The National Interest

The process for selecting refugees to be resettled in the United States has long seemed arbitrary and unfair. For the most part, refugees were randomly picked by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to come here, while others in similar circumstances were left behind.

One couldn’t have expected that the selection process would get even more arbitrary.

Who is Welcoming Whom?

The Welcome Corps, a new program introduced by the Biden administration in January 2023, hands over the control of part of the resettlement process to refugee advocates in the United States (whether private individuals or organizations) and allows them to select their own refugees and future American citizens. Per U.S. immigration law, resettled refugees are required to apply for a green card one year after arrival and can apply for citizenship four years later (not five, as the five-year count for refugees starts on the day of arrival).

The Welcome Corps will not replace but instead complement the traditional resettlement process led by UNHCR and resettlement agencies—with the latter being religious or community-based organizations contracted by the Department of State to provide services to refugees once they’re here. As underlined by the Biden administration, this UN refugee agency with “the international mandate to provide protection to refugees worldwide, has historically referred the vast majority of [resettlement] cases to the United States.” This will not be the case under the Welcome Corps.

Under the new program, private individuals in the United States (backed by various non-governmental organizations) will take on the primary responsibility of selecting candidates for resettlement and then providing them with initial support once here. In fact, private sponsors do not even need to identify particular candidates for resettlement—the “Welcome Corps team” (i.e., non-profit organizations, including the above-mentioned resettlement agencies) will be in charge of matching sponsors with people to be resettled.

In effect, the Biden administration is handing the control of refugee selection and admission of future U.S. citizens to, not just a number of private individuals (including freshly arrived refugees), but to a powerful machine of non-profit organizations and philanthropists advocating for an increase in the number of refugees resettled here.

Here’s where it gets more puzzling: those picked for refugee resettlement under the Welcome Corps do not even need to be refugees according to the UNHCR’s Refugee Status Determination, let alone that subset of refugees determined by the UN to be in “need of resettlement.” This was confirmed at a USCIS Refugee Processing Quarterly Engagement last March.

The UNHCR refugee selection and resettlement referral process is far from perfect, but it does fall under an internationally recognized system. While the UNHCR touts resettlement as a “critical lifeline” for some, it acknowledges that it is not the best option for most refugees; of the 21.3 million refugees under UNHCR’s mandate, it says only two million are in need of resettlement in 2023. And out of those two million, only a small proportion of refugees will end up being resettled, whether in the United States or other countries.

So if not based on the UNHCR’s designation, on what grounds are resettlement referrals by private sponsors and/or non-profits under the Welcome Corps made?

The Biden administration assures us that the Welcome Corps “will ultimately be a key part of the U.S. refugee resettlement system, providing a life-saving lifeline to vulnerable people in need of resettlement.” But, if private sponsors (and the organizations behind them) are not choosing “refugees in need of resettlement,” whom are they “saving”? Who exactly are they bringing here? Could they be simply choosing people based on friend/family ties? And how fair is this process to refugees who genuinely are in desperate need of this supposedly “critical lifeline” given their own circumstances?

Under the new program not only American citizens but also green card holders (likely including those with conditional two-year green cards) can act as private sponsors. This means that newly resettled refugees—who, as noted, are required to apply for a green card one year after arrival—can now decide who gets to follow them here and who gets a chance to become American. Not only that, but other newcomers who made it here in recent years and were granted green cards can now start sponsoring their friends, neighbors, and family members as “refugees.”

What’s more, those chosen for resettlement under the Welcome Corps receive preferential treatment; it can take “regular” refugees years to be resettled, while those who are privately sponsored are expected to make it in just “1-2 months” after their application has been approved.

The random selection of those who do not necessarily “need saving” but are nonetheless welcomed here is becoming a trend under the Biden administration—and this is without even referring to the border crisis. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken introduced the Welcome Corps as a program intended to “build on the extraordinary response of the American people over the past year in welcoming our Afghan allies, Ukrainians displaced by war… and others fleeing violence and oppression.”

Not-so-United for Ukraine

On the topic of Ukraine, there is another program called “Uniting for Ukraine.” It is a streamlined process put in place by the Biden administration to offer Ukrainian nationals, who fled their country following the 2022 Russian invasion, a chance to come to the United States straight from Europe under humanitarian parole, provided U.S.-based supporters agree to support them financially during their stay here. More than 125,000 Ukrainian nationals and their family members have been admitted under this process. And even though they were not formally admitted as “refugees,” they will be treated as “refugees” (as per H.R. 7691) and receive taxpayer-funded refugee resettlement benefits upon arrival.

On the first anniversary of this program, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas stated the following: “One year ago today, the United States Department of Homeland Security launched the groundbreaking and life-saving process known as Uniting for Ukraine.”

But how is it “life-saving”?

Ukrainians admitted to the United States are generally not fleeing a country of war but are coming from European countries in which they sought refuge and where they were granted “temporary protection”—which entails a residence permit, access to employment, housing, social welfare, medical treatment, education, etc. Actually, this “American welcome” could very well be a poisoned gift to many of those who are leaving Europe and its numerous protection benefits; stories of Ukrainians ending up homeless in the United States after their sponsors bailed on them have made headlines. The director of Catholic Charities told the New York Times that it was common for people to sign up as sponsors under Uniting for Ukraine “thinking, ‘I’m doing a good deed,’ but then really not following it up with anything.”

This program could very well be providing Ukrainian nationals with a pathway to the United States in order to pursue different opportunities than those offered by welcoming European countries; it could also simply be a means for reuniting with family or friends, or simply a way to access the American dream. But, for the most part, the program does not offer a “life-saving” way out of Ukraine’s war zones.

Abandoning Afghan Allies?

And consider the Afghan crisis. Despite the ongoing narrative, most of those who were evacuated following the withdrawal of U.S. troops in 2021 were not American “allies”—i.e., Afghan nationals who risked their lives to help U.S. forces in Afghanistan. In fact, amid the chaos and the urgency, most had nothing to do with the U.S. government or any of its contractors; which means they were not Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) holders or applicants. (SIVs are for Afghan interpreters or “allies”—i.e., those who worked for or on behalf of the U.S. government and who faced a serious threat as a result of that employment.) Nor were the evacuees formally granted refugee status; hence, the use of parole as the entry ticket to the United States.

Those Afghan parolees can now sponsor their family members as “refugees” into the United States, following the launch of the Afghan Family Reunification Program designed by the Biden administration in January 2023. This is important because, unlike parolees whose status is in theory temporary, refugees are granted permanent resettlement. As such, why allow family reunification for Afghan parolees, since parole is meant to grant temporary protection only? And why give family members of parolees refugee status just because their relatives happened to be the ones who succeeded in boarding U.S. planes out of Afghanistan in the summer of 2021? What’s more, those who were randomly evacuated and ineligible for SIVs or asylum protection, but are able to sponsor relatives as refugees can, at some point, become green card holders or U.S. citizens via those very family members who were allowed to join them as refugees.

Furthermore, there are millions of Afghans who did not assist U.S. forces but who could nonetheless end up wanting to leave their country, fearful of Taliban rule. Should we “save” or “welcome” all of them as well? Is every Afghan wishing to leave his or her Taliban-governed country a potential refugee to be resettled in the United States?

Those Left Behind

So, if we are now welcoming non-refugees as “refugees”—if we are admitting Afghans who are not our “allies” but just those who managed to get on those planes; if we are letting in Ukrainians who are not fleeing a country of war but are instead choosing to leave European countries and the many benefits available to them there—who exactly are we “saving?” And, who by the same token, are we leaving behind?

Dr. Nayla Rush is a Senior Researcher at the Center for Immigration Studies, focusing on refugee and asylum policy.

Image: Shutterstock.

A growing number of high-level U.S. global affairs summits have brought large numbers of world leaders together for dialogue, attempting to foreground discourse over hard-handed political, military, and economic approaches to policy. The recent U.S.-led Summit for Democracy was just one example of this fanfare-promoting approach to American global influence, to lukewarm reviews. While by no means a new tool in global politics, the Biden administration has made a tilt toward summitry a hallmark of its agenda, part of a wider attempt to right size from the Trump administration’s swings against multilateralism.

But do summits work? The problem is: no one knows. Critics warn that high-level meetings lead to minimal results, favor pageantry over policy, or, worse, open the United States up to accusations of hypocrisy, ultimately undermining U.S. leadership. These criticisms are inevitably shaped by controversy over America’s democratic weaknesses in recent years, debates over invite lists, and other internal policy problems. Supporters, meanwhile, find summits can serve as important counterpoints to growing geopolitical threats, helping boost multilateralism and symbolic support for policy priorities.

The reality sits somewhere in between. U.S. leaders require a more refined understanding of the benefits and drawbacks of high-level convening to meet the goals summits aim to achieve.

A Summit for Everything?

Recent high-level meetings, ranging from the U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit, the Summit for Democracy, and the Summit of the Americas, all shared aspirations to help ignite a sea-change around critical dimensions of U.S. foreign policy. As nations emerge from isolation brought on by coronavirus, these meetings combined in-person and virtual connection aiming to “showcase progress” and “organize action” for U.S.-led partnership on global challenges, with sessions addressing everything from conflict in Ukraine to emerging technology for democracy to supporting the status of women around the world.

Scholars have identified some evidence of the symbolic value of high-profile convenings: large international meetings can contribute to improved coherence and coordination in multilateral agenda-setting, can support network building among complementary government and civic actors, and, perhaps above all else, high-level symbolic support for particular issues. These meetings can also launch important policies and commitments, such as the 2021 Presidential Initiative for Democratic Renewal launched at last year’s Democracy Summit, or the announcement of new partnerships and funds stemming from the recent U.S.-Africa Leaders’ Summit.

But these initiatives and their respective budgetary allocations have been seen as relatively minimal results for the effort made. The recent high-profile U.S. Summit for Democracy was met with lukewarm reception domestically and abroad. Critics saw the three-day event as everything from awkward, alienating, and a waste of time, and to many, missed the mark in terms of policy-forward solutions to a pressing global tightening on democratic governance. As Jon Temin recently argued, “[i]f this [U.S. Democracy] summit, like the first, doesn’t elevate democracy to the status of a core national security interest and lead to country-specific strategies for countering authoritarianism, many champions of democracy will be disheartened and could grow cynical about American intentions.” For many, these fears were realized as concrete goals were minimally met, while the Summit forced countries into “with us or against us” mentality, playing into adversarial narratives of a polarized world. Many long-anticipated global meetings have led to modest budgetary and policy announcements. For these minimal results, these high-level meetings have received significant attention and administrative resources, making their results even more disappointing.

Highlighting Hypocrisy

Although the coronavirus pandemic had halted major global meetings from taking place, it is unclear what, if any, damage was caused by the pause. The reinvigoration of major global meetings in 2022 led to “mild successes” at best. This leaves open the question – what purpose do these meetings serve, and should the United States continue to turn to summitry over other options?

Perhaps even more alarming are the risks. These high-level meetings can open governments up to accusations of hypocrisy, which critics warn can actually impart serious damage. One estimate of the costs of hosting the UN Convention on Climate Change, a convening consistently branded as “disappointing,” suggested the meeting came with a cost of some several hundred million pounds, alongside the awkward issue of air transportation for leaders otherwise promoting greener activities. Even with the use of virtual conferencing, which Biden’s administration deployed substantially in the recent Democracy Summit and experts stress should be balanced skillfully with hybrid in-person approaches, these initiatives can take up substantial time and bandwidth for officials who are otherwise responsible for important tasks.

The particularly concerning dangers of high-profile events like the Democracy Summit are that they may undermine the goals they aim to support. The Biden administration’s extension of invitations to the recent Democracy Summit to India, currently facing heat for the jailing of opposition leader Rahul Gandhi, Israel, which is being criticized for controversial judicial reform, and Mexico, which is accused of shutting down free and fair elections, has raised inevitable critique. Similarly, this winter’s U.S.-Africa Summit convened leaders to discuss, among prominent issues, enhancing gender equality in Africa as a priority issue. But, of the forty-seven U.S. and African leaders depicted in photos of the event, just one was a woman.

Smarter Summitry

Proponents will insist that the pageantry of summits can help expand rhetorical support for democracy, and, in turn, U.S. soft power. The idea is that such efforts are a far better alternative to those pushed by military might and force. Casting a wide net of invitations for pleasantries and rhetorical commitments can help build a sense of global solidarity and can contribute to strength in numbers against the rising tide of ideological adversaries. The semi-regular meeting of the World Conference on Women, for example, first held in 1975 and held periodically since, has helped galvanize attention to a range of global women’s rights issues, and arguably helped accelerate national monitoring and commitments to the achievement of UN Sustainable Development Goal 5. Similarly, studies of international legal commitments including my research on the impact of international human rights laws, have found that even when rhetorical commitments are not upheld, they can help contribute to domestic support for issues which can in turn hold governments to account. To some, the recent Democracy Summit’s biggest success was the wide reach of its umbrella, which helped put China “on the back foot” as a perceived foe to a growing democratic club.

The bottom line is that these effects, while well-intentioned, remain largely speculative. It is reasonable to assume that there are both risks and benefits to high-level convenings, and both need to be balanced and considered. Summits should not be seen as policy solutions in themselves but rather as vehicles to bring attention to otherwise developed and consistent policy efforts. The risks of hypocrisy should be evaluated and contribute, where possible, to the design of invite lists, U.S. statements, and policy priorities. The benefits of promoting rhetorical commitment to goals among those least aligned should also play a role.

A China Daily article touting critique of the recent Democracy Summit as “simply for political show” alongside a recent Washington Post article from Zambia’s President reciting the adage “you cannot eat democracy” indicates that the battle for global leadership and influence will not be won with photo opportunities and pleasantries, but rather, with results shown for the strength of democracy everywhere. A careful understanding of the global temperature is needed to direct strategic approaches that meet complex global challenges. The chance to learn from a slate of recent global meetings about the challenges and opportunities for an American-led global future is stronger than ever. Policymakers should seek to understand the diversity of consequences—both negative and positive—of high-level summits to strive for stronger solutions to global challenges.

Rachel George works at the Council on Foreign Relations and serves as a Fellow at Duke University's Department for International Development in the Sanford School of Public Policy. Her work has been published in Foreign Policy, World Politics Review, The National Interest, Human Rights Review, and in chapters in The Routledge History of Human Rights and The Arab Gulf States and the West: Perception and Realities - Opportunities and Perils, among other outlets. She holds a PhD in International Relations from the London School of Economics.

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In his recent critical Foreign Affairs essay, “America’s Bad Bet on India,” Ashley J. Tellis argued that the Biden administration’s India policy is “misplaced.” He accused Washington of overlooking “India’s democratic erosion” because the United States needs a reliable partner in South Asia to challenge the rise of China. The article’s perceptive analysis of the U.S.-India security partnership notes that the relationship is hardly based on mutually assured democratic trust. He notes, for example, that India is breaking with the West in the context of the Russo-Ukrainian War and instead “goes it alone.”

Tellis’ conclusion is that “India’s security partnership with the United States will remain fundamentally asymmetrical for a long time to come.” While New Delhi would want Washington to prevail in a major conflict with Beijing in the East China Sea or the South China Sea, it is “unlikely to embroil itself in the fight.” This assessment is predicated largely on India’s nominal “strategic autonomy” in its foreign policy. India has evolved with a history of Soviet and Russian military ties as well as a lingering record of border conflicts with China.

However, China’s unprecedented military and economic capabilities have increasingly challenged New Delhi’s strategic autonomy. A matured India may not have a strategic alternative to sustain the past; it must thus work harmoniously and collaboratively with Washington for its national interest and civilizational heritage.

The “Return to History”

For the civilizational states of China and India, the past is often prologue. In his book, The India Way: Strategies for an Uncertain World, Indian external affairs minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar wrote that New Delhi believes it faces an inevitable “return to history,” rather than the Fukuyaman “end of history,” in the emerging international governance of multipolarity.

To the east, China—which holds a similar worldview regarding multipolarity and the perception of American decline—has begun to prepare itself for the coming era. To that end, it has devised an incremental “Blue Dragon” strategy for the Indo-Pacific region. This approach encompasses the country’s expansion and influences in nearby major bodies of water, supported by economic and military projects. Starting with the East China Sea, Beijing has already aimed at expanding its reach to the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean to encircle India.  

To this end, China has wasted no time sitting idle over the past few years. Instead, Beijing set its eyes on the two island nations of Sri Lanka in the heart of the Indian Ocean and Taiwan in the Western Pacific to advance its’ best “core” national interests and fulfill its longstanding geopolitical ambitions. For Beijing, Taiwan has been a “breakaway province” of mainland China; Sri Lanka has maintained religious, diplomatic, and trade links to China for millennia.

Concurrently, these two strategically located island nations have become increasingly vital to American foreign policy objectives—including the freedom of navigation in the Indo-Pacific region, the promotion of democratic governance, and the maintenance of peace and prosperity in the region. These two island nations have also long been characterized as “unsinkable aircraft carriers.” The phrase, originally attributed to General Douglas MacArthur, was used to describe Taiwan and to highlight its historical and strategic importance to China as well as to the United States.

China’s approach towards these two “unsinkable aircraft carriers” is composed of two different strategies—a carrot and a stick—aimed at China’s rejuvenation. Guided by the Blue Dragon strategy, Beijing has basically encircled the expanding vicinity of the East China Sea and Taiwan, the South China Sea and the artificial islands in the Paracel archipelagos, and the Indian Ocean. Sri Lanka, located at the southern tip of India and in a perfect strategic position, has historically been important to Beijing.

Against this backdrop, are India and the United States able to jointly and harmoniously work together to make the Indo-Pacific region safe for democracy?

The Indian Conundrum

It is against this background that one must consider Tellis and other discerning observers’ questioning of India’s position as the United States’ most important and dependable democratic partner and friend. These doubts arise from the civilization dogma of “return to history,” which can be traced back to India’s millennia-old Hindu and Buddhist traditions. Such influences are nothing new; after achieving independence in 1947, India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, advocated a “middle-path” non-aligned foreign policy during the Cold War period.

In his India Way, Jaishankar attempts to reconcile and transcend right-wing tendencies and left-wing aspirations by defining Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s political vision, his economic agenda, and India’s security and geopolitical challenges. The Modi administration’s worldview seems to fit well with the emerging approach of “multipolarity” towards global governance, in which New Delhi could play an interlocutor role between and among China, Russia, and the United States. In his video message to the recent G20 Meeting of the Foreign Ministers in Srinagar, for example, Modi said: “As you meet in the land of Gandhi and the Buddha, I pray that you will draw inspiration from India’s civilizational ethos—to focus not on what divides us, but on what unites us.”

Despite all this, the Russo-Ukrainian War emerged as a test for India of Gandhian morality and Buddhist ethics in international affairs. New Delhi—a longtime military partner of Moscow—called for an end of hostilities but failed to criticize the Russian invasion and declined to support UN resolutions against Russia. The United States and other Western leaders have been notably disappointed but accepted India’s neutrality and its reluctance to “condemn” Russia’s unjustified aggression. Moreover, these leaders—particularly those in Europe—understand India’s long history of reliance on Russian weapons and energy sources.

In the prevailing gamut of complexities and changing national security interests, Jaishankar summarized that “this is a time for us to engage America, manage China, cultivate Europe, reassure Russia.” For India, this approach is in keeping with the “vivid expression of [Indian] beliefs and traditions” of the middle path of Buddhism and the foreign policy of Nehruvian Panchsheel.

For the United States, however, the current situation presents an interesting conundrum. This evolving foreign policy—from the non-alignment to strategic autonomy—has prevented New Delhi from fully aligning with Washington.

There are some signs for optimism. In recent years, successive U.S. administrations have engaged with India as a reliable partner in trade and investment, science and technology, as well as security and education. Similarly, the share of weapon procurements from the Soviet vintage has gradually been declining as India has begun to buy defense weaponry from the United States and two other Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad) countries: Australia and Japan. In the past, Russian defense materiel was vital for Indian defense in light of sectarian conflicts with Pakistan as well as the lingering border disputes with China. Even before the Russo-Ukrainian War, defense relations between India and Russia apparently started to drift apart and continue to “steadily drift away” after the strategic Sino-Russian “no-limit” agreement was signed at the Beijing Winter Olympics in February 2022—mere weeks before President Vladimir Putin launched the “special military operation” in Ukraine.

With Russia entangled as a junior partner to assertive China’s strategic and tactical gamesmanship, it is increasingly challenging for New Delhi to preserve its historic partnership with Moscow. The strategic “no-limit” pact between China and Russia hardly mentions Ukraine but has purposefully included Taiwan. Nonetheless, China now realizes that the United States and its democratic allies link their indirect efforts to weaken Russia in Ukraine to confront China elsewhere. Of course, the Ukraine war and the Taiwan issue cannot be easily compared, but the strategic resemblance of the two seems to illustrate both Russian and Chinese endgames.

Which Way, India?

As Jaishankar highlighted, New Delhi must “engage America, manage China, cultivate Europe, reassure Russia.” However, both India’s future and democratic legacy increasingly seem to depend more on being associated with the United States. In fact, this process began with the U.S.-India Civil Nuclear Agreement in 2005—followed by the four foundational U.S.-India Defense and Security Agreements and the Quad.

As Tellis argues, the strategic but asymmetrical partnership between India and the United States—along with other American allies and democratic friends in the Indo-Pacific—may deepen to counteract a more assertive China. Meanwhile, the Russian and Indian defense and energy linkages might continue but will weaken over time.

However, Indian investment in the Quad and its military exercises—combined with the four foundational agreements on defense procurements, intelligence sharing, and cyber security—would help New Delhi to preserve its strategic autonomy in its neighborhood and against its two neighboring nuclear powers: China and Pakistan, the latter of which is China’s “all-weather” friend.

Additionally, India must recognize the medium- and long-term calculus of China’s grand-yet-veiled vision of national rejuvenation in the Indo-Pacific. It encompasses Beijing’s Blue Dragon strategy that has already put necessary footprints in the continental and maritime region of South Asia to encircle India in both security and economic domains. The subtle encirclement starts with Taiwan in the Western Pacific Ocean and extends to Sri Lanka in the heart of the Indian Ocean.

All this points to a deterministic grand vision articulated by Beijing that is historically deeper and more geographically expansive than the United States’ conception of “strategic competition” or India’s strategic autonomy. Modern China has adhered to the advice of Sun Tzu, who long ago asserted that “the supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.” Following his counsel, Beijing has succeeded in building militarized artificial islands in the South China Sea while the United States and its regional allies did not intervene because it would lead to an open confrontation with China. Likewise, if nothing changes, the Indian Ocean could eventually become China’s “Western Ocean” as described in ancient Chinese literature.

G20 leaders plan to meet in New Delhi in September of this year. Until then, Modi and Jaishankar certainly have time to reconsider their views on China’s intentions and capabilities. What New Delhi must ask itself is which would it rather see occur: China achieving national rejuvenation and global hegemony based upon military and economic strength, or an Indo-Pacific region that remains safe for democracy by fully aligning India with the United States and its allies?

Dr. Patrick Mendis, a former American diplomat and a military professor in the NATO and the Indo-Pacific Commands of the Pentagon, is currently serving as a distinguished visiting professor of transatlantic relations at the University of Warsaw in Poland.

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Insight into the relationship between the Russian government and former U.S. president Donald Trump was recently provided by a list of Americans that Moscow is sanctioning as retaliation for American sanctions on Russia because of the latter’s invasion of Ukraine. Among the 500 Americans on whom Russia is placing travel and financial restrictions are some who have nothing to do with setting policy toward Russia, are unlikely to have any dealings with Russia at all, and whose only common trait is that Trump considers them adversaries. These include: Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state who resisted Trump’s pressure to alter the results of the 2020 election; Letitia James, the New York attorney general who is suing Trump for business fraud; and Jack Smith, the special prosecutor who is investigating multiple possible violations by Trump of federal law. The Russia list even includes Michael Byrd, a Capitol Police officer who shot a rioter who was at the front of one part of the pro-Trump mob that attacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

The sole plausible explanation for Russia’s inclusion of such people in its sanctions list is that Moscow had a stake in Trump gaining and maintaining power in Washington and today has a stake in him possibly returning to power.

The full scope of exactly what that stake entails is unknown to anyone but Trump and the Russians, and that is part of the problem. We don’t know because there has not been a full, unimpeded counterintelligence investigation of Trump. The investigation by former special counsel Robert Mueller was limited in scope to Russia’s interference in the 2016 U.S. election and Trump’s obstruction of inquiries into that interference, and by a policy decision not to do criminal investigations of a sitting president. The Federal Bureau of Investigation is the agency that would be responsible for a counterintelligence investigation. But what steps the Bureau has taken to fulfill its responsibilities in this regard have not only been impeded but also met by a full-blown political attack aimed at discrediting the FBI and anything it might uncover.

It is highly likely that even before Trump first descended the escalator at Trump Tower and announced his candidacy for president, Russian security agencies had identified him as a promising “developmental,” as intelligence services term such prospects. The Russians already were familiar with Trump from his business dealings in Russia. In the United States, Trump was well-known, had a following, and showed political ambition. He was wealthy but also had money problems, as manifested in his multiple business bankruptcies. He lacked ethical scruples. His disjointed personal life provided additional angles the Russians could work. The mere possibility of Trump as a future agent of influence provided ample grounds for Russia to keep his case open.

Exactly what angles the Russians have worked and what vulnerabilities they may have exploited are part of what is unknown. Some of the more salacious possibilities, involving alleged conduct during visits to Russia that most people would find embarrassing, probably did not constitute a vulnerability for Trump. His salacious behavior in the United States has not seemed to hurt him politically, and he even boasts about it. A more workable angle has been pecuniary and has involved Trump’s business objectives, such as building a skyscraper in Moscow—an objective that, as Mueller found, Trump was still pursuing even after he announced his candidacy for president.

If Donald Trump were an ordinary applicant for a position somewhere in the U.S. national security bureaucracy that required a security clearance, it is unlikely he would have received that clearance. There was ample reason to disqualify him on what security adjudicators call suitability grounds, including the bankruptcies and multiple accusations of sexual misconduct. If that were not enough, then the business connections with Russia would be a disqualifier.

If, despite those huge red flags, Trump had somehow slipped through the clearance gauntlet, he would have come to be regarded as just as much of a security error as Jack Teixeira, the Massachusetts airman who freely shared classified information to impress his online buddies. Like Teixeira, Trump had no compunction about carting off to his home, contrary to U.S. law, piles of classified documents. While president, he tried to impress the Russian foreign minister and ambassador with the classified intelligence he had by showing some of that material to the Russian officials.

Trump’s mishandling of classified information may be coming full circle back to his foreign business dealings. The prosecutors under Smith who are investigating that mishandling recently issued a subpoena for information about Trump’s foreign business ventures since he took office.

But all this and the serious implications of it have been largely shoved out of the public consciousness by a huge, sustained campaign led by Trump’s political party to discredit any investigation of the matter or even any public attention to it. The initial motivation for that campaign was to neutralize the stigma of foreign influence associated with Trump’s Russia-aided 2016 election victory. The campaign has taken multiple forms, including the intentional mischaracterization by Trump attorney general William Barr of Mueller’s findings, Jim Jordan’s committee on supposed “weaponization” of law enforcement and security agencies, and Barr’s appointment of John Durham as a special prosecutor with the mission of trying to find something—anything—wrong with the FBI’s earlier investigation of matters involving Trump and the Russians. Durham’s investigation was a four-year, $6.5-million-dollar dud. Far from finding the sort of politically motivated deep state effort to defame Trump that Barr had suggested would be uncovered, Durham was a loser in the courtroom, and his recently issued final report was reduced to applying to the FBI the kind of hindsight-laden criticisms that can be found in just about any report looking back at a difficult government investigation, such as that there was insufficient “analytical rigor.”

In criticizing the FBI for acting based on “raw, unanalyzed, and uncorroborated intelligence,” Durham either misunderstood or, more likely, intentionally misrepresented the Bureau’s work. The FBI necessarily deals with that kind of intelligence all the time. As the organization’s name implies, its business is investigation. Its job is to take available lead information—which by its nature is typically raw, unanalyzed, and uncorroborated—and to investigate to determine what can be corroborated and what cannot, and what is true and what is not. When the lead information points to a possibility as serious as a hostile foreign regime’s influence at senior levels of the U.S. government, the Bureau would be derelict in its duty if it did not investigate. If no action were to be taken on any information other than what is already neatly packaged, analyzed, and corroborated, then the nation would not need a Federal Bureau of Investigation.

It would be interesting—if this did not prolong further a misappropriation of public funds and attention—to do an investigation of Durham’s investigation and to apply to it the same standards that Durham claimed to apply to the FBI’s work. For example, with regard to “analytical rigor,” on the same page in which Durham asserted that he had found “no evidence” that the FBI had considered how the Clinton campaign’s interest in tying Trump to the Russians might affect the Bureau’s investigation, the report cites a message from a senior FBI official warning his colleagues of exactly that hazard.

The Republican political interest in erasing the whole smelly Trump/Russia story from the public mind has been aided by some on the Left who, evidently motivated by a desire to downplay anything that risks exacerbating U.S.-Russian tensions, also have tried to discredit not only a Trump connection to Russia but the very fact that Russia interfered in the 2016 election on his behalf. Whether the smokescreen is coming from the Left or the Right, the smoke has now been blown so strongly and for so long that “Russiagate” gets repeatedly and casually voiced as a mantra that is assumed to be equatable with a hoax. And the FBI appears to have been browbeaten into not pursuing the subject further.

The fact of the Russian interference, to the benefit of Trump, in the 2016 presidential election is beyond any doubt. The interference has been documented by the intelligence community, the Mueller report, and most thoroughly for the public in a bipartisan report by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

As for Trump’s role and whether there was something warranting investigation, the inspector general of the Department of Justice had already determined, before Durham had gotten very far into his own effort, that the FBI’s investigation of the subject, while its conduct was subject to some legitimate criticism, was indeed warranted.

Even without access to all the material that the FBI and the inspector general had access to, the public has seen enough that ought to justify both worry and further investigation. Recall what is a matter of public record regarding how Trump and his entourage dealt with the Russian interference. Trump publicly urged Russia to hack into his opponent’s emails, and a few days later the Russians did exactly that. Mueller reported that the Trump campaign and members of the Trump family replayed material created by the Russian trolls who were Moscow’s main cyber instrument for interference in the election campaign. The Trump campaign chairman repeatedly met and shared polling data with a Russian intelligence agent. Senior members of the Trump campaign and family met in Trump Tower with a Russian known to have ties to the Russian regime, for the purpose of receiving dirt on Hillary Clinton. And as Mueller determined and documented in his report, Trump repeatedly obstructed investigation of the Russian interference.

Once in office, Trump provided additional reason for suspicion about the nature of his relationship with Moscow, with perhaps the most suspicious thing being how he choreographed his meetings with Russian president Vladimir Putin. In a highly unusual way of handling such meetings, Trump shut out his own staff and officials with responsibilities involving relations with Russia, not even giving them an after-the-fact debrief. After his first meeting with Putin, Trump confiscated his interpreter’s notes and ordered him not to disclose to anyone what he had heard. In other conversations with the Russian president, he used Putin’s interpreter, with no Americans present besides Trump himself. To this day, we do not know what they discussed.

Trump said and did a number of things favorable to the Russian regime while he was in office, including publicly siding with Putin rather than U.S. intelligence agencies when the Russian president falsely denied interfering in U.S. elections. Such sayings and doings represent part of the payoff that Russia has gotten for its investment in Trump. Another big part of the payoff is the exacerbation of political division in the United States and discrediting of American democracy that Trump has done so much to foment. Most or maybe all of this was part of the approach Trump would have taken anyway in his bid for power, but it is a consequence that is in Russia’s interest and very much against U.S. interests.

Trump’s advocacy on behalf of the Russian regime has continued while out of office. Two days before the start of Russia’s brutal war in Ukraine, Trump was calling Putin a “genius” and lauding him for his “smart move” in deploying a “peace force” to the border with Ukraine. Such talk is not explainable in terms of any U.S. grand strategy, Republican foreign policy ideology, or even the culture-war-driven sympathy that some on the American Right have shown for Putin’s anti-woke themes. It becomes explainable only by postulating that there is even more to the relationship between Trump and Russia than has yet come to light.

Today, Donald Trump is the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024. Some polls show him going on to win the general election. If he does, Russia may again have an asset in the Oval Office. Because of what is still unknown, the exact nature of the Trump-Russia relationship could be anywhere along a spectrum of the sorts of relations that a foreign power can have with an asset in the United States. On one end of the spectrum is the useful fool, who is not consciously doing a foreign regime’s bidding but acts for his own reasons in that regime’s interests. On the other end is a Russian version of a Manchurian Candidate.

It is inexcusable, in the face of what may be one of the most serious cases ever of malign influence by a foreign power at high levels of the U.S. government, for politicians and commentators acting out of partisan motives—or even the ostensibly noble motive of minimizing U.S.-Russian tensions—to discourage the vigorous investigation that is needed to fill the remaining gaps in this disturbing story.

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.

Image: Shutterstock.

Yemen’s vicious civil war, ongoing since 2014, has now claimed close to 400,000 lives. Yet since April 2022, this war, which initially pitted the remnants of the loyalist forces with the backing of a Saudi-led coalition against the Iran-backed Houthi regime in Sana’a, has been frozen due to a temporary ceasefire. Given that the Houthis have established a solid grip over Northern Yemen and control approximately 200,000 troops, it is hard to imagine the scattered loyalists and fatigued Saudis being able to decisively defeat them on the battlefield. As such, negotiations to end the conflict are ongoing, but there is no end in sight.

Meanwhile, the power vacuum opened by the government’s collapse allowed the rise of a third force: the Southern Transitional Government (STC). This entity hopes to reestablish an independent South Yemen and maintains effective control over Aden and the most productive areas of the region. Here, too, reverting to the status quo ante bellum appears unrealistic, and the STC will likely remain the dominant force in the South for the foreseeable future.

The United States, which officially backs the Saudi-led coalition with military and intelligence support, has few interests in Yemen other than stopping the bloodshed and stabilizing the country. Given Washington’s interests and the conflict’s intractable nature, a change in tact is required. To resolve the war in Yemen, a north-south partition of the country is necessary.

Understanding the Yemen Divide

North Yemen gained independence from the Ottoman Empire right after the end of World War I, while South Yemen remained a British protectorate until 1967. The South soon gained Soviet support, while the North grew closer to Saudi Arabia and the West. Aden and Sana’a fought two wars to unify the country until an agreement in 1990 led to a peaceful merger. However, southern separatism became a perennial problem, and tensions reemerged after the Arab Spring.

Interestingly, the current demarcation line between the Houthis and the STC roughly corresponds to the former North-South Yemen international border. Since the Houthi regime controls most of former North Yemen and the STC dominates the southern seaboard, rooting for the losing loyalists makes little sense. The loyalist government has lost control of the country’s most populous and wealthy areas. It still stands thanks only to Saudi support and has no path to victory.

Moreover, the internationally-recognized authorities are notoriously corrupt and show little concern for the Yemeni public’s well-being. The Houthis and the STC are no better, but they are the ones with effective control over Yemen’s core—the country’s future is now in their hands. Reviving the old North-South Yemeni border with a Houthi government in the north and an STC government in the south is Washington’s best bet to end the war for good.

Can America Push for a North-South Divide?

Some may disagree with Washington speaking against respect for territorial integrity. But the United States has broken with this norm in the past. It supported Montenegro’s independence from Serbia in 2006 and Kosovo’s in 2008. Moreover, it recognized South Sudan as a sovereign state in 2011 after it seceded from Sudan. At the end of the day, internationally-recognized borders are just that; a line on the map. Borders are not fixed for eternity, but merely the expression of a certain balance of power at a certain time. The United States accommodated secessionist states in the past and should do it again for South Yemen.

If the United States chose to pursue this diplomatic route, it may find support from its regional allies. The United Arab Emirates supported the rise of the STC and would readily accept a partition of Yemen. Saudi Arabia, too, has an often overlooked but essential security interest in a divided Yemen. The country’s population is almost as large as the kingdom’s, and it is growing quickly. Moreover, a robust unified Yemen could use its oil and gas reserves to kick-start its economic growth, which could in the long-term break Riyadh’s domination over the Arabian Peninsula and be a formidable competitor.

However, Riyadh might resist such a partition plan, as the Saudis have long feared the presence of a pro-Iranian Houthi stronghold on their southern border. Nevertheless, the Saudis are eager to exit the Yemeni war and have come to increasingly acknowledge that the Houthis are here to stay. Additionally, the recent thaw in Saudi-Iran relations has alleviated some of Riyadh’s concerns about Iranian clout.

Still, if diplomacy fails to sway the Saudis, light American pressure might. Washington could leverage its military support; for instance, restricting the U.S. supply of ordnance and spare parts to the Saudi Air Force would limit Riyadh’s ability to bomb the Houthis in the future. This would push Saudi Arabia toward accepting partition and a definitive peace with the Houthis. Yemen is one of the rare ongoing crises where America could reach a relative international consensus. Outside the Middle East, China, Russia, and other major powers have little stake in the Yemeni civil war’s outcome and are unlikely to oppose an American peace plan.

President Joe Biden pledged to end the Yemen war. A partition plan acknowledging realities on the ground appears as the last viable path toward a lasting settlement. The administration stands to lose nothing from trying, and a successful partition would be hailed as a major victory for U.S. diplomacy. Will Biden seize the opportunity?

Dylan Motin is a Marcellus Policy Fellow at the John Quincy Adams Society and a former visiting research fellow at the Institute for Far Eastern Studies. Dylan was named one of the Next Generation Korea Peninsula Specialists at the National Committee on American Foreign Policy and a Young Leader of the Pacific Forum. His research expertise revolves around international relations theory, and his main interests are balance-of-power theory, great power competition, and Korean affairs.

Image: Shutterstock.

If you happened to be waiting for your morning coffee at the Starbucks in the Pentagon, you might not be aware that you are surrounded by what is probably the world’s highest density of strategists. Every year, without fail, thousands of mid-level and senior military officers as well as their civilian counterparts will complete some form of professional education that prepares them to be strategists or emphasizes strategic thinking. But what is the true payoff of all the money the U.S. government spends on “strategic education” aside from all those fancy certificates on office walls in Washington DC? A quick look at the last two decades of American global strategy suggests strategic education may simply have become a rite of passage instead of something to be put into practice.

To be sure, every student who attends a strategic education program is undoubtedly familiar with Prussian military strategist Carl von Clausewitz, who famously wrote that “war is a continuation of politics by other means.” But it seems that two decades of American strategists have forgotten (or worse, never truly absorbed) Clausewitz’s prescient admonition that politicians and military commanders must “recognize the kind of war they are undertaking, neither mistaking it for, nor attempting to turn it into something it cannot be because of the nature of the circumstances.” Our track record certainly leaves much to be desired. Over the past twenty years, the $6 trillion Afghanistan and Iraq debacles were followed by more regime change in Libya, plunging that country into a civil war (and subsequent proxy war) that rages to this day. Western attempts to overthrow Syria’s Bashar al-Assad were blunted by Russian support, ensuring Assad remains firmly in control. American strategy failed to deter Russia from invading Georgia in 2008 or Ukraine in 2014 and again in 2022. Finally, the hawkish consensus emerging in Washington (i.e. a “New Cold War”?) that conflict with China is increasingly likely—if not inevitable—risks excessively securitizing every aspect of the U.S.-China relationship.

How did we get here? The United States, at least since industrialization, has won its wars (when it’s won them) through the overwhelming application of force and firepower. We have essentially churned out awe-inspiring amounts of war material that we brought directly to bear on clearly identified and traditional (nation-state) opponents who could not match or withstand it. While not necessarily pretty, it was effective. This highly linear approach (action “x” will lead to predictable/intended effect “y”) to warfare became our default strategic playbook.

Unfortunately, such a linear approach is often insufficient in highly complex, interconnected, and interdependent environments. In today’s world, the challenges are much more multi-dimensional and don’t often present a clearly identifiable military center of gravity—never mind one whose damage or destruction can be easily translated into political objectives.

This gets at the fundamental problem: for the United States, the typical answer is to militarize problems that may elude purely military solutions. Our national security leadership appears incapable—even after immense amounts of so-called “strategic education”—to be able to look at an emerging strategic challenge and ask themselves: 1) what are its unique characteristics and requirements; and 2) do we actually have the tools/capabilities to achieve the desired political outcomes? Lacking this ability, they too often default—ineffectively at best and catastrophically at worst—to the toxic belief that if we just apply enough force, we can achieve whatever goal we desire.

Instead of learning from our past mistakes, we are doubling down on failed strategic approaches. The same voices that led us into the strategic fiascos of the past two decades still loom large in contemporary security debates. Turn on any cable news show and you’ll see one of the architects or enablers of these failed policies lecturing us on the “right way ahead.” Apparently, even relying on one’s “gut instincts” alone (as one recent Air Force memo suggests) is an acceptable means of making strategy. Part of this problem, however, lies in a dangerous culture of toxic positivity within the national security establishment. There is a big difference between a proactive, “can-do” approach and a failure to simply look facts in the face. The unintended consequences and outcomes of excessively linear thinking over the last twenty years underscore this reality.

So, is there a better way to educate our national security leaders? Ultimately, today’s complex strategic environment requires a fundamentally different set of skills. To be sure, we need a strong understanding of strategic foresight, future literacy, and complex systems. We must also acknowledge that today’s hyper-connected strategic challenges are not so much solvable as they are merely manageable. Strategic foresight—which involves the practice of envisioning alternative futures in order to better sense, shape, and adapt to change—can help. It cultivates a tolerance for uncertainty, which cognitive psychology tells us can reduce judgmental bias and promote non-linear thinking.

As we shift to building artificial intelligence-based platforms and data solutions, we must also deliberately develop intellectual capital. Seizing and occupying the high ground in national security requires more than just “buying things,” developing weapons systems, or pursuing disruptive technologies. It requires security professionals to have the cognitive capacity to leverage them. Perhaps most importantly, we need a new approach to strategic education that produces leaders that are humble and not paralyzed—or worse, driven to obsolete default behaviors—by the unavoidable uncertainty of today’s complex world. We need more leaders who can bring themselves, when appropriate, to say “no, we probably can’t achieve that through military means, but we might be able to do this with the range of tools we have available.” After twenty years of failures, American taxpayers ought to know that their government has a plan to effectively leverage this cadre of strategists in whom they have invested so much.

Josh Kerbel is a member of the research faculty at the National Intelligence University, the academic arm of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Lt. Col. Jake Sotiriadis, USAF, Ph.D., is a career Air Force intelligence officer. He currently serves on the research faculty at the National Intelligence University and is Director of the Center for Futures Intelligence.

The opinions expressed herein are solely those of the authors and do not reflect the official positions of the U.S. intelligence community or the Department of Defense.

Image: Felix Mittermeier/Unsplash.

Four dozen countries have applied a broad array of financial restrictions, export control measures, and targeted sanctions in response to Russia’s full-scale aggression against Ukraine. The intent of these restrictions was to limit sanctioned individuals’ ability to provide support to the Kremlin, and from there, convince Russian billionaires to use all available means to affect Russian president Vladimir Putin’s decisions. Although the sanctions have slashed individual oligarchs’ wealth, the number of Russian billionaires and their collective net worth actually increased over the past year since the Russian invasion began. Individual sanctions have contributed to a “rally around the Kremlin” effect and increased elites’ dependence on Moscow.

Individual sanctions, in their current form, are a weak tool for dismantling Russia’s crony capitalism, which combines incentives for elites’ loyalty to the regime and punishment for defection. Russia’s war in Ukraine and Western sanctions have provided the Kremlin with new opportunities to reward loyal tycoons through asset redistribution and heighten economic repression against renegade business elites.

The system has been in place since Putin was elected Russia’s president. Two months after his inauguration on May 7, 2000, the president gathered twenty-one Russian tycoons in the Kremlin. In this historic meeting, Putin struck a kind of “social contract” with Russia’s richest men, who had amassed their spectacular wealth during the previous decade. In exchange for their loyalty and political non-interference, Putin promised the oligarchs that his government would stand by the results of the chaotic privatization of the 1990s that enriched Russia’s post-Soviet elite. In the coming years, the Putin government put the unwritten rules of the social contract into effect. The oligarchs who reneged on his deal paid with their lives and freedom. The loyalists who pledged their allegiance to the president became the regime’s benefactors.

The class of wealthy economic elite in Russia has swelled over Putin’s long reign, fueled by ample opportunities for predatory asset stripping. The poor protection of property rights and recurrent economic hardships have incentivized many oligarchs making money in Russia to stash their wealth abroad. To tighten his government’s grip on business and political elites, Putin launched the “deoffshorization” campaign in 2013, which resulted in a series of measures prohibiting Russian officials from holding their assets abroad and levying hefty taxes on profits made through overseas ventures.

Before 2014, Russia’s economic elite, unwilling to bend to Putin, moved their capital and residency abroad. Between 2008 and 2014, 1,993 Russian nationals received the United Kingdom’s “golden visas,” which offered residency to people investing £2 million or more in the country. The United States, Portugal, and Austria were among the top issuers of investor visas for wealthy Russians. These opportunities began fizzling away following the imposition of Crimea-related sanctions on a number of Russian oligarchs linked to the Kremlin. Despite the financial losses that the Russian tycoons incurred, the list of Russian billionaires grew by a third—from 77 in 2016 to 106 in 2018—and their net worth rose to a collective $485 billion in the two years following the 2014 tranche of sanctions.

When Russia brazenly invaded Ukraine, the U.S. government promptly levied an array of well-coordinated economic and individual sanctions. By the one-year anniversary, the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control extended asset freezes and travel bans on more than 2,400 individuals, including at least forty-six Russian or Russian-born billionaires. The European Union, similarly, has sanctioned some 1,473 Russian nationals.

A day after the invasion, Putin called a meeting with four dozen Russian tycoons and heads of state-owned companies. In the meeting, Putin demanded solidarity from Russia’s business community in exchange for support from his government. He also threatened defectors, thus reiterating the rule of the “social contract” struck in 2000. In the subsequent months, business moguls who expressed criticism of the Russian government lost their valuable assets. Russian billionaire Oleg Tinkov, for instance, who slammed the “crazy war” against Ukraine on Instagram, reported selling his 35 percent stake in Tinkoff Bank—one of Russia’s largest lenders—to a company controlled by Vladimir Potanin, a Putin confidant and Russia’s richest man. According to Tinkov, the shares he traded were worth “ten times more” than what Potanin purchased them for. Another public critic of the war in Ukraine, billionaire Oleg Deripaska, lost the $1 billion hotel and marina complex in Sochi, ostensibly for condemning the Russian invasion. In December 2022, Putin supported a legislative initiative that would confiscate the assets of the Russian citizens who fled abroad and criticized the war.

The perceived threat to disloyal tycoons’ lives has compounded the risks of asset appropriation. During the first year of the war in Ukraine, a total of thirty-nine influential Russian figures, including fifteen Russian business leaders and executives, died under mysterious circumstances. The stream of inexplicable deaths by “suicide” or illness rocked the Russian business elite. The fact that the perished wealthy businessmen were predominantly from the oil and gas sector and many had ties to Putin led to speculation over the Kremlin’s involvement. Regardless of whether the Russian government, which has a long history of dubious “poisonings” and “window-fallings,” participated in the demise of these prominent Russians, the deaths engendered widespread fears in the oligarchs’ circles, effectively preventing them from speaking openly against the Russian government’s actions abroad.

The Russian state has also, notably, kept its promise to support loyal tycoons. After more than a thousand Western firms departed Russia, they left hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of assets behind. The Russian state has nationalized these assets in retaliation for the freezes of Russian assets abroad. Moscow expropriated Exxon Mobile assets valued at more than $4 billion, and confiscated Shell’s shares in a Sakhalin project with Gazprom. Apart from the state itself, Putin’s loyalists have enjoyed the benefits of this wealth redistribution. Putin ally Gennady Timchenko, for example, was awarded a new state contract to sell Russia’s liquified gas to China. Yuri Kovalchuk, known as “Putin’s banker,” now owns most of the Russian Internet. A Chechen business leader close to Ramzan Kadyrov acquired a factory and what was left of Starbucks in the Russian-seized Ukrainian city of Mariupol.

To cushion the impact of sanctions on the wealthy Russians, Putin also endorsed changes to the Russian tax code that exempt sanctioned individuals from paying personal income tax and other taxes on frozen income and assets. Additional amendments to the Russian Criminal Code terminate criminal responsibility or soften the punishment for the most egregious cases of tax evasion in Russia. Simultaneously, new Russian laws criminalize calls for foreign sanctions against Russia or support in their implementation, and prohibit cooperation with international bodies “to which Russia is not a party,” such as the International Criminal Court.

The new measures implemented by the Kremlin to shield its loyalists from the sanctions’ pernicious effects have strengthened Putin’s crony capitalist system. Russia’s wealthiest individuals emerged $154 billion richer in March 2023 compared to a year ago. This is the wealth that the Russian government is eyeing for a new one-time war tax to patch gaps in the state budget. The current individual sanctions regime is too weak to pose an existential threat to oligarchs’ wealth—a kind of hypothetical threat that would have forced them to seek to change Russia’s policies and institutions. To weaken the symbiotic relationship between power and wealth buttressing Putin’s system, individual sanctions would have to be considerably broadened and deepened.

Oligarchs have enjoyed unrestricted access to their wealth by transferring legal titles for their assets to family members. Given this, sanctions would have to be applied to any nominee who has the formal rights to property of the sanctioned business elite. A critical vulnerability of the opaque web of trusts, off-shore companies, and subsidiaries owned by Russian billionaires is a small and secretive network of financial experts who manage the tycoons’ wealth. Identifying and sanctioning these wealth managers, who have previously escaped scrutiny, would likewise have debilitating consequences for the Russian oligarchs.

Effectively detecting and capturing tycoons’ assets requires the sharing of financial, banking, and intelligence information among countries. This has been achieved by the multilateral Russian Elites, Proxies, and Oligarchs (REPO) Task Force, in which intelligence services of the United States, Australia, France, Canada, Germany, Japan, Great Britain, and the European Commission cooperate. The efforts of REPO, however, would have to be extended to more countries. The interests and assets of Russian business moguls are spread across the globe. Sanctioned Russian moguls have been welcomed in Israel, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates, among other states. The threat of secondary sanctions and reputational costs would have to be imposed on countries providing sanctuaries to Russian business elites and their business ventures.

The REPO Task Force countries must move quickly to simplify and expedite the seizure of the Russian tycoons’ assets for their use for Ukraine’s benefit. Freezing an asset is easier than confiscating it. The seizure of an asset typically involves a lengthy legal process, which is complicated by the burden of identifying its owner. Another challenge facing sanctioning governments is that they become responsible for the expensive maintenance costs of luxury properties or must allow their owner to access funds to upkeep their estate. As the Russian oligarchs have already filed lawsuits against sanctions in several jurisdictions, the REPO Task Force countries’ authorities need to establish mechanisms for asset seizure.

Last but not least, the United States, the UK, and other Western countries need to garner the political will to close loopholes for tax evasion and anti-money laundering mechanisms. In the United States, for example, the richest 1 percent of Americans have been able to hide more than 20 percent of their income using opaque ownership structures and complex trusts, especially in the real estate sector and offshore businesses. These are the same loopholes that once made Western real estate markets and tax haven jurisdictions hospitable to Russian oligarchs’ investments. Increasing the transparency of assets’ ownership and financial transactions and spreading the application of the anti-money-laundering rules to the real estate and offshore sectors will likely meet domestic resistance. Indeed, these same rules, which attracted Russian “dirty money,” are benefiting wealthy business people, celebrities, and politicians in the West.

Dr. Mariya Y. Omelicheva is a Professor of Strategy at the National War College, National Defense University.

Alexander Sukharenko is the Director of New Challenges & Threat Study Center in Vladivostok, Russia.

Image: Shutterstock.

On April 20, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen delivered some notable remarks at Johns Hopkins University. In discussing sanctions on Chinese companies, Yellen noted that, “our goal is not to use these tools to gain competitive economic advantage.” She tried to emphasize that a U.S.-China decoupling was not on the horizon. A week later, on April 27, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan spoke at the Brookings Institution, where he echoed Yellen by saying that the Biden administration is “looking to manage competition responsibly and seeking to work together with China where we can.” But Sullivan also criticized China’s overuse of industrial policy and indicated that U.S. policymakers would respond in kind.

Both Yellen and Sullivan are misguided about China’s views on economic and security policy.

For China, economic issues are security issues. Chinese president Xi Jinping stated in 2014 that economic security is the “foundation” of his “comprehensive security concept.” For Xi, military power protects economic development, and economic growth is critical to national security. Since 2014, Xi has only hardened his position, remarking at the “Two Sessions” in March 2023 that “security is the foundation of development.”

In this, Xi is borrowing from Deng Xiaoping, the architect of the “Reform and Opening-Up Era.” From the late 1970s onward, Deng pursued economic modernization, which used market incentives to support the “Four Modernizations” of agriculture, defense, industry, and science and technology. China’s economy responded by averaging double-digit growth between 1980–2010.

In the early days Xi’s presidency, concepts such as “strategic emerging industries” and “Made in China 2025” were announced. They signaled an inward turn in economic policy, concerning Washington. Chief among these concerns was intellectual property theft and the potential for advanced technology to fall into the hands of the Chinese military.

U.S. policy responded by seeking to blunt the rollout of China’s new economic system. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) began blocking more Chinese acquisitions of foreign technology companies. For example, CFIUS blocked the purchase of Magnachip, a South Korean semiconductor business, by Wise Road Capital, a Chinese company. Capital controls combined with the reformulation of U.S. export controls under the Export Control Reform Act of 2018 signaled an increased focus on U.S. economic security.

The White House also continued the trade war started by President Donald Trump. It maintained those tariffs and passed the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022—a $50 billion dollar investment in U.S. semiconductor manufacturing that aims to revitalize a perceived dwindling lead in the sector.

The Biden administration wants to reduce economic tensions with China and fix underlying problems. But as reported by Politico, Biden officials may have competing ideas. To make matters worse, the Chinese are not returning U.S. phone calls, though Katherine Tai, the U.S. trade representative, is reportedly meeting with the Chinese commerce minister later this month. Hopefully, this meeting will be the prelude to higher-level, follow-on meetings.

But making macro-level improvements in U.S.-China relations begins with reframing the problem. It should be recognized that economics are security are intertwined. For great powers, economics is a foundational element of national power, allowing for the build-up of military capabilities. But it also serves more fundamental security concerns.

China faces major demographic changes and a slowing (but still steady) rate of economic growth. As Beijing grapples with these challenges, technological development is viewed as the sustaining driver of long-term economic prosperity. This makes science and technology imperative to China’s advanced development path, meaning that any policy that attempts to stall or cut-off China’s technological growth is going to make diplomacy especially challenging.

Beijing does not see U.S. economic countermeasures as narrow and limited; it perceives its national interests as being infringed upon. In an anarchical, self-help world, Beijing has no incentive to believe that coercive American economic statecraft will cease. This causes them to engage in an “action and retaliation” cycle, responding with coercive measures of their own.

So what can the United States do?

First, U.S. policy towards China needs more coordination between the security and economic portfolios. Planning and high-level visits should include officials from both areas.

To represent the economic portfolio, we recommend Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, who views technology and economics as deeply connected. Raimondo also sees the connection between international trade and the U.S. domestic economy, stating that “we need to continue to do business with China, and trade with China supports American jobs.” Additionally, it is evident from the battery of laws passed in the last year that the Commerce Department will lead the United States in organizing and executing its own science and technology policies and executing U.S. responses to China’s policies. As such, the Department’s secretary is the natural lead on a new approach.

Second, more bilateral meetings need to be set up. Trust can be built with lower-level bureaucrats who can elevate communications to higher levels. In terms of location, a third-party country would allow both Washington and Beijing to maintain some of their pride. Previous meetings at Bali and Geneva indicate the value of a third-country meeting point, as does the Vienna meeting between Sullivan and Wang Yi, director of the Central Foreign Affairs Commission.

Lastly, the United States should take more meaningful actions, rather than just verbalize reassurances to China. The ambiguity of state-business relations in China and whether the end-user of technology is a military or commercial one is Washington’s real concern. But too often “national security” is a blanket term. A better route would be to explicitly state the conditions that make something a real national security threat.

In terms of the Commerce Department’s Entity List, clear rules should be established for being removed. Clarifying that transparency on the part of Chinese firms and state organs would go a long way in developing guardrails in a spiraling economic relationship.

Sullivan’s speech rightly emphasized making the economically competitive domain a place of “small yards, high fences.” But this is more of a philosophy than a specific policy. A better policy would view economics and security together, paving the way for real progress in U.S.-China relations.

J. Tedford Tyler is a Foreign Policy Associate at the Charles Koch Foundation.

Kedar Pandya is a Research Assistant at the Texas A&M University Economic Statecraft Program.

The views expressed here by the authors are their own.

Image: Shutterstock.

In 1954, scientists at Bell Labs in the United States invented the first silicon solar panel. By 1978, American firms produced over 95 percent of the global solar market. Yet despite this initial dominance, American firms only produced a paltry 6 percent by 2021. Instead, it is China that controls 70 percent of global production. A similar story can be seen with hypersonic missiles: the technology was initially developed in America in the 1960s, but currently, America has “catching up to do very quickly.” This sort of situation is so common, in fact, that China has a lead in thirty-seven out of forty-four major emerging technologies, according to a report by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.

Despite the United States continuing to spend the most on research and development (R&D) of any nation, the United States is lagging behind in spearheading new technologies. The issue isn’t a lack of R&D spending but rather an inability to implement new technologies or maintain a market edge over other nations. In other words, we are still the greatest innovators in the world, but we cannot successfully commercialize our innovations. The major reasons for this are a shift away from industrial policy to science policy, industry consolidation, and a lack of financing for small and medium enterprises. If we wish to correct course, it is necessary to look at the history of R&D in the United States.

During the 1950s and 1960s, the U.S. federal government, particularly the Department of Defense (DoD), played an active role in fostering innovation by being the “first buyer” of many new technologies and encouraging technology-sharing between firms. For example, the first market for transistors was NASA, which bought every transistor in the world in 1962 for the Apollo missions. More recently, NASA used a similar method in its commercial orbital transportation service program (COTS) program, which encourages commercial spaceflight by buying cargo and crew transporters for the International Space Station. One major success of this program has been SpaceX, whose first major success was developing the Falcon 1 for a COTS contract in 2006, demonstrating that the concept is just as viable today as it was in the 1960s. Additionally, the DoD often facilitated knowledge sharing between firms and researchers, especially by using second source contracts—i.e., contracts that stipulated that any new technology purchased by DoD would have to be produced by at least two firms—creating redundancy in the supply chain.

Meanwhile, the majority of research was performed by large corporate laboratories rather than academia—in the 1960s DuPont produced more patents than Caltech or MIT combined. This, combined with an already massive industrial base, allowed the United States to retain a technological edge by rapidly creating a new market for a technology and quickly creating an ecosystem of suppliers. After the initial creation of the market, long-term commercialization and competitiveness were more or less left to the market. Since the United States had a near monopoly on many high-tech products such as semiconductors and solar panels, there was little need for government intervention. However, this created a period of complacency in the 1970s that was quickly ended by foreign competition from Japan in the 1980s.

The competition caused the U.S. government to shift predominantly towards “Science Policy,” wherein academia would provide the bulk of the research, and this research would primarily focus on basic sciences with no immediate application. Essentially, the cost of basic R&D was offset from the company level to the government. Meanwhile, large companies consolidated supply chains, and the implementation of new technology would be left to small firms with little guidance from the government. This approach did initially work in certain sectors. For example, America actually regained dominance in semiconductors in the 1990s. However, it failed in the long term. As of 2021, Intel was responsible for 19 percent of global semiconductor R&D spending but still lost the bleeding edge in chip processes to TSMC and Samsung. The same thing happened in solar panel manufacturing as well: despite the United States outspending Japan in R&D in every year except one from 1980 to 2001, the United States still lost its market share. The focus on efficiency, in short, worked too well. The consolidation in technology supply chains made it difficult for companies to adopt new innovations since it became impossible for smaller firms to test new process improvements and “move them up the chain.” Additionally, the focus on basic research alone meant that rapid commercialization took a backseat, allowing other nations to establish first-mover advantage and maintain it by iterating on already commercialized technology.

From these failures, it can be ascertained that if the United States wants to regain its lead, it will need to shift its research policy back towards having the state to encourage the commercialization of new technology, along with intentionally creating redundancy in supply chains to sustain innovation. However, Washington must go further than either disorganized disbursing of one-time grants or a de facto focus for the DoD. Instead, commercialization should be as focused and institutionalized to the same degree as basic research is today with organizations such as the National Science Foundation.

A good example to emulate in this regard is Germany’s Fraunhofer Society. Founded in 1949, the organization focuses on bridging the gap between research and industry by connecting academics with companies and venture capitalists, or VCs, while funding the scale-up of technology that is too risky for VC firms. This is accomplished through bilateral contract research (a company hiring the institute for a specific research task), spin-off companies founded by Fraunhofer staff, licensing technology to companies, transferring personnel to industry, and “innovation clusters,” where different companies are brought together to establish common standards or otherwise coordinate for mutual benefit. Importantly, 70 percent of the Fraunhofer Society’s funding is generated through industry contracts, IP revenue, or public research. This encourages the organization to be dynamic and entrepreneurial in how they approach problems. A similar approach would work well in the United States—saving taxpayer dollars and attracting talent from both academia and the VC world.

It's worth noting that the Fraunhofer Society already has a branch in the United States and is regarded as “an indispensable promoter of scientific exchange between the USA and Germany.” The process of creating a similar institute for the United States is less daunting of a task than one might imagine, since the U.S. government can consult, acquire personnel, and gain expertise from the American branch with relative ease. Such a policy would also carry the additional benefit of improving relations between Washington and Berlin.

While the United States has been losing its edge in technological innovation, this loss is not an inevitability. By creating an institution for bridging the gap between basic scientific research and commercialization by the private sector, the United States can regain dominance while greatly benefiting the public by allowing for more cutting-edge technology to make it to store shelves. There is already a good “template” for such a system in the form of the Fraunhofer Society in Germany, alongside an existing presence in the United States, so it should be a high priority for America’s science policymakers to implement the model here.

Siddhartha Kazi is an undergraduate student studying Industrial Engineering at Texas A&M University. He has written for The National Interest.

Image: Shutterstock.

Get ready for a China-centered global order. The de-dollarization push, China-centered economic and security pacts along with ongoing efforts to build its sphere of influence, and the geared domestic dominance all indicate the end of Beijing’s traditional policy of “hide and bide.” Global leaders and CEOs flock to China as pilgrims. Macron signed multiple deals with the Middle Kingdom, including some related to deepening military cooperation despite allies’ disappointment and the ongoing war with Russia, China’s strategic partner. Hubristically, the Global Times, a jingoistic state-owned Chinese tabloid, chided South Korean president Yoon Suk Yeol for his U.S.-leaning visit as going “against the trend.”

The trend in question is that of China’s rapid ascent in international affairs through multiple fronts, particularly in the realm of trade and economics. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and scholar Hal Brands once sketched out China’s path toward global hegemony through economic power. Clearly, the glaring influence Beijing wields today does not come from its military—studies have long confirmed the notion that strong economic power is influence. Similarly, the Cold War was not simply won by military means, but via economic and ideological strength.

On these fronts, China is winning, rapidly becoming an economic and technological superpower. Just five years ago, the United States was worried about steel overproduction and Huawei. Today, there are concerns over semiconductors, which country is the largest auto exporter (hint: it’s not a Western country), and TikTok, which influences 150 million Americans. The United States increasingly feels passive and defensive in the influence race. The Global South, and regional powers such as Saudi Arabia and Brazil, are increasingly turning to China, praising a country that also happens to be their largest export market.

In fact, as the largest trading partner of over 120 countries, China has become a central hub for global production. Yet the most striking part is, again, the trend. According to the United Nations, in merely twenty years, China has increased its global share in mid-high- and high-technological production (value-added) from a single digit to nearly 40 percent, more than the G7 countries combined, and is poised to reach 50 percent by 2030. Such dominance is accompanied by deprived opportunities for others. Many tradable industries of the United States and others have sharply declined; many of these with economic and security implications. America has also lost its lead in most strategic technologies, according to the top 10 percent cited academic papers. All of this has unfolded ever since China joined the World Trade Organization (WTO).

The result has been a rapid shift in global power distribution in China’s favor, which is a fundamental factor that international relations theorists believe explains global politics and China’s increasing assertiveness and influence. Loss of industries, especially higher-end ones, impacts jobs, fiscal revenue, public goods, technology and innovation, global competitiveness, supply chain security, and economic and political polarization, particularly within civil society at large. The global market, on the other hand, incentivizes Chinese firms to reinvest continuously in technology, quality, and innovation. China is enjoying a breakout in almost every major industry.

The “Leviathan” Created by Global Trade

How did China achieve such power over global production?

The key lies in international trade, which has essentially enabled Beijing to reorganize global production in its favor. New research has pointed out that conventional trade theories based on comparative advantage are quite flawed, since for 90 percent of tradable industries, cost advantage is more applicable. Yet, cost advantage isn’t just low labor prices. As found in the author’s ongoing research, China’s unrivaled cost advantage is actually a “structural competitive advantage,” which arises from its unique economic and political system, gigantic size, and the interactions of all components. These components include state-led mercantilism, massive scale, currency policy, competitive business ecosystems, world-class human capital and infrastructure, technology diffusion and innovation networks, and various institutional and social advantages.

Some scholars have proposed various concepts naming this phenomenon. Terms such as “state capitalism,” “China Inc.,” “predatory trade,” or “brute force trade” have been thrown around. Behind the various terms though, what matters is that “structural competitive advantage” is why few other states, richer or poorer, cannot outcompete China, after it acquires know-how. As an example, the same Tesla electric vehicle models produced in Shanghai with most localized components are 20–30 percent cheaper than those made in Texas or Berlin. Likewise, Apple’s reliance on China has shifted from low labor costs to an unmatched “ecosystem” that can provide product design, components, apps, and more.

More importantly, China’s structural advantage behind its gigantic size of millions of Chinese firms and 900 million increasingly skilled workers is the “invisible hand” and powerful “market force” driving China to dominate most high-value and strategic sectors, with the rapid progress of technology mutually reinforcing each other. This advantage is present regardless of seemingly detrimental issues, such as a slowly aging population or a weak financial system. The resulting organic, competitive Chinese ecosystem can nullify U.S. industrial policies, such as the CHIPS Act, in the longer term. It also extends to advanced fields like artificial intelligence and biotechnology.

As a result of these factors, evaluating trade policy through localized winners and losers—such as a few firms, sectors, or consumers—makes less sense. When viewed as a nation as a whole, the prospect of free trade with China looks grim: it is leading to Beijing’s dominance, given its size, authoritarian nature, and global ambitions, and others’ weakness, dependency, and vulnerability. This reality even contradicts the original conception of free trade: the mutually-beneficial division of labor. Global trade has de facto created an unprecedented leviathan.

American Trade Policy Needs to Aim Big

The worker-centric trade policy of the Biden administration is born of the realization that free trade has failed to deliver for American workers. The United States also has been drawn into a subsidy war in a few “national security” areas whose outcome is uncertain and ignores many important industries—for example, automobiles, machinery, electronics, chemicals, etc. Additionally, Washington pays little attention to how China is deliberately integrating international trade into its grand strategy (e.g., using trade to de-dollarize, support Russia, coerce dissidents, build a new sphere of influence, or rupture the bonds between the United States and its allies).

As in Jake Sullivan indicated in his recent speech at Brookings Institution, the post-World War II free trade regime is unsustainable. This is not only due to the dysfunction of the WTO, but also because its assumptions no longer hold: the major powers are playing mercantilist games. Geopolitical rivalries make interdependence a dimming problem rather than a solution. WTO rules set twenty years ago did not take into account a tightly organized, non-market superpower party-state (hence, “China Inc.”) that also seeks to convert the current order.

Admittedly, the post-World War II economic order has experienced troubles and anomalies. The WTO was supposed to support a greater liberal order by trade. It has notably fallen short. Globalization disproportionately benefits only some, while leaving many behind. Moreover, the order has created an interdependence mess, as illustrated by the effects following Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Western sanctions applied in the aftermath, and Xi Jinping’s party-state securitization in China. To top it all off, the existing order does not, despite what adherents claim, particularly favor democracy, but rather mercantilism and autocracy: the top three trade surplus countries in 2022 were China, Russia, and Saudi Arabia. Free trade has slid from the one envisaged by Adam Smith and David Ricardo, oriented toward natural liberty and division of labor, to a predicament where one authoritarian, non-market superpower advances its own domination.

The Future is Bleak if the Trend is not Reversed

The United States has realized that expecting China to change course is hard—no one is going to change something that is bringing success. China follows its own agenda: realism and authoritarianism are the foundations undergirding CCP's behavior, with power considered essential and liberalism viewed as an existential threat.

Despite Sullivan’s correct diagnoses, his proposed solution stops at domestic redistribution and subsidies in a few areas, which won’t alter the grander structural market force to reverse the trend in China’s favor. The United States needs a larger, more sweeping strategy for China and trade. With China’s growing economic dominance, the world will be reshaped in an illiberal way, as predicted by scholars such as John Mearsheimer and Charles Glaser. Apart from the realms of technology and the military, this includes shaping global norms and rules detrimental to democracies: as with domestic rule, the Communist Party has no interest in an order upholding liberty, democracy, human rights, or transparency. Instead, its top-down model with leading technologies has shown the capability to undermine the existing order and its values.

It’s Not About Promoting, but rather Protecting Democracy

Not only are prosperity and security being undermined by the growing strength and attractiveness of “the China model,” but so are democratic values, a key pillar in both President Joe Biden’s and President Donald Trump’s 2022 and 2017 National Security Strategies. Today, autocrats around the world resurge, unite and crack down unscrupulously. As democracies continue to lose global market share to China, vital to prosperity and security, many problems they face today will not be reversed. Compared to a China model which attains high-value jobs and builds fancy infrastructure, democracy no longer appears to be the path to modernity and can look chaotic, less able to deliver, and less appealing to citizens, resulting in “existential” legitimacy issues. That is why leading expert Rush Doshi expresses concerns about the possibility of the United States becoming a “big Venezuela.”

Ultimately, it all comes down to what world we will live in—the ultimate end that justifies the means. The right question to ask is, should the United States continue to integrate with China, given this dire trend, and that China is likely to be an economically powerful Soviet Union? Trade shouldn’t be an end in and of itself. Trade should be at the center of U.S. grand strategy, which is oriented to ensure prosperity and security, and protects democratic values through concerted means.

A dire future awaits us should the current trend continue. As China integrates the global economy, more countries will find it too costly to “say no.” Malaysia and Singapore, even Germany and France, already downplay security concerns—careful not to upset the economic ties.

China is rallying countries around the world to “divide and rule,” bolstering autocracies in the fields of economy and technology. To nullify this trend, a bounded economic order may have to be the solution.

Democracies are never immune to external aggressions. Sullivan is right that traditional trade deals are insufficient for modern trade. Yet they are the exact problem that has the United States bleeding and resulting in China grabbing one sector after another.

Therefore, Washington should consider integrating market access provision, the biggest incentive, into the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework soon: there is growing Chinese influence on the framework’s members. Vietnam or Mexico is more complementary to the United States; neither can take away American jobs as massively and effectively. These frameworks are also powerful geopolitical instruments (so perhaps also reconsider the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership) that should include those who play by rules (especially emerging democracies). The $600 billion yearly imports from China, a huge political leverage and vulnerable dependency, requires friend-shoring at least, starting from strategic sectors. All in all, the key boils down to the U.S.-led trade bloc.

This is not to say that there is no cooperation or no co-existence. The West and the Soviet Union co-existed and cooperated on global issues during the Cold War. In fact, China is far ahead of the game on climate and already dominates the clean energy industries. Perhaps this is a useful place to start a conversation.

George Yean is a PhD candidate at the Department of Government of Harvard University. His research areas include international economy, technology, security, and grand strategy. He was trained in economics, political science, and engineering, and spent years working for high-tech companies such as Cisco. He can be reached at gyean@g.harvard.edu.

Image: Shutterstock.

The Left’s winning streak in Latin American presidential races screeched to a halt on April 30 with the election of Santiago Peña, an economist and conservative member of Paraguay’s ruling Colorado Party. Peña’s election gives center-right Latin Americans reason to hope that the tide is turning against the socialist wave that has swept through the region in recent years.

Prior to Peña’s victory, five of the last six presidential elections in Latin America have gone to Leftist leaders, many of whom are showing signs of authoritarianism and rabid anti-Americanism.

Colombian president Gustavo Petro purged political moderates from his coalition government the day after he held an international conference to whitewash Venezuela’s criminal Maduro regime. Honduran president Xiomara Castro abandoned Taiwan in favor of Communist China. Brazil’s newly elected president, Lula da Silva, traveled to Beijing to promote the end of the U.S. dollar’s dominance in global trade and later criticized Western support for Ukraine against Russian aggression.

And that was just last month.

Many voters who pulled the lever for these Leftist leaders now realize they chose poorly. Latin American businessmen from the region’s five largest economies, including Colombia and Brazil, withdrew roughly $137 billion out of their countries in 2022. And in 2023, according to sources within the Customs and Border Patrol, Colombians became the second-largest nationality arriving on the U.S. southern border. Capital flight and outward migration are the direct consequences of Petro and Lula’s leftist policies.

But elsewhere, things are starting to shift.

In a blow to leftist President Gabriel Boric, Chileans on May 7 voted overwhelmingly for conservative parties to draft a new Constitution. Upcoming presidential elections in Guatemala and Argentina later this year could see conservative candidates win. Could this be the beginning of a rightward shift in the hemisphere?

From roughly 2012–2018, Latin America saw at least ten pro-business, pro-U.S. presidents come to power. They focused on fixing their country's financial portfolios and strengthening relations with the United States. Except for Peru, which ran through six presidents in six years, all of them finished their terms with a healthier national balance sheet. But that didn’t translate into popularity. Except for Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, most of these conservative presidents ended their term with lower approval ratings than when they began. They were succeeded by far-left candidates.

Among the many mistakes made by Latin America’s conservatives was that they focused too much on policy and not enough on popular messaging. The result was their countries fell prey to brutal disinformation campaigns that fomented organized riots and violent protests. In 2019, a simple four-cent hike in Chilean public transit fares led to violence, the destruction of the country’s infrastructure, and, ultimately, the election of a thirty-five-year-old Marxist. Something similar happened in Colombia.

Digital forensics analysis found that foreign disinformation accounted for at least 30 percent of the online noise during the 2019 Chilean protests. The same blueprint was followed in Colombia in 2021, where Venezuela and Russia interference exacerbated the crisis. These foreign campaigns irreversibly weakened Colombia and Chile’s conservative governments who relied on conventional reelection strategies in the face of an unconventional threat. Both countries saw left-wing governments replace them.

Radical leftist politicians capitalized on these mistakes by using non-state networks to entrench their power. Even after leaving office, autocrats such as Ecuador’s Rafael Correa or Bolivia’s Evo Morales remained powerful. Their on-the-ground, horizontally aligned grassroots movements persistently attacked their successors, allowing them to control the political narrative. The leftist wins in Latin America have led to a geopolitical realignment toward China, Russia, and Iran.

Unfortunately, it is not clear that Latin American conservatives have learned these lessons. The day after he won the presidency, Paraguay’s Peña recognized Latin America’s worst dictators and Russian, Chinese, and Iranian clients in Caracas and Havana.

Should Latin America’s new Right retake and hold power across the region, they will need to adopt a policy vision that embraces individual liberty and economic freedom, while prioritizing national sovereignty and national security. That is not consistent with flirting with China’s neo-imperial ambitions. Half the region lists the People’s Republic of China as its top trading partner, but that doesn’t mean it must acquiesce to its economic coercion. For Latin America, creating distance from China by prioritizing relations with the West and Taiwan, is not just in the U.S. national interest, it’s critical for its own sovereignty and stability.

In sum, mass migration, crime and violence, inflation, poverty, and food insecurity are all on the rise in Latin America. But so is a new conservative consciousness that has been yearning for new leaders.

Paraguay, Guatemala, and Argentina have the opportunity to right the wrong in 2023. With a rising China and other bad actors on its shores, this could be Latin America’s last chance for lasting progress. It’s time for the new Right in Latin America to rise to the occasion.

Joseph M. Humire is the executive director of the Center for a Secure Free Society (SFS) and a visiting fellow of The Heritage Foundation’s Allison Center for Foreign Policy. 

Image: Shutterstock.

On April 15, clashes between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) broke out in the capital city of Khartoum and in the Darfur region of Sudan. Almost a month later, an estimated 500 people have been killed and thousands of civilians wounded. The war between these two rival military groups comes after months of disputes; the two sides worked together to oust the civilian prime minister in October 2012, but as negotiations over the division of power stalled, it led to increased tensions which escalated into the armed conflict we are seeing today. This fighting has the potential to spill over and spark further chaos abroad. Particularly worth paying attention to is neighboring Egypt to the north.

In the past month, it is estimated that over 90,000 Sudanese refugees have journeyed into Egypt; the real numbers are likely much higher, as thousands are waiting at the border—without shelter, safe drinking water, and reliable food—to cross over. Yet Egypt itself is not the ideal safe haven: it is currently grappling with an economic crisis, severe food shortages, and a devaluation of its currency, the Egyptian pound. Over the past year, Cairo has been borrowing large sums of money from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, further increasing its debt. If Egypt cannot rectify its worsening economic situation, the resulting instability may lead to widespread civil unrest, protests, and an exacerbated humanitarian crisis that could ripple throughout the North African region.

The Conflict in Sudan…

International efforts to halt the conflict in Sudan are well underway, with Saudi Arabia hosting conversations between the two rival factions in partnership with the United States. Talks are set to continue throughout the month of May. Meanwhile, though both the SAF and RSF have called for a ceasefire, the fighting continues. Both groups have likewise proposed several truces since the fighting began in April, but none of them have held. Each blames the other for not adhering to the terms of a truce, suggesting that the likelihood of any success at the negotiating table will be negligible.

As such, the conflict in Sudan continues to rage, displacing over 900,000 people internally, along with an estimated 120,000 crossing borders into neighboring countries such as the Central African Republic, Libya, Ethiopia, Chad, and Egypt. This number is expected to grow significantly in the coming weeks, with United Nations Human Rights Council estimating that as many as 800,000 people could cross various borders in the next six months. Given that Sudan was already home to a diverse population of refugees, and housed as many as 1 million displaced people from other various regional conflicts that have taken place over the past decade, the current crisis easily has the potential to ripple across the region.

As refugees scramble to get out of Khartoum and neighboring Sudanese regions, the majority are fleeing to Egypt in particular, as policies toward refugees in other North African countries, such as Libya and Tunisia, are less than desirable. Although Chad is now accepting small numbers of refugees, it had originally closed its borders due to internal stressors, leaving only the Egyptian-Sudanese southwest border into Argeen and Qustul-Ashkit as the only viable option for refugees fleeing the violence.

…Has Consequences for Egypt

This is quite the turnaround, as up until the conflict broke out Sudan was a major Egyptian economic partner, with trade revenues coming close to $1 billion annually. Egypt had also set forth strategic plans for agricultural investment in Sudan, which have since been put on hold due to the conflict, further hindering any plans for its economic recovery.

As the gateway to North Africa for Western countries, Egypt is a key trading and political partner with many states in the region. The United States’ total bilateral trade with Egypt totaled $9.1 billion in 2021, while EU trade exceeded €37 billion in 2022. In addition to Egypt’s economic value to the West, it also serves a strategic role in the Arab League, assisting in providing regional peace and stability. The country is also known for its vast natural resources, including petroleum, natural gas, phosphates, and iron ore; interest in these resources has only heightened since the war in Ukraine called energy supplies into question.

Yet Egypt itself is in a precarious economic situation, facing record-high inflation. In a conversation with a Japanese newspaper, Egyptian president Abdel Fatah al-Sisi expressed concern that the influx of refugees from Sudan would place an increased economic burden on Egypt. Moreover, there are also security concerns: as thousands gather at the southwest border between the two countries, the chances for terrorism, human and drug trafficking, and smuggling activity are at an all-time high.

The border region between the two countries has a history of violence, with extremist groups such as ISIS and Al Qaeda often using the area to carry out illicit activities in the region. Since the border has also been a hub for human trafficking, the substantial increase in refugees increases the odds for extremist group members to cross over into Egypt. In response to this threat, Cairo has dispatched anti-terrorism troops to the border to protect refugees and improve security.

The West Must Act to Prevent Further Instability

Nonetheless, the fighting in Sudan has put the nation at risk of collapse, with Egypt at risk of following suit due to its already fragile economic situation. The potential for increased destabilization and conflict throughout the region must be taken seriously. The international community must assist Egypt in processing and providing for these refugees.

Yet with both sides of the Sudanese conflict having tens of thousands of fighters, foreign backers, and resources, it is difficult to say when this war will end and how many people will continue to be displaced as a result. If peace talks in Saudi Arabia do not go well, this conflict has the potential to mirror other conflicts that have devastated entire regions, such as Lebanon and Syria. Aiding Egypt in its mitigation of the refugee crisis is one step that the West can take to prevent this from happening. The United Nations has pledged $445 million to ease the crisis, which will be sent to countries that are receiving refugees throughout the region. The United States, in partnership with the European Union, should provide direct assistance to Egypt to ensure that both Egyptians and the refugees crossing the border have access to secure food sources. Additional foreign aid should be provided to assist in stabilizing the Egyptian economy, incurring the security of U.S. and EU trading interests through the Suez Canal. These measures could include infrastructure packages and efforts to help stabilize the Egyptian pound.

As the conflict continues, it is imperative that the West take action. Egypt’s economy continues to deteriorate, and external stressors—including and especially the conflict in Sudan—could have monumental destabilizing impacts on the rest of the region, with consequences that could eventually affect both the United States and Europe directly.

As Washington engages both the SAF and the RSF in Saudi Arabia in the coming weeks, it should encourage reconciliation and a more permanent and successful solution. Otherwise, everyone involved will have to confront the consequences of failure: an increasing refugee crisis, additional stress on the Egyptian economy that could push it over the edge, and regional destabilization.

Riley Moeder is a Senior Analyst at New Lines Institute for Strategy and Policy, focusing her research on drivers of fragility in North Africa.

Image: Shutterstock.

In five days of fighting that ended with a Saturday night ceasefire, terrorists in Gaza fired more than a thousand rockets into Israel—1,468 rockets to be precise. Thanks to bomb shelters and the Iron Dome missile defense system, the barrage only claimed the lives of two victims inside Israel, one of them a Palestinian construction worker from Gaza. Four Palestinians also died when rockets fell short of the border, hitting homes in Gaza, according to Israel’s military.

This latest round of hostilities is at odds with what Joe Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, described last week as the “fundamental direction and trend of de-escalation that we have supported and encouraged” throughout the Middle East. Before a gathering of experts on regional affairs, Sullivan explained that the positive developments of the past two years were no accident, but “the result of what we have tried to lay down as a comprehensive policy framework.”

By itself, a single flare-up in Gaza does not discredit Sullivan’s broader point. He stressed he was “not pulling out the victory flag” and warned that conflict can resume at any time. Yet a closer look at the violence in Gaza shows that the events of the past few days are part of a trend that runs counter to the White House’s claim that regional tensions have diminished since Biden took office. Specifically, Sullivan underplayed the role of Iran’s clerical dictatorship in stoking conflict across the region and in Gaza in particular.

Israel’s adversary in the latest round of fighting was not Hamas, but the lesser-known and smaller Islamic Jihad. The latter is also a U.S.-designated terrorist organization committed to the destruction of Israel and its replacement with an Islamic state. What makes Islamic Jihad different is the exceptional degree of its subordination to the regime in Tehran. The group is an instrument Iran employs to escalate tensions with Israel on demand.

Tehran does not rely on a single proxy, however. Rather, it seeks to surround Israel with Iranian confederates. There is Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria, along with Hamas and Islamic Jihad in the West Bank and Gaza. They often refer to themselves the “axis of resistance.” Last month, during the final days of Ramadan, Israel had to contend with near-simultaneous attacks from Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank, and Gaza. The scale of the attacks was limited, but they underscored that Iran and its proxies can press Israel on four different fronts at once. Tehran calls this “the unification of the arenas.”

Sullivan’s address skirted this dynamic entirely. In his view, one of the administration’s three most important achievements in the region entailed “Ending a war in Gaza in eleven days [in May 2021], then working to keep the peace even as it’s punctuated by periods of heightened tension.”

First of all, Egyptian strongman Abdel Fattah al-Sisi did most of the heavy lifting that led to the May 2021 ceasefire—a role that Cairo played again in this round of fighting.

More importantly, the peace is not being kept. Violence in the West Bank and Gaza has been growing since Hamas and Islamic Jihad launched a wave of attacks on Israeli civilians in March. Iran continues its efforts to arm Hezbollah with precision-guided munitions that can target Israeli infrastructure and population centers more effectively.

The threat that looms larger than proxy wars is Iran’s rapid advance toward a nuclear weapons capability. Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testified before Congress in March that “Iran could produce fissile material for a nuclear weapon in less than two weeks, and would only take several more months to produce an actual nuclear weapon.” The White House’s response to this problem is to say that it’s all the fault of the previous administration. As Sullivan explained, the administration is “engaging Iran diplomatically regarding its nuclear program, and we continue to believe that it was a tragic mistake to leave the [2015 nuclear] deal with nothing at all to replace it.”

This diplomatic engagement has not reined in the Iranian nuclear program. In fact, Iran took its most provocative steps toward a nuclear weapons capability—such as enriching uranium to 83 percent purity—after Biden took office and made clear he would offer extensive sanctions relief in exchange for Tehran returning to the 2015 agreement.

The clerical regime is also displaying unusual audacity outside the region. Its agents sought to kidnap Iranian-American dissident Masih Alinejad on American soil and assassinate senior officials who served in the Trump administration. British intelligence likewise reported multiple Iranian plots to kidnap or kill enemies of the regime on British soil. Iran also continues to hold both U.S. and British hostages. And it is arming Russia with weapons, including attack drones, that help to devastate Ukrainian infrastructure.

There is one adversary, however, with whom the Iranian regime is now on better terms: Saudi Arabia. In March, China stunned foreign observers by brokering a deal for Tehran and Riyadh to restore diplomatic relations and reduce regional tensions. The Biden administration sought to play down concerns that Beijing had stolen a march on Washington. If the deal promotes de-escalation then it is a good thing, officials argued—a point that Sullivan echoed in his remarks.

In the short term, there may be some actual reduction in tensions, especially in Yemen, where Riyadh and Tehran have been fighting a proxy war since 2015. But their newfound comity is better understood as an expression of the Saudis’ realization that they cannot hold the line against Iranian destabilization of the region if the United States does not engage the threat seriously.

There are good things the Biden administration wants to accomplish in the Middle East. It seeks to “strengthen and expand the Abraham Accords” to include normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia, Sullivan said. In contrast to his predecessor, Biden has not wavered on the importance of maintaining a small contingent of U.S. troops in northeast Syria to prevent both the resurgence of the Islamic State and, to some extent, the expansion of Iranian power.

Yet if the White House persuades itself that tensions are truly subsiding across the Middle East, it may find itself unprepared for the significant escalation the Iranian regime is planning against America’s allies across the region.

David Adesnik is a senior fellow and director of research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

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In a gruesome display of brutality, Russian soldiers recorded themselves beheading a defenseless Ukrainian soldier, sparking outrage and condemnation. The footage surfaces while Russia holds the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) presidency—much to the opposition of Ukraine and its allies. The brazen paradox of an international aggressor presiding over an institution of peace underscores the absurdity of Russia’s UNSC presidency.

The legitimacy of Russia’s UNSC seat has been questioned, in no small part due to the lack of formal approval from the UN General Assembly (UNGA). Russia’s succession of the USSR’s seat in the UNSC is not a result of an automatic operation of law, but rather the result of a political choice—whether logical or not. Despite having never been voted into UN membership by the UNGA, Russia was given the USSR seat in 1991. Article 4 of the UN Charter requires new members to be admitted through an UNGA vote; however, Russia sidestepped this stipulation by claiming to be the sole legitimate successor of the USSR’s UN membership. The tacit consent of Russia’s UNSC seat is now at the forefront of international debate. All successor states of former Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia were obliged to be admitted by an UNGA resolution—only Russia was granted silent approval to proceed not according to precedent or law.

The United Nations is also discredited by the mockery that is Russia’s UNSC presidency. Russia at the helm of the UNSC has an internationally-sanctioned channel to disseminate propaganda which risks the UN becoming a mouthpiece. The UN’s credibility helps legitimize disinformation that Russia circulates through “narrative laundering,” whereby Russia cultivates proxies to spread disinformation to mainstream media. By clouding or legitimizing disinformation sources, Russia promotes fragments of false narratives, which aim to discredit Ukraine. Russia’s strategic communication strategies enable it to bring anti-Ukrainian propaganda to the Global South, particularly to Africa and Latin America, to shape public opinion favorably. Such actions undermine the UN and erode trust in its legitimacy.

This is not the first time that the UN is unable to address Russia’s defiance of international law. In 2009, following Russia’s invasion of South Ossetia, Russia vetoed the extension of the UN observer mission in Georgia. This shifted international attention from the invasion and set Russia on a path of continued impunity. Following the 2014 annexation of Crimea, Russia’s UNSC presence ensured that neither a resolution reaffirming Ukraine’s territorial integrity nor action reversing the annexation could be taken. When the Syrian Government used chemical weapons against civilians in 2018, Russia vetoed proposals for a meaningful response to the war crimes to keep President Bashar al-Assad in power. These examples reinforce the continuity of Russian harm to the UN’s mission and illustrate the imperative of UNSC reform. They also highlight institutional risks arising from Russian veto rights in the context of the Ukraine war. If unreformed, the UN’s fate might resemble that of the League of Nations, which failed to prevent World War II due to non-reaction to Germany’s 1939 invasion of Poland.

To reform the UNSC, the UN Charter needs to be amended—amendments require ratification from two-thirds of UNGA members including all permanent UNSC members. Past reform attempts have been an uphill battle; however, there are short-term tools to address Russia’s repeated disregard of the institution’s mission.

First, investigations into the transfer process of the USSR’s permanent seat to Russia should be launched. These investigations operate on the assumption that Belarus and Ukraine, as founding UN members, had an equally justified claim to the seat—a characteristic no other original members share. Second, Belarus should be disqualified from the permanent seat due to complicity in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Third, rules on procedural matters should be invoked and a vote on replacing Russian UNSC representatives initiated. This decision requires a nine-member UNSC majority and cannot be vetoed by permanent members. By referencing Russia’s violations of the UN Charter through its disrespect of Ukrainian sovereignty, these tools can counter Russian disinformation and restore institutional credibility.

Long-term reforms should not be off the table. At a minimum, reforms should allow for temporary suspension of a member’s presidency. The basis for suspension could be an UNSC simple majority vote declaring a member temporarily unfit to fulfill the presiding role. This vote should be held based on a set of criteria, including the invasion of another country. The basis could also be UNGA support of suspension exemplified by resolutions against a UNSC member’s conduct.

Almost eighty years after World War II, the UN faces a similar fate as the League of Nations when it failed to prevent the largest catastrophe of the century. If the UN fails to take meaningful action against Russia, it could spell the end of the institution’s legitimacy and encourage similar future UN Charter violations. The international community must address Russian recklessness, lest Russia escalates its war crimes and hijacking of the international order. 

Svenja Kirsch is a Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center. She is affiliated with the Project on Europe and the Transatlantic Relationship. She works on the future of European security amid the war in Ukraine and specializes on the future role of NATO and the EU, cyberwarfare, and Europe’s role in great power competition.

Vladyslav Wallace is a Ukrainian-American Belfer Young Leader Student Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School and a Thomas R. Pickering Graduate Fellow at the U.S. Department of State. He works on U.S. diplomacy and foreign policy and specializes in matters related to Eurasia such as human rights and democracy.

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This week, world leaders will converge in Hiroshima, Japan, to kick off the G7 Summit. This gathering of leaders from the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Japan, Germany, Canada, Italy, and others presents a well-timed opportunity to lay the groundwork for an international artificial intelligence regulatory framework.

Unfortunately, AI development isn't even listed on the agenda.

Instead, the spotlight will likely focus on U.S.-China relations, a trilateral meeting about Indo-Pacific cooperation between the United States, Japan, and South Korea, and the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, with the overarching theme of the summit revolving around outreach to the Global South and how the G7 can encourage a rules-based order. All are worthy topics, but it looks like the conversation on AI regulation and development is at risk of being sidelined altogether. That would be a missed opportunity to address rapid innovation in AI and its inevitable societal implications.

The G7 should initiate the development of a codified and widely adopted agreement or treaty setting clear rules prohibiting dangerous AI development. This agreement should consider prominent state approaches to AI regulation while addressing industry and open-source development standards as distinct components to AI development. It might encourage the adoption of a risk-based AI regulatory framework, which would limit dangerous AI applications while enabling competition in the AI space. The G7 should also anticipate reluctance from less aligned nations, such as China, and formulate strategies to align international interest in establishing international rules and standards around AI development.

Since the debut of GPT-3, policymakers worldwide have grappled with regulating AI as a groundbreaking technology. Today, industry-led pacts to limit training of large language models (LLMs) beyond GPT-4 provide some respite, allowing for a regulatory catch-up. But this weak, implicit pause on training future LLMs is precarious, and regulators are ill-prepared for the imminent evolution in the AI landscape. The G7 needs to address this and work toward establishing international norms for AI regulation. If they don’t, humanity could reap the consequences.

International norm-setting is urgently needed. A bipolar AI race between the United States and China may lead to a race to the bottom. Due to the extreme uncertainty presented by further AI development, it is crucial to govern the rollout of advanced AI models, allowing international lawmakers and regulators to anticipate and be prepared to address the spillover effects of further AI development.

The growing competency of the open-source AI development community poses a substantial hurdle to regulation. Open-source development blurs the lines of responsibility for different AI applications and makes AI regulations harder to enforce, despite being initially encouraged by tech giants. With such a chaotic approach to AI development, how do we hold AI developers accountable for myopic AI advancement? While many countries are considering how to regulate AI, a risk-based AI regulation framework has been the most pragmatic solution. This approach, which paved the way for the UK’s risk-based AI Framework launched in March 2023, fosters innovation while ensuring the cautious development of AI applications with potentially negative impacts. Under a risk-based framework, AI regulation is considered in the context of specific AI use cases as opposed to curbing AI development unilaterally.  Adopting a risk-based approach allows regulators to mitigate against existential threats presented by underregulated AI development while allowing countries to be competitive in the AI space.

Recent developments, like Italy’s resolved ban on ChatGPT after OpenAI addressed the nation's data privacy concerns, suggest that there are ways to reach a consensus between the AI industry and state regulators. The summit could serve as a platform to explore similar data standards and privacy concerns on a larger scale, providing a path to align AI development with international expectations through multinational agreements.

The genie is indeed out of the bottle. The G7 nations must collaborate on a strategic plan to address emerging norms and suggest an international approach to mitigating the perverse downstream effects of AI. Their focus should be two-pronged: encouraging proactive AI innovation while minimizing negative spillovers instigated by AI. Their ultimate goals should be encouraging all states to engage in a dynamic, collaborative approach to international AI regulation.

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

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“Prometheism,” an ideology and strategy devised in the early part of the twentieth century to combat Russia’s imperialism, is being revived in Europe’s east. The ideology—whose name is derived from ancient Greek mythology, in which the god Prometheus stole fire from the Olympian gods and gave it to humans as a symbol of knowledge, technology, and advancement—represents freedom, progress, and national liberation from Russian imperialism. Poland and Ukraine stand at the forefront of this developing movement, aimed at weakening Russia from within by supporting a host of national and regional groups seeking sovereignty and independence.

The Promethean strategy was originally developed by revolutionary fighters for Polish independence. In response to Russia’s mass invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the approach has now been revived and unofficially adopted by both Ukraine and Poland. Both Kyiv and Warsaw are laying the foundations of a new power center in Europe, having put aside their historic disputes to share a strategic vision that the Russian state must never again be allowed to threaten its neighbors. With a combined population of some eighty million, two of Europe’s most powerful armies, and substantial prospects for economic development after the war, both countries will be strengthened by a closely synchronized foreign and security policy.

Poland’s priorities are to help Ukraine defeat the Russian military, gain membership in NATO, and position a major NATO force in the country on a permanent basis. It also seeks to accelerate Ukraine’s membership in the European Union and provide a major boost to its post-war economy. A vital component of Ukraine’s revival and reconstruction is to guarantee that Russia no longer poses a threat to its territory and statehood. In this context, Prometheism offers an important strategy to embroil Moscow in its own internal problems while dismantling its imperial possessions.

Current “neo-Prometheism” is the third stage in its historic development following the collapse of Tsarism and Sovietism. The first Promethean Movement emerged during the death throes of Tsarist Russia and heralded the national liberation of Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland from Mosvow’s control as an example to other captive nations. Lenin’s Bolsheviks staged a coup in 1917 in order to restore the collapsing Russian empire under an internationalist communist ideology. After several years of war and reconquest, they managed to subjugate several new states that had declared their independence, including Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and a number of republics in what is now the Russian Federation, including in the North Caucasus and Middle Volga.

During the 1920s and 1930s, Prometheism was both an anti-imperial and anti-communist movement that promoted the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the creation of independent states. It encouraged any centrifugal forces, whether ethnonational or regional, that could undermine Moscow’s control. It was also based on the calculation that if Russia again succeeded in subjugating Poland, then it could dominate all of Central Europe. According to modern Poland’s founding father Józef Piłsudski and his supporters, Poland could only be protected against Moscow’s expansionism by pushing Russia back eastward and keeping it permanently enclosed within the borders of the sixteenth-century Grand Duchy of Muscovy. Poland’s plans for a wide-ranging Promethean revolution in the post-Tsarist empire were bolstered by its defeat of the Red Army in 1920, but were subsequently thwarted by the Treaty of Riga signed in March 1921. The treaty did not guarantee Poland a lasting peace, while the partition of Belarusian and Ukrainian territories prevented the creation of independent states and allies along Poland’s eastern border.

During the interwar period, Warsaw established a Promethean League that included representatives of nations that sought to gain independence from the Soviet Union and Polish strategists and activists that worked behind enemy lines. The Promethean agenda was followed by several public institutions dealing with Eastern Europe, and in the late 1920s became state policy until the signing of the Polish-Soviet non-aggression Pact of 1932. The Promethean project suffered a major setback when Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany signed their own non-aggression pact in 1939 to divide up Europe’s east and subsequently launched World War Two by invading Poland. As a result of the war, Moscow’s post-war communist empire captured half of Europe and stifled all national dissent, but Promethean ideology survived, mostly in émigré circles.

During the 1970s, Polish émigrés Jerzy Giedroyc and Juliusz Mieroszewski developed a doctrine that followed the Promethean tradition by advocating reconciliation among all Central-East European countries, the independence of Ukraine, Belarus, and Lithuania, and for a future independent Poland to give up any claims to its former eastern territories that were seized by the Soviet Union after World War Two. This policy was adopted by all democratic governments after the fall of Communism in 1989 and was central to developing trust between Poland and its newly independent neighbors. This second stage of Prometheism bore results in the early 1990s when the Soviet bloc was dissolved, the Central European countries liberated themselves from Moscow’s control, and the Soviet Union itself collapsed into fifteen new states, including Ukraine. In effect, this constituted the second phase of dismantling the Russian empire.

No Polish government or any significant political party has harbored aspirations to absorb, partition, or suborn Ukraine or Belarus. On the contrary, since the rejection of Soviet imperialism, Warsaw has campaigned for the freedom of independent states to enter the multi-national institutions of their choice. For Poland, NATO and EU membership and a strategic partnership with the United States became cornerstones for the defense of its independence. Warsaw also endeavored to secure and stabilize its eastern borders by helping immediate neighbors move closer toward European institutions. In addition, Poland has revived the post-World War I “Intermarium” project among Central-East European states including Ukraine. This is not depicted as a substitute for either NATO or the EU, but as a proposed alliance to enhance regional cooperation in national defense and economic development and as mutual protection against any resurgence of Russian imperialism. Poland’s multi-national regional efforts have included the Three Seas Initiative to enhance economic and infrastructural connections between the Baltic, Adriatic, and Black Seas.

Moscow’s full-scale attack on Ukraine in February 2022 was an attempt to recapture wider swathes of its former empire. The plan has not only failed militarily, but it has backfired geopolitically by reviving a multi-national neo-Promethean movement that is supported by both Warsaw and Kyiv. The third historical stage of this broad multi-national project is the permanent rupture of the centralized Putinist-Muscovite inner empire, disguised as the Russian Federation. Although the fracturing of Russia is not official state policy, both Warsaw and Kyiv have hosted meetings among representatives from national and regional movements that seek liberation from Moscow. Although most activists operate in exile, they also maintain links with their home republics and regions inside Russia. An embassy for the independent Chechen-Ichkerian government in exile will be opened in Kyiv in May and other national movements are likely to follow suit. Several Ukrainian officials, Polish parliamentarians, and a number of experts have stated that Russia’s demise is essential for any durable regional security.

A growing multi-national movement unofficially supported by Kyiv and Warsaw held its first Free Nations of Post-Russia Forum in Washington in April with representatives from over a dozen republics and regions demanding independence from the Russian Federation. Moscow’s failing war in Ukraine and its increasing isolation from Europe and the rest of the democratic world provide a unique opportunity for building new states to ensure the dissolution of Europe’s last empire. Activists representing a diverse assortment of nations from Chechnya and Tatarstan to Siberia, Buryatia, and Sakha in the Far East believe that conditions for imperial collapse are ripening. Moscow’s enormous military losses and the country’s accelerating economic decline are revealing the incompetence of Russia’s ruling elite. Moscow is increasingly perceived as an exploiting colonial metropolis that has failed to provide either security or welfare for its subjects.

Ukraine’s military victory will also demonstrate that Russia’s claimed borders are transient. The loss of occupied Crimea and three Ukrainian regions officially annexed by Moscow will symbolically and practically demonstrate that Russia is losing territory. Other regions can also free themselves from Moscow’s control as regime capacities weaken in holding together the diverse and unwieldy Russian state. Warsaw and Kyiv believe that it is crucial for independent voices beyond the narrow Moscow-centric liberal opposition to bring their message to the United States and Western Europe, similar to the “captive nations” during the Cold War whose independence was supported by the U.S. government and Congress.

The key message for Western leaders is that encouraging regions and republics to cooperate in designing a “post-Russia” will help contain the violent disintegration that many in the West fear. The regime in Moscow is likely to promote violence to try and keep the country together, as occurred during the collapse of the twentieth-century Russian Empire and to some extent during the disintegration of the Soviet Union, with military crackdowns in several Union Republics. Moreover, it is unclear how many states will arise from the demise of the Russian Federation, what their precise borders will be, and what sort of governments will gain power. Nonetheless, nations trapped inside Russia who want to coexist peacefully with their neighbors will welcome Western support and mediation over statehood, borders, resources, and institutions. Hence, preparations to recognize the independence of new states seeking freedom, democracy, self-determination, and international cooperation are fully in line with Western values and interests.

Aspiring states also want to focus attention on the positive outcome of Russia’s rupture. A shrinking state under international sanctions with a collapsing budget and escalating internal pressures for the formation of new states will have severely reduced capabilities to attack its neighbors. Moscow’s ability to entangle Europe in energy dependence, engage in political corruption, and spread disinformation will all be curtailed. NATO’s eastern flank from the Arctic to the Black Sea will become more secure and enhance economic development, business investment, and regional cooperation. Ukraine, Moldova, and Georgia can regain their occupied territories and petition for EU and NATO integration without fear of Russia’s reaction. Belarus can also secure its independence. Despite frequent threats from Moscow, a shrunken Russian state will not use nuclear weapons against internal adversaries and its leaders will not commit suicide by attacking the West. As during the Soviet collapse, they will seek to retain as much power and assets as possible to ensure their political survival.

The Promethean strategy has a positive view of Russia’s citizens rather than the patronizing stereotypes evident among many Western policymakers who see them as passive followers of autocratic rulers. With open support from the West for pluralism, democracy, and regional sovereignty, Russia’s citizens will realize that they are not globally isolated. They will also need information that Moscow suppresses, particularly on the political and economic advantages of forming new states that cultivate cooperative relations with all neighbors.

Russia’s rupture and the emergence of over a dozen entities is likely to be a prolonged process that can generate new instabilities for which Washington needs to prepare and minimize any spillovers and escalation of regional conflicts. However, the positive results must also be acknowledged, as several arising states can become new allies for Western and Eastern democracies, whether across the Atlantic, Pacific, or Arctic Oceans. American leaders should not fear the collapse of a failed empire but view it as an opportunity to intensify multi-national cooperation, open new markets, and help embryonic democracies to develop. They also need to understand that Polish-Ukrainian neo-Prometheism is based on an optimistic vision of Europe and Eurasia, in which freedom ultimately prevails over imperial subjugation.

Janusz Bugajski is a Senior Fellow at the Jamestown Foundation in Washington DC. His recent book is Failed State: A Guide to Russia’s Rupture. His next book is titled Pivotal Poland: Europe’s Rising Strategic Player. He has just toured Ukraine with the Ukrainian translation of his Russia Rupture book.

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Two recent diplomatic events brokered by the West in the ongoing peace process between Armenia and Azerbaijan indicate that the United States and the European Union have become fully engaged in brokering a deal to normalize relations between the two sides. The outcomes of these two events also represent the final nail in the coffin for the secessionist ambitions of the Karabakh Armenians and their supporters.

The West has thus now unambiguously aligned its position on the territorial integrity of Azerbaijan with support for the territorial integrity of Ukraine. This is due not only to a renewed realization of the advantages of upholding this cornerstone principle of world order centered on the UN Charter, but also to the recognition that Azerbaijan is the indispensable country for the advancement of the West’s strategic energy and connectivity ambitions in the Caspian Sea basin, and Eurasia more broadly (a more useful term here might be “Silk Road region”).

This, in turn, implies a strong connection between supporting the establishment of enduring peace between Baku and Yerevan along lines proposed by the former in spring 2022 and broader Western interests in what Zbigniew Brzezinski called the “strategically pivot states” of Eurasia, like Azerbaijan. And this, in turn, implies the relativization of a values-first U.S. foreign policy in the face of more solidly realist geopolitical and geoeconomic considerations. In the present case, this involves understanding the implication of the contrast between the fact that Azerbaijan’s president was the “first post-Soviet leader to publicly distance himself from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine” with the assessment that Armenia is a satellite of Russia and an ally of Iran—notwithstanding perhaps genuine yet tactically unfulfillable overtures to the West.

The foregoing is an integral part of the background against which we can measure the achievements of the two recent events brokered by the West involving the Armenia-Azerbaijan peace process. The first was held in Washington and hosted by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken on 1–4 May 2023. Delegations led by the foreign ministers of Armenia and Azerbaijan (Ararat Mirzoyan and Jeyhun Bayramov, respectively) produced significant enough progress on the text of a peace treaty to set the stage for the second recent event: a meeting between the leaders of the two states (Nikol Pashinyan and Ilham Aliyev, respectively) in Brussels on May 14, 2023, which was hosted by EU Council president Charles Michel.

The statement read by Michel at the conclusion of the Brussels meeting (we can safely assume it was drafted with Armenian and Azerbaijani input) suggests that peace has never been closer—both its tone and substance reflect Blinken’s remark at the end of the Washington meetings that “an agreement is within sight, within reach”—whilst still leaving unanswered the question of whether it is close enough.

Four basic observations are warranted in this regard.

First, the Brussels meeting was the first one between President Aliyev and Prime Minister Pashinyan in many months. It took quite a long time for Michel to overcome the opposition of French president Emmanuel Macron, who insisted on personally participating in the continued EU facilitation of the peace talks, which Azerbaijan deemed unacceptable. An intra-EU compromise seems to have finally been worked out. Without American support, however, the peace process would have likely reverted entirely to Russian mediation. Not only did the United States pick up the ball after the EU needlessly dropped it, but Washington and Brussels seem now to be closely coordinating their efforts: the outcome of the American thread of the process looks to have been seamlessly woven into the European one.

This concerted Western effort is all the more important since it does not necessarily appear to be at zero-sum odds with Russian mediation. This effectually makes the South Caucasus the sole geopolitical theater in which the White House and the Kremlin are presently not in overt opposition, which suggests a tacit realization by each that their respective interests in this part of the world are not entirely incompatible. The veracity of this hypothesis, however, will be tested soon on May 19, when foreign ministers Mirzoyan and Bayramov travel to Moscow for further talks brokered by the Russian side.

Second, the fact that Aliyev met with EU Commission vice president Maroš Šefčovič on the same day that Michel hosted peace talks in Brussels suggests that the two main branches of the EU—the Council and the Commission—are also closely coordinating their approaches. Further evidence is the meeting that took place between Bayramov and the head of the EU diplomatic service, Josep Borrell, one day later, also in Brussels. Of note is that the Aliyev-Šefčovič and Bayramov-Borrell meetings took place two weeks after the latest round of the EU-Azerbaijan Energy Dialogue between EU Commissioner for Energy and Energy Minister Parviz Shahbazov, which also took place in Brussels.

Both the timing and outcome of the Aliyev-Šefčovič meeting represents a critical signpost. It demonstrates that the bilateral strategic energy partnership is further deepening, both in terms of the provision of more Azerbaijani natural gas but also renewables from Azerbaijani (and Georgian) sources in the years and decades ahead. All this flows directly from the terms of the historic Memorandum of Understanding that was signed in Baku between Aliyev and President of the EU Commission Ursula von der Leyen in July 2022.

Why is the Azerbaijan-EU strategic energy partnership important in the context of the peace process? Because it shows that the EU is broadening its understanding of the consequences of Azerbaijan’s indispensability, as characterized above. The imperative of fulfilling the unique potential of the aforementioned strategic energy partnership ensures the EU remains constructively neutral in its role as a facilitator of the peace process. This appreciably reduces the influence of “spoilers” like the Armenian diaspora operating in parts of the EU, particularly in France (and, by extension, parts of the United States). It also compartmentalizes the “Macron effect” by indicating clearly that the French president’s participation in informal Aliyev-Pashinyan-Michel meetings scheduled to take place on the margins of the European Political Community summits in June (Moldova) and October (Spain) will be supplemented by the participation of German chancellor Olaf Scholz, whom Baku considers to be less partisan than his French counterpart.

In other words, when it comes to engaging strategically with the Silk Road region, particularly in the context of providing support to Armenia-Azerbaijan normalization and the anticipated peace dividend, the EU is no longer even pretending that geopolitics and geo-economics are not intrinsically linked. This is a direct consequence of the EU’s decision to impose sanctions on Russia, in close coordination with the United States.

Third, the press statement made by Michel after the Brussels meeting shows that the five peace principles that Azerbaijan put forward in Spring 2022, as noted above, continue to be the primary basis of the negotiations.

Going into some of the textual details is warranted, because the Michel statement is refreshingly clear on several fundamental points, two of which should be highlighted. One, the document says that Aliyev and Pashinyan “confirmed their unequivocal commitment to the 1991 Alma-Ata Declaration,” which recognized all the Soviet-era union republic borders as the sovereign borders of the newly-independent states. The immediate sequel explicitly mentions the square kilometer area of both countries, which unmistakably signifies no support for what the Michel statement calls the “former Nagorno Karabakh Autonomous Oblast” as anything other than constituting an integral part of Azerbaijan. The message is clear: the Michel statement extinguishes the secessionist hope of the Karabakh Armenians and their supporters. The territory former NKAO, which is known in secessionist circles as “Artsakh,” has no legal personality whatsoever.

Two, the entire paragraph of the Michel statement on what Baku calls the Zangezur Corridor is very encouraging from the standpoint of regional connectivity. The document says that the Armenian and Azerbaijani position on “reopening the railway connection to and via Nakhchivan” are “very close to each other.” This implies that a road connection is unlikely to be part of the agreement, at least not initially. But it indicates that a rail link will probably become a reality in relatively short order. What still needs to be finalized, the document says, are some modalities—including customs arrangements—and a concrete timetable on construction. But the text indicates that Aliyev and Pashinyan agreed to instruct their technical negotiating teams to get this done. Presumably, this means that Michel (and perhaps Blinken) will push Armenia not to renege on its commitment to actually achieve a breakthrough on the Zangezur rail link. The document does not indicate what, if any, role will be played by the Russian FSB Border Guard Service in this context, which, after all, is one of the provisions of Article 9 of the November 10, 2020 tripartite statement. In fact, the Michel document does not mention Russia at all.

The fourth observation concerning the Michel statement centers on what else the document did not say. One, the text says absolutely nothing about arrangements having to do with the Lachin Corridor. The omission here likely implies that this topic falls outside of the EU thread of the peace process and lends credence to Baku’s position that these arrangements—now and in the future—effectually have nothing to do with Armenia, either.

Two, the Michel statement also says nothing about the establishment of any sort of new foreign on-the-ground monitoring presence or oversight or anything similar—whether in the context of the delimitation of the Armenia-Azerbaijan border or in the context of the providing for the Karabakh Armenian population. Regarding the former, it does not exclude the possibility of Armenia making side deals with Russia, the CSTO, or the EU in this regard, although Azerbaijan is unlikely to take kindly to such unilateral or uncoordinated steps. Baku’s reaction to the establishment and subsequent deployment of a small, two-year European Union Mission in Armenia (EUMA) speaks to this point, as does the Armenian perception of its ineffectiveness. Regarding the latter, the statement does indicate Michel’s “encouragement” for Azerbaijan to “develop a positive agenda with the aim of guaranteeing the rights and security of this population, in close cooperation with the international community.” This, understandably is a perfectly reasonable standard for what is now accepted as being a domestic matter (more on this below), which can be achieved through the resumption of what the Michel statement calls a “transparent and constructive dialogue” between the central authorities in Baku and the local Karabakh Armenian population.

There are two evident implications of the foregoing. One, foreigners are unlikely to actively participate in Baku’s talks with the Karabakh Armenians in anything resembling the manner in which they have in the peace talks between Baku and Yerevan. This suggests that the Armenian side has dropped its earlier demand for the intra-Azerbaijan (Karabakh) discussions to take place within an “internationally mediated” mechanism. Two, no new foreign civilian, much less military, presence on the ground is likely to be established to “guarantee” the implementation of whatever ends up being agreed between the central authority and the Karabakh Armenians.

If Armenia actually strikes a deal with Azerbaijan, then normalization with Turkey will swiftly follow. The resulting peace dividend would provide Yerevan with significant diplomatic, economic, and security benefits whilst bringing Armenia back into the regional fold after three decades of political isolation. Although a derailment remains a possibility, the train does appear to be nearing its station. Not only because the West now truly seems to understand the “geostrategic stakes and is making a smart play,” as Mike Doran recently wrote, but also because all external stakeholders, including Russia, appear to have concluded that the continued pursuit of their respective interests lies in maintaining, even strengthening, their ties with Baku.

All things considered, Azerbaijan’s intensifying centripetal allure may indeed turn out to be the reason the peace process crosses the finish line.

Damjan Krnjević Mišković is Professor of Practice at ADA University and Director for Policy Research, Analysis, and Publications at its Institute for Development and Diplomacy, serving as Co-Editor of Baku Dialogues. He is a former senior Serbian and UN official (2004–2013) who previously served as managing editor of The National Interest (2002–2004). He is also a member of the Board of Editors of Orbis. The views and opinions expressed herein are solely those of the author.

Image: Shutterstock.

There is no other way to say it: the outcome of Turkey’s elections is a huge setback for the country’s political opposition. Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the “Nation Alliance’s” candidate, seeking to defeat incumbent President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, gained 45 percent of the vote, coming in second after Erdogan, who achieved 49.3 percent. Kilicdaroglu and Erdogan will now face a runoff election on May 28. Whoever crosses the 50 percent threshold will win the presidency. Many who voted for Kilicdaroglu are understandably demoralized and stunned at the outcome. This was supposed to be the occasion when Erdogan was finally dethroned. Alas. Critics are crying foul play, while others declare that it’s not over yet, and there is still a chance to defeat Erdogan at the runoff. How expected was this outcome and what are the chances for Kilicdaroglu to defeat Erdogan on May 28?

It depends on who you talk to. A variety of established observers of Turkish politics in the media, academia, and policy world predicted for months that Erdogan’s downfall was imminent. This certainty was predicated on the overly-confident claim that the country’s depressed economy, the impact of the earthquake, and Erdogan’s deepening authoritarian slide were all straws that broke the camel’s back and frustrated the citizenry. Therefore, Erdogan would lose. On the other hand, more cautious observers highlighted several red flags, mainly related to the nature of Turkey’s authoritarian regime, arguing that it was too soon to pop the champagne. This latter group of observers was somewhat callously labeled as “pessimists” and ignored. The actual result on election night was that much more stunning, because of the false euphoria generated by Turkey’s mainstream independent media, respected scholars, and policy analysts.

Bottom line: expectation management should have guided analysts’ analysis, which unfortunately gave way to them becoming cheerleaders for team Kilicdaroglu. Within days of the election, allegations started surfacing from across the country, specifically from voting precincts that there may be widespread fraud in the reporting of results. This may or may not be true and should obviously be investigated. That said, one should bear in mind that these objections will likely get tied up in courts and the Supreme Election Council, will likely certify the results anyway. We may never find out the true vote count, but more importantly, it demonstrates that the Nation Alliance was wholly unprepared to mitigate what the so-called “pessimist” camp had been warning about for months.

Even if the results are tainted, it does not change the basic outcome that Erdogan beat Kilicdaroglu and Erdogan’s People’s Alliance gained a majority of seats in parliament. This is not because it is right, but because this is what is likely to be imposed by the YSK. To be fair, both Erdogan and his governing Justice and Development Party lost votes since the 2018 election, and contrastingly, Kilicdaroglu gained the highest percentage of votes in his Republican People’s Party’s (CHP) history since 1950.

While these are important details, voters only really care about who will win the presidency on May 28. At present, this looks more likely to be Erdogan. Kilicdaroglu’s campaign, in the last few weeks focused exclusively on principles, encapsulated around the slogan “Rights, Rule of Law and Justice!” On stage, Kilicdaroglu and his surrogates promised to free the country from Erdogan’s yolk of injustice and rebuild a more equitable economy that benefited ordinary citizens. This was likely the right strategy, but it underestimated the role of identity. The most plausible explanation that explains why Erdogan received nearly 50 percent is based on the polarizing campaign he ran. In his campaign rallies, Erdogan drove home the point that every vote for Kilicdaroglu and the CHP would be one which would close down mosques, allow same-sex individuals to marry, and undermine Turkey’s family values. Moreover, Erdogan screamed from podiums that voting for the CHP would result in Kurdish terrorists being released into the streets. Ultimately, this seems to have resonated with voters, and in the event that Erdogan succeeds in clinching the presidency in the second round, Turkey’s political landscape is likely to be represented by hyper-nationalism, homophobia, and anti-Westernism.

If Kilicdaroglu has any chance of defeating Erdogan on May 28, he has to look and behave like a winner. This has not been the case since election night. He has barely been seen in public. As the results were becoming increasingly clear in the early hours of May 15, an emboldened President Erdogan confidently stepped outside his party headquarters balcony in Ankara and addressed thousands of his supporters. Moments later, the six leaders of the Nation Alliance assembled on stage in a closed auditorium with only journalists present and whined about how election results were being falsely reported. Supporters of Kilicdaroglu are justifiably frustrated. They have all been aware that serious challenges exist to prevent a free and fair election from taking place. The question they desperately want to be answered is: what are Kilicdaroglu and his alliance going to do about it? Complaining about it is unlikely to satisfy voters, as well as change the outcome of what they fear to be an Erdogan victory in less than two weeks. A serious strategy change must be adopted by the CHP leadership if they want to even contemplate winning.

On the other hand, if Erdogan does clinch the presidency on May 28, he will be in charge of the country for another five years. He will also have a parliamentary majority and many now fear that he will use this opportunity to eradicate the remaining vestiges of democracy. Remaining journalists, independent media outlets, and academics who have been vocal critics of Erdogan fear that they may no longer have room to breathe in a country that has all but stifled freedoms. If Kilicdaroglu does lose, there’ll be immense pressure for him to resign as chairman of the CHP. If that happens, the charismatic mayor of Istanbul, who arguably was the lifeblood of the Nation Alliance’s campaign, is well-positioned to become the next leader of Ataturk’s party. However, he has a lawsuit pending against him, which could see him slapped down with a political ban. In addition to losing his political rights, Erdogan could appoint an unelected caretaker mayor of Istanbul, which he has long desired, since losing the country’s largest city in the 2019 local elections.

Sobering times await Turkey and its brave, yet beleaguered citizens.

Sinan Ciddi is a nonresident senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, where he contributes to FDD’s Turkey Program and Center on Military and Political Power. Follow Sinan on Twitter @SinanCiddi.

Image: Shutterstock.

Within days of Russia’s attack on Ukraine in February 2022, the State Department undersecretary of state for political affairs, Victoria Neuland, declared that the U.S. objective in the conflict is the “strategic defeat” of Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

One month later, Nuland doubled down. “It is clear that Russia will lose this conflict. ... It is only a matter of time.”

At Davos one year ago, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen added Europe’s voice to the American chorus. “Putin's aggression must be a strategic failure,” she said.

It is well and good, and indeed to be expected, that when the guns start sounding leaders will seek to rally their troops to the cause. Remember George W. Bush’s famous, if premature “mission accomplished” declaration, well before the decisive conflict in Iraq commenced.

But when the real work of waging war commences, President Joe Biden, and the public whose endorsement he seeks, must, in word as well as deed, answer the question: What indeed does such high-sounding rhetoric really mean? How will we know when we have arrived at such a solemn and expansive if indefinite objective as Russia’s strategic defeat? 

Putin has paid very close attention to the statements coming from Washington. He cannot afford to have illusions about Washington’s objective or dismiss its intentions as hyperbole.

“The goal of the West,” he declares, “is to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia. To finish us off. That’s exactly how we understand it all. It’s about the existence of our country. But they cannot fail to understand that it is impossible to defeat Russia on the battlefield.”

In a war notable for Washington’s incremental, and so far strategically unsuccessful, escalation of the means—military as well as economic and financial—employed to attain Russia’s strategic defeat, the clarity of U.S. aims today is no more definite than it was at the war’s outset. 

Both Washington’s political class and the public at large have become minor-league strategists. They prefer to focus on simple and often simplistic calculations to ascertain the direction of the conflict—how many tanks and artillery shells Washington is sending to Ukraine—even as they avoid more significant questions raised by Washington’s commitment to Putin’s ruin that a sober appreciation of costs and benefits would challenge if not reject outright.

Indeed, by declaring such an outsized and unambiguous purpose—for that is what a pledge to achieve Russia’s “strategic defeat” requires—the Biden administration risks a policy debacle not unlike Barack Obama’s famous declaration that Syria’s “Assad must go.” That policy has now entered its final act in Syria, where President Bashar Assad has just been unconditionally readmitted to the Arab League.

The antonym of strategic failure is strategic victory, and that indeed is what Iran is now announcing these very days in Damascus.

Iranian president Ebrahim Raisi’s deputy for political affairs, Mohammad Jamshidi, noted prior to Raisi’s recent arrival in Damascus that the visit is a sign of “the Islamic Republic of Iran’s strategic victory in the region.”

Jamshidi explained that the very same Arab nations that supported Washington’s campaign of “maximum pressure” against Iran are now reconciling with Tehran—with China’s and Russia’s support—and coordinating Syria’s return to the Arab fold. Washington’s role has been reduced to that of a spoiler, exiled to the periphery of dynamic events aimed at ending Syria’s civil war.

Obama’s call for regime change in Syria, for all of its increasingly evident faults, at least had the advantage of clarity.

In contrast, after a year of war in Europe, Washington, even as it claims that Putin is “scaling back his near-term ambitions” in Ukraine, admits that the chance of Russian concessions at any negotiating table this year “will be low.”

Clearly, the Biden administration is no closer to defining a scale for measuring the degree to which the war’s essential achievement in Washington’s calculus—that is Russia’s strategic defeat—has been, or indeed can be, achieved.

While the diplomats chatter, months of war have dragged on in battles more reminiscent of the static battle lines of World War I than the shock and awe of Washington’s Iraq invasion.

I admit that I am no military expert, but Europe’s bloody history advises that betting against the Russian army is a dangerous and costly wager.

Historian Mark Perry, of blessed memory, never tired of describing the Soviet Red Army as a formidable and, indeed, an implacable foe whose strength and power derived from the immensity of Russia’s unassailable command of the Eurasian landmass. He would often note that during World War II, Josef Stalin executed almost 200,000 of Russia’s own for desertion. In other words, Russia conducts war in a historical and geographic context different, indeed foreign, to our own.

To command the strategic defeat of any enemy, let alone a nuclear-armed Russia, is no mean feat. Recent history offers few examples of this scale of victory—the Taliban’s recent expulsion of Western forces, Israel’s June 1967 triumph, perhaps even Bush’s Operation Desert Shield come to mind—but even these military achievements proved short-lived or incomplete.

Washington’s commitment to Putin’s (or is it Russia’s?) strategic defeat seeks to leave Russia unable to achieve even the most modest of its war objectives in Ukraine as well as weaken Moscow’s sovereign capabilities to resist NATO’s expansion. Events of the past year have at least made it clear that Washington’s commitment to Russia’s strategic defeat has not been accompanied by a U.S. guarantee of Ukraine’s “victory,” however defined.

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: Pimen / Shutterstock.com

On February 24, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo launched the Biden administration’s vision for implementing the CHIPS Act, encouraging semiconductor companies to apply for a piece of the $39 billion which has been devoted to reinvigorating America’s domestic chipmaking capacity. Coupled with the Commerce Department’s stringent export controls issued last fall, which targeted leading chipmakers with ties to the Chinese military such as YMTC, it’s clear that the Biden administration is serious about semiconductor competition with China. But every chip matters to national and economic security, not just the leading-edge variety. But as a new paper from China Tech Threat argues, the administration must now address the threat of “legacy” Chinese chips from companies like Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC).

Also known as mature chips, legacy chips—either fourteen or twenty-eight nanometers in size or larger, depending on your definition—are the semiconductors that go into commonplace technologies such as cars, refrigerators, and washing machines. More importantly, defense systems make frequent use of them—Gina Raimondo has told the U.S. Senate, “We have reports from Ukrainians that when they find Russian military equipment on the ground, it’s filled with semiconductors that they took out of dishwashers and refrigerators.” While they don’t get as much attention as leading-edge chips, which are associated with advanced technologies, legacy chips are everywhere. And with the adoption of 5G networks fueling the rise of “smart” objects, the demand for all types of semiconductors will only increase. Unfortunately, the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS), which administers export controls, has only targeted China’s advanced semiconductor-making capacity.

Chinese companies, perhaps recognizing how the West has underestimated the importance of legacy chips, have decided to increase their output of these critical products. John Lee, the director of the consulting firm East West Futures, told the MIT Technology Review in January that China’s role in supplying these “indispensable chips … is becoming bigger rather than smaller.” Leading that effort is SMIC, China’s largest chipmaker. The Commerce Department placed SMIC on the Entity List in late 2020 with the intent to kill its ability to make leading-edge chips. But SMIC’s legacy business remains unaffected. The company recently posted a record $7.2 billion in revenue and announced expansion plans, despite uncertainty in the broader semiconductor sector. When the company’s four new production fabs come online, it will more than triple the company’s output, estimates Samuel Wang, a chip analyst with the consulting firm Gartner.

A deluge of Chinese legacy chips will spell lots of pain for the global chip market. Because SMIC and other Chinese semiconductor companies have benefitted from billions of dollars in Chinese government subsidies, SMIC is positioned to undercut prices, threaten Western competitors’ existence, and increase American and global dependence on China. China has already poured subsidies into its domestic solar panel industry to become the world’s leader in production. Beijing is poised to run that playbook again with legacy chips.

SMIC is also a threat because of its ties to the Chinese military apparatus. James Mulvenon, an expert on the Chinese military and Chinese cyber issues, has extensively documented these ties, including SMIC’s relationship with China Electronics Technology Group Corporation, “a state-owned defense conglomerate specializing in the research and production of military-use electronics, defense electronic information infrastructure, and military-use software.” Multiple other Chinese entities focused on applied research for military purposes also use SMIC products in their work. The United States shouldn’t allow U.S. technologies to support Beijing’s military buildup. Nor should Chinese chips of any kind be allowed in any U.S. military equipment out of sabotage and cybersecurity concerns. But the risk of compromised American weapons increases if there is no alternative to a China-controlled supply.

Lawmakers on Capitol Hill are sounding the alarm about the economic and national security concerns SMIC poses. Senator Bill Hagerty has confirmed SMIC’s “very close ties” to the Chinese military and highlighted reporting that SMIC may be jointly developing a $10 billion chipmaking facility with Entity-Listed Huawei. Senator Marco Rubio and Representative Michael McCaul, chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, have also observed, “Although SMIC’s designation on the Entity List is hampering its ability to make the most bleeding-edge semiconductors, it is having little to no effect on its overall production capability.”

The duty of plugging this leak in export control policy falls to the Department of Commerce. BIS under secretary Alan Estevez and his team should expand the current restrictions on SMIC so that American technologies cannot be used in the production of legacy chips manufactured by SMIC or any other Chinese-owned and operated chip firms. There’s nowhere to go but up: in the span of just a few months in 2020 and 2021, BIS approved $41 billion in licenses for American companies looking to sell their technologies to SMIC.

Leaders on Capitol Hill also have their own levers to pull. According to former National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien, “The idea that ‘made in China’ chips are embedded in U.S. defense and intelligence systems, national critical infrastructure, and government networks is both absurd and, unfortunately, our reality.” This year’s National Defense Authorization Act should include an expansion of Section 5949 to completely bar federal contractors from using Chinese chips in their equipment. Doing so will better safeguard American military systems and U.S. critical infrastructure that China is virtually certain to target for a cyberattack in the event of an invasion of Taiwan.

As a geostrategic imperative, the CHIPS Act is a generational step toward bringing advanced chip manufacturing back to America. Ideally, the United States will one day reclaim its status as a world-leading manufacturer of legacy chips. But if we fail to counteract SMIC and other Chinese legacy chipmakers now, that opportunity may never come.

Retired U.S. Army Major General James “Spider” Marks is a principal at China Tech Threat. His final posting in uniform was as the Commanding General of the U.S. Army Intelligence School in Fort Huachuca, Arizona.

Image: Shutterstock.