Diplomacy & Crisis News

The spread of liberal values gives America a competitive edge over China.

Adapting a Cold War strategy to a new threat.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu doubles down on Israel’s stance against Palestinian statehood.

The massive publicity around the consecration of a temple to the Hindu warrior-king Rama further consolidates the Indian prime minister’s political dominance.

The United States has expanded its security commitments around the world—and the bill is coming due.

Kyiv can close the innovation gap with Russia.

How to wipe out a scourge that kills and disables millions every year.

But to get there, both sides—and America—need to be realistic about what’s achievable now.

How a fragile democracy inched forward—and how it can consolidate the gains.

Away from the frontlines, Russia cements its conquest.

How COP28 demonstrated what's missing from climate diplomacy.

Iran and its allies are fighting with missiles and memes.

Technology and the element of surprise can put Russia on the back foot.

 

The end of 2023 became a demonstration of how bad policy had lead to the most evident atrocities ever documented in recorded history. What prevents many of these modern conflicts from spiralling out of control was a relatively new form of AI, in advanced missile systems that are capable of intercepting air and ballistic missile threats in many forms. In order to counter this AI, regressive technical systems such as drones were massed in order to overwhelm such systems and protract conflicts further, as without a serious threat, conflicts would not escalate past a certain point. Even with these numerous threats, many missile systems have functioned successfully, with an established strategy being used as a method to incur greater economic and supply costs on the defenders while prolonging the conflict even further. Missile defence worked in reducing conflict, as it reduced the losses to the defending party and lowered the demand for a forceful response to the initial attacks. Without such effective missile defence, a country would have few options but to react with force to the initial act under their rights to respond to Casus Belli.

The importance of missile defence does not only play a key role in policy decisions for military and political leaders, but often can be the main component of a security situation that limits or prevents greater conflicts from escalating past a point of no return. Such great importance should be placed on missile defence that actions taken by opposing forces, third parties, or even allies that aids or assists the diminishment of such a defence should be considered as an act that actively contributes to a conflict, where the results of such actions are known or should have been known to the contributing party. Acting as an accessory to Casus Belli ties the parties to the act of war itself, and should be met with legal responses, sanctions, or a defensive response. Such actions should be prevented using clear measures.

The funding of rogue nations and coercive third parties are one of the main sources of funds that enable and motivate many acts of violence in the past and is a significant threat in 2024. Often such actions have been established over a number of years, and work within a cooperative framework in normally democratic countries to fund and promote regimes in countries that are anything but democratic. These subversive acts benefit few people in the democratic infrastructure, and operate in such a manner to not only give access to funds abroad for nefarious groups, but corrupt systems and institutions in the democratic West linked to such entities. Fines and investigations on such actions often expose certain large financial institutions and their contributions to acts of violence, and have even exposed international organisations for being linked to the acts directly. A legal precedent already exists in aiding in the propagation of war, but the law of often ignored and not applied in countries where the Government is passively supporting/actively ignoring the financial ties of a few individuals to the conflict.

The allowance of knowledge and equipment to be exported to rogue states and organisations that are linked to crimes against humanity are also a key contributor to conflicts that escalate into larger wars. Much of the terror weapons used against civilians in places like Ukraine were built on commercial technologies exported to rogue countries, with little being done about the exchange well after it was known to have been used to target civilians. While the West has spent Billions to support their allies, the other end of those same economies have been exporting and profiting from weapons parts production and have funded the further production of adversarial weaponry through the third party purchase of energy products from their key adversary. Even with the knowledge that many of their adversaries are also oppressing their own people for demonstrating their own popular support for our values, Western nations have worked in conjunction with abusive regimes who oppress local movements while enabling acts of war abroad. If knowledge of such material support for acts of war is discovered, it should stop immediately. If it was known and was supported through weapons sales, parts sales and direct purchasing of sanctioned energy products, it should be met with fierce legal consequences domestically, internationally and via the countries that have suffered from the act of war themselves. Countries who have been attacked will never be able to acquiesce to threats as they have no other option but to protect their own citizenry from act of war. It is their obligation to seek justice for their own citizens under International Law. Avoiding their obligations could make them culpable to the crime itself.

Along with the passive support of conflict through the sale of weapon parts above, the active sale of weapons that enable civilians to be harmed must be met with the coercive obligations countries have to protect their citizens and those of peaceful countries from direct and immediate threats to peace. If a country seeks to prohibit or limit conflict, missile defence in the theatre of war must be married to not only an active financial and material restriction on supporting the initiant to a conflict, but must seek to disrupt the production of such weapons if that capability is available. Known threats to shipping and population centres that initiate Casus Belli, also includes the production facilities of such weapons, even if not in the immediate theatre. Handling such threats before such weapons engage military and civilian targets alike will prevent wider conflicts and demonstrate consequences for third parties in their contribution to violence in the region. It is often the case that if you destroy the roots of the foundation of a conflict, the wider conflict becomes more manageable. Until such actions are taken, the situation will almost certainly become worse for all parties involved, especially the innocent.

U.S. allies and adversaries are responding to the chance of his return.

But it can still prevent Chinese hegemony.

For lasting peace, Israel must end Its occupation of Palestinian land.

Donors must challenge, not comfort, the existing order.

Akula-class submarine primer: Russia’s Akula-class submarines may be nearing their third decade in service. However, these nuclear-powered attack submarines continue to sail the seas effectively - and make the U.S. Navy worry.

During the end of the Cold War, the USSR began developing this series of fourth-generation SSNs, which included several sub-classes of Project 971 Shchuka-B.

Both the USSR and U.S. were vigorously competing to produce more advanced submarines in the 1960’s to gain an edge over the other.

When the USSR launched the first Akula-Class in 1985, U.S. officials were reportedly “shocked” since Western intelligence indicated that the Soviets were at least ten years out from achieving such technology.

Introducing the Akula submarines

The Akula-class submarines were constructed by the Amur Shipbuilding Plant Joint Stock Company at Komsomolsk and by Sevmash at the Severodvinsk shipbuilding yard.

Each submarine was designed as a double hull system consisting of an inner pressure hull and an outer hull. This layout enables more freedom in the exterior hull’s shape, allowing the submarine to reserve more buoyancy than its Western counterparts.

Each Akula submarine is powered by one OK-650B pressurized water reactor, the same system incorporated onto many Soviet predecessors.

When the OK-650 was introduced to service in the 1970s, it was considered more advanced and reliable than previous submarine reactors. This reactor has also been installed on the Sierra I, Sierra II, the Oscar I, Oscar II, and Typhoon class submarines.

The first seven boats that make up the Akula I class are the Puma, Delphin, Kashalot, Kit, Pantera, Bars and Narvel. An improved Akula-class variant known as Project 971U includes the Volk, Morzh, Leopard, Tigr and Drakon.

In terms of armament, the Akula class was quite formidable. Each submarine was designed to carry S-10 Granat (designated by the West as SS-N-21 Sampson) cruise attack missiles. The S-10 Granat is comparable to the American-made Tomahawk. Subsequent Akula-class variants were fitted with six additional 533mm external torpedo tubes.

The submarine class also sported more advanced sensors than previous submarines. Specifically, the Akula’s surface search radar is the Snoop Pair or Snoop Half.

As detailed by Naval Technology, “]T]he submarine is fitted with the MGK 540 sonar system which provides automatic target detection in broad and narrow-band modes by active sonar. It gives the range, relative bearing and range rate. The sonar system can also be used in a passive, listening mode for detection of hostile sonars. The sonar signal processor can detect and automatically classify targets as well as reject spurious acoustic noise sources and compensate for variable acoustic conditions.”

The Akula II variant

Only one Akula II variant was ever completed- the Vepr (K-157).

In 1990, her keel was laid down and she officially launched four years later. In 1995, the Vepr commissioned. Two additional Akula II-class variants were planned in the late 1990s. However, neither boat was completed.

Notably, the hull sections from the Rys (K-333) and the Kuguar (K-337) were later incorporated in the constructions of the Alexander Nevsky and Yury Dolgorukiy. The Akula II submarines measured at 110m long and could displace up to 12,770t.

Each submarine in this class had a top speed of 35 knots submerged and a maximum diving depth of 600m. Although construction of the Akula II began back in 1991, it was suspended for nearly a decade due to a shortage of funds.

India and the Akula-Class 

A unique leasing opportunity arose when Moscow granted the Indian Navy the ability to “rent” the Akula II submarine.

The SSN, renamed INS Chakra by New Delhi in 2023, was expected to enter service with the Indian Navy in 2007. However, several delays postponed this deadline. At first, issues with installing new systems and technologies onboard set engineers back in schedule. In 2008, a fatal gas leak that broke out on the submarine led to the deaths of 20 civilian crew members, further pushing the submarine’s entry to service back.

Ultimately, New Delhi would sail the INS Chakra for under nine years before returning the submarine to Russia in 2021. Reports suggested that the submarine was returned to Moscow early due to issues with its nuclear propulsion system.

The Akula II SSN was more formidable in armament than its sister variant. Armed with four 533mm torpedo tubes, the submarine could deploy Type 53 torpedoes, RPK-6 or RPK-2 missiles.

Additionally, this vessel could sport naval mines, the RPK-7 missile and four 650mm torpedo tubes.

In 2022, NATO naval forces monitored the Vepr when it transited from the Northern Fleet to the Baltic. The boat is expected to remain in service with the Russian Navy for another few decades.

About the Author: Maya Carlin 

Maya Carlin, National Security Writer with The National Interest, is an analyst with the Center for Security Policy and a former Anna Sobol Levy Fellow at IDC Herzliya in Israel. She has by-lines in many publications, including The National Interest, Jerusalem Post, and Times of Israel. You can follow her on Twitter: @MayaCarlin. You can email the author: Editor@nationalinterest.org. 

All images are Creative Commons. 

This week, the International Court of Justice begins consideration of whether the devastation and deprivation that Israel is inflicting on the Gaza Strip constitute genocide. The impetus for the ICJ taking up the case is a filing by the government of South Africa, a country that knows a thing or two about what it means for one ethnic group to oppress another. The South African initiative has received explicit support from several other governments, the fifty-seven-member Organization of Islamic Countries, numerous nongovernmental organizations worldwide, and even some concerned Israelis.

The eighty-four-page filing is carefully constructed, exhaustively documented, and judiciously worded. It places the current crisis in context with regard not only to the jurisdiction of the court but also to the entire history of Israeli subjugation of Palestinians. It describes in excruciating detail the various facets of what Israel has imposed on Gaza, including the killing of thousands of civilians, the injuries, the destruction of homes and infrastructure, the forced dislocation, and the deprivation of food, water, sanitation, and medical care. It then documents the numerous statements from Israelis themselves—from the president and prime minister on down—indicating that their lethal actions are targeted not just against Hamas or some other group that has done Israel harm but against Palestinians in general.

Despite the voluminous evidence of what has been happening in the Gaza Strip during the past three months, there exists significant resistance to invoking the concept of genocide. Some reasons for this resistance are general and apply to almost any case in which that concept has been mentioned. Other reasons are more specific to the case of Israel and the Palestinians.

One general reason is anxiety about comparisons with historical cases that were even more egregious than whatever case is at hand. The highly egregious case that immediately comes to mind is the Nazi Holocaust, and there is legitimate concern about debasing historical understanding of that event if the concept of genocide begins to be applied too frequently elsewhere.

Another general reason to worry about follow-on implications is if the ICJ makes a formal legal judgment that genocide has occurred. The relevant legal framework is the 1948 Genocide Convention, to which 152 nations (including Israel, South Africa, and the United States) are parties. The convention calls for criminal prosecution of persons who have committed any of the acts the convention covers. If a national court fails to discharge that responsibility, then an international tribunal—such as that other standing tribunal that meets in The Hague, the International Criminal Court—may do so. 

Reasons specific to the Israeli-Palestinian case include all the political factors that, especially in the United States, but also to a lesser extent in parts of Europe, have led to Israel being given a pass for most of what it has done to the Palestinians. 

Now, with the United States having supplied thousands of tons of munitions that Israel has employed in the devastation of Gaza and having used its veto power to block international calls for a cease-fire, the United States has assumed a share of the responsibility for the devastation. This makes relevant Article III of the Genocide Convention, which lists as punishable acts not only genocide itself but also, among other things, “complicity” in genocide.

It thus is not surprising for the Biden administration’s public response to South Africa’s initiative at the ICJ to be, in the words of National Security Council spokesman John Kirby, that the South African submission “is meritless, counterproductive, and completely without any basis in fact whatsoever.” It is unsurprising but highly inaccurate as a characterization of a filing filled with well-documented and relevant facts. The U.S. response is only slightly farther off the rails than Israel’s hysterically-toned official assertion that the South African action is “blood libel,” a response that no doubt reflects genuine concern in Israel that the South Africans have a strong case.

A concept that is also applicable to what Israel is doing to Gaza but is a bit milder than—and without the same legal implications as—genocide is ethnic cleansing. There is no “ethnic cleansing convention,” although some actions that generally have been placed under the label of ethnic cleansing constitute violations of international law, including the laws of war. There is some, though not all, of the same hesitation to apply that label as to apply the label of genocide, and for some of the same reasons, mostly involving attempts to protect one’s own government and its clients from accusations of nefarious behavior.

In an article in the current issue of Political Science Quarterly, Meghan Garrity of George Mason University argues for discarding the term ethnic cleansing. One reason is that the term originated with some of the perpetrators, especially in the former Yugoslavia, who applied the term with non-pejorative intent to their own actions. Another reason is conceptual confusion resulting from commentators referring to different specific behaviors when talking about ethnic cleansing.

Garrity proposes, in the interest of descriptive and analytical precision, replacing that term with four more specific components of the kind of ethnic oppression to which the term is usually applied. Those components are: 1) control, intended to subjugate the target population; 2) coercive assimilation, intended to eliminate a unique cultural identity; 3) mass expulsion, intended to remove the target population; and 4) massacre, intended to annihilate that population.

Garrity wrote her article before the current Israeli assault on Gaza, but her typology corresponds to different aspects and different phases of Israeli policy toward the Palestinians. Assimilation into Jewish-dominated Israeli life has never been part of that policy. Still, denial of a unique Palestinian national and cultural identity certainly has been, dating back to early rationalizations of the Zionist project as “a land without a people for a people without a land.” Subjugation through control has been the dominant continuing aspect of Israeli policy in the half-century since Israel’s conquest of Palestinian territories in the 1967 war. Expulsion—involving the displacement of some 750,000 Palestinians—was a central feature of the Nakba or “catastrophe” associated with the 1948 war in Palestine. Now, the Israeli minister of agriculture (and former head of the security service Shin Bet) openly declares that Israel is “rolling out the Gaza Nakba.” As for massacres, the mostly civilian Palestinian death toll from the current carnage in the Gaza Strip—now approximately 23,000 and still rising—is the largest of all the rounds of Israeli-Palestinian violence.

In current Israeli policy, massacre and expulsion are complementary. Israel is pressing countries from Egypt to the Congo to accept Palestinians from the Gaza Strip. Israel euphemizes such relocation as “voluntary,” even though the only alternative for the Palestinians involved would be more Israeli-inflicted death and destruction inside Gaza.

So, how does the concept of genocide fit into this picture? Garrity observes that it is part of the same conceptual and semantic confusion that has afflicted references to ethnic cleansing. She notes that some analysts and commentators consider genocide a subtype of ethnic cleansing, some treat the two phenomena as separate, and some consider them as overlapping. 

Garrity has scholarship in mind and suggests that her substitution of the four dimensions of control, assimilation, expulsion, and massacre facilitates rigorous research into why, for example, a regime chooses one of these methods over another. Indeed, the Israeli-Palestinian case provides ample material for such research, such as dissecting the Israeli decision to rely heavily at this time on the combination of expulsion and massacre.

The policy lesson in all this should be that substance matters more than semantics. As the South African case proceeds at the ICJ, expect Israel and its defenders to try to turn the proceeding into one of semantics—to define genocide narrowly. To the extent this tactic succeeds, it will deflect attention from what is actually happening in the Gaza Strip, including the immense human suffering involved.

Such use of semantics to deflect attention from substance is reminiscent of Donald Trump’s supporters repeatedly shouting “no collusion” to try to deny the nature of Trump’s ties with Russia. An absence of the kind of master plot hatched in a back room that might meet someone’s idea of “collusion” does not negate the fact that during the 2016 election, Trump and his campaign encouraged, facilitated, exploited, and provided cover for Russia’s interference in the election to his benefit, nor does it negate continued reasons to be concerned today about the nature of Trump’s relationship with Russia.

Just as the use or non-use of the C-word does not make the Trump-Russia problem go away, neither does the use or non-use of the G-word—by the ICJ or anyone else—cause the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza and the policies that have generated it, to go away. Control, cultural denial, expulsion, and massacre are all despicable policies for one ethnic group to apply against another and should be opposed, regardless of whether a court or anyone else applies a particular overarching term or label to such policies.

Paul R. Pillar retired in 2005 from a twenty-eight-year career in the U.S. intelligence community, in which his last position was as the National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and South Asia. Earlier, he served in a variety of analytical and managerial positions, including as chief of analytic units at the CIA, covering portions of the Near East, the Persian Gulf, and South Asia. His most recent book is Beyond the Water’s Edge: How Partisanship Corrupts U.S. Foreign Policy. He is also a contributing editor for this publication.

Image: Anas Mohammed / Shutterstock.com.