The National Interest

From wind turbines to electric vehicles, rare earth elements—rare earths for short—are needed for key technologies to transition to a sustainable energy revolution. In addition, rare earths power modern military technology, such as radar systems and precision-guided munitions. Furthermore, as technological advancements continue in these areas, companies will need more rare earth for future technologies to function.

The Chinese government has committed tremendous financial and political resources to control the global rare earth elements market. These actions have yielded great dividends for the Chinese economy, which now controls 85 percent of the global rare earth processing market. With decades of financial and institutional support, Chinese refining businesses have developed the technology and skills to refine rare earth at a far lower price than the United States and other countries.

It is alarming that China is willing to leverage its rare earth monopoly to accomplish its foreign policy objectives. After the Japanese government detained a Chinese fish trawler due to an ongoing border dispute, China responded by embargoing its rare earth supply to Japan. Japan, which had imported 30 percent of its rare earth elements from China, was eventually forced to release the fishing captain back to China so that they could have a supply of rare earth. During the ongoing trade war, China has threatened to restrict rare earth exports to the United States.

To counter this threat, former President Donald Trump signed an executive order to increase the domestic production of rare earth for military technology. The Biden administration has also noted in its 2023 Annual Threat Assessment that China’s dominance in the critical minerals market “could pose a significant risk to U.S. and Western manufacturing and consumer sectors if the Government of China was able to adeptly leverage its dominance for political or economic gain.” The Biden administration has devised a few policies to diminish China’s dominance in the rare earth market. Notably, U.S. Defense Department has granted $10 million to MP Materials Inc, one of America’s rare earth mines. Furthermore, President Joe Biden signed executive order 14051 to ensure an adequate stockpile of rare earth for national security purposes. However, these policies are equivalent to shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic, as they are inadequate in addressing China’s current dominance.

The timeframe for Biden’s current investments in mining and extraction will take too long to materialize. A study found that rare earth mines from 2010 to 2019 took over sixteen years from initial discovery to production. The process takes this long because it typically takes twelve years to conduct feasibility studies of potential mining locations, followed by four years of construction. The urgent shortage of rare earth elements means the United States cannot rely on opening new mines and immediately seeing current problems disappear.

To address this, the Biden administration should also continue to invest in businesses that can efficiently decrease their dependence on rare earth elements. Following the 2010 Senkaku boat collision incident, the Japanese government began investing in rare earth recycling and electric vehicle battery production that did not require rare earth to function. The United States should take notes and needs to continue to invest in businesses dedicated to decreasing its dependence on rare earthsWhile many U.S. startups will fail, just a few startups surviving in the market will provide the U.S. with the ability to diminish China’s concentration and leverage in the rare earth market.

Most importantly, the Biden administration must recognize and prioritize the rare earth elements it needs to ensure national security. In a recent congressional hearing about U.S. energy policy, Interior Secretary Haaland stated that the administration is currently “identifying those critical minerals within the U.S. Geological Survey.” Not all rare earth are created equal. Some rare earth, like yttrium, is essential for munitions, while others, like neodymium, is more useful for powering electric vehicles. Given the time frame and the severity of the shortage, the Biden administration needs to prioritize this research. Only with an understanding of the type and quantity of certain rare earth can the Biden administration devise the optimal rare earth policy for the United States’s economic and national security.

Rare earth elements have propelled the global economy. The nations that control rare earth element refining capabilities will be able to determine the future environmental, economic, and military capabilities of their country and its allies. ​​In 1992, while visiting a Chinese Rare Earths Research Institute in Baotou, Deng Xiaoping famously stated that “there is oil in the Middle East; there is rare earth in China.” America’s leaders must share the same attitude that Deng had for China.

Richard Li is an undergraduate student at Cornell University. He can be contacted at rll246@cornell.edu. Follow him on Twitter @RichardLuLi1.

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In June 2021, President Joe Biden made fighting global corruption an official priority, directing the National Security Council to conduct an interagency review and promulgate an all-of-government anti-corruption strategy. In December of that year, the Biden White House published its Strategy on Countering Global Corruption, and for the first time in history, fighting global corruption became a “core United States national security interest.” This is commendable, but it would be more effective if the fight against global corruption also highlighted—and targeted—the symbiotic relationship between organized crime, terror finance, and corruption.

The president already has, by virtue of legislation and executive orders enacted by his predecessors, a panoply of tools to go after transnational organized crime and terror finance networks. And the Biden White House also expanded its toolkit in 2021, appointing a State Department coordinator to fight global corruption, establishing the U.S. Council on Transnational Crime, and issuing an executive order to impose sanctions on foreign persons involved in the global illicit drug trade. Yet what’s missing is an integrated approach based on an understanding of how these threats intersect, which targets them simultaneously. It is not enough to prioritize corruption. The Biden anti-corruption strategy must go after both bribers and bribed. Hezbollah is a perfect candidate.

On April 18, 2023, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) indicted Nazem Said Ahmad and eight associates for their alleged role in a fraudulent transaction involving artwork, luxury goods, and precious stones, many of them purchased in the United States. Contemporaneously, the Treasury Department sanctioned Ahmad’s international network, expanding its 2019 designation against him and his companies. Ahmad, Treasury asserts, is a Hezbollah financier and an associate of Hezbollah financier Mohammad Bazzi, whom Treasury designated in 2018. (Romanian authorities arrested Bazzi in Bucharest last February, and he is awaiting extradition to the United States.)

These actions, as well as past DOJ and Treasury actions, show Hezbollah’s global reach as a terrorist organization funded through criminal activities by its members, associates, and sympathizers. Less evident, though no less important, is something else these cases all have in common: corruption. The Ahmad network, the Treasury designation states, leveraged “Hizballah’s influence at … ports of entry to move assets into Lebanon without paying the applicable taxes and duties”—a likely reference to immigration, security, and customs officials in Hezbollah’s payroll. Bazzi, for his part, leveraged his connection with Yahya Jammeh, then dictator of Gambia, buttressing local corruption in exchange for the ability to run illicit businesses that ultimately financed Hezbollah.

Outside of Lebanon, Hezbollah buys impunity from local scrutiny and prosecution for its illicit networks through bribery and corruption at the highest levels of government and local public administration. In Lebanon, it uses its influence and political power to buy impunity—through bribes—for those running illicit businesses. Such extensive corruption contributes to the erosion of good governance, weakens democratic institutions, undermines the rule of law, and empowers corrupt officials and politicians.

Corruption, then, is a critical tool in Hezbollah’s strategy to self-fund through illicit activities, which has been underscored by previous Treasury designations against Hezbollah operations in the Gambia, Guinea, and Paraguay. Since it is also a top foreign policy priority for the Biden White House, the president should recognize that corruption is an integral element of Hezbollah’s modus operandi, and target, through designations, both sides of the corruption equation. Why not, for example, sanction the corrupt Lebanese officials who facilitated the recently sanctioned Ahmad network’s operations?

Terror organizations like Hezbollah self-finance by engaging in extensive transnational criminal activities, often in close cooperation with international criminal syndicates. The crime-terror finance nexus is nothing new. Across the span of history and geography, terrorism has been self-financed, at least in part, through criminal activities. The Bolsheviks in tsarist Russia funded their subversive activities through crime—which catapulted a young Joseph Stalin to center stage in the party machine. More recently, Ireland’s Irish Republican Army, the Italian Red Brigades, the Basque ETA, Colombia’s FARC, the Taliban, Al Qaeda, and the Islamic State all engaged in criminal activities to fundraise—including the illicit drug trade, human trafficking and organ harvesting, and trafficking in antiquities. Hezbollah continues to be involved in a multiplicity of criminal activities, including, critically, money laundering on behalf of international criminal syndicates. The Trump administration designated Hezbollah as a transnational criminal organization for its involvement in global criminal activities.

Trafficking and laundering depend on the ability of terror groups to establish working relations with crime syndicates, which can evolve into symbiotic partnerships. Criminals and terror financiers depend on one another for the supply of illicit merchandise and the transport, distribution, and laundering of the proceeds from sales.

Critically, both rely, for the success of their criminal endeavors, on their ability to infiltrate state institutions at all levels—police, customs, border guards, port workers, the judiciary, and elected officials—and to put these people on their payroll to protect their commercial enterprise.

Hezbollah is no exception. As Marshall Billingslea, then assistant secretary for Treasury’s Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, said in a speech at the Atlantic Council in September 2019, “Hizballah supplements its income by using businessmen to operate a wide range of companies, using political relationships to gain favored contracts and even monopolies in prominent sectors … Hizballah also benefits from various international criminal schemes, including money laundering, drug trafficking and counterfeiting, operated by its supporters, sympathizers, and members.”

Examples abound of Hezbollah’s systematic reliance on corruption to grease the wheels of its complex criminal enterprises. Take Paraguay, one of the most corrupt countries in Latin America, ranked 137 out of 180 in the Transparency International 2022 corruption index, whose systemic corruption makes it a gangster’s paradise. While historically a hub for smuggling, in recent years, Paraguay has been turned by international crime syndicates into a key transit point for narcotrafficking. The U.S. Department of State’s 2022 annual International Narcotics Control Strategy Report (Volume II) noted that crime syndicates in Paraguay, especially in the tri-border area it shares with Brazil and Argentina, often rely on “the assistance of co-opted government officials” for their trafficking. The corruption of politicians and public officials has deep roots in the local political culture, and criminals, including Hezbollah, exploit this.

Last January, the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned Paraguay’s past president, Horacio Cartes, and its current vice president, Hugo Velazquez, “for their involvement in the rampant corruption that undermines democratic institutions in Paraguay.” (Cartes’s attorney dismissed the allegations as politically tainted; Velazquez announced, through his attorney, that he will challenge them in a U.S. court.) But according to Treasury, both politicians have ties with members of Hezbollah, which, Treasury explained, “has regularly held private events in Paraguay where politicians make agreements for favors, sell state contracts, and discuss law enforcement efforts in exchange for bribes. Representatives of both Cartes and Velazquez have collected bribes at these meetings.” If confirmed, this situation—in which Hezbollah representatives buy off Paraguayan politicians in exchange for favors, state contracts, and information on law enforcement efforts, presumably against their interest—calls for U.S. sanctions not only against those Paraguayan officials who were bribed, but also the Hezbollah emissaries who put money in their pockets.

This is not the first time the United States has tied Hezbollah’s illicit finance to corruption in Paraguay. In 2021, Treasury sanctioned Kassem Mohamad Hijazi, a Lebanese-Brazilian dual national who was subsequently extradited to the United States and indicted, for buying off law enforcement officials in order to guarantee protection for a trade-based money laundering network.

Although sanctioned for corruption and indicted on money laundering charges, Hijazi is, according to leaked classified State Department cables from 2005, a Hezbollah fundraiser and supporter. Paraguayan media have reported that Hijazi, to derail the extradition proceedings, allegedly paid a bribe to a family member of a Paraguayan Supreme Court judge, who has denied any involvement. This, then, is a case where U.S. authorities targeted an alleged Hezbollah briber, but not the beneficiaries of his bribes.

As goes Paraguay, so go other countries with high rates of corruption. Guinea, in West Africa, ranks even worse than Paraguay in the annual Transparency International Corruption Index. Unsurprisingly, Hezbollah has exploited political connections in that country to facilitate illicit activities. In 2022, Treasury sanctioned two Guinean-Lebanese dual nationals, accusing them of buying off airport authorities to facilitate the transit of suitcases filled with cash, destined for Hezbollah in Lebanon. The two, well-established businessmen in that country, were charged, according to Treasury, with collecting financial support for Hezbollah and transferring the funds to Lebanon. Facilitating contacts and good relations with the highest authorities in the country allegedly helped them smooth and promote commercial and financial activities for Hezbollah’s benefit. Both enjoyed diplomatic status as honorary consuls and both had close relations with the former president of Guinea, Alpha Condé, whom the State Department recently sanctioned for his role in human rights violations. The two were sanctioned for financing terrorism, not corruption. Those they presumably bought off were not sanctioned on corruption grounds.

As noted, Hezbollah also exploited close political connections in Gambia during the presidency of Yahya Jammeh, who pillaged his country’s resources during his twenty-one-year rule. Mohammad Ibrahim Bazzi, a Belgian-Lebanese dual national, was part of Jammeh’s inner circle of foreign businessmen who greatly benefited from the president’s corrupt rule. Billingslea, then Treasury assistant secretary, accused Bazzi of involvement in human trafficking, among other illicit activities, which, according to Billingslea, he was able to conduct thanks to his close relationship with Gambia’s Jammeh. The U.S. Treasury sanctioned Bazzi in 2018, highlighting his close connection to what it called “the corrupt former leader of The Gambia who, in addition to ordering targeted assassinations, plundered The Gambia’s state coffers for his personal gain.” Billingslea went further, explicitly accusing Bazzi of involvement in human trafficking, among other illicit activities he was able to conduct thanks to his close relationship with Gambia’s Jammeh. Bazzi sued Treasury to have his designation removed, but failed in his bid and settled out of court in 2021. He remained under sanctions and was arrested in Romania in February 2023, pursuant to a U.S. international arrest warrant on money laundering charges. During Jammeh’s presidency, Bazzi, too, gained the status of honorary consul for Gambia in Lebanon. In this instance, at least, the United States also sanctioned former president Jammeh and his wife on corruption charges.

As the above examples show, throughout the years, U.S. sanctions have occasionally revealed the systemic corruption of ruling elites who act as facilitators for organized crime and terror finance. The Biden administration’s decision to elevate the fight against global corruption to a national security priority is commendable, and it should now systematically highlight the inextricable link between corruption, organized crime, and Hezbollah’s terror finance. While sanctions against corrupt foreign officials make an impact, exposing the ultimate beneficiaries of their corruption, who often turn out to be those paying the bribes, will further multiple aspects of the Biden administration’s national security agenda.

It is corruption that allows the movement of illicit merchandise and dirty money on a global scale. It buys impunity for those engaged in illicit conduct and irreparably undermines democratic institutions as it bends the law to favor criminals, interferes with fairness in the allocation of public contracts, impedes and derails investigations, and in some cases, even leads to the removal, or downright murder, of prosecutors and judges who refuse to take bribes. It also provides influence over political processes and electoral outcomes that can benefit crime and terror finance networks, whose bought-off politicians and officials will continue to protect them. Finally, corruption may grant criminal syndicates and terror groups like Hezbollah critical access to state secrets.

Making global corruption a national security priority is the right decision. Recognizing Hezbollah’s systematic reliance on corruption to facilitate its illicit finance networks would make the White House strategy more effective.

Emanuele Ottolenghi is a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington, DC-based non-partisan research institution. Follow him on Twitter @eottolenghi. 

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Part of the essence of realism in international affairs is to recognize things as they are and to deal with those actual circumstances prudently and practically, as opposed to dwelling in a realm of things as we wish they would be. In the land that Israelis and Palestinians inhabit, two major features of reality have become undeniable. One is the persistence and bloodiness of the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, despite efforts to “shrink” the conflict, to sidestep it, or simply to ignore it. The conflict has become increasingly bloody lately, with violence surging over the past year.

The other reality is that Israel’s policies since its conquest of the West Bank fifty-six years ago have institutionalized a single state between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. The large-scale Israeli colonization of the conquered territory—with the number of Israeli settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem now exceeding 750,000 and growing—has been accompanied by the construction of physical and legal infrastructure to serve their needs the same as for any other Jewish Israeli citizens. Israel treats that land as an integral part of its own territory for whatever purposes it suits Israel to treat in that way.

There already is a one-state “solution” to the conflict, although it is a solution only for those content with a system of one ethnically defined group oppressing and subjugating another group that is denied political rights and self-determination, with all the resentment and potential for violence that such an arrangement inevitably involves. Meanwhile, a two-state solution, which has been part of the standard vocabulary of diplomats and politicians for decades, has been pushed ever farther out of reach and, in the view of many informed observers, is dead.

In a recent article in Foreign Affairs, Michael Barnett, Nathan Brown, Marc Lynch, and Shibley Telhami have described this reality and observed that “It is no longer possible to avoid confronting a one-state reality.” The resistance to recognizing that reality—and the implications for U.S. policy that flow from that recognition—remains strong among those determined to stick up for Israeli policies and to advocate continued U.S. condoning of those policies. Thus there inevitably has been pushback against the Barnett, et al. article, including in a recent piece in this publication by Dennis Ross and David Makovsky of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

Ross and Makovsky invoke many of the old chestnuts long used by American sympathizers with Israel in ways that may have been valid fifty-six years ago but now seem stuck in a time warp. They open their piece with a flourish about how the recent demonstrations in Israel against the Netanyahu government’s plan to emasculate the judiciary show “the depth of the Israeli public’s commitment to democracy.” But the democracy about which the demonstrators have been chanting has nothing to do (as Ross and Makovsky later acknowledge) with the several million Palestinians whom Israel rules and who have no say in choosing their rulers. The commitment to democracy (of some Israelis, and not, according to Ross and Makovsky’s own logic, those who back the extreme right-wing government that is pushing the judicial overhaul) may be deep insofar as it applies to themselves, but it is narrow in not applying it to other people next to whom they live.

The chestnuts also include the familiar image of Israel surrounded by hostile neighbors supposedly determined to destroy it. Ross and Makovsky write of how “Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas deny Israel’s right to exist, support terror against it—and would even if there was no occupation—and acquire and develop weapons to act on their aims.” Such an image ignores the entire question of capabilities, and how Israel’s building of what is now by far the most capable military in the region—even at the conventional level, let alone beyond that level—makes its existence assured even in the face of any foe that might prefer that it not exist. The image also ignores the intentions of foes, such as Hamas, which, notwithstanding its extreme rhetoric, long ago made clear that it would accept a hudna, or long-term truce, as part of an arrangement of living peacefully beside a continuing Israel.

The Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory has been a big part of Israel’s conflicts with its regional foes. It obviously is with a Palestinian group such as Hamas, whose goal is to be the government for all Palestinians. It also is for Iran, which has long backed Palestinian resistance groups both because of sympathy for subjugated Palestinians and Tehran’s awareness of how much resonance the issue has elsewhere in the Arab world. And the occupation of Palestinian territory is the sole reason most Arab governments have still not begun full diplomatic relations with Israel.

To the extent that animosity toward Israel goes beyond issues related to the occupation and conflict with the Palestinians, Israel’s actions have had at least as much to do with that hostility as have the actions of the neighbors. Hezbollah, for example, was able to establish itself in the 1980s as a major political player by presenting itself as the champion of resistance to an Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the years-long occupation of a portion of that country. As for animosity between Israel and Iran, a cursory look at the rhetoric from each regime about the other shows hostility by Israel against Iran to be much more all-consuming than hostility in the other direction. It is not just rhetoric that displays this imbalance. Israeli sabotage and lethal terrorism in Iran are unmatched by anything Iran has done to Israel.

Even more to the point at hand, how exactly can the ritual invocation of Israel living in an unfriendly neighborhood constitute a rationale for clinging to the occupied Palestinian territory? It is not as if the occupation somehow bolsters Israeli security. To the contrary, it detracts from it. Besides being the main stimulants for regional resentment against Israel, the occupation and West Bank settlement project constitute a major burden on the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) that lessens its ability to respond to any foreign threats.

Ross and Makovsky strive to convey the impression that Palestinians have been primarily responsible for the absence of a resolution to their conflict with Israel. A careful review of the decades-long history of the conflict shows that impression to be false. And never do Ross and Makovsky acknowledge the biggest asymmetry of the conflict today, which is that Israel, not the Palestinians, is the side with the military power, with control of the land, and thus with the ability to change the status quo if it wanted to.

In a manipulation of cause and effect, Ross and Makovsky repeatedly explain away Israel’s actions that have prolonged or intensified the conflict as responses to Palestinian behavior, without ever mentioning how much of what one sees on the Palestinian side is a response to Israeli behavior. For example, in response to the observation by Barnett and his co-authors that Israel’s “withdrawal” from the Gaza Strip is somewhat of a misnomer in that Israel retains to this day a suffocating control of Gaza’s airspace, sea lanes, and borders, Ross and Makovsky note that nasty Hamas is in Gaza and has attacked Israel even after the Israeli “withdrawal.” Never do they consider how the Israeli-imposed plight of the Gaza Strip as an open-air prison has much to do with a group like Hamas gaining and maintaining as much popular support as it has.

Not surprisingly, Ross and Makovsky dislike the use by Barnett et al. of the A-word. Ross and Makovsky define apartheid, implicitly referring to the South African experience, as a legal edifice involving the oppression of a majority by a minority, and declare that this is not true of Israel. So are we supposed to be less appalled when one racial or ethnic group oppresses another group that happens to be numerically inferior? Even their minority/majority semantic stratagem—which, by the way, is hardly part of any consensus conception of apartheid—breaks down when applied to the West Bank, where Palestinian residents are a clear majority and where a legal edifice institutionalizes oppression based on ethnicity.

An even bigger motivation for these two denizens of the Washington policy world to take issue with the article by Barnett and company is that article’s policy recommendation to condition U.S. aid to Israel “on clear and specific measures to terminate Israel’s military rule over the Palestinians.” The Israeli occupation is contrary to U.S. interests on multiple grounds, including its contribution to persistent instability in the Middle East and the association of the United States with ethnically-based repression. The end to the military rule also would be necessary to realize any version of a two-state solution, which Ross and Makovsky claim to support.

With no direct answer to those facts, Ross and Makovsky try to argue that any loosening of the unconditional U.S. support to Israel would somehow embolden Israel’s regional foes. They ask how “the Iranians, Hezbollah, and Hamas would react to an American cut-off of military assistance to Israel” (in a formulation that implicitly assumes that Israel, given the chance to continue receiving voluminous U.S. aid if it ends the occupation, would refuse that option). Wouldn’t those foreign foes, they suggest, “perceive great opportunity in such a circumstance?”

Ross and Makovsky support this line of speculation by pointing to the schadenfreude-laden reactions to Israel’s current internal political turmoil by the likes of Ayatollah Khameini and Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. But that turmoil has nothing to do with the status of U.S. aid to Israel. It instead stems from the efforts of the far right in Israel to cement its power.

If U.S. aid to Israel were to be cut off, it is unlikely any of those foreign foes of Israel would change their calculations—Israel would still be by far the most powerful military power in the region. Given Israel’s wealth, it can afford to maintain that superiority by itself. The difference the U.S. aid makes is that American taxpayers rather than Israeli taxpayers pay for some of that military power.

If making U.S. aid conditional were, despite all the indications of Israeli obstinacy, to lead to an end to the occupation and a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, security challenges to Israel from regional foes would not become more likely and probably would become less so. The biggest regional grievance against Israel would be gone, the change would take the wind out of the sails of the Iranians and others who have used the issue to seek influence elsewhere in the region, and the IDF would no longer have the major distraction of administering the occupation.

Ross and Makovsky are right that Palestinian violence does not contribute to a solution to a conflict and has only exacerbated the problem at multiple points in the conflict’s history. But their repeated suggestion that if only Palestinians would act differently then something good “could” happen to them is of a piece with how the whole so-called peace process has understandably become, in Palestinian eyes, a never-ending charade about a promised land that is frequently pledged but never arrives.

The authors state that “a serious Palestinian move to reform the Palestinian Authority or a determined and more public and peaceful form of Palestinian protest against occupation could help stimulate the debate in Israel” about how best to resolve the conflict. But the Palestinian Authority was intended as a temporary transitional arrangement and passed its sell-by date a quarter-century ago. It has become little more than a security auxiliary to the IDF, as such has lost credibility among the Palestinian people, and it will hardly be a needle-mover whether reformed or unreformed.

As for a “more public and peaceful form of Palestinian protest,” consider one of the most time-honored forms of peaceful protest—the boycott—which in the Palestinian case has taken the form of the BDS (boycott, divestment, sanctions) movement. Far from stimulating a constructive debate, let alone any constructive Israeli policy changes, the Israeli response has been a no-holds-barred (and mostly successful) effort, extending into the United States and elsewhere abroad, to extinguish support for any boycott by asserting that the entire movement, not just some elements in it, is an illegitimate and antisemitic campaign to destroy Israel.

Ross and Makovsky also are right about the strength of nationalism among both Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs, and how a two-state arrangement would be the best way of accommodating the nationalist impulses of both. Or make that “would have been” the best way. There was an opportunity to do this, but the policies that have entrenched the one-state reality may mean that the two-state solution will have to enter the history books alongside the U.S. failure to join the League of Nations and other departures that would have been beneficial but never were taken.

Ross and Makovsky present themselves as being on the good side of advocacy in charting a course for Israel and take pains to distinguish themselves from Itamar Ben-Gvir, Bezalel Smotrich, and other extremists in the Israeli government. They say they support a two-state solution, but they in effect are advocating a continuation of the current one-state “solution” with unchanged Israeli subjugation of the Palestinians. Too much history has transpired to believe otherwise. It has not only been fifty-six years since the conquest of the West Bank, but also thirty years since the Oslo Accords, which created the supposedly transitional Palestinian Authority. There is no reason to think that the same tired talk of support for a two-state solution and intimations that nice things “could” happen if only the Palestinians would behave better will bring about—absent a fundamental change in U.S. policy toward Israel—any more results than they have in the last several decades. With the political trend in Israel having brought to power those who are more explicit than ever in rejecting any self-determination for Palestinians, there is strong reason to believe that the tired talk will bring about no positive results at all.

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

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The late February reception of the American Chamber of Commerce in Egypt was a swanky affair. Wine flowed in the majestic foyer of the new Grand Egyptian Museum, the buffet brimmed with sushi, and a harpist played soothing music. Despite the festive environs, however, the Egyptian businessmen I met were despondent. These commanders of industry were in a dour mood because the Egyptian economy was in freefall.

Today’s precipitous decline was set in motion nearly a decade ago, when Cairo embarked on an unsustainable spending spree, borrowing money for profligate outlays on weapons, megaprojects, and infrastructure. Making matters worse, during this period the military’s role in the economy dramatically expanded, choking off the private sector and disincentivizing foreign direct investment. The downward trajectory of the most populous Arab country should concern Washington greatly.

The quagmire is deep. Since President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi was elected in 2014, the state’s external debt has more than tripled to nearly $160 billion. This year, 45 percent of Egypt’s budget will be devoted to servicing the national debt. Meanwhile, inflation hovers around 30 percent, and food prices have increased over the past year by more than 60 percent.

To be sure, the deterioration is not all Sisi’s fault. Covid-19 and the war in Ukraine further stressed Egypt’s economy, curtailing tourism—12 percent of GDP—and driving up commodity prices, especially wheat. Last year, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates delivered $22 billion in investments and Central Bank deposits to cover recurrent state deficits and stabilize the financial situation in Cairo. As with previous Gulf bailouts, however, the support failed to stem the crisis.

Facing an inflection point, in December, Sisi signed Egypt up for yet another International Monetary Fund (IMF) program. The conditional arrangement promised to deliver $3 billion in cash and the prospect of an additional $14 billion in regional and international investment and financing. In return, Egypt committed to floating the currency and curtailing the military’s role in the economy. The Egyptian pound was floated and has devalued by 50 percent to date. But Sisi has yet to follow through on his pledge to reduce the military’s reported control over an estimated 30-40 percent of the economy.

Inflow of capital from the Gulf is predicated on military divestment from the economy. To this end, in February, the government published a list of some thirty-two military-owned companies to be sold off. Initial optimistic appraisals of this initiative quickly faded, however, when it emerged that only minority shares in these enterprises were on offer. While some assets on the block may be appealing, Gulf investors are unlikely to enthusiastically invest in non-controlling interests in opaquely operated—and perhaps overvalued—state-owned enterprises.

Like oil-rich Gulf States, the IMF is also skeptical about Sisi’s commitment to actually sideline the military from the Egyptian economy. The first review in the four-year program was slated for March 15, but the IMF has delayed the evaluation—and the disbursal of loan tranches—until Cairo makes progress on privatization.

Sisi’s reticence to undertake this reform is understandable. He’s a former flag officer, and his regime relies heavily on the continued support of the military. But Sisi has few options. This past January, Saudi Arabia—Cairo’s financier of last resort—made it clear the days of unconditional grants and enormous string-free deposits in the Egyptian Central Bank were over. Henceforth, Gulf capital will flow to Egypt only if there is a return on investment.

Egypt already owes $23 billion to the IMF, and it remains unclear whether the state will eventually meet its onerous obligation to the fund. There is little indication in any event that Cairo is changing its approach to spending. To wit, in February Egypt issued $1.5 billion in so-called “sukuk” financial instruments, bonds paying 11% interest. The sukuk are intended to enable the state to repay its Eurobonds debt, whose interest rate was only 5.57%. So even as Egypt is borrowing from the IMF, it is accruing more debt, borrowing more money at even higher interest rates to repay outstanding liabilities.

Meanwhile, average Egyptians are struggling. Amidst skyrocketing inflation, the nearly one-third of the population living below the poverty line—making less than $3.80 per day—is having a harder time making ends meet. The middle class has also been hit hard. Since Sisi took power, the Egyptian pound has lost nearly 80 percent of its value—50 percent alone over the past year—effectively wiping out life savings. Food staples like bread, rice, and meat are all more expensive, and strains on foreign currency reserves have resulted in spikes in cost and limited availability of some medications. Meanwhile, Egypt’s wealthiest, anecdotally at least, are increasingly moving into gated communities and compounds on the outskirts of Cairo.

Ultimately, Sisi may relent, embrace IMF reforms, and stanch Egypt’s downward trajectory. Absent a significant course correction, however, it’s difficult to imagine the situation changing for the better. Should the crisis persist, the bitter experience of the 2011 Revolution would seem to mitigate against wide-scale protest. Still, things could get worse. Egypt could see episodic spontaneous protests, increased crime, more capital flight, and heightened repression. Like Tunisia and Lebanon, Egyptians may try to migrate, either legally or illegally, via boat to Europe.

The Biden administration seems to recognize that Egypt has a problem, albeit not a particularly urgent one. At a joint press conference this past January, Secretary of State Antony Blinken described Egypt’s economic difficulties as a “challenge,” in contrast to his Egyptian counterpart, who characterized the situation as a “crisis.” Meanwhile, Washington is attributing the financial crunch to a “perfect storm” of Covid-19 and the war in Ukraine—as exogenous rather than endogenous factors such as Egypt’s ill-advised economic policies. More than a month after the IMF postponed its program review, Washington has yet to publicly comment on Egypt’s reticence to meet its IMF obligations.

With a population nearing 110 million, Egypt has been described as “too big to fail.” Hesitant to move the military out of the economy and without its traditional Gulf financial safety net, however, a further deterioration is possible. While Washington may not yet be seized with concern about developments in Egypt, it appears that Egyptians increasingly are. Notwithstanding the regime’s notorious intolerance for dissent, during a recent visit to Cairo, a number of Egyptians I met expressed a surprising nostalgia for the good old days of former President Hosni Mubarak.

David Schenker is a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and a former assistant secretary of state for Near East affairs during the Trump administration.

Image: 360b / Shutterstock.com

The recent negative trajectory in U.S.-China relations underscores a profoundly important question: is peaceful coexistence between the two countries still possible and achievable? Or are the United States and China destined for a hostile adversarial relationship? What purpose or objective might still be served by reviving substantive diplomacy between Beijing and Washington?

Recurring claims that a new “cold war” is emerging obviously evoke the U.S.-Soviet precedent. And although there are many differences between that historical example and the current U.S.-China relationship, there nonetheless are lessons to be learned from making the comparison. Several such lessons can be derived from scholar Frank Costigliola’s new biography of George F. Kennan, the intellectual author of the U.S. policy of containment of the Soviet Union. One of the key themes of the book—Kennan: A Life Between Worlds—is Kennan’s failure over the latter half of his life to convince his policymaking successors in Washington that containment was not intended as a military strategy, and was instead meant as a prerequisite for negotiating the terms of peaceful coexistence between the United States and the Soviet Union.

According to Costigliola, Kennan sought from almost the beginning of the Cold War to end it by “pursuing serious diplomacy” aimed at reaching “an honorable settlement that would reduce tension” between Moscow and Washington and thus preempt a costly militarized struggle. Kennan’s central proposal was military disengagement from Europe by both the United States and the Soviet Union, which in his view would have defused or obviated the most dangerous aspects of the inevitable U.S.-Soviet rivalry. Kennan was focused on what he saw as the limits of U.S. power, and the consequent need to pursue some kind of accommodation with the Soviets so that the United States could devote sufficient attention and resources to addressing America’s domestic challenges. In short, Kennan advocated a combination of “patience, sacrifice, and restraint.”

But as Costigliola shows, this approach was largely dismissed by U.S. leaders for the duration of the Cold War in favor of a militarized version of containment that sought a “rollback” of Soviet power and influence. In Kennan’s view, Washington essentially adopted the unrealistic goal of achieving Moscow’s “unconditional surrender.” But even many of Kennan’s admirers dismissed his approach as unrealistic. Most supported the consensus view that a more hard-edged containment strategy brought overall stability to U.S.-Soviet relations without requiring substantial U.S. compromises with Moscow.

All of this resonates in U.S.-China relations today. Washington is embracing an almost exclusively competitive approach to Beijing that has many of the earmarks of the militarized, zero-sum containment strategy it pursued against the Soviet Union. The goal similarly appears to be China’s unconditional surrender. Many strategists and analysts have instead advocated military restraint and serious diplomacy with China, and emphasized the increasingly apparent limits on U.S. power and leverage. Some have specifically advocated negotiations with Beijing aimed at reducing military tensions in East Asia, analogous to Kennan’s proposals for U.S.-Soviet talks on military posture in Europe. But as with Kennan, these ideas have been criticized as pollyannish or unworkable given China’s presumed untrustworthiness and aggressive intentions. The relative stability of a confrontational approach to China is deemed preferable to the risks of compromise or accommodation with Beijing, which would probably be futile if not counterproductive.

This also echoes broader observations by Kennan about the U.S. approach to the Soviet Union during the Cold War, especially its vilification of the adversary and its lack of strategic empathy. In the 1970s, Kennan discerned several assumptions that Washington was making about Moscow:

That the Soviet leadership [is] inspired by a desire, and intention, to achieve world domination…and views a military showdown with the United States as the inevitable outcome of the ideological and political conflict between the two powers…That for this reason, the Soviet armed forces serve…primarily aggressive rather than defensive purposes. Supplementing these views there seems to be an assumption…that the differences in aim and outlook between the Soviet Union and the United States are indeed of such a nature that no peaceful resolution of them is conceivable.

The same assumptions are now becoming prevalent in Washington with regard to China. Kennan elaborated further that these assumptions fueled a U.S. mindset in which “the Soviet Union appeared in a far more menacing posture” than it had previously. Among the characteristics of this mindset were:

…the sweeping militarization of the American view of East-West relations; the assumption of deadly and irreconcilable conflict; the acceptance of the likelihood, if not the inevitability of a Soviet-American war; [and] the contemptuous neglect of the more favorable scenarios…All of these assumptions and scenarios are either quite incorrect or highly improbable; but they are now so deeply and widely implanted in the public mind that in all probability nothing I could say…could eradicate them…Meanwhile, we face the fact (and it is here that the greatest danger comes in) that distortions of this nature, like all false prophecies and all false images of conflict and enmity, tend to be self-fulfilling.

Again, this seems to accurately capture the emerging American mindset about China, and the inherent dangers of that mindset. In that regard, Kennan noted the particular risks of failing to recognize how the Soviets would perceive and interpret the U.S. attitude:

What impression must all this make upon the persons charged with the ultimate powers of decision in Moscow? Are we sure we know?…It seems to me more probable that…Soviet leaders will see sinister motives behind these various phenomena—that they will conclude, in particular, that we have come to see war as inevitable and have put out of our minds all possibilities for the peaceful accommodation of our differences. If they gain this impression, then they, too, will tend to push such possibilities out of theirs.

Reinforcing this absence of strategic empathy, Kennan observed separately that Washington often failed or refused to acknowledge the extent to which assertive Soviet behavior was a response to U.S. actions. He also noted occasions when Washington had little interest in negotiating with Moscow because “Russia was already identified as the epitome of evil; and it wouldn’t look good, from the domestic political standpoint, to be negotiating and compromising with evil.”

Nearly fifty years after Kennan characterized the U.S. approach to the Soviet Union this way, it clearly is reverberating in America’s emerging approach to China. The prevailing narrative in Washington is that we are facing a “deadly and irreconcilable conflict” and “the likelihood if not the inevitability” of a U.S.-China war because China seeks “to achieve world domination.” The U.S.-China contest is portrayed as a winner-take-all struggle between democracy and autocracy. Congressman Mike Gallagher, who chairs the new House Select Committee on China, told its first hearing in February that the United States and China are engaged in “an existential struggle over what life will look like in the twenty-first century.” Moreover, much of the resistance in Washington to diplomatic engagement with Beijing appears to be driven by the domestic political risks of appearing to be “negotiating and compromising with evil.” Accordingly, it would not be surprising if Chinese leaders were in the process of concluding that Americans “have put out of our minds all possibilities for the peaceful accommodation of our differences” and, as a result, were doing the same.

Beijing, of course, shares ample responsibility for this bilateral dynamic because of its own vilification of U.S. policy toward China, lack of strategic empathy with the American perspective, and periodic resistance to engagement with Washington. But what both sides need to recognize is the symmetry of their perspectives, and the mutual distrust and recrimination that are fueling it.

If Kennan failed in his efforts to get Washington and Moscow to overcome such an interactive dynamic and to reach a diplomatic modus vivendi that might have eased or ended the Cold War, the question today is whether the opportunity still exists for Washington and Beijing to negotiate a similar modus vivendi before the competitive aspect of their relationship leads inexorably to another cold war, or worse. Kennan correctly warned that mistaken attribution of motives and false assumptions of enmity can be self-fulfilling. U.S.-China relations now appear to be on that path. If there were missed opportunities to ease U.S.-Soviet relations during the Cold War, we may now be missing opportunities to put U.S.-China relations on a less hostile and more constructive path.

Proponents of negotiation with Beijing toward that end, however, face the same obstacles and counterarguments that Kennan did. “Engagement” with China is widely characterized as an approach that has already proven a failure—because its supposed purpose was to lead Beijing to adopt Western values and support Western interests. Chinese leaders, it is argued, have betrayed those American objectives, cannot be trusted to deal with Washington in good faith, and indeed are not genuinely interested in reciprocal engagement. As a result, a confrontational U.S. approach focused on “extreme competition” and what amounts to militarized containment is considered a safer bet than seeking any accommodation with Beijing, and as probably inescapable.

It may be true that mutually beneficial relations and peaceful coexistence with China are as much of a pipe dream today as Kennan’s vision of an “honorable settlement” with the Soviet Union was thought to be fifty years ago. Given the levels of bilateral distrust and the domestic politics on both sides, strategic empathy may no longer be achievable, or even politically possible, in Washington or Beijing. Leaders on both sides may not be prepared or willing to assume the risks of pursuing mutual accommodation, especially if they have already concluded that doing so would be futile.

But are they prepared to assume the risks of not doing so, or of refusing to do so? Both Washington and Beijing appear to calculate that they are approaching their competition from a position of strength, if not with the upper hand. Each side, however, almost certainly is both overestimating its own leverage and underestimating the leverage of the other side. Washington in particular is at risk of overlooking a key difference between China today and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. In the earlier episode, Washington could temporize and generally disregard Kennan’s proposals for US-Soviet military disengagement from Europe because the Soviet Union’s relative global power and influence—outside the nuclear realm—was so far behind that of the United States. There usually was no perceived imperative for the United States to consider mutual accommodation, beyond nuclear arms control.

China, however, is a genuine peer competitor of the United States, with global economic power and diplomatic influence that far exceed what the Soviet Union was ever able to exercise. Beijing and Washington are thus destined to have overlapping spheres of influence, and to possess the capability and leverage to resist each other’s will. Under these new historical circumstances, some version of mutual accommodation almost certainly is the only alternative to inevitable conflict. Both sides need to recognize this, and not dismiss the other side’s readiness to acknowledge it. For these reasons, Kennan’s idea of “serious diplomacy” in pursuit of peaceful coexistence merits even greater consideration and urgency now than it did fifty years ago.

Paul Heer is a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. He served as National Intelligence Officer for East Asia from 2007 to 2015. He is the author of Mr. X and the Pacific: George F. Kennan and American Policy in East Asia (Cornell University Press, 2018).

Image: Shutterstock.

Religion, and the interplay between religious and national identities, has played and continues to play a major role in shaping Central and Eastern Europe. The dominance of an atheistic political system and atheistic regimes for nearly half a century under communism was culturally alien to the region, and the role of faith has reasserted itself quite strongly since the implosion of the Soviet Union. In the past thirty years, we’ve seen a reversion to the historical norm that illustrates the staying power of deeply embedded cultural traits, including and especially religious identity. Its role in public life and national identity is felt more strongly in some countries than it is in others—it holds more influence in Poland, for example, than in the Czech Republic—but in most cases, religion plays a very significant role in each country’s sense of identity.

Western observers and policymakers would do well to pay attention to this reality. Given the central role played by faith communities in sustaining political and social cohesion, national identity, and strengthening the region in myriad ways, the United States now more than ever needs to embrace religious freedom in the region, as it needs to elsewhere.

The Centrality of Religion in Human Affairs

Many responsible for shaping foreign policy in Washington and Western Europe have a limited appreciation, at best, for the role of religion and religious freedom in the public lives of nations. As Thomas Farr has written, the U.S. State Department’s understanding of the Catholic Church and appreciation of its role in Cold War Poland was so poor that embassy officials were caught off guard by its contribution to the events that led to the end of the Cold War and that so heavily reshaped the region after the fall of the Soviet Union. They should not have been caught off guard—if nothing else, the sight of one million Poles in 1979 gathering for Mass under the then-new Polish pope, John Paul II, and chanting, in the face of their atheist oppressors, “We want God!” should have been an indication that the Roman Catholic faith remained a powerful influence in the everyday lives of Poles and in their sense of themselves as a people.

The role of religion in sustaining cultural and national identities has historically been, and continues to be, central to the human experience. Human beings have a natural desire to create communities of meaning with those with whom they share the deepest of bonds, values, and aims. Values and aims rooted in the transcendent—that is to say, religiously based values and aims—are the deepest foundations for a sense of common identity and a shared sense of meaning. In recent years that has been difficult to grasp for many political leaders in the West, which tend to be shaped by an aggressive form of secularism that looks askance at religious devotion, despite the fact that thriving faith communities, and in particular polities characterized by strong religious freedom protections, are consistently repositories of respect for other fundamental human freedoms.

While religion can be used to support authoritarian regimes, as we see today in Russia and elsewhere around the world, religious freedom undermines authoritarian forms of government and supports a panoply of other democratic freedoms. Religious freedom, partially because it causes us to realize that our ultimate loyalties lie not with a nation or state but to a higher reality, serves to undergird other democratic freedoms. As the late sociologist Peter Berger has observed, “Religion most emphatically proposes that there are limits to the legitimate power of the state.” Religious freedom and strong faith communities are critical to any political project based on limited government and strong civil societies and citizenship rights protections. Conversely, both because religious freedom implies distinct limits on the authority of the state, and because it is a foundational freedom that allows for the existence/emergence of other freedoms, authoritarian states seek to restrict it.

Religion in Central and Eastern Europe

The conflict in Ukraine, particularly since early 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea and became militarily active in eastern Ukraine, highlights not only this trend, but also the importance of religion in this context, shaping the perceptions and loyalties of actors on both sides. While Vladimir Putin’s “Russian world” ideology may be a propaganda tool on the part of the Kremlin to justify Russian attempts to dominate its neighbors, most Russians nevertheless agree that being “Russian” is very closely intertwined with being “Russian Orthodox.” This is despite the fact that most Russians do not regularly attend service or otherwise follow behavior that would be recognized as observant. Likewise, many Russians agree that a Russian cultural sphere based upon a common Orthodox faith gives Russia a “natural” place as the culturally and geopolitically dominant actor in its neighborhood.

Moving west, religion is perceived throughout the Central and Eastern Europe region as being an important element of national belonging whether citizens are religiously observant or not. This is the case despite the fact that levels of religious observance in the region tend to be lower than those of the United States or Latin America. Pew studies have shown that the resurgence of citizens who say religion is important to them has been much larger in Orthodox countries such as Russia and Ukraine than it has been in Roman Catholic countries such as Hungary and Poland. This likely says less about the true vitality of faith in places such as Hungary and Poland than it does about the stubbornness with which faith continued to be an important part of people’s lives in those countries even during the communist era as well as in shaping their sense of national identity, despite the overlay of the culturally alien ideology of Soviet communism.

With regards to Poland, Joseph Stalin famously called Poles “radishes”—red on the outside and white on the inside, showing that he was convinced that true belief in Marxism had not really penetrated the Polish national consciousness or psyche. This may be due to the centrality of Catholicism in shaping that national consciousness, as well as to the legacy of religious freedom that for centuries caused Poland to be characterized by flourishing faith communities in general, which in reality also shaped in very positive ways Poland’s sense of self.

The Case for Supporting Religious Freedom

The essentiality of religion to not just human affairs, but also liberal democracy, is why the United States must support religious freedom globally. Fostering such around the world helps to ensure the protection of other fundamental human rights that together, studies show, tend to result in greater political stability, greater economic vitality, greater levels of social trust and cohesion, and less aggressive international behavior. The level of religious liberty protections around the world is thus closely tied to not just democratic freedoms as a whole, but also to the stability of the international system.

The importance of Europe as well as of the larger Eurasian landmass to American strategic interests dictate that Washington make religious liberty in both Europe and in Eurasia as a whole a key policy aim. We need to pay particular attention to this issue in Eurasia at this particular point in history, in which Russia and China are attempting to strengthen their influence in Eurasia at American expense. Both take seriously the early twentieth-century British geopolitical theorist Halford Macker, who argued that any power or alliance of powers who controlled the Eurasian Heartland had the potential for world domination. That is precisely what Russia and China and their allies are attempting. In the early twenty-first century, Eurasia is undergoing a historical reintegration—economically, politically, and strategically—at a time when both relative American power and American determination to lead is an open question. This dynamic accentuates the importance of allies, such as those in Central and Eastern Europe, whose strong traditions of faith and commitment to religious freedom make them vital partners at a time when America needs all the partners it can get.

Uncomfortable as it may be for those in Washington to recognize, the American-led international order is quickly becoming a thing of the past, and the future is looking increasingly murky and dark. One of the most important ways in which to pursue American interests in this period is to strengthen those alliances that are characterized by important shared values, such as those that we share culturally and politically with most of Central and Eastern Europe. To see Eurasia come under the total sway of an alliance of authoritarian, anti-American, and anti-democratic powers would see the diminution of human rights and a general darkening of the whole global system.

It is vital, therefore, that the United States reinforce its relationship with Europe and challenge the growth of authoritarian powers that hate religious freedom. Recognition of the value of thriving faith communities to the vitality of our Central and Eastern European allies will have to be a key part of American strategy if we are to set things aright and see the renewal of a global order in which the historical American values which once animated our international behavior do so once again.

Dr. Paul Coyer is a Senior Fellow at the Common Sense Society.

Image: Shutterstock.

What happens when the U.S. military needs emergency access to satellites? With China and Russia having developed anti-satellite weapons and other nations placing their own equipment into space, being able to replace or add to U.S. capabilities in space quickly is critical to national security. That requires us to keep a number of satellites in reserve and possess the capabilities to get them into orbit. The Space Force’s ability to reassert U.S. satellite capacities in a pinch could mean the difference between intercepting threats to the homeland and not even knowing they’re on the horizon.

Other branches of the military have already shown how reserve fleets can save lives. Two programs, the Civil Reserve Air Fleet and the National Defense Reserve Fleet, provide the Air Force and the Navy the ability to use civilian aircraft and boats for military purposes in a time of extreme need. That is how we could fly civilians out of Kabul, Afghanistan, using planes from a reserve fleet so the military could secure airports and evacuate its own personnel. 

The U.S. Space Force has been putting together its own reserve fleet of commercial satellites for use when the Department of Defense’s satellite capabilities fall short in a time of crisis. Ensuring that data collected from satellites continues to flow uninterrupted to the U.S. military is essential. Dubbed the Commercial Augmentation Space Reserve, it is still in its early stages of development and only focused on keeping satellites in orbit—not keeping them on the ground. We need reserves on the ground in case a satellite is disabled or damaged while in orbit. The U.S. Space Development Agency has purchased and intends to launch hundreds of low-cost, low-orbiting satellites in the future. This ensures that should adversaries want to disrupt U.S. space capabilities, they will need to destroy hundreds of small satellites instead of disabling just one. The Space Force’s ability to seamlessly shift its stream of satellite-provided information will make certain that the U.S. military has the most up-to-date information available to inform their decisionmaking. 

Unlike boats and airplanes, satellites must usually be launched from fixed positions on Earth that are easily identifiable to adversaries. That makes quick replacement of satellites in orbit risky, as sites like Cape Canaveral, Vandenberg Space Force Base, and the Kennedy Space Center are all well-known sites that could have their payloads of satellites intercepted in a conflict. That is why the United States must have the capability to launch a satellite back into orbit from anywhere. The Air Force Research Lab is currently testing the RS1 and GS0 systems that would provide small teams of personnel the ability to launch payloads into space from a small concrete pad in under twenty-four hours. Currently, these systems are being evaluated on the amount of time it takes to train operators and ensure system sustainability but could provide military personnel with space-launch capabilities in the coming decades. 

Equipping personnel on the ground with rapid-response space launch capacities would add even more depth to reserve space systems in the CASR. These “operationally responsive space” capabilities would allow satellites and other equipment weighing less than 1,200 kilograms into orbit to either augment or replace defunct or disabled satellites with a minimal amount of large infrastructure on the ground needed to facilitate a launch. Launching objects from existing aircraft into low-Earth orbit is also within the realm of possibility: the U.S. Space Force’s TacRL-2 mission successfully placed an object in low-Earth orbit from a launch aboard an L-1011 aircraft traveling above the Pacific Ocean. As of last year, the Space Force gave three weeks’ notice to prepare for a launch, but with innovations like the RS1 and GS0 systems, the Space Force could shrink its launch time even further to just twenty-four hours. Being able to replace important capabilities in space from anywhere on the ground within a day would be a boon for overall deterrence and would add a massive amount of depth to U.S. space capabilities. The U.S. military should be prioritizing this technology to back up its satellite fleet.   

This rapid-launch technology is still nascent, and the United States needs to invest in developing it faster. A more recent test of an RS1 rocket on Alaska’s Kodiak Island failed due to engine malfunctions but was able to be on the launchpad ready at short notice. One solution could be leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) to conduct pre- and post-launch checkups of their systems could cut safety and inspection times down dramatically. Researchers at Japan’s Institute of Space and Astronautical Science were in the process of developing an AI for rockets that can perform safety checks, but tests remain ongoing.

Whether these solutions solve the problem or not, the ability for the United States to respond quickly to changes in space will be critical in future conflicts.

Roy Mathews is an Innovation Fellow at Young Voices. He is a graduate of Bates College and a former Fulbright Fellow. His work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, National Review, and Boston Herald.

Image: Shutterstock.

Political backing for Lebanon’s central bank governor, Riad Salameh, appears to have started to wane, according to a report by Reuters citing political sources speaking on the condition of anonymity. Salameh himself has announced in an interview with Asharq News in February, and repeatedly afterwards, that he will not be seeking a new term in office once it expires in next month. However, there are unconfirmed reports that Salameh has already submitted his resignation in March to caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati. This reportedly is pending approval of the government, which is said to be a complex process due to the need to maintain a sectarian balance of power.

Meanwhile, investigations into Salameh’s alleged financial crimes in Lebanon and Europe are apparently gathering pace. Salameh is facing numerous accusations of alleged crimes, including embezzlement of public funds, corruption, illicit enrichment, and money laundering. European investigators returned to Lebanon in late April to continue questioning witnesses and individuals charged in Lebanon in connection with these allegations.

These developments are occurring against the backdrop of political paralysis, as the stalemate in electing a president for Lebanon persists. Yet at the same time, there is an urgent need to restore confidence in Lebanon’s financial and banking institutions as the country faces an unprecedented economic and financial catastrophe. The crisis—which combines a dire set of economic and financial factors, including hard foreign debt default, triple-digit inflation, severe currency devaluations, insolvent banks, an alarming GDP contraction, and an increasing shortage of basic goods—has been described by the World Bank as one of the worst in modern history. At this critical juncture, the selection of a central bank governor is almost as important as electing a president.

The Origins of Lebanon’s Economic Crisis

The causes of Lebanon’s financial collapse are rooted in the chronic mismanagement of public finances, leading to massive debt accrued by successive governments since the end of the Lebanese civil war in 1990. Critics point to Salameh, who pursued an aggressive monetary policy of lending to the Lebanese state since his appointment as governor of the central bank in 1993—had he not done so, previous Lebanese governments would not have been able to fund their spending and accrue such an enormous sovereign debt.

Salameh established and maintained a stable exchange rate climate in Lebanon, which was favorable for foreign direct investment, driven initially by Lebanon’s post-war reconstruction agenda then promoted by the late Lebanese prime minister and ultra-wealthy entrepreneur, Rafik Hariri. Salameh tied the Lebanese pound to the U.S. dollar, effectively dollarizing the currency and successfully pegged it at a fixed rate of 1,507 pounds per dollar since 1997.

This currency peg brought monetary and economic stability to Lebanon until a few years before the crisis. However, most economists agree that it depended on a crucial economic fundamental: steady foreign currency/dollar inflows to Lebanon, which would constantly boost the central bank’s foreign currency reserves. This was necessary to support the country’s exchange rate, keep the Lebanese pound stable against the U.S. dollar, meet debt obligations, and attract international investors. Fortunately, Lebanon's large diaspora, especially wealthy Lebanese, provided the dominant source of foreign currency through remittances. Other sources included tourism spending, foreign aid, and transactions with Gulf Arab states that bolstered central bank reserves.

In 2019, mass protests erupted as the country’s fiscal crisis deepened and Lebanese banks faced a significant share of deposit withdrawals, leading to a crash in confidence in the banking sector. In response, banks imposed capital restrictions, drastically limiting withdrawals of hard currency. The entire fixed exchange rate system collapsed. Remittances from the Lebanese diaspora—which had been declining significantly prior to the protests, particularly since 2014 when Lebanese in Gulf states reduced money transfers due to rapidly declining oil prices, job, and wage cuts, and more severely from 2016 onward—kept plummeting. There were also geopolitical causes for the acceleration of the financial crisis in Lebanon, such as the civil war that erupted in Syria in 2011, which affected foreign investment confidence in neighboring Lebanon, and Saudi Arabia withdrawing economic support for Lebanon in response to Iranian-backed Hezbollah’s growing influence in the country.

“Financial Engineering”

However, many argue that another fundamental feature that precipitated the crisis and defined Salameh’s bold and widely criticized monetary policy was the so-called “financial engineering” that took place. This scheme involved the complicit circulation of U.S. dollars between the state, the central bank, and Lebanese banks using high-interest rates, income, and profits as economic incentives. This, in reality, was part of a larger effort to continue funding successive governments’ controversial public spending. The entire endeavor worked for so long because it was structurally compatible with the policy of the currency peg, as it concurrently required constant flows of foreign currency/dollars to Lebanon, mainly deposits at Lebanese banks (which, as previously mentioned, largely originated from diaspora remittances).

In simple terms, banks received foreign currency deposits primarily from the Lebanese diaspora’s remittances and tourism, which they placed at the central bank in the form of certificates of deposits to earn generous interest income supported by a favorable (though substantially overvalued) fixed exchange rate of 1,507 pounds to the dollar. In turn, the central bank used the deposits to support government spending, pay for imports, and pay back the interest on accrued public debt but also on foreign currency deposits to the banks. Earning handsome interest income was a great incentive for both customers placing their savings at Lebanese banks and for banks themselves by lending to the state through primarily the central bank or directly. There are numerous important and complex financial details omitted here, but much of the interlinkage can be explained in this simple way.

Most observers agree that the political and economic elite, who managed and controlled the state’s resources, the central bank helmed by Salameh (or, allegedly, Salameh and other associates who are also the subject of investigations into embezzlement and illicit enrichment), and particularly the Lebanese banks )which hold more than 50 percent of Lebanon’s public debt) were the main beneficiaries of this financial engineering scheme. However, as a consequence, the scheme further enriched and inflated the assets of an already oversized and dominant banking sector in Lebanon on the back of the accrued state’s sovereign debt. By consistently pursuing and promoting this financial scheme, Salameh arguably prioritized safeguarding the attractiveness of local banks at the expense of the domestic economy and GDP growth.

It’s also worth noting that, while Lebanese bank customers and retail investors took some advantage of the interest income stemming from their deposits, Salameh’s financial engineering schemes mostly benefited the banks shareholders and wealthy depositors. Moreover, a research paper commissioned in 2016 by the Economic Research Forum on bank ownership mapping in Lebanon additionally highlights an underlying vicious cycle: close to 43 percent of Lebanon’s commercial banking sector assets are associated with the country’s political elites. As an unconventional Lebanese banker puts it, Lebanon’s financial assets have been controlled far beyond what is characterized as the political elites but by a Lebanese deep state.

As remittances plummeted, and foreign currency reserves fell to a strained level in 2016, Salameh reportedly doubled down on the central bank’s financial engineering operations to keep the dollars flowing in. He did this by exponentially raising the income that can be earned from interest on dollar deposits by commercial banks, far above market interest rates. At the same time, he increased Eurobond borrowings but most drastically pursued more aggressive lending to the state through regularly buying government bonds.

Salameh’s financial engineering, which the International Monetary Fund (IMF) politely described as “unconventional”  at the time, has more appropriately been likened to a ponzi scheme by the World Bank in a report published in 2022. The report noted that fiscal policy practices were consistently mismanaged by the government and central bank to serve an entrenched political and economic elite at the expense of the citizenry, including incurring massive public debt to maintain confidence in the financial system, an overvalued currency to sustain deposit inflows, macro-financial imbalances “binding” fiscal, monetary, and financial balance sheets, and the ruling elite’s exploitation of state resources for private gains.

Despite being blamed by some for Lebanon’s current distress, Salameh has insisted that the Lebanese financial crisis is not a consequence of monetary policy but of political impasse. He has complained of a political campaign seeking to undermine his record, mainly waged by the camp of former Lebanese president Michel Aoun and his son-in-law, the controversial politician Gibran Bassil. Salameh has attributed the crisis to a series of factors and contingencies, including the 2019 protests leading to the temporary closure of banks, the 2020 government default on paying its dues on Eurobonds, the coronavirus pandemic, the infamous Beirut port explosion, and the ongoing political crisis over the presidency. He has also claimed that it was the government that compelled the central bank to finance its public expenditures through laws.

Many have wondered how Salameh could still be running the central bank and not be held accountable in view of the mounting investigations into his alleged financial crimes. To answer this, many analysts and commentators point to Salameh’s support from top politicians and the country’s economic elite, and further ascribe the matter to the country’s sectarian patronage and clientelist system. Yet at the same time, this ignores the country’s broader economic and financial context. The uncomfortably truth is that while Salameh contrastively dollarized the Lebanese currency in his three-decade tenure as the governor of the central bank, he ultimately did little to break with the country’s history of an uncontested and minimally regulated laissez-faire banking system in Lebanon.

Will the IMF Rescue Lebanon?

At this moment, the path out of the financial crisis itself depends in great part on the implementation of an IMF economic reform program, following a preliminary agreement reached between the IMF and the Lebanese government in April 2022. As part of the agreement, on the condition that reform measures are fulfilled, the IMF will provide a $3 billion bailout to Lebanon aimed at restoring the country’s economic and financial sustainability. The IMF reform plan primarily requires the implementation of several painstaking reforms, including the restructuring of the country's commercial banks, the abolishing of central bank financing, a capital controls law, amending the banking secrecy law to conform with international standards of fighting financial crimes, and the unification of the multiple exchange rates for the Lebanese pound, which resulted from the collapse of the stable exchange rate following the crisis. However, according to an IMF statement following a team’s mission to Lebanon in March, limited progress has been made in fulfilling comprehensive economic reforms. The statement noted the lack of action by Lebanese authorities to enact key changes, as well as the persistence of a set of financial practices harmful to the Lebanese economy.

Above all, the IMF’s proposal calls for financial sector losses to be distributed between the government, the banks, and large depositors in a manner that protects small depositors while keeping recourse to state assets to a minimum. Not surprisingly, this proposal has been largely opposed by Lebanese banks, contributing to stalling reforms.

For now, it seems, Lebanon continues to be stuck and must wait for deliverance, both political and economic/financial. Salameh’s fate may end up being a bellwether for the country’s situation: will be held for account for his numerous alleged crimes, signaling that change is at hand, or will he somehow manage to get away with all that he has done?

Rany Ballout is a New York-based political risk and due diligence analyst with extensive experience in the Middle East. He holds a master’s degree in International Studies from the University of Montreal in Canada and a bachelor’s degree in Linguistics from Uppsala University in Sweden.

Afghanistan’s key economic sectors have long been bedeviled by the lack of security, widespread corruption, and weak law enforcement. Following the takeover of the Taliban in August 2021, national funds were frozen, sanctions were imposed, and development aid was halted by the international community. Nonetheless, the Taliban have found ways to sustain the country’s fragile economy, thanks to Afghanistan’s ample mineral resource deposits.

Estimated to be worth about a trillion dollars, the Taliban have already started converting these assets into hard revenue. Coal, for example, is already being extracted and exported—the earnings from such help sustain the new regime, particularly in light of the economic shortfall left by the country’s abrupt political crisis. To ensure a swift cash flow, in the second quarter of 2022, the Taliban’s finance ministry raised export duties on coal from 20 percent to 30 percent, coupled with the rise in coal rates from $90 to $200 per ton. By mid-2022, approximately $40 million was collected in customs duties on coal from the exports to neighboring Pakistan.

In an exclusive interview on a state-owned TV in 2022, Shahabuddin Dilawar, the acting minister of mines and petroleum, explained that Afghanistan has millions of tons of coal reserves in different provinces and that around 130–144 million Afs are generated every week as domestic revenue. For the cash-strapped Taliban, coal mining thus presents an essential economic lifeline. However, given the chronic dearth of capital and labor in other sectors of the Afghan economy—such as manufacturing, education, agriculture, and the public sectors—over-reliance on natural resources, particularly coal mining, could lead Afghanistan to suffer from the infamous Dutch Disease.

Afghanistan’s Economic Disparity

The Taliban’s newfound dependence on mining revenue bodes ill for Afghanistan, which is already suffering from a high unemployment rate—in the first weeks of the Taliban’s takeover alone, a total of more than 500,000 people lost their jobs.

Because of the country’s poor economic situation, workers are seeking jobs in cash-rich industries like coal mining. However, this has led to a severe understaffing problem in other essential sectors, such as agriculture and social services. Additionally, as the mining industry consumes a significant portion of capital, there may also be a lack of capital in these other sectors, leading to an overall imbalance in the economy.

Further complicating the situation is the ugly reality that only those with political clout can find work. This is because workers are frequently designated based on individual preferences, connections, and ideological compatibility with the Taliban. As a result, further national poverty and inequality seem likely, which could lead to an increase in child labor, as even the low wages earned by children working in fields like mining are deemed necessary by starving households.

None of this has dissuaded either domestic or international investors, however. Many parties are keen to invest in the country’s mining industry. For instance, Chinese and Iranian companies have shown interest, and may soon make huge investments in Afghan coal mining.

Kabul is thus left in an ugly situation: the Afghan economy is imbalanced in favor of mining, while other sectors go understaffed and underfunded. Yet reform is hard to achieve, due to the country’s delicate and volatile politics.

Fighting over the Mines and Power

Because of its sheer importance, the Taliban’s leaders have exerted monopolistic control over the mining sector. As reports note, the Afghan mining industry is now beholden to a few top Taliban leaders, and relying solely on income from mining likely exacerbates political fractures among these leaders. The resulting covert power struggles have unfortunately led to mismanagement and exploitation. In early 2023, for example, the Taliban’s Ministry of Public Works announced that it plans to offer coal mining extraction contracts to local (road) construction companies in exchange for the restoration of the Kabul-Kandahar highway.

Given that Afghanistan is already susceptible to economic and political threats—whether it be from disaffected local forces, the Islamic State of Khorasan Province, and/or the National Resistance Force—any disagreements over the equal distribution of coal mines and their revenues could not only lead to Dutch Disease but also to further instability.

Nonetheless, in the current context of Afghanistan’s volatile political and economic landscapes, the newfound reliance on natural resources is necessary for the country’s short-term economic survival, as was the case in some other countries such as Indonesia and Nigeria. In the long run, however, the Taliban regime needs to advance new policies, such as promoting economic diversification and the inclusion of Afghan private enterprises. This could make the use of natural resources more efficient by ensuring proper capital allocation and job creation in different sectors. In this way, the Taliban can avert a number of local threats and even pacify some anti-Taliban factions for national security.

Given that the country’s coal mines are among the Taliban’s few major sources of domestic revenue, these require tactical and careful management. Otherwise, the implications could be devastating. Conflicts over coal mines, for example, have already been reported between the Taliban and locals in Sar-e-Pol province. Such disputes over the control of the mines will further encourage locals to engage in the illicit trade of natural resources—a major problem for the Taliban given their dependence on the mines and coal.

The Need for Change

Given current circumstances, the Taliban sees the use of natural resources as a boost for their economy and survival. However, if they only invest in natural resources without creating other kinds of jobs, they risk instability and causing Dutch Disease, which could have disastrous consequences for their regime. To avoid this, they should inclusively encourage domestic startups to participate in the mining industry to create jobs. Rather than relying solely on exporting coal, the Taliban could use it as a raw material for other industries within Afghanistan, such as iron manufacturing, and/or use the surplus earnings from coal exports for capital allocation in other sectors. Another option would be to exchange coal exports for things that Afghanistan needs, such as agricultural equipment and technological services.

One thing is for sure, however: if the Taliban does not change its approach, the long-term consequences will be a natural resource curse, increased unemployment, and internal political turmoil.

Hamayun Khan is an independent researcher pursuing an MSc in International Business at George Washington University. He holds an MBA in Finance from IKG Punjab Technical University, India. Hamayun has published articles on Afghanistan with several think tanks, and news outlets including The Diplomat, Migration Policy Institute, Eurasia Review, South Asia Monitor, and South Asia Journal.

Nasrat Sayed is a researcher and commentator on Afghanistan. He has published articles on Afghanistan for several think tanks and news outlets, including the Migration Policy Institute, The Diplomat, International Growth Center, The Interpreter, South Asia Monitor, and TOLOnews.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors.

Image: Shutterstock.

As we’ve learned from recent leaks of top secret documents on Discord, the United States is engaged in a direct conflict with Russia. It’s neither akin to covert Russian intervention in Vietnam, nor even the major U.S. role in the Soviet-Afghan War. We already knew American dollars were buying American weapons to kill Russian troops, aided by American intelligence and targeting.

What it now appears—assuming the leaks are genuine—is that American boots are on the ground, too. The media has misrepresented the state of the conflict, covering it as a traditional proxy war, but the reality is patently unsustainable.

For most Americans, foreign policy is not a top priority, especially when almost every aspect of American life has gotten harder in the past few years. Inflation is still issue number one, and its issue number two as well. But something unsettling has occurred amidst that inattention and the free hand we’ve given to Washington’s foreign policy establishment: Europe now faces its first massive land war in seventy years, and our leaders seem content to let it drag on indefinitely, underestimating the risk that a prolonged and direct conflict with a major world power could metastasize into a global catastrophe.

When I ran for Congress last year, I heard very directly from the citizenry of western Pennsylvania a deep concern that we had slipped back into a different era, one in which cataclysmic outcomes were again possible. Voters understood that without America coming to Ukraine’s aid, Russian president Vladimir Putin would conclude that he can take what he wants. But concerns about support for Ukraine were just as nuanced: are we acting in America’s interest, or expending our energy on a conflict that is not our fight? Especially given the crises we face here at home—the economy, the border, and many more. Whose sovereignty matters most?

There remains a gap, dangerous and growing, between the commitments American elites have made and what the average American will support. That gap is our largest strategic weakness, one unaddressed by virtually everyone in the political sphere. With no prospects for a clear victory by either side in Ukraine, and these new revelations that show how our foreign policy is prolonging this attritional war, America must turn its efforts to peacemaking.

We can start by speaking plainly: our own intel suggests that Ukraine’s spring offensive is unlikely to change the tide. The diplomat ideologues and civilian think tankers who brought us to this moment have no plan for a decisive battlefield victory, nor even a sufficient advantage to convince Russia to sue for peace. This is an underappreciated risk: intervention so heavy and so direct near guarantees escalation or dangerous spillover. We are running out of time before this officially becomes a greater, messier international conflict. America cannot rely on Ukrainian or Russian leadership. We must determine the sufficient price for peace and then, quite frankly, as the senior party and chief financial partner to the conflict, impose those terms on all parties.

First, we need to stop dealing in the arbitrary posture that every new development in this conflict is the final front in stopping Putin’s territorial ambitions. Putin began his imperial project in Georgia in 2008 and continued it with little pushback in Crimea in 2014. Over the course of that time, he assumed de facto sovereignty over approximately 2.5 million people, and that can’t be ignored. But resisting Putin’s expansionism must be viewed strategically, not just tactically. The risk we take by hurling American lives and equipment into this conflict until the Ukrainians have what we judge is a sufficient advantage is that this regional conflict boils over into a global one.

Washington’s foreign policy establishment argues for no compromise, no negotiation with Putin. It believes we can work the subtle line between sapping Russian capabilities and preventing escalation. For example, it advocates for limiting Ukrainian strikes in Russia. But by prolonging the conflict and increasing Ukrainians’ and Russian desperation, we guarantee it won’t stay contained. The incentives and impact of an attritional war won’t align so cleanly.

Who will end this war if not us? Russians and Ukrainians just celebrated Orthodox Easter, and for the second year in a row, Pope Francis called for a two-week Easter truce. But there was no truce and there will be no truce. The two countries are engaged in more than a war: they are engaged in a crusade. But even crusades require resources, allies, and hope of victory. The longer we provide these to Ukraine carte blanche, the longer each side will remain convinced it needs to wait for more favorable terms before pursuing peace.

Every week there is more news and opinion about one side or the other’s battlefield advantage. These breathless reports aren’t changing the broader picture. The longer this war drags on, the likelier that leaders in Russia and Ukraine will see strikes outside the immediate battlefield or other destabilizing, asymmetric actions—as desirable and reasonable. And in the fuzzy logic of wars of attrition, they will be.

Right now, the United States foreign policy establishment is not merely supporting an ally. We are prolonging an unsustainable war and risking global security. The free people of Ukraine deserve support, but unless we are committed to running two Defense Departments—American and Ukrainian—then we need to find a solution, and soon. As the Discord leaks showed, we’re committing resources and manpower to prolong a conflict that is only uncovering additional layers of mobilization and escalation, while decimating the lives of the average Ukrainian, as hearty and committed as many are. Instead of being accomplices to this destructive deadlock, we should provide the means of ending it: forcing the parties to negotiate a structured peace, not just for their interests, but for ours.

Jason Killmeyer is a political commentator and national security expert who focuses on defense policy and emerging technologies.

Image: Drop of Light / Shutterstock.com

Argentina is set to go to the polls on October 23 to elect a new government. The election—amidst a deep economic crisis, which includes high inflation (over 100 percent), a complicated exchange rate system, a drought in prime agricultural regions, falling international foreign currency reserves, large fiscal deficits, and a messy debt situation—will be momentous. There is even some talk that the Fernández government may not last until election day. Yet despite a pervading sense of pessimism over the economy, one sector has shined: lithium. The flaky white metal is widely seen as an export that can help grow the country out of its troubles.

But there is a sharp debate about how to play the lithium card: should it be exported as a raw material (in the form of lithium carbonate), with a welcome role for foreign companies, or should there be a value-added process that extends to the creation of a local battery industry guided by the state and restrictive to the foreign sector? The discussion over how to approach this issue is likely to intensify as the election draws closer, with foreign mining companies and governments watching closely.

Lithium as Key to the World’s Energy Future

Lithium’s importance stems from its central use in the making of batteries. As the world moves away from fossil fuels to renewable energy, the need for batteries increases as they are essential to power electric vehicles (EVs) and help augment storage for wind and solar power. In the United States, the great energy transition has received a massive amount of government support, most noticeable in the $369 billion Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). The European Union, meanwhile, is taking measures to secure diverse, affordable, and sustainable supplies of critical raw materials, including lithium.

While the United States and the EU are major users of lithium, China is the largest consumer of the metal due to its use in its booming electronics and EV industries as well as being the world’s leading battery maker. Some of its largest mining/energy companies are already engaged in Argentina. Other countries are also scrambling to find secure sources of lithium, including Australia, Canada, Japan, South Korea, and the UK. According to the U.S. Geological Service, global consumption of lithium in 2022 was estimated to be 134,000 tons, a 41 percent increase from 95,000 tons in 2021. Expectations are that demand for lithium is only going to grow in the decade ahead.

In this rapidly changing energy landscape, Argentina has the good fortune to be part of the “lithium triangle” that also encompasses Bolivia and Chile. It is estimated that 60 percent of the world’s identified lithium reserves are in this region, with Chile being the second largest producer and Argentina in fourth place. Although Bolivia holds the world’s largest reserves (21 million tons) and is seeking to develop its lithium mining, political problems and a longstanding disinclination vis-à-vis foreign investment have translated into only meager output. In contrast to Bolivia, Argentina has maintained a more open investment climate for lithium mining, which is paying off. In 2022, Argentina’s mining exports hit a historic high of $3.86 billion, driven by robust lithium income. Indeed, lithium exports surged 234 percent from a year earlier, accounting for a fifth of all Argentine mining shipments. Most of the country’s lithium is produced in three northern provinces, Catamarca, Jujuy, and Salta, which have dealt with the wave of foreign companies and are indicating that they would like a larger slice of the profits, possibly through a tax increase.

Argentina’s Lithium Choices

Lithium’s attractiveness as an export has gained considerable attention from Argentina’s political class. The question they face is how to extract as much value as possible to benefit the country. The dirigiste or statist model is to nationalize lithium and/or have the state play a major role in its development. This argument is grounded in the view that the global push to renewables provides an opportunity for Argentina to advance its industrialization and technological development while avoiding the risk of reprimarization of the economy. According to Veronica Robert, the Undersecretary for Strategy for Development of the Secretariat of Strategic Affairs in the Peronista Fernández administration: “The development of a manufacturing and technological sector associated with the production of cathode materials (which are derived from lithium) such as battery cells could position our country in a privileged place within the production of electric and hybrid vehicles, in the same way that it could complement our capacity to generate electricity.”

With the dirigiste model, foreign companies are either not welcome or limited to public-private arrangements. According to Marcos Actis, Dean of Engineering at Universidad Nacional de La Plata, “Handing over the lithium mines to foreign private companies was the worst thing that could have been done.” His reasoning stems from the fact that Argentina exports a primary ingredient for batteries but must import by-products and batteries from China for the local industrial development of renewables. His preference is to require foreign companies to install local battery plants, which is being pursued by Indonesia with its nickel mining and in Bolivia.

Actis also believes that Argentina’s state-owned energy company, YPF, should play a more significant role in the lithium sector. While YPF is mainly driven by oil and gas production, it has also created YPF Tec, a technology company that is seeking to launch a lithium battery factory supplied lithium by U.S. mining company Livent (which is mining in Argentina). The plant is the first in Latin America that will produce lithium battery cells, which will be used in stationary batteries for energy storage.

The argument for a more statist role in the lithium sector received a boost from neighboring Chile, whose left-of-center president, Gabriel Boric, announced in April that he will increase the state’s role in his country’s lithium industry to strengthen the economy and protect biodiversity. Under the proposed plan, which must pass the Chilean Congress, the government will negotiate with the two licensed lithium mining companies present in the country—SQM (Chilean and partially Chinese-owned) and Albemarle (American)—for new contracts that increase the state’s share of ownership and profits. Moreover, the state-owned copper mining company, Codelco, will oversee the process as well as help to create a new state-owned lithium company. The reception to this plan was mixed, with much of the global media and investors calling the Chilean government’s action a nationalization, though there was no outright seizure of foreign company ownership.

While the dirigiste model appeals to Argentina’s populist wing, there is a more market-based option. According to Santiago J. Dondo, former Undersecretary of Mining Policy, who served during the more market-oriented administration of President Mauricio Macri (2015–2019), “In Bolivia, Evo Morales convinced everyone that they will not take our lithium if it is not in a Bolivian electric car. The result: Bolivia does not produce lithium commercially despite having the largest salt flat in the world.”

Dondo also noted that, despite discussions over an expanded state role in Chile, that country’s tax regime and mechanisms to boost local battery production have led to a cooling in foreign investment into the sector. The move to nationalize the Chilean lithium industry is likely to further chill foreign investment to Argentina’s benefit.

Dondo prefers what he calls the Australian model, which is based on market-friendly principles, openness to foreign investment, and investment in technology to lower the costs of producing lithium. Consider that while neighboring Bolivia sits on the world’s largest identified reserves, the country has struggled to launch its lithium business since Evo Morales came into office in 2006 and insisted on a very restricted foreign company role and the development of a local battery industry, all run or guided by the state. In sharp contrast, Australia is the world’s largest producer. Dondo and others worry that the adoption of the Bolivian model would take away from Argentina’s attractiveness as a place to mine lithium.

An additional risk in turning away foreign investment is that lithium mining companies and their badly needed technology can go elsewhere. Brazil is developing its own lithium sector, and African lithium-rich countries, such as Zimbabwe and Namibia, are moving to develop processing and refining industries to capture a portion of the global demand for battery material. The more difficult the investment process, the more foreign companies will look for easier points of entry.

The Geopolitics of Argentine Lithium

Argentina’s lithium debate also puts it in the geopolitical crosshairs. In 2022, China made up 43 percent of all lithium exports, followed by Japan at 29 percent, South Korea at 14 percent, and the United States at 10 percent. For the United States, Argentina accounted for 51 percent of its lithium imports in 2023, followed by Chile and China. Consequently, what happens in Argentina matters to the rest of the world. This was clearly reflected by the German chancellor Olaf Scholz’s January visit to Argentina and the current state of intense negotiations between Buenos Aires and Washington to forge some type of trade agreement to allow lithium imports under the IRA, which precludes imports except for countries that have a free trade agreement (FTA) with the United States. Argentina currently lacks a FTA.

China has also heavily invested in Argentina, complete with suggestions that the South American country join the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) club and a recent agreement for trade between the two nations to be conducted in yuan. China is Argentina’s second-largest trade partner after Brazil and has lent Argentina $17 billion for a wide range of infrastructure projects, many of which have been troubled by local labor and environmental issues. China also reportedly has some type of bases (supposedly linked to its space program) in the country, and Chinese companies are actively engaged in the lithium sector. Although Argentina represents a challenging environment for Chinese companies, it maintains an important geoeconomic importance, especially in terms of its natural resources. What is going on in Argentina, including the debate over the lithium production regime, is of considerable interest to Beijing.

Although Argentina’s economic crisis dominates its electoral politics, the lithium sector is enjoying considerable success, in part due to the successful handling of the business by the three major provincial governments where it is produced. Whoever wins the 2023 elections will have a say in whether the federal state plays a larger role or if Argentina will maintain an investment regime that is open to foreign investment. Argentina has a window of opportunity to make good in the lithium sector, but it needs to maintain a pragmatic approach to achieve the greatest value it can for the country and keep foreign investment positively engaged.

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

Image: Ksenia Ragozina/Shutterstock.

The United States operates some of the most advanced and capable tactical aircraft ever to take to the skies, but what does it cost to train the pilot? More than you might think.

Back in 2019, the U.S. Air Force worked with the RAND Corporation to conduct an analysis of what the branch spends on bonuses and incentive pay aimed at retaining existing pilots, versus the cost of recruiting and training new pilots to replace them. According to the 73-page report, this comparison was of particular import at the time (and today) because the commercial-airline industry has been aggressively pursuing qualified pilots to replace its own aging workforce, encouraging highly-trained Air Force pilots to get out of the military and take on cushier jobs ferrying passengers between New York and LA.

Related: How long does it take to become an Air Force fighter pilot?

New pilots versus old, in terms of dollars and cents

There are a number of variables to take into consideration when trying to determine the right pilot force structure. High levels of retention mean high levels of expertise, but it also means higher personnel costs across the board as aviators continue to progress in their careers toward higher pay grades. An all-senior pilot force also creates problems as those senior pilots begin to reach retirement age. Conversely, an all-junior (or recruited) pilot force offers lower costs in terms of payroll and bonuses, but comes with the high initial cost of recruitment and training.

Obviously, the right structure is a mix of the two, with a number of senior aviators sticking around being the pay structure, bonuses, and incentives make it worthwhile as compared to commercial or civilian endeavors, and a number of aspiring aviators coming in each year to train for their military careers. This offers a mixture of experience, skill sets, and costs that allows the pilot corps to be sustainable over the long haul, but in order to manage this balance, the Air Force must have a thorough understanding of what such a mixture will cost for the purposes of budget allocation.

Of course, the first step in making this determination is assessing exactly how much it costs to train a person off the street to fly a hundred million dollars worth of state secrets into enemy airspace and live to tell the tale.

Related: How fighter pilots plan combat missions

Pilot training costs vary widely

In order to assess the cost of training a pilot, RAND had to consider a number of things outside the direct expenses incurred by the student (housing, payroll, etc), like the cost per flight hour for aircraft leveraged and the support costs incurred by maintaining these training fleets. Costs from each stage of training, from flight screening all the way through assignment to formal training units, were included.

The analysis found that the cost of training pilots varied greatly based on the platform. For instance, it costs about ten times more to train a pilot to fly America’s premiere air superiority fighter, the F-22 Raptor, than it costs to train a pilot to fly a C-17 cargo plane. This, of course, makes a great deal of sense seeing as aircraft like the F-22 costs far more per hour to operate than more utilitarian platforms like the C-17.

Related: What is Air Force fighter pilot training like?

Here’s how much the U.S. Air Force spends training its pilots:

The chart below shows the Air Force cost of training one pilot on each platform, according to the RAND Corporation analysis from 2018, as well as today’s updated figures when adjusted for 2023’s inflation, using the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics inflation calculator.

Aircraft 2018 Dollars 2023 Dollars A-10 $5,961,000.00 $7,194,795.47 B-1 $7,338,000.00 $8,856,804.09 B-2 $9,891,000.00 $11,938,218.76 B-52 $9,688,000.00 $11,693,202.24 C-130J $2,474,000.00 $2,986,063.41 C-17 $1,097,000.00 $1,324,054.80 C-5 $1,397,000.00 $1,686,148.18 F-15C $9,200,000.00 $11,104,197.01 F-15E $5,580,000.00 $6,734,936.88 F-16 $5,618,000.00 $6,780,802.04 F-22 $10,897,000.00 $13,152,440.00 F-35A (basic) $10,167,000.00 $12,271,340.00 F-35A (transition) $9,467,000.00 $11,426,460.12 KC-135 $1,196,000.00 $1,443,545.61 RC-135 $5,447,000.00 $6,574,408.82

Figures obtained from “The Relative Cost-Effectiveness of Retaining Versus Accessing Air Force Pilots” by the Rand Corporation

Alex Hollings is a writer, dad, and Marine veteran who specializes in foreign policy and defense technology analysis. He holds a master’s degree in Communications from Southern New Hampshire University, as well as a bachelor’s degree in Corporate and Organizational Communications from Framingham State University.

This article first appeared at Sandboxx News.

Image: Shutterstock.

In recent weeks Israel has been facing its most severe internal political and judicial crisis in recent times. At the center of it stands a controversial judicial reform aiming to weaken the power of the supreme court in the national decisionmaking process.

The country’s supreme court is regarded by many Israelis as a beacon of liberal human rights. Yet others see it as an undemocratic institution with too much power. The judicial reform put forward by the government included plans to curtail the power of the judiciary in several ways, including:

1. Merely requiring a simple majority in the Knesset (Israel’s parliament) to overrule court decisions;
2. Increasing the government representation on the committee which appoints the supreme court judges;
3. Canceling the legal requirements that ministers have to obey the advice of legal advisers, guided by the attorney general.

The reaction to the proposed reform has been unprecedented in Israeli history: massive protests took place across the country, with as many as 200,000 people flooding the streets in Tel Aviv and over 500,000 countrywide; a countrywide strike was called out by Israel’s Histadrut trade union; and as many as 750 reservists of the Israeli Defense Forces stopped answering their call-ups for training. Reserve and military officers from Israel’s Military Intelligence Special Operations Division warned in an open letter the “legislation in question will destroy everything we have served and fought for. We will not let that happen.” On the evening of Monday, March 27, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu announced the temporary freeze of the legislation. Laying aside the internal political implications, we expect the long-term strategic-political consequences for the U.S.-Israel relationship, as well as for the United States’ future standing in the Middle East, to be paramount.

The relationship with America has historically been an important one, as the United States has been decisive in ensuring the security and safety of Israel in the Middle East and in the rest of the world. However, the relationship has become strained over the last months and has led the Biden administration to change its rhetoric towards Israel. Statements released by the administration have been increasingly admonitory and interfering with Israeli internal politics. This is highly unusual, as the United States does normally not openly do so towards allies, and, historically, U.S. administrations have adopted this policy towards Israel. This change occurred as a result of several factors, including pressure from the Jewish-American community, which has been very supportive of the opposition to Netanyahu’s government, and radical progressive figures within the Democratic Party and the Congress that are exerting strong pressure on the administration to take a clear stand against the proposed judicial reform.

During a call between President Joe Biden and Netanyahu, Biden “underscored his belief that democratic values have always been, and must remain, a hallmark of the U.S.-Israel relationship, that democratic societies are strengthened by genuine checks and balances, and that fundamental changes should be pursued with the broadest possible base of popular support.” After meeting  Netanyahu on January 30, Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced that “the relationship between our countries, what we come back to time and again is that it is rooted both in shared interests and in shared values. That includes our support for core democratic principles and institutions.”

This strong attitude towards Israel has not gone unnoticed and has been widely criticized, including by right-wing Knesset member and Minister of National Missions Orit Strock, who tweeted in Hebrew: “Dear Mr. Blinken, I understand that you decided to give our prime minister a lesson in democracy. Well, democracy is first of all the duty of a country to determine its course according to the votes of its citizens, each of which is given equal weight, without foreign involvement.”

Since the (temporary) freezing of the judicial reform, the tension between Washington and Jerusalem has further increased. On 28 March, Biden announced that Netanyahu will not receive an invitation to the White House “in the near term,” and told reporters that “like many strong supporters of Israel, I’m very concerned. I’m concerned that they get this straight. They cannot continue down this road. I’ve sort of made that clear.” Even for the United States, which recently described the Israeli finance minister Bezalel Smotrich as “offensive, concerning and dangerous,” such comments are unprecedented. Additionally, they coincide with a time of fragile internal and external security in the country, as the religious holidays of Passover, Ramadan, and Easter coincided this year.

Netanyahu himself has strongly rebuked the Biden administration, emphasizing that “Israel is a sovereign country which makes its decisions by the will of its people and not based on pressures from abroad, including from the best of friends.” Yet Israel now finds itself in an insecure position where it stands to lose political and public support from Washington, and is slowly moving towards diminished economic, political, and security support from its oldest and most powerful ally. This is especially threatening in light of Iran’s rise as a nuclear power, as inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency found uranium particles enriched to 83.7 percent in Iran’s nuclear facilities. Moreover, the terrorist organizations Hamas and Hezbollah have recently expanded their infrastructure, and Israel suffered increased aggression during Passover, with thirty-four rockets fired at Israeli territory from Lebanon—the worst bombardment since the 2006 Lebanon war.

The harsh American involvement in Israel’s internal affairs has been met with bold condemnation from within countries. Instead of weakening the Israeli government and Netanyahu, the Biden administration’s statements invigorated his supporters within both the public and the government coalition. Even center and left-wing political figures expressed their dislike of the U.S. policy towards Israel.

Moving forward, this is expected to have decisive consequences regarding America’s standing in the Middle East in general and the U.S.-Israeli relationship in particular. The image of the United States as a power determined to stand in support of its allies while respecting their internal political processes and refraining from interference in their internal affairs has suffered a strong blow. Pro-American allies in the Arab world—like Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, Jordan, and Lebanon—will have to take into consideration that the United States might wish in the future to interfere in their own internal affairs, in particular with regard to their willingness to adopt democratic procedures and to go along with issues of human rights and the treatment of minorities. These will make them think twice regarding U.S. pledges of support in case of real and concrete threats to their security from radical powers—in particular, Iran.

The United States’ conduct in the recent internal turmoil will have two major implications in Israel.

First, and most importantly, it exposed the limited power of the United States vis-a-vis Israel. Washington has come to realize that Israel’s dependence on the United States does not deter it from making it clear that it will not tolerate an exceeding American interference in its internal affairs. Moreover, at this stage, it has become clear that U.S. interference in support of the opposition to Netanyahu’s government has no real effect on its policy. More than ever, the Israeli government seems determined to implement the judicial reform.

Second, the statements against Netanyahu will certainly weaken the United States’ image as an “honest broker” in a peace process leading toward a settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This faux pas has cost the United States authority in the Middle East, and will make it more challenging for Washington to move ahead on an American peace initiative in the region. This comes alongside a general insecurity about U.S. global leadership in light of Washington’s failed efforts to deter Russia from attacking Ukraine, the Trump-led era, and the disastrous U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.

All in all, the judicial reform and the protests have caused an unprecedented situation, the long-term consequences of which are not yet clear. We can only expect that the precedent of military insubordination will lead to a bandwagon effect, especially regarding missions in the occupied territories. The White House is expected to soften its stance over the coming days and weeks, but Israel still finds itself vulnerable and in tension with its most powerful ally. Nevertheless, Israel has set clear boundaries for the Biden administration, demonstrating that foreign interference with Israeli internal affairs will not be accepted in the future. It is yet unclear how this will play out in the case of the Israel-Palestine conflict, but the changed U.S.-Israel relationship will make the arduous peace process even more complicated in the future.

Even so, the United States’ commitment to Israel’s security has not wavered. U.S. National Security Council coordinator for strategic communications John Kirby announced during a press conference on March 22 that “[…] the President, in his discussion with Prime Minister Netanyahu, made clear that our support for Israel’s security will remain ironclad. Nothing is going to change about that. President Biden has, through his entire public life, been one of Israel’s strongest supporters and friends, and that will not change.”

Professor Zaki Shalom is a senior researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) in Tel Aviv, Israel, and Professor Emeritus at Ben-Gurion University. He has published extensively on various facets of Israel’s defense policy, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the role of the superpowers in the Middle East, and Israel’s struggle against Islamic terror.

Sophia Schmidt is a research intern at the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) in Tel Aviv, Israel. She holds a B.A. from the University of Oxford.

Image: Shutterstock.

Military adventures in far-off regions require a reliable forward outpost, friends in the neighborhood, and, most importantly, the fuel to get there. Since the Gulf War began in 1990, the United States has looked to Saudi Arabia to fill these requirements. In exchange for their hospitality, camaraderie, and oil at a reasonable price, the Saudis received American protection and weapons—adynamic colloquially called “oil for security.” The relationship between a strictly democratic state and an unapologetically authoritarian kingdom went steady for nearly two and a half decades. On paper, the partnership was an exceptional triumph of realpolitik in a period of idealistic geopolitics.

However, as America wraps up its interventions in the region, it no longer requires a forward outpost. Nor does it need a military ally in the region with whom to exchange intelligence. The only things keeping the partnership alive are Saudi Arabia’s vast oil deposits and leadership in OPEC. Yet Saudi oil policy has run contrary to U.S. interests. OPEC’s production quotas have kept oil prices worldwide high, twisting the knife in a struggling American economy. Additionally, the Saudi military intervention in Yemen using American weapons and intelligence has kept the region unstable and damaged America’s international reputation. Current U.S. policies have utterly failed to address these imbalances. It’s time for an ultimatum: Riyadh must provide the oil or lose the security.

The Middle East is a region lacking a structure for stability. It has neither a clear military and/or political hierarchy nor an effective economic union between its disparate states. The closest thing it has to an economic union is OPEC, whose mandate only coordinates oil production and as such only counts oil producers amongst its member states. And while the borders in the Middle East are artificially drawn, for the most part, the religious and ethnic rivalries are very real. This state of affairs leaves a constant power vacuum that no individual state can fill, while also making negotiation on a personal and political level extremely difficult.

Among the states in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia is in the most unique position. The reach of its borders and the factors within them create peculiar geopolitical realities that serve as both boons and disadvantages.

Saudi Arabia lies upon one of the largest oil deposits in the world, earning it the envy of all countries—developing or otherwise. Oil is such a dominant industry in the country that any instability in its global price generally directly corresponds with instability in the Saudi economy. If tomorrow oil became worthless, or even just halved in price, Saudi Arabia’s economy would almost certainly collapse. To prevent this scenario from taking place, Saudi Arabia has aggressively maintained its position in OPEC, fighting to manipulate the global oil market and keep its economy flourishing, often at the expense of the rest of the world.

Also within its borders are the two holy cities of Mecca and Medina, the most important sites in Islam. Simply controlling these cities grants Saudi rulers a place high in the leadership of Islam. At the same time, their presence puts pressure on (or perhaps gives an excuse for) the state to adhere more strictly to the rules of the Quran, creating an extremely conservative, rigid society. It is because of this that foreigners are often unwelcome in the country, and relations with non-Muslim nations can often be driven by the sentiment of Muslims rather than the state apparatus itself.

While its leaders see regional hegemony as an obvious next step in Saudi power, the existence of Iran complicates this endeavor. The two states are roughly comparable in power and influence in the area, and have been locked in a struggle for dominance since the removal of Baathist Iraq as a relevant competitor in the early 2000s. The states’ adherence to rival branches of Islam only makes the competition more bitter. Iran has served as the champion of Shia Islam, backing numerous Shia militant groups throughout the Middle East such as Hezbollah and the Houthis. While Saudi Arabia’s arid climate and long borders make it an unattractive target for conventional warfare, they leave it dangerously open to infiltration by smaller militant groups.

To further its own influence and minimize the risk these groups pose to its stability and national defense, Saudi Arabia has committed itself to counter-militancy. This policy has manifested most clearly in the ongoing Saudi-led intervention in Yemen, the country in which the Houthi movement is based. With the help of U.S. training, weapons sales, and intelligence, coalition forces have led an intensive bombing and ground campaign with the aim of ousting the Houthis and restoring the former Yemeni government. The conflict has created one of the largest humanitarian crises in history. Tens of thousands of civilians have been killed, millions are displaced, and millions more are starving. The intervention has no clear end date, and beyond being a massive humanitarian catastrophe serves as a blight on American international reputation by virtue of its second-hand involvement.

While Saudi policy was more palatable during America’s own intervention in the Middle East, upon taking a step back it is clearly antithetical to American interests in almost every way. The United States needs cheap oil, or else its economy grinds to a halt: Saudi Arabia is directly involved in keeping oil expensive. The United States needs the Middle East to be stable so that it is not dragged into another conflict: the Saudi-Iranian rivalry endangers that stability. The United States needs to recover its international reputation after its disastrous Middle East wars: cooperation with Saudi intervention in Yemen makes that considerably more difficult.

Current U.S. policy does little to address these glaring relationship deficiencies. There has been a malaise in American Middle Eastern diplomacy since the Afghanistan pullout. Yet America’s leverage is considerable. Saudi Arabia needs American weapons for its national defense, and it needs American expertise to maintain these weapons. Despite the recent cooling of some tensions, there is no strong evidence that the country’s rivalry with Iran is a thing of the past. Additionally, Saudi Arabia is no longer vital to America’s interests. Completely severing the relationship now would have almost no effect in comparison to severing it ten years ago. Even in the economic area, there are possible alternatives to Saudi oil that could be explored such as Venezuela, Nigeria, the UAE, Brazil, or even America itself. The United Stat should utilize its leverage, and demand that Saudi Arabia hold up its side of the oil-for-security bargain or else look elsewhere for defense.

Gerard A. Neumann is a student at Columbia University.

This essay was a runner-up in the 2023 John Quincy Adams Society Student Foreign Policy Essay Contest.

With its sights set squarely on countering Chinese threats in the Pacific and Russian aggression in Europe, the U.S. now has at least five secretive new warplanes in development. These programs range from next-generation air superiority fighters that will fly amid a constellation of AI-driven support drones to dual-cycle scramjet-powered hypersonic strike drones very similar to the long-awaited SR-72 concept.

With new multi-static anti-stealth radar arrays and more advanced integrated air defense systems continuing to come online, the U.S. Air Force has stated that it believes even the mighty F-22 Raptor will no longer be survivable enough in near-peer contested airspace as soon as 2030. The Raptor is widely considered to be the stealthiest fighter ever to take to the skies, so the broader context one can glean from concerns about its survivability is clear: the U.S. needs a slew of new offensive and defensive warplanes it can rely on to dominate the skies over its opponents. These warplanes will also have to defend our own airspace against a sea of new stealth fighters and bombers being hurriedly developed by Russia and China.

In order to meet the combined threat of new air defenses and increasingly potent enemy warplanes, the U.S. now has two different but deeply connected stealth-bomber programs at some stage of development, alongside two similarly connected stealth-fighter programs. But perhaps the most secretive of all of these new programs is an Air Force Research Laboratory effort to field fully-functioning dual-cycle scramjet engine systems for a low-observable hypersonic drone designed to fly three different types of combat missions.

Related: What kind of fighter could the latest military tech really build?

1) NGAD: The US Air Force’s next air superiority fighter will come with its own drone wingmen

The F-22 Raptor is widely seen as the most capable air-superiority fighter on the planet, but with fewer than 150 combat-ready airframes left in service, America’s apex predator of the skies is an endangered species. That’s where the U.S. Air Force’s NGAD program comes in.

Unlike other efforts to field new warplanes, NGAD isn’t aiming to develop a single jet, but rather a whole family of systems that can be spread across multiple airframes, including a bevy of support drones that will fly alongside the crewed fighter. This new family of systems will specialize in air combat with the stated aim of dominating enemy airspace. However, like all modern tactical aircraft, it will have multi-role capabilities that will allow for air-to-ground engagements as well.

NGAD is expected to lean further into current aviation trends of cockpit automation and data fusion, taking many of the more monotonous or complex flight control functions out of the pilots’ hands to allow them to focus on the fight, especially while directing support drones to engage air or surface targets on the fighter’s behalf. While not confirmed, it’s expected that the NGAD fighter will leverage now-in-development adaptive cycle engines for increased thrust, improved fuel economy, and a dramatic jump in thermal management (and as a byproduct of that, more energy production for advanced systems like directed energy weapons).

In 2020, it was announced that a full-sized technology demonstrator for the NGAD program had not only already been flown, but had even broken multiple records. While it’s important to note that a technology demonstrator is not the same thing as a flying prototype and may not even look like the new air dominance warplanes the U.S. will eventually field, it sounds as though the NGAD program is progressing at full speed.

The expected sticker price for America’s new NGAD fighters will likely begin at around $200 million per airframe. Its support drone costs are expected to range wildly from attritable low-cost platforms like the Kratos XQ-58 Valkyrie, at around $1.3 million apiece, to fully-functioning unmanned stealth fighters at a per-unit cost of around $100 million which is greater than the F-35A’s per-unit cost. That may sound pretty steep, but it’s worth noting that America’s F-22 Raptor, which saw price increases due to the abrupt cancellation of the line, ended up ringing in at around $337 million per jet (when rolling development costs into production) in 2011 dollars. That’s a whopping $442 million today. The Air Force has stated that it does not intend to purchase NGAD fighters as 1:1 replacements for the F-22, so the total number of fighters this program will deliver remains uncertain.

Related: America’s NGAD fighter might actually be nothing like you think

2) B-21 Raider: The US Air Force’s next stealth bomber will sneak past radars that can even spot stealth fighters

Despite its sleek, futuristic aesthetic, Northrop Grumman’s B-2 Spirit stealth bomber has now been in service for more than a quarter-century. Now, as China and Russia continue developing their own B-2 competitors, the firm is looking to expand America’s lead in this field with the B-21 Raider that is currently in development.

The B-21 will draw heavily from the B-2’s successful flying-wing design that Northrop has long specialized in, yet will be a fair bit smaller, carrying an anticipated 30,000-pound payload into the fight, rather than the B-2’s impressive 60,000. Despite the shrinkage, the B-21 will still be rated to carry just about every nuclear and conventional munition we’ve come to expect out of America’s bomber fleets, while leveraging stealth technology said to be at least “two generations ahead” of the famously sneaky B-2.

Unlike stealth fighters, which are detectable (though not targettable) using low-frequency radar bands, the flying-wing design leveraged by both the B-2 and B-21 is said to be extremely stealthy against all radar frequencies. This makes these long-range bombers perfectly suited for strike operations in a heavily contested airspace in the initial days of conflict. If a war were to break out with China, for instance, it would almost certainly begin with U.S. stealth bomber fleets engaging anti-ship defenses on Chinese shores to allow aircraft carriers to close in.

Today, there are at least six B-21 Raider airframes in some stage of production, and unlike most clean-sheet builds for new warplanes in U.S. history, the Raider is expected to conduct its first test flights with all its mission systems already installed and operational. If all goes well, that will dramatically reduce the time between first flight and initial operating capability. The U.S. Air Force capped the per-unit price for its new stealth bomber at $550 million per airframe in 2010, which when adjusted for inflation, puts the Raider’s anticipated cost at around $729.25 million each. That figure might make your eye twitch, but the U.S. is said to have spent as much as $2 billion each on its original stealth bomber when rolling R&D costs into procurement.

Related: How the B-21 Raider could shift power in the Pacific 

3) F/A-XX: The US Navy’s new stealth fighter will share systems with NGAD while delivering a huge jump in range

After decades of trying to force every fighter the U.S. has ever developed into carrier duty culminating in the acquisition nightmare that has been the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, the U.S. Navy’s next stealth fighter is being developed specifically to thrive on America’s flattops.

Being developed under the name F/A-XX, the “F/A” prefix indicates that this new aircraft will be expected to not only deliver multi-role capabilities like all modern fighters but will also be expected to excel at both air-to-air and air-to-ground combat operations. The U.S. Navy and Air Force have both indicated that the stealth fighter to emerge from the F/A-XX effort will share some common systems with the NGAD program, which will allow this new fighter to be fielded more rapidly. That will also mean the Navy’s next jet will benefit from the same modular software and hardware architecture intended to allow for frequent low-cost updates to these aircraft as technology matures around them.

Aside from the requisite boost in stealth and data fusion capabilities the U.S. prioritizes in new fighter programs, the Navy’s F/A-XX will also need to deliver a huge increase in fuel range over the Super Hornets and F-35Cs currently operating at sea. China’s area-denial bubble, or the area of the Pacific that falls within reach of China’s advanced hypersonic anti-ship missiles like the DF-ZF, now extends more than 1,000 miles from Chinese shores, while Navy jets like the F/A-18E and F-35C have a combat radius of only around 650 miles. That means American carriers cannot sail close enough to China to fly combat sorties without placing the carriers themselves at risk of being sunk.

The F/A-XX is expected to address this capability gap by leveraging both larger fuel stores and the aforementioned more-efficient adaptive cycle engines likely destined for the NGAD, while also benefitting from mid-air refueling provided by carrier-based MQ-29 drones. The Navy has not yet released cost estimates for this fighter, but it will likely ring in at a comparable price to the NGAD.

Related: Carrier Woes: The Navy’s fighters can’t reach China

4) Wingman Bomber: The US Air Force’s B-21 Raider will fly with an extremely advanced drone stealth bomber

During a keynote speech delivered at the Air Force Association’s 2022 Warfare Symposium earlier this year, Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall revealed that the United States is exploring the idea of an uncrewed stealth bomber platform that could fly missions ahead of the optionally-crewed B-21 Raider to expand upon America’s deep penetration strike capabilities in hotly contested airspace. This new bomber platform would be expected to have a “comparable range” to that of the new globe-spanning bomber, with payload capabilities to be determined in large part by price point… which is currently estimated to land somewhere near the incredible figure of $300 million or more per drone.

An unclassified Request for Information the Air Force has released to industry partners calls for this new drone stealth bomber to have at least a 4,000-pound payload capacity and a combat radius of 1,500 miles. Yet, as Aviation Week’s Steve Trimble has pointed out, it seems likely this aircraft will need to be able to match the B-21’s range in order to serve its purpose as a means of support on long-duration missions.

A substantially cheaper drone stealth bomber that can fly ahead of the B-21 Raider could offer a huge strategic value. Raider crews could use these uncrewed bombers to target anti-ship weapons that are too well defended to risk engaging crewed aircraft, or they could engage air defense systems to allow for a safer route to the objective. Of course, at half the cost of a B-21, we’re still talking about a drone stealth bomber that costs as much as three or more F-35s. Nevertheless, the F-35 very likely couldn’t reach these targets, to begin with, whereas these new drone stealth bombers will be able to.

With the B-21 expected to replace both the B-2 Spirit and the B-1B Lancer, it makes sense for the U.S. to consider fielding less-expensive drone stealth bombers as a supplement to its next-generation bomber fleets. This program is still in the early stages of development, with Air Force officials currently assessing which of the B-21’s systems should be migrated to the stealth drone and which can’t be due to cost limitations.

5) Mayhem: The highly secretive US Air Force effort to field a hypersonic stealth drone could finally bring the SR-72 to fruition

Hidden within the long list of hypersonic weapon programs drawing funds from Pentagon coffers, the Air Force Research Laboratory’s Mayhem Program appears to be developing a dual-cycle scramjet propulsion system for more than just missiles. The effort was originally tasked with fielding larger scramjet systems capable of propelling larger payloads further distances than unspecific “existing systems.”

Although Mayhem is regularly referred to as a missile program, a closer look at the branch’s issued Requests for Information (ROIs) suggests Mayhem is more likely aimed at fielding an uncrewed, reusable hypersonic drone platform capable of conducting two different specified mission sets: strike operations and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, or ISR, missions.

As Joseph Trevithick over at The War Zone noted late last year, Mayhem’s formal name recently changed from “Expendable Hypersonic Multi-Mission Air-Breathing Demonstrator” to “Hypersonic Multi-mission ISR and Strike,” and the effort has also been referenced as a “Multi-Mission Cruiser.” This strongly suggests that we’re not talking about a missile you fire at a target and forget about. The removal of the word “expendable” in conjunction with the “multi-mission” moniker both suggest Mayhem aims to field a reusable, autonomous platform that leverages what will likely be the world’s first dual-mode or turbine-based combined cycle (TBCC) hypersonic propulsion systems.

In other words, Mayhem aims to field a turbine-based scramjet system that can function at all airspeeds from subsonic to supersonic and then hypersonic. Today’s ramjet and scramjet systems don’t function reliably until they’re moving at extremely high speeds, which are currently achieved using rockets that fire before the propulsion systems come online.

This concept is tantalizingly similar to the longstanding discussion about Lockheed Martin’s planned successor to the Mach 3.5-capable SR-71 Blackbird, known as the SR-72. All the way back in 2018, Lockheed Vice President Jack O’Banion seemed to indicate that an SR-72 demonstrator may have already flown, and he stated clearly that a full-sized propulsion system had already been built and tested. “The aircraft is also agile at hypersonic speeds,” O’Banion told a crowd at the 2018 SciTech Forum, “with reliable engine starts.”

A hypersonic strike and ISR platform would have far-reaching strategic ramifications: from the ability to deliver less-expensive non-hypersonic ordnance to targets at speeds above Mach 5 to rapid intelligence gathering even in places where satellite coverage is compromised. While the world worries about who is fielding new hypersonic missiles, it seems the Air Force is secretly planning to win the hypersonic aircraft race before the rest of the world even knows it’s begun.

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in August 2022.

Alex Hollings is a writer, dad, and Marine veteran who specializes in foreign policy and defense technology analysis. He holds a master’s degree in Communications from Southern New Hampshire University, as well as a bachelor’s degree in Corporate and Organizational Communications from Framingham State University.

This article was first published by Sandboxx News.

Image: Mike Mareen / Shutterstock.com

The U.S. Treasury Department recently sanctioned a multi-jurisdiction procurement ring supporting the Islamic Republic of Iran’s drone and military programs. Concurrent with Iran’s continued proliferation of drones to Russia for use in Ukraine, both the Biden administration and Congress have sought to stem the flow of American components found in downed Iranian unmanned aerial systems.

Yet while preventing transfers of such Western equipment to Iran is both necessary and understandable, Asia has long served as a critical hub for military and missile technology to the Islamic Republic. An increase in the pace and scope of penalties targeting Tehran’s networks and fronts in Asia will be essential to disrupting Iran’s drone program.

The latest U.S. penalties center around an Iranian electronics firm known by an English transliteration of its acronym, PASNA. First sanctioned in 2018 for seeking technology with military applications from China and for reportedly providing material support to the sanctioned Iran’s Electronics Components Industries—a subsidiary of the sanctioned Iran Electronics Industries, which is, in turn, a subsidiary of Iran’s sanctioned Ministry of Defense and Armed Forces Logistics (MODAFL)—PASNA continued its activities after exposure in 2018 through fronts, aliases, and affiliates, both in Iran and Malaysia.

Beyond exposing these fronts, the Treasury Department also sanctioned the managing director of PASNA, Mehdi Khoshghadam, as well as four suppliers of electronic goods and microelectromechanical systems to PASNA operating in both Hong Kong and the People’s Republic of China. These penalties build on recent efforts by the Treasury Department to disrupt other Iranian drone technology procurement rings in Asia. Last month, the department targeted five firms operating in China and Hong Kong that sold aerospace components and light-aircraft engines to Iran Aircraft Manufacturing Industries, which is a subsidiary of the Iran Aviation Industries Organization, itself another MODAFL subsidiary.

Iran’s ability to erect, sustain, and even recreate front companies across jurisdictions despite Washington’s increased willingness to crack down on drone procurement, production, and proliferation networks should come as a surprise to no one. Oil shippers and shadowy fronts across Asia have long helped the Islamic Republic generate illicit revenues through the sale or storage of crude oil and petrochemicals, including at the height of U.S. sanctions.

For Tehran, which has a robust domestic defense industrial base, continued illicit procurement of drone components is a sign of the growing importance these low-flying unmanned aerial systems play in bolstering the revolutionary regime’s status and security.

Iran’s transfer of drones to Russia marked a historic first in Tehran’s relationship with Moscow, and one that the Islamic Republic is reportedly already cashing in on. Over the past three decades, it was Iran who served as a junior partner to Russia, purchasing Russian weapons like surface-to-air missile systems, fighter jets, and even diesel-electric submarines. Now it is Iranian weapons that are helping preserve Russian long-range strike platforms like cruise and ballistic missiles and helping sustain Russia in its war against Ukraine.

Regionally, variants of Iranian drones have become a regular feature of low-intensity conflict in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen where they bolster the capabilities of Iran’s “Axis of Resistance” and strike U.S. persons, interests, and partners. On the home front, while drones were once seen as the purview of the elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, these weapons are being increasingly diffused through Iran’s Armed Forces and branches of Iran’s Artesh, or national military.

Additionally, over the past few years, Iran has taken to directly launching drones from its own territory, striking at adversaries while operating beneath their threshold for the overt use of force. Of particular importance here have been loitering munitions or suicide drones. Such weapons have been launched by Iran in a combined arms operation with land-attack cruise missiles against Saudi Arabian oil facilities in 2019, as well as against moving targets like an Israeli-owned oil tanker in 2021.

All of this is to suggest that sporadic or graduated sanctions against Iranian procurement or proliferation networks will not handicap Iran’s drone program overnight nor will it deter future drone use by Iran. For example, there is no reason why Washington waited half a decade to sanction the head of an entity that was already subject to sanctions and still engaging in sanctionable activity, as was the case with PASNA and its managing director.

Conversely, sustained pressure against managers, boards, companies, and networks alike—especially when levied in large tranches rather than meted out over time—does stand a chance at both exposing and impeding the supply chains that feed Iran’s drone program. This is especially the case when focused on jurisdictions across Asia where illicit Iranian activity continues. Washington must therefore allocate more time, resources, and political capital to keep pace with this threat.

Behnam Ben Taleblu is a senior fellow focusing on Iranian political and security issues at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), where he contributes to its Iran Program, Center on Military and Political Power (CMPP), and Center on Economic and Financial Power (CEFP).

Image: Shutterstock.

When discussing the various inconvenient friendships of convenience in which the United States is entangled, Pakistan is a country that comes to mind almost immediately. Since gaining independence from Britain in 1947, the South Asian nation has had a difficult time maintaining pace with other economic juggernauts in the neighborhood—namely, China and India. Though Pakistan’s stagnating agrarian-based economy deserves its fair share of the blame for the country’s current state, the directionless and at times counterintuitive national-defense policies adopted by the ruling elite have also played their part in this downward spiral.

In its seventy-five years of existence, Pakistan has fought four wars with its archrival India, gone through a civil war that saw the liberation of its eastern wing (now known as Bangladesh), and has been facing waves of terrorism for the past two decades. As a result of such constant geopolitical turmoil, the country’s democratic institutions have continued to erode over time, paving the way for military dictators to rule the country for over half of its lifespan. Even in times when elected civilian governments have existed, the all-powerful military establishment has continued to exert its dominance over defense and foreign policy.

And to the detriment of both Pakistani and American long-term interests, the military establishment has consistently maintained its policies of appeasing and sponsoring terrorist groups. Outfits like al-Qaeda, the Afghan Taliban, Lashkar-e-Taiba, and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, have been known to have institutional support from the Pakistani military through its premier intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).

Among the multitude of reasons why the Pakistani military establishment has chosen this calamitous approach is an eternal quest for “strategic depth.” Pakistan is sandwiched between India in the east and Afghanistan and Iran in the west. Given the intense and bloodied rivalry with India, a country four times as big in land mass and almost seven times as big in population, the Pakistani military establishment determined that the best approach would be to install a puppet government in Afghanistan.

In the view of the country’s top military brass, this would give Pakistan the strategic depth the nation needed to offset India’s growing military and geopolitical stature. To achieve this decade-long goal, the military establishment, through the ISI, has been arming, training, and logistically supporting certain terrorist groups deemed to be both capable of establishing their rule in Afghanistan and loyal to Pakistani interests.

For the United States, Pakistan’s cozy relationship with armed militant groups was a trump card in the Cold War, when these very groups were used to take down the mighty Soviet military as it invaded Afghanistan starting in 1979. Washington provided extensive financial support to the Mujahideen through a CIA-run covert program, Operation Cyclone. Using these funds, ISI operatives ran training camps for thousands of Mujahideen fighters. The effort paid off when the Soviets fully withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989. The Soviet Union could never recover from this geostrategic low and ended up being dissolved in 1991.

Fast forward a few more years and the extremists, ever loyal to their ISI handlers, won control of Afghanistan, giving Pakistan the much-coveted comfort of ‘strategic depth’, and giving the United States a victory in the Cold War. Win-win situation, right? The thousands of Americans and the millions of Afghanis affected by the 9/11 attacks and their aftermath would say otherwise. You see, Operation Cyclone was all about creating a lethal guerrilla force, capable of defeating the mighty Soviets. This task was accomplished successfully, but as we learned in the era of former President George W. Bush, “Mission Accomplished” can often mean something different than its literal meaning.

Eventually, the monster that the U.S.-Pakistani partnership of convenience created would come back to haunt both countries. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, Washington pressed the Pakistani military establishment to completely dissociate itself from any and all radical Islamist terror groups, an ultimatum that some Pakistani policymakers found hard to swallow. In subsequent years, Pakistan continued to covertly nurture these terrorist groups, using them against India and the Western-backed government in Afghanistan.

As Pakistan continued to adhere to its strategy of double-facedness, the United States kept bestowing its former ally with political and financial accolades. Pakistan was even given arguably the most prestigious friendship bracelet that America issue—being designated a major non-NATO ally (MNNA). Currently, only nineteen countries have been declared MNNAs, with the most controversial and questionable being Pakistan. Additionally, in the last two decades, Pakistan was provided with billions of dollars of American taxpayer money in military aid to earn its support in the post-9/11 War in Afghanistan.

Yet the policy of backstabbing continued. In fact, when asked about who is most responsible for the 2021 Fall of Kabul into Taliban hands, any seasoned and impartial member of the United States Intelligence Community will point toward Pakistan and the ISI in a heartbeat. In the last few years, American leaders and policymakers have become increasingly wary of Pakistan’s deceitful practices. This has pushed Pakistan more towards China’s sphere of influence, with the latter signing on to the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor in 2015, a multibillion-dollar infrastructure project seen as the centerpiece of China’s Belt and Road Initiative.

The United States has two options in its partnership with Pakistan. The first option is to conduct exhaustive lobbying efforts through international organizations to woo Pakistan’s military leadership. Specifically, the United States can use its influence over the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank to secure bailout packages for Pakistan’s cash-strapped economy. In exchange, Pakistan can be made to grant certain assurances that it will use its intelligence capabilities to monitor potential threats to the United States and its allies from Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.

The alternative is to accept Pakistan’s status as China’s “all-weather friend” and focus on boosting ties with a country that sees both Pakistan and China as adversaries: India. Obviously, this approach would mean abandoning a geopolitically important country and leaving it in the hands of an increasingly powerful rival. If you accept domino theory, this may not seem like the finest strategy, but it sure is an option. Now, it is up to the decisionmakers in Washington to make the call as soon as possible. As onlookers, we can only hope that they make the right one.

Zoraiz Zafar is a student at Colorado College.

This essay was a runner-up in the 2023 John Quincy Adams Society Student Foreign Policy Essay Contest.

Image: Shutterstock.

In a speech shortly after he took power as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev declared “It’s obvious, comrades, that we all need to change. All of us.” The line foreshadowed perestroika—Gorbachev’s effort to reform the USSR’s deteriorating political and economic system. It was, as he later described to the United Nations, an endeavor by which the USSR was “restructuring itself in accordance with new tasks and fundamental changes in society as a whole.” Yet, despite Gorbachev’s optimism, perestroika failed; the Soviet system simply did not have the capacity to pull off such massive change without collapsing.

With this in mind, it is worth noting the significance of U.S. national security advisor Jake Sullivan’s recent speech on “Renewing American Economic Leadership” at the Brookings Institution. His remarks mark a profound shift in American strategic and economic thinking; a confession that much of what the United States has been doing and saying for decades has been wrong, and a recognition that painful and urgent reform is necessary.

As Gorbachev learned, recognizing the need for change and successfully enacting such change are two wildly different things. Is the Biden administration on the path to learning the same painful lesson?

The Failure of the “Old” Washington Consensus

Sullivan’s speech does not just reflect his individual views—the whole event was billed in the days leading up to it as an “outline” of “the Biden administration’s international economic doctrine.” It also builds upon views that Sullivan and others in the administration have been developing for quite a while.

In brief, the speech was a strong repudiation of the United States’ strong free-market economic policies for the past forty-odd years. Sullivan challenged the idea that markets always allocate capital effectively and in socially optimal ways, that “in the name of oversimplified market efficiency, entire supply chains of strategic goods—along with the industries and jobs that made them—moved overseas. And the postulate that deep trade liberalization would help America export goods, not jobs and capacity, was a promise made but not kept.” He also acknowledged the mistake of favoring the financial sector over the “real economy” (involving material goods): “our industrial capacity—which is crucial to any country’s ability to continue to innovate—took a real hit.”

Sullivan noted that much of international economic policy, predicated on the notion that economic integration could result in countries adopting essentially Western political values, turned out to be dead wrong. “Economic integration didn’t stop China from expanding its military ambitions in the region, or stop Russia from invading its democratic neighbors,” he admitted. The China shock in particular was not adequately anticipated or addressed.

On top of these issues, Sullivan went on, are two new challenges: the climate crisis and economic inequality, the latter of which is partially a consequence of previous economic thinking. These two issues have fundamentally changed the economic landscape and require a new approach to economics. Trickle-down economics, labor union squashing, tax cuts, deregulation, and corporate concentration—all the product of strong free-market thinking—have made things worse. The combined result of all of these factors have endangered democratic stability in both America and other countries. As such, Sullivan argues, there is a need for a new approach to economics that takes into account these new realities, including a return of industrial policy.

All of this sounds awfully familiar to Donald Trump’s denunciations over the “rape” of America and calls to “make things” again, but with much more moderated language. In fact, the more intellectual cohort of the so-called New Right has been advocating for such changes over the past few years, from the hitherto heterodox economic think tank American Compass to the industrial policy-focused journal American Affairs. I myself have argued along these lines, noting America’s long and storied history of utilizing industrial policy to pursue national development.

That the Biden administration—and thus, implicitly, Washington policy officialdom—is now reading from the same music sheet is a welcome development. President Joe Biden’s agenda, per Sullivan, is centered around the capacity to build, produce, and innovate. The first step towards such is investing at home through a modern American industrial strategy. Sullivan argues, though some would contest this, that although industrial policy as a word went away, the practice did not. He cites the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) as an example.

Overall, Sullivan’s speech highlights a growing recognition that a new approach to economics is needed, especially in light of changing domestic and international economic conditions and realities.

The Coming Failure of the “New” Washington Consensus

Sullivan’s remarks are certainly welcome, but admitting that there is a problem is merely the first step to addressing it. The Biden administration faces three major obstacles that will frustrate, if not completely demolish, its efforts at reform.

First, the popular name for this new economic policy—the “New Washington Consensus,” a clear reference to the old, free-market-oriented Washington Consensus—suggests a failure to fully let go of the current paradigm. It is a symptom of a broader problem in Western policy circles, which is an inability to articulate and justify a forward-looking vision for society without leaning on past glories—see no further than the recurrent attempts to cast economic development programs as “a Marshall Plan for [insert country/region here],” the “Green New Deal,” the “Longer Telegram” for addressing the challenge posed by China, and so on. One gets the feeling that Western policymaking is intellectually exhausted and out of ideas. At the very least, there is a failure of imagination at play here, which is concerning when broad and serious reform is at stake.

Second, the speech is dishonest about what the Biden administration—and U.S. policymakers more broadly—says its intentions are for its relationship vis-à-vis China. Sullivan stressed the United States is “competing with China on multiple dimensions, but we are not looking for confrontation or conflict. We’re looking to manage competition responsibly and seeking to work together with China where we can.” Sullivan’s position—and, implicitly, the administration’s—is, as Todd N. Tucker summarized, “We are not trying to constrain China's growth. Their development and that of others is good for the world and stability.”

This rings hollow. Since the current administration took office, it has implemented significant export controls on semiconductors and blacklisted numerous Chinese companies via the Department of Commerce, whose secretary, Gina Raimondo, has stated that the United States must work with European states to “slow down China’s rate of innovation.”

An observer might point out that the intention here is to pursue “a healthy economic competition,” per Sullivan’s description, in contrast to China’s current approach of liberally pilfering U.S. intellectual property and systemically breaking and abusing the current trade system. That is true. But putting aside that industrial espionage and intellectual theft are, realistically, the rules of the game in geoeconomic competition—something the United States is intimately familiar with—Foreign Policy columnist Adam Tooze made a key observation a few days ago while analyzing Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen’s own speech on competing with China. Tooze, summarizing Yellen’s nominal stated position (and, implicitly, the Biden administration’s position), noted that “a strong and self-confident America has no reason to stand in the way of China’s economic and technological modernization except in every area that America’s national security establishment, the most gigantic in the world, defines as being of essential national interest. For this to be anything other than hypocrisy, you have to imagine that we live in a goldilocks world in which the technology, industrial capacity, and trade that are relevant to national security are incidental to economic and technological modernization more broadly speaking.”

Washington, it seems, wants to have it both ways: it recognizes it must engage in the painful (but necessary!) reform, which would realistically require a limited drawdown of the American-led unipolar world order, while also somehow maintaining that order, refusing to give an inch to the prospect of multipolarity. The feasibility of this is an open question.

Third, and most importantly, while Sullivan’s speech recognizes the urgent need to address America’s multiple economic problems and challenges, it is yet unclear whether such change can be realistically achieved at this point in the country’s current political and socio-economic context. Having written ardently in favor of this sort of change, I am now skeptical given the broader structural economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic, the war in Ukraine, and Washington’s reactions to these events. Our position is simply far weaker than it used to be, and domestic political unity has eroded over the past three years.

As Swedish writer Malcom Kyeyune has noted, “the single most dangerous period for a political system is when it has ignored a looming crisis for years and decades, and then finally, backs snugly perched against a wall that cannot be moved, tries to apply wide-reaching reforms.” It is here that political revolutions are most liable to occur; consider the French Revolution, the fall of the Qing dynasty, or the collapse of the Soviet Union. Even the current cause célèbre of defenders of the American-led order, the war in Ukraine, has its origins in a similar situation; the Maidan Revolution occurred in large part because the politically bankrupt Yanukovych regime tried and failed to save the country’s economy, described in 2014 by the Washington Post as “a legacy of 23 years of incompetent economic management.”

It's good that policymakers are finally admitting our problems are real. But, as Gorbachev could attest, fixing these problems requires buy-in from multiple levels of society, which may not be so disposed toward change.

Consider Wall Street. Can U.S. banks, the originators of credit and the economy’s most essential actors, truly accept that the Trente Glorieuses of American finance have ended? The current low-interest rate environment has already led these institutions to increase spending on lobbying in DC by 20 percent. Will venture capitalists, private equity firms, and investors—those who have gotten fantastically wealthy in the pro-speculation environment of the past few decades—welcome a world where options are limited? A world where investing in tech app companies that deliver 5-10x returns in two years is no longer an option, and instead money must be directed towards long-term (ten to twenty years), low-return (relative to tech), risk-loaded projects like factories, refineries, and the like? Common sense says such change would be fought every step of the way.

What about the military-industrial sector? Will the major prime contractors, who have gotten rich off of the current financial paradigm while failing to deliver productivity, be open to painful adjustments? Will the U.S. Army be receptive to arguments that their budget must be cut to empower the Navy? Will various congressmen really vote in favor of closing down unnecessary bases, factories, and other job-producing facilities in their own home districts? Will hundreds of former senior-level military officials, including influential and media-savvy types, embrace a fiscally necessary end to their lucrative consulting gigs?

Perhaps most concerningly, what of nonprofits and the broader media space? Much of the sector’s recent growth was due to surplus capital and a low-interest rate environment—billionaires being able to fund NGOs and media empires because there was plenty of money. Think Jeff Bezos’ famous acquisition of the Washington Post, private equity companies’ buying of newspapers, or even cryptocurrency exchange Binance’s $200 million“strategic investment” in Forbes. Now that the (low-interest rate) party is over, the preference for the service sector is ending, and economic adjustments must be made, much of the money that allowed these socially important but economically “unproductive” enterprises will vanish. In the past week alone, Buzzfeed News shut down, Vice Media closed its flagship program and is looking to sell itself, Insider cut 10 percent of its staff, and Disney will be laying off 7,000 employees in its news division—including Nate Silver, the founder of the opinion poll analytics website FiveThirtyEight (a favorite of the Washington DC class). Will this throng of employees, and others like them, who are typically college-educated and politically savvy, not fight back like mad to prevent “change” that is taking their jobs, even if said jobs are fiscally unsustainable in a new economic environment? This notion alone should cause Democrats and many Republicans to take pause and worry.

Has Time Run Out?

At this point in time, implementing a U.S. industrial strategy will not be easy, if at all feasible. While still wealthy and powerful, the United States faces internal political division, multiple external challengers, and, perhaps most worryingly, strongly entrenched internal interests that would take a firm line against any sort of radical but needed change in the country’s national and international economic doctrine. Without a clear plan of attack, the Biden administration’s agenda—to say nothing of any potential successor administration's efforts after the 2024 election—could well founder.

Policymakers and experts must address this reality and come to grips with its implications. Otherwise, the country risks waking up one day, like the French monarchy, to tiles being thrown from the roofs by enraged citizens—an eerie prelude of what could follow.

Carlos Roa is the Executive Editor of The National Interest.

Image: Shutterstock.

Despite high expectations following the Velvet Revolution of 2018 that overthrew the regime of ex-President Serzh Sargsyan, the democratic landscape of Armenia has remained bleak in recent years. The current government of the country is steadily backsliding towards non-democratic governance, and perhaps even authoritarianism.

Of special concern has been the persecution of political activists and journalists, as reflected in the annual reports of a number of NGOs specialized in evaluating the functioning of democratic institutions. Reports about Armenia’s democratic environment also include human rights violations, the persecution of political activists and members of LGBTQ+ community, as well as instances of domestic violence.

For instance, Freedom House, in its most recent annual report, downgraded its assessment of political rights and civil liberties in Armenia. The report revealed that large-scale measures were being taken against political dissidents, journalists, and human rights activists by the country’s authorities.

Moreover, in its report last May, Google’s Threat Analysis Group revealed the unlawful use by “government-backed actors” of spyware called Predator, created by the North Macedonian company Cytrox. The software had been used to target journalists, dissidents, and human rights activists in the country, with local media outlets reporting that the electronic devices of several Armenian opposition politicians have been hacked. Yet Predator is not the only spyware being used; an Armenian opposition leader Artur Vanetsyan once claimed that the Pegasus spyware had been installed on his phones in 2021. Despite the claim and the following scandal, the use of Pegasus against Armenian journalists and opposition figures has apparently not been discontinued. According to a study conducted by social media specialists in Armenia in November 2022, Pegasus may still monitor the key opposition and media personalities.

Political Arrests

The worrying developments do not stop with such spying. It is apparent that Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has also begun persecuting members of the previous government he overthrew. For instance, two former defense ministers have been arrested on what have been described as politically-motivated charges. Former Defence Minister Seyran Ohanyan, who served from 2008 to 2016, was arrested in 2020 on charges of embezzling over $2 million in state funds. The same charge was also brought against another former defense minister, David Tonoyan, who was detained in 2021.

The ex-minister Tonoyan, two other generals, and an arms dealer were arrested by the National Security Service (NSS) in September 2021 as part of a criminal investigation into the supplying of an allegedly outdated missile to Armenia’s armed forces. However, experts believe the arrest of Tonoyan had a political motivation—he was simply made a scapegoat for Armenia’s defeat in the six-week war with neighboring Azerbaijan in 2020. Having served as the defense minister between 2018 and 2020, Tonoyan resigned a week after his country’s capitulation in the war over Karabakh but obviously could not escape the persecution. It’s worth noting that Tonoyan, contrary to what one would assume, defended Pashinyan’s signing of the trilateral statement of November 2020 that ended the war. “Despite the fact that the Armenian Armed Forces, the entire system of the Ministry of Defense and the government did their best to be successful, calling the agreement reached to end the Karabakh war a ‘betrayal’ or ‘defeat’ is an insult,” he said in response to criticism voiced following Armenia’s signing of the deal.

The political persecution does not stop there; members of the country’s political opposition have been targeted, namely Dashnaktsutyun (Armenian Revolutionary Federation) party members. Artavazd Margaryan, head of Dashnaktsutyun faction in the Council of Elders (the municipality council) of Artashat, was detained for seventy-two hours along with the party’s activist Gerasim Vardanyan in January this year. The arrest was mocked by Margaryan’s lawyer, who posted on social media: “The detention is obviously illegal; it is devoid of any logic. You won’t believe it, but Margaryan had such charges only because he has a phone.”

Some arrests may end up in a tragedy, as was in the case of Armen Grigorian. A notable opposition personality, Grigorian fainted in court and later passed away in the summer 2022. He was put in pre-trial custody for two months, despite committing no crimes and despite lawyer and family concerns about his health. As each day went by, his immune system got worse.

Rapid Political Change

What is perhaps most surprising is how fast Armenia’s trajectory from budding democracy towards increasing illiberalism occurred. After the ruling government won the snap elections in the summer of 2021, things began to shift quickly. The government resumed its interrupted task of finding “the enemies of the people”—a process evocative of Stalin-era purges—with increased speed after receiving what Prime Minister Pashinyan calls a “steel mandate” from his people following the 2020 war. The representatives of the Armenian diaspora communities living in various countries around the world were one of the initial targets in this fight. For instance, the authorities in Yerevan refused to let Mourad Papazian, the chairman of an Armenian diaspora organization in France, enter the country in July 2022. Papazian, who has never committed a crime, was solely prohibited from entering Armenia due to his alleged involvement in anti-Pashinyan protests in Paris in 2021.

Pashinyan’s blacklist does not stop with Papazian. At Zvartnots airport on August 1, Armenian security personnel approached two Dutch-Armenians, Massis Abrahamian and Suneh Abrahamian, and informed them that they had been designated persona non grata in Armenia. Similar to Papazian, these two diaspora activists were prohibited from entering the country because they spoke out against Armenia’s current government.

Also notable is how quickly religious freedoms have also been declining in the country. In 2020, the NSS launched an investigation into Sashik Sultanyan, the chairperson of the Yezidi Center for Human Rights, after the latter publicly stated that Armenia’s Yazidi community was facing discrimination. Despite the criticism by international human rights NGOs, Sultanyan’s trial was in progress as of late 2022. If convicted, the activist will face six years in prison on the charge of being a part of an “anti-state” conspiracy.

Likewise worth mentioning is the deteriorating condition of media freedom as well. According to the Resource Center on Media Freedom in Europe, media freedom remains restricted in Armenia, “among threats of violence, strong political inferences, and expensive defamation lawsuits.” An Armenian-based NGO, the Committee to Protect Freedom of Expression, has recorded fifteen cases of journalists experiencing physical violence between January and September 2022. Moreover, most print and broadcast outlets are affiliated with political or larger commercial interests.

Despite earlier promises during and after the 2018 Velvet Revolution that brought Nikol Pashinyan and his team to power, and even the 2021 snap elections during which the war-torn society gave another chance to the incumbent government after the devastating defeat in the conflict against Azerbaijan, the political climate in Armenia has been changing, unfortunately in the negative direction. As one Armenian expert expresses, the country`s leader “has turned hatred into a principle of governance and lies into a form of governing.”

Aleksandar Srbinovski is a journalist with over fifteen years of experience working in print and online media. He has worked for Nova Makedonija, Newsweek, Europa, Blic, Politika, ABC News, Vecher, TV Sitel, and Skok. He holds a BA in journalism from the Saints Cyril and Methodius University of Skopje and has pursued continued training with the University of Oklahoma.

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This week Israel is celebrating the seventy-fifth anniversary of its independence. On any travel website, a fair assessment of Israel’s achievements during its first seven and a half decades would earn it a rank between “outstanding” and “exceptional.” Indeed, if asked, I would give it a rank that does not exist on travel websites: a miracle. And yet, during the past four months, this miracle has experienced nothing short of a Perfect Storm.

What are the components of the miracle and what are the makings of this Perfect Storm?

The Miracle of Israel…

First and foremost, Israel is an economic miracle. By 2021 its GDP has already reached $488 billion—a 1,860 percent increase since 1980. The economies of France and Germany grew during the same forty-one years by 246 percent and by 361 percent, respectively. By 2021, Israel’s per capita GDP already reached $52,15—a 720 percent increase since 1980—and is now higher than that of both Germany and France.

Another dimension of the economic miracle is the appreciation Israel received as the “Start-up Nation.” In 2021, Israelis registered almost twice as many patents per one million people than France: 1,851 versus 1,011. Israeli companies also have an impressive presence in the U.S. stock exchanges: currently, some 107 Israeli companies with a market value of $165 billion are listed in the U.S. market.

Yet the Start-up Nation could not have come about without an infrastructure of research and education in science and technology, creating a society immersed in a culture of technology. Israel’s success in these realms accounts for the very high grade it received in the UN Human Development Index (HDI), which includes factors like university degrees per capita. In 2021, Israel was ranked 22nd in this index, with a score of 0.919. By contrast, France was given an HDI score of 0.903 that year, placing it at 28th, six notches below Israel.

Within this context, one of Israel’s most successful sectors is its highly advanced military-industrial complex. The latest on this front is a multi-billion deal to sell advanced anti-missile Arrow 3 systems to Germany and a deal being finalized to export the David Sling system to Finland. Currently, the largest customer of Israeli arms, importing multi-billion dollars’ worth of weapons and ammunition, is India.

Adding to these economic miracles is that, in recent years, Israel has been the finding of huge natural gas reserves in the Eastern Mediterranean. These reserves will allow the country to become for the first time energy independent and provides the context for an important dimension of Israel’s integration in the region: its membership in the new Eastern Mediterranean Energy Cooperation group that includes Egypt, Jordan, Greece, Cyprus, and the Palestinian Authority.

The recent widening of the network of Arab states that have signed and begun implementing peace and normalization agreements with Israel is yet another dimension of Israel’s success. By this writing, Israel’s peace agreements with Egypt and Jordan have survived many challenges over forty-four years and twenty-nine years, respectively. Then, in 2002, the same Arab League that in 1948 decided to prevent Israel’s creation by invading Palestine, and that expelled Egypt because of President Anwar Sadat’s peace offensive, now adopted the Arab Peace Initiative (API) that offered Israel to be integrated into the region under some conditions.

And in October 2020, four additional Arab countries dropped the conditions stipulated in the API and signed peace and normalization agreements with Israel, commonly known as the Abraham Accords: Bahrain, the UAE, Morocco, and Sudan.

Moreover, in October 2022, a U.S.-brokered Israel-Lebanon agreement on their economic boundaries was signed, allowing the reciprocal exploitation of natural gas fields in the Eastern Med. Most remarkable: the agreement was clearly green-lighted by Hezbollah, a movement that continues to be formally dedicated to Israel’s destruction and is heavily supported and armed by Iran.

An equally miraculous component of the new regional environment were the new forms of defense cooperation agreements reached between Israel and its neighbors: with Jordan, in the fight with ISIS, especially in southern Syria; with Egypt, in the fight against ISIS-related and Al-Qaida-related terrorists in the Sinai; and with Abu Dhabi, in the installation of a state-of-the-art anti-rocket and anti-cruise missile systems. Similarly, relations between the Israeli and the Bahraini armed forces and between the Israeli and Moroccan armed forces have become increasingly intimate.

Not less miraculous has been the rapid development of Israel’s now exploding cultural scene. The wave of Russian Jewish immigration to Israel in the early 1990s added at least three more symphony orchestras to the Jewish state, and in the last two decades, the country experienced an explosion in the Israeli film and video world. Culture, as an important dimension of the quality of life, may also affect life expectancy. By 2021, Israel’s has reached 83.3 years, compared to 76.4 years in the United States.

The final dimension of the miracle is that, at least until this writing, Israel continues to be a thriving democracy. Indeed, this is possibly the biggest miracle of all, since none of Israel’s founding fathers, with the sole exception of Israel’s first president, Chaim Weizmann, came from any country that had previously experienced democratic government.

…Challenged by the Perfect Storm

Yet now, this truly amazing miracle finds itself at the epicenter of a Perfect Storm. For some 16 weeks, Israel has been experiencing mass protests the likes of which it has never seen. On each of the past Saturday nights, a quarter of a million Israeli—the equivalent of 8.5 million Americans—have taken to the streets. These protestors include many members of the Israeli elite: physicians, lawyers, retired judges, and leaders of Israel’s financial community and of its industrial sector. Many among them are either the leaders or the soldiers of the Start-up Nation.

Many thousands among the Israelis protesting are also IDF reservists—veterans of its various arms and special forces as well as of the Mossad and Shabak. What brings so many of them to leave the comfort of their homes and head to the nearest town square? This time the challenge against which they are mobilized appears not to be threats to their country’s physical existence but rather to the organizing principles of its creation: the core of a Jewish-democratic state.

What comprises the six dimensions of the challenge, together making it a Perfect Storm?

The first and arguably the most important of these is the attempt of Israel’s new government to redistribute power between the country’s executive and legislative branches and its judiciary. How was this to be achieved? Largely in three ways.

First, by changing the process of appointing Israel’s judges primarily by changing the composition of the committee that nominates Israel’s supreme court judges, providing politicians a far greater day in this critically important process.

Second, by significantly weakening the Supreme Court’s power to veto a law passed by the Knesset in the event that it views such a law as contradicting one or more of Israel’s Basic Laws. How was this weakening to be achieved? By amending a basic law to include an “over-ride” clause that would allow the Knesset to overcome Supreme Court vetoes of legislation that was adopted by the Knesset.

Third and finally is the suggested legislation to significantly limit the judges’ liberty to rule what government officials’ conduct could be regarded as “reasonable.” One recent example was whether the court could rule that an individual’s appointment as Minister in the government should be rejected as unreasonable in the event that this individual was twice indicted and convicted on corruption charges.

In addition to these three key components, the legal dimension of the Perfect Storm includes a tsunami of legislative proposals that would legalize corruption. One example is a bill that would allow elected officials to receive gifts from individuals or firms to fund their personal legal and medical expenses.

The second dimension of the Perfect Storm is an attempt to violate one of the basic principles stipulated as early as 1948 by Israel’s founding father, David Ben Gurion; namely, “the unity of command.” This principle stipulated that the state must possess a monopoly of force—that is, one civilian government that commands one army and one police force. So critically important was this principle to Ben Gurion and so truly was he convinced that the alternative was complete anarchy and chaos, that in the embryonic state’s very early days, when it had very few weapons with which to defend itself, he gave the order to sink the Altalena—a ship carrying arms and ammunition to “the Irgun” that, in his view, comprised a militia that still resisted merging into the defense forces of the newly created state.

Now, seventy-five years later, the new Israeli government coalition agreement gives two right-wing extremist leaders, the dual finance and defense minister, Bezalel Smotrich, and minister of national security, Itamar Ben Gvir, roles and responsibilities over powerful administrative bodies and law enforcement agencies—primarily the border patrol and the Coordinator of Government Operations in the [occupied] Territories. These bodies, which for decades have been under the sole command of the minister of defense and the Israel Defense Force chief of staff, were now to be placed under the partial control of these extremist leaders. The proposed change could prove catastrophic by allowing these individuals to inflame Palestinian-Israeli relations and by implementing policies that encourage violence.

The third, related dimension of the Perfect Storm is the recent further deterioration of Israeli-Palestinian relations, not only accelerating a likely slide to a Third Palestinian Intifada, but also threatening the sustainability of the aforementioned Abraham Accords. This slide is not entirely new—it has been brewing for some years, through the tenure of different Israeli governments. Moreover, the slide’s causes are located as much on the Palestinian side as on the Israeli side, with the diminishing credibility of the Palestinian Authority, its president, and its security services.

Yet the views of some members of the new Israeli government also undermine all efforts to protect and defend the occupied Palestinian population from the violence exercised by extremist Jewish settlers, as happened some six weeks ago in Huwara—an Arab town in the West Bank, where settlers went on a rampage in response to the murder there of two Israelis by a Palestinian terrorist.

The fourth dimension fueling the Perfect Storm could be called “burden sharing.” At its core is a new draft law that would exempt Haredi (ultra-orthodox) students from military service. This is a problem that has grown exponentially during the past decades. In 1992, a manageable 4 percent of eighteen-year-old males received such exemptions. By 2022, this number has reached 16.4 percent. One can only guess how many additional ultra-orthodox Jewish students will be exempted from military service if the proposed new draft law will be enacted. And who will be expected to continue serving in the IDF? Of course: the hundreds of thousands of largely secular Israelis who are now in the streets protesting.

The fifth dimension of the Perfect Storm is the threat to Israel’s most important alliance: that with the United States and with America’s Jewish community. From Israel’s early days, this alliance was based on the values that America and Israel share as two liberal democracies, two nations of immigrants, and, more recently, as two countries that are challenged by Islamic terrorism. Yet the proposed changes in Israel’s political system and other developments comprising the Perfect Storm threaten the “common values” basis of the very close ties between the United States and Israel. Clear warnings to that effect have already been issued by President Joe Biden; by Secretary of State Anthony Blinken; by Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Senator Bob Menendez, and by many leaders of the American Jewish community. Additionally, to date, President Biden has put on hold any invitation to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the White House.

The sixth and final dimension of the Perfect Storm is the ever-developing Iranian nuclear threat—a threat that recently reached another milestone with Iran apparently enriching uranium up to 84 percent. Indeed, in testimony given to the U.S. Congress by General Mark Milley, chairman of Joint Chiefs, he assessed Iran as only two weeks away from producing enough fissile material for a nuclear bomb and only a few months away from producing nuclear weapons.

Yet this multi-dimensional Perfect Storm also produced some remarkably positive news: the Israeli liberal democratic center and center-left that went to sleep—if not into depression following the 1995 assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and the September 2000 launching of the Second Palestinian Intifada—has finally woken up. And it has woken up big time. It has finally realized that it cannot permit the committed, active, mobilized right wing to dominate the country and to set its agenda, and that they must now be called up for reserve service in the struggle over what kind of a state they want Israel to be. For Israel’s political Right, this is a classical case of “overreach”: in attempting to go too far and to achieve too much in the service of an agenda far too extreme, the Israeli Right awakened the country’s center and center-left, and the latter are showing no signs of going back to sleep.

Thus, the Perfect Storm seems to have opened a new chapter in Israel’s social history.

Shai Feldman is the Raymond Frankel Chair of Israeli Politics and Society at Brandeis University’s Crown Center for Middle East Studies. From 2005–2019 he was the Center’s founding director. During 2019–2022 Feldman served as president of Sapir Academic College in Israel, located less than two miles from the Gaza Strip.

The author would like to thank his colleague, Professor Nader Habibi, Henry J. Leir Professor of the Economics of the Middle East at Brandeis University’s Crown Center for Middle East Studies, for his generous help in researching the economic data relevant to this article.

Image: Shutterstock.