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Quotes of the Day:
“This constant lying is not aimed at making the people believe a lie, but at ensuring that no one believes anything anymore.
A people that can no longer distinguish between truth and lies cannot distinguish between right and wrong. And such a people, deprived of the power to think and judge, is, without knowing and willing it, completely subjected to the rule of lies.
With such a people, you can do whatever you want.”
—Hannah Arendt, German historian and philosopher (1906–1975)
"To every man, there comes in his lifetime, that special moment when he is figuratively tapped on the shoulder and offered a chance to do a very special thing, unique to him and fitted to his talents; What a tragedy if that moment should find him unprepared or unqualified for the work which would be his finest hour."
– Sir Winston Churchill
"There can be no political morality without prudence; that is, without consideration of the political consequences of seemingly moral action."
– Hans Morgenthau
1. US risks learning the wrong lessons about Ukraine’s drones, expert says
2. Secret Service Director’s Testimony Sparks Bipartisan Calls for Her Resignation
3. Clueless at the Secret Service
4. Biden Drops Out, the Dangers of a Lame-Duck President Emerge
5. The Post-Biden Foreign Policy
6. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, July 22, 2024
7. Israel–Hamas War (Iran) Update, July 22, 2024
8. To Secure the Red Sea, Sink Iran’s Navy
9. Israel Risks All-Out War With Hezbollah. A Truce in Gaza May Reduce That Threat.
10. War, Adaptation and AI by Mick Ryan
11. Countering Chinese Aggression in the South China Sea
12. Israel’s Next War
13. America’s Dilemma in Kenya
14. NATO’s New Mission: Keep America in, Russia Down, and China Out
15. Ukraine confronts labor shortage as need for soldiers drains workforce
16. Can Biden’s arsenal-of-democracy foreign policy outlast him?
17. Pentagon’s new Arctic strategy focuses on adversaries, new technologies
18. Can Hamas Be Left to Defeat Itself? Debating the Endgame in Gaza
19. US warns Chinese banks over Russian shipments
20. Opinion: Project 2025 would slash veterans' hard-earned benefits
21. Why does China care about a rust bucket in the middle of the sea?
1. US risks learning the wrong lessons about Ukraine’s drones, expert says
US risks learning the wrong lessons about Ukraine’s drones, expert says
Ukraine is increasingly using drones for mining and resupply, even as drone use analysis focuses on strikes.
defenseone.com · by Sam Skove
Ukraine’s innovative use of technology is playing a vital role in the war—but not necessarily in the ways shown on social media, said one analyst who travels frequently to the region.
The plentiful social media videos of Ukrainian drones destroying tanks, for example, give viewers the impression that the units flying the drones are more successful than they actually are, said Michael Koffman, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
“The problem is that you get into huge issues with sample bias,” said Koffman, speaking at Army Application Laboratory's VERTEX event. “The least successful units are going to show you probably their most successful strikes.
Meanwhile, Ukraine’s increasing use of drones to drop mines and run resupply missions is getting less attention than the flashier strike missions, he said.
“Defensive mining missions have become one of their primary tasks, very commonly employed with magnetic influence mines,” Koffman said. Units then record the mines’ locations, allowing them to disrupt enemy logistics without affecting their own operations.
By contrast, loitering munitions may work poorly against vehicles, Koffman said, noting a story he heard about a Bradley armored fighting vehicle attacked by Russian first-person-view drones carrying explosives that sustained more than 20 hits and kept going.
Other units Koffman has talked to say that as many as half of the resupply missions are done by small logistics drones no larger than a few feet across. Such drones are necessary because the Russians regularly hit vehicles traveling within five to six kilometers of the front.
Small logistics drones are not capable of carrying large quantities of supplies. However, larger drones would be easier targets, in the air and when soldiers cluster around them when they land, Koffman said. Most of the resupply at Ukraine’s months-long river bridgehead at Krinky was done by drones, he added.
Koffman also said that if you compare the damage done to the number of drones lost, large drone bombers are among the most effective attack drones Ukraine has.
Still, Ukraine’s use of drones also comes with trade-offs, Koffman said. For one, drones require more people to operate them than other weapons with similar effects.
A single drone team operating first-person-view drones might include a drone pilot, a weapons specialist, a repair specialist, and another pilot spotting targets with an observation drone. But a single anti-tank guided missile operator could have a similar effect on the battlefield.
An overreliance on drones could also lead to commanders micromanaging troops, he said, likening the process to playing a real-time strategy computer game.
Drones can also be tricked, he said, but only if decoys are sufficiently realistic. Decoys must emit thermal and electronic signals, be mobile, and look like the real thing, Koffman said.
Those Ukrainian decoys attract many strikes by Russian attack drones and short-range missiles, he said. But Ukraine’s lack of air defenses compared to Russia’s huge number of drones means that Russian drones can still pick out targets as deep as 60 miles behind Ukraine’s frontline, he added.
“If you shoot down a [Russian observation drone], they’ll put up another one in 10, 15 minutes,” he said. Shooting them down also leaves fewer missiles to shoot down more dangerous attack helicopters, and exposes the position of the air defenses, he said.
Despite the challenges of using drones for strike missions, Koffman said the United States should learn from Ukraine’s use of drones to achieve mass precision strikes at close range. Drones have “democratized precision” in close-range fights, Koffman said.
By contrast, the United States currently overemphasizes the use of precision weapons to take out command posts and other targets deep behind the frontline. Striking these targets is “an important enabler, but it's not a substitute for success in the close battle,” he said.
Koffman also warned U.S. commanders to re-think any assumptions they may have that they’d do any better than Ukraine at smashing through Russian lines.
There is an “overemphasis on maneuver warfare,” in the U.S. military, Koffman said, referring to a military strategy consisting of disorienting the enemy through fast, unexpected strikes that result in fewer casualties. But with a conflict like the war in Ukraine, “you really have to make peace with a high level of attrition.”
defenseone.com · by Sam Skove
2. Secret Service Director’s Testimony Sparks Bipartisan Calls for Her Resignation
She should have walked into the hearing with her letter of resignation and began her formal statement with "Here is my letter of resignation. It is effective at the completion of this hearing." Then she should have answered every question thoroughly, transparently, and without equivocation. That would have been the honorable thing to do.
Secret Service Director’s Testimony Sparks Bipartisan Calls for Her Resignation
House lawmakers expressed anger that Kimberly Cheatle wouldn’t offer more details about near assassination of Donald Trump
https://www.wsj.com/us-news/kimberly-cheatle-secret-service-house-oversight-committee-13a7aaf8?mod=hp_lead_pos7
By C. Ryan Barber
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and Sadie Gurman
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Updated July 22, 2024 3:39 pm ET
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House lawmakers grilled U.S. Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle over the security measures at a rally in Butler, Pa, where former President Donald Trump survived an assassination attempt. Photo: Michael Reynolds/Shutterstock PHOTO: MICHAEL REYNOLDS/SHUTTERSTOCK
WASHINGTON—Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle offered lawmakers few answers Monday about how a 20-year-old gunman was able to open fire on former President Donald Trump at a campaign rally, fueling bipartisan anger and widespread calls for her resignation in the wake of what she acknowledged was a colossal security lapse.
Republicans and Democrats on the House Oversight Committee peppered Cheatle with hours of questions about the near assassination of Trump in Butler, Pa., the Secret Service’s most stunning failure since President Ronald Reagan was shot in 1981. But the director, citing ongoing investigations, declined to address some of the most pressing concerns, including how gunman Thomas Matthew Crooks accessed a rooftop with a clear line of sight to Trump.
“Did the Secret Service have an agent on top of that roof?” the committee chairman, Rep. James Comer (R., Ky.), asked.
“Sir, I’m sure, as you can imagine, that we are just nine days out from this incident, and there’s still an ongoing investigation,” Cheatle said, deflecting the question as lawmakers collectively groaned.
The director declined to answer questions about how the security perimeter was drawn for the rally, whether law enforcement swept the roof in advance or how many agents were assigned to the event, saying a review of the breakdown is ongoing.
“The No. 1 question everyone in America is wondering is, why was the roof left open? And after nine days, we should at least maybe have a bit of that information,” Rep. Michael Cloud (R., Texas) said. “And when you come to this committee hearing and you don’t have anything to say about that, it’s very, very troubling.”
Cheatle acknowledged that Crooks was identified as suspicious, with a range finder—which resembles binoculars that hunters use to measure distance to a target—and backpack, more than an hour before he opened fire at Trump’s rally. Pressed by lawmakers, she acknowledged that Secret Service agents had received multiple notifications of a person acting suspiciously.
“I don’t have an exact number to share with you today, but from what I’ve been able to discern, somewhere between two and five times there was some sort of communication about a suspicious individual,” Cheatle said.
The director declined to elaborate on those communications. She also declined to say whether authorities sought to approach Crooks after he was initially identified as suspicious.
In one revealing exchange, Cheatle suggested that the security team with Trump before he went on stage didn’t know that the former president was facing an active threat.
“If the detail had been passed information that there was a threat, the detail would never have brought the former president out on the stage,” Cheatle said in response to a question from Rep. Jamie Raskin (D., Md.).
Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle, center, arriving on Capitol Hill for a House Oversight Committee hearing on Monday. PHOTO: MICHAEL REYNOLDS/SHUTTERSTOCK
Crooks fired at least six rounds from the roof of the American Glass Research building roughly 400 feet away from where Trump spoke, killing one spectator, critically injuring two others and leaving Trump with a graze wound to the ear. A Secret Service sniper team shot back, killing Crooks, whose motive remains a mystery.
Much about the shooting remains unclear, with federal, state and local officials voicing at-times conflicting information about what transpired and who was responsible for different aspects of the security plan.
As the hearing progressed, a growing chorus of lawmakers said they didn’t have confidence in Cheatle’s leadership or ability to keep protectees safe. Republican leaders last week had already called for Cheatle to step down. On Monday, Democrats joined them.
Raskin, the top Democrat on the panel, called the session “an unusually depressing hearing” and said he would join in calling for Cheatle’s ouster.
“This relationship is irretrievable at this point,” Raskin said. “And I think that the director has lost the confidence of Congress at a very urgent and tender moment in the history of the country, and we need to very quickly move beyond this.”
Some lawmakers expressed disbelief that Crooks hadn’t been identified as a threat sooner. Cheatle said she believed Crooks transitioned from being seen as suspicious to threatening only “seconds before the gunfire started.”
When pressed on the timeline of events by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R., Ga.), Cheatle said she didn’t have all the answers. She also said she couldn’t address what happened after rallygoers alerted authorities of Crooks going up the roof with a rifle.
“I’m not certain at this time how the information from the people in the crowd was relayed to any law-enforcement personnel,” she said.
Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D., Fla.) likened Cheatle’s performance to that of the leaders of elite universities who in a December House hearing equivocated on whether calling for the genocide of Jewish people violated the campus code of conduct, and were eventually pressed to resign. “Did you see that hearing?” Moskowitz said. “Well, let me tell you, it didn’t go well. And the short end of that story was, those university professors all resigned. They’re gone. That’s how this is going for you.”
Lawmakers expressed ongoing concern about rising political violence in the U.S., as authorities have said they expect to see more threats and attacks ahead of November’s presidential election. The Federal Bureau of Investigation said threats of politically motivated violence, already high, have spiked online since the assassination attempt.
“There need to be answers,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) said. “This is not a moment of theater. We have to make policy decisions, and we have to make them now.”
Cheatle, who was making her first-ever appearance before Congress, has said she won’t resign, and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has voiced full confidence in her. On Sunday, Mayorkas named former Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and other law-enforcement experts to conduct an independent, 45-day review of the attempted assassination.
The security lapse made Cheatle, 53 years old, something of a household name after she spent nearly 30 years at the agency in relative obscurity. She applied for the service right out of college and rose through the ranks in a series of roles. She served on the team of agents that secured Vice President Dick Cheney on Sept. 11, 2001. Cheatle later worked on Biden’s detail during his vice presidency and was assigned to his wife, Jill Biden.
She left the agency in 2021 for a private-sector stint at PepsiCo, but returned when President Biden tapped her as director in 2022.
Lawmakers have separately invited state and local law enforcement to testify before the House Homeland Security Committee. On Monday, members of that committee were set to visit the site of the July 13 rally.
Write to C. Ryan Barber at ryan.barber@wsj.com and Sadie Gurman at sadie.gurman@wsj.com
3. Clueless at the Secret Service
Clueless at the Secret Service
Director Kimberly Cheatle can’t explain what happened, or why a would-be assassin was able to get so close with a rifle to nearly kill Donald Trump.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/clueless-at-the-secret-service-279e0d04?mod=latest_headlines
By The Editorial Board
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July 22, 2024 5:35 pm ET
Kimberly Cheatle, Director, U.S. Secret Service, testifies on Monday PHOTO: ROD LAMKEY/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Everyone with a video screen knows about the failure to protect Donald Trump from a would-be assassin in Butler, Pa. But don’t look to Secret Service director Kimberly Cheatle for answers because she doesn’t have any.
That was the bottom line from a House Oversight Committee hearing on Monday. Ms. Cheatle said the agency failed in protecting the former President—no kidding—but did little to explain the staggering operational mistakes. She couldn’t illuminate even basic facts about how a young shooter, apparently acting alone, was able to get an AR-15 style rifle within a few hundred feet of the former President.
We know law enforcement noticed the alleged gunman, Thomas Matthew Crooks, before the rally began and designated him as suspicious. Local police alerted the Secret Service because of the man’s behavior near the magnetometers. Around 5:30 p.m. the shooter was spotted again looking through a rangefinder, a device shooters use to calculate distance to a target.
Those moments should have been enough to transform Crooks from a “person of interest” to an active threat. But that didn’t happen, and Ms. Cheatle deflected lawmakers’ questions with a bureaucratic defense. “I think we’re conflating the difference between the term ‘threat’ and ‘suspicious,’” she said. “An individual with a backpack is not a threat. . . . An individual with a range finder is not a threat.”
She was wrong about that. Instead of law enforcement questioning and searching him, the gunman continued his amateurish plan unmolested. About 10 minutes before Mr. Trump took the stage, Crooks had climbed atop a building a few hundred yards away with an unobstructed view of Mr. Trump’s podium.
The Secret Service has said the building where the shooter perched was outside its security perimeter for the event, but why? When Oversight Chairman James Comer (R., Ken.) asked about responsibility for the roof, Ms. Cheatle said there was “a plan in place to provide overwatch” but didn’t provide details.
The Secret Service has acknowledged that its agents should have been in control of the building rather than relying on local law enforcement. This alone is a huge failure. Police provide additional security, but the Secret Service is the protection detail. Agents should be clearing all areas and keeping eyes on risky corners with drones or other surveillance.
In the minutes before he tried to kill Mr. Trump, the shooter was spotted by rally attendees who pointed and shouted to alert law enforcement. Why wasn’t the gunman taken out by snipers before he fired into the crowd. Why was Mr. Trump even allowed on stage?
Ms. Cheatle failed to answer those questions, telling lawmakers she needed to wait until the internal investigation is done in some 60 days, Her non-answers managed the rare feat of uniting Democrats and Republicans in calls for her resignation. Mr. Comer and ranking Democrat Jamie Raskin (D., Md.) both say she should go.
At the hearing, progressive Rep. Ro Khanna (D., Calif.) asked Ms. Cheatle if she knew what Secret Service director Stuart Knight did after the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan. “He remained on duty,” Ms. Cheatle said. Mr. Khanna replied, “He resigned.”
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Wonder Land: Even after the assassination attempt, the leaders of our eroding institutions have no answer or just look the other way. Photo: EVAN VUCCI/ASSOCIATED PRESS PHOTO: EVAN VUCCI/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Copyright ©2024 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
Appeared in the July 23, 2024, print edition as 'Clueless at the Secret Service'.
4. Biden Drops Out, the Dangers of a Lame-Duck President Emerge
Excerpts:
Mr. Trump made the 2020-21 transition perilous by trying frantically and erratically to thwart the results of the 2020 election. Whether one considers the Jan. 6 riot and the runup to it an insurrection or simply disgraceful and disqualifying for Mr. Trump, his lame-duck period was the second-worst in American history (after James Buchanan to Abraham Lincoln in 1860-61).
While it’s difficult to predict what Mr. Biden may do as a lame duck, or what external threats or crises might develop, our current circumstances hold uncharted dangers. Congress, the candidates and especially the American public need to begin thinking about the challenges ahead, and monitoring Mr. Biden’s prolonged lame-duck status closely.
Biden Drops Out, the Dangers of a Lame-Duck President Emerge
As Americans focus on the campaign, the world asks what our global role will be for the next six months.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-dangers-of-a-lame-duck-biden-withdraw-race-2024-election-foreign-policy-national-security-d8101017?mod=commentary_article_pos7
By John Bolton
July 21, 2024 5:39 pm ET
President Joe Biden speaks at the White House in Washington, Feb. 8. PHOTO: EVAN VUCCI/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw from the presidential race effectively makes him a lame duck. The odds favored his achieving this status on Nov. 5 anyway, but America now faces a nearly 100-day longer interregnum than in prior transition periods. We may focus on the election campaign, but the wider world worries what Washington’s global role will be for the next six months.
History affords no clear answer. The constitutional rule that we have only one president at a time is often hard for Americans, let alone foreigners, to grasp. The dangers posed by uncertainty about who’s in charge even in normal transitions are exacerbated by a weak incumbent no longer seeking re-election. U.S. adversaries, and even some allies, will see opportunities to advance their interests. Nor can we rule out what an otherwise responsible, but disappointed and possibly bitter lame duck might consider doing as his tenure in office dwindles.
The national-security risks and opportunities facing lame-duck presidents vary with the international environment and their own beliefs and proclivities. This year, the length of Mr. Biden’s lame-duckery offers unique complexities. Given the 22nd Amendment’s two-term limit, one could argue that presidents become lame ducks on their second Inauguration Day, but that obscures the key differences between how the Reagan, George W. Bush and Obama administrations ended versus the “defeated” Lyndon Johnson, Carter and Biden presidencies.
Past lame-duck periods don’t uniformly demonstrate presidential (or national) weakness. While Mr. Biden may simply slumber through the remainder of his term, that outcome is far from preordained. For good or ill, presidents retain broad discretion, and their approaches have ranged from high-minded to vindictive, with enormous consequences for their successors.
Wide-ranging actions by lame ducks are sometimes simply unnecessary. Transitions between same-party presidents, which may or may not happen this cycle, are rare, but in 1988-89 Ronald Reagan worked hard to facilitate Vice President George H.W. Bush’s accession to office.
In some cases, lame-duck presidents simply do their own thing, irrelevant to their successor. Bill Clinton continued to chase the gray ghost of Middle East peace while Gov. Bush and Vice President Al Gore slugged it out in the Florida recount. During the 2008-09 financial crisis, global disarray so thoroughly dominated international affairs that the U.S. didn’t seem particularly vulnerable.
Lame-duck periods during party-to-party transitions are the most dangerous, almost unavoidably so, whether the outgoing president was defeated or simply trying to finish without impairing his party’s nominee. Freighted with potential consequences, conflicts between the lame duck and his successor, and between their teams, are often testy, reflecting just-concluded campaigns, and most acutely raising the question of who’s in charge.
The 1980-81 Carter-Reagan transition was such a case, dominated by the Iran hostage crisis. The campaign had been bitter, with mutual recriminations on many fronts, including about the hostages. Fortunately, a potentially destructive Carter lame-duck period was averted by a deal that suited all the actors: releasing the hostages (a plus for Mr. Carter) after Reagan was actually inaugurated (a plus for Reagan), bringing a temporary end to Tehran-Washington tensions (a plus for Tehran). Nonetheless, with controversies like the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East and high tensions with China, the prospect of conflict clouding Biden’s lame-duckery is palpable.
After the 1992 election, George H.W. Bush intervened militarily in Somalia to open closed channels for humanitarian assistance. The White House made it clear Bush would act as he saw best while still president, but he offered to withdraw all U.S. forces before Mr. Clinton’s inauguration if the new president desired. Mr. Clinton chose to continue the mission, later mistakenly expanding it, but the two presidencies functioned smoothly during the handover.
In stark contrast, Barack Obama chose to settle scores with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the United Nations Security Council. By abstaining on Resolution 2334 (passed 14-0-1 on Dec. 23, 2016), Mr. Obama figuratively knifed both Mr. Netanyahu and the incoming Trump administration, which had openly advocated a U.S. veto. While abstaining wasn’t a startlingly new position, it was unnecessary and vindictive, auguring in a small way what a determined lame-duck could do.
Mr. Trump made the 2020-21 transition perilous by trying frantically and erratically to thwart the results of the 2020 election. Whether one considers the Jan. 6 riot and the runup to it an insurrection or simply disgraceful and disqualifying for Mr. Trump, his lame-duck period was the second-worst in American history (after James Buchanan to Abraham Lincoln in 1860-61).
While it’s difficult to predict what Mr. Biden may do as a lame duck, or what external threats or crises might develop, our current circumstances hold uncharted dangers. Congress, the candidates and especially the American public need to begin thinking about the challenges ahead, and monitoring Mr. Biden’s prolonged lame-duck status closely.
Mr. Bolton served as White House national security adviser, 2018-19, and ambassador to the United Nations, 2005-06. He is author of “The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir.”
WSJ Opinion: The Replicator Drone Initiative and the Department of Defense
WSJ Opinion: The Replicator Drone Initiative and the Department of Defense
Play video: WSJ Opinion: The Replicator Drone Initiative and the Department of Defense
Replicator’s goals of drone deployment and business development process change are both worthy objectives. But given the Pentagon's antiquated culture, is two years enough time to procure more hard power faster? Photo: Dept. of Defense PHOTO: DEPT. OF DEFENSE
Copyright ©2024 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
Appeared in the July 22, 2024, print edition as 'The Dangers of a Lame Duck'.
5. The Post-Biden Foreign Policy
Excerpts;
Time comes for us all, as Mr. Biden discovered last weekend. The question American allies and adversaries alike will be asking amid the race to succeed him is whether Father Time also has come for the policy of global engagement in defense of an American-led world order. A recent Pew Research Center survey found that majorities of under-30 American adults ranked only three foreign-policy goals as top national priorities: dealing with climate change, stopping the spread of weapons of mass destruction, and defending the U.S. against terror attacks.
We live in dangerous times; old certainties are falling by the wayside. Mr. Biden’s successor will need clear vision and superb leadership skills to surmount America’s challenges abroad.
The Post-Biden Foreign Policy
Public skepticism is rising on both right and left about the U.S.-led world order.
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July 22, 2024 5:24 pm ET
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and his vice-presidential pick Sen. J.D. Vance, (R., Ohio) in Grand Rapids, Mich., July 20. PHOTO: EVAN VUCCI/ASSOCIATED PRESS
The enthronement of Donald Trump and J.D. Vance at the Republican National Convention, the defenestration of Joe Biden and his anointing of Kamala Harris as the Democratic heir, the attempted assassination of Mr. Trump and a scandal over the Secret Service’s performance all have heads spinning at home and abroad. For Americans caught up in the presidential drama, the news was more about personalities and parties than foreign policy. But for foreign governments struggling to understand the direction of the world’s largest military and economic power, the news was all about uncertainty and risk.
By selecting Sen. Vance of Ohio, Mr. Trump doubled down on the populist, antiestablishment approach to foreign policy that shocks some and thrills others abroad. Mr. Vance is skeptical of aid to Ukraine, supports protectionist tariffs, and advocates a Jacksonian-inflected MAGA agenda.
Vice President Harris’s apparent ascension as the Democratic nominee suggests that Democrats, too, may be moving away from the center. The picture is murky because Ms. Harris hasn’t left deep footprints in important foreign-policy debates and decorum obliged Harris staffers to emphasize their mind meld with Team Biden on all matters. But people familiar with the thinking in both camps believe significant differences on the Middle East and other issues could soon emerge.
Whether Mr. Trump or Ms. Harris takes the oath of office in January, President Biden will likely be remembered as the last of the post-Cold War presidents. While revisionist powers like China, Russia and Iran have been mounting forceful challenges, public skepticism is rising at home on both the left and the right about the American-led world order. Team Biden sought to preserve the order that was established after World War II and then strengthened and extended by Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton after the Cold War.
First and foremost, this meant cementing ties with allies in Europe, sorely tested during the disruptive Trump presidency, based on the values of international law and democracy at the ideological core of the old world order. Once Russia invaded Ukraine, the current administration’s focus shifted to building a coalition that will, Biden aides hope, ultimately force Vladimir Putin to end the war on terms acceptable to Ukraine and its Western supporters. In Asia, Team Biden successfully transformed the old hub-and-spoke model of U.S. alliances to what officials call a “lattice structure,” in which cooperation among U.S. allies in Asia strengthens the alliance system as a whole. (The U.S. has had treaties with several Asian allies, but there was relatively little integration or cooperation among countries like South Korea and Japan.) In the Middle East, the Bidenites worked on uniting Israel, Saudi Arabia and the U.S. to offset Iran’s relentless drive for hegemony. Complicating Team Biden’s bid to maintain the old international order was the burden that emerging problems placed on a struggling international system. Engineering the transition to a net-zero future means replacing the global energy system with something radically new. Change on that scale is risky and expensive, and it adds considerably to the difficulties of managing an international system already under attack from geopolitical rivals.
Simultaneously, the general retreat of democratic governance in much of the world, along with the increasing prominence of LGBTQ issues in the Western human-rights agenda, made Team Biden’s “democracy vs. autocracy” framing of American strategy a tough sell in much of the Global South.
The trend toward greater protectionism will likely continue no matter who enters the Oval Office in January. Both Mr. Trump and Ms. Harris will focus on enforcing strict rules of economic engagement with China. Beyond that, Mr. Trump would stress national defense and restoring American manufacturing jobs in his trade policy. A President Harris might organize a restrictive trade agenda around the energy transition and green tariffs.
Time comes for us all, as Mr. Biden discovered last weekend. The question American allies and adversaries alike will be asking amid the race to succeed him is whether Father Time also has come for the policy of global engagement in defense of an American-led world order. A recent Pew Research Center survey found that majorities of under-30 American adults ranked only three foreign-policy goals as top national priorities: dealing with climate change, stopping the spread of weapons of mass destruction, and defending the U.S. against terror attacks.
We live in dangerous times; old certainties are falling by the wayside. Mr. Biden’s successor will need clear vision and superb leadership skills to surmount America’s challenges abroad.
WSJ Opinion: Making Sense of the Vance VP Pick
WSJ Opinion: Making Sense of the Vance VP Pick
Play video: WSJ Opinion: Making Sense of the Vance VP Pick
Journal Editorial Report: How will he fare as Trump's top deputy? Photo: Evan Vucci/Associated Press PHOTO: EVAN VUCCI/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Copyright ©2024 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
Appeared in the July 23, 2024, print edition as 'The Post-Biden Foreign Policy'.
6. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, July 22, 2024
Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, July 22, 2024
https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-july-22-2024
Key Takeaways:
- Russia and North Korea are pursuing increased cooperation in the judicial sphere.
- Russia is taking steps to codify terms broadly expanding the Russian official definition of prosecutable extremism as part of its ongoing effort to criminally prosecute and stymie domestic opposition to the Kremlin and its war in Ukraine.
- Kursk Oblast officials appointed a critical Russian milblogger to an advisory role within the regional government, likely as part of wider Kremlin efforts to appease critical commentators by granting them certain reputational concessions in exchange for their increased informational loyalty.
- Ukrainian forces conducted drone strikes against Russian oil infrastructure in Krasnodar Krai and a military air base in Rostov Oblast on July 22.
- Georgian authorities reportedly placed roughly 300 Georgian citizens who have served as volunteers in the Georgian Legion alongside Ukrainian forces on Georgia's wanted list.
- Russian forces recently advanced near Vovchansk, Siversk, Toretsk, and Donetsk City.
7. Israel–Hamas War (Iran) Update, July 22, 2024
Israel–Hamas War (Iran) Update, July 22, 2024
https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/iran-update-july-22-2024
Key Takeaways:
- Iraq: US and Iraqi officials began talks on July 22 in Washington, DC, to continue negotiations over the end of the International Coalition’s mission in Iraq.
- Gaza Strip: The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) 98th Division launched a new clearing operation in Khan Younis on July 22 to disrupt Hamas’ efforts to reconstitute in the governorate.
- West Bank: The Shin Bet said on July 22 that it uncovered a plot by Palestinian fighters to kidnap IDF soldiers and Israeli civilians in the West Bank.
- Lebanon: A Wall Street Journal report on July 22 highlighted challenges that Israel faces intercepting drones targeting northern Israel.
8. To Secure the Red Sea, Sink Iran’s Navy
To Secure the Red Sea, Sink Iran’s Navy
Attacking the Houthis hasn’t kept up with the pace of Tehran’s resupply effort.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/american-and-israeli-failure-to-reopen-the-red-sea-houthis-iran-resupply-effort-2f48973f?utm_medium=social
By Shay Khatiri
July 22, 2024 5:31 pm ET
Smoke rises from an explosion on a tanker ship attacked by the Houthis in the Red Sea. PHOTO: HOUTHIS MEDIA CENTER HANDOUT/SHUTTERSTOCK
Three consecutive U.S. administrations have failed to resolve the problem of Iranian-backed Houthi militia in Yemen—a failure demonstrated by the Iran-made drone that killed an Israeli in Tel Aviv this month, striking near the U.S. Consulate. The main cause of this American failure has been a lack of will, arising from fear that Iran would unleash its proxies on the U.S. It’s time to cut supply lines to the Houthis by imitating the Reagan administration, which sank roughly half of Iran’s navy in 1988, ending Iran’s assaults on oil tankers and convincing it to end the war with Iraq.
The U.S. has tried several strategies to defeat the Houthis. In 2015, Washington began to provide support for a Saudi-Emirati campaign against the militia. After six years, the campaign had made little progress and was a humanitarian catastrophe, leading the Biden administration to end support for the Arab partners in 2021. The recent drone attack shows the failure of the campaign to reopen the Red Sea and America’s broader Yemen policy.
The U.S. and its partners haven’t been able to degrade Houthi assets faster than Iran supplies them. The halting of the Saudi-Emirati assault, combined with the de facto lifting of U.S. sanctions on Iran, allowed the Houthis to grow stronger between 2021 and 2024. Following Hamas’s attack on Israel in October, the Houthis rushed to assist the Palestinians. They began by targeting the Israeli homeland and contributing to Iran’s missile and drone barrage against Israel in April. No missile launched from Yemen landed in Israel, thanks to Israeli air defense and assistance from American, European and Arab governments. But another Houthi strategy has been more successful: targeting commercial shipping through the Red Sea.
The U.S. attempted to address this through Operation Prosperity Guardian, a multinational coalition aiming to reopen the Red Sea. This effort has been a humiliating failure. Israel responded to the recent drone attack by striking Houthi targets inside Yemen. But even if Israel can deter further direct attacks, the Houthis’ Red Sea strategy will continue to harm global commerce and thereby hurt Israeli interests.
Israel must recognize that degrading Houthi capabilities alone won’t succeed. The Saudis, Emiratis and Americans can attest to this. Iran will continue to supply the Houthis faster than their military assets can be destroyed.
America saw this effect in Afghanistan, where Pakistan resupplied the Taliban. The Afghans lacked the capability to take the fight directly to Pakistan and the U.S., for its own reasons, preferred not to. A successful strategy must cut off the supply of weapons to the Houthis, taking the fight directly to Iran.
Iran has no land access to Yemen, and so all supplies to the Houthis must leave Iran by sea. The primary route is through Oman. Iran’s ships cross the Sea of Oman southward and land in northern Oman, where local tribes, with which Iran has cultivated relations, aid the transit. Other routes include exiting the Sea of Oman into the Arabian Sea and arriving in southern Oman or Yemen. To end this trade, someone needs to patrol the Sea of Oman—an expensive task for which the small Israeli navy is unequipped and that the overstretched U.S. Navy can’t undertake without cutting vital commitments elsewhere.
The alternative is for the U.S. to sink Iran’s navy. This carries the risk of escalation, but history shows that Iran typically backs down when attacked. Iran backtracked in 1988, after the Reagan administration sank roughly half of its navy, and in 2020, after the Trump administration killed Qasem Soleimani, which halted Iran’s proxy attacks for months. And when Israel responded to the April barrage by attacking Iran on its own soil, Tehran didn’t retaliate.
The key to ending the Houthis’ assaults on Israel and commercial shipping is interrupting their ability to restock. That will require attacking the Iranian ships that are supplying the weapons. This strategy carries risks, but defeat is the only risk-free strategy. The U.S. and Israel stand to lose the most from the continued blockade of the Red Sea. If they don’t start protecting their own interests, they will face a failure similar to the U.S. failure in Afghanistan.
Mr. Khatiri is a vice president and senior fellow of the Yorktown Institute.
WSJ Opinion: Roger Wicker Sounds the Alarm on Fading U.S. Defenses
WSJ Opinion: Roger Wicker Sounds the Alarm on Fading U.S. Defenses
Play video: WSJ Opinion: Roger Wicker Sounds the Alarm on Fading U.S. Defenses
Review and Outlook: Mississippi Sen. Roger Wicker, the ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, is pushing much higher defense spending to meet the growing threats from China, Russia, Iran and North Korea. Image: Mc2 Evan Mueller/US Navy/Zuma Press
9. Israel Risks All-Out War With Hezbollah. A Truce in Gaza May Reduce That Threat.
Israel Risks All-Out War With Hezbollah. A Truce in Gaza May Reduce That Threat.
After nine months of low-level conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, the risk of all-out war is higher than ever. A cease-fire in Gaza would provide an offramp for both sides, diplomats say.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/22/world/middleeast/israel-hezbollah-gaza-war.html
A soldier with the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon inspecting a house destroyed last week by an Israeli attack in Yarine, in southern Lebanon.Credit...Diego Ibarra Sanchez for The New York Times
By Patrick Kingsley and Euan Ward
Patrick Kingsley reported from Jerusalem, and Euan Ward from Beirut, Lebanon.
July 22, 2024
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For nine months, Israel and Hezbollah, an Iran-backed militia that dominates southern Lebanon, have fought a low-level conflict that has edged closer to an all-out war. Since October, both sides have fired thousands of missiles across the Israel-Lebanon border, wrecking towns, killing hundreds, displacing hundreds of thousands and leading both to threaten to invade the other.
Now, mediators between the two sides hope that a truce in Gaza could provide the impetus for a similar drawdown along the Israel-Lebanon border, even as the risk of escalation there remains higher than ever.
An ally of Hamas, Hezbollah has said it will stop firing rockets if Israel halts its war with Hamas in Gaza. If that happens, both Israel and Hezbollah have signaled to interlocutors that they would be prepared to begin negotiations for a formal truce, according to three Western officials briefed on the sides’ positions and an Israeli official. The officials all spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to speak more freely.
Those negotiations would focus on the withdrawal of Hezbollah fighters from the southernmost areas of Lebanon and the deployment of more soldiers from Lebanon’s official military, according to the officials. The talks would also focus on how to demarcate the westernmost parts of the border between the two countries, the officials said; the border has never formally been delineated because the two countries have no diplomatic relationship.
Even if those negotiations ultimately failed, the hope is that their initiation could provide the sides with an excuse to maintain an informal cease-fire and give displaced residents the confidence to return home, the officials said.
Israel and Hezbollah’s openness to such negotiations reflects how, despite their retaliatory strikes and public rhetoric, both sides appear to be privately looking for an offramp that would allow them to de-escalate without losing face. Amos Hochstein, a U.S. envoy, and top French officials have shuttled between the two countries in recent months, trying to coax each side toward an informal truce.
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Searching a destroyed building after Israeli aircraft struck in Tyre, Lebanon, in 2006.Credit...Tyler Hicks/The New York Times
Their efforts have failed to stop the fighting, but some diplomats have become more optimistic about the situation since Mr. Hochstein’s most recent visit in June. Mr. Hochstein built trust in both Israel and Lebanon in 2022 when he successfully encouraged the two countries to delineate their maritime border.
The sides last fought a major land war in 2006, in a monthlong conflict in which Israel devastated large parts of Beirut, the Lebanese capital, and southern Lebanon. The scale of the destruction led Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, to subsequently concede that his group would not have kidnapped and killed several Israeli soldiers that summer had it known it would set off such carnage.
Another big war would be far more damaging for both sides. Nearly two decades later, Hezbollah is considered one of the world’s most heavily armed nonstate actors. U.S. government experts estimate that Hezbollah has a stockpile of more than 150,000 rockets, drones and missiles. Those could be used to take out Israel’s power grid, according to a recent warning from the head of a state-owned Israeli electricity company.
“Neither side really wants a bigger war because they understand the huge damage that it would cause their countries,” said Thomas R. Nides, a former United States ambassador to Israel. “The problem is that wars are caused by miscalculations. And by trying to deter each other from escalating, they risk making a miscalculation that does the opposite of what they intended.”
Roughly 100,000 people in Lebanon and 60,000 in Israel have been displaced, with scores of schools and health centers shuttered in both countries.
More than 460 people in Lebanon have been killed, most of them militants. More than 100 were civilians, including 12 children and 21 health workers, according to the U.N. and Lebanon’s Health Ministry. Strikes on Israel have killed 21 Israeli soldiers and eight civilians, according to the Israeli government.
The chances of a miscalculation have risen in recent weeks as both sides have tested each other with particularly provocative attacks and statements.
And the threat of a regional escalation was highlighted by a drone strike on Tel Aviv on Friday that was claimed by the Houthis, a Yemeni militia backed by Iran. Israel responded by striking the Yemeni port of Hudaydah on Saturday, and the Houthis fired a missile toward Israel on Sunday.
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Israeli soldiers securing a road in the Israeli-annexed Golan Heights this month amid continuing cross-border clashes between Israeli troops and Hezbollah fighters.Credit...Jalaa Marey/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Since the start of June, the Israeli military has killed two senior Hezbollah commanders and said it had finalized plans for an “offensive” in Lebanon. Israel’s foreign minister, Israel Katz, said the country was “very close to the moment of decision to change the rules against Hezbollah and Lebanon.”
“In an all-out war,” he said, “Hezbollah will be destroyed and Lebanon will be severely hit.”
During the same period, Hezbollah has fired two of its largest barrages since the start of the war, sending hundreds of rockets into Israel. It taunted Israelis by broadcasting aerial footage of the Israeli city of Haifa, filmed from a drone that seemed to have evaded Israel’s air defense system. Shortly afterward, Mr. Nasrallah said an invasion of northern Israel remained “on the table.”
So far, the exchange of fire has followed a loose logic: The deeper one side strikes inside the other’s territory, the deeper the response will be. Initially, that allowed for a relatively contained conflict, with strikes limited to a few miles of the border area. But nine months into the fighting, both sides have gradually extended their range of fire: Israel is now striking 60 miles north of the border, while Hezbollah’s deepest strike hit roughly 25 miles inside Israel.“Both sides are playing on the edge,” said Gen. Mounir Shehadeh, a former liaison between the Lebanese government and U.N. peacekeeping forces in Lebanon. “Any uncalculated mistake could lead to things slipping out of hand into a full-scale war.”
For now, though, their threats can be construed as attempts to deter each other, rather than as cast-iron pledges to invade, analysts said.
For example, Hezbollah’s slick propaganda videos often appear to be directed at making ordinary Israelis understand the cost of an all-out war. The group often posts speeches by Mr. Nasrallah and accompanies them with Hebrew subtitles and footage of strikes on sensitive Israeli fortifications.
“
Whoever thinks of war against us will regret it,” read a Hebrew caption at the end of a video of a recent speech by Mr. Nasrallah.
“Your tanks will be your graves,” read another recent Hezbollah video addressed to Israeli soldiers.
Through articulating such threats, Hezbollah hopes it can avoid having to put them into action, according to Mohanad Hage Ali, a Beirut-based fellow for the Carnegie Middle East Center, an American research group.
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Female supporters of Hezbollah watching a televised speech given by Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, in May near Beirut.Credit...Diego Ibarra Sanchez for The New York Times
“Their focus is showcasing more what they can do rather than actually inflicting harm on the Israelis,” Mr. Hage Ali said.
“Hezbollah wants to avoid an all-out war for a reason that is Lebanon’s own fragility,” he said. “Now what remains for Hezbollah is to have a face-saving exit strategy.”
As well as a militia, Hezbollah is a powerful political force in Lebanon. Analysts say that the group fears losing that social influence if it is deemed by the Lebanese public to have dragged the country into an unnecessary and disastrous war.
Iran, Hezbollah’s patron, also fears a major war that could damage its biggest regional proxy, analysts and officials say. To protect Hezbollah, Iran wants a cease-fire in Gaza because it thinks it could lead to a cease-fire between Israel and Hezbollah, according to an Arab official briefed on Iran’s position, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomacy.
Publicly, Iran has ramped up its rhetoric. In June, it threatened an “obliterating war” if Israel launched a full-scale attack in Lebanon and said that “all options,” including the involvement of Iran-backed armed groups across the Middle East, “are on the table.”
In Israel, the government needs a pretext to return tens of thousands of civilians who evacuated the area bordering Lebanon in October.
A bigger war with Hezbollah could eventually provide that pretext: By invading Lebanon, the Israeli government could tell domestic audiences that it had pushed Hezbollah away from the border, even if analysts are skeptical that such an outcome is possible.
But such an approach is a big gamble. Top Israeli generals privately believe that their forces, though capable of fighting a larger war, are not in an optimal state for one. They are running low on some munitions and spare parts, while fewer reservists are reporting for duty.
Still, the risk of an escalation is so high because both sides have already sustained considerable losses, making it harder for either side to back down. And while regional officials remain hopeful that a cease-fire in Gaza can prompt a truce in Lebanon, there is no clear route to de-escalation if the talks over Gaza fail.
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A strike in the Upper Galilee region of northern Israel by a rocket fired from southern Lebanon on Sunday.Credit...Jalaa Marey/Agence France-Presse via Getty Images
Hwaida Saad contributed reporting from Beirut, Lebanon, and Adam Rasgon from Doha, Qatar.
Patrick Kingsley is The Times’s Jerusalem bureau chief, leading coverage of Israel, Gaza and the West Bank. More about Patrick Kingsley
Euan Ward is a reporter contributing to The Times from Beirut. More about Euan Ward
A version of this article appears in print on July 23, 2024, Section A, Page 4 of the New York edition with the headline: The Battle Lurking In Israel’s North. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
See more on: Israel-Hamas War News, Hezbollah, Hamas, Hassan Nasrallah
10. War, Adaptation and AI by Mick Ryan
And we should heed the quote from Sir Michael Howard below.
Excerpts:
Creativity, innovation, a tolerance of failure, and the capability to quickly learn from failure are important ingredients in any effective adaptive stance in 21st century military institutions. This can be improved with AI-enabled adaptation. But it will also demand investment and experimentation in an array of different algorithms, processing and communications technologies as well as cultural evolution to improve adaptation that informs military decision making. Experimentation and testing will be necessary, and this is likely to be an ongoing requirement in any organisation that has a learning culture.
Before concluding, one final issue should be re-emphasised. The transformation the learning cultures and adaptive processes required in contemporary military institutions will often have little to do with technology. The many technologies, including data management, communications technologies, and AI, comprise an important capability.
But the larger and most important role in improving learning and adaptation through AI is actually that of humans. The success or otherwise of enhanced adaptation through AI support will be almost entirely driven by human decision-making, processes and culture. As such, my paper is heavily biased towards the human aspects of an AI-enabled approach to adaptation. I look forward to being able to share the full paper on AI-enabled adaptation with you in due course.
THE FUTURE OF WAR
War, Adaptation and AI
Algorithmic Support to Military Adaptation in Peace and War - a discussion about a new paper that I am presenting at a Canberra seminar this week
https://mickryan.substack.com/p/war-adaptation-and-ai?utm
MICK RYAN
JUL 23, 2024
Image: ANU
I am tempted to declare that whatever doctrine the Armed Forces are working on now, they have got it wrong…it does not matter that they have got it wrong. What matters is their capacity to get it right quickly when the moment arrives. Sir Michael Howard, 1974
This week, I am spending some time in Canberra, Australia at a workshop that is exploring Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its application in decision-making about the use of force in warfare. I have been fortunate to have been able to participate in this Australian National University-Harvard Belfer Center collaboration over the past couple of years. In previous years I have also participated in similar workshops.
I have done this because I want to better understand AI and its potentially impacts on how humans are informed, and how they make military and strategic decisions, before, during and after wars.
I explored this issue in my book, War Transformed, and then also wrote about it in the follow up published last year, White Sun War: The Campaign for Taiwan. Even before these were published, I had been dipping my toe in this debate for some time. In 2019, I wrote a piece for the Australian Journal for Defence and Strategic Studies that explored how AI might be applied. In that piece, I described how:
The relentless speed of change and the complexity of the strategic environment militaries will increasingly be required to operate in defies human capacity to adapt… Given the enormous complexity of this problem, enhancing biological sources of the intellectual edge with silicon-based intelligence—AI— appears to offer one pathway to an enhanced advantage for nations in the 21st century as it brings together the macro-sources of technology and intellectual advantage.
Other explorations I have conducted into the interaction of AI and warfare over the past few years have included how AI will impact professional military education, reading lists for military personnel on AI, as well as a short series of fictional stories and an illustrated story on how humans might eventually be intellectually augmented with AI.
Image: From “Urquhart Redux” in Destination Unknown, Vol. 2, USMC, 2020
It is probably fair to state that military institutions are still at very immature states when it comes to the absorption of AI. While there are a multitude of trials with different kinds of AI taking place, from weapon systems to battle command and control to logistics and personnel management, much remains to be done to wrangle the necessary data, integrate AI into military processes and importantly, build trust in the application of AI among military personnel.
The war in Ukraine has provided an intensive experimental environment for AI. A variety of functions have been augmented, improved or invented through the use of AI since the beginning of the war. A recent story by The Economist explored many different applications of AI that included aiding Ukrainian prosecutors to find those responsible for warcrimes through to better targeting processes. Time Magazine has explored how large western companies have used Ukraine as a laboratory to test their products while also assisting the Ukrainian war efforts.
The Center for a New American Security and the International Institute for Strategic Studies have both produced reports with useful insights that examine improvements to Ukrainian targeting processes, and other battlefield awareness functions, through the application of AI. The Global Governance Institute has examined how Ukraine uses AI to combat Russian regional and global propaganda activities. The Center for Strategic and International Studies has explored the use of AI in military wargaming, as has the RAND Corporation. There are many other articles and reports that have been published on this subject.
Against this background, I am presenting a paper in Canberra this week on how AI might be applied to an important individual and institutional function in war: learning and adaptation.
Learning, Adaptation and AI
Learning and adaptation is one of the ways that good military commanders, and smart military institutions, seek to reduce uncertainty and the potential for tactical and strategic surprise. But, as the history of military affairs demonstrates, not every military organisation possesses the learning cultures necessary to recognise the need for change and then conduct disciplined, multi-level adaptation to improve their effectiveness. This requires many different leadership, training, educational, technological and cultural components that are practiced in peace, and provide a foundation for an institution to be reflexively adaptive when war occurs.
Every wartime decision can and should be informed by previous decisions, and thus, can be improved through effective adaptive cultures. This might be improved further through AI decision-support tools.
Key wartime decisions that might be impacted by AI-enabled adaptation processes include decisions on the ethical use of force, balancing tactical and strategic forces, achieving an optimal force structure of crewed and uncrewed systems, prioritising munitions, equipment and personnel as well as a wide gamut of training and education initiatives. Depending on the level of data available, AI might also be employed to provide better risk calculations and estimates of casualties to improve decision-making about risk-benefit in the tactical, operational, strategic and even political arenas.
But learning and adaptation is also important in military institutions outside of wartime.
War is normally only a small proportion in the life of any military institution. Many military personnel spend their entire careers in military services without conducting a wartime deployment. Of greater pertinence, the processes, technologies, leadership philosophies and cultures incentivised in an organisation between wars provides the foundations for military effectiveness and adaptation during wars. The military institution that a nation begins a war with is almost never the military institution that it wins with.
Image: USNI website.
The wars in Ukraine and Gaza have provided examples of how humans have recognised problems at the tactical, strategic and political levels, and then produced solutions that are aimed at enhancing their chances of success. Uncrewed systems have been at the forefront of many examinations of adaptation in this war, but there are other examples.
The Ukrainian capacity to mesh civil and military sensor networks and analytical capacity on the battlefield, in the air defence environment and in other national security endeavours is another example of institutional adaptation. Russian improvements in electronic warfare capacity to degrade the performance of western precision munitions and minimise the impact of Ukrainian drones on the frontline is another example.
At the same time however, this process can be flawed, subverted or just plain inept. The sharing of battlefield lessons is often insufficiently automated, and sometimes compromised because of time or individual leadership shortfalls. The strategic collation and assessment of battlefield lessons and then turning this into new capability can be hindered by lack of time or focus, institutional cultures, computational resource shortfalls or the lack of established learning processes. Much of the analysis that is relevant to military adaptation continues to be a laborious human endeavour.
In the Russian system, collecting and sharing lessons is exacerbated by a fear of reporting failure and a culture of centralised command. This was examined in a Royal United Services Institute report on preliminary lessons from the war in November 2022. The report described how the ‘reporting culture’ of the Russian Army was deficient because it “does not encourage honest reporting of failures.” Anyone who is perceived to have failed is normally replaced or punished.
The adaptive capacity of a military institution and its ability to adapt its battlefield tactics as well as its strategic warfighting functions is critical to success in war. But the pace of war, and the speed of change in the geostrategic environment beyond warfare, means that contemporary approaches to learning, adaptation and decision-making must be improved.
Many military institutions have realised the theoretical value of AI in improving decisions and the overall effectiveness of their organisations. Some are yet to fully realise this value, although countries such as the U.S., Britain, Canada, and Australia all possess AI strategies which they are in various stages of implementing.
The most recent additions to this panoply of strategies are the 2024 NATO AI Strategy which was released during the Washington Summit on 10 July 2024 and the U.S. Marine Corps AI Strategy which was released on the same day.
Adaptation and AI: Building a Meshed Human-AI Adaptive Capacity
My paper this week proposes an evolved concept for multi-level, individual and institutional military adaptation, through the fusion of new learning processes and AI to speed up and enhance the quality of military adaptation and strategic decision-making. This transformation of the learning cultures and processes in military institutions has very little to do with technology, however.
The larger and most important role is played by humans. The success of enhanced adaptation through AI support will be almost entirely driven by human decision-making, processes and culture. For institutions to apply AI to improve the quality and speed of their learning and adaptation related to decision-making, I believe there are five key areas that require reform:
1. Set (and evolve) Measures of Effectiveness. If AI-enabled adaptive capacity is to work effectively, measures of military effectiveness to guide which direction adaptation might take. These need to be developed at the tactical, operational and strategic levels to guide development and implementation of AI-enabled adaptation.
2. Know where adaptation relevant data is found, stored and shared. An enhanced adaptive stance in military institutions must have enhanced data awareness as a foundation. Institutional measures will be an important element, but so too will data discipline in tactical units and by individuals. As such, data awareness and management will need to become one of the basic disciplines taught to military personnel.
3. Explicitly Embrace adaptation. Senior institutional leaders must nurture people and formations that are actively learning and capable of changing where it is safe and effective to do so. This culture must begin with clear statements about the leadership environment, and its tolerance for risk and new ideas.
4. Scale AI support from individual to institution. There is unlikely to be a one-size fits all algorithm or process that can enhance learning and adaptation at every level of military endeavours. A virtual arms room of adaptation support algorithms will be necessary in an institution-wide approach to adaptation.
5. Military process and doctrine stripping and reform. The observation and absorption of lessons needs to be part of normal military interaction rather than a separate and parallel ecosystem that often has difficulty inserting itself into strategic decision making. Tactical learning must connect to and inform strategic learning. Human processes and committees must evolve to improve this interaction.
Better Military Adaption in Peace and War Through AI
An important virtue in contemporary and future military institutions is the ability to develop adaptive processes in peacetime that can then be applied at multiple levels during war. Succeeding in the adaptation battle is founded on robust institutional learning, and is a central military function in war and peace.
Creativity, innovation, a tolerance of failure, and the capability to quickly learn from failure are important ingredients in any effective adaptive stance in 21st century military institutions. This can be improved with AI-enabled adaptation. But it will also demand investment and experimentation in an array of different algorithms, processing and communications technologies as well as cultural evolution to improve adaptation that informs military decision making. Experimentation and testing will be necessary, and this is likely to be an ongoing requirement in any organisation that has a learning culture.
Before concluding, one final issue should be re-emphasised. The transformation the learning cultures and adaptive processes required in contemporary military institutions will often have little to do with technology. The many technologies, including data management, communications technologies, and AI, comprise an important capability.
But the larger and most important role in improving learning and adaptation through AI is actually that of humans. The success or otherwise of enhanced adaptation through AI support will be almost entirely driven by human decision-making, processes and culture. As such, my paper is heavily biased towards the human aspects of an AI-enabled approach to adaptation. I look forward to being able to share the full paper on AI-enabled adaptation with you in due course.
11. Countering Chinese Aggression in the South China Sea
Excerpts:
Even if these efforts come to fruition, however, the U.S.-Philippine alliance will remain vulnerable because Manila’s military and coast guard are extremely weak, a problem that won’t be solved for years, if ever. Bolstering the alliance thus will require the United States to become more directly involved in confronting Chinese coercion in the South China Sea. The United States could, for example, convoy Philippine resupply missions to the BRP Sierra Madre at Second Thomas Shoal or simply use U.S. ships to resupply the base there. These efforts could be backed up by multinational patrols involving other regional allies such as Japan and Australia. Bullying the Philippines might not look so attractive to Xi if coercion consistently yielded a tightening ring of allied security cooperation. These steps obviously carry risks for U.S. forces.
The agreement this past weekend, will purportedly allow the Philippines to temporarily conduct resupply missions to the BRP Sierra Madre without militarized interference, while China maintains its claim that the atoll is firmly within Chinese territorial water. As the text of this agreement has yet to be made public, we cannot firmly say how these gains were won, but it is possible that the recent strengthening of the U.S.-Philippines alliance, or even explicit offers from the United States to assist in defending the atoll have caused China to reconsider its aggressive stance. However, agreements with China built on détente have historically failed to achieve their goals. If recent history is any guide, the best way to avoid a further escalation of the conflict in the South China Sea is to make clear that Beijing cannot conquer the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone at anything like an acceptable cost.
Countering Chinese Aggression in the South China Sea - War on the Rocks
SIMON WEISS AND MICHAEL BECKLEY
warontherocks.com · by Simon Weiss · July 23, 2024
Over the weekend, the Philippines and China, which have been locked in a tense stand-off around the Second Thomas Shoal for months announced an agreement to deescalate tensions. While potentially positive, we believe that the long-term risk of conflict in the South China Sea remains alarmingly high. Our new dataset shows that China’s military coercion is more rampant than previously documented and disproportionately directed at the Philippines, the weakest link in the chain of U.S. alliances in Asia.
Recent skirmishes near Second Thomas Shoal, an obscure reef about 100 miles west of the Philippines’ Palawan Island, have brought this issue into sharp focus. The Philippines maintains a precarious military presence there, using a rusty shipwreck as a makeshift base for a handful of marines. An international court ruled in 2016 that the area lies within the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone. But China rejected the ruling and has repeatedly attempted to block resupply missions to the outpost by blinding Philippine crew members with high-powered lasers, ramming supply ships, and blasting them with water cannons.
These aggressive acts, and dozens of others going back to 2012, have not been primarily defensive reactions to foreign provocations, as China claims. Instead, they appear to be part of a premeditated assault on the soft underbelly of the U.S. alliance system, an attempt to undermine the credibility of U.S. security guarantees throughout the region by bludgeoning Philippine forces with impunity.
The Rodrigo Duterte administration (2016–2022) tried to shelve its territorial disputes with Beijing at various times and threatened to scuttle the U.S.-Philippine alliance. Yet Chinese military coercion toward the Philippines actually increased during Duterte’s term in office and was more intense than the coercion China directed at Vietnam — despite the fact that Hanoi aggressively expanded its military presence in the South China Sea. China also has harassed the Philippines more frequently than Japan, implying that China’s preferred target is a weak and floundering U.S. alliance rather than a strong one.
In sum, a comprehensive account of Chinese military coercion since 2012 suggests that Beijing’s behavior should be confronted rather than accommodated to avoid further escalation.
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A History of Violence
China engaged in military coercion, ranging from seizing civilian vessels in contested waters to occupying new territory with military force, at least 132 times from 2012 to 2022 — a frequency roughly four times greater than previously estimated by scholars and an order of magnitude greater than any other country in the region. China has begun a new physical confrontation with its neighbors once per month on average, using all manner of hostile acts, including firing warning shots near foreign vessels or blocking their passage. China also paired this harassment with a dramatic expansion of its military presence across the South China Sea, including the construction of seven military bases atop artificial islands.
China claims it is simply defending its territory against foreign encroachments, engaging in what some Western analysts have called “reactive assertiveness.” In this view, which seemed plausible to some Sinologists in the early 2010s, China’s top leaders generally desire to avoid hostilities and employ coercion mainly in response to provocations from neighboring countries and the United States. The implication is that China might remain at peace, if other countries would cease their threatening and expansionist behavior.
The new data, however, suggests that this view is outdated, if it were ever true. Since at least 2012, China’s behavior in the South China Sea and East China Sea could be more accurately described as unprovoked aggression. Only 12 percent of China’s coercive acts were preceded by any sort of perceived hostile foreign move, such as when then Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan in August of 2022. The remaining 88 percent of Chinese coercive acts were opportunistic, employed against vulnerable targets at times and in places of China’s choosing. More often than not, that place was the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone, a fact that underscores the grand geopolitical ambitions behind China’s fierce contestation of uninhabited rocks.
Targeting the Philippines
A decrepit ship in the Spratly Islands might seem an unlikely place for the world’s two most powerful countries to face off. But the United States has extended security guarantees to Philippine forces, aircraft, and public vessels operating in the South China Sea, presumably including the BRP Sierra Madre, which the Philippines deliberately ran aground on Second Thomas Shoal in 1999 — and which China has recently attempted to blockade. What might otherwise be a local territorial dispute has become a test of whether the United States will defend its allies, and for Beijing that seems to be the point.
Coercing the Philippines enables China to confront the United States with a dilemma: defend a weak and shaky ally over its territorial claims or stand aside as China expands its control of the South China Sea and undermines U.S. alliance commitments. China could wipe out the two frigates and handful of corvettes that comprise the Philippine Navy in a single skirmish, so there is little risk for Beijing in shoving Philippine forces around — and potentially much to gain. The U.S.-Philippine alliance is a vital component of the U.S. defense perimeter in Asia, providing U.S. forces with their only major bases within unrefueled combat range of the Taiwan Strait and South China Sea, besides the two vulnerable bases on Okinawa, Japan that China has targeted with dozens of missiles. Yet the U.S.-Philippine alliance has often been tenuous since the Cold War, and Beijing has good reason to question how vigorously the United States would defend Filipino possessions in the South China Sea. “Would you go to war over Scarborough Shoals?” the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was overheard saying in 2016. Every time China batters Philippine forces unopposed, it shows observers worldwide that America’s answer is “no.”
In addition, the Philippines is a symbolically important target for China. In 2016, Manila took Beijing to the Permanent Court of Arbitration in the Hague and won, with the tribunal ruling that China’s South China Sea claims were null and void. In response, China declared that it would not be bound by the rulings of a “puppet” court half a world away. Ejecting Filipino forces from their isolated South China Sea outposts enables China to back up that declaration in dramatic fashion and demonstrate resolve to consolidate its territorial claims throughout the region.
Perhaps for these reasons, China seems to be singling out the Philippines for special abuse. The contrast with Vietnam is striking. Over the past decade, Vietnam has aggressively contested Chinese territorial claims, openly challenging the legitimacy of China’s self-proclaimed Nine-Dash Line, such as by sending armed naval assets to counter the Chinese Coast Guard during the 2014 oil-rig standoff. Yet the Philippines has faced far more Chinese coercion since 2012 measured both by the duration and intensity of the confrontations. The Philippines is the only country in the region to have had territory permanently seized by China during this period, as occurred following the Scarborough Shoal incident in 2012. Dozens of Philippine fishing vessels have been sunk, robbed, or turned away from their traditional fishing grounds, thousands of Chinese flagged maritime-militia vessels have illegally operated in waters belonging to the Philippines, and nearly every military mission conducted by the Philippine navy has been met by resistance from Chinese forces.
The Philippines also has experienced more than twice the amount of Chinese coercion as has Japan — China’s hated historical enemy — and most of China’s confrontations with Japan in recent years have been non-kinetic, involving, for example, Chinese military flyovers of Japanese airspace rather than the ship-ramming, territorial seizure, and other violent punishment that Beijing has meted out to Manila.
Japan has strengthened its military forces and alliance with the United States in recent years and is much more militarily powerful than the Philippines. Those factors may explain why Beijing has focused more of its animus on Manila than Tokyo. Whereas the Philippines sought to appease China during the 2010s, Japan increased its joint military exercises with the United States, expanded the rotational presence of U.S. forces in Japan, and enhanced their integrated air and missile defense systems — all while reviving the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue as a not-so-subtle anti-China alliance. These steps signaled to Beijing that aggressive actions, such as the frequent confrontations between Chinese and Japanese forces near the Senkaku Islands in the early 2010s, will inspire a robust strategic response from Tokyo.
Duterte’s Failed Appeasement
China’s targeting of the Philippines is especially notable because Manila tried to placate China, off and on, from 2016 to 2022. Duterte chose not to enforce the 2016 arbitration ruling on the South China Sea, opting instead for bilateral engagement and joint development discussions with China. His administration prioritized economic cooperation, securing billions in investment pledges for infrastructure projects by linking his “Build, Build, Build” program with China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Duterte made multiple visits to China, emphasizing collaboration and downplaying territorial disputes. He frequently praised China’s support, once stating, “I simply love Xi Jinping,” and highlighted the benefits of Chinese investment for the Philippines.
Simultaneously, Duterte’s stance towards the United States was characterized by frequent criticism and actions that strained bilateral relations. He insulted then-President Barack Obama with derogatory remarks, calling him a “son of a whore,” and expressed a desire for the U.S. to “go to hell.” Duterte also threatened to terminate the Visiting Forces Agreement, which governs the presence of U.S. troops in the Philippines, declaring, “Bye-bye, America” and hinting at seeking arms from Russia and China instead. While he ultimately suspended and then reinstated the agreement, the threat highlighted his intent to distance the Philippines from its longstanding military ally. Duterte also reduced the scope of joint military exercises with the United States, sought to diversify military procurement by exploring arms purchases from China and Russia, and suspended joint patrols in the South China Sea.
Despite Duterte’s rhetoric and actions favoring China, his policy of appeasement failed to reduce hostilities. In fact, Beijing instead dialed up its coercion of the Philippines during his administration, increasing the yearly rate of incursions into the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone. In addition, this time saw the emergence of new areas of contestation as China deployed ships around the Second Thomas Shoal, Whitsun Reef, Sabina Shoal, and Thitu Island — all of which are located within the Philippines exclusive economic zone — and regularly harassed Filipino fisherman.
Duterte’s failed gambit shouldn’t have come as a surprise. In 2012, the United States attempted to mollify China on behalf of the Philippines by brokering an agreement for both countries to withdraw their forces from a contested area near the Scarborough Shoal. The Philippines respected the arrangement and removed its ships from the area. But the Chinese navy quickly returned, and has maintained de facto sovereignty over it ever since. Scholars found that due to this lackluster response, the Chinese government determined that the United States was unlikely to follow up on its redlines towards these uninhabited territories and saw it as a green light to expand operations across the South China Sea.
Implications
China’s actions in the South China Sea seem to weaken U.S. alliances by targeting the most vulnerable links, primarily the Philippines. The empirical record since 2012 suggests that avoiding confrontations and appeasing China does not guarantee a reduction in hostilities and may simply invite more coercion. By contrast, strengthening military capabilities and alliance ties can potentially deter further Chinese encroachments, as the bolstering of the U.S.-Japanese alliance seems to have done in the East China Sea. Currently, the U.S.-Philippine alliance is in the worst of all positions: provocative enough to arouse China’s ire, but too weak to deter China’s rampant use of maritime coercion.
Since 2022, Manila and Washington have started to rectify their vulnerabilities by resuming military exercises, preparing additional bases for potential use by U.S. forces, and transferring military equipment from the United States to Philippine forces, including reconnaissance drones, coastal patrol vessels, and radar systems. The United States also has temporarily deployed a mid-range missile system in the northern Philippines for annual joint military exercises. Prominent U.S. think tanks are proposing ways to enhance the Philippines’ maritime domain awareness and coast guard capabilities — for example, by transferring advanced surveillance technologies, including unmanned systems, and non-lethal capabilities such as water cannons, laser dazzlers, and long-range acoustic devices — so that Manila can impose costs on Beijing’s aggressive tactics without requiring the United States to answer the difficult question of which peripheral territories it is willing to defend itself.
Even if these efforts come to fruition, however, the U.S.-Philippine alliance will remain vulnerable because Manila’s military and coast guard are extremely weak, a problem that won’t be solved for years, if ever. Bolstering the alliance thus will require the United States to become more directly involved in confronting Chinese coercion in the South China Sea. The United States could, for example, convoy Philippine resupply missions to the BRP Sierra Madre at Second Thomas Shoal or simply use U.S. ships to resupply the base there. These efforts could be backed up by multinational patrols involving other regional allies such as Japan and Australia. Bullying the Philippines might not look so attractive to Xi if coercion consistently yielded a tightening ring of allied security cooperation. These steps obviously carry risks for U.S. forces.
The agreement this past weekend, will purportedly allow the Philippines to temporarily conduct resupply missions to the BRP Sierra Madre without militarized interference, while China maintains its claim that the atoll is firmly within Chinese territorial water. As the text of this agreement has yet to be made public, we cannot firmly say how these gains were won, but it is possible that the recent strengthening of the U.S.-Philippines alliance, or even explicit offers from the United States to assist in defending the atoll have caused China to reconsider its aggressive stance. However, agreements with China built on détente have historically failed to achieve their goals. If recent history is any guide, the best way to avoid a further escalation of the conflict in the South China Sea is to make clear that Beijing cannot conquer the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone at anything like an acceptable cost.
Become a Member
Simon Weiss holds a bachelor’s degree in international relations from Tufts University with a focus area on U.S. foreign policy and the trilateral relationship between the United States, China, and Taiwan. He is the original creator of this dataset.
Michael Beckley is associate professor of political science at Tufts University, nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and Asia director at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.
Image: Philippine Coast Guard via Wikimedia Commons
Commentary
warontherocks.com · by Simon Weiss · July 23, 2024
12. Israel’s Next War
Excerpts:
During the Israel-Hamas war, I have made a point of visiting the norther border of Israel every two or three weeks, in order to follow events on this second front of the war, which could yet become the primary one. It has been a frustrating experience. Once Israel’s most beautiful regions, it is now scarred with medium-intensity military conflict. Many houses in villages along the border are totally destroyed, mostly by Russian-made Kornet antitank rockets—supplied to Hezbollah via Iran—which cause more damage than the Katyusha rockets that Hezbollah relied on in the past.
In one of my recent visits, I went to the Shebaa Farms, the contested area on the eastern part of the northern border which Israelis call Mount Dov. An IDF brigade commander told me that when soldiers from certain outposts now go on leave, they have to leave on foot, because it is too dangerous to allow large vehicles to enter an area that is continually exposed to Hezbollah’s antitank rockets. Along the road to one outpost, I could see the remains of a civilian truck hit by a rocket in April. Its driver, an Arab Israeli citizen, had been killed.
In mid-July, I went to see a friend, an army reserve officer who has been on active duty since October. He lives in a kibbutz in the western Galilee, about a mile from the border, and serves nearby. His family are now considering returning to their house after nine months of forced exile. The kids miss home. (Although it is up to families themselves to decide whether to return, few have done so.) And yet he still does not see a way out any time soon. “We have been defending rather well, but these tactical achievements do not converge into a strategic victory,” he told me. “Most of what we do is only a reaction to alterations along the border.”
If the situation explodes, however, the border region—and both countries—will experience something they have never encountered before: a full-blown war that will include unprecedented damage to civilian populations and national infrastructure. The current war in Gaza has already shown how easy it is for this kind of conflict to get prolonged. And judging from past wars between Israel and Lebanon, it is unlikely that it would come to a satisfying end.
Israel’s Next War
The Mounting Pressure to Fight Hezbollah in Lebanon—and Why That Is So Dangerous
July 23, 2024
Foreign Affairs · by 34 Days: Israel, Hezbollah, and the War in Lebanon · July 23, 2024
More than nine months into its war with Hamas in the Gaza Strip, Israel now appears closer than ever to a second, even larger war with Hezbollah on its northern border. In June, the Israel Defense Forces announced that plans for a full-scale attack in southern Lebanon had been approved. And in mid-July, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said that the Iranian-backed Shiite group was prepared to broaden its rocket attacks to a wider range of Israeli towns.
Although the possibility has received relatively little scrutiny in the international media, a full-scale war between Israel and Hezbollah would have consequences that dwarf the current Gaza conflict. A major Israeli air and ground assault against Hezbollah, the most heavily armed group in the Middle East, would likely cause turmoil across the entire region, and could prove particularly destabilizing as the United States enters a crucial stage of its presidential election season. It is also far from clear that such a war could be ended quickly, or that there is a clear path to a decisive victory.
The implications for Israel itself could be stark. Although Israeli air defense systems have been extremely successful thus far against missile attacks from Gaza, Lebanon, Iran, and Yemen, a total war with Hezbollah would be a whole different ballgame. According to Israeli intelligence estimates, Hezbollah’s weapons stockpile is more than seven times as large as Hamas’s and includes far more lethal weapons. Along with hundreds of attack drones, it includes some 130,000–150,000 rockets and missiles, including hundreds of ballistic missiles that could reach targets in Tel Aviv and even further south—indeed, every point in the country.
Moreover, as previous wars attest, Lebanon is a treacherous battlefield. Israel’s last war with Hezbollah, in the summer of 2006, was inconclusive, and despite killing several hundred of the group’s fighters, it left the group’s military power largely intact. Hezbollah is also far better armed than it was then. Israel’s home-front command estimates that if a full-scale conflict broke out now, Hezbollah would launch some 3,000 rockets and missiles every day of the war, threatening to overwhelm Israel’s missile defenses. Israel would have to concentrate on defending crucial infrastructure and military bases, tell the civilian population to stay in bomb shelters, and hope for the best. It would be a challenge that far exceeds anything that Israeli leaders have faced before.
For now, both sides still have reason to exercise restraint. In fact, it seems that all the actors involved in the current conflict—Israel, Hezbollah, Iran, the Lebanese government, and the United States—have strong reasons to try and avoid a regional war. But even if the Biden administration manages to achieve an agreement between Israel and Hezbollah that includes a withdrawal of Hezbollah forces from the area around the border, Israel’s leaders may still find it hard not to respond to a domestic audience that favors dealing with Hezbollah once and for all. If Israel succumbs to that temptation without a clearly defined endgame or strategy for limiting the war, the results could be devastating.
THE BIG ONE
In contrast to its unexpected war in Gaza, Israel has long been preparing for a war with Hezbollah. Although Israel’s military leadership was caught completely by surprise by Hamas’s October 7 attack, it had for several years anticipated that Hamas might try to unite with Hezbollah and Iran’s other regional proxies in a coordinated multifront attack against Israel. In the years before his 2020 assassination by U.S. forces, Qasem Soleimani, who headed Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Quds Force and supervised Iranian proxy forces across the Middle East, actively promoted a new strategy called “ring of fire”: by backing and arming a series of mostly Shiite militias, the Islamic Republic would gain influence in countries such as Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen. At the same time, he tightened links with the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip.
These militias, several of which sat on Israel’s borders, provided Iran with deterrence against Israel’s more powerful military and gave Tehran a ready launching pad for attacks. By early 2023, Salah al-Arouri, a senior Hamas leader who was then based in Lebanon and helped cement Hamas’s ties with Hezbollah, was talking publicly of the need to “unite all fronts” against Israel. To many Israeli officials, Hezbollah, as the most heavily armed and well trained of these Iranian proxies, posed the greatest threat. On October 7, as Hamas’s brutal assault was unfolding along the Gaza perimeter, Israeli leaders rushed to prepare for an even larger attack from Hezbollah in the north.
Israeli missile defenses intercepting Hezbollah rockets, northern Israel, June 2024
Ayal Margolin / Reuters
Thus, in the morning and afternoon hours of October 7, even as the IDF’s leadership frantically tried to save the southern Israeli communities and military bases around Gaza, it was also positioning massive numbers of troops on the Lebanese border in case Hezbollah decided to join in. Though this second task was little reported at the time, it proved much more successful than the first. In the south, where nearly 1,200 Israelis would be killed and 255 kidnapped by Hamas, the IDF took hours or even days to regain control. By contrast, in the north, three Israeli divisions, including tens of thousands of soldiers, were rapidly deployed and Hezbollah hesitated—missing the chance to strike an unprepared Israel. “Had they been quick enough,” one IDF division commander told me, “we would have managed to stop them only at Haifa”—Israel’s third-largest city, about 26 miles south of the Lebanese border.
In fact, the army’s northern command had been preparing for years for this challenge. Still, on October 7, Israeli forces at the border knew that everything depended on Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s secretary-general. Had Hezbollah acted more decisively, the situation probably wouldn’t have been much different than it was around Gaza. But Nasrallah chose to wait. Hezbollah did not respond until the following day, and then only by launching a limited number of rockets, drones, and antitank missiles toward IDF outposts and Israeli border communities. By that time, the IDF had made the huge deployment at the border and began returning fire, although neither side attempted to cross the border.
In fact, Hezbollah and its patron Iran had been taken by surprise on October 7, just like Israel. As Israeli intelligence and Hamas sources later confirmed, Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’s leader in the Gaza Strip, did not notify his partners in Tehran and Beirut in advance of his intentions. In retrospect, the Israelis assess that had he confided in Iran and Hezbollah, they would have managed to intercept some of those messages and prepare to halt the attack. At the time, however, this was not known and Israeli officials feared the worst.
That day, the army made another fateful decision, approved by the Israeli government: all Israeli residents living within three miles of the northern border were ordered to evacuate. As a result, some 60,000 Israelis became refugees inside their own country, mostly staying at hotels around the country, including in Tel Aviv, financed by the state. At the time the order was issued, it was assumed that it would be temporary; no one guessed that these people would still be displaced more than nine months later. But as soon as these villages and towns in northern Israel had been emptied, Hezbollah turned them into a shooting range, rendering many of them virtually uninhabitable.
The common complaint among Israelis is that the evacuation of the north has given Hezbollah a three-mile security zone inside Israel, thus upending a status quo on the border that had more or less held since the 2006 war. The fact that twice the number of Lebanese citizens have been forced out of their homes as well, and from an area even further away from the border, is of little comfort for the displaced Israelis. But arguably even more important in the immediate aftermath of October 7 was the outcome of an intense debate within the Israeli government about whether to launch a massive assault on Hezbollah itself.
DON’T DO IT
If some of Israel’s military leaders had their way, Israel might have launched a war against Hezbollah even before the IDF invasion of Gaza began. On October 10, U.S. President Joe Biden gave an important speech in which he promised American help to Israel against Hezbollah and Iran, including sending two aircraft carriers to the region. He also warned the Iranian leadership with one word: “Don’t.” Tehran took note.
At the Kirya, the IDF’s Tel Aviv headquarters, some officers were weeping as they watched the president’s speech. This was the first good news since the horror of October 7 began. Nonetheless, a day later, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and some of the generals tried to push Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to approve a major operation against Hezbollah that apparently would include the assassination senior Hezbollah leaders.
But Netanyahu knew that Biden’s “Don’t” was also meant for him. He also understood that a major attack on Hezbollah would very likely end up in a ground invasion of southern Lebanon, as well, and he doubted whether the army was up to the task of fighting vicious wars on multiple fronts, just days after Hamas’s massacre of Israelis on October 7. So Netanyahu did something quite strange, according to officials who were present that afternoon: he told his security detail to prevent Gallant from entering the prime minister’s office in Tel Aviv. By the time Gallant could get through, several hours later, the window of opportunity for an airstrike had been lost.
That evening, Netanyahu also decided to invite Benny Gantz and Gadi Eisenkot, two former chiefs of staff for the IDF who were leaders of the centrist National Unity Party, to the newly established war cabinet, a move that would allow the government to restrain some of the more hawkish ideas suggested by Gallant or the leaders of his other right-wing coalition partners. (With their military background, Gantz and Eisenkot were concerned that an immediate war in Lebanon would be too much for the IDF after the Gaza fiasco.)
The aftermath of an Israeli strike in the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war, Tyre, Lebanon, July 2006
Nikola Solic / Reuters
As the war in Gaza has unfolded, the situation along the northern border has remained volatile. Although both sides have exercised a degree of restraint, Israel has decided to escalate on multiple occasions. In early January, Israeli forces assassinated Arouri, the Hamas leader, while he was staying in the Dahiya, the Shiite quarter in southern Beirut—crossing a significant threshold, since Israeli attacks as far north as Beirut have been rare in recent years. More recently, Israel has also assassinated three of Hezbollah’s senior commanders. Throughout the war, the Israeli Air Force has frequently struck weapons convoys and sometimes killed Hezbollah operatives in the Bekaa Valley, close to Lebanon’s border with Syria. As of mid-July, Hezbollah had confirmed the deaths of more than 370 of its fighters in Israeli strikes since the war in Gaza started. Dozens of Palestinian gunmen and Lebanese civilians have also been killed.
Hezbollah, in turn, has gradually increased the range and quantity of its own rocket attacks, and on the Israeli side, about 30 soldiers and civilians have died. Towns and villages on both sides of the border have been flattened. Israeli authorities say that more than 1,000 houses and buildings have been severely damaged as a result of Hezbollah attacks. There are similar assessments regarding damage on the Lebanese side. But the largest effect on Israel thus far may be the long-term displacement of tens of thousands of Israelis.
When the Israeli government told residents of towns near the northern border to evacuate, it was mainly responding to those communities’ initial fears that they could face a similar fate as their counterparts near Gaza: a surprise Hezbollah invasion of towns and villages that would result in horrific violence. During the past few months, however, there is far more concern about Hezbollah’s growing use of antitank rockets, which have a range of up to 6.5 miles and are highly accurate and difficult to intercept. They have caused much of the damage and many of the casualties in the north since the violence started.
THE RADWAN AND THE RIVER
At the center of the standoff between Israel and Hezbollah is the Shiite group’s occupation and arming of areas south of the Litani River, which flows through southern Lebanon not far from the Israeli border. According to the 2006 cease-fire agreement, Hezbollah was supposed to remain north of the Litani, with the land between the river and the Israeli border—the distance varies from about seven miles in the east to 20 miles in the west—under UN control; only the Lebanese army would be allowed to have a military presence there. But these measures were never implemented, and from the outset Hezbollah forces established de facto control of the border with Israel.
Thus, Israel’s most important demand is that Hezbollah units, and especially the group’s elite Radwan forces—special operations forces that are designed to conduct raids and cross-border attacks in Israel—must remain north of the Litani River. To the contrary, Hezbollah has said that it will accept a future cease-fire only if it provides for a return to the pre–October 7 status quo—in other words, allowing Hezbollah fighters to return south of the Litani. In such a scenario, the group would also likely seek to reconstitute the 20 military outposts it built along the border two years ago, which the Israelis bombed and destroyed shortly after the war in Gaza began.
Hezbollah fighters with a weapon used to counter drones, in southern Beirut, July 2024
Aziz Taher / Reuters
Since late 2023, Amos Hochstein, President Biden’s special envoy to the region, has been trying to broker a cease-fire between Israel and Hezbollah. But Hezbollah has made clear that it will continue fighting as long as Israel’s war in Gaza continues. In early July, Washington launched a new push for a hostage deal between Israel and Hamas, which would include a cease-fire in Gaza while the first part of a prisoner swap is implemented. If that plan succeeds—the chances appear slim at the moment—the White House would immediately work to move the Israeli-Lebanese negotiations forward. As far as the northern front goes, the IDF’s leadership views a Gaza cease-fire as a “clutch moment” that would provide a chance to end hostilities in the north.
But U.S. and Israeli assumptions about a détente with Hezbollah may be too optimistic. “It is hard to envision a long-term sustainable agreement,” Assaf Orion, former head of IDF strategy and a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told me. Given what he calls “Hezbollah’s overconfidence,” he sees little prospect that a negotiated deal will be able to “answer Israel’s concerns about Hezbollah’s proximity to the border and the rocket threat.”
Even if Hezbollah agreed to Israel’s main demand and withdrew from the border, history suggests that it is highly unlikely that Hezbollah’s fighters will stay away permanently—or that any external player could enforce such a withdrawal. After Israel’s intelligence fiasco along the Gaza perimeter, how would Israel’s northern communities be reassured that the IDF will not miss similar signals on the Lebanese border? It is already clear that the IDF will have to permanently deploy significant forces in the north and around Gaza. Even then, however, it will be up to residents of these areas to decide whether the situation is safe. If they are not convinced, many of them won’t return.
Shimon Shapira, an Israeli analyst of Hezbollah, believes that Nasrallah hopes to avoid a full-scale war with Israel. Yet he sees further escalation—even if unintended—as entirely possible. One side might decide to strike a preemptive blow against the other, fearing that its opponent was planning a similar surprise attack. For example, if Hezbollah maintains its forces in the south on high alert, Israeli military intelligence could mistakenly assume that the group is preparing for an immediate operation and respond with massive force.
The calendar may also contribute to heightened support in Israel to take on Hezbollah soon. With the school year beginning on September 1, many families from the north are losing patience. Heads of local municipalities in the north fear that without government action many families will choose to leave the region for good. The Netanyahu government has gained notoriety for neglecting communities on the frontlines of the war—and although a special office was established to deal with the needs of southern residents, no similar action has been taken in the north. In recent weeks, opposition leaders have seized upon the government’s failure to address security around the northern border, and Netanyahu may conclude that time is running out.
DAMNED IF YOU DO
The unsustainable situation on the northern border has left the Israeli government in a dilemma. Although Netanyahu and Gallant have threatened Hezbollah and the state of Lebanon with absolute destruction if Hezbollah launches an all-out war, neither seems keen on such a scenario now.
It is worth recalling that Hezbollah was itself established in the wake of Israel’s first invasion of Lebanon in 1982, in what is now known as the First Lebanon War. By 2000, Hezbollah had been able to drive the Israelis out of their self-proclaimed security zone in southern Lebanon, forcing the IDF’s full withdrawal over growing Israeli public concern about military casualties. Then, the war that broke in July 2006 ended after 34 days in a miserable draw that left both sides unhappy but also wary of another massive direct confrontation. Many Israeli analysts suspect that Hezbollah has prepared itself rather well for the next round.
Israeli forces withdrawing from southern Lebanon, May 2000
Reuters
If Israel is drawn into a full-scale war, it is reasonable to assume that the IDF will mostly prefer a standoff conflict, in which it relies primarily on its air superiority and accurate strike capabilities. Israeli generals would probably also stage a ground incursion, but it is doubtful that they would have Israeli forces continue north of the Litani. Such a move would risk spreading their forces too thin, especially if the war in Gaza continues during that time. And any decision to attack will have to take into consideration Israel’s rather limited available manpower after nine months of fighting in Gaza; In July, the Knesset approved a bill to extend mandatory military service to three full years in an effort to make up for troop shortfalls.
Israeli officials have also hinted that the army is facing a severe shortage of accurate bombs and shells in Gaza, which could place significant constraints on a simultaneous offensive in Lebanon. As for ground forces, in spite of the relative military success achieved in Gaza, the challenge in Lebanon would be different. Though South Lebanon would presumably be almost empty of civilians, Hezbollah is far more sophisticated than Hamas. The IDF would probably be capable of winning the battle of South Lebanon, but it might come at a high cost to its forces. Israel would also have to consider the risks for its entire home front, including cities such as Tel Aviv and Haifa, which would likely be exposed to continual rocket attacks, including more sophisticated guided missiles that Hezbollah has received from Iran in recent years.
Israel found itself in Ukraine’s shoes, but was soon regarded as another Russia.
Some Israeli politicians and generals maintain that there is a middle way: by ramping up military pressure on Hezbollah for a few days, the thinking goes, Hezbollah, fearing an all-out war and the destruction it would unleash on Lebanon, would balk and withdraw from the border. This is a dangerous case of wishful thinking. In reality, once this kind of escalation was underway it would be very difficult for Israel to dictate to Hezbollah when the war should stop. If, for instance, Netanyahu decides to strike targets in Beirut, Nasrallah might decide to respond in kind by hitting Tel Aviv. And if a part of such an attack got through Israel’s antimissile defenses, there would be enormous pressure for a larger war that would inevitably threaten the civilian populations of both sides.
For the moment, both sides continue to seek to restore deterrence, in spite of escalating attacks. Nasrallah has talked publicly of a strategic equation, in which his group chooses targets in response to Israeli actions. Both sides are fully aware of the devastation that would be wrought in a full-scale war. Israeli airstrikes could bring massive destruction to all state-owned civilian infrastructure in Lebanon within a few days. It’s unlikely that Gulf states would volunteer to foot the bill after such devastation—and until now, Iran was only willing to directly assist Hezbollah and the Shiite community in Lebanon. Hezbollah, in turn, with its huge arsenal, could send Israelis into bomb shelters for weeks on end.
If a full armed conflict does occur, it may not be brief. There’s a chance that Hezbollah, with Iran’s encouragement, would attempt a war of attrition, hoping that this would gradually lead to Israel’s collapse, the way Tehran’s hard-line leaders have imagined it. Following the war in Ukraine from afar, many Israelis have been fearing that they would face a similar scenario: a never-ending war, designed to exhaust the country’s willpower and capabilities, until it succumbs to outside pressure. What they didn’t anticipate, given Hamas’s brutal invasion and attack on Israeli communities on October 7, was that Israel would indeed find itself in Ukraine’s shoes but, as it sought to defend itself, would be treated instead, by many Western countries and in the international media, as another Russia, almost a pariah state. (The Russian government, of course, is glad to see the prolongation of the war in Gaza, because it diverts Western attention and U.S. resources from its own bloody campaign in Ukraine.)
NO WAY OUT
During the Israel-Hamas war, I have made a point of visiting the norther border of Israel every two or three weeks, in order to follow events on this second front of the war, which could yet become the primary one. It has been a frustrating experience. Once Israel’s most beautiful regions, it is now scarred with medium-intensity military conflict. Many houses in villages along the border are totally destroyed, mostly by Russian-made Kornet antitank rockets—supplied to Hezbollah via Iran—which cause more damage than the Katyusha rockets that Hezbollah relied on in the past.
In one of my recent visits, I went to the Shebaa Farms, the contested area on the eastern part of the northern border which Israelis call Mount Dov. An IDF brigade commander told me that when soldiers from certain outposts now go on leave, they have to leave on foot, because it is too dangerous to allow large vehicles to enter an area that is continually exposed to Hezbollah’s antitank rockets. Along the road to one outpost, I could see the remains of a civilian truck hit by a rocket in April. Its driver, an Arab Israeli citizen, had been killed.
An Israeli soldier inspecting damage from a Hezbollah rocket, Kiryat Shmona, northern Israel, May 2024
Ayal Margolin / Reuters
In mid-July, I went to see a friend, an army reserve officer who has been on active duty since October. He lives in a kibbutz in the western Galilee, about a mile from the border, and serves nearby. His family are now considering returning to their house after nine months of forced exile. The kids miss home. (Although it is up to families themselves to decide whether to return, few have done so.) And yet he still does not see a way out any time soon. “We have been defending rather well, but these tactical achievements do not converge into a strategic victory,” he told me. “Most of what we do is only a reaction to alterations along the border.”
If the situation explodes, however, the border region—and both countries—will experience something they have never encountered before: a full-blown war that will include unprecedented damage to civilian populations and national infrastructure. The current war in Gaza has already shown how easy it is for this kind of conflict to get prolonged. And judging from past wars between Israel and Lebanon, it is unlikely that it would come to a satisfying end.
Foreign Affairs · by 34 Days: Israel, Hezbollah, and the War in Lebanon · July 23, 2024
13. America’s Dilemma in Kenya
Excerpts:
It is not just young Kenyans who doubt the seriousness of the United States’ commitment to Africa. Online, young people across the continent have noted how much American attention the crises in Ukraine and Gaza have garnered, while Africa’s own emergencies—including in eastern Congo, the Sahel, and Sudan—have gone underreported and the efforts to solve them underfunded. These young adults are vividly aware, too, of how African countries were pushed to the back of the line for COVID-19 vaccines. They see climate change wreaking havoc on their societies and are fully aware that their countries did not create the problem.
If Kenya cannot satisfy its young, urbanized population, it is hard to see how other African states that lack its advantages will avoid similar crises—or how the United States can successfully partner with any of them. Multiple countries clearly need a more holistic approach to unsustainable debt. But in the very near term, to demonstrate that it is listening and can offer valuable help to Africans, the United States will have to do more to help Kenya, and quickly.
America’s Dilemma in Kenya
Washington Erred in Embracing Ruto—but Now Must Double Down on Helping Him Succeed
July 23, 2024
Foreign Affairs · by Michelle Gavin · July 23, 2024
In June, Kenyans took to the streets to oppose government proposals to hike taxes. In doing so, they were also airing their bitter disappointment with President William Ruto, who swept into power two years ago after a tight electoral victory. Ruto had promised to lower the cost of living and increase job opportunities for young Kenyans. Instead, Kenyans watched as he pivoted outward, positioning himself as a mediator in regional conflicts and giving major speeches at international forums—and allying with the United States.
U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration made a show of embracing Ruto, too, inviting him for a rare state visit in May. U.S. and Kenyan officials stressed the fact that Ruto was the first African leader to receive such a welcome since Ghana’s President John Kufuor in 2008 and the first Kenyan leader to make a state visit to Washington in more than two decades. The U.S. government announced that it would designate Kenya as the United States’ first major non-NATO ally in sub-Saharan Africa, a designation that puts it in company with the likes of Australia and Japan. Yet just one month later, images of smoke rose from Kenya’s parliament, as popular protests against the government turned violent. Over 30 people were killed, many at the hands of police, prompting the U.S. embassy and other diplomatic missions to express shock and call for restraint.
This uprising—and the Kenyan government’s doomed, start-and-stop authoritarian response—should jolt U.S. officials into a different gear. The protests against a leader supported so prominently by Washington have now resulted in over 50 deaths and hundreds of injuries, and clearly pose a dilemma for the United States. Washington now has two options: it can pull back, confirming the view of critics who have called the recent U.S. efforts to build a partnership with Ruto shallow and ill informed. Or it can double down on helping the Kenyan government succeed in meeting the demands of its citizens. It must do the latter. The U.S.-Kenyan relationship has a long and deep history, and as the Horn of Africa grows increasingly unstable and international institutions grow increasingly dysfunctional, Kenya could prove to be a vital American partner in avoiding worst-case scenarios and helping reform the region’s institutional architecture. But Washington must act to provide the country some real economic relief, conditioned on anticorruption and human rights benchmarks, to show that the United States is serious about Kenya, not just enamored of Ruto.
AMERICAN DREAM
During his 2022 campaign for president, Ruto—a longtime member of parliament and the Kenyan cabinet and Kenya’s deputy president from 2013 to 2022—claimed he would end the modus operandi that had dominated Kenyan politics: rule by a few prominent family dynasties that extended exclusive opportunities and too much government largesse to their inner circles. Instead, he promised to focus on the 80 percent of Kenyans who toil in the informal economy by expanding job opportunities and freeing the country from what he called “debt slavery.”
Initially, Ruto’s 2022 victory made many of Washington’s veteran Africa watchers nervous. He had a history that suggested a comfort with political violence. After bloody protests swept through Kenya in the wake of a disputed 2007 election, the International Criminal Court charged him with crimes against humanity related to the killings. The ICC subsequently dropped the charges—not because they lacked merit, but amid claims of witness tampering. Ruto has tangled with the Kenyan justice system multiple times regarding irregular land deals, but he has always evaded criminal accountability. His reputation for tolerating graft only grew when, in 2022, he selected a running mate and then cabinet officials who had eyebrow-raising histories of scandal. Many American observers feared that as president, Ruto would prove vindictive, antidemocratic, and transactional, favoring international partners less sensitive to reputational risk than the United States.
But in Washington’s view, Ruto proved to be a pleasant surprise. He showed a welcome appetite for conducting regional diplomacy and deepening ties with the United States. American officials came to excuse the dubious cast of characters that populated his government, accepting the argument that Kenyan politics required rewarding various elites with plum jobs. It seemed a relatively small price to pay for deepening a partnership with a significant African power.
Kenya seemed to be an ideal place to demonstrate a constructive partnership between the United States and an African country.
U.S. influence has been waning on the continent. Sahelian states allied with Russia have ousted U.S. forces intended to help restore peace and security, and anemic American commercial diplomacy is constantly overshadowed by China’s more robust attempts to boost trade and investment ties with Africa. The decline of American influence comes at a bad time, as African states become more consequential to the world’s transition to a green economy—the continent is rich in critical minerals and precious carbon sinks—and collective efforts to reform international institutions. For the Biden administration, an opportunity to deepen the United States’ already strong ties with Kenya was particularly appealing. The country has largely been an island of stability next to fragile, volatile neighbors such as Ethiopia, Somalia, and South Sudan. Its society is far more inclined to prioritize freedom of expression and the rule of law than those in the African states that have recently fallen to Russian-backed military juntas. And it plays a vital diplomatic role in efforts to resolve multiple regional conflicts and contributes regularly to international peacekeeping efforts.
Ruto sought to expand Kenya’s leadership role, advocating for African priorities in climate financing and pressing international institutions to do more to acknowledge African concerns. In June 2024, Ruto’s government even deployed several hundred police officers to Haiti to help the beleaguered Haitian police maintain law and order. This initiative, celebrated in Washington but controversial in Kenya, was seen in some quarters as an explicit favor to the United States. By the time Ruto arrived in the United States in May for the state visit, Washington had clearly set its early concerns about him aside. Kenya seemed to be an ideal place to demonstrate what a constructive partnership between the United States and an African country could deliver.
FALSE MESSIAH
But for ordinary Kenyan citizens, the concrete benefits of a deepened partnership with the United States have been harder to discern. Little of what the United States appreciated about Ruto had much bearing on the campaign promises he had made to Kenyans themselves. Domestically, the biggest story to emerge from the state visit was a scandal about the Emirati private jet that carried the president and his entourage to Washington. The so-called hustler nation that supported Ruto expected the economic relief that his campaign had promised. Instead, Kenya’s unsustainably high interest payments on government debt led Ruto’s government to seek new revenue by hiking up existing taxes and adding new ones. As president, Ruto began to speak the language of austerity as he worked to appease the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which conditioned badly needed funding on commitments to raise revenue and cut subsidies. At the same time, graft among the country’s elites appeared to continue unchecked.
Less than a year after Ruto’s election, Kenyans began protesting the country’s rising cost of living. But their message was muddled by the role that the opposition stalwart Raila Odinga played in summoning demonstrators to the streets. The recent wider demonstrations, however, cannot be attributed to behind-the-scenes incitement. Young Kenyans are not interested in Kenya’s old political dramas. In 2022, many of them declined to vote at all. Anyone who confused that for apathy, however, did so at their peril. Kenya’s Generation Z has turned out to be committed to finding dignified, secure employment and holding their leaders accountable. They reject revenue-generating attempts that do not go hand in hand with better governance or higher-quality services. Describing themselves as “tribe-less, party-less, and fear-less,” they have backed Ruto’s political message about turning the page on Kenya’s history of identity politics at a level he clearly did not anticipate.
These young Kenyans have done more than just express disappointment with Ruto. They have organized online and then taken to the streets to oppose the government’s economic strategy, winning concessions on proposals to tax bread, cooking oil, and mobile money transactions. In June, the demonstrations tipped into violence; in Nairobi, protesters smashed their way into parliament, setting parts of the building ablaze and forcing lawmakers and staff to evacuate. Officials responded by throttling Kenya’s Internet speeds and unleashing the security services to lob tear gas, shoot water cannons, and eventually fire live rounds at protesters. Ruto’s first response was to vilify the protesters and call for military action. But he soon bowed to pressure, agreeing to scrap his controversial finance bill and dissolving his cabinet.
But now that young Kenyans have flexed their political muscles, confrontation is likely to continue. Some demonstrators insist that Ruto resign. Others seek a credible investigation into the heavy-handed state response to the protests. Meanwhile, the Kenyan president has vacillated between accommodating the protesters—holding an online listening session and vowing to rein in government excess—and lashing out at the imagined hidden hands driving his political misfortunes while seeking to curtail Kenyans’ right to express their discontent. His mixed messages—and his decision to reappoint some of the same disreputable cabinet ministers to new portfolios just days after dismissing them—suggest a leader totally at sea.
PIVOT POINT
By embracing Ruto despite misgivings, the United States has found itself aligned with a government that has an increasingly antagonistic relationship to its population and no intent to relinquish power now or in the next election cycle. It is worth noting that for many Africans, the IMF and other Bretton Woods institutions are understood to be instruments of U.S. policy. Staying the current course may well mean the United States finds itself in the worst of all possible worlds: as Washington works to illustrate the seriousness of its commitment to African populations, it may remain supportive of a government that could grow increasingly repressive as a means to retain power, and it may become closely associated with that government’s least popular policies.
Rather than backing away, it is time for Washington to think bigger. The explosion of popular discontent in Kenya does not make its future any less important to U.S. interests. The only way the United States’ investments in its bilateral relationship with Kenya can pay off is if the Ruto administration starts delivering for the Kenyan people. The United States must urgently help it do so. The U.S. ambassador to Kenya, Meg Whitman, has worked mightily to attract more U.S. investment to the country, but it will take time for those efforts to translate into jobs and more prosperity.
In the lead-up to Ruto’s recent state visit to Washington, the Kenyan government asked the United States to consider a sovereign bond guarantee—a mechanism for removing default risk that allows a recipient country to access financing from capital markets at lower rates. Such a move would be expensive for the United States and would require a heavy political lift on Capitol Hill. But Washington has assisted countries such as Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Tunisia, and Ukraine in this way in the past. And extending Kenya this fiscal breathing room makes a lot of sense: it could fund improved service delivery and ease the economic pressure on Kenya’s most vulnerable people. It would certainly mean much more to the young Kenyans now taking to the streets than the hodgepodge of announcements that accompanied the state visit.
Kenya's explosion of popular discontent does not make its future less important to U.S. interests.
A sovereign bond guarantee, however, must be linked to verifiable anticorruption commitments by the Kenyan government, particularly on government procurement and budgetary transparency. The waves of protests indicate that the center of gravity in Kenyan politics has shifted. The country’s prior approach—accommodating different ethnic constituencies by giving their elites access to state coffers—no longer works. Ruto will have to adapt to a new order in which the risk of countenancing large-scale corruption outweighs the risk of alienating old political kingpins. Fiscal relief for Kenya should also be conditioned on respect for human rights and press freedoms, as well as accountability for the unlawful abductions of activists and the violent government response to constitutionally protected demonstrators. The Kenyan government’s harsh response to the protests is continuing to fuel popular anger, and the political salience of police brutality to the region’s young, urbanizing populations should not be underestimated.
Fortunately, Kenya is blessed with courageous civil society leaders who can inform the substance of anticorruption and human rights conditions the U.S. imposes—these are already core demands of the ongoing protests—and keep a watchful eye on their implementation. The relief that a sovereign loan guarantee with conditions would offer could, in short, help make the Kenyan government more successful. That in turn would likely make Kenya’s leaders less inclined to engage in violent repression or feel the need to cook the books to hoard a massive campaign war chest to avoid a loss at the next election.
It is not just young Kenyans who doubt the seriousness of the United States’ commitment to Africa. Online, young people across the continent have noted how much American attention the crises in Ukraine and Gaza have garnered, while Africa’s own emergencies—including in eastern Congo, the Sahel, and Sudan—have gone underreported and the efforts to solve them underfunded. These young adults are vividly aware, too, of how African countries were pushed to the back of the line for COVID-19 vaccines. They see climate change wreaking havoc on their societies and are fully aware that their countries did not create the problem.
If Kenya cannot satisfy its young, urbanized population, it is hard to see how other African states that lack its advantages will avoid similar crises—or how the United States can successfully partner with any of them. Multiple countries clearly need a more holistic approach to unsustainable debt. But in the very near term, to demonstrate that it is listening and can offer valuable help to Africans, the United States will have to do more to help Kenya, and quickly.
- MICHELLE GAVIN is Senior Fellow for Africa Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. She was Senior Africa Director at the National Security Council from 2009 to 2011 and U.S. Ambassador to Botswana from 2011 to 2014.
Foreign Affairs · by Michelle Gavin · July 23, 2024
14. NATO’s New Mission: Keep America in, Russia Down, and China Out
Excerpts;
Expanding NATO’s cooperation with the IP4, especially South Korea, is not just about keeping China at bay. The repercussions of European security challenges, such as the war in Ukraine, extend to the Korean Peninsula, where North Korea’s cooperation with Russia poses direct threats. The newfound friendship between Kim Jong Un and Vladimir Putin illustrates the interconnected nature of these regional threats and the necessity for a coordinated response.
Europe has always been within the range of North Korean ballistic missiles, and the United States could have always invoked Article 5 of the NATO treaty if it had been attacked by North Korea. In the past, these were more or less theoretical options. Now, the situation with North Korea is more urgent due to its alleged supplies of munitions to Russia and potentially other support, including sending men to assist Russia in its war in Ukraine. This new reality underscores the critical need for closer cooperation between NATO and South Korea to address these evolving threats effectively.
As NATO concluded its 75th anniversary summit, the strategic importance of deepening ties with the IP4 and particularly with South Korea cannot be overstated. This cooperation is crucial for addressing the multifaceted threats posed by hybrid warfare, cybersecurity challenges, and geopolitical instability. NATO’s like-minded alignments – between the alliance and its partners – are the cornerstone of maintaining a rules-based international order. By solidifying these partnerships, NATO can enhance its strategic reach and resilience, ensuring a stable and secure global environment.
The evolving NATO-South Korea relationship exemplifies this approach, demonstrating how such like-minded alignments can drive global security and stability in the face of common threats.
NATO’s New Mission: Keep America in, Russia Down, and China Out
thediplomat.com
NATO has been taking its lessons from the Euro-Atlantic area to prepare for contingencies in the Indo-Pacific.
By Tereza Novotna, Youngjun Kim, and Silvia Menegazzi
July 22, 2024
Meeting of the North Atlantic Council at the level of Heads of State and Government, Indo-Pacific Partners and the European Union, in Washington, D.C., Jul 11, 2024
Credit: NATO
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As NATO commemorated its 75th anniversary at the summit in Washington D.C., the organization found itself at a critical juncture: expanding cooperation with the Indo-Pacific Four (IP4) countries, among them South Korea. NATO’s strategic pivot to the Indo-Pacific has become crucial not only for maintaining global stability but also for addressing the interconnected challenges posed by actors like Russia and North Korea on the one hand and China on the other.
In the words of NATO’s first Secretary General, Lord Hastings Lionel Ismay, the alliance was created to “keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.” Nowadays, particularly should Donald Trump be re-elected as the U.S. president, the mission has evolved: to keep the Americans (still) engaged, to hold Russia’s aggressive actions in Europe down, and to prevent China’s influence from expanding in the Indo-Pacific region. In other words, NATO has been taking its lessons from the Euro-Atlantic area to prepare for contingencies in the Indo-Pacific.
In fact, the Washington Summit Declaration in its Article 30 says as much: “The Indo-Pacific is important for NATO, given that developments in that region directly affect Euro-Atlantic security.” The declarations emphasized the need to discuss, together with the EU, “common security challenges and areas of cooperation.” For that, fostering like-minded alignments with partners in the Indo-Pacific, especially South Korea, is decisive.
NATO’s Strategic Pivot to the Indo-Pacific
The 75th anniversary summit in Washington D.C. served as a pivotal moment for NATO to solidify its commitments and strategies in the Indo-Pacific region. Echoing this, U.S. President Joe Biden in his post-summit press briefing emphasized the role of the Indo-Pacific for NATO several times and the Korean Peninsula no less than nine times.
Similarly, South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol, who attended his third NATO summit in a row, underscored the importance of this engagement. This continuity at high-level meetings reflects a growing recognition within NATO of the need to deepen partnerships in the Indo-Pacific, an area increasingly seen as central to global security.
European pundits often argue that the world’s future will be shaped by events in Europe, such as the ongoing war in Ukraine, or the Middle East, where conflicts like the one in Gaza continue to simmer. However, the real battleground for global influence and stability may well be in the Indo-Pacific. The dynamics in the region, particularly involving China and but also the Korean Peninsula, have direct and significant implications for both regional and global security.
Concrete deliverables are essential for these high-level summits to translate into actionable policies and joint initiatives. As hinted at in the Washington Declaration, cybersecurity and hybrid threats are two areas where NATO and South Korea can make substantial progress. For instance, the establishment of joint cyber operations and intelligence sharing mechanisms would be a significant step forward. The importance of cyber cooperation, including the potential for joint exercises and coordinated responses to cyber threats and disinformation campaigns, could bring NATO and South Korea into an even closer alignment.
Another practical area of cooperation lies in hybrid warfare strategies. There is ongoing work within NATO on countering China’s hybrid threats. By leveraging South Korea’s firsthand experience with North Korean cyber activities, NATO could enhance its own capabilities and resilience against such threats. This includes integrating South Korean experts into NATO’s Centers of Excellence in Tallinn and Helsinki, which focus on hybrid threats and cybersecurity.
NATO’s Institutional and Cultural Challenges
However, the path to deeper cooperation is not without challenges. There are institutional and cultural hesitancies within NATO regarding a more pronounced role in the Indo-Pacific. Several European countries often exhibit caution, fearing that expanding NATO’s mandate too far beyond its traditional Euro-Atlantic focus could overextend the alliance and complicate its core mission. These internal dynamics need careful navigation to build consensus and maintain the momentum for cooperation.
Moreover, the geopolitical landscape adds another layer of complexity. The different relationships between China and various NATO members, often driven by economic interests, create a divergence in threat perception and strategic priorities. While economic considerations influence national policies, there is a unanimous recognition within classified NATO settings of the strategic challenges posed by China.
One of the more symbolic yet impactful steps NATO could take is to establish a regional office in Tokyo (or perhaps Seoul). French President Emmanuel Macron, who initially blocked the opening of a NATO office in Japan, should now seize the momentum before a new government with potentially anti-American sentiments takes power in Paris. Allowing the office to be opened would not only facilitate closer coordination and engagement with Indo-Pacific partners but also signal NATO’s long-term commitment to the region – and cement France’s leadership role within NATO.
South Korea already maintains a dedicated representative attached to NATO, albeit out of its embassy to Belgium rather than within NATO premises. Formalizing NATO’s presence in the region with a dedicated NATO office in Tokyo (or Seoul) would enhance operational efficiency and strategic alignment. It would also provide a physical space for regular interactions, joint planning, and crisis management exercises, thereby institutionalizing the partnership.
The Broader Implications
Expanding NATO’s cooperation with the IP4, especially South Korea, is not just about keeping China at bay. The repercussions of European security challenges, such as the war in Ukraine, extend to the Korean Peninsula, where North Korea’s cooperation with Russia poses direct threats. The newfound friendship between Kim Jong Un and Vladimir Putin illustrates the interconnected nature of these regional threats and the necessity for a coordinated response.
Europe has always been within the range of North Korean ballistic missiles, and the United States could have always invoked Article 5 of the NATO treaty if it had been attacked by North Korea. In the past, these were more or less theoretical options. Now, the situation with North Korea is more urgent due to its alleged supplies of munitions to Russia and potentially other support, including sending men to assist Russia in its war in Ukraine. This new reality underscores the critical need for closer cooperation between NATO and South Korea to address these evolving threats effectively.
As NATO concluded its 75th anniversary summit, the strategic importance of deepening ties with the IP4 and particularly with South Korea cannot be overstated. This cooperation is crucial for addressing the multifaceted threats posed by hybrid warfare, cybersecurity challenges, and geopolitical instability. NATO’s like-minded alignments – between the alliance and its partners – are the cornerstone of maintaining a rules-based international order. By solidifying these partnerships, NATO can enhance its strategic reach and resilience, ensuring a stable and secure global environment.
The evolving NATO-South Korea relationship exemplifies this approach, demonstrating how such like-minded alignments can drive global security and stability in the face of common threats.
Authors
Guest Author
Tereza Novotna
Dr. Tereza Novotna is an affiliated researcher at Free University Berlin, a senior associate research fellow at EUROPEUM Prague (a Europe-focused think tank), and Korea associate at 9DashLine. She has been working on Europe-Asia and Europe-Indo-Pacific relations with a special focus on North and South Korea. She holds a Ph.D. from Boston University and other degrees from Charles University Prague.
Guest Author
Youngjun Kim
Dr. Youngjun Kim is a professor and a dean at the Korea National Defense University, an advisor to the Republic of Korea’s Ministry of National Defense and a former visiting fellow (2023/24) at the Elliott School of International Affairs, the George Washington University. His work and publications focus primarily on North East Asia security dynamics. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Kansas.
Guest Author
Silvia Menegazzi
Dr. Silvia Menegazzi is assistant professor at LUISS University Rome where she teaches International Relations and Asian Studies. Between 2021 and 2023 she was EAVI Fellow at the Elliott School of International Affairs (GWU). Her research interests focus primarily on comparative regionalism and global governance, EU-Asia relations, foreign policy, think tanks and non-governmental actors of contemporary Asia (China, Japan, Korean Peninsula).
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15. Ukraine confronts labor shortage as need for soldiers drains workforce
War transforms societies. (A BFO - blinding flash of the obvious)
Ukraine confronts labor shortage as need for soldiers drains workforce
Ukraine’s urgent need for soldiers to fight Russia’s invasion is eroding the workforce and creating a drag on the economy but also new opportunities for women.
By Isabelle Khurshudyan and Serhiy Morgunov
July 23, 2024 at 1:00 a.m. EDT
The Washington Post · by Isabelle Khurshudyan · July 23, 2024
PAVLOHRAD, Ukraine — Going to work is an escape for Tatyiana Ustymenko. She rides an elevator down more than 1,500 feet into a coal mine and leaves behind her cellphone — meaning no distractions from the latest developments at the eastern front line just 60 miles away. That far below ground, she also can’t hear the air raid sirens warning of a Russian missile strike.
“It’s peaceful,” Ustymenko said. “You forget there’s a war going on.”
Were it not for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, however, Ustymenko wouldn’t have this job. The coal mine in Pavlohrad allowed women to work underground for the first time in its history only after Russia invaded in February 2022. It was desperate to fill the many vacancies left by men who joined the military.
The mine is not the only workplace experiencing a critical labor shortage. Online job portals in Ukraine say they have never advertised so many openings. Millions of Ukrainians moved abroad to escape Moscow’s brutal bombardment, and of those who stayed, hundreds of thousands of men have traded their jobs for military service.
Now, with Kyiv ramping up its mobilization efforts, businesses expect that workers will be even harder to find, further straining Ukraine’s crippled economy. With more openings than jobseekers, many businesses have had to raise wages to compete — or they risk shutting down.
Ukraine’s lack of laborers — a problem expected to get worse the longer the war goes on — is adding strain to an economy that is already under pressure and reliant on foreign aid. In the first year of the war, Ukraine’s gross domestic product declined by 29 percent. It has rebounded since then as a new defense production sector has boomed and the country managed to restart traffic in its largest Black Sea port in Odessa.
But “without Western financial aid, the Ukrainian economy would collapse,” said Serhiy Fursa, an economist and deputy director of Dragon Capital, an investment firm in Kyiv.
Rolling blackouts across the country from repeated Russian strikes on energy infrastructure interrupt work or force businesses to invest in costly generators. That has also scared away some private foreign investment. Ukraine is still expected to experience relative economic growth of about 4 percent this year, but it would be more if not for the workforce shortage, Fursa said.
For example, he said, metals factories could increase their production if not for the shortage of staff. He projected that the mobilization of 200,000 to 300,000 new soldiers would reduce economic growth by about 0.5 percent.
“But this pressure could increase if many people get scared and leave the labor market,” Fursa said. “If 200,000 to 300,000 people are mobilized, many may decide it’s better to hide from draft officers somewhere than go to work, leading them to leave the labor market. In that case, the impact on economic indicators could be much greater. It’s impossible to calculate this accurately because we don’t know how many people are currently hiding and not working.”
One unintentional result has been some gender equalization in the workplace as many industries have opted to hire women for roles that were previously reserved for men because they were considered too labor-intensive. Not unlike the surge of American women who went to work during World War II, Ukrainian women are getting new career opportunities to operate machinery in factories, drive tractors or serve as bodyguards.
Kyiv’s subway system, which lost nearly a third of its pre-war staff to the military, last month announced the first training courses for women to become train conductors. In the eastern Ukrainian city of Kryvyi Rih, ArcelorMittal — a steel plant — has billboards showing women wearing the plant’s uniform with the slogan, “Ladies really run things here!”
At Pavlohrad’s coal mine, the change in policy to allow women to work underground created an opportunity for Ustymenko, 40, to obtain her dream job. All of the men in her family were miners. After her father showed her the mine, and its vast network of tunnels, for the first time when she was 16, Ustymenko longed to spend more time in what she described as a different world underground.
In the months after Russia’s invasion in February 2022, miners in Pavlohrad regularly pulled double shifts after roughly 15 percent of the staff left to fight the Russian invaders. Then DTEK, the mine’s owner and Ukraine’s largest private energy company, invited the women who had been working jobs on the surface to apply for work underground — an opportunity for a higher salary and the chance of overtime shifts.
Ustymenko was among the first to raise her hand. Some jobs were still off-limits, but others with less physical strain, such as servicing the small electric trains that haul workers from the lift shaft, are now done by the more than 120 women underground.
“At first, the men didn’t quite understand how this could work,” said Olha Khandryha, 36, who has worked in the mine for two years. “They all said, ‘They won’t manage, they won’t cope.’ Not everyone, of course; some said, ‘The girls will show you how to work.’”
“Over time, it was forgotten,” Khandryha added. “Now no one even remembers that they once said such things.”
But even with companies hiring more women, a workforce shortage persists.
Andriy Chernetskyi, deputy chief executive officer of DTEK’s coal facilities in Pavlohrad, said each mine is consistently short at least 100 workers. Other Ukrainian hiring managers said the threat of mobilization taking away a significant percentage of their staff has led to them hiring more young men — under the minimum conscription age of 25 — in addition to women.
The Ukrainian government has allowed some industries — such as those in critical infrastructure and defense production — to “reserve” their male employees from being drafted. But most enterprises that qualify can exempt just 50 percent of their male staff in what managers described as a tedious and bureaucratic process.
Businesses that comply with tax laws in good faith and maintain proper records are popular targets for military recruitment because their data is open, making it easier to mobilize their employees, Fursa said. Men, therefore, might choose to work elsewhere.
Farms are among the businesses that can exempt half of their eligible male workers, but especially during planting and harvesting seasons, there has been a shortage of tractor drivers since the invasion started, said Denys Marchuk, the deputy chairman of the All-Ukrainian Agrarian Council.
Qualified staff are especially scarce and hard to replace, Marchuk said, and the paperwork to reserve some employees from conscription can often take up to two months to be processed. In that time, men are at risk of being drafted, especially in rural areas.
“The agricultural machinery we use is highly sophisticated and expensive, costing between $150,000 to $200,000,” Marchuk said. “It is impractical to entrust such equipment to untrained individuals, as improper use could result in costly damages. And training new personnel, including young people who are not subject to mobilization, is crucial but time-consuming, taking at least six months. In the meantime, essential agricultural activities cannot be paused.”
Marchuk said some farming universities are already tailoring courses for women, such as instruction for long-haul driving. But even after the war, “there will not be an immediate influx of personnel due to casualties and injuries. The sector will face a significant labor shortage,” he said.
The management at the coal mine in Pavlohrad isn’t sure if the decision to allow women to work underground is permanent. No one knows when the war will end, or what will happen when it does and thousands of men head back to their old jobs.
The women who have grown to love their jobs in the mine’s depths hope there will still be room for them. Already, they said, the male miners react with surprise anytime they see a man working in one of the jobs now allotted for women.
“But at least from those women I personally know and communicate with, we really don’t want to leave,” Ustymenko said. “Because here, besides all of the social benefits, we have gained a certain collegial atmosphere, which is completely different from before.”
Serhii Korolchuk in Kyiv contributed to this report.
The Washington Post · by Isabelle Khurshudyan · July 23, 2024
16. Can Biden’s arsenal-of-democracy foreign policy outlast him?
Strengthening our alliances has been a hallmark of the administration. I hope it can be sustained, replicated and even improved upon.
Can Biden’s arsenal-of-democracy foreign policy outlast him?
The president's focus on alliance building will be hard to replicate.
defenseone.com · by Patrick Tucker
Love him or hate him, the foreign-policy legacy of Joe Biden will be defined, in part, by his exhaustive support of allies in crisis: Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan.
“American alliances are what keep us, America, safe. American values are what make us a partner that other nations want to work with,” the president said last October in an Oval Office appeal for more aid. “To put all that at risk if we walk away from Ukraine, if we turn our backs on Israel, it’s just not worth it.”
But Biden’s successor, whoever he or she is, will likely view these three areas, and America’s role in them, in at least slightly—and possibly wildly—different ways.
Ukraine presents perhaps the clearest moral case for continued U.S. support: an independent country invaded by a murderous former KGB operative simply for acting in their collective desire to be free of Kremlin corruption, embrace rule of law, and pursue a future in the mold of the American experiment. Joe Biden has been a stalwart supporter, providing arms and other support worth tens of billions of dollars. The U.S. also established and leads a global coalition whose donations have been vital to Ukraine’s continued perseverance against Russian forces.
Israel, a long-time and strategic ally in the Middle East, is at once surrounded by foes seeking its destruction but also exercises control over the daily life of an indigenous population with increasing brutality, alienating many people even in allied countries. The Biden administration serves as a loyal ally and arms supplier. Administration officials have expressed alarm at evidence of Israeli crimes against Palestinian civilians during its Gaza campaign, but the White House has taken few real (or at least visible) steps to curb Israeli action. It has also sent U.S. warships to the Red Sea, assigned to the costly task of batting down missiles and drones aimed at Israel with expensive U.S. missiles—while defending themselves from the same.
Taiwan presents a shining example of the prosperity that democracy promises. But it is also democracy living under the threat of a Chinese takeover that may take any form or date but which is always present. Under Biden, the United States has stuck to the One China policy, which formally disavows Taiwanese independence and seeks to preserve the status quo. His administration has worked to bolster Taiwan’s defensive capabilities and bring Pacific nations together in a fragile posture of unified strength.
To Joe Biden, the uniting feature among these three cases was the very idea of democracy–as laid out in his Oct. 22 “arsenal of democracy” speech.
“Hamas and [Russian President Vladimir] Putin represent different threats, but they share this in common. They both want to completely annihilate a neighboring democracy — completely annihilate it,” he said in a rare Oval Office broadcast. It’s an idea to which he would commit time, effort, focus, and a tremendous amount of American resources while also carefully managing risks and keeping U.S. troops out of harm’s way.
Those supportive measures will take on a new shape in the months ahead as Vice President Kamala Harris emerges as the likely (but not certain) Democratic Party nominee and the Trump campaign attacks not only the Biden administration but norms and accepted truths among the American foreign-policy establishment since the days of Woodrow Wilson.
A series of questions now loom. What interest will the next Democratic Party candidate have in maintaining or furthering the massive web of multilateral alliances that have helped to arm and financially support Ukraine? Will that candidate also display the same timidness to provide Ukraine with key weapons or allow them to strike targets of choice with those weapons inside of Russia? To what extent will that candidate be persuaded by arguments that Ukraine is unlikely to retake territory lost to Russia under any circumstances, and therefore the war could be solved quickly if only Ukraine capitulates on matters that are key to its security and sovereignty?
In the Middle East, will the next Democratic candidate continue to arm an Israel accused of war crimes by the United Nations? Will he or she continue to pursue complicated humanitarian missions to attempt to ease famine among the Gazan people? How will he or she approach the question of governance of Gaza following the end of Israeli operations?
On Friday, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said that a peace deal between Hamas and Israel was in the final stages. How will that candidate persuade the relevant parties that key commitments that are part of those negotiations are still stable? How will he or she address the cause of Palestinian statehood and the fundamental but long-denied human rights of the Palestinian people? Will that candidate embrace a more aggressive posture toward Iran and Iranian-backed forces that are regularly targeting U.S. forces across the Middle East?
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is set to visit Washington, D.C., this week to seek continued support for military operations that have destroyed much of Gaza’s housing and infrastructure and killed upward of 35,000 people, many of them children. How will this next candidate push for Israeli accountability to charges of war crimes?
On Taiwan, will the candidate continue the efforts to deter China militarily, a massive focus of the Defense Department that also rests on continued military-to-military outreach to partners and allies across the Pacific. Will he or she continue the work of slowly decoupling the U.S. economy from China’s without causing massive economic losses for either side?
Vice President Kamala Harris, in her few public engagements directly related to foreign policy, has sounded very much like Biden but has not laid out foreign policy specifics. As a candidate she focused little on foreign policy and as vice president devoted time mostly to issues like voting rights, reproductive healthcare and migration. And, of course, while she has the endorsement of Joe Biden she does not yet have the nomination.
Donald Trump’s approach to the issues above is more certain. He is no fan of complicated multilateral alliances and has expressed indifference to Ukraine’s cause (though his views on NATO are more nuanced). On the Middle East, he has cast himself as a reliable friend of Israel, adversary of Iran, and no sympathizer of the Palestinian people. On Taiwan, he has expressed reluctance to aid them militarily (at least not for free) but has also hinted at a harder stance against China.
defenseone.com · by Patrick Tucker
17. Pentagon’s new Arctic strategy focuses on adversaries, new technologies
Excerpt:
“It's a really tricky place to operate on and ground, with ground operations and with manned platforms, so where we can lean into remote platforms, it can make a lot of sense. However, it's really tricky to operate remote platforms due to weather and due to connectivity issues. And so that's where we're trying to lean, is looking at how we can test and do some [research and development] around ensuring these platforms can operate.”
Pentagon’s new Arctic strategy focuses on adversaries, new technologies
China and Russia and working more closely in the Arctic, DOD says. That’s forcing more research into unmanned systems.
defenseone.com · by Patrick Tucker
Pfc. Anthony DiLeonardo, 1st Squadron, 40th Cavalry Regiment, 2nd Infantry Brigade Combat Team (Airborne), 11th Airborne Division launches a Raven drone April 2, 2023, during exercise Joint Pacific Multinational Readiness Center-Alaska 23-02 in the Yukon Training Area, Alaska. ( Army photo/John Pennell
By Patrick Tucker
New technologies like autonomy and artificial intelligence will make operations in the Arctic more achievable in the future, defense officials said Monday, as the Pentagon unveiled a new Arctic strategy aimed at countering the influence of Sino-Russian collaboration in the region and overcoming the effects of climate change in accelerating Arctic activity.
The Defense Department released its first Arctic strategy back in 2013. But the newly released Arctic strategy is the first to emphasize the growing collaboration between Russia and China in the region.
“Over the course of the PRC's 13 Arctic research expeditions to date, the [3 icebreaking vessels] have tested unmanned underwater vehicles and polar-capable fixed-wing aircraft, among other activities. People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) vessels have also demonstrated the capability and intent to operate in and around the Arctic region through exercises alongside the Russian Navy over the past several years,” the strategy reads.
But something else has changed in the way the Defense Department views the Arctic: new emerging technologies like robotic automation and artificial intelligence are making it easier for the Pentagon to continuously monitor activity in places where sending human operators is difficult. The Arctic is emerging as a laboratory for new unmanned concepts.
“You have to ensure that even those uncrewed systems are survivable to a long enough, at least, to endure, or are so inexpensive that their attritable nature is still worth it for the mission you're putting them on,” Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks said Monday at the Pentagon. “So that means a lot of research and development and testing, and that's where we're focused in this area, looking at the possibilities of where uncrewed systems can bring value.”
But, she said, potential use cases for AI and autonomy in the Arctic are many. “Domain awareness missions are well suited for uncrewed systems approaches in all domains. So sensing missions, [intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance], etc. This is a clear area where we can apply some of what we're doing in the department.”
The Defense Department is already using artificial intelligence applied to satellite and weather data to operate better in the Arctic, Iris Ferguson, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for Arctic and global resilience, told reporters.
“One of a couple of examples where we've done that to effect recently is looking at Coast Guard imagery, some 12,000 images, to detect maritime targets with our Coast Guard partners, we've also worked at looking at acoustic energies to employ on our submarines and on our [Piper] aircraft. So we're committed to trying to leverage the best technology available, and are also, of course, trying to do so in a manner that's both responsible and lawful.”
Still, there is important research yet to be done on building out a better physical presence in the Arctic using robotic and unmanned systems.
“It's a really tricky place to operate on and ground, with ground operations and with manned platforms, so where we can lean into remote platforms, it can make a lot of sense. However, it's really tricky to operate remote platforms due to weather and due to connectivity issues. And so that's where we're trying to lean, is looking at how we can test and do some [research and development] around ensuring these platforms can operate.”
18. Can Hamas Be Left to Defeat Itself? Debating the Endgame in Gaza
Excerpt:
Hamas showed callous disdain for the welfare of Palestinians by launching the October 7 massacre of innocent Israelis. When Israel responded with military force, Hamas protected its leaders and fighters underground as hundreds of thousands of Palestinian civilians suffered and starved on the surface—and tens of thousands died. But Hamas’s conduct does not absolve Israel of its responsibility to safeguard Palestinian civilians during military operations, including by ensuring they have enough to eat. According to The Wall Street Journal, the Hamas military leader Yahya Sinwar has called the deaths of Palestinian civilians “necessary sacrifices.” If the horrific plight of Palestinian civilians is indeed an integral part of Hamas’s propaganda strategy, as Ophir Falk argues, then apparently the Israeli government is playing right into the group’s hands.
Can Hamas Be Left to Defeat Itself?
Debating the Endgame in Gaza
By Ophir Falk; Audrey Kurth Cronin
July 23, 2024
Foreign Affairs · by Ophir Falk; Audrey Kurth CroninJuly 23, 2024 · July 23, 2024
The Case for Military Force
Ophir Falk
Hamas will end, but Audrey Kurth Cronin (“How Hamas Ends,” July/August 2024) is mistaken in asserting that the group will end if simply left to “defeat itself.” It will take more than that. After Hamas invaded Israel on October 7, murdering 1,200 people and taking 250 hostages, Israel’s war cabinet directed the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to destroy Hamas’s military and governing capabilities, free all hostages, and ensure that Gaza would no longer pose a threat to Israel. Limiting the goal to merely preventing another October 7 is not enough. No sovereign state would allow a genocidal terrorist organization to exist on its border.
Numerous studies, including my own, have shown that targeted killing is effective in mitigating Palestinian terrorism. Targeted killing against Hamas, however, is necessary but insufficient. Applying military pressure—or “military repression,” as Cronin refers to it—is also required. That is what Israel is doing, and it is doing so carefully and precisely. “Israel has done more to prevent civilian casualties in war than any military in history,” John Spencer, the chair of urban warfare studies at West Point, has observed, “setting a standard that will be both hard and potentially problematic to repeat.”
Israel seeks to minimize civilian casualties. That is an integral part of its counterterrorism policy. Hamas seeks to maximize civilian casualties. That is an integral part of its propaganda strategy, and too many people are falling for it. The war in Gaza might have ended long ago had Israel applied indiscriminate force, akin to the force the Allies applied in Dresden during World War II or the force Russia applied in Chechnya in the first decade of this century. And of course, this war could end immediately if Hamas laid down its arms, agreed to an unconditional surrender, and released the hostages.
As of this writing, in July, the IDF has dismantled about 22 of Hamas’s 24 battalions, including their stronghold and crucial infrastructure in Rafah. It has killed over 17,000 Hamas terrorists, incapacitated a similar number, and captured about 5,000. The unfortunate deaths of civilians, used by Hamas as human shields, are Hamas’s responsibility. Israel has enabled over 30,000 trucks carrying humanitarian aid, including 500,000 tons of food and medicine, to enter Gaza. That is far more than the “trickle” Cronin suggests.
In light of the unique challenges of this war—including Hamas’s extensive tunnel network, the number of hostages held by Hamas in civilian settings, and the refusal of Egypt to provide temporary refuge for Palestinian civilians—these achievements are phenomenal. More is needed, but Israel’s objectives are within reach.
Hamas will not end on its own, but it will end. Israel will prevail.
OPHIR FALK is Foreign Policy Adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Cronin replies:
My article laid out a strategic pathway to ending Hamas by turning its weaknesses against it. That is a much more ambitious aim than merely preventing another attack akin to the one the group carried out on October 7.
If Israel’s targeted killings had been strategically effective in mitigating Hamas’s terrorism, the October 7 attack would not have happened. Instead, since the 1990s, targeted killings have often boosted the group’s recruitment efforts, deepened its networks, and replaced weaker leaders with more extreme ones.
Hamas showed callous disdain for the welfare of Palestinians by launching the October 7 massacre of innocent Israelis. When Israel responded with military force, Hamas protected its leaders and fighters underground as hundreds of thousands of Palestinian civilians suffered and starved on the surface—and tens of thousands died. But Hamas’s conduct does not absolve Israel of its responsibility to safeguard Palestinian civilians during military operations, including by ensuring they have enough to eat. According to The Wall Street Journal, the Hamas military leader Yahya Sinwar has called the deaths of Palestinian civilians “necessary sacrifices.” If the horrific plight of Palestinian civilians is indeed an integral part of Hamas’s propaganda strategy, as Ophir Falk argues, then apparently the Israeli government is playing right into the group’s hands.
Foreign Affairs · by Ophir Falk; Audrey Kurth CroninJuly 23, 2024 · July 23, 2024
19. US warns Chinese banks over Russian shipments
I think sanctioning Chinese banks would be a game changer in the sanctions world.
US warns Chinese banks over Russian shipments - Asia Times
Most machine tools and chips imported by wartime Russia come from China, but Beijing calls them normal trade
asiatimes.com · by Jeff Pao · July 22, 2024
China has vowed to take necessary measures to safeguard its rights after American officials said the United States may sanction Chinese banks for facilitating transactions related to shipments to the Russian defense sector.
The US is preparing a new round of sanctions against Chinese entities that supplied dual-use items to Russia’s war machine in Ukraine, US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said at the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado on July 19.
Sullivan said the US side had seen Beijing respond to its concern that some Chinese banks are facilitating problematic transactions. However, he added that “the picture is not pretty” as China continues to be a major supplier of dual-use items to Russia’s war machine.
“There are targeted ways in which they are responsive, but the larger picture continues to travel in the wrong direction,” he said, adding that people can expect to see additional sanctions measures in the coming weeks.
He said US President Joe Biden had authorized Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen to sanction foreign banks while such a measure was put in place so that the US can take action if needed.
US State Secretary Antony Blinken said at the same event that China is providing the inputs for Russia’s defense industrial base.
“Seventy percent of the machine tools that Russia is importing come from China. Ninety percent of the microelectronics come from China,” Blinken said. “And that’s going into the defense industrial base and turning into missiles and tanks and other weapons.”
“China can’t have it both ways,” he said. “It can’t all at once be saying that it’s for peace in Ukraine when it is helping to fuel the ongoing pursuit of the war by Russia. It can’t say that it wants better relations with Europe when it is actually helping to fuel the greatest threat to Europe’s security since the end of the Cold War.”
On July 11, NATO leaders said in a joint declaration that China is a “decisive enabler” of Russia’s war against Ukraine.
‘Sinister intentions’
“Both China and Russia are independent major countries,” Mao Ning, a spokesperson of the Chinese Foreign Ministry, said in a media briefing on Monday. “China and Russia have normal cooperation, which does not target any third party and should not become a target for external interference or coercion.”
She said China firmly rejects all kinds of illicit unilateral sanctions and long-arm jurisdiction and will take all measures necessary to safeguard its legitimate rights and interests.
“China has said many times that Sino-Russian cooperation is not aimed at any third party, and China and Russia will not form an alliance. But did NATO listen? Absolutely not,” a Hebei-based military writer using the pseudonym “Xingchen” says in an article on Monday.
He says figures showed that 60% of Russia’s weapon parts were imported from the West while 72% of them came from the US.
“Based on NATO’s logic, are western countries including the US supporting Russia?” he says. “NATO has repeatedly accused China of its cooperation with Russia. Its sinister intentions are obvious.”
He adds that NATO, which offered US$43 billion of military support to Ukraine annually, is the real culprit that is shaking global peace and stability.
In June 2023, the KSE Institute, a think tank at the Kyiv School of Economics, said in a report that 66% of the foreign critical components found in weapons systems the Russian military has used in Ukraine were manufactured by American companies between March and December 2022. Newsweek pointed out that most of these parts were shipped to Russia via China.
Another Chinese commentator says that the Biden administration needs to show a tough stance against China as Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has gained an upper hand since he was injured in an assassination attempt on July 13.
That commentator says that, by smearing China-Russia cooperation, Blinken wants to increase his bargaining power in the coming meeting with Chinese diplomat Wang Yi at the ASEAN ministerial meeting in Laos this week.
On July 8, Gonzalo Saiz, a researcher at the Center for Finance and Security of the Royal United Services Institute, a United Kingdom-based think tank, told TheBanker.com that some small Chinese banks operate as “burner banks” as they can be shut down if they are sanctioned by the US due to Russian transactions.
Hera Smith, director and practice lead for financial crime compliance, Moody’s Analytics, said major Chinese banks may face trouble if they unintentionally process problematic transactions for smaller banks.
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US pressure
In 2023, China’s exports to Russia grew 46.9% to US$111 billion from a year earlier, according to China Customs. The figure increased only 1.5% year-on-year to US$24.4 billion in the first quarter of this year and fell 3.4% year-on-year to US$27.2 billion in the second quarter.
The changing trend is seen as a result of the United States’ increasing efforts to block China from shipping dual-use items to Russia.
In a visit to Beijing on April 8, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said the US could sanction Chinese financial institutions if they were involved in transactions related to shipments that bolstered Russia’s military capacity.
Russian newspaper Izvestia reported on April 12 that four more Chinese banks had recently stopped accepting payments from Russia after three largest Chinese banks did the same in February. On April 22, a US official told Reuters that the US did not have an immediate plan to sanction Chinese banks.
On June 12, the US Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) revised the definition of “Russia’s military-industrial base” stated in an executive order previously-issued by the US President.
After the amendment, foreign financial institutions that conduct or facilitate significant transactions or provide any services involving Russia’s military-industrial base will run the risk of being sanctioned by OFAC.
Read: China hawk: Fix symbolic, ineffective US sanctions
Follow Jeff Pao on X: @jeffpao3
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asiatimes.com · by Jeff Pao · July 22, 2024
20. Opinion: Project 2025 would slash veterans' hard-earned benefits
Opinion: Project 2025 would slash veterans' hard-earned benefits
The tenants of Project 2025, written by former and possibly future Trump administration officials, would overhaul the VA at the expense of veterans.
RUSSELL B. LEMLE, JASPER CRAVEN
POSTED ON JUL 21, 2024 2:53 PM EDT
taskandpurpose.com · by Russell B. Lemle, Jasper Craven
This article is an opinion essay written by 0Russell B. Lemle and Jasper Craven of the Veterans Healthcare Policy Institute. Task & Purpose welcomes submissions on Project 2025 and veteran healthcare topics.
As the November presidential election approaches, veterans deserve to know exactly what to expect regarding their hard-earned healthcare and disability benefits — and the overall future of the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) — should former President Trump win re-election.
They needn’t look further than Project 2025, an intricate road map for veterans’ policy under a second Trump administration. The sweeping presidential agenda was produced by the Heritage Foundation and written by more than 140 contributors who previously worked for Trump.
By its own description, the 920-page Project 2025 was designed to be implemented beginning on day one of a second Trump administration. It addresses all aspects of the federal government, including the VA, and is part of an overarching effort to completely remake American government to fit an ultra-conservative doctrine.
Project 2025 proposes several alarming recommendations that could significantly reduce veterans’ access to healthcare. One would realign healthcare benefits to cover only “service-connected conditions,” – i.e., medical or mental health problems that were acquired or exacerbated by military service. Currently, once veterans prove they have a service-related condition, they can receive care for that problem as well as other conditions that they may develop. For example, a veteran whose leg was amputated in the military would not only have lifetime care for that problem, but also for the high blood pressure or cancer that they develop, in civilian life.
The Heritage blueprint argues for the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) to eliminate some clinical services that “don’t align with service-connected conditions.” If this strategy to authorize care based on service-connected disabilities is taken to its logical extension, other care, like for an amputee’s hypertension in the example above, would no longer be furnished. There are five million veterans who have a service-connected designation, and they all potentially stand to lose access for the bulk of their healthcare needs. Two million veterans without a service-connected designation could potentially be disenrolled from VA healthcare entirely. Such a draconian concept accords with the Koch-backed group Concerned Veterans for America, whose Veterans Independence Act proposes “tightening eligibility requirements for new enrollees at a certain date in order to reorient the VA back towards its mission of providing care for service-connected disabled veterans.” It is also a goal espoused in the Heritage Foundation’s Budget Blueprint for Fiscal Year 2023.
The 2025 plan would further require VHA facilities to “increase the number of patients seen each day to equal the number seen by DOD medical facilities.” It’s a directive that disregards the stark differences between the two populations. Veterans are, on average, 58 years old, compared to servicemembers, who have an average age of 28. Veterans are also far more likely to have multiple, co-occurring medical conditions compared to U.S. servicemembers. As a result, VHA healthcare providers need to spend more time with veterans during their appointments to effectively address their complex health needs. By demanding that VHA facilities match the patient volume at DOD facilities, Project 2025 risks shortchanging veterans and compromising the quality of care they receive by treating them as if they are in the prime of their youth.
The document also calls for identifying VHA medical facilities whose “referrals for Community Care are below the averages in other similar markets,” then goading them to increase outsourcing. Such a formula creates a vicious, never-ending cycle, for even when one facility improves and is dropped from the list, another is added. The approach relentlessly pushes the number of community care referrals higher, ultimately leading to the closure of VHA facilities and the privatization of care. In an Orwellian double-speak, the document refers to this downscaling of a system that veterans rely on as a “genuine ‘Veteran-centric’” philosophy.
Financial compensation for service-connected disability is also set to be reduced.
Project 2025 calls for a review of the VA Schedule for Rating Disabilities to “target significant cost savings from revising disability rating awards for future claimants.” Not only would these changes result in less money in the pockets of disabled veterans, but for those failing to meet the new standards, their eligibility for VA healthcare would disappear.
Heritage hopes these changes will be implemented immediately to “ensure political control of the VA.” In parallel, Trump has said he intends to implement so-called “Schedule F,” which would potentially remove hundreds of experts who hold vital, tailored knowledge and replace them with ideologues and loyalists who can ensure the disassembly of the VHA system.
The specific section of the document focused on gutting veterans’ health and disability benefits was written by Brooks Tucker, one of Trump’s former VA policy advisers. Another contributor to the section was Darin Selnick, another former Trump advisor who has called for dismantling the VHA.
The VA’s hallowed mission “to care for those who served in our nation’s military, and for their families, caregivers and survivors” is no longer assured. Such a mission has never been assured, but instead secured only through the grit and tenacity of veterans fighting to preserve and expand this national gem. In the upcoming election, the potential for an unprecedented loss of veterans’ hard-earned benefits is more real than ever.
The latest on Task & Purpose
Veterans Healthcare Policy Institute
Russell B. Lemle, PhD, is a Senior Policy Analyst for the Veterans Healthcare Policy Institute. From 1981 to 2019, he worked for the San Francisco VA Healthcare System, including as Chief Psychologist for 25 years.
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Veterans Healthcare Policy Institute
Russell B. Lemle, PhD, is a Senior Policy Analyst for the Veterans Healthcare Policy Institute. From 1981 to 2019, he worked for the San Francisco VA Healthcare System, including as Chief Psychologist for 25 years.
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taskandpurpose.com · by Russell B. Lemle, Jasper Craven
21. Why does China care about a rust bucket in the middle of the sea?
Why does China care about a rust bucket in the middle of the sea?
Beijing and Manila have struck a provisional deal to allow the resupply of the dilapidated Sierra Madre in the South China Sea, which has become a potential conflict point.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/07/23/china-philippines-south-china-sea-sierra-madre/?utm
8 min
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The dilapidated Sierra Madre sits in the shallow waters of Second Thomas Shoal in the South China Sea in March 2014. China objects to Philippine efforts to keep the crumbling ship afloat. (Bullit Marquez/AP)
By Michelle Ye Hee Lee and Pei-Lin Wu
July 23, 2024 at 1:00 a.m. EDT
A dilapidated World War II-era vessel, the Sierra Madre, run aground on a tiny reef in the South China Sea has emerged as a potential flash point that could trigger a regional war, with the Chinese coast guard repeatedly swarming and ramming into Philippine vessels to stop them from resupplying the ship.
Beijing and Manila have now forged a provisional agreement that would allow the Philippines to take supplies out to the ship, hoping that it will end the recent escalation in tensions in the contested waters of the South China Sea.
The intensifying territorial dispute had threatened to drag the United States, a security ally of the Philippines, into another global conflict.
“Both sides continue to recognize the need to de-escalate the situation in the South China Sea and manage differences through peaceful means,” the Philippines’ Foreign Ministry said in a statement Sunday.
The Chinese foreign minister confirmed the two sides had reached a “temporary arrangement on the transportation of humanitarian supplies” and to “jointly manage maritime differences and promote the cooling of the situation in the South China Sea.”
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The territorial dispute centers on Beijing’s claims of sovereignty over the vast majority of the South China Sea — claims that neighboring countries reject, leading some Southeast Asian nations, including the Philippines, to exert their economic and maritime interests.
Here’s how Beijing views this conflict.
WHAT TO KNOW
Why does China care so much about the Sierra Madre?
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In 1999, the Philippines grounded the Sierra Madre on a half-submerged reef known as the Second Thomas Shoal, part of the Spratly Island chain, to lay claim on the islands. Manila now uses it as a naval outpost for a small group of troops stationed there — serving as an extension of Philippine sovereignty — and it sends resupply shipments of food, water and fuel for the Marines posted there.
The Second Thomas Shoal, which the Chinese call Ren’ai Jiao, is located in the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone but also falls within China’s “ten-dash line,” a swath of the South China Sea that Beijing claims as its territorial waters. The U-shaped area goes from China’s southernmost Hainan province, down past Vietnam to Malaysia, then up past the Philippines and behind Taiwan, incorporating the island into Beijing’s territory.
CHINA
TAIWAN
10-dash line
Hong
Kong
China’s maritime claims
Luzon
Hainan
(CHINA)
Manila
Paracel
Islands
Scarborough
Shoal
Subic
Bay
Second Thomas
Shoal
PHILIPPINES
VIETNAM
Palawan
Mischief
Reef
Seven islands
occupied by
China within the
Spratly Island
chain
MALAYSIA
BRUNEI
Borneo
200 MILES
INDONESIA
A 2016 arbitration ruling by the U.N. Convention of the Law of the Sea overwhelmingly sided with the Philippines, finding that China’s territorial claims to the Second Thomas Shoal were unlawful and that the reef lies inside the Philippine exclusive economic zone. Beijing rejects the ruling as “null and void” and has refused to adhere to it.
Chinese experts claim the other countries are the ones in the wrong.
“These countries illegally occupied these islands and reefs, so they tried to rationalize it and win international recognition. So this is the true intention behind internationalizing and escalating the South China Sea issue,” Wu Shicun, chairman of Hainan-based Huayang Research Center for Maritime Cooperation and Ocean Governance, said in a Chinese media documentary about the conflict.
China has repeatedly tried to block Philippine resupply missions that Manila calls “humanitarian” and wants to watch the disintegration of the ship so that Manila can no longer lay claim using the ship, experts say.
Both sides want the “status quo” in the South China Sea, but sharply differ in how they define it, said Yun Sun, senior fellow and director of the China program at the Washington-based think tank Stimson Center.
For the Philippines and the United States, the existence of Sierra Madre where it is now is the status quo. For the Chinese, it is how things were pre-1999 — which they believe the Philippines violated, Sun said.
A Chinese coast guard ship fires a water cannon at a Philippine boat during a resupply mission to the Sierra Madre on May 4. (Ezra Acayan/Getty Images)
Why has this come to a head now?
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Beijing views the delivery of construction materials to the ship, part of an effort to reinforce it and prolong its life, as a deliberate act designed to escalate tensions. China claims such shipments have increased in recent years, leaving it no choice but to act.
The Financial Times reported last week that the Philippines has secretly conducted missions to extend the life of the ship by sending construction materials to it “in recent months.”
Philippine officials say they are making “superficial repairs” so that soldiers can live on the boat. Beijing has rejected this characterization.
Chinese analysts say Manila has become more hostile toward Beijing under President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., who took office two years ago. In contrast to his predecessor, Rodrigo Duterte, who had forged closer ties with China, Marcos has increasingly asserted his nation’s claims in the South China Sea and has drawn closer to Washington.
Marcos is framing China as a threat to bolster his own domestic image, said Ding Duo, associate research fellow at the National Institute for South China Sea Studies, also based in Hainan. But for China, Marcos’s actions — including drawing closer to the Biden administration, which wants to counter China’s influence in the Indo-Pacific region — symbolizes a provocative stance toward Beijing, Ding said.
“The United States and other countries outside the region view the South China Sea issue as a security issue and a geopolitical issue, while China views it as an issue of safeguarding its own territorial sovereignty,” Ding said.
Philippine and Chinese coast guard personnel deploy fenders as they brace for a collision on March 5. Philippine ships conduct routine resupply missions to troops stationed at Second Thomas Shoal. (Ezra Acayan/Getty Images)
Chinese officials allege that the resupply trips under Marcos run afoul of an unwritten “gentlemen’s agreement” through which Duterte agreed not to bring in construction materials without Beijing’s approval or inspection.
The Chinese also claim that they had reached a “consensus” with the Philippines that Manila would tow the ship away, and that servicing the ship violates that agreement. (Philippine officials deny the existence of any such agreements, and Marcos has rejected “secret” arrangements that Duterte may have made with the Chinese.)
Why is the Second Thomas Shoal strategically important for China?
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For China, its core interest in the Second Thomas Shoal conflict is territorial sovereignty and integrity, which is critical to maintaining its centuries-long claim over the waters, experts say.
“What is more important to China may be that it involves the honor of the country, the reputation of the country, the obligation … to safeguard its sovereignty,” said Hu Bo, director of the Center for Maritime Strategy Studies at Peking University in Beijing.
Amanda Hsiao, senior analyst for China the International Crisis Group, said it is also important for Beijing to signal to the Philippines and other governments with whom it has territorial dispute that it’s willing to “impose costs on those who publicly defy Beijing.”
“In doing so, it seeks to deter bolder assertions of sovereignty by Manila and others,” Hsiao said.
An aerial view from March 2023 shows the Sierra Madre on the contested Second Thomas Shoal in the South China Sea. (Eloisa Lopez/Reuters)
China also may want to use the conflict to test Washington’s security commitment to Manila and the region, especially during a time when the United States is engaged in prolonged global conflicts elsewhere and facing a presidential election that could upend both domestic and international politics.
“If China is able to grab the shoal from the Philippines … and the United States fails to directly intervene and help the Philippines retain its occupation of the shoal, the credibility of U.S. security commitments to its allies in the region may be damaged,” said Li Mingjiang, nonresident scholar at the Singapore-based Carnegie China. “This may be the strategic calculation in the minds of Chinese decision-makers.”
What are China’s wider ambitions?
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The South China Sea is so important to China because it is the entry point into the Pacific Ocean, where it has ambitions to eclipse the United States’ post-World War II military dominance in the Asia-Pacific region. It has been gradually building its military presence throughout the Pacific — an effort the United States is trying to counter alongside its Asian security allies like Japan, Australia and the Philippines.
China has already demonstrated its ability to militarize tiny coral reefs, even turning them into artificial islands that it claims as its own.
In 1994, China seized Mischief Reef, located northwest of Second Thomas Shoal, and built small huts on stilts that it said were shelters for fishermen. Over two decades, China has built that reef into a major military outpost, which has given Beijing the ability to influence and monitor events across the sea, said Hsiao, of the International Crisis Group.
China views it necessary to establish dominance in the South China Sea, especially in the face of what it perceives as a growing security threat from the United States, Chinese experts say.
De Oppresso Liber,
David Maxwell
Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy
Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation
Editor, Small Wars Journal
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
Phone: 202-573-8647
email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com
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