Diplomacy & Crisis News

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

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

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

A Potential Azerbaijani-Iranian Conflict?

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

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

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

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

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

Russia’s Declining Regional Influence

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

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

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

America Must Pay Attention

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

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

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

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

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

Image: Peter Hermes Furian/Shutterstock.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Image: Shutterstock.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Image: Shutterstock.

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

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

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

From the East

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

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

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

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

From the West

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

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

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

Linking East and West

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

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

How to Bridge Open Spaces

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Image: Shutterstock.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Image: Shutterstock.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Image: Shutterstock.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Image: Shutterstock.

If President Donald Trump accomplished anything during his four years in office, it is that he broke the pre-existing U.S. foreign policy consensus, upending previously held beliefs regarding China, Arab-Israeli relations, European dependence on Russian energy, and more. While many may decry and fight over the particular details of his administration’s policies and changes, no one disputes that his term in office brought marked change to America’s foreign policy.

Yet despite Trump’s legacy and the new opportunities that he created for change in America’s foreign policy, the Republican Party is now entering the U.S. presidential primary season with a significant problem on its hands: a weak foreign policy agenda.

This has led to some confused head-scratching. The past few years have seen much energetic discussion on the future of conservative and Republican foreign policy, yet relatively little in terms of concrete proposals. The most recent example of such is an essay in Foreign Affairs written by Dan Caldwell, the new(ish) vice president at the Center for Renewing America. In his essay, Caldwell persuasively lays out the case for why Republicans should adopt a more restrained foreign policy. He correctly notes the hard “economic, military, and political limitations” that the United States faces and suggests quite reasonably that policymakers should make necessary adjustments, with a few broad recommendations worth considering.

Yet these types of articles, and the discussion they encourage, miss the point. The problem Republicans face is not in determining what set of principles or values should guide U.S. foreign policy: that issue has more or less been intellectually settled in most Republican circles in favor of restraint. Even foreign policy elites who disagree must operate in an environment where public opinion is very much in favor of restraint-oriented views; running for higher office without endorsing such positions is becoming increasingly difficult. Moreover, it is likely that restraint-oriented policies will only become more widely accepted as policymakers come to grips with the reality that the country does confront real limitations amidst a changing global geopolitical context.

Rather, the real problem is that Republicans are unable to formulate, advocate, and implement specific policies due to political and ideological constraints.

American Foreign Policy has Factions…

Understanding Republicans’ current inability requires diving into unfolding factional politics within both the Republican Party and the broader U.S. foreign policy establishment. Majda Ruge and Jeremy Shapiro, experts at the European Council on Foreign Relations, proposed a suitable framework last year that works rather well, describing three “tribes” that have emerged within conservative foreign policy. I will borrow some, but not all, of their terminology—starting by noting these groups are more factions than tribes, as they are less cohesive in their loyalties and cohesion than the word “tribe” would indicate.

In any case, there are three primary factions in conservative U.S. foreign policy: the Primacists, the Pragmatists, and the Restrainers.

Primacists, as their name implies, believe in the primacy of U.S. military, diplomatic, and economic leadership, and believe that such should be maintained worldwide. They reject—or at least, contest—the idea that the United States lacks the necessary resources for maintaining this foreign policy stance, and often advocate for a strong engagement abroad in all forms.

Restrainers, by contrast, hold the opposite view: they believe in the exercise of restraint, especially military, in the conduct of foreign affairs, and that Americans are better served focusing on domestic priorities. Restrainers believe America should lead by example, rather than through direct leadership, and that, given limited resources and capabilities, strong foreign engagement should be reserved only for when the most important of national interests are at stake—a categorization which, they contend, is often abused by primacists, who tend to classify everything as a significant national interest.

Between these are the Pragmatists. Shapiro and Ruge use the term “Prioritisers” instead, though I disagree with its usage, on the basis that the latter implies agreement with Primacists on American leadership but disagreement over its focus. Pragmatists are not necessarily wedded to that notion of U.S. primacy—they agree it holds significant advantages and can be a force for “good,” but are cognizant of its material and reputational costs. Like Restrainers, Pragmatists note that U.S. resources—and thus U.S. foreign policy options—are limited, but do not take the view that such should preclude the United States from being actively engaged abroad. They believe that there is a strict hierarchy of U.S. national interests and that each issue should get the attention and resources it warrants.

…and Sub-Factions

What Ruge and Shapiro’s framework misses, however, is that within these factions are various competing sub-factions, each with their own agenda and set of beliefs. They both cooperate and compete both with sub-factions and without their respective factions for political capital, resources, and policy-setting power. It is here that the Republican Party’s problem starts to appear.

I would like to note that the following list of sub-factions is neither exhaustive nor authoritative—I have no doubt that more could be conceived and described, and that many will debate over various aspects of my categorization. While I welcome such debate, I would just like to note that at present my intention is simply to help illustrate to readers the dynamics at play within U.S. foreign policy.

For example, within the Primacist camp there are neoconservatives, neoliberals, and hegemonists. Neoconservatives believe in using military power and interventionism to spread liberal democracy and American values throughout the world. Closely tied, but not necessarily the same, are the neoliberals, who are more economically oriented and support the spread of free market capitalism and the reduction of impediments to the free flow of capital. Hegemonists, compared to neoconservatives, are more defensive in nature; they firmly believe in the benefits of U.S. primacy (both to the country and to the world at large), and perhaps even that it is a force for good, but do not take the view that defending such requires actively spreading American values through force of arms.

Restrainers are more varied. On the political Right, Paleoconservatives draw heavily from traditional conservative values and advocate for a non-interventionist foreign policy. Less partisan are the Multipolarists, who both accept and advocate the transition from an American-led unipolar international order to a multipolar one as a matter of practical necessity—and this begins with exercising restraint in foreign policy. Finally, as a small but very real (and controversial) minority are the Neo-Isolationists, who stand for avoiding international entanglements and focusing on domestic issues, while opposing involvement in foreign conflicts or alliances, including NATO.

Pragmatists, as per their nature, are perhaps the most technically oriented (broadly understood) of the lot. Because of this, intra-pragmatcist debates center on how foreign policy issues should be practically approached, rather than debating underlying principles and values. Defense Prioritizers, for example, focus on addressing the highest kind of national interests—strategic interests—from a military perspective. Less martial are the National Developmentalists: devout Hamiltonians who approach issues from an economic perspective, firmly believing that considerations about the nation’s economy and national industry should form the true basis of foreign policy decisionmaking. After all, a nation cannot fight a war if it can’t even produce the requisite hardware and ammunition, which in turn requires all sorts of supply chains and industrial capacity. Diplomatists, meanwhile, approach problems from a diplomatic perspective, and take the view that far more could be done to achieve U.S. foreign policy objectives via burden-sharing and off-loading responsibilities to American allies and partners—and that the U.S. foreign policy community in general, from the diplomatic corps to the intelligence community, does a poor job understanding what is actually happening abroad.

These various groupings are not equal in terms of size, political strength, and influence. When you factor in their diverse interests and agendas, one can start to see how collaboration and competition, both within and without, become necessary. This leads to constant politicking, as each sub-faction seeks to form a coalition with like-minded groups on one issue or another. This, however, also creates the potential for failure, which is what the Republican Party may be experiencing right now.

The NatCon Revolution and its Discontents

For the past thirty-odd years, the Republican Party’s foreign policy has been dominated by primacists, particularly neoconservatives and neoliberals. Restrainers maintained a steady opposition to this state of affairs—especially paleoconservatives. Trump’s election and presidency shattered the GOP establishment’s dominance over policy, with primacists (neoconservatives and neoliberals) specifically targeted for their culpability in advocating for the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, among other ruinous and expensive foreign interventions, geoeconomic and trade policies, and so on.

The political movement that Trump spawned, the National Conservatism (NatCon) movement, is playing the long game, aiming to take over the GOP and its various institutions. Already it has achieved measurable progress, helping elect new legislators and influencing sitting ones. Yet while the movement seems to be coalescing on its domestic policy prescriptions, foreign policy remains muddled. There are five reasons for this, and they all have to do with factional dynamics.

First, there is sharp disagreement between the various sub-factions over what America’s immediate foreign policy priority should be. Paleoconservatives and other culture-war-focused groupings have established a dominant position within the NatCon movement, and argue that tackling domestic cultural issues, especially the “woke” movement, should be of utmost concern. They contend that America’s orientation toward a primacist foreign policy is significantly influenced (if not wholly determined) by liberal ideology. Thus, fundamentally reorienting U.S. foreign policy toward greater restraint requires focusing on fighting the culture war at home.

Others are of a different opinion. Primacists, many pragmatists, and even some other restrainer sub-factions take the view that focusing overwhelmingly on the domestic culture war is misguided at best, and politically reckless at worst—especially given that the U.S. public is more concerned about inflation, the economy, and other material issues. Many of these sub-factions instead argue that addressing China should be America’s foremost foreign policy priority, only to be met with counter-arguments (including from within their own sub-factions) that an aggressive focus on countering China risks opening the door for neoconservatives to take over again. These voices, which include many national developmentalists, contend that the primary focus should be addressing pressing material realities—the international competition for key resources, the state of the economy, and so on—and that China should be the focus insomuch as it serves as a threat by which various policies and budgets can be justified.

Second, even without fully determining what Republicans’ foreign policy priorities should be, there is strong disagreement over how they should be addressed. Consider, for example, the intra-pragmatist debate on China. Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Elbridge Colby, perhaps the most prominent defense prioritizer, strongly advocates that the United States should pursue a strategy of denial to contain China’s territorial ambitions, with Taiwan being key to this entire endeavor. Meanwhile, David P. Goldman, a notable national developmentalist and Spengler columnist for Asia Times, views this as a misguided endeavor—the real competition with China is happening in the realms of technology and economics, and America will lose if it does not properly prioritize, fund, and reform how it conducts research and development.

Given an environment of limited resources and political capital, such debates over what should be politically prioritized matter a great deal.

Third, the very framing of these debates—focusing on pressing priorities—means that various topics receive practically zero consideration. There is, for example, almost no discussion on what NatCon (and Republican) policy toward Africa and Latin America should be, to say nothing about what Republican policy toward specific countries within these regions should be. At most, there are general calls to challenge Chinese encroachment and, in the Latin American context, for the reimposition of the Monroe Doctrine—an idea certainly not welcome by the region’s inhabitants. Diplomatists are in veritable despair at the lack of consideration being given to these issues.

Fourth, Republicans (and conservatives in general) are currently in an unfavorable position in regard to foreign policy hiring. The profession, by its nature, imposes various requirements on its practitioners: holistic proficiency in a variety of intellectual subjects (history, economics, diplomacy, military science, etc.); strong critical thinking skills; knowledge of a foreign language (or several); an understanding of and exposure to foreign cultures, customs, and mores; a strong capacity for writing/arguing well; geographical residence in more-expensive urban environments for proximity to relevant/key institutions; and so on. Not all of these are necessary for an individual to be involved in foreign policy decisionmaking, of course. But even then, the requirements are such that foreign policy tends to be an elite-dominated profession, with a minor tendency to skew to the political Left due to the concentration of jobs and institutions in major metropolitan cities, which trend politically liberal.

As such, conservatives tend to have a harder time recruiting professionals in foreign policy-relevant fields. This difficulty is compounded by the fact that most existing conservative non-university supplementary educational institutions overwhelmingly focus on teaching conservative political philosophy, to the detriment of other subjects. This affects foreign policy factional composition. For example, there are far more paleocons than pragmatists, relative to the general population. Particularly rare are Republican Diplomatists with experience living abroad or serving in the State Department. The overall resulting lack of expertise and experience means that Republicans, and especially the NatCon movement, face an uphill battle.

Fifth, restrainers are constrained by the fact that major key institutions and talent pipelines—Congressional offices, think tanks, major publications, government agencies, and so forth—remain politically dominated by primacists. Pragmaticists suffer from the same issue but to a lesser degree, as they can collaborate with and take advantage of primacist-dominated institutions and programs. Although both factions have begun building new rival training programs, policy journals, popular magazines, professional associations, and policy-focused think tanks, along with efforts to change existing institutions, these will take time, financing, and concentrated effort. Moreover, worries over who specifically controls these new institutions and the agenda-setting process may hamper overall efforts.

Nature Abhors a Vacuum

Republicans’ inability to advance from agreement on underlying foreign policy principles has left them stuck, unable to formulate and implement a coherent foreign policy. In the meantime, the party has become vulnerable to being outflanked by Democrats, who now take NatCon/Republican ideas and pursue them with vigor.

For instance, though the Trump administration reintroduced protectionism and industrial policy into public discourse, arguing such measures are necessary to bring back manufacturing jobs from China, it is Democrats who have marched ahead with these changes. See no further than the Inflation Reduction Act, de facto a $500 billion green industrial policy bill, or the CHIPS Act, which two commentators accurately described as a “market-shaping measure designed to eliminate systemic geopolitical risk to the supply of critical goods, while also recasting the socioeconomic geography of domestic industrial production.” In other words, the sort of stuff that Republican national developmentalists advocated for during the Trump administration.

Other examples abound. The 2022 National Defense Strategy (NDS) essentially builds upon the Trump-era 2018 NDS. The Biden administration’s trade policy is a continuation of Trump’s policy, with some improvements. Likewise, the push toward great power competition, pioneered by the Trump administration’s 2017 National Security Strategy, has been kept and expanded.

Republican restrainers are in an increasingly awkward position: unable to fully claim credit for restrain-oriented policies—such as Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan and the potential forthcoming repeal of the Iraq War authorization for the use of military force. Their positions are being normalized, but by Democrats. Meanwhile, restrainers are also confronting the reality that the present Republican Party gridlock has created an opening by which primacists can reassert themselves. This is playing out in debates over U.S. support for Ukraine, what should be done about Mexico’s drug cartels, the contours of U.S. China policy, and so on. Pragmatists, on the other hand, are growing frustrated by the situation and a perceived lack of Republican seriousness on various issues—and are reconsidering their options, especially in light of Democrats’ newfound interest in adopting pragmatists’ preferred policy prescriptions.

Much can still change in the coming months, especially as the U.S. Republican presidential primary begins to heat up. The campaign trail will force both candidates and their supporters—including would-be foreign policy advisors, key institutions, and others—to become serious about their foreign policy agenda. Whether this will be enough to overcome existing divisions and disagreements, however, remains to be seen.

Carlos Roa is the Executive Editor of The National Interest.

Image: Shutterstock.

In mid-March, the White House issued a major ultimatum to TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance: divest from the popular social media app or risk fighting a national ban. It took the Biden administration too long to take action, but it is now following its predecessor’s lead and reinvigorating the pressure campaign that began in late 2020. Given TikTok’s record of censorship, legitimate espionage concerns, and the platform’s legal obligation to comply with an authoritarian regime that has, for decades, committed egregious human rights violations, it’s about time that Washington clamped down on the controversial company.

TikTok became a household name during the early days of the pandemic and has not waned in its global popularity, with its current user base exceeding one billion. The video-sharing platform has even prompted legacy competitors, like Instagram and YouTube, to roll out features that mimic the short-form content models that TikTok provides. In many ways, the app is an exemplar of innovation organically displacing dominant incumbents—the powerful “Big Tech”—in a market that many lawmakers believe has insurmountable barriers for new competitors. TikTok provides a conduit for free expression, a source of income for content creators, and a means by which users can find levity and entertainment. These are valuable societal benefits. Yet they do not negate nor supplant the company’s inseparable ties to the Chinese government.

As Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers said during this week’s TikTok hearing, “ByteDance is beholden to the [Chinese Communist Party], and ByteDance and TikTok are one and the same.” Her statement is accurate: Article Seven of China’s National Intelligence Law, enacted in 2017, states that “any organization or citizen shall support, assist, and cooperate with state intelligence work according to the law.” This responsibility can manifest in a variety of forms. The state can require TikTok to grant access to user data, circulate disinformation, or modify the recommendation algorithms that filter content.

Organizations and citizens must also protect “any state intelligence work secrets of which they are aware.” TikTok’s CEO claims that the government has never asked for assistance with espionage, and that the company would not comply with such requests if asked. Given these legal obligations, however, such promises are cold comfort.

Despite the CEO’s comments, evidence suggests that TikTok is heeding the state’s orders. In 2020, Elizabeth Kanter, a TikTok executive, admitted during a British parliamentary hearing that the company censored videos about the humanitarian crisis in Xinjiang. Kanter stated that there were “some incidents where content was not allowed on the platform, specifically with regard to the Uyghur situation.”

The Chinese government exercises this discrete yet influential form of control, especially in the technology sector. It has recently moved to acquire, by compulsion, “golden shares” in private firms like Alibaba and Tencent, giving officials an even greater foothold in the business world while bolstering its power and surveillance capabilities. These realities should inform how the U.S. government perceives TikTok as a national security threat.

In 2019, the social media platform promised to stop accessing clipboard content on users’ devices. Several months later, Apple’s privacy transparency feature revealed the practice continued unabated. TikTok has been fined for collecting information from minors and sued for harvesting personal data, all without consent. As a general rule, private companies should not need to earn political favor in order to operate in the United States. But compounded with China’s propensity to involve itself with its businesses and engage in espionage—let’s not forget the spy balloon—this unwillingness to respect privacy is problematic.

Other countries are attuned to this threat as well. The United States, in addition to the United Kingdom, the European Union, New Zealand, and Canada, have restricted government employees from downloading TikTok on their work devices.   

Banning TikTok or forcing divestment will not give the United States an upper hand in the ongoing conflict with China. But it will impede the Chinese government from leveraging a platform that has become ubiquitous in American society. 

Rachel Chiu is a visiting fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum’s Center for Economic Opportunity and a contributor for Young Voices. She tweets @rachelhchiu.

Image: rafapress / Shutterstock.com

In early March, oil and gas firms Chevron and Talos Energy announced their intention to triple the size of the proposed Bayou Bend carbon capture and storage hub, which will collect and store greenhouse gas emissions from industrial facilities along the Gulf Coast. The expanded hub could store more than one billion metric tons of carbon dioxide (CO2), making it one of the largest carbon storage projects in the world upon completion.

Not everyone is convinced that recent progress on large-scale carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS) projects is good news. Critics argue that CCUS technology is costly, unproven, and will give fossil fuels an undesirable “new lease on life.” But if the world is serious about addressing climate change, we should welcome forward momentum on this critical technology.

CCUS technology—which captures CO2 emissions from industrial facilities and reuses or stores them underground—supports the energy transition in several ways. These include reducing emissions from existing power plants; providing decarbonization solutions in hard-to-abate sectors such as cement, iron and steel, and chemical manufacturing; supporting the rapid scaling up of low‐carbon hydrogen production; and enabling negative emissions technologies like direct air capture and bioenergy with carbon capture and storage.

The world’s leading energy and climate bodies agree that CCUS will play a significant role in a net-zero world. The International Energy Agency (IEA), in its Net Zero by 2050 flagship report, cites CCUS as a “key pillar of decarbonization” that could account for up to one-fifth of global emissions reduction requirements. Of the seven “Illustrative Mitigation Pathways” that limit global warming to below 1.5°C identified in the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report, the sole pathway that does not include CCUS also requires global energy demand to halve in the next three decades—an unrealistic scenario given that energy demand is expected to increase as developing countries industrialize and urbanize. If we trust that climate change is as urgent and dangerous as the world’s leading scientists say it is, we should also take their word on the necessity of CCUS.

Today, nearly 80 percent of global energy supply comes from fossil fuels; these cannot be replaced by renewables overnight. Even if global fossil fuel use declined, in a straight line, to zero in 2050, the cumulative CO2 emissions over that period from the energy sector would amount to roughly 500 gigatons of CO2. Without CCUS, these emissions would make limiting global average temperature rise to 2°C extremely difficult, if not impossible, in light of emissions from other sectors before these can be eliminated. Clearly, CCUS is not only important but close to indispensable for meeting internationally agreed targets.

CCUS has a proven track record of safe, effective use across a range of applications. CO2 injection and storage in the subsurface has been used for enhanced oil recovery (EOR) since the 1970s. Pure storage, without EOR, began in 1996. CCUS is often dismissed as prohibitively expensive, but there are around thirty-five commercial CCUS facilities already in operation today, and improved tax incentives, like those in the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act, are making it increasingly economically competitive. Moreover, technological improvements, experience and learning, and scaling up will almost certainly drive the cost down over time, just as they did for wind and solar over the last twenty years. But concerns about price perhaps miss the point: the cost of CCUS pales in comparison to the climate damages it could prevent. It would be folly to invest only in the cheapest climate solutions.

CCUS is the key to satisfying the “energy trilemma”—our often-conflicting pursuit of energy security, affordable energy access, and environmental sustainability—which has been made more salient by the war in Ukraine. CCUS will play a particularly important role in retrofitting Asia’s existing fleet of predominately coal-based power plants, which are some of the youngest and most efficient in the world. With CCUS retrofits, these plants can avoid early retirement and continue operating with substantially reduced emissions—averaging 85 percent CO2 capture—providing affordable, reliable electricity while still delivering on national and global decarbonization and energy security goals. U.S. leadership on CCUS could provide a technological path to help major emitters like China and India accelerate their domestic deployment of CCUS.

We’re going to need every tool in the toolkit, including CCUS, to solve the climate crisis. Today, CCUS projects are already burying millions of tons of CO2 each year, but that’s a drop in the bucket compared to what’s needed. Despite recent progress, currently planned CCUS capacity for 2030 represents just 20 percent of that required in the IEA’s net zero emissions scenario. To get on track for 2050, we need a swift and major ramp-up, with more large-scale CCUS hubs like Bayou Bend to turn those millions of tons into billions.

Mohammed Al-Juaied is a research fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and a Courtesy Professor of Mechanical Engineering and a member of the Clean Combustion Research Center at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia. He has more than twenty-five years of experience in R&D, commercialization, and project management of emerging energy technologies, including carbon capture, utilization, and storage.

Image: Anne Coatesy/Shutterstock.

The Saudi Arabia-Iran agreement, formally known as the Joint Trilateral Statement, was brokered by China in Beijing on March 10 and has since been hailed as a significant diplomatic breakthrough. This development could have far-reaching implications for countries where Iran and Saudi Arabia vie for regional influence and fuel proxy conflicts, including Lebanon. The agreement has drawn expert analysis and commentary from both regional and global sources, evaluating the broader and more specific consequences of the deal on the security of the region, particularly for the Gulf states. This follows decades of animosity between Iran and Saudi Arabia, which reached a fever pitch in 2019 with drone attacks on Saudi oil facilities by Yemen’s Iran-aligned Houthi group amidst widespread suspicion that Iran was the actual perpetrator behind the attack.

The agreement gives Iran and Saudi Arabia two months to restore full diplomatic relations and reopen their respective embassies after having formally severed ties in 2016, following the execution of Saudi Shiite cleric Nimr al-Nimr in Saudi Arabia. Most notably, the trilateral statement asserts that both sides agree to respect the principle of state sovereignty and the “non-interference in internal affairs of states.” Although China led the agreement, it came after two years of prior mediation efforts by Iraq and Oman, which facilitated formal bilateral talks between both sides since early 2021.

Lebanese analysts and commentators are speculating whether this Saudi Arabia-Iran agreement will help alleviate tensions simmering across Lebanon and lead to the election of a compromise president for the country. Lebanon has been grappling with a persistent presidential election deadlock for over four months and is in the midst of a severe economic crisis, which the World Bank has deemed as one of the worst since the 1850s. The nation has also been governed by a caretaker government with limited powers since the parliamentary elections in May 2022.

While observers and politicians generally concur that it is too early to gauge the deal’s impact on the Lebanese situation, some believe it may ease tensions between political parties and foster a positive environment for sustained negotiations. Nevertheless, caution remains the prevailing sentiment, as intra-Lebanese dialogue might prove more difficult than anticipated, given the country’s prudence amidst a national crisis, and rapidly evolving geopolitical consequences.

To date, Iran has not officially commented on the potential repercussions of the agreement on Lebanese politics or the current deadlock. However, a few hours after the announcement, Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister, Faisal Bin Farhan, provided the only official statement from a senior Saudi government official. He remarked that Lebanon requires “a Lebanese rapprochement and not an Iranian-Saudi one,” adding that Lebanese politicians must prioritize Lebanon’s interests above all else. In a related development, the Saudi ambassador to Lebanon, Walid Boukhari, met with Lebanese parliament speaker Nabih Berri on March 13. When asked if there were any positive developments for Lebanon, Boukhari briefly replied, “certainly.”

However, following the announcement of the Saudi Arabia-Iran agreement, attention naturally shifted toward the reaction of the Iran-backed Lebanese Shiite group Hezbollah. Nominally, the group welcomed the deal. However, in a televised speech shortly after the announcement, Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah struck a cautious tone. He emphasized that while the deal is an “important development”—if it follows its natural course—Hezbollah is firmly convinced that it should not come at its expense. Nasrallah added that Iran does not impose its stances on Hezbollah.

Similarly, Hezbollah’s opponents in Lebanon also expressed caution following the agreement’s announcement. Samir Geagea, a prominent Lebanese politician and leader of the Christian Lebanese Forces party, which is close to Saudi Arabia and made significant gains in the 2022 parliamentary elections, emphasized that the presidential election battle is a local concern. He stated that it is “in the hands of the 128 parliamentary deputies who are ready to vote to elect a president today before tomorrow,” adding that the presidential election should not be influenced by external factors. Lebanese Forces member of parliament (MP) Pierre Bou Assi expressed skepticism about the deal, doubting its potential benefits for Lebanon. Fares Saiid, a former Christian MP and staunch critic of Hezbollah and Iranian influence in Lebanon, suggested that the effects of the deal might take months to reach Lebanon. He emphasized that Christians in Lebanon and its constitution should uphold their Arab identity, given Hezbollah’s and its allies’ allegiance to Iran. 

Following Nasrallah’s speech, several observers, including Geagea, highlighted one of his statements made just a few days before the agreement. Nasrallah had said that those expecting an Iranian-Saudi deal to resolve the presidential stalemate would have to wait for a long time, leading some to conclude that he had no prior knowledge of the upcoming agreement. This prompted online commentators to derisively question the extent to which Iran consults with Hezbollah on its affairs, given the significance of the deal.

In general, when considering the entire deal and its broader regional implications beyond Lebanon, Saudis appear more cautious and moderate in their expectations, while Iranian officials and observers tend to frame it as a victory against the United States and Israel. This perspective seems to arise against the backdrop of the U.S.-brokered Abraham Accords, which normalized diplomatic relations among Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan. For example, Faisal Ben Farhan recently attempted to temper grand expectations for the deal’s all-encompassing regional impact, stating that while the agreement aims to pave the way for restoring diplomatic relations, it will not necessarily resolve all disputes between Saudi Arabia and Iran. In contrast, Yahya Safavi, the Iranian top military advisor to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, expressed high hopes, framing the agreement as the beginning of the decline of American and Zionist hegemony in the region.

Similar overstatements were also reflected in some of Hezbollah’s statements following the deal. The group began publicizing the agreement as a victory for Iran’s axis of resistance in the region, claiming that Saudi Arabia prioritized Yemen over Lebanon because it seeks to exit the brutal Yemeni war. For instance, Nabil Kaouk, a member of Hezbollah’s Central Council, said that with the deal, the Middle East has now entered a new phase detrimental to US and Israeli interests, as their aspirations to normalize relations with Israel did not lead to Iran’s isolation. 

At its core, the presidential election stalemate in Lebanon is primarily due to a political standoff between the Iran-backed Hezbollah and its allies on one side, and pro-Western Sunni and Christian groups backed by Saudi Arabia on the other. The conflicting parties have been at odds since the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in 2005 and Syria’s subsequent withdrawal from Lebanon after decades of occupation.

The rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran in Lebanon dates back to years before the Syrian withdrawal and is largely shaped along sectarian fault lines. Since then, Saudi Arabia and Iran have more aggressively supported opposing factions in the country. Post-Syria Lebanon saw Saudi Arabia primarily seek to mobilize the Sunni sect, largely represented by the Future Movement party founded by the late Rafik Hariri. Meanwhile, Iran aimed to grow and entrench its influence through its proxy, Hezbollah. Most consequentially, the Shiite-Sunni conflict in post-Syria Lebanon reached a crisis point when Hezbollah and its major ally, the Shiite Amal party, took control of West Beirut in a military operation on May 8, 2008. This was in retaliation for then-Prime Minister Fouad Siniora’s government’s decision to disband Hezbollah’s telecommunications network and oust the airport security chief affiliated with the group.

However, in recent years, Saudi Arabia has largely disengaged from Lebanon in response to Hezbollah’s growing influence in Lebanese politics, its sway over the Lebanese state, and its reported military support for the Houthi rebels in Yemen, where Saudi Arabia has been involved in a proxy war with Iran. According to a report by the New York Times, Saudi Arabia’s dismay with Iranian and Hezbollah’s influence in Lebanese politics came to a head in 2017 when former Prime Minister Saad Hariri, the son of Rafik Hariri, resigned from his post in a televised statement from Riyadh. Hariri was reportedly forced to do so after being detained in the kingdom; both Hariri and Saudi Arabia denied the allegations. However, more recently, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states recalled their envoys from Lebanon in October 2021 over criticism by the then-Lebanese Information Minister of Saudi Arabia’s and the United Arab Emirates’ intervention in Yemen. The ambassadors returned to Lebanon in April 2022, signaling improving relations. 

In essence, the conflict in Lebanon is primarily a consequence of a power struggle between sectarian groups competing for political influence and enhanced socioeconomic advantages, rather than being solely the result of regional strife. This strife is compounded by a sectarian power-sharing system, which has been in place since Lebanon’s independence in 1943 and often comes at the expense of a strong state. Due to this power-sharing agreement, sectarianism in Lebanon has consistently played a fundamental role in shaping politics, often serving as a form of socioeconomic and political power that intersects with domestic, regional, and international contests. These dynamics are further marked by ever-shifting domestic alliances that mirror mutating regional and international power dynamics.

In parallel, the rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran is also largely political, contrary to what many analyses characterize as being merely sectarian, involving proxy wars across the region. It represents a ceaseless search for leadership over the Muslim world since the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1979. As Lebanese journalist and political analyst Nadim Koteich notes in a recent lecture, Iran embraced Shiite doctrine in the sixteenth century as a result of a political decision, and since then, Shiism has served politics, not the other way around. He adds that sectarianism is a tool employed by regional powers to serve broader interests.

In concluding their agreement, both Iran and Saudi Arabia now appear to have prioritized the prosperity of their economies and the reduction of regional security tensions. Iran is facing an economic crisis and increasing isolation due to its nuclear program and, more recently, its evident support for Russia in the Ukrainian war. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia seems to have chosen to return to a calmer foreign policy for the sole purpose of focusing on its economic Vision 2030, free from Iranian security threats. 

However, Iran and Saudi Arabia are not the only significant foreign actors in Lebanon. Notably, France and the United States also collaboratively play essential roles in Lebanese politics, with the United States being indispensable in potentially reintegrating Lebanon into the international financial system amidst the country’s imminent economic collapse.

As Mohanad Hage Ali opines at the Malcolm H. Kerr Carnegie Middle East Center, Saudi Arabia is part of a five-country coordination group over Lebanon’s financial crisis, which includes the United States, France, Qatar, and Egypt. This group collectively coordinates any new policies regarding Lebanon, which potentially entails coupling “economic incentives with painful reforms.” In fact, the Lebanese parliament is currently working on a series of laws that are prerequisites for potentially obtaining $3 billion in IMF funding. Most recently, in February 2023, France hosted a summit in Paris, attended by the group, aimed at ending the political and social deadlock in Lebanon.

The US’s involvement in Lebanese affairs dates back long before the current crisis. The list of its engagements is extensive, whether through direct military intervention to protect Lebanon’s independence from regional interference in 1958, participation in multinational peacekeeping forces during the Lebanese civil war in 1982, or its role in supporting the principles of Taif Agreement which ended the Lebanese civil war in 1990. The United States also exerted considerable pressure, along with France, in 2005 for Syria to withdraw its troops from Lebanon. More recently, in October 2022, the United States successfully mediated the conclusion of a maritime border agreement between Israel and Lebanon to conduct offshore gas exploration, following a decade of contentious negotiations. 

The United States essentially welcomed the agreement between Saudi Arabia and Iran but cast doubt on whether Iran would adhere to the deal, while emphasizing the resolution of the war in Yemen as a crucial test. For example, commenting on the agreement, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said on March 10 that the United States welcomed the deal and any efforts that help put an end to the war in Yemen and broadly reduce tensions in the Middle East, expressing doubts that the Iranian regime would honor “their side of the deal.” Later, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken on March 15 generally expressed support for a China-brokered agreement that could help reduce tensions in the region but added it depends on whether "Iran follows through on the commitments."

Particularly on Yemen, most observers and regional/international officials, including U.S. officials, seem to assess that the success of the agreement to restore diplomatic relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia will hinge on settling the Yemeni war first before moving forward with resolving other respective disputes across the region – although until recently, Iran has denied any claims that it was involved in funding or arming the Houthis. Indeed, in a clear indication of the preeminence of the Yemeni issue contingent on ending the proxy war based on the agreement, the Wall Street Journal reported on March 16, citing U.S. and Saudi officials, that Iran had agreed to halt supplying the Houthis with weapons as part of the agreement.

Thus, while both Iran and Saudi Arabia clearly retain interests in Lebanon, Yemen appears to be Saudi Arabia’s top priority at the moment, given the proxy conflict and its proximity to Saudi Arabia. Consequently, according to most commentators, reaching an agreement in Lebanon, including ending its presidential election stalemate and potentially reviving its economy provided that reforms are enacted, is contingent on resolving the Yemeni conflict. 

At this stage, though, the deal primarily constitutes a roadmap and, in the words of many, is merely a declaration of intent. While a seemingly low-profile online media outlet has published confidential security clauses, allegedly as part of the agreement, that embedded agreed-upon security imperatives for the two sides beyond the restoration of diplomatic relations, no official corroboration of such clauses has yet occurred. The clauses generally allege that both Iran and Saudi Arabia will abstain from engaging in any security, military, or media activity that destabilizes either state.

The agreement is still in its early days. Nevertheless, specifically with regard to Lebanon, as the major details of the agreement remain unknown, the Lebanese debate persists, revolving around an assessment of which party the Lebanese file would be relegated to in the agreement. According to some analysts, an Iranian delegation may soon visit Lebanon to discuss the development with Hezbollah, and potentially the presidential election matter. However, Kareem Pakradouni, a veteran Lebanese analyst and former president of the Lebanese Christian Kataeb Party and former minister, cautioned in an interview a few days ago that the Lebanese should wait and see which party involved in the agreement will first mobilize and visit Lebanon before concluding to which party the Lebanese file has been delegated, Saudi Arabia or Iran.

Rany Ballout is a New York-based political risk and due diligence analyst with extensive experience in the Middle East. He holds a master’s degree in International Studies from the University of Montreal in Canada and a bachelor’s degree in Linguistics from Uppsala University in Sweden.

Image: Shutterstock

Turkey may have an opportunity to fix its relationship with Egypt, which it broke a decade ago. The outcome will depend entirely on President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s policy choices, and whether he remains the country’s president after the May 14 elections. It will be difficult to normalize ties between the two countries, however, as Cairo has a list of tough demands and Erdogan is obstinate. To achieve progress, Turkish foreign minister Mevlut Cavusoglu recently met with his Egyptian counterpart, Sameh Shoukry, but the meeting did not end as Cavusoglu would have liked. Shoukry informed Cavusoglu that three things had to happen before normalization: Turkey would have to terminate all its military activities in Libya, extradite all members of the Muslim Brotherhood in Turkey that are wanted by Egypt, and resolve its differences with Cyprus and Greece in the eastern Mediterranean.

To put things in context, although Egypt is a priority for Erdogan, Ankara has been exploring the possibilities of mending fences with several Arab states as well as Israel since 2021. Obviously, had Erdogan not spent the last decade torpedoing his relationships with Middle Eastern and Mediterranean powers, he would not need to knock on doors today. So why mend fences now? This is relatively easy to answer: The biting reality of Turkey’s regional isolation is forcing Erdogan’s hand to attempt to roll back his hatred for regional competitors. Egypt, Syria, and Israel would all be interested in rebuilding ties with Turkey, but they all have big asks.

Beginning in 2013, Erdogan tore apart Turkey’s bilateral relationship with Egypt, a country that is arguably the leader of the Arab World and a close U.S. ally, Egypt. Following the overthrow of the country’s democratically elected, albeit Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated president, Mohammed Morsi, Erdogan disparaged Abdel Fattah al-Sisi as a brutal “tyrant,” whom he refused to recognize. The ensuing fallout resulted in the termination of diplomatic ties between Ankara and Cairo. Soon, Erdogan began touring the world, professing that the “world is bigger than five!”—a reference to the unfair and ineffective composition of the UN Security Council’s permanent five member states, who willingly turned a blind eye to dictators and persecution of Muslims. While he was comfortable criticizing the Egyptian regime being ruled by an unelected military dictator, Erdogan conveniently remained silent on the persecution of Uyghur Muslims by China, as well as the Russian invasion of Crimea in 2014, where he swore to protect the region’s Muslim Tatar minority, and then forgot about them.

In the late 2010s, Ankara has taken to pursuing unacceptable positions toward Cairo. Erdogan threw his support behind Libya’s Fayez al-Sarraj much to the chagrin of Cairo, who supports his counterpart Khalifa Haftar. The decision to back Sarraj resulted in the Libyan government delimiting its maritime borders with Ankara, in an agreement that is not recognized by any other government in the region, as it cuts across much of Greece’s maritime borders by ignoring the existence of Crete. The move also conflicts with existing maritime borders established by countries under the umbrella of the East Mediterranean Gas Forum (EMGF)—which Egypt is a member of. While maritime borders are a vital element of national sovereignty, in this case, their importance is heightened owing to the existence of natural gas deposits underneath the sea, which all countries would like to monetize and consume. While EGMF members go about this in a diplomatic and legal manner, Turkey acts as a belligerent spoiler. It does not recognize the Republic of Cyprus, contests the maritime borders of Greece and Egypt, and has sent in its own exploration and drilling ships into contested waters, escorted by military vessels.

Egypt’s approach to foreign policymaking shows that since coming to power, Sisi has not been idle. He has made himself palatable to the United States and invested a significant amount of diplomatic capital in establishing robust ties with other notable regional actors such as Israel, Cyprus, and Greece. The EGMF is perceived to be legitimate and has strong international support. If Erdogan seeks a reset with Sisi, he will have to abandon his existing Libya and Mediterranean policies.

Per Cairo’s suggestion, Ankara does have the option of dropping its antagonistic approach to maritime borders and joining the EGMF. This will be hard to achieve, however, owing to the long-standing maritime disputes between Turkey, Greece, and Cyprus. That being said, instead of trying to force its hand, Ankara could try to achieve its goals through diplomacy rather than belligerence. On the other hand, Erdogan could satisfy Egypt’s demands on the Muslim Brotherhood without much effort. The Brotherhood’s footprint in Turkey is much smaller than it used to be. Many of its members have left the country and steps were recently taken by authorities to close down a television station affiliated with the brotherhood. Inaction on the other hand is not really an option for Turkey, and Erdogan knows this.

His decision to shake Sisi’s hand at the opening of the FIFA World Cup in 2022 was not a chance encounter. Rather, it was a carefully choreographed photo opportunity, as well as a tacit admission that his entire Middle East foreign policy over the last decade is a failure. Erdogan’s fantasy to be surrounded by a region that is ruled by leaders close to the Muslim Brotherhood, which he hoped to notionally lead, has all but vanished. From Egypt to Tunisia to Iraq to Syria, there is presently a zero chance of establishing Sunni regimes that are close to the brotherhood’s worldview, which Erdogan has long admired. Instead, they are all led by strongmen who have succeeded in eliminating contenders. This is the reason why Erdogan is also attempting to “normalize” ties with Syria’s Bashar Al-Assad, whom he sought to overthrow, presumably to have him replaced by a Sunni alternative. For this to bear fruit, however, Assad is demanding the removal of the Turkish military presence inside of Syrian territory—yet another bitter pill for Erdogan to swallow.

Finally, there’s Israel, a state which Erdogan is seeking a rapprochement with once again. In 2007, Erdogan accused Israel of being a “baby killer,” and followed up this statement by attempting to breach a naval blockade of Gaza in 2010 that resulted in an armed confrontation and an end to diplomatic ties. Like Egypt, Israel did not sit on the sidelines. Its signing of the Abraham Accords and participation in the EGMF have helped the Jewish state establish substantive relationships with the Arab states in its neighborhood and marginalized Ankara. To overcome this, Israel and Turkey have recently succeeded in reestablishing diplomatic ties at the ambassadorial level. However, a relationship built on trust is unlikely to materialize unless Turkey satisfies some key Israeli demands such as the expulsion of Hamas leaders from its territory, as well as shutting down its offices.

Wherever you look, Erdogan wants a “reset” and “rapprochement.” But in every single case, there will be a price to pay. The states he wants to build relationships with have a long list of justified grievances against Erdogan. Addressing these grievances is a tall order, but Erdogan doesn’t have many options. Turkey is pretty much alone and will continue to be, unless bold choices are made.

Sinan Ciddi is a non-resident senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), where he contributes to FDD’s Turkey Program and Center on Military and Political Power (CMPP). He is also an Associate Professor of Security Studies at the Command and Staff College-Marine Corps University and Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. He tweets @sinanciddi.

Image: Shutterstock.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken recently finished his first tour of Central Asia. His visit began in Astana, Kazakhstan, where he met with the C5+1 Foreign Ministers during a C5 Ministerial Meeting and ended in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, on March 1. In Uzbekistan, in response to a self-imposed question regarding Russia’s disregard for other countries’ sovereignty, Blinken stated, “That’s exactly why we remain committed to standing for the sovereignty, the territorial integrity, the independence not only of Ukraine, but for countries across Central Asia and, indeed, around the world.”

Although Blinken’s visit may be characterized as a refresh in relations between the United States and Central Asian countries, his rhetoric of pledging support for Central Asia’s sovereignty, territorial integrity, and independence is beating a dead horse.

Blinken’s rhetoric aligns with a 2020 report released by the State Department, United States Strategy for Central Asia 2019-2025: Advancing Sovereignty and Economic Prosperity. The report stressed “border security” and “stabilizing Afghanistan” as crucial policy issues. Additionally, the recently released National Security Strategy (NSS) frames Russia and China as presenting “different challenges” in Central Asia. The document asserts Russia “poses an immediate threat to the free and open international system.” Meanwhile, Central Asia perceives itself to be in an anxiety-inducing situation facing challenges on two fronts with the potential of spillover of terrorism from Afghanistan and Russia’s war against Ukraine.

Militarism has long characterized U.S. involvement in Central Asia, as the United States established military bases in Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan during the war in Afghanistan. However, it is not the United States’ responsibility to preserve the sovereignty of all foreign nations. On top of this, Central Asia is not facing the threat of subjugation to a regional hegemon as Russia, China, and to a lesser extent, the EU have stakes in the region. Instead, the United States should prioritize commercial engagement with Central Asia partners and avoid establishing security commitments.

Russia’s influence in Central Asia has waned recently following its invasion of Ukraine; for instance, Moscow has withdrawn troops from the region to serve as reinforcements on the Ukrainian frontlines. On the diplomatic front, Central Asian leaders have protested Russia’s aggression by not voicing support for Vladimir Putin’s invasion, providing humanitarian aid to Ukraine, not allowing its citizens to participate in the war, and accepting Russians fleeing Putin’s mobilization efforts. However, the United States must avoid viewing this as an opportunity to fill the security void left by Russia. Military engagement like the Steppe Eagle exercises in Kazakhstan should be discontinued, given that the United States faces no credible threats in Central Asia and they expose U.S. troops to potential unnecessary blowback.

Additionally, given the war in Ukraine, it is difficult to conceive of a successful Russian assault on the Central Asian countries. Russia is primarily concerned with stability in Central Asia rather than conquering the region by brute force. A Russian invasion would absolutely undermine security in an area that Putin has long viewed as “Russia’s most stable region.”

Instead, the United States should focus on commercial partnerships with the Central Asian countries without expecting political favors that would agitate Russia or China. Central Asian countries clearly do not want to be vassals of Russia or China but do not want to sever ties with these great powers completely. As Kazakh Deputy Foreign Minister Roman Vassilenko explicitly stated, Kazakhstan would not “allow its territory to be used to circumvent sanctions” and would bear that in mind “when it comes to assessing any potential new initiatives.”

Amid sanctions on Russia, Central Asia has shown itself to be open to doing business with new partners, such as the United States. Energy and rare-earth minerals are abundant commodities in Central Asia that the United States needs to maintain a high standard of living. The minerals found in Central Asia, such as neodymium and lanthanum, are used to produce technology such as loudspeakers, hard drives, wind turbines, and television screens. Therefore, the United States should focus on securing these resources while maintaining open and transparent commercial relationships with Central Asian countries and other great powers like Russia and China. In addition, the United States can enable Central Asian countries to adopt more environmentally friendly extraction methods of energy and rare-earth minerals to reduce contributions to climate change. Russia and China would also benefit from these improved methods.

Openness and transparency will also be necessary for future diplomatic actions in Central Asia as well. The United States can lead an initiative for inclusive diplomatic forums and meetings via the C5+1, along with similar groups like “Japan plus Central Asia” and European Union partners. Transparency and openness with the Russia and China-led Shanghai Cooperation Organization will be critical to incorporating China and Russia into future discussions and negotiations. Red lines and expectations should be established and abided by to address sources of friction between the great powers.

The United States must focus on concrete, narrow interests in Central Asia that are realistically attainable. Central Asian countries, now more than ever, are looking to expand their commercial partner base amid the Russo-Ukrainian conflict. Peaceful cooperation should be the U.S. strategy, not unnecessary entanglement.

Alex Little is an MS graduate of Georgia Tech and specializes in Russian and Central Asian affairs.

Most people assume military innovation and transformation are two sides of the same coin, and in many respects they are. Many also believe military innovation and transformation are good, never bothering to “look under the hood” and ask the hard questions about the integration, testing, and validation needed to assure a positive outcome and bring about genuine improvement in operational capability

Two recent articles address the virtues and pitfalls of redesigning a military force, albeit from different perspectives. These articles deserve a closer look given ongoing innovations and transformations across the military services. The poster child for both revolutions is the United States Marine Corps, which is well down the road of redesigning and restructuring itself for what it perceives, correctly or not, are the challenges of the twenty-first century. Pursuing the unwise strategy of “divest to invest,” the Marines have shed approximately 50 percent of the combined arms capabilities needed to fight and win today to acquire new weapons and technology for specific future threats. These new capabilities are at least six to eight years away from being fielded in sufficient quantities to be operationally relevant. The Marine Corps is foolishly gambling that potential enemies will ignore the window of opportunity these misguided actions present them. 

The first article, “Dangerous Changes: When Military Innovation Harms Combat Effectiveness,” is authored by Kendrick Kuo. One of Kuo’s most important cautions is “The notion that innovative and better military performance go hand in hand is thus intuitive. It is also wrong.” True innovation is the result of a well-developed and tested operating concept that can be vetted through a robust combat development process to determine integrated requirements necessary to effectively implement the concept. The enablers include doctrine, force structure and organizations, training and education, equipment, and facilities and support. A good example of failed innovation is the flawed Pentomic Army Divisions developed between 1957 and 1963 to counter the possible use of tactical nuclear weapons on the battlefield. Conversely, an example where innovation succeeded was the Army’s Air-Land Battle concept that was developed to counter the Warsaw Pact’s plan to overrun NATO defenses in Europe in the 1980s and was later validated during Operation Desert Storm in Kuwait and Iraq. 

A valuable second observation by Kuo is 

“harmful innovation is more likely to occur when military services … make desperate gambles on new capabilities to meet over ambitious goals while cannibalizing older capabilities. The military services treat innovations as a silver bullet and endorses destroying traditional capabilities before innovation advances can justify their beliefs about the new one’s effectiveness.” 

“Harmful innovation” is exemplified by Marine Corps Force Design 2030. The Corps has mortgaged its current and future capabilities as a global force-in-readiness and combined arms team valued by combatant commanders for the allure of long-range precision weapons and associated technology that are experimental and may not perform as expected.

A final reflection by Kuo is during combat, “…the military service is likely to discover that it has overspecialized in the new capability to its own detriment. To improve performance, the service may try to downgrade the centrality of the new capability and restore traditional capabilities that remain surprisingly relevant and necessary.” This conclusion highlights the unacceptable risks associated with “divest to invest.” In the case of the Marine Corps, traditional capabilities for global response have been lost today because the equipment, personnel, and logistics required have been drastically reduced or totally discarded.

The second article, “Transforming the Marine Corps for an Uncertain Future” by General Charles Wilhelm, USMC (Ret), compares and contrasts two different approaches for transforming the Marine Corps. One approach resulted in a more relevant and capable service with a global focus. The other approach will result in a less relevant and less capable service with a narrow geographical focus.

The first transformation began in the late 1980s. The Marine Corps commandant began to refocus the service on its traditional core competency as the “first to fight” with a new emphasis on the doctrine of maneuver warfare and the intellectual development of Marines. In Wilhelm’s words, “Marines would outfight and outthink their adversaries.” The Marine Corps was better configured to support the combatant commanders, as specified in the Goldwater-Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act of 1986. Marines were made more capable of supporting and participating in joint and special operations.

The next two commandants built on and solidified these principles and established a systems-based approach to identify and develop future capabilities: the Marine Corps Combat Development Process. The process allowed Marines to remain ready, relevant, and capable of responding to constantly shifting threats and national security priorities. Concepts led the way to the identification, prioritization, and integration of doctrine, force structure, equipment, training and education, and facilities and support. Current capabilities were maintained until new capabilities were developed, tested, and fielded.

The second transformation begun in 2020 rejected the systems-based approach in favor of one based on intuition and hope. The range and depth of capabilities needed to fight and win today are being eliminated or significantly degraded to acquire future, experimental capabilities, creating a window of opportunity for our adversaries. Marine forces are being optimized for one task, against one enemy, in one specific location. According to Wilhelm, the Marine Corps is being transformed into a “less tactically and operationally capable and less strategically relevant force than the one that emerged from the previous transformation.” 

Both articles raise concerns about military innovation and transformation that should alarm the new Congress. Congressional oversight is needed, to include hearings where witnesses for and against ongoing transformations are asked hard, thoughtful questions about whether the services, especially the Marine Corps, are transforming in a manner that supports current and future U.S. national security objectives. The Congress cannot assume every prospective military innovation and transformation is necessarily good for the national defense simply because it offers seductive budgetary solutions and illusions of future “silver bullet” technologies. To paraphrase former President Ronald Reagan, our elected representatives can trust but they must verify.

Brigadier General Jerry McAbee (USMC, Ret) is a career artillery officer who served thirty-six years on active duty.

Brigadier General Mike Hayes (USMC, Ret.) is a career artillery officer who served thirty-three years on active duty.

Image: DVIDS.

The 118th Congress is working at a fever pitch to find ways to economically punish China.

With headline-grabbing titles like Fair Trade with China Enforcement Act, Ending China’s Developing Nation Status Act, and Neutralizing Unfair Chinese Export Subsidies Act of 2023, a flurry of bills in both the House and Senate seek to impose costs on China for its coercive economic and national security policies. Many of these bills are a step in the right direction. Others are simply political theatre. While bashing China is undoubtedly in vogue, the costs and benefits of these bills need serious scrutiny. Good intentions can backfire; these bills might hurt the US more than China.

Take, for example, the China Oil Export Prohibition Act of 2023. Penned by Senator Marco Rubio, the bill calls for banning US exports of oil products to China. It follows on the heels of the Protecting America’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve from China Act, which forbids the drawdown of US strategic oil reserves for sale to China. The latter will do little to hurt China, which accounts for just 7.5 of the 296 million barrels of Strategic Petroleum Reserve Washington put up for sale. In any case, that window has closed. Rubio’s bill, which one study says has a 20 percent chance of passing, lacks support from Democrats, yet could pick up steam in the wake of China’s balloon incident.

What’s important about Rubio’s bill is that it excludes natural gas and liquified natural gas (LNG). But this might change for several reasons, not all of which are about Beijing. For example, a ban on LNG exports to China could complement the Democrats’ push to move away natural gas.

Still, banning LNG exports to China would be a mistake. It would amount to the expropriation of US assets dedicated to fulfilling contracts with China, and force Beijing closer to Moscow.

In 2021, China imported more LNG than any other country. That year saw U.S. LNG exports to China reach an all-time-high of 400,000 million cubic feet. By 2022, this figure had plunged to 100,000 cubic feet, in part due to political uncertainty about the prospect of future sales. This puts American jobs on the line. It also positions Russia, as China’s third-largest supplier of natural gas, to pick up the slack.

In an essay titled “How Congress Can Protect Americans from Communist China’s Bid for Domination,” Rubio explains that “[f]irst and foremost, we need to prevent markets from enriching Beijing-controlled firms.” To this end, he’s sponsored no fewer than eight bills taking aim at China, covering everything from corporate corruption to “fair trade” and investment in companies on the US government’s blacklists. No one can excuse Rubio of “being soft” on China.

That said, Rubio’s China Oil Export Prohibition Act of 2023 would do far more harm than good for the United States if LNG were to be included in a subsequent draft, or in a related bill.

In his remarks on the twenty-year anniversary of China joining the World Trade Organization, Rubio said that U.S. approval “was rooted in a flawed assumption” that put “economic integration” over “our national security.” This view is also held by the Industrial Energy Consumers of America (IECA), which asked the Senate’s Select Committee on Intelligence to “examine the national and economic security implications of China’s actions to contract for significant volume of US LNG for periods of up to 20 years.” But this national security argument doesn’t hold water.

That’s because, as the IECA further notes, China is “also locking up large volumes of LNG from Russia, Australia and Qatar.” That’s the point: if the United States were to ban LNG exports to China, Russia would make up the difference, solidifying an alliance that is a growing threat to U.S. national security.

The implication of Rubio’s bill is that an export ban, like “our national security,” can’t be viewed in a vacuum. The global economy is replete with trade partners. A ban on U.S. LNG exports would only imperil good American jobs and investments, and deepen China’s alliance with Russia.

Marc L. Busch is the Karl F. Landegger Professor of International Business Diplomacy at the Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University, and a Global Fellow at the Wilson Center’s Wahba Institute for Strategic Competition. Follow him on Twitter @marclbusch.

Image: Shutterstock.

Earlier this month, Iran and Saudi Arabia agreed to restore diplomatic ties after seven years and signed a China-brokered agreement in what is being termed a breakthrough deal for the region. How does this impact and alter America’s geopolitical stature in the region? What are the first and second-tier consequences of weakening the U.S. presence and position in the Gulf in favor of Washington’s main geopolitical rival?

While some see the Saudi-Iranian rapprochement as a striking diplomatic success for China, others claim it is nothing more than Beijing attempting to insert itself into a strategic region and play peacemaker. After all, the failure of China’s “Going Out” campaign, aimed at increasing foreign investments and infrastructure development abroad, caused multi-billion-dollar losses. Beijing’s Wolf Warrior Diplomacy, where officials exhibited aggressive and insulting behavior, backfired. However, the newly-reached détente between the Middle East’s leading Sunni and Shia rivals improves China’s ability to leverage energy ties in the region, while great power rivalry in the Gulf may heighten tensions there. 

The United States has found it difficult to help its allies neutralize the Iranian nuclear program and multipronged Iranian extremist and imperialist stratagems, which include supporting the Houthi rebels in Yemen, Shia militias in Iraq, and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Simultaneously, the United States allowed its relationship with long-time ally Saudi Arabia to go from bad to worse. All the while, China was expanding its influence in the Middle East. Thus, a power realignment in the energy-rich region was unfolding while America slept. It’s time to wake up.

The latest Saudi-Iranian development did not come out of nowhere. China has developed robust political and economic relationships with the Middle East through increasing trade and investment in the region. By maintaining a steady cash flow, Beijing has transformed economic partnerships into political ones. As the British used to say: “soldiers followed traders.”

There are several strategic vehicles the Chinese use: The Shanghai Cooperation Organization was expanded to several Middle Eastern countries, such as Iran and Turkey, as “dialogue partners.” This calculated growth did not come overnight; it demonstrates the deliberate pace of Beijing’s growing influence. 

Chinese president Xi Jinping’s flagship venture, the Belt and Road initiative (BRI) is aimed at gaining access to natural resources in the Middle East and beyond. Recent contracts under the BRI include three ports, two in Israel and one in the United Arab Emirates; thousands of miles of railroads and highways; twelve 5G contracts; a drone factory; and even an expansion project on the Suez Canal valued at $8.5 billion, with China investing close to $5 billion in the canal’s economic zone. The cumulative Chinese investment in the Gulf is $137.27 billion, while it reached $213.9 billion in the broader Middle East between 2005 and 2021.

China is also the biggest customer for both Saudi Arabian and Iranian oil, which explains Beijing’s interest in moving forward with a settlement between the two and their place among the top beneficiaries of the BRI. The Chinese have agreed to a $400 billion investment over the next twenty-five years in Iran’s banking, telecommunications, ports, railways, healthcare, and information technology sectors in exchange for a heavily discounted supply of Iranian oil. 

Even leaders who might be amicable to the West won’t push back on China’s creeping influence in regional matters given the economic benefits their countries can gain through ties with Beijing. The United States needs to come to grips with the depth of China’s financial reach and strategize to counter Beijing’s clear political intent.

The United States is also heavily invested in the Middle East, not just for economic interests, but for regional security—which directly affects its own national security. These investments are too important to jeopardize by ignoring China’s calculated attempts at undermining America’s role.

The next logical step for the United States is to push for Iran’s full compliance with the Additional Protocol of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, giving up all its highly enriched uranium, and allowing International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors full access to its nuclear facilities. The United States should also enhance its military cooperation with the Gulf states as the Iranian threat will not wane.

The influence of oil and gas trade on the region’s politics is too big to ignore. Energy markets are significant to geopolitical relationships—even if some U.S. stakeholders prefer a foreign policy independent of the hydrocarbon economy. Finally, it is also important to engage with the Gulf nations in their efforts to diversify their economies, where the United States has much to offer in high technologies, internet technologies, health, education, and other industries.

As Xi visits Moscow pretending to broker peace between Russia and Ukraine, checking China’s influence in strategic areas of the world, including Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, is becoming vital for U.S. national security. Competition with China in science, technology, business, diplomacy, and global security has become the defining theme of the twenty-first century. The Iranian-Saudi deal brokered by China is a test of Washington’s power and skill. It is a challenge the United States cannot afford to fail.

Ariel Cohen, Ph.D., is Director of the Energy, Growth, and Security Program at the International Tax and Investment Center and a non-resident Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council. He is the founder of International Market Analysis Inc www.IMAStrategy.com

Image: Salma Bashir Motiwala / Shutterstock.com

On March 14, Lebanese banks renewed a nationwide strike in response to ongoing investigations and recent rulings regarding their policies and practices since the start of the country’s brutal economic collapse in 2019. The bank strike, spearheaded by the Association of Banks in Lebanon (ABL), which represents Lebanese commercial banks, has all but frozen transactions for the average Lebanese citizen in the name of fighting so-called judicial overreach. But even the most casual observer of the eastern Mediterranean country’s political discourse can quickly understand what truly underpins the strike: a zero-sum demand from Lebanon’s political and economic elite for the right to rob the country blind.

The bank strike first began on February 7 as a result of Judge Ghada Aoun’s years-long investigation into money laundering and corrupt practices in the Lebanese banking sector. The investigation is particularly focused on commercial banks, although Aoun is also investigating the Banque Du Liban (Central Bank of Lebanon) and its long-running governor, Riad Salameh. Aoun charged Salameh with illicit enrichment on February 21 following a long-running investigation into his efforts to transfer public funds into his brother’s bank accounts in Switzerland and other European countries.

Lebanese banks wasted little time responding to the investigation, especially after Aoun charged two senior bankers from Bank Audi and Audi Group with money laundering for refusing to lift banking secrecy terms connected to the accounts of senior bank officials. ABL also took issue with another early-February ruling by the Court of Cassation against Fransabank regarding a lawsuit from two Lebanese citizens, Ayad al-Gharabaoui Ibrahim and Hanane Maroun al-Hajj Ibrahim, who demanded access to their bank deposits. The suit was ultimately decided in the plaintiffs’ favor, leading the ABL to strike as early as March 2022, when the first of many decisions against the bank were made regarding the same case.

The Fransabank ruling is substantial as it orders the banks to pay the plaintiffs in cash following their account closings. The bank originally preferred to pay by check to avoid losses in bank holdings given the disparity between the Lebanese lira and U.S. dollar. Such a ruling is crucial, as it sets a precedent protecting small depositors from harmful bank practices—arguably the major economic sticking point for Lebanese citizens since 2019.

While the ABL originally announced an indefinite strike, political intervention led it temporarily suspend the nationwide strike for a week, beginning on February 24. “Based on the Prime Minister's wish, the banks' sensitivity to difficult economic conditions, and the need to secure banking services to all citizens at the end of the month, [the ABL] have decided to suspend the strike temporarily for a week,” the bank noted in an official statement.

Indeed, the Lebanese political system was again swooping in to save the banking system. Prime Minister Najib Mikati announced on February 23 that he would ask the security forces and Interior Minister Bassam Mawlawi to not act on Aoun’s orders, citing “an overstepping of authority.” Mawlawi complied with this order. Further, Lebanon’s top prosecutor, Ghassan Oweidat, ordered Aoun to “temporarily suspend [her] investigative procedures until decisions are taken on the issue raised.” Aoun described the actions as “a total breakdown of justice” and “an unprecedented interference in the work of the judiciary.” Amid Aoun’s continued efforts, the banks renewed the strike on March 14 and again on March 21-22, announcing an end at the start of Ramadan.

Unfortunately, as evidenced by the ABL’s ongoing intransigence this month, Aoun’s statements define how Lebanon has landed in such a precarious economic and political situation. Since the 2019 October Revolution, the Lebanese people have continuously protested what they rightly describe as open corruption, but to no avail. Rather than reform the system collapsing around them, Lebanese elites in banking and political circles have consolidated their wealth, security, and power within a Ponzi scheme resembling a glass house of cards set to collapse. The World Bank’s assessment of the country’s economic state described this in the starkest of terms in a 2021 report, highlighting the situation as one of the worst economic meltdowns in modern history. The ABL’s actions, as well as that of the prime minister, are a continuation of the direct lines of corruption long evident in Lebanon and undergirding this meltdown.

A natural response to such a scenario is reform, which Lebanese citizens, world leaders, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have aggressively called for in recent years. Central to this debate are the capital controls and banking secrecy laws that would, if drafted along the IMF’s standards, fight back against shady banking practices and protect individual depositors as opposed to wealthy, connected elites. Unsurprisingly, the ABL rejects the IMF’s recommendations and that of the Lebanese people’s basic right to access their bank accounts, as well as basic international transparency standards. This is not an objective position on the part of Lebanon’s banking sector—it is an intentional ploy to avoid accountability for robbing Lebanese citizens of their savings while attempting to wait out the crisis until international support arrives (as has occurred in the past).

However, international support does not appear to be on the horizon this time around. World leaders are fed up with Lebanon’s ruling class for its refusal to change and reform. Rather than read the tea leaves, Lebanese elites will opt to not allow investigations to challenge the status quo. The Beirut Blast investigation is a case in point given the political interventions surrounding it, presenting a scenario in which it is difficult to see other investigations succeeding, especially without stronger international pressure. In this light, keep an eye on scapegoats (i.e., Salameh) who could be sacrificed to the people in exchange for window-dressing reforms.

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

Image: Shutterstock.

Mexico’s presidential elections are more than a year away, but the jostling has already begun. The president is already limited to one six-year term, and the left-wing governing party, MORENA, has already narrowed it to two viable candidates: Mexico City’s Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum and Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard. Officially, President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador—or AMLO, as he’s popularly known—states that MORENA supporters will choose the candidate by a poll. Still, some observers expect the president to use el dedazo to select his successor unofficially. Regardless of the primary’s results, the presidential candidate will be elected in July 2024. Yet with MORENA likely keeping the presidency and possibly Congress, some wonder whether Mexico is returning to an era of one-party democracy. While there are some indications that MORENA can lead Mexico without meaningful opposition for decades, there are several questions about whether the party can successfully be in power without AMLO as its head.

Mexico’s Democratic Moment

Mexico has had a long-experienced history of authoritarian rule, whether openly so or not. In the twentieth century, this took the form of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), which was founded to preserve the power structure that emerged after the turmoil in the 1910s. While the country was officially a democracy, PRI’s monopolistic control of Mexico’s political institutions remained strong until the late 1980s, thanks to the party’s repression of dissidents, co-option of interest groups, and electoral fraud. Their grasp of the country fell only due to economic turmoil starting in the 1970s and a split between the party’s left-wing base and its neoliberal elite. Mexico’s democratic moment was short-lived, as the rise of competitive elections spawned political violence that plagues the country today.

Furthermore, the administrations of Vicente Fox and Felipe Calderon of the Partido Acción Nacional (PAN), the conservative party, proved to be no less capable of promoting social equity or clamping down on corruption than their PRI predecessors. With the failure of the PAN to live up to this moment, many Mexicans became disillusioned about democracy, turning to AMLO and his left-wing, anti-establishment MORENA party. In 2018, MORENA won a historic victory, as AMLO was the first candidate in thirty years to win with an absolute majority, cementing both his presidency and his party’s dominance.

Can MORENA be the new PRI?

On the surface, MORENA appears capable of re-establishing Mexico as a one-party democracy for two main reasons.

First, the opposition remains fractured and discredited after decades of misrule from both the PAN and the PRI. While both parties cooperated under the alliance Va Por Mexico and had some success in the 2021 midterm elections, their coalition wasn’t enough to prevent MORENA from winning four gubernatorial elections last year. Moreover, the coalition could split the vote if the parties ran separate candidates for the presidency. But another reason is that MORENA seems to have captured most political institutions, solidifying its control over the government. This can be seen partly by the party using the military and national guard to provide security and social services. Additionally, a recent election law passed by the party in the Mexican Congress cut the national electoral institute budget and election oversight. Most Mexicans do not approve of these reforms, and the country was awash in protests to prevent the law from being passed to no avail. Without a strong bastion of political or bureaucratic opposition, MORENA is at the cusp of having a monopoly of political power for decades.

Second, as powerful as MORENA is today, whether the party can sustain its power permanently remains an open question. It has failed to deliver a new era of peace, prosperity, and order to Mexico, despite the lofty promises made in its foundation. AMLO’s proclaimed “Fourth Transformation” has been a series of contradictory policies that haven’t delivered the robust economic growth seen from 1950–1980, or become mired in bureaucratic boondoggles, such as the Maya Train or energy reform. Some of his changes will indeed take longer to bear fruit, such as the recent nationalization of Mexico’s lithium reserves, though MORENA’s legitimacy will corrode if they cannot provide faster economic growth.

MORENA without AMLO?

For now, MORENA’s failures haven’t dampened its popularity, thanks to the charisma and popularity of AMLO. Yet his enduring popularity masks an issue of whether the party can succeed without him at its head. Political parties that depend on an individual for power have difficulty surviving without their charismatic leader, such as UKIP’s Nigel Farage in the UK. The only way parties can survive is through a measure of institutionalization, which develops talent through the party and provides a measure of political cohesion. The PRI was adept at this, as there was massive coordination and organization in the party from the federal government to the municipalities. So far, AMLO hasn’t created much of an organization within MORENA, as he made the party into his electoral campaigning with almost no consideration for the party after his departure. With AMLO’s successors experiencing ongoing criminal issues or lacking charisma, MORENA’s standing power will likely not last long after its leader’s departure.

If MORENA wishes to sustain itself in power, it must develop a campaigning and political organization separate from AMLO’s personality to survive. Unfortunately for the party, AMLO has demonstrated remarkably little interest in supporting a political movement that he is not leading. This bodes poorly for AMLO’s successor, as that candidate will struggle to develop his (or her) own independent administration. In other words, AMLO will not really leave the presidency—he will instead allow his successor to wear the sash while he remains in the background. This bodes poorly for Mexico—historically, such arrangements do not last long, providing further political instability in a country already awash in poverty and violence.

Heberto Limas-Villers is a management consultant living in Washington, DC. He was previously a graduate fellow at the National Defense Industrial Association focusing on naval policy and the defense industrial base.