Diplomacy & Crisis News

Moscow may temporarily profit from the West’s focus on the Middle East, but navigating its ties in the region will be tricky.

Escalating violence could set Israel and Iran on a collision course.

The culture of intelligence agencies paved the way for disaster. Regional war could revive the nuclear specter that haunted the world in 1973.  

The administration’s regional security concept has collapsed. Does the president know it?

The West has wasted precious time in developing a common strategy.

Holding Putin to account will require offering the court more than just intelligence.

The Israel-Hamas war presents a conundrum for Islamabad.

The White House is trying to balance its commitment to Israel with the dire humanitarian situation in Gaza.

In a dramatic display of collective frustration, the streets of Baghdad recently became a theatre of dissent as around 300 Iraqis took to Nisour Square to protest acute water shortages. The demonstrations were held on 18 July near the Turkish embassy and marked a crucial moment in Iraq’s ongoing water crisis. They highlighted mounting tensions in the Middle East over shared water resources, the repercussions of climate change and poor governance.

The protests weren’t an isolated event. They were a manifestation of long-simmering discontent with the water crisis in Iraq. Faced with dwindling access to potable water and a significant decline in river levels, citizens took to the streets to demand accountability from a government perceived to have mishandled the nation’s most precious resource.

Iraq’s water scarcity comes back to its geography. It sits at an intricate intersection of water resources. The Tigris and Euphrates rivers, originating in neighbouring Turkey and Iran, respectively, are vital lifelines for Iraq. However, unyielding demand for water upstream has led these countries to construct dams and diversions that diminish flows downstream, devastating Iraq’s water supply.

The Baghdad protests drew attention to the delicate balance needed among nations that share water and the pressing need for cooperation in water management. Turkey’s and Iran’s dams on the Tigris and Euphrates have been contentious because they significantly alter flows downstream in Iraq. Tensions have made it challenging to achieve consensus on equitable sharing agreements, but also made diplomatic efforts to foster cooperation even more urgent.

Water is pivotal in any country’s development, but with Iraq experiencing sharp population growth and rising food demand, it’s feeling the pinch hardest. In Syria and Iraq, the Tigris and Euphrates supply the vast majority of water. The Euphrates provides around 85% of Syria’s renewable water, and the two rivers combined make up nearly 100% of Iraq’s supply. Ownership of the rivers’ basins is divided among Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Jordan.

The Tigris originates in Hazar Lake in Anatolia and flows out of Turkey through Syria and Iraq before its confluence with the Euphrates at the Shatt al-Arab canal in southern Iraq. The water conflict in the Euphrates–Tigris basin has been ongoing since the 1960s with Turkey, Syria and Iraq competitively constructing large-scale water-supply schemes.

Diplomatic resolutions are complicated by the unpredictable flow of the Tigris, but Turkey’s control of 88.7% of the Euphrates basin’s water potential is the main strain on water relations. The Euphrates’ salinity has also been increasing beyond sustainable levels on the Syria–Iraq border, hindering irrigation. Yet all three countries have initiated extensive development plans to harness yet more of this water in hopes of achieving food security for their rapidly growing populations.

During the Syrian civil war, water was frequently used as a weapon. In May 2015, for instance, Islamic State took control of the Ramadi Dam in Iraq and reduced the outflow of the Euphrates River, diverting water into Lake Habbaniya. This drained the water supply of several provinces, hurting civilian communities. Other parties to the conflict in Syria also weaponised water access to punish or gain leverage over populations and exacerbated the already dire water crisis.

The war also severely damaged water infrastructure. Plants and pipes were hit directly by fighting, but also indirectly through energy infrastructure. This worsened the humanitarian crisis, leaving many Syrians without access to clean water for drinking, sanitation and agriculture.

Longstanding tension, environmental challenges and the impact of the war have combined to push the water crisis to a critical level. Addressing it will require not only sustainable water management practices in each country on the rivers; it will also require better conflict resolution, infrastructure and humanitarian aid across the region to protect access to clean water.

Meanwhile, climate change looms ominously over the Middle East. Rising temperatures and erratic precipitation patterns have disrupted the water cycle, reduced river flows and increased evaporation rates. Scarcity of water is a common challenge in the Middle East, with downstream states suffering the most, and water often triggers conflict as states compete to control it. While conflict is rare in regions with abundant water, areas with less often fight over vital supply sources. As the climate continues to change, Iraq’s water situation will deteriorate and strain the nation’s capacity even further.

Governance challenges have also affected Iraq’s ability to effectively manage water resources. Decades of conflict have severely hampered the maintenance and development of essential infrastructure. Mismanagement, corruption and a lack of coherent policies have compounded its water crisis, exacerbating discontent among Iraq’s citizens and highlighting the need for robust and accountable governance.

There have been steps in the right direction. Iraq recently joined the Convention on the Protection and Use of Transboundary Watercourses and International Lakes, becoming the first country in the Middle East to do so. The landmark decision makes Iraq the 49th party to the framework and reflects its commitment to cross-border cooperation on water. In addition, Iraq has chosen to participate in the United Nations Water Conference.

Iraq has also sought to better collaborate with Turkey, and in March they signed an agreement to double water releases from dams on the Tigris River for one month. During the same visit, Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia’ al-Sudani and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan reiterated their plans to establish a joint water resources research centre in Baghdad to cooperatively address water challenges and develop sustainable water management strategies.

With the region home to 12 of the most water-scarce countries on the planet, the significance of effective, collaborative water management cannot be understated. Communities in the Middle East rely on water that crosses international boundaries, and cooperation is needed to ensure its equitable access and responsible use.

Arushi Singh is a researcher at the Consortium of Indo-Pacific Researchers and a geopolitical risk analyst for a private consulting firm based in the Middle East.

This article was first published by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.

Image: Shutterstock.

A recent intelligence report published by the UK’s Ministry of Defence about Russia’s attempt to capture the town of Avdiivka in the Donetsk region is the latest illustration of just how much the conflict in Ukraine is becoming a war of attrition. Russia’s push to mount a new offensive in the east has resulted in substantive “personnel losses” for its military.

In the west, many assume that every inch of Ukrainian land that is liberated brings Russia closer to military defeat and Europe to peace. But Russia has adapted to both internal and external shocks. As of August, it was estimated that Russia had suffered “as many as 120,000 deaths”. That number will have risen in recent weeks. And as the death toll climbs, the ability to replace troops becomes as important as military equipment and technology.

Even though many young men left Russia rather than be sent to the front, the country still has a large pool of young men from which to recruit and has claimed to have enlisted a large number without resorting to general conscription – although the Kremlin’s figures have been questioned by other sources.

But the question remains as to how many Russian military deaths is too many for Putin to retain the support of the Russian people. And it’s a very difficult question to answer. In Russia, the notion of military sacrifice plays an important role in informing national identity.

Russia’s national story is constituted by loss. It has lived and continues to live a tale of self-induced suffering. Even just considering the past century, military losses during the second world war and in Afghanistan – followed by the loss of a sense of identity after the collapse of the Soviet empire in 1991 – have all come to define Russia’s character today. The sense of the “loss of empire” is what has driven Vladimir Putin’s foreign adventurism in Georgia and Ukraine.

For the motherland

For the British people, the death of 179 solidiers in Iraq was traumatic enough for leaders to change course. But military sacrifice has a different meaning in Russia, one that is diametrically opposed to the value the liberal west places on the individual subject.

For Russia, every dead soldier in Ukraine constitutes a step towards victory and reclaiming the great power image of the country’s Soviet past. While the west’s liberal philosophy promulgates the importance of individual rights, Russia is defined by a system of collectivism. Within its value system, the individual subject confers prestige through their self-sacrifice for the collective wellbeing.

In Soviet iconography, tropes of self-sacrifice and fatal injury tend to be closely tied to nationalist ideas of pride and superiority. They pervaded propaganda posters during the “great patriotic war”.

Take the image For the Motherland! (1942) by Aleksei Kokorekin as an example. It conveyed Soviet resilience through the portrayal of a wounded soldier fighting on bravely and showing no sign of physical weakness despite his injuries.

This juxtaposition between the injured self and national status is telling. Kokorekin’s depiction of Soviet heroism was also indicative of the Soviet mentality on death – where the emphasis on physical suffering became a source of national superiority.

Spirituality of loss

This logic permeated the consciousness of subsequent generations and in how they interpreted military sacrifice. For her 1990 study Tsinkovye mal’chiki (translated as Zinky Boys) by Nobel prize-winning writer Svetlana Aleksievich, the author interviewed army veterans from the campaign in Afghanistan. She recalled how in one interview an artillery soldier described war as “a spiritual experience”, while referencing the self-sacrifice of the Red Army during the great patriotic war.

This experience of spirituality through war not only reflects how Russians seek to replay and become part of the past, but speaks to the religious dimension of Russia’s discourse on self-sacrifice. This theme emerged strongly in comments by Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, in September 2022, in which he was encouraging Russian men to join up.

…if a person dies in the performance of this duty [war], then they have undoubtedly committed an act equivalent to sacrifice. They will have sacrificed themselves for others. And therefore, we believe that this sacrifice washes away all the sins that a person has committed.

His statement rationalised the self-sacrifice of the Russian soldier on the basis that it served a transcendental duty – a Christ-like sacrifice – which would ultimately absolve them from sin. The patriarch’s comments speak to a particular historical tradition of religious masochism – the practice of self-induced physical trauma – in Russia, which dates back to “the early days of Christian Rus’”.

Military martyrdom

Deciphering this internal logic governing the way many Russians deal with loss is imperative to the west’s understanding of the Ukraine war. Putin draws on a language of sacrifice which has its cultural and historical roots in Russian Orthodox thinking and Soviet mythology.

This language reveals something important about Russian psychology when it comes to dealing with news of large-scale casualties on the battlefield. A soldier’s body is a potent mixture of the political and spiritual in the Russian psyche.

The death of that body is for Russia a step towards achieving the fantasy of national prestige. For some Russians (by no means all), the trauma of military loss does not mean that they should stop fighting in Ukraine. On the contrary, it can represent a pathway to martyrdom.

Ben Soodavar is a Researcher in the Department of War Studies at King's College London.

This article was first published by The Conversation.

Image: kibri_ho / Shutterstock.com

China’s Belt and Road Initiative, which is celebrating its 10th anniversary this week, has now advanced more than $330 billion, which is about 80% of the lending of the World Bank over that period.

The BRI mainly lends to infrastructure projects, while the World Bank increasingly focuses on ‘capacity-building’ projects, such as education and agriculture reform, but both are operating in the same field of development lending.

It is less widely appreciated that China is also competing with the International Monetary Fund, in providing liquidity or ‘lender of last resort’ finance, principally through its central bank, the People’s Bank of China.

A World Bank working paper published earlier this year estimated that $170 billion had been used to provide liquidity support across 128 rescue lending operations to 13 countries, using currency ‘swap’ arrangements set up since 2009.

In addition to the swap financing, the World Bank study establishes that China’s state-owned banks have provided a further $70 billion in balance-of-payments support to troubled BRI borrowers. This lending and the swap arrangements amount to about 20% of IMF liquidity support over the past decade.

With both the BRI and the liquidity backstop operations of the PBOC, China is turning its chronic and massive balance-of-payments surpluses to its geopolitical advantage.

Unusually among developing nations, China has built up huge foreign exchange reserves, thanks to its model of export-led growth, so it has money to lend. It also has expertise and spare capacity in building infrastructure.

China has attracted representatives of 130 nations to its BRI forum being held in Beijing this week, after the IMF and World Bank meetings held in Marrakech last week.

Currency swap arrangements among central banks were pioneered by the US Federal Reserve at the peak of the 2008–09 global financial crisis, when global liquidity in US dollars almost disappeared. They were designed to ensure that US currency was available for international transactions.

The PBOC followed suit and now has a total of $570 billion in bilateral swap arrangements (including one with the Reserve Bank of Australia for A$40 billion). While these were initially seen as a means of facilitating trade in renminbi, they are increasingly being used to assist BRI borrowers facing financial difficulty.

The biggest users of the country’s liquidity supports have been Argentina, Mongolia, Pakistan and Suriname. Egypt, Nigeria and Russia have also tapped these facilities multiple times.

Argentina, which established a $19 billion swap with the PBOC in 2009, tapped it in both July and August this year for a total of $3 billion to meet a scheduled repayment on a 2018 IMF loan.

Argentina was in desperate straits. It had negotiated a new $44 billion loan from the IMF and was due for a $7.5 billion disbursement, but it had exhausted its foreign exchange reserves, had no funds to meet the repayment on the earlier loan and had no access to private banks.

The IMF will not lend anything to a country that falls into arrears and nor will the World Bank. By using the swap agreement with China to meet a repayment on the old IMF loan, Argentina was able to keep the new IMF loan alive and, when the $7.5 billion disbursement was finally made, the first use of the funds was to repay the PBOC.

Argentina was in a position to use the swap agreement because its finance minister, Sergio Massa, had travelled to China in May and negotiated to double the portion of the swap line over which Argentina had complete discretion to $10 billion.

Reuters quoted the former head of the IMF’s western hemisphere department, Alejandro Werner, saying the deal demonstrated how ‘much more agile Chinese external financial diplomacy can be, and it’s an additional virtue that countries see in maintaining a constructive relationship with China’. It’s unthinkable that the US Federal Reserve would countenance its swap arrangements being used in this way.

The geopolitical advantage that China gains from this transaction may prove ephemeral. The frontrunner in next week’s Argentine elections, the conservative populist Javier Milei, has said that if he wins he will freeze relations with the Chinese government, which he described as an ‘assassin’, and adopt the US dollar as the country’s currency.

China has often been accused of recalcitrance in negotiating the restructure of debts of troubled borrowers. The central issue has been that China won’t accept writing down the value of debts when the IMF and the World Bank also refuse to do so.

China sees the IMF and the World Bank as essentially Western institutions and as its peers in supporting poorer nations. Although China is a member of both funds, their governance is dominated by the Western nations. The managing director position of the IMF is reserved for a European, while the World Bank president is always an American.

China’s voting share in the IMF is less than Japan’s and a third of that of the United States. The US voting share gives it sole veto rights over major IMF decisions. Last week’s IMF and World Bank meetings agreed to an increase in contributions, but the US rejected any increase in China’s share.

The IMF and the World Bank, as a matter of principal, won’t accept any losses on their loans, although they insist that commercial lenders and other national development banks should do so. China has demanded equal treatment with the IMF and the World Bank.

A prolonged impasse on this point over Zambia’s debts was resolved last year with an agreement on an interest-rate grace period and extended repayment terms, rather than writing down the value of the debt.

China last week surprised Sri Lanka’s Western creditors and the IMF by being the first to strike a deal over the rescheduling of debt. The agreement is expected to defer payments on $4.2 billion of debt to China. Other creditors must also agree to debt restructuring before the IMF will release funds from a $2.9 billion facility.

The World Bank notes that Chinese loans differ from IMF loans by being opaque, carrying relatively high interest rates, and being offered exclusively to BRI borrowers.

‘China has developed a system of “Bailouts on the Belt and Road” that helps recipient countries to avoid default, and continue servicing their BRI debts, at least in the short run,’ the paper says.

The paper says China’s role as an international crisis manager is similar to that of the US Treasury during previous Latin American debt crises and the European Union’s stability mechanism that was deployed during the Greek debt crisis in 2010. It helps to avert or resolve defaults by highly indebted borrowers. Its financing is more like ‘bridging finance’, than the extended support provided by the IMF.

The geopolitical advantage gained by China from its international lending is hard to assess. A study by a US-based research institute, Aiddata, examined more than 13,000 BRI projects and found that 35% had implementation problems, such as corruption, labour conflicts, environmental problems or public protest.

However, the same study notes that China is an active financier of infrastructure in low-income countries that struggle to obtain funding from anyone else.

David Uren is a senior fellow at ASPI.

This article was first published by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.

Image: John Wreford / Shutterstock.com

One of the key tasks of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is to monitor member countries’ economic and financial policies and provide them with sound economic policy advice. This activity is known as surveillance. 

It would be a gross understatement to say that the IMF failed miserably in this task last year, particularly in the United States, the IMF’s largest member country. Despite all the warning signs, it managed not to sound the alarm about the inflationary dangers that lay ahead due to irresponsibly loose fiscal and monetary policies. Unchastised by this experience, the IMF now looks like it is failing in the opposite direction. It is doing so by cheerleading central banks on the need for high-interest rates for longer. Never mind that the world economy is slowing, long-term bond yields are spiking, and cracks are appearing in the global financial system. 

In March 2021, the Biden administration secured passage of its $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan to support the economy. Added to the previous year’s COVID budget stimulus packages, the Biden stimulus implied that the economy would receive cumulative budget support equivalent to a staggering 20 percent of GDP. Yet unlike former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, who characterized this budget policy as the least responsible fiscal policy in the past forty years, the IMF was disappointingly silent in voicing criticism. 

It is equally regrettable that in 2021, the IMF did not take issue with the Federal Reserve’s excessively easy monetary policy that contributed to inflation’s surge to a multi-decade high. This is all the more inexcusable, considering that the Federal Reserve allowed the broad money supply to increase by 40 percent in 2020 and 2021. At the same time, it was fueling asset price and credit market bubbles at home and abroad through aggressive bond-buying activities. 

Fast forward to today, where we find that the IMF is cheerleading the Federal Reserve in its call for high interest rates for longer to reduce inflation. This is the case even though the Fed has raised interest rates by 525 basis points in the short space of eighteen months, and the broad money supply is now contracting at an unprecedented pace. It is also the case that even though the ten-year Treasury bond yields have spiked to 4.75 percent—their highest levels in the past sixteen years—signs of credit restraint abound.

Making the IMF’s acquiescence to the Fed’s currently hawkish monetary policy stance all the more difficult to understand is the fact that the IMF’s own Global Financial Stability Report (GSFR) highlights the point that financial stability risks remain elevated and risks to global growth are skewed to the downside. Among the worrying factors that it notes are the erosion in the capacity of borrowers to repay debt as rate hikes have continued, the challenges faced by the commercial real estate sector as a result of low occupancy rates with defaults on the rise, the worsening of non-bank financial institution vulnerabilities as a result of high-interest rates, and the fact that an increasing share of small and mid-sized firms in both advanced and emerging market economies have barely enough cash to pay their interest expenses.

It seems to have escaped the IMF’s notice that the recent sharp spike in Treasury bond yields could heighten the chances of a financial crisis next year. It could do so by further undermining the banks’ balance sheet position by causing further losses on their bond portfolios. This would seem to be the last thing the banks need when they are likely to be hit by a wave of defaults, especially on their commercial real estate lending.

The IMF also has forgotten that monetary policy operates with long lags. Based on past experience, it is only now that we should expect the full impact of the Fed’s earlier tightening to occur. This would suggest that the prudent course for the Fed and other central banks would be to pause and wait to see the full effect of their earlier aggressive monetary policy tightening. Yet the IMF is urging continued monetary policy hawkishness.

If the IMF again fails in its surveillance function of U.S. economic policies, it will do serious damage to its credibility. After all, the United States is the world's largest economy, and an unnecessarily deep economic recession to regain inflation control will send seismic reverberations throughout the world economy.

Desmond Lachman is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and was previously a deputy director in the International Monetary Fund’s Policy Development and Review Department and the chief emerging-market economic strategist at Salomon Smith Barney.

Image: Shutterstock. 

In the early weeks of the war, peace was still possible before the unimaginable loss of life, the devastation of infrastructure, and the loss of land in Ukraine. That peace was possible three times: in talks in Belarus, in talks mediated by then-Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennet, and, most promisingly, in talks in Istanbul. In all three, the war could have been ended on terms that satisfied Ukraine. In all three, Ukraine was willing to renounce membership in NATO. And, in all three, the United States blocked the negotiations.

Though the negotiated terms satisfied Ukrainian goals, they did not satisfy U.S. goals. The United States told Ukraine to go on fighting instead of negotiating and promised weapons, training, and intelligence for “as long as it takes.” The three-day war that might have ended in Belarus and the weeks-long war that produced a signed tentative agreement in Istanbul became a now year-and-a-half-long war.

The United States pushed Ukraine into a disastrous counteroffensive, knowing that it “didn’t have all the training or weapons—from shells to warplanes—that it needed to dislodge Russian forces." Instead, U.S. officials counted on “Ukrainian courage and resourcefulness” and “envisioned Kyiv accepting the casualties.”

There is a dawning realization in the political West that the war is not going to end with a military victory for Ukraine and that it is not going to end by attaining the goals necessary to force Russia to concede Ukraine’s key demands at the negotiating table. It is long past the moment when Ukraine is in the best position “on the battlefield [to] be in the strongest possible position at the negotiating table.”

Hundreds of thousands of lives and limbs after peace could have been attained in Istanbul, Ukraine will likely be forced to sign an agreement on the same terms—but worse—than it could have signed in Istanbul. As in Istanbul, Ukraine will still have to guarantee neutrality, but they will do so without at least parts of the Donbas, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia, all of which they could have kept at that time.

Since Istanbul, Ukraine has suffered the loss of lives, limbs, and land only to sign an agreement that they were willing to sign at the start of the war. That is the tragedy. The whole war was fought to end the same way it could have ended weeks into the war, but on worse territorial terms and with horrendously greater loss of life.

The war’s beginning was Russia’s fault; the war’s end will be America’s.

Ted Snider is a regular columnist on U.S. foreign policy and history at Antiwar.com and The Libertarian Institute. He is also a frequent contributor to Responsible Statecraft and The American Conservative, as well as other outlets.

Image: Shutterstock. 

There has been much speculation about an imminent U.S.-China rapprochement. President Joe Biden predicted an approaching “thaw” in U.S.-China relations that would open the path to a better relationship. This year, the Biden administration has sent a series of top officials to China to actualize the thaw. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, and Climate Envoy John Kerry visited the Middle Kingdom quickly to demonstrate their commitment to this new direction. It remains to be seen if the Biden administration can convince Beijing to engage in substantive cooperation. 

At this point, it has become a cliché to say that Beijing’s decision-making process is a black box. Nevertheless, the aphorism holds. The conversations and policy debates within Zhongnanhai (the compound that houses the CCP leadership) remain a mystery to outside observers. The best approach to predicting how China will respond to these new advances is by understanding their recent behavior. A study of recent events demonstrates that the most significant barrier for Washington is China’s fundamentally different approach to cooperation. 

The Two Lists & Three Bottom Lines

The Biden administration has consistently aimed to create space for areas of cooperation even when the U.S.-China relationship was at its most tense. In 2021, Deputy Secretary Wendy Sherman went to China to defend U.S. interests. Even in a tense conversation, Sherman stressed the importance of cooperation, highlighting climate change, drug control, and international and regional hotspot issues, as well as strengthening crisis management capacity and general conflict avoidance. The Chinese response was less than enthusiastic.

Rather than embrace Sherman’s proposals, her Chinese counterparts countered with what has been called the “two lists” and “three bottom lines.” The two lists primarily include an inventory of grievances the United States must “unconditionally” reverse to be rewarded with good relations with China. The demands included ending restrictions on Confucius Institutes, withdrawing the extradition request for Meng Wanzhou, and lifting visa restrictions for CCP members, government officials, and students. 

The more concerning elements came from the “three bottom lines,” the first being: “The U.S. must not challenge, slander, or even attempt to subvert the path and system of socialism with Chinese characteristics—this is a core interest.” It is essential to understand that socialism with Chinese characteristics is not just China’s development strategy but contains fundamental revisionist and coercive elements that undermine U.S. interests. If the United States adhered to this bottom line, it would almost certainly entail abandoning U.S. assistance to Taiwan and American support for allies and partners in the region. 

In the context of the two lists and three bottom lines, Foreign Minister Wang Yi put it more bluntly when he stated, “The U.S. side wants the climate change cooperation to be an ‘oasis’ of China-U.S. relations. However, if the oasis is all surrounded by deserts, then sooner or later, the ‘oasis’ will be desertified. China-U.S. cooperation on climate change cannot be divorced from the overall situation of China-U.S. relations.”

These demands indicate a larger pattern of how Beijing sees engagement with Washington. Beijing prefers a rigid linkage between the two spheres of cooperation and competition. This experience shows that unless Washington is ready to surrender in the great-power competition, China will not cooperate even on issues of converging interests.

The Four To-Do Lists

A year later, the Biden administration once again sought to delink areas of cooperation with Beijing and lower tensions. When Foreign Minister Wang Yi met with Secretary Blinken in Bali, Yi did not present Blinken with their original two lists and three bottom lines but instead gave Blinken a new configuration known as the “four to-do lists.” While never fully released, the first three lists were screeds against American “wrongdoings” and other perceived transgressions. However, the fourth list seemed to offer the administration some hope. It was a list of eight areas of mutual cooperation, including climate change, public health, and people-to-people exchange. Even if this list was to be a bright light, the follow-through on the Chinese side has been non-existent.

However, the U.S.-China meetings in Bali were a turning point in the relationship. Since Bali, China has abandoned these lists. However, this should not be mistaken for a shift in policy but rather a shift in tactics and rhetoric. U.S.-China cooperation is still essentially non-existent because China does not value delinking cooperation. Despite the recent high-level visits, the United States and China have failed to produce substantive cooperation.

U.S.-China Crisis Hotline

Even though China’s list diplomacy has primarily stopped and its rhetoric has cooled, its approach has not changed. How Beijing has handled the U.S.-China hotline and other critical communication channels is a good illustration. Crisis hotlines have been around for some time. The goal is to provide a quick and direct line of communication for policymakers to avoid misunderstandings and reduce tensions. During the Cold War, crisis communications were a reasonably reliable way for the United States and the Soviet Union to communicate during crises. These were never a means for ending rivalries or resolving disputes but simply a mechanism to manage competition. While not a form of diplomacy like the previous examples, China’s stance on this form of communication demonstrates its broader approach to cooperation. 

Initially formed in 2008, the U.S.-China hotline now lies dormant. When the Biden administration decided to shoot down the Chinese spy balloon that entered U.S. airspace earlier this year, Defense Department officials called the hotline to communicate with the Chinese military. The Chinese refused to pick up the phone. Moreover, the Chinese military has refused over a dozen meeting requests from the United States at multiple levels since 2021. The most recent rejection came this summer when Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin sought a meeting with Chinese Defense Minister Li Shangfu. Blinken pushed to establish a direct military line of communication between Washington and Beijing, and President Xi Jinping flatly rejected the initiative. 

Like the other examples, the Chinese have said they will resume crisis communications when the United States has “created a proper atmosphere.” While crisis hotlines are more of a tool used during competition and less of an area of explicit cooperation like climate change or global pandemics, this example still indicates how Beijing approaches working with Washington. Crisis hotlines do not require China to sacrifice any national interests. All the Biden administration seeks is that they answer the phone. China’s reluctance to engage in an area vital to managing competition demonstrates that these two countries’ approaches to cooperation are far apart.

The Australian Example

This fundamental difference in approaches to cooperation ultimately explains why the recent visits to China were disappointing. However, this does not mean U.S.-China relations will enter a doom cycle. The China-Australia case might illuminate how the United States should approach this dilemma.

In 2020, China slapped Australia with a laundry list of tariffs for criticizing China. These tariffs were imposed on critical Australian exports like coal, wine, red meat, timber, and an 80 percent tax on barely exports—a severe hit to the Australian economy. Similar to the American experience, as Australia sought to engage with China, Australian officials were hit with a list totaling fourteen demands before cooperation could proceed. Even when Beijing welcomed the change in Canberra from the conservative-controlled Scott Morrison government to the new Labor-dominated Anthony Albanese premiership, China still issued four new demands. In response, Prime Minister Albanese also emphasized cooperation by stating, “We will cooperate with China where we can… But we will stand up for Australia’s interests when we must.” China’s demands failed to soften Canberra.

Fast forward to today. China has announced it is lifting its harsh barley tariffs, and negotiations are underway to remove a 218 percent tariff on Australian wine. Since 2020, Australia has met none of China’s demands. Instead, it released a defense review calling for the modernization of the Australian Defence Force and entered into a new security partnership with the United States and the United Kingdom (AUKUS).

The explanation for China’s reversal is simple. Canberra demonstrated its resolve by boosting competitive policies and illustrating that Chinese coercion will not get Australia to the negotiating table. When Canberra decided to take a firm stance, Beijing adjusted. As the United States continues to think about diplomacy with China, Washington should recognize the precedence set by this scenario. 

The Dead End of Engagement

Every administration has sought engagement with China, with varying levels of success. High-level diplomatic visits can have utility. The United States should continue meeting and talking with Chinese officials. Normalizing communication and dialogue can help prevent a complete deterioration of relations, and it costs the United States very little. It can help manage our competition and stymie a misunderstanding. While the United States and China have accomplished no concrete initiatives, they have established several consultation mechanisms that might grease the wheels of further engagement. However, policymakers must be clear-eyed about how the Chinese view engagement and cooperation. Since the Biden administration has taken office, U.S. officials have made several overtures to Beijing about cooperation. China’s unwillingness to delink areas of competition from realms of cooperation and its demand for unconditional concessions is the most significant barrier to a U.S.-China rapprochement. Beijing’s recent behavior demonstrates that China is not interested in reciprocal reconciliation. Washington must not sacrifice our interests for a goal that may be unattainable.  

Connor Fiddler is a research assistant at the American Enterprise Institute. His research focuses on U.S.-China relations, U.S. alliance management, and Asian security. His research has been published in The Hill, The Diplomat, RealClearDefense, and American Purpose, among others. He tweets at @Connor_Fiddler.

Image: Shutterstock. 

Will North Korea give up its nuclear weapons? Probably not in the near future. However, it does not mean North Korea will never return to the negotiation table. Despite several denuclearization pledges by North Korean leaders and U.S. diplomatic efforts to guarantee the regime’s security, North Korea is unlikely to move to a complete denuclearization. North Korea has had several agreements with the United States, including the Agreed Framework in 1994, Six-Party Talks from 2003 to 2009, the “Leap-Day Deal” in 2012, and the Singapore Summit in 2018, but it has failed to implement those agreements.

One of the most challenging questions in U.S. diplomacy is persuading Pyongyang to implement the agreements. When we look at these agreements, we find that they have a similar pattern. A crisis catalyzed talks, which stalled for a considerable period but eventually reached a consensus. Nonetheless, when they reached the implementation stage, the agreements collapsed. The United States has been involved in diplomatic engagements with North Korea to de-escalate the crisis but primarily focused on intensifying sanctions and deterrence when North Korea conducted nuclear and missile provocations.

It is essential to understand this pattern when analyzing U.S. agreements with North Korea. In particular, the process of reaching an agreement includes two different phases: crisis and negotiation. What caused the crisis each time before the U.S. obtained a deal with North Korea? In what conditions and circumstances did the denuclearization dialogue proceed after the crisis? What factors led to an agreement on denuclearization with North Korea, and what conditions were agreed upon? The key issues here are the crisis in the process leading to the denuclearization negotiation and the failure of the implementation, finally leading to the agreement's collapse. So, it is necessary to assess the three-decade-long U.S. diplomacy toward the denuclearization of North Korea and its failed efforts through the crisis and negotiation phases.

This pattern may also emerge during the Biden administration. Even with Pyongyang’s hardline policy of “heads-on breakthrough,” this crisis may catalyze new talks with North Korea. Of course, it does not necessarily mean that there would be another agreement between the United States and North Korea. The Biden administration has not pursued any active North Korea policy to break out of this pattern. President Biden reiterated the goal of the complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula and described his North Korea policy as a “calibrated and practical approach.” 

However, it looks more like Obama’s “strategic patience,” a wait-and-see approach where Washington would not move until North Korea changed its course of action first. Furthermore, due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the strategic rivalry with China, the Biden administration lacks the time and interest to focus on North Korea.

The problem is that North Korea is not likely to engage the United States either. Pyongyang has recently recognized the return of the Cold War order in international relations and seeks to take advantage of it on the Korean Peninsula. This is the reason for Pyongyang’s efforts to improve ties with China and Russia. A crisis may become a catalyst again, but it would be difficult to get out of the old pattern. So, the stalemate will continue.

Jihwan Hwang is a professor in the Department of International Relations at the University of Seoul.

Image: Shutterstock. 

The Israel–Hamas war is a bitter reminder of the al-Qaeda attacks on the US on 11 September 2001, and America’s response to them. One of the effects of those events was that it strained relations between the domain of Islam and the West. The current war stands to take the world back to that paradigm, potentially spawning a new generation of jihadi or combative fighters.

Relations between the Muslim realm and the Judeo-Christian world have historically experienced ups and downs since the birth of Islam more than 14 centuries ago. However, in recent times, two events more than any others marked the start of a new phase in the rise of radical political Islamism and in the West’s treatment of it as a threat: the 1978–79 Iranian revolution and the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The Iranian phenomenon produced a radical Islamic government with an anti-US and anti-Israeli posture. The invasion of Afghanistan stimulated Islamic jihadism—as personified by the Afghan Islamic resistance forces, the mujahideen—to repulse Soviet aggression with a commitment to Islam as an ideology of resistance and transformation.

The US and many of its allies rejected the Iranian change as ‘fundamentalist’ and an anomaly but supported the Afghan resistance in conformity with their geopolitical preferences. They didn’t discern that their support of Afghan jihadism could eventually lead to the empowerment of a medievalist Islamic force, the Taliban, in Afghanistan and provide impetus to a range of other Jihadi groups.

Al-Qaeda’s 9/11 attacks moved jihadi Islamism to what was widely condemned as terrorism. The US’s retaliatory actions included intervention in Afghanistan, from where the attacks had been orchestrated under the protection of the Taliban, as part of a wider war on terrorism. Although US President George W. Bush and UK Prime Minister Tony Blair said that their target was not the religion of Islam per se but rather those who had hijacked it for selfish objectives, some other political leaders and opinion-makers in the West blamed the religion itself.

Al-Qaeda and like-minded groups were able to exploit this division to galvanise support among Muslims and engender new generations of violent jihadis. This was most evident in Iraq after the US invasion in 2003 and in conflict-ridden Syria, where the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria managed to overrun vast territorial areas and declare its caliphate in 2014. Islamic State’s politics of brutality and anti-Western stance brought the US back into Iraq, which it had left in 2011 after nearly nine years of combat.

The US and its allies didn’t succeed in uprooting the anti-Western jihadi forces in Afghanistan, Iraq or Syria. Al-Qaeda survived and franchised itself in alliance with the Taliban, whose defeat of the US and return to power after two decades of fighting in Afghanistan provided a powerful shot in the arm for kindred extremist forces. Similarly, Islamic State, while losing its caliphate, retained an ideological and operational capability to hit targets not only in the Levant but also across the Middle East, Asia and Africa as well as Europe.

Yet not all was lost. Efforts were made to repair the damaged relations between the Muslim and Western worlds in the wake of 9/11 and events prior to and after it. Moderate and reformist forces of Islam and their conciliatory counterparts in the West managed to build bridges of harmony and peaceful co-existence in the intervening period.

The Israel–Hamas war is now set once again to weaken Muslim–Judeo-Christian relations for many. Hamas’s actions against Israel, involving killing and kidnapping of civilians, are indefensible under international law and international humanitarian law, as is Israel’s retaliatory Gaza campaign, because it amounts to collective punishment of the 2.3 million people who live in the tiny, densely populated and totally blockaded Gaza Strip for the actions of a group from among them.

Israel’s stated goal is to destroy Hamas once and for all. This is similar to what the US set out to accomplish, but failed, with al-Qaeda, Islamic State and the Taliban. It prevented these forces from executing another mega-operation like 9/11, but it couldn’t wipe them out altogether. With the Taliban’s re-empowerment, they are revelling in the fertile grounds that have been provided for new generations of jihadis.

Whatever the ultimate outcome of the Israel–Hamas war, neither Hamas as a militant force nor the Palestinian struggle for freedom and independence will evaporate. The situation is likely to produce a more radical generation of Palestinian as well as Jihadi fighters with feelings of intense hostility towards Israel and its international supporters. As I have argued for over 20 years, the use of brute force may work up to a point, but beyond that a comprehensive political strategy is needed to deal with those aspects of protracted problems in world politics that defy military solutions. That conclusion is still valid.

Amin Saikal is professor emeritus of Middle Eastern and Central Asian studies at the Australian National University and adjunct professor of social sciences at the University of Western Australia, and the author of Islam and the West: conflict or cooperation?

This article was first published by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.

Image: Shutterstock.

On March 18, 2021, former Congresswoman Elaine Luria of Virginia criticized the Navy’s then-recently-released Unmanned Campaign Framework as “full of buzzwords and platitude but really short on details.” When promised a classified concept of operations, she added, “I think the biggest question I have [is]… it is a fleet to do what?”

Two and a half years later, the American public – soon to spend half a billion dollars on unmanned vessels – could ask the same thing. What strategic ends are unmanned vessels intended to serve? The Navy has yet to update the Unmanned Campaign Framework. The document promises all the right things (“faster, scalable, and distributed decision-making”; “resilience, connectivity, and real time awareness”) but provides little granular detail about the differential utility of unmanned systems across mission and warfare areas.

Nevertheless, unmanned vessels are receiving more attention than ever. The media frenzy surrounding Ukraine’s “drone boats” continues; the Navy’s Task Force 59 (responsible for testing small unmanned surface vessels in the Persian Gulf) gets the feature-length treatment in Wired; and a front-page article in the New York Times all but lobbies for more unmanned ships.

Perhaps a concept of operations for unmanned surface vessels is floating around in the classified world. But elsewhere, buzzwords still rule the day. Just weeks ago the Department of Defense announced its new “Replicator” initiative to deploy thousands of drones within two years: it will be “iterative,” “data-driven,” “game-changing,” and of course, “innovative” (variations of the latter appear 22 times in the announcement). Never mind that, in warfare, “innovative” is not always synonymous with “useful.”

Part of the problem is conceptual. The term “unmanned system” includes everything from a civilian hobbyist quadcopter used for spotting artillery in Ukraine, to the Navy’s as-yet-unbuilt “large unmanned surface vessel,” a tugboat-sized ship that is supposed to launch cruise missiles. This expansive terminology can confuse lay observers or new students of the subject. Unmanned systems have matured at different rates. Some have been thoroughly tested and proven their mettle in real-world operations; others are, at present, theoretical or even daydreams. The U.S. military has decades of experience operating unmanned aerial systems (or “aerial drones”), for instance. But the record of unmanned surface vessels – the focus of this article – is limited. Only two types of unmanned surface vessels have seen operational duty in the current era: Ukraine’s (decidedly non-autonomous) explosive-laden drones, and the U.S. Navy’s tiny “Saildrone,” a vessel with little current purpose besides visually-identifying other ships in a permissive environment. Despite these narrow use cases, the two examples are almost-unfailingly invoked in claims that a naval revolution is underway.

When the same few words, and the same few examples, so frequently justify a wholesale strategic pivot, policymakers and strategists should take pause. If the Navy intends to reorient its ways and means of warfare – and if the taxpayer is expected to pay for it – then Congress and the American people deserve a formal, public strategy document on the general purposes and risks of unmanned surface vessels.

The Missions of the Navy

The 2021 Unmanned Campaign Framework is less a plan than a promotional pamphlet. The Framework dedicates one page each to the Department of Defense’s four unmanned systems “portfolios” – air, surface, subsurface, and ground – an understandably brief introduction given the infancy of the technology and classification concerns. Because specific programs are prone to change, it is more informative to examine the promise of unmanned systems from the perspective of the underlying strategic motivation for their development. That context is a shift to what the Navy calls “distributed maritime operations”: a plan to field more platforms, in a more dispersed fashion, networked together to share information and concentrate fires, while keeping people outside the enemy’s weapons envelope, and sending more expendable assets inside of it. Unmanned ships, the Framework contends, free up humans for other tasks, reduce the risk to human life, increase the fleet’s persistence, and make it more resilient by providing more “nodes” in the network. They are also – the Navy frequently claims – cheap. The Chief of Naval Operations’ Navigation Plan 2022 also promises that unmanned systems will deliver particular means of warfare (e.g., increased distribution of forces) but again, without specifying the differential application of such means across mission and warfare areas.

The first step in determining the likely future distribution of unmanned surface vessel risk is projecting where those vessels are most likely to be used. Setting aside strategic deterrence, which remains the realm of ballistic missile submarines, the Navy’s core four missions are sea control, presence, power projection, and maritime security.

Forward Presence is the practice of keeping ships persistently deployed overseas, demonstrating U.S. capabilities and resolve, in order to deter adversaries and reassure allies. Unmanned ships’ putative “advantages” – that they are cheap, small, expendable, and don’t risk personnel – are decidedly counterproductive for this purpose. Deterrence and reassurance require convincing adversaries and allies that one has skin in the game, and risking an unmanned asset hardly compares to risking a destroyer and her crew. On the other hand, the Navy’s large and medium unmanned surface vessels, if ever successfully fielded (and there are ample reasons to suggest that severe challenges remain) might contribute to the credible combat power that deterrence requires.

Another possible argument is that unmanned vessels will free up manned ships for those specific presence operations where a human touch is invaluable (such as port visits), reducing strain on the fleet. But that raises a conundrum. For a ship to demonstrate credible combat power, it must be able to shoot. And the Navy has made clear that any unmanned ship with missiles and guns will be under human control. Particularly in the next few decades, when unmanned vessels’ maintenance and support requirements will be high, nearby manned ships will probably provide that control. Hence, while unmanned vessels could increase the fleet’s vertical-launch capacity – and therefore its combat credibility – they may also worsen operational tempo or contribute to higher overall costs.

Power Projection is the use of ships to fire missiles, launch aircraft, land troops, or provide logistical resupply in support of combat operations on land. The Navy’s large unmanned surface vessel is expected to serve this mission by swelling the Navy’s capacity to launch land-attack missiles. Destroyers and guided missile submarines already serve this function, but unmanned vessels will, according to their advocates, do so more cheaply and with less human risk. But since manned assets’ capabilities in this area are proven, and unmanned assets’ capabilities are not, the Navy must explain what happens if the new technologies fail, and the traditional fleet – perhaps prematurely shrunken or reordered to accommodate the unmanned systems – has to step in to pick up the slack. Unmanned vessels are not officially intended to “replace” manned warships, but a significant strategic imperative for their development is the Navy’s tacit acknowledgment that, given constrained budgets, it cannot achieve its desired fleet expansion with manned ships alone.

Sea Control is attacking enemy ships, aircraft, and submarines, so that the U.S. and its allies can use the sea for power projection or make it passable for wartime commerce. Its corollary is sea denial: preventing an enemy from using of the sea for his purposes. This is where unmanned surface vessels are really supposed to shine. The two biggest arguments for their value-add in sea control are intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR), and increased anti-ship missile capacity. There are also interesting emerging use cases, such as swarming electromagnetic warfare.

Small unmanned surface vessels, like the Saildrone – the argument goes – can loiter in large numbers, for weeks at a time (using solar power), all over a battlespace, looking and listening for enemies. While such a niche case for surveillance can be useful, the problem is that maritime surface ISR can struggle to match the global access and persistence of space-based and airborne ISR. Even in relatively constrained areas like the East and South China Seas, the search areas are vast. Unmanned surface vessels cannot match the revisit rates of low earth orbit satellites when combing large swaths of the ocean’s surface. In the last few years, the vast growth in low-earth orbit satellite constellations (both commercial and government-owned) has further diminished the urgency and budget efficiency of meeting ISR needs with surface ships. Ironically, the Saildrone and similar craft may end up being more dependent on space, because unmanned surface ISR assets operating over the horizon will rely on satellite communications to send mission data back. As for airborne ISR (that conducted by manned or unmanned aircraft), small unmanned surface vessels deployed en masse can exceed the persistence of aircraft, but at the cost of sensor reach: these vessels’ low “height of eye” inherently limits the range of their electro-optical sensors.

That relates to the second role unmanned ships are expected to serve in the sea control mission: offensive surface warfare. As noted, the Navy has been explicit that any unmanned ship with kinetic capabilities will be controlled by humans. As such, these vessels cannot be compared to, say, a command-guided missile that switches to radar in the terminal phase. Any kinetic-equipped unmanned vessel will rely on over-the-horizon communications relay provided by satellites, manned and unmanned surface vessels, or airborne assets. But if the Navy expects a satellite-degraded environment, as is possible in a conflict with a peer competitor, then surface and airborne assets will substantially assume the relay burden (requiring far greater numbers of them). Considering the Navy’s stated intent that most unmanned assets be “attritable,” however, it remains to be seen how long such a distributed network would last before manned vessels must themselves assume the relay function, bringing them closer to the enemy’s weapons engagement zone.

Maritime Security refers to constabulary functions such as protecting commerce from terrorists and pirates and preventing illegal behavior such as arms smuggling and drug running. In such operations, small and medium unmanned surface vessels could technically conduct surveillance, issue warnings, or engage threats with small-caliber weapons while under remote human control. The latter, however, seems especially unlikely in practice. Maritime security is a peacetime endeavor, conducted in congested sea space among civilians. Accordingly, there is a high premium on positive identification of bad actors, and generally the goal is not to kill anyone. A human touch will be required – not just “in the loop,” but probably on-scene.

Another problem is that, if unmanned vessels are small and cheap – two of their most celebrated characteristics – terrorists and drug runners may be able to disable them quite easily. Saildrone, therefore, adds most value for maritime security ISR under the following narrow set of conditions: when no aviation assets, satellite coverage, or allied coast guards are available; manned ships or shore facilities are within communications range; it is sunny, or enough sunny days have recently passed to keep batteries charged; and the targets of surveillance are incapable of shooting at, or (as with Iran in 2022), attempting to capture the drone monitoring them from within visual range.

The Risks of Concentration

Most contemporary Navy ships can be used for a variety of the missions delineated above. Destroyers can be used for power projection, sea control, presence, and maritime security; aircraft carriers can be used for all of those; amphibious assault ships are best for power projection and presence but can readily support maritime security. None of this is true for any unmanned vessel – not any in production, and none even in the design phase. A large unmanned surface vessel will have one purpose: to support power projection. Medium unmanned surface vessels will have two purposes: to contribute to sea control and maritime security.

Multi-mission capability, however, is not necessarily the goal. Unmanned assets, proponents argue, will not replace manned ships, but rather augment them as part of a “hybrid fleet.” The Navy expects a force structure that is 40 percent unmanned by 2050, although that does not mean that each naval mission area will be 40 percent unmanned. Some missions will rely more heavily on unmanned platforms than others will. This means the risks of unmanned vessels will not be evenly distributed across the Navy’s missions.

In general, we can forecast that unmanned vessels will fall out of operation (in peacetime) or attrite more quickly (in wartime) than manned ships for two reasons. First, the technology is immature and likely to remain so for a long time; currently, unmanned vessels are prone to inherent hull, mechanical, and electrical casualties, and cyber vulnerabilities. In brief, persistence is these vessels’ greatest challenge (and one the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is attempting to solve). Unmanned vessels may be required to keep station for weeks or months, in contrast to aerial drones’ persistence times, which are measured in hours. The longer unmanned surface vessels are at sea without maintenance, the greater their chance of routine equipment failure that either requires remote troubleshooting or on-scene repair. The former incurs both electromagnetic targeting and cyber risk. Second, unmanned vessels are explicitly designed to be less survivable, or “expendable” in the words of proponents.

The New York Times feature article mentioned previously illustrates the problem. It observes that the Navy has not scaled the success of Saildrone by integrating larger unmanned surface vessels into the fleet. This failure is attributable, the article argues, to bureaucratic inertia and industry capture. Missing from the discussion is the fact that the hull, mechanical, and electrical solutions required to field a 2000-ton medium unmanned surface vessel (especially one capable of persistent operations) are an order of magnitude more complex than those required for the 14-ton Saildrone. The propulsion requirements alone, let alone combat systems, place the former decades behind the latter in technological maturity. It is therefore nearly guaranteed that by 2030, for instance – even if the Navy has increased the overall percentage of unmanned vessels in its force structure – the Navy will not be able to have significant numbers of unmanned vessels in key mission areas.

Accordingly, the Navy must assess concentration risk: what happens when certain missions, but also warfare areas within those mission areas, degrade at different rates due to the differential survivability of manned versus unmanned assets. As a thought experiment, let us assume the Navy hits its 40 percent unmanned target. However, because Saildrones are far less technically complex, and far cheaper, than large unmanned surface vessels, the future fleet has more of the former than the latter. That future fleet would therefore be more reliant on unmanned assets for maritime security than for presence. Suppose, then, that China executes a successful cyber attack against a network of Saildrones; suddenly the maritime security mission is compromised, and the Navy must draw on its manned assets to support it – at the expense of the presence mission.

Sound unrealistic? Ukraine recently hacked Iranian-made drones used by Russia; during the Solar Winds hack, malicious code was delivered via legitimate code process; and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s satellite network was hacked on at least one known occasion. And these are only some of the reasons why any unmanned asset with external communications capability must be assumed as cyber-vulnerable by default.

Beware Innovation for Innovation’s Sake

It should make the hairs stand up on the back of one’s neck when a new capability is described as simultaneously cheaper and more effective; when dozens of articles use the same buzzwords; when strategy documents are heavy on sweeping generalizations and light on detail; when the claim that technology will “mature” is delivered as a certainty; when “innovative” is treated as synonymous with “useful;” or when the same few empirical examples appear in every article on a subject. All of these are present in spades in media coverage of unmanned vessels.

If the U.S. Navy is to embark on a costly project with uncertain chances of success, it owes Congress and the American people a better Unmanned Campaign Framework, or an unclassified concept of operations that disaggregates the role of unmanned ships across the Navy’s various missions, and the warfare areas that comprise them. Such a concept must be honest about concentration risk and suggest ways to mitigate it. And Congress, which has already begun to take a deeper interest in unmanned platforms, should hold the Navy to account.

Jonathan Panter is a Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science at Columbia University. His dissertation examines the strategic logic of U.S. Navy forward presence. Prior to attending Columbia, he served as a Surface Warfare Officer in the U.S. Navy.

The author thanks Anand Jantzen and Ian Sundstrom for comments on an earlier draft of this article.

This article was first published by CIMSEC.

Image: DVIDS.

U.S. President Joe Biden’s decision to travel to an active war zone and the scene of an unfolding humanitarian crisis spoke volumes, even before his arrival.

The White House has stated that Biden’s purpose is to “demonstrate his steadfast support for Israel” after Hamas’ “brutal terrorist attack” on Oct. 7, 2023. But Israel wasn’t meant to be his only stop.

The president was also scheduled to travel to Amman, Jordan, to meet with Jordanian King Abdullah II, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. However, the meeting was canceled with Biden already en route to Israel.

The trip is a bold but risky move, a carefully orchestrated display of Biden’s belief that the United States should take an active leadership role in global affairs. It is a strategy Biden has used before, most notably in his February 2023 surprise visit to Ukraine.

As a scholar of U.S. presidential rhetoric and political communication, I have spent the past decade studying how chief executives use their international travels to reach audiences at home and abroad. I see clear parallels between Biden’s trip and similar actions by other presidents to extend American influence on the world stage.

A paramount duty

Prior to 1906, no U.S. president had ever traveled abroad while in office. A long-standing tradition held that the U.S. had left the trappings of monarchy behind, and that it was much more appropriate for chief executives to travel domestically, where Americans lived and worked.

President Theodore Roosevelt, who had an expansive view of presidential power, bemoaned what he called this “ironclad custom” and ultimately bucked it. In November 1906, Roosevelt visited the Panama Canal Zone and posed at the controls of a giant steam shovel to shore up public support for constructing the canal. Beyond pushing this megaproject forward, the trip enabled Roosevelt to see and be seen on the international stage.

Other presidents followed suit as the U.S. began to take a more active role in global affairs. Just before Woodrow Wilson departed for the 1919 Paris Peace Conference at Versailles, where world leaders convened to set the terms for peace after World War I, he stated in his annual message to Congress that it was his “paramount duty to go” and participate in negotiations that were of “transcendent importance both to us and to the rest of the world.”

During World War II, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt embraced this idea of bearing a moral responsibility to speak to, and for, both U.S. citizens and a global audience. Images of FDR seated between British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Soviet leader Josef Stalin at Tehran and Yalta symbolized global leadership – a robust vision that endured after the U.S. president’s untimely death.

Embodying US foreign policy

Going global quickly became a deliberate rhetorical strategy during the Cold War, as presidents from Harry Truman to Ronald Reagan used trips abroad to symbolize American commitment to important places and regions. By choosing to visit certain destinations, presidents made clear that these places were important to the U.S.

This is exactly what Biden no doubt hopes to accomplish through his visit to Israel. When he condemned the Hamas attack on Israel as “an act of sheer evil,” he also declared: “We stand with Israel.” Traveling to an active war zone embodies this pledge far more clearly than words alone.

And this is how Israelis have interpreted the visit. Tzachi Hanegbi, the leader of Israel’s National Security Council, described the visit as “a bear hug, a large rapid bear hug to the Israelis in the south, to all Israelis, and to every Jew.”

Addressing both sides

But Biden must also acknowledge the very real plight of Palestinians who are trapped in dire conditions in Gaza as Israel prepares for a ground invasion. This is no doubt the reason his team sought a face-to-face meeting with Abbas.

I expect that Biden will demonstrate U.S. support for Israel while also drawing a clear distinction between Hamas and the Palestinian people. And Biden will likely draw on his friendship of many years with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to urge moderation in Israel’s military response.

The home audience

Biden’s trip also has important meaning for U.S. electoral politics. A former chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Biden has long maintained that the U.S. must take an active role in the world. In the 2020 presidential campaign, he argued that Donald Trump’s policy of “America First” had left “America alone” by undercutting relationships with critical U.S. allies.

For Jewish voters, the president’s visit offers tangible evidence of an enduring U.S. commitment to Israel, especially after some far-left Democratic lawmakers refused to criticize the Hamas attack. And Biden’s willingness to condemn Hamas as a “terrorist organization” may also speak to Republican voters, who are much more likely to back Israel.

Defining an appropriate role for the U.S. in world affairs is certain to be an important issue in the 2024 presidential election, especially with active conflicts in Ukraine and now in the Middle East. Biden has consistently called for U.S. engagement abroad – not only in words, but by showing up in places like Kiev and Tel Aviv.

Allison M. Prasch is Associate Professor of Rhetoric, Politics and Culture, at University of Wisconsin-Madison.

This article was first published by The Conversation.

Image: lev radin / Shutterstock.com

The president of the General Assembly talks about the organization's possible next steps in the Israel-Hamas war.