Diplomacy & Crisis News

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Image: U.S. Navy Flickr.

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

Why Cabinet Wars Matter

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

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

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

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

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

So What Does Clausewitz Tell Us?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

History Lessons

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Flaws of the Deal

The 2020 agreement has six primary flaws.

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

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

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

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

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

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

And Yet…

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

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

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

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

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

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

Image: Leonid Altman/Shutterstock.

In 2022, the United States and Egypt marked the centennial of their diplomatic relations. As Secretary of State Antony Blinken wrapped up his fourth visit to the Middle East in late January 2023, with stops in Egypt, Israel, and the West Bank, he acknowledged the strong U.S.-Egypt strategic partnership and Egypt’s contributions to regional stability and international security. He also emphasized ongoing bilateral cooperation and defense ties. President Joe Biden had previously highlighted Egypt as a key partner in the U.S.-led global climate agenda during his visit to Sharm El-Sheikh for COP27 last November.

Given Egypt’s significance, it is important that the U.S. Government align with its National Security Strategy, which places priority on “making sure [U.S. partners] can defend themselves against foreign threats,” all while fostering human rights and human security. This includes supporting Egypt with U.S. military aid for defense security, as well as economic aid directed to human security, through both government-to-government partnerships and people-to-people ties.

Egypt a key pillar in U.S. regional security architecture

Egypt has been an integral part of the United States’ Middle East security policy since Cairo signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1979. The inclusion of Israel and Egypt, a former Soviet ally, in the U.S. camp required both countries to feel militarily secure in relation to one other and against new emerging threats. This resulted in the provision of U.S. military aid to both countries. It is important for the U.S. Congress to consider the long-standing U.S.-Israeli-Egyptian trilateral relationship before making future decisions to halt U.S. military aid to Egypt.

The Congress should also recognize that U.S. military aid enables Egypt to receive U.S.-made arms through what is essentially store credit, making it more of a subsidy to the domestic U.S. defense industry than a gratuity to Egypt. Every year, Congress allocates $1.3 billion in military assistance to Egypt. However, the funds never reach Egypt directly. Instead, they are transferred to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and then to a trust fund at the Treasury, finally being distributed to U.S. military contractors who manufacture the tanks and fighter jets that are ultimately delivered to Egypt. This gives the United States oversight over the way funds are dispersed. Thus, it is important for Congress to consider U.S. military aid as a means of maintaining regional peace and security, as well as an economic driver for the domestic U.S. defense industry, rather than a significant financial burden on the U.S. budget. 

Criticism of U.S. Military Aid to Egypt

Egypt has been criticized for its choice of military equipment requests, especially tanks and F-16 fighter jets, with some experts saying back in 2013 that the tanks are not well-suited for the types of threats facing Egypt, such as terrorism and border security in the Sinai Peninsula. Legitimate questions were asked of the Egyptian military: What is the military’s objective? What do you see as the real threat? Some scholars exclaimed at the time that, “There’s no conceivable scenario in which they’d need all those tanks short of an alien invasion.”

But contrary to these assessments a decade ago, Egypt’s military strength served as a deterrent in a high-threat perception region. Turkey has been Egypt’s main perceived threat. Turkey’s military adventurism in Syria and encroachments on Libya raised red flags for Egypt regarding its western border. U.S. military advisers in Cairo had advised back in 2013 against further acquisitions of tanks or F-16s, as they deemed that Egypt already had more than it needs. However, the Egyptian military foresaw these weapons as crucial for their security. Following protocol, the United States decides which weapons to send to Egypt “in consultation with our partners’ own determination of their strategic and force structure requirements.”

The recent conflict in Ukraine has highlighted the value of tanks and F-16s as a deterrent. Supreme Allied Commander of Europe Christopher G. Cavoli recently stated two key facts: 1) Hard power is a reality; and 2) kinetic effects matter. “If the other guy shows up with the tank, you better have a tank,” he said. Egypt possesses 4,664 tanks, while Turkey has 2,229. In June 2020, speaking during an inspection visit to Sidi Barrani air force base on the Libyan border, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi declared the Libyan city of Sirte and Jufra airbase as a “red line.” Egypt’s possession of tanks has been a deterrent to Turkey’s encroachments onto Libya, leading to a ceasefire in that country.

Human Rights, Foreign Threats, and Homeland Security

Despite the historical and strategic importance of the U.S. military aid to Egypt, there have been further criticisms of the aid in recent years. Some argue that the aid is provided without sufficient considerations for human rights by the Egyptian government. Additionally, there have also been criticisms of the aid for being too focused on military equipment and not enough on other areas such as economic development and civil society.

The United States Government rightfully takes into account the human rights record of countries receiving aid as it charts its policies. While the assessment of human rights in Egypt has been a topic of detailed discussion, it is equally important to consider both foreign threats and homeland security when assessing criteria for providing military aid to U.S. strategic partners.

In the past decade, Egypt perceived the Turkey-Qatar alliance that formed around the Arab uprisings of 2011 as its primary foreign threat. Turkey pursued hegemonic and expansionist pan-Islamist policies throughout the region. In response, Egypt categorized the Muslim Brotherhood, which Turkey backed, as a transnational terrorist organization, not a domestic political faction. The Egyptian government detained and jailed numerous members and/or affiliates of the transnational group it banned and treated them as agents operating on behalf of foreign enemy states within the scope of informational warfare. Egypt’s human rights file worsened in response to these regional circumstances over the past decade. 

However, with improvements in state-to-state relations between Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain, on one hand, and Turkey and Qatar, on the other, following Al Ula Declaration in 2021, there is now room for the Egyptian government to treat Muslim Brotherhood members as individuals, i.e. not as a threatening transnational collective backed by foreign enemy states. Sisi and Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan shook hands in Qatar during the 2022 World Cup, making a significant step toward normalization between the two regional rivals. 

The recent changes in the region’s political landscape have opened up opportunities for the release and pardoning of numerous political prisoners. In light of this, U.S. State Department officials have recognized the “improvement” of human rights in Egypt, marked by the release of hundreds of individuals from Egyptian prisons over the past two years. To encourage further releases, the newly elected Congress should be cognizant of this progress.

Besides the Muslim Brotherhood prisoners, Blinken was asked about the case of Alaa Abdel Fattah during his trip to Egypt. Blinken confirmed that he discussed individual cases with Egyptian officials but stated that the actions of the government are its own prerogatives. It is important to note that Abdel Fattah is not an Islamist but an anarchist who has a history of advocating for the collapse of the armed forces and police in Egypt. The United States should advocate for the individual human rights of Abdel Fattah and others, while acknowledging that promoting ideas that pose a security threat to a regional partner would be a risk.

Impact of Cutting Aid

Withholding military aid to Egypt also has negative impacts on Egypt’s ability to defend itself against foreign threats and support U.S. interests in regional security and stability. In 2013, the Obama administration’s decision to withhold the delivery of Apache helicopters that the Egyptian government had already paid for hindered Egypt’s ability to fight against transnational terrorist factions who flocked to Northern Sinai. The hold was eventually lifted in 2015, but it’s worth noting that these attempts to reduce military aid or postpone the delivery of fully-paid-for U.S. military equipment were perceived by the Egyptian public as acting against Egypt’s national security interests. This negatively influenced the Egyptian people’s perception of the United States, jeopardizing the two countries’ strategic partnership. 

Future attempts to cut or withhold military aid to Egypt may push Egyptians to seek new arms suppliers. This can lead to further diversification away from U.S. arms and toward other countries such as France and Germany, or even Russia and China. Egypt has indeed purchased French Mistrals, German submarines, and sought Russian and Chinese military equipment. It’s important to consider the potential consequences of losing leverage with Cairo before making changes to the current U.S. military assistance or Foreign Military Sales deals.

Conclusion

In summary, it is advantageous for the United States to maintain its military aid to Egypt without implementing slight reductions that may not influence Egypt’s policies on homeland security or defense against foreign threats. These cuts may even increase the “rally around the flag” effect among Egyptians and strengthen their relationship with their government. The Biden administration recognizes this scenario, as demonstrated in its National Security Strategy, which considers the external threats perceived by the United States’ regional partners. 

Also relevant to economic aid is Egypt’s successful hosting of COP27, which, for the first time, included a breakthrough agreement on a new “Loss and Damage” fund for vulnerable countries. COP27 further solidified the partnership between the United States and Egypt on climate issues. Biden’s speech acknowledged the climate crisis as a question of “human security, economic security, environmental security, and national security.” There is a shared outlook and vocabulary between the United States and Egypt regarding the concept of human security that can be capitalized upon. The $500 million package announced by the United States, the EU, and Germany to finance Egypt’s transition to clean energy, and the $150 million deal enabling Egypt to serve as a hub for African countries’ climate resilience activities, demonstrate the strong future of U.S.-Egypt bilateral relations, especially in civilian economic aid. Finally, this type of civilian economic cooperation should be inclusive of entrepreneurial Egyptian youth and private sector investors as this deepens people-to-people relations and positively impact the Egyptian people’s economic security.

The new Congress is likely to understand these issues. This can pave the way for a deeper U.S.-Egypt strategic partnership on defense and security matters, all while placing the discourse on both human rights and human security in its important and proper context.

Dr. Marwa Maziad is Visiting Assistant Professor of comparative civil-military relations at the Department of Government and Politics and the Gildenhorn Institute for Israel Studies at the University of Maryland. She is an Affiliate Scholar with the Middle East Institute’s Strategic Foresight Initiative. @marwamaziad

Image: Photo Spirit / Shutterstock.com

Editor's note: This article originally stated that Congress withheld the delivery of Apache helicopters to Egypt in 2013. It was the Obama administration, not Congress. We regret the error.

For years, Iran’s rockets, missiles, and drones have terrorized the Middle East and, more recently, Ukraine. With its recent attacks on multiple Iranian military interests, including reportedly targeting a meeting of Iranians and Syrians to discuss drone manufacturing on February 19, Israel appears to be the only country consistently and proactively countering Tehran’s threats to regional and global security. The United States should be encouraging, supporting, and joining Israel in taking strong action to prevent Iran from carrying out terrorism and advancing its nuclear program.

Israeli drone attacks struck three Iranian targets between January 28-30: an Iranian military facility in Isfahan overnight on January 28, a convoy of six Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)-linked trucks reportedly carrying Iranian weapons along the Syria-Iraq border on January 29, and Iranian-backed militia leaders in Syria on January 30.

These attacks continue Israel’s strategy to directly confront, roll back, and deter Iran’s military expansionism. Since Israel began its “campaign between the wars” in 2015, it has launched airstrikes to degrade the capabilities of Iran and its partner militias and prevent Tehran from proliferating precision weaponry. Under former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, Israel adopted the “octopus doctrine” of imposing costs directly on the Iranian head in addition to the regime’s proxy tentacles across the Middle East.

Over the last eight years, the visible results of Israel’s approach amount to over 400 airstrikes against Iran’s regionwide military expansion, including 350 in Syria, over fifty in Lebanon, four in Iran, and one in Iraq, according to data compiled by JINSA.

The United States, in contrast, has been far more subdued in confronting Iran. In the two years since President Joe Biden took office, there have been eighty attacks on U.S. troops or contractors in Iraq and Syria, with Iranian-backed groups firing over 230 projectiles, including 170 rockets and sixty drones, according to JINSA’s Iran Projectile Tracker, which we compile. Yet, the Biden administration has launched only three rounds of airstrikes on Iranian-backed militias in Iraq and Syria.

Despite its important and consequential “maximum pressure” campaign to cripple the Islamic Republic economically, the Trump administration was not much more aggressive militarily than its successor. The exception to this is the January 2020 strike that killed IRGC Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani and Kataib Hezbollah commander Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, which significantly undermined Iran’s terror network. Regular U.S. strikes against those who seek to imminently harm U.S. interests, like Soleimani and Muhandis, would serve as a powerful deterrent and means of reducing Iranian capabilities.

Though both the United States and Israel have warned repeatedly over the years that Iranian weapons pose threats, only Israel regularly and preemptively damages Iran’s ability to develop, manufacture, and proliferate these weapons.

Israel’s latest reported actions are more evidence of its value as a security partner. While Washington and Kyiv have pressured Jerusalem to provide weapons to Ukraine, Israel is the only country now hindering the flow of deadly drones into Russia’s hands. Meanwhile, U.S. officials have admitted that they have not stopped the transfer of Iranian drones to Russia while European countries allow the same Iranian terror airlines that deliver drones to Russia to use European airports.

With America focused on helping Ukraine to defeat Russian forces, the Biden administration should use tools beyond sanctions and diplomacy, including military force and covert action, to disrupt Iran’s lethal support to Russia.

Working with Israel, the United States should publicly adopt a policy similar to Israel’s octopus doctrine to deter and thwart Iranian attacks and weapons proliferation by using consistent, preemptive military force. This should complement a larger shift toward a “Plan B” Iran policy—including closer coordination with Israel—in light of the clear failure of the Biden administration’s good-faith, but ultimately counterproductive, open-ended nuclear diplomacy with Iran that only further undermines U.S. deterrence in the eyes of Tehran.

Fortunately, the United States can build on recent diplomatic and military coordination with Israel, including last month’s large-scale Juniper Oak exercise, to improve and broadcast both joint readiness and Israel’s ability to operate independently. The Biden administration should expedite the delivery of KC-46A aircraft refueling tankers to Israel that would be critical should it become necessary for Israel to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities. The Pentagon should also replenish its war reserve stockpile in Israel, known as WRSA-I, which has become obsolete. However,  now that the United States has transferred artillery from WRSA-I to Ukraine, there is open space to preposition the precision-guided munitions that Israel would need in a full-scale war with Iran and Hezbollah.

With Iran reportedly threatening to retaliate by targeting ships with ties to Israel, as it did in 2021 when Israel allegedly sabotaged Tehran’s attempts to smuggle oil to Syria, U.S. Naval Forces Central Command should also push for Israel to be included in the Combined Maritime Forces, which focuses on freedom of navigation, counterpiracy, counter-narcotics, and other illicit activities.

The United States should be closely partnering with Israel to degrade Iranian capabilities more broadly. Israel has developed a model for directly combating Iranian aggression that America should firmly endorse.

VADM Mark Fox, USN (ret.) is a member of the Jewish Institute for National Security of America’s (JINSA) Eastern Mediterranean and Abraham Accords policy projects. He served as Deputy Commander of U.S. Central Command and previously served as commander of U.S. Naval Central Command/U.S. 5th Fleet/Combined Maritime Forces.

Andrew Ghalili and Ari Cicurel are Senior Policy Analysts at the JINSA.

Image: BeAvPhoto / Shutterstock.com

Much has been said and written about the National Conservative (NatCon) movement on the political Right that supposedly stands in opposition to the pro-Big Business and globalist orientation of the Republican Party establishment. More specifically, this movement has positioned itself against the twin intellectual forces that have dominated the political conservative movement in recent decades: a neoconservative and interventionist foreign policy and a libertarian-leaning pro-free market approach to economic affairs.

Most of the focus on this insurgent group of intellectuals has been on their traditional conservative positions on social and cultural issues, the rejection of the so-called “globalist elites” and their allies in Silicon Valley, their hardline stance on immigration, their support for industrial policy and growing government intervention in the economy, and of course—and more significantly—their seeming association with former President Donald Trump. Hence why the terms “National Conservatism” and “Trumpism” have been used interchangeably.

Less attention has been paid to the movement’s foreign policy platform—although occasionally it has been argued and lamented in the mainstream media that NatCons or Trumpists have embraced an anti-interventionist or “isolationist” agenda that echoes the Republican Party’s mid-twentieth century Old Right, led by the legendary Senator Robert Taft, that resisted American entry to World War II and later to the Cold War.

In fact, there has never been a clear statement of a national conservative foreign policy by any of its nominal spokespeople, ranging from the militant Zionist and pro-Likud Israeli philosopher Yoram Hazony to Fox News’s enfant terrible Tucker Carlson. There is a simple reason for this: NatCons don’t agree on major global affairs. Consider the aforementioned individuals: Hazony hopes that the United States will bomb Iran to the Stone Age and expresses sympathy to Ukraine, whereas Carlson supports a nuclear deal with Tehran but lambasts American aid to Kyiv. That Trump opposed the nuclear deal with Iran while bromance-ing with Russia’s Vladimir Putin—although it should be noted that, as president, he approved selling arms to Ukraine—and revoked his predecessor’s nuclear deal with Iran only highlights the difficulties in defining the NatCon foreign policy agenda.

More recently, the notion that the GOP has come under the influence of the Trumpist and supposedly “isolationist” wing of the party has been highlighted by the media as impacting party policy—see how Kevin McCarthy, the new Speaker of the House, insisted that his party won’t give the Biden administration a “blank check” when it comes to U.S. aid to Ukraine.

 McCarthy’s comments seemed to reflect the supposedly growing opposition among Republicans to continuing U.S. assistance to Ukraine, as demonstrated by the ten Republican House members who co-sponsored a resolution calling for an end to such. This position was supported by some Republicans in the Senate, including Senator Josh Hawley, a self-proclaimed NatCon, and Senator Rand Paul, a long-time conservative libertarian.

Hawley has stated that U.S. support for Ukraine “has to stop”, but to describe his foreign policy approach as isolationist or just anti-interventionist is frankly ridiculous.

Like other NatCons and Trumpists, as well as many neoconservatives and traditional Republicans, Hawley has effectively called for launching a new Cold War against China, starting with the decoupling of the American and Chinese economies and strengthening the U.S. defense budget to the stratosphere to prepare for a possible military confrontation with Beijing over the future of Taiwan and other key issues.

In fact, the main reason that Hawley supports reducing aid to Ukraine is because he believes that Russia’s aggression in Ukraine, unlike China’s militarist policies in the Pacific, doesn’t threaten America’s core national interests, and that the preoccupation with Ukraine only diverts U.S. attention and resources from the coming war with China. “We have a lot of military power on our side,” Hawley said in a recent address. “But it isn’t deployed where it should be, and the world is about to face the consequences.”

Yet though clear on China, Hawley and other Trumpists have never provided a coherent explanation of what the role of the United States should play in Europe; notwithstanding all his America First bravado, former President Trump did not take steps to military disengage from the Atlantic and called on other NATO members to increase their contribution to the alliance. That President Joe Biden has proven to be more aggressive than his predecessor in his approach to China challenges the notion the political Right has to energize the American people to confront Beijing.

At times it seems that some NatCons fantasize about some sort of an alliance between the United States and Russia—as well as with their favorite European authoritarian leader, Hungary’s Viktor Orban—as part of devising a common Western strategy against China. But such an idea doesn’t make a lot of sense given that Russia is trying to strengthen its military ties with China and Hungary is bending the knee to Beijing. Hosting China’s foreign policy chief, Wang Yi, in Budapest, Hungarian Foreign Affairs Minister Peter Szijjarto lauded China and offered his support for China’s Ukraine-Russia peace proposal.

Another and more serious contradiction in the NatCon foreign policy agenda is that many NatCons, despite nominally being anti-interventionist, reject the nuclear deal with Iran and regard political Islam—and in some cases Muslims in general—as a threat to America and the West. Many of these individuals, like former Trump aide Steve Bannon, are also allied with the most militant political forces in Israel that, like Hazony and others, reject any deal with Palestinians and would like to see the United States and Israel prepare for a military confrontation with Iran—something that would inevitably lead to more U.S. interventions in the Middle East that NatCons so often decry.

It’s true that NatCons have broadly opposed neoconservative plans to remake and democratize the Middle East and, more broadly, much of the world. This is, perhaps, a reflection of what foreign policy thinker Walter Russel Mead referred to as the “Jacksonian” impulse in American foreign policy, with its emphasis on the need to use American military power to protect U.S. interests. But at this point in time, the foreign policy agenda embraced by Republican Party leaders, including Senate Republicans, is Hamiltonian and certainly not Jeffersonian.

But much of what the NatCons support on China or other issues doesn’t necessarily reflect consideration of core U.S. national interests—unless such are defined by the need to have a strong national government whose role is to protect American businesses and workers from foreign intervention, and assumes that a rising and prosperous China is by definition a threat to such.

Certainly, the “populist” NatCons have yet to ask the American people whether they are willing to pay the high costs—military, economic, social—of a new Cold War, and whether they are willing to fight a potential hot war to support the independence of Taiwan.

Without clear support from the American people for such an ambitious and costly foreign policy agenda, the NatCons may end up looking very much like the reviled neoconservatives: a bunch of intellectuals seeking to drive the American people to new military adventures in Asia and the Middle East in the name of advancing their own fantasies.

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

Image: National Conservatism Conference.

With the announcement that ninety-eight-year-old former President Jimmy Carter would not seek added medical care but would live out the rest of his life under hospice care, the outpouring of sentiment, from pundits and the public alike, focused on his stellar post-presidency overcoming his failed one-term presidency. The media understandably highlighted his Nobel Prize for post-presidential peace efforts in the Middle East, his active promotion of Habitat for Humanity to build housing for those in need, and his founding of the Carter Center, which focuses on human rights, conflict prevention, election monitoring, and international public health. Yet it is now time for analysts and the American people to reassess his presidency.

The tendency of historians, political scientists, and pundits is to be biased against one-term presidents from the get-go. After all, the voters rejected them. But many one-term presidents, including the much-maligned Carter, were good presidents. Admittedly when Carter first took office with no experience at the national level, he was almost too honest for Washington. He initially failed to get his way with Congress, because he refused to horse-trade pork projects for his legislative agenda. However, as his term progressed, his growing experience made him more effective in the office.

Carter was rejected for a second term largely because he was unable to extricate the hostages held in Iran during the Iranian Revolution and because of economic stagflation—a combination of inflation and slow economic growth that occurred in the late 1970s—occurred during his watch. However, such criticism of Carter on foreign policy and economic policy is sorely misplaced.y

In the wake of the two-decade disaster of unnecessary and costly U.S. military intervention in the war in Southeast Asia (58,000 U.S. lives, millions of Vietnamese, Laotian, and Cambodian lives, and tens of billions of dollars), Carter decided it was time to run a more restrained foreign policy. Carter avoided getting entangled in the Somali-Ethiopian war in the Horn of Africa and other non-strategic brushfire wars in the developing world. He wisely returned the canal zone to Panama, brokered the Camp David Accords for Middle East peace, and completed Richard Nixon’s effort for better relations with China. As part of that less interventionist foreign policy, instead of attacking Iran when hostages were seized in the U.S. embassy there, he, putting the lives of the hostages over macho posturing, first tried to negotiate their release and when that failed, he tried a military rescue; this operation failed because of mechanical failure of the military mission. Carter was then blamed for letting the military readiness deteriorate, when perhaps the obvious presidents to blame were Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Richard Nixon, who exhausted the U.S. military by entangling it in a failing quagmire in Southeast Asia from 1954 to 1973. 

The aftermath of the war in Southeast Asia, his predecessors’ expansive monetary policies, and the Iranian Revolution of 1978 and 1979, which spiked world oil prices, contributed heavily to both high inflation and a sluggish U.S. economy during Carter’s term. Initially, Carter bore some blame for high inflation because he appointed G. William Miller as chairman of the Federal Reserve, who, in only a little over a year in the job, exacerbated inflation by increasing the U.S. money supply. However, Carter then replaced him in August 1979 with Paul A. Volcker, who, in a “monetarist experiment,” dramatically tightened the screws on the money supply, thus inducing an economic slowdown that would doom Carter’s re-election chances. Volcker, unlike Miller, realized that inflation was a bigger problem than slow economic growth and successfully bled it out of the economy. Volcker’s monetarist policies—much more than Ronald Reagan’s 1981 supply-side tax cut, which produced staggering budget deficits and soaring national debt without commensurate budget cuts—led to the “Reagan prosperity” of the 1980s (in fact, Reagan increased taxes in most years of his eight-year presidency, thus making is net tax reduction as an annualized percentage of GDP less than any other post-Truman Republican president). Although post-Truman presidents that reduced annualizing federal spending as a portion of GDP have been rare (only Bill Clinton and Dwight Eisenhower), of the ten other presidents during that time, Carter had the second-best record by this measure of fiscal austerity while reducing the annualized debt as a portion of GDP (in contrast to Reagan). Most people think that the economy was a total disaster during the Carter administration, but he was tied for fourth place in annualized GDP growth among post-Truman presidents.

In short, after a stretch of progressive presidents from John F. Kennedy through Richard Nixon (although a Republican, policy-wise he was a lefty), despite his party affiliation, Carter was the first in a series of conservative presidents since Calvin Coolidge. Carter cut capital gains taxes in 1978 and deregulated the banking, telecommunications, energy (oil and natural gas), and transportation (trucking, railroad, and airline) industries. He also began the post-Vietnam increases in defense spending after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. Reagan continued Carter’s deregulation and defense spending increases—although Reagan usually only reduced enforcement of regulations (future presidents could and did resume such enforcement), whereas Carter usually changed the underlying laws upon which agency regulations were based, making deregulation more permanent.

Carter also preached personal responsibility, argued for local responsibility, proposed reducing farm subsidies, and wanted to reform welfare because he believed government welfare programs eroded the family and the work ethic. Finally, because he was a budget hawk who correctly prioritized cutting inflation over reducing unemployment, he resisted not only the policy wish list of labor unions and other Democratic interest groups but also a large fiscal stimulus that would have helped his chances of re-election. Carter was largely principled to the end of his presidency.

Ivan Eland is a senior fellow with the Independent Institute and author of Recarving Rushmore: Ranking the Presidents on Peace, Prosperity, and Liberty.

Image: Joseph Sohm/Shutterstock.

Deterrence is the art of convincing the other side that starting a war would not be worth the cost. The United States wants to deter China from invading Taiwan, but it would desire to do so without starting a new Cold War. However, amazingly little thought seems to have been given to that problem by American military or civilian strategic thinkers. The generals and admirals seem more concerned with hyping the military threat from Beijing to increase their share of the budget, and many civilians seem intent on not appearing too belligerent. We need to ask ourselves if we want a Cold War approach to China or if we want to nudge Beijing into a less confrontational position regarding Taiwan and the West more broadly.

Some in the West believe that China's Xi Jinping wants to “reunify” Taiwan to cement his legacy as a leader who could do what Mao could not. If that is the case, only Xi knows for sure. If that is not the case, there are two reasons for Beijing to try to take Taiwan by force. 

A second motivation could be the emergence of a major economic or political crisis, which might encourage Xi or a potential successor to go to war to distract from domestic woes. The third would be a Taiwanese declaration of independence, which is a red flag that no mainland leader could ignore. It is American policy to discourage the Taiwanese from this course, as normal deterrence might not work in the heat of the moment. That is dangerous because sovereignty issues are particularly virulent in East Asia.

However, in the first two cases, American deterrence can be a strong disincentive for China to attack Taiwan. The challenge for the United States is to frame that deterrent to show that it doesn’t want war but will fight and win if one starts.

If China does decide to invade Taiwan, it will probably try to place an exclusion zone around it as the British did with the Falklands in 1982. This would limit the war to the immediate area around the island, allowing Beijing to conduct trade as usual elsewhere in the world. If the United States wants to create real deterrence, its leaders must make it clear that such a ploy will not work and that any war would be a major regional conflict with a total blockade of China assured. That would put the Chinese in a position where a conflict would exacerbate rather than alleviate any domestic crisis that might cause the Chinese Communist Party to contemplate a martial adventure.

The means of accomplishing such a blockade would be military, primarily naval, but the effects would be economically disastrous to China, which has an export-driven economy. A year-long blockade would cost China hundreds of billions of dollars in exports to the United States alone. Moreover, a blockade would put over $2 trillion in economic activity in jeopardy. Since most of that trade goes by sea, a blockade would be a catastrophe for China.

The temptation to keep wars limited and manageable is seductive for American political leaders, but the approach seldom works well politically or militarily. It doomed Harry Truman's hopes for a successful presidency during the Korean War. The tacit American bipartisan approach to keeping the war in Vietnam limited allowed the North Vietnamese to gauge American responses carefully. Through an adroit combination of escalation and negotiation, the Communist regime in the north was able to emasculate the overwhelming American military potential to a manageable degree, allowing Hanoi to wait out the will of the American people to continue what appeared to be a hopeless struggle. Hanoi recognized the self-imposed constraints that the Americans were operating under and deftly exploited them.

Similarly, in Afghanistan, the Taliban came to understand that the United States viewed the war against them as a sideshow in its "Global War on Terror". After several years, the Islamic fundamentalists realized that they could wait the Americans out. In addition, war paid. Poppies and help from the Pakistanis, who were opposed to any strong, U.S.-supported government in Kabul, helped the Taliban finance their long-term efforts. Again, limited goals and the lack of a full commitment doomed Washington's war efforts.

The United States has the capability to conduct a blockade with attack submarines and airpower. Such an economic war would certainly hurt the United States, but it would devastate China in the long run. That is the essence of deterrence.

The United States could start building a credible deterrent posture by re-starting the Naval War College Global War Game (GWG) series. There is good evidence that the GWG series got the attention of Soviet planners during the Cold War and convinced them that the United States was serious about its intention and ability to bring the Soviet Union economically and militarily to its knees through aggressive sea and land action. The games did not threaten the Soviet Union directly because they always postulated a Soviet-initiated conflict.

Such a series of games might convince the Chinese that we can make them pay an unacceptably heavy price for attacking Taiwan. They might also help debunk some ill-conceived American concepts regarding war with China, such as the Marine Corps' current Force Design 2030 approach. So far, this notion has only been tested in Marine Corps service-specific war games of dubious quality and rigor, but the Marines have made serious force structure decisions based on them. Such notions warrant a thorough joint and interagency examination.

No one wants a Sino-American war over Taiwan, but the best way to persuade Beijing not to start one is to convince it that an attack will be too costly.

Gary Anderson was the Director of Marine Corps Wargaming and Chief of Staff of the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab. He led the Red Teaming effort that predicted that there would be an insurgency in Iraq in 2003, and became a Special Advisor to the Deputy Secretary of Defense.

Image: Cpl. Djalma Vuong-De Ramos/U.S. Navy Flickr.

As the relationship between the United States and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) becomes more contentious and distrustful, differences between the two countries over the current state and future status of Taiwan—always a source of tension—are becoming more pronounced, and the stakes more elevated. The island is in serious danger of becoming a source of zero-sum strategic competition between Beijing and Washington—a significance it has never possessed in the past. 

For nearly fifty years, Beijing and Washington have successfully avoided the transformation of Taiwan into a focal point of strategic competition and a potential trigger of war. This has been made possible largely because of a tacit, but nonetheless clear, understanding reached between the two nations at the time of normalization and diplomatic recognition. 

This understanding exchanged Washington’s official recognition of the PRC (and derecognition of the Republic of China, or ROC) as the sole legitimate government of China and its “acknowledgment” of the PRC’s position that Taiwan is a part of China. China, in exchange, replaced its stress on forcefully “liberating” Taiwan with a new policy of peaceful unification as a top priority. 

The U.S. side of this understanding constitutes the core of its One China Policy, while Chinese leaders have repeated their position in official statements since the 1970s.

Although Beijing does not accept some aspects of the U.S. One China Policy—e.g., that Washington only “acknowledges” that Taiwan is part of China and holds that the legal status of Taiwan remains undefined—it has, until recently, taken it as a credible statement of a U.S. commitment to refrain from supporting Taiwan if it were to seek sovereignty or permanent separation from mainland China. This has given Beijing the opportunity to focus on reunifying peacefully with the island while sustaining deterrence against possible attempts to violate the understanding. 

To be clear, Beijing has never disavowed the possibility of using force to reunify with Taiwan as a last resort. So too does the process for achieving peaceful unification and the specific features of that end–state (beyond vague descriptions of the “one country, two systems” formula) remain largely undefined. Nonetheless, the United States has seen China’s commitment to peaceful unification as sufficiently credible to justify upholding its One China Policy and limiting its military assistance to Taiwan, albeit in the context of continued arms sales to the island.

Maintaining the viability of this U.S.-China understanding requires the upholding of specific types of behavior. Most importantly, Washington’s scope of relations with Taiwan must remain limited to the unofficial level, defined in ways that are readily understood and accepted, especially by Beijing. In addition, Washington’s resistance to any unilateral effort by Taipei to permanently separate Taiwan from China must remain credible. 

Equally important, to maintain the viability of the One China policy, the United States must continue to reject efforts to treat Taiwan as a full-fledged security ally—e.g., by holding military exercises with Taiwan’s forces, deploying U.S. combat forces to the island, or bringing Taiwan within the U.S. defense network now being built along the Asian littoral. Violations of these behaviors, regardless of whether U.S. officials rhetorically continue to espouse fealty to the One China Policy, directly undermine the U.S.-China understanding; it increases the possibility of a very dangerous conflict over Taiwan, which Washington wants to avoid. 

Similarly, Beijing’s commitment to peaceful unification with Taiwan must also remain credible. This implies continued efforts to engage Taipei in cross-strait talks, to strengthen cross-strait economic, cultural, and social ties, and to avoid acquiring major amphibious or other military capabilities or making deployments that would logically convey preparations for attacking Taiwan.

Unfortunately, the commitments of both the United States and China to the above features, which maintained stability in the Taiwan Strait for decades, have been eroding for several years. This erosion process began in the 1990s, if not earlier, but has accelerated significantly over the past decade with the intensification of competition between Beijing and Washington. 

Although both sides are to blame for this process, the United States is arguably the most dangerous driver of potential conflict. This is because Beijing’s red line is much more easily crossed than Washington’s. For China, the risks and costs of resorting to force to seek control over Taiwan are certain and remain extremely high, while an increasing number of American observers believe that eviscerating or even abrogating the One China policy is a necessary and acceptable risk to deter Beijing.

There is little doubt about the consequences of a Chinese decision to attack Taiwan. Numerous war simulations, Track Two crisis management discussions, and detailed assessments of military capabilities on all sides clearly show that a war over the island would result in a pyrrhic victory, regardless of which side prevails.

Despite the U.S. need to maintain strategic ambiguity as to whether and when it might aid Taiwan in a conflict with Beijing, it is virtually certain that U.S. forces would be deployed to defend the island if China were to attack it without provocation, thus ensuring a major conflict. As a result, Taiwan would suffer enormous physical and economic damage, which would guarantee a deep level of enmity between Taiwan and China for generations. Loss of lives would likely number in the tens of thousands, if not more. China’s economic and diplomatic relations with the United States, Japan, and other major countries would collapse, triggering a major regional and global recession. And military capabilities on all sides would of course be degraded severely through the loss or expenditure of numerous aircraft, ships, missiles, and other weaponry and logistics facilities. Finally, any major war would risk nuclear conflict if one or both sides were to miscalculate.

Xi Jinping has placed significant emphasis on achieving progress toward unification. However, seeking to make progress toward unification and actually moving decisively to achieve unification are two very different things. Despite its increasing reliance on military intimidation, Beijing’s calculus for the actual use of force remains heavily political, not military; it is centered on whether or not Washington entirely abrogates its One China Policy and opts for the permanent separation of Taiwan from China.

Such a U.S. move would back Beijing into a corner and compel it to take the huge risk of using force, either to compel Washington to reverse course or to attempt to resolve the Taiwan problem once and for all. And it would almost certainly do this even if the United States enjoyed a superior military capability, given the extremely high, nationalist stakes involved in China “losing” Taiwan. China is far more motivated to achieve unification through indirect pressure and enticements, as long as Washington does not close off that option by abandoning its One China policy.

The United States weighs different considerations when it contemplates moves that undermine its bilateral understanding with Beijing. Instead of eroding the One China Policy, Washington sees itself as engaging mainly in prudent increases in military deterrence and signals of resolve and support for Taiwan, undertaken without any threat of direct military action and in compliance with the Taiwan Relations Act. However, these have included many actions that clearly undermine the U.S. commitment to conduct only commercial, cultural, and other unofficial relations with Taiwan.

Some of these actions include: using official, governmental types of nomenclature or symbols to describe U.S. offices or maps relevant to Taiwan; sending very senior government officials and military officers to the island; receiving senior Taiwan officials in U.S. government offices in Washington; shrugging off the optics of Nancy Pelosi’s recent visit to Taiwan when she was Speaker of the House, which gave the impression of an official visit; attempting to discourage countries from switching their diplomatic recognition from Taiwan to the PRC; dispatching U.S. military trainers to Taiwan; placing increasing emphasis on the Taiwan Relations Act and the Six Assurances (both intended to justify close defense relations with and to reassure Taiwan) in descriptions of US. policy regarding Taiwan; remarks by a senior U.S. defense official describing Taiwan as a critical strategic node in the U.S. defense posture in Asia; statements by President Joe Biden that the United States will definitely defend Taiwan militarily if China attacks, and that Taiwan alone will determine whether or not the island becomes independent; and an effort by former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, when in office, to lift all limits on relations with Taiwan short of re-establishing formal state-to-state diplomatic relations with the island.

In addition to all these moves, countless numbers of former U.S. officials, members of Congress, defense analysts, and policy experts have advocated a wide range of actions that, if implemented, would severely undermine the One China Policy and, in some cases, clearly violate the understanding with Beijing.

For example, since leaving office Pompeo has openly advocated for the United States to recognize Taiwan as a sovereign, independent nation—a move that would almost certainly lead to an armed crisis if not outright war. Defense analysts such as Elbridge Colby argue that, given its supposedly critical strategic location, Taiwan must be brought within the U.S. defense perimeter. And some serving U.S. military officers want to re-establish elements of the U.S.-ROC mutual security treaty which Washington terminated in 1980, one year after normalizing relations with Beijing. Members of Congress have described Taiwan as a front line in the defense of Guam, Hawaii, and the continental United States, advocating extensive joint military exercises with Taiwan and the deployment of combat forces to the island. Meanwhile, analysts have stoked tensions by predicting a near-imminent war over Taiwan.

Supposedly justified under the provisions of the Taiwan Relations Act or simply seen as a necessary “push–back” against China, many U.S. observers perceive these actions as much less dangerous than many Chinese would perceive a decision by China to launch a military assault on Taiwan. Beijing views these U.S. actions as clear steps toward ending the One China Policy and making Taiwan a full-fledged security ally. Rather than acting as a deterrent, these U.S. actions have strengthened the argument in China for doubling down on its own forms of military deterrence, such as increased military forays and exercises around Taiwan, the firing of ballistic and cruise missiles near the island, and a significant increase in China’s nuclear inventory. All in all, then, the momentum behind breaking the understanding that has kept the peace in the Taiwan Strait for nearly fifty years is stronger on the U.S. side.

Some observers call for China to begin breaking this vicious cycle by unilaterally reducing its military displays near Taiwan, thus giving the United States a strong reason to reverse its de facto weakening of the One China Policy. However, the steady, seemingly unstoppable erosion of that policy and the many supporters of such actions both in and out of the U.S. government strongly suggest that such a response is unlikely. Few even admit that the policy is being hollowed out. China might, therefore, reasonably believe that if they reduce their military pressure on Taiwan, the United States will respond to China’s perceived weakness by further hollowing out its One China Policy.

The only logical solution to this problem is for Washington and Beijing to explicitly agree on a set of reciprocal, credible reassurance measures that will breathe life back into their original understanding regarding Taiwan. To keep the peace across the Taiwan Strait, there is no viable alternative to exchanging clear, credible assurances of U.S. limits on relations with Taiwan and its implacable opposition to any unilateral move toward Taiwan independence, with China reciprocating by reiterating assurances that it rejects any timeline for unification and will end its military exercises near the island of Taiwan. Reaching this sort of agreement should be at the center of any senior-level Sino-U.S. dialogues.

Michael D. Swaine is director of the Quincy Institute’s East Asia program.

Image: 

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s February 2023 visit to Argentina, Brazil, and Chile is something that the Biden administration could learn from. Germany, one of the world’s oldest and most competitive auto hubs, is deeply concerned about gaining and maintaining access to lithium, a key component in batteries used to power electric vehicles (EVs). Without lithium, there will be serious problems in making the batteries used to power EVs. There is not much lithium in Europe, but around 60 percent of the world’s total supply is in three countries often referred to as the “lithium triangle”; Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile. National security also factors high for Germany, which is seeking to diversify its energy sourcing away from Russia. And it faces another geopolitical risk: the country that has the most access to the world’s lithium is China, which also happens to currently make 79 percent of lithium-ion batteries, handles half of the world’s lithium refining, and has its own rapidly expanding EV industry. For Germany’s Scholz, a trip to Argentina and Chile is worth the visit. Can the same be said of U.S. President Joe Biden?

It is worth briefly reviewing Chancellor Scholz’s visit. He met with the leaders of Argentina, Chile, and Brazil, with the stated intention of helping his country’s companies develop stronger business ties with Latin America. German companies have traditionally been active in the region, especially in the automotive industry and more recently with renewable energy. Germany is one of the top 10 trade partners of the three countries of the 2023 visit and a major foreign direct investor. 

While considerable attention was given during the Scholz visit to Brazil to the revitalization of the European Union-Mercosur trade deal, which languished due to discord with Brazil’s Bolsonaro government, lithium loomed large in talks with Argentina and Chile. Considering that the automotive sector plays a large role in the German economy, securing lithium sources for EV batteries has taken on a sense of urgency in Berlin.

Bolivian Troubles

German companies have made early attempts to access the lithium triangle through Bolivia. According to the U.S. Geological Service, Bolivia sits on the largest reserves at 21 million tons, followed by Argentina with 19 million tons and then Chile with 9.8 million tons. While Argentina and Chile have lithium sectors that are up and exporting, backed by a cadre of foreign companies and expertise, Bolivia’s lithium has largely remained in the ground. Under President Evo Morales (2006–2019) efforts were made to launch the sector, but the strategy was constructed around a poorly-run state company (now called Yacimientos de Litio Bolivianos, or YLB). Complicating matters, Bolivia was generally perceived as non-investor friendly, with the Morales government presiding over an earlier nationalization of the gas industry. However, over time it was understood that lithium could become a new export for the country, though the preference remained that YLB would partner with foreign investors, creating a state-dominated sector that operates everything from salts-to-battery materials. Under such a scheme, Bolivia would move from being just an extractor of lithium to exporting adding value-added goods. 

In 2018, Bolivia negotiated two joint venture deals—one with Germany’s ACI Systems to produce lithium hydroxide and another with China’s Xinjiang TBEA to produce lithium from two salt flats. The deal was greeted with considerable excitement in Germany, with the country’s then Economy Minister Peter Altmaier stating, “Germany should become a leading location for battery cell production. A large part of production costs are linked to raw materials. German industry is therefore well advised to secure its needs for lithium early in order to avoid falling behind and slipping into dependency.” 

German excitement over the deal, however, quickly soured when Bolivian protests erupted in 2019 over local demands for higher royalties for the country. Confronted with a nationalist backlash, Morales canceled the contracts. Morales was soon ousted (partially due to his resistance to his wish to extend his presidential tenure beyond the constitutionally-mandated fourteen years). It was also rumored that control over lithium reserves was the real reason for Morales’ forced exit, which was said to have been done with the support of Western governments and Tesla owner Elon Musk.

Bolivia’s interest in accessing foreign help in the lithium sector resumed under the government of President Luis Arce (elected in 2020), who has stated that he wants to make his country “the world capital of lithium.” His objective is for Bolivia to supply 40 percent of global lithium by 2030. A new bidding process to launch the lithium business was initiated in 2022, with a number of foreign companies participating—including three Chinese firms (in a consortium called CBC standing for CATL, Brunp, and CMOC), U.S.-based EnergyX, Russia’s Uranium One, and Lilac Solutions (backed by German automaker BMW and Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Ventures). CATL is the world’s largest maker of batteries, Brunp is majority-owned by CATL and is a recycling technology company, and CMOC is the largest molybdenum miner in the world and a major force in tungsten, cobalt, niobium, and copper production. 

In late January 2023, Bolivia signed a deal with the Chinese CBC to develop the country’s lithium deposits. YLB estimates that lithium will begin export in 2025. As part of the deal, the CBC will undertake the construction of “infrastructure, highways, and necessary conditions to jumpstart the plants.” The deal received a mixed reaction among the public and foreign parties. It was said that China got the deal because it offered an infrastructure overhaul and that the Chinese government actively promoted the deal with a left-leaning Bolivian government that has often harbored anti-U.S. sentiment.

What Berlin Wants

Considering the high political risk in Bolivia, Argentina, and Chile have greater appeal for German companies. Although China is active in both nations, companies from other countries have set up shop, including entities from Australia, Canada, South Korea, and the United States. Despite ongoing political froth, there is a broad consensus in Argentina that lithium is open for business, though environmental challenges exist. Chile has a more structured system and is awaiting government plans to possibly create a state company. 

In Argentina and Chile Scholz made three important points.

First, Germany wants to advance its energy transition away from fossil fuels to cleaner energy, which means greater use of lithium batteries for EVs and other technological goods and public utilities. Buenos Aires and Santiago are imports of Berlin’s new energy map. 

Second, Germany wants to make certain that it secures the right energy sources so end its dependency on Russian fossil fuel and reduce Chinese leverage in lithium batteries. For Germany, the Russo-Ukraine War that erupted in February 2022 has been highly disruptive, as it upended its considerable dependence on Russia for oil, natural gas, and coal. In addition, the shutdown of the country’s nuclear industry and slower-than-expected alternative fuel programs left the Scholz government scrambling to secure new sources of energy, with the Chancellor and other high-ranking officials visiting a number of Middle Eastern and African countries to secure supplies of natural gas and oil. 

Third, Germany is very open to the idea of allowing local value being added to the production process. In Buenos Aires, he stated, “The question is: Can one not move the processing of these materials, which creates thousands of jobs, to those countries where these materials come from?” A country does not have to have a free trade agreement with Germany to develop the trade in lithium and/or batteries, which is the U.S. policy under the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) passed in 2022. Under the IRA, it will be much easier to export Chilean lithium to the United States than for Argentina to do so. However, the United States, like Germany, faces limitations on its supply of lithium, as well as considerable environmental hurdles (the Biden administration has killed several recent mining deals related to clean energy).

German Lessons

As Chancellor Scholz met with Argentina’s President Alberto Fernandez in Buenos Aires and later his Chilean counterpart Gabriel Boric in Santiago, thought must have been given as to when was the last time a U.S. president ventured into these countries to help generate business and uphold national energy security. President Donald Trump was the last U.S. leader to visit Argentina in 2018, attending the G20 meeting. President Barack Obama was the last U.S. leader to visit Chile in 2011. No U.S. president has visited Bolivia, and Washington has lacked an ambassador in La Paz since 2008, with its business being conducted by the chargé d’affaires. Germany has an ambassador in each country; so does China.

The main lesson from Scholz’s trip to the lithium triangle is quite elementary: if you want to play, you have to show up. This is something that President Joe Biden and his foreign policy and energy teams need to think harder about. 

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.

Russian President Vladimir Putin announced Russia’s suspension of the New START Treaty on February 21. New START is the last remaining nuclear arms control agreement between Russia and the United States. The treaty limits the size of both arsenals to 1,550 nuclear warheads deployed on 700 strategic delivery systems—a combination of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and long-range bombers. It also provides a verification procedure that allows officials from each country to inspect nuclear sites in the other.

While Russia has not officially withdrawn from the treaty, its suspension likely foreshadows the treaty’s demise. Future expansion of Russia’s nuclear arsenal is possible. However, the immediate concern is a resumption of nuclear testing. Russian president Vladimir Putin mentioned the possibility of testing in his announcement, directing Rosatom—Russia’s state-run nuclear energy company—to begin preparations for testing.

This testing will have two goals. First, Russia will use nuclear tests as a tool of coercive diplomacy. Tests will be timed to coincide with events of political or military importance. These tests could occur ahead of new offensives in Ukraine or an expansion of Russian attacks on civilian infrastructure. Beyond Ukraine, nuclear testing could precede efforts to destabilize other Russian neighbors, such as the potential plot to overthrow the Moldovan government.

These nuclear tests would serve as signals that Russia is willing to use its arsenal in the event of U.S. or NATO operations against Russia. In the case of Russian military operations—whether the current operation in Ukraine or future operations elsewhere—these tests could be part of a Russian strategy to prevent the escalation of a local conflict to a regional conflict. This escalation management is a central feature of Russian military doctrine. Experts have claimed that nuclear weapons are important tools for escalation management, although there is debate about how these weapons may be used or not used.

Russia already engages in nuclear signaling for these purposes. Putin and other Russian leaders have used nuclear threats repeatedly during and before the war in Ukraine. Nuclear-capable hypersonic weapons were deployed to Kaliningrad and Syria—where they would be within range of NATO capitals in Western Europe and the Mediterranean—in the weeks preceding the invasion. Nuclear testing would add another means for coercive nuclear signaling.

This strategy would not be uniquely Russian. North Korea also pairs nuclear testing with political objectives. North Korean tests often coincide with joint U.S.-South Korean military drills, the inauguration of new U.S. or South Korean presidents, or important events in U.S. relations with South Korea, Japan, or China.

The second goal of renewed nuclear testing is to improve Russia’s nuclear arsenal. Russia is currently engaged in a major nuclear modernization program. This modernization impacts all three legs of Russia’s nuclear triad and includes both upgrades to existing capabilities—such as developing the Sarmat ICBM or the Borei-A SSBN—and novel systems such as the Avangard hypersonic glide vehicle.

Both Russia and the United States have developed new warheads and delivery systems without detonating a nuclear weapon over the past few decades. Computer modeling has allowed both countries to design and evaluate new weapons. American nuclear maintenance and modernization through the Department of Energy’s Stockpile Stewardship Program have been a success. Officials expect to rely on Stockpile Stewardship rather than test detonations for the foreseeable future.

Russia’s military maintenance and modernization programs have not been as reliable as their American counterparts. Russia has experienced repeated military failures in Ukraine, despite a comprehensive and costly conventional modernization program following another shockingly poor performance during the 2008 Russo-Georgian War. Reports of corruption and ineptitude in Russia’s defense industry and military have surfaced, alleging that much of Russia’s investment in conventional modernization went into the pockets of various elites instead of into new and better equipment.

The failure of Russia’s conventional modernization has led to speculation about the state of Russia’s nuclear arsenal. The corruption and ineptitude of Russia’s defense industrial and military leadership may degrade the reliability of Russian weapons. Testing may allow Russian leaders to confirm the capabilities of new systems better than computer modeling, assuaging fears of an unreliable nuclear deterrent. Testing also shows adversaries that these weapons will work, improving the deterrent abilities of Russia’s nuclear arsenal.

If testing is to occur, it will most likely happen at Novaya Zemlya. The Arctic archipelago is heavily militarized and was one of the Soviet Union’s main nuclear testing sites. Tsar Bomba, the largest nuclear device designed and detonated, was tested there.

Russia has increased the development of military infrastructure and capabilities in its far north, including Novaya Zemlya, over the past several years. The region is perceived as critical to Russian security, and the resumption of nuclear testing would increase its strategic value to Moscow. This could lead to further militarization of the Russian Arctic. 

Increasing Arctic militarization would have significant strategic consequences for other Arctic powers, all of whom are current or aspiring NATO members. Russia has expanded its claims to the Arctic seafloor over the past few years, bringing its territorial claims into greater contact with those of Canada and Norway. Russia and Norway are also engaged in tense relations along their land and maritime Arctic borders. These disputes have become increasingly militarized. Increasing Russian military assets in the Arctic would exacerbate these disputes and increase the insecurity of other Arctic states, including the United States. 

While I would argue the impending death of New START is likely, it is not guaranteed. The United States should attempt to revive Russian participation in the deal. But it is unlikely that efforts will be successful, especially without concessions that are unacceptable to the United States and its allies.

Given the likely failure of diplomatic overtures to Moscow, the United States and NATO must be ready to deal with the resumption of Russian nuclear testing. American nuclear testing is probably not necessary. However, improving defenses in the Arctic—a region the United States has deprioritized—is. In addition to developing its own capabilities, the United States must work with critical Arctic partners such as Canada, Norway, and Denmark. Non-Arctic NATO members such as the United Kingdom and France should also engage with Arctic allies and ensure that their naval forces can contribute to enhancing Arctic security.

This also increases the urgency of adding Sweden and Finland to NATO. Both countries are Arctic powers. Both add significant military capabilities to the alliance in a region of vulnerability. They also have the means and geography to provide important intelligence on Russian activity on or near Novaya Zemlya.

Russia’s suspension of New START participation is the latest in a sequence of events leading to the likely death of the treaty. Russia publically suspended U.S. inspections of Russian sites in August and withdrew from the treaty’s bilateral consultative commission meeting in Cairo in December. On-site verification inspections have been on indefinite hiatus since 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Why is Russia taking this step now? The likely reason is that the cost of withdrawal has decreased for Russia while the benefits of testing have become increasingly important. Russia will need to increase its reliance on nuclear weapons to deter either an adversary’s aggression against Russia or an international intervention to support Ukraine. 

Meanwhile, unilateral suspension of or withdrawal from the treaty would likely bring significant condemnation from international actors. Supporters of greater arms control would call for increasing Russia’s isolation. This could harm Russia’s trade and relations with its European neighbors. 

This potential harm has already happened. Russia’s isolation from these states has grown significantly over the course of the war, and trade—especially in oil and gas—has plummeted with Europe. Much of this trade has shifted to China and India, with the potential for future trade growth with both Beijing and New Delhi. Neither has strong support for arms control agreements. China has resisted efforts to bring it into an arms control regime and has interests in expanding its own arsenal. It has also built an increasingly close partnership with Russia. 

India, meanwhile, has been an outspoken critic of the global arms control and nonproliferation regime since its inception in the 1960s. India may also benefit economically from new nuclear testing. Advancements in nuclear weapons technology could spill over into Russia’s civilian nuclear sector, which has been an important partner for India’s small but growing nuclear energy industry.

The death of New START is likely upon us. In its wake is the increasing potential for a new era of Russian nuclear testing. This testing will increase the effectiveness of Russian nuclear weapons, become a tool for coercive diplomacy, and lead to greater militarization in the Arctic. Russia may also expand its nuclear arsenal. But the strategic and political impacts of doing so will likely be less than the impacts of nuclear testing. The United States has a large stockpile of non-deployed nuclear weapons that could match Russian nuclear expansion for some time. And this expansion will be limited by financial and resource constraints, especially as conventional losses increase the cost of replacing materiel.

Spenser A. Warren is a Ph.D. candidate studying political science at Indiana University Bloomington. His dissertation explores the sources of Russian nuclear modernization, and his broader research program focuses on nuclear politics, Russian foreign policy, and Transatlantic security.

Image: Shutterstock.

Though Ukraine was the focus of this year’s Munich Security Conference, interesting developments regarding a different conflict in Russia’s near abroad occurred on the sidelines of the conference: the Amernia-Azerbaijan conflict.

On February 18, Armenian prime minister Nikol Pashinyan and Azerbaijani president Ilham Aliyev held talks at a meeting hosted by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken. Both leaders took the opportunity to discuss a number of important issues: the draft peace treaty between the two states, the delimitation of inter-state borders, and the opening of transportation communications.

This, of course, was not the first time such a high-level meeting between the two leaders was mediated by a third party—what differed this time around however was who was meditating between the two.

For a long period of time, Russia was the principal mediator between Armenia and Azerbaijan. However, since 2021, this role has been contested by the European Union. Moreover, due to the war in Ukraine, the OSCE Minsk Group—which since the 1990s has held the mandate to assist in negotiating a peaceful settlement between Armenia and Azerbaijan but was widely regarded as a failure—has effectively ceased to function.

Russia has not been receptive to this change: it has repeatedly criticized the EU’s mediation efforts, accusing the West of attempting “to hijack Armenian-Azerbaijani peace talks.” On February 17, the spokeswoman of the Russian foreign ministry, Maria Zakharova, expressed skepticism that U.S. mediation has “any added value.”

The change in meditator is important to consider, as Russia and the West have different motives to get involved in these peace talks—and these motives can shape negotiation outcomes in the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict. 

Russian Motives

As the traditional hegemonic power in the South Caucasus and arbiter in the decades-long Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict, Russia is inclined to cling to preserving its regional dominance. At the moment, its primary mechanism for doing so is by trying to extend the presence of its peacekeeping contingent, deployed after the end of the Second Karabakh War in 2020. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, however, threatens its influence in the South Caucasus—the war is draining away Moscow’s military power and economic resources. Moscow worries that its declining influence will upset the region’s balance of power. The West, along with local middle-sized powers like Türkiye, have stepped into this breach and are seizing the opportunity to extend their influence in this strategically important region.  

The Kremlin realizes that, once the conflict’s two belligerents come to a basic agreement, Moscow’s involvement will become redundant. The Russian peacekeeping troops deployed in 2020 have a fixed term ending in 2025—though an extension is theoretically possible. Baku, however, has made it clear that it considers the presence of these peacekeepers on its internationally recognized territory to be a temporary affair, and will not endorse an extension beyond 2025.

In other words, if Armenia and Azerbaijan reach an agreement under Western auspices, Russia’s influence in the region would be significantly degraded. For that reason, Moscow seeks to preserve its influence in the following ways:

First, Moscow seeks a long-term military presence on the ground. For that, it requires the occasional flare-up of inter-ethnic tensions in order to justify maintaining Russian peacekeepers in the Karabakh region. 

Second, Moscow can further justify its presence by dividing Armenian political unity. It is conceivable, for example, that the Kremlin-orchestrated arrival of the Russian oligarch Ruben Vardanyan (who is of Armenia origin) is part of a scheme to only inflame tensions between local Armenians and Azerbaijan, but also to drive a wedge between Karabakh Armenians and the Western-leaning government in Yerevan. Vardanyan’s arrival caused a major standoff on the Lachin road between Azerbaijani government-backed activists and Karabakh Armenians—which only serves to further justify the presence of Russian peacekeepers.  

Third, Moscow’s plan for a peace treaty contains a provision postponing resolving the status of Karabakh. In the words of the Russian envoy to Yerevan, “the status of Nagorno-Karabakh is an issue that should be left to the next generation.” This ambiguity provides Moscow with additional leverage in future bargaining with Baku.

Western Mediation

Since 2021, there have been complementary efforts by the Biden administration in the United States and European Council president Charles Michel to play an increasingly active role in mediating between Baku and Yerevan.

Both the United States and the EU are interested in ending the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict, as its unresolved status has been a major stumbling block in the South Caucasus’ emancipation from Russia’s imperial projections of power. If the conflict were to be partly or fully resolved, it would undermine Moscow by removing the underlying source of Russian leverage in the region. 

Additionally, the West is also pursuing its own interests by seeking to extend its influence in this traditionally Russia-linked sub-region. Due to geographic location and historic ties, Russia views this region as a key element of its strategy to avoid complete isolation. The West wants to reverse this by turning both Armenia and Azerbaijan away from Russia’s sphere of influence. 

Finally, both the United States and EU believe that the normalization of ties between Baku and Yerevan depends upon the mutual recognition of territorial integrity and emphasizing the rights and security of ethnic Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh. Western mediators are concerned about the fate of this Armenian population once it is fully re-integrated into Azerbaijan proper. Therefore, since mid-2022, both Washington and Brussels have proposed direct talks between Baku and representatives of the Armenian community in Xankəndi—which local Armenians call by its Soviet name, Stepanakert—with the intention of establishing credible guarantees. Promisingly, at this year’s Munich Security Conference, Aliyev stated that “it was agreed with our international partners that there will be discussions on the rights and security of the Armenian minority in Karabakh.”

What’s Next?

Which peace treaty proposal will prevail hinges upon what is acceptable to both Armenia and Azerbaijan, and the capacity of the mediator in being able to support a peace deal. So far, the EU and the United States seem to be outcompeting Russia in this regard. Azerbaijan will definitely favor the West’s proposal, which calls upon both sides to respect each other’s territorial integrity, and rejects the Russian proposal that risks delaying the status issue. Armenia, on the other hand, prefers the Russian proposal, though the Pashinyan government is cognizant of the risks associated with tying its future security with Russia. Despite its bilateral security alliance with Russia and its membership in the Russia-led Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), the CSTO proved to be unreliable when Armenian troops clashed with the Azerbaijani military along the inter-state border—and the latter reportedly captured some strategic heights inside the Armenian territory—in September last year. This triggered the search for alternative security allies, and ultimately the establishment of a new two-year EU Mission in Armenia (EUMA). While the mission raised eyebrows in Russia and Azerbaijan, it could actually incentivize Yerevan to pursue a peace proposal offered by the West.  

The competing logics of third-party interests will interfere and might complicate the process of reaching a final agreement unless Russia is completely exhausted by its war efforts in Ukraine. Once Russia stops scheming against a peace treaty, the chances are that the sides will finally agree on a lasting peace.

Farid Guliyev, Ph.D., is a Lecturer in Comparative Politics at the Department of Political Science and Philosophy at Khazar University in Baku. The views expressed herein are solely the responsibility of the author.

Image: Sameer Madhukar Chogale/Shutterstock.