The National Interest

U.S. secretary of state Antony Blinken’s visit to Guyana on July 6 was significant, both for the country and for South America more broadly, for a number of reasons. Following so closely on Mike Pompeo’s September 2020 visit, the first ever by an American secretary of state, Blinken’s was confirmation of Guyana’s growing economic and geostrategic importance to the United States. With Guyana’s huge oil reserves and potential to be a major player in energy security in the Americas, this hitherto relatively unknown small state has suddenly become a country of real interest to the most powerful nation in the world.

The courting of Guyana is quite logical given the current geopolitical context of Latin America: the political pendulum swinging to the left in the region; neighboring Venezuela’s political and economic woes, along with its dramatic decline in oil production; the threats posed by transnational organized crime; and U.S. competition with China for geopolitical influence in the wider region. The United States clearly has ample reason to keep Guyana close.

Former Secretary Pompeo’s visit was linked to the fraught period following the 2020 Guyanese election. It was a sign of support for the country’s democracy and recognition of its emergence as an oil producer. Pompeo’s visit brought a firm indication of U.S. interest in enhancing the bilateral relationship, particularly with regard to security and market opportunities, amidst concerns about the erosion of democracy in Venezuela and China’s growing footprint in the region. U.S. interest in developing a robust, private sector-led trade and investment relationship is even stronger today. Secretary Blinken’s visit, however, marks a turning point.

The official announcement of the visit flagged the following issues for discussion: food and energy security, decarbonization, climate resilience, regional migration, and building local capacity. After their meeting, both President Irfaan Ali and Secretary Blinken stressed the solidity of the bilateral relationship based on shared values, common interests, and, more tangibly, the fact that the United States is Guyana’s number one trading partner. Responding to President Ali’s remarks, highlighting, among other things, the aspiration to position Guyana as “a global leader on energy security, food security, and climate security,” Secretary Blinken said their talks had focused on energy security, climate adaptation, and hard security. He also endorsed Guyana’s dual commitment to fighting climate change and to exploiting its hydrocarbon resources to finance the transition to low carbon development, stating that “Guyana will soon be the highest oil-producing country per capita in the world, but it’s also a leader in forest conservation, demonstrating that it’s possible to prioritize climate mitigation and environmental protection while responsibly using fossil fuel resources.” This statement is not insignificant in the context of the debate on fossil fuels and global warming.

While there was no mention of the Guyana-Venezuela border controversy or any public expression of U.S. support for Guyana, it would be reasonable to expect that the matter was privately discussed. One would hope that such support is a constant, even if nothing can be taken for granted. Nor was there any specific mention of new bilateral cooperation initiatives to help build capacity and strengthen national institutions. But, in underscoring the partnership between the U.S. Export-Import Bank (EXIM) and Guyana, on the “gas-to-energy project that’s going to cut emissions by 50 percent,” Secretary Blinken also made a direct pitch for greater U.S. private sector involvement: “American companies can bring unparalleled expertise, high labor and environmental standards, and transparency to help power Guyana’s dynamic growth, to advance regional energy security, to deliver tangible benefits to all the people of Guyana.”

This second visit in less than three years by a secretary of state to a country with a population of fewer than one million people and not wracked by war or any comparable crisis is a strong message that the United States wishes to remain Guyana’s strategic partner of choice, and is ready to compete with other interested parties.

In the broader context, Blinken’s visit immediately followed his participation in the annual meeting of Caricom Heads in Trinidad on July 5, and built upon Vice President Kamala Harris’ meeting with Caribbean leaders in the Bahamas in June. Both encounters were aimed at advancing the implementation of the U.S.-Caribbean Partnership to Address the Climate Crisis 2030 (PACC 2030), through three joint action committees, launched at the Ninth Summit of the Americas in June 2022.

U.S. outreach to the Caribbean and Guyana is very welcome, albeit a little late given the longstanding challenges faced by the region’s governments in accessing cooperation and concessionary financing for development. And with 2024 being a U.S. election year, continuity of engagement cannot be assumed.

Much will depend on how much the three action committees can achieve in terms of addressing energy security, food security, and access to finance in a relatively short time period. In this respect, Guyana has a key role to play. As President Ali already has lead responsibility for food security.

In the meantime, the Guyana government should do all it can to capitalize on Blinken’s visit, to offer a welcoming environment for U.S. private sector investment, particularly in the fields of energy—both non-renewables and renewables—and infrastructure.

The stage is set for the rolling out of a framework to facilitate U.S.-Guyana private sector partnerships to bid for tenders and promote business activity. Such a framework with clear guidelines, transparent tender processes, and a minimum of bureaucratic red tape could also attract business and investment from the Guyanese-American diaspora, which can draw on the resources of U.S. federal agencies like EXIM.

All this would pave the way for meeting Guyana’s broader infrastructure and development needs, particularly in areas aimed at economic diversification, including agriculture, fisheries, air travel, tourism, education, health, and information technologies. As Secretary Blinken implicitly recognized, the United States can directly support the country’s economic transformation, thereby contributing, in his own words, to the delivery of “tangible benefits to all the people of Guyana.”

Dr. Riyad Insanally was a career diplomat for thirty-one years and last served as Guyana’s ambassador to the United States of America and Permanent Representative to the Organization of American States, from September 2016 to June 2021. He is currently a Fellow at the Caribbean Policy Consortium, a nonresident senior fellow at the Caribbean Initiative of the Atlantic Council’s Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center, and Senior Advisor for the Caribbean at the Transnational Strategy Group in Washington DC.

The Biden administration has been making efforts to expand the Abraham Accords by brokering an agreement on the normalization of relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel. The Saudis have set out their goals, which alongside their desire for progress on the Israel-Palestinian issue include several major “asks” from the United States: a security guarantee, easier access to U.S. arms purchases, and U.S.-Saudi cooperation on the development of a nuclear power industry.

What are the prospects for success? Should the United States be willing to offer Saudi Arabia some form of security guarantee or “major non-NATO ally” status? Can the United States and Saudi Arabia find a formula to overcome disagreements on nuclear safeguards? How does this impact the recent moves toward a Saudi-Iranian détente? These are only a few of the relevant questions. The Center for the National Interest hosted a virtual discussion of these issues with two leading experts on July 27, 2023.

Jonathan Lord is Senior Fellow and Director of the Middle East Security program at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS). Prior to joining CNAS, Lord served as a professional staff member for the House Armed Services Committee and had previously served as the Iraq country director in the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy and as a political military analyst in the Department of Defense.

Firas Maksad is a Senior Fellow and Director of Strategic Outreach at the Middle East Institute (MEI). He is a recognized expert on the politics of Lebanon and Syria, the geopolitics of the Arab Gulf, and the broader dynamics of the Middle East region. He is also an adjunct professor at George Washington University.

Greg Priddy, Senior Fellow for the Middle East at the Center, moderated the discussion.

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Taking advantage of disputes between adversaries is an attractive idea and the United States has had success at this in the past. The most spectacular example was how Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger were able to take advantage of the growing Sino-Soviet dispute to improve U.S. relations both with China and the Soviet Union in the early 1970s. But there have been other examples as well. 

In his 2021 book, The Power to Divide: Wedge Strategies in Great Power Competition, Timothy W. Crawford described how in 1940-41 the United States and the United Kingdom succeeded at dissuading Spanish leader Francisco Franco from allowing German forces into Spain and attempting to seize Gibraltar from Britain by providing food assistance to his civil war-ravaged country. In the late 1940s, the United States was able to take advantage of the growing dispute between two communist leaders—the Soviet Union’s Joseph Stalin and Yugoslavia’s Josip Tito—to help communist Yugoslavia exit the Soviet bloc and be neutral throughout the rest of the Cold War. In the early 1970s, Nixon and Kissinger were able to leverage Egyptian leader Anwar Sadat’s disillusionment with the Soviet Union to facilitate Egypt’s move from being a Soviet ally to an American one. In the mid-1980s, the previously hostile U.S.-Iraqi relationship underwent a dramatic improvement for a few years on the basis of common antipathy toward Iran. A second rapprochement between Washington and Moscow occurred in the late 1980s/early 1990s on the basis of what appeared to be not just a convergence of foreign policy interests but political values as well. In the mid-1990s, the Clinton administration embarked on the normalization of U.S. relations with America’s erstwhile adversary, Vietnam, which has developed into a stronger relationship ever since partly on the basis of their common concern about China. In the mid-2000s, the George W. Bush administration and Libyan ruler Muammar Gaddafi turned the previously hostile U.S.-Libyan relationship into a cooperative one partly on the basis of their common concern about jihadist forces which both governments regarded as a threat.

Some of these rapprochements lasted for many years or are still in effect while others were far briefer. More recent U.S. efforts at improving relations with adversaries, however, have either failed to make significant progress or have been reversed by subsequent administrations. The George W. Bush administration’s success in improving ties with Libya ended abruptly when the Obama administration worked with several other governments to bring about its downfall in 2011. The Obama administration’s efforts to improve ties with both Cuba and Iran were reversed by the Trump administration. The Trump administration’s attempts to improve relations with Russia, North Korea, and even (oddly enough) Iran also failed. The Biden administration’s efforts to improve ties with Iran enough to restore the Iranian nuclear accord have so far been unsuccessful, though its efforts to improve ties with Venezuela have been somewhat more so.

This is unfortunate for American foreign policy. The United States now has many adversaries, including formidable states such as China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea, and various jihadist groups. There are also a number of minor adversaries which cooperate with Russia, China, and/or Iran: Syria, Lebanon’s Hezbollah, Yemen’s Houthis, Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and others still. In the current war between Russia and Ukraine, Iran and North Korea are both supplying arms to Russia while China is supplying Russia with vital economic support.

It would be beneficial for the United States if it could drive wedges among its various adversaries. And there are numerous disagreements and tensions among them that might provide Washington with opportunities for doing so. At present, though, the United States does not seem able—or even willing—to do this. Why? There are several possible explanations.

One identified by Crawford in The Power to Divide is opposition from existing allies to a state offering concessions to an adversary to induce it to alter its behavior. The cases examined by Crawford, though, all occurred either during World War I or just prior to or during World War II. In these cases, the allies in question were all peers or near peers of the state seeking to drive a wedge between adversaries by offering concessions to one of them. Even if the allies were all (more or less) on board, though, such efforts did not necessarily succeed. But opposition from an ally to an effort to woo an adversary made such an effort more difficult to mount due to unwillingness to risk souring relations with or even losing an existing ally in an uncertain attempt to either gain a new one or just to disrupt alliances between one’s adversaries.  Opposition from an existing ally also tended to make a state’s efforts to woo an adversary less credible to that adversary. 

Since the United States has not had peer or even near-peer allies but only smaller allies since the Cold War up through the present, Washington would appear to be in a very different position than that which the allied nations faced during World War I or World War II. Despite this, however, American allies that are by no means equal to the U.S. in military and economic strength have had an outsize influence on undermining recent American efforts to improve relations with adversaries and reducing their ties to more powerful ones. Israel and Saudi Arabia in particular expressed vociferous opposition to the Obama administration’s efforts in conjunction with the UK, France, Germany, Russia, and China to reach a nuclear accord with Iran. Although such an accord was achieved in 2015 despite their opposition, both cheered President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw from the agreement in 2018 and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has opposed the Biden administration’s efforts at reviving it. A great power whose policies are so subject to influence from its smaller allies will clearly have difficulty in wooing adversaries whom those allies regard as implacable threats—even though improved ties between the United States and an adversary might better serve to reduce the threat from it to America’s existing allies.

Still, small allies can only succeed in disrupting American efforts to take advantage of disputes between adversaries if there is something about the American foreign policymaking process as well as American domestic politics that allows them to do so. And this points to a second explanation, also identified by Crawford, for why the United States cannot successfully pursue wedge strategies: American domestic politics. Improving relations with adversary states is often highly unpopular in the United States. Political forces opposing this are often stronger than political forces supporting it. Allied governments fearing a U.S. rapprochement with an adversary can work with diaspora communities in the United States to oppose it. Diaspora communities from the adversary Washington seeks rapprochement with often oppose it too, especially if they were dispossessed by the regime in power there. Republicans have criticized the Biden administration just for considering lifting some sanctions against Iran and Venezuela in an attempt to change their behavior. (By contrast, Republican efforts to pursue such rapprochements are usually not opposed by Democrats and have had better success in overcoming objections from fellow Republicans.) But as in previous cases (including the Nixon administration’s rapprochements with the Soviet Union and China, the Clinton administration’s normalization with Vietnam, the Obama administration’s nuclear diplomacy with Iran, and even the Trump administration’s efforts to improve ties with North Korea) have shown, Washington has been able in the past to overcome allied and domestic opposition to the pursuit (even if unsuccessful, as in the case of Trump and North Korea) of rapprochements with adversary regimes not undergoing fundamental internal change. Some might argue, though, that heightened political tensions inside the United States in recent years make the pursuit of pursuit or even rational discussion of a host of policy issues more difficult now.

There is, however, a third possible explanation for why the United States is less able now to take advantage of disputes between adversaries than it was in the past: several of America's adversaries have become much more successful themselves at exploiting differences not only between the United States and its other adversaries, but also between the United States and its traditional allies. China’s enormous trade relations with so many of America’s traditional allies have given many of them an incentive to resist isolating Beijing in ways that the Trump and Biden administrations have sought. Many non-Western governments—including all of America’s traditional allies in the Middle East—have largely refused to join America and the West either in condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine or supporting Ukraine militarily. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates not only have maintained good relations with Russia after the start of its war in Ukraine but have recently been pursuing their own rapprochements with Iran.

All of these factors may play a role in explaining why it has seemingly become more difficult for the United States to take advantage of disputes among its adversaries. But while they may be obstacles, they are not insurmountable ones. 

Objections of smaller allies might be overcome if Washington did a better job of explaining what advantages they may receive from the United States improving ties with common adversaries as well as the continuing or even worsening problems that could result if such a policy does not succeed. A firmer U.S. position which warns of the dangers of interfering in U.S. domestic politics as well as points out the inconsistencies between their objecting to American efforts to improve relations with adversaries when they themselves have sought to do so with different or even the same ones would also be in order.

The United States must also do a better job of explaining to the American public why improving ties with adversaries can be useful while not exaggerating what the benefits of doing so are. Washington needs to explain how improving ties with one U.S. adversary which has grown wary of another can be beneficial to the United States while not doing so can mean that alliances among adversaries might persist despite serious differences between them. Above all, Washington must convey to the American public that it pursues rapprochements with adversaries not out of altruism or naïve expectations (as the opponents of such rapprochements loudly claim), but in pursuit of realpolitik interests.

Finally, the success of America’s adversaries in taking advantage of differences between Washington and several of its traditional allies shows that American diplomacy needs to focus not just on taking advantage of differences between America’s long-established adversaries, but also on blunting growing rapprochements between its adversaries and traditional U.S. allies. Indeed, it is because America’s adversaries have been as successful as they have in exploiting differences between the United States and some of its allies that it is now especially important for the United States to increase its own efforts at exploiting differences both between its adversaries and between its adversaries and Washington’s traditional allies. The U.S. inability to do this successfully—whether as a result of allied obstruction, domestic political opposition, or any other reason—will only serve to enhance its adversaries’ ability to do so.

Mark N. Katz is a professor of government and politics at the George Mason University Schar School of Policy and Government, and a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. He has contributed numerous articles to The National Interest.

Image: Shutterstock.

The Taliban seized power in Afghanistan almost two years ago, in August 2021. Contrary to what some may have hoped, resistance to the Taliban regime remains sporadic at best, and the strongest opposition group is now likely the terrorists of the Islamic State. The Taliban have proven their ability to maintain stable governance over Afghanistan. Since there is no clear alternative to Taliban rule and no will in the United States for another military intervention, working with the new regime to further American interests appears to be the least-worst option.

The Taliban Can Help Against Rivals

Engaging with Kabul could improve America’s position against its rivals, primarily China. A U.S.-sympathetic Afghanistan will encourage China to bolster its defenses in the areas bordering Afghanistan. This additional military burden would be relatively light for Beijing, but it is a low-hanging fruit and an inexpensive win for Washington. Every People’s Liberation Army soldier guarding the Afghan border is a soldier unavailable for a military invasion of Taiwan. Conversely, if Washington lets Beijing’s influence dominate Afghanistan, it will help China secure its western borders. A China-aligned Afghanistan will allow Chinese planners to focus on projecting power outward instead of border security.  

Cooperating with the Taliban will also harm China in a more indirect way. Pakistan is a close partner of Beijing, and the two have hostile relations with India. But in recent years, New Delhi has become a key U.S. partner for containing China in the Indo-Pacific region. Meanwhile, U.S.-Pakistan relations worsened significantly since the 2010s. Hence, by pressuring India, Pakistan is a hindrance for Washington. The more Islamabad is free to focus its energy against New Delhi, the less New Delhi can focus on pushing back Beijing.   

Although Pakistan has armed and funded the Afghan Taliban since its creation in 1994, the two have had a falling out since the takeover of Kabul. Border disputes along the Durand Line poison the bilateral relationship, leading to deadly skirmishes. Furthermore, Islamabad resents the new regime’s lack of help in fighting the Pakistani Taliban.

This brewing conflict opens a historic opportunity for the United States. If Washington can help build a strong and stable Afghanistan, Pakistan will have to maintain significant forces to defend its western border. Islamabad will have fewer capabilities to challenge India in its east. That would be a win for the United States, as the Indians would have more forces available to counterbalance China.

As seen through recent deadly border clashes, Iran-Taliban relations are similarly contentious. The Taliban follows a fundamentalist, Sunni interpretation of Islam, while Iran is predominantly Shia. During the Taliban’s rule in Afghanistan from 1996–2001, Tehran opposed the treatment of the Shia minority and supported the Northern Alliance, an opposition group to the Taliban. The Iranians also probably fear that Kabul will partner with the Gulf powers, thus threatening their rear. 

Engaging Afghanistan can help Washington further its objectives regarding Iran, both for negotiation and containment purposes. If the United States wants to reach an agreement with Iran to freeze its nuclear and missile programs and scale down its regional ambitions, a friendly Afghanistan would become a bargaining chip and additional leverage to pressure Tehran. Iran’s domestic political and economic situation is already difficult, and it is increasingly wary of its northern neighbors. Turkey now occupies parts of northern Iraq and Syria, and the Iranians have a growing antagonism with Azerbaijan; they do not want a strong, hostile Afghanistan rising on their eastern border. Hence, if entente with Iran appears impossible, Kabul would become a valuable partner to counterbalance Iranian power throughout the Middle East. 

Now that the United States has withdrawn from Central Asia, Kabul has little to fear from Washington. The Taliban fully understand that American planners are overwhelmingly focused on great power competitors like China and Russia and have no bandwidth left to attack their regime. Meanwhile, Kabul has to contend in its immediate neighborhood with hostile Iran and Pakistan, a rising China, and a lurking Russia. Distant America is thus a partner of choice for this weak state surrounded by actual or potential threats.

Fighting Trafficking and Terrorism

Other benefits would come from working with the Taliban: it is the most straightforward and efficient way to fight terrorism in Afghanistan. The Taliban themselves never participated in terrorist attacks on U.S. soil. They are now the only sizable force present on the ground and have proven their ability to contain terrorism. Since they seized power, Al Qaeda, the Islamic State, and their consorts have been unable to reestablish sanctuaries.

For instance, in July 2020, before the fall of the Ghani government, the United Nations reported that Al Qaeda had between 400 and 600 fighters in the country. In June 2023, the UN assessed that Al Qaeda had fewer than 400 fighters and 60 senior officials in Afghanistan, and the U.S. intelligence community believes this figure to be overinflated. Contrary to what some feared, no resurgence of Al Qaeda occurred under the Taliban regime.

Indeed, some discreet cooperation against terrorism between Kabul and Washington is already ongoing. A journalist  reported for Foreign Policy that “U.S. and Afghan security and diplomatic sources say the United States relies on intelligence provided by the Taliban.” While the Taliban are capable of holding their own against terrorist groups, other, far more worrying nests of terrorism exist in the failed states throughout the Middle East and Africa.

The Taliban government can also help fight disruptive drug trafficking. The West has long worried about Afghanistan’s role as a leading producer of opioids, fueling the use of illicit drugs. In 2022, Kabul banned the cultivation of poppy from which opium is extracted. The ban was highly effective, and production collapsed. Other opium-producing countries may ultimately replace the loss, but it is still a step in the right direction. Since the ban will likely destabilize the already troubled Afghan economy, establishing normal economic relations with Kabul will encourage the Taliban to remain on track.

What Should the United States Do?

Concerns about engaging with the Taliban regime are understandable, given its history of violence and repressive rule. Critics may argue that America should not legitimize or endorse the regime. However, one must distinguish engagement from endorsement. By engaging with the Taliban government, the United States can gain economic and diplomatic leverage to hold them accountable in case of mischief and push for meaningful reforms. Over the long run, engaging Kabul may even urge respect for human rights and foster a more inclusive Afghan society. Isolation and sanctions only marginalize pro-Western voices and embolden extremist elements. On the other hand, engagement would allow the United States to make gains regionally and globally at little cost.

Washington should prioritize three courses of action. First, it must help stabilize the Afghan economy to strengthen the country over the long run. A costless policy is to give Afghanistan back its billions of dollars of financial assets held in the United States and elsewhere. Ending the sanctions is also crucial, as they did little to shake the Taliban’s rule and only harmed the Afghan people.

Second, even small-scale military assistance would significantly bolster Afghanistan. The Taliban’s military maintains large quantities of U.S.-provided weaponry, sometimes even using them in skirmishes against Iran. As time passes and wear and tear do their work, Kabul will find it harder to keep this equipment operational. Washington should thus allow U.S. defense companies to sustain American weaponry there and furnish new ones if necessary. Furthermore, encouraging the Afghans to use U.S. equipment will create a path dependency for the Taliban, offer additional leverage, and keep them away from Chinese and Russian defense industries. 

Third, establishing normal diplomatic relations with the Taliban regime would further U.S. interests. Exchanging embassies would promote trade and investment in Afghanistan and persuade likeminded international partners to do the same. It would also facilitate cooperation to fight terrorism and crime. 

Only through engagement can the United States contribute to a more prosperous and secure Afghanistan while safeguarding its interests.

Dylan Motin is a Ph.D. candidate majoring in political science at Kangwon National University. He was previously a Marcellus Policy Fellow at the John Quincy Adams Society and a visiting research fellow at the Institute for Far Eastern Studies. His research focuses on balance-of-power theory, great power competition, and Asian affairs.

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Last December, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida unveiled Japan’s National Security Statement (NSS), pledging to increase defense spending to 2 percent of GDP by 2027, turning Japan into the third-largest military spender in the world. While many commentators see this as a reactive move toward Chinese aggression and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the NSS indicates Japan is deliberately and proactively creating a new vision for the Indo-Pacific: “As a major global actor, Japan will join together with its ally, like-minded countries and others to achieve a new balance in international relations, especially in the Indo-Pacific region.”

To pursue this goal, Japan implemented a new diplomatic posture by moving toward ending trade disputes and normalizing defense ties with South Korea. Additionally, Japan’s NSS calls for strengthened cooperation with the United States: “Japan, while ensuring the bilateral coordination at its strategic levels, will work in coordination with the United States to strengthen the Japan-U.S. Alliance in all areas, including diplomacy, defense, and economy.”

Japan’s NSS, in short, highlights that the country aims to become an increasingly active player in Asia and that increased cooperation with the United States is key to maintaining prosperity for both countries.

Tokyo’s willingness to increase spending and cooperation in defense should be seen as a great boon to America’s defense strategy. According to a recent wargame by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, every single optimistic scenario alteration regarding Japan results in a “major change” toward a successful defense of Taiwan, whereas the worst-case scenario of Japan remaining neutral leads to a decisive Chinese victory. This resulted in the paper recommending U.S. leaders to “[prioritize] deeping military and diplomatic ties with Japan.” In particular, operational coordination between the United States and Japanese military was seen as especially important by “participants who had experience with the Japanese military.” However, increased strategic cooperation between the United States and Japan should not be limited solely to the military sphere; Japan can play a vital role in achieving a broad array of America’s strategic objectives.

Under the Biden administration, an American counter to China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) was proposed to the G7 but has struggled to get off the ground. One of the issues contributing to this failure is, according to one analyst, “little understanding of the policy strategy or delivery mechanisms.” In essence, the American response suffers not only from a lack of funding, but also from an incoherent organizational structure and vision for actually delivering on promised projects.

Meanwhile, Japan already has a system for offering development funds and furthering its foreign policy goals in the form of the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), which disburses funds on behalf of their Official Development Assistance, a subdivision of their Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In fact, this system was established back in 1974, arguably making it an inspiration for China’s BRI. Aside from funding development projects, the agency sends personnel abroad and trains personnel in developing countries, amounting to 197,000 experts sent abroad and 649,000 accepted trainees since 1954. Considering current political realities in the United States and a lack of appetite in Europe to create “grand new projects” due to the war in Ukraine, it is prudent to coordinate with Japan’s already well-established system rather than create a new system from scratch. 

Another pillar of America’s strategy is rebuilding its industrial base, as demonstrated by the passage of industrial policy-oriented legislation such as the CHIPS Act and the Build America, Buy America Act. A key part of this task is improving the quality and quantity of personnel in the industrial sector. Currently, there is a talent shortage in the manufacturing sector which will expand to 2 million unfilled openings by 2030 if current trends persist. The Buy American Act is already struggling to find domestic suppliers for many critical goods, particularly in the construction industry. According to industry officials, no domestic manufacturers exist for dock cranes, trucks, boat lifts, and similar equipment. Furthermore, the recently built Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) chip fab in Arizona has “...yielded very little benefit for TSMC or Taiwan” due to steep construction costs (ten times higher than in Taiwan) and a shortage of qualified personnel.

Japan, meanwhile, has a strong manufacturing base in those sectors, but lacks design talent and ranks dead last in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development for the average annual entry rate of new enterprises. Considering that America’s venture capital ecosystem remains the largest in the world and accounts for 43 percent of chip design talent demand, it would be in the best interest of both nations to pursue personnel exchanges and corporate cooperation.

This is already occurring in some key industries: Japan’s Rapidus, a company formed to put Japan back on the leading edge of the semiconductor industry, has partnered with U.S. tech giant IBM to manufacture the latter’s 2nm chip design. However, the focus shouldn’t only be specialization (i.e., America providing chip design while Japan builds them): both nations should instead look to improve on each other’s weaknesses. For example, President Joe Biden could pass an amendment to the Buy America Act that allows for a temporary exemption for equipment the United States cannot currently produce in exchange for Japanese companies either sending some of their engineers to America (to teach current firms the best practices for producing the equipment) or opening joint ventures in America (for producing the equipment).

The latter has been done before, albeit under far less amicable terms. Following Toyota’s rapid expansion into the American car market in the 1980s, Congress implemented a voluntary export restraint with the Japanese government, limiting automobile exports to the United States to 22 percent of the U.S. market. This action, alongside the looming threat of import tariffs on Japan, encouraged Toyota to create a joint venture with U.S. automotive manufacturing giant General Motors (GM) to produce cars in America, leading to the formation of New United Motor Manufacturing Inc. The goal was for Toyota to learn how to run a factory in America while General Motors would learn how to implement the Toyota Production System successfully to increase the quality of its cars. This venture proved incredibly beneficial to both companies: Toyota is now the second-largest carmaker in America, operating fifteen factories across the United States and employing around 176,000 Americans, while GM’s procurement and production system is “world-class and every bit as efficient as the Japanese automaker’s system” according to the White House Automotive Task Force. If such a productive outcome could come from a mix of desperation on GM’s part and coercion on Toyota’s part, then even greater heights could be achieved today with America and Japan having clearly aligned interests.

Additionally, on a cultural level, American analysts more seriously cooperating with their Japanese counterparts concerning Beijing will result in a more effective China strategy. Due to their shared and turbulent history, many Japanese diplomats were ahead of the curve when it came to many of the issues that resulted from China’s ascension as a great power. Early last year, Sasae Kenichiro, a former Japanese ambassador to America, wrote in an article by The Economist stating that: “We warned the US: this is not a small compartmentalized issue between Japan and China, but a sign of a growing power in the region” Unfortunately at the time, these warnings fell on deaf ears. As one China specialist at Tokyo University lamented in the same article: “Fifteen years ago, if I talked to [Western colleagues] about the negative aspects of China, I was treated as a right-wing, China-hating, Japanese scholar.”

This needs to change. Ideally, the United States should have nearly as many personnel dedicated to understanding and working with Japan as there are for China. The America-Japan alliance is the cornerstone of the current geopolitical order in the Pacific, and it is time for both nations to work toward strengthening bilateral ties to maintain that status.

Siddhartha Kazi is an undergraduate student studying Industrial Engineering at Texas A&M University.

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More than forty years ago, I wrote a book titled Negotiating Peace that analyzed the diplomatic and military dynamics of bringing a war to an end. It drew material from the endings of wars through nearly two centuries, as well as a closer examination of a few major cases that had extended periods of simultaneous combat and negotiations. It also drew on theoretical work, chiefly by economists, about bargaining. Parts of the book got rather technical—it included differential equations—but it also had a more digestible prescriptive side. An appendix titled “Lessons for the Statesman at War” included forty-four pieces of advice for how best to employ diplomatic and military instruments to achieve a peace that will maximize the interests of one’s own nation.

Much of this advice is at least potentially applicable to the current war in Ukraine—from the standpoint not only of decisionmakers in Kyiv and Moscow but also of policymakers in Washington, in terms of what they should expect or hope to promote. The actual applicability of some of my apothegms will depend on events yet to unfold, but the following outlines a few of the major lessons.

The ending of the war in Ukraine will almost certainly entail some form of bargaining between Ukraine and Russia, and will leave a situation that represents a compromise between the interests of the two nations. It is rare in interstate conflicts for one belligerent to eradicate the other so that it has no need for any bargaining or compromise. It is not so rare in intrastate warfare, in which an insurgency might eliminate and replace an incumbent regime or the regime might crush the insurgency solely through military means (such as Sri Lanka’s final eradication of the Tamil Tiger insurgency in 2009).

But the eradication of a nation-state is a different matter and a less feasible outcome. Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein managed to do that temporarily when he used armed force to swallow Kuwait in 1990, but a U.S.-led intervention reversed that outcome the following year. The objective of Russian president Vladimir Putin in launching the current war in February 2022 may have been to eliminate Ukraine as an independent country, either through formal incorporation into Russia or by installing a puppet regime in Kyiv. It now is clear that Russian military force is insufficient to achieve any such outcome. And obviously, Ukraine cannot eliminate the Russian state.

Even a war that is said to end in a surrender does not involve totally imposing the will of one side on the other and involves a negotiated compromise. No surrender is unconditional if the side surrendering still has some ability to fight. The surrender of Japan in 1945 was a deal in which Japan agreed to stop fighting and thus spared the Allies what would have been an extremely costly military conquest of the main islands of Japan. 

Another possible ending of an interstate war is for one or both belligerents simply to withdraw from the battle (as occurred with the border war between China and India in 1962), leaving a frozen conflict with or without occupation of the disputed territory. Such an outcome is possible in Ukraine, but an explicit war-ending agreement has multiple advantages for all concerned. It provides a framework that facilitates prisoner exchanges, peacekeeping protocols, and other useful measures. It provides a degree of certainty that reduces the risk of misinterpretations of the other side’s actions leading to renewed warfare. 

In any event, bargaining, possibly tacit, is still taking place even without a formal written agreement. The withdrawal from battle leaves a state of affairs that affects the interests of each belligerent in both positive and negative ways, and which each side must compare with the “no agreement” situation of continued warfare to decide whether to accept the bargain that this state of affairs represents.

An implication of the foregoing is that to speak of the termination of the war in Ukraine in terms of “winning” or “losing” the war is not helpful in understanding likely scenarios for termination and in preparing for those scenarios.

The end of the war is likely to be preceded by a period of bargaining—perhaps in formal negotiations—accompanied by continued combat, rather than a military outcome being fully established before work begins on constructing a political outcome. Traditionally there tended to be a temporal separation between military operations and peace diplomacy—such as with the end of World War I, when the guns were silenced by an armistice at Compiègne in November 1918 and a peace treaty was negotiated at Versailles the following year. But that sequence was mainly a legacy of the limitations of pre-modern communications, when day-to-day coordination of military operations and diplomacy was difficult (except for someone like Napoleon Bonaparte, who combined military field command and ultimate political authority in his own person). That difficulty no longer exists, and belligerents have an incentive to continue using their military instrument in ways that they hope will add heft to their diplomacy.

Regardless, silencing the guns—and ending the suffering of Ukrainians from a continued war, and with it the threat of escalation into a wider war—ought to be considered the most important component of terminating this war. Moreover, even an agreement that is labeled as merely an armistice and not a full resolution of political issues may be the only peace agreement that a conflict ever gets. That has been true, for seventy years and counting, of the armistice agreement that ended the Korean War. This is one of the reasons that the Korean War—which was one of the major cases I studied in researching the book—has been mentioned by some other observers as a model for terminating the war in Ukraine.

Belligerents will become willing to negotiate a peace agreement when they both have demonstrated, to themselves and to the enemy, the limits of what they are able and willing to do militarily, and there is little or no prospect for either side to change the situation on the battlefield appreciably with one more offensive effort. Another analyst, I. William Zartman, has called such a situation a “hurting stalemate.”

A war that has not reached a stalemate and is going either too badly or too well for a belligerent is likely to lead that belligerent to resist peace negotiations for the time being, for different reasons. Too badly, and the impulse is to keep fighting to shore up the situation on the battlefield, in the hope of looking and being stronger in whatever negotiations eventually take place. Too well, and the tendency is to expand one’s war objectives and to hope to accomplish them without the need for negotiation and compromise. The first year of the Korean War illustrated each of these tendencies, as the front line moved up and down the peninsula with the initial North Korean invasion, the U.S.-led intervention under the United Nations flag, the later Chinese intervention, and another UN push that finally brought the line to what became a stalemate near the 38th parallel.

An implication of this pattern for the war in Ukraine is that it is a mistake to talk about hoped-for breakthroughs by the Ukrainian counteroffensive, with Russian forces thrown backward, as being a precursor, and maybe even a necessary precursor, for peace negotiations. Given Putin’s stake in the conflict, his reaction might be just like the U.S. reaction to the two major communist offensives that threw friendly forces backward in Korea: to see this as making it all the more necessary to assume increased military costs and risks to improve the battlefield map before sitting down to talk peace.

One other lesson, regarding the substance of any possible peace agreement, is already worth mentioning. Notwithstanding the value of a written peace agreement in lending precision and certainty to the postwar situation, sometimes some uncertainty can have value in helping the parties come to any agreement at all. This was true regarding the uncertain future of the South Vietnamese government in the years following the peace agreement between the United States and North Vietnam in 1973. Although the concept of a “decent interval” involved a domestic political motive for President Richard Nixon, leaving the fate of the Saigon regime somewhat to chance was a way to reconcile the United States’ refusal to explicitly abandon that regime with Hanoi’s objective to rule all of Vietnam.

In Ukraine, the bargaining gap that must be bridged is between Ukraine’s disinclination to formally cede any of its territory and Putin’s need to show some gain from his costly military misadventure. Some political issues probably will have to be in effect punted, with their eventual outcome uncertain, if any peace agreement is to be reached, despite the future risk of misunderstandings and festering grievances. Mechanisms such as referenda that leave some future outcomes to chance may be part of a formula for ending this war.  

Paul Pillar retired in 2005 from a twenty-eight-year career in the U.S. intelligence community, in which his last position was as a National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and South Asia. Earlier he served in a variety of analytical and managerial positions, including as chief of analytic units at the CIA covering portions of the Near East, the Persian Gulf, and South Asia. Professor Pillar also served in the National Intelligence Council as one of the original members of its Analytic Group. He is also a contributing editor for this publication.

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More than a century and a half after the end of the American Civil War, historians still debate the reasons for the Northern defeat of the South. President Abraham Lincoln’s effective leadership? General Ulysses Grant’s winning military strategies? The failure of the Confederacy of the eleven states of the South to win support from Britain and France?

But there is a general consensus among researchers that in many ways, the Union’s victory in the war was preordained that the agrarian economy of the South was no match for the industrial capacity of the North that helped it to manufacture its arms and build its transportation infrastructure.

On another level, the conflict between the South and the North amounted to a struggle between the past and the future, between a world built on an agricultural economy based on the exploitation of slave labor and a rising universe of manufacturing industries and commercial centers; between those who fancied themselves as the romantic knights of Walter Scott’s novels and an emerging urban population whose values reflected those of the Enlightenment.

From that perspective, the kind of civilizational clash is evident in the current evolving cold civil war in Israel. Although it may be seen as a struggle over judicial reform, it is really one between the future—the demonstrators who represent Israel’s Westernized economic and cultural elites—and the forces of the past—the ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students and ultra-right West Bank settlers.

Israeli pundits have proposed that the conflict is between two opposing forces: “Judea,” the Jewish settlers who seek to annex the occupied Palestinian territories and establish in Israel an apartheid system joined by ultra-Orthodox theocrats whose sons don’t serve in the military and don’t study basic math; and “Israel,” the high-tech entrepreneurs of the celebrated start-up nation, retired air force pilots, and other members of the nation’s productive economic sector.

It's a struggle whose outcome would determine Israel’s future. Will Israel remain a progressive liberal democracy and an advanced industrial and high-tech economy? Or will it be transformed into a backward theocracy with a third-world economy, a binational state, and eventually a Middle Eastern community like Lebanon with never-ending fights between ethnic groups, religious sects, and tribal factions?

Not unlike the leaders of the southern Confederacy during the American Civil War, those who lead “Judea” live in a fantasy in which they would be able to rule forever on another nation, in which the United States needs Israel more than Israel needs the United States, and if the world refuses to abide their dictates they would lead a fight to the end a la Masada, this time with nuclear weapons added to the mix.

But more likely than not, the war between Judea and Israel would not end in an apocalyptic nightmare. Instead, with the situation deteriorating, Israel’s best and brightest young would emigrate from a collapsing Jewish state to Silicon Valley, to Wall Street, to London and Berlin.

After all, why should they risk their lives to defend young healthy men who refuse to serve in the military and help subsidize the ultra-Orthodox Jewish parasitic economy and the West Bank settlements that threaten the long-term chances for peace? Why should they live in a country where women and LGBTQ people are discriminated against and Arabs are treated as second-class citizens?

Policymakers and lawmakers in Washington need to take into consideration these dramatically changing political realities in Israel and recognize that the country’s pragmatic political and military elite may soon be swept away and replaced by politicians whose values and interests don’t align with those of the United States.

To put it differently, if there was a time when Americans were worried that irrational ayatollahs in Tehran would have access to nuclear weapons, they should now find themselves worrying about what would happen if a Masada-obsessed Jewish fanatic would have control over Israel’s nuclear arsenal. Unless that is, the lessons of the American Civil War are applied and Israel defeats Judea.

Dr. Leon Hadar, a contributing editor at The National Interest, has taught international relations at American University and was a research fellow with the Cato Institute. A former UN correspondent for the Jerusalem Post, he currently covers Washington for the Business Times of Singapore and is a columnist/blogger with Israel’s Haaretz.

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In a turbulent year for both Israel and Lebanon, one would assume the two countries would work to avoid additional crises at all costs. Rather, Tel Aviv and Beirut are opting to escalate their long-running border dispute, raising concerns regarding a major conflict like the 2006 Israeli-Hezbollah War. Yet, while neither side can realistically afford renewed fighting of such a magnitude, this round likely represents an attempted show of strength on the part of actors in both countries—one that centralizes so-called “deterrence through resilience” on the border while managing and minimizing potentially escalatory actions. Additionally, political elites in both countries likely see the value of the crisis in distracting their populaces from other pressing issues.

Current events are symptoms of long-running border disputes in the area where Lebanon, Syria, and Israel meet. This includes the city of Ghajar and the rural areas of Shebaa Farms and the Kfar Chouba Hills—all areas captured by Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War and originally part of Syria’s Golan Heights. Israel currently occupies Golan despite UN condemnation following its annexation in 1981. This worsened Tel Aviv’s border conflict with Beirut while further complicating a pre-existing dispute between Syria and Lebanon. Damascus and Beirut have long disagreed over the Golan borders demarcated during the former French Mandate and Ottoman eras.

As a result, the two countries have sparred over relatively minuscule bits of territory for decades, often with only the slightest movements along the “Blue Line”—the established border following the Israeli withdrawal and controlled by the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL). UNIFIL was established in 1978 to oversee an Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon. Following the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war, the UN amended UNIFIL’s mandate to monitor the cessation of hostilities and act as a neutral arbiter to keep the peace. Roughly 9,300 UN peacekeepers are deployed to the disputed area.

Yet UNIFIL struggles to contain aggression on either side of the border, as reflected by the last two months of aggressive actions by Israel and Hezbollah. The current crisis revolves around Hezbollah’s establishment of an “outpost” in the form of two tents in the Chebaa Farms and Kfar Chouba Hills area and claims it shot down an Israeli drone in June. Hezbollah and other Lebanese officials claim the move was in response to Israel’s construction of a border fence around the Lebanese side of Ghajar, a city spanning both Lebanon and the Golan split in half upon the Blue Line’s creation in 2000. The northern part of the city was re-occupied by Israel in 2006. Tel Aviv refuses to vacate the city and effectively prevents entry from the Lebanese side, violating the terms of the split.

A series of tit-for-tat incidents occurred before and after Israel asked UNIFIL to request the tents’ removal, which Beirut conditioned upon Tel Aviv’s pullout from Ghajar. This includes an incident between an Israeli bulldozer and soldiers of each country on July 5, Israeli shelling near Kfar Chouba in response to a missile fired near Ghajar into its territory on July 6, and an explosion near the Lebanese city of Bustan that wounded three Hezbollah members supposedly attempting to cross into Israel and sabotage the border fence on July 12—the seventeenth anniversary of the beginning of the 2006 war. Israel claims it used stun grenades, while Hezbollah accused Tel Aviv of excessive force. A similar construction incident occurred on July 20 that led Israeli forces to launch smoke grenades at Lebanese citizens attempting to build a road near the border.

This series of events is unique from other issues that regularly occur in these areas, not limited to Hezbollah-backed protests along the border or militant attempts to enter Israel. Typically, such problems are connected to violence in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), given Hezbollah’s strong support for the Palestinian resistance. Similarly, Israel violates the border with its occupation of the Golan and military flights over Lebanon to bomb Iranian targets in Syria, let alone aggressive actions that cross the border—often against the border protests in Lebanese territory.

For Lebanon, and particularly Hezbollah, this round is at least partially connected to recent violence in the West Bank—namely, the brutal Israeli raid on Jenin on July 4 that killed twelve Palestinians and destroyed vast stretches of property. However, the Israeli fence around northern Ghajar also plays a role, given the long-running nature of disputes in this area and the northern Golan more broadly. Beirut feels strongly about its right to these areas—making this situation more than just a Hezbollah issue.

Of potentially equal importance to Lebanon’s political elites is the unifying nature of the situation and its ability to distract the public, as some Hezbollah affiliates have indirectly hinted. Indeed, a renewed border crisis offers a useful distraction for Lebanon’s political class, who wish to draw public attention away from the economic and political nightmare of the last few years. While hardly enough to resolve widespread frustrations, Lebanon’s powers that be likely view a manageable crisis as helpful at a time when their popularity is waning. One need only look at their rampant scapegoating of Syrian refugees to understand how Lebanon’s elites view and utilize a good distraction.

For Israel, any border dispute threatens deterrence against attacks from Iran-backed militants. Tel Aviv is home to a hawkish approach to national security that often rejects compromise—at least publicly—with such groups. Hezbollah is no exception, given it poses the greatest threat to Israel on its border. While the Israeli government likely views this situation as manageable as well, it will not show weakness in the face of one of its core rivals. Hezbollah will likely follow suit.

The fortunate reality is that neither actor desires a major escalation on their disputed border. Israel is struggling with domestic unrest stemming from a deeply polarizing judicial reform effort under the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and an increasingly difficult security situation in the West Bank that it appears to be ill-prepared to address without a full-scale military operation—one that will cause a full-blown war with Palestinian militants and further harm its international image. On the other hand, Hezbollah does not appear willing to take on Israel, as evidenced by its reaction to the Hamas rocket launch from southern Lebanon in early April. It should be noted that Tel Aviv also opted to avoid escalation at that time, assessing Hezbollah was not interested in a broader war.

For these reasons, while this round of border insecurity is notable and exceptional, neither major actor appears willing to escalate their actions beyond a point of no control. The time is not ripe for a repeat of 2006—a reality that hopefully sustains itself to prevent such bloodshed.

Alexander Langlois is a foreign policy analyst focused on the Middle East and North Africa. He holds an M.A. in International Affairs from American University’s School of International Service. Follow him at @langloisajl.

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While President Joe Biden termed the idea of Saudi-Israel normalization “a long way off” in a CNN interview in early July, his administration is seriously discussing with the Saudis the set of U.S.-provided incentives which they want as sweeteners for a potential deal. The primary requests from Riyadh are formal security guarantees from the United States, a U.S.-Saudi partnership to develop civilian nuclear energy, and the ability to access arms sales without Congressional review, as press reports in March indicated. While Israel obviously would like to see normalization with one of the most important Arab states, the influential Saudi commentator Ali Shihabi has laid out a “sales pitch” to Washington in a recent article for the Hoover Institution, arguing that the United States also would see profound benefits from such a deal. Shihabi holds out the prospect for what is essentially a reset of the U.S.-Saudi relationship, restoring diminished U.S. influence. In return for a “formal structure or agreement” which would “be perceived by adversaries as obligating the United States to come to the defense of the [Kingdom of Saudi Arabia] (in one form or another) if the latter is threatened,” Washington could “could expect a much closer and more influential relationship with Saudi Arabia, with all that such an alliance would entail.”

It is difficult to envision U.S. security guarantees taking the form of a Senate-ratified treaty, but there has been plenty of support in the U.S. Congress for the goal of promoting regional security integration between the United States, Israel, and Arab partner militaries, particularly on the development of joint regional air and missile defenses. While Shihabi does not explicitly make the argument that it would diminish Chinese influence in the kingdom in relative terms, that effect is clearly implied.

From a U.S. standpoint, though, Shihabi’s argument rings hollow. Offering security guarantees (even if less than a treaty) is a major concession that could tie our hands in a future crisis, and there are many reasons to doubt that it offers much incremental benefit to the United States. First, Saudi policymakers’ increasing shift to the East, and to China, is structural and economically driven. China is now by far the Saudis’ larger trading partner. While oil is still fungible, the United States’ need for imports from the Persian Gulf region has largely evaporated due to the increase in supply from domestic producers and other countries in the Western Hemisphere. It is, therefore, very difficult to see U.S. relative influence in the bilateral relationship going back to where it was during the “unipolar moment” of the 1990s, even if the Saudi side were no longer frustrated about what it considers a U.S. failure to use force against Iran after the September 2019 attacks against critical oil facilities in Abqaiq and Khurais, as well as broader a perceived U.S. retreat from its regional security role. Second, the tradeoff articulated by Shihabi would involve very specific U.S. commitments on security in return for the relatively abstract and unenforceable notion of restored bilateral relations and relative influence. 

The Abqaiq and Khurais attacks are often cited by Saudi observers as proof that the United States has abandoned its security role in the region, but while they demonstrated Iran’s new capabilities in a jarring manner, the attacks were calibrated to avoid a catastrophic oil market disruption—not to cause one. It is true that the facilities at Abqaiq in particular are uniquely important to Saudi export flows, and arguably a more important vulnerability than the Strait of Hormuz. However, the facility runs at well below its maximum capacity, and it was designed so that oil volumes can be routed around individual components of the facility which might be damaged in an attack. By targeting only a limited number of components at Abqaiq, Iran created a large outage—5.7 million barrels per day according to Saudi Aramco—but one which allowed for the kingdom’s full production level to be restored by the end of September 2019, about two weeks after the attack. This also was apparent to analysts, including me, looking at the commercial satellite photos available the day after the attack, limiting the impact on oil prices. It also was certainly clear to U.S. officials, and the intentionally limited impact on oil flows is likely a large part of the reason why President Donald Trump chose not to take military action against Iran as a result. Iran had shown that it could cause a catastrophic volume loss by hitting roughly triple the number of aim points at Abqaiq with accurate suicide drones, but it chose not to do so. 

The Abqaiq episode has not demonstrated to Iran that the United States has abandoned its interest in protecting the free flow of oil from the region or would be unwilling to take military action if Iran caused damage at a higher threshold. If Saudi Arabia had a U.S. security guarantee, that probably would have prevented a demonstration attack like this, but if it had not the United States could have been locked into taking military action over something below the threshold of major damage to U.S. interests. Trying to decide exactly how the threshold for such a guarantee should be defined would be difficult in a region known for the widespread use of gray-zone provocations, but an unambiguous guarantee with a low threshold could easily entangle the United States in an escalating conflict over a relatively minor trigger. Abqaiq is a perfect example of how U.S. and Saudi views about these thresholds can differ.

In addition, the use of support for proxies and gray-zone provocations by both Saudi Arabia and Iran raises the issue of potential “moral hazards” stemming from a security guarantee. Would Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman feel emboldened in his regional actions? The converse of that seems to have arguably been operative in the years since Abqaiq, in which a sense of vulnerability produced a dialogue with Iran and the recent agreement to normalize relations and mutually curtail actions that had caused friction between Iran and Saudi Arabia, including support for proxies. The fact that China stepped in to midwife the agreement toward the end of the process made it a bit uncomfortable for the United States, but it still promotes the U.S. interest in regional stability.

The Saudis and Emiratis’ frequent complaints in the years since Biden took office that the United States is “withdrawing” from the Middle East are belied by the facts. The United States still maintains a robust naval presence in the Persian Gulf and has substantial land-based air assets in the region, along with pre-positioned equipment for ground forces. This is clearly a major reduction from the levels seen in the post-9/11 era. However, it compares to the levels seen in the 1990s following the first Gulf War of 1991 and is well above levels of in-theater CENTCOM assets that prevailed in the 1980s. The United States is not withdrawing from regional security but rather returning to a more normal level. What is different, though, is the challenge the United States faces from a rising China outside the region, which is an argument for not allowing commitments in the Middle East to tie up more U.S. military resources.

Even without a security guarantee, there is plenty the United States can and should do to help Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf Arab states secure themselves against the primary threat they face, which is Iran’s growing arsenal of precision-guided munitions (PGMs)—suicide drones and much more accurate ballistic missiles—which has sometimes been shared with proxies such as the Houthis in Yemen. Israel is a technology leader in this field, and the United States should facilitate cooperation to the extent possible. An integrated regional network would be ideal, but there are plenty of political obstacles unrelated to a U.S. security guarantee, especially the current state of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as well as distrust among Gulf Arab states, including between Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Regardless of any U.S. guarantees, it is difficult to envision sufficient trust between these states to do the sort of extensive integration of sensitive data and information technology systems, which is seen between the United States and Canada in NORAD or members of NATO in Europe. Even if not fully integrated or publicly acknowledged, though, such cooperation should be encouraged.

The U.S.-China rivalry is driving the Saudi’s strategy of emphasizing their options and trying to use that to extract concessions from the United States. But while the United States cannot hope to pry Saudi Arabia away from China due to their economic interests, there is little indication that the Saudis genuinely have the option of junking the U.S. security relationship. China has long sought to be a supplier of military systems the West would not sell to the kingdom, going back all the way to China’s sale of medium-range ballistic missiles to Riyadh in the mid-1980s, but it has shown no interest in providing fourth- or fifth-generation fighter aircraft to regional powers—where U.S. and British systems currently provide the Saudis with overwhelming air superiority in any conflict with Iran. The financial cost of converting its forces to different equipment also would be prohibitive during a period when the kingdom is focused on diversifying its economy away from dependence on oil, not to mention the chronological gap in capabilities during the transition if the United States were ever to withdraw support for its weapons systems. China also is clearly not interested in abandoning its extensive relationship with Iran.

In sum, it simply does not make sense for the United States to make huge concessions to Saudi Arabia in the form of a formal security guarantee in response to concerns about China or the desire for Saudi-Israeli normalization. The United States should continue to play a leading role in regional security, but on its own terms, not theirs.

Greg Priddy is a Senior Fellow at the Center for the National Interest.

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Washington, Paris, and Doha are working to find a solution to Beirut’s nine-month presidential deadlock as well as to prevent another vacuum from plunging Lebanon into a deeper crisis.

A recent meeting held in Doha, Qatar, dubbed the “Quincy Committee,” sought to devise a strategy that can be delivered to the authorities in Lebanon. The countries that made up the committee were the United States, France, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Qatar. American ambassador Dorothy Shea attended the meeting alongside her French colleague, Jean-Yves Le Drian.

Le Drian, who is Paris’s special envoy to Lebanon, is expected to arrive on July 25 in Beirut after consulting with French president Emmanuel Macron and Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna about the conclusions reached in Doha. The French diplomat visited Lebanon in June to have a series of meetings with the different heads of the political parties. He also had spoken with caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati, whom he left with a grave warning, “time does not work in favor of Lebanon.”

Yet it does seem to be working in favor of Lebanese politicians. One example is that the European Parliament had recently decided to extend a waiver for the imposition of targeted sanctions against Lebanese who are undermining the country’s democracy for another year. This is effectively a deadline: Lebanese leaders have one year to vote for a new president before sanctions will be imposed.

This European lifeline is a bit contradictory when compared to Le Drian’s words. Lebanese share the perception that the international community is failing them. Perpetual calls by global leaders like Macron for reform and accountability have fallen on deaf ears. Despite threats of sanctions and punishment for ignoring international standards for good governance, no serious actions have been taken to rectify the behavior of Lebanon’s ruling class. Karim Bitar, an associate professor of international relations at Saint Joseph University, talked to the National Interest about what likely will result from the Quincy Committee and its impact on the presidency and central bank governorship.

“It is quite unlikely that this meeting will solve the presidential deadlock. The last time the five countries met in France, they decided unanimously that there should be no extension to the term of the central bank governor Riad Salameh.”

Salameh, seventy-three, has been governor of the Lebanese central bank since 1993. Prior to the 2019 crisis, he was seen as a financial genius and the man credited for protecting the Lebanese pound (lira) by pegging it to the U.S. dollar. Now, he is regarded with contempt by most Lebanese people and is considered to be the gatekeeper of Lebanese corruption. Ordinary citizens have been unable to access their own bank accounts since late 2019. Salameh is facing investigations at home and abroad for financial crimes such as embezzlement and money laundering.

Salameh denies the charges made against him and has vowed to challenge them. Back in February, the long-time banking chief said he would not renew his term as governor. There is now a discussion among the Lebanese political elite and attendees from the Doha talks about how to proceed on the central bank succession. In Beirut, talk of offering an extension for a limited period was believed to be put on the table. Yet the group from Doha is said to have reached a near-consensus that if there is no extension, all responsibilities should be transferred to the first deputy governor, Wassim Mansouri. Everyone is now waiting to see the results of Le Drian’s visit and how he is gauging where the winds of Lebanese politics are blowing. If Salameh’s term is not extended to a caretaker capacity and the government cannot find a suitable replacement, it will mean that there will be a double vacancy for the first time in Lebanese history: one for the president and one for the central bank governor. The government and the five countries from the Quincy Committee have one week to find a solution. If they don’t, the politics of improvision will continue to rule Lebanon.

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

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In recent months, there has been a flurry of diplomatic activity, with American, European, and Chinese diplomats jetting from one capital city to another. For the Europeans, these trips are part of a long-term strategy to hedge their bets. For the United States, the overtures have been an attempt to thaw relations with the People’s Republic of China (PRC). In the meantime, President Xi Jinping and his Politburo have toned down their inner “wolf warrior” to capitalize on European equivocations and U.S. weakness to push the “rules-based international order” to their advantage. 

At its summit in June, the European Council reiterated its view that the PRC is “simultaneously a partner, a competitor and a systemic rival.” It and Europe have “shared interests … anchored in a respect for the rules-based international order,” and Europe will “continue to engage with China” to “tackle global challenges.” Yet many of the challenges that today menace the EU have their origins in the foreign policy ambitions of the Chinese Communist Party. The international order the CCP aspires to establish is opposed to the Westphalian nation-state system that emerged from Europe in the seventeenth century. Instead, Beijing envisions a Chinese civilization-state at the center of the political universe, upheld by a ruthlessly pragmatic Marxist-Leninist modus operandi.

European leaders appear little perturbed. Germany’s inaugural National Security Strategy acknowledged that “China is trying in various ways to remold the existing rules-based international order.” Still, it continues, the PRC is “a partner without whom many global challenges…cannot be solved.” Beyond the veneer of its more bellicose rhetoric, the new German China strategy asserts much the same. When Chancellor Olaf Scholz met with Premier Li Qiang in June, he avoided any mention of Taiwan, Xinjiang, Hong Kong, or economic de-risking. At the request of Beijing, he also avoided the press.

French president Emmanuel Macron has been more overt. Macron has long held that any EU policy on China should not reflect Washington’s position. Between photo ops in Beijing in April, he implored Xi to “play a major role” in Ukraine by finding a “pathway to peace.” At the June summit of his pet project, the New Global Financing Initiative, he extended a coveted speaking slot to Li. “China will unequivocally reject trade protectionism and all forms of decoupling and severing of supply chains,” the premier warned. Macron has since suggested that he should attend the upcoming BRICS summit in August. It would come as little surprise if he advocates for China’s inclusion in the G7 in the future.

The French and German position appears to be a feature rather than a bug in Europe’s approach to China. EU leaders increasingly speak of a “multipolar world” where China plays a prominent role. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky—currently besieged by the man Xi once called his “best, most intimate friend”—has even suggested that his country could be a “bridge to Europe” for Chinese businesses. 

Outside of Europe, hedging has also become the path of least resistance. At a recent left-wing Sao Paulo Forum meeting, South American leaders applauded Macron’s push for European strategic autonomy and a China policy independent of Washington. Similar echoes can be heard from Africa to Southeast Asia, where China has been deploying its highest officials for the last two decades to solidify its influence.

China has aimed to portray itself as a more compatible partner, one that will not meddle in a country’s internal affairs while championing the interests of the Global South on the world stage—a convenient, if relativist, strategy that resonates in Egypt, South Africa, Myanmar, and Pakistan, among others. Despite the Biden administration’s assurances that American leadership is back and stronger than ever, policy failures in the Middle East and misguided agendas elsewhere have left the United States increasingly isolated, with key partners inching closer to Beijing. Exacerbating its loss of influence, Washington, like Europe, has been attempting to thread the Beijing needle—despite bipartisan hawkishness on Capitol Hill. 

During her trip to Beijing earlier this month, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen repeated the administration’s new talking point: U.S.-China relations need to be “on a better track” that maintains “open and honest lines of communication.” “The world is big enough for both of our countries to thrive,” Yellen announced. What this means is unclear. But what is clear is that the PRC has little interest in honest dialogue or stabilization with the United States.

Consider what happened in June when Blinken traveled to Beijing. After it had refused a one-on-one with Xi until the last day of the visit, the CCP staged the encounter to depict the president as if he were holding court, with Blinken as a submissive petitioner. The trip's primary objective—to re-establish military-to-military communications—was, for the United States, a failure. Yet, for the CCP, it was a policy and public relations win. As long as Beijing delays the renewal of the bilateral military exchanges, it may draw more concessions from Washington. In the meantime, Xi’s feigned concern for fentanyl outflows into the United States and other policy issues came as wittingly crafted signs of “progress.”

Special Envoy for Climate, John Kerry, also supports engagement with China on environmental issues though this has not won him any goodwill in Beijing. Kerry returned from China last week without winning any further carbon reduction commitments from Xi. China is the world’s leading polluter, responsible for over a quarter of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions and more than half of its coal production. Last year, it sanctioned domestic coal production equal to two new large coal power plants per week. Consequently, Xi and his central committee have little interest in genuine climate talks. What they are interested in, however, is exploiting Biden’s green agenda to weaken U.S. industry and undercut national security. 

No doubt, planting a de-escalation ladder between the superpowers is a worthy aim. Yet as the New York Times noted, Biden “is betting that high-level dialogue can itself act as a ballast in a relationship.” Yet, that bet and the administration’s detente has only emboldened the PRC. Xi has made it clear he has no desire to de-escalate—or even meet Biden halfway in establishing a viable, working relationship. In the last six months alone, China has violated U.S. airspace, increased patrols and unsafe maneuvers in the Taiwan Strait, and placed export restrictions on minerals critical to the United States and allied defense production. While Washington continues to call for a “fair set of rules,” Beijing plays its own game, knowing that—beyond vacuous calls for more dialogue—it will be met with no meaningful response. Recent revelations that the CCP hacked multiple U.S. government agencies suggest that the provocations will not abate.

With Europe wavering, U.S. partners edging ever closer to Beijing, and a U.S. administration intent on engagement for engagement’s sake, China has carte blanche to do what it likes when it likes. Steadily, Xi is reshaping the rules-based international order with impunity. If neither Europe nor America resist, this diplomatic activity could herald China’s “new world order” sooner than expected.

Amy K. Mitchell is a founding partner at Kilo Alpha Strategies. She brings extensive national security and defense experience to the firm, having advised three Secretaries of Defense and several large defense contractors. Her unique understanding of U.S. national security and foreign policy interests provides companies with high-level insights and counsel. Ms. Mitchell is currently a Visiting Fellow at George Mason University’s National Security Institute, a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at New Lines Institute, serves on the advisory board of the Vandenberg Coalition and is a member of the U.S. Global Leadership Coalition Foreign Policy Study Group.

Aleksandra Gadzala Tirziu is the founder of the geopolitical risk and strategic communications firm Magpie Advisory. She is a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council, Visiting Fellow at the Independent Women's Forum, Contributing Editor with the New York Sun, and serves on the advisory board of the Vandenberg Coalition. She holds a Ph.D. in Politics from the University of Oxford.

Image: Shutterstock.

Despite another round of negotiations in Brussels on July 15, the situation in the long-contested region of Nagorno-Karabakh remains volatile as violence continues to rage between Armenia and Azerbaijan. In an attempt to stabilize boiling tensions, Armenian prime minister Nikol Pashinyan has vowed to recognize Nagorno-Karabakh as Azerbaijani territory. Future U.S.-hosted peace talks between Baku are critical for deciding the region's fate. While peacekeeping proposals focus on the two direct combatants, the involvement of Turkey, which supports Azerbaijan, and Iran, which supports Armenia, will be necessary for potential talks to form an enduring settlement.

Given its shared cultural and ethnic heritage and desire to protect its sphere of influence, Turkey has long supported Azerbaijan’s territorial claims in Nagorno-Karabakh. During the 2020 Second Nagorno-Karabakh War, Turkey grew bolder in its support by providing infrastructure and weapons assistance, including Bayraktar TB2 armed drones, which helped secure Azerbaijan’s overwhelming victory. Ankara’s support has encouraged Baku’s assertiveness and reluctance to grant concessions. This attitude persisted throughout the September 2022 border clashes. Turkish foreign minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu directly intervened, tweeting, “Armenia should cease its provocations and focus on peace negotiations and cooperation with Azerbaijan.”

Iran, meanwhile, played a pivotal role in perpetuating the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. The Iranian army and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps have conducted large-scale military drills along its border with Azerbaijan. While Iran has a sizable Azerbaijani population, Tehran is concerned about Israeli influence in the Caucasus. Baku has received high-tech drones and other weapons from Jerusalem. Azerbaijan also supplies 40 percent of Israeli oil consumption. Iran is also concerned that Israel’s support for Azerbaijan is an opportunity for the former to conduct surveillance on Tehran via unmanned surveillance aircraft. Additionally, if Baku were to construct the Zangezur overland transport corridor, which would connect Azerbaijan and Turkey via southern Armenian territory, Iran could be further isolated from the South Caucasus.

Excluding the regional powers from future Nagorno-Karabakh peace negotiations would be an unwise error. Upcoming Nagorno-Karabakh talks present the opportunity for Armenia and Turkey to make concrete steps in pursuing the normalization of ties discussed in 2022. Iran could also appease its Azerbaijani population by achieving peace with its neighbor.

Reconciling Turkey and Iran could also serve as an avenue for Washington to improve its own relations with Ankara and Tehran. U.S.-Turkey relations have deteriorated since the early 2000s. U.S.-Iran links have been in a deep freeze since the United States withdrew from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) in 2018. As a result, the Iran nuclear crisis has worsened, with Iran now possessing enough fissile material for a nuclear weapon. Through cooperation over Nagorno-Karabakh, Washington and Tehran could potentially revitalize peace talks in other areas, including nuclear nonproliferation.

While diplomatic cooperation between Iran and the West may appear unlikely, all parties have clear interests in furthering peace. Iran’s Azerbaijani population, which has staged protests in the past, poses problems for Iranian unity. The United States and France are also home to sizable Armenian diaspora communities. American and EU investors maintain commercial interests in Azerbaijan’s energy projects. Baku helped build 2,174 miles of natural gas pipelines to Europe via Georgia and Turkey. These projects will be critical for the success of the EU-Azerbaijan energy plan to double Brussels’ gas imports from Azerbaijan by 2027.

What conditions will ensure a durable peace settlement in Nagorno-Karabakh? First, Azerbaijan must cease its blockade of the Lachin corridor. This blockade has restricted the freedom of movement for the 120,000 Karabakh Armenians and threatened their access to food and medicine. Ending the blockade would be a suitable concession, allowing Armenia to recognize Nagorno-Karabakh as Azerbaijan’s territory.

Protection of the Armenian population in Nagorno-Karabakh will also be crucial for lasting peace and will put to rest Yerevan’s concerns about a potential ethnic cleansing. Persecution of Karabakh Armenians would surely lead to an increase in Iran and Turkey’s military involvement in the region. The United States should make clear that failure to assure the security of Karabakh Armenians would negatively impact Baku's reputation as a dependable trading partner.

If these objectives can be met, a commitment from Iran and Turkey to reduce escalatory practices will keep Karabakh tensions from spiraling into a more significant conflict. UN peacekeepers are ideal, neutral guarantors of preserving these conditions, as Russian peacekeepers have been ineffective in quelling violence in the region. Peacekeepers from the United States are out of the question, as there are no vital U.S. national interests in the South Caucasus that would warrant the risk of starting new wars.

The United States should recognize that it can reap considerable benefits from including Turkey and Iran in future Nagorno-Karabakh peace talks. Not only is it a chance for open dialogue on a myriad of important issues, but it could provide the greatest likelihood of lasting peace in the Nagorno-Karabakh region.

Alex Little is an MS graduate of Georgia Tech and specializes in Russian and Central Asian affairs.

Image: Shutterstock.

Washington’s search for a security model aimed at ensuring Russia’s “strategic defeat” in Ukraine continues in fits and starts.

In a CNN interview timed to reinforce the deliberations of NATO’s recent summit in Vilnius, President Joe Biden explained that “the United States would be ready to provide, while [Ukraine’s accession to NATO] was going on, to provide security a la the security we provide for Israel: to providing the weaponry they need, the capacity to defend themselves … If there is an agreement, if there is a ceasefire, if there is a peace agreement.”

The relevance of the Israel model embraced by Biden to Ukraine’s security is deeply flawed conceptually and practically. Biden’s interest in the concept suggests that either he has been poorly briefed about the history of U.S.-Israel security ties—an unlikely conclusion given Biden’s extensive experience on the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee—or the more likely explanation of continuing confusion in Washington about how to imagine a new security relationship with Kyiv during what is turning into a forever war against Russia.

In operational terms, the Israel model is barely relevant to the predicament that Ukraine finds itself in and hardly a good model upon which to build the desired security relationship between the United States, NATO, and Ukraine. In conceptual terms, there is little beyond a superficial comparison between Jerusalem and Kyiv to recommend the concept.

First a little history.

U.S.-Israel security ties were born out of three principal elements: (1) Cold War competition in the Middle East; (2) Israel’s overwhelming victory in June 1967; and (3) Israel’s surreptitious development of a nuclear weapons capability from the 1950s onward.

It is all but impossible that Ukraine will be able to exit its war with Russia with the kind of total territorial victory that provided the basis for U.S.-Israel ties after June 1967. Biden in his remarks appears to condition an enduring security relationship with Ukraine, let alone its invitation to NATO, upon a ceasefire and peace agreement with Moscow, a far cry from the unambiguous Israeli victory that provided the foundation for U.S.-Israel security ties.

The U.S. commitment to supply Israel with conventional weapons, principally aircraft, has always been at the heart of U.S.-Israel security ties, as it would be with Ukraine.

However, beginning with F-4 Phantoms in a deal brokered by Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and U.S. diplomat Paul Warnke, and continuing more recently with F-35 stealth aircraft—the supply of such weapons remains an explicit and vital element of a bargain in which Israel pledged to maintain ambiguity about its nuclear weapons arsenal, and subsequently declare that Israel would not be the first to “introduce” nuclear weapons to the Middle East.

In this context, there may well be those in Ukraine (but one hopes not in Washington) who see the Israel model—creating an integrated nuclear weapons option while maintaining nuclear ambiguity as long as the conventional weapons pipeline from Washington is open—as instructive.

But here too reality intrudes. The U.S. bargain with Israel aims explicitly at assuring Israel’s superiority in conventional weapons against any combination of Arab/Iranian enemies. To that end, through FY2020, the United States has provided Israel with $146 billion in military, economic, and missile defense funding—$236 billion in 2018 dollars.

In just the first year of the war, Ukraine received $77 billion from Washington, about one-half of its total military, economic, and humanitarian assistance.

At best, the U.S. military support at current historic levels has won Kyiv a military stalemate. Ukraine, certainly out of NATO and arguably even as a member, will never enjoy an Israeli-style Quality Military Edge (QME) over Moscow, or be able to command the region’s strategic or security agenda as Israel has done in the Middle East.

Furthermore, unlike Ukraine, Israel has never aspired to win explicit and public alliance guarantees at the heart of Ukraine’s demand for formal participation in NATO. In contrast, Washington’s commitment to maintaining Israel’s QME is a key element of a policy designed to honor Israel’s (and Washington’s) preference to keep Israel out of NATO. Indeed, Israel has resolutely opposed any agreement with Washington that would constrain its “freedom of action” in a strategic perimeter once defined by Ariel Sharon to include any place between Morocco and Pakistan.

The Biden administration continues to search for a workable security assistance formula that promises Ukraine more than a tactical approach to incrementalism capable of achieving the strategic objective of imposing a “strategic defeat” on Russia. The Israel model is, at worst, a dangerous incentive for Kyiv to reinvigorate nuclear capabilities surrendered during the U.S.-Russia honeymoon a generation ago. At best, Biden’s interest is a reflection of the confusion that currently passes for strategic thinking on Pennsylvania Avenue.

Geoffrey Aronson is a non-resident fellow at the Middle East Institute and a former advisor to the EU and others on regional political and security issues.

Image: Shutterstock.

To remain competitive in the digital world, states, and the bureaucratic organizations that run them, must digitalize. This transformation requires several innovations such as the creation and maintenance of digital infrastructure, the collection and maintenance of large digital databases, the assignment of unique digital identities to citizens and businesses, the digital delivery of services, and new digital-friendly regulatory regimes.

For states that are able to successfully digitalize, several benefits will materialize, including improved economic performance, decreased administrative costs, and geopolitical or military advantages.

Yet, digitalization also poses significant risks, especially risks relating to the loss of privacy due to the creation of new opportunities for (digital) surveillance. These risks can be minimized if digitalization programs follow and respect democratic values and norms.

While the United States is well-positioned to lead the world in the development of digital states, it is currently falling significantly short of its potential. Instead, it is now other geopolitical actors, especially the European Union and China, that are leading the world.

The United States

The current digital shortcomings have not always been present. During the 1990s, it was the United States that was driving the world’s interest in the digitalization of the state. This is well captured by the 1993 report “Technology for America’s Economic Growth, A New Direction to Build Economic Strength” and the subsequent significant investments that were made in the development of America’s digital infrastructure.

These investments led the United States to consistently place as a leader in international rankings. Availability of internet access improved, opportunities to engage with the government (digitally) became available, and many of the internal operations of the government digitalized. Under the Obama administration, digitalization was made a priority and the chief technology officer of the United States was created to help drive and steer digitalization within the United States.

Yet, while the United States has made significant investments in its technical infrastructure, during the coronavirus pandemic it became increasingly clear that its digital infrastructure is antiquated and crumbling. In international digital government rankings, the United States has been on a consistently declining trajectory. Internet access is widely available, but there is still a problem with the digital divide.

Similarly, the United States continues to see significant failures with its digitalization projects, most notably the initial launch and failure of Healthcare.gov. While the United States has had a chief technology officer in office since 2009, under the Biden administration this role has been left vacant.

European Union

In contrast to the United States, the European Union (EU) has quickly become a world-leading digital superpower and is unlikely to fall from this position soon.

The EU has made one of its core focus areas the digitalization of its societies and governments, supported by the launch of the “digital decade” policy program. The program’s goals are ambitious but are being supported both politically and financially.

In the EU, public services and government data are being transformed so that they may be offered across state borders. Regulatory developments, such as eIDAS, have fostered the creation of interoperable and cross-border digital identity systems. To ensure that citizens and businesses thrive in the emerging digital society, numerous initiatives have been launched to bridge the digital divide.

The EU’s digital successes have led states around the world to adopt European approaches to digitalization—both technically and regulatorily. This process is what is known as the “Brussels Effect,” where international states and businesses adopt EU best practices while being based in a separate jurisdiction.

As states and businesses continue to adopt EU-supported digital innovations, they will only grow as a global digital leader.

China

Like the EU, China has made digitalization a significant priority and proposed a clear path for the creation of a “digital China” by 2035. To China, digitalization is essential for the long-term sustainability of the existing political regime; technology is a core component of their “social management” strategy.

Though there are many components to this, the most well-known digital component is the “social credit system,” which, to the surprise of many in the West, enjoys a high level of support from the general public. Infrastructurally, China is less hindered by legacy technologies like in the United States and is making quick progress in constructing state-of-the-art digital infrastructures—from 5G to quantum computing to data storage.

Drawing on this expertise, China has made a conscious effort to propagate its digital worldview internationally by exporting its digital technologies as part of the Digital Silk Road initiative. Though the West, and in particular the United States, is trying to push back against these initiatives, China is still seeing success in its digital development ambitions.

Coming Competition

To remain competitive in the emerging digital geopolitical competition, states must digitalize their governments and maintain cutting-edge digital infrastructure. As states begin to digitalize and develop such infrastructure, they will grow in strength and power.

However, this digital transformation does bring about real risks for the creation of a centralized or authoritarian future. These risks can only be confronted by the creation and development of digital infrastructure that is inscribed with democratic values.

Traditionally, this has been a role that the United States has willingly filled. Unfortunately, today, the United States is failing in this role, living within the shadow of the EU and an increasingly-digitalized China. 

If the United States wants to remain competitive in the world’s emergent digital future, it must invest in and modernize its crumbling digital infrastructure, making the digitalization of the state a priority. This will be hard to do and will require substantial transformations: funding must be made available, new regulations must be developed, new technologies must be built and implemented, and capacity within the public service must be developed.

Failing to develop itself as a digital state, the United States will quickly find itself a bystander between the EU and China as the world’s new digital powers. 

Dr. Keegan McBride is a lecturer in AI, Government, and Policy at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford. His research explores how new and emerging disruptive technologies are transforming our understanding of the state, government, and power.

Albi Nani is a research assistant at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford. His work focuses on the impact of digital transformation on industries, organizations, and wider society.

Image: Shutterstock.

Western media, for the most part, has ignored a remarkable array of Chinese pilot products in industrial automation, executed primarily by Huawei, the world’s largest maker of telecommunications infrastructure and the target of a global suppression campaign by the United States. Fully automated factories, mines, ports, and warehouses already are in operation, and the first commercial autonomous taxi service is starting up in Beijing. Huawei officials say the company has 10,000 contracts for private 5G networks in China, including 6,000 in factories. Huawei’s cloud division has just launched a software platform designed to help Chinese businesses build proprietary AI systems using their own data.

There’s no indication that the Biden administration’s restrictions on high-end chips and the software and machines that make them have slowed China’s drive for dominance in the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution—the application of AI to manufacturing, mining, farming, and logistics. Although the fog of tech war makes it hard to evaluate China’s progress with precision, available information points to surprisingly rapid progress in China’s efforts to work around technology restrictions.

The Three Potential Outcomes

China’s single-minded goal is to lead the next wave of industrial technology. Former World Bank Chief Economist Justin Yifu Lin, now a professor at Peking University and a councilor of China’s State Council, wrote in a 2021 book:

China’s 5G technology has become the world leader in the new industrial revolution. In the past few years, the US has repeated its old tricks and suppressed Chinese companies with groundless accusations, using all of its national resources. If the US succeeds in suppressing China by means of a blockade in the new industrial revolution, China will not be able to achieve its second centennial goal. How can China break through the US blockade? It can only do this by working hard to lead the new industrial revolution.

China is leading in the application of AI and high-speed broadband to business productivity. This can have one of three outcomes:

1. The United States and its allies make a concerted effort to leapfrog China and reclaim technological leadership in industry;

2. America and Europe adopt Chinese industrial technology and become followers, as China was a follower of developed markets a generation ago;

3. America continues to lose market share in industry and increases its import dependency, following the United Kingdom’s path of industrial decline.

The first option would require an industrial policy of some kind. America has turned towards such through the CHIPS Act, which has motivated $200 billion in projected investment in semiconductor production, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association. How effective the research and development (R&D) component of the CHIPS Act will be remains to be seen. Whatever the merits and flaws of the legislation, building chip fabs in the United States is justifiable on national security grounds but does not necessarily contribute to the productivity of other industries. On the contrary: the same quality (and even better) chips can be imported at a lower cost from Taiwan and South Korea; TSMC reportedly will sell chips made in the United States at a price 30 percent higher than the same product made in Taiwan. And beyond chips, the United States has not begun to consider a broader industrial policy, let alone begin to put such a policy into place.

To some extent, the second option—adopting Chinese technology—already is taking hold in increments. As noted below, only American companies that already have large-scale manufacturing operations in China have adopted AI/5G applications, entirely in the auto and related sectors.

The third alternative, continued deindustrialization, is unacceptable.

China’s Chip Dominance and the Failure of U.S. Tech Controls

Western analysts have overestimated the impact of technology controls on China, and underestimated China’s ability to work around them. There is a great deal of confusion about the importance of the latest generation of computer chips, whose narrow gate width allows more transistors to be packed into a single chip. The newest iPhones run on chips with 13 billion transistors; for reference, the computer that took the Apollo capsule to the moon in 1969 had about 64,000. The faster speed and energy efficiency of the newest chips are indispensable for 5G handsets. The graphics processing units (GPUs) produced by Nvidia and AMD make tractable the enormous datasets required for large language models (LLMs), like ChatGPT. But older chips, alone or working in parallel, can handle most business AI applications. More important than raw chip speed is the availability of the right data, the ability to transmit it quickly and conveniently, and the overall system architecture.

After the Trump administration banned sales of high-end U.S. semiconductors to Huawei in 2020, Western media predicted that China’s 5G rollout would grind to a halt. The Nikkei Asian Review wrote, for example: “Huawei Technologies and ZTE, China’s two largest telecoms equipment providers, have slowed down their 5G base station installation in the country, the Nikkei Asian Review has learned, a sign that Washington’s escalating efforts to curb Beijing's tech ambitions are having an effect.”

On the contrary: the number of 5G base stations in China doubled in 2021 to 1.43 million, and rose to 2.31 million in 2022, out of a world total of 3 million. Huawei simply built the 5G base stations with mature chips (with a 28-nanometer gate width rather than the 7-nanometer chips banned by Washington). Energy consumption was higher than optimal, but the system worked. Without access to the newer chips, Huawei’s handset business, the world’s largest in the second quarter of 2020, shrank drastically, because 5G handsets need powerful, energy-efficient processors.

Now it appears that Huawei can design its own high-end chips and manufacture them in China. Chinese research firms report that Huawei will reenter the 5G handset market in the second half of 2023. Reuters reported on July 12 that, “Huawei should be able to procure 5G chips domestically using its own advances in semiconductor design tools along with chipmaking from Semiconductor Manufacturing International Co (SMIC), three third-party technology research firms covering China’s smartphone sector told Reuters.” Caixin Global Daily reported in March that Huawei had co-developed Electronic Design Automation software with local firms for older 14-nanometer chips. It isn't clear whether SMIC can make enough 7-nanometer chips to meet Huawei's requirements, or whether the reported new 5G chips use another technology, for example, “stacking” two 14-nanometer chips in a “chiplet” to achieve 7-nanometer performance.

Consumer technology like handsets, though, is a subplot. The decisive issue is business productivity. Huawei and other Chinese companies now offer cloud-based AI services along with training and consulting to propagate the new technology to thousands of firms.

Huawei Cloud CEO Zhang Pingan July 7 rolled out a business-centered AI system before the 6th World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai, with a dismissive nod to ChatGPT: “The Pangu model does not compose poetry, nor does it have time to compose poetry, because its job is to go deep into all walks of life, and help AI add value to all walks of life.” Unlike OpenAI’s LLM, Huawei’s entry will train AI systems for customers in manufacturing, pharmaceutical R&D, mining, railways, finance, and other industries, Zhang said. The platform is powered by Huawei’s own Kunpeng and Ascend AI accelerator chips. Like the American LLMs, Pangu writes computer code, according to Huawei. But “it was designed for industry, and will be dedicated to industry,” Zhang added.

Most of these are embryonic, but with the Pangu system, Huawei Cloud offers its customers “large-scale industry development kits. Through secondary training on customer-owned data, customers can have their own exclusive industry large models,” the company said.

Zhang Pingan added that Huawei has built an AI cloud platform based on its own Kunpeng and Ascend processors, supporting a suite of AI software. Although “Nvidia’s V100 and A100 GPUs remain the most popular GPUs for training Chinese large-scale models,” a recent study notes, “Huawei used its own Ascend 910 processors” to train the Pangu model. Second, China appears able to produce proprietary AI chips like Ascend, although U.S. sanctions continue to prevent it from fabricating its Kirin smartphone chipset in Taiwan. Chinese chipmakers are keeping their cards close to their vests about fabrication capability.

The overriding issue is that industrial systems rarely require the complexity and computing power that ChatGPT applies to composing school essays and Valentine’s Day poems. China can’t import the fastest and most efficient chips with gateways of 7 nanometers or less, let alone the equipment to manufacture them. But it can make 7-nanometer chips with a costlier process, or approximate the performance of the fastest chip by stacking older chips into so-called chiplets, or jerry-rig older chips to approximate the performance of newer ones through clever system architecture.

Think of the railroad in the nineteenth century, which made it profitable to grow large crops far from water transport. This unleashed ripple effects that made the U.S. economy the world’s largest. Whether the train traveled at 40 or 80 miles an hour made a small difference to its impact on the broader economy—what mattered is that the distance could be crossed. The combination of AI and high-speed broadband creates a data highway that will transform the way most businesses run.

China Is Pushing Ahead on Tech, and It Shows

The United States and China approach AI differently. The trillion-dollar valuations of the great American technology companies mainly come from consumer entertainment. China, as Huawei’s Zhang said, has no time for poetry. Rather than guess when the machines will become sentient or when AI will replace human beings, China has focused on the automation of drudge work: inspecting parts on a factory conveyor belt, checking the bins near the coal face for foreign objects, detecting anomalies in machines, picking containers out of ships and placing them on autonomous trucks, and so forth.

China’s plan to assert leadership in the Fourth Industrial Revolution—the application of AI to production, logistics, and services—appears to be on track.

Except for large manufacturers who already maintain large-scale operations in China, American manufacturers have shown little commitment to Fourth Industrial Revolution technology. To my knowledge, the only U.S. manufacturing firms that have installed private 5G networks to support factory automation are General Motors (which made 2.3 million cars in China in 2022), Ford (which made 500,000 cars in China in 2022), and John Deere (which rolled its 70,000th Chinese-made tractor in February). These firms have joint ventures with Chinese manufacturers and can be considered auxiliaries of Chinese industry.

The trouble is that what is left of American manufacturing after the great decline of the 2000s often does not have the scale to realize the benefits of AI applications. The installation of private 5G networks does not coincide completely with AI applications; wifi and fiber optic cables can transmit information just as well in certain factory environments. But 5G has obvious advantages over cable-based communications in environments with fast-moving heavy machinery, especially in robot-intensive manufacturing, mines, ports, and warehouses.

According to a count by the European 5G Observatory, about sixty factories, ports, and airports have built private 5G networks, prominently including automakers like Volkswagen, Porsche, Saab, and Toyota. Again, most of the manufacturing and transport firms applying this Industry 4.0 technology have a major presence in China.

As a Western consumer technology, 5G has been a disappointment. As the Wall Street Journal headlined a January 2023 report: “It’s Not Just You: 5G is a Big Letdown.” With download speeds of about 150 mbps per second, moreover, American 5G networks are half as fast as China’s. And some U.S. 5G networks have higher latency than the 4G networks that preceded them, making them less useful for applications like autonomous vehicles. Reduced spending on 5G infrastructure pushed Ericsson into a loss during the second quarter of 2023.

China, by contrast, views 5G as an industrial technology, and expects 5G2B (5G to business) to drive sales. The relative stock price performance of Western vs. Chinese companies contains some forward-looking information. Huawei, the largest provider of telecom infrastructure, is a private (employee-owned company) and has no listed stock price, so no insight can be gleaned there. But China’s number two telecom company, ZTE, provides a rough proxy for Huawei. Its stock price has doubled over the past five years, while the second and third-ranked global firms, Ericsson and Nokia, have lost about 30 percent of their market value (price performance calculated in U.S. dollars). That is noteworthy considering that the broad European market rose 23 percent between July 2018 and July 2023 while the Chinese market (CSI 300) is almost unchanged. American pressure has excluded the Chinese firms from the U.S. market and many European markets as well, but the Chinese firms dominate their home market and most of the Global South.

China thus has a distinct advantage in 5G broadband, a critical element in business automation. Transmitting large amounts of data (for example, thousands of photos of a factory conveyor belt per minute or real-time video of underground mining operations) is more of a bottleneck than chip speed. Last month, China was the first country to allocate spectrum in the 6GHZ band to 5G and 6G services, to promote “global or regional division of 5G/6G spectrum resources” and provide the groundwork to “promote mobile communications and industrial developments at home.”

U.S. spectrum allocation favors wifi over mobile broadband, allocating virtually all of the 6GHz band to “unlicensed use,” that is, Wi-Fi. As the industry website Lightreading observed, “the ruling represented a win for the cable industry and other Wi-Fi proponents ranging from Apple to Cisco. But for 5G network operators – which continue to argue they don’t have enough spectrum for high-bandwidth services like fixed wireless – the FCC’s ruling came as a setback.”

In other words, U.S. policies continue to favor consumer-oriented Big Tech over industry applications.

Telecom infrastructure and related applications have also buoyed China’s exports to the Global South, which have risen 50 percent since 2019 in ASEAN, nearly 100 percent in Brazil, and 250 percent in Turkey. Broadband has a transformational impact on countries with a high proportion of informal employment. It puts payment systems onto smartphones and opens banking and credit to previously marginalized people, and provides information and sales opportunities to entrepreneurs. It reduces the cost of delivery of services, including education and healthcare, and fosters new industries.

Because of all of these efforts, China in 2023 became the world’s leader in the largest manufacturing industry, automobiles, with $3 billion in global sales. High-tech manufacturing and economies of scale are likely to increase China’s edge. In 1908, Henry Ford defined an era of mass ownership of personal cars by pricing the Model T at $800, then America’s per capita GDP. China now produces electric vehicles with adequate range and power at around $11,000, just below China’s per capita GDP. China’s cheap but full-featured electric cars may dominate the low end of Europe’s auto market. Once China’s best-selling brand, Volkswagen’s market share has fallen, with annual sales down to 3.2 million units in 2022 from 4.2 million before the coronavirus pandemic. The benefits of 5G2B and artificial intelligence are thus tangible and visible: Cheaper industrial products, more efficient ports, deployment of automated vehicles, and so forth.

Meanwhile, in the West, how LLMs will drive profitability is less clear. Generative AI may find more lucrative uses in the future, especially in the automation of software, but how the existing technology justifies the trillions of dollars of additional equity valuation inspired by ChatGPT remains something of a mystery. OpenAI’s ChatGPT model meanwhile appears to have peaked as an object of popular curiosity, with a 10 percent decline in website visits in June.

As for present usage and estimates, the picture is sanguine. An Asia Times study noted that replacing every help desk employee in the United States with a chatbot would save a mere $1.6 billion a year, while replacing the bottom 25 percent of computer programmers by earnings would save just $2.5 billion.

Why Have U.S. Tech Sanctions Failed?

For several reasons, U.S. sanctions are ineffective in constraining AI development in China.

First, as noted, China’s home designs are competitive in industry applications, which typically require less computing power than LLMs and may already offer performance equivalent to the Nvidia and AMD offerings

Second, China’s SMIC can produce 7-nanometer chips, albeit with much higher costs and lower efficiency. It can certainly meet the requirements of China's military for 7-nanometer chips. These are probably quite small; existing military systems overwhelmingly use older chips, which are more robust and easier to harden, as the RAND Corporation explained in a 2022 study.

Third, Nvidia’s fastest AI chips are readily available in China through third-party sellers although at higher prices. Slower versions designed by Nvidia to stay within U.S. guidelines are still sold to China, although Washington reportedly may ban these as well.

Stopping Chinese firms from using American AI computing power via cloud services won’t accomplish much, according to US industry leaders. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy was asked by CNBC July 6: “One of the things the administration has floated is the idea that Chinese companies wouldn’t have access to kind of AI-grade cloud computing resources through hyper scalers, through cloud providers, like Amazon. Do you have a sense of how that would affect Amazon if Chinese companies couldn’t access AI scale computing on [Amazon Web Services]?” Jassy replied: “Well, the reality is that there are some very strong cloud providers who are Chinese cloud providers in China. So Chinese companies in China are going to have access to AI capabilities, whether they come from U.S. companies, European companies, or Chinese companies.”

Compete Seriously or Perish

U.S. limits on technology exports to China do not appear to have stopped or even slowed the rollout of the AI applications that have the greatest strategic impact. At the same time, restrictions on sales to China reduce the revenues of U.S. semiconductor companies and endanger their R&D budgets. In December 2019, the Defense Department vetoed a Trump administration plan to ban the export of high-end chips to Huawei on the grounds that the loss of Huawei as a customer would impinge on chipmakers’ ability to sustain R&D. President Donald Trump initially backed the Pentagon position, but reversed this later in 2020 after the coronavirus epidemic hit with full force.

The semiconductor industry is unique in the scale of its R&D requirements. It budgeted $200 billion for R&D on $600 billion in 2021 sales (the actual total will be $160 billion or less due to market softness). No other industry devotes a third of revenue to R&D. The world’s largest industry, automobiles, spends about one-fourteenth of its revenue in R&D. For companies like Qualcomm, which earns a third of its revenue in China, or Nvidia, which earns one-fifth of revenue, the support available under the CHIPS act will not compensate for revenues lost due to federal regulation. These companies are lobbying the Biden administration to relax controls on China, and they have a good case—in fact, the same case the Pentagon made in December 2019.

Restrictions on technology exports to China at best are a stopgap. Eventually, China, which graduates more engineers each year than the rest of the world combined, will develop its own substitutes, as ASML, the world’s premier maker of chip lithography equipment, avers. Even as a stopgap, though, the controls are failing. They impose high costs on China in several ways but have not impeded the Fourth Industrial Revolution. On the contrary: the limited adoption of Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies by American industry is concentrated in firms that have major commitments to China.

Whatever its merits, the CHIPS Act is not a substitute for the kind of effort the United States made under the Apollo program, or during the late 1970s and early 1980s, when DARPA funded the invention of the digital economy. In 1983 the United States devoted 1.2 percent of GDP and 5 percent of the U.S. budget to federal R&D. Today we spend only 0.6 percent of GDP on federal R&D and barely 2 percent of the federal budget.

To maintain a technological edge over China, we will have to spend an additional several hundred billions of dollars, train a highly-skilled workforce, educate or import more scientists and engineers, and provide broader incentives to manufacturing. It is simply too late to try to suppress China. That is no longer within our power. What remains within our power is to restore American pre-eminence.

David P. Goldman is Deputy Editor of Asia Times and a Washington Fellow of the Claremont Institute. He is the author of You Will Be Assimilated: China’s Plan to Sino-Form the World, How America Can Lose the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and Restoring American Manufacturing: A Practical Guide.

Image: Shutterstock.

This summer, the bipartisan, congressionally mandated Afghanistan War Commission (AWC) will kick off a four-year inquiry into the origins, conduct, and conclusion of America’s war in Afghanistan. You should care about this Commission, and you should care about the report they are going to issue. If the AWC produces a quality report—fair, comprehensive, evidence-based—it will guide and inform the next generation of U.S. foreign and security policy.

The AWC presents a rare opportunity: America’s democratic institutions roused to ask pointed questions of the men and women charged with our country’s national security. The Church Committee of the 1970s, and more recently the 9/11 Commission, suggest these types of congressionally-mandated inquiries happen once a generation. A British historian once joked that Britons acquired their empire in a fit of absentmindedness. That is an astute observation. For anyone, myself included, who has patiently explained to friends, family, the pharmacist, the grocer, and others that yes, we really were still in Afghanistan more than two decades after the initial invasion, it certainly rings true. As a nation, we obligated the authorizations and signed the checks without giving much thought about what it is we were authorizing, what we were paying for, or why.

The AWC’s report could ultimately prove to be a consequential moment for the United States. If we get a quality report; if the American people are allowed to read it and consider its meaning and implications for the whole nation, and not just this or that slice of America; and if the report ultimately informs real reforms; it will be significant. More importantly, if you’re looking for proof that democracy in America still works, it counts for something that, after two decades of war, the U.S. government has appointed capable, public-spirited people to investigate and explain clearly and openly what went down in Afghanistan. Exploring and identifying exactly what happened, however, will require AWC members to ask pointed questions ranging the entire breadth of America’s longest war.

Who Was Actually in Charge?

The first question the AWC will need to answer is: how was the war authorized? Authorities are the tendons of our national security. They are the invisible thread that connects the fire team on the ground to the American people back home, linking the budgetary and lawmaking authority of the legislative branch to the operational authority of the executive. Authorities matter.

There are different kinds of authorities and a key question in Afghanistan is: what took place under military authorities, civilian authorities, and intelligence authorities? In a war, authority is usually concentrated in the hands of a commander who, by literal definition, commands the war effort. The commander oversees the theater of conflict, and in this capacity works with Washington to set and implement the president’s strategy. A clear chain of command means clear responsibilities, and responsibility enables the American people to hold commanders accountable for failures and recognize them for their successes. That is the theory.

Yet well before the first American boots hit the ground, Afghanistan defied the logic of normal military operations. America’s involvement in the country before 2001 was driven primarily by the U.S. intelligence community (IC), and the IC took the lead in the discussions about going into Afghanistan in the immediate aftermath of the September 11 Al Qaeda attacks. This, in effect, placed the U.S. Central Command in an apparently subordinate role to the IC. In 2004, for instance, while many former Taliban headed to Pakistan to join the armed opposition to the U.S.-backed Afghan government led by then president Hamid Karzai, the U.S. forces commander on the ground, Lieutenant General David Barno, drafted policies to avoid harm to civilians. But, according to a comprehensive history of the war in Afghanistan, Lt. Gen. Barno did not command all of the special operations forces conducting the operations in Afghanistan. Numerous books, studies, memoirs, and newspaper reports suggest that, in Afghanistan, U.S. intelligence officers exercised significant autonomy. So then, who was in charge?

A related question is this: what is the appropriate role of intelligence in policy decisionmaking? In theory, intelligence is the function of gathering and analyzing information to inform military and policy decisions. A good AWC report on Afghanistan should ask whether that happened and whether we have—whether we need—updated guardrails to further separate the IC from the U.S. military and policy decision making process.

At the same time, if intelligence officers were in the drivers’ seat, the AWC should ask what impact they had on the core intelligence mission to generate objective, actionable information. Did confusion between the intelligence and policy process have an impact on intelligence? For example, the U.S. IC’s assessment of the durability of Ashraf Ghani’s government following a full U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan very likely was a critical component of U.S. war and policy planning efforts. Unfortunately, this assessment appears to have been inaccurate. The question is why.

What Were Our War Aims?

The United States sent its forces to Afghanistan to destroy Al Qaeda and bring Osama bin Laden to justice in the wake of 9/11. The moment American forces swept the Taliban from power—and the U.S. administration at the time refused to consider any post-war power structure that included the Taliban—the United States also became engaged in nation-building, whether America’s leaders liked it or not. Yet, it wasn’t really until 2005 that the George W. Bush administration started defining and funding a post-war Afghanistan. By then, however, the Taliban had already launched its insurgency in earnest. As that and subsequent U.S. administrations defined what post-war Afghanistan should look like, they became more and more committed to an idealized vision for developing a social democracy in one of the poorest countries in the world. Why did U.S. objectives seem to grow and then balloon even as it became clearer and clearer to informed observers that lasting, outright victory in Afghanistan was becoming less and less possible?

One excellent study has charted the U.S. tendency over the years to escalate its commitment to Afghanistan in the face of growing adversity. In democratic politics, as in bureaucratic politics, doubling down often cements authority, while flipflopping is the kiss of death. Added to that, Afghanistan was so far removed from day-to-day politics back home that the costs of staying the course in Afghanistan never seemed as bad as the risk that cutting U.S. losses could lead to a major disaster, perhaps including the reemergence of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. This logic seems to have driven policy makers from U.S. presidents to senior officials on the ground, apparently motivating them to respond to chronic American underperformance in Afghanistan by chronically overpromising future results that never materialized.

The proliferation of outsized objectives in Afghanistan was often matched by the proliferation of international actors. Beyond Washington and Kabul, funding appeals were met, policies set, and decisions taken by NATO in Brussels and other international organizations and actors in other foreign capitals, which combined created a dense web of overly ambitious commitments to Afghanistan. Did the many, overlapping lines of effort impede coherent planning or complicate U.S. efforts to set and follow its own established operational priorities? It is worth the AWC asking whether the internationalization of development and security assistance efforts in Afghanistan contributed to a mismatch between ends and means, between promises and what was achievable on the ground.

Post-conflict reconstruction is a tremendous task under the best of circumstances. In Afghanistan, the AWC should ask how and why a major, international peacebuilding effort coincided with a major counterinsurgency campaign to secure Afghan population centers and prop-up the then Afghan government. Fortunately, the AWC will have at its disposal the voluminous records of the Department of Defense’s Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), which documented and continues to document the challenges and pitfalls of reconstructing that country in the midst of a war. Yet SIGAR’s reports are necessarily limited to U.S. governance and U.S. expenditure, which comprise only part of the story. The same question that applied to military command also applies to nation building: who was in charge, and what was the strategy?

The AWC might also consider the wider impact of the contradiction between U.S. reconstruction and war efforts in Afghanistan. U.S. military forces and civilian personnel in Afghanistan typically relied heavily on elite, English-speaking Afghans, familiar with the language of Western governments and donors, to tell them what was going on. What did it mean for ordinary Afghans to experience both the high-flying rhetoric of social reconstruction and the horrors of insurgency and counterinsurgency? What did it mean for hundreds of thousands of ordinary Americans, who responded to the call to defend democracy overseas?

Making Peace

Just as Americans need to understand why U.S. leaders found it so hard to define their objectives for the war, so too should we ask why the United States found it so difficult to find a path to a working and sustainable peace settlement in Afghanistan. This is not a purely historical consideration. In an era of great power competition, the United States needs to be able to speak with its enemies, and needs to be capable of defining limited, achievable objectives amid conflict. This capacity is critical to America’s ability to limit, control, and halt conflict.

There is general agreement among many observers that the Taliban attempted to engage the United States between 2002 and 2005; U.S. officials, however, did not seriously consider talking to the Taliban or initiate Washington’s outreach efforts in earnest until 2010. The U.S. troop surge was well underway and could have provided an important bargaining chip in negotiations, but the surge also reflected years of America’s fighting and sacrifice in Afghanistan. By 2010, interests and suspicions were deeply entrenched on both sides. There were no substantive negotiations. Instead, for years after 2010, a cycle of preconditions and talks about talks wore on. The available evidence suggests there was no effort to link U.S. policy in Afghanistan—the troop surge, for instance, or the drawdown that followed—to any viable process or framework for peace talks.

Why did it take the better part of a decade of war to think about diplomatic engagement? Why did it take another decade to conclude a three-page agreement with the Taliban? Wars cannot be limited in scope and duration—they cannot end—without diplomacy. The commitment to dialogue, dealmaking and compromise is a necessary component of the use of force. Benjamin Franklin’s dictum, that a bad peace beats a good war, recognized that even a peace based on a three-page agreement is when the hard work of development and engagement and changing minds can truly begin.

Speaking with our enemies is hard. And yet the greatest risk to diplomats is not the enemy, but the perpetual fear their own country will condemn them—or worse—for seeking something less than total victory somewhere other than the field of battle. What is achievable is not always just; what is workable is not always reasonable; but we are always just one more offensive away from ideal conditions.

Thousands of lives and trillions of dollars later, the American people deserve to understand why it was so much easier to prolong a fruitless war than to seek a functional peace. Of all the questions the AWC could attempt to answer, this is the most profound. Understanding how and why and when to start or control or stop a fight is the most essential function of statecraft. The Afghanistan War Commission offers America a chance, unique for our generation, to ask whether the U.S. government could have done a better job in Afghanistan and could do a better job in the future of navigating the perils of the very dangerous world we now face. We owe it to ourselves and future generations alike to get this right.

Andrew Baker has over a decade of experience in the public sector and holds a DPhil in International Relations from Oxford University.

The views expressed herein are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. government.

Earlier this week, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu received an invitation from the White House to “probably” meet with President Joe Biden, before the end of the year, somewhere. Meanwhile, Yitzhak Herzog, Israel’s non-partisan president who has limited power, spent Tuesday meeting with Biden in the Oval Office before addressing a joint session of Congress on Wednesday to mark Israel’s seventy-fifth anniversary.

Herzog’s invitation to Washington, arriving before one for Netanyahu, should be viewed by Jerusalem as a reflection of the United States’ deep commitment to Israel, but a recognition that its current policies are out of sync with Washington’s. Having different policies is unarguably Israel’s sovereign right, and Netanyahu’s as its leader. But if those differences become the default, it can threaten to permanently alter the nature of the relationship.

The right approach to Iran, for example, always the dominant foreign policy concern for Jerusalem, continues to divide Israel and the United States; even as strong bilateral communication and meaningful cooperation on the topic has helped mitigate public disagreements, as happened in 2015 over the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. But even excellent communication is unlikely to mitigate a public, and angry, Israeli reaction if the Biden administration agrees to even a limited agreement with Tehran. 

As communication has improved on Iran, it conversely seems to have fallen off when it comes to other major foreign policy challenges. The proposed expansion of settlements and settler-Palestinian violence is slowing the pace of progress between Abraham Accords members, most recently demonstrated by Morocco’s decision to cancel the latest Negev Forum. The accords, however, are something the United States places great weight on; a new position was just created at the State Department dedicated to the issue.

Further abroad, Netanyahu’s decision to visit China later this year is prime to compound misalignment since it seems to be less about a genuine bilateral China-Israel relationship and more about a way to needle the United States and compel it to increase its regional involvement.

But Israel is neither Saudi Arabia nor the UAE, both of which are trying to employ a strategy of hedging between the United States and China. As Mark Dubowitz, a longtime ally of the Israeli Right and CEO of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, said on Twitter, “If Netanyahu thinks he can … play the US and China off each other, he better hope that Israel becomes a major oil producer, returns the $38 billion in US military aid and no longer requires American support at the UN.” 

The announcement over Netanyahu’s decision to visit Beijing follows U.S. frustration with the Israeli leader for his refusal last winter to provide Ukraine with HAWK anti-aircraft missiles, currently sitting in storage. Israel has long been concerned that providing weapons to Ukraine could lead them to fall into the wrong hands and be reverse engineered, threatening Israel’s security. Moreover, Jerusalem was concerned that transferring them to Ukraine would lead Russia to impede Israel’s freedom of action to strike Iranian and Hezbollah targets in Syria, where Russia still operates.

But by denying the request, Netanyahu essentially dismissed out of hand the United States’ biggest near-term global priority in exchange for hoping Russian president Vladimir Putin doesn’t interfere with Israel’s interdiction strikes; all while Russia’s military relationship with Iran grows closer.

And in Israel itself, civil unrest will probably come to a peak over the next two weeks as legislation to curtail the power of the Israeli Supreme Court as an independent check on the legislature advances.

I happen to be in Israel this week for a conference. On Saturday evening, I wandered from my hotel down to Kaplan Street to observe the judicial reform protests in person. What I saw was tens of thousands of overwhelmingly diverse, patriotic, and scared Israelis, fearful that the judicial reforms will fundamentally undermine, in their view, Israel’s democracy.

While a strong U.S.-Israel relationship will, and should, continue no matter what happens with the legislation, there is no way to minimize or avoid that democracy is a shared, core, and fundamental tenet of the U.S.-Israel relationship; even if both of ours are imperfect works in progress.

The United States engages and has strong relationships with lots of countries that don’t share its ethos for democracy and freedom. But those relationships all come with an invisible ceiling.

On Tuesday, Biden told New York Times columnist Tom Friedman that there is a need, “to seek the broadest possible consensus,” when it comes to the judicial reforms; a follow-up to his comments in March when he said, a “compromise” is needed. Back in March Netanyahu responded to those comments with seeming annoyance, noting that Israel is a “sovereign country” and rejects “pressure from abroad.” But the President then, like now, was not seeking to interfere in Israel’s domestic politics. Rather, he was implicitly reflecting his own Zionism; almost certainly concerned that if Israel no longer meaningfully shares the bedrock principle of democracy, over time, the US-Israel relationship will transform from one with few limits, into a much narrower one with a ceiling.

And that is the challenge of misalignment as a whole. Allies can always agree to disagree on policies. But when they begin to be out of sync on too many of them, it can threaten to alter the contours of the broader relationship, no matter how strong. Such a policy chasm is not going to jeopardize the U.S.-Israel relationship today; but if it continues and widens, it can in the future. 

At some point this year, Biden will probably meet with Prime Minister Netanyahu. How it goes will depend on whether or not the US and Israel are better aligned. 

Jonathan Panikoff is the director of the Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative at the Atlantic Council and the former deputy national intelligence officer for the Middle East.

The views expressed are the author’s and do not imply endorsement by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Intelligence Community, or any other U.S. government agency.

Image: Shutterstock.

In the United States, attention toward recent improvements in South Korea-Japan relations focuses heavily on hard security cooperation vis-à-vis China. Indeed, the Biden administration has worked hard to encourage this. But closer Korea-Japan interaction—if sustained—could also have significant consequences in other areas, especially energy.

Few relationships are as complex and nuanced as the one between South Korea and Japan. The peoples of the Korean Peninsula and the Japanese Archipelago have interacted culturally and economically since ancient times. Nonetheless, Imperial Japan’s invasion and occupation of the peninsula (1910–1945) left behind many unresolved issues and painful historical memories for the Korean inhabitants.

The relationship between South Korea and Japan is bound to change as time passes. A 2022 poll conducted by Korea’s East Asia Institute and Japan’s Genron NGO has shown a sizable shift in opinion since South Korean president Yoon Suk Yeol’s government took office in 2022. Compared to the previous year, respondents in both countries are more likely to express willingness to overcome problems in bilateral relations.

In addition, respondents in another poll said that the United States, Japan, and South Korea should strengthen military cooperation. This is due to the intensified nuclear threat from North Korea and the increased sensitivity to various challenges from China. Now, more people in the two countries believe that increased cooperation between Korea and Japan benefits the balance of power in Northeast Asia.

President Yoon and Japanese prime minister Fumio Kishida have reinstated so-called “shuttle diplomacy,” and follow-up consultations are underway at the working level. Beyond security discussions, talks on cooperation in the energy sector have resumed after a five-year hiatus; the last Korea-Japan bilateral energy dialogue was in 2018.

Lee Wonju, Director General for Energy Policy from South Korea’s MOTIE (Ministry of Trade, Industry, and Energy), and Minami Ryo, Deputy Commissioner for International Policy on Carbon Neutrality from Japan’s METI (Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry), held a policy meeting on May 25, on the occasion of the World Climate Industry Expo 2023 in Busan. The officials discussed the need to strengthen energy policy coordination between the two countries, which share high dependence on energy imports and similar energy consumption patterns.

Seoul and Tokyo recognize the need to strengthen energy security and carbon neutrality measures amid the recent unstable energy market. Therefore, the two countries exchanged views on expanding carbon-free energy (CFE) and cooperation in strengthening stable energy supply chains for natural gas and minerals. METI announced the two sides had agreed to continue close communication to expand energy cooperation to various fields.

Korea and Japan have very similar energy concerns and dilemmas. Most importantly, Korea and Japan have built their economies through export-driven manufacturing. Since each country has minimal natural resources, their economic structures have made them highly dependent on imported energy and minerals. Therefore, any external energy crisis would seriously impact both countries. The two oil crises in the 1970s weakened their economies, and since then, both countries have been trying to diversify their energy sources by using natural gas and nuclear power. Nevertheless, maintaining a stable supply of imported energy remains a vital issue for both countries.

Second, both countries declared “2050 carbon neutrality” goals in October 2020 and legislated this goal domestically. Korea’s NDC (Nationally Determined Contribution) under the Paris climate agreement calls for a 40 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from 2018 levels by 2030. Japan has committed to reducing its emissions by 46 percent from 2013 levels in 2030. However, both countries have similar structural problems that will make meeting these targets quite difficult.

As mentioned above, both countries have manufacturing-oriented economies that are necessarily energy-intensive. Both depend heavily on fossil fuels for power generation and manufacturing, particularly in the steel sector. Korea relied on coal for 36 percent of its electricity generation and natural gas for 26 percent as of 2022. Japan also relies on coal and gas for over 70 percent of its electricity generation. Decarbonizing the power sector is an urgent task for both countries, which they can only accomplish by constructing more renewable or low-carbon power sources.

Innovation and advancements in grid and storage technologies are needed too. In South Korea, privatization rules power generation, but KEPCO (Korea Electric Power Corporation) still monopolizes distribution. However, KEPCO’s accumulated astronomical deficits (due in part to artificially low electricity prices) make it difficult to reinvest and innovate. Japan has struggled to restart its nuclear reactors since the infamous 2011 Fukushima meltdown.

Third, both countries share common demographic and socio-structural challenges, such as aged societies, low birth rates, declining populations, increasing single-person households, and rural decline. In South Korea, the proportion of single-person households exceeded 40 percent. In Japan, the number of single-person households is also increasing while the population is decreasing. As a result of these demographic shifts, the types of housing and energy consumption behaviors have changed significantly from the past. In addition, the gap between metropolitan and rural areas in both countries is widening, leading to social conflicts and problems in areas such as education and public health. The declining population in Korea and Japan accelerates the so-called “rural extinction” phenomenon. In such a desperate demographic situation, assuming high economic growth in formulating policy is impossible.

Given the above, Korea and Japan are suitable partners to share energy policy ideas and pursue cooperation. The most promising areas are natural gas, recycling and energy efficiency, nuclear safety, and new areas like hydrogen and smart grids.

Natural gas emits fewer harmful air pollutants than coal, and neither Korea nor Japan is likely to reduce consumption substantially anytime soon. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year increased fuel price volatility and concerns about the security of gas supplies. Korea and Japan have been paying the so-called “Asian premium,” buying gas at higher prices than the rest of the world, and are among the largest importers of Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) from their ally, the United States. Japan is more dependent on Russian LNG than South Korea because of its involvement in the Sakhalin project, where two major Japanese firms remain as investors. While Japan has joined the post-war sanctions against Russia, its firms have not withdrawn from the Sakhalin project, citing energy security.

But the competition for gas is becoming increasingly fierce. European countries seeking to escape Russia have significantly increased their imports of American LNG and LNG from the Middle East. Korea Gas Corporation and Mitsubishi Corporation of Japan have regrettably clashed over the Senoro gas field in Indonesia. However, the discussion should not stop there but rather continue to discuss ways to cooperate by learning from past failures. Korea and Japan, which have similar situations, need to work together to diversify their gas imports and find ways to increase their leverage with suppliers.

Therefore, since stable gas supplies are a crucial energy security matter for both countries, there is a high possibility that they will continue to compete. Still, it is worth trying to structure this competition and institutionalize bilateral cooperation to increase the bargaining power of the two countries vis-à-vis suppliers.

Resource recycling and energy efficiency are also areas where Korea and Japan can cooperate. In Europe, the so-called “battery passport” system, which digitizes information on the entire life cycle of batteries, is being promoted to increase the recycling rate of batteries from a circular economy perspective. This is also an area where Korea and Japan could exchange ideas and share policy approaches.

Furthermore, Korea and Japan can identify common areas for collaboration, such as nuclear safety, smart grids, future cities, and green hydrogen and ammonia supply chains. Hydrogen and ammonia will likely be essential for reducing emissions from each nation’s manufacturing sector.

For these collaborations to be possible, rebuilding trust between the two countries is essential. In particular, it is worth noting that the discharge of the Fukushima nuclear wastewater is prompting a raging political conflict in South Korea. This is, of course, because the political landscape is very divided and polarized. However, the fact that there is opposition in Korea, China, and even Japan shows that the Japanese nuclear industry and regulators have lost a lot of credibility. Korea is one of the most exemplary nuclear operating countries, so if Korea and Japan can further build trust and set high standards, starting with the nuclear sector, it will positively impact Northeast Asia and beyond.

Given the historic nature of the relationship between the two countries and the differences in the structure of their energy markets, it may be challenging to accelerate cooperation. However, if the two countries are willing to share policy ideas on common concerns and identify policy synergies, they can contribute to peace and economic prosperity in the region.

Eunjung Lim is an associate professor at the Division of International Studies, Kongju National University and a board member of the Korea Institute of Nuclear Nonproliferation and Control.

Image: Shutterstock.

President Gustavo Petro’s time at the helm of Colombia thus far has come in two acts. The first began with his taking office in August 2022 and was defined by his pushing ahead on key policies and living up to the hope that his center-left government would help steer Colombia to a more peaceful, greener, and economically equitable future. Act two began with the failure to pass health care legislation in April 2023, which was followed by a cabinet reshuffle and the failure to pass other reform bills. Furthermore, a scandal broke in June involving his former chief of staff, Laura Sarabia, and his ambassador to Venezuela, Armando Benedetti blindsided the administration.

Petro is now seeking to regain momentum, but he faces a challenging political and economic landscape, which could be defined by gridlock with Congress, policy drift, and potentially opening the door to social instability. Given Colombia’s importance as a reliable U.S. partner in South America, observers and policymakers in Washington ought to pay attention to these developments.

The Petro Show: Acts I and II

Petro’s victory in 2022 came amid considerable excitement. A former member of M-19, a flag holder for Colombia’s Left, and mayor of Bogóta, he inspired many youthful voters and other marginalized groups who had tired of center-right and conservative governments often hit by corruption scandals, human rights violations, and a hard-nosed approach to dealing with the country’s arms-bearing radical Left. Petro was seen as a new type of Colombian leader; one that could clean up the country’s politics and enact a progressive agenda that would, among other things, pursue more eco-friendly policies (by downsizing the country’s coal and oil sectors) and orient Bogóta toward ensuring socio-economic justice.

Petro’s first act saw the formation of a broad-based cabinet, the passage of a tax reform bill, and an accord to buy land from cattle ranchers and give it to landless rural people. At the same time, he was able to bring the country’s largest remaining armed revolutionary (and drug trafficking) group, the ELN, to the negotiating table as part of his “Total Peace” policy—an ambitious plan to minimize violence, protect civilians, and dismantle the country’s many armed groups. He also restored relations with the dictatorial Maduro regime in Venezuela in 2022—a sharp change in direction that seeks to normalize the border and improve trade, departing from the approach of his predecessor, President Iván Duque.

Act two began roughly around April 2023, following the failure of his health care reform package to make it through the lower house of the country’s congress. Petro, in response, took his government leftwards. He replaced seven cabinet members with leftists, seeking to reinvigorate his reform program. Particularly noticeable was the departure of the market-friendly and internationally-respected Finance Minister José Antonio Ocampo, who was seen by the country’s Left as a sop to the center-right and Right (and whose earlier support was essential to passing legislation in the Congress). He was replaced by Ricardo Bonilla, a former finance chief of Bogóta and close Petro ally.

In practice, the cabinet reshuffle is important. Petro barely won the majority of the vote on the second round (50.47 percent) and his party and allies failed to obtain a majority in either chamber of Congress, making a politically broader cabinet necessary passage of his legislation. While the president appears intent on having a more ideologically cohesive group of people around him that will pursue his agenda with greater vigor, it also sets the stage for less cooperation in Congress and potential gridlock.

The Nanny Scandal and the Family Scandal

Following the cabinet reshuffle, Petro’s administration was hit by a scandal in early June around accusations that his former chief of staff’s nanny, Marelbys Meza, had stolen a large sum of cash in a briefcase from her apartment. Meza told the media that she was taken to a basement near the presidential palace in January 2023, accused of stealing the briefcase, and forced to take a polygraph test.

The scandal quickly blossomed into a wider tangle of alleged illegal wiretapping (something Petro has previously railed against), the alleged suicide of a security officer (suspected of being involved in the wiretappings), expletive-laden leaked audio messages by Benedetti to Sarabia, and allegations of campaign finance violations (made by Bendetti and later retracted). Adding another layer of complexity to the scandal is that Meza appears to have been at the center of a bitter power struggle between Benedetti, a major conservative power broker who allied with Petro during the election, and Sarabia, who worked under Benedetti before leading Petro’s campaign. Sarabia and Benedetti were dismissed from their posts following the announcement that the attorney general’s office had commenced an investigation into the affair. Rounding out the picture, relations between Petro and his attorney general, Francisco Barbosa, are strained, with the president having accused Barbosa, who was appointed by a prior conservative government, of acting against his “change” agenda.

Petro faces other legal problems; there are accusations that his son, Nicolás Petro, might have kept donations to his father’s campaign for his own personal use (some of them allegedly from a former drug trafficker), and that the president’s brother, Juan Fernando Petro, may have received money from the country’s drug cartels. Both men have denied the allegations, but the attorney general’s office has indicated that it is investigating matters. If nothing else, this development only adds to the sense of embattlement felt by Petro and further polarizes the country between his supporters, who believe that this is part of a plot against the president, and those opposed to his progressive agenda.

The scandal has eroded public confidence, with some of the most recent opinion polls putting Petro’s popularity around 33 percent and disapproval ratings a little over 50 percent. When elected he had an approval rating of 56 percent. At the same time, Petro’s reform agenda has stalled. In June a bill to regulate the purchase, sale, and distribution of marijuana narrowly failed in the Senate, while a labor reform bill was shelved after committee members in Congress’ lower house failed to reach a quorum. The fate of two other reforms, pension, and healthcare, remains in limbo.

Where to, Colombia?

Where does Colombia head from here?

Petro sees himself first and foremost as a man of the Left, who, according to The Economist, “believes he is predestined to liberate his country from conservative elites.” He is known to be zealous, temperamental, and impulsive as well as having a tendency to radicalize rather than reconcile after disputes. Petro’s political personality is likely to be severely tested. He is increasingly facing public discontent with lackluster economic growth (with 1.0 percent real GDP projected by the International Monetary Fund for 2023) and high inflation, which is being felt in food prices. Though slowing for the third month in a row, inflation remains high by Colombian standards at 12.13 percent in June.

But that is not all. The nanny scandal has given Petro’s enemies a chance to portray him as a hypocrite, and there is also a degree of public discontent over growing insecurity in urban and rural areas. Under this scenario, there is a risk that Petro may shift his attention away from party politics and seek to take his case for reforms directly to the people hoping for them to demonstrate in favor of his proposed reforms thus pressuring Congress to act.

Frustration with the democratic process has raised the concern that Petro could seek to govern in a more autocratic and populist fashion, much like El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele. Bukele’s populist approach and hard line on law and order are seen in a positive light by increasing numbers of Latin Americans frustrated by threats to their personal safety and the corruption of entrenched political elites. Petro did beat the drum of populist change as Bogóta’s mayor and as a presidential candidate, though it has yet to be seen whether he would take steps to undermine the autonomy of institutions that could check his concentration of power.

Opinion polls are not giving Petro any relief. According to an Invamer poll released in late June, 70 percent of Colombians feel that their country is on the wrong track, 79 percent are convinced that the economy is in bad shape, and 74 percent are convinced that the corruption rates have increased. This of course is bad news for Petro, but he is not alone; Colombia’s congress has an unfavorable rating of 74 percent, the supreme court with 60 percent unfavorable, and the media at 58 percent. The institution or group seen as most unfavorable was the ELN at 89 percent.

While the Petro administration faces a challenging landscape, the political right is happy to goad Petro into moving further left to cast him as a radical of the same ilk as Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro, who presided over their country’s economic collapse and the exodus of seven million Venezuelans. Moreover, the peace process with the ELN remains controversial, with plenty of critics. In October 2023, Colombians will vote in gubernatorial and local elections. By stalling Petro’s reforms and goading him to become more radical the right can claim that he is an ineffectual leader and position itself as a force for law and order and economic growth with an eye to the next national elections.

The Future of Colombia

The state of Colombian democracy is important to the rest of Latin America and the United States. Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela are dictatorships and there are concerns over much of Central America, Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia. Argentina is amid an economic crisis and could be in for contentious elections in October 2023. Prospects for Mexico have also deteriorated, with President Andrés Manuel López Obrador silencing critics, tampering with the country’s independent electoral authority, and expanding the military’s role in the economy.

While there is a pressing need to maintain a constructive relationship with Colombia, policy differences between Bogóta and Washington clearly exist, with Petro’s policy toward Venezuela probably being the most challenging. Considering the Colombian leader’s willingness to accommodate Maduro despite his obvious rigging of the upcoming elections, Petro’s refusal to meet Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó in April 2023 during a Colombian-sponsored Latin American, European, and North American conference on unfreezing negotiations between Maduro’s regime and the opposition, and ongoing call for the lifting of sanctions against Venezuela, Colombian-U.S. relations have developed a certain edge. That said, it is important that the relationship remains constructive. More democratic backsliding in Latin America is not in Washington’s interest and plays to the authoritarian narratives out of China and Russia.

Colombian democracy is stressed, confidence in key institutions is sagging, government policy is in drift mode and the country seems to have tired of the government of change in less than a year. The country’s leader is temperamental but has thus far worked his way through the democratic system, having served as a congressman and senator, the mayor of Bogóta, and run for the presidency twice before he was successful in 2022. Moreover, Colombia’s political stability has been challenged before by revolutionary movements, populist uprisings like the Bogotazo of 1948 and drug cartels. It has weathered each storm. It will probably do so again, but there is considerable downside risk as the Petro administration is increasingly embattled. Another round of social turmoil cannot be ruled out.

Dr. Scott B. MacDonald is the Chief Economist for Smith’s Research & Gradings, a Fellow with the Caribbean Policy Consortium, and a Research fellow with Global Americans. Prior to those positions, he worked for the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, Credit Suisse, Donaldson, Lufkin and Jenrette, KWR International, and Mitsubishi Corporation. His most recent book is The New Cold War, China and the Caribbean (Palgrave Macmillan 2022).

Image: Shutterstock.

Though the commercial low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellite industry is booming, it could have an adverse geopolitical impact.

The LEO satellite market is highly fragmented as firms compete for a dominant share. However, the finite nature of orbital slots and spectrum allocation creates a natural market threshold that will likely prevent future entrants from joining the industry’s competition. This dynamic has created what is in effect a satellite race, with both domestic firms and other countries trying to launch their own satellite constellation to compete with the combined might of U.S. firms. We need to ensure that this scramble for space isn’t a race to the bottom.

The Competition for Space

Earth’s lower orbit has limited orbital slots, or specific satellite positions. Each satellite also requires spectrum access on specific frequencies for communication, which companies in the LEO industry and other industries want and compete for. In other words, both orbital slots and spectrum allocation exhibit dynamics similar to a parking lot: once the parking lot is full, there are no spaces left.

As such, the rapid proliferation of LEO constellations and the dearth of orbital slots and spectrum allocation highlights a need for a proactive space policy that can ensure the sustainability of space as a new frontier for technological and economic progress.

The latter is particularly notable, given how LEO satellite constellations have become remarkably popular for commercial uses. Companies such as SpaceX’s Starlink and Amazon’s Project Kuiper have capitalized on consumer demand for high-speed, low-latency Internet connectivity and are vying for the opportunity to send thousands of satellites into LEO to achieve global coverage.

Though the United States has been paving its own path in the space industry, U.S. policymakers need to be conscientious of how the country is setting a precedent in space exploration. Given our current advantage, we can establish policies that ensure safe, proactive space innovation and LEO practices.

American space companies are ahead of the pack when it comes to space exploration, and other countries are taking notice. America’s peer competitors recognize the risk presented by American orbital and spectral slot dominance and are encouraging commercial satellite development accordingly. For example, China’s state-backed “Starnet” system plans to launch thousands of satellites into low-Earth orbit to compete with SpaceX’s Starlink and other Western competitors. To Beijing, mega-constellations such as Starlink give the US a strategic edge and threaten China's national security interests.

Space Chokepoints

Aside from national security concerns raised by American rivals, the finite nature of LEO slots creates a low-Earth atmosphere bottleneck. Any object launched further into space must safely navigate through the orbital paths of the thousands of satellites operating in LEO. A densely packed LEO approaching its carrying capacity could serve as a chokepoint, obviating other space activity. As such, the country that de facto “controls” LEO will determine who can explore beyond it. These dynamics may create a security dilemma and encourage more aggressive space activity, such as intentional satellite collisions.

Encouraging efficient utilization of orbital slots should be paramount to international policymakers. Creating an effective satellite allocation system, such as an assigned “parking space” framework, wherein each LEO satellite is assigned a specific orbital slot, could help provide stability and lessen the downstream effects of the projected satellite trends, which anticipate nearly all Earth observation and communication satellites to be sent to orbit without “comprehensive governance.”

Another chokepoint created by commercial LEO satellites is spectrum allocation—the process of issuing frequency bands for communication, which is required by LEO constellations for seamless communication between the satellites and ground stations.

Spectrum band capacity is finite, and distribution is regulated by various international regulatory bodies, which can stifle competition between LEO providers by enabling uneven spectrum access. For example, if different countries try to use the same frequency bands for their LEO satellites, communication failures can be created by interference between the satellites.

If the United States were to create an effective spectrum allocation across different jurisdictions, we could decrease the risk of interference, which would be in all satellite companies’ best interests.

Overall, Washington should reevaluate space regulation and propagate international space norms to foster safe, proactive space innovation and LEO practices. The alternative is the eventual development of aggressive and potentially damaging space competition, culminating in armed conflict for the future of space.

Cassandra Shand is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Cambridge and a Young Voices Innovation Fellow. Twitter: @CassandraShand.

Image: Shutterstock.