Diplomacy & Crisis News

Local elections in the Central African Republic (CAR), which have been pending since 1988 and are slated for September, will deepen efforts to decentralize power and expand political space, the UN envoy for the country told the Security Council on Tuesday, encouraging the new Government to “deploy all possible efforts” to calm the political climate.

Kris Osborn

China-Taiwan War, Asia

A Chinese invasion of Taiwan could be made more likely if U.S. forces were not operating in close enough proximity to intervene against a Chinese assault.

There is a less recognized but equally dangerous subtext to the expected Russian invasion of Ukraine: the question of China.

Could China feel emboldened by a successful Russian invasion of Ukraine and seize the opportunity to invade and annex Taiwan? China may see an opportunity to move if the United States is distracted as it attempts to secure sensitive border regions in Eastern Europe. Moreover, depending on the United States’ response to any Russian aggression, China may estimate that U.S. forces would not directly confront China to defend Taiwan.

“China is watching. We shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that what we are about to see in Ukraine could be repeated further east,” said Tim Morrison, Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute and former Deputy Assistant to the President for National Security.

Pentagon officials have routinely emphasized that U.S. forces will not fight in Ukraine, and Russian forces are expected to attack at any moment. Could China gamble on the possibility that the United States might take a similar stance regarding Taiwan? This could be made more likely if U.S. Navy forces were not forward operating in close enough proximity to intervene against a Chinese amphibious assault on Taiwan.

Regardless of how the United States would respond, Morrison’s point that China might seize an opportunity to invade rings true in light of China’s massive uptick in drills, war preparations, and fighter jet patrols near Taiwan.

However, as was the case with Russia’s military buildup near Ukraine, satellites observing the Pacific theater would likely detect a large Chinese amphibious attack force being prepared to move on Taiwan. This might give the U.S. Navy, which already maintains a regular presence in the region, an opportunity to marshal the forces and resources necessary to counter a Chinese attack. These forces would likely include F-35 fighters, Tomahawk missiles, and Amphibious Ready Groups.

As Japan’s Southern Islands are between 500 and 1,000 miles north of Taiwan, it is entirely possible that a U.S.-Japanese coalition might be able to intercept or attack an approaching Chinese amphibious force. Tomahawks, for example, can travel as far as 900 miles, and newer Tomahawks can use a two-way data link and sensor to adjust course and destroy moving targets at sea. In tactical terms, this means that a Navy destroyer armed with Tomahawks might be capable of targeting Chinese amphibious assault ships at distances of up to 900 miles.

These response capabilities would be crucial in any effort to defend Taiwan. This is because, unlike Ukraine, Taiwan is surrounded by water, which would make it difficult to quickly deploy mechanized land forces to defend Taiwan.

Kris Osborn is the Defense Editor for the National Interest. Osborn previously served at the Pentagon as a Highly Qualified Expert with the Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army—Acquisition, Logistics & Technology. Osborn has also worked as an anchor and on-air military specialist at national TV networks. He has appeared as a guest military expert on Fox News, MSNBC, The Military Channel, and The History Channel. He also has a Master's Degree in Comparative Literature from Columbia University.

Image: Reuters.

Peter Suciu

Polish Military, Europe

If Putin was hoping that his saber-rattling would make NATO cave to his demands, his plan has failed spectacularly.

Russian president Vladimir Putin has demanded that NATO return to its 1997 status and remove many of the former Warsaw Pact nations that joined the alliance in recent decades. While it isn't likely that Putin would mount an invasion of his Eastern European neighbors yet, there is little denying that he'd like to see many of them back in Moscow's sphere of influence. However, the Polish government is now doing everything it can to ensure that never happens.

It was announced last week that Warsaw is pushing forward with a plan to purchase $6 billion of military hardware and equipment from the United States. That move comes as Russia continues to mass troops on its border with Ukraine. "Some of those forces [are] within 200 miles of the Polish border," U.S. secretary of defense Lloyd Austin noted during a press conference Friday.

Weapons Heading to Poland

According to the U.S. State Department, the newly announced deal would include 250 M1A2 Abrams main battle tanks, 250 short-range jamming systems, twenty-six combat recovery vehicles, and around 800 machine guns.

Contractors involved in the sale include BAE Systems, Leonardo DRS, Honeywell, Raytheon Technologies, and Lockheed Martin, DefenseNews reported.

"This proposed sale will support the foreign policy and national security of the United States by helping to improve the security of a NATO Ally that is a force for political stability and economic progress in Europe," the Defense Security Cooperation Agency announced in a release. "The proposed sale will improve Poland's capability to meet current and future threats by providing a credible force that is capable of deterring adversaries and participating in NATO operations. Poland will have no difficulty absorbing this equipment into its armed forces."

Warsaw has been engaged in a sweeping military modernization effort. In 2019, Warsaw inked a $6.5 billion deal to buy thirty-two F-35 fighters, and subsequent agreements have been made for Poland to purchase mobile rocket artillery systems from the United States.

Congressional Support

Many U.S. lawmakers have also shown their support for Poland in the face of Russia’s aggression and posturing.

Last month, Republicans on the House Armed Services Committee pushed Secretary Austin to expedite congressional notification of the weapons sale to help bolster NATO's eastern flank against Russia. However, that sale is still subject to congressional approval.

Lawmakers have been even more vocal in their support this month.

"It is critical that the United States do all we can to reinforce NATO's Eastern Front as Russia's threats to further invade Ukraine grow more troubling by the day," Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.), the ranking member on the House Armed Services Committee, said in a statement on Friday. "I'm glad to see that these tanks will finally be going to Poland to aide in the defense of NATO."

If Putin was hoping that his saber-rattling would make NATO cave to his demands, his plan has failed spectacularly. Instead of the United States and NATO scaling back their commitment in Eastern Europe, additional forces have been deployed to the region. U.S. paratroopers and F-15 fighters arrived in Poland earlier this month, and Warsaw has only ramped up its military modernization efforts.

Peter Suciu is a Michigan-based writer who has contributed to more than four dozen magazines, newspapers and websites. He regularly writes about military small arms, and is the author of several books on military headgear including A Gallery of Military Headdress, which is available on Amazon.com.

Image: Reuters.

Mohammad Javad Mousavizadeh

Iran Russia, Middle East

Officials believe that Russia is a reliable friend of Iran, but public opinion remains divided.

After the Soviet Union fell in 1991, Iran and Russia’s relationship has had its ups and downs. During the Iran-Iraq war, for example, Russia armed the Iraqis against Iran, but, over time, their relations improved, and, today, the two are strategically aligned in opposition to the United States.

Presently, most Iranian officials think that the West block is diminishing in power, and that the East is rising in influence. Thus, despite previously adhering to its mantra of “Neither the East nor the West” that was born from its 1979 revolution, the Islamic Republic today is increasingly seeking economic, political, and military collaborations with the major eastern powers.

Indeed, Tehran has grown increasingly closer to China and Russia over the past year. In March 2021, Iran and China signed a twenty-five-year cooperation agreement that caught the West off guard, and Iran attained full membership in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization that September. Then, in January 2022, Iran and Russia began finalizing the details of their own twenty-year agreement.

Iran has always depended on Russia and China to circumvent U.S. sanctions, and the three countries have agreed to use their national currencies rather than the dollar in trilateral trade.

According to an Iranian official, trade volume between Russia and Iran has increased 12 percent in weight and 41 percent in value in the first nine months of this Iranian calendar year (March 21-December 21, 2021). Also, the trade figure between the two sides stood at over 3.5 million tons for the same time period.

As a key member of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of action (JCPOA), Russia is poised to greatly benefit from trade with Iran if the deal if revived. Tehran and Moscow are eager to grow their trade volume once U.S. sanctions are lifted. Iran also purchases a variety of Russian weapons, and the two countries are seeking to advance their military cooperation alongside their broader bilateral ties. For example, in January 2022, Russia, China, and Iran held a trilateral naval drill in the Indian Ocean with an official saying they were meant to “strengthen security.” According to reports, Iran is also considering whether to purchase Russian Su-35 fighters.

Iranian officials see Russia as one of their closest allies against U.S. pressures. In recent years, Russia has used its veto powers to protect Iran at the UN Security Council, including over its missile program and the illegal use of Iranian-made missiles by the Houthi insurgency in Yemen. Russia has also cooperated with Iran in Syria in support of Bashar al-Assad’s beleaguered government. “Cooperation between Iran and Russia in Syria can become an effective model for developing the countries’ relations in various directions,” Iranian president Ebrahim Raisi said on speaking at the plenary session in the State Duma in his visit to Moscow.

Contrarily, some Iranians view Russians pessimistically. In the last two centuries, the Russian tsardom and then the Soviet Union held a colonial view of Iran and sought to maximize their interests there. During this period, many exploitative concessions in the fields of mining, fisheries, and railways were given to the Russians. Also, Iranians have not forgotten that parts of their country were occupied by the tsars from 1804 to 1813.

In fact, for most Iranians, anti-Russian sentiment originated from anti-Soviet feelings. Although Russia’s overly negative image relates more to tsarist and then Soviet expansionist policies, pessimism towards Russia is an issue that transcends history.

After the U.S. withdrew from the JCPOA in 2018, Iranian officials accused Moscow of welcoming sanctions against Iran in order to raise oil prices. “Russia has turned our country into an embankment against the United States. The negative view of a part of the Iranian society towards the Russians has been indisputable, and even today we can observe some of the biased behaviors of our northern neighbor, Russia, against the interests of Iran,” said the former head of the National Security Commission of the Iranian Parliament.

Some analysts believe Russia is not interested in seeing Iran realize its potential as a military power, which explains why Russia has refused to sell its best military weapons to Iran in recent decades. Instead, Russia has only sold outdated weapons, like submarines and fighter jets of previous generations.

Also, Iran could challenge Russia’s position in the European gas market. Russia has the biggest natural gas reserves globally, with Iran in second. Iran took significant steps to export gas to Europe in the 1990s but was deprived of market share by U.S. sanctions. Since then, Russia has attempted to control Iranian gas fields to ensure that Iran will be kept far away from the European gas market.

Not surprisingly, Russia will also not tolerate a new nuclear power in its neighborhood and has sought to stop Iran from producing nuclear weapons and mastering the nuclear fuel cycle. Some observers believe that Russian officials used nuclear cooperation with Iran as a bargaining chip with the United States. For example, Russia agreed to finish Iran‘s Bushehr power plant in 1992 but did not completely implement its commitments on time.

Recently, Mikhail Ulyanov, the Russian envoy to the JCPOA talks in Vienna, has published a photo from his meeting with Robert Malley, the U.S. special envoy for Iran. The picture has provoked a negative reaction from Iranians on social media. Some Iranians believe that, throughout the talks in Vienna, Russia is only pretending to advocate for Iranian interests while actually prioritizing its own in any future agreement.

“The photo shows a paternalistic role of Russia in the talks, and Russian officials are concerned that the nuclear deal could be the starting point for improvement in Iran-US relations in the future,” Javid Ghorbanoghli, a former Iranian diplomat, said.

Most importantly, Iran and Russia share the Caspian Sea, a valuable treasure of many resources, including oil and natural gas reserves. Iran dominated 50 percent of the Caspian Sea during the Soviet era. However, after the fall of the Soviet Union, three post-Soviet states, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan have demanded their share from the sea that borders their countries’ territories.

Additionally, Russia has warm relationships with Israel, a stalwart Iranian adversary. Russia has sought to balance its relationship with Iran and Israel at the same time. For example, during the 2020 conflict between Iran and Azerbaijan, Iran urged Russia to stand firm against Israel’s presence in Azerbaijan, but Moscow disregarded Tehran’s concerns.

For Russia, engagement with Israel is more important than its relationship with Iran. While Iran targets Israeli’s interests in the Middle East, Russia has committed itself to preserving Israel’s regional interests. In fact, Jerusalem is a close ally of Moscow while Tehran is only a partner for the Kremlin.

“Comprehensive solutions to the problems of the region must take into account the security interests of Israel as a matter of principle,” Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov wrote in an article for Israel’s Yedioth Ahronoth daily.

Although Russia wants to prevent a new Iranian-Israeli conflict, the country has persuaded Iran to accept that Russia will pursue closer relations with Israel. In fact, although Israel has made several clandestine attacks against Iran’s nuclear facilities in recent years, Russian officials always have tried to prevent Iran from retaliating against Israel. “Were Iran to attack Israel, Moscow would stand by the Jewish state’s side. In the case of aggression against Israel, not only will the United States stand by Israel’s side—Russia, too, will be on Israel’s side,” said the former Russian deputy ambassador to Israel.

While the Iranian government’s opponents and reformists see Russia as an enemy, Iranian officials believe that Moscow is sympathetic to Iran. Iran’s over-dependence on Russia is dangerous for Tehran, but the Islamic Republic needs both Russia and China to help balance its poor relations with the United States. Both are seizing this opportunity to gain influence while benefitting from sanctions against Tehran.

Based on experience, Russia and China will not support Iran at the expense of their interests with the United States. Thus, it may be time for Iranian officials to ask how much they have gained in return for their concessions to Russia.

Mohammad Javad Mousavizadeh is a journalist and analyst in international affairs and foreign policy. He has written many articles for digital publications worldwide. He is also an English translator for Iranian newspapers and news agencies. Follow him on Twitter @mousavizadehj.

Image: Reuters.

Dov S. Zakheim

Ukraine Crisis, Europe

Washington fears that too deep involvement on the ground could bring on a war with Russia. Why should Putin not have the same fear?

For years, Vladimir Putin’s detractors have been calling him a mere tactician, rather than the strategist that he is. How wrong they have been. He has positioned Russia in the eastern Mediterranean to an unprecedented degree. Russia now has a long-term lease on a Syrian airbase, Khmeimim, in addition to a new lease on the Tartus naval base, from which the Soviet Navy operated during the Cold War. He has maintained good relations with both Israel and Egypt; the former had no real relations with the USSR, the latter kicked the Soviets out in 1972. His oligarchs and others have flooded Cyprus with their ill-gotten gains. He has a friendly government in Greece.

And now he has consolidated Russia’s position in Europe, with the promise of doing even more. He has added the Ukrainian provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk to the list of so-called independent states—Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Transnistria—that only Russia recognizes. He has effectively absorbed Belarus into Russia’s orbit; it is now no more independent than Byelorussia was during the Cold War, its UN vote notwithstanding. Putin no doubt plans the same for Ukraine, which also had its own vote in the UN during the Soviet era.

It must be conceded that the manner in which Putin has gone about squeezing Kyiv is proving highly effective. In continuing to station some 300,000 troops around Ukraine’s borders, including about 50,000 in Belarus for an exercise that seems to have no end, he can both maintain constant pressure on Kyiv and deter it from taking any action against Donetsk and Luhansk. Moreover, he can always create a new pretext for biting off more of Ukraine—beginning with Mariupol and Odessa—whenever he so chooses.

At some point as well, he will absorb the two provinces into Russia, no doubt at the request of their leaders. Americans, in particular, should find such behavior hardly surprising. Texas broke away from Mexico in 1836, declared itself a republic that the United States recognized in 1837, and became the twenty-eighth state eight years later.                  

Putin’s “manifest destiny” clearly is to restore Russia’s Czarist glory. To that end, not only Ukraine, but Finland, the Baltic States, and Poland have good cause for worry. They were all part of the Russian empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; and apart from Finland, until 1918. Putin’s expansionist appetite differs from America’s “manifest destiny” in one critical respect. Whether Texas, or California, or any other state that entered the Union, it was the will of the population to do so. Neither the Baltic States, Poland, nor Finland have any interest in rejoining Russia. Nor do the Soviet Union’s former Warsaw Pact allies, all of whom are now well entrenched inside NATO.

The West is doing far too little to disrupt Putin’s playbook, however.  His argument that he is merely seeking to protect the residents of the breakaway provinces from the predations of Kyiv echoes Adolf Hitler’s demand for Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland, supposedly to protect the Sudeten Germans. And just as Britain’s Neville Chamberlain and France’s Eduard Daladier acquiesced to Hitler’s demand, in order to achieve “peace in our time,” the West, led by the United States, is doing little more than to impose sanctions not on Russia itself, but only on Luhansk and Donetsk. For Putin, such sanctions are little more than a mosquito bite.

Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy has begged the West for far more weapons than he has received to date. Washington has thus far furnished Kyiv with Javelin anti-tank missiles, coastal patrol boats, Humvees, sniper rifles, reconnaissance drones, radar systems, and night vision and radio equipment. Other NATO countries have made smaller contributions; Britain has provided armored vehicles and some 2,000 short-range anti-tank missiles together with trainers. The Baltic States, who view themselves as most vulnerable to a future Russian assault, have provided Javelins as well as Stinger anti-air missiles, which Washington has yet to send. Poland is sending GROM anti-air missiles. Turkey has provided drones that were effective against Russian-backed forces in Libya and against Armenian unions in the latest flare-up in Nagorno-Karabakh. On the other hand. Germany refuses to provide any arms to Kyiv, sending only helmets and a military hospital.

The West and the United States should do more now. Washington fears that too deep involvement on the ground could bring on a war with Russia. Why should Putin not have the same fear? Biden should never have ruled out not sending forces to support Ukraine; surely its freedom is as important for Europe as ejecting Iraq from Kuwait in 1991 was important for international oil prices. Having determined not to aid Kyiv with American troops, the Biden administration should at least provide Ukraine with the additional arms it seeks. These include American helicopters, light armored vehicles, and communications systems; Norwegian SAMs; and Czech self-propelled artillery.

In addition, Washington, and NATO, should not only sanction the breakaway provinces but Russia itself. The current “wait and see” attitude leaves the initiative to Putin. Sanctions, especially on gas and oil supplies can always be lifted if Putin pulls back his forces. Such sanctions, coming on top of Germany’s suspension of its approval of the Nord Stream II gas pipeline, would bite Putin now and force him to react, instead of the other way round. For the past fourteen years, ever since Russia seized Abkhazia and North Ossetia, Putin has been playing a game of chicken with the West, and up to now has succeeded. It is time to turn the tables on him once and for all.

Dov S. Zakheim served as the Undersecretary of Defense (Comptroller) and Chief Financial Officer for the U.S. Department of Defense from 2001–2004 and as the Deputy Undersecretary of Defense (Planning and Resources) from 1985-1987. He also served as the DoD’s civilian coordinator for Afghan reconstruction from 2002-2004. He is Vice Chairman of the Center for the National Interest.

Image: Reuters.

Trevor Filseth

Mali, Africa

The political and economic turmoil within Mali has strained the country’s relationship with France.

The military-dominated parliament of Mali approved on Monday a timetable for a democratic transition, allowing the military government of Colonel Assimi Goita to continue ruling the country for up to five more years.

The legislature also declared that the current president, who officially serves in an interim capacity, would not be allowed to stand for a democratic election at that time—in theory preventing Goita from running for office. However, some observers have noted that the restriction would not apply to Goita if he resigned ahead of the elections and ran for the presidency as a private citizen.

While the bill promised that democratic elections would be held within five years, it did not specify what date the elections would be held on, something that could allow Goita to rule uninterrupted until February 2027. The vote on the bill was nearly unanimous, with 120 out of 121 members of Mali’s interim parliament voting in favor.

Goita, the leader of the military junta that deposed President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita in 2020, was initially appointed to lead a joint civilian-military government as Mali’s transitional president. In May 2021, Goita consolidated his power by launching a second coup, dismissing many civilian leaders and ensuring the primacy of the military in the country’s government.

In the aftermath of the first coup, the government promised that it would hold democratic elections in February 2022. However, in December 2021, the junta indicated a more liberal timetable for the transition, suggesting that it could take place at an unspecified time between mid-2022 and late 2026. In response to the delay, the Economic Community of West African States, or ECOWAS, imposed sanctions on Mali, arguing that the proposed length of the transition period was excessive and allowed the military too much latitude to find ways to remain in power.

The political and economic turmoil within Mali has strained the country’s relationship with France, the traditional security guarantor of West Africa. French troops, which have carried out a campaign against Islamist militants in the country’s north since 2013, agreed to withdraw from the country this week after several hostile diplomatic exchanges with Mali’s government. In a move that sparked opposition from Western nations, France’s departure led Goita and his associates to push for assistance from Russia’s Wagner Group.

Trevor Filseth is a current and foreign affairs writer for the National Interest.

Image: Reuters.

Trevor Filseth

Russia-Ukraine Crisis, Ukraine

Recognition of the two separatist territories in the Donbas violates the Minsk Protocols and could bring Russia closer to all-out war with Ukraine.

Russian president Vladimir Putin’s decision to recognize the two separatist governments of Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region, and the subsequent deployment of Russian “peacekeepers” led to renewed fears of a war between Russia and Ukraine on Monday. Some experts warned a potential Russia-Ukraine war would be the largest and deadliest conflict in Europe since 1945.

The announcement also led to an economic downturn within Russia. Putin’s recognition of the separatist territories led the Biden administration to impose a series of limited international sanctions against the country, with the promise of more to follow if a broader war began.

The Russian ruble, which usually trades at roughly seventy to the dollar, slipped up to eighty after the announcement was made, though it regained some value later in the day. The Russian stock market also saw significant individual drops, with the well-known RTS index fund down 13 percent. Shares of two Russian banks – Sberbank and VTB – also plunged by double digits in the aftermath of the announcement, and Russian oil giant Rosneft saw its share value decrease by 13 percent.

Although these changes are not likely to immediately affect average Russians, the ruble’s devaluation against other currencies, most notably including the U.S. dollar, will make it harder for Russians to purchase goods abroad in the long run. Further economic action by the West against Russia, along with counter-sanctions, could make imports far more costly or cut them off altogether.

Putin’s recognition of the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics as independent nations violated the Minsk Protocols negotiated between Ukraine and the pro-Russian separatists. The decision also contradicted Russian ambassador Anatoly Antonov’s remarks on Sunday in which he “confirm[ed] that Donbas and Luhansk [are] a part of Ukraine.” It is widely believed that Russian recognition of Donetsk and Luhansk raises the stakes for a broader Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Russia has stationed about 150,000 of its troops along the Ukrainian border and an additional 30,000 within Belarus, bordering Ukraine to its north. Although the Russian troops were originally scheduled to leave Belarus at the conclusion of Russian military exercises there, Belarus’ defense ministry said this weekend that it would allow them to remain in the country indefinitely.

Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, is less than one hundred miles from the Belarusian border. 

To defuse the crisis, both Putin and President Joe Biden agreed “in principle” to an in-person meeting, although that announcement was made before the entry of Russian troops into the two separatist regions. 

Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov are still scheduled to meet on Thursday, February 24. American officials previously said that the meeting would be canceled if Russia launched an invasion of Ukraine.

Trevor Filseth is a current and foreign affairs writer for the National Interest.

Image: Reuters.

Trevor Filseth

Iran Nuclear Deal, Iran

Iran has sought assurances that the United States won't unilaterally withdraw from a deal if a change in political leadership occurs.

A spokesman for Iran’s foreign ministry said negotiations over the status of Tehran’s nuclear weapons program have resulted in “significant progress.” Discussions between the “P5+1” nations, which includes the United States, are being held in Vienna.

However, Saeed Khatibzadeh, the government spokesman, noted that “nothing [would be] agreed until everything is agreed,” leaving room for last-minute complications to derail any prospective agreement between the two sides.

“The remaining issues are the hardest,” Khatibzadeh said during a press conference on Monday.

Iranian president Ebrahim Raisi outlined the broad strokes of any potential agreement between Iran and the P5+1 during his visit to Doha, the capital of Qatar. In remarks with Qatari emir Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, Raisi said that the United States needed to lift several “major sanctions” on Iran before the deal could go into effect.

“To reach an agreement, guarantees are necessary for negotiations and nuclear issues,” Raisi said.

Iranian diplomats have refused to directly engage their American counterparts during talks in Vienna. The Iranians noted that the renewed nuclear issue only came after the United States unilaterally withdrew from the “Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action,” the original agreement between the two sides, at the behest of President Donald Trump in 2018.

In the aftermath of the United States’ withdrawal, Trump’s administration re-imposed “maximum pressure” sanctions on Iran. The sanctions damaged Iran’s economy and prompted it to resume its enrichment activities. Today, Iran’s “breakout time,” the time it would take if it set aside security concerns to construct a nuclear weapon, has been estimated at weeks or months.

Against this backdrop, Iran has demanded that the Biden administration provide a guarantee that any potential agreement reached in 2022 would not be violated by the United States after a change in political leadership. Republicans in the House of Representatives made clear Biden could not offer those assurances last week.

In spite of this and other challenges, a draft deal between Iranian and P5+1 negotiators was crafted at the conference. According to Reuters; it includes provisions to restrict Iranian enrichment to 5 percent and ship its centrifuges out of the country in exchange for lifted international sanctions and the release of $7 billion in frozen Iranian assets in South Korea.

Several diplomats, including British foreign secretary Liz Truss, said that the existing framework would be the “last chance for Iran to come to the negotiating table with a serious resolution to this issue.”

Trevor Filseth is a current and foreign affairs writer for the National Interest.

Image: Reuters.

Mitchell Blatt

China 2022 Olympics, Asia

The Olympics have ended, but the diplomatic spat between China and Korea has just begun.

The Olympics have ended with South Korea bringing home nine medals and a growing resentment of China.

Long before the torch relay began, the XXIV Olympic Winter Games in Beijing were already a source of burning controversy. When the light was lit by a Uyghur cross country skier at a ceremony in which a representative of China’s ethnic minority Chaoxian-zu race donned a Korean hanbok dress, it was just the beginning of many controversies.

The Chosun Daily’s special reporting team in Beijing concluded: “The Beijing Winter Olympics … exposed the weakness of Korea-China relations. The controversy over the hanbok dress and the poor officiating easily transferred into anti-Chinese and anti-Korean sentiment.”

Korean politicians, including the major candidates in the upcoming presidential election, slammed China, and the Chinese Embassy in South Korea criticized the Korean politicians back. Netizens from both countries unleashed seething vitriol. In one example cited by the Chosun Daily, an employee of a Chinese think tank shared fake news accusing a Korean speed skater of throwing the panda mascot Bingdun-dun in the trash can.

The games opened on February 4 with the kind of grand ceremony China has become known for. For years, China has put great effort into proclaiming itself a tolerant multi-ethnic state of fifty-six officially recognized ethnic groups. Taking the vast Mongol-led Yuan Dynasty and Manchu-led Qing Dynasty as high points of its history, China lays claim to Tibet, Xinjiang, and Inner Mongolia. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs argues on its outreach website, “Although there were short-term separations and local divisions in Chinese history, unity has always been the mainstream in the development of Chinese history.”

While the few territorial disputes between China and the two Koreas are relatively limited and not fiercely contested, the dispute over the territory of history is extreme. The history and traditions of the Korean kingdom Goguryeo (37 BCE–668 CE) and its successor Balhae (698–926 CE) are claimed by both Korea and China. This underlying tension periodically leads to arguments about the origins of kimchi, Dragon Boat Festival, and other items of cultural heritage.

So, when the Chinese woman walked out onto the field of Beijing National Stadium wearing the hanbok, many Koreans assumed it was an example of China claiming a part of Korean culture as its own. China denied that interpretation, stating that the woman was just one of fifty-six people representing the ethnic peoples living in China.

Indeed, she was surrounded by representatives of each group, all wearing the clothing associated with that group. Over 1.8 million Chinese citizens of Korean ethnicity live in the People’s Republic of China, most of them in the border region that long ago was a part of Goguryeo. More than half of the Chaoxian-zu (Chinese name; Joseonjok in Korean) crossed over the porous border during the Japanese occupation of Korea in the period between 1911 and 1950.

The inclusion of Chaoxian-zu in the group of Chinese ethnic groups was not likely an intentional affront to Korea, but rather a standard part of China’s usual ethnic policy expression. It might have caught Koreans, who have no such ethnic policy, off guard.

The admonition of Democratic candidate for president Lee Jae-myung towards China to “not covet the culture of others” came as a blow to China. Anti-China sentiment in Korea largely has been associated with the Right, while the progressive Democratic Party has been accused of being pro-China by its critics. It would be fair to say the Democrats have often been more critical of Japan than they have been of China, and they were more supportive of working with China on the North Korea issue than were the conservative People Power Party. The outrage expressed by liberals as well as conservatives shows negative views of China are spreading across the spectrum.

Korea’s anger against China was incited again during the 1,000-meter speed skating relays when two of South Korea’s skaters, including world record holder Hwang Dae-heon, were disqualified, paving the way for China to take gold and silver. Hwang Dae-heon passed Chinese skater Ren Ziwei on the inside to take the lead and cross the finish line first, but he was disqualified for what appeared to be, if anything, gracing contact. Fellow Korean Park Jung-hyuk was also disqualified.

Then in the finals, Ren and Hungarian skater Sándor Liu Shaolin were scuffing so intensely Ren even threw Liu down into the ice. Liu got up and finished first but was disqualified for the pushing, while Ren was not and was allowed to take gold. The ruling appeared to many to be a clear double standard. Both Korea and Hungary protested to the head referee, and both country’s protests were rejected.

“I can’t contain my disappointment and anger,” candidate Lee Jae-myung wrote of the rulings on Facebook. The increasingly critical words expressed towards China might mean shifting perspectives on issues of policy import, too. Lee has coupled his sports-related anger with calls for cracking down on illegal Chinese fishing operations in Korean waters.

China’s embassy in Seoul has issued statements of rebuke to unnamed (but implied) Korean politicians, further fueling the flames. “Some South Korean media and politicians have criticized the Chinese government and Beijing Olympics as a whole, even instigating anti-Chinese sentiment, worsening the public sentiment of the two countries and drawing a backlash from Chinese online users,” the embassy said on February 9.

The somewhat unorthodox use of an embassy to criticize candidates running for office has drawn scorn from Koreans. The Korean government warned the embassy not to interfere in Korean politics after China’s ambassador criticized one of candidate Yoon’s positions.

Yoon responded to the Chinese embassy on February 11 with a statement criticizing both the embassy and the Moon administration’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs for being too docile. It is “ridiculous,” he wrote, for China to “intervene in internal affairs” and criticize politicians in the host country. “Nevertheless,” he continued, “the [Korean] Ministry of Foreign Affairs only issued a brief remark.” The past five years of policy towards China, he said, have been “humiliating.”

Outrage towards China, while growing, still isn’t universally shared, and some in Korea made distinctions between the various component controversies. On the question of the hanbok dress, progressive pundits pointed out that Korean ethnic people around the world all share a claim to the hanbok.

“Hanbok is the clothing of the Korean community that crosses borders and is worn by North and South Koreans,” an op-ed in the progressive Hankyoreh said. Moreover, another article in the newspaper warned that vitriol directed towards China was starting to morph into hate speech directed towards Chinese people, including threats to assault Chinese university students.

The real outrage with the hanbok—and the display of ethnic minorities in general—is not that Chinese might be trying to claim one piece of Korean culture as its own. It is rather the pieces of ethnic culture China is trying to eliminate. They trot out the ethnic garb on these occasions for it to be worn by smiling, dancing minorities, but in the Korean schools in Yanbian (and even worse in the reeducation camps in Xinjiang), the real people who live there are forbidden from speaking their own languages.

I have talked to Joseon-jok people who have told me of their youth growing up in bilingual households, attending bilingual schools. These days, those schools are taught completely in Chinese, a Chinese-born ethnic Korean waitress at a cafe in Cheonan said.

The amount of Joseon-jok immigrating to South Korea has increased since 2000, and now they make up a majority of many of the Chinatowns throughout Korea, but Korean acceptance of Joseon-jok as their fellow countrymen has not increased in tandem. Many Korean films depict Daerim district of Seoul, a major Joseon-jok neighborhood, as “a city of crime,” and Korean-born Koreans warn visitors to “be careful” there.

The Olympics have ended, but the diplomatic spat between China and Korea has just begun, and the ethnic Korean Joseon-jok/Chaoxian-zu who are used as a political cudgel remain being excluded from full participation in the life of both countries.

Mitchell Blatt is a former editorial assistant at the National Interest. He is based in Korea where he covers foreign policy, Korean politics, elections, and culture. He has been published in USA Today, The South China Morning Post, The Daily Beast, The Korea Times, and Silkwinds magazine, among other outlets. Follow him on Facebook at @MitchBlattWriter.

Image: Reuters.

Seemingly sensible proposals to Kyiv to partially satisfy Moscow’s demands in Eastern Ukraine are counterproductive. They ignore the record of compromising with Russian revanchism, and underestimate the unexplored potential of serious sanctions. They also do not take into account the political mood that has emerged in Ukraine since the start of the war in 2014.

In recent months, a popular idea to lower tensions between Russia and the West has, among some experts, become to ask Kyiv to seek compromise with Moscow. In the seeming absence of better options, Ukraine should succumb to permanent unofficial Kremlin control of the Donets Basin (Donbas) currently occupied by Russia. This would satisfy Moscow for now and be in the Ukrainians’ own best interest.

Indeed, Ukraine’s hopes for Western direct military assistance, NATO and EU membership, or a US mutual aid pact are unrealistic. Thus, reaching a compromise with Russia may be Ukraine’s currently “best bad” option, and might appear as useful to be pursued by the West. Yet, such a compromise is, for three reasons, only on the surface a suitable instrument to lower tensions in Eastern Europe.

First, compromising with post-Soviet Russia’s disregard for the sovereignty and integrity of other successor states of the USSR is neither a new nor a successful strategy. The most telling – because it’s the longest – story is that of Moldova. In 1992, Russia intervened militarily in an inner-Moldovan conflict. Ever since, a Moscow-supported pseudo-state in Transnistria, and Russian regular troop detachment, stationed without consent from Chisinau, have been undermining Moldovan sovereignty. A similar story has been ongoing in Georgia since 2008, if not before. Russia has not been sanctioned for its destructions of the Moldovan or Georgian states, and has thereby been encouraged to continue.

When Russia started its military aggression against Ukraine in late February 2014, the West initially also refrained from any substantial material action. It instead encouraged Kyiv to not deploy its troops in Southern Ukraine to defend Crimea. The minor Western sanctions imposed after the peninsula’s annexation were too little too late.

The result of the West’s restrained behaviour was neither a resolution of the Crimea issue nor an achievement of peace. In March 2014, Moscow launched a broad hybrid attack on mainland Ukraine involving various Russian state agencies, paramilitary groups, proxy organizations, and regular troops. Alongside thousands of Ukrainian soldiers and civilians, over 200 hundred EU citizens on flight MH17 became victims of Russia’s war against Ukraine.

The looming new escalation between the two countries suggests a need to urgently ease tensions. Some think that this can be only achieved via Western pressure on Ukraine to agree to Russia’s interpretation of the Minsk Agreements on Donbas. The resulting concessions by Kyiv might temporarily satisfy Moscow, and buy some time for Ukraine. Yet, such an appeasement would have grave collateral effects, and may have repercussions.

An ad hoc Russian political triumph in the Donbas would be a merely partial, or even elusive success for the Kremlin. Obtaining permanent control over the Eastern Donets Basin has an only instrumental purpose. It does not play – like the annexation of Crimea – an essential role by itself for the Kremlin. Moscow does not need the Donbas as such but sees it as a mean to destabilize and influence Ukraine. A Western compromise on the Donbas would not satisfy Moscow’s original wish to turn Ukraine as a whole into something approximating the “people’s republics” in the eastern part of the country. 

Ukrainian concessions on the Donbas would not meet the Kremlin’s larger demand to fundamentally renegotiate the European security order. Moscow’s plans for Ukraine are the most important, but not only expressions of the Kremlin’s desire that the West recognizes a Russian special sphere of interest. Worse, it would demonstrate to Moscow three older inferences. (A) Military posture or/and escalation works. (B) Ukraine’s independence remains incomplete. (C) The West can be made to function as an accomplice to Russian attempts to subvert the integrity of post-Soviet states.

A second defect in Western debates on how to deal best with Russia is an underestimation of the social impact of economic measures. This is a serious Western instrument to contain Russia without employing military means. Some, however, suppose that such sanctions will not be imposed, others that they may not help to sufficient degree. This assumption is fundamental to the conclusion that Western pressure on Kyiv is the only way out of the current quagmire.

One cannot know for certain, in advance, the effects of substantive individual and sectoral sanctions on the Russian political leadership and system. Yet, there are indications that restrictive economic measures may be more effective regarding Russia than in relation to, say, North Korea or Iran. The current Western sanctions imposed on Russia are, despite much European fanfare, limited. Many of the measures target individuals and a number of companies. Most sanctions do not directly hit the Russian economy as a whole. The somewhat more significant general restrictions imposed by the EU in the summer of 2014 are not properly sectoral, but rather sub-sectoral. They only concern the EU’s sale of certain narrowly defined high technologies and financial services to Russia.

Assuming a significant impact of serious Western sanctions on Russia’s economy and, in extension, its behaviour is plausible in view of what we already know today. It can be extrapolated from some well-researched consequences of the existing individual and sub-sectoral measures that have been in place since 2014. Two detailed studies published in 2021, by Erik Andermo and Martin Kragh in the journal Post-Soviet Affairs as well as by Anders Aslund and Maria Snegovaya in a report for the Atlantic Council, have demonstrated considerable negative indirect repercussions for Russian economic growth of the limited Western sanctions that have been in place during the last seven years. While these minor measures have not led to a Russian economic decline, they have prevented a likely higher economic growth since 2014. These studies indicate that Russians would have had billions of dollars more income without the rather modest sanctions adopted seven-and-a-half years ago.

The seemingly considerable potential of unused Western sanctions should be seen in connection to two other recent empirical studies by Maria Snegovaya, a Russian political economist living in Washington, DC. Snegovaya has demonstrated a correlation of Russian expansionist sentiments with the income from energy exports, as well as the country’s related general socio-economic situation. The aggressiveness of Russian presidents’ foreign policy rhetoric is positively related to the level of oil prices and export revenues. Moreover, Russia’s population’s mood is more enterprising in foreign affairs in times of good socioeconomic development. While these studies do not address the issue of sanctions, they indicate that economic performance and their social effects are important issues for the foreign political thinking of both, the elite and population of Russia.

A third miscalculation in many Western deliberations about Ukraine concerns the domestic repercussions of further Ukrainian compromises on its political sovereignty and territorial integrity. To be sure, a joint Western insistence that Kyiv consents to an implementation of the Minsk Agreements leaving the occupied Donbas territories under informal Moscow tutelage is possible. Yet, the larger challenge for Kyiv and the West would be how to make Ukrainian society and especially those parts of it that have been involved in the more than seven-year war effort settle with such a solution.

There are today numerous Ukrainians who have contributed and sacrificed a lot for the defence of the fatherland. Millions have invested their money, time, nerves, energy, and health while thousands have lost their beloved in the war. Many Ukrainians would thus hardly agree to a fishy peace deal with Russia. In fact, a significant part of Ukrainian society is already today unhappy about what they perceive as Kyiv’s not hawkish enough stance vis-à-vis Russia and the two so-called “people’s republics,” in the East.

Historical experience suggests that a dubious compromise between Kyiv and Moscow could not only lead to Ukrainian riots. In the worst case, protests against concessions towards Russia could turn into a, now, real and not, like hitherto, pseudo-civil war in Ukraine. In summer 2015, then President Petro Poroshenko, hardly a dove, started, under Western pressure, a process to change Ukraine’s Constitution allowing for a special status of the occupied East Ukrainian territories. This led to disturbances in front of Ukraine’s parliament leaving several people dead and dozens injured.

Since then, the aversion against any Ukrainian allowances in the war with Russia has grown rather than declined. One suspects, moreover, that the enormous domestic risks from a fundamental Ukrainian policy change regarding the Donbass war are fully understood in the Kremlin. Perhaps, an escalation of inner-Ukrainian tensions has been a major or even the major purpose of the entire Russian enterprise, in the first place.

The stark choice facing the Ukrainian leadership is even bleaker than many in the West might recognize. The alternative is not only and not so much between a self-sacrificing war, on the one side, and denigrating peace-deal with Russia, on the other. Instead, Kyiv’s possible partial satisfaction of Moscow’s appetite entails secondary domestic and foreign dangers that could turn out to be, in their sum, larger than the hazards of a new armed escalation today.

Why Compromise in the Donbas Is Unhelpful | Global Policy Journal

David C. Hendrickson

Ukraine Crisis, Europe

The Ukrainian escalations of the last week, together with Russia’s recognition of the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics and its movement of forces into their territories, advance the conflict to a new level.

Vladimir Putin’s decision to recognize the independence of the Donetsk (DPR) and Luhansk People’s Republics (LPR) on February 21, followed by the introduction of Russian “peacekeepers” into the territory of the two republics, are big developments. They signal the abandonment of Russia’s commitment to the Minsk Process, maintained in theory for the last seven years. Recognition also provides the legal ground for a Russian intervention on behalf of the statelets. Russian troops are moving into the territory, which they had not done since the early phases of the conflict.  

The Minsk Impasse

Negotiations to implement the agreements reached at Minsk in February 2015 have long been seen by responsible observers as the only viable way of resolving the conflict. Minsk II had the merit of splitting the difference between the parties, giving Ukraine sovereignty and the Donbas autonomy. Though the formula pleased diplomats in Germany and France and was acceptable to Russia, it was from the outset utterly remote from the facts on the ground. The Ukrainians received Minsk II as a diktat. They have been dead set against offering autonomy to the Donbas; conventional thinking in Kyiv is that no government could survive such an offer. By the same token, the inhabitants of the DPR and LPR never wanted the Minsk formula either and would have had no trust in any assurances Kyiv might have offered. That Kyiv didn’t offer any, together with getting shelled for seven years, confirmed to these people that reintegration into Ukraine would be extremely prejudicial to their interests.

Each opposing side could only have been brought to accept the Minsk formula through the dictatorial sway of their respective patrons. Mainly because the Ukrainians never took the first step and received no U.S. advice to alter their position, it has remained a dead letter. Russia’s recognition of the DPR and LPR delivers the formal death certificate, but the corpse, now seven years old, never once showed signs of real life. Its only existence was in thoughtful speeches by thoughtful statesmen, like former German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier. The two nations most committed to Minsk, Germany and France, have little leverage with either of the parties or their patrons. France under President Macron, though unfortunately powerless in the crisis, at least gives evidence of direction and will; Germany, by contrast, seems to drift in the ether, unformed, like disconnected particles yet to become a star.

Russian recognition of the two statelets has the primary implication and purpose of reinforcing Russia’s determination to fight in the event of a Ukrainian attempt to recapture that part of the Donbas occupied by the two statelets. Any such attempt appeared to have been put on extended hiatus in the aftermath of the firm declaration of the U.S. government in December that no U.S. forces would be sent to Ukraine in the event of a Russian Ukrainian War. The logic underlying this conclusion was simple: Ukraine has military superiority over the DPR and LPR. Russia has military superiority over Ukraine. The Ukrainian forces in the Donbas are estimated to be anywhere from 100,000 to 125,000, whereas the size of the military formations in the LPR and DPR are less than 50,000. If Ukraine faced the forces of the statelets by themselves they would easily prevail; if they encountered direct Russian intervention, they would not prevail. They are wholly unprepared and ill-equipped for that task.

Ukrainian Escalation

Events of the last few days suggest that the absence of a direct U.S. military backup has not stayed the hand of the Ukrainian military. They have engaged in a big escalation. This is denied by the Ukrainian authorities and by the U.S. State Department, but the maps published by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) monitors, detailing explosions in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions on February 18 and February 19-20, clearly suggest the contrary. Those big red splotches on the map around Donetsk and Luhansk show an intense bombardment. Overall, there were over 1400 shell and mortar detonations on February 18, about 2,000 explosions over the next two days. From the two maps, it looks like about two-thirds to three-fourths were on the Russian side of the line. This level of activity marks a big change. In early February, the previous thirty-day average was around sixty explosions per day.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Sunday referred to “provocations created by the Russian or separatist forces over the weekend, false flag operations.” These artillery strikes on the territory controlled by the two statelets must be what he is referring to. One infers from official U.S. sources that all the ordnance is being expended on the Russian side—some to attack the Ukrainians, the larger share reserved for an attack upon themselves. For the military non-experts, the administration could perhaps explain how one positions artillery and mortars to do this sort of thing—that is, fire on your own positions—and why this would escape the notice of OSCE observers and cameras. The administration might even go so far as to provide real evidence from their sophisticated reconnaissance capabilities as to what is going on. It is, of course, virtually guaranteed that it won’t.

Administration officials and the corporate media have thus got their story straight on this nefarious Russian plot—those thousands of false flags fluttering amidst exploding ordnance on the outskirts of Donetsk and Luhansk—but none of the media reports bother to mention the OSCE data. You would not know that this observer mission exists if you were just reading the FT, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal over the last week. And these are serious outlets which do not, like the cable networks, generally make it their business plan to subtract from the sum total of human knowledge.

The Ukrainian bombardments, intended to harass rather than to kill, are putting pressure on the inhabitants of Donetsk and Luhansk to leave. How large that evacuation will be remains unclear at this stage—the 700,000 figure announced by the leader of the DPR is not necessarily to be taken at face value—but the strike on the Donetsk water system, affecting some one million inhabitants according to International Red Cross observers, cannot provide much motivation to stick around. Russian reinforcements, however, may do so.

Who exactly controls the levers of power in Kyiv is not clear. Does Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky have 100 percent control over the military establishment, such that he can dictate military responses and operational plans along the line of contact? We do not know the answer to this question, though the suspicion arises that he is dealing with some very tough characters who brook no nonsense from the president. Nor do we know whether Ukraine is responding to U.S. coaching or defying it in its approach to the Donbas.

Why would Ukraine dramatically escalate its shelling with no American military backstop? There would seem to be two possible answers. It might have calculated that Russia would decide not to intervene, given the diplomatic and economic costs such an intervention would entail, even if limited to the Donbas. On this theory, it believed that these actions would put it on the course to victory. Whatever credence was given that theory by Ukrainian authorities, it seems now essentially foreclosed by Russia’s actions on February 21. Given all the previous signs that Russia would not permit Ukraine to replicate Azerbaijan’s victory over Armenia in 2020, it seems unlikely that the Ukrainians counted on Russian forbearance and passivity.

The much more probable Ukrainian calculation is that even a tactical defeat will lead over time to a strategic victory. That is, it would heighten the West’s desire to speed up Ukraine’s rearmament, because the more severe the Russian punishment, the angrier Western (and world) opinion would get. The dead Ukrainian soldiers would become martyrs to the cause, whose memory would be defiled if Ukraine broke from that cause. Short-term pain, long-term gain.

The Likely Denouement

Whatever the motive, the Ukrainian escalations of the last week, together with Russia’s recognition of the DPR and LPR and its movement of forces into their territories, advance the conflict to a new level. The military conflict to be expected is the one arising from the control of the territory of the insurgent republics. This, not the fantastic scenarios of the conquest of Ukraine conjured by “U.S. intelligence,” is the pivot of the whole controversy. If further escalation comes, it would probably consist of a Russian aerial blitz against Ukrainian artillery close to the line of contact; even a larger operation is far more likely to resemble Russia’s actions in 2008 against Georgia than the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in late 1979.

Russia faces with almost every alternative the bleak prospect of far-reaching sanctions, with the United States and Europe proposing in effect the consolidation of a new Iron Curtain or cordon sanitaire. It is as if our purpose all along was to strip from Russia all its incentives for restraint. Putin’s anger is conditioned by reason of state, to which he ordinarily bows, but he is angry. 

Well before the recent escalation in artillery and mortar strikes, Russia said that it would not allow Ukraine to conduct an operation like that which Azerbaijan undertook in 2020, or which Croatia mounted in 1995, which in the present context would produce lots of people killed and huge numbers of people displaced. Even if the fallout to civilians were limited, the United States and the West would still be supporting the imposition upon these people of rulers whom they distrust and fear. Putin’s use of “genocide” is an overstatement, but remember that William Walker, the U.S. diplomat who headed the Kosovo Verification Mission, deemed the discovery of forty-five dead Kosovars in 1999 to be evidence of the same and to justify U.S. intervention in Serbia.

The combined population of Crimea and the two statelets is about 6 million; the displacement of one-third to a half of these people, uprooted from their homes and forced into exile, would be a very big deal to them, but not of course to the West, for whom six million people seems not to be a big number at all. The truth is that the men and women of these territories, Crimea included, hate the idea of being ruled by Kyiv. We have come to learn, however, that the entire fabric of world order depends on denying to them the right to choose their own country.

David C. Hendrickson is President of the John Quincy Adams Society and the author of Republic in Peril: American Empire and the Liberal Tradition (Oxford, 2018).

Image: Reuters.

David Gattie, Michael Hewitt

Energy Security, Europe

The United States is in a twenty-first-century competition for hearts and minds, and much of that competition will revolve around energy sovereignty.

At the end of the Cold War, it appeared democracy had won the final battle in civilization’s perpetual struggle between individual liberty and authoritarianism. Some even raised the possibility democracy had prevailed and history had ended. However, revisionist powers China and Russia have revived and now threaten to bring history back with a vengeance.

The latest evidence is the recently released “Joint Statement of the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China, International Relations Entering a New Era and the Global Sustainable Development.”

This is the vision these two authoritarian powers have for the twenty-first-century century world order. And with a few word substitutions, it might fool many in the West into believing it was written by a U.S.-European Union diplomatic alliance as the two powers twist Western philosophical and ideological verbiage into what could be characterized as “Democracy with Communist Characteristics.”

A few days after the release of this statement, the U.S.-EU Energy Council released a joint statement, largely in response to the current energy crisis in Europe and Ukraine, framed within the broader context of energy security and climate change.

The China-Russia statement appeals to the world on the grounds that each nation “can choose such forms and methods of implementing democracy that would best suit its particular state, based on its social and political system,” where “it is only up to the people to decide whether their State is a democratic one.” Essentially, a country is free to develop as it chooses, without respect to Western norms for human rights or climate change.

The U.S.-EU statement appeals on the grounds of supporting countries in market and regulatory reforms “to ensure robust decarbonization efforts, a swift, just and socially inclusive energy transition to a climate-neutral future, and to address energy poverty including in Africa.”  

The battle for the hearts and minds of emerging economies and uncommitted nations is a core objective of great power competition, although the outcome is determined by the decisions of the weaker powers—not by great powers. Great powers may compete, but weaker powers determine who wins.

In the energy space, many of today’s weaker powers are fledgling economies in dire need of reliable and secure energy. However, as evidenced by the U.S.-EU statement, the West is focused on renewable energy and decarbonizing its economies by moving away from more reliable fossil fuels. This doesn’t connect with the unprecedented and immediate energy needs of emerging regions who understand full well they can’t industrialize their economies on the narrow shoulders of intermittent energy resources.

Energy as the currency of the twenty-first century, just like oil in the twentieth century, is starting to dominate decisionmaking by rational actors and allies in Europe.

Russia and China recognize this disconnect and are capitalizing on the opportunity to gain geopolitical influence through oil, natural gas, coal, civilian nuclear partnerships, and renewable technologies—an all-the-above offering. This is particularly problematic with civilian nuclear power—a technology the U.S once dominated globally but in which it has been largely dormant for the past thirty-plus years. Problematic because China and Russia have taken advantage of America’s dormancy and established themselves as the dominant partners for nuclear collaboration. This, in and of itself, is a threat to U.S. and global security as China and Russia position themselves to be the global steward of the nuclear fuel cycle while leveraging their nuclear collaborations as extensions of the state to restructure the world order according to their own designs and interests. This is not what the founders of U.S. nuclear power policy envisioned in the 1940s-50s.

However, an opportunity is at hand that can be leveraged for advancing America’s efforts to revitalize its civilian nuclear enterprise and compete once again on the world stage.

The U.S. Army recently released its Climate Strategy, reflecting the heightened climate concerns conveyed in the U.S.-EU joint statement and in keeping with President Biden’s executive order “putting the climate crisis at the center of foreign policy and national security.” The strategy rightly identifies adaptation, mitigation, and resilience as overall objectives, but it leans heavily on renewables without considering small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs).

The extent to which renewables can be deployed without sacrificing energy reliability and security and without compromising the military’s capacity to meet its strategic objectives is questionable at best.

SMRs should be the takeoff point for any military climate strategy. The DoD has had a long history of sponsoring leading innovation and accelerating commercial benefits for the globe.  In this instance deploying a new fleet of SMRs onto military installations can address resiliency, carbon reduction, improved warfighting effectiveness, and the lack of a viable commercial industry.

A central problem for the private U.S. nuclear sector is cost competitiveness for the current nuclear fleet and for new construction. For currently operating reactors, natural gas and subsidized renewables are oftentimes less expensive at the margins. Moreover, high capital costs for large nuclear power plants are disincentives to attracting investment dollars for such long-term projects. SMRs offer lower construction costs and shorter construction schedules. But, without a demand for SMRs and a book of business, economies of scale will remain elusive and costs will remain high.

Enter the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD).

By including SMRs as a necessary technology in its long-term energy security and climate strategy, the U.S. DoD can create a strong demand signal that would, in turn, lead to the development of an efficient nuclear supply chain and, eventually, lower costs. This not only benefits U.S. military, it also benefits the U.S. civilian nuclear sector as SMRs become an economically viable option that invites private capital.

Such an approach would represent a strategic effort to move U.S. nuclear down the cost curve quicker and position it as an attractive partner for nuclear development in emerging economies. Without a sustained demand signal and an efficient supply chain, the road to nuclear deployment in the U.S. will be much longer. The longer the road is, the more strongly it plays to the advantage of China and Russia by positioning them as the more reliable partner for nuclear development.

The United States is in a twenty-first-century competition for hearts and minds, and much of that competition will revolve around energy sovereignty. The Eurasian Economic Union-Belt and Road Initiative mentioned in the China-Russia statement describes a China-Russia economic development bridge that should awaken U.S. policymakers and corporations to the realization that global markets are at risk of being overrun and monopolized by China’s state-owned enterprises.

Moreover, U.S. policymakers who are determined to restructure America’s industrial base around renewable energy for the purpose of reducing carbon emissions and battling climate change should take heed that China and Russia are structuring their industrial bases to battle America and its allies and to dominate Eurasia. They are weaponizing energy and energy technologies as instruments of national power to achieve their geopolitical objectives and shape a new world order to suit their own authoritarian interests.

History’s competition between democracies and authoritarian powers hasn’t ended and shows no signs of ending any time soon. Today’s great power competition must be continually foreseen and managed, so it becomes the history we want for our posterity. Moreover, democracy doesn’t have the intrinsic momentum to sustain itself. Democracy is maintained through strength, engagement, and the pursuit of primacy by a nation that is founded on individual freedom and is continually forming a more perfect union—a transparent democracy for all to see.

“Energy Sovereignty” will be the “Westphalian Principle” of the twenty-first century. It will be driven by the need for abundant, baseload, and clean energy.  It will show nuclear power (as Eisenhower projected) will be critical to energy sovereignty. The paradoxical danger of over commitment to clean will not be lost.

America must understand its post-WWII legacy and responsibilities, including its legacy and responsibilities in nuclear power leadership. Otherwise, it risks permanent “contemporary amnesia” of where it came from and how dangerous the world would be without U.S. leadership.

David Gattie is an Associate Professor of Engineering at the University of Georgia’s (UGA) College of Engineering, and a Senior Fellow at UGA’s Center for International Trade and Security. He has provided testimony on energy, climate, and nuclear power policy before the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee.

RDML (ret) Michael Hewitt, U.S. Navy, is Co-Founder and CEO of IP3 Corporation and CEO of Allied Nuclear Partners. IP3 is the lead U.S. integrator for the development and operations of peaceful and secure civil nuclear power in the global marketplace. IP3’s vision is to create threuriving, peaceful environments in critical world markets through the development of sustainable energy and security infrastructure via public/private initiatives and industry-led partnerships.

Image: Reuters.

Trevor Filseth

Sudan, Africa

Demonstrators throughout Sudan demanded an immediate end to military rule on Monday.

A new wave of demonstrations erupted across Sudan on Monday, as protesters renewed their demands for a reversal of the country’s October 2021 military coup and the restoration of civilian rule.

Monday’s protests were the latest incarnation of a months-long movement against the government of Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, the Sudanese military leader who currently chairs the country’s Sovereign Council. While Burhan was instrumental in longtime dictator Omar al-Bashir’s fall from power in 2019, he overthrew the transitional government of Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok and seized power for himself two years later.

On Monday, Sudanese protesters chanted a demand that the military “go back to the barracks” in Wad Madani, a regional capital of around 300,000 residents located to the south of Khartoum. In the country’s east, groups of demonstrators insisted that a “civilian [government] is the people’s choice” and demanded an immediate end to military rule. Within Khartoum, hundreds of protesters converged on the presidential palace, leading security forces to use tear gas to disperse them, according to Al Jazeera.

Although the Sovereign Council—a joint military-civilian body established in the aftermath of Bashir’s ouster—nominally continues to operate, the military now controls the country’s affairs in practice. Earlier in February, Mohamed al-Faki Suleiman, a former member of the council who was dismissed and briefly detained after Burhan’s coup, was arrested again, eliciting further protests.

The coup led to international condemnation, both from the Western world and from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates—two historical Sudanese allies with strong links to Burhan. The coup was also followed by significant cuts to international aid for Sudan, with the United States freezing a $700 million aid package and the World Bank cutting off a lesser reconstruction effort.

The coup also led to protests within Sudan and retaliation by Sudanese security forces. So far, there have been at least eighty protest-related deaths and hundreds of injuries from clashes with the military. More than 200 dissidents have been arrested during the same period, according to a group of pro-democracy lawyers within the country.

Monday also marked the arrival of Adama Dieng, a UN human rights expert, roughly one month after Burhan’s government requested a delay in his visit. Dieng will evaluate human rights conditions in Sudan, meet with civilian and military officials, and author a report for the UN.

Trevor Filseth is a current and foreign affairs writer for the National Interest.

Image: Reuters.

Jonathan Schanzer, Richard Goldberg

Environmental, Social, Governance Movement, United States

Ben & Jerry’s is now a cautionary tale on the dangers of the Environmental, Social, Governance movement run amok.

This month’s tweet from Ben & Jerry’s urging President Joe Biden not to send troops to eastern Europe to deter a Russian invasion of Ukraine was roundly and deservedly jeered on Twitter by Russia experts, military hands, and foreign policy specialists.

“You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war,” the ice cream company stated. “We call on President Biden to de-escalate tensions and work for peace rather than prepare for war. Sending thousands more US troops to Europe in response to Russia’s threats against Ukraine only fans the flame of war.”

One critic of this naïve statement went so far as to suggest a new flavor for the occasion: Appease Mint.

But the tweet was more than an embarrassing gaffe. It was a clarifying moment. The Environmental, Social, Governance (ESG) movement has lost its way. Corporate leaders with little to no experience in foreign affairs increasingly feel entitled to weigh in on complex policy challenges. If they are lucky, it only results in embarrassment. It’s time to provide ESG with some guardrails, if not all-out reform. 

Ben & Jerry’s is now a cautionary tale on the dangers of ESG run amok. Last year the company, which is owned by parent company Unilever, announced it would terminate its license to distribute in Israel. In doing so, the company picked sides in a century-old clash of nationalist aspirations that has vexed even the sharpest diplomatic minds. The 2021 decision was particularly odd, given that the company failed to take such strident positions on other disputed territories.

To be fair, Unilever isn’t alone. Many corporations that advertise their commitment to ESG are rather selective in their application. Take, for example, the major sponsors of the Beijing Olympics. Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble, Visa, Toyota, and Panasonic all purport to adhere to ESG principles, with dedicated pages on their websites to all the good they do for the world. Yet, they have all chosen, for the sake of profit, to ignore the documented genocide destroying the lives of millions of Uighur Muslims in China.

The goal here is not merely to single out these companies for hypocrisy. In a sense, they are victims of a growing malady. Corporate boards increasingly feel the need to keep pace with politically charged causes to avoid “cancellation.” Companies often find themselves under duress for support of the wrong cause (or nonsupport of the right ones). This explains why they have sought out the counsel of ESG consultants and experts who purportedly know how to navigate this complicated space.

Here's the rub: these experts have no idea what they are doing. Even the most seasoned ESG consultants will quietly cede that there are no rules in this field. It’s entirely subjective. There is, in fact, no correct way to commit to ESG principles. The embrace of ESG is more about virtue signaling and branding than substantive change. Corporations often adopt the policies that impact their businesses the least. But they don’t want to risk running afoul of the latest corporate craze. So, they invest valuable time and resources to demonstrate their commitment to ESG.

Consultants who purport to be ESG gurus are paid top dollar to train corporations in how to get high ESG investment ratings and be included in ESG-based index funds. For a hefty fee, the C-suite can gain a coveted ESG stamp of approval. Yet, after doing so, they often continue with business as usual. Petroleum companies continue to have a heavy carbon footprint. Big pharma continues to produce drugs that can cause social upheaval. Multinationals continue to work in jurisdictions with poor human rights records. But they vow to be better global stakeholders, with occasional divestments or statements that reflect the latest political trends. In the era of ESG, this accounts for something.

One might argue that if corporations wish to project their softer side, ESG is a fairly innocuous way of doing so. However, this may not necessarily be the case. Morningstar, for example, acquired the ESG rating company Sustainalytics last year. This means that Sustainalytics’ ESG analysis will be used in twenty-nine countries by millions of investors. This also means that the subjective interpretation of Sustainalytics on political, social, and environmental issues will influence those millions of investors. Who is to say that this particular company’s perspective on a wide range of contentious issue is correct?

How are investment and divestment decisions being made? What data or analysis feeds into such recommendations? How does one company end up boycotting the pluralistic democracy of Israel while others enable a genocide in China? For a movement built on calls for transparency, these corporations are increasingly making decisions based on non-transparent, politicized information without regard to fiduciary responsibilities and shareholder value.

Deluged with complaints and concerns about the company’s ESG standards, Morningstar has hired a law firm to audit its process.

This is a welcome development. But Morningstar is not the only company that requires oversight. This was something that the SustainAbility Institute observed, which led to its sputtered effort to “rate the raters.” Absent such efforts from within the ESG community, it may be time for federal investment authorities, such as the Securities and Exchange Commission, to take a close look at the analytical practices wielded by financial firms providing ESG research and by corporations, themselves. This may be more urgent than ever given a Department of Labor proposal that would allow corporations to drag pension investments into the ESG abyss.

Last month, one top Unilever investor said the company had “lost the plot” due to its fixation on ESG. The same could be said for any number of corporations today. The commitment to being better corporate citizens is laudable. But when ice cream executives start weighing in on complex conflicts a half a world away, it just might be time to re-assess.

Jonathan Schanzer (@JSchanzer), a former terrorism finance analyst at the U.S. Department of the Treasury, is senior vice president for the nonpartisan think tank Foundation for Defense of Democracies, where Richard Goldberg (@rich_goldberg), a former U.S. Senate aide and National Security Council official, is senior adviser.

Image: Reuters.

Yoav J. Tenembaum

U.S.-China Relations, Eurasia

Few events in modern diplomatic history have astounded the world as much as Nixon’s visit to China.

Fifty years ago this week, U.S. president Richard Nixon paid an official visit to China, thus ending an official diplomatic boycott that had lasted since the Communists took power in 1949.

The visit, which took place from February 21-28, 1972, was a diplomatic spectacle as few others have been. Few events in modern diplomatic history have astounded the world as much as Nixon’s visit to China. Only Egyptian president Anwar Sadat’s official visit to Israel in November 1977, which ended the diplomatic boycott of Israel that existed since its foundation in 1948, can be compared to it. Nixon’s visit was the culmination of a major diplomatic breakthrough and the beginning of an emerging relationship between the two former foes.

Nixon’s visit came in the wake of a secret meeting between U.S. national security advisor Henry Kissinger and China’s Prime Minister, Zhou Enlai, in July 1971.

Since the Chinese Communists came to power in 1949, the United States had no official diplomatic contacts with the government in Beijing as it recognized the nationalist government in Taipei, Taiwan, as the legitimate Chinese government.

The enmity between the United States and Communist China reached a peak during the Korean War (1950-1953), when the two countries fought each other.

But increasing hostility between the two Communist powers, the Soviet Union and China, which then led to armed clashes between the two in the winter of 1969, offered an opportunity for the United States to attempt a rapprochement with its long-time rival.

To be sure, before he was even elected president, Nixon had written a Foreign Affairs article in 1967 arguing that Communist China was too important to be relegated on the sidelines of the international system.

After becoming president, Nixon and Kissinger set out to explore the possibility of a diplomatic thaw with Communist China. Following some unsuccessful attempts, the Pakistani government, which maintained close links with both countries, facilitated negotiations, finally leading to Kissinger’s secret mission to China and subsequently to Nixon’s official visit.

An official presidential visit of such a long duration would be difficult to countenance nowadays, particularly with a country with which the United States has no diplomatic relations. Nixon would describe his visit as “the week that changed the world,” which reflected the contemporary view that the visit was a singular turning point in the history of international relations. The same can be said fifty years later.

Following Nixon’s visit, the United States had to maneuver between its desire for an ever-closer dialogue with Communist China and its pledge to Taiwan’s security. The dilemma facing the United States was not simple. To achieve a rapprochement with Communist China was one thing; establishing full diplomatic relations was another. The United States had to strike a delicate balance between its moral commitment to Taiwan and its pragmatic interest in forging closer links with Communist China. That lead to diplomatic ambiguity, such as the Shanghai Communique published at the end of Nixon’s official visit to China, in which the United States stated that “all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain that there is but one China.”

This statement, in principle, was something both Communist China and Taiwan could agree on. After all, both believed that there was but one China; they just differed on which regime should rule over it.

Nixon’s visit changed the nature of the Cold War. Pursuing a policy of détente towards the Soviet Union, the United States was able to manoeuver between the two Communist powers. Détente created a situation, as Kissinger put it, in which the Soviet Union and Communist China were more distanced from each other than either was from the United States.

Arguably, the bipolar international system that existed until then turned into a tripolar one.

To be sure, Communist China under Chairman Mao Zedong was a totalitarian state. Mao and his regime were responsible for the deaths of millions of Chinese citizens and the persecution, humiliation, and torture of a large section of the population. The cult of personality in China reached Stalinist levels. The diplomatic opening to Communist China and the long-term effects were certainly not prompted by any ideological affinity.

Indeed, Nixon and Kissinger had already made clear that the principal motivating factor in their foreign policy was serving the U.S. national interest. There was a strong pragmatic streak behind their policy. Ideological reasoning was not completely absent from their decisionmaking process, but it was secondary. As Kissinger himself would argue many years subsequently, Nixon’s rhetoric was more idealistic than his actions; his objectives were defined in Wilsonian terms, while the tactics he employed were more pragmatic.

Nixon did not consider Communist China more politically enlightened than the Soviet Union. Most did not regard Mao and the Chinese Communist leadership as more open-minded than their Soviet counterparts. In this regard, the initiative behind U.S. policy was founded upon a strong belief that Communist China was too important an international actor to be left on the sidelines of U.S. foreign policy. In the context of the Cold War and the prevailing bipolar international system, Nixon believed that a rapprochement with Communist China, which was at loggerheads with the Soviet Union and thus more amenable to opening up a serious diplomatic dialogue with the United States, was needed. Such a policy would lead the Soviet Union to be more flexible towards the United States to prevent a further rapprochement with Communist China. The United States would conduct a policy of détente with the Soviet Union aimed at moderating the super-power conflict, which for its part would lead Communist China to welcome an ever-closer dialogue with the United States to prevent an anti-Chinese alliance between the Soviet Union and the United States.

With the benefit of hindsight, many regarded Nixon’s opening to China as his most astounding foreign policy success. It was not merely an ephemeral, tactical achievement, but rather a deeply influential, long-lasting crowning of a presidency marred by the Watergate scandal, which brought about Nixon’s downfall in August 1974. Although Watergate tarnished his reputation, Nixon managed to make a remarkable comeback into public acclaim as he became an elder statesman, whose opinions on foreign affairs leaders and policymakers frequently sought.

Dr. Yoav J. Tenembaum is a lecturer in International Relations at Tel Aviv University. He holds a doctorate in Modern History from Oxford University and a master’s degree in International Relations from Cambridge University.

Image: Reuters.

Ethen Kim Lieser

Inflation, United States

For much of the past year, sky-rocketing home prices and the cutthroat real estate market have grabbed countless headlines.

For much of the past year, sky-rocketing home prices and the cutthroat real estate market have grabbed countless headlines.

But beneath that inflation-driven rubble is another concerning trend affecting millions of Americans—the cost of renting an apartment or home is surging.

As reported by National Public Radio (NPR), rent costs in Orlando rose nearly 30 percent just last year alone, according to a survey by the real estate firm Redfin. Moreover, certain cities in Florida, New York, and New Jersey have witnessed particularly sharp jumps in rent.

And in Austin, Texas, rents came in at a whopping 40 percent higher year-over-year.

“That doesn’t literally mean that every person in Austin is going to see their rent go up 40 percent. But it means that if you are on the market right now looking for an apartment or home to rent, the prices will be 40 percent higher than they were the year before,” Redfin’s chief economist Daryl Fairweather told NPR.

“The root cause of the problem is a lack of supply. We have not built enough homes to meet demand,” she continued.

Fairweather also pointed out that more millennials are actively making the move toward home ownership, which is exacerbating the supply shortage.

“Millennials are the biggest generation,” she said. “We’re forming households, and we want a place of our own and that is causing an increase in demand.”

PPI Reaches New Highs

As rental and home prices continue their unrelenting march higher, another key inflation measure revealed that prices are rising more than expected last month.

The producer price index (PPI)—which tracks average price changes the country’s producers get paid for their goods and services over time—surged 9.7 percent in January year-over-year, as reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. For January alone, prices climbed 1 percent, adjusted for seasonal swings. Forecasts had only been for a 0.5 percent increase.

“PPI offers a window to the price pressures that businesses are facing, and which will likely be passed on to consumers in the way of consumer price inflation in the months to come,” PNC economist Kurt Rankin told CNN.

Credibility on the Line

In response, a top Fed official said earlier this week that such high-inflationary pressures being witnessed across all sectors may force the Federal Reserve to step up its campaign to get rising prices back under control.

“This inflation we’re seeing is very bad for low and moderate-income households. Real wages are declining. People are unhappy. Consumer confidence is declining. This is not a good situation,” St. Louis Federal Reserve President James Bullard told CNBC.

“We have been surprised (by) the upside on inflation. … Our credibility is on the line here. We have to react to data. … We have to reassure people we are going to defend our inflation target and we are going to get inflation back to 2 percent,” he added.

Ethen Kim Lieser is a Washington state-based Science and Tech Editor who has held posts at Google, The Korea Herald, Lincoln Journal Star, AsianWeek, and Arirang TV. Follow or contact him on LinkedIn.

Image: Reuters.

Stephen Silver

Roku TV,

Now, a new report says Roku is eying another move—one towards making its own TVs for the first time.

The Roku brand has become very successful in the last decade, first as a type of streaming media player and later as an operating system found on the TVs of manufacturers like TCL and Hisense. A report this week found that more than one-third of those who watched last Sunday’s Super Bowl did so through the Roku platform, the most of any in the survey. 

More recently, Roku has made a big move into original content, purchasing the library of the late streaming service Quibi and also making other new shows, driving viewers to its Roku Channel. The company also earns money when users subscribe to different services and rent movies and TV shows through the Roku Channel. 

Now, a new report says Roku is eying another move—one towards making its own TVs for the first time.  

According to Business Insider, Roku has been hosting focus groups in which they have asked customers how they would feel about the company making its own TVs, rather than licensing the Roku TV brand to other companies. 

The idea of doing so “has been discussed as part of Roku's roadmap,” a person familiar with the company’s strategy told the news outlet. "This is a manufacturing operation. They want to go into making their own TVs,” that source told the outlet. 

That focus group, Business Insider said, was shown “different models, feature sets and names, sizes, [and] price points.” 

A second executive told the site that Roku has been considering the plunge into manufacturing for some time. "The analysis has been done. They recognized that owning the last bit of branding made a lot of sense, particularly if you are going into content,” that executive said of the plans. 

The report arrived ahead of Roku’s quarterly earnings, set to arrive after the bell on Thursday. Roku is one of many companies, like Netflix and Peloton, that hit new heights during the pandemic, with millions more people than usual stuck at home and using their product, but have struggled more recently as such conditions have receded. The company fell short of estimates in the third quarter. 

“Roku's TV [original equipment manufacturers] struggled to get TVs to market due to component shortages and supply chain disruption,” analyst Michael Pachter, managing director at Wedbush Partners, said in a note, as reported by Business Insider. 

How exactly the manufacturing would work, and where it would take place, is unclear. 

Back in January, NPD’s tracking service found that Roku was the number one smart operating system for TVs sold in 2021. At the same time, during the Consumer Electronic Show, Roku announced a new deal to make Sharp its newest manufacturing partner. 

Stephen Silver, a technology writer for The National Interest, is a journalist, essayist and film critic, who is also a contributor to The Philadelphia Inquirer, Philly Voice, Philadelphia Weekly, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Living Life Fearless, Backstage magazine, Broad Street Review and Splice Today. The co-founder of the Philadelphia Film Critics Circle, Stephen lives in suburban Philadelphia with his wife and two sons. Follow him on Twitter at @StephenSilver.

Image: Reuters.

Caleb Larson

U.S. Navy, United States

The Navy argued that the Sailors leaked a piece of government property, declining to prosecute a sailor who only photographed the aftermath of the crash.

Four enlisted U.S. Navy sailors and one junior officer are being charged in connection with a leaked video showing a recent ramp strike during an attempted landing aboard an aircraft carrier.

The crash involved an F-35C Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter, the navalized variant of the United States’ fifth-generation stealth fighter.

Off the Deck and Into the Ocean

An F-35C can be seen approaching the USS Carl Vinson’s flight deck during the video. However, the approach is too low, and a landing officer can be heard yelling at the pilot to “wave off,” which means the pilot should abort the landing to come around for another pass.

However, the F-35C does not gain enough altitude to wave off, and strikes the aircraft carrier’s front ramp. At least one of the airplane’s landing gear is shorn off, and the aircraft slides across the deck, leaking fuel and catching fire.

The airplane reaches the port side of the deck and falls into the sea. The harrowing video can be seen here and is worth a watch.

The video is actually a recording of a recording. It is a cell phone video of a monitor displaying the USS Carl Vinson’s PLAT system, a Pilot Landing Aid Television that records take-off and landing from the aircraft carrier flight deck.

An additional cell phone video of the incident exists, taken from the stern of the ship. That video shows the airplane's approach, but not the actual crash.

A photo also appeared on social media and showed the F-35C following the accident. The airplane can be seen floating on top of the ocean after the pilot ejected.

The Navy decided to charge only the sailors involved in recording the PLAT video, arguing that the PLAT video is government property and therefore subject to Navy approval before release. In contrast, the second video and the photo of the airplane were taken from personal cell phones.

Charged

“The sailors being charged under Article 92 are either being charged on a general orders violation theory or as a dereliction – as in they negligently failed to execute a duty not to record and leak onboard footage,” former military lawyer Rob Bracknell said to USNI News. “There are two reasons to charge this conduct: Leaking footage of a mishap might reveal platform or performance vulnerabilities to an adversary – maybe not in this case – but they want to deter the conduct in other cases and they want to deter sailors recording onboard systems with personal cell phones and broadcasting them.”

Caleb Larson is a multimedia journalist and defense writer with the National Interest. A graduate of UCLA, he also holds a Master of Public Policy and lives in Berlin. He covers the intersection of conflict, security, and technology, focusing on American foreign policy, European security, and German society for both print and radio. Follow him on Twitter @calebmlarson.

Image: Reuters.

Aaron Crimmins

Ukraine Crisis, Europe

As the Russian offense plays with new strategies and tools, Ukraine’s cyber defenders must always be vigilant.

Ukraine and Russia seemed to have a shared destiny. For decades the two nations have been entwined across myriad realms, while locked in constant struggle over identity. Once a primary Soviet Republic, Ukraine now feels the gravitational pull from two directions. In the East, their past comrades in Moscow, and in the West, their potential future compatriots in Western Europe. Ukraine is positioned on the front line in the ongoing contest of realities between the Russian Federation and NATO, and every day the friction between these societal tectonic plates grinds hotter.

As the military and diplomatic situation on Ukraine’s borders deteriorates before our eyes, we must watch these fields in collaboration with the unseen cyber field. Modern conflicts present many facets, and in the Ukraine-Russia conflict, cyber conflict features quite prominently.

Russia has for years honed its cyber skills against its smaller neighbors, treating them as cyber-training grounds. To test their prowess against world-class adversaries from the jump would be foolish and likely lead to reprisals the Russian cyber and intelligence communities may not be ready for. Instead, while troops remain in the barracks, the Russian intelligence community engages on an invisible battleground without clear borders. As far back as 2005, malware such as Turla, or Ouroboros, has plagued Eastern Europe. From there, the infamous trojan has made its rounds through Western cyberspace as well. Ukraine saw cyber meddling—widely agreed to be Russian in origin—again come to a head in 2013, when, according to Ukrainian intelligence, the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) engaged in a “spearphishing” campaign against the Ukrainian government and law enforcement in retaliation for Ukraine participating in pro-EU talks. In 2014, for similar reasons, a multi-pronged attack hit Ukraine’s election infrastructure, reportedly due to potential pro-EU election outcomes. During the Russian invasion and annexation of Crimea, the Russians jammed communications and even damaged the physical connections that carry information from location to location in physical space. The following year, cyber aggression from the east again ratcheted up, with the now infamous BlackEnergy helping to cause rolling blackouts across Ukraine and Poland. The very next year, once again, Ukraine’s power grid was struck, resulting in similar damage. Throughout 2017, Ukraine fell victim to various strains of Petya, and NotPetya, both widespread botnet attacks.

In the nearly two decades prior to the current upheaval in Ukraine, the embattled Eastern European country has endured a constant barrage in cyberspace. Ukrainian government cyber experts have had to mount a valiant defense on the front line, facing new and evolving Russian cyber campaigns. As the Russian offense plays with new strategies and tools, Ukraine’s cyber defenders must always be vigilant. In the Donbass region, contested since the incursions of 2014, Russian aligned separatists have created a malware playground, attracting cyber actors from all over the world to test their skills. From there, there is little stopping malware from wreaking havoc elsewhere in Ukraine and the globe.

All of this has created a perfect storm for Ukraine in 2022. Cyberspace actors from all over the world have converged in the Russian sandbox, raising the stakes and the threat level in the current conflict. Indeed, Ukraine has already begun to suffer renewed, albeit modest, attacks on its banking system, seemingly designed to encourage fear and financial instability. Although these attacks remain modest for now, the Russian cyberwar machine has many other tricks up its sleeve, many designed and tailored specifically for Ukraine, after decades of practice. Were this cold conflict to heat up, and Ukraine resist Russian demands, it seems overwhelmingly likely the Ukrainian cyber defenders will be once again put to the test.

The United States and NATO’s assistance to Ukraine may put these other countries in the crosshairs as well. The United States and other NATO countries have sent diplomatic entourages to Eastern Europe many times in previous weeks to sue for peace on behalf of Ukraine and greater Europe. Russian kinetic aggression may be limited to Ukraine and eastern Europe, but without clear borders and blockages to limit their scope, the current Russian-Ukrainian conflict may spill over, threatening further escalation with NATO and other powers.

Aaron Crimmins, Esq. is a cyber strategy and governance consultant and writer based in San Diego, California. He tweets @00crims.

Image: Reuters.

Peter Hoekstra

War in Yemen, Middle East

The Houthis as an organization have carried out terrorist attacks targeting civilians and U.S. personnel and they should be redesignated as such by the Biden administration.

Yemen is a country that many Americans would have difficulty finding on a map. Few would know that Yemen has been bitterly divided by warring factions for much of its existence. They probably would not know the Houthis or who other combatants in Yemen are and who the U.S. government supports. They might have heard that the conflict has created a dire humanitarian crisis where nearly 400,000 people have died and many more face a very difficult future.

Reviewing the statistics: Yemen is a country of almost thirty-one million people. It is estimated that roughly 21 million need humanitarian relief, of which eleven million are children. Almost three million Yemini’s are currently displaced. These numbers clearly paint a picture of a massive humanitarian crisis.

Further aggravating the current dire situation is the fact that United Nations relief aid is facing severe funding limitations that may result in eight million people possibly losing humanitarian assistance as soon as March 2022. Combined with an escalation of fighting between the warring factions, this is a bad situation that grows worse by the day.

The United States must exert leadership to help alleviate these awful conditions. There are multiple steps that can be taken. It begins with taking action and putting an end to deliberation. For far too many Yemenis, time already has run out or soon will. Our clear objective should be getting aid to those who need it and punishing those who are preventing aid from getting where it needs to go.

The Houthis, an Iranian terrorist proxy group in Yemen, are the primary obstacle to addressing this catastrophic humanitarian crisis. As the crisis worsens, it is the Houthis who have raised the war tempo in the country, and indications from Washington are the Biden administration is divided on how to respond. The National Security Council leans towards reimposing the terrorist organization designation on the Houthis while the State Department’s preference is to designate individual Houthi leaders and sanction them.

The facts on this issue are relatively clear. The Houthis as an organization have carried out terrorist attacks targeting civilians and U.S. personnel and they should be redesignated as such by the Biden administration. This would reimpose a designation put in place near the end of the Trump administration but lifted soon after President Joe Biden assumed office. Designation of the Houthis as a terrorist organization should go hand-in-glove with continuing to designate individual Houthis as terrorists and sanctioning them appropriately. One does not exclude the other. With the stakes as high as they are, the Biden administration should pursue both avenues.

At the same time, the United States should continue supporting its allies, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, in the region. The Biden administration should encourage them to continue their efforts against the Houthis and also enlist their support in providing and delivering the assistance Yemen so desperately needs.

Some believe that Congress may try and exert pressure on the president to designate the Houthis as a terrorist organization. While this would be a positive step forward, I am skeptical that a letter by a bipartisan group of lawmakers will have much of an impact. Yes, it would be helpful, but it will not be decisive. Even if Congress wanted to take stronger measures to compel the administration to act, the House does not even return for business until February 28. Besides this fact, the administration has all the information it needs to make a decision, and it should act sooner rather than later.

With the impending calamity that is facing Yemen, the United States working through the UN and humanitarian organizations should focus on getting relief supplies into the country for immediate distribution. Much of the relief has been going through a single port facility, Hodeidah. This port has the best facilities in the country but is also controlled by the Houthis. Given the real possibility for the Houthis to steal, manipulate, and profit from aid distribution, this single port is insufficient. The country is partitioned with the Houthis controlling parts of the country and the internationally recognized Yemeni government controlling other sections with other parts of the country under the influence of Al Qaeda. Humanitarian assistance must reach all these areas.

If the immediate effort is to limit the humanitarian crisis, the strategy should be to open multiple ports, land bridges, and air bridges into the country to get relief supplies in. That is how we save Yemeni lives instead of helping facilitate an Iranian-backed terrorist organization.

The United States should encourage countries to participate in an upcoming pledging conference in Sweden. The immediate shortfall in financial support for relief efforts needs to be addressed. The conference provides the best opportunity for the international community to help make that happen.

This will not be easy to accomplish. Major legitimate concerns about fraud within the assistance programs exist. There are additional concerns that the aid programs in some cases may be doing more harm than good by creating dependencies and weakening what little infrastructure still exists in Yemen.

While all of this is going on it is obvious that the United States and the international community need to attempt to reach a negotiated political settlement. But as long as the Houthis are unwilling to genuinely engage in constructive talks, U.S. policymakers will have to deal with the way things are rather than how they want them to be.

For the Biden administration, Yemen presents a very complicated challenge but domestically it is not a political issue. The Biden administration can take the steps outlined above and receive bipartisan congressional support for its efforts. It will receive support from the UAE and Saudi Arabia. It will be denounced by Iran, the country that is supporting and, in many ways, directing the Houthis and stands to lose from a decline in the Houthis power. But in this case, by standing by U.S. friends in the region and the people of Yemen, the United States will be in a better position and help counter the evil influence Iran spreads in the region. Iran continues to use Yemen and the Houthis as a force to destabilize the region. It has no regard for the tremendous suffering it is imposing on the people of Yemen. It is who Iran is. It is this fact that the United States should never forget it as the Biden administration continues the dangerous and ill-advised effort to again enter a nuclear deal with Iran.

Peter Hoekstra is the former Ambassador to the Netherlands and U.S. Representative from Michigan.

Image: Reuters.