Diplomacy & Crisis News

Pakistan is once again in trouble. Since the Afghan Taliban (hereafter the Taliban) returned to power in August 2021, Pakistan has witnessed an uptick in violence perpetrated by the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), which uses Afghanistan as a safe haven. The Taliban’s reluctance to rein in the TTP or to hand it over to Islamabad has disappointed Pakistan, where many celebrated the Taliban victory over Ashraf Ghani. In 2021-2022, the Taliban brokered a ceasefire between the Pakistan Army and TTP. The TTP, however, brought an end to the ceasefire in November 2022, ordering its fighters to resume their attacks.

Pakistani opinion and decisionmakers are now suggesting hitting the TTP hard, initially in Pakistan and, if need be, even in Afghanistan. But Pakistani decisionmakers should remember that they have tried to both negotiate and fight with the TTP since the latter’s inception in 2007—Neither approach seems to have worked in Pakistan’s favor. Therefore, given Pakistan’s past experiences with the TTP, any future military campaign by the Pakistan Army is likely to fall short of achieving long-term strategic success. Afghanistan is in no position to help Pakistan with its TTP problem either. At this point, Pakistanis should accept living with the TTP. While such a proposal might sound offensive, Pakistan’s choices are limited given historical and ground realities.

Afghanistan and TTP Challenge

First, it should be recalled that Afghans do not take away the protection they offer to others. The Taliban preferred to lose their government in 2001 rather than hand over Osama bin Laden to the United States. The only major exception to this practice is the Afghan government’s decision, during World War II in 1941, to ask German and Italian nationals to leave Afghanistan on the condition that the Allies would guarantee their safe return to their home countries. Even at the height of World War II, while being sandwiched between the British and Russians, Afghanistan did not hand over the Germans and Italians to the British or Russians.

Additionally, Afghanistan has offered protection to any Pashtuns fleeing Pashtun majority areas of the subcontinent (India under British rule, and Pakistan since 1947). From Amir Abdur Rahman Khan (1880-1901) to President Mohammad Najibullah (1987-1992), it was an unwritten policy of successive Afghan governments. Afghanistan also hosted dissident Pakistani Baloch and Sindhi elements—including former Pakistani prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s sons and followers. The practice helped Afghanistan maintain influence among Pakistanis and put pressure on Pakistan when necessary.

Since Afghans have not lost interest in the Pashtun majority areas of Pakistan, the TTP’s demand to reinstate the tribal status of the former tribal areas (hereafter the tribal areas), where the TTP would have more autonomy, is too tempting a prospect for Afghans to ignore. Afghans have historically held a self-appointed role to advocate for greater rights for Pashtun tribes in the subcontinent. More importantly, the restoration of the tribal areas will also have a practical utility for Afghanistan: to relocate the TTP and other terror groups from Afghanistan to the tribal areas.

In addition to historical baggage, there are also ideological links between the Taliban and TTP. Like the Taliban themselves, the TTP regards the Taliban leader, Hibat Ullah Akhundzada, as its leader. No Taliban leader would ever hand over their followers and supporters, who fought shoulder to shoulder with their fighters, to another country. The TTP’s claim that it wants to enforce Sharia in the tribal areas also resonates with the Taliban leaders, who claim to have also fought to enforce Sharia.

The Taliban cannot afford to expel the TTP by force. The Taliban do not want to create pro-TTP and anti-TTP factional divisions amongst themselves. It is also unclear if the Taliban have the ability to take military action against the TTP. More importantly, even if the Taliban were able to, they would not take military action against the TTP to avoid pushing the TTP toward an alliance with the so-called Islamic State. It seems unnecessary for the Taliban to pick a fight, at Pakistan’s request, with fellow Pashtun Taliban, who have the same ideology and leader as them.

Furthermore, tribal Pashtuns, who today form the bulk of the TTP and live along the Afghan-Pakistani border, have a long history of resisting outsiders such as the Mughals, British, Soviets, and NATO. The border areas’ Pashtuns’ struggle against the British, whom they fought for a century, is of particular importance. Despite tens of military operations and spending tens of millions of pounds and losing countless soldiers, Britain could not subdue the Pashtun tribes like the Masuds (aka Mehsuds), Wazirs, Orakzais, Mohmands, and Afridis.

Tribal raids—which the TTP has replaced with ambushes and suicide attacks—on cities and towns, including Peshawar, were common under the British, who could barely venture out of their cantonments after dark. As such, history advises that military operations against Pashtun tribes will only add to the Pakistan Army’s problems. The tribes will defend their honor and land at any price. If they need to, they will retreat to Afghanistan to live to fight another day. But the tribesmen do not forget or forgive anything. The TTP, in addition to being a terror outfit, is a channel to express frustration at the Pakistan Army and its continued presence on tribal lands.

The idea that the Pakistan Army can handle the Pashtuns better than the British Indian Army because of presence of a large number of ethnic Pashtuns in the former needs to be re-evaluated. There was a large number of ethnic Pashtuns in the British Indian Army as well. The British also, multiple times, raised and disbanded tribal militias, composed entirely of Pashtuns, to counter fellow Pashtun tribesmen. The presence of Pashtuns on both sides did not help curb the violence then; it will not be helpful now.

Moreover, the notion that the TTP has no popular support in the tribal areas needs to be revisited. For decades, the Afghan government lied to us that the Taliban had no popular support in Afghanistan. A similar rhetoric has emerged in Pakistan. The Pakistani government will find it embarrassing and costly to admit that the TTP has popular support amongst Pashtuns in Pakistan. Ironically, the TTP’s main objective to enforce Sharia is widely shared, especially by religious circles, across Pakistan.

Finally, the TTP also enjoys some degree of popular support amongst Afghans, just like the Taliban enjoyed popular support amongst Pakistanis. In addition to ethnic and linguistic ties, Afghans believe if the Taliban received popular support from Pakistan to enforce Sharia in Afghanistan, why should the TTP not receive popular from Afghanistan to enforce Sharia in Pakistan? If enforcing Sharia is a noble calling, it should be equally noble in both countries.

The Way Forwar

First, despite the seriousness of the situation, there is no easy way out of this crisis for Pakistan. Pakistan may wish to take military action against the TTP. The TTP will cross into Afghanistan, wait for an opportunity to recross into Pakistan, and stage violent attacks—a practice similar to what the Taliban used to do during the Karzai and Ghani governments, but in the opposite direction. The fencing on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border has proved unreliable, and can be easily removed or blown, or tunnels can be dug underneath it.

Second, the Pakistan Army—with its Iman (faith), Taqwa (piety), and Jihad motto—is India-centric. Fighting fellow Muslims in Pakistan is the last thing the Pakistan Army would want to do. But more than the army, it is the people of the tribal areas who do not seem to be supportive of any further military operations in their area. Their flocking in droves to Pashtun Tahafuz Movement (PTM) rallies against war in the tribal areas is an indication of how much the tribes have become fed up with continued military operations by the Pakistan Army.

Third, taking the war against the TTP inside Afghanistan can entail serious long-term security consequences for Pakistan. The Taliban, in retaliation, will stop cooperating with Pakistan. The Taliban will also likely switch from tacit tolerance to active support of both the TTP and Baloch militants, who have kept their insurgency on and off since Pakistan’s inception. Pakistan should take seriously the risk of the TTP joining hands with Baloch insurgents. Such an alliance would spell disaster for Pakistan, especially if it receives active support from India.

Repeated incursions by Pakistan into Afghanistan also run the risk of pushing the Taliban toward India. Pakistan refrained from sincere cooperation with the Karzai and Ghani governments because they were considered pro-India. Now by alienating the Taliban, Pakistan will achieve the exact opposite of what it intended.

Fourth, Pakistan may feel tempted to seek support from the United States against the Taliban and TTP, especially with respect to carrying out drone attacks in Afghanistan. Drones have taken countless innocent lives and contributed to resentment against those who have conducted and facilitated them. One reason why the Taliban are bitter towards Pakistan is because of the latter’s complicity in drone attacks against the former.

Domestically, if Pakistan’s cooperation with the United States against Afghanistan gets exposed, Pakistani authorities will most likely face a popular backlash, especially within religious circles, and lose support for taking strong measures against the TTP. It is also very likely that the United States will abandon Pakistan to deal with any fallout from drones and other issues related to Afghanistan—something Pakistan is not prepared for.

Finally, the Taliban do not fear border closures with Pakistan, should Pakistan close its borders with Afghanistan to punish the Taliban. The Taliban can rely on Iran and Central Asia for trade. In retaliation, the Taliban will not allow Pakistan to trade with Central Asia through Afghanistan, which will cost Pakistan tens of millions of dollars annually. The illicit drugs, which the Taliban have been trading and trafficking for decades, will still make its way to the international market regardless of the status of the Afghan-Pakistani border.

Pakistanis should prepare for difficult times ahead. There are no easy solutions. The TTP is not going to disappear. For the TTP to deny Pakistan a victory, it only needs to survive. Thus, Pakistanis are advised to accept to live with the TTP for now. In the long run, Pakistan may want to do two things: first, try to steer its society away from extremism so that a lasting and genuine peace may be achieved; second, genuinely engage the Pashtun tribes through their elders and listen to them, without trying to impose anything on them from Rawalpindi.

Arwin Rahi a former adviser to the Parwan governor in Afghanistan. He can be reached at rahiarwin@gmail.com.

Image: Trent Inness / Shutterstock.com

The United States is officially sending Ukraine its long-serve Patriot air defense system to help defend the embattled nation’s civilian infrastructure against the ongoing Russian assault. This decision represents what could be a significant leap in Ukraine’s defensive capabilities, while also serving as a powerful political message about America’s deepening support for the wartorn nation.

However, America’s Patriot air defense system, like the air defense enterprise itself, is a widely misunderstood topic online. So we set out to offer a better understanding of the system itself, its capabilities, and perhaps most importantly, its limitations.

It’s a near certainty that Russia will leverage misconceptions about both the system and its role to advanced narratives meant to undermine faith in American equipment and in Ukraine’s chances at emerging from this conflict victorious.

So, in order to innoculate yourself against the flood of disinfomation that’s sure to ensue, here’s a crash course in America’s MIM-104 Patriot Air Defense system.

What is the Patriot air defense system?

The MIM-104 Patriot system is comprised of multiple assets but serves a singular purpose: identifying and intercepting inbound threats ranging from aircraft to both cruise and ballistic missiles.

Developed by Raytheon, the MIM-104 Patriot Air Defense System first entered service in the early 1980s as a replacement for both Nike Hercules high-to-medium air defense and MIM023 Hawk medium tactical air defense systems.

Despite being developed with a focus on defending against high-performance aircraft, there was a clear need for countering tactical missiles by the mid-80s. In this context, tactical missiles refer to short-range ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and air-to-surface missiles deployed by air and rotorcraft.

Ballistic and cruise missiles offer different challenges for air defenses due to their inherent differences in their operation. Ballistic missiles like Russia’s air-launched Kh47M2 Kinzhal or even its nuclear-armed RS-28 Sarmat ICBM could be thought of as similar to rockets. They’re commonly launched using a conventional rocket booster along a high, arcing ballistic flight path before separating from the booster and careening back toward their target at extremely high rates of speed. Nearly all ballistic missiles achieve hypersonic velocities as they approach their targets, but unlike modern hypersonic missiles, they rarely maneuver during their descent, making their trajectories fairly predictable.

Cruise missiles, on the other hand, can be thought of as more akin to suicide drones. They’re often powered by air-breathing jet engines, not unlike tactical aircraft, which allow them to fly under power along a more horizontal and unpredictable trajectory. These weapons fly at much lower speeds than ballistic missiles but can be more dangerous due to their maneuverability and the ability to use to curvature of the earth to mask their approach.

To this end, the U.S. soon fielded two modifications to the Patriot system before it ever even saw combat. The first, Patriot Advanced Capability 1 (or PAC-1), was a software upgrade while the second, PAC-2, included changes to the hardware itself, including a new fuse and larger fragments within the warhead. By the time the first Patriot systems were deployed in the Middle East for the Gulf War in 1991, both of these modifications had been fielded, which made the Patriot system more adept at engaging missiles than it had been at its onset.

However, the Patriot system failed to live up to expectations during its first combat deployment, and as a result, it is often dismissed by those who only recall those early controversies. However, mistaking today’s MIM-104 Patriot system for the same one America fielded over three decades ago would be a mistake.

“In the first Gulf War Patriot was right around 25%. It was doing something it wasn’t necessarily designed for. It was actually built for planes but they decided to throw it at missiles and it sometimes hit. Since then, we have vastly improved the system — like hundreds of upgrades,” explained U.S. Army Patriot Fire Control Enhanced Operator-Maintainer, Sergeant First Class Long. “Now days, Patriot has right around a 95% hit ratio.”

We’ll dive much further into the controversy surrounding the Patriot’s early performance in an another piece.

The Patriot system is usually deployed in batteries that are made up of six primary components as well as some others depending on circumstance:

• An electrical power plant
• A radar set
• An engagement control station
• Launching stations
• An antenna mast group
• The Patriot interceptor missiles themselves

Today, the Patriot is operated by 18 nations, with the United States operating the largest fleet of systems, with 16 Patriot battalions operating upwards of 50 Patriot batteries with more than 1,200 interceptors in the field.

However, it’s important to understand that the Patriot system does not operate as an island unto itself under normal circumstances. In America’s missile defense apparatus, the Patriot serves as one portion of a layered defense strategy, something Long and the Army refer to as “defense in depth.”

“Defense in depth is defined as having increasing levels of firepower as the threat gets closer to you,” Long explains, “which means the enemy runs into an increasing number of fires as they approach friendly forces.”

What can Patriot missiles (PAC-2 and PAC-3 Interceptors) really do?

Today’s American Patriot systems operate interceptors from two primary families: PAC-2 and PAC-3, though even the PAC-2 missiles are a far cry from their siblings employed in the 1990s.

Incredibly, both PAC-2 and PAC-3 interceptors are actually launched by the Patriot system before it has even secured what’s known as a “weapons-grade lock,” or a targeting solution for the inbound aircraft or missile. Instead, the weapon is deployed in what’s called the “initial fly out” stage of its guidance approach where it is then fed active guidance information from the Patriot’s radar array until it gets close enough to the target to transition from the Patriot’s radar system to its own onboard guidance systems.

This results in an extremely short window of time between an aircraft, for instance, being notified of a radar lock and the weapon itself actually reaching its target.

“The Patriot is by far the most lethal SAM system in the world, and there is no aeroplane in existence that is going to get away from it. The missile itself is also designed to bias its impact on the nose of the aircraft so as to kill the pilot. If a Patriot is fired at your aircraft, you might as well eject, as there is nothing you can do to get away from it,” explained Navy Lt. Cdr. Rod Candiloro, an F/A-18 Hornet pilot who flew during Operation Iraqi Freedom.

His concerns about the system were warranted. At the time, the system was proving very effective at intercepting enemy missiles with its processes automated, but that automation ultimately led to two friendly-fire incidents against a Royal Air Force Tornado and a U.S. Navy Hornet. All three crewmembers involved in those intercepts were killed.

PAC-2 GEM-T

PAC-2 missiles are interceptors that benefit from the PAC-1 and 2 updates discussed above, however, the modern PAC-2 GEM-T, or Guidance Enhanced Missile – Tactical (as opposed to GEM-C with the “C” denoting cruise missile), is a modernized iteration with a number of further enhancements to improve its performance against tactical ballistic missiles.

These interceptors come equipped with a new proximity fuse for their explosive fragmentation warheads, which represents one of the significant operational differences between these weapons and the kinetic-based PAC-3 interceptors.

“As the interceptor missile approaches the target, its active seeker will steer the missile to the target. A PAC-2 Patriot missile will detonate in the vicinity of the threat missile whereas a PAC-3 will seek to impact the warhead of the threat ballistic missile,” says NATO’s “Patriot Deployment Fact Sheet.

The PAC-2 GEM-T is also equipped with a new low-noise oscillator in the nose that allows for improved targeting of aircraft or missiles with a low radar cross-section. These interceptors entered service in 2002 and saw significant success in Iraq the following year.

“In contrast with the experience of Desert Storm, Patriot interceptors defeated every ballistic missile they engaged during the 2003 Operation Iraqi Freedom. Since 2015, Patriot has successfully engaged scores of missiles and drones in the Yemen Missile War. Israel has likewise used it on a number of occasions to defeat drones, aircraft, and other threats,” write Mark Cancian and Tom Karako for the Center for Strategic & International Studies.

While the PAC-2 missiles used blast fragmentation warheads to take out incoming missiles or aircraft, the smaller and more modern PAC-3 missiles leverage “hit to kill” technology to destroy targets with sheer kinetic force. Another important difference is manufacturer — while PAC-2 missiles come from Raytheon, PAC-3 interceptors come from Lockheed Martin. As such, the PAC-3 missiles are completely new “clean sheet” designs meant to maximize the Patriot air defense system’s capability set.

PAC-3 missiles use an active Ka-band radar seeker for terminal guidance into the target, with 180 solid-fueled attitude control motors (ACM) in its forward section to allow for heightened maneuverability.

Despite the leap in performance, PAC-3 missiles are much smaller than PAC-2 interceptors, reducing their overall range despite the interceptor’s improved aerobatics allowing them to defend a larger overall area. The PAC-3 MSE, or Missile Segment Enhanced, is slightly larger and offers different capabilities than the PAC-3 CRI, which stands for Cost Reduction Initiative.

How much heat can each Patriot battery carry?

A single Patriot battery can include up to eight separate M901 launch stations. A launch station carries up to four launch canisters on a two-axle trailer. These canisters can each hold one PAC-2 GEM-T interceptor, three PAC-3 enhanced missiles, or as many as four PAC-3 CRI (cost reduction initiative) missiles. America’s Patriot systems tend to deploy with an assortment of these interceptors to offer the best option for whatever the incoming threat may be.

What about the Patriot’s radar system?

Patriot batteries have operated a number of different radar systems over the years, known as the AN/MPQ-53, AN/MPQ-65, and AN/MPQ-65A radars. Unlike the Nebo-M system leveraged by Russia’s S-300 and S-400 systems, the Patriot radar actually combines surveillance, tracking, and engagement functions into one assembly mounted on a single trailer — dramatically reducing deployment time and increasing mobility while offering the same function and performance of multiple arrays.

The AN/MPQ-53 system operates at the C-band frequency range for long-range detection (low-frequency) and at the G/H bands for precision targeting at distances claimed to be as great as 100 kilometers (62 miles), while the more modern AN/MPQ-65 systems offer a disclosed range of better than 150 kilometers (or about 93 miles).

However, the older MPQ-53 system has been reported to actually offer a range of up to 170 kilometers (105 miles), suggesting the newer MPQ-65 can actually reach significantly further than had been acknowledged.

The more advanced MPQ-65 system is said to be capable of tracking up to 100 airborne targets simultaneously while guiding nine separate missiles toward their targets.

Despite their high degree of capability, these arrays do have limitations, however. One notable limitation is its inability to offer full 360-degree scanned coverage.

Today, the Army is working on rolling out another, even newer, radar array for the Patriot, dubbed the Lower Tier Air and Missile Defense System (LTAMDS), part of Raytheon’s GhostEye family of radars. It promises offer full 360-degree coverage. Despite being about the same size as previous Patriot radar systems, Raytheon claims it offers twice the power.

Which radar system the Patriot battery provided to Ukraine will operate has not been disclosed thus far.

How effective is the Patriot air defense system?

As is so often the case when discussing advanced military systems, trying to assess the Patriot’s real efficacy is a simple question with a complicated answer. Historically speaking, the Patriot system has seen a dramatic improvement since its rocky start in the Gulf War, achieving what SFC Long says is around a 95% intercept success rate.

But Long himself will tell you that there’s much more to the story when it comes to air defenses than simply comparing intercept ratios between very different systems like America’s Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD), Israel’s Iron Dome, or Russia’s S-400. Each of these systems was designed for specific (and often different) portions of the air defense enterprise. But further than that, they also see very different rates of use.

“Right now, on paper, THAAD has a 100% engagement efficiency. It has had one engagement and hit one missile,” he explains.

And while the Patriot system currently has around a 95% success rate, it still only engages a few times a year. The more frequently the system is called on to defend against incoming threats, the more chances it has to fail and the lower its overall success rate may be. Iron Dom, Long points out, may have a success rate of just 80-85%, but it sometimes sees use multiple times per week, giving it that many more opportunities to fail.

On paper, the MIM-104 Patriot air defense system is among the most advanced and capable missile defense assets on the face of the planet, and there’s a sound argument to be made that it’s even more advanced and capable than Russia’s much-touted S-400… but the complicated reality of the air defense enterprise is that it’s extremely complex, and nothing is invincible.

This article was first published by Sandboxx News.

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

Image: DVIDS.

Vice Admiral William Joseph Houston is a thoughtful and experienced United States naval officer, entrusted with command of perhaps the most potent US capability: its submarine fleet.

Houston is also steeped in the history of the US submarine service, and the outsized role it played in defeating Japan in World War II. Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, the only viable weapon immediately available was the US submarine force. In fact, USS Gudgeon commenced the US fleet’s first offensive patrol just four days after the attack of 7 December 1941.

By the time the war had ended, US submarines had sunk more than 30% of Japan’s navy (including eight aircraft carriers) and more than 60% of Japan’s merchant marine fleet.

Not surprising, then, that Houston is fond of describing his submarines as ‘apex predators’ that fear ‘nothing above the sea, nothing on the sea, and nothing under the sea’.

Which is why Australia wants the best possible submarines, too. Nuclear-propelled boats would give Australia the same ‘stealthy, full-spectrum expeditionary platform’ that the US Navy has—minus the nuclear weapons, of course.

But Houston has a problem on his hands: while the number and size of submarines planned for the US Navy continues to grow, the size of the workforce needed to build those submarines has shrunk in real terms.

Events of the past week have highlighted the risk that, regardless of the strongly stated political and military support for AUKUS, members of Congress could begin to take a more ambivalent view if it comes at the expense of US operational readiness.

The leak of a letter that the chairman of the Senate armed services committee, Jack Reed, and then-ranking Republican member James Inhofe wrote to President Joe Biden showed that the senators held concerns that the AUKUS plan to sell or transfer Virginia-class submarines to Australia would undermine the US Navy’s own requirements.

The letter highlights the risk of key US policymakers concluding that nuclear-powered submarines for Australia are a great idea, just not right now. Not while the US is simultaneously planning for war with China.

At the heart of the problem is this simple fact: according to current projections, the US needs to turn out two submarines a year, but only around 1.3 per year are coming out of its shipyards.

The deficit in shipyard capacity is a problem that affects maintenance and refits as well as new boat construction. Last year, Rear Admiral Doug Perry, director of undersea warfare requirements in the US Navy, admitted that of America’s 50 attack submarines, ‘18 were either in maintenance or waiting to go in maintenance’. That figure should be closer to 10.

In the words of senators Reed and Inhofe, ‘what was initially touted as a ‘do no harm’ opportunity to support Australia and the United Kingdom and build long-term competitive advantages for the US and its Pacific allies, may be turning into a zero-sum game for scarce, highly advanced US SSNs’.

Reed and Inhofe will have been briefed in detail by US officials, and presumably those classified briefings led them to conclude that the projected additional demand from the AUKUS program would come at the expense of America’s own military preparedness.

The senators added that they ‘recognise the strategic value of having one of our closest allies operating a world-class navy’. Indeed, Reed subsequently tweeted that he is ‘proud to support AUKUS’, noting that America’s advantage over China is ‘our network of partners and allies’.

Or as one senior US government official privately stated: ‘China hates AUKUS, which means we should love AUKUS—and I love AUKUS!’

Further support arrived in the form of an open bipartisan letter to Biden from nine members of Congress calling for expanding the industrial base, and noting that ‘far from a zero-sum game’, AUKUS could be a ‘rising tide that lifts all boats’.

However, the back-and-forth shows that wider congressional commitment could be put under strain if the program comes to be seen as improving Australian capability while stretching the US to breaking point.

Ultimately, the success of the AUKUS submarines program will be determined not by expressions of political support, but by the ability of an integrated defence industrial base in the US and Australia.

It will take some difficult, even unpalatable decisions: more money, certainly, in the form of government support. But likely also a larger, deeper, better-skilled workforce that will need to start being trained almost immediately, and possibly a workforce that poaches talent overseas from countries that themselves face capacity constraints.

All that plus a fundamental rethink of the way governments and the private sector integrate on long-term advanced technology projects. Add to that the need for a concerted effort to overcome institutional and policy barriers such as the labyrinthine US export controls regime, and the way forward will be anything but easy.

The alternative for Washington, however, is a less capable ally in its primary area of strategic competition. At a time when it is widely accepted by governments in Washington, London and Canberra that the US cannot be expected to carry the burdens of strategic deterrence alone, AUKUS is worth the investment.

Mark Watson is director of ASPI Washington, DC. A version of this article was published in the Australian Financial Review.

This article was published by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.

Image: Shuttstock.

Shortly before the December holidays, Senators Bob Menendez (D-NJ) and Jim Risch (R-NJ), chair and ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, delivered a straightforward message to Lebanon’s leaders: make progress or face sanctions.

After making multiple trips to the country last year, including one with congressional staff, it is clear that the United States continues to have a vital leadership role to play in not only helping Lebanon recover from this historic crisis, but also rebuilding its foundation to become a country with transparent and reform-oriented political and financial leadership. There is an overwhelming consensus in the policymaking community, reflected in the senators’ letter and a policy brief authored by twenty leading U.S.-Lebanon policy experts, that there needs to be a new international framework to incentivize better governance in Lebanon. The United States needs to lead such an effort now because Lebanon is on the precipice of failure.

The priority for Lebanon’s elected leaders and political parties is the election of a reform-oriented and corruption-free president committed to addressing the needs of the people. This needs to be followed with the timely formation of an effective government. Lebanon has been without a president since Halloween. The United States needs to use all tools at its disposal, as the Senate letter calls for, to pressure Lebanon’s leaders to elect a president and form a government that can usher in the reforms the country so desperately needs. There is no time to waste.

The suffering of the Lebanese people is a tragic consequence of the corruption of Lebanon’s financial and political elite who benefitted from a Ponzi Scheme that has rendered the country’s currency valueless and triggered a crisis in the banking sector. Meanwhile, Lebanon’s elected leaders have delayed implementing reforms outlined in the International Monetary Fund (IMF) staff-level agreement, which are necessary for unlocking IMF support to rehabilitate the country’s economy. The United States has made it clear that the IMF package is essential for both Lebanon’s socioeconomic recovery and future support from the United States and international community. As a result of this crisis, 80 percent of Lebanon’s population of 6.5 million residents and refugees live below the poverty level. The country’s education and healthcare sectors are being neglected at all levels. The largest university in Lebanon, Lebanese University, doesn’t even have paper to administer exams. As Lebanon drifts into failed state status there is a strong chance the United States will be dragged further into a protracted and increasingly difficult task to protect U.S. interests in the region and counter increasing encroachment from Russia and Iran.

Electricity reform is an area where the United States can show leadership that concretely affects millions of Lebanese. Right now, the Lebanese people are only receiving about one to two hours of electricity per day due to corruption and incompetence in the electricity sector. Without this vital source of power, economic stability will be impossible, and the lives of the Lebanese will deteriorate.

The Levantine Energy Deal, which would see Egyptian gas and Jordanian electricity imported to Lebanon, is a major solution promoted by the United States. Lebanon has an equally important role to play as the Ministry of Energy needs to recruit a politically-neutral Electricity Regulatory Authority (ERA) and propose a sustainable cost recovery program as necessary conditions for World Bank support for the project. This is all the more important because Iran has approached Lebanon with an offer of a “gift” of fuel for Lebanese power plants to avoid the complication of sanctions.

Support for the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) continues to be one of the strongest bipartisan pillars of support for the United States in the Middle East. Given the depleting salaries of the soldiers due to the country’s economic crisis, the one-time livelihood support the United States is providing to military families in the LAF and Internal Security Forces (ISF) in Lebanon is crucial and comes hand in hand with encouraging U.S. allies to continue their support. Consistent support for the LAF is essential if Lebanon is to control its own security and protect its territorial integrity against both its own enemies and those of the United States.

The United States has recently shown its indispensable leadership in facilitating the maritime boundary agreement between Lebanon and Israel, thus avoiding the threat of another war. The United States will need to show the same determination in leading the international community, especially its partners in Europe and the Gulf, in pressuring Lebanon’s elected leaders to elect a president who is clean, capable, and willing to institute needed reforms that address Lebanon’s needs. If the United States can prioritize the Lebanon response now, it can avoid further deterioration which will only result in a more-costly price to be paid later.

Edward M. Gabriel is president of the American Task Force on Lebanon, a leadership organization of Americans of Lebanese descent, and former U.S. Ambassador to Morocco.

Image: Shutterstock.

Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has hinted at holding what the Washington Post has described as the “world’s most important election in 2023,” on May 14. This would put the date of the election just over one month earlier than the mandated June 18 deadline. It is also a symbolic date, representative of Turkey’s first free and fair elections in 1950 when the nascent Democrat Party of Adnan Menderes defeated the Republican People’s Party (CHP, the party of Ataturk) in a landslide. Seventy-three years later, the irony could not be louder: Sevket Sureyya Aydemir, a veteran chronicler of the early republic and author of biographies of both Ataturk and his successor, Ismet Inonu, wrote that the Turkish Armed Forces in May 1950 stood ready to uphold the leadership of the CHP, regardless of the electoral outcome. According to Aydemir, it was Inonu who insisted that the CHP’s greatest defeat (at the ballot box) would also be its greatest victory—facilitating, for the first time, the peaceful transfer of power from the founding party of the republic to the popularly elected party chosen by the people.

Erdogan does not appear to be interested in repeating history. The 2023 presidential and parliamentary elections are an occasion where Erdogan and his governing Justice and Development Party (AKP) are seeking to retain power and are not interested in achieving this goal by democratic means. Instead, the elections are under the shadow of a rapidly maturing authoritarian landscape. One of the most likely presidential candidates that stands a decent chance of defeating Erdogan is Istanbul’s mayor, Ekrem Imamoglu. To prevent him from challenging Erdogan, the pro-Erdogan courts have slapped down a political ban on Imamoglu that could very well prevent him from assuming the presidency if he were to run and win. Moreover, the country’s top court—the Constitutional Court—is poised to shut down the second most popular party in the opposition ranks: the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democracy Party (HDP). As it stands, the HDP polls between 12-15 percent. Closing it down would mean that its share of votes would be redistributed to the remaining parties and candidates in the race. There are other factors that will likely prevent a free and fair election from taking place: a largely pro-Erdogan mainstream media that actively shuns and delegitimizes all shades of the political opposition landscape.

Added to this punch bowl is a rapidly expanding economic strategy that Erdogan is unleashing day by day to increase his chances of electoral victory. This is Erdogan and the AKP’s soft underbelly: a disastrous economy plagued by unbridled consumer inflation, officially running at 65 percent. The unofficial rate is far higher—and likely closer to reality—at 170 percent. Beginning in 2023, the government has offered up a barrage of spoils intended to please a diverse body of voters: increases to the minimum wage, increases to pensions, lowering of interest rates for borrowers, and widespread availability of credit opportunities for businesses. These are haphazard economic measures that will no doubt saddle the country with further debt, but everything is intended for the short term and to one end: woo enough voters to vote for Erdogan and worry about the consequences later.

However, to achieve the threshold of victory—50 percent of the vote, plus one—Erdogan is hoping for the continuity of one factor that is not directly under his control: the continued incompetence of the opposition parties that joined together as the Nation Alliance.

Spearheaded by the CHP and the Good Party (IP), the opposition alliance of six parties appears intent on handing over victory to Erdogan on a silver platter. Since its inception, the alliance, which was designed to remove Erdogan from power and reinstate the country’s parliamentary governance structure, has held many summits to discuss strategy and select a presidential candidate to challenge Erdogan. This has yet to happen, but circulating rumors suggest that the alliance is under tremendous pressure from the CHP to nominate its chairman, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, as its presidential candidate. This is the worst possible choice. Polls consistently demonstrate that Kilicdaroglu is the least favored individual to defeat Erdogan. A wiser choice would either be Imamoglu or the mayor of Ankara, Mansur Yavas. While Imamoglu faces the prospect of a political ban that could bar him from taking office, Yavas is bedeviled by his lack of appeal to Kurdish voters owing to his political roots as a Turkish nationalist. (In contrast, it is likely that Imamoglu can deliver the Kurdish vote, judging by the Kurdish support he received for his Istanbul campaign in 2019.) Kurdish voters are a vital part of the rod to victory, as they account for 12-15 percent of the total vote share. Added to this is the most important point which the opposition is decidedly overlooking: Imamoglu is the only person who has defied Erdogan at the ballot box; he won the Istanbul mayoral race twice in 2019, despite Erdogan’s efforts to nullify his victory.

So why does the alliance not nominate Imamoglu? There are two possible explanations. Frustratingly, the Nation Alliance is second-guessing itself. The opposition fears that if it nominates Imamoglu, and he runs to claim victory, he will ultimately be barred from taking office due to legal bans. A political ban is exactly the same problem Erdogan faced when the AKP won the general election in November 2002. Erdogan had to wait until March 2003 before he could assume the office of prime minister. The second and perhaps more worrying reason is ego. Kilicdaroglu, either by himself or the political groupies he is coddled by within the CHP, thinks he deserves to be the nominee. This is despite the fact that he has not scored one electoral victory against Erdogan since becoming chairman of the CHP in 2010. Meral Aksener, who leads the IP, is opposed to Kilicdaroglu’s candidacy, but it remains to be seen whether she can sway his mind.

This election, as far as the opposition alliance is concerned, is supposed to be about doing what it takes to vote Erdogan out of power, restore the rule of law, re-anchor Turkey as a parliamentary democracy, and distance it from the shadow of one-man rule that Erdogan has imposed. If the opposition is interested in seeing this become a reality, it would do well to nominate Imamoglu as the alliance’s candidate. Let Erdogan do his very worst! If Imamoglu is nominated, Erdogan will likely pull out all the stops to prevent his victory. In the likely event that Imamoglu wins the presidency, Erdogan will be tempted to rely on illegitimate bans to prevent him from taking office. But Erdogan knows he cannot count on that. Public pressure from an Imamoglu victory would likely be so great that that insistence on upholding his political ban in the courts is likely to falter. It is way past time for Turkey’s opposition to make the right choice. Imamoglu represents the best chance for a democratic Turkey.

Sinan Ciddi is a non-resident senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), where he contributes to FDD’s Turkey Program and Center on Military and Political Power (CMPP). He is also an Associate Professor of Security Studies at the Command and Staff College-Marine Corps University and Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. He tweets @sinanciddi.

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Secretary of State Antony Blinken will visit China in early February for a trip that was agreed upon during President Joe Biden’s meeting with Chinese president Xi Jinping in Bali, Indonesia, on November 14. Blinken’s visit ostensibly aims to follow up on the understandings reportedly reached in Bali, especially the agreement—as characterized by the official White House readout of the summit—to “maintain communication and deepen constructive efforts” on a range of bilateral and global issues. The two leaders pledged to pursue such efforts through a “joint working group” and also “discussed the importance of developing principles that would advance these goals” and allow Washington and Beijing to “manage the [US-China] competition responsibly.” According to the Chinese readout of the Bali meeting, the two sides would “take concrete actions to put U.S.-China relations back on the track of steady development.”

In the two months since Bali, however, there has been little evidence of “concrete actions” or “constructive efforts” in that direction, involving either a joint working group or progress in the development of principles to guide the bilateral relationship. Yes, there have been additional high-level bilateral meetings: Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin met with his Chinese counterpart in Cambodia shortly after the Bali summit; Assistant Secretary of State Dan Kritenbrink and White House Senior China Director Laura Rosenberger traveled to Beijing in December to discuss Blinken’s upcoming visit; and Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen met Chinese vice premier Liu He in Zurich on January 18. But it remains unclear what if any substantive progress was made in those meetings: the U.S. readouts suggest that they largely consisted of exchanges of predictable talking points, and that American officials largely reiterated the need to “responsibly manage competition” and “maintain open lines of communication”—a minimalist phrase that has become Washington’s standard characterization of the current purpose of U.S.-China engagement.

In the meantime, Beijing and Washington appear to have essentially returned to the pre-Bali trajectory of mutual distrust and recrimination. Both sides continue to pursue policies that appear aimed more at competition and confrontation than at pursuing avenues for cooperation. This appears to have been clear even at Bali, when Biden (again, according to the White House summary of the meeting) emphasized that “the US will continue to compete vigorously with the PRC, including by investing in sources of strength at home and aligning efforts with allies and partners around the world.” Kritenbrink and Rosenberger reiterated this core message in Beijing before moving to “explore potential avenues for cooperation where [US and Chinese] interests do intersect.” More recently, White House Indo-Pacific Policy Coordinator Kurt Campbell reiterated publicly on January 12 that “the dominant feature of US-China relations will continue to be competition.”

Beijing has its own reasons for adopting a confrontational posture, including its growing belief—reinforced by recent evidence—that the United States is essentially undertaking an economic and science and technology (S&T) containment strategy toward China, while diluting its “one China” commitment regarding Taiwan. In response, Beijing is clearly pursuing a broad strategy of maximizing its global wealth, power, and influence relative to the United States, while affirming its will to fight over Taiwan. Chinese leaders are probably also hunkering down because they face domestic uncertainty and vulnerability in the wake of Beijing’s recent reversal of its “zero-Covid” strategy.

There are also multiple reasons for Washington’s own foot-dragging on substantive and constructive engagement with Beijing. The Biden administration certainly has been reluctant to assume the domestic political risks of appearing accommodative to an assertive authoritarian China, given the delicate balance of power in Washington. In the prevailing environment, anything that looks like (or is called) “engagement” is easily characterized and denounced as appeasement.

One recurring assertion in Washington is that the United States has on several occasions sought substantive dialogue with Beijing on key issues but has been stymied because Chinese officials have been unwilling or unprepared to meaningfully engage. It is more likely, however, that Beijing has not been willing to engage on Washington’s terms. Indeed, this was apparent during the Biden administration’s first high-level exchange with Chinese officials in Anchorage, Alaska, in March 2021, when Beijing’s then top diplomat told his American counterpart that “the United States does not have the qualification to say that it wants to speak to China from a position of strength.” Another senior Chinese diplomat, later addressing Washington’s call for “guardrails” for the U.S.-China relationship, said any such guardrails “should not be unilaterally set by the United States as a behavior boundary for China.”

There is an obvious symmetry here in Washington’s unwillingness to engage with Beijing on China’s terms. This was one of the reasons the Obama administration a decade ago ultimately dismissed a Chinese proposal for a “new model of great power relations”—because it was perceived as an attempt by Beijing to dictate the framework and terms for the relationship. In effect, both sides appear to believe that they have sufficient—if not decisive—leverage with which to resist making concessions to the other side or deferring to its preferences and priorities for the bilateral agenda. This is why Washington’s claim that Beijing is not seriously interested in negotiating on key bilateral issues is almost certainly mirrored by a Chinese perception that Washington itself is not genuinely interested in substantive talks. It appears that both sides would rather blame the other for obstructing—or trying to dictate—the agenda than acknowledge the limits on their leverage and the need to make some accommodations.

In the runup to Blinken’s visit next month, this equation has been reinforced by the apparent perception in Washington that the U.S. side may now have enhanced leverage over Beijing because Chinese leaders are simultaneously grappling with domestic problems (after the Covid policy reversal) and undertaking a diplomatic “charm offensive” to improve China’s global image in the wake of its earlier “overreach.” It is convenient for the Biden administration to calculate that this gives Washington the upper hand. But it invites the risk of mistaking a genuine Chinese desire to engage substantively on key issues—which, as noted above, U.S. officials are already inclined to dismiss as disingenuous—for a Chinese sense of vulnerability that allows Washington to respond minimally and/or try to extract unilateral concessions from Beijing. This is not hard to imagine, given that Washington itself probably assumes that any genuine U.S. eagerness to substantively engage with Beijing would be interpreted by Chinese leaders as a sign of American weakness and an opportunity to exploit.

Indeed, Beijing has expressed what almost certainly is a genuine—and greater—interest in constructive engagement. The Chinese readout of the Xi-Biden meeting in Bali was more extensive and detailed than the U.S. version on the need for sustained dialogue and on the range of bilateral and global issues that should be addressed through “strategic communication” and “regular consultations.” Moreover, Beijing has repeatedly criticized Washington’s characterization of the relationship as primarily competitive, emphasizing instead that bilateral cooperation should be elevated and maximized.

These themes have been echoed by Chinese foreign minister Qin Gang, who will be Blinken’s primary host in Beijing and who was just appointed on December 30 after eighteen months as the Chinese ambassador to the United States. On the occasion of his departure from Washington, Qin published two articles for the American audience, one in The National Interest and one in the Washington Post. In addition to invoking Xi’s messages in Bali, Qin wrote that the United States and China “should and can listen to each other, narrow our gap in perceptions of the world, and explore a way to get along based on mutual respect, peaceful coexistence, and win-win cooperation.” He reminisced about his frequent travels across the United States during his tenure as ambassador, and highlighted his extensive interactions with officials, scholars, businesspeople, and journalists: “Though we did not always see eye to eye, I appreciated their readiness to listen to the Chinese perspective.”

Predictably, Qin’s farewell articles were largely dismissed in Washington as typically lame and/or disingenuous Chinese efforts at public diplomacy. Indeed, they featured standard Chinese talking points on issues like Taiwan and Ukraine; well-worn propaganda about such things as Beijing’s pursuit of a global “community with a shared future for mankind”; and the recurring claim that responsibility for improving the U.S.-China relationship rests primarily with the U.S. side: “The Chinese people are looking to the American people to make the right choice.”

Qin reportedly received little high-level attention from the Biden administration during his tenure in Washington, partly because he was perceived as little more than a mouthpiece for such Chinese rhetoric, or as one of Beijing’s arrogant and obnoxious “wolf warrior” diplomats. The announcement of his appointment as foreign minister thus generated much commentary about whether this had been a miscalculation on Washington’s part. Some observers have dismissed the idea of a lost opportunity with Qin on the grounds that Beijing’s ambassadors and even its foreign minister are not really key players in the formulation of Chinese foreign policy. But this retroactive excuse appears only to reinforce the perception—in China and elsewhere—that Washington is unwilling to engage substantively with Beijing.

For his part, Qin never complained—at least publicly—about his treatment in Washington, and upon his departure even expressed appreciation for “several candid, in-depth and constructive meetings with [Blinken] during my tenure” as ambassador. Moreover, the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman has publicly welcomed Blinken’s upcoming trip, expressing the hope “that the United States can work with China to fully deliver on the important common understandings reached between the two heads of state, and bring China-US relations back to the track of sound and steady growth.”

But the obstacles to crossing that threshold are still evident in the way the two sides are framing their expectations. The Foreign Ministry spokesman added that Beijing “hopes that the United States will adopt a correct perception about China, stick to dialogue rather than confrontation, and pursue win-win results rather than a zero-sum game.” Blinken, for his part, reverted in his farewell conversation with Qin to invoking the modest goal of “maintaining open lines of communication.” And Campbell, in his public remarks on January 12, reiterated Washington’s focus on “building a floor” under the U.S.-China relationship and “guardrails” to prevent it from going off track.

This language from both sides suggests low expectations and limited potential for substantive forward progress in U.S.-China relations, at least in the near term. For now, it appears that meaningful reciprocal engagement, mutual development of “principles” to frame the relationship, and the possibility of setting sights higher than the floor will be slow in coming. With this backdrop, Blinken’s visit to Beijing will provide some indicators of how much the Bali meeting actually accomplished.

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).

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On December 21, China officially opened its first consulate general in Bandar Abbas, Iran’s most important southern sea transportation hub. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and Iran both praised the move as a step towards further cementing bilateral ties. The Chinese ambassador to Iran hailed the move as a landmark moment in China-Iran relations, while Iran’s former ambassador to China said that he anticipated Beijing to play a leading role in developing Iran’s southern coastal regions.

Why Does the Consulate Matter?

To better understand the importance of this development, one must grasp the bigger picture, starting with the signing of a semi-secretive twenty-five-year strategic cooperation document.

This consulate opening comes after the signing of an agreement known as the “Comprehensive Strategic Partnership between Iran and China” in March 2021, following an initial agreement during Chinese president Xi Jinping’s visit to Tehran in January 2016.

Though the details of this document have not been made public, according to some reports, the agreement includes special concessions given to China by Iran, including selling Iranian oil, gas, and petrochemical products at a guaranteed discounted price; the leasing of certain Iranian islands to China; and approving the establishment of a Chinese military base to secure Beijing’s facilities in Iran’s restive southern provinces.

To some Iran experts, with the signing of the twenty-five-year deal, Tehran has become a de facto Chinese colony and is even vulnerable to a demographic change and a massive influx of Chinese nationals. Other pundits contend that China’s endgame is to build an espionage hub in Iran under the agreement.

Could China’s Military Suppress the Uprising in Iran?

While both counties are determined to expand bilateral ties, the Iranian government faces an unprecedented domestic challenge as the nationwide protests enter their fourth month. The clerical regime has failed to subdue its youth, who seek structural transformation—i.e., regime change—and Tehran may need to ask for external support to quell opposition.

There is a precedent for seeking help from foreign fighters and non-Iranian militia groups. Indeed, Shia citizens from Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen have been turned into groupings formed by Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Consider the following examples. In early November 2022, it was reported that Iraqi Hashd al-Shaabi and Kata’ib Hezbollah forces arrived in Iran, probably to help suppress protesters. In March 2019, a senior Iranian official stated that Tehran could use Shia militias from other parts of the Middle East to crack down on popular uprisings in Iran. Amid the protests during the 2009 presidential Iranian election, also known as the Green Movement, Tehran reportedly brought foreign agents to persecute Iranian protesters.

Nevertheless, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) of China is a much harder sell. Iran is aware that deploying the non-Muslim, officially atheist PLA in the streets of Iran could backfire spectacularly. China, too, is quite reluctant to deploy its security forces abroad, let alone in the never-ending conflicts in the Middle East. Yet, as the world’s leading executioners and human rights violators, Iran and China can share their expertise, and the CCP may assist the clerical establishment in Iran by providing it with anti-riot equipment and know-how on detecting and tracking Iranian protesters. 

What Brings Communist China and Islamist Iran Together?

Despite initial appearances, both the clerical regime in Iran and the Chinese Communist Party have values that bind them together.

The regimes in Iran and China loathe human rights and see Western democracy as a non-indigenous, invading, and harmful foreign concept. The Chinese development model promises countries like Iran and Arab Gulf states prosperity and economic progress, devoid of headaches such as political opening and human rights. This is why the CCP’s friends and foes alike are inclined to imitate the Chinese governance model in the Middle East and some other parts of the developing world. If anything, Iran’s “Look to the East” foreign policy orientation and Saudi Arabia’s recent “Pivot to Asia” approach show that China’s rise to prominence has made its alternative, authoritarian development model more fashionable among other developing countries, especially as democracy is in decline globally.

Both the Iranian regime and the CCP despise Uncle Sam. Iran and China, along with Russia, seek to weaken what is known as the “U.S.-led rules-based world order” under the disguise of advocating for a multipolar world. The China-led multipolar world promises such revisionist countries like Iran an opportunity to play a larger role by diminishing America’s sole superpower status.

Both Tehran and Beijing have pursued a policy of demographic reengineering. By replacing Turkic Uighur Muslims with Han Chinese settlers, the CCP plans to gain further political control over the whole Xinjiang region and create a population that is sympathetic to Beijing. Using the same playbook, the clerical regime in Iran seeks to subdue non-Persian ethnic groups by turning them into minorities in their own ethnic heartland via demographic reengineering. In a leaked letter, former Iranian vice president Sayed Mohammad-Ali Abtahi suggests the forced migration of indigenous Ahwazi Arabs out of Ahwaz (Khuzestan) province and their replacement with non-indigenous but loyal settlers, particularly ethnic Persians.

Is the Consulate a Security Threat to America?

Since 2012, when Xi consolidated control over the party, the CCP has become increasingly assertive in its global military and geopolitical dominance. Not surprisingly, Xi has changed the CCP’s traditional foreign policy approach, ending “peaceful ascendance” and seeking superpower status and the eventual replacement of America. “Wolf warrior” diplomacy and the recent reassignment of the combative Zhao Lijian as China’s chief diplomat, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), debt trap diplomacy, and accelerating plans to take over Taiwan are some of the changes in China’s foreign policy approach that either began or gained momentum under Xi’s reign.

In tandem with its efforts to rapidly achieve global primacy, the CCP established its first overseas military base in Djibouti in 2017, deployed its first flotilla to the Gulf, and reached strategic partnerships with Algeria, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, and Iran. Xi’s China has, for the first time, also staged multiple naval drills with Russia and Iran. Now, China is reportedly planning to open a military base on the northern shores of the Gulf. While the southern coast of the Arabian Gulf is a U.S.-friendly neighborhood, the northern part (Iran) is a hotbed of anti-Americanism and geopolitical revisionism.

A strong Chinese diplomatic, economic, security, and military presence in the northern part of this crucial waterway is not a welcome development for the United States for a variety of reasons:

The fight for global primacy is intensifying

China’s traditional foreign policy—known as the “peaceful rise” to great power status—was replaced by a more assertive one under Xi Jinping. Despite its COVID-19 hiccup, Xi’s China continues to not-so-peacefully rise to become a global economic and military powerhouse, and its ascent to global prominence poses a security challenge to America’s supremacy amid the intensified New Cold War between the two superpowers. Skeptics don’t rule out a scenario where China’s security goals change, prompting it to engage in systemic conflict with the United States across the world. In that case, the energy-rich Gulf region is going to be a key U.S.-CCP battlefield in the war for global supremacy. The opening of a Chinese consulate in the northern part of the Arabian Gulf can be interpreted as a step in that direction.

Great power competition and dominating two strategic straits

If China decides to engage in systemic conflict with the United States, dominating transportation hubs, strategic canals, waterways, and straits would be key. Strangulating America in the strategic straits of Hormuz and Bab al-Mandab would become essential and is one of China’s long-term objectives in its competition with the United States. America may have a sizable military presence in the Arabian Gulf region that secures the Strait of Hormuz for now, but as a counterbalancing act, Iran can help China establish its security, intelligence, and military foothold in the Gulf.

As for the Bab al-Mandab Strait, home to one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes, China already has a military base near the southern part of the strait in Djibouti, and its expansion to the northern part of this strategic waterway would bolster Beijing’s geopolitical posture. Iran’s proxy force, the Houthi militias, who are the de facto rulers of Yemen, can help China expand its influence on the northern part of the strait. The new consulate in southern Iran will facilitate China’s efforts to achieve this goal.

The China-Iran-Russia Triangle

Iran, Russia, and China are increasingly united on the cause of anti-Americanism. They have formed an unofficial “Triangle Alliance” in Asia that, according to the Iranian parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Committee spokesman, heralds the “end of the inequitable hegemony of the United States and the West.”

The military aspect of this triangle alliance stands out. Iran, China, and Russia have held at least three joint naval exercises in recent years. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, military cooperation between Tehran and Moscow has been growing on such a scale that, according to U.S. national security council spokesman John Kirby, Iran has become Russia's top military backer.

In addition, China’s AI and other military technology capabilities are rapidly developing. Beijing provides Iran with UAVs, whereas Iran sells its Shahed-136 kamikaze drones to Russia. These game-changing weapons are radically altering the military landscape in Ukraine. Conversely, Russia is set to supply Iran with dozens of its Sukhoi Su-35 fighter jets, giving Iran much-needed air superiority capabilities.

China’s Bandar Abbas consulate would undoubtedly serve as a conduit to consolidate this new triangle alliance.

Coordinating the Belt and Road Initiative

The success of the BRI gives the Xi administration a strategic tool in great power competition. China intends to improve Iran’s transportation infrastructure by building roads, bridges, ports, factories, and industrial towns, in accordance with the twenty-five-year strategic agreement. When completed, these infrastructural projects in Iran’s southern free trade zones in Jask and Chabahar would be integrated into China’s trillion-dollar BRI to export its goods to the Middle Eastern, Central Asian, and European markets. Needless to say, opening a consulate at Iran’s transportation hub would expedite this integration.

The Reconquista of Taiwan.

If the forceful unification of Ukraine is inevitable for Russian president Vladimir Putin’s realization of his imperial Novorossiya (New Russia) project, for Xi, the reunification with Taiwan is necessary to fulfill the “One China” objective.

As the world’s largest energy importer, China seeks to ensure an uninterrupted flow of hydrocarbon resources from Iran, Saudi Arabia, and other Gulf states. By signing comprehensive economic and security agreements with Iran and Saudi Arabia, the Gulf’s major players, the CCP has taken steps to ensure a smooth flow of oil in the event that the West punishes it for attacking Taiwan.

The opening of a CCP consulate in Iran can serve, among other things, as a platform to ease the energy and economic consequences of this strategic decision.

Ahmad Hashemi is an independent foreign policy analyst with a focus on Iran, and Middle East affairs. Follow him on Twitter @MrAhmadHashemi.

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Semiconductors are at the center of the new cold war. President Joe Biden’s signing of the CHIPS and Science Act in August 2022, followed by the U.S. Department of Commerce’s announcement in October of complementary export controls, made clear U.S. concerns about China.

More broadly, high-tech competition is a driver of foreign policy for the United States, and its national security is dependent on maintaining a technological advantage over its adversaries. The Biden administration has assessed the risk China poses to that technological advantage and drawn a line in the sand. This high-stakes reality has informed Washington’s preparedness to not only deny China access to advanced chips but also limit access to the machinery and expertise required to make them.

This is not the first time America’s leadership in high tech and the semiconductor industry has come under threat. Throughout the 1980s, Japan’s rise in efficient and low-cost production of dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) chips forced Silicon Valley companies, such as Intel, to pivot to the production of microprocessors for PCs in order to stay competitive. At the time, research and development (R&D) grants for leading manufacturers and universities from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and deft trade diplomacy by Washington in the form of coordination with new partners such as South Korea, helped the United States maintain leadership in semiconductor design and prevent Japan’s low-cost chips from undercutting the U.S. market. Collaboration across supply chains with partners sharing mutual interests enabled U.S. market dominance and national security. Preserving these wins remains vital in today’s strategic competition with China.

Australia—like South Korea in the past—can help fill the gap in the U.S. semiconductor supply chain. Looking outward to collaborative opportunities with partners, particularly trusted allies such as Australia, will be key in ensuring the United States maintains its tech advantage and, in turn, its national security. For Washington, Australia represents an opportunity to develop a secure semiconductor supply chain that supports U.S. sovereign industry and export policies. Australia is not yet entrenched in the global semiconductor ecosystem and therefore can support alliance interests without having to weigh “trade” against “geopolitics,” which is a major concern for existing semiconductor manufacturers such as South Korea’s Samsung and Taiwan’s TSMC. Both companies rely on semiconductor supply relationships with China.

In the context of China developing technology capabilities in artificial intelligence (AI) and Quantum powered by advanced semiconductors, Australia and the United States should be seeking to collaborate on how the alliance network can be leveraged to both slow China's access to these advanced chips and ensure mutual semiconductor security.

Australia along with the rest of the world is closely watching how the United States engages with its global partners. U.S. commerce secretary Gina Raimondo recently stated that the United States is “working very closely” with like-minded countries and is confident that countries such as the Netherlands and South Korea will “work in concert” with the United States due to mutual national security interests. Some linchpins in the global semiconductor supply chain, such as Dutch company ASML Holding—a global leader in lithography—already appear poised to align with U.S. policies.

The Japan-U.S. R&D collaboration announced in early January is indicative that other major semiconductor players are recognizing mutual security that is gained through friend-shoring semiconductor supply chains. Significantly, it is occurring through public-private partnership, with U.S. company IBM and Rapidus, a new Japanese government-backed company, partnering to develop next-generation chips.

This development signals that Washington is prepared to engage and back cross-sector collaboration with aligned partners and is a trend on which Canberra should seek to capitalize. The advanced capability sharing under pillar two of the AUKUS agreement is further indicative of the existing recognition of the benefits of streamlining technology sharing between trusted partners. AUKUS pillar two is dependent on public-private sector collaboration, which has also been identified as necessary for Australia to grow its semiconductor industry, as outlined in the 2022 Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s (ASPI) “Australia’s semiconductor national moonshot” report. Semiconductor production should therefore be integrated into AUKUS discussions as partners work to address the challenges of developing a shared defense industrial base and adjusting barriers, such as International Traffic in Arms Regulations, to achieve the agreement's goals. The advanced technologies identified as critical under AUKUS are all dependent on semiconductors and therefore should explicitly consider how this enabling technology can be secured to begin with.

For Australia, the urgency driving U.S. export polices and diplomatic coordination with allies incentivizes complementary development of a sovereign industry capability. Australian governments have recognized the security benefits of developing a sovereign semiconductor capability in recent years. The publication of a 2020 report commissioned by the office of the New South Wales government chief scientist and engineer on the capabilities, opportunities, and challenges in Australia’s semiconductor industry, provided a signal as to what the development of the industry could look like.

Australia’s nascent semiconductor industry offers an alternative capacity to secure “trailing edge” technologies and compound chips, as opposed to advanced silicon chips that the United States specializes in. “Trailing edge” technologies refer to less advanced chips that are larger and slower, but crucial in legacy systems such as household appliances to existing weapons systems. This differs from the advanced semiconductors used in cloud computing and AI systems that the U.S. export controls primarily concern.

Compound semiconductor production is also a ripe opportunity for Australia given the limited U.S. production of these chips. Compound chips are a strategic investment due to their utility in supporting wireless communication technology, and renewable technology such as solar panels. The existing expertise and base-level production capacity within Australia by companies such as Morse Micro enhance the practical focus on this aspect of semiconductor production.

The start-up investment required is significant. ASPI’s moonshot report estimated that $1.5 billion is needed to stimulate $5 billion in compound semiconductor foundry manufacturing activity. In the long term, such an investment would help ensure Australian security in a critical industry and assuage any concerns about Australia’s technical capability to support the U.S.-Australia alliance in this critically important field.

Harnessing diplomatic and trade relationships built on existing security alliances and decades of trust offers an attractive and comparatively reliable policy avenue for addressing the unknown risks associated with the global scramble for semiconductor security.

Bronte Munro is an Analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute in Washington, DC, with a focus on critical technology and cyber. 

Image: Shutterstock.

The United States can help Taiwan defeat a Chinese invasion, but doing so will rely heavily on American airpower and come at a significant cost.

While largely classified Pentagon war games have previously suggested China would succeed in such an attack, a recent series of war games carried out by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) think-tank indicates that previous Defense Department war games were likely aimed at identifying weaknesses within Taiwan’s and America’s defensive postures, rather than providing a clear and realistic view of how such a conflict would play out.

But despite the seemingly optimistic outcomes of CSIS’s war games, one thing remained clear throughout every iteration: American intervention on behalf of Taiwan would lead to staggering losses of life and military hardware unlike anything seen by American forces since the Second World War.

And as is so often the case when it comes to Uncle Sam’s combat operations, victory for Taiwan is heavily dependent on the effective use of the full breadth of American airpower — though surprisingly, it’s not the F-22 or F-35 that could make the biggest difference. Instead, it’s America’s bomber force that could win the day.

Related: Are we too quick to draw parallels between Ukraine and Taiwan?

CSIS played out China’s invasion of Taiwan 24 times, and heavy losses were a constant through all of them

  (U.S. Army photo by Thomas Mort)

In a 165-page report released by CSIS, entitled The First Battle of the Next War: Wargaming a Chinese Invasion of Taiwan the think-tank outlined the outcomes of 24 wargame scenarios in which China launches a full-scale invasion in 2026. Leveraging the full breadth of unclassified information about each country’s respective military capabilities, stockpiles, and doctrine, the project team played each scenario through the end of the heaviest fighting, and the results were largely positive for those in the West… though positive is a subjective term.

In the one interval played out without any American or allied intervention, Taiwan fell to Chinese forces somewhat rapidly, offering a baseline for the value of Western intervention in maintaining the country’s sovereignty.

In the handful of scenarios played through with the most optimistic of circumstances, the U.S. and Taiwan secured rapid victories, but with an average of 200 American combat aircraft and eight warships lost, in addition to similar Japanese losses.

In the most realistic “base” scenarios, China was rapidly defeated or fought to a stalemate that would likely ultimately result in Taiwan’s victory, but the average losses for American forces in these iterations included some 270 combat aircraft and 17 warships of varying sorts.

The vast majority of iterations played through were considered “pessimistic scenarios,” in that they included variables meant to hinder American capabilities in ways that potentially could play out in a real conflict.

Even in the pessimistic scenarios, Chinese forces failed to secure a single dominant victory. In three iterations, Taiwan and the U.S. emerged victorious. In seven more, the forces fought to a stalemate that favored Taiwan’s eventual victory. In two others, they fought to a stalemate that favored neither side, and finally, in just three of these pessimistic scenarios, China was able to secure a stalemate that appeared to favor its eventual success.

However, despite that promising list of outcomes, losses for the United States were severe, with a combined average of 484 American combat aircraft lost and 14 U.S. warships destroyed. Once again, Japan also suffered similar losses.

These losses, of course, were relatively small compared to China’s, but because America’s losses usually included two aircraft carriers and many 5th-generation fighters, the personnel and material losses for the United States would be immense and would require years, if not decades, to recover from.

Related: Taiwan Strait Crises: How history is repeating itself in the Pacific

RAGNAROK: For China to take Taiwan, it must negate US AirPower

(U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Keenan Daniels/Released)

After Chinese forces failed to secure a single outright victory in any of the optimistic, baseline, or pessimistic scenarios that included American intervention, the project team established one more set of circumstances meant specifically to identify what it would take for China to succeed. This iteration was dubbed, “Ragnarok” — which is the final battle of the gods and the forces of evil in Norse mythology. Based on their findings, the success of the Chinese invasion is predicated specifically on beating America at what America does best.

“To be victorious, China must negate U.S. airpower, both fighter attack and bombers.”

“The First Battle of the Next War: Wargaming a Chinese Invasion of Taiwan,” Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), January, 2023

Doing so would require a few specific events to play out as needed to benefit the Chinese invasion force, but they’re not entirely unrealistic. First, Japan would need to bar the United States from flying combat operations from their soil, limiting American airfields to Guam where China could concentrate air and missile strikes, wiping out hundreds of aircraft while still on the ground.

This could leave American bombers without viable fighter escorts, opening the door for Chinese fighters to engage them with long-range air-to-air missiles, and limiting their ability to deploy long-range anti-ship cruise missiles toward China’s invasion fleet.

Related: What does the invasion of Ukraine mean for China and Taiwan?

Why are these outcomes so different from previously discussed DoD wargames?

(U.S. Army Military Review)

In 2020, anonymous sources within the Defense Department leaked the results of a series of Pentagon war games in which China repeatedly defeated American forces in the Pacific by 2030. These results were widely publicized and discussed, but like many discussions about military exercises and war games, they often lacked essential context about the nature of such efforts.

It is true that Pentagon war games are conducted behind closed doors to leverage the full breadth of classified intelligence available, which might seem to suggest that these games should be taken more seriously than efforts like this more recent CSIS series, which was based on open-source data. But it’s important to understand the nature and intent of Pentagon war games, and where they differ from objective analysis.

As we’ve discussed in previous coverage around debates surrounding notional training dogfights with high profile platforms like the F-22 Raptor, the goal of these sorts of efforts is not to secure victories and pad a score card, but rather, to specifically place units, leaders, and individual service members in difficult circumstances to assess the very real limitations of current training, equipment, and doctrine. While the goal of each participant is to win, winning isn’t the goal of the enterprise. Learning is.

(DoD photo by Javier Chagoya)

These war games are incredibly important for the leaders, strategists, and planners involved in them, but when it comes to divining what they may mean for real-life conflict from the outside looking in, with only bits and pieces of leaked information to work with, they offer little real value.

This conclusion has now been substantiated by two different war-game revolutions from separate independent think tanks: the aforementioned series from CSIS, and a June 2022 series conducted by the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) that indicated neither side could secure a swift victory without incurring massive losses.

However, this does not mean victory over China would be assured, and it certainly doesn’t mean that the United States could rapidly defeat China in a large-scale conventional war in the Pacific of another sort. Instead, these war games offer an insight into the size of the challenge all parties face in such a conflict, and by better understanding those challenges, we can better predict what different parties may do to overcome them.

These types of exercises aren’t meant to soothe or stoke fears. They’re tools that can be used to understand how a fight might play out, with the ultimate goal of using what’s learned to prevent one from starting in the first place.

Because, at the end of the day, warfare is about far more than comparing numbers on paper. But if we’re lucky, we’ll be able to leave it that.

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

This article was first published by Sandboxx News.

Image: Shutterstock.

Much has been written and discussed about the problem of “free riding,” in general, and in foreign policy, in particular. During the Cold War and its aftermath, America’s allies across the Atlantic and the Pacific were being criticized in Washington for relying on the United States to spend its national treasure in terms of higher military expenditures to provide them with global security.

With prime examples being Germany and Japan, it was argued that the allies were provided with little incentive to contribute to the production of an international public good that takes the form of the protection of global interests of the Western alliance as long as the United States seems to be ready to provide that cost-free.

Most of this discussion focused on geostrategic issues. But in the aftermath of the Cold War, it also spilled into geo-economic issues. Why should America continue bankrolling the defense budgets of countries like Japan, surplus economies whose companies compete with American businesses in the global arena?

Paying less for defense, thanks to U.S. subsidies, allows these free riders to spend more on social-economic programs while fiscal tightening forces Americans to cut expenditures on education and health.

Moreover, the United States’ hegemonic position in the Middle East, which has been maintained through huge military and financial costs, allowed America’s allies in Europe and Asia that are dependent on energy imports to have freedom of access to the oil resources in the Persian Gulf.

And then there is the international reality under which the United States is committed to use its nuclear weapons to defend its North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies as well as Japan and South Korea if those countries face threat from a rival nuclear power. Hence, the Americans are supposedly ready to see New York and San Francisco being nuked in order to save Berlin and Tokyo from annihilation.

Thus, pressing NATO members to increase their defense budgets and their military and economic contributions to the alliance has become a ritual of sorts in Washington, practiced by Republican and Democratic officials and lawmakers, until President Donald Trump’s behavior made it look faux pas.

At the same time, the growing anti-globalization sentiments in the United States reflected an unwillingness on the part of the Americans to continue to open their markets and to continue supporting the liberal economic order while the allies were breaking free-trade principles. But then that was the way the industrial miracles of Germany and Japan had happened, very much at the expense of American economic interests.

And there is no doubt that the costs of the wars the United States has fought in the Greater Middle East have started challenging the Washington consensus about the U.S. role in the world. America is supposedly ready to come to the aid of its allies as the global balancer of last resort, and thus, for example, ensure their access to the energy resources in the Persian Gulf, while the allies pay very little in exchange, and even try to force the United States into costlier military interventions in the Middle East, as France did in the case of Libya.

But then came events—Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and growing Chinese threats to Taiwan—that according to the conventional wisdom may have finally convinced the U.S. allies that free riding isn’t an option anymore and that they need to start playing a more activist role in the protection of Western interests against the threat of powerful global disruptors. They now have to contribute to the production of that international public good, since alone the United States will not continue to provide it cost-free.

On some level, the conventional wisdom is correct if one considers the German responses to the Russian attack on Ukraine and the Japanese reaction to the perceived threat from China. These developments seemed to have changed the balance of power in Europe and Asia, where America can supposedly now count on its allies to play their roles as its deputies while the United States remains primus inter pares (first among equals), call it American Hegemony Lite.

Indeed, Germany’s post-Ukraine policy changes were dramatic. “We are living through a watershed era. And that means that the world afterwards will no longer be the same as the world before,” Chancellor Olaf Scholz told a special session of the Bundestag in April, proclaiming a Zeitenwende (”historic turning point”), that involved witnessing a total collapse of strategic principles embodied in Ostpolitik (“Eastern Policy”) and its notion of Wandel durch Handel (“change through trade”).

Announcing the most far-reaching policy reversals in postwar German history, Scholz pledged to invest significantly more in the armed forces, to provide military support for the Ukrainian army, to revamp Germany’s energy policy, and lead the efforts for joint European Union (EU) sanctions against Russia’s regime.

Japan, the other nation that was defeated by the United States and its allies in World War II, responded like Germany to the changes in the global balance of power by embracing a more militarist posture.

Under Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, who has asked his parliament to double his government’s defense budget, Japan seems to be trying to move beyond its post-WWII pacifist tradition.

During a visit to Washington, Kishida reaffirmed his country’s commitment to acquire hundreds of American Tomahawk cruise missiles, while the United States announced plans to expand its military assistance to Tokyo, suggesting that both sides will benefit from the relationship. Or so it seems.

In a way, dealing with Trump for four years provided a lesson of sorts for the Japanese, Germans, and other U.S. allies: in the long run, the American public isn’t going to tolerate the kind of relationship under which America does more for its allies than it gets in return. In short, Americans don’t want to be played for suckers anymore in both the geostrategic and geo-economic arenas.

Liberalizing American trade policies while dealing with nations that practiced protectionism made some sense at the beginning of the Cold War. The economies of Japan and Germany were recovering from the WWII devastation and were shielding their domestic industries from foreign competition by taxing imports when Washington wanted to ensure the economic growth of its allies in Europe and Asia.

But those who assumed that Trump’s economic nationalist policies would change under the more internationalist President Joe Biden are discovering now that that approach enjoys bipartisan support.

Biden’s decision not to join the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), which would have required the Americans to reduce tariffs on some Asian imports, and his administration’s enactment of electric-vehicle subsidies that U.S. allies regard as unfair protection of U.S.-made goods are signs that Washington has turned upside-down the Cold-War-era deal with the allies. It was based on the expectations that the United States needed to win the geostrategic commitment of its allies through concessions in the geo-economic area.

If anything, the message coming from Washington these days is that if the allies want to be able to continue to rely on U.S. military leadership, they are the ones who would have to accept the economic conditions set by the Americans: Ending their energy deals with Russia, sanctioning it, and joining the United States in a long and costly economic-technological war with the Chinese.

This approach runs contrary to free-trade principles and reflects the basic tenets of power politics that might make right, despite the attempt by Biden to market these policies as part of a campaign to fight dictators and promote democracy worldwide. In the same way, unlike the Soviet Union, neither Russia nor China is interested in seeing its respective political-economic model win the hearts and minds of the people of this world. Like the United States, they seek access to economic and military power.

Given that perspective, and in consideration of the backdrop of threats that are being posed by Russia and China, the decisions by Germany, Japan, and other countries to increase their defense contributions stem from the recognition that this is the minimum they need to do to have America continue pledging to see Washington destroyed in order to protect Berlin and Tokyo.

That means that even if Germany and Japan do increase their military spending to the stratosphere, they would still remain free riders on American power unless they decide to go nuclear in order to defend themselves because they cannot count on U.S. support anymore.

It can be argued that it’s in America’s interest to prevent Japan, Germany, South Korea, Taiwan, and Saudi Arabia—or for that matter, Ukraine—from developing independent nuclear military power since that would supposedly make the world a more dangerous place. However, this is ironic. We should remember that it has been the United States and Russia that have launched a series of wars in recent decades that have made the world more dangerous. In retrospect, if Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and Ukraine had nuclear weapons, the world would have probably been less dangerous today.

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: Shutterstock.

2023 could be a watershed year for public policy regarding Big Tech. Since 2020, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the Department of Justice (DOJ), and the European Union (EU) have filed lawsuits against major U.S. tech companies, alleging they have relied on anti-competitive methods to maintain monopolies over social media platforms, search engines, advertising, and app stores. “The agencies have started laying the foundations for a more interventionist stance over the last two years, and this year is when we’ll start to see some of those efforts come to fruition—or be stopped in their tracks by the courts,” said Colin Kass, a partner in Proskauer Rose LLP’s antitrust group.

On November 10, the FTC voted to replace its 2015 “Statement of Enforcement Principles Regarding ‘Unfair Methods of Competition’ under Section 5 of the FTC Act” with a new “Policy Statement Regarding the Scope of Unfair Methods of Competition Under Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act.” This new policy statement is reflective of FTC chair Lina Khan’s antitrust philosophy and President Joe Biden’s “Executive Order on Promoting Competition in the American Economy.” However, Logan Breed, a partner at Hogan Lovells, has noted that “this policy statement exists in a vacuum. There is no real clarity on what [Section 5] means, and we’re just going to have to wait and see what the FTC decides to do. … And that’s likely going to happen in 2023.”

The new policy statement defines a method of competition as “a conduct undertaken by an actor in the marketplace”—as opposed to merely a condition of the marketplace not of the respondent’s making, such as high concentration or barriers to entry. This conduct must implicate competition directly or indirectly. In addition, the term “unfair” is defined as conduct that “goes beyond competition on the merits,” e.g., a firm having “superior products or services, superior business acumen, truthful marketing and advertising practices, investment in research and development that leads to innovative outputs, or attracting employees through better employment terms.” The new FTC policy statement is explicit that an FTC “inquiry will not focus on the ‘rule of reason’ inquiries more common in cases under the Sherman Act, but instead focus on stopping unfair methods of competition in their incipiency based on their tendency to harm competitive conditions.” Actual harms may not always be necessary to warrant enforcement, and such “incipient threats” now become challengeable.

Furthermore, the recent passage by Congress of the $1.7 trillion omnibus spending bill includes the “State Enforcement Venue Act,” which extends a federal exemption to consolidate antitrust cases pending in different districts before a single court when they concern common questions of fact to state governments involved with multidistrict litigation. The act was prompted partly by Google’s successful move to change the venue of a case brought by Texas and other states that was eventually consolidated with related cases in the Southern District of New York. The bill was originally proposed by, among others, Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) and had been publicly supported by the National Association of Attorneys General and FTC chair Lina Khan.

Both Khan and Jonathan Kanter, who leads the DOJ’s antitrust division, are willing advocates of novel antitrust legal theories—even if that means sometimes losing a case. Both the FTC and the DOJ are pursuing major Big Tech investigations and have federal judicial rulings expected in 2023. They include:

FTC v. Facebook

The FTC alleges that Meta (formerly Facebook) is illegally maintaining its personal social networking monopoly through a years-long course of anticompetitive conduct—including its 2012 acquisition of up-and-coming rival Instagram, its 2014 acquisition of the mobile messaging app WhatsApp, and the imposition of anticompetitive conditions on software developers—to eliminate threats to its monopoly. The FTC originally sued Meta in December 2020. However, the lawsuit was dismissed in 2021 due to a lack of evidence. The FTC refiled its lawsuit following the dismissal and was allowed to proceed in January 2022.

FTC v. Meta/Within

The FTC is attempting to block Meta’s acquisition of virtual reality (VR) company Within. In a lawsuit filed in July 2022, the FTC alleges that unlike building a VR app on its own—an action that would increase competition—Meta’s attempt to purchase another VR developer would dampen “future innovation and competitive rivalry.” The FTC accused Meta of attempting to purchase its way to the top of the VR market rather than competing or building its own product. The FTC anticipates a ruling by the end of January.

FTC v. Microsoft

The FTC sued Microsoft in December 2022 to block its acquisition of video game developer Activision Blizzard, which owns the popular Call of Duty franchise. The FTC alleges that the $69 billion deal, which would be Microsoft’s largest acquisition in the video game industry, “would enable Microsoft to suppress competitors (such as Sony and Nintendo) to its Xbox gaming consoles and its rapidly growing subscription content and cloud-gaming business.” In response, Microsoft has stated that its goal is to create a cloud gaming service that allows consumers to stream various games on multiple devices for one reasonable fee. The FTC filed its case in administrative court and has not yet requested a federal court to grant an injunction blocking the acquisition.

U.S. v. Google (Alphabet, Inc.)

The Trump administration’s DOJ sued Google in 2020, alleging that it maintained its “gatekeeper” role as a monopoly for online search services and search advertising through anti-competitive practices, i.e., developing an unlawful web of exclusionary and interlocking business agreements that shut out competitors. The case will go to trial in September 2023. If successful, the DOJ could seek structural changes to Google, including a spinoff of the company’s Chrome browser.

A private antitrust case worth watching is Epic Games v. Apple. In 2020, Epic Games, Inc. alleged that Apple violated antitrust laws through its Apple App Store policies by charging exorbitant commission fees and instituting a requirement to use Apple’s in-app payment method rather than alternative payments on iOS devices. Apple countered that Epic Games had breached its developer agreements and App Store guidelines by introducing a direct pay option on iOS devices in Epic Games’ popular video game Fortnite. While Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers initially ruled that Apple’s conduct was not anti-competitive, Epic Games has since appealed the decision.

Also, on January 5, the FTC unveiled proposed rules prohibiting companies from asking workers to sign non-compete clauses, which may limit or delay workers from starting competing businesses or moving to rival companies. The proposed ban could most impact the tech industry, as such agreements are widely used by tech companies, which cite the need to protect trade secrets and intellectual property.

In the executive branch, Tim Wu, a major critic of Big Tech, stepped down as a White House special assistant for competition and technology policy in early January to return as a law school professor at Columbia University. Wu was one of three antitrust policy advocates in the Biden administration pushing for more assertive antitrust measures designed to rein in Big Tech giants such as Amazon and Google. Wu was also a key architect of the more than seventy initiatives to improve competition in the technology, healthcare, and agricultural industries within the Biden administration’s “Executive Order on Promoting Competition in the American Economy.” Elizabeth Kelly of the White House’s National Economic Council will now oversee Wu’s work on technology policy, while Hannah Garden-Monheit will take over competition policy.

In Congress, several proposed privacy and antitrust bills did not make it into the end-of-year $1.7 trillion omnibus spending bill, including the American Innovation and Choice Act and the Open App Markets Act, both of which deal with the tech industry. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) “killed” both bills. However, as a consolation, Schumer allocated an extra $85 million to the nation’s two antitrust enforcement agencies: $50 million to the FTC and $35 million to the DOJ. The majority leader also included an amendment authorizing these agencies to collect higher fees from companies that require a proposed merger review. As a result, the FTC and DOJ are projected to collect approximately $1.4 billion over the next ten years.

What tech industry legislation can be expected in the 118th Congress? Ultimately, there will be few opportunities for antitrust legislation to be enacted in the House or the Senate. Nevertheless, there is bipartisan support in both chambers for addressing privacy issues—including Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act—and cybersecurity issues with broadband.

Thomas A. Hemphill is David M. French Distinguished professor of strategy, innovation and public policy in the School of Management, University of Michigan-Flint.

Image: Shutterstock.

Following the West’s repudiation of the Maduro regime, for a class of government-connected Venezuelans commonly referred to as enchufdos—those who are “plugged” into government—there came a fear to invest internationally. When faced with the prospect of sanctions, incarceration, and frozen bank accounts, this ragtag group, composed mainly of members of the enabling old elite and phony populists who became the country’s nouveau riche, had to innovate.

In the pursuit of new money flows, and limited by an inability to re-invest their ill-earned dollars with confidence, this group, accompanied by so-called anti-imperialists, suddenly went all-in with the de facto dollarization of the Venezuelan economy. With this came not only the unexpected opening of a Ferrari dealership in the capital, but what many referred to as “La Era del Bodegón” (The Age of Bodegas), a term used by shocked, sometimes optimistic, and often satiric, Caraqueños who—after enduring the absence of milk, toilet paper, and sugar—started to see the rise of bodegas with, to many’s surprise, basic essentials. 

This is all rather uneventful, some may think, but with this perceived progress came a reduction of expressed social discontent.

This is not due to a substantive change in the state of affairs. The country remains corruption-ridden and the currency hyper-inflated. To this day, there are gasoline and water shortages (yes, in Venezuela). The overwhelming majority of the population lives under the poverty line. Still, even when the emigration numbers are comparable with those in Syria and Ukraine, thousands who have been forced to live miserably can be made ecstatic with vacuous, slight progress. Under the guise of social betterment, it appears that there is nothing more than a superficial notion of modernization.

To properly assess the situation on the ground, it’s necessary to examine social relations within the country with honesty—and without unshakeable faith in development theory. This means that instead of expecting dissatisfaction with the regime, hoping for it to perish or for imminent revolution to happen, we must take all predictions with a grain of salt. Criticism of the country’s fractured opposition and commentary regarding the changing approach of foreign actors may carry some validity. But the two are insufficient without a deeper exploration of how the population of Venezuela feels about the country they live in today, as multifarious as that feeling may be. 

The claim that “Venezuela se Arregló,” which translates to “Venezuela has been fixed,” has become ubiquitous in popular discourse, although sometimes it is expressed in an almost nihilistic manner. In family reunions and parties, in the supermarket and after church, and throughout the country, overhearing these debates is unavoidable. As journalist Alonso Moleiro claimed in El País, the phrase has become a mirage that torments the national consciousness, as its expression alludes, correctly, to some progress in the proliferation of establishments, while others believe that the utterance in itself looks over the galloping monetary catastrophe and the ever-evolving human rights crisis.

As someone who lived a significant part of my life in the country, and is visiting Caracas for the first time in six years, I decided to examine what the “Venezuela se Arregló” claim really means by talking to Venezuelans themselves.

As I arrived in Caracas, once known as “the Pearl of the Caribbean,” my first conversation was with a talkative taxi driver and family man from San Cristóbal. When I asked about the now-popular saying, he outright coarsely responded: “pure bullshit.” He explained that his nephew “spent three months in prison after the 2012 protests, even when he was not protesting.” In his words, the true intention of his capture was criminal, as “the national guard asked for four thousand dollars” for his release. With visible horror, he claimed that, while arbitrarily detained, his nephew was terrorized to such a degree that, when his nephew’s mother brought maize-based arepas for her son, they were filled with human feces—an attempt to degrade the now traumatized young man.

“Fear”, he said, “combined with the need to adapt to changing circumstances” has reduced public demonstrations, saying that those who claim that things are better were privileged beforehand. He suggested that the recently built business establishments appeal to a select few, as the average Venezuelan would have to work for weeks to afford a plate at one of the more trendy restaurants. If conditions were getting better, he posited, “there would not be thousands selling everything they have to leave their home country in precarious conditions.”

The next day I talked to a very different sort of individual: a college student at the Metropolitan University of Venezuela. We met at a burger joint. The food was good, the prices were higher than I expected, and the conversation lovely. Without having to ask, he updated me on how much has changed since he last saw me.

“Do you remember Las Mercedes?” From what I could recollect, it was the nicer part of the city, with good gastronomy and nightlife. But then again, the last time I was in the city I was a sixteen-year-old and lacking a sophisticated palate.

According to him, Las Mercedes is now “literally the bastard child of Paris.” Semi-jokingly, he explained that the district is “all lit-up as if it were Times Square, with rooftops, and hundreds of new restaurants.” To this, he added that there is a replica of the iconic Miami-based nightclub, E11EVEN, which has been conveniently baptized as “Twelve.” According to him, it is “just a hole in the ground, but still, there are plenty of new places to party,” something that previously did not exist. If this sounds exaggerated, then BBC’s Norberto Paredes calling the district “the epicenter of Venezuelan capitalism” should be even more eye-catching.

Following this, I talked to one friend’s mother, and she had a lot to say. From a six-floor glass-covered gallery, with all the luxury brands named Avanti to several padel courts built by the family of First Lady Cilia Flores, she suggested that Caracas “has been fixed.” She emphasized that “all the money is dirty, but people don’t think about it too much,” suggesting that “it’s always been corrupt, so for some, it’s a matter of a corruption that at least builds, or a corruption that only destroys.”

Like her, another mother helped me learn a lot about the absurd changes in the city. She talked about Altum, a floating Dubai-style restaurant that lifts its customers to incredible heights with a crane, which she described as “insane and obscene,” claiming that she has no doubts “money laundering is behind it.” Additionally, she talked about the opening of Salvaje Caracas, a luxury Japanese cuisine chain with restaurants in Paris, Miami, and Madrid.

In her eyes, although a few businesses weren’t started by enchufados, there is no doubt, and in dozens of cases, it has been proven, that those connected with the narco-state are behind most of the development. The mother exclaimed that “they have billions of dollars that they cannot hide.”

Regarding the bodega phenomenon, the college student suggested that “there are more American products here than in the United States.”  Putting aside this fascinating sales pitch, the tone of the conversation shifted when I queried if this was a marked departure from the old status quo. “Even ‘Venezuela Plus’ is still Venezuela,” he asserted, suggesting that the water is still cut on a day-to-day basis, and that, “the wifi still sucks.” When pressed about the social discontent, he claimed that “there are no protests anymore,” explaining that being an enchufado has become so normal that even the old elites have many of them in their friend groups.

“We know who is who, but we don’t do anything about it, we can’t do anything, and trying to do anything leads to nothing,” he mused.

When talking to an older man while in line for some pastries, I found general agreement. Although more politically focused, the man told me that the revolution-esque discourse has been replaced with cohabitation, and many of the people with any money left are either in “survival mode or taking advantage of the changing business environment.” He claimed that the opposition is filled with opportunists who, when push comes to shove, benefit from the status quo, stating that, “everyone hates Maduro, but no one does anything, so it is just what it is.”

With notable hopelessness, and maybe a tad of indifference, another student, this time from Andrés Bello Catholic University, told me that “with things the way they are, who cares who is in power?” He continued, “all politicians in this country are corrupt, Venezuelans have a short memory, and those with power who could challenge Maduro lack balls,” claiming that, unlike what some “Guaido-lovers hoped,” things will not change. If anything, he stated, “Maduro’s grasp on power will become even stronger.”

The foreign policy world must be made aware of these sorts of views and developments. From regime change supporters to barrier-reduction advocates, it is essential to grasp how the Venezuelan regime and its enablers have reacted to a hostile international market and how their reaction affects the prospects of political change. Only by doing this can policymakers enhance their approach to this particular South American nation, so that any steps made actually advance tangible, lasting goals. Even more so, for those who seek to understand how nations change, if anything can be learned from these interviews it is that much can be extracted vis-à-vis social relations within a country from how citizens interact on an ordinary basis.

One cannot appreciate what one cannot remember. In the case of Venezuela, memories of national greatness have been overshadowed by those of national tragedy. The effects this has on perceptions of progress are evidenced in the Venezuela se Arregló debacle, and to understand Venezuela today, this trend cannot be overlooked.

Juan P. Villasmil “J.P. Ballard” is a commentator and analyst who often writes about American culture, foreign policy, and political philosophy. He has been featured in The American Spectator, The National Interest, The Wall Street Journal, International Policy Digest, Fox News, Telemundo, MSNBC, and others.

Image: Shutterstock.

With the appointment of Boris Pistorius, the former interior minister of Lower Saxony, to replace Christine Lambrecht as defense minister, Germany has reached a turning point. Chancellor Olaf Scholz declared a Zeitenwende, or new era, in a dramatic speech in the Bundestag in February 2022, but he has not really fulfilled his promise. With a NATO defense ministers meeting on Ukraine taking place at the U.S. military base in Ramstein on January 20, he now has a second chance.

In confronting a new threat from Russia, Germany faces many of the same issues and sentiments that it once faced after World War II when it began to contemplate the creation of armed forces. Christian Democratic Chancellor Konrad Adenauer was key to the process. Adenauer was determined to break with the bad, old German past of shuttling between East and West for geopolitical advantage. A staunch Atlanticist, he wanted to embed Bonn in the West. To accomplish his goal, he drew on the help of the former Wehrmacht general Hans Speidel, who later became the first German NATO commander, to write a series of papers contending that German security was an integral part of Western Europe’s.

In their history, From Shadow to Substance, Dennis L. Bark and David R. Gress note that in 1949 Speidel drafted a memorandum for Adenauer recommending the creation of “15 German army divisions at once, to be equipped with American weapons.” The majority of the German population was opposed to the establishment of a military force, including everyone from unrepentant Nazis to members of the Social Democratic Party, with the former seeing it as a sellout to the West and the latter believing it would jeopardize relations with the East. But as the early Cold War developed, America, France, and Great Britain realized that they could not defend Europe against Stalin’s Soviet Union absent the contribution of West Germany itself. With the outbreak of the Korean War, rearmament became a foregone conclusion, but it took until November 1955 for the formal establishment of the Bundeswehr. The pacifist sentiments and sympathy toward Russia that resided among the Social Democrats would never go away, manifesting themselves in the concessive Ostpolitik of the 1970s, a new policy based on economic, political, and cultural engagement rather than confrontation that was a direct reaction to what was seen as an ossified hardline approach toward the Soviet Union.

At bottom, the German Army was always an unwanted stepchild in German society—a regrettable necessity rather than a bulwark of freedom. But since the end of the Cold War, matters have worsened. The threat of war seemed to recede wholly into the past, and the Bundeswehr fell into utter disrepair, rendering it a subject of widespread mockery in the German media. The furor Teutonicus of yore had been replaced by a stupor Teutonicus.

Former Defense Minister Christine Lambrecht failed to initiate the modernization of the German Army despite the government’s approval of an outlay of an additional €100 billion to modernize the Army. She added insult to injury by declaring that Germany would assist Ukraine with 5,000 military helmets and by posting a cheerful New Year’s Eve video that hailed her personal encounters in Ukraine even as fireworks exploded around her in Berlin.

Can Pistorius save the day? In initial remarks in Hannover on Tuesday, Pistorius did not mince his words. He stated, “The Bundeswehr must adjust to a new situation that has been created by Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine. I want to strengthen the Bundeswehr for the era that confronts us.” Pistorius must insist that Germany allow the shipment of Leopard 2 tanks from Poland and Finland to Ukraine now.

But as Christoph von Marschall perceptively notes, the question is whether Scholz recognizes his past missteps in fearing to antagonize Moscow or shuns a course correction. He could start by approving the shipment of Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine, a move that would signal that Germany is not wavering but all in on supporting Kyiv in its struggle against Russian aggression.

Until now, Scholz’s coalition partners, the Free Democrats and the Greens, have been far more forthright than him about assisting Ukraine and assailing the Kremlin. Many in the Social Democratic Party cling to the notion that they can go back to the future—to the cozy ties that once existed between Moscow and Berlin. But the war crimes that Russian president Vladimir Putin has committed in Ukraine mean that this is a dangerous chimera. The time for Germany once again to go West has arrived.

Jacob Heilbrunn is editor of The National Interest.

Image: DVIDS.

Editor's Note: Due to massive reader interest in all things Leopard 2 as it could be headed to Ukraine, we represent this article to get a better understanding of this tank. 

Germany’s Leopard 2 main battle tank has a reputation as one of the finest in the world, competing for that distinction with proven designs such as the American M1 Abrams and the British Challenger 2. However, that reputation for nigh-invincibility has faced setbacks on Syrian battlefields, and placed Berlin in a uniquely awkward national-level dispute with Turkey, its fellow NATO member.

Ankara had offered to release a German political prisoner in exchange for Germany upgrading the Turkish Army’s older-model Leopard 2A4 tank, which had proven embarrassingly vulnerable in combat. However, on January 24, public outrage over reports that Turkey was using its Leopard 2s to kill Kurdish fighters in the Syrian enclaves of Afrin and Manbij forced Berlin to freeze the hostage-for-tanks deal.

The Leopard 2 is often compared to its near contemporary, the M1 Abrams: in truth the two designs share broadly similar characteristics, including a scale-tipping weight of well over sixty tons of advanced composite armor, 1,500 horsepower engines allowing speeds over forty miles per hour and, for certain models, the same forty-four-caliber 120-millimeter main gun produced by Rheinmetall.

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Both types can easily destroy most Russian-built tanks at medium and long ranges, at which they are unlikely to be penetrated by return fire from standard 125-millimeter guns. Furthermore, they have better sights with superior thermal imagers and magnification, that make them more likely to detect and hit the enemy first—historically, an even greater determinant of the victor in armored warfare than sheer firepower. A Greek trial found that moving Leopard 2s and Abramses hit a 2.3-meter target nineteen and twenty times out of twenty, respectively, while a Soviet T-80 scored only eleven hits.

The modest differences between the two Western tanks reveal different national philosophies. The Abrams has a noisy 1,500-horsepower gas-guzzling turbine, which starts up more rapidly, while the Leopard 2’s diesel motor grants it greater range before refueling. The Abrams has achieved some of its extraordinary offensive and defensive capabilities through use of depleted uranium ammunition and armor packages—technologies politically unacceptable to the Germans. Therefore, later models of the Leopard 2A6 now mount a higher-velocity fifty-five-caliber gun to make up the difference in penetrating power, while the 2A5 Leopard introduced an extra wedge of spaced armor on the turret to better absorb enemy fire.

German scruples also extend to arms exports, with Berlin imposing more extensive restrictions on which countries it is willing to sell weapons to—at least in comparison to France, the United States or Russia. While the Leopard 2 is in service with eighteen countries, including many NATO members, a lucrative Saudi bid for between four hundred and eight hundred Leopard 2s was rejected by Berlin because of the Middle Eastern country’s human-rights records, and its bloody war in Yemen in particular. The Saudis instead ordered additional Abramses to their fleet of around four hundred.

This bring us to Turkey, a NATO country with which Berlin has important historical and economic ties, but which also has had bouts of military government and waged a controversial counterinsurgency campaign against Kurdish separatists for decades. In the early 2000s, under a more favorable political climate, Berlin sold 354 of its retired Leopard 2A4 tanks to Ankara. These represented a major upgrade over the less well protected M60 Patton tanks that make up the bulk of Turkey’s armored forces.

However, the rumor has long persisted that Berlin agreed to the sale under the condition that the German tanks not be used in Turkey’s counterinsurgency operations against the Kurds. Whether such an understanding ever existed is hotly contested, but the fact remains that the Leopard 2 was kept well away from the Kurdish conflict and instead deployed in northern Turkey, opposite Russia.

However, in the fall of 2016, Turkish Leopard 2s of the Second Armored Brigade finally deployed to the Syrian border to support Operation Euphrates Shield, Turkey’s intervention against ISIS. Prior to the Leopard’s arrival, around a dozen Turkish Patton tanks were destroyed by both ISIS and Kurdish missiles. Turkish defense commentators expressed the hope that the tougher Leopard would fare better.

The 2A4 model was the last of the Cold War–era Leopard 2s, which were designed to fight in relatively concentrated units in a fast-paced defensive war against Soviet tank columns, not to survive IEDs and missiles fired by ambushing insurgents in long-term counterinsurgency campaigns where every single loss was a political issue. The 2A4 retains an older boxy turret configurations which affords less protection from modern antitank missiles, especially to the generally more vulnerable rear and side armor, which is a bigger problem in a counterinsurgency environment, where an attack may come from any direction.

This was shockingly illustrated in December 2016 when evidence emerged that numerous Leopard 2s had been destroyed in intense fighting over ISIS-held Al-Bab—a fight that Turkish military leaders described as a “trauma,” according to Der Spiegel. A document published online listed ISIS as apparently having destroyed ten of the supposedly invincible Leopard 2s; five reportedly by antitank missiles, two by mines or IEDs, one to rocket or mortar fire, and the others to more ambiguous causes.

These photos confirm the destruction of at least eight. One shows a Leopard 2 apparently knocked out by a suicide VBIED—an armored kamikaze truck packed with explosives. Another had its turret blown clean off. Three Leopard wrecks can be seen around the same hospital near Al-Bab, along with several other Turkish armored vehicles. It appears the vehicles were mostly struck the more lightly protected belly and side armor by IEDs and AT-7 Metis and AT-5 Konkurs antitank missiles.

Undoubtedly, the manner in which the Turkish Army employed the German tanks likely contributed to the losses. Rather than using them in a combined arms force alongside mutually supporting infantry, they were deployed to the rear as long-range fire-support weapons while Turkish-allied Syrian militias stiffened with Turkish special forces led the assaults. Isolated on exposed firing positions without adequate nearby infantry to form a good defensive perimeter, the Turkish Leopards were vulnerable to ambushes. The same poor tactics have led to the loss of numerous Saudi Abrams tanks in Yemen, as you can see in this video.

By contrast, more modern Leopard 2s have seen quite a bit of action in Afghanistan combating Taliban insurgents in the service of the Canadian 2A6Ms (with enhanced protection against mines and even floating “safety seats”) and Danish 2A5s. Though a few were damaged by mines, all were put back into service, though a Danish Leopard 2 crew member was mortally injured by an IED attack in 2008. In return, the tanks were praised by field commanders for their mobility and providing accurate and timely fire support during major combat operations in southern Afghanistan.

In 2017, Germany began rebuilding its tank fleet, building an even beefier Leopard 2A7V model more likely to survive in a counterinsurgency environment. Now Ankara is pressing Berlin to upgrade the defense on its Leopard 2 tanks, especially as the domestically produced Altay tank has been repeatedly delayed.

The Turkish military not only wants additional belly armor to protect against IEDs, but the addition of an Active Protection System (APS) that can detect incoming missiles and their point of origin, and jam or even shoot them down. The U.S. Army recently authorized the installation of Israeli Trophy APS on a brigade of M1 Abrams tanks, a type that has proven effective in combat. Meanwhile, Leopard 2 manufacturer Rheinmetall has unveiled its own ADATS APS, which supposedly poses a lesser risk of harming friendly troops with its defensive countermeasure missiles.

However, German-Turkish relations deteriorated sharply, especially after Erdogan initiated a prolonged crackdown on thousands of supposed conspirators after a failed military coup attempt in August 2016. In February 2017, German-Turkish dual-citizen Deniz Yücel, a correspondent for periodical Die Welt, was arrested by Turkish authorities, ostensibly for being a pro-Kurdish spy. His detention caused outrage in Germany.

Ankara pointedly let it be known that if a Leopard 2 upgrade were allowed to proceed, Yücel would be released back to Germany. Though Berlin publicly insisted it would never agree to such a quid pro quo, Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel quietly began moving towards authorizing the upgrade in a bid to improve relations in the face of what looks suspiciously like tank-based blackmail. Gabriel presented the deal as a measure to protect Turkish soldiers’ lives from ISIS.

However, in mid-January 2018, Turkey launched an offensive against the Kurdish enclaves of Afrin and Manbij in northwestern Syria. The attack was precipitated generally by Turkish fears that effective Kurdish control of the Syrian border would lead to a de facto state that would expand into Turkish territory, and proximately by an announcement by the Pentagon that it was recruiting the Kurds to form a “border security force” to continue the fight against ISIS.

However, photos on social media soon emerged showing that Leopard 2 tanks were being employed to blast Kurdish positions in Afrin, where there have several dozen civilian casualties have been reported. Furthermore, on January 21, the Kurdish YPG published a YouTube video depicting a Turkish Leopard 2 being struck by a Konkurs antitank missiles. However, it is not possible to tell if the tank was knocked out; the missile may have struck the Leopard 2’s front armor, which is rated as equivalent to 590 to 690 millimeters of rolled homogenous armor on the 2A4, while the two types of Konkurs missiles can penetrate six or eight hundred millimeters of RHA.

In any event, parliamentarians both from German left-wing parties and Merkel’s right-wing Christian Democratic Union reacted with outrage, with a member of the latter describing the Turkish offensive as a violation of international law. On January 25, the Merkel administration was forced to announce that an upgrade to the Leopard 2 was off the table, at least for now. Ankara views the deal as merely postponed, and cagey rhetoric from Berlin suggests it may return to the deal at a more politically opportune time.

Sébastien Roblin holds a Master’s Degree in Conflict Resolution from Georgetown University and served as a university instructor for the Peace Corps in China. He has also worked in education, editing, and refugee resettlement in France and the United States. He currently writes on security and military history for War Is Boring.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

To pursue an efficient foreign policy, the United States should send its best diplomats to countries of vital interest. As the Indo-Pacific remains the most contested region in global geopolitics, Washington must devote its utmost attention and resources to the region, including its best people. Today, the strategic salience of India is more than any other nation for the United States. It is vital that Washington send an ambassador to New Delhi sooner rather than later.

India is the only credible power in the Indo-Pacific that could help the United States create a stable balance of power in the region. The country is indispensable in boosting the coalitional ability of the United States, primarily because the other significant actors in the region are either already U.S. allies or under Chinese influence. On top of this, India faces active Chinese aggression at its borders, and it is the only country with combat experience against the People’s Liberation Army in the last four decades. Finally, India contributes skilled talent in the technology sector, which is crucial for the United States if it wishes to lead the technology and innovation race against China.

Unfortunately, though President Joe Biden’s term in office is nearly half done, there is still no U.S. ambassador in New Delhi. Ever since Ambassador Kenneth Juster stepped down from the post in January 2021, the Biden administration has appointed six interim chargé d’affaires, the most recent of which was named in October of last year. Now over 700 days, this is the longest period of time in the two countries’ diplomatic history, including the Cold War, in which there has been no U.S. ambassador in India’s capital. The continual appointment of ad hoc envoys sends a woeful message to New Delhi: Washington is being negligent.

This is not entirely the White House’s fault. Biden nominated former Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti to be the U.S. ambassador to India in July 2021. Garcetti’s confirmation vote, however, was put on hold after a Republican senator alleged him of inaction against sexual misconduct by his aide.

Garcetti’s bid has been on hold ever since. A number of other factors have delayed the confirmation vote: pending business in a hung Senate, partisan bickering, and Washington’s overriding preoccupation with the Russo-Ukrainian War. 

With the U.S. Senate’s flip in Democrats’ favor, however, the Biden administration is now better positioned to secure full support for Garcetti’s hung nomination. A White House press conference in December conveyed a similar sentiment. More recently, Biden re-nominated Garcetti for the position. 

Yet by not having an ambassador for almost two years, the United States has compromised diplomatic continuity and lost touch with realities in New Delhi. The Biden administration risks its understanding of India being limited to what is written by armchair analysts and “India watchers,” rather than drawing upon information provided by on-the-ground professional diplomats. Complicating matters even further is the fact that India’s diplomatic corps comes from an elite bureaucracy that is very hierarchical and sensitive to protocols. They perceive an organizational slippage from the American side, as intermittent chargé d’affaires have been posted for so long.

In practice, this means that dealing with New Delhi becomes much more difficult barring the involvement of top-level leadership. For instance, India’s external affairs minister, S. Jaishankar, a veteran diplomat-turned-politician, had to bring up a minor consular matter, like trouble overcoming visa deadlocks, to U.S. secretary of state Antony Blinken at a very public joint press conference.

Furthermore, popular opinion in India is still distrusting of the United States from the Cold War despite genuine progress in the bilateral ties. When India’s extremely popular BJP government explicitly positions itself as “not-West,” it only reinforces mass skepticism towards the United States. Consider, for example, Jaishankar’s unprecedentedly voracious articulations of India’s stance on various issues and how they differ from the West, especially since the beginning of the war in Ukraine.

An ambassador in New Delhi will only help diffuse anxieties within India’s entire political apparatus.

During the Cold War, the United States maintained an excellent track record of posting experienced envoys in India. For example, only two ambassadors—Kenneth Galbraith and Chester Bowles—served in New Delhi for most of the 1960s. Despite India’s staunch nonaligned position, Galbraith and Bowles developed close friendships with Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and advised him on economic policy. Galbraith even convinced the Kennedy administration to send military support to India during the 1962 India-China War. Even later, the ambassadors harnessed their connections to exercise significant influence on New Delhi despite its inclination towards Moscow. If the United States ensured a stable diplomatic engagement with a socialist India back then, there is no reason why it should leave any stone unturned now.

Today, India's outlook is very different from the nonaligned obsession of the Nehruvian era. India is now both confident and capable of playing a positive role in modern-day geopolitics. It is not far-fetched to claim that New Delhi can be to the U.S.-China rivalry what Beijing was to the United States during the Cold War. It is because of this critical role that the U.S.-India relationship must be nurtured across all levels, from national leadership to the last consulate worker. The United States risks both practical inefficiency and creating political misunderstandings in otherwise growing ties by not having an ambassador in New Delhi.

Ambuj Sahu is a doctoral student in the Department of Political Science at Indiana University Bloomington. He was previously trained as an electrical engineer at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi.  He tweets at @DarthThunderous. 

Image: Flickr/U.S. State Department.

Here's What You Need to Know: Only USS Missouri remained operational when the Korean War began, so the other three battleships had to be reactivated and updated.

In the final months of the Second World War, the battleships of the U.S. Navy (USN) ranged across the archipelago of Japan, bombarding industrial, military and logistical targets at will. The Japanese military lacked enough ships, planes and fuel to defend the nation, leaving coastal areas at the mercy of the steel behemoths. Although most of the credit (such that it is) for the destruction of urban Japan belongs to the bombers of the U.S. Army Air Force, the battleships and cruisers of the navy contributed their share.

At the end of the war, most of the USN’s battleships were scrapped, sunk as targets or placed into reserve. When the United States went to war again, earlier than anyone had expected, three battleships of the Iowa class returned to service, joining their sister USS Missouri off the coast of Korea. For three years, these ships would rain terror down upon North Korean and Chinese forces.

Response and Reactivation

The ferocity and efficiency of the North Korean offensive of June 1950 into South Korea took everyone, including the U.S. Navy, by surprise. Nevertheless, local forces quickly responded, including the Oregon City-class heavy cruiser USS Rochester, which used its eight-inch guns to soften beaches at Inchon and elsewhere. USS Missouri, the only U.S. battleship to have remained operational since World War II, arrived in Korean waters on September 19, 1950. In a few weeks she would conduct extensive shore bombardments along the coast of North Korea. Missouri continued to provide fire support after the tide of war turned in November; in December, she conducted bombardments to ensure the survival of U.S. troops retreating from the People’s Liberation Army’s surprise offensive.

Notably, the U.S. Navy decided not to transfer the three heavy cruisers of the Des Moines class, which mostly remained in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. These cruisers, carrying auto-loading eight-inch guns, could lay waste to a coastal area nearly as effectively as a battleship. However, they were regarded as too important to the mission of deterring the Soviet Union to risk transfer to the Pacific.

Instead, the U.S. government decided to reactivate the three other Iowa class battleships. Iowa, New Jersey and Wisconsin had all entered the reserve fleet before the beginning of the Korean War. All three remained in excellent condition, and required minimal modification in order to return to service. The most significant change came with the replacement of World War II-era floatplanes by helicopters. The navy recommissioned New Jersey in November 1950, Wisconsin in March 1951 and Iowa in August 1951. Several heavy cruisers also conducted tours off of Korea, but the navy declined to reactivate any of the thirteen other battleships in the reserve fleet.

Operations

Each of the four battleships acted as a flagship at one time or another, contributing facilities necessary to the coordination of broader naval warfare efforts. More to the point, however, the battleships used both their sixteen-inch main armament and their five-inch secondary armament to pound Chinese and North Korean positions along the coast. These positions included cave systems, concealed artillery and command posts. As with the end of the Second World War, the battleships also hit strategic and operational targets, including railways, industrial parks and transport centers. These attacks, which could range up to twenty miles inland, periodically disrupted but did not stop Communist efforts to resupply their armies in the field.

Extensive mining reduced the freedom-of-action of U.S. naval forces, to the extent that the battleships only rarely operated against North Korean and Chinese positions along the Yellow Sea. Although Communist aircraft did conduct attacks against major U.S. ships early in the war, UN air and naval superiority made such sorties difficult as the war proceeded. Other than mines, the main danger to the battleships came through coastal artillery, which they regularly sparred against. However, the effectiveness of the USN in bombarding all along the peninsula showed both countries how vulnerable they were to naval attack.

After a refit beginning in March 1951, USS Missouri resumed bombardment and escort duties from October 1952 until March 1953. New Jersey carried out her first shore bombardment in May 1951, and remained in the area until November. She returned for a second tour in April 1953, and remained through the duration of the conflict. USS Wisconsin operated off Korea from November 1951 until April 1952, and USS Iowa contributed short bombardment between April and October 1952.

Reaction

The Iowas certainly delivered a great deal of ordinance to targets on the Korean Peninsula over the course of the war. However, the overall impact of their presence is difficult to assess. Communist forces quickly learned to move critical facilities and troop concentration outside of the range of the battleships’ guns, although the transport network was hard to shift inland. Heavy U.S. bombing of targets across Korea contributed to the general destruction, making it hard to parse out how much the battleships themselves mattered. The smaller, cheaper heavy cruisers could often deliver similar levels of destruction to enemy targets. Still, the very presence of the battleships may have had some degree of psychological effect on Communist and UN forces alike.

Wrap

By 1958, all four Iowas had returned to the reserve fleet. Although they performed their shore bombardment role effectively, but not really any more effectively than the smaller, cheaper heavy cruisers. The manning requirements were significant, however, making them very expensive ships to operate for extended periods of time. The navy would only reactivate one of the four (USS New Jersey) for the Vietnam War, and only in partial service. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the United States disposed of the remaining thirteen battleships in its inventory.

The Iowas nevertheless survived, and were finally reactivated (and modernized) in the 1980s. The legacy of the Iowas’ performance off Korea lived on in North Korean and Chinese naval doctrine and procurement. Both Pyongyang and Beijing became aware of their dreadful vulnerability to naval attack, and developed coastal defense capabilities intended to dissuade any foe from approaching their waters. China’s People’s Liberation Army Navy has grown past that stage, but the navy of the DPRK continues to concentrate on defensive operations in the littoral.

The Iowas will not, of course, participate in any future conflict on the Korean Peninsula. However, in the event of conflict USN surface ships will undoubtedly contribute significantly to the conflict by means of land attack cruise missiles. Moreover, the navy may yet provide USS Zumwalt and her sisters with the means to provide gunfire support against land targets. In such a case, North Korean coastal installations would become very vulnerable, indeed.

Robert Farley, a frequent contributor to the National Interest, is author of The Battleship Book. He serves as a senior lecturer at the Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce at the University of Kentucky. His work includes military doctrine, national security and maritime affairs. He blogs at Lawyers, Guns and Money, Information Dissemination and the Diplomat.

This article first appeared in 2017 and is being republished due to reader interest.

Image: Reuters.

At the virtual Munich Security Conference in February 2021, newly elected U.S. president Joe Biden declared that “America is back. The transatlantic alliance is back.” In a pre-election pitch, Biden also made clear that NATO is at the very heart of U.S. national security and is the bulwark of the liberal democratic ideal.

To date, Biden has held firm on his promise and revitalized NATO in its stand against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The same applies to Europe, which has abandoned its lethargy and also taken a firm stand.

Biden also made it clear that the United States would withdraw the vast majority of its troops from the wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan, narrowly defining America’s mission as defeating Al Qaeda and the Islamic State (ISIS). This shift focused on America’s most cost-effective operation, where 2,000 special forces troops and intelligence assets allied with the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in northern Syria to defeat the Islamic State. 

In October 2019, then-President Donald Trump reversed U.S. policy when he, in a telephone call with Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, greenlighted a third Turkish incursion into Syria and ordered the withdrawal of U.S. special forces from the area. Trump considered the move “strategically brilliant,” although Brett McGurk, once Trump’s special presidential envoy for the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS, panned it as “strategically backward.” Nevertheless, U.S. special forces have maintained a foothold in the region.

Consequently, U.S. support for the SDF and its backbone, the Kurdish YPG militia, remains a bone of contention between the United States and its supposed Turkish ally. This week, Turkish foreign minister Mevlut Cavusoglu is visiting Washington in an attempt to iron out disagreements with Secretary of State Antony Blinken. These issues include a plan to sell forty F-16 fighter jets and nearly eighty modernization kits to Turkey and Ankara’s purchase of the Russian S-400 air-defense system.

But given that Turkey is a major disruptive force in the region, it is incomprehensible that the Biden administration would consider the sale of the F-16 jets to be in line with U.S. national security interests and NATO’s long-term unity. The State Department’s letter to Congress recommending the sale even went so far as to claim that Turkey is “an important deterrent to malign influence in the region.”   

In fact, Turkey has decided to capitalize on its nuisance value. For example, in 2019, it attempted to block NATO’s plans for the defense of Poland and the Baltic states unless it labeled the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces as terrorists. It is doing the same with Finland and Sweden’s applications for NATO membership, unless Sweden, in particular, hands over a number of political refugees.

As Nate Schenkkan, then the project director at Freedom House, noted five years ago, while hostage-taking is a feature of Turkish foreign policy, it backfired in Ankara’s attempt to swap pastor Andrew Brunson for the Turkish imam Fethullah Gülen.

A cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy in the region is the Eastern Mediterranean Security and Energy Partnership Act, which denotes Greece as a valuable NATO member, Israel as a steadfast ally, and Cyprus as a key strategic partner. In 2021, the U.S.-Greece Mutual Defense Cooperation Agreement (MDCA) was updated to reinforce defense and security cooperation.

In contrast, Turkey has adopted its “Blue Homeland” maritime strategy, which lays claim to 462,000 square kilometers in the Eastern Mediterranean, the Aegean, and the Black Sea, including Greek and Cypriot territorial waters. Erdogan has also threatened Greece with a missile strike.

Against this backdrop, supplying Turkey with additional weaponry makes no strategic sense. According to the Turkish press, the sale of the F-16s is already a done deal. “The [Biden] administration intends the prospect of the sale to prod Türkiye to sign off on Finland and Sweden’s accession to NATO,” according to a report in the Hürriyet Daily News. If this is the case, the Biden administration has settled for a policy of appeasement.

Former National Security Advisor John Bolton holds a different view and believes Turkey’s NATO membership should be called into question because of its support for Russia.

There will be presidential and parliamentary elections in Turkey this June. If there were a level playing field, Erdogan would face defeat, not least because of Turkey’s cash-strapped economy and monumental inflation.

Erdogan has already locked up the co-chair of the Kurdish-based HDP (Peoples’ Democratic Party), Selahattin Demirtas, and Turkey’s Constitutional Court has suspended the HDP’s funding over alleged ties to terrorism. Erdogan’s major contender, Ekrem Imamoglu, the mayor of Istanbul, faces jail time and a political ban on a charge of insulting electoral officials. But three of Erdogan’s rivals also stand a good chance of replacing him.

Now, Erdogan is considering a well-tried way of drumming up popular support: a fourth incursion into Syria against America’s Kurdish allies. For this, he needs Moscow’s approval and for Washington to look the other way.

If all this fails, there are fears that Erdogan might attempt to overthrow the constitutional order with the support of his own militia, SADAT, Turkey’s answer to Blackwater and the Wagner Group.

Robert Ellis is an international advisor at the Research Institute for European and American Studies in Athens.

Image: Flickr/White House.

Here's What You Need To Remember: Given that the YF-23 was generally perceived to be the more innovative design, and that it had a slightly higher price tag, the chances that it could have sailed through without a hitch are correspondingly low. And trouble with design and production might have left the USAF with even fewer operational fighters.

The Advanced Tactical Fighter (ATF) competition, staged at the end of the Cold War, yielded a pair of remarkable fighter designs. The United States would eventually select the F-22 Raptor, widely acknowledged as the most capable air superiority aircraft of the early twenty-first century. The loser, the YF-23, now graces museums in Torrance, California and Dayton, Ohio.

How did the Pentagon decide on the F-22, and what impact did that decision have? We will never know, but going with the F-22 Raptor may have saved the Pentagon some major headaches.

ATF Competition:

The origins of the ATF competition came in the early 1980s, when it became apparent that the Soviets were planning to field fighters (the MiG-29 and the Su-27) capable of competing effectively with the U.S. Air Force’s (USAF) F-15/F-16 “high-low” mix. The ATF would allow the US to re-establish its advantages, potentially on grounds (notably stealth) where the Soviets would struggle to compete.

To great degree, the success of either of the ATF competitors was overdetermined. The Soviet Union disappeared during the course of the competition, and the major European aerospace powers largely declined to compete on the same terrain (stealth, supercruise, and eventually sensor fusion). Either the F-22 or the F-23 would become the finest fighter of the early 21st century; the only question was which aircraft would win the investment of DoD. And each plane had its advantages. The YF-23 enjoyed superior supercruise, and in some accounts better stealth performance, over the F-22. The F-22 offered a somewhat simpler, less risky design, along with an extraordinary degree of agility that made it an awesome dogfighter.

The Choice:

As Dave Majumdar pointed out a year ago, political and bureaucratic factors contributed to the selection of the F-22. Fed up with Northrop and (the still independent) McDonnell Douglas in the wake of the B-2 and A-12 projects, the Pentagon preferred Lockheed. The US Navy disliked the F-23 for idiosyncratic reasons, and hoped it would get a crack at a heavily modified F-22. For its part, the Air Force preferred the gaudy maneuverability of the F-22, which gave it an advantage in nearly every potential combat situation. In a sense, the F-22 (and to some extent its Russian competitor, the PAK-FA) represent the ultimate expression of the jet-age air superiority fighter. They can challenge and defeat opponents in every potential aspect of a fight, while also having stealth characteristics that allow them to engage (or refuse an engagement) under highly advantageous circumstances.

Had the ATF competition not taken place coincident with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the YF-23 might have stood a chance for resurrection. Some of its characteristics were sufficiently advanced that they could have drawn further attention and investment. Moreover, building the F-23 alongside the F-22 could have been justified on grounds of maintaining the health of the US defense industrial base; as it was, the selection of the Lockheed aircraft undoubtedly contributed to the decision to consolidate Boeing and McDonnell Douglas.

Raptor Problems:

As is the case with the X-32, the YF-23 never faced the most dramatic problems to afflict the F-22 Raptor. It never experienced cost overruns, technology failures, software snafus, or pilot-killing respiratory issues. Those problems, which regularly afflict new defense projects (in fairness, the pilot suffocation is largely idiosyncratic to the Raptor) were consequential. In context of the broader demands of the War on Terror, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates curtailed the F-22 production run at 187 operational aircraft, just as the fighter was working through its teething troubles. Although understandable at the time, this left the USAF with a fighter deficit that only the F-35 could fill.

Had the YF-23 enjoyed a smoother development path (a huge “if”), the fighter might not have faced such a hostile environment as it entered service. But given that the YF-23 was generally perceived to be the more innovative (and therefore riskier) design, and that it had a slightly higher price tag, the chances that it could have sailed through without a hitch are correspondingly low. And trouble with design and production might have left the USAF with even fewer operational fighters.

Parting Thoughts:

The F-23 included some characteristics that may eventually find themselves in a sixth generation fighter, or perhaps in the Air Force’s “deep interceptor” intended to support B-21 Raiders on the way to their targets. For example, the V-tail aspect has been mentioned in some of the early conceptualization for a next generation fighter. And Boeing will undoubtedly hearken back to its experience with the F-23 when thinking about its next fighter.

For years, one of the two YF-23 prototypes sat in the Hangar of Unwanted Planes (more formally known as the Research and Development Hangar) at the National Museum of the United States Air Force in Dayton, Ohio. The YF-23 was positioned right under the last remaining XB-70 Valkyrie, the centerpiece of the museum’s collection. Both aircraft have now moved to the newly opened fourth building of the museum, where they continue to represent alternative visions of the (past) future of the Air Force, visions deeply grounded in the industrial and organizational realities of American airpower.

Robert Farley, a frequent contributor to TNI, is author of The Battleship Book. He serves as a Senior Lecturer at the Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce at the University of Kentucky. His work includes military doctrine, national security, and maritime affairs. He blogs at Lawyers, Guns and Money and Information Dissemination and The Diplomat.

This first appeared several years ago and is being reprinted due to reader interest.

Image: Wikipedia.