote advanced manufacturing technologies, especially semiconductor production. As National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan put it in April 2023, the Biden administration’s strategy “identifies specific sectors that are foundational to economic growth, strategic from a national security perspective, and where private industry on its own isn’t poised to make the investments needed to secure our national ambitions.”
Two motifs have featured prominently in justifications for this new consensus. The first is the Biden administration’s ambition to craft a “U.S. foreign policy for the middle class,” based on the perception that the traditional tools of U.S. foreign policy, such as free trade, have benefited American elites while doing little for—if not actively harming—most Americans in the middle.
The second motif relates to enhanced U.S. competitiveness and supply chain resilience. Pandemic-era supply chain shocks and their adverse impacts on inflation stoked policymakers’ anxieties by revealing a deep reliance on Chinese supply chains in areas as diverse as solar panels, rare earths, and electric vehicle batteries. In response, the Biden administration is making sizable new investments in high-technology sectors to build U.S. capabilities in sectors such as green energy and has embraced trade and investment restrictions through a “small yard and high fence” approach, curbing trade and investment in domains in which U.S. national security interests are at stake.
A PEOPLE PROBLEM
As the election nears, the U.S. economy’s remarkable “soft landing”—a recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic that has been marked by waning inflation, strong economic growth, and a healthy employment picture—stands in sharp contrast to the experience of other industrialized countries. Economists have concluded that strong immigration has been the United States’ secret sauce, contributing to higher-than-expected growth and an overall reduction in inflation since mid-2022. The Congressional Budget Office has predicted that between 2024 and 2034, with more people working, mostly as a result of higher net immigration, U.S. GDP will be $7 trillion larger and revenues $1 trillion higher than they would be without such labor force growth. New restrictions on immigration would not only hurt the United States’ bottom line; they would also generate labor shortages and increase supply chain backlogs, much like the country experienced during the pandemic when borders were shut.
Even with current immigration flows, U.S. businesses struggle with persistent labor shortages. In June 2024, there were 8.1 million job openings in the United States and only 6.8 million unemployed Americans. The U.S. Census Bureau has projected that by 2030, one-fifth of all Americans will be over the age of 65, testing the solvency of Social Security and exerting new stresses on the country’s health-care system. Moreover, these demographic pressures will apply most to those sectors in which industrial policy is presently focused. For example, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics has estimated that the United States will need one million more workers in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) fields in 2032 than it did in the decade prior, not even considering the workers who will retire during that timespan.
There are two obvious responses to this conundrum. The first is to nourish domestic human capital, which requires strengthening K–12 education and boosting underrepresented groups in STEM fields. The new industrial policy push includes billions of dollars for educating and retraining the country’s domestic workforce under programs such as the American Rescue Plan, which provided $170 billion in school rescue funds for public schools; the Apprenticeship Building America initiative, which funds public-private partnerships to expand apprenticeship opportunities in priority sectors such as information technology, clean energy, and the care economy; and American Workforce Hubs, which offer training in critical areas such as construction and semiconductor manufacturing in nine cities, including Baltimore, Columbus, Milwaukee, and Pittsburgh. These new investments are crucial, but the development of a labor market with the right mix of skills for twenty-first-century sectors such as artificial intelligence, green technology, and semiconductors will take time to bear fruit.
Attracting foreign-born talent is essential for boosting innovation and economic prosperity.
Consequently, the United States will also need to adopt a second response to the labor shortage: attracting global talent. On the surface, this approach may seem to conflict with a core goal of the renewed embrace of industrial policy: to reshore by creating solid, well-paying jobs at home. After all, how can policies enacted to “bring jobs home” justify increasing the number of job opportunities for foreign-born workers?
Concerns about immigrants displacing native-born workers are natural, but an emerging body of empirical scholarship suggests that immigration is not a zero-sum game. First, foreign-born high-skilled workers do not necessarily have native-born substitutes. Although U.S. universities awarded 29 percent more bachelor’s degrees in science and engineering in 2021 than they did in 2012, the overall number is still relatively modest. In 2021, the United States produced 812,000 college graduates majoring in STEM fields—just one-fifth of the 4.5 million that China and India collectively produced that year. Since 2019, China has awarded the highest number of science and engineering doctoral degrees. Although the quality of training in the United States is markedly superior (large numbers of STEM graduates in China and especially India are poorly trained), it is not sufficient. Second, a decline in the number of foreign workers does not necessarily mean that more native workers get hired. When visa quotas for high-skilled workers were cut in the first decade of this century (after a temporary increase was allowed to lapse), the sharp decline in foreign workers was not met with a corresponding increase in the hiring of native workers. Instead, dramatic decreases in the supply of highly skilled immigrant visas can drive multinational firms to simply offshore labor. Third, immigration has also lowered consumer prices, raised the output of the technology sector, and boosted firms’ profits, contributing to a larger and more vibrant economy for all Americans.
It is hard to overstate the importance of attracting and nurturing foreign-born talent as a method of boosting innovation and economic prosperity. Thirty-six percent of all Nobel Prizes awarded to Americans in the fields of chemistry, medicine, and physics since 1901 have gone to immigrants. Immigrants represent 16 percent of all U.S.-based inventors, and one-quarter of the aggregate economic value created by all patents filed between 1990 and 2016 was generated by patents filed by immigrants.
The immigrant advantage also extends to broader measures of economic prosperity. In 2022, 55 percent of the startup companies in the United States valued at over $1 billion had been founded by immigrants, for a total of 319 companies with a collective value of $1.2 trillion. Among more established technology companies, 60 percent of the top 25 firms were founded by immigrants or Americans with at least one immigrant parent; just under half of Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or their children.
NO ENTRY
The United States risks losing its unsurpassed capacity to attract talent. Although international student enrollment has rebounded from the twin shocks of the Trump administration and the pandemic, the U.S. share of international students worldwide decreased from 23 percent in 2000 to 15 percent in 2020. Maintaining a comparative advantage among the pool of internationally mobile students is essential because such students make up a significant share of the United States’ STEM talent. In 2022–23, more than half of all international undergraduate students and two-thirds of international graduate students enrolled in U.S. colleges and universities were studying in STEM fields. Among higher education institutions experiencing declining international enrollment, three-quarters identify visa hurdles as the principal culprit.
But attracting the best international students will pay off only if they stay and work in the United States after graduation. The United States’ international student retention rate is well below the average for other industrialized countries. Even those students who complete undergraduate degrees in the United States are eligible to live and work in the country only for up to one year, with the option of a two-year extension for those in STEM fields.
Once this period lapses, immigrants who wish to continue working legally typically apply for an H1-B visa, a temporary visa category that allows employers to petition for work authorization for college-educated immigrants working in “specialty occupations.” By law, there is a hard cap of 85,000 H1-B visas each year (employees with universities, governments, and nonprofits are exempt from this cap). This visa cap is routinely maxed out within the first few days of each fiscal year, and because demand far outstrips supply, the United States uses a lottery system to determine which sponsors can file an H1-B petition with immigration authorities. For fiscal year 2025, applicants had a one-in-four chance of being selected.
Even those who manage to procure a work visa are not guaranteed permanent resident status, with only 140,000 green cards available for immigrant workers each year—a number that has not been adjusted since the Immigration Act of 1990 was passed—and no country can account for more than seven percent of legal permanent resident admissions each year. In 2023, the skilled worker green card backlog grew to 1.8 million cases. The tortuous green card line, in turn, drives a sizable number of talented individuals to give up and leave the country for more hospitable climes.
RACE FOR THE TOP
If the United States wants to succeed in the global competition for talent, there is little time to waste. Other countries are already rushing to poach workers that are unable (or unwilling) to settle in the United States. Last June, Canada unveiled a new Tech Talent Strategy, which grants a three-year work permit to up to 10,000 people who hold H1-B visas in the United States to come to Canada, with work or study permits for accompanying family members. The program reached 10,000 applications in less than 48 hours. Germany, for its part, has rolled out a job seeker visa that grants temporary entry for foreign workers so that they can find employment.
In the past year, the Biden administration has taken modest steps to streamline processing for highly skilled workers. In October 2023, the Department of Homeland Security announced several changes to the H1-B program, including extending the grace period for graduates seeking to stay in the United States as they transition from student to work visas. The administration also issued an expansive executive order providing guidance to simplify visa applications and processing times for noncitizens with experience in critical and emerging technologies.
For years, Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill have been unwilling to consider high-skilled immigration reform outside of a comprehensive immigration solution. Biden deserves credit for waking up to the United States’ talent crunch. But his administration’s tepid position is no longer tenable. Any viable solution will require both executive and legislative action.
If congressional leaders can break this impasse, there is plenty of low-hanging fruit to grab. For starters, Congress could increase the annual cap for H1-B visas. There is precedent for this. In the 1990s, Congress temporarily increased the annual cap from 65,000 to 115,000 visas and later to 195,000, as the United States scrambled to find computer programmers to address the dreaded “Millennium Bug,” a computer flaw that experts worried could wreak havoc because the original code used by most machines could not deal with dates beyond December 31, 1999.
The United States risks losing its unsurpassed capacity to attract talent.
Even if the number of temporary visas were increased, the H1-B lottery has other shortcomings: it creates significant uncertainty for job seekers and lacks any sense of prioritization. No private-sector firm would randomly select their future employees, nor does it make sense for the U.S. government to do so when admitting its workers. The U.S. government should set up a system that prioritizes individuals working in sectors or possessing skills that are uniquely in high demand in any given year, a system made possible by the growing sophistication of AI-driven predictive analytics.
Even without congressional action, the executive branch could provide automatic work authorization for the spouses of H1-B workers, who currently must apply separately for permission to work in the United States. One study has shown that 90 percent of H1-B spouses have at least a bachelor’s degree, and half of those degrees are in STEM fields. The Department of Homeland Security has the authority to immediately extend work authorization to H1-B spouses, an action it could take if it wanted to.
When it comes to permanent residency, it is unlikely that there will be much political appetite to increase the overall number of green cards. It is easier, however, to envisage a change that would reduce the number of family reunification–related green cards and increase the number of work-related green cards—a rebalancing that would enhance the larger national interest.
Another relatively simple fix would be to reform or remove the country-specific caps built into the green card process. The statistics, compiled by the economist William Kerr, are undeniable: Chinese and Indian inventors are responsible for 20 percent of all U.S. patents; around half of all international students come from China and India and are disproportionately concentrated in STEM fields; and immigrants from these two countries account for eight in ten H1-B visas issued each year. In the face of these numbers, and with China and India accounting for one-third of the world’s population, limiting each country to seven percent of the United States’ total annual pool of green cards makes little sense.
Another idea that has been proposed is the “recapturing” of unused green cards, another move within the executive’s purview. For bureaucratic, financial, or other reasons, including pandemic-era delays, there have been years when green card caps have not been met. Some experts have called for the administration to recapture those unused green cards (more than 200,000 in number), which would make an immediate dent in the backlog. There is precedent for this maneuver, and, best of all, it would not require legislative action, although explicit congressional approval could expand the total number of unused green cards put back into circulation.
WITHIN REACH
For the past several decades, the political class in Washington has been obsessed with managing and controlling illegal immigration. It is high time policymakers devoted the same degree of attention to legal—and especially high-skilled—immigration.
Just as there is a bipartisan consensus behind industrial policy among politicians, there is also a bipartisan consensus among voters that the United States should do more to encourage high-skilled immigration; three of four respondents in a December 2022 Bipartisan Policy Center survey embraced expanding high-skilled immigration, including 68 percent of Republicans, 74 percent of independents, and 85 percent of Democrats. And in the past, Democratic and Republican lawmakers have joined forces to adjust immigration rules that would strengthen the United States’ standing at a time of geopolitical stress and technological upheaval.
Today is another such time. In a globalized world, top talent goes to the highest bidder. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the United States’ unique ability to attract immigrant labor facilitated the country’s rise as a manufacturing powerhouse. In the twenty-first century, maintaining a position of technological dominance will require the United States to retain its status as the destination of choice for the most skilled workers. The bipartisan “Made in America” vision can become reality, but only if it is built by harnessing the talent of immigrants.
- DEVESH KAPUR is Starr Foundation Professor of South Asian Studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.
- MILAN VAISHNAV is Senior Fellow and Director of the South Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Foreign Affairs · by Devesh Kapur and Milan Vaishnav · August 22, 2024
17. The Case for a Clean Energy Marshall Plan
Everything needs a Marshall Plan (apologies for my sarcasm).
Excerpts:
The United States should seize the occasion to lead on its own terms. The Clean Energy Marshall Plan would be good for U.S. workers and businesses, unlocking billions of dollars of market opportunities; good for the United States’ developing country partners, by delivering low-cost decarbonization solutions; and good for the world order, by building more resilient supply chains and a more balanced and sustainable trading system.
Such a plan requires political focus and money, but it is not impossible. The United States can spend far less than it did on the Marshall Plan, thanks to the better financial tools available today and falling clean technology costs. And it could recycle the proceeds from a carbon-based border adjustment tariff into the finance and resilience authorities, thus setting up a system that pays for itself.
In this moment of domestic economic strength—stark against the backdrop of heightened competition, a fracturing world, and a raging climate crisis—the United States can do something generous for people across the globe in a way that benefits Americans. It should take that leap, not just because it is the morally right thing to do but also because it is the strategically necessary thing to do.
The Case for a Clean Energy Marshall Plan
How the Fight Against Climate Change Can Renew American Leadership
September/October 2024
Published on August 20, 2024
Foreign Affairs · by Brian Deese · August 20, 2024
For decades, global integration—of trade, of politics, of technology—was seen as a natural law. Today, integration has been replaced by fragmentation. The post–Cold War institutions are teetering, industrial strategies are back in vogue, and competition with China is growing. These dynamics are creating geopolitical friction across global supply chains, for vehicles, minerals, computer chips, and more.
Against this backdrop, the clean energy transition remains the most important planetary challenge. It also presents the greatest economic opportunity: it will be the largest capital formation event in human history. And it presents the United States with a chance to lead. Thanks to its still unparalleled power and influence, Washington maintains a unique capacity—and a strategic imperative—to shape world outcomes.
In 2022, the United States recognized these opportunities when it passed the Inflation Reduction Act, the world’s largest-ever investment in clean energy technologies. This transformative industrial strategy was a crucial first step for the United States in positioning its economy for success by accelerating the clean energy transition at home. Now is the time to take this leadership to the global stage, in a way that promotes U.S. interests and supports aligned countries. But the United States need not create a new model for doing so.
Seventy-six years ago, also facing a fractured world order and an emerging superpower competitor, U.S. President Harry Truman and U.S. Secretary of State George Marshall launched an ambitious effort to rebuild European societies and economies. Although often associated with free-market neoliberalism, the 1948 Marshall Plan was hardly laissez-faire. It was, in fact, an industrial strategy that established the United States as a generous partner to European allies while promoting U.S. industries and interests. Generations later, the Marshall Plan is rightly understood as one of the great successes of the postwar era.
Although today’s challenges are undoubtedly different, the United States should draw lessons from that postwar period and launch a new Marshall Plan, this time for the global transition to clean energy. Just as the Marshall Plan assisted those countries most ravaged by World War II, the new Marshall Plan should aim to help countries most vulnerable to the effects of climate change: the United States’ partners in the developing world. Developing countries and emerging markets will need access to cheap capital and technology to transition away from fossil fuels quickly enough to halt global warming.
The United States again has the chance to help others while helping itself. Putting its own burgeoning industries front and center in the energy transition will generate further innovation and growth. Clean energy investment in the United States reached about 7.4 percent of private fixed investment in structures and equipment in the first quarter of this year, at $40 billion, up from $16 billion in the first quarter of 2021. Investment in emerging energy technologies—such as hydrogen power and carbon capture and storage—jumped by 1,000 percent from 2022 to 2023. Manufacturing investment in the battery supply chain went up nearly 200 percent over the same period. By creating global markets for its own clean energy industries and innovators, the United States can scale these economic gains and strengthen domestic support for an energy shift that has not always been an easy sell to voters.
The fracturing world order and the ominous climate crisis lead some observers to focus on the potential tensions between those two developments. But they also provide an opening for the United States to deploy its innovation and capital in a generous, pragmatic, and unapologetically pro-American way—by launching a Clean Energy Marshall Plan.
THE SINCEREST FORM OF FLATTERY
Gauzy invocations of the Marshall Plan often induce eye rolling, and with good reason. In U.S. policy circles, commentators have called for a new Marshall Plan for everything from ending global poverty to rebuilding Ukraine. The term has become shorthand for a response to any problem that mobilizes public resources to achieve an ambitious end. But this overuse has blurred the substance of what the Marshall Plan really was—and was not.
The Marshall Plan was not, as many assume, born solely out of visionary ideals of international unity after the horrors of World War II. Instead, it reflected the pragmatic constraints of a fracturing, uncertain world order. In the spring of 1947, having returned from China after a failed attempt to head off a communist takeover there, Marshall was left to grapple with the newly emerged Iron Curtain in Europe. The shifting geopolitical reality forced Truman and Marshall to consider how to exert U.S. leadership to shape the world for good—to forge peace, rebuild cities, and promote American values in the face of communism. But they clearly recognized the limits of hard power and understood that economic stability could yield geopolitical stability.
Fundamentally, the Marshall Plan was an industrial strategy that deployed public dollars to advance U.S. manufacturing and industrial capabilities in service of reconstructing Europe. Washington spent $13 billion—equivalent to $200 billion today—over four years, mostly in the form of grants to discount the European purchase of goods and services. Because U.S. companies were at the center of the program, 70 percent of European expenditures of Marshall Plan funds were used to buy products made in the United States. Italy, for example, used Marshall Plan funds to buy American drilling technology, pipes, and other industrial equipment to rebuild its energy sector—including the equipment needed to restart Europe’s first commercial geothermal plant, powered by steam from lava beds in Tuscany. By 1950, that region had more than doubled its geothermal capacity and remained a major contributor to Italy’s total power demand.
The adoption of low-cost clean energy technologies is not self-executing.
The structure of the Marshall Plan allowed it to meet Europe’s pressing needs while winning over a skeptical and war-weary American public. Because there was little appetite for providing foreign aid following World War II, Marshall and Truman centered their plan on Americans’ economic interests. The country’s industrial capabilities had grown considerably during the war, but after the war, the task was to find new markets for them. As the plan’s chief administrator, Paul Hoffman, explained, the goal was to turn Europe into a “consumer of American goods” at a time when postwar U.S. GDP had fallen precipitously and exports were imperiled by a moribund European economy. The Marshall Plan would thus help American companies and save American jobs.
To sell the plan to the public, its architects and supporters launched a public relations campaign, squarely anchoring their case in these core U.S. economic interests. In the ten months after Marshall’s June 1947 speech introducing the plan, it gained traction, securing a 75 percent public approval rating and winning over a majority of the U.S. Congress—in an election year and with a divided government to boot.
Yet even though the Marshall Plan was attuned to U.S. economic interests, its architects recognized that it was important for the United States to be a generous, reliable partner to U.S. allies. The plan helped Europe rise from the rubble, pay off its debts, refill its foreign exchange reserves, recover its industrial production and agricultural output, adopt new technologies, and build goodwill for the United States, all while reducing the appeal of communism. By filling a financing gap that no other power could, the United States cemented its transatlantic partnerships. And by supporting its own economy, it became a capable and reliable global partner.
THE CHEAPER, THE BETTER
Like the original Marshall Plan, a Clean Energy Marshall Plan should meet other countries’ development needs while advancing U.S. interests. In this case, the goal is to speed the adoption of low-cost, zero-carbon solutions, such as the manufacture of batteries, the deployment of nuclear and geothermal energy, and the processing of critical minerals. This approach reflects the basic intuition that, as useful as it can be to make carbon pollution more expensive by putting a price on it, the most credible way to accelerate the adoption of zero-carbon technologies is to make that technology cheap and widely available.
The Inflation Reduction Act embodies this theory: it created long-term public incentives that promote the innovation and deployment of a variety of clean energy technologies. This public investment is already transforming the U.S. energy industry, and it holds even more potential for global energy markets. By driving down the cost of clean energy technologies—particularly innovative technologies such as nuclear power and carbon capture—the IRA could generate up to $120 billion in global savings by 2030. The resulting uptake of clean energy technologies in emerging markets could ultimately yield emission reductions in the rest of the world that would be two to four times as large as those achieved in the United States.
But the adoption of low-cost clean energy technologies is not self-executing. Without U.S. leadership, the world will simply not do enough fast enough to limit the worst effects of global warming. Unfortunately, the United States has yet to offer a full-throated answer to China’s Belt and Road Initiative, the $1 trillion infrastructure project Beijing designed to expand its influence across the globe. And now, some leaders in China are calling for Beijing to go even further and develop a Marshall Plan–style approach to drive clean energy adoption in developing countries. Meanwhile, other players are also stepping up where the United States has not. For all the controversy about the United Arab Emirates—a fossil fuel nation—hosting last year’s UN climate conference, it is notable that it was the UAE, and not the United States, that proposed a large funding effort aimed at scaling zero-carbon technology to appropriate levels for emerging markets.
Turbines at a wind farm near Villalba, Spain, March 2024
Nacho Doce / Reuters
Ceding this space is a failure of American leadership and a missed economic opportunity. Skepticism of the United States, exacerbated by its handling of the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, is already high in Southeast Asia and across the developing world, where Washington cannot afford to see alliances fray. And when countries there look to China or the UAE for capital and technology, American innovators and workers lose ground.
Implementing a Clean Energy Marshall Plan won’t be easy, but the process must begin now. As after World War II, the United States can be generous as well as pro-American in its approach. It can promote U.S. interests by scaling its industries to meet global needs while winning greater influence in this new geopolitical landscape. And it can meet developing countries where they are—supplying them with the energy they need to expand their economies and the innovation they need to decarbonize efficiently.
To accomplish these aims, however, Washington needs a clear mandate, adequate resources, and flexible tools. And it will need to enact a strategy that does three things: finances foreign deployment of U.S. clean energy technology, secures more resilient supply chains, and creates a new, more balanced trade regime that encourages the development and implementation of clean energy technology.
HOMEGROWN ADVANTAGES
The United States should begin with a focused investment and commercial diplomacy effort, akin to that of the Marshall Plan. The Marshall Plan had a straightforward aim: subsidize European demand for U.S. products and services needed to rebuild Europe. Today, the United States should establish a Clean Energy Finance Authority with an updated mission: subsidize foreign demand for clean energy technology and put American innovation and industry at the front of the line.
This new body would enable the United States to participate in foreign deals that promote U.S. innovation and production while reducing emissions. The purpose would be to reduce the premium that emerging-market economies must pay to meet their energy needs in a low-carbon way. To receive U.S. investments, governments and private sectors in these countries would themselves need to invest in clean energy. The promise of reliable U.S. support would prompt reform.
The good news is that most of the technologies necessary, from solar power to battery storage to wind turbines, are already commercially scalable. Other technologies are now scaling up rapidly, thanks to U.S. investment. For example, the United States has used its existing drilling capacity to become the world’s leading producer of advanced geothermal energy. It is well positioned to leverage its homegrown advantages to export geothermal components to geopolitically important markets in Southeast Asia and Africa and beyond, where sources of reliable power are needed. And the more these technologies are deployed, the more costs will come down, as processes become more efficient with scale. With patient capital, the dividends will be manifold: steady, clean power; faster-growing markets; diversified supply chains; and support for hundreds of thousands of U.S. jobs. Similar opportunities exist for advanced nuclear and hydrogen power and carbon capture.
The United States has yet to offer a full-throated answer to the Belt and Road Initiative.
To be effective, the Clean Energy Finance Authority would need to be big yet nimble. Not only has the United States lagged other countries in offering public capital to lead the energy transition, but its financial support is also unnecessarily inflexible. Officials in foreign capitals joke that the United States shows up with a 100-page list of conditions, whereas China shows up with a blank check. The United States’ current financing authorities are constrained by byzantine rules that block U.S. investment that could advance its national interests.
For example, the U.S. Development Finance Corporation, which invests in projects in lower- and middle-income countries, cannot invest in lithium processing projects in Chile because it is considered a high-income country, yet companies in the low-income Democratic Republic of the Congo often find it impossible to meet the DFC’s stringent labor standards. Meanwhile, Chinese companies invested over $200 million in a Chilean lithium plant in 2023 and gained rights to explore Congolese lithium mines the same year. Of course, U.S. finance must continue to reflect American values, but there is still room for far greater flexibility in the name of national interest and the energy transition.
Promising models for a Clean Energy Finance Authority also exist. Domestically, the Department of Energy’s Loan Program Office rapidly expanded its capabilities, approving 11 investment commitments to companies totaling $18 billion in the past two fiscal years (versus just two commitments in the three years before that). Internationally, the DFC expanded its climate lending from less than $500 million to nearly $4 billion over the last three years. And the United States has supported creative financial partnerships with several countries. In Egypt, for example, the United States and Germany committed $250 million to stimulate $10 billion of private capital to accelerate the Egyptian energy transition.
Solar panels in Rio de Janeiro, April 2024
Pilar Olivares / Reuters
The most effective aspects of these examples should be harnessed together under the Clean Energy Finance Authority, which should have a versatile financial toolkit, including the ability to issue debt and equity. It should be able to deploy this capital in creative arrangements, such as by blending it with foreign capital and lowering risk premiums with insurance and guarantees. It should draw on, not re-create, the Department of Energy’s expertise in assessing the risks and benefits of emerging technologies, such as advanced nuclear energy, hydrogen power, and carbon capture and storage. The Clean Energy Finance Authority could be managed by the U.S. Treasury Department, in light of the latter’s experience in risk underwriting and financial diligence, and given the mandate to coordinate closely across agencies.
With nimble, market-oriented financing capacities, the Clean Energy Finance Authority would be able to accelerate and initiate, not impede, financial transactions. Whereas the Marshall Plan was 90 percent financed with U.S. grants, a Clean Energy Marshall Plan could easily be the inverse, with less than ten percent of its expenditures in the form of grants and the rest of the capital being deployed as equity, debt, export credit, and other forms of financing. And whereas the Chinese Belt and Road model relies on government-dominated financing, an American approach would be market-based and therefore more efficient because it enables competition and encourages large investments of private capital.
The Clean Energy Finance Authority should be capitalized with a significant upfront commitment of money—enough to generate market momentum that tips the balance of clean energy investment toward the private sector; ultimately the private sector, not the public sector, will need to provide the majority of the financing the energy transition needs over the coming decades. If this new authority is set up and deployed properly, U.S. companies and innovators would gain more foreign demand, on favorably negotiated terms, and new market share. Foreign consumers, for their part, would gain access to new channels of cheap clean energy technology. For emerging-market countries and major emitters—such as Brazil, India, and Indonesia—the United States could act with both generosity and its own interests in mind.
THE DANGER OF DEPENDENCE
The United States should also establish a Clean Energy Resilience Authority, whose goal would be to create more resilient supply chains for the clean energy transition. To support burgeoning manufacturing production in developing countries, and to expand that of the United States, the world needs diversified supply chains that are not dominated by individual states and do not have exploitable chokepoints. Today, China controls 60 percent of the world’s rare-earth mining production and approximately 90 percent of its processing and refining capability.
The United States should lead a coalition of partners to build access to processed critical minerals such that the energy transition does not substitute dependence on foreign oil for dependence on Chinese critical minerals. Thankfully, the term “rare-earth minerals” is a misnomer: these elements are abundant and geographically dispersed. Eighty percent of the world’s lithium reserves, 66 percent of its nickel reserves, and 50 percent of its copper reserves are in democracies. Eighty percent of oil reserves, by contrast, are in OPEC countries, nearly all of which are autocracies.
In today’s energy market, the most important tool the United States wields is the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, a stockpile of oil created 50 years ago as a response to the 1973 oil crisis. In the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, in 2022, the U.S. government used this reserve to ensure adequate supply by selling 180 million barrels of oil. When prices fell, the administration began refilling the reserve, securing a profit for U.S. taxpayers of close to $600 million as of May 2024. This mechanism has reduced the volatility of oil prices while advancing U.S. strategic interests.
As part of the Clean Energy Marshall Plan, Washington must level the playing field through the use of trade tools.
The United States should create a strategic reserve capability for critical minerals, as well. A body similar to the U.S. Treasury’s Exchange Stabilization Fund, a reserve fund used to prevent fluctuations in the value of the U.S. dollar, but for critical minerals would enable the United States to stabilize the market for these resources. The Clean Energy Resilience Authority could offer various forms of financial insurance that would steady prices, protect consumers from price spikes, and generate stable revenue for producers during low-price periods. And it should have the ability to build up physical stockpiles of key minerals, such as graphite and cobalt, whether on U.S. soil or in allied territory.
Support for this type of reserve capability already exists. The bipartisan House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party recommended just such a body. The United States’ allies are also on board: in May, South Korea allocated an additional nearly $200 million to build up domestic lithium reserves. Indeed, the original Marshall Plan also recognized the need to improve access to strategically important materials, funding domestic stockpiles for goods such as industrial equipment and medical supplies.
With the Clean Energy Resilience Authority, the United States would be better able to craft multilateral agreements to diversify critical minerals processing. As part of that effort, it could organize a critical minerals club among leading producers and consumers, wherein members could offer and receive purchase commitments. Such an arrangement would give countries that produce and process minerals reliable access to the United States and other developed markets—assuming they meet high standards for sustainable and ethical mining practices. The outcome would be more minerals processed in a more diverse supply chain, sold into a more stable market.
TRADING PLACES
The Marshall Plan underscored the importance of using trade policy to advance U.S. interests: it required European countries to integrate their economies and to remove trade barriers as a means of expanding U.S. exports, promoting capitalism, and warding off communism. A Clean Energy Marshall Plan should help lead a coalition to elicit a more balanced global trading system.
Right now, China is the central actor in global supply chains for clean energy technologies. Facing a stalling domestic economy, China is pursuing a state-led strategy of investing in domestic manufacturing capacity rather than in greater domestic demand or a stronger social safety net. For some goods, such as electric vehicles, batteries, and solar panels, China explicitly aims to dominate global manufacturing. That strategy is fundamentally unsustainable for the global economy. For one thing, it creates acute supply chain vulnerabilities; because the world relies so heavily on China for processing rare-earth minerals, a natural disaster or geopolitical tensions could threaten the entire global supply. For another thing, the strategy erodes industrial capacity across the world, including in the United States. By flooding global markets with artificially cheap goods without a commensurate increase in imports, China forces the cost of its subsidies onto its trade partners—undercutting employment, innovation, and industrial capacity elsewhere. Indeed, this strategy even harms China’s own industrial sector and fails to address the root causes of its domestic economic challenges.
As part of the Clean Energy Marshall Plan, Washington must level the global playing field through the active yet measured use of trade tools such as tariffs. Doing nothing and being resigned to China’s statist approach is neither economically nor politically sustainable. And using blunt tools to effectuate what amounts to a unilateral retreat is dangerous. Former U.S. President Donald Trump’s call to essentially end all imports from China within four years is a cynical fantasy playing on populist fears. In 2022, U.S. goods and services trade with China amounted to over $750 billion. It is not practicable to decouple from any major economy, let alone the United States’ third-largest trading partner. Global trade delivers important benefits, whereas unilateral, asymmetric escalation would leave the United States isolated and vulnerable.
The right approach is to harmonize more active trade policies with like-minded countries. Indeed, Brazil, Chile, India, South Africa, Thailand, Turkey, and Vietnam, among others, are all investigating or imposing tariffs on Chinese dumping practices. China is now the object of twice as many retaliatory measures as it was four years ago. This growing pushback represents a chance for the United States to address the Chinese-driven global trade imbalance by crafting a global coalition to galvanize a coordinated response while creating more global trade in clean energy goods and services.
Electricity infrastructure in Hernandarias, Paraguay, October 2021
Cesar Olmedo / Reuters
To accomplish this, the United States must use expanded, stronger, and smarter trade authorities. For example, Washington should build into its tariffs on imported goods an assessment of how much carbon was used to produce them. Tariffs should be determined by the emission intensity of the trading partner’s entire industry, rather than company by company, to avoid “resource reshuffling,” whereby countries try to dodge penalties by limiting their exports to only products manufactured with clean energy instead of reducing their emissions overall. These tariffs should be aimed at all countries, but given its current production practices, China would be hit the hardest.
This form of tariff regime could be coordinated with what other countries are doing on the same front. The effort should begin with the steel sector. Chinese-made steel is two to five times as carbon-intensive as U.S.-made steel and is being dumped in markets around the world. The United States has been working on an arrangement with the European Union to harmonize tariffs on steel and aluminum. But the EU need not be the United States’ first or only partner in this initiative. There is a global appetite to enact a common external tariff regime on China to respond to its overproduction and carbon-intensive practices. Washington should work to pull this group together through the G-7 and G-20.
There is also a domestic appetite for this approach, in both the U.S. Congress and the private sector. For example, Dow Chemical has advocated the use of carbon policies to favor environmentally responsible industries that make heavily traded goods. Several bipartisan bills now in Congress propose similar policies. The United States could develop an industrial competitiveness program for heavy industries, such as those producing cement, steel, and chemicals, that bolsters domestic industry and makes trade more fair by charging a carbon-based fee on both domestic industries and imports at the border. This program would incentivize domestic innovation and efficiency, and it would advantage environmentally responsible U.S. companies that compete with heavy-carbon-emitting foreign producers. The revenue from the fee could be rebated to the U.S. private sector by rewarding the cleanest domestic producers and investing in research and development.
Investing in the clean energy transition abroad will benefit businesses and workers at home.
A carbon-based tariff, or a carbon border adjustment, should further motivate climate action by exempting countries that are hitting their nationally determined goals under the 2016 Paris climate agreement or those that fall below certain income and emission thresholds. To complement the Clean Energy Finance Authority, the tariff could be lowered in exchange for foreign procurement of clean energy technologies or of clean products made in the United States. For many developing countries, the tariff would act as a powerful accelerant to their energy development plans.
This approach would allow the United States to transition from its current indiscriminate, broad-based tariff regime to a more comprehensive carbon-based system that more accurately targets Chinese overcapacity and trade imbalance concerns. And the United States should leave the door open to cooperating with China in this context, as well.
Policymakers will have to reimagine existing trade rules—and be willing to lead the World Trade Organization and other international institutions in thinking about how trade can accelerate the clean energy transition. The WTO’s objective was never just to promote free trade for free trade’s sake; its founding document includes a vision for sustainable development. The WTO must reform if it is to deliver on that vision, but in the meantime, the United States shouldn’t cling to old trade conventions when more targeted and effective approaches exist.
BANKING ON THE FUTURE
Finally, as the United States upgrades its tools of economic statecraft, it should also increase its expectations of the world’s multilateral development banks, especially the World Bank. Like its predecessor, the Clean Energy Marshall Plan would be temporary, designed to unlock a wave of innovation investment to address a global need. The multilateral development banks are a necessary complement to active U.S. leadership today, just as they were in the postwar era. But the banks need to deploy their capital with the urgency that the energy transition and economic development demand. Although there has been a welcome recent focus on this reform agenda—including by the Biden administration, the G-20, and even the banks themselves—progress has been tepid, and conventional proposals lack ambition and creativity. Incremental change is not enough.
Some avenues already exist to spur the proper level of ambition. For example, donor countries can increase the stakes for the banks by fostering competition among them to make tangible progress on reforms that increase lending for climate-related projects and leverage their investments more effectively. Washington can already provide capital in the form of guarantees to multilateral development banks; this authority could be expanded such that U.S. capital is allocated to these banks based on which ones deserve it most. This “play to get paid” structure would challenge the banks to come forward with legitimate plans to improve their lending practices for clean energy projects. And the guarantee structure offers a great bang for the buck: the World Bank can spend $6 for every $1 of guarantee provided.
The Green Climate Fund, the sole multilateral public financial institution devoted to addressing climate change, could follow this approach, too. Almost 15 years after it was founded, the GCF has disbursed only 20 percent of the funding it has received. To speed up its progress and increase its leverage, the GCF should allocate a portion of its funds to the multilateral development banks, building on its existing practice of lending to these institutions, based on a similar “play to get paid” principle. Instead of submitting individual project applications, the banks would submit proposals for leveraging hybrid capital to scale climate lending in support of the GCF’s mission, including the even split between those projects that prevent climate change and those that respond to its current impacts. In other words, the banks that can best attack the problem would receive flexible GCF capital to scale those efforts. Such a change would be merely one part of a multilateral system that maintains the momentum created by a Clean Energy Marshall Plan.
WIN-WIN-WIN
A Clean Energy Marshall Plan has the makings of a compelling pitch to U.S. domestic audiences: investing in the clean energy transition abroad will benefit businesses and workers at home. Evidence of that effect is already easy to find. The clean investment boom is turning novel technologies into market mainstays: emerging technologies such as hydrogen power and carbon capture now each receive more investment than wind. Billions of dollars are flowing to areas of the United States left behind by previous economic booms, bringing new jobs with them. But to further this momentum, the country needs to turn to foreign markets to boost demand for U.S. products.
The United States should seize the occasion to lead on its own terms. The Clean Energy Marshall Plan would be good for U.S. workers and businesses, unlocking billions of dollars of market opportunities; good for the United States’ developing country partners, by delivering low-cost decarbonization solutions; and good for the world order, by building more resilient supply chains and a more balanced and sustainable trading system.
Such a plan requires political focus and money, but it is not impossible. The United States can spend far less than it did on the Marshall Plan, thanks to the better financial tools available today and falling clean technology costs. And it could recycle the proceeds from a carbon-based border adjustment tariff into the finance and resilience authorities, thus setting up a system that pays for itself.
In this moment of domestic economic strength—stark against the backdrop of heightened competition, a fracturing world, and a raging climate crisis—the United States can do something generous for people across the globe in a way that benefits Americans. It should take that leap, not just because it is the morally right thing to do but also because it is the strategically necessary thing to do.
- BRIAN DEESE is the Innovation Fellow at MIT. He served as Director of the White House National Economic Council from 2021 to 2023.
Foreign Affairs · by Brian Deese · August 20, 2024
18. Trump 2.0 Would Get Mixed Responses in the Indo-Pacific
Transactional can be predictable (and is in fact by definition predictable) and possibly stable (depending on how you define stable).
Conclusion:
Going forward, a future Trump administration would have to consider where it stands in nations across the Indo-Pacific, and make adjustments to its policies and strategies accordingly. For the moment, at least, Trump can reasonably claim to have strong ties with countries like North Korea, Vietnam, India, and the FAS, but his second administration would have a long way to go on key U.S. allies and partners, especially Australia, Japan, the Philippines, South Korea, and Taiwan. It certainly is not impossible to improve these relationships, but it would also require a discernible shift toward a less transactional and more predictable and stable American approach to the region.
Trump 2.0 Would Get Mixed Responses in the Indo-Pacific
thediplomat.com · by Derek Grossman
How a country views the prospect of another Trump term depends in large part on whether or not it already has good relations with the United States.
By
August 22, 2024
President Donald J. Trump and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi walk together from Hyderabad House to deliver a joint press statement on the lawn of Hyderabad House in New Delhi, India, February 25, 2020.
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If former President Donald Trump wins the U.S. presidential election this November, it will have significant implications for U.S. foreign policy, including in Washington’s priority theater: the Indo-Pacific. Of course, there is still much uncertainty surrounding just how a second Trump administration might handle the region, mostly due to Trump’s own capriciousness.
One possibility is that the new Trump team simply dusts off its old Indo-Pacific strategy from 2019, which is mostly aligned with the Biden administration’s strategy, and proceeds with waging great power competition against China and strengthening alliances and partnerships. But another possibility is that the U.S. under Trump 2.0 turns its back on the Indo-Pacific to focus on an “America First” agenda, potentially emboldening foes and imperiling key allies and partners.
The evidence so far suggests that although a second Trump term would likely continue to prioritize great power competition, it might simultaneously intensify its transactional – or, more charitably, realist – approach to Indo-Pacific allies and partners. For example, Trump’s selection of J.D. Vance, an avid supporter of competition with China, suggests strategic competition will be a defining feature of Trump’s strategy. But Trump’s comment last month, in which he said Taiwan “should pay us for defense” adds fuel to the idea that he will continue to view allies and partners purely through the prism of how they can help the United States and not necessarily the other way around. These concerns are most acute in Eastern Europe, where Trump has similarly questioned U.S. support of Ukraine in its ongoing war with Russia.
For the most part, the nations of the Indo-Pacific have remained mum on Trump’s potential return to the White House. This is mostly out of respect for the current occupant and a general aversion to commenting on American domestic politics because it opens the door for Washington to do the same to them on their internal matters. But that does not mean the Indo-Pacific is not considering the very real prospect of a second Trump term; it certainly is. And the responses from across the Indo-Pacific to a second Trump administration are likely to be mixed, with the determining factor being whether the country in question maintains a close relationship with the United States. Typically, those who do will be most worried, but those with less dependence on Washington, including rivals, will be either indifferent or welcoming.
Indo-Pacific receptivity to a second Trump term will be important to monitor as it will contribute to the success or failure of American efforts in the region. Although officials from the first Trump administration like to tout their achievements, in reality, the Indo-Pacific was on edge during those four years and craved a more predictable and stable U.S. policy. The Biden administration certainly has not been perfect, but has at least offered these things and hence markedly strengthened America’s position in the region. A second Trump administration could equal or surpass the Biden team’s efforts were it to assuage concerns about abandoning or undermining U.S. alliances and partnerships, while maintaining the pressure on China in order to demonstrate American resolve and staying power.
Northeast Asia would be a good place to start. It is highly worrisome that Trump’s most avid supporter there is North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. During his first administration, Trump met Kim three times, and even became the first sitting president to step over the DMZ into North Korea, in a risky gambit to convince Kim to pursue denuclearization. To be sure, Trump’s efforts at diplomacy should be lauded, but while they met in 2018 and 2019, Kim secretly continued building his nuclear arsenal.
Since then, Trump has ignored this point and persists in portraying the relationship as positive, recently remarking about Kim, “I get along with him, I think he misses me” – a claim North Korean state media recently denied. Regardless, Kim would like to see Trump in power again to resume diplomacy, with the end goal being sanctions relief and retaining his nuclear weapons. Trump offers that opportunity.
But America’s two longstanding security allies in Northeast Asia, South Korea and Japan, are concerned that Trump might accommodate Kim at their expense. South Korea is strenuously trying to deter a North Korean attack or invasion and seeks denuclearization. And yet, during his first administration, Trump referred to U.S.-South Korea military exercises as “war games,” aligned with North Korea’s provocative descriptions of the alliance’s deterrence activities. He further sought a 400 percent increase in 2020 in Seoul’s expenditures to keep U.S. troops stationed in South Korea. If Trump were to become president again, then South Korea would seek to preserve the progress made in healing the alliance and to focus on North Korea as its primary threat.
An emboldened North Korea could also impact Japan, which on several occasions has endured Pyongyang firing ballistic missiles over its territory. But that did not stop Trump from at one point publicly musing about whether the U.S.-Japan alliance should be revised to ensure Japanese support if the U.S. were ever attacked. This could open the door to changes in other parts of their Mutual Defense Treaty that might impact Japanese security. In June, however, Trump’s interlocutors fortunately signaled to both Japanese and South Korean officials that he would retain a Biden-era annual trilateral summit to help maintain these alliances.
Japan is further concerned over China’s rising assertiveness throughout the Indo-Pacific. Much of its focus has been on the years-long standoff over the Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea, but in recent years, Tokyo has shifted its attention farther south to the Taiwan Strait. Following Trump’s comment on whether it would be worth defending Taiwan from Chinese attack, a Japanese government spokesperson pointedly noted that “peace and stability” in the Taiwan Strait was “hugely important not just for our own security, but for the entire international community.” As with South Korea, Japan will look to keep the U.S. not only engaged in the region but also supportive of its interests.
Taiwan also has qualms about a second Trump administration. Trump’s comment on the island essentially reconfirms for Taipei his aversion to expending American resources and personnel for an overseas conflict unless it directly impacts U.S. national security. In response, the Taiwanese premier underscored that “Taiwan has steadily strengthened its defense budget and adjusted the conscription serving period to strengthen resilience in our society to demonstrate our responsibility as one of the members of the international community.” At the end of the day, Taiwan wants to avoid falling into the same category as Ukraine, in Trump’s eyes.
Finally, within Northeast Asia, China’s response to a second Trump administration will be quite interesting. It would seem that Beijing has mixed perspectives. On the one hand, because Trump might intensify great power competition, this could present new challenges for China. On the other hand, if he were to walk back U.S. alliances and partnerships both bilaterally and multilaterally (like in 2017 when he withdrew from the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement), then this could actually support Beijing’s objectives, such as “reunification” with Taiwan or its establishment of control over the South China Sea. For now, at least, Beijing’s position on Trump is a mystery, but Chinese leaders will likely welcome him if he rethinks U.S. alliances and partnerships in the Indo-Pacific.
In Southeast Asia, many nations remain neutral about the prospects of a Trump 2.0 scenario. Last month, for example, Singapore’s defense minister, in an interview with Foreign Policy, noted that “we’ve worked with the Trump administration before…I’m not so much concerned.” During a trip I took in May to Indonesia, one of the world’s largest democracies, virtually nobody expressed concerns about a second Trump administration. Similarly, U.S. security ally Thailand has refrained from commenting.
The same is true for Brunei and Timor-Leste. Vietnam – a key strategic partner of the United States with ongoing territorial and sovereignty disputes with China in the South China Sea and along the Mekong River – has much to lose if a future Trump administration were to reduce its support. And yet, Hanoi has remained quiet. Its silence, however, should not be interpreted as acceptance, and its level of receptivity will be highly dependent on the extent to which Washington engages and helps the country achieve its objectives.
There are other nations within Southeast Asia, including Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar, that might welcome Trump’s transactional approach. These authoritarian states despise what they perceive to be American lectures on human rights and the need for democracy, and a new Trump administration might avoid these types of engagements in order to cooperate more closely with them on great power competition. However, in his first term, Trump attempted to reset U.S.-Cambodia ties by writing then-Prime Minister Hun Sen a letter in which he called out the importance of a return to the “path of democratic governance,” So it is unclear whether a second Trump administration would be a net positive for them.
Perhaps the biggest loser in Southeast Asia from a second Trump administration would be the Philippines. Manila in recent years has expanded and deepened its security alliance with Washington to help counter Beijing’s rising gray zone tactics in the South China Sea, especially at the disputed Second Thomas Shoal, Scarborough Shoal, Sabina Shoal, and Thitu Island. What is worrisome is that Trump, during his first administration, seemed to be uninterested in the U.S.-Philippines alliance. When then-President Rodrigo Duterte, for example, attempted to cancel the Visiting Forces Agreement – a key part of the alliance – Trump replied, “I don’t really mind if they would like to do that. It will save a lot of money…my views are different than others.”
But today’s President of the Philippines, Ferdinand Marcos Jr., is the opposite of Duterte – pro-U.S. and anti-China – and thus seeks sustainable commitments from Washington. Without U.S. support, the Philippines would be mostly left to fend for itself against the growing Chinese encroachments into its exclusive economic zone.
Separately, Malaysia is likely to oppose Trump, primarily based on his support of Israel in its war against Hamas. Officials from the Muslim-majority nation have come out in staunch support of both the Palestinians and Hamas, and thus would oppose Trump if his pro-Israel policies remain intact.
Trump would likely receive mixed reviews in South Asia as well. In the largest nation in the region and the world’s largest democracy, India, Trump’s return would be welcomed. Although Trump has criticized India in the past over U.S. job losses, his personal relationship with Prime Minister Narendra Modi is strong and New Delhi generally appreciates a transactional approach to cooperation. The first Trump team also successfully looped India into its Indo-Pacific strategy to counter China, most notably by reviving the Quad, a multilateral security group including Australia and Japan. Washington supported New Delhi with intelligence during its land border clashes in May and June 2020 against China and was willing to look the other way on its longstanding defense relationship with Moscow.
Smaller and medium-sized countries in South Asia, including Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Maldives, Nepal, and Sri Lanka, probably view Trump neither as a threat nor as a positive contributor to their interests. But like in much of Southeast Asia, this will be entirely contingent upon the actions he and his administration take within the region. Of the six, Afghanistan would probably feel the least threatened given that Trump is the same president who negotiated the deal for the U.S. military to withdraw from that nation. Bangladesh, which experienced a student-led coup earlier this month, will first have to get its own house in order before it can think about foreign policy and how to respond to Trump being back in the White House.
Pakistan is set to suffer the most in South Asia from a second Trump administration. Trump during his first term accused the country of “deceit” and harboring terrorists. In 2018, Trump accordingly canceled security assistance to Pakistan, and though he pursued a reset the following year, it was only because Islamabad was willing to facilitate the peace process in Afghanistan. The new Trump administration would further look to keep U.S.-India ties strong, and cooperating with Islamabad undermines that goal.
Finally, Trump’s return to the White House would be highly worrisome for most if not all nations in Oceania. Despite being a U.S. security ally, Australia strongly contemplated the need for greater self-reliance during the first Trump term because it came to feel that it could not fully trust Washington. And now, the stakes are even higher, especially because of the need to maintain the AUKUS security pact, inked under Biden, to counter China. New Zealand in recent years has shifted from an independent and neutral foreign policy to one that now prioritizes a closer security partnership with the United States. But Wellington might pivot away from this approach if Trump comes back, primarily due to the consequences for fellow Pacific Island nations (more on this in a moment), which could prompt it to reconsider joining the non-nuclear submarine portion of AUKUS, known as Pillar 2.
Pacific Island nations – for example, the Marshall Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, and Palau (collectively known as the Freely Associated States) as well as countries like Fiji, Papua New Guinea, and Vanuatu – would be disillusioned by a second Trump administration. This is primarily because of Trump’s denial of climate change as a scientific phenomenon. For Pacific Island nations, climate change is not only real, but an existential threat as many are already observing rising sea levels that threaten their territories, and warmer waters that negatively impact their fishing stocks. Trump would have to recognize the reality of climate change and take substantive steps to roll it back or mitigate its worst effects to gain trust with Pacific Island leaders.
But interestingly, the first Trump administration’s revived focus on the Pacific Islands region as a new theater of great power competition was not uniformly dismissed in the region. Indeed, the FAS generally welcomed the additional American attention, suggesting that waging great power competition in the Pacific, though not the priority of the majority of its residents, could still resonate somewhat there as well.
Going forward, a future Trump administration would have to consider where it stands in nations across the Indo-Pacific, and make adjustments to its policies and strategies accordingly. For the moment, at least, Trump can reasonably claim to have strong ties with countries like North Korea, Vietnam, India, and the FAS, but his second administration would have a long way to go on key U.S. allies and partners, especially Australia, Japan, the Philippines, South Korea, and Taiwan. It certainly is not impossible to improve these relationships, but it would also require a discernible shift toward a less transactional and more predictable and stable American approach to the region.
Authors
Contributing Author
Derek Grossman
Derek Grossman is a senior defense analyst at the nonprofit, nonpartisan RAND Corporation, regular contributor to The Diplomat, and adjunct professor at the University of Southern California.
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thediplomat.com · by Derek Grossman
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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