Diplomacy & Crisis News

Weihuan Zhou, Lisa Toohey

Trade, Pacific

Australia won't take China's barley tarriffs on the chin. 

Australia is reportedly ready to initiate its first litigation against China at the World Trade Organisation.

China has this year taken punitive action against imports of Australian coal, wine, beef, lobster and barley.

It is the five-year 80.5% barley tariff China imposed in May that Australia will take to the World Trade Organisation. More than half of all Australian barley exports in 2019 were sold to China, worth about A$600 million a year to Australian farmers.

Chinese authorities began an anti-dumping investigation into Australian barley in November 2018. Anti-dumping trade rules are meant to protect local producers from unfair competition from “dumped” imported goods.

Dumping occurs where a firm sells goods in an overseas market at a price lower than the normal value of the goods. China calculated the normal value of barley using “best information available” on the grounds that Australian producers and exporters failed to provide all information Chinese investigators requested.

The barley tariff will last for five years unless Chinese investigators initiate a review and decide to extend it beyond 2025.

What can Australia hope to achieve from a WTO dispute?

Not a quick and easy win. A formal resolution will likely take years. But it plants a seed, starting a structured process for dialogue. This is an important step in the right direction.

A lengthy process

WTO litigation is no quick fix. There is a set process that moves through three phases – consultation, adjudication and compliance.

The standard timetable would ideally have disputes move through consultation and adjudication within a year. In reality it often take several years, particularly if appeals or compliance actions are involved.

The timetable schedules 60 days for the first stage of negotiations, though these can take many more months. That’s worthwhile if it leads to a resolution. But given the tensions between China and Australia, a quick resolution looks remote.

The adjudication process typically involves a decision by a WTO panel followed by an appeal to the organisation’s Appellate Body.

A WTO panel is meant to issue its decision within nine months of its establishment, but it usually takes much more time. If the panel’s decision is appealed, the Appellate Body is meant to make its decisions within 90 days, but nor is this time frame met in many cases.

Once a WTO decision is final, it is up to the losing party to comply with the ruling. That may include a request for time to make the necessary changes. In practice, this can take six to 15 months.

Appeals blockage

One complication is the current non-functioning WTO appeals process. Appointing judges to the WTO’s Appellate Body requires agreement from all WTO member nations. US obstruction of new appointments has reduced the number of judges to zero, and the Appellate Body requires three judges to hear appeals.

This paralysis has created a major loophole, enabling an “appeal into the void” to block unfavourable rulings.

In light of this, the 27 European Union nations and 22 other WTO members – including both China and Australia – have signed on to a temporary appeals process known as the “multi-party interim appeal arbitration arrangement” (MPIA).

Given China’s commitment to the WTO and its dispute settlement system, there is no reason to anticipate it snubbing interim arrangements if an appeal arises. But the appeal process is also likely to take just as long as the Appellate Body procedure.

No guaranteed win

Federal Trade Minister Simon Birmingham has expressed confidence in Australia’s “strong case” but victory against China is not assured.

China’s tariff on Australian barley comprises an “anti-dumping duty” of 73.6% and a “countervailing duty” of 6.9%. Anti-dumping and countervailing calculations are highly technical. Whether China’s barley tariff has violated WTO rules will require detailed examination of its methodology.

A key challenge to the Chinese methodology is that it largely disregarded information on domestic sales by Australian barley producers and used data from Australian sales to Egypt.

The WTO has found China’s use of similar methods in several past disputes breached WTO rules. But every case depends on very specific facts. The past rulings against China do not necessarily predict the result here.

 

No compensation

Even if Australia is successful, a “win” isn’t total.

The WTO system is designed to make states change their ways. It is not designed to compensate those harmed by illegal trade measures. In other words, an Australian win may require China only to remove the tariff, not compensate those who paid more or lost revenue as a result.

There is also a risk that China could simply initiate a re-investigation of the barley tariff, which might lead to a decision to impose duties very similar to the original ones. In some past disputes, it took China five years or longer to remove duties.

So even if the World Trade Organisation rules in favour of Australia, this might not lead to the tariff’s end before its current expiry date in 2025.

Still the best option

Despite all this, the World Trade Organisation is Australia’s best step.

The WTO is not perfect, but it is now a tested and respected mechanism to resolve trade disputes.

WTO litigation also compels the disputing parties to enter into consultations – and talking is something Australia’s officials have had difficulty having with their Chinese counterparts.

China might drag its heels in other ways, but it can be expected to respect the WTO’s procedural rules and enter into these negotiations. Those talks could help repair communication channels better than missives through social media and press conferences.

Litigation the new normal

In commencing a formal dispute, Australia also sends a firm but dignified message – that it is willing to use international rules and procedures to solve grievances.

WTO litigation is a normal feature of trade relations between countries. Even close allies bring disputes against one another – such as New Zealand’s case against Australia’s restrictions on New Zealand apples, or Australia’s case against Canadian restrictions on imported wines in liquor stores.

China and Australia badly need a relationship reset. Meeting in a rules-based forum with structured processes for dialogue can do no harm.

Weihuan Zhou, Senior Lecturer and member of Herbert Smith Freehills CIBEL Centre, Faculty of Law, UNSW Sydney, UNSW and Lisa Toohey, Professor of Law, University of Newcastle

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Image: Reuters

David Axe

Security, Americas

For every sailor who’s not in a submarine, submarines are real scary.

Here's What You Need To Remember: Everyone fears aircraft carriers - but aircraft carriers fear submarines.

A photo taken in 2016 depicting an American nuclear-powered submarine poking its periscope above the waves—within shooting distance of a British aircraft carrier during a war game—is a useful reminder of one of the most important truths of naval warfare.

For every sailor who’s not in a submarine, submarines are real scary.

Stealthy and heavily-armed, subs are by far the most powerful naval vessels in the world for full-scale warfare—and arguably the best way to sink those more obvious icons of naval power, aircraft carriers.

The public may not fully appreciate submarines’ lopsided combat advantage, but the world’s leading navies sure do. Today Chinese, Russian and American submarines, among others, are busy sneaking up on, tracking and practicing sinking rival fleets’ flattops.

The provocative photo, see here, depicts the masts of the U.S. Navy attack submarine USS Dallas near the carrier HMS Illustrious during a naval exercise in the Gulf of Oman on Oct. 3, 2013. Six warships including Dallas and Illustrious conducted an anti-submarine-warfare exercise that saw Dallas stalking Illustrious while British and American surface warships and helicopters attempted to locate and “sink” the undersea vessel.

Neither navy has published the results of the exercise, so it’s not clear whether Dallas got close enough in the course of the war game to simulate firing Mark-48 torpedoes at the flattop, which at 22,000 tons displacement is one of the largest ships in Royal Navy service.

But there are good reasons to assume the 7,000-ton Dallas did succeed in pretend-sinking Illustrious. In 2007 HMCS Corner Brook, a diesel-electric submarine of the Canadian navy, sneaked up on Illustrious during an exercise in the Atlantic.

To prove they could have sunk the carrier, Corner Brook’s crew snapped a photo through the periscope—and the Canadian navy helpfully published it.“The picture represents hard evidence that the submarine was well within attack parameters and would have been successful in an attack,” boasted Cmdr. Luc Cassivi, commander of the Canadian submarine division.

Corner Brook, a former British submarine displacing only 2,400 tons, is no more capable than Dallas—and probably much less so once crew training is taken into account. American submariners spend far more time at sea than their Canadian counterparts.

Dallas and Corner Brook scored their simulated carrier kills against allied warships in the context of a scripted exercise. But many other close encounters between subs and flattops have occurred between rival nations deep at sea, in a usually bloodless duel that is nevertheless deadly serious.

To prepare its submarines to hunt and sink American aircraft carriers in some future World War III, during the Cold War the Soviet navy ordered its hundreds of sub captains to get as close as possible to U.S. flattops … and stay there. The U.S. Navy routinely surrounds its multi-billion-dollar carriers with escorts including surface ships and submarines, but the defensive screen is not impenetrable.

In 1974 a Soviet Il-38 patrol plane spotted what was later described as the carrier USS Nimitz and its escorts off the U.S. East Coast. The ship’s identity is in doubt, as in 1974 the brand-new Nimitz was in the water at a Virginia shipyard and still being worked on.

Whichever carrier it was, Soviet commanders instructed an attack submarine to track the flattop and its escorts. “Three days we [followed] Nimitz [sic],” navigator Pavel Borodulkin told Tom Briggs, an American who visited Russia decades later.

Borodulkin implied that the sub spent much of the time at a depth of 120 feet. As for being detected … “We did not worry,” Borodulkin said, explaining that American sonar was not optimized for detecting a target moving on the same course and speed as the vessel doing the searching.

“Our stealth was high,” Borodulkin said. To prove his claims, the navigator gave Briggs the above blurry photo of a flattop, snapped through the Soviet sub’s periscope.

That wasn’t the only NATO carrier the Soviets tailed. In 1984 a Victor-class Soviet submarine played cat and mouse with the flattop USS Kitty Hawk off the Korean Peninsula. The Americans lost track of the Victor and, in the dead of night, the 80,000-ton carrier actually collided with the 5,000-ton sub.

“I felt the ship shudder violently and, going to the starboard side, I could see two periscopes and the upper part of a submarine moving away,” Kitty Hawk Capt. Dave Rogers told The Sydney Morning Herald. A Japanese patrol plane later spotted the apparently damaged Victor limping away at three knots.

In November the same year Illustrious, then a young vessel, passed within 500 yards of a Soviet Tango-class submarine during a Royal Navy exercise off the Scottish coast, according to The Robesonian newspaper.

When the Soviets introduced their own small aircraft carriers in the mid-1970s, British and American subs no doubt watched them as closely as Soviet undersea boats followed NATO flattops. But there were no public accounts of Western subs getting caught doing so until 2007, when a Russian newspaper reported that warships escorting the carrier Admiral Kuznetsov in the Atlantic pursued an unspecified submarine for half an hour.

The snooping sub reportedly got away by deploying self-propelled decoys.

After the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991, the Russian submarine force shrank considerably and, for a few years at least, was much less aggressive. The Russian carrier fleet declined to a single vessel, the Admiral Kuznetsov.

American attention gradually shifted east to the Pacific, where in the early 2000s China had launched a massive naval rearmament program that included refurbishing a former Soviet carrier, a sister ship of the Admiral Kuznetsov that was renamed Liaoning in Chinese service.

In addition to their new flattop, the Chinese built several new submarines per year on average, soon boasting a fleet of some 60 undersea boats—about as numerous as American subs.

Not nearly as large, advanced or active as U.S. subs, the Chinese boats were at a huge disadvantage. Beijing’s subs struggled to gather intelligence and develop wartime tactics. They enjoyed at least one dramatic success in October 2006, when a Chinese Song-class diesel-electric attack submarine quietly surfaced within nine miles of Kitty Hawk in the waters between Japan and Taiwan.

The Song-class vessel, displacing 2,200 tons, was close enough to hit the Kitty Hawk with a torpedo. None of the carrier’s roughly dozen escorting warships detected the Song until it breached the surface. American officers were flabbergasted.

“This could well have escalated into something that was very unforeseen,” said Adm. Bill Fallon, then commander of U.S. Pacific forces.

But it’s apparent that China is more scared of American submarines than the Americans are scared of Chinese boats. In 2012 Liaoning was finally ready to set sail from the Dalian shipyard. As Beijing’s only carrier facing a fleet of 10 American flattops, Liaoning was widely expected to stage from China’s most modern naval base on Hainan Island in the south, near Taiwan and Vietnam.

Instead Beijing announced the 70,000-ton carrier would be heading north to Qingdao. The apparent reason was that the area around Qingdao was already home to a squadron of Song-class submarines plus Type 091 nuclear subs. Those vessels are the best defense China possesses against the American and Japanese subs that will undoubtedly hound Liaoning every time she leaves port, practicing to sink the carrier in the event of war.

Doing, in other words, what submarines do best.

This article first appeared several years ago.

Image: Reuters.

Robert W. Merry

Politics, Americas

Can Biden craft a trade policy that keeps overseas markets open to U.S. goods while protecting the interests of working-class Americans devastated by past unfair practices by American trading partners, particularly China?

THE MOST pressing imperative facing the incoming president, Joe Biden, is to pacify the ongoing and increasingly tense civil conflict between America’s coastal elites, who are liberal and globalist in outlook, and the nationalist/traditionalist folks of the heartland, who feel beleaguered by those elites. In order to do this, he will have to build a governing coalition that starts with a large segment of his Democratic base but also seeks to draw in more moderate elements of the opposition. If he tries to govern strictly from the Left, as his party will want, the civil conflict will continue and deepen, Biden’s government will seize up, and he will fail.

Donald Trump’s strong popular-vote showing, along with the outcomes in congressional balloting and state-legislative races, makes clear that American politics continues to reside on a knife’s edge of political parity and mutual hostility. There will be no wave of popular support of the kind that Franklin Roosevelt could summon after his strong 1932 election, or that Ronald Reagan commanded after 1980. If Biden is to succeed he must generate his own wave through the delicate art of governing.

Will he do it? Not clear. Can he succeed even if he tries to do it? Less clear. The president-elect’s party, still traumatized by the very emergence of Trump, will want Biden to govern as if the incumbent’s defeat on November 3 places the country back where it was before the vulgar billionaire crashed the political scene four years ago. That would mean policies and pronouncements denoting the party’s continuing view of Trump supporters as “deplorables.”

But Trump, for all of his limitations as a national leader, transformed the American political landscape by bringing new issues and new sensibilities to the Republican Party and the nation, and things aren’t going back to where they were when the party was led by the likes of Jeb Bush. That’s a reality Biden needs to absorb.

Consider, for example, the issue of immigration, the most incendiary of the cultural conflicts facing the country. Many Trump supporters believe the Democratic establishment favors relatively open borders as a means of transforming the essence of America in ways they oppose. And Democratic liberals consider resistance to their broad migrant hospitality to be a form of racism. This divide contributes significantly to the civil strains roiling America, and it’s difficult to see how Biden can bridge this gap and fashion a moderate consensus that can capture the center and neutralize the high-voltage passions emanating from the extreme wings of both parties.

Most likely he won’t try but will instead employ his executive authority to foster and encourage greater immigration flows, thus perpetuating the tensions and anxieties generated by the issue. 

Similar questions surround other major domestic matters. Can he craft a trade policy that keeps overseas markets open to U.S. goods while protecting the interests of working-class Americans devastated by past unfair practices by American trading partners, particularly China? Can he piece together a health-care system that expands coverage without introducing widespread inconvenience (such as rationing) for those seeking medical attention? And can he reconcile economic-growth imperatives with the importance of fiscal responsibility?

On foreign policy, Biden faces one issue that dwarfs all others, and that is China. The People’s Republic, a major global competitor in the realm of economic power, now seeks geopolitical dominance in East Asia (through naval power) and what the famous early-twentieth-century British geographer Halford Mackinder called the Eurasian Heartland (through infrastructure dominance and possibly, in the future, land power). America must decide if it will accept these surges of power—particularly in East Asia, as the realization of China’s ambitions there would mean that America eventually would be kicked out of the region. But Chinese dominance of the Eurasian Heartland carries other global hazards, since China then would be positioned to threaten Western Europe and Russia.

Some suggest that, given these developments, war between America and China is inevitable. Perhaps, but not necessarily. Through deft and imaginative diplomacy, and the building of alliance coalitions to bolster U.S. influence in the region, the country could signal its seriousness and perhaps foster a peaceful, though uneasy, accommodation with China.

This also suggests that the United States must clear the decks of its own geopolitical thinking so as to not get distracted from the primary challenge through counterproductive diplomatic and military actions elsewhere around the world. The country thus should extricate itself from “forever wars” in the Middle East and from unnecessary tensions with Russia and India, two nations that have been traditional Chinese adversaries.

But the challenge here is fearsome and the requirements of diplomacy daunting. Is Biden up to it? Judging from some of his past statements on China, this would seem to be an open question. “They’re not bad folks, folks,” he said early in the campaign. “But guess what? They’re ... not competition for us.”

That’s a remarkable statement from the former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. American foreign policy today should begin with an understanding that they are competition for us and see themselves as such. Then we can get to the question of how we should deal with that fundamental reality.

Robert W. Merry, former President of Congressional Quarterly and Editor of The National Interest, is the author most recently of President McKinley: Architect of the American Century (Simon & Schuster).

Image: Reuters.

Patrick Mendis, Antonina Luszczykiewicz

China, Asia

For the United States to counterbalance an increasingly assertive China, President Biden has to push the India policy envelope conceived by the Trump administration while championing America’s founding values of freedom and democracy.

President Donald Trump’s “America First” ethos has permanently aligned India within the United States’ overarching Indo-Pacific strategy. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s unique personal chemistry with Trump has resulted in a pivotal geostrategic calculus to challenge the rise of restless China.

It is no coincidence that President-elect Joe Biden selected Senator Kamala Harris—a descendant of Indian heritage—as his running mate. But, even with Vice President-elect Harris, the Biden White House will still face great challenges to overcome Modi’s Hindu nationalist politics and Trump’s white evangelical-Christian nativism when confronting China.

The Trump White House discounted human rights and the rights of ethnic minorities at home and abroad, especially of Tibetans and Uyghurs in China as well as Muslims in Indian Kashmir. Yet, his evangelical-led administration has still used India as a counterweight to China by pursuing its Indo-Pacific strategy with Australia and Japan. Like with the Taiwan policy, the incoming Biden White House’s National Security Council will have no choice but to continue with Trump’s India policy in its battle with China, especially on the restructuring of global supply chains in the Sino-American “trade war” and the tech cold war.

Setting the Stage

To set a lasting foundation for U.S.-India relations, President Trump dispatched his top national security officials to New Delhi in late October 2020. The White House decision for the concurrent visit of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and then-Defense Secretary Mark Esper had significant salience. The visit took place just a few days ahead of the U.S. presidential election and during a pandemic that both the most powerful and largest democracies are failing to control, leaving no doubts about the Trump administration’s perception of the importance of American engagement with India.

It was Pompeo’s fourth visit to India as secretary of state and the third in the U.S.-India 2+2 ministerial dialogue as part of the broader Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (the Quad). His latest trip was most significant given that Pompeo was accompanied by Defense Secretary Esper in a scheduled meeting with their counterparts: India’s Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar and Defense Minister Rajnath Singh.  

As members of the Quad with Australia and Japan, the United States and India have now signed the last of four foundational accords—the Basic Exchange and Cooperation Agreement (BECA) for Geospatial and Intelligence Cooperation—to solidify their bilateral military ties and to access exceptionally accurate geospatial data, high-end defense technology, and classified satellite data on military-related issues. With the BECA agreement, the other three accords form the basis of the U.S.-India defense cooperation framework:

- General Security of Military Information Agreement (GSOMIA) in 2002 

-The Logistics Exchange Memorandum of Agreement (LEMOA) in 2016  

-The Communications Compatibility and Security Agreement (COMCASA) in 2018 

The BECA agreement will be crucial for India given its June 2020 deadly border clashes with the Chinese People’s Liberation Army forces in the disputed Himalayan Galwan river valley in Ladakh and the previous Doklam valley standoff in the India-China-Bhutan trijunction border area. Under the agreement, the U.S. military will provide advanced navigational and avionic hardware in addition to sharing geospatial intelligence with India to deter Chinese transgressions into the Indian-claimed territories.

The Indian alliance with the Quad has now been solidified under a broad military pact. In protest, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi characterized the Quad’s goal to build an “Indo-Pacific NATO” in a strategy that harkens back to the Cold War. In 2018, however, Wang dismissed the Quad and the Indo-Pacific (instead of Asia-Pacific) alliance as an “attention-grabbing idea” that would “dissipate like ocean foam.” Despite his rhetoric, the evidence suggests an emergence of a new NATO-like Indo-Pacific alliance triggered largely by the recent Sino-Indian border confrontations in the Himalayan Ladakh region.

Beijing’s Strategic Miscalculations

The deaths of twenty Indian soldiers—together with an unconfirmed number on the Chinese side—in the Himalayan border skirmish were the first recorded casualties since 1975. The Modi government retaliated by banning over one hundred Chinese apps—such as WeChat and TikTok—for which India was supposed to become the biggest foreign market. In doing so, the Indian government renounced the 1988 breakthrough in which economic and cultural relations between India and China were to be developed irrespective of the ongoing border dispute. The Trump White House could not have been more pleased to secure India as a willing partner of the American trade and tech wars against China.

It is no secret that in recent years India and the United States have worked closely on tightening military, economic, and diplomatic cooperation. The cooperation began to accelerate with the U.S.-India Civil Nuclear Cooperation Treaty signed in 2008. After more than a decade of negotiations, the 2020 BECA agreement will now allow India and the United States to share satellite and mapping data for better accuracy of their missiles and drones—and for better surveillance against China and its “all-weather friend” Pakistan. With unanimous support from U.S. Congress, the longest-negotiated BECA accord is the final part of four military agreements between India and the United States that would fortify their military partnership to galvanize the Quad operations in the Indian Ocean and beyond.

Without directly stating that the U.S.-India alliance is aimed primarily at counterbalancing the influences of China, Pompeo remarked at the 2+2 ministerial dialogue in New Delhi that “we have a lot to discuss today: our cooperation on the pandemic that originated in Wuhan, to confronting the Chinese Communist Party’s threats to security and freedom, to promoting peace and stability throughout the region.” From his evangelical-Christian perspective, atheist-China is not the elephant in the room anymore, but the enemy of Christian America—openly pointing a finger at Beijing. While the Trump administration’s core values of nationalistic white supremacy have criticized China for its human rights abuses, it remains consciously blind to the treatment of Muslims in Kashmir by the Hindu nationalist government and the human rights abuses of Hispanic and Muslim immigrants in America, to name a few.

The Hedge Against the Biden Factor

Regardless of the significance of these values and agreements, some questions related to timing remain. Why did President Trump send his top national security officials only a few days ahead of the presidential election when the loss of his presidency was a possibility? Why didn’t India follow the “wait-and-watch” strategy until the U.S. election results were clarified?

The geopolitical context of Pompeo’s visit suggests it is a long-lasting strategy to limit the United States in its approaches to both China and India—and to ensure it will be continued regardless of who occupies the White House. Like the appointment of conservative judges to the U.S. Supreme Court for a lasting legacy, it is clear that Trump’s trade and tech wars with China will be inevitable and irreversible, regardless of President Biden’s intentions. Initiatives such as the Quad and the Indo-Pacific strategy confirm that the Biden administration has no choice but to counterbalance—or even isolate or possibly decouple with China—not just in economic but also in political domains.

In the prevailing domestic political perspectives, Pompeo’s visit to India was yet another occasion to use the “China threat” rhetoric and anti-Chinese sentiments in the presidential campaign to galvanize their voter base for years to come. From accusations of spreading the “Chinese virus” to presenting China as an economic bandit, Trump has been trying to mobilize his supporters while deflecting blame for the pandemic. His continued legacy—with a voter base of some 74 million, compared with 81 million who voted for President-elect Joe Biden—suggests that his style of American politics will not stop at the edges of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Having raised “huge sums of money from his loyal supporters,” his post-presidency will provide Trump with “tremendous flexibility” to advance his ambitions and to exploit his foreign policy initiates by advocating his success with conservative-evangelical voters and windfalls from the military-industrial complex (with his policies on armed sales to Saudi Arabia, Israel, Taiwan, India, and others).

Nonetheless, President-elect Biden will most certainly need to welcome Indian Prime Minister Modi’s iconic bear-hug, a symbol of his “personal diplomacy,” as well as the mutually beneficial nature of an evolved bilateral relationship.

Goodbye to Non-aligned Nonsense

With its new U.S. military alliance, India has finally removed the mask of “non-aligned” foreign policy which it has nominally employed since independence in 1947. During the Cold War, the so-called non-alignment was supposed to give India the flexibility to maneuver in its relations between the United States and the former Soviet Union. However, recent border tensions and China’s increasingly bold attempts at interfering in India’s internal affairs make it impossible for New Delhi to keep the facade of neutrality. As British Prime Minister Boris Johnson plans to visit India in January 2021 in his bid to transform the G7 group into a Democracy 10 (D-10) with Australia, South Korea, and India, the new democratic alliance would pave a way for the Biden administration to lead in combating authoritarian regimes and challenging China.

Yet in comparison to Secretary Pompeo and other Trump officials who openly call China an enemy, Indian leaders still seem much more restrained in their rhetoric. Although neither Jaishankar nor Singh called a spade a spade, the Indian government’s anti-Chinese motivations cannot be doubted anymore, despite some joint China-India soft power projects in recent years.

India seems ready to secure its Himalayan borders through an international alliance—the first military alliance aimed at protecting its boundary that New Delhi has joined openly in post-independence history. There is no doubt that a NATO-like Asian democratic “coalition of willing” countries or a global “D-10” grouping will have far-reaching implications for the Indian subcontinent and U.S. Indo-Pacific strategy. 

For the United States to counterbalance an increasingly assertive China, President Biden has to push the India policy envelope conceived by the Trump administration while championing America’s founding values of freedom and democracy. By upholding these values on the world stage, Biden would at least be remembered as an authentic U.S. president who re-established the American narrative as the “shining city upon a hill” for the rest to emulate. 

Dr. Patrick Mendis, a former American diplomat and a military professor in the NATO and Pacific Commands, is a distinguished visiting professor of global affairs at the National Chengchi University and a distinguished visiting scholar at the Taiwan Center for Security Studies in Taipei. 

Dr. Antonina Luszczykiewicz, a specialist in political and cultural history of China and India at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland is currently a visiting research scholar at Tamkang University in Taipei. Both are Taiwan fellows of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the Republic of China. The views expressed in this analysis neither represent the official positions of the current or past institutional affiliations nor the respective governments.  

Image: Reuters.

David Kennedy

Coronavirus,

Why it matters that the coronavirus is changing – and what this means for vaccine effectiveness.

A new variant of SARS-CoV-2 is spreading rapidly in the United Kingdom, with over 1,400 cases since September. SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, generally accumulates mutations slowly over time, but this new variant had accumulated many mutations quickly.

If this new version of the virus is here to stay, as it appears to be, what does that mean? Will this new version of the virus replace the old one? Will it be easier to catch? And, most important, will the current vaccines still be effective?

This interests me because I am an evolutionary microbiologist who studies the link between the transmission and evolution of infectious diseases. In particular, I spend a lot of time considering the effects of vaccines on pathogen evolution and the effects of pathogen evolution on the impact of vaccines.

What is the new SARS-CoV-2 mutant that has emerged?

The new version of SARS-CoV-2 – named the B.1.1.7 lineage – is spreading in the U.K. and possibly beyond. The differences between the old and new virus include 23 mutations in the virus’s genetic code that have altered four viral proteins.

Eight of these 23 mutations affect the spike protein. This matters because the spike protein enables the virus to enter human cells, and it is a key target of our immune response, both in fighting off the virus during infection and in protecting us from disease following vaccination with the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines.

If the changes to the spike protein help the virus enter human cells more easily, then the virus could be transmitted from person to person more readily.

These mutations may also alter how well the host’s immune system combats the virus, potentially reducing the efficacy of the current vaccines.

What is different about this new version of SARS-CoV-2?

Samples of the new virus isolated from patients suggest that this variant has been increasing in relative frequency over the past three months.

The increase in frequency is concerning, as it suggests – but does not prove – that the B.1.1.7 isolates of SARS-CoV-2 are more transmissible than the original virus. Some have estimated that the new virus may be up to 70% more transmissible than the old virus. While these estimates are consistent with the data, it is entirely too early to make a definitive conclusion.

If this increase in transmissibility is confirmed, it might be due to of the mutations in the spike protein allows it to bind more tightly to the ACE2 receptor, which provides a gateway for the virus to enter human cells.

But it might also be due to any of the other changes to the virus.

Is it more dangerous? If so, why?

If the new version, B.1.1.7, is indeed more transmissible than the old virus, it will be more dangerous in the sense that it will make more people sick.

However, I am not aware of good evidence that there is any difference in severity of disease caused by the new version of this virus compared with the older one. That said, with so few known cases, it may still be too early to say.

Will the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines still be effective against this new strain?

Both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines work by training our immune systems to recognize a specific version of the viral spike protein. The version of the spike protein used by the vaccines was designed to match that of the old virus, not that of the B.1.1.7 virus. This means that the vaccines might become less effective than expected should this new virus spread widely.

Vaccine-virus mismatch is an ongoing challenge for scientists charged with developing the seasonal flu vaccine. But even with a virus-vaccine mismatch, the flu vaccine reduces the likelihood, and the severity, of disease.

The question is therefore not whether the vaccines will be effective, but rather how effective they will be. The severity of the mismatch matters, but the only way to determine its impact in this case is through scientific study, and to my knowledge, no data on that has yet been collected. In other words, it’s too early to say whether and how this new variant will influence the overall effectiveness of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines.

Should people still get the new mRNA vaccine?

The appearance of this new B.1.1.7 makes it even more important that people get vaccinated as soon as possible.

If this new version is more transmissible, or if the vaccine is less effective because of a virus-vaccine mismatch, more people will need to be vaccinated to achieve herd immunity and get this disease under control.

Moreover, we now have proof that the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2 can change drastically in a short time, and so it is critical that we get the virus under control to prevent it from evolving further and completely undermining vaccination efforts.

David Kennedy, Assistant Professor of Biology, Penn State

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Image: Reuters

Phil Zuckerman

Politics, The Americas

In this last election, the emerging influence of secular voters was felt not only at the presidential level, but also on many down-ballot issues.

The voting patterns of religious groups in the U.S. have been scrutinized since the presidential election for evidence of shifting allegiances among the faithful. Many have wondered if a boost in Catholic support was behind Biden’s win or if a dip in support among evangelicals helped doom Trump.

But much less attention has been paid to one of the largest growing demographics among the U.S. electorate, one that has increased from around 5% of Americans to over 23% in the last 50 years: “Nones” – that is, the nonreligious.

I am a scholar of secularism in the U.S., and my focus is on the social and cultural presence of secular people – nonreligious people such as atheists, agnostics, humanists, freethinkers and those who simply don’t identify with any religion. They are an increasingly significant presence in American society, one which inevitably spills into the political arena.

In this last election, the emerging influence of secular voters was felt not only at the presidential level, but also on many down-ballot issues.

The new ‘values voters’

For years, both scholars and pundits have referred to the political impact of “values voters” in America. What that designation generally refers to are religious men and women whose scripturally based values coagulate around issues such as opposing marriage equality and women’s reproductive autonomy.

But dubbing such religious voters as “values voters” is a real semantic bamboozle. While it is true that many religious Americans maintain certain values that motivate their voting behavior, it is also very much the case that secular Americans also maintain their own strongly held values. My research suggests they vote on these values with just as much motivation as the religious.

Sex education

This played out in November in a number of ballot initiatives that have flown under the national media radar.

Voters in Washington state, for example, passed Referendum 90, which requires that students receive sex education in all public schools. This was the first time that such a measure was ever on a state ballot, and it passed with ease – thanks, in part, to the significant number of nonreligious voters in the Pacific Northwest.

The fact is, Washington is one of the least religious states in the union. Well over a third of all Washingtonians do not affiliate with any religion, more than a third never pray and almost 40% never attend religious services.

The referendum’s passing was helped by the fact that nonreligious adults tend to value comprehensive sex education. Numerous studies have found that secular Americans are significantly more likely to support comprehensive sex education in school. In his research, sociologist Mark Regnerus found that secular parents were generally much more comfortable – and more likely – to have open and frank conversations with their children about safe sex than religious parents.

Drugs policy

Meanwhile, voters in Oregon – another Pacific Northwestern state that contains one of the most secular populations in the country – passed Measure 110, the first ever statewide law to decriminalize the possession and personal use of drugs.

This aligns with research showing that nonreligious Americans are much more likely to support the decriminalization of drugs than their religious peers. For instance, a 2016 study from Christian polling firm Barna found that 66% of evangelicals believe that all drugs should be illegal as did 43% of other Christians, but only 17% of Americans with no religious faith held such a view.

Science at the ballot box

Secular people are generally more trusting of scientific empiricism, and various studies have shown that the nonreligious are more likely to accept the evidence behind human-generated climate change. This translates to support for politicians and policies that take climate change seriously.

It may also have factored in to the success of a November ballot measure in Denver, Colorado, to fund programs that eliminate greenhouse gases, fight air pollution and actively adapt to climate change. The ballot passed with over 62% of the vote – and it is of note that Denver is one of the most secular cities in the nation.

Meanwhile voters in California – another area of relative secularity – passed Proposition 14 supporting the funding of stem cell research, the state being one of only a handful that has a publicly funded program. Pew studies have repeatedly found that secular Americans are far more likely than religious Americans to support stem cell research.

Values versus values

On issues that the religious right has held some sway in recent years, there is evidence of a counterbalance among secular “value voters.”

For example, while the religious have been more likely to oppose same-sex marriage, secular Americans are more likely to support it, and by significant margins. A recent Pew study found that 79% of secular Americans are supportive, compared to 66% of white mainline Protestants, 61% of Catholics, 44% of Black Protestants and 29% of white evangelicals.

There are many additional values that are prominent among secular Americans. For example, the U.S. Secular Survey of 2020 – the largest survey of nonreligious Americans ever conducted, with nearly 34,000 participants – found strong support for safeguarding the separation of church and state.

Other studies have found that secular Americans strongly support women’s reproductive rights, women working in the paid labor force, the DACA program, death with dignity and opposition to the death penalty.

Secular surge

According to Eastern Illinois University professor Ryan Burge’s data analysis, around 80% of atheists and agnostics and 70% of those who described their religion as “nothing in particular” voted for Biden.

This may have been decisive. As Professor Burge argues, “it’s completely fair to say that these shifts generated a two percentage-point swing for Biden nationwide. There were five states where the gap between the candidates was less than two percentage points (Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and North Carolina). Four of those five went for the Biden – and the nones were between 28% and 37% of the population in those key states.”

As this past election has shown, secular values are not only alive and well, but they are more pronounced than ever. It is also noteworthy that more openly nonreligious candidates were elected to public office than ever before. According to an analysis by the atheist author and activist Hemant Mehta, not only did every member of the secular Congressional Freethought Caucus win reelection, but 10 state senators who are openly secular – that is, they have made it publicly known that they are nonreligious – were voted into office, up from seven two years ago. There is now an all-time high of 45 openly secular state representatives nationwide, according to Mehta’s analysis. Every one of them is a Democrat.

Religious voters will certainly continue to vote their values – and for politicians that express similar views. But so, I argue, will secular voters.

Phil Zuckerman, Professor of Sociology and Secular Studies, Pitzer College

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Image: Reuters

Lana Dbeibo

Coronavirus,

All your questions answered by a medical professional. 

I fully support the use of vaccines, but I worry about possible long-term side effects with the new vaccines. How can anyone say with any confidence there will be no long-term consequences with vaccines that have been developed so rapidly?

There are reasons the vaccines were developed rapidly: First, the production started before the end of phase 3 clinical trials. Second, there was a lot of interest in volunteering for the trials that tested the vaccines’ effectiveness, which expedited the process. Researchers often wait many months and sometimes even years to get people to volunteer to be part of trials.

Last, there was a lot of disease in the community which made it faster to see whether the vaccine was effective. The coronavirus has caused disease in millions of people in the U.S. alone, while Ebola and Zika viruses, while extremely serious, affected far fewer.

I worry much more about the long-term effects of the virus, which can be very debilitating and start soon after the infection. We have not seen reports of major effects of the vaccine in the past few months that it was studied; if there were major effects, I believe we should have started to see them by now. This could can change, however, and scientists would update recommendations accordingly.

My husband is 72 and undergoing chemo treatment for metastasized cancer in his lymph nodes. So far, treatment is showing shrinkage of tumors and no new spread. I’m 73. Should I get the vaccine?

There are two issues to address here. First, there is a question of whether someone who has been vaccinated could spread the disease to someone else. There is very limited data on whether the vaccine effectively limits spread of the disease, but we are waiting on studies to answer this question.

The second issue you raise is about people with compromised immune systems and whether they should get the vaccine. While the efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccines was not studied in immunocompromised people, the danger of COVID-19 to patients with a weaker immune system like your husband’s is very high. Because the benefit may exceed the risk, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention did not list being immunocompromised as a contraindication to receive the COVID vaccine. Please consult with your physician to have a conversation about this.

I have rheumatoid/psoriatic arthritis. I am taking the biologic Actemra and Solu Medrol as an infusion, monthly. I also take methotrexate twice a week. Is the vaccine considered safe for people with compromised immune systems?

The answer to this is very similar to the answer above. The CDC did not list having a weakened immune system as a reason not to get the vaccine, or what we doctors call a contraindication. Still, it is important for you to talk to your physician about your particular case.

My 22-year-old son had a reaction to the MMR vaccine when he was approximately 6 years old. He ran a fever for several days and developed the bleeding disorder ITP within a month or two after receiving the MMR vaccine. Should he be concerned about receiving the coronavirus vaccine?

Having any type of allergy other than anaphylaxis, which is a severe and sometimes life-threatening allergic reaction, to vaccines or components of the COVID vaccine is not a contraindication to receive the COVID vaccine. Everyone who receives either one of the drugs that have received emergency use authorization will be monitored for 15-30 minutes in the clinic after the vaccine dose because serious reactions will happen in the first few minutes after the vaccine is given.

At age 7 or 8, I received tetanus antitoxin (horse serum) and quickly lost consciousness for about four days. Subsequently, I remember having hives a few times in childhood and mild asthma until I was about 25. I do not now have significant allergies. I have had several cardiac procedures, including open thoracotomy for mitral and aortic bovine valve replacement in 2010 and a “Watchman” procedure. I have a pacemaker and daily take Metoprolol, Torsemide and penicillin g (after two episodes of endocarditis. Also a hemicolectomy for cancer. No problem with flu shots. Generally I am feeling better than I have in the past several years. I drive without difficulty. Should I get the vaccine?

My answer here would be similar to one answered above – having any allergy other than anaphylaxis to vaccines or components of the COVID vaccine is not a contraindication to receive the COVID vaccine. Similarly, having asthma or seasonal allergies is not a contraindication. I would recommend you consult with your doctor for specifics related to your other health issues.

And remember that scientific observations of the vaccine are ongoing. The CDC, FDA and other government agencies will update the public on significant changes if they occur.

Lana Dbeibo, Assistant professor of clinical medicine, Indiana University School of Medicine

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Image: Reuters

Kris Osborn

U.S. Special Operations Forces,

A new U.S. maritime strategy tries to focus U.S. special ops forces for a very different future: great power war. 

They use night vision and high-speed maneuver to launch small targeted boat attacks under cover of darkness, swim underwater for long distances to approach enemy shores, conduct clandestine reconnaissance operations and confront enemy fire amid hostage rescue or high-value target attack missions… to site just a few of the high-risk, high-casualty missions expected of Naval and Marine Corps Special Operations Forces preparing for major maritime warfare. 

Given the last several decades of U.S. military war campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, many are likely to regard Special Operations Forces such as Navy SEALs or Special Naval Warfare units as primarily focused upon and experienced in counterinsurgency missions. While such a thought would indeed be accurate when it comes to the SOF mission envelope, war planners also see Special Operators as increasingly vital when it comes to the possibility of major-power maritime conflict as well. 

This reality may in large measure be why a new U.S. Navy, Marine Corps and Coast Guard strategy document carves out a special place to highlight maritime Special Operations Forces as fundamental to the Navy’s pivot toward major power warfare. 

“Naval special operations forces help prepare the operational environment in contested and denied areas. Their skills and access enable the Naval Service to insulate vulnerable partners and maneuver naval forces inside of contested areas,” the strategy, called Advantage at Sea .. Prevailing With Integrated All Domain Naval Power, states. 

Marines even operate something called a MEUSOC, or Marine Expeditionary Unit, Special Operations Capable, to support specific kinds of smaller, more targeted yet vital intelligence, rescue or attack missions. 

Perhaps a small group of Special Operations capable Marines need to drop in behind enemy lines to gather intelligence or even conduct clandestine hit-and-run attack missions otherwise not possible. 

These are factors why a number of large Navy platforms are specifically engineered to support, transport and enable Special Operations Missions. Littoral Combat Ship mission packages, for instance, incorporate 11-meter rigid, inflatable boats, small watercraft often used by SOF for high-speed transport, rescue missions, maritime casualty evacuations or small, covert, highly surgical targeted attack operations. 

Virginia-class attack submarines are also now engineered with a specific mind to supporting SOF missions; Block III Virginias, for instance, many of which are now operational, are built with what is called a Lock Out Trunk, an designated, separated area within the sub that can house small groups forces then fill up with water to enable SOF divers to quietly swim out of the submarine for stealthy reconnaissance or attack missions without needing to surface. This kind of innovation, which makes a certain kind of stealthy force insertion much more realistic and likely to favor success, seeks to leverage the training benefits and warfare skills unique to Special Operations Forces. 

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 Masters Degree in Comparative Literature from Columbia University.

Warfare History Network

History, Americas

Antiseptic techniques were not yet in practice, and contaminated instruments and non-sterile conditions resulted in many wound infections.

Here's What You Need To Remember: Friendly fire was the direct cause of Jackson's death; an erroneous medical diagnosis helped. However, given what we know now about medicine, most historians agree that it is unlikely that the doctors could have done much to help him.

Following his greatest victory, at the Battle of Chancellorsville on May 2, 1863, Confederate Lt. Gen. Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson was scouting ahead of the lines with members of his staff when tragedy struck. In the pitch blackness of the early-spring evening, Jackson and his men were mistaken for Union cavalry and fired upon by their own side. Jackson sustained a severe wound to his upper left arm, necessitating amputation. Upon hearing the news, victorious General Robert E. Lee remarked, “He has lost his left arm, but I have lost my right.” Lee’s words proved prophetic. Eight days after the amputation, Jackson was dead.

It was a loss the Confederacy could ill afford. Before Chancellorsville, Jackson had enjoyed the fortuitous combination of personal skill as a commander, the ineptitude of his opponents, and the good luck that often follows such a combination. He had begun the Civil War as an unknown professor at Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, Virginia, after having distinguished himself during the Mexican War 15 years earlier. Fresh out of the United States Military Academy at West Point, where he had graduated a hard-won 17th in a class of 59, Jackson had earned two brevets for gallantry as an artillery officer during the Mexican War. By the end of the war, he had become a brevet major at the age of 24. He resigned his commission in 1852 to take the position of professor of artillery tactics and natural philosophy at VMI.

Jackson Volunteers for War

Jackson was commissioned a colonel of volunteers in April 1861 and promoted to brigadier general two months later. He won fame at the Battle of First Manassas on July 21, 1861, where his staunch defense of Henry Hill earned him the memorable nickname “Stonewall.” He was promoted to major general in October and appointed commander of all Confederate forces in the Shenandoah Valley the following month.

In the subsequent Shenandoah Valley campaign, Jackson fought a masterful series of battles against a greatly superior Union force. In doing so, his men prevented the reinforcement of Maj. Gen. George McClellan during McClellan’s drive on Richmond, probably saving the Confederate capital. After being repulsed at Kernstown, Jackson outmaneuvered and defeated enemy forces at Front Royal, Cross Keys, and Port Republic between May 23 and June 9, 1862. His campaign, long regarded by military historians as a tactical masterpiece, proved him to be a fearless and aggressive commander, a brilliant tactician, and a master of rapid maneuver. He summarized his approach to generalship as “always mystify, mislead and surprise the enemy.” This strategy also applied to his own subordinates, who were rarely informed of Jackson’s plans beforehand. Jackson consulted only with Robert E. Lee.

Jackson rejoined Lee in driving McClellan from the peninsula during the Seven Days’ Battles between June 26 and July 2. Jackson next destroyed Maj. Gen. John Pope’s supply depot at Manassas Junction on August 27 and repulsed Pope’s counterattack at Groveton the next day. He contributed substantially to Lee’s crushing victory over Pope at Second Manassas on August 29-30. During the invasion of Maryland, Jackson won added distinction at the Battle of Antietam. Despite the Confederate defeat, he was promoted to lieutenant general the following month. At the Battle of Fredericksburg in December 1862, Jackson commanded the right flank in another devastating defeat of Union forces, this time led by Maj. Gen. Ambrose Burnside.

A Grievous Wound

Jackson’s brilliant flanking move at Chancellorsville helped Lee reverse the tide of seeming Union victory and shatter the forces of the new enemy commander, Maj. Gen. Joseph Hooker. It would be Jackson’s last hurrah. After sustaining a gunshot wound to his upper left arm and a minor wound to his right hand, Jackson left the battlefield supported by two aides. He was then placed on a litter. One of the litter-bearers was shot, causing the general to be thrown painfully to the ground. Jackson was lifted back onto the litter and carried a few hundred yards to the rear, where the 27-year-old medical director of the II Corps, Dr. Hunter McGuire, examined his wounds. “I hope you are not badly hurt, General,” he said. “I am badly injured,” Jackson responded forthrightly. “I fear I am dying. I am glad you have come. I think the wound in my shoulder is still bleeding.”

McGuire observed that Jackson’s clothes were saturated with blood and saw that the wound to the left arm indeed was still bleeding. He applied compression to an artery and called for a light to examine the wound more closely. He found that the bandage had slipped and adjusted it to stop the hemorrhage. McGuire also found that Jackson’s hands were cold, his skin was clammy, and his face and lips were pale—all classic signs of hemorrhagic shock. Jackson, however, admitted no discomfort. He was given morphine and whiskey nonetheless—despite being a lifelong teetotaler—and was removed to a nearby field hospital.

Immediate Surgery

At the hospital, McGuire determined that immediate surgery was necessary. When he informed Jackson, the general replied, “Yes, certainly, Dr. McGuire, do for me whatever you think best.” Chloroform was administered and Jackson murmured, “What an infinite blessing,” as he slipped into unconsciousness. McGuire first extracted a round ball that had lodged under the skin at the back of Jackson’s right hand. It had entered the palm and fractured two bones. Next, McGuire wrote, “The left arm was then amputated, about two inches below the shoulder, very rapidly, and with slight loss of blood, the ordinary circular operation having been made.”

Amputations accounted for approximately 75 percent of all operations during the Civil War. Antiseptic techniques were not yet in practice, and contaminated instruments and non-sterile conditions resulted in many wound infections. Nevertheless, prompt amputations undoubtedly saved many lives by converting traumatic wounds into surgical procedures to improve patient survivability. During the war, surgeons found that amputations performed within 48 hours of an injury were twice as likely to be successful as those performed later. Union records reveal a total of 5,540 upper-arm amputations, from which 1,273 amputees died from complications—a fatality rate of 23 percent.

Jackson tolerated the surgery well despite his earlier significant blood loss. At 3:30 the following morning, Major Alexander “Sandie” Pendleton arrived at the hospital to obtain orders for Maj. Gen. J.E.B. Stuart, Jackson’s replacement as corps commander. Jackson attempted unsuccessfully to respond. “He tried to think,” reported Pendleton. “He contracted his brow, set his mouth, and for some moments appeared to exert every effort to concentrate his thoughts. For a moment we thought he had succeeded, for his nostril dilated, his eye flashed its own fire, and his thin lip quivered again, but it was just for a moment. Presently he relaxed again, and very feebly, and oh so sadly, he answered, ‘I don’t know. I can’t tell. Say to General Stuart that he must do what he thinks best.”

An Uneven Recovery

Jackson then slept for several hours and appeared to be free of pain when he awoke. At 10 am, however, he experienced a severe and sudden episode of pain in his right side and called for McGuire. Jackson assumed that he had injured his side when he struck a stone or stump during his fall from the litter the night before. McGuire made a careful examination and concluded, “No evidence of injury could be discovered by examination; the skin was not broken or bruised, and the lung performed, as far as I could tell, its proper function.” The pain soon abated.

By 8 pm, the pain had disappeared and Jackson seemed to be doing well. The following day, fearing Jackson’s capture by nearby Federals, Lee ordered McGuire to remove his patient to Guiney Station, 27 miles away. Early the next morning the ambulance set out, and Jackson seemed to tolerate the transfer well. Later in the day he became nauseated and asked that a wet towel be placed on his abdomen. Upon arrival, he felt well enough to take bread and tea.

The house where Jackson was to convalesce already contained several other wounded soldiers, including several with cases of highly contagious erysipelas, a skin infection caused by the bacteria streptococcus. McGuire would not allow Jackson to be exposed to the infection and found him a small building on the grounds that had been used as an office. The general slept well that night and awoke to eat a hearty breakfast.

McGuire dressed Jackson’s wounds and found them to be healing well without signs of infection. Jackson seemed satisfied with his progress and inquired how long it would be before he could return to the field. At 1 am, however, he suffered another bout of nausea and asked a servant to reapply a wet towel to his abdomen.

Jackson did not want to disturb the exhausted McGuire, who awoke to find his patient complaining again of pain in his right side. After examination, McGuire reluctantly concluded that Jackson had “pleuro-pneumonia of the right chest,” presumably secondary to the fall from the litter. The doctor speculated, “Contusion of the lung, with extravasion of blood in the chest, was probably produced by the fall referred to, and the loss of blood prevented any ill effects until reaction had been well established, and then inflammation ensued.”

Making a Diagnosis

On Thursday, May 7, Jackson’s wife, Anna, arrived with their five-month-old daughter, Julia. The sight of her husband’s mangled body and his difficulty breathing alarmed Anna, who said Jackson’s condition “wrung my soul with such grief and anguish as it had never before experienced. He looked like a dying man.” Upon seeing Anna, Jackson smiled and said, “I am very glad to see you looking so bright,” before falling back asleep. When he awoke and saw the look of concern on her face, he said, “My darling, you must cheer up and not wear a long face. I love cheerfulness and brightness in a sickroom.” For his sake, Anna tried to display a happy countenance, but her despair continued to grow.

McGuire had requested the assistance of Dr. Samuel B. Morrison, who arrived late that afternoon. Morrison was a medical school classmate of McGuire’s and a relative of Anna’s. He had treated Jackson before the war and was recognized by the general when he arrived. “There is an old familiar face,” said Jackson, although Morrison was actually five years younger. Morrison was unconvinced that Jackson’s labored breathing and pain in the side were due to pneumonia. He favored a diagnosis of prostration, or complete physical collapse.

Some accounts maintain that Jackson had been ill with a respiratory tract infection prior to the Battle of Chancellorsville, pointing to the fact that he was wearing his raincoat on a warm day owing to chills. However, none of the eight physicians who attended him in the last week of his life mentioned this history or described any sign or symptoms suggesting a preexisting infection. McGuire and Morrison conferred and decided to send to Richmond for Dr. David Tucker, a leading authority on pneumonia. In the meantime, McGuire requested that two other surgeons, Robert J. Breckinridge and John Phillip Smith, join the medical team.

Jackson was restless throughout Thursday night, calling out various orders to his men. “A.P. Hill, prepare for action!” he shouted on one occasion. “Pass the infantry to the front!” he commanded, as well as “Tell Major Hawks to send forward provisions for the troops!”

The four physicians carefully examined Jackson the next morning. The wounds were suppurating, but seemed to be healing normally. There was little they could do, however, to relieve Jackson’s persistent shortness of breath and chest pain. He seemed to be growing weaker by the hour. After another restless night, Tucker arrived from Richmond on the morning of May 9 and confirmed McGuire’s original diagnosis of pneumonia. He recommended cupping. Hot glasses were applied to the afflicted area to “draw the blood.”

“I am not Afraid to Die”

Jackson continued to decline, fading in and out of consciousness. When he awoke in the afternoon and saw several surgeons standing around his bed, he said, “I see from the number of physicians that you think my condition dangerous, but I thank God, if it is His will, that I am ready to go. I am not afraid to die.” Following another difficult night, the general awoke on Sunday, May 10, completely exhausted. It was apparent to everyone that he could not last the day. Anna broke down sobbing and told Jackson that there was no hope for his recovery. Jackson called for McGuire and said, “Doctor, Anna informs me that you have told her I am to die today. Is it so?” McGuire replied that there was nothing further the doctors could do. Jackson paused, then responded, “Very good, very good. It is all right.”

After brief visits from little Julia and Major Pendleton, Jackson lapsed into a coma. He awoke shortly before 3:15 pm and spoke his final, enigmatic words: “Let us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees.”

The Diagnosis in Retrospect

While McGuire and the other attending physicians all agreed that pneumonia was the cause of Jackson’s death, modern-day analysis raised the more likely possibility of pulmonary embolism. The source of the so-called pleuro-pneumonia was presumed to be a lung contusion incurred during Jackson’s fall from the litter. However, from the distance of a few feet at most, the ribs would have absorbed most of the force of the fall, protecting the underlying lung. There would also have been external evidence of trauma such as bruising in an injury serious enough to result in a lung contusion. Neither McGuire nor the other physicians found any evidence of such trauma.

Pleuro-pneumonia is a medical term that is rarely used today. Pleurisy occurs when inflammation involves the pleura, or outer surface, of the lung. Pleuritic chest pain often accompanies pneumonia, thus the term pleuro-pneumonia. Sir William Osler’s 1892 edition of his classic textbook, The Principles and Practice of Medicine, states: “Pneumonia is a self-limited disease, and runs its course uninfluenced in any way by medicine. It can neither be aborted nor cut short by any means at our command.” Osler went on to say that “the first distressing system is usually pain in the side, which may be relieved by local depletion—by cupping or leeching.” Such treatment was used unsuccessfully on Jackson.

According to the thinking of the day, Jackson’s clinical presentation fit with pneumonia. His physicians cannot be faulted for their diagnosis or treatment, although it should be noted that 19th-century physicians were adept at eliciting the subtle physical signs of pneumonia, such as hearing a cracking sound in the lungs with a stethoscope or finding dullness to percussion of the chest. Neither of these classic signs of pneumonia was found by any of Jackson’s doctors.

In terminal pneumonia, the clinical course typically goes from bad to worse. But in Jackson’s illness, there were two distinct, sudden episodes of deterioration. These occurred on May 3 and May 6, and both were described as being associated with the onset of acute chest pain, shortness of breath, fatigue, and perhaps fever. These symptoms are consistent with pulmonary emboli, which are blood clots traveling to the lungs. Among the numerous complications following amputation of an extremity are nonhealing of the stump, infection, and thromboembolism, or the formation of a blood clot within a large vein. According to McGuire, Jackson’s wound appeared to be healing properly and infection did not seem significant.

It is known today that an amputee is at significant risk for venous thromboembolism and pulmonary embolism. Immobilization of the patient following surgery can allow the blood to pool and clot within the veins. More dangerous is the formation of clots in the large veins that are tied off during amputation. The tying off of the veins, or ligation, leads to stagnation of blood in the veins, which leads in turn to a thrombus, or clot, which can then travel to the lungs and kill the patient.

Even with today’s advanced technology, it is estimated that as many as half of all pulmonary emboli go undetected by physicians. The current treatment and prevention of thromboembolism is accomplished by the use of blood-thinning agents such as Heparin and Lovenox. Although Stonewall Jackson’s death was unpreventable, given the state of medicine at the time, it is more likely that he died from thromboembolism as a direct consequence of his wound and amputation, than from the indirect cause of pneumonia.

This article by J.D. Haines first appeared at the Warfare History Network.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Warfare History Network

History, Europe

But the RAF’s raid on the mountain had been in vain. Templeman-Rooke had been misinformed—the Führer was not in residence.

Here's What You Need To Remember: None of the Nazi leaders were present. But the alpine pleasure complex - a sort of Nazi Camp David - was heavily damaged by the raid.

Adolf Hitler believed in Vorsehung (providence). The German leader felt that if anything was going to happen to him, such as assassination, there was nothing he could do about it. He had been selected by fate to achieve something great; he would not die, either by accident or assassination, until he had fulfilled that God-given mission.Time and time again in the past, providence, not planning, had taken care of him. In 1933, for instance, just before he became master of the Third Reich, he was involved in a terrible car crash with a truck. He emerged from the wreckage stating that he could not die yet—his mission had not yet been achieved.

It was the same with assassination attempts. Hitler explained that he had many enemies and expected disgruntled Germans and others to try to kill him. But they would never succeed, especially if they came from the German working class. He used to state to his staff quite categorically, “Mil tut kein deutscher Arbeiter was” (“No German worker will ever do anything to me.”). Once, when he was advised by worried police to use the back entrance to a noisy and angry meeting of workers, Hitler snorted, “I am not going through any back door to meet my workers!”

As for those aristocratic Monokelfritzen (Monocle Fritzes, those high-born, monocled aristocrats Hitler had hated with a passion ever since the Great War), both civilian and military, whom he knew from his intelligence sources had been trying to eradicate him in these last years of the 1930s, he was confident that this personal providence would save him. And in truth, until the very end, providence did protect Hitler from all the attempts on his life, including the generals’ plot to kill him in July 1944.

Naturally, ever since Hitler’s election as chancellor in 1933, his security guards had taken secret precautions to protect him. Like some medieval potentate, all the Führer’s food was checked daily before it was served to him. Each day, his personal doctor had to report that the Führer’s food supplies were free of poison. Party Secretary Martin Bormann ran daily checks on the water at any place where the Führer might stay to ascertain whether it might contain any toxic substances.

Later, when Bormann, in his usual fawning manner, started to grow “bio-vegetables” in his Berchtesgaden gardens for the Führer’s consumption, Hitler’s staff would not allow the produce to appear on the master’s vegetarian menu. Once, just before the war, a bouquet of roses was thrown into the Führer’s open Mercedes. One of his SS adjutants picked it up and a day later started to show the symptoms of poisoning. The roses were examined and found to be impregnated with a poison that could be absorbed through the skin. Thereafter, the order was given out secretly that no “admirer” should be allowed to throw flowers into Hitler’s car. In addition, from then on, adjutants would wear gloves.

“We Have not Reached the Stage in Our Diplomacy When We Have to Use Assassination as a Substitute for Diplomacy.”

On another occasion, Hitler, who loved dogs (some said more than human beings), was given a puppy by a supposed admirer. It turned out that the cuddly little dog had been deliberately infected with rabies. Fortunately for Hitler, and not so fortunately for the rest of humanity, the puppy bit a servant before it bit him. It seemed that Hitler’s vaunted providence had taken care of him yet again.

Thereafter, plan after plan was drawn up to kill Hitler by his German and Anglo-American enemies. All failed. Although back in 1939, the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, had stated, “We have not reached the stage in our diplomacy when we have to use assassination as a substitute for diplomacy.” Prime Minister Winston Churchill decided in April 1945, however, that Hitler must die—by assassination! He gave the task to his most ruthless and anti-German commander, Sir Arthur “Bomber” Harris, the head of Royal Air Force Bomber Command, whose aircrews often called him bitterly “Butcher” Harris.

Back in the summer of 1943, Harris had sworn that Berlin would be “hammered until the heart of Nazi Germany would cease to exist.” Hard man that he was, Harris had once been stopped by a young policeman and told if he continued to speed in his big American car, he would kill someone. Coldly, “Bomber” had replied, “Young man, I kill hundreds every night.” He now ordered that Hitler should be dealt with at last in his own home. The Führer had escaped, so Allied intelligence reasoned, from his ruined capital Berlin. So where could he be? The answer was obvious. “Wolf,” the alias Hitler had used before he achieved power in 1933, had returned to his mountain lair.

In that last week of April 1945, Allied intelligence felt there were only two possible places where Hitler might now be holed up since his East Prussian headquarters had been overrun by the Red Army. Either he was in Berlin, or at his Eagle’s Nest in the Bavarian Alps above the township of Berchtesgaden. Reports coming from Switzerland and relayed to Washington and London by Allen Dulles of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) stated that the Germans were building up a kind of last-ditch mountain fortress in the Austrian-German Alps, so Allied intelligence was inclined to think that Hitler had already headed for Berchtesgaden where he could lead the Nazis’ fight to the finish. The bulk of the Reichsbank’s gold bullion had already been sent to the area to disappear in perhaps the biggest robbery in history.

Luftwaffe chief Hermann Göring had gone in the same direction, followed by Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, who had taken up residence in his stolen Austrian castle. More importantly, SS General Sepp Dietrich’s beaten 6th SS Panzer Army was retreating from Hungary, followed by the Red Army, heading for Austria and the same general area. Thus, the Allied planners decided that if they were finally going to assassinate Hitler, they would find him in his mountain home—built for him over the last decade by Bormann. Prominent Nazis, the Prominenz, just like Mafia chieftains, had erected their own homes in Berchtesgaden to be close to Hitler.

Once it had simply been a rural beauty spot, with a couple of modest hotels surrounded by small hill farms that had been in the same hands for centuries. Bormann changed all that. He bribed, threatened, and blackmailed the Erbbaueren (the hereditary farmers, as they were called) to abandon their farms. He sold their land at premium rates to fellow Nazis and then, as war loomed, erected a military complex to protect the Führer whenever he was in residence on the mountain among the “Mountain People,” as the Nazis called themselves. After he completed his 50th birthday present for the Führer, the Eagle’s Nest, which Hitler visited only five times and which cost 30 million marks to construct, Bormann turned his attention to making the whole mountain complex as secure as possible, both from the land and the air.

Bormann, the “Brown Eminence” as he was known, the secretive party secretary, who in reality wielded more power on the German home front than Hitler himself, declared the whole mountain sperrgebiet (off limits). A battalion of the Waffen SS was stationed there permanently. Together with mountain troops from nearby Bad Reichenhall, the SS patrolled the boundaries of this prohibited area 24 hours a day, something the British planners of Operation Foxley, a land attack planned by the British in February 1945, had not reckoned with.

If Anyone Could, Harris Swore, He Would Blast Berchtesgaden Off the Map.

Then, Bormann turned his attention to the threat of an air attack. Great air raid shelters were dug, not only for the Führer and the Prominenz, but also for the guards, servants, and foreign workers—there was even a cinema, which could hold 8,000 people. Chemical companies were brought in and stationed at strategic points on the mountain. As soon as the first warning of an enemy air attack was given, they could produce a smoke screen, which, in theory, could cover the key parts of the area in a matter of minutes. Finally, there were the fighter bases such as Furstenfeldbruck in the Munich area where planes could be scrambled to ward off any aerial attack from the west or indeed over the Alps from the newer Allied air bases in Italy.

Whether it was because of Bormann’s precautions, the problem of flying over the Alps in a heavy, bomb-laden aircraft, or Allied scruples about bombing an enemy politician’s home, the mountain had not been seriously troubled by air raids until now. Bomber Harris was determined to end all that. If anyone could, Harris swore, he would blast Berchtesgaden off the map.

To do so, he picked one of his most experienced bomber commanders: 24-year-old Wing Commander Basil Templeman-Rooke, who had begun his bomber career in 1943. By the end of that year, he had already been awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross (DFC) and more importantly had flown over the Alps to bomb Turin in the hope that a bombing raid on that city, so far away from England, would encourage the Italians to surrender. After one tour of duty, Templeman-Rooke commenced another one in May 1944. He took part in the D-Day preinvasion bombing of French railways, storage depots, and other targets, and then in the attacks on V-1 buzz bomb sites after the invasion.

The controversial bombing of Dresden followed in February 1945. Shortly thereafter, Templemann-Rooke had been given the command of the Royal Air Force’s 170 Squadron and awarded a Bar to his DFC. In March, he received the Distinguished Service Order. For Harris, the young squadron commander must have seemed the ideal leader for what he had in mind for 170 Squadron. He was young, brave, very experienced and, above all, lucky. In his two years of combat, he had survived over 40 missions, and even when he had been hit by flak over Gelsenkirchen, he had brought his Avro Lancaster bomber back on two engines and crash-landed the four-engine plane without injury. Now, Harris ordered Templeman-Rooke to fly his squadron’s last combat mission of the war, its target perhaps the most important one left in Germany during April 1945.

For days now, although the hilltops were still covered with snow down to 900 meters and causing fog, reconnaissance planes kept flying over the mountain, setting off the wail of the sirens and sending the populace scurrying for the shelters. Then, once again the smoke screen would descend on the deserted homes of the Prominenz. For even Hitler’s most devoted followers had reasoned that the mountain was no place to be at this stage of the war. Still, there had as yet been no attempt to bomb the area.

That changed at 0930 on Wednesday, April 25, 1945. On the half hour precisely, the pre-alarm sirens started to sound. Obediently, the locals began to file into their air raid shelters, believing that, as usual, nothing much would happen. This time they were wrong. Most of the mountain, right up to the Eagle’s Nest at 9,300 feet, was obscured by fog. This time, on Harris’s order, 170 Squadron, part of a force of 318 Lancasters, was determined to carry out its mission. Within half an hour of the pre-alarm being sounded, the first bombs were raining down on the twin heights of Klaus-and-Buchenhoehe.

Then came the second raid. According to German reports, the Lancasters swept in shortly afterward, dropping 500-pound bombs. Immediately, they hit Hitler’s Berghof, where back in what now seemed another age, the Führer had once received British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, the “Umbrella Man,” as the Germans had mocked him due to his appearance. Afterward, as German eyewitnesses recorded, the interior looked like a landscape after an earthquake. Göring’s house, demolished together with his swimming pool, followed. Bormann’s house received a direct hit. The only place that was not destroyed or damaged was the Eagle’s Nest. It had been well camouflaged with tin leaves and was perhaps too small a target for Harris’s men. But as the bombers swept on to attack nearby Bad Reichenhall, where 200 people were killed that day, they left behind them only smoking wreckage, which would be added to when the SS guards retreated, setting fire to everything they could not loot.

But the RAF’s raid on the mountain had been in vain. Templeman-Rooke had been misinformed—the Führer was not in residence. He had remained in his bunker, spared yet again by the “providence” in which he believed so strongly. But he knew he could not go on forever. As he declared to anyone still prepared to listen to him in his Berlin bunker, he was not going to die at “the hands of the mob” like his friend and fellow dictator Mussolini. Nor was he going to allow himself to be “paraded through the streets of Moscow” in a cage. So, a broken man, embittered at the failings of his own people, and perhaps a little mad, the leader who had survived so many assassination attempts died by his own hand. His “providence” had run out at last.

Even today, at a certain angle, one can see the series of depressions leading up to where Göring’s house was, marking one bomber’s run into the attack. Of the house itself only a few steps remain next to some bushes where visitors allow their dogs to do their business—“Hundepissecke” the locals call it. One wonders what roly-poly Göring would have said. Probably, he would have reached for his shotgun and started blazing away; he was always very keen to shoot anything on four legs.

Charles Whiting has contributed regularly to WWII History. He has written a number of well-received books, which have sold millions of copies worldwide.

This article originally appeared on Warfare History Network.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Kris Osborn

U.S. Naval Forces,

In the event of some kind of major power warfare on the open seas, allied combat support for U.S. Naval forces at war is something which could not be understated.

In the event of some kind of major power warfare on the open seas, allied combat support for U.S. Naval forces at war is something which could not be understated as it would not only massively expand the size and reach of a collective force engaged in combat but also share node-to-node information across vast, seemingly unpassable distances and domains. 

A new Naval war strategy document specifically cites some of the decisive,  crucial roles allies would need to play in any kind of massive Naval war engagement. Of course, allied forces would naturally figure prominently in the event of large scale ocean war, yet one interesting point made by the new strategy explains that the mere presence and involvement of allies may simply stop war from happening in the first place. 

“Alliances and partnerships are true force multipliers in times of crisis. Partner and ally deployments of combat-credible forces increase the legitimacy of our response, strengthen our deterrence, and demonstrate multinational resolve,” the text of the strategy, called “Advantage at Sea .. Prevailing With Integrated All Domain Naval Power,” states. 

It is also likely not by accident that the text of the strategy makes a point to emphasize U.S.-allied information sharing and surveillance operations, something naturally able to exponentially expand and strengthen the operational reach of any force immersed in war. 

“They (allies) further contribute by providing intelligence, logistics, cyber, and space capabilities. They also provide specialty capabilities, such as mine warfare and anti submarine warfare. Finally, our alliance and partner forces help secure sea-lanes and maintain global maritime security,” the strategy writes.  

This kind of tactical reality might almost immediately come to mind regarding two major, high-risk theaters of possible war… the Pacific and Europe, of course relating specifically to Russia and China to a large extent. As part of this, the strategy makes a clear reference to logistics and allied collaboration when it comes to enabling war operations. 

“They interdict adversary war materials and commerce; provide access, basing, and overflight; and deliver additional critical capabilities, such as intelligence and logistics support. Allies and partners will also play a crucial role in deterring opportunistic aggression in additional theaters, as well as maintaining maritime governance and exposing malign behavior,” the strategy writes. 

These factors may be part of why U.S. Navy destroyers regularly operate in the Black Sea demonstrating interoperability and solidarity with several Eastern European allies, many of which are NATO-aligned.  In a manner naturally fully aligned with this kind of regional activity, the U.S. Navy also makes a routine point of engaging in war preparations, exercises and training opportunities with major NATO allies in places such as the Baltic Sea, an area of great tactical relevance because it affords attack or long-range fire possibilities into Russian territory in the event of any kind of major warfare.

The relevance of the Pacific and U.S. Southeastern Asia allies is of course vital to the point wherein it might seem almost too obvious to mention, however, data sharing, surveillance, and maritime-oriented war preparations indeed take on new operational relevance in an area as vast and widely dispersed as the Asian theater. 

“Allies and partners add capability, capacity, and legitimacy in combat operations. Leveraging our interoperable C2 networks, allies and partners provide all-domain fires to help establish sea control and project power.” 

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 Masters Degree in Comparative Literature from Columbia University.

Warfare History Network

History, Europe

Raeder was doomed to fail before he even began.

Here's What You Need To Remember: Geography doomed the Kriegsmarine. The Royal Navy was able to keep it mostly contained to the Atlantic Coast, and there was no massive Jutland-style naval battle in World War II. This did not, however, prevent hundreds of U-Boats from slipping past the Royal Navy and wreaking havoc in the Atlantic.

On the nights of August 21 and 24, 1939, two dark ships slipped out of the German naval base at Wilhelmshaven and turned west toward the English Channel. Forty-eight hours later they were well out into the broad Atlantic Ocean, safe from prying British eyes. They were two of the Kriegsmarine’s most innovative warships, the compact but powerful pocket battleships Admiral Graf Spee and Deutschland. Each was armed with six 11-inch guns and could range for nearly 10,000 miles, prowling the seas for vulnerable prey.

A week before Hitler’s attack on Poland, Germany was already preparing to initiate Grand Admiral Erich Raeder’s Plan Z, the daring surface campaign to destroy Britain’s military and commercial sea trade.

The two ships were the vanguard of what Raeder hoped would eventually be dozens of fast and potent cruisers and battleships that would disrupt and destroy the Allies’ sea lanes and starve England into surrender.

At the war’s outset, Britain possessed about 2,000 merchant ships and another 1,000 coastal vessels of less than 2,000 tons each. This added up to around four million tons of cargo capacity. Another three million tons came from countries conquered by Germany, while another million tons were being launched each year. Britain required about 55 million tons of imports— consisting of food, oil, cotton, wool, and other industrial products—to sustain it. Raeder’s goal was to sink more tonnage than Britain could endure and force the capitulation. In essence, his raiders had to sink ships faster than Britain could replace them. As events proved, Raeder was doomed to fail before he even began.

Grand Admiral Erich Raeder led the Kriegsmarine until he fell out of favor with Hitler.

Erich Raeder, who had risen to command the Kriegsmarine after a career that went back to being a junior officer aboard Kaiser Wilhelm II’s yacht Hohenzollern to the post of chief of staff for Admiral Franz von Hipper’s battlecruiser force in the Great War, was a strong advocate of fast surface commerce raiders. They had proved successful during World War I, even if their impact on the outcome was negligible. The most successful surface raider was the light cruiser SMS Emden. In three months in the Indian Ocean, Emden sank two Allied warships and captured or sank 16 merchant vessels totaling 70,000 tons. Emden was undoubtedly Raeder’s inspiration for his vision of fast raiders running wild through Allied shipping. But he failed to give much credibility to the U-boat campaign of World War I. Although the U-boats were often hampered by the diplomatic need to appease neutral nations who violently opposed unrestricted submarine warfare, in 51 months the 371 U-boats sank 5,282 British, Allied, and neutral merchant ships totaling more than 11 million tons.

Ignoring this persuasive statistic, Raeder had convinced Adolf Hitler that a surface fleet was essential to victory at sea. In January 1939, he proposed his Plan Z, envisioning a huge fleet of battleships, heavy cruisers, and aircraft carriers that would roam and dominate the seas by 1948. Hitler had promised his fleet commander that there would be no war until at least 1944, giving Raeder a healthy margin of time to carry out his grand building program. 

But in the summer of 1939, Raeder learned of the planned invasion of Poland. Even though there was little doubt that Britain would quickly become involved, Hitler forged ahead, disrupting Raeder’s carefully laid plans to build a huge surface fleet. Faced with a fait accompli, Raeder used what few large surface warships he possessed to support Hitler’s grand campaigns.

But Raeder was more of a tactician than a strategist, a remnant of his time with the battlecruisers under Hipper. He never developed a broad strategy, instead using his meager force in hit and run raids and attacks. Additionally, Raeder gave little thought to U-boats as a viable means of cutting the Allied sea lanes. But his greatest blunder was that he failed to recognize the nearly two decades of advances in aviation, marine technology, and radar that made a surface fleet more of a target than a threat.

His shortsighted dogmas condemned the Kriegsmarine to defeat.

Erich Raeder was not only up against the powerful Royal Navy, but the former First Lord of the Admiralty and later Prime Minister Winston Churchill, whose devotion to the Navy was close to reverence. Churchill gave the Navy all the support it needed to assure Britain’s survival.

The German battleship Bismarck posed a tremendous threat to Allied shipping with its main 15-inch gun batteries. Bismarck was hunted down and sunk by Royal Navy warships in 1941.

The last thing Churchill and the Admiralty wanted was for the distinctive shape of a huge German battleship to come out of the misty horizon and open fire with its heavy guns on a helpless convoy of tankers and transports.  A salvo of heavy 8-inch or 11-inch high-explosive shells screaming out of the sky like angels of death could be devastating. The thin-skinned merchant ships could be sunk in minutes, leaving their crews to flounder and die in the freezing sea. Germany’s powerful ships would be wolves in the fold, unstoppable and deadly.

Raeder lacked the strength and time to make a significant contribution to the Third Reich’s war aims, but he doggedly followed a radically shrunken version of his original raiding plan. His only advantage was that the Royal Navy was largely equipped with vessels that had been launched during or shortly after the Great War. They were mostly older, slower battleships and battlecruisers with a leavening of light cruisers and destroyers.

However, Raeder’s ships were all new, having been launched since 1931 and fitted with the latest naval technology and engines. They were for the most part fast, heavily armed and armored and were the equal of their larger British counterparts. But there were too few of them.

The numbers leave little doubt as to the inevitable outcome. Even at a fraction of its former glory, the British Home Fleet consisted of seven battleships, two battlecruisers, four aircraft carriers, 21 cruisers, more than 50 destroyers, and 20 submarines. The navies of Canada, New Zealand, and Australia added their own strength to this huge armada. Against this Raeder never had more than 10 powerful warships. Three were the so-called “pocket battleships” Deutschland, Admiral Graf Spee, and Admiral Scheer. In Germany they were officially called Panzerschiffen, or “armored ships.” They carried two triple turrets with six 11-inch guns. They were registered as being 10,000 tons each but actually displaced over 12,000 tons. Three 14,500-ton Admiral Hipper-class cruisers, Hipper, Blucher, and Prinz Eugen, each carried eight 8-inch guns in four turrets. Formidable in themselves, they were soon superseded by two larger vessels, which were called heavy cruisers but were in fact battleships. Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, launched in 1936, each carried nine 11-inch guns in three turrets. While they were officially registered as displacing 19,000 tons, their registered gross tonnage was closer to 32,000. This made them larger than any German warship ever constructed up to that time, but Raeder was not finished. His planned armada was only partially complete.

The zenith of Raeder’s raider fleet were the huge new battleships Bismarck and Tirpitz, each of more than 50,000 tons and carrying eight 15-inch guns in four turrets. Launched in 1939 and 1940, respectively, the sisters were the largest and most heavily armed and armored warships ever built in Germany. But their very size and power made them the focus of Royal Navy attention even before they completed their sea trials. They were also the last capital ships built in Germany during World War II.

A large crowd gathered in June 1934 to watch the launching of the pocket battleship Graf Spee. Graf Spee came to grief in 1939, scuttled after the Battle of the River Plate.

In August 1939, Raeder initiated Plan Z by sending Graf Spee and Deutschland out to sea. Graf Spee, named for Count Maximillian von Spee, commander of the German East Asia squadron in 1914, went to the South Atlantic, while Deutschland headed for the North Atlantic.

From the moment Graf Spee received word that Great Britain and Germany were at war, her captain, Hans Langsdorff, who was above all a gentleman warrior, began his hunt for British merchant ships. German raiders were under the strict rules of cruiser warfare, where all ships stopped must be searched and their crews allowed to escape in lifeboats before the vessel was sunk. His crew was skilled and loyal to their mission. Langsdorff used his ship’s reconnaissance plane to scout for prey. When Graf Spee came upon a likely ship, the first thing Langsdorff did was to destroy the merchant ship’s radio room with direct fire, preventing a distress call. Then he ordered the captain to abandon the vessel before he opened fire. Graf Spee sank 16 ships in three months of raiding in the Indian Ocean and South Atlantic. Not one person was killed or injured. But time and circumstances were catching up with Langsdorff.

Three British cruisers, HMS Exeter, Achilles, and Ajax, none of which had the firepower of Graf Spee, were under the command of Admiral Henry Harwood, a brilliant tactician. Harwood deduced that Graf Spee would head for the port of Montevideo at the mouth of the River Plate in Uruguay where a convoy was expected. On the morning of December 13, 1939, Langsdorff found the three Royal Navy ships converging on him. With few options, he chose to fight. While the three British cruisers had less firepower than their foe, they split up and forced Langsdorff to either concentrate on a single ship or split his own limited firepower. Graf Spee’s main armament of six 11-inch guns were in two triple turrets.

After only 20 minutes of battle, Langsdorff had severely damaged Exeter but suffered major damage to his own ship’s superstructure. The British guns could not penetrate his hull or turret armor. He chose to break off and attempt to make repairs in Montevideo. But the Uruguayan government would not allow him to stay long enough to make repairs, and in the end Langsdorff had to either face a more numerous and powerful foe or scuttle his ship. He stripped Graf Spee of all classified equipment and set off charges that sank her in the river.

Langsdorff and his crew then headed for Buenos Aries, where he later committed suicide.

Coincidentally Admiral Maximillian von Spee had died aboard his flagship SMS Scharnhorst only 1,000 miles from where his namesake would be scuttled almost exactly 25 years later.

The two forward 11-inch main batteries of the battlecruiser Scharnhorst loom as the ship lies at anchor in the port of Kiel in the winter of 1940. Scharnhorst sank the British aircraft carrier HMS Glorious but was destroyed in the Battle of the North Cape.

Graf Spee’s sister, Deutschland, had a longer but far less successful career. Commanded by Captain Paul Veneker, Deutschland was operating off southern Greenland and Nova Scotia to interdict British shipping. At first she was moderately successful with two ships taken, but then Venaker made an error that caused great embarrassment to the Third Reich by capturing the American steamer City of Flint less than 1,200 miles from New York. The ship was seized and the American crew taken prisoner. Evading prowling British warships, Venaker headed for Norway. This was a further outrage, as both America and Norway were still neutral. The United States sent a flood of protests to the Nazi government.

Veneker then tried to go to Murmansk, but the Soviets, also neutral, refused entry. This meant that Deutschland and her crew were, in effect, kidnappers. Returning to Norway, Deutschland was boarded by Norwegian officials and the Americans set free. Deutschland returned to Germany for refit. To avoid any connection with the highly embarrassing incident, the ship was renamed Lutzow. Lutzow was heavily damaged by gunfire and torpedoes during the invasion of Norway the following year and towed back to Germany. Her luck failed to improve when the ship was again torpedoed by a Bristol Beaufort of RAF Coastal Command in June 1941.

Repaired, the ship then went aground off the coast of Norway, thus missing the famous July 1942 attack that scattered convoy PQ-17. By 1944, Lutzow nee Deutschland was providing support to German troops retreating from the advancing Soviets on the Baltic coast. Then an RAF Avro Lancaster heavy bomber dropped a 12,000-pound Tallboy bomb on the deck, doing great internal damage. Repaired once again, her ignominious career was ended when she was deliberately blown up four days after Hitler committed suicide in 1945.

Yet, as ineffective as Deutschland’s raids had been, she had managed to stretch the Royal Navy’s assets to the breaking point. Dozens of cruisers and battleships were detailed to protect the convoys from German raids, making things easier for Raeder’s plans but also rendering his goals virtually impossible.

Worse was in store for Raeder’s reputation. In November 1939, even before Graf Spee’s death ride, the battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau found the armed merchant cruiser SS Rawalpindi in the region between the Faeroe Islands and the Denmark Strait. A small P&O liner of 16,700 tons, she was fitted with eight 6-inch and two 3-inch guns. Under the command of Royal Navy Captain E.C. Kennedy, the Rawalpindi savagely attacked the two big German battleships. Even while the small liner sank from dozens of heavy shell hits, her guns continued to fire. The action forced the two German raiders to leave the area before a heavier Royal Navy force arrived.

he heavy cruiser Lutzow lies at anchor in a Norwegian fjord in 1942. The warship was originally christened as the Deutschland, but its name was changed after the seizure of the American steamer City of Flint.

Almost exactly a year later, another converted liner, the 14,000-ton SS Jervis Bay, under Commander Edward Fegen, was escorting Convoy HX-84 from Bermuda to Britain. Admiral Scheer found the convoy off the coast of Iceland. Fegen charged at the German ship with her seven 6-inch and three 3-inch guns. Jervis Bay was sunk in 20 minutes. Fegen earned a posthumous Victoria Cross. The convoy escaped without loss.

Despite some victories, one factor Raeder could not ignore was that the German surface raiders needed fuel, ammunition, replacement parts, food, and other supplies as they roamed far and wide in their hunt for Allied ships. Tankers and freighters had to be stationed in neutral or friendly ports. The raiders could patrol no farther than a few thousand miles from a support vessel, further limiting their range and effectiveness. Raeder recognized that it would become increasingly difficult for any of his raiders to evade the Royal Navy and patrol aircraft.

The other factor was geographical. Germany has only one coastline in the Baltic and North Seas. The major ports on the two seas are connected by the Kiel Canal, built in 1895 and expanded in 1913 to allow rapid deployment of ships, avoiding the long and often treacherous route around Denmark. But the fact was Germany could not deploy any ships without passing England either via the North Sea or through the English Channel. Raeder began to urge Hitler to invade Norway. This would provide dozens of fjords and harbors far up the North Sea from which to send his ships out to the Atlantic. Hitler, who had always considered the Norwegians to be a racially kindred nation with Germany, and seeing both strategic and tactical advantages to taking Norway, agreed. Raeder’s ships and transports were used extensively in the campaign, which began in April 1940.

The heavy cruiser Admiral Hipper and four destroyers were escorting 1,700 troops to Trondheim when they were spotted and attacked by the British destroyer HMS Glowworm. Hipper’s captain first fired on the Glowworm and then attempted to ram, but the British ship turned the tables by ramming the larger ship, tearing a 100-foot rent in the hull. While Glowworm later exploded, Hipper needed extensive repairs. Another invasion unit consisting of the newly named Lutzow and Hipper’s sister Blucher was accompanied by the light cruiser Emden, namesake of the famous raider of World War I. They headed for Oslo, which was guarded by 40-year-old 11-inch guns purchased by the Norwegians from Krupp to defend the city. When the German ships were almost near enough to “see the whites of their eyes,” the heavy guns began firing. Blucher was so heavily damaged that she was easily finished off with torpedoes. More than 1,000 German seamen went down with her. Lutzow was also damaged but escaped. The big German surface ships had not played a major role in the Norwegian campaign.

The Royal Navy sent the carriers HMS Ark Royal and HMS Glorious, recently arrived from the Mediterranean, to support the defense of Norway. They were to recover the remaining RAF fighters and bombers that were now stranded in Norway. The captain of Glorious, a veteran of World War I, failed to have an air patrol watching for any attack as his ship landed the precious fighters and bombers. Then, vectored in by Luftwaffe reconnaissance planes, the battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau raced in and began firing their 16 8-inch guns at the helpless carrier. Even with a smokescreen laid down by the escorting British destroyers, Glorious went to the bottom an hour later. This was the only significant warship, other than the battlecruiser HMS Hood the following year, to be sunk by German surface raiders.

The heavy cruiser Admiral Hipper engaged the British destroyer Glowworm off the Norwegian coast in April 1940. Glowworm rammed Hipper, causing extensive damage, but was sunk in the unequal fight.

With the fall of Norway in June 1940, Raeder had his North Sea sanctuaries for the raider fleet. Germany now controlled 3,000 miles of coastline from northern Norway to the Bay of Biscay, 10 times more coastline than before the war.

By the spring of 1941, Raeder was scrutinizing the total number of ships sunk in the first full year of war. Graf Spee had sunk 16 ships, totaling 50,000 tons. Admiral Sheer did better in the less heavily patrolled Indian Ocean, sinking 17 ships totaling over 113,000 tons before sneaking back to Germany in March 1941. Scharnhorst and Gneisenau managed to send 122,000 tons of ships to the bottom before being forced to run for a safe base in France.

The totals were not nearly as high as Raeder had promised Hitler.

And things were only going to get worse. Using radio direction finding (RDF) and brilliant cryptanalysis, the British Admiralty was tracking the raiders with ever-increasing skill. Long-range patrol aircraft, such as the American-built Consolidated PBY Catalina and its Canadian-built counterpart, the Canso, were scouring the Atlantic Ocean over the convoy routes. Added to this must be the work at Bletchley Park, where the German radio traffic was analyzed and distributed to the fleet. The Royal Navy was able to deduce the location and operational orders for Raeder’s ships. Every tanker and supply ship that was found and sunk further limited Raeder’s ability to find and attack the convoys.

But Raeder’s delusion that his few remaining ships could still do what he had envisioned in 1939 refused to die. He sent word to the newly operational Bismarck in April 1941, that she and her escort, the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen, should move out of southern Norway and head to the Atlantic. His ultimate plan was to have the two ships join with the newer Tirpitz and the sisters Scharnhorst and Gneisenau to break into the Atlantic and hit the big convoys. His theory was that the two biggest warships could temporarily control and extend into regions of the North Atlantic with their speed and heavy guns. Bismarck, being the most dangerous, was to fight and distract the Royal Navy escort ships while the other German raiders sank the helpless merchant ships. But Raeder’s grand plan was never to materialize. Tirpitz was not yet fully operational, Scharnhorst was having her engines overhauled, and Gneisenau had been torpedoed in the harbor at Brest, France. All Raeder had left were Bismarck and Prinz Eugen. No destroyer escorts could accompany them on their sortie as their range was too limited.

Raeder had little choice. The British convoys were carrying the weapons and troops for the invasion of Crete in the Mediterranean. They had to be destroyed or disrupted. This was pure folly on Raeder’s part. The Royal Navy was well aware of Bismarck’s location and was keeping a close eye on her. Norwegians, resisting their conquerors, reported any movement of German warships and planes to their British allies. Raeder assumed, with some justification in light of Rawalpindi and Jervis Bay, that the Royal Navy was defending convoys with as few as one warship or converted liner.

Yet the Royal Navy was more than willing to strip protection from other convoys to provide extra firepower to destroy Bismarck. In all, the British force consisted of six battleships, four battlecruisers, two carriers, 13 cruisers, 33 destroyers, and dozens of patrol aircraft. This was the largest force ever tasked with the destruction of a single ship.

Even without the additional support of three other large warships, Bismarck was to sail in mid-May and wreak havoc on the convoys no matter what.

There is little need to detail the chase and sinking of Bismarck as it has been covered many times over the years. But it serves as an excellent example of bad planning, bad leadership, and bad judgment by both Raeder and the fleet commander, Admiral Guenther Leutjens, who commanded Bismarck and Prinz Eugen on their ill-fated attempt to break out to the Atlantic. Leutjens made some very poor decisions that not only sealed Bismarck’s fate but condemned nearly his entire crew to death without any hope of success.

The crew of the battleship Tirpitz busily camouflages the warship, which lies at anchor in Flehke Fjord, Norway, in 1942.

By the summer of 1941, Scharnhorst, Gneisenau, Admiral Scheer, and Admiral Hipper were all being repaired or under constant air attack. They were unable to find a way to escape their French and Baltic Sea prisons. Then there was the last big raider, Tirpitz. She was what Raeder called a “fleet in being,” a term for a single powerful ship dominating an entire region. That might have had some validity at the start of the war, but by late 1942 it was pure madness. But Tirpitz’s fearsome presence did reap some unexpected benefits for Raeder. When the Soviet Union joined the Allied cause, Churchill promised Josef Stalin that he would begin sending convoys carrying vital war material to the Russian arctic ports of Murmansk and Archangel.

By the end of 1941, the first seven of these, designated PQ and JW, made it through to their destinations unscathed, but soon the Kriegsmarine was able to take action. More surface raiders and U-boats were sent to northern Norway, and long-range Focke-Wulf FW-200 Condor planes were sent out to find the convoys.  Then the Royal Navy received word that the huge Tirpitz, along with the pocket battleship Admiral Scheer and the cruiser Prinz Eugen, were being sent to Norway. This was ominous news, as they could only have one objective: the Murmansk convoys.

Prinz Eugen was spotted and torpedoed, forcing her into a port for repairs.

In March 1942, Tirpitz was sent out to interdict PQ-12, but bad weather made finding the convoy impossible. The battleship returned to the safety of the Norwegian fjord. The Royal Navy conducted several air raids against the ship, but none were able to get close due to heavy antiaircraft fire.

Convoy PQ-17 was assembled in Iceland. It consisted of 35 merchant ships, 22 of which were American. Their cargoes were composed of hundreds of tanks, aircraft, and trucks, as well as fuel, ammunition, and supplies badly needed by the hard-pressed Red Army in its desperate battle to stop the Germans. The escort was six destroyers and a covering force of four cruisers, two British and two American. Several Royal Navy battleships were sent out in case Tirpitz emerged from her Norwegian redoubt.

On June 27, PQ-17 set a course into the Arctic Ocean, well aware of the threat that could come from the many fjords and harbors along the enemy coast. The convoy was spotted by a Condor on July 1, and the U-boats closed in to sink two ships. Then the Admiralty received word via Bletchley Park that Tirpitz was refueling in a northern Norway port. This could only mean one thing: she was going to attack PQ-17. There was no way for the heavy battleships of the Royal Navy to get there in time to stop a bloodbath. Near panic ensued, and in a series of badly conceived orders, the covering cruiser force was to head west and the convoy was to scatter, each ship to make a run for Murmansk on its own. 

The last transmission from the convoy escort commander was, “Sorry to leave you like this. Good luck. Looks like bloody business.” Convoy PQ-17 was now at the mercy of Doenitz’s U-boats and the Luftwaffe. Day after day they charged in with a savage fury. By the time the remains of PQ-17 reached Murmansk, only 11 of the original 35 ships were left. It was a costly debacle. It was also the German Navy’s greatest single victory against an Allied convoy. The truth was, Tirpitz was never sent out to the convoy, but merely fueling and shifting its berth. The scattering of PQ-17 served to show how much the Admiralty feared the power of heavy guns on a convoy. Yet neither Tirpitz nor any of the other surface raiders fired a single shot at the unprotected ships.

In April 1944 the battleship Tirpitz was attacked by British Fairey Barracuda bombers. Tirpitz took multiple hits, and 300 crewmen were killed or wounded. Still, the battleship sustained only minor damage to its superstructure. The ship was finally sunk by British bombers in November 1944.

The turning point in the debate over the effectiveness of U-boats versus surface raiders was decided in favor of the former at the end of 1942.  Early on, at Hitler’s insistence, Raeder had issued standing orders for the raider fleet. It stated that they engage at whatever cost, as long as they did not endanger or lose their ships. Even a casual reading of this order reveals its obvious contradiction. It ultimately led to Raeder’s fall from power.

In December 1942, Hipper, Lutzow, and six destroyers were sent from Norway to attack convoy JW-51B. The convoy consisted of 15 ships moving through the Arctic Ocean to Kola. The force was heavily escorted by seven destroyers and two light cruisers. Corvettes and air support from Murmansk were at the ready.  When the German ships hove into view on December 31, they attacked the outer escort screen, sinking one minesweeper and a destroyer. But it was apparent that many more British warships were coming and further reinforcements had been called in.

The German commander broke off the action. Raeder’s order had also made it plain that if the German force was confronted with ships of equal strength they were to disengage.  Not one freighter had been sunk. Worse, Hipper received three hits from 8-inch shells. The BBC announced the incident, and Adolf Hitler, never one to accept or recognize his culpability, went into a rage and ordered that all the remaining surface raiders be scrapped, their guns turned into coastal fortifications and their crews transferred to the U-boat fleet. In light of how poorly the surface raiders had so far served the Third Reich, this might have been a good tactical move.

Raeder resigned on January 30, 1943. The new grand admiral of the fleet was Karl Dönitz. The U-boats finally had the high command’s full support.

As for Tirpitz, she remained under heavy air and shore protection in Trondheim throughout much of the war, being subjected to numerous and costly air attacks by Royal Navy torpedo planes and land-based bombers. The only time Tirpitz, the last and most powerful battleship in the Kriegsmarine, ever fired her huge guns at the enemy was a shore bombardment of a British weather station on the island of Spitzbergen in September 1943. Fuel shortages prevented her from any further sorties, and the ship spent months sheltered in antiaircraft and antitorpedo defenses.

More Royal Navy torpedo planes and land-based bombers made attacks on Tirpitz through the summer and fall of 1944. The end finally came in November 1944, when Lancasters of No. 617 Squadron, the same group that had bombed the Ruhr Valley dams in March 1943, attacked Tirpitz with huge 12,000-pound Tallboys. Even though most bombs missed, there were enough hits to assure that the last German battleship would never leave port.

In the end, the mighty Tirpitz rolled over and sank in Tromso, Norway. No more surface raiders emerged from the Baltic or North Sea to threaten Allied shipping lanes.

After February 1943, the U-boats were the primary German naval weapon of the war. Altogether U-boats sank 2,779 ships for a total of 14.1 million tons, or 70 percent of all Allied shipping losses in all theaters of the war. The most successful year was 1942, when more than six million tons of shipping were sunk in the Atlantic.

As for the surface raiders, the total tonnage sunk by their guns was just short of 800,000. Considering the expense and the number of men needed to operate them, the results were dismal. The irony is that Raeder, who oversaw all new construction, was undoubtedly aware that for the cost, materials, and manpower of building just one battleship like Bismarck the Kriegsmarine could have launched at least 10 U-boats. If he had turned the Navy’s efforts to constructing submarines as far back as 1935, there could have been as many as 100 more U-boats manned and in service by 1940.

Churchill had openly stated that the thing that most frightened him during the war was the U-boat menace. Fortunately for the Allies, Raeder followed his own doomed plan. Of all the German surface raiders that put to sea in World War II, only one survived the war. The heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen, whose sole claim to fame was accompanying Bismarck on part of her death ride, was captured by the Allies and ended up in the Pacific.

Prinz Eugen was made into a target in the Operation Crossroads atomic bomb tests at Bikini Atoll in July 1946. While Prinz Eugen survived the two blasts, the sturdy cruiser was so totally irradiated that she had to be towed to Kwajalein Atoll and left as a derelict. She later turned over and sank. Her stern is still visible today.

This was the final blow to Admiral Erich Raeder’s fleet of surface raiders.

Author Mark Carlson has written on numerous topics related to World War II and the history of aviation. His book Flying on Film—A Century of Aviation in the Movies 1912-2012 was recently released. He resides in San Diego, California.

This article first appeared at the Warfare History Network.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Simon Cotton

Security, Asia Pacific

At the heart of this debate, though, lies a mistake that threatens to blind the US to its options and, in doing so, could lead to a stance that increases the risk of conflict.

As Joe Biden’s inauguration approaches, debate about the US’s China policy is intensifying. At issue are the traditional pillars of strategy ambiguity and dual deterrence. Strategic ambiguity means that the US reserves the right to assist Taiwan militarily in the event of a conflict with China but does not commit itself to doing so. Dual deterrence means that the US doesn’t only seek to deter China from an unprovoked attack on Taiwan; it also seeks to deter Taiwan from provoking an avoidable conflict by declaring independence.

Biden has endorsed both pillars in the past. In a 2001 Washington Post op-ed, he wrote that while he remained a strong supporter of Taiwan, ‘The United States has not been obligated to defend Taiwan since we abrogated the 1954 Mutual Defense Treaty’. He also stressed that ‘there is a huge difference between reserving the right to use force and obligating ourselves, a priori, to come to the defense of Taiwan’.

Yet a growing number of commentators and policymakers argue that China’s power is now so great, and its ambitions so extensive, that the US should move away from strategic ambiguity and towards what Richard Haass and David Sacks described in Foreign Affairs as ‘strategic clarity’. In short, they suggest that to better deter China the US should make an unequivocal public commitment to aid Taiwan in any conflict.

At the heart of this debate, though, lies a mistake that threatens to blind the US to its options and, in doing so, could lead to a stance that increases the risk of conflict.

Both critics and defenders of strategic ambiguity tend to assume that it is required for dual deterrence, and thus that, regrettable as it may be, moving away from strategic ambiguity will mean giving up on dual deterrence. It is only the prospect that the US might assist Taiwan, in other words, that can deter China while simultaneously deterring Taiwan. This is why critics of strategic ambiguity like Haass and Sacks feel the need to stress that ‘deterring Taiwan from declaring independence is no longer a primary concern’, while defenders like Walter Lohman and Frank Jannuzi stress the opposite.

In reality, however, this assumption is false. It would be possible for the US to move away from strategic ambiguity without giving up on dual deterrence.

Suppose that, instead of maintaining an ambiguous stance, the US were to make two unequivocal, but conditional, public guarantees: first, to aid Taiwan in the event it were subject to an unprovoked attack, and second, to not aid Taiwan in the event it were to provoke a conflict by declaring independence. In this case, the US would shift away from strategic ambiguity without sacrificing dual deterrence. And it would better deter China from naked aggression without reducing the incentive Taiwan has not to spark an avoidable conflict. Indeed, it may increase this incentive.

It’s not surprising that people conflate strategic ambiguity with dual deterrence, because a certain kind of ambiguity can magnify deterrence. In the right circumstances, adopting a retaliatory stance without saying what would actually trigger retaliation can get your adversary to second-guess their every move. Drawing a clear line in the sand, in contrast, gives them the green light to do everything they can short of crossing that line. To give a well-known illustration, it’s sometimes thought that US Secretary of State Dean Acheson effectively gave a green light to North Korean leader Kim Il-sung to start the Korean War by making a speech in January 1950 that delineated a US ‘defensive perimeter’ that excluded South Korea.

These are not the circumstances in the Taiwan Strait, however. As such, a shift away from strategic ambiguity without a movement away from dual deterrence is not just possible, but advisable.

For one thing, it would be grossly disproportionate—not to mention illegal—for the US to use military force in response to merely diplomatic or economic pressure on Taiwan. As a consequence, a threat to use such force would lack credibility at the best of times—indeed, even if it were plainly stated. It’s no surprise, then, that China is already doing everything it can short of using military force to bring Taiwan back within the fold. There’s thus little that could be gained from strategic ambiguity on this front.

Further, the balance of effective military power in the Taiwan Strait may have shifted so far away from the US that, rather than inducing policy paralysis, strategic ambiguity merely gives China the impression that the US wants to be in a position to save face were it not to aid Taiwan. As the doyen of strategic studies, Thomas Schelling, put it in his 1966 book Arms and influence, when our stance is ‘ill-defined and ambiguous—if we leave ourselves loopholes through which to exit—our opponent will expect us to be under strong temptation to make a graceful exit (or even a somewhat graceless one)’. At this point, in other words, strategic ambiguity threatens to undercut rather than magnify deterrence.

Of course, it might be thought that for the US to positively commit to not assist Taiwan were it to declare independence takes things one step too far. Mightn’t China interpret this as indicating that the US doesn’t recognise the many advantages to retaining Taiwan that are impervious to any such provocation, thereby leading China to downrate US resolve still further? At the very least, wouldn’t such a stance incentivise China to interfere in Taiwanese politics in an attempt to engineer such a declaration?

Yet the US could still better deter China without making such a commitment, namely by moving away from strategic ambiguity vis-à-vis China while retaining it vis-à-vis Taiwan. In other words, the US could make an unequivocal public guarantee to aid Taiwan in the event of an unprovoked attack while reserving the right to aid Taiwan in the event of a conflict sparked by a declaration of independence.

At this stage, the smart money is on the Biden administration retaining strategic ambiguity. But it would a great pity, to put it mildly, if this were done under the false impression that anything else would mean ‘ced[ing] to Taiwan … the ability automatically to draw us into a war across the Taiwan Strait’, as Biden himself put it in 2001. Two decades later, the challenge of the Taiwan issue calls for a far more careful analysis than that.

This article was first published by the Australian Strategic Policy Initiative. 

Image: Reuters

Ana Santos Rutschman

Coronavirus,

The general rule is yes – with some exceptions.

Editor’s note: The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the federal agency in charge of enforcing laws prohibiting discrimination in the workplace, on Dec. 16 said that employers can require employees to get vaccinated before entering the workplace. Now that two COVID-19 vaccines have received emergency use authorization in the U.S., some people are concerned they could be fired if they don’t want to take the vaccine. We asked legal scholar Ana Santos Rutschman, who teaches a course on vaccine law at Saint Louis University, to explain the decision and the rights employees and employers have.

1. Can employers require employees to get a vaccine?

The general rule is yes – with some exceptions.

Under U.S. law, private employers have the ability to define general working conditions, including the adoption of health and safety within the workspace. Requiring employees to get vaccinated against diseases that could compromise health and safety in the workplace is viewed as part of that ability.

2. Does the rule apply to COVID-19 vaccines?

Earlier in the pandemic, there were some doubts about whether the general rule would apply to COVID-19 vaccines because the first vaccines that became available in the U.S. have not been fully approved by the Food and Drug Administration. They have received an emergency use authorization, which is temporary permission to commercialize the vaccines because of the public health crisis the U.S. is facing. This is the first time emergency use authorization has been granted to a new vaccine. For this reason, some legal scholars questioned whether existing laws applied to temporarily authorized vaccines.

That question was addressed when the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission issued guidelines that said employers have the right to impose a mandatory COVID-19 vaccination policy.

From a legal perspective, this view is based on the fact that the law allows employers to impose requirements to make sure that employees don’t pose threats to the “health or safety of other individuals in the workplace.” The EEOC treated emergency use vaccines as part of the sets of measures that employers are able to mandate in order to accomplish this goal.

Therefore, the general rule applies and employers should be able to require that employees get vaccinated against COVID-19, within certain limits. These limits – including the exceptions below – are the same as the general exemptions applicable to any employer-mandated vaccination.

3. Are there religious exemptions?

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act established that if an employee has a sincerely held religious belief incompatible with vaccination, the employer cannot require that employee to be vaccinated. The EEOC has traditionally interpreted the concept of “religious belief” very broadly. Vaccine refusal cannot, however, be a personal or politically motivated belief.

If an employee qualifies for a religious exemption, the employer must then try to reasonably accommodate the employee. An example of an accommodation would be for the employer to have the employee switch from in-person to remote work while COVID-19 poses risks to public health.

However, the employer does not have to grant an accommodation if doing so would result in “undue hardship.” Typical cases of undue hardship include situations in which the accommodation would compromise the health and safety of other employees or in which implementing the accommodation is too costly or logistically burdensome. In case of a dispute over what constitutes an undue hardship for the employer, a court would typically be asked to resolve it based on the cost of offering the accommodation, as well as how difficult it is for the employer to implement it.

4. How about disability-related exemptions?

The balance of rights between an employee with a disability and her employer is similar to the one described above. Under the Americans with Disabilities Act, if an employee has a disability and cannot safely receive a vaccine, that employee qualifies for an exemption and the employer has to provide reasonable accommodations. But the act also establishes that employers do not have to provide an accommodation that would result in undue hardship.

The technical question here was whether employers could impose COVID-19 vaccination because the Americans with Disabilities Act severely limits the ability of employers to require medical examinations. In its Dec. 16 guidance, the EEOC clearly stated that COVID-19 vaccines do not fall in the “medical examination” category.

Therefore, requiring employee vaccination does not violate federal disability law.

5. What if the employer cannot provide accommodation?

If an employee qualifies for either a religious or disability-related exemption but the employer is unable to provide an accommodation because of undue hardship, then the employer has the right to exclude the employee from going to the workplace.

Given the broad set of rights that the law gives employers in order to promote health and safety, in some cases it is possible for an organization to go even further and terminate employment if a worker refuses vaccination and there is no reasonable way to provide an accommodation. For example, if there is no reasonable accommodation that an employer can provide a barista that would allow her to continue make lattes at the coffee shop where she works, the employer may be able to terminate her employment.

However, the EEOC guidelines explicitly say that the inability to reasonably accommodate an employee does not automatically give the employer the right to fire her. Finding out whether the coffee shop could indeed terminate its unvaccinated barista would depend on a variety of factors, including state law, union agreements and any other potentially applicable requirements at the federal level.

[Research into coronavirus and other news from science Subscribe to The Conversation’s new science newsletter.]

Ana Santos Rutschman, Assistant Professor of Law, Saint Louis University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Coronavirus,

An immunologist's answers.

I am a professor of infectious diseases at the University of Virginia, where I care for patients with COVID-19 and conduct research on how best to prevent, diagnose and treat this new infection. As I interact with patients in the hospital, some mothers and expectant mothers have asked whether it is safe for them to take the vaccine. Here is what I have said to them.

1) Can I get vaccinated if I am pregnant or breastfeeding?

Yes, you can and should get a COVID-19 vaccine if you are either pregnant or breastfeeding.

An important reason is that COVID-19 is more severe during pregnancy. In a study of 23,000 pregnant women with symptomatic COVID-19, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported pregnant women were 3 and 2.9 times more likely to end up in the ICU or on mechanical ventilation, respectively. I find it reassuring, though, that the absolute risk remains low. Only about one out of 100 pregnant women with COVID-19 is admitted to an ICU.

Vaccines are, in general, safe and well tolerated during pregnancy.

Neither the Pfizer nor Moderna COVID-19 vaccine contains the live SARS-CoV-2 virus, so there is no risk of the pregnant woman or her fetus developing COVID-19. These vaccines are safe for another reason. The mRNA used in both vaccines to stimulate a protective immune response never enters the nucleus of a cell. That means it doesn’t interact with the DNA that encodes the human genome of the mother or fetus.

The caveat is that safety data is lacking for the COVID-19 vaccines, because pregnant women were intentionally excluded in the phase 3 studies of the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines.

In the absence of clinical trial data on the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines in pregnant and breastfeeding women, but with the expectation that these vaccines should be safe in these populations, both the CDC and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists have recommended that vaccination be a personal decision of women who are pregnant.

For pregnant women who decide to be vaccinated, any fever associated with vaccination should be treated with acetaminophen, since fever has been associated with adverse pregnancy outcomes.

There is no concern that the vaccines will interfere with lactation and no reason not to be vaccinated if you are breastfeeding.

2) Will I be protected from asymptomatic infection?

Initial data shows 60% protection from asymptomatic infection after the first dose of the Moderna mRNA vaccine. It is likely Pfizer will also protect from asymptomatic infection, but this has not yet been shown. This means that your risk of getting an asymptomatic infection is reduced by more than half after the first dose of the Moderna vaccine.

Subjects in the phase 3 study had nasal swabs taken at the time of the second dose of the vaccine. Of these, 14 of the 15,000 volunteers in the vaccine group and 38 of 15,000 subjects in the placebo group experienced SARS-CoV-2 infection without symptoms – which is called asymptomatic COVID-19.

[Get facts about coronavirus and the latest research. Sign up for The Conversation’s newsletter.]

This is evidence that asymptomatic infections are being prevented even after only the first dose. This is wonderful news, as vaccine-induced protection from asymptomatic infection will facilitate herd immunity and the end of the pandemic.

3) Will new versions of the SARS-CoV-2 virus succumb to the vaccine?

Fortunately all of the versions of the SARS-CoV-2 virus identified to date are neutralized by the COVID-19 vaccines.

The primary way that these vaccines act is by preventing the spike protein on the exterior of the coronavirus from attaching to the ACE2 protein on human cells.

The vaccines do this by triggering the human immune system to produce anti-spike antibodies that attach to the spike protein whenever they encounter it and neutralize the virus.

All 17 versions of the virus tested so far have been neutralized, including the variant that is most common in the United States.

The new variant in the United Kingdom that is likely more easily spread person to person is also unlikely to evade the new vaccines, despite the presence of mutations in the spike glycoprotein. This is in part due to the fact that there are multiple sites on the spike protein that antibodies can target to neutralize the virus. This is being formally tested now.

William Petri, Professor of Medicine, University of Virginia

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Sebastien Roblin

History, Americas

In fact, the incident caused a scare for the warship that had FDR on board.

Key Point: Several things went wrong over several days with these ships. In the end, one of them would actually be lost.

Patriotic action movies would have you believe military units regularly perform like well-oiled fighting machines. But sometimes reality is closer to Bill Murray’s Stripes.

Such at least was the case of the William D. Porter, whose mishaps were famously immortalized in an article by Kit Bonner.

Named after a swashbuckling Union Civil War captain, the Porter was one of 175 Fletcher-class destroyers built during World War II. Destroyers, dubbed "tin cans" because of their lack of armor, were relatively small but fast warships often tasked with protecting convoys and larger warships. Fletcher-class destroyers boasted ten torpedo tubes, depth charge projectors, and five radar-guided 5” dual-purpose guns allowing them to ably combat aircraft, submarines and surface warships.

The “Willy D’s” shakedown cruise in the summer of 1943 proceeded uneventfully under Lt. Commander Wilfred Walter. That November, she was then assigned to a secret task force charged with escorting President Franklin D. Roosevelt aboard the battleship USS Iowa to conferences in Cairo and Tehran.

FDR was accompanied by Secretary of State Cordell Hull, and the chiefs of the Army, Army Air Force and Navy (Admiral Ernest King). Their meetings with Churchill, Chiang Kai-Shek and Stalin would shape the postwar geopolitical order.

German U-Boats were then exacting a terrifying toll from U.S. convoys in the Atlantic, so the taskforce had to maintain strict radio silence to keep the Kriegsmarine in the dark.

As Porter slipped from her quay in Norfolk, Virginia on November 12, things immediately began to go wrong. Her crew failed to properly raise the anchor, which went rattling across the deck of a neighboring destroyer, tearing away railings and lifeboats.

The following day, Iowa, Porter and two other ships were underway in the Atlantic when an underwater explosion shattered the calm. The taskforce began evasive maneuvers in response to the apparent submarine attack.

But Porter then signaled it was a false alarm: one of her depth charges had accidentally rolled off deck and detonated—because nobody had secured the charge’s safety.

Then a violent wave slammed into the destroyer, sweeping a man overboard, who was tragically never rescued, and flooding one of her boilers. The Porter fell behind and broke radio silence to update the Iowa on her repairs—eliciting an irate message from Admiral King.

Then on November 14, Roosevelt—who had been Secretary of the Navy during World War I—asked to observe an air defense drill. Balloons were released, and gunners on the Iowa and Porter began blasting them out of sky.

Captain Wilfred decided to follow up with a torpedo drill, in which the Porter practiced mock attacks on the Iowa—with the torpedoes’ primer charges removed.

Two mock torpedo launches went smoothly. But upon the third firing command at 2:36 PM, a 24-foot-long Mark 15 torpedo lept from the Porter and surged towards the Iowa.

Torpedoes were tricky to land on target and often unreliable—but just one or two lucky hits sometimes sank even huge battleships and carriers.

The torpedo needed only a few minutes to traverse the 6,000 yards separating the Porter from the Iowa. But Wilfred, reluctant to break radio silence again, insisted on conveying the disastrous news using a signal lamp.

Unfortunately, the signalman garbled the messages twice. Finally, Wilfred radioed “Lion, lion! Turn right!” (“Lion” was Iowa’s codename.) When the Iowa’s operator responded in confusion, the captain clarified “Torpedo in the water!”

Iowa turned hard to port and accelerated to flank speed. Though the 825 pounds of HBX explosive in the torpedo might leave the Iowa at the bottom of the sea in a few minutes given a lucky hit, Roosevelt instructed the Secret Servicemen pushing his wheelchair to position him with a view. The former Navy Secretary wanted to see the action.

Finally at 2:40, the torpedo struck the Iowa’s wake and detonated a safe distance away.

The taskforce’s commander had had enough. He ordered the Porter to report to Bermuda. There, the Navy held an inquiry to evaluate why exactly things had gone so spectacularly wrong. Gross incompetence? A plot to kill Roosevelt?

Eventually, Chief Torpedoman Lawton Dawson admitted to having forgotten to remove the primer from the torpedo. The inexperienced seaman was sentenced to fourteen years hard labor, but Roosevelt intervened to wave his sentence.

As FDR was a Democrat, legend has it Navy ships henceforth greeted the Porter with “Don’t shoot! We’re Republicans!”

But Porter’s misadventures were far from over. On December 29 she arrived at Dutch Harbor, Alaska for her new assignment. While partying on New Year’s Day, a drunk sailor discharged one of her 5” guns, sending a 55-pound shell arcing into the backyard of the base’s commandant, who was hosting a holiday party—leaving his flower garden the worse for wear.

Over the next eight months, the Porter’s crew undertook uneventful anti-submarine patrols and raided the Japanese Kuril islands. Then in November, she joined the fighting at Leyte Gulf, where her gunners shot down at least three aircraft.

In 1945, as U.S. troops engaged in a bloody invasion of Okinawa, Porter was assigned first to cover the landing, then to serve as an air defense picket. In one month, she expended 233 tons of 5” shells bombarding shore positions and blasting six more aircraft out of the sky.

But outrageous misfortune revisited the destroyer a final time on June 10. At 8:15 AM a D3A1 ‘Val’ dive bomber plunged towards Porter in a kamikaze attack. As Porter’s guns roared, the obsolete aircraft smashed into the water beside her.

But the Val’s momentum carried it underneath the Porter, before the explosives packed inside it detonated. The eruption raised the 2,500-ton destroyer out of the water. The impact as she smacked back down ruptured steam lines, causing fires to break out. 

For three hours the Porter’s crew attempted to save the listing destroyer (photo here) before the order to abandon ship was given.

But the unluckiest ship in the Navy had one good turn left: every single member of her crew escaped with his life.

Sébastien Roblin holds a Master’s Degree in Conflict Resolution from Georgetown University and served as a university instructor for the Peace Corps in China. He has also worked in education, editing, and refugee resettlement in France and the United States. He currently writes on security and military history for War Is Boring. This article originally appeared in August 2019 and is being republished due to reader interest.

Image: Reuters.

Si « Le Monde diplomatique » a beaucoup changé depuis soixante ans, ce rationalisme tranquille, cette espérance progressiste, ce refus de hurler avec les loups demeurent son invariant. / France, Culture, Économie, Finance, Idées, Internet, Médias, Mutation, Politique, Presse, A propos du « Diplo », (...) / France, Culture, Économie, Finance, Idées, Internet, Médias, Mutation, Politique, Presse, A propos du « Diplo », Crise économique, Indépendance - 2014/10

Kris Osborn

Drones,

Drones can do so much and cost little that they are now a critical part of the U.S. maritime services new strategy for the 2020s and beyond. 

By keeping an eye on enemy movements, beaming back real-time video of combat developments, and sustaining a persistent, electronic “eye” in the sky, wartime drones increasingly offer what many war planners consider a decisive margin of difference and defining element of modern conflict. While this may, to a very large extent, be considered somewhat self-evident, what is significant is the staggering pace at which U.S. Maritime forces are adding unmanned systems to its surface, undersea and aerial fleet. 

This is so much the case that a new Marine Corps, Navy and Coast Guard warfare strategy, called “Advantage at Sea .. Prevailing With Integrated All Domain Naval Power,” says “our unmanned campaign plan will synchronize our efforts to field a multi-domain portfolio of shore-launched and sea-launched unmanned platforms with urgency.”

The strategy goes on to specifically cite drones as, among other things, adding the capability to “monitor, record, and report instances of coercive behavior. They will also add the capability for scouting, targeting, communications, and battle damage assessment.” 

Part of why drones are receiving so much attention and tactical emphasis is because they no longer merely offer a kind of “point-to-point” connectivity between a forward “node” and command and control system but increasingly network with one another and other larger and small combat platforms in near real-time. 

A Drone Future

“Our networks, battle management aids, and data infrastructure will connect with other joint networks. Combining many informational inputs into a common, actionable operational picture will enable our forces to act more quickly and effectively than our competitors,” the strategy writes. 

For example, the strategy document explains that networked unmanned systems can, among other things, provide warnings of major power rivals’ military preparations and operations while “naval forces—including submarines, surface ships, aircraft, and unmanned systems—gather intelligence from a variety of sources.” 

Tactically speaking, it is not an exaggeration to say that unmanned systems are fast re-shaping the character of war, opening up a new era of land, air, surface and undersea data sharing, massively multiplying the points of view and overall intelligence picture for combat commanders. In effect, they reinforce, sustain and increasingly enable an emerging warfare tactical reality that information itself is a weapon of war as sharing targeting data between submarines, surface ships or carrier-launched fighter jets in minutes if not seconds completely transforms the sensor-to-shooter timeline, a factor which could easily be seen as something quite likely to determine the outcome in war. 

They also of course add longer endurance as an undersea or surface drone, for instance, would not have to return to port or a host ship as a specific “shift” to return sailors and marines. Some undersea drones, for instance, can maintain an uninterrupted operational presence for up to a month without needing to return to the launching point. This phenomenon is also true, to varying extents, with surface drones as well such as mine-sweepers, attack drones, or even large unmanned command and control ships. The Navy is now in various stages of fast-tracking new large, medium and small surface, undersea and aerial drones to the fleet, some of which are expected to be operational in a matter of just several years, if not months. 

Finally, it may seem almost too obvious to mention that perhaps the greatest advantage afforded by drones in combat is … lives. Removing the need for manned boats subject sailors and marines to closer-in enemy fire. Stand-off distances, enabled by command and control networking, allow humans to make decisions about attacks, intelligence or other tactical nuances while much safer from enemy attack. 

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 Masters Degree in Comparative Literature from Columbia University.  

Kris Osborn

Advantage at Sea,

A new U.S. Navy, Coast Guard, and Marine Corps maritime warfare strategy outline a significant and tactically impactful plan for “crisis response” in the event of major warfare.

A new U.S. Navy, Coast Guard and Marine Corps maritime warfare strategy outline a significant and tactically impactful plan for “crisis response” in the event of major warfare. The plan has many substantial details, including deterrence missions, stability operations, offensive strikes, and specific maritime combat strategies. 

A New Maritime Strategy for the 2020s and Beyond

The strategy, called “Advantage at Sea .. Prevailing With Integrated All Domain Naval Power,” incorporates Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard mission options, multi-service operational coordination, and what could be called a new mixture of interwoven variables. Some of these nuances include a modern emphasis upon expeditionary warfare, forward deployments, and rapid response in the event of war. 

Interestingly and not surprisingly, much of the Navy strategy is simply to be “already on-scene” in the event of war, an approach which of course sheds light upon the service’s consistent requests from Combatant Commanders for more forward-deployed assets in vital areas of the globe. 

“The Naval Service offers flexible options to respond to crises, manage escalation, and preserve decision space for national leaders. Because naval forces are globally maneuverable and persistently operate forward, we are often already on-scene at the onset of a crisis,” the strategy writes.  

Why It Matters

Simply put, this concept helps explain why the Navy is so often conducting training operations and security patrols in key areas such as the Pacific and Black Sea, among others. A powerful, heavily armed presence with major power-projection capability, prevents war, as the thinking goes. 

“Operating our naval forces far forward—in harm’s way and in contested environments— raises the risks for rivals considering the path of escalation and prevents crisis from escalating into war. Navy and Marine Corps forces demonstrate visible combat readiness, support deterrence, and missile defense,” the strategy writes. 

Along with its major Naval focus, the strategy also places a high premium upon Marine Corps ship-to-shore amphibious attack possibilities to function as a deterrence force ready to attack if necessary. It is also no surprise, and tactically significant, that the strategy places a crucial premium upon Coast Guard missions. 

“Coast Guard forces provide additional tools for crisis management through capabilities that can de-escalate maritime standoffs nonlethally. Crisis operations require an accurate understanding of the operating environment,” the strategy states. 

Not only does the Coast Guard support international Naval security operations but also of course performs a major homeland defense role. This function only continues to take on greater urgency as defending the homeland is by no means restricted to preventing piracy, terrorism, and drug trafficking. These things are crucial, yet now also greatly compounded or added to by the reality that potential adversaries are quickly gaining more and more long-range weapons and attack platforms increasingly capable of striking the U.S. homeland. 

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 Masters Degree in Comparative Literature from Columbia University.

Zachary Keck

Security, World

Alliances in international politics are at best a necessary evil.

Here's What You Need to Remember: France, America’s oldest ally, was constantly at odds with the United States during the Cold War, criticized America as a hyperpower in the decade after it and led global opposition to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Similarly, the U.S.-Japanese alliance may be the foundation of America’s alliance system in Asia.

An old truism recommends keeping your friends close and your enemies closer. But how to tell the two apart?

Alliances in international politics are at best a necessary evil, somewhat analogous to government in liberal political philosophy. For a regional hegemon with global interests, like the United States, allies are particularly indispensable, given Washington’s need to project power globally.

That fact is cold comfort for the diplomats and military officers tasked with maintaining them, as even the best allies are a never-ending source of migraines and anguish. Many would contend that America has no greater friend than Israel. And yet, Israel is a counterintelligence nightmare with a habit of announcing settlement expansions at particularly inopportune times for U.S. officials.

It is hardly an anomaly in this regard. France, America’s oldest ally, was constantly at odds with the United States during the Cold War, criticized America as a hyperpower in the decade after it and led global opposition to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Similarly, the U.S.-Japanese alliance may be the foundation of America’s alliance system in Asia. Still, despite initially welcoming his election, U.S. officials have been dismayed by Japanese premier Shinzo Abe's historical analysis and field trips to the Yasukuni Shrine.

No U.S. ally is perfect. But five alliances of convenience in particular stand out. (Note: the list is not limited to formal treaty allies.)

1. Imperial Japan

As most Japanese celebrated the success of Pearl Harbor, the architect of the attack, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, reflected ominously, “I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and filled him with a terrible resolve."

If only U.S. officials had demonstrated such prescience nearly a century before when they sent Commodore Matthew Perry to forcibly open up the hyperisolationist country. Although Perry was successful in his immediate objective, the United States ultimately got more than it bargained for in the exchange.

After shedding their initial reluctance, Japanese leaders embraced modernization with a fervor nearly unparalleled in human history. Underlying this drive was a desire to transform Japan into a great power so that it could never again be bullied by Western powers.

Although the bilateral relationship was never free of tension, particularly over China and immigration issues, the United States initially found much to like in an increasingly powerful Japan. For example, Tokyo joined American and European powers in helping to suppress the Boxer Rebellion in China. Even before then, Theodore Roosevelt used a rising Japan as a check against Russian power in Asia. Japan was also valuable in commandeering Germany’s Pacific holdings during WWI. Following the war, and despite continued tensions, Japan and the United States signed a number of important agreements at the Washington Conference of 1922.

Of course, all of this was more than outweighed by what followed, as tensions over China and Asia greatly intensified. This ultimately culminated in the attack on Pearl Harbor that killed over 2,000 Americans and wounded more than a thousand others. Imperial Japan followed up the surprise attack by conquering much of the Asia-Pacific, including the U.S.-controlled Philippines. It would rule over these territories with barbaric savagery.

Removing Japan from these lands—which fell primarily to the United States—proved no easy task. Imperial Japanese soldiers surrendered at appallingly low rates. According to some sources, only one to three percent of Japanese forces surrendered throughout the war, and only one third of these troops actually wanted to surrender (the rest were too sick or wounded to commit suicide or continue fighting.) As a result, most estimates suggest that America’s casualty rate in the Pacific theater was about three and a half times larger than in Europe.

2. The Soviet Union

A case could be made that the Soviet Union was actually one of America's best allies to date. After all, while the United States has struggled to get even the most marginal military contributions from its NATO allies, the Soviet Union tied down about 70 percent of Nazi forces during WWII and accounted for around 75 percent of German military casualties.

Nonetheless, no list would be complete without the Soviet Union. Even FDR, one of the earliest and most ardent supporters of the alliance, compared partnering with the Soviet Union to holding hands with the devil.

To begin with, as large as the Soviet Union’s contribution to the allied victory was, Moscow hardly offered up this support enthusiastically. To the contrary, Stalin had originally allied with Germany in the hope that France and England would bear the burden of defeating Hitler. It was only when the Führer invaded the Soviet Union that Stalin joined the fight against the hated fascists. Even still, throughout the war, Stalin constantly (and understandably) demanded the United States and England open up a second European front immediately to relieve the Red Army. FDR and Churchill (just as understandably) demurred until the Red Army was on its way to Berlin.

In other words, the Soviet Union made its enormous contribution to the war effort only because it had no choice. Moscow also extracted a heavy price (at least in America’s eyes) for its role during the war by swallowing up most of Eastern and Central Europe. This set the stage for a global rivalry between the two superpowers that lasted almost half a century. Talk about buyer’s remorse!

3. Saddam Hussein’s Iraq

If Saddam Hussein wasn’t quite the monster that Stalin or Hitler was, it wasn’t for lack of ambition. During his quarter century in power, Hussein ruled with a brutality uninhibited by moral conscience. His ruthlessness extended beyond Iraq’s borders, as he frequently invaded unsuspecting neighbors. And when it came to using chemical weapons, Saddam did not distinguish between internal and external enemies.

It was therefore fitting that after taking power, Saddam continued to ally with the Soviet Union and have no relations with the United States. Even after the Iran-Iraq War first began, the United States adopted a policy of strict neutrality in a conflict pitting two countries in which it maintained no diplomatic relations against one another.

Ultimately, however, America’s disdain for revolutionary Iran—still fresh from the hostage crisis—allowed the Iraqi strongman to curry favor with Washington. When, in the spring of 1982, Iranian forces threatened to overrun Basra, the Reagan administration paved the way for supporting Saddam by removing Iraq from the list of state sponsors of terrorism. The following year, the U.S. president issued a classified National Security Decision Directive that pledged to do "whatever was necessary and legal" to prevent Iraq from losing the conflict. Soon thereafter, Iraq and the United States restored diplomatic relations during a trip to Washington by Iraqi foreign minister (and Saddam’s right-hand man) Tariq Aziz, which included meetings with President Reagan and Secretary of State George Shultz.

Even before that time, in 1982, the United States had begun to furnish Iraq with various kinds of assistance to bolster its war effort. This support would only grow more expansive throughout the war. As one senior official at the time later recounted:

The United States actively supported the Iraqi war effort by supplying the Iraqis with billions of dollars of credits, by providing U.S. military intelligence and advice to the Iraqis, and by closely monitoring third country arms sales to Iraq to make sure that Iraq had the military weaponry required.

This included “strategic operational military” intelligence on Iranian troop positions, which the Iraqi army used to greatly enhance the effectiveness of its chemical weapon attacks, as well as “cluster bombs and anti-armor penetrators,” which CIA Director William Casey termed “force-multipliers.”

Of course, the United States would come to regret this cooperation nearly immediately after the war ended, when Saddam invaded Kuwait in 1990. Although the United States and its allies scored a decisive victory against Iraqi forces in the first Gulf War, Saddam would continue to haunt U.S. officials through the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Even the Clinton administration called Saddam and like-minded dictators ”the greatest security threat we face.” And, of course, the decision to remove Saddam proved beyond costly for the United States (to say nothing of Iraq and the greater region). It was therefore something of an understatement when the former deputy U.S. ambassador to Iraq later conceded of cooperating with Saddam: “History will demonstrate that this was a miscalculation."

4. Pakistan

To defeat Hitler in WWII, FDR was willing to hold hands with the devil. To combat Al Qaeda after 9/11, the United States literally partnered with the “ally from hell.”

Truth be told, America’s relationship with Pakistan long predated the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In fact, the United States was one of the first countries to formally recognize and establish ties with Pakistan in the late 1940s, and Washington made Islamabad an integral part of both its Central and Southeast Asia Treaty Organizations the following decade.

This longevity should not obscure the fact that the bilateral relationship has at best been a dysfunctional marriage.

Even in the brief moments when Pakistan has been valuable to the United States, it has undercut its case with serious transgressions. For example, during the 1970s, Pakistan helped facilitate America’s rapprochement with China while simultaneously committing genocide against the Bengalis in what was then Eastern Pakistan. Similarly, during the 1980s, Pakistan was instrumental in helping the United States and its allies funnel aid to the Afghan Mujahideen resisting the Soviet occupation of their country. At the same time, Islamabad used this support to force Washington to tacitly accept Pakistan’s burgeoning nuclear-weapons program.

But Pakistan’s duplicity reached unimaginable heights in the years after 9/11. On the one hand, when faced with an offer it couldn’t refuse immediately after the attacks, Pakistan signed on to the Global War on Terrorism. For this effort, Islamabad was compensated handsomely, receiving upwards of $25 billion in U.S. aid from 2002 to 2012.

On the other hand, Pakistan has continued to provide massive support for Afghan insurgent groups fighting Kabul, and has hosted most of Al Qaeda’s leaders. Most egregiously, after years of Pakistani officials constantly denying he was even in the country, Osama bin Laden was found living comfortably alongside the country’s military elite.

Nothing captures the sheer dysfunction of America’s relationship with Pakistan better than the fact that those closest—and most supportive of it—have subsequently become its fiercest critics. For example, as Pakistan’s U.S. Ambassador, Husain Haqqani was the strongest advocate for a “real alliance” (instead of a transactional one) between the United States and Pakistan. “If anybody can carry it off, it’s him,” then-chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Rep. Howard Berman, quipped in 2008—a sentiment Haqqani probably would have wholeheartedly agreed with at the time. Only a few short years later, however, Haqqani wrote a scathing book entitled, Magnificent Delusions, in which he condemned U.S.-Pakistani relations and urged the two sides to adopt the type of transactional relationship he had long tried to transcend.

Similarly, Admiral Michael Mullen spent much of his tenure as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, trying to cultivate better relations with Pakistan. According to his own count, Mullen met with his Pakistani counterpart, General Ashfaq Pervez Kayani, more than twenty-four times over a four-year span. Nonetheless, during his final testimony before Congress, a defeated Mullen conceded that the Haqqani Network is a “veritable arm” of Pakistan’s intelligence service, and that Islamabad "use[s] violent extremism as an instrument of policy.”

5. The Shah of Iran

When Iranians took to the streets in 1978, most cited the Shah’s alleged status as a pawn of the United States as one of their main grievances against him. By that time, it was probably more accurate to describe America as the Shah’s pawn.

To be sure, the United States did help place the Shah in power on two separate occasions. Nonetheless, if the Shah felt any gratitude for this, he certainly didn’t show it. As early as the JFK administration—only a few short years after a U.S.-backed coup had restored him to the throne—the Shah was enraged when Washington urged him to improve on human rights. As William Polk, who was serving on the policy planning staff at the time, later recounted:

My colleagues and I mildly encouraged the Shah to spread the benefits of Iran's growing revenues more equitably among the people, to curtail the rush toward militarization, and to open the government to political processes. The Shah was furious. In one of our meetings, he told me that he had identified me as the principal enemy of his regime. He set out to do precisely the opposite of what my colleagues and I had recommended.

The Shah only became more brazen as the United States grew increasingly dependent on him to “stabilize” the Middle East following the Vietnam War. Particularly notable during this time period was the Shah’s treachery in the Israeli-Iranian-American operation to aid Iraq’s Kurds in their ongoing rebellion against Baghdad. The United States initially only played a bit role in what was then largely an Israeli-Iranian affair. However, as Trita Parsi has explained, “during President Richard Nixon and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger's visit to Tehran in May 1972, the Shah convinced the United States to take on a much larger role in what up to then had been a largely Israeli-Iranian operation.” The CIA and the State Department opposed this action, warning the White House that the Shah would ultimately betray the Kurds. While accurate, both agencies failed to warn that the Iranian monarch would also betray the United States.

But this is exactly what happened in March 1975 when the Shah and Saddam Hussein signed the Algiers Accord, which settled many outstanding border issues in Iran’s favor. Immediately afterward, the Shah cut off all support for the Kurds (including allowing the United States and Israel to use Iranian territory to provide assistance.) The United States and Israel were infuriated. As Parsi notes:

The agreement took Israel and the United States by complete surprise. The Shah neither consulted nor informed his Israeli and American allies about the negotiations with the Iraqis, nor did he indicate that the collaboration with the Kurds was in jeopardy.

In truth, the United States should not have been the least bit surprised by the Shah’s complete disregard of U.S. interests in the Kurdish operation. After all, he had acted far more egregiously in manipulating oil prices, particularly in the wake of the 1973 Arab oil embargo.

To be clear, the Shah, a quiet ally of Israel and adversary of the Arabs, did not participate in the oil embargo over the war. In fact, seizing upon higher prices, Iran actually upped its production in the immediate aftermath to capitalize on the higher prices (In October 1973, OPEC had raised the price of oil by over 70 percent, from $3.01 to $5.11 a barrel).

These higher prices were not enough to fund the Shah’s grandiose visions for Iran. In addressing the OPEC meeting in Tehran that December, the Shah urged the oil-producing nations to push the price of crude even higher, promising that “I shall defend our action before the entire world.” With the Shah’s encouragement, OPEC agreed to more than double the price of oil from $5.11 to $11.65. Over a twelve-month period, oil prices had risen an incredible 470 percent, which proved extremely lucrative for Iran and other Persian Gulf countries. As Andrew Scott Cooper notes of the year, “the economic wealth of OPEC members had [sky]rocketed by the then-astronomical sum of $112 billion—an amount that represented the largest single transfer of wealth in history.” Iran’s GDP alone was projected to grow by 50 percent!

Of course, the Shah’s move was catastrophic for Western economies, including the United States’, where law and order began to break down. Time magazine reported in January 1974:

in New York City, motorists fought with fists and knives among themselves and with policemen assigned to keep order around jammed stations. In Phoenix, pump jockeys began packing pistols — for self-protection, they explained.

In hindsight, they should have packed more heat; in Albany, NY, a man toting a hand grenade demanded all the gas he could transport.

Increasingly desperate among the growing chaos, President Nixon appealed directly to his old friend the Shah. His pleas fell on deaf ears, as the Shah flat out ignored Nixon’s request. Instead, the Shah went on 60 Minutes to deny that the United States was experiencing oil shortages at all, insisting instead that the United States was importing “more oil than any time in the past."

Worse still, he admonished: “The industrial world will have to realize that the era of their terrific progress and even more terrific income and wealth based on cheap oil is finished.”

“They will have to find new sources of energy, tighten their belts,” the Shah continued. “If you want to live as well now you’ll have to work for it. Even all the children of well-to-do parents who have plenty to eat, have cars, and run around as terrorists throwing bombs here and there—they will have to work, too.”

With friends like the Shah, who needs enemies?

Zachary Keck is the former managing editor of the National Interest. You can find him on Twitter: @ZacharyKeck. This article first appeared several years ago.

Image: Reuters.