Diplomacy & Crisis News

Peter Suciu

Hypersonic Weapons,

A recent meeting between Secretary Austin and defense industry leaders shed light on what industry insiders believe might be causing delays in hypersonic weapons development.

Earlier this month, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin met with the CEOs of more than two dozen of America's largest defense contractors and called for accelerated efforts to develop hypersonic weapons. Austin’s call comes as China and Russia are making advancements in the development of the game-changing technology.

Top executives from Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, Leidos, Aerojet Rocketdyne, BAE Systems, L3Harris, and about a half dozen other defense companies were represented at the meeting, which was chaired by Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks.

"We need to anticipate how [China is] going to evolve its capabilities. And we need to be out in front of that," Austin told attendees of the meeting.

Capable of reaching speeds of Mach 5 or faster, hypersonic weapons are incredibly difficult to detect, something that poses a significant challenge to missile defense systems. Hypersonic missiles can also maneuver and evade missile defense systems while in flight. In addition, hypersonic missiles can travel at a far lower trajectory than high-arching ballistic missiles, which are more easily detectable.

The United States’ effort to develop hypersonic weapons has suffered multiple setbacks in recent months. In October, the Pentagon said a test of a hypersonic glide body failed due to a problem with its rocket. In addition, a hypersonic missile failed to separate from a B-52H Stratofortress bomber during a test at Edwards Air Force Base last April. April’s test was the eighth test aimed at determining how to arm the Cold War-era bomber with the advanced AGM-182A Air-launched Rapid Response Weapon.

Three military branches, as well as DARPA and the Missile Defense Agency, are now pursuing their own programs. The 2022 Department of Defense budget committed $3.8 billion to hypersonic research, an increase from the previous year's $3.2 billion. While funding has been increased, one issue will be determining how the Pentagon should allocate funding for those various programs.

"The meeting between industry heads and a Defense Secretary was a rare occurrence and serves to underscore that hypersonic development is a priority to the U.S. military," explained William Davies, an analyst at the international analytics firm GlobalData.

"Despite a concerted push by DoD officials to advance hypersonic weapon timelines, the ambition will not be realized unless the 2023 budget shows targeted funding for achieving deployment of ongoing programs," Davies added.

The meeting between Secretary Austin and the defense industry leaders shed light on what industry insiders believe might be causing delays in hypersonic weapons development. Several factors have been cited, including supply chain constraints, budget instability, and access to wind testing facilities.

Such complaints will likely have an impact on future budget priorities, which may also include increasing workforce development funds to ensure that the United States remains competitive with its adversaries, GlobaData suggested.

"The U.S. has expressed significant concern recently about the proliferation of hypersonic weapons amongst adversaries, and this meeting will likely serve to focus minds on what needs to be done to enable defense primes to bring weapons to market on schedule," Davies noted. "The U.S. is likely to prioritize testing infrastructure such as wind tunnels and missile test ranges in coming years, but whether this will be enough to speed up development remains to be seen."

Peter Suciu is a Michigan-based writer who has contributed to more than four dozen magazines, newspapers and websites. He regularly writes about military small arms, and is the author of several books on military headgear including A Gallery of Military Headdress, which is available on Amazon.com.

Image: Reuters.

Parents and pregnant women globally are exposed to aggressive marketing for baby formula milk, according to a report launched jointly by two UN agencies on Tuesday.

The latest developments in Ukraine are testing “the entire international system”, Secretary-General António Guterres said at a media stakeout on Tuesday, adding “we must pass this test.”

Trevor Filseth

Burkina Faso Coup, Africa

The coup in Burkina Faso marks the third high-profile overthrow of a government in West Africa since 2019.

The United States announced on Friday that it would suspend a $160 million aid package to Burkina Faso after an internal review concluded that the military’s overthrow of President Roch Kabore constituted a coup d’etat.

Because U.S. law automatically forbids providing aid to military governments that depose democratically-elected leaders, the aid package was frozen after the determination was made, according to Reuters.

“The State Department assesses that a military coup took place in Burkina Faso,” a statement issued by a State Department spokesperson read. “Therefore, approximately $158.6 million in foreign assistance that benefits the Government of Burkina Faso is restricted.”

However, the government also indicated that the law allows for exceptions to the blanket ban, including for the provision of essential humanitarian goods such as medicines.

Kabore was overthrown in January after a bloodless but chaotic military coup that began when Burkinabe soldiers took control of a military base in Ouagadougou, the country’s capital. Although Kabore was initially reported to have escaped an attempted kidnapping by the mutineers, it was later revealed that he was imprisoned at the base. While the leaders of the mutiny initially issued a series of demands for the government, they did not indicate that they would depose Kabore. After a day of uncertainty, however, they backtracked and announced that they would seize power. The junta’s leader, Lt. Col. Paul-Henri Damiba, was officially sworn into office as the country’s president on Wednesday.

The military junta justified its overthrow of Kabore by criticizing his failure to quell an Islamist insurgency in the country’s eastern border regions. The ongoing insurgency has forced more than one million citizens, or roughly five percent of the country’s population, to flee their homes.

The coup in Burkina Faso marks the third high-profile overthrow of a government in West Africa since 2019. In neighboring Mali, army officer Assimi Goita seized control of the country in 2020 and launched a second coup in May 2021 to dismiss civilian elements of the government and consolidate power. Then, in September 2021, Mamady Doumbouya, a Guinean special forces officer, orchestrated a coup of his own, overthrowing Guinean leader Alpha Conde. Goita and Doumbouya reportedly knew one another, as both had received counterterrorism training from U.S. forces.

The wave of military takeovers has destabilized West Africa, causing French troops to depart from Mali and leading to an uptick in Islamist insurgent violence across the Sahel region.

Trevor Filseth is a current and foreign affairs writer for the National Interest.

Image: Reuters.

Mark Episkopos

Russia-Ukraine War, Ukraine

It is unclear if the advancing Russian forces will confine their presence to the separatist Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics or if they will seek to establish a perimeter in the broader Donbas region.

Russian president Vladimir Putin has ordered troops into two rebel-held regions in eastern Ukraine.

The announcement follows an hour-long presidential address on Monday in which Putin framed Ukraine as a historically and culturally inseparable part of Russia’s sphere of influence. Russian lawmakers voted unanimously on Tuesday to authorize Putin to use military force in Donbas

It is unclear if the advancing Russian forces will confine their presence to the separatist Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics (DNR and LNR) in the near term, or if they will seek to establish a perimeter in the broader Donbas region.

Video footage has emerged of main battle tanks (MBTs) and other military equipment rolling into the separatist-controlled city of Donetsk. The scale of the Russian intervention—both in the number of participating military personnel and the types of military equipment used—remains unknown, as do the Kremlin’s long-term military aims.

Putin characterized the deployment as a “peacekeeping” effort, following allegations from Moscow and the separatists that Ukraine is conducting a “genocide” against the majority Russian-speaking, pro-Russian population of the eastern Donbas region. U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations (U.N.) Linda Thomas-Greenfield said Moscow’s peacekeeping claim was “nonsense,” adding, “we know what they really are."

Deputy National Security Advisor Jon Finer described Russia’s Donbas deployment as an  “invasion,” a term the White House was initially hesitant to use. “We think this is, yes, the beginning of an invasion,” Finer told CNN on Tuesday. “I am calling it an invasion. We’re taking a severe response including sanctions on Russia [that] we’ll be rolling out in a matter of hours.”

The Biden administration has implemented a mild initial sanctions package involving prohibitions on “new investment, trade, and financing by U.S. persons to, from, or in the so-called DNR and LNR regions of Ukraine,” with White House press secretary Jen Psaki noting that additional measures will come later this week. British prime minister Boris Johnson announced financial restrictions on five Russian banks and three Russian billionaires—a package he described as the “first barrage” of British sanctions on Moscow. Berlin has suspended the certification process for Nord Stream 2, a natural gas pipeline running from Russia to Germany.

“Moscow has moved from covert attempts to destabilize Ukraine to overt military action,” said NATO secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg during a briefing on Tuesday. “We will continue to provide Ukraine with strong political support and allies are providing equipment to help Ukraine defend itself as well as sustained financial support.”

Western governments and intelligence sources have expressed concern that the entry of Russian troops into territories currently not under direct Ukrainian control could be followed by a full-scale invasion and occupation of all or large parts of the country.

Mark Episkopos is a national security reporter for the National Interest.

Image: Reuters.

Stephen Silver

Child Tax Credit,

Romney's deal may be the only way for the child tax credit to survive, although whether it has enough support remains an open question.

The expanded child tax credit expired at the end of 2021 after it became clear that there wasn’t enough support to pass the Build Back Better package, which would have funded the credit for one more year.

Despite this setback, a number of Democratic senators have continued to push for a continuation of the expanded credit, and some lawmakers have highlighted that the expiration of the credit led to a noticeable increase in child poverty in the first month of 2022. However, as long as Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) continues to oppose the credit, it’s unclear how something resembling the Build Back Better version can pass a divided Senate.

One possible way around that barrier is a bipartisan version of the child allowance proposal, which was put forward in early 2020 by Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT). Earlier this week, NBC News looked at what form such a deal would take.

“His proposal would bring back the direct monthly payments many parents used for six months last year to cover the cost of food, clothing, and child care before Congress let the tax credit expire," NBC reported. “But Romney's form of extra monthly payments would add stringent work requirements, slash programs that aid vulnerable Americans and make significant changes to the tax code.”

Such a deal may be the only way for the child tax credit to survive, although whether it could get enough support from both parties remains an open question. Democratic supporters of the expanded credit have not been receptive to the idea of work requirements. However, Romney did tell NBC that multiple Democratic senators have expressed interest, although he did not name those senators.

“I think momentum is growing quite a bit, and there’s more interest because folks on the right want to do something,” an aide to Romney said. “I think folks on the left are realizing if they don’t do it bipartisan, it’s not going to happen.” While Romney has not officially introduced legislation for the proposal this year, he did introduce a similar proposal in early 2020.

“I’ve spoken with enough Democrats, including Joe Manchin, that insist that that’s essential. And, by the way, a number of Republicans, as well, say that’s absolutely essential—there has to be a work requirement,” Romney said last month during a speech at the American Enterprise Institute.

Stephen Silver, a technology writer for The National Interest, is a journalist, essayist and film critic, who is also a contributor to The Philadelphia Inquirer, Philly Voice, Philadelphia Weekly, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Living Life Fearless, Backstage magazine, Broad Street Review and Splice Today. The co-founder of the Philadelphia Film Critics Circle, Stephen lives in suburban Philadelphia with his wife and two sons. Follow him on Twitter at @StephenSilver.

Image: Reuters.

The BA.2 virus, a sublineage of the Omicron COVID-19 mutation, should continue to be considered a variant of concern, scientists convened by the World Health Organization (WHO) said in a statement on Tuesday. 

Local elections in the Central African Republic (CAR), which have been pending since 1988 and are slated for September, will deepen efforts to decentralize power and expand political space, the UN envoy for the country told the Security Council on Tuesday, encouraging the new Government to “deploy all possible efforts” to calm the political climate.

Kris Osborn

China-Taiwan War, Asia

A Chinese invasion of Taiwan could be made more likely if U.S. forces were not operating in close enough proximity to intervene against a Chinese assault.

There is a less recognized but equally dangerous subtext to the expected Russian invasion of Ukraine: the question of China.

Could China feel emboldened by a successful Russian invasion of Ukraine and seize the opportunity to invade and annex Taiwan? China may see an opportunity to move if the United States is distracted as it attempts to secure sensitive border regions in Eastern Europe. Moreover, depending on the United States’ response to any Russian aggression, China may estimate that U.S. forces would not directly confront China to defend Taiwan.

“China is watching. We shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that what we are about to see in Ukraine could be repeated further east,” said Tim Morrison, Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute and former Deputy Assistant to the President for National Security.

Pentagon officials have routinely emphasized that U.S. forces will not fight in Ukraine, and Russian forces are expected to attack at any moment. Could China gamble on the possibility that the United States might take a similar stance regarding Taiwan? This could be made more likely if U.S. Navy forces were not forward operating in close enough proximity to intervene against a Chinese amphibious assault on Taiwan.

Regardless of how the United States would respond, Morrison’s point that China might seize an opportunity to invade rings true in light of China’s massive uptick in drills, war preparations, and fighter jet patrols near Taiwan.

However, as was the case with Russia’s military buildup near Ukraine, satellites observing the Pacific theater would likely detect a large Chinese amphibious attack force being prepared to move on Taiwan. This might give the U.S. Navy, which already maintains a regular presence in the region, an opportunity to marshal the forces and resources necessary to counter a Chinese attack. These forces would likely include F-35 fighters, Tomahawk missiles, and Amphibious Ready Groups.

As Japan’s Southern Islands are between 500 and 1,000 miles north of Taiwan, it is entirely possible that a U.S.-Japanese coalition might be able to intercept or attack an approaching Chinese amphibious force. Tomahawks, for example, can travel as far as 900 miles, and newer Tomahawks can use a two-way data link and sensor to adjust course and destroy moving targets at sea. In tactical terms, this means that a Navy destroyer armed with Tomahawks might be capable of targeting Chinese amphibious assault ships at distances of up to 900 miles.

These response capabilities would be crucial in any effort to defend Taiwan. This is because, unlike Ukraine, Taiwan is surrounded by water, which would make it difficult to quickly deploy mechanized land forces to defend Taiwan.

Kris Osborn is the Defense Editor for the National Interest. Osborn previously served at the Pentagon as a Highly Qualified Expert with the Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army—Acquisition, Logistics & Technology. Osborn has also worked as an anchor and on-air military specialist at national TV networks. He has appeared as a guest military expert on Fox News, MSNBC, The Military Channel, and The History Channel. He also has a Master's Degree in Comparative Literature from Columbia University.

Image: Reuters.

Peter Suciu

Polish Military, Europe

If Putin was hoping that his saber-rattling would make NATO cave to his demands, his plan has failed spectacularly.

Russian president Vladimir Putin has demanded that NATO return to its 1997 status and remove many of the former Warsaw Pact nations that joined the alliance in recent decades. While it isn't likely that Putin would mount an invasion of his Eastern European neighbors yet, there is little denying that he'd like to see many of them back in Moscow's sphere of influence. However, the Polish government is now doing everything it can to ensure that never happens.

It was announced last week that Warsaw is pushing forward with a plan to purchase $6 billion of military hardware and equipment from the United States. That move comes as Russia continues to mass troops on its border with Ukraine. "Some of those forces [are] within 200 miles of the Polish border," U.S. secretary of defense Lloyd Austin noted during a press conference Friday.

Weapons Heading to Poland

According to the U.S. State Department, the newly announced deal would include 250 M1A2 Abrams main battle tanks, 250 short-range jamming systems, twenty-six combat recovery vehicles, and around 800 machine guns.

Contractors involved in the sale include BAE Systems, Leonardo DRS, Honeywell, Raytheon Technologies, and Lockheed Martin, DefenseNews reported.

"This proposed sale will support the foreign policy and national security of the United States by helping to improve the security of a NATO Ally that is a force for political stability and economic progress in Europe," the Defense Security Cooperation Agency announced in a release. "The proposed sale will improve Poland's capability to meet current and future threats by providing a credible force that is capable of deterring adversaries and participating in NATO operations. Poland will have no difficulty absorbing this equipment into its armed forces."

Warsaw has been engaged in a sweeping military modernization effort. In 2019, Warsaw inked a $6.5 billion deal to buy thirty-two F-35 fighters, and subsequent agreements have been made for Poland to purchase mobile rocket artillery systems from the United States.

Congressional Support

Many U.S. lawmakers have also shown their support for Poland in the face of Russia’s aggression and posturing.

Last month, Republicans on the House Armed Services Committee pushed Secretary Austin to expedite congressional notification of the weapons sale to help bolster NATO's eastern flank against Russia. However, that sale is still subject to congressional approval.

Lawmakers have been even more vocal in their support this month.

"It is critical that the United States do all we can to reinforce NATO's Eastern Front as Russia's threats to further invade Ukraine grow more troubling by the day," Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.), the ranking member on the House Armed Services Committee, said in a statement on Friday. "I'm glad to see that these tanks will finally be going to Poland to aide in the defense of NATO."

If Putin was hoping that his saber-rattling would make NATO cave to his demands, his plan has failed spectacularly. Instead of the United States and NATO scaling back their commitment in Eastern Europe, additional forces have been deployed to the region. U.S. paratroopers and F-15 fighters arrived in Poland earlier this month, and Warsaw has only ramped up its military modernization efforts.

Peter Suciu is a Michigan-based writer who has contributed to more than four dozen magazines, newspapers and websites. He regularly writes about military small arms, and is the author of several books on military headgear including A Gallery of Military Headdress, which is available on Amazon.com.

Image: Reuters.

Mohammad Javad Mousavizadeh

Iran Russia, Middle East

Officials believe that Russia is a reliable friend of Iran, but public opinion remains divided.

After the Soviet Union fell in 1991, Iran and Russia’s relationship has had its ups and downs. During the Iran-Iraq war, for example, Russia armed the Iraqis against Iran, but, over time, their relations improved, and, today, the two are strategically aligned in opposition to the United States.

Presently, most Iranian officials think that the West block is diminishing in power, and that the East is rising in influence. Thus, despite previously adhering to its mantra of “Neither the East nor the West” that was born from its 1979 revolution, the Islamic Republic today is increasingly seeking economic, political, and military collaborations with the major eastern powers.

Indeed, Tehran has grown increasingly closer to China and Russia over the past year. In March 2021, Iran and China signed a twenty-five-year cooperation agreement that caught the West off guard, and Iran attained full membership in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization that September. Then, in January 2022, Iran and Russia began finalizing the details of their own twenty-year agreement.

Iran has always depended on Russia and China to circumvent U.S. sanctions, and the three countries have agreed to use their national currencies rather than the dollar in trilateral trade.

According to an Iranian official, trade volume between Russia and Iran has increased 12 percent in weight and 41 percent in value in the first nine months of this Iranian calendar year (March 21-December 21, 2021). Also, the trade figure between the two sides stood at over 3.5 million tons for the same time period.

As a key member of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of action (JCPOA), Russia is poised to greatly benefit from trade with Iran if the deal if revived. Tehran and Moscow are eager to grow their trade volume once U.S. sanctions are lifted. Iran also purchases a variety of Russian weapons, and the two countries are seeking to advance their military cooperation alongside their broader bilateral ties. For example, in January 2022, Russia, China, and Iran held a trilateral naval drill in the Indian Ocean with an official saying they were meant to “strengthen security.” According to reports, Iran is also considering whether to purchase Russian Su-35 fighters.

Iranian officials see Russia as one of their closest allies against U.S. pressures. In recent years, Russia has used its veto powers to protect Iran at the UN Security Council, including over its missile program and the illegal use of Iranian-made missiles by the Houthi insurgency in Yemen. Russia has also cooperated with Iran in Syria in support of Bashar al-Assad’s beleaguered government. “Cooperation between Iran and Russia in Syria can become an effective model for developing the countries’ relations in various directions,” Iranian president Ebrahim Raisi said on speaking at the plenary session in the State Duma in his visit to Moscow.

Contrarily, some Iranians view Russians pessimistically. In the last two centuries, the Russian tsardom and then the Soviet Union held a colonial view of Iran and sought to maximize their interests there. During this period, many exploitative concessions in the fields of mining, fisheries, and railways were given to the Russians. Also, Iranians have not forgotten that parts of their country were occupied by the tsars from 1804 to 1813.

In fact, for most Iranians, anti-Russian sentiment originated from anti-Soviet feelings. Although Russia’s overly negative image relates more to tsarist and then Soviet expansionist policies, pessimism towards Russia is an issue that transcends history.

After the U.S. withdrew from the JCPOA in 2018, Iranian officials accused Moscow of welcoming sanctions against Iran in order to raise oil prices. “Russia has turned our country into an embankment against the United States. The negative view of a part of the Iranian society towards the Russians has been indisputable, and even today we can observe some of the biased behaviors of our northern neighbor, Russia, against the interests of Iran,” said the former head of the National Security Commission of the Iranian Parliament.

Some analysts believe Russia is not interested in seeing Iran realize its potential as a military power, which explains why Russia has refused to sell its best military weapons to Iran in recent decades. Instead, Russia has only sold outdated weapons, like submarines and fighter jets of previous generations.

Also, Iran could challenge Russia’s position in the European gas market. Russia has the biggest natural gas reserves globally, with Iran in second. Iran took significant steps to export gas to Europe in the 1990s but was deprived of market share by U.S. sanctions. Since then, Russia has attempted to control Iranian gas fields to ensure that Iran will be kept far away from the European gas market.

Not surprisingly, Russia will also not tolerate a new nuclear power in its neighborhood and has sought to stop Iran from producing nuclear weapons and mastering the nuclear fuel cycle. Some observers believe that Russian officials used nuclear cooperation with Iran as a bargaining chip with the United States. For example, Russia agreed to finish Iran‘s Bushehr power plant in 1992 but did not completely implement its commitments on time.

Recently, Mikhail Ulyanov, the Russian envoy to the JCPOA talks in Vienna, has published a photo from his meeting with Robert Malley, the U.S. special envoy for Iran. The picture has provoked a negative reaction from Iranians on social media. Some Iranians believe that, throughout the talks in Vienna, Russia is only pretending to advocate for Iranian interests while actually prioritizing its own in any future agreement.

“The photo shows a paternalistic role of Russia in the talks, and Russian officials are concerned that the nuclear deal could be the starting point for improvement in Iran-US relations in the future,” Javid Ghorbanoghli, a former Iranian diplomat, said.

Most importantly, Iran and Russia share the Caspian Sea, a valuable treasure of many resources, including oil and natural gas reserves. Iran dominated 50 percent of the Caspian Sea during the Soviet era. However, after the fall of the Soviet Union, three post-Soviet states, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan have demanded their share from the sea that borders their countries’ territories.

Additionally, Russia has warm relationships with Israel, a stalwart Iranian adversary. Russia has sought to balance its relationship with Iran and Israel at the same time. For example, during the 2020 conflict between Iran and Azerbaijan, Iran urged Russia to stand firm against Israel’s presence in Azerbaijan, but Moscow disregarded Tehran’s concerns.

For Russia, engagement with Israel is more important than its relationship with Iran. While Iran targets Israeli’s interests in the Middle East, Russia has committed itself to preserving Israel’s regional interests. In fact, Jerusalem is a close ally of Moscow while Tehran is only a partner for the Kremlin.

“Comprehensive solutions to the problems of the region must take into account the security interests of Israel as a matter of principle,” Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov wrote in an article for Israel’s Yedioth Ahronoth daily.

Although Russia wants to prevent a new Iranian-Israeli conflict, the country has persuaded Iran to accept that Russia will pursue closer relations with Israel. In fact, although Israel has made several clandestine attacks against Iran’s nuclear facilities in recent years, Russian officials always have tried to prevent Iran from retaliating against Israel. “Were Iran to attack Israel, Moscow would stand by the Jewish state’s side. In the case of aggression against Israel, not only will the United States stand by Israel’s side—Russia, too, will be on Israel’s side,” said the former Russian deputy ambassador to Israel.

While the Iranian government’s opponents and reformists see Russia as an enemy, Iranian officials believe that Moscow is sympathetic to Iran. Iran’s over-dependence on Russia is dangerous for Tehran, but the Islamic Republic needs both Russia and China to help balance its poor relations with the United States. Both are seizing this opportunity to gain influence while benefitting from sanctions against Tehran.

Based on experience, Russia and China will not support Iran at the expense of their interests with the United States. Thus, it may be time for Iranian officials to ask how much they have gained in return for their concessions to Russia.

Mohammad Javad Mousavizadeh is a journalist and analyst in international affairs and foreign policy. He has written many articles for digital publications worldwide. He is also an English translator for Iranian newspapers and news agencies. Follow him on Twitter @mousavizadehj.

Image: Reuters.

Dov S. Zakheim

Ukraine Crisis, Europe

Washington fears that too deep involvement on the ground could bring on a war with Russia. Why should Putin not have the same fear?

For years, Vladimir Putin’s detractors have been calling him a mere tactician, rather than the strategist that he is. How wrong they have been. He has positioned Russia in the eastern Mediterranean to an unprecedented degree. Russia now has a long-term lease on a Syrian airbase, Khmeimim, in addition to a new lease on the Tartus naval base, from which the Soviet Navy operated during the Cold War. He has maintained good relations with both Israel and Egypt; the former had no real relations with the USSR, the latter kicked the Soviets out in 1972. His oligarchs and others have flooded Cyprus with their ill-gotten gains. He has a friendly government in Greece.

And now he has consolidated Russia’s position in Europe, with the promise of doing even more. He has added the Ukrainian provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk to the list of so-called independent states—Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Transnistria—that only Russia recognizes. He has effectively absorbed Belarus into Russia’s orbit; it is now no more independent than Byelorussia was during the Cold War, its UN vote notwithstanding. Putin no doubt plans the same for Ukraine, which also had its own vote in the UN during the Soviet era.

It must be conceded that the manner in which Putin has gone about squeezing Kyiv is proving highly effective. In continuing to station some 300,000 troops around Ukraine’s borders, including about 50,000 in Belarus for an exercise that seems to have no end, he can both maintain constant pressure on Kyiv and deter it from taking any action against Donetsk and Luhansk. Moreover, he can always create a new pretext for biting off more of Ukraine—beginning with Mariupol and Odessa—whenever he so chooses.

At some point as well, he will absorb the two provinces into Russia, no doubt at the request of their leaders. Americans, in particular, should find such behavior hardly surprising. Texas broke away from Mexico in 1836, declared itself a republic that the United States recognized in 1837, and became the twenty-eighth state eight years later.                  

Putin’s “manifest destiny” clearly is to restore Russia’s Czarist glory. To that end, not only Ukraine, but Finland, the Baltic States, and Poland have good cause for worry. They were all part of the Russian empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; and apart from Finland, until 1918. Putin’s expansionist appetite differs from America’s “manifest destiny” in one critical respect. Whether Texas, or California, or any other state that entered the Union, it was the will of the population to do so. Neither the Baltic States, Poland, nor Finland have any interest in rejoining Russia. Nor do the Soviet Union’s former Warsaw Pact allies, all of whom are now well entrenched inside NATO.

The West is doing far too little to disrupt Putin’s playbook, however.  His argument that he is merely seeking to protect the residents of the breakaway provinces from the predations of Kyiv echoes Adolf Hitler’s demand for Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland, supposedly to protect the Sudeten Germans. And just as Britain’s Neville Chamberlain and France’s Eduard Daladier acquiesced to Hitler’s demand, in order to achieve “peace in our time,” the West, led by the United States, is doing little more than to impose sanctions not on Russia itself, but only on Luhansk and Donetsk. For Putin, such sanctions are little more than a mosquito bite.

Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy has begged the West for far more weapons than he has received to date. Washington has thus far furnished Kyiv with Javelin anti-tank missiles, coastal patrol boats, Humvees, sniper rifles, reconnaissance drones, radar systems, and night vision and radio equipment. Other NATO countries have made smaller contributions; Britain has provided armored vehicles and some 2,000 short-range anti-tank missiles together with trainers. The Baltic States, who view themselves as most vulnerable to a future Russian assault, have provided Javelins as well as Stinger anti-air missiles, which Washington has yet to send. Poland is sending GROM anti-air missiles. Turkey has provided drones that were effective against Russian-backed forces in Libya and against Armenian unions in the latest flare-up in Nagorno-Karabakh. On the other hand. Germany refuses to provide any arms to Kyiv, sending only helmets and a military hospital.

The West and the United States should do more now. Washington fears that too deep involvement on the ground could bring on a war with Russia. Why should Putin not have the same fear? Biden should never have ruled out not sending forces to support Ukraine; surely its freedom is as important for Europe as ejecting Iraq from Kuwait in 1991 was important for international oil prices. Having determined not to aid Kyiv with American troops, the Biden administration should at least provide Ukraine with the additional arms it seeks. These include American helicopters, light armored vehicles, and communications systems; Norwegian SAMs; and Czech self-propelled artillery.

In addition, Washington, and NATO, should not only sanction the breakaway provinces but Russia itself. The current “wait and see” attitude leaves the initiative to Putin. Sanctions, especially on gas and oil supplies can always be lifted if Putin pulls back his forces. Such sanctions, coming on top of Germany’s suspension of its approval of the Nord Stream II gas pipeline, would bite Putin now and force him to react, instead of the other way round. For the past fourteen years, ever since Russia seized Abkhazia and North Ossetia, Putin has been playing a game of chicken with the West, and up to now has succeeded. It is time to turn the tables on him once and for all.

Dov S. Zakheim served as the Undersecretary of Defense (Comptroller) and Chief Financial Officer for the U.S. Department of Defense from 2001–2004 and as the Deputy Undersecretary of Defense (Planning and Resources) from 1985-1987. He also served as the DoD’s civilian coordinator for Afghan reconstruction from 2002-2004. He is Vice Chairman of the Center for the National Interest.

Image: Reuters.

Trevor Filseth

Mali, Africa

The political and economic turmoil within Mali has strained the country’s relationship with France.

The military-dominated parliament of Mali approved on Monday a timetable for a democratic transition, allowing the military government of Colonel Assimi Goita to continue ruling the country for up to five more years.

The legislature also declared that the current president, who officially serves in an interim capacity, would not be allowed to stand for a democratic election at that time—in theory preventing Goita from running for office. However, some observers have noted that the restriction would not apply to Goita if he resigned ahead of the elections and ran for the presidency as a private citizen.

While the bill promised that democratic elections would be held within five years, it did not specify what date the elections would be held on, something that could allow Goita to rule uninterrupted until February 2027. The vote on the bill was nearly unanimous, with 120 out of 121 members of Mali’s interim parliament voting in favor.

Goita, the leader of the military junta that deposed President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita in 2020, was initially appointed to lead a joint civilian-military government as Mali’s transitional president. In May 2021, Goita consolidated his power by launching a second coup, dismissing many civilian leaders and ensuring the primacy of the military in the country’s government.

In the aftermath of the first coup, the government promised that it would hold democratic elections in February 2022. However, in December 2021, the junta indicated a more liberal timetable for the transition, suggesting that it could take place at an unspecified time between mid-2022 and late 2026. In response to the delay, the Economic Community of West African States, or ECOWAS, imposed sanctions on Mali, arguing that the proposed length of the transition period was excessive and allowed the military too much latitude to find ways to remain in power.

The political and economic turmoil within Mali has strained the country’s relationship with France, the traditional security guarantor of West Africa. French troops, which have carried out a campaign against Islamist militants in the country’s north since 2013, agreed to withdraw from the country this week after several hostile diplomatic exchanges with Mali’s government. In a move that sparked opposition from Western nations, France’s departure led Goita and his associates to push for assistance from Russia’s Wagner Group.

Trevor Filseth is a current and foreign affairs writer for the National Interest.

Image: Reuters.

Trevor Filseth

Russia-Ukraine Crisis, Ukraine

Recognition of the two separatist territories in the Donbas violates the Minsk Protocols and could bring Russia closer to all-out war with Ukraine.

Russian president Vladimir Putin’s decision to recognize the two separatist governments of Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region, and the subsequent deployment of Russian “peacekeepers” led to renewed fears of a war between Russia and Ukraine on Monday. Some experts warned a potential Russia-Ukraine war would be the largest and deadliest conflict in Europe since 1945.

The announcement also led to an economic downturn within Russia. Putin’s recognition of the separatist territories led the Biden administration to impose a series of limited international sanctions against the country, with the promise of more to follow if a broader war began.

The Russian ruble, which usually trades at roughly seventy to the dollar, slipped up to eighty after the announcement was made, though it regained some value later in the day. The Russian stock market also saw significant individual drops, with the well-known RTS index fund down 13 percent. Shares of two Russian banks – Sberbank and VTB – also plunged by double digits in the aftermath of the announcement, and Russian oil giant Rosneft saw its share value decrease by 13 percent.

Although these changes are not likely to immediately affect average Russians, the ruble’s devaluation against other currencies, most notably including the U.S. dollar, will make it harder for Russians to purchase goods abroad in the long run. Further economic action by the West against Russia, along with counter-sanctions, could make imports far more costly or cut them off altogether.

Putin’s recognition of the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics as independent nations violated the Minsk Protocols negotiated between Ukraine and the pro-Russian separatists. The decision also contradicted Russian ambassador Anatoly Antonov’s remarks on Sunday in which he “confirm[ed] that Donbas and Luhansk [are] a part of Ukraine.” It is widely believed that Russian recognition of Donetsk and Luhansk raises the stakes for a broader Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Russia has stationed about 150,000 of its troops along the Ukrainian border and an additional 30,000 within Belarus, bordering Ukraine to its north. Although the Russian troops were originally scheduled to leave Belarus at the conclusion of Russian military exercises there, Belarus’ defense ministry said this weekend that it would allow them to remain in the country indefinitely.

Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, is less than one hundred miles from the Belarusian border. 

To defuse the crisis, both Putin and President Joe Biden agreed “in principle” to an in-person meeting, although that announcement was made before the entry of Russian troops into the two separatist regions. 

Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov are still scheduled to meet on Thursday, February 24. American officials previously said that the meeting would be canceled if Russia launched an invasion of Ukraine.

Trevor Filseth is a current and foreign affairs writer for the National Interest.

Image: Reuters.

Trevor Filseth

Iran Nuclear Deal, Iran

Iran has sought assurances that the United States won't unilaterally withdraw from a deal if a change in political leadership occurs.

A spokesman for Iran’s foreign ministry said negotiations over the status of Tehran’s nuclear weapons program have resulted in “significant progress.” Discussions between the “P5+1” nations, which includes the United States, are being held in Vienna.

However, Saeed Khatibzadeh, the government spokesman, noted that “nothing [would be] agreed until everything is agreed,” leaving room for last-minute complications to derail any prospective agreement between the two sides.

“The remaining issues are the hardest,” Khatibzadeh said during a press conference on Monday.

Iranian president Ebrahim Raisi outlined the broad strokes of any potential agreement between Iran and the P5+1 during his visit to Doha, the capital of Qatar. In remarks with Qatari emir Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, Raisi said that the United States needed to lift several “major sanctions” on Iran before the deal could go into effect.

“To reach an agreement, guarantees are necessary for negotiations and nuclear issues,” Raisi said.

Iranian diplomats have refused to directly engage their American counterparts during talks in Vienna. The Iranians noted that the renewed nuclear issue only came after the United States unilaterally withdrew from the “Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action,” the original agreement between the two sides, at the behest of President Donald Trump in 2018.

In the aftermath of the United States’ withdrawal, Trump’s administration re-imposed “maximum pressure” sanctions on Iran. The sanctions damaged Iran’s economy and prompted it to resume its enrichment activities. Today, Iran’s “breakout time,” the time it would take if it set aside security concerns to construct a nuclear weapon, has been estimated at weeks or months.

Against this backdrop, Iran has demanded that the Biden administration provide a guarantee that any potential agreement reached in 2022 would not be violated by the United States after a change in political leadership. Republicans in the House of Representatives made clear Biden could not offer those assurances last week.

In spite of this and other challenges, a draft deal between Iranian and P5+1 negotiators was crafted at the conference. According to Reuters; it includes provisions to restrict Iranian enrichment to 5 percent and ship its centrifuges out of the country in exchange for lifted international sanctions and the release of $7 billion in frozen Iranian assets in South Korea.

Several diplomats, including British foreign secretary Liz Truss, said that the existing framework would be the “last chance for Iran to come to the negotiating table with a serious resolution to this issue.”

Trevor Filseth is a current and foreign affairs writer for the National Interest.

Image: Reuters.

Mitchell Blatt

China 2022 Olympics, Asia

The Olympics have ended, but the diplomatic spat between China and Korea has just begun.

The Olympics have ended with South Korea bringing home nine medals and a growing resentment of China.

Long before the torch relay began, the XXIV Olympic Winter Games in Beijing were already a source of burning controversy. When the light was lit by a Uyghur cross country skier at a ceremony in which a representative of China’s ethnic minority Chaoxian-zu race donned a Korean hanbok dress, it was just the beginning of many controversies.

The Chosun Daily’s special reporting team in Beijing concluded: “The Beijing Winter Olympics … exposed the weakness of Korea-China relations. The controversy over the hanbok dress and the poor officiating easily transferred into anti-Chinese and anti-Korean sentiment.”

Korean politicians, including the major candidates in the upcoming presidential election, slammed China, and the Chinese Embassy in South Korea criticized the Korean politicians back. Netizens from both countries unleashed seething vitriol. In one example cited by the Chosun Daily, an employee of a Chinese think tank shared fake news accusing a Korean speed skater of throwing the panda mascot Bingdun-dun in the trash can.

The games opened on February 4 with the kind of grand ceremony China has become known for. For years, China has put great effort into proclaiming itself a tolerant multi-ethnic state of fifty-six officially recognized ethnic groups. Taking the vast Mongol-led Yuan Dynasty and Manchu-led Qing Dynasty as high points of its history, China lays claim to Tibet, Xinjiang, and Inner Mongolia. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs argues on its outreach website, “Although there were short-term separations and local divisions in Chinese history, unity has always been the mainstream in the development of Chinese history.”

While the few territorial disputes between China and the two Koreas are relatively limited and not fiercely contested, the dispute over the territory of history is extreme. The history and traditions of the Korean kingdom Goguryeo (37 BCE–668 CE) and its successor Balhae (698–926 CE) are claimed by both Korea and China. This underlying tension periodically leads to arguments about the origins of kimchi, Dragon Boat Festival, and other items of cultural heritage.

So, when the Chinese woman walked out onto the field of Beijing National Stadium wearing the hanbok, many Koreans assumed it was an example of China claiming a part of Korean culture as its own. China denied that interpretation, stating that the woman was just one of fifty-six people representing the ethnic peoples living in China.

Indeed, she was surrounded by representatives of each group, all wearing the clothing associated with that group. Over 1.8 million Chinese citizens of Korean ethnicity live in the People’s Republic of China, most of them in the border region that long ago was a part of Goguryeo. More than half of the Chaoxian-zu (Chinese name; Joseonjok in Korean) crossed over the porous border during the Japanese occupation of Korea in the period between 1911 and 1950.

The inclusion of Chaoxian-zu in the group of Chinese ethnic groups was not likely an intentional affront to Korea, but rather a standard part of China’s usual ethnic policy expression. It might have caught Koreans, who have no such ethnic policy, off guard.

The admonition of Democratic candidate for president Lee Jae-myung towards China to “not covet the culture of others” came as a blow to China. Anti-China sentiment in Korea largely has been associated with the Right, while the progressive Democratic Party has been accused of being pro-China by its critics. It would be fair to say the Democrats have often been more critical of Japan than they have been of China, and they were more supportive of working with China on the North Korea issue than were the conservative People Power Party. The outrage expressed by liberals as well as conservatives shows negative views of China are spreading across the spectrum.

Korea’s anger against China was incited again during the 1,000-meter speed skating relays when two of South Korea’s skaters, including world record holder Hwang Dae-heon, were disqualified, paving the way for China to take gold and silver. Hwang Dae-heon passed Chinese skater Ren Ziwei on the inside to take the lead and cross the finish line first, but he was disqualified for what appeared to be, if anything, gracing contact. Fellow Korean Park Jung-hyuk was also disqualified.

Then in the finals, Ren and Hungarian skater Sándor Liu Shaolin were scuffing so intensely Ren even threw Liu down into the ice. Liu got up and finished first but was disqualified for the pushing, while Ren was not and was allowed to take gold. The ruling appeared to many to be a clear double standard. Both Korea and Hungary protested to the head referee, and both country’s protests were rejected.

“I can’t contain my disappointment and anger,” candidate Lee Jae-myung wrote of the rulings on Facebook. The increasingly critical words expressed towards China might mean shifting perspectives on issues of policy import, too. Lee has coupled his sports-related anger with calls for cracking down on illegal Chinese fishing operations in Korean waters.

China’s embassy in Seoul has issued statements of rebuke to unnamed (but implied) Korean politicians, further fueling the flames. “Some South Korean media and politicians have criticized the Chinese government and Beijing Olympics as a whole, even instigating anti-Chinese sentiment, worsening the public sentiment of the two countries and drawing a backlash from Chinese online users,” the embassy said on February 9.

The somewhat unorthodox use of an embassy to criticize candidates running for office has drawn scorn from Koreans. The Korean government warned the embassy not to interfere in Korean politics after China’s ambassador criticized one of candidate Yoon’s positions.

Yoon responded to the Chinese embassy on February 11 with a statement criticizing both the embassy and the Moon administration’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs for being too docile. It is “ridiculous,” he wrote, for China to “intervene in internal affairs” and criticize politicians in the host country. “Nevertheless,” he continued, “the [Korean] Ministry of Foreign Affairs only issued a brief remark.” The past five years of policy towards China, he said, have been “humiliating.”

Outrage towards China, while growing, still isn’t universally shared, and some in Korea made distinctions between the various component controversies. On the question of the hanbok dress, progressive pundits pointed out that Korean ethnic people around the world all share a claim to the hanbok.

“Hanbok is the clothing of the Korean community that crosses borders and is worn by North and South Koreans,” an op-ed in the progressive Hankyoreh said. Moreover, another article in the newspaper warned that vitriol directed towards China was starting to morph into hate speech directed towards Chinese people, including threats to assault Chinese university students.

The real outrage with the hanbok—and the display of ethnic minorities in general—is not that Chinese might be trying to claim one piece of Korean culture as its own. It is rather the pieces of ethnic culture China is trying to eliminate. They trot out the ethnic garb on these occasions for it to be worn by smiling, dancing minorities, but in the Korean schools in Yanbian (and even worse in the reeducation camps in Xinjiang), the real people who live there are forbidden from speaking their own languages.

I have talked to Joseon-jok people who have told me of their youth growing up in bilingual households, attending bilingual schools. These days, those schools are taught completely in Chinese, a Chinese-born ethnic Korean waitress at a cafe in Cheonan said.

The amount of Joseon-jok immigrating to South Korea has increased since 2000, and now they make up a majority of many of the Chinatowns throughout Korea, but Korean acceptance of Joseon-jok as their fellow countrymen has not increased in tandem. Many Korean films depict Daerim district of Seoul, a major Joseon-jok neighborhood, as “a city of crime,” and Korean-born Koreans warn visitors to “be careful” there.

The Olympics have ended, but the diplomatic spat between China and Korea has just begun, and the ethnic Korean Joseon-jok/Chaoxian-zu who are used as a political cudgel remain being excluded from full participation in the life of both countries.

Mitchell Blatt is a former editorial assistant at the National Interest. He is based in Korea where he covers foreign policy, Korean politics, elections, and culture. He has been published in USA Today, The South China Morning Post, The Daily Beast, The Korea Times, and Silkwinds magazine, among other outlets. Follow him on Facebook at @MitchBlattWriter.

Image: Reuters.

Seemingly sensible proposals to Kyiv to partially satisfy Moscow’s demands in Eastern Ukraine are counterproductive. They ignore the record of compromising with Russian revanchism, and underestimate the unexplored potential of serious sanctions. They also do not take into account the political mood that has emerged in Ukraine since the start of the war in 2014.

In recent months, a popular idea to lower tensions between Russia and the West has, among some experts, become to ask Kyiv to seek compromise with Moscow. In the seeming absence of better options, Ukraine should succumb to permanent unofficial Kremlin control of the Donets Basin (Donbas) currently occupied by Russia. This would satisfy Moscow for now and be in the Ukrainians’ own best interest.

Indeed, Ukraine’s hopes for Western direct military assistance, NATO and EU membership, or a US mutual aid pact are unrealistic. Thus, reaching a compromise with Russia may be Ukraine’s currently “best bad” option, and might appear as useful to be pursued by the West. Yet, such a compromise is, for three reasons, only on the surface a suitable instrument to lower tensions in Eastern Europe.

First, compromising with post-Soviet Russia’s disregard for the sovereignty and integrity of other successor states of the USSR is neither a new nor a successful strategy. The most telling – because it’s the longest – story is that of Moldova. In 1992, Russia intervened militarily in an inner-Moldovan conflict. Ever since, a Moscow-supported pseudo-state in Transnistria, and Russian regular troop detachment, stationed without consent from Chisinau, have been undermining Moldovan sovereignty. A similar story has been ongoing in Georgia since 2008, if not before. Russia has not been sanctioned for its destructions of the Moldovan or Georgian states, and has thereby been encouraged to continue.

When Russia started its military aggression against Ukraine in late February 2014, the West initially also refrained from any substantial material action. It instead encouraged Kyiv to not deploy its troops in Southern Ukraine to defend Crimea. The minor Western sanctions imposed after the peninsula’s annexation were too little too late.

The result of the West’s restrained behaviour was neither a resolution of the Crimea issue nor an achievement of peace. In March 2014, Moscow launched a broad hybrid attack on mainland Ukraine involving various Russian state agencies, paramilitary groups, proxy organizations, and regular troops. Alongside thousands of Ukrainian soldiers and civilians, over 200 hundred EU citizens on flight MH17 became victims of Russia’s war against Ukraine.

The looming new escalation between the two countries suggests a need to urgently ease tensions. Some think that this can be only achieved via Western pressure on Ukraine to agree to Russia’s interpretation of the Minsk Agreements on Donbas. The resulting concessions by Kyiv might temporarily satisfy Moscow, and buy some time for Ukraine. Yet, such an appeasement would have grave collateral effects, and may have repercussions.

An ad hoc Russian political triumph in the Donbas would be a merely partial, or even elusive success for the Kremlin. Obtaining permanent control over the Eastern Donets Basin has an only instrumental purpose. It does not play – like the annexation of Crimea – an essential role by itself for the Kremlin. Moscow does not need the Donbas as such but sees it as a mean to destabilize and influence Ukraine. A Western compromise on the Donbas would not satisfy Moscow’s original wish to turn Ukraine as a whole into something approximating the “people’s republics” in the eastern part of the country. 

Ukrainian concessions on the Donbas would not meet the Kremlin’s larger demand to fundamentally renegotiate the European security order. Moscow’s plans for Ukraine are the most important, but not only expressions of the Kremlin’s desire that the West recognizes a Russian special sphere of interest. Worse, it would demonstrate to Moscow three older inferences. (A) Military posture or/and escalation works. (B) Ukraine’s independence remains incomplete. (C) The West can be made to function as an accomplice to Russian attempts to subvert the integrity of post-Soviet states.

A second defect in Western debates on how to deal best with Russia is an underestimation of the social impact of economic measures. This is a serious Western instrument to contain Russia without employing military means. Some, however, suppose that such sanctions will not be imposed, others that they may not help to sufficient degree. This assumption is fundamental to the conclusion that Western pressure on Kyiv is the only way out of the current quagmire.

One cannot know for certain, in advance, the effects of substantive individual and sectoral sanctions on the Russian political leadership and system. Yet, there are indications that restrictive economic measures may be more effective regarding Russia than in relation to, say, North Korea or Iran. The current Western sanctions imposed on Russia are, despite much European fanfare, limited. Many of the measures target individuals and a number of companies. Most sanctions do not directly hit the Russian economy as a whole. The somewhat more significant general restrictions imposed by the EU in the summer of 2014 are not properly sectoral, but rather sub-sectoral. They only concern the EU’s sale of certain narrowly defined high technologies and financial services to Russia.

Assuming a significant impact of serious Western sanctions on Russia’s economy and, in extension, its behaviour is plausible in view of what we already know today. It can be extrapolated from some well-researched consequences of the existing individual and sub-sectoral measures that have been in place since 2014. Two detailed studies published in 2021, by Erik Andermo and Martin Kragh in the journal Post-Soviet Affairs as well as by Anders Aslund and Maria Snegovaya in a report for the Atlantic Council, have demonstrated considerable negative indirect repercussions for Russian economic growth of the limited Western sanctions that have been in place during the last seven years. While these minor measures have not led to a Russian economic decline, they have prevented a likely higher economic growth since 2014. These studies indicate that Russians would have had billions of dollars more income without the rather modest sanctions adopted seven-and-a-half years ago.

The seemingly considerable potential of unused Western sanctions should be seen in connection to two other recent empirical studies by Maria Snegovaya, a Russian political economist living in Washington, DC. Snegovaya has demonstrated a correlation of Russian expansionist sentiments with the income from energy exports, as well as the country’s related general socio-economic situation. The aggressiveness of Russian presidents’ foreign policy rhetoric is positively related to the level of oil prices and export revenues. Moreover, Russia’s population’s mood is more enterprising in foreign affairs in times of good socioeconomic development. While these studies do not address the issue of sanctions, they indicate that economic performance and their social effects are important issues for the foreign political thinking of both, the elite and population of Russia.

A third miscalculation in many Western deliberations about Ukraine concerns the domestic repercussions of further Ukrainian compromises on its political sovereignty and territorial integrity. To be sure, a joint Western insistence that Kyiv consents to an implementation of the Minsk Agreements leaving the occupied Donbas territories under informal Moscow tutelage is possible. Yet, the larger challenge for Kyiv and the West would be how to make Ukrainian society and especially those parts of it that have been involved in the more than seven-year war effort settle with such a solution.

There are today numerous Ukrainians who have contributed and sacrificed a lot for the defence of the fatherland. Millions have invested their money, time, nerves, energy, and health while thousands have lost their beloved in the war. Many Ukrainians would thus hardly agree to a fishy peace deal with Russia. In fact, a significant part of Ukrainian society is already today unhappy about what they perceive as Kyiv’s not hawkish enough stance vis-à-vis Russia and the two so-called “people’s republics,” in the East.

Historical experience suggests that a dubious compromise between Kyiv and Moscow could not only lead to Ukrainian riots. In the worst case, protests against concessions towards Russia could turn into a, now, real and not, like hitherto, pseudo-civil war in Ukraine. In summer 2015, then President Petro Poroshenko, hardly a dove, started, under Western pressure, a process to change Ukraine’s Constitution allowing for a special status of the occupied East Ukrainian territories. This led to disturbances in front of Ukraine’s parliament leaving several people dead and dozens injured.

Since then, the aversion against any Ukrainian allowances in the war with Russia has grown rather than declined. One suspects, moreover, that the enormous domestic risks from a fundamental Ukrainian policy change regarding the Donbass war are fully understood in the Kremlin. Perhaps, an escalation of inner-Ukrainian tensions has been a major or even the major purpose of the entire Russian enterprise, in the first place.

The stark choice facing the Ukrainian leadership is even bleaker than many in the West might recognize. The alternative is not only and not so much between a self-sacrificing war, on the one side, and denigrating peace-deal with Russia, on the other. Instead, Kyiv’s possible partial satisfaction of Moscow’s appetite entails secondary domestic and foreign dangers that could turn out to be, in their sum, larger than the hazards of a new armed escalation today.

Why Compromise in the Donbas Is Unhelpful | Global Policy Journal

David C. Hendrickson

Ukraine Crisis, Europe

The Ukrainian escalations of the last week, together with Russia’s recognition of the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics and its movement of forces into their territories, advance the conflict to a new level.

Vladimir Putin’s decision to recognize the independence of the Donetsk (DPR) and Luhansk People’s Republics (LPR) on February 21, followed by the introduction of Russian “peacekeepers” into the territory of the two republics, are big developments. They signal the abandonment of Russia’s commitment to the Minsk Process, maintained in theory for the last seven years. Recognition also provides the legal ground for a Russian intervention on behalf of the statelets. Russian troops are moving into the territory, which they had not done since the early phases of the conflict.  

The Minsk Impasse

Negotiations to implement the agreements reached at Minsk in February 2015 have long been seen by responsible observers as the only viable way of resolving the conflict. Minsk II had the merit of splitting the difference between the parties, giving Ukraine sovereignty and the Donbas autonomy. Though the formula pleased diplomats in Germany and France and was acceptable to Russia, it was from the outset utterly remote from the facts on the ground. The Ukrainians received Minsk II as a diktat. They have been dead set against offering autonomy to the Donbas; conventional thinking in Kyiv is that no government could survive such an offer. By the same token, the inhabitants of the DPR and LPR never wanted the Minsk formula either and would have had no trust in any assurances Kyiv might have offered. That Kyiv didn’t offer any, together with getting shelled for seven years, confirmed to these people that reintegration into Ukraine would be extremely prejudicial to their interests.

Each opposing side could only have been brought to accept the Minsk formula through the dictatorial sway of their respective patrons. Mainly because the Ukrainians never took the first step and received no U.S. advice to alter their position, it has remained a dead letter. Russia’s recognition of the DPR and LPR delivers the formal death certificate, but the corpse, now seven years old, never once showed signs of real life. Its only existence was in thoughtful speeches by thoughtful statesmen, like former German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier. The two nations most committed to Minsk, Germany and France, have little leverage with either of the parties or their patrons. France under President Macron, though unfortunately powerless in the crisis, at least gives evidence of direction and will; Germany, by contrast, seems to drift in the ether, unformed, like disconnected particles yet to become a star.

Russian recognition of the two statelets has the primary implication and purpose of reinforcing Russia’s determination to fight in the event of a Ukrainian attempt to recapture that part of the Donbas occupied by the two statelets. Any such attempt appeared to have been put on extended hiatus in the aftermath of the firm declaration of the U.S. government in December that no U.S. forces would be sent to Ukraine in the event of a Russian Ukrainian War. The logic underlying this conclusion was simple: Ukraine has military superiority over the DPR and LPR. Russia has military superiority over Ukraine. The Ukrainian forces in the Donbas are estimated to be anywhere from 100,000 to 125,000, whereas the size of the military formations in the LPR and DPR are less than 50,000. If Ukraine faced the forces of the statelets by themselves they would easily prevail; if they encountered direct Russian intervention, they would not prevail. They are wholly unprepared and ill-equipped for that task.

Ukrainian Escalation

Events of the last few days suggest that the absence of a direct U.S. military backup has not stayed the hand of the Ukrainian military. They have engaged in a big escalation. This is denied by the Ukrainian authorities and by the U.S. State Department, but the maps published by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) monitors, detailing explosions in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions on February 18 and February 19-20, clearly suggest the contrary. Those big red splotches on the map around Donetsk and Luhansk show an intense bombardment. Overall, there were over 1400 shell and mortar detonations on February 18, about 2,000 explosions over the next two days. From the two maps, it looks like about two-thirds to three-fourths were on the Russian side of the line. This level of activity marks a big change. In early February, the previous thirty-day average was around sixty explosions per day.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Sunday referred to “provocations created by the Russian or separatist forces over the weekend, false flag operations.” These artillery strikes on the territory controlled by the two statelets must be what he is referring to. One infers from official U.S. sources that all the ordnance is being expended on the Russian side—some to attack the Ukrainians, the larger share reserved for an attack upon themselves. For the military non-experts, the administration could perhaps explain how one positions artillery and mortars to do this sort of thing—that is, fire on your own positions—and why this would escape the notice of OSCE observers and cameras. The administration might even go so far as to provide real evidence from their sophisticated reconnaissance capabilities as to what is going on. It is, of course, virtually guaranteed that it won’t.

Administration officials and the corporate media have thus got their story straight on this nefarious Russian plot—those thousands of false flags fluttering amidst exploding ordnance on the outskirts of Donetsk and Luhansk—but none of the media reports bother to mention the OSCE data. You would not know that this observer mission exists if you were just reading the FT, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal over the last week. And these are serious outlets which do not, like the cable networks, generally make it their business plan to subtract from the sum total of human knowledge.

The Ukrainian bombardments, intended to harass rather than to kill, are putting pressure on the inhabitants of Donetsk and Luhansk to leave. How large that evacuation will be remains unclear at this stage—the 700,000 figure announced by the leader of the DPR is not necessarily to be taken at face value—but the strike on the Donetsk water system, affecting some one million inhabitants according to International Red Cross observers, cannot provide much motivation to stick around. Russian reinforcements, however, may do so.

Who exactly controls the levers of power in Kyiv is not clear. Does Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky have 100 percent control over the military establishment, such that he can dictate military responses and operational plans along the line of contact? We do not know the answer to this question, though the suspicion arises that he is dealing with some very tough characters who brook no nonsense from the president. Nor do we know whether Ukraine is responding to U.S. coaching or defying it in its approach to the Donbas.

Why would Ukraine dramatically escalate its shelling with no American military backstop? There would seem to be two possible answers. It might have calculated that Russia would decide not to intervene, given the diplomatic and economic costs such an intervention would entail, even if limited to the Donbas. On this theory, it believed that these actions would put it on the course to victory. Whatever credence was given that theory by Ukrainian authorities, it seems now essentially foreclosed by Russia’s actions on February 21. Given all the previous signs that Russia would not permit Ukraine to replicate Azerbaijan’s victory over Armenia in 2020, it seems unlikely that the Ukrainians counted on Russian forbearance and passivity.

The much more probable Ukrainian calculation is that even a tactical defeat will lead over time to a strategic victory. That is, it would heighten the West’s desire to speed up Ukraine’s rearmament, because the more severe the Russian punishment, the angrier Western (and world) opinion would get. The dead Ukrainian soldiers would become martyrs to the cause, whose memory would be defiled if Ukraine broke from that cause. Short-term pain, long-term gain.

The Likely Denouement

Whatever the motive, the Ukrainian escalations of the last week, together with Russia’s recognition of the DPR and LPR and its movement of forces into their territories, advance the conflict to a new level. The military conflict to be expected is the one arising from the control of the territory of the insurgent republics. This, not the fantastic scenarios of the conquest of Ukraine conjured by “U.S. intelligence,” is the pivot of the whole controversy. If further escalation comes, it would probably consist of a Russian aerial blitz against Ukrainian artillery close to the line of contact; even a larger operation is far more likely to resemble Russia’s actions in 2008 against Georgia than the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in late 1979.

Russia faces with almost every alternative the bleak prospect of far-reaching sanctions, with the United States and Europe proposing in effect the consolidation of a new Iron Curtain or cordon sanitaire. It is as if our purpose all along was to strip from Russia all its incentives for restraint. Putin’s anger is conditioned by reason of state, to which he ordinarily bows, but he is angry. 

Well before the recent escalation in artillery and mortar strikes, Russia said that it would not allow Ukraine to conduct an operation like that which Azerbaijan undertook in 2020, or which Croatia mounted in 1995, which in the present context would produce lots of people killed and huge numbers of people displaced. Even if the fallout to civilians were limited, the United States and the West would still be supporting the imposition upon these people of rulers whom they distrust and fear. Putin’s use of “genocide” is an overstatement, but remember that William Walker, the U.S. diplomat who headed the Kosovo Verification Mission, deemed the discovery of forty-five dead Kosovars in 1999 to be evidence of the same and to justify U.S. intervention in Serbia.

The combined population of Crimea and the two statelets is about 6 million; the displacement of one-third to a half of these people, uprooted from their homes and forced into exile, would be a very big deal to them, but not of course to the West, for whom six million people seems not to be a big number at all. The truth is that the men and women of these territories, Crimea included, hate the idea of being ruled by Kyiv. We have come to learn, however, that the entire fabric of world order depends on denying to them the right to choose their own country.

David C. Hendrickson is President of the John Quincy Adams Society and the author of Republic in Peril: American Empire and the Liberal Tradition (Oxford, 2018).

Image: Reuters.

David Gattie, Michael Hewitt

Energy Security, Europe

The United States is in a twenty-first-century competition for hearts and minds, and much of that competition will revolve around energy sovereignty.

At the end of the Cold War, it appeared democracy had won the final battle in civilization’s perpetual struggle between individual liberty and authoritarianism. Some even raised the possibility democracy had prevailed and history had ended. However, revisionist powers China and Russia have revived and now threaten to bring history back with a vengeance.

The latest evidence is the recently released “Joint Statement of the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China, International Relations Entering a New Era and the Global Sustainable Development.”

This is the vision these two authoritarian powers have for the twenty-first-century century world order. And with a few word substitutions, it might fool many in the West into believing it was written by a U.S.-European Union diplomatic alliance as the two powers twist Western philosophical and ideological verbiage into what could be characterized as “Democracy with Communist Characteristics.”

A few days after the release of this statement, the U.S.-EU Energy Council released a joint statement, largely in response to the current energy crisis in Europe and Ukraine, framed within the broader context of energy security and climate change.

The China-Russia statement appeals to the world on the grounds that each nation “can choose such forms and methods of implementing democracy that would best suit its particular state, based on its social and political system,” where “it is only up to the people to decide whether their State is a democratic one.” Essentially, a country is free to develop as it chooses, without respect to Western norms for human rights or climate change.

The U.S.-EU statement appeals on the grounds of supporting countries in market and regulatory reforms “to ensure robust decarbonization efforts, a swift, just and socially inclusive energy transition to a climate-neutral future, and to address energy poverty including in Africa.”  

The battle for the hearts and minds of emerging economies and uncommitted nations is a core objective of great power competition, although the outcome is determined by the decisions of the weaker powers—not by great powers. Great powers may compete, but weaker powers determine who wins.

In the energy space, many of today’s weaker powers are fledgling economies in dire need of reliable and secure energy. However, as evidenced by the U.S.-EU statement, the West is focused on renewable energy and decarbonizing its economies by moving away from more reliable fossil fuels. This doesn’t connect with the unprecedented and immediate energy needs of emerging regions who understand full well they can’t industrialize their economies on the narrow shoulders of intermittent energy resources.

Energy as the currency of the twenty-first century, just like oil in the twentieth century, is starting to dominate decisionmaking by rational actors and allies in Europe.

Russia and China recognize this disconnect and are capitalizing on the opportunity to gain geopolitical influence through oil, natural gas, coal, civilian nuclear partnerships, and renewable technologies—an all-the-above offering. This is particularly problematic with civilian nuclear power—a technology the U.S once dominated globally but in which it has been largely dormant for the past thirty-plus years. Problematic because China and Russia have taken advantage of America’s dormancy and established themselves as the dominant partners for nuclear collaboration. This, in and of itself, is a threat to U.S. and global security as China and Russia position themselves to be the global steward of the nuclear fuel cycle while leveraging their nuclear collaborations as extensions of the state to restructure the world order according to their own designs and interests. This is not what the founders of U.S. nuclear power policy envisioned in the 1940s-50s.

However, an opportunity is at hand that can be leveraged for advancing America’s efforts to revitalize its civilian nuclear enterprise and compete once again on the world stage.

The U.S. Army recently released its Climate Strategy, reflecting the heightened climate concerns conveyed in the U.S.-EU joint statement and in keeping with President Biden’s executive order “putting the climate crisis at the center of foreign policy and national security.” The strategy rightly identifies adaptation, mitigation, and resilience as overall objectives, but it leans heavily on renewables without considering small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs).

The extent to which renewables can be deployed without sacrificing energy reliability and security and without compromising the military’s capacity to meet its strategic objectives is questionable at best.

SMRs should be the takeoff point for any military climate strategy. The DoD has had a long history of sponsoring leading innovation and accelerating commercial benefits for the globe.  In this instance deploying a new fleet of SMRs onto military installations can address resiliency, carbon reduction, improved warfighting effectiveness, and the lack of a viable commercial industry.

A central problem for the private U.S. nuclear sector is cost competitiveness for the current nuclear fleet and for new construction. For currently operating reactors, natural gas and subsidized renewables are oftentimes less expensive at the margins. Moreover, high capital costs for large nuclear power plants are disincentives to attracting investment dollars for such long-term projects. SMRs offer lower construction costs and shorter construction schedules. But, without a demand for SMRs and a book of business, economies of scale will remain elusive and costs will remain high.

Enter the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD).

By including SMRs as a necessary technology in its long-term energy security and climate strategy, the U.S. DoD can create a strong demand signal that would, in turn, lead to the development of an efficient nuclear supply chain and, eventually, lower costs. This not only benefits U.S. military, it also benefits the U.S. civilian nuclear sector as SMRs become an economically viable option that invites private capital.

Such an approach would represent a strategic effort to move U.S. nuclear down the cost curve quicker and position it as an attractive partner for nuclear development in emerging economies. Without a sustained demand signal and an efficient supply chain, the road to nuclear deployment in the U.S. will be much longer. The longer the road is, the more strongly it plays to the advantage of China and Russia by positioning them as the more reliable partner for nuclear development.

The United States is in a twenty-first-century competition for hearts and minds, and much of that competition will revolve around energy sovereignty. The Eurasian Economic Union-Belt and Road Initiative mentioned in the China-Russia statement describes a China-Russia economic development bridge that should awaken U.S. policymakers and corporations to the realization that global markets are at risk of being overrun and monopolized by China’s state-owned enterprises.

Moreover, U.S. policymakers who are determined to restructure America’s industrial base around renewable energy for the purpose of reducing carbon emissions and battling climate change should take heed that China and Russia are structuring their industrial bases to battle America and its allies and to dominate Eurasia. They are weaponizing energy and energy technologies as instruments of national power to achieve their geopolitical objectives and shape a new world order to suit their own authoritarian interests.

History’s competition between democracies and authoritarian powers hasn’t ended and shows no signs of ending any time soon. Today’s great power competition must be continually foreseen and managed, so it becomes the history we want for our posterity. Moreover, democracy doesn’t have the intrinsic momentum to sustain itself. Democracy is maintained through strength, engagement, and the pursuit of primacy by a nation that is founded on individual freedom and is continually forming a more perfect union—a transparent democracy for all to see.

“Energy Sovereignty” will be the “Westphalian Principle” of the twenty-first century. It will be driven by the need for abundant, baseload, and clean energy.  It will show nuclear power (as Eisenhower projected) will be critical to energy sovereignty. The paradoxical danger of over commitment to clean will not be lost.

America must understand its post-WWII legacy and responsibilities, including its legacy and responsibilities in nuclear power leadership. Otherwise, it risks permanent “contemporary amnesia” of where it came from and how dangerous the world would be without U.S. leadership.

David Gattie is an Associate Professor of Engineering at the University of Georgia’s (UGA) College of Engineering, and a Senior Fellow at UGA’s Center for International Trade and Security. He has provided testimony on energy, climate, and nuclear power policy before the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee.

RDML (ret) Michael Hewitt, U.S. Navy, is Co-Founder and CEO of IP3 Corporation and CEO of Allied Nuclear Partners. IP3 is the lead U.S. integrator for the development and operations of peaceful and secure civil nuclear power in the global marketplace. IP3’s vision is to create threuriving, peaceful environments in critical world markets through the development of sustainable energy and security infrastructure via public/private initiatives and industry-led partnerships.

Image: Reuters.

Trevor Filseth

Sudan, Africa

Demonstrators throughout Sudan demanded an immediate end to military rule on Monday.

A new wave of demonstrations erupted across Sudan on Monday, as protesters renewed their demands for a reversal of the country’s October 2021 military coup and the restoration of civilian rule.

Monday’s protests were the latest incarnation of a months-long movement against the government of Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, the Sudanese military leader who currently chairs the country’s Sovereign Council. While Burhan was instrumental in longtime dictator Omar al-Bashir’s fall from power in 2019, he overthrew the transitional government of Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok and seized power for himself two years later.

On Monday, Sudanese protesters chanted a demand that the military “go back to the barracks” in Wad Madani, a regional capital of around 300,000 residents located to the south of Khartoum. In the country’s east, groups of demonstrators insisted that a “civilian [government] is the people’s choice” and demanded an immediate end to military rule. Within Khartoum, hundreds of protesters converged on the presidential palace, leading security forces to use tear gas to disperse them, according to Al Jazeera.

Although the Sovereign Council—a joint military-civilian body established in the aftermath of Bashir’s ouster—nominally continues to operate, the military now controls the country’s affairs in practice. Earlier in February, Mohamed al-Faki Suleiman, a former member of the council who was dismissed and briefly detained after Burhan’s coup, was arrested again, eliciting further protests.

The coup led to international condemnation, both from the Western world and from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates—two historical Sudanese allies with strong links to Burhan. The coup was also followed by significant cuts to international aid for Sudan, with the United States freezing a $700 million aid package and the World Bank cutting off a lesser reconstruction effort.

The coup also led to protests within Sudan and retaliation by Sudanese security forces. So far, there have been at least eighty protest-related deaths and hundreds of injuries from clashes with the military. More than 200 dissidents have been arrested during the same period, according to a group of pro-democracy lawyers within the country.

Monday also marked the arrival of Adama Dieng, a UN human rights expert, roughly one month after Burhan’s government requested a delay in his visit. Dieng will evaluate human rights conditions in Sudan, meet with civilian and military officials, and author a report for the UN.

Trevor Filseth is a current and foreign affairs writer for the National Interest.

Image: Reuters.