Diplomacy & Crisis News

Despite high expectations following the Velvet Revolution of 2018 that overthrew the regime of ex-President Serzh Sargsyan, the democratic landscape of Armenia has remained bleak in recent years. The current government of the country is steadily backsliding towards non-democratic governance, and perhaps even authoritarianism.

Of special concern has been the persecution of political activists and journalists, as reflected in the annual reports of a number of NGOs specialized in evaluating the functioning of democratic institutions. Reports about Armenia’s democratic environment also include human rights violations, the persecution of political activists and members of LGBTQ+ community, as well as instances of domestic violence.

For instance, Freedom House, in its most recent annual report, downgraded its assessment of political rights and civil liberties in Armenia. The report revealed that large-scale measures were being taken against political dissidents, journalists, and human rights activists by the country’s authorities.

Moreover, in its report last May, Google’s Threat Analysis Group revealed the unlawful use by “government-backed actors” of spyware called Predator, created by the North Macedonian company Cytrox. The software had been used to target journalists, dissidents, and human rights activists in the country, with local media outlets reporting that the electronic devices of several Armenian opposition politicians have been hacked. Yet Predator is not the only spyware being used; an Armenian opposition leader Artur Vanetsyan once claimed that the Pegasus spyware had been installed on his phones in 2021. Despite the claim and the following scandal, the use of Pegasus against Armenian journalists and opposition figures has apparently not been discontinued. According to a study conducted by social media specialists in Armenia in November 2022, Pegasus may still monitor the key opposition and media personalities.

Political Arrests

The worrying developments do not stop with such spying. It is apparent that Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has also begun persecuting members of the previous government he overthrew. For instance, two former defense ministers have been arrested on what have been described as politically-motivated charges. Former Defence Minister Seyran Ohanyan, who served from 2008 to 2016, was arrested in 2020 on charges of embezzling over $2 million in state funds. The same charge was also brought against another former defense minister, David Tonoyan, who was detained in 2021.

The ex-minister Tonoyan, two other generals, and an arms dealer were arrested by the National Security Service (NSS) in September 2021 as part of a criminal investigation into the supplying of an allegedly outdated missile to Armenia’s armed forces. However, experts believe the arrest of Tonoyan had a political motivation—he was simply made a scapegoat for Armenia’s defeat in the six-week war with neighboring Azerbaijan in 2020. Having served as the defense minister between 2018 and 2020, Tonoyan resigned a week after his country’s capitulation in the war over Karabakh but obviously could not escape the persecution. It’s worth noting that Tonoyan, contrary to what one would assume, defended Pashinyan’s signing of the trilateral statement of November 2020 that ended the war. “Despite the fact that the Armenian Armed Forces, the entire system of the Ministry of Defense and the government did their best to be successful, calling the agreement reached to end the Karabakh war a ‘betrayal’ or ‘defeat’ is an insult,” he said in response to criticism voiced following Armenia’s signing of the deal.

The political persecution does not stop there; members of the country’s political opposition have been targeted, namely Dashnaktsutyun (Armenian Revolutionary Federation) party members. Artavazd Margaryan, head of Dashnaktsutyun faction in the Council of Elders (the municipality council) of Artashat, was detained for seventy-two hours along with the party’s activist Gerasim Vardanyan in January this year. The arrest was mocked by Margaryan’s lawyer, who posted on social media: “The detention is obviously illegal; it is devoid of any logic. You won’t believe it, but Margaryan had such charges only because he has a phone.”

Some arrests may end up in a tragedy, as was in the case of Armen Grigorian. A notable opposition personality, Grigorian fainted in court and later passed away in the summer 2022. He was put in pre-trial custody for two months, despite committing no crimes and despite lawyer and family concerns about his health. As each day went by, his immune system got worse.

Rapid Political Change

What is perhaps most surprising is how fast Armenia’s trajectory from budding democracy towards increasing illiberalism occurred. After the ruling government won the snap elections in the summer of 2021, things began to shift quickly. The government resumed its interrupted task of finding “the enemies of the people”—a process evocative of Stalin-era purges—with increased speed after receiving what Prime Minister Pashinyan calls a “steel mandate” from his people following the 2020 war. The representatives of the Armenian diaspora communities living in various countries around the world were one of the initial targets in this fight. For instance, the authorities in Yerevan refused to let Mourad Papazian, the chairman of an Armenian diaspora organization in France, enter the country in July 2022. Papazian, who has never committed a crime, was solely prohibited from entering Armenia due to his alleged involvement in anti-Pashinyan protests in Paris in 2021.

Pashinyan’s blacklist does not stop with Papazian. At Zvartnots airport on August 1, Armenian security personnel approached two Dutch-Armenians, Massis Abrahamian and Suneh Abrahamian, and informed them that they had been designated persona non grata in Armenia. Similar to Papazian, these two diaspora activists were prohibited from entering the country because they spoke out against Armenia’s current government.

Also notable is how quickly religious freedoms have also been declining in the country. In 2020, the NSS launched an investigation into Sashik Sultanyan, the chairperson of the Yezidi Center for Human Rights, after the latter publicly stated that Armenia’s Yazidi community was facing discrimination. Despite the criticism by international human rights NGOs, Sultanyan’s trial was in progress as of late 2022. If convicted, the activist will face six years in prison on the charge of being a part of an “anti-state” conspiracy.

Likewise worth mentioning is the deteriorating condition of media freedom as well. According to the Resource Center on Media Freedom in Europe, media freedom remains restricted in Armenia, “among threats of violence, strong political inferences, and expensive defamation lawsuits.” An Armenian-based NGO, the Committee to Protect Freedom of Expression, has recorded fifteen cases of journalists experiencing physical violence between January and September 2022. Moreover, most print and broadcast outlets are affiliated with political or larger commercial interests.

Despite earlier promises during and after the 2018 Velvet Revolution that brought Nikol Pashinyan and his team to power, and even the 2021 snap elections during which the war-torn society gave another chance to the incumbent government after the devastating defeat in the conflict against Azerbaijan, the political climate in Armenia has been changing, unfortunately in the negative direction. As one Armenian expert expresses, the country`s leader “has turned hatred into a principle of governance and lies into a form of governing.”

Aleksandar Srbinovski is a journalist with over fifteen years of experience working in print and online media. He has worked for Nova Makedonija, Newsweek, Europa, Blic, Politika, ABC News, Vecher, TV Sitel, and Skok. He holds a BA in journalism from the Saints Cyril and Methodius University of Skopje and has pursued continued training with the University of Oklahoma.

Image: Shutterstock.

This week Israel is celebrating the seventy-fifth anniversary of its independence. On any travel website, a fair assessment of Israel’s achievements during its first seven and a half decades would earn it a rank between “outstanding” and “exceptional.” Indeed, if asked, I would give it a rank that does not exist on travel websites: a miracle. And yet, during the past four months, this miracle has experienced nothing short of a Perfect Storm.

What are the components of the miracle and what are the makings of this Perfect Storm?

The Miracle of Israel…

First and foremost, Israel is an economic miracle. By 2021 its GDP has already reached $488 billion—a 1,860 percent increase since 1980. The economies of France and Germany grew during the same forty-one years by 246 percent and by 361 percent, respectively. By 2021, Israel’s per capita GDP already reached $52,15—a 720 percent increase since 1980—and is now higher than that of both Germany and France.

Another dimension of the economic miracle is the appreciation Israel received as the “Start-up Nation.” In 2021, Israelis registered almost twice as many patents per one million people than France: 1,851 versus 1,011. Israeli companies also have an impressive presence in the U.S. stock exchanges: currently, some 107 Israeli companies with a market value of $165 billion are listed in the U.S. market.

Yet the Start-up Nation could not have come about without an infrastructure of research and education in science and technology, creating a society immersed in a culture of technology. Israel’s success in these realms accounts for the very high grade it received in the UN Human Development Index (HDI), which includes factors like university degrees per capita. In 2021, Israel was ranked 22nd in this index, with a score of 0.919. By contrast, France was given an HDI score of 0.903 that year, placing it at 28th, six notches below Israel.

Within this context, one of Israel’s most successful sectors is its highly advanced military-industrial complex. The latest on this front is a multi-billion deal to sell advanced anti-missile Arrow 3 systems to Germany and a deal being finalized to export the David Sling system to Finland. Currently, the largest customer of Israeli arms, importing multi-billion dollars’ worth of weapons and ammunition, is India.

Adding to these economic miracles is that, in recent years, Israel has been the finding of huge natural gas reserves in the Eastern Mediterranean. These reserves will allow the country to become for the first time energy independent and provides the context for an important dimension of Israel’s integration in the region: its membership in the new Eastern Mediterranean Energy Cooperation group that includes Egypt, Jordan, Greece, Cyprus, and the Palestinian Authority.

The recent widening of the network of Arab states that have signed and begun implementing peace and normalization agreements with Israel is yet another dimension of Israel’s success. By this writing, Israel’s peace agreements with Egypt and Jordan have survived many challenges over forty-four years and twenty-nine years, respectively. Then, in 2002, the same Arab League that in 1948 decided to prevent Israel’s creation by invading Palestine, and that expelled Egypt because of President Anwar Sadat’s peace offensive, now adopted the Arab Peace Initiative (API) that offered Israel to be integrated into the region under some conditions.

And in October 2020, four additional Arab countries dropped the conditions stipulated in the API and signed peace and normalization agreements with Israel, commonly known as the Abraham Accords: Bahrain, the UAE, Morocco, and Sudan.

Moreover, in October 2022, a U.S.-brokered Israel-Lebanon agreement on their economic boundaries was signed, allowing the reciprocal exploitation of natural gas fields in the Eastern Med. Most remarkable: the agreement was clearly green-lighted by Hezbollah, a movement that continues to be formally dedicated to Israel’s destruction and is heavily supported and armed by Iran.

An equally miraculous component of the new regional environment were the new forms of defense cooperation agreements reached between Israel and its neighbors: with Jordan, in the fight with ISIS, especially in southern Syria; with Egypt, in the fight against ISIS-related and Al-Qaida-related terrorists in the Sinai; and with Abu Dhabi, in the installation of a state-of-the-art anti-rocket and anti-cruise missile systems. Similarly, relations between the Israeli and the Bahraini armed forces and between the Israeli and Moroccan armed forces have become increasingly intimate.

Not less miraculous has been the rapid development of Israel’s now exploding cultural scene. The wave of Russian Jewish immigration to Israel in the early 1990s added at least three more symphony orchestras to the Jewish state, and in the last two decades, the country experienced an explosion in the Israeli film and video world. Culture, as an important dimension of the quality of life, may also affect life expectancy. By 2021, Israel’s has reached 83.3 years, compared to 76.4 years in the United States.

The final dimension of the miracle is that, at least until this writing, Israel continues to be a thriving democracy. Indeed, this is possibly the biggest miracle of all, since none of Israel’s founding fathers, with the sole exception of Israel’s first president, Chaim Weizmann, came from any country that had previously experienced democratic government.

…Challenged by the Perfect Storm

Yet now, this truly amazing miracle finds itself at the epicenter of a Perfect Storm. For some 16 weeks, Israel has been experiencing mass protests the likes of which it has never seen. On each of the past Saturday nights, a quarter of a million Israeli—the equivalent of 8.5 million Americans—have taken to the streets. These protestors include many members of the Israeli elite: physicians, lawyers, retired judges, and leaders of Israel’s financial community and of its industrial sector. Many among them are either the leaders or the soldiers of the Start-up Nation.

Many thousands among the Israelis protesting are also IDF reservists—veterans of its various arms and special forces as well as of the Mossad and Shabak. What brings so many of them to leave the comfort of their homes and head to the nearest town square? This time the challenge against which they are mobilized appears not to be threats to their country’s physical existence but rather to the organizing principles of its creation: the core of a Jewish-democratic state.

What comprises the six dimensions of the challenge, together making it a Perfect Storm?

The first and arguably the most important of these is the attempt of Israel’s new government to redistribute power between the country’s executive and legislative branches and its judiciary. How was this to be achieved? Largely in three ways.

First, by changing the process of appointing Israel’s judges primarily by changing the composition of the committee that nominates Israel’s supreme court judges, providing politicians a far greater day in this critically important process.

Second, by significantly weakening the Supreme Court’s power to veto a law passed by the Knesset in the event that it views such a law as contradicting one or more of Israel’s Basic Laws. How was this weakening to be achieved? By amending a basic law to include an “over-ride” clause that would allow the Knesset to overcome Supreme Court vetoes of legislation that was adopted by the Knesset.

Third and finally is the suggested legislation to significantly limit the judges’ liberty to rule what government officials’ conduct could be regarded as “reasonable.” One recent example was whether the court could rule that an individual’s appointment as Minister in the government should be rejected as unreasonable in the event that this individual was twice indicted and convicted on corruption charges.

In addition to these three key components, the legal dimension of the Perfect Storm includes a tsunami of legislative proposals that would legalize corruption. One example is a bill that would allow elected officials to receive gifts from individuals or firms to fund their personal legal and medical expenses.

The second dimension of the Perfect Storm is an attempt to violate one of the basic principles stipulated as early as 1948 by Israel’s founding father, David Ben Gurion; namely, “the unity of command.” This principle stipulated that the state must possess a monopoly of force—that is, one civilian government that commands one army and one police force. So critically important was this principle to Ben Gurion and so truly was he convinced that the alternative was complete anarchy and chaos, that in the embryonic state’s very early days, when it had very few weapons with which to defend itself, he gave the order to sink the Altalena—a ship carrying arms and ammunition to “the Irgun” that, in his view, comprised a militia that still resisted merging into the defense forces of the newly created state.

Now, seventy-five years later, the new Israeli government coalition agreement gives two right-wing extremist leaders, the dual finance and defense minister, Bezalel Smotrich, and minister of national security, Itamar Ben Gvir, roles and responsibilities over powerful administrative bodies and law enforcement agencies—primarily the border patrol and the Coordinator of Government Operations in the [occupied] Territories. These bodies, which for decades have been under the sole command of the minister of defense and the Israel Defense Force chief of staff, were now to be placed under the partial control of these extremist leaders. The proposed change could prove catastrophic by allowing these individuals to inflame Palestinian-Israeli relations and by implementing policies that encourage violence.

The third, related dimension of the Perfect Storm is the recent further deterioration of Israeli-Palestinian relations, not only accelerating a likely slide to a Third Palestinian Intifada, but also threatening the sustainability of the aforementioned Abraham Accords. This slide is not entirely new—it has been brewing for some years, through the tenure of different Israeli governments. Moreover, the slide’s causes are located as much on the Palestinian side as on the Israeli side, with the diminishing credibility of the Palestinian Authority, its president, and its security services.

Yet the views of some members of the new Israeli government also undermine all efforts to protect and defend the occupied Palestinian population from the violence exercised by extremist Jewish settlers, as happened some six weeks ago in Huwara—an Arab town in the West Bank, where settlers went on a rampage in response to the murder there of two Israelis by a Palestinian terrorist.

The fourth dimension fueling the Perfect Storm could be called “burden sharing.” At its core is a new draft law that would exempt Haredi (ultra-orthodox) students from military service. This is a problem that has grown exponentially during the past decades. In 1992, a manageable 4 percent of eighteen-year-old males received such exemptions. By 2022, this number has reached 16.4 percent. One can only guess how many additional ultra-orthodox Jewish students will be exempted from military service if the proposed new draft law will be enacted. And who will be expected to continue serving in the IDF? Of course: the hundreds of thousands of largely secular Israelis who are now in the streets protesting.

The fifth dimension of the Perfect Storm is the threat to Israel’s most important alliance: that with the United States and with America’s Jewish community. From Israel’s early days, this alliance was based on the values that America and Israel share as two liberal democracies, two nations of immigrants, and, more recently, as two countries that are challenged by Islamic terrorism. Yet the proposed changes in Israel’s political system and other developments comprising the Perfect Storm threaten the “common values” basis of the very close ties between the United States and Israel. Clear warnings to that effect have already been issued by President Joe Biden; by Secretary of State Anthony Blinken; by Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Senator Bob Menendez, and by many leaders of the American Jewish community. Additionally, to date, President Biden has put on hold any invitation to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the White House.

The sixth and final dimension of the Perfect Storm is the ever-developing Iranian nuclear threat—a threat that recently reached another milestone with Iran apparently enriching uranium up to 84 percent. Indeed, in testimony given to the U.S. Congress by General Mark Milley, chairman of Joint Chiefs, he assessed Iran as only two weeks away from producing enough fissile material for a nuclear bomb and only a few months away from producing nuclear weapons.

Yet this multi-dimensional Perfect Storm also produced some remarkably positive news: the Israeli liberal democratic center and center-left that went to sleep—if not into depression following the 1995 assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and the September 2000 launching of the Second Palestinian Intifada—has finally woken up. And it has woken up big time. It has finally realized that it cannot permit the committed, active, mobilized right wing to dominate the country and to set its agenda, and that they must now be called up for reserve service in the struggle over what kind of a state they want Israel to be. For Israel’s political Right, this is a classical case of “overreach”: in attempting to go too far and to achieve too much in the service of an agenda far too extreme, the Israeli Right awakened the country’s center and center-left, and the latter are showing no signs of going back to sleep.

Thus, the Perfect Storm seems to have opened a new chapter in Israel’s social history.

Shai Feldman is the Raymond Frankel Chair of Israeli Politics and Society at Brandeis University’s Crown Center for Middle East Studies. From 2005–2019 he was the Center’s founding director. During 2019–2022 Feldman served as president of Sapir Academic College in Israel, located less than two miles from the Gaza Strip.

The author would like to thank his colleague, Professor Nader Habibi, Henry J. Leir Professor of the Economics of the Middle East at Brandeis University’s Crown Center for Middle East Studies, for his generous help in researching the economic data relevant to this article.

Image: Shutterstock.

Denys Kryvenko is the first person I met just a few days before the April 2023 opening of the Superhumans Center in Lviv, Ukraine. Denys is a twenty-four-year-old Ukrainian war hero from a small village who lost both legs and an arm fighting in Bakhmut. Before the war, he was, like many other twenty-four-year-olds, just playing sports, lifting weights, and chasing girls.

Then the war came. His thoughts turned to his country and to protecting his family. Now Denys is a triple amputee who is being photographed. Nick, the photographer, captured Denys’s aspirations for the future during a photo shoot with a pensive pose.

Denys wants to become a contact psychologist at the Superhumans Center, which is a special position. Military veterans typically don’t like to open up and talk. Since Denys is a veteran himself, it will be easier in group and individual sessions to encourage others to talk about their experience and the heavy fighting they have seen in the Donbas. Denys is motivated to give back and to help others who have been through the same wartime experiences. He will help them heal.

Two days later, on April 14, Superhumans launched its medical center outfitted with a prosthetics lab, elaborate rehabilitation rooms including a swimming pool, and PTSD treatment rooms in an afternoon ceremony that celebrated Denys and a dozen patients. At the ceremony, Ukrainian first lady Olena Zelenska, Ukrainian minister of health Viktor Liashko, French minister of solidarity and health François Braun, Superhumans co-founder Andrey Stavnitser, CEO Olga Rudnieva, and American philanthropist Howard G. Buffett all spoke, but the focus remained on Denys and the other patients include soldiers and civilians, men and women, young and old.

“We are honored to be a part of this extraordinary effort to bring world-class care to Ukrainians who have suffered life-altering injuries from this war. They are truly superhumans,” said Buffett, Chairman and CEO of the Howard G. Buffett Foundation. “Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine is a war on civilians, and many men, women, and children will lose their lives, or their limbs, even long after the war ends due to the pervasive presence of landmines. This Center is a step towards giving Ukrainians a chance to rebuild their lives and their country. We must also do everything possible to end this war and the daily devastation it creates for all Ukrainians.”

Buffett is right. As a result of Russia’s invasion, Ukraine is now the most heavily mined country in the world. Reports of civilians being injured or killed by mines have become an almost daily occurrence. Overall, the war has also taken a devastating toll on the civilian population. No one knows the exact figure because it remains classified, but more than 12,000 Ukrainians are believed to currently need prosthetics. This would be a challenge for the world’s wealthiest states. For Ukraine, it is simply beyond the country’s resources.

This is where Superhumans steps in. Through a $16.3 million gift from the Howard Buffett Foundation and others, the Center is taking on some of the more complex cases involving multiple limbs or complex injuries that the state cannot handle or afford. Superhumans provides all services to civilians and soldiers free of charge. The price tag for providing Denys with three prosthetic limbs plus rehabilitation is more than $100,000.

Then there’s the incalculable and ever-present physical and mental anguish. The World Health Organization warns that one in four Ukrainians are currently at risk of a severe mental disorder as a result of the war. Huge numbers of Ukrainians will require professional support for many years to come.

There is another hidden wound from this monstrous war, elusive yet common. Something so fundamental that Ukraine and the world cannot rebuild without it. Millions face a loss of faith in the future. It is vital to rebuild the human spirit by restoring belief in a meaningful life filled with skills and purpose.

“Superhumans is not just the name of a project. I think it is a new social contract encapsulated in a single word. It is a philosophy representing not only of a clinic but a entire country. Superheroes instead of victims. Superpowers instead of disabilities. We want to build not just a clinic, but a super-country for Ukrainians. Because all of them are superhumans,” said First Lady Olena Zelenska.

Zelenska’s words encapsulate the new Center’s vision of a Ukraine where limb difference is only part of a person’s story, but by no means the whole story. Denys doesn’t feel limited. Neither does the very first Superhumans patient, Vitalii Ivashchuk, who is already climbing the tallest mountain in Ukraine with his bionic arm and driving at fast speeds. “My hand is completely restored, and I’m only getting started,” Ivashchuk said.

Michele Anenberg Poma is a team member at the Superhumans Center. She tweets @MAnenbergPoma.

Image: Superhumans.

There are intense and often heated differences between Turkey watchers over the outcome of the presidential elections that are just around the corner on May 14. Individuals have really dug into their respective camps with little room left in the middle: folks are convinced that Recep Tayyip Erdogan will definitely win or lose by a large margin. Both sides cite relatively compelling narratives for their position based on a myriad of explanatory factors: their experience as journalists or scholars, or, based on references to polls, the country’s economic situation.

The truth is, at this point in the calendar, it’s a guessing game. For my part, I am on record predicting that Erdogan has a greater chance of holding onto power for a third five-year term than opposition candidate Kemal Kilicdaroglu has of winning. I have attempted to explain my rationale in other opinion pieces and interviews. At this point, however, it is worth pondering, should my prediction come to pass, who or what factors will account for Erdogan staying in office?

To begin, there is the most obvious element: Turkish voters themselves. In the event that Erdogan scores a legitimate victory, much of that could be attributed to voter demands. The majority of Turks going to the polls on May 14 will not prioritize the rule of law, democracy, and other governance issues as their top priority. If they did, we would not see Erdogan polling in the 40 percent margins. Instead, voters are primarily motivated by their desire to hedge: “in voting, who do I believe will take care of my economic interests?” To address this motivation, Erdogan has turned on the monetary taps in the last few weeks: bonuses for retirees, free natural gas to households, and increases to the minimum wage. Kilicdaroglu’s problem here is that he is not in a position to convince voters that he can deliver better on pocketbook issues than Erdogan—the latter is already in a position to demonstrate such and thus tempt voters. He controls the purse strings of state resources, which are already being utilized to buy citizens’ votes.

By contrast, French and Israeli citizens have recently taken to the streets, protesting about governance issues they feel threaten the very viability of their democratic futures. In France, largely over the non-deliberative way in which the age of retirement was raised, voters are demanding government accountability. In Israel, in defiance of the government’s attempt to curtail judicial independence, citizens have engaged in mass protests. In both cases, voters are motivated by democratic governance issues. If a significant number of Turks attempted to replicate these two examples, the Erdogan government would likely use brute force to suppress such challenges, as displayed during the Gezi Park protests of 2013.

Linked to voter demands is the main opposition, the “Nation Alliance”—the six opposition parties who took the decision to nominate Kemal Kilicdaroglu as their candidate. Unfortunately, one can observe that, from the outset, this opposition bloc never prioritized the rule of law and democratic governance issues beyond rhetoric. Instead, it has been focused on the division of political spoils. The process of deciding who the alliance’s presidential candidate would be, for example, turned into a dysfunctional squabble and nearly broke apart the alliance. Given that the alliance’s main campaign promise is to transition Turkey back to a parliamentary system of governance (that would deprioritize the powers and position of the presidency), one wonders why alliance leaders fought so hard on who the presidential candidate would be. If the objective was to defeat Erdogan and re-establish the rule of law and democratic governance in Turkey, numbers suggest that nominating Istanbul mayor Ekrem Imamoglu would have been the best choice. Kilicdaroglu’s insistence on being the nominee instead lays bare the limits of the opposition’s democratic priorities. The intense rivalry to become the presidential nominee has been mirrored in the debates over determining the list of parliamentary candidates. Until the April 12 deadline (when all parties have to submit their parliamentary candidate lists), intense horse-trading over which party in the alliance would allot how many safe seats was the focus of attention. This basically signaled to voters the one thing they are already relatively accustomed to: politicians and political parties are only interested in securing their positions in government.

Throw into the mixture that there are two independent candidates, which divides the opposition vote, and the chances of defeating Erdogan in the first round of voting. More importantly, however, the candidacies of Muharrem Ince—who dismally ran against Erdogan in 2018 and failed—and Sinan Ogan are widely perceived as opportunistic, spurred on by Erdogan to tarnish and divide the opposition camp.

In the final analysis, supposing an Erdogan victory, voters will be grievously let down by opposition political elites who did their very best to not defeat Erdogan. In the event that Kilicdaroglu loses, much of the blame will be attributed to his lackluster candidacy.

Of course, none of these explanatory factors considers the possibility of chicanery and foul play that may come to determine who ultimately wins the presidency. There is a decent chance that undemocratic means may be utilized by Erdogan and/or state institutions to ensure a third term for the country’s longest-serving leader. In many ways this is already apparent: the Supreme Election Council has already accepted Erdogan’s unconstitutional candidacy to run for president. Additionally, there is little by way of press freedoms and access to media coverage that is not already exclusively pro-Erdogan.

A third term for Erdogan will likely curtail what remains of Turkey’s faltering democracy. Erdogan will likely use this opportunity to crack down on what little remains of critical voices within the country’s media and public space, while at the same time trying to turn a new page with the country’s allies in the West. By whatever means Erdogan is able to secure victory, both Washington and Europe will likely choose to remain silent and find new ways to work with him, based on their respective interests. If his re-election is perceived to be illegitimate, don’t expect the West to call this out. A new Erdogan term will likely result in old ways of finding paths to accommodate him.

Sinan Ciddi is a nonresident senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, where he contributes to FDD’s Turkey Program and Center on Military and Political Power. Follow Sinan on Twitter @SinanCiddi.

Image: Shutterstock.

Space transportation company SpaceX provided this month what was a spectacle in two senses. One was the physical show of launching the most powerful rocket ever built. The other was how the whole affair, which ended with an explosion just four minutes into what was programmed to be an orbital mission, was described as a success, with congratulations from government officials and cheering by the company’s employees.

This way of defining success and failure reflects SpaceX’s engineering strategy, which involves launching a series of test vehicles with the expectation that each vehicle probably will have something wrong but will provide a learning experience to guide modifications on later versions. The upper stage of the Starship rocket, which never separated from its booster during this month’s launch, had already compiled a record of successive fiery crashes during earlier test flights.

This strategy is much different from the one that the government’s space agency, NASA, has had to follow. A failure of a NASA mission is regarded as a failure, period, and is not praised as a stepping-stone to some future hoped-for success. Because of that, the engineering that goes into a NASA mission is a more meticulous and time-consuming process aimed at achieving success in the fullest sense of the word every time a rocket is launched.

When NASA ignited its Space Launch System (SLS) rocket last November—making it at the time the most powerful rocket ever launched—it was only after numerous delays, which have been typical of NASA missions, as engineers checked every possible point of failure with the intention of making everything go right the first time. That first use of the SLS, in what NASA designated as Mission One of the Artemis program, was a success in the full sense, sending a spacecraft looping around the moon on a twenty-five-day mission.

This difference in the methodology of these two space programs is indicative of an expectation of perfection that often gets applied to government but not to the private sector. Some of the government agencies concerned are, like NASA, doing something as difficult as rocket science. Some routinely must address problems in which there are big information gaps—such as the intelligence agencies, that get looked to most on the very problems on which the information gaps are the biggest. Despite the inherent challenges involved—including the determination of adversaries to keep secrets and the unpredictability of many future events—when the intelligence community is unable to fill one of those gaps correctly on a matter that for some reason gets heightened public attention, this gets described as an “intelligence failure” amid calls for the problem to be “fixed.”

Understanding of such inherent challenges often is not extended to governmental missions but routinely is to all manner of activities in the private sector. In baseball, batters do not know what pitch the pitcher will deliver, and even the best batters in the major leagues fail to get a hit two-thirds of the time. But they do not get condemned for each out as a “batting failure.”

The chief reason for the differential treatment is that government programs are subject to politics, and politics involves incentives to find fault and demand accountability, regardless of the inherent challenges of a mission and the impossibility of achieving perfection. Those incentives are part of the process of one-upping political opponents and of politicians making names for themselves. The epitome of the process is the public congressional hearing in which committee members highlight in front of television cameras the less-than-perfect performances of governmental departments and demand changes. Daniel Dumbacher, a former NASA official who heads the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, said of SpaceX’s explode-and-learn method, “Government programs are not allowed to operate that way because … we have all the stakeholders being able to watch over and tell you no.”

The intense partisanship of current American politics intensifies this process. The motivation is strong to highlight any failings that can be associated with the other party, even if it is only some problem that falls in the area of responsibility of an executive branch agency, and that branch happens to be headed by a president of the other party.

Politics may underlie differential treatment between NASA and SpaceX regarding launch-related measures on the ground. At NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the launch pads used for the largest rockets have flame trenches and water deluge systems that mitigate the effects of a blast-off. In SpaceX’s move-fast-and-break-things approach, no such infrastructure was constructed at its facility in Texas. The huge Starship rocket took off from a platform atop one corner of an ordinary-looking concrete slab.

As a result, effects on the ground were substantial, extending well beyond the SpaceX facility itself. The launch blasted a crater into the slab and threw debris more than a half mile away, onto a public beach, adjoining wetlands, and the ocean. A road to the beach remained closed until chunks of concrete and rebar could be cleared away. An enormous cloud of dirt and dust coated houses and cars in the town of Port Isabel, miles to the north. Some local activists have expressed concerns but there has not been a critical response from officialdom. Had this been a NASA operation—with a Democrat as head of the executive branch in Washington and Republicans in control in Texas—it is likely the official response would have been different.

Zero failures may sound like a beneficially aspirational, even if not practically achievable, standard to apply to government programs, but the application has costs. One is that it may simply not be the best approach for tackling large problems and achieving major goals. SpaceX’s own experience is suggestive. Although the company had numerous early failures as it was developing smaller rockets, such experimentation eventually led to the Falcon 9, which is now a profitable and reliable workhorse rocket for orbital missions. Imposing a less flexible standard on government programs may help to make self-fulfilling any argument that such programs are inherently less effective than risk-taking counterpart efforts in the private sector.

Another potential cost is that fixation on a failure and insistence on fixing it may introduce new problems in the fix. This is true, as I have described at length elsewhere, of much of the intelligence “reform” enacted after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, which has been established in popular discussion as a landmark “intelligence failure.”

The inordinate focus on a happening that the public and political class can easily and immediately brand as a failure may obscure larger issues at stake that by their nature are not so easily branded. A leader’s effort to avoid the easily identified type of failure may lead to policies that inflict greater costs on the nation than the failure would.

A leading example is the war in Afghanistan. The messy end in August 2021 to the U.S. involvement in the war has been repeatedly and vigorously labeled as a failure, especially by political opponents of President Joe Biden, who ordered that final withdrawal. But the withdrawal was a necessary pulling of the plug on a two-decade military expedition that had become a feckless effort at nationbuilding and entailed far more costs than anything incurred during the few days of denouement. The very swiftness of the collapse of the Ashraf Ghani regime and its security forces demonstrated the fecklessness and how even the best-planned withdrawal would have looked ugly. Three previous U.S. administrations (including the Trump administration, which negotiated a withdrawal agreement but did not execute it) shied away from pulling the plug and risking exposure to denunciations of “failure,” and in so doing kept the war going indefinitely.

Another sort of failure that those earlier administrations wanted to avoid—bearing in mind the general awareness of the history of the 9/11 attack—was an anti-U.S. terrorist attack that had some connection, however tenuous, to Afghanistan, which would be blamed on any president who had earlier withdrawn U.S. troops from that country. The anxiety about avoiding that type of failure obscured the reality that the Afghan Taliban, who took over the country in August 2021, constitute an insular movement that does not do international terrorism and is an enemy of the Islamic State, or ISIS, which is the group with a presence in Afghanistan that would be most likely to perpetrate such terrorism. A reminder of this reality came this week with word that a Taliban operation killed a leader of the local ISIS element who had planned a bombing at the Kabul airport that killed thirteen U.S. service members during the August 2021 withdrawal.

That news did not interrupt the political game of pouncing on a single “failure” to the exclusion of broader realities. The Republican chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Michael McCaul of Texas, grudgingly acknowledged the desirability of the ISIS leader’s demise but said that “this doesn’t diminish the Biden administration’s culpability for the failures that led to the attack” at the airport.

The subject of terrorism in the post-9/11 era has been especially prone to a zero-failures mindset that has spawned avoidable costs that exceed the potential harm of the feared terrorism itself. Those costs have included not only the material and human costs of foreign wars such as the one in Afghanistan but also encroachments on personal liberty and the moral stain of resorting to torture.

Public policy, foreign and domestic, should never be thought of as a duty to reduce the probability of even a highly feared contingency to zero, regardless of the costs of trying to do so. Public policy is necessarily a matter of weighing non-zero risks and costs of various contingencies and objectives, with the pursuit of some objectives being unavoidably in conflict with the pursuit of other objectives. This means that even the most carefully constructed policy will see some failures. 

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

Image: Shutterstock.

Israel turns seventy-five this week. Most Israelis certainly didn’t anticipate this kind of commemoration as the country is engulfed in its biggest domestic crisis since its inception.

Yet this crisis is turning into the very gift that Israelis are giving to themselves and others for their birthday. It turns out that for all the talk that democracy cannot take root in countries where there is no democratic tradition, Israel’s demographic makeup tells a very different story. Notwithstanding that the majority of its population today has immigrated from across the Middle East, people are strongly committed to their freedoms.

With now sixteen straight weeks of demonstrations often totaling up to 4 percent of the entire population, one sees the depth of the Israeli public’s commitment to democracy. Nowhere else in the Middle East would even one week of such demonstrations be met with anything but massive bloodshed—and this extraordinary grassroots movement is a reminder that Israelis won’t tolerate the threat to end the separation of powers and an independent judiciary. Israelis won’t accept a majoritarian approach to the country that fails to respect the rights of minorities and preserves the rule of law.

The Israeli public has been aroused by what they see as a threat to Israel’s democratic character. Many of those demonstrating now have never demonstrated before. Reservists from elite air, naval, and commando units; the high-tech sector; the universities going on strike, hospitals offering only emergency services—all this forced Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to call for a pause and to signal he understands that any such judicial change must reflect a broad consensus in Israel. The story is not over by any means, but the Israeli public has acted in an unprecedented way because it perceived a threat to the democratic fabric of the country. At this point, the tide seems to have turned in favor of the grassroots democracy movement.

There are many lessons from this crisis that will be discussed for some time, but one of them surely is how a society that is fundamentally resilient can self-correct, especially when seeking to preserve its democratic identity. In Israel’s case, being a Jewish-democratic state is part of its ethos and that means both sides of the hyphen must flourish or they will each whither. In this framework, a Jewish-democratic state has meant equal voting rights whether one is Jewish or not for the last seventy-five years.

It is true that the Palestinian issue has not been the focus of the grassroots democracy movement in Israel. But there is no way to preserve Israel as a Jewish democracy without addressing the Palestinian issue. Those Israelis who favor yielding land in the West Bank do so not just to maintain dignity for Palestinians, but to ensure that Israel can remain both Jewish and democratic. This is critical to understand. For those Israeli leaders who take two states for two peoples off the table, they leave only one state as the answer—or their silence and the absence of a story to tell about the endgame of the conflict with the Palestinians leaves a vacuum. On the inside in Israel, there are extremist ministers like Itamar Ben-Gvir and Betzalel Smotrich who are only too happy to fill it.

But we also see there are those on the outside who, from a very different perspective, will seek to fill the intellectual and policy vacuum left by seemingly departing from two states for two peoples as a goal.

A case in point is the recent Foreign Affairs article written by Michael Barnett, Nathan Brown, Marc Lynch, and Shibley Telhami, entitled “Israel’s One State Reality.” Regrettably, they offer a one-sided view of the conflict and present a picture that seems divorced from reality. In the Barnett et al telling, there is only a denial of Palestinian rights. One would not know that there are rejectionist threats against Israel. That Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas deny Israel’s right to exist, support terror against it—and would even if there was no occupation—and acquire and develop weapons to act on their aims. Barnett et al note Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 and say that Israel retained control over the territory’s entry and exit points and the air and sea around it. Why? No mention is made of the fact that even after Israel withdrew, Hamas continued to carry out attacks against it and still does eighteen years later.

Hamas has never put the development of Gaza over its aims of resistance against Israel. It went from having roughly 3,000 rockets after the 2014 conflict to having over 30,000 in the 2021 conflict. Hamas used that time not just to acquire rockets but to build an underground city of tunnels, exploiting materials (concrete, electrical wiring, steel, and wood) that could and should have been used to develop and build Gaza above ground. The tunnels weren’t to protect the people of Gaza by creating shelters. Rather, their purpose was to protect Hamas leaders, fighters, and weapons and to be used to try to infiltrate Israel. If Barnett et al are concerned about Israel’s control of entry and exits from Gaza, why not call for Hamas to give up its rockets and stop building tunnels in return for a Marshall Plan for Gaza and an end to such Israeli control? Why not call on Hamas to accept a two-state solution?

But sadly the authors are more concerned with indicting Israel than promoting Palestinian needs and rights. In a world in which the authors are indifferent to the threats that Israel faces, it is not a leap to argue, as they do, to condition military aid to Israel in order to terminate Israeli military rule over Palestinians. How do the authors think the Iranians, Hezbollah, and Hamas would react to an American cut-off of military assistance to Israel? Would that make conflict less likely? Would that reassure others in the region about the threats they are likely to face? Wouldn’t the forces that produce failed and failing states in the region—Iran’s greatest export—perceive great opportunity in such a circumstance? We have seen a foretaste this spring. Amid all the announcements that Israeli pilots and elite forces were threatening to refrain from reserve duty due to the democracy demonstrations, Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Khameini and Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah openly talked about Israel’s early collapse. Hamas leader Ismail Haniya rushed to Beirut amid talk about the possibilities of a united front.

None of this is a concern to the authors. They are far more concerned with Israel being a Jewish state which “fosters a form of ethnic nationalism rather than a civic one…” For the authors, this is a sin, and while they acknowledge that it is not a perfect fit, they still apply the apartheid label to Israel. But apartheid was an ideology of subjugation of a large majority by a small minority; it promulgated a legal structure to ensure the power and control of the white minority over the black majority of people, permitting them to live only in certain areas, to have only certain kinds of jobs, go to certain schools, with limited access to any legal remedies. Is there inequality in Israel (as there is in the United States and in other democracies)? Yes. Is it written into the law, no. Is there a minority oppressing a majority with a legal edifice justifying it? No.

But the apartheid label fits the authors’ purpose of indicting Israel and justifying its call for creating equality in one state. There is equality before the law in Israel of its citizens, including its Arab citizens who vote and hold parliamentary and judicial office, even if this is not necessarily realized in the daily reality of those citizens. Obviously, the Palestinians in the West Bank are treated differently.

And, to be fair, there is a drift toward a binational state that needs to be arrested and reversed. We wrote a book about the need for Israel to have a political leadership that will make the hard decisions—and override the inevitable backlash of those like Ben-Gvir, Smotrich, and extremist settlers—to ensure that Israel does not become a binational state where either it gives up being a democracy or it gives up being a Jewish state.

By definition, in a binational state, Israel cannot be both Jewish and democratic. For the extreme in Israel, they see no contradiction between being Jewish and denying rights to Palestinians. We do. Unlike the authors, who see the extremist vision having “strong grounding in Zionist thought and practice,” we see that vision as a fundamental contradiction of Zionism and its basic values. The most important Zionist theorists and leaders shared a deep belief in democracy and the rights of all people, including that the rights to Arabs must not be denied.

In no small part, the backlash today in Israel and the strong movement domestically to save Israel’s democratic character is a response to an extremist vision of Israel. They see the Supreme Court as the institutional safeguard against those trying to impose their values on the country—whether it is to block the religious parties trying to impose their values on the secular majority in Israel or it is the settler-dominated parties who don’t want the Court to block their ability to claim private Palestinian land.

One of the basic things that Barnett et al fail to see is that the democracy movement has the potential to address not just the internal threat to Israel’s democratic character but also the one posed by continuing occupation of Palestinians. Drifting toward a binational state is also a threat to Israel as a Jewish democracy. Yes, to date that drift has seemed far too abstract to produce a serious public backlash against it—especially with Hamas in control of Gaza, the Palestinian Authority characterized by dysfunction and corruption, and no sign of any Palestinian willingness to compromise. But with an aroused Israeli public more sensitive to the threats to democracy, it may no longer be possible to postpone the necessary debate on the dangers of a binational state.

While Barnett et al put the onus only on Israel, two states for two peoples requires something of the Palestinians as well. In fact, a serious Palestinian move to reform the Palestinian Authority or a determined and more public and peaceful form of Palestinian protest against occupation could help stimulate the debate in Israel. Violence plays into the hands of those in Israel who favor one state. They see it as definitive proof that Israeli territorial concessions will make it more vulnerable and not more secure. But ultimately one state is a threat to Israel and the drift toward it needs to be addressed.

For Barnett et al, one state is not just a reality, it appears desirable. But this, too, is a misreading because there is no such thing as a one-state solution. The authors fail to understand that the separate national identities of Israelis and Palestinians are deeply rooted and will not melt away. Both Israelis and Palestinians have paid a heavy price to preserve who they are. Israelis have built a state in an environment where they were rejected and wars were forced on it. Does a country with a flourishing culture and which successfully achieved its raison d’être by ingathering more than a million Jews from the Soviet Union, as well as providing a home to Jews from Ethiopia, Syria, Yemen, and throughout discriminated communities in the Middle East, suddenly yield that identity? Does a country of close to ten million—over seven million Jews and two million Israeli Arab citizens—that has persevered through wars to become the “start-up” nation with a GDP per capita now ahead of Germany, Britain, France, and Japan, say their state and identity has failed?

Palestinians, too, have persevered. In their dispersal, in the refugee camps, and through two intifadas and profound suffering, they have not surrendered their identity. Ahmed Ghneim, a Fatah activist who remains close to Marwan Barghouti, once explained why he favored two states: “in one state, one of us [Israelis or Palestinians] will feel the need to dominate the other.” Ghneim is right. A binational state would guarantee that the conflict would turn inward. For a country that does not share the same language, religion, or experience, this would turn into a nightmare very quickly.

Two states for two peoples may be difficult to achieve but it serves both Israeli and Palestinian interests. Barnett et al are too focused on their one-state reality to address how it would be certain to doom both Israelis and Palestinians to enduring conflict. Indeed, the bloodiest wars are civil wars. Having a flag and a soccer team is not enough. The authors ignore that in the Middle East there is not a post-nationalism reality. Every state in the region that is characterized by more than one sectarian, tribal, or national identity is either at war internally or completely paralyzed. Does anyone really want Israel-Palestine to look like the tragic conflicts that have engulfed Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, or Yemen? Is that the future that we should hope for these two peoples?

Yes, it is hard to go from where we are to two states for two peoples. And, yes the United States tried three times to achieve an end of conflict result requiring major compromise. You would not know from the authors of the essay that the Palestinians were a large part of the failure of those efforts, even if there is enough blame to go around. Even if the end of conflict moment is not at hand, Israel needs to have a policy that has two states for two peoples as a destination. The starting point for getting there is having that as a vision; moving to improve the realities on the ground for Palestinians; reforming the Palestinian Authority the way it was done in 2007 when Salaam Fayyad came in and restored law and order and created transparency economically; pressing the Israelis to help a reforming PA to deliver; restoring a sense of possibility for both Palestinian and Israeli public.

Given the complex realities of the Middle East, it is not enough for an idea to have abstract appeal. It has to provide very detailed, real-world answers that would satisfy deeply held nationalist aspirations on each side of this conflict. One state cannot and will not do that. If one state may seem too simple and misguided, that is because it is.

Ambassador Dennis Ross is counselor and William Davidson Distinguished Fellow at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy and teaches at Georgetown University’s Center for Jewish Civilization. Ambassador Ross’s distinguished diplomatic career includes service as special assistant to President Barack Obama and National Security Council senior director for the Central Region, special advisor to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, Middle East Envoy to President Bill Clinton, and Director of Policy Planning for President George H.W. Bush.

David Makovsky is the Ziegler Distinguished Fellow at The Washington Institute and director of the Koret Project on Arab-Israel Relations. He is also an adjunct professor in Middle East studies at Johns Hopkins University's Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). In 2013–2014, he worked in the Office of the U.S. Secretary of State, serving as a senior advisor to the Special Envoy for Israeli-Palestinian Negotiations.

Image: Shutterstock.

On April 13, Russia’s Institute of Technological Development for the Fuel-Energy Complex organized a panel to discuss energy cooperation between Moscow and African countries. One of the experts, Gabriel Anicet Kotchofa, who served as Benin’s ambassador to Russia, explained that “in Africa, we are waiting for Russia—for what Russia can do. I will tell you something that is never said today: we are tired of Europe.”

As a graduate of the Gubkin Russian State University of Oil and Gas and a Russian citizen, Kotchofa is not a neutral commentator. Nonetheless, recent energy trends support his proclamation. African countries are exponentially multiplying their imports of Russian oil in response to European sanctions and price caps, providing the Kremlin with additional flexibility in the financing of its war against Ukraine.

Morocco imported 600,000 barrels of Russian diesel in the entirety of 2021. In February 2022 alone, approximately double that number arrived in the North African country’s Mediterranean ports. Last month, Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria accounted for 30 percent of Russia’s diesel exports, which just returned to pre-pandemic levels.

Moscow is fulfilling a need in Africa. The International Energy Agency noted that the coronavirus pandemic provoked debt crises in twenty African countries, which will exacerbate the subsidy burdens that these nations already face as a result of frequent oscillations in energy prices. Paired with the fact that factories have still not recovered from pandemic restrictions, African countries are looking for outside aid from new sources. “Significant parts of [African refineries] are idle or underloaded due to equipment deterioration, maintenance problems, [and] interruptions in the supply of raw materials,” said Lyudmila Kalinichenko, a researcher at the Russian Academy of Sciences, during the aforementioned panel. At the same time, Africa’s population is growing vertiginously.

As such, African countries are faced with two compounding challenges: energy refinery shortages and rising demand. One solution they have pursued is to step up their reliance on imports. Accordingly, these nations have turned to Russian gas companies happy to gain access to new markets. Some African companies have taken advantage of this realignment of imports and exports to deceive European countries seeking replacements for the Russian energy that used to flow under the Baltic Sea.

In Morocco, for instance, an MP accused several energy companies of forging documents about the origins of Russian gas quickly resold to Europe at a higher price upon arrival. These companies have allegedly mixed Russian oil into their domestic components to alleviate pressure from local extraction processes and augment their profits from both Russian sellers and European buyers. The gas Moscow is sending to Africa is clearly not all being used to satisfy domestic demand.

Beyond energy, relations between the EU and Africa have been deteriorating for the past few decades. Russian disinformation tactics, which have been scaled up since the start of the Russo-Ukraine war, partly explain this trend.

Despite European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen’s assurances that the EU has “no sanctions on food and agricultural products,” Senegalese president Macky Sall repeatedly voiced concern that European trade restrictions have blocked mechanisms that allow African countries to pay for indispensable Russian grains and fertilizers. On the military side, France’s inability to protect Malians from jihadist terrorist groups led to a complete withdrawal of its forces in 2022. This sparked widespread anti-French sentiment in West Africa, leading to attacks on businesses and diplomatic buildings in addition to shocking images of French flags being burned.

Russian propaganda has fueled this discontent. The Kremlin’s state-funded television networks like RT have signed deals with their African counterparts to shape minds about the ongoing war in Ukraine while repeating to audiences that France and the United States have harmed African interests. The recent U.S. intelligence leak adds detail about how Russian officials brainstormed propaganda initiatives to “realign” African public opinion on Western influence.

Russia has not spared energy debates from its carefully crafted narratives. During the panel, Kotchofa argued that African countries have been “forced to conclude unprofitable contracts with European partners in which over 90 percent of oil and petroleum products are exported from the continent.” He added that since Russia is blessed with its own array of natural resources, it feels “no need to take raw materials” from others. Such rhetoric is frequently repeated in the media and diffused throughout Africa, even if it blatantly ignores Russia’s increase in cobalt, gold, and diamond mining and the proliferation of joint ventures between Russian and African companies.

Indeed, Russia has entered into natural resource deals with about twenty African countries. In November 2021, the Russian State Space Corporation “Roscosmos” signed a cooperation agreement with Zimbabwe to expand its satellite intelligence in the country as a way to locate mineral deposits. Earlier this year, a columnist in one of Russia’s largest state-owned news sources, RIA Novosti, noted that Congo’s immense trove of resources represents the financial “contract of the century” before claiming that Russia feels no urge to repeat Europe’s “neo-colonialism.” He then exposed Moscow’s media-based strategy: “African leaders often do not have to explain why they need Russia…[our] PR on the continent is good and self-supporting.”

Western and Russian observers alike make the mistake of saying that Beijing and Moscow’s replacement of French influence in Africa demonstrates that the United States is losing ground on the continent. In reality, French and American interests in Africa are not interchangeable.

However, the United States and France do agree that it is strategically advantageous to oppose Russia. Their unity against the Kremlin will strengthen as Russians take the place of the French. And if Russian companies pool resources into Africa only to be outmatched by China while the United States directs its attention toward Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe, and Latin America, Moscow’s increased involvement in Africa suddenly does not look so bad. With this logic, perhaps the United States should not rush to extend diplomatic ties to the disillusioned African countries tempted by Russian energy exports.

This argument has a critical flaw, however. It contradicts the sanctions policy that the U.S. Treasury Department has pursued since the start of the war in Ukraine: erode Moscow’s ability to financially support its wartime operations. With the recent news that Russia’s oil is being shipped to Europe through Africa, the Biden administration should think of the growing continent as inseparable from its Russia strategy rather than as a separate theater. This is especially the case for the North African countries that border the Mediterranean.

As one of the Russian experts said during the panel, “We are currently shipping Russian oil and petroleum products across the sea in the Mediterranean, in the Spanish port of Ceuta, and in the Greek port of Kalamata. But what prevents us from using the port infrastructure of North African countries for these purposes?” If American policymakers want to hinder the scope of Russia’s military operations, they cannot turn a blind eye to the African countries that have begun accepting enormous shipments of Russian oil and may fall prey to the Kremlin’s disinformation campaigns.

The U.S. Agency for International Development, Voice of America, and U.S. oil and gas companies must synchronize their efforts to achieve this goal. The first can scale up humanitarian aid, the second can provide further support to independent media organizations, and the third can provide competitive alternatives to Russian oil sailing to the African coast.

Russian experts are seriously thinking about how they can use Africa as an eager energy market and a natural resource hub to gain ground on the battlefield. American experts must do the same, focusing on the African countries that receive substantive aid from the West and are prepared to counter the Kremlin’s gas diplomacy and the way Russian media has portrayed the war in Ukraine.

Axel de Vernou is a sophomore at Yale University studying Global Affairs and History with a Certificate of Advanced Language Study in Russian. He is a Research Assistant at the Yorktown Institute.

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There is growing discussion that Department of Defense (DoD) procurement programs are not nimble enough to meet emerging threats from peer competitors such as China. The timeline for the development of new defense capabilities is lengthy, impeding the nation’s ability to offset swiftly and efficiently growing capabilities of potential adversaries. Critics say that the Department is not adequately accelerating the development of game-changing technologies and not effectively leveraging commercial technology. They have called for comprehensive procurement reform as the solution to these problems.

In fairness, the Pentagon has often proven itself more than able to use existing procurement authorities rapidly and effectively when urgency demands quick action. For example, in 2008, in response to warfighter needs in Afghanistan and Iraq for enhanced intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities, the Air Force successfully developed and deployed the MC-12 Liberty aircraft in less than eight months following congressional funding approval. Similarly, in order to protect soldiers and Marines from improvised explosive devices, the Department of Defense rapidly acquired a new armored vehicle, the Mine Resistant Ambush Protect (MRAP). The decision to buy, followed by the actual commencement of production, took less than a year. More recently, the Air Force used its Rapid Capabilities Office to develop the new B-21 Raider bomber on time and on budget (so far!).

The challenge that remains is fostering an even greater collective effort to expedite weapons development. How can the nation better accelerate the DoD acquisitions process? What can be learned from the experience of the private sector to help? How might DoD adapt the intelligence community’s successful experiment, establishing In-Q-Tel, for military procurement? What can be done to harness private capital markets to help fund and speed Pentagon building programs, such as the renovation of our Navy’s shipyards?

When Aversion to Risk is a Negative

Complicating the challenge of improving the procurement process is the natural tendency toward risk aversion within any large government organization such as DoD, governed by a complex regulatory structure. Innovation carries risk. The safer approach, one surmises, is to follow the careful procurement system that has been developed incrementally by thousands of Pentagon regulations over the course of decades. Moving fast can mean less review, and hence carry greater risk for failure. Only when the need for speed is urgent and clearly demanded by top leadership, such as was the case with MRAP’s or Operation Warp Speed, does the bureaucracy turn to quicker procurement techniques available in the legal toolbox. Much as no one was ever fired at DoD for buying IBM computers in the 1960s, no one in the building is fired today for taking a careful, safe approach to procurement under the guidelines of a manifold regulatory system.

Another aspect of the challenge requiring consideration is congressional authority. Procurement laws and rules only address “how” the contracting process is pursued for the development and purchase of a weapons system. They do not address the issue of authorization—i.e., “what” Congress has empowered the Pentagon to do on a specific weapons system or program, including the expenditure of funds. The Air Force developed and deployed the MC-12 aircraft only after receiving congressional permission. The plane’s development was specifically authorized and funded by Congress, as was the Space Development Agency’s satellite constellation. Unless funding is first approved by Congress, DoD cannot lawfully commence the contracting process for the development of any new system.

This approach of detailed congressional authorization tends to be somewhat more pronounced for the DoD than for other government entities. Most federal agencies are governed by broadly worded authorizations that give them latitude for innovative purchasing and, in many cases, the ability to guarantee credit. The Department of Defense, on the other hand, tends to be controlled by a more detailed, annual National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) process that delimits exactly what it can and cannot develop and buy over specific time periods. The end result is an awkward system of annual funding for complex, long-term programs and institutionalized, cultural reluctance by the Pentagon to move innovatively unless specifically authorized by Congress.

An Alternative Approach?

A good illustration of the problem is DoD’s approach to experimenting with venture capital compared to other agencies. The CIA, in collaboration with other members of the intelligence community, created its own venture capital fund, In-Q-Tel, almost a quarter century ago. NASA followed suit a few years later with the creation of the Mercury Fund. In both instances, the CIA and NASA relied on their general statutory authority to set up these programs.

In 2002, Congress created the Army Venture Capital Corporation to invest in startups relating to power technology, but its funding robustness has so far been largely limited to its original appropriation. More recently, in December 2022, Secretary of Defense Austin established an Office of Strategic Capital whose mission will include partnering the Pentagon with public and private capital markets However, at this point, its ability to raise capital funding in the markets remains an open question as it continues to await specific congressional authorization to operate and guarantee credit, as well as an appropriation that can be used to support program funding, corporate investments, and reserves against lending or guarantees. Language contained in the Senate Report for NDAA 2023 contained wording that would have done much of that, but it was not incorporated into the final congressional conference report for the bill.

Change and innovation are hard. With rising strategic challenges in the Pacific and around the world, the Pentagon and the Hill must continue to work together to find more ways to speed the acquisition process. The Pentagon should continue, whenever possible, to use alternative approaches provided by existing procurement regulations to accelerate strategic weapons development. The regulatory success of such initiatives as Operation Warp Speed, MRAP, or the MC-12W aircraft might serve more often as an approach to speed up other programs. At the same time, Congress could consider providing the Pentagon with broader empowerment language for specific programs under the annual NDAA and appropriations process, as Capitol Hill has long done with other agencies. For example, Congress, if willing, could give DoD’s new Office of Strategic Capital just a few lines of NDAA wording to empower more open, Pentagon access to capital markets to support the application of commercial technology and major recapitalization projects.

The bottom-line reality is that practical approaches and solutions are available, both through the regulatory and legislative processes. More red tape can be cut, better enabling faster production of weapons systems to meet growing challenges in a multi-polar world.

Chuck Blanchard, a former general counsel of the Army and Air Force, is an Arnold & Porter partner specializing in government contracts law.

Ramon Marks, a retired Arnold & Porter partner, is Vice Chair of Business Executives for National Security (BENS).

The views expressed in this article are strictly their own.

Image: Shutterstock.

When it comes to illegal mass migration, it is almost impossible to successfully protect a thin border line stretching for hundreds and thousands of miles. Thousands of people—concentrating their efforts on short border sections—can easily overrun the equipment and guards, as has happened from the Spanish exclave of Ceuta to the small city of Yuma, Arizona.

Neighboring states are reluctant to deter people from crossing because they do not want to serve as a “parking lot” for illegal migrants, as Serbian president Aleksandar Vučić has said. It is much simpler for transit countries to simply let people go—a win-win situation both for the migrants and the transit country.

Similar patterns are visible not only in Europe, but also in Mexico, which—after the end of pressure and threats from the Trump administration—has begun refusing to permit Customs and Border Protection to expel families with children under the age of seven, citing a new law relating to the treatment of migrant children since the Biden administration took office. 

Yet it is not only the “carrot and stick” policy—which does not save transit countries from becoming parking lots—that can bear fruit for both transit and destination countries. Providing support for transit countries’ own border protection to prevent aliens from entering can be more beneficial for all participants, likely in a cheaper manner than pure—and costly—blackmailing and bargaining.

During the current migration crisis in Europe, more and more countries recognized the need for closer cooperation with transit countries in a way that makes them also interested in combating illegal border crossings. One of the possible solutions is to help them with their own border security. In November 2022, Austria, Hungary, and Serbia signed a trilateral agreement in which the two EU member states offered to help Belgrade organize deportations by plane for people who arrived in the Balkan nation from safe countries and are not eligible for asylum. Furthermore, they pledged a police contingent equipped with vehicles, thermal vision goggles, and drones to strengthen border protection along the North Macedonian-Serbian border. So, what actually happened was that the three countries shifted the focus of border security to the south, from the Hungarian-Serbian border to the Serbian-North Macedonian one. It made Belgrade interested in participating in the collaboration and perhaps it is closer to a durable solution than the constant debates between Belgrade, Vienna, and Budapest. And this may be just the beginning. As President Vučić emphasized, “we are ready to move further south together with North Macedonia and thus protect both Europe and our own country.”

Due to the increasing number of illegal border crossings across the Western Balkan routes toward Italy, a similar plan emerged through the participation of Croatia, Slovenia, and Italy in late March. According to the preliminary negotiations, Slovenia and Italy will send joint police forces to their neighbor to combat illegal migration within Croatia, while local authorities can concentrate their efforts on the border area. The measure could make available hundreds of additional law enforcement personnel to strengthen border protection, while it can also reduce the flow of irregular migrants to Slovenia and Italy.

Similar solutions are not unknown on the other side of the Atlantic: certain U.S. administrations also realized that it was much cheaper and more efficient to provide assistance for Mexico to police its own southern border than focusing only on the American one. For instance, the Southern Border Plan aimed to construct a network of communications towers along Mexico’s southern border region in 2014–15 to help security and migration forces to communicate despite gaps in radio coverage. According to a report by WOLA, most towers had been built by 2019, even if final construction was delayed by Mexico’s lack of issuance of a deployment plan. 

But physical infrastructure is not the only thing. In the drug war, U.S. DEA agents are deployed to Mexico to facilitate the fight against cartels. The United States could follow similar patterns against illegal migration, sending Border Patrol agents to the southern border of Mexico. Even if they could operate—similarly to their European counterparts—only with the presence of local law enforcement agencies, it could increase the protection of the Mexico-Guatemala border and, from a humanitarian perspective, could make the procedure easier for people who are really escaping from persecution and war.

Furthermore, we should not forget that the length of the southwest border of the United States is 1,954 miles, while the Mexico-Guatemala one is just one-quarter of that, 541 miles, which makes more concentrated efforts possible.

Of course, this will not mean that the United States can neglect its own border security in the southwest. Even with enhanced support from Mexican border authorities, thousands will manage to reach the United States—not to mention people who fly directly to Mexico with valid tourist visas, and later move north. But preventing illegal migrants from crossing into Mexico from the south is also in the interest of Mexico City, which does not want to be “a parking lot.” Therefore, similarly to the European examples, it can lead to a mutually-beneficial collaboration and a win-win situation for both participants.

Viktor Marsai, Ph.D., is the Director of the Budapest-based Migration Research Institute, an associate professor at the University of Public Service, and an Andrássy Fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, DC.

Image: Shutterstock.

French president Emmanuel Macron has again sparked controversy by suggesting that Europe should chart an independent course from the United States, this time over Taiwan. This is a recurring theme from the French leader, one that is both a challenge to his fellow Europeans and an opportunity for the United States.

On the one hand, the French have sought ways to distance themselves and Europe from U.S. leadership, while at the same time advancing their own authority. On the other hand, they have shown a reluctance to participate in the very organizations they seek to benefit from and to head. It is not easy to belong to a group whose leader does not seem to want to be a member.

The French have at least been consistent. Charles DeGaulle withdrew France from NATO's integrated military structure in 1966, intent on maintaining French autonomy, while at the same time retaining France's membership, and voting rights, in the organization.

In the early 1990s, in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the eventual dissolution of Yugoslavia, French officials promoted the Western European Union (WEU), a fully-European security organization and tacit substitute for NATO. The WEU—made up initially of French and German military units—was supposed to provide Europe with the modest level of security it needed in the post-Cold War era, cutting Washington out of the scene.

But the WEU did not work. Worse still was what might have happened if it did. France would not accept German leadership, nor were the Germans eager to cede authority to Paris. In the wake of European paralysis in response to dueling crises in Bosnia and Kosovo, the WEU was quietly euthanized and Europe returned to its security dependence on the United States.

However, the Gallic dream of a purely European security alliance—one with France at the helm—never entirely perished. Macron has enthusiastically sponsored a new security dialogue with his counterpart in Germany, Olaf Scholz, both before and after Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The Germans, for their part, appear amenable to continuing the conversation, though the question of which great power will hold greater sway in the relationship remains unaddressed.

Such posturing regarding jettisoning reliance on the United States routinely elicits anguish and anxiety from members of the Atlantic security establishment. Yet it is doubtful that European security run, and paid for, by Europeans constitutes a significant problem for the United States.

Indeed, there are a number of benefits. The first, and most obvious, is that it would be cheaper. There has long been bipartisan support in the United States for the idea of Europe ponying up more for its own defense. American presidents from Barack Obama and Bill Clinton to Donald Trump have called for Europeans to do so. The problem is that Europe did not have to. Free-riding is a thing. European autonomy would force Europeans, not Americans, to pay for Europe's security.

Europe was also skeptical of the need for security and reluctant to provide what U.S. officials thought prudent. President Vladimir Putin of Russia has kindly resolved doubts on this matter. At the same time, the war in Ukraine has made it clear that in military terms Russia is not the Soviet Union. What was once thought to be “the second best army in the world” is now more widely acknowledged as possibly the second-best army among the former Soviet republics.

While Russia and other security challenges remain, Europe is fully capable of addressing them. Gone are the days when Europe, humbled by two world wars, could not afford to protect itself. Europe has instead become addicted to American largesse (a phenomenon I refer to as "military welfare") while at the same time complaining about their North American partners.

One final concern is that the United States will lose the benefits it accrues from membership in NATO. What are these benefits? One of the most often referenced, and vague, is "influence." The notion that Europe will stray into darkness without U.S. supervision, as it did twice in the twentieth century, is a uniquely American conceit. Europe is a different place today, one that is stable, affluent, and moderate in its posture. It does not need Americans telling it what to do.

Nor is it the case that the United States needs to meddle in European affairs for its own policy purposes. By and large, Europeans will adopt policies and actions that are, for the most part, compatible with U.S. interests, with or without U.S. efforts to impose outcomes on Europe.

At the same time, America needs to focus on problems elsewhere. China is richer and likely more competent militarily and politically than Russia. While some European militaries have executed gestures in solidarity with U.S. efforts to contain Beijing, these efforts mostly just demonstrate the limited value of Europe's contributions in a region that is distant from Europe geographically and politically. A better outcome for the United States would be for Europeans to resolve their own security concerns, allowing the United States to actually pivot to Asia.

Macron has laid heavy hints that the United States has overstayed its welcome in Europe. Other leaders are more polite, but their sentiment is also clear. America can afford to be gracious in response. As tensions in Eastern Europe abate in the aftermath of the Russo-Ukraine war, there will be an opportunity for the United States to refocus and streamline its security commitments in Europe. Doing so will free up resources and reduce liabilities on both sides of the Atlantic.

Erik Gartzke is professor of political science and director of the Center for Peace and Security Studies at the University of California at San Diego.

Image: Nicolas Economou / Shutterstock.com

Until recently, relations between Mexico and the United States had largely been centered around immigration, almost to the exclusion of other concerns, with the Biden administration seeking to control cross-border flows while moving away from former President Donald Trump’s harsh “build the wall” rhetoric. However, lately, another sensitive issue, narcotics trafficking, which had been relatively dormant in recent years, has become a high-profile source of friction, with harsh words over fentanyl emanating from both Washington and Mexico City, followed by some efforts to defuse tensions.

Unquestionably, there is reason for concern regarding fentanyl, a highly addictive synthetic opiate, as it has increasingly become the product of choice among U.S. consumers of hard drugs. It is fifty times more potent than heroin. 70,000 deaths per year have been attributed to fentanyl overdoses, out of a total of 100,000 narcotics-related deaths.

Fentanyl’s precursor chemicals are produced in China, cross the Pacific by sea, and are smuggled into Mexican ports. The final product is then created in laboratories in Mexico and sent to the United States. The infrastructure for this, of course, already exists as Mexican drug trafficking organizations have long been major sources of heroin and cocaine entering the United States.

Calls in Washington for Unilateral Action Provoke a Sharp Response

With fentanyl deaths rising and receiving extensive coverage in the media, American politicians have become engaged. Republican Representatives Michael Waltz and Dan Crenshaw have submitted draft legislation authorizing the use of military force against the fentanyl trafficking cartels, while Republican Senators Lindsey Graham and John Kennedy have submitted a bill designating the cartels as foreign terrorist organizations.

The evident intention of these bills is to put the United States in a position to take unilateral kinetic action against the cartels whether or not Mexico agrees, as has been done against terrorist targets in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. Although Crenshaw did tell Mexico that “we would love to have you as a partner,” the implication behind such a statement is that the United States should act in any event. And Trump publicly stated that if re-elected he will “order the Department of Defense to make appropriate use of special forces, cyber warfare and other overt and covert actions” against the cartels.

Mexican president Andres Manuel López Obrador reacted immediately to these initiatives. Never one to hold back on his own rhetoric, he asserted that fentanyl was America’s problem and the result of its “social decay,” rather than that of Mexico which, he said, does not produce or consume the product. This claim of Mexican non-involvement is true only if one somehow does not consider the processing laboratories in Mexican soil as production. And as for consumption, while it has not become a major issue in Mexico yet, there are documented examples of it taking place there.

Obrador has gone so far as threatening to urge Mexican-Americans to vote against Republicans if they do not cease their pressure campaign. This has resulted in some pushback from activists from that community, who have suggested that, instead, he should be concentrating on securing the safety of would-be immigrants—there was recently a fire at a Mexican detention center along the border in which forty detainees died.

Foreign Minister Marcel Ebrard also took up the cry against the American congressmen, going so far as to say he would call upon consular officials stationed in the United States to mount a public relations campaign “to defend Mexico.” And unsurprisingly, Mexican officials have also repeated their often-used response to American pressure on security issues, asserting (with considerable truth) that their country is flooded with weapons that are smuggled in from the north.

Answer: An Action Plan

After several weeks of sniping by American congressmen on one side and the López Obrador administration on the other, there has been some effort to turn down the heat. The Biden administration has avoided reacting to the Republicans’ offensive on the issue, doubtless viewing it as a complement to their ongoing effort to characterize its immigration policy as ineffective, despite the reality that fentanyl is smuggled into the United States through border crossings and not through illegal immigration.

For its part, despite its initial (and highly predictable) hostile reaction to U.S. congressional pressure, Mexico apparently has grudgingly accepted the need to be seen as “doing something” on fentanyl. A meeting between U.S. and Mexican officials took place on April 13, and Mexico has announced a fentanyl action plan which covers ground that will be familiar to those who have followed drug policy initiatives over the years.

The elements of this plan include creating a coordinating body within the Mexican government to address fentanyl, increasing the number of army personnel monitoring land customs stations and the number of navy and customs personnel at maritime ports, creating a special unit within the national prosecutor’s office dedicated to synthetic drugs and weapons, and establishing a protocol for consultations between the Mexican Finance Ministry and the U.S. Treasury Department on money laundering.

And after saying that fentanyl was entirely a U.S. problem, López Obrador has at least recognized that the precursor chemicals are entering Mexico. He has written to Chinese president Xi Jinping asking that action be taken to halt their flow. He is still awaiting a response.

At the same time, the U.S. Justice Department has recently announced charges of fentanyl trafficking against the sons of now-imprisoned drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzman, together with a $10 million reward for their capture. In addition to whatever legal merits this step may have, it has come at a moment when the Biden administration would certainly benefit from the appearance of aggressive action on this issue. However, López Obrador has criticized the United States for operating without consulting Mexican authorities, and said that his law enforcement priority is “public safety.” Further, while Mexican cooperation with the United States on fighting drugs will continue, López Obrador noted that it is at a “second level” of importance, seemingly undercutting any impact of the previously announced action plan.

The Drug Issue Always Comes Back

Thus it is not clear if the politics of fentanyl will remain conflictive or whether some sustained effort will be made to lower the decibel level. History shows that U.S. politicians and media become periodically seized on the issue of drugs coming from Mexico.

This includes during the Nixon administration when the border was nearly shut down for thirty days in “Operation Intercept”; during the Reagan administration, where at one point U.S. customs briefly repeated this action in an effort to put pressure on Mexico to address the abduction of a Drug Enforcement Agency agent; and during the Bush and Obama administrations, when, more productively, in response to the unprecedented rise of powerful drug cartels, the United States provided massive counter-narcotics assistance to Mexico under the so-called “Merida Initiative,” including aid to the police and military and also resources for judicial reform and human rights observance.

The narcotics issue, now manifesting itself as fentanyl, rises and falls as a public concern but never goes away. And the pattern of a spike in concern and the exchange of heated rhetoric by politicians, followed by an effort to return the issue to normal bureaucratic channels is likely to repeat itself. Ultimately, both countries have an interest in preventing the issue from disrupting the overall relationship. But in managing the issue, policymakers on both sides of the border will have to recognize certain unchanging realities.

The United States Needs to Get Real…

One reality that the United States must face is that unilateral action—subjecting the drug cartels to counterterrorist-style operations without Mexican consent—is a non-starter. Indeed, one may ask whether those promoting it are truly serious or are just looking to score political points. But if reiterated often enough an idea, no matter how dangerous, can go from the fringes to the center of debate, moving the famous “Overton window” of thinkable policy options.

First and foremost, unilateral action would not work. “Decapitation” strategies are unlikely to change the capabilities of the drug cartels if not accompanied by broader efforts to reclaim state presence in the large, lawless areas of rural Mexico in which they operate. Killing an individual drug lord or destroying an individual laboratory will have little effect without long-term follow-up by the Mexican government. General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, whose career includes service in Colombia, has stressed that counternarcotics operations are fruitless without local “support and approval.”

And few things would be more likely to make such cooperation impossible than unilateral military action within Mexico by the U.S. armed forces. The country’s historic memory includes the 1846–48 Mexican War in which much of its north was annexed and during which Mexico City was occupied. It also includes the U.S. interventions during the administration of Woodrow Wilson in which the port city of Veracruz was occupied and General John Pershing embarked on a “punitive expedition” against Pancho Villa in northern Mexico.

Given this history, no Mexican government could tolerate U.S. forces acting on its soil without its consent. It would likely mean that cooperation on immigration, the other top U.S. priority, would stop, and instead of Mexican security forces discouraging periodic caravans of would-be immigrants trudging towards the border from Central and South America, they would simply let them pass.

The “remain in Mexico” policy, which began under Trump and was maintained with some modifications by President Joe Biden, under which asylum claimants are not allowed to enter the United States for adjudication but must wait in Mexico until their hearing date, would no longer be tenable. And vital cooperation on trade, law enforcement, the environment, and public health could come to a grinding halt.

…And So Does Mexico

But there are also realities that Mexico needs to recognize, notably that legalization by the United States of hard drugs, a solution preferred throughout Latin America, is simply not on the political agenda. While marijuana has been largely legalized at the state level (and de facto at the federal level), there does not appear to be any movement toward doing the same for cocaine, heroin, or now fentanyl. Given the rise in deaths and the potency of this synthetic drug, Mexican leaders cannot expect that the United States will solve the problem for them.

And although change is unlikely to occur during his administration, another reality is that López Obrador’s policy regarding the drug cartels has been a failure. He termed his approach “abrazos no balazos” (hugs, not shooting), arguing that the answer to the drug problem was social welfare spending to improve the situation of poverty-stricken Mexicans who would otherwise turn to this illicit trade.

Implicit in this policy shift was an end to aggressive action to defeat or even contain the cartels—live and let live, essentially in the hope of seeing reduced violence. This entailed lowering the frequency and intensity of counter-narcotics operations, disbanding a U.S.-trained investigative unit while severely curtailing the DEA’s ability to work with local counterparts, and forcing the United States to replace the Merida Initiative assistance to a far less counternarcotics-oriented “Bicentennial Framework.”

The result has been continued narcotics-related violence, and ever-stronger cartel domination of many of Mexico’s states, with local governments and security services becoming in effect their junior partners. And while this has gone on, the cartels, with their Chinese associates, have moved into fentanyl production—and although the recent round of tough talk in each direction may have gotten the López Obrador government at least to admit that a problem exists, it strains credibility to think that placing a few hundred more soldiers and sailors at customs posts and holding inter-agency meetings, per its recently announced plan, will make much difference.

In It for the Long Haul?

What steps should the United States take? First, to quote Hippocrates, do no harm. The prospect of treating fentanyl traffickers like terrorists may have brought the issue to the forefront but further threats of unilateral action will be unlikely to produce results and actually undertaking it would be a disaster. And we must recognize that López Obrador, heading toward his last year in office, is not likely to make major changes in his narcotics policies behind the absolute minimum to keep the United States at bay.

For the United States, the only hope is to press for greater cooperation from López Obrador while understanding that the real challenge will be to begin a dialogue with his potential successors, be they from his party or from one of the opposition groupings. It will need to make clear that the prospect of legalization, and especially that of fentanyl, is a chimera, while recognizing that geographic reality and ongoing demand for narcotics in the United States means that complete elimination of Mexico-based trafficking is impossible.

Rather, both the United States and Mexico need to understand that aggressive Mexican law enforcement, backed by significant U.S. assistance, can have a positive, though admittedly not conclusive effect on containing and then shrinking the power of the cartels and their capacity to traffic in fentanyl.

Mexico, of course, is not likely to greet a restart of an aggressive counternarcotics effort with great enthusiasm. Action against the cartels will cost lives and treasure, and require patience. The initial goal must be simply to keep the cartels’ power and their capacity to produce fentanyl and other drugs from increasing. But Mexico may come to realize—hopefully before it is too late—that simply letting the cartels have their way and expand further will impose far higher costs, and indeed may let the country drift toward failed state status in large areas of its territory. On both sides of the Rio Grande, realism is in order.

Richard M. Sanders is a Global Fellow of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. A former member of the Senior Foreign Service of the U.S. Department of State, he served as Deputy Director of the Office of Mexican Affairs and as Director of the Office of Brazilian and Southern Cone Affairs and at embassies throughout the Western Hemisphere.

Image: Shutterstock.

Ukraine may need to use older missile defence systems with the dwindling stock of more advanced surface to air missiles.

A modern development of war that many were likely not aware of over the last decade was the ability for missiles to shoot down other offensive munitions like missiles and artillery shells. While it is still very difficult to shoot down targets that are small and fast moving, very high, or very low, if an acquisition radar can see a target, many advanced missiles have a high probability of shooting it down. The stealth solution can provide a level of protection, but at great cost and limited capability depending on the system being used. Even in the case of stealth, newer and more powerful radars are now able to see many stealth aircraft, but are unable to fire on the target for the time being. With modern missiles being such a great threat, it is often better to avoid using many air assets in a war zone, or use non-expensive and disposable equipment like cheaper drones en masse to overwhelm a small anti-air unit. In Ukraine, the conflict might change rapidly as it may be the case that Ukraine and its allies are running out of many of the advanced missile systems keeping the country protected from Russian missile and artillery threats.

In the video in the link here, the analyst discusses the probable lack of proper advanced air defence missiles possessed by Ukraine, and the limited numbers of international stock of other types of advanced missiles needed to keep up the current level of protection over Ukraine. The tactic of using low cost drones to terrorise Ukraine’s population by Russia, pressured Ukraine to use much of their modern missile stock against many low cost drones over the last few months. While the use of lower cost anti-air artillery like Gepards, Oerlikons and Shilkas might have been less effective, the upgrading of those systems should have been considered early on as an essential project to knock down drones as advanced missiles are limited in number, costly, and take time to produce in quantity. Another essential tactic to eliminate the threats of terror weapons on Ukrainians would have been to target the source of such equipment, especially if it is outside of Russia. Considering those weapons were designed to be used specifically against civilians, it would be considered an appropriate target under International Law.

With the recent decision to finally move allied MiG-29s into Ukraine from their neighbours, Ukraine will soon depend more on air-to-air assets for defence. This sudden change in policy is likely due to the low stock of Air Defence missiles possessed by Ukraine and its allies. Ukraine will soon be depending on fighter jets to manage the tracking and guidance of their own missiles on targets. Another reason for the increase in air assets to Ukraine is that with a diminished Air Defence shield, Russian Air Force planes are now less likely to be shot down by advanced anti-air systems from the ground. The mostly absent Russian air arm has been fairly passive in its approach since the beginning of the war, and it could be the case that the months of drone attacks to waste advanced Ukrainian missiles was planned so that the spring offensive could be supported in a more robust manner by Russian Air force artillery. Even with advanced tanks coming from NATO, air assets could cause a lot of problems for Western tanks on the field in Ukraine. Severe losses of NATO equipment may not change the position of the front lines in the war, but it would diminish the perception of power Western countries have over Russian forces in Ukraine. Whatever the outcome, the upcoming spring offensive will alter the narrative of the war when fighting intensifies on the fields of Ukraine.