Diplomacy & Crisis News

Washington must make it easier to recruit and retain top talent.

A contest to succeed President Abbas could destabilize the region.

On February 24, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo launched the Biden administration’s vision for implementing the CHIPS Act, encouraging semiconductor companies to apply for a piece of the $39 billion which has been devoted to reinvigorating America’s domestic chipmaking capacity. Coupled with the Commerce Department’s stringent export controls issued last fall, which targeted leading chipmakers with ties to the Chinese military such as YMTC, it’s clear that the Biden administration is serious about semiconductor competition with China. But every chip matters to national and economic security, not just the leading-edge variety. But as a new paper from China Tech Threat argues, the administration must now address the threat of “legacy” Chinese chips from companies like Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC).

Also known as mature chips, legacy chips—either fourteen or twenty-eight nanometers in size or larger, depending on your definition—are the semiconductors that go into commonplace technologies such as cars, refrigerators, and washing machines. More importantly, defense systems make frequent use of them—Gina Raimondo has told the U.S. Senate, “We have reports from Ukrainians that when they find Russian military equipment on the ground, it’s filled with semiconductors that they took out of dishwashers and refrigerators.” While they don’t get as much attention as leading-edge chips, which are associated with advanced technologies, legacy chips are everywhere. And with the adoption of 5G networks fueling the rise of “smart” objects, the demand for all types of semiconductors will only increase. Unfortunately, the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS), which administers export controls, has only targeted China’s advanced semiconductor-making capacity.

Chinese companies, perhaps recognizing how the West has underestimated the importance of legacy chips, have decided to increase their output of these critical products. John Lee, the director of the consulting firm East West Futures, told the MIT Technology Review in January that China’s role in supplying these “indispensable chips … is becoming bigger rather than smaller.” Leading that effort is SMIC, China’s largest chipmaker. The Commerce Department placed SMIC on the Entity List in late 2020 with the intent to kill its ability to make leading-edge chips. But SMIC’s legacy business remains unaffected. The company recently posted a record $7.2 billion in revenue and announced expansion plans, despite uncertainty in the broader semiconductor sector. When the company’s four new production fabs come online, it will more than triple the company’s output, estimates Samuel Wang, a chip analyst with the consulting firm Gartner.

A deluge of Chinese legacy chips will spell lots of pain for the global chip market. Because SMIC and other Chinese semiconductor companies have benefitted from billions of dollars in Chinese government subsidies, SMIC is positioned to undercut prices, threaten Western competitors’ existence, and increase American and global dependence on China. China has already poured subsidies into its domestic solar panel industry to become the world’s leader in production. Beijing is poised to run that playbook again with legacy chips.

SMIC is also a threat because of its ties to the Chinese military apparatus. James Mulvenon, an expert on the Chinese military and Chinese cyber issues, has extensively documented these ties, including SMIC’s relationship with China Electronics Technology Group Corporation, “a state-owned defense conglomerate specializing in the research and production of military-use electronics, defense electronic information infrastructure, and military-use software.” Multiple other Chinese entities focused on applied research for military purposes also use SMIC products in their work. The United States shouldn’t allow U.S. technologies to support Beijing’s military buildup. Nor should Chinese chips of any kind be allowed in any U.S. military equipment out of sabotage and cybersecurity concerns. But the risk of compromised American weapons increases if there is no alternative to a China-controlled supply.

Lawmakers on Capitol Hill are sounding the alarm about the economic and national security concerns SMIC poses. Senator Bill Hagerty has confirmed SMIC’s “very close ties” to the Chinese military and highlighted reporting that SMIC may be jointly developing a $10 billion chipmaking facility with Entity-Listed Huawei. Senator Marco Rubio and Representative Michael McCaul, chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, have also observed, “Although SMIC’s designation on the Entity List is hampering its ability to make the most bleeding-edge semiconductors, it is having little to no effect on its overall production capability.”

The duty of plugging this leak in export control policy falls to the Department of Commerce. BIS under secretary Alan Estevez and his team should expand the current restrictions on SMIC so that American technologies cannot be used in the production of legacy chips manufactured by SMIC or any other Chinese-owned and operated chip firms. There’s nowhere to go but up: in the span of just a few months in 2020 and 2021, BIS approved $41 billion in licenses for American companies looking to sell their technologies to SMIC.

Leaders on Capitol Hill also have their own levers to pull. According to former National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien, “The idea that ‘made in China’ chips are embedded in U.S. defense and intelligence systems, national critical infrastructure, and government networks is both absurd and, unfortunately, our reality.” This year’s National Defense Authorization Act should include an expansion of Section 5949 to completely bar federal contractors from using Chinese chips in their equipment. Doing so will better safeguard American military systems and U.S. critical infrastructure that China is virtually certain to target for a cyberattack in the event of an invasion of Taiwan.

As a geostrategic imperative, the CHIPS Act is a generational step toward bringing advanced chip manufacturing back to America. Ideally, the United States will one day reclaim its status as a world-leading manufacturer of legacy chips. But if we fail to counteract SMIC and other Chinese legacy chipmakers now, that opportunity may never come.

Retired U.S. Army Major General James “Spider” Marks is a principal at China Tech Threat. His final posting in uniform was as the Commanding General of the U.S. Army Intelligence School in Fort Huachuca, Arizona.

Image: Shutterstock.

In an episode of the hit TV show How I Met Your Mother, one of the characters drily explains that “the Eighties didn’t come to Canada until, like, ’93.” Today, Canadian cultural delay remains in full force. Just this year, the American 2016 presidential election seems to have finally arrived up north. This time, it is foreign interference by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) at issue. The Chinese have targeted America’s largest trading partner, our partner in continental air defense, and a founding member of NATO. Americans should take notice.

As any American who even remotely paid attention to Russia’s efforts to sow chaos in the 2016 election can attest, the fog of foreign interference is disconcerting and frightening. While recent studies have suggested that these efforts did not sway a critical mass of voters, they did succeed in causing a significant portion of the American population to doubt the legitimacy of the Trump administration. Now, it’s Canada’s turn in the barrel.

Since February, Canadians have been treated to a constant stream of damning reports, spurred by a source in the Canadian intelligence services, suggesting that Canada has been the target of a widespread effort to affect elections at the federal, provincial, and local levels. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has ordered two separate, albeit closed-door, investigations into China’s chicanery—although both the Tories and Trudeau’s governing coalition partner, the New Democracy Party, have argued that this is insufficient.

The allegations are as salacious as they are troubling: explicit Chinese involvement in defeating targeted candidates, including cash donations and Russian-style disinformation campaigns, in both the 2019 and 2021 federal elections. China’s aims in 2021 were allegedly to secure a chaotic minority government led by, but not dominated by, the Liberal Party. While a review conducted by the former chairman of the Pierre Trudeau Foundation—which itself has been embroiled in a scandal wrought by revelations it received CA$140,000 from a donor backstopped by the PRC—claimed the results were unaffected by China’s activity, former Conservative leader Erin O’Toole estimates that the Chinese activity may have scuppered eight or nine Tory victories.

More recent revelations are just as shocking. China’s diplomatic mission in Vancouver conducted candidate recruitment efforts ahead of the city’s most recent local elections. Worse, it appears that the Trudeau government knew that a Chinese diplomat operating in Toronto was targeting the Hong Kong-based family members of Michael Chong, the current shadow foreign affairs minister, and failed to notify Chong or expel the PRC's man from the country. (After this failure became public, the Canadian government did expel the diplomat, Zhao Wei, spurring China to expel a Canadian diplomat in turn.)

One of the alleged targets of China’s efforts, Kenny Chiu, just happened to be the champion of a foreign agents’ registration bill. (Canada, unlike the United States, does not require political influencers in the pay of foreign governments to register and report activities on behalf of their paymasters.) One of the alleged beneficiaries of Beijing’s largesse, Han Dong, purportedly urged a Chinese diplomat not to release two Canadian citizens being held hostage by the PRC because doing so would benefit the Conservative Party. (Dong, who has left the Liberal bench to become an independent, hotly denies these allegations and has filed suit against the Canadian media outlet that has reported it.)

That these events were set in motion by a source in the Canadian intelligence services is also disquieting. It could be—as the leaker him/herself suggested in the pages of the Globe and Mail—that the appropriate political agents have been hesitant to take action against Beijing’s shenanigans, perhaps unwilling to forgo the possible political rewards. But at this juncture, it could just as easily be the case that profane, not patriotic motives were at issue. Given that Canada is a crucial intelligence partner of the United States through the Five Eyes arrangement, neither option is a good ingredient to toss into the boiling cauldron bubbling on our northern border.

As you might expect, this is just the beginning. Trudeau’s chief of staff has testified in Parliament, albeit in a more limited capacity than desired by the opposition, about how the government learned of China’s interference. And at the end of May, a special rapporteur appointed by Trudeau will make a recommendation on whether the two secret reviews are sufficient—or whether a public inquiry (think something north of the Mueller investigation and south of the January 6th Committee in terms of publicity) is necessary.

As a rule, the American public tends not to pay attention to the vagaries of Canadian politics. This benign neglect may be unsustainable going forward. Americans do not generally recognize how deeply intertwined we are with Canada’s political and economic system for the same reason that fish do not think about why the water is wet. But a loss of public faith in Canada’s electoral system could spark a significant and unsalutary crisis in Ottawa—just as Russian interference did here. Such instability could echo through the U.S.-Canadian relationship.

Furthermore, we should keep in mind that hostile foreign powers will undoubtedly seek to replicate whatever elements of China’s Canadian playbook appear promising, including in our own election next year. This is unlikely to be an isolated incident. While there is still time, the United States needs to get on the same page with our North American cousins and confront these threats together going forward.

Zac Morgan is an attorney specializing in First Amendment and campaign finance law. He previously worked for the Institute for Free Speech, and currently serves as counsel to Commissioner Allen Dickerson of the Federal Election Commission.

The views expressed in this article are his own and do not express an official view of the U.S. government.

Image: Shutterstock.

/ France, Éducation, Inégalités, Jeunes, Société - Social / France, Éducation, Inégalités, Jeunes, Société - Social

Après de longs mois de tractations et huit motions de défiance du Parlement, le président sud-africain Jacob Zuma, impliqué dans plusieurs scandales de corruption, a fini par démissionner, le 14 février, au profit de M. Cyril Ramaphosa. Le Congrès national africain affronte de graves tensions internes (...) / Afrique du Sud, Criminalité financière, Démocratie, Élections, Histoire, Parti politique, Politique - 2018/03

The new geopolitics of synthetic opioids.

Can a new president hold the country together?

With national elections taking place in Turkey, the stakes could hardly be higher as President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his rival, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, battle for the presidency.

The Center for the National Interest invited two leading foreign affairs analysts to discuss the elections on Sunday, May 14.

Henri Barkey is the Bernard L. and Bertha F. Cohen professor in international relations at Lehigh University and has served on the U.S. State Department Policy Planning Staff.

Dennis Ross is the William Davidson Distinguished Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. He has served as special Middle East Coordinator under President Bill Clinton and as Director of Policy Planning at the State Department under President George H. W. Bush.

Jacob Heilbrunn, editor of The National Interest, moderated the discussion.

Image: arda savasciogullari / Shutterstock.com

Today, Turks will head to the polls to elect a new president and parliament. The incumbent, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, will be on the ballot. Previous elections have seen comfortable majorities both for Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP), which has enabled him to stay in power for twenty years—first as prime minister from 2003 to 2014, and then as president from 2014 onwards.

The upcoming elections, however, will prove to be the biggest challenge to his authority over the Turkish state. The deterioration of the Turkish economy and the damage caused by the massive earthquake on February 6 has turned much of the Turkish population against Erdogan, and there is the very real possibility of his party, and by extension Erdogan himself, being voted out of office, thereby forcing him to take a number of steps to bolster support. One way he has done this is by leveraging Turkey’s position in NATO to block Sweden’s ascension to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), by claiming that Sweden has been refusing to extradite suspected terrorists and not taking concrete steps to combat groups that Turkey considers to be security threats. While there might be some legitimacy in these claims, Erdogan’s belligerent stance towards Sweden can be more realistically interpreted as a means of portraying himself as a populist who will protect the Turks from Kurdish separatist groups and project Turkey’s influence as a serious player on the international scene to garner support ahead of the elections.

Under Erdogan’s leadership, Turkey has become more confrontational in its foreign policy and is more willing to intervene in the domestic affairs of its neighbors. According to Kali Robinson, “Erdogan has engineered an assertive shift in foreign policy that focuses on expanding Turkey’s military and diplomatic footprint. To this end, Turkey has launched military interventions in countries including Azerbaijan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria; supplied partners such as Ethiopia and Ukraine with drones; and built Islamic schools abroad.” It should be recognized, however, that domestic factors have long influenced Turkish foreign policy, and that the country’s foreign policy positions have often changed to accommodate those factors. As such, while it is easy to take the current diplomatic spat between Turkey and Sweden at face value, it should be framed within the context of the upcoming election and the impact of Turkey’s considerable internal problems.

The greatest among those problems is the economy. Since he was first elected in 2003, Erdogan favored using aggressive pro-growth policies—such as encouraging foreign investors, undertaking massive infrastructure projects, and accumulating of debt—to stimulate the economy. Over time, this economic model proved to be unsustainable since the glut of cheap loans and low-interest rates that were implemented by the Turkish central bank put an increasing strain on the economy. Erdogan’s own views on economics run counter to reality, and he has continually insisted on keeping interest rates low out of the belief that high-interest rates cause inflation when the reality is the opposite. In an interview with TRT news, Erdogan stated that “interest rates make the rich richer, the poor poorer,” and has invoked Islamic teachings against usury and referred to interest on loans as “the mother and father of all evil.” It can be debated as to how much Erdogan believes in such ideas and how much of it is to pander to his more conservative base, but the reality is that his policies have had a severe impact on the Turkish economy. Property prices have skyrocketed by 241 percent as of October 2022, the value of the Turkish lira has been slashed by half, and according to official figures published by the Turkish Statistical Institute, inflation reached 85 percent, although unofficial figures have put the annual rate at 185 percent. The purchasing power of the average Turkish citizen has collapsed, and many goods and services have become too expensive for many people to buy. The situation has only been made worse by Erdogan’s stubborn refusal to listen to anyone who disagrees with his economic policies, to the point of firing three members of the central bank’s monetary policy committee who opposed Erdogan on the issue of interest rates.

There are several factors that work in Erdogan’s favor though. Inflation has slowly been decreasing, as Erdogan has been pumping money into the economy in the leadup to the elections in an effort to soften the blow of the crisis to the Turkish population. These measures have included raising the minimum wage by 55 percent, providing subsidized loans to small businesses and tradespeople, and launching a scheme to protect savers against exchange rate losses if they convert their dollar and euro accounts to lira. The devaluation of the currency has also meant that exports have become cheaper, with exports increasing by 13 percent in 2022, meaning that foreign currency in entering the country.

The situation became direr, however, after the February 2023 earthquake. The disaster killed around 50,000 people in Turkey alone, destroyed thousands of buildings, and according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, more than 20 percent of Turkey’s agricultural production was damaged, affecting over 15 million people. To add insult to injury, floods caused by torrential rains killed a further two dozen people in March, and left thousands more homeless. All in all, the damage caused by the earthquake exceeds $100 billion dollars, which accounts for roughly 10 percent of Turkey’s GDP. Recovery efforts are expected to take years to yield results.

The earthquake also piles political pressure on Erdogan. The government’s slow response to the earthquake and its inability to provide timely aid to the victims has seen its popularity drop. Despite increased efforts by the Turkish government to provide aid, many survivors expressed criticism of the government’s initial response, with many stating that the authorities were nowhere to be found, with people left homeless in the middle of winter with nowhere to go, supplies running low, and the impression that the victims were left to fend for themselves. The earthquake also tainted Erdogan’s personal reputation. When the AKP party was swept into power in 2003, Erdogan made promises of good governance, a clampdown on corruption, and establishing a state that was more receptive to the needs of the people. These promises were music to people who were upset at the aftermath of a previous earthquake in 1999, which led to a reform of the country’s building codes to earthquake-proof Turkey’s infrastructure. Instead, corruption became more entrenched as contractors took advantage of a construction boom to cut corners while the authorities awarded contracts without competitive tenders or proper regulatory oversight. To address this criticism, Erdogan has issued arrest warrants for dozens of contractors and fast-tracking reconstruction efforts, although it is unclear if this will have an impact.

Erdogan’s opponents have taken full advantage of his dilemmas and have shown a remarkable level of unity and discipline. Six opposition parties spanning the center-left and center-right, have allied together to create the Nation Alliance and put forward veteran politician Kemal Kilicdaroglu as their candidate. Kilicdaroglu, who is nicknamed the “Turkish Gandhi,” has projected an image of an everyman appeal, and has campaigned on promises of tackling inflation and ensuring a return to parliamentary democracy. His prospects increased when the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), which usually wins around 10 percent of the vote in national elections, decided not to nominate their own candidate—which is especially advantageous since Kilicdaroglu has, in the past, expressed a willingness to extend more political rights to the Kurdish community.

The final factor to consider is the impact of the Kurdish question. Since 1978, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) has fought a guerilla campaign to force the Turkish state to give greater rights to the Kurds, and Turkey has labeled the PKK as a terrorist group. Early in his tenure, Erdogan supported greater political rights for Turkey’s Kurdish minority but several factors changed his approach. While the AKP has consistently been the largest party in Turkey since 2003, it has had to ally with the far-right, ultranationalist Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) to achieve a majority in parliament. Due to the MHP’s hardline stance towards the Kurds, Erdogan has had to adopt some of their policies to keep their alliance intact. The issue only grew more complicated with the outbreak of the Syrian civil war. The breakdown of the Syrian state apparatus in the north of the country allowed the Kurdish population there to establish an autonomous Kurdish enclave. This stoked fears of Kurdish separatism that would spill over into Turkey, which led Erdogan to order the Turkish armed forces to conduct military operations into the enclave in an effort to stymie the Kurds from consolidating control of the area.

So, what does this have to do with Sweden? The answer is that the Scandinavian country is an easy target for Erdogan to distract the Turkish citizenry away from Turkey’s internal problems and towards an imagined bad-faith actor. Historically, Sweden has been a favorite destination for political dissidents to seek refuge and, as a result, has a large Kurdish diaspora population. When Sweden submitted a joint formal application, alongside Finland, to join NATO in May 2022 in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Turkey initially blocked the bid. In June 2022, however, Turkey, Finland, and Sweden signed the Trilateral Memorandum, whereupon Sweden and Finland would agree to take a stronger stance against Kurdish separatist groups, drop all arms embargos by Sweden and Finland against Turkey, and extradite individuals that Turkey considers terrorists. The agreement fell apart, however, in December 2022, when Sweden’s supreme court rejected the extradition request of Kurdish journalist Bulent Kenes due to the “risk of persecution based on the person’s political views” if he were to be sent back to Turkey, which did not sit well with Erdogan. Kenes used to be the editor of Today’s Zaman, an English-language newspaper that was often critical of Erdogan. After the failed coup attempt against Erdogan in 2016, Today’s Zaman was shut down and Kenes escaped to Sweden after an arrest warrant was issued against him alleging that he part of a network linked to U.S.-based cleric Fetullah Gulen, who Erdogan blamed for the coup attempt. The situation only escalated in January 2023, after pro-Kurdish demonstrators in Stockholm waved flags of various Kurdish groups, including the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, which has waged a decades-long insurgency against Turkey and is banned in the country, as well as hanging an effigy of Erdogan. This happened in parallel with another incident where far-right Danish-Swedish politician Rasmus Paludan burned a copy of the Quran during a protest in front of the Turkish embassy.

Unsurprisingly, Erdogan was upset with these developments and stated that Turkey would refuse to support Sweden’s application to join NATO as long as Sweden allowed Quran burning and pro-Kurdish protests to continue. In response, the Swedish government stated that it did not support the protests, but that they cannot ban the pro-Kurdish protests nor Quran burning because such actions would go against Swedish law which protects them as free speech. Regardless, though, this was not enough for Erdogan, with Turkish foreign minister Mevlut Cavusoglu accusing Sweden of being complicit of a “hate and racist crime.” There is still hope that Turkey might become more conciliatory towards Sweden after the elections, and the Swedish government is introducing a new anti-terrorism law which it hopes will persuade Turkey to change its mind.

Despite the strained relationship between the two countries, Erdogan’s primary concern is winning the election, and antagonizing Sweden is just one of the tactics that he is employing to shore up support. Once the elections have passed, it is quite possible that new negotiations will pave the way forward for Sweden to join NATO and even help to reset the relationship between the two countries.

Joe Boueiz is an independent analyst in international relations and the politics of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. He is a graduate of the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs and the American University of Beirut (AUB), and a former lecturer of international relations at the Modern University of Business and Science (MUBS) in Beirut, Lebanon.

Image: Shutterstock.

Over the last fifty years, western European energy businesses developed deep personal and business connections with the Soviet and then Russian gas industry. The greatest exponent of this relationship is former German chancellor Gerhard Schroder. As chancellor, he cleared the way for the Nord Stream 1 pipeline project, becoming its chairman after he left office. Alongside this job, he was a persistent advocate of an ever-stronger German-Russian energy relationship.

For Schroder and others like him in the European energy sector, the small matter of an all-out, state-on-state war on the European continent between Russia and Ukraine does not necessarily mean an end to business as usual. For now, it is true that Gazprom exports of Russian pipeline gas to the European Union have collapsed. Nevertheless, many business and political leaders want to return to “normal” as soon as possible. Already in Germany, Saxony’s prime minister called for the Nord Stream 1 pipeline to be repaired and Russian gas flows restored. In Italy, one of the members of the Russian-Italian energy old guard, Paolo Scaroni, has been elected to become the chairman of the Italian energy giant ENEL.

It is not too difficult to see the game at play. The “business as usual” crowd, led by the likes of Schroder and Scaroni, will be pushing for doing deals on gas flows with Moscow.

At first sight, Re-Schroderisation looks impossible. Imports of Russian pipeline gas to Europe have fallen from 40 percent of European imports to around 5 percent. The largest Russian gas importer, Germany, has secured several new LNG floating regasification ships to import LNG. German ministers are constantly repeating talking points on energy diversification. Germany will take Norwegian natural gas, LNG, wind, solar—anything but Russian gas. However, beneath the radar Russian natural gas has not wholly gone away. Whilst it is true that Russian pipeline imports have collapsed, Russian LNG imports have increased. In fact, across the EU, Russian LNG imports are now only in second place to U.S. LNG imports.

More fundamentally the economic and political support system for Russian energy imports across Western Europe has not disappeared. It may be that, currently, it is seeking lower visibility, but that support system is ready to reengage and push Russian gas at the first opportune moment. Already we have Saxony’s prime minister, Michael Kretschmer, making the case for the repair of Nord Stream 1. Interestingly Kretschmer uses the suppression of Germany’s nuclear power station, the last three of which were switched off on April 15, as a justification. This case for restoring flows through Nord Stream 1 fits with a broader strategy of German supporters of Russian gas. They know that it is going to be difficult to furnish Germany with sufficient alternative energy sources with the effective ending of Russian gas imports. The loss in the last three years of altogether six nuclear power stations increases demand for more power from elsewhere, and planning restrictions make it difficult to bring wind power on enhanced networks to where it is needed. No one wants to massively increase coal use (though that is happening). All the German supporters of Russian energy need is a really cold winter and the Chinese buying up sufficient liquid natural gas on global markets that natural gas prices ramp up dramatically. At that point, the case for repairing Nord Stream 1—at the mere cost of $500 million—and returning to business as usual will be made.

This is not just an argument that will be made just in Germany. Schroderization, which sees European politicians and business executives seeking and supporting deep connections with the Russian energy market was, and remains, a feature of the Western European energy sector as a whole—not just in Germany. One can now see Re-Schroderization also in play in Italy, where the Meloni government, pushed by its pro-Russian Berlusconi wing, appointed a member of the Russian-Italian energy old guard, Paolo Scaroni, as chairman of ENEL, the Italian energy giant.

Scaroni was previously CEO of the other major Italian energy company, ENI, and developed a strong relationship, as the Kremlin minutes themselves demonstrate, with Vladimir Putin. He also supported, and partially financed, the ill-fated South Stream project which had the aim of undermining Ukraine by providing an alternative transit route for Russian gas into Europe. The clear overall aim of Moscow was not just to weaken Ukraine’s revenues but also to reduce Ukraine’s importance to the EU, making it easier (in theory) to attack later, with less chance of any European interest. ENI under Scaroni also locked Italy into the Russian gas network by sustaining long-term gas contracts with Gazprom and acquiring gas fields in Russia.

Like many others like him, Scaroni has shown no rethinking or repentance for his actions. He has continued to argue that Italy needs Russian gas for another decade and has opposed sanctions on Russia. This is despite the fact that the Russian invasion of Ukraine threatens European security and the international order. And despite the fact that the actions of Scaroni, Schroder, and others in the Western European energy establishment essentially encouraged Putin to contemplate invading Ukraine. From an energy perspective, their actions made Europe dependent on Russian gas, and when Moscow pulled the energy rug from underneath the EU, European consumers ended up paying the bill. The cost of EU energy imports in 2022 was three times what it was in 2021.

It is not difficult to see that Scaroni will soon be coordinating with the pro-Russians in the German energy establishment to push a resumption of Russian gas imports. All it will take is a cold winter, limited LNG, and high energy prices, and Scaroni will be seeking a revival of Russian gas flows, with Gerhard Schroder, and other Russian “energy understanders.” The Re-Schroderization of the Western European energy sector will then be fully underway.

Dr. Alan Riley is a Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council, Washington DC. He specializes in antitrust, trade and energy law, and EU policy issues.

Image: Shutterstock.

The war in Ukraine has settled into a bloody stalemate with no end in sight. As the world braces for more bloodshed and destruction in the second year of the war, all the major players find themselves having gained no clear victory—except China.

On one side of the conflict are the United States and its allies. Since President Joe Biden has come to office, the United States has been Ukraine’s most steadfast supporter, pumping more than $75 billion into the country in humanitarian, financial, and military support. Washington has been, or will soon be, providing Kiev with advanced weapons systems, including Javelins, the Patriot air defense system, and M1A1 and A2 Abrams tanks. America’s European partners have also been providing ongoing assistance to Ukraine in different areas, including financial, humanitarian, energy, and budget support, as well as diplomatic outreach. The European Union in December last year agreed on a legislative package that will provide Ukraine with €18 billion in financial support over 2023. Yet, despite the seemingly bottomless support provided by the West to Ukraine, the United States and its European allies are no closer to expelling Russia from Ukraine than when the war first began, while draining their own resources.

On the other side of the war is Russia, which continues to be the architect of its own demise. While the Russian economy has resisted the brunt of Western economic sanctions, Moscow has lost the EU market, experienced a tremendous brain drain, grown dependent on Iran and North Korea for arms and supplies, and become the de facto junior partner to China. By all metrics, Russia has failed in its bid for renewed hegemony over its own front yard. NATO is now more united than ever, has added Finland to the alliance, and is on track to add Sweden. Furthermore, the Russian-Ukrainian war has accelerated the global transition towards alternative energy, thereby posing a grave threat to Moscow’s fossil-fuel-based economy. In terms of the human cost of war, the Centre for Strategic and International Studies reports that Russian armed forces and private military contractors fighting alongside them have suffered 60,000 to 70,000 combat fatalities over the past year.

Clearly, the biggest loser in the war is Ukraine itself. Having heroically fought off the initial Russian decapitation strike aimed against Kiev, which targeted President Volodymyr Zelenskyy himself, Ukraine now finds itself facing a World War I-esque situation of trench warfare against the Russians. The frontlines have become largely static along the oblasts of Kherson, Zaprizhchia, Donetsk, and Luhansk. At least 8,000 non-combatants and tens of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers have been killed since the war began. Nearly 18 million people are in dire need of humanitarian assistance, with 14 million displaced from their homes. Vladimir Putin has ratcheted up the nuclear brinkmanship, announcing plans to station tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus by July of this year—a move that would pose an existential threat to Ukraine’s survival. While Kiev has managed to avert defeat, victory—or more practically an end to the war—appears nowhere in sight.

Yet there is one country that is winning from the carnage: China. Just as Beijing sat back and smiled as the United States bled itself in various interventions in the Middle East over the past two decades, it is again doing the same now as Washington has found itself bogged down in yet another protracted and unwinnable war. In the meantime, China has funneled considerable expenditure into its military, modernizing its air and ground forces, expanding its naval forces in East Asia to counter the existing U.S. naval presence, and upgrading its strategic and tactical nuclear stockpile and launch systems. Chinese policymakers understand that continued and costly American forays abroad will only tip the balance of power further in Beijing’s favor. China has also taken advantage of the Ukraine war in its foreign policy, steadily increasing its economic relations with Russia and, according to some China experts, possibly supplying Russia with weapons and ammunition in the near future.

The devastating irony of the situation is that the West became embroiled in a war against Russia at the very moment when it should have been cultivating Russia as a counterbalance against the rise of China. Instead, the West has pushed Russia into the waiting arms of Beijing, which has been more than willing to pursue a “friendship with no limits” with a Russia that has every reason to fear a rising China. Nevertheless, instead of a situation where the United States and Russia are working together to contain China, we instead have one where they are effectively fighting a war against each other in Ukraine. The United States has thus set itself up for a confrontation against two great powers, a situation that only naïve optimists believe the United States can win.

Nilay Saiya is an associate professor of public policy and global affairs at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.

Rahmat Wadidi is a graduate student in international relations at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore.

Image: Shutterstock.

The recent visit of Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, often simply known as Lula, to Beijing should be a reality check for Washington. Coming on the heels of visits from leaders of France, Spain, Singapore, and Malaysia, plus success brokering a rapprochement between Iran and Saudi Arabia, it affirms that China is now a global player on the world stage. Its presence is permanent and growing. Yet the United States has not fully accounted for the magnitude of China’s rise, nor for the multipolar system of international relations it augurs.

The U.S. relationship with China has always been defined in binary terms. The “good” China was the pragmatic one; it embraced capitalism following Deng Xiaoping’s reforms in 1978 and fostered illusions that political pluralism, if not democracy, was around the corner. The “bad” one is the increasingly authoritarian Communist China of Xi Jinping, which parted with Deng’s reforms in 2012. This China has centralized power, stifled openness, massively modernized the military in every warfare area, and projected its power in East and Southeast Asia.

Yet China and the United States are stuck in a codependent relationship. Trade and investment ties between the two countries are critical to their prosperity and that of the world economy. The Biden administration’s extension of Donald Trump’s protectionist policies has curtailed trade and made China insecure. China’s rejection of international collaboration in favor of national self-reliance in technological innovation, from AI to quantum computing, has similarly alarmed Washington.

China believes the United States seeks to contain its rise—a far from fanciful notion given that Barack Obama’s pivot to Asia in 2012 was partly intended to reassert America’s military primacy in the Asia-Pacific. The United States, for its part, fears that China will supplant it as the world’s hegemon. Although its relentless growth has been diminished by the effects of the coronavirus pandemic, the bursting of the real estate bubble, nonperforming loans, and a shrinking labor pool, China is still likely to become the world’s dominant economic power by midcentury. This trajectory and Xi’s repeated verbal sallies that the United States is in fatal decline only intensify American anxieties.

Pressured by public opinion produced by their own rhetoric, Washington and Beijing are demonizing each other, and talk of war is in the air. Critical to retreating from the precipice of conflict is re-establishing a dialogue. Without such a dialogue, there can be no hope of regaining a measure of mutual trust, as Tom Friedman wrote in the New York Times on April 14.

Both sides must reduce their attachments to cultural blinders that obstruct compromise. Xi may fancy that China has resurrected its celestial status as the Middle Kingdom, the center of civilization around which the world revolves, but that is an anachronism in a world of emerging powers. Ditto for the culturally ingrained American belief that the United States has been historically destined to redeem a wayward world. The objective of foreign policy is not to transform the world into America’s self-image; it is to defend and enhance the country’s interests in a competitive and often conflictual world.

To advance this objective, eliminate barriers to communication, and rebuild trust between Washington and Beijing, greater emphasis must be placed on diplomacy. Xi must abandon the combative wolf warrior diplomacy driven by hostility toward the West and resume the cooperative and pragmatic approach of Hu Jintao and his predecessors. The United States should put to rest its lingering attachment to unipolarity and the simplistic division of the world into democracies and autocracies. There needs to be a rule of law, but in the multipolar world that is emerging the United States will no longer be the sole rulemaker.

Protecting America’s interests requires retaining a robust military force, one that is well-trained and equipped and operates at a high state of readiness. It is prudent to impose sanctions on dual-use semiconductor chips that China will use to modernize its military capabilities. Publicly communicating America’s social and scientific achievements and its success in improving the quality of life for its citizenry, as Robert Gates has written, will also help to counter Chinese disinformation so long as the message is free of sanctimony. America should present itself as a model for others to emulate rather than as a proselytizing missionary.

Ultimately, the United States must recognize that China’s rise is part of the broader redistribution of global power stimulated by the end of the Cold War. Freed from the constraints of the U.S.-Soviet struggle, emerging countries began to assert their national interests. India, Brazil, Turkey, Indonesia, and other states are intent on replacing a Western-dominated world order with policies that coincide with their objectives.

They favor a rules-based world, as Indian foreign minister S. Jaishankar said last year, so long as it does not compromise their interests. Southeast Asian nations refuse to take sides in the U.S.-China conflict; they remain skeptical that the war in Ukraine is the portentous clash of ideologies presented by the West. Conflicting interests prompted fifteen African countries to abstain from the February 2023 UN vote calling on Russia to remove its forces from Ukraine. Competing interests likewise intrude on the solidarity of America’s allies, who wish to avoid becoming “vassals,” as French prime minister Emanuel Macron put it, in a U.S.-China confrontation.

De-dollarization is underway in international trade, in part to avoid U.S. financial sanctions in national security matters. Lula favors the use of alternative currencies to settle cross-border trades, and Bangladesh has recently decided to pay for a Russian nuclear power plant using the Chinese renminbi. Economists and investors such as Nouriel Roubini and Ruchir Sharma maintain that we are headed for a world of currency blocs.

Rising tensions between the United States and China threaten to redivide a world whose cohesion will be crucial to addressing a multitude of problems, among which climate change, poverty, disease prevention, and military conflict loom the largest. In the evolving international political system that is emerging from the ruins of the former U.S.-Soviet condominium, the distribution of power is becoming more dispersed. To maintain a stable world order, it will be increasingly important for both the United States and China to find a middle ground with other regional powers no less intent on having a say in how the world is governed. To avoid a calamitous conflict that would balkanize the world or, far worse, plunge it into a new dark age of perpetual warfare, Washington and Beijing must find a modus vivendi that will allow them peacefully to reconcile their competing interests in a changing world.

Hugh De Santis is a former career officer in the Department of State who served on the Policy Planning Staff, among other assignments, and later chaired the department of national security strategy at the National War College. His latest book is The Right to Rule: American Exceptionalism and the Coming Multipolar World Order.

Image: Shutterstock.

Le 19 avril prochain, les guérilleros qui ont participé à la révolution cubaine quitteront définitivement le gouvernement et la gestion du pays passera aux mains d'hommes politiques qui n'appartiennent pas à la famille Castro. Une révolution dans la révolution ? Probablement pas. / Cuba, Caraïbes, (...) / Cuba, Caraïbes, Amérique latine, Socialisme, Communisme, Élections - 2018/03

La fée penchée sur l'aube de l'année 2018 a-t-elle fumé sa baguette magique ? Le 13 janvier, « The Economist », l'organe officiel du libre-échange, s'inquiétait du sort du « prolétariat numérique » ; deux semaines plus tard, « Le Point » consacrait un dossier à l'urgence de « reprendre le contrôle » sur nos (...) / France, Internet, Technologies de l'information, Entreprise, Capitalisme, Informatique, Technologie - 2018/03

The hidden power struggle sustaining Russia’s brutal militia.

Joe Biden, as featured on the White House’s website, has recognized that tackling the climate crisis also represents a unique opportunity; a place “where conscience and convenience cross paths, where dealing with this existential [environmental] threat to the planet and increasing our economic growth and prosperity are one and the same.” We are wholly in agreement.

That said, Mr. President? While doing the right thing, it is just as important to do the thing right… in energy policy, as in all things.

As it happens, there are ways to achieve both and more. Doing so requires pursuing an energy policy founded in pragmatism, rather than misguided beliefs or notions. To that end, we are announcing Washington DC’s newest think tank, Washington Power & Light: an institution not affiliated with, nor funded by, any industry or sector, that is dedicated to encouraging such an approach.

Pragmatism is the most powerful known way of achieving across-the-board progress. We urge the Congressional “Problem Solvers Caucus”—headed by Chairmen Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA) and Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ)—to add energy policy, now curiously absent, to its platform.

Deferring, per the logic behind Pascal’s Wager, to the president’s commitment to treating greenhouse gas emissions as an existential threat and fully sharing his enthusiasm for economic growth and equitable prosperity, how might we get the best of both worlds? Let’s not settle for trafficking in tradeoffs that result in the half-baked achievement of both important policy objectives!

As it happens, the federal government’s own U.S. Energy Information Agency (EIA), “the statistical and analytical agency within the U.S. Department of Energy,” publishes an annual report entitled Annual Energy Outlook (AEO). The agency and its findings are disclaimed as “independent of approval by any other officer of employee of the U.S. government,” and whose views “do not represent those of [the Department of Energy] or any other federal agencies.”

Yet the EIA is considered by many an authoritative source. Its Administrator’s Foreword, in the latest AEO, stipulates with refreshing candor that:

The U.S. energy system is rapidly changing. … Ideally, we would model these dynamics to produce precise numerical forecasts that demonstrate how energy prices, technology deployment, and emissions will shift over time. Unfortunately, such precise forecasts are not possible. The 30-year decision landscape we model is too complex and uncertain. Thus, our objective must be to identify robust insights rather than precise numbers—think ranges and trends, not predictions and point estimates. … Among the uncertainties we must confront, the timing, structure, and targets associated with yet-to-be-developed policy are the most uncertain. We only consider current laws and regulations across all modeled cases in this AEO. For some readers, this approach may be unsatisfying because policy rarely remains static for long periods. But this AEO should be considered part of an iterative policymaking process rather than apart from it; it gives decision-makers an opportunity to peer into a future without new policy. If the projected outcomes are undesirable from their viewpoint, they can effect change.

The agency provides a data-driven analysis, refreshingly free of what we call “hopium”—defined by YourDictionary.com as “irrational or unwarranted optimism.” Its analysis presents, in dry expository form, conclusions that fossil fuels will still dominate as our energy source both in 2030 and 2050, with renewables approximately doubling yet still dramatically below rival power sources.

Curiously, nuclear energy, among the most environmentally- (per a growing chorus of environmentalists) and prosperity- (per the consensus of economists) friendly is projected to decline. So much for the aspirational hopium-fueled goal of carbon neutrality by 2050.

Different energy sources are optimal based on geographical and other factors. Let’s be cognizant that, in the spirit of Bob Marley’s “One Love”, all humanity (and other living things) shares one atmosphere. And while we consider renewed reliance on nuclear power to be a constructive, likely imperative, contribution to cutting CO2 emissions while contributing to prosperity and security, we do not consider nuclear energy a panacea.

In  addition to environmental benefits, economic benefits, and energy security benefits, consider that America’s main rival, China, is permitting two huge coal-fired electricity plant per week, “six times as large as that in all of the rest of the world combined.” Geopolitics and worldly economics factor into the policy calculus.

The New York Times, notwithstanding its predominantly center-left worldview, represents the epitome of journalism. Its idealism is often tempered by pragmatism.

It is therefore notable when it provides column inches to the proposition that nuclear waste is misunderstood—fears of radiation from nuclear power plants wildly overblown—by the founder of the progressive Campaign for a Green Nuclear Deal. This promptly is followed by a pretty darn glowing review of maverick filmmaker Oliver Stone’s new documentary, Nuclear Now, advocating nuclear energy as the decisive remedy both for climate change and for “climate doomerism.”

Meanwhile, The National Interest recently provided, over the course of two weeks, opinion pieces unflinchingly making the case for nuclear energy as the answer to global and environmental economics woes and another as to why nuclear power is the only realistic way of scaling up supply to meet future energy demand.

Bottom line? We applaud energy policies that honor President Biden’s stated goals: the imperative for both a clean environment and equitable prosperity. To those two objectives we would add energy security, unquestionably another value held by the president and most Americans, both in the general public and makers of policy.

Progress certainly will entail making laws, regulations, and overall energy policy based on data and analysis, rather than faith-based utopian “hopium” or narrative-driven dystopian hysteria or despair. But how? Simply follow the clear implications of the analysis provided annually by the Energy Information Agency to nurture the growing transpartisan consensus that energy policies fostering both equitable prosperity and environmental integrity are complementary, not antagonistic, values.

Energy policy based on proven, field-tested, engineering to bring about win-win solutions will bring federal policy back into better alignment with the mission statement placed right to the fore of the Constitution: to “establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”

Chairmen Fitzpatrick and Gottheimer? President Biden?

You’ve got the solution to a problem right in the palm of your hands. We encourage you and your colleagues to take a good look!

Jeff Garzik is an internationally respected futurist, entrepreneur, and software engineer, co-founder and CEO of Bloq. He is well recognized for his work on the original dev team of Bitcoin and for his extensive work with the Linux Foundation.

Ralph Benko worked in or with three White Houses, two executive branch agencies, and several Congresses, co-founded and chairs the 201,000-follower Capitalist League, is a multi-award-winning author and columnist.

The authors are the co-founders of Washington Power & Light, a new DC policy institute dedicated to pragmatic energy policy. Washington Power & Light, not affiliated with, nor funded by, any industry or sector, is dedicated to encouraging an energy policy based on pragmatism.

Image: Shutterstock.

At a scaled-down and muted World War II Victory Day Parade, Vladimir Putin again compared the war in Ukraine to the epic struggle of the USSR against Nazism. The ideological justification of Putin’s invasion—the “denazification of Ukraine”—is linked to the reanimated veneration of Stalin. Resurrecting the Soviet dictator, however, is much more than a wartime propaganda tool: it serves to legitimize the strategic culture of Putin’s Russia. If Stalin’s legacy becomes morally acceptable and legitimate, then Putin’s revisionist foreign policy goals—and all the means to accomplish them—will become similarly virtuous. To achieve lasting peace in Europe, the West must understand the present-day implications of Putin’s historic revisionism.

In February of this year, a new larger-than-life Stalin bust was unveiled in Volgograd to honor one of the deadliest battles of the Second World War: the battle of Stalingrad. A watershed moment of what Russia calls the “Great Patriotic War,” the Nazi expansion into the Soviet Union was halted at Stalingrad. The battle marked the turning of the tide, as the Red Army began to march victoriously all the way to Berlin. In the weeks preceding the unveiling of the new bust, officials floated the idea of changing the city’s name back to its Soviet-era name: Stalingrad.

However, the reanimated cult of Stalin is a more serious project than putting up a bunch of busts to boost wartime morale. The rehabilitation of the man of steel had already been going full steam when Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine in February 2022. In December 1999, when Putin was named acting president following Boris Yeltsin’s resignation, he pledged to reestablish order domestically and restore the strength of Russia abroad. The new president turned to the image of Stalin to build on Russian nostalgia for the lost gilded age of the Soviet empire. Barely a year in office, Putin replaced the Russian national anthem in 2000 with the National Anthem of the Soviet Union—a hymn personally selected by Stalin in 1943. The updated lyrics were written by the same Sergey Mikhalkov who penned the original version—mentioning Stalin—during the Great Patriotic War.

The rehabilitation of Stalin gradually gained momentum over the following years. In 2007, Putin called Stalin an “effective manager” and stated in Oliver Stone’s documentary, The Putin Interviews, that Stalin was “excessively demonized.” One of the last independent TV channels, Rain, was shut off in 2014 after it polled its viewers on whether Stalin should have surrendered Leningrad rather than killing more than a million citizens—including Putin’s brother—in the Nazi siege. The Kremlin has also been covering up Stalin’s genocidal act, the Ukrainian famine of 1932–1933, known as the Holodomor—going as far as getting rid of a monument dedicated to the victims in Russian-occupied Mariupol. To nurture the legacy of Stalin, Putin must erase the ostentatious inhumanity of the most murderous communist dictator in Russian history.

In 2020, Putin delivered an online history lesson for high school students and pre-university cadets where he praised the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, in which the Third Reich and the Soviet Union carved up Eastern Europe between them. In an essay published the same year in this very publication, Putin claimed that in September 1939 the Red Army only marched into Poland because “there was no alternative.” According to him, Stalin decided to carve up its neighbor to protect millions from “anti-Semites and radical nationalists.” Soviet-style “protection” included the massacre of around 22,000 Polish military officers and intelligentsia prisoners of war in Katyn in 1940—a fact that Putin conveniently ignores. What is more, recently released FSB documents attribute this war crime to the Third Reich. Never mind the fact that the Russian Duma condemned Stalin for the massacre back in 2010. In his essay, Putin also paints the occupation and subsequent annexation of the Baltic countries during the fall of 1940 as “implemented on a contractual basis, with the consent of the elected authorities.” These rigged elections served the same goal as the phony referendums in Russian-occupied Eastern Ukraine organized last year: to discipline the population and teach them how to behave under Soviet/Russian rule.

Make no mistake: the Russian population is more than susceptible to Putin’s Stalin worship. According to Levada, a polling agency, 56 percent of polled Russians in May 2021 agreed that Stalin was a “great leader.” Astonishingly, in Russia, Putin is sometimes even reproached for not being “Stalin enough.” Already in 2016, a bizarre, Stalin-mask selfie app became wildly popular on Russian Instagram. Just before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, this was written into Russian law: “any public attempt to equate the aims and actions of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany during World War II, as well as to deny the decisive role of the Soviet people in the victory over fascism” is a criminal offense. It seems that Putin successfully seized on the unifying and catalyzing potential of the Soviet victory in World War II and the trauma of the dissolution of the USSR to vindicate Stalinism.

Like all people, Russians have the right to honor their leaders and write their own history. But the intensifying rehabilitation of Stalin only serves to legitimize Putin’s authoritarian regime and to support his revisionist foreign policy aspirations. When U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt, British prime minister Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin met in Yalta in February 1945 to decide on the post-war order in Europe, Stalin promised to allow free elections in Poland. He lied. Yalta didn’t stop Stalin from pursuing his imperial goals in Eastern Europe. In the same vein, the 1993 Budapest Memorandum didn’t stop Putin from invading Ukraine.

Putin is not Stalin, but Stalin’s heritage is omnipresent and deeply embedded in the Russian psyche. To understand Putin’s strategic culture, it must be perceived through a “Stalin lens.” The United States and its Western allies must look at history as a guide if they want to devise sustainable peace in the region.

Mónika Palotai is a Visiting Research Fellow at Hudson Institute specializing in the European Union, International Law, and Energy Security

Kristóf György Veres is a Senior Researcher at the Migration Research Institute (within the Mathias Corvinus Collegium) in Budapest.

Image: Shutterstock.

On May 27, Henry Kissinger will celebrate his one-hundredth birthday and a long life of exceptional consequence in the two highly competitive worlds of diplomacy and ideas.

Fleeing Nazi Germany, Kissinger arrived in the United States in 1938 as a bookish teenager with no immediate prospects. Thirty years later, he commanded U.S. foreign policy, first as national security advisor, then as the emblematic secretary of state to two presidents, Richard M. Nixon and Gerald R. Ford. He shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973.

In his four years as secretary of state, he helped end America’s most controversial war, split China from Russia (the hegemonic power that propelled China’s leader to power), and redrew the boundaries of several nation-states. His books, real doorstoppers crammed with careful research and close argument, continue to climb bestseller lists and compel the attention of leaders and thinkers across the world. Decades after leaving office, he continues to be consulted by chief executives, presidential candidates, and network-television bookers.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies, chaired by another great man, a patriot and one of the most enlightened men in the American establishment, John Hamre, organized a reception in honor of Kissinger to celebrate his extraordinary accomplishments. Hamre began by reviewing history and Kissinger’s mark on it.

First, there was the Vietnam War. As the deadly presidential approached, Vietnam had settled into deadly stalemate. The year began with North’s massive Tet Offensive, which the United States desperately beat back. By September, the Viet Cong ceased to exist as a separate fighting force, but that meant no victory for the United States. The North Vietnamese Army was becoming an increasingly lethal force with its growing divisions of Soviet tanks, aircraft, and increasingly effective anti-aircraft missiles.  As long as the USSR and China backed the North, the United States could never defeat it.

The stalemate was evident, and it divided America. Protests, both anti- and pro-war (the pro-soldier “hard hat revolt” in Central Park was one the largest protests in the 1960s), divided America. On television, Americans saw burning wreckage in Saigon and burning draft cards in Seattle. The public was tiring of the war.

It was Kissinger who led the peace talks. Yes, South Vietnam collapsed in 1975. But, two years earlier, the U.S. military was able to make a secure and, above all, dignified withdrawal.

It is to Kissinger that we owe the famous policy of détente with the Soviet Union. For the first time, the United States and the USSR agreed to significantly slow the nuclear arms race. As a result, several regional conflicts de-escalated. Nuclear war was avoided, and lives were spared in Southeast Asia, southern Africa, and among the Pacific islands—every place where communist guerillas fought with the local successor states to colonial powers.

To strengthen America’s position in Asia, the Nixon administration made a diplomatic rapprochement with mainland China, from which the United States had been estranged since 1949, when the Communists had won control. To seal the new relationship, Nixon took a spectacular trip to China in February 1972.

After October 6, 1973, Israeli officials telephoned Kissinger to say that they were fighting off an invasion. Egyptian forces were attacking in the Sinai while the Syrian army was in Israel’s north. The so-called fourth Arab-Israel War had begun. Nixon dispatched Kissinger to negotiate with Israel, Egypt, and Syria—Kissinger’s famous “shuttle diplomacy.”

At the end, there was a new and, this time, lasting peace. These served a few important American interests: it stopped the cycle of invasions, halted the embargo by Arab oil-exporting states, and set the stage for a historic peace treaty between Israel and Egypt (the Camp David Accords of the Carter years). Kissinger may be the only Nobel Peace Prize winner to secure more peace after winning the prize than before.

These successes make him a diplomat of historic stature. The intensity and scope of these diplomatic initiatives, and their success—in the sense that they all resulted in agreements—have no parallel in American history, and perhaps no parallel in the history of Israel. With his prodigies of diplomacy, Kissinger left his mark on the twentieth century.

While Kissinger admits that prophets have “the most passionate vision,” he said he prefers statesmen to them because they recognize on-the-ground realities and can see value in incremental gains.

Sadly, the current political climate does not encourage the emergence of leaders like Kissinger. His book devoted to “leadership” exemplified the importance of building consensus on the major issues. It is not by tweeting or posting on Facebook that a political leader can develop a vision that gives him the status of a statesman. Instead, as Kissinger writes, leaders are made by the cautious study of history.

All democracies suffer from the same ailment: An intellectually impoverished political class that is more obsessed with polls and social networks than a vision for their societies.

But this is a problem that even short-term thinkers should consider: How can America continue to lead the world without leaders who can combine high theory and grounded pragmatism, as Kissinger does?

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

Image: Mark Reinstein / Shutterstock.com

L'association Générations futures a dévoilé le 20 février un rapport sur la présence de pesticides dans les produits agricoles : 73 % des fruits analysés pendant cinq ans et 41 % des légumes étaient contaminés. De quoi renforcer encore l'intérêt pour l'agriculture biologique. Mais que disent les études (...) / France, Agriculture, Agroalimentaire, Alimentation, Économie, Environnement, Santé - 2018/03