Diplomacy & Crisis News

Before the supply chain woes suffered from COVID-19, now-National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and now-high-level White House official Jennifer M. Harris argued that the United States needed to implement an industrial policy to be more economically resilient for the coming global challenges in the twenty-first century. In addition, bipartisan calls in 2020 to strengthen the U.S. supply chain made it clear that national industrial policy legislation would be inevitably introduced. Immediately after taking office, the Biden administration signed an executive order aimed at improving the resilience of U.S. supply chains. The White House also hosted a global summit attended by leaders from fourteen countries and the European Union to discuss semiconductor supply chain vulnerabilities. During the summit, the Biden administration urged European countries to work with the United States in developing resilient semiconductor supply chains that minimize dependencies on non-Western actors. Most notably, the Biden administration signed the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022, providing $52 billion in federal subsidies to encourage domestic semiconductor manufacturing.

But though the Biden administration has recognized and made necessary changes to strengthen U.S. supply chains, there remain three pressing issues: the mapping of supply chains to determine existing vulnerabilities, persistent labor shortages, and the need for improved human capital. As long as the three problems persist, U.S. supply chains cannot be secure from geopolitical changes. 

If the United States wants to secure its supply chains, it must map its supply chains for manufacturing to determine existing vulnerabilities. Mapping these is difficult, involving numerous inputs, suppliers, and so forth. For context, a Japanese semiconductor firm took over a year to develop its supply chain. The Biden administration and multiple pieces of legislation have designated the need to identify such vulnerabilities. This is promising, but recent proposals have created more questions than answers. For instance, by their nature, corporations are always incentivized to focus on business efficiency rather than redundancy. How will the government hold companies accountable that they are properly identifying their supply chain networks? Additionally, globalization incentivizes multinational companies to source their resources and goods from various markets and locations with varying levels of transparency. Even if companies wanted to attain an accurate understanding of their supply chain, they might need help. Finally, the time needed to map these vulnerabilities meticulously is a problem with no proposed solution. 

Labor shortages of essential workers mean that supply chain bottlenecks will persist. These can have compounding effects—a labor shortage in the U.S. trucker market, for instance, has aggravated some supply chain issues. The trucker industry has a staggering 94 percent turnover rate, resulting in shortages continuing to plague supply chains because goods cannot be delivered in time and will often be stuck waiting on cargo docks. The Biden administration urged ports to stay open all day in southern California to decrease congestion. This did not improve the situation, as more truckers sought to enter the ports to transport cargo. Without taking steps to alleviate this issue, such as by raising wages and improving working conditions, instability in the trucking market will continue to have cascading impacts on the U.S. economy. Large and flashy investments into semiconductor manufacturing and other industries will be futile if consumers cannot receive the goods because there is a lack of truck drivers. 

While the U.S. government has provided substantial funding to domestic semiconductor manufacturing, it needs an influx of capable human capital to reach its full potential. Morris Chang, the founder of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), has stressed that the United States currently lacks a big enough talent pool capable of manufacturing semiconductors domestically. Moreover, America needs to do so with a labor pool that is talented and demands higher wages than its East Asian competitors. Even when Washington provides additional subsidies, it cannot speed up the time and energy required to train the number of workers needed to manufacture semiconductors instantaneously.

The Biden administration has correctly identified the critical role semiconductors play in U.S. national security. No one should doubt the sincerity and progress in addressing this vulnerability in the last few years. However, there is still much more work to be done. The U.S. government must tackle all three of these issues with urgency to unleash the capabilities of U.S. domestic semiconductor manufacturing.    

Richard Li is an undergraduate student at Cornell University. He can be contacted at rll246@cornell.edu.

Image: BiksuTong/Shutterstock.

Depuis le sociologue allemand Max Weber et son livre « L'Éthique protestante et l'esprit du capitalisme », on se représente le capitalisme comme ascétique, rigoriste, autoritaire, puritain et patriarcal. Et, depuis près d'un siècle, on se trompe. Comme le montre la lecture et la redécouverte de (...) / Capitalisme, Histoire, Idées, Idéologie, Inégalités, Spiritualité - 2017/12

What the war in Ukraine has revealed about Putin’s regime.

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The liftoff of Artemis 1 last November launched a new era in space, as the United States prepares to send humans beyond low-Earth orbit and back to the Moon for the first time in half a century. The Space Launch System (SLS) and Orion capsule finally made their debut after $23 billion and eleven years of development.

Back on Earth, another element that will define this new era in human exploration of the cosmos has also begun taking shape. The Artemis Accords are a set of shared, non-binding principles that aim to govern “responsible, peaceful, and sustainable” exploration of space, taking the form of bilateral agreements between the United States and twenty-two signatory countries. This new international space club saw nine nations sign on last year.

As we finally enter the Artemis Era, the Accords must play a more prominent role in U.S. space geopolitics and public diplomacy.

Artemis and its Predecessors

The Artemis Accords, launched by NASA in mid-2020, aim to enhance international cooperation around the return to the Moon and establish the prevailing norms and guardrails for space exploration and governance in the lunar system and beyond. The principles center around peaceful, cooperative, responsible, and transparent use of space, as well as pledges to address space debris, share data, and preserve historic places or objects like landing sites or defunct spacecraft. Many of these are common-sense and broadly acceptable principles. Another section permits the establishment of “safety zones,” which require notification and coordination procedures around the sites of activity in space to avoid conflict.

The Accords build on decades-old multilateral agreements called the “five United Nations treaties on outer space” and their celestial protocols. The 1967 Outer Space Treaty (OST) is the foundational document for international space law, establishing outer space as the “province of all mankind.” On the Moon and “other celestial bodies,” states commit to not claiming territory and to peaceful activity. States also agree to refrain from placing nuclear weapons in space. 

Subsequent treaties expanded on these issues. The Registration Convention, for example, requires states to inform the UN of objects launched into space and their orbits. The Liability Convention states that anything launched within the territory of a state is the liability of that state, no matter who is doing the launching. For instance, if your company’s smallsat hitches a ride on a Falcon 9 rocket and later ends up colliding with a French communications satellite, the United States is the responsible party. The Moon Agreement expands the “province of all mankind” principle to the Moon and its resources, requiring “equitable sharing by all State Parties.” Unsurprisingly, the United States, China, and Russia have not agreed to restrict commercial exploration and use of the Moon; Saudi Arabia’s recent withdrawal is more proof this view is fading.

This is also why there is the more geopolitically contentious line concerning “Space Resources” in the Artemis Accords, which states that “the signatories affirm that the extraction of space resources does not inherently constitute national appropriation.” A chief OST principle established that no nation can lay claim to a celestial body in space—in other words, no space conquistadors. Taking resources from that body is another question. Could a nation take Moon rocks as souvenirs, or mine substantial amounts of helium-3? The United States had already attempted to answer this question: the 2015 Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act formally legalized U.S. space mining. The Artemis Accords are an effort to establish de facto international agreement that space resource extraction is consistent with the OST’s provisions on sovereign claims.

The signatories of Artemis are geographically and culturally diverse. All have alliances or close relationships with the United States, and include NATO allies and important partners in the Indo-Pacific, the Middle East, and Latin America. Two African nations, Nigeria and Rwanda, signed at the end of last year.

Great Power Competition Goes to Space

China and Russia have rejected the premise of the Accords. Russia has slammed them as “too U.S.-centric,” and China state media claimed the Accords are redundant, given the existence of the OST, and are a U.S. effort to stunt Chinese space ambitions. 

Instead, China is forging ahead with the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS), a base on the Moon’s south pole, by the middle of the next decade. Unveiled in 2021, the ILRS will be a phased program with “reconnaissance” and “construction” stages through 2035 and crewed landings beginning in 2036, though China could achieve a crewed landing by 2030. China has opened the program to others, likely intending the ILRS as an alternative to the Artemis Program. This would be in line with its efforts to disrupt the liberal, U.S.-led global order and to develop its own.

China and Russia could silently abide by the Accords without signing or violating them, or create a set of alternative principles around ILRS that attracts signatories and emerges to compete with Artemis, similar to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (which excludes the United States). There’s been no sign of this yet, but the UAE (an Artemis signatory) inked a Moon exploration partnership memorandum of understanding with China in September of last year. An Artemis head start doesn’t necessarily mean the Accords will prevail.

So as U.S.-China tensions reach the cosmos, defining a framework for space exploration in the twenty-first century will be crucial. China claims that its activities in space are for peaceful purposes, but U.S. intelligence has warned about China’s planned militarization and weaponization of space. Among our most vulnerable assets are satellites. China famously tested an anti-satellite (ASAT) weapon in 2007 and has continued to build an ASAT weapons program that could threaten our critical satellites.

It is also not difficult to imagine a militarized ILRS base. A report last August predicted China would overtake the United States “as the dominant global space power economically, diplomatically and militarily by 2045, if not earlier,” and that America “may likely lose space superiority to China within the next decade.”

The Accords are also vital for economic reasons. There are potentially trillions of dollars of resources on celestial bodies, such as helium-3, iron, nickel, and gold, and nations that develop the capacity for space mining will want a slice of that pie. The Accords thread the needle between permitting resource extraction—by any nation—and reiterating that celestial bodies are not subject to sovereignty. The lack of internationally accepted rules of the road for space, or a situation with competing principles, will inhibit peaceful exploration of space, increase the likelihood that the domain becomes militarized, and reduce opportunities for commercial growth: if the playing field is unstable or unclear, companies won’t invest—and space is risky enough already.

Growing the Club: Prioritize Germany and India

Germany and France were not part of the initial signatory list, skeptical of the text and the coalition. France was apparently under the impression that the OST banned space mining. Many nations in Europe understandably want to maintain leverage and their own capacity to shape global policy independent of the United States. Europe has diverged from Washington on the regulation of Big Tech with the General Data Protection Regulation, for example. France and Germany also want to boost the role of the European Space Agency.

But it is in the broader European interest to join U.S.-led initiatives in a multipolar world, and the best bet to guarantee its own interests are represented in space. Infighting over defense spending had strained NATO to the point of “brain death.” But once a major threat to European security emerged from the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the alliance quickly came back together with a robust response. Members of the alliance share overarching values, and European-American disputes are relative by nature. There shouldn’t need to be a cataclysmic event with China in space to galvanize U.S. allies. 

France ultimately signed last June after being convinced by U.S. officials that the Accords were the beginning of a discussion on space resources, not a finite end. Getting Germany onboard would send another important signal that key U.S. allies are united on Accords principles, and should be a priority.

India’s accession remains elusive. India-U.S. ties are warming, and the nation has no qualms about joining new U.S.-led groups and dialogues such as the Quad and the I2U2 Group. But the country’s thinking likely remains tied to its broader geopolitical positioning. India’s historical relationship with the Soviet Union and now Russia complicates Artemis talks. Much like India’s cautious approach to Ukraine, India may choose to play it safe for now with a wait-and-see approach on competing frameworks and groupings. India may simply not sign any set of multilateral principles in space that it sees favoring one international bloc over another.

India has a robust space program with big ambitions, not to mention immense geopolitical significance for U.S. national security in the Indo-Pacific, and it is likely the biggest outstanding prize for the Accords. If India continues to seem reluctant, then the Accords should allow for some sort of partnership or secondary signatory category, at least at first. It is critical that the U.S. builds on a broad array of signatories beyond its traditional allies, and such an option might attract additional signatories.

Signing the Accords acts as a signaling device to other nations and builds consensus around principles that align with our values and interests. Every country makes a difference and can contribute in its own way. There’s a lot at stake for nations participating in the Artemis Program, whether it be future hardware or angling for astronaut slots. More signatories enlarge the pool of U.S. partners for missions to the Moon and beyond. 

Moving Forward with the Artemis Accords

NASA and U.S. policymakers should be utilizing the Accords more than they currently are. A recent NASA Office of the Inspector General report found that, despite high interest in Artemis, NASA “lacks an overarching strategy to coordinate Artemis contributions” from other countries. The agency can start with the Accords.

We should enlist current national signatories to help recruit others to enlarge the group. President Joe Biden has not yet taken advantage of the opportunity brought by Artemis 1 to outline the program’s success and gather further public support for its future. To that end, he could give a major address outlining U.S. plans for human space exploration and include a call for countries to sign the Accords. 

Second, the Accords should be part of a broader public communications and diplomacy campaign. NASA should be heavily promoting the Accords, both principles and signatories, on their media channels—securing captive audiences of millions is incredibly difficult to do, and we should be taking advantage of these rare events that draw massive public interest and excitement.

Finally, the Accords should be used as an intergovernmental forum to enhance dialogue and cooperation between signatory nations, which so far has not occurred. Thankfully, the United States just hosted the first gathering of Accords nations in Paris along with France and Brazil at the International Astronautical Congress in September 2022. However, this should just be the beginning of a transformation of the Accords from a list of national signatures to an operational and influential entity with regularly scheduled meetings and fora.

Space norms developed now have the potential to build a prevailing international framework that could last decades if not centuries, as principles aimed at the Moon could remain in place when we one day develop capabilities to reach Europa and Enceladus, orbiting Jupiter. As other actors with different values build their own competing programs, the stakes are high. The Accords will help build a new framework for international dialogue and cooperation that can increase economic opportunity for countries via space resources, inspire new generations of explorers, and increase intercultural exchange between peoples.

With twenty-three countries, the Artemis Accords are off to a great start, but expanding to other signatories and solidifying the principles as norms, more heavily promoting their existence and purpose, and reducing the chance of an alternative set of prevailing principles should be top priorities for U.S. space policy.

Alex Dubin is an Endless Frontier Fellow at the Lincoln Network focusing on space policy.

Image: SpaceX/Flickr.

On February 6, a magnitude 7.8 earthquake shook the southern cities of Turkey. Thousands of buildings, vital highways, and airports collapsed. According to the latest figures, more than 30,000 Turkish citizens were killed, while millions of people are directly impacted.

Although Turkey is highly prone to earthquakes, Erdogan’s government is facing severe criticism because of the insufficiency of the government’s response. Centralized bureaucracy has hampered the mobility of many NGOs and volunteer associations, indirectly increasing losses.

The earthquake could not come at a worse time. The Turkish economy is already in a bad shape, and the current disaster further complicates the economic and political situation in the country. We cannot know at this time the expected costs of reconstruction efforts, but the Izmit Earthquake (1999), which was less destructive, cost approximately $17 billion, or approximately 1 percent of the GDP at that time.

When Turkish voters head to the polls in June—presuming elections are not postponed due to the earthquake—for the first national elections since 2018, they will be tasked with affirming or correcting President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s sweeping economic policies over the last ten years.

Turkey’s economy is an anomaly, even against the backdrop of global economic turmoil. Since the country lifted its COVID-19 lockdowns in June 2020, the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) has instituted sweeping economic reforms to stimulate growth at all costs.

This has led to strong economic indicators, including 11 percent economic growth in 2021, growth for nine quarters during a global recession, surpassing many G-20 and OECD countries, and an expected 5 percent growth last year, making it one of the world’s fastest-growing economies.

Over that time, Turkey has also proven that economic growth does not necessarily lead to prosperity. Millions of Turkish citizens have been hurt by these policies, leading to a severely weakened Lira and runaway inflation, an impoverished middle class, and a steep decline in consumer confidence. These circumstances have bankrupted many small businesses and led to Turkish bonds reaching “junk” status among foreign investors.

Just two years ago, $1 was equal to approximately seven Turkish Liras. Today, with a strengthening dollar and a weakening Lira, that conversion rate is approaching 1:19, adversely affecting purchasing power.

Turkey’s economic “rising tide” has left the vast majority of the population underwater. These people will now decide if the current policies stick, or if a new path forward is needed.

Despite the recent economic hurdles, Turkey still possesses the potential to become a regional and global economic force. With a population of 84 million people and a strong manufacturing industry, Turkey is a global leader in consumer products, transportation equipment, electronics, and agricultural products.

To realize its full potential, Erdogan’s administration—or his successor’s—must embrace a broader definition of economic success.

Cooling Off the Overheated Economy

As of October 2022, Turkey’s runaway inflation reached 85.5 percent year-over-year, which ranked seventh-highest among any nation in the world, alongside low-income, underdeveloped countries like Zimbabwe, Lebanon, and Venezuela, and sanctioned economies such as Iran.

Though it fell to 64 percent in December, Turkey’s inflation rate is still nearly ten times that of leading Western economies.

Increasing interest rates is a commonly used tactic by central banks to cool down hot economies. However, Erdogan holds the unorthodox economic belief that high-interest rates generate high inflation, pushing for lower interest rates to keep economic activity high in exchange for popular support. To maintain his control over monetary policy, he has replaced the governor of the Turkish Central Bank four times over the last seven years.

Last fall, Erdogan called on the central bank to take interest rates into the single digits to close out 2022. This fourth-straight rate cut pushed Turkey into what Bloomberg described as “extreme outlier status” at a time when most central banks have been hawkish on interest.

In addition to driving inflation, Erdogan’s interventionist monetary policies jeopardize the independence of the Turkish Central Bank and lead to a dramatic decrease in confidence from domestic consumers and foreign investors.

Combine this with widespread industry strikes and civil unrest, a gutting of the country’s middle class, and a 55 percent raise in the minimum wage—which is expected to fuel inflation further and crush small businesses—and Turkey is nearing a hyperinflation spiral, despite its economic growth.

Turkey’s CDS premiums, the putative indicators of country risk, exceeded 900 in July 2022, the highest since 2003. This means the country is at high risk of default.

The Election Effect on an Interventionist Economy

Turkey has a strong democratic tradition, yet in recent years, there have been concerns raised regarding the transparency and accountability of the country's democratic institutions.

Turkey’s 2023 election is thus considered a watershed moment by many, a choice between institutionalizing competitive authoritarian rule or moving back to democratization.

Erdogan has signaled that he intends to stay the course on high growth at the expense of taming inflation. Poor management of the economy is the principal source of widespread dissatisfaction with Erdogan and the AKP. 

Stagflation can be tolerated by an electorate if other political issues outweigh the economy. In recent elections, voters have valued the AKP’s approach to national security and fighting terrorism over economic weakening. Prior to the recent earthquake, the weakness of the Turkish economy was the most important issue among likely voters. But now it seems that the earthquake will remain the main topic in the political agenda during the next year with irrefutable economic consequences.

Nevertheless, Erdogan cannot be underestimated, thanks to his firm control over the state.

The current presidential system—a shift from the parliamentary system before it—was endorsed in a national referendum in 2017. Since his re-election in 2018, Erdogan has consolidated power over all institutions, including the judiciary, removing democratic checks and balances.

According to many international watchdogs, Erdogan has embraced the telltale signs of authoritarianism, including nepotism, clientelism, and a lack of governmental accountability. Whoever has spoken out against Erdogan internally has been replaced by a loyal yes-man.

A win for the AKP in May, which seems probable, will serve as a ruling mandate for these policies, despite their unsustainable track. This will likely lead to increased interventionism and state management as the situation spins out of control. 

Drawing insights from Erdogan’s actions and rhetoric, Turkey could see a deterioration of economic ties with the European Union and the International Monetary fund, leading to decreased Western foreign direct investment (FDI) and borrowing capacity.

However, Erdogan has shown a pragmatic approach to replacing the influence of Western economic support, including by strengthening ties with erstwhile regional rivals Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

It’s Not Too Late for a Turkish Turnaround

On the other side of the ballot, the opposition alliance has assembled some of the world’s top economic minds to provide an alternate vision for economic success. These include world-renowned economists like Daron Acemoglu, Wharton professor Bilge Yilmaz, and former AKP economic minister and ex-Erdogan ally Ali Babacan.

If these technocrats can reach a consensus, they could swing the election and help restore the trust of foreign investors and international donors.

It will be challenging for a new government to prioritize Turkey’s long-term economic health with short-term, necessary pain. There is no path forward without institutional revision that attains broad domestic and international support. 

Returning to conventional economic policies also means unraveling some of the artificial economic growth over the last few years.

Turkey’s economy would also benefit from a return to its democratization process. A more transparent and accountable government would create a more predictable and stable business environment, thereby encouraging entrepreneurship, investment, and growth in the country.

Embracing Stakeholder Capitalism to Defeat Income Inequality

In Turkey’s new economy, everyone needs to have a seat at the table—a model commonly referred to as stakeholder capitalism. Everyone, including investors, business owners, workers, customers, and the general public, should experience long-term economic gain from growth.

Poor policy-making and governance have led to the current paradigm, taking much of the economy down with it. However, certain sectors are showing resilience against economic headwinds.

Turkish tech startups Getir, Peak Games, and Insider each recently attracted investments from prominent venture capital firms. Technology-driven development is more important for Turkey’s future, providing major employment and wage growth.

If the winner of the next election embraces logical economic governance, Turkey can become a more predictable place for FDI and investment of all kinds. If existing policies change, startups will have greater access to capital, which they can leverage to grow in Turkey. If current trends stay the same, however, then these startups will leave and take the opportunity for economic prosperity with them. It’s really that simple.

The current government bears an enormous responsibility for the recent economic losses, including from the earthquake. After all, earthquake taxes are collected in Turkey and designated for disaster relief. However, in recent years, much of those funds have been redirected to infrastructure projects, such as highways and airports.

Likewise, it would be tough for any government to coordinate relief efforts after such a large disaster like the one that has befallen Turkey. However, the current government took a number of unwise and incorrect steps, including banning social media.

Dealing with the reconstruction just three months before an upcoming election will not be easy for the current government, since there is an already ongoing and entrenched economic crisis. The adverse effects of the earthquake will aggravate the poor state of the economy and impact the tide of the election.

Turkey needs a fresh start. That’s why the next election is the key to unlocking Turkey's vast economic potential and creating a bright, equitable future for its citizens. A robust economy in combination with a stable democratic system would make Turkey a pillar of stability in an uncertain region.

Cenk Sidar is the co-founder and CEO of Enquire AI, a business intelligence software company based in Washington, DC. He is also an expert on the Turkish economy and foreign policy. He previously ran as a candidate for Member of Parliament for the Republican People's Party (CHP) in Turkey's 2015 parliamentary elections.

Image: Thomas Koch/Shutterstock.com.

Delivered just three days after a U.S. fighter jet shot down a high-altitude reconnaissance balloon from the People’s Republic of China (PRC), President Joe Biden’s State of the Union Address sounded incredibly benign toward Beijing. To be sure, the president repeated the consistent themes of “competing with China” and “autocracies have grown weaker, not stronger.” Even at one point, he shouted out “name me a world leader who would change places with Xi Jinping, name me one!” But, he also reaffirmed that he wanted “no conflict,” and stated that “I am committed to work with China where it can advance American interests and benefit the world.” The president neither explicitly mentioned the balloon nor the U.S. military response. Instead, Biden ambiguously said, “[M]ake no mistake: as we made clear last week, if China threatens our sovereignty, we will act to protect our country. And we did.” On a separate occasion, Biden told reporters that taking down the PRC spy vessel would not “weaken” U.S.-Chinese relations. “We’ve made it clear to China what we’re going to do. They understand our position. We’re not going to back off. We did the right thing. And there’s not a question of weakening or strengthening; it’s just the reality.”

Is this an about-face on U.S. China policy? Hardly. Biden has not retreated from the key U.S.-Chinese battleground—securing cutting-edge technology and semiconductor supply chains. Building on the CHIPS Act passed last August to promote U.S.-based semiconductor production, free from Chinese interference, Biden asserted, “We're going to make sure the supply chain for America begins in America … I will make no apologies that we are investing to make America strong. Investing in American innovation, in industries that will define the future, and that China’s government is intent on dominating.” 

The downplaying of the PRC balloon flap seems to be a measured approach as Xi’s China is revealing signs of growing domestic instability and policy irrationality. As David Sanger observed in the New York Times, The Biden administration is debating which China will be harder to handle: “a confident, rising power or the one that, in recent months, seems to be stumbling, unable to manage the Covid-19 virus, and increasingly stressed as it tries to restore the spectacular economic growth that was the key to its power.” Apparently, an opaque authoritarian regime, marked by the lack of transparency and free policy deliberations, is always prone to reckless and nationalistic overseas undertakings. As Xi transforms the Chinese political system from the post-Mao collective leadership into a personalist or strongman regime, the echo-chamber effect may generate even more audacious, though aimless, foreign policy ventures that could easily escalate tensions into greater confrontations. 

Beijing’s motivation to fly a spy balloon to the United States, in such a presumptuous manner and on the eve of a crucial high-level official meeting aimed to steady U.S.-PRC relations, requires serious investigation. The Biden administration reproached the Chinese government for grossly violating America’s national sovereignty, prompting a last-minute cancellation of a trip to Beijing on February 3 by Secretary of State Antony Blinken—the highest-ranking U.S. official to visit China since 2018. Blinken’s trip was meant to follow up on Biden’s meeting with Xi at the G-20 last November as part of an effort to put a floor under the increasingly contentious relations between the United States and PRC. Did Xi intentionally approve the mission to test U.S. resolve despite the potential risks of being discovered and derailing Blinken’s trip? Or was it internal mismanagement and a deficiency of coordination and communication between the civilian and military bureaucracies? The notion is that the right hand does not know what the left hand is doing. Biden officials believed that “both the senior leadership of the People’s Liberation Army and Chinese Communist Party, including Xi, were also unaware of the balloon mission over the United States, and that China is still trying to figure out how this happened.” Alternatively, if Xi was apprised of the balloon launch and approved its mission, he might have underestimated the strong domestic reactions within U.S. politics.

The intransigent attitude and poor handling by the Chinese government in its aftermath suggested the capriciousness of an autocrat that has grown drunk on his concentrated power, propaganda, and self-fulfilling narratives. It may be prudent for Biden to refrain from overly hyping up tensions with Beijing and avoid pushing a beleaguered Xi to the corner until more information and facts are received and assessed. However, Washington must be more vigilantly prepared to step up its guard in countering not only an aggressive PRC but, worse, an erratic one.

Dean P. Chen, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Political Science at Ramapo College of New Jersey.

Image: Midary / Shutterstock.com

De tous les ouvrages consacrés à la critique de l'Union européenne, et il n'en manque pas d'éruptifs, le plus dévastateur pourrait bien être l'un des plus discrets. L'un des plus décalés aussi. Travail méticuleux d'historien, « Les “Collabos” de l'Europe nouvelle », de Bernard Bruneteau, a de quoi faire (...) / Europe, France, Histoire, Idées, Intellectuels, Nazisme, Politique, Seconde guerre mondiale 1939-1945 - 2017/12

« Qu'ils s'en aillent tous ! » Quinze ans après celui des Argentins confrontés au chaos économique, le cri parcourt un Brésil balayé par les scandales de corruption. Alors qu'aucune formation traditionnelle n'échappe au discrédit, une droite radicale parfois liée aux militaires émerge, qui promet de (...) / Amérique latine, Brésil, Communisme, Économie, Extrême droite, Libéralisme, Parti politique, Pauvreté, Politique, Religion, Extrême gauche, Corruption - 2017/12

What if the war had gone differently—or takes a sudden turn?

Even great powers aren’t safe from economic warfare—if the U.S.-led order sticks together.

U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken spent two days visiting Israel and the West Bank. After meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Blinken said that normalization is “not a substitute for progress between Israelis and Palestinians.” In other words: Washington wants to tether Israel’s warming relations with the wider Arab world to the progress of negotiations with the Palestinians that have gone nowhere for the last fifteen years.

By linking these two efforts, Blinken is likely guaranteeing the failure of both.

The historic Abraham Accords agreements were signed with fanfare in 2020 on the south lawn of the White House, ushering in a new era of peace and cooperation between Israel, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain. Sudan and Morocco soon followed suit. A regional tectonic shift, the agreements opened the doors to new embassies, direct flights, a free trade agreement, and an influx of Israeli tourists—in particular to the UAE. The accords also seemed to signal a thawing of ties between Israel and Saudi Arabia, which last year agreed to allow Israeli aircraft to use Saudi airspace.

When the Abraham Accords were announced, the Palestinian leadership expressed outrage, further complicating their already strained relations with the UAE. Palestinian rejectionism is nothing new—the Palestinian Authority (PA) wants to be the gatekeeper for Israeli access to the Arab world, blocking normalization unless it’s on Ramallah’s terms.

But waiting for the PA means waiting forever. Palestinians see the PA as both corrupt and incapable of preserving law and order. It has no mandate to make the difficult compromises necessary for peace with Israel. Israelis know they have no credible partner with whom to negotiate peace, so no prime minister has the mandate to make painful concessions. The parties of the “peace camp,” once a powerful force, barely garnered enough votes last year to sit in the Israeli Knesset.

Four Israeli prime ministers from different political parties offered compromises in the name of peace over the years, but Palestinian leaders rejected them all. Rather than laying the groundwork for peace, the PA’s education system is rife with incitement to violence: Palestinian schoolbooks have erased Israel from the map, and the PA continues rewarding terrorists and their families with handsome salaries for killing and maiming Jews.

PA President Mahmoud Abbas—who is now entering the eighteenth year of his four-year term—is eighty-seven years old and deeply unpopular. More than three-quarters of West Bank Palestinians want him to resign. But the PA’s troubles don’t end there. The West Bank is facing the deadliest increase in violence since the Second Intifada (2000–2005), with more Israelis killed in the West Bank in almost a decade and more Palestinian fatalities since 2007.

Against this backdrop, it makes no sense for Blinken to create a linkage between advancing regional normalization and the moribund Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Instead, the United States should be working furiously to decouple the two.

The normalization track has particular value for Washington because it is building a robust regional alliance to serve as a bulwark against Iran.

President Joe Biden has reiterated time and again that he will not allow Iran to acquire nuclear weapons. However, a recent analysis by the Institute for Science and International Security estimates that Iran is dangerously close to breakout capacity. A nuclear Iran threatens not only threatens Israel but also U.S. allies and assets in the Gulf and beyond. If Iran becomes a nuclear power, it will set off a nuclear arms race in the region and super-charge the many proxy militias that Iran has funded around the Middle East.

As Iran barrels towards nuclear capabilities, and with America’s attention and resources drawn to pressing global threats like the war in Ukraine and the threat from China, Blinken should focus on rallying a coalition to share the work of deterring and containing Iran. In that coalition, Israel is the only country that has credible options for the use of force to prevent a nuclear Iran.

By placing an unnecessary emphasis on Israel’s domestic issues and the elusive dream of Palestinian statehood, Blinken underscored an apparent fissure between the U.S. and its strongest and most capable Middle Eastern ally. But there is still time for the Biden administration to reevaluate its strategy and set its priorities straight: national security and regional stability before the national cause of a hapless Palestinian Authority.

Enia Krivine is the senior director of the Israel Program and the FDD National Security Network at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Follow Enia on Twitter at @EKrivine.

Jonathan Conricus is an advisor to the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, focusing on the Middle East, terrorism, media, and information warfare. Follow Jonathan on Twitter at @jconricus.

Image: Shutterstock.

For decades, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been honing its abilities in cyberspace, attacking any targets with strategic value to the regime, while increasingly integrating cyber as part of the nation’s broader intelligence and warfighting toolkit. Yet, despite the CCP’s widespread and relentless use of damaging and disruptive cyberattacks, little attention has been paid to the way China’s cyber strategy has been directly shaped and influenced by Xi Jinping since he came to power in November 2012. Indeed, over the last several years, as the CCP has become less about the collective and more about Xi, so too have the country’s cyberattacks. For Xi, cyberspace has become a reflection of his personal preferences, priorities, and insecurities, and a key domain he can and does routinely exploit to suppress his critics, disseminate his narratives, fulfill his visions, and maintain his cult of personality. For China, cyberspace is no longer just a means of leapfrogging its rivals and ascending the global power ladder—it has also become a key tool in the preservation of Xi Jinping.

Xi’s Digital Fortress

Most autocrats are deeply insecure and self-absorbed individuals, fixated on their own power and security. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that Xi has emboldened and empowered China’s already extensive security system to become the most pervasive and illiberal surveillance state in the world—primarily as a means to safeguard himself as the most powerful leader in the country’s history. As many observers have noted, since taking charge of the country in 2012, and despite consistently pontificating about things like “common prosperity,” the fact he wants China to become a “fully developed, rich, and powerful” nation, or his vision for a “community of Chinese nationhood,” it has become increasingly clear Xi is most concerned about something else—himself. Unlike his predecessor Hu Jintao—China’s leader during the country’s initial foray into any sort of noteworthy cyber conflict—Xi’s visions of homogeneous national growth, identity, and unity revolve entirely around him and his divinity as China’s anointed savior. For Xi, a key piece of the enormous digital fortress he continues to shield himself with is cyberspace—a domain he uses unlike any other leader in world history to inflict harm on people or organizations who threaten him, or who question his vision and his “right to rule.”

While Chinese leaders and elites before Xi viewed cyberspace as a tool for advancing their political and ideological goals, China’s cyber strategy under Xi now unquestionably reflects his insecurities as well as his ambitions to consolidate power, protect his own image, and control the Chinese people inside and outside the mainland in ways his predecessors could not have imagined. To achieve these objectives and maintain what China expert Michael Schuman recently described as “the relentless promotion of his personality cult,” Xi has broadened the country’s cyber strategy far beyond espionage as a means of national growth and influence to now account for the protection and promotion of his greatness. Through three key steps—taking over control of China’s military, including its cyber units; bolstering the world’s most advanced domestic internet censorship system; and using cyberspace to attack and harass critics and dissidents abroad—Xi has completely reshaped the country’s cyber posture as a means of protecting himself, assuaging any insecurities and paranoia, and ensuring all facets of Chinese life at home and abroad reflect his personal beliefs. Xi Jinping wants to rebuild China in his image, and he is using cyberspace to do it.

The PLA’s New Commander-in-Chief 

Since his earliest days as general secretary of the CCP and chairman of the Central Military Commission, Xi Jinping has made it clear China’s military must be modernized. Tapping into visions of the country’s “century of humiliation” Xi has framed a strengthened People’s Liberation Army (PLA) as being crucial to restoring China’s greatness—greatness the country can only attain through his vision. In his own words, Xi has opined, “a nation’s backwardness in military affairs has a profound influence on a nation’s security. I often peruse the annals of modern Chinese history and feel heartbroken at the tragic scenes of us being beaten because of our ineptitude.” For Xi, ensuring China is never beaten or embarrassed again is critical. However, ensuring he himself is never beaten, challenged, or embarrassed is equally, if not more important. Luckily, for Xi, the country’s cyber soldiers—soldiers he controls—help to ensure these things are unlikely to ever happen. As China expert Tai Ming Cheung has said, “no other Chinese Communist Party leader, not even Mao Zedong, has controlled the military to the same extent as Xi does today.”

From a cyber perspective, Xi has been talking about making China a “cyber power” for the better part of a decade, and since at least 2015 when he announced a new Strategic Support Force, the PLA branch responsible for space, cyber, and electronic warfare, cyber has been a pillar of the country’s military modernization. Typically, works analyzing this latest chapter in the modernization of China’s military suggest this historic change is rooted in things like state security, regime survival, social cohesion, and the changing nature of warfare. Of course, all of these issues have contributed to Xi’s desire for China to have a “world-class military” by the middle of the century. However, it is now hard to ignore the fact that as Xi has come to control the PLA, including elements of the Chinese military responsible for carrying out cyber operations (e.g., Unit 61398), many of these aforementioned factors are now anchored to Xi and his own security and survival—not the Party’s. To echo William Lam, a political analyst at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, “Xi is paranoid about maintaining his personal security and of course, his power and his status as leader for life.” 

Control at Home

In the physical world, Xi has taken a number of steps to position himself as the unquestioned and unchallenged unitary leader of China. From integrating “Xi Jinping Thought” into the country’s constitution and national educational curricula to positioning himself as leader for life, to harassing, intimidating, and imprisoning dissidents, Xi has sought to ensure he is fully in control of China’s 1.4 billion people. Likewise, Xi has also worked to increasingly control online information and disseminate his messages throughout the mainland. For example, in 2014 the CCP created a new government department—the Cyberspace Administration of China—to regulate the internet, which Xi ultimately controls. In addition, Xi has long pushed the concept of “internet sovereignty”—or the idea that China (and presumably other countries) should be free to control the internet within its borders as it sees fit. Xi has also relied heavily on the country’s “Great Firewall”—the CCP’s legislative and technological toolkit—to limit outside information into the country as a means of shaping public thought and discourse in his personage. Some have suggested Xi’s control of cyberspace has been so pronounced that he has radicalized a generation. Writing for Human Rights Watch, Yaqiu Wang notes, “Now young online Chinese, once conduits for new ideas that challenge the power structure, are increasingly part of Beijing’s defense operation.” 

Early into Xi’s takeover, the government also introduced historic laws authorizing prison terms of up to three years for individuals caught posting defamatory comments online, or for people the government considered responsible for inciting protests or unrest. Control of online information on Xi’s terms has been so important, the government reportedly hired over two-million people as “microblog monitors” in 2013 to track and report unauthorized online information. Other online legal and institutional mechanisms the CCP have applied since Xi came to power include requiring government licenses for all online news sources, including messaging apps, blogs, and internet forums; mandating companies censor prohibited online content and requiring website registrants use their real names; restricting VPN usage; and increasingly ensuring internet providers obey state rules. 

An illustrative example of China’s ability to censor online information critical of Xi came in October 2022, when authorities purged the country’s internet of any evidence of a recent (and minor) protest calling for Xi’s removal. Some internet users who shared photos or videos of the protest have allegedly been cut off from accessing certain social media apps—apps which in China, are essential to daily life. Put bluntly, Xi’s obsession with securitizing himself and his image is paramount, and China’s state activities and repressive online behavior reflect this. As Susan Shirk recently wrote “…Xi takes the paranoia that has been endemic to Chinese politics since Mao Zedong’s rule to an extreme.”

Xi’s Global Insecurities  

Ensuring that his messaging, aura, and image are preserved abroad is equally important for Xi—a priority that has been reflected in the country’s use of cyberspace for years. In fact, Xi considers both internal and external threats as intertwined mutually reinforcing vulnerabilities. For starters, to combat and quell foreign threats, Xi has an entire army of cyber propagandists at his disposal who work around the clock to shape and influence public opinion abroad on social media sites. Xi’s “Fifty Cent Army”—the country’s state-backed internet militia—also regularly carries out harassment campaigns against individuals who pose a threat to Xi, and targets Chinese-language media outlets around the globe with messages and narratives important to him and his regime. China also routinely uses cyber as a means of harassing and coercing people with connections to dissidents the regime wants to return to China. For example, in July 2020, a Chinese student studying in Australia who manages a Twitter account critical of the general secretary said she had received video calls from a Chinese police officer, who, standing next to her father, warned her “remember that you are a citizen of China.” Speaking to this issue in October 2020, then-United States Assistant Attorney General John C. Demers, alongside FBI Director Chris Wray, delivered remarks announcing charges against eight agents of the CCP carrying out these types of acts against individuals living in the United States. Describing operation “Fox Hunt”—the CCP’s global anti-corruption campaign—Demers said, “…some of the individuals [targeted through this international CCP operation] may well be wanted on traditional criminal charges and they may even be guilty of what they are charged with. But in many instances, the hunted are opponents of CCP Chairman Xi – political rivals, dissidents, and critics.”

There has also been a well-documented surge of online disinformation targeting Chinese communities abroad, in places ranging from the United States to Canada, Germany, New Zealand, Australia, and Japan. Further, last year, the FBI also accused China of targeting Uyghurs based in the United States, through both physical and digital tactics. The FBI bulletin reads “Threatened consequences for non-compliance routinely include detainment of a U.S.-based person’s family or friends in China, seizure of China-based assets, sustained digital and in-person harassment, Chinese government attempts to force repatriation, computer hacking and digital attacks, and false representation online.” This nefarious online behavior that started under Xi, is a reflection of his paranoia and insecurities, as well as his desire to Sinicize China inside and out, while ensuring the world’s global Chinese population adheres to her personal vision for the country. 

The Xi Threat

While espionage is still China’s top priority in cyberspace and across the nation’s broader intelligence community (as illustrated by their recent spy-balloon fiasco) the country’s use of cyberspace under Xi has changed dramatically as he has progressively consolidated his power, and incrementally worked to shape Chinese society and thought in his image. In addition, China’s behavior in the digital domain now reflects the insecurities and paranoia of the most powerful leader in the country’s history. 

Going forward, more scholarly work is required to assess the degree China’s cyber strategy is shaped and influenced by Xi, and further, what that relationship might mean from a policy perspective. Perhaps if scholars and policymakers can develop a better understanding of what drives China’s behavior in cyberspace—as opposed to continuously focusing on how the country operates online—we will be better equipped to protect ourselves. In cyberspace, it might be time to start thinking about the “China threat” as the “Xi threat.” With Xi having secured another five-year term at the 2022 Communist Party congress, it is more important than ever that we develop a better understanding of the man who controls everything in China, and the extent to which his own beliefs and preferences shape the country’s strategy online and beyond.

Dr. Casey Babb is an International Fellow with the Glazer Israel-China Policy Center at the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) in Tel Aviv, an Associate Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute in London, England, and an instructor at the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs at Carleton University, in Ottawa. His writing has appeared in Lawfare, The Globe and Mail, The National Post, The Jerusalem Post, and in scholarly peer-reviewed publications in Canada, the United States, and Europe. Casey is also a former advisor to two of Canada’s defense ministers, and a former Senior Analyst in Public Safety Canada’s National and Cyber Security Branch.

Image: Shutterstock.

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What the war in Ukraine has revealed about alliances.

On February 4, a Chinese high-altitude surveillance balloon and its payload fell into the ocean off the coast of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, after a U.S. Air Force F-22 fighter jet destroyed the balloon with an air-to-air missile. With it went the potential for near-term improvement in U.S.-China relations. The day before, Secretary of State Antony Blinken had postponed a planned visit to Beijing, explaining to China’s top diplomat that the appearance of the balloon had “undermined the purpose of the trip.” He added that he hoped to reschedule the visit “as soon as conditions allow,” but given how the balloon episode unfolded it is not at all clear when that might occur.

The balloon fueled what can only be deemed hysteria in Washington and across the country, driven in part by political pressure on the Biden administration to eliminate the threat from China by shooting it down. The Pentagon, however, assessed that falling debris from a shootdown posed a greater danger on the ground than the balloon posed in the air, partly because U.S. countermeasures had minimized its intelligence collection capability. So the balloon drifted from Montana to South Carolina, spreading alarm and outrage before meeting its fate.

It also generated ample speculation about why China would conduct such a hostile and “brazen violation of United States sovereignty,” as the U.S. House of Representatives characterized it in a unanimous condemnation of the balloon’s flight. One of the prevailing theories is that a “rogue” element in the Chinese military intended the balloon to subvert Blinken’s trip to Beijing, presumably to prevent Chinese leader Xi Jinping, who had agreed to meet with Blinken, from engaging in diplomacy that might compromise Chinese interests or security. It is much more likely that the balloon was a routine intelligence operation of which Xi was tactically unaware, and that the Chinese military operators who launched it were inattentive to if not ignorant of Blinken’s visit.

Yet the narrative about the balloon in the United States has largely presumed deliberate and hostile Chinese strategic intent. Congressman Mike Gallagher, chairman of the new House “Select Committee on the Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party,” said in an interview that he does not believe the timing of the balloon flight on the eve of Blinken’s planned trip was a coincidence because it would be “well within the CCP’s playbook” to try to humiliate Washington. Beijing did not help its case by claiming that the balloon was a “civilian airship” for “mainly meteorological” research—a weather balloon—that was blown off course by force majeure. The Pentagon was quickly able to refute this by confirming that the balloon was an intelligence collection platform.

But many questions remain unanswered that are highly relevant to assessing Chinese intentions. Although the “airship” was obviously not a weather balloon, it remains unclear whether it was in fact blown off course and out of its operators’ control. It is difficult to understand how the Chinese could have calculated that the balloon would have drifted across the entire continental United States without detection or a response. However, in the wake of the shootdown details began to emerge that multiple such Chinese balloons had previously entered or skirted U.S. airspace over the past several years without a U.S. response. Knowledge of those precedents almost certainly led the Chinese to anticipate that even if this balloon was detected, it was unlikely to be shot down—regardless of whether it was on its intended course. Moreover, Beijing—in a highly unusual step—expressed “regrets” for this “unintended” and “unexpected situation.” In addition, Chinese officials now claim that the United States has flown similar balloons over China.

The goal here is not to adjudicate the facts of the balloon incident and its origins and uniqueness. Rather, the point is that understanding what actually happened and assessing its implications requires an empirical assessment of the facts and the available evidence on Chinese intentions. In this case, however, the relevant facts and evidence have emerged only piecemeal, while in the meantime conclusions were drawn and narratives took hold—based in part on some problematic assumptions. This rush to judgment and action was driven in part by political pressure and inflated threat perceptions in the United States, and by Beijing’s deception and secrecy—which have undermined the credibility of any Chinese explanation or countercharges. This all reflects the emerging adversarial pathology of U.S.-China relations, which is increasingly obstructing any efforts at mutual understanding, and contributing to what many observers have already described as a new cold war.

This volatile dynamic is certain to pose serious challenges for rescheduling Blinken’s trip to China. The balloon incident has increased the stakes and perhaps moved the goalposts for his visit, partly by reinforcing a confrontational American approach to Beijing and intensifying the partisan political attention in Washington to Blinken’s trip. At the same time, the balloon may have significantly reduced the potential for the visit to yield positive results, given its impact on Washington and Beijing’s perceptions of each other’s strategic intentions and posture.

Even before the balloon appeared, expectations for Blinken’s visit were low. The original plan was to use the trip to follow through on notional agreements reached by Biden and Xi at the G-20 summit in Indonesia last November, and to take the next steps forward in establishing principles and “guardrails” to guide the relationship. But there had been little progress in that direction since November, and it appeared likely that Blinken’s trip would produce little more than a standard exchange of grievances.

After the balloon appeared and enflamed anti-China sentiment, White House officials reportedly judged that the trip “wasn’t worth the potential domestic political costs of going, given that Blinken’s talks were not expected to yield much in the first place.” This raises the vital question of under what circumstances the Biden administration would accept the “potential domestic political costs” of a rescheduled trip, given the inevitable political pressure on Blinken to extract concessions from Beijing in the wake of the balloon incident, and the inevitable uncertainty about Beijing’s willingness to accommodate that expectation. With that backdrop, it is hard to see when and on what basis “conditions [will] allow” for Blinken to go ahead with the trip.

Complicating this equation, and the prospects for a productive visit, is the Biden administration’s apparent calculation that the balloon incident strengthens Washington’s hand. This is based on both the notion that Beijing is obliged to make amends for the balloon incursion, and that Xi had previously launched a “charm offensive”—which was likely to include a newly accommodative approach to Washington—because Chinese leaders decided that they need to repair China’s global image and reduce external pressure so they can focus on recent internal policy challenges. This was reflected by an unnamed U.S. official who observed that “China’s foreign policy is a constant search for leverage,” but its defensive reaction to the balloon episode suggests that it is “nearly out of options” in that regard.

Washington, engaged in its own constant search for leverage with Beijing, appears to calculate that it has gained some as a result of Beijing’s misstep with the balloon. This adds a new layer to Blinken’s original agenda for his trip. According to a former U.S. diplomat, the Biden administration’s plan was to focus on highlighting problematic Chinese behaviors and suggesting ways for Beijing to reduce bilateral tensions, rather than suggesting ways the two sides could “play nicely.” Presumably, Blinken will double down on this approach whenever his trip is rescheduled, now with the balloon as ammunition.

This strongly suggests that Washington is focused more on scoring points against Beijing than on pursuing the kind of reciprocal engagement that both sides claim to be seeking and which Xi rhetorically invoked in his meeting with Biden in Indonesia. Indeed, in his State of the Union speech last week, Biden said he had told Xi that “we seek competition, not conflict,” and mentioned the potential for cooperation only as an afterthought. This was echoed a few days later in Congressional testimony by senior State Department and Pentagon officials, who reiterated that the Biden administration’s focus in its interactions with Beijing is “competing vigorously” with China, “managing that competition,” and “maintaining open lines of communication.”

For its part, Beijing is almost certain to deflect if not reject Blinken’s planned approach. Chinese officials have repeatedly criticized Washington’s focus on competition over cooperation in the relationship, and specifically the notion that the United States can deal with China “from a position of strength.” Chinese leaders almost certainly judge that Washington overestimates its leverage in the relationship and underestimates Beijing’s. They probably also judge—and probably correctly—that Washington is misinterpreting the rationale for Beijing’s recent “charm offensive,” which is likely aimed more at scoring points against the United States internationally than at seeking favors from Washington. Accordingly, Beijing is likely to balk at any attempt by Blinken to parlay the balloon incident into greater U.S. leverage with China.

Beijing, of course, has itself to blame for the balloon debacle. The operation may not have been “brazen,” inasmuch as the Chinese apparently didn’t expect the balloon to generate attention, and they uncharacteristically apologized for its appearance. But if it wasn’t brazen, it was stupid, ill-timed, counterproductive, and nonetheless a violation of U.S. sovereignty. As such, it was an unanticipated gift to the Biden administration’s characterization of China as a difficult and challenging partner. Moreover, Beijing’s explanations have been neither complete nor credible, thus undermining its indignation at the U.S. shootdown and complaints that “some politicians and media in the US have hyped it up to attack and smear China.” In addition, the Chinese military spokesman’s statement that Beijing “reserves the right to take necessary measures to deal with similar situations”—by hinting at potential retaliation against U.S. intelligence operations—bodes ill for a relaxation of bilateral tensions in the security realm. This all suggests that Beijing itself may now be more focused on scoring points against Washington than on finding a path toward substantive engagement.

So where does this leave U.S.-China relations? Substantially worse off than they were before the appearance of the balloon, which is unlikely to be a blip from which the relationship quickly recovers. An incident that probably reflected little if any strategic thinking on Beijing’s part (beyond routine intelligence operations) escalated very quickly into a diplomatic crisis and ultimately military action because of exaggerated fears and domestic politics on the U.S. side; bureaucratic fecklessness, lack of transparency, and diplomatic deception on the Chinese side; and strategic distrust and failure to communicate on both sides. It will be difficult and will take time to repair the damage to the point where both Washington and Beijing are prepared to go forward with Blinken’s trip—especially because both sides will probably have elevated the requirements for it to be politically defensible and diplomatically productive. And both sides will probably continue to overestimate their leverage and thus their ability to set the terms of engagement.

This turn of events is especially disturbing because nothing is more urgent and vital to salvaging U.S.-China relations than dialogue aimed at mutual understanding and developing the principles for managing the relationship that Biden and Xi talked about in November. This would be best achieved through some attempt at strategic empathy on both sides, but the rapid escalation of the balloon incident raises serious questions about whether the two sides are still capable of understanding and acknowledging each other’s perspectives, and whether their domestic politics would allow room for that to happen. In the meantime, another crisis could escalate quickly, given the volatility of the environment. Washington and Beijing need to find a way to defuse that possibility.

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.

The occasion did not get much attention, but December 31 marked the end of what came to be called the “war on terrorism” (or alternatively, the “war on terror,” the “global war on terrorism,” or the GWOT). To be more precise, that is the date that overseers of military decorations in the Department of Defense declared to be the final day of eligibility to receive the National Defense Service Medal, which is awarded to all service members on active duty during a time of war. The medal had previously been awarded during the wars in Korea and Vietnam and the first Persian Gulf war. Then there was a period of eligibility lasting more than two decades for the “war on terrorism,” from September 11, 2001, until last New Year’s Eve.

This administrative detail about medals is the closest thing we are likely to get to an official announcement about the end of this latest “war.” American political leaders would understandably be reluctant to declare an end to this endeavor, only to have their opponents replay their words after the next terrorist attack that takes American lives. But now is as good a time as any to reflect on the mistakes that were central to this “war.”

The very concept of a war on terrorism—that is, warfare against a tactic, which many different people have used for many different purposes through the centuries—is fundamentally flawed. As former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski observed, speaking of a war on terrorism is like calling World War II a war on blitzkrieg. The administration of George W. Bush was most responsible for putting the GWOT concept into heavy use, but countless commentators accepted and used the concept as if it made perfect sense.

One of the additional faults of the war metaphor is that it implied the counterterrorist effort had a definite beginning and end—as World War II for the United States could be said to have begun with the attack on Pearl Harbor and ended on VJ Day. But just as terrorism has been used for centuries and lacks an identifiable beginning and ending, counterterrorism has no clear starting and stopping points. Many Americans regard September 11, 2001, as a starting point, but the United States was very much engaged in counterterrorism, with good reason, well before that. (During much of the 1990s I worked in the Counterterrorist Center at the CIA, as chief of analysis and then as deputy chief of the center.)

Although the administrators of military decorations had to come up with some ending date for a “war” that had gone on for two decades, neither terrorism nor the need for counterterrorism has ended. But some of the policies adopted in waging the GWOT implicitly assumed that there would be an end—a counterterrorist equivalent to VJ Day. Some of those policies concerned the detention of captured combatants. In a real war, such issues generally get resolved when the war ends, as prisoners of war are paroled or repatriated. But with the GWOT, thirty-four prisoners remain at Guantanamo, with no indication that this detention facility that is a stain on America’s international reputation will close in the foreseeable future.

Another fault of the war metaphor is to overemphasize the use of military force. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, there were even silly pseudo-syllogisms that said the country faced a grave security problem, that to treat the problem seriously we must declare war, and if it’s war then that means we fight it with military force. Military force is only one of several policy tools that can be used in counterterrorism. Like the other tools, it has distinctive advantages but also its own limitations and disadvantages. The chief limitation is that terrorism often does not present good military targets, especially when preparations for a terrorist attack are made in the very country that will be the target of attack. The chief disadvantage is that the spilling of blood from the use of military force can enrage people enough to resort to using terrorism themselves, or to support and sympathize with those who do. This counterproductive aspect of use of the military in the name of counterterrorism can arise even from merely deploying armed forces in a foreign land.

The most damaging and costly use of armed force associated with the GWOT was the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Critical to the Bush administration’s ability to muster support for this major act of aggression—against a country that had nothing to do with 9/11—was the notion that the invasion was nonetheless part of a “war on terrorism.”

Wars in the American tradition are seen not only as having a definite end but also as ending in victory—again, just like World War II. With counterterrorism, living in this tradition leads to a kind of mission creep that seeks a victorious ending that is never likely to come. The prime case in point is Afghanistan, where the military intervention aimed at Al Qaeda and its Taliban hosts was a justifiable response to 9/11 but morphed into a twenty-year nation-building effort that was bound to fail.

The GWOT’s damage to legal systems and constraints has been substantial, and the war metaphor is largely to blame. In a real war, some normal legal procedures and standards are curtailed or circumvented with the general understanding that a national emergency sometimes requires emergency procedures that will end when the emergency ends. But again, counterterrorism does not end.

The very choice of Guantanamo as the location for a detention facility represented a departure from the rule of law, given that the choice was an attempt to put the facility beyond the reach of U.S., Cuban, or any other law. A military tribunal system that was installed there, in foolish disregard of the substantial and successful record of regular civilian courts in handling terrorism cases—especially in the Southern District of New York, the jurisdiction in which the World Trade Center was attacked—reprised an emergency system that had been used during World War II to prosecute German saboteurs captured in the United States. Whatever was right or wrong about that usage, it was over and done with when World War II ended. Today, the military tribunals at Guantanamo trundle on in a seemingly endless mess of delays and procedural quandaries. Justice still has not been administered to the 9/11 suspects, twenty-one years after their actions.

Perhaps because, as Brzezinski observed, wars do not really get fought against tactics rather than a named enemy, thinking about the GWOT came to postulate a named enemy. That enemy, following naturally from 9/11, was sometimes defined as Al Qaeda and sometimes more generally as foreign radical Islamists. The narrower definition led to widespread misunderstanding about how Islamist terrorism supposedly was the work of a single, centrally controlled group, which it never really was. Even the broader definition was not broad enough to reflect how terrorism, including terrorism that strikes U.S. interests, is by no means solely the work of radical Islamists.

United Nations secretary-general Antonio Guterres recently warned that the “biggest threat of terrorism” today comes from right-wing and white supremacist groups in the West. Other expert observers have reached a similar conclusion about terrorist threats within the United States. Perceptions of terrorism that developed within a conceptual framework built around a “war” supposedly starting with 9/11 have ill-prepared the American public to understand the terrorist threats the country faces today.

Notions associated with the GWOT continue to impair strategic thinking about national security in other ways as well. One is a tendency to disconnect terrorism from other forms of political violence that can be at least as destructive as terrorism properly defined and can raise some of the same strategic and moral questions. Related to that is a frequent failure to relate terrorism and other forms of political violence to the political context in which they occur. The attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, and subsequent party politics related to that event, have blurred boundaries between violent extremism and what passes for a political mainstream in much of present-day America. The GWOT framework is not built to understand that blurring or to appreciate the danger it represents.

Finally, the tendency to think of a GWOT as defining an era that ran from the end of the first post-Cold War decade to a current era of great-power competition impedes grand strategy by encouraging the notion that policymakers think, and should think, about only one type of security problem at a time. Great power competition was a big part of the strategic reality that the United States faced during the period of the GWOT, and terrorist threats continue to be part of the reality that the country faces today. Policymakers always have had to walk and chew gum at the same time, and they still do.

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

Image: Shutterstock.

Following the “long wars” in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. military is in the midst of attempting a major re-orientation toward the Indo-Pacific region. Concurrently, rising neo-isolationism on both ends of the political spectrum and perennial resource allocation decisions between domestic and security programs are generating questions about America’s role in the world and how to achieve strategic ends given limited strategic means. Not surprisingly, domestic politics, COVID, and economic issues have consumed attention spans and resulted in much self-absorption.

Meanwhile, the nation’s adversaries present as having no such self-questioning. To the contrary, they are clearly on the march: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, China’s increasingly assertive moves throughout the Indo-Pacific region and beyond, North Korea’s continued development and provocative testing of missiles, Iran’s linkages with and support of both Russia and China, and a host of transnational entities ramping up violence and chaos. In short, multiple state and non-state actors are moving into real and perceived vacuums caused by diminishing American presence.

One essential characteristic of American culture is an unquestioned faith that anything can be improved through the application of more and better technology. This is certainly true of the American way of war, which is highly technocentric, even to the point that capability development now seems to be driving the formulation of strategy rather than the other way around. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the Indo-Pacific.

All of this brings us to the issue of how the U.S. military in general, and its sea services in particular, are redesigning themselves to contend with Chinese ambitions in the midst of multipolar global turmoil. It is not an encouraging picture. Old strategic paradigms like “containment” are being dressed in new vocabularies and labeled as “modernization.” The self-deceiving trap of “mirror-imaging” dominates deterrence assessments. Various technologies are being hawked as panaceas for reduced American capabilities. 

Current U.S. Marine Corps leadership has so seized on the idea of technologically enabled containment and has divested so much warfighting capability toward that end that it is no longer capable of leading a credible “from the sea” counteroffensive. The essence of its containment concept is emplacing small antiship missile detachments throughout the First Island Chain. Numerous articles have identified significant basing and supportability issues with this concept. Rather than re-visit those valid tactical matters, we want to draw attention to the inherent strategic fallacy undergirding U.S. notions of containment with respect to China.

The United States can take some pride in the conception and implementation of “containment” against the Soviet Union during the Cold War. But, it risks great hubris if it continues to fail to understand China’s conception of containment—a conception deeply embedded in Chinese culture and much more nuanced and subtle than current Western thinking. 

In their desire to explain China’s more sophisticated strategy, some analysts have turned to a Chinese game, weiqi, better known in the West as Go. Weiqi is believed to have been invented over 2,500 years ago. The very word weiqi (pronounced way-kee) means “encirclement board game” or “board game of surrounding.” As such a name implies, skilled players of weiqi develop a deep understanding of both encircling and counters to encircling. Moreover, unlike more Western forms of direct confrontation, weiqi players seek firstly to build strong structures throughout the board and then from multiple positions of strength weaken and suppress enemy structures. The better players shun contact, preferring to parry threats with counter-threats. From the perspective of weiqi, the PRC homeland is but one structure of many being built around the globe.

A recent Atlantic Council-University of Denver study entitled China-US Competition: Measuring Global Influence uses the Formal Bilateral Influence Capacity (FBIC) index to organize data so as to help strategists better understand influence trends over time. Axios extracts three global views (1980, 2000, and 2020) from the study to enable quick tabbing among time frames. These graphics not only highlight increasing Chinese influence and decreasing U.S. influence, but thet also do so in a way that enables us to see the parallels with a sophisticated weiqi strategy: China’s actions over forty years to build influence structures in multiple areas around the globe.

 Applying a weiqi model to PRC global initiatives, we can make several observations:

1. While current U.S. attention on Taiwan, China, and the First Island Chain indicates that the United States is focused on a direct approach to containment, the graphics indicate that China is taking a more indirect approach by developing multiple influence structures globally.

2. While U.S. political leaders talk of a “whole of government” approach to international security but struggle to put one into action, the PRC is already acting, taking advantage of lapses in U.S. presence and capabilities.

3. While the graphics help us understand geospatial aspects of Chinese influence structures, we need to be mindful of weiqi applications in other domains, e.g., cyber, critical materials, information, space, chip industry, and so on.

From these observations, we can derive several implications with respect to strategy and force design:

1. The U.S. military’s divestment of current capabilities to invest in unproven future capabilities in essence removes players from the global board and creates vacuums that China and other adversaries are exploiting. It is precisely the wrong business model at the wrong time.

2. China’s 40-year development of overseas influence structures and capabilities aims to outmaneuver any containment strategy based on the First Island Chain. Strategically, Marine Corps elements planning to occupy portions of the First Island Chain are mostly irrelevant even before they deploy. In weiqi terms, they are attempting to occupy what is already a forbidden point—a point surrounded by opposition stones and having no liberties—a rather compelling way of describing the support conundrum of the Marine emplacement of isolated antiship missile detachments!

3. China’s numerous, capable, and growing influence structures overseas will continue to proliferate absent immediate, decisive, and coordinated action by those seeking to forestall Chinese hegemony. Specifically, that intent on preserving some semblance of a more open and free global order must act to increase U.S. presence.

4. The challenges of securing basing rights in the face of Chinese influence structures indicate that multiple naval task forces of varying sizes operating from the seas are essential to countering both Chinese and other adversary attempts to “re-colonize” lesser developed nations.

5. The number, type, and global dispersion of Chinese influence structures mandate a similarly broad-based Western strategy. Within that strategy, the implication for the U.S. naval services is an increased number of naval task force packages capable of multidimensional combined arms operations across the spectrum of conflict—putting more general-purpose, fully capable players on the global game board. 

Pulling these points together, we can see that both domestic and Long War distractions have created influence vacuums that China and others have exploited. Divesting general-purpose, sea-based forces has removed potent and relevant players from the board at precisely the wrong time. Worse, developing a specialized, unsupported force for a specific area in an attempt at direct containment is precisely the wrong strategy for the wrong adversary. National strategists need to pull back from a direct, technocentric concept and develop a more sophisticated global strategy that appreciates multi-domain, multipolar influence structures. Civilian leaders need to reverse the current process by which myopic, military force design drives strategy. Rather, the nation needs to restore a coherent process of safeguarding national security by which national strategy drives force design.

Brigadier General Keith T. Holcomb, USMC (Ret.), is a former USMC Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. His last assignment was as Director of the Training and Education Division, U.S. Marine Corps Combat Development Command.

Image: Z​erbor/Shutterstock.

When Churchill made his famous “Iron Curtain” address, it seemed apposite to the zeitgeist of the time. Alas, now, the curtain swaying across Central Europe—from the Baltic to the Bosphorus Straits, and from Bialystok to the Black Sea—is not one of iron. The Cold War antithesis, that Free Market vs. Communism bivalent thinking which had symbolized everything from the dawn of Christianity onward, became solidified into the concepts of good and evil. That type of thinking, with Liberalism being the successor to Christianity, has continued, although there are several shades of grey now between good and evil. No more the clarified pure air of indians and cowboys, or the honest sun setting on the philanthropic British Empire. No, the twentieth century threw up what the Czech philosopher, Jan Patocka called the polemos of night, a century of war and horror—a reckoning of third-world nations, of revolutions, of metaphysical solutions. After the Enlightenment reaction to Christian thinking and the sanctification of reason, there sat in opposing camps the sciences and the spirit. The legacy of the French Revolution appeared to show the epic struggle of Church vs. State.

Now, in the post-Liberal epoch, the bivalent labels are still used to categorize the good and the bad. The new curtain falling across Europe is a virtual one. It can be moved, reassembled, realigned. Essentially it is a curtain of appearances, a simulacrum of reality. For, behind the “arras” of Enlightenment morality, of “just wars,” lurks Polonius and the spirit of realism. The specter of communism has gone, yet there still stands guard the Janus-faced China, wearing a mask of capital, beyond the wall. Therefore, it tells us something different about the weltanschauung of the present. It is the end of ideology, not the end of history. Realism in politics is back. It comes in three forms; a big Russian bear, a Chinese Silk Road, and a realization that wars of liberal universalism are over.

Realism is an important weather vane, shifting like the frosts of the Eurasian steppe. The new president of the Czech Republic, Petr Pavel, arrived in time for a kind of “Prague Spring,” and very conveniently, in the midst of a volte-face of sorts by the good coalition. Whilst it is a welcome bolstering for the Western alliance forces against Russia, the weather cock of realism has started crowing. The Czechs are rooted in the earthly, ruby soil realism of Bohemia, of the “Good Soldier Svejk” of Jaroslav Hasek. In this, Hasek mocks the pointless crusades of war; it sees through the surreal nightmare of a war and loyalty to an empire the Czechs have no allegiance to. This is realism; it’s opposed to the “blood and soil” of the Third Reich or the Alexander Dugin-type romanticism of the Russian soul. Not for the Czech spirit the existential wonder of war of Ernst Junger. Yet, unlike the liberal credo of the West, it also is not enshrined in the moral language of universalism or the correctness of liberal values. It isn’t therefore bivalent, it is ambivalent. The Czechs sit uncomfortably in this buffer zone of Europe. At once a culture of resigned despair at the alacrity of its neighbors. Hence Pavel strides both of these camps although, as a former NATO commander, he knows the value of realpolitik. It was Bismarck who anecdotally said, “he who is master of Bohemia, is master of Europe.”

The liberal method of transposing its values to foreign policy has hit the buffers, despite Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s Sisyphusian demands. You can judge the winds of change in foreign policy by the sudden proliferation of “think tanks” piping up and stating the obvious. There are tanks and think tanks, and, despite the commitment of the Leopards , it may be the think tanks gaining the upper hand. The RAND Corporation posits in its paper Avoiding a Long War: US Policy and the Trajectory of the Russia – Ukraine Conflict that the mantra of Kiev, to push the Russians out of the Ukraine, particularly Crimea, is unrealistic. There is a recognition that a likely Russian counter-offensive this spring will push back any Ukrainian gains. The report sees a kind of “sliding scale”; whilst Ukraine’s territory gains may appease the media of the West, it comes at a greater infliction of Russian infrastructure attacks. A Ukrainian campaign to take Crimea, besides increased loss of life and the fact that Crimeans are aligned with Russia, makes such a move a bridge too far, according to the report. But most tellingly, it also does not align with the United States’ other “global priorities,” and the fact that “duration is the most important” factor for the United States. Biden seems to be lagging behind; he was quoted in The New York Times (January 18) to be all for striking Crimea, a day before his CIA chief, William Burns was hinting to Zelenskyy in Kiev that unlimited aid was old school, despite the new tranche of $45 billion sent forth in December. Putin is manipulating these tendencies, and with China is playing the long-term economic game of Xiangqi—the ancient Chinese board game—the object of which is to surround your opponent by attrition, rather than a knockout blow, like chess. The idea of unlimited support, implanted in the minds of Kiev by portfolio-less politicians like Boris Johnson, also augers badly for future peace talks.

The Washington Post signals a “post-war military balance that will help Kiev deter any repetition of Russia’s brutal invasion.” Hence the Article 5-like support is waning and the tactic will be the allocation of weapons rather than fighter jets or NATO entering the equation. It would seem the United States is angling for the sense of the April 2022 proposal in Istanbul; military backing by the West but a foregoing of NATO membership by Kiev. Boredom and Time are ephemeral things. Schopenhauer, the arch-melancholic who made Sartre look like a stand-up comedian, opined that “Life swings like a pendulum back and forward between pain and boredom.” Where the pendulum freezes will determine whether the short-termism of the West, the drain on cash and weapons, will inflict too much pain on the Faustian liberal West. The Russian spirit, accustomed to hardship, to the vast endless plains of Dostoyevsky’s soul, are used to playing a long game.

Despite the advent of Pavel in the Czech Republic, the new school of realism is drawing the curtain. The president of Croatia, Zoran Milanovic, has said he is opposed to “sending any lethal arms as it prolongs the war” describing the war as “deeply immoral” due to a continuation of the war. A Just War must be tempered by realism and suffering. Continued support raises other issues such as the fate of ethnic Russians and Ukrainians in the Donbass. Two-thirds of the ethnic populations of Donetsk and Lugansk have left to Russia or Ukraine respectively. Ukraine would be looking at a re-plantation of the Donbass; the history of Northern Ireland being a sobering lesson for the future. The Western alliance is not de facto uniform; Croatia, Austria, Hungary, and Italy are noticeable “culture” states opposed to the pastorate like civilizing missions of the Western powers. Yet the Western alliance is predicated on a liberal worldview that incorporates a globalist economic perspective. This is the petrol in the think tank, the resource-driven contradiction which conflicts with a moral hegemony. The battle between tanks and think tanks continues. The virtual curtain flutters through Bohemia. Meanwhile Zelenskyy ushers in a campaign against corruption, no doubt aware of Machiavelli’s maxim: “War makes thieves and peace hangs them.”

Brian Patrick Bolger studied at the LSE. He has taught political philosophy and applied linguistics in Universities across Europe. His articles have appeared in the United States, the UK, Italy, Canada, and Germany in magazines such as The National Interest, GeoPolitical Monitor, Voegelin View, The Montreal Review, The European Conservative, The Hungarian Conservative, The Salisbury Review, The Village, New English Review, The Burkean, The Daily Globe, American Thinker, The Internationalist, Philosophy News. His book, Coronavirus and the Strange Death of Truth, is now available in the UK and the United States. His new book, Nowhere Fast: The Decline of Liberal Democracy, will be published soon by Ethics International Press. He lives near Prague, Czech Republic.