Diplomacy & Crisis News

For years, certain voices in Lebanon have opposed the rising influence of Hezbollah, a pro-Iranian political military movement, and have warned of the dangerous consequences of not directly addressing this issue with a clear vision. Among these voices is Samy Gemayel, the president of the Kataeb Party, whom I recently had the chance of interviewing. For Gemayel, the reality is simple: Hezbollah is the greatest threat to Lebanese sovereignty, and all roads lead to them.

Gemayel and his Kataeb supporters have a specific grievance against Hezbollah. They view the movement’s decisions and current form as that of an autonomous armed group, which poses an unnecessary danger to the Lebanese people. This danger is especially apparent given the country’s current economic crisis, the worst in Lebanese history. While the existence of Hezbollah’s arms did not solely cause the crisis, other factors, such as the lack of strong state institutions and weak accountability for corruption by other political forces, played a role. Despite this, the problem of how Hezbollah sees Lebanon and what it is remains relevant. It raises the question of whether Lebanon can modernize as a country if it cannot have a single source of authority. Two viewpoints exist on this matter. On the one hand, some in Lebanon argue that the power of Hezbollah grows because of the absence of a state. On the other, there are those who argue that the state is weakened because of Hezbollah and thus cannot effectively legislate and govern. It is even possible that both views are right, leaving Lebanon in a catch-22 situation.

Kataeb is striving to explain the issue of Lebanon's sovereignty to other members of Lebanon’s parliament to ensure a unified approach. Gemayel notes that though economic and other reforms have been agreed upon, there is a lack of consensus on how to address Hezbollah. Whether this was due to naiveté or fear, he answered: “I don’t know, I think it is a bit of both. They didn’t face Hezbollah in the last fifteen years like we did. They didn’t see firsthand the violence, the intimidation, and the will to block the country and to destroy the economy the way we saw it. We cannot hide this elephant in the room called Hezbollah and we cannot escape from tackling this problem.” Gemayel emphasized the need to confront the problem posed by Hezbollah, which has imposed its convictions on all other players in Lebanese politics, leaving no benefits for the Lebanese people.

Opposing Hezbollah has been a top priority in Mr. Gemayel’s political life, but after years of nonviolent resistance alongside other allies of the March 14th Alliance, a political coalition which sought to disarm the Shiite political party, Hezbollah has only grown stronger. Gemayel attributed this to Hezbollah’s ability to bring everyone under its umbrella since 2015–2016, which resulted in the election of Michel Aoun, their primary ally, as president. This move effectively included everyone under their umbrella. “All the political players, played the game of Hezbollah. This was the problem.”

Why did March 14th Alliance Fail?

In 2005, following the assassination of Prime Minister Rafic Hariri, most Lebanese people rallied across the country demanding an end to Syria’s near thirty-year-long military occupation. This call for sovereignty paved the way for the formation of the March 14th Alliance. Syria had intervened in Lebanon’s civil war at the request of the Lebanese government in March 1976. The intervention was intended to halt the war and continued until the signing of the Taif Agreement in Saudi Arabia in 1990, which was endorsed by all Lebanese military and political factions. However, the Syrian army remained in Lebanon despite the agreement's promise that the troops would leave eventually.

As opposition to Syria’s increasing influence in Lebanon grew, so did the voices of dissent. Among them was Pierre Gemayel, the late brother of Samy Gemayel, who was eventually assassinated for his opposition to Syria’s military rule and its proxy in Lebanon, Hezbollah. Pierre was killed along with others who spoke out against Syria’s power in Lebanon. Prominent anti-Syrian regime voices within the early stages of March 14th Alliance were also assassinated, including the independent politician and respected former editor of An-Nahar, Gebran Tueni, in 2005. In December 2013, former Lebanese minister and Hezbollah critic Mohamad Chatah, who was an advisor to the Saad Hariri government, a Lebanese ambassador, and member of the March 14th Alliance, was also assassinated in downtown Beirut. Shortly before his death, he tweeted a warning about Hezbollah's attempts to take control of specific state responsibilities: “Hezbollah is pressing hard to be granted similar powers in security & foreign policy matters that Syria exercised in Lebanon for 15 yrs.”

To this day, no one had taken responsibility Chatah’s killing. Hezbollah has denied all involvement in the assassinations of their political rivals, saying it benefits the enemies of Lebanon to sow internal division. Putting accusations aside, the greatest common factor for all these kinds of assassinations is that none of their perpetrators have been brought to a fair and just trial. Why? Because the rule of law is not practiced in Lebanon. The truth of the matter is, if every March 14th leader had the courage of Gebran Tueini, Pierre Gamayel, and Mohamed Chatah, Lebanon might be in a better situation today. Instead, everyone pursues their own narrow interests. The public is forced to remain silent out of fear and total cynicism of the country’s political, judicial, economic, and other systems’ failure to live up to promises of a better future.

What Comes Next for Lebanon?

Gemayel believes that Lebanon’s current problems are due to the concessions made to Hezbollah, which has caused Lebanon to be in a state of “confrontation with all the Arab countries and the Western world.” He notes that his party has been opposed to these concessions from the start.

Yet there are some minor signs of change. While in the past, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah has condemned Saudi Arabia as a sponsor of terrorism, there has been a shift in rhetoric following a rapprochement between Iran and Saudi Arabia mediated by China. Nasrallah welcomed the normalization, stating “This is a good development. We have complete confidence that this will not come at our expense.”

There is optimism that the resumption of ties between the region’s most influential players could help Lebanon. Nevertheless, it is a matter of principle, not deal-making, for Kataeb. No political party today in Lebanon must be allowed to carry weapons. “As long as we have this military organization in parallel to the Lebanese army, making decisions parallel to the Lebanese state and acting like first-degree citizens while the rest of us are second-degree citizens, the problem will remain,” Gemayel says. He hopes for a positive impact but acknowledges that “as long as Hezbollah’s behavior with the Lebanese people and Lebanese institutions doesn’t change, the problem is still there.”

And If Lebanon Does Not Change Course…?

 In early February, Gemayel spoke at Kataeb’s 32nd general assembly about how he sees the country’s present situation: that there are effectively two Lebanons.

“On the one hand, you have the Republic of Lebanon, with all the people from all the sects who believe in it and believe in the democratic system and the constitution, which governs the relations of the Lebanese from all sects with one another. And on the other hand, there is a state called the Islamic Republic of Hezbollah.” He went to declare that Hezbollah’s actions are tantamount to asking for a national divorce, and if that is what it wants, “lets have it.”

When we spoke, I pressed him on this question. Some have accused him of desiring partition or federalism for the country—policies that are not practical or within the best interest of all Lebanese.

Gemayel indicated that what he was doing was pointing out that living under Hezbollah’s hegemony is not an option. He clarified that Kataeb’s resistance to Hezbollah will always remain non-violent, but that regardless, political paralysis cannot remain an option. “What I am trying to point on that Hezbollah is responsible for creating this huge gap between the Lebanese society. This gap may turn into something more dangerous, which is a kind of two Lebanons.”

In other words, Gemayel’s statement about the two Lebanons was not about partition or federalism, but rather a warning about the division between those who believe in the democratic system and those who follow Hezbollah. Such a situation, if not ultimately resolved amicably, could certainly turn into something more dangerous. For a tragedy-ridden country, such a prospect is grim.

Adnan Nasser is an independent foreign policy analyst and journalist with a focus on Middle East affairs. Follow him on Twitter @Adnansoutlook29.

Image: Shutterstock.

The question “are the United States and China in a new cold war?” is not particularly challenging. The answer is yes. A more intriguing question might be, “can the United States and China avoid the mistakes of the previous Cold War?”

One of these mistakes was a fear-driven credulousness; a tendency to take all boasts and claims of the rival power (think Nikita Khrushchev’s pronouncement of “We will bury you!”) as accurate, and in doing so, miss a chance to craft sensible, non-escalatory responses. Currently, after Xi Jinping’s visit to Moscow and boasts about China being ready to “stand guard over the world order,” it might be worth taking a closer look at China’s foreign policy environment. Do its boasts match reality, or is China’s global position weakening like a seaside home at high tide?

Far from being astride the globe, the “China Dream” globally—China’s economic power, political attraction, and standing—are all eroding. Several key indicators reveal that, in the epic clash with the United States and the “collective West,” China is weaker than at any time in the last ten years.

Consider the economic dimensions for starters. A key instrument of great power influence has long been foreign direct investment (FDI), something that is also crucial for China’s own economic health. Spurred by its 2001 “Go Out” policy and supercharged with the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in 2013, Chinese outward FDI grew steadily, from $10 billion in 2005 to more than $170 billion by 2017. Since then, four of the last five years have seen drops in outward FDI—including a 15 percent fall in 2022, according to the American Enterprise Institute. Chinese investment into Europe, previously a choice location because of its high value-added manufacturing capacity and weak regulation, fell sharply as well. Once eager partners like Germany, Italy, and the EU itself have adopted or strengthened investment screening mechanisms and blocked key Chinese acquisitions. A mutual investment treaty that is supposed to address chronic business complaints about Chinese practices and restrictions has stalled in the European Parliament due to widespread Chinese human rights violations and tit-for-tat individual sanctions. Viewed in the other direction, European investment into China dropped steadily after 2018 until rebounding last year. But as Rhodium Group figures show, FDI inflow to China has become concentrated to the point where almost 90 percent of European FDI in China comes from only four countries. During the coronavirus pandemic, the Rhodium report notes, “virtually no European investors that were not already present in the country have made direct investments.” The impact of European investment, which had in 2018 accounted for 7.5 percent of Chinese GDP, fell to 2.8 percent three years later.

The most serious challenge to Chinese economic clout has come from the United States. Heightened tariffs and restrictions put in place during the Trump administration have continued under Joe Biden. Reviews of foreign (read: Chinese) investments have broadened, as have policies blocking the sale of high-tech goods to China—not only from the United States, but also from companies in other countries whose goods have U.S. components. Washington redoubled its efforts to block Huawei and TikTok, along with passing legislation to subsidize U.S. production of high-tech goods at home and direct “friendshoring” investments to reliable allies and partners.

As an economic colossus, China has alternatives, especially in Asia, Africa, and other places where it claims to offer an alternative development model. But here, too, China’s presence has run out of steam. Annual investments in the countries of the BRI, once the flagship vehicle for the extension of Chinese influence, are today less than half of what they were only five years ago. And most of that is in countries with serious debt issues. As a report in Foreign Policy put it, “China can make friends or break legs. It can’t do both.”

In some places, the Chinese “model” proved more destructive than instructive. Beijing’s bullying of Sri Lanka into handing over the Hambantota port that it built with borrowed Chinese money has not exactly burnished Beijing’s reputation as a guardian of a new world order. In fact, according to Pew Research, favorable views of China have dropped sharply around the world—a fall reinforced by China’s “digital authoritarianism” during coronavirus, its draconian and unsuccessful lockdown policy, and its support for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

In Europe, which is generally less strident than the United States, China is on the verge of trading its once flourishing ties with the world’s most advanced economies for the cheap oil and the desperate embrace of what Alexander Gabuev calls its “new vassal,” Russia. At the EU-China summit in April 2022, the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, was blunt: “China, as a permanent member of the UN Security Council, has a special responsibility. No European citizen would understand any support to Russia's ability to wage war.” She is right. In February 2023, a report by the Munich Security Conference showed that across the globe—including in India and Brazi—two-thirds of those surveyed felt that China’s support for Russia's invasion of Ukraine made them wary of Chinese ambitions.

Among the EU’s new East European members, Beijing’s much-touted “CEE+” framework has foundered on China’s willingness to see Ukraine’s sovereignty ravished and its bullying of states that veer even a little on Taiwan, like Lithuania. China has also forfeited one of its more important European trade and investment partners in Ukraine itself. At one point. Volodymyr Zelensky offered Ukraine as “China’s bridge to Europe,” and Chinese companies began the construction of the largest wind farm in Europe near Donetsk and the refitting of the port of Mariupol, now in ruins.

If weakening the Western alliance structure is one of Beijing’s aims, it is now more distant than ever. Ukraine and Moldova have been advanced to candidate status for the EU, and NATO, the very embodiment of Western global domination in Beijing’s view, has been given new life, strength, and members by the actions of Xi’s “best friend” in Moscow. Worse than that from China’s point of view, the alliance has now incorporated China’s own neighborhood into its security stance. In 2022, NATO formally declared the Indo-Pacific to be part of its “shared security interests.” Under President Joe Biden, the United States has significantly increased the prominence of policy initiatives in this region, such as the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue or Quad (composed of India, Australia, Japan, and the United States), and taken actions—like selling nuclear-powered submarines to Australia and adding U.S. bases in the Philippines—that support a more muscular U.S. presence in the region.

Even the EU—which is certainly not a military alliance—has adopted the strategic aim of insuring an “open and rule-based” South China Sea—a direct rejection of China's unilateral claims to virtually all of it—and backed up this rhetoric with action. This month, Italy—the only G-7 country to sign on to the BRI and once the most open to Chinese investment—announced the deployment of one of its two aircraft carriers to the region and confirmed a tripartite deal with Japan and the UK to develop and produce a new generation fighter plane.

Nowhere has the rise of China been greeted with more alarm than in Japan. It was then-Prime Minister Shinzo Abe who first put forth the notion of a “Free and Open Indo-Pacific,” now widely adopted, as a notion to counter China’s influence. More recently, Japan has doubled its defense budget, reconceptualized the notion of what “defense” means, and opted for new, higher-quality weapons. While some of this comes as a response to North Korea’s menacing actions, Japan’s new national security strategy, adopted in December 2022, makes clear that China represents “the unprecedented and greatest strategic challenge.”

A broader unwelcome development for China is the comparison offered in the United States and elsewhere between Russian actions in Ukraine and possible Chinese actions against Taiwan—a comparison rejected by Beijing. As an alarm bell, the sound could not be clearer. “Ukraine today could be East Asia tomorrow,” said Japanese prime minister Fumio Kishida, who just concluded a high-profile visit to Ukraine.

The news is not all bad for China. Foreign trade is up—including with its number one partner, the United States. Beijing scored a significant coup by facilitating the recent deal between Saudi Arabia and Iran, Honduras has changed sides, and European leaders still head off to Beijing, with groups of businessmen in tow. But the overall worsening international setting cannot be encouraging for Xi and the Chinese Communist Party, which must at the same time reckon with a dramatically slower growth rate at home, the consequences of a disastrous coronavirus policy, and a population that is both declining and aging.

Brave words and boasts are required when authoritarian leaders need to use nationalism to stay in power at home. But they need not be swallowed whole by outside observers in the face of contrary evidence, nor by policymakers trying to ensure that the new Cold War stays cold.

Ronald H. Linden is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Pittsburgh. During the spring of 2023, he has been Visiting Professor in the Department of Political Science of Sapienza University, Rome. Recent publications include, “Is Moldova Next? Brigadoon in a Tough Neighborhood,” The National Interest, May 22, 2022, and “No Limits? China, Russia and Ukraine” (with Emilia Zankina) Eurozine, May 4, 2022.

Image: Shutterstock.

The deterioration of liberal democracy has become a global phenomenon and, one by one, countries in different parts of the world have fallen victim to assaults on such. Israel is only the latest victim of an attempted attack.

However, civil society’s mobilization against such moves may teach us how to deal with slow-moving authoritarian tendencies.

The Fundamental Law of Hungary initiated by the government of Viktor Orbán, which passed in only nine days and without much public discussion, reduced judges’ retirement age from seventy to sixty-two, forcing almost three hundred judges into retirement. With a parliamentary majority, Orbán could pack the courts with loyal judges. Hungary’s system of constitutional courts was established in 1990 after communism collapsed and interpreted laws and rights according to constitutional principles, following the spirit of the European Union. Orbán’s Fundamental Law annulled rulings that helped define and protect these fundamental rights.

In Poland, the governing Law and Justice Party (PiS) attacked the Polish courts by claiming they represent an elite whose decisions often do not align with the majority's will. Like in Hungary, the PiS removed judges by reducing the age of retirement. The Polish government attacked the constitutional tribunal, which protected the democratic process and limited executive and legislative power. It refused to recognize elected judges and publish constitutional courts' opinions and judgments. The PiS also proceeded to control the public prosecutor's office and politicized the national council responsible for nominating judges.

In Turkey, the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government moved to control the courts by passing amendments to expand the size of the constitutional courts and increase the number of Supreme Court judges and prosecutors. Those amendments aimed not to strengthen these institutions but to pack the judiciary with AKP ideologues.

In Argentina, the then-president and now vice president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, introduced the concept of “democratization of the judiciary,” which in spirit has nothing to do with real democracy. Upon taking office in late 2019, President Alberto Fernández and Vice President Kirchner accused the judiciary of being political and unsuccessfully introduced a broad judicial reform to expand the number of federal courts in Buenos Aires from twelve to forty-six. This sharp increase would have allowed Fernández and the Peronist-controlled Senate to appoint many new judges loyal to the party. The president also appointed a commission of experts that proposed other changes to the judiciary, including creating new tribunals that would reduce the influence of the Supreme Court.

Along the same lines, the Fernandez-controlled Argentinean Senate voted to remove judges deciding on corruption cases involving Kirchner. However, a Supreme Court ruling managed to postpone it indefinitely.

Likewise, Fernandez initially refused to comply with a Supreme Court decision that forced the government to return federal money to the city of Buenos Aires (The president refused to give the city of Buenos Aires, which is not a district that typically votes for the president's party, federal money the city was entitled to). Fernandez was also particularly hostile to the tribunal after his vice president was found guilty of corruption. The president helped mobilize the masses after a federal criminal court sentenced Vice President Kirchner to prison for fraud and corruption. The vice president claimed she was a victim of lawfare orchestrated by the judiciary. The president, the vice president, and their allies sarcastically call the courts "the judicial party" as if the courts did not represent independent institutions of justice but a political party that serves the interests of the opposition. Last year, again unsuccessfully, the president proposed to pack the court by increasing the number of Supreme Court justices from nine to twenty-five. 

Early this year, President Fernandez publicly called to impeach four members of the Supreme Court, accusing the high court of abusing its power when it forced the government to return federal funds to the city of Buenos Aires. The impeachment is not likely to occur because there is not a majority to approve it. However, the fact that the president openly attacks the high court is a distressing act of illiberalism, if not authoritarianism.

In Israel, a coalition government-proposed judicial reform would allow for a simple majority vote in the Knesset, Israel's unicameral parliament, to revoke Supreme Court decisions.

The proposed reform would enable an “override clause” to eliminate judicial review of legislation and would change the makeup of the Judicial Selection Committee to ensure the government controls the appointments of judges and justices. Likewise, it would weaken the criterion of "unreasonableness" the Supreme Court occasionally uses to oversee and intervene in executive orders.

The separation between the executive and legislative power is nonexistent in Israel because Israeli law requires a parliamentary majority to form a government. Therefore, weakening the Supreme Court would open the way to an unchecked government—an absolute power.

Thus, Israel has been on the way to joining the nations moving in the direction of illiberal democracy. The official rhetoric looks as if it were taken from the Kirchner playbook: since judges do not constitute an elected entity, they do not represent the majority's spirit and sentiments.

But by rebelling against that move, Israelis have made an enormous difference. More than a million people have taken to the streets to demonstrate in front of the parliament and government offices. Centrist and left-wing parties, individuals from the right, academia, doctors, reservists, trade unions, professional associations, and many others who make up the fabric of society have participated in the protests.

The same social networks that united Israelis in times of war have connected them in the face of an attempted government power grab. This has created schisms within the governing Likud party, forcing it to seek a pause to open a dialogue with the opposition.

The judicial overhaul is still on the table, and the government’s proposal represents a severe crisis. But on the other hand, the Israeli people— its officers, doctors, and its productive force—have stood up to the government assault. Israelis have proved willing to challenge their government even amid widespread Palestinian terrorist attacks. Furthermore, to defend democracy, reservists have been ready to refuse army service in a clear message to the government that the state is not the rule of the elected, and that the state must continue to guarantee citizens' rights and protection of political minorities.

As illiberalism spreads throughout the world, the courts, along with the media and the political opposition, are the first victims. It is difficult to reverse the process when society remains passive in the face of slow government movements toward authoritarianism. The people at large will be the next victims. It is enough to see the blood, torture, incarceration, and purges that Venezuelans, Turks, Nicaraguans, and others are already experiencing.

Illiberalism is the spirit of our times. Even in Europe and the United States, illiberal forces have gained ground.

The Israelis, this time, provided a counterexample. This time is not about how to fight terrorism or develop state-of-the-art technology but how to avert, from the outset, attempts at destroying democracies in slow motion.

Luis Fleischman, PhD, is co-founder of the Palm Beach Center for Democracy & Policy Research, and professor of Social Sciences at Palm Beach College.

Image: Roman Yanushevsky/Shutterstock.

On March 10, Iran and Saudi Arabia announced reestablishing diplomatic relations, under Chinese good offices, after seven years of hiatus. The Iranian president appears poised to visit the kingdom in the near future. Some see Iran’s diplomatic rehabilitation and the apparent decline of the U.S. role in the Middle East as a threat. Yet concerned pundits overlook the changing regional balance of power and the opportunities coming with it.

Iran’s Troubles

The normalization deal results not from Iran’s strength but from Iran’s growing difficulties in sustaining its regional ambitions. Iran faces domestic troubles and new enemies while its regional endeavors remain fruitless.

On the domestic front, the Iranian regime has been confronting a massive protest movement since the death of Mahsa Amini at the local police’s hands in September 2022. These protests have turned in some regions into a latent insurgency. The protest movement has worsened the country’s already dire economic situation, forcing Tehran to refocus on domestic problems and new rivals.

The contestation aroused longstanding Iranian fears of Azerbaijani independentism and, beyond it, of Azerbaijan and Turkey. Iranian Azeris represent the majority of the population in three northwestern provinces of the country. Tehran worries that Azerbaijan supports Iranian Azeris’ actual or supposed separatism. It also resents Baku’s strong ties with Israel, Iran’s official enemy. Azerbaijan’s victory in its 2020 war against Armenia (which has good relations with Tehran) also reinforced its position, mechanically weakening Iran’s. Border incidents have become frequent, and, most dramatically, a gunman attacked the Azerbaijani embassy in Tehran in January.

Iran’s worsening conflict with Azerbaijan entwines deeply with a new sense of Turkish threat unseen since the Ottoman Empire’s collapse. Turkey supports Azerbaijan against Armenia, Iran’s close partner. Furthermore, Turkey’s military occupation of several chunks of northern Syria, Iran’s foremost ally in the region, has worried the Iranians for many years. Ankara’s growing military encroachments over northern Iraq did little to allay these concerns. The establishment of a Turkish military base in Qatar right across the Gulf also added to Iran’s restlessness. Turkish expansionism poses a rising challenge to Iran’s core interests.

More broadly, Iranian endeavors throughout the Middle East cost the Iranians dearly for little tangible gains. Iran has spent billions subsidizing its allies in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen, and Palestine. The only clear-cut Iranian success is Assad’s victory in the Syrian Civil War, but Syria is now more Russia’s satellite than Iran’s. Yemen’s Houthis survived loyalist forces’ assaults but so far failed to conquer the whole country. Hamas and Hezbollah have proven unable or unwilling to harm Israel significantly. Although pro-Iranian militias roam Iraq, Baghdad still maintains its independence and a multivectorial foreign policy.

In addition, the growing trend among Arab states to normalize relations with Syria threatened to place Iran in an awkward position. Its main regional ally would have had working relations with its Arab rivals while itself would have stayed isolated. If Iran had not jumped on the appeasement bandwagon, it might have lost in the long term its hard-won influence over Damascus, lured away by Gulf petrodollars. Now that the Assad regime has emerged from the civil war as the victor, it needs Iranian military backing less than before. Diplomatic and economic support from the Arab world would dwarf anything a cash-strapped Iran could offer.

Saudi Concerns

Iran’s internal difficulties, new threats on its northwestern borders, and costly regional stalemates pushed Tehran toward appeasing Saudi Arabia. But Riyadh, too, faces problems of its own, although less severe. It wants to extricate itself from the Yemeni quagmire, where it has failed since 2015 to defeat the Houthi regime. Riyadh needs to talk with the Iranians, the Houthis’ principal supporters, to end this conflict on acceptable terms. Also, the United States’ growing focus on great power competition and China diminishes Washington’s commitment to Saudi preferences and thus pushes the Kingdom to rethink its regional posture.

The Saudis have complicated relations with Turkey, too. Normalizing relations with Iran allows Tehran to focus on other priorities like northern Syria and Iraq. They would benefit greatly from letting the Iranians and the Turks fight each other in distant lands, thus leaving Riyadh free rein to consolidate its power at home and in its “near abroad,” the Arabian Peninsula.

Saudi Arabia understands it is unlikely to ever outdo Iran’s superior size, military power, and soon-to-be nuclear capabilities. Conversely, Tehran cannot seriously threaten Saudi survival. Its conventional military is in escheat and lacks the means to conquer Saudi Arabia and march on Riyadh. Furthermore, the Iranian army will remain unable to enter Saudi territory as long as Iraq maintains its independence. In addition, the Saudis still benefit from the United States’ nuclear umbrella and understand that a nuclear Iran is unlikely to nuke them out of the blue. Since neither could win, Riyadh and Tehran have agreed to a relative draw.

America’s Interests

The Iran-Saudi Arabia normalization thus arises from Tehran’s growing weakness and Riyadh’s changing security environment. What would be the best course of action for the United States in that background?

First, Washington is deeply interested in building good relations with Iran, regardless of its nuclear program. The United States is refocusing its foreign policy toward great power competitors, primarily China. It cannot waste finite resources on feuding with Iran, a relatively weak state. On the contrary, Washington should want to improve its relations with Tehran—and Syria—to prevent it from supporting China or Russia. A nuclear Iran could even become a formidable buffer between Chinese and Russian power and the Persian Gulf.

In any case, Washington has no easy path to stop Iran’s nuclear program. An airstrike against Iran is unlikely to produce long-lasting success and would slow down Iran’s nuclear program for only a few months. A ground invasion is the surest way to eliminate the Iranian nuclear program. However, invading such a large country would be an operation of an unimaginable scale. The Iraqi and Afghani campaigns would pale in comparison, and the bloodshed would be immense.

In addition, regional powers are capable of containing even a nuclear Iran. The Middle East already counts a nuclear state, Israel, which could deter a nuclear-armed Iran if it ever had expansionist ambitions. Israel’s military capabilities combined with those of Saudi Arabia and other Arab states should suffice to prevent an Iranian bid for regional hegemony. Thus, Tehran does not represent a major threat to the United States, and Washington would be better off rethinking its approach toward Iran.

Second, the United States should use the Iranian-Saudi rapprochement as a foundation for a larger regional security architecture. Ongoing conflicts in Syria and Yemen open the Middle East doors to Washington’s main rivals, China and Russia. Regional instability also allows Turkey to harbor destabilizing expansionist ambitions. Reintegrating Iran into the regional concert could, in time, lead to a general Arab-Iranian-Israeli normalization. Such a depolarization would leave fewer openings for Beijing and Moscow to penetrate the region. Also, alleviating regional conflicts will free additional U.S. bandwidth for great power competition.

The Saudi-Iranian normalization remains far from a total reshuffle, and their longstanding mistrust will continue for the time being. It came out of exhaustion more than of a sincere desire for reconciliation. However, these evolutions offer the United States the opportunity to reduce regional cleavages and thus close possible avenues for Chinese and Russian power.

If the United States remains committed to confronting Iran at every corner for its nuclear program or human rights record, Washington’s regional position is likely to decline. Iran will growingly align with China and Russia to counteract American pressure, while the Arab-Iranian normalization will break Tehran’s isolation. Continuing the failed ‘maximum pressure’ campaign will only bring the worst of both worlds: a nuclear-armed Iran replaced at the center of regional politics, a springboard for Sino-Russian endeavors.

The current era of intense great power competition requires political imagination combined with astute diplomacy. Decisionmakers must keep foreign policy traditionalism and dogmatism about Iran from sacrificing this opportunity to advance essential American interests at little cost.

Dylan Motin is a Ph.D. candidate majoring in political science at Kangwon National University and a Marcellus Policy Fellow at the John Quincy Adams Society.

Image: Shutterstock.

As the one-year anniversary of the war in Ukraine passed, there are promising signs that the war may soon end.

In something of a Christmas miracle, President Vladimir Putin made an advent day announcement that Russia is “prepared to negotiate some acceptable outcomes” in regard to the war. Last month, China announced its peace plan for the conflict, and President Xi Jinping visited Moscow to explore the plan’s feasibility.

Both Russia and Ukraine are locked in a bitter stalemate, with no real changes on the battlefield in recent months. Now seems to be the perfect time for some sort of ceasefire, armistice, or similar agreement.

As the momentum begins to shift, it is time to think about what will happen after the war. Specifically, billions of dollars’ worth of American military equipment will remain in a country rebuilding from war with the possibility of weak institutions, a pro-Russian insurgency, and occupied territories.

To date, the United States has given some $34 billion in military assistance to Ukraine, 48 percent of a total of $48 billion dollars in combined humanitarian and financial aid. Of the total military aid, $12.7 billion have been provided in the form of weapons and equipment from existing Department of Defense stocks, along with $1.3 billion in grants and loans to purchase more defense articles.

It is right and just for the United States to support Ukraine. Putin’s war of aggression is one of choice, unlike anything seen in Europe since World War II. The United States has an obligation to support democracy and freedom where it is in such danger. However, it is also right for the United States to demand accountability for the weapons it sends to Kiev, something that Republicans in congress have been calling for.

What the United States should avoid is a repeat of the Soviet-Afghan War. The similarities are striking. There, the Soviet Union led a war of choice, and there, the United States supported brave Afgan freedom fighters up against similarly impossible odds. In that conflict, it was the U.S.-made FIM-92 Stinger shoulder-fired missile system that led to many Soviet helicopter losses and helped turn the tide of the war. At the time it was considered sensitive technology, and U.S. aid stipulated that in order to receive new missiles, expended ones had to be returned.

In the aftermath of that conflict, the United States launched a buyback program to retrieve the estimated 1,000 Stingers that it sent to Afghanistan. The $65 million program was largely seen as a failure. The missiles supplied to the Mujaheddin soon found their way to North Korea, Iran, Qatar, and Tajikistan.

In Ukraine, it is the American FGM-148 Javelin that is destroying Russian armor with a 93 percent kill rate. In November, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Colin Kahl stated that the Russians have “probably lost half of their main battle tanks” with many destroyed by the Javelin. Over 8,500 have been supplied to Ukraine, along with over 1,650 Stingers, 1800 Phoenix Ghost Tactical drones, and 2,500 in various types of missiles and rocket systems.

Yet very little is being done to monitor sensitive weapons. The U.S. embassy in Kiev, which has the U.S. government lead over accountability, isn’t fully staffed nor operational as a result of the war. There is no 1:1 swap for Javelins, as was the case for the Stingers sent to Afghanistan in the 1980s.

Ukraine is the poorest country in Europe, and is the second most corrupt nation on the continent after Russia. It is ranked 122nd in the world for corruption—a place it shares with Estwani, the last absolute monarchy in Africa. At the end of the Cold War, Ukraine was notorious for the illegal arms trade, a result of the massive former Soviet stockpiles in the country. From 1992 to 1998, the country lost $32 billion in military equipment through theft, lack of oversight, and discounted sales.

EUROPOL, the EU Agency for Law Enforcement Cooperation, has stated that “the proliferation of firearms and explosives in Ukraine could lead to an increase in firearms and munitions trafficked into the EU via established smuggling routes or online platforms.” It added that the threat may be even higher at the end of the conflict. Weapons sent to Ukraine have already been found in underground networks in Finland, Sweden, Denmark, and the Netherlands.

What the United States should do is increase the number of on-site inspections. Only 10 percent of high-risk weapons have undergone such measures since U.S. aid began. These are conducted by the Defense Attaché and Office of Defense Cooperation at the U.S. embassy in Kiev.

In the case that such inspections would be too dangerous, the United States should stipulate end-use monitoring by the Ukrainians themselves. Pictures of serial numbers and geolocation tags could be uploaded to a database shared by the Ukrainians and the U.S. government.

Finally, a one-for-one swap should be mandatory for the most sensitive of U.S. weapons. When a Javelin missile is fired, for example, the fiberglass tube should be returned in order to receive a replacement missile.

Such standard accountability for the weapons sent to Ukraine is not a right-wing talking point; it is something that must continue to be taken seriously and planned for. Nothing lasts forever, and for the sake of millions, hopefully, the end of this war comes soon. We must be prepared for that eventuality and for what comes after.

Wesley Satterwhite works as a consultant at the U.S. Department of State. He holds a BS in Diplomacy & International Relations from Seton Hall University and a MA in Security Studies from Georgetown University. A U.S. Army Reserve Intelligence Officer, he served in U.S. Army Europe from 2019–2020.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

The United States is in danger of losing the tech race to China.

Two weeks ago, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) issued a startling report revealing that China is leading the United States in researching and developing thirty-seven of forty-four critical or emerging technologies across key sectors, such as defense, space, artificial intelligence (AI), energy, environment, biotechnology, advanced materials, robotics, and quantum computing. The findings, which are the result of a year-long initiative in which ASPI examined 2.2 million data points, offer one of the clearest illustrations to date of China’s efforts to position itself as the global leader in science and technology.

This comes amid a collection of recent studies published over the past few years documenting China’s advances in technological innovation and research and development.

In December 2021, Harvard University’s Belfast Center warned that China is outpacing the U.S. in high-tech manufacturing and 5G and could soon overtake us in quantum computing. A study from The National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence revealed that China is poised to overtake the United States as the world leader in AI by 2030. And earlier this year, the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) issued an alarming report finding that China has now surpassed the United States in total innovation output and has already established itself as the world leader in the implementation of key, cutting-edge technologies.

The literature—coupled with increasingly frequent testimony from industry leaders, high-ranking officials, and military brass—paint a clear and concerning picture: China is beating the United States in the race to develop the transformative technologies of the future. These next-generation technologies—such as AI, quantum computing, and biotechnology—will fundamentally upend practically every facet of society. And whichever country develops them first will enjoy decades of unparalleled economic and geopolitical advantage.

If China succeeds in winning the tech race, it will capture trillions of dollars in economic value, make the world increasingly dependent on its technology and supply chains, and secure a critical military edge that would undermine the national security of the United States and our allies.

Thankfully, this outcome is far from a foregone conclusion. We still have time to channel the entrepreneurial spirit and penchant for innovation that has helped build the United States into the wealthiest, most powerful nation in the history of the globe. But doing so will require a concerted effort, and the same measure of collective focus and strategic thinking we have mustered in response to other grave threats throughout our nation’s past.

The establishment of the U.S. House of Representatives’ new Select Committee on the Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party is certainly a step in the right direction. Both Chairman Mike Gallagher (WI-8) and Ranking Member Raja Krishnamoorthi (IL-08) are serious legislators with a clear-eyed understanding of the challenges before us.

America’s elected leaders have a responsibility to lead the charge. That is why it has been disconcerting to see some in Congress pushing proposals that would handcuff innovators with onerous new regulations that dictate how our tech companies can compete, who they can compete with, and how their products should function.

This is the wrong approach.

America’s private sector technology companies play an indispensable role in driving innovation. In fact, each year, the six largest U.S. tech companies invest more in research and development than the entire Pentagon. That is why it is imperative for lawmakers to focus on enacting policies that promote innovation and ensure our brightest minds in the public and private sectors have the runway they need to pioneer the cutting-edge breakthroughs of tomorrow.

The recent reports from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute and other esteemed institutions must serve as a wake-up call. For more than eighty years, the United States has stood alone as the global leader in technological development and innovation. But now that primacy is under assault by a determined adversary with the resources and resolve to overtake us. Lawmakers and leaders from across the aisle must respond in kind and ensure we do not allow our technological edge to slip away.

Former U.S. Senators Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) and Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) are co-chairs of the American Edge Project’s Economic Advisory Board.

Image: Shutterstock.

If President Joe Biden is worried about the implications of judicial reform in the Jewish state, with its long traditions of civil debate and compromise, he should be much more concerned about Lebanon, where a U.S.-designated terrorist organization has already eviscerated the rule of law.

Talking to reporters this week, Biden implored Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu to compromise on his proposals for overhauling the Israeli judiciary, lest he plunges his country into enduring chaos. Biden and his top advisers have exerted continual pressure on Netanyahu’s government regarding the judicial overhaul, even though it is a matter of Israeli domestic politics.

Meanwhile, enduring chaos has already arrived in next-door Lebanon, where a Hezbollah-aligned government continually subverts the rule of law and the prerogatives of the judiciary.  The country has been leaderless since October, unable to elect a president. The response from Washington? A few pieties about democracy, but mostly a shrug.

Israel is a close ally, of course, while Lebanon is a nominal friend that soaks up billions of dollars of U.S. aid but is often more responsive to Tehran than Washington.

Hezbollah, bankrolled by Tehran, dominates Lebanon’s political order, propping up its members and allies in virtually every state institution, as it has for the past fifteen years. There are regular elections, but Hezbollah’s guns, its monopolization (with its partner Amal) of Shiite representation, and its overall primacy, give it veto power. Stabilizing—let alone rebuilding—the economy has proven to be far beyond the terror group’s capabilities, although it does engage in continuous obstruction of the judicial system.

The investigation into the Beirut Port explosion is a case in point.

In August 2020, Lebanon was rocked (quite literally) by a massive explosion at the Port of Beirut. Some 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate that had been unsafely stored at the port for years detonated, sending a mushroom cloud over Beirut. More than 200 people died, including multiple American citizens, thousands were injured, and hundreds of thousands were rendered homeless.

Public records indicate that Lebanese officials were aware of the dangers posed by the chemicals at the port and failed to act accordingly. As early as 2014, the head of Beirut port received notice that ammonium nitrate is “extremely hazardous” and “requires taking due diligence and precaution” to store.

The Lebanese people, the U.S. government, and the international community have called for accountability and justice, but so far neither has been served. In February, a British court held liable a London-based company that delivered the chemicals, but Lebanese officials continue to enjoy de facto immunity.

Days after the explosion, Lebanon’s High Judicial Council appointed Judge Fadi Sawan to spearhead an investigation. But mere months into his probe, Sawan was removed from the case, apparently at the request of two ex-ministers Sawan had charged with criminal negligence.

Sawan’s successor, Tarek Bitar, was forced to suspend his investigation four times between February and December 2021 due to legal challenges raised by Hezbollah and its allies. At one point, Hezbollah’s campaign to remove Bitar turned deadly; armed clashes broke out between rival parties at a Hezbollah-Amal protest in Beirut, leaving six dead.

The latest twist came in January when Bitar unexpectedly reopened his investigation and levied charges against several former ministers, including Lebanon’s top prosecutor, Ghassan Oweidat. Oweidat proceeded to file counter-charges against Bitar, impose a travel ban on the judge, and order the release of all suspects detained in connection with the case—including a U.S. national who immediately returned to the United States, circumventing travel restrictions.

Meanwhile, American officials continue to urge Lebanese officials to conduct a “swift and transparent investigation,” despite clear indications that the Hezbollah-led order will not allow it.

All of this internal jockeying has yielded little change in U.S. policy. The United States remains committed to underwriting the status quo, placing misguided trust in Lebanon’s civil institutions. Look no further than the State Department’s annual Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, which was released last week: the 46-page report includes one paragraph on the Port investigation and fails to acknowledge Hezbollah’s intimidation tactics altogether.

It is time Washington mustered an appetite for tougher action.

In December, Senators Robert Menendez and James Risch wrote to Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen petitioning the administration to implement “a more forward-leaning policy.” Citing Hezbollah’s “attempts to derail basic state functions,” including “the constant delaying actions targeting investigations,” Menendez and Risch proposed sanctioning a “spectrum” of Lebanese political leaders in tandem with our European allies.

There is little point in waiting any longer for Lebanon to implement critical reforms. Washington has a vested interest in justice for the American victims of the blast and in spurring an overhaul of Lebanon’s broken political system. Imposing sanctions in concert with our European allies would help marginalize the corrupt and malign actors who are preventing a credible investigation of the port explosion and, more broadly, killing any hope of reform. The Biden administration should refocus its efforts on a country that actually needs help.

Natalie Ecanow is a research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. FDD is a Washington, DC-based, nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.

Image: Shutterstock.

China’s President Xi Jinping is the latest world leader to offer a plan to end Russia’s war on Ukraine. With recent success brokering the re-establishment of diplomatic relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran, Xi’s efforts are another sign of China’s global ambitions and that its influence is not confined to northeast Asia. Xi’s special relationship with Putin has led to a deepening of ties and a goal of a “no limits” partnership, but Xi’s efforts will be fruitless. Ukraine’s ability to fight more effectively than Russia combined with Russia’s history of violating international norms and disregarding security agreements with Ukraine forestall Xi’s efforts to broker peace.

When the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, the world’s third-largest nuclear weapons stockpile was on Ukrainian territory. While Kyiv had physical control of the weapons, Moscow retained operational control and launch capabilities. Through considerable U.S. pressure, Ukraine signed the 1994 Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances. In exchange for relinquishing physical control of the nuclear weapons, Russia, the United States, the UK, and later France and China agreed to support Ukraine’s independence, sovereignty, and Russia would refrain from the use of force or economic coercion against Ukraine.

The 1997 Treaty on Friendship, Cooperation, and Partnership between Ukraine and the Russian Federation reaffirmed the post-Cold War status quo. Article 3 clearly states, the countries will maintain “relations with each other on the principles of mutual respect, sovereign equality, territorial integrity, the inviolability of borders, the peaceful settlement of disputes, the non-use of force or threat of force, including economic and other means of pressure, the right of peoples to control their own destiny, non-interference in internal affairs, observance of human rights and fundamental freedoms, cooperation among States, and conscientious fulfillment of international obligations and other universally recognized norms of international law.” This was violated in 2014 when Russian military hackers exploited Ukraine’s Central Election Commission and attempted to interfere with Ukraine’s presidential elections. And Russia physically violated Ukrainian territory when it invaded in 2014, which resulted in the illegal occupation of Crimea and fomented fighting in the eastern Ukrainian oblasts of Luhansk and Donetsk.

In the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2014, the trilateral contact group composed of Russia, Ukraine, and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) signed the Minsk Protocol. With twelve goals to end the fighting and prevent escalation, the agreement was supposed to create an immediate bilateral ceasefire. Unfortunately, Russia never respected this ceasefire. After additional rounds of fighting, as Moscow tried to improve its position the parties met again just six months later when Minsk II was signed in February 2015. The agreement was endorsed this time by leaders of France and Germany. After this agreement, too, Russian-led forces continued to fight. Russia, while an original signatory of the Minsk Agreements and the principal aggressor in the conflict, untruthfully claimed not to be a party to the conflict, and rather only a “facilitator” in it. The deal required not only a ceasefire, but also the withdrawal of foreign military forces, disbanding of illegal armed groups, and returning control of the Ukrainian side of the international border with Russia back to Ukraine, all under the supervision of the OSCE. Russia did not honor the agreement, and between 2014 and early 2022, thousands of people continued to die in eastern Ukraine.

Since 2014, Russia supported its proxies in Eastern Ukraine. Casualties rose on both sides, and outside civilians were killed as well. In July 2014, 298 people died when a Russian Buk surface-to-air missile, which originated from the 53rd Anti-Aircraft Missile Brigade of the Russian Federation and was transported from Russia the day of the crash, shot down Malaysia Airlines flight 17, which was traveling from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur. Separately, while Russian delegates approved the mandate of the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission (SMM) in Ukraine from its seat in Vienna for years, Russia would then block the implementation of the mission on the ground along the Line of Contact in Donetsk and Luhansk.

On February 22, 2022, Russian president Vladimir Putin declared the Minsk agreements “no longer existed” and began to escalate his war against Ukraine. With efforts to destroy Ukrainian identity and the Ukrainian state, there is very little confidence in a China-brokered agreement to end the fighting with Russian forces inside of Ukraine’s 1991 borders. Moreover, China will not want to support any precedent which could invalidate its own claims over Taiwan, which suggests that even China’s diplomatic approach will not endorse Russia’s own claims.

When adding the regional context with Russia invading and occupying parts of regional neighbors Georgia and Moldova, Xi’s plan is insufficient to reassure Ukraine. Finally, the plan is a non-starter because of Russia’s other international law and norm violations such as interference in political processes in North America and Europe, use of information operations to undermine media in democratic countries, use of chemical weapons to target political opponents, and violations of arms control agreements with the United States.

With Russia’s track record in mind, Kyiv will continue to fight for its survival and plan for a future defined by armed resistance to Russia rather than any agreement with vague promises of security guarantees. Just as other countries in Europe sought NATO membership as a reaction to Russia’s historic and post-Cold War expansionism, Ukraine will likely do the same when the active fighting ends, seeing the vital need for a security guarantee against future Russian aggression. Just like the Korean conflict ended without a treaty in 1953 but held in check by the U.S. alliance with South Korea, this one may follow a similar path. The deterrent value of alliances remains strong and NATO members’ reactions to improving European defense since 2022 strengthen the importance of collective defense in Europe. There is some irony that no one has done more to increase the relevance (and soon, the size of NATO) than Putin himself.

It is useful to remember that war is about achieving political aims and Putin’s international position is worse off. Most outside Moscow seem to understand this as the war has been very costly for Russia in material and symbolic terms. Russia’s ground forces have been decimated, its arms industry has been tarnished, and its connections to the West are growing more restricted by the day. The ICC indictment of Putin for crimes against humanity effectively ended any prospect for post-war normalized relations, so Putin is unlikely to withdraw its forces from Ukraine. What started as Putin’s dream to become greater than Tsar Peter I may end with Putin being remembered as the last Tsar Nicholas II.

Derek S. Reveron is Professor and Chair of the National Security Affairs at the U.S. Naval War College. The views expressed in this publication are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the U.S. Naval War College, Department of the Navy, Department of Defense, or the U.S. government.

Image: Shutterstock.

Yalta, the site of the 1945 conference where American, Soviet, and British leaders shaped postwar Europe through the creation of respective spheres of influence, has become a dirty word of sorts in the annals of U.S. diplomacy.

“Yalta” has come to represent the alleged Western betrayal of its legal and moral obligations to the Czechoslovak and Polish states in the prelude to the Cold War as part of an agreement with the Soviet Union, not unlike the Western duplicity represented by “Munich.”

The latter was named after the 1938 conference where, in the prelude to World War II, under a similar sphere-of-influence deal with Nazi Germany, the Brits and French discarded their commitments to Czechoslovakia.

From that perspective, Yalta, not unlike Munich and the notion it represents of great powers dividing the international system into the spheres of influence, has been criticized by American liberal internationalists as a demonstration of a cynical and duplicitous realpolitik approach and an example of deceitful European diplomacy that seeks to achieve worldwide stability at the expense of the weak.

There is an element of hypocrisy in this critique if one considers that the Monroe Doctrine, which was followed by President Theodore Roosevelt’s “corollary,” turned the entire Western Hemisphere into a U.S. sphere of influence where the Americans have had the exclusive responsibility of preserving order and protecting the life and property in the countries in that region.

Or, as political thinker Walter Lippmann put it, “We have never thought of acknowledging the ‘right’ of Cuba or Haiti or the Republic of Panama – all of them independent and sovereign states – to contract alliances which were inconsistent with the concert of the whole North American region.”

Yet this policy pursued by liberal internationalist presidents like Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt ended up protecting U.S. political and economic interests in its strategic backyard and prevented turning it into an arena for confrontations between great powers, with the exception of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.

In a way, the dynamics of superpower diplomacy that led to the resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis. coupled with the building of the Berlin Wall a year earlier, helped transform the deal signed in Yalta—cynical or not—into a viable power-sharing agreement between Washington and Moscow.

That agreement secured stability and preserved peace in Europe for three decades and protected the interests of the United States and its NATO allies. At the same time, it prevented the turning of out-of-area regional conflicts, like in Southeast Asia or the Middle East, into military conflagrations between the two superpowers.

It formed what the late Australian international affairs scholar Coral Bell described as a “shadow condominium”: that with the relationship between Washington and Moscow swinging between competition and cooperation—not diplomatic engagement—it made it possible to manage the relationship between the two “frenemies.”

Ironically, it was in the aftermath of the Cold War, starting with Yugoslavia’s wars of succession and up to the current war in Ukraine, that bloody military conflicts have re-occurred in Europe. The sphere-of-influence system dubbed by critics as a conspiracy between great powers has been more conducive to allowing the weak, Serbs and Croats, Georgians and Ukrainians, to live in peace.

For a while in the aftermath of the Cold War, following the integration of China into the international system and the growing diplomatic engagement between the world’s two largest economic superpowers, there was some talk promoted by realpolitik types like Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski about the possibility of forming power-sharing agreements between Beijing and Washington.

Indeed, the notion of a G-2 of these two economic superpowers—proposed by Brzezinski and Fred Bergsten of the Peterson Institute for International Economics—as members of the UN Security Council, and as the most prominent rising power and the strongest “status-quo” power, working together to address the big challenges facing the international system and providing the global public goods that the world required, became quite popular—until it wasn’t. 

Reality has bitten. It has become clear that under the conditions of rapid international power transition—when the rising power would inevitably challenge the status quo and the position of the state or states that were securing the established order—rivalry between Washington and Beijing is more likely, as it is today. The idea of a G-2 now sounds more and more like science fiction.

But as Bell’s concept of “shadow condominium” suggested, when applied to Soviet-U.S. relationship after the Cuban Missile Crisis and the pre-Détente era, a temporary power-sharing arrangement can emerge during periods of acute crisis engaging the interests of the two dominant powers. To put it differently, rising tensions between the two could also encourage the development of mechanisms that prevent an international crisis from turning into a full-blown war, as it did in 1962.

But as foreign policy expert Brendan Taylor points out, once that danger had passed, that arrangement retreated “into the shadows of the future,” and default adversarial postures resumed; although there was always “a prospect for the condominium to re-emerge out of those shadows during times of deep crisis,” becoming an integral element of their relationship to be re-activated when the threat of military confrontation rises.

Is it possible, wonders Taylor, that while we need to recognize the way that our period of power transition affects the relationship between China and the United States in an adversarial or even dangerous direction, we could also envision the existence of the “shadow condominium” “during such periods could provide stability through joint great power management of the balance of power between the two.

In a way, the current mix of competition and cooperation in Sino-American relationship, especially when one considers the continuing deep economic ties between them notwithstanding all the talk about “de-coupling,” creates the conditions for the management of the balance of power. Indeed, Taylor mentions the way the two have tried to stabilize the Korean Peninsula in face of North Korea’s nuclear strategy and despite growing Sino-American tensions has averted a military conflict over the issue.

From that perspective, the concept of a U.S.-China “shadow condominium” could manifest itself in the event of a crisis between the United States and China over Taiwan. Both countries have an interest in avoiding direct military conflict, much like America and the Soviet Union did in 1962, which could include a possible nuclear confrontation.

That kind of arrangement wouldn't amount to a formal power-sharing agreement between two nations. They don't share common values or understanding of international relations. It certainly won't take the form of respective spheres of influence in Asia.

But in the long run, it could create incentives for the evolution of a more stable balance of power system in the Indo-Pacific region. The nations of Southeast Asia seek to avert a military conflict between the two regional giants. Meanwhile, Japan, South Korea, and Australia would not be under pressure to acquire nuclear military capabilities, on one hand, and yet won’t feel marginalized under a Sino-American co-management system, on the other hand. Additionally, India, like Western Europe during the Cold War, could help promote Sino-American détente in the future.

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

Image: Shutterstock.

Vladimir Lenin once observed that “There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen.” And then there were Five Days in March, when a new and promising future began to unfold—one marked by broad-based cooperation among democratic allies and a growing awareness of the convergence of security in the Indo-Pacific and Europe.

The Five Days began on March 16, when Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida welcomed the Republic of Korea’s President Yoon Suk-yeol, the first visit by a Korean president in twelve years. The summit came about as a result of Yoon’s decision to move beyond the past, reflected in the contentious dispute over wartime forced labor, to focus on the future in the Korea-Japan relations and the development of political, economic, and security ties. The summit marked a return to the “Future-Oriented Relationship,” outlined in the joint statement at the Kim-Obuchi Summit of 1998.

On March 17, the defense ministers of Japan, the United Kingdom, and Italy met in Tokyo to discuss the basic design of a sixth-generation fighter aircraft to be co-produced under the Global Compact Air Program, agreed to in December 2022. The meeting followed the January 10 announcement by Prime Ministers Kishida and Giorgia Meloni to upgrade Japan-Italy ties to the level of a strategic partnership.

On March 18, Germany’s Chancellor Olaf Scholz visited Tokyo to participate in the first Japan-Germany Inter-Governmental Consultations focused on economic security. Both governments condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, expressed support for the rules-based international economic and political order, and opposition to economic coercion. The governments also agreed to take steps to strengthen defense and security cooperation and develop their strategic dialogue. Their joint statement expressed the recognition that “the security of Europe and that of the Indo-Pacific are closely linked.”

On March 20, Kishida, in New Delhi, announced “Japan’s New Plan for a Free and Open Indo-Pacific – Together with India as an Indispensable Partner. “

As for the New Plan, Kishida explained the present need, an era in which there is no agreement on what the international order should be. At this point “FOIP is a vision that is in fact gaining in relevance…a visionary concept…whose fundamental concept remains the same…We will enhance the connectivity of the Indo-Pacific region…into a place that values, freedom, the rule of law, free from force or coercion, and make it prosperous.” The prime minister set out “three Principles for Peace and Rules for Prosperity to include “respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity and opposition to unilateral changes in the status quo by force.” He condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and expressed Japan’s opposition to “any unilateral changes into the status quo by force anywhere in the world.”

Kishida committed Japan’s economic, financial, and technological resources to address issues of concern across the Global South, including, high-quality infrastructure, health, the environment, digital connectivity, security in the maritime domain, and the strengthening of maritime law enforcement capabilities. The New Plan would highlight diversity, inclusion, openness, and equal partnership.

So where are these Five Days in March heading?

In Northeast Asia, the normalization of the ROK-Japan relationship has opened the door to increased security, diplomatic, and economic cooperation. In the realm of security, it has enhanced deterrence against the mutually shared threat posed by North Korea’s rapidly expanding missile and nuclear programs. Normalization has also expanded opportunities for trilateral cooperation with the United States, not only in Northeast Asia but also in support of a Free and Open Indo-Pacific as outlined in the Phnom Penh Statement on U.S.-Japan-Republic of Korea Trilateral Partnership for the Indo-Pacific, released on November 13, 2022.

Meanwhile, Japan, Italy, and the United Kingdom’s agreement on the co-production of a sixth-generation fighter speaks to the increasing engagement of European democracies in the Indo-Pacific. Over the past several years, governments in France, the Netherlands, Germany, and the UK as well as the European Union have released their respective Indo-Pacific strategies. Each focused on the importance of stability in the Indo-Pacific to European prosperity and on the challenges posed by China to regional security and the rules-based international order.

The UK’s Integrated security review of 2021 announced a “tilt” toward the Indo-Pacific, an engagement marked by “a greater and more persistent presence than any European country.” The UK’s Integrated Refresh Review 2023, called attention to “a new network of ‘Atlantic-Pacific’ partnerships, based on a shared view that the prosperity and security of the Euro-Atlantic and Indo-Pacific are inextricably linked.” The 2023 document moved engagement from a “tilt” to engagement, as a “stronger and enduring, and a permanent pillar of the UK’s international policy.” The AUKUS agreement is a case in point.

That Kishida chose New Delhi as the launch site for his New Free and Open Indo-Pacific Plan honors the history of the Free and Open Indo-Pacific. New Delhi was, as Kishida acknowledged, the stage on which former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe set out the initial vision of a Free and Open Indo-Pacific. Likewise, it reflects the long-standing Japan-India friendship, having grown in strategic significance during the Abe-Modi years as both Tokyo and New Delhi became increasingly concerned about China’s increasing assertiveness across the Indo-Pacific region. And, it marked a turn to the Global South and recognition of India’s leading role there.

The Five Days in March, capped by Kishida’s visit to Ukraine, again underscored the growing convergence of security in Europe and the Indo-Pacific. At the same time, those Five Days in March also played into the three days in Moscow of the Putin-Xi Summit and offered a clear choice—an international order governed by authoritarianism and control or a future defined by freedom and openness.

James Przystup is a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute.

Image: Shutterstock.

Russian president Vladimir Putin’s decision to deploy nuclear weapons with nuclear-capable launchers to Belarus caught the attention of media commentators and military experts this week. This announcement comes on the heels of Putin’s three-day meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in Moscow, after which a number of agreements were reached by the two heads of state on political, military, and economic cooperation going forward. Russia and China are now explicitly and jointly working to create a new world order in which the United States is marginalized and, from their perspective, a unipolar world dominated by the United States is supplanted by a multipolar system more conducive to Chinese and Russian objectives.

The apparent counterpoint, between the hubris at the level of high politics and the Russian decision to station nuclear weapons outside the borders of the Russian Federation, could not be more revealing. The golden handshakes between Xi and Putin should have provided Russia with a renewed sense of confidence relative to its political and military objectives. Instead, Putin moved some of his military pawns on the chessboard as a form of nuclear signaling and messaging. This move is not a sign of confidence, but of uncertainty and desperation. It is also dangerous.

After more than a year of fighting in Ukraine, Russian military forces have been unable to close the deal. An initial blitzkrieg fell short of taking Kiev or inducing the government of President Vladimir Zelenskyy to capitulate. Russia’s military operations in eastern and southern Ukraine have resulted in bloody stalemates and minimal advances. Russian casualties have been enormous and the troops dispirited. In addition, Russia’s various factions of siloviki are at loggerheads, including obvious rivalries between the mercenary Wagner Group and regular army forces. Increased draft levees have led many young men of military age to flee the country. Meanwhile, Putin’s gamble has united and revived NATO as a political alliance and increased its military capabilities relative to those of Russia. Adding Finland (and possibly Sweden) to NATO membership only compounds this faux pas.

On the other hand, economic sanctions have impacted negatively Russia’s economy far less than NATO had expected or hoped, and majorities of the Russian public still support the war against Ukraine. In addition, it is reasonable to suppose that Russian political and military leaders anticipate that a long war against Ukraine favors Russia, on account of the latter’s larger population and greater resources. Russian military thinking recognizes a distinction between wars of annihilation, in which a decisive victory is obtained by one rapid and overpowering military operation, and a war of attrition, in which two sides attempt to wear one another out of manpower, resources, and will over an extended period of time. And this distinction might apply to the war in Ukraine, were we still living in the twentieth century.

But we are not. The culture of the twenty-first century is driven by the Internet and its globalization of information. Like everything else, this culture spills over into decisions about war and peace. Heads of state and commanders are pressured by a twenty-four-hour news cycle to provide omnipresent gratification and reassuring symbolism, especially if they are accountable to voters in a democracy. But even if not, the image of defeat or stalemate on the battlefield will be projected for the world audience to see, and to the humiliation of leaders even as narcissistic as those in Russia’s high command. “Winning” a war of attrition, if the cost in blood and treasure is too high, comes with an embedded political risk. The nostalgia among Russians for Stalin, grotesque as it seems to westerners, is not a desire for a return to the gulags and mass executions of that era. It is, instead, a remembrance of victory in the Great Fatherland War and the pinnacle of Soviet power that resulted from it.

Even Putin must realize that Russia faces an urgent necessity to show results in the battlespace, and reports of a large Russian offensive against Ukraine planned for later this spring are repeatedly appearing in news sources. On the other hand, the Ukrainians are also planning counteroffensives in the east and south, and the United States, together with its NATO allies, has promised to deliver more advanced weaponry to Kiev, including modern tanks and personnel carriers, longer-range missiles, drones, and intelligence support for battlefield operations. Some critics of the Biden administration lament that more advanced weapons should have been sent to Ukraine sooner, but newer systems require training time for operators and an accelerated production line for heavy metal items. Thus far, Ukrainians’ battlefield agility, determination, and skilled use of intelligence and command-control-communications systems have checked Russia’s superior numbers and plodding commanders.

Russia thus cannot assume that it has forever to wear out motivated Ukrainian forces, and Putin’s willingness to deploy tactical nuclear weapons outside of Russia (but, presumably, under Russian control), together with his prior threats of nuclear first use, cannot be dismissed as misguided messaging only. It tells us that, if Russia faces serious battlefield reversals to the extent that fundamental objectives are lost and Ukraine appears close to regaining all of its former territories, a misguided Russian decision in favor of “limited” nuclear first use is possible. Russia might take this decision, not only as a means of compensation for a conventional war that is not going well, but also on the assumption that the first nuclear weapon fired in anger since the bombing of Nagasaki would have unprecedented shock value. It might, according to some Russian thinking, stun the Ukrainian high command, divide NATO politically, create mass public fear across Europe and North America, and push the world toward acquiescence to Russian terms for a peace settlement.

On the other hand, as Clausewitz warned, the character of war changes from one era to another, based on changes in technology and tactics, but the nature of war does not. One aspect of the nature of war is that escalation is inherent in the process of fighting. Left to its own devices, and undisciplined by wiser political control from heads of state, fighting has a natural tendency to expand in destructiveness. So a NATO reaction to a Russian nuclear first use might not be acquiescence, but retaliation. Even a ”demonstrative” nuclear shot by Russia—say, by exploding a weapon at a high enough altitude to create a widespread electromagnetic pulse (EMP) that damages critical space-based military assets and/or disrupted terrestrial communications and control systems—could fail to achieve its desired effects. Instead of stunning NATO into backing down, it might enrage public and elite opinion further against Russia.

In addition to the possibility that Russia’s decision to deploy some of its nuclear weapons in Belarus is a mistaken message based on faulty reasoning, it also raises technical issues. If these weapons are intended as deterrents, they may also be seen as attractive targets for Ukrainian commando operations or dissident Belarus opponents of the Lukashenko regime. Moreover, suppose dissatisfied Russian field commanders or their mercenary cronies decide to hijack the weapons from storage sites and use them to demand ransom. In theory, only the president of Russia and his top military commanders can authorize nuclear release, but in practice, the chain of command is only as strong as its weakest link. History shows that stranger things happen within militaries that are on the cusp of defeat and disintegration. Could a cabal of praetorians in Moscow combined with duplicitous field operators in Belarus create chaos in the midst of a fraught field of battle, or in the face of an impending Russian strategic defeat?

Stephen Cimbala is a Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Penn State, Brandywine.

Lawrence Korb is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and former Assistant Secretary of Defense.

Image: Shutterstock.

Winds of change blow through the arena of international affairs, as the global balance of power shifts dramatically. March 22, 2023, marked the beginning of an unprecedented era as Russia’s slow descent into vassalage under China—a process that began when the former decided to invade Ukraine—reached a tipping point. This transformation not only signifies the formation of an unofficial alliance between these two powers, but also the dawn of a new era—a “Pax Sinica.”

Russia, once a formidable superpower with imperialist ambitions in China now finds itself in a position of dependence on a country it once bullied. How did this happen? For years, Russia’s witnessed a steady erosion of its influence on the global stage, resulting from a combination of economic stagnation, international sanctions, and waning soft power. As the West has sought to isolate and punish Russia for its actions in Ukraine, Georgia, and other areas, China has stepped in to fill the void.

While it’s true that Russia and China have a long history of diplomatic cooperation, what we are witnessing now is a much deeper and more significant partnership. As the West continued to squeeze Russia economically, Moscow’s had no choice but to pivot eastward, seeking solace in China's embrace. Today, it is evident that the relationship has evolved from a mere partnership to a dynamic where Russia has become increasingly beholden to China.

The Sino-Russian alliance is solidified by their shared interests, such as the desire to challenge the U.S.-led international order and create a multipolar world. This is not an opinion, but rather the global ambition that has been stated by both leaders, with Xi Jinping directly claiming that together, the two countries will create “changes not seen in a hundred years.” The interdependence between these two nations is evident in their booming bilateral trade and coordination on regional and global issues. However, this partnership comes at a cost, especially to Russia’s sovereignty.

China’s economic clout has allowed it to invest heavily in Russia’s energy sector, infrastructure, and defense industries. As a result, Beijing now wields considerable leverage over Moscow's political and economic decisions. Moreover, as Russia’s economy is heavily reliant on its energy exports, China’s voracious appetite for natural resources has made it the primary consumer of Russian oil and gas. This dynamic has led to an imbalance in the relationship, rendering Russia increasingly subservient to China.

The unofficial alliance between Russia and China marks the beginning of Pax Sinica: a Chinese-dominated era of relative peace and stability, akin to the Pax Romana of the Roman Empire or the Pax Americana of the post-World War II era, at least in the Eastern Hemisphere. This new era is characterized by China’s rise as a serious global superpower, with a sphere of influence extending across Asia, Africa, and even into Europe.

As China expands its global reach, other nations, especially those in Asia, will be compelled to accept its hegemony—either willingly, under duress, or naturally out of circumstance. Russia’s gradual submission to Chinese authority is a stark example of this new order. The West, too, must now reassess its approach to international relations, as the dawning of Pax Sinica will challenge the liberal, rules-based order that has shaped the world for decades.

As the Pax Sinica takes hold, it is not only Russia that will find itself within the orbit of China’s expanding influence. Southeast Asia and China’s neighboring countries are highly likely to be enveloped by this new era of Chinese dominance, effectively reinstating China as the center of the Asian world; a position it hasn’t been in since the High Qing era (1783–1799), when China possessed the fourth-largest empire in history.

No one will feel the dawn of the Pax Sinica as much as Southeast Asia. China has long maintained an interest in region, given its strategic location along vital trade routes, its abundance of natural resources, and its rapidly growing economies. Through initiatives such as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), China has been positioning itself as the primary driver of regional development in the area, providing much-needed infrastructure and investment to these countries. This economic engagement extends beyond Southeast Asia, reaching into South Asia, Central Asia, and even Africa, thus amplifying China’s influence on a global scale.

The Pax Sinica is also likely to see China continuing to assert its dominance over the contested South China Sea, a region rich in resources and a critical artery for global trade. We already know of China's construction of artificial islands and military facilities in the area, and how that’s alarmed Southeast Asian neighbors and raised tensions with the United States. However, as the Pax Sinica unfolds, smaller nations in the region may find it increasingly difficult to challenge China’s claims and actions. This development will further cement China’s position as the regional hegemon, with the potential to reshape the maritime security landscape in the Asia-Pacific.

It is important to note that China’s rise is not solely predicated on its economic and military prowess. The propagation of its political ideology and the projection of its soft power also play crucial roles. As China’s neighbors become more intertwined with its economic and political systems, they may find themselves gradually adopting aspects of the Chinese model, including its authoritarian tendencies and strict control of information. Sinicization of the region is not new, but Marxist-Leninist Sinicization is, and could slowly but surely alter the political landscape of the region, further entrenching China’s dominance.

Through a combination of economic engagement, military assertiveness, and soft power projection, China is poised to reclaim its position as the center of the East Asian world. Russia’s transformation into a quasi-Chinese vassal state is a harbinger of a new geopolitical era, and marks the beginning of both an unofficial alliance between these two powers and the emergence of Pax Sinica. This transformation will have far-reaching implications for the region's political and economic landscape, heralding a new era of Chinese dominance that will demand careful navigation by both regional and global players.

Symington W. Smith is a member of the National Committee on US-China Relations.

Image: Shutterstock.

Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, many observers expected that Putin’s proxies in the Western Balkans would face hard times, yet the opposite seems to be occurring. Instead of punishing Kremlin’s long-standing allies, the Biden administration has chosen to appease these actors in order to drive a wedge between Russia and its supporters. This abrupt change in U.S. policy can best be seen in countries such as Kosovo, Montenegro, and Bosnia, and it sets a dangerous precedent as it helps facilitate conditions for the next conflict in the Balkans.

Kosovo and Montenegro have been unwavering U.S. allies for decades, yet both are facing pressure from Washington to make concessions to Serbia, the utmost pro-Russian country in Europe. Kosovo is publicly being pressured by the U.S. State Department to change its constitution in order to create a Serb-run para-state structure in the north of its territory, conspicuously named the Association of Serb Municipalities. Kosovo’s Constitutional Court already ruled in 2019 that such a structure is not permissible, yet American officials are adamantly requesting that Albin Kurti, Kosovo’s prime minister, introduce such changes in order to appease the Serbs.

Last year, Montenegro signed the so-called “Basic Agreement” with the Serbian Orthodox Church, giving it considerable power compared to other religious communities. The controversial agreement came under scrutiny from numerous pro-Western political parties, human rights activists, as well as Montenegro’s president, Milo Djukanovic. Their main concerns rest not only on the lack of transparency surrounding the agreement, but that it is being used as a tool within Montenegro to foster closer ties with Russia and Serbia. While the EU adopted a resolution outlining concerns that the Orthodox Church promotes Russia in countries such as Montenegro, Serbia, and Bosnia, the United States has been notably absent on the topic.

In Bosnia, pro-U.S. allies were caught by surprise last October when the U.S. supported controversial changes to Bosnia’s electoral law that were imposed by Christian Schmidt, the High Representative of Bosnia. In an alarming move, Schmidt changed the country’s electoral law minutes after the general election polls closed. The imposed law was praised by the government of Croatia, as it favors the HDZ political party. Croatian foreign minister Gordan Grlic Radman tweeted that the government of Croatia was satisfied with the outcome and pleased that their efforts and arguments were recognized. This open admission of interference into Bosnia’s internal affairs evidenced that the United States and EU gave in to the demands of Croatia and the HDZ at the expense of Bosnia’s democracy. As a result, some of the key positions in the country’s newly formed government are filled by politicians that are currently sanctioned by the United States, such as Marinko Cavara, the speaker of the House of Representatives.

Despite the Biden administration’s best efforts to entice pro-Putin supporters away from the Kremlin, the last few months have proven that the change in policy has not been effective. For example, on January 9, Milorad Dodik, the president of Bosnia’s smaller entity known as Republika Srpska (RS), broke the law once again by celebrating an illegal holiday. Dodik’s military parade invoked fear and violence as he once again called for the secession of RS from Bosnia. He went on to award Vladimir Putin with a medal of honor, in hopes that RS can further strengthen its cooperation with Russia. And while the United States has placed sanctions on Dodik and engages in anti-corruption efforts in places like Bosnia, no such initiatives or pressure can be seen in Serbia or Croatia.

A year into Russia’s attack on Ukraine, Serbian president Aleksandar Vucic has yet to join the West in sanctioning Russia, choosing to tacitly ally himself with Putin instead. Late last year, he once again stroked tensions in the region by placing Serbian troops on the border with neighboring Kosovo, exacerbating an already tense situation. In the last few years, Vucic has gone to great lengths to militarize Serbia by increasing its defense spending by 70 percent, and purchasing state-of-the-art offensive military equipment from both Russia and China.

However, the pro-Putin support in the Balkans does not end with Dodik and Vucic but can be seen in Croatia as well. Zoran Milanovic, the current president of Croatia was recently condemned by Kyiv for questioning the territorial integrity of Ukraine. He has gone on to say that Ukraine has no place in NATO and objects to Zagreb sending military aid. Further, he sparked further outrage when he publicly denied the Srebrenica Genocide and claimed that Kosovo was forcefully taken from Serbia.

The Biden administration’s decision to appease pro-Putin actors in order to try and draw a wedge between the Kremlin and its Western Balkans proxies is a dangerous and short-sighted policy. First, it sends the wrong message to the world, and signals that the United States does not seem to stand for its principles or its longstanding allies. Second, by rewarding and empowering pro-Putin actors, the U.S. can be seen as betraying not only its allies, but the Western norms that have helped democratization efforts in that part of the world for the last three decades.

Governments and actors that are led by strongmen have no interest in embracing democratic values. Rewarding such actors is not rooted in the American tradition of promoting democracy abroad. A then-Senator Joe Biden often echoed this sentiment when he pushed the Clinton administration to counter Serbia’s aggression against its smaller neighbors. In the 1990s, Serbia’s irredentist policies culminated in genocide against Bosnia’s Muslim population and the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo’s non-Serb population. However, President Biden has chosen to provide support to Serbia’s president, who served as a high-ranking government official in the Milosevic regime.

The collateral damage of the current U.S. policy towards the Western Balkans will only work to erode the decades of trust and friendship between the United States and pro-Western people of the region. Further, it is important to note that the small nations of the Western Balkans have relied on the United States and NATO security umbrella for decades, however, if they become unable to rely on that security, they will have no choice but to try to seek out new alliances in the East, as well as develop their own defensive capabilities. As a result, this may lead to instability and further tensions in the region.

The Biden administration needs to revisit the lessons from the past and re-think the current U.S. policy towards the Western Balkans. If history has taught us anything, it is that the United States should not abandon its principles for a temporary advantage. If the U.S. is seeking to win the hearts and minds of the people in the Balkans, it should maintain principled, consistent, and reliable policies that do not reward those that seek to undermine the core Western democratic values. President Biden’s administration should take (Senator) Biden’s advice about the Western Balkans.

Reuf Bajrovic is the Vice President of US-Europe Alliance and a Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.

Ajla Delkic is the President of the Advisory Council for Bosnia and Herzegovina (ACBH) and co-chair of the Southeast Europe Coalition.

Image: Shutterstock.

While the world’s attention is primarily concentrated on Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine, other worrying developments are unfolding along Russia’s periphery. In the South Caucasus, Iran is concentrating military forces along the border with Azerbaijan and preparing to hold military exercises near the country’s exclave of Nakhchivan. There are reports of visits by high-ranking officials, including the commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps Ground Forces, General Sardar Mohammad Pakpur, and the commander of the Iranian Border Troops, Ahmad Ali Gudarzi, to the border zone. In addition, on March 11, Azerbaijan was also alarmed by an Iranian military aircraft making a non-stop flight along the Azerbaijan-Iran state border from the direction of Zangilan District to Bilasuvar District and backward.

These provocative developments represent a marked departure from the regional status quo—if these Iranian exercises were to go ahead, for example, it would be the third time such have been conducted in the past two years, which never occurred in this region prior to the Second Karabakh War of 2020.

Yet these developments are not occurring in a vacuum. The reality is that Iran’s growing assertiveness in relations with Azerbaijan, along with its other attempts to obtain a stronger influence over the South Caucasus, is due to the gradual decline in Russian hegemony over this region. Washington, which is already concerned about recent developments with regard to Iran, should pay close attention. 

A Potential Azerbaijani-Iranian Conflict?

Iran’s military moves are not the only signs of recently increased aggression. The developments along the Azerbaijani-Iranian border come on the heels of a violent January attack in Tehran against the Azerbaijani embassy that resulted in the death of a security officer and the injury of two others. Azerbaijan officially characterized this as a terrorist attack and evacuated its diplomats from the Iranian capital.

On the other side of the border, Azerbaijan’s security agencies have been working overtime, conducting multiple operations over the past months in response to significantly greater Iranian espionage and covert activities. Dozens of people, who reportedly carried out assignments for Iranian special services, have been detained. In this context, the assassination attempt against an Azerbaijani parliamentarian, Fazil Mustafa, who is rather critical of Iran on March 28, was interpreted by many in Azerbaijan as being linked with Iran. The fact that both attacks took place after Azerbaijan decided to open an embassy in Israel, and the latter attack happened on the same day when Azerbaijan’s foreign minister visited Tel Aviv to inaugurate the Azerbaijani embassy, appeared suspicious. Most damningly, as of today, March 31, Azerbaijan’s foreign ministry confirmed that the “initial traces of the investigation of the terrorist act against Fazil Mustafa point to Iran.”

Understandably, these various developments have heightened the tensions between the two countries significantly, and raised concerns that a violent confrontation may occur.

Why is Iran doing this? The answer is simple: regional geopolitics are changing, and not necessarily in Tehran’s favor.

For Iran, the “encroachment” of external players into the South Caucasus is inadmissible. The Russia-Ukraine war complicated the region’s geopolitics for Iran, as the European Union (EU) and the United States have increased their influence by strengthening their mediating role in the Armenia-Azerbaijan peace process. This has effectively sidelined Russia, and was followed by the deployment of a monitoring mission to the Armenia-Azerbaijan border in the aftermath of the Prague summit on October 6. Against this background, increasingly closer relations between Israel and Azerbaijan, and the emerging possible Israel-Turkiye-Azerbaijan trilateral cooperation platform, further worries Iranian authorities. Tehran also views Azerbaijan’s and Turkiye’s plans to launch a transportation corridor via the southern Armenian territory as a threat, as this would allegedly cut off Iran’s borders with Armenia and deal a severe blow to Iran’s regional standing.

Russia’s Declining Regional Influence

This geopolitical turbulence is in large part because Russia’s regional hegemony, which it has enjoyed over the region since the early nineteenth century, is fading away and the security order it built in the region—i.e., its hegemonic stability—is eroding.

Until recently, Iran had to recognize the South Caucasus as part of Russia’s sphere of influence. This has been the region’s state of affairs ever since the Treaty of Turkmenchay, which ended the Russo-Persian War of 1828 and established Russian control over the South Caucasus. Russian dominance in the region continued to be acceptable for Iran following the collapse of the Soviet Union, as Moscow managed to prevent the “incursion” of rival powers like the United States and Turkiye.

Yet in the wake of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Moscow’s dominance in the South Caucasus is weakening, thereby opening up opportunities for other powers. For example, Azerbaijan is now able to more vehemently criticize Russia’s support for what it considers to be (and the international community broadly agrees is) a separatist regime in its Karabakh region, tries to end the mission of the Russian peacekeeping contingent, deepens its strategic alliance with Turkiye, increases its contributions to European energy security, and relies more on the EU’s mediation in the peace process with Armenia. Armenia, meanwhile, increasingly defies Moscow’s authority by distancing itself from Russia’s military bloc, is building closer relations with the European countries and the United States, and has invited an EU mission to monitor the security situation along Armenia’s border with Azerbaijan.

America Must Pay Attention

These are worrying developments for Iran. Some of its interests overlap with Armenian, in that both countries seek to counterbalance Azerbaijan and its alliance with Turkiye and Israel. The recent growing military and economic ties between Yeveran and Tehran have provided an opportunity for Iran to more assertively involve itself in the region and form a de-facto alliance against the two Turkic states. Part of this includes increasing bilateral trade, with a turnover from $700 million to $3 billion. Iran is also discussing supplying combat drones to Armenia.

Iran’s regional ambitions, prompted by Russia’s regional decline, are thus increasingly regarded as a security threat, especially by and for Azerbaijan. Notably, the United States is also concerned by these developments.

In Washington, where prominent voices are once again voicing concern over Iran’s nuclear program and Iranian actions in Syria, Tehran’s recent moves into the South Caucasus are cause for conversation. In a recent Senate committee hearing, Secretary of State Antony Blinken stressed the importance of supporting Azerbaijan with military education and training funds, noting that  “Azerbaijan has a long border with Iran, which needs defending.”

Yet more needs to be done if Washington and its allies wish to ensure that this vital yet underrecognized region of the world remains stable. This is especially pertinent given the war in Ukraine: Azerbaijan is not only now an important alternative supplier of energy for the West, but also a critical link in East-West international trade. The best thing that the Biden administration can, and should continue doing, is playing a mediating role in the Armenia-Azerbaijan peace process. Without such an agreement between those two countries, there can only be turbulent times ahead of the South Caucasus.

Vasif Huseynov is Head of Department at the Center of Analysis of International Relations (AIR Center).

Image: Peter Hermes Furian/Shutterstock.

In January 2023, Guyanaese president Irfaan Ali visited India, meeting Indian prime minister Narendra Modi. The two leaders discussed a broad range of economic opportunities, but the major topic was oil.

Guyana, which has emerged as the world’s newest petro-state, has plenty of oil; India, one of the world’s largest economies, lacks oil. Indeed, India is one of the world’s largest importers of oil, ranking third behind China and the United States. The tempo of Guyanese-Indian relations has accelerated over the past two years and is likely to deepen—an important development that has geopolitical implications not just for Guyana, but also for the Southern Caribbean Energy Matrix and the United States.

India has long had relations with the Caribbean, with many people from the South Asian nation arriving in the region to work on sugar estates in the early nineteenth century. King Sugar has long been dead, but oil is the newest king, pumping up the Guyanese economy, helping to revitalize Trinidad and Tobago’s (more on the natural gas side), and holding out hope for Suriname. India began buying Guyanese oil in 2021.

The January Ali-Modi meeting demonstrated that there is a mutual interest in further developing relations between the two countries, with oil the key issue. However, other areas of potential cooperation were discussed, including agriculture, infrastructure development, pharmaceuticals, healthcare, technology, and defense cooperation. Ali also met with Indian president Droupadi Murmu, and his itinerary included visits to Delhi (the country’s capital territory), Kanpur (a major industrial center), Bangalore (India’s tech capital), and Mumbai (the business and financial capital).

In February, Guyanaese vice president Bharrat Jagdeo arrived in India and met with Murmu. One of the results of the meeting was a memorandum of understanding (pending approval of respective governments) over future oil sales. Additionally, it was reported that there was potential for Indian investment in Guyana’s oil sector. Guyana has indicated that it plans to auction fourteen offshore oil blocks, while taking back 20 percent of the Stabroek offshore oil block from ExxonMobil—which could be sold to Indian oil companies.

The Jagdeo visit also discussed tapping Indian skilled workers to help develop Guyana’s emerging gas industry as well as help in several other sectors, including agriculture. Guyana also indicated an interest in defense cooperation (including potential fast patrol boat purchases from India) and improved transportation linkages between the two countries, which is expected to be backed by an air services agreement (ASA). This would allow airlines from both countries to travel back and forth (currently, travel must transit through New York or London).

The main driver from the Indian side is energy. Despite efforts to develop clean energy, India remains heavily dependent on fossil fuels. Coal is the South Asian country’s leading energy source, accounting for 46 percent of total energy in 2021, followed by oil (23 percent), biomass (21 percent), natural gas (6 percent), and primary electricity—defined as hydro, nuclear, water, and wind (4 percent).

Although New Delhi understands the need to reduce its carbon footprint, it is not likely to make a radical shift away from fossil fuels anytime soon. Modi announced in 2021 that his country would zero out its greenhouse gas emissions by 2070. This means that while India will work on developing clean energy alternatives, it will continue to be a major buyer of oil and gas over the medium term.

India’s energy picture has been further complicated by the Russo-Ukrainian War, which commenced in February 2022 and resulted in Western economic sanctions on the sale of Russian oil and natural gas. To mitigate its lost Western markets, Russia significantly increased its oil exports to “friendly” countries, like China, India, and Turkey.

In late 2022, Russia passed Saudi Arabia as India’s largest source of oil, and in January 2023, the South Asian country’s Russian oil imports rose to a record 1.4 million barrels per day, up 9.2 percent from December. While cheap Russian oil is being soaked up by India’s refiners, New Delhi is under pressure from the United States on this issue. New Delhi needs U.S. support to counterbalance China, with which it fought bloody border disputes in the Himalayas in 2021 and 2022. In this context, positive U.S.-Indian relations are key to balancing China. Enter Guyana.

Although Guyana is far from India, it offers a friendly and less controversial oil source than Russia or, for that matter, Venezuela, which had earlier been an important supplier. Guyana is also friends with the United States; Indo-Guyanese constitute the country’s largest ethnic group (around 40 percent of the total population); and the two countries share a parliamentary form of government. Indian and Guyana also share faiths in Hinduism and Islam, and similar experiences as British colonies.

For Guyana, deeper relations with India offer an opportunity to diversify its trade and investment partners. While the United States has positive relations with Guyana and remains its major economic relationship, especially considering the presence of U.S. energy companies like ExxonMobil and Hess, Indian involvement could broaden the investment base. A fulsome Indian economic engagement could also help contain the influence of China, which is active in trade, the oil industry, and infrastructure development.

Yet there are limits as to what India can offer Guyana, and vice versa. It is easy to take a cynical view and opine that Guyana is after fast Indian money and that the Ali government is pandering to its Indo-Guyanese base. Moreover, India’s trade with Guyana, while on the upswing, remains relatively small; according to the International Monetary Fund’s Direction of Trade statistics for 2022, India was Guyana’s ninth-largest source of imports and twenty-eighth in terms of exports.

Looking ahead, Guyana’s national interests are to maintain its independent role in the global economy, not become a satellite of a large power, and not fall victim to the Dutch Disease (which afflicts oil-producing countries). For India, Guyana could serve as a friendly source of oil and, over time, natural gas. A more developed relationship with Guyana could also help India develop a larger role in nearby Suriname, which has yet to start exporting oil. Indeed, Surinamese president Chan Santokhi also met with Modi in January 2023. A more developed Indian role would broaden the set of economic relationships that have emerged with the Southern Caribbean Energy Matrix. A deeper Indian engagement in Guyana could help counterbalance China’s influence in the Caribbean and Latin America, something that plays well to Washington’s strategic concerns.

Dr. Scott B. MacDonald is the Chief Economist for Smith’s Research & Gradings, a Fellow with the Caribbean Policy Consortium, and a Research fellow with Global Americans. Prior to those positions, he worked for the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, Credit Suisse, Donaldson, Lufkin and Jenrette, KWR International, and Mitsubishi Corporation. His most recent book is The New Cold War, China and the Caribbean (Palgrave Macmillan 2022).

Image: Shutterstock.

Saudi Arabia and the Gulf monarchies exploring their geopolitical options with China has a dimension that the Washington debate has neglected: the kings, dictators, and their relatives across the world have accumulated hundreds of billions of dollars through the “privatization” of national budgets and/or what is known as “state capture,” where public service becomes the most profitable kind of business. 

In the 1990s, authoritarian rulers like Presidents Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire or Suharto of Indonesia were accused of stealing not less than $5 billion and $20 billion respectively, sums that were never recovered. In the Mobutu case, Swiss authorities found only several million dollars in accounts that were returned to Mobutu’s family in 2009, while Suharto’s family was ordered to repay just $324 million more than fifteen years after he abdicated from the presidency. 

Following the Arab Spring of 2011, the new government of Egypt arrested the former president, Hosni Mubarak, and his two sons, who allegedly built a business family empire estimated by some sources at a staggering $70 billion. 

The Egyptian authorities ordered the funds accumulated in Mubarak relatives’ accounts to be frozen, and following this order around 700 million Swiss francs were blocked in Switzerland, with France and Luxembourg following suit. But a decade-long legal battle finally ended so that the Swiss authorities between 2018 and 2022 have returned almost $600 million to fourteen people associated with Mubarak’s clan. Hardly a triumph for justice. 

The U.S. Department of Justice built up an international task force following the Nigerian government’s demand for locating and returning assets belonging to late dictator General Sani Abacha, his son Mohammed, and his associate Abubakar Atiku Bagudu. Due to their interminable efforts, more than $600 million in funds were transferred to the Nigerian treasury from the United States, Great Britain, and Switzerland—but the process took around a quarter of a century with the last portion of the funds, estimated at $20.7 million, being released in November 2022. 

Similar claims, put forward by half a dozen of countries, are still being considered by courts and justice and finance ministries throughout Europe and the United States. Most of the successful claims have been resolved if the nation asking for the recovery of funds has geopolitical importance for the West and has proven its transition from a dictatorship to a more democratic and liberal order.

Uzbekistan, the landlocked, most populous Central Asian country bordering Afghanistan, is a case in point. This post-Soviet republic was ruled for twenty-five years by President Islam Karimov, who enjoyed full control over the country until his death in 2016. In 2015, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project accused Russian mobile telecom operators Vimpelcom and MTS (both registered in the European Union) and Scandinavian companies TeliaSonera and Telenor of transferring more than $1 billion to Karimov’s daughter Gulnara, who later deposited them into her Swiss accounts. For twenty years, Gulnara was the country’s glamor girl, a diplomat, and a wealthy businesswoman, dabbling into pop singing, extortion, and corruption. 

The case looks notorious for two reasons. On the one hand, it resembles charges brought against Odebrecht S.A., a global construction conglomerate based in Brazil, for paying $788 million in bribes to or for the benefit of government officials in eleven foreign countries. In both cases, the companies involved cooperated with international prosecutors and agreed with penalties for their wrongdoings (Vimpelcom alone paid out $795 million to resolve U.S. and Dutch money-laundering investigations that became the largest-ever charge paid under the Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Initiative). Gulnara Karimova has been jailed since 2014, with pressure on her increasing following the death of her father in 2016. She was sentenced to thirteen years in 2020. 

On the other hand, Uzbekistan’s case looks unique because Karimova became subject to prosecution under the U.S. Magnitsky Act that targets corrupt officials all over the globe—and even if she is released by her government, she will remain indicted by the U.S. authorities until she repays the illicitly acquired funds, estimated at $865 million. 

The Uzbek government of President Shavkat Mirziyoyev, which succeeded Karimov, consequently asked Swiss, Belgian, and Irish authorities to unfreeze the funds and return them to the country’s treasury. However, in this case, the process appears to be glacial, and faces many conditions: e.g., the 2020 release of $131 million was only undertaken in exchange for a promise that the money will be invested in projects which support sustainable development under United Nations supervision (in accordance with the UN 2030 Agenda and Uzbekistan’s development strategy). Meanwhile, around $850 million remains in Switzerland, awaiting the agreement between Tashkent, Bern, and Washington.

Truly, in some cases, the governments of developing countries cannot be fully trusted since no one can guarantee that the restituted money will not be plundered again—but in many cases, some progress is achieved. 

Uzbekistan is one such case: it has liberalized considerably under Mirziyoyev, allowing freer media and conducting economic and social reforms; its modernized financial system is being hailed by the World Bank and international development agencies. It is rapidly developing, and in recent years became a vital ally for the Western world in fighting Islamic extremism in Central Asia. 

As Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s visit to Central Asia has shown, the United States is also monitoring China’s actions in Central Asia, which is doing its best to comply with the Russia sanctions. Antagonizing Tashkent is not in the interests of the United States, United Kingdom, or European Union. It remains unclear why the Western governments are so reluctant to return ill-gotten funds to governments like those of Nigeria, Uzbekistan, or Egypt that badly need money for social and economic development at a time when globalization is stalled and foreign direct investment is decreasing. 

The money flows from the world’s periphery to the global financial centers may be called the “Third Imperialism,” allowing the West to exercise its control over “the rest” without military or political pressure. Let us hope that Karimova’s case will not evolve in a similar way to Mobutu or Mubarak families’ cases. It is not in the United States or the West’s interests.

Vladislav Inozemtsev, Ph.D., is Special Advisor to MEMRI’s Russian Media Studies Project, and is the Founder and Director of Center for Post-Industrial Studies.

Image: Shutterstock.

American interests are advanced by bridging the world’s free and open spaces, thereby preventing authoritarian regimes from dividing the world into hard spheres of control. In the face of a bellicose China, a destabilizing Iran, and a marauding Russia, American interests call for holding firm on free and open Indo-Pacific and transatlantic communities, normalizing relations between Israel and the Arab nations; and using these partnerships to connect with free and open spaces throughout the greater Atlantic region, the Mediterranean, and North and East Africa.

This can best be achieved, not with military force or blank checks of foreign aid, but with active diplomacy, encouraging foreign direct investment and security cooperation on key strategic projects, and building stronger bridges between the transatlantic community, Eurasia, and the Indo-Pacific. Energy, digital, and transportation ties should be the focus of that bridge-building.

This initiative can start with existing initiatives that are already focused on preserving free and open spaces.

From the East

The Quad. In the Indo-Pacific, the Quad—India, Japan, Australia, and the United States—provides an overarching mechanism for promoting a free and open Pacific. This partnership has already borne fruit, including better coordination for engaging Pacific Island nations and constructively engaging in development in the Indian Ocean region.

The Quad Plus. This second set of relationships allows other partners to flow in and partner where it makes sense on common projects and initiatives, including Taiwan, Vietnam, South Korea, Singapore, the Philippines, and others. One example is the joint cooperation of Indo-Pacific nations in responding to the COVID pandemic.

The Middle Corridor. This initiative is establishing a corridor linking Central Asian nations (like Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan) and Caucuses nations (such as Azerbaijan and Georgia) to the West. This project can produce resilient, additive supply chains, energy and material resources, and digital connectivity, initiatives developed by the nations themselves outside the oppressive influence of China, Iran, and Russia.

The Abraham Accords. Normalizing relations between Israel and Arab nations creates opportunities for security, diplomatic, and economic cooperation that will serve as a firebreak against Iran and create a secure, prosperous region that contributes to stability in North and East Africa and safeguards the crucial links between the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean.

From the West

The Three Seas Initiative. Europe lacks effective North-South integration that incorporates Central Europe. The Three Seas Initiative (3SI) is a project of commercial investments in infrastructure, digital connectivity, and energy that will establish the missing North-South corridor.

Ukraine Reconstruction. The 3SI has now added Ukraine as a partner nation. The United States has a strategic interest in seeing Ukraine become a successful economic barrier to Russian aggression and fully integrated with the West. 3SI could be an instrument to speed up this effort.

Mediterranean and Black Seas. Efforts to ensure a free and open Eastern Mediterranean span from Southern Europe to North Africa. In particular, Southern Europe is a hub for bringing energy from the Caucuses, North Africa, the Middle East, and the United States. Further, the north-south backbone of the new European economy stands on the foundation of access to the Black Sea and the Eastern Mediterranean. This access links all of Europe to the Middle East and North Africa, and the linkage then continues across the Atlantic to the United States and Canada. Thus, the United States has an interest in a free and open Black Sea, with nations having the capacity to protect their commercial air and maritime traffic. Italy, Israel, Greece, and Romania all also have important roles to play in ensuring a free and open Black Sea linked to the East Mediterranean.

Linking East and West

U.S. policies ought to adopt as an aim, not just supporting these initiatives, but promoting actions and architecture linking them. Enhancing connectivity between free and open spaces adds more value to each region. It also creates more resilient, secure, and diverse supply chains and more opportunities for commerce.

In addition, linked spaces dramatically add to global stability. They decrease opportunities for destabilizing powers to dominate and disrupt the global commons, create strategic choke points, or control critical sources of energy, materials, supply chains, and manufacturing capacity. Free and open connectivity is an alternative to regional competition with security coming from the stand-off of hardened alliances. Rather, free and open common bonds delivering shared prosperity provide breathing space for nations to determine their own future outside the weight of great power competition.

How to Bridge Open Spaces

It is time to think creatively about how to add momentum to the ongoing initiatives mentioned above. But it’s also time to think of launching new initiatives that can deliver new synergies. Here are some ideas.

Encourage new partnerships. To meet the China challenge over the long term, we will need not just regional allies, but nations beyond the region to work with us on a global scale. To this end, we must establish enduring partnerships that transcend security cooperation and span the economic, political, and cultural spheres. South Korea is one example of where America must broaden engagement. India is another. The United States must also encourage bilateral relations among critical interregional nations such as India and Italy.

The United States should also encourage broadening regional partnerships such as strengthening digital and physical connectivity along the north-south axis on Europe’s eastern flank. This can be done by strongly backing 3SI, improving connectivity among the nations along the Baltic, Black, and Adriatic Seas. Further, an energetic 3SI will facilitate American and European outreach across the Caucuses and Caspian Sea to the republics of Central Asia. Italy and Greece ought to consider joining or partnering with the 3SI, cementing the linkage between north-south integration and Southern Europe.

Link Strategic Regions. Bridging free and open spaces ought to include reaffirming collective actions with close allies. For example, the United States should foster linking the Indo-Pacific through ASEAN and the Eastern Mediterranean. While ASEAN relies on the United States for its security (with the United States serving as the indispensable guarantor of freedom of navigation), China predominates the region’s economic and trade interests. In short, an American security blanket subsidizes Chinese commercial relations with ASEAN. This is a prescription for friction and conflict, not cooperation. What is needed is substantially more market integration of ASEAN, the Quad economies, the Middle East, and Europe. Free and open bonding could help speed up that process. One example is the newly announced digital cable from India to Italy, which could benefit all ASEAN economies.

Another important conceptual link is bonding the Indo-Pacific with the Atlantic Region through the region the Eastern Mediterranean. Both the Indo-Pacific and the Atlantic region share a common concern: China’s destabilizing efforts to expand its hegemony at the expense of others. Empowering like-minded actions on issues such as illegal fishing sends a strong, united message against China’s exploitive behavior.

It is also time for new framework that links the United States, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia through a new regional grouping of I2U2—India, Israel, UAE, and the United States. This grouping could elevate the Abraham Accords to a strategic bridge between the free and open Indo-Pacific and the Mediterranean. Italy has already moved in this direction, fostering closer economic and commercial ties between the eastern Mediterranean and the Arabian Seas and signing an India-Italy strategic partnership.

New Opportunities for Africa. Extending the linkage of free and open spaces into North and East Africa could help expand prosperity and counter violent extremism and the malicious influences of China and Russia. Optimizing east-west links between the Arabian and Mediterranean seas will, for example, create new opportunities for East African economies. The United States could accelerate cooperation by promoting regional African summits, alternately hosted by the Quad and European nations.

Expand the G7. The G7 needs to be updated to include the leading free and open democracies and economies of both the Atlantic and the Indo-Pacific. The next two G7 host nations—Japan and Italy—should work to transition from G7 to G10, adding India, Australia, and South Korea.

All the nations committed to free and open spaces share the desire to attain energy security, counter violent extremism and illegal mass migration, deter wars of aggression, foster growing, vibrant economies, and mitigate the debilitating instability of great power rivalries. This is also good for America. We need strong U.S. leadership promoting loose, flexible, and evolving groupings of like-minded nations committed to free and open spaces powered by self- and collective interests.

James Jay Carafano is a Heritage Foundation vice president, responsible for the think tank’s research on matters of national security and foreign relations.

Kaush Arha is the president of the Free & Open Indo-Pacific Forum and a senior fellow at both the Krach Institute for Tech Diplomacy at Purdue and the Atlantic Council.

Image: Shutterstock.

This week marks fifty years since the United States withdrew its last troops from Vietnam. It was the end of America’s bloodiest war, as measured by American casualties, since World War II. The departure of the last troop-bearing plane culminated in a sixty-day withdrawal period as specified by a peace agreement that Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho had negotiated and was signed in Paris in January 1973.

I was on that last plane. As an Army lieutenant in a unit that processed personnel coming in or out of Vietnam, I had to manage the departure of other GIs who were still in Vietnam before my colleagues and I could pack our own bags and head for home. That experience sparked a lasting interest in the ending of wars that became the subject of a doctoral dissertation and book and the focus of much thinking about subsequent conflicts.

The peace agreement of 1973, notwithstanding what many contended were its flaws, was the right U.S. course of action at the time. Not to reach that agreement or something very much like it would have meant the perpetuation of costly U.S. involvement in a conflict that inevitably would have lost to a movement—the Viet Minh, which became the North Vietnamese regime—that embodied Vietnamese nationalism and had the wind of decolonization at its back.

Some war-ending agreements are inevitably as unpopular as they are necessary. Domestic criticism of the Vietnam policies of Kissinger and President Richard Nixon came primarily from those who contended that the United States should have pulled out of that war sooner. But criticism also came from those who believed—a belief that has lingered in a few small circles for decades—that the United States still could have achieved a successful outcome of the Vietnam War if it had stuck it out.

This picture parallels criticisms of the Biden administration’s policies toward the war in Ukraine, with some arguing that the United States should pull back from its support for the Ukrainian war effort and others calling for an increase in that assistance. Such disagreements are partly about how the war ought to be fought, but they also are disagreements over how the war can and should end, because the arguments carry corollaries about what conditions on the battlefield will or will not produce conditions at the negotiating table conducive to reaching a peace agreement.

Compromise agreements are the rule, and outright victory or defeat the exception, in wars that have mattered to the United States since the end of World War II. Both sides typically leave the negotiating table dissatisfied about some things, and that was true of the 1973 Paris agreement. The dissatisfactions on the U.S. side were matched by Hanoi’s frustration in having to postpone yet again—as the Viet Minh had done when negotiating with the French in 1954—their objective of ruling over a unified Vietnam. Perhaps it was a mark of this frustration that the airbase where I was stationed was rocketed by Communist forces after the agreement was signed and ninety minutes before the cease-fire went into effect. It probably would have seemed like a waste to have carried those munitions all the way down the Ho Chi Minh Trail without getting in one last blow at the Americans.

For some peace agreements to be reached at all, they may have to leave much to chance. No one could have predicted with precision how events would play out in a contest between North and South Vietnam with American forces gone. Nixon and Kissinger expected that South Vietnam would be unable to stand indefinitely but would stand long enough for Americans to largely forget about Vietnam and move on to other issues. This was the concept of a “decent interval,” which deserves criticism insofar as the strategy was motivated by domestic political considerations. Nonetheless, the leaving of much of the immediate future of South Vietnam to chance probably was essential in closing the negotiating gap between Washington and Hanoi and reaching any agreement at all.

Mistaken wars are especially prone to messiness when they finally end, or when the United States pulls out of them. The very mistakenness usually involves the failure of a client regime to become strong enough and legitimate enough to stand on its own. Thus, the collapse of that regime is part of the ugly denouement. In Vietnam, that collapse came two years later, amid images of rooftop helicopter rescues in Saigon. In Afghanistan, it came with the collapse of Ashraf Ghani’s government in August 2021, amid images of Afghans clinging to transport aircraft at Kabul airport. The very swiftness of the latter collapse underscored the futility of the previous two decades of attempted nation-building in Afghanistan through military force.

Relationships between Washington and client regimes have constituted an important dimension of ending as well as fighting wars. Nixon had exploited that dimension during the 1968 presidential election campaign when he secretly used emissaries to urge South Vietnamese president Nguyen Van Thieu to balk at a Johnson administration peace initiative that, if successful, might have brought victory to Democratic candidate Hubert Humphrey. Having learned the power of such obstreperousness, Thieu later applied it to Nixon himself as Kissinger and Tho were nearing the end of their negotiation. One result was the devastating bombing campaign against North Vietnam in December 1972 known as the Christmas bombing—the largest aerial attack by heavy bombers since World War II—which was aimed as much at pressuring Thieu not to block an agreement as it was at pressuring Hanoi.

Today’s policy questions regarding the war in Ukraine involve correspondingly delicate and difficult questions about the relationship between Washington and Kyiv and how their interests diverge. There are major differences, of course, between that war and the one in Vietnam, including not only that the United States has not directly involved its own troops but also that Ukraine is led by a legitimate government with much popular support and has been the victim of naked international aggression, rather than the legacy of a partial decolonization. But the ending of this war is again likely to involve the persuasion of a Ukrainian ally as much as the pressure of a Russian adversary.

Anti-Vietnam War protests within the United States had been going on at high volume for several years by the time the 1973 agreement was signed. They exhibited several recurring unhelpful characteristics of many such protests, including self-righteousness, a concern more for volume and emotion than for practical effects on policy, and an apparent lack of appreciation for what it takes to wind down a war. An action such as leaking of the Pentagon Papers was treated as heroic even though the leaking did little or nothing to hasten the drawdown of U.S. troops, which already was well under way at the time of the leakage.

U.S. troop strength in Vietnam peaked at approximately 540,000 around the time that Nixon assumed the presidency. Bringing home an army that large is an enormous undertaking, in terms not just of basic logistics but also, amid an ongoing war, such things as force security and continuing a rotation of personnel that will maintain a balanced force structure in which essential support functions continue. One reflection of this is that much of my work during my year in Vietnam—even though the overall drawdown continued apace—involved processing Army personnel into Vietnam as well as out of it. Many GIs saw me both coming and—with their tours of duty cut short by the drawdown—going.

I like to think that the work of my colleagues and me during that time did more—in a very direct and quantifiable way—to get U.S. troops out of Vietnam than anything accomplished by someone with a bullhorn or a placard on an American street. The work was certainly not heroic but necessary. Along with the many mundane logistical tasks was the need to deal humanely with the disturbingly high number of troops who, by that stage in the war, had become heroin users.

The messiness continued until the end. Withdrawal of the 25,000 U.S. troops still in Vietnam when the Paris agreement was signed was supposed to be coordinated with the repatriation of U.S. prisoners of war held in North Vietnam. The coordination worked satisfactorily until the final two weeks, when disagreements over the movement of the prisoners required us to freeze our flight operations. Once that snafu was resolved, we had just three days to move out the last several thousand troops, while at the same time winding up our own unit’s affairs. I got almost no sleep during that finale, before being able to step into a C-141 and sleep most of the way across the Pacific.

Once in California, I participated in a brief ceremony at which my unit—the 90th Replacement Battalion—was formally deactivated and its colors furled. A reporter at the ceremony asked for my thoughts. I expressed hope that the unit—which had first been stood up in the European theater in World War II—would never need to be reactivated for another foreign war.

Since then, other units have performed the same function of moving U.S. troops in and out of multiple later wars. Thoughts about how those and future U.S. wars can and should end can still draw some insights from the Vietnam experience. But memories fade, and nearly two-thirds of American alive today had not even been born in 1973.

Paul Pillar retired in 2005 from a twenty-eight-year career in the U.S. intelligence community, in which his last position was 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.

It has been a tough month for the Biden administration’s leadership of the free world. 

First came the three-day summit meeting between China’s President Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Although both leaders avoided discussing a formal military alliance, their talks about “cooperation in the sphere of military-technical interaction”—as Putin coyly put it—served as one more proof that China and Russia are working together to displace the United States as the world’s leading superpower, and to impose a new totalitarian world order. The White House seems unsure of how to push back.

Then came the attack by an Iranian-origin drone on a U.S. military facility in Syria, killing an American contractor and wounding seven more—the same drones that Iran supplies to Russia in its war in Ukraine. Again, the administration seemed unsure how to respond, even though the attack makes it undeniable that the Russia-China de facto alliance includes a third revisionist power, namely Iran. 

Like China’s brokered normalization agreement between Iran and Saudi Arabia; its twelve-point peace plan for Ukraine and Russia; its supply of aid to Russia in exchange for Russian energy, even as Beijing invests heavily in Iran’s energy industry; and Iran’s steady progress toward developing weapons-grade uranium with Russia’s help while Russia also supplies Iran with offensive cyber weapons, all demonstrate that the Beijing-Moscow-Tehran axis I warned about back in 2015, and again in 2019, is now a full-blown reality, and is increasingly dictating the course of world affairs.

At the same time, the Biden team has been focused—arguably overly focused—on supporting Ukraine and worrying about a possible war with China over Taiwan. While supporting Ukraine and defending Taiwan are important, the United States clearly needs to develop a broader global strategy to match the global threat posed by this New Axis.

Fortunately, the United States is in a powerful position to implement that strategy, by bringing together the advanced democratic nations as an Arsenal of Democracies, to parallel the Arsenal of Democracy that prevailed against an earlier axis in World War II—this time, however, in order to deter war, rather than fight one. 

Indeed, the Biden administration’s AUKUS agreement with Australia and Great Britain for the joint construction of new nuclear submarines, can serve as a springboard for this multilateral approach. However, that model needs to be expanded when it comes to the advanced systems of the future.

In creating that earlier Arsenal of Democracy, for example, the United States had the advantage of the greatest industrial base in the world and the supply chains needed to single-handedly arm itself and its allies. Today the war in Ukraine has proved that America’s industrial base is not up to being the free world’s armorer by itself—perhaps not even for ourselves in the event of a protracted conflict with China over Taiwan. 

However, instead of treating the decline of that industrial base as a net strategic loss, it offers an opportunity to partner with democratic allies around the world in developing and building the present and future advanced technology arsenal that can defend freedom against its enemies, both large and small. 

A look at the numbers helps to put the contest between the Beijing-Moscow-Tehran axis and the democratic nations in perspective. 

As China continues to grow as the world’s second-largest economy—possibly surpassing the United States as early as 2030—Russia and Iran barely register on the list of the world’s economies in terms of GDP. By contrast, the United States together with the other democratic nations in the top ten (Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, India, France, Italy, Canada, and South Korea) total more than twice China’s GDP.

Looking more closely, according to Global Finance magazine’s 2022 estimates, the United States and its fellow democracies occupy eighteen of the top twenty slots of the world’s most advanced tech countries (the exceptions being the United Arab Emirates, a U.S. ally, and Hong Kong). China, meanwhile, ranks thirty-second on the list, while Russia and Iran don’t even score.

All this indicates that if the United States and democracies band together, they can overpower China and the New Axis not only in terms of economic muscle but with the kind of high-tech focus that will be the core of a winning Arsenal of Democracies.

For example, while China has taken a lead in using artificial intelligence (AI) as a tool for government control of its citizenry, U.S. companies like Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta continue to be the world’s leaders in AI’s commercial applications, all of which can be a springboard to AI being used as a powerful battlefield asset. At the same time, allies like Japan, South Korea, and Canada are making major strides in AI development, while European countries like France and Germany working to catch up.

Hypersonics will be another decisive tool in a future Arsenal of Democracies. The United States along with Russia and China are today the leading wielders of hypersonic weapons, including missiles that can travel ten times the speed of sound. However, in September 2020 India tested its first Hypersonic Technology Demonstrator Vehicle, and has drafted a five-year plan to develop its own hypersonic missile. Australia, France, Germany, and Japan are also pursuing hypersonic weapons development, even as Israel and South Korea have started foundational research on hypersonic weaponry that could significantly improve existing systems.

Directed energy weapons, including laser weapons, will be in the forefront of future weapons systems. The U.S. government enjoys a clear lead in contracting with manufacturers such as Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, and Boeing to develop and deploy these systems. While China is a leading manufacturer of directed energy weaponry, so is India. At the same time, Japan has been following its own innovative path toward similar directed-energy arms.

The same is even more true when it comes to space technology. While Russia and China have been long-time leaders in developing anti-satellite weaponry, the United States still has a major lead in the commercial development of space technologies thanks to companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin. 

In fact, in terms of the top twelve countries carrying out space launches from 2021 to December 2022, Russia and China’s 4,342 total launches still lag behind the United States’ 5,534. Meanwhile, the United Kingdom, with its $16.6 billion space agency, managed 515 launches compared to China’s 731. Japan, France, India, Germany, and Canada (the first country to launch a satellite that was not made in either the United States or Russia), taken together equal or surpass China’s launch effort over the last two years.

The numbers show that the United States and allies like Japan, India, and Europe have space-based manufacturing and technology bases that can guarantee that the great space commons will be dominated by the democratic nations, not their enemies. 

The bottom line is, the advanced democratic nations enjoy a winning economic and technological edge over the Beijing-Moscow-Tehran axis. By bringing its allies together through bilateral agreements as well as joint public-private partnerships with U.S. and foreign companies that can break down regional barriers, the United States can confront the gravest threat the free world has faced since the end of the Cold War—and leave the New Axis wondering why it ever dared to challenge the forces of freedom.

Arthur Herman is a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute, and author of Freedom’s Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II.

Image: Shutterstock.

In yet another display of diplomatic prowess in the greater Middle East, China recently brokered a rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Iran, two states that have regarded each other as primary regional adversaries since 1979. The two countries agreed to restore diplomatic relations and reopen their embassies within two months, and also plan to revive an old security pact as well as another agreement to cooperate on trade and technology.

Though the deal has understandably elicited surprise and controversy among commentators, Beijing’s successful mediation between Tehran and Riyadh falls well into the pattern of Chinese diplomacy in the Middle East over the past several decades.

Since its industrial output grew in the late 1990s, Beijing became increasingly reliant on Middle Eastern energy sources to support its rapidly expanding economy, and steadily ramped up its engagement with the region. Additionally, China actively promoted trade and investment with key players in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), especially after Chinese president Xi Jinping’s announcement of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in 2013. The centrality of the Middle East to the success of the global BRI led Beijing to become the region’s largest foreign investor and the main bilateral trading partner for several Arab states.

Nonetheless, as recent events demonstrate, China’s goals in the region were far from being solely commercial as many observers have alleged. Beijing’s growing economic stakes in the Middle East compelled it to take on wider political, diplomatic, and military roles to safeguard these interests. As China expert Dawn Murphy discusses in her book China’s Rise in the Global South, Beijing has also sought to gradually craft alternative spheres of influence and challenge the U.S-led order in the region. For instance, China has exploited its leverage over BRI partners to advance its territorial claims in the South and East China Seas and suppress criticism over crackdowns in Xinjiang.

Another key pillar of China’s regional strategy has been mediating disputes, which has increased its influence over U.S. adversaries and allies alike. Beijing’s self-portrayal as a “responsible actor” and adherence to a doctrine of “non-interference” in the domestic affairs of partner countries has won Xi considerable support among leaders disillusioned with the West’s lectures on human rights. Chinese officials have also criticized Washington’s “military adventurism” in an attempt to gradually pull countries away from the American orbit.

Many claimed that Beijing’s “balancing act” and simultaneous relationships with regional adversaries such as Saudi Arabia and Iran would preclude it from becoming the Middle Eastern hegemon, as only the United States would allegedly be able to provide Israel and the Gulf states the full protection they seek from Tehran’s aggression. But Xi’s skillful diplomacy, partners’ perceptions of American retrenchment, and Beijing’s successful infiltration of the Middle East’s drone market enabled China to increase its leverage over both Riyadh and Tehran as Washington’s sway steadily declined. Rather than turning to the United States for pushback against Iran, the recent agreement could encourage Arab states to de-escalate tensions with the Islamic Republic with Beijing’s help, in exchange for greater trade and investment with China.

U.S. analysts have also traditionally taken comfort in the overwhelming American security presence in the Persian Gulf. But this too could eventually be jeopardized as China takes advantage of newfound opportunities to strengthen its economic and political foothold in the MENA. If the past is precedent, Beijing will likely use the diffusion of Chinese physical and digital infrastructure to advance its military presence in the region, namely through “dual-use” civilian ports and technology that could serve the People’s Liberation Army’s intelligence-gathering capabilities, in addition to augmenting its conventional power projection through joint military and naval exercises and arms sales.

So far, the White House has tried to frame the China-brokered deal as a win for U.S. interests and downplay its significance. Indeed, though Beijing is unsurprisingly touting the agreement as a major diplomatic breakthrough, its long-term implications for the geopolitical landscape in the MENA are still difficult to gauge. As stated by Jonathan Lord, the director of the Center for New American Security’s Middle East Program, both Riyadh and Tehran have held dozens of rounds of talks in recent years, and others have also expressed doubts that the resumption of diplomatic relations would do much to temper underlying hostilities between the two regional powerhouses. Indeed, as the Cold War demonstrates, “détentes” between geopolitical rivals are not guaranteed to last.

For the Saudis, reaching out to Tehran could have been an attempt to shield themselves (or at least buy themselves some time) from the potential consequences of Iran’s prospective possession of a nuclear weapon, as suggested by some of Riyadh’s recent demands that the United States support Saudi nuclear capabilities in exchange for the kingdom recognizing Israel. The kingdom may also have been hoping to temper Iran’s other troublesome behavior, particularly its support for regional proxy groups such as Hezbollah and the Yemeni Houthi rebels. Meanwhile, in light of criticism from the international community over Iran’s crackdowns on domestic protests, support for Russia’s war against Ukraine, and fears of an Arab-Israeli coalition against it, Tehran sought much-needed legitimacy in the MENA and the Arab World. The deal with Saudi Arabia could be an economic and diplomatic lifeline for the Iranian regime, a potential gateway to agreements with other Arab nations, and a boon to Iran’s interests by gradually dislodging America as the predominant external power in the Gulf. 

But even if the agreement proves to be a temporary marriage of convenience between Riyadh and Tehran, it could nonetheless pose some extraordinary challenges for Washington’s Middle East policy. Firstly, America’s absence from such a critical agreement is a blow to its prestige both in the region and on the international stage. In contrast to just a few years earlier, when it mediated the Abraham Accords, the United States was entirely left on the sidelines from the recent negotiations—a signal to allies and adversaries alike that American influence over shifting developments and credibility in the MENA have notably declined from their zenith at the end of the Cold War.

The rapprochement could also lead to other countries easing diplomatic and economic pressure on the Islamic Republic, albeit cautiously. Saudi Arabia exercises considerable sway in the Sunni Islamic and Arab Worlds, particularly among the Gulf States, and its neighbors and allies could interpret Riyadh’s moves as a green light to pursue better relations with Iran. For instance, Bahrain is reportedly looking to normalize ties with Iran, and Tehran also expressed a desire to mend relations with the kingdom’s other allies, such as Egypt.

While some have claimed that improved relations between Iran and Arab nations could potentially deescalate other regional conflicts, such as those in Yemen, Syria, and Lebanon, there is good reason to be skeptical of this argument. Though foreign support is an important element of these ongoing disputes, they are also heavily enmeshed in local grievances and internal dynamics. Moreover, groups like the Houthi rebels and Hezbollah are ideologically rooted in anti-Americanism and politically committed to upending the status quo in the greater Middle East. Even if Iran gradually tempers its support (at least overtly) for its regional proxies, the fundamentally revisionist nature of these organizations is unlikely to change.

There could also be troubling implications in terms of Tehran’s other mischief, both in terms of its domestic oppression and its conduct abroad. At a time in which Washington should be attempting to isolate Iran on the global stage for attempting to assassinate American officials, providing weapons to Russia, cracking down on protestors, and dragging its feet throughout the nuclear negotiations, the Islamic Republic may have instead gotten a major lifeline and the regional legitimacy it was seeking. Moreover, Washington may no longer have the option of exploiting the Sino-Iranian partnership to roll back China’s influence among the Gulf states.

Additionally, China’s ability to pull off such an agreement between two of the region’s most significant players is testimony to its considerable clout in the MENA and a sign of its future ambitions for the region and beyond. Given the importance of the greater Middle East to the BRI, Europe and Asia’s continued dependence on hydrocarbons and clean energy sources from the region, and the implications of Beijing’s ties with Tehran on conflicts in Eurasia and South Asia, China’s steadily increasing presence in the Persian Gulf will appreciably serve the country’s geostrategic interests in other crucial theaters. It could also give the Chinese Communist Party an edge in its broader, global rivalry against the United States.

But most concerning about the Biden administration’s nonchalant response to the China-mediated Saudi-Iranian reconciliation is its failure to acknowledge the role of years of misguided U.S. policies in contributing to these developments. While Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman and other regional leaders ultimately have their own calculations behind their foreign policy decisionmaking, including their attempts to hedge their bets with China and Russia, these trends were no doubt exacerbated by Washington’s neglect of its allies’ security needs, counterproductive “pariah” rhetoric, and unwillingness to address Iran’s malevolent behavior and progress toward developing a nuclear weapon. This widespread (and warranted) concern over American retrenchment in light of calls by Western policymakers to disengage from the Middle East in favor of rebalancing to Asia, despite President Joe Biden’s recent attempt to reverse these perceptions, compelled Riyadh and other U.S. partners to diversity their relationships and desperately mend relations with Tehran, rather than relying on America’s fickle commitments to defend them.

In other words, Washington’s efforts to “pivot to Asia” have finally come back to bite it in the Middle East.

Niranjan Shankar is a software engineer and foreign policy analyst and writer based in Atlanta focusing on great power rivalry, the Middle East, tech policy, and diplomatic history. His other writings have appeared for the Hoover Institution, Washington Examiner, RealClearMarkets, Quillette, the Bulwark, and more. Follow him on Twitter @NiranjanShan13

Image: Shutterstock.