Diplomacy & Crisis News

Rhetoric aside, most congressional Republicans and Democrats agree on the key national security challenges the United States faces.

The Gulf Cooperation Council has maintained links to both Russia and the West.

Ukraine’s love-hate relationship with SpaceX’s Elon Musk continues.

For too long, the international community has ignored the Nigerian military’s abuses.

India’s geopolitical shift is inexorable, and membership in the G-7 would help bridge north-south divides.

« Onze septembre 2001. Deux avions de ligne percutent deux tours géantes à la pointe de Manhattan. » Très vite, comme pour conjurer l'effet de sidération, le dramaturge Michel Vinaver écrit une pièce de théâtre en forme d'oratorio qui recompose, de manière factuelle et sobrement, à partir d'informations (...) / États-Unis, France, Culture, Terrorisme, Théâtre, Banlieue - 2017/12

Critics fear upcoming reform on wiretapping rules will hamper the judiciary.

British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak promises training for Ukrainian pilots.

Europe’s brutal conflict has been a harsh but instructive teacher.

How to shore up Washington’s eroding credibility in Asia.

What the war in Ukraine has revealed about non-Western powers.

The response to the vessel in U.S. airspace shows how the next Cold War could be as overreactive as the first.

Since the start of the war in Ukraine, foreign policy pundits have resurrected political jargon that suggests that Western efforts to protect the liberal international order are being challenged by nation-states that belong to the so-called “Global South.”

Even a conservative realist scholar like Walter Russel Mead has been prone to refer to the South, a term coined by neo-Marxist political economists during the 1980s, when he recently wrote that the skepticism expressed by Brazil’s President Lula Da Silva regarding NATO’s policies in Ukraine reflect “decades of wariness in the Global South about the Wilsonian agenda.” Further, Mead noted the continued existence of the perception that Wilsonian or multilateral institutions formed after World War II are “instruments of Western domination that should be feared and resisted.”

To recall, according to the intellectual jargon that was trendy before the end of the Cold War and the ensuing era of globalization, the terms “North” and “South” were used as a way to compare the industrialized and developed nations associated with the mostly white nations of Western Europe, the United States, Canada, and Australia to the poor, “underdeveloped,” or “less developed” and mostly non-white countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, later to be known as the Third World.

Neo-Marxist scholars came up with the grand theory of “dependency” that stipulated that the global capitalist system encouraged the flow of resources from the “periphery” of poor states in the South to the “core” of wealthy nations in the North, enriching the latter at the expense of the former. In order to correct this injustice, they said, there needed to be a major transfer of wealth from the North to the South that would then develop by rejecting Western forms of capitalism and embracing centralized economic systems.

Even liberal-internationalist American policymakers bought into this political-economic model, arguing very much like Mead does today that the opposition to American Cold War policies by the likes of Venezuela, Nigeria, or Nepal is rooted in their common belief that the white industrialized nations have failed to help them deal with their social-economic challenges.

From that perspective, the Soviet Union was seen at that time—like Russia and China today—as exploiting the misery of the South. So, in order to strengthen its geostrategic position and win the hearts and minds of the Southerners, the North had to slow down its drive to spread capitalism and free markets and trade worldwide. Instead, it helped create a New International Economic Order that would channel economic resources to what were then authoritarian regimes in Latin America, Asia, and Africa.

Needless to say, much of the above proved to be, in retrospect, like much of Marxist thinking, no more than provocative but useless intellectual exercises, with the international economic order shifting in the direction of free markets and liberalized trade. That helped bring countries like India and China out of poverty and turned the so-called “Asian Tigers” (Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan) into economic success stories, with the former poverty-stricken city-state of Singapore enjoying a higher rate of Gross National Income per capita today than the former imperial power that ruled it, Great Britain.

The North not only helped the South integrate into the global economy and take the road toward industrialization and prosperity, but the North, led by the United States, also ended up winning the Cold War against the Soviet Bloc. Of course, this was not due to it being white—after all, so were the Russians and Eastern Europeans—but because its military strength depended on its economic power. Contrary to some ensuing myths, the role that America’s allies in the South played in that victory was marginal. If anything, arming countries in the Third World and subsidizing their corrupt leaders proved to be a burden and not an asset in the competition with the former Soviet Bloc.

The United States and its allies became popular after the collapse of the Berlin Wall not because of the amount of economic assistance they provided to Third World countries but because they were victorious and their model of economic development helped turn, say, South Korea into a regional and international winner as opposed to North Korea that remained behind as a loser.

But Mead gets one point right: Contrary to fairy tales disseminated by Western propagandists, America and its allies were driven not by altruistic notions of spreading democracy but by self-interest that in many instances was fused with Realpolitik cynicism. The West was committed to ensuring that the Soviet Union and its allies didn’t dominate the Eurasian continent and pose a direct threat to Western interests in maintaining a free association of nations states, including free navigation and trade.

This explains why the United States and its NATO allies are now backing Ukraine. It’s not part of a narrative in which democracies are standing up to authoritarian regimes, but a strategy aimed at containing an aggressor that has challenged the status quo and balance of power in Europe. That poses a direct and immediate threat to the interests of the United States, Germany, France, Poland, and the other members of the NATO alliance as well as some of its leading partners in East Asia, such as Japan and South Korea, which rely on the United States to contain the influence of China, another potential challenger to the regional status quo.

However, Russia’s aggression doesn’t pose an immediate and direct threat to the long list of nation-states that have very little in common in terms of their economic and social development, culture, race, and overall direction of foreign policy.

After all, what binds together Brazil and other American partners in Latin America, technologically-advanced and pro-America Israel, wealthy Saudi Arabia, post-apartheid South Africa, and the mighty regional power and great civilization of India? Each of these states made a cost-benefit calculation which led them to conclude that the costs of joining the United States and its allies in a global military-economic campaign against Russia outweighed the benefits they could derive from such a policy.

Mead is wrong to think that the problem, to quote United Nations secretary-general Antonio Guterres, is that the West has failed to grasp just how alienated the South has become from the Western world system, supposedly reflecting the “gravest levels of geopolitical divisions and mistrust in generations.”

The challenge facing the United States and its allies is mostly geostrategic. Its interest lies in ending the war in Ukraine without allowing Russia to defeat its partner, Ukraine. There needs to be a debate on how the United States could and should achieve that goal. But if it does, expect most nations of the “South” to applaud. As before, interests rule the day.

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

Image: Amit.pansuriya / Shutterstock.com

The earthquake that recently rocked Turkey and Syria measured 7.8 on the Richter scale but was off the charts on the scale of human misery, particularly in Syria. America, as a beacon of Western liberal values, must act now.

While the government in Damascus allows aid to enter the region through only one border crossing, it has been resistant to opening up aid into northern areas, where whole neighborhoods have toppled over, burying alive fathers, mothers, children, and infants. Those who have not been crushed alive are choking on dust in small air pockets that soon become due to poisonous carbon dioxide—the pollution expelled from the victim’s own lungs.

Then came the snowstorm, dropping temperatures to dangerous levels.

Neighbors clawed at the rubble with their bare hands, struggling to save the buried survivors as bitterly cold winds stung their hands and frustrated their sacrificial, saving acts.

Turkey, a NATO ally, has received promises of tens of millions in humanitarian aid. As for Syria, which suffered in the same earthquake, few are lining up to help. Syria’s allies, Russia and China, both with shrinking economies, have each made promises but have little capacity to bring immediate aid by air.

The Assad family regime, which rules Syria with an iron fist, is of course, despicable. Its brutal actions in that nation’s tragic civil are responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands and the dispersal of millions of refugees. Syria is not a U.S. ally, and it is politically impossible for Washington to make a pact with Assad.

Meanwhile, other regions, said to be held by the “Syrian opposition” are, in reality, held by pro-Al Qaeda jihadist factions.

Still, what is politics to a starving infant that just lost her mother in the horrifying instant when the earth moved? What is politics to the stricken old man, watching his loved ones emerge from the mound of earthen blocks, dead—knowing that he will have to find some way to pay to bury them again?

President Joe Biden cannot claim to be a defender of universal liberal values and look away from these helpless children, their faces blackened by the dust of their former homes and their eyes clouded by tears as they hunt for relief from the immense suffering. And now comes the snow and the aftershocks.

It is outrageous for the people of one nation to be rescued by Western aid yet the people of a neighboring nation, who suffered the same calamity, are ignored.

Four million individuals in opposition-held northwest Syria live in appalling conditions with limited access to health care, food, or warm places to sleep. Something must be done.

The U.S.-led international community must immediately mobilize men, money, and materiel to support rescue and humanitarian efforts in northern Syria. The United States must also put pressure on the Assad government to allow humanitarian aid to flow freely to all areas affected by the earthquake, without political restrictions.

In order to regain the confidence of the Arab world, the United States has to prove by actions that the United States says what it means and means what it says. 

Ahmed Charai is a Publisher. He is on the board of directors of the Atlantic Council, the International Crisis Group, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Foreign Policy Research Institute, and the Center for the National Interest.

Image: Voice of America/Wikimedia Commons.

Following the inauguration of Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brasília, Iran announced that it would send two of its warships to the South American country. The Russian state news agency, Sputnik, which has some other local proxies as its sounding board, recapitulated the announcement just two days before the ships were scheduled arrival of the ships to arrive—as published in the Brazilian government’s official journal. However, the ships never arrived.

What made Iran change its plans? Or rather, what were Iran’s plans?

Officially, Iran says that its ships, Dena—a Mowj-class frigate—and Makran—a former crude oil tanker converted into a helicopter carrier, now the largest ship in the Iranian navy—are on their way to the Panama Canal. The crossing of the Pacific Ocean would be the focal point for its plans to “go around the world.”

So far, it is not known what prompted the Iranians to change their plans and possibly their route. A seemingly isolated event may reveal part of the answer. On January 16, seven days before the Iranian ships arrived in the Port of Rio de Janeiro, the U.S. Air Force dispatched a WC-135R Constant Phoenix aircraft to South America. The operational purpose of the WC-135 is, notably, to identify atmospheric signs of nuclear activity—in other words, to be a “nuke sniffer.”

Dispatching such a plane on an unprecedented mission to collect a baseline reading of normal atmospheric conditions in South America raises eyebrows. The aircraft departed from Puerto Rico and collected atmospheric data off the coasts of Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname, French Guiana, and part of Brazil. It also traversed an area from the north up the Rio de Janeiro region, where the Iranian warships were due to be. The U.S. military did not intend for the mission to be secret: the plane’s transponder data was available to the public via flight monitoring platforms.

A second flight was carried out days later. The plane retraced its route around South America in the opposite direction, collecting data over the Caribbean, the northern coast of Venezuela, and over the waters of Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru. On this route, it flew over the Panama Canal, the presumed strategic destination of the Iranian flotilla.

This radiation survey over South America may have been a warning to Iran, creating problems for Tehran. Establishing baseline measurements of the region’s natural radiation levels would have become a hindrance if Iran had plans to use South America for nuclear testing. If the Iranian ships had been carrying radioactive material or weapons for offshore testing, possibly off of Venezuela, then the United States could identify anomalies in the atmosphere from its survey prior to the ships’ arrival in Brazil.

When it comes to Iran, everything is not what it seems. In 2005 and 2020, stories that Iran was producing missiles in Venezuela consumed the attention of researchers and governments looking for evidence that the two regimes were acting in concert to violate sanctions. While the West’s attention was diverted, Iran and Venezuela deepened their relationship through clandestine networks that possibly served to support the former’s nuclear program and transport materials, people, and financial and technological resources between the two regimes.

In 2020, Iran sent tankers to Caracas in defiance of sanctions and cast doubt about what the ships were actually carrying besides its declared fuel cargo. President Nicolás Maduro has never missed an opportunity to exacerbate tensions—for instance, he once publicly stated that he viewed the acquisition of Iranian-made long-range missiles as a “good idea.”

Iran’s efforts at concealment led many analysts to suspect, for example, that a network of tunnels had been dug under Venezuelan military installations in Maracay, in north-central Venezuela, to conceal missiles. Today, it would not be absurd to think that such facilities could be used for nuclear tests in partnership with Iran.

It is hard to say why Iran’s naval mission to South America has been “delayed”—or even interrupted. Maybe the mission was just another empty provocation. Maybe it was a smokescreen for clandestine activity, such as transporting nuclear material. If the first scenario is correct, Iran may have achieved what it wanted by causing tensions and forcing the United States to spend time, money, and attention on purely a propaganda operation. But if Iran had plans to deliver nuclear material to the region, then they might have found themselves cornered and were forced to reconsider their strategy. The “disappearance” and delay (or unannounced suspension) of its official port call in Brazil may certainly not have been a gamble in vain.

Leonardo Coutinho is an author and a senior fellow at the Center for a Secure Free Society.

Image: Shutterstock.

In a previous article, I suggested “the DeSantis doctrine” has three components. First, win elections and govern effectively. Second, push back against the woke-industrial complex. Now I lay out the third component: the DeSantis doctrine in U.S. foreign policy.

Internationally, there is typically little call for state governors to develop an elaborate foreign policy stance. However, Florida has an unusually big footprint overseas as well as in the United States, and Governor Ron DeSantis has spoken out on several important international matters. He also has a record of statements and actions on national security issues going back to his years in Congress.

During his time as a U.S. House Representative, from 2013 to 2018, DeSantis was critical of the Obama administration’s foolish attempts to accommodate Communist Cuba. In Congress, DeSantis supported aggressive measures relating to the targeting and detention of suspected Salafi-jihadist terrorists. He criticized Pentagon waste but supported a strong U.S. military with all the budgetary implications. He called for U.S. aid to Israel. He was furthermore an outspoken critic of President Barack Obama’s nuclear arms control giveaways to the Islamic Republic of Iran. Once Donald Trump was elected president, DeSantis applauded that administration’s withdrawal from the ill-fated Iran deal. The Floridian also rallied to Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign against North Korea. In other words, all mainstream Republican positions during those years.

As governor of Florida since 2019, DeSantis has continued to call attention to the depredations of left-wing dictatorships in Latin America, including those of Cuba and Venezuela. He has signed legislation designating one day of the year to honor the victims of Communist regimes while insisting that schoolchildren learn the truth about it. For those of us with ancestors who managed to escape the Soviet Union, it’s gratifying to see this departure from the usual left-liberal reticence in condemning Marxist atrocities. And of course, many Floridians know from firsthand experience how rotten Communism really is.

Speaking of Marxist-Leninist dictatorships: in relation to the People’s Republic of China, DeSantis has said and done things indicating he understands the scale of the challenge. As he pointed out in his September speech to the National Conservatism conference in Miami, free trade with China demonstrably failed to soften one-party rule. It enriched that regime while leaving it more threatening than ever before. DeSantis appears to grasp that Chinese Communist Party (CCP) influence is a transnational threat, not simply a conventional military one. Last year, he signed into law measures requiring companies that do over $100,000 in business with Florida to disclose any ties to China. He banned the CCP-affiliated Confucius Institute from state colleges and universities. And he has called on the Florida state legislature to block Chinese companies from buying up real estate in the Sunshine State. As he noted while visiting Bonita Springs last month:

If you look at the Chinese Communist Party, they’ve been very active throughout the Western Hemisphere in gobbling up land and investing in different things…and when you see how they’ve wielded their authority - especially with President Xi, who's taken a much more Marxist-Leninist turn since he’s been ruling China – that is not in the best interests of Florida to have the Chinese Communist Party owning farmland, owning land close to military bases.

Over at the New York Times, Bonnie Kristian recently worried that a President DeSantis might be insufficiently committed to accommodating anti-American dictatorships overseas. I must admit this fear does not keep me up at night. The editor of Modern Age, Dan McCarthy, strikes me as more persuasive when he points out that refusing to accommodate the mullahs of Iran does not necessarily equal support for some gigantic nation-building expedition to overthrow them. If we survey the DeSantis record carefully, we can see he does not quite fit preconceived notions of what a Republican must believe. For example, in 2013, as then-President Obama was ramping up plans for “unbelievably small” airstrikes against Syria, Congressman DeSantis questioned the utility of the administration’s half-baked plans. As he said at the time:

The Obama administration has not articulated a clear objective for using military force in Syria, much less a plan to achieve that objective. This is all the more problematic given the realities of a Syrian civil war in which Assad’s dictatorship (supported by Iran and Hezbollah) is fighting so-called rebels that are populated with Sunni Islamic supremacists and Al Qaeda fighters.

Not exactly the neoconservative position. And yet the governor clearly favors robust deterrence. A year ago, when Putin attacked Ukraine, DeSantis called out the Biden administration for failing to prevent the invasion. During the summer of 2021, DeSantis characterized Biden’s chaotic disengagement from Afghanistan as terribly weak and likely to invite further aggression. The governor was right about that. At the same time, he has confessed to certain doubts about prior U.S. strategies in Afghanistan. He once said: “After 9/11, we needed to go and rout the Taliban and Al Qaeda. But I think in hindsight, we should have come home after that. I think trying to do democracy and all that, I think has been very problematic.”

When it comes to the much-vaunted global institutions that liberal internationalists revere, DeSantis shows no special deference. “I look at these people at the World Economic Forum,” he says, “and I’m like, they just view us a bunch of peasants.” They certainly do. The World Trade Organization, he points out, paved the way for the stupendous rise of the People’s Republic of China. The World Health Organization mismanaged and wrongly acquiesced to that same regime over the Wuhan virus three years ago. The United Nations—an organization that boasts numerous tinpot dictators within its ranks—has even had the temerity to critique Florida state laws in criminal policing. DeSantis laughs that off as a badge of honor. As he says, summing up his whole approach as governor, “I am basically the protector of the state’s freedom and opportunity.” So, he pushes back against the woke-industrial complex whether its demands emanate from inside or outside the United States. If Davos doesn’t like it, tough luck.

All things considered, when DeSantis’s statements on foreign policy matters are taken as a whole, he comes across as neither a hyper-interventionist, nor a dove, nor a liberal. Instead, he comes across as someone who favors a strong U.S. military, together with a certain care and decision in using it. Multilateral institutions receive no automatic submission in his view. Nor do anti-American dictators who insist on diplomatic, economic, and strategic concessions from the United States. Taken together, this is an outlook sometimes described as Jacksonian. We could do a lot worse. In fact, we frequently have.

So, there you have the broad possible outlines of a DeSantis doctrine: the protector. First, win elections and govern effectively. Second, push back against the woke-industrial complex. Third, guard against America’s self-described enemies overseas.

Of course, there are those spanning the ideological spectrum who insist that no U.S. president can possibly do all three things at once.

And what I’d like to know is: why not?

Colin Dueck is a Professor in the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University, and a senior non-resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

Image: Hunter Crenian/Shutterstock.

Ukraine’s defensive war against Russia, if successful, is going to have an impact every bit as epochal as Iraq’s 1991 eviction from Kuwait or Argentina’s forced departure from the Falklands in 1982, to name just a few salutary lessons delivered to aggressive states. 

Over the years, crises big or small have periodically defined the international “system” for good or ill. Think also of Suez Crisis in 1956, or the 1938 capitulation to Adolf Hitler at Munich.

Does the current yearlong response by Ukraine’s allies, most of them grouped in NATO, have a similarly defining effect? To be sure, the Western response has delivered economic pain to Russia, and critically important intelligence and munitions to Ukraine. But do the results add up to a convincing display of deterrence and resolve? 

The Western coalition in Ukraine is seen as also deterring China from attacking neighboring countries, notably China’s “renegade province,” Taiwan. But is it doing that? The answer is mixed, not least because the spotlight we have put on our response in Ukraine has revealed crucial American and Western vulnerabilities. 

The weaknesses lie in the re-emergence of defense industrial warfare in the new international powerplays. The year-long war in Ukraine has spawned profligate artillery and rocketry duels, in numbers not seen since the last world war.

After a year’s fighting, keeping ammunition stocks and fighting vehicles sufficiently plentiful and routinely upgraded seems the challenge which will determine the course of the war and its outcome. For months, drone footage and satellite imagery have shown us leveled cities and pock-marked fields, recalling artillery and bomb-scarred moonscapes of the first and second world wars. 

In November, the U.S. Department of Defense calculated that Russia was firing 20,000 artillery shells a day. The numbers expended by the Ukrainians had meanwhile reached up to 7,000/day. With these rates of fire, stocks are becoming exhausted, on both sides. For Ukraine’s allies, there is also a draining effect. How can stockpiles be reliably replenished to keep the Ukrainians in the field?

The challenge must not be minimized. In December, the Royal United Services Institute said that Russia, in just two days of that month, had used more ammunition than that contained in the entire stock of the British military. And while the United States has much larger stockpiles of weapons and munitions, the Pentagon recently decided to boost six-fold the production of critically important 155-millimeter shells. Just ten days of fighting in January had outpaced current production. 

This explains the Pentagon’s searching high and low for stores of munitions. It has sought munitions from Israeli and South Korean stockpiles, straining to keep up with Ukrainian demand. The Pentagon’s chief acquisition officer, Bill Laplante, put it succinctly a few months ago: “[Ukraine] has focused us ... on what really matters, and what matters is production.”

In recent years, of course, production shortfalls and delivery impediments have afflicted our own and others’ economies. The past allure of “just-in-time” warehousing and other minimalist stocking practices have weakened our industrial resilience. Acquisition shortfalls typify the broader status quo, a state of industrial complacency going far beyond shortages of specific munitions or war-fighting gear.

America’s military-industrial base has become as vulnerable as the wider economy. The supply chain crisis now afflicts everything, from specific weapons systems to the basic materials for developing affordable clean energy technologies. The Ukraine War highlights our dependence on Chinese manufacturing, the beneficiary of outsourcing decisions frustrating immediate supply (and re-supply) needs. Whether for narrow defense manufacturing, or much broader consumer goods, industrial supply chains have become stubbornly vulnerable to disruption—be this from pandemics, civil unrest half a world away, or the machinations of geopolitical rivalry. 

The data reveals the weakness. Productive capacity in the United States for all essential goods and materials falls well short of minimally acceptable capacity. Laplante singles out the lagging supply of rare earth elements (REE), describing a China controlling 80 percent of global REE as decades ahead in developing the type of supply chains we need. 

Apart from rare earths, China controls most of the battery metals which underpin rapidly advancing electric vehicle (EV) production. Building American EV capacity, from the mine to the assembly line, has become a national must-do—lest we find the United States and other Western economies locked out of the new transportation paradigm. 

Apart from its fighting forces, America’s greatest role during World War II emerged as the “arsenal of democracy.” U.S. industry provided nearly two-thirds of all Allied military equipment during the war—specifically 297,000 aircraft, 193,000 artillery pieces, 86,000 tanks, and two million army trucks. By the war’s end, the United States had become home to more than half of the world’s entire industrial production. 

Today, only one economy has the productive capacity to rival what the United States then achieved: China. The Chinese generate over thirty percent of total global manufacturing, producing, in particular, more than half of the world’s raw steel, three-fourths of all lithium-ion batteries, and four-fifths of all the world’s solar panels. China’s manufacturing dominance may not be, on its own, a “threat,” but our naked dependence on Chinese supply chains counts as a terrible vulnerability.

Thankfully, Congress and the Biden administration, have become alert to this problem. Beginning in the previous administration and continuing into today’s, we find ourselves once again in a world of great power competition. 

Facing this reality requires new investment in our entire industrial base, not in just especially favored defense industries. We need to see it holistically, as all of one piece, a regaining of the capacity underpinning our economic, energy, and national security. Beyond the present war, that is the best way to project deterrence.

James Clad is a former U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Asia-Pacific Security Affairs.

Image: United States Department of Defense.

Colonial exceptionalism and a victim mentality are integral to Russia’s self-image.

Russia is sending more bodies. Ukraine doesn’t have enough. And the tanks won’t arrive in time.

But Joe Biden shouldn’t play along.