Diplomacy & Crisis News

“We are engaged anew in a great battle for freedom. A battle between democracy and autocracy. Between liberty and repression,” President Joe Biden said in the wake of Russia’s belligerent incursion into Ukraine. Indeed, emphasizing an epochal struggle between competing systems of political governance as the key feature of international politics in the twenty-first century has become the hallmark of U.S. grand strategic rhetoric under the current administration. In the words of Walter Lippman, this binary proposition arguably constitutes “the fundamental postulate of American national security doctrine” in the age of great power competition and in the context of new Cold War discourse.

True, the democracy-autocracy formula offered the spirit of trans-Atlanticism a new lease on life at a time when the liberal international order seemed in irretrievable disarray. As a clarion call, it has proven useful as a force for psychic and material mobilization, whether with respect to galvanizing support for Ukraine (primarily among G7 nations), weening continental Europe off its reliance on Russian energy, or rendering the idea of popular sovereignty and its conflict with the principle of autocracy the dominant current of the age.

Yet for all its rhetorical expediency and partial truth, the democracy-autocracy formula is an artless Manichean antithesis as imprecise as it is untenable. So long as it continues to deeply inform U.S. foreign policymaking under the Biden administration, it deserves to be routinely scrutinized. Notwithstanding its lilting assonant appeal—democracy versus autocracy—this formula precludes strategic flexibility and the pursuit of détente at precisely the moment in which both are required. Even Evan Osnos of The New Yorker, author of Joe Biden’s definitive biography, Joe Biden: American Dreamer, recently pleaded as much, arguing that “if we are to limit the worst risks of a [new] cold war, the U.S. should … prepare for what the Nixon Administration called détente,” involving in the words of Henry Kissinger, “both deterrence and coexistence, both containment and an effort to relax tensions.”

In the words of Hans Morgenthau, harping on the democracy-autocracy antithesis has enabled the Biden administration to “indulge in the cultivation of moral principles divorced from political exigencies.” If the United States wants to be successful in a geopolitical war of attrition over the long run with bitter antagonists and peer competitors like China, Russia, and Iran, administration officials need to recognize the limitations of this cherished dyadic nostrum, which emerged as a hyperbolic over-reaction to the cartoonish neo-isolationism of the Trump years.

To be clear, America should defend democratic values. It should even promote such values—in some cases, at the end of the lethal aid sword. Restrainers rightly caution against the excesses of American interventionism. But the progressive critique of American military power projection, if not simply ‘liberal imperialism,’ often comes across as the fashionable preoccupation of worthy dilettantes, who tend to downplay the degree to which history abhors a vacuum—and arcs toward Whiggish progress. The point is that the United States can combine high power with high purpose without hitching its foreign relations to a blinkered ideological lodestar.

Analytically speaking, the democracy-autocracy formula flies in the face of the extensive regime typology literature in the comparative politics subfield, the existence of which is prima facie evidence of the slogan’s empirical vacuity and practical incoherence. For example, in 2022, India was downgraded by Freedom House to the status of an “electoral autocracy.” Does this mean that India is an enemy of democracy, an enemy of the United States? Singapore is described as a nation-state that “allows for some political pluralism, but…constrains the growth of credible opposition parties and limits freedoms of expression, assembly, and association.” Is Singapore, too, an enemy of democracy? Ukraine, of all nations, has a 39.39 “Democracy Percentage” according to the metrics devised by the non-profit. Someone should tell the White House that it is underwriting a “transitional or hybrid regime” to the tune of tens of billions of dollars in military assistance, even if obliged to do so (and right to do so) by way of the Budapest Memorandum. Even the Chinese party-state capitalist model has been described as an “autocracy with democratic characteristics” by political scientists living and working in America, such as Yuen Yuen Ang.

Moreover, if we understand the administration to be “progressive,” it should be all the more sensitive to the field of post-colonial studies, which stresses the (supposedly) pernicious Eurocentric assumptions that underwrite neocolonial attitudes toward ‘traditional’ modes of political governance and “local” processes of political-economic development. Governments come in many shapes and sizes. The democracy-autocracy formula is what the German historian Reinhart Koselleck might have deemed an “asymmetrical-counter concept.” Given the Biden administration’s moral economy, we live in a world of “Hellenes” and “Barbarians,” “Christians” and “Heathens,” small-d democrats and autocrats—and nothing in between.

With respect to international trade and economics, the democracy-autocracy antithesis suffers from a grave internal contradiction. From its earliest days, the Biden administration has spoken of a “foreign policy for the middle class.” Instead of belligerent tariff wars, it would pursue meaningful forms of strategic decoupling and enact concrete industrial policies, the redistributive effects of which would presumably alleviate Rust Belt grievances and set the United States on a path to splendid critical-industrial self-sufficiency (although U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo oddly disputes this). Indeed, with the CHIPS Act and the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), Congress passed two pieces of legislation that will likely bear significant fruit in these respects (although the jury is still out, as inputs do not linearly imply outputs).

The obvious problem, however, is that the neomercantilist flavor of Biden’s “America First” agenda directly undermines the Atlanticist spirit of cooperative multilateralism and the geoeconomic interests of America’s democracy-loving allies, threatening to entrench intractable rifts between them, even if “friend-shoring” is feasible. In December 2022, Thierry Breton, the European Union’s internal market commissioner, pulled out of the U.S.-EU Trade and Technology Council, a “key coordinating body for trans-Atlantic economic policy,” as its agenda “no longer gives sufficient space to issues of concern to many European industry ministers and businesses.” More recently, French president Emmanuel Macron argued that the implementation of the IRA threatens to “fragment the West.”

The practical limitations of the democracy-autocracy antithesis have been made abundantly clear in the global response to the war in Ukraine, specifically, with the emergence of a Cold War 2.0 non-aligned ‘movement’ of nations, largely in the so-called “Global South,” many of which insist on neutrality for various reasons. Much ink has been spilled on these dynamics. Suffice it to say that although Western resolve is remarkable and important, as was clear at the Munich Security Conference and in the resolution (predictably absent Russian and Chinese endorsement) passed at the recent G20 summit condemning Russian aggression, “key states in the global south,” as Stephen Walt has recently argued, “do not share the Western belief that the future of the 21st century is going to be determined by the outcome of the war. For them, economic development, climate change, migration, civil conflicts, terrorism, the rising power of India and China, and many others will all exert a greater impact on humanity’s future than the fate of the Donbas or Crimea.”

Where Western analysts often see the clear emergence and demarcation of two distinct civilizational spheres of influence, rooted in a preponderance of military and economic power emanating largely from Washington and Beijing, the rest of the world sees multipolarity for what it is. For most states caught in the crossfire of great power competition, the shifting distribution of power in the international system simply means a future of pragmatic adaptation, not zero-sum ideological contestation. As World Trade Organization director-general Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala has simply said, “Many countries don’t want to have to choose between two blocs.”

Other instances of relatively recent U.S. diplomatic engagement demonstrate the limitations of the democracy-autocracy formula. The “Summit of Democracies,” hosted by Biden in June 2021, was pitched as an attempt at “renewing democracy in the United States and around the world.” Yet the event was panned as “a fiasco, a flop, a disappointment.” For the most part, so too was the “Summit for the Americas,” hosted by the White House in June 2022, as both events excluded leaders from countries deemed qualitatively lacking in democratic bona fides. Biden being reduced to exchanging a deflating “cool dad” fist bump with Mohammad Bin Salman while in search of crude oil infusions from OPEC+ during the peak of the 2022 oil-supply shock, after vowing to turn the crown prince into a “pariah” in light of the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, was another such instance.

It turns out Washington must do business with nominally autocratic governments—at least if it hopes to maintain friendly relations with “a vital U.S. partner on a range of issues.” It is worth noting that the U.S. recently released two Pakistani brothers, held in devastating Kafka-esque captivity in Guantanamo Bay for twenty years without ever being charged with substantial crimes, all the while subjected to unspeakable torture methods. Which is more barbaric: dissolving a man’s body in an acid bath after his perhaps not-so-swift execution or two decades of “rectal rehydration,” sleep deprivation, beatings, and solitary confinement in cold cells and subjection to a byzantine and unilateral international legal regime?

Apart from the practical limitations of the democracy-autocracy formula, “a strategic monstrosity,” as Lippman might have put it, the ideological content of this antithesis deserves greater attention. Just when “the end of the end of history” seemed to have definitively arrived, the Biden administration sought to resuscitate not only a kind of apocalyptic George W. Bush-era logic (“you are either with us or against us”), but a familiar eschatological vision for Western liberal democracy, that is, its “imminent universalization.” Biden and his senior staff sometimes wind up sounding like Alexis de Tocqueville, who once claimed, in a moment of unrivaled teleological conviction (although he had his great doubts about liberalism), that an “attempt to check democracy would be…to resist the will of God.”

Likewise, just as the international system became genuinely multipolar, the Biden administration insisted on the emergence of a world order characterized by ideological bipolarity. This effort was always an expression of a kind of “unipolar moment anxiety disorder.” The democracy-autocracy formula exhumed the repressed determinism at the heart of post-Cold War triumphalism about the “unabashed victory” of economic and political liberalism at precisely the wrong moment in time. A world safe for liberal democratic capitalism is something to aspire to, of course. But given the administration’s rhetoric, the United States is now presumably engaged in a “twilight struggle” with any nation that does not satisfy Freedom Houses’ holistic criteria.

Biden tends to draw on elements of Teddy Roosevelt’s “rhetoric of militant decency” and Woodrow Wilson’s implacable Calvinist belief in America’s providential promise, combing the universalist impulses of liberal internationalism (or progressive imperialism) with the expansive essence of containment (which, of course, George Kennan spent a good deal of his life trying to remedy) and the hegemonic idealism of “armed primacy.” With such rhetoric, Biden has not made the world safer for democracy, but rather brought to it a mighty set of unwieldy swords. The idea that the emergent world order will not be safe until it consists only of democracies (or constitutional republics, parliamentary democracies, and so on) is more theological than the concept of a balance of power, which the administration should counsel.

If anything, the U.S. foreign policy community should look to the diplomatic culture cultivated within and implicitly promoted by ASEAN, a political and economic union made up of ten member states, some of which embrace autocratic tendencies (or “responsive communitarianism”), that has managed, in Kishore Mahbubani’s words, to pursue and maintain relative regional peace and security by embracing a “nuanced and pragmatic approach to managing geopolitical competition,” and as such, is “increasingly seen as a model for the rest of the developing world.”

Biden should stop insisting on the wisdom of this great rhetorical gambit, for its disadvantages far outweigh its advantages in terms of securing American interests abroad. The age ahead is likely to be fraught with moral ambiguities, unpalatable compromises, and the emergence of novel forms of political economy, political governance, and social, civilizational, and regional organization and segmentation—as all ages are—that utterly defy the democracy-autocracy spectrum. After all, some American commentators have recently questioned whether the United States is, in fact, a democracy at all.

Addis Goldman is a writer based in New York. He holds an MA in International Relations from the University of Chicago, an MA from the Committee on Global Thought at Columbia University, and a BA in Political Science from Colorado College. He previously interned in the David Rockefeller Studies Program at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.

Image: Shutterstock.

The first anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is an appropriate time to assess Israel’s policies toward it, chiefly its refusal to sell weapons to Ukraine. The need for this assessment is particularly acute given the close strategic relationship that has emerged between Russia and Iran and the ramifications for U.S.-Israeli relations.

Israel’s sympathies lie squarely with Ukraine. Nevertheless, its response to date has been limited to significant, but not overwhelming, humanitarian aid, including a field hospital, ambulances, protective vests, helmets, food, water purification equipment, and more. Israel has reportedly also provided Ukraine with intelligence information and voted with it in the United Nations. Conversely, Israel has steadfastly rebuffed Ukrainian requests to provide weapons, including defensive ones, such as Iron Dome.

A wounded bear is particularly dangerous and Russia can cause Israel severe harm. We thus believe that Israel’s refusal to sell Ukraine weapons remains appropriate, but that this may change depending on Russia’s actions. For now, we propose a number of semi-military measures that would be of great utility for Ukraine and position Israel firmly within the Western camp but mitigate Russia’s response.

There are seven primary reasons for our caution.

First, Iran has supplied Russia with 1,700 drones, is apparently building a factory in Russia to produce as many as 6,000 more, and may provide it with ballistic missiles. In return, Russia has reportedly agreed to supply Iran with SU-35s fighters, helicopters, and possibly the S-400 air-defense system, warships, submarines, and satellites. Russia and Iran already cooperate in the cyber realm. They also recently signed two agreements designed to promote bilateral economic ties and circumvent international sanctions: a “transportation corridor” from Russia to Iran and out to the Far East; and an alternative mechanism to the global SWIFT system. Israel must avoid measures that may lead to an even closer Russian-Iranian strategic alliance.

Second, Russia and Iran are the two primary players in Syria. At times, Russia has sought to counterbalance Iran’s efforts to expand its influence there, including the build-up of a significant military presence and use of Syria to transfer weapons to Hezbollah. Wartime needs forced Russia to withdraw some forces from Syria, but not the S-400s. If used against Israeli aircraft, Israel’s ability to counter Iran’s buildup would be greatly constrained. So far, Russia has refrained from doing so, but that could change at any time. No less than NATO countries, Israel is on the front lines with Russia today and can find itself at war at any moment with Iran, Hezbollah, and Iranian-supported Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Israel cannot allow this to happen.

Third, Russia is a party to the nuclear agreement with Iran and ongoing international negotiations. At times, Russia has played a constructive role in this regard, but it has been supportive of Iran in the International Atomic Energy Agency recently and can be highly disruptive. A desperate Russia might even provide Iran with concrete assistance for its nuclear program. Israel cannot afford to alienate Russia too much.

Fourth, Israel is not a global power with major weapons stockpiles, does not have the spare capability, and cannot transfer critical systems to Ukraine without endangering its own security. Indeed, it has the minimum number of Iron Dome batteries necessary and a shortage of interceptor missiles. Moreover, as Ukraine’s defense minister indicated, other systems are better suited to its needs, including American ones, which the United States has abjured from supplying so far. What Ukraine really wants is to drag Israel into the conflict on its side. That is understandable, but Israel must weigh its overall interests, not just sentiments.

Fifth, some 15 percent of Israel’s population has roots in the former USSR and 600,000 Jews still live in Russia. Russia has already taken measures designed to demonstrate its ability to stop emigration. The ingathering of the exiles is Israel’s raison d’être.

Sixth, unless the United States changes the policy of partial disengagement from the Middle East pursued by four consecutive presidents, Russia will remain a critical player in the region. In addition to support for Iran, Russia is providing Turkey and Egypt with advanced weapons and nuclear power reactors that could morph into military nuclear programs, has proposed similar deals with the Saudis and others, is an important player in OPEC+ and Libya, and more.

Seventh, France, Germany, Japan, and other leading states have provided only limited aid to Ukraine, belatedly and hesitantly. South Korea has refused to provide any weapons. Even the United States has imposed strict limits on the kinds of weapons it provides, for example, aircraft, missiles, air-defense systems, and until now, tanks. Israel does not have to be at the forefront of this issue. Some question Israel’s commitment to the Western camp because they have high expectations of it; others because they wish to use this issue as part of a broader delegitimization campaign. Most understand that Israel’s strategic circumstances require painful compromises between moral and strategic considerations.

Changes to Israel’s refusal to supply weapons to Ukraine might be warranted if, for example, Russia decided to limit its freedom of aerial maneuver in Syria; supplied certain weapons systems to Iran, e.g. the S-400s; adopted a clearly obstructionist position in the nuclear talks; or provided direct assistance to Iran’s nuclear program. In each case, the details would determine the nature of Israel’s response. Russia must be made to understand that Israel has the ability to significantly harm its interests, if pushed too far.

What Israel should be doing, were it not engulfed in its domestic convulsions, is providing Ukraine with outsized humanitarian assistance. It should send the field hospital back to Ukraine, if necessary, by turning it into an Israel Defense Force (IDF) operation; dispatch IDF search and rescue teams; expand rehabilitation programs for wounded Ukrainians; and complete the transfer of the rocket alert technology promised to Ukraine, all areas in which Israel is a global frontrunner. It should again provide emergency supplies for Ukrainian civilians.

Expanded assistance such as this would be of significant benefit for Ukraine, but likely not lead to an excessive Russian response. All sides understand that there are certain rules to the game.

Chuck Freilich is a senior fellow at the Miryam Institute and was a deputy national security adviser in Israel.

Danny Ayalon, a policy expert at the Miryam Institute, is a former deputy foreign minister of Israel and a former ambassador to the United States.

Both authors are co-hosts of the Miryam Institute’s biweekly podcast, the Israel Defense and Diplomacy Forum (IDDF).

Image: Shutterstock.

When most people hear the word intelligence in a political context, they immediately think of clandestine sources, spies, and secret meetings. Intelligence services still rely on human source intelligence (HUMINT) and intercepted communications (SIGINT). However, in the twenty-first century, open-source intelligence (OSINT) has become indispensable for understanding your adversaries and is often the primary and most valuable source of actionable intelligence. According to a detailed article highlighting the power of OSINT in the Wall Street Journal, “80% of what a U.S. president or military commander needs to know comes from OSINT.”

What then is OSINT, and why is it so important in 2023?

In brief, OSINT is the painstaking gathering and analysis of information from a wide range of open sources for the military, intelligence, police, and business communities. The explosion of social media—from real-time videos to blogs to chat rooms to Twitter and Facebook—has produced unprecedented opportunities for insight into areas and people where HUMINT and SIGINT are not as effective or cost too much while decreasing the risk to human intelligence assets. In addition, the analysis of covert intelligence is informed and sometimes significantly changed by OSINT.

As such, combining OSINT, HUMINT, VISINT (visual intelligence), and SIGINT allows a country’s national and diplomatic security apparatus to pre-emptively act to thwart threats, inform allies, negotiate from the point of strength, and challenge international organizations and non-government organizations with accurate information, especially those with hostile intent.

OSINT’s importance is increasingly recognized, especially in U.S. intelligence circles. The aforementioned Wall Street Journal article quotes Robert Cardillo, a senior intelligence expert, commenting that he “doesn’t worry about the intelligence community going away. I worry about it mattering. Goverment policymakers could rely less on traditional intelligence briefings and more on open-source products, which are generally cheaper and easier to access.” Almost in response to this challenge, former high-ranking U.S. intelligence experts—including a director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, a retired Army major general who commanded the Army Intelligence Center, and the former deputy director of national intelligence for analysis—have formed the OSINT Foundation, which is “focused on OSINT's use within the intelligence community to answer questions for national leadership and policymakers because of a recognition that U.S. intelligence doesn’t give it the prominence it deserves.”

The significance of OSINT is not lost on U.S. adversaries either. Consider China: according to William Hannas of Georgetown University, Beijing has an “estimated 100,000 analysts scouring scientific and technical development globally” through open sources. Even in closed societies, the exponential growth of social media has given opposition forces the tools to share information with the outside world. It was the Iranian opposition that first revealed Iran’s advanced nuclear program, after all.

But it is perhaps in the private sphere that OSINT’s effects are being felt most, private intelligence companies may surpass government intelligence agencies in the gathering of actionable intelligence. An intelligence unit of Dow Chemical, using only open-source intelligence, predicted the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 23, 2022: “Supercharged by the Ukraine war, the rise of open-source intelligence, which comprises everything from commercial satellite imagery to social media posts and purchasable databases, poses revolutionary challenges for the Central Intelligence Agency and its sister spy agencies, according to former senior officials who spent decades working in those agencies’ classified spaces.”

Consider as an example of this trend the Israeli research and educational think tank Alma—which one of the authors of this article is the CEO of. The organization studies Syria, Iraq, and Iran while relying almost entirely on OSINT. Its reporting and analysis are used by major media organizations, politicians, and security agencies for reliable information on the threats posed by Hezbollah in Lebanon and other Iranian proxies in Syria and Iraq. Alma’s special reports and analysis have unearthed information on a vast array of issues, including the propagation of Iranian unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) from Europe to south Florida, Hezbollah’s drug industry in Syria, Iran’s entrenchment in south Damascus, Hamas’ growing presence in Lebanon, the Iranian smuggling of weapons into Beirut and Damascus airports, Russia’s military deployment in Syria, Iranian and Hezbollah espionage and terrorist activity in Scandinavia, details on the Iranian weapons land corridor, analysis of Syria’s air defenses, and documentation on the deployment of advanced Iranian UAVs throughout the Middle East. Hezbollah was so concerned about the accuracy of Alma’s reporting that they threatened the organization by posting its GPS coordinates as a warning.

Yet OSINT is not without some drawbacks, which must be kept in mind.

For one, given the enormous volume of open-source intelligence, professional analysts must somehow separate the wheat from the chaff. Analyzing press briefings, websites, government-supported journals, private commercial imagery from satellites, technical reports, corporate and government databases, first-hand observation, and more, the list of OSINT sources is endless. Information overload is a potential problem that must be navigated. In the past, people tended to believe secret sources produced the most valuable intelligence. Today it is becoming increasingly clear that professional and creative OSINT analysts can draw an excellent picture of reality—but only so long as analysts can condense an enormous amount of information into a presentable and accessible intelligence product.

Next is the problem posed by disinformation. Intelligence communities that rely on the complete range of intelligence sources have long had to stand guard against such, and there is a belief that OSINT can be more challenging for intelligence analysts as there may be a greater risk of such. At the same time though, it is also clear today that every form of intelligence, whether open or secret source, is maybe “infected” by disinformation. Appropriate judgment and careful evaluation are now more important than before.

Finally, leaked classified information that makes its way into open sources presents a double-edged sword: while such information can be helpful to policymakers who were cut out of the classified loop by their security agencies, the problem is that now one’s enemies also know.

No one knows the future of intelligence, but valuing the importance of OSINT, in combination with HUMINT and SIGINT, will give us a fighting chance to inform our leaders with the best information to protect our interests and societies from those who want to do us harm.  

Dr. Eric Mandel is the Director of MEPIN, the Middle East Political Information Network, and briefs members of Congress and their foreign policy experts. He is the Senior Security Editor of the Jerusalem Report and a regular contributor to The Hill. 

Sarit Zehavi is the CEO of Alma Research and Education Center. She is a lieutenant colonel (res.) in the Israel Defense Forces and served for fifteen years as a military intelligence officer.

Image: Shutterstock.

As an unprecedented protest movement quickly spread to dozens of Chinese cities last fall, calling into question Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s authority, the country’s Orwellian surveillance system went into high gear to scrutinize video footage, track phone records, and identify those involved. Yet China’s success in neutralizing these and other threats to the regime rests not on technology developed in Beijing, but in Silicon Valley.

Protests in China are not particularly rare. The number of “public order disturbances” rose tenfold from about 8,700 per year in the 1990s to around 90,000 in the early 2000s, according to Chinese government statistics. Beijing stopped reporting protest data in 2006, although credible studies suggest such figures have hovered near historic highs, with one such study estimating nearly 180,000 protests in 2010 alone. But whereas most Chinese protests involve specific material issues, such as local pay disputes and environmental causes, last December’s demonstrations centered around overturning Xi’s harsh zero-COVID restrictions—with some protestors even calling for Xi’s ouster.

Thousands of people from all parts of society risked their lives to pressure the Chinese government into relaxing mandatory COVID testing requirements, quarantines, and stringent lockdowns. The public anger was understandable: Xi’s pandemic restrictions wrought havoc on China’s public finances and exacerbated many of the structural imbalances that have long plagued Chinese society. The result has been a sharp uptick in urban youth unemployment, a record $1.1 trillion Chinese budget deficit, and a 26 percent drop in land sale revenues—a key driver of local government spending. Spooked by the scale of the demonstrations and the intensity of citizens’ grievances, Xi did the unexpected: he hastily retreated and ordered the rollback of nearly all of China’s pandemic-related restrictions.

Seemingly overnight, China’s protest movement fizzled out, too—but not because Xi relented. Instead, within hours of the first demonstrations, Chinese authorities began knocking on protestors’ doors and demanding to know their whereabouts during the unrest. Many demonstrators received threatening text messages about their participation in “illegal riots,” whereas others were ordered to report to the nearest police station for questioning. Some simply vanished.

China’s successful protest crackdown was no fluke—it was by design. For three decades, China has been developing a complex web of high-tech surveillance systems with ominous names like “Sharp Eyes” and “Golden Shield.” Their first objective was to establish a unified network of spy cameras around the country, many featuring facial recognition software linked to China’s national registry database. These systems were later bolstered by corresponding cloud-based databases and geolocation platforms capable of analyzing terabytes of information generated hourly by Chinese traffic cameras and telecommunications networks, as well as data gleaned by China’s army of internet censors. Under Xi’s leadership, China nearly doubled its annual spending on “public safety” to $210 billion—a figure that exceeds the country’s defense budget.

The beneficiaries of Xi’s surveillance spending spree included Silicon Valley, which explains why U.S. software and equipment from companies such as IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle is deeply embedded throughout China’s police state. Beyond aiding in the development and maintenance of government-controlled systems used to squash last December’s protests, some U.S. firms also actively collaborate with Chinese companies that publicize their links to China’s surveillance apparatus and human rights atrocities.

A typical example of these problematic partnerships is U.S. semiconductor manufacturer Intel’s years-long relationship with Tiandy, a Chinese firm recently blacklisted by Washington for aiding Beijing’s persecution of Uighurs and other minorities in Xinjiang province. Tiandy produces surveillance cameras and networked surveillance systems equipped with facial recognition technology that Chinese authorities have deployed throughout China, including in cities where last month’s protests occurred. The company also sells torture devices known as “tiger chairs” used by Chinese officials to interrogate, sometimes for days, political dissidents. An investigation by tech watchdog IPVM further revealed Tiandy sold its surveillance systems to the sanctioned Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, possibly for use against peaceful protesters there.

Tiandy hardly hid its ties to China’s police state. In fact, the company championed such collaboration in its advertising materials and on its website. Tiandy CEO Dai Lin even hosted meetings with former Deputy Communist Party Secretary of Xinjiang Province Wang Junzheng, whom the U.S. government sanctioned for his role in orchestrating China’s Uighur genocide. And yet, Tiandy also maintained a top-tier alliance with Intel, whose processors power Tiandy’s genocide-enabling products. Even worse, IVPM alerted Intel about Tiandy’s activities in 2021 and Intel elected to maintain the partnership, only severing it when Tiandy was added to Washington’s export control list in December.

Intel is not alone, and its links to Tiandy go well beyond any due-diligence snafu. Instead, the company’s approach is broadly representative of Silicon Valley’s culture of compliance in China, where U.S. tech firms often outsource human rights and end-user risk assessments to third-party suppliers, many themselves linked to China’s military-industrial complex. In passing the buck, U.S. multinationals can have it both ways. They can claim to be vetting their supply chains, but also maintain some plausible deniability about what derogatory information may or may not have been shared with them by these third-party entities.

To be fair, most tech sales to Chinese entities are not prohibited by U.S. law, particularly because Washington often issues licenses explicitly permitting such transfers. But, the provision of any technology that optimizes the performance or sustains the day-to-day operations of Chinese entities involved in human rights violations is, at a minimum, ethically problematic. This moral dilemma is compounded further because many U.S. tech firms, including Intel, tout their commitment to environmental, social, and governance (ESG) initiatives even as they sell their products and services to autocratic regimes. At the same time, investment research firms, like Morningstar, have acknowledged how gaps in their ESG ratings systems can inadvertently give a free pass to companies linked to China’s censorship and surveillance apparatus.

For instance, it was Cisco that provided the routers and know-how necessary to construct China’s “Great Firewall”—used by Beijing to block Western websites and censor data—even though, since 1994, Chinese leaders have been transparent about using internet gateways to control China’s masses. As recently as 2017, Apple also helped China shore up the firewall by deleting five dozen apps that Chinese citizens could use to circumvent government internet filters.

Just as troubling, Public Security Bureaus in Beijing, as well as Fujian, Guangdong, and Henan provinces, all rely on IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle products to maintain their monitoring and censorship operations, according to public contract documents from as recently as 2020. These products enable, among other things, internet traffic monitoring, as well as facial and license plate recognition. Meanwhile, Microsoft’s Windows operating system is widely used by Chinese police departments, which the U.S. State Department has cited for their “routine, arbitrary, and unlawful interference” in Chinese citizens’ lives.

The U.S. tech sector’s links to the Uighur genocide are even more glaring. For instance, the Chinese entity responsible for constructing the Uighur detention facilities in Xinjiang, Zhongke Fuxing, counts IBM, Intel, Hewlett Packard, Microsoft, and Oracle among its trusted partners. For their part, Intel and Nvidia chip’s power the Urumqi Cloud Computing Center in Xinjiang, which, since its inception in 2015, has been cited by Chinese state media for its ties to China’s security apparatus. More specifically, this computer center analyzes peoples’ daily patterns to support China’s so-called predictive policing, in which anyone can be pre-emptively arrested for crimes they have not even committed.

In all, far too many U.S. companies, as well as well-respected U.S. universities like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, have engaged in wide-ranging, unregulated, and often dual-use research with Chinese firms whose business models revolve around furthering repression and undermining freedom. Even when those Chinese companies have been cited by the U.S. or other governments as national security threats, some multinationals look the other way.

Case in point: Amazon Web Services—which maintains billion-dollar contracts with the U.S. Defense Department and intelligence community—hosts streaming services for Hikvision and Dahua, two surveillance firms blacklisted by Washington for supporting China’s Uighur genocide. Both companies are banned from selling their products in the United States. Hikvision, in particular, developed police tools to track protest activities in China, including system-wide alarms that are triggered when crowds “disrupt order in public places.” For its part, Amazon contends that these relationships are in “in full compliance with the law.”

Some U.S. tech giants, like Dell, have signaled plans to draw down their China-based operations amid concerns over Sino-U.S. tensions. But if Amazon’s legalistic retort is any indication, hard-hitting new laws and export control regulations will be needed to compel tech firms to decouple from China’s surveillance state. Indeed, it took an outright ban on the importation of Chinese goods made via forced labor for clothing manufacturers to finally get serious about mapping their distributor networks and shifting supply chains. Similar measures—in which the legal onus falls on tech companies to prove that their third-party vendors are not linked to Chinese law enforcement agencies—should be considered.

That said, the hope of better due diligence in the future will be cold comfort to Chinese citizens arrested for participating in last month’s peaceful protests, including demonstrators identified with the use of Silicon Valley’s latest wares. For America’s tech giants, that’s just business.

Craig Singleton, a former U.S. diplomat, is a senior China fellow at the non-partisan Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

Image: Jiraroj Praditcharoenkul/Shutterstock.

What should Ukraine’s long-term future relationship with Europe, and the West in general, look like if and when this terrible war can be brought to a close? It is not too soon to ask this question. Waiting for talks to begin would be imprudent, given the importance of the task. Indeed, planning for the post-World War II international order began well before 1945. This may not be World War II—but the Ukraine conflict is nonetheless a major event in European history. It behooves us to think big and think from first principles when considering how to help end it. 

A stable peace will require a fair deal that allows Ukraine to rebuild its nation with strong ties to the West and strengthen its economy even as it seeks to do so in a way that minimizes the likely Russian counterreaction. Thinking of Ukraine and Turkey together as new members of the European Union by 2030 provides the right strategic objective as we contemplate a new architecture for the region. These are the two largest countries of Europe’s eastern flank, besides Russia itself, and the two that are also most in flux geostrategically. Anchoring them into a broader European order will be important not only for their future security, but for the broader region’s stability as well—whether we think in terms of the West’s coherence and cohesion, or deterrence of Russia, or both. 

One element of such an approach clearly must involve security. As one of us has written elsewhere, a negotiated settlement to the current war requires enough reassurance and security enhancement for Ukraine that Russia will not wind up attacking again in a year or two or three. NATO membership for Ukraine, and binding security guarantees, seem implausible as part of any accord with Russia. But a strong NATO training presence in a future Ukraine, combined with the creation of a new Eurasian security structure that is distinct from NATO and stronger than the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, may provide the right formula. Ukraine would be a founding member of such a structure, along with many or most NATO members. A post-Vladimir Putin and reformed Russia could someday join as well.

However, it is not all about security, as important as that is. Ukraine’s broader place in Europe is crucial to consider, as well. The alternative to thinking about postwar dynamics now is to wait for military conditions to be ripe for political negotiations between Kyiv and Moscow to begin. This strategy of patience may prove too long, too risky, and too costly for all the parties involved, including Europe and the United States. While the West must continue to help Ukraine militarily and economically, it should also incentivize Kyiv to think about postwar stabilization, democracy, and prosperity. A clear path leading to Ukraine’s EU membership—with a generous financial package for postwar reconstruction—is a promising and realistic strategy for the West. 

But this long-term European strategic objective that includes Ukraine in the EU should not shut the door to Turkey. Europe must not turn into a Christian club that excludes a critically important Muslim country that applied to join the club long before Ukraine even emerged as an independent state in 1991. To be sure, Turkey’s autocratic path under Recep Tayyip Erdogan cannot and should not be rewarded. Instead, the EU must chart a course that incentivizes and rewards a post-Erdogan Turkish political context. This scenario may very well emerge after the Turkish elections scheduled for this summer. The recent devastating earthquake in the country has only sharpened the resolve of the Turkish opposition, who blames the Erdogan government for the slow rescue effort, inefficient post-disaster relief, and lax construction standards. According to most polls the opposition—a unified front of six political parties—has a reasonable chance to win. A combination of dismal economic conditions and Erdogan-fatigue among large segments of Turkey’s young and dynamic society is likely to turn a new page in Turkish politics after twenty years under the same ruler. Under a more democratic government and after having welcomed Sweden and Norway as new NATO members, a post-Erdogan Turkey will deserve a second chance with the EU. Given Turkey’s complex—and potentially helpful—role in the Ukraine crisis, this new page in Turkey-EU relations can also help Ankara escape Russia’s strategic and economic orbit. 

Ukraine gained candidate status in the EU shortly after the Russian invasion began. But candidacy is no guarantee for membership, as Turkey, another country that gained such status in 1999 and began accession negotiations in 2005, bitterly knows. Some may object that the EU cannot accept a state with occupied territory. In fact, the EU already has a member with unsettled borders: Cyprus. To Turkey’s dismay, Cyprus gained membership in the union despite voting against a United Nations-sponsored plan that would have united the island. 

Turkey’s own EU accession process is currently on hold for reasons largely related to its autocratic turn. But Cyprus and Greece are also serious impediments. An opposition victory against Erdogan in the upcoming elections could create a narrow window of opportunity on that front too. A recent document outlining the Turkish opposition’s strategic vision underlines the need for diplomatic engagement rather than saber-rattling with Greece. Reviving Ankara’s EU membership process in a post-Erdogan context would provide a rewarding boost to a new Turkish government that seeks diplomatic rather than militaristic solutions to deeply-rooted problems in the Aegean sea and Eastern Mediterranean. 

All this is easier said than done. With Brexit, the EU lost the country that was the most ardent supporter of enlargement. Washington also lost its most valued partner in the EU. In the absence of the United Kingdom, Washington needs to become the champion of EU enlargement. The case to be made to the EU’s Franco-German engine is a convincing one: a path for Ukraine and Turkey to join the club by 2030 will significantly improve peace and stability in Europe. The alternative will be a Ukraine in limbo and a frustrated Ankara continuing to move away from the transatlantic community. Yes, Turkey is already a NATO member, but a highly problematic one. Ankara has purchased missile defense systems from Russia and currently holds Finnish and Swedish membership to NATO hostage. The Biden administration should make the case that a more democratic Turkey after Erdogan will need a European perspective to stay the course. This positive trajectory change in Turkish foreign and domestic politics will certainly be a game-changer for Turkish-Russian relations. 

At the end of the day, only the EU can take decisions about its future. Declaring that EU membership for Ukraine could take “decades,” French president Emmanuel Macron has recently launched the “European Political Community”—a large and toothless initiative bringing together forty-two countries that includes Israel, Georgia, and Armenia. Ukraine and Turkey will need more than inclusion in a large and ineffective pan-European tent with no economic and political benefits. To truly defeat Russian objectives, the EU and the United States need to establish a stronger and much more audacious transatlantic agenda. Anchoring Ukraine and Turkey in the EU by the end of the decade should be at the heart of this strategic vision. 

Michael O’Hanlon holds the Philip Knight Chair in Defense and Strategy at The Brookings Institution and is author of Military History for the Modern Strategist: America’s Major Wars since 1861.

Omer Taspinar is professor at National Defense University and Johns Hopkins/SAIS.

Image: Salma Bashir Motiwala / Shutterstock.com

The past few years have seen a wave of concern over how increasing political and social polarization is negatively affecting the political systems of the United States and other democracies. To clarify, social polarization refers to the growing divide between different social groups, which is often characterized by deep political, ideological, and cultural differences. Rising polarization can lead to increased distrust and even hostility between social groups, to the point where the domestic stability of both developed and developing countries are threatened—particularly in democracies. As people view those on the opposite end of the ideological spectrum as a threat or enemy, the likelihood of justifying violence to “protect their country” or “take it back” from “others” increases. Experts have examined the unfavorable impacts of polarization on several political dynamics, such as civic engagement, social trust, and trust in government.

However, we have a poor understanding of how polarization in society would affect militaries, particularly their performance and relations with their parent governments. After all, military institutions often reflect the characteristics of their societies, so there is little reason to believe militaries are immune to social polarization. Military officers have their own political views, and increasing political partisanship and polarization among the ranks has become worrying, if not detrimental, for national security.

The Military Consequences of Polarization

The first and perhaps the most serious such consequence is the decline of public trust in the military. When people perceive the military as representing one particular ideological view, especially one that is opposed to the views held by a significant segment of the civilian population, a military’s traditional neutral and non-partisan role is eroded, creating a divide between the military and the civilian public. Such a public perception would threaten a military’s ability to maintain the support of a broader population, making it difficult to elicit public support for military-related matters, particularly concerning funding, equipment, or training.

Second, polarization also increases the risk of politicizing the military appointment process. Politicians are incentivized to appoint partisan loyalists in military leadership, since they may not trust other military leaders who disagree with their political beliefs. Moreover, this would also affect the appointment of mid-level officers, since military leaders themselves might prefer working with subordinates who share similar political views, and distrust those who do not.

Beyond the appointment process, polarization could even affect the basic recruitment process in the military. The Turkish military is a prime example of this: polarization among ultranationalist, secularist, and religious communities in Turkey has deepened under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s rule over the past two decades, affecting the country’s military as Erdogan divided and dispersed it, taking complete control of what was once an institutional force. One of Erdogan's strongest allies, SADAT, officially a defense consultancy contractor, has been involved in choosing the desired candidates for the Turkish Military Academy (recently rebranded as National Defense University) and determining the list of questions in cadet selection interviews. Instead of questions that measure the qualifications of the candidates, SADAT’s questions are designed to recruit candidates who share their political views. Consider the following example questions: “Should Turkey be governed by democracy or theocracy?” “If both the Chief of the General Staff and the President give you an order at the same time, whose order would you follow?”

Third, social polarization can also impact the battlefield performance of militaries. The breakdown in social trust caused by polarization can be felt across the ranks, making it difficult for militaries to create strong bonds and cohesive units. This can deteriorate morale, and negatively impact soldiers’ performance on the battlefield. Additionally, polarization can make it difficult for militaries to undertake important efforts, such as intelligence gathering. If a military is perceived as closely aligned with one particular social group, or out of touch with certain social groups, it will find it hard to gain trust and cooperation from those groups. This could degrade a military’s ability to gather vital intelligence about an adversary, particularly in a counterinsurgency context where gathering information from locals is critical.

Polarized Military as Menace to Democracy

The dangers of a polarized military are not limited to the military itself—they can spread and even threaten the existence of fundamental democratic values, such as democratic civilian control over the military, that the military should possess non-partisan character, or even the acceptance of political transitions.

Consider for example recent political events in Brazil, where now-President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva defeated the incumbent Jair Bolsonaro in an election. Following Bolsonaro’s electoral defeat, a mob of his supporters attacked Brazil’s federal government buildings, including the nation’s Congress. Lula though noted that individuals in the military facilitated these insurrectionists’ storming of government buildings, indicating that polarization between right- and left-wing supporters in Brazil has affected the country’s military.

In addition to active-duty officers, social polarization also influences retired officers. For instance, there is a recent trend of retired U.S. officers adopting partisan positions and weighing in on subjects not related to military expertise. 124 retired generals and admirals released a letter in 2021 advancing a false claim that the presidential vote in 2020 was rigged in Joe Biden’s favor and opined about various domestic issues, such as the construction of a border wall. Retired generals in the United States also sometimes get directly involved in politics by speaking at political party conventions and endorsing political candidates. By involving themselves in these kinds of political activities, officers fail to preserve a military’s non-partisan character.

Polarization can create challenges to another democratic norm: civilian control of the military. If the military is perceived as being more powerful or influential than other institutions in society, the potential for abuse of power or erosion of democratic accountability can manifest. Additionally, if the military is perceived as being more respected or trusted than other institutions, this can produce a sense of entitlement and overconfidence among military leaders, making it harder for civilian leaders to provide effective oversight and guidance. This argument is consistent with professor Peter Erickson’s view that high levels of social polarization, combined with high military prestige, is a dangerous mix.

Overcoming Military Polarization

Despite this gloomy picture, there are also several potential solutions to the problem of polarization.

One solution is for militaries to engage with communities that perceive them as representing a different ideological group. There are several ways to achieve this, including diversifying the pool of recruits by including people from marginalized communities. Doing so can increase contact between people with different worldviews and foster a shared sense of purpose among those from diverse backgrounds, which can help alleviate the adverse effects of polarization.

Moreover, military organizations can partner with local organizations that serve their communities to better understand local needs. This partnership is particularly crucial during times of crisis, such as when militaries provide assistance during natural disasters—especially when marginalized communities are disproportionately affected. By paying special attention to helping these communities in a timely manner, militaries attain trust and break down barriers.

Furthermore, accountability is crucial for strengthening efforts to contain polarization. Not all officers are equally professional, and some may not even be aware of their implicit political biases. To prevent the possibility that such biases might poison the culture of professionalism and accountability in the military, senior leadership must take certain necessary measures, such as offering specialized training and making reporting channels open. Training can help officers become more aware of their implicit biases, foster a culture of open communication, and being able to raise concerns within legal limits against polarizing rhetoric or behaviors can help neutralize the harmful effects of polarization.

Together with the military’s own efforts, civilian leaders must do their bit to hold politicians responsible for their own deeds that could exacerbate a military’s polarization problem. To stop the politicization of uniformed troops or military resources in partisan contexts, the public ought to speak out and advocate for changes to laws on civil-military relations or the educational doctrine of particular militaries. These changes should aim to strictly restrict politicians from taking advantage of the reputation of their militaries for their own political agendas.

Lessons Learned from History

History is the most powerful teacher, and historical examples aptly demonstrate how polarization has led to defeats on the battlefield or undermined a military’s ability to respond to threats. Using these examples to demonstrate the consequences that a military faces, if polarization is left unresolved, might encourage individual military personnel to do their part to fix the issue.

The Ottoman military’s performance during the Balkan Wars (1912 to 1913) is a case in point. The Ottoman defeat in the First Balkan War was attributed to polarization among the officer ranks and the lack of a clear ideological message to unite soldiers.

The Balkan Wars marked the beginning of the Ottoman empire’s final decade. While conscription of non-Muslim males eligible for military service was legal since 1856, it was only enforced after 1909. While some Ottoman elites believed a more inclusive military was necessary to promote Ottomanism and save imperial unity, others believed it would exacerbate the already existing fault lines in the polarized Ottoman forces. The defeat in the Balkan Wars and World War I revealed the political tensions within the Ottoman political and military elite over Ottomanism, Islamism, and Turkism. The wars and the military coup of 1913 led to a de facto military dictatorship by the Committee of Union and Progress’ triumvirate until the end of the empire. Aware of the dangers of a politically polarized military, Mustafa Kemal Pasha, the founding father of the nascent Turkish Republic, enforced a strict separation of the officer ranks from politics through legislation and constitutional amendments.

In sum, social polarization can lead to several serious consequences for militaries, such as the decline of public trust, the politicization of appointment and recruitment processes, and the negative impact on battlefield performance. These consequences are particularly worrying in a time of growing political partisanship and polarization in societies, where the military’s neutral and non-partisan role can be threatened, and its ability to maintain public support may be compromised. Furthermore, a polarized military can become a menace to democracy, where its actions may even threaten fundamental democratic values. It is crucial to recognize the impact of social polarization on militaries and take action to mitigate its negative consequences, such as promoting merit-based appointments and curbing civilian politicization of the military. An institution tasked with national security and defense of the nation can’t afford political exploitation of its nonpartisan ethic and constitutional duty. Preserving the institutional identity and shared values of the military calls for resilience and resistance from military leadership, civilian defenders, and a vigilant public.

Mustafa Kirisci is an Assistant Professor of Homeland Security at Desales University. His research interests are terrorism, civil conflict, interstate conflict, and civil-military relations.

Ibrahim Kocaman is an Assistant Professor at the department of security studies and international affairs at Embry Riddle Aeronautical University. His research interests are civil conflict, civil-military relations, interstate conflict, and political economy.

Cagil Albayrak is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Kansas. His research interests are terrorism, political institutions, and civil-military relations.

Image: Shutterstock.

The arrest of a “global terrorist” and financial supporter of Hezbollah in Romania on February 24 exemplifies the lengths the Lebanese militant group will go to insulate itself from U.S. sanctions. According to an indictment from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Eastern District of New York, Mohammad Ibrahim Bazzi, a fifty-eight-year-old Lebanese and Belgian citizen, conspired to “secretly move hundreds of thousands of dollars from the United States to Lebanon” and “provide continued financial assistance to Hizballah,” a designated foreign terrorist organization. Bazzi, who was himself declared a Specially Designed Global Terrorist (SDGT) by the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) in 2018, is now awaiting extradition to the United States alongside another Lebanese citizen, Talal Chahine, for participation in the same crimes.

Bazzi and Chahine’s offenses reach far beyond Romania and the United States. As described in the OFAC designation, Bazzi has generated millions of dollars for Hezbollah from business activities in Belgium, Gambia, Lebanon, and Iraq, among other locations. Further, as a “key Hizballah financier,” he maintains ties to other material supporters of Hezbollah and OFAC-designated and sanctioned SDGTs, as well as the Central Bank of Iran.

The Iran angle is particularly interesting, as Hezbollah has been known to receive the bulk of its funding (and weapons) from the Islamic Republic of Iran. As Iran’s foremost proxy which has carried out Iranian-backed operations in Syria and Yemen and against Israel, the ties between the two are extensive. Hezbollah has grown so powerful due to Iranian largess that it has often been called a “state within a state,” and has leveraged its capabilities to exert considerable political influence over Lebanon’s domestic and foreign policies.

Yet Hezbollah has also faced various financial constraints over the past two decades, including those brought on by Iran’s deteriorating economy, international financial sanctions, political competition in Lebanon, and combat operations in Syria. These pressures created an impetus for Iran and Hezbollah to get creative. Just this last week, for example, Israel announced the discovery of a gold smuggling operation between Iran and Venezuela, in which the former’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force would smuggle Venezuelan gold to Iran, sell it for a profit, and transfer the funds to Hezbollah.

This revelation should not be surprising. Hezbollah has worked assiduously to establish a presence in Latin America, especially in the notorious tri-border area between Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay, where a significant number of Lebanese immigrants live. As described by Matthew Levitt, a former senior official at the Treasury Department and a counterterrorism expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, in his 2013 book, Hezbollah: The Global Footprint of Lebanon’s Party of God, Hezbollah not only built formal and informal support networks in this area, including sleeper cells, but engaged in drug trafficking and “every financial crime in the book” to generate funds.

Hezbollah has established similar transnational criminal networks in Europe, Africa, and even the United States, providing it with sources of funding that are entirely independent of Iran. This has made cracking down on the group an arduous task for U.S. and international law enforcement.

This brings us back to Bazzi and Chahine. Despite being described as “the most senior catch in the top tier” of Hezbollah’s Business Affairs Component, the organizational structure that undergirds the group’s international enterprises, it is far from a death blow. Indeed, countering Hezbollah, which in addition to controlling a worldwide criminal network also commands a large political following in Lebanon, requires friends of a free and democratic Lebanon to play the long game.

To be sure, one way in which the United States has sought to support Lebanese democracy and Lebanese alternatives to Hezbollah is by supporting the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF). According to the U.S. State Department, the United States has invested over $3 billion into the LAF since 2006 as a means of supporting Lebanon’s institutions, strengthening its sovereignty, securing its borders, and countering internal threats and terrorists.

Unfortunately, Lebanon’s economic emergency and political dysfunction are straining the LAF to the breaking point. Al-Monitor reported in late February that desertions are rising as the country’s currency has collapsed by more than 98 percent over the past three years. Lebanese security chiefs are warning of their declining ability to secure the country at the same time that Lebanese citizens and police are “storming” banks to access their own money and violent clashes are occurring in the country’s largest Palestinian refugee camp.

Whether a solution to these problems can be found is difficult to say, but Lebanon’s long-standing political deadlock suggests that the situation will further worsen before it improves. The country has failed to elect a new president since its former president, Michel Aoun, left office last October, leaving it in the hands of a caretaker government. This constitutional crisis is only one more problem upon a mountain of challenges that the Lebanese must summit before their situation improves. In this light, the arrest of two senior Hezbollah financiers is laudable, but ultimately a sideshow for the Lebanese people, whose country stands on the edge of a precipice.

Adam Lammon is a former executive editor at The National Interest and an analyst of Middle Eastern affairs based in Washington, DC. The opinions expressed in this article are his own.

Image: Crop Media/Shutterstock.

The Melian Dialogue is among the most heavily analyzed sections in Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War. Athens wanted to take Melos, a small island, as a subject of their empire. The Athenians sent envoys to negotiate with the Melians, who had no true means of resisting a superpower like Athens unless their allies, the Spartans, chose to once again fight a long, bloody war on their behalf.

Unlike Melos, which never received Spartan aid and whose population was ultimately annihilated, Ukraine has received an endless supply of military aid from Western countries. Russian leaders regularly warn that the West’s military support of Ukraine could lead to a full-fledged war between NATO and Russia. After all, the truth of the matter is that American and other NATO members’ weapons are being sent to Ukraine in order to kill Russian soldiers.

Furthermore, while the Melian Dialogue certainly consisted of a lot of talking, there was hardly any true negotiation. Each party maintained unconditional positions that were paradoxical to one another, making any meaningful progress impossible. The same can be said with Russia and Ukraine; each party refuses to even come to the negotiating table until the other agrees to unacceptable demands. To avoid a Melian ending in Ukraine, one or both parties will have to modify their conditions. To avoid a worse ending, NATO should consider the following questions. Was it prudent for Sparta not to intervene in Melos, or should they have risked another massive war with Athens over the island? Should Melos have surrendered? As the war in Ukraine rages on, and peace talks have yet to commence, it’s long past time we ask ourselves if helping Kyiv regain control of eastern Ukraine is worth the risks, and if there isn’t another way forward.

The Athenian envoys opened the dialogue by acknowledging that they were brought only before the rulers of Melos, or “the Few,” because the people,“the Many,” would quickly agree to the Athenians’ demands and inferred that the Few knew this to be true. The Melians stated that though they would take part in a dialogue, there was hardly any serious discussion to be had. They understood that the Athenians had made up their minds and intended to turn Melos into their subject, which the Melians refused to consider. Herein lies the key problem that persists throughout the entire dialogue: each side maintained unconditional positions that were paradoxical to one another. The unconditional Athenian position was that Melos would become a subject of the Athenian empire, the only question being whether they would secure it through Melian submission or war. The unconditional Melian position was that they would not become a subject of the Athenian empire, the only question being whether they would achieve that through persuasion or war. The only outcome that both parties were willing to accept was also the one they both wanted to avoid. Does this sound familiar?

Kyiv has offered a ten-point peace proposal to the Russians, which includes the withdrawal of Russian troops from Ukraine and the restoration of pre-war borders. It should come as no surprise that Russia declined Kyiv’s proposal. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has urged Ukraine to accept the “new realities” and that if they don’t, “no kind of progress is possible.” Among these “new realities” include the annexed regions of eastern Ukraine being part of the Russian Federation. Referendums were held in each of these regions, and though they all allegedly voted to join the Russian Federation, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, along with most of the Western world, has denounced these referendums as “shams” with “no legal value.”

Like the Athenians and Melians, Russia and Ukraine each maintain paradoxical, unconditional positions. The party being aggressed has every right to resist. That said, if either of these countries eventually become serious about ending the war for the sake of preventing further loss of life and destruction, there will have to be peace talks, and concessions will have to be made. Short of that, the only alternative is for one side to military defeat the other, which would lead to a far worse outcome for the loser.

The Athenians, like the Russians today, encouraged the Melians to accept the reality before them. They dismissed all arguments grounded in the abstract, such as the importance of hope. The Melians spoke of “the fortune of war” and stated that “to submit is to give ourselves over to despair, while action still preserves for us a hope that we may stand erect.” The Athenians responded coldly, referring to hope as “danger’s comforter,” and said that when reality is too harsh to accept, people “turn to the invisible, to prophecies and oracles, and other such inventions that delude men with hopes to their destruction.” Ukraine is in a similar position, but unlike the Melians, they have been fed reasons to be hopeful by Western governments. Melos received no support from their allies, whereas Ukraine has received foreign military aid since the beginning of the war. This has been noticeably beneficial to the Ukrainians. As of November 2022, Ukraine has reclaimed over 50 of percent the land captured by Russia, though Russian forces still control roughly 15 to 20 percent of the country. Even with most NATO members agreeing to supply Ukraine with tanks, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy has stated that dozens of tanks will hardly make a difference, given the fact that Russia has thousands of them. Despite the quantity being insufficient, those tanks do provide a real benefit to the Ukrainian military, according to Zelenskyy. “They do only one very important thing—they motivate our soldiers to fight for their own values. Because they show that the whole world is with you.” In short, the West has supplied Ukrainians with hope.

The Melians cited the prospect of a Spartan intervention as a stronger argument against Athenian aggression. They claimed that the Spartans would intervene, “if only for very shame…”. Again, the Athenians struck them down, saying that danger is something “the Spartans generally court as little as possible.” One might not think of the United States as a nation that courts danger infrequently, given their long history of foreign interventions. But in the post-World War II era, the United States has exclusively fought against relatively minor powers. Major powers, which make up most of the United States’ greatest adversaries, tend to be off limits, and rightfully so. Not because America would lose a conventional war against a major power, but because of one key factor: nuclear weapons. In this regard, Americans are like the Spartans, who generally court danger as little as possible.

After going back and forth several more times over the prospect of a Spartan intervention, the Athenians suggested that the Few should seek advice from others before it’s too late. Before leaving, they told the Melians to make their final decision carefully, as it was a choice between “prosperity or ruin.”

The Few never changed their minds, they never sought advice from others and war ensued. The Melians held out for roughly a year before finally surrendering, at which point every man in Melos was executed, the women and children were sold into slavery, and Athenian colonists settled Melos for themselves. The Many were annihilated because of a decision made by a small group of individuals. To prefer death over the loss of sovereignty is noble. Subjecting an entire city to that decision is probably poor governance. If the Many had any say in this dialogue, would they have made the same decision, or would they have preferred to live as subjects of the Athenian empire? For the war in Ukraine to end through peace talks instead of a more Melian fate, either Russia or Ukraine will have to change their unconditional demands. 

There are only two possible outcomes for Ukraine. Either most of Ukraine will remain under Kyiv’s control, or all of Ukraine will be reduced to rubble, its leadership overthrown, and the entire country will potentially face annexation. The first outcome relies on peace talks taking place before the Ukrainian military is outright defeated. Those peace talks would probably include Kyiv surrendering its eastern territory to Russia. The second outcome is virtually guaranteed if Ukraine is defeated before agreeing to a peace treaty that involves forfeiting territory it hasn’t had real control of since 2014 anyway. This is true even with a continued supply of Western military equipment.

Readers will note that excluded from these two options is the outcome that most hope for: Ukraine defeating the Russian military and regaining control of the entire country. Those in the West who promote this outcome are feeding Ukrainians with what we know to be “danger’s comforter.” The longer the West provides Ukraine with military aid, the longer Ukrainians will be deluded in the face of greater dangers than those they already face.

Ending the war through a peace treaty, even an unideal one, is an objectively better outcome than the logical conclusion of its current course. Each new round of military equipment sent to Ukraine is more advanced than the last. The first batch of American aid included anti-armor and antiaircraft munitions. Roughly a year later, NATO countries have provided Ukraine with Patriot missile systems and are in the process of supplying them with tanks as well. Meanwhile, the Russians are becoming increasingly angry with Western governments, cutting diplomatic ties, exiting treaties, and occasionally threatening nuclear war. Is helping Kyiv regain control over the eastern territory worth that risk? Alternatively, Western governments could instantly eliminate that risk by ceasing its military aid. That would, of course, expedite Ukraine’s inevitable defeat and hurt the pride of Western leaders. Was the pride of the Few, or their value of sovereignty, worth the lives of Melos’ populace? And is there a lesson to be learned from the Spartans’ decision not to intervene?

Michael Guy is a political writer, activist, and campaign worker with a master’s degree in political science with a focus on political theory and American politics.

Image: Shutterstock.

One year after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the ugliness of humanity is fully on display. But instead of working to stop the war immediately, major powers in the world are directly or indirectly prolonging this man-made tragedy.

In total, as of the time of writing, the United States has committed more than $27.4 billion in security assistance to Ukraine since the beginning of the current administration, and more than $26.7 billion since the beginning of Russia’s brutal invasion on February 24, 2022. President Joe Biden himself announced another half a billion dollars in military aid to Ukraine during his February 20 surprise visit to Kyiv. “To meet Ukraine’s evolving battlefield requirements, the United States will continue to work with its Allies and partners to provide Ukraine with key capabilities,” the U.S. Department of Defense declared when announcing the additional security aid. When appearing alongside Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky in Kyiv, Biden proudly stated that, “Together, we’ve committed nearly 700 tanks and thousands of armored vehicles. 1,000 artillery systems, more than 2 million rounds of artillery ammunition, more than 50 advanced launch rocket systems, anti-ship and air defense systems, all to defend Ukraine.”

At the same time, Japanese prime minister Fumio Kishida said his country would be pledging another $5.5 billion in assistance, because of “strong concern that Ukraine may be tomorrow’s East Asia.” 

Supporting Ukraine in its resistance against Russian invasion is the right thing to do. But is this the only thing the United States can do? Have the United States and other powers tried to end the war? Why has our society become so tolerant of this bloody war?

China, another major global power—which is reportedly considering supplying Russia with drones and artillery equipment—released its “Global Security Initiative Concept Paper” a few days before the one-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion. In this document, China touts the concept of “common, comprehensive, cooperative and sustainable security,” and reiterates its commitments “to respecting the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all countries” and “to taking the legitimate security concerns of all countries seriously.”

This is a paradoxical position: the first commitment appears to be supporting Ukraine, while the second supports Russia. Without specific, actionable measures to implement this supposed global security initiative, the document sounds hollow. 

Yet the contradictory position may be the point, since the same dire situation that exists in Ukraine also exists in the Taiwan Strait. It’s in everyone’s interest not to turn Taiwan into another Ukraine. Yet the United States and China seem to be heading towards the exact same kind of showdown.

Depending on who you ask, a U.S.-China war over Taiwan could break out in 2049, 2035, 2027, or as soon as 2025—with that last one being based on the “gut feelings” of General Mike Minihan of the U.S. Air Mobility Command.

And how is the United States preparing for this potential scenario? By arming Taiwan.

Washington has never ceased arms sales to Taiwan after it switched official recognition from Taipei to Beijing in 1979, which is consistent with the Taiwan Relations Act (TRA). The TRA, passed by Congress and signed into law by President Jimmy Carter, states that the United States “shall provide Taiwan with arms of a defensive character.”

In recent years, the United States has sharply increased security and military support for Taiwan while China becomes more assertive. For instance, the Taiwan Enhanced Resilience Act, included in the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), authorizes appropriations for military grant assistance for Taiwan up to $2 billion per year from 2023 through 2027.

This so-called “porcupine strategy” is aimed at arming Taiwan so much that China would think twice before it launches an attack on Taiwan. The question is, with the People’s Liberation Army’s own modernization and Xi Jinping’s historical mission of realizing the “Chinese dream,” which includes China’s unification with Taiwan, will the porcupine strategy work? Or is it counterproductive, since Washington’s efforts to beef up Taiwan’s defense will only harden Beijing’s resolve to be better prepared for an eventual conflict?

U.S. diplomats and scholars used to be the most consistent and loudest supporters of cross-Taiwan Strait dialogue. Nowadays, nobody in Washington is promoting dialogue; everyone is busy predicting when the war with China will start—it is automatically presumed that such an outcome is a foregone conclusion.

The U.S. government tended to be vague about its long-term goal in Taiwan, and it was believed that Washington did not care about a particular outcome of cross-strait relations so long as the process is peaceful. Today, the United States does not seem to support cross-strait unification anymore, even if it is achieved peacefully. Indeed, Taiwan has become a more valuable strategic asset for both Washington and Beijing as U.S.-China rivalry intensifies.

As Washington continues to arm Taiwan and as Beijing ramps up military and diplomatic pressures on Taiwan, a U.S.-China military conflict seems highly likely.

No one benefits from wars, except greedy arms dealers. As great powers, the United States and China should ask themselves: what have we done to end or prevent wars?

Zhiqun Zhu is a professor of international relations and political science at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. He has written extensively on U.S.-China relations and East Asian political economy.

Image: Shutterstock.

Newly re-elected Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and high-level Israeli ministers have recently met with multiple U.S. delegations led by National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan on January 19, CIA director Bill Burns shortly after, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken between January 30-31. The litany of meetings marks the first early engagements between the partner countries under Israel’s new government, coming at a truly unique moment for Israel and Palestine in which a perfect confluence of hardline views and groups could erupt into a regionally destabilizing conflict.

The historic election of the most far-right government in Israeli history following Israeli parliamentary elections in November has dominated the media cycle for months, in no small part because Netanyahu’s coalition consists of ultranationalist and ultraorthodox parties operated by openly racist and xenophobic fascists. The most notable non-Likud parties and individuals in this new coalition include Religious Zionism, run by Bezalel Smotrich; Otzma Yehudit, led by Itamar Ben-Gvir; Shas, led by Aryeh Deri; and United Torah Judaism, led by Yitzchak Goldknopf.

Netanyahu’s Likud is the largest party in the Israeli Knesset (the Israeli parliament) with thirty-two seats. It is also the furthest left political entity in the coalition, raising eyebrows given that the party is very conservative. Major cabinet-level positions were given to each of the party leaders in the coalition, including Smotrich as minister of finance and Ben Gvir as minister for national security. Specifically, Smotrich will control the Finance Ministry for two years while also serving as a minister in the Ministry of Defense, overseeing West Bank settlements. Ben Gvir will oversee police forces across Israel and the West Bank.

Ultimately, the ministry assignments are striking considering the conflict of interests at play. This includes Smotrich’s plans to shift governing responsibilities from the Israel Defense Forces’ (IDF) Civil Administration under the Defense Ministry to “relevant ministries” and thus civilian control—a “de facto annexation” of Palestinian land as it would apply Israeli civil law instead of military rule to the occupied territories. Smotrich’s Finance Ministry would likely be one governing entity gaining powers over the West Bank in this regard, as he desires full control of development in Area C (60 percent of the West Bank) to advance Israeli settler colony construction. Importantly, Smotrich lives in the historic settlement of Kedumim, half of which falls under Area C.

This plan was partially operationalized on February 23, when a number of responsibilities under the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) and the Civil Administration, the two Defense Ministry agencies in charge of civilian affairs in Area C of the West Bank where Israel has full security and civilian control, were transferred to Smotrich. To avoid political backlash, the power transfer is defined as within the Defense Ministry, where Smotrich is a minister. Ultimately, power over the West Bank will be split between Smotrich, Defense Minister Yoav Galant, and Netanyahu—setting up a power struggle. More importantly, Smotrich will now have supposed final say on enforcement of illegal settlement construction.

Each of these leaders, as well as their parties broadly, openly support repressive policies that advance Israeli apartheid over Palestinians specifically and non-Jewish minorities generally. This includes settlement expansion (including legalizing illegal outposts in occupied Palestine on February 12), expanding policing of Palestinian-majority communities, loosening policies allowing for police to fire on civilians, outlawing the Palestinian flag, and broadening the interior minister’s ability to revoke citizenship for a lack of “loyalty” to the state of Israel. Each of these policies is used to decrease the power of Palestinians to resist the occupation and further harden the alternative legal regime under which they live.

Ultimately, the combination of fascistic politicians, coupled with the guaranteed deepening of Israeli apartheid against Palestinians in both Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT)—not to mention the attempted annexation of Palestinian land through settlement expansion, recognition, and legal reforms—is certain to spell disaster for Palestine, Israel, and the broader region. Indeed, the advent of Israel’s new government comes amidst the perfect storm of adjacent issues.

This includes the rapidly decaying influence of and support for the Palestinian Authority (PA), which governs parts of the West Bank. Aging PA president Mahmoud Abbas, alongside most of the PA leadership under his Fatah Movement, is widely viewed as ineffectual and out of touch—for good reason. PA cooperation with Israel has regularly produced terrible outcomes for Palestinians, often in the form of Ramallah’s brutal repression of the Palestinian street itself. Many Palestinians view the PA as an arm of the Israeli government, especially given its own brutal tactics against the Palestinian people.

Due to its loss of legitimacy, the PA is ceding ground to new armed groups across the OPT, not limited to the Iran-backed Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, alongside newer groups like the Lion’s Den. Palestinian Youth are particularly prominent in new militant groups in the West Bank and carry widespread support—a sign that Palestinians have lost faith in peaceful engagement with Israel. This is best represented by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research’s (PCPSR) latest polling of Palestinians in the West Bank, which found that 40 percent of individuals now support “waging an armed struggle” against the occupation.

This is a long-running and unsurprising trend. Israel has forced millions of Palestinians into both poverty and increasingly smaller communities over the decades while supporting settler efforts to swallow up OPT land, such as mob attacks on Palestinian communities. Consecutive Israeli governments have ignored the clear need for peace talks with the Palestinian leadership, cynically opting to slowly creep over Palestinian land and ethnically cleanse entire communities, in no small part because it is politically popular in Israel. Masafer Yatta, near Hebron, offers one of a litany of examples of this strategy. Indeed, the Israeli far-right appears dead set on expanding Israeli territory to force Palestinians out of their communities. Smotrich’s statements, claiming he has “no interest” in the PA’s existence, is the personification of a broader reality in which the West Bank is entirely annexed—a leading cause of Palestinian upheaval today. Israeli efforts to cut PA funding, led by Smotrich, only worsen destabilization.

Thus, the perfect storm presents itself. One of the core sources of regional instability—namely the fight for Palestinian statehood—is reaching an apex moment in which hardline stances in Israel and Palestine are resulting in exceedingly violent incidents. Much of this falls on Israel’s refusal to negotiate with the Palestinians given domestic political realities and the perception that it can bypass concessions through efforts to expand the Abraham Accords, which connected Israel to multiple Arab governments in 2020 through so-called “peace deals.”

This, coupled with overt military repression that has particularly worsened in the last year, evidenced by a marked increase in West Bank raids since last year, has forced many Palestinians to view violence as their only option. To be sure, increasingly repressive tactics are the norm of both moderate and right-wing Israeli governments for years, especially following the deadliest year for Palestinians on record (2022). Unfortunately, the new government’s makeup and rhetoric prove that it will continue to push Palestinians beyond the breaking point. Recent violence in the West Bank during the U.S. delegation visits, including the worst Israeli raid in a decade, and, subsequently, the worst Palestinian attack on Israelis in fifteen years are the results.

Without exceedingly careful diplomacy by world leaders—namely, the United States—a new and major conflict will erupt between Israelis and Palestinians that could transcend the OPT into Israeli communities. This was already witnessed during the 2021 Gaza War, which for the first time saw intracommunal violence across Israel as Hamas and the IDF rained bombs on each other for weeks. Simply put, it is not outlandish, albeit incredibly saddening, that 2023 faces the very real risk of a third Intifada should the new Israeli government push Palestinians to the breaking point. PCPSR’s research suggests that many think this is already occurring, with 61 percent of Palestinians and 65 percent of Israeli Jews agreeing an intifada has already started.

Recent U.S. delegations to Israel suggest that important conversations focused on stabilizing the situation are occurring. However, Netanyahu’s word is highly contentious given the far-right’s hold over him due to his ongoing corruption trial. Ultimately, Netanyahu needs his coalition partners to push through judicial reforms that will save his political career. His decision to create a coalition with fascists already suggests he is compromised on this front and beholden to their interests. Thus, his comments about stability and the status quo should ring hollow, let alone any expectation that he can keep his cabinet in check. This is particularly true given the recent conflict within his cabinet following the destruction of the illegal Or Hachaim outpost in the West Bank, in which Gallant and Smotrich clashed over the closing of the settler outpost. Israel’s brutal Nablus raid on February 22, mere hours after promising to cease West Bank raids in exchange for the PA’s removal of a highly critical United Nations Security Council resolution against Israel, further proves this reality. The brutality that occurred during the Huwara pogroms, at nearly the same time as meetings in Jordan between Palestinian, Israeli, American, and other regional delegations, only adds insult to injury.

Washington must recognize the moment. The Biden administration has attempted to play “quiet diplomacy” with Israel in the hopes of avoiding a rupture, but this strategy was always doomed to fail. Any approach that utilizes increasingly toothless peace and security rhetoric without a political process, which Israel and the United States continue to say is not viable, is doomed to lead to violence as Palestinians face daily raids, deaths, poverty, and no state. Hoping that an outbreak of additional (and worse) violence does not occur even as the U.S. government does its utmost to defend Israel and the current status quo will neither support U.S. interests nor aid in peace and stability. It will only leave the region a powder keg set to ignite at any moment.

Alexander Langlois is a foreign policy analyst focused on the Middle East and North Africa. He holds an M.A. in International Affairs from American University’s School of International Service. Follow him at @langloisajl.

Image: abu adel - photo / Shutterstock.com

U.S. president Joe Biden paid a surprise visit to Ukrainian president Volodymir Zelenskyy in Kyiv on February 20, 2023. Speaking together at the Mariinsky Palace, Zelenskyy said, “Right now, in Ukraine, the destiny of the international order based […] is decided.” He rightly emphasized that “a common, joint task for all the countries” is their defense of the rules-based international order. From Kyiv to Taipei, and from Warsaw to Tokyo, we are entering a new geopolitical stage that encompasses both terrestrial Eurasia and the maritime Indo-Pacific.

Although Russia’s war in Ukraine gravely threatens the international order, the most acute international security problem emanates from the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The October 2022 U.S. National Security Strategy, for instance, pointed to the PRC as “the only competitor with both the intent to reshape the international order.” Half a world away, Japan’s National Security Strategy, released in December 2022, spelled out the threats associated with “historical changes in power balances.”

During the 2010s, the “Indo-Pacific” emerged as a geography of strategies, a commensurate response awakened by a gnawing sense of systemic unpredictability. Democratic powers—what we term Indo-Pacific lynchpins—have begun conducting flanking maneuvers to counter China’s revisionism. The Quadrilateral (Quad) cooperation of Australia, India, Japan, and the United States―an informal grouping of the lynchpin Indo-Pacific states―stands in China’s way and erodes its political momentum.

The Quad’s collective actions may have borne fruit, but questions hang over its capacity to build a larger coalition. It certainly does not yet dominate the Indo-Pacific “great game,” but rather assures, importantly, the meaningful balance of power. What the Communist leadership in Beijing may not yet realize is that these Indo-Pacific strategies have now entered a new stage which, in part, have stemmed directly from the Zeitenwende of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Of course, Chinese policymakers are aware of the meaning and implications of the “Indo-Pacific”—a vast region stretching from the eastern shores of Africa across the Indian Ocean to Southeast Asia and ending in the eastern Pacific. Essentially, it is a geographized political reality, one that encapsulates the gravity generated by political realities. Yet, the Indo-Pacific is also a lodestar, a guiding normative geostrategy, and it is in this sense that China and its rivals in the Quad fully understand it.

Nevertheless, it engenders very different words and actions from the competitors. This vast area has, therefore, become the geographic “ground zero” of China’s attempts to revise the international order and others to protect it. Accordingly, proponents of the latter, led by the Quad states, often couch their words and actions by referencing the term “Indo-Pacific.” China does not.

These Indo-Pacific ideations espouse what we call a “principled regionalism,” one based on the values and norms of international law. In particular, the “free and open Indo-Pacific” concept, first advanced by Japan, has become the inspirational source of narrative and response for the Quad’s members. This conceptual framework, because it speaks directly to the national security concerns of Indo-Pacific states, has engendered the quartet’s vigorous dynamism.

Since 2021, for example, the Quad has held several foreign ministers and summit meetings, underscoring its substantial stake in world affairs. In May last year, Japanese prime minister Fumio Kishida welcomed his Quad peers, Anthony Albanese, Narendra Modi, and Joe Biden in Tokyo. The four leaders reaffirmed the Quad-led international cooperation and partnership ranging from maritime domain awareness, fellowship, coronavirus relief, climate change, critical technologies, cybersecurity, and space exploration to infrastructure. But the unspoken aim—the elephant in the room—remained China.

In part to counter China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)―President Xi Jinping’s flagship whole-of-government program―significant resources have been made available to national bodies such as the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation or the Japan Bank of International Cooperation. These are being used for a variety of projects across the Indo-Pacific. Contrary to the China-led BRI, the quality infrastructure and investments provided in the name of the Indo-Pacific respect local priorities and debt-managing capacities.

In terms of security cooperation, when the Quad states conduct naval drills, among themselves or with varying partners, the stage setting is the Indo-Pacific, whether to the west of India in the Arabian Sea or the Philippine Sea. Security and defense cooperation, led by the individual Quad members or in concert with other like-minded states, are also flourishing across the Indo-Pacific.

All is not rosy in the Indo-Pacific, however. The ongoing U.S.-China competition occurs in a highly fragmented, multipolar world. Many states in the political South increasingly claim autonomy vis-à-vis both Washington and Beijing, and equidistance, whether in Southeast Asia or the Arab Middle East, is a familiar posture. As such, alignment competition has become a subject laden with implications for the outcome of great power competition. Engaging with numerous “middle players” and building a wider coalition of states thus remains critical for the Quad members if they wish to build a collaborative and highly robust Pax Indo-Pacifica.

Looking at the big picture of global alignment, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine drastically changed the strategic landscape and added much-needed clarity to Indo-Pacific strategies and perspectives. These cataclysmic shifts were also engendered by China’s domestic difficulties laid bare during the coronavirus pandemic. This, more than anything else, contradicts the conventional, albeit deeply flawed views of China’s unstoppable “rising” power. Let us be specific.

Traditionally, European leaders have not considered the threat of China as their problem. When the European Union (EU) issued its Indo-Pacific strategy in September 2021, the EU’s approach to the PRC was still influenced by an equidistance mindset between Washington and Beijing. Apart from its emphasis on normativity, Brussels’ posture was rather similar to that of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Even after Russia invaded Ukraine, the Strategic Concept released by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in June 2022 did not go so far as to regard China as “the most significant and direct threat” in the way Russia was.

Yet, a sea change is occurring. The United Kingdom had already moved from its pro-China stance to taking a hard line as early as 2020. Some states in Central and Eastern Europe have also distanced themselves from China in favor of Taiwan. A chorus of European leaders began voicing their concerns about authoritarian China as did NATO’s Secretary General, Jens Stoltenberg, when he visited Tokyo and Seoul in January 2023.

Nevertheless, states taking a hardline against China like Lithuania are the minority within the EU. Germany, which maintains huge business interests in China, maintains an equivocal stance. Like Germany’s shift in support for Ukraine against Russia, we assess an increasingly harsh stance on China by European governments, in turn, will result in their favor of the Quad’s initiatives, projecting a “Euro-Indo-Pacific” or “Atlantic-Pacific” dynamism.

The Ukrainian War also clarified the Quad’s operational scope. India’s alliance with Russia and refusal to condemn Moscow’s territorial aggression were problematic vis-à-vis the Quad’s emphasis on universal norms. However, India’s actions by no means fatally undermined the Quad. Instead, New Delhi led the charge, perhaps inadvertently, to ensure that the four-member grouping remains focused on China, not Russia. Although some may lament India’s pro-Russia stance, crisis scenarios in the Indo-Pacific can now be envisaged more realistically.

For these reasons, and the inherent limitations of the informal Quad, the United States, and Japan, along with Australia, must explore other architecture to address warfare scenarios in East Asia, in which Russia siding with China is plausible. With this “Quad Minus” situation in mind, the U.S.-Japan Alliance, the AUKUS alliance of Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, the G7, and other relevant partnerships must be considered to effectively counter Chinese attacks.

This does not mean, however, that India is not needed. On the contrary, India’s participation is indispensable for any Indo-Pacific grand strategies. Delhi’s political, economic, and military leverage along with its geography on China’s southern flank is essential for the Quad’s efforts to deter China. In addition, India’s inclusive and all-directional Indo-Pacific strategy has been put to good effect by Delhi to encourage broader support from non-Western states for the Indo-Pacific.

All these elements, however, may not be as disruptive as the shift coming from China itself. In contrast to the trajectory of Indo-Pacific cooperation, China has encountered strong headwinds. China’s appetite for territory in its near abroad has resulted in something of a backlash from its neighbors, who have tightened their guard. China’s rapid over-expansion of its BRI has resulted in a number of intractable problems: unpayable and insoluble debts, environmental degradation, project failures, corruption, and local resentment. What can be termed “BRIgret” has surfaced among recipient governments. The BRI’s current stagnation, exemplified by decreases in funding from Beijing, contrasts starkly with China’s ascendancy on the world stage in the 2010s.

China’s structural, domestic challenges have grown and tarnished its cherished “Chinese Dream.” The country has entered a period of demographic decline and economic stagnation. Although the PRC was supposed to supersede the United States by the end of the 2020s, this prospect is unlikely. As China’s decline comes into view, it is unclear whether it can marshal enough power and influence to challenge U.S. primacy.

Yet because of this, as Hal Brands and Michael Beckley warn, China may become even more recklessly aggressive. Russia’s aberrant war in Ukraine and subsequent setbacks, for example, have raised the bar higher for China’s eventual invasion of Taiwan. Even here, however, Beijing has strategically and politically miscalculated. Xi, fed reports that overestimate Chinese power and grandeur, has given himself (and China) a deadline to absorb Taiwan. By painting himself into a corner, Xi is damned if he does invade and damned if he does not.

Given this situation, the Quad must carefully exploit China’s weakening conditions in their favor. The good news is that this entails doing more of the same: advocating the rules-based international order as a system that benefits all the countries in the world. In doing so, sympathizers of the international status quo will increase, and the Quad members will be able to strengthen their engagement with these non-aligned middle players. The United States and Japan can also seek European moral and political support for their cause.

The War in Ukraine, nonetheless, shattered this rosy picture of coalition building and showed its limits. Instead, voting at the United Nations and support for West-led sanctions demonstrated who the “core players” were in defending the international order. The U.S-led international responses to the PRC’s bellicosity will probably witness core players sticking together and many states in the political South remaining neutral.

Despite its pessimistic landscape, Russia’s war helped better simulate an eventual armed conflict provoked by China, most probably in the East China Sea theater around Taiwan. The recent U.S. agreement with the Philippines also demonstrated how a former fence-sitter could wisely come to the side of the Indo-Pacific coalition. Along with Japan’s emboldened defense posture, this agreement is another step onto the new stage of Indo-Pacific strategies. The circle is tightening around China.

The world is in crisis, engendered by Russia’s bald aggression. But this has strengthened the case for defending the rules-based international order. What happened to Ukraine must not be repeated in the Indo-Pacific by China. This region must be kept free from coercion and predation. With the benefit of clearer perspectives, the United States, Japan, and other like-minded partners must boldly enter the new Indo-Pacific stage by joining forces to keep their region free and open. The future of this century very much depends on these next steps.

Kei Hakata is a professor at Seikei University in Tokyo. Brendon J. Cannon is an assistant professor of international security at Khalifa University in Abu Dhabi. Both Cannon and Hakata are the editors of Indo-Pacific Strategies: Navigating Geopolitics at the Dawn of a New Age.

Image: U.S. Navy Flickr.

The nineteenth-century Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz famously wrote On War, which remains a leading work of military theory down the present. However, he wrote far more: to date, parts of his writings have yet to be translated into English, even if scholars are working to change that. One of his untranslated works is a short history of a Russian war in Ukraine. Clausewitz’s analysis of this eighteenth-century war gives lessons that strategists studying the current conflict in Ukraine would do well to heed. His commentary draws parallels between eighteenth-century Russian practices and the present, and allows us to see continuities in Russia’s aims.

Why Cabinet Wars Matter

But can reading an analysis of a limited conflict fought by men in laced coats and powdered wigs really inform our view of war in the twenty-first century? It can, and it should. Why?

First, Western and Russian commentators like Franz-Stefan Gady, James Lacey, and Valery Alekseev have claimed that Kabinettskriege, or cabinet wars, can provide a window into warfare in the 2010s and 2020s. Lacey has argued: 

In any future great power war, it might be helpful to think of objectives such as Taiwan or the Baltics as small territories that are in one camp but are coveted by another great power, like provinces in an 18th-century cabinet war. One side is willing to fight to keep the province (state) within its sphere, while the other side is willing to fight to take it. Neither great state, however, is willing to see itself destroyed or its internal political order overthrown to attain its objective.

Second, these wars are worth studying because they left a significant formative impact on Clausewitz and his most famous book. There are almost as many references to eighteenth-century commanders like Frederick the Great, Daun, and Lacy in On War as there are to Napoleon himself. While acknowledging that the French Revolution had radically changed warfare, Clausewitz still believed the military past could inform future doctrine.

Third, understanding this history matters, as I have argued elsewhere, because Russian president Vladimir Putin is obsessed with it. He views his war as an imperial project, where he is reenacting the conquests of Russian leaders like Peter and Catherine the Great.

So What Does Clausewitz Tell Us?

Years before he would write On War, a younger Clausewitz examined the Russo-Turkish War of 1736–1739 and sketched out a brief description of the four-year-long conflict. At first glance, Clausewitz’s interest in this war might seem odd: why would a Prussian officer concern himself with an Eastern European war that ended over sixty years earlier? In fact, many Prussian officers, including Clausewitz’s principal source of information on the war, Christoph Hermann von Manstein, served alongside the Russians in this war as advisors and volunteers. Wilhelm August von Steuben, the father of the “American” Baron von Steuben, was one of them.

In this war, the Russian Empire, ruler Empress Anna and her ministers, sought, as Putin would 278 years later, to conquer and occupy the Crimean Peninsula. The local inhabitants of Crimea, the Tatars, received military support from a great power of the time, the Ottoman Empire. Much like the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, this war began with vast Russian overconfidence: the Russian commander, Field Marshall Burkhard Christoph von Münnich, asserted that Azov and Crimea would fall in the first year, and that by 1739, that even Constantinople would be under Russian control. What actually followed was four years of indecisive conflict, with repeated Russian invasions, setbacks, withdrawals, and new invasions. By the time the dust settled in 1739, neither side had achieved their goals, and the Russians’ Austrian allies were forced to cede major territorial concessions.

Clausewitz turned to this conflict while studying at the Berlin Kriegsakademie. Sometime around 1801, connected to his studies, Clausewitz wrote a short history of the war. Historian Peter Paret has argued that this text was merely an exercise in narrative history writing, “little more than [an] outline.” Although the narrative is short and follows the major events of the conflict, Clausewitz does provide a number of interpretations, particularly of the first two years of the war. These interpretations, combined with Clausewitz’s brief comments on this conflict in On War, provide notable parallels to the current conflict. 

Much like Western observers trying to discern Putin’s motives, Clausewitz was unsure of the true Russian goals in the war. He asserts, “It is uncertain whether the Empress Anna… wanted to conquer Crimea, or just to devastate it… the latter made but little political sense.” Despite this judgment, Clausewitz returns to the theme of devastation again and again in the text, showing that the various Russian armies, put the enemy territory, “under fire and sword,” “destroy[ed] these areas,” waged, “a campaign of raiding,” and “devastate[d] the peninsula.” Clausewitz eventually concluded that these measures were essentially “preventative… namely as a means of distracting and hindering the [Crimeans] so they could not,” take more decisive military action. Modern Russian tactics, such as the strike campaign against the Ukrainian power grid, have confused modern commentators, but experts such as Justin Bronk and Michael Kofman assert they have a similar goal: depleting Ukraine’s stocks of air defense missiles. In other words, in both the 1730s and 2020s, Russia has used devastation against civilian targets to cause chaos, diluting the effectiveness of their enemy’s military response. 

Clausewitz was also surprised by the lack of logistical readiness on the part of the eighteenth-century Russian army. He noted that in their first campaign the Russians, “suffered from a lack of water,” that they, were “weakened by disease,” and that, “provisions for the whole campaign were not carried along.” The following year of 1737, they suffered 24,000 losses, “mostly caused by disease and the lack of supplies.” In 1738, “Lack of food, many diseases, [and] massive losses of [pack] animals…caused this campaign to end without results.” In a section specifically analyzing logistical shortfalls, Clausewitz asserted: 

There was never a lack of fodder for animals because of the nature of the terrain, but there was often a lack of food. The army was forced to steal herds of sheep from the Tatars, subsisting from the local area. Firewood and water were most wanted. 

Clausewitz showed that in three of the four years of conflict, logistical problems handicapped the Russian effort, and made lasting gains unattainable. Once again, there are parallels to the present. Experts on the current war in Ukraine argue that Russia has been significantly hindered by its logistical shortcomings. Indeed, some noted this before the war. Though Münnich and the Russians eventually overcame this logistical failure, it cost the Russians manpower in the opening campaigns of the war. 

Clausewitz was critical of the heavy losses the Russians suffered for comparatively little gain. In the first year, he asserted that Russian losses were, “quite expensive for the campaign,” and in the following year, notes that the 50,000 Russian losses were, “far too much for the conquest of a fortress that had to be evacuated… in the next year.” He concluded that the Russians callously succeeded, “at the cost of many thousands of their own men,” and that such losses, “seem[ed] cruel.” It is possible that the Russians lost as many as 200,000 men in this conflict. When adjusted for changes in the Russian population between the eighteenth century and the present, that is equivalent to over 2 million in today’s population. In the eighteenth century, large losses had little impact on the Russian strategy. Russia ended the war when their allies, the Austrians, stopped fighting, and even gained a small amount of territory. Today, journalists seem explicitly focused on the body count, which may or may not impact the immediate duration of the war. 

Finally, Clausewitz noted the importance of the “Ukraine Line” in the 1736 war, providing Russian forces a fortified border to withdraw behind, rearm, and reconstitute. In this period, the Russian state constructed extensive fortified positions to protect its southern border. These included the Belgorod and Izium lines of the late seventeenth century and the modernized Ukraine Line of 1731. To man this border, the Russians created a secondary army of 30,000 reservists or Ukrainian Land Militia (ukrainskiy landmilitskiy). These men defended a line of fortified positions that measured just under 300 kilometers. The threat of raids from Crimea convinced men to serve in this force. Important fortified positions on the line include placenames that are well-known today: Izium and Bakhmut. Clausewitz noted that each fall, Russian troops would return to their defensive lines, but each spring, they would launch a new invasion with more manpower than they had the previous year. Today, nuclear deterrence provides the Russian forces with a modern “Ukraine Line.” With the threat of atomic weapons, Russian forces are able to withdraw from campaigns that are failing, reconstitute, and redeploy to other portions of Ukraine. Ukrainian officials have noted that there are more Russian forces currently deployed than were massed last year at the start of the invasion.

History Lessons

For all of the failings of the Russian war in 1736–1739, historians disagree about the war’s legacy. My own mentor, Christopher Duffy, focused on the heavy losses incurred for little gains in this war. In contrast, the leading scholar of this war, Brian L. Davies, has concerningly noted that the Russian army learned much from the failures of the initial campaigns and modernized their doctrines during wartime, overcoming their logistical problems. For Davies, this was a war where Russians could take heavy losses, rebuild their forces, and remain dangerous in the post-war environment.

Clausewitz’s short treatise on a seemingly obscure conflict in eighteenth-century Russian history imparts lessons for strategists today. First, even in ages that focus on the rules of engagement and laws of war, enemy forces might target civilians in order to distract their opponents and shape the situation to their advantage. Second, logistical problems can hinder a force more than enemy action. Third, the center of gravity may not be military casualties; heavy enemy losses do not always equate victory. Fourth, creating a situation where your home territory is defended from attack enables withdrawal, reconstitution, and redeployment.

Like Clausewitz at the turn of the nineteenth century, we should be willing to listen to the lessons of wars that might initially seem foreign or quaint. 

Alexander S. Burns is a visiting assistant professor at the Franciscan University of Steubenville, studying the American Continental army’s connection to European militaries. His edited volume, The Changing Face of Old Regime Warfare: Essays in Honour of Christopher Duffy, was published in 2022. You can follow him @KKriegeBlog.

Image: Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg/The David Rumsey Map Collection​.

Two years ago, on February 29, 2020, Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, Special Representative for Afghanistan Reconciliation representing the United States, signed a deal with Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, Chief of Taliban’s Political Office in Doha representing the Taliban, to end the twenty-year U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan. Since the signing, pundits and foreign policy practitioners from all sides have widely criticized the deal for its flawed language and unnecessary concessions. One needs little legal background or foreign policy expertise to identify these flaws—a mere glance at its contents and it almost appears as if its terms were primarily dictated by the Taliban at the time. Indeed, on the day of the signing, the Taliban celebrated their victory by marching with their flag from their political office to the Sheraton Hotel, where the two parties inked the agreement in front of international observers. That march was a harbinger of things to come, culminating with the Taliban’s complete takeover of Afghanistan on August 15, 2021.

Despite the deal’s deep flaws, the Biden administration should still insist that the remaining parts of the deal be implemented; namely, intra-Afghan negotiations and the termination of support for foreign terrorist groups. Implementing these provisions could eventually lead to the formation of an “inclusive” Afghan government that could guarantee basic human rights and women’s rights in Afghanistan. Such a government would be able to attain recognition from the international community and begin the difficult process of Afghanistan’s post-war reconstruction, serving the long-term interests of both the United States and Afghanistan. 

The Flaws of the Deal

The 2020 agreement has six primary flaws.

First, the whole concept of the United States directly negotiating, and eventually signing, a deal with the Taliban—a non-state actor under U.S. and UN sanctions, and led by internationally designated terrorists—was not a good look for Washington. The United States can certainly engage with non-state actors around the world, but only tactically to achieve its immediate, and short-term objectives. Getting into public negotiations such as those in Doha, and eventually signing a deal with the Taliban that indirectly legitimized them and elevated their status from non-state to a state actor, proved to be inimical to both U.S. and Afghan interests.

Second, throughout the text of the deal—which was negotiated without the participation of the Afghan government—the turn-of-phrase “Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, which the U.S. doesn’t recognize as a State but is known as the Taliban” appears repeatedly, but there is not a single reference to the “Islamic Republic of Afghanistan,” which the U.S. did recognize as a State. There was a missed opportunity to mention the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan in the prisoner’s exchange clause—itself deeply problematic, but the deal instead refers to the “prisoners from the other side.” These textual errors represented wins for the Taliban, who never wanted to hear, see, or talk about the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. This wholesale disregard for the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan was deeply demoralizing for the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF). The subsequent, sudden collapse of government and the rapid victory of the Taliban in August 2021 arguably derived in some part from that demoralization.

Third, it was not wise to include the prisoner exchange in the U.S.-Taliban deal as a trust-building measure. That should have been the first item on the agenda at the intra-Afghan negotiations, since the relevant prisoners were being held under the jurisdiction of the Afghan government. The inclusion of the prisoner exchange in the deal unnecessarily caused many months of challenging and at times difficult moments in the bilateral relationship between the United States and the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. The Taliban prioritized the releases and may have engaged substantively in intra-Afghan negotiations to achieve them. Instead, the Taliban got an exponential win, as the insurgents received their prisoners and the Ghani administration’s relations with Washington grew deeply strained. The United States put pressure on the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan to release the Taliban prisoners for the sake of implementing the deal, reinforcing the Taliban’s narrative that the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan was nothing but a U.S. puppet.

Fourth, the language that made Taliban accountable for passports and visas, while they were not in control of issuing such documents, sent a crushingly disheartening signal to various elements of the society, including the ANDSF, who interpreted it as an indication the United States no longer stood by the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan and instead considered the Taliban as the legitimate Afghan state. No number of references to an “Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan”—which the United States doesn’t recognize as a state but is known as the “Taliban”—could alter that interpretation. 

Fifth, the text of the deal was a surprise to Afghans (many in the U.S. government) and troop-contributing NATO allies, who only obtained a copy mere days before the signing and saw that the deal contained references to withdrawing “all non-diplomatic civilian personnel, private security contractors, trainers, advisors, and supporting services personnel.” These non-military elements were not supposed to be on the negotiating table. If the Taliban wanted the U.S. combat forces to withdraw, and if Washington and its allies were willing to withdraw their combat forces, then that should have sealed the deal. Including these non-military elements meant that the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, and especially the ANDSF, were on their own, which only further demoralized the Afghan forces, especially the Air Force, as they were fully dependent on contractors. 

Sixth, there is no verification mechanism for the United States to hold the Taliban accountable on their counter-terrorism commitments, especially their cutting of ties with Al Qaeda. The deal rests solely on the Taliban’s verbal commitments to instruct their commanders to avoid cooperation with Al Qaeda. Any questions about the Taliban’s commitment to uphold this portion of the agreement were answered when the U.S. operatives unilaterally found and eliminated Al Qaeda leader Aiman Al-Zawahiri in a Taliban safehouse in Kabul. 

And Yet…

Despite its many flaws, the deal did contain valuable elements, especially the repeated references to the initiation of the intra-Afghan negotiations, which was to lead to the establishment of a “Post-settlement Afghan Islamic Government.” The United States and the rest of the international community should continue to insist that the Taliban honor and implement this important provision of the agreement.

Insisting on implementation of the promises made in the 2020 U.S.-Taliban Deal—especially the formation of an inclusive Afghan government and the termination of assistance and sanctuary to foreign terrorist groups—should be the firm basis for U.S. and international engagement with the Taliban. Any move toward diplomatic recognition or reconstruction assistance should be based on this concept. 

The plight of the 40 million Afghans, especially women and girls, as well as the sacrifices of countless Afghans, Americans, and Western allies and their families demand that we do more to bring real peace to Afghanistan. The investments of blood and treasure have the potential to pay dividends so long as the United States seeks to encourage real progress. 

Such progress can be achieved by completing the implementation of the 2020 Deal; the United States and its Western allies should help jump-start a UN role in catalyzing the intra-Afghan negotiations between the Taliban and all of the Afghan factions; including the women, and youth, that could lead to the establishment of an inclusive Afghan government.

Such a broadly represented government, which would include the Taliban, can then agree on establishing a verifiable on-the-ground mechanism to monitor and detect terrorist threats. Such a government could then be recognized by the international community and could facilitate the re-opening of the diplomatic outposts necessary to engage directly with the Afghan population. This would lay the basis for helping the new government with technical, economic, and security assistance needed to deliver basic services to the people of Afghanistan, and build a stable and sustainable future. 

Sadiq Amini is a program manager at ORF America, overseeing external relations and outreach. He was previously a political assistant at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul and worked at Afghanistan’s Permanent Mission to the United Nations. The views expressed here are strictly his own.

Image: Leonid Altman/Shutterstock.