Author Topic: US Foreign Policy & Geopolitics  (Read 372961 times)

Crafty_Dog

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GPF: The Big Five of 2022
« Reply #1300 on: December 30, 2022, 08:06:11 AM »
The Most Geopolitically Significant Events of 2022
undefined and Director, Stratfor Center for Applied Geopolitics at RANE
Rodger Baker
Director, Stratfor Center for Applied Geopolitics at RANE, Stratfor
8 MIN READDec 30, 2022 | 13:00 GMT





A Ukrainian soldier’s silhouette is seen in the city of Kharkiv on March 30, 2022, as a gas station burns behind him after Russian attacks.
A Ukrainian soldier’s silhouette is seen in Kharkiv on March 30, 2022, as a gas station burns behind him after Russian attacks on the city.

(FADEL SENNA/AFP via Getty Images)

Choosing the top five most geopolitically significant events of 2022 is no easy feat. Russia’s (re)invasion of Ukraine clearly stands at the top of the list for the myriad of immediate and lingering implications, though events in and of themselves are rarely as significant as the broader trends and shifts they reflect.

That is why, in compiling the below list, we focused on the events over the past year that had the furthest-reaching impacts (both geographically and temporally) and/or represented key shifts in greater global patterns. There were, of course, numerous “honorable mentions,” but we were ultimately able to narrow it down to these final five:

The Most Geopolitically Significant Events of 2022
5) The Artemis I Mission (Nov. 16-Dec 11, 2022)

NASA successfully launched the Artemis I rocket on Nov. 16, sending an uncrewed Orion space capsule to the moon that returned to Earth on Dec. 11. The mission was the first major launch under NASA’s Artemis lunar exploration program, which aims to send astronauts back to the moon by 2025. The Artemis program represents a revival of the global space race, as well as the United States’ attempt to shape the future norms and governance of lunar and extra-terrestrial exploration and exploitation. The race to return to the moon has been underway for several years, drawing both nation-states and private industry into a mix of cooperative and competitive initiatives that go far beyond simply landing a person on the lunar surface for the first time since 1972. The next space race is looking at lunar orbital space stations that can facilitate lunar exploration and a potential staging point for future manned Mars missions. It’s also looking at lunar and asteroid resource exploitation, space-based manufacturing and biomedical engineering, and (less publicly) the increasingly important role of space in national security. The expansion of the private space industry is granting numerous new players access to the final frontier by making it cheaper and easier to venture beyond Earth's atmosphere. But while we may have “slipped the surly bonds of Earth” (to quote the 1940 poem penned by the Canadian airforce pilot John Gillespie Magee), we have not slipped the bonds of terrestrial politics and international relations — making an update to the 1967 Outer Space Treaty all the more important. As space becomes more crowded with geopolitical rivals and new entrants, it will not only drive technological breakthroughs and competition, but challenge global governance models.

4) Russia and Ukraine Sign Turkish-Brokered Grain Deal (July 22, 2022)

Turkey’s brokering of the grain export deal between Russia and Ukraine over the summer eased a major constraint on global food security instigated by the war in Ukraine. But it also highlighted Turkey’s expanding role as an activist middle power, as Ankara pursues its own interests and exploits new opportunities provided by the return to a multipolar world. Over the past few years, Turkey has intervened in the Caucasus (largely replacing Russia as the primary foreign influencer), continued to assert its interests (militarily) in Iraq and Syria, stepped up its involvement in the Eastern Mediterranean, threatened to hold up NATO expansion, and integrated Russian-made air defense systems while still retaining its military ties to Europe and the United States. Ankara has also sold armed drones to Ukraine and promoted the trans-Caspian route as an alternative for China’s Belt and Road Initiative after the Russian invasion of Ukraine threatened the transit corridors through Russia and Belarus. In addition, Turkey has managed to simultaneously work with (and frequently against) the United States, Russia, China and Europe, all while asserting itself as an important regional power. Turkey’s actions highlight how middle powers are navigating the gaps and seams between the big powers to better position themselves and secure their own interests in an increasingly multipolar world system. Indeed, Indonesia, Brazil, Poland, Japan and India have also started taking a more active role within their regions and beyond in an effort to insulate themselves against big power coercion and mounting pressure from China, Russia, the United States and the European Union to pick a side.

3) Eurozone Inflation Reaches 10.7% (October 2022)

European inflation rates continued to climb in 2022, driven by post-COVID-19 supply chain disruptions amid uneven economic openings, and exacerbated by additional disruptions following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and constraints on Russian energy imports. While Europe’s programs to buy liquified natural gas (LNG) and delay the shuttering of hydrocarbon-powered energy plants have likely ensured energy supplies through the winter, these programs came at a cost; high food, fuel and commodity prices, as well as government actions to manage fuel supplies, reinforced European deindustrialization trends and contributed to rising political nationalism that has seen the European Union compromise on its "strategic autonomy" and accept more national and regional protectionist measures. Across the Atlantic Ocean, the United States’ Inflation Reduction Act — an amalgam of legislation aimed at responding to rising costs, national supply chain security and climate issues — highlighted the potential impact of protectionist policies even on allies, raising challenges from Europe and South Korea, among others. Globally, U.S. interest rates and localized political instability have seen many national currencies fall against the U.S. dollar, raising the risk of future debt crises in several developing (and even a few developed) nations, all while China’s uneven COVID-19 recovery suggests Beijing may be less than generous with its own outbound foreign assistance through at least 2023.

2) Chinese Military Exercises Around Taiwan (Aug. 4-9, 2022)

In response to U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s Aug. 2-3 visit to Taiwan, China held two consecutive sets of military exercises around the island, including live-fire exercises at multiple locations, ballistic missile tests, numerous aerial incursions across the Taiwan Strait median line, and anti-submarine and "sea assault" operations. The exercises marked a significant escalation from Beijing’s typical responses to what it portrays as political provocations by Taipei and Washington, and in doing so set a new baseline for future coercive responses. China’s actions accelerated regional security cooperation trends, with the Philippines approving new U.S. military facilities under the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement and stepping up military exchanges with Japan, South Korea and Japan increasing defense cooperation dialogue, Australia reemerging as a key regional defense actor, and European countries committing to additional regional maritime patrols. In response to the Chinese exercises, several other countries also sent political representatives to Taiwan, blunting Beijing’s political message. Additionally, Washington agreed to increase key arms sales to Taiwan, and U.S. President Joe Biden, while claiming no change to U.S. policy, said the United States would intervene in a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. Beijing's military exercises also motivated the United States and other nations to accelerate their partial decoupling of key technologies and supply chain connections from mainland China.

1) Russia Announces 'Special Military Operation' and Invades Western Ukraine (Feb. 24, 2022)

The Russian invasion of Ukraine was the most geopolitically significant event of the year, raising the specter of nuclear war, driving NATO expansion, testing the continuity of global norms and European unity, and impacting energy prices and food security well beyond 2022. Russia’s poor performance revealed an underlying weakness that leaves the country vulnerable to its neighbors, particularly Turkey and China. Finland and Sweden, long holdouts of integrated security, applied for NATO membership, expanding NATO’s northern flank and perhaps solidifying a split in post-Cold War cooperative Arctic governance. Western European countries reinvigorated defense spending and cooperation, driving greater interest in both NATO and European defense concepts, though their debates also highlight differences between the states on the Russian frontier, which prefer NATO, and those in Western Europe. Global response to the war also highlighted the realities of multipolarity, as the United States and its key European partners were unable to garner universal cooperation to economically counteract Russia, at times even from key partners like India and Hungary. Europe’s energy dependence on Moscow triggered a rapid shift in European energy supplies and future plans, altering the infrastructure and future of energy imports, delaying some green energy goals, and expanding LNG supply chains. The war also revealed strains in the Russia-China relationship, and Moscow’s battlefield setbacks, coupled with strong Western economic counters, may push Russia to become increasingly dependent on China. And mere months after the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council signed a new statement on the prevention of nuclear war and arms races, Moscow’s less-than-subtle threats reopened the prospect of the use of nuclear weapons. These threats placed U.S. nuclear forces on their highest level of alert in decades and strengthened the perception in many non-nuclear states that nuclear weapons may be a necessary deterrent, as fear of expanded nuclear conflict appears to have limited Europe's and the United States' willingness to fully counter Russia’s actions in Ukraine. The revival of attention to nuclear security has only been compounded by China’s recent nuclear "breakout" and the challenges facing future arms control regimes that must take into account three, rather than two, major nuclear powers.

Crafty_Dog

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GPF: Grading Our 2022 Annual Forecast
« Reply #1301 on: December 30, 2022, 08:08:30 AM »
second

Grading Our 2022 Annual Forecast as 2023 Approaches
undefined and Director of Analytic Client Solutions
Amelia Harnagel
Director of Analytic Client Solutions, Stratfor
8 MIN READDec 29, 2022 | 21:38 GMT






(SERGEI SUPINSKY/AFP via Getty Images; OZAN KOSE/AFP via Getty Images; THIBAULT CAMUS/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)

Our analysts take a lot of pride in their forecasts. And they should; it's an incredibly difficult discipline. But the work of forecasting is not complete when we hit publish. As I wrote years ago, ''the best way for us to improve our ability to look forward is to turn around and take a look back.'' A rigorous self-assessment process is as important to our forecasting methodology as anything else. There is an old quote that reads ''We learn wisdom from failure much more than from success.'' And we truly believe that.

Below you'll find our 2022 Forecast Scorecard, in which we celebrate what we got right and acknowledge what we got wrong (though I'm proud to say we, once again, had many more hits than misses).

Asia Pacific
In 2022, we forecast that ''Beijing will not act militarily against Taiwan'' (spoiler alert: this will also be our forecast in 2023), and we were correct. With that said, we did expect continued Chinese incursions in Taiwan's air defense identification zone (ADIZ), which did occur throughout the year. Taiwan also saw increased support from Europe and the United States this year, both economically and diplomatically.

In Hong Kong, we correctly asserted the island's alignment with Beijing would accelerate this year. Throughout 2022, we also saw the fulfillment of our forecast that ''Hong Kong's judicial and legislative independence [would] further deteriorate.''

Europe
France's presidential elections in the spring were highly contested, but the end results lined up with our forecasts: a moderate, pro-EU government led by incumbent President Emmanuel Macron. And from this correct forecast flowed many others. For example, we anticipated the Macron government would seek greater policy coordination with Germany and together pursue ''more flexible EU fiscal rules.'' And indeed, in 2022, the European Union suspended its fiscal rules to allow member states to free up spending and stabilize their economies, while France and Germany also pushed for EU-wide subsidies to protect their economies.

At the end of last year, we were confident that Europe's 2021 economic growth would not continue into 2022. Specifically, we identified increased food and energy prices as being a pain point for many governments across the Continent, which we said would ''create fertile ground for social unrest'' and force ''governments to continue or even expend their welfare measures.'' We saw significant strikes and protests across Europe this past year, most notably in France and the United Kingdom. And in response, most European countries approved billions of euros in aid, subsidies and other forms of spending to help companies and households cope with the economic crisis.

Middle East and North Africa
Entering the year we were optimistic that U.S.-Iran nuclear talks would yield a limited deal. But although negotiators came close to reaching an agreement in both March and August, Iran's overt support for Russia in the war against Ukraine ultimately complicated matters to a degree that became insurmountable. However, we were correct in asserting that Iran was unlikely to ''scale back its nuclear program or aggressive regional behavior'' in advance of inking such a deal, with Iran announcing greater uranium enrichment at its Fordow nuclear site and conducting continued attacks against Israel over the past year.

In Turkey, we correctly forecast that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) would pursue ''high-risk [economic] policies,'' with a focus on short-term growth at the expense of long-term stability, in an effort to boost support ahead of the country's 2023 national elections. We were also correct in forecasting that the AKP would ''pursue politics designed to curry favor with its traditional Islamist-nationalist base,'' as demonstrated by the Turkish government's recently proposed constitutional amendments related to same-sex marriage and secular headscarf rules.

Eurasia
There is no getting around it: We were wrong when we said Russia wouldn't invade Ukraine in 2022. Our assessment was based on two assumptions: a full-scale invasion was unlikely to be successful and would also do little to further Russia's interests (like deterring NATO's expansion). And both of these have proven true. Russia failed to quickly take control of the country after launching its ''special military operation'' in February, and is now struggling to hold on to the early territorial gains it made in eastern Ukraine. And instead of deterring NATO's expansion, the invasion has only accelerated it, as evidenced by Sweden and Finland's coming accession to the Western security alliance. The ongoing war in Ukraine has also seen both NATO forces and weapons systems move even closer to the Russian border. So, while our conclusion that Russia would not invade Ukraine was incorrect, the reasons behind it were solid. And we know that and have worked hard to learn from it. Coming out of February, we did multiple post-mortems on the matter; you can read the output of two of these here and here.

It is also worth noting the rest of our Eurasia forecast was correct. A ''significant improvement in U.S.-Russia bilateral relations [did] remain elusive in 2022,'' and ''Western sanctions [did] constrain the Belarusian economy, forcing the country to further align its foreign and domestic politics with Russia.'' And finally, ''Russia [did] demand a greater say in Belarus' domestic and foreign policies'' and achieved even deeper Belarusian dependence on Moscow. That said, the driver behind these developments was the Ukraine invasion, which we did not foresee. So while we were correct in our forecast, we were wrong in our reasoning, making these all partial hits.

Americas
In the lead-up to Brazil's general elections in the fall, we forecast that President Jair Bolsonaro would attempt ''to boost his appeal'' by increasing a monthly cash-transfer program, which he and his congressional allies did do in July. We were also correct that there would be clashes between different branches of the Brazilian government as each tried to ''shape the election.'' In addition, we correctly asserted (though this wasn't a stretch) that Bolsonaro would contest the outcome of the presidential election if his challenger, former left-wing President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, won the race. That said, the protests staged by Bolsonaro supporters were certainly more half-hearted than we expected.

If it seems like we've been tracking Argentina's economic struggles for years, it's because we have. And once again we were correct in our forecast. In 2022, we expected that Argentina would teeter on the edge of a default but not fall down. The International Monetary Fund and the Argentine government were able to renegotiate the country's $44 billion debt in March. We also correctly anticipated a bumpy year politically for the government in Buenos Aires. What we forecast as ''fierce internal disputes'' played out most notably with the appointment of three economy ministers in less than two months.

South Asia
As we expected, India saw robust economic growth over the past year, despite global headwinds. With such a strong position, we forecast that India would look to finalize as many trade deals as possible in an effort to boost exports. And throughout the year, New Delhi was able to do so, striking final agreements with the United Arab Emirates and Australia, as well as an interim deal with the United Kingdom.

Sub-Saharan Africa
At the start of the year, the Ethiopian military was riding high after a series of battlefield gains against the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF) in late 2021. And yet, we forecast that a victory was not at hand for Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed's government. In fact, we said 2022 would see ''a protracted conflict followed by a negotiated settlement.'' And after 24 months of war, and many false starts, representatives of the Ethiopian government and the TPLF agreed to a cessation of hostilities in early November.

In Nigeria, we forecast a ''highly contested and unstable run-up'' to the country's February 2023 election. And this has largely played out, with Nigeria's two largest parties — the ruling All Progressives Congress Party (APC) and the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) — both nominating presidential candidates who, if elected, would break with the country's decades-long, informal power-sharing system. We also forecast that 2022 would see significant defections from the APC and PDP as politicians jockeyed for influence. While we have seen many such shifts this year, the most notable was Peter Obi's departure from the PDP to make a long-shot run as the smaller Labor Party's presidential candidate. We also forecast a ''worsening security situation'' throughout the year, and have tracked increased terrorist activity in Nigeria outside of the traditional northeastern states, as well as attacks on electoral officials and politicians.

Crafty_Dog

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GPF: Trends for 2023
« Reply #1302 on: January 03, 2023, 07:19:43 AM »
January 3, 2023
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Trends That Will Define the Coming Years
They include deglobalization, stagflation and the bursting of the tech bubble.
By: Antonia Colibasanu
The world is always changing, but some changes are more important than others. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine will likely be remembered as the start of a new era in geoeconomics. In response to the war, the West launched sanctions against Russia, escalating the economic war the Kremlin began when it blocked Ukraine from trading with the world through its ports. Moscow answered by drastically reducing natural gas exports to Europe. The uncertainty and tit-for-tat measures kicked off an energy crisis. And the war renewed focus on the growing divide between the West and a nascent revisionist bloc led by China and Russia. It is difficult to see a path back to the status quo ante bellum, but several major trends that will define the next decade have become clear.

Protectionism and Global Realignment

For years before COVID-19, China, Russia, Iran and North Korea challenged the economic, financial, security and/or geopolitical order that the United States and its allies created after World War II. The era of relentless globalization had started to slow or even reverse. The pandemic kicked things into overdrive, accelerating reshoring and so-called friendshoring and depriving developing economies of foreign investment.

The war in Ukraine and its economic aftereffects are squeezing developing countries even more. In 2022, most of them put off making a choice between the West and Russia, hoping for a resolution to the conflict that would ease their economic pain. A case in point is Hungary, which, like many of these countries, depends on Russian energy and other commodities to sustain its economy and thus is wary of breaking ties with Moscow. Budapest has sought to slow the progression of Western sanctions against Russia. Others have avoided adopting anti-Russia sanctions altogether.

For Europe, the conflict between Russia and the West has shaken public and corporate confidence about the near future and made it nearly impossible to do business with Russian entities. Elsewhere, businesses expend time and resources checking whether their operations will incur sanctions, looking for alternatives whenever possible. The Black Sea is a de facto war zone, which has the upside of encouraging investment in overland infrastructure and the downside of making maritime trade more expensive.

As important as developments in Europe are, China and its internal stability may be the more consequential economic challenge in 2023. Facing growing protests late in the year, the Chinese government abandoned its zero-COVID policy with no apparent plan B. Official data is sparse and unreliable, and local and regional governments have been put in charge of managing the situation. It is unclear whether this will become a headache for Chinese leader Xi Jinping, especially since it falls between the start of the political transition in November and its end in March, when most officials will have their new posts confirmed. Meanwhile, the United States is escalating its trade war with China.

The result is likely to be a fragile economic recovery for China in 2023. The enduring weakness of the real estate sector has outweighed positive impulses in other economic areas, and fear of a financial crisis is weighing on private investment. Increasing youth unemployment adds a dangerous element to the mix. Beijing has taken steps recently to solve the real estate sector’s liquidity crisis, but it needs political stability for the measures to be effective.

This is not good news for the global economy. As much as the West would like to be shielded from events in China, Europe and the U.S. still depend on Chinese manufacturing of important inputs. Chinese lockdowns created kinks in supply chains, and the country’s political and economic instability could prolong them. Consumption and industrial activity in the U.S. and Europe are already in retreat, and there’s no end in sight to the energy crisis. A crisis in China would only make things worse.

Stagflation and Greenflation

In addition to the global economic slowdown, for the first time since the 1970s the world is simultaneously facing high inflation. The drivers of this bout of inflation include excessively loose monetary and fiscal policies that were kept in place for too long, the restructuring of global trade caused by the pandemic, and the sharp spike in the cost of energy, industrial metals, fertilizers and food as a result of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Angered by the unequal distribution of the gains of globalization, voters demanded more government support for workers and those left behind. However well-intentioned, such policies risk an inflationary spiral as wages and prices struggle to keep pace with one another. Rising protectionism also restricts trade and impedes the movement of capital, limiting improvements on the supply side.

To the extent that the energy crisis is causing high inflation, investment in renewables will mitigate inflationary pressure. Renewable capacity will take time to develop, however, and in the meantime, there is underinvestment in fossil fuel capacity. The latter will take priority. Moreover, the green transition will require the development of new supply chains for certain metals and will increase the cost of energy generally, creating what’s been termed “greenflation.”

This coincides with a rapidly aging population not only in developed countries but also in China and some other emerging economies. Young people tend to produce more, while older people spend their savings and consume more services. And due to the market uncertainty caused by the pandemic and the war in Ukraine, young people are producing less and reluctant to invest, which translates into a general economic slowdown. Therefore, just as the global economy will continue fragmenting into 2023, so will inflation persist.

Future of Tech

The war in Ukraine has caused disruption also in the tech industry. While most sectors have been impacted by declining investment and the challenging state of affairs overall, tech appears to be the hardest hit. Twitter, for example, has cut its workforce by 50 percent, and Facebook parent company Meta is letting go of 11,000, about 13 percent, of its employees. Amazon reportedly cut 10,000 jobs, representing about 1 percent of its global workforce. Meanwhile, FTX, the second-largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world, recently valued at $32 billion, has imploded. The full fallout of its collapse is still unclear, but other crypto firms have already felt the effects.

Gone are the days of the early 2000s, when global markets were relatively stable and supply chains built on cheap labor were reliable. In those times, companies increasingly depended on the internet to grow their business, and tech firms benefited from low interest rates. But the factors that helped propel the fast growth of the early 2000s are today progressively volatile, as the global economy hobbles through the early stages of restructuring.

Like companies in other sectors, many tech businesses won’t recover, while others will adapt and bounce back slowly. New opportunities will arise. The restructuring of manufacturing and supply chains will require technology, and automation will increase, especially as the population ages. More important, governments will likely seize the opportunity to steer the tech industry in specific directions. There has been much talk about the role of social media in politics and in shaping policy, and as a result, lawmakers have tried to regulate things like privacy and competition as they relate to social media platforms. Cybersecurity is also an increasingly concerning issue for governments worldwide, and will likely continue to be as the sophistication of cyberattacks increases. Governments will therefore be pushed to become more assertive in regulating tech beyond its military applications.

Conclusion

The major trends in geoeconomics for 2023 and beyond are interconnected. The challenges they pose will require a systematic, coherent approach, but the political leadership in countries around the world is struggling to keep up. The speed of the change requires a different toolset than governments are used to, leaving them trying, and sometimes failing, to adapt to new realities. Cooperation is increasingly difficult, but it has actually grown stronger in some limited areas, like the West’s economic war against Russia following the Ukraine invasion.

Thus, even as deglobalization gains momentum, interdependency isn’t going away completely. Restructuring itself will be a global process. There’s just no avoiding the fact that the world today is interconnected in ways never seen before. Different perspectives will need to be reconciled, and people’s place in society beyond their economic value as consumers and political value as voters will have to be acknowledged. Human behavior, and therefore state behavior, is driven by everything from politics and economics to culture and psychology and even technology. This complexity will drive the challenges, and potential solutions, of tomorrow.

Crafty_Dog

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George Friedman
« Reply #1303 on: January 07, 2023, 08:11:46 PM »

January 6, 2023
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Putting the World in Perspective
Thoughts in and around geopolitics.
By: George Friedman
In working on GPF’s Annual Forecast recently, I was looking for ways to measure national power and differentiate countries with large mouths from countries that are actually influential. The best approach to something like this is to be stupid and embrace the obvious. The obvious is to identify at least one of the elements of national power and find a way to measure it.

I thus stumbled upon something at once well-known and astounding. One self-evident measure of power is the economy, and the simplest way to measure the economy is by measuring gross domestic product. Rough though it may be, GDP can tell you much about a country, from the kind of military it might have, to the kind of public satisfaction it boasts, and ultimately the strength of its economy and its economic influence.

The following numbers are ones I know about but frequently don’t take the time to really absorb: the GDP of the top five nations as a percentage of global GDP:

The United States (24.06)
China (15.2)
Japan (6.02)
Germany (4.56)
India (3.2)
These five countries account for more than 50 percent of global GDP. Naturally, this correlates with military power. GDP measures production possibilities, including missiles and soldiers, but must also support civilian life. So there is a variation in the amount of effort put into military matters, but the potential to field a military force stands up to scrutiny. We can say, then, these five countries produce half of the world’s product and have the ability to produce equivalent massive militaries.

The most advanced and capable, if not numerically the largest, is the United States, a nation that has simultaneously maintained a relatively dynamic economy, systemic interludes of weakness notwithstanding. China boasts the world’s second-largest economy and has sought to build a major military. The historical question is whether the substantial gap between the United States’ GDP and China’s GDP has left China militarily weaker than the United States.

Behind the two major powers, Japan is trying to build a military based within the ever-changing parameters of its constitutional prohibition, but it certainly has the ability to become a substantial power again. Germany doesn’t really want to rearm but has never fully shut the door on the prospect. It is, however, involved in sending arms to Ukraine and in the economic war against Russia. India is engaged occasionally with China but, despite its GDP, is vast and impoverished. It is the smallest economically of the five and the least militarily engaged. It is also part of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue with the U.S., Australia and Japan, even as it builds relations with Russia.

The reality is that the five largest economies are either involved in a war or preparing their militaries with some rapidity in order to be able to wage one. This means that the world’s top economic powers are all engaged in active warfare or are preparing for it. Any uncertainty in military systems inevitably creates economic uncertainty. This, of course, applies to countries outside the top five list such as Russia, which is ranked number 11.

The most important country to forecast is, therefore, the United States. It has the largest economic and military footprint and has a tendency to engage in military operations at some level and economic operations as a main force. The next most important is China, particularly with regard to how it behaves in relation to the U.S. The U.S.-Chinese relationship is not only fundamental to what will happen for the rest of this year but also emblematic of the complex nature of power. It gives both nations a chance to compete on multiple levels and find a basis for collaboration. Washington’s role in the world is easy to forget among the political noise, but it's the basic reality driving the world.

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I wonder who pays for this
« Reply #1304 on: January 12, 2023, 08:28:40 AM »
Big global banks are eying some of the world’s most fragile countries for a new experiment in financial engineering: debt relief in exchange for environmental protections. Called “debt-for-nature swaps,” they present a tempting solution for the rising number of nations in distress, particularly those with ecosystems to protect. A country gets to avoid default and lower its debt burden, as long as it’s willing to earmark some of the savings to salvage a coral reef, preserve a forest or build a wind farm, for example. Global investors get better returns and enhanced green credentials. Wall Street takes a cut. As much as $2 trillion of developing country debt may be eligible for this kind of restructuring, according to a rough estimate by the Nature Conservancy, a US nonprofit that’s taking a lead role in these deals. Belize inked a $364 million nature swap in 2021; Gabon signaled plans for a $700 million restructuring in October; Ecuador is said to be working on a $800 million transaction, and Sri Lanka is considering a $1 billion deal. Buoyed by the finance industry’s newfound enthusiasm for biodiversity, backers of this latest flavor of swap are finding eager partners in investment banks and institutional investors. These are “turbocharged swaps,” said Daniel Munevar, economic affairs officer at the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development and former adviser to finance ministries in Greece and Colombia. “The limit in these operations isn’t the money to fund the swaps, it’s how much debt can be swapped.” (Source: bloomberg.com)

Crafty_Dog

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Re: US Foreign Policy & Geopolitics
« Reply #1305 on: January 12, 2023, 12:24:08 PM »
Of course, there is a cheat here.  OTOH getting blood from a stone is a non-starter.  The ecosystem of the planet IS threatened in various ways.  I can imagine there being times this would be a good thing.  Of course, with that camel's nose in the tent , , ,

Crafty_Dog

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A sidebar Uke warmonger friend comments
« Reply #1306 on: January 14, 2023, 10:58:05 AM »
By and large I agree with most of the points. Russia has lost the war since it has lost the element of surprise. NATO, the EU, and most importantly the Pentagon are now awake to the Russian threat. This is Russia's operation Barbarossa, the ill fated invasion of Russia by Hitler. Had Putin waited one or two years NATO would have been even further depleted of men and material that she couldn't sustain a major on Russia or support the Ukraine.

Moving on, Russia is involved in a major conflict that they thought would be a walk in the park. While Biden and the White House are involved in a major scandal that will at the very least stop Biden from running for a second term, and could result in him resigning for medical reasons, or facing an article 25. Everyone in the White House, including Blinken, are running around searching for a pair of iron pants to make sure they don't get caught up in this thing. What it seems is that the anyone but Trump candidate has finally screwed up to the degree that try as they may the US MSM can't save his ass.

For Israel this couldn't be better, Russia has had to recall it's troops and S-300s from Syria. Which means the sky's are open to take out Iranian assets in Syria. While just this week Israel has warned Hezbollah in lebanon to not push forward for a war against Israel or we will rain hell from the sky's on them. There is even doubt among the IDF that if we attack Iran, that Hezbollah and Hamas may put up only a token response or none at all. Israel itself is only months away from having operational laser weapons that only cost a few bucks to arm and fire. Compared to the thousands that it cost for Iron Dome to take out homemade or dumb rockets and missiles supplied by Iran. According to the current head of the IDF Israel is prepared for Iranian attacks, and have had three drills dealing with what they believe is the most likely long range nuclear attacks by the Mullahs.

So, Putin is busy in the Ukraine, China is watching and keeping its powder dry, and the US has domestic problems. England is fighting a war between liberals and Tories, lots of strikes and raising inflation. While in Europe, they are madly building up weapons system to help the Ukraine while defending themselves. The EU, UN, and NATO are all on the same page with regards to the Ukraine, and while the UN is an empty shield, NATO is seeing billions of dollars being spent on training and buying new equipment. In fact, the other day on German TV was a story that said for the first time since before the Second World War, German high school students see the military has an option for careers. What a difference between now and just five years ago when anti war pacifists dominated the countries politics. The peace dividend is over, money is being spent on the military, and today Germany is no longer dependent on Russia for energy....NATO is larger, even in Washington Iran is seen as a belligerent state, and China's problems with Covid have not stopped. I'm not saying things are Rosey,  but just one year ago I gave the Ukraine a one in three chance to survive the winter....Now, it looks like even odds......Thanks to America, Germany, Poland, and most of the rest of the EU.

My rejoinder:

I would add to your rosy scenario the recent militaristic developments in Japan which support of US-Taiwan goals see e.g. the recent war game by the Pentagon showing that if we bring Japan into the equation that at high cost we would beat China if it attempted to take Taiwan.

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« Last Edit: January 16, 2023, 06:03:06 AM by Crafty_Dog »

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Re: US Foreign Policy & Geopolitics
« Reply #1308 on: January 16, 2023, 06:03:44 AM »
Thought provoking and well worth considering well. 

Nice find!


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Walter Russell Mead: Europe on Thin Ice
« Reply #1309 on: January 23, 2023, 07:07:48 PM »
The Frailty Behind Europe’s Triumphalism Over the Ukraine War
The Continent’s hopes rely on GOP votes in Congress.
Walter Russell Mead hedcutBy Walter Russell MeadFollow
Jan. 23, 2023 5:52 pm ET


The temperature was in the single digits as your Global View columnist struggled to drag his suitcase across the icy streets of Davos to catch the 6 a.m. shuttle bus to Zurich on Saturday. The first winter meeting of the World Economic Forum since 2020 had been a success. While few Chinese and no Russians were present, India and the Gulf states more than took up the slack, and participation from the private sector reached an all-time high.

For Klaus Schwab, the 84-year-old founder and chief impresario of the World Economic Forum, the 53rd annual meeting was a triumph. French President Emmanuel Macron, pushing unpopular reforms to his country’s retirement system, prudently gave Davos a miss. But Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, and Roberta Metsola, president of the European Parliament, joined German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in delivering major addresses. A closing panel on the global economic outlook featured the president of the International Monetary Fund, the heads of the European and Japanese central banks, and luminaries like Larry Summers.

No other event brings together this mix of power and prominence. With all its flaws, the World Economic Forum remains an essential destination for the global power elite. And when CEOs and world leaders flock to Davos, journalists and commentators can hardly stay away.

While much of the real business of Davos takes place among CEOs and investors in private meetings, the gathering’s public agenda was dominated by two topics: climate change and the war in Ukraine.

The enthusiasm for Ukraine was vivid. Europeans wore yellow and blue to show their solidarity. President Volodymyr Zelensky addressed the conference by video while Ukraine’s first lady visited in person. Both drew rapturous receptions—though non-European, non-American participants from places like India and the Gulf were less enthusiastic.

European enthusiasm for Ukraine is driven partly by relief. The combination of a warm winter and efforts by European governments foiled Vladimir Putin’s plan to bring the Continent to its knees by an energy embargo. And despite qualms in countries like Hungary, Greece and Slovakia, the European Union has been able to unite around economic sanctions against Russia and aid for Ukraine. Speaker after speaker returned to these themes: Europe is strong, Europe is united, Europe has become a major geopolitical actor like China and the U.S.

This latest bout of Euro triumphalism was unconvincing, and not only because of policy battles over issues like Germany’s reluctance to send Leopard tanks to Ukraine. Europe’s weakness matters even more than its divisions. If Ukraine had depended on Europe alone for help, the Russian flag would be flying over the ruins of Kharkiv, Kyiv and Odessa. More than 30 years after the end of the Cold War, Europe can’t act in its own backyard without depending on the U.S. But Washington is increasingly preoccupied by challenges in the Indo-Pacific. With many European leaders sheltering under the American security umbrella even as they double down on close economic relations with China, it isn’t clear how long the U.S. will be willing or able to protect the EU from the consequences of its geopolitical incapacity.

This isn’t an idle concern. Mr. Putin hasn’t yet lost his war. Fears that Russian mobilization could bring hundreds of thousands of fresh if poorly trained troops into the conflict, along with a sober assessment of the effectiveness of the Russian air campaign, are leading some in Kyiv and elsewhere to warn of a massive Russian offensive in the spring.

If Germany relents and sends tanks to Ukraine, Russian hopes for a successful offensive will take a hit. Yet even then, without American money, equipment and ammunition, Ukraine can’t continue the unequal struggle indefinitely.

In my last column, I noted that European hopes for concerted global action on climate change can’t succeed without support from American Republicans. Europe’s hopes for Ukraine likewise depend on GOP votes in Congress. The belief that the EU can achieve its core objectives without engaging seriously with American conservatives is magical thinking. Mr. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine should have alerted Europeans to the danger of erecting foreign policy on wishes and dreams. That doesn’t seem to have happened.

Europe is walking on thin ice. Russia, China and Iran challenge the existing world order. Much of the Global South increasingly resents the status quo. And in the U.S., the political consensus behind two generations of global American engagement is badly frayed.

European diplomats pride themselves on bridge building and dialogue, though they sometimes seem more willing to engage with Tehran and Beijing than with Ohio and Florida. Let’s hope that 2023 will begin an era of engagement, facilitated perhaps by the WEF, between European leaders and the increasingly disgruntled American conservatives whose support they desperately need.

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RANE: George Friedman: Forecast for 2023
« Reply #1310 on: January 26, 2023, 04:04:34 AM »
January 26, 2023
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Forecast for 2023
Though the war in Ukraine is agonizing to observe, it is not the most important issue of 2023.
By: George Friedman

Our 2023 Annual Forecast, like those before it, is an attempt to provide a sense of the direction of the world. We do this by looking at it holistically, paying particular attention to regions and nations whose actions significantly affect the global system. All countries matter to those who live in them, but for our purposes many are excluded, even though we expect them to be influenced – sometimes dramatically – by the countries and regions we do include.

The central issue this year will be the ongoing spasm of economic dysfunction, due in equal parts to the war in Ukraine, post-pandemic recovery efforts, and the more banal aspects of ordinary business cycles. These problems are compounded by the dramatic economic crisis in China, its effects inevitably transmitting throughout the world by virtue of China's economic weight. Transnational, multifaceted economic crises like these take years to resolve, and in their resolution, they will generate political consequences within countries and between them. This phenomenon will intensify in 2023. And though the war in Ukraine is agonizing to observe, it is not the most important issue we face this year. That honor belongs to China.

China

As expected, China’s economic crisis intensified in 2022, leading to more, higher-profile instances of social unrest. They were ostensibly caused by COVID-19 lockdown measures, but as with all protests, they became broader movements of people airing economic and political grievances. In some ways, China is a victim of its own success. Its breakneck economic growth was unsustainable, but domestic and international investors believed it to be permanent, as they're wont to do. China desperately needs investment capital and unfettered exports to stabilize its system. With the global economic crisis, both are harder to come by – a fact that has forced China to redefine its relationship with perhaps the only country able to provide investment capital and demand for products amid a recession: the United States.

Lockdown Protests Spread Across China
(click to enlarge)

China has had a formal communications channel with the United States since November. So far, talks have not been productive, but we forecast they will be. Beijing will have to ease military tensions with the United States, save for the normal face-saving theatrics. The U.S. has reason to play nice too; it doesn’t want China to move closer to Russia, nor does it want Beijing to act aggressively in the face of economic catastrophe.

For all the saber-rattling between the two, we do not expect a Sino-American war. China cannot afford a defeat in a war as its economic standing at home is in question. Its focus must be on solving its economic problems and quelling unrest. It will need a reasonable relationship with the U.S. to do that.

The United States

At this point, the U.S. cannot afford to abandon Ukraine. Having asserted its interests there and pressured other nations to cooperate, American options are limited. Still, Washington is fighting an optimal war. The Ukrainians are absorbing casualties, even as the delivery of U.S. weapons and munitions imposes heavy casualties on the Russians. Washington will press for a negotiated settlement that keeps Russia as far from NATO’s borders as possible and will hold this position through the year.

At home, the U.S. will experience a significant recession, similar to the 1970s, when the cost of Vietnam, the Arab oil embargo and natural downturns in the business cycle created massive inflation and job pressures. This recession, like that one, will begin to focus on cyclical changes for the decade.

Russia

The war in Ukraine is gridlocked. Every time the Ukrainian armed forces score a tactical victory, Russia prevents them from fully exploiting it – and vice versa. This state of affairs would suggest a negotiated settlement is in the offing, and though we believe that to be the logical outcome, so far no one seems willing to budge.

The prospects for a settlement depend, to some degree, on the viability of the Russian economy. The West’s initial response to the invasion was a debilitating campaign that, for a spell, crippled Russia’s economy. Though Russia isn’t out of the woods, it has rebounded well enough to at least maintain some leverage in the war, in international energy markets, and so on.

Russian Federal Budget
(click to enlarge)


(click to enlarge)

Economics aside, two major obstacles have frustrated any attempt to end the stalemate. The first is a precondition that neither side will resume hostilities at a time of their choosing. Both want to retain that right. The second is an unwillingness to cede territory, which is difficult for domestic political reasons. The Ukrainians want control of their whole country. The Russian public would be appalled that all the death and hardships were for far less than promised. (A key element on both sides of the war is management of the public. Ukraine and the U.S. have shown they can manage their publics. Russia is the one to watch.)

There is no reason to believe that either side will crush the other. It’s possible that there will be peace talks, but a rapid settlement is unlikely. The stakes are high, and neither side will break. The most likely course is that the war will continue, but don’t be surprised to see the beginnings of talks toward resolution.

Europe

It’s difficult to forecast Europe because "Europe" is ultimately a geographic concept bound together by multinational organizations, the biggest of which are NATO and the European Union, each with its own membership list and mission. It’s better to think of Europe as an arena for cooperation and coemption.

A major issue for Europe in 2023 will be continued access to Russian energy. Europeans agree that they need oil, but they cannot agree what price should be paid for it. Poland opposes any concession to Russia. Hungary doesn’t. Germany is eager to maintain oil shipments but must subordinate itself to the United States, its largest customer and guarantor of national security. Consider also that Europe broadly believes a Russian victory in Ukraine would be bad for the continent. Countries like Poland, the Czech Republic and Germany remember the Cold War, and they are in no hurry to recreate the boundaries that defined it. There is genuine support in governments – and in some publics – for the war.

Dependency on Russian Oil and Petroleum, 2020
(click to enlarge)

The European Union was designed for peace and prosperity. War strains these ideals and skews geopolitical interests and economic desires. Some countries feel they must prioritize war preparations over economic considerations. This will strain the unity of the EU in the coming year, not only over this issue but also over an increasing sense that the bloc undermines national economic and military interests. The EU will continue, however slowly, to fragment as national interests diverge.

India

India is slowly emerging as an economic and military power whose ascension affects everyone. It has one of the fastest-growing major economies – certainly among comparably developed and similarly sized economies. It must now be included with nations that influence the global system.

India's national strategy is to balance between greater powers, particularly Russia and the United States, a practice that will inevitably create tensions inside a country that is famously variegated. India will therefore grow in fits and starts as it manages its relationships with historical adversaries and skews ties with traditional allies. New Delhi will, for example, enhance economic and industrial cooperation with Russia to balance against China. There have always been questions as to when India would emerge as a great power. Next year seems the moment.

The Middle East and North Africa

New alliances will emerge and old ones will decay. Israel has already become a major anchor of the region, as evidenced by the Abraham Accords, but forces inside the country have created a degree of unease in Arab nations. More important is the political future of Turkey, with the Erdogan era waning and the region preparing for new Turkish policies. Internal matters will dominate the region in 2023 – no small matter for a region beset by decades of war – and those within Israel and Turkey most of all. Neither will yield much clarity.


(click to enlarge)

Latin America

Driving the behavior of Latin America in 2023 will be its inability to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic. It was arguably the worst-hit region and has been the slowest to recover. Latin American countries will see intense social unrest, and governments will prioritize foreign ties with economic benefits. Increased global uncertainty and competition surrounding commodities like food, energy and metals will spark renewed interest from countries in the Western Hemisphere to establish commodity-driven commercial ties. Russia and China will not be able to compete as strongly in Latin America as they have in past years. Their own economic problems will prevent them from offering financial solutions this far afield, creating an opportunity for the U.S. to shore up ties, including with sometimes adversarial governments in Cuba and Venezuela.

Conclusions

It’s easy to forget we’ve been living in the post-Cold War era for more than 30 years. The world was never perfectly harmonious, but countries broadly seemed to be paddling in the same direction. 2023 may finally be the year the world starts to move into another age. Alliances and relationships will fragment as interests diverge, which could even ease pressure in some places. Tensions created by the U.S.-China competition will at least partly shape those interests, even as Beijing and Washington come to some kind of formal economic understanding and informal military understanding.

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Some of this makes a lot of sense
« Reply #1311 on: January 29, 2023, 04:38:17 PM »
Ukraine: The War That Went Wrong
NATO support for the war in Ukraine, designed to degrade the Russian military and drive Vladimir Putin from power, is not going according to plan. The new sophisticated military hardware won't help.
CHRIS HEDGES
JAN 29

 



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Empires in terminal decline leap from one military fiasco to the next. The war in Ukraine, another bungled attempt to reassert U.S. global hegemony, fits this pattern. The danger is that the more dire things look, the more the U.S. will escalate the conflict, potentially provoking open confrontation with Russia. If Russia carries out retaliatory attacks on supply and training bases in neighboring NATO countries, or uses tactical nuclear weapons, NATO will almost certainly respond by attacking Russian forces. We will have ignited World War III, which could result in a nuclear holocaust.

U.S. military support for Ukraine began with the basics — ammunition and assault weapons. The Biden administration, however, soon crossed several self-imposed red lines to provide a tidal wave of lethal war machinery: Stinger anti-aircraft systems; Javelin anti-armor systems; M777 towed Howitzers; 122mm GRAD rockets; M142 multiple rocket launchers, or HIMARS; Tube-Launched, Optically-Tracked, Wire-Guided (TOW) missiles; Patriot air defense batteries; National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile Systems (NASAMS); M113 Armored Personnel Carriers; and now 31 M1 Abrams, as part of a new $400 million package. These tanks will be supplemented by 14 German Leopard 2A6 tanks, 14 British Challenger 2 tanks, as well as tanks from other NATO members, including Poland. Next on the list are armor-piercing depleted uranium (DU) ammunition and F-15 and F-16 fighter jets.

Since Russia invaded on February 24, 2022, Congress has approved more than $113 billion in aid to Ukraine and allied nations supporting the war in Ukraine. Three-fifths of this aid, $67 billion, has been allocated for military expenditures. There are 28 countries transferring weapons to Ukraine. All of them, with the exception of Australia, Canada and the U.S., are in Europe.

The rapid upgrade of sophisticated military hardware and aid provided to Ukraine is not a good sign for the NATO alliance. It takes many months, if not years, of training to operate and coordinate these weapons systems. Tank battles — I was in the last major tank battle outside Kuwait City during the first Gulf war as a reporter — are highly choreographed and complex operations. Armor must work in close concert with air power, warships, infantry and artillery batteries. It will be many, many months, if not years, before Ukrainian forces receive adequate training to operate this equipment and coordinate the diverse components of a modern battlefield. Indeed, the U.S. never succeeded in training the Iraqi and Afghan armies in combined arms maneuver warfare, despite two decades of occupation.

I was with Marine Corps units in February 1991 that pushed Iraqi forces out of the Saudi Arabian town of Khafji. Supplied with superior military equipment, the Saudi soldiers that held Khafji offered ineffectual resistance. As we entered the city, we saw Saudi troops in commandeered fire trucks, hightailing it south to escape the fighting. All the fancy military hardware, which the Saudis had purchased from the U.S., proved worthless because they did not know how to use it.

NATO military commanders understand that the infusion of these weapons systems into the war will not alter what is, at best, a stalemate, defined largely by artillery duels over hundreds of miles of front lines. The purchase of these weapons systems — one M1 Abrams tank costs $10 million when training and sustainment are included — increases the profits of the arms manufacturers. The use of these weapons in Ukraine allows them to be tested in battlefield conditions, making the war a laboratory for weapons manufacturers such as Lockheed Martin. All this is useful to NATO and to the arms industry. But it is not very useful to Ukraine.

The other problem with advanced weapons systems such as the M1 Abrams, which have 1,500-horsepower turbine engines that run on jet fuel, is that they are temperamental and require highly skilled and near constant maintenance. They are not forgiving to those operating them who make mistakes; indeed, mistakes can be lethal. The most optimistic scenario for deploying M1-Abrams tanks in Ukraine is six to eight months, more likely longer. If Russia launches a major offensive in the spring, as expected, the M1 Abrams will not be part of the Ukrainian arsenal. Even when they do arrive, they will not significantly alter the balance of power, especially if the Russians are able to turn the tanks, manned by inexperienced crews, into charred hulks.

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So why all this infusion of high-tech weaponry? We can sum it up in one word: panic.

Having declared a de facto war on Russia and openly calling for the removal of Vladimir Putin, the neoconservative pimps of war watch with dread as Ukraine is being pummeled by a relentless Russian war of attrition. Ukraine has suffered nearly 18,000 civilian casualties (6,919 killed and 11,075 injured). It has also seen  around 8 percent of its total housing destroyed or damaged and 50 percent of its energy infrastructure directly impacted with frequent power cuts. Ukraine requires at least $3 billion a month in outside support to keep its economy afloat, the International Monetary Fund’s managing director recently said. Nearly 14 million Ukrainians have been displaced — 8 million in Europe and 6 million internally — and up to 18 million people, or 40 percent of Ukraine’s population, will soon require humanitarian assistance. Ukraine’s economy contracted by 35 percent in 2022, and 60 percent of Ukrainians are now poised to live on less than $5.5 a day, according to World Bank estimates. Nine million Ukrainians are without electricity and water in sub-zerotemperatures, the Ukrainian president says. According to estimates from the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, 100,000 Ukrainian and 100,000 Russian soldiers have been killedin the war as of last November. 

“My feeling is we are at a crucial moment in the conflict when the momentum could shift in favor of Russia if we don’t act decisively and quickly,” former U.S. Senator Rob Portman was quoted as saying at the World Economic Forum in a post by The Atlantic Council. “A surge is needed.”

Turning logic on its head, the shills for war argue that “the greatest nuclear threat we face is a Russian victory.” The cavalier attitude to a potential nuclear confrontation with Russia by the cheerleaders for the war in Ukraine is very, very frightening, especially given the fiascos they oversaw for twenty years in the Middle East.

The near hysterical calls to support Ukraine as a bulwark of liberty and democracy by the mandarins in Washington are a response to the palpable rot and decline of the U.S. empire. America’s global authority has been decimated by well-publicized war crimes, torture, economic decline, social disintegration — including the assault on the capital on January 6, the botched response to the pandemic, declining life expectancies and the plague of mass shootings — and a series of military debacles from Vietnam to Afghanistan. The coups, political assassinations, election fraud, black propaganda, blackmail, kidnapping, brutal counter-insurgency campaigns, U.S. sanctioned massacres, torture in global black sites, proxy wars and military interventions carried out by the United States around the globe since the end of World War II have never resulted in the establishment of a democratic government. Instead, these interventions have led to over 20 million killed and spawned a global revulsion for U.S. imperialism.

In desperation, the empire pumps ever greater sums into its war machine. The most recent $1.7 trillion spending bill included $847 billion for the military;  the total is boosted to $858 billion when factoring in accounts that don’t fall under the Armed Services committees’ jurisdiction, such as the Department of Energy, which overseesnuclear weapons maintenance and the infrastructure that develops them. In 2021, when the U.S. had a military budget of $801 billion, it constituted nearly 40 percent of all global military expenditures, more than the next nine countries, including Russia and China, spent on their militaries combined.

As Edward Gibbon observed about the Roman Empire’s own fatal lust for endless war: “[T]he decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness. Prosperity ripened the principle of decay; the cause of the destruction multiplied with the extent of conquest; and, as soon as time or accident had removed the artificial supports, the stupendous fabric yielded to the pressure of its own weight. The story of the ruin is simple and obvious; and instead of inquiring why the Roman Empire was destroyed, we should rather be surprised that it had subsisted for so long.”

A state of permanent war creates complex bureaucracies, sustained by compliant politicians, journalists, scientists, technocrats and academics, who obsequiously serve the war machine. This militarism needs mortal enemies — the latest are Russia and China — even when those demonized have no intention or capability, as was the case with Iraq, of harming the U.S. We are hostage to these incestuous institutional structures.

Earlier this month, the House and Senate Armed Services Committees, for example, appointed eight commissioners to review Biden’s National Defense Strategy (NDS) to “examine the assumptions, objectives, defense investments, force posture and structure, operational concepts, and military risks of the NDS.” The commission, as Eli Clifton writes at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, is “largely comprised of individuals with financial ties to the weapons industry and U.S. government contractors, raising questions about whether the commission will take a critical eye to contractors who receive $400 billion of the $858 billion FY2023 defense budget.” The chair of the commission, Clifton notes, is former Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA), who “sits on the board of Iridium Communications, a satellite communications firm that was awarded a seven-year $738.5 million contract with the Department of Defense in 2019.”

Reports about Russian interference in the elections and Russia bots manipulating public opinion — which Matt Taibbi’s recent reporting on the “Twitter Files” exposesas an elaborate piece of black propaganda — was uncritically amplified by the press. It seduced Democrats and their liberal supporters into seeing Russia as a mortal enemy. The near universal support for a prolonged war with Ukraine would not be possible without this con.

America’s  two ruling parties depend on campaign funds from the war industry and are pressured by weapons manufacturers in their state or districts, who employ constituents, to pass  gargantuan military budgets. Politicians are acutely aware that to challenge the permanent war economy is to be attacked as unpatriotic and is usually an act of political suicide.

“The soul that is enslaved to war cries out for deliverance,” writes Simone Weil in her essay “The Iliad or the Poem of Force”, “but deliverance itself appears to it an extreme and tragic aspect, the aspect of destruction.”

Historians refer to the quixotic attempt by empires in decline to regain a lost hegemony through military adventurism as “micro-militarism.” During the Peloponnesian War (431–404 B.C.) the Athenians invaded Sicily, losing 200 ships and thousands of soldiers. The defeat ignited a series of successful revolts throughout the Athenian empire. The Roman Empire, which at its height lasted for two centuries, became captive to its one military man army that, similar to the U.S. war industry, was a state within a state. Rome’s once mighty legions in the late stage of empire suffered defeat after defeat while extracting ever more resources from a crumbling and impoverished state. In the end, the elite Praetorian Guard auctioned off the emperorship to the highest bidder. The  British Empire, already decimated by the suicidal military folly of World War I, breathed its last gasp in 1956 when it attacked Egypt in a dispute over the nationalization of the Suez Canal. Britain withdrew in humiliation and became an appendage of the United States. A decade-long war in Afghanistan sealed the fate of a decrepit Soviet Union.

“While rising empires are often judicious, even rational in their application of armed force for conquest and control of overseas dominions, fading empires are inclined to ill-considered displays of power, dreaming of bold military masterstrokes that would somehow recoup lost prestige and power,” historian Alfred W. McCoy writes in his book, “In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of US Global Power.” “Often irrational even from an imperial point of view, these micro-military operations can yield hemorrhaging expenditures or humiliating defeats that only accelerate the process already under way.”

The plan to reshape Europe and the global balance of power by degrading Russia is turning out to resemble the failed plan to reshape the Middle East. It is fueling a global food crisis and devastating Europe with near double-digit inflation. It is exposing the impotency, once again, of the United States, and the bankruptcy of its ruling oligarchs. As a counterweight to the United States, nations such as China, Russia, India, Brazil and Iran are severing themselves from the tyranny of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, a move that will trigger economic and social catastrophe in the United States. Washington is giving Ukraine ever more sophisticated weapons systems and billions upon billions in aid in a futile bid to save Ukraine but, more importantly, to save itself.

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Re: Some of this makes a lot of sense
« Reply #1312 on: January 29, 2023, 04:51:07 PM »
The "elites" thought they'd use Ukraine as a way to remove Putin and shatter Russia into pieces to be exploited, as well as distract from the slow-motion trainwreck that is the western world.

Now they are desperate to save face and are throwing miltech at the wall, praying something sticks.

Stupid AND desperate.

That makes them especially dangerous.

To us.



Ukraine: The War That Went Wrong
NATO support for the war in Ukraine, designed to degrade the Russian military and drive Vladimir Putin from power, is not going according to plan. The new sophisticated military hardware won't help.
CHRIS HEDGES
JAN 29

 



SAVE
▷  LISTEN
 


Everything Must Go - Mr. Fish

Upgrade to paid


Empires in terminal decline leap from one military fiasco to the next. The war in Ukraine, another bungled attempt to reassert U.S. global hegemony, fits this pattern. The danger is that the more dire things look, the more the U.S. will escalate the conflict, potentially provoking open confrontation with Russia. If Russia carries out retaliatory attacks on supply and training bases in neighboring NATO countries, or uses tactical nuclear weapons, NATO will almost certainly respond by attacking Russian forces. We will have ignited World War III, which could result in a nuclear holocaust.

U.S. military support for Ukraine began with the basics — ammunition and assault weapons. The Biden administration, however, soon crossed several self-imposed red lines to provide a tidal wave of lethal war machinery: Stinger anti-aircraft systems; Javelin anti-armor systems; M777 towed Howitzers; 122mm GRAD rockets; M142 multiple rocket launchers, or HIMARS; Tube-Launched, Optically-Tracked, Wire-Guided (TOW) missiles; Patriot air defense batteries; National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile Systems (NASAMS); M113 Armored Personnel Carriers; and now 31 M1 Abrams, as part of a new $400 million package. These tanks will be supplemented by 14 German Leopard 2A6 tanks, 14 British Challenger 2 tanks, as well as tanks from other NATO members, including Poland. Next on the list are armor-piercing depleted uranium (DU) ammunition and F-15 and F-16 fighter jets.

Since Russia invaded on February 24, 2022, Congress has approved more than $113 billion in aid to Ukraine and allied nations supporting the war in Ukraine. Three-fifths of this aid, $67 billion, has been allocated for military expenditures. There are 28 countries transferring weapons to Ukraine. All of them, with the exception of Australia, Canada and the U.S., are in Europe.

The rapid upgrade of sophisticated military hardware and aid provided to Ukraine is not a good sign for the NATO alliance. It takes many months, if not years, of training to operate and coordinate these weapons systems. Tank battles — I was in the last major tank battle outside Kuwait City during the first Gulf war as a reporter — are highly choreographed and complex operations. Armor must work in close concert with air power, warships, infantry and artillery batteries. It will be many, many months, if not years, before Ukrainian forces receive adequate training to operate this equipment and coordinate the diverse components of a modern battlefield. Indeed, the U.S. never succeeded in training the Iraqi and Afghan armies in combined arms maneuver warfare, despite two decades of occupation.

I was with Marine Corps units in February 1991 that pushed Iraqi forces out of the Saudi Arabian town of Khafji. Supplied with superior military equipment, the Saudi soldiers that held Khafji offered ineffectual resistance. As we entered the city, we saw Saudi troops in commandeered fire trucks, hightailing it south to escape the fighting. All the fancy military hardware, which the Saudis had purchased from the U.S., proved worthless because they did not know how to use it.

NATO military commanders understand that the infusion of these weapons systems into the war will not alter what is, at best, a stalemate, defined largely by artillery duels over hundreds of miles of front lines. The purchase of these weapons systems — one M1 Abrams tank costs $10 million when training and sustainment are included — increases the profits of the arms manufacturers. The use of these weapons in Ukraine allows them to be tested in battlefield conditions, making the war a laboratory for weapons manufacturers such as Lockheed Martin. All this is useful to NATO and to the arms industry. But it is not very useful to Ukraine.

The other problem with advanced weapons systems such as the M1 Abrams, which have 1,500-horsepower turbine engines that run on jet fuel, is that they are temperamental and require highly skilled and near constant maintenance. They are not forgiving to those operating them who make mistakes; indeed, mistakes can be lethal. The most optimistic scenario for deploying M1-Abrams tanks in Ukraine is six to eight months, more likely longer. If Russia launches a major offensive in the spring, as expected, the M1 Abrams will not be part of the Ukrainian arsenal. Even when they do arrive, they will not significantly alter the balance of power, especially if the Russians are able to turn the tanks, manned by inexperienced crews, into charred hulks.

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So why all this infusion of high-tech weaponry? We can sum it up in one word: panic.

Having declared a de facto war on Russia and openly calling for the removal of Vladimir Putin, the neoconservative pimps of war watch with dread as Ukraine is being pummeled by a relentless Russian war of attrition. Ukraine has suffered nearly 18,000 civilian casualties (6,919 killed and 11,075 injured). It has also seen  around 8 percent of its total housing destroyed or damaged and 50 percent of its energy infrastructure directly impacted with frequent power cuts. Ukraine requires at least $3 billion a month in outside support to keep its economy afloat, the International Monetary Fund’s managing director recently said. Nearly 14 million Ukrainians have been displaced — 8 million in Europe and 6 million internally — and up to 18 million people, or 40 percent of Ukraine’s population, will soon require humanitarian assistance. Ukraine’s economy contracted by 35 percent in 2022, and 60 percent of Ukrainians are now poised to live on less than $5.5 a day, according to World Bank estimates. Nine million Ukrainians are without electricity and water in sub-zerotemperatures, the Ukrainian president says. According to estimates from the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, 100,000 Ukrainian and 100,000 Russian soldiers have been killedin the war as of last November. 

“My feeling is we are at a crucial moment in the conflict when the momentum could shift in favor of Russia if we don’t act decisively and quickly,” former U.S. Senator Rob Portman was quoted as saying at the World Economic Forum in a post by The Atlantic Council. “A surge is needed.”

Turning logic on its head, the shills for war argue that “the greatest nuclear threat we face is a Russian victory.” The cavalier attitude to a potential nuclear confrontation with Russia by the cheerleaders for the war in Ukraine is very, very frightening, especially given the fiascos they oversaw for twenty years in the Middle East.

The near hysterical calls to support Ukraine as a bulwark of liberty and democracy by the mandarins in Washington are a response to the palpable rot and decline of the U.S. empire. America’s global authority has been decimated by well-publicized war crimes, torture, economic decline, social disintegration — including the assault on the capital on January 6, the botched response to the pandemic, declining life expectancies and the plague of mass shootings — and a series of military debacles from Vietnam to Afghanistan. The coups, political assassinations, election fraud, black propaganda, blackmail, kidnapping, brutal counter-insurgency campaigns, U.S. sanctioned massacres, torture in global black sites, proxy wars and military interventions carried out by the United States around the globe since the end of World War II have never resulted in the establishment of a democratic government. Instead, these interventions have led to over 20 million killed and spawned a global revulsion for U.S. imperialism.

In desperation, the empire pumps ever greater sums into its war machine. The most recent $1.7 trillion spending bill included $847 billion for the military;  the total is boosted to $858 billion when factoring in accounts that don’t fall under the Armed Services committees’ jurisdiction, such as the Department of Energy, which overseesnuclear weapons maintenance and the infrastructure that develops them. In 2021, when the U.S. had a military budget of $801 billion, it constituted nearly 40 percent of all global military expenditures, more than the next nine countries, including Russia and China, spent on their militaries combined.

As Edward Gibbon observed about the Roman Empire’s own fatal lust for endless war: “[T]he decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness. Prosperity ripened the principle of decay; the cause of the destruction multiplied with the extent of conquest; and, as soon as time or accident had removed the artificial supports, the stupendous fabric yielded to the pressure of its own weight. The story of the ruin is simple and obvious; and instead of inquiring why the Roman Empire was destroyed, we should rather be surprised that it had subsisted for so long.”

A state of permanent war creates complex bureaucracies, sustained by compliant politicians, journalists, scientists, technocrats and academics, who obsequiously serve the war machine. This militarism needs mortal enemies — the latest are Russia and China — even when those demonized have no intention or capability, as was the case with Iraq, of harming the U.S. We are hostage to these incestuous institutional structures.

Earlier this month, the House and Senate Armed Services Committees, for example, appointed eight commissioners to review Biden’s National Defense Strategy (NDS) to “examine the assumptions, objectives, defense investments, force posture and structure, operational concepts, and military risks of the NDS.” The commission, as Eli Clifton writes at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, is “largely comprised of individuals with financial ties to the weapons industry and U.S. government contractors, raising questions about whether the commission will take a critical eye to contractors who receive $400 billion of the $858 billion FY2023 defense budget.” The chair of the commission, Clifton notes, is former Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA), who “sits on the board of Iridium Communications, a satellite communications firm that was awarded a seven-year $738.5 million contract with the Department of Defense in 2019.”

Reports about Russian interference in the elections and Russia bots manipulating public opinion — which Matt Taibbi’s recent reporting on the “Twitter Files” exposesas an elaborate piece of black propaganda — was uncritically amplified by the press. It seduced Democrats and their liberal supporters into seeing Russia as a mortal enemy. The near universal support for a prolonged war with Ukraine would not be possible without this con.

America’s  two ruling parties depend on campaign funds from the war industry and are pressured by weapons manufacturers in their state or districts, who employ constituents, to pass  gargantuan military budgets. Politicians are acutely aware that to challenge the permanent war economy is to be attacked as unpatriotic and is usually an act of political suicide.

“The soul that is enslaved to war cries out for deliverance,” writes Simone Weil in her essay “The Iliad or the Poem of Force”, “but deliverance itself appears to it an extreme and tragic aspect, the aspect of destruction.”

Historians refer to the quixotic attempt by empires in decline to regain a lost hegemony through military adventurism as “micro-militarism.” During the Peloponnesian War (431–404 B.C.) the Athenians invaded Sicily, losing 200 ships and thousands of soldiers. The defeat ignited a series of successful revolts throughout the Athenian empire. The Roman Empire, which at its height lasted for two centuries, became captive to its one military man army that, similar to the U.S. war industry, was a state within a state. Rome’s once mighty legions in the late stage of empire suffered defeat after defeat while extracting ever more resources from a crumbling and impoverished state. In the end, the elite Praetorian Guard auctioned off the emperorship to the highest bidder. The  British Empire, already decimated by the suicidal military folly of World War I, breathed its last gasp in 1956 when it attacked Egypt in a dispute over the nationalization of the Suez Canal. Britain withdrew in humiliation and became an appendage of the United States. A decade-long war in Afghanistan sealed the fate of a decrepit Soviet Union.

“While rising empires are often judicious, even rational in their application of armed force for conquest and control of overseas dominions, fading empires are inclined to ill-considered displays of power, dreaming of bold military masterstrokes that would somehow recoup lost prestige and power,” historian Alfred W. McCoy writes in his book, “In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of US Global Power.” “Often irrational even from an imperial point of view, these micro-military operations can yield hemorrhaging expenditures or humiliating defeats that only accelerate the process already under way.”

The plan to reshape Europe and the global balance of power by degrading Russia is turning out to resemble the failed plan to reshape the Middle East. It is fueling a global food crisis and devastating Europe with near double-digit inflation. It is exposing the impotency, once again, of the United States, and the bankruptcy of its ruling oligarchs. As a counterweight to the United States, nations such as China, Russia, India, Brazil and Iran are severing themselves from the tyranny of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, a move that will trigger economic and social catastrophe in the United States. Washington is giving Ukraine ever more sophisticated weapons systems and billions upon billions in aid in a futile bid to save Ukraine but, more importantly, to save itself.


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Russia-Iran Axis and Biden
« Reply #1314 on: January 31, 2023, 04:54:59 AM »

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19317/russian-iranian-axis

Russian-Iranian Axis: Biden Administration Missing in Action?
by Judith Bergman
January 31, 2023 at 5:00 am


Iran is now selling surface-to-surface missiles to Russia for use in its war on Ukraine -- on the cusp of a reported "major Ukrainian offensive" -- in addition to the drones it has already been delivering, two senior Iranian officials and two Iranian diplomats told Reuters.

"In exchange, Russia is offering Iran an unprecedented level of military and technical support that is transforming their relationship into a full-fledged defense partnership.... This is a full-scale defense partnership that is harmful... to the international community." — John Kirby, White House National Security Spokesperson, December 9, 2022.

When asked how Iran's sale of drones and missiles impacts the Biden administration's stance on the Iran nuclear deal... John Kirby deflected the question.

At a time when Iranians are desperately risking their lives to free themselves of a vicious theocratic dictatorship, it would be equally impressive if the Biden Administration would stand firmly behind the protestors in their fight for liberty and human rights, values America has always professed to support. President Ronald Reagan did it with great success to aid the collapse of the Soviet Empire.

Speaking a rally in California in October, President Joe Biden said, "we stand with the citizens, the brave women of Iran." Such words are cost-free: They will not do much to help the Iranian protesters fighting for freedom and human rights.

Even former President Barack Obama, who ignored Iran's "Green Movement" protesters in 2009, admitted in October that his lack of support then for the Iranian dissidents was a mistake.

Statements of solidarity, however strong, will not produce serious results. What is needed from the US is to help the people of Iran concretely – to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons to dominate the Middle East, South America, Europe -- and the United States.

Iran is now planning to station warships in the Panama Canal – which China is aggressively trying to control. The U.S. has not even had an ambassador in Panama since 2018.

All one has to do is look at how terrified the Biden administration has been of "provoking" Russian President Vladimir Putin into using nuclear weapons. What actually provokes dictators? That America exists.


Iran is now selling surface-to-surface missiles to Russia for use in its war on Ukraine, in addition to the drones it has already been delivering, two senior Iranian officials and two Iranian diplomats told Reuters. Pictured: Firefighters in Kyiv, Ukraine try to put out a fire in a four-story residential building, in which three people were killed when it was hit by a "kamikaze drone" (many of which are supplied to Russian forces by Iran), on October 17, 2022. (Photo by Paula Bronstein/Getty Images)
Iran is now selling surface-to-surface missiles to Russia for use in its war on Ukraine -- on the cusp of a reported "major Ukrainian offensive" -- in addition to the drones it has already been delivering, two senior Iranian officials and two Iranian diplomats told Reuters.

According to anonymous US and allied officials quoted by the Washington Post, Iran has secretly agreed to send "what some officials described as the first Iranian-made surface-to-surface missiles intended for use against Ukrainian cities and troop positions."

Russia is reportedly buying Iranian-made missiles capable of hitting targets at distances of 300 and 700 kilometers, respectively.

"The Russians had asked for more drones and those Iranian ballistic missiles with improved accuracy, particularly the Fateh and Zolfaghar missiles family," one of the Iranian diplomats told Reuters.

The news of the missile deal came after it became publicly known in August that Russia had been buying Iranian drones, including the Mohajer-6 and the Shahed-series drones. The first batch, according to the Washington Post, was picked up by Russian cargo flights in late August, with Iranians reported to be training Russian soldiers in using them for Russia's war on Ukraine.

The Shahed-136s kamikaze drones, are designed to explode upon impact with their targets. According to the Washington Post, they are capable of delivering explosive payloads at distances of up to 1,500 miles.

John Kirby, White House National Security Council spokesperson, confirmed in December, that Iranian military support for Russia has become indispensable to Russia's war effort in Ukraine and directly enabling it to kill Ukrainians; that Iran is considering selling ballistic missiles to the country and that the two regimes are developing a military partnership that is mutually beneficial. Kirby said in a December 9 briefing:

"Iran is providing Russia with drones for use on the battlefield in Ukraine... In exchange, Russia is offering Iran an unprecedented level of military and technical support that is transforming their relationship into a full-fledged defense partnership.... This partnership poses a threat, not just to Ukraine, but to Iran's neighbors in the region..."

"Iran has become Russia's top military backer. Since August, Iran has transferred several hundred drones, UAVs, to Russia. Russia has been using these UAVs to attack Ukraine's critical infrastructure, and as I said earlier, to kill innocent Ukrainian people...

"We expect Iranian support for the Russian military to only grow in coming months. We even believe that Iran is considering the sale of hundreds of ballistic missiles from Iran to Russia... We've also seen reports that Moscow and Tehran are considering the establishment of a joint production line for lethal drones in Russia. We urge Iran to reverse course, not to take the steps...

"Russia is seeking to collaborate with Iran on areas like weapons development and training. As part of this collaboration, we are concerned that Russia intends to provide Iran with advanced military components. Moscow may be providing Tehran with equipment such as helicopters and air defense systems. As of this spring, Iranian pilots have reportedly been training in Russia to learn how to fly the Su-35. This indicates that Iran may begin receiving aircraft within the next year. These fighter planes would significantly strengthen Iran's air force relative to its regional neighbors.

"This is a full-scale defense partnership that is harmful, as I said to Ukraine, to Iran's neighbors, and quite frankly to the international community."

Russia's use of Iranian military equipment against Ukraine not only strengthens Russia in Ukraine, but it gives Iran what the Ukrainian Defense Ministry called "test runs' of its drones, to update their systems for future use against the US and its allies, such as Israel.

Kirby spoke on October 20 about the US response to Iran's drone sales to Russia:

"We have imposed new sanctions, including on an air transportation service provider for its involvement in the shipment of Iranian UAVs to Russia... We've also sanctioned... companies and even one individual that was involved in the research, development, production, and procurement of Iranian UAVs and components... including specifically the Shahed family of drones that we know are being used... in Ukraine."

When asked how Iran's sale of drones and missiles impacts the Biden administration's stance on the Iran nuclear deal, also known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), Kirby deflected the question:

"Our focus right now, quite frankly... is not on the JCPOA. We are way far apart with the Iranians in terms of a return to the deal, so we're just simply not focused on that right now. They had demands that were well in excess of what the JCPOA was supposed to cover. And again, so we're just — we are not focused on the diplomacy at this point."

At a time when Iranians are desperately risking their lives to free themselves of a vicious theocratic dictatorship, it would be equally impressive if the Biden Administration would stand firmly behind the protestors in their fight for liberty and human rights, values America has always professed to support. President Ronald Reagan did it with great success to aid the collapse of the Soviet Empire.

Iranian security forces have killed at least 500 people since the protests there began in mid-September, including 69 children, according to the U.S.-based Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA). According to HRANA, Iranian authorities have recently arrested more than 18,400 people in connection with the protests. In addition, at least 100 protesters are currently at risk of facing "execution, death penalty charges or sentences," according to the Oslo-based Iran Human Rights NGO. "This is a minimum as most families are under pressure to stay quiet, the real number is believed to be much higher."

Speaking a rally in California in October, President Joe Biden said, "we stand with the citizens, the brave women of Iran."

Such words are cost-free: They will not do much to help the Iranian protesters fighting for freedom and human rights.

Even former President Barack Obama, who ignored Iran's "Green Movement" protesters in 2009, admitted in October that his lack of support then for the Iranian dissidents was a mistake.

"When I think back to 2009, 2010, you guys will recall there was a big debate inside the White House about whether I should publicly affirm what was going on with the Green Movement, because a lot of the activists were being accused of being tools of the West and there was some thought that we were somehow gonna be undermining their street cred in Iran if I supported what they were doing. And in retrospect, I think that was a mistake."

"Every time we see a flash, a glimmer of hope, of people longing for freedom, I think we have to point it out. We have to shine a spotlight on it. We have to express some solidarity about it."

Statements of solidarity, however strong, will not produce serious results. What is needed from the US is to help the people of Iran concretely – to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons to dominate the Middle East, South America, Europe -- and the United States.

Iran is now planning to station warships in the Panama Canal – which China is aggressively trying to control. The U.S. has not even had an ambassador in Panama since 2018.

All one has to do is look at how terrified the Biden administration has been of "provoking" Russian President Vladimir Putin into using nuclear weapons.

What actually provokes dictators? That America exists.

There are a number of ways the Biden administration can "take steps," suggest Eric Adelman Counselor at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments and senior adviser at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and Ray Takeyh, senior fellow for Middle East Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations:

"First, the United States should formally declare that it will end negotiations with Iran on a putative return to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action... The United States should also make clear that it will not negotiate with an Iranian government that is repressing the Iranian people and destabilizing its neighbors. Such declarations would rob the regime of its ability to generate hope among the population that sanctions might be lifted under its rule.

"Publicly closing the door on negotiations would also free up the Biden administration to fully enforce sanctions already on the books. The United States should target Iranian officials guilty of the most egregious human rights violations, bolstering hope among Iran's people for government accountability. This should be accompanied by full-throated and ongoing U.S. government statements supporting the protesters and drawing attention to the worst instances of repression."

Adelman and Takeyh also argue that the US should increase protesters' ability to communicate by "sending Starlink terminals," which would enable Iran's anti-regime protest movement to "get around the regime's censorship and blocks on social media. Apparently, thanks to Elon Musk, Iran now has "around 100."

"Other software apps, such as Ushahidi, have been used to monitor elections in sub-Saharan Africa by allowing voters to share images of polling places. Such applications could be repurposed to allow Iranians to share images of acts of protest in different parts of the country, enabling coordination among different groups of protesters and, by forcing the government to overstretch its security forces, making it harder for the regime to quash dissent. The United States should also use popular social media channels, such as Telegram, to provide dissidents with accurate information about what is going on throughout the country, including protests, human rights abuses, and executions. The expansion and creative use of such channels of communication could help new protest leaders emerge and drown out regime propaganda.

"In addition, the United States should ramp up broadcasting by the Voice of America's Persian Service and Radio Farda and fund private television broadcasting by Iranian expats, which could provide additional fuel for the fire raging in the streets of Iranian cities. Currently, the United States is projected to spend less than $30 million in the 2023 fiscal year on broadcasting in Iran."

Judith Bergman, a columnist, lawyer and political analyst, is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at Gatestone Institute.

Follow Judith Bergman on Twitter

Crafty_Dog

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RANE: Navigating the Risks of a Multi-Polar World
« Reply #1315 on: February 16, 2023, 02:48:15 PM »


Network Intelligence Report: Navigating the Risks of a Multipolar World
133 MIN READFeb 15, 2023 | 16:03 GMT






(Shutterstock)

 

Editor's Note: This is a complimentary piece of content we share from our Core Intel platform. RANE’s community-based solutions help address a range of enterprise risks covering Safety + Security, Cyber + Information, Geopolitical, and Legal, Regulatory + Compliance. Contact us to learn more.

RANE's Network Intelligence Report incorporates our analysts' diverse expertise to assess risks and opportunities pertinent to our clients across our taxonomy's four areas of focus: geopolitics; legal, regulatory and compliance; cyber and information; and physical safety and security.

Although we only began conceptualizing this special Navigating Multipolarity issue of the Network Intelligence Report towards the end of 2022, it has been clear for several years that the era of unchallenged U.S. hegemony – and of the broader Western-led global order – is over. The Russian invasion of Ukraine is only the most recent and acute demonstration of this, but more broadly the rise of China and the emergence of multiple small and middle powers have introduced a great deal of uncertainty into the global environment. Even a more integrated Europe, though still close to the United States, has created new challenges as Washington and Brussels pursue divergent policies in many areas, such as tech and environmental regulation.

Our Network Intelligence Report begins with an overview of what this emerging multipolar world looks like and the implications for organizations trying to navigate it. As we are keenly aware, business leaders across industries and company sizes have identified geopolitical risk as a key concern in 2023. Our analysts examine five key areas of this new world order that are highly relevant to our clients.

One of the defining characteristics of the emerging global environment is a decline in the relevance and effectiveness of the Western-led multilateral political, economic and security institutions that emerged in the wake of World War II. In particular, the rise of alternative lending institutions and business norms, many of which are championed by China, creates new legal, reputational, financial and operational risks to organizations.

Just as new multilateral institutions are increasingly dividing the physical world, so too are countries increasingly resorting to nationalism in cyberspace. What was once a global commons is increasingly split along national or regional lines. This is creating a much more complex and protectionist digital landscape for organizations to maneuver and protect their data.

Countries are also growing more protectionist in their environmental policies as they seek to pair action on climate change with state-led economic intervention. While China has long done this, it is the United States that has more recently and unexpectedly led this charge, forcing Europe to respond. This is already creating compliance challenges, which are set to only grow in the coming years, for multinational businesses.

If these challenges are not enough, legal and compliance teams are also facing a growing array of sanctions requirements. Though most immediately focused on Russia, Western nations are expanding and in some cases wholly redesigning their sanctions architecture in ways that will make it crucial for all organizations to improve their due diligence practices to avoid legal or reputational blowback, especially as regulators turn their focus toward China.

Finally, a shifting and more uncertain world will make it more important than ever that organizations have a model and tools to evaluate and mitigate the various risks future crises may bring, especially for physical security. Applying a framework from the U.S. Intelligence Community that leverages the proliferation of open-source intelligence for a corporate context offers one well-developed way forward.

We strongly believe that you will find this special Navigating Multipolarity issue of the Network Intelligence Report a useful guide to this emerging multipolar world order. As always, we are indebted to the work of our talented analysts and expert contributors, whose observations and guidance frame each advisory.

Sincerely,
Sam Lichtenstein, Director of Analysis, RANE

Geopolitical Disruptions: The Return of Multipolarity
 

The reemergence of a multipolar world and rising peer competition is changing the global security and business landscape. Defense budgets are climbing. National security considerations are driving geo-economic competition. Global norms and expectations that have held for decades are in flux. Complex supply chains woven since the end of the Cold War are fraying. Adapting to this shifting global landscape will require rethinking longstanding assumptions, but also understanding the geopolitical forces driving change.

Multipolarity is not new – in fact, it may be the norm of the modern globalized world. With the exception of the Cold War and a brief period of re-adjustment following the collapse of the Soviet Union, modern global history has been characterized by a multipolar world system. No power was able to hold sway over the rest singularly. Even at the height of British imperialism, the UK was not the clear global hegemon, as seen in its continued struggles to manage competing powers on the European continent as well as Russian advances in Central Asia toward South and Southeast Asia – the so-called "Great Game." No truly global bloc formation emerged until after World War II. Instead, the global balance of power was fluid.

From Globalization to Liberal Economics
From a geopolitical perspective, which seeks to take the long, structural view, the "modern" world began sometime in the early 16th century, when Europe "discovered" the rest of the globe. Before this time, there were empires rising and falling, cultures emerging and developing, and science and technology advancing, all over the globe. And there were connections moving people, goods and ideas across Europe, Asia and Africa. But distance remained a major constraint on global connectivity, and it took the combined advances in shipbuilding, navigation technologies and economic resources to bring the globe into clear focus and integration.

By the 19th century, global trade, strategic competition and shifting technology meant that the world was a closed political system. As British geographer Sir Halford Mackinder assessed in 1904, "every explosion of social forces, instead of being dissipated in a surrounding circuit of unknown space and barbaric chaos, will be sharply re-echoed from the far side of the globe, and weak elements in the political and economic organism of the world will be shattered in consequence." In other words, what happened on one continent had repercussions for those on other distant continents and vice versa. Thus the American Revolution had significant implications for Britain's security in India (and affected London's dispersion of force and decision-making), and the expansion of European sea trade to the Far East degraded the economic viability of Central Asian trading routes (and the fortunes of the Italian city-states).

With the integration of the world into a single system, fully cognizant of itself, we can trace the origins of today's globalization to the early 1500s, with sporadic maturation over the succeeding centuries. But it is only after World War II that the modern framework for globalization emerged. At the end of the war, the United States stood as one of the few strong economic powers, and Washington used this heft to rebuild Europe and establish a new global economic and philosophical framework. Modern liberal economic policies may have their origins in older eras and theorists, but it was the widespread destruction of World War II that allowed the construction of a new liberal economic framework, which took on more importance as the world quickly moved into the Cold War architecture.

The Cold War was both a strategic and ideological competition. The United States and Western Europe promoted a liberal ideology that linked personal freedoms, private industry and democracy as the fundamental (and universal) conditions for economic growth and success. This challenged Soviet collectivism and statism, but it also challenged other traditional forms of economic and social collectivism that characterized much of the developing world. When the collapse of the Soviet Union "proved" the superiority of Western liberal economics, the West could demand adherence to its norms amid the rapid expansion of global trade, trade agreements and economic interactions. Thus, one abnormal period (the bipolar Cold War) gave way to another oddity, the "hegemonic" moment of U.S. power that lasted until the early 2000s. This was a transitory period where the rest of the world sought balance, particularly the rapidly growing China.

Challenging the Status Quo
China stands in stark contrast to the universal assertions of Western liberal economic norms. While China made some economic progress through the 1980s, it was the 1990s and early 2000s that saw the real surge in Chinese economic growth and global importance. China was well positioned to take advantage of its massive low-cost labor pool to draw industrial investment and link into the rapidly expanding containerized shipping. Global norms and trade agreements facilitated the growth and complexity of global supply chains, allowing corporations to move goods at various stages of completion to different countries, with products at times crossing oceans several times before reaching their final destinations. China played within this system when it was beneficial, but Beijing never gave up state involvement in the economy or Communist Party control over the government and people.

As China's economic power rose, and its importance to global trade flows increased, Beijing grew more confident in beginning to challenge aspects of the global (i.e. Western) norms, highlighting its own successes in economic growth without the same political or personal freedoms the West asserted were necessary co-requisites. Beijing's message resonates with much of the world. The Western liberal economic and political ideas are not inherently universal, but rather come from a particular strand of philosophy and were codified at a unique moment in history. But the North Atlantic no longer comprises the bulk of global economic activity and heft. Thus, China argues, the West's mores should not necessarily dictate the political, economic and social choices of other countries.

China is not alone in challenging the status quo. As U.S. power seemed to grow unchecked following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the rest of the world sought balance. Freed of the Soviet threat, Europe accelerated its own integration, creating a massive single market that gave Brussels power in asserting global norms on issues ranging from the environment to human rights. Russia perceived unchecked U.S. power, and the expansion of NATO, as a direct threat to its own strategic position, and by the early 2000s began its own push against the global order. As these four poles of power became clearer, small and middle powers like Turkey, India and Japan saw the opportunity to begin exploiting the differences between the big powers, finding their own advantages where they may, but also introducing uncertainty into political and economic policies as they bucked against U.S., European, Chinese and Russian interests, or saw local politics swing between different big power influence.

Challenges and Opportunities of a Multipolar System
The United States and China sit at the core of the new multipolar system, with Europe and Russia as similar but not fully aligned poles – and an array of small and middle powers shifting throughout this new ecosystem. But despite growing U.S.-China strategic competition, it is unlikely the world returns to another Cold War-like architecture. Unlike at the end of World War II, there is no massive dislocation of global trade and peoples that can allow the formation of a new competing set of economic and political blocs. Rather, no single power has the ability to either dominate the international system alone or force other countries to fully choose a side. This has strategic and economic implications not only for government policies and international relations but for internationally engaged and exposed businesses and organizations.

Uncertainty in international relations: Multipolarity provides space for many small and middle-tier countries to decline "choosing a side" between big powers, leading to more flexible alignments rather than expanding strong alliances. In the Indo-Pacific, for example, many countries are finding themselves largely aligned economically with China while militarily with the United States. This may make them more susceptible to economic coercion from big powers, and economic impacts are often based less on the economic fundamentals in a specific smaller country than on the political actions of the larger powers. Thus, unexpected economic disruptions may become more common, requiring not only adept political risk awareness that draws on the expanding amount of open-source intelligence but an understanding of the broader geopolitical balance as well.
Emergence of miniblocs: While traditional large-scale complex alliances may be waning, the multipolar system encourages the frequent formation of smaller mini-blocs, attempts by like-minded countries to pool their relative power to better maneuver between the big powers. These may be driven by the big powers, as seen in groupings like the QUAD or AUKUS, or be regionally focused, as with the closer cooperation emerging among the Baltic countries and Poland, or the renewed collaboration within the core of ASEAN. This will force businesses to navigate increasingly diverse – and at times opposed – political and economic blocs, posing new compliance, supply chain, data security and other risks.
Rising nationalism: The challenges to assertions of universal norms (such as Western liberal economics) and the impact of re-emerging great power competition drive renewed nationalism and protectionist tendencies, even on topics like climate change that are truly global challenges. As the global trade system undergoes structural realignment, big powers employ geo-economic tools against one another and ideas of economic security as a key component of national security are revived, protectionist actions and greater state involvement in economics and industry become both more normal and more acceptable. And this moves well beyond the issue of trade, or ideas of near-shoring and friend-shoring. It is also rapidly expanding into new territories, such as information and cyber-sovereignty, and expansion of traditional ideas of air sovereignty to now include space.
Fraying of global financial architecture: While there is little likelihood of a near-term replacement of the U.S. dollar as the global reserve currency, its dominance and the global financial architecture give Washington disproportionate power to use economic tools to shape global political and security environments. China, Russia and many other countries are actively seeking alternatives to the dollar and existing financial infrastructure to soften Washington’s ability to punish and coerce. But this is not limited to just direct competitors to the United States. Even nominal partners, such as Middle Eastern oil suppliers, are making arrangements for alternative currency exchanges, and both China and the European Union have developed regulations that can counteract U.S. sanctions, leaving businesses in the difficult position of choosing which set of regulations to adhere to.
More localized conflict: As nationalism rises, so does sub-nationalism, and many ethnic or regional groups within countries are asserting their own right to self-determination. At the same time, as the big powers step up strategic competition, more localized competition within and among smaller powers may devolve into military conflict. With the focus on China and Russia, the United States and Europe may be less likely to intervene in moderate localized conflict, suggesting that the threshold for intervention is shifting.
Uncoordinated responses to broader global issues: Multipolarity makes collaborative global action more difficult. Nationalism and economic security will often take precedence over global issues, and while this doesn’t end the momentum for addressing things like climate change or illegal fishing, it may lead to more regional and local responses or actions by big powers more focused on their particular location than on the overall globe. This may be particularly notable in places like South America and the Pacific Islands – the former where we are seeing a New Left harness environmentalism as part of its challenge to outside economic exploitation, the latter where their very survival is already being challenged by climate change.
Restructured supply chains: Organizations and corporations that have very complex multi-company supply chains, and those that have very narrow, single-source supply lines, are highly vulnerable to disruptions in the multipolar world. Resilience may require redundancy, which is costly, or more flexibility in identifying and being able to rapidly shift to alternatives in times of localized stress. This impacts not only physical goods but services and information-based products as well. Increasingly, companies will also need to develop their own foreign policy, particularly if they have heavy exposure to more than one of the big powers, or wide-ranging supply chains. Understanding multiple layers of supply, at times down to the initial minerals, will also become an important component in managing geopolitical risk and trade. This will only increase the need for organizations to have robust frameworks to proactively collect, analyze and mitigate various risks.
China's Challenges to Bretton Woods: Implications for Businesses
 

The rise of non-Bretton Woods institutions (BWIs) in an increasingly multipolar world has significant implications for global business opportunities and demonstrates the need for firms to modify their operational strategies to mitigate potential geopolitical, legal and financial risks. Since the founding of institutions such as the New Development Bank (NDB) in 2015 and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) in 2016, both of which are headquartered in China and guided and resourced to a significant extent by Beijing, concerns have grown that infrastructure development investment projects that these new institutions underwrite, are accompanied by a different set of rules and norms for business and investment that may diverge from the values affirmed during the Bretton Woods era. As part of Chinese President Xi Jinping's vision of the "Chinese Dream," China seeks to challenge the Western-centric global order through such projects as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the new Maritime Silk Road and new multilateral development institutions that offer loan packages that appeal to developing countries and deprioritize transparency, anti-corruption and safeguards for workers, among other things. Close observers of the Chinese influence on multilateral lending by the AIIB and NDB point also to the potential linkages between lending decisions and China's geopolitical objectives. In order to better understand the legal, reputational, financial and operational risks to businesses likely to emerge as competition from non-Western multilateral lending institutions challenges the norms and practices enshrined in the values of BWIs, RANE spoke with Nathan Picarsic and Emily de la Bruyère, Co-Founders of Horizon Advisory.

The Rise of Bretton Woods and China's Recent Challenge
In December 1944, 44 delegates representing the Allied Powers met in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, to discuss the formation of an international organization to finance the reconstruction of Europe following the conclusion of World War II. The primary lending institution that emerged from the conference is the World Bank Group (WBG). Composed of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the International Development Association, the International Finance Corporation, the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency and the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes, the WBG's primary mandate is to provide financing to low- and middle-income countries for development projects. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) was founded alongside the WBG with a mandate to resolve international financial crises and to correct balance of payment issues.

The BWI ecosystem has given rise to a number of multilateral development banks (MDB) focused on regional lending, such as the African Development Bank (1964) and the Asian Development Bank (1966). These MDBs have largely been organized and capitalized in a manner similar to the WBG and have adopted the same terms, practices and norms, and have participated in coordination with other WBG entities in lending activities. To supplement the activities of these MDBs at the regional level in Europe, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) was established in 1961. Headquartered in Paris, the OECD's stated purpose is to stimulate economic progress and world trade. It is a forum whose member countries describe themselves as committed to democracy and the market economy, providing a platform to compare policy experiences, seek answers to common problems, identify good practices, and coordinate the domestic and international policies of its members. A brief synopsis of relevant multilateral institutions and their mandates that comprise the BWI ecosystem can be found below:

A List of Major Multilateral Development Banks Founded Since World War II
In general, the norms and behaviors of these multilateral lenders reflect those of the international liberal order established by the United States and its allies at the Bretton Woods Conference. Since the 1990s, this "international liberal order" has come to be defined by the Washington Consensus. The Washington Consensus features policy prescriptions such as fiscal discipline, pro-growth spending, market-based interest rates, free trade, privatization of state-owned enterprises, deregulation of business and basic property rights. Furthermore, integrating the Washington Consensus into its loan packages, the WBG began to require that aid recipients implement structural adjustment programs if they wished to receive new loans or adjust the interest rates on existing loans. Conceived in the aftermath of economic crises in Latin America throughout the 1980s, structural adjustment programs often require recipients to curtail social spending and implement fiscal austerity plans, leading to allegations of neocolonialism and the undermining of national sovereignty. As a result of such policies, the WBG, IMF and their affiliated institutions have been criticized by various groups and opposition leaders in recipient states as examples of Western hegemony.

As global development accelerated, the drumbeat of criticism by emerging and developing economies, most particularly China, became louder. China insisted that the governance structure of the BWIs is too tightly controlled by the United States and its Western allies, and that the investment decisions and economic support provided by the BWIs are inextricably linked to the Washington Consensus. In line with recurring geopolitical tensions between Washington and Beijing, China came to believe that it did not have appropriate voting power and influence in the BWIs to reflect its own growing economic size and geopolitical influence. The leadership of the World Bank is traditionally reserved for a U.S. representative. The IMF is run by a representative chosen from Western Europe. Even the most relevant regional MDB, the Asian Development Bank (ADB), works in concert with BWI norms and practices and is always headed by a Japanese representative.

In 2016, to correct this perceived imbalance, China established the AIIB, headquartered in Beijing, and coordinated with other emerging and developing economies countries — Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS) — to establish the BRICS Development Bank, which was subsequently rebranded as the NDB, and headquartered in Shanghai. As of 2021, the five BRICS countries represented 41% of the world's population and 24% of global GDP. Furthermore, as of 2022, China alone represented nearly 18.5% of the global population and the equivalent percentage of global GDP.

The governance of the new institutions is illustrative: China controls a 26.5% voting share in AIIB decision-making, whereas the next largest vote holder is India, with 7.6% voting rights. China can control the governance of AIIB given that its voting power is greater than the 25% required to block decisions made even by a supermajority of AIIB voting members (which would require 75% of the vote by two-thirds of the Bank's members). China holds a 20% share of voting rights in the NDB, along with 20% held by each of the other four original BRICS founding members. China is the largest capital provider to the Contingent Reserve Arrangement (CRA), instituted in the same year as the NDB, which provides balance of payments assistance to BRICS countries. China has committed $41 billion to CRA, the largest contribution from the five BRICS countries, giving it 39.5% of the voting power. Although the United States is not a member of the AIIB, NDB or the BRICS-controlled CRA, Western nations such as Australia, France, Germany, Italy and the UK have joined AIIB (with a combined voting power of 13.2%), demonstrating the rise of the AIIB and NDB as viable, multilateral alternatives to the BWIs.

Unpacking the Challenges
The challenge of these China-centric institutions comes at a time of staggering investment opportunity and need throughout the world's emerging and developing economies. In its 2017 report, Meeting Asia's Infrastructure Needs, the ADB estimated that in the Asia-Pacific region alone, the investment need is approximately $1.7 trillion per year through 2030, "if the region is to maintain its growth momentum, eradicate poverty, and respond to climate change." However, the rise of China-centric multilateral institutions such as the AIIB and the NDB challenge the BWIs and their affiliates and create myriad geopolitical, reputational and economic risks, particularly with respect to the rise of a "Beijing Consensus," divergent positions on human rights, corruption and business transparency, and increasing friction in the Western alliance on shared values and competing commercial interests between the United States and Europe.

A List Showing Challenges to Global Trade and Finance in a Multipolar World: Asia-Pacific
 
The Beijing Consensus
Picarsic and de la Bruyère both note that China appears to view the AIIB, NDB and related infrastructure initiatives as opportunities to rewrite global norms surrounding lending and economic growth in the developing world. Emblematic of this perspective is the "Beijing Consensus." Defined as a development framework that prioritizes infrastructure, active state intervention in markets and gradual market reform vs. "shock therapy," the Beijing Consensus is an extension of the policy prescriptions that have enabled the Chinese economy to lift over 300 million citizens from poverty since the beginning of the "Reform and Opening Up" period in 1978. Indeed, since 2012, China has leveraged international partnerships and the Belt and Road Initiative, a cornerstone of President Xi's development policy that seeks to provide infrastructure funding in the developing world, to provide training to over 10,000 bureaucrats in the developing world, using the sessions to extol the virtues of state capitalism and infrastructure-led development. Commenting on China's export of new norms, de la Bruyère states that "Beijing is increasing its footprint and that of its institutions and organizations internationally," suggesting that China is likely to continue this practice as it seeks to supplant the U.S.-led unipolar order. For de la Bruyère, this ideological conflict between China and the West is likely to intensify, particularly to the extent that China strengthens its "no-limits friendship" with Russia amid Russia's war in Ukraine.

According to Picarsic, this trend demonstrates how China has learned from the mistakes of the "Washington Consensus" and now seeks to use its lending power in a more appealing formula when engaging the developing world. A primary criticism of the BWIs and structural adjustment programs is that they undermine national sovereignty and breed popular resentment as people chafe at austerity measures required in exchange for financial support. Picarsic theorizes that China has "watched what the United States did since World War Two and throughout the Cold War. And I think they have updated and learned from it." By avoiding overt conflict with aid recipients in favor of an approach that champions active state intervention in markets, he believes that Beijing Consensus policies will likely continue to serve as an attractive alternative to the BWI-led order.

Picarsic also notes that Beijing may be more likely, given its close reading of the history of BWI-led investment and pushback from recipient countries, to position its own geopolitical interests more carefully as commercial and civilian engagements. This approach "won't spur the same kind of wake up call" in the West, Picarsic notes. It may give China the opportunity to present itself in a manner that does not show signs of overt military or undue geopolitical influence while behind the scenes engaging in renegotiations of lending and other financial interactions to increase China's control and influence. For example, in 2022 under the BRI, China's Export-Import Bank extended a $4.7 billion loan to Kenya to finance the country's railway system. Notably, the loan does not feature any expectations for structural adjustment programs and has drawn significant media attention for its questionable terms, portrayed as secretive and exploitative by transparency activists in Kenya. Picarsic adds that using some of the leverage China has in the global financial system through its lending will be part of Beijing's geopolitical playbook, stating that "It won't be the same sort of blunt, in your face mode." Picarsic and de la Bruyère also see China managing its economic policy to further a geopolitical goal of dividing the US relationship with Western Europe. Both comment that there is an "underrecognition of this problem" in which China appears to use economic levers in a manner that creates friction between the United States and its European allies by selectively favoring European companies over U.S. companies. In a more fractured trans-Atlantic alliance, U.S. firms may face stiffer competition in a less fair geopolitical environment and have the added responsibility of managing differing sets of compliance requirements between Europe and the United States.

Human Rights, Corruption and Norms
Within the BWI lending framework, loans are often conditioned on the adoption of policy prescriptions that protect basic human rights such as the freedoms of religion, assembly and expression. In addition, recipients of loans from the IMF and WBG must also commit to anti-corruption measures, particularly on how aid money is spent and allocated, as well as sign on to other good governance initiatives like protecting workers' rights. However, many recipient countries chafe at these restrictions and view them as neocolonial attempts to interfere in domestic governance. Recognizing this opportunity to provide condition-free financing that forges linkages with leaders in developing states, loan agreements from the AIIB and NDB omit language around human rights, anti-corruption and other good governance standards in favor of "resource for infrastructure" loan programs that are often seen as corrupt. As just one of many examples, as of 2020, Angola had received $42 billion in loans from China in exchange for access to Angolan oil.

Indeed, commenting on the deprioritization of anti-corruption in non-BWI institutions, de la Bruyère states that U.S. and Western firms that seek to bid on contracts for major development projects can become "immensely frustrated" because they cannot compete given what she calls the "corruption of the Chinese approach" and the "high degree of bribery." Therefore, as Western firms continue to seek business in the developing world, particularly in primary and raw goods markets, or as participants in the infrastructure development activities financed by these new MDBs, firms will have to be mindful of the constraints on their ability to do business given the anti-corruption and business practice norms and behaviors to which they are held accountable by their home governments.

Reputational Risk and Potential Sanctions
De la Bruyère believes that firms bidding for contracts as part of projects funded by the Bretton Woods institutions, AIIB or NDB investments will have to be mindful of "major reputational and regulatory risk." Because Chinese firms may not be held to the same regulatory and ethical standards as Western firms, consortia led by China could make decisions that run afoul of Western sanctions or other regulations. De la Bruyère suggests that firms should adopt a holistic view of reputational risks throughout the lifecycle of a deal and pursue rigorous due diligence before making agreements and continue to monitor the transaction closely. Picarsic notes that if a Chinese firm becomes aware that a competitor is doing anything that can somehow be construed as cutting corners or seeking ex parte, non-competitive support or assistance on a transaction, "the Chinese side has shown that they're able to weaponize that type of information and use it against the international competitor." The Chinese competitor may have access to Chinese government resources — including classified intelligence or surveillance technology — to potentially compromise and manipulate the international competitor via intellectual property (IP) theft, hack-and-leak cyberattacks and/or reputational attacks.

Picarsic notes the significant reputational risk faced by Western companies that have an on-the-ground local market presence and compete with Chinese firms in the kinds of project development investments that the AIIB finances. He notes "I think those risks are probably going to flow to parent entities in ways that existing compliance and oversight mechanisms probably aren't prepared to handle at the corporate level." He also points out that business activities involving Chinese entities are attracting greater scrutiny from Western politicians and regulators. For example, Disney's continued engagement with China has led to public boycotts by human rights activists such as Hong Kong democracy activist Joshua Wong. Picarsic also notes that capital markets regulators and other watchdogs will be increasingly focused on business that involves China in order to assess and mitigate sectoral exposure to human rights abuses, sanctions violations and other unethical business practices.

Related to environmental, social, and governance (ESG) standards, de la Bruyère notes that human rights issues are the first line of investigation when assessing ESG and reputational risks. For example, in July 2022, the U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control sanctioned five Chinese government officials for involvement in human rights violations against ethnic minorities in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. The move by the Treasury followed the publication of an advisory earlier the same month by the Treasury and the U.S. Departments of State, Commerce and Homeland Security warning companies of the reputational and legal risks of doing business with entities involved in human rights violations in Xinjiang. This followed the Department of Commerce in 2019-2020 added 37 entities to its Entity List, which flags entities with which U.S. companies are prohibited from engaging in commercial activity, or must do so under specific licenses and approvals from Commerce. De la Bruyère adds that as the incentives and abilities for official governmental watchdogs and non-state monitoring groups to uncover human rights abuses grow, this ESG risk will surface and be a bigger concern that companies will need to monitor and manage.

Picarsic adds that Western firms need to monitor closely for poor environmental performance by the Chinese firms with which they participate in development investment activities. For example, project finance agreements may have content requirements or other stipulations by Chinese finance providers that Chinese solar panels or batteries be used. The production of these materials is often done in an environmentally harmful manner. Picarsic suggests that with more global scrutiny of China-related business, and better watchdog tracking of supply chain realities, the issue of ESG compliance may become "a battleground where you see a reckoning and increasing tension between the reality of Chinese projects and the normative ambitions of ESG friendly capital and corporates."

Geopolitical Risk: Companies on the Frontline and Frayed Alliances
The relationship between China and the West has grown increasingly strained at the same time that China has assumed a more aggressive role in global finance and commerce. The COVID pandemic and the perception by some that China covered up or moved too slowly to combat the possible origin of the virus, as well as increasing concerns over Chinese intentions over Taiwan and China's crackdown on domestic dissent, have complicated China's relationship with Western countries. Even more recently, China's unwillingness to take a hard line opposing Russia's invasion of Ukraine has also been a major concern for the Western alliance. As a result of increasing tension, and the political significance that the U.S. relationship with China plays in U.S. economic and geopolitical decision-making and policy, on Jan. 10, 2023, the new Republican-led House of Representatives established, with broad consensus, a House Select Committee on China. The new committee will likely focus on Chinese threats to U.S. cybersecurity and the IP of U.S. entities, the perceived overdependence of U.S. firms on supply chains originating in China and the risk that some investments by U.S. firms in China may contribute to Chinese human rights violations or the modernization of the Chinese military. In addition, the Committee may investigate activities by Beijing to support and influence the academic study of China in the United States — namely, the use of Confucius Institutes — which it believes shape student perceptions in a manner that favors China over U.S. values and interests. Opposition to China appears to be one of the few bipartisan areas of agreement; there is every indication that U.S. relations with China will assume more politicized attention as the country moves toward the presidential election in November 2024.

De la Bruyère makes the point that China's industrial policy focuses on prioritizing Chinese companies in key strategic value chains. A continuing market risk for non-Chinese firms is the assumption that, if they are operating at a more sophisticated point on the value chain and if significant competition from China is not yet evident, they are immune to competition from Chinese firms. She says it is a mistake to ignore the preferential treatment China provides its companies or how it works to make them more competitive. De la Bruyère comments that "China's approach to international competition and power projection and as geopolitical tension escalates, is to use the private sector as a tool. China puts pressure on U.S. companies so they in turn put pressure on the U.S. government. China inflicts costs on the U.S. for the sake of geopolitical competition."

China is not only targeting the developing world but also states that have been supporters of the international liberal order and the norms captured by the BWIs. "China reaches out to other Western countries about American 'unilateralism,' and presents Beijing's approach as one that actually gives everybody a voice," de la Bruyère comments. She adds that Beijing emphasizes the economic costs of siding with Washington and suggests giving sweetheart-type deals to Western countries with the objective of isolating the United States and driving a wedge over China issues between Washington and its traditional allies. Picarsic agrees, emphasizing that one of China's objectives is to divide the United States from its allies. "In terms of Alliance maintenance and cooperation," he notes, "whether it's international trade or social and cultural trends, the Chinese are farther ahead than we give them credit for, and some of that is that we've just been looking at the wrong things." Picarsic continues to say that while the West may not see clear examples of Chinese military encroachment in areas with immediate geopolitical implications to current conflicts — such as a Chinese presence in the Black Sea, for example — there are examples in recent years of Chinese commercial and financial activities giving Beijing possible dual-use commercial and military influence over other geostrategic locations. High degrees of indebtedness to Chinese commercial lending, such as the Chinese acquisition of a 99-year lease to operate the Hambantota Port in Sri Lanka — could lead to an influx of other Yuan-denominated debt transactions that tip a sovereign nation into conceding port access, valuable raw materials or some other geostrategic asset to Chinese control.

In evaluating the trajectory of U.S.-European unity regarding China, Picarsic references the United Kingdom as a key country to track. He recalls that during the Trump administration, London aligned closely with Washington on the geopolitical threat posed by China, specifically the national security risks of allowing Chinese telecommunications company Huawei access to commercial procurement transactions that could put the privacy of communications at risk of penetration by Beijing. Picarsic points to the UK National Security and Investment Act, which came into law in January 2022. London has used the law to unwind the 2021 purchase of Newport Wafer Fab, the United Kingdom's largest microchip assembly facility, by Nexperia Holding, the Dutch subsidiary of Chinese company Wingtech Technology Co. Picarsic suggests the Newport example is illustrative and worth tracking. He believes that, if the UK continues to scrutinize Chinese investment and use the National Security and Investment Act to roll back transactions as necessary, that would bode well for the trans-Atlantic alliance with respect to working together to blunt the geopolitical threats from China coming via commercial transactions. But if the unwinding of the Newport transaction is appealed and if the United Kingdom is not able to show the resolve to use the Act to prevent Chinese commercially directed interests from accessing strategic and emerging industries, there will be cause for greater concern.

Furthermore, Picarsic raises a current test case of how China may seek to exploit the fault lines of Western alliances: the manner in which the United States and its Western allies address the discovery and recent media coverage of overseas police stations linked to the Chinese intelligence services. Various media reports have shown that China uses overseas police stations to monitor the activities of Chinese nationals abroad, harass dissidents and in some cases even forcibly repatriate them. While Picarcic acknowledges that governments' public condemnation has been fairly consistent throughout the Western world, he notes that an "interesting early indicator in the months ahead" will be the degree to which countries are willing to confront this Chinese encroachment. He poses a hypothetical question: if the response by some countries is tepid, to avoid the opprobrium of China, will that suggest that they are more concerned about losing access to Chinese markets and deals arranged through Chinese financing, such as AIIB project loan activities than such an affront to national sovereignty?

How to Respond: Practical Guidance
To limit their risk profile to these threats, there are numerous best practices organizations can implement. The primary obstacle to mitigating the legal and reputational risks of participation in potentially corrupt development projects is to obtain clarity regarding potential business partners and develop a thorough understanding of all firms involved in the life cycle of a deal. To that end, Picarsic stresses the importance of conducting robust due diligence when bidding on contracts, noting that strong due diligence can help firms "execute their compliance mandates." He further states that effective due diligence can "help with governance issues if a firm is publicly listed on an exchange." By conducting appropriate due diligence when evaluating whether to participate in a deal funded by a non-BWI institution or a Chinese-influenced firm, companies will be able to reduce their legal exposure and preempt potential sanctions if the project engages entities on a sanctions list. In particular, effective due diligence should include a thorough investigation of corporate ownership (as Chinese authorities at all levels of government have significant financial holdings in many nominally private firms) and state influence on corporate decision-making. Given that firms in China are required to host Communist Party cells if the firm employs three or more Party members, the Party-state could influence business strategy and potentially implicate partner firms in rights violations.

Moreover, in the context of reputational risk associated with non-BWI-funded development projects, firms can mitigate the fallout of frayed alliances among Western states by maintaining a low profile and avoiding direct engagement with politically-charged discussions. In practice, this means that firms must give more thought to a carefully balanced PR strategy that avoids statements or actions that could be perceived as overtly partisan or political. This approach will enable the firm to focus on business and avoid entanglement with great power competition. To complement this approach, firms can also develop a proactive media policy that assures investors and government regulators that they seek business free from bribery or impropriety. As de la Bruyère notes, because the Western world "is reluctant to engage in what rings of a return to a bipolar world," firms will have to be careful in their messaging on China-centric issues.

Both Picarsic and de la Bruyère note that ESG watchdog specialists, particularly in the human rights, corruption and environmental categories, are increasing their scrutiny of Chinese business activities, looking at the long tail of supply chains and the ecosystem of business participants in a large business transaction like complex, multiyear project finance activities. Companies may need to devote additional resources and develop more comprehensive reviews and documentation of their own ESG targets across their business as a whole, calibrating the differing expectations for ESG between the United States and Europe as necessary, and with due consideration for the ESG performance of the Chinese and other companies with which they partner or who provide business services for them.

Corporate security officers at companies with significant global business activity, particularly involving Greater China, may also need to enhance their understanding of the ongoing risk that managers and employees in their firms face with Chinese competitors that have the advantage of using government resources to monitor and manipulate those individuals. Chinese companies can use information collected about the personal lives and activities of managers and employees, as well as information about their pre-transaction activities and preliminary marketing discussions, to manipulate and create a distorted narrative that may make it difficult for these firms to continue to compete against Chinese firms for participation in transactions. Legal and compliance teams may need to create additional company processes to require structured documentation of the manner in which transactions originate and to record that compliance steps are being undertaken. This documentation also makes sense given the increasing level of scrutiny Western firms may face from home government regulators and public interest organizations.

In addition, maintaining the integrity of proprietary company plans and data is crucial, as is protecting company employees from the risks of being targeted and involved in efforts to suborn their cooperation — both of which point to a need for corporate security teams to prepare for both increased cyber and physical security threats to their data and personnel. On this point, Picarsic points out the ability of Chinese firms to "weaponize" information and use it against their competitors. The overseas police stations previously cited by Picarsic are likely designed to monitor overseas Chinese students and dissidents, but the blatant disregard for national sovereignty they represent suggests that China is capable of taking steps to secure interests that go far beyond the Western liberal order's respect for individual rights, rule of law and territorial integrity of other countries. The drumbeat of attention on all things China is likely to increase; while not engaging in fear-mongering or ignoring the very real and rewarding opportunities to participate in selective transactions with Chinese counterparts, corporate security officers may need to increase the messaging about general best practices and encourage strong internal reporting of threats and concerns regarding the company's China business given the heightened risk environment.

Navigating Growing Nationalization of Cyberspace in a Multipolar World
 

As the international system has become increasingly multipolar, geopolitical and national security concerns have begun to shape the boundaries of the internet, heightening compliance risks for companies seeking to navigate these competing regulatory frameworks. Some regions, such as Europe, have created a comprehensive and detailed legal framework for its citizens' data rights, in the form of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), while other countries such as the United States have still not adopted a federal legal framework to address data privacy regulations. Outside of the West, other major powers like China have pursued radically different approaches to cyber regulations, reflecting a much higher level of security, evidenced by China's so-called "Great Firewall." In between, emerging powers such as India are only just beginning to bolster and revise cybersecurity policies within their respective cyberspaces amid growing foreign commercial investment in India's markets. As a result of the broad variation between different regions' approaches to regulating cyberspace and as geopolitical tensions rise, businesses will have to grapple with a number of compliance requirements, heightening their reputational and financial risks as a result of the shifting regulatory landscape. To better understand how the internet is changing and which forces are driving this fragmentation, RANE spoke with Ronald Marks, President at ZPN National Security and Cyber Strategies; John Wunderlich, Senior Advisor at Privacy Pro; Michael Morrissey, Chief Information Security Officer at PrivacyEngine; and Andrea Little Limbago, Senior Vice President of Research and Analysis at Interos.

The Move Toward Securitizing Cyberspace
As the digital revolution over the past few decades has grown to encompass most aspects of daily life, many governments have realized the vulnerabilities posed by the open nature of the internet. While digital communication has vastly improved the convenience of sharing information, the internet has also had major implications for national security, individual user privacy, and commercial and economic interests. These realizations have resulted in many governments pursuing different strategies to better protect digital information within their respective cyberspace.​​​​​​

Marks first points to the infrastructure of the internet, as it was originally designed, highlighting the fact that the way it was built did not prioritize security. He notes that "It wasn't built to regulate … in fact it was deliberately built the other way — so you could just put whatever out there you wanted to. And that of course has run into the kinds of problems of any mature industry where it was nice when everyone was playing nice but now we have unexpected challenges with it."
Wunderlich further elaborates on how this natural insecurity has heightened nations' awareness of the dangers posed by an unregulated internet, stating that "A lot of countries — irrespective of left, right, center, up, down, sideways in terms of the orientation of the government — are reexamining, for a number of reasons, why free flows of data turned out to be a bad idea." To many experts, the internet has already begun to fracture. In fact, from Marks' point of view, "There's already a Balkanization of the internet … The question is how far it goes."
In addition to the internet's lack of natural privacy protections, Wunderlich further highlights that data has increased rapidly in commercial value. As he explains, "The more significant data becomes economically, the more it intrudes on the stage of geopolitics and therefore national interests are engaged." Geopolitical tensions, especially between the United States and China, have increasingly included an economic component as both countries seek to advance ahead of the other in a number of strategically important sectors. The heightened value of digitized information, including proprietary data, personally identifiable information (PII) and other sensitive data has added another rationale for governments to try to take greater control of cyberspace.
 

A Chart List of Three Approaches to Data Privacy
The European Union, the GDPR and the United Kingdom
The European Union paved the way for a rights-based, comprehensive legal framework under the GDPR. The GDPR, which took effect in 2018, includes extensive and stringent requirements for how PII is defined and used, as well as how data is collected, stored and processed by domestic and foreign companies. Among the GDPR's provisions, the legislation upholds EU citizens' data rights, including that data is collected and processed for only its articulated use, limitations on how long clients' data can be stored and various requirements for reporting data breaches. Additionally, the GDPR requires companies to uphold EU citizens' data rights, including their right to be informed on how their data is being used, the right to access their data, the right of data portability, and the right to data rectification and erasure. The extensive compliance requirements that the GDPR enforces pose a number of legal and regulatory challenges for both Europe-based companies and foreign companies operating in European markets. Following Brexit, companies must now also navigate the added challenges of complying with emerging data privacy legislation in the United Kingdom that will likely differ from the GDPR in many ways.

Morrissey first explains the primary differences in how Europe approaches data security compared to other locations like the United States. He notes that "In Europe, personal data is owned by the living individual. It's legally their data, so a company doesn't own it. The latter are called a data controller. They control it on behalf of the individual, and the GDPR defines specific legal obligations on how controllers process such data. So that's an important legal difference between the United States and EU." This foundational difference in how the European Union shapes data privacy and security protections and puts extensive responsibility on companies to uphold this framework, heightening their legal, financial and reputational risks for not complying with the GDPR's high standards.
Failure to comply with the GDPR has resulted in many companies being fined or otherwise penalized, including many U.S. companies operating in Europe. For example, in 2022 alone, a number of companies were fined for noncompliance with various GDPR provisions. These included Meta, which was fined $405 million in September 2022 over how the company handled minors' data and Google, which was fined $57 million in December 2022 for failing to obtain users' consent before using their data for ad personalization purposes.
In addition to the GDPR's rigorous compliance requirements, the British decision to withdraw from the European Union has also complicated the overall European cyber landscape. Since the Brexit process first began, the United Kingdom has sought to enact new domestic legislation in a number of policy areas, including cyber and data regulations. Morrissey explains that Brexit has had a direct impact on any business operating between the United Kingdom and the Continent. He further explains that the United Kingdom is looking to replace the U.K. Data Protection Act of 2018, based on the GDPR, with new legislation in the coming year, which will likely create a number of digital divisions between London and Brussels.

Morrissey highlights the special attention that Europe will likely be paying to the United Kingdom as it pursues new data protections in the coming year. He says, "I think there's a bigger concern about European data going into the U.K. into the future and making sure that there's some degree of alignment between these two pieces of legislation that allows data to continue to flow. He elaborates that "The EU is the U.K.'s biggest trading market, and vice versa. Something has to be figured out that allows business and commerce to continue to operate normally regarding digital data, which is more and more important every day in terms of its intrinsic value."
Morrissey also outlines the challenges that companies will have to face in operating in both the European Union and the United Kingdom under different legislation. He states that "In reality for businesses, if you're an organization in the U.K. and you're trading into the European Union, you're going to have to comply with two pieces of legislation ... So it's going to create an operational headache for companies in the U.K. because they're going to have a double set of legislative standards that they will have to comply with." He explains further, "It's a very concerning problem for them because it's magnifying the complexity at a technical level where they have to segregate data potentially into silos based upon these geo-national restrictions which are coming down the line and that's a headache because it's both an additional operational and capital expenditure cost, as you are potentially duplicating technology across multiple geographical locations, in order to offset compliance risk."
The Fragmented U.S. Approach to Cyberspace
The United States contrasts with the broad and comprehensive EU legal framework with a more disjointed approach to its cyberspace. With no single federal data privacy regulation framework, the United States operates in a decentralized system with multiple overlapping federal agencies and organizations that oversee U.S. cyber practices, leaving states largely to decide data privacy regulations. While this fragmentation may be more attractive for some companies wishing to bypass strict regulation found in other jurisdictions like the European Union, it also poses risks because the lack of a federal data breach reporting requirement, for example, leaves businesses more vulnerable to losses if impacted by a cyberattack or if data is otherwise compromised. Though many states still do not have a comprehensive regulatory framework in place, this is changing, as several states are beginning to adopt data regulation practices modeled after the European Union.

Although federal lawmakers have made some efforts to create a more explicit data privacy framework, each has subsequently fallen through. Without a single federal framework, U.S.-based companies have freer rein and an expanded scope for data collection practices. Limbago notes that, as a result of the growing nationalization of cyberspace, many companies are reshoring to the United States. Though partially due to the extended leeway many are granted in terms of regulation, she claims that it is mostly because of a greater stability and rule of law that provides a better business environment. Nonetheless, Limbago argues that much of the reason for a lack of a federal data framework is due to lobbying by U.S. companies, saying "that's probably why we don't have a data privacy law in the U.S. yet. Instead, we've got a very big patchwork. We have 54 different data breach notification laws because, you know, some core industries have helped limit our ability to have a data privacy law."
Following in the footsteps of the EU GDPR, a handful of states have started enacting more stringent data protection laws using the EU "rights-based" model. In 2023, five states  California, Colorado, Connecticut, Utah and Virginia — will begin enforcing these EU-like data privacy laws. Other states — including Michigan, New Jersey, Ohio and Pennsylvania — are also considering data privacy revisions, demonstrating a state-based trend to bolster cybersecurity protocol even in the absence of a federal mandate. While these changes will enhance cybersecurity regulations within these states, they will also pose more compliance risks to companies that will have to navigate data regulations from state to state.
U.S. cyberspace regulations are not only still being formed through various means, both at a federal and a state level, but also through international cooperation. Despite the absence of a single federal framework to govern data, the United States has participated in a great deal of international collaboration in this field. In fact, Limbago notes that although cross-data border flows are becoming more closed as a result of this growing trend toward the nationalization of cyberspace, in some ways they are also becoming more open — at least between certain jurisdictions. Indeed, agreements that allow for cross-border data flows may make it easier for companies based in the United States to straddle multiple cyberspheres, either to collaborate or work with others outside of this digital sphere or to expand their business scope beyond U.S. borders.

In March 2022, U.S. President Joe Biden and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced an EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework to facilitate trans-Atlantic data flows. Since the European Union is a major trading partner for the United States, the framework, which is still under review in the European Union, is designed to provide a legal mechanism to transfer EU personal data to the United States that addresses privacy concerns and is compatible with EU law. Washington and Brussels frame the d

Crafty_Dog

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Re: US Foreign Policy & Geopolitics
« Reply #1316 on: February 26, 2023, 01:37:54 PM »
Part of my follow up to an interesting conversation with a friend with whom I have just re-established contact after a long time:
=============================================

Next time I'd like to follow up with your discussion about the natural dynamics of human groups in other parts of the world and how the American Creed might not be a good fit.

Over the years I have done substantial reading in evolutionary psychology, with the starting point being the study of Aggression-- defined as intra-species, hence Konrad Lorenz's formulation of: territorial, hierarchical, and reproductive with predatory behaviors being excluded because they were inter-species.  However, upon reflection, much human criminal behavior is both predatory and meets the intra-species criterion.

Analyzed through this filter it makes sense to me to say that free markets work because they sublimate this reality:  Corporations (Tribes) establish market share (Territory), individuals compete to rise with in the corporation (Hierachy) in order to be a mighty hunter who brings home the bacon in order to score better pussy (Reproduction)  The trick is the Rule of Law (i.e. Win-Win over Zero Sum) which enforces Contract (Private Law)-- a.k.a. the libertarian principle of non-violence-- .

=================================

So, how then to work win-win with others who lack the building blocks for Natural Law/American Creed mind and are not interested in developing them? 

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Will China arm Russia?
« Reply #1317 on: March 02, 2023, 07:49:23 AM »
China’s Russia Dilemma
Will China arm Russia?
N.S. LYONS
MAR 2

“China sending Russia aid in the style of Soviet propaganda” (DALL-E 2)

This was going to be the first section of the next Subscriber Commentary and Review Thread, but it ended up being long enough that I decided to just publish it for you as a separate piece. I’ll send out the rest of the subscriber thread next week. – N.S. Lyons

Over the last two weeks the US government has alleged that China is “strongly considering” providing arms to Russia, one year into the war in Ukraine. Simultaneously, China last week put out a (highly vague) peace plan for the conflict, which was immediately dismissed by Washington. A number of people have asked me about both, so I figure I may as well briefly comment on how things stand, in my view.

First, to be clear about the situation, China has not yet actually sent Russia any arms or ammunition. This is a fact CIA Director Bill Burns acknowledged on Sunday, when he said in an interview that the US government was “confident” Beijing had been considering “the provision of lethal equipment,” but admitted that so far they’ve turned up no evidence of “actual shipments of lethal equipment.”

But the Biden administration is clearly very worried about the possibility, since they keep leaking intel to that effect to the press and issuing loud warnings to Beijing not to do it, calling the provision of arms a “red line” that would have “serious consequences” if crossed. “We will not hesitate to target Chinese companies or officials that violate our sanctions or otherwise engage in Russia’s war effort,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Tuesday. Burns declared it “would be a very risky and unwise bet” for China.” This preemptive uproar appears to mostly be in response to reported intelligence that at least one Chinese company has been in negotiations to potentially produce military drones for the Russians.

China swears they have no such intention, however, and there are actually some reasons to believe them (for now). The fact is that China appears to be highly conflicted about how to approach the war, as they are trapped in a situation in which they have multiple, fundamentally conflicting interests at play.

There is no need to be naïve about this: China’s ultimate goal is to smash American/Western hegemonic power and initiate a Chinese Century – but how best to accomplish this? On the one hand, China’s likeminded friend Russia is now engaged in a military challenge to the American-led Western liberal global order, and if it can win decisively in Ukraine the credibility of that order will be badly, maybe even fatally, damaged. China would love to see that happen. On the other hand, the whole basis of Chinese national power is derived from the continued growth of its economic strength; and China’s economy is currently a mess, badly weakened by years of draconian zero-Covid stupidity, an ongoing real estate crisis, huge levels of debt, and communist political mismanagement. Meanwhile international companies are beginning to shift supply chains out of China as they read the room and see Cold War 2.0 dawning. Getting back on track economically is therefore the top priority of Chinese leadership for the foreseeable future, and keeping China’s largest trade partners from decoupling themselves economically is especially critical for Beijing. Which is why China is currently engaged in a big diplomatic “charm offensive,” deploying its top diplomats to fan out across the world and try to convince everyone to get back to doing business with it again as normal.

In addition to whatever sanctions the US might impose on China, arming Russia would completely destroy this diplomatic effort in Europe and deeply alienate much of the continent, which is China’s most important trade partner. In comparison, Chinese trade with Russia, an economy roughly the size of Italy, is miniscule. When US Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Wally Adeymeo recently threatened that the Chinese now “have a choice between doing business with the countries of our coalition, which represent 50% of the global economy, and doing business with Russia,” he was pretty accurate in pointing out China’s strategic predicament.

Nonetheless, the White House is panicking for a reason. Chinese material military support would absolutely be a game changer for Russia, and would likely swing the conflict decisively in its favor. As many have noted, this has become a war of attrition, with both sides running low on ammunition and equipment, as well as manpower. Russia has the advantage when it comes to manpower, but thanks to NATO’s backing Ukraine has a firm advantage in war material. I’ve noticed that some people don’t seem to appreciate the scope of this, perhaps imagining that Russia still has the manufacturing power of the USSR during the Cold War. It does not.

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WSJ: The US is not ready
« Reply #1318 on: March 06, 2023, 05:06:57 PM »
The U.S. Is Not Yet Ready for the Era of ‘Great Power’ Conflict
Since 2018, the military has shifted to focus on China and Russia after decades fighting insurgencies, but it still faces challenges to produce weapons and come up with new ways of waging war
By Michael R. GordonFollow
Updated March 6, 2023 11:54 am ET


Clint Hinote returned from a deployment in Baghdad in the spring of 2018 to a new assignment and a staggering realization.

A classified Pentagon wargame simulated a Chinese push to take control of the South China Sea. The Air Force officer, charged with plotting the service’s future, learned that China’s well-stocked missile force had rained down on the bases and ports the U.S. relied on in the region, turning American combat aircraft and munitions into smoldering ruins in a matter of days.

“My response was, ‘Holy crap. We are going to lose if we fight like this,’” he recalled.

The officer, now a lieutenant general, began posting yellow sticky notes on the walls of his closet-size office at the Pentagon, listing the problems to solve if the military was to have a chance of blunting a potential attack from China.

“I did not have an idea how to resolve them,” said Lt. Gen. Hinote. “I was struck how quickly China had advanced, and how our long-held doctrines about warfare were becoming obsolete.”

Mammoth shift
Five years ago, after decades fighting insurgencies in the Middle East and Central Asia, the U.S. started tackling a new era of great-power competition with China and Russia. It isn’t yet ready, and there are major obstacles in the way.


Despite an annual defense budget that has risen to more than $800 billion, the shift has been delayed by a preoccupation with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the pursuit of big-ticket weapons that didn’t pan out, internal U.S. government debates over budgets and disagreement over the urgency of the threat from Beijing, according to current and former U.S. defense officials and commanders. Continuing concerns in the Mideast, especially about Iran, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine have absorbed attention and resources.

Corporate consolidation across the American defense industry has left the Pentagon with fewer arms manufacturers. Shipyards are struggling to produce the submarines the Navy says it needs to counter China’s larger naval fleet, and weapon designers are rushing to catch up with China and Russia in developing superfast hypersonic missiles.

When the Washington think tank the Center for Strategic and International Studies ran a wargame last year that simulated a Chinese amphibious attack on Taiwan, the U.S. side ran out of long-range anti-ship cruise missiles within a week.

The military is struggling to meet recruitment goals, with Americans turned off by the long conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, potentially leaving the all-volunteer force short of manpower. Plans to position more forces within striking range of China are still a work in progress. The Central Intelligence Agency, after two decades of conducting paramilitary operations against insurgents and terrorists, is moving away from those areas to focus more on its core mission of espionage.

The U.S. military’s success in the Mideast and Afghanistan came in part from air superiority, a less well-equipped foe and the ability to control the initiation of the war. A conflict with China would be very different. The U.S. would be fighting with its Asian bases and ports under attack and would need to support its forces over long and potentially vulnerable supply routes.

If a conflict with China gave Russia the confidence to take further action in Eastern Europe, the U.S. and its allies would need to fight a two-front war. China and Russia are both nuclear powers. Action could extend to the Arctic, where the U.S. lags behind Russia in icebreakers and ports as Moscow appears ready to welcome Beijing’s help in the region.


The U.S. military is still more capable than its main adversaries. The Chinese have their own obstacles in developing the capability to carry out a large-scale amphibious assault, while the weaknesses of Russia’s military have been exposed in Ukraine. But a defense of Taiwan would require U.S. forces, which are also tasked with deterring conflict in Europe and the Middle East, to operate over enormous distances and within range of China’s firepower.

The threat is mounting. Beijing has in recent years shifted the security terrain in its favor in the areas around China. In the South China Sea, it has built artificial islands and fortified them with military installations to assert control over the strategic waterway and deny the U.S. Navy freedom to roam.

Decades of ever bigger military budgets, including a 7% boost in spending this year, have improved the lethality of China’s air force, missiles and submarines, and better training has created a more modern force from what was once a military of rural recruits. China is developing weapons and other capabilities to destroy an opponent’s satellites, the Pentagon says, and its cyberhacking presents a threat to infrastructure.

The CIA said President Xi Jinping has set 2027 as a deadline for the Chinese military to be ready to carry out a Taiwan invasion, though it said Mr. Xi and the military have doubts whether Beijing could currently do so.


Structures on the artificial island in Cuarteron Reef in the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea, shown in October, part of China’s effort to control the strategic waters.
PHOTO: EZRA ACAYAN/GETTY IMAGES

A China in control of the South China Sea and Taiwan would hold sway over waters through which trillions of dollars in trade passes each year. It would also command supplies of advanced semiconductors, threaten the security of U.S. allies such as Japan and challenge American pre-eminence in a part of the world it has dominated since World War II.

In its efforts to meet the new challenge, the Pentagon has expanded its access to bases in the Philippines and Japan while shrinking the U.S. military footprint in the Middle East. New tactics have been devised to disperse U.S. forces and make them less of an inviting target for China’s increasingly powerful missiles.

The Pentagon’s annual budget for research and development has been boosted to $140 billion—an all time high. The military is pursuing cutting-edge technology it hopes will enable the military services to share targeting data instantaneously so that U.S. air, land, sea and space forces, operating over thousands of miles, can act in unison, a current challenge.


Many of the cutting-edge weapons systems the Pentagon believes will tilt the battlefield in its favor won’t be ready until the 2030s, raising the risk that China may be tempted to act before the U.S. effort bears fruit.

A conflict in the Western Pacific might also give Russia’s military, which has been badly battered in Ukraine, the confidence to carry out President Vladimir Putin’s goals of reviving Russian power in what it believes to be its traditional sphere of influence in Central and Eastern Europe.

“This is a massive problem to dig out of,” said Eric Wesley, a retired Army lieutenant general who served as the deputy commanding general of the Army Futures Command, which oversees that service’s transformation. “We are in a vulnerable period where we are pursuing this deterrence capability and their time is running out.”

Chris Meagher, a top Pentagon spokesman, said that Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin was directly overseeing the implementation of the U.S. defense strategy to counter China and that the department’s forthcoming spending request would advance the effort.

“The challenge posed by the PRC is real, but this Department is tackling it in historic ways with urgency and confidence,” he said, referring to the People’s Republic of China. “Our strategy drove last year’s budget request and is driving our soon-to-be released budget, which will go even further in matching resources to our strategy. We are continuing our work developing new operational concepts, deploying cutting-edge capabilities, and making investments now and for the long term to meet the challenges we face.”


A little more than a generation ago, the U.S. looked unassailable. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the rapid success of the U.S.-led Desert Storm campaign to evict Saddam Hussein’s troops from Kuwait in 1991 demonstrated Washington’s ability to wage a new type of war, using precision-guided munitions and stealth technology to vanquish regional dangers. President George H.W. Bush declared a “new world order” with the U.S. as its anchor.

In 1995, Beijing began a series of aggressive military exercises near Taiwan to underscore its objections to a visit to the U.S. by Taiwan’s president. The Clinton administration responded with the largest display of American military might in Asia since the Vietnam War, sending U.S. ships through the Taiwan Strait and positioning two aircraft carrier battle groups in the region the following year.


Strategists at the Pentagon’s in-house think tank nonetheless saw trouble ahead.

By using long-range missiles, antisatellite weapons and electronic warfare, Beijing could turn the tables on Washington by attacking the bases and ports the U.S. relied on in the western Pacific to project power, potentially keeping the Americans far from the conflict.

Guided by his defense advisers, candidate George W. Bush proposed to skip a generation of technology and move to advanced tools, such as long-range weapons, sensors and data-sharing technology to counter Beijing’s “anti-access” strategy.

Then the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks changed the threat, and the Pentagon’s mission.

“There was a moment when we thought ‘Huzzah, the transformation of the force is actually going to happen,’ ” recalled Jeff McKitrick, who worked at the Pentagon think tank and is now a researcher with the Institute for Defense Analyses, a Pentagon-supported research center. “Then 9/11 came and everybody focused like a laser beam on the global war on terror.”


Soon this became the mission of Gen. Hinote, then a major, as well. He was known by the call sign “Q,” after the fictional character in the James Bond stories who runs the spy service’s gadget lab, because of his skill in programming the radars and sensors of fighter jets. At the outset of the 2003 Iraq war, he was assigned to a squadron of “stealthy” F-117 fighter jets.

He helped plan the operation to strike at military targets in Baghdad and disable the air defenses of Saddam Hussein’s forces. “We had a really good plan for taking down the Iraqi communications infrastructure, leadership infrastructure and what we thought were the weapons of mass destruction,” he said. “China learned from that.”

As the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan dragged on, the top U.S. Air Force officer in Japan warned that China’s air defenses were becoming impenetrable to all but the most sophisticated U.S. fighters.

In 2009, Robert Gates, defense secretary from 2006 to 2011, limited the procurement of F-22 fighter jets to 187 to free up funds for other weapons programs.

The Air Force’s Air Combat Command said at the time that would leave the service nearly 200 short of the premier air-to-air fighter jets it previously sought for potential conflicts with China and Russia. Such air-to-air combat experience was limited: The June 2017 shootdown of a Syrian Su-22 jet by a Navy FA/18 over Syria was the first time a U.S. fighter pilot had blasted an enemy plane out of the sky since 1999.

Mr. Gates said he sought to hedge against future threats while also focusing on the war on terror. “My concern as secretary was all about balance,” he said, in an email response to questions. “The need to prepare for future potential large-scale conflict with Russia and China while properly funding the long-term ability to deal with smaller-scale conflicts we were most likely to face in the future.”

Mr. Gates said both Presidents Bush and Obama saw cooperation with China as possible and thought a conflict “was low probability.” He said that changed when Mr. Xi came to power in 2013. The Chinese president has backed a stronger Chinese military and a more assertive foreign posture as part of his campaign to expand Beijing’s global clout.

In 2011, Congress and the White House agreed to multiyear spending limits known as sequestration to curb the federal deficit. The move forced a series of across-the-board cuts and hampered initiatives to transform the military, including on artificial intelligence, robotics, autonomous systems and advanced manufacturing.

“With the grinding wars in the Middle East taking $60 billion to $70 billion a year, and service chiefs worried first and foremost about declines in force readiness, we simply didn’t have the necessary resources to cover down on all of the more advanced threats like hypersonics,” said former Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work. “The U.S. responses to China and Russia’s technical challenges were therefore delayed—and when it did respond, its choices were constrained by sequestration.”

In 2018, the Pentagon issued a National Defense Strategy saying the U.S. would prepare for a new world of “great power competition.”

Deterring China from invading Taiwan, a longstanding U.S. partner that Beijing claims as Chinese territory, defines the challenge. Allowing China to take Taiwan, just 100 miles from the Chinese mainland, and then trying to wrest it back, Pentagon officials concluded, would involve the U.S. in a protracted fight and might spur China to escalate to nuclear weapons. The U.S. needed to demonstrate it could prevent Beijing from seizing the island in the first place—a requirement included in the Biden administration’s National Defense Strategy issued in 2022.


In 2019, Gen. Hinote, using his new authority in the Air Force’s future war office, organized another classified wargame. The simulation postulated a Chinese attack on Taiwan and assessed how two U.S. forces might fare in contesting it: an “outside force” made up entirely of long-range U.S. bombers and missiles, and an “inside force” of aircraft, ships and troops that would fight within the range of Chinese planes and missiles.

The conclusion was that neither approach would succeed on its own.

“We needed a mix to protect Taiwan and Japan,” he said. “Ever since, we have been gaming, simulating and experimenting to determine that mix.”

A more recent wargame conducted by the Pentagon’s Joint Staff showed the U.S. could stymie a Chinese invasion of Taiwan and force a stalemate if the conflict was fought later in the decade, although high casualties on both sides would result. That simulation assumed that the U.S. would have the benefit of new weapons, tactics and military deployments that are currently being planned at the Pentagon.

To prepare for the future, the Marine Corps has gotten rid of its tanks and is reinventing itself as a naval infantry force that would attack Chinese ships from small islands in the western Pacific. A new Marine littoral regiment, which operates close to the shore and will be equipped with anti-ship missiles, is to be based in Okinawa by 2025.

In an exercise in May 2021, the Marines lugged a 30,000-pound Himars missile launcher across a choppy sea to the Alaska shoreline, loaded it into a C-130 transport plane and flew it to a base in the wilderness. The purpose was to rehearse the sort of tactics the Marines would employ on islands in the western Pacific against the Chinese navy.

The Army, which saw its electronic warfare, short-range air defense and engineering capabilities atrophy amid budget pressures and the previous decades’ wars, is moving to develop a new generation of weapons systems that can strike targets at much longer ranges. It is planning to deploy a new hypersonic missile in the fall though its utility against Chinese forces will depend on securing basing rights in the Pacific.

The Navy, which is confronting budget pressures, personnel shortages and limits to American shipbuilding capacity, is currently planning to expand its fleet to at least 355 crewed ships, a size still smaller than China’s current navy. In the near term, the U.S. will have around 290 ships.


The Air Force, which has one of the oldest and smallest inventory of aircraft in its 75-year history, has rolled out the first B-21 bomber and is pursuing the capability to pair piloted warplanes with fleets of drones. It has tested a new hypersonic missile that will be fired from fighter aircraft, and developed plans to disperse its planes among a wider range of bases in the Pacific.

Decades-old B-52s are being refurbished to fill out the bomber fleet. The service has decided to buy the E-7 command aircraft—originally produced by Australia—and is procuring advanced weapons to attack Chinese invasion forces.

At times, the pace has been slower than Gen. Hinote would have liked. “As we began to push for change, we lost most of the budget battles,” he said. “There is more sense of urgency now, but we know how far we have to go.”

The general has pushed to equip cargo planes with cruise missiles to boost allied firepower, the use of high-altitude balloons to carry sensors and electric “flying cars” to carry people and equipment throughout the Pacific island chains—ideas that have led to experiments but so far no procurement decisions.

He thinks a future Air Force could rely more on autonomous, uncrewed aircraft and deploy fewer fighters. “When push comes to shove and you have to decide if you are going to field unmanned vehicles, or keep flying old aircraft, we’ve never made that decision,” he said.

“I think we’ve got a recipe for blunting” a Chinese attack, he said. “I just think you have to reinvent your force to do it.”

Photo Illustration: Adrienne Tong/The Wall Street Journal; Photos: Associated Press; EPA/Shutterstock; U.S. Navy; istock(2).

Design by Andrew Levinson.

Write to Michael R. Gordon at michael.gordon@wsj.com

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Zeihan: US can
« Reply #1319 on: March 07, 2023, 08:58:04 AM »

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ET on Luttwak on China's Strategic Weaknesses
« Reply #1320 on: March 08, 2023, 05:50:40 PM »


Food and Soldiers: China’s Strategic Weaknesses
Renowned geostrategist Edward Luttwak pinpoints Beijing's Achilles' heel
Tourists look on as a Chinese military helicopter flies past Pingtan island, one of mainland China's closest points to Taiwan, in Fujian Province, on Aug. 4, 2022. (Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images)
Tourists look on as a Chinese military helicopter flies past Pingtan island, one of mainland China's closest points to Taiwan, in Fujian Province, on Aug. 4, 2022. (Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images)
Guermantes Lailari
By Guermantes Lailari
March 3, 2023

On Dec. 7, 2022, Edward Luttwak, a strategy consultant to the U.S. government, gave the keynote speech at Japan’s National Institute of Defense Studies (NIDS) International Symposium on Security Affairs. The speech was entitled “Can China Fight a War?”

Most media outlets didn’t cover the NIDS conference, and almost none of them mentioned Luttwak’s speech. News sources missed an opportunity to highlight some of China’s most important strategic weaknesses. These should be ferociously pursued if the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) orders the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to conduct a military operation against Taiwan.


Can China Wage a War?
Luttwak noted at the beginning of his speech that he can’t answer the question: “Would the Chinese government actually initiate war operations; would it go to war against Taiwan?” He noted that leaders of countries (such as Russian President Vladimir Putin in the Ukraine or then-U.S. President George W. Bush in Iraq in 2003) “are quite capable of starting wars they cannot possibly win.”

“That is true of Russians and Americans, and it’s even more true of China,” he said.

Luttwak asked a simple question: “Can the People’s Republic of China as it now exists, actually wage a war … a small war … such as, for example, a war to take Taiwan?”

Using the metaphor of sustainability, he argued that the CCP would be in trouble if it fought a war against Taiwan today, especially if the war continued for more than several months. His analysis wasn’t based on standard military comparisons of the two countries’ military order of battle, weapon systems, or numbers of soldiers.

Instead, Luttwak focused on two key Chinese strategic weaknesses regarding sustainability: food supplies and dead soldiers.

Looking at Russia
Luttwak contrasted Russia and China. First of all, does Russia have a sustainable war?

According to Luttwak: “Russia does not import food. Russia may import some special pâté de foie gras from Paris, but the food the Russians make is the food they eat.”

Second, Russia doesn’t import energy; Russia exports energy.

Third, Russia has the most valuable commodity in wartime: Some families have extra sons.

The Importance of Food
In contrast, Luttwak noted that China annually imports several million tons of food. For example, in 2022, China imported more than 85 percent of its soybeans (95 million tons), mainly from the United States, Brazil, and Argentina.

China imports human food and animal feed, he said, including “95 million tons of soybeans, plus approximately 20–30,000 tons of maize, wheat, sorghum, millet, and these other things to feed to animals.” In addition to meat, “there are of course dairy imports, a lot of dairy imports.”

Consequently, according to Luttwak, “China is a protein-eating country, and the protein is important. Now, whatever else may happen, the moment a fight of any kind starts, even a small war, G-7 type sanctions start,” meaning that China will be cut off from imports such as soybeans from the United States and Canada.

Epoch Times Photo
Workers stand near a crane unloading sacks of imported soybeans from Russia at Heihe port in Heilongjiang Province, China, on Oct. 10, 2018. (Stringer/Reuters)
He argued that once a war starts, “within about three months, they’ll have to kill … most of the pigs and the chicken, the mutton, the beef.”

Luttwak further claimed that during Mao’s rule over China, people survived because they ate more simply. They didn’t have much meat and certainly no yogurt.

“China used to be self-sufficient,” he said. “In other words, it used to be the way Russia is now for food. And now, it is completely different.”

Luttwak noted that Chinese leadership failed to ensure that China would continue expanding local sources of food. Despite recent laws preventing the conversion of agricultural land to housing or industry, China has continued to lose its agricultural land, primarily due to land erosion, industrialization, and urbanization.

However, he noted that Russia has been in a war since February 2022, and “still people in Russia … eat the same food they ate six months ago, a year ago.”

Energy
Some analysts might predict that China would be challenged to procure energy resources during wartime. However, although China imports a great deal of petroleum and liquified natural gas, Luttwak said, those imports “are not so important strategically as food is.”

He noted that “China has a large domestic production of petroleum and gas.” In wartime, he argued, China would be able to divert energy resources used for the export trade to support its population.

“And, in wartime, it is quite easy to ration some energy use,” Luttwak said.

Dead Soldiers: The Past Can Inform the Future
Luttwak noted that the very lowest estimate of Russians killed in Ukraine as of December 2022 was 25,000 (while many estimates put the number at well above 100,000). He said the Russians “can lose 25,000 soldiers in several months and it makes no difference. … Nobody is blocking the streets in Moscow in protest. It can continue like this for a long time.”

He then compared the USSR’s 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, and the PLA’s possible invasion of Taiwan.

According to Luttwak, when the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968, it was “able to put in 400,000 troops in the first 24 hours. And within 48 hours 800,000 troops.”

However, when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, it made the big mistake of only using 135,000 troops to invade a country that is 4 1/2 times larger than Czechoslovakia (603,700 square kilometers versus 127,900 square kilometers) and four times more populous. (In 1968, Czechoslovakia’s population was 10 million people; in 2022, Ukraine’s population was about 41 million people.) In Luttwak’s view, Russia should have planned to deploy four times the number of troops that the USSR sent into Czechoslovakia, or approximately 3.2 million.

Using similar population ratios, the PLA would need to deploy a minimum of 1.6 million soldiers within 48 hours of an invasion, since Taiwan’s population is about half of Ukraine’s population. The CCP would struggle with an inadequate number of ground forces, in the same way that Russia is struggling in Ukraine.

Post-Heroic Warfare
Luttwak said: “If you want to fight the war, you need to have a supply of expendable soldiers, sailors, airmen. … You cannot start the war if you’re not willing to tolerate casualties. Many years ago [1995], I published a theory called post-heroic warfare. … And my argument was terribly simple, really simple. The wars of history were fought by spare male children.”

According to his theory of post-heroic warfare, “the acceptance of casualties has gone down everywhere. Let’s say … [on] June 6, 1944, on Omaha beach, there was a mistake … 2,200 Americans died in one morning … but the war continued.”

Epoch Times Photo
Vietnam veterans gather at the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War, on April 8, 1995. (Joyce Naltchayan/AFP/Getty Images)
“[In] Vietnam, the United States lost 50,000 over 10 years … and that was considered very traumatic. … And, of course, since that time, society has changed further,” Luttwak said. “American families are smaller … so tolerance for casualties has gone down a lot. Now it doesn’t mean, of course, that if you go into a place like Iraq or Afghanistan and you lose a few thousand, that’s OK. But what you can’t do is to lose 10,000 dead before breakfast and continue normally. That is the post-heroic change.”

The following statistics for Afghanistan and Iraq support his argument. Almost 2,500 U.S. soldiers died in Afghanistan during the 20-year war (2001–20) and 4,400 U.S. soldiers died in Iraq during the seven-year war (2003–10). Additionally, more than 3,800 U.S. contractors were killed in Afghanistan and almost 3,600 in Iraq during the same respective time periods.

China’s Lack of Sons
Luttwak cited statistics in what he called “a post-heroic China.” In 1980, the CCP instituted its “one-child policy,” which lasted until 2016. Most Chinese families today have only one child. Although that’s supposed to change under new policies encouraging larger families, those policies won’t have an impact for decades.

In a model in which families are very small, “there are no spare male children, then families and society and the culture and the government all have to reduce casualties,” he said.

Luttwak told a story about the clash between Chinese and Indian troops in the Galwan River Valley of Ladakh in 2020. Approximately 20 Indian soldiers were killed, and shortly after the fighting, the dead were given military funerals, including a brigadier general.

The CCP, however, announced its killed-in-action eight months after the fighting. The CCP acknowledged four soldiers had been killed: one officer and three enlisted. What happened during those seven months is the interesting part of the story.

The PLA officer’s wife, a local music teacher, was promoted to a position as a music professor at a major conservatory.

The three enlisted soldiers were also each given special propaganda value. One soldier who looked very young was made into a local hero. Another PLA soldier was made into the “good guy” who was reported to have said, “I will give my life to defend the motherland—every inch of the motherland; I’m here to defend every inch.” Of course, Ladakh was never part of China—an inconvenient truth.

The CCP presented the third enlisted soldier as “very traditional.” In a letter that he supposedly wrote before he died, he said, “Dear Mom and Dad, I’m very sorry that I will not be there for you when you need me, but if there is an afterlife … then I hope to be there with you.” Luttwak noted the illogic of a reference to the afterlife by communist atheists.

In short, the Chinese “were concerned about the public reaction.”

This entire operation was to reduce the emotional impact of saying that four people died,” he said.

Intolerance for Casualties
Luttwak argued that if the CCP took eight months to work out the details for four soldiers, how will it deal with the death of several thousand, or perhaps several tens of thousands? He estimated that 25,000 to 40,000 PLA soldiers would die in the first week of a conflict with Taiwan. Many would die on ships or airplanes trying to land in Taiwan. These PLA casualties would be caused by Taiwan’s anti-ship systems and U.S. and allied submarines.

He concluded that although China would be unable to win a war in the near- to mid-term timeframe, it might, nonetheless, start such a war.

“I am not at all confident that the fact that China cannot fight a war means that they will not try to fight a war,” Luttwak said.

However, he predicted that “if China starts a war, it will have to stop quite quickly.”

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

Crafty_Dog

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RANE: Will China provide military aid to Russia? Part 1
« Reply #1321 on: March 09, 2023, 05:11:22 PM »
A Cost-Benefit Analysis of China Providing Military Aid to Russia, Part 1
undefined and Asia-Pacific Analyst at RANE
Chase Blazek
Asia-Pacific Analyst at RANE, Stratfor
9 MIN READMar 9, 2023 | 19:14 GMT




Editor's Note: This column is the first in a two-part series examining China's potential cost-benefit analysis for providing military assistance to Russia for its war in Ukraine. In part one, we broadly lay out why Beijing may (or may not) decide to provide such support and the implications of each scenario.

Reports that China is considering providing Russia with lethal military aid in Ukraine provide a natural case for a cost-benefit analysis paired with scenario planning about what such aid would mean for the war, as well as China's development and its relations with the West. In the past two weeks, there has been a flurry of news reports that China is contemplating providing Russia with lethal aid (e.g. ammunition, weapons and/or weapons' parts) for its war in Ukraine. On Feb. 23, German news outlet Der Spiegel claimed, citing unnamed sources, that Chinese drone manufacturer Xi'an Bingo Intelligent Aviation Technology was planning to sell 100 ZT-180 kamikaze drones to Russia's defense ministry as soon as April, and would also help Russia domestically produce 100 of these drones each month. This came after U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Feb. 18 that Washington had intelligence China was strongly considering providing lethal aid to Russia for its war effort in Ukraine. That same day, Blinken warned China's top diplomat Wang Yi that there would be ''serious consequences'' if Beijing provided such support to Moscow. Speaking with The Wall Street Journal and CNN, other U.S. officials familiar with the intelligence Blinken referred to claimed that in addition to drones, China would likely also provide artillery ammunition and other weapons to Russia, if Beijing decided to aid Moscow's war effort. Despite these claims, U.S. President Joe Biden on Feb. 24 said he doesn't ''anticipate a major initiative on the part of China providing weapons to Russia,'' and had previously stated the White House was working on declassifying relevant intelligence reports. Since this story broke, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and senior EU officials have warned China not to provide arms to Russia as well, calling the issue a ''red line."

Scenario #1) China provides Russia with lethal aid.
A number of factors could drive China to provide Russia with lethal military aid in Ukraine, including Beijing's desire to preserve Russia as a strong strategic partner, an internal policy shift toward prizing national security over economics, and circumscribed information flows to China's top decision-makers. Russia is China's closest partner in its strategic and ideological competition with the West. Beijing views its partnership with Moscow as necessary to combat what it perceives as a U.S.-led containment effort against China's economic and military development. But a strategic failure in Ukraine could threaten that partnership by potentially leading to the downfall of Russian President Vladimir Putin's regime or a significant weakening of Russia's state power. To mitigate this risk, China could decide to support Moscow's war efforts by providing Russia with weapons. In doing so, Beijing would be wagering that Western trade retaliation is worth safeguarding the stability of Russia. In this scenario, China is more likely to provide significant lethal aid to Russia than it is to provide limited lethal aid. This is because while Western sanctions retaliation would certainly scale with the magnitude of China's aid, the consequences to China's economy and diplomatic standing in the world would be great either way — in for a penny, in for a pound. Domestically, China's choice to aid Russia could be a strong indicator that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)'s internal debate about the relative importance of economic growth and national security to China's modern development had skewed decisively toward the latter. Such a decision could also be heavily influenced by President Xi Jinping's close personal relationship with Putin. Moreover, the increasingly ideologically tinged information flows reaching Xi's desk as he consolidates state and CCP power in his hands could present Xi with an incomplete cost-benefit analysis and lead him to make a suboptimal choice on weapons aid to Russia. This could mirror Putin's own circumscribed intelligence flows that led him to believe in February 2022 that the Ukraine invasion would be a month-long affair of rapid regime change in Kyiv — and not the prolonged conflict Russia now finds itself in more than a year after launching its ''special military operation.''

But while sending weapons to Russia could help secure Moscow's strategic objectives in Ukraine, it could also impede China's economic development as Western engagement with China plummets. Dwindling supplies are the biggest challenge that Russian troops are facing in Ukraine. Chinese weapons could thus help the Russian military fend off increasingly well-equipped Ukrainian forces and secure key Ukrainian territories to achieve Moscow's strategic objective of holding a land corridor to Crimea. This aid, however, would also effectively put the United States and China in a proxy war, with both sides competing militarily through intermediaries and attempting to shape the strategic landscape in distant lands — lending some credibility to media speculation about the possibility of a ''New Cold War.'' In response to China's aid, the West could either opt to double down on its own weapons aid to Ukraine or push for a peace process to keep the war from becoming a years-long frozen conflict, or worse, spilling beyond Ukraine's borders. Either way, the West's relations with China would take a sharp turn for the worse. The United States and Europe would no longer see China as a future military adversary (i.e. in the event of a Taiwan invasion) but as a present one, with Beijing helping reshape the borders of Europe. This could not only accelerate trade decoupling and significantly slow China's economic growth (which would escalate China's risks of domestic unrest) but spur a Western-aligned military build-up in Europe and China's near seas. Such a military build-up could take the form of expanded funding for and deployment of stand-off, counterstrike and rapid response capabilities by the United States, Europe, Japan and South Korea amid a heightened Chinese military threat. Should Beijing's support for Moscow catalyze a much more aggressive Western push to defend Taiwan, this escalating security environment could even prevent China from retaking the island and becoming the region's dominant military power. Together these risks mean that Chinese support for Russia in Ukraine could jeopardize the CCP's greater strategic goals of the last 40 years, which include turning China into a high-income country, fielding the predominant military in Asia, and maintaining political stability at home.

Aside from these strategic implications, China's aid to Russia could have a number of near-term tactical benefits for the Chinese military and certain sectors of the economy, but these would likely be offset over time. Russian use of Chinese kamikaze drones, artillery pieces or other military assets could provide the Chinese military with a rare opportunity to test its platforms in active combat, providing crucial field data for China's military modernization. It would also enable China to wield its deep industrial base and supply chain capabilities to drain Western militaries of their own assets and supplies in Ukraine. However, the Western response to China's actions — ramping up military-industrial production to a degree commensurate with Chinese aid and Western concern for a Ukrainian loss in the conflict — would offset this benefit. Nonetheless, Western capacity to match China's industrial production would likely take time to build. Russia's purchases could accelerate the development of China's domestic arms industry, supplementing economic growth in a tough year, although Western trade retaliation would weigh on China's broader economy.

Scenario #2) China doesn't provide Russia with lethal aid.
If China doesn't provide Russia with military aid, it could signal Beijing's desire to preserve economic growth and public stability, as well as the limits of Western intelligence on an increasingly closed-off China. If China opts against sending lethal aid to Russia, this could be a sign of Beijing's confidence that a Russian loss in Ukraine would have limited long-term impacts on its closest strategic partner. But it could also be a sign of pure self-preservation, with Beijing conceding that the fallout in relations with the West would be too much for China's economy to handle, especially amid its fragile post-COVID recovery. Closely linked to this would be Beijing's concerns for political stability following the anti-lockdown protests of late 2022, with the CCP perceiving that additional economic pain incurred by Western sanctions could spur a repeat of nationwide unrest and pose a direct threat to the CCP's (and Xi's) power. More broadly, China's decision to not provide arms to Russia would indicate continuity in Chinese policymaking long-term, with economic growth goals not yet subservient to national security concerns. It could also firm up President Xi's domestic political support base, as elite academics and even CCP cadres have (often anonymously) questioned China's decision not to condemn Russia's invasion and to maintain close relations with Russia amid the war. Alternatively, China may end up not sending weapons to Russia because it never intended to, which would indicate subpar Western intelligence capabilities regarding Beijing's policymaking. Though Washington's intelligence on Russia amid the Ukraine war has been top-notch, U.S. intelligence on China may be weaker due to Beijing's advanced counterintelligence capabilities and its world-class surveillance network — both in society at large and especially within the CCP.

China's restraint in Ukraine would preserve Beijing's ability to limit the decline in relations with the West, though a proper rapprochement remains unlikely. Opting against sending weapons to Russia would leave some room for Beijing to limit trade decoupling with the West and the deterioration of China's attractiveness as an investment destination. One recent example of this sort of damage control is China's recent move to slowly restore its trade relations with Australia after Canberra's calls for an international inquiry into the Chinese origins of COVID-19 prompted Beijing to ban key Australian imports in 2021. But regardless, China's relations with the United States and Europe would likely still continue on their slow downward trajectory — with Western concerns persisting about China's human rights abuses and technological development, as well as the threat China poses to the stability of the Indo-Pacific.

In the next part of this series, we'll delve deeper into the historical, economic, social, political and security aspects that could inform China's decision on whether to send lethal aid to Russia.

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Max Boot: What we Neocons got wrong
« Reply #1322 on: March 10, 2023, 08:05:27 AM »
What the Neocons Got Wrong
And How the Iraq War Taught Me About the Limits of American Power
By Max Boot
March 10, 2023

Page url
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/afghanistan/what-neocons-got-wrong

Shortly after September 11, 2001, I became known as a “neoconservative.” The term was a bit puzzling, because I wasn’t new to conservatism; I had been on the right ever since I could remember. But the “neocon” label came to be used after 9/11 to denote a particular strain of conservatism that placed human rights and democracy promotion at the forefront of U.S. foreign policy. This was a very different mindset from the realpolitik approach of such Republicans as President Dwight Eisouenhower, President Richard Nixon, and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, and it had a natural appeal to someone like me whose family had come to the United States in search of freedom. (We arrived from the Soviet Union in 1976, when I was six years old.) Having lived in a communist dictatorship, I supported the United States spreading freedom abroad. That, in turn, led me to become a strong supporter of military action in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Traditional conservatives, such as U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, wanted to teach the Taliban and Saddam Hussein a lesson and then depart each country as quickly as possible. The neoconservative position—which eventually triumphed in the George W. Bush administration—was that the United States could not simply topple the old regimes and leave chaos in their wake. The Americans had to stay and work with local allies to build democratic showcases that could inspire liberal change in the Middle East. In this way, Washington could finally lance the boil of militant Islamism, which had afflicted America ever since the Iran hostage crisis in 1979.

Regime change obviously did not work out as intended. The occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq were, in fact, fiascos that exacted a high price in both blood and treasure, for both the United States and—even more, of course—the countries it invaded. As the saying goes, when the facts change, I change my mind. Although I remain a supporter of democracy and human rights, after seeing how democracy promotion has worked out in practice, I no longer believe it belongs at the center of U.S. foreign policy. In retrospect, I was wildly overoptimistic about the prospects of exporting democracy by force, underestimating both the difficulties and the costs of such a massive undertaking. I am a neocon no more, at least as that term has been understood since 9/11.


Today, I am much more cognizant than I once was of the limitations of American power and hence much more skeptical of calls to promote democracy in China, Egypt, Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Venezuela, and—fill in the blank. The United States should continue to champion its ideals and call out human rights abuses, but it should do so with humility and not be ashamed to prioritize its own interests. Foreign policy cannot be solely or even mainly an altruistic exercise, and attempting to make it so is likely to backfire in ways that will hurt the very people Americans are trying to help.

Above all, the United States must be more careful about the use of military power than it was in the heady days of the “unipolar moment” following the collapse of the Soviet Union. The era of great-power competition is back with a vengeance. Although the United States remains the world’s strongest military power and has interests and responsibilities around the world, it cannot afford to squander its strength in conflicts of marginal importance.

THE REGIME CHANGE FALLACY
Twenty years ago, in early 2003, Saddam was clinging to power, and the Bush administration was preparing to launch an invasion to overthrow him. I would never have supported military action had I known that he was not actually building weapons of mass destruction, but what I really wanted was to get rid of Iraq’s cruel dictator, not just his purported weapons program. One of the central arguments that I and other supporters of an invasion made was that regime change could trigger a broader democratic transformation in the Middle East. I now cringe when I read some of the articles I wrote at the time. “This could be the chance to right the scales, to establish the first Arab democracy, and to show the Arab people that America is as committed to freedom for them as we were for the people of Eastern Europe,” I wrote in The Weekly Standard—the now defunct flagship of the neoconservative movement—a month after 9/11. “To turn Iraq into a beacon of hope for the oppressed peoples of the Middle East: Now that would be a historic war aim.”

In hindsight, that was dangerous naiveté born out of a combination of post–Cold War hubris and post-9/11 alarm. I desperately wanted to believe that spreading freedom could solve the security dilemmas confronting the United States—that by doing good in the world, it could also serve its national security interests.

It would have been nice if it had worked out that way, but it didn’t, and I should have realized at the time how far-fetched the entire mission was. Who were Americans to think that they could transform an entire region with thousands of years of its own history? I am still kicking myself for not paying greater attention to a wise op-ed I ran in 2002, when I was the op-ed editor at The Wall Street Journal. Under the headline “Don’t Attack Saddam,” the experienced foreign policy hand Brent Scowcroft accurately predicted that an invasion of Iraq would require “a large-scale, long-term military occupation” and would “swell the ranks of the terrorists.” I discounted such warnings because I was dazzled by the power of the U.S. military after its victories in the Gulf War and the invasion of Afghanistan—and dazzled also by the arguments of neoconservative scholars such as Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami that Iraq offered fertile soil for democracy. In hindsight, I am amazed and appalled that I fell prey to these mass delusions.

Like the war in Vietnam, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq offered a potent warning about the dangers of good intentions gone awry. The 2011 U.S. intervention in Libya under the Obama administration, which I also supported, later confirmed on a smaller scale those same lessons. The United States and its allies bombed Muammar al-Qaddafi’s forces, leading to his overthrow and murder, but the result was not the blooming of a Jeffersonian democracy in the desert. To this day, Libya remains trapped in a Hobbesian hell of internecine warfare and lawlessness. In all those countries, the United States was so eager to spread democracy, just as it was once eager to contain communism, that it inflicted great misery on the very people it was supposed to be helping—and then left them in the lurch.

As a result, I am hardly alone in souring on wars of regime change. I have even become skeptical of trying to foment regime change by covert action or strict sanctions—policies that many still advocate in such countries as China, Cuba, Iran, and Venezuela, where odious, anti-American regimes have faced large protest movements in the recent past. Covert actions seldom work. Witness the failure of U.S.-supported rebels to topple the murderous dictator Bashar al-Assad in Syria and the failure of U.S.-supported rebels to topple Saddam before 2003. Sanctions are often unavoidable when the United States wants to impose a cost on rogue regimes for their wrongdoing, but (with only a few exceptions, such as apartheid South Africa) they generally are not effective in bringing down autocrats.

GETTING REAL ON IRAN
Yet many of my erstwhile ideological allies have not reached the same conclusions about the folly of regime change. Last October, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, which is often described as a neoconservative think tank, released a paper calling for the “maximum support for the Iranian people.” Most of what the report recommended—such as using “cyber capabilities in support of protesters,” enabling “censorship circumvention,” expanding “human rights sanctions,” and condemning “Iran within international organizations”—was eminently sensible. Much of it, indeed, was already being implemented by the Biden administration. But FDD went too far in calling for an end to diplomatic efforts to get Iran to rejoin the nuclear deal that U.S. President Donald Trump foolishly exited in 2018. This was one of the worst foreign policy decisions in U.S. history. Iran had been abiding by the accord, but today it is a nuclear threshold state with enough highly enriched uranium to produce at least one nuclear weapon.

The United States is running out of options to stop Iran’s nuclear weapons program. The only obvious alternative to a diplomatic solution is a military solution. Years ago, I might have said this was a risk worth running (indeed, I basically suggested as much in 2011), but given how advanced the Iranian nuclear program has become, I no longer believe that. As I wrote in 2019, airstrikes are unlikely to destroy all of Iran’s well-protected nuclear facilities, and they could well trigger a regional conflagration. They could even backfire by convincing Iran to actually build a nuclear weapon. It would be wonderful if liberal protesters were to overthrow the regime and end its nuclear program, but most Iran experts seem to agree that there is no imminent danger of regime collapse. Indeed, protests that began in the fall have already waned. And there is no reason to think that any amount of U.S. intervention, short of outright invasion, could hasten the fall of the ayatollahs.

Opponents of diplomacy with Iran contend that the country would be strengthened by the windfall it would receive if it rejoined the nuclear deal and sanctions were lifted. In truth, the regime has no trouble funding its security forces and repressing dissent even without a nuclear deal. By one count, from mid-September 2022 to early January 2023, 516 protesters had been killed and more than 19,200 arrested. But even if it were true that a nuclear deal would strengthen the state’s capacity for internal repression, that would be a price worth paying for the United States if it actually led Iran to stop its rush to build the bomb. An Iran with nuclear weapons would threaten the United States and its allies and would likely lead some of its neighbors (such as Saudi Arabia and Turkey) to acquire nukes of their own.


The United States is running out of options to stop Iran’s nuclear weapons program.
Of course, the whole debate is academic at the moment, because the hard-liners in Tehran have shown no willingness to rejoin a deal they abhor as much as U.S. and Israeli hard-liners do. No doubt, like other dictators around the world (such as North Korea’s Kim Jong Un), the mullahs have studied recent history and drawn the logical conclusions: Qaddafi and Saddam were overthrown by the United States after giving up their weapons of mass destruction programs. Hence, any dictator who wants to stay in power should develop a nuclear arsenal. This is yet another way that the U.S. zeal in spreading democracy has backfired. The error was compounded in the case of Iran by Trump’s exit from the imperfect but important nuclear deal without having a Plan B. His decision will be scrutinized for years to come as a case study of the dangers of prioritizing politics above prudence in the conduct of foreign affairs.

At this point, there are few good options left with Iran. U.S. or Israeli covert action—assassinating weapons scientists or spreading computer viruses—will only slightly delay a program that can soon produce a nuclear weapon. Washington should keep trying to reach a diplomatic breakthrough, but assuming that fails, it will need to rely on deterrence and containment, as it did during the Cold War. That means resisting the spread of Iranian power by working through regional allies such as Israel and the Gulf states and making clear to Iran that any use of nuclear weapons would lead to its own destruction.

No matter how abhorrent the Iranian regime is, the United States should, if possible, return an ambassador to Tehran to open lines of communication. Likewise, Washington needs to maintain close contact with Beijing to avoid a nuclear confrontation, even as it condemns the regime’s egregious human rights abuses, from Xinjiang to Hong Kong. So, too, does the United States need to talk to Saudi Arabia’s de facto leader, Mohammed bin Salman, even as it condemns the murder of The Washington Post contributor Jamal Khashoggi and the imprisonment of dissidents. The United States cannot simply cut off a country that is a key ally against Iran and the world’s top oil exporter.

THE WORLD AS IT IS
Dealing with repressive regimes is unsavory and unpopular—for good reason—but in most cases, the United States doesn’t have the luxury of simply cutting them off and slapping them with sanctions. Such policies may be morally satisfying, but they are not particularly effective. As I suggested in November, to the outrage of the right, the United States might be able to do more for the people of Cuba and Venezuela by easing sanctions in return for human rights improvements rather than demanding regime change. Likewise, it should not be afraid to offer North Korea an easing of sanctions in exchange for a freeze or rollback of its nuclear program, even if that results in more money for the country’s Stalinist regime. (Of course, Pyongyang has shown no interest in such a deal.)

Washington should still call out human rights abuses. It should still champion liberal dissidents, such as the Russian political prisoners Alexei Navalny, Vladimir Kara-Murza, and Ilya Yashin and the brave Iranian demonstrators risking arrest and execution. It should send military aid to embattled democracies, from Ukraine to Taiwan. Even though I am no longer as idealistic as I once was, I have not become the kind of self-styled realist who blames the United States for Russian aggression or thinks that it should sacrifice Ukraine as the price of peace. Nor do I approve of a president kowtowing to dictators (as Trump did). The United States remains the world’s most powerful liberal democracy, and it has a moral obligation to at least speak up for its principles.

But there is a crucial difference—one I did not sufficiently appreciate in the past—between defending democracy and exporting democracy. The United States has a better track record of the former (think Western Europe during the Cold War) than the latter (think Afghanistan and Iraq). Twenty years ago, many advocates of regime change in Iraq and Afghanistan, myself included, were misled by the U.S. success in transforming Germany, Italy, and Japan after World War II. What we failed to grasp was that these countries benefited from unique historical circumstances—including high levels of economic development, widespread social trust, strong states, and a blank slate created by defeat in a total war—that, it turns out, are nearly impossible to replicate. It was and is foolish to try.


Outsiders can barely understand local societies, much less manipulate them successfully.
Even when it comes to defending democracy, Washington must sometimes make difficult decisions based on a realistic assessment of local conditions far removed from the airy abstractions favored in U.S. political debates. Both South Korea and South Vietnam were worth defending from communist aggression, but the Koreans showed greater skill and willingness to fight for their own freedom than the South Vietnamese did. The United States needs to be hardheaded in its assessment of where it has local partners that can be successful and where it doesn’t.

Ukraine easily meets the test, because its government enjoys the enthusiastic support of its people, and its military has shown itself to be skilled and motivated. By contrast, the regime that the United States and its allies created in Kabul after the overthrow of the Taliban never had sufficient popular legitimacy. As a result, the Afghan military had insufficient motivation to fight on its own. I still opposed the pullout negotiated by Trump and executed by President Joe Biden because I thought it was possible to keep the Taliban out of power at relatively low cost, and I feared the dangerous signal that a U.S. exit would send to other aggressors. Today, I favor maintaining U.S. military advisers in Iraq as a hedge against the power of Iran and the resurgence of the Islamic State (also known as ISIS). But those are much more modest objectives than the ones I envisioned 20 years ago. The time I spent with U.S. forces in Afghanistan and Iraq over the past two decades gave me a greater appreciation for the importance of local dynamics. No matter how powerful or well intentioned, outsiders can barely understand local societies, much less manipulate them successfully.

At one time, for example, I believed that Ashraf Ghani would be an ideal president for Afghanistan because he was a Western-educated technocrat who wasn’t corrupt. When he came to power in 2014, I wrote, “If anyone is qualified to tackle Afghanistan’s problems, he is.” But he turned out to be a terrible wartime leader who did not rally his people and fled before the Taliban even entered Kabul. I didn’t expect much, by contrast, from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, a former television comedian. But he has turned out to be a Churchillian figure worthy of the United States’ unstinting support. In truth, even if Ukraine weren’t a liberal democracy, it would still make sense for Washington to back it in order to uphold the principle that international borders cannot be changed by force. (That was why Washington was right to defend Kuwait in the Gulf War and South Korea in the Korean War.) But that Ukraine is a liberal democracy makes it easier to rally to its side.

VALUES, MEET INTERESTS
There is, of course, an age-old debate in U.S. foreign policy over the role of values versus interests. In the 1820s, when the Greeks were fighting a war of independence, many American philhellenes wanted to aid their struggle against the cruelty of the Ottoman Empire. Secretary of State John Quincy Adams resisted those entreaties, famously proclaiming that America “goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.” In the past, I have bridled at Adams’s words, which have often been cited by isolationists. But I now have a greater appreciation for his conservative wisdom. As it happened, the Greek rebels won their war of independence with support from France, Russia, and the United Kingdom. But far from ushering in a new Periclean age, they created a barely functional monarchy overseen by foreign kings and punctuated by military coups.

I still favor U.S. international leadership and support of allies, including a strong U.S. military presence in the three centers of global power—Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia—where their deployment is essential to maintain order and deter aggression. But I would no longer make democracy promotion the centerpiece of U.S. foreign policy, because I don’t have much confidence that the United States knows how to do it successfully and because other priorities (such as economic security and national security) have to be considered, too.

Biden discovered the difficulty of orienting U.S. foreign policy around support for democracies when he held a Summit for Democracy in December 2021. Some of the countries invited to the virtual meeting, such as India, Pakistan, and the Philippines, are hardly paragons of liberal democracy. Not invited were some especially autocratic governments, such as Singapore, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, and Vietnam, even though the United States has many shared interests with them. Predictably, the summit achieved little, because a mere commitment to democracy is hardly enough to mobilize joint action among 110 countries from all corners of the globe. Besides their democratic political systems, after all, what do Zambia and Uruguay really have in common?

Indeed, the response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine does not break down neatly along democratic-authoritarian lines, with many democracies in the global South—such as Brazil, Indonesia, and South Africa—refusing to sanction Russia. Unlike the broader group of the world’s democracies, NATO has staunchly supported Ukraine because most of its members—with the partial exceptions of increasingly autocratic Hungary and Turkey—are united by both values and interests. The U.S. alliances with Australia, Japan, and South Korea are success stories for the same reason, although it is worth remembering that the United States fought for South Korea long before it was a democracy.


Hope is not the basis for a sound foreign policy.
The world is an ugly place, and U.S. officials must deal with it as it is, without imagining that they have more power to transform it than they really do. In the real world, the United States often has to work with regimes it abhors, whether China or Saudi Arabia. Only in the movies and the fantasies of progressive activists is the CIA powerful enough to overthrow any leader on the planet. Its actual record of covert action is far less impressive, and on those few occasions when it helped pull off successful coups, the results have usually backfired. The Iranian mullahs still teach their people about American perfidy by citing the U.S.-backed coup that overthrew Mohammad Mosaddeq in 1953.

In the modern world, dictators have proved distressingly talented at using high-tech surveillance tools to suppress popular uprisings. Over the past 20 years, according to the scholar Erica Chenoweth, the success rate of mass protests has declined substantially. It was not terribly surprising, therefore, that China was able to put an end to protests against Xi Jinping’s “zero COVID” policy through a combination of repression and conciliation.

Anyone expecting that a people power revolution will usher in a liberal, pro-Western government any time soon in Beijing, Moscow, or Tehran if only the United States provides more support to protesters, is engaged in wishful thinking. Such hopes may come true, but hope is not the basis for a sound foreign policy. Washington should support liberal protesters with words of encouragement, communications technologies, and other nonmilitary assistance, but it should not count on their success, and it should keep in mind that when a dictatorship falls, the alternative is not always preferable. Remember that Ayatollah Khomeini followed the shah of Iran and that anarchy followed Qaddafi. Russian President Vladimir Putin is a war criminal who should be on trial in The Hague, but if he does lose power, his successor may not be a liberal figure like Navalny. It could be an even more reckless, ultranationalist hard-liner who might actually use Russia’s nuclear arsenal in Ukraine rather than merely threatening to do so. Even in Iran, today’s theocracy might be replaced not by a liberal democracy but by a junta of hard-line generals that would be more secular but no less dangerous. There is, alas, little reason other than wishful thinking to expect that other nations will evolve along Whiggish lines into model Western-style democracies.

Dictatorships are, in fact, proving more resilient than many democracies. Even in the United States and India, the world’s two largest democracies, freedom has been under siege in recent years. Elsewhere, in countries including Myanmar, Nicaragua, Russia, and Tunisia, democracy briefly took hold and then has been lost to cunning strongmen. Even in eastern Europe, where the spread of freedom in the 1990s inspired me and so many others across the world, democracy in Hungary and Poland has regressed. I have long ago been cured of the democratic triumphalism born of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Now, I am much more acutely conscious of the difficulties of creating liberal democracies that last.

OLDER AND WISER
After two decades of bitter experience, I am trying harder than I did in my callow youth to reconcile the aspirations of idealism with the restraints of realism. I still believe the United States should continue to promote human rights and defend democracy, but I have sadly concluded that U.S. foreign policy should not fixate on exporting democracy. That may make me an ex-neocon—a neocon mugged by reality—if “neocon” is taken to mean “a fervent promoter of exporting democracy.” But in some ways, I am harking back to the vision of the original neocons, who were united in their opposition to Soviet designs but hardly advocated a crusade for freedom abroad.

I now occupy a chair at the Council on Foreign Relations named in honor of Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, a former Democrat who was one of the most important neocon intellectuals in the 1970s and 1980s, when I was growing up. She first came to fame by writing a 1979 Commentary article called “Dictatorships and Double Standards” that argued for making common cause with “moderate autocrats friendly to American interests” despite their human rights violations. That led directly to her appointment as U.S. ambassador to the UN under President Ronald Reagan. As a member of Reagan’s cabinet, she did not want to support the United Kingdom during the 1982 Falklands War because she viewed the Argentine military junta as a bulwark against the expansion of communism in Latin America. Later, long after leaving office, she came to oppose the U.S. invasion of Iraq, arguing that “Iraq lacked practically all the requirements for a democratic government.” Kirkpatrick’s worldview should make clear that democracy promotion was hardly integral to neoconservatism as originally conceived.

So what was neoconservatism about? In the very first issue of the neoconservative publication The Public Interest, in 1965, its founders—Daniel Bell and Irving Kristol—expressed suspicion of all attempts to oversimplify complicated public policy issues by falling back on “ideology, whether it be liberal, conservative or radical.” That magazine would become a forum for dense, closely argued essays on vexing social science problems, not for sweeping ideological manifestos. In explaining the name of their magazine, Bell and Kristol cited the columnist Walter Lippmann’s definition of the “public interest”: “The public interest may be presumed to be what men would choose if they saw clearly, thought rationally, acted disinterestedly and benevolently.” Sexist language aside, that remains a good guide to public policy, whether at home or abroad—and it is one that I regret to say I sometimes disregarded in my zeal to spread freedom.

Lippmann, it should be noted, was originally a liberal internationalist whose views were not all that different from those of the modern neocons. He began his long and influential journalistic career as a liberal idealist who helped draft President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points to “make the world safe for democracy” and ended it as a liberal realist who opposed U.S. intervention in Vietnam. That’s a trajectory I can understand
« Last Edit: March 10, 2023, 02:44:09 PM by Crafty_Dog »

ccp

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Boot, Max
« Reply #1323 on: March 10, 2023, 12:09:54 PM »
some good points
but by * Max Boot* and real self introspection
as a neocon
a  major TDS sufferer always
on I think CNN and maybe mspcp

I am ok with not loving DJT but when self described conservatives go on enemy Dem stations to rant against anything Republican and make everything about DJT , I have to listen with a grain of salt.

he advised Marco Rubio  :-o

also is a woke convert it seems ; one of the self described "socially liberal and fiscal conservative " which to me is an oxymoron

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Boot

Crafty_Dog

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Re: US Foreign Policy & Geopolitics
« Reply #1324 on: March 10, 2023, 02:46:33 PM »
Putting aside the man's remaining internal inconsistencies and cognitive dissonance, is there anything to take away from his now "corrected" vision for American foreign policy?

ccp

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Re: US Foreign Policy & Geopolitics
« Reply #1325 on: March 10, 2023, 03:35:55 PM »
without studying the piece but quickly reading it over
I surmise he has now come around to the conclusion the spreading Democracy around the world via wars military strategies is a fool's errand

not necessarily populist I don't think though.

while he debates this international view he has gone woke at home .

do you read the same?

G M

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Re: US Foreign Policy & Geopolitics
« Reply #1326 on: March 10, 2023, 05:08:08 PM »

Max Boot is a steaming pile of grifter.


without studying the piece but quickly reading it over
I surmise he has now come around to the conclusion the spreading Democracy around the world via wars military strategies is a fool's errand

not necessarily populist I don't think though.

while he debates this international view he has gone woke at home .

do you read the same?

Crafty_Dog

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Re: US Foreign Policy & Geopolitics
« Reply #1327 on: March 10, 2023, 07:24:09 PM »
So, how would we describe/distinguish our POV here?

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Re: US Foreign Policy & Geopolitics
« Reply #1328 on: March 11, 2023, 02:33:44 AM »
So, how would we describe/distinguish our POV here?

Can't speak for others but to me, he conflates hawk with neocon, with views that perhaps don't have a name yet, Colin Powellism?

Neocon is a perjorative tossed around by people aiming (in the 2000s) to slur certain people new to a hawkish position of going after enemies of the US outside our borders.

Hawk vs dove is an older distinction between doing something about known threats outside our borders versus letting them fester.

A third view is, build the mightiest military but don't intervene - until it hits us.

My own foreign policy view falls in between hawk and build the mightiest economy and military for deterrence and defense.  Evil cannot become the greatest force, not under our watch.,

Yes, some hawks used the argument of building 'democracy' in Iraq and Afghanistan as part of a justification for continuing our involvement after the original threat and justification was at least for the moment defeated.

Failure to build great democracy in its place does not mean toppling the regime was wrong, in Iraq, for example.

Colin Powell falsely declared about Iraq, if we break it, we must fix it.

That is a different argument than the 23 point justification passed by Congress declaring war against the regime of Saddam Hussein.

We didn't break Iraq.  It was already broken - by a tyrannical dictator. Staying decades to fix or manage things after Saddam (and bin Laden) were toppled were different decisions than the original declarations of war.

Hindsight is an unfair tool for current threats but still we need to learn and keep learning.

I've asked, what is the lesson of WWII, the European war in particular.  Answer I think is, intervene earlier against evil.

Switch over to today's threats and conflicts:

In Ukraine, the argument back is that Putin Russia is not the threat Hitler's Nazi Germany posed.  It is a different sort of threat. I am okay with slowing him rather than declaring all out war against him for that reason.

Regarding Taiwan, we must ask what threat the totalitarian, genocidal regime of Communist China poses, and what line  if not the invasion of Taiwan, is where we or anyone will stop them.

The idea this regime militarizing the region and building the world's greatest military without any checks or balances will stop peacefully after consolidating it's power on the mainland, in Hong Kong, and in Taiwan, is, shall we say, a bit optimistic.

If they don't stop with Taiwan, then that hindsight question comes back to bite us.  When could we have intervened.  When were they stoppable.

If not now, when?
« Last Edit: March 11, 2023, 06:02:11 AM by DougMacG »

ya

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Re: US Foreign Policy & Geopolitics
« Reply #1329 on: March 11, 2023, 08:19:19 AM »
Note the puddle under the baltics


« Last Edit: March 11, 2023, 08:31:39 AM by ya »

Crafty_Dog

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American Geopolitics Forward
« Reply #1330 on: March 11, 2023, 05:38:31 PM »
Bringing this over from the Political Rants thread:

I asked GM:

GM:

Should America do as you advocate:

a) What happens in Ukraine?
b) What happens in East Europe?
c) What is America's credibility on the world stage?
d) What does China do?
e) What does Iran do?
f) What does North Korea do?

He replied:

a) What happens in Ukraine? Not our problem
b) What happens in East Europe? Not our problem
c) What is America's credibility on the world stage?  :roll:
We have credibility? With whom?
d) What does China do? If we onshore our manufacturing, the PRC is pretty scroomed
e) What does Iran do? Not our problem
f) What does North Korea do? South Korea can figure it out.

======================

Those are crisp answers.  Let the conversation begin.  I may not get to it until tomorrow.

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Re: American Geopolitics Forward
« Reply #1331 on: March 11, 2023, 06:10:57 PM »
Bringing this over from the Political Rants thread:

I asked GM:

GM:

Should America do as you advocate:

a) What happens in Ukraine?
b) What happens in East Europe?
c) What is America's credibility on the world stage?
d) What does China do?
e) What does Iran do?
f) What does North Korea do?

He replied:

a) What happens in Ukraine? Not our problem
b) What happens in East Europe? Not our problem
c) What is America's credibility on the world stage?  :roll:
We have credibility? With whom?
d) What does China do? If we onshore our manufacturing, the PRC is pretty scroomed
e) What does Iran do? Not our problem
f) What does North Korea do? South Korea can figure it out.

======================

Those are crisp answers.  Let the conversation begin.  I may not get to it until tomorrow.

LA in 1983:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3s1PUDqfX4

LA in 2023:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TdIGUkA__w

We must unfuck this country first before we worry about anything else.

America has gone from "a shining city on a hill" to a literal dumpster fire.

G M

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Re: American Geopolitics Forward
« Reply #1332 on: March 12, 2023, 01:15:07 PM »
Bringing this over from the Political Rants thread:

I asked GM:

GM:

Should America do as you advocate:

a) What happens in Ukraine?
b) What happens in East Europe?
c) What is America's credibility on the world stage?
d) What does China do?
e) What does Iran do?
f) What does North Korea do?

He replied:

a) What happens in Ukraine? Not our problem
b) What happens in East Europe? Not our problem
c) What is America's credibility on the world stage?  :roll:
We have credibility? With whom?
d) What does China do? If we onshore our manufacturing, the PRC is pretty scroomed
e) What does Iran do? Not our problem
f) What does North Korea do? South Korea can figure it out.

======================

Those are crisp answers.  Let the conversation begin.  I may not get to it until tomorrow.

LA in 1983:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3s1PUDqfX4

LA in 2023:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TdIGUkA__w

We must unfuck this country first before we worry about anything else.

America has gone from "a shining city on a hill" to a literal dumpster fire.

https://redstate.com/bobhoge/2023/01/21/philadelphia-neighborhood-like-a-walking-dead-episode-as-soft-on-crime-policies-and-animal-tranquilizer-craze-take-over-the-city-n691823

Crafty_Dog

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Re: US Foreign Policy & Geopolitics
« Reply #1333 on: March 12, 2023, 05:47:04 PM »
"We must unfuck this country first before we worry about anything else."

This is a potent point.

"America has gone from "a shining city on a hill" to a literal dumpster fire."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GflKh9jlCg&t=15s

Circling back to the Geopolitical position you crisply laid out , , , tomorrow   :-D

Crafty_Dog

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Russia's biggest threat is China
« Reply #1334 on: March 13, 2023, 03:00:50 AM »
In the long run, perhaps.  But in the meantime?


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iibs7buNwxQ

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Death of a myth
« Reply #1335 on: March 13, 2023, 09:24:57 AM »

Crafty_Dog

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Re: US Foreign Policy & Geopolitics
« Reply #1336 on: March 13, 2023, 12:55:08 PM »
There are some cogent points lurking therein, but mixed in is a goodly dose of deceptive Russo-Prog type propaganda.

This is frustrating, because the need to evolve our heuristics for things geopolitical is great.
« Last Edit: March 13, 2023, 01:11:05 PM by Crafty_Dog »

ccp

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A few counter points / thoughts
« Reply #1337 on: March 13, 2023, 01:41:08 PM »
some of the #' s of death
blamed on USA
is misleading

Americans did not kill millions of Arabs
 they killed each other

Americans did not kill Cambodians - they killed each other

S. Korea is free thanks to us.
What would it have been like if all of Korea was Kim's

it was Red China and Russia spreading their disease down to SE Asia
that started the whole thing

As for Iraq - hard to believe that Iraqis would have been better off with Sadam left in place and he invaded Kuwait

Was Iraq  II a mistake
Was Vietnam a mistake
Was Korea a mistake

many would argue yes

Was Afghanistan something we should not have done?

Well there was Muslim terrorism and it was real.

The author would also say the Lincoln was not our best President but our worst
Thanks to him 750,000 (more recent estimates ) excess Americans died .





Crafty_Dog

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Re: US Foreign Policy & Geopolitics
« Reply #1338 on: March 13, 2023, 01:57:08 PM »
Well articulated.

G M

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What do we tell the horribly maimed?
« Reply #1339 on: March 13, 2023, 02:39:56 PM »
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/12/22/amputation-ied-walter-reed-soldier-fungus/4038281/

Thank you for your service?

You fucked up, you trusted us?

We turned the Taliban into the 26th largest army in the world and they didn’t even have to pretend to not be the fucking Taliban.

ccp

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Re: US Foreign Policy & Geopolitics
« Reply #1340 on: March 13, 2023, 02:47:39 PM »
yes I get it

but the terrorists were coming from Afghan and Pocky stan

so should we not have gone there

the attempt at building a democracy was folly
but we had to push back -
or not ?

keep the terrorists there not hear

what do you tell the near 3,000 people who died on 9/11?

Crafty_Dog

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Re: US Foreign Policy & Geopolitics
« Reply #1341 on: March 13, 2023, 03:59:38 PM »
Good points both.

G M

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Re: US Foreign Policy & Geopolitics
« Reply #1342 on: March 13, 2023, 05:15:09 PM »
yes I get it

but the terrorists were coming from Afghan and Pocky stan

so should we not have gone there

the attempt at building a democracy was folly
but we had to push back -
or not ?

keep the terrorists there not hear

what do you tell the near 3,000 people who died on 9/11?

Do you think the global jihad is done with us? We pissed away lives, limbs and treasure and handed the global jihad a massive win.

Crafty_Dog

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Re: US Foreign Policy & Geopolitics
« Reply #1343 on: March 13, 2023, 05:55:37 PM »
Incompetence can do that.


G M

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Re: US Foreign Policy & Geopolitics
« Reply #1344 on: March 14, 2023, 06:49:25 AM »
yes I get it

but the terrorists were coming from Afghan and Pocky stan

so should we not have gone there

the attempt at building a democracy was folly
but we had to push back -
or not ?

keep the terrorists there not hear

what do you tell the near 3,000 people who died on 9/11?

Do you think the global jihad is done with us? We pissed away lives, limbs and treasure and handed the global jihad a massive win.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/afghanistan-again-becomes-a-cradle-for-jihadism-and-al-qaeda

Crafty_Dog

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Re: US Foreign Policy & Geopolitics
« Reply #1345 on: March 14, 2023, 08:27:26 AM »
"Do you think the global jihad is done with us? We pissed away lives, limbs and treasure and handed the global jihad a massive win."

Should we have not gone?

Should we have stayed "to mow the lawn" as necessary?


G M

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Re: US Foreign Policy & Geopolitics
« Reply #1346 on: March 14, 2023, 09:23:16 AM »
"Do you think the global jihad is done with us? We pissed away lives, limbs and treasure and handed the global jihad a massive win."

Should we have not gone?

Should we have stayed "to mow the lawn" as necessary?

9/12/2001 should have been where Mecca, Medina and Afghanistan were turned into radioactive glass.

Crafty_Dog

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Re: US Foreign Policy & Geopolitics
« Reply #1347 on: March 14, 2023, 09:26:44 AM »
A touch glib, don't you think?


G M

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Re: US Foreign Policy & Geopolitics
« Reply #1348 on: March 14, 2023, 09:31:10 AM »
A touch glib, don't you think?

No. Violence works, overwhelming violence works overwhelmingly well.

To defeat the global jihad, you must gut Islam.

Crafty_Dog

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Re: US Foreign Policy & Geopolitics
« Reply #1349 on: March 14, 2023, 10:45:12 AM »
How is that working for Russia?