Diplomacy & Crisis News

While the long-term results of the People’s Republic of China’s diplomatic outreach into both the Middle East and Ukraine remain unknown, it is apparent that the foreign policy establishment in Washington DC was taken aback by the speed at which Beijing’s reputation is rising. They shouldn’t be. The long-running Saudi-Iranian rivalry has been partially fueled by the United States, meaning that Washington could never serve as a reliable mediator for all parties. China’s distance and relatively non-partisan-seeming approach to the region, however, enables more parties to be willing to at least discuss putting aside one of the more dangerous rivalries of the twenty-first century. Elsewhere, India plays an agile game of diplomacy, neither endorsing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine nor rejecting its long-standing and beneficial security relationship with Moscow that dates back to independence. Brazil, increasingly, tows no one’s line at the UN and is quick to question narratives from the great powers. France asserts that European core interests and North American core interests are rapidly diverging.

Commentary on the return of the multipolar world has rightfully arisen. The industrial and economic share of American power on the global stage has narrowed considerably since its heydays in the Cold War and even at the start of the twenty-first century. Regardless of what anyone thinks about it, the multipolar world is already here. And rather than being regarded as some great shock or oddity, a multipolar world is in fact the normal condition of the international system. What we are seeing now is the world emerging out from under an outlier period and into something more typical with the majority of history. It is apparent by the actions of countries like China, India, and Brazil that most of the world knows this and is working towards adapting to such a future.

But the United States and many of its dependent allies are not. The rhetoric from places such as Washington and London is one of appealing to the logic of a “New Cold War”, where an “Axis of Authoritarianism” is rising between China and Russia that seeks to wage an ideological battle against “The Free World” in a bid for total global supremacy. With the possible exception of a reactive and increasingly culture war-obsessed Russia, however, few outside of the North Atlantic world take this rhetoric seriously. They have already moved on to focus on their regional self-interest. This begs the question: how can so much of the foreign policy class in the Beltway continue sacrificing the outcome of results for more tired declarations of loyalty to an ideology of global conflict over universal values? What is it that holds Anglo-American elites in thrall to a way of viewing the world which was questionable even in the Cold War, but is surely beyond unhelpful now?

Last year, the scholar Dr. Emily Finley released an important and comprehensive book that charts the history of this worldview. In The Ideology of Democratism, Finley charts how the world view of Rousseau, built upon by later additions coming from Thomas Jefferson, Woodrow Wilson, John Rawls, Leo Strauss, and up through the Bush Era neoconservatives, injected a universalist faith in liberal democracy as the guiding principle of not just specific societies and local circumstances (the preference of Washington, Hamilton, and the early Federalists in U.S. history), but of the entire world. Democratic systems are no longer outgrowths of particular historical and geographic circumstances but are taken to be the inevitable destiny of all of mankind. For a democracy to be threatened anywhere is to be threatened everywhere. Thus, democracy becomes a kind of civic religion known as “Democratism.”

One of the paradoxes of Democratism, as described by Finley, is that the democratist claims to speak “for the people” while also being highly dismissive of local concerns or popular opinion should these contradict the missionary mentality of expansion of democracy abroad or deviate from the plans of democracy experts. The “national will” is not something left up to individual elections but is rather a long-term project that can only be entrusted to the technocrats of democratic governance. In other words, only the democratists themselves can govern policy because only the mission of democratization is a legitimate purpose for a government whose goals transcend day-to-day concerns about security and infrastructure. Finley contends that this is now the default ideology of the governing and media classes in the North Atlantic, and especially in the foreign policy establishment of Washington. In a world where the U.S. expects Europe to hold solidarity with it on Taiwan (or Japan to not breaks ranks sanctioning Russia over Ukraine), it becomes apparent that, whether cynically or genuinely used, democratism is the rhetoric if not the purpose of present-day global over-extension.

While not the entirety of the reason why the Beltway struggles to shed its imperial hubris and adapt to the new multipolar world, (much of that is simply complacency) understanding democratism’s hold over the governing elite is vital for explaining the unique hostility found in so much of foreign policy commentary towards a soberer and more realistic appraisal of the world. From the bafflement expressed at countries failing to rally behind support for Ukraine and sanctions on Russia, to the clueless exhortations for a “values-based” diplomacy that prioritizes a nation’s domestic politics over its strategic opportunities, democratists will not concede that perhaps their worldview is unsuited for the proper practice of diplomacy under conditions of multipolarity. Particularly in a world where non-liberal powers have a variety of localized interests and abilities to assert themselves to greater degrees than were previously possible.

Perhaps the most damaging manifestation of the democratist worldview is the assignment of a type of karma point system to how nations are ranked. “Good” countries have policies that reflect Anglo-American norms and thus are worthy of some sovereignty, while “bad” countries can have their sovereignty violated on a economic or humanitarian pretext for failing to play their assigned role in the view of North Atlantic policymakers. The backlash this inevitably causes is taken as further proof that this contest for political power is a Manichean struggle of good versus evil which is existential, rather than a clash of interests that could be solved by diplomacy. Such tendencies serve only to drive nonaligned powers further away from partnership with countries enthralled by the democratist worldview.

Geopolitics is the contest for resources and power among territorial units jealous of their security and suspicious of their rivals. The rising and more assertive middle powers cannot coast on the received wisdom of ahistorical ideological projects, they must develop and survive. Having no comforting mythological narrative to blind them, they embrace the world as it is, rather than as they wish it to be. It is this that gives them a key advantage over a self-indoctrinated global power whose commitment to democratist and exceptionalist rhetoric prevents it from adapting to the very real world in which its power is embedded. Nations that understand this dynamic will outperform expectations and those that do not will comparatively underperform. You can have effective situational crisis management, or you can wage a global jihad for abstract universal values. You cannot have both.

Christopher Mott (@chrisdmott) is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy and the author of the book The Formless Empire: A Short History of Diplomacy and Warfare in Central Asia.

Image: Shutterstock.

In the realm of foreign policy discourse, few memes have been more prevalent or misleading than the oft-cited comparison of Russia’s economy to that of Italy’s. The phrase, first coined by Senator Lindsey Graham in 2014, has been wielded like a blunt instrument by Western policymakers and commentators, the implication being that Russia’s economy is feeble and inconsequential when contrasted with the collective might of the West. This soundbite, depressingly, has informed and shaped our approach to Russia, and it is high time we abandon it.

For if Russia’s economy were as small and unimpressive as the statistics suggest, how could it withstand the sanctions imposed upon it? Why has President Joe Biden’s declaration that “the Russian economy will be cut in half” failed to materialize? Did not French finance minister Bruno Le Maire tell a French radio station that the West’s goal was to “cause the collapse of the Russian economy” and bring Moscow to heel? How does a nation with an economy purportedly the size of Italy manage to exert such global influence, to the point where U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen recently stated that Western sanctions are themselves putting U.S. dollar hegemony at risk?

On paper, Sen. Graham’s observation seems accurate; both Russia and Italy are close to each other in terms of nominal gross domestic product, or GDP, which has been the preferred method of measuring a country’s economic size and power since World War II. The figure is produced by determining the total cost of all goods and services either produced or sold in a country within a given time frame. According to World Bank data, in 2013, Russia’s nominal GDP was around $2.29 trillion while Italy’s was around $2.14 trillion. As recently as 2021, Russia’s nominal GDP was around $1.78 trillion while Italy’s stood at $2.11 trillion.

Yet error in this comparison lies in the reliance on measuring nominal GDP itself, as it fails to account for exchange rates and purchasing power parity (PPP), which accounts for the standard of living and productivity (and from there, per capita welfare and, importantly, resource use). Renowned French economist Jacques Sapir has pointed out the inadequacy of this metric, arguing that Russia’s GDP, when measured in PPP ($3.74 trillion in 2013, $4.81 trillion in 2021), is closer to Germany’s ($3.63 trillion in 2013, $4.85 trillion in 2021) than Italy’s ($2.19 trillion in 2013, $2.74 trillion in 2021). This is a crucial distinction, and it is both puzzling and troubling that so many continue to parrot the Russia-Italy comparison.

But even the PPP figures do not fully capture the significance of Russia’s economic power. Sapir further expanded his analysis in an essay for American Affairs, a policy journal, and noted that the PPP measurement “may not yet reflect the real importance of the Russian [economy] when strategic, geopolitical issues are at stake.”

Sapir notes that, over the past fifty years, Western economies have become increasingly dominated by service sectors, which, while contributing to GDP calculations, lose their importance during times of conflict. In such situations, it is the production of physical goods that matters, and by this measure, Russia’s economy is not only stronger than Germany’s but also more than twice as robust as France’s. Furthermore, Russia’s dominant position in the global energy and commodities trade—as it is a key producer of oil, gas, platinum, cobalt, gold, nickel, phosphates, iron, wheat, barley, buckwheat, oats, and more—provides it with substantial leverage over markets and economies, making it less susceptible to sanctions and less easily cowed by Western pressure. This reality has not been lost on many nations in the Global South, who have been reticent to support Ukraine in its struggle against Russian aggression.

Though Senator Graham made a significant mistake in deploying the Russia/Italy economic comparison, he can perhaps be forgiven on the grounds that he is a politician. The same, however, cannot be said for a number of economists and foreign policy experts who have repeated the line over the years up to and including the present.

Yet the persistence of the Russia-Italy myth among these professionals is perhaps not surprising given the allure of the service sectors in the West. The spectacular growth of these capital-intensive sectors, along with their nominal wealth and productivity, has led many in Washington and various Western capitals to not just embrace them, but also to politically, culturally, and ideologically prefer them. We Americans take particular pride, for example, in the success of our tech giants as drivers of innovation, growth, and national prestige. The Internet, and the various applications that flourished on smartphones, are considered by many to be inherently democratizing, effectively serving as a conduit for American values and an enabler of U.S. national interests.

This love for service sectors results in a tendency to view the labor-intensive industries of the past—energy, agriculture, resource extraction, manufacturing—as antiquated relics. But this skewed perspective has left us unprepared for a world in which tangible goods are once again of vital importance, as evidenced by our struggles in the face of the war in Ukraine. The conflict has “exposed a worrisome lack of production capacity in the United States.” In Europe, the United Kingdom has noted that “it will take 10 years to replace weapon stocks gifted to Ukraine and rebuild British weapon numbers to an acceptable level.” The EU, for its part, now cut off from cheap Russian energy, faces the terrifying possible prospect of rapid deindustrialization.

It is high time that we admit how much we severely underestimate the relative size and power of rival economies, including and especially Russia’s. It would also behoove policymakers to reevaluate their current policy approach to economic statecraft—sanctions are not a one-size-fits-all solution, particularly when dealing with a nation that wields significant economic power.

But above all, let us resolve to never again utter the words “Russia has an economy the size of Italy.”

Carlos Roa is the Executive Editor of The National Interest.

Image: Shutterstock.

A Chinese moon base sounds like the punchline of a bad conspiracy theory. But Yang Mengfei—a member of the China Aerospace and Technology Corporation (CASC)—sees it as an ambitious goal within reach of the People’s Republic of China. Despite this posturing, China is lightyears away from a moon base.

Late last month, Mengfei called on China to seize the opportunity to build critical space infrastructure on the moon that would lay the groundwork for the economy of the future. Yet the latest announcement about a Chinese-Russian lunar base is just another piece of propaganda; U.S. policymakers should not have serious concerns about a Chinese lunar base.

Certainly, China’s advancements in space exploration in the twenty-first century are not to be ignored. China’s Chang’e 4 lunar explorer became the first space probe to land on the far side of the moon in 2013. Furthermore, in recent years China has conducted high-resolution imaging of the Earth’s surface and constructed the BeiDou Navigation Satellite System (BDS), which provides China with economic and security data that informs its industrial development. The Chinese government has also proposed its own Lunar Research Station (LRS) in partnership with Russia to counter the United State’s Artemis Program, which seeks to return U.S. astronauts to the moon.

Mengfei and the Chinese Communist Party obviously want to tout these accomplishments to increase China’s prestige on the international stage. However, China’s space technology is still lightyears behind the United States in terms of reusability and cost efficiency. China’s main rocket used for heavy payloads, the Long March 9, is having to be completely redesigned in order to make it a reusable rocket on par with SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and other privately-owned reusable rockets in the United States. This redesign could delay the Long March 9’s utilization for a decade or more. Previous launch failures, like that of the Long March 5 in 2018, have also delayed Chinese space missions by a number of years. China’s ability to calibrate its own rockets will take time, but it is in the diplomatic sphere that the CCP’s moon base ambitions may face their biggest challenge.

The war in Ukraine has exposed Russia’s space programs to the budgetary chopping block, making any potential assistance from Russia to China’s space program negligible at best. Currently, these cuts stand at $557 million, with funding for scientific research and development cut completely. This comes on the heels of Russia announcing it would quit the International Space Station in 2024, thereby sacrificing a key source of revenue and forsaking the massive amount of leverage it possessed over the United States and other Western space programs. Russia previously used the Baikonur Cosmodrome to launch other nations’ satellites and payloads into space in exchange for payments by the United States and several other Western nations but has refused to do so over the war in Ukraine, depriving the government of millions more in revenue. Those countries are now turning to the United States or the private sector to launch their products into orbit. Russia has spurned countries that have sanctioned the Kremlin in favor of countries on friendlier terms with Moscow, but this has also resulted in a substantial loss of revenue that has severely hampered the Kremlin’s space program.

China’s decision to partner with a diplomatically isolated ally that now lacks any major cutting-edge space technology or financial investment in spacefaring can only hobble China’s own ambitions. While both China and Russia recognize the massive potential for moon resources, like minerals and solar power generation, Russia can only tepidly support Chinese alternatives to U.S.-led space policy. This renders China and Russia’s LRS partnership a mere theoretical alternative to the U.S. Artemis Accords being presented to other nations. What’s more, partnerships with other countries have failed due to U.S. export laws that prohibit the transfer of sensitive technologies. With already-limited funding, Russia’s ability to dodge U.S. sanctions will be restricted, meaning its contributions to China’s moon base ambitions will be minimal at best.

China’s successful strides to join the ranks of space-faring nations is something that the Communist Party rightly touts in the diplomatic sphere. Yet the notion that China is serious about putting together an Earth-Moon system that will generate billions of dollars and solidify Chinese control of the Moon is pure fantasy. While Yang Mengfei’s recent success as chief designer and chief commander of China’s 2020 Chang’e-5 lunar sampling mission allows him to promote China’s breakneck pace in matching U.S. capabilities in space, mega-projects such as the Chinese moon settlements exist only in Beijing’s imagination.

Roy Mathews is an Innovation Fellow at Young Voices. He is a graduate of Bates College and a former Fulbright Fellow. His work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, National Review, and the Boston Herald.

Image: Marcos Silva/Shutterstock.

Bilateral cooperation remains the coin of the Western world. But cooperation cannot be achieved by berating countries to fall into line. Nations seeking to grow and prosper must find ways to work together. U.S.-Hungarian relations, for example, are no exception.

Surely America wants a Europe that is free, prosperous, and at peace. As a global power with global interests and responsibilities, the United States needs friends at its back.

And surely every European nation would like to be unshackled from the threat of being terrorized and squeezed between competing great powers and empires.

That said, a European superstate is not the answer. While there is undeniable value in the European Union, it is an institution with limits and not immune from political influence where some try to dominate and dictate to others.

Nations participate in the EU primarily because they recognize that it can advance their national interests. But, in the end, each member state bears the real risks and responsibilities of delivering peace, prosperity, and freedom to its own people.

The transatlantic community is another grouping of like-minded countries bound by common interests and geography, reflecting the history, tradition, religions, and culture of Western civilization. It, too, has the capacity to serve the mission of governments to serve their people.

Within Europe and among the transatlantic community, bilateral relations are as important as ever. Indeed, strong honest relations between members—built on trust and confidence—as well as mutual interests and understanding of differences, will strengthen institutions like NATO and the European Union. That, in turn, empowers these organizations to deliver better outcomes for their members.

Obstacles to Bilateral Cooperation

But all is not well in transatlantic relations. Today there are pathologies that, if left untreated, will make it harder to meet the challenges of the modern world through joint action.

Mirror-Imaging Politics. The old truism “politics stops at the water’s edge,” no longer holds true. Domestic political battles are widely reported throughout the world, often through the filter of reporters’ political biases. Audiences reflexively absorb partisan content from foreign pundits, politicians, and media, just as they do domestic news. Too often, people assume that the political Right and Left in other countries are pretty much the same as in theirs. It is not. In Europe, for instance, center-right governments and political parties have a wide diversity of views on domestic and foreign issues. Yet, the impulse to pigeonhole can lead to labeling Giorgia Meloni’s election in Italy a victory for right-wing extremism, when the reality is it is anything but.

Political Infighting. Political fights will exist. That is foundational to a community of free nations. We disagree on things. That is why we have elections. But democracy is for the people and by the people: We should let them decide. And, even if they do not vote the way we wish, we must work together with the elected governments as friends and allies should do.

Ossifying Orthodoxies. One way to stifle political competition is to declare the debate settled. Yet many issues that are fundamental to the freedoms and prosperity of our citizens—climate, energy, family, education, migration, gender, and economic freedom to name a few—remain unsettled.  We can’t build a strong base for common action by declaring a willing partner who challenges political orthodoxies to be a radical extremist and a danger to democracy.

Threats to Free Markets. No orthodoxy must be challenged more than that our economies should be wholly centrally managed by transnational bureaucrats. Doing business should mean doing business. Investors will have to make profits, but they also provide jobs and tax revenues for the host country. We should acknowledge that and not shy away from admitting it. Healthy market competition between countries that respect free market competition creates space for win-win situations.

Uneven Development Initiatives. There are problems the EU has been habitually and consistently unable or unwilling to solve. Topping the list is developing North-South infrastructure in Central Europe. The Three Seas Initiative can be a great solution, addressing needs that have gone unanswered for thirty-plus years, but the entire leadership of the transatlantic community needs to get behind the initiative.

Energy Insecurity. The community needs to get more serious about energy security. That means establishing stable and alternative supply sources (including gas, oil, and nuclear) and routes to deliver fuels and electricity. There must be more cooperation—and a commitment to proceed on a businesslike basis not tainted by favoritism or politics—to develop real plans to open up new markets, where profits can be made, and new enterprises established, with partners like the Abraham Accord countries and the nations of the Middle Corridor (Caucuses and Central Asia).    

The West has failed to overcome these obstacles to cooperation by wasting its energy beating what are often portrayed as recalcitrant allies into submission.

Solutions, Not Slander

When you can’t beat down an obstacle, it is time to try something else: building bridges through better bilateral cooperation. How do we know cooperation can work in these troubled times? We see evidence of it every day.

Many governments in Europe have proven extremely stable despite high energy prices, inflation, migration issues, and the uncertainty of the war over Ukraine. Why? In part because they have made taking care of their citizens their top priority and then worked with other countries to make it happen. One example is the quick action to build the gas corridor from Azerbaijan. Another is the NATO consensus to let Finland join the alliance. How can we build on these examples?

Honest assessments on empirical data. When different countries tackle challenges differently, the outcomes can be measured, debated, and compared, yielding lessons that can inform public policies. Rather than impose orthodoxies, let’s encourage objective, collaborative research on family policy, education, monetary policy (like the Eurozone), and energy and the environment.

Building free and open spaces. We spend too much time arguing over who are and aren’t our competitors and enemies, and too little time working to build partnerships and create new opportunities that will allow nations to work together and make their own choices rather than just have to submit to one sphere of influence or other.

New Forms and Platforms of Dialogue. Decades after the end of the Cold War, the discourse and debate within NATO and the EU is dominated by the same platforms and players as they were decades ago. They are not diverse. They do not make more space for debate on the “orthodoxies.” They include many of the same people who always say and advocate for the same things. We need new instruments of connectivity. Not just more forums that parrot views, but real exchange. Civil society in the West needs to get back in the game. It should become the font of innovation and creativity, not the twenty-first-century version of the Spanish Inquisition.

Defense Cooperation. Nations often most berated by the EU are also among those most committed to NATO, deterrence, and building up their own self-defense capabilities. Defense cooperation, industrial partnerships, and joint efforts focused on advancing collective security in the transatlantic community are a pathway for greater collaborative efforts.

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

Marton Ugrosdy is the Head of the Office of the Prime Minister’s Political Director in Hungary and former Director of the Institute for Foreign Affairs and Trade in Budapest.

Image: Shutterstock.

Despite Vladimir Putin’s move to “suspend” Russia’s participation in the New START treaty and the recent decision by the United States to stop sharing nuclear stockpile data, Washington should not abandon all hope of this treaty or future arms control/risk mitigation endeavors.

It is possible Russia and the United States can come to terms on another extension or update of this treaty, although unlikely given the current state of relations. However, America should continue to adhere to the tenets of the treaty even after its likely expiration. This would show continued U.S. resolve and commitment to arms control not only to Russia but the entire global community.

Some will argue the demise of New START will spark another arms race, and that the United States will have no choice but to keep pace with Russia should the latter decide to deploy more nuclear warheads above the treaty limit. Yet this line of thinking causes more problems than it solves. The New START limits of 1,550 deployed nuclear warheads, along with the warheads currently in storage, is enough for the United States to maintain a capable and credible force that can counter any adversary. There is no reason to discard treaty limits to pursue greater numbers of deployed nuclear weapons unless absolutely necessary. A recent State Department annual report on arms control concluded that despite Russia’s suspension and noncompliance with New START, there is no “strategic imbalance”, at least for now, with regard to nuclear capabilities between Russia and the United States

It’s important to note that Moscow’s use of the word “suspension” of the treaty does not mean “cancellation.” While Moscow has eschewed all data exchanges and on-site verification, the Russian Foreign Ministry has publicly stated they will continue to abide by the treaty limits as well as the Ballistic Missile Launch Notification Agreement. Separate from New START, this 1988 Agreement requires U.S. and Russian notification of impending unarmed test launches of any Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) and Sea Launch Ballistic Missile (SLBM). The agreement stipulates the notification must occur at least twenty-four hours prior to the launch and provide the planned date, launch location, and planned impact area of the relevant unarmed reentry vehicle(s). This prudent agreement provides transparency to the ICBM and SLBM test launch process and reduces the risk of misinterpretation. As someone who participated in numerous ICBM test launches as a member of an ICBM test launch squadron, this is a welcome relief.

Additionally, if the treaty does expire, a lapse in arms control is not without precedent. During the transition to New START from the original START treaty there was a gap of well over a year from expiration to ratification. During this time, there was no interim treaty in place and both countries successfully navigated through that process. This fact, plus recent statements from Moscow, at least provide a glimmer of hope.

In concert with pursuing future arms control and risk mitigation, the United States should continue the current path toward modernizing the nuclear force to include deployment of the Sentinel ICBM, the Columbia class nuclear submarine, and the B-21 bomber. It would seem paradoxical to relate upgrading our nuclear force with arms control. However, history suggests that past U.S. nuclear modernization efforts provided negotiators with leverage and options that actually helped negotiators find common ground during treaty deliberations. Moreover, America still requires a capable nuclear force to provide security for the homeland and allies while bringing the United States closer to nuclear modernization “parity” with Russia, if indeed their nuclear force is nearly 90 percent modernized.

To be clear, modernization does not mean an increase in deployed warheads over the New START limit nor is that needed. Modernization means increased reliability and capability; not more.

If New START can’t be saved, it is essential to retain agreements such as the Ballistic Missile Launch Notification Agreement and any other type of communication that could facilitate crisis management with Russia. The road ahead for nuclear arms control will look much different and likely not just between Russia and the United States. China will certainly figure into the equation due to its rapid nuclear force buildup. Reducing the risk of a nuclear conflict should be a primary concern not only to Washington and Moscow, but also Beijing. Current tensions notwithstanding, the United States and Russia have well-established communication, protocols, and data sharing which provide confidence and transparency (at least it did, and still can) that is vital to avoid stumbling into a nuclear conflict. Despite the fact there is no similar relationship with China, leveraging protocols such as those in New START and the Ballistic Missile Launch Notification Agreement could provide an opportunity, at the very least, to begin a dialogue with Beijing toward the goal of strategic stability. Moreover, future agreements between all three, while difficult, should not be considered an impossibility.

While any type of formal nuclear arms treaty or risk reduction agreement between Russia and/or China will be incredibly difficult to achieve, efforts toward strategic stability must endure. The rules and the players of the game may be changing, but the goal remains, that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.”

Dana Struckman is a retired Air Force Colonel and a Professor of National Security Affairs at the Naval War College. He was a missile launch officer on active duty and commanded an intercontinental ballistic missile squadron at Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota.

The views expressed here are solely those of the author and not of the Naval War College, the Department of the Navy, the Department of Defense, or the United States government.

Image: U.S. Department of Defense.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has made clear that there are gaps in the U.S. defense industrial base, which will prove costly in Ukraine and other geopolitical hotspots if not addressed. The most important one is undoubtedly Taiwan, the democratically self-ruled island that Beijing asserts as its own, which is reliant on U.S. military aid to keep a credible defense. But Taiwan isn’t getting the help it needs, and the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission identified “diversion of existing stocks of weapons and munitions” to Ukraine as a key reason for delays and backlogs in delivery of promised defense articles to Taiwan. The Biden administration must invoke the Defense Production Act (DPA) to ensure Taiwan has the capabilities to defend itself.

Invoking the DPA is the best and only immediate solution to surging production capacity. Under the act, the president is authorized to “allocate materials, services, and facilities” for national defense and emergency preparedness purposes and instruct private companies to prioritize contracts from the federal government. The DPA has been increasingly used for defense and non-defense purposes alike:, former President Donald Trump instructed 3M to produce N95 respirator masks, and General Motors to produce ventilators during the Covid-19 pandemic, and President Joe Biden ordered defense contractors to boost production of Virginia-class attack submarines in 2021.

Although some lawmakers have recently criticized the Biden administration’s use of the DPA, such scrutiny has primarily focused on non-defense purposes such as solar panels and biofuels. Nevertheless, lawmakers from both sides of the aisle, such as Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-CN., and Rep. Mike Gallagher, R-WI, have already called for invoking the DPA for Stingers and Javelins. “The cupboard is empty, or it will be very, very shortly unless the president invokes the Defense Production Act to provide that demand signal on an expedited basis,” Blumenthal said in an April 2022 hearing.

Taiwan has been unable to receive billions of dollars in military equipment to defend itself amid China’s increasingly coercive activities in the Taiwan Strait. Under the Taiwan Relations Act, the United States is obligated to provide Taiwan with the necessary equipment for self-defense. But more than $19 billion of weapons and equipment has not been delivered to Taiwan. This includes a 2019 $8 billion purchase of sixty-six F-16 fighter jets and a 2015 agreement to supply more than 200 Stingers and Javelin shoulder-launched surface-to-air missiles to Taiwan. Without adequate weapons to defend itself, Taiwan will be unable to create the strategic environment that would deter Beijing from pursuing “reunification”—an objective that Chinese Communist Party general secretary Xi Jinping has promised to fulfill in his lifetime.

Amid the United States’ struggles with its defense industrial base, China continues to pursue an ambitious military modernization program consistent with Xi’s desire to transform the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) into a “world-class” military by 2050. Such modernization includes a large-scale reorganization of the PLA that “encourages synergy between and within military, defense industrial and academic communities.” China’s state-owned and state-controlled enterprises allow for state-led industrial policies that can divert all resources into the military. No more than 4 percent of China’s military equipment was modern in the 1990s. At present, most of its equipment is. As Oriana Skylar Mastro and Derek Scissors point out in Foreign Affairs, China will have more than 450 naval ships within ten years—a number the United States will not reach until 2045.

Dwindling stockpiles of arms and armaments are making it increasingly more difficult to give Taiwan the weapons it needs. Take, for example, artillery, a crucial and decisive tool on the battlefield. The Russian military describes artillery as “The God of War,” and used it to puncture German defenses during World War II. Similarly, the United States outfired the Chinese three-to-one during the Korean War’s Chinese spring offensive, facilitating a successful defense. And at present, Ukraine is doing the same thing with HIMARS and 155mm howitzers against the Russians, demonstrating a fierce and formidable resistance. Of course, artillery shells are an essential tool in the war theater. But a U.S. defense official characterized the stockpile of 155mm shells as “uncomfortably low” due to the United States giving more than 1 million artillery rounds to Ukraine.

A low stockpile of artillery shells is incredibly concerning because, in an invasion scenario, Taiwan’s military would certainly need artillery to stop an amphibious assault. It would take four to five years to rebuild the 155mm ammunition stockpile at the current non-surge production rates. And it’s not just artillery shells. Since the start of the war, Ukraine has received one-third of the United States’ Javelin missiles and one-quarter of its Stinger missiles to repel the Russian invasion. The dwindling U.S. arsenal, according to Mark Cancian, senior advisor at the Center for International and Strategic Studies, is likely reaching a point where defense strategists are beginning to question whether war plans can be executed. At the very least, depleted stockpiles exacerbate already prolonged delays in weapons deliveries to U.S. allies and partners.

To replenish stockpiles and, in turn, ensure that Taiwan is armed to the teeth to deter forceful unification, the United States needs first to address production capacity and the delivery of defense systems and platforms to Taiwan. To do so, the current administration must invoke the Defense Production Act.

By all means the act is crucial to bolstering depleted stockpiles, but it does not address underlying issues of decreased, in some cases closed, production lines. To illustrate, the United States currently buys roughly 1,000 Javelins a year. Even if the United States decided to build as many Javelins as possible—6,480 a year—it would take thirty-two months before delivery, and anywhere from three to four years to replenish the number of Javelins already sent to Ukraine. Moreover, the Department of Defense has not purchased Stingers for more than eighteen years and closed its production lines in 2020. Greg Hayes, Raytheon’s chief executive, pointed out in April 2022 that there is “a very limited stock of material for Stinger production.” In other words, even if defense contractors were compelled by the federal government to prioritize producing weapons such as Javelins and Stingers, they may still be unable to boost production capacity.

Nonetheless, preparing for war costs much less than fighting a war. That is why addressing our dwindling U.S. stockpiles is essential. Task and Purpose’s Jeff Schogol said it best: “it’s time for the military to stock up on things that go boom.” The thought of a weak defense industrial base and depleted stockpiles should haunt policymakers. At the very worst, it could lead adversaries to conclude that the U.S. military is not as strong as it portrays itself to be. Hal Brands of the American Enterprise Institute warned that unless U.S. stockpiles are replenished, the United States might as well “get ready for ‘missile famine’ if there is a great-power war.” U.S. allies and partners are signaling they are ready to take on looming threats; they will need a defense-industrial base that they can rely on.

Pieter van Wingerden is a fellow at the Keck Center for International and Strategic Studies at Claremont McKenna College.

Image: DVIDS.

The United States and Europe have a vested interest in ensuring a free and fair electoral outcome in Turkey. On May 14, 2023, Turkish citizens will vote to decide if President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has run the country for twenty years, will continue to do so for another five. Under present circumstances, if free and fair elections were held, it is a safe bet that Erdogan would lose decisively against Kemal Kilicdaroglu. (Several recent polls show Kilicdaroglu with a significant lead.) It is far from certain, however, that the elections will be free or fair.

The viability of a democratic Turkey is in the United States’ interest. Regional adversaries such as Russia and Iran would be further emboldened if Turkey continues to drift from the West. Rebuilding Turkey’s democratic governance and institutions will ultimately be up to the people and the country’s future leaders. Unfettered free and fair elections, however, will ultimately help them reach that goal. 

Turkey is already drifting away from NATO’s orbit and moving ever closer to Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Erdogan also threatens the stability and security of the eastern Mediterranean by recklessly pursuing broad claims to undersea gas exploration and antagonizing NATO allies. He threatens Syria’s stability by threatening to launch new military incursions against the Syrian Kurds. If Turkey is to once again become a trusted and integral part of the Western alliance system, a democratic change must occur that will oversee Erdogan’s departure.

Between 1950 and 2015, Turkey held relatively free and fair elections (although incumbent governments always enjoyed an advantage in the mass media given their dependence on government subventions), helping to represent citizens’ choices at the ballot box and electing its leaders. This is important not least because Turkey is a major NATO ally but also because it is arguably the only Muslim democracy in the region. Indeed, Turkey’s neighbors have found it difficult to match Turkey’s democratic credentials.

In his twenty years of ruling Turkey, Erdogan has unfortunately overseen the country’s dramatic transition into authoritarian rule. This has been carefully documented in the Department of State’s annual reports on human rights and Freedom House’s assessments of democracy. The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe found that Turkey’s elections since 2017 have witnessed interference from the governing party. Since the coup attempt of July 2016, Freedom House identified Turkey as a country that is no longer “free.”

Unfortunately, Turkish voters lack important resources to choose their next president. Turks lack unfiltered information about all political parties and candidates. They don’t have a media environment free of government interference. And they desperately need bureaucratic institutions that can ensure the sanctity of citizens’ choices. Just recently, Turkey’s media watchdog refused to extend the license of the German broadcaster, Deutsche Welle—signaling that independent foreign media may be kept from reporting on the elections.

Meanwhile, Erdogan has been using the power of his incumbency to purchase the affection of voters by increasing the minimum wage and pensions and offering cheap credit to businesses—all short-term measures designed to win the election but destabilizing to the health of the overall economy. Such measures were already underway prior to the devastating earthquakes that struck Turkey in early February 2023 but now continue under the guise of relief and reconstruction.

In short, the outcome of Turkey’s presidential elections is heavily tilted in Erdogan’s favor. This is the case because Erdogan himself is in a race for political survival. Staying in power is not a simple matter of wielding power for Erdogan; it is existential. If he is no longer the president, it is likely he will have to answer for his numerous abuses of power in a court of law.

A unique opportunity exists for the United States to stand behind the Turkish people in their time of need. Washington must make a strong call to champion the cause of democratic elections in Turkey. The United States can continue to offer Turkey its support by promoting the cause of free and fair elections.

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

Eric Edelman is a senior advisor at FDD. FDD is a nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.

Image: Shutterstock.

Bolivia’s economy is running aground, squeezed by higher global interest rates and policy missteps. Its foreign exchange reserves, which stood at $15.4 billion in 2014, are now estimated to be under $400 million (not counting $2.6 billion in gold reserves)—able to provide less than two weeks of import coverage. The country’s overvalued exchange rate is showing signs of strain. Bank runs are ongoing as people try to get their dollars ahead of what increasingly looks like a collapse. While the Andean country’s slide into a major balance of payments crisis is by itself bad news, it also has wider geopolitical implications, affecting the global energy transition and filtering into the new Cold War between China and the United States.

Bolivia’s Energy and Money Problems

The country’s economic plight originates in its longstanding heavily statist economic model, largely implemented following Evo Morales’ election to the presidency in 2006. While the model allowed the country to reduce poverty, improve per capita income, and kept inflation down, other problems mounted. The current government is under pressure from ongoing expansionary policies—primary subsidies for agriculture, industry, and fuel, which were all strained by the coronavirus pandemic and the Russo-Ukrainian War. Additionally, oil and gas production is declining; revenues from the energy sector have long financed state largesse.

Once called the “beating heart” of South American natural gas production, Bolivia had no major discoveries for many years and production has fallen since 2015. According to energy research firm Wood Mackenzie, based on current trends Bolivian gas production is expected to decline from 1.4 billion cubic feet per day in 2022 to almost nothing by 2030.

The nation’s natural gas sector has numerous problems. The Morales government nationalized the industry in 2006 but then failed to reinvest in exploration. Meanwhile, Bolivia’s foreign investment record is poor; other countries offer better terms for exploration and production and lower political risk. Bolivia’s energy standing is further complicated by changes in its key customers, Argentina and Brazil, which have developed their own energy resources. To avoid a painful adjustment (which means reducing subsidies), the government over the past decade has routinely tapped its foreign exchange reserves to cover any gaps in spending. Falling gas revenues are now a major headache for President Luis Arce’s government.

A Lack of Potential Solutions

Bolivia’s options are limited. Further tapping foreign exchange reserves will be difficult, given that the vast majority of what is left is in gold. Selling gold on international markets could take time—as the government requires Congressional approval to do so—and would at most serve only as a temporary measure. Moreover, it would further sap confidence in the country’s financial situation.

Alternatively, the central bank could tap the foreign exchange reserves held by the country’s commercial banks, as it did in 2018. But such action would only deepen the public’s nervousness over the country’s financial institutions. Government policies are already under intense scrutiny, including demands that the government provide an explanation as to why $918 million of retirement funds were invested in Bolivian sovereign bonds, which have suffered a severe devaluation.

Turning to the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and/or the Inter-American Development Bank would be politically difficult. Any such assistance would surely entail conditionality measures: cutting subsidies (to improve the country’s fiscal position), changing the central bank’s monetary regime (to help boost exports and reduce the central bank’s exposure to currency swaps), introducing policies that promote a more welcoming environment for foreign investment (to help natural gas exploration and develop the nascent lithium industry), and pension reforms. Considering the populist-leaning nature of the Arce government, these measures would be painful, especially with elections in 2025. Furthermore, Bolivia, with its single B credit ratings, would be a hard sell to international bond investors—a situation not helped by rising international interest rates, which have caused some ructions in global bond markets and banks.

Complicating the situation even further Arce’s MAS (Movimiento al Socialismo) government wants to keep the country’s subsidies and overvalued foreign exchange rate in place because of Bolivia’s own personal history with inflation. There is a deep concern that the reduction or removal of subsidies on fuel would result in higher inflation, which Bolivia has suffered through before in the 1980s. At that time, inflation peaked at an astounding 23,464 percent in 1985. Any gains that have been made in the country’s standard of living could be washed away with another such bout of high inflation, and would certainly open the door to social turmoil.

Then there is the country’s internal political dynamics, which only further frustrate the policymaking environment. There are tensions inside MAS between supporters of former President Evo Morales (2006–2019), who is thought to seek reelection, and the incumbent Arce. There is also animosity between the Arce administration and the country’s strongest economic region, Santa Cruz province. This more conservative province has often clashed with both the leftist Morales and then Arce governments on economic policy. Tensions escalated in December 2022, when the province’s conservative governor (and a leader of the opposition), Luis Fernando Camacho, was arrested for his alleged role in the 2019 turmoil that led to the forced removal of then-President Morales.

The Lithium Issue

Bolivia’s troubles begin to take on an international dimension when one adds the country’s lithium to the equation. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, Bolivia has the largest amount of lithium resources in the world at 21 million tons. Achieving the Biden administration’s ambitious plans to make half of all cars sold in the United States electric vehicles (EVs) by 2030 means lithium batteries for each—something that is beyond the small amount extracted in the United States itself. America currently imports most of its lithium from the Lithium Triangle countries of Argentina (51 percent of lithium imports) and Chile (40 percent). Bolivia is the third country in the triangle.

Yet at the same time, China has made important inroads into Bolivia. While the United States has lacked an ambassador to the country since 2008 and relations have generally been poor over the past few years (partly due to the Morales administration’s anti-U.S. stance), China has developed a formidable diplomatic representation. Chinese diplomats are an integral part of Beijing’s economic statecraft, which is geared toward securing access to critical metals like lithium. Bolivia joined the Bridge and Road Initiative in 2018 and China has lent it $3.2 billion, mainly for infrastructure construction. It was no surprise that in January of this year Bolivia selected a Chinese consortium led by CATL, the world’s largest battery maker, to mine lithium and help the Andean country develop a battery plant. The deal came with an announcement that the Chinese consortium would invest over $1 billion in the project’s first phase, boosting infrastructure, roads, and conditions needed to create plants to produce lithium cathodes and batteries.

Questions for Washington

Bolivia’s economic troubles raise some important geopolitical questions. Is China willing to provide bridge financing or stretch out its repayments? Does the United States have an interest in helping Bolivia by facilitating a path through the IMF, World Bank, and Inter-American Development Bank? China has demonstrated a reluctance to help troubled debtors find an easy exit ramp by adding new capital resources, though it did eventually help Ecuador with a debt restructuring. But it has had a difficult path with two countries Pakistan ($24.7 billion of external debt to China) and Venezuela ($60 billion). Does Bolivia have the option to play the China card? Most likely China will probably seek to sidestep another troubled debtor situation, but China does want Bolivia’s lithium.

In any case, Bolivia is certainly facing a major economic crisis. It is time for the Bolivian government to overhaul its economic model and move toward policies that are less reliant on the state, which is running out of money in the face of declining natural gas production. In neighboring Argentina, a more liberal investment regime helped increase the country’s lithium exports by 234 percent in 2022, pushing up the country’s total mining exports (a fifth of which were lithium) to $3.86 billion. Argentina expects to see mining revenues of around $6 billion in 2023, pushed along by a rush of foreign company investment from the United States, China, Japan, South Korea, Canada, and the United Kingdom.

As more countries shift to EVs and use batteries to store more power in national electricity grids, Bolivia risks restricting foreign investment flows and developing a dependency on one market, China. Bolivia should consider a more open foreign investment policy. However, that may be attained only after an economic crisis, which might have been averted. It has been said that no crisis should go to waste, maybe that is the lesson to be learned in La Paz and something that is going to be closely watched in Beijing and Washington.

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

Image: Hyotographics/Shutterstock.

The military signaling by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in August 2022, following the visit to Taiwan by U.S. speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, set a benchmark by which to assess the latest Taiwan Strait crisis touched off by the meeting between Taiwanese president Tsai Ing-wen and new House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. Some observers interpreted Beijing’s reaction to the Tsai-McCarthy meeting as “dialed down” or “nothing compared with the belligerent reaction to Pelosi’s visit.”

This might support a hopeful conclusion that the deterioration of U.S.-China relations is bottoming out. Washington and Taipei reportedly coordinated to lower the profile of the Tsai-McCarthy meeting. McCarthy altered his original plan to travel to Taiwan as Pelosi had done. Instead, he and Tsai had an “unofficial” meeting in California, far from Washington, DC, as part of what has become a routine transit, one of twenty-nine by Republic of China (ROC) presidents (seven by Tsai).

A strongly negative reaction from Beijing was inevitable. Nevertheless, if it was clear that Xi Jinping’s government intentionally limited its response as a signal that it was reciprocating efforts by the U.S.-Taiwan side to be less provocative, this might be the beginning of a virtuous cycle that could gradually reduce cross-strait tensions.

Alas, this interpretation of China’s behavior in the aftermath of the Tsai-McCarthy meeting is probably unjustified.

Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan on Aug. 2, 2022, was one of a series of U.S. gestures of support for the Taipei government that began during the Trump administration and continued into Joe Biden’s presidency. Even before Pelosi’s visit, official PRC commentators were criticizing what they called a U.S. “salami slicing” campaign to gradually move Taiwan toward permanent independence from China. Although Pelosi’s visit was not unprecedented, since a different speaker of the U.S. House had traveled to Taiwan twenty-five years earlier, the PRC government had characterized Pelosi’s planned visit as an unusually egregious political offense—a “gross violation of the one-China principle” that would “deal a severe blow to Sino-US ties.” Foreign Minister Wang Yi warned that “China will surely make a firm response.” The Chinese Communist Party-owned tabloid Global Times warned that PRC military forces might intercept Pelosi’s aircraft en route to Taiwan.

Pelosi didn’t get shot down, but Beijing’s reaction was unprecedented in two ways. First, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) carried out its largest military exercises ever near Taiwan. Live-fire drills took place in six areas that surrounded Taiwan and that were particularly close to major shipping and air-travel routes. The exercises included an aircraft carrier and a nuclear-powered submarine.

Second, while the PRC had employed practice missile launches in attempts to intimidate Taiwan during the Third Taiwan Strait Crisis of 1995-1996, the post-Pelosi retaliation of August 2022 was the first time that Chinese missiles overflew the island of Taiwan and landed in the waters of Japan’s exclusive economic zone.

China’s behavior in the April 2023 Taiwan Strait Crisis might have been slightly less bellicose, but even that proposition is debatable. The most positive possible spin is to emphasize the lack of PLA missile launches, which were the most spectacular feature of the August 2022 demonstration. 

But like the post-Pelosi retaliation, the post-McCarthy retaliation involved partial rehearsals of specific aspects of the likely PLA cross-strait war plan, even if this time there was less of a role for missile tests.

A PRC Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson said the exercises were “a stern warning to the provocative activities of ‘Taiwan independence’ secessionist forces and their collusion with external forces.” The latter phrase was an obvious reference to the United States and Japan. The positioning of some of the exercises suggested Beijing wanted to demonstrate its ability to block an intervention from the north or east.

Chinese forces carried out multiple live-fire exercises in the Taiwan Strait. The PRC aircraft carrier Shandong sailed through the Bashi Channel (between Taiwan and the Philippines) into the seas to the east of Taiwan and, for the first time, launched J-15 fighter jets into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone,.

Near-record numbers of PLA aircraft crossed the median line of the Taiwan Strait, long understood by both sides as a provocation. The aircraft menacing Taiwan included H-6K bombers “with live ammunition” supported by fighter, early warning, and electronic jamming aircraft.

For the first time, PRC media described the military exercises as practice strikes against important targets on Taiwan’s territory. Commentators mentioned that the drills were training for specific wartime missions, including “electronic suppression of the radar and anti-missile bases on the island.”

While the August 2022 exercises implied a threat to impose a wartime blockade, the April 2023 version made the threat explicit. The Chinese government announced that the Fujian Maritime Safety Administration would carry out “inspections” of commercial vessels in the Taiwan Strait for three days. Although there were no reports of PRC vessels attempting to forcibly board Taiwanese vessels, Beijing seemingly moved closer to implementing an actual blockade.

Of course, China’s reaction to the McCarthy-Tsai meeting could have been stronger and more violent. But even if something did indeed moderate the PRC’s behavior, the most likely cause of that moderation was not anything the United States did. 

On the same day that Tsai met with McCarthy, French president Emmanuel Macron, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen, and former ROC president Ma Ying-jeou were in China. Beijing is courting Western European elites, trying to weaken their strategic partnership with Washington and deepen their economic engagement with China. An excessively belligerent PRC demonstration toward Taiwan so soon after the departure of von der Leyen and Macron would have played poorly in Europe. The meeting with Macron went especially well for Xi. Macron distanced France from Taiwan’s predicament and from the United States. It was not in Xi’s interest to squander his gains by making Macron look even more like a stooge.

Similarly, Ma’s visit helped promote the Chinese Communist Party’s agenda. “People on both sides of the Strait belong to the same Chinese nation,” he proclaimed. Taiwan’s next presidential election is in January 2024. Beijing desperately hopes for a victory by Ma’s Kuomintang party, which shares the PRC view that Taiwan is part of China. The PRC wants to use the prospect of war to frighten Taiwan’s voters away from supporting Tsai’s independence-leaning Democratic Progressive Party, but not so overdo it as to repulse potential Kuomintang voters.

The United States moderated, but China did not reciprocate. The PRC government does not see the Tsai-McCarthy meeting in California as an act of goodwill toward China, but rather as another American provocation requiring another Chinese demonstration of determination to fight to prevent Taiwan’s independence. McCarthy’s meeting with Tsai, and similar pro-Taipei gestures by Washington, are not cowing China into backing down. As occurred in August 2022, China has permanently increased its level of military activity near Taiwan this month even after the conclusion of the main show of force, an unwelcome adjustment of the status quo. U.S.-China relations have deteriorated further, and Taiwan is less secure.

U.S. secretary of state Antony Blinken complained that “Beijing should not use the transits [by Tsai] as an excuse to take any actions, to ratchet up tensions, to further push at changing the status quo.” If Beijing needed an “excuse” to gain valuable warfighting practice, better to have not provided it.

Denny Roy is a Senior Fellow at the East-West Center in Honolulu.

Image: Shutterstock.

France has long been celebrated as America’s oldest ally, going back to 1778 when the French monarchy recognized the independence of the United States. It provided military and economic assistance during the American American Revolutionary War which was crucial to the American victory. Symbolizing this long and supposedly strong Franco-American friendship was the Marquis de Lafayette, the French aristocrat who fought in the war. He commanded American troops in several battles, including in the siege of Yorktown, and is considered an American national hero who was granted honorary citizenship by Congress in 2002.

Yet both as a colony and an independent nation, America would end up fighting five wars with France, including the French and Indian War. France itself attempted to conquer Mexico in the 1860s, motivating Washington to intervene to prevent such from happening.

In a way, and contrary to the myths perpetrated by Lafayette’s American admirers, the main motivation for the French assistance during the Revolutionary had nothing to do with common ideals—France was, after all, then ruled by a reactionary monarchy—and more by French interest in recouping some of its losses in the French and Indian War.

Indeed, it was French national interests, rather than President Woodrow Wilson’s desire to “make the world safe for democracy” that drove Paris to draw the United States into the Great War. It ended with French prime minister Georges Clemenceau encouraging the imposition of Germany’s humiliating surrender agreement, which helped sow the seeds of the next world war.

As the historian Michael Neiberg suggests, America’s post-World War I European strategy was based on faith in the French military. Its strength was supposed to prevent Germany from dominating the continent, reflecting the assumption in Washington that France would serve as a “protective barrier for the United States from the conflicts in the Old World.”

Instead, France’s abrupt military armistice with Nazi Germany in 1940, leaving its British ally isolated, forced the United States to re-establish the balance of power in Europe after being drawn once again into another war there.

It was not a secret that the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, which continued to work with the Vichy government despite its pro-Nazi tendencies, had very little trust in French resistance figure Charles de Gaulle. The Americans rightly suspected that de Gaulle would attempt to rebuild the decaying French Empire and challenge American global interests after the war. In fact, during much of the Cold War, French interests collided with those of America which, de Gaulle believed, was intent on forming a European condominium with the Soviets while marginalizing France and the Western Europeans.

After the 1956 Suez Crisis, during which the Americans forced the French and their then-British allies to withdraw their military troops from Egypt and the return of General de Gaulle to power, tensions between Paris and Washington grew. French foreign policy, aka Gaullism, led to the decision to remove all French armed forces from the integrated military command of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1966.

But Gaullism, as a coherent foreign policy, proved to be nothing more than wishful thinking on the part of the old general. He fantasized about drawing the Soviets into a European confederation and of Europe serving as an intermediary between Washington and Moscow. He rejected Britain, which he regarded as America’s lackey, as a member of the European community and tried to win Arab support by distancing the French from Israel.

But the Americans didn’t need French help in managing their relationship with the Soviets, while the 1973 Middle Eastern oil embargo demonstrated Paris’ continuing dependency on America’s military presence in France’s strategic backyard. That reality was the product of France’s post-Gaullism foreign policy: asserting its “independence” from the United States while recognizing that its national security interests required sustaining the alliance with Washington.

Hence the need to count on the massive U.S. military machine that made the difference in Desert Storm as well as in the military campaigns against Serbia during the wars in the Balkans. The French could have their croissant while biting into the American hamburger.

One major example of this French approach has been its post-Cold War strategy in the Levant and North Africa, where France needed to secure core geostrategic and geoeconomic interests. That included French access to the energy resources in the region, the threat of terrorism, the challenge of a nuclearized Iran—whose would-be weapons of mass destruction would pose a direct threat to southern Europe. And all this is without mentioning the need to deal with the flow of Muslim immigrants from that part of the world.

The French economy, unlike the American one, is dependent on oil imports from the Middle East, and what happens in that region directly affects its interests and those of its southern European neighbors in the same way that developments in Mexico and Central America affect U.S. interests.

Yet the French government, with the exception of the occasional attention to Lebanon and its former colonies in the Maghreb, has refrained from embracing a strategy that would employ French military and economic power and that of the European Union (EU) to advance its interests in the region.

Instead, it has expressed criticism of U.S. policy in the region, including its policy towards Israel, and by opposing President George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq. These steps helped the French win diplomatic brownie points with Middle Eastern players while continuing to depend on the United States to secure the oil resources in the Persian Gulf and to contain potential aggressors.

This Machiavellian French approach of relying on U.S. military power was underscored in 2011 when the Obama administration agreed to back a French-British plan to oust Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi without any guarantee that the Europeans would send troops to establish order in Libya after regime change. The result has been chaos across Libya. In that case, the notion that France, Italy, and the other southern European governments should have taken the lead in dealing with the upheaval in Libya made sense. It explained why President Barack Obama was initially reluctant to get the U.S. military involved in Libya. Instead, Obama decided that Washington would take the lead role in launching military action in Libya while hoping that France and other governments would end up “taking over” leadership of the operation.

They didn’t. Obama ended up playing directly into the hands of then-French president Nicolas Sarkozy, who succeeded in drawing the United States into a military campaign aimed at protecting French and European interests.

Current French president Emmanuel Macron, who likes to compare himself to the legendary de Gaulle, entered office stressing French efforts to win “strategic independence” for the EU and enable the Europeans to compete with the Americans on the global stage; he has insisted that Paris and Brussels shouldn’t follow the more assertive U.S. position towards these two powers.

But the Russian invasion of Ukraine disrupted those grand designs. Macron tried, but failed, to reverse President Vladimir Putin’s decision to go to war and to reach a deal between Moscow and the United States.

If anything, the war only highlighted the European dependency on American military and economic power in containing aggression and maintaining stability in Europe. That has strengthened America’s leadership role in NATO. And with the United States replacing Russia as Europe’s largest natural gas supplier, the French and the Europeans have found it difficult to challenge the Biden administration’s decision to provide subsidies to electric vehicles and other kinds of U.S.-based manufacturing.

Likewise, another example of the way the changing geostrategic and geoeconomic balance has weakened France’s hand has been the American decision to pursue a technological cooperation agreement with Britain and Australia—a move that wrecked a French submarine contract with the Australians. Paris complained and recalled its ambassador from Washington, but there wasn’t much that the French could actually do to reverse that decision.

Yet Macron continues to pursue his Gaullist dreams. He insists that France and the EU need to distance themselves from the Americans in their dealings with the Chinese, telling reporters recently that “the paradox would be that overcome with panic, we believe we are just America’s followers;” he believes that contrary to the U.S. position, it isn’t in Europe’s interest to “accelerate” a crisis with Taiwan, that it need embrace neither “the US agenda” nor “a Chinese overreaction.”

But instead of working together with Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, to project European unity and “balancing power” vis-à-vis Beijing, Macron’s recent visit to China, where he was joined by a contingency of French business executives, only underscored that his policies are driven mainly by French interests. As they should be, and were under the original Gaullism, with its similar pretensions to remake France into a great power like it was during the age of Lafayette. But France wasn’t such under de Gaulle, and it isn’t today.

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

Image: Shutterstock.

In the early morning of Monday, March 27, 2023, former Israeli minister of diaspora affairs Nachman Shai was interviewed on the country’s public Hebrew-language news channel. The interview was part of live coverage of events unfolding since the country’s minister of defense had been fired the night before. The latter decision, by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, spurred an upsurge in the street protests and public upheaval that had taken hold of the country since the government had proposed a judicial reform package about three months earlier.

Shai, who is just a little older than the State of Israel itself and has therefore consciously lived through most of its history, claimed that he had never experienced anything similar to what was going on. Indeed, not only had tens of thousands spontaneously taken to the streets and blocked a main artery in Tel Aviv for several hours, the country’s largest trade union Histadrut was about to announce a national strike, with academia, healthcare services, air traffic, and the diplomatic corps joining the movement to different extents. All this was just the culmination of a massive protest movement that had taken root after a far-right government had been sworn in following four years of inconclusive elections and political instability.

The immediate steam was let off on Monday night, after Netanyahu temporarily shelved the contentious bills and when clashes between demonstrating supporters and opponents ended without major injuries. Still, the temporary truce does not mean that the country is on an easy track to deal with the questions it faces. First of all, the composition of the current government is not one that seems conducive to compromise, either internally or with the opposition, as the judicial reform saga has made clear. Also, while Netanyahu is known for the tricks he usually has up his sleeve, his coalition partners’ ideologies and motivations for joining the government may well require particular skills if the coalition is to hold. More fundamentally, however, both the government and the opposition, and Israeli society in its entirety, still need to come to grips with some basic questions that have accompanied the country since it was founded almost seventy-five years ago.

First, the relations between the very diverse groups within Israeli society, as well as their rights and duties, have not been the object of a fundamental legislative process as in many other countries with a “Western” tradition. Although the Israeli Declaration of Independence of May 15, 1948, stipulated that a constitution would be adopted no later than October 1 of the same year, such a foundational document never saw the light. As a result, many fundamental institutional changes—which elsewhere would require specific procedures or special majorities—can be carried out by a simple parliamentary vote. And such changes are increasingly being proposed and discussed because of demographic and societal developments that reshuffle the ways in which the different components of society interact. Indeed, several internal divisions exist within Israel’s Jewish population, of which the distinctions between Ashkenazi and Sephardic/Mizrachi, and between secular and religious are the most obvious. During the country’s first decades of existence, its institutions (government, judiciary, media, academia, etc.) were mainly shaped by Ashkenazi, secular left-wingers. The Sephardic and Mizrachi communities, however, started claiming more visibility and influence, especially since Menachem Begin’s electoral victory in 1977, while the (strictly) religious population has grown slowly yet steadily. These evolutions have raised fundamental issues about the place of tradition and religion in public life: does “religious conscience” trump anti-discrimination rules? Is gender segregation in civic spaces allowed? What is the role of strictly religious Torah scholars, who often do not work and usually do not serve in the army? Despite the blurring of old distinctions after decades of interaction as well as the arrival of Ethiopian and former Soviet Jews, questions like these revive the feeling of a real or perceived overlap between intra-Jewish faultlines, in which the left-wing, Ashkenazi, and secular oppose the right-wing, Sephardic/Mizrachi, and religious. Importantly, all these oppositions seem to have gained prominence in the Israeli debate of late, especially during Netanyahu’s time in power. In such a context, it was not surprising to recently hear several of the judicial reform’s proponents fume against the “elites,” in a reference to the circles that were in power following the state’s foundation. As long as this kind of history is part of the national (sub)consciousness, mutual understanding and conciliation tend to be fragile, certainly in the context of deeply divisive legislative proposals. 

Another issue intrinsically linked to Israel’s founding is the standing of its Arab citizens, who make up about a fifth of its population. While they enjoy full civil and political rights like all other Israelis, relations between them and Jewish Israelis can take many different forms in practice, from collegiality and close friendships to mistrust and—in rare cases—outright violence. Arab Israelis, internally probably as diverse as their Jewish counterparts, collectively face a number of serious issues, such as internal violence and limited political representation. These matters are of an intricate nature and neither the Arab-Israeli communities themselves nor the Jewish-majority institutions can be held entirely accountable for them. 

A second important observation is that large numbers of Arab Israelis take advantage of the opportunities the state offers to all citizens, yet many do not feel represented by the same state, a situation that probably originates in a shared responsibility as well. Tellingly, the waves of blue-and-white flags at the recent mass protests engulfed very few Arab citizens. Last week on Monday, while the Hebrew-language public broadcaster covered developments in a more than twenty-four-hour livestream, nothing similar was available at its Arabic-language counterpart. However, much more is needed—in education, media, and political debate—to bridge the gaps between Jewish and Arab experiences as well as narratives. While language, religion, and traditions are clearly distinct, a minimal extent of shared belonging and mutual awareness is necessary to prevent that divergences in interests or viewpoints escalate into violence, as painfully recalled by the May 2021 Jewish-Arab riots.

Violence has also been a regrettable characteristic of Israeli-Palestinian relations during most of Israel’s existence. While political negotiations between both parties have often been impossible, controversial, or difficult, the legal status of the territories in question—the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, and (except in most Israeli views) East Jerusalem—remains unclear. Whereas Israelis regularly consider “Judea and Samaria” as a “part” of Israel (without specifying what that entails), the area in question was never annexed and Israel finds itself in a situation in which its borders are neither fixed nor internationally recognized. For the Palestinians, this state of affairs has produced, because of Israeli rule and control, huge consequences, that many Jewish Israelis are—willingly or not—unaware of. Still, for military, legal, and budgetary reasons, the Palestinian question also continues to influence life and politics within the Green Line. Therefore, beyond the obvious fact that improved Israeli-Palestinian relations are likely to lead to more security and better lives for all involved, progress regarding the Palestinian issue is also crucial for appeasement within Israeli society.

Nearly seventy-five years after the country’s founding, it seems that Israel is in dire need of true dialogue between the population groups within and outside its official borders. Such a dialogue, however, is not straightforward when schools, media, and religious institutions are operated in siloed ways, as is often the case in Israel and the Palestinian territories. Also, realities in the Middle East reinforce a political and societal culture that invests more in immediate reaction and stopgap measures than in in-depth debate and long-term planning. Nevertheless, the latter may be the only way to get to grips with some of the country’s fundamental choices. Interestingly, following the uproar last week on Monday, both a government and an opposition Knesset member claimed that the people are superior to specific points of contention. Moshe Solomon from the National Religious Party did so in a television interview from the Knesset, while opposition leader Yair Lapid used similar language in his address at a rally in Jerusalem. Following the latest developments, however, it remains to be seen whether people are indeed drawing lessons and whether citizens and their leaders are capable of opening up breaches in the ideological walls that have been separating them.

Dr. Alexander Loengarov is a Senior Affiliated Fellow at the Institute for International Law at the University of Leuven (KU Leuven, Belgium), as well as a former official of the European Economic and Social Committee of the European Union.

His writings reflect solely his own views, and not those of the European Economic and Social Committee or the European Union, which cannot be held responsible for any use made of it.

Image: Shutterstock.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine relies on old tanks but new tactics—engaging in a hybrid war of bullets, propaganda, cyberattacks, nuclear bluster, and economic bullying. This last tactic is broad and indiscriminate, aimed at Ukraine and the democratic, rules-based order. Russia has unleashed comprehensive economic warfare, using its energy sector, currency reserves, and infiltration of Western financial systems to sow division within Europe and build deeper economic alliances with China and Iran. Comprehensive and long-lasting financial isolation must be enforced to show the world that the global financial order will no longer tolerate Russia’s military expansionism and economic disruption.

The United States has responded to Russia’s unjust war on Ukraine, unleashing its own economic weaponry of sanctions and export controls, targeting leaders and oligarchs who push the conflict forward and feed the Kremlin’s war machine. The United States and Europe have unified to cut some Russian banks off from the SWIFT messaging system, freeze Russia’s overseas currency reserves, cap the price of Russian oil, and deny access to the Western financial system. The Western private sector, too, has fled Russia in substantial numbers, divesting assets and writing off billions of dollars in losses. Ukrainian teachers- and accountants-turned-soldiers are holding the frontline for their homeland while the entire democratic and rules-based economic order fights a parallel war against illicit money and malign oligarchs.

Russia is not simply seeking to shift its borders but has, for years, been sowing chaos, disinformation, and interference in democracies around the world, including election interference in the U.S. propaganda campaigns in Latin America, ransomware attacks on multinational companies, exporting corruption and infiltrating multinational organizations, propping up dictators in Iran and Syria, and funding mercenaries and terrorists around the world.

As the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) lays out in its new report, Ruble Rumble: Offensive and Defensive Measures to Defeat Russia in the Economic Domain, the United States and its allies must bolster Russia’s economic isolation and step up their financial pressure campaign if they expect to effectively undermine the military war machine and economic coercion of an autocratic and bellicose Russia. Sanctions must be designed and enhanced to impose true consequences on Moscow for its reckless and destructive choices. There is an offensive element of our economic battle with Moscow. Still, there must also be an equally strong defensive approach—protecting our election integrity against interference, redoubling our protections against hackers and cyber-attacks, cutting Russia off from the global financial system, and weeding out dirty Russian money from our real estate, our hedge funds, and our supply chains.

For China, which is watching and plotting its next move along the Taiwan Strait, a permanent financial ostracization of Putin’s Russia should make the CCP think twice about using missiles and battleships to bring Taiwan under Beijing’s authority.

A weakened Russia also stymies Beijing’s attempts to create a political and economic order parallel to and in defiance of democratic capitalism. If Russia and China work together, China can afford to increasingly turn its back on engagement with the West, controlling our supply chains but more resilient against any attempts at economic isolation.

To properly counter Russia’s expanded economic war, sanctions, and other economic consequences against Russia should be aggressively expanded. As recommended in the FDD report, the United States should increase secondary sanctions, eliminate sanctions exemptions (and omissions) in the banking sector, address weaknesses in the oil price cap, and hobble the Russian energy sector, including winding down U.S. dependence on Russian state-owned Rosatom. In addition, the United States and its allies should take steps to cut out the Russian alternative to SWIFT and similar economic workarounds. The West should reach out to neutral economies, like India, Turkey, Brazil, and the United Arab Emirates—making a case for the benefits of joining the democratic fold against Russia... and the consequences of continuing to do business with Putin or joining an anti-Western alliance with China. Finally, the United States must levy real and substantial punishments for sanctions evasion—with particular attention to third countries such as China as well as so-called “enablers” that move tainted Russian money through the Western financial system.

While Russia has engaged in an economic war against the West for more than a decade, its actions have been facilitated by weaknesses and loopholes we have built into the financial and legal system. It is time for robust defensive economic measures, taking a firm and aggressive stand against malign finance and illicit actors that have infiltrated Western economies—undermining democracy, fueling corruption, funding terrorism, and finding new ways to evade U.S. and allied sanctions regimes. This will require a fight for financial transparency, the effective implementation of beneficial ownership rules, due diligence requirements for professional enablers, limitations on foreign influence on democracies, a battle against misinformation, and expanded resources for enforcement authorities at the U.S. Treasury, State, and Commerce Departments.

Putin and China seek to build a new rogue gallery of autocrats and oligarchs who can undermine democracy and transparent capitalism around the globe. For democracy and capitalism to flourish, we must unleash the full arsenal of economic weaponry to isolate Russia from the world, hobble its expansionist tendencies, and remind others that the Western financial system is closed to those who seek to destabilize and undermine the liberal, rules-based order.

Elaine Dezenski is the Senior Director and Head of the Center on Economic and Financial Power at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

Peter Doran is an Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

Image: Shutterstock.

In February 2023, the chairman of the House Select Committee on China, Rep. Mike Gallager, secretly visited Taiwan, highlighting the importance of policymakers visiting countries and observing first-hand the defensive preparations being made. By interacting with the Taiwanese government and military officials, Gallagher learned that consistent delays in U.S. weapons delivery to Taiwan have been frustrating the island’s leaders and negatively impacting their confidence in acquiring external defensive aid. This information is crucial for U.S. policymakers who are seeking to make informed decisions about their support for Taiwan. Moreover, while there is a perception in the United States that a potential Chinese invasion of Taiwan would play out similarly to Ukraine, stimulating defense preparation in countries where potential threats exist, analysts suggest that there is no need to panic.

In any situation, there is often a disparity between what political messaging claims and reality. Not only is the power disparity between China and Taiwan far greater than that between Russia and Ukraine, but survey results of the recent Taiwan National Security Survey, conducted by Duke University in mid-December 2022 with national representation in Taiwan, show that in an open-ended response setting, only 13.3 percent of respondents answered that they would join the army. Another 15.1 percent responded that they would resist China in some way. In the case of Taiwan’s geopolitical situation, if less than a third of Taiwanese may be as willing to fight a war of annihilation as the Ukrainians, the United States cannot afford to be ignorant of this reality.

Within the halls of American politics, a perception has developed that the Taiwanese people are not only eager to resist China but are capable of doing so after receiving the weapons through arms sales. This sentiment has been reinforced by Taiwan’s current governing party, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). The DPP touts programs, such as extending military service for conscripts, as evidence that the Taiwanese are determined to defend themselves. However, without a dedicated training plan in place and given China’s numerical superiority, it is unlikely such hollow gestures will meaningfully affect Taiwan’s overall combat potential. And even if it did, Taiwan would likely still decisively lose any protracted war without direct American assistance. Chest pounding with potential support from allies is an effective election tactic for any governing party but has little bearing on a nation’s actual ability to fight. While the oppositional Nationalist Party (Kuomintang) has been portrayed as soft on China and said to be subordinating itself to China’s interests, the ruling DPP tends to reinforce this perception by sharing Washington’s tough stance on China—both to satisfy U.S. policymakers and benefit electorally. This is an aspect of the situation American lawmakers must understand. If Taiwan continues down this path, the island nation could provoke an avoidable conflict that the United States could find itself drawn into.

The primary reason Taiwan should adopt a more conciliatory stance is due to the changes inside China itself. In the past, any leader’s actions that would threaten China’s position in the world would often see them ousted by the Politburo Standing Committee. However, China’s current president, Xi Jinping, has consolidated near absolute power within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Suppose Taiwan’s independence was perceived as inevitable by China. In that case, a war may break out regardless of whether it benefits China, as Xi cannot afford to lose Taiwan, much like Russian president Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine has been to the detriment of Russia. This is why provoking the CCP, as the pro-Taiwan independence camp has done for the purposes of political expediency, is such an existential threat to Taiwan’s survival. While it is true that China could manufacture a crisis to justify hostilities, it is essential that, in the eyes of the world, Taiwan is doing everything to avoid confrontation. If Taiwan is seen inviting the CCP’s wrath, it will give China control over the war narrative. Such an outcome could reduce international support for Taiwan and handicap any effort to make China accountable for its actions

For these reasons, among others, it is clear that neither major political party in Taiwan is working toward the island’s political subjugation; instead, there is a disagreement about how best to maintain Taiwan’s democratic way of living. And seeing as no one can successfully defend the island in the case of war, the most prudent solution is to ensure war does not arrive by sufficiently deterring Chinese aggression. As most of what the United States understands about the conflict across the Taiwan Strait comes from political messaging, believing that all is well is tempting. However, in this critical moment, it is a necessity that we place reality over political bravado and allow the ships of state to be steered by empirical facts rather than the misplaced confidence of ill-designing men.

Dr. Dennis L.C. Weng is an associate professor of political science at Sam Houston State University, where he teaches comparative politics and international relations with a focus on East Asia. Weng also serves as the Founding Chief Executive Officer of Asia Pacific Peace Vision Institute, a new think tank on Asia Pacific Peace Studies.

Jared Jeter is a Research Associate at Sam Houston State University.

Image: Shutterstock.

The 2023 Summit for Democracy, initiated by the United States and co-hosted by Zambia, South Korea, the Netherlands, and Costa Rica, concluded on March 30, after affirming that “free, fair, and transparent elections” are “the foundation of democratic governance.” A week before, the People’s Republic of China held its own Second International Forum on Democracy. It took up such anodyne topics as “Democracy and Sustainable Development,” “Democracy and Innovation,” “Democracy and Global Governance,” “Democracy and the Diversity of Human Civilization” and “Democracy and the Path to Modernization.”

China’s Forum on Democracy was not about ensuring political freedom and self-government, but rather detaching the idea of democracy from its essence before an audience in the grip of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). At its philosophical core, the project is being mirrored by developments in Western democracies.

Manipulation of the concept of democracy by the CCP began before its takeover in 1949; the revolution would succeed with a promise of democracy, then abandon it when power had been achieved. During his long struggle to assume control of China, Mao Zedong proposed the “New Democracy” concept to establish “a democratic republic under the joint dictatorship of all anti-imperialist and anti-feudal forces led by the proletariat.” Mao believed the Chinese Revolution should be done in “two steps“: the first step was to defeat imperialism and feudalism, and establish a new, democratic society through a democratic revolution; the second step was to continue the socialist revolution based on this foundation, and gradually transition China into a socialist society.

Mao scrapped “New Democracy” in the early 1950s, but subsequent Chinese leaders unveiled other democratic concepts to promote their programs. Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zeming advocated for “socialist democracy,” claiming that “without democracy, there can be no socialism, and without socialism, there can be no modernization. The purpose of political system reform is to eliminate disadvantages and develop a socialist democracy with Chinese characteristics.”

In 2019, Xi Jinping proposed “whole-process people’s democracy,” which is “socialism with Chinese characteristics” guided by the CCP, emphasizing “people’s participation,” “elections,” “democratic consultation,” and other terms lifted from liberal democracies. The CCP published a White Paper about China’s “democracy” in December 2021.

Objectively, free, fair, and transparent elections do not exist in China. China is a one-party state. Voters can only elect deputies at the township, district, and county levels, and under the strict control of the CCP. 

According to Article 2 of the Chinese Election Law, “The election of deputies to the National People’s Congress and local people’s congresses at all levels adheres to the leadership of the Communist Party of China…”

Appropriating the idea of democracy is consistent with the CCP’s habit of intellectual property theft, which has, along with forced labor, helped drive its rapid economic growth. Theft of basic science and technology breakthroughs has allowed China to profit from the export of complex products without investing in basic or applied research. The U.S. FBI said Chinese economic espionage has resulted in one of the largest transfers of wealth in human history. 

Many people around the world, repulsed by China’s genocidal policies toward Muslim citizens, repression of dissent and freedom of religion, and chilling promises of a “New World Order” that is run by powerful states that are unconstrained by common human rights standards, boycott Chinese products. 

While democracy had been appropriated by his predecessors and used as bate, Xi’s approach has been even more sinister; Xi’s democracy knock-off is more than the cynical appropriation of an attractive ideal to obscure the way it is subverted. In fact, history’s most brutal totalitarian regimes, including those in East Germany and North Korea, in addition to China, have called themselves democracies. But in doing so, as Theodore Dalrymple observed, they have sought “not to persuade or convince, not to inform but to humiliate,” forcing “assent to obvious lies.” Propaganda serves the process of moral domination. CCP leaders are showing the world that they have more power than the truth; that they can do what they want with the vocabulary of freedom. They are showing that they can call totalitarianism democracy, and by wearing it as a badge, demonstrate their power over reality, and over the minds and souls of their subjects and clients. 

In this regard, their methods are consistent with the intellectual aggression of ideological, post-modern wordsmiths in the West, whose manipulation of language and suppression of opposing views reveal what is also basically an ideology of power. What is happening in schools, businesses, and even in the military begins to resemble Maoist “Thought Reform,” a cultural revolution brainwashing technique aimed at detaching people from their social bonds, traditions and beliefs. Accompanying inverted, Orwellian slogans like “diversity” is institutionalized, soft-totalitarian coercion. Political correctness and the cancel culture are strategies in a movement from within against the central value system of Western civilization, one based on the universality of reason and nature. While China’s Democracy Forum appears as a crude, resentful and childish imitation of an American initiative, we would be wise not to sneer, but rather to apply its inner lessons to ourselves. 

Aaron Rhodes is Senior Fellow in the Common Sense Society and President of the Forum for Religious Freedom-Europe. He is the author of The Debasement of Human Rights (Encounter Books, 2018).

Image: Sandra Sanders / Shutterstock.com

Today, more than half of the sovereign states in Latin America and the Caribbean are governed by left-wing presidents, including the big three: Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico. Only five years ago, Latin America’s left held power in less than one-third of the region.

This political shift prompted claims that political change in Latin America resembles a pendulum effect, a series of reactions to social crises, which lead to perpetual oscillation from left-to-right-wing governments. Although pervasive in the foreign policy world, the claim holds no ground.

Some self-described Latin Americanists, who all too often reveal themselves to be Castro-sympathizing historians, assert this theory ad nauseam. They, along with a growing group of liberal policy wonks, profess that these sorts of political shifts are natural and unavoidable. Many have fallen into the trap of oversimplification, while others have simply benefited from perpetuating the myth.

Concretely, in recent years, many promoting the pendulum effect—as if it were fact and not merely theory—have posited that the rise of anti-Americanism and left-wing governments in the region is nothing but yet another chapter in a long book; one that will soon be followed by one of pro-Americanism and right-wing governments. Although reassuring, as theory usually is, this schematization does nothing but constrain the proper understanding of realities on the ground.

It is true that political transition originates in part from reactions to changing local dynamics. After all, no socialist has ever risen to power when income inequality in a given country is small. But local politics in and of itself is insufficient to explain the recent political shifts in Latin American countries in the twenty-first century.

For sure, some regions in the world are characterized by institutions and histories that facilitate the success of particular ideas over others. In the case of Latin America, it is often said that the rise of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela and the so-called Pink Tide, which began in the early 2000s, followed the failures of widespread neoliberalism in addressing poverty and inequality. Before that, some go further to explain that the rise of neoliberalism in Latin America in the late twentieth century was itself a reaction to the high inflation and mounting debt generated by the dominant import-substitution-industrialization framework of the 1970s.

Still, while looking at these trends complements a proper analysis of why nations change, it is insufficient without acknowledging the role of ideologically motivated domestic elites in Latin America and the role of external actors in enabling, if not guiding, these political transitions.

Both Michel Foucault and Karl Marx understood that knowledge and power are closely linked, and that revolutionary elites play an instrumental role in spreading knowledge, guiding the masses, and achieving systemic change. They knew that to take control, revolutionaries must not only distance themselves from “bad” elites, but also need to embrace “good” elites. After all, the legendary Che Guevara was not necessarily poor, and the same Hugo Chávez who spent decades exclaiming that “¡ser rico es malo!” (meaning that being rich is evil) died a billionaire. Some might call men like these hypocrites, and in some cases, they were. But more often than not, the Marxist text that inspired them justified their actions.

Times may have changed, but the same remains true: these revolutionaries are a-ok with the wealthy… if the wealthy support them. Extend this to the next logical conclusion, and one can understand that they also favor imperialism, if the empire supports them.

For some, these observations are not brain-boggling at all: they are common sense. In the United States’ foreign policy community, politically dominated by a class of self-loathing narcissists, these views sound alien. But for a group of rising U.S. and Latin American scholars and thinkers that grasp on-the-ground realities better than most, it is time for a change.

Earlier this year, on a damp night at the International Spy Museum in Washington D.C., more than one hundred twenty U.S. and Latin American political leaders, think tank scholars, and national security experts from eleven countries gathered in celebration of the tenth anniversary of the Center for a Secure Free Society (SFS), along with the organization’s Western Hemisphere Security Forum.

At this event, you could hear a variety of Spanish accents. But aside from diversity in that regard, what was palpable, if not ubiquitous, in the cocktail reception before the panels began was the group’s desire for the rise of a new conservative movement in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Participants in the Forum, including Venezuela’s highest-polling opposition leader Maria Corina Machado and Colombian presidential-candidate-in-the-making Senator Maria Fernanda Cabal, understand, unlike many Latin American elites, that what has hit the region is even stronger than the so-called Pink Tide that plagued the region for the first decade of this century.

Moreover, inside the walls of the Spy Museum that night, there were no doubts that the political shift in the region is not the result of the pendulum’s bob swinging back. Rather, it is due to the progression of bad ideas that have slowly but surely moved to the political Left under the guidance of internal illiberal forces and external actors that wish to challenge American hegemony.

More than two decades ago, the rise of Hugo Chávez came after a piecemeal process of expanding Cuban influence that swallowed Venezuela’s institutions, which culminated with an uprising—demonstrating that, as Ernest Hemingway said in his 1926 breakthrough novel The Sun Also Rises, change can happen “gradually, then suddenly.”

After Chávez’s success, through petrodiplomacy and with the help of Russian-Iranian-Cuban intelligence and Chinese credits and loans, a new wave of authoritarian governance was reciprocated across the region like a viral pathogen. This wave came with a prescribed set of enemies and friends, along with several go-to institutional reforms—which always came under the guise of promoting a form of “equity” that ultimately deteriorates democracy. For example, Bolivia’s Evo Morales and Ecuador’s Rafael Correa both advanced constitutional reforms to end presidential term limits, following the footsteps of the Venezuelan tyrant.

In that same vein—unexpectedly for some, but predictably for many at the SFS Forum—the Latin America ideological map today is even more politically red than what it looked like a decade ago.

Joseph Humire, the executive director of SFS, told me that “the last so-called conservative wave in Latin America lacked a geopolitical vision that understood the new realities in the era of great power  competition; you cannot maintain China as your top trade partner while asking the U.S. for loans and development assistance, or continually buy military armament from Russia while sucking up to SOUTHCOM for more military support.” This lack of understanding of how the world was shifting, led, according to Humire, to “the return of not just leftist presidents in Latin America, but rising authoritarians who are seeking to take the region further away from the United States and toward greater conflict.”

With this in mind, it is evident that what the region has observed is no pendulum effect. A better metaphor would be that of a driver that occasionally makes small adjustments to the steering wheel to keep the car on track, but overall, the car stays on course, moving toward a specific destination.

In this case, that driver is a mix of malign regional actors, namely Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, and Bolivia, as well as neo-imperialist totalitarian regimes from Beijing, Moscow, and Tehran. Today, more than ever, the car's fuel is provided by these extra-regional actors who benefit from this change in Latin America — primarily China.

Neutrality in the hopes of the pendulum’s bob bouncing back will only lead to the rise of new anti-American authoritarians in our proximity, impacting America’s economic relationships and worsening the migration crisis, as it already is. If Latin American conservatives want to win, they need new drivers, new cars, and new fuel. With prudence, the United States must back a new wave of Latin American leaders, and, with determination, Latin America must course-correct.

Juan P. Villasmil “J.P. Ballard” is a commentator and analyst who often writes about American culture, foreign policy, and political philosophy. He has been featured in The American Spectator, The National Interest, The Wall Street Journal, International Policy Digest, Fox News, Telemundo, MSNBC, and others.

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Less than a month after entering the White House in 2017, President Donald Trump flew to Dover Air Force Base to attend the dignified transfer ceremony for Chief Petty Officer William “Ryan” Owens, a Navy SEAL who was the first U.S. service member killed in action during the Trump presidency. It was a weighty experience, especially for the president who had personally ordered the raid. I was with him shortly after he somberly received news of Owens’ death. It impacted him so deeply that he would go on to bring up the Owens family—and in particular Owens’ widow, Carryn—many times in the months and years to come.

Other presidents have undoubtedly felt the weight of sending Americans into harm’s way and remember the first time that one of their orders resulted in an American servicemember being killed in action. But the reality is, most presidents in recent history haven’t let these harsh realities of war stop them from sending Americans to die in conflicts that are hard to justify, from mission creep in Afghanistan that turned into America’s longest war, to nation building in Iraq, and beyond. Senator J.D. Vance was right to hail Trump’s greatest policy success as simply not starting any wars. This would perhaps be a low bar if it hadn’t been too high for most modern presidents to clear.

There isn’t a singular explanation for how Trump accomplished this, but it certainly wasn’t because of pacifist sentimentality, although the above anecdote illustrates his deep emotional connection to the troops. After all, just two months after his first trip to Dover, he launched fifty-nine Tomahawk cruise missiles into Syria in response to a chemical weapons attack by the Assad regime.

Trump’s intuitive approach means something very specific to America’s enemies: There is always the possibility that he will use overwhelming and shocking violence if he feels they have harmed or humiliated the United States. Unrestrained savagery doesn’t fit neatly beside the foreign policy elite’s favorite euphemisms, like “targeted killings” and “kinetic military action,” but no matter what you call it, it proved to be an effective restraint on our most vicious adversaries.

When Trump’s military advisors proposed a menu of options to deal with Iranian terrorist general Qasem Soleimani—an evil man with Americans’ blood on his hands, who was actively plotting more attacks—he chose the most aggressive option.

In the middle of the night, as Soleimani was being whisked away from an Iraqi airport, an American MQ-9 Reaper drone unleashed a Hellfire missile that tore him to pieces, along with several other members of Iran’s elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

The move was so provocative that Joe Biden warned it could bring the Middle East to “the brink of a major conflict.” It didn’t. In fact, Trump doubled down, warning the Iranians that the United States had targeted “52 Iranian sites (representing the 52 American hostages taken by Iran many years ago), some at a very high level & important to Iran & the Iranian culture,” making it clear that if they responded by harming Americans, they would be “hit very hard and very fast.” In other words, there was no telling what he might do. The only thing they – and other American adversaries – could be sure of was that if they crossed Trump’s threshold, he would not be going through a laborious policy process to figure out how to react.

Unfortunately, Iranian attacks have skyrocketed since President Biden took office. Most recently, an Iranian drone attack in Syria last week killed one American and injured six others. The Biden administration responded with what they called “proportionate and deliberate action,” an air strike against Iranian-backed militia facilities. Iranian proxy forces responded the very next day with attacks against U.S. troops. And while there were no casualties, it was a clear indication that they have priced in the Biden Administration’s predictable response as just the cost of doing business.

Trump’s critics—and in the case of his threat to Iranian cultural sites, even his own cabinet officials—bemoan his lack of restraint and willingness to deploy over-the-top force, but this approach has deep roots in America’s foreign policy tradition and maintains a firm grip on the American psyche.

In Walter Russell Mead’s seminal work on the Jacksonian tradition in American foreign policy, he remarked that “those who prefer to believe that the present global hegemony of the United States emerged through a process of immaculate conception avert their eyes from many distressing moments in the American ascension.” For example, American bombing raids at the end of World War II killed nearly a million Japanese civilians, “more than twice the total number of combat deaths that the United States has suffered in all its foreign wars combined.” In Korea, Mead noted that U.S. forces killed an estimated 1 million North Korean civilians, approximately thirty civilian deaths for every American soldier killed in action.

Many Jacksonians—and Trump is perhaps more of a Jacksonian than even Jackson himself—take a narrow view of America’s national interests, but when those interests are harmed, hell hath no fury like a Jacksonian unleashed. They will not be constrained by so-called international law or multinational institutions. As Mead wrote, “Jacksonians believe that there is an honor code in international life—as there was in clan warfare in the borderlands of England—and those who live by the code will be treated under it. But those who violate the code—who commit terrorist acts in peacetime, for example—forfeit its protection and deserve no consideration.”

The virtues of deploying such ruthless and devastating force are that it seeks to defeat aggressors as quickly as possible, resulting in fewer lives lost than there would be in protracted conflict, and serves as a deterrent against future attacks. Even suggesting there are virtues to this approach will result in condemnation from the foreign policy establishment, who decry Jacksonians as immoral, isolationist cowboys. But for many Americans, especially those who live in the American heartland far away from the coastal elites, this approach to foreign policy—and to life in general—holds deep resonance.

In 1968, Richard Nixon confided in his top aide, H.R. Haldeman, that he liked to employ what he called “the Madman Theory” to convince the North Vietnamese that he “might do anything to stop the [Vietnam] war.” Nixon as vice president had seen how President Dwight D. Eisenhower contained communism—and, according to Eisenhower, convinced China to end the war on the Korean Peninsula—by leveraging the terrifying threat of nuclear war.

Some pundits have tagged examples of Trump’s approach as the Madman Theory reborn, and there is some truth to that. But one thing the critics seem to miss is that it’s not a charade; its effectiveness lies in Trump’s capacity for genuine unpredictability, his openness to letting new developments shape and change his responses in real time.

As much as it will exasperate Trump’s foreign policy critics, nowhere was the success of this approach more evident than in the containment of Russian military aggression.

Here are the facts: Russia invaded Georgia in 2008 when George W. Bush was president. Russia took Crimea in 2014 when Barack Obama was president. Russia has now invaded Ukraine with Biden as president. However, when Trump was president, Russia did not seize territory from any of its neighbors.

Russian president Vladimir Putin’s appetite for expansion did not wane during the four years Trump was in office, and the world was not just miraculously a safer place. Bad actors—from Russia and China to Iran and North Korea—simply knew that they had to restrain themselves or deal with the unpredictable but inevitably severe consequences.

That, perhaps more than anything else, is how Trump kept Americans safe without starting a war.

Cliff Sims served as Special Assistant to the President, 2017-18, and as Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Strategy and Communications, 2020-2021.

Image: Joseph Sohm / Shutterstock.com

Policymakers in the United States are starting to come to grips with a stark reality—a Cold War with China—and the need for a strategy with clear objectives. The Chinese spy balloon traversing U.S. airspace and growing concerns over China’s diplomatic and potential military support for Russia’s war against Ukraine are just the latest developments galvanizing U.S. policymakers on the need for action to counter the threat from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

The United States’ new hardline position on China was long overdue and has caught many, including Beijing, off-guard. But it should not have. For decades, China has systematically abused the privileges that it has been accorded as a member of the free and open community of nations in its own bid for dominance. Evidence of this can be seen in China’s ongoing use of diplomatic coercion, unlawful military provocations, and, in the economic realm, the rampant theft of intellectual property, predatory trade practices, and widespread market manipulation through massive subsidies to favored industries. The use of these tactics by the Chinese Communist Party is not an accident but part of a deliberate strategy to supplant the United States as the global leader and create a regional and global order deferential to its authoritarian preferences.

To put it bluntly, America has been far too slow to rise to this challenge. The fundamental change to a competitive approach made by the Trump and Biden administrations were a start, but a comprehensive strategy that organizes and coordinates America’s considerable policy tools to achieve victory still does not exist—especially in the economic arena.

That is why we launched the China Economic and Strategy Initiative, to help develop and articulate an optimal economic strategy, one that includes objectives with clear lines of effort, to address China’s epochal economic and technological challenge to U.S. geopolitical leadership. A vital part of that process is to first understand what has already been done to counter China to identify how the United States must position itself for success going forward.

“Strategic Competition” Is Not a Strategy

The start of the Trump administration in 2017 marked a shift in the United States’ post-Cold War foreign policy focus as it sought to bring back a great power competition mindset and apply it to what the administration viewed as America’s number one threat: China. This was enshrined in strategic documents such as the 2017 National Security Strategy (NSS)—which stated that China, alongside Russia, sought to challenge “American power, influence, and interests, attempting to erode American security and prosperity”—and the 2018 National Defense Strategy (NDS), which identified China as a “strategic competitor.” The administration’s declassified U.S. Strategic Framework for the Indo-Pacific which guides the implementation of these strategies is another useful strategic baseline that future administrations can expand and implement.

The Trump administration’s policy shift was, in many ways, a hard reset of the United States’ foreign policy and national security agenda. Instead of focusing on unconstrained globalization and hunting terrorists in the Middle East, the Trump administration sought to instill a competitive spirit in the hope that it would permeate all aspects of the U.S. diplomatic, military, and economic agenda. The challenge that the Trump administration faced, however, was that the bureaucratic muscle memory and appetite for risk that the United States had developed to defeat the Soviets were all but dead, complicating the implementation of the NSS, NDS, and Strategic Framework. This ultimately limited the administration’s ability to execute the strategy it declared.

The Biden administration, in large part, has continued the Trump-era policies, with its 2022 NSS reinforcing the view that China has the “intention and increasingly, the capacity to reshape the international order in favor of one that tilts the global playing field to its benefit,” and that it remains America’s most “consequential geopolitical challenge.” But President Joe Biden has also inherited the same institutional challenges of a fractured bureaucracy unable to coordinate a China strategy. Despite the significance of two consecutive administrations maintaining the same overarching policy on China, a strategy with clear objectives and means to achieve them has failed to materialize.

The result is that the United States still finds itself reacting to China’s malign behavior rather than seizing the initiative with calculated actions working toward clear strategic objectives.

The Economy Is Ground Zero

America’s shift in sentiment on China and growing desire for an economy free from the authoritarian influence of the CCP has made the economy ground zero for competition. The Trump and Biden administrations made attempts to impose economic costs on China for its predatory economic practices and position the United States to compete both at home and abroad. Policy actions taken by both administrations centered on leveling the economic playing field, defending America’s technological advantage, and cooperating with allies and partners. But have these policies, many of which were touted as political victories, made a measurable impact on protecting the American economy and way of life?

Advancing America’s Economic Interests

A core part of former President Donald Trump’s campaign bid in 2016 focused on advancing America’s economic interests by rolling back China’s unfair trade practices that have undermined the American economy and workforce. In 2018, the Trump administration took its first major action by imposing Section 301 tariffs on $50 billion of Chinese goods that have benefited from the theft of U.S. intellectual property and China’s unfair industrial practices, in addition to imposing Section 232 tariffs on steel and aluminum imports to combat China’s “dumping” of products in the United States. The Trump administration, in response to China’s tariff retaliation, expanded Section 301 tariffs that at one point reached a 2019 high of $370 billion across numerous sectors.

President Biden, despite vowing to remove U.S. tariffs, has left more than $300 billion worth of tariffs on Chinese goods under Section 301, reinforced its commitment to Section 232 steel and aluminum tariffs on China, and even extended Section 201 tariffs put in place in 2018 on Chinese solar components to protect American solar manufacturers.

The Trump administration also sought to negotiate a more open Chinese market, a process that culminated in the U.S.-China Economic and Trade Agreement, otherwise known as the Phase One Deal, that was signed in 2020. The Phase One Deal sought to level the playing field with structural reforms to China’s economic and trade regime and reduce the trade deficit by obligating China to make additional purchases of at least $200 billion in U.S. goods across a range of sectors in a two-year period—an agreement that Beijing has failed to honor. The Phase One Deal, however, was significant in that China signed the deal without the removal of any U.S. tariffs, implicitly accepting the U.S. charge of malign economic behavior. It also allowed the United States to unilaterally seek remedies if China was not living up to its end of the deal.

The overall impact of these policies on the goal of leveling the economic playing field with China, however, is questionable. While tariffs modestly shifted some supply chains away from China to other regional partners and the Phase One Trade deal brought China to the negotiating table, these actions appear to have a limited effect on trade. The new 2022 trade statistics support this trend, as the U.S.-China bilateral goods trade hit a new record at more than $690 billion with Chinese imports still outpacing U.S. exports. While the Section 301 tariffs sent a serious message to Beijing and the rest of the world that the U.S. would not accept business as usual, it also could have been the catalyst to implement a consistent approach to deal with China’s rampant intellectual property theft and a clear violation of U.S. laws. But that did not happen.

Defending America’s Technological Advantage

The Trump and Biden administrations both rightfully identified the need to protect America’s technological advantage to ensure the United States is not aiding China’s military modernization and surveillance state network. The Trump administration’s move to reform the United States’ inbound investment screening process in 2018 with the Foreign Investment Risk Review Modernization Act (FIRRMA) expanded the ability of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) under the Treasury Department to screen transactions for potential threats to national security. The Administration’s 2019 Executive Order on Securing the Information and Communications Technology and Services Supply Chain (ICTS) also gave Commerce a powerful tool to screen information technology transactions from identified foreign adversaries, including China, that could impact U.S. national security. The impact of both FIRRMA and ICTS, however, is minimal at best due to lagging implementation and the absence of clear policy guidance on cases involving China at the Treasury and Commerce Departments.

The Trump Administration’s modernization of the United States’ outdated export control regime with the 2018 Export Controls Reform Act (ECRA) also directly gave the President greater authority to control dual-use exports and emerging technologies that could be applied to China’s military-industrial complex. The Department of Defense’s creation of the Communist Chinese Military Companies List (CCMC) in 2020 and the subsequent executive order banning investment in CCMC companies could potentially be a blow to China’s military-industrial complex. However, the Biden administration’s transfer of authority for this policy to the Department of Treasury in June 2021 dulled its impact by reducing the scope of the companies to be sanctioned. It has also failed to update the list for over a year.

Protecting American data has also been a key stated priority. The Trump administration sought to address this issue in 2019 by adding Huawei, China’s leading telecommunications company, to Commerce’s Entity List and later announcing Huawei’s indictment under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) Act in 2020 for trade espionage. The Biden administration in 2022 doubled down on this effort by banning the sale and import of equipment made by both Huawei and ZTE in the United States, in addition to banning TikTok from federal government agency devices. Huawei, ZTE, and TikTok are the most high-profile cases of China’s access to Americans’ data, but gaps still exist in other sectors, such as healthcare, that need policymaker attention.

One of the greatest challenges that both administrations faced was how to generate more domestic production through “reshoring” initiatives while simultaneously decoupling from China in core technologies such as semiconductors to reduce dependencies. Although President Biden’s CHIPS and Science Act aims to increase the United States’ domestic production of semiconductors, especially in advanced technology, it is still unclear how the United States is going to decouple from Chinese production of “legacy” chips that are also fundamental to our day-to-day activities. The October 2022 announcement of the Department of Commerce’s newly expanded export controls to deny China cutting-edge semiconductor chips and equipment reinforced this effort, but once again, only focused on high-end manufacturing.

Cooperation with Global Partnerships

One theme that has been consistent across both administrations is utilizing a strong network of like-minded partners to compete against China economically and uphold the free and open system for all nations. Despite signing the BUILD Act, a move meant to counter China’s Belt and Road Initiative with economic statecraft, the Trump administration’s efforts to rally international partners largely fell flat. This was in part to the administration’s attempts at the time to re-negotiate long-standing trade deals with key U.S. allies and demand nations pay their fair share for defense, as well as hitting some friends with tariffs. This made real economic cooperation with China politically untenable at home for many of America’s global partners.

The Biden administration has sought to bring something more tangible to the table by launching the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF) in 2022. Although this framework offers coordination with Indo-Pacific nations to discuss trade, supply chains, and anticorruption issues, the IPEF will likely fall short of countering China’s commanding economic position in the Indo-Pacific without concrete trade provisions such as market access agreements. In contrast, the Biden Administration’s newly signed 2023 agreement with Japan and the Netherlands to curb China’s ability to manufacture high-end semiconductors is a prime example of the types of agreements and partnerships that the United States should be forging to make gains in this competition.

America Needs a Strategy Tied to Objectives and Means

If America stands any chance of prevailing against the threat from the CCP, U.S. policymakers must begin implementing policies that are driven by a clear strategy—especially in the economic arena. Identifying the United States’ desired end states and core objectives, and means to achieve them, should be the foremost priority. The United States already has an arsenal of policy tools at its disposal that could be used, but a lack of strategic direction has meant that key economic agencies within the Departments of State, Commerce, Treasury, Defense, and the United States Trade Representative are simply not incentivized to compete with China.

The United States must maintain the economic might to defend its interests, ensure that the free and open system remains the dominant global economic model absent of authoritarian control, and undermine China’s malign economic policies. U.S. economic strategy must include targeted strategic decoupling to ensure the United States is reducing its dependence on China, optimizing the U.S. bureaucracy and legal system for competition, and creating alternative economic power centers with like-minded allies and partners.

First, targeted strategic decoupling from China will likely be the most challenging of these three efforts given the extent of the United States’ economic entanglements with China. This administration, and future ones, should continue to take steps to fully decouple from China in leading-edge technologies that could be used to give China an economic or military edge, including supply chains, manufacturing processes, and R&D efforts that are 100 percent free of Chinese influence. In addition to semiconductors, the United States should focus on other sectors that are vital to the security of the United States, such as China’s role in the manufacturing of pharmaceuticals and next-generation clean energy production. Policymakers should also identify “choke points” that the United States could leverage to deny China the critical components they need for the manufacturing of high-end technology for military operations.

Second, a competitive spirit must now infuse the work of the U.S. bureaucracy to optimize the United States to defeat its rival. One of the biggest ways this could occur is to have clear guidance from the White House that directs the creation of a coherent and expansive “lawfare” strategy that would maximize the entirety of the U.S. policy “tool kit” for one purpose—to undermine China’s strategy. The United States already has a robust set of export, tariff, sanctions, and investment authorities available to hold China accountable that need to be coordinated, organized, and implemented with a clear objective in mind. More robust attempts to weaken China’s military-industrial complex should be an easy starting point for U.S. policymakers.

Lastly, when it comes to allies and friends, America must focus on taking concrete steps to strengthen its tools for economic statecraft—prioritizing the use of positive trade tools instead of punitive ones. Defending against China’s malfeasance is not enough. The United States must help build alternative economic power centers across the globe. This is especially true in the Indo-Pacific as deepening our economic relationship could reinforce the Department of Defense’s efforts to strengthen its position in the region and help the United States and its allies better prepare for a regional conflict. Bilateral trade agreements with nations such as the Philippines, given their strategic significance and basing opportunities, should be prioritized by the U.S. Trade Representative and Congress, with an additional focus on more targeted bilateral or even multilateral agreements in mutual areas of interest, such as supply chain resilience or building a new global technology ecosystem.

The United States’ policy on China has changed dramatically during the Trump and now Biden administration in ways that even a decade ago would not have been feasible. Confronting the threat from China will be challenging and require sacrifice. But America has faced similar challenges before and prevailed—and it can do it again with the right strategy that leverages the tools and relationships America has invested in for decades to defend the free and open order for all nations.

Randy Schriver is Chairman of the China Economic & Strategy Initiative.

Dan Blumenthal, Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, is the Vice Chairman of the China Economic & Strategy Initiative.

Image: Christian Lue/UnSplash.

A shroud of pessimism has hung over the United States for nearly a decade. Politically, economically, and culturally—and independent of socioeconomic class, gender, race, or geography—a majority of the population lacks a positive outlook on life in general.

Adding to this malaise, on March 16, 2022, the Federal Open Market Committee enacted the first of what would be eight interest rate increases. The result has been painful for both Wall Street and Main Street, with the most recent notable example being the collapse of both Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank. (Although it should be noted that for the last two decades, there have been approximately two bank failures per month.)

As for the current banking crisis, it is one that did not happen overnight but was years in the making. The earthquake in eastern Turkey, the war in Ukraine, and the Covid-19 pandemic were all outcomes of long-term processes. These events were just triggers that brought existing tensions to the surface. Lessons learned from large-scale events with devastating effects have allowed us to curtail the recurrence of such events or at least to significantly diminish their impact. However, introducing new rules to prevent certain types of crises can contain the seeds of other forms of crisis. 

The subprime turmoil of 2008 triggered a credit crunch, large-scale bankruptcies, and a global recession along the way. It took massive and coordinated liquidity injections and a major restructuring of the banking sector to pull the world out of this mess. Systemic risks were curbed by deploying all forms of circuit breakers into the system and shoring up the balance sheet of banks. 

Recapping recent history, SVB, a bank whose balance sheet looked good, had a high concentration in treasury bonds, which was matched by a client base that came mostly from the tech industry. As the pandemic receded, demand for tech dropped, triggering large-scale layoffs and causing customers to withdraw more than usual. At the same time, new account openings dried up, forcing the bank to sell its bond holdings at steep losses. Panic ensued, triggering a classic bank run which necessitated the intervention of the government to avert wider contagion. 

Several other smaller banks folded along the way, such as Signature, but the real shock came with the lingering troubles at Credit Suisse, a 167-year-old institution on the too-big-to-fail list. Fear and panic reached fever pitch, forcing the Swiss government to step in to avert a crisis with huge global financial repercussions from materializing. The events exposed some glaring deficiencies in the system and a troubling thought that even well-funded, too-big-to-fail banks were not immune from the effects of irrational mobs. 

The global economy appears to be in a transition phase, with conflicting signals indicating steady inflationary pressures and the potential for a looming recession. The Federal Reserve, which had been focused on combating inflation, is now having to deal with the fallout from its aggressive tightening, causing recession fears to show up in bond and currency markets. The United States is facing several challenges, including a slowing economy, record deficits leading to political showdowns, and the 2024 presidential election. The growing rift with China and Russia will likely create economic frictions, and a process of partial decoupling of their economies seems inevitable. 

Europe is also facing challenges, including a resource-sapping conflict, widening social upheavals, and an ongoing banking crisis. Over the longer term, Europe must secure its energy needs and navigate ideological rifts between East and West. The Biden administration’s drive to reduce dependence on China through subsidies is causing friction with Europe. 

Volatility is expected to persist in the second half of the year as the world transitions from the post-Covid recovery and inflation phase to a potential recession. Recent gains in gold and bitcoin suggest a lack of confidence in monetary authorities to steer the global recovery out of troubled waters. Bond markets may benefit as yields drop, but the outcome will depend on the banking crisis’s evolution. 

As for equity markets, these face headwinds, especially if the economic slowdown turns into a major recession, causing layoffs and reducing consumer demand, further squeezing profit margins. This is an environment that warrants a high degree of diversification with a conservative bias, and higher volatility allocations should tilt toward alpha-generating solutions. 

It is natural to ask: What should be the role of the government to alleviate banking crises and prevent future ones? Some argue that more regulation is needed while others argue “let the market sort things out.” Recognizably, there is no panacea and no way for financial institutions to insulate themselves from major macroeconomic and geopolitical “black swans.” The only recourse financial institutions do have within their control is to ensure they are well-capitalized, diversified in their portfolios, adept at managing risk, technologically sophisticated, and staffed with the very best people—and that includes their CEO.

Altuğ Ükümen is a Geneva-based investment consultant specializing in portfolio management, asset allocation, and fund selection. Jerry Haar is an international business professor at Florida International University and global fellow of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C.

Image: Shutterstock.

“Your platform should be banned … TikTok surveils us all and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is able to use this as a tool to manipulate America as a whole,” emphatically asserted Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers in a striking hearing featuring TikTok CEO Shou Chew. Amid mounting concerns over Beijing’s potential invasion of an island far from the American homeland, Washington has discovered another battleground that seems more aligned with its vested interests and can be better leveraged against China’s adverse influence, hopefully striking a chord with the public this time.

As both countries vie for global prominence, their respective approaches have exposed underlying weaknesses. One such vulnerability lies right in the role of the U.S. Congress. What used to be a strategic ballast during Richard Nixon’s groundbreaking meetings with Mao Zedong is now a catalyst behind the hardening U.S. approach toward China; the Achilles’ heel in this intricate ballet of diplomacy. The notion that the current U.S.-China dynamics mirror that between America and the Soviet Union during the Cold War not only resonates with individual convictions but holds broad appeal on Capitol Hill.

Historical analogies, in general, are found omnipresent during the U.S. foreign policy process. Members of Congress frequently invoked the Munich and Vietnam analogies during debates surrounding the Persian Gulf crisis in 1991, as both heuristics instruments and post-hoc justifications leading up to following policy actions. In light of the Washington-Beijing-Taipei triangle, this Cold War analogy conveys nothing but a clear and enduring pro-Taiwan bipartisan bias long rooted among American legislators.

A 1977 poll conducted by Brown University sheds light on this domestic pushback during the period of U.S.-China détente. In response to Beijing’s “three demands” (break diplomatic ties with Taiwan, withdraw the U.S. military, and abrogate the 1954 security treaty), approximately 93 percent of American political elites opposed them as preconditions for normalization. This aligned with the 89 percent of respondents who voted to uphold Taiwan’s “independence and freedom,” as well as the three-quarters who expressed support for maintaining diplomatic relations and a defense treaty with Taiwan in the event of an independence declaration. At the time, Rep. Robert E. Bauman, then vice-chairman of the American Conservative Union, vehemently criticized the Carter administration’s efforts to normalize relations with China, describing it as “the greatest act of appeasement since Neville Chamberlain went to Munich.” Likewise, Sen. Barry Goldwater denounced the move as “one of the most cowardly acts” and “a stab in the back” to Taiwan.

Men exploit the past to prop up their prejudices. In contrast to the majority of Democrats rallying behind Carter back then, bipartisan majorities appear to have reached a consensus: the multifaceted challenges China poses to U.S. values and interests constitute the greatest threat to American security and well-being. Considering that the GOP’s “China Task Force” was, at worst, able to produce some informed policy outputs led by experienced China hands—despite their slogans articulating the “CCP’s malign influence”—then the new China Select Committee seems solely dedicated to serving the hawkish agenda in Congress.

Some have flagged alarm that the preliminary undertakings of the committee indicate a potential inclination to repeat historical pitfalls. Indeed, different from inclusive reflections in the strategic community, the poverty of China debates on the Hill reveals its prioritizing political spectacle over meaningful analyses. Rather than presenting nuanced evaluations, it welcomes testimonies from those who corroborate the committee members’ assertive predispositions towards China, such as former Trump officials Matthew Pottinger and H.R. McMaster, both known for emphasizing the China threat. More importantly, fingers have been pointed at their American counterparts. McMaster contented during his testimony that leaders in academia, industry, finance, and government should be to blame for their long “wishful thinking and self-delusion” on China’s intentions. Those words are floating signifiers. Implying those professionals as pro-China sympathizers would likely translate to the label as transgressive, discredited pariahs, some of whom may be squarely relegated to the margins or even outside the policy circle in the future.

A similar situation happened in the recent high-profile TikTok hearing. As lawmakers grappled with the implications of Chinese technology companies on American soil, questions surrounding data privacy, national security, and the ever-present specter of censorship came to the fore and demanded clarifications as well as alternative solutions. Unfortunately, what was supposed to be an effective conversation to appreciate the public’s perspective and tackle critical national security-related concerns wound up being a nearly one-sided berating. Besides the indifference to Project Texas—the proposed TikTok-Oracle cooperation agreement to ensure compliance regarding data access—the “yes or no” style of interrogating on subtle, complex, even irrelevant topics, taken together, treated TikTok’s Singaporean CEO as a target. During that five-hour duration, Chew, whether he wanted it or not, became a proxy and scapegoat of CCP in the United States. It is also exposed that the inherent function of the hearing was no more than anti-China advertising and political posturing for armchair experts based on ideology and partisanship.

In her latest writing regarding the Taiwan issue, Jessica Chen Weiss cautioned that “[i]n any society, there are people who go looking for a fight.” But it appears that most of these individuals have now gathered at the Capitol, wielding more influence than those who keep a level-headed, cautiously calibrated approach toward China, particularly within the executive branch and epistemic communities. In this case, the congressional impact on China policy primarily exercises negative control by either rejecting proposals outright or altering their core substance. For example, Sen. Tom Cotton chastised the administration on the earlier Chinese balloon incursion by declaring that“President Biden should stop coddling and appeasing the Chinese communists…As usual, the Chinese Communists’ provocations have been met with weakness and hand-wringing.” He was hardly alone; the House unanimously passed a resolution condemning the Chinese spy balloon shortly after.

If the balloon incident is viewed merely as a reaction, then it is difficult not to evoke memories of the Third Taiwan Strait Crisis with Tsai Ing-wen’s sensitive stopover on American soil and her meeting with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. In 1995, Lee Teng-hui’s visit to his alma mater, Cornell University, to deliver a speech was perceived by China as a provocative move towards Taiwan’s independence, promptly sparking a series of missile tests and military exercises near Taiwan. Should a similar congressional provocation occur following Nancy Pelosi’s recent trip to the island, it would almost certainly antagonize Beijing again, leading to large-scale military and economic coercion, with tensions escalating further. If left unchecked, such tendencies would put the Biden administration in an awkward position, leaving them with no choice but to adopt a confrontational stance, thereby worsening the already deteriorating U.S.-China relations.

The original symbolic push for acts—centered on showcasing attitudes and claiming credit instead of prescribing concrete policy impacts—is turning Congress into an arena rife with demagoguery and sophistry, whereas genuine public interest finds no room to thrive. In such an inflated threat climate and a tendency to gaze on the present as tabula rasa, the United States struggles to pierce the informational and cognitive cocoon in an effort to grasp a comprehensive understanding of China’s motives. Consequently, the country may confront mounting difficulty in extricating itself from an arms race or open conflict with China, let alone crafting an effective long-term strategy towards China.

Junyang Hu is a Lloyd and Lilian Vasey Fellow at Pacific Forum.

Image: Shutterstock.

Recently, Azerbaijani people around the world commemorated the Genocide Day of Azerbaijanis. Although most Israelis and Americans are not aware of it, as the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia around World War I in March 1918, armed gangs of Armenian Dashnaks committed an act of genocide against Azerbaijanis, both Jewish and Muslim, killing thousands of Azerbaijani civilians merely for the crime of being Azerbaijani.

Milikh Yevdayev, the leader of the Mountain Jewish Community in Baku, wrote in the Jewish Journal: “After the 1917 October Revolution in Russia, losing Baku and its vast oil reserves was out of the question for the Bolsheviks.   Their leader Vladimir Lenin even once said that Soviet Russia would not survive without the Baku oil.  To fully control Baku and its oil, Bolsheviks, led by Armenian Stepan Shahumyan, and Armenian Dashnaks created an alliance against Baku’s Azerbaijani Muslim population, who were opposing the Bolshevik Dashnak subjugation of Azerbaijan.”

According to him, “The atrocities against Azerbaijani residents of Baku culminated at the end of March 1918 into a real genocide, resulting in the horrific massacre of over 12,000 Azerbaijani Muslims, many of them women and children, within just a few days.  One in five Azerbaijanis living then in Baku were murdered by Armenian Dashnaks with Bolshevik assistance.  The unarmed civilian population of Baku had no chance against the heavily armed 10,000 strong Dashnak-Bolshevik forces.”

Yevdayev added: “This was an unusually brutal set of events.  Armenian nationalists murdered entire families, burned down homes, created mass graves of women and children, with so many mutilated in the most horrific manner possible.  Many were unidentifiable because they had been decapitated.   A young woman was nailed to a wall, while she was still alive.  Elderly couples were thrown into burning buildings to die most painfully.  Children were shot in a row, standing with their mothers.  Bodies were thrown into wells and into the Caspian Sea.”

As Jahangir Zeynaloglu wrote in A Concise History of Azerbaijan, “In Baku, a beautiful national historic building called Ismailiyye was burned down.   The Armenians shelled and burned the New Pir and other mosques.  The Armenian brigands attacked other cities in north-east Azerbaijan.    They destroyed the city of Shemakha and annihilated its entire population.  The Armenians occupied Lenkoran, Salyan, Quba, Hajigabul and Kurdernir and were closing in on Ganja.  The Armenian Dashnaks made use of the Bolsheviks in this crime as well as Bicherakhov, CentroCaspi and other anti-Turkic groups.”

According to Zeynaloglu, “The Armenian Dashnaks who turned the east of Azerbaijan into a scene of carnage continued their atrocities in the south of the country.   211 Azerbaijani villages were destroyed.”  The Armenian Dashnaks continued to slaughter Azerbaijanis literally until a small brigade of Azerbaijanis supported by the Ottomans stopped them.  In total, 50,000 Azerbaijanis and 3,000 Jews who assisted their Muslim neighbors in Guba were slaughtered in this genocide.  

One may ponder, why is the Azerbaijani Genocide of 1918 important now?   After all, it occurred a very long time ago and not many of its survivors are here with us.   I believe it is important because recently, the city of Haifa, the third largest city in Israel, decided to establish an Armenian Genocide Square, but not an Azerbaijani Genocide Square.   In fact, not a single city around the world has established an Azerbaijani Genocide Square.   It is as if this genocide did not exist in the Western mind.   While countless Americans learn in high school about what happened to the Armenians in 1915, they do not learn what happened to the Azerbaijanis three years later in 1918.

If one truly wants to be objective, then the city of Haifa and the West more generally should not be so one sided.   They should establish an Azerbaijani Genocide Square right beside the Armenian Genocide Square in their city, so that people will learn about not just the tragic events of 1915, but also what happened three years later in 1918 to the Azerbaijani people.  

After all, to raise awareness about what happened in 1915 while ignoring what happened in 1918 is nothing more than one-sided propaganda, which has no place among those who seek to study history and commemorate historical events in an objective manner.   The famous Holocaust scholar Elie Wiesel once said, “For the dead and the living, we must bear witness.”   However, we must bear witness for all of the dead and the living, regardless what their religion and ethnic origin is.  Killing Muslims is just as bad as killing Christians is.  Therefore, the West must stop ignoring the deaths of Muslims as if they were less relevant than those of Christians and an Azerbaijani Genocide Square in Haifa must be established at the soonest possible date.