Quotes of the Day:

“Change your opinions, keep to your principles, change your leaves, keep intact your roots.”

–Victor Hugo

“Being against evil doesn’t make you good.”

– Ernest Hemingway

"In order for a war to be just, three things are necessary. First, the authority of the sovereign.... Secondly, a just cause.... Thirdly... a rightful intention."

– St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica 

!. IN THE KILL ZONE: The Life and Times of Willie Merkerson (Part 4)

2. How China Benefits from a Russian Long War in Ukraine by Mick Ryan

3. NEWSFLASH: Children hospital hit by brazen Russian daylight attacks

4. SEAL Team Six - POTUS Has Immunity, Not You.

5. Immunity Granted to All Presidents & Biden and Europe Face an Uncertain Future

6. NATO is losing patience with one of its own members — and it’s not who you think

7. Chinese Soldiers Arrive In Belarus For Anti-Terrorism Exercises

8. Jemaah Islamiyah Disbands: End Of An Era Or Strategic Transformation? – Analysis

9. US says troops are leaving Niger bases this weekend and in August after coup

10. Flawed Wargames Imperil National Security

11 Former USAF European Commanders: Let Ukraine Take the Fight to Russia

12. Secret Meetings, Private Threats and a Massive Arms Race: How the World is Preparing for Trump

13. Deadly Osprey Crash, Police Shooting: General Reflects on Time as Head of Air Force Special Operations

14. North Korean troops could be sent to Ukraine due to their sheer numbers, not their effectiveness, experts say

15. Why NATO Should Stay Out of Asia

16. A Better Path for Ukraine and NATO

What Kyiv Could Do Now for a Place in the Alliance

17. Exclusive: South Korea's Yoon to discuss Pyongyang's 'distinct threat' to Europe at NATO

18. War, Peace, and Politics: Reflections on Writing

19. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, July 7, 2024

20. Israel–Hamas War (Iran) Update, July 7, 2024

1. IN THE KILL ZONE: The Life and Times of Willie Merkerson (Part 4)

Another fascinating chapter in this series on a great American. Looks like there will be a Part 5 too.

There is a lot of inside baseball about the agency in this.

And you really have to appreciate the bureaucracy, even the CIA's bureaucracy.

IN THE KILL ZONE: The Life and Times of Willie Merkerson (Part 4)

Part 4: Disappearing in Plain Sight

https://thehighside.substack.com/p/in-the-kill-zone-the-life-and-times-b91?utm

SEAN D. NAYLOR AND JACK MURPHY

JUL 08, 2024

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Willie Merkerson (front row, second from left) with the Sudanese presidential guard in 1983. (Photo courtesy of the Merkerson family.)

It was about 7 am on a warm, dusty morning in the Sudanese city of Omdurman. The sun was only beginning to bake the air into the upper 90s it would reach that day in late summer 1983.

Willie Merkerson and Scott Eder, two former Green Berets turned CIA operatives, were in the back seat of a military Land Rover that a young Sudanese corporal was maneuvering through the early morning traffic. A Sudanese captain was riding shotgun.

The four were en route to a training site on the other side of Omdurman, which sits across the Nile River from the capital, Khartoum. Following miles behind them was a truck carrying the members of the Sudanese presidential guard they were due to train that day.

The rush-hour traffic was moving steadily, but not fast enough for the impatient corporal. Intending to pass the vehicles in front of him, he pulled out of his lane only to see a truck with an open bed full of unsecured passengers barreling toward him. Too late, he tried to swerve back into his lane. “The front left of our fender struck the lorry and the lorry rolled,” Eder told The High Side.

The impact left the Land Rover spinning “like a top,” with the only injury to the four occupants being Eder’s bruised shin, he said. “We were the luckiest men in the world at that moment.”

The truck passengers were not so fortunate, he said: “There were bodies everywhere.”

The corporal who had caused the accident “disappeared,” Eder said. “He just vamoosed, and it was just me, Willie and the Sudanese captain” left to deal with the situation.

After getting out to inspect the scene, Eder, who was suffering from a severe bout of food poisoning, returned to the Land Rover and climbed into his seat. “I was not in top condition,” he said.

But as he tried to gather his strength and his wits, Eder soon became aware of a large crowd – “hundreds of them” – gathering at the crash site.

Whipped up by agitators, the mob was looking for someone to blame for the horrific scene. Eder, the Land Rover’s only white occupant, offered a convenient scapegoat. Within minutes, many in the crowd were pointing menacingly at him as the man responsible.

Already alert to the danger, Merkerson walked briskly over to the Land Rover. “They’re blaming you for the accident,” he told Eder. “We need to get out of here.”

With the vehicle surrounded and the corporal gone, driving away was out of the question.

Together with the Sudanese captain, Merkerson and Eder started moving through the crowd, which quickly became more difficult as the mob formed around them, jostling them and shouting angrily. “The fists started flying,” Eder said.

As the captain and Merkerson pushed him through the crowd while fighting off those trying to get to him, Eder had little doubt of his fate if the mob got their hands on him. He was familiar with “necklacing,” a common form of vigilante justice in Africa in which a tire filled with gasoline or another flammable liquid is placed around a victim’s neck and set alight.

“They were going to necklace me with the tire and the fuel, because I was the white guy,” he said.

Eder felt the mob closing in.

The warrior becomes a headhunter

Switching careers from the Army to the CIA as he turned 41 required “no transition at all,” Merkerson said. “I just went to work.”

Recruited as a paramilitary officer in the agency’s International Activities Division (now known as the Special Activities Center), Merkerson fitted into his new role smoothly. He was assigned to the division’s Ground Branch, which, he said, was divided between an “operations” unit that ran covert missions worldwide and a “training” unit that instructed foreign security forces with whom the CIA had a relationship.

Despite being in his early forties, Merkerson immediately stood out in his new unit for his relative youth. “I was the youngest guy in my part of Ground Branch when I came in the agency,” he said, adding that many of his colleagues were “retired sergeants major” and others with similar levels of experience. (Someone who joined Ground Branch at roughly the same time as him, Merkerson said, was Ron “Popeye” Franklin, who had been one of his instructors at One-Zero School in Vietnam a decade previously, before going on to join Delta Force in its earliest incarnation.)

“They didn’t allow many young people to come into Ground Branch,” Merkerson said. “They wanted instructors, primarily, not shooters, and they wanted wisdom, knowledge and stuff like that.”

As a former Green Beret, Merkerson was a natural fit. “The paramilitary officers where I worked did pretty much the same thing as Special Forces did – worked through the indigenous [fighters] to get the job done,” he said. “It was easy.”

Paramilitary officers weren’t required to attend the agency’s six-month operations course, graduation from which is needed to become a case officer – someone empowered to recruit foreign spies. But two years later, the CIA’s Africa Division sent him to the course at “The Farm,” the CIA’s training facility at Camp Peary, Virginia. “Africa Division wanted me to be an operations officer in Africa, because I had a lot of Africa expertise that other people didn’t have,” he said. As a result, “unlike most guys, I was an OO, which is a case [or operations] officer and a PMOO – paramilitary operations officer.”

“It’s very difficult to make that transition,” said Mel Gamble, who for a time ran officer recruitment for the agency’s directorate of operations. “There were not many to do that.”

As a black man, Merkerson was also joining a very small community within the CIA’s operations directorate. While the CIA closely guards its personnel statistics, in 1974 – eight years before Merkerson attended the operations course – the agency had “fewer than ten black case officers,” writes historian John Prados in his book “Safe for Democracy: The Secret Wars of the CIA.”

“All the black officers in the agency at that time, we all hung out, we all knew one another,” said Mike Shanklin, a case officer who served with Merkerson in Khartoum. “There couldn’t have been more than 10 or 15 of us.”

When he was assigned to Ground Branch’s training unit, “I was one of only two black guys,” Merkerson said. “The other guy was a retired Marine master sergeant … He was a logistician.”

Merkerson said he had no idea how many black case officers the CIA had at the time that he graduated from the operations course. “That stuff was compartmented.” However, one black officer the agency apparently did not include in its numbers was Merkerson, who said that five years into his CIA career he discovered that due to a bureaucratic snafu the agency’s personnel office had him down as being white.

A 6-feet-4-inch, 215-pound black man strolling the agency’s corridors, he had “disappeared in plain sight,” said Merkerson, who jokingly observed that the agency that was supposed to be “the eyes and ears of America, [but] you don’t know what your employees look like.” It took him until 2000 – 20 years after he joined – to rectify the problem, he said.

“That was a big joke,” Merkerson told The High Side. “Some of the guys joke about it with me now – ‘The black man who disappeared.’”

In becoming an operations officer, Merkerson was also pushing against the precedent set by many of his Ground Branch forebears and peers. Although the agency pushed to qualify paramilitary officers as case officers in order to create a more flexible workforce, this was not a route that appealed to all paramilitary personnel, according to Merkerson.

“Some of my best friends … [who] rose to be very, very high in Special Activities Division and Center, never had an overseas assignment, not an [operations officer] assignment or a [paramilitary] assignment,” he said. “And others only went over when they could get a PM assignment overseas in a place like Angola or Pakistan, where you had some PM slots. They didn’t have to do any agent handling or nothing like that, they just shoot, scoot and communicate, collaborate and coordinate, because that was the old doctrine. Some of these old-timers were just adamantly against ever becoming case officers. They didn’t want anything to do with it.”

Such paramilitary veterans looked down on the operations officer’s main task: recruiting spies. “They called it ‘headhunting,’” Merkerson recalled, before impersonating a grizzled paramilitary officer – “‘That ain’t my job, I’m a warrior.’” Merkerson had little time for such views. “Yeah, you’re ‘a warrior,’ alright. Who feeds the warrior? The goddamn OO.”

Staying calm to save a life

Merkerson was already an operations officer when he found himself fending off Sudanese rioters bent on extracting revenge against Scott Eder for what they wrongly perceived as his culpability in a vehicle crash that resulted in multiple fatalities.

He and the Sudanese army captain were holding the crowd at bay, but there appeared little chance of escape.

Just when the situation seemed perilously close to irretrievable, Eder felt strong hands under his armpits. Two Sudanese police were lifting him onto the bed of their pickup truck. The cops had arrived on the scene just in time. “Willie and the captain jumped on board and we were spirited away,” Eder said.

Merkerson had kept his cool throughout the ordeal, which Eder said lasted for what felt like three hours but was probably closer to 15 minutes. By “staying calm and recognizing that this was getting ugly very fast and we needed to get out of there,” Merkerson had averted a disaster, Eder said.

While acknowledging that the two cops also played their part in his survival, Eder’s gratitude to Merkerson and the Sudanese officer remains strong more than four decades later. “I credit Willie and this captain,” he told The High Side. “They saved my life.”

Sudanese President Jaafar al-Nimeiri (left) and U.S. President Ronald Reagan during a November 1983 visit to Washington by Nimeiri, a longtime client of the United States. (Screenshot courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

“We wanted to get access and placement to the president.”

Merkerson and Eder were in Sudan, a country the size of the United States east of the Mississippi, as a two-man team on temporary duty to train the bodyguards who protected President Jaafar al-Nimeiri.

The ruler of Sudan since 1969, Nimeiri was a dictator whose leftist policies in the 1970s and increasing Islamism in the 1980s had not prevented his government from becoming a major recipient of U.S. aid. But that also made him and his regime targets for U.S. intelligence collection.

Training Nimeiri’s presidential guard was the CIA’s job because the U.S. Secret Service, from which Merkerson had taken a course in executive protection, was not allowed to teach those skills to foreigners, according to Merkerson. For the CIA, the rules were different. “We could teach it,” Merkerson said.

But the CIA’s priority in training Nimeiri’s guards was not keeping the Sudanese president alive.

“We taught it for the express purpose of intel collection,” Merkerson said. “We didn’t give a damn about whether the president got killed or not, that’s their problem. We wanted to get access and placement to the president, [somebody] who could help … tell [us] about his plans and intentions, his strengths, his weaknesses, his leadership and his vulnerabilities and capabilities.”

Asked whether that worked in Sudan when it came to intelligence on Nimeiri, Merkerson said: “Of course.”

During this period, Merkerson was conducting similar training across “a wide swathe” of Africa, impressing station chiefs wherever he went. “I had made it my personal goal … wherever I went to do the best job I could possibly do [and] establish not just a working relationship but a great working relationship with the [local CIA] station,” he said. “Because that’s the whole reason for our being out there: Not to go out there and hug the Sudanese or kiss the Somalis but to facilitate access to the targets by the station.”

Among those impressed by his efforts, according to Merkerson, were the chiefs of station in Mogadishu and Khartoum, the capitals of Somalia and Sudan respectively. Each wanted Merkerson assigned to his station full time. The Mogadishu station chief had known Merkerson longer. However, the Khartoum station chief “outranked him … and won out,” Merkerson said.

Thus, four years after Philip Cherry recruited him in Lagos, Merkerson found himself assigned to Sudan, serving under Milt Bearden, who had been Cherry’s successor as Lagos chief of station. Already on his way to becoming a legendary figure in the agency, the larger-than-life Bearden was now chief of station in Khartoum.

A CIA officer since 1964, Bearden had an outsize personality that made him hard to forget. “Milt is a flamboyant, outspoken, confident – lots of self-confidence – guy,” said Eder. “They threw the mold away [after him].”

“He could sell sex to Jesus and know that he was going to be forgiven,” said Shanklin, who served under Bearden for several months in Khartoum. “Shit happens because of Milt, period. Period. He moves the ball.”

Milt Bearden in Afghanistan in the late 1980s. As CIA chief of station in Islamabad, Pakistan, from 1986 to 1989, Bearden ran the agency’s covert support of the Afghan mujahideen. (Photo courtesy Milt Bearden)

A dream assignment – for some

A city of 2 million, for some U.S. officials Khartoum in the mid-1980s was a dream assignment. The United States’ embrace of Nimeiri meant U.S. Embassy Khartoum – and therefore its CIA station – played key roles for U.S. policy in Africa. Between Nimeiri’s steadily declining popularity, an ongoing civil war between the president’s increasingly Islamist regime in the north and the animist rebels in the south, and tensions with Libya (which shared a border with northwest Sudan), life in Khartoum promised to be interesting, if nothing else.

“I was delighted” to get the job, Hume Horan, the U.S. ambassador from 1983 to 1986, told a State Department historian. “I thought it would be an exciting adventure to serve there.”

Bearden was also clearly in his element in Khartoum.

“Some of the shit we did with Milt, you’d have to be braver than Batman to try,” said Shanklin. “Milt would do it at the drop of a hat and be successful.”

“Milt wasn’t scared of anything,” said Robert Baer, who also served under Bearden in Sudan.

That combination of courage and infectious self-confidence engendered fierce loyalty from Bearden’s subordinates. “The whole station would be scared to fucking death, and Milt would say, ‘Here’s how we’re going to do this,’” said Shanklin. “Bam! And because he said it, we did it.”

“I would have walked through hell and back with Milt Bearden,” Eder said.

In 1985, as Bearden’s tour as station chief neared its end, the CIA sent his replacement, Jim Senner, out for what the agency calls “warm turnovers,” meaning the outgoing chief introduces his contacts in the host nation service to the incoming officer. “I remember him telling me, ‘Look … you’re going to be the most important guy in the country, you’ll run the country,’” Senner told The High Side. “’You’re more important than the ambassador, you’re more important than Nimeiri.’”

Bearden’s recollection of the conversation is quite different. “I can’t imagine ever saying that,” he told The High Side. “I can [imagine saying], ‘After the ambassador and the president of the country, you’re going to be pretty much up there because that’s the way you’re viewed by most of the important Sudanese.’” In fact, Bearden added, senior Sudanese officials might accord “a greater importance to the CIA station chief in Sudan than the station chief would himself.”

Senner discounted Bearden’s hyperbole, as he perceived it, but like Horan, he too was excited by the possibilities. “At that time this was our largest station in Africa, and I would say [our] premier station, and they had unlimited resources,” Senner said, adding that the Khartoum station chief even had his own airplane. “I was quite looking forward to the job.”

But other CIA officers sent to Khartoum, the world’s hottest capital, were less enthusiastic. “Khartoum was a miserable place to be assigned,” said Baer, the station’s best Arabic speaker (according to Bearden and Senner). “You’d come in in the morning and your desk would just [have] like an inch of dust on it.”

The climate tended to dissipate officers’ energy, according to Baer. “It was just hard to get anybody to do anything, to get motivated to go out on the street,” he told The High Side, adding that the Nimeiri regime’s newfound enthusiasm for Sharia law meant Khartoum’s social life also left something to be desired, at least from the perspective of a Western visitor. “There’s no places to go,” he said. “There’s no clubs for foreigners, expats, nothing like that.”

This made the professional side of life challenging as well, according to Baer. “You didn’t go out to restaurants to meet Sudanese,” he said. “And walking through their intelligence [headquarters], it was all so dusty and hot … It wasn’t like you just kicked back with a cup of coffee with these guys.”

Nor was the city safe. “We had a lot of terrorists just retired over there, relaxing over there long enough so they could get enough resources, wealth and direction and guidance to go and attack another target,” Merkerson said. “It was a hotbed.”

In 1973, a decade before Merkerson first arrived in the city, the Palestine Liberation Organization had taken hostage and then assassinated U.S. Ambassador Cleo Noel and Deputy Chief of Mission Curt Moore, along with a Belgian diplomat, during an attack on the Saudi Embassy.

Perhaps with that event in mind, Horan, who died in 2004, took what for an ambassador were extraordinary precautions. “I usually would carry a weapon – as instructed by the [embassy’s regional security officer] – when I’d go to diplomatic functions,” Horan told the State Department historian.

Retired Ambassador David Shinn, who was deputy chief of mission at the embassy from 1983 to 1986, said that unlike his boss he did not step out armed in the Sudanese capital. Nonetheless, he told The High Side, “Khartoum’s kind of a dangerous place and you’ve got to be careful.”

The Merkerson “magic”

Merkerson was assigned full-time to Khartoum in 1984, the year before Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the Soviet Union. The Cold War was still at the forefront of the CIA’s collective mindset. There were about a dozen case officers in the Khartoum station, but the station’s priority was not recruiting Sudanese agents.

“What did we care about?” Baer said. “Soviet sources. That’s the CIA’s raison d’etre.”

Bearden had a slightly different take. “It’s a little more complex than that,” he said. “Yes, almost every station in the world [had] a priority objective assigned to it to recruit Soviet sources,” but in Africa, “you want to penetrate the local intelligence service” as well.

“A chief of station’s responsibility in any country is to know how the [place] works,” he said. “If you’re chief of station in London, you don’t spend a lot of time on that … but all through Africa you really want to be able to have a grip on the country.”

For this reason, the CIA’s Khartoum station had deep penetration of the Sudanese intelligence service, with which it worked extremely closely. “We owned that service,” Merkerson said.

In this dusty, intrigue-filled milieu, Bearden watched Merkerson demonstrate what the station chief called his “magic” at working with host nation counterparts that had so impressed Cherry in Lagos.

“He was able to kind of take these Sudanese officers … almost under his wing, and they began to look up to him,” Bearden told The High Side. “He did just a superb job. He could get the Sudanese to do pretty much anything.”

The CIA refers to any collaboration between its officers and those of a foreign security service as a “liaison” relationship, and Merkerson was adept at exploiting that relationship, according to Bearden. “I can't get too far into that,” he said, “but he could move somebody into what I used to call ‘liaison plus,’ which means they'd go a little bit farther. And then there are other steps beyond ‘liaison plus.’”

The result was a priceless stream of intelligence flowing through the CIA’s Khartoum station and on to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. “Willie was able to create a situation in his work with the Sudanese that always gave the agency and then the U.S. position an advantage at a pretty critical time in the Horn of Africa,” Bearden said.

Merkerson’s physical appearance as a tall, slender black man helped him operate in Sudan, according to Scott Eder.

“Willie would fit right in,” he said, adding that this was particularly the case when Merkerson dressed in a long, white, loose-fitting garment worn by men in Sudan and Egypt called a jellabiya. “He put a jellabiya on and wrapped his head [in a turban], he looked like a local, 100%.”

When meeting sources, Merkerson would use a motorbike that bought from one of the embassy’s generator mechanics. “He'd go have his agent meetings on a motorcycle – pick the guy up and drive out of town in the dust and everything and have his meetings all looking like a local with all these other folks on motorcycles,” Eder said. Merkerson confirmed this, adding that he used a Yamaha dirt bike because it could go cross country “and then I didn’t have to worry about anybody following me.”

One of Merkerson’s main responsibilities in Khartoum was to keep tabs on – and recruit agents in – two elite Sudanese units: the presidential guard (who of course he had spent much of the 1983 training), and an airborne commando unit now known as the 144^th Special Forces Battalion that provided direct support to Nimeiri. The two units were headquartered in adjoining compounds beside the airport.

“I was pretty well wired in with these guys,” Merkerson said, adding that the CIA would exchange information with the two units, in addition to recruiting their members as agents. “Almost seven days a week [I was there] to bring intel or to pick up intel – this was an overt exchange,” he said. “Then I’d deal with my other guys [i.e., the recruited agents] on the side later on.”

The 144^th began life as an airborne infantry unit, but with training from CIA paramilitary teams it adopted a counterterrorism mission too. The agency paid for the construction of mock towers and vehicle frames “so they could practice raids and ambushes and assaults,” Merkerson said. “There was a lot of money put into it.”

After the CIA, acting on Merkerson’s advice, kitted the unit out in new combat boots and desert camouflage uniforms, “they all of a sudden stood taller and [acted] more elite,” Bearden said. “We even built a shooting house … for training these guys.”

Merkerson spent so much time with the 144^th’s upper ranks that he began to understand Arabic, he said. “They were bringing me over to the officers club and we were doing workouts [and getting] massages.”

There was more to the CIA’s interest in the 144th than simply creating a good counterterrorism outfit for Sudan. The unit developed strong relationships with Palestinians and other Arabs, “so they gave us a lot of indirect access to a lot of tough targets,” Merkerson said. “They could also inform us of the modus operandi of all those people in the Middle East, especially the elite ones. So, we were able to build up not only a strong tactical force but also an intelligence force and a counter-intelligence force through the 144^th.”

Omar al-Bashir in 1989, several years after Willie Merkerson and Milt Bearden made his acquaintance. (Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

The deputy commander of the 144^th’s higher headquarters was an ambitious lieutenant colonel named Omar al-Bashir, according to Merkerson. “Bashir was the guy I dealt with every day,” he said. “He knew me by name and he spoke English and we would chat and drink coffee almost every day that I was over there ... because he spoke English and his commander did not.”

Bashir’s political instincts likely had led to his oversight of the 144^th as it grew in capability, according to Bearden. “Bashir was connected to it because he was airborne,” he said. “Him being smart probably said, ‘I think this falls under me,’”

However, Bearden confirmed that whatever Bashir’s role, it put him in regular contact with Merkerson and his boss. “We got linked up with him then and I got to know him very well, as did, certainly, Willie,” Bearden said.

Merkerson said that despite his familiarity with Bashir, the up-and-coming officer was not a paid asset of his. If true, that was the rarest of things in Merkerson’s life – a missed opportunity – because in 1989, a few years after Bearden and Merkerson left Sudan, Omar al-Bashir led a military coup that toppled the government. He ruled as president of Sudan until 2019.

However, Merkerson’s knowledge of Nimeiri’s guard force was to prove invaluable in 1985, when the lives of four intelligence officers hung in the balance.

To be continued in Part 5

Editor’s Note: This series contains Amazon hyperlinks for books. If you buy the books after clicking on the links, as part of the Amazon Affiliates program, The High Side will earn a small commission.

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2. How China Benefits from a Russian Long War in Ukraine by Mick Ryan

Excerpts:

The European Council on Foreign Relations report mentioned earlier in this article describes how many intellectuals in China believe that America is using the war in Ukraine as part of its strategy to encircle China. The report notes that “they describe American foreign policy as conducive to generating chaos around the world…Many think that America is instrumentalising the war in Ukraine and NATO’s involvement in the conflict as part of its efforts to contain not only Russia, but also China.”

As such, the Chinese Communist Party and President Xi are probably comfortable with the war continuing for some time to come. They have more to gain from its continuance than its ending. As one Russia analyst recently explained, "the war in Ukraine may be a drain on the West’s resources and on the economies of developing countries, but it suits Beijing’s interests just fine. China has gained power over Russia, all while paying minimal economic and diplomatic penalties. China, then, may stay the course."

The 2023 NATO Vilnius Summit communique noted that “the deepening strategic partnership between the PRC and Russia and their mutually reinforcing attempts to undercut the rules-based international order run counter to our values and interests. We call on the PRC to…condemn Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, to abstain from supporting Russia’s war effort in any way, to cease amplifying Russia’s false narrative blaming Ukraine and NATO for Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine.”  

Given that China’s support for Russia has only increased since the last NATO summit, China’s position on the war will almost certainly be given a harder examination at this week’s Washington NATO Summit. But with China deriving substantial strategic, economic and ideological benefits from the war, a variety of robust diplomatic and economic measures will be needed from Western nations to convince Xi to step back from his support for Russia.

Whether NATO members are willing to take such measures - and whether they would actually work - remains to be seen.

PACIFIC THEATRE

How China Benefits from a Russian Long War in Ukraine

China and its ongoing support for Russia is likely to be an important topic at this week’s Washington NATO summit.

https://mickryan.substack.com/p/china-benefits-from-a-long-war-in?utm

MICK RYAN

JUL 08, 2024

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Source: CBS News

China is the main enabler of Russia’s war aggression against Ukraine.

Jens Stoltenberg, 7 July 2024

The NATO 75th anniversary summit will be held in Washington DC in the coming 48 hours. Key issues on the agenda will include the war in Ukraine, enhanced deterrence and improving military interoperability. But it is likely that China’s support to Russia’s war effort in Ukraine will also be a topic of discussion. As outgoing NATO Secretary General, Jens Stoltenberg, recently noted, China is "sharing a lot of technologies, [like] micro-electronics, which are key for Russia to build missiles, weapons they use against Ukraine…at some stage, we should consider some kind of economic cost if China doesn't change their behaviour".

Last week, reports emerged of Chinese and Russian companies allegedly beginning co-development this year of an attack drone similar to the Iranian Shahed uncrewed aerial vehicle (UAV) that has been deployed in the thousands by Russia against Ukrainian targets. Last year, a Chinese defence company unveiled an attack drone which it called the Sunflower 200. This aerial vehicle looked very similar to the Iranian- Shahed-136 drone that has been procured and employed by Russia against Ukraine. 

Also last week, Russian President Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping travelled to the capital of Kazakhstan for a meeting of leaders from the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO). The joint communique from this meeting stated that “the circle of states that stand for a just world order and are ready to resolutely defend their legitimate rights and protect traditional values is expanding.”

Putin and Xi’s relationship has bloomed over the past few years. The two leaders have met several times since Russia’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022. As Alexander Gabuev recently wrote in Foreign Affairs:

The tightening of this alignment between Russia and China is one of the most important geopolitical outcomes of Putin’s war against Ukraine. The conscious efforts of Xi and Putin drive much of this reorientation, but it is also the byproduct of the deepening schism between the West and both countries. 

Given how this relationship between the two authoritarians has blossomed since the beginning of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Chinese leader must see a benefit to China not only in a closer relationship with Russia, but in the ongoing war itself. It begs the question, what does China gain from the war, and how might China benefit from a continuation of Russia’s long-war strategy in Ukraine?

China Benefits from Prolonging the War in Ukraine

Chinese strategists probably view the war in Ukraine as a net positive for the achievement of Chinese national security objectives. It is unlikely that Xi or his strategists have any sense of the moral tragedy of the war; Xi has shown no empathy for the Ukrainian people since Russia’s brutal attempt to subjugate the country commenced in 2022. 

There are however three areas where Xi and his advisors probably see an advantage to China for the war continue into the medium and long term. These elements of advantage rest in the strategic, economic, and ideological domains.

Strategic Benefits. The first strategic benefit to China is that the war in Ukraine is absorbing much of the attention of key strategic decision-makers in the United States. While there have been calls from some commentators for the U.S. to focus solely on the challenge posed by China, wiser strategic thinking has prevailed because security in Europe is in the direct national interests of the United States. But because a secure, unified and prosperous Europe has been a key American strategic objective since the end of the Second World War, evidenced by the Marshall Plan and formation of NATO among many other U.S. initiatives, it means that the U.S. must continue to invest in the defence of Ukraine.

Every minute that American political and strategic leaders invest in thinking about Ukraine is a minute they cannot focus on the China threat. Every dollar spent on Ukraine for military and economic aid is a dollar that can’t be invested in securing the western Pacific against Chinese aggression or funding the pivot to the Indo-Pacific. While it is appropriate that American make these (and potential increased) investments in Ukraine, China will see benefit in these continuing for as long as possible.

In a similar fashion, Chinese strategists will see a continuation of the war in Ukraine as keeping the Europeans in Europe. China will have been discomforted by increased deployments of European navy and air force assets into the Pacific region over the last few years. While the war in Ukraine may not halt such deployments, it may reduce their tempo and the possibility of large increases in such European deployments to the western and southwest Pacific regions. While China is happy to trade with European nations, it does not want to see its military forces in what it considers to be its region. Prolonging the war in Ukraine contributes to them achieving this.

Another strategic benefit for China of a prolonged war in Ukraine is that it provides a gigantic testbed for Chinese ideas about future war in the Pacific. While we may not see Chinese weapons being employed directly by Russia (although that could change) the war in Ukraine is offering many different insights into the application of new technologies in the air, ground, space, maritime, cyber and information domains.

The longer the war continues, the more the Chinese also learn about the benefits and methods of contemporary integrated, joint operations and joint targeting processes. Additionally, as the war prolongs the Chinese are learning more about the need to review the quality of their military leadership, training and education. The PLA has demonstrated competence in learning from other people’s wars, will be appreciating the opportunity to hone many of their technologies, ideas and organisations for any future confrontation with America and its allies in the Pacific.

But beyond the war in Ukraine, China is also learning about how western politicians and alliances make strategic decisions about war and about the defence industries that support them. For example, Xi and his advisors will have watched western decision-making about nuclear deterrence and the contribution of conventional weapons to Ukraine. The war is continuing to allow Chinese decision-makers and strategists to observe how Russian statements on nuclear weapons and escalation condition western politicians to be very cautious and risk adverse in their strategic decision making. The more that Chinese decision-makers can study modern Western leadership methods, the more benefit they will gain.

Ultimately, the war is likely to result in a weakened Russia. It may still be a nuclear power and a large military force that straddles the European and Asian landmass, but the personnel, economic and reputational costs of the war will have a generational impact on Russia. The longer the war continues, the longer it will take Russia to recover, regardless of the outcome. This decrease in Russian power and influence will be of net benefit to China.

As Andrew Michta has identified, China might benefit in two other ways. First, Russia might be more willing to share sensitive military technologies with China. And second, if a defeated Russia fractures politically, China might be well positioned to exploit Russia’s eastern territories for its own purposes.

But it isn’t just in the strategic realm that China benefits from a continuation of the war in Ukraine. Economics is another interesting area where China is doing very well indeed from the war.

Economic Benefits. Over the past 28 months since the beginning of the Russian large-scale invasion of Ukraine, China’s trade with Russia has increased markedly. In 2023, China-Russia trade grew by 26% compared to the previous year. In that time, Chinese shipments to Russia soared by 46% and Russian shipments to China increased by 13%. Despite western sanctions, China has now stepped up to become the largest importer of Russian energy.

Over the period January to September 2023, Chinese imports to Russia largely replaced EU imports to Russia. Chinese monthly exports have grown from US$3.9 billion to around US$9 billion. The kinds of exports from China to Russia range from machine tools to raw materials, transportation to communications equipment. And to give an indication just how profound this shift has been the diagram below shows Chinese exports to different countries, including Russia, over the period January 2022 through to January 2024. Chinese companies are literally making out like bandits as a result of the war in Ukraine. 

Growth in China’s Trade with China since 2022. Source: Atlantic Council

To be fair, many other nations have also exploited the war to gain more favourable terms of trade with Russia and exploit western sanctions regimes. India, which refuses to condemn Moscow over its February 2022 large-scale invasion of Ukraine, has since become as one of the largest buyers of Russian oil since sanctions were imposed. While the two way trade between India and Russia is much smaller than that of China (about US$67 billion in the year to March 2024), India’s foreign minister has recently stated that this is “not a temporary phenomenon.”

But China’s massive growth in exports to Russia, and purchase of Russian energy, gives it far more leverage over Russia that India’s growing trade does. As such, this has significantly changed the dynamic in the Russia-China relationship in China’s favour. However, I don’t believe this makes Russia a Chinese supplicant as some have proposed. Russia still has agency in the relationship, just not as much as it did before the invasion.

Ideological Benefits. At the 20^th Party Congress in 2022, Xi Jinping described how China remains at threat from external actors, and indeed he considers the external environment to be getting worse:

Confronted with drastic changes in the international landscape, especially external attempts to blackmail, contain, blockade, and exert maximum pressure on China, we have put our national interests first, focused on internal political concerns, and maintained firm strategic resolve.

A defining feature of Xi’s three terms as President has been his escalation of the ideological struggle against the West. Xi noted in his report to the 20^th Party Congress that “we have stayed committed to Marxism-Leninism, Mao Zedong Thought, Deng Xiaoping Theory, the Theory of Three Represents, and the Scientific Outlook on Development, and we have fully implemented the Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era as well as the Party’s basic line and basic policy.”

From Xi’s perspective, Russia’s war in Ukraine is part of the larger confrontation that countries like China, Russia, Iran and other are waging against western dominance. A 2023 report from the European Council on Foreign Relations found:

Many scholars argue that China is right not to emulate Washington’s activism – for example, mobilising around the idea of defence of democracy – by trying to build a counter-alliance. They support Beijing’s positioning of remaining neutral as a way to further build support in the global south that does not want to be drawn into the war. 

China clearly sees the opportunity to ideologically cleave more nations – especially those in the so-called Global South – away from American influence. The war in Ukraine also allows Xi to portray the conflict as a fight forced upon Russia by NATO and America. Further, from Xi’s perspective, it justifies the increased focus on national security, increasing the political purity of senior civilian and military leaders, and PLA military modernisation that were focal points of the 20^th Party Congress.

Finally, with Russia ‘confronting NATO and the west’ in Ukraine, China does not have to do all the heavy lifting in that broader ideological confrontation. If China is going to convince other nations that it can provide a better design for global prosperity and security than the one provided by America since 1945, it helps to have another major nation on board. Russia, and its war against Ukraine, assists China in this regard.

Assessment

In a 12 June 2024 briefing, U.S. Permanent Representative to NATO Ambassador Julianne Smith described how “China has taken a side; China has opted to support Russia through the provision of these dual-use components; and that if it opted to stop doing that, we believe it would have a major impact on Russia’s ability to conduct the war on the ground inside Ukraine.”

While China has put forward a twelve-point peace plan for ending the conflict in Ukraine, this was not a genuine initiative to stop the war. Rather, the vague assertions and desired outcomes of the Chinese ‘peace plan’ masks several deeper aspirations of the Chinese Communist Party. These include ensuring that Russia does not lose in Ukraine (which would weaken Chinese narrative of the west in decline), that China plays a central role in brokering any peace agreement instead of America, and that China does not suffer a drastic impact with its economic relations with the west.

China’s refusal to attend the June 2024 Ukraine peace summit in Switzerland is further proof that the Chinese Communist Party is not an honest or unbiased broker with regards to the war in Ukraine. It refuses to abandon its Russian partner, and is likely to work behind the scenes to sabotage any peace proposals that are not proffered by the Chinese foreign ministry.

The moral imperatives of shortening the war and reducing human suffering also plays no role in Chinese thinking about the war in Ukraine.

In the early 2000s, China benefitted from the United States focus on counter terrorism operations inside the U.S., as well as the American expeditionary operations into Iraq, Afghanistan and at a smaller scale, Africa. With the U.S. distracted by its Middle East operations, China was able to rapidly modernise its military and expand its network of South China Sea outposts with minimal interference from the U.S. administration.

The Chinese Communist Party may see a prolonged war in Ukraine as a similar opportunity. While Russia and China may have signed a ‘no limits’ friendship pact in 2022, there should be no doubt that China is exploiting Russia, as well as Ukrainian suffering, to achieve its own national goals.

The European Council on Foreign Relations report mentioned earlier in this article describes how many intellectuals in China believe that America is using the war in Ukraine as part of its strategy to encircle China. The report notes that “they describe American foreign policy as conducive to generating chaos around the world…Many think that America is instrumentalising the war in Ukraine and NATO’s involvement in the conflict as part of its efforts to contain not only Russia, but also China.”

As such, the Chinese Communist Party and President Xi are probably comfortable with the war continuing for some time to come. They have more to gain from its continuance than its ending. As one Russia analyst recently explained, "the war in Ukraine may be a drain on the West’s resources and on the economies of developing countries, but it suits Beijing’s interests just fine. China has gained power over Russia, all while paying minimal economic and diplomatic penalties. China, then, may stay the course."

The 2023 NATO Vilnius Summit communique noted that “the deepening strategic partnership between the PRC and Russia and their mutually reinforcing attempts to undercut the rules-based international order run counter to our values and interests. We call on the PRC to…condemn Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, to abstain from supporting Russia’s war effort in any way, to cease amplifying Russia’s false narrative blaming Ukraine and NATO for Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine.”  

Given that China’s support for Russia has only increased since the last NATO summit, China’s position on the war will almost certainly be given a harder examination at this week’s Washington NATO Summit. But with China deriving substantial strategic, economic and ideological benefits from the war, a variety of robust diplomatic and economic measures will be needed from Western nations to convince Xi to step back from his support for Russia.

Whether NATO members are willing to take such measures - and whether they would actually work - remains to be seen.

3. NEWSFLASH: Children hospital hit by brazen Russian daylight attacks

More Russian brutality.

The Counteroffensive with Tim Mak

99+

NEWSFLASH: Children hospital hit by brazen Russian daylight attacks

https://www.counteroffensive.news/p/newsflash-children-hospital-hit-by?utm

Just a week ago we profiled the work of the Okhmatdyt Children's Clinic in Kyiv. Today, it was hit. We rushed to the scene to report.

TIM MAK, OLEH TYMOSHENKO, ANASTASIIA KRYVORUCHENKO, AND MYROSLAVA TANSKA-VIKULOVA

JUL 08, 2024

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Top: Okhmatdyt Children's Clinic in Kyiv today. Bottom: The hospital’s trauma department. (Photos: Oleh Tymoshenko)

In central Kyiv, you can often hear the difference between outgoing air defense missiles firing up over the city: a hollow, thumpy, ‘poof!’ sound; sometimes you can even see the smoke trail it makes as it rises into the sky.

And then there’s the kind of explosion you don’t want to hear:

…a low rumbling; a crunchier, sharper sound indicating something on the ground has been hit.

Today, the sites hit include a children’s hospital.

Russia attacked Ukraine with more than 40 missiles of various types, President Zelenskyy said. The targets were the Ukrainian cities Kyiv, Dnipro, Kryvyi Rih, Sloviansk, and Kramatorsk.

Ukrainian air defense shot down 30 of the 38 missiles that Russians used to attack Ukraine in the morning. But there were still dozens of casualties.

A total of 28 people were killed and more than 112 others were wounded in the Russian massive attacks, said Ukrainian Interior Minister Klymenko. In addition, more than 50 civilian objects were damaged, including residential buildings, a business center and two medical facilities.

We rushed to Okhmatdyt Children's Clinic in Kyiv to begin assessing the situation.

Mykyta Nechaev, the acting head of diagnostic radiology, speaks outside the hospital. (Photo: Tim Mak)

Mykyta Nechaev, who leads the hospital’s diagnostic radiology department, said that it all happened in "one second," an instant, while he was with children in the basement.

He immediately started helping clear debris, but seemed to still be in a state of shock — "how could we know it would happen," he said. "How could we expect that?"

Larysa Moisienko, a senior nurse at the trauma unit, walks in her department after the attack. (Photo: Oleh Tymoshenko)

Larysa Moisienko, a senior nurse in the trauma unit, and her colleagues were sitting in the corridor during the explosion, having managed to evacuate all the patients before the blast.

"We were sitting there, and the blast wave completely blew us all away to the corner. At that time, all the windows and doors were blown out, absolutely everything was blown out," Larysa said.

A child being urgently evacuated from the hospital. (Photo: Oleh Tymoshenko)

Immediately afterward, a fire broke out.

The plasterboard ceiling caught fire.

She and other staff members had to look for fire extinguishers and put out the fire, at the same time evacuating the wounded from the building.

Here’s what the hospital grounds looked like after the attack:

The Counteroffensive’s Oleh Tymoshenko had just visited this hospital to profile the work they do for chronically ill children.

“It’s unbelievable,” he said. “I was just there two weeks ago. It was like they hit my home.”

Natalia Samonenko, head of the Rare Diseases Department at the Okhmatdyt Children's Clinic, was in a corridor when the explosion happened.

She was unharmed. A few minutes before, they had moved all the patients to the shelter. So at the time of the explosion, she was just checking to see if everyone had left the wards.

But the patients who were on the second floor, above Natalia’s department, in the intensive care unit, were seriously injured. Many of them were hit by glass shards, as there not a single intact window left in the building.

A man carries a child away from the hospital. (Photo: Oleh Tymoshenko)

The Rare Diseases Department, which had been renovated just a few months ago, is now destroyed, though this is not the main problem now.

"We will restore the building. But the main thing is that we are worried about people, because we cannot reach some doctors and do not understand what is happening," Natalia said.

Editor’s note: There are graphic photos circulating of bleeding children from the hospital, but we’ve decided not to publish them.

In his photos from last week — delicate and full of brightness — you can see that the staff strive to create a safe, nurturing environment for the young ones. In times of blackouts and attacks, sometimes it is the small things that make huge differences: like vivid flowers to keep spirits high.

Top: Alina Teliuk poses for a portrait at the Okhmatdyt Children's Clinic on June 24, 2024 in Kyiv, Ukraine. Bottom: Natalia Samonenko shows the examination room for patients with rare diseases at the Okhmatdyt Children's Clinic on June 24, 2024 in Kyiv, Ukraine. (Photos: Oleh Tymoshenko)

Here’s what it looked like today: a chaotic scene, with the acrid smell of smoke drifting throughout the hospital grounds.

Blown out windows; splintered trees; and shocked medical staff looking towards the toxicology department, where rescue workers immediately began working.

But you also saw acts of inspiring civic service that defines a nation in hard times. As we arrived, we saw civilians rushing to the hospital, bringing water and food for survivors.

Within an hour of the explosion, volunteers had already started sweeping up debris into neat piles. (Photo: Tim Mak)

Olena, who was nearby when the missile hit today. She was waiting to buy medicine for her child, who was thankfully staying at a different hospital and safe.

Olena immediately grabbed a broom and spontaneously began sweeping up glass and debris.

"I can't do nothing when something big like this happens," she said.

Many of the children have been evacuated from the premises, like this one, but some remain sheltered in place.

A child lays on a stretcher on the street outside the hospital. (Photo: Oleh Tymoshenko)

In fact, not long after the attack, an explosion sounded, not far above the hospital. It appeared to be air defense firing.

Some people began to panic, and begin running in every direction.

Children wait in a corridor in the Okhmatdyt Children's Clinic in Kyiv, following today’s attack. (Photo: Oleh Tymoshenko)

The attack drew instant condemnation from international humanitarian groups.

“No child should grow up under the threat of missile strikes. No child should risk dying amidst the rubble of hospitals meant to be safe havens for healing and recovery,” said the International Rescue Committee's health coordinator in Ukraine, Dr. Marko Isajlovic. “Health facilities are protected under international law and must remain out of harm’s way in times of conflict.”

As I write this, I can hear the warbling of ambulances and firefighters rushing to the scenes across the city.

This is the reality of Kyiv at war.

The Counteroffensive’s Myroslava Tanska-Vikulova (center) looks at the camera while waiting in the subway during Monday’s attacks.

In the Dniprovsky district of the capital, missile fragments hit a maternity hospital, KIAA reported. Preliminary, 4 people were killed and 3 others were wounded.

Three transformer substations were completely destroyed or damaged in Kyiv, DTEK reported, which will worsen the already deteriorating energy infrastructure in the city. Power engineers are already working on the ground.

Ukraine is initiating an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council because of Russian strikes on civilian infrastructure, Volodymyr Zelenskyy said at a briefing in Warsaw.

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4. SEAL Team Six - POTUS Has Immunity, Not You.

Prepare for some controversy.

SEAL Team Six - POTUS Has Immunity, Not You.

Trump vs. The United States Immunity Decision Challenges The Relationship

Between The Military And The President

https://www.strategycentral.io/post/seal-team-six-potus-has-immunity-not-you

By Monte Erfourth – July 6, 2024

Introduction

This week, the Supreme Court made a decision that changed the relationship between the military and civilian leadership. In particular, it highlighted a dubious role that SEAL Team Six might play in the increasingly bitter partisan political wars our nation continues to experience. The court found that the President would be immune from criminal prosecution while conducting any official act. In exploring the issue, the court asked if the President could order SEAL Team Six to assassinate a political rival and be criminally immune.[1]-[2] The findings reveal a stunning answer. Opening the door to this possibility should inspire everyone in uniform to ask questions. These leap to mind: “Would you, as the SEAL Team Six Commander, follow an unlawful order from the President knowing he is immune from prosecution and you are not? Particularly if that meant killing Americans on American soil and that you will likely be relieved for failure to follow a Presidential directive?” As of Monday, these are questions a military commander may face.

Trump v. the United States declared all official Presidential acts beyond criminal prosecution. In short, the court grants the Executive branch absolute immunity from acts deemed “core powers.” It leaves the question of what core powers are unsettled. Still, it adds to the confusion by explaining that the President also has peripheral powers that maintain the presumption of immunity. There is no standard or definition given to clear this up. The court further adds that no official acts can be used as evidence for personally committed crimes. The bottom line is that it shifts legal jeopardy off of the President and onto his staffers, cabinet heads, lesser officials, and uniformed personnel who might follow an unlawful order from the President. For the first time in the 248 years of our union, the President, an elected official, faces no criminal liability for issuing an unlawful order.

This immunity creates a new hazard for every current and future armed forces member. It is not new that following an unlawful order risks criminal prosecution. It is also not new that refusing an order deemed unlawful risks violating Article 92 of the UCMJ and possible court martial. What is new is that the Commander in Chief faces no possible criminal liability for issuing an illegal order. The military assumes all the risk once that order is issued. It is the proverbial rock and a hard place for everyone in the Executive branch’s chain of command, from the Secretary of Defense to the E-1.

The legal jeopardy is clear and stark for the Department of Defense. Being Commander in Chief of the U.S. Armed Forces, as prescribed in Article II of the Constitution, is clearly a core function of the Executive and immune from criminal liability. The legal jeopardy will now be the civilians and uniformed personnel to bear; the President will never share those concerns. It is simply a matter of time before this corrupt path to expanded power tempts a politician. This article examines the Trump v. the United States immunity decision and explores the profound ramifications for the military. 

Trump vs. The United States Findings

In the Supreme Court case of Trump v. United States, Chief Justice Roberts delivered an opinion addressing the indictment of former President Donald J. Trump. The Court examined the scope of Presidential immunity from criminal prosecution. The decision changes the relationship between the President and all those he has the authority to direct in performing his Constitutional role. The Executive branch’s authority and reach were expanded because the rule of law no longer applies in whole or part to official and peripheral acts by a President.

The Court held that the President must be immune from prosecution for exercising core constitutional powers to ensure the effective and independent functioning of the Executive Branch. This absolute immunity applies to actions within the President's exclusive constitutional authority, such as the power to pardon or remove executive officers, the Commander in Chief of the military, treaties, and appointing ambassadors and officers to lesser posts as defined in Article II. 

This ruling creates some peculiar and problematic potential scenarios for the armed services. While on appeal in the D.C. Circuit Court, Judge Florence Pan asked if the scenario of a President ordering SEAL Team Six to assassinate a political rival would be considered exempt from criminality for a President with absolute immunity.[3] The Trump legal team concurred it would. In Oral Arguments at the Supreme Court, the legal team was asked the questions again by Justice Soto-Mayor. The response was that such an order would be official and immune from criminal liability but would remain an illegal order by the President. D. John Sauer presented oral arguments on behalf of Trump and, as part of his argument, said while the President could issue such an order, the UCMJ and criminal law would prevent the military from following such an order.[4] The President might be impeached for directing a military coup or assassination, but the onus of responsibility to decline such an order now falls on the military.

Unfortunately, the court left a lot that is unclear. The Court declared that there is no immunity for a President's unofficial acts; it also said that nothing in executing an official act can be used as evidence of personal criminal wrongdoing. The Supreme Court's decision in Trump v. United States creates vague standards to delineate the scope of Presidential immunity, granting absolute immunity for official acts within the President's exclusive authority, presumptive immunity for official acts within shared authority with other branches of government, and no immunity for unofficial acts. However, it developed a new notion of core and periphery powers open to broad interpretation. It also made it possible to be in the commission of core powers while engaged in simultaneous criminal wrongdoing. However, immunity would protect this wrongdoing if conducted with other government officials and using government infrastructure. Even more mysterious is how the President could be found criminally liable for taking a bribe, treason, high crimes, or misdemeanors. These things are explicitly mentioned in the Constitution as offenses but now have almost no way to be tried other than by impeachment.

Because no evidence can be presented from official acts, nothing criminal can be charged or demonstrated. Even the President’s motive cannot be questioned. The case was remanded for further circuit court proceedings to apply these principles to the specific allegations against former President Trump. Perhaps the circuit court judges will clarify these executive powers and their relationship to immunity, but that might take years. In the meantime, the current and future Presidents are immune from prosecution for whatever they order the military to do.[5] The repercussions for civil-military leadership are severe and mandate further explanation.

Implications For the Civil-Military Relationship

This case has profound implications for the scope of Presidential immunity, particularly concerning the President's actions as Commander in Chief of the military under Article II of the Constitution. The ruling declares that the President possesses absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions deemed part of their "core powers," including directing military operations. Under the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), Title 10 of the U.S. Code, and federal and state criminal laws, any military member executing such an order would be subject to prosecution for committing crimes, as the illegality of the act remains unaffected despite the existence of a Presidential directive.[6]

In Justice Sotomayor's dissent, she elaborates on the potential chaos such unchecked power could unleash. If the President were to order the assassination of a political opponent, the military personnel involved would be in a precarious position. They would have to choose between obeying a direct command from the Commander in Chief or adhering to legal and ethical standards that prohibit unlawful killings. This situation would likely lead to court-martials and criminal charges against those who complied with the order.[7] But once done, no impeachment or loud public protests can bring back the slain rival. In a Machiavellian sense, it is all upside for a President so inclined.

Some might find the SEAL Team Six scenario far-fetched, including Justice Roberts. But it is unclear why. The framers of the Constitution were concerned with the separation of powers, especially with checking the Executive's power. They did not want an Executive with the powers of a king, who was traditionally beyond the law. They intentionally did not include immunity for the President and created a power-sharing arrangement between the Congress and the President to lessen Presidential power. Much of each element is missing in this ruling for a court that claims “text, history, and tradition” as its primary approach to the law.

The following potential scenarios highlight the military's perilous position. Could President Biden declare Trump an enemy? Could President Biden then direct the military to detain the former President? Could Biden then direct the Department of Justice to establish an ad hoc tribunal to convict and potentially execute Trump as a traitor? Biden would face no criminal charges if he used official channels and means. Or, why not declare an insurrection during the Republican Convention and send the military police to arrest the Republicans for plotting to overthrow the government? What’s stopping him from trying something like this? His lawyers? His character? Tradition? His conscience? 

Conversely, could a newly reelected President Trump seek revenge on Biden and direct MARSOC or the 82ndAirborne to kill Biden? Yes, he could. It would be unlawful, but he could order it. He, too, could declare an insurrection and physically threaten his rivals or protesters or order the military to shoot immigrants crossing the border. Any President could fire any commander refusing such an order because firing is now an official act. The same would apply to any Secretary, Assistant Secretary of Defense, or Deputy for refusing to support an unlawful order. There is no penalty for the President other than possible impeachment or negative public opinion. There is little to no recourse for the fired civilian or relieved commander. If you are a murdered political rival, protestor, or immigrant, no court or impeachment can restore your life. Serving as a senior leader defending our homeland just got more precarious.

Should anyone in the military follow a Presidential directive that might be unlawful? “The boss said so” is not a good legal defense, as the Nuremberg trials revealed. Like all Presidential directives, it would have to pass the scrutiny of military Judge Advocates and the judgment of civil-military leadership. If the new Trump administration removes all Schedule F civilians and replaces them with loyalists, as is likely, the military could face a situation where the civilians support the unlawful order and try to strong-arm the military to follow suit.[8]This will put extreme pressure on uniformed leadership to uphold the law and our Constitution while risking their career and reputation. Their moral courage will be severely tested.

What Should the Military Do?

The ruling underscores the critical need for military and civilian officials within the Department of Defense to exercise extraordinary caution. They must be vigilant in assessing the legality of orders, especially those in the gray zone of legality. Disobeying an illegal order is not just a matter of ethical duty but a legal imperative to avoid prosecution and maintain the rule of law. The potential for a President to exploit their immunity while leaving subordinates exposed to legal jeopardy necessitates a robust system of checks and balances within the military and the broader executive branch.

Sustaining and reinforcing a culture prioritizing allegiance to democratic values and the Constitution over individual leaders is more important than ever. The military not only needs to guard against the misuse of power in domestic civil and political matters that go beyond the intent of the Constitution, but it must also prevent a future President from creating military units that may be loyal to him instead of to the country or constitution.

Robust civilian oversight ensures that the chain of command remains accountable to the people by placing democratically elected leaders above military leaders. However, when a President has protections that go beyond the law, military leaders must be cautious about the motivations of civilian leadership. It is important for politicians, civil officials, and military members to equally promote transparency and accountability to prevent any single political leader or institution from having undue influence. The military must also ensure that a diverse and representative recruitment process is followed to reflect the society it serves. This would reduce the likelihood of factionalism and shifts in personal loyalty.

Rigorous training and education programs must emphasize democratic governance. Strong internal mechanisms must be established to detect and deter any attempts to politicize the military. Most importantly, it is the duty of the President to protect the nation from any abuse of power. It is a national imperative to elect individuals with the character and commitment to ensure that democracy and the people come first. However, if a person with a tyrannical nature is elected and seeks to use the military to consolidate power, the last line of defense protecting American citizens will be those in uniform who are willing to say "no."[9]

Conclusion

While the President may now have immunity from criminal prosecution for directing the military to commit unlawful acts, this protection does not extend to others who follow these orders. The legal frameworks governing military conduct and federal criminal law ensure that those below the President remain accountable for their actions. The Supreme Court’s ruling places a heavy burden on military and defense officials by increasing the likelihood a President will issue unlawful commands. Their understanding of the law and commitment to upholding the Oath of Office is our best way to safeguard the integrity of the military and the principles of American democracy.

This has always been the case. The military has always put orders under legal scrutiny. That’s part of upholding the rule of law and defending the Constitution. However, the new power of Presidential immunity has changed the dynamic dramatically. No longer is the burden of criminal proceedings mutually shared. The President does not have to fear acting unlawfully. This is a dangerous possibility for a nation under the rule of law. Some impacts should be immediate. No American joins the military to become the brute enforcer of criminal Presidential behavior or to physically menace their fellow citizens on the whims of the President. It is inherently unconstitutional to do so, but the fact that it could happen may further dampen recruitment efforts. Senior leadership may find their trust in civilian leadership eroded. Commanders in the field may be less inclined to act on White House directives. Other cascading problems could result from this ruling, but it is hard to imagine more good than bad coming from it. Time will tell us if our nation can endure this extreme expansion of Presidential powers. The military must double down on the Oath of Office and guard the people from this new potential for Presidential mischief. Good character and judgment better hold firm in our flag-grade officers; the nation's fate is in their hands. 

[1] Griffin, Kelsey, Erica Orden, and Lara Seligman. "The terrifying SEAL Team Six scenario lurking in the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling." POLITICO, July 2, 2024. [Politico Article](https://www.politico.com/news/2024/07/02/trump-immunity-murder-navy-sotomayor-001SixSix385)

[2] Bump, Philip. "The perfectly valid Presidential-immunity murder hypothetical." The Washington Post, July 2, 2024. [Washington Post Article](https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/07/02/Presidential-immunity-murder-hypothetical/)

[3] https://www.cadc.uscourts.gov/internet/opinions.nsf/1AC5A0E7090A350785258ABB0052D942/$file/23-3228-2039001.pdf#:~:text=URL%3A%20https%3A%2F%2Fwww.cadc.uscourts.gov%2Finternet%2Fopinions.nsf%2F1AC5A0E7090A350785258ABB0052D942%2F%24file%2F23

[4] https://www.supremecourt.gov/oral_arguments/argument_transcripts/2023/23-939_f2qg.pdf

[5] https://thedispatch.com/podcast/advisoryopinions/winning-without-winning/

[6] Griffin, Kelsey, Erica Orden, and Lara Seligman. "The terrifying SEAL Team Six scenario lurking in the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling." POLITICO, July 2, 2024. [Politico Article](https://www.politico.com/news/2024/07/02/trump-immunity-murder-navy-sotomayor-001SixSix385)

[7] Ibid.

[8] Heritage Foundation. "Project 2025." January 31, 2023. Accessed June 25, 2024. https://www.project2025.org/.

[9] Ozan Varol, "The Democratic Coup d’État," Military Review, 2012. Accessed July 5, 2024.

5. Immunity Granted to All Presidents & Biden and Europe Face an Uncertain Future

A useful roll up that I should have sent yesterday.

Immunity Granted to All Presidents & Biden and Europe Face an Uncertain Future

THE STRATEGY & TECH WEEKLY

Summaries and Links to This Week’s Curated Articles

July 1 – 7, 2024

https://www.strategycentral.io/post/immunity-granted-to-all-presidents-biden-and-europe-face-an-uncertain-future

SCOTUS Opinion in Trump v. US Raises Concerns of a US President as King.

THE BIG PICTURE

International Political Landscape

A recent Supreme Court ruling in Trump v. United States grants the President immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts, reshaping the relationship between military commanders and the President. This decision raises concerns about the legal risks faced by military personnel who might follow potentially unlawful orders, creating a dynamic where the President is untouchable. In contrast, those in uniform could face consequences. This ruling emphasizes the necessity for military leaders to exercise vigilance and uphold democratic principles to safeguard the integrity of the armed forces and American democracy. In a related context, the upcoming NATO summit, initially intended to celebrate President Biden's leadership, has become uncertain due to concerns about Biden's political and physical condition. NATO members are anxious about the implications of a potential Biden withdrawal from the presidential campaign, especially considering the possibility of Donald Trump's victory, which could strain U.S.-European relations and be exploited by adversaries like Russia and North Korea.

Amidst political challenges, President Biden faces waning popularity and recent public setbacks as he navigates his re-election campaign. Drawing parallels with recent political developments in France and the U.K., Biden must maintain strategic clarity and resilience to secure his political future. In the economic sphere, the U.S. labor market continues to show resilience by adding 206,000 jobs in June despite the unemployment rate rising to 4.1 percent. This consistent job growth over 42 months has potential implications for Federal Reserve policy, possibly prompting rate cuts later in the year. Additionally, the U.S. commitment to Ukraine's potential NATO membership while avoiding direct confrontation with Russia exposes contradictions in the alliance's preparedness and military spending. Instead of focusing solely on NATO membership, prioritizing Ukraine's defense capabilities to deter future Russian aggression is suggested. The historical and often contentious relationship between the U.S. and China is marked by strategic, economic, and ideological conflicts, underscoring the importance of understanding past confrontations and collaborations to navigate future challenges in U.S.-China relations.

Technological Innovations

The global economic landscape is witnessing remarkable advancements across various technological domains. Innovations in robotics are exemplified by a new bug-like robot capable of complex maneuvers. AI and machine learning are becoming integral to workforce development, with companies like Apple and Microsoft focusing on smaller, more efficient AI models. The aerospace sector is exploring unconventional energy sources, such as microwaves, to power planes despite potential environmental concerns. Quantum mechanics is pushing the boundaries of information transfer, as demonstrated by experiments at the Large Hadron Collider, and traditional semiconductor devices are being harnessed to advance quantum internet capabilities. AI and 3D printing are revolutionizing crop management in agriculture, and geospatial data is being redefined through smartphone and crowdsourcing technologies. Environmental sustainability is also a focus, with atom-thin graphene membranes enhancing carbon capture efficiency. Robotics continues to evolve with new methods for smoother gait transitions in hexapod robots, and the aerospace industry is seeing breakthroughs with AI-designed rocket engines successfully passing hot-fire tests. These developments collectively highlight a dynamic interplay of innovation and strategic investment, driving forward the global economy.

Economic Developments

New labor data indicates that the US job market is slowing down, with companies hiring more moderately in June and wage growth cooling as unemployment claims rise for the ninth straight week, the longest stretch since 2018. This slowdown has led to record closes for the S&P 500 and Nasdaq as investors anticipate potential Federal Reserve rate cuts. Meanwhile, the global shipping industry faces ongoing challenges with significant disruptions due to Houthi attacks in the Red Sea, port congestion, and geopolitical tensions. These issues have driven up spot container rates and delays, particularly in key hubs like Singapore. Supply chain experts predict that shipping rates will remain under pressure, potentially reaching pandemic highs, necessitating strategic planning to navigate these bottlenecks effectively.

ECONOMY

• New labor data added further evidence that the US jobs market is indeed slowing down. Companies hired workers at a more moderate pace in June and wage growth cooled as recurring claims for unemployment benefits rose for a ninth straight week, the longest stretch since 2018. 
• S&P 500, Nasdaq post record closes Friday as jobs report raises Fed rate cut hopes.
• Investors looking for a safe haven from French chaos are going here.
• This is why finding an apartment in New York City is almost impossible.
• These flight routes suffer the world’s worst turbulence.
• Britain’s famed universities are approaching a financial cliff.

“Global Shipping Strains Seen Extending Into Second Half,” authored by Brendan Murray and published in Bloomberg on July 2, 2024, highlights the ongoing challenges faced by the global shipping industry as it enters the peak demand season. The article discusses how disruptions, including Houthi attacks in the Red Sea and port congestion, have significantly increased spot container rates and delays, particularly in key hubs like Singapore. Supply chain experts predict continued pressure on shipping rates, potentially reaching pandemic highs, due to a mix of geopolitical tensions, tariff uncertainties, and labor strikes. The article emphasizes the need for strategic planning to navigate these persistent supply chain bottlenecks. [Read the full article] (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-07-02/global-shipping-strains-seen-extending-into-second-half).

TECH WATCH

Description

URL

Here’s the Most Buglike Robot Bug Yet: It can take off, hover, land, crawl, and even flip itself over.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/flying-robot-bug

Your Next Great AI Engineer Already Works for You: How to build your team’s skills in AI and ML.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/your-next-great-ai-engineer

Apple, Microsoft Shrink AI Models to Improve Them: “Small language models” emerge as an alternative to gargantuan AI options.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/small-language-models-apple-microsoft

Powering Planes With Microwaves Is Not The Craziest Idea: If you don't mind massive ground antennas and fried birds, that is.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/electromagnetic-waves

Faster Than the Speed of Light: Information Transfer Through “Spooky Action at a Distance” at the Large Hadron Collider. This finding extends the behavior of entangled particles to distances beyond the reach of light-speed communication and opens new avenues for exploring quantum mechanics at high energies.

https://scitechdaily.com/faster-than-the-speed-of-light-information-transfer-through-spooky-action-at-a-distance-at-the-large-hadron-collider/

Silicon Magic: Powering the Quantum Internet of the Future. Using traditional semiconductor devices, researchers have unlocked new potentials in quantum communication, pushing us closer to realizing the vast potential of the quantum internet.

https://scitechdaily.com/silicon-magic-powering-the-quantum-internet-of-the-future/

How AI and 3D Printing Are Changing the Way We Grow Food: Scientists use laser scanning to generate 3D models of the above-ground parts of the sugar beet plant from a crop field, providing a step forward in developing AI-assisted crop pipeline improvement.

https://scitechdaily.com/how-ai-and-3d-printing-are-changing-the-way-we-grow-food/

Revolutionizing the Map: How Smartphones and Crowdsourcing Are Redefining Geospatial Data. Collaborative research outlines significant impacts on various industries and the ongoing need to integrate user-generated and traditional data sources for comprehensive analysis.

https://scitechdaily.com/revolutionizing-the-map-how-smartphones-and-crowdsourcing-are-redefining-geospatial-data/

Atom-thin graphene membranes make carbon capture more efficient: Scientists have developed advanced atom-thin graphene membranes with pyridinic-nitrogen at pore edges, showing unprecedented performance in CO2 capture.

https://techxplore.com/news/2024-06-atom-thin-graphene-membranes-carbon.html

A new method to achieve smooth gait transitions in hexapod robots: Their proposed gait control technique is based on so-called central pattern generators (CPGs), computational approaches that mimic biological CPGs.

https://techxplore.com/news/2024-06-method-smooth-gait-transitions-hexapod.html

LEAP 71’s AI-Designed Rocket Engine Passes First Hot-Fire Test: This engine, made from copper, was designed autonomously without human help and then tested in the U.K., reducing design and production time.

https://3dprint.com/310671/leap-71s-ai-designed-rocket-engine-passes-first-hot-fire-test/

“The Challenges of Policy in an Era of Fulcrum Technologies,” authored by Melissa K. Griffith and Nina Kelsey and published in War on the Rocks on July 2, 2024, explores the complex landscape of emerging technologies critical to American security, prosperity, and sustainability. The article highlights the tension between the increasing electricity demands of industries like AI and the U.S.'s decarbonization targets. Griffith and Kelsey introduce the concept of "fulcrum technologies," which require unprecedented coordination between domestic and international stakeholders to manage economic, security, and sustainability concerns simultaneously. The authors argue for innovative policy approaches and better staffing to navigate these intertwined challenges effectively. [Read the full article](https://warontherocks.com/2024/07/the-challenges-of-policy-in-an-era-of-fulcrum-technologies/).

NATIONS MAKING HEADLINES

THE USA

“SEAL Team Six - POTUS Has Immunity, Not You” by Monte Erfourth, published by Strategy Central on July 6, 2024, discusses a recent Supreme Court ruling in Trump v. United States, which grants the President immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts. This landmark decision redefines the relationship between military commanders and the President, raising concerns about the legal risks faced by military personnel who might follow potentially unlawful orders. The ruling underscores a perilous dynamic where the President remains untouchable while those in uniform bear the consequences of executing directives that may contravene the law. Erfourth explores the profound implications for civil-military relations and emphasizes the necessity for military leaders to exercise vigilance and uphold democratic principles to safeguard the integrity of the armed forces and American democracy. https://www.strategycentral.io/post/seal-team-six-potus-has-immunity-not-you

“Opinion | As Biden slips toward the edge, NATO holds its collective breath,” authored by David Ignatius and published in The Washington Post on July 4, 2024, discusses the growing concerns within NATO regarding President Biden's faltering political and physical condition. The article highlights how Biden's poor performance in a recent debate has transformed the upcoming NATO summit, originally intended as a celebration of his leadership, into a period of uncertainty and apprehension. NATO members are particularly anxious about the potential implications of a Biden withdrawal from the presidential campaign, especially in the face of a possible Donald Trump victory, which could strain U.S.-European relations. The article also touches upon the quiet concerns among national security officials about adversaries like Russia and North Korea exploiting this period of political limbo in the U.S. [Read the full article] (https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/07/04/biden-nato-anxious-allies-eager-enemies/?utm_campaign=wp_follow_david_ignatius&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl-davidignatius&cartaurl=https%3A%2F%2Fs2.washingtonpost.com%2Fcar-ln-tr%2F3e331ed%2F66871b29f4065c4775a8e4f0%2F5ff58171ae7e8a2a747ff61b%2F6%2F23%2F66871b29f4065c4775a8e4f0).

“Biden needs to be clear-eyed about the election. France and the U.K. show why,” authored by The Washington Post Editorial Board, examines President Biden's political challenges as he navigates his re-election campaign amidst waning popularity and recent setbacks in public appearances. The article draws parallels between Biden's situation and recent political developments in France and the U.K., highlighting the volatile nature of modern politics and the critical need for strategic clarity and resilience. By reflecting on the electoral outcomes and political dynamics in these European countries, the editorial underscores the importance of Biden maintaining a clear and focused approach to secure his political future. [Read the full article] (https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/07/02/biden-regret-france-uk-elections/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_todayworld&utm_campaign=wp_todays_worldview).

“U.S. Job Growth Remains Solid,” authored by Talmon Joseph Smith and published in The New York Times on July 5, 2024, reports on the resilience of the American labor market, which added 206,000 jobs in June. Despite the uptick in the unemployment rate to 4.1 percent, marking the first time it has surpassed 4 percent since November 2021, the labor market has shown consistent strength with 42 consecutive months of job growth. The article discusses the potential implications of this data for Federal Reserve policy, noting that signs of a moderating labor market might prompt rate cuts later in the year, a scenario welcomed by both investors and the Biden administration. [Read the full article] (https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/07/05/business/june-jobs-report).

“America Is in Denial About NATO’s Future,” authored by Daniel Treisman and published in Foreign Policy on July 5, 2024, critiques the U.S. stance on Ukraine’s potential NATO membership. Treisman argues that the U.S. commitment to Ukraine’s NATO future, while simultaneously avoiding direct confrontation with Russia, exposes a significant contradiction. He suggests that NATO expansion has historically been marked by reduced military spending and a lack of preparedness, leaving the alliance vulnerable. Treisman contends that instead of focusing solely on NATO membership, the West should prioritize building Ukraine’s defense capabilities to deter future Russian aggression effectively. [Read the full article](https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/07/05/america-nato-ukraine-denial/).

“When America and China Collided,” authored by John Pomfret and published in Foreign Affairs on July 6, 2024, delves into the complex and often contentious relationship between the United States and China. The article recounts historical incidents and diplomatic tensions that have shaped the interactions between these two global powers, highlighting the strategic, economic, and ideological conflicts that persist. Pomfret provides an in-depth analysis of how past confrontations and collaborations influence current policies and the global balance of power. The narrative underscores the importance of understanding this history to navigate future challenges in U.S.-China relations. [Read the full article](https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/when-america-and-china-collided).

“10 soldiers will compete for Team USA in the 2024 Olympics,” authored by Zamone Perez and published in Military Times on July 3, 2024, reports that ten U.S. Army service members will represent the United States in the upcoming Olympic and Paralympic Games in Paris. Seven active-duty soldiers are set to compete in various sports, including shooting, rugby, track and field, wrestling, and swimming, while three others will participate in the Paralympics. The article highlights the dominance of Army athletes in the selection trials, as well as the inclusion of two soldiers as coaches for Team USA. [Read the full article](https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-army/2024/07/03/10-soldiers-will-compete-for-team-usa-in-the-2024-olympics/).

RUSSIA

“Beijing and Moscow Go From 'No Limits' Friendship to Frenemies in Russia’s Backyard,” authored by Austin Ramzy and published in The Wall Street Journal on July 6, 2024, examines the evolving and increasingly strained relationship between China and Russia. The article highlights how China’s growing influence in Central Asia and the Arctic, regions traditionally dominated by Russia, has led to tensions between the two nations. Despite their proclaimed “no limits” partnership, Beijing and Moscow are finding themselves at odds as they vie for economic and strategic dominance in these critical areas. This shift from allies to competitors marks a significant change in the geopolitical landscape. [Read the full article](https://www.wsj.com/world/beijing-and-moscow-go-from-no-limits-friendship-to-frenemies-in-russias-backyard-52b3f1a4?mod=russia_news_article_pos1).

EUROPE

“Labour Wins Landslide Victory in U.K. Snap Elections,” authored by Daniel Treisman and published in Foreign Policy on July 5, 2024, analyzes the surprising results of the recent U.K. snap elections. The Labour Party, led by Keir Starmer, secured a decisive victory over the Conservative Party, led by Rishi Sunak. This electoral outcome is seen as a significant shift in the British political landscape, indicating widespread public dissatisfaction with the Conservative government’s handling of economic issues and public services. The article discusses this political shift's potential implications for domestic policy and the U.K.'s international relations. [Read the full article] (https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/07/05/uk-snap-elections-results-labour-keir-starmer-sunak/?tpcc=recirc_latest062921).

“Marine Le Pen Betrays Her Past to Widen National Rally's Appeal,” authored by Ania Nussbaum and published in Bloomberg on July 4, 2024, explores Marine Le Pen's strategic shift to moderate her party's far-right image in order to capture a broader electorate. The article highlights Le Pen’s efforts to distance herself from the controversial legacy of her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, and to present the National Rally as a viable alternative to the current government. This transformation includes softening her stance on various issues and courting business interests, significantly increasing her party’s popularity. As France faces a critical election, Le Pen’s rebranding aims to position her as a mainstream political force capable of leading the nation. [Read the full article] (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-07-04/le-pen-set-to-fall-short-of-majority-in-france-polling-shows).

“Exclusive: NATO to Establish New Kyiv Post for Ukraine,” authored by Michael R. Gordon and Daniel Michaels and published in The Wall Street Journal on July 1, 2024, reveals NATO’s plan to station a senior civilian official in Kyiv as part of broader measures to bolster long-term support for Ukraine. This move aims to enhance Ukraine’s prospects of eventually joining NATO without offering immediate membership. The article details the establishment of a new command in Wiesbaden, Germany, to coordinate military equipment provision and training for Ukrainian troops. These steps are seen as an effort to ensure continued support for Ukraine, even if U.S. policies shift following potential political changes. [Read the full article](https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/nato-to-establish-new-kyiv-post-for-ukraine-81b4205c?mod=series_rusukrainenato).

CHINA

“The Looming Crisis in the Taiwan Strait,” authored by Bonnie S. Glaser and Bonny Lin and published in Foreign Affairs on July 2, 2024, analyzes the escalating tensions between Taiwan and China following the inauguration of Taiwan’s new president, Lai Ching-te. Lai's firm stance on Taiwan's sovereignty has provoked a harsh response from Beijing, including military exercises simulating an invasion. The article explores how the lack of communication and increasing hostility heighten the risk of miscalculation and conflict. The authors argue that the United States must balance strengthening Taiwan's defense capabilities with encouraging diplomatic engagement to mitigate the crisis. [Read the full article](https://www.foreignaffairs.com/taiwan/looming-crisis-taiwan-strait).

“What Taiwan Is Learning From Ukraine,” authored by Ishaan Tharoor and Anika Arora Seth and published in The Washington Post on July 1, 2024, discusses how Taiwan is drawing lessons from Ukraine's resistance to Russian invasion as it faces threats from China. The article highlights Taiwan’s efforts to boost its defense spending, extend military training, and develop asymmetric warfare capabilities. The authors emphasize the importance of civic resilience and whole-of-society involvement, noting Taiwan’s strategic moves to deter Chinese aggression and ensure its sovereignty amidst growing geopolitical tensions. [Read the full article] (https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/07/01/taiwan-lessons-ukraine-war-china/).

“The Underground Network Sneaking Nvidia Chips Into China,” authored by Raffaele Huang and published in The Wall Street Journal on July 2, 2024, investigates the covert operations used to bypass U.S. export controls and smuggle Nvidia’s high-end AI chips into China. The article details how a Chinese student transported Nvidia A100 chips in his luggage, part of a broader network of buyers, sellers, and couriers. Despite U.S. restrictions, Chinese distributors openly advertise these chips online, fulfilling orders through complex logistics involving Southeast Asian contacts. The persistent demand underscores the geopolitical and technological rivalry between China and the U.S. [Read the full article](https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-underground-network-sneaking-nvidia-chips-into-china-f733aaa6).

“Satellite Images of Cuba Show Expansion of Suspected Chinese Spy Bases,” authored by Warren P. Strobel and published in The Wall Street Journal on July 2, 2024, reports on newly captured satellite images revealing the expansion of electronic eavesdropping stations in Cuba, believed to be linked to China. The analysis identifies four sites, including a previously unreported location near the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay. These developments are part of broader efforts by China to leverage Cuba’s geographical proximity to intercept sensitive communications from U.S. military installations. The article underscores growing concerns about the strategic competition in the Caribbean and the potential implications for U.S. national security. [Read the full article] (https://www.wsj.com/articles/beijing-plans-a-new-training-facility-in-cuba-raising-prospect-of-chinese-troops-on-americas-doorstep-e17fd5d1?mod=article_inline).

ISRAEL & THE MIDDLE EAST

“The IDF's Command and Control Problem,” authored by Benjamin V. Allison and published in Foreign Policy on July 3, 2024, examines the serious command and control issues within the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) exposed during their campaign against Hamas in Gaza. The article highlights the lack of discipline among troops, inadequate coordination with humanitarian organizations, and the controversial use of military doctrine that tolerates high civilian casualties. Allison argues that these problems not only undermine the IDF's operational effectiveness but also pose significant ethical and strategic challenges, especially given the IDF's reliance on U.S. military support. [Read the full article](https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/07/03/idf-command-control-gaza-hamas/).

“Robberies, Revenge Killings Send Gaza Deeper Into Chaos Nine Months Into Israel-Hamas War,” authored by Stephen Kalin and published in The Wall Street Journal on July 2, 2024, describes the increasing lawlessness in Gaza amid ongoing conflict. The article details the surge in crimes such as robbery, smuggling, and protection rackets, exacerbated by the breakdown of public order following Israeli bombardments and the weakening of Hamas's control. This chaos has hampered international aid efforts and heightened fears of a prolonged governance vacuum. Kalin highlights the dire conditions for Gazans, who are facing a collapse of basic services and rising violence. [Read the full article](https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/gaza-crime-lawlessness-israel-war-570e3eb3).

“What to know about Masoud Pezeshkian, Iran’s next president,” authored by Susannah George and published in The Washington Post on July 6, 2024, details the victory of reformist Masoud Pezeshkian in Iran’s presidential election. Pezeshkian, who advocates for limited social reforms and engagement with the U.S. over Iran's nuclear program, defeated ultraconservative Saeed Jalili in a runoff election marked by low voter turnout. The article highlights Pezeshkian's moderate political stance, his background as a cardiac surgeon and former health minister, and the challenges he may face from Iran's conservative factions in implementing his policies. [Read the full article] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/07/06/pezeshkian-iran-new-president/).

“Taliban Engagement Comes With Trade-Offs, Doha Process Shows,” authored by Michael Kugelman and published in Foreign Policy on July 3, 2024, examines the complexities and compromises involved in engaging with the Taliban through the Doha process. The recent talks, which included senior Taliban leaders and international diplomats, highlighted the inherent trade-offs of such engagement, including the Taliban's demands for sanctions removal and the international community's concerns about Afghan economic conditions. The article underscores the difficult balance between maintaining diplomatic engagement to achieve humanitarian goals and the risk of legitimizing the Taliban regime, all while navigating significant human rights concerns, particularly regarding Afghan women. [Read the full article] (https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/07/03/taliban-engagement-doha-process-un-diplomacy/).

6. NATO is losing patience with one of its own members — and it’s not who you think

I would not have guessed it was Canada.

NATO is losing patience with one of its own members — and it’s not who you think

This week’s summit in Washington will get uncomfortable for Canada as allies press for more cash commitments.

By PAUL MCLEARY

07/08/2024 05:00 AM EDT

Politico

This week’s summit in Washington will get uncomfortable for Canada as allies press for more cash commitments.

Canada’s lack of a spending plan prompted U.S. senators to tell Prime Minister Justin Trudeau that they were “concerned and profoundly disappointed." | Andre Ivanov/AFP via Getty Images

07/08/2024 05:00 AM EDT

Canada has been dodging its commitment to NATO for a decade. It may not be able to hold out for much longer.

Over the past several years, Ottawa has become an outlier among the 32-member alliance. It has failed to hit domestic military spending goals, has fallen short on benchmarks to fund new equipment and has no plans to get there.

It’s a stance that has frustrated allies far and wide — from the White House to the halls of Congress to capitals all over Europe.

And it’ll be on members’ minds when they gather this week in Washington for the NATO Summit, where they are expected to press Ottawa to come up with the cash while warning that things could get much worse if Donald Trump returns to the White House.

“What’s happening now that everyone is spending more, the fact that the Canadians aren’t even trying has become obvious,” said Max Bergmann, a former State Department arms control official.

It’s perhaps surprising that Canada is a laggard on spending even though it’s proven to be a strong ally in other arenas, from its purchase of U.S. weapons to its close coordination with the U.S. in defending North America to its deployment of troops to Iraq and Afghanistan.

But interviews with a half-dozen diplomats from NATO countries make clear that when it comes to defense spending, allies are fed up.

“They’re going to continue to be obstinate” because there is no real penalty for failing to meet the alliance goal, said one U.S. congressional staffer, who like others quoted in this story was granted anonymity to speak freely about a close ally. “Europeans are frustrated that they’re being criticized and Canada is not feeling the same pressure from Washington.”

One of the 12 founding members of NATO, Canada readily signed the 2014 pledge to spend 2 percent of GDP on defense in the wake of Vladimir Putin’s seizure of Crimea in Ukraine. The alliance as a whole might have been slow to get there, but this year, 23 of the 32 NATO members will hit the mark as fears grow along the alliance’s eastern front over Putin’s plans.

Two of the holdouts are Canada and Belgium, both of which are not only failing to meet the 2 percent goal but also the requirement to spend 20 percent of that on new equipment.

Unlike Canada, however, Belgium says it’ll get there by 2035. When will Canada? They won’t say.

The Canadian case is particularly frustrating, the diplomats say, because of Ottawa’s seeming lack of urgency, despite significant problems with its aging military equipment and its strong economy. Its military is so underfunded that half of its equipment is considered “unavailable and unserviceable” according to a leaked internal report.

“The Canadian public doesn’t really see the need,” said Philippe Lagassé, Barton chair at Canada’s Carleton University. “If forced to choose between defense spending, social programs or reducing taxes, defense would always come last. So there’s no political gain to meeting the pledge.”

Canada’s stance prompted a bipartisan group of 23 U.S. senators to take the exceedingly rare step of sending a letter to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in May saying they were “concerned and profoundly disappointed that Canada’s most recent projection indicated that it will not reach its 2 percent commitment this decade.”

And the situation could get much worse if Trump is elected.

While Trump targets Germany and France have pledged billions more in weapons buys and are upgrading their armed forces, years of underinvestment have left Canada’s military underequipped and unready. And if the former president comes back to the White House, he’ll notice.

Yet Canadian politicians’ seeming indifference to the situation was on full display in April when Trudeau’s government released a new defense policy that gets to only 1.7 percent by 2030.

The report led some in the alliance to single out Ottawa for criticism given the country’s strong economy, lack of debt load and leading position on a variety of international security issues.

And their stance sets a bad example for others.

“I do think what Canada is doing is making it easier for European countries to go slow on getting to the mark,” one European diplomat said.

One diplomat from another NATO country said that U.S. officials have often singled out Canada in discussions as a country that isn’t doing enough to outline a path to the 2 percent, pointing to the increasingly sorry state of the Canadian arsenal as what can happen without more investment.

“There has been a clear push from the Americans that burden-sharing is very important. They’re saying it in a general way, though they have pointed to Canada specifically” as a country failing to keep up with the majority of the alliance, the official said.

The view from Washington, the congressional staffer said, is that “everyone has to make tough decisions” on how to spend on defense, even wealthy nations like Canada. “That is called being a leader. And we’re not seeing Canada do that.”

In a brutally candid interview on Canadian television in June, Canadian Chief of the Defence Staff Gen. Wayne Eyre said that underinvestment in defense means that “the military that we have right now is not ready to counter the threats that we see coming.” Asked about the lack of a plan to hit 2 percent, he added “I do not defend that, and nobody in uniform defends that.”

At the NATO Summit in Washington, it will be made clear that “2 percent is not the ceiling, it’s the floor,” for what countries are expected to contribute to their own defense budgets, the diplomat from the NATO country said. Countries such as the U.S., Poland, Norway and Estonia have already pushed past 3 percent, or have publicly shared plans to get there,

Since the Trump years, and especially since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, “there’s an expectation of sharing the burden and seriousness about defense that Canada is not meeting,” said an official from a NATO state that has pushed well beyond the 2 percent threshold.

“Allies who do not spend at least 2 percent of GDP on defense seriously undermine their own credibility and common deterrence posture,” an adviser to one NATO defense ministry observed, noting that the failure of a small and dwindling coterie of nations to even outline a path to get there has serious political consequences in the United States and beyond.

The failure to meet the standards set by Brussels “is used as a pretext to attack NATO and Europe by those members of the American foreign and security community who opt for either ‘China first’ strategy or belong to the isolationists camp,” the official said. “Such a policy fundamentally undermines trust towards those allies. If they don’t have sufficient determination today, I am not optimistic about their behavior if we had a direct war between Russia and NATO.”

On a visit to Washington in May, new Defense Minister Bill Blair pushed back on criticisms that Canada had no intention to join the 2 percent club.

“I’m hoping that when we return to Washington for the July summit that we’ll be able to reassure our allies that Canada understands its obligations,” he told reporters.”There’s more to do. We’re going to do more, we have to do more. … I want to be able to assure allies we’re doing the work now. We’ve got our heads down. We’re still going hard on this. We know there’s more to do.”

Canada does have a story to tell, and it’s not all bad news.

From 2016 to 2017, Ottawa’s defense budget more than doubled from US$13.5 billion to US$29 billion, led by purchases of 88 U.S.-made F-35 fighter jets, 16 Poseidon P-8A surveillance aircraft, and the early work on a huge project to build 15 frigates for the navy that will be built in Canada.

“Canada is committed to reaching the NATO target of spending 2% of GDP on defense,” Daniel Minden, spokesperson for Blair, said in a statement when asked for comment.

A new defense policy document outlines additional investments to get Canada to 1.7% of GDP by 2030, “meaning that we will have nearly tripled Canada’s defense spending since 2014. In fact, we will be increasing defense spending by 27 percent over the course of the next year alone,” Minden added.

“There remains more work to do,” he said. “Canada is determined to meet its commitments.”

Canada’s NORAD Modernization Plan, released in 2022, invests an additional US$38.6 billion over 20 years in the joint Canada/U.S. air and missile defense effort.

Canadian officials are also looking to invest in a new class of submarines to replace its aging — and rarely operational — Victoria-class submarines. Ottawa is considering both conventionally powered and nuclear-powered models built by a variety of international partners, but there are no firm plans in place to do so, making any potential spending on new submarines still years away.

Despite this, Canada is also failing on a second NATO metric. As part of the 2 percent pledge, nations also agreed to spend 20 percent of that on new equipment purchases. Canada and Belgium are the only countries that continue to fail to do so.

While Poland is pouring tens of billions into buying American and South Korean tanks, multiple rocket launchers and fighter planes, Germany is increasing production of armored vehicles and artillery shells, and small Baltic nations are using their minuscule budgets to design and build new drones and are pooling resources to purchase long range missiles systems and air defenses, Canada is still reluctant to spend.

Unlike other countries, Canada can’t complain about a flat economy or ballooning debt.

“Canada is always talking about how responsible it is because of the debt to GDP ratio,” Lagassé said. “So if you keep talking about how successful you are financially and fiscally, people go, ‘OK, well, then you have room to do more.’”

Kyle Duggan contributed to this report from Ottawa.

Politico

7. Chinese Soldiers Arrive In Belarus For Anti-Terrorism Exercises

Chain engages with a lesser known member of the Axis of Dictators.

July 07, 2024

• By RFE/RL

Chinese Soldiers Arrive In Belarus For Anti-Terrorism Exercises

https://www.rferl.org/a/belarus-china-xi-lukashenka-military-maneuvers/33024563.html

Chinese President Xi Jinping (right) and Belarusian ruler Alyaksandr Lukashenka in 2023

Chinese soldiers arrived in Belarus on July 6 for joint a “anti-terrorism training exercise,” Belarus’s Defense Ministry said on Telegram. It said the maneuvers will be held from July 8-19. The joint training “will allow…the laying of a foundation for further development of Belarusian-Chinese relations in the field of joint training of troops,” it said. Belarus on July 4 joined the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), a regional grouping promoted by Beijing and Moscow as an alternative to Western influence, while China has been making moves in recent years to increase ties with countries in Eastern Europe and Central Asia.

8. Jemaah Islamiyah Disbands: End Of An Era Or Strategic Transformation? – Analysis

For all those who have served in the Asia Pacific and have had to deal with these terrorists. 

We will see if this is for real as Sydney Jones seems to think.

Excerpts:

Sidney Jones, a senior advisor to the Jakarta-based Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict, described the disbandment as “the culmination of a long move toward ending JI’s existence as a covert organization and operating openly in the interests of Islamic outreach and education.”

“It’s for real. In some ways the move began in 2009 but it gathered strength after Para Wijayanto became emir,” she told BenarNews.

However, she also acknowledged the potential for splinter factions. 

“Surely some in JI will see it as a betrayal,” she said.

Jemaah Islamiyah Disbands: End Of An Era Or Strategic Transformation? – Analysis

https://www.eurasiareview.com/07072024-jemaah-islamiyah-disbands-end-of-an-era-or-strategic-transformation-analysis/#google_vignette

 July 7, 2024  0 Comments

By BenarNews

By Kusumasari Ayuningtyas

Jemaah Islamiyah, a Southeast Asian Islamist militant group once linked to al-Qaeda, has publicly disbanded, marking a potential turning point in the fight against terrorism in Indonesia, amid concern about the potential for continued underground activity.

The announcement, made by JI leaders on Sunday, has been met with mixed reactions, with some experts expressing skepticism about the group’s motives and the potential for continued underground activity.

JI carried out some of Indonesia’s most deadly terrorist attacks, targeting Western interests and Indonesian security forces, including the 2002 Bali bombings that killed 202 people.

We stand “ready to actively contribute to Indonesia’s progress and dignity,” declared Abu Rusydan, one of the group’s leaders, as he read from a prepared statement in the presence of other senior members at an office of the National Counterterrorism Agency in Bogor, about 50 kilometers (31 miles) south of Jakarta.

Mohammad Adhe Bhakti, executive director of the Center for the Study of Radicalism and Deradicalization (PAKAR), said JI had already shifted away from violence under the leadership of Para Wijayanto, who was granted leave from jail to attend Sunday’s declaration. 

“Senior JI figures…have chosen the most logical path by dissolving JI,” Adhe told BenarNews.

However, he expressed concern that lower-level members may not follow suit. 

“I am worried that splinter groups will emerge at the lower levels,” he said.

Abdul Rahim Ba’asyir, the son of one of JI’s founders, Abu Bakar Bashir, also welcomed the move.

“It’s a good thing for them to disband and declare their return to the fold of the Indonesian state,” Abdul Rahim told BenarNews. 

“It helps dispel the false notion that Muslims are terrorists.”

JI was established in the 1990s with the explicit aim of creating an Islamic state throughout Southeast Asia.

In addition to the 2002 and 2005 Bali bombings, the group was behind the 2003 and 2009 attacks on the Marriott hotel in Jakarta, and the bombing of the Australian embassy in the Indonesian capital in 2004.

The Indonesian government cracked down on JI after the first Bali bombings, arresting and imprisoning many of its leaders. 

The group was officially banned in 2008, but it continued to operate underground, recruiting members, raising funds and conducting military training, officials and analysts have said.

The decision to disband comes after years of pressure from Indonesian authorities, who have arrested dozens of JI members in the past few years. 

The group’s current leader, Para, who was sentenced to seven years in prison for terrorism in 2020, is believed to have favored a more moderate approach, focusing on Islamic outreach and education rather than violence, analysts said.

However, the disbandment has been met with skepticism by some, who believe it may be a ploy to protect the group’s assets and funding sources, particularly its network of Islamic schools. 

Sofyan Tsauri, a former JI member, said he observed anger over the disbandment declaration within JI’s internal groups. He warned of the potential formation of a new, possibly more radical, “neo-JI.”

“Post-dissolution, there must be monitoring and guidance, which is the government’s responsibility. Without it, the disbandment is meaningless,” Sofyan told BenarNews.

He also expressed concern about the group’s network of nearly 100 schools, which he said teach a literalist, puritan version of Islam. 

“This must be changed,” he said. 

In their declaration, JI leaders committed to overhauling the syllabus of the group’s schools to align with mainstream Islamic teachings.

Sidney Jones, a senior advisor to the Jakarta-based Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict, described the disbandment as “the culmination of a long move toward ending JI’s existence as a covert organization and operating openly in the interests of Islamic outreach and education.”

“It’s for real. In some ways the move began in 2009 but it gathered strength after Para Wijayanto became emir,” she told BenarNews.

However, she also acknowledged the potential for splinter factions. 

“Surely some in JI will see it as a betrayal,” she said.

In a May interview with BenarNews, Ali Imron, serving a life sentence for his role in the 2002 Bali bombings, said JI had been leaderless since the mid-2000s. 

Indonesian authorities’ crackdown on extremist groups has left JI without clear leadership, he said. 

“There is no official leader of JI now,” Imron said, adding that an internal agreement suggested JI had ceased to exist as an official entity.

Amid the decline in JI-led violence, the Islamic State-inspired Jamaah Ansharut Daulah (JAD) emerged as a new threat. 

Founded in 2015 and now banned, JAD was responsible for attacks on churches in Surabaya in 2018 and a cathedral in Makassar during Palm Sunday. 

A JAD-affiliated attacker also bombed a police headquarters in Medan in 2019. However, there have been no reported JAD attacks since then.

Irfan Idris, director of prevention at the National Counterterrorism Agency (BNPT), said that the JI leaders’ declaration was a tangible success for security forces and society in combating terrorism and achieving a “zero-attack” status in Indonesia.

“We operate under the law and will remain vigilant against any threats that may arise,” he said. “Terrorism and its ideology pose a grave danger to the nation’s unity.”

The announcement of JI’s disbandment might seem like a positive development on the surface, but a closer look reveals a more complex and potentially concerning reality, according to Bilveer Singh, an associate professor at the National University of Singapore.

Singh cautions that the history of extremist groups in Indonesia, like JI, is marked by transformation and reemergence. 

“Radical groups have never disappeared in Indonesia since 1945,” he told BenarNews, adding that JI itself has a history of evolving every 15-20 years.

He warned that the disbandment could be perceived as a strategic move, with some members continuing their activities underground and potentially forming a new, more dangerous group.

“The Bogor declaration may disband JI, but there is a risk that a more dangerous organization than JI could emerge in Indonesia,” Singh said. 

Arie Firdaus in Jakarta contributed to this report.

BenarNews

BenarNews’ mission is to provide readers with accurate news and information that reflects the complex and ever-changing world around them. With homepages in Bengali, Thai, Bahasa Malaysia, Bahasa Indonesia and English, BenarNews brings timely news to its diverse audience. Copyright BenarNews. Used with the permission of BenarNews

9. US says troops are leaving Niger bases this weekend and in August after coup

US says troops are leaving Niger bases this weekend and in August after coup

The U.S. military commander in Niger says all American forces and equipment will leave a small base in the West African country this weekend and fewer than 500 remaining troops will be out of a critical drone base in August

By Lolita C. Baldor | AP

July 5, 2024 at 4:08 p.m. EDT

The Washington Post · by Lolita C. Baldor | AP · July 5, 2024

WASHINGTON — The U.S. will remove all its forces and equipment from a small base in Niger this weekend and fewer than 500 remaining troops will leave a critical drone base in the West African country in August, ahead of a Sept. 15 deadline set in an agreement with the new ruling junta, the American commander there said Friday.

Air Force Maj. Gen. Kenneth Ekman said in an interview that a number of small teams of 10-20 U.S. troops, including special operations forces, have moved to other countries in West Africa. But the bulk of the forces will go to Europe, at least initially.

Niger’s ouster of American troops following a coup last year has broad ramifications for the U.S. because it is forcing troops to abandon the critical drone base that was used for counterterrorism missions in the Sahel, a vast region south of the Sahara desert where groups linked to al-Qaida and the Islamic State group operate.

Ekman and other U.S. military leaders have said other West African nations want to work with the U.S. and may be open to an expanded American presence. He did not detail the locations, but other U.S. officials have pointed to the Ivory Coast and Ghana as examples.

Ekman, who serves as the director for strategy at U.S. Africa Command, is leading the U.S. military withdrawal from the small base at the airport in Niger’s capital of Niamey and from the larger counterterrorism base in the city of Agadez. He said there will be a ceremony Sunday marking the completed pullout from the airport base, then the final 100 troops and the last C-17 transport aircraft will depart.

Under the junta agreement, two-thirds of U.S. troops and equipment must be out of the country by July 26, Ekman said. That deadline, which forced the Pentagon to move quickly, is a key reason why U.S. Africa Command will complete its withdrawal of all 1,000 troops from Niger early.

But it also leaves a counterterrorism gap that U.S. officials are struggling to fill as security threats from extremist groups in the Sahel grow.

One of those groups, Jama’a Nusrat ul-Islam wa al-Muslimin, known as JNIM, is active in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger and is looking to expand into Benin and Togo. Those expansion locations could be used initially as hubs to rest, recuperate, get financing and gather weapons, according to U.S. officials, but the group also has increased attacks there.

“Niger was immensely helpful for us as a location because it was in the Sahel and it was adjacent to those areas where the threat is most concentrated,” Ekman said. Now, he said, the challenge is battling the insurgency while having to get access from outside Niger, which makes it more difficult.

He said other coastal West African nations are concerned about the Sahel-based threats and want to talk about how they can partner with American forces. Ekman added that the small teams of U.S. troops moving to other West African nations are not combat forces but advisers, as well as special operations, personnel recovery and intelligence and surveillance forces.

Talks with other nations continue, and Ekman said some may be interested but not ready to allow in more U.S. troops. One example, he said, is Togo, which is southwest of Niger on the coast.

“In Togo, what I find is a partner that is friendly to the U.S. but that right now is unresolved on the degree they want the presence of any additional U.S. military personnel there,” he said. “My assessment was, ‘Not yet.’”

Speaking to reporters from The Associated Press and Reuters from the U.S. embassy in Niamey, Ekman said that while portable buildings and vehicles that are no longer useful will be left behind when U.S. troops leave Niger, a lot of larger equipment will be pulled out. For example, he said 18 4,000-pound (1,800-kilograms) generators worth more than $1 million each will be taken out of Agadez.

Unlike the withdrawal from Afghanistan, he said the U.S. is not destroying equipment or facilities as it leaves.

“Our goal in the execution is, leave things in as good a state as possible,” he said. “If we went out and left it a wreck or we went out spitefully, or if we destroyed things as we went, we’d be foreclosing options” for future security relations.

Niger’s ruling junta ordered U.S. forces out of the country in the wake of last July’s ouster of the country’s democratically elected president by mutinous soldiers. French forces had also been asked to leave as the junta turned to the Russian mercenary group Wagner for security assistance.

Washington officially designated the military takeover as a coup in October, triggering U.S. laws restricting the military support and aid.

Ekman said he has been told that there are fewer than 100 Russian troops at the base near in Niamey and that once they are done training Niger troops, they will also leave the country.

The Washington Post · by Lolita C. Baldor | AP · July 5, 2024

10. Flawed Wargames Imperil National Security

Ouch!

Excerpts:

General Smith stated that the Force Design wargames were “one element in the Corps’ ‘virtuous cycle’ of learning,” but the three whistleblowers who participated in the games maintain the wargames were anything but upright and honest.

In conclusion, the Congressionally mandated independent study (section 1076) of the implementation of Force Design must be thorough and comprehensive. Furthermore, if leaders manipulated these wargames to achieve a certain outcome, they owe it to their Marines and to their country to articulate the consequent risks to national security.

Flawed Wargames Imperil National Security

By Paul K. Van Riper

July 08, 2024

https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2024/07/08/flawed_wargames_imperil_national_security_1042809.html?mc_cid=b0752958a9&mc_eid=70bf478f36

The Marine Corps’ current use of wargames is incomplete, faulty and commandeered by recent military leaders to justify their foregone decisions about how to structure the Corps.

With decades of experience supervising the conduct of wargames, as well as participating in a multitude of games, I am troubled that military leaders make critical decisions on the structure and equipping of operational forces based on games that ignored critical warfighting functions.

In an article published in the Marine Corps Times this March, writer Irene Loewenson reported that personnel who ran the Marine Corps Force Design 2030 (Force Design) wargames admit they did not test all seven Marine Corps warfighting functions, including logistics and command and control. Nonetheless, former Commandant General David Berger cited the results of these wargames as support for a fundamental overhaul of the Marine Corps.

I know of no other case where the Marine Corps made important decisions on its future force structure without fully examining the effect on all seven warfighting functions: command and control; fires; force protection; information; intelligence; logistics; and maneuver.

According to Loewenson’s article, a Wargaming Division spokesman indicated the Marine Corps is now attempting to rectify the mistake by belatedly examining logistics and other warfighting functions glossed over in the original Force Design wargames. This sounds like a case of closing the barn door after the horse has bolted. General Berger had already made critical decisions leading to the divesture of weapons and equipment and cuts in force structure.

Loewenson’s article also raises concerns about the combat or force development process.

Properly done, this process begins with the identification of a military problem, then moves to one or more conceptual solutions, which are in turn modified and elaborated upon in workshops and conferences. Only when developers consider an operational concept sufficiently mature do they examine it in a series of wargames to ensure the seven warfighting functions adequately support the concept.

If operational concepts show promise in these wargames, then they undergo further analyses before evaluations in field exercises. Concepts that developers determine mature enough to implement lead to the creation of requirement documents for new or modified doctrine, organizational structures, training programs, material solutions (weapons and equipment), leader development programs, personnel actions and the construction or modification of facilities.

But there is little evidence the Marine Corps used its combat development process to create Force Design.

Rather, there is ample evidence the Marine Corps made decisions to divest weapons and equipment and stand down units before conducting the Force Design wargames. The current Commandant, General Eric Smith, claims the Marine Corps couldn’t wait until the concepts were “totally fleshed-out” before implementing them.

I know of no other case where the Marine Corps short-circuited the combat development process before implementing a concept. Past leaders certainly never made the fundamental, Corps-wide changes that then-Commandant General Berger did from 2019 through 2023.

I have read the 17 pages of notes revealed by one identified and two anonymous individuals involved in the wargames. These officials reported inappropriate manipulation of the games and their results. Their notes contain observations such as these:

“MCWL [Marine Corps Warfighting Lab] leaders have been pressured to put their ‘thumbs on the scale’ in ways that appear to ‘validate’ early FD [Force Design] decisions […]”

“FD 2030 is the answer so now figure out how to employ it […]”

“in short there has been a clear desire to support and shape CMC’s [the Commandant’s] preferred outcomes.”

General Smith stated that the Force Design wargames were “one element in the Corps’ ‘virtuous cycle’ of learning,” but the three whistleblowers who participated in the games maintain the wargames were anything but upright and honest.

In conclusion, the Congressionally mandated independent study (section 1076) of the implementation of Force Design must be thorough and comprehensive. Furthermore, if leaders manipulated these wargames to achieve a certain outcome, they owe it to their Marines and to their country to articulate the consequent risks to national security.

Lieutenant General Paul K. Van Riper is a retired infantry officer whose last assignment was as the Commanding General of the Marine Corps Combat Development Command. While on active duty and in retirement he participated in a host of Joint, Navy, Army, and Marine Corps wargames, most notably as the Red Team leader in Millennium Challenge 2002. 

11. Former USAF European Commanders: Let Ukraine Take the Fight to Russia

Former USAF European Commanders: Let Ukraine Take the Fight to Russia

Today, we urgently appeal to your generosity and compassion. Your support is crucial to our mission of advancing strategic advocacy for Ukraine. With your donations, we can continue to provide vital assistance, support humanitarian efforts, and amplify the voices of those affected by the ongoing war.

Every contribution, no matter the size, makes a difference. Please consider making a donation today and join us in our mission to build a peaceful tomorrow for Ukraine.

Last week, there was an excellent discussion relating to Ukraine – some important history and needed conversation about the situation in Ukraine.

It is difficult to highlight the most important comments because that would depend significantly on your level of knowledge of Putin’s war on Ukraine beginning in 2014.

As for comments about the current situation, I will present two from General Phil Breedlove (Ret.), former Supreme Allied Commander Europe, and member of our Friends of Ukraine Network (FOUN).

Breedlove: “We are not giving Ukraine everything they need.”  Rather than a “silver bullet” in the form of F-16s, the Joint Air-to-Surface Missile, or any other particular system, “what they need is the ability to broadly use those tools that we bring to the fight, that are integrated ability to hold Russian targets at risk before the Russian forces can be brought to bear on Ukraine.”

In addition, General Breedlove repeated a sad fact that he and other members of FOUN have made over and over: in war, you are to deter your enemy, not be deterred by the enemy.  Since Putin started this war in 2014, Washington has been deterred by Putin’s threats and bluster. We must stop being deterred.

To listen to the discussion, follow this link – highly recommended:

https://www.airandspaceforces.com/former-usaf-european-commanders-ukraine-russia/

Former USAF European Commanders: Let Ukraine Take the Fight to Russia

An Air Force F-16 from the 480th Fighter Squadron, Spangdahlem Air Base, Germany

July 3, 2024 | By John A. Tirpak

If Ukraine is to make strides in retaking its territory, the U.S. must stop being deterred by concerns about a broader conflict with Russia, and give the green light to use American weapons that can strike Russian staging areas, former Air Force European commanders said.

“This is bigger than airpower,” retired Gen. Phillip Breedlove, former Supreme Allied Commander Europe and head of U.S. European Command said during an event hosted by the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies.   

“We are nearly completely deterred right now,” Breedlove said of U.S. reluctance to take actions or provide Ukraine with weapons that could strike inside Russia.

“There are a myriad of options that I think could be considered and used,” he added, including ATACMs and air-delivered weapons that could strike Russian staging areas and air bases in far eastern Ukraine or inside Russia itself.

Basic military doctrine advises: “Seek the initiative and maintain the initiative, and we have blown both of those. We are deterred, and we are reactive,” Breedlove said. “We need to step up, and have the courage to address this.“

The event was to roll out a new paper from the Mitchell Institute, co-authored by retired Lt. Gen. David Deptula, dean of the Mitchell Institute, and Christopher Bowie, airpower analyst and historian, on the significance of airpower for the Ukraine-Russia conflict.

Retired Gen. Tod Wolters, also a former SACEUR and EUCOM commander and retired Gen. Jeffrey Harrigian, former commander of U.S. Air Forces in Europe, also participated in the discussion.

Deptula recently returned from a visit to Ukraine, during which he conferred with and advised the country’s military leaders, offered suggestions about steps the U.S., NATO, and Ukraine should take to regain the initiative in the war, the beginnings of which date back to 2014 but devolved into an all-out conflict in 2022.

Wolters pointed out that it takes unanimous agreement on the part of all NATO allies—now numbering 32 members—to take offensive action, or actions that could be perceived as offensive. He said the U.S. is succeeding in making the case with its allies for a more proactive approach in Ukraine.   

“We are in a position, after two years of great coaching in all domains to where we can take advantage of offensive capabilities,” Wolters said. “I believe that we’re getting closer and closer to be able to do that.”

Once momentum is regained by Ukraine, NATO should be “in a position to where, irreversibly, Ukraine becomes a member of NATO in six months [to] two years or three years from now. And those are the kinds of campaign momentum items that we have to be prepared to do,” Wolters said.

“We need to continue to put pressure on it to get those policy shifts to where we can begin to strike targets at range that are critical infrastructure that Russia possesses, that they are using against Ukraine to strike Ukrainian sovereign soil, and those are certainly justifiable targets in anybody’s observation,” he noted.

Wolters also noted that wars can last longer than expected and it is necessary to act now to achieve results down the road.

“You better have a steady, positive military campaign momentum, so that you can be the strategic victor,” he said.

Deptula said the war has devolved to a “ground-centric, attrition-focused grind,” which ultimately favors Russia. To break out of that rut and restore Ukrainian momentum, he offered a number of suggestions, which he said he discussed with Ukrainian officials.

“If Ukraine is to have a shot at victory, then we need to empower them to break out of this stalemate, and that requires effective air power, plus rules of engagement allow them to use it decisively,” Deptula said.

Air superiority “can provide Ukrainian forces the freedom from attack and the freedom to attack that’s absolutely necessary for them to achieve advantages relative to the larger and stronger Russian forces,” Deptula said. Western limits on how Ukraine can use weapons provided to it have given Russian forces “a sanctuary.” Those limits on long-ranged weapons must be “completely removed” he said, and Ukraine freed to attack “any Russian forces, materiel, or infrastructure that could be potentially used against Ukraine.”

To gain air superiority, Ukraine needs to discard its old, Soviet-style methods of using airpower purely to support ground operations.

“Only with the kind of integration that creates a synergy between surface and air operations can Ukraine further its military momentum on the battlefield,” Deptula said.

Ukraine must also be provided with the right weapons “in numbers sufficient to achieve strategic gains in the battlespace,” he said. These include both crewed and uncrewed aircraft, precision weapons, cyber and electronic capabilities, and intelligence and special operations which can all “play a significant role if coordinated in an integrated campaign.”

By integrating low-cost drone use with High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS), ATACMS, and cruise missiles, Ukraine can “suppress enemy air defenses. In this way, they can help establish air dominance in times and places of Ukraine’s choosing,” Deptula said.

Harrigian noted, however, that suppression of enemy air defenses is a skill gained through experience and practice and will not materialize quickly for Ukraine.

The F-16s that Ukraine will get from NATO donors “can create effects across a much broader and strategic target set,” Deptula said. They will expand radar detection range, expand threat warning and situational awareness through Link 16 and, along with Mirage 2000s being donated by France, “also deliver heavy weapons in mass that, with their superiority, can disrupt Russian ground forces and pave the way for Ukrainian army progress and breakthroughs.”

Deptula and Bowie’s recipe for success requires the U.S. and NATO no longer deter themselves with “escalation management” and allow Ukraine to shoot ATACMS against Russian air bases that generate sorties against Ukraine.

They also urge greater provision of timely intelligence for Ukraine “to make quick and decisive determinations on when and where to employ its forces to achieve windows of air dominance.” Ukraine must stop treating aviation “as extension of ground forces,” and Deptula urged Ukraine to incorporate air leadership on its general staff “to foster and facilitate integrated, all-domain concepts, planning and employment.”

Breedlove argued that “we are not giving Ukraine everything they need.” Rather than a “silver bullet” in the form of F-16s, the Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile, or any other particular system, “what we need is the ability to broadly use those tools that we bring to the to the fight that are an integrated ability to hold Russian targets at risk before the Russian forces can be brought to bear on Ukraine.”

As it now stands, “We have to wait for them to come across the border, except for a couple areas that we’ve authorized, we have to wait for Russia to fire or strike before we respond, and we need to break out of that and use all the tools” in the Air Force’s toolbox and “would hold targets much deeper in Russia at risk.”

ROBERT MCCONNELL

Co-Founder, U.S.-Ukraine Foundation

Director of External Affairs, Friends of Ukraine Network

The introductory comments are Mr. McConnell’s and do not necessarily represent the views of the U.S.-Ukraine Foundation or the Friends of Ukraine Network (FOUN).

12. Secret Meetings, Private Threats and a Massive Arms Race: How the World is Preparing for Trump

I bet more of our friends, partners, and allies, as well as our adversaries, have studied Project 2025 in greater detail than even the pundits in DC.

Secret Meetings, Private Threats and a Massive Arms Race: How the World is Preparing for Trump

America’s NATO allies are ramping up weapons production, consulting Donald Trump’s advisers and holding secret meetings with each other to feverishly lay the groundwork for his return.

By PAUL MCLEARY, CHRISTOPH SCHILTZ, STEFANIE BOLZEN, JACOPO BARIGAZZI and PHILIPP FRITZ

07/07/2024 05:00 AM EDT

Politico

In 2016, no one in the world was ready for President Trump. America’s NATO allies aren’t making the same mistake this time.

Illustration by Jade Cuevas/POLITICO (source images via AP and iStock)

By Paul McLeary, Christoph Schiltz, Stefanie Bolzen, Jacopo Barigazzi and Philipp Fritz

07/07/2024 05:00 AM EDT

In Brussels, NATO officials have devised a plan to lock in long-term military support for Ukraine so that a possible Trump administration can’t get in the way.

In Ankara, Turkish officials have reviewed the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 policy road map for clues into Donald Trump’s designs on Syria.

In Atlanta, Austin and Lincoln, Nebraska, top ministers from Germany and Canada have met with Republican governors to shore up relations on the American right.

And in Washington, Trump’s return is the dominant topic at monthly breakfast meetings of ambassadors from European countries. At one of those meetings, the top envoy from one country asked his colleagues whether they were engaged in a fool’s errand.

“Can we really prepare for Trump?” this person asked, according to another top diplomat. “Or do we rather have to wait and see what the new reality would look like?”

Folly or not, the preparations are underway.

More than six months before the next American president takes office, there is already an extraordinarily advanced effort across the NATO alliance, and far beyond, to manage a potential transfer of power in America. With President Joe Biden listing badly in his bid for reelection, many allies anticipate that at this time next year they will be dealing with a new Trump administration — one defined by skepticism toward Europe, a strident strain of right-wing isolationism and a hard resolve to put confronting China above other global priorities.

In the run-up to this week’s NATO summit in Washington, POLITICO and the German newspaper Welt embarked together on a reporting project to assess how the world is preparing for Trump’s possible return to the White House; reporters for both publications interviewed more than 50 diplomats, lawmakers, experts and political strategists in NATO nations and elsewhere. Many of those people were granted anonymity to speak about sensitive matters of diplomacy and international security.

What emerged from this reporting was a picture of a world already bending to Trump’s will and scrambling to inoculate itself against the disruptions and crises that he might instigate.

In many respects NATO member states feel far more confident of their ability to handle Trump than they did when he first came to power seven and a half years ago as a total amateur on the world stage. That is in part because these countries are laying the groundwork now to manage his political resurrection.

Their preparations fall into three categories.

First, there is extensive personal outreach to Trump and his advisers, in the hope of building relationships that will help minimize conflict.

Second, there are policy shifts aimed at pleasing Trump and his political coalition, chiefly by soothing Trump’s complaints about inadequate European defense spending.

Third, there are creative diplomatic and legal measures in the works to armor NATO priorities against tampering by a Trump administration.

Taken together, it starts to look like a plausible strategy for managing the turbulence of a Trump-led world. Still, even the NATO leaders driving this approach acknowledge that much of this project may ultimately be at the mercy of Trump’s individual whims.

“Of course, the biggest challenge is we don’t know — and I think nobody knows, exactly — what he will do,” said one diplomat from a NATO country.

When Trump first came to office, the West was in a state of relative calm, and U.S. allies mostly hoped that they could wait out an American political meltdown for four years. Their thinking is different this time, now that it is clear that Trumpism is no passing fad — and the NATO alliance is confronting far more immediate threats to European security.

Perhaps surprisingly, there is no widespread panic this time about Trump withdrawing the U.S. from NATO, as he has threatened in the past. But if allies do not see that as a likely scenario, the alliance is still in an anxious mood — a state of trepidation only sharpened by the rising power of right-wing NATO skeptics in France and elsewhere on the continent.

Camille Grand, a former NATO assistant secretary general and French defense official, said the alliance was approaching Trump far differently now than it did in 2017.

“Last time, it was much easier because there was no war,” said Grand, who is aligned with French President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist coalition. “Now, we are in an environment where the conversation is really, really different.”

Trump Politics is Personal

A scant two weeks before NATO’s leaders were set to descend on Washington for the summit, a rumor tore through the diplomatic world: Trump had a plan to bring peace to Ukraine.

The art of this deal was said to rest on a brazen threat: If Vladimir Putin refused to negotiate an end to the war, the U.S. would flood Ukraine with even more weapons. And if Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy refused to sit at a negotiating table with Russia, the U.S. would withdraw its copious military support.

There was one big problem. The plan was being pitched not by Trump himself, but by several of his many allies and self-described surrogates circulating through political and diplomatic circles — each purporting to speak for the former president, and in turn advertising a direct line back to him. Upon closer scrutiny, it became clear that there was no secret, Trump-approved blueprint to end the war.

As the election has approached, it has become a full-time mission for U.S. allies to parse who is an authentic Trump emissary and who is a pretender. One embassy staffer confirmed that they had been in contact with several people claiming to speak for Trump, “but it’s not always clear how close they are to him.”

But, the staffer said, “we need to take the meetings.”

The result has been a frantic quest for access to the people closest to Trump — and to Trump himself.

“It’s a race to be the last person to speak to him before he makes a decision,” said one European defense official.

One lesson that American allies drew from the first Trump administration is that personal relationships are paramount with the former president and the people closest to him. Trump formed warm bonds as president with an eclectic range of leaders, from Shinzo Abe and Jair Bolsonaro to Boris Johnson and Kim Jong Un, all of whom used that direct personal link to their own advantage.

Since Trump locked up the Republican nomination, Poland’s president, Andrzej Duda, and Japan’s former prime minister, Taro Aso, have paid respects to him in person. So has David Cameron, the former British foreign secretary and prime minister, who used a visit to Mar-a-Lago to make the case to Trump for supporting the war effort in Ukraine.

Overtures are underway to other quarters of the Republican Party: François-Philippe Champagne, a Canadian minister helping lead preparation for the U.S. election, has met with Republican governors including Henry McMaster of South Carolina and Jim Pillen of Nebraska, emphasizing international stability as a shared concern, according to a person briefed on the meetings. Last fall, German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock visited Texas to meet with Gov. Greg Abbott, a powerful Trump supporter, making a friendly overture but also airing her stark disagreement with Abbott on abortion rights.

In recent weeks, several diplomats from NATO member states quietly traveled to Washington to meet with conservative academics and people associated with think tanks that they believed could have some influence on Trump’s policy. The meetings seemed to be productive, said one ambassador. But there is an air of contingency around them.

“We don’t know if the people we meet will actually still be there if Trump is elected president,” said one NATO official during a conversation at headquarters in Brussels.

Perhaps the most ostentatious outreach to Trump and the MAGA coalition came this spring from David Lammy, Britain’s shadow foreign secretary at the time, who was appointed the U.K.’s top diplomat last week after elections there. During a visit to Washington in May, Lammy met with Trump allies and MAGA luminaries, including Sens. Lindsey Graham and J.D. Vance. In public remarks, Lammy said Trump’s criticism of NATO had often been “misunderstood,” and that the former president mainly wanted Europe to spend more on defense.

This was a dramatic U-turn for Lammy, who previously described Trump as a racist and a “woman-hating, neo-Nazi-sympathizing sociopath.” But his Washington tour seemed to have a clear purpose: to open the way for a relationship with Trump in government — and to make sure British voters knew he was doing it.

His meeting with the Trump campaign emerged from quiet, persistent outreach, and Chris LaCivita, Trump’s senior campaign adviser, rearranged his schedule to meet with Lammy at the offices of the RNC.

It was a breezy conversation, according to people familiar with the exchange. Lammy explained his role as shadow foreign secretary, a position with no equivalent in the American system, and talked about how he has family ties to the United States. LaCivita briefed him on the state of the Trump campaign.

Minutes after the meeting concluded, stories about it hit the London Times and the Daily Mail, startling the Trump campaign.

One Trump adviser, recognizing the point of the conversation was for the Brits to be able to say they had the conversation, marveled that Labour had leaked the news before Lammy even left the building: “They had this whole thing pre-written.”

Lammy’s MAGA-friendly tour frustrated some center-left leaders on both sides of the Atlantic, including in the White House. One British diplomatic figure said there were senior Democrats who were “very, very upset with David,” particularly given his warm relationships with Democrats including Barack Obama. Adrienne Watson, a spokesperson for the National Security Council, said the Biden White House had been unconcerned.

This British diplomat said Lammy’s trip was, on its own terms, a mission accomplished.

“In the world of the embassy and Foreign Office, Lammy was seen to have done a good job, and that it was a smart move for Labour to hedge their bets in case they have to deal with a Trump administration in six months or so,” the diplomat said.

Money, Money, Money

If much of Trump’s transatlantic agenda seems fluid and impulse-driven, he has been entirely consistent on one point: He wants European countries to spend far, far more on their own defense.

Increasingly, Trump is getting his way.

Europe has good reasons to increase defense spending that have nothing to do with Trump. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 shattered the illusion in many European capitals that Putin could be treated as a quasi-friend, or that his imperial ambitions could be contained to Crimea and a few marginal precincts of Eastern Europe.

But the Russian threat is all the more terrifying for Europe because of Trump’s ambivalence about NATO’s commitments to collective security. The former president has railed openly against defense-spending laggards in Europe and elsewhere, venting frustration that so much of the world counts on American taxpayers to foot the bill for foreign security needs. Earlier this year, Trump said he would give Russia free rein to “do whatever the hell they want” to NATO allies that do not meet their defense-spending obligations.

In a June speech, Trump deplored the ongoing stream of American money into the war effort in Ukraine. “It never ends,” he railed.

Much of the NATO alliance has shifted toward making defense investments aimed simultaneously at deterring Russia and pleasing Trump. Twenty-three of the 32 NATO member states are assessed to spend 2 percent or more of their GDP on defense, meeting a goal outlined for the alliance in 2014.

Jens Stoltenberg, the outgoing secretary general, boasted of these figures at a meeting in Washington weeks before the summit, and is expected to make the same point prominently at the gathering. According to several NATO officials involved in internal discussions, the alliance’s strategy is to provide Trump with a message to his own voters letting himself take credit for making the alliance fairer and more effective.

Some countries have recently outlined newly ambitious plans to expand their military capacity. In April, Norway unveiled a 12-year plan to spend $152 billion on defense, much of it focused on production of rockets and artillery.

Romania, which signed a $4 billion deal to acquire Patriot missiles under the Trump administration, is helping expand what will soon become NATO’s largest military base in Europe. (A return of Trump is “not on the list of … major concerns” for the country, a Romanian official said.)

In Poland, which spends more than 4 percent of its GDP on defense, the most of any NATO country, some officials are pressing the rest of Europe to keep up. Duda, the right-wing president who is friendly with Trump, has called on alliance members to hit a 3 percent spending target.

Pawel Kowal, chair of the Polish Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee, said in an interview that the most important preparation for his country and others was these investments.

“Without question, Europe must take care of its own security, finally take the Russian threat seriously, help Ukraine and arm itself, including developing a common air defense,” said Kowal, who is also the Polish government’s Ukraine envoy.

“Vladimir Putin must think at least three times before he weighs an attack on NATO,” Kowal said. “If Europe is stronger, there is a good chance that we will also get along better with Trump.”

Not all American allies have responded with similar enthusiasm to the demands of the moment, however.

Two of the wealthiest countries in the NATO alliance, Italy and Canada, are far from meeting the 2 percent threshold even as the security demands on NATO continue to increase. So are several smaller allies, including Spain, Portugal and Belgium.

In Canada, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau faced an unusually open and bipartisan reproach from the United States in May when two dozen Republican and Democratic senators wrote him a letter saying they were “profoundly disappointed” that Canada was going to “fail to meet its obligations” to NATO. Trudeau acknowledged there was “more to do” for Canada’s defense, but for years has made no major policy shift in that direction.

The political pressure on these countries and others is likely to grow in the coming months, not just from Trump but also from their neighbors. Riho Terras, a former commander of the Estonian Defense Forces who is now a center-right member of the European Parliament, put it bluntly.

“I am not afraid of Trump withdrawing from Europe,” Terras said. “I am afraid that Europe is not willing to spend more money on defense.”

Finnish Foreign Minister Elina Valtonen, speaking to POLITICO at the end of an EU foreign ministers meeting in Luxembourg, said Europe could not sway the American election — but it could make itself “a very attractive partner to the United States.”

“We should certainly constantly concentrate on issues where we do have influence and that is building our own defense and deterrence as strongly as possible,” Valtonen said, adding: “And that’s, I guess, what also Mr. Trump has been calling for.”

Trump-Proof vs. Trump-Compatible

At a mid-June meeting of NATO defense ministers in Brussels, members of the alliance agreed in principle on a plan to shift control of NATO’s support for Ukraine. Up to this point, the United States has taken the lead in organizing military aid through a 300-person unit known as the Security Assistance Group-Ukraine, housed at an American military office in Wiesbaden, Germany.

Stoltenberg proposed an alternative configuration: transferring responsibility for aid management to NATO itself, and especially to European partner states. In theory, this would make the administration of aid “Trump-proof,” as some diplomats say. The final decision is expected at the NATO summit in Washington.

If implemented, this plan would gradually shift control of aid to a group of 200 NATO soldiers in the Belgian city of Mons — a group that would continue working with the United States, but under the NATO flag.

Schemes like this one, devised to blunt the impact of Trump’s edicts on shared NATO priorities, might be sorely tested if Trump were to come back to power.

There are others like it, not just in Europe but also in Asia and even in Washington, where last December a bipartisan majority in the House and Senate voted to make it impossible for a president to withdraw from NATO without strong support from Congress. It was a measure plainly aimed at handcuffing Trump or a future president who shares his views.

The State Department recently acknowledged that another American ally, South Korea, was pressing for an early renewal of a deal that helps pay for the 28,000 U.S. troops stationed in the country. The current deal does not expire until 2025, but renegotiating it with Trump could be much more difficult, given his frequent complaints about the cost of American support for South Korea.

Harry Harris, the retired admiral and former U.S. ambassador to South Korea, said the country appeared to be “hedging against a possible Trump 2 administration — they’ve seen this movie and it was very painful.”

But it is not clear how much these formal arrangements might really serve to limit Trump if he were wielding the power of the presidency.

For all the determination in some European capitals to approach a second Trump presidency with relative optimism, it is also impossible to escape the plain reality that no one on the continent really knows how chaotic a second Trump term might be.

He is unlikely to be tempered by defense secretaries and cabinet officials similar to those who served during his first term — Cold War traditionalists and military veterans such as Mike Pompeo, H.R. McMaster, Jim Mattis and John Kelly — who had spent their careers working within traditional foreign policy structure alongside allies.

Some Trump advisers have unnerved Europe by speaking with ambivalence about America’s commitment to defending NATO allies with its full military might. Elbridge Colby, a former top Pentagon official who is seen as a contender to lead the National Security Council in a second Trump administration, has rattled allies repeatedly by saying that the U.S. cannot overextend itself in Europe at the expense of countering China.

In an interview, Colby indicated there were limits to what the U.S. might do to counter certain kinds of Russian aggression, like an attack on the Baltic states.

“The NATO treaty does not oblige us to send our whole military. Henry Kissinger supposedly once said that alliances are not suicide contracts,” Colby said, adding that he was concerned about leaving the U.S. “vulnerable to a knockout blow by China.”

Hannah Neumann, a member of the European Parliament representing Germany’s Green Party, said Europeans also should keep in mind that Trump would be in his last term as president if he were reelected — and could be even more volatile the second time around. Neumann, who sits on a subcommittee governing security and defense, suggested that Europe could not take the risk of complacency.

“He has announced 100,000 foolish things. He is a loose cannon,” Neumann said of Trump. “It would be naive not to think about scenarios and prepare for some things lying ahead of us, in case Trump were to weaken or even leave NATO.”

During a spring visit to Washington, one Trump adviser offered a preview of what the smash-it-up approach might look like, delivering a blistering tirade about European defense to Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the former Danish prime minister and NATO secretary general, and Fabrice Pothier, the CEO of Rasmussen’s international consulting firm.

On a phone call, Pothier recalled, this person uncorked “a kind of Trumpian rant about the European allies not spending enough,” naming specific countries that were slacking on defense.

“That person kept asking Anders: How will you punish them? How will you punish them?” Pothier recalled, adding: “International relations don’t really work like that.”

Then, he acknowledged they might work that way soon enough — and allies had to adapt to that reality.

“In one line, I would say: Don’t try to Trump-proof yourself, but try to make yourself Trump-compatible,” Pothier advised. “I’m not buying the Trump-proof approach, which I think worked relatively well the first time. I think today we are facing a different kind of Trump.”

Jonathan Martin, Alexander Burns, Alex Ward, Rosa Prince, Eli Stokols, Carolina Druten, Stefan Boscia and Phelim Kine contributed to this report.

Politico

13. Deadly Osprey Crash, Police Shooting: General Reflects on Time as Head of Air Force Special Operations

Deadly Osprey Crash, Police Shooting: General Reflects on Time as Head of Air Force Special Operations

military.com · by Thomas Novelly · July 8, 2024

Lt. Gen. Tony Bauernfeind's tenure as the head of Air Force Special Operations Command was eventful.

As soon as he took the helm in December 2022, the longtime special operations pilot had to tackle ongoing maintenance issues facing the service's CV-22 Osprey aircraft, including groundings, flight restrictions and, ultimately, the tragic death of eight of his airmen in November when their tiltrotor aircraft crashed in Japan due to an unknown mechanical failure.

Just two months before he was set to leave his command, one of his commandos -- 23-year-old Senior Airman Roger Fortson -- was suddenly killed by a Florida sheriff's deputy while he was FaceTiming his girlfriend at his apartment, prompting public outcry about another police brutality incident.

Bauernfeind, a self-described introvert, admitted in a nearly hourlong exclusive interview with Military.com that addressing those crises wasn't easy but taught him how to respond to those tragedies as humanly as possible.

He relinquished his role as the Air Force Special Operations commander Tuesday and is heading to his next position as the superintendent of the Air Force Academy in Colorado. It's a vastly different assignment, but one that he feels prepared for, not only because he's a 1991 graduate of that military service academy, but also due to the hard truths he learned, and shared with others, amid those tragedies.

"There's just a whole myriad of crises that life sends your way, and the golden rule I have is, and I tell them, you've got exactly five seconds to go outside and scream at the sky," Bauernfeind said. "Then, after that, you got to start leading."

'A Global Impact'

Bauernfeind was eating breakfast with his family May 4 when he was notified that Fortson had died at the hospital after being shot multiple times by a sheriff's deputy in the doorway of his apartment near Hurlburt Field, a base in the Florida panhandle.

"Every loss hurts," Bauernfeind said. "But we knew that this one was going to have a global impact."

The next day, just ahead of a large conference in Tampa, Bauernfeind quickly gathered his team and spoke about how he would respond to the force. While a lot was still unknown about the situation at that time, he wanted to make one thing clear: Fortson's family needed them.

"There's going to be a lot of questions, but priority one is to the family," the former AFSOC commander said. "We'll handle the other questions later, but let's make sure the family's taken care of."

Bauernfeind sent an email, obtained by Military.com, to the whole force May 9, in which he broke from the traditional mode of silence often exhibited by top-ranking officers with off-base tragedies among the rank and file.

"We will all see this event through varying lenses, informed by our own journeys, and our own perspectives," Bauernfeind wrote. "We must acknowledge and respect these varying perspectives so we can move forward as a team."

In that message, he told airmen to avoid saying or assuming that Fortson "did something wrong" or that "law enforcement did something wrong." He added that "the investigation will lay out the facts" and service members should avoid "failing to acknowledge we have grieving teammates with differing journeys and perspectives."

In another move not often seen among the top brass, Bauernfeind's commandos, alongside other airmen, showed up at Fortson's funeral in dress blues, and the Air Force Special Operations commander addressed the family and crowd during a speech.

In late May, Air Force Special Operations Command held a town hall with Okaloosa County Sheriff Eric Aden -- the boss of the deputy responsible for Fortson's death -- at Hurlburt Field with Air Force and community leaders to speak to airmen about the shooting. The Air Force said it gave them an opportunity to openly convey "feelings of frustration and sadness," and Bauernfeind said it was important.

"It's important to have those conversations so we can wrap our arms around them and move ourselves forward from that conversation," Bauernfeind said. "The world is not perfect, and we've got to all continue moving forward so we can get the best of our people."

Meka Fortson, the mother of Roger Fortson, told Military.com that the "united front" of the special operations leadership and airmen has been pivotal in applying pressure to investigators and showcasing her son's achievements. While she wants to see more be done in the wake of her son's death, that support from airmen has been crucial.

Just one day after the town hall, it was announced that Deputy Eddie Duran, an Army veteran who had been with the department since 2019, was fired from the Okaloosa County Sheriff's Office. An Administrative Internal Affairs investigation showed his "use of deadly force was not objectively reasonable and therefore violated agency policy."

'Proud of Their Weapon System'

Bauernfeind's predecessor -- then-Lt. Gen. Jim Slife -- had to grapple with the woes of the Osprey, namely hard clutch engagements, a mechanical issue that left an Air Force CV-22 stranded at a nature preserve in Norway for more than a month and also was cited as the cause of an Osprey crash in 2022 that left five Marines dead in the California desert.

Tragedy struck the Air Force in November, when a CV-22 Osprey crashed off the coast of Japan, killing all eight airmen aboard -- the deadliest crash for that aircraft in the service's history.

That loss of life led Pentagon officials to temporarily ground all the aircraft used by the Air Force, Marine Corps and Navy. While investigations into that November crash are still ongoing, officials have said that it was caused by a new issue never seen before, further complicating the already controversial relationship the military has with the Osprey.

Despite those ongoing issues, the Pentagon lifted the grounding several months after the crash, and Bauernfeind continues to showcase trust in the CV-22.

Recently, as the Air Force has moved toward returning to flight, Bauernfeind told Military.com he got aboard one of the Ospreys himself to fly and watch the crews recertify their skills firsthand.

"To see the professionalism of our maintainers and our operators, as they are regaining their skills back, I was impressed," he said. "They are laser focused, proud of their capabilities, proud of their weapon system."

While the services don't have plans to purchase new Ospreys, it's unclear what will replace the tilt-rotor aircraft for the Air Force's special operations missions in the future. But, for now, the CV-22 is staying, and pilots and maintainers are learning how to avoid the mechanical pitfalls.

"The requirements for the capability that the CV-22 provides are still there; we still must provide that requirement," Bauernfeind said. "The question becomes, how do we cover that requirement? And right now, the platform that we have is the CV-22 Osprey, and I have the full faith and confidence in our operators and our crews and the weapon system to achieve that capability."

Finding the remains of the eight CV-22 Osprey crew members off the coast of Japan was a monumental task, and ultimately all, excluding those of Maj. Eric "Doc" Spendlove, were recovered.

What followed were funeral services and ceremonies across the country for the eight crew members, and Bauernfeind attended several of them.

"Just the outpouring of support was heartwarming," Bauernfeind told Military.com, getting choked up as he spoke. "At times, you know, we think that the military is kind of being less appreciated. And you see that from California to Minnesota, New York to Florida, Ohio to Massachusetts that, no, America still appreciates their military. Especially the service and the sacrifice."

Looking to the Future

In the wake of the U.S. military's withdrawal from Afghanistan, an area where U.S. special forces had been utilized heavily for two decades, Bauernfeind said the work hasn't slowed for AFSOC.

In addition to still being "heavily involved in making sure that those violent extremist organizations are contained and not a threat to our homeland," Bauernfeind said AFSOC is also reorienting to the Air Force and Department of Defense's pivot to what it calls "great power competition" -- lingo that means increased spending and strategy focused on adversaries, namely China.

"I'm exceptionally proud of what our air commanders did over almost two decades in Afghanistan," Bauernfeind said. "And, you know, I think they did a Herculean effort to support national and political objectives as it moves forward. As we transition to other parts of the world, we will keep sustaining and supporting our allies."

In many ways, Bauernfeind will be adapting too. In May, President Joe Biden's administration nominated him to become the next superintendent of the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado. He was confirmed by the Senate on June 18.

Lt. Gen. Michael Conley, who previously served as the director of operations for Headquarters AFSOC, assumed command of Air Force Special Operations Command in a ceremony Tuesday.

"I am honored and humbled for this opportunity," Conley said in a press release. "I am committed to making this command the best it can be in ensuring we are ready to go whenever you need us to."

At the ceremony, Bauernfeind was given a final salute and also awarded the Distinguished Service Medal for his tenure. While he refuses to say that his time at AFSOC was his most difficult, he points out that he's learned a lot about people and even more about himself.

"This is my eighth command," he said. "Just like every other human being out there, I'm fallible and every single morning I wake up, knowing that I have great teammates that hopefully will make me better. And I'm a learning machine. I have learned from every single one of my assignments because I've had phenomenal teammates, mentors to make me better as a human."

military.com · by Thomas Novelly · July 8, 2024

14. North Korean tqroops could be sent to Ukraine due to their sheer numbers, not their effectiveness, experts say

So Russia just wants cannon fodder.

North Korean tqroops could be sent to Ukraine due to their sheer numbers, not their effectiveness, experts say

Business Insider · by Thibault Spirlet

Military & Defense

Thibault Spirlet

2024-07-07T10:23:02Z

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un attends a military demonstration in North Korea, in this picture released on March 16, 2024. KCNA via REUTERS

This story is available exclusively to Business Insider subscribers. Become an Insider and start reading now. Have an account? .

• North Korea deepened its defense ties with Russia through a new security pact last month.
• The Pentagon said it would "keep an eye" on North Korea potentially sending forces to Russia.
• If troops were sent it would be due to their numbers, not their effectiveness, experts told BI.

Speculation has been growing that North Korea could send troops to Ukraine.

Last month, Russia and North Korea signed a pact agreeing to give each other military assistance if the other is attacked.

As part of the pact, South Korea's TV Chosun reported, citing an unnamed South Korean government official, North Korea plans to send construction and engineering forces to occupied Ukraine later this month for rebuilding efforts.

This story is available exclusively to Business Insider subscribers. Become an Insider and start reading now.

No official confirmation has been made so far, but speculation heightened during a Pentagon press briefing late last month when a journalist said that North Korea's Central Military Commission had announced that North Korea would join forces with the Russian military.

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(The Institute for the Study of War questioned the reporter's claim, saying that it had found no such statement made by North Korea.)

In response, Pentagon Press Secretary Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder described North Korea potentially sending military forces to Russia as "certainly something to keep an eye on."

As of now, the prospect of North Korean soldiers being deployed to Ukraine is speculative and unlikely, experts told Business Insider.

But if it did happen, the main advantage Russia would take from it would be North Korea's sheer number of soldiers — not their effectiveness, they said.

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"North Korea has a large military of 1.3 million," Edward Howell, Korea Foundation Fellow with Chatham House's Asia-Pacific Programme, told BI.

"Yet, the quality of North Korean conventional weapons, arms, and the soldiers themselves is far weaker," he said.

John Hardie, deputy director of the Russia program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said that even if the reports were true, he doubted the deployment of North Korean troops would have a "significant" impact on the battlefield in Ukraine.

One of the largest militaries but not the most effective

North Korea has the world's fourth-largest army, with estimates putting its troop numbers at about 1.2 million personnel.

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But while it is "well trained" and "highly motivated," the Korean People's Army has not had any real-world combat experience in decades, said Evans Revere, senior advisor with the global advisory firm Albright Stonebridge Group.

The last time they really fought was during the Korean War, where fighting ended in 1953.

Revere, who served as the acting assistant secretary for East Asia and Pacific affairs during the George W. Bush administration, said this raised questions about how its troops would perform in combat against the "agile, determined, experienced, and tough Ukrainian military."

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The Korean army's military exercises focus on fighting two adversaries, the US and South Korea, he said, adding that its weapons include "a lot of what the US military calls 'legacy systems,' particularly their aircraft, tanks, and artillery."

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"This could be a problem on the battlefields of Ukraine," he said.

While North Korea is estimated to have 50 nuclear warheads as of January 2024, its stockpile of weapons is seen as outdated and unreliable, experts said.

This means it would take a while for North Korean soldiers to adjust to newer weaponry, Bruce Bennett, a defense researcher at RAND, told BI.

This would likely prompt Kim Jong Un, the country's leader, to only send "politically reliable" troops to support Russia, he said.

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"What is uncertain is whether the Russians would provide the North Koreans with needed advanced weaponry — better tanks and artillery, communications and electronic warfare," Bennett said, adding that Kim would likely insist on that.

Wallace Gregson, a former US Marine Corps officer and former assistant defense secretary for Asian and Pacific Security Affairs, said that North Korean troops' effectiveness would also depend on how they are supported with food, fuel, and medical care, and their command relationships with the Russians.

"Given what we know about nutrition in North Korea, even in the army, they might have issues," he told BI.

Howell from Chatham House was more blunt.

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"If North Korea were to send troops to aid Russia's war, then they would merely be there due to their sheer numbers and not their military effectiveness," he said.

Deployment should not be completely ruled out

According to Benjamin Young, assistant professor of homeland security and emergency preparedness at Virginia Commonwealth University, Kim would not send troops "thousands of miles to Europe in order to die meaningless deaths on the front lines for a different country."

Young, the author of "Guns, Guerillas, & the Great Leader: North Korea and the Third World," said that, if they were sent, "the North Korean troops will most likely play an auxiliary role in terms of building fortifications and structures."

"They may also help repair tanks, weapons systems, and other armaments," he added.

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Hardie, from the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said we should "wait and see" if the report is true and an actual deployment takes place.

But if it does, he added that North Korean soldiers may "simply" be helping rebuild a destroyed city like Mariupol.

Other experts, however, had a different view.

Bennett, from RAND, said he thinks it is "fairly likely" that North Korea will send troops to Ukraine, without elaborating further.

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Howell, meanwhile, said we should not rule out the possibility of some transfer of individuals — whether troops or support personnel — given the recent increase in defense ties between Russia and North Korea.

But we "must remember that, at present, these rumors are merely speculative," he added.

Russia Ukraine North Korea

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Business Insider · by Thibault Spirlet

15.  Why NATO Should Stay Out of Asia

There are a number of NATO countries who are conducting operations and training in the region. Consider the member states that are members of the UN COmmand in Korea. Consider the countries that are working out of the Operations Center in Japan that are supporting sanctions enforcement with north Korea. NATO may not be in Asia but some of its members are.

Why NATO Should Stay Out of Asia

The Alliance Would Leave the Region Less, Not More, Secure

By Mathieu Droin, Kelly A. Grieco, and Happymon Jacob

July 8, 2024

Foreign Affairs · by Mathieu Droin, Kelly A. Grieco, and Happymon Jacob · July 8, 2024

Writing in Foreign Affairs last week, NATO’s secretary-general, Jens Stoltenberg, took aim at Beijing, condemning its support for Russia’s war in Ukraine and declaring that NATO had entered a new era of “enduring competition with China.” This situation “shows that in today’s world, security is not a regional matter but a global one,” he wrote, adding, “Europe’s security affects Asia, and Asia’s security affects Europe.” This is not a new idea. Stoltenberg has long championed a greater role for NATO in countering China’s rise. “Everything is intertwined,” he said in June, referring to European and Asian security at a joint press conference with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, “and therefore, we need to address these challenges together.”

Stoltenberg’s statements echoed a crucial pillar of U.S. President Joe Biden’s vision for countering China and Russia, as laid out in his administration’s October 2022 National Security Strategy: “We place a premium on growing the connective tissue—on technology, trade and security—between our democratic allies and partners in the Indo-Pacific and Europe.” NATO, with Washington’s backing, has made some progress toward this goal of strengthening cooperation with key partners in Asia. In 2022, for the first time in the alliance’s history, NATO officially identified China as a security challenge. The organization is now strengthening political dialogue and practical cooperation with its Indo-Pacific partners on a wide range of issues including cyberdefense, new technologies, space, and maritime security.

The alliance has also boosted its visibility in the region. In another landmark first for the organization, in 2022, NATO observers attended regional military exercises in the Indo-Pacific. Acting in their national capacities, NATO allies such as France, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom increasingly participate in large-scale military drills with Asian partners and have dispatched naval vessels to high-profile waters including the South China Sea amid rising tensions between China and its neighbors. At the Shangri-La Dialogue security conference in Singapore in June a high-ranking Chinese general accused Washington of trying to build an “Asia-Pacific version of NATO.” Lest anyone miss it, the alliance’s 75th-anniversary summit, beginning on July 9, will offer a very public reminder of NATO’s focus on the region. For the third consecutive year, the leaders or representatives of four non-NATO states—Australia, Japan, New Zealand, and South Korea, known as the Indo-Pacific Four (IP4)­—will take to the NATO summit stage.

That NATO and its Asian partners are deepening their cooperation is clear. What is less clear is that this cooperation is in either’s best strategic interests. China’s assertiveness presents complex challenges, and transatlantic and Indo-Pacific security are interconnected in important ways, particularly because of closer collaboration between Beijing and Moscow. NATO, however, is not the correct forum for fostering transregional cooperation to counter China. Pulling the alliance into Asia fuels Beijing’s narrative of a U.S.-led confrontation between global blocs and risks alienating Asian countries without ultimately helping to shore up regional security or deterrence.

NATO can still contribute indirectly to Indo-Pacific security, however, by prioritizing the threat posed by Russia—and by building up European military capabilities that would allow the United States to pivot toward Asia. At the same time, the alliance should adopt a lower profile in Asia to avoid stoking Chinese paranoia and instead emphasize practical and discreet cooperation with the region. Instead of drawing NATO into Asia, policymakers should leverage the European Union’s considerable economic and diplomatic power to build transregional cooperation among Asian, European, and North American states, using a web of flexible and overlapping partnerships and issue-based coalitions. Only through such a network of close ties can the United States and its partners effectively counter threats that span the globe, but having NATO lead that effort would ultimately be counterproductive, leaving both Asia and Europe less, not more, secure.

SQUARE PEG IN A ROUND HOLE

NATO’s Indo-Pacific outreach may be a largely welcome development for its IP4 partners—particularly Japan, which has pursued close collaboration with the alliance in the face of mounting provocations from China as well as Russia. South Korea and New Zealand, however, have been more cautious in their engagement with the organization, given their extensive trade ties with China, as well as Seoul’s desire to secure Beijing’s cooperation on North Korea and Wellington’s long-standing tradition of foreign policy independence. Australia’s enthusiasm has varied over time, reflecting shifts in its domestic politics regarding support for a tough stance toward China. But NATO has a deeper problem: its engagement in Asia is out of sync with broader regional political dynamics, especially in South Asia and Southeast Asia, where many states fear it will destabilize the delicate balance that they strive to maintain in their relations with Washington and Beijing.

Even though concerns about Chinese aggression and lack of respect for international norms in arenas such as the South China Sea are steadily growing, most Asian countries tend not to perceive Beijing as an existential threat and in turn are unwilling to pick a side in the U.S.-Chinese rivalry. Depending on the issue at hand, Asian countries may seek to work with China, the United States, neither, or both. Indonesian President-elect Prabowo Subianto, for instance, stated in June that his country would “continue our strong cooperation with China” but “at the same time, we will work to expand and deepen our close partnership with the U.S. and the West.”

NATO is not the correct forum for fostering transregional cooperation to counter China.

Many regional leaders—and some European ones—have expressed concern that NATO’s deepening involvement could not only force them to pick sides but also divide Asia into rival blocs. President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos, Jr., of the Philippines, for instance, has called on the region to reject a “Cold War mindset.” Policymakers throughout the Indo-Pacific are wary that NATO’s foray into Asia could constitute another step in Washington’s efforts to build a U.S.-led regional security bloc to counter China. These fears are fed by the legacy of European colonialism and Western intervention in the region and by uneasiness over NATO’s military approach. Kishore Mahbubani, formerly Singapore’s ambassador to the United Nations, for example, has warned that the “biggest danger” of NATO’s Indo-Pacific shift is that the alliance “could end up exporting its disastrous militaristic culture” to East Asia.

NATO is not a good fit for a region where states such as India and Indonesia have long traditions of not aligning with military alliances. And leaders in key capitals have pushed back on the idea of an “Asian NATO.” India’s External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, for example, referred in 2021 to the use of that term as a “mind game” and asserted that India has never had a “NATO mentality.” The power to set the country’s own path, he declared, is “my national choice.”

NATO has attempted to allay these fears, offering repeated assurances that it will neither move into the South China Sea nor admit Asian members. But skeptics and opponents of NATO in Asia remain unconvinced of the alliance’s intentions, especially as NATO now routinely invites top officials from IP4 countries to its summits and ministerial meetings. The alliance has also pushed for the opening of a liaison office in Japan. Nor has it helped the organization’s messaging when influential figures such as James Stavridis, NATO’s former supreme allied commander, have floated the idea of expanding the alliance to include Asian democracies. If NATO continues to insert itself into the Indo-Pacific, it is possible that some will see the alliance, rather than China, as a risk to regional security dynamics—alienating the very countries the United States and Europe need to balance Chinese power in the first place.

WORST OF ALL WORLDS

Supporters of engagement with Asia, both within the alliance and among NATO’s Asian partners, believe that these partnerships can enhance deterrence in the region. The organization is a military alliance, after all, so some observers imply that it could play some larger military role in Asia. At a minimum, the argument goes, the alliance could offer indirect support such as weapons, logistics, and intelligence sharing to Asian partners as well as to NATO member states choosing to intervene militarily under their national flags in a Taiwan Strait or South China Sea contingency. But it is unclear how this kind of deterrence would work in practice—and a more active NATO role in Indo-Pacific security could well backfire.

Rather than bolstering regional security, the alliance’s growing engagement with Asia could fuel insecurity and instability. Indo-Pacific states can see firsthand how NATO’s recent tilt feeds China’s paranoia, and they worry about being caught in the crossfire should a conflict break out. Beijing regularly accuses Washington of using the alliance as a “handy tool” for unifying its European and Asian allies into an “Asia-Pacific NATO” designed to “encircle” and “contain” China. Such rhetoric could be dismissed as Chinese propaganda, but many states in the region fear that Beijing could lash out if it felt it were backed against a wall. This kind of security dilemma would become more likely with a larger NATO presence in the region—and the alliance’s half-hearted military engagement and its less-than-perfect security assurances would offer scant protection for its Indo-Pacific partners.

Indeed, there are good reasons to doubt that NATO has the political will or military capabilities to make a meaningful contribution to Indo-Pacific security and deterrence. Many European allies would not be willing to support a NATO mission to check Chinese aggression in a far-off theater, either because they are busy dealing with Russia; because of their extensive economic ties with Beijing; or because Asia is, strictly speaking, not an existential interest for European countries.

Pulling NATO into Asia fuels Beijing’s narrative of a U.S.-led confrontation between global blocs.

The bulk of NATO’s enhanced cooperation consists of individually tailored partnerships with IP4 countries rather than “ironclad” security commitments, amounting more to cheap talk than credible signals of intent. As a result, Asian states are well aware that closing ranks politically with NATO in the absence of any security commitments could raise the risks of becoming a target. As the aftermath of Russia’s 2008 invasion of Georgia—and its invasions of Ukraine in 2014 and 2022—make clear, the alliance does not intervene directly to protect mere partners. NATO’s collective defense, via Article V of its founding treaty, applies only to full-fledged members, and is geographically limited via Article VI to attacks occurring on their territory or their assets in “the Mediterranean Sea or the North Atlantic area north of the Tropic of Cancer.” In a contingency affecting a regional partner—a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, for instance—NATO would have no obligation to intervene, and as a consensus-based organization, it would most likely remain on the sidelines.

Even if every NATO member wanted to intervene in Asia, the alliance has little to no spare capacity for operations thousands of miles away. European defense budgets are on the rise, spurred by Russia’s war in Ukraine, but those funds will be used primarily to replenish weapons sent to Ukraine, and to close urgent shortfalls for collective defense against Russia. Moreover, the type of military assets that NATO countries in Europe require for deterrence and defense on the continent—such as heavy artillery, antitank weapons, and tactical drones—are quite different from the maritime and air capabilities needed to project power into the Indo-Pacific. NATO is simply not equipped to deal with Asian contingencies.

NATO’s Asian proposition, in short, is the worst of all worlds: it feeds fears about the alliance’s intentions and infuriates Beijing without giving Asian partners the means to further deter China. Half-measures meant to counter China could end up sparking the very conflict the alliance is seeking to defuse.

IT’S NOT NATO OR NOTHING

Even if NATO avoids deeper involvement in Asia, however, greater European engagement in the region remains critical to countering China’s rising power and assertiveness. A reimagined European contribution to Asian security should proceed along several tracks. First, instead of trying to project military power into Asia, NATO’s European members should prioritize strengthening conventional deterrence and defense on their own territory, building up their own military capabilities to allow the United States to shift more resources to Asia. In keeping with this more indirect approach to Asian security, NATO should concurrently lower its public profile in the region, emphasizing tailored, discrete, and useful technical cooperation with the IP4 in areas such as intelligence threats, standardization of equipment, cybersecurity, and maritime security over high-profile military exercises and photo ops.

Transregional cooperation should also leverage Europe’s advantages—its diplomatic clout and economic, financial, and technological resources—to counter Beijing. Europe, the United States, and like-minded Asian partners should work together to promote good governance, particularly at the United Nations, where Chinese nationals have served in many leadership positions in recent years and used those opportunities to advance Beijing’s promotion of authoritarian rules and norms. NATO members must engage in diplomatic cooperation with Asian allies, including to jointly elect candidates to top UN positions, to effectively push back against Beijing’s efforts. Europe should also leverage its position as an economic powerhouse to expand trade and foreign direct investment with Asian partners, providing an economic counterweight to China. The European Union should start by finalizing free trade agreements with India, Indonesia, and the Philippines and delivering on its promise to invest 10 billion euros in areas such as sustainable infrastructure and digital connectivity in Southeast Asia through the Global Gateway initiative over the next few years. Most Asian countries are looking for more than just military assistance; they want help in achieving fast-paced economic growth, technological advances, and regional stability.

NATO is simply not equipped to deal with Asian contingencies.

The European Union is far less politically controversial than NATO and much better equipped to address this broad array of concerns. Indo-Pacific policymakers should make the most of EU security and defense tools that have already proved their value in the context of the war in Ukraine and that offer an alternative path for building European-Asian cooperation in the absence of NATO. These instruments include the European Peace Facility, which coordinates the provision of military equipment to partners and EU training missions for partner countries; and the Critical Maritime Routes Indo-Pacific (CRIMARIO) project dedicated to enhancing maritime security and capacity building with Indo-Pacific partners. These EU programs offer an effective alternative to the kind of defense cooperation NATO boosters claim the alliance could provide. Moreover, cooperating through the European Union would also open opportunities to address a wide range of security-related issues that fall outside of NATO’s remit, such as protecting critical infrastructure, regulating foreign investments, and building societal resilience against disinformation and hybrid threats. Whereas NATO’s hard military focus could provoke a regional backlash, the EU’s inclusive approach is likely to garner far more support in the Indo-Pacific.

Finally, European states should work to integrate themselves more fully into the region’s security architecture. There is no one-size-fits-all solution to the security challenge presented by Beijing; states in the Indo-Pacific are building different strategies to address their China problems. Europe should lean into the region’s mix of bilateral and multilateral arrangements, including more robust collaboration with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations on issues including cybersecurity, sustainable clean energy, and supply chain resilience. It should also deepen and expand minilateral initiatives with the region, such as the trilateral initiative between France, India, and the United Arab Emirates focused on defense, technology, and climate innovation projects, or Germany and the United Kingdom’s joint efforts to address the threat Pacific Islands face from rising sea levels through the Blue Pacific Initiative.

If the objective is to effectively counter China’s growing assertiveness in Asia, militarized Western platforms are not the best answer. Instead, Asian and European countries must come together to forge more nuanced and calibrated approaches that won’t stoke further conflict—or put the region in an impossible, and potentially ruinous, position.

• MATHIEU DROIN is a Visiting Fellow in the Europe, Russia, and Eurasia program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
• KELLY A. GRIECO is a Senior Fellow at the Reimagining U.S. Grand Strategy Program at the Stimson Center and an Adjunct Professor at Georgetown University.
• HAPPYMON JACOB is Associate Professor of Diplomacy and Disarmament at Jawaharlal Nehru University and the founder of the Council for Strategic and Defense Research.

Foreign Affairs · by Mathieu Droin, Kelly A. Grieco, and Happymon Jacob · July 8, 2024

16. A Better Path for Ukraine and NATO

Conclusion:

The bottom line is that the clock is ticking and remaining viable options are few. If Ukraine is not to be left scrambling as U.S. support dwindles—imploring Europeans to plug the gaps caused by congressional discord or second-term Trump cutoffs—it is necessary to consider all options, including less than ideal ones, for institutionalizing its security in NATO. Norway and West Germany show how. And taking this path would be far preferable, for Ukraine and the alliance, than continuing to put off membership until Putin has given up his ambitions in Ukraine, or until Russian has made a military breakthrough. This path would bring Ukraine closer to enduring security, freedom, and prosperity in the face of Russian isolation—in other words, toward victory.

A Better Path for Ukraine and NATO

What Kyiv Could Do Now for a Place in the Alliance

By M. E. Sarotte

July 8, 2024

Foreign Affairs · by Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post-Cold War Stalemate · July 8, 2024

We know what will not happen at NATO’s 75th anniversary summit in Washington this week: Ukraine becoming the alliance’s 33rd member. U.S. officials are talking instead about giving Ukraine “a bridge to NATO,” as National Security Council Senior Director for Europe Michael Carpenter put it recently. But when it comes to membership, many of the alliance’s leaders—including the United States and Germany—remain concerned that a formal move will be impossible as long as Kyiv is at war, given the centrality of the alliance’s Article 5 guarantee that an attack against one will be considered an attack against all.

Yet such concerns, while understandable, do not take sufficient account of either the current state of U.S. politics or the war itself. Ukraine’s “bridge to NATO” could easily become a bridge to nowhere if Donald Trump wins the November U.S. presidential election. Trump has threatened to withdraw from the alliance—or, as former NATO and Trump administration officials wrote together in Foreign Affairs recently, he could undermine the alliance by “withholding funding, recalling U.S. troops and commanders from Europe, and blocking important decisions in the North Atlantic Council.” He has also pledged to end the war in Ukraine in a single day.

Even without a Trump victory, it is unlikely that the flow of assistance from the U.S. and European governments will continue at anywhere near the levels of the past two and a half years. Chances of a major Russian advance or breakthrough will grow. Those could cause destabilizing refugee movements and panic among Russian border states (and beyond). Some countries might respond by doing what French President Emmanuel Macron proposed—sending their own forces to Ukraine, which could provoke retaliation against their NATO-protected home territories.

For the United States and its allies, securing Ukraine’s future shouldn’t be dismissed as an altruistic act that can be put off until later; it’s an act of self-defense that demands implementation now. Although bilateral accords are useful, they lack staying power at a time when elections scramble governments on both sides of the Atlantic. It’s hard to avoid seeing NATO membership as the most enduring solution to a conflict with potentially catastrophic consequences.

So how could Ukraine join the alliance in the near future, given that Russian troops are almost certain to occupy portions of its sovereign territory for years to come? History provides answers and precedents as to how to grant membership to a divided state—even one on the frontline. These historical models aren’t a perfect fit, their chances of working are far from certain, and the costs involved would be gut-wrenchingly high, because they include Ukraine ending major combat and provisionally tolerating division of its territory. Yet despite the costs, it’s time to consider these models seriously—because if any country deserves a hearing on some kind of creative way to become an ally as soon as possible, it’s Ukraine.

There’s room for creativity, because although NATO’s 1949 founding treaty does obligate allies to treat an attack on one as an attack on all, it doesn’t impose one-size-fits-all membership requirements, meaning that some countries have been able to negotiate bespoke terms. France, for example, remained an ally even after President Charles de Gaulle committed seemingly the ultimate dealbreaker in the mid-1960s—withdrawing from NATO’s integrated military command. Two other examples are even more relevant: Norway and West Germany, which both found ways to join the alliance despite, respectively, proximity to and conflict with Moscow.

NORTHERN EXPOSURE

Seventy-five years ago, Norway wanted what Ukraine wants today: to become an ally despite bordering Russia (then in the Soviet Union). Although Moscow wasn’t invading Norway at that time, or ever—in fact, the Red Army had even helped liberate some northern Norwegian territory from the Nazis—Norwegians had bitter memories of how their onetime neutrality had ended in brutal Nazi occupation. And they were horrified as Czechoslovakia—another formerly occupied country between East and West—fell under Moscow’s control in 1948. These experiences diminished the attractiveness of continued neutrality.

Norwegians debated two options: stronger Nordic defense cooperation or a transatlantic alliance—despite the risk of becoming the only NATO founding member with a Soviet border, thereby bearing responsibility for bringing the alliance to Russia’s door. Norway settled on the second option, but with a twist. The Norwegian government issued a unilateral declaration on February 1, 1949, two months before the formation of the alliance, stating that it would not “make available for the armed forces of foreign powers bases on Norwegian territory, as long as Norway is not attacked or subject to the threat of attack.” It later added similar restrictions on nuclear weapons.

There was allied grumbling about this then and afterward. During post–Cold War NATO enlargement, the Clinton administration’s National Security Council even argued against “a ‘Norway’ status for new NATO members.” But there has been broad consensus among Norwegians that this strategy has served their national security interests well, resulting not in “NATO-lite” but in full Article 5 status, with the option of changing Norway’s posture in response to new developments. To this day, Oslo can react to threats by altering or dropping these self-imposed restrictions, providing a mechanism for signaling and deterrence.

Despite the many differences between Norway in the Cold War and Ukraine today, the Norwegian model remains relevant, because it shows how a country sharing a border with Russia can join NATO: by carving out targeted, unilateral exceptions to mitigate the risk of a hostile response from Moscow. And there’s another benefit to the Norwegian model. Both former Russian President Boris Yeltsin and President Vladimir Putin, his successor, decried NATO expanding its membership. But when push came to shove in various negotiations, they revealed a different bottom line: opposition to NATO expanding its infrastructure. For example, on December 17, 2021, Putin issued a de facto ultimatum to NATO—the “sign here or else Ukraine gets it” treaty—demanding not the rollback of NATO memberships but of its infrastructure, specifically “military forces and weaponry,” along with a block on deploying “land-based intermediate and short-range missiles.”

This distinction presents an opening. In 1997, it enabled NATO to make post–Cold War enlargement minimally tolerable to Moscow by declaring, in the NATO-Russia Founding Act, that the alliance would carry out missions in new member states by means other than the “permanent stationing of substantial combat forces” and associated infrastructure and weapons. Norway’s homegrown strategy had long since achieved the same—without preventing the country from building a headquarters for Allied Forces Northern Europe and stockpiling heavy military equipment for U.S. and Canadian forces, among many other preparations.

DIVIDED WE STAND

The West German path to membership in 1955 is relevant for a different reason: it shows how a country can become an ally despite being divided. Advocating for this model requires strong disclaimers. Ideally, Ukraine would repel Russian invaders and restore its 1991 borders. Yet despite their courage, Ukrainian forces have heartbreakingly little chance of doing so through military means in the near term. The odds will become even smaller if Trump wins the November election.

Accordingly, it’s a matter of awful but urgent necessity to consider membership consistent with division—although not in the way proposed by commentators during the 2023 NATO summit in Vilnius. They argued that, since a divided Germany had joined NATO, a divided Ukraine could, too—immediately and as-is. That’s a serious misreading of history, however, because a divided Germany was not in NATO. West Germans got into NATO; East Germans got left in the lurch.

Simply put, no state without clear borders can join NATO because, for Article 5 to be credible, the extent of its coverage must be clearly defined. Yet having a defined border does not mean having an irrevocable or even an internationally recognized border, as long as a country follows West Germany’s example and adopts a strategy of provisionality—that is, making clear from the start that the border is provisional.

The West German path to NATO membership in 1955 shows how a country can become an ally despite being divided.

The best way to understand this strategy is to recall how West German leaders executed it. They realized that they had to tolerate division for an open-ended period and to renounce “recourse to force to achieve the reunification of Germany.” But they made clear that they were enduring, not accepting, that division by refusing to recognize the inner German border. They adopted not a constitution but a temporary “basic law,” calling on “the entire German people . . . to achieve by free self-determination the unity and freedom of Germany,” and pledging to finalize the country’s legal structure only after that event. They chose as their capital not a major city but a Rhineland town called Bonn, enhancing the notion of West Germany as a provisional construct; making a city like Frankfurt the capital would have seemed too permanent. And they upheld the goal of unification in diplomatic agreements from NATO accession to the Helsinki Final Act of 1975, which maintained the possibility of border changes at West German insistence.

Kyiv of course deserves better than this bitter model. But given that Ukraine and its backers have been unable to end the de facto division of the country, that division is for now a reality. Better to follow the West German example and achieve full NATO membership for independent Ukraine than to watch essential U.S. support dwindle as Congress bickers and Trump’s reelection odds increase.

And Ukraine can hope to follow the West German model in another way. After joining NATO in 1955, West Germany solidified both its economic recovery and new democratic norms, becoming a major exporting state and strong NATO ally—a future devoutly to be wished for Ukraine. As the historian Stephen Kotkin has put it: “The sine qua non of Ukraine winning the peace is an armistice and an end to the fighting as soon as possible, an obtainable security guarantee, and European Union accession. In other words, a Ukraine, safe and secure, which has joined the West.” NATO membership covering most of Ukraine would allow the country to begin moving toward such a future without having to wait for Putin to concede.

MORE THAN HALF A LOAF

Given the lessons in these models, leaders of NATO member states should, in private, encourage Kyiv to do three things: First, define a provisional, militarily defensible border. Second, agree to self-limitations on infrastructure on unoccupied territory (such as the permanent stationing of foreign troops or nuclear weapons) with the important Norwegian disclaimer that these limits are valid only as long as Ukraine is not under attack or threat of attack. Third, and most painful, undertake not to use military force beyond that border except in self-defense, as the West Germans did, in order to assure NATO allies that they won’t suddenly find themselves at war with Russia as soon as Ukraine becomes a member. The cost of this step would be acceptance of open-ended division, but the benefit would be to give most of Ukraine a safe haven in NATO.

Once settled, Kyiv and the alliance would go public with these agreements. NATO could amplify Kyiv’s unilateral statement with a similar declaration. The goal would be for independent Ukraine to join NATO as soon as feasible, ideally before January 20, 2025—but, if need be, as part of Trump’s “deal.”

While these announcements would, taken together, represent a fait accompli—that is, they would not be negotiated with Russia—there would still be an implicit negotiation: instead of a land-for-peace deal, the carrot would be no infrastructure for peace. Raising this issue publicly would, at a minimum, have the benefit of revealing two key Russian preferences: whether Putin will once again negotiate over defense infrastructure, and whether Russian cooperation and NATO membership are mutually exclusive.

This proposal would come with significant risks and challenges. At least five initial ones come to mind: First, all allies would have to approve Ukrainian accession, which in the United States requires Senate approval. That’s a steep uphill climb, but it’s a climb on any path to NATO membership, so not a unique burden to this proposal.

For Ukraine, the clock is ticking and remaining viable options are few.

Second, Russia will, to put it mildly, oppose Ukrainian NATO membership. Given that the former Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, has called for the partition of Ukraine, however, Moscow would have the face-saving option of calling that a victory. And given that Putin’s highest priority—even more than success in Ukraine—is the survival of his personal regime, a marketable version of Ukrainian alliance membership might be enough. The people who would suffer are those, tragically, already under Moscow’s occupation. But unless the West decides it’s worth significant escalation to reclaim occupied territories, that will be the case in any event.

Third, Moscow will boycott any real negotiations, not least because Putin senses time is on his side and so has little incentive to settle. But there’s no document Putin could sign that would be believable, so this is less of a problem than it appears. Despite the recent circulation of an accord suggesting Russia wanted a deal in 2022, Moscow retains no credibility as a negotiating partner. Ukraine and its supporters can and should aim at a peace without Putin. The result would be the lack of an internationally recognized border for Ukraine—but, as West Germany shows, that’s not an obstacle to membership as long as borders are clearly demarcated and militarily defensible.

Fourth, many Ukrainians would attack their president, Volodymyr Zelensky, for taking these steps. He could and should blame the West in reply, in order to protect himself domestically. And there would be a major benefit to Ukrainians, one which becomes apparent in the work of the scholar Jade McGlynn, who argues that weary Ukrainian forces are increasingly losing hope and willingness to fight. Although hating to concede division, they would find inspiration in knowing that, for their families, a large part of Ukraine had become safe.

Finally, protecting independent Ukraine during the accession process would be enormously difficult. The recent decision to allow use of Western-provided weapons against some targets inside of Russia, however, shows an increased tolerance for risk. As McGlynn has argued, that willingness could be pushed to cover the phased introduction of a no-fly zone over the provisional line of division during the accession process.

THE NEXT ALLY

This proposal rests, ultimately, on a belief in the staying and deterrent power of Article 5. For all of his seeming brashness and brutality, Putin has not launched any major attacks on Article 5 territory. Skeptics might argue, not without merit, that Ukraine joining NATO could be the event that causes him to change his mind, leading to catastrophic escalation. But even in the fall of 2022, as Russian troops fled humiliatingly before a rapid Ukrainian advance and Putin reportedly considered the use of nuclear weapons, he did not violate Article 5. Given that Russians have, despite heroic Ukrainian efforts, firmed up their lines, and that Ukrainian NATO membership would come with a renunciation of use of force and a limit on military infrastructure, it’s not unreasonable to believe Article 5 will hold.

The bottom line is that the clock is ticking and remaining viable options are few. If Ukraine is not to be left scrambling as U.S. support dwindles—imploring Europeans to plug the gaps caused by congressional discord or second-term Trump cutoffs—it is necessary to consider all options, including less than ideal ones, for institutionalizing its security in NATO. Norway and West Germany show how. And taking this path would be far preferable, for Ukraine and the alliance, than continuing to put off membership until Putin has given up his ambitions in Ukraine, or until Russian has made a military breakthrough. This path would bring Ukraine closer to enduring security, freedom, and prosperity in the face of Russian isolation—in other words, toward victory.

• M. E. SAROTTE is a Professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and the author of Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post–Cold War Stalemate.

Foreign Affairs · by Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post-Cold War Stalemate · July 8, 2024

​17. Exclusive: South Korea's Yoon to discuss Pyongyang's 'distinct threat' to Europe at NATO

Sort of a counter to the Foreign Affairs article saying NATO should stay out of the Asia Pacific.

Exclusive: South Korea's Yoon to discuss Pyongyang's 'distinct threat' to Europe at NATO

https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/south-koreas-yoon-discuss-pyongyangs-distinct-threat-europe-nato-2024-07-08/

By Ju-min Park and Jack Kim

July 8, 20244:44 PM GMT+8Updated 6 hours ago

South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol at a recent meeting in the Blue House in Seoul, South Korea, 27 May 2024. JEON HEON-KYUN/Pool via REUTERS/File Photo Purchase Licensing Rights, opens new tab

SEOUL, July 8 (Reuters) - South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol said he would discuss with NATO leaders the distinct threat North Korea poses to Europe by deepening military ties with Russia, warning that Moscow must choose between the two Koreas where its true interests lie.

It "depends entirely" on Russia where it wants to take future ties with South Korea, Yoon said, adding that Seoul would make a decision on weapons support for Ukraine based on how a new military pact between Moscow and Pyongyang plays out.

"Military co-operation between Russia and North Korea poses a distinct threat and grave challenge to the peace and security on the Korean peninsula and in Europe," Yoon told Reuters.

The remarks came in a written response to Reuters' questions ahead of a visit to Washington for a NATO summit.

Yoon, who became the first South Korean leader to attend a NATO summit in 2022, is set to depart on Monday for the Washington event, his third time attending such a meeting.

​Together with Australia, Japan and New Zealand, South Korea makes up the four Asia-Pacific partners joining in the talks on July 10 and 11.

Relations between South Korea and Russia have soured as Moscow receives shipments of ballistic missiles and artillery from Pyongyang for its war against Ukraine. Both Russia and North Korea deny such deals.

Russia has called South Korea "the most friendly among unfriendly countries", with President Vladimir Putin saying it would be making "a big mistake" if it decided to supply arms to Ukraine.

South Korea protested when Putin visited Pyongyang in June and signed a treaty with leader Kim Jong Un that covers mutual defence.

"North Korea is clearly a menace to the international society," Yoon said in his comments. "I hope that Russia will sensibly decide which side - the South or the North - is more important and necessary for its own interests."

He added, "The future of ROK-Russia relations depends entirely on Russia's actions," referring to South Korea by its official name, the Republic of Korea.

Yoon has pushed for greater security ties with Europe and other U.S. allies to deter North Korea's nuclear and missile threats.

At the same time, he has looked to boost the South's role in global security, on issues such as Russia's invasion of Ukraine and rivalry between China and the United States.

ARMS FOR UKRAINE

When asked if he would authorise weapons for Ukraine, Yoon said South Korea would look at "the level and substance of military co-operation between Russia and North Korea".

That would include areas such as arms dealing, transfers of military technology and assistance with strategic materials, he added.

Russia, a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council which approved sanctions resolutions until 2017, has engaged in an "illegal" military partnership with North Korea, Yoon said, adding that it was troubling to consider what help it might be giving Pyongyang in return.

There will be a clear "negative" impact on South Korea's ties with Russia if it continues to violate U.N. resolutions, he added.

Before Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, it was South Korea's fifth-largest export destination, while Russia was a key supplier of energy to South Korea, the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies says.

South Korea will take its partnership with NATO to a new level in September, through a cyber defence exercise in which it plans to host NATO member states, organised by the country's intelligence agency, Yoon said.

Leaders are gathering in Washington for the summit of the the North Atlantic Treaty Organization that will also celebrate the 75th anniversary of the military alliance.

Yoon declined to comment on possible changes to U.S. policies if Donald Trump becomes president a second time in November elections, but pointed to unwavering bipartisan support for the U.S.-South Korea alliance over the past 70 years.

"The alliance will stay strong going forward," Yoon added.

Trump's allies are assuring officials in Japan and South Korea he will support a Biden-era effort to deepen three-way ties aimed at countering China and North Korea, Reuters has reported.

Get the latest news and expert analysis about the state of the global economy with Reuters Econ World. Sign up here.

Reporting by Ju-min Park, Jack Kim, Josh Smith, Hyonhee Shin, Hyunsu Yim; Editing by Clarence Fernandez

18. War, Peace, and Politics: Reflections on Writing

Excerpt:

As I said, however, some of the most important, interesting questions cannot be answered definitively. All that one can do is to examine and explore, to look at questions from different angles and perspectives, to challenge unspoken assumptions and lazy thinking, and to assess what is right in front of us in a fresh, insightful way. That is precisely what Phil Zelikow does in his brilliant and beautifully written piece, “Confronting Another Axis: History, Humility, and Wishful Thinking.” Phil is a good friend, and I have had the pleasure of hearing him lay out his argument on several occasions; and, truth be told, I don’t buy much of the argument, either about the coordination between America’s rivals or the historical parallels to previous periods of crises. That is no matter, however, since the questions he superbly takes on are both of fundamental importance and, ex ante, unanswerable. Perhaps counter-intuitively, the excellence of the article does not depend on whether he is right or wrong. The best way to assess an article like Phil’s is to ask whether it forces us to challenge our own views, to see the world differently, and, if we disagree, to make our arguments sharper, better. Few pieces I’ve read in recent years accomplish that task more effectively.

War, Peace, and Politics: Reflections on Writing - War on the Rocks

warontherocks.com · by Francis J. Gavin · July 8, 2024

Editor’s Note: This is the introduction to Volume 7, Issue 3 of the Texas National Security Review.

When I was a young scholar, I was torn between two models of academic writing. I was trained as a historian, but my mentors, research subject, and professional background had exposed me to international relations theory and security studies. These groups displayed different characteristics in their academic scribblings.

For the security studies crowd, academic writing was too often crafted like a terse but bold legal brief, with the key points presented in outline form, the argument simple, sharp, and often combative. “The long-held conventional wisdom about subject X, offered by the leading and misguided school of thought/methodology/paradigm, is embarrassingly wrong. My powerful, parsimonious theory upends what we thought we knew about war/conflict/street cleaning/circus clown management. The article will proceed in three parts. The first will demonstrate why the collective brainpower of the competing paradigm/methodology has been so breathtakingly mistaken for so long. Part two will lay out my all-powerful theory, mention canonical strawman texts that are oft cited but never read, while burying key caveats in long, discursive footnotes. Part three will provide an overly simplistic historical sketch based on a large data set that aggregates a disparate array of events that have little to do with each other but will be fitted neatly into a 2×2 matrix. I will conclude by emphasizing how embracing my one-size-fits-all conceptual lens and powerful, novel methodology/theory will transform the discipline and lead to smarter policy, less stupidity, and brighter teeth and fresher breath.”

The style of writing in scholarly history journals was much different. Articles often started with an obscure, strange story from the past that that would “illuminate a puzzle” and “expose lacunae” by exploring a previously unstudied event, person, or group of people, phenomena, or household commodity that no one had ever bothered to investigate before. “The fact that all the bakers in this small, 17th-century French village were left-handed and subsisted only on salted beet roots may seem curious, even inexplicable to us today, but in truth it revealed something important about the powerful if hidden hegemonic sociocultural, socioeconomic, and neo-colonial structures that formed the foundation of the early modern world.” The article would then highlight a previously undiscovered archive, a “treasure trove” of diaries or municipal records, or uncollected trash that “sheds new light” even as it “problematizes, decenters, and complicates” our understanding of key parts of the world. It would conclude by saying that the history we thought we knew was more complex, more nuanced, and began much earlier than we once thought, while declaring that more research — indeed, a whole subfield — should be devoted to explaining this once-obscure issue or group.

This is, perhaps, an unhelpful caricature. And I certainly wrote my share of articles that mirrored these practices. Over time, however, I became dissatisfied with the stylistic practices of both fields. There were a few reasons for this.

First, I found it disconcerting that the language I used for my scholarship was so much different than how I taught my classes. As I have emphasized on these pages before, smart young people are both eager to learn about the world while possessing finely tuned B.S. detectors, and some of what passed for scholarship in both disciplines is not convincing. Over time, I adjusted my syllabi accordingly. Early in my career, teaching Modern European History, I eschewed journal articles for primary documents and literary works. I found that asking the students to read Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night or Curzio Malaparte’s Kaputt provided a keener sense of the nightmarish brutality of war in Europe; Czesław Miłosz’s Native Realm revealed the contested, complex identities in Central Europe, and his Captive Mind exposed the beguiling, disturbing allure of Stalinism to intellectuals; Milan Kundera’s The Joke highlighted the absurd cruelty of communism; while viewing Leni Riefenstahl’s haunting, troubling film masterpiece, Triumph of the Will, emphasized the horrifying appeal of Adolf Hitler to Germans in the 1930s. I realized that the goal of my pedagogy was not to teach how a particular academic field operated, to help students understand its scholarly methodologies and “literature,” or to identify who were the leaders of the field, but instead to provide young people with the insights to make sense of the actual world, in all its complexity, tragedy, and danger. I wanted to write more like how I taught, which resembled an intense but open conversation, rather than a didactic lecture.

Relatedly, I worried that the scholarly styles of my fields were often inaccessible, limiting the audience. To be clear, I learned an enormous amount from other scholars and their serious, thoughtful research, and I enjoyed the debates, the give and take, that took place in both fields. And many scholars tried to go beyond the stylistic inhibitions to engage the world outside of their narrow disciplinary confines. I was increasingly drawn to broader, bigger discussions. For example, I was swept away by Jill Lepore deploying her extraordinary historical skills in The New Yorker to introduce us to new worlds. Samuel Huntington and Francis Fukuyama were fully versed in disciplinary debates, but instead of engaging in endless fights, they offered expansive, counter-intuitive insights into how the world worked. Their analysis generated scorn from scholars but shaped real-world policy debates.

None of this is to say that I was a self-loathing academic or believed anything I had to say was so interesting that it would be read beyond my narrow field. There was and is great scholarship being produced in security studies and history from which I benefitted enormously and that advanced our understanding of the world. And many of the expansive pieces were, to put it politely, problematic. Huntington and Fukuyama did deserve serious criticism, though perhaps not the jealousy-tinged rage thrown at them by fellow professors. When Lepore wrote a New Yorker piece about something I possessed deep expertise in, the result was, to be polite, not great. Daniel Drezner’s book, The Ideas Industry, highlights the occasionally problematic nature of thinkers seeking bigger, broader audiences, such as Ted Talk–ing “thought leaders” and intellectual endeavors funded by plutocrats. Rigorous academic debate, deep research, an obsession with research design and methodology, peer review — these characteristics of scholarly journal articles had steep costs, no doubt, but it could be argued that they are the price that had to be paid to maintain quality and advance knowledge.

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What Are We Trying to Accomplish?

As I reflected upon it more, I realized that my dissatisfaction had less to do with how academic articles were written and more with what they were trying to accomplish. Often, academic researchers were simply trying to decisively win an argument and to lay to rest an important question, or to reveal a history or phenomena we did not know or recognize before, as they were (correctly) trained to do. These are important, laudable goals, and to achieve it, the stylistic norms of each discipline are often appropriate.

Over time, however, I recognized that the questions that most interested me — the ones that kept me up at night — were often immune to final answers. They could not be solved for X; the best one could hope for was wisdom and guidance and perhaps a thoughtful road map. Sometimes the most important questions and answers in the field I cared about — war, statecraft, and strategy — were shaped as much by passions than by reason. Thucydidesreminds us that people go to war for three reasons: fear (or appetite), honor, and interest. Social science traditionally focused most on the last, interest, but is far less insightful and convincing on fear and especially honor — factors that are increasingly salient in a world where conflict makes little rational sense. As such, perhaps these crucial subjects required less certainty, and were better served by writing that combined curiosity, playfulness, and humility — qualities rarely rewarded in the academy.

Who would be interested in such musings? It is easy to forget that earlier this century, short of winning the lottery and publishing an opinion piece in the New York Times or Washington Post or ghost writing for a presidential candidate or secretary of state in Foreign Affairs, it was not easy to find platforms that published serious, thoughtful writing about national and international security freed from academic norms and strictures. About 12 years ago, I had the good fortune of meeting Ryan Evans as he launched War on the Rocks. I confess I was a tad skeptical when he told me his vision, but years later, I am grateful. War on the Rocks helped transform and expand the publication landscape in exciting ways. In the years since, writing for War on the Rocks allowed me to pursue what a good friend calls my “epistolary” style: more conversational, open-ended, quizzical, playful, even as the issues I care about are deadly serious. I still occasionally write the sharp, tightly outlined academic jeremiad. But, over time, the gap between how I teach and how I write has narrowed, which has been gratifying.

How does this affect the Texas National Security Review, which is, after all, a refereed academic journal that publishes historians, international relations scholars, and researchers and practitioners from security and strategic studies? We understand that to attract the best work from the most creative thinkers, especially younger scholars in the academy, we can’t completely ignore the incentives and norms of the institutions and disciplines that employ and assess them. Academics need to get jobs, promotions, and tenure — hallmarks that are judged by the often obscure, puzzling standards of their disciplines. As an older, tenured scholar, I have the luxury to lambast the at-times ridiculous ways that higher education rewards and punishes young people. I have sat in numerous faculty meetings, in both disciplinary and interdisciplinary settings, where my colleagues go on about metrics like Google Scholar, H-Index, citation numbers, and “first tier” journals or academic presses while assessing the value of younger colleagues by “how they’ve advanced the field” through the number of articles or books they publish, and the ranking of the journal or press in which they publish. What is rarely mentioned is that most intelligent laypeople would find many of these journals largely unreadable or irrelevant, and the books are too often formulaic and offered at extortionate prices that only well-endowed research libraries can afford.

Regardless of the field or university, my sense is that these faculty conversations all too rarely engage and evaluate the actual quality, importance, and relevance of the scholarship examined to a larger world outside of their discipline; nor do they recognize that one book or article that changes how we understand a complicated world is far more important than a “tenure package” containing ten articles in leading field journals that say little or influence no one outside of a self-defined, enclosed field. To make matters worse, this package is then farmed out to “experts” from the field for supposedly arm’s-length evaluations. Having read scores of them over the years (and written a few myself), the letters are often “gamed.” Instead of providing an honest assessment, people turn down the opportunity to evaluate a candidate unless they can say something nice, save for the two or three cranky professors (inevitably old dudes) who have little good to say about anyone and whose letters are then discounted (indeed, having one of these cranky letters in a file helps the bland, rote, positive evaluations seem more credible). Both writing and evaluating these letters is perhaps the only good use I can think of for Chat-GPT.

This Journal’s Role

If things are so bad, you might wonder, why on earth am I so passionate about an academic journal like Texas National Security Review? Since its founding almost seven years ago, we’ve strived, in our own small way, to improve the dynamics of academic publishing. The Texas National Security Review is interdisciplinary, demands jargon-free language, is distributed widely to academics and policymakers, and is available for free. While we don’t always succeed, we strive to publish the best, most innovative, accessible work that respects but is not subservient to “inside baseball” academic or disciplinary norms. I have been very pleased to see our pieces placed prominently in “tenure files” that I have been asked to assess. And while I have no idea how well our articles perform on various citation indexes, one thing I am most proud of is how often I see our pieces on course syllabi.

This issue is no exception, as all the pieces are outstanding, providing critical insight on important questions. I want to highlight two pieces in particular, however, since they brilliantly reflect two of the most important qualities of excellent scholarly writing that I’ve come to treasure at the Texas National Security Review: the playful or the precise.

What do I mean? When there is a difficult, contested question that can be answered, precision is the most important quality a scholar can demonstrate. M. Taylor Fravel, George J. Gilboy, and Eric Heginbotham’s penetrating analysis, “Estimating China’s Defense Spending: How to Get it Wrong (and Right),” is an exemplar of this kind of scholarship. Many American policymakers and scholars see China as a dire geopolitical challenge, whose threat to Taiwan and allies in East Asia could lead to a great-power war. American strategies that seek to deter China — and, if a war tragically began, to prevail — focus on, amongst other variables, China’s military capabilities. Assessing a military balance before a conflict is notoriously hard, and history provides countless examples of threat inflation and dangerous underestimation of adversarial capabilities. Perhaps the best measure we have is costing out precisely the resources a state expends on national security — figures that are notoriously difficult to assess, especially in authoritarian systems. Fravel, Gilboy, and Heginbotham meticulously go through the best and worst ways to pursue this analysis, an extraordinarily valuable service to scholars and policymakers alike. Their article will dramatically improve and shape an important academic and policy debate.

As I said, however, some of the most important, interesting questions cannot be answered definitively. All that one can do is to examine and explore, to look at questions from different angles and perspectives, to challenge unspoken assumptions and lazy thinking, and to assess what is right in front of us in a fresh, insightful way. That is precisely what Phil Zelikow does in his brilliant and beautifully written piece, “Confronting Another Axis: History, Humility, and Wishful Thinking.” Phil is a good friend, and I have had the pleasure of hearing him lay out his argument on several occasions; and, truth be told, I don’t buy much of the argument, either about the coordination between America’s rivals or the historical parallels to previous periods of crises. That is no matter, however, since the questions he superbly takes on are both of fundamental importance and, ex ante, unanswerable. Perhaps counter-intuitively, the excellence of the article does not depend on whether he is right or wrong. The best way to assess an article like Phil’s is to ask whether it forces us to challenge our own views, to see the world differently, and, if we disagree, to make our arguments sharper, better. Few pieces I’ve read in recent years accomplish that task more effectively.

In the end, there are many reasons scholars write — reasons that go far beyond the ones I chronicle here. That is what makes being associated with the Texas National Security Review such an amazing experience. It is an honor and a pleasure to be associated with a journal that publishes such great work, that not only answers important questions, but generates new ones.

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Francis J. Gavin is the Giovanni Agnelli distinguished professor and the director of the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs at the School of Advanced International Studies in Johns Hopkins University. He serves as chair of the editorial board of the Texas National Security Review. He is the author of, most recently, The Taming of Scarcity and the Problems of Plenty: Rethinking International Relations and American Grand Strategy in a New Era published in the Adelphi Series by the International Institute for Strategic Studies/Routledge.

Image: Midjourney

Commentary

warontherocks.com · by Francis J. Gavin · July 8, 2024

19. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, July 7, 2024

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, July 7, 2024

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-july-7-2024

Key Takeaways:

• Ukrainian forces conducted a drone strike against a Russian ammunition depot in Sergeevka, Voronezh Oblast on the night of July 6 to 7.

• Satellite imagery confirms that the Ukrainian Air Force conducted a successful strike against a reported Russian regimental command post in Belgorod Oblast in late June 2024, likely with Western-provided weapons – further demonstrating how Ukraine could disrupt Russian offensive operations should the West continue to lift restrictions on Ukraine's use of Western-provided weapons to strike military targets in Russia.

• Ukrainian drone operators appear to be improving their capabilities to interdict longer-range Russian drones in mid-air, and these technological innovations may allow Ukrainian forces to ease pressures on short-range and medium-range air defense assets if successfully fielded at scale.

• Chechen "Akhmat" Spetsnaz forces likely coerced a Russian milblogger to issue a public apology after he criticized "Akhmat" forces – an illustrative example of unprofessionalism in the Russian military.

• Russian forces recently made confirmed advances near Chasiv Yar and Toretsk, and Ukrainian forces recently advanced north of Kharkiv City.



• Open-source researchers analyzed satellite imagery and assessed that Russia has removed roughly 42 percent of Russian tanks from pre-war open-air storage since the start of the full-scale invasion.

20. Israel–Hamas War (Iran) Update, July 7, 2024

Israel–Hamas War (Iran) Update, July 7, 2024

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/iran-update-july-7-2024

Key Takeaways:

• Ceasefire Negotiations: Hamas is continuing to resist Israeli and US efforts to create a phased ceasefire deal that would secure the release of Israeli hostages, end the war, and begin major reconstruction efforts in the Gaza Strip. The remaining gap in ceasefire negotiations is significant because agreeing to the most recent Hamas language would effectively commit Israel to the permanent ceasefire Hamas has been demanding before Hamas had released all remaining hostages. Hamas’ current demands could also enable Hamas to drag on negotiations indefinitely with no mechanism to compel it to release the remaining hostages.

• Gaza Strip: Hamas military spokesperson Abu Obeida claimed on July 7 that Hamas has regenerated materiel and personnel across the Gaza Strip.

• Iran: Post-election statements by both President-elect Masoud Pezeshkian and the supreme leader indicate that the Pezeshkian administration will not change the regime’s trajectory.

• Northern Israel: Lebanese Hezbollah launched a heavy barrage of rockets targeting IDF air defense assets and surveillance equipment in response to a recent Israeli strike. Hezbollah aims to degrade Israel's integrated air defense system by targeting Mount Meron, which hosts air surveillance and battle management functions.

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