The National Interest

China’s efforts to position itself as a mediator in Middle East conflicts are now open to doubt. Particularly open to scrutiny is Beijing’s lack of concrete actions following the Israel-Hamas conflict is now subject to scrutiny. This may have immediate and long-term consequences for China’s standing in the broader Middle East. Bridging the gap between rhetoric and concrete actions will be crucial in China’s role as a regional mediator.

In recent years, mediation diplomacy has emerged as one of the central pillars of China’s foreign policy objectives and practice, with Beijing deliberately positioning itself as a peacemaker in the Middle East region. This approach aligns with China’s broader foreign policy objectives, including expanding its global influence, fostering economic ties, and positioning itself as a responsible international player. Earlier this year, China brokered a deal between Saudi Arabia and Iran that many hailed as a diplomatic breakthrough. It signaled Beijing’s desire to be a diplomatic heavyweight in the Middle East—a region traditionally dominated by American power. China’s top diplomat, Wang Yi, said the country would continue to play a constructive role in handling global “hotspot issues.” 

Over the decades, many players in the global and regional arena have intervened, at some stage or another, in the Middle East region conflicts, especially the Israel-Palestine conflict, as peace brokers. The United States, the EU, Russia, regional powers (e.g., Egypt, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia), and major international organizations have all tried without noticeable success to broker lasting peace and security in the region. As the world’s second economic and great power, China, unlike the Western powers or Russia, carries no religious, political, historical, or colonial baggage, making it a suitable candidate to break the gridlocks in the region’s conflicts and to play the role of an “honest broker.” China’s involvement could offer a fresh perspective and potential contributions to peace and stability in the region. However, its effectiveness will depend on its ability to navigate complex and deeply rooted issues, gain the trust of all relevant parties, and avoid being seen as pursuing purely self-serving interests.

Beijing has been eager to become more involved in Middle East conflicts, especially the Israel-Palestine conflict. China has a long history of friendly relations with Palestine. Since founding the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1964, China has recognized the State of Palestine and actively supported the Palestinians. Beijing has supported the Palestinian cause in international forums, consistently advocating for a peaceful solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict based on the two-state solution. In 2023, China signed a strategic partnership agreement with the Palestinian Authority, underscoring its commitment to strengthening its ties with Palestine.

At the same time, China-Israel relations have evolved and grown. Today, they are especially noteworthy in economy, culture, academic cooperation, and tourism, and in 2017, they signed a “comprehensive partnership.” Beijing’s prime interest in Israel is its advanced technology, and it sees Israel as a world leader in technology and innovation in cybersecurity, bio-agriculture, and green technology. Israel’s geographical location makes it a potential node in China’s “Belt and Road Initiative.” For Israel, the attraction of Beijing lies not only in its vast economy but also because Israel seeks to diversify its export markets and investments away from the United States and Europe. China (excluding Hong Kong) became Israel’s third-largest trading partner ($21 billion in two-way trade), behind the European Union ($48.5 billion in 2022) and the United States ($22 billion in 2022). In 2021, China officially surpassed the United States to become Israel’s most significant source of imports. To diversify its foreign reserves, Israel added the Chinese yuan to its central bank holdings in April 2022 while reducing its dollar and euro holdings. The two countries are expected to conclude a free trade agreement (FTA) soon.

Over the years, Beijing has consistently sought opportunities to project the image of a peace broker in the Israeli-Palestine conflict through rhetoric and peace plans without putting real weight behind them. Thus, China’s mediation role is part of a carefully devised conflict-management strategy, which suits the country’s non-interference policy framework. This approach, rather than conflict resolution, has served Beijing well over the past several decades. Therefore, China’s mediation efforts in the Israeli-Palestine conflict mainly aim at constructive conflict management rather than conflict resolution. Beijing’s inability to back up its promises with concrete actions may suggest a lack of willingness or capability to influence the situation in the Middle East. In the long run, this persistent pattern might affect China’s image and credibility as a reliable peace broker. Beijing’s longstanding non-interference policy can sometimes clash with its aim to demonstrate its great-power status.

China’s Response to Hamas Terrorist Attack

On October 7, the Palestinian terrorist organization Hamas launched large-scale surprise attacks on Israel. Hamas had fired thousands of rockets from Gaza and sent fighters to kill and abduct soldiers and civilians. At least 1,300 Israelis were killed, over a hundred kidnapped hostages, including children and the elderly, and more than 3,000 wounded after dozens of Palestinian militants infiltrated Israel from Gaza by land, sea, and air. Israel launched airstrikes on Gaza; at least 2,600 Palestinians have been killed and more than 9,000 injured in the Israeli strikes. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared, “We are at war. Not an ‘operation,’ not a ‘round,’ but at war”, adding that “the enemy will pay an unprecedented price.”

The outbreak of violence between Israel and Gaza challenges China’s mediation efforts in the Middle East. Beijing has tried to position itself as a potential mediator in the region, and the international community closely scrutinizes its responses to such crises. However, the United States, the EU, and much of Asia, Africa, and Latin America issued statements condemning Hamas’ terrorist actions and expressing support for Israel. Beijing’s initial response to the attacks did not mention the militant group by name, instead calling for de-escalation, protecting civilians, and implementing a two-state solution. Its response was no condemnation of Hamas for a rampage that unleashed the killing of civilians and kidnapping of hostages, including children and the elderly: “China is deeply concerned over the current escalation of tensions and violence between Palestine and Israel. We call on relevant parties to remain calm, exercise restraint, and immediately end the hostilities to protect civilians and avoid further deterioration of the situation.”

The Foreign Ministry and Chinese officials continued to take this line throughout the week: “We call on relevant parties to remain calm, exercise restraint, and immediately end the hostilities to protect civilians and avoid further deterioration of the situation,” China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement last Sunday about the “escalation of tensions and violence between Palestine and Israel.” China’s permanent representative to the United Nations, Zhang Jun, together with the representative of Russia, prevented a formal condemnation by the Security Council against Hamas and said, “China condemns all violence and attacks against civilians in Israel and the Palestinian territories.” At the regular press briefing, Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said China “opposes and condemns acts harming civilians” and said the priority is to “end hostilities and restore peace as soon as possible.” 

Israel is disappointed by Beijing’s response, which expressed little sympathy or support for the Israeli people during these tragic times. Israeli diplomats in China have called for stronger condemnation of Hamas, “When people are being murdered, slaughtered in the streets, this is not the time to call for a two-state solution.” The current crisis raises the question of whether this would seriously impact Beijing’s role as the Middle East’s new peacemaker and its relationship with Israel in the longer term. Paraphrasing the words of Abba Eban, Israel’s legendary foreign minister, the “Chinese never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity to play the role of peacemaker in the Middle East.”

Before the Hamas-Israel conflict outbreak, China tried to present itself as a mediator in conflicts in the Middle East. Its weak response may expose its limited regional influence and undermine its honest broker image. Mediating effectively in an area requires balancing diplomatic principles of non-interference and demonstrating a commitment to resolving conflicts. The vagueness of Beijing’s condemnation of the terrorist attacks on Israel is consistent with its policy of non-interference in global conflicts. Beijing’s reluctance to condemn Hamas has drawn comparison to its response to the Ukraine war. There, China has refused to condemn Russia’s aggression or consider it an “invasion.” It also reflects the limit of its diplomatic efforts in the Middle East and reconfirms the impression that Beijing will not be a peacemaker. Beijing has little to do, and its remarks and actions show that the mediation diplomacy approach is limited.

Moreover, China’s response does not come as a surprise; Chinese diplomacy has long been risk-averse, and the spiraling conflict between Israel and Hamas puts its diplomats in a difficult spot, given its traditional support for the Palestinians, its rivalry with the US, and its relationships with Russia and Iran. To be sure, Beijing can successfully manage problems by brokering reconciliation agreements (e.g., Saudi Arabia and Iran). However, when it comes to conflict resolution, it is a very different situation. Thus, China’s role in the Middle East, especially as a peacemaker, will continue to be a subject of scrutiny and debate. Its ability to adapt its diplomacy to the evolving dynamics in the region and take a more active role in resolving conflicts remains a significant question for international observers and stakeholders.

Israel does not expect Beijing to resolve the longstanding conflict with Hamas. Still, it would like China to demonstrate more support, and it hopes Beijing could use its power to weigh and influence some Middle Eastern allies as well. Israeli Ambassador Irit Ben-Abba called on Beijing to leverage its close relationship with Iran to rein in Hamas by engaging in talks around the conflict. “We really hope China can be much more involved in talking to its close partners in the Middle East and particularly Iran.”

The Hamas-Israel conflict may also hit Beijing’s relationship with Jerusalem and the broader Middle East. China has long tried to adopt a balanced position by supporting Palestinian statehood while maintaining strong economic and diplomatic ties with Israel. Beijing has reasons to balance its relationships on both sides of the conflict, with its bilateral trade with Israel totaling some $21 billion last year, and more than half of its exports to China are electric components, including microchips. This trade with Israel is crucial as the United States urges its partners to limit the sale of semiconductor technology to Beijing. While Washington provided Jerusalem with sympathy and practical support and is sending aircraft carriers to the region to prevent Iran and Hezbollah from escalating, China’s lax response can have an immediate and long-term price. For example, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s planned official visit to China probably did not materialize, and the two parties will not likely conclude an FTA, which has been under discussion for several years.

More importantly, the intensifying great power rivalry created a highly precarious situation for future Sino-Israeli ties. Israel faces a complex geopolitical and commercial calculus, with new pressures on managing its national security and economic development. This complicates its efforts to maintain hedging behavior within certain limitations and forces it to choose between keeping the U.S. security partnership or strengthening its economic and technological collaboration with Beijing. Washington expects Israel, its closest ally in the region, to align with its strategic interests and positions in rivalry with China. The special relationship between Israel and the United States is rooted in shared values and deep and practical cooperation in every field, from military and security to diplomacy and commerce. In times of need, true friends reveal themselves through their actions. The Hamas-Israel conflict can serve as a lesson to countries in the Middle East thinking through their relationship with China. 

Dr. Mordechai Chaziza is a senior lecturer at the Department of Politics and Governance and the Multidisciplinary Studies in Social Science division at Ashkelon Academic College (Israel) and a Research Fellow at the Asian Studies Department, University of Haifa, specializing in Chinese foreign and strategic relations.

Image: Shutterstock. 

That the current war in the Gaza Strip poses a clear existential threat to Hamas and potentially to the entire Palestinian cause is abundantly clear. But the current conflict, Israel’s pronounced intent to wipe Hamas off the face of the earth, even if this means a months-long war, will have profound long-term implications for any actor with a stake in the postwar balance of power and regional order in the Middle East. Israel’s purpose and identity as a viable country for and protector of the Jewish people are at stake. But the vital interests of the entire Iranian camp in the Middle East—the self-described “axis of resistance,” of which Hamas has become a key member in recent years, are also hanging in the balance. 

Spearheaded by Iran—its primary supplier of military hardware, know-how, and technology—the “axis of resistance” mainly consists of the Lebanese Hezbollah, the Gaza Strip, Syria, Yemen’s Houthi rebel movement Ansar Allah, and multiple Iran-backed Shiite groups in Iraq. Together, they have gained critical mass as a coordinated and synchronized strategic community. In recent years, these actors have become a regional bloc, thinking in geopolitical terms and sharing the aspiration for an anti-Western regional order in what Iran calls “West Asia.” 

In addition to their quest to defeat Israel and Western powers from the Middle East, “resistance” actors from Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran share a similar strategic concept. In essence, the basic underlying logic of the strategy of “resistance” accepts that superior actors such as Israel, the United States, and Saudi Arabia will always be able to visit immense civilian pain on their countries. However, although these actors exhibit severe civilian vulnerability, their military apparatuses, command-and-control systems, and continued conventional second-strike capability remain secure. This is precisely the logic behind the reliance of the “axis of resistance” on vast stockpiles of stand-off weapons such as rockets, precision-guided missiles, long-range attack drones, and shore-to-sea missiles.

In the Gaza Strip, Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq, and Iran, these military capabilities are secured in underground tunnels and facilities—what Iran calls “missile cities.” In every one of these conflict zones, the “resistance” actors have harnessed these capabilities in the service of subjecting their superior adversaries to what they call “rules of the game,” deterrence “equations,” and “rules of engagement.” Significantly, although all these originate with Iran’s advanced military industries, the strategic lexicon and mindset of the “resistance” originates not with Iran but with Hezbollah. Indeed, when it comes to “resistance” as a coherent asymmetric strategy, the primary “laboratory” has been the Israel-Hezbollah conflict.

On multiple occasions over the years, Hezbollah’s long-time Secretary General Hasan Nasrallah, who is a key, integral part of Iranian decision-making, explained the strategic logic of “resistance.” According to Nasrallah, rockets and missiles are the weaker “resistance” actor’s means of offsetting the stronger side’s aerial supremacy. Thus, as long as the stronger actor’s offensive continues, so do the weaker actor’s rocket barrages continue to impact its own cities. As Nasrallah explained, ultimately, the stronger side might be forced to unleash a land invasion—something that is supposed to level the playing field. A military invasion is thus seen as a desirable outcome.

For the “resistance” actors, this very strategy is currently at stake, which was rightly perceived as having withstood Israel’s military might in several conflicts in Lebanon in the 1990s and the thirty-four-day-long 2006 Lebanon War. In all these conflicts, Israel fell short of inflicting a decisive military blow or otherwise impacting its critical vulnerabilities. In all cases, what Israel failed to accomplish militarily, it was also unable to accomplish diplomatically. This meant that in the day after, Israel, despite its immense military superiority, was deterred. As a result, it was forced to abide by certain “rules of the game” and effectively tolerate continued violence and Hezbollah’s accelerated military build-up. 

Hezbollah later actively exported this model to the Gaza Strip, where Hamas drew on its experience and adopted its vocabulary. Thus, the same phenomena have applied to Israel’s conflicts in the Gaza Strip since Hamas’s June 2007 takeover. Hamas is now attempting to deter Israel and subject it to “deterrent equations” whereby Israeli assaults beyond a certain threshold are retaliated against with heavy rocket fire on Israel’s commercial capital, Tel Aviv. Calling the prospect of an IDF invasion of the Gaza Strip “laughable,” the spokesperson of Hamas’s Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades military wing stated that “nine-tenths of the Al-Qassam army” were eagerly waiting to confront any invading army. 

In the years after the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war, Hezbollah has established itself as Israel’s primary military threat. Ever since that war, which Hezbollah cast as a “divine victory,” Iran provided it with many of its advanced capabilities in a way that has in recent years diminished the Israeli Air Force’s freedom of action over Lebanon. Hezbollah’s current military capabilities, and those of Iran as well, are now far more advanced. As then-U.S. Central Command Chief Kenneth McKenzie admitted in 2021, “Iran’s strategic capacity is now enormous…. They’ve got overmatch in the theatre—the ability to overwhelm.” McKenzie’s successor, Michael Kurilla, stated in 2023 that the IRGC “of today is unrecognizable from just five years ago.”

Hamas undoubtedly drew courage and inspiration from its cooperation with Iran and Hezbollah, which has increased significantly since 2021, and from its sense that the entire “axis of resistance” had its back. Hamas’s military spokesman confirmed that Hamas’s “level of coordination with the brethren in the axis of resistance had increased and developed in terms of mobilizing the efforts with respect to the future of the conflict.” Nowhere was this more evident than in a recent interview by Salih al-Aruri, Hamas’s second-in-command, who stated in late August that a “decisive” multi-front regional war with Israel was not only desirable but, in fact, “necessary” in “the near term.” 

Warning that the Palestinians had between two to three years before Israel’s right-wing government increased the number of Jewish settlers in the West Bank to two million, the Beirut-based Al-Aruri said that there is currently a regional “interest that there be a regional war…there are parties who are extremely active in this regard, and who are discussing this.” Al-Aruri concluded that if war broke out, “Israel would be dealt a defeat that is unprecedented in its history. We are certain of this. And it will be subjected to new realities. Its standing, the way in which it is viewed by the world…their own belief in themselves…and also those in the region who have hopes that Israel will serve as a guarantor and protector—all of this will change.” 

One week after Hamas dealt Israel what its leaders are already calling the worst catastrophe inflicted upon Jewish civilians since the Holocaust, Al-Aruri’s words ring more prescient than anyone would have given him credit for before October 7, 2023. In order to disprove his prediction, Israel will engage in actions and behaviors that will likely clash with its enemies’ vital interests, thereby increasing the likelihood that the current war will become far broader. Already now, they are on the cusp of a regional war. Whichever way things develop, the regional repercussions will be formative. In more than one way, this could very well change not only the Middle East, as Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has pledged, but Israel itself. 

Daniel Sobelman is a research fellow with the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs’ Middle East Initiative and an Assistant Professor of International Relations at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. A former Arab affairs correspondent for Haaretz, Dr. Sobelman has published extensively on Israel’s conflict with Hezbollah and the “axis of resistance” for over two decades.

Image: Shutterstock.

President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has come at huge economic costs. By conservative estimates, the Russian economy has taken a US$67 billion annual hit as a result of war expenses and the effects of economic sanctions. In the early stages of the invasion, some analysts put the costs even higher, at $900 million per day.

These war costs show no sign of abating. The newly released Russian government budget for 2024 calls for a 70% defense expenditure increase, an astonishing reallocation of precious resources for a war that some observers expected to last a week at most.

Despite the toll of war and sanctions, the Russian economy has not collapsed and seems to have proven somewhat resilient against being shut out of global value chains.

Indeed, if you were to tune in to broadcasts of state-run RT television’s “CrossTalk” with American host Peter Lavelle, you’d be reassured that hardly anyone notices “irrelevant” Western sanctions, with even some reputable Western economists claiming that sanctions are harming Europe more than Russia.

Certainly, Muscovite oligarchs can still stroll across Red Square to Agent Provocateur and the GUM luxury shopping mall to buy lingerie for their wives and perhaps mistresses, too. And almost 8 in 10 Russians report to pollsters that sanctions have not affected their daily lives.

But from our standpoint as experts on Russian economic history, it looks very much like a Potemkin village – a false facade that belies harsh economic realities, including unsustainable defense spending, a plummeting currency and rising bond yields. Meat and poultry prices in Moscow continue to rise, retail sales across Russia have dropped by nearly 8% since February 2022, and Russia’s aviation industry has plummeted for lack of spare parts and maintenance.

Such an economic hit was to be expected. As we show in a preprint study, imperial overreach from Russia in territories that are not its own has resulted in long-term damage to the Russian economy for over a century. More importantly, even during czarist times, rebellion in the modern-day lands of Ukraine against Russian rule led to the highest costs for the Russian economy.

Huge boost in military spending

Russia’s ability to seemingly absorb massive shocks since February 2022 is due in part to producers becoming accustomed to the milder sanctions that began in 2014 with the initial invasion of Ukraine and annexation of Crimea.

However, a larger driver of performance has been the Russian government taking it upon itself to try to keep the economy afloat by increasing its involvement in all sectors of the economy, nationalizing formerly Western-owned businesses and pumping money from the state budget into the military industrial complex.

This approach has continued with the Russian government’s 2024 budget, which is currently on its way to be rubber-stamped in the Russian parliament, the Duma. While mobilization of troops for Russia’s growing quagmire is moving in fits and starts, the Kremlin has proceeded with a full-scale economic mobilization. Expenditures on defense are forecast to be 6% of the country’s GDP, making up a full 29% of all Russian government spending, according to an analysis by the Bank of Finland, and with an additional 9% spent on “national security.” In contrast, social programs are a mere 21% of the budget. Compare this with the United States, where defense spending is 3% of GDP and 12% of all government expenditures.

Financial markets have reacted poorly to Russia’s most recent imperial adventure. The ruble’s turbulence is well known, once again breaking 100 rubles to the dollar on Oct. 3, 2023, but Russia’s inability to service its debt has been more under the radar.

For the first time since the Bolsheviks refused to honor the country’s foreign debt in 1918, Russia defaulted on its foreign currency payments in June 2022, and major ratings agencies stopped rating Russian government bonds.

At the same time, bond yields on existing Russian government debt – an excellent measure of fiscal risk – have been climbing almost continuously since the first invasion of Ukraine in 2014, rising to nearly 14% in 2014 and recently climbing to over 13%, an 18-month high.

Ponzi-like scheme

The combination of military aggression, stretched finances and battlefield stagnation are nothing new for Russia, especially in Ukraine. As our study shows, czarist fiscal management from 1820 to 1914 was based on a Ponzi-like scheme that funded land grabs and military expansion with government borrowing through bond issues, taxation of newly acquired territories and bond repayment by a government now overseeing a more geographically extensive state.

By 1914, Czar Nicholas II had bonds worth more than $155 billion in 2022 dollars trading abroad – by comparison, the value of British debt in 1914 equates to approximately $123 billion today.

Vladimir Putin’s handling of the economy since the early 2000s has been based on a similar pyramid scheme, we would argue. A combination of aggressive foreign borrowing and natural resource exports have financed foreign wars and domestic repression in territories of Russia’s near abroad: These have included conflicts in Chechnya and Georgia in the 2000s; Crimea and the Donbas in the 2010s; and the rest of Ukraine in the 2020s. Until this current round of aggression toward Ukraine, the outcome of these conflicts appeared to favor Russia, with its seemingly strong central government, military and economy.

However, Russia may now be at an inflection point. Historically, when Russia’s military was successful, it was able to finance both its war machine and industrialization.

Yet even past military success put the regime on very shaky ground that allowed small setbacks to threaten its foundation. Military reversals such as the stunning loss to Japan in 1905 or even the costs associated with pacifying troublesome territories such as in the Caucasus created more difficulties and risk for Russian bond markets and its economy. Indeed, unrest, armed rebellion and serf revolts in the far reaches of the empire raised Russian bond yields by approximately 1%. This risk was much higher than if such unrest occurred even in St. Petersburg or Moscow.

And perhaps most importantly, in Ukraine the cost of empire during czarist times was the largest, with each rebellion or bout of unrest in Ukraine raising Russian yields by between 3% and 3.5%.

With its newest defense budget going “all in” on its already faltering invasion of Ukraine, Russia appears to have learned none of the lessons of its past. Then as now, Ukraine and Ukrainian defiance constituted a grave threat to Russian territorial ambitions.

In 2024, that defiance just might prove too determined and too costly for an increasingly fragile Russian economy. And as in 1917, the consequences could be far beyond the control of the modern-day czar in the Kremlin.

Christopher A. Hartwell is Professor of International Business Policy at the ZHAW School of Management and Law.

​Paul Vaaler is Professor of Law and Business at the University of Minnesota.

This article was first published by The Conversation.

Image: kibri_ho / Shutterstock.com

Recently, concerns have arisen regarding Chinese ambitions to establish overseas military bases. These concerns hold particular validity in certain regions, such as Cambodia and Pakistan, where Chinese influence is significant, and the prospect of military facilities is a genuine cause for worry. In other cases, while we cannot rule out the possibility of Chinese base establishment entirely, it remains uncertain, as in Vanuatu and West Africa. However, upon delving into the geography and history of the Solomon Islands and the technical specifications of Chinese equipment, fears of Chinese base construction, in this case, appear baseless. This paper will first review the background of the relations between the Solomon Islands and China, the history of its civil war, and then analyze why China is highly unlikely to construct a base in the archipelagic nation.

Initially, Taiwan and the Solomon Islands maintained strong diplomatic relations. This was largely due to Taiwan providing substantial financial incentives to Solomon Islands politicians. These financial incentives allowed politicians to divert a significant portion of foreign aid funds for personal gain while still having sufficient resources to distribute among their constituents. The distribution of Taiwanese aid to regular Solomon Islanders was similar to American pork barrel spending and outright vote buying. Consequently, Taiwan enjoyed widespread popularity among the Solomon Islands population, except for the educated elite in Honiara, who did not benefit from Taipei’s financial support.

Unfortunately for Taiwan, China has been actively pursuing a strategy of isolating Taiwan diplomatically. China offered the Solomon Islands a significantly larger financial incentive than Taipei could match. Additionally, China promised to fund the same programs that Taiwan had supported. Consequently, after the re-election of Manasseh Sogavare for another term in office, he pledged to investigate the possibility of switching diplomatic recognition from Taiwan to China. However, midway through the investigation, which was staffed with individuals favorable to China, Sogavare abruptly changed the Solomon Islands’ diplomatic recognition from Taiwan to China without waiting for the conclusions of the already biased committee. This decision sparked two riots, one of which led to the destruction of Honiara’s Chinatown, not for the first time. In addition, the violence required the intervention of Australian, Papuan, and Fijian peacekeepers from the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI) to quell both riots.

Now is an opportune moment to delve into the history of the Regional Assistance Mission to the Solomon Islands and its relevance in explaining why the Chinese would be highly unlikely to obtain permission to establish a military base in the Solomon Islands, even if they were interested. During the civil war in the Solomon Islands, the country notably lacked a legally recognized national military. The conflict primarily pitted the inhabitants of Guadalcanal against those from Malaita. During World War II, some residents had been forcibly displaced from their land to make way for a military base, leading them to seek refuge in a different part of Guadalcanal. These islanders were also never compensated.

Additionally, people from the island of Malaita came to the island of Guadalcanal due to the economic opportunities created by the base. However, the people of Guadalcanal regarded these people as invaders. After bias against the natives by the people in government, the people of Guadalcanal started to rise against the government and, through the actions of the Isatabu Freedom Movement, forced Malaitians into the city of Honiara. However, the people in government tended to side with the Malatian community, and the Royal Solomon Islands Police Force often gave arms and assistance to the people fighting on the side of the Malaitian Eagle Force. The civil war persisted until 2003 when Australian-led intervention forces entered the Solomon Islands. This intervention was crucial in establishing a fragile but generally enduring peace.

This historical context is essential for understanding the local dynamics and sensitivities in the Solomon Islands, which could significantly influence decisions regarding foreign military bases, such as those thought to be sought by China, as few, if any, governments would be willing to recreate the same circumstance that caused a civil war.

Given this historical context, it seems highly unlikely that the Chinese would be granted permission to establish a military base on Kolombangara Island, the area of their supposed interest. This island is relatively small, with a population of around 6,000 people. However, it’s crucial to consider that the Solomon Islands has a total population of 800,000 individuals. If one were to relocate the inhabitants of Kolombangara Island forcibly, it would be comparable to the United States displacing the entire population of cities like Chicago or Houston. This situation raises significant optical challenges. Evicting people from an island to build a military base would have horrible optics, especially in a country that experienced a civil war partially triggered initially by the displacement of people from an island to construct a military facility. A decision by a democratic government to do such a thing could have disastrous results in the next election or could start another riot. Additionally, technical concerns and practical constraints would further complicate using Kolombangara Island as a viable base location.

Indeed, several practical issues with Kolombangara Island make it unsuitable for establishing a PLA Navy base, regardless of historical considerations. One significant limitation is the island’s port infrastructure. First and foremost, the pier is only approximately fifty meters long before encountering very shallow water (see yellow line in Figure 1). This means that no oceangoing PLA-N ship can operate from that port (see the red line in Figure 1). Moreover, there’s just one pier at this port, which severely restricts its operational capacity. In the best-case scenario, the Chinese could only base two small naval combatants at this single pier. Expanding the port would necessitate displacing local villagers, as there is a town near the pier (see Figure 1). Consequently, the island’s port facilities are inadequate for hosting oceangoing ships, and the limited docking space available would only accommodate a maximum of two vessels. These limitations render the island ill-suited as a PLA Navy base, in addition to the historical and ethical considerations previously discussed.

Image: CNES/Airbus, Maxar Technologies/Google Maps

While there is an old airstrip on Gizo Island, an island right next to Kolombangara Island, suggesting the possibility of using the Solomon Islands for ground installations or missile deployments akin to some of China’s South China Sea bases, there are more technical limitations. The airstrip on the island measures approximately 1,100 meters in length. However, the lightest aircraft in China’s inventory capable of carrying substantial equipment for a base and covering the necessary distance to reach the Solomon Islands, the Y-8, requires a runway length of about 1,800 meters for safe landing. Extending the runway might seem like a viable solution, but it’s important to note that this airstrip is on an island with limited available space. In the case of Gizo airstrip, for instance, extending the runway would necessitate enlarging the island itself, as the airstrip already occupies nearly the entire length of the island (see Figure 2). These technical constraints further complicate, if not eliminate, the feasibility of using Kolombangara Island as a potential military base.

Image: CNES/Airbus, Maxar Technologies/Google Maps

Given the Solomon Islands’ small size and low population count, Chinese engineering projects expanding the port or airstrip would not work because of the potential impacts on any individual island. If the Chinese build a base on the Solomon Islands, they will likely force the Solomon Islanders out of their homes. Even if they don’t demolish villages, mass construction will destroy the only local source of income, logging. Even if the construction doesn’t take up the entire island, it would be doubtful that the Chinese would want a logging company to operate close to their military bases. As a result, logging will likely stop, forcing the island’s residents to go live elsewhere and possibly even trigger a second civil war. 

The concerns regarding a potential Chinese naval base on Kolombangara Island lack historical, technical, and geographic merit. However, should China genuinely desire a naval base in Melanesia, its focus would more likely be on Vanuatu. Vanuatu already possesses a Chinese-built port capable of hosting cruise ships, which can, in turn, accommodate various types of oceangoing warships in the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN). Furthermore, Vanuatu is historically aligned with the concept of “Melanesian Socialism,” indicating a significant degree of ideological affinity between China and Vanuatu. Thus, if there are genuine concerns regarding the potential establishment of a PLAN base in the Pacific Islands, Vanuatu, rather than the Solomon Islands, should be the primary focus of such concerns.

Paul Weisko is a research fellow at the University of Haifa’s Maritime Policy and Strategy Research Center. He is a specialist in East Asian maritime security.

Image Credit: Chinese Military/YouTube Screenshot. 

Because of its unique national security challenges, Israel has a long history of developing highly effective, state-of-the-art defense technologies and capabilities. A prime example of Israeli military strength is the Iron Dome air defense system, which has been widely touted as the world’s best defense against missiles and rockets.

However, on Oct. 7, 2023, Israel was caught off guard by a very large-scale missile attack by the Gaza-based Palestinian militant group Hamas. The group fired several thousand missiles at a number of targets across Israel, according to reports. While exact details are not available, it is clear that a significant number of the Hamas missiles penetrated the Israeli defenses, inflicting extensive damage and casualties.

I am an aerospace engineer who studies space and defense systems. There is a simple reason the Israeli defense strategy was not fully effective against the Hamas attack. To understand why, you first need to understand the basics of air defense systems.

Air defense: detect, decide, disable

An air defense system consists of three key components. First, there are radars to detect, identify and track incoming missiles. The range of these radars varies. Iron Dome’s radar is effective over distances of 2.5 to 43.5 miles (4 to 70 km), according to its manufacturer Raytheon. Once an object has been detected by the radar, it must be assessed to determine whether it is a threat. Information such as direction and speed are used to make this determination.

If an object is confirmed as a threat, Iron Dome operators continue to track the object by radar. Missile speeds vary considerably, but assuming a representative speed of 3,280 feet per second (1 km/s), the defense system has at most one minute to respond to an attack.

The second major element of an air defense system is the battle control center. This component determines the appropriate way to engage a confirmed threat. It uses the continually updating radar information to determine the optimal response in terms of from where to fire interceptor missiles and how many to launch against an incoming missile.

The third major component is the interceptor missile itself. For Iron Dome, it is a supersonic missile with heat-seeking sensors. These sensors provide in-flight updates to the interceptor, allowing it to steer toward and close in on the threat. The interceptor uses a proximity fuse activated by a small radar to explode close to the incoming missile so that it does not have to hit it directly to disable it.

Limits of missile defenses

Israel has at least 10 Iron Dome batteries in operation, each containing 60 to 80 interceptor missiles. Each of those missiles costs about US$60,000. In previous attacks involving smaller numbers of missiles and rockets, Iron Dome was 90% effective against a range of threats.

So, why was the system less effective against the recent Hamas attacks?

It is a simple question of numbers. Hamas fired several thousand missiles, and Israel had less than a thousand interceptors in the field ready to counter them. Even if Iron Dome was 100% effective against the incoming threats, the very large number of the Hamas missiles meant some were going to get through.

The Hamas attacks illustrate very clearly that even the best air defense systems can be overwhelmed if they are overmatched by the number of threats they have to counter.

The Israeli missile defense has been built up over many years, with high levels of financial investment. How could Hamas afford to overwhelm it? Again, it all comes down to numbers. The missiles fired by Hamas cost about $600 each, and so they are about 100 times less expensive than the Iron Dome interceptors. The total cost to Israel of firing all of its interceptors is around $48 million. If Hamas fired 5,000 missiles, the cost would be only $3 million.

Thus, in a carefully planned and executed strategy, Hamas accumulated over time a large number of relatively inexpensive missiles that it knew would overwhelm the Iron Dome defensive capabilities. Unfortunately for Israel, the Hamas attack represents a very clear example of military asymmetry: a low-cost, less-capable approach was able to defeat a more expensive, high-technology system.

Future air defense systems

The Hamas attack will have repercussions for all of the world’s major military powers. It clearly illustrates the need for air defense systems that are much more effective in two important ways. First, there is the need for a much deeper arsenal of defensive weapons that can address very large numbers of missile threats. Second, the cost per defensive weapon needs to be reduced significantly.

This episode is likely to accelerate the development and deployment of directed energy air defense systems based on high-energy lasers and high-power microwaves. These devices are sometimes described as having an “infinite magazine,” because they have a relatively low cost per shot fired and can keep firing as long as they are supplied with electrical power.

Iain Boyd is Director at the Center for National Security Initiatives and Professor of Aerospace Engineering Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder.

This article was first published by The Conversation.

Image: Creative Commons. 

Israel has declared war on the Islamist extremist group known as Hamas after a surprise attack that began on Saturday claimed the lives of more than 1,200 Israelis. While conflict between Israel and Palestine is nothing new, this attack has been characterized as unprecedented in terms of both organization and brutality by media outlets and defense officials alike.

Hamas is the ruling party of the Gaza Strip – one of the two occupied Palestinian territories in Israel. But while a great deal of internet discourse thus far has painted this conflict as between Israel and Palestine as a whole, the reality is more complex than that.

Hamas rules over the two million Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip, while a separate and more secular Palestinian political party known as Fatah, an inverted Arabic acronym for the “Palestine National Liberation Movement,” rules over the remaining 2.7 million living in the West Bank. Technically speaking, Fatah is a political party within the Palestinian Authority that is recognized as the ruling body of Palestine.

The Palestinian Authority is the internationally recognized Palestinian government, Fatah is the political party in charge of that government, and Hamas is an extremist organization outside that organizational hierarchy.

WHAT IS HAMAS AND HOW DID THEY RISE TO POWER?

Founded in 1987, Hamas is a Sunni Islamist extremist organization that rules over the Gaza Strip and has significant political power within Palestinian territories. In 1993, Hamas carried out its first suicide bombing and was designated as a foreign terrorist organization by the United States in 1997. Other countries, including the EU members, have also designated Hamas a terrorist organization.

In 2006, elections were held for the Palestinian Legislative Council in the Gaza Strip, with Hamas candidates securing some 44.45% of the popular vote and Fatah candidates winning 41.43%. After efforts to hammer out a power-sharing agreement sputtered, factional fighting between Palestinians began in what is now known as the Battle of Gaza. After days of fighting and hundreds killed, Hamas forced Fatah out of the Gaza Strip and has not held another election since.

Formal reconciliation efforts between Hamas and Fatah started and failed no fewer than seven times between 2006 and 2018, with the Hamas-led Gaza Strip engaging in three armed conflicts with Israel during the same time.

THE PALESTINEAN PEOPLE ARE NOT A MONOLITH

Although tensions between these Palestinian groups have lessened in recent years, there remain significant differences in both the ideologies and methodologies employed by their members. Hamas, is an inherently Islamist organization that adheres to a strictly enforced religious law, while Fatah is considered more secular. Likewise, Hamas believes the only solution to Israeli occupation is armed conflict, while Fatah prefers negotiation. However, it’s important to understand that Fatah’s preference for diplomacy should not be seen as tacit support for Israeli policies toward Palestine, as Fatah’s leadership is open about its disdain for what they see as Israel’s repressive policy decisions.

To that point, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has called on the United Nations to curtail Israel’s military operations against the Gaza Strip and has expressed solidarity with the civilians being affected by the ongoing fighting. The Palestinian Authority has not condemned Hamas’ attack, but thus far, does not appear to have been involved in its execution.

Some Western analysts have gone so far as to suggest that Abbas and the Palestinian Authority find themselves on very dangerous footing due to Hamas’ offensive. One could argue that Hamas does not seek to remove the boot of Israeli oppression from Palestine’s neck, but rather, simply replace it with its own. Any success in this conflict would strengthen Hamas’ hand and potentially undermine the future security of Fatah, but siding with Israel – even with vague statements – could undermine Fatah’s credibility among its own people, who would see such an act as siding with Israel against them.

WHAT IS THE GAZA STRIP?

The Gaza Strip is a 25-mile long, six-mile-wide Palestinian enclave bordered by Israel to the North, Egypt to the South, and the Mediterranean Sea to the west. Surrounded by walls and fences constructed by Israeli occupying forces, the Gaza Strip is home to some 2.3 million people and is among the most densely populated territories in the world.

In 2007, a year after Hamas’ victory in Gaza’s legislative elections, Israel enacted a number of policies aimed at isolating the Gaza Strip and its new extremist government; these included strict restrictions on people and even goods entering or exiting the territory. Israel, as a result, has been criticized by members of the international community. Human Rights Watch, a non-governmental organization accused Israel of turning the densely packed territory into an “open-air prison.”

While several independent organizations consider Human Rights Watch credible, it is important to note that the group has also been accused of selection bias at best and “hostility and hypocrisy” at worst by pro-Israeli groups. This is a running theme throughout a great deal of discourse surrounding Israel and Palestine as both groups have historic claims over the land (with Israel’s dating back further, but Palestine’s dominating modern history), and both groups likewise being subject to grave human rights abuses, often at the hands of one another.

For modern Palestineans, this conflict began in 1948 with the establishment of the nation of Israel – which included the forced relocation of Palestinians from their homes. But to the people of Israel, the Arab world began this blood feud in 722 BCE, when the Jewish population was forced out of their homes by invading Assyrians, leading to centuries of repression and genocide for the stateless people that culminated in the extermination of six million Jews in the Holocaust of World War II.

And therein lies an example of the sheer complexity of the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas. Contemporary discourse is dominated by social media and news headlines, which have a habit of robbing complex topics of their nuance in favor of succinct “hot takes” and highly meme-able messages. However, conflict is rarely as simple as it’s presented online, and few conflicts better reflect the quagmire of intertwined human nature and geopolitics quite like the fight between Israel and Palestine.

Related: The US Intelligence Community has a new strategy for the future

DOES HAMAS SPEAK FOR PALESTINE?

It’s important to understand the distinction between Hamas – the governing party of the Gaza Strip – and the civilians who live under Hamas’ rule. For many Palestinians, Hamas represents the rock and Israel the hard place they now find themselves stuck between.

A poll conducted in June 2023 by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PCPSR) showed that about half of the Palestinian population in both Gaza and the West Bank politically supports Hamas despite the group’s restrictive adherence to the Sharia-based Palestinian Basic Law.

There is evidence to suggest that this support may be based on the repressive measures enacted by Israel, rather than on confidence in Hamas and its standing leadership, however. According to a 2021 report from the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, there are credible reports of a wide variety of human rights violations enacted by Israeli forces against the people of Palestine spanning years.

“Significant human rights issues included credible reports of: unlawful or arbitrary killings; arbitrary detention, often extraterritorial detention of Palestinians from the occupied territories in Israel; restrictions on Palestinians residing in Jerusalem including arbitrary or unlawful interference with privacy, family, and home; substantial interference with the freedom of association; arbitrary or unlawful interference with privacy; harassment of nongovernmental organizations; significant restrictions on freedom of movement within the country; violence against asylum seekers and irregular migrants; violence or threats of violence against national, racial, or ethnic minority groups; and labor rights abuses against foreign workers and Palestinians from the West Bank,” the State Department’s report states.

The 2023 report shows that 73% of Palestinians believe Hamas-run institutions in the Gaza Strip are corrupt, an increase of 2% over the same poll conducted three months prior. Just shy of 60% of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip say they could not criticize Hamas’ authorities without fear of reprisal.

However, despite concern and fear of Hamas leadership, 55% of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip believed an armed struggle is the only way to end the Israeli occupation, with only 21% believing negotiation could work. It is worth noting, however, that 21% marks a three-percent increase over the same poll three months prior.

While 38% of Palestinians polled said establishing an independent Palestinian state should be their people’s first priority, 25% highlighted internal corruption as the more pressing issue facing Palestine today. In other words, Palestine is far from a monolith, and Hamas should be seen less as the de facto voice of an oppressed people, and more as an extremist element of an internally fractured Palestine. But extreme as Hamas may be, there’s no denying the group’s influence and allure to those struggling under what they consider to be inhumane Israeli policies.

Alex Hollings is a writer, dad, and Marine veteran.

This article was first published by Sandboxx News.

Image: Anas-Mohammed / Shutterstock.com

As the Israeli army has stepped up its counteroffensive into the Gaza Strip, questions remain on how the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas was able to use bulldozers, hang gliders and motorbikes to conduct the largest attack in 50 years against the most powerful military in the Middle East.

On Saturday, Oct. 7, 2023, around 6:30 a.m. local time, Hamas launched upward of 3,000 rockets and sent 1,000 fighters across the border from Gaza into Israel.

Despite the scale and scope of the attack, ABC News reported that Israeli defense officials claimed to have had no specific warning that Hamas “was preparing a sophisticated attack that required coordinated land, air and sea attacks.”

Many political and military analysts have criticized Israel for its intelligence failure to anticipate the attack, but the success of Hamas’ surprise attack was an operational failure as well.

Over the course of my military career in special operations, I conducted hundreds of tactical, operational and strategic missions based on intelligence. Never once did I expect intelligence to be perfect.

In fact, it rarely was. I based my plan on the best intelligence available, but I also thought of every possible scenario that I could in order to be ready for anything the enemy might throw at me. It seems the Israelis didn’t do that.

The limits of intelligence

If the definition of an intelligence failure is “when something bad happens to you and you didn’t know about it,” as former U.S. Sen. Warren Rudman once described it, then the Hamas surprise attack on Israel was clearly an intelligence failure.

At present, no one knows why the Israelis were unable to detect the Hamas attack, and it may be many months before the Israelis can answer the question.

Historically, Israel has been perhaps the best government in the world at penetrating terrorist organizations, which are arguably the most difficult to infiltrate with informants.

Israel built a defense plan that relies on preventing rocket attacks, border crossings and early warnings.

But intelligence can only do so much. The other key piece of defense is understanding how your enemy thinks and operates. And there the Israelis also appeared to struggle.

Known as the Iron Wall, the 40-mile-long security barrier that separates Gaza from Israel was completed in 2021 at a cost of US$1.1 billion. It includes a sensor-equipped, 20-foot-tall fence, hundreds of cameras and automated machine gun fire when sensors are tripped.

But the wall was not effective against the surprise Hamas attack. Hamas was able to breach the barrier in multiple locations around Gaza and continue its attacks without much initial resistance.

Likewise, Israel built its Iron Dome, an air defense system, to protect its citizens from rocket attacks emanating from Gaza. Completed in 2011, the dome cost the U.S. and Israeli governments $1.5 billion to develop and maintain. Before the surprise Hamas attack, the defense system had a success rate of between 90%-97% of striking down enemy rockets.

The Iron Dome worked well when militants launched relatively few rockets, but it was less effective against the Hamas attack. When Hamas launched as many as 3,000 rockets into Israel in just 20 minutes, the system was overwhelmed and not able to respond. The quantity “was simply too much for Iron Dome to manage,” according to an analysis by the Modern War Institute at West Point.

Beyond intelligence

In my view, the Hamas attack was not particularly sophisticated, nor particularly innovative. At its core, the attack was a textbook military operation involving ground, sea and air attacks launched by one group against another.

It’s my belief that this type of basic attack is something that the Israels could have and should have anticipated – even if not on the scale it was executed. Given that the basic goal of Hamas is “destroy the State of Israel,” Israel could have developed a defense plan that was not reliant on intelligence that is inherently unreliable.

Ancient Chinese military theorist Sun Tzu stressed the importance of “knowing the enemy.”

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles,” he wrote in “The Art of War.”

The problem for the Israelis, and many modern militaries, is that they have become too reliant on intelligence instead of knowing the goals of their enemy and developing a deeper understanding of how they think and operate.

That understanding may not prevent the next surprise attack, but it can help prepare the military defense.

Liam Collins is Founding Director of the Modern War Institute, United States Military Academy West Point.

This article was first published by The Conversation.

Image: Creative Commons. 

On Saturday, the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas launched a land and sea attack on Israel along with a barrage of thousands of rockets. Rocket attacks are nothing new for Israel or its world-renowned Iron Dome air defense system, but as rockets continued to pour into the country, it soon became evident that not all inbound weapons were being intercepted.

In our modern upvote/downvote culture, we have a habit of robbing complex topics of their nuance, and air defense is no exception. The common perception that modern air defenses serve as something akin to a shield capable of stopping all incoming threats, however, isn’t reality. Air defense is an extremely complex enterprise, and even the best systems in the world can’t stop everything.

WHAT IS THE IRON DOME?

Israel’s Iron Dome is a mobile short-range missile defense system developed by the Israeli companies Rafael, Elta Systems, and mPrest Systems with a specific focus on intercepting the sorts of short-range rockets and artillery attacks often mounted by Hezbollah (from Lebanon) and Hamas (from the Gaza Strip). Its development started in 2007 and it became operational in 2011.

Like many other air defense systems, an Iron Dome battery is comprised of multiple separate components, including a battle-management system, a fire control radar array, and between three and four launchers, each capable of carrying up to 20 Tamir missile interceptors.

Iron Dome can intercept munitions up to almost 45 miles away. But distance isn’t helping the Israelis in this conflict. The Gaza Strip, where Hamas is headquartered and from where it launches most of its attacks against Israel, is approximately 37 and 47 miles from Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, respectively. That means that the Iron Dome often has less than 120 seconds to intercept an incoming munition from the time it’s fired. That’s an extremely short amount of time and requires constant vigilance and superb capabilities to counter.

However, the Iron Dome does not operate on its own. Instead, it makes up the lower-altitude portion of a three-system approach to Israeli air defense, with another system known as “David’s Sling” focused on slightly higher altitudes and longer rangers than the Iron Dome, and yet another system dubbed “Arrow” serving as a long-range defense.

Related: America’s new precision strike missile has China in its crosshairs

HOW DOES THE IRON DOME PROTECT ISRAEL?

Israel maintains at least 10 Iron Dome batteries for short-range defense against rockets and similar attacks. These batteries are placed strategically around densely populated areas and valuable infrastructure. Each battery has a publicly disclosed protective umbrella that covers about 60 square miles, giving Israel a total area of only some 600 square miles under the Iron Dome’s protective eye.

When the Iron Dome’s radar array detects an incoming target, it uses an artificial intelligence-enabled algorithm to rapidly determine its trajectory and assess whether to engage it or not. This is important, as Israeli Tamir interceptor missiles can range in cost from $20,000 to $100,000 each, but do-it-your-own rockets launched by Hamas regularly ring in as low as just $300 each, making each intercept a losing fiscal proposition in even the best of cases.

If the incoming target poses a threat to citizens or infrastructure, the system calculates an intercept point in the target’s trajectory and launches a Tamir missile toward that point, steering the interceptor toward the target via radar until it is close enough to transition over to its onboard infrared seeker for terminal guidance.

Israel’s claimed success rate with the Iron Dome is extremely high – often between 85% and 90%. Yet, this figure doesn’t mean that Israel intercepts between 85% and 90% of all rockets, mortars, or drones, but rather that it successfully intercepts between 85% and 90% of the targets it deems to be a legitimate threat.

Related: US has no plans to join Israel conflict, say senior officials

REACHING A SATURATION POINT

Israel’s Iron Dome may be highly capable, but no air defense system is invincible. Many have exaggerated expectations of what such systems are capable of, and as a result, see any failed intercept as a failure of the system itself. There are a number of limitations these systems contend with and one of the most prominent is their saturation point, something that Hamas took advantage of.

Air defense systems can only track, target, and intercept so many incoming threats at once before becoming overwhelmed. Their limit is called the saturation point. With thousands of rockets pouring in from Gaza, Israel’s Iron Dome batteries often reached saturation points that allowed rockets to pass through without being intercepted due to the physical limitations of the system itself.

Also, the Palestinian fighters have had years to study the Iron Dome and understand its weaknesses. For example, they could have calculated how long it takes for the Israelis to reload the air defense batteries. Taking advantage of the system’s saturation point and those windows Hamas pierced the Iron Dome and managed to get munitions through its umbrella.  

Nevertheless, at the end of the day, the Iron Dome really does live up to its hype – but no system, no matter how capable, can stop everything. And as Hamas terrorists continue to lob thousands of missiles and rockets into Israel following their surprise attack, the Iron Dome is often what stands between life and death for many innocent civilians.

This piece was written by Alex Hollings and Stavros Atlamazoglou.

This article was first published by Sandboxx News.

Image: ChameleonsEye / Shutterstock.com

The prospect of an Israeli military incursion into Gaza is worrying because of the massive civilian casualties that will no doubt occur. Israelis have every right to strike Hamas, which has established its headquarters and infrastructure deep inside civilian population centers, often beneath apartment buildings currently bearing the brunt of bombardments. 

This conflict is different from others in the past, not just because of Hamas’ unimaginable brutality but also because the United States is directly involved. Over twenty-seven Americans were murdered, and a dozen or more are feared kidnapped. The Biden administration has sent two aircraft carrier strike groups to the eastern Mediterranean, providing itself with policy options. For one, it is a deterrent to others tempted to join the fight, such as Hezbollah and other Iranian proxies.

Hamas wants Israel to invade Gaza; it is goading it to do so. From its perspective, the greater the number of civilian Palestinian casualties, the better it is for Hamas, as it distracts from its barbaric attacks on Israeli civilians and presents it with the opportunity and justification to kill more Israelis. Hamas perceives this as a win-win situation since it is willing to sacrifice countless residents of Gaza.

The Biden administration can intercede to create an opening that may result in a pause in the conflict that could allow the civilians in Gaza to get a respite. In collaboration with Israel, the President can call for a temporary cessation of the bombardment and demand for all hostages, Americans, Israelis, and other nationalities, to be released unconditionally within 24 hours.  

Such a demand will certainly pit the Hamas leadership against the population of Gaza. This is more the case with Israel demanding the evacuation of northern Gaza, a stipulation that will cause further civilian pain. Before the conflict started last week, polling suggested that most Gazans opposed breaking the ceasefire with Israel. Yet, Hamas is not a democratic body. Though many may be sympathetic to Hamas, which has ruled Gaza since 2007 with an iron fist, civilians are not responsible for the organization’s decisions, nor can they hold it to account in any meaningful way. 

At this stage, a U.S. diplomatic intervention that buys time and allows cooler minds to prevail, no doubt complemented by furious behind-the-scenes maneuvering, is the best possibility to prevent a catastrophe. The Israeli war aim is clear: the destruction of Hamas. A respite in the bombardment allows the Gazans to choose: either the leadership of Hamas agrees to leave, probably to Iran, or the war resumes. 

In other words, this may resemble the 1982 departure of the Palestine Liberation Organization, PLO, and its leader, Yasser Arafat, following Israel’s siege of Beirut. Arafat then ended up in Tunis and, years later, negotiated with Israel a peace deal. Hamas and Iran agree entirely: they both want the destruction of the Israeli state. Hence, Tehran is probably the only place in the world where the Hamas leadership can feel safe.

The Israelis may not be completely satisfied with a deal that does not end up punishing the Hamas leadership, but it is a compromise that will avoid many more deaths. The eviction of Hamas may also usher in a new era for Gaza and allow its citizens, aided by the international community, to make new choices.

Similarly, these events are going to transform Israel. The moral bankruptcy of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s leadership and its extreme-right allies has been exposed once and for all. The balance of power in Israel is likely to shift away from the right, the settlers, and the religious groups that have usurped the state and its institutions. 

Nothing is starker than the comparison between Netanyahu and his brother Yonatan, who died in the 1976 Entebbe rescue effort. One can argue that his brother sacrificed himself for his country, and “Bibi” sacrificed his country for himself. Netanyahu relentlessly pursued judicial reforms to protect his and his coalition’s interests to the detriment of other pressing concerns, leading to this week’s crisis. 

Israel, as in the past, will work things through. But, it will take time to untie Palestine’s Gordian Knot. This may be an overly optimistic prognosis, but it tops the other potential outcomes. Before one can start dreaming, the Biden administration has to follow through with the smart decisions it has made so far. It has earned Israel’s trust and deployed a formidable force that will deter others from joining. Therefore, it alone in the world can let in a ray of hope over a bleak region. 

Henri J. Barkey is the Cohen professor of international relations at Lehigh University and an adjunct senior fellow for Middle East studies at the Council of Foreign Relations.

Image: Anas-Mohammed / Shutterstock

Much has changed in the U.S.-China relationship over the past three decades as China has increased its global economic and political influence, built modern military forces, and grown to be the world’s second-largest economy. One thing that has not changed, however, is that Taiwan is still the most likely trigger of a U.S.-China war.

There are many irritants in U.S.-China relations, but very few things that would foment a military conflict. China and the United States will not go to war against each other over the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) economic coercion, spy balloons, U.S. restrictions on the sale of advanced technology to China, Chinese cyber-theft, repression in Xinjiang and Hong Kong, China holding U.S. citizens as hostages, China’s rapid economic growth, alleged U.S. attempts to subvert the Chinese government, U.S. security cooperation in the region, a Chinese naval base in one of the Pacific island states, statements by Americans that “hurt the feelings of the Chinese people,” or China’s nuclear weapons buildup.

The South China Sea deserves mention as a “flashpoint.” An incident between U.S. and Chinese ships or aircraft could escalate into hostilities. Generally, however, Beijing is maintaining if not gradually gaining ground, and this trend is unaffected by occasional U.S. “freedom of navigation” sail-bys. 

A war on the Korean Peninsula could result in Chinese and U.S. forces shooting at each other, but only if both sides took a series of wrong turns.

In general, three contingencies would cause Beijing to consider going to war. The first is the emergence of a situation that endangers the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) monopoly over political power in China and that could be neutralized by opting for war. The second is the killing of PRC nationals by operatives of a foreign government. Probably a large number; note that the bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade in 1999 by U.S. aircraft, which killed three Chinese, did not lead to U.S.-China hostilities. A third possible casus belli would be foreign seizure of what Beijing considers to be Chinese territory.

Two of these contingencies would apply to Taiwan. The narrative built by the CCP forces it to resist at all costs the permanent political separation of Taiwan from China, or else the party by its own criteria proves itself unfit to rule China. Faced with a choice between fighting a war it did not think it could win and acquiescing to Taiwan’s independence, the regime would likely see the former as offering the better chance of keeping the CCP in power.

Beijing also defines Taiwan as Chinese territory that would be “lost” if it became the Republic of Taiwan—particularly valuable territory, as Taiwan by itself is the world’s twentieth-largest economy.

For the United States, the most likely path to a war on the western rim of the Pacific Ocean is the need to defend a friend or ally that is under attack. Although not an ally, Taiwan is a U.S. protectorate, and U.S. ally Japan has a vital interest in Taiwan remaining free of PRC control.

There are at least three crucial variables at play. The first is Taipei’s cross-Strait policy—whether it remains cautious or openly drives toward de jure independence. The second variable is Beijing’s assessment of what actions by Taiwan would constitute intolerable movement toward independence. The third variable is China’s perception of U.S. intentions toward Taiwan: whether Washington is pushing for or trying to restrain independence. A final important variable is the cross-Strait military balance. Although the certainty of winning is not the determinative issue for Beijing, it would be easier for China to opt for war if the chances of operational success are high rather than low.

How Washington, Taipei, and Beijing manage the cross-Strait dispute will make the difference between a U.S.-China war probably occurring and probably not occurring in the near future.

Denny Roy is a Senior Fellow at the East-West Center in Honolulu.

Image: Hung Chung Chih / Shutterstock.com

In the last few days, the conflict between Hamas and Israel has reached a new level of escalation that has killed thousands of people, and the risk of more lives being lost is rising. Hamas’ Operation Al Asqa Flood has enraged and embarrassed the Israeli military and intelligence services. Now, Israel wants to make the point that it will never allow Hamas to take this initial blow as a sign of Israeli weakness. Immediately after Hamas’ offensive, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared war. Now a full-scale invasion of Gaza seems imminent. 

Israel’s military command has ordered Palestinians living in the north to evacuate to the other parts of the Gaza Strip within twenty-four hours. It dropped leaflets from the sky to warn people of new air strikes. Once Gaza’s only power station ran out of fuel, people had to use private generators for limited electricity. This has only increased the suffering of the civilians who are now torn between fleeing or remaining in their homes. Israel has imposed a new “complete” blockade from the border crossing and has refused to allow any humanitarian aid into Gaza until its abducted civilians are returned. Early in the fighting, Hamas boasted that it captured over 100 people in its attacks, many of whom are foreigners, including Americans. 

Israeli minister of energy and infrastructure Israel Katz stated that no humanitarian aid will be delivered to the besieged territory until Israeli captives are freed. 

“Humanitarian aid to Gaza? No electrical switch will be turned on, no water pump will be opened, and no fuel truck will enter until the Israeli abductees are returned home. And no one will preach us morals.”

Hamas has claimed that thirteen of its prisoners have been killed by Israeli jets bombing the densely populated area. It has also informed Israel that if it persists with its attacks that result in Palestinian deaths, it will “execute” civilian hostages. 

The Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades had warned this week that “every targeting of our people without warning will be met with the execution of one of the civilian hostages.” In a televised address, U.S. president Joe Biden confirmed that at least over a dozen Americans had been killed and others are currently in the hands of Hamas. The United States is supporting Israel in its war. Hours after Hamas’ multi-strike force hit Israel, the United States delivered munitions for the Israeli army and a naval strike group led by the U.S. Navy’s most formidable supercarrier,  the USS Gerald R. Ford, arrived in the Eastern Mediterranean. It is a message that Washington will defend Israel against its enemies. But will it endorse an Israeli invasion of Gaza that could lead to the Israel Defense Forces re-occupying the enclave? 

No safe passage for Palestinian civilians to leave Gaza

The White House National Security Council coordinator, John Kirby, had recently said that Israel’s call for civilians to leave Gaza so quickly is a “tall order, given how densely populated it is.” The Gaza Strip is home to a little over 2 million people. For many of them to survive the Israeli incursion into Gaza, there needs to be corridors for them to escape to. The only other country that Gaza shares a border with is Egypt, and that border crossing is still functioning despite being bombed by the Israeli Air Force. Washington and Cairo are reportedly in talks to open the Rafah crossing for American nationals and other foreigners. The Egyptian government has said it is willing to create a humanitarian corridor to supply food and medical supplies but has thus far rejected allowing a massive wave of refugees to escape into the Sinai Peninsula. According to U.S. secretary of state Antony Blinken, the discussion for establishing a humanitarian corridor is “ongoing” but “understandably complicated.” 

The United Nations has said that Israel’s order for Palestinians to flee from the north is “impossible” and cannot be done without “devastating humanitarian consequences.” It is calling for the decision to be reversed.

The war has now killed over 1,300 Israelis and 1,800 Palestinians with many thousands more wounded. Reports from Human Rights Watch assert that Israel’s military is using white phosphorus in its operations in Gaza, which increases the risk of serious and long-term injuries. 

The probability of an invasion is rising

If Israel chooses to invade, it may be a partial one. Israeli leaders may not want to take on the responsibility of re-occupying Gaza, as the country had removed all of its military and civilian settlements from inside the territory in 2005. Either way, an Israeli invasion would be catastrophic for the Palestinians trapped inside what has become the Middle East’s most dangerous warzone.

 A spokesperson for Hamas’ Al-Qassam Brigade, Abu Obaida, made it clear that Hamas is ready for a new phase of the war. He addressed the Israeli public and government by saying, "Since this morning, we have launched 150 rockets towards Ashkelon and 50 rockets towards Sderot. We also targeted Ben Gurion Airport.” More attacks are expected soon. It is becoming increasingly clear neither side wants to back down first. Yet, it should be understood that the longer the fighting goes on, the more innocent lives will lost. 

Everyone is working around the clock to see an end to the bloodshed before the situation worsens. The first order of business is to get both sides to agree to a general and permanent ceasefire, followed by humanitarian assistance and negotiations to release the hostages.

Adnan Nasser is an independent foreign policy analyst and journalist with a focus on Middle East affairs. Follow him on Twitter @Adnansoutlook29.

Image: Abu Adel - Photo / Shutterstock.com

If one were to imagine a Mount Rushmore of European Union (EU) bureaucrats, it would certainly feature the likeness of former European Council President Donald Tusk. Consequently, seeing Tusk’s face emblazoned across international media this week has been unsurprising. On October 1, he presided over a large pro-abortion rally calculated to kick off two weeks of adulatory media coverage before Poland’s October 15 parliamentary elections. 

The campaign represents a homecoming of sorts. Tusk served as prime minister from 2007–2014, becoming the first post-Communist head of state to win reelection in Poland. He departed for Brussels to assume the European Council presidency, and his Civic Platform (PO — usually now referred to as Civic Coalition or KO, after an alliance with smaller parties) lost power one year later after controversially agreeing to the EU’s migrant resettlement scheme. 

Since that time, Tusk and KO have watched bitter rivals Law & Justice (PiS) govern for two terms, often sparring with Brussels in the process.

Poland has changed dramatically during that time. The country’s spectacular economic growth is well known. Neither the 2008 financial crisis nor the COVID-19 Pandemic has halted this trend. The war in Ukraine has highlighted Poland’s role as a vital military and diplomatic force in Europe. After decades of emigration, Poles are returning home from places like the United Kingdom and Ireland. The Telegraph even called Poland “Europe’s next superpower.”

One can appreciate the country’s economic vitality by simply walking around central Warsaw, but the prosperity isn’t limited to the capital. Żyrardów, a city of 40,000 inhabitants about thirty miles southwest of Warsaw, offers a fascinating snapshot of twenty-first-century Poland. 

Built as a planned factory town, it was a significant player in the nineteenth-century textile and linen markets. Its importance declined by the world wars, and the communist regime artificially shored up its factories. By the 1990s, the town had become decrepit; trash, overgrown weeds, and broken windows characterized the townscape. 

The Żyrardów of 2023 is a decidedly pleasant place. Its center has been painstakingly rebuilt in distressed red brick to evoke the city’s economic heyday. Stara Przędzalnia (The Old Spinning Mill) is a former factory converted into a mixed-use complex of apartments, hotel rooms, cafes, and shops. The stunning neo-Gothic Our Lady of Consolation Catholic Church overlooks the city hall and a pretty town square. A government investment billboard notes the aim of “revitalizing the marginalized area of the City of Żyrardów by giving it new socio-economic functions.” Officials hope a proposed nearby airport will elevate Warsaw to among the major aviation hubs of Europe.

A statue of a pregnant mill worker stands before a restaurant in yet another restored red-brick factory building. She symbolizes the travails of Żyrardów’s workers and the city’s rebirth—and, one might conclude, that of Poland generally. 

Pro-opposition voices would claim Żyrardów owes its fortunes to European Union money, something Brussels has been increasingly willing to withhold. Pro-government figures would counter that the revitalization occurred precisely on the PiS watch. They might add that a similar exurban location near a Western European capital would be unkempt, unsafe, and unrecognizable to its former inhabitants. Ultimately, the two competing visions of Poland hinge on this debate. 

Onlookers could reasonably characterize pro-government campaign rhetoric with the Polish flag and the country’s unofficial motto: Bóg, Honor, Ojczyzna (God, Honor, Fatherland). During Tusk’s most recent made-for-TV march, the contrast in the opposition camp was vivid. The streams of EU, rainbow, and Ukraine flags might just as easily have been photographed in a Western European capital.

Opposition leaders also checked familiar rhetorical boxes. “We are moving…towards a Poland that is tolerant, diverse, European, and smiling,” said Rafał Trzaskowski, Warsaw mayor, KO deputy leader, and LGBT-issue figurehead. 

The campaign has been bitter and full of click-worthy controversies. Migration, abortion, celebrity activism, German neo-imperialism, and Vatican influence are just a few of the topics hotly debated in the Polish political sphere. 

PiS almost certainly will win the highest number of votes, but its ability to form a majority government is uncertain. KO already leads a coalition with the Left party and centrist Third Way in the Senate; polls suggest these three will obtain roughly 50 percent of the vote total. The right-wing Confederation party could combine with PiS to acquire a majority, but such an alliance is not assured; some have even called it unlikely. Warsaw and Brussels will be on edge until October 15, if not longer.

In Żyrardów, residents enjoy something of the good life for the first time in several generations. A Polish television feature on the city noted, “It’s possible to get the impression that time has stopped here.” Until the election result delivers the country from uncertainty, the advertisement is more apt than it knows.

Michael O’Shea is a visiting fellow at the Danube Institute. He is an alumnus of the Budapest Fellowship Program, sponsored by the Hungary Foundation and the Mathias Corvinus Collegium. He is a dual citizen of the United States and Poland.

Image: Shutterstock. 

International aid groups are warning that they cannot deliver food and other basic services to people in the Gaza Strip and that a “dire” humanitarian crisis is set to worsen.

International aid groups provide food and other means of support to about 63% of people in Gaza.

Israel stopped allowing deliveries of food, fuel and other supplies to Gaza’s 2.3 million residents on Oct. 10, 2023, and is reportedly preparing for a ground invasion.

I am a scholar of peace and conflict economics and a former World Bank consultant, including during the 2014 war between Hamas and Israel.

International aid groups now face the same problem in Gaza that local businesses and residents have encountered for about 16 years: a blockade that prevents civilians and items, like medicine from easily moving into or out of the enclosed area, roughly 25 miles long. That 16-year blockade did not apply to the food and fuel that groups brought in to Gaza.

Now, it does.

Gaza’s blockade and economy

Gaza is about the size of Philadelphia and requires trade with different businesses and countries in order to maintain and grow its economy.

But Gaza is heavily dependent on foreign aid.

This is partially the result of Israel setting up permanent air, land and sea blockades around Gaza in 2007, one year after Hamas rose to political power. Egypt, which borders Gaza on its southern end, also oversees one checkpoint that specifically limits people coming and going.

While Israel has granted permits to about 17,000 Gaza residents to enter and work in Israel, the food, fuel and medical supplies that people in Gaza use all first pass through Israel.

Israel controls two physical checkpoints along Gaza, which monitor both the entry and exit of people and trucks. Israel limits the kind and quantity of materials that pass into Gaza. And the blockades generally prohibit Gazans who do not have work permits or special clearance – for medical purposes, for example – from entering Israel.

Israel’s restrictions through the blockade intensified since Hamas’ surprise attack on 20 Israeli towns and several military bases on Oct. 7, with Israel then announcing a broad blockade of imports into Gaza. This stopped all food, fuel and medical supplies from entering the region.

Gaza’s isolation

The Palestinian enclaves of West Bank and Gaza – which are generally lumped together in economic analyses – both have small economies that run a massive deficit of US$6.6 billion in losses each year, as the value of the imports they receive greatly outweighs the value of the items they produce and sell elsewhere.

More than 53% of Gaza residents were considered below the poverty line in 2020, and about 77% of Gazan households receive some form of aid from the United Nations and other groups, mostly in the form of cash or food.

Gaza’s weak economy is caused by a number of complex factors, but the largest is the blockade and the economic and trade isolation it creates.

For the average Gazan, the blockade has several practical effects, including people’s ability to get food. About 64% of people in Gaza are considered food insecure, meaning they do not have reliable access to sufficient amounts of food.

Food as a percentage of Gaza’s total imports has skyrocketed by 50% since 2005, when Israel first imposed a temporary blockade. And the amount of food the West Bank and Gaza actually produce has tumbled by 30% since then.

It is hard for Gaza to produce food within its own borders. One factor is that Israeli airstrikes hit Gaza’s only power generation plant and main sewage treatment plant in 2008 and again in 2018. These attacks resulted in the spread of sewage waste on land and in the water, destroying farmlands and food crops and threatening fish stocks in the ocean as well.

The UN’s big role in Gaza

Gaza’s weak economy and isolation because of the blockade mean that it relies heavily on international aid organizations to provide basic services to residents. The biggest of these aid groups in Gaza is the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East – also known as UNRWA.

Today, UNRWA is the second-largest employer in Gaza, following Hamas. It provides the bulk of the education, food aid and health care services for people in Gaza, in addition to 3 million other people registered as Palestinian refugees who live in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank and other places.

Over time, UNRWA has evolved into a kind of parallel government, alongside Hamas, which Israel, the United States and other countries designate as a terrorist organization.

UNRWA funds and runs a network of 284 schools in Gaza alone, employing over 9,000 local people as staff and educating over 294,000 children each year.

UNRWA runs 22 hospitals in Gaza that employ almost 1,000 health staff and has 3.3 million patient visits per year.

Its schools are converted into humanitarian shelters in times of crisis, such as the current war. People can go there to get clean water, food, mattresses and blankets, showers and more.

The number of people in Gaza who are displaced from their homes has quickly risen over the last few days, totaling over 330,000 on Oct. 12, 2023. Over two-thirds of these people are staying in UNRWA schools.

A complicated US relationship

The U.S. has historically been the single-largest funder of UNRWA, a U.N. agency that relies on governments to support its work. The U.S. gave more than $500 million to Palestinians from April 2021 through March 2022, including more than $417 million that went to UNRWA.

U.S. support to UNRWA has fluctuated throughout different presidential administrations.

Total U.S. aid to the West Bank and Gaza peaked at $1 billion in 2009 – after Israel sealed off the territory. It reached $1 billion in annual contributions again in 2013, when former Secretary of State John Kerry helped restart peace talks between Israel and Hamas.

In 2018, the Trump Administration cut almost all of the money the U.S. typically gives to UNRWA, amounting to roughly 30% of the organization’s total budget.

Defenders of the policy change cited UNRWA-published textbooks that allegedly glorified jihad. UNRWA, for its part, maintained that, as an outside organization, it can only use the educational materials the country it is working in wants.

The Biden administration then restored funding to UNRWA and other organizations helping Palestinians in 2021.

Some Republican politicians have said that UNRWA has “cozied up” to Hamas. And an internal UNRWA ethics committee has accused top staff at the agency of “sexual misconduct, nepotism, retaliation … and other abuses of authority” that created a toxic work environment.

Meanwhile, since the war between Israel and Hamas began on Oct. 8, more than 1,500 Gazans have been killed and more than 5,300 injured, while Hamas attacks have killed more than 1,300 people in Israel and injured about 3,200 others.

International aid groups and European Union officials have called for a humanitarian corridor to be set up in Gaza – meaning a protected path specifically for civilians, aid workers and necessary basic items to pass through safely back and forth from Gaza to Israel and Egypt. So far, there are no clear plans for such a protected pathway.

Topher L. McDougal is Professor of Economic Development & Peacebuilding at the University of San Diego.

This article was first published by The Conversation.

Image: Shutterstock.

The shocking terrorist attack by Hamas in southern Israel requires a swift response as well as some introspection from the Israeli government, which now has the opportunity to show the transparent and targeted resolve of an open society in contrast to the indiscriminate barbarism of a terrorist group. A response that methodically cripples the militants and deters future atrocities can still be proportionate and justified.

That military mission will necessarily seek justice. Over the longer term, Israel will need to rebuild its people’s trust in the nation’s intelligence community and foreign policy. Responsibility lies with Hamas and its backers such as Iran, but Israelis are entitled to ask how this atrocity could have happened to a technologically advanced country with a formidable security apparatus and vaunted intelligence agencies.

Contrary to common belief, such breakdowns are actually quite rare. Claims of intelligence failures have in the past been used to cover up policy neglect (as was the case with the Argentine invasion of the Falklands in 1982) or a confused response (such as to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990). Warnings may go unheeded, reports may remain unread or advice may be too broad to spur action. Rarely do dots simply go unconnected.

Given this, some observers have blamed government distraction for the failure to prevent Hamas’s attack because of the current divisive state of Israeli politics and authorities’ focus on more politically pressing issues of West Bank security. There are also emerging allegations that the government ignored warnings from Egypt.

Of course, intelligence failures do happen. And an Israeli intelligence failure is not unheard of, despite the reputation of its agencies. Witness the surprise outbreak of the five-year-long second intifada at the end of September 2000.

What’s more, these shocking events, with their brazenness and costs, echo 1973’s Yom Kippur War – an example of intelligence failure mentioned in the same breath as Pearl Harbor, Operation Barbarossa and 9/11 (even if the latter three were more accurately strategic warning failures, with intelligence agencies, policymakers and politicians all at fault).

The Yom Kippur War was sparked by surprise Egyptian and Syrian offensives, intended to reverse the Arab losses and Israeli victories of 1967. Caught out during its holiest festival, Israel struggled initially to respond, before prevailing at significant human and materiel cost (and a Soviet–US near confrontation.) The day before the invasion, Israel’s director of military intelligence had assured Prime Minister Golda Meir that observed Egyptian activities were likely defensive in nature and there wouldn’t be an invasion of the Israeli-occupied Sinai Peninsula.

There are still debates about the cause of the Israeli failure. Some point to the ‘crying wolf’ factor. Intelligence warnings earlier in 1973 that initiated Israeli military mobilisation proved unfounded—and costly. Others blame cognitive failings of individuals, bureaucratic monopolies and cultural misunderstandings.

However, one explanation that took hold was the idea of the ‘concept’.

Israeli military intelligence had become fatally wedded to the assessment that, without effective means to counter Israeli air superiority that had prevailed in 1967’s Six-Day War, Egypt would not launch an offensive. That meant the Syrians also wouldn’t attack because they would never act alone. But the assessment failed to consider that Egypt might instead adopt limited but important objectives (such as seizing the right bank of the Suez Canal and forcing a negotiated return of the broader Sinai) combined with an asymmetric advantage (including effective denial of Israeli airspace using missile forces based back inside Egypt).

These assumptions held for a time, but neglected to take account of an abrupt change in Egyptian strategy in 1972 at the command of President Anwar Sadat.

The ‘concept’ was reinforced by hubris. Israel’s highly regarded intelligence sources inside Egypt were quiet until the very eve of the invasion, when Mossad’s best-placed source in Cairo (believed to be former President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s son-in-law, Ashraf Marwan) reported an impending invasion. Israel had also hamstrung itself by having a ‘special collection’ signals intelligence system—speculated to be a tap on Egyptian military communications—that was exquisite but vulnerable, leaving them reluctant to actually turn it on.

So, what had started out as sound intelligence analysis and strategic rationale had calcified into a self-defeating heuristic. The result: terrified surprise when, on 6 October 1973, Israel was invaded on two fronts.

A question now lingers: before last Saturday, was Israeli intelligence in thrall to a new concept, this time about what Hamas and its jihadist allies would not, or could not, do from Gaza?

In the rush for explanations, we shouldn’t forget that intelligence is at its heart a contest in which the enemy gets a vote. Hamas has consistently adapted to changing circumstances, turning to rocket barrages when faced with Israel’s clampdown on moving its forces, then to tunnels under the border and now to hostage-raiding reminiscent of the Dark Ages and intended to prey on Israeli vulnerabilities. And it’s why they strove to deny and deceive Israeli surveillance, as was the case with Egyptian deception efforts in 1973.

In the aftermath of 1973, the Agranat Commission cut a swathe through the intelligence leadership. It would traumatize agencies for decades.

Israel’s current emergency is still in its early days, but when the apparent intelligence failure is dissected, there will likely be lessons for other national intelligence communities—even for Australia’s, which is currently undergoing an independent review.

As different as Australia’s circumstances are, we can learn from Israel’s experience, including the lesson that precedent is a guide only and not to be relied upon: strategic circumstances change and nations must be ready to adapt. It takes leadership to actively promote contestability and a willingness to constantly test existing intelligence, military and policy assumptions. It also takes investment in new tools to better understand, plan for and manage strategic risk, ideally to prevent such crises but also to respond effectively if, and when, they occur.

The good news is that Australia holds an intelligence review every five to seven years to ensure risk is assessed in times of peace, not only in war or after a crisis. Sadly, a major event is too often the ultimate test of any system, but calm and frank evaluations like the current review remain the best ways to anticipate, avert and recover from future crises.

Justin Bassi is the executive director of ASPI.

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

Image: Shutterstock.

The Hamas slaughter of civilians on October 7 puts the Gulf state of Qatar, which hosts and funds Hamas leadership, under new scrutiny. There is a way out for Qatar, but first, let’s understand how Qatar got to this uncomfortable situation.   

...We in Qatar are a very small country and our survival depends on being open to everyone. We host the largest American military base in the region, and we share the world’s largest offshore gas field with Iran. We have no choice but to coordinate with Iran. We support the Palestinians and we were among the first Arab countries to open an Israeli government office during the Oslo peace process of the 1990s. We are devout Muslims and we are happy to have Christian churches in Doha. Being open to all is both our strategy and our culture as a trading nation.

So Muhammad al-Kawari, Qatar’s ambassador in Washington, explained to me over a series of lunches some years ago when I worked at the State Department. At the time, I oversaw a grab-bag portfolio of Middle East regional issues that included international air flight negotiations; al-Kawari was interested in the prospects for Qatar Air. He also attended the Jerusalem funeral of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 as deputy head of Qatar’s cabinet.

Qatar’s vision of itself—an international entrepôt open to all—is shared to some extent by all six Arab states of the Gulf. In a general way, U.S. policy towards these states has been to encourage such openness both on human rights grounds and as a way of diversifying their economies away from total reliance on raw resource exports.  

There is a dark side to Doha’s policy, however, and that is allowing the political arms of terror organizations to reside and flourish on its own soil. For years, America and the West have not objected to this aspect of Qatar’s policy. Sometimes, it was seen as useful. For instance, Qatar became the channel for American talks with the Taliban throughout the American presence in Afghanistan and continues today. Qatar hosted the Afghan Taliban after they were removed from power in Kabul.   

But Qatar’s hosting of Hamas is now another matter. Hamas’ barbaric murders last weekend will change some things, to put it lightly, in the Middle East. And one of them must be Qatar’s—and the Gulf’s—funding of fundamentalist terror organizations. Specifically, Qatar should get ahead of what is coming by deporting the political leadership of Hamas, stopping all official financing of Hamas, and freezing accounts of terror organizations in its banking system.  

Now, this kind of 180-degree policy shift is easier said than done. The United States and Israel must start by admitting their failures to comprehend and react to the clear and present danger that Hamas poses. American and Israeli officials—not just Qataris—acted on the belief that Hamas was normalizing over time as the government of the Gaza Strip.   

There is plenty of policy failure to go around when it comes to Hamas and the other Muslim Brotherhood spokesmen and affiliates, from Sadiq al-Mahdi in Sudan in the 1960s and 1980s through Tariq Ramadan in Europe in the 1990s, Yusuf al-Qaradawi in Egypt and Qatar until very recently, and, in the United States, Nihad Awad of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which has called on Muslims to support Hamas in the immediate aftermath of the massacres.

I used to meet regularly with Muslim Brotherhood leaders in Cairo as a U.S. Embassy political officer from 1997–2000. Some of their leaders are sophisticated and educated. They all hide a totalitarian, supremacist, and violent version of Islam that only emerges when they gain power, as they did in Gaza in 2006. In Egypt in 2013, they were just beginning to change the governing system before the military cast them out of power in a coup d’état.

The world has changed after October 7. Qatar’s open society itself could be threatened by the Islamist poison of the Muslim Brotherhood. The Qatari ruling elite apparently believes it can control the Muslim Brotherhood and sees it as a tool for expanding Qatari influence. However, the movement could easily turn on the ruling House of al-Thani after swinging enough Qataris to their worldview. The good news is this: despite all of our collective failures to date, now the world has jolted awake to this danger. Qatar, as a smart and nimble player on the world stage, should act sooner rather than later. 

In every policy discussion of Qatar, the “elephant in the room” is the al-Udeid airbase, the most extensive U.S. military base in the Middle East, which the Qataris built and maintain to American specifications at their cost. It is an essential aspect of U.S. power projection throughout the Middle East and beyond, alongside the U.S. Sixth Fleet headquartered in Bahrain and the U.S. Army base in Kuwait. The Washington consensus posits that there are no readily available alternatives to al-Udeid, and thus, U.S. policy has become hostage to whatever Qatar wants to do. According to many in Washington, this fact would make encouraging Qatar to deport Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas and freeze his bank accounts rather difficult.

Yet, the Washington consensus may be wrong about Qatar in the post-10/7 world. 

First, I believe Qatar’s rulers, especially Emir Tamim ibn Hamad al-Thani, are pragmatic realists, not ideologues or Muslim Brotherhood adherents. The emir showed his pragmatism regarding Qatar’s relationship with another terrorist group—Lebanon’s Hezbollah. After the Second Lebanon War in 2006, Qatar helped fund Hezbollah as part of its effort to reconstruct Lebanon. Hezbollah, so the feeling went at the time, could be normalized through engagement. That optimistic view of Hezbollah turned out to be wrong, and the current emir reversed policy and cut funding to Hezbollah. 

Qatar showed its pragmatism again this week, according to news reports, by agreeing informally with the U.S. Treasury not to release any of the $6 billion of Iranian oil revenue held by Qatar. 

Second, in the post-10/7 world, Hamas has just murdered not only hundreds of Israelis but also twenty-seven Americans while holding others hostage. Its political leaders broadcast threats from Qatar, and its former leader now calls for attacks on Americans. 

America is not the only beneficiary of the al-Udeid base. Qatar gets a significant U.S. military presence/effective security blanket from this base. The United States doesn’t have to initiate a withdrawal from al-Udeid right away. But as a planning measure, it should initiate talks with the UAE and Saudi Arabia, both of whom, during their recent embargo of Qatar, offered to host the U.S. Air Force instead of al-Udeid. Those offers may have been idle talk. But basing talks are run out of the State Department, not the Pentagon, which helps ensure good foreign policy and military policy coordination. We should let new airbase talks start and see where they lead while we raise the Hamas requests of Qatar.  

With Secretary of State Antony Blinken visiting Qatar this week to discuss the release of Hamas’ hostages, we should remember that persuading our allies and security partners to do hard things in mutual interest is the essence of good diplomacy. While the war with Hamas is fresh, I believe that we should act now to cut off its foreign sources of support while Israel does the hard work on the ground in Gaza. 

Qatar has been a U.S. security partner in the Gulf for decades. It certainly doesn’t want to become a state sponsor of terrorism. Qatar’s supporters in Washington realize this and are urging it to eliminate the now toxic Hamas presence. Changing policy on Hamas is the right thing for Qatar and the world.    

Robert Silverman, a former senior U.S. diplomat and President of the American Foreign Service Association, is a lecturer at Shalem College, executive editor of The Jerusalem Strategic Tribune, and founder of the Inter-Jewish Muslim Alliance.

Image: Shutterstock.

Intellectuals have a deep addiction to terror. From the French revolutionaries of the late 18th century who invoked Jean Jacques Rousseau to the physician ideologues of ISIS like Ayman al-Zawahiri, intellectuals have been at the forefront of justifying and instigating mass violence.

The latest iteration of this intellectual tradition of terror is “decolonization.” The invasion of Israel and the murder of over 1300 Israelis to date have illustrated this mindset at work.

In the wake of the slaughter, Walaa Alqaisiya, a research fellow at Columbia University, wrote “Academics like to decolonize through discourse and land acknowledgments. Time to understand that Decolonization is NOT a metaphor. Decolonization means resistance of the oppressed and that includes armed struggle to LITERALLY get our lands and lives back!”

Likewise, for Uahikea Maile, Assistant Professor of Indigenous Politics in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto, “From Hawaiʻi to Palestine—occupation is a crime. A lāhui [Nation, race, tribe, people, or nationality] that stands for decolonization and de-occupation should also stand behind freedom for Palestine.”

Leave aside the malleable notion of “settler colonialism,” which is regularly leveled at Israel as well as Western states like the U.S. and Australia but never at Muslim, Arab, or African ones. Many pro-Palestinian intellectuals have long claimed that “resistance” may include any means and may not be criticized. For academics, who dominate wide swaths of academia, the notion of “decolonization” has been cited but with little specificity regarding the term’s meaning, at least in practical terms.

Indeed, in an often cited paper, “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor,” academics Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang expound at length on the “entangled triad structure of settler-native-slave,” and the “the real and symbolic violence of settler colonialism.”

They posit decolonization as “a distinct project from other civil and human rights-based social justice projects, is far too often subsumed into the directives of these projects, with no regard for how decolonization wants something different than those forms of justice.” But they insist that “decolonization specifically requires the repatriation of Indigenous land and life. Decolonization is not a metonym for social justice.” But “decolonization is not obliged to answer” what methods are involved or what the future looks like for anyone.

But now we know. Decolonization in Hamas’ case looks like rape, murder, kidnapping, beheading, torture, and execution of hostages, in this case with a uniquely Islamic bent reminiscent of ISIS. Its future is simply the extermination of Israel.

Decolonization dissolves fundamental categories of combatants and civilians, it legitimizes everything, including the abuse of corpses, and demands our acquiescence in the name of “resistance” and “liberation.” It renders international law meaningless except to bend it over backward as a tool of violence and terror. Decolonization is thus an explicit license for ethnic cleansing and genocide, provided it is done by, and against, the proper people. Not surprisingly, “decolonization” increasingly dominates university courses and academic discourse. 

What explains this intellectual love of violence? One understated feature is the role of philosopher Frantz Fanon, whose book The Wretched of the Earth provided a justification for retributive violence that stands outside of any conventional morality. Ussama Makdisi of UCLA approvingly cites Fanon’s famous quote "But every time Western values are mentioned they produce in the native a sort of stiffening or muscular lockjaw...when the native hears a speech about Western culture he pulls out his knife—or at least he makes sure it is within reach.”

Makdisi goes on to claim that “the Western idea of morality has long had a Palestine-shaped hole in it. The West simply does not count Arab Palestinians as equal human beings. Which is why Palestinians turn to armed struggle in face of massive Western-funded & backed oppression. Then the West condemns them [sic].” This pretzel-shaped morality fails to account for billions of dollars in Western support for Palestinian institutions and billions more from Iran for Islamist ones. Similarly,  for philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, who lauded Fanon, the liberation of the “colonized” can only come about by eliminating all aspects of European life. Apparently, this now includes taboos against the rape of captives and the murder of infants.

Yet, at the heart of this matter is an intellectual psychodrama, of passive-aggressive participation by the intelligentsia in something an authentic and exhilarating revolutionary moment. Events of historical importance give otherwise humdrum lives meaning, even if no one in Cambridge or Morningside Heights has to pull the trigger themselves.

The question of whether, if given the chance, Hamas supporters including “decolonial” intellectuals, would pull the trigger, or behead fellow human beings, is pressing, especially as thousands of supporters march through the streets of Western cities cheering the bloodshed. Of course, the fact that the victims were Jews—now redefined by too many intellectuals and progressives in the Soviet-style as Nazis or fascists themselves—helps to suppress whatever tinges of compassion might remain.

How should normal people with normal morality respond to academics who advocate terror? One is to identify, repudiate, and isolate intellectuals who espouse these views, and who use the shield of academic freedom to defend their hateful views. Publicize them widely and condemn them, challenge their ideas and their immorality, and question their fitness to be accepted into society, much less their role as teachers and thinkers.

What can be done institutionally? Condemning universities and think tanks that employ bigots who salivate over murder may cause embarrassment but no change. Refusing to engage with these institutions is key. They rely on their social reputations for their very existence—reputations that should already be in tatters for countless other reasons, from exorbitant costs to nonsensical course offerings. Moral obscenities like cheering mass murder in the name of decolonization should be the final straw.

Shattering their reputations and repudiating their influence and roles in society, is key. Without it, murder will find high-sounding advocates who sway students, like those thirty student groups at Harvard who “hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” Those students, too, should be isolated and shunned. But without addressing the intellectual foundations that support, in this case, Islamic antisemitic terrorism, academia will become irredeemable. The moral foundations of global society stand in the balance.

Alex Joffe is the Director of Strategic Initiatives of the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa.

Asaf Romirowsky is the Executive Director of the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa (ASMEA) and Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (SPME).

Image: Shutterstock.

Eight years ago, Pedro Domingos envisioned an artificial intelligence breakthrough he called “the master algorithm” – a single, universal machine learning model that would be able to derive all past, present, and future knowledge from data. By this definition, the master algorithm would generalize to almost any task that humans can do, revolutionizing the global economy and automating our daily lives in countless ways.

Today, the spectacular rise of large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT has a lot of observers speculating that the master algorithm, or at least its primordial form, has been found. ChatGPT and its siblings show great promise in generalizing to a vast range of use cases – any domain where data exists and where knowledge can be represented by tokenized language is fair game.

The power and apparent simplicity of this vision is seductive, especially in the public sector. Leading tech companies in the federal space are already probing the potential for LLMs to transform government bureaucracies, processes, and data management. The funding lavished on OpenAI and other research and development teams for LLMs is based on business cases for digital assistants, customer service chatbots, internet or database search, content generation, content monitoring, etc. The possibilities are vast.

Some of these are common to the public and private sectors, and LLMs will be exquisitely useful in addressing them. But not every problem or solution can or should be dual use. Governments face wicked problems that the private sector does not. Right now, LLMs are only half of the answer for the most difficult problems in government – disaster response, counter drug trafficking, and military operations, to name a few. These are tasks where data is scarce, dirty, and intermittent in ways that are hard to fathom by commercial expectations. They demand decisions, actions, and human judgment in high-stakes scenarios where false positive or false negative hallucinations from an LLM could be deadly, or catastrophic. In a sensor-saturated future, where every relevant aspect of our existence can be captured as data, sophisticated LLMs may finally, truly, completely eat the world. That future, and the manifestation of a genuine master algorithm, is still a long way off.

What we need now is a salt to the LLM’s pepper – a complement that relies less on mountains of human-generated or human-curated data, is still highly generalizable, and can give humans predictive insight that is immediately relevant to the problem sets faced by the public sector in the physical world. To find it, we can look back at the previous machine learning hype cycle starting in 2015, when AlphaGo, AlphaStar, and OpenAI Five helped create a fresh wave of excitement about the potential of reinforcement learning (RL).

In each of these cases, an RL algorithm mastered a complex strategy game and defeated human world champions in that game. OpenAI Five’s achievements in the globally popular videogame Dota II are particularly interesting because its research team used an approach called “self-play” to train the model. Unlike AlphaGo and AlphaStar, which benefited from training on historical gameplay data from humans, OpenAI Five learned entirely by playing against itself. By scaling and parallelizing self-play instances, the OpenAI Five team was able to train the model on 45,000 years of Dota gameplay over the course of 10 real-time months.

In later projects involving multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) in a virtual environment, OpenAI researchers found that individual reinforcement learning “agents” playing against each other in teams were able to cooperate to achieve objectives and discover novel and unforeseen actions entirely through self-play, with no outside direction from humans. In other words, these MARL agents quickly mastered a complex game, and then learned new ways of interacting with their environment to win the game – alien tactics that humans did not or could not discover by themselves.

This is inductive reasoning on steroids. With MARL, it becomes possible to rapidly simulate thousands of alternate versions of a given scenario, and then analyze and learn from those scenario iterations. By identifying patterns in these iterations and understanding how variables like agent decision making and environmental features change outcomes, MARL can help us plan and understand future actions. Dr. Strange’s character in the movie Infinity War provides an analogy for this: he “goes forward in time” to examine over 14 million possible futures of the war between the Avengers and Thanos. Ultimately, he finds just one in which the Avengers are able to defeat their nemesis, and this foresight helps the good guys win in the end.

What if we created a relevant abstraction of the real world – a virtual environment with representative physics and a focus on the behaviors, interactions, and decisions between intelligent agents? If we get this balance between physics and intelligence right, this MARL environment would allow us to peer into the future and optimize our decision making in new and powerful ways.

Consider the specific problem of counter drug trafficking operations. Every year, thousands of drug-carrying vessels transit the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean, delivering vast quantities of illegal drugs to ports in the north. The United States’ Joint Interagency Task Force South (JIATF-S) uses every resource at its disposal – Navy and Coast Guard ships, maritime patrol aircraft, and more – to detect and interdict as many of these shipments as possible. This is an exceptionally difficult wide area search problem, and JIATF-S simply cannot cover the entire ocean all of the time. On average, JIATF-S only detects about 10% of estimated maritime smuggling events. Even when these vessels are detected, approximately one in five get away.

MARL could help address this problem by simulating JIATF-S operations thousands of times over, revealing through agent behavior and decisions the optimal placement and employment of scarce patrol ships, aircraft, and other resources to detect and interdict more illicit vessels. MARL could also help JIATF-S planners experiment with tactics and long-term strategies, simulating scenarios where new technologies or methods are used to help with search, or new overseas bases become available for operations. These simulations could also be used to understand how changes in the environment or drug cartels’ trafficking operations affect the JIATF-S mission.

This type of experimentation with MARL could greatly benefit other national security use cases such as military wargaming, systems engineering, mission planning, and command and control. It could also enable similar use cases across each of these areas, creating a common tool and a common thread between the acquisitions and procurement community and the warfighting community. For example, if a MARL simulation platform helps a wargamer quickly create an experiment to test a novel idea or a hypothetical capability, the same tool could just as easily be used by an operational commander’s staff to compare and contrast differing friendly courses of action. MARL could also help mission planners develop and refine adversary courses of action and enhance red cell efforts.

If we evolve this idea from Charmander to Charizard, we can envision a capability that approaches clairvoyance. In the future, the MARL tool could automatically run simulations based on critical real-world data injects: a new adversary troop movement is detected, a new weapon system is deployed, critical infrastructure is suddenly damaged, or a new weather pattern emerges in the operational environment. It is not unrealistic to think that MARL could rapidly provide decision makers with a window into the future for these types of events, in conjunction with the automation and alerting delivered by other machine learning capabilities like LLMs and computer vision. If MARL could become a crystal ball, perhaps the time has come for a deeper look.

Jaim Coddington is a member of Spear AI and the Marine Corps Reserve. His graduate studies at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government focused on the role of technology in public policy. All views expressed in this article are privately held and do not represent the official positions of any public or private organization.

This article was first published by RealClearDefense.

Image: Shutterstock.

Although American special operators may play a role in recovering hostages taken by Hamas militants, the United States currently has no plans to put conventional “boots on the ground” to support Israeli combat operations, a State Department official explained during a press conference on Tuesday.

The presence of an American aircraft carrier strike group led by the world’s largest warship, the USS Gerald R. Ford, is meant to send a strong message of deterrence, but does not signal America’s intent to join the fray, President Joe Biden said on Tuesday.

“The United States has also enhanced our military force posture in the region to strengthen our deterrence,” Biden said. “Let me say again to any country, any organization, anyone thinking of taking advantage of this situation. I have one word: Don’t.”

This announcement came after Hamas launched a surprise offensive against Israel on Saturday, with militant extremists targeting Israeli civilians with a brutality American Defense officials described as “unprecedented.” These attacks include the killing of hundreds at a music festival and the systemic murder of children as Hamas militants poured over the border into Israel.

“I saw hundreds of terrorists in full armor, full gear, with all the equipment and all the ability to make a massacre, go from apartment to apartment, from room to room, and kill babies, mothers, fathers in their bedrooms,” Israeli Maj. Gen. Itai Veruv told CNN. CNN was not able to confirm the general’s claims, but stories about these deaths have permeated both social and news media since the fighting began.

The United States has already begun providing military assistance to Israel, with interceptors for the nation’s various air defense systems – including the widely touted Iron Dome – chief among the list of munitions.

“My team has been in near constant communication with our Israeli partners and partners all across the region and the world from the moment this crisis began,” President Biden said. “We’re surging additional military assistance, including ammunition, and interceptors to replenish Iron Dome. We are going to make sure that Israel does not run out of these critical assets to defend its cities and its citizens.”

Alex Hollings is a writer, dad, and Marine veteran.

This article was first published by Sanboxx News.

Image: U.S. Navy. 

When it comes to gauging the Italian economic outlook, we would do well to remember Herb Stein’s famous aphorism: If something cannot go on forever, it will stop. If ever that aphorism was true, it has to be in regard to the Italian government’s continued ability to issue ever larger amounts of debt to cover its budget deficits. This is especially the case when there is little prospect that Italy will ever reduce the size of its public debt mountain.

Needless to add another round of the Italian sovereign debt crisis is the last thing that the world economy needs at this time of synchronized world economic slowing. The Italian economy is some ten times the size of that of Greece and it has a $3 trillion government bond market. If the 2010 Greek debt crisis shook world financial markets, how much more so would an Italian debt crisis do so today?

A principal reason to brace ourselves for another round of the Italian debt crisis is that all of the factors that might allow that country to reduce its debt burden are now moving in the wrong direction. This has to be of particular concern when today’s Italian public debt to GDP ratio is 145 percent or some 20 percentage points higher than it was at the time of the 2012 Italian debt crisis.

Purely as a matter of arithmetic, the three factors that might improve a country’s public debt burden are a healthy primary budget surplus (the budget balance after excluding interest payments), lower interest rates at which the government can borrow, and a faster pace of economic growth. Unfortunately, in Italy’s current case, all three of these factors are going in the opposite direction.

Far from producing a primary budget surplus, the disappointing Italian budget presented this week by the Meloni government implies a meaningful primary budget deficit. At the same time, in the context of European Central Bank (ECB) monetary policy tightening and investor questions about the direction of the current government’s economic policy, Italian 10-year government bond yields have risen sharply to close to 5 percent. That is their highest level since the 2012 Italian debt crisis.

Meanwhile, far from experiencing rapid economic growth, the Italian economy seems to be on the cusp of another economic recession: The fall-out from ECB monetary tightening to regain inflation control. Such a recession would hardly inspire confidence in Italy’s ability to grow its way from under its debt mountain given its sclerotic growth record. Since joining the Euro in 1999, the level of Italy’s per capita income has barely changed.

Until recently, the Italian government has had little difficulty in financing itself on relatively favorable terms despite its public debt mountain. That was largely due to the fact that under its aggressive quantitative program, the ECB covered almost the totality of the Italian government’s net borrowing needs. However, since July 2023, the ECB has completely terminated its bond buying programs. This makes the Italian government very much more reliant on the financial markets to meet its borrowing needs.

With Italy’s highly compromised public finances, it is especially important that its government instill investor confidence so that it is capable of managing a very difficult economic situation. For this reason, it has to be regretted that the far-right Meloni government has failed to deliver on its economic promises. Among its more disappointing missteps have been its botched windfall tax on bank profits and the introduction of a budget that envisages a 5.3 percent budget deficit that puts it on a collision course with the European Commission.

In recent days, the markets have refocused attention on Italy’s shaky public finances and sent the Italian-German government bond spread to its highest level since the start of the year. The Italian government should take note of the market’s shot across its boughs and change economic course soon if it wants to avoid a full-blown Italian debt crisis next year.

Desmond Lachman joined AEI after serving as a managing director and chief emerging market economic strategist at Salomon Smith Barney. He previously served as deputy director in the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) Policy Development and Review Department and was active in staff formulation of IMF policies. Mr. Lachman has written extensively on the global economic crisis, the U.S. housing market bust, the U.S. dollar, and the strains in the euro area. At AEI, Mr. Lachman is focused on the global macroeconomy, global currency issues, and the multilateral lending agencies.

This article was first published by the American Enterprise Institute.

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After a strong start to 2023, Chinese economic activity has sharply fallen short of expectations. Exports have collapsed. Consumption, production and investment have slowed, while inflation levelled out and the unemployment rate edged up. The Chinese renminbi hit new lows in August and September 2023, driven by worries about the domestic economy.

Former US treasury secretary Larry Summers has made ominous comparisons between China, Russia and Japan, saying that ‘people are going to look back at some of the economic forecasts about China in 2020 in the same way they looked back at economic forecasts for Russia that were made in 1960 or for Japan in 1990’.

As always, there are cyclical and structural factors at play in the unfolding economic outlook. Among the cyclical factors are scars from the COVID-19 pandemic — deteriorating balance sheets, an ailing property sector and a limited macroeconomic policy response. Meanwhile, structural pressures are weighing on confidence as regulatory, security and political stability concerns continue to mount.

After three years of pandemic pressure, the balance sheets of households, enterprises and local governments are stretched. Unlike the United States, China’s government did not hand out large subsidies to households and enterprises during the COVID-19 pandemic. Without that demand-side stimulus, Chinese consumption has been sluggish.

Financially, China’s biggest worries revolve around the property sector. If this sector were to collapse, the consequences would be very damaging.

But one difference between China’s situation and that of, for example, the 2007–08 US subprime crisis, is the lack of visible negative equity in Chinese property. This is due to the substantial down payments required in China, especially for second or third property purchases, which range from 60 to 90 per cent. If property prices were to drop — and they haven’t yet substantially in most areas — the property sector’s contribution to financial crisis risk would be smaller than that of the United States in the global financial crisis, although the resultant losses in terms of household wealth and economic growth could still be large.

Fiscal and monetary responses to China’s current woes have been modest, both during and after the worst phases of the COVID-19 pandemic. This is despite China’s facing deflation rather than inflation risk, in contrast to the United States and Europe. Since late 2020, real interest rates have been relatively flat, even increasing over several quarters when the consumer price index fell faster than the policy rate.

The lack of aggregate easing reflects current policy objectives. Supply-side reforms have dominated demand-side considerations in policy thinking.

There are also structural pressures on Chinese growth. Not least among them are regulatory actions that severely dampened business confidence, especially among technology companies and foreign-invested enterprises.

Some of these policies were implemented to address national security concerns, while others were attempts to deal with legitimate regulatory problems, such as consumer protection and fair competition. They reflect the increasing weight the government assigns to security issues and the costs it is willing to bear as a result.

The government has moved to offset some of these negative policy impacts. As a part of its broader policy mix, it has announced new policies aimed to shore up confidence and support private enterprise, foreign-invested firms and consumption. The government’s 31-point plan released in July 2023 highlights the importance of the private sector and fair competition, eliminating barriers to entry, protecting property rights and drawing private enterprises into national projects.

But the changing geopolitical environment weighs down on the economy. Both China and the United States are attaching growing importance to concerns about national security that impact trade and investment.

Given that both countries share similar concerns, though not necessarily identical definitions of political stability and national security, cooperation to address the challenges posed by globalisation is possible. Such cooperation first requires more dialogue. Conversation is valuable even — or especially — when the political terrain is rough.

Third parties can also play an important role in stabilising relations. The European Union’s ‘de-risking’ approach, even if just partial decoupling by another name, is a helpful example. In Asia, particularly with ASEAN, regional relations can play a stabilising role.

Has China’s economic miracle ended? The answer is probably yes, as no miracle lasts forever. Higher incomes and the higher labour costs they create, deteriorating external conditions and an ageing population all present serious long-term headwinds against high growth.

But China is neither the Soviet Union in the 1960s nor Japan in the 1990s. For China, sectors like technology platforms, electric vehicles, green energy and electronics are now vibrant sources of innovation and growth. A major financial crisis, like a blow-up of the property sector, is still unlikely. The economic impact of demographic shifts will be partially countered by artificial intelligence and the digital economy.

Regulatory changes have dampened some sectors, but China’s ability to average above 9 per cent growth for 40 years suggests some flexibility remains. The recent announcement of the new policy package also demonstrates that policymakers do respond to economic challenges.

Economic activity probably suffered its last major drop, in July 2023. August data suggests that the economy is bottoming out, albeit very gradually. Casual observation confirms that economic recovery was under way in September.

But the fog of geopolitics is unlikely to recede any time soon. Many of the challenges China faces, like sustaining growth while security uncertainties are on the rise, are global. Finding ways to address these concerns within global frameworks that promote open trade and investment will be crucial to navigating the uncertainties ahead.

Yiping Huang is Professor and Deputy Dean at the National School of Development and Director of the Institute of Digital Finance, Peking University.

This article was first published by the East Asia Forum.

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