Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

"If more North Koreans come to recognize that unification through freedom is the only way to improve their lives... they will emerge as strong allies for a freedom-oriented unification."

– President Yoon Suk Yeol, August 15, 2024

“The party’s comprehensive conclusion after reviewing decades-long inter-Korean relations is that reunification can never be achieved with those ROK riffraffs that defined the ‘unification by absorption’ and ‘unification under liberal democracy’ as their state policy. That is in sharp contradiction with what our line of national reunification was: one nation [minjok], one state with two systems. Reunification is realistically 'impossible' and the two Koreas are separate 'belligerent states' at war."

– Kim Jong Un, January 1, 2024

"This constant lying is not aimed at making the people believe a lie, but at ensuring that no one believes anything anymore. A people that can no longer distinguish between truth and lies cannot distinguish between right and wrong. And such a people, deprived of the power to think and judge, is, without knowing and willing it, completely subjected to the rule of lies. With such a people, you can do whatever you want."

– Hannah Arendt (14 October 1906 – 4 December 1975) German historian and philosopher

1. China researchers call for 'shadow government' in Taiwan ahead of takeover

2. How Israel Killed a Ghost

3. Economic Hostility: United States vs. China: A Great Power Competition Report

4. Deploying on U.S. Soil: How Trump Would Use Soldiers Against Riots, Crime and Migrants

5. Ukraine’s Kursk Offensive Is a Turning Point in the War

6. What Does Zelensky Want in Kursk?

7. Will Ukraine’s Kursk Offensive Turn the Tide?

8. Michael Oren: Should Israel Strike First?

9. Opinion: Red Thin Line – How to Play Russia

10. During Ukraine’s Incursion, Russian Conscripts Recount Surrendering in Droves

11. Kremlin response to Kursk incursion shows how Putin freezes in a crisis

12. Behind Ukraine’s Russia Invasion: Secrecy, Speed and Electronic Jamming

13. Calls for Putin removal in biggest threat to Kremlin since Wagner revolt

14. Seeds of Today's Middle East Disaster Were Sown by the CIA

15. What the U.S. Can Learn from the Chinese Development Playbook

1. China researchers call for 'shadow government' in Taiwan ahead of takeover

Chinese unconventional warfare. Do Chinese scholars/researchers read US doctrine" (hell, yes and certainly more than US scholars/researchers) Is a shadow government feasible in Taiwan? Can effective counterintelligence prevent or disrupt it? Or is Taiwan too vulnerable? What happens if this effort is successful and there is no larger scale conventional invasion of Taiwan? What do we do then? Taiwan can "fall" three ways: (1) to its own domestic politics (a party arises that seeks peaceful unification with the PRC), (2) to PLA unconventional warfare (successful insurgency that overthrows the Taiwan government), or large scale combat operations via PLA invasion of the nation. What are we preparing for?

Chinese unconventional warfare. Do Chinese scholars/researchers read US doctrine? (hell, yes and certainly more than US scholars/researchers) Is a shadow government feasible in Taiwan? Can effective counterintelligence prevent or disrupt it? Or is Taiwan too vulnerable? What happens if this effort is successful and there is no large scale conventional invasion of Taiwan? What do we do then? Taiwan can "fall" in three ways: (1) to its own domestic politics (a party arises that seeks peaceful unification with the PRC), (2) to PLA unconventional warfare (successful insurgency that overthrows the Taiwan government), or large scale combat operations via PLA invasion of the nation. Of course the commander will always choose COA 4 when three are presented and that is a combation of all three with intent that the first two will work but if the third is necessary the first two can prepare the way for the third as well as prepare for what comes next after the third is executed. What are we preparing for?

In U.S. unconventional warfare (UW) doctrine, a "shadow government" refers to an administrative structure established by insurgent groups to perform governmental functions in areas they control or influence. This concept is part of a broader strategy to undermine and eventually replace the existing government by providing alternative governance. The shadow government can include functions such as food distribution, healthcare, security, legal decisions, and education, aiming to satisfy local grievances and gain popular support.

The shadow government operates within the framework of UW, which involves activities conducted to enable a resistance movement or insurgency to coerce, disrupt, or overthrow a government or occupying power. It can reside within the guerrilla force or the underground, serving as a parallel authority that challenges the host nation (HN) government.

In practice, the shadow government seeks to establish insurgent legitimacy and influence while displacing the regime's legitimacy. It manages community resources in support of the insurgent organization and prepares for the transition to post-regime governance. This structure is crucial for insurgencies as it helps mobilize the population and strengthens the insurgent's position against the incumbent government.

China researchers call for 'shadow government' in Taiwan ahead of takeover

Newsweek · by Micah McCartney · August 16, 2024

Academics at China's Xiamen University in Fujian have outlined what they see as the path toward reshaping Taiwan in Beijing's image after a forced unification with the island democracy.

The authors also call for a "shadow government" to be organized beforehand to ensure "regime change" goes smoothly.

The document, which doesn't list the authors' names, has been shared online by the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank after being pulled from Chinese social media, where it was first posted.

China claims sovereignty over Taiwan and has vowed to unite with it, by force if necessary, though Beijing's Chinese Communist Party government has never ruled on the island. In recent years China has dialed up military activity in waters near Taiwan to pressure its neighbor, including a series of major military drills launched after the inauguration of Taiwan's President Lai Ching-te in May.

Activists mark the third anniversary of the start of massive pro-democracy protests that roiled Hong Kong in 2019 during a rally on June 12, 2022. Chinese academics have outlined what they see as the path... Activists mark the third anniversary of the start of massive pro-democracy protests that roiled Hong Kong in 2019 during a rally on June 12, 2022. Chinese academics have outlined what they see as the path toward reshaping Taiwan in Beijing's image after a forced unification with the island democracy. Sam Yeh/AFP via Getty

The authors write that China's experience with Hong Kong showed the "one country, two systems" framework introduced to the former British colony would not suit Taiwan. This would have "little persuasive power," they note, because of the "disruption"—an apparent reference to the pro-democracy protests of 2019 and 2020 that were crushed by the special administrative zone's Beijing-approved government.

Likewise, the authors say it would be impractical to give Taiwan a 50-year adjustment period before it assimilates into the mainland, something it had promised Hong Kong in the Sino-British Joint Declaration signed before the handover.

The paper states the "comprehensive takeover of Taiwan" after unification is "urgent" and goes on to call for Chinese authorities to prepare a "shadow" Taiwan government that could hit the ground running to ensure a smooth transition.

In the meantime, a committee should be set up to focus on "post-takeover policies" spanning law, currency conversion, customs and integration of infrastructure on both sides of the Taiwan Strait. Committee members would familiarize themselves with the Taiwanese institutions they replace and draw up plans related to "screening" Taiwanese civil servants, teachers and members of the military.

The authors also recommend setting up "a highly realistic physical environment" in which to experiment with their policy ideas before putting them into practice in Taiwan.

Taiwanese "cadres who are familiar with the mainland" could be recruited to help advise Chinese planners on local norms to help shorten the "transition period," while pro-unification individuals already in Taiwan should also be made use of, the authors add.

The paper observes pro-unification sentiments have greatly weakened in Taiwan, adding that even the island's relatively Beijing-friendly opposition party, the Kuomintang, has been "softening and moving toward implicit Taiwan independence."

"The fact it says the KMT's moving toward 'implicit Taiwan independence' shows at least some self-awareness on the mainland's part that it has all but lost Taiwan," Sean King, Asia scholar and senior vice president of New York-based consultancy Park Strategies, told Newsweek.

"But the report wholly overlooks the anticipated upheaval that would precede any unification because Taiwan's populace would not go willingly," King added. He believes "nothing short of military action" would bring Taiwan into the fold and pointed out the Xiamen University authors did not even mention a potential postwar reconstruction.

Taiwanese would continue to "actively resent and seek to undermine any and all PRC rule over them. It would not be a happy union," he said.

China has threatened war in the event Taiwan declares official independence. President Lai maintains this is not necessary, as Taiwan is already independent. Polling in recent years shows more than three-quarters of Taiwanese support maintaining the status quo of de facto independence in the Taiwan Strait, either indefinitely or moving toward eventual de jure independence.

The Taiwanese and Chinese foreign ministries did not immediately respond to written requests for comment.

Newsweek · by Micah McCartney · August 16, 2024

2. How Israel Killed a Ghost

I am reminded of reading about Operation Wrath of God which was conducted to hunt down those responsible for the 1972 Terrorist attack at the Olympics in Munich. I remember reading "The Hit Team" in the 1970s

This also reads like the Netflix drama "Fauda" or the current Amazon Prime series "Ghosts of Beirut."

How Israel Killed a Ghost

Hezbollah’s commander Fuad Shukr lived a life so secret few knew his name or face before an airstrike killed him and helped put the Middle East on the brink of war

https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/how-israel-killed-a-ghost-73e6db68?mod=hp_lead_pos7

By Sune Engel RasmussenFollow

, Adam Chamseddine and Carrie Keller-Lynn

Updated Aug. 18, 2024 12:00 am ET

BEIRUT—Fuad Shukr had eluded the U.S. for four decades, ever since a bombing killed 241 American servicemen in a Marine barracks in the Lebanese capital, which it says he helped plan. At the end of July, an Israeli airstrike found him on the seventh floor of a residential building not far away.

The militant was one of the U.S.-designated terrorist group Hezbollah’s founders and most senior operatives, a longtime trusted friend of the leader Hassan Nasrallah who played a key role in developing the missile arsenal that has made Hezbollah the world’s best-armed nonstate militia. For the past 10 months, he had commanded the group’s increasingly intense cross-border skirmishing with Israel.

Yet despite being one of the most important figures in Hezbollah’s history, he lived an almost invisible life, appearing only in small gatherings of the group’s trusted veterans. He emerged in public early this year to attend the funeral of a nephew killed fighting Israel—but only for a couple of minutes, an acquaintance said. Shukr was so secretive that Lebanese media outlets reporting on his death published photos of the wrong man.

Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah gives a televised speech at a memorial ceremony for Fuad Shukr. Photo: Wael Hamzeh/Shutterstock

Hezbollah supporters hold portraits of Fuad Shukr during his funeral service in Beirut. Photo: Marwan Naamani/Zuma Press

The commander few people knew spent his last day, July 30, in his office on the second floor of a residential building in the southern Beirut neighborhood of Dahiyeh, a Hezbollah official said. He lived on the seventh floor of the same building, likely to limit the need to move around in the open. Nasrallah said during his eulogy for Shukr that he had been in touch with him until just hours before his death.

That evening, according to the Hezbollah official, Shukr received a call from someone telling him to go to his apartment five floors up. Around 7 p.m., Israeli munitions slammed into the apartment and the three floors underneath, killing Shukr, his wife, two other women and two children. More than 70 people were injured, according to the Lebanese Health Ministry.

The call to draw Shukr to the seventh floor, where he would be easier to target amid the surrounding buildings, likely came from someone who had breached Hezbollah’s internal communications network, the official said. Hezbollah and Iran continue to investigate the intelligence failure but believe that Israel beat the group’s countersurveillance with better technology and hacking, the official said.

The killing was a major blow to Hezbollah, taking out one of the group’s best strategists and exposing the degree to which its operations have been penetrated. Paired with the death hours later of Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in a suspected Israeli attack in Tehran, it also pushed the Middle East to the brink of a regional war that the U.S. is scrambling to head off.

The remains of the building where Fuad Shukr lived and was killed by an Israeli strike in Beirut. Photo: Manu Brabo for WSJ

Fuad Shukr’s grave in a mausoleum in Beirut. Photo: Manu Brabo for WSJ

“These targeted killings have a cumulative effect on the operational capability of the organization,” said Carmit Valensi, a senior researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv and expert on Hezbollah, referring to the Lebanese group.

“He was a source of knowledge,” she said of Shukr. “He knew how to work and communicate with Nasrallah. They spoke the same language.”

Shukr lived nearly his entire adult life at the heart of Hezbollah’s operations and decision-making and was a key link between the group and its main benefactor, Iran. In 1982, still in his early 20s, he helped organize Shiite guerrilla fighters in Beirut to oppose Israel’s invasion of Lebanon during its civil war.

After Israel laid siege to Beirut that year, the resistance retreated to the Bekaa Valley in eastern Lebanon, where it made contact with about 1,500 members of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps who had arrived through Syria. Shukr at the time worked for the General Directorate of General Security, Lebanon’s government intelligence agency.

He was asked to escort a group of Iranian diplomats from the Syrian border to the embassy in Beirut, according to Qassem Kassir, a political analyst familiar with Hezbollah who had known Shukr since the early 1980s. The diplomats were abducted along the way—allegedly by the Lebanese Forces, an armed Christian faction—and never seen again. Shukr, as a state security employee, was let go.

Known by his nom de guerre, Hajj Mohsin, Shukr became the point man between the Iranians and the camp they established in the Bekaa to train Hezbollah militants, said Kassir, who worked at the Iranian Embassy in Beirut at the time. Shukr later traveled to Iran to oversee the training of elite Hezbollah forces.

Early in the morning of Oct. 23, 1983, a truck bomb containing an estimated 12,000 pounds of TNT exploded outside a U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut. Hezbollah had yet to officially declare its existence, and a group called Islamic Jihad took responsibility. The U.S. later said Shukr played a key role in planning and executing the attack.

Rescuers worked at the site of a U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut after a blast there killed 241 American servicemen in October 1983. Photo: ASSOCIATED PRESS

Hezbollah formally announced its formation in 1985, and Shukr became its first military commander. He continued to wage a guerrilla campaign in the south until Israeli forces fully withdrew from the country in 2000 and earned a reputation as a strategic thinker with knowledge of the entire region.

“We used to joke with him in our sessions and in our meetings, and say that the engine of his brain was working with terrible force,” Nasrallah said in his speech. “He had a wealth of ideas and suggestions, and we would say to him: ‘Sir, you have to be patient with us.’ ”

On June 14, 1985, a group of hijackers seized TWA Flight 847 after takeoff from Athens, and flew the plane back and forth between Beirut and Algiers for three days demanding the release of 700 prisoners held by Israel. Shukr helped plan the operation, according to Kassir, and shortly thereafter went underground as his notoriety spread throughout Beirut.

“He became invisible,” Shukr’s acquaintance said.

One of the hijackers of TWA Flight 847 leaned from the cockpit window at Beirut airport after the plane was seized in 1985. Photo: AFP/Getty Images

Shukr commanded the respect of Hezbollah’s rank and file and occasionally appeared from hiding. During protests in Beirut in 1993 against the Oslo peace accord between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization, he personally intervened to convince a group of Hezbollah members to pull back from a clash with security forces and prevent bloodshed, this acquaintance said.

Some outings were more brazen. In 1996, after Israeli forces firing artillery shells killed more than 100 civilians sheltering in a United Nations compound in southern Lebanon, Shukr went on a pilgrimage to Mecca. Walking around the Kaaba, he led a large group of pilgrims in chants of “Death to America” and “Death to Israel,” said the acquaintance who accompanied him on the trip.

The secretive life took its toll on Shukr, who compensated for the time he lost seeing friends and associates by treating those around him, when he saw them, with extra attention and care, Kassir said. He was fiercely loyal to a close circle of friends, many of whom had come of age with him, including Nasrallah, who became Hezbollah chief in 1992 after Israel assassinated his predecessor.

“These high-rank military guys,” said Hanin Ghaddar, senior fellow and Hezbollah expert with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, “are expected to have a very secretive life and mission—no public appearances, no photos to the public, and definitely no interactions with others in the Shia community.”

When the next devastating war hit Lebanon, in 2006, Shukr again was instrumental. He helped command the fighters who infiltrated northern Israel, killing eight soldiers and abducting two others, triggering a monthlong invasion that devastated parts of Lebanon.

A wounded Israeli was brought to a hospital after a Hezbollah attack in northern Israel in 2006. Photo: Elad Gershgorn/ASSOCIATED PRESS

After the war, Shukr oversaw a military buildup that expanded Hezbollah’s arsenal from some 15,000 rockets and missiles to about 150,000, including antiship and cruise missiles, drones, and rockets. He became the point man for Iran’s deliveries, through Syria, of components that turned unguided rockets into precision-guided ones, according to the Israeli military.

In 2008, Shukr’s friend and Hezbollah commander in chief Imad Mughniyeh was killed by a car bomb in a joint CIA-Mossad operation in Damascus, Syria. Mughniyeh was leaving a reception marking the anniversary of the Islamic Republic in Iran when he got into his car alone and a bomb hidden in a spare tire exploded.

An image of Hezbollah commander Imad Mughniyeh in Beirut, in 2008, following his killing. Photo: AFP/Getty Images

In 2016, another Hezbollah friend Mustafa Badreddine was killed by an explosion, also in the Syrian capital. Hezbollah blamed Sunni militants for the killing, while Israel said he had been killed by his own men due to internal rivalries on Nasrallah’s orders.

Yet, in recent years Shukr appeared to grow more relaxed, Kassir said. His friends had been killed in Damascus, not Beirut, where a targeted assassination seemed unlikely.

“The rules of engagement with Israel were established,” Kassir said. “There were red lines.”

The rules held even after Oct. 7, when Hamas—a Hezbollah ally—attacked Israel and killed 1,200 people, most of them civilians, according to Israeli authorities. Hezbollah began firing at Israel the following day, setting off a back and forth in which Israel targeted and killed around 400 of the group’s operatives, including key commanders, but not in Beirut.

Nasrallah, concerned about the intelligence breakdowns that enabled the killings of his operatives, in February ordered his fighters and their families not to use smartphones: “Abandon your phone, disable it, bury it, lock it in a metal box,” he said. To prevent Israeli eavesdropping, Hezbollah resorted to using coded language not only on open channels but on their internal communications network as well, the Hezbollah official said.

Shukr came into Israel’s crosshairs after a rocket landed in a soccer field in Majdal Shams in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights in late July, killing a dozen young people. Hezbollah denied involvement, but Israel blamed the group, saying the rocket was one of Hezbollah’s and came from Lebanon.

A damaged football pitch after a rocket strike in Majdal Shams, in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. Photo: Menahem Kahana/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

Early on the day Shukr was targeted, Hezbollah sent out orders for high-ranking commanders to disperse amid concerns they were at risk, the Hezbollah official said. After the strike, it wasn’t immediately clear whether he had been killed. Some in Hezbollah thought he might have heeded the evacuation orders and fled, the official said. It took a while to find his body. It had been flung into a neighboring building.

Shukr’s death finally brought him out of the shadows. At his eulogy, his face was printed on billboards and footage of his life on the battlefield was projected onto a large screen as a voice-over extolled his virtues at earsplitting volume.

He was buried in a public cemetery in Beirut alongside a young man who had died fighting in Syria, according to the fighter’s mother.

“We’d heard his name, but we never saw him,” said a young neighbor who sat on the pavement near the building where Shukr was killed. “He was like a ghost.”

A Quran and pictures of Fuad Shukr at his grave in Beirut. Photo: Manu Brabo for WSJ

Write to Sune Engel Rasmussen at sune.rasmussen@wsj.com

3. Economic Hostility: United States vs. China: A Great Power Competition Report

Economic Hostility: United States vs. China

A Great Power Competition Report

Strategy Central

By Monte Erfourth – August 18, 2024

https://www.strategycentral.io/post/economic-hostility-united-states-vs-china?postId=7

THE COMPETITION REPORT SERIES

The Strategy Central Great Power Competition report series details the United States and China’s great power competition in the first half 2024. It offers an analysis to help strategists grasp the current rivalry between these two superpowers regarding national power, economics, military power, and diplomacy. This is the second of five segments covering each aspect of great power competition and will focus on economic competition.

The economic aspect of great power competition between the United States and China is the most dynamic dimension of their rivalry. It has far-reaching implications for global stability and the balance of power. This article delves into the economic hard edges that define this competition, examining how each nation leverages its economic strengths and addresses its vulnerabilities to outmaneuver the other. The analysis covers the strategies both nations employ, including trade policies, technological advancements, and investment initiatives, and how these efforts shape the global economic landscape.

The ongoing economic tensions between the two superpowers, including the imposition of tariffs, export controls, and investment restrictions, will also be examined. These measures reflect a broader strategy by both the United States and China to secure critical resources, dominate key technological sectors, and influence global markets. The great powers’ pursuit of resources impacts other nations, particularly in the Indo-Pacific region, where the competition between China and the United States is most intense.

Ultimately, this article aims to provide a comprehensive overview of the economic strategies and policies driving the great power competition between the United States and China. By examining the strengths and weaknesses of both nations' economies and the broader geopolitical implications of their rivalry, the article offers insights into the future trajectory of global power dynamics and the potential outcomes of this ongoing competition.

ECONOMIC REVIEW

Ongoing and escalating tensions have marked the economic relationship between China and the United States over the past decade. One significant issue in the first half of 2024 was the continuation of trade disputes, with both countries imposing tariffs and trade restrictions. China retaliated against U.S. trade measures by threatening to sell U.S. Treasuries and controlling exports of critical minerals, which could impact global supply chains—the last seven months also heightened scrutiny of China's economic policies, such as its ambitious and distortionary industrial strategies, particularly in sectors like electric vehicles and high technology. These strategies have prompted the U.S. and its allies to implement measures to reduce dependency on Chinese goods and technology, contributing to further friction.

Between January and July 2024, the United States implemented several measures to prevent China from accessing critical technology, particularly in sectors deemed vital for national security and technological leadership.

Export Controls and Investment Restrictions

The U.S. has continued to expand its export controls on critical technologies. These controls, first significantly revised in October 2022, have been further tightened to restrict the export of advanced semiconductors, semiconductor manufacturing equipment, and AI-related technologies to China. The Biden administration has built on these measures by restricting outbound investments in vital technological sectors, including semiconductors, quantum computing, and AI. This comprehensive approach aims to prevent the transfer of technology that could enhance China's military capabilities and its high-tech industry.

Sanctions and Cybersecurity Measures

In response to persistent cyber threats, the U.S. Department of the Treasury, in coordination with other agencies, sanctioned Chinese entities and individuals linked to state-sponsored cyber activities targeting U.S. critical infrastructure. For example, in March 2024, the Treasury sanctioned Wuhan Xiaoruizhi Science and Technology Company, Limited, and associated individuals for their roles in cyber operations against U.S. infrastructure. These sanctions are part of broader efforts to disrupt malicious cyber activities and protect U.S. national security.

Collaboration with Allies

The U.S. has actively sought to harmonize its technology control measures with those of key allies. Agreements with countries like Japan and the Netherlands have been crucial, particularly in limiting China's access to advanced lithography equipment essential for semiconductor manufacturing. This coordinated approach helps close loopholes that could allow China to bypass U.S. restrictions by sourcing technology from other advanced economies.

Policy and Legislative Actions

The U.S. has also leveraged legislative tools to bolster its technology control framework. The Export Control Reform Act of 2018 and subsequent updates under the Biden administration have provided a robust legal basis for restricting technology exports. Additionally, the Department of Commerce has added numerous Chinese entities to its Entity List, requiring U.S. companies to obtain licenses for exporting specified technologies to these entities. This strategy aims to limit the transfer of technologies that could contribute to China's military modernization and strategic ambitions.

Cooperation

During the first half of 2024, the United States and China made several notable strides in economic collaboration despite ongoing tensions. Their commitment to renewing the U.S.-China Science and Technology Cooperation Agreement was a significant achievement that fostered joint research and development in various scientific fields. Additionally, both nations agreed to expand renewable energy efforts and reduce carbon emissions, reflecting a shared interest in addressing climate change. These agreements underscore the mutual benefits of economic collaboration and the necessity of cooperation in global sustainability efforts.

2024 China Economic Performance

China’s GDP growth in Q1 2024 reached 5.3%, surpassing both consensus expectations and the 5.2% reading from 2023, suggesting that the country's 4.6% growth forecast for 2024 is attainable, with potential for upward revision. Despite this, the economic structure remains unbalanced, with a more robust supply-side overshadowing weaker demand. The recovery's foundation is still shaky, mainly due to the ongoing real estate adjustments and economic imbalance. Key risks include real estate, local government debt, deflation, supply chain shifts, and geopolitical tensions, though systemic financial risks appear manageable. In response, China continues implementing expansionary monetary and fiscal policies, emphasizing fiscal stimulus to bolster recovery amid weak economic sentiment and ineffective monetary easing.

2024 USA Economic Performance

In 2024, the United States displayed a robust economic performance, marked by steady GDP growth and strong labor market indicators. 2024 GDP for Q1 increased at an annual rate of 1.6%, and 2.7% in Q2, according to the World Bank. Consumer spending remained a key driver, buoyed by rising wages and low unemployment rates. Inflation pressures eased compared to previous years, allowing the Federal Reserve to maintain a balanced monetary policy stance. The tech and healthcare sectors led gains in corporate earnings, while manufacturing showed signs of resilience despite global supply chain challenges. However, concerns about fiscal sustainability persisted amid elevated government debt levels, and geopolitical uncertainties posed potential risks to economic stability. The U.S. economy demonstrated resilience and adaptability in a complex global landscape.

2023 Lowey Asia Economic Capability Rating

Unsurprisingly, China and the United States are economically equivalent. Even with the divisions of allies and partners, China and its network have about the same economic power compared to the U.S. and its allies and partners.

Economic Analysis

The United States has employed a multi-faceted strategy to prevent China from accessing critical technology. This includes stringent export controls, sanctions on cyber actors, collaboration with international allies, and robust legislative measures. These efforts reflect a broader U.S. strategy to maintain technological leadership and safeguard national security in the face of growing competition from China. A significant achievement was made in the commitment to renew the U.S.-China Science and Technology Cooperation Agreement, which fosters joint research and development in various scientific fields.

In 2024, China's economic growth is projected to slow to around 4.1%, influenced by structural challenges and external pressures. Despite robust export growth to ASEAN countries and Latin America, trade with Western economies has remained strong. Domestically, the Chinese government is prioritizing wage increases and consumer spending to boost economic growth, transitioning from an investment-driven model. However, the effectiveness of these measures remains uncertain, and the country faces significant risks, including a downturn in the property sector and weakened global demand.

China's decades-old, debt-fueled model of relying on real estate and infrastructure investments to drive its domestic economy is still facing its most severe challenge. The real estate sector, which accounts for 25–30 percent of the country’s GDP, is in crisis, with property developers losing the capacity to buy land, purchase construction materials, pay contractors, and deliver housing units. This has led to defaults on dollar-denominated bonds by 34 of 50 developers and pushed the two largest companies toward bankruptcy. Similarly, infrastructure construction, comprising another 15 percent of GDP, is under pressure. The property crisis has drastically reduced local government revenue from land sales, which traditionally accounted for one-third of their revenue, impacting essential public services.

With approximately 70 percent of household wealth tied up in real estate, falling property sales and prices have shifted consumer focus to reducing household debt, raising deflation risks. Despite two decades of official statements on boosting consumption, household consumption as a share of GDP dropped to its lowest level in nearly a decade in 2022, with only a slight rebound in 2023. This forces China to rely on exports to sustain growth, distorting global markets. The failing real estate model has caused systemic financial stress, with rising property loan defaults and declining asset sales and prices creating broader financial instability. Banks face shrinking profit margins and consumer deposit rates while carrying increasing nonperforming loans. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) faces the dual challenge of addressing local debt accumulation while managing financial risks and maintaining foreign investor confidence amidst an overall debt-to-GDP ratio that exceeded 300 percent in 2023.

In 2024, the U.S. economy showed a mixed performance with moderate growth amid persistent challenges. The real GDP growth rate is projected to average around 2.4% for the year, supported by robust consumer spending and a strong job market. However, this represents a slowdown from the previous year's growth due to elevated interest rates and geopolitical tensions impacting trade and investment. Consumer spending continued to be a significant driver, growing at 2.3%, buoyed by households leveraging savings and new debt. However, this growth is expected to decelerate as savings deplete and borrowing reaches its limits.

Inflation remained a key concern, with the Federal Reserve maintaining higher interest rates to combat price increases, impacting borrowing and investment activities. The labor market remained resilient, with a low unemployment rate of around 3.9%, contributing to sustained economic activity despite external pressures. Defense spending saw an uptick due to geopolitical conflicts, providing an economic stimulus that partially offset some of the downturns from international tensions and higher oil prices. While the U.S. economy demonstrated strength and resilience, it faced significant headwinds that moderated its growth trajectory.

The short-term projection for the U.S. economy for the remainder of 2024 and early 2025 suggests moderate growth amidst persistent challenges. GDP growth is expected to average around 2.4% for the year, driven by robust consumer spending and a strong job market. However, this represents a slowdown compared to previous years due to elevated interest rates and ongoing geopolitical tensions impacting trade and investment. Inflation pressures will likely ease somewhat, allowing the Federal Reserve to maintain a balanced monetary policy stance.

Despite these positive indicators, several risks persist. The U.S. faces challenges from trade deficits, higher inflation rates, and vulnerabilities in global supply chains, particularly for critical minerals and high-tech components. Defense spending is anticipated to rise due to geopolitical conflicts, which will provide some economic stimulus and strain the budget. While the U.S. economy is expected to demonstrate resilience, it must navigate significant headwinds that could moderate its growth trajectory in the short term.

Summary

The economic competition between China and the United States is marked by strengths and vulnerabilities, shaping the broader geopolitical environment and influencing global power dynamics. China's economic strengths lie in its robust export markets, particularly in ASEAN countries and Latin America, and its strategic investments under the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which continue to secure economic influence and open new markets. China also faces significant structural challenges, including an aging population, youth unemployment, and ongoing issues in its real estate sector, which undermine its long-term economic stability. Additionally, China's dependency on exports, coupled with increasing external pressures from trade tensions with the United States and other Western economies, adds further risk to its economic outlook.

On the other hand, the United States maintains its economic edge through innovation and technological leadership, particularly in sectors such as artificial intelligence and renewable energy. The U.S. also benefits from a resilient consumer market, which has remained strong despite inflation and global supply chain disruptions. However, the U.S. is not without its economic vulnerabilities. Persistent trade deficits, inflationary pressures, and a heavy dependency on global supply chains for critical minerals and high-tech components pose significant risks to its economic security. Moreover, geopolitical tensions, particularly with China, have led to increased defense spending, which, while providing short-term economic stimulus, could strain the U.S. budget in the long run.

The competition between these two economic giants revolves around technological supremacy, access to critical resources, and the ability to influence global markets. Both nations are heavily invested in securing technological advancements, particularly in emerging fields like semiconductors, AI, and quantum computing. The U.S. has implemented strict export controls and investment restrictions to prevent China from accessing critical technologies that could enhance its military capabilities and high-tech industries. This has led to a broader strategy of economic decoupling, where both nations seek to reduce their dependencies on each other, leading to the fragmentation of global supply chains and the re-alignment of international trade partnerships.

This economic rivalry significantly shapes the geopolitical landscape, particularly in the Indo-Pacific region, where China and the U.S. vie for influence. China's economic initiatives, such as the BRI, are designed to expand its geopolitical footprint by securing trade routes and resource access across Asia, Africa, and beyond. Meanwhile, through its alliances and economic measures, the United States seeks to counterbalance China's growing influence by bolstering partnerships with key regional players and ensuring its technological and military dominance.

Conclusion

While both nations exhibit considerable economic strengths, the United States holds an economic edge due to its innovation, technological leadership, and resilient consumer market. However, this advantage is not absolute and is subject to the persistent challenges of inflation, supply chain vulnerabilities, and geopolitical tensions. The outcome of this economic competition will largely depend on how each nation addresses its weaknesses and adapts to the evolving global environment.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

"Biden and Xi at APEC: Averting Further Crisis in U.S.-China Relations." United States Institute of Peace. Accessed August 5, 2024. https://www.usip.org.
"China Sets Diplomatic Goals for 2024." China Daily. Accessed August 5, 2024. https://www.chinadaily.com.cnn
"China’s Top Diplomat Presents Diplomatic Goals for 2024." English.gov.cn. Accessed August 5, 2024. https://english.www.gov.cn.
"Cooperate and Compete: Getting the Most out of U.S.-China Economic Relations." CSIS. Accessed August 5, 2024. https://www.csis.org.
"Five Takeaways from China’s Latest Diplomacy." United States Institute of Peace. Accessed August 5, 2024. https://www.usip.org.
"The U.S.-China Relationship in 2024: Managing Competition without Conflict." CSIS. Accessed August 5, 2024. https://www.csis.org.
"The U.S.-China Relationship in 2024 Is Stabilized but Precarious." Brookings. Accessed August 5, 2024. https://www.brookings.edu.
"Votes Around the World in 2024 Will Test Chinese Diplomacy." Chatham House. Accessed August 5, 2024. https://www.chathamhouse.org.
Lee, John. "Xi Jinping Conceals China’s Vulnerability, Hoping We’ll Fall for It." Hudson Institute. Accessed August 7, 2024. https://www.hudson.org/foreign-policy/xi-jinping-conceals-china-vulnerability-hoping-well-fall-it-john-lee.
Smith, Andrew. "U.S. Military Engagement in Taiwan: Strengthening Defense Capabilities." Asia-Pacific Defense Journal, April 2024.
Johnson, Robert. "Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement: U.S.-Philippines Military Collaboration in 2024." Pacific Security Review, May 2024.
Davis, Michael. "Freedom of Navigation Operations in the South China Sea: U.S. Strategies and Implications." Naval War College Review, June 2024.
Tanaka, Hiroshi. "U.S.-Japan Joint Defense Initiatives in the East China Sea." Japan Defense Quarterly, July 2024.
https://power.lowyinstitute.org/report/
https://www.armedservices.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/nds_commission_final_report.pdf

4. Deploying on U.S. Soil: How Trump Would Use Soldiers Against Riots, Crime and Migrants

I just do not understand the rationale for deploying US troops on US soil.

Of course we have done it before - Active duty troops were deployed for civil rights actions.

Desegregation of Central High School, Little Rock, Arkansas (1957):

University of Mississippi Integration (1962):

University of Alabama Integration (1963)

Deploying on U.S. Soil: How Trump Would Use Soldiers Against Riots, Crime and Migrants

The former president’s vision of using the military to enforce the law domestically would carry profound implications for civil liberties.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/17/us/politics/trump-2025-insurrection-act.html

By Charlie Savage Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman

Aug. 17, 2024
Updated 2:58 p.m. ET

During the turbulent summer of 2020, President Donald J. Trump raged at his military and legal advisers, calling them “losers” for objecting to his idea of using federal troops to suppress outbreaks of violence during the nationwide protests over the police murder of George Floyd.

It wasn’t the only time Mr. Trump was talked out of using the military for domestic law enforcement — a practice that would carry profound implications for civil liberties and for the traditional constraints on federal power. He repeatedly raised the idea of using troops to secure border states, and even proposed shooting both violent protesters and undocumented migrants in the legs, former aides have said.

In his first term in office, Mr. Trump never realized his expansive vision of using troops to enforce the law on U.S. soil. But as he has sought a return to power, he has made clear that he intends to use the military for a range of domestic law enforcement purposes, including patrolling the border, suppressing protests that he deems to have turned into riots and even fighting crime in big cities run by Democrats.

“In places where there is a true breakdown of the rule of law, such as the most dangerous neighborhoods in Chicago, the next president should use every power at his disposal to restore order — and, if necessary, that includes sending in the National Guard or the troops,” Mr. Trump said at a conservative conference in Dallas in August 2022, shortly before announcing that he was running to be that next president.

During his time out of power, allies of Mr. Trump have worked on policy papers to provide legal justifications for the former president’s intent to use the military to enforce the law domestically. In public, they have talked about this in the context of border states and undocumented immigrants. But an internal email from a group closely aligned with Mr. Trump, obtained by The Times, shows that, privately, the group was also exploring using troops to “stop riots” by protesters.

While governors have latitude to use their states’ National Guards to respond to civil disorder or major disasters, a post-Civil War law called the Posse Comitatus Act generally makes it a crime to use regular federal troops for domestic policing purposes.

However, an 1807 law called the Insurrection Act creates an exception to that ban. It grants presidents the emergency power to use federal troops on domestic soil to restore law and order when they believe a situation warrants it. Those federal troops could either be regular active-duty military or state National Guard soldiers the federal government has assumed control over.

The Insurrection Act was last invoked in 1992, when President George H.W. Bush sent troops to help suppress riots in Los Angeles following the acquittal of white police officers who had been videotaped beating a Black motorist, Rodney King. In that case, however, the governor of California, Pete Wilson, and the mayor of Los Angeles, Tom Bradley, had asked for federal assistance to restore order.

But parts of the Insurrection Act also allow presidents to send in troops without requiring the consent of a governor. Presidents last invoked the act to deploy troops without the consent of state authorities in the late 1950s and early 1960s during the civil rights movement, when some governors in the South resisted court-ordered school desegregation.

Mr. Trump has boasted that, if he returns to the White House, he will dispatch forces without any request for intervention by local authorities. At a campaign rally in Iowa last year, for example, he vowed to unilaterally use federal forces to “get crime out of our cities,” specifically naming New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco as “crime dens” he pointedly noted were run by Democrats.

“You look at what is happening to our country — we cannot let it happen any longer,” Mr. Trump said. “And one of the other things I’ll do — because you are not supposed to be involved in that, you just have to be asked by the governor or the mayor to come in — the next time, I am not waiting.”

Anthony Romero, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said that, as part of his group’s contingency planning for how to resist what it sees as potential risks from any second Trump administration, it is drafting lawsuits to challenge invocations of the Insurrection Act against protesters. He said the group sees it as likely that Mr. Trump would be drawn to the authoritarian “theatrics” of sending troops into Democratic cities.

“It’s very likely that you will have the Trump administration trying to shut down mass protests — which I think are inevitable if they were to win — and to specifically pick fights in jurisdictions with blue-state governors and blue-state mayors,” he said. “There’s talk that he would try to rely on the Insurrection Act as a way to shut down lawful protests that get a little messy. But isolated instances of violence or lawlessness are not enough to use federal troops.”

In a statement, a Trump spokeswoman, Karoline Leavitt, said, “As President Trump has always said, you can’t have a country without law and order and without borders. In the event where an American community is being ravaged by violence, President Trump will use all federal law enforcement assets and work with local governments to protect law-abiding Americans.” She added that he was committed to “using every available resource to seal the border and stop the invasion of millions of illegal aliens into our country.”

Mr. Trump has long been attracted to the strongman move of using military force to impose and maintain domestic political control. In a 1990 interview with Playboy, he spoke admiringly about the Chinese Communist Party for displaying the “power of strength” a year earlier when it used troops and tanks to crush the pro-democracy protests in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.

Many years later, at a 2016 Republican primary debate, he claimed that his comments in that old interview did not mean he actually endorsed the crackdown. But then, as he continued talking, he described the Tiananmen Square demonstration as a riot: “I said that was a strong, powerful government. They kept down the riot. It was a horrible thing.”

Seeking a Show of Strength

In 2020, the videotaped killing of Mr. Floyd, a Black man, by a white police officer in Minneapolis, Derek Chauvin, sparked racial justice protests. Peaceful demonstrations sometimes descended into rioting — especially when anarchists hijacked some of the protests as an opportunity to set fires, smash store windows and take other destructive actions. This was especially visible in Portland, Ore., where the Department of Homeland Security flooded the streets with hundreds of federal officers, many not wearing any identifying insignia.

Image

Federal officers on patrol in Portland, Ore., during demonstrations following the videotaped killing of George Floyd in 2020.Credit...Brandon Bell for The New York Times

During a stormy protest in Washington, D.C., centered in Lafayette Square outside the White House, protesters knocked over barricades. The Secret Service whisked Mr. Trump away to take shelter in a bunker underneath the White House. Attorney General William P. Barr later wrote in his memoir that Mr. Trump was enraged — in part by the violence but “especially the news reports that he was taken to the bunker.” He wanted to make a show of strength as the world watched.

Because D.C. is a federal enclave, not a state, it has no governor, and its National Guard always reports to the Pentagon. The secretary of defense, Mark Esper, sent National Guard forces to support the Park Police and other civilian agencies protecting federal buildings — and, to particular controversy, National Guard helicopters swooped frighteningly low over crowds of people.

But civilians remained in control of the response in the nation’s capital. Mr. Trump wanted to instead put the military directly in charge of suppressing violent protesters — and to use regular, active-duty troops to do it. Members of his legal team drew up an order invoking the Insurrection Act in case it became necessary, according to a person with direct knowledge of what took place. But senior aides opposed such a move, and he never signed it.

Mr. Barr later wrote that he and the acting Homeland Security secretary had thought using regular troops was unnecessary, and that Mr. Esper and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, had “recoiled at the idea, expressing the view that regular military forces should not be used except as a last resort, and that, absent a real insurrection, the military should not be in charge but should provide support to civilian agencies.”

As Mr. Trump nevertheless publicly threatened to put the regular military in the streets across the country, General Milley issued a memo on June 2, 2020, to top military leaders saying that every member of the military swears an oath to uphold the Constitution and its values, including the freedoms of speech and peaceful assembly.

The next day, on June 3, Mr. Esper contradicted Mr. Trump from the Pentagon podium, saying: “The option to use active duty forces in a law enforcement role should only be used as a matter of last resort, and only in the most urgent and dire of situations. We are not in one of those situations now. I do not support invoking the Insurrection Act.” Mr. Trump was outraged, seeing this as an act of defiance. He fired Mr. Esper that November.

Image

Demonstrators in Washington reacting to a low-flying helicopter in 2020 after the secretary of defense, Mark Esper, sent National Guard forces to support the Park Police during a protest against the killing of Mr. Floyd.Credit...Roberto Schmidt/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

In a comment for this article before President Biden dropped out of the 2024 campaign, Mr. Esper pointed to his earlier remarks, adding, “I think the same standard applies going forward, whether it is a second term for Biden, Trump or for any other future president.”

Back in 2020, the protests or riots eventually ebbed, without any use of regular troops or Mr. Trump’s federalizing a state’s National Guard. But on the 2024 campaign trail, Mr. Trump has rewritten that history, falsely bragging that he personally sent troops into the streets of Minneapolis, who quelled violence there.

In reality, it was Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota — now the presumptive Democratic nominee for vice president — who ordered his state’s National Guard to briefly deploy in Minneapolis. Mr. Trump did not direct and was not responsible for the operation.

In a 2021 interview, Mr. Walz recalled consulting with General Milley and Mr. Esper about his decision to use the state’s National Guard at a time when they were resisting Mr. Trump’s desire to send in federal troops — a step that Mr. Walz said would have made the situation worse by exacerbating the anger of people protesting a police murder.

“It was critically important that civilian leadership was seen as leading this, and that the face forward needed to look like your state, it needed to be the National Guard, it needed to be those local folk,” he told the authors Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns.

However, Mr. Walz has faced criticism from some quarters for moving slowly to deploy the guard when some protests in Minneapolis became riots.

Troops at the Border

Mr. Trump has broken with his former subordinates who raised objections to his desire to use federal troops that summer. Those who have stuck with Mr. Trump are working to ensure that a second administration would not contain politically appointed officials or lawyers who would be inclined to see it as their duty to constrain his impulses and desires — one of several reasons a second Trump presidency is likely to shatter even more norms and precedents than the first.

Indeed, even by the standards of various norm-busting plans Mr. Trump and his advisers have developed, the idea of using American troops against Americans on domestic soil stands apart. It has engendered quiet discomfort even among some of his allies on other issues.

Most of the open discussion of it by people other than Mr. Trump has focused on the prospect of using troops in border states — not against American rioters or criminals, but to arrest suspected undocumented migrants and better secure the border against illegal crossings.

Image

Mr. Trump with Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas in February during a visit to the U.S.-Mexico border in Eagle Pass, Texas.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times

In recent years, administrations of both parties — including Mr. Biden’s — have sometimes used the military at the border when surges of migrants have threatened to overwhelm the civilian agents. But the troops have helped by taking over back-office administration and support functions, freeing up more ICE and Border Patrol agents to go into the field.

The idea Mr. Trump and his advisers are playing with is to go beyond that by using regular troops to patrol the border and arrest people.

In an interview with The New York Times last fall, Stephen Miller, Mr. Trump’s top immigration adviser, said Mr. Trump’s plans for an unprecedented crackdown on immigration included invoking the Insurrection Act to use troops as immigration agents.

And, in its 900-page policy book, Project 2025 — a consortium of conservative think-tanks that is working together to develop policy proposals and personnel lists to offer Mr. Trump should he win the election — has a brief line saying regular troops “could” be used at the Southwest border for arrest operations in the context of tackling drug cartels.

But the book has no further analysis or discussion of the idea, and Project 2025 is not substantively engaging with the idea of invoking the Insurrection Act in any context, according to multiple people with knowledge of the effort who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

‘Insurrection — Stop Riots ** — Day 1, Easy’

Regular troops are generally trained to operate in combat situations, not as domestic law enforcement, which heightens the risk of serious and, at times, even fatal mistakes — as happened when a Marine on an antidrug surveillance team assisting the Border Patrol shot and killed an American teenager near the border in 1997.

For that reason, the idea of using regular troops to enforce the law on domestic soil — especially away from the border — crosses a line that gives even some in the conservative think-tank world pause. Policy development work on using the Insurrection Act has joined a small number of other policy ideas circulating in Mr. Trump’s orbit, like disengaging with NATO, that are too radioactive to gain a consensus among the conservatives involved in Project 2025.

Image

Mr. Trump and his allies want any second Trump administration to use troops in Southwest border states to enforce immigration law.Credit...Verónica Gabriela Cárdenas for The New York Times

Instead, legal and policy development work on ideas that are too radical even for Project 2025 are being handled elsewhere, including at a Trump-aligned think tank called the Center for Renewing America that is run by Russell Vought, who was Mr. Trump’s White House budget chief.

An early 2023 email from a member of the center’s staff listed 10 agenda topics for papers that the center planned to write on legal and policy frameworks. An introduction to the email said the goal was to “help us build the case and achieve consensus leading into 2025.” The email went on to circulate more broadly, and The Times reviewed a copy.

The email placed each topic into one of three categories. One set involved Congress. A second involved “broader legal” issues — including “Christian nationalism” and “nullification,” the pre-Civil War idea that states should be able to negate federal laws they don’t like. The third category was “day one” ideas, meaning those whose legal frameworks were already well established, and which could be put into effect by a president unilaterally.

No. 4 on the list: “Insurrection — stop riots ** — Day 1, easy.”

The Center for Renewing America has since published papers about several other agenda items on its list, including arguing that a 1974 law banning presidents from impounding funds — or refusing to spend money Congress has appropriated for things the White House dislikes — is unconstitutional (No. 1 on the list) and advocating for the elimination of the post-Watergate norm of Justice Department investigative independence from the White House (No. 5).

The center has not published any paper on invoking the Insurrection Act to use troops to suppress violent protests. But earlier this year, it published a paper on a closely related topic: invoking that law to use troops in Southwest border states to enforce immigration law. The paper was co-written by Ken Cuccinelli, the acting deputy Homeland Security secretary in the Trump administration.

While the paper focuses on border security, most of its legal analysis applies to any situation in which a president deems the use of troops necessary to suppress lawlessness. It laid out extensive arguments for why the Insurrection Act provides “enormous” leeway for the president to use regular troops directly to make arrests and enforce the law.

It also cited a sweeping Justice Department memorandum written after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, by John Yoo, a Bush administration lawyer with an idiosyncratically broad view of presidential power. Mr. Yoo had argued that the Posse Comitatus Act could not stop a presidential decision to use the armed forces domestically to combat terrorist activities.

In a statement responding to The Times’s reporting, Rachel Cauley, a spokeswoman for the Center for Renewing America, said, “Thank you for confirming that we have made it a priority to articulate that the president has the legal authority to use the military to secure the border.”

While the center’s statement — like its paper — framed the prospect of using troops on domestic soil in the context of securing the border, not suppressing anti-Trump protests, Mr. Vought was more expansive in a hidden-camera video released last week by a British journalism nonprofit, the Centre for Climate Reporting, which spoke with him while deceptively posing as relatives of a wealthy conservative donor.

“George Floyd obviously was not about race — it was about destabilizing the Trump administration,” he said. “We put out, for instance, a 50-page paper designed for lawyers to know that the president has, you know, the ability both along the border and elsewhere to maintain law and order with the military and that’s something that, you know, that’s going to be important for him to remember and his lawyers to affirm. But we’ve given them the case for that.”

Blurry Lines

Mr. Trump and his campaign have tried to distance themselves from Project 2025 and other outside conservative groups, saying that only policy proposals endorsed by the campaign count. Ms. Leavitt said, “As President Trump and our campaign has repeatedly stated, outside groups do NOT speak for him. The ONLY official second-term policies are those that come directly from President Trump himself.”

Still, as a matter of substance, the lines between Project 2025’s work, the materials being developed separately by the Center for Renewing America and the Trump campaign can be blurry.

Image

Russell Vought, at the Capitol in 2020, is also in charge of one of the most important components of Project 2025: drafting executive orders and other unilateral actions Mr. Trump could take over the first six months in office.Credit...Anna Moneymaker/The New York Times

For example, Mr. Vought has also been in charge of one of the most important components of Project 2025: drafting executive orders and other unilateral actions Mr. Trump could take over the first six months in office. Mr. Vought also remains personally close to Mr. Trump. And the Republican National Committee, which Mr. Trump controls through allies, including his senior campaign adviser, Chris LaCivita, and his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, put Mr. Vought in charge of the committee that developed the party’s platform.

That platform calls for “moving thousands of troops currently stationed overseas to our own southern border” to secure it against migrants.

At the Center for Renewing America, Mr. Vought has also hired Jeffrey Clark, a former Justice Department official in the Trump administration who was indicted in Georgia for working with Mr. Trump to help overturn the 2020 election.

Mr. Clark wrote the center’s paper laying out a legal framework for why the president can take direct control of Justice Department investigations and prosecutions, and was also appointed to co-lead Project 2025’s Justice Department policy efforts.

The federal indictment of Mr. Trump, which deems Mr. Clark an unindicted co-conspirator, recounts how a White House lawyer told Mr. Clark that there had not been outcome-changing election fraud — and warned that if Mr. Trump nonetheless remained in office, there would be riots in every major city in the United States.

“Well,” Mr. Clark responded, according to the indictment, “that’s why there’s an Insurrection Act.”

Charlie Savage writes about national security and legal policy. More about Charlie Savage

Jonathan Swan is a political reporter covering the 2024 presidential election and Donald Trump’s campaign. More about Jonathan Swan

Maggie Haberman is a senior political correspondent reporting on the 2024 presidential campaign, down ballot races across the country and the investigations into former President Donald J. Trump. More about Maggie Haberman

A version of this article appears in print on Aug. 18, 2024 of the New York edition with the headline: Trump’s Vision For the Border: Send In Troops. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

See more on: Donald Trump, American Civil Liberties Union

5. Ukraine’s Kursk Offensive Is a Turning Point in the War

Excerpts:

But the critical question is whether he has the means for an effective response. He can hardly drop nuclear bombs on his own territory to dislodge Ukrainian forces. Russian missile and drone barrages against Ukrainian cities and infrastructure have so far had no effect on Ukraine’s determination to defend itself. And a further large-scale mobilization to generate more Russian soldiers—including so far largely exempted Moscow and St. Petersburg—might be more than his society and economy can take. North Korean and Iranian stocks of missiles and drones are not endless. Is he running out of options? Could he get more support from China? We can’t be certain, but his options are clearly narrowing.

In this situation, it is important to look at every way in which Ukraine’s backers can increase their support—with the clear and now more realistic aim of shortening the war. There is much that can be done. We can speed up financial support, lift restrictions on the use of certain Western weapons, accelerate the training of F-16 pilots, get smarter on sanctions (including against helpers in China, India, and Turkey), and speed up deliveries of ammunition from Western production, which is now gradually increasing.

War is certainly about what happens on the battlefield, but as the Prussian military strategist Carl von Clausewitz taught us, it is ultimately a battle of political will. There is little doubt that Putin still sees no alternative to winning his war, but after Ukraine’s Kursk operation, many others are beginning to lose conviction in his belief. Now it’s a question of accelerating that process—in order to shorten the war and lead to a more benign outcome.

Ukraine’s Kursk Offensive Is a Turning Point in the War

The biggest impact is the destruction of Vladimir Putin’s narrative for victory.

By Carl Bildt, the co-chair of the European Council on Foreign Relations, and former prime minister and foreign minister of Sweden.

Foreign Policy · by Carl Bildt

Russia
Ukraine

August 14, 2024, 11:53 AM

Russia’s War in Ukraine

Understanding the conflict two years on.

What Does Zelensky Want in Kursk?

Ukraine’s strategic objectives remain murky—and the operation creates many risks—but it could alter the course of the war.

By John R. Deni, a research professor at the U.S. Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute, a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, and a senior fellow at the NATO Defense College.

Foreign Policy · by John R. Deni

Military
Russia
Ukraine

August 16, 2024, 12:38 PM

Russia’s War in Ukraine

Understanding the conflict two years on.

Will Ukraine’s Kursk Offensive Turn the Tide?

Kyiv’s risky incursion could be game-changing—or allow Russia to entrench its gains in Donetsk.

By Emma Ashford, a columnist at Foreign Policy and a senior fellow with the Reimagining U.S. Grand Strategy program at the Stimson Center, and Matthew Kroenig, a columnist at Foreign Policy and vice president and senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security.

Foreign Policy · by Emma Ashford, Matthew Kroenig

Russia
Iran
Ukraine
Emma Ashford
Matthew Kroenig

August 16, 2024, 12:22 PM

its-debatable-functional-tag

The Stimson Center’s Emma Ashford and the Atlantic Council’s Matthew Kroenig debate pressing issues for policymakers.

Matt Kroenig: Hi Emma, Washington is usually pretty quiet in August, with many people on vacation, and I know I’m enjoying the downtime. Are you relaxing during the last few weeks of summer?

Emma Ashford: Oh, yes. The kids are in camp, we’re spending lots of time at the pool, and—as the New York Times put it last week—Joe Biden is winding down his U.S. presidency in “a Nation Entangled in War.”

Things don’t seem like they’ve actually calmed down that much. Shall we start in Ukraine? Or rather, shall we start in Russia? The Ukrainians have decided to retake the initiative and have invaded Russia and seized several Russian towns.

MK: Yes. Did Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky catch Russian President Vladimir Putin napping in his dacha on the Black Sea? This Ukrainian offensive into Russia’s Kursk region has caught everyone by surprise. Ukraine has now claimed hundreds of square miles of territory, and, at the time of writing, it is still going.

What do you make of this surprise attack on a region with so much historical meaning for Russia? Do you think it is as significant as I do, or is it much ado about nothing?

EA: Well, “Kursk offensive” has an impressive level of historical gravitas that even casual observers of history have probably heard of. This offensive couldn’t possibly measure up to the last one; the original Battle of Kursk might have been the largest battle in human history and was one of the key turning points of the Eastern Front in World War II, contributing substantially to the Allied victory over Nazi Germany. This fits with a broader pattern: The battles of the war in Ukraine have almost all ranged across well-known territory better known for major World War II or even Napoleonic battles.

I think it’s too soon to really tell what this offensive will achieve. For now, I think we can conclusively say that Ukraine has retaken the narrative initiative; this offensive is attention-grabbing and diverts the media in the West away from the ongoing series of negative stories elsewhere in the war. But it’s not clear whether Ukrainian forces can hold the territory they’ve taken or this is just a fast strike, and whether the move can be leveraged for any political advantage. It’s also not clear if it has weakened Ukraine’s lines elsewhere in the war.

So color me skeptical that this is a war-changing development. Let me guess: You think the Ukrainians are going to waltz to Moscow?

MK: No. But I do think the offensive is significant for many reasons, including that it proved us wrong! For the past several months, you and I have basically agreed that the conflict was likely going to wind down roughly along the current lines, but the Ukrainains have upset that expectation by opening up a new front in the war.

In addition, this offensive accomplishes several other aims. It brings the war home to Russia. Russian officials said they evacuated nearly 200,000 people after the attack, and Ukraine has already taken hundreds of prisoners of war. It calls into question Putin’s competence as a wartime leader. Another week of Putin looking helpless would be very damaging, as it could encourage his inner circle to turn on him.

The move is buoying the spirits of the Ukrainian people and military forces. It is accomplishing operational objectives, such as degrading Russian capabilities that have been used to attack into Ukraine. It is a rebuke to the U.S. and European caution in this conflict—a ground invasion of Russian territory using Western weapons is apparently not a sufficient red line for Russian nuclear escalation! Ukraine could dig in and occupy at least some of the territory as a bargaining chip for future negotiations.

But, yeah, otherwise, no biggie.

EA: Hold your horses. It’s just way too soon to say most of those things. Perhaps this will change the fight in Ukraine’s favor, but the country is still dealing with limited manpower, an overburdened government, a potentially problematic debt crisis, and a much bigger opponent. All those maps of Ukraine advancing into hundreds of square miles of Russian territory look hugely impressive, but that’s what happened in the early days of the war in the other direction. What we saw then was that it didn’t give the Russians political or even military control over most of what they’d seized, and that they struggled to hold any of it. What if we get to a week or two from now and Ukrainian forces find themselves overextended and forced to retreat?

Best-case scenario, it gives them some negotiating leverage. But I still think the biggest benefit here is likely to be in media coverage, rather than practical. This is pretty much the only good news out of Kyiv in months.

MK: We both like to think strategically, so let us examine how this offensive ends. I see three possibilities. First, maybe you are right. Maybe Ukraine will end up abandoning all these gains and retreating to Ukrainian territory. I still think it accomplishes many of the items I listed above. It showed that the lines are not static and that it could do something similar in the future without risking nuclear escalation, for example.

Second, maybe the Ukrainians continue to occupy all the territory they currently claim, or even keep driving deeper into Moscow. I think we probably agree that this is unlikely to be sustainable.

Third, and finally, what if they partially pull back and dig into a more sustainable position, maybe even just occupying a few villages on the border? I think that would provide a substantial bargaining chip in the war and any future negotiations. I don’t see how Putin can declare victory with Ukraine in possession of Russian territory it conquered in war.

EA: It certainly would complicate the Russian demands for freezing the conflict along current lines! But I doubt that is a strategic consideration as much as a pleasant side effect.

You left out some options, though. What if Ukraine manages to hold a small amount of sustainable territory inside Russia, but in doing so commits so much in arms and equipment that Russian gains elsewhere accelerate? I just have difficulty seeing this shifting the fundamental dynamics of the war: Ukraine is smaller and weaker than Russia, and there are limits to what it can accomplish on the battlefield.

I guess we’ll see what things look like in a couple of weeks.

Shall we pivot to the Middle East? Everyone else is. The United States now has two aircraft carriers back in the region, a truly ridiculous number when you consider that we’re supposed to be focused on the rise of China.

MK: Yes. Let’s go there. The world has been bracing for Iran’s threatened retaliation to Israel’s assassination of Hamas’s leader in Tehran since at least our last column, and we are all still waiting.

Part of the delay, I would argue, is due precisely to those aircraft carriers. Iran simply cannot afford a big war with Israel or the United States, so it is calibrating its approach. It needs to hit back, but not too hard.

What do you predict will happen next?

EA: Iranian officials are clearly trying to calibrate their response. They have to respond, or they lose any chance to deter similar actions in the future. But as you say, their options aren’t good.

I’m most worried about the several thousand U.S. troops located at bases in Iraq and Syria who are sitting ducks for rocket attacks from proxy groups in the region. They’re in harm’s way for no good reason that I can ascertain.

And then there’s the broader context. The Israeli government continues to refuse to countenance a cease-fire in Gaza, keeping the whole situation at a boil, and the White House appears to be more concerned about offering a sweetheart security guarantee to Saudi Arabia than actually looking for ways to put pressure on Israel. Maybe the ceasefire talks in Doha, Qatar, will yield some progress, but I’m not holding my breath. It’s a mess.

MK: Too often, Washington’s instinct is to de-escalate the conflict. But sometimes escalation is helpful to advance national security objectives.

Biden should return to his initial instinct of backing Israel in its effort to eliminate Hamas. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s former national security adviser has argued this would mean two to three more months of intense fighting against Hamas followed by an occupation of Gaza for about one year, during which Israel could continue to conduct targeted raids and strikes against any holdouts. After that, Israel could turn Gaza over to some form of international governance.

EA: I’m not sure another three months will resolve the inherent problems of rooting out insurgents embedded within a civilian population. Historically speaking, that’s not something that ends well. That’s probably why there’s significant division within the highest levels of the Israeli government over how to proceed! Netanyahu might want to keep the war going, but his own Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant has expressed openness to a cease-fire.

MK: There is also a renewed debate in Netanyahu’s cabinet about how to handle Hezbollah. Some argue that a war is inevitable sooner or later and that, rather than wait for the next Hezbollah attack, Israel should go ahead and conduct a preemptive strike and move ground forces to create a buffer zone in southern Lebanon.

Finally, Washington should see any Iranian retaliation as an opportunity to retaliate and finally destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities.

The Middle East can be more secure in the long run if Washington and its allies are willing to take some risks in the short term.

EA: You know, every time you suggest bombing Iran, I get that Beach Boys parody song stuck in my head.

Seriously, though. You’re argued above that Iran isn’t responding forcefully to Israeli actions because it’s wary of starting a big war with the United States that it cannot win. And then you’re arguing that Washington should go ahead and start that war instead? And the Israelis should invade Lebanon, too, despite the fact they’re struggling to clear Gaza? Do we think the Arab states will be happy with us effectively joining the Israeli war effort?

The risks are huge, the downsides substantial, and I’m really struggling to see how this would do anything other than cause the regional cataclysm that we are trying to avoid.

MK: The single biggest driver of conflict in the region is Iran and its proxies. A nuclear-armed Iran would only make everything much more dangerous. Meaningful military action against Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Iran’s nuclear program could defang the threat.

With those threats degraded, what is left to cause a cataclysm? As Monty Python asked, what are they going to do, bleed on us?

EA: Well, I’m pretty sure they’ll actually go nuclear as soon as the dust settles. Perhaps sooner. There are already rumors—albeit not from the most credible sources—that Iran might accelerate its nuclear program in light of everything that’s happened. With no nuclear safeguards like those created by the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), and Iran’s breakout time down to just a few weeks, we might be looking at a nuclear Iran sooner than later.

MK: Iran has been accelerating its nuclear program for years, and, as I have argued at length elsewhere, the JCPOA did not provide a meaningful constraint. I agree Iran is on the verge of becoming a nuclear power, but that is mostly because the West deluded itself into thinking it could talk Iran out of building a bomb. A tougher approach has always been the only effective solution, and the world is running out of time.

EA: Even an attack like you suggest only delays Iran a few years. And then there’s the prospect for regional instability in friendly states: popular unrest, a wave of new Palestinian refugees, and all the rest of it. And what makes you think—after the United States’ 20 years in Afghanistan and the past year of Israeli intervention in Gaza—that Washington can actually eradicate or destroy Iranian proxies throughout the region? Or do you propose going all the way to Tehran?

MK: Iran might choose not to rebuild, and, if it does, rebuilt nuclear facilities can be hit again. U.S. allies in the region would be delighted to see Iran weakened. Israel could have succeeded in Gaza already if it were not being held back by the United States.

Iran is the only country in the world that regularly provides weapons to non-state groups to attack across international lines. The world should be clear that such behavior is unacceptable and that Iran will pay a severe price.

EA: Holding Israel back from doing what? Bombing population centers? Torturing prisoners? I’m sympathetic to the Israeli dilemma—they face a difficult security environment—but this war has been brutal and highly unrestrained. Israel cannot succeed in Gaza through military means alone. That’s not just my opinion. It’s the opinion of senior U.S. officials and has also been expressed by the spokesman for the Israel Defense Forces!

I’d suggest we discuss Venezuela next, but I think we’re almost out of time. For me, current events just show how difficult it can be to get entrenched authoritarians to leave, even when hugely unpopular. Everyone would benefit from Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro bowing out gracefully, but since he’s likely to face prosecution if he gives up power that’s unlikely to happen. We’ve done what we can with sanctions; it might be time to think about carrots rather than sticks.

MK: It was reported that the Biden administration offered Maduro amnesty in the United States. That is a pretty sweet carrot, but it doesn’t look like he will take it.

EA: OK, finally: the Olympics! International sport, after all, is meant to be a replacement for warfare. Which was your favorite?

MK: I don’t care what Foreign Policy says, the United States is still the world’s basketball superpower in my heart. Did you see Steph Curry’s string of three pointers in the waning minutes of the gold medal game? Very impressive!

You?

EA: Fencing, equestrian, archery, kayaking … it’s all good. Though I did question the inclusion of “breaking”—better known to us all as breakdancing—as a demonstration sport. A number of the participants seemed to lack basic rhythm or hand-eye coordination. Maybe next time we’ll get something culturally appropriate for Los Angeles. Red carpet walking? White Bronco racing?

Foreign Policy · by Emma Ashford, Matthew Kroenig

8. Michael Oren: Should Israel Strike First?

1967 versus 1973. Discuss and debate.

Excerpts:

And so Israel waits and broadcasts its fears while Iran keeps threatening to pummel us. The U.S. continues to amass forces in the Middle East, but only for defensive purposes, while rejecting any suggestion of an Israeli first strike. If Netanyahu decides, as Golda did, to absorb Iran’s initial assault, he may gain the legitimacy to retaliate, but Israel might once again pay a prohibitive price and in the end earn only America’s contempt. But if he chooses the path of Eshkol, Netanyahu could thwart Iran’s planned aggression and gain America’s esteem.

Either way, Israel stands on the cusp of the all-out war its leaders have long labored to avert. Perhaps this is neither an Eshkol or Golda moment for Israel, but one that is gruelingly, nightmarishly unique.

Michael Oren: Should Israel Strike First?

Is this period more like 1967, when Israel preemptively attacked its enemies? Or like 1973—when it failed to do so?

https://www.thefp.com/p/michael-oren-israel-strike-first

By Michael Oren

August 15, 2024

For more than two weeks, Israelis have been waiting for war. Immediately after the July 31 assassination of Hamas political chief Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran, Iran pledged to retaliate massively against Israel.

So far the main event hasn’t happened. Talks for the release of the remaining 111 Israeli hostages in Hamas’s hands drag on inconclusively and Hezbollah rockets slam into the north, but it’s the fear of Iranian missiles raining down on our homes that most consumes Israelis. We are hoarding essentials and stocking our bomb shelters with canned tuna and bottled water. Nobody dares travel far from home. Nobody wants to get caught in their car, in the middle of a highway, when the sirens wail.

I’m a historian. So over the course of these long days and nights—part of them spent volunteering as an IDF reservist, helping to guard Kibbutz Kfar Blum near the northern border—I’ve found my mind looking back to Israel’s past. Specifically, I’ve wondered if the predicament we are facing now in 2024 is more like 1967 or 1973.

In other words: Are we living in a Levi Eshkol or a Golda Meir moment? Do we have a prime minister who will preemptively attack our enemies? Or one who won’t take the risk?

Levi Eshkol was Israel’s prime minister in May 1967, when the Egyptians ousted UN peacekeepers from Gaza and the Sinai Peninsula, remilitarized them both, and closed the Straits of Tiran to shipping to and from Eilat. Joining Egypt in preparing to destroy Israel and cast its inhabitants to the sea were the armies of Jordan, Syria, and Iraq. Israel was surrounded and shorn of allies; France, its sole superpower backer, precipitously switched sides. The Arabs, unlike Israel, had oil.

When asked by Israeli foreign minister Abba Eban on May 26 whether the United States would back a preemptive strike against its assembled enemies, President Lyndon Baines Johnson repeatedly replied, “Israel will not be alone unless it decides to go it alone.”

The decision was up to Eshkol.

A wry, gray, avuncular leader—hardly the warrior type—Eshkol had to weigh the risks of not striking first versus the danger of forfeiting American support. By waiting for the Arab armies to attack, Israel’s very existence might be endangered. Egyptian tanks could be rumbling through Tel Aviv and the Jordanian flag flying over Jerusalem. On the other hand, if Israel struck first and failed, the country would be left utterly defenseless. No nation, not even the United States, would come to Israel’s aid.

Israeli prime minister Levi Eshkol (center) visits the Syrian front during the Arab-Israeli Six-Day War, June 1967. (Photo by Central Press/Hulton Archive via Getty Images)

For the three weeks still remembered by Israelis of that generation as Tekufat HaHamtanah—the waiting period of unbearable tension—Eshkol exhausted one diplomatic option after another. Then, finally, he decided.

On the morning of June 6, Israeli warplanes bombed hundreds of Egyptian fighter jets on the ground. The air forces of Jordan and Syria were incinerated next. Israeli ground troops soon charged into Sinai, Gaza, Jerusalem, and the West Bank, conquering all. Syria’s Golan Heights was the last to fall. Six days later, Israel had almost quadrupled the territory under its control—including, for the first time since the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, the Old City of Jerusalem.

The Jewish world rejoiced. But what would President Johnson say? Would he punish Israel for its insolence—perhaps even sever ties?

LBJ did nothing of the sort. On the contrary, he admired Israel’s determination to stick up for itself. For the first time, an American president approved the sale of tanks and advanced jets to Israel and stood firmly beside it in the UN Security Council. Out of Eshkol’s gumption, the U.S.-Israeli strategic alliance was born.

Six years later, another Israeli leader, the wise yet tentative Golda Meir, grappled with virtually the same predicament. On the afternoon of October 5, 1973, Israel learned that Egypt and Syria were poised to launch a massive attack the following day. Would Israel act as it had in 1967 by preempting the enemy assault?

U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger reminded Golda, as she was colloquially known, that she had not sufficiently cooperated with American efforts to mediate treaties between Israel and the Arab states based on the principle of territory-for-peace. If Israel struck first, Kissinger warned, it could not count on the U.S. for support.

Like Eshkol, Golda deliberated, but unlike her predecessor, decided against preemption. The following day’s onslaught overwhelmed Israeli forces, driving them back into Sinai and from most of the Golan Heights. Much of this territory was subsequently regained but at the horrific loss of more than 2,500 soldiers. And though President Nixon, all but incapacitated by the Watergate crisis, ordered the large-scale resupply of Israel’s military, neither he nor Kissinger expressed the slightest gratitude for Golda’s forbearance. By buckling to American pressure in 1973 and not resisting it as in 1967, Israel earned America’s contempt rather than its respect.

Israeli prime minister Golda Meir stands with President Richard Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger at the White House, November 1, 1973. (Photo by Trikosko/Library of Congress/Interim Archives via Getty Images)

Today, Israel faces a hauntingly similar dilemma. We are again surrounded on all sides—not by Egypt and its allies but by Iran and its proxies—yet equally committed to our destruction. Our enemies trumpet their intention to strike us a painful if not mortal blow. The U.S. administration is once more reminding Israeli leaders of their rejection of its peace efforts and warning them not to preemptively strike. America will assist in defending Israel’s skies, the White House has stated, but not in penetrating Iran’s. Heavily dependent on American munitions supplies and diplomatic support, Israel has no choice but to take America’s opposition into account.

In place of Eshkol and Golda we now have Benjamin Netanyahu. In utter contrast to his bellicose reputation, the prime minister is in fact conflict-averse and often halting in approving risky military moves. Ordering preventive action against Iran and its militias would mark a sharp departure from his record. Though known to be a longtime admirer of Eshkol and a disdainer of Golda, he is more inclined, character-wise, to emulate the latter.

There are, of course, factors that distinguish Israel’s current situation from those of 1967 and 1973. Most complicating of these is the continuing war in Gaza and its toll on Israel’s resilience and morale. Though a majority of Israelis support an armed initiative to deter Iran and drive Hezbollah back from the northern border, the public is generally war-weary. Reservists have spent five months or more in active combat; some have been on duty since October 7. Families, businesses, and entire communities and regions of the country have suffered.

Then there are the hostages and Israel’s gut-wrenching need to secure the release of as many of them as swiftly as possible. By attacking Iran, Israel would doom the chances of achieving a hostage-release deal any time soon. Hamas head Yahya Sinwar wants nothing more than a regional conflict that would draw the remaining Israeli troops from Gaza and vastly increase international pressure on the Jewish state.

And so Israel waits and broadcasts its fears while Iran keeps threatening to pummel us. The U.S. continues to amass forces in the Middle East, but only for defensive purposes, while rejecting any suggestion of an Israeli first strike. If Netanyahu decides, as Golda did, to absorb Iran’s initial assault, he may gain the legitimacy to retaliate, but Israel might once again pay a prohibitive price and in the end earn only America’s contempt. But if he chooses the path of Eshkol, Netanyahu could thwart Iran’s planned aggression and gain America’s esteem.

Either way, Israel stands on the cusp of the all-out war its leaders have long labored to avert. Perhaps this is neither an Eshkol or Golda moment for Israel, but one that is gruelingly, nightmarishly unique.

Michael Oren, formerly Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Knesset member, and deputy minister for diplomacy in the prime minister’s office, is the founder of the Israel Advocacy Group and the author of the Substack Clarity.

9. Opinion: Red Thin Line – How to Play Russia

Excerpts:

The West should allow Ukraine to use all means necessary, including using the offensive weapons provided to it on Russian territory.

The West itself should also be prepared for anything, not just defending against Russian hybrid attacks but responding to them below the threshold of war. This includes cyberattacks on Russian systems and destabilizing Russia at a socio-political level.

Unfortunately, democratic countries face legal obstacles here. Unlike regimes like Russia and Belarus, there are limitations. Nevertheless, even within these constraints, policy must not be toothless, at least at the rhetorical level.

Opinion: Red Thin Line – How to Play Russia

kyivpost.com · by Michał Kujawski · August 18, 2024

Kursk Russia War in Ukraine

Ukraine’s bold Kursk incursion not only demonstrated that the Kremlin’s threats are often bluffs but also allowed Ukraine to seize the narrative and respond to Russia in a language it understands.

By Michał Kujawski

August 18, 2024, 8:47 am

A Ukrainian military vehicle drives past a burning car on a road near the border with Russia, in the Sumy region of Ukraine, on August 14, 2024. The Ukrainian army entered Russia's Kursk region on August 6, capturing dozens of settlements in the biggest offensive by a foreign army on Russian soil since World War II. (Photo by Roman PILIPEY / AFP)

For years, Russia has employed an escalating language of force, creating faits accomplis, waging hybrid warfare against Poland, the Baltic states, and other countries on NATO’s eastern flank, and regularly engaging in nuclear blackmail. In contrast, much of the Western political class has acted in the opposite manner, opting for de-escalation. But is this approach effective?

The fear of the “red lines” drawn by the Kremlin seems unwarranted at this point. Many of these lines have been crossed, most recently in a spectacular manner with Ukrainian forces entering Russian territory in the Kursk region.

This bold move by Kyiv not only demonstrated that the Kremlin’s threats are often bluffs but also allowed Ukraine to seize the narrative and respond to Russia in a language it understands.

The operation in the Kursk region has multiple dimensions – military, informational, and political. This unexpected incursion into Russian territory sent an important message to the Russian people. While it may not suddenly cause Russians to respect or sympathize with Ukrainians, it may lead them to doubt their own state.

Of course, the belief that “the tsar is good, the boyars are bad” still persists in Russia, but it’s important to remember that in the eyes of Russian society, the country can be led by a thief, a criminal, or a degenerate, but never by someone weak. Violence is pervasive in Russia, from cradle to grave, both symbolically and in every aspect of social life.

Russian occupying management of the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant claimed a Ukraine drone dropped an explosive charge on a road used by staff, according to Kremlin news agency TASS.

How to talk to Russia?

Russia clearly doesn’t know how to handle the humiliation of having its territory breached – since the first day of the Ukrainian operation, Kremlin propaganda has been claiming that it was Polish and NATO forces involved. This rhetoric fits perfectly into Russia’s narrative of a “war with the collective West.”

For years, Russian authorities have described Ukraine and Ukrainians not as a nation and state but as a “territory” that slipped out of their control. It’s evident that the Russian cult of strength and violence is cognitively incapable of processing the Ukrainian offensive.

This is reflected, among other things, in the words of Lukashenko, the Belarusian leader allied with the Moscow regime, who in an interview on Thursday called for negotiations to end the war.

He said, “It is not needed by Ukrainians, Russians, or Belarusians.” Could there be a better argument to support the thesis that Russia only understands the language of force?

Seizing the Narrative

After Russia launched its full-scale invasion, there were attempts by Western politicians to seize control of the narrative.

On March 15, 2022, during his visit to Kyiv, Jarosław Kaczyński, leader of Poland’s Law and Justice party (PiS), stated, “A NATO peacekeeping mission or a broader international arrangement is needed in Ukraine.”

Similar sentiments were echoed by the current Polish Foreign Minister, Radosław Sikorski from the Civic Platform (PO), who suggested in his comments that the presence of NATO forces in Ukraine would be beneficial.

French President Emmanuel Macron also made similar remarks.

It’s no secret that there is a significant qualitative gap between NATO forces and the Russian military. The mere act of making such statements could cause the Kremlin to think twice before taking further steps.

The Ukrainian operation in the Kursk region demonstrates that de-escalation is not necessarily what prevents further escalation – at least not in this case.

The West should allow Ukraine to use all means necessary, including using the offensive weapons provided to it on Russian territory.

The West itself should also be prepared for anything, not just defending against Russian hybrid attacks but responding to them below the threshold of war. This includes cyberattacks on Russian systems and destabilizing Russia at a socio-political level.

Unfortunately, democratic countries face legal obstacles here. Unlike regimes like Russia and Belarus, there are limitations. Nevertheless, even within these constraints, policy must not be toothless, at least at the rhetorical level.

The views expressed in this opinion article are the author’s and not necessarily those of Kyiv Post.

To suggest a correction or clarification, write to us here

You can also highlight the text and press Ctrl + Enter

Please leave your suggestions or corrections here

Michał Kujawski

Michał Kujawski, a Warsaw-based journalist focusing on the CEE region, and former Head of Current Affairs at TVP World, is a Special Correspondent for Kyiv Post.

kyivpost.com · by Michał Kujawski · August 18, 2024

10. During Ukraine’s Incursion, Russian Conscripts Recount Surrendering in Droves

Do captured Russians want to return to Russia? What will they face upon return?

During Ukraine’s Incursion, Russian Conscripts Recount Surrendering in Droves

More than 300 have been processed in a prison in Ukraine, providing the country with a much-needed “exchange fund” for future swaps of prisoners of war.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/17/world/europe/ukraines-incursion-russian-conscripts.html

By Andrew E. KramerPhotographs by David Guttenfelder

Reporting from northern Ukraine

Published Aug. 17, 2024
Updated Aug. 18, 2024, 4:26 a.m. ET

They were lanky and fresh-faced, and the battle they lost had been their first.

Packed into Ukrainian prison cells, dozens of captured Russian conscripts lay on cots or sat on wooden benches, wearing flip-flops and, in one instance, watching cartoons on a television provided by the warden.

In interviews, they recalled abandoning their positions or surrendering as they found themselves facing well-equipped, battle-hardened Ukrainian forces streaming across their border.

“We ran into a birch grove and hid,” said Pvt. Vasily, whose small border fort was overrun on Aug. 6 — at the outset of a Ukrainian incursion into Russia that was the first significant foreign attack on the country since World War II. The New York Times is identifying the prisoners by only their first names and ranks for their safety if they are returned to Russia in a prisoner exchange.

The fighting marked a significant shift in the war, with Ukrainian armored columns rumbling into Russia two and a half years after Russia had launched an all-out invasion of Ukraine.

Russia’s border, it turned out, was defended thinly, largely by young conscripted soldiers who in interviews described surrendering or abandoning their positions. Private Vasily said he had survived by lying in the birch forest near the Russian border for three days, covered in branches and leaves, before deciding to surrender.

“I never thought it would happen,” he said of the Ukrainian attack.

The Russian military command had, by all signs, made the same assumption, manning its border defenses with green conscripts, some drafted only months earlier. Their defeat and descriptions of surrendering in large numbers could increase Ukraine’s leverage in possible settlement talks and lead to prisoner exchanges.

It could also resonate inside Russia. The losses of young, drafted Russian soldiers during wars in Afghanistan and Chechnya stirred widespread discontent at home.

Image

Many of the Russian conscripts abandoned their positions when they saw how badly outnumbered and outgunned they were.

For the bloody trench fighting inside Ukraine, the Russian Army deploys older soldiers mobilized from their civilian jobs, volunteers and prisoners, who agree to a tour of duty in exchange for their freedom, should they survive. Conscripts are barred by law from being deployed outside Russia. But stretched for manpower, or blind to the risk, the military used them to guard the border.

In Russia, conscripts represent the bottom rung in a two-tiered military that took shape in the post-Soviet period. They are drafted after high school and typically serve a year performing menial tasks, like shoveling the snow at bases deep in Russia. Contract soldiers are volunteers, better paid, and they bear the brunt of wars in Syria and Ukraine.

Ukrainian officials say they have captured hundreds of young conscripts over the past week and a half, in what President Volodymyr Zelensky has praised as a move replenishing Ukraine’s “exchange fund” for the swapping of prisoners.

The prison in northern Ukraine, where the conscripts interviewed on Friday were held, has processed 320 prisoners of war so far, 80 percent of them conscripts, according to the prison warden, who asked not to be identified by name for security reasons; the numbers could not be independently verified. After processing, prisoners are sent west, farther from the fighting.

On Friday, the prison held 71 prisoners of war, packed into basement cells, where they are safeguarded from potential airstrikes, the Ukrainian military says.

They wore hand-me-down track suits, T-shirts and shorts that their captors had provided. Some had shrapnel or gunshot wounds. Wide-eyed, and appearing to be disoriented, they watched as guards escorted journalists into the cells for interviews.

Image

The detainees said they had faced a sudden, ferocious attack and quickly gave up the fight.

Image

The prisoners wore hand-me-down track suits, T-shirts and shorts. Some had shrapnel or gunshot wounds.

The prison provided access for several media outlets, including The Times, whose journalists identified themselves, and asked permission for interviews and to take photographs. The detainees were interviewed after being captured, and in the presence of guards, so their accounts could not be independently verified. The guards did not intervene, and were some distance from the prisoners during the conversations.

The prisoners described being stationed at platoon strength, about 30 men, in concrete or earthwork fortifications spaced a mile or so apart along the border. There, they had faced a sudden, ferocious attack and quickly gave up the fight.

Ukrainian soldiers, independent military analysts and Russian military bloggers have also reported a quick rout along the border.

Pvt. Igor, a slender 21-year-old who was drafted in December, said Ukrainian artillery fire had picked up a few days before the incursion. “We reported to commanders, but they didn’t react,” he said. “They said, ‘Well, there’s nothing we can do about it.’”

On the day of the attack, bombarded by artillery, he tried to hunker down in the fortification, but it caught fire.

He and others ran for a nearby forest, he said. From his group of 12 who had tried to dash to safety, five survived, he said.

The position had only one recoilless rifle, he said, and it could not shoot at Ukraine’s American-provided Bradley infantry fighting vehicles as they attacked because it was pointed in the wrong direction.

Pvt. Sergei 20, from the region of Tatarstan in the Volga River valley, said his platoon leader had led the 28 soldiers from his fort on a chaotic retreat. They holed up in a village house, but Ukrainian soldiers found them. All surrendered.

The platoon leader, he said, had yelled out a window: “‘There are conscripts here. We want to surrender.’”

Image

After being processed at a prison in northern Ukraine, near the border with Russia, the prisoners are sent farther west to a more secure facility.

Some lamented being sent with inadequate training to a battlefield that has evolved into a complex mixture of exploding drones, electronic jamming and the use of finely honed tactics for storming trenches and fortifications.

Pvt. Dmitry 21, from the Komi region in northern Russia, said that when their radios stopped working on the day of the attack, he assumed it was because of Ukrainian jamming. Without orders, the soldiers realized they were overmatched and tried to retreat, but were captured. “They said we might see a sabotage group, maybe 10 guys, not an army,” he said.

While the Ukrainian forces took full advantage of the element of surprise and what both sides described as a weak and disoriented Russian defense, the Ukrainian advance has bogged down away from the border against better prepared Russian forces.

Conscripts are still being caught, however. This past week, the Ukrainian news media published a video said to show more than 100 conscripts lying face down in a field, reportedly filmed by the S.B.U., Ukraine’s domestic intelligence agency. The videos could not be independently verified.

Image

Many of the captured Russian conscripts were barely out of school and had undergone only a few months of training.

For Mr. Zelensky, the influx of prisoners of war eases what had become a simmering domestic problem. The distraught families of Ukrainian soldiers held in Russia have staged weekly protests in Kyiv, the capital, to draw attention to their detained loved ones. Russia does not disclose the numbers of Ukrainians it has captured, but was assumed, before the incursion, to have more Ukrainians than Ukraine had Russians.

The haul of new prisoners has cheered these families.

That includes Tetyana Vyshnyak, whose son served with the Azov regiment and was captured and sentenced to 22 years in a Russian prison. There had been little hope of his release, given Russia’s advantage in the number of prisoners of war.

“For all of us, this is a great chance and hope that our loved ones will be exchanged,” Ms. Vyshnyak said in an interview.

Valeria Subotina, a former press officer with the Azov regiment, spent 11 months in Russian captivity before an exchange in 2023. “It’s incredibly difficult to go on living when your friends and loved ones are in captivity,” she said. “I hope the operation in the Kursk region can change this.”

Yurii Shyvala contributed reporting from northern Ukraine, and Stas Kozljuk from Kyiv, Ukraine.

Andrew E. Kramer is the Kyiv bureau chief for The Times, who has been covering the war in Ukraine since 2014. More about Andrew E. Kramer

A version of this article appears in print on Aug. 18, 2024, Section A, Page 6 of the New York edition with the headline: Russia Conscripts Taken by Surprise, Then Taken Prisoner. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

11. Kremlin response to Kursk incursion shows how Putin freezes in a crisis

Kremlin response to Kursk incursion shows how Putin freezes in a crisis

When Russian President Vladimir Putin’s authority is tested, his response often lacks quick, decisive action that lives up to his bellicose rhetoric.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/08/18/vladimir-putin-kursk-crisis-reponse/

8 min

1039

Watched by armed security, people displaced by the war gather to receive humanitarian aid Friday at a distribution site in Kursk. (Tatyana Makeyeva/AFP/Getty Images)

Analysis by Robyn Dixon

August 18, 2024 at 5:00 a.m. EDT

Faced with crisis, Vladimir Putin tends to freeze.

Moscow’s slow, fumbling military response to Ukraine’s surprise occupation of parts of the western Kursk region is the latest example of the Kremlin chief failing to respond with quick, decisive action to match his bellicose rhetoric.

The Kursk incursion is the fourth major blow to Putin’s authority since his February 2022 invasion of Ukraine and highlights the weaknesses of a top-down autocracy that operates largely on fear and punishment.

In each case — after Russia’s failure to topple the Ukrainian government at the start of the invasion, after the Wagner mercenary boss Yevgeniy Prigozhin led a rebellion against the regular Russia military command and after Islamist extremists struck the popular Crocus City Hall concert venue — the Kremlin’s response has been halting, with Putin waiting 24 hours or more to offer any public comment.

“It’s always the same style. Putin likes to keep everything secret. When he appears publicly, he doesn’t say much. He prefers not to be alarmist,” said Tatiana Stanovaya, founder of France-based analytical group R. Politik.

Following World news

Following

Top officials, meanwhile, often dissemble to hide their failures rather than risk displeasing the president. Immediately after Ukraine’s attack on Kursk last week, Gen. Valery Gerasimov, the chief of the General Staff, who personally wields operational command over the war in Ukraine, insisted — falsely — that the Ukrainian assault had been stopped.

During a televised meeting of security officials on Monday, Putin appeared more rattled than usual as he read remarks from a thick notepad of scrawled black handwriting. He also irritably cut off Kursk’s acting governor, Andrei Smirnov, when he dared to openly disclose the scale of the incursion: 28 villages captured and at least 2,000 Russians missing in territory taken by Ukraine.

“Even then, he did his usual thing of more or less saying, ‘Just sort it out,’ and not actually providing any meaningful leadership or strategy for how to do that,” said Mark Galeotti, a Russian security expert with the London-based Royal United Services Institute. “Once again, it shows Putin in classic form, hiding from a crisis.”

Putin ordered the officials to drive Ukrainian forces out — then reverted to scheduled meetings, including talks with regional governors and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in the days that followed, without publicly mentioning the crisis. Putin held a regular meeting with his Security Council on Friday to “talk about new technical solutions” for the Ukraine war, before announcing plans to jet off to Azerbaijan as if there was nothing amiss at home.

“This is Putin expecting other people to do all the hard work, and he’ll claim the credit for anything that goes well, and likewise, he’ll blame people for anything that goes badly,” Galeotti said.

Four days after Putin tasked Russia’s military with driving out Ukrainian forces, it was clear that an attack initially seen as a short-term nuisance — a “provocation” in Putin’s words — was increasingly likely to take Russian forces weeks or months to address.

Russian President Vladimir Putin leads a meeting with members of the Security Council in Moscow on Friday. (Aleksey Babushkin/Sputnik/Kremlin Pool/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)

“The Kursk offensive in the last two weeks exposed the Putin regime’s true nature: a system built on lies, indifference, and self-preservation at the expense of its citizens’ lives and safety,” said Mikhail Khodorkovsky, an exiled Russian tycoon and opposition figure jailed by Putin for 10 years, in a post Friday on X.

Eleven days into the stunning cross-border operation, Kyiv claims to occupy around 386 square miles, with more than 180,000 Russians ordered to evacuate from their homes. Ukraine has sought to expand the fighting into the adjacent Belgorod region, but progress slowed after Russia deployed reserves and stepped up its resistance.

Gerasimov and the commander of the Akhmat Special Forces in the region, Apti Alaudoniv, have repeatedly asserted that the Ukrainian advance had been halted, and by Friday the defense ministry claimed to have wiped out more than 2,800 Ukrainian soldiers.

But defense ministry reports are dismissed as lies even on the Russian side, with nationalist military bloggers expressing outrage at ministry’s claims and publishing their own reports confirming Ukrainian advances. Defense ministry video of supposed Russian attacks on Ukrainians in Kursk turned out to be false, having been filmed in Ukraine earlier in the summer, The Insider discovered.

But the continued damage to Putin’s authority after a catastrophic war and repeated shocks does not translate to an internal threat to his power. Nor is there a risk his regime might collapse in the foreseeable future, according to analysts.

Stanovaya said that many Russians, particularly members of the elite, had come to expect the worst in the war but realized that there was no alternative to Putin in Russia’s repressive political system.

“They are so used to shocking events. They're so used to living in a very unpredictable situation, so it's very difficult to surprise them. And they are also used to the feeling that they don't have the power to affect anything, and they are helpless,” she said.

The crisis, she continued, had certainly undermined Putin’s authority — without necessarily undermining his grip on power.

The Kursk incursion has humiliated Russia’s military and demonstrated Ukraine’s resilience, but has not altered the fundamental situation in a long, grinding war of attrition.

Ukraine is under increasing pressure to negotiate a deal potentially giving up land for peace, after last summer’s failed counteroffensive, problems with personnel, doubts about future Western weapons deliveries, and fears that if Donald Trump becomes president, he will force a peace deal favorable to Russia.

Russia has pounded eastern Ukraine with glide bombs weighing as much as three tons, while Kyiv struggles with deliveries of just enough advanced Western weapons to hang on but not to win. Meanwhile it is barred from using Western weapons to strike military targets deep in Russia.

As some of Ukraine’s most battle-hardened forces gain ground in Kursk, Russia has advanced on the town of Pokrovsk in Donetsk in eastern Ukraine, with reports that Ukrainian forces could be forced to abandon the town soon to avoid encirclement.

Putin’s response to the Kursk crisis has been to rule out any new compromise, and he appeared at the meeting Monday to dismiss the prospect of peace talks with Ukraine.

He said Kyiv’s attack seemed designed to improve its position in negotiations, “But what kind of negotiations?” he scoffed. “How do we even talk with people who indiscriminately strike at civilians, at civilian infrastructure and try to create threats to nuclear energy? What can we even talk about with them?”

Stanovaya said Putin has not retreated from the maximalist position he staked out about possible peace talks in June, when he said Ukraine would have to surrender even more territory to Russia and give up joining NATO as a condition for peace.

“When he talked previously about a peace proposal by Russia, it was an ultimatum. It was not a real proposal, and the terms and conditions of these talks are absolutely unacceptable for Ukraine, and he knows it,” she said. Now, she continued, “it will become much harder for him to promote this idea of a peace ultimatum because in the current circumstances you can’t talk about peace.”

Polling by Levada Center independent polling agency in July indicates that even as Russian state media has trumpeted Russian gains in eastern Ukraine, 58 percent of Russians now support an end to the war, compared with only 34 percent who want to go on fighting.

Those in favor of continuing to fight fell by nine percentage points between June and July, from 43 percent to 34 percent.

“These are the lowest figures for support of the opinion on the need to continue military action over the entire observation period,” the Levada Center said in a statement about the poll. Women, young people, people who had barely enough money for food and residents of small cities and towns were more likely to support a move to peace talks — about two thirds of them in each case. But most Russians — 76 percent in the June Levada poll — oppose concessions to Ukraine for peace.

Some pro-Kremlin commentators on state media in recent days have bemoaned propaganda from officials and others claiming Russian supremacy over Ukraine, given the shocking incursion into Kursk.

“We could lose if such blunders continue,” said nationalist commentator Karen Shakhnazarov, a regular fixture on state television talk shows about the war, speaking on Rossiya 1 state television. “This isn’t defeatism. This isn’t scaremongering. It’s just an absolute understanding of the price that we and our motherland will have to pay.”

Russia needs a jolt, such as realizing that defeat is a real possibility, he said, “so that in our heads the situation forms as to what will happen if we lose and what will happen to us.”

12. Behind Ukraine’s Russia Invasion: Secrecy, Speed and Electronic Jamming

A fascinating initial "AAR" - after action review (but a review that is while the action is still taking place).

Behind Ukraine’s Russia Invasion: Secrecy, Speed and Electronic Jamming

Ukrainians embarrass Putin by becoming first foreign military force to occupy Russian territory since World War II

https://www.wsj.com/world/behind-ukraines-russia-invasion-secrecy-speed-and-electronic-jamming-188fcc22?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=1

By Isabel ColesFollow

, Michael R. GordonFollow

and Ievgeniia Sivorka | Photographs by Svet Jacqueline for WSJ

Updated Aug. 17, 2024 12:01 am ET

PYSARIVKA, Ukraine—Six days after Ukrainian forces swept through the Russian border town of Sudzha in a lightning advance, a Ukrainian platoon carrying out a mopping-up operation stumbled upon a dozen Russian soldiers hiding in a butter factory.

The platoon leader, who goes by the call sign Yanyk, said his demand for the Russians to surrender was met by salvos of automatic-rifle fire. “So we eliminated them,” he said.

The speed and scale of this month’s Ukrainian advance—the first time a foreign military force has occupied Russian soil since World War II—left pockets of surprised and disoriented Russian soldiers trapped behind enemy lines.

Watch: Ukraine Destroys Bridge in Russia’s Kursk Region

Play video: Watch: Ukraine Destroys Bridge in Russia’s Kursk Region

The Ukrainian military launched a missile strike and destroyed a bridge in Russia’s Kursk region. Photo: Ukraine’s Air Force Commander Mykola Oleshchuk/Reuters

Led by electronic-warfare units that jammed Russian communications and drones, units from Ukraine’s strategic reserve swarmed across the border on Aug. 6, seizing what Kyiv has described as 82 towns and villages in Russia’s Kursk region.

In all, Ukraine has taken 2,000 prisoners, according to a Ukrainian official, and seized about the same amount of territory that Russia, in grinding, high-casualty offensives, has taken from Ukraine since the start of the year.

Ukraine’s opportunistic assault has energized a nation battered by 2 1/2 years of war. It has also sent a message to Kyiv’s backers that the nation is still in the fight and can successfully mount complex and innovative offensive operations.

For Russian President Vladimir Putin, the Ukrainian thrust is an extraordinary reversal just as the weight of Russia’s massive war machine was beginning to wear down Ukraine’s defenses along the country’s eastern front.

Putin has vowed to drive Ukrainian troops out, but his forces have yet to mount a coherent counterattack and have had to pull units from Ukraine to respond. To dislodge the Ukrainians, Russia will likely have to send even more troops and pulverize its own towns and villages with artillery barrages, as it has done across a swath of Ukraine.

The challenge for Ukraine is how to capitalize on its early successes. Ukraine has committed thousands of troops. Sending in more could divert resources desperately needed to hold the Russians back on the main front line in eastern Ukraine. Russia is still advancing there against Ukrainian forces short on manpower and equipment.

To take full advantage, Ukraine would need a level of backing that the U.S. and some of its allies until now haven’t been willing to provide.

The Biden administration, which has said it didn’t know about the Ukrainian attack before it was launched, has barred Ukraine from using U.S.-provided longer-range missiles called ATACMS to strike Russian territory.

Washington isn’t sharing intelligence with Ukraine on targets inside Russia, said a senior U.S. official, who added that the Biden administration doesn’t want to be seen as enabling an attack into Russian territory.

The Ukrainians have used U.S.-supplied Bradley and Stryker armored vehicles inside Russia, taking advantage of the expanded latitude that the White House granted Ukraine to respond to Russia’s Kharkiv offensive in May.

This account of the Kursk incursion is drawn from interviews with dozens of Ukrainian soldiers involved, U.S. and allied officials and a person familiar with the operation, as well as videos verified by The Wall Street Journal and reports by Russian military bloggers.

Satellite images from late July and mid-August show an area of the Kursk region of Russia before and after defensive trenches were dug.

Planet Labs, Maxar Technologies/Reuters

A quiet buildup

Ukraine’s last attempt at a major advance, in summer 2023, ended badly. That counteroffensive gained only a few villages and cost the lives of thousands of experienced troops who couldn’t break through heavily fortified Russian defensive lines.

Since last fall, Russia has used its larger forces to grind out slow advances but at a heavy cost. Both sides are now dug into trenches along 600 miles of front lines surrounded by land mines and with artillery and drones ready to strike.

With the Kursk operation, Ukraine found a solution: go around.

Preparations began earlier this summer as Ukraine used drones to attack infrastructure in Kursk, from the power grid to ammunition and fuel-storage depots and surveillance equipment.

Members of an anti-Kremlin paramilitary group backed by Ukrainian military intelligence carried out raids across the border, probing for weak spots and conducting reconnaissance. Two weeks before the operation began, Ukrainian drones destroyed Russian observation systems at a border post on the road to Kursk.

For Mykola Toryanyk, a local Ukrainian official, the first rumblings came in early August. At night he could hear the sound of tracked vehicles on the rutted roads leading to the border near his district in Sumy province.

Ukrainian soldiers heading toward Kursk, Russia, from Ukraine’s Sumy border region.

He assumed that Ukraine was pre-empting an attack by Russia, which had launched a fresh incursion into the nearby Kharkiv region in May. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had warned that Moscow was massing troops for another thrust across the border.

Instead, Ukrainian forces were quietly building up for an attack of their own. Soldiers and equipment pulled from brigades across the country dissolved into the forests and villages near the border. The plan was shrouded in such secrecy that many of the men who would take part were unaware of their mission until it was nearly under way.

“We didn’t know,” said a slight Ukrainian artilleryman who goes by the call sign Shoom. His crew of eight men from Ukraine’s 44th Artillery Brigade had arrived in the Sumy border region days earlier after being pulled from the front line in the south.

At around 3 a.m. on Aug. 6, they unleashed an intense barrage from six M777 howitzers, supplied by Ukraine’s Western backers, which were set up along a stretch of the border aiming into Russia.

A speedy assault

As Ukrainian assault forces smashed across the border in the early hours that morning, several Russian units found that their drones and communications systems weren’t working.

Ukrainian electronic-warfare units went into Russian territory ahead of the main mechanized assault forces to jam Russian equipment to stop Russian forces from pinpointing Ukrainian positions or intercepting their communications.

That unusual, early deployment—more like that of a reconnaissance unit—created a protective bubble around advancing Ukrainian assault forces.

Leading the charge were the 80th and 82nd air assault brigades, among Ukraine’s most powerful units, which are equipped with U.S. Stryker and German Marder armored vehicles.

Ukrainian troops back on home soil during the Kursk, Russia, offensive.

The Western equipment had proved of limited utility on the battlefield in eastern and southern Ukraine, where dense minefields and drones make maneuver warfare all but impossible.

But in Kursk, Ukrainian mechanized troops raced down Russian roads with little resistance. Within hours, they had advanced miles into Russian territory, driving past towns and villages rather than attacking them head-on.

At a command center on the Ukrainian side of the border, members of the Nightingale Battalion, a drone unit, received coordinates. They sent explosive drones up to 10 miles into Russia to strike enemy dugouts, equipment, fortifications and soldiers.

The assault troops were advancing so fast it was hard to keep up with them, said one drone operator. There were few Russian armored vehicles to target because they had retreated north, he said.

Damage from Russian weaponry in the Sumy region of Ukraine.

“It’s not just because it was sudden,” said Kholod, another member of the drone unit. “It was deeply and well planned.”

Hours after the initial barrage, the artillery crew moved their M777 across the border and took up a position about 4 miles inside Russian territory. Adrenaline was high, said Shoom.

While assault troops surged ahead, other brigades poured into the Kursk region to mop up behind them on tanks and infantry fighting vehicles. In one village, a soldier stood on another’s shoulders to tear the Russian tricolor down from the local administration building.

Lightly armed Russian soldiers were still scattered in small groups, mounting localized resistance. “There’s a lot of them hiding in the forests and woods,” said Perchik, a soldier from the 22nd Brigade with a red-tinged beard.

To flush Russian soldiers out of a fortified position near the border, the brigade pointed the barrel of a tank directly at it, forcing them to surrender. Twenty-nine soldiers emerged in single file with their hands behind their heads. An additional 53 soldiers surrendered near the entrance to a gas-compression plant the same day, according to open-source videos.

Perchik had only ever taken one or two Russian prisoners at a time on the eastern battlefield, where he was fighting before. He took a selfie, wearing wraparound sunglasses and a huge grin in front of a line of fresh-faced POWs lying facedown on the asphalt. “They’re very young boys,” he said.

The elation was soon interrupted.

As they loaded the prisoners onto a truck to be taken to Ukraine territory, two Russian Lancet drones targeted Ukrainian equipment nearby, wounding four of the prisoners and knocking Perchik to the ground.

Displaced residents of the Sumy region after shelling forced them to leave their homes.

Trenches and fortifications in the Sumy region.

‘On edge’

Russia, caught off guard, scrambled to pull together a response. With most of its military committed to Ukraine, Moscow initially relied on warplanes and helicopters to try to slow the Ukrainian advance, as well as lightly armed National Guard units. The Ukrainians moved forward air-defense systems to hold back Russian aircraft and used an explosive drone to down an attack helicopter.

On the fourth day of the incursion, a convoy of Russian military trucks laden with soldiers near the town of Rylsk was struck by rockets fired from a U.S.-provided Himars rocket system.

Video footage showed more than a dozen burned-out vehicles, some containing corpses. A U.S. official said Friday that the Biden administration didn’t believe Ukraine had moved Himars launchers into Russia but was most likely using them to fire precision-guided rockets from border areas in Ukraine.

Ukrainian artillery quickly moved deeper into Russian territory. On the outskirts of Suzha, the crew from the 44th Brigade targeted Russian equipment and soldiers on the main highway from Kursk.

Food, water and cigarettes were scarce, according to members of the crew, indicating the challenges Ukraine faces in resupplying troops in enemy territory. In the supermarkets, fresh produce had spoiled because there was no power, and the crew members were reluctant to shoot livestock.

Members of the 44th Brigade recounting the offensive into Russia, with items taken back to the Sumy region.

“It’s hard the first week because you don’t know the roads,” said a stocky soldier with a gravelly voice, who makes daily trips in and out of Kursk to get supplies for his unit. The route is constantly changing because Russia is striking roads used by Ukraine, he said.

Most in demand are cigarettes and energy drinks. “You don’t sleep,” he said. “You’re on edge.”

An even bigger problem is glide bombs dropped by Russian warplanes. “They’re destroying their own cities,” said Shoom, the artilleryman, acknowledging that it gave him satisfaction after seeing Russia wreak destruction on Ukraine.

Ukraine has sought to counter the threat of glide bombs by attacking the airfields from which Russian warplanes take off. Ukraine attacked the military airfield in the Lipetsk region neighboring Kursk with drones in the early days of the incursion, destroying hundreds of Russian glide bombs, according to a Ukrainian official.

The Ukrainians were fighting what military experts call the close battle and the deep battle at the same time.

Members of the Nightingale unit.

Ukraine is trying to cut off more Russian towns and make it difficult for Russian reinforcements to reach the front line by striking rail hubs and bridges. A bridge in the Glushkovo district, west of Sudzha, was destroyed Friday in a Ukrainian missile strike. Russia, meanwhile, said it had taken out two Himars systems in the Sumy region.

Nine days into the incursion, Ukraine appeared to have lost dozens of armored vehicles, according to counts by analysts who verify videos posted online. The human losses are unclear, but a spotter in the 44th Brigade crew said they were much lower than in last year’s counteroffensive, which he took part in.

Western military estimates suggest Ukraine has committed as many as 6,000 soldiers to Kursk and has up to 4,000 additional troops in support roles in the Sumy region.

To avoid weakening the front line, a substantial number of the troops came from a reserve force Ukraine had been building with Western encouragement for operations later this year and in 2025, according to the person familiar with the operation.

A bus being used for Ukrainian civilians during the offensive into Russian territory. Two residents of a village watch the procession of military columns.

The Ukrainians are aware of that risk and are balancing so far, the person said.

Russia has pulled several understrength brigades from Ukraine in response, totaling up to 5,000 troops as of the middle of this past week, the person said. One brigade was from the Donetsk region, the focus of Russia’s current offensives, but others were from less essential areas.

Still, Russia might have to pull more troops out of Ukraine if it wants to take the territory back, which would require a larger force than the Ukrainians and would probably need to number more than 20,000 properly trained personnel, the person said.

In Moscow, Putin has held televised meetings with top defense and security officials in which he has ordered the Ukrainians expelled from Russia.

Satellite imagery, meanwhile, shows that Russia is hastily digging antitank ditches and other fortifications more than 30 miles from the border.

A Ukrainian vehicle headed toward Russian territory.

Jane Lytvynenko contributed to this article.

Write to Isabel Coles at isabel.coles@wsj.com and Michael R. Gordon at michael.gordon@wsj.com

13. Calls for Putin removal in biggest threat to Kremlin since Wagner revolt

Serious threat or wishful thinking? It begs the question, what might come next? (or what happens during the process on the way to "what's next?")

Calls for Putin removal in biggest threat to Kremlin since Wagner revolt

Zakrevsky launched a blistering attack on the Russian president during a video in which he blamed all the military failures in Ukraine on Putin personally.

By John Varga

17:49, Fri, Aug 16, 2024 | UPDATED: 17:51, Fri, Aug 16, 2024

Express · by John Varga · August 16, 2024

Vladimir Putin is facing a serious military revolt (Image: Getty)

The head of a Russian private militia has called on the army to overthrow Vladimir Putin in what is potentially shaping up to be the biggest threat of revolt the Kremlin has faced since the Wagner mutiny last year.

Georgy Zakrevsky is the founder of the Paladin PMC, one of many shadowy military groups like the former Wagner militia, that are loosely linked to the Kremlin.

The private military company (PMC) has around 300 members and has fought in wars around the world, including in Syria and Africa.

Zakrevsky launched a blistering attack on the Russian president during a video recording in which he blamed all the military failures in Ukraine on Putin personally.

Georgy Zakrevsky is the founder of the Paladin PMC (Image: Telegram)

He also went on to accuse Putin of causing all of Russia's economic and social ills, as he urged the military to rise up and free the country from the tyrant's rule.

"Our country is not just on the brink of disaster or already right next to it, our country is already in trouble - in big trouble," he said.

"Drones are flying all over central Russia, right up to Moscow and St. Petersburg. They even attacked the Kremlin.

"Our Black Sea fleet is being pushed out. It's being pushed out as if we are not a great power with a great fleet, but some third-rate country.

"Our aviation is practically not working because it is also being pushed out. We are standing in the same positions that we took more than two years ago, and partly in those to which we retreated.

"The population is dying out, becoming impoverished, drinking itself to death - no one cares.

"All they have time to do is bring in migrants. And all this was done by the so-called 'president' - 'The Great' Putin."

The video has been extensively distributed among the Russian army and clearly presents an alarming threat to the Kremlin.

Last June, the Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin launched a stunning revolt against Putin, that saw his troop march on Moscow in a lightening attack.

A fighter from the Paladin PMC (Image: PMC Paladin)

Seeds of Today's Middle East Disaster Were Sown by the CIA | Opinion

Newsweek · by Dan Perry · August 14, 2024

Seventy-one years ago this week, a pair of energetic American brothers carried out a plan to overthrow a pesky Middle Eastern government, setting in motion a chain of events that has the region on the cusp of all-out war. The convoluted tale offers a clear illustration of a truism we tend to ignore: Beware most of all the consequences that are unintended.

In the summer of 1953, the target of U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and his brother, CIA director Allen Dulles, was Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, who had nationalized Iran's oil industry. It was a popular move that was part of a broader effort to assert Iranian sovereignty and please Iranians frustrated with foreign control of their resources.

Indeed, while Mossadegh was not exactly a democrat by today's standards, his rise was something of a democratic dawn. He had been elected by Iran's parliament, which was itself elected (albeit only by men who were members of the country's economic elite).

Flanked by two guards, former Iranian Premier Mohammed Mossadegh is shown holding the floor at the opening session of his trial in Teheran on charges of defying the Shah, trying the overthrow the monarchy and... Flanked by two guards, former Iranian Premier Mohammed Mossadegh is shown holding the floor at the opening session of his trial in Teheran on charges of defying the Shah, trying the overthrow the monarchy and illegally dissolving parliament. Bettmann/Contributor

He set about reforming the system to diminish the power of the pro-Western head of state, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who had been in power for just a decade and was the latest incarnation of centuries of monarchic rule. Having come of age in World War II, the "Shah of Iran" was mindful of the preferences of the victors, chiefly the United States and Britain, and knew well that they preferred their oil close at hand.

As the government seized more and more of the shah's authority, he attempted to dismiss Mossadegh through a royal decree—but the premier refused to step down, leading to a political crisis. Fearing for his safety, the shah fled Iran, going first to Baghdad and then to Rome, leaving Mossadegh briefly fully in charge.

Enter the brothers Dulles, aided by Britain's spy agency, MI6. Only declassified in recent years, their Operation Ajax included all the hallmarks: Psychological warfare, bribes, orchestrated street protests and dark propaganda warnings of a world where the Soviet Union could gain a foothold in the oil-rich Middle East if Mossadegh's nationalist agenda prevailed.

The effort began in earnest on Aug. 15, 1953, and reached its climax four days later when pro-shah forces stormed Mossadegh's residence, leading to his arrest. The shah was reinstated with U.S. and British backing, his return celebrated with orchestrated jubilation.

The shah ruled for a quarter century more, and he was a modernizer like his father, Reza Shah. Iran under his rule because reasonably advanced and wealthy and benefited not only from great ties from the West but—in a reality that may seem incredible today—with the young state of Israel, too. It was not unheard of for mixed Israeli-Iranian couples to live in either country, and there was strong security cooperation and a brisk commerce between the two.

But the indomitable Persian spirit yearned for democracy nonetheless: The shah in later years became an autocrat far too dependent on his fearsome SAVAK secret police, established with the help of the CIA and Israel's Mossad. He also focused too much of his modernization effort on the elites—as an autocracy might—forgetting that the urban poor and rural religious have far more children. By 1978, demonstrations and strikes against his rule became so fearless as to truly destabilize the regime—representing a wide swath of society, from the more traditional poor to liberals, socialists, and nationalists as well.

Events unfolded with speed. In January the shah fled (again!) to Egypt, destined never to return and dying of cancer the following year. In February, the exiled Islamic leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned from France, and began deploying his charisma and wiles to set up the foundations of an Islamist theocracy. By April, a referendum was held in which the new state apparatus declared that close to all Iranians supported this plan.

By November, the regime declared its seriousness when it engineered a takeover of the U.S. Embassy by fake students, and took 53 hostages in a crisis that helped destroy the presidency of Jimmy Carter and only ended with their release in January 1981, on the day Carter left office.

In 1980, Saddam Hussein invaded Iran, hoping to destabilize the regime for fear that it would try to turn Iraq's population—which unlike Iran's are Arabs but like Iran's are mostly Shiite Muslims—against his Sunni-led rule. He badly miscalculated, leading to an eight-year stalemate (then in 1990 badly miscalculated again by invading Kuwait).

The Iran-Iraq war cemented Islamist rule, if anything. In the years that followed the Islamic Republic became increasingly brazen and ruthless, laying down occasional markers in the sand, such as Khomeini's 1979 "fatwa" ruling legitimizing the murder of British author Salman Rushie (leading to his stabbing more than 30 years later, in 2022) for alleged blasphemy in The Satanic Verses.

And in recent decades Iran has realized Saddam's fear and began to export its revolution to the Arab Middle East. Shiite militias are now crawling all over the region, including in Iraq, and two of them have essentially taken over key countries—Hezbollah in Lebanon, bordering Israel, and the Houthis in Yemen, along the waterway leading to the Suez Canal.

Iranian officials publicly yearn for and predict the destruction of Israel, and Iran is also the main funder and backer of the Hamas rejectionist group in the Palestinian areas. In 2007, Hamas seized control of the Gaza Strip. On Oct. 7, Hamas invaded Israel, triggering the war that at this very moment threatens to spiral out of control. Hezbollah has many tens of thousands of Iran-gifted rockets, many of them guided missiles, which it threatens to unleash any day.

Iran has also pressed for decades to achieve nuclear weapons, through various subterfuge while exhausting global inspectors and negotiators with cat-and-mouse games. In 2015, the regime was willing to suspend that project, effectively in exchange for guarantees that it would not be isolated or attacked—but two years later then-President Donald Trump committed a major strategic blunder in cancelling the agreement, and Iran is now believed to be a threshold state, able to quickly build a bomb.

Quickly—but not quite immediately. There may still be time. The world desperately needs regime change in Iran. Indeed, Iran's people desperately need regime change in Iran.

The Islamist Republic has grown extremely unpopular through its own despotism, which is certainly worse than anything attempted by SAVAK. The regime, which imposes Islam in various ways, women's dress codes among them, has brought misery and sparked economic sanctions that brought poverty; it is genuinely reviled.

Unfortunately, it also seems to be more ruthless that the regime of the shah. In 1978, the people were insufficiently terrified not to rise up, and once they did the shah's regime did not decide to open fire at the crowds. The feeling today is that the Islamist regime probably would.

The choice for the world is whether to let Iran go nuclear, at which point its misbehavior will probably increase further still—or take action. The hope would be that focused attacks on the nuclear sites and key installations of the regime might paralyze it long enough to give the people courage. Perhaps the best that can be hoped for at that point is a palace coup by the Revolutionary Guard, the praetorian operation that is the core of the regime and controls much of the economy; they might dump the Islamism like a hot potato.

Ironically, there is some nostalgia for the shah, and many Iranian exiles will tell you that the best outcome is the installing of his son, Reza Pahlavi, who lives in the United States, heads one of the exile groups, and has called for Iran to be a secular parliamentary democracy.

The CIA (and MI6) would sign on to that plan in about a second—yet it was the direction of things in under Mossadegh, when them ham-fistedly messed with the timeline. One wonders what might have happened if the Dulles brothers had turned their attentions elsewhere—to Cuba, perhaps—for the rise of the Islamic Republic can be traced directly back to the unintended consequences of the 1953 coup.

In their bid to secure short-term geopolitical gains, the Dulles brothers (and their boss, President Dwight Eisenhower) not only stifled Iran's democratic development but also instilled a deep-seated resentment towards foreign interference. This resentment found expression in the radical policies of today. The immediate objective of maintaining control over Iranian oil was achieved, but at the long-term cost of giving rise to a monster.

The story of Iran is a cautionary tale for policymakers. A little humility can go a long way. Carry a big stick but think with a bigger brain. Does that mean to leave Iran alone right now? Could anything possibly be worse? Very tricky indeed.

Dan Perry is the former Cairo-based Middle East editor and London-based Europe/Africa editor of the Associated Press, the former Chairman of the Foreign Press Association in Jerusalem, and the author of two books about Israel. He first interviewed Netanyahu in 1988. Follow him at danperry.substack.com.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.

Newsweek · by Dan Perry · August 14, 2024

15. What the U.S. Can Learn from the Chinese Development Playbook

Seems like a no brainer: execute national security and economic development and humanitarian aid in concert. Isn't this what we would call a whole of government approach?

But for what end? Here is my assessment of the Chinese "ends:" China seeks to export its authoritarian political system around the world in order to dominate regions directly and/or indirectly through proxies, co-opt or coerce international organizations, create economic conditions favorable to China alone, while displacing democratic institutions.

What the U.S. Can Learn from the Chinese Development Playbook

To win in great power competition, the United States needs to ensure that national security and economic and humanitarian outcomes are designed and executed in concert.

The National Interest · by Leah Kieff · August 17, 2024

In what has come to be referred to as the Great Power Competition (GPC), malign, revisionist powers, like the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and Russia, challenge nations and institutions across the globe. As FBI Director Christopher Wray said in 2020, “China is engaged in a whole-of-state effort to become the world’s only superpower by any means necessary.” Extensive, well-documented, publicly available, year-over-year evidence exists, ranging from intellectual property theft to data-collection efforts to transnational repression, which together paint a clear picture that the PRC is a direct threat not only to the United States but to all liberal nations.

The GPC demands revisiting the way the United States engages with the world, including the way we deploy foreign aid. As of 2019, the United States was the largest donor of foreign aid in the world. Even though foreign aid accounts for approximately 1 percent of the U.S. federal budget as of 2019, it still represents a key component of the diplomatic and economic aspects of U.S. power. The United States should learn from the PRC’s effectively matrixed investments, leveraging of PRC firms, and security stipulation. By learning from these three key elements that the PRC does effectively, the U.S. can make the 1 percent go much further.

Aid Should Follow National Security Aims

In 2013, the PRC launched a global program called the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). This initiative, sometimes referred to as a “modern-day Silk Road,” weaves together policy, trade, people, and financial institutions with an emphasis on infrastructure development. But, although the BRI was marketed as an attempt to create secure trade routes and economic opportunities worldwide, it often involves China investing in foreign countries in ways that benefit China more than the host countries. The PRC’s link of economic and geopolitical goals in this effort is a reminder of the profit that can be captured through matrixed investment.

To win the GPC, the U.S. needs to ensure that national security and economic and humanitarian outcomes are designed and executed in concert. The existing U.S. development apparatus must evolve to achieve this harmony. The United States can learn from what the PRC has done well while ensuring these execution efforts are done in alignment with liberal values.

U.S. Firms Should be Contracted for All Development Work.

The international community has criticized the PRC for using far fewer local firms for contracting than other development partners. However, using PRC firms for most of these projects means that their government spending on these has a direct positive effect on PRC companies. PRC-funded project contractors are approximately 89 percent PRC companies; for projects funded by the multilateral development banks, 29 percent are PRC-owned.

The United States can learn from both the economic benefits to its economy of using U.S. firms, as well as the need to involve local partners, by requiring all development dollars to be contracted with U.S. companies in partnership with a local firm for all goods and services, with exceptions on a case-by-case basis. This model will enable U.S. companies to mentor private ventures in host countries while ensuring that the U.S. government appropriately prioritizes U.S. commercial interests.

There are already similar preference requirements in place for U.S. government flights and domestic contracting. These could serve as models for a similar framework to align U.S. government dollars being spent abroad with U.S. commercial interests while simultaneously doubling the positive effect by encouraging partnerships with private industry in the host country.

The BRI’s approach to debt has also been criticized across the international community for, at a minimum, not adhering to international standards, including restructuring for low and middle-income countries and, at worst, deliberately structuring likely-to-fail deals. The latter is referred to as “debt-trap diplomacy” because this debt is then used as leverage to force concessions that the host country would not otherwise have given. Countries unable to pay these debts are encouraged to give land or natural resource rights in exchange for forgiveness, or both, as in Tajikistan. These deals may also result in countries giving away majority equity control of state-owned enterprises to the PRC in exchange for debt forgiveness, such as Laos giving the PRC majority ownership of its power grid. At a minimum, accepting these funds commits countries to back PRC stances publicly, such as ownership in the South China Sea or regarding Taiwan. Requesting countries to create or alter policies to align with the donor’s interests is something the United States also does and should continue to do. Washington can learn from and adopt lessons from the BRI, such as increased engagement of U.S. firms, while avoiding the malign elements of the PRC’s activity, such as its debt traps.

Security Must be a Key Component of All U.S. Funded Development Efforts.

Security stipulations for both the investment itself and the personnel involved should be included in the planning of all future U.S. development projects. These requirements would build on the widely accepted best practices in the economic development of community contributions. In this model, the country or community receiving the aid is required to provide a portion of the funding either in real dollars or in-kind contributions.

The model is leveraged not only to maximize community buy-in for the project but also to ensure the community prioritizes foreign assistance versus simply these projects reflecting foreign nation priorities. This practice also ensures that projects draw the widest possible range of development experience and perspectives. Given that violence against aid workers has increased, it also makes sense to ask host countries to guarantee the security of aid projects and workers.

This security planning should also include increased attention to the hardware and software used in projects. It is well documented that the PRC exports facial recognition technology and privacy-invasive cyberinfrastructure as a part of the BRI. It is also well documented that the PRC prioritizes investments in ownership and operation, largely through the BRI, in maritime ports. U.S. economic development should seek to develop and adopt standards of infrastructure, both physical and cyber, in line with the host countries’ capabilities, working to educate partners and allies on the importance of these being agreed upon broadly as a pre-requisite for investment.

Developing Development

The PRC and all illiberal powers deserve critique for not prioritizing humanitarian aims and for deliberately suppressing human rights on the road to a consolidation of power. However, the PRC’s development programs are not entirely coercive, nor are the United States’ entirely collaborative. Both countries leverage a system of incentives and disincentives in the way development dollars are leveraged in support of bilateral or multilateral aims. The United States can do this better by adopting matrixed investments, leveraging U.S. firms, and including security stipulations. Adopting these best practices will serve not only U.S. taxpayers’ interests at home but also the most disadvantaged people across the globe.

Leah Kieff is a senior associate (non-resident) with the Project on Prosperity and Development at CSIS. All views, positions, and conclusions expressed in this publication should be understood to be solely those of the author and not reflective of any group, organization, or institution that may be affiliated.

Image: Stanley Dullea / Shutterstock.com.

The National Interest · by Leah Kieff · August 17, 2024

16.

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

V/R

David Maxwell

If you do not read anything else in the 2017 National Security Strategy read this on page 14:

"A democracy is only as resilient as its people. An informed and engaged citizenry is the fundamental requirement for a free and resilient nation. For generations, our society has protected free press, free speech, and free thought. Today, actors such as Russia are using information tools in an attempt to undermine the legitimacy of democracies. Adversaries target media, political processes, financial networks, and personal data. The American public and private sectors must recognize this and work together to defend our way of life. No external threat can be allowed to shake our shared commitment to our values, undermine our system of government, or divide our Nation."

Access NSS HERE

Company Name | Website

China researchers call for 'shadow government' in Taiwan ahead of takeover

How Israel Killed a Ghost

Hezbollah’s commander Fuad Shukr lived a life so secret few knew his name or face before an airstrike killed him and helped put the Middle East on the brink of war

Deploying on U.S. Soil: How Trump Would Use Soldiers Against Riots, Crime and Migrants

Seeking a Show of Strength

Troops at the Border

‘Insurrection — Stop Riots ** — Day 1, Easy’

Blurry Lines

Ukraine’s Kursk Offensive Is a Turning Point in the War

The biggest impact is the destruction of Vladimir Putin’s narrative for victory.

Russia’s War in Ukraine

What Does Zelensky Want in Kursk?

Ukraine’s strategic objectives remain murky—and the operation creates many risks—but it could alter the course of the war.

Russia’s War in Ukraine

Will Ukraine’s Kursk Offensive Turn the Tide?

Kyiv’s risky incursion could be game-changing—or allow Russia to entrench its gains in Donetsk.

Michael Oren: Should Israel Strike First?

Opinion: Red Thin Line – How to Play Russia

During Ukraine’s Incursion, Russian Conscripts Recount Surrendering in Droves

Kremlin response to Kursk incursion shows how Putin freezes in a crisis

Behind Ukraine’s Russia Invasion: Secrecy, Speed and Electronic Jamming

Ukrainians embarrass Putin by becoming first foreign military force to occupy Russian territory since World War II

A quiet buildup

A speedy assault

‘On edge’

Calls for Putin removal in biggest threat to Kremlin since Wagner revolt

Zakrevsky launched a blistering attack on the Russian president during a video in which he blamed all the military failures in Ukraine on Putin personally.

Trending

Seeds of Today's Middle East Disaster Were Sown by the CIA | Opinion

What the U.S. Can Learn from the Chinese Development Playbook