Archive of "Military" Category
August 11, 2026 // 31 Comments »
Andrew Crapuchettes is a man with a mission. He wants to bring patriotic values to government employment recruiting, and, he wants to personally help implement Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s mandate to reform the Department of State to better represent those values abroad long past the end of the Trump/Vance/Rubio administrations. Can he do it?
Crapuchettes earlier this spring received an almost one million dollar contract to act as a recruiter for the Department of State for new Foreign Service Officers (FSOs). He intends to implement this contract for finding America’s next generation of diplomats via his existing employment search websites, RedBalloon and Military Hire. When he talks about values-based recruiting, Crapuchettes pulls no punches about what his intention for State is, saying a lot of State’s “recruiting was focused on DEI. It was focused on trying to get in the guy with a PhD in black dance, rather than people who can actually do a good job.” He promises future recruits that “all of a sudden you’re in a position where you can have a huge influence for the rest of your life on the U.S. government.” He even sat for an interview with podcast CrossPolitic titled “Could 1,000 Employees Change the State Department Forever?”
The promised changes are in line with broader directives from President Trump and Secretary Rubio. In March 2025 Trump signed a memorandum directing the Secretary of State to remove “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility” (DEIA) as a Core Precept that under Biden controlled Foreign Service promotions. Supervisors under Biden were required to list specific DEIA accomplishments for each diplomat on his yearly job evaluation. The Trump memo further directed State not base Foreign Service recruitment and hiring on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin, nor embed discriminatory equity ideology within any element of the Foreign Service. Rubio was quick to act, firing some 1,300 State Department employees, including 246 Foreign Service Officers, and recalling many then-ambassadors seen as opposed to Trump’s foreign policy. Rubio wrote about the restructuring that “motivated and creative State Department employees see their ideas watered down by turf battles until they give up… While the talented and loyal are driven into indifference. Radical ideologues and bureaucratic infighters have learned to play on this exhaustion to push through their own agendas that are often at odds with those of the president and undermine the interests of the United States.”
Some of the first concrete steps to dismantle DEIA and chip away at State’s culture Rubio took after the initial firings already concerned recruitment; new officers offer a faster way to reshape institutional culture than attempting to change the outlook of an entrenched workforce. Rubio suspended the Charles Rangel and Thomas Pickering Fellowships. Both existed to provide an alternative pathway into the Foreign Service with benefits not available through the standard hiring process, with a focus on increasing representation of underrepresented groups. The programs were administered through Howard University, a historically black institution, and the recruited Fellows were estimated to be 80 percent black, multi-racial or Hispanic. Rubio also did away with diplomats in residence (DIR), a program designed to reach populations with lower percentages in the Foreign Service than their share of the general population. Many DIRs were based at Historically Black Colleges and Universities. Today, almost everyone who enters State as an FSO must now pass the same rigorous vetting, leveling the playing racial field.
A look at Crapuchettes’ current job employment websites at RedBalloon and Military Hire offers some clues to how State’s FSO recruitment may work in the near future. The sites advise all employers must pledge to honor free speech and medical privacy, something that may challenge State with its complex restrictions on FSOs appearing on TV and even in social media. RedBalloon itself states it seeks “motivated job seekers who value freedom, hard work, and merit-based recognition, and employers that respect their constitutional rights and provide a positive workplace where merit and achievement are honored.” MilitaryHire is much the same, but leans more heavily toward matching former military members with technical skills with businesses working alongside government. Crapuchettes is unabashedly Christian (this is of course what the MSM seized upon).
Browsing Crapuchettes’ employment sites shows they currently recruit for ICE and the Border Patrol. Some advertisements seek people who have or who will qualify for security clearances to work at Northern Virginia locations such as McLean, which may or may not be affiliated with the Intelligence Community or its network of contractors. One such ad is looking for people with proven lockpicking skills. Most other employers in the Washington, DC area appear to be well-known conservative or right-of-center groups and NGOs.
It is clear, in line with Rubio’s other changes, the change in recruiting venue is part of an all-out effort to radically change the culture of the State Department. Its last radical change, actually more of a lateral move, was during the Obama and Biden eras, especially under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Democrats expanded the traditional conception of diplomacy to include advocacy on LGBT rights, women’s rights, labor issues, and other social justice policy priorities. Critics argued recruitment favored applicants from elite universities and applicants who shared prevailing progressive assumptions within the foreign policy establishment. It is consistent with this former pseudo-ideological strategy that the new recruitment emphasis fits with the Trump administration’s own approach to foreign affairs.
Trump in his first term talked a good game about State Department reform, but he chose weak Secretaries of State who never understood they needed to affect change at all levels to alter State’s broader culture. The rank and file in an almost feral way understood this and stymied initiatives, slow-walked paper, and resisted initiatives until the changemakers ran out of time and likely interest. State successfully waited out its opponents in the first Trump administration because it did not believe it represents the Executive or even an America which it did not support politically. State instead had its own version of what the world really needs.
Things may be different now, as a growing cohort of conservative thinkers that will outlast Trump has come out of the closet inside State for the first time. Rubio’s changes reach into the hereto untouched recruitment, training, and promotion processes, the systems that shape institutional culture over the long run. Whether these reforms endure past the next Republican president is the central question. Personnel policies can be quickly reversed by future administrations. Rubio appears to be betting that changing who enters the Foreign Service will prove more durable than changing those already inside it.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Posted in Biden, Democracy, Embassy/State, Military, Trump
July 14, 2026 // 5 Comments »
I watched the New York-based Pride Parade live streamed. The parade is a major event in NYC, attended by well over one million people. Today, eleven years after Obergefell v. Hodges legalized same-sex marriage, the movement that once celebrated equality alongside most Democrats looks very different. The near-complete embrace of trans rights as seen in the parade, especially as it affects children, will likely harm the Democratic Party in coming elections. FYI, I’ll use the word “gay” as shorthand here for the various constructions, the most complete of which is the unhandy LGBTQQIP2SAA+.
One of the most noticeable changes in the Pride Parade was the replacement of the once-ubiquitous rainbow flag with the “trans flag,” adding pink, brown, white, and black. Trans people were present in large numbers, had their own floats, and were noticeably name-checked by most of the speakers and signs I saw. As in years before, Democratic politicians were also quite visible. But this year the senior pol, Chuck Schumer (D-NY), was booed. Some in the crowd turned their backs on him, and when the parade paused, they shouted out about how he did not support trans rights. Chuck yelled back he was the first major politician to ever attend a Pride Parade, back in the 90’s. Meanwhile, all-in trans modern supporters Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Congresswoman AOC (D-NY) got some of the biggest applause of the day.
In Gallup polls from 1996 only about a third of Americans supported same-sex marriage. But by the mid-2010s, the figure had flipped and remained about two-thirds into the 2020s. This change culminated in the 2015 Supreme Court decision in Obergefell v. Hodges. In 2024 the Republican Party even removed opposition to marriage equality from its platform. Importantly, the Court ruling followed—not preceded—the broader cultural shift. The emphasis that led to acceptance of gay rights was driven by several factors, key among which was the emphasis on marriage involving consenting adults, many of whom were already cohabitating in various statuses. Advocacy focused on the universal human rights already part of American law and society, such as the right to work, to own property jointly, and so on, nothing more than asking people accept someone else’s private life. It did not include sexual rights for children.
Then something happened concurrent with the first election of Donald Trump. Where it once was sufficient to support basic rights, the Pride Parade started to include overt anti-Trump messages. Signs started to read “Trans rights are human rights” and the new flag was debuted. Far from “celebrating victory, defending the gains, and staying vigilant while winding down as a movement that had achieved its core objectives,” many gay groups did the opposite. They radicalized. Democrats increasingly viewed gay activism as an important component of their electoral coalition. The letter Q and the term queer came to symbolize the idea that one’s sexuality was a political act. In the 2016 presidential election, gay voters embraced Hillary Clinton, promoting irrational fears as bizarre as Trump endorsing imprisoning gays in concentration camps. This voting pattern reflected a broader social shift, where identity-based politics became increasingly central to how one voted. The Democrats took full advantage of this, fanning the flames further in the next election cycle with careful allotments by gender identity (as well as race, disability, etc.) throughout the Biden administration, especially in the military.
The move from basic rights to gender identity made things much more complex as Trump took office a second time. The gay rights movement prior to Obergefell v. Hodges demanded equality and mutual respect. No one’s straight life would change when gay marriage became legal. But then the shift started toward children, and the political advantage Democrats enjoyed because the majority of American supported same sex marriage began to fail. They advocated that gender? sex? was no longer biology, it was an undesired societal construct. Medical schools began teaching newspeak like “chest-feeding” instead of “breastfeeding,” “birthing parent” for “mother,” and “person with a uterus” instead of simply “woman.” Many libraries became repositories of sexual education, often aimed at elementary-age kids “considering” becoming trans.
Divas in drag became a library staple in progressive areas. Teachers at some schools were expected to morph into gender coaches for those same kids, and rules were made that allowed schools in some areas to keep all this from parents, no matter how young the child. Schools in general also took the lead in transitioning to all-sex toilets, with biological boys being allowed to change in front of girls whose opinion of this was never considered. It required a Supreme Court decision to allow states to keep biological boys out of girl’s sports. Quickly evolved medical standards saw doctors encouraged to perform “gender-affirming care” for pre-pubescents who were supposed to be experiencing gender dysphoria at an age when they likely could not correctly spell the term. This care, often called “support,” included things sometimes irreversible such as chemical puberty blockers, hormone therapy, and surgical interventions. Parental involvement varied down to zero.
Democrats, greedy for votes, supported this all as received wisdom. No debate was allowed. Opponents were shouted down and canceled, called bigots and fascists, labeled homophobic. Even the author of many young voters’ childhood favorite books, J.K. Rowling, was ostracized because she did not support trans rights the woke way. Democrats intend to take this way of thinking into the midterms and the next presidential election. It is very unclear that is a good idea.
In one post-election survey, cultural issues, including transgender issues, mattered more to swing voters than even immigration and inflation. Reality also plays a part. Predictions that a second Trump administration would seek to overturn same-sex marriage have not materialized, despite a conservative Court. Instead, his Secretary of the Treasury is a married gay man with kids. Republican candidates have improved their messaging, focusing on education policy and parental rights, framing the issue as oversight and consent rather than identity or discrimination. In fact, the Supreme Court’s 2020 decision in Bostock v. Clayton County held that Title VII protects gay and transgender workers against discrimination at work, growing gay rights. Changes Trump made have negatively affected trans people in the military, but never drove things broadly back toward Clinton’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” days.
Public attitudes toward gay Americans shifted more rapidly than any other civil rights issue in U.S. history. They are shifting again. The public increasingly appears willing to separate support for gay equality from support for gender-identity activism. Whether Democrats recognize the distinction, that voters are sensing overreach, is an important question for the next election.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Posted in Biden, Democracy, Embassy/State, Military, Trump
June 30, 2026 // 6 Comments »
The U.S.-Iran War may be dwindling its final phase, though the durability of any ceasefire remains uncertain. So who won? As the kids say, it’s complicated.
Much of the discussion of the war’s meaning, even as it drags on, focuses on how it has already damaged Donald Trump politically. Lost in that pile-on is a more important question: what did the war produce? The answer may lie in the 14-point Memorandum of Understanding that may still someday mark the end of the fighting. However, the talk now is almost exclusively and presumably about how the war’s failure will help crush the Republicans in November. That misses at first that any missteps or any failures, or any successes, are America’s to reckon with for now forever forward, not simply some trite shot at a hated President. Wars belong to the nation, not to a particular administration. It may have once been called Johnson’s and Nixon’s war, but the Vietnam vets who still suffer today are America’s. The outcome of the Iran War should not be hooted and cheered as if it was another simple downturn in the polls.
So what does a fuller look at the outcome of the war tell us? History as always will be the final judge (as it will on whose agreement, Obama’s or Trump’s, was better) but the text of the 14-point Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between the U.S. and Iran points in a possible positive direction. If the MOU can be translated into actual day-to-day relations, it opens the door for a new pattern for two countries which have been at war with each other for decades in a regional, multigenerational, power struggle.
Chief among the hopeful parts of the MOU is Paragraph Eight, which states in part “The Islamic Republic of Iran reaffirms that it shall not procure or develop nuclear weapons. The United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran have agreed to resolve the disposition of stockpiled, enriched material pursuant to a mechanism that will be mutually agreed upon in accordance with the schedule mentioned in Paragraph 7, with the minimum methodology to be down-blending on site under the supervision of the I.A.E.A.” If this works it means no nukes for Iran. It would sharply limit Iran’s ability to coerce its neighbors and alter the regional balance of power. It means ending the apocalyptic threat to Israel, always a cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy. It means no future strikes by the U.S. or Israel to brush back Iranian nuclear plans. It means no Iran with fissionable material to sell or barter globally. Yes, the MOU wording is vague in places (but quite specific in others) and yes the Iranians have cheated on past agreements. But if Paragraph Eight can be effectively implemented it will justify the recent war by preventing future ones.
Another critical part of the MOU is Paragraph 7, which explains “The United States of America undertakes to terminate all types of sanctions against the Islamic Republic of Iran, including the United Nations Security Council resolutions, I.A.E.A. Board of Governors resolutions, and all unilateral U.S. sanctions, primary and secondary, in an agreed-upon schedule as part of the final deal.” This paragraph joins with several others regarding the release of Iranian assets held in U.S. banks and the removal of restrictions on Iran selling oil on the global market, to be the carrot on the no nukes pledge (the stick of course being the reimposition of sanctions backed up by B-2s). The heavy sanctions Iran has faced since the 1979 Islamic Revolution have raised the price of everything inside the country, and basically control the consumer economy. For example, after the reimposition of U.S. sanctions in 2018, Iranian oil exports fell sharply from roughly 2.5 million barrels per day to well under 1 million barrels per day for a period. Sanctions have restricted Iran’s access to foreign currency and the international banking system, weakening the rial. This has made imports more expensive and fueled inflation. Sanctions have all but shut off large-scale foreign investment, restricted access to needed medical and civilian aviation technology, and reduced trade.
What decades of sanctions have not done is stop Iran from its nuclear ambitions. Removing sanctions, in measured stages as Iran complies piece-by-piece with the no nukes pledge, will reintroduce Iran into the world economy. Peaceful trading with other nations has been the center of the world order the United States created following World War II. Bringing Iran into the system can lessen its need to suffer as a pariah country. Success here could possibly replace Obama’s Libyan no nukes disaster (surrendering strategic weapons leaves a regime vulnerable to later coercion) with a lesson that Cuba and North Korea might take note of.
There does exist in the MOU one loaded gun, something which could cause the rest of the MOU to fail. One hopes the final agreement between the U.S. and Iran dramatically revises Paragraph 5, which states “Upon the signing of this M.O.U., the Islamic Republic of Iran will make arrangements using its best efforts for the safe passage of commercial vessels with no charge for 60 days only from the Persian Gulf.” It is possible to understand the U.S. conceding to this faint language at this stage to secure the rest of the agreement, but it is critical that Iran in the end not control the Strait by any means, including some sort of fee, insurance or toll system.
Granting any measure of control of the Strait to Iran would set a catastrophic precedent. At the post-WWII Bretton Woods Conference, Washington created an economic system that depended in large part on the United States Navy safeguarding global freedom of navigation, a principle that underpins international trade and economic stability today. By maintaining a forward-deployed presence in key maritime chokepoints and with carrier groups in all oceans, the world’s most powerful navy ensures sea lanes remain open in accordance with international law. No other nation comes close to being able to play such a role. Europe’s sea power has not been able to do so since the collapse of the British Empire, and China still lacks the sizable blue water navy and extensive world-wide base network to try. It would be strategically devastating for America to follow the regional empowerment of Iran through its failures in Iraq and Afghanistan by handing over a global lever of control. The opening of the Strait of Hormuz cannot become a bargaining chip. The consequences will extend far beyond the Middle East, reshaping the global order in ways the United States may not be able to reverse.
This war with Iran is not over but it has reached a stage where its ultimate significance can be decided. The MOU and what happens next shows the war need not be a waste, and that the outcome is still in play even as the guns fall silent. The verdict lies not on the battlefield but in whether the MOU survives implementation. That verdict remains unwritten.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Posted in Biden, Democracy, Embassy/State, Military, Trump
May 12, 2026 // 6 Comments »
The Iran War may prove to be little more than a blip on the world’s radar. Or its real significance may lie less in who wins militarily than in whether it accelerates global recognition that the United States is no longer willing or able to enforce the international order it created after 1945.
There is a strong argument that even as the missiles continue to fly the war is not that significant. It appears today the most likely outcome will be a return to something of a status quo in the Middle East. Everyone wants the oil to start flowing again, albeit for different reasons, and this is a powerful pull toward compromise. Iran will play its strongest card, opening the Strait of Hormuz to the best deal, while the U.S. will push its military advantage further forward to pressure Tehran to some kind of a better deal. If Iran signals it is willing to remain just a threshold nuclear state, this can be made to look good enough for both parties. But the paradigm shifts once hoped for will not happen. The current administration has limited political time, and shrinking leverage if the Democrats do well in the midterms. America’s allies in Europe and elsewhere have a long history of waiting out American adventures hoping the next president will play more nicely. Like so many other conflicts that changed little, history may more or less ignore this war.
The opposite argument requires focus on a longer sweep of history, which may come to see the Iran War as a significant marker in the slow-motion end of the global system set in place by the United States after WWII.
Some perspective is required to see just how dramatic those post-war events were in reshaping the planet and what might happen if they are gone. From WWII the United States emerged as the only major industrial power whose economy and infrastructure were intact, and it used that position to build a global economic system designed to avoid the instability that had helped produce depression and fascism. The two world wars shattered the old imperial order. World War I destroyed the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires, while World War II fatally weakened Britain, France, and Japan, and accelerated decolonization. The U.S., alone with its nuclear weapons, was left the most powerful nation on earth.
America’s leaders rushed into the gap. Brilliantly, they did not seek the immediate gains of colonies of their own or brutal war reparations. They wanted a sustainable system, not a fragile empire, to replace the old way. At the Bretton Woods Conference, Washington created a new global economic system. It devised the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank to stabilize currencies, provide reconstruction loans, and encourage development. The Federal Reserve Bank in New York became the world’s gold repository. The U.S. dollar became the world’s reserve currency, with other major currencies pegged to the dollar, giving the United States enormous financial influence. Through the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade in 1947 and later the World Trade Organization the U.S. pushed against the tariffs which had previously encouraged world war to expand global commerce. The Marshall Plan poured billions into rebuilding Western Europe, alongside similar efforts in Japan. This not only created vast markets for American goods but also helped prevent another democracy-gutting economic collapse that might have fueled post-war communist movements as it had the fascists before it. The U.S. made it known it would function as the world’s policeman, unilaterally as necessary.
Despite a massive dose of propaganda to the contrary, this system was never altruistic. It was built from the ground up to serve American strategic interests and keep America the world’s most powerful nation. By guaranteeing access to trade routes through the U.S. Navy, maintaining open sea lanes, and underwriting security, Washington created the environment necessary for international trade to flourish. The United States stood alone at its center as both creator and chief beneficiary.
Time and again, despite horrendous blunders like the soul-crushing Vietnam War and failure to bring the collapsed Soviet Union into the world economy, the system favored the U.S.; it should have, having been designed that way. Through some forward-thinking diplomacy, Eastern Europe became capitalist and denuclearized without shots fired. China, with the exception of an expedition into Vietnam, stayed within its borders and evolved into one of the world’s most powerful capitalist economies. The robust South Korean economy, and that of Taiwan, was created by U.S. investment and sustained by the U.S. military to further American reach into Asia. OPEC rose to threaten the world economy and then was tamed. After Desert Storm, the United States emerged as the dominant military power in the Gulf and could have converted that position into control over regional energy flows. It chose instead to preserve the broader international system that benefited it more in the long run. Dictators were supported or selected by Washington all around the world to favor American economics, and discarded in CIA-led overthrows when no longer needed. Pundits with more imagination than knowledge once proclaimed “Japan as Number One” for a few years at some point. But despite ups and downs, the U.S.-led system prevailed.
Fast-forward to May 2026 and the real question is whether America still possesses the political patience and strategic discipline required to sustain the global order built after 1945. Questions are arising about America’s political willingness to fight for open sea lanes. With a few notable exceptions, America with Israel as its Rottweiler has for six decades acted as the principal enforcer of global nuclear nonproliferation. Will she abandon this role this time in return for Iranian promises? Ukraine has become an example of festering strategic drift, with Washington oscillating between commitments that are costly enough to prolong the war but insufficient to shape its outcome. Iraq, Afghanistan, and now perhaps Iran have ended the likely future use of the big blunt stick of coercive diplomacy the U.S. could hold over the world’s rogues. This is not geopolitical strategy anymore. It’s improvisation. America can still lash out (Libya, or Venezuela, for example) with limited consequences but the post-9/11 quasi-religious belief that American military superiority could quickly eliminate threats before they fully materialized is gone. In Iran, Washington once again demonstrates overwhelming firepower but struggles to produce a political settlement in line with U.S. goals.
If the conclusion of the Iran War is a return to the status quo, it will further expose the limits of American power brewing for several decades. More importantly, with the questions above being asked in capitals around the world, we are left with the fear that we are living through the ragged end of the post-WWII system. It is a subtle and potentially dangerous situation, the quiet retraction of an American-led world order without the safety of a replacement. We call that chaos, and chaos is when states make their most dangerous calculations.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Posted in Biden, Democracy, Embassy/State, Military, Trump
April 30, 2026 // 8 Comments »
“Tell me how this ends,” a young General David Petraeus asked early in Gulf War II, after the Iraqi Army had largely been defeated. The United States is extraordinarily good at the first half of wars and far less capable in the second. So how does this one with Iran end?
Gulf War I was fought on mostly contrived circumstances. Saddam Hussein thrived in power in Iraq in part due to U.S. support; he certainly survived the 1980s Iraq-Iran War due to behind the scenes U.S. involvement. But by 1990 Saddam morphed into a bad guy invading Kuwait, and the U.S. went to war against him supposedly to free Kuwait. Later we added on something about supporting the Iraqi people, but the real reason the U.S. went to war was to recapture and protect the oilfields, especially of Saudi Arabia. The U.S. was fully dependent on that oil, but our government could not say so, so white-washed all that happened with public justifications that obscured more material interests. We “won” that war by only fighting the part that really mattered to U.S. foreign policy, first half of it, the oil part, and declaring victory.
It is still contested why the U.S. fought Gulf War II, the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan following the events of 9/11. The stated goals shifted from counterterrorism to fake weapons of mass destruction to nation-building while broader ambitions of regional dominance remained in the shadows. Nation building proved a palatable sell to the American public. But the underlying reason for the war was hegemony, remaking the regional balance of power and surrounding Iran under what some came to call the Rumsfeld Doctrine. Ironically Iran did offer some sort of rapprochement in 2004 when it looked to them that America was going to be successful in both Iraq and Afghanistan and the entire U.S. military stood panting on Iran’s east and west borders. But that rapprochement did not happen, thanks to American hubris.
And now is Gulf War III. As before, the reasons on paper for this current war are unclear. Originally it was to free the Iranian people (sound familiar?) and then it was about nukes (remember that as a casus belli against Saddam?) but no one can really be sure. We picked up some ancillary reasons that did not exist a few months ago, specifically holding open the Strait of Hormuz and stopping Iranian harassment attacks against Israel and our Gulf allies. We also ended up with the job of assuring places we cooperate with economically like China, Japan, and India they don’t run out of oil.
You can walk this whole history back to the Carter Doctrine of 1980, which stated the U.S. would use force to protect American interests in the Middle East. Or 1979, the Islamic Revolution in Iran, when the U.S. lost the country as a military partner and oil supplier. Or even back to 1956, the Suez Crisis, which marked the handover of de facto power in the area from the decayed British and French Empires to the United States. Or perhaps 1945 when President Franklin D Roosevelt assured the safety of Saudi Arabia to secure access to its oil. Or maybe even Sykes-Picot in 1916.
But no matter what starting date you settle on, America’s strategy has been based on the idea that the Middle East is to be controlled by U.S. power. In various countries Washington selected then often abandoned dictators, supported nascent moves toward democracy only as long as they did not aim at overturning the broader status quo, fought wars large and small every 10-20 years as America’s domestic whims could be manipulated, sanctioned regimes, drew and discarded red lines, let the Russians in then kicked them out, etc. Yet the underlying assumption endured that with few exceptions nothing truly important happened without Washington’s say-so. Oil was once a powerful subtheme to all this but it is now down to pure power.
So the question hanging over the present U.S.-Iran war is whether we are witnessing the reassertion of American dominance or the continuation of its gradual displacement. The United States is still the meanest dog on the block. No nation can match our ability to destroy things, literally to erase a whole society off the face of the earth if we really wanted to. Even without our archipelago of bases worldwide, the U.S. can launch untouchable B-2s and other bombers from Missouri, bomb Tehran, and return them home safely. That is not the same as shaping what comes after, primacy. The way the Iran War plays out says in part whether the U.S. is indispensable in reacting to nascent nuclear states or directing events on the very largest scales possible as was envisioned in the post-WWII world. Hats off to those insightful men who saw the end of WWII as a chance to reshape the world as boldly as was done in 1776, but we have not been led by such men for many years.
So how does this end?
History says we’re still on the wrong path. We failed to fundamentally alter Iran’s behavior since 1979, despite sanctions and more sanctions, CIA hijinks as yet untold, aiming Iraq at them in the 1980s, and more. Gulf War I ended in a return to status quo for all the effort. The 2003 invasion shattered the Iraqi state, empowering Iran further. Afghanistan ended in a tail-between-the-legs evacuation. Libya demonstrated a) having an alliance with America means little; b) having a nuke is the only sure way to protect yourself in a world of hegemons and c) if the U.S. can’t win outright, it can turn you into a failed state if it wishes to.
If “winning” today means regime change, elimination of Iran’s regional influence, and an end to its nuclear ambitions, it is unlikely the U.S. can win. History has proven airpower and grave threats, basically 19th century gunboat diplomacy, cannot alone accomplish those goals. Decades of sanctions have not crippled the regime. Whatever internal dissent exists in Iran, it is unlikely to reach the point of regime change. Limited strikes (“mowing the lawn“) invite endless proxy retaliation and destabilizing acts. Iran has spent decades successfully resisting such pressure.
An alternative is a vicious military punishment, destruction on a scale that drives Iran away from regional power status. Even then the level of destruction would have to be fully crushing, something outside the bounds of American morality if directed against civilian targets, less so if the destruction is of Kharg Island or Iran’s floating oil reserves outside the Persian Gulf.
If war with Iran ends with a return to the status quo (Gulf open-ish, nukes delayed but not forever gone, Islamic government in power, etc.) it will send a clear message the U.S. failed again in its broader, historical strategy. Iran will be further empowered. Gulf states will be forced to diversify their diplomacy. Countries like China and India may be forced to expand their diplomatic efforts. Israel will steadily act more unilaterally. This all will happen slowly, carefully, evolutionarily, with much less of an immediate impact than MSNOW and The Atlantic will proclaim. Washington will hopefully back away from the illusion the United States can engineer political outcomes in societies it only partially understands, a lesson it should have learned from the Vietnam War.
We are not at the end of a war that Trump began, but in the midst of something bigger. America must now look past blame and towards how it will adapt to the encroaching next chapter in the Middle East. The pressing question is not really if the United States can win this war. It is whether it can recognize that the kind of victory it seeks is no longer practically available.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Posted in Biden, Democracy, Embassy/State, Military, Trump
April 21, 2026 // 17 Comments »
Why is it so important for the U.S. to take and retain control of the Strait of Hormuz? No matter what else, why is this the only real non-negotiable with Iran?
At first glance the non-negotiable seems to be Iran’s nuclear program. This leaves open the question of what might be left of the program at all after massive bombing by the U.S. and Israel. The media makes much of some enriched uranium supposed still buried under one of the ruined sites, and of course no one should simply write off radioactive material in the hands of an adversary. But the more immediate concern is not what remnants of Iran’s nuclear program survived bombing, but how easily any reconstruction effort could be detected from space and struck from a distance. That reality makes the nuclear issue containable. The genie is out of the bottle on bombing inside Iran, so any nascent efforts to reconstruct a nuclear program can be destroyed by the U.S. and Israel with little political fallout. It would be better if none of that had to happen, but it easily could, because agreement or no agreement, Iran does not have to play fair.
Understanding what the U.S. is really negotiating with Iran — the shifting of the balance of power in the Middle East — points to the one truly non-negotiable term. That means the Strait of Hormuz. The Strait of Hormuz is an international waterway that must be open to shipping, free of violence, and free of tolls.
Granting control of the strait to Iran would set a catastrophic precedent. Would Houthi militants then try for control at the mouth of the Red Sea? What if Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, China or any of the other nation-states in the region lay claim to the Strait of Malacca? Never mind the Persian Gulf; over 94,000 vessels a year pass through Malacca, making it the busiest strait in the world. It carries about 25 percent of the world’s traded goods, including oil, and Chinese manufactured products. For decades China referred to the “Malacca Dilemma,” the fear that rivals could blockade this narrow, vital energy route, so it could be time to act. Just this week (coincidence?) China deployed ships to tighten control of the Scarborough Shoal in the South China Sea, roiling tension with the Philippines. And what about the Taiwan Strait, or any other of the world’s commercial chokepoints?
Since the days of the Barbary pirates one of the core jobs of the United States Navy has been safeguarding global freedom of navigation, a principle that underpins international trade and economic stability. By maintaining a forward-deployed presence in key maritime chokepoints and with carrier groups in all oceans, the Navy ensures sea lanes remain open in accordance with international law. No one nation comes close to being able to play such a role. Europe’s sea power has not been able to do so since the collapse of the British Empire, and China still lacks the global blue water navy and extensive world-wide base network to try.
At present China is willing to benefit from this stable maritime order without contributing much to it. Yet a world where it appears the order is breaking down, such as if Iran remains in control of Hormuz, could press China to act. While China still lacks naval reach, it may already be capable of asserting control over regional chokepoints like the Strait of Malacca, especially if it concludes the existing maritime order is eroding. For its own self-interest (oil) China also could expand diplomacy and arms sales to the new toughest kid on the Gulf block, Tehran. Elsewhere, the Gulf states and maybe even allied countries in East Asia will have to soften ties with the U.S. in recognition of the new regional power of Iran.
But we don’t need to cede control of the Strait of Hormuz. Forcing it open is a military objective for which the Pentagon has planned for decades, and has in some form already been done twice. The Trump White House will remember in 2019 the Islamic Revolutionary Guard threatened to close the Strait. It sabotaged four oil tankers in the United Arab Emirates and damaged two others with mines. But in the end Iran backed away from the fight. It could not afford a potential blockade of its oil exports along the lines of Venezuela. The U.S. could blockade the Strait at low cost in the Arabian Sea, away from Iranian interference. Iran also knows while it could harass and frighten, it can not seal the Strait to all traffic in the face of a massive U.S. Navy deployment. This would morph from asymmetrical warfare Iran could execute, to peer-to-peer fighting, which if the U.S. was willing to escalate to, Iran could not survive.
Even more instructive is the Iran–Iraq “Tanker War.” Between 1984 and 1988, oil tankers and merchant vessels became targets for Iran in a campaign designed not to defeat an enemy navy but to strangle the Iraqi economy. After an unsuccessful gambit to reflag Kuwaiti tankers as American to warn off the Iranians, a change in American tactics neutralized the Iranian threat. The United States shifted from escorting tankers to directly confronting Iranian forces. The turning point came in April 1988, after a U.S. frigate struck a mine in the Gulf. Although the ship survived, the incident triggered a massive American retaliation. In Operation Praying Mantis, U.S. helicopters disabled an Iranian ship laying mines, and sank three other Iranian boats. Navy warships shelled Revolutionary Guard bases and Iranian oil platforms. SEALs destroyed a platform as well. Navy and Marine elements would go on to selectively destroy multiple targets as well as numerous Iranian naval and aircraft. The 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU) now in the Gulf would be able to carry out a similar strategy.
Having gone this far, the U.S. may need to go further. This power struggle between Washington and Tehran has been going on for a long time. This most recent round follows an emboldened Iran who watched the United States destroy or greatly weaken its two major enemies, Iraq and the Taliban, clearing both Iran’s east and west borders at no cost to Tehran. The American public went on to lose its taste for war and Iran’s nukes fell off Washington’s once sweeping martial agenda in the Middle East. Iraq became an Iranian subjugate even as Iran expanded its proxy fighting in Lebanon knowing the U.S. had had enough.
It would be strategically devastating at this point for America to follow the regional empowerment of Iran through its failures in Iraq and Afghanistan by handing over a global lever of control. This regional, multigenerational, power struggle is not a problem that will be solved in a single negotiation or a single conflict. But one principle must remain constant: the Strait of Hormuz cannot become a bargaining chip. If it does, the consequences will extend far beyond the Middle East, reshaping the global order in ways the United States may not be able to reverse.
Old sayings resonate in the Middle East. “The rug is never sold” reminds marketplace negotiators that no deal is ever final; there is always more to extract. That is useful context if U.S. officials sit down again with the Iranians for another bite at the apple. But amid the expected give-and-take, one issue must remain non-negotiable: keep the Strait of Hormuz open.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Posted in Biden, Democracy, Embassy/State, Military, Trump
April 16, 2026 // 5 Comments »
Why does the U.S. mainstream media continue to mock America’s war efforts? Why does coverage of the Iran war appear to favor Iranian narratives?
The New York Times pulled no punches on where it thinks things stood just before the pre-cease fire. “A slurring Trump rehashed a bunch of his Truth Social posts, alternately boasting about America’s military progress while threatening war crimes… He showed us that he has no plan to get out of the mess he created. One way to judge how the war is going is to look at which side is trying to wrap it up. U.S. intelligence agencies have assessed that ‘the Iranian government believes it is in a strong position in the war and does not have to accede to America’s diplomatic demands.'” Even after the ceasefire and plans to reopen the Strait was announced, the Times could only sum up Trump’s power diplomacy as “the mark of an impulsive leader who is used to getting his way through coercion and unpredictability” and that he had “backed down.”
The Times goes on to review “American war crimes” and claims bombing only strengthened Iranian resolve. It concludes “all we know is that he [Trump] has managed to give Iran the upper hand in this conflict while tanking the global economy and shredding America’s most important alliances.” Another headline claims the takeaway from the earlier rescue of the downed American airman was all of “Trump is Emboldened” followed by “Trump Revels in Threats to Commit War Crimes in Iran” now that the missing airman is safe.
Another piece claims “Iran has now demonstrated de facto control over much of the global economy. Its Parliament is considering whether to formalize the charging of fees for passage, and an Iranian official warned earlier on social media that the United States would not regain access to the strait.” The article goes on to place suffering on a scale of justice, expressing regret over the civilian deaths in Iran without mentioning those in Israel. It cryptically refers to “displaced millions” across the Gulf without indicating who they might be. It blames all these problems and more on Trump personally.
An Op-Ed headlined “Remember the Oil Shocks of the ’70s? This Is Going to Be Worse. Much Worse” depicts the global economy spiraling out of control by citing the cost of a gallon of gas. It fails to note the price for gas peaked at around $5 per gallon in June 2022 under the worst of the Biden inflation, and almost $6 during COVID and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Crude oil, varying between $88 a barrel and over $100, hit $116 in 2022 without the media writing in apocalyptical terms, never mind blaming one man. It has already dropped to $93 following the ceasefire.
The prize for most egregious telling of the Iran War story pre-cease fire, however, goes to flagship Democratic journal Foreign Affairs, which features an article written by none other than Javad Zarif, the Islamic Republic’s former Vice President, Foreign Minister, and UN Representative. Zarif writes “…More than a month in, the Islamic Republic is clearly winning it. American and Israeli forces have spent weeks incessantly bombing Iranian territory, killing thousands of people and damaging hundreds of buildings, all in hopes of toppling the country’s government. Yet Iran has held the line and successfully defended its interests. It has maintained continuity of leadership even as its top officials have been assassinated, and it has repeatedly hit back at its aggressors even as they strike at its military, civilian, and industrial facilities. The Americans and the Israelis who started the conflict with delusions of forcing capitulation thus find themselves in a quagmire without an exit strategy. The Iranians, by contrast, have pulled off a historic feat of resistance.” He concludes the U.S. must now basically sue for peace with Tehran and remove the sanctions which have been in place for the 47 years, since Iran took over the American Embassy in Tehran and began asymmetric war across the Gulf. If not, Zarif warns, there is “reason to continue fighting until the aggressors are adequately punished rather than to search for a negotiated ending.” A companion article by a former State Department official claims “Tehran will now set the terms for peace.”
The dominant tone in high-visibility outlets frames Donald Trump’s decisions not just as controversial or risky, but as inherently unserious, worthy of ridicule, even dangerous. Late-night, top-tier Op-Eds, and even purported straight news analysis emphasize impulsiveness, strategic incoherence, or near-comedic personal motivations (the entire war is nothing but cover for the Epstein files!) behind decision-making. Thus every action is wrong, and every loss of American life, however tragic, is actually an exaggerated negative turning point. When a deadline is extended, it is seen as an example of weakness rather than a diplomatic tool. The troops, from the generals on down, once labeled by the media as the baby killers of Vietnam, have morphed into a sort of victim themselves, forced to commit war crimes in a meaningless struggle.
Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) accused media of engaging in selective coverage that benefited Iran during the first 30 days of the war. “I read the entire political spectrum on Epic Fury. Iran now loves and learns from the media,” Fetterman said. “The media’s selective coverage rewards and reinforces Iran’s strategy. Media amplifies the one percent chaos Iran creates, while ignoring the 99 percent of Iran’s beatdown.”
From an ironic point of view, based on American media coverage, one can’t help but be impressed by what the Iranians apparently have accomplished. Despite weeks of bombing, the destruction of over 12,000 targets, the loss of layers of tested leadership, the effective end of its navy and air force, the loss of oil revenue through the Strait, and the end of relationships with all the other Gulf states, it seems the Iranians have brought America down to its knees, stuck in a quagmire watching the world collapse around it. Iranian actions are admired as tactically clever, disciplined, and strategically effective as they take American military and Israeli civilian lives. There is almost respect for the plucky Iranian ability to harm our own people. All after only some six weeks.
Criticism often focuses on this being a war without end. In comparison, what did the media say about the Vietnam War (1,018 weeks), or Iraq II (about 416 weeks depending on who is counting)? America’s longest war, in Afghanistan, went on for some 1,040 weeks. The 1991 air campaign in Iraq, part of universally praised (at the time) Operation Desert Storm, lasted for approximately six weeks, about the same as today’s Iran war and needed to be followed by a massive ground invasion. The media initially celebrated each of those wars, and in the case of Iraq II and Afghanistan, tolerated true quagmires for decades across multiple presidencies, going as far as agreeing to label flat-out escalations as the nicer sounding “surges.” For years they allowed completely false claims about weapons of mass destruction to stand solidly as justification for war in Iraq, even as they have turned Trump’s own war objectives into an SNL skit.
During the Cold War, mainstream media often assessed the Soviet military and later the North Vietnamese with a degree of awe. The issue today is when only derision toward American leadership and blind praise for Iranian effectiveness are published. When a headline mocks a U.S. operation as chaotic while another describes Iran’s response as “measured” or “savvy,” the cumulative effect can feel less like reporting and more like an expectation. The United States, once the most powerful nation in the world with overwhelming technological capability, is recast as bumbling, while its adversary is granted the aura of competence and control.
Some tension among patriotism, objectivity, and partisanship is actually a good thing for the media to wrestle with. Intelligent skepticism is good. During the later stages of the Vietnam war, criticism centered on whether journalists had legitimately lost faith in U.S. policy. The debate was mostly whether the media turned against the war too soon, or did it simply reflect the emerging reality? A mostly shared narrative organically evolved over time. In contrast, criticism today is that the media purposely practices distortion with selective coverage that purposely highlights or creates failures while ignoring progress.
It is too early to know how this war ends, or even if the ceasefire will hold in the short term. But that is not the real issue here as revealed by the media. The coverage of the current war comes down to the desire to humiliate Trump. The mess, from the gas pump to the Middle East writ large, is entirely Trump’s fault. He is bleeding out American pocketbooks and American soldiers lives for some unclear personal gain (if not just being duped by Israel). His believed eventual failure with Iran, amplified in lockstep by the media, is what will finally bring down the King when lawsuits, impeachments, Russiagate, pussy hats, and the Epstein files failed. When audiences watch American actions mocked while Iranian actions are admired even as troops suffer, the distinction of whose side the media are on can become difficult to figure out. Helluva way to run a war.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Posted in Biden, Democracy, Embassy/State, Military, Trump
March 24, 2026 // 48 Comments »
Much of the commentary on the confrontation in the Strait of Hormuz assumes the United States has stumbled into an unprecedented crisis. CNN started the meme claiming unidentified “sources” leaked a classified briefing saying just that, that what was unfolding is racked by confusion and disbelief. The Atlantic followed with a scolding think piece, the NYT with its own version, and then The New Yorker, calling the unpreparedness “inexcusable.” In reality, Washington and Tehran have fought variations of this maritime contest before. What is unfolding today is not Armageddon, just Round Three.
During Trump’s first term Tehran used the same tactics of threatening to block the Strait and attacking oil infrastructure in the Gulf states. In 2018, after pulling out of the Obama nuclear deal, Trump launched a “maximum pressure campaign” against the Islamic Republic, which included extensive sanctions designed to shut down Iran’s oil industry. In February 2019, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps threatened it would close the Strait. It then backed off from full closure, understanding Iran’s need to export oil would likely cripple its society long before global reserves were used up. In early summer 2019, Iran turned up the pressure, sabotaging four oil tankers in the United Arab Emirates. Iranian mines in the Gulf of Oman damaged two freighters, Japanese and Norwegian. A barrel of oil was projected to spike from $65 to as much as $170.
But it didn’t, as Iran backed away from the fight. It could not afford a full blockade of its oil exports to China, which the U.S. could have effected at very low cost, in the Indian Ocean, away from Iranian interference and any closed Strait. Iran also knew while it could harass shipping, it could not seal the Strait to all traffic in the face of the massive U.S. Navy deployment. This was asymmetrical warfare, not peer-on-peer fighting, after all. Iran in 2019 instead chose the long-game: survive sanctions while applying calibrated pressure rather than risking an all-out regime-threatening war. The strategy worked because oil markets react to risk — fear — not necessarily reality. When tensions rise between Iran and the United States, oil prices spike because investors fear shipping could be interrupted. Insurance rates rise over worry about the future, not the present. Threats to the Strait get Iran most of what it needs (survival) at low cost. Temporary chaos can achieve political goals, and makes a helluva diplomatic bargaining chip.
Many of the lessons Iran applied in 2019 were learned in the Iran-Iraq “Tanker War.” Between 1984 and 1988, oil tankers, merchant vessels, and neutral shipping became targets in a campaign designed not to defeat an enemy navy but to strangle an enemy economy. After years of brutal stalemate on land, both Iran and Iraq looked for ways to inflict economic damage on each other. Oil exports were the lifeblood of both states, and nearly all of that oil moved by ship through the narrow waters of the Persian Gulf (the Strait carried a larger share of globally traded oil back then, as compared to 20 percent now). Beginning in 1984, Iraq began attacking tankers carrying Iranian oil. Iran targeted vessels linked to the Arab states, who were mostly supporting Baghdad, and selling to the U.S. Hundreds of ships were attacked, but few were destroyed outright. In total, only 55 of the 239 petroleum tankers (23 percent) struck were completely sunk.
Iran learned its strategy was less about sinking ships than about creating fear of sinking ships. Oil tankers are massive vessels designed to withstand damage. Many ships struck by missiles or mines did not sink but burned before being towed to safety.
But it was the threat that soon drew the United States into the conflict. Kuwait sought protection, and in 1987 Washington agreed to the controversial arrangement of reflagging Kuwaiti tankers under the American flag and having the U.S. Navy escort them. But even the world’s most powerful navy could not fully guarantee safety in such a narrow waterway. The first escorted convoy immediately encountered trouble when the tanker Bridgeton struck an Iranian mine in July 1987. The explosion did not sink the vessel, but it was a public embarrassment. Iran’s tactics exposed the vulnerability of modern shipping. Mines, cheap and difficult to detect and remove, proved effective as tools of harassment. A handful of mines could shut down vast areas of sea.
However, a change in American tactics ultimately neutralized the Iranians. The United States shifted from escorting tankers to directly confronting Iranian forces. The turning point came in April 1988, after a U.S. guided-missile frigate struck a mine in the Gulf. Although the ship survived, the incident triggered a massive American retaliation. American ships and aircraft destroyed Iranian oil platforms used for military surveillance and sank or damaged Iranian naval vessels. SEAL operations destroyed the shore facilities Iran used to launch its mine boats and missiles, and captured Iranian vessels at sea. That the 31st Marine MEU is today steaming toward the Gulf with 2500 special operations capable Marines and its own SEALs suggests the U.S. may be planning to follow a similar strategy.
The operation demonstrated the overwhelming conventional superiority of the U.S. Navy. By the time the Iran–Iraq War ended later in 1988, the Tanker War had produced no victor. Both Iran and Iraq continued exporting oil throughout the conflict. Despite hundreds of attacks, the flow of petroleum through the Gulf never stopped entirely. The maritime campaign could not achieve its strategic objective for Iran, the same lesson learned anew in 2019.
The central lesson is a cautionary one. Military power can keep sea lanes open, but it cannot eliminate fear and risk. The Gulf remains a narrow, congested waterway where accidents, miscalculations, and asymmetric tactics can rapidly escalate if the U.S. allows them to do so. The war reinforced another lesson important today, that protecting commerce at sea may be necessary, but it is never simple, and it is rarely without consequences. America has kicked off a lot here, and it will cost her lives and money to finish it.
So what happens next?
Despite decades of threats, Iran has never fully closed the Strait. It is vital to remember that Iran in 2026 has not actually closed the Strait. Ships are just afraid to go through. Yes, a small number of mines may have been sown, but in conjunction with Iran already offering safe passage under a number of scenarios. It promises safe travel to any country that expels its American and Israeli ambassador. It doubled down by
saying at one point any ship not connected to America or Israel may pass safely, thus precluding the widespread use of mines, which target indiscriminately. It has effectively lost its navy and air force, leaving only small boats to carry out its plans. Drones are a new threat since the last time, but can be countered and are unlikely to sink a large ship. A closure would disrupt Chinese energy supplies and damage the last relationship that keeps Iran’s economy afloat. It may need to once again pull back. Iran holds a useful card in threatening the Strait of Hormuz. But history suggests it is a six, not an ace. Tehran can create fear and temporary disruption, but it has never shown the ability to permanently close the waterway against determined naval opposition and the right strategic response.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Posted in Biden, Democracy, Embassy/State, Military, Trump
December 16, 2024 // 3 Comments »
Originally published on Responsible Statecraft.
If a time traveler from 2024 went to the Middle East of some years ago with the intent of revealing the future, he might not be believed. He’d tell how the stalwart regimes of Quaddafi, Saddam, Pahlavi, and the Assad family were gone, their once stable countries now either in some level of chaos/failed state or under control of Tehran as proxies. Same for Lebanon and Hezbollah. The Palestinian Liberation Organization is gone, Hamas is beholden to Iran for its survival, and Egypt survives as a sort of U.S. ally, saved by American do-nothingism from the democratic possibilities of the Arab Spring.
When asked how all this could have happened, he’d explain with the exception of the Iranian Revolution and the PLO, it mostly had to do with the United States and its invasion of Iraq, the destruction of a stable (“evil” regime; they’re all evil) regime it turned out was a linchpin holding most of the whole Sykes-Picot world together. In 2003 the U.S. invasion began a process of inviting all comers to take hold of a piece of Iraq and see how far they might get with it. Many of the same ISIS and former al-Qaeda elements that now stand athwart Syria (and will no doubt soon begin fighting each other for control there) almost grabbed the entire country after the U.S.-trained and equipped post-Saddam Iraqi army ran from the field. It was left for the Iranians to take the reigns, fashioning Iraq into a client state after the U.S. cut its losses by cooperating with Iran to wipe out most of ISIS in Iraq and abandoning the Kurds who had foolishly believed the U.S. owed them a nation-state after all this.
American hubris led to the fall of Quaddafi after a U.S.-sponsored revolt of sorts ended up doing little more than creating a failed state in the once stable region. Pundits saw it, as they will wrongly see the fall of Syria, as a blow toward Russian ambitions in the area, not calculating the negative value of unleashing chaos in a region consumed by the Iranian-U.S./Israeli proxy war. As a side note, watching Quaddafi being sodomized on TV after he gave up his nuclear weapons assured the world North Korea would never do the same. But that’s another world away…
Nobody is going to miss the Assad family. Bashar’s father and the family ran Syria since a 1970 coup. Assad initially portrayed himself as a modern reformist, but he responded to peaceful protests during the Arab Spring with brutal crackdowns, sparking a nationwide uprising. As the ISIS rebels advanced, they took over many of the notorious prisons where the Assad regime had for decades tortured and killed political prisoners. As with Iraq being left open for anyone who wanted a piece of it and could find a way to hold it, Syria is going to dissolve. Israel already grabbed snippets of territory to round out its border with Syria, and destroyed the Syrian navy, rocket and chemical stores, and much of its air force because in chaos lies possibility if you have not already blown your money, lives, and goodwill in Iraq. Unlike in 2012, when Hezbollah came to Assad’s rescue against insurgents, Hezbollah today has few shock troops available to help. The internecine fighting among revolutionary groups will inevitably result in one of them seeking aid from Iran (who else? Turkey?), who’ll emerge as the victor of sorts in all this with another proxy statelet under its belt. A weakened Russia is out of the picture and appears to have already abandoned its naval base in Syria.
What’s left is to see what America has to say. There are 900 American soldiers on the ground today in Syria, and U.S. warplanes flew bombing missions accidentally in support of Assad against ISIS factions in their battles outside Damascus (strange bedfellows and all that.) Had all this happened a year ago, when Joe Biden was still nominally in charge of the U.S. military, you might have seen some sort of intervention, more of a blocking move really, to keep the ISIS factions from uniting, to limit their success or at least slow it down, and to interdict any Iranian help arriving from the east. Joe Biden is no longer really in charge of anything. He used up his Commander-in-Chief goodwill on two ugly proxy interventions, fighting Russia to the last Ukrainian and of course supporting Israel in Gaza. A year, or more realistically two or three years, ago Joe might have made the case for either direct involvement in Syria or hitching the old bull of America more directly to another proxy, maybe the beleaguered Kurds who still want a piece of Syria for their own. As it stands, Joe lacks the political oomph to do any of that in his final days in office and good riddance. We are in no position (and have no wherewithal) to take advantage of the situation in a positive way. This will be in spite of trying to claim the lead ISIS faction has a nice government on its mind. Any future expedient rehabilitation of the Syrian terrorists is analogous to the disingenuous glow up granted the Ukrainian Nazi militias (U.S. would recognize a Syrian government that comes from inclusive process, Secretary of State Antony Blinken says, uh oh.)
Incoming president Donald Trump has made it clear he wants no part of a war in Syria (and is not too enamored with continuing the one in Ukraine, either.) He tried in Term 1.0 to withdraw American forces from Syria and failed, and will likely try early on in Term 2.0 to pull them out. It would be the right thing to do and likely engender wide support. Americans getting killed in the Middle East for vague reasons is so-2003 and far from the mandate Trump was handed. Syria will sort itself out, with Israel on one side helping keep the fight inside existing borders (or less!) and Iran, if it is clever enough, siding with the ISIS group most likely to emerge as the most powerful in Syria, say Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, whom the U.S. considers a terrorist group. If all that fails to come true, expect another failed state in the heart of the Middle East.
Our Middle East time traveler would certainly have some explaining to do.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Posted in Biden, Democracy, Embassy/State, Military, Trump
September 19, 2024 // 18 Comments »
We’ve reached the place in America where people can believe Trump taking a photo is more disgraceful than the Biden-Harris administration getting a son killed on a badly conceived final day in Saigon.
It began when Donald Trump was invited to attend a wreath-laying ceremony in honor of the 13 American service members who were killed as a result of the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan three years ago August. During the visit, the former president was asked to take pictures with the family of Staff Sergeant Darin Taylor Hoover—one of the service members killed in the 2021 suicide bombing at Abbey Gate outside the Kabul airport in Afghanistan—at his gravesite. Democrats then used that photo to attack Trump, with some claiming he broke federal law simply by being present, and that he had disrespected the dead simply by his presence.
Kamala Harris led the hand-wringing, saying “As Vice President, I have had the privilege of visiting Arlington National Cemetery several times. It is a solemn place; a place where we come together to honor American heroes who have made the ultimate sacrifice in service of this nation. It is not a place for politics. And yet, as was reported this week, Donald Trump’s team chose to film a video there, resulting in an altercation with cemetery staff. Let me be clear: the former president disrespected sacred ground, all for the sake of a political stunt.”
As for exploitation, turn next to pearl-clutching The New York Times, who sent a reporter to record the names of those buried near where the Trump photo alongside the 13 Gold Star families was taken and then find their families to seek an anti-Trump quote. As their way of honoring the dead, the Times called out Master Sgt. Andrew Marckesano, an eight-tour combat vet who died by suicide in 2020, and whose headstone inadvertently appeared in the photos of Trump with the Gold Star families. The Times tracked down sister Michele who said only “We hope that those visiting this sacred site understand that these were real people who sacrificed for our freedom and that they are honored and respected accordingly.” So much for reptilian journalism.
“When you take a photo of your loved one then other headstones are gonna be present as well,” Senator and veteran Tom Cotton (R-AR) said. “Frankly, I think it’s very disappointing that The New York Times went and found a family whose headstone was featured in that photograph of another Gold Star family and then went to them to try to embarrass the Gold Star families who wanted President Trump there.”
We’re sure the family was honored to have Master Sgt. Andrew Marckesano brought into all this by the Times, and was pleased the Times did not bother to talk about the epidemic of solder suicides which plague our best. Nope, Marckesano was only worth exploiting to the point where one of his relatives might backhandedly criticize Trump. He was used again by a heartless media strung out on TDS. Bonus: The New York Times scolding not just Trump, but all those who appeared in the picture taken in Section 60. That included several Gold Star family members.
Yet here is a photo of Joe Biden at Arlington with a grieving Gold Star relative, in Section 60, with plenty of names visible on adjacent headstones. No evidence The New York Times contacted any of their relatives. Is it no less exploitive and political? What was its intent if not to add to the propaganda and political noise that Joe Biden cares about the troops’ deaths? Joe Biden also used shots of Arlington National Cemetery and flag-draped caskets in a recent political ad. You can even see the names on the gravestones in the video with the caption reading “Donald Trump doesn’t know a damn thing about service to his country.” Most of the ad text is Biden “quoting” President Trump degrading military service based on unknown sources from debunked reporting by liberal tabloids. Here’s another. FYI: Joe Biden depended on the same kind of medical deferments Trump did to stay out of the military during the Vietnam war. Harris never served and her running mate misrepresented his National Guard experience.
Arlington National Cemetery is a difficult place to visit. On the one hand signs admonish visitors to show respect to the dead of so many wars while on the other hand hordes of sweat-drippy tourists race from one famous grave site to another to the Tomb of the Unknowns as if the place was the Disneyworld of Death. It is all solemn as a cheerleader, and yes, many photos are taken of headstones with names visible, the fallen men and women treated as props for selfies to show back home. And here we are outside the Tomb! Looks just like on the tee vee! is the next shot.
All this drives home the point Arlington exists for many purposes, many ends. But here is one rarely spoken of: it is a place for Commanders-in-Chief to confront the results of their decisions. They all made the pilgrimage at some point, the warmongers Bush and Obama, game faces on. This stands in for neither man ever sweating in body armor in the Iraqi summer sun, or wincing when a bullet flew too close, or watching someone now in Section 60 die in their lap.
Biden and Harris were not at Arlington to meet the 13 Gold Star families because they were afraid. They stood aside from those men and women as they stood aside from their decision to use those men and women in a terrible war which they now want us to forget. Biden in particular bears a heavy burden, having sponsored the war for eight years as Obama’s vice president and then continuing to do so under his own administration. Now, for Harris to rake Trump over the coals for posing for some photos instead of taking responsibility for the dead in the those photos tells you much about the woman, crying exploitation while shirking the responsibility of her own exploitation of those young lives.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Posted in Biden, Democracy, Embassy/State, Military, Trump
January 3, 2024 // 8 Comments »
Boy oh boy, if anyone looks seriously into the end game in Afghanistan is somebody gonna be in trouble. See, according to the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction (SIGAR) the collapse of the Afghan army and government was mostly our own fault. No dessert for you!
You remember the war in Afghanistan, don’t you? Anyone? Bueller? See it was America’s longest war, stretching from 2001 until 2021, long enough that soldiers who deployed near the end had not even been born when it all started. Now that’s a war! The thing is, the war accomplished nothing in its 20 years. The situation on the ground — Taliban in charge, open territory for any terrorist needing an AirBnB — is pretty much status quo September 2001 except it is now 2024.
And now it turns out that’s mostly our fault. SIGAR released its report, Collapse of the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces: An Assessment of the Factors That Led to Its Demise. It posits two major factors that lead to the demise: unclear U.S. war aims, and corruption and mismanagement on the part of the Afghan government created, advised, and funded by the U.S. (so that’s sorta on us, too.) General James Mattis, who served as Mad Dog, head of Central Command from 2010 to 2013, and as Secretary of Defense from 2017 to 2018, told SIGAR, “The lack of political clarity on ends, ways, and means meant we were always wondering if we were still going to be here next year. Were we going to be funded next year? We weren’t sure whether to attack, retreat or go sideways.”
SIGAR found that the single most important factor in the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces’ (ANDSF) collapse in August 2021 was the decision by two U.S. presidents to withdraw U.S. military and contractors from Afghanistan, while Afghan forces remained unable to sustain themselves. One former U.S. commander in Afghanistan told SIGAR, “We built that army to run on contractor support. Without it, it can’t function. When the contractors pulled out, it was like we pulled all the sticks out of the jenga pile and expected it to stay up.” The sad-great thing about those quotes is that they could have been applied at most any point in the 20 year war. Lack of political clarity? It was a couple of years into the war itself before anyone knew the reason for the war (it turned out to be “terrorism.”) An unstainable Afghan military? Maybe someone could point out where in say year 16 the army was sustainable. Boy, heads are gonna roll over that one! All we need to do is find out who was responsible for creating a sustainable army and political clarity and roast ’em.
The other factor which contributed to the demise of the Afghan army was the last-minute wholesale restructuring of Afghanistan’s security institutions. In 2021, amid rapidly deteriorating security, President Ghani reshuffled most of his security officials, often replacing them with fellow ethnic Pashtuns. These leadership changes were part of a broader pattern of politicization and ethnicization (in favor of Pashtuns) of the security sector in the final years of the Ghani administration.
One analyst told SIGAR, “Districts collapsed not because of the army, but because of that restructuring that happened and the fact that none of [the replacement police chiefs] had connections” at the district level. He claimed it was the police that did most of the fighting in the final 18 months, not the army. By undermining the morale and political legitimacy of the police, this restructuring directly contributed to the collapse in August 2021. Ethnic competition between Pashtuns and non-Pashtuns was likely the single biggest source of dysfunction within the ANDSF. But some former Afghan officials described other types of friction. One former MOD official described competition between the younger and older generation of officers, between the jihadis and the professional officers, and between ethnicities. All these issues distracted from the fight, he said. Now, see, someone on the American side should have been watching for that!
This strategic level mismanagement had a direct effect in the field. “Overnight, 98 percent of U.S. air strikes had ceased… the Doha agreement’s psychological implication was so great that the average Afghan soldier felt this idea of abandonment… U.S. soldiers were confused about what to engage and what to not. On an hourly basis, the U.S. military had to coordinate with the Doha office of Ambassador Khalilzad and others from the State Department to get clarification on what they could do,” said one former Afghan Army corps commander. “They [U.S. partners] said it was not right, but they have to follow orders. They would see the Taliban attacking our checkpoints. They would have videos of the Taliban doing it. But they would say we are not able to engage, because we have limitations. There was also so much concern about civilians, which gave the Taliban an advantage,” explained a former Afghan Army General.
According to an senior Afghan official, it was not until President Biden’s April 2021, announcement of the final troop and contractor withdrawal date that Afghan President Ghani’s inner circle said they realized that the ANDSF had no supply and logistics capability. Although the Afghan government had operated in this way for nearly 20 years, their realization came only four months before its collapse.
Then there was the lack of coordination between the U.S. and the Afghan governments as the Americans negotiating in Doha cut their own deals with the Taliban to enable a quick exit. One former Afghan government official told SIGAR that following the U.S.-Taliban agreement, President Ghani began to suspect that the United States wanted to remove him from power. That official and a former Afghan general believed Ghani feared a military coup. According to the general, Ghani became a “paranoid president… afraid of his own countrymen” and of U.S.-trained Afghan officers. According to a former Afghan general, in the week before Kabul fell, President Ghani replaced the new generation of young U.S.-trained Afghan officers with an old guard of Communist generals in almost all of the army corps. Ghani, that general said, was “changing commanders constantly [to] bring back some of the old-school Communist generals who [he] saw as loyal to him, instead of these American-trained young officers who he [mostly] feared.”
Afghan officials, largely removed from the negotiations, struggled most of all to understand what the United States had agreed to with the Taliban. According to Afghan government officials, the U.S. military never clearly communicated the specifics of its policy changes to the Ghani administration. According to a former Afghan general, in a broad sense, the U.S. military took on the role of a referee and watched the Afghan government and Taliban fight, something the general referred to as “a sick game.” According to that general, Afghan troops had not only lost U.S. support for offensive operations, they no longer knew if or when U.S. forces would come to their defense. U.S. inaction fueled mistrust among the ANDSF toward the United States and their own government. The Taliban’s operations and tactics, however, suggested that they may have had a better understanding of new levels of support the United States was willing to provide to the ANDSF following the signing of the U.S.-Taliban agreement. For example, under the U.S.-Taliban agreement’s rules, U.S. aircraft could not target the Taliban groups that were waiting more than 500 meters away—the groups “beyond the contact” that would engage in the second, third, or fourth wave to defeat the last ANDSF units. A senior Afghan official said this was a loophole that the Taliban used in their targeting to their advantage.
SIGAR’s sad conclusion to the report could have been written at any point, including in 1968. “The U.S. approach to reconstructing the ANDSF lacked the political will to dedicate the time and resources necessary to reconstruct an entire security sector in a war-torn and impoverished country. As a result, the U.S. created an ANDSF that could not operate independently, milestones for ANDSF capability development were unrealistic, and the eventual collapse of the ANDSF was predictable. After 20 years of training and development, the ANDSF never became a cohesive, substantive force capable of operating on its own. The U.S. and Afghan governments share in the blame. Neither side appeared to have the political commitment to doing what it would take to address the challenges, including devoting the time and resources necessary to develop a professional ANDSF, a multi-generational process. In essence, U.S. and Afghan efforts to cultivate an effective and sustainable security assistance sector were likely to fail from the beginning.”
“Likely to fail from the beginning” is a helluva epitaph for U.S. policy in Afghanistan. If only SIGAR could find the guys responsible, we might avoid another round in Ukraine, where our policy depends on another U.S. patsy leader whose army is now totally dependent on U.S. funding, supplies, and advisement in a war that cannot be won, only sustained at great expense.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Posted in Biden, Democracy, Embassy/State, Military, Trump
November 22, 2023 // 5 Comments »
The handwriting was on the wall. An Op-Ed in the New York Times entitled “I’m a Ukrainian, and I Refuse to Compete for Your Attention” summed things up nicely: a media junket the author’s friend had been organizing to Ukraine was canceled. The TV crew instead left for the Middle East.
The United States controls how the war in the Ukraine proceeds and always has. Former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder said it was the American side which scuttled any chance of peace in Ukraine as early as March 2022, soon after the war began. “The only people who could resolve the war over Ukraine are the Americans. During the peace talks in March 2022 in Istanbul, Ukrainians did not agree to peace because they were not allowed to. They had to coordinate everything they talked about with the Americans first. However, nothing eventually happened. My impression is that nothing could happen because everything was decided in Washington.”
Fast-forward to 2023 and the story is different. Earlier this month NBC News quietly released a report which said U.S. and European officials broached the topic of peace negotiations with Ukraine, including “very broad outlines of what Ukraine might need to give up to reach a deal with Russia.” NBC said “the discussions are an acknowledgment of the dynamics militarily on the ground in Ukraine and politically in the U.S. and Europe.” They began amid concerns the war has reached a stalemate and about the ability to continue providing open-ended aid to Ukraine. Biden administration officials are also worried Ukraine is running out of men in this war of attrition, while Russia has a seemingly endless supply. Ukraine is also struggling with recruiting and recently saw public protests (not shown on American TV) about President Volodymyr Zelensky’s open-ended conscription requirements. Kiev is today sending 40 and 50-year-olds to the front.
This comes as Time reported Zelensky’s top advisers admitted the war is currently unwinnable for Ukraine. Things look a bit better from the point of view of Ukraine commander-in-chief General Valery Zaluzhny, who believes the war is only at a stalemate. “It’s now a battle of inches,” say American sources quietly.
Americans will be forgiven if they never hear this bad news, never mind be surprised by it if they did. The narrative which drove sports teams to wear blue and yellow patches and E Street Band member Steve Van Zandt to paint his guitar the Ukrainian colors was simple. Amid a flood of propaganda, the story was always the same: Ukraine was pushing back the Russians with weapons provided by a broad range of agreeable NATO benefactors. Between Ukrainian jet fighter aces with improbable kill ratios to patriotic female sniper teams with improbable hair and makeup, Russia was losing. It would be a difficult but noble slog for “as long as it takes” to drive the Russians out. Any talk about peace was insulting to Kiev, fighting for its survival and all. Meanwhile mediagenic President Zelensky at first flew around the world like the anti-Christ Bono, procuring weapons while showing off his man-to-man relationships with celebrities. Now desperate, Zelensky is inflight claiming Russia, Iran, and North Korea sponsored Hamas’ attack on Israel, trying to rattle up some support.
It was as compelling as it was untrue. Any thoughtful analysis of the war showed it to be, from early days, a war of attrition at best for the Ukrainian side and while the U.S. could supply nearly bottomless cargo planes full of weapons and munitions, right up to the promised F-16 fighter-bombers and M1A tanks due on line soon, it could not fill the manpower gap. Any appetite for American troop involvement was hushed up early in the fight. Russia could do what she had always done at war, hunker down in the field and reach deep into its vast territory to find ever more conscripts to wait out the enemy. It didn’t hurt that Russia’s capability versus NATO equipment was surprisingly good, or perhaps the Ukrainians’ handling of sophisticated Western arms was surprisingly bad.
But the most predictable factor leading to quiet U.S. moves toward some sort of “solution” in Ukraine is as predictable as the battlefield results. There is unease in the U.S. government over how much less public attention (despite the propaganda) the war in Ukraine has garnered since the Israeli-Hamas conflict began more than a month ago. Combined with what looks like a feisty new Speaker of the House seeking to decouple aid to Israel from aid to Ukraine, officials fear that shift could make securing additional funds for Kiev difficult.
Americans, the people and their government, assisted by their media wielding the greatest propaganda tools ever imagined, seem capable of focusing on only one bright shiny object at a time. Over 41 percent of Americans now say the U.S. is doing too much to help Kiev. That’s a significant change from just three months ago when only 24 percent of Americans said they felt that way. In the case of wars, a new bright shiny object must include two clear sides, one good and one pure evil, with one preferably an underdog, daily combat footage which can be obtained without too much danger, and a football game-like progression across a map that is easy to follow. It should not be boring. Ukraine was such a conflict and enjoyed almost a full two-year run. But the fickle attention of America shifted to the Middle East just as things started to look more and more like static WWI trench warfare in Ukraine. It was a hard act to follow but something always follows nonetheless (the same calculus works for natural disasters and mass shootings, which are only as mediagenic-good as the next one coming.)
Ukraine, like Israel, owes most of its continued existence to American weaponry. However, despite the blue and yellow splattered on social media at present, Ukraine does not have anywhere near the base of support Israel does among the American public and especially within the American Congress. The terms for resolving the war will be dictated to Kiev as much by Washington as they will be by Moscow, as with Crimea a few years ago. The end will be quite sad; Russia will very likely solidify its hold on Donbas and the Crimea, and achieve new territory to the west approaching Kiev, roughly 20 percent of Ukraine. Ukraine will be forced to set aside its goal of joining NATO even as the U.S. takes a new stand on its western border with Poland.
It is all something of a set piece. America’s habit of wandering into a conflict and then losing interest is long (Iraq) enough to count as an addition to history (Afghanistan.) “We have your back” and “we will not abandon you” join “the check’s in the mail” and “I’m from the government and I’m here to help” among joking faux reassurances. Our proxies seem to end up abandoned and hung out to die. As in Iraq and Afghanistan, never mind Vietnam before that, what was realized at the end could have most likely been achievable at pretty much anytime after the initial hurrahs passed away. It is sad that so many had to die to likely see it happen in 2023.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Posted in Biden, Democracy, Embassy/State, Military, Trump
November 2, 2023 // 2 Comments »
It is not hard to tell right from wrong, morality from expediency, especially at the extremes of human existence in war.
It is impossible to see as right — moral — attackers who intentionally targeted and killed over 1,400 civilians, babies and the elderly, and laborers from Thailand who could not be responsible for the decades of Gazan violence, as if that could be justification anyway. Those same gunmen took hostages to use as human shields and will likely murder many of them, too.
It is moral to condemn barbarism. It cannot be brushed aside by phrases such as “ethics is rarely black and white” when in many cases — the massacres in Israel — black is indeed black and white is white. No one can justify killing babies. Morality is not “that the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”
It speaks poorly of American education that right and wrong are so muddled, that the expediency of horrendous acts is confused with independence. A coalition of 34 student organizations at Harvard say they “hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” A club in Brooklyn staged an “Intifada Fundraver” using images of militants to advertise a night of pre-Halloween dancing on the graves of more than 1,400 murder victims. A recent You.gov poll conducted after the Hamas attacks in Israel found only 32 percent of Americans aged 18-29 think Hamas deliberately targeted civilian areas in Israel. In a roundup of atrocities, one outlet found at UPenn students chanted “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” in response to the killings. Students for Justice in Palestine at the University of Virginia cheered the “events of yesterday” as a “step toward a free Palestine.” Student groups at the California State University in Long Beach advertised a “Day of Resistance” rally with a poster featuring an image of a paraglider, used to kill over 200 ravers. A Columbia professor called the attacks “awesome” while another at Cornell described them as “exhilarating.” Thousands rallied in Times Square and across America claiming to support Palestine even as they stepped aside morally for the massacres to occur.
It may be clearer to define the terms morality and expediency. Here’s a practical example, adapted from my first book.
Soldiers in Iraq who would joke about anything would become quiet on a checkpoint. Within the limits of available electricity, they tried to light up the ‘point as best they could, so drivers could see it. Iraq at night was a dark and dangerous place, and like in inner city America the drivers were not going to slow down, or God forbid, stop, without a very good reason. So, Step One was to brighten up your checkpoint so the drivers had that good reason to admit they saw it. Drivers knew if they then tried to run a checkpoint they’d be shot at, a bad way to make time. After the lights were on as best they could be (you could only run so many watts if all you had was some Chinese portable generator), the next step was to communicate to the often uninformed drivers that they needed to stop. There was no such thing as licensing drivers in Iraq; someone showed you how to drive and then you were a driver. Driving trucks, either as suicide bombers or as delivery persons, was sought-after employment, so fibbing about actually knowing how to drive was popular. It was possible the guy heading toward your checkpoint had not, like you, done this before.
Standing at a checkpoint in a dense area was easier, as the jammed up traffic meant cars approached you at a crawl and everyone had some time to signal their intentions across cultures and languages. However, in the suburbs or on a lesser-traveled road, things got stickier. You could start with big signs in Arabic and English that told folks to slow down, but there was that light problem again, plus many Iraqis were illiterate. You could set up all manner of flashers and twirling things, a good start, but ambiguous. It could be a wedding party (plenty of guns there as well).
Car bombs were a thing to be scared of at a checkpoint. In most cases the explosives were intended for some other target, and just had to pass through your ‘point. But, if the driver thought you were on to him, he’d blow the car right there and never mind the real target. Checkpoints also made everyone nervous, and nervous people and guns were a bad mix. Iraqi drivers hit the gas too often, worried about whatever, maybe angry, maybe stuck in an Arabic macho cycle and needing to show the Army who had guts in a real dumb way.
You hitched up your pants and started thinking about the ROE as cars approached. ROE meant “rules of engagement,” basically a set of orders on when you were allowed to kill someone legally, without consequence. Even wars have rules, and nobody went outside the wire without knowing exactly what the rules were. ROEs changed all the time, but at a checkpoint they might have gone like this: try and stop the car with lights, sounds, and hand gestures. If he kept coming, shine a laser or bright light at the driver (called “beaming”). If that did not work, fire a warning shot, or a non-lethal round. Still coming? Fire into the engine block to disable the car. Not enough? Kill someone. This all seemed logical, but let’s play the game together for real.
You are 23 years old and at a checkpoint, having been up the last 18 hours, and staying awake only with the constant application of Rip It energy drinks, chew and instant coffee crystals crunched between bites of candy. Last night one of your buddies was almost killed by a driver at a checkpoint who got scared and hit the gas. You are sweating despite the cool weather because standing still anywhere, never mind under bright lights, can attract snipers and you do not want to get popped tonight. The vehicle approaching has only one headlight, and it looks like there are several people in the front seat where you’d expect only one or two. In the span of three seconds you need to try and wave down the driver, beam him with the laser if he doesn’t slow down, fire a non-lethal round if he gases and goes and then switch weapons and be ready to take a life. You’re Zeus throwing lightning bolts. Make the decision. Make the decision now, shoot or don’t shoot the guy. You’re the judge of your own cause.
And that’s the difference between what Israel has done in the past through mistakes and as a consequence of war, and what the Palestinians did earlier this month taking 1,400 lives and killing babies by choice. There is no equivalency. It seems new, a sick product of our modern age, but it is all old. The Greek Thucydides’ account of the Peloponnesian War is a seminal work in the field of military history. It offers a deep exploration of the intersection between morality and expediency in the context of a long conflict between Athens and Sparta more than 2.000 years ago. Thucydides presents the moral dilemmas and strategic considerations people face during times of war, offering insight into the timeless tension between what is right and what is expedient. In the end, however, everyone gets to decide for themselves.
You don’t shoot. You get to decide many times every night at the checkpoint. It takes a lot of guts to not shoot someone.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Posted in Biden, Democracy, Embassy/State, Military, Trump
October 12, 2023 // 10 Comments »
One of the evils of the Trump era was that illegal, immoral, and at times unconstitutional acts were raised to high standards if they seemed to chip away at Trump somehow. So a fake dossier, which consumed several years and millions of dollars of American life, was brushed off with in the end a fine from the elections commission, not someone going to jail for lying to the FBI. So it is now with General Mark Milley, the Left’s newest bestest friend in violating the Constitution in order to save the Constitution from Trump.
A slithering little piece of hagiography in The Atlantic about Milley (published while he was still technically Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a position he goes to great pains to explain should be apolitical while being hella political) might have just been that, a chance to kick the dog one more time without consequence, except for the fact that Milley clearly has higher intentions in Washington (or at least to sell books) and most of all because Trump stands close to a second term. The article hashes over the usual, proclaiming Trump an existential threat to Mom and apple pie, never mind democracy, all without details or explanation. Readers of The Atlantic just know it is true and the author, Jeffrey Goldberg, sees no reason to expand on the idea. The real danger here is not poor journalism (we’re used to it) but the promotion of the idea that Trump is inherently dangerous and without men like General Milley willing to bend the rules and warp the Constitution we will all die in some Trumpian nuclear hissy fit.
It is important to restate at this point that Trump finished his four years as president. He started no new wars. He did not launch nuclear attacks on Iran or North Korea, nor antagonize nuclear power Russia closer to the edge of one. He came as close as any modern president to some sort of rapprochement with North Korea. Trump never used the Insurrection Act to send the military against lawful protesters in the United States. It is worth remembering because Milley’s comments create the impression of something very different.
A healthy portion of The Atlantic article details what Milley felt was Trump’s disrespect for the military (Trump’s deferments but not Biden’s are mentioned liberally.) The Atlantic’s Jeffery Goldberg writes. “Milley’s family venerated the military, and Trump’s attitude toward the uniformed services seemed superficial, callous, and, at the deepest human level, repugnant.” Former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, Goldberg continued, “in addition to other former Trump administration officials, also argued the former president had such contempt for the military that it made it challenging to explain concepts of honor, sacrifice and duty. That sour view of the armed forces, alongside Trump being unfit to serve as president among other points of contention, made Milley’s first 16 months as chairman far more difficult than he anticipated.” “For more than 200 years, the assumption in this country was that we would have a stable person as president,” retired three-star general James Dubik, one of the general’s mentors.
One wonders about that disrespect for the military, and how a candid Milley might characterize the actions of commanders Bush and Obama. Was invading Afghanistan when the 9/11 perpetrators came mostly from Saudi the act of a sane man? How about lying to create an excuse to invade Iraq? What about the bombing of Libyan infrastructure, the results of which were on display for the world recently as tens of thousands drowned in a broken-dam flood there? Over 7,000 U.S. service members, plus near millions of civilians, died in the post-9/11 wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. Are those sane acts? Should Milley or one of his counterparts have acted unconstitutionally to stop them? See what happens when one man determines he’s smarter than the rest?
Milley, while speaking out of one side of his mouth about the sanctity of the chain of command and the president’s role as commander-in-chief, goes on to call Trump a “nuclear monarch” and bemoan the fact that Trump alone could order the use of nuclear weapons as if that was something new. Milley then says without batting an eyelash that during the final days of the Trump administration he took the extraordinary step of having key military officers swear an oath to him promising to involve Milley in any decisions “weird or unusual.” Milley called together senior military officials in charge of the National Military Command Center on January 8 and “instructed them not to take orders from anyone unless he was involved.” Milley says his fear (without evidence, of course) was that Trump would initiate a nuclear war with Iran after losing the 2020 presidential election. Milley was out to break the chain of command to stop it, which you see was A-O.K. because breaking all the rules if you possess the judgement of General Milley is itself A-OK.
His other brush with insubordination was two phone calls to General Li Zuo cheng, leader of China’s People’s Liberation Army, in the days surrounding January 6, assuring the PLA that the U.S. had no plans to launch a first strike against China. Milley was not ordered to do this, he just did it because he felt on his own Trump might launch the nukes as a bizzaro-world way to stay in office after the “insurrection” of January 6 failed. Oh yeah, that insurrection — Milley, an alleged student of history — claims was America’s “Reichstag moment.” He called Trump’s statements “The gospel of the Führer.”
Kori Schake, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, said the revelations Milley covertly acted to counter his commander-in-chief are “bad for the military as an institution… It encourages people to do what Americans are already doing, which is viewing the military as they view the Supreme Court: apolitical when they agree with them, partisan when they don’t,” she said.
As if the prove the point, an anonymous (of course) senior military official said Milley “did what he had to do to fulfill his oath to the Constitution and to protect this country.” Yet Trump called it treason. Senator Marco Rubio demanded Milley resign, as did Christopher Miller, who served above Milley as acting defense secretary in the final months of Trump’s presidency. Milley ignored his boss’ admonition to quit. So much for the chain of command.
Milley did not act to fulfill his oath; he acted like a coup planner at best, an idiot at worst because (checks notes) Trump did not launch a nuclear attack on China, and General Li must have wondered exactly what was going on in Washington to prompt Milley to call and foreswear a strike, a first of its own in U.S. history.
None of this — what he said recently and what he did during the Trump administration — has hurt Milley’s standing in political Washington. Biden loves him. Milley was chosen to speak at the French ambassador’s residence, a journalist-heavy throng that officially was a celebration of the First Amendment. It was the sort of gathering where you’d “expect an address from a fight-the-power free-speech lawyer or a hell-raising investigative reporter, not a uniformed four-star general. But Milley’s lack of journalism credentials didn’t appear to bother many in the audience, who greeted him as a hero.” Politico says “Milley has become a cause celebre in Washington — and a presence around town.” WaPo calls him “Pattonesque.”
In peacetime it is not normal for a senior general in the U.S. military to be famous. It is not normal for one to seek the spotlight as a domestic protector of our democracy. It is not normal for a general to claim to be apolitical while acting aggressively in the political sphere. Milley instead found a way to spread the gospel of a non-politicized military as itself a political act. Why you’d almost think Milley was up to something, setting himself up for some new role, maybe running for some office. Milley warns in his Atlantic interview he and others will likely be sent to jail if Trump is reelected. Be sure to vote accordingly.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Posted in Biden, Democracy, Embassy/State, Military, Trump
August 22, 2023 // 10 Comments »
Though some say it is wishful thinking to be talking today about the reconstruction of Ukraine (they have to win first), it is never too early to pull out lessons learned from the last fiasco, in hopes they can be baked in to whatever eventual process is undertaken. That’s why a group of senators asked the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction (SIGAR) to put together a brief list of things not to do again in the course of rebuilding Ukraine.
SIGAR was in charge of overseeing the two-decades-long, $146 billion spend to rebuild Afghanistan. Over the course of years, in addition to the 1,297 audit recommendations SIGAR made to recover funds, improve agency oversight, and increase program effectiveness, they also made 143 sector-specific recommendations to executive agencies as part of the agency’s Lessons Learned Program. So while few people seemed to listen to them regarding Afghanistan, that doesn’t mean they had nothing to say, especially as regards to the next reconstruction program in Ukraine. As SIGAR notes, “While Afghanistan and Ukraine are very different countries with a history of facing very different threats, many of the challenges U.S. agencies faced in Afghanistan—coordinating efforts, dealing with corruption, and effectively monitoring and evaluating projects and programs—will be the same as the ones they will face in Ukraine.”
Trigger Warning: most of what SIGAR cautioned about for Afghanistan was exactly the same stuff its sister organization, the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR), cautioned earlier about in that war. Everything was equally ignored. It can be very frustrating to watch a whole-of-government approach to repeating one’s predecessor’s mistakes. It can be even more frustrating to have participated in it all, as I did, overseeing two reconstruction teams in Iraq while I still worked for the State Department.
Here’s a wild prediction: at some point in the future there will be a Special Inspector General for Ukraine Reconstruction (SIGUR!) which will watch the same mistakes from Iraq and Afghanistan repeated, with no one listening. Creating SIGUR has already been suggested; Senator Rand Paul back in May temporarily placed a hold on a $40 billion aid package to Ukraine, demanding unsuccessfully Congress insert a provision into the aid package creating an inspector general to oversee the distribution of the aid.
Nonetheless, there is always hope (the SIGAR people must be the most optimistic people on earth) in putting down on paper the blindingly obvious when billions of dollars and national credibility are at stake. So, from SIGAR with love, here are the seven lessons from Afghanistan for the reconstruction of Ukraine:
— Lesson 1: The U.S. government struggled to develop a coherent strategy for what it hoped to achieve in Afghanistan and imposed unrealistic timelines that led to wasteful and counterproductive programs.
Now who would think lacking a strategy and indeed any agreed-upon goal would slow things down? In Ukraine, will the goal be raising the entire country to Western European standards? Favoring the anti-Russian areas? Trying to buy loyalty in the pro-Russian areas? Or as in Afghanistan (as in Iraq, just substitute the two country names from here on out) simply spending money willy-nilly in hopes a coherent strategy might emerge in retrospect. Unrealistic timelines (variously, success before the next local election, before the next U.S. election, before the military change of command, before my tour as team leader is up…) meant most timelines were ignored. Hope they do better in Ukraine.
— Lesson 2: Lack of effective coordination—both within the U.S. government and across the international coalition—was a major obstacle to success in Afghanistan and resulted in a disjointed patchwork of ineffective efforts, rather than a united and coherent approach.
There’s that naughty word, coherent, again. In Iraq the Italian reconstruction team did not talk to never mind take direction from the Americans; they were too focused on providing commercial opportunities for their countrymen. USAID was really into schools and bridges, whereas State focused on “democracy building” such as empowering women in medieval Islamic societies via local modern drama clubs. The hope that synergy would emerge was consumed by the same thing that makes a million monkeys typing away at a million typewriters still unlikely to produce a great work of literature. And they may need all that time; reconstruction in Ukraine is expected to take decades.
— Lesson 3: Though viewed as our greatest strength, the level of financial assistance in Afghanistan was often our greatest weakness.
Like with teenagers and booze, too much money can only lead to trouble. Billions were spent with little oversight, leading directly to corruption. The money tsunami “overwhelmed the Afghan economy and fueled massive corruption from senior government officials in Kabul to low-level officials around the country. This corruption posed a critical threat to the mission.” SIGAR found “in Afghanistan, the U.S. government spent too much money, too quickly, in a country that was unable to absorb it” and warns of the same in the future Ukraine reconstruction.
Lacking a trusted banking system connected to international standard systems, business in Iraq and Afghanistan was done in cash, vast amounts of paper money brought in to the country on pallets and stored in copier paper boxes stacked alongside the safes which could not hold a tenth of the moolah on hand. It begged to be misused.
And then there was the unequal distribution of reconstruction funds. The military always had more than anyone else and so always won every discussion about what to do next. As SIGAR noted, when USAID tried to stop implementing projects in areas where they could not be monitored or evaluated, the military simply used funds from its Commander’s Emergency Response Program to implement those projects anyway—often in even less secure areas, where projects were unlikely to succeed.
— Lesson 4: Corruption was an existential threat to the reconstruction mission in Afghanistan.
This will be a massive issue in a place like Ukraine (it remains the most corrupt country in Europe excluding Russia; according to USAID, rooting out corruption in Ukraine will be a generational challenge) with its very organized crime emboldened by “lost” American weapons from the battlefield and new members with military experience. Rebuilding Ukraine means fighting graft first, claimed the Washington Post. Ukraine has “entrenched patronage networks that involve senior officials who can inhibit reconstruction and international aid by wasting assistance and damaging the government’s ability to deliver services. Combating corruption is difficult because it requires the cooperation and political will of those elites who benefit the most from it. Few cooperate willingly,” SIGAR wrote. Militia leaders, warlords, oligarchs, meh, they’re all pretty much the same problem in different headgear.
— Lesson 5: Building and reforming the Afghan security forces was hindered by their corruption, predation, and chronic dependency on the United States.
The Ukrainian military is 100 percent dependent on the United States for everything from spare parts to uniforms to strategic and tactical leadership. They have already lost the ability to fight on their own. The numbers help tell the story: over the course of two decades in Afghanistan, the United States spent an average of $375 million each month on security assistance. By comparison, the U.S. is currently spending $2.5 billion each month—nearly seven times the average monthly amount it spent in Afghanistan—on security assistance in Ukraine. Intended or not, that buys a lot of dependence.
Meanwhile, as in Afghanistan, the Ukraine’s internal security forces remain rife with corruption and require urgent reform. Ukraine’s police have been largely feared and distrusted by the people they are supposed to serve. In some areas of the country, the police have resembled “a mafia-style organization” that intimidates locals with impunity, warns SIGAR.
— Lesson 6: Tracking equipment provided to Afghan security forces proved challenging well before the government collapsed.
So much military equipment poured haphazardly into a country is sure to see some of it end up in the wrong hands. In Afghanistan, the U.S. was supplying both sides of many encounters, arms leaking out into the countryside via corruption, lack of security, and poor stock keeping. Already in Ukraine, Russian organized crime groups, local crooks, and unauthorized volunteer battalions obtained or stole weapons from Department of Defense security aid meant to arm the Ukrainian military for its defense against Russia, according to an inspector general report revealed as the result of a Freedom of Information Act request submitted by Military.com. In just a taste of what’s to come, the report shows how U.S. efforts to meet end-use goals for billions in security assistance donated throughout 2022 often failed. Little or no accountability existed on the U.S. side, allowing weapons to be diverted to criminals and opposition forces.
Another Department of Defense (DOD) report made public found employees fell short of requirements for tracking financial aid to Ukraine. The report examined how the DOD was monitoring transactions from over $6.5 billion in funding from the Ukraine Supplemental Appropriations Act through Advana software, the only authorized reporting platform. Auditors warned DOD’s subpar reporting processes, including use of systems that are unreadable by Advana, could hinder oversight and transparency (the U.S. did not properly track $18.6 billion in aid to Afghanistan, partly because it employed software systems that were either incompatible with one another or incapable of handling the volume of data received. Most projects in Iraq, millions of dollars, were tracked only via a shared Excel spreadsheet.)
— Lesson 7: Monitoring and evaluation efforts in Afghanistan were weak and often measured simple inputs and outputs rather than actual program effectiveness.
In Iraq we evaluated a program’s effectiveness like this: we increased the amount of money we spent one quarter on education by 13 percent. The next quarter we announced a 13 percent improvement in education in our area; it was simple as that.
“Oversight became an afterthought,” wrote SIGAR. “The U.S. government is poor at predicting the resources and length of time necessary to rebuild complex institutions in other countries. The timelines created by U.S. officials ignored conditions on the ground and created perverse incentives to spend quickly and focus on short-term goals. The U.S. government emphasized short-term, tangible projects where money could be spent rapidly and success claimed more immediately over less tangible but potentially more enduring, long-term programming, such as capacity building. Physical security, political stability, and immediate reconstruction needs took priority over the slow, iterative work of building good governance and the rule of law, the foundations for combating corruption.”
There are the lessons, solid suggestions each one. They were largely ignored in Afghanistan and Iraq. Think they’ll do any better in Ukraine?
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Posted in Biden, Democracy, Embassy/State, Military, Trump
May 6, 2023 // 7 Comments »
Air National Guard leaker Jack Teixeira had one of the highest levels of security clearance. Over five million Americans, more than the population of Costa Rica, Ireland or New Zealand, hold some type of security clearance. Can we trust them? Is Teixeira an exception, or is the process never expected to work 100 percent of the time?
A security clearance is issued by a part of the U.S. Government (Department of Defense, CIA, the State Department…) and says the holder can be trusted to handle sensitive documents and duties. At the low end this may mean a contractor can enter the Navy Yard without a body search, or at the extreme means a person will assume a completely new identity, live abroad, and conduct clandestine actions on behalf of the U.S.
Government-wide there are three basic levels of clearance: Confidential, Secret, and Top Secret. There are formal definitions, but the basic idea is that the higher you go up the ladder, the more harm and damage disclosure would create. Added to this three-tiered system are many subcategories, including Sensitive But Unclassified, for well, unclassified things that are still sensitive, such as an applicant’s social security number, Law Enforcement Sensitive and the like. Top Secret is supplemented by Sensitive Compartmented Information (SCI), often used to denote information obtained from intelligence sources. There are also many, many flavors of Special Access Programs (SAP) that require both a very high level clearance and specific permission to access just that single project, such as a clandestine operation against Iran, or the identities of spies in Syria. The military has its own lexicon of classifications.
The clearance process is largely a variation on a single note: let’s look into what this person has done in his life prior to seeking a clearance, and then try to extrapolate that into what he will do once cleared. But because, like your mutual funds, past performance is no guarantee of future success, the process is inherently flawed.
Despite the wide variety of clearances available, the process of obtaining one is similar across the board. What changes is less the process of looking into someone’s life than the granularity of the look. Most everyone seeking a clearance begins at the same place, filling out Standard Form 86, Questionnaire for National Security Positions, form SF-86. The SF-86 is mainly a very detailed autobiography, the raw material that fuels the rest of the process. Young people filling out their first SF-86 invariably end up on the phone to mom, gathering old addresses they lived at as kids, birthdays of disconnected relatives, foreign countries visited on family trips and more, a lot more: the SF-86 runs some 129 pages. Some interesting perjury bait is near the end, almost silly questions such as “Have you ever engaged in an act of terrorism?” and a follow-up requiring you to describe, in one line, “The nature and reason for the terror activity.”
After a hundred pages of names and dates the SF-86 dips into the deal breakers, the questions that weed out quickly those who are unlikely to get very far in the clearance process. Applicants are asked to self-describe financial problems, debts, drug use, gambling, drinking, mental health issues, legal troubles, job firings, and more. Whether out of duty and honor, or more likely a thought process that the agency will find out anyway and lying is an automatic disqualification, most applicants do tell the truth and disqualify themselves.
Everyone who gets past the SF-86 has some standard checks run on them. Since U.S. Citizenship is the most basic and unwavering requirement for a clearance, every applicant’s claim to being an American is verified. Every applicant then gets a run through whatever databases and electronic records can be found. The goal is to verify quickly as much of the self-provided data and to skim off the low-hanging fruit. A serious arrest record, neck-deep financial problems, and the like will be easily found. Checks are also run through the various intelligence files (a National Agency Check) to make sure while you’re applying for a job at the State Department you are not on some secret list of bad guys over at CIA. For some low-level or short-term clearances, the process can stop here and a decision is made. The time period varies, but usually is a couple of months for a background-only clearance.
For higher level clearances, including Top Secret, a full spectrum investigation is required. An investigator will visit an applicant’s home town school teachers, his second-to-last-boss, his neighbors, his parents, and almost certainly the local police force and ask questions in person. As part of the clearance process, an applicant will sign the Mother of All Waivers, basically giving the government permission to do all this as intrusively as the government cares to do. This is old fashioned shoe leather police work, knocking on doors, eye balling people who say they knew the applicant, turning the skepticism meter up to 11. The investigator will ask each interviewee to keep quiet about the interview, but typically the applicant will get a hushed phone call or email from some old acquaintance saying the Feds just knocked. Many of the contract investigators at this level are retired FBI or Secret Service people and often will present their old ID to add some gravitas to the procedure. If an applicant lived abroad, the process is tasked out to the nearest U.S. Embassy. All this on-the-street work does not come cheap. A full background investigation can run $15-20,000.
For many agencies, including the CIA and NSA and likely for a guy like Teixeira, an additional step in the clearance process is the polygraph, the lie detector, the box. The federal government polygraphs about 70,000 people a year in connection with security clearances. What portion of the polygraph process that isn’t shrouded in movie drama is classified, but the basics are simple; even Mythbusters looked into it. The process is based on the belief that when one fibs one’s body involuntarily expresses stress in the form of higher blood pressure, changes in pulse, breathing, and perspiration rate. Those things can be precisely monitored. Did you ever steal anything? No? That’s a lie — see here, your heart rate went up X percent when you answered.
Some say that the presence of the polygraph machine itself may be mostly for show, and the real nuts and bolts of the process are actually just clever manipulation and interrogation techniques as old as dirt. An awful lot of information obtained via a polygraph has nothing to do with the needles and dials per se, but the applicant’s fear of them and belief that they “work.” Polygraphers are allowed considerable freedom in style, and some get more into role-playing than others. Often the applicant will self-incriminate.
Up to this point the clearance process has been mostly the aggregation of information. Along the way some applicants might be picked off, but most applicants for a clearance end up in adjudication. And in adjudication lies the core problem in the clearance process: it relies on human judgment.
The basics of an adjudication look at vulnerabilities, and at past examples of trusts kept or violated.
Vulnerabilities are easier to determine. People betray their country’s trust for money, sex/compromise, ego or ideology. People with loads of debt or a gambling problem are more susceptible to bribes. People with records of infidelity or a pattern of poor judgment might be lured into sexual encounters that could be used to compromise them. In the bad old days when most LGBT applicants were deeply closeted, this was used as a one-size-fits-all pseudo-reason to deny them employment. Ego is a tougher one to pin down, but persons who lack self-esteem or who want to play at being a “real spy” might be tempted to become “heroes” for the other side. Ideology is a growing issue as more and more hyphenated Americans seek government work and, needing qualified language employees, more and more are recruited by the government. Will a Chinese-American’s loyalty fall to her new home or to the old country where grandma still resides?
Back in the good old days, when qualification for high level positions required one to be male, pale and Yale, these things were less of concern. Fathers recruited sons, professors noted promising students, and no one thought much about the messy range of people now sought for government work. Need fluent Farsi speakers or a surge of network engineers? You’re going to have to recruit farther afield than the country club. Agencies who used to toss back into the pond pretty much anyone without a pristine background now face unfilled critical positions. So, standards change, always have changed, and will continue to change. Security clearances just work that way.
If vulnerabilities seem sometimes ambiguous to adjudicate, the next category, trust, is actually much harder. Persons who have kept trusts extended to them, not been fired, not broken laws, paid their bills, saw to their responsibilities, are in the Nice category. Those who didn’t end up over in Naughty. The adjudication part becomes important because very few people are perfect, and very few are really bad. Most everyone falls in the middle, and so agencies must make judgment calls. The goal is to come up with a picture of the person, and then project that picture forward into what they might be like on the job. Like any human-powered process that attempts to predict the future, it is flawed. That’s how Jack Teixeira (Ed Snowden, Chelsea Manning, et al) ended up with a Top Secret security clearance.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Posted in Biden, Democracy, Embassy/State, Military, Trump
March 25, 2023 // 3 Comments »
This week marks the 20th anniversary of Iraq War 2.0. The date is worthy of some reflection.
I was part of the war, heading two embedded civilian provincial reconstruction teams (ePRTs) 2009-2010 and wrote a book critical of the program, We Meant Well, for which was I was punished into involuntary retirement by my employer the U.S. State Department. The working title for the book was originally “Lessons for Afghanistan from the Failed Reconstruction of Iraq” and was meant to explain how our nation building efforts failed to accomplish anything except setting afire rampant corruption, and how repeating them nearly dollar-for-dollar in the Afghan theatre was just going to yield the same results. After all, isn’t one definition of madness doing the same thing over and over but expecting different results?
Between 2003 and 2014, more than $220 billion was wasted on the effort to rebuild Iraq. In the end, the sum was we accomplished worse than nothing. Iraq before our invasion(s) was a more or less stable place, good enough that Saddam was even an ally of sorts during the Iraq-Iran War. By the time we were finished Iraq was a corrupt client state of Iran. Where once most literate Americans knew the name of the Iraqi Prime Minister, a regular White House guest, unless he’s changed his name to Zelensky nobody cares anymore.
But today I reflect on another war anniversary, its sixth, which I spent in Iraq. There were no parties, nothing official to mark the day as any different from any other day, hot and dusty with a slight chance of being killed.
We had not always gotten along, the four of us, arguing over what the right thing to do was, how best to get through our year. We moved gracelessly to a small patio near our office, outlined by a CONEX shipping container on one side, a sloppy brick wall standing because it was too lazy to fall on a second, and the remnants of another building on the third. Usually when we came back with our secreted beer from the Embassy (as State Department employees, we did not fall under the military’s General Order No. 1 forbidding alcohol) we parceled the cans out in ones and twos, trying to make the stash last longer, like teens in our parents’ basement. A can tonight, maybe two on Friday, and a couple of cases could pass the time for weeks.
But tonight, maybe in honor of the anniversary, something unspoken made us greedy. We chugged cans, we popped the tops of the ever-warmer brew (room temperature was 104 degrees) and slurped the foam like Vikings on a New World bender. One of the benefits of not drinking often was that your body dried out, and so even a little alcohol thrown down that dry hole kicked your butt. A lot of alcohol drunk purposely under these conditions sent four adults into drunkenness, marvelously rich and fine. It tasted of a high school summer.
With a lot of dust in the air and only a toenail clipping shaped moon out, the darkness was complete as we sat drinking the last. A light would have embarrassed us. Seen in a photo, we could have been anywhere, there were no clues for an outsider to decode. We four felt closer to this place, and to one another, than we had ever had.
The long days at the Embassy for meetings where we had been laughed at as Country Cousin Muggles, unworthy, the warm beer, and the blanket of the dark, led to stories. With the exception of a long, wandering tale that had something to do with a tree, the Germans, and a lawsuit, we had all heard the drunken stories before. The two divorces, a daughter who did not write, the woman whose name had been forgotten even as the teller spent ten minutes describing how her shoes looked next to his bed—the stories all poured out in equal measure to what we poured down our throats. Some were bitter (the sum of our ages totaled over 200; nation-building was not a young man’s game), most more matter of fact. A lifetime of experiences, a thousand autumns, all tied up in those voices.
We realized, maybe for the first time, that we had more in common than we had differences. Like every dog year equaling seven human ones, time spent together in Iraq fast-forwarded how you felt about the people sharing it with you. Nobody cursed Iraq or the anniversary—on the contrary, though none of us could walk a straight line to save his life, we were sharply aware that it was only because we were in Iraq that we could share what we were sharing. There was little talk of the routines of home that used to govern our lives, mortgages, Saturday morning chores and errands. That happened only at the beginning of your time, when you could still smell home on your shirt, or at the end of a tour when you had to will yourself to remember so you could try to fit back in.
The talk instead was about people, friends, lovers, girlfriends, wives, Dads; what we did not have here and for whom we all accepted one another as surrogates. Maybe because we were drunk, we recognized we cared about each other, our differences not resolved but perhaps more vital, dispelled temporarily.
The next morning I awoke with a vicious headache and the realization that someday I would come to miss being with those men as much as I now missed the smell of pillows on my bed at home, or kissing my wife when we both tasted of coffee. It was already over 100 degrees, a Thursday, if I remember it right.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Posted in Biden, Democracy, Embassy/State, Military, Trump
January 5, 2023 // 1 Comment »
Nobody is going to miss 2022. With the won’t-die pandemic, inflation at home and economic troubles abroad, plus the war in Ukraine, it has not been a happy 12 months. Nevertheless, with the year 2022 behind us, it is time for some housecleaning. Here are four memes we really should bury and not have to hear about again.
The internet changed everything/The internet promotes democracy globally. Nope, it turns out the internet was a big grift and we were allowed to play with its full potential only for a few years until the big guys wanted it back for their own. Though the grift of free speech and a marketplace of idea took place in full view of us all, it was fully bitter and disappointing to see Twitter was never what we thought of it. From early days Twitter was manipulated by a small group of people to favor one set of ideas and either discredit another or simply make them go away. Now it happened that that small group of people had green hair and eyebrow pierces unfavored more liberal ideas, but that is just a technicality, like saying the thugs who monitor the web in North Korea favor North Korean ideas. It means missing the real point, of censorship, of favoring one way of thinking.
The internet available to people in more liberal countries and the internet available to people in more totalitarian places are rapidly converging, not in the specific ideas they display but in the one-sided way they display them. It matters less each day that a powerful group of people in the United States control what we see or that a powerful group of people in China control what folks there see. The point is control itself, not specific content. And double-plus good for those who imagine folks in China yearning to swap their government-controlled media for America’s corporate controlled media. Same chicken but some eggs have brown shells instead of white. Ain’t nobody being empowered or standing up without permission no matter what it looks like in small-scale from the outside to glib commentators.
Countries with a McDonald’s don’t make war on one another. It was ever-so journalistic NYT columnist Tom Friedman who coined the phrase. He wrote the benefits of economic integration reduce the policy choices open to governments, making war—which disrupts that integration—so unattractive as to be practically unthinkable, part of all that end of history stuff that was once the vogue for the hive mind. The concept was built around everyone wanting to be more like us. Well, you can’t get fries with that idea in Kiev or Moscow or in Warsaw today, it is as dead as the broader idea it embodied, that war had become obsolete. In fact, reality suggests it all can work in the opposite as Europe’s dependence (e.g., vulnerability) on Russian energy gave Putin one more weapon to consider as he planned his invasion of the Ukraine.
Same for what Richard Haass of the Council of Foreign Relations calls integration, which has driven decades of Western policy and basically controlled the State Department, with its many offices for education exchange, cultural stuff and women’s issues. This strategy, too, rested on the belief that economic ties – along with cultural, academic, and other exchanges – would drive political developments, rather than vice versa, leading to the emergence of a more open, market-oriented world automatically more moderate in its foreign policy. The idea didn’t win the Cold War with jazz, movie stars, and public speakers, and it did not do much for us in 2022. Educational exchange, the grand savior of U.S.-China relations also near-collapsed in 2022, a victim of lop-sidedness, as well Covid, and misuse by the intelligence agencies.
And we might as well lump in sanctions here as a dead and done policy option. Sanctions do not create meaningful changes in policy behavior. Sanctions in the case of Russia have accomplished less than nothing, as the limited availability of energy out of Russia had actually driven up the prices and resulted in a net gain in income. Most of the world had no interest in isolating Russia diplomatically and economically. Multilateralism, another thing that was supposed to have been dead, remains alive and allows Russia to sell its energy to China and India, much of it for re-export to the countries in Europe (and Japan) where it was originally intended. It is almost embarrassing to have to include a 2022 version of sanctions here as an example, given how decades of sanctions have failed to effect the situation in pre-Ukraine Russia, never mind China, Iran, Cuba, North Korea, and elsewhere.
You have to be at war to be at war. Not unique to 2022 but exemplified by it are the new forms of warfare-but-not-war the United States has pioneered. Is the U.S. at war in Ukraine, for example? Once upon a time that would have meant an act of Congress, a declaration of war, to answer the question in the affirmative. But who among us would say the U.S. is not just a little bit “at war” in Ukraine? The conflict continues to exist solely because of a growing in amount and complexity in the weapons available to Ukraine. American advisors in the form of Special Forces and CIA paramilitaries are on the ground, alongside American combat “volunteers.” No major decisions take place without Washington’s say so, and no form of conflict resolution will take place without Washington’s say so. But it’s not war, right?
Same elsewhere, where U.S. weapons animate the conflicts with Yemen and Syria, and U.S. assistance runs like code in the background of the Israeli-Iran power struggle across the Gulf. Sure sounds like war.
U.S. leadership is near dead. Anybody see any American leadership exercised globally (never mind internally) over Covid? Any international, coordinated responses? Nope. Instead every country made up its own rules, bought its vaccines from its own political partners and allowed/banned travel in line with its national economics. The recent gathering of world leaders in Egypt to address climate change accomplished as little as previous meetings other than to prolong John Kerry’s 15 minutes of fame past their due date with all the grace of milk spoiling. American whining to expand NATO eastward is met with sighs of fatigue. Lastly as far as leadership is concerned there is Ukraine, where each U.S. pronouncement and weapons dump is met with increasing silence out of France and Germany. The U.S. appears resigned to “lead” around little Poland to accomplish its aims. Best to just retire the phrase for now and hope things go better in 2023.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Posted in Biden, Democracy, Embassy/State, Military, Trump
August 20, 2022 // 1 Comment »
As most of America forgets Nancy Pelosi’s stirring up of tensions in East Asia last week, it is important to double-back to review what messages where actually sent by each entity involved in the spat.
Japan, who welcomed Pelosi as a conqueror following her visit to Taipei, found about half of the Chinese missiles fired over and around Taiwan as “punishment” actually landed in Japanese-claimed waters around small islands in the Pacific Ocean east of Taiwan. Japan, which sent a message of undiluted support for Pelosi’s Taiwan Adventure, found itself the recipient of a message of its own. Left undiscussed were that those islands themselves are a point of ownership contention among Taiwan, Japan, and the Philippines. But the main message is clear enough: Japan no longer has a foreign policy of its own, and is de facto an American military protectorate alongside Guam and Saipan, a model for the Philippines of the future past.
Taiwan reassured itself it is a beloved American vassal state with a visit from mom, much like a child of divorced parents who blames himself for the breakup. Minor politician and likely lame duck Nancy Pelosi went for the low hanging fruit by seeking to anger China greatly at little cost. With a constituency about one-third Chinese American back home, Pelosi has made a career out of appearing on the scene to criticize China, after Tiananmen, at various Olympiads, over Hong Kong, and hey, why do we need a specific reason 2022 edition. Knowing the way the Chinese often over-value symbolic acts, she committed one at the expense of Joe Biden and the United States, forcing Biden to get off his couch and dispatch an aircraft carrier to demonstrate he still held the majority of testosterones in the relationship. Taiwan, of course, ate up all the attention and President Tsai the chance to play at center stage for a day or two. Imagine daddy competing with mommy to give the best unnecessary present in that post-divorce race for affection — a personal visit versus your own carrier strike group for a few days. Who loves you more?
South Korea alone sent a message of strength among the nations involved in Nancy Pelosi’s magical mystery tour. Little covered in the U.S. media, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol skipped an in-person meeting with Pelosi in lieu of a phone call due to his being on “summer vacation” in his nation’s capital, Seoul, minutes from Pelosi’s hotel. Never mind Pelosi was the first sitting speaker to visit South Korea since Dennis Hastert stopped by Seoul in 2002. All she got was a meet with her counterpart, Kim Jin Pyo, the speaker of the National Assembly, and an agreement to support both governments’ efforts to achieve denuclearization and blah blah blah blah on the peninsula. Pelosi got the message and did not mention Taiwan once in her remarks.
Korea’s actions also drive home a big unspoken story, that all of East Asia and beyond has to figure out a dual foreign policy, one toward the U.S.-China-Taiwan scruffle, and one toward China proper, the most populous nation on earth, with a massive military, and a contender for most economically powerful country of the next decade. South Korea alone seems to understand this, snubbing Pelosi as a way of reminding the United States long after its showboating politicians go home and forget, it still has to make its way alone in a scary neighborhood. Seoul, well aware North Korea’s only substantive diplomatic relationship is with Beijing, held to the clearest and most on-point messaging of last week. It was thus no surprise that only days after Pelosi returned home top South Korean and Chinese diplomats, Foreign Ministers Park Jin and Wang Yi, pledged to develop closer relations and maintain stable industrial supply chains at a time of deepening rivalry between Beijing and Washington.
Though nowhere near as forceful in their presentation as South Korea, both Singapore and Malaysia asked Pelosi not to go to Taiwan, saying that it would force them to choose between the U.S. and China.
Despite some skillful diplomacy, China still sent a mixed message of weakness in its over-reaction and strength in its ability to throw together a coordinated response that managed to suggest it could blockade Taiwan, attack U.S. assets at sea with missiles from the Mainland, and tweak Japan, all at the same time. Extra points for its domestic propaganda campaign that, with exciting video, looked like a joint Tom Cruise-Tom Clancy production. The situation is a far cry from the 1995-1996 crisis in the Taiwan Strait, when a visit by Lee Teng Hui, who would become Taiwan’s first democratically-elected president, to his alma mater Cornell University, sparked real tensions between the US and China.
The Pelosi affair was also a chance for China to practice large scale drills which under normal circumstances would likely be seen as too provacative, a nice bonus. It may even result in a new normal, more aggressive military actions in the gray zones as hardliners in Beijing are able to point to what they got away with as signs they might have gotten away with even more militarily. As one laughing nationalist in Beijing put it when he was interviewed last week, “Thanks Comrade Pelosi”!
The U.S. message came off as uncoordinated and too confused to be called weak. Joe Biden made some remarks from his Covid sick bed, and Antony Blinken did the same rumbling around Asia himself. For all his gaffes in the past (three times making the same mistake is nearly a new policy in some minds) claiming the U.S. had some sort of obligation to defend Taiwan, Biden and his spokespeople stuck right to the script, John Kirby of the National Security Council even making headlines for his non-news reassurance to Beijing the U.S. does not support Taiwan independence. Biden for his part sent the message to China loud and clear that U.S. domestic politics mattered to him (and Nancy) a lot more than whatever China thought. Shock and awe this was not.
The American media’s message was it cannot understand world events past a second grade level, and has the attention span of a two-year-old. All the complexities of East Asia get compressed into a Super Bowl scenario, Big Blue versus Big Red, Eagle versus Dragon, in a caged death match in the Taiwan Strait. China’s carefully moderated military sparring is exaggerated into headlines worrying about a new world war, and her thrusts around Taiwan morph into “attacks surrounding the island nation” and a drill which can become a blockade at any moment. Left out of the discussion is how many military lives were put at risk due to accidents and mistakes by Pelosi’s stunting.
Also left out is what a lousy blockade surrounding the island makes for; Taiwan has no ports on its cliff face east coast and sees the majority of its commerce come from China itself. Beijing might best mine Hong Kong harbor if it wanted to hurt Taiwan economically. Meanwhile, the massive cottage industry in American think tanks and academia which regularly rises to predict imminent war over Taiwan settled back down, waiting no doubt for the rough and ready speech about reunification coming this November with the 20th Party Conference in Beijing. Will they go to war!?!?! Does Xi have a timetable in mind????
As for that short attention span, Pelosi hadn’t unpacked and done a wash at home when the media pivoted away, leaving the last of Chinese military tantrum last week to finish in a kind of void. Until next time…
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Posted in Biden, Democracy, Embassy/State, Military, Trump
August 12, 2022 // 5 Comments »
China policy seems to be made by, and written about by, adults who were often beaten up on the school playground. They retain the language of bullying, and weaknesses, and standing up, and the fantasy that something would sweep in and save them from losing another days’ lunch money (maybe an aircraft carrier group?) That these people are now in control of the media, if not the House, does nothing good for anyone, especially anyone located on either side of the Taiwan Strait. American seems dumb enough to play at this game; is Beijing also?
By now we all know Nancy Pelosi, likely with only a couple of months left as Speaker of the House, decided to spend her summer vacation stirring up the entire Pacific theater for what appears to be largely her own ego. Just days after RIMPAC 2022 concluded (China sure knew the U.S. just wrapped up the largest live fire exercise of the year in the Pacific, involved a dozen nations and hundreds of ships and planes all aimed at the “Blue” team defeating the “Red” team across thousands of miles of Pacific Ocean. While the NYT editorial team was putting ice on their fat lips over in the Ron Burgundy Lounge, Beijing sure saw RIMPAC and Pelosi as part of the same) bully Pelosi shoved Joe Biden into a mud puddle and said she was going to Taipei. For those worried about “showing weakness,” mark this: Biden was too weak to tell a member of his own party to stay out of trouble when he was sick with Covid, sick with inflation, and digging an ever deeper hole in Ukraine, another war with no endgame but wait for the other side to win.
There was no great need for anyone to visit Taiwan this week. There was no crisis brewing, no event requiring anyone to stand with Taipei, support its democracy, or start wearing colored masks, not that the arrival of a lame duck Speaker would accomplish that or anything else in an quick show and tell. Nope, this mess was created by a Nancy Pelosi who wanted to show off, made worse by Joe Biden being too weak to stop her, and then exacerbated all to heck by China infusing much meaning into something that could have been shrugged off as having very little to say for itself.
Remember the advice your mom gave you on bullies? Ignore them and they’d go away? Imagine China listening to their mom on this one and announcing “We heard Nancy was going to Taipei. Neither Nancy nor Taipei are particularly important to the soon-to-be greatest economy in the world, so we’ll ignore them both.” If pressed for comment Beijing could add “But we hope Nancy chokes on her dinner” and leave it at that.
But while Nancy the Bully imagined she was standing up to Beijing the Bully, pretty soon everyone had to stand with, show up, not back down. So you have the New York Times, no stranger to losing its lunch money while being pantsed on the playground, saying “Bullies often seek tests of strengths to probe for signs of weakness. And they always read efforts at conciliation as evidence of capitulation.” The Times even quotes Sun Tzu (note to China watchers: if a pundit who does not read Chinese quotes Sun Tzu, duck, some b.s. is coming your way.) “If Beijing,” the Times continued, “had gotten its way over something as seemingly minor as Pelosi’s visit, it would not have been merely a symbolic victory in a diplomatic sideshow. It would have changed the rules of the game. Rather than avert a diplomatic crisis, it would have hastened a strategic disaster: the further isolation of a democratic U.S. ally and key economic partner as a prelude to surrender, war or both.”
So there you have it. We just barely avoided a strategic disaster, a game changer, a mere preclude to surrender or war… or both! Good golly, lucky for us Nancy landed the plane safely in Taipei.
It is time for some seriousness. China is not going to war with Taiwan. After all the smoke clears and overflights are tallied, China did only one substantive thing to punish Taiwan: China halted Taiwanese snack imports (including biscuits and pastries ahead of moon cake season) just before Pelosi’s arrival. That seems, Sun Tzu’s admonishment to try small steps before large ones aside, not something akin to war or surrender, and something unlikely to lead to violence. It actually really does not matter. Like Nancy.
Need we walk through the other 99 percent of what is going on between Taiwan and China? Between 1991 and March 2020 Taiwan’s investment in China totaled $188.5 billion, more than China’s investment in the United States. In 2019, the value of cross-strait trade was $149.2 billion. China applied in September to join the new Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership. A week later, with no opposition voiced by Beijing, Taiwan applied to join as well. China is Taiwan’s largest trading partner. “One country, two systems” has not only kept the peace for decades, it has proven darn profitable for both sides. As Deng Xiao Ping said of this type of modus vivendi, “who cares what color a cat is as long as it catches mice.” China might one day seek to buy Taiwan, but until then what incentive would it have to drop bombs on one of its best customers? Heck, they even invited Taiwan to the Beijing Olympics Nancy Pelosi protested.
An attack on Taiwan would likely see a frightened Japan and South Korea step over the nuclear threshold and China would thus face more powerful enemies. In addition, a serious attack on Taiwan would severely damage the economy there Xi would no doubt see as part of the prize. Lastly, an attack on Taiwan would see Chinese killing Chinese, people who speak the same language and share several thousand years of culture. Pre-Covid, travelers from China made 2.68 million visits a year to Taiwan, many of which were to visit relatives. Student exchanges between Taiwan and China began in 2011, with some 25,000 Mainland kids studying on Taiwan pre-Covid. Even a “successful” attack would be near-political suicide for Xi. An invasion of Taiwan would leave the China politically isolated, economically damaged, and reputationally crippled. A failed attack could lead to a Taiwanese declaration of independence China would be incapable of stopping.
Caution is not appeasement. Every diplomatic move is not a full-spectrum weighing out of strength. Tiananmen was 33 years and a major change or two of governments ago (you still talking about that Kent State thing, bro?) Hong Kong was taken from China and colonized and exploited by the British before being returned to much the same status under Beijing. Same for Macao and the Portuguese. The U.S. fought China directly in Vietnam and Korea and that did not bleed over into Taiwan. China went nuclear and did not invade Taiwan.
Strength and weakness do not rest on a single visit by someone as close to the end of her tenure as Nancy Pelosi. Bullies are gonna bully but China and Taiwan are not in that sort of relationship; they exist in a complex diplomatic dance overshadowed by massive amounts of cross-straits commerce, investment, and travel. In every sphere outside the political and martial they grow closer together, not further apart, and much of the differences are promoted by the U.S. and an industry of “China experts” who thrive like dung beetles off the potential for conflict.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Posted in Biden, Democracy, Embassy/State, Military, Trump
August 9, 2022 // 6 Comments »
If you think the lies spilling out of Ukraine about casualties and atrocities are shocking, on the August 6, 77th anniversary, of the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and death of some 140,000 non-combatants, meet the greatest lie of modern history. The only nation in history to employ a weapon of mass destruction on an epic scale, against an undefended civilian population, shrugs off the significance of an act of immorality.
Beyond the destruction lies the myth of the atomic bombings, the post-war creation of a mass memory of things that did not happen. This myth has become the underpinning of American policy ever since, and carries forward the horrors of Hiroshima as generations of August 6’s pass.
The myth, the one kneaded into public consciousness, is that the bombs were dropped out of grudging military necessity, to hasten the end of the war, to avoid a land invasion of Japan, maybe to give the Soviets a good pre-Cold War scare. Nasty work, but such is war. As a result, the attacks need not provoke anything akin to introspection or national reflection. The possibility, however remote, that the bombs were tools of revenge or malice, immoral acts, was defined away. They were merely necessary and because we won in the end, justified. That is the evolved myth, but it was not the way the atomic bombings were first presented to the American people.
Harry Truman, in his 1945 announcement of the bomb, focused on vengeance, and on the new power to destroy at a button push – “We are now prepared to obliterate more rapidly and completely every productive enterprise the Japanese have above ground in any city,” said Truman. The plan put into play on August 6 — to force the Japanese government to surrender by making it watch mass casualties of innocents — speaks to a scale of cruelty previously unseen. It was fair; they’d started it after all, and they deserved the pain. Imagine that idea cut loose in Ukraine.
The need to replace that justification to one of grudging military necessity, a tool for saving lives, grew out of John Hersey’s account of the human suffering in Hiroshima, first published in 1946 in the New Yorker. Owing to wartime censorship, Americans knew little of the ground truth of atomic war, and Hersey’s piece was shocking enough to the public that it required a formal response. Americans’ imagined belief that they’re a decent people needed to be reconciled with the indecency of what had been done. With the Cold War getting underway, and with American leadership fully expecting to obliterate a few Russian cities in the near future, some nuclear philosophical groundwork needed to be laid.
And so the idea the bombing of Hiroshima was a “necessity” appeared in a 1947 article, signed by former Secretary of War Henry Stimson, though actually drafted by McGeorge Bundy (later an architect of the Vietnam War) and James Conant (a scientist who helped build the original bomb). Dr. Conant described the article’s purpose as countering Hersey’s account at the beginning of the Cold War as “You have to get the past straight before you do much to prepare people for the future.”
The Stimson article was the moment of formal creation of the Hiroshima myth. A historically challengeable argument was recast as unquestionable — drop the bombs or kill off tens of thousands, or maybe it would be millions (the U.S. regularly revised casualty estimates upwards), of American boys in a land invasion of Japan. It became gospel that the Japanese would never have surrendered, though of course surrender was in fact exactly what happened. Nonetheless, such lies were created to buttress a national belief that no moral wrong was committed, and thus there was no need for introspection by the United States.
No later opportunity to bypass reflection was missed. American presidents from Truman to Bush chose not to visit Hiroshima. The 50th anniversary of the bombing saw a moderately reflective planned exhibit at the Smithsonian turned into a patriotic orgy that only reinforced the “we had no choice” narrative. When Barack Obama became the first sitting president to visit Hiroshima in 2016, his spokespeople went out of their way to make it clear he would be looking only forward with ally Japan, the mushroom cloud safely out of sight.
American foreign policy thus proceeded under a grim calculus that parses acts of violence to conclude some are morally justified simply based on who pulls the trigger, with much of the history of the next 77 years a series of immoral acts allegedly servicing, albeit destructively and imperfectly, the moral imperative of saving lives by killing. America’s decisions on war, torture, rendition, and indefinite detention could be explained in character as the distasteful but necessary actions of fundamentally good people against fundamentally evil ones. Hiroshima set in motion a sweeping, national generalization that if we do it, it is right.
We are, in fact, able to think we are practically doing the people of Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Somalia… a favor by killing some of them, as we believe we did for tens of thousands of Japanese that might have been lost in a land invasion of their home islands had Hiroshima not be killed for their prospective sins. There is little discussion because debate is largely unnecessary; the myth of Hiroshima says expediency wipes away concerns over morality. And with that neatly tucked away in our conscience, all that is left is pondering where to righteously strike next. Donbas perhaps?
America’s deliberate targeting of civilians, and its post-facto justifications, are clearly not unique, either in World War II, or in the wars before or since. Other nations, including Japan itself, added their own horror to the books, without remorse. But history’s only use of nuclear weapons holds a significant place in infamy, especially on this August 6. America’s lack of introspection over one of the single most destructive days in the history of human warfare continues, with 21st century consequences.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Posted in Biden, Democracy, Embassy/State, Military, Trump
April 30, 2022 // 5 Comments »
The answer is one failed in Ukraine, one has kept the peace. The question, going forward, is the model the strategic clarity of NATO’s Article 5 or the strategic ambiguity of the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act?
The principle of collective defense is at the very heart of NATO, created by a 1949 Treaty. Its history is embedded in WWII, when the Nazis gained a massive advantage in the earliest days of the war by playing the various European nations against each other, picking off territory while London and Paris bickered over what to do. NATO was be the solution. Article 5 of the NATO treaty says “An armed attack against one or more of the [signers] shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them… will assist the Party or Parties so attacked.” The critical points are that the treaty is inclusionary — all NATO members, large or small — and exclusionary in that it only applies to NATO members. An attack on NATO member Poland triggers Article 5. An attack on Ukraine or Taiwan, not NATO members, does not.
The 1979 Taiwan Relations Act (TRA; also the U.S.-PRC Joint Communique) grew out of Mainland China dictator Mao’s threat to “liberate” Taiwan and Nationalist dictator Chiang Kai-shek’s demand for U.S. support to reclaim the Mainland. With the Korean War sopping up American blood, Washington had no desire to join what would have been a land war to rival WWII. Instead, it established diplomatic relations with Taiwan, and signed a mutual defense treaty in 1954. That lasted until 1979, when the U.S. switched its diplomatic recognition from the people of Taiwan to the people of the Mainland (China; but note the diplomatic wording) and Congress enacted the Taiwan Relations Act. The TRA listed two obligations to Taiwan: to sell it arms and to maintain the U.S.’ capacity “to resist any resort to force or other forms of coercion” against Taiwan.
The actual wording in the TRA is instructive: “Peace and stability in the area are matters of international concern… any effort to determine the future of Taiwan by other than peaceful means, including by boycotts or embargoes is considered a threat to the peace and security of the Western Pacific area and of grave concern to the United States.” This represents diplomatic brilliance, and came to be known as “strategic ambiguity,” a policy understood to mean the U.S. doesn’t have to defend Taiwan, but it can. The circumstances and means of defense are left unspoken. China matched this with a policy of “strategic patience.”
The most important thing about the TRA is it works. The Mainland has not invaded Taiwan. Despite changes in leadership as dramatic as Mao (albeit in 1976) to Deng to Xi the Mainland has not invaded. Despite Taiwan changing from military dictatorship to democracy, the Mainland has not invaded. Despite global changes including the Korean and Vietnam wars where China and the U.S. fought each other directly, development of nuclear weapons by China, fall of the Soviet Union, the Mainland has not invaded. The Chinese military has gone from peasants with rifles to a blue water navy and the Mainland has not invaded. China has gone from agrarian isolation to an essential part of the industrialized global economy, and the Mainland has not invaded. Ukraine happened, and the Mainland has not invaded.
The irony is deterrence worked in Ukraine, at least from Putin’s point of view. It prevented the U.S. from getting involved in the shooting war between Russia and Ukraine. The NATO treaty was written to compel its signatories to act once someone moved against them (the treaty was obviously written with the Soviet Union in mind though Article 5 has only been invoked once, following 9/11, and then mostly for show.) As Putin readied to invade Ukraine, Biden threw away any trace elements of strategic ambiguity by declaring early and often NATO would not intervene and the U.S. would not unilaterally enter the fighting. It was as green a light as could be for Putin. ‘Round the other side of the world, Sino-Asia sleeps at peace knowing everything is on the table should the Mainland invade but nothing is at risk should it not. What better example of deterrence working?
The concern now is moves in both hemispheres to formalize redlines. Much talk will be devoted post-invasion as to whether Ukraine should join NATO, feign at joining NATO, or promise never to join NATO. Joining or something akin will be the wrong answer. It was in fact the rigidity of NATO’s promise that saw it fail, again, in Ukraine as in Crimea. Putin understands this and uses it — judo master that he is — against his adversary. NATO prescribes war whether the broader circumstances (of say energy dependence on Russian gas) make that seem wise. It is an exploitable flaw. The good news is Europe is again at a stasis point for the time being, Ukraine seemingly headed toward a resolution that provides Russia its buffer zone no matter what it is all spun as in the western media.
The risk lies in Asia, where bullish elements are tempted to disturb an equally functional power status quo, and jeez, it’s Joe “Regime Change” Biden and his gaffes again. At a CNN town hall in October 2021, the host asked Biden if the U.S. would defend Taiwan. He said “Yes, we have a commitment to do that,” another gaffe-erino which the White House quickly walked back into the realm of strategic ambiguity. But post-Ukraine, some hawks want that clarity and are pushing for a formal, Article 5-like declaration. In their perfect world, that Asian Article 5 would include not only Taiwan and the U.S., but also Japan, Korea, Australia, the Philippines, and maybe others (the U.S. has various types of self-defense treaties already with many Asian nations.)
The justifications for such moves often make no sense in the face of the current TRA strategy’s multi-decade success. Some say because Beijing ramped up its rhetoric and shipbuilding (a test of resolve!) we need to do something to match that. But wouldn’t a guarantee to go to war for Taiwan make those on Taiwan who want to declare independence that much more reckless? There are those in Congress who want a more formal agreement (if you think the Israel lobby is powerful, check how Taiwan’s punches above its weight.) The ever-pugilistic Council on Foreign Relations wants strategic unambiguity as a show of force.
Joe Biden will come under some pressure to “do something” (the scariest words in Washington) following the clusterflutz in Ukraine. This would be a very, very risky move. Remember, for deterrence to be credible, it does not need to depend on a willingness to commit anything like suicide in the face of a challenge, but rather must carry the risk that the deterrer is likely to do something that is “fraught with the danger of war.” Strategic ambiguity is enough. Article 5 and anything like it to come in the Pacific purposefully ties its signatories’ hands. The Taiwan Relations Act purposefully leaves all options open to deal with the complex realities of the Sino-Pacific. History shows which one works and which one does not. A more aggressive posture does not resolve the root issues across the Taiwan Strait, it only risks exacerbating them.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Posted in Biden, Democracy, Embassy/State, Military, Trump
April 29, 2022 // 2 Comments »
Are you the kind of guy (or gal!) who likes to do things for yourself? You know, like not leave the fighting to soldiers but doing your part for Ukraine by paying higher gas prices? You and your president are already working hand-in-hand, making empty gestures that do nothing to affect things in real life. Why not step it up and give America’s war-weary journalists a break, too? Not all of us can travel to the Ukraine to be photographed in front of a burning tank (Russia Losses Grow) or children playing with matches (Young Ukrainians Make Molotovs for Freedom.) So why not write your own Ukrainian news article? We will show you how.
Rule One is truth is irrelevant. You’re taking a side. And don’t worry if the Ukraine story has jumped the shark by the time you read this. The basics of modern journalism — false basis, exhausting duration, and an inscrutable villian, anything from one man (Putin) to a thing (the virus) to an idea (terrorism) — never change. Teach a man to fish, amiright?
You start with what our “journo” community calls a lede. It is just an opening paragraph, the more dramatic the better. Try “Democracy is at stake, but Ukrainians have its back.” You can go the other way, something in the generic Russia is bad category like “Pure evil Russian conscripts destroy puppies for fun.” If you’re a history buff, try “New fascist Nazis roll across eastern Europe.” It does not matter that it was the Russians rolling west in 1945 that actually destroyed fascism, it just has to evoke all the feels. Ledes used to summarize the story. Now, they just deliver a shock and food pellet. Think of it as Insta in b&w words.
Next, you have your Putin paragraph. Americans are pretty stupid, and certainly cannot understand that as with their own country, other nations have strategic objectives. Americans like to either believe wars are fought for moral reasons (the ones we start) or are the result of some evil madman (the ones they start.) This is called storyfication. So don’t write boring things about NATO expansion or buffer zones — yawn much? Instead, reduce the geo-political calculations of the world’s largest country to the egotistic whims of one man. For the most part you can just call him by the one name, like Bono, Madonna or Elvis.
The important thing is to describe Putin as insane, unpredictable, bonkers, out of control, psychopathic, sociopathic, an enigma, a madman or unhinged. If you run out of ideas, Google old articles about Saddam, Assad, Qaddafi, any Iranian mullah or Kim Jung Un for ideas. Say no one understands him or his motives then go on to psychoanalyze him as if you do as a friendless, desperate loner intent on cosplaying the former Soviet Czarist glory empire. Make death threats, and go for it invoking Qaddafi’s still-celebrated, pointed demise. You can also make homophobic jokes to your heart’s content, the kind of stuff woke culture places off limits everywhere. If you have the stomach for it, Google “trump putin porn” to get started. Tell your shocked IT guy it is for work, thank you. If he say he has to report you to HR, scream “1A, witch!”
Next, do exactly the same thing but in the opposite way for the Ukrainian president. Picture him shirtless astride an aroused unicorn. Use pseudo-Shakespearean words like honor, bravery, and generosity. In the same way you could go full homophobe on Putin, you must suggest everyone in America wants to make warm love with Zelensky, maybe astride a unicorn. But do not for the love of all things holy Google “Zelensky porn” for inspiration. Even the 1A can’t save you there.
Include a line saying Donald Trump started the war. Check your contract; most editors require this, but even if not, it is a best practice to include it. You should at this point have four or five solid paragraphs of emotion-eliciting journalism, all without any context or actual information on what is going on in Ukraine. If you’re writing for television or VICE, you’re done. Good work. However, if you are writing long form you’ll need some more.
You can branch off in two ways. One is a dramatic ode to democracy. The other is where you take all those analytic skills you developed as an on-line virologist these past two years and apply them to being an on-line military expert.
The first branch is the easiest, because no one believes in talking dramatically about democracy more than Americans. Tall about redlines, say this is a 1939 moment, invoke the Founders to characterize Zelensky, call everything a turning point or existential threat or a test of resolve, it doesn’t matter. It can get hard to tell from photos who is who as both sides use the same rusty Soviet hardware, so apply this guide: if the tank is moving it is Russian enroute to shell an orphanage; if the tank is stopped it is Russian bogged down due to lack of fuel, Chinese tires, incompetent leadership, or conscript moral. Remember Russians showing photos of captured Ukrainians is a Geneva Convention war crime while Ukrainians kneecapping bound Russian prisoners is a morale booster, albeit unconfirmed. Be sure to use alternative spellings like Kyiv not Kiev to virtue signal. Every little step counts towards victory!
A few miscellaneous points: Russians earning more than minimum wage are oligarchs. People who disagree with you are Putin lovers and you should ask them online if they’re paid in rubles (never gets old.) Every article must mention social media but don’t bother with sentences, just write social media social media social media. Underage Ukrainians holding rifles bigger than themselves are not child soldiers. A movie star with a political opinion on Twitter is just as quotable as an expert as anyone else on Twitter.
The same cosplaying rednecks in camo body armor you called white supremacists at a MAGA rally are now heroes if they say they’re headed to Ukraine. Putin censors, YouTube removes misinformation. The EU not joining the US in oil sanctions is a “united front.” Your not being able to log on to Facebook is a Russian cyberattack. The official name for the Russian currency is “yacht.” And remember cluster bombing civilians is not always bad — can’t you tell the difference between ousting an evil dictator and invading a neighbor?
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Posted in Biden, Democracy, Embassy/State, Military, Trump
April 10, 2022 // 3 Comments »
The U.S. should not use its military power to deter China from invading Taiwan. It is unnecessary, and anything more than what is already being done is more likely to help provoke a war than stop one. It might even be better to turn down U.S. enthusiasm a notch or two.
The current status of strategic ambiguity serves two important American goals – it keeps the peace and allows for a productive trilateral++ relationship among China, Taiwan, U.S. and the rest of Asia. Those two goals work in lockstep, not in conflict of one another, a key point. Peace serves all masters here. What we have is useful stasis, not some sort of historical fantasy of unfulfilled frustration. And we’ll still keep the focus on U.S. strategic interests, not those of Taiwan or other allies. You can’t expect more than that.
Unnecessary
During the entire 73 year existence of Taiwan, the Mainland has not invaded. Despite changes in leadership as dramatic as Mao to Deng to Xi the Mainland has not invaded. Despite Taiwan changing from a military dictatorship to a democracy, the Mainland has not invaded. Despite global changes including the Korean and Vietnam wars, development of nuclear weapons by China, the fall of the Soviet Union (and Donald Trump) the Mainland has not invaded. US posture has varied from garrisoning the island to strategic ambiguity and the Mainland has not invaded.
The Chinese military has gone from peasants with rifles to a blue water navy backed by ICBMs and the Mainland has not invaded. China has gone from the agrarian isolation of the Cultural Revolution to a fully-integrated if not essential part of the industrialized global economy, and the Mainland has not invaded. Putin got away with Ukraine and the Mainland has not invaded. That is not going to change in our lifetimes, so there is not much more to say. The ball keeps bouncing, history remains. I’ll be at the bar. Thank you.
OK, OK, a little more detail. Taiwan has not invaded China, either. You laugh but that was indeed Chiang Kai Skek’s plan, with U.S. help of course, in the early years. Though we don’t think of it much, the current policy of strategic ambiguity keeps Taiwan in line as well. Nobody expects the ambiguity to stretch as far as Taiwan launching military force. Or proclaiming independence. You would hate to have some sort of strategic clarity embolden independence “trouble makers” on Taiwan, one of those unintended consequences.
A couple of points to establish. I threw away my Mao (and Che) T-shirt sophomore year. I don’t have a grey pony tail. I know Beijing is not a democratic regime, much like America’s allies across the Middle East and Africa are not. I’ve worked in Taiwan when it was under military rule, and China under autocratic rule. The food was great, but I do not want to live that way. So none of this is about defending that.
Focus is important; this is about preventing war. It is not about China being mean to democracy in Hong Kong; why act surprised, the government does not like democracy in Shanghai, never mind in Riyadh or other allied places. And often left out of the discussion is the United States worked closely with the Nationalists on Taiwan to make it a very undemocratic place until about 1989.
For the lawyers here tonight, everything I say represents merely my own views and not those of my past or present employers. Nothing in my talk tonight is even remotely classified. If that disappoints, you might still be able to get your money back. A version of my talk is already posted on my website at wemeantwell.com with all the links to data cited, so you can fact check me in real time, or for those with babysitters on the clock at home, read ahead.
Provocation: Deterrence is Dangerous
Deterrence is a funny word. What looks like deterrence from one side — forward deploying an aircraft carrier — might look like provocation from the other. What looks like deterrence against American hegemony in Asia — overflights — might look like provocation from the other. The concept of deterrence itself is not without its uses, and in the end likely kept the Cold War a lot cooler, but military deterrence as argued for here holds the risk of accidents and misinterpretations.
More importantly, there is little need for the military deterrence many advocate for, such as Professor Galston this evening. The Chinese on both sides of the strait understand well there is much to be gained from economic ties amid political ambiguity and much greater risk in anything like an invasion that would accomplish little besides tidying up the leftovers from the creation of the PRC in 1949.
About that deterrence versus provocation thing. China has four overseas military bases, to include a small logistics operation in Djibouti, a listening post on Great Coco Island (not near the Bahamas, it’s off Myanmar), navy outpost in Gwadar (it’s in Pakistan) and of course a military post in Gorno-Badakhshan, Tajikistan. I’m going to guess a lot of people who consider themselves informed on this topic could not have named more than one of those.
In contrast, the U.S. maintains 750 bases across the globe, a few less now that the Afghan adventure is over. That includes formal facilities in eight Asian nations, with some 53,000 troops in Japan and 24,000 in South Korea alone. The U.S. maintained troops on Taiwan until 1979 and recently began sending Special Forces there again on training missions. That many of those American bases predate the founding of the People’s Republic, and all have survived the fall of the Soviet adversary they were built to, um, deter, tells the real story.
Let’s look at the boilerplate articles about Chinese “incursions” into Taiwan’s air space. Chinese aircraft are not overflying Taiwan. They are flying within Taiwan’s self-declared Air Defense Identification Zone. Look at a map of that zone, and other zones declared by Japan and China. Taiwan’s zone, the one Beijing is flying in, actually is large enough to cover thousands of miles of the Chinese mainland itself; PLA planes are in violation when sitting on their own runways.
Taiwan’s zone also overlaps Beijing’s Air Defense Zone which overlaps Japan’s and Korea’s. Japan’s Air Defense zone also overlap’s Taiwan’s to take in a small island which is disputed between Tokyo and Taipei, a diplomatic fist fight the U.S. ignores. Criss-crossing everyone’s zones are American aircraft conducting “freedom of navigation” exercises (known in Beijing as “incursions.”) Chinese air flights are provocative only to the uninformed, or those who want them to be seen as provocative. Left unsaid: as China was supposedly provoking a fight in the air this October, the U.S. was simultaneously conducting some of the largest multi-national naval exercises in the Pacific since WWII.
At various points in history some American bases stored nuclear weapons, and may do so today. Forward-deployed U.S. warships are believed to also contain nuclear weapons; the Ohio-class submarines off China’s coasts, each with 20 Trident ballistic missiles, certainly do. No matter; nuclear-armed aircraft are available direct from the U.S. mainland within hours. Pretend you’re from Mars and just visiting earth and tell me who seems to be provoking. Deterrence as practiced by the U.S. is a dangerous thing.
For deterrent threats to be credible, they ‘do not need to depend on a willingness to commit anything like suicide in the face of a challenge’ but rather must carry the risk that the deterrer ‘is likely to do something that is fraught with the danger of war’
The key element of the strategic ambiguity of the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act over Professor Galston’s “strategic clarity” is a conditional response, call if flexibility if you like. The more specific your response is ahead of time – say in writing like Article 5 – the more your hands are tied. Remember deterrence worked in Ukraine, for Russia; it stopped the U.S. from more actively intervening.
MORE REASONS IT’LL NEVER HAPPEN
What Do They Want?
When I was a diplomat we were taught that trust was always a nice thing, but what was better was to understand the other side’s goals and intentions. If you knew those, or could make a decent guess, you could predict their actions and poke effectively at their asks a lot better than hoping they would just do what they promised. The number of affairs inside marriages where monogamy was the opening promise supports my argument.
So what do China and Taiwan want? There may be someone who is listening into bedrooms, boardrooms, and tea shops and hearing the answer from the principle players, but absent that simply looking at the last 70 some years of history is pretty good.
China and Taiwan do not want war. Absent some scraps back in the 1950s, nobody has invaded or attacked anyone. The US and China only sent shots at each other when the US approached China’s border through its ally North Korea in that war, and on a lesser scale when the US approached China’s border through its ally North Vietnam in that war. There’s kind of a pattern. Both of these events are celebrated in the People’s Army Museum in Beijing as examples of defending the homeland’s borders. The Museum, in addition, features an American U-2 spyplane shot down over the mainland. The Museum also has exhibits showing the U.S. purposely bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999, killing three and destroying the diplomatic sanctuary. How many American embassies has China bombed?
The fact that through all of the massive changes of the last 70 years — the end of Mao, those two wars with the US, the handover of Hong Kong, the entire Cold War itself, and the list is long, there has been no invasion. Scientists call that a steady state, and something bigger than Mao, the Cold War, etc. would have to appear and change it. I’m not sure what that could be. Does anyone seriously believe some rogue statement in the Taiwan legislature would qualify, or some five-way disputed rock outcropping in the South China Sea? And by the way, speaking of the historical record, there’s the same track record for Macau and Hong Kong, where China did not invade or attack over 200 some years of very non-democratic colonial rule even after they had the military means to make it a cakewalk.
My own first brush with a “why now” event was in the 1980s, when I went to Taiwan as an American diplomat. Taiwan was crawling out from under four decades of authoritarian rule, and taking its first difficult democratic steps. After decades of speech suppression, a lot of people were testing their legs, saying all sorts of crazy stuff about independence. Among ourselves we called it “the D word,” as independence in Mandarin is romanized duli. One emerging political party was even called the Taiwan Independence party, and was likely to grab a few seats in the legislature. The U.S. mission was fearful this could serve as a trigger to Beijing. “Big China” had made clear a declaration of independence was a red line.
Beijing’s reaction was soon apparent: Taiwan’s stores started to feature mainland goods; the end of the hated Kuomintang opened up a new market. Even before this thaw you could sort of fly from Taipei to China, something that many people on both sides of the strait were desperate to do to visit relatives. The catch was the flight had to touch down in then-British Hong Kong. In 2008 these flights were made direct, with no need for the Hong Kong stopover. Today six China-based airlines and five from Taiwan operate direct flights. The line of progress has been in one direction, far at odds with war.
Follow the Money
China and Taiwan do want economic benefits. Between 1991 and March 2020 Taiwan’s investment in China totaled $188.5 billion, more than China’s investment in the United States. In 2019, the value of cross-strait trade was $149.2 billion. China applied in September to join the new Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership. A week later, with no opposition voiced by Beijing, Taiwan applied to join as well. China is Taiwan’s largest trading partner. “One country, two systems” has not only kept the peace for decades, it has proven darn profitable for both sides. As Deng Xiao Ping said of this type of modus vivendi, “who cares what color a cat is as long as it catches mice.” China might one day seek to buy Taiwan, but until then what incentive would it have to drop bombs on one of its best customers? Heck, they even invited Taiwan to the Beijing Olympics.
There’s also the U.S. to consider, as any cross-strait violence would affect US-China relations. Not counting Hunter Biden (I kid) the total Chinese investment in the U.S. economy is over $145 billion. U.S. investment in China passed $1 trillion. When Covid shut down world logistics, everyone learned the American economy is voluntarily dependent on Chinese manufacturing and vice-versa. China is the second largest foreign holder of U.S. government debt. If something interfered with all that commerce, China would have to find a way to use unfinished iPhones as a food source. The Chinese are literally betting the house on America’s success and continued economic engagement.
Ignore (Most of) the Rhetoric
Oh, the rhetoric, all that stuff about reunification that tumbles out of Beijing. History is again our guide, as Chinese President Xi’s rhetoric about reunification is essentially the same as Mao’s. But if you want to cite Chinese propaganda as evidence of actual intent, it is best to pay attention to the details.
It was the United States itself that most clearly asserted the shared tripartite goal was reunification, declaring as part of the diplomatic break with Taiwan “there is only one China and Taiwan is a part of it.” Chinese President Xi regularly reiterates reunification as a goal, but always stresses the process is historical (as in, it is inevitable and we just need to be patient, don’t wait up for it to happen) and must be peaceful. Sorry, if you’re going to quote Chinese propaganda statements as proof of intent, you can’t cherry pick out only the scary parts. It makes no sense to trust Xi on the plan but claim he’s lying about the (peaceful) execution in the same breath.
Not by coincidence most of these reunification proclamations occur around important political holidays. One of Xi’s most recent invocations was in a speech marking the 110th anniversary of the Xinhai 1911 Revolution, aimed at the foreign Manchu Qing dynasty. The chosen occasion is important, because Xinhai, ideologically midwifed by Dr. Sun Yat Sen, is acknowledged by both the most hardcore Communists and the most fervent Nationalists as the common origin point for modern China. This is drilled into every schoolkid on both sides of the Strait and forms a common vocabulary among their diplomats. The point is to understand Xi’s remarks in the same context as the Chinese, not John Wayne, likely do.
In Sun’s spirit Xi reiterated a vow to peaceful reunification with Taiwan. He urged the Chinese people “stand on the right side of history and join hands to achieve China’s complete reunification,” invoking the way the people who would form the Communist and Nationalist parties worked together against a common enemies — the Manchus, then warlordism and feudalism, then the Japanese, and perhaps someday the Americans. Xi, talking to his own people and those on Taiwan, sketched a shared vision a long way from the PLA amphibious assault the West fears.
Taiwan is a “wanderer” that will eventually come home and not a chess piece to be played with, the Chinese government’s top diplomat said recently.
Philosophically Chinese leaders have for thousands of years believed in historical cycles. They waited close to 300 years to end the foreign Qing dynasty. They waited out Britain for hundreds of years for the peaceful return of Hong Kong. Such things come up in conversation with Chinese diplomats as casually as talk about the weather. Chinese diplomacy is patient, not short-term optimistic or spasmodically reactive. There is no fierce urgency to reunification. Sun Tzu: One waits to win.
China matched this with a policy of “strategic patience” (antagonists argue China will not wait forever, but also understands the time between now and forever is long.)
Some Housekeeping
As for the funny arguments in favor of deterrence, one of the most hilarious is that the U.S. has to maintain its posture over Taiwan as a signal to the rest of the world about commitment or we’ll lose our global credibility. Of course the neo-neocons are saying the same thing about Crimea, um, sorry, Ukraine. I’m still waiting for those who make that argument to explain away our abandoning Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Arab Spring.
And yes, China is building its military. They now have one real aircraft carrier (same number as India; China also sort of float an old Soviet model) and three high-end Type 075 amphibious landing ships with Type 071s coming soon online. In comparison, the U.S. has 11 carriers and eight high-end amphibious landing ships. There’s a long way to go before we talk invasion or steeled threat, never mind parity.
As for the idea China is building out its fleet and therefore must somehow ignore all the other points I made here tonight and thus must attack someone, I can only point to the Cold War where the Russians despite in about 1972 having at least parity with NATO and with the US tied down in Vietnam never attacked in Europe. Now if you wanna simply credit deterrence go ahead, but there’s also the idea that other things I’ve tried to touch on tonight plays a role in all of this. We act sometimes like our adversaries are all suicidal hegemonic Bond villains instead of calculating nation-states with complex goals. Any connections to Putin-mania and the Ukraine are purely coincidental.
But don’t believe me, believe the Pentagon’s annual China Military Power report. It stated “China’s significant investment in its amphibious fleet does not necessarily portend an invasion of Taiwan. An attempt to invade Taiwan would likely strain China’s armed forces and invite international intervention. These stresses, combined with China’s combat force attrition and the complexity of urban warfare and counterinsurgency, even assuming a successful landing and breakout, make an amphibious invasion of Taiwan a significant political and military risk.”
Never spoken of is what would happen to President Xi and the Chinese system if his invasion failed, with or without US involvement. Where are the Marines tonight? I know Professor Galston was in the Corps, thank you for your service. Aren’t massive amphibious landings considered the hardest of military moves to execute, especially for the untested PLA? And this isn’t Normandy, Chinese ships would be under Taiwan’s indigenous missile defenses almost as they left their harbors (known as area denial.) If Xi fails, he is done for and perhaps with him the current political system. Needless to say a Chinese military which felt it had been misused and blooded unnecessarily would not be a healthy thing for the Beijing government to have around. I think the word for coup in Mandarin is Jūnshì zhèngbiàn.
Win or lose, an attack on Taiwan would likely see a frightened Japan and South Korea step over the nuclear threshold and China would thus face more powerful enemies. In addition, an attack on Taiwan would severely damage the economy there Xi would no doubt see as part of the prize. Lastly, an attack on Taiwan would see Chinese killing Chinese, people who speak the same language and share several thousand years of culture. Pre-Covid, travelers from China made 2.68 million visits a year to Taiwan, many of which were to visit relatives. Student exchanges between Taiwan and China began in 2011, with some 25,000 Mainland kids studying on Taiwan pre-Covid. Even a “successful” attack would be near-political suicide for Xi.
Conclusion
An invasion of Taiwan would leave the China politically isolated, economically damaged, and reputationally crippled. And ironically, a failed attack could lead to a Taiwanese declaration of independence China would be incapable of stopping.
There is no rational, risk vs. gain, reason for hostilities and thus no need for deterrence. My fear is the United States has already decided a bench clearing, superpower showdown is needed, eagle vs. dragon, for control of the Pacific, or at least a new and profitable arms race. You can lie about Iraq possessing weapons of mass destruction long enough to get a war started, but an actual Chinese invasion is a bridge too far for straight-up fabrication. I worry deeply we are looking for a reason, given that China is unlikely to be a sport and invade Taiwan for us, using the cloak of deterrence to prepare for war. America’s current China policy is unnecessarily adversarial. It is impractical and dangerous.
America is still a big, mean dog, but our ability to influence events around the world is limited to barking and biting and only works when barking and biting is the solution. When anything beyond threats is needed, say when dealing with near-peers like China, we have few if any tools but to reimagine legitimate competitors into enemies. It plays out as if U.S. foreign policy is run by WWII reenactors.
And with that settled, the Professor will now go on to resolve the situation in Ukraine and fix the NY subway system. What, no more time? Sorry friends, next time.
Bīng dòng sān chǐ, fēi yīrì zhī hán — It takes more than one cold day for a river to freeze a meter deep.
Nándé hútu — Ignorance is bliss.
BONUS I: Taiwan is not Ukraine
I have a medal for winning the Cold War. It was for any member of the military, or federal civilian employee, who served during the Cold War. That included me, at the tail end, with the State Department. Ironically my so-called Cold War service was on Taiwan. I probably should return the thing; the Cold War is far from over.
Part of the Cold War’s real conclusion is playing out in Ukraine in real time. Is Taiwan, another hanging chad from the Cold War, next? Is President Xi watching a weakened America giving in to the Russians and seeing his chance to seize Taiwan?
Nope. Taiwan is not Ukraine is not Taiwan. The two places only exist next to each other in articles like this because both are the results of American policy. Each exists alongside its nemesis only because the rules the U.S. created (the “liberal world order” as long as the U.S. is in first place) are not subscribed to anymore by most of the world, if they ever really were. But that does not mean Taiwan is in imminent danger.
While Putin‘s invasion timing may or may not have had something to do with Joe Biden (if Trump were really his puppet that would have seemed an easier time to do this) the reality is what is unfolding in the Ukraine reaches back much further than Biden or Trump, to the collapse of the Soviet Union.
It was then the policy of the United States to empower the former Soviet satellite states and grow American influence by expanding NATO eastward (Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Poland, and Romania formally joined the alliance, East Germany as well by default) and to do this while taking the nuclear weapons away from those states so that none of them would become a threat or rival in Europe.
We took their people, too. As a young State Department officer in London in the early 1990s I was told to issue visa after visa to former nuclear scientists from the Ukraine, as well as all sorts of rogues headed to the United States to get them out of the ‘Stans. We created a brain drain to ensure none of the newly independent states could rise above the nuclear threshold the United States established unilaterally for them. It was American policy to have weak but not too weak states between Russia and the “good” part of Europe, dependent on America for defense.
Understanding why an adversary does something is not the same as supporting him. As the Soviet Union collapsed, borders were redrawn with more attention to the West’s needs than any natural flow of those borders (the same mistake was made earlier by the British post-WWI in the Middle East.) The reality of 2022 is Putin is seeking to redraw borders, something now doable because Russia has been allowed to re-grow its fangs. Ukraine as a possible NATO member is a threat to Putin and he is now taking care of that. Americans live in a country that has no border threats and fail to understand the mindset time after time. We believe instead when we invade countries (Vietnam, Cambodia, Grenada, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan) it’s part of international law.
Geo-politically, it was easy. A pro-Russian faction exists inside Ukraine, and Ukraine exists outside the NATO umbrella. Putin’s 2014 proof-of-concept in Crimea assured him NATO would not intervene. About the only real obstacle was the likely pleas of President Xi to hold off and not spoil the Olympics.
Taiwan is another Cold War relic. While the U.S. propped up Taiwan’s very undemocratic military government for decades as an ironic bulkhead against communism, the island grew into an economic powerhouse. In that lies the fundamental difference between the relationships of Russia and Ukraine, and China and Taiwan.
China and Taiwan are economic partners. Between 1991 and March 2020 Taiwan’s investment in China totaled $188.5 billion, more than China’s investment in the United States. In 2019, the value of cross-strait trade was $149.2 billion. China is Taiwan’s largest trading partner. China and Taiwan are ethnically the same people, enjoying an enormous bounty of cross strait commerce, culture, student exchanges, and other ties signifying a growing relationship not an adversarial one. What incentive would China have to drop bombs on one of its best customers?
Any cross-strait violence would affect US-China relations; Ukraine has little effect on the already poor state of US-Russia relations. Chinese investment in the U.S. economy is over $145 billion. U.S. investment in China passed $1 trillion. China is the second largest foreign holder of U.S. government debt. If something interfered with all that commerce, China would have to find a way to use unfinished iPhones as food.
One of the problems with the sanctions Biden is claiming he’s going to use to punish Russia is how unintegrated Russia is into the world economy after so many years of sanctions. What’s left that will sting? Biden promises “economic consequences like none [Putin]’s ever seen.” But the Panama Papers show much of the so-called oligarch money, including Putin’s, is not in the U.S. or its allies’ banking systems anyway. The oft-discussed SWIFT international banking system is run as a neutral entity out of Belgium, and Russia cannot be blocked from it by any U.S. “sanction.”
Germany is temporarily halting certification of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, but no one is talking about tearing it down. And if U.S. sanctions drive up gas prices without affecting the situation on the ground in Ukraine, who is sanctioning whom?
China on the other hand is deeply vulnerable to sanctions and disruptions of commerce following an attack on Taiwan. The risk in calculable dollars is beyond any gain owning Taiwan would bring; imagine the impact of closing U.S. ports to Chinese cargo vessels.
On the military side, Russia was able to literally drive into Ukraine, something the mighty Red Army has been perfecting since 1945. Taiwan famously is an island, and a Chinese amphibious invasion would scale beyond the Normandy landings. Taiwan fields Harpoon missiles with the range to put Chinese forces under fire almost as they leave port. Tactically there is no comparison between the flat plains of the Ukraine and the rocky coast of Taiwan. Nobody undertakes an invasion they are likely to lose.
An invasion of Taiwan would leave China isolated and economically crippled. Not so for Russia and Ukraine where the benefits to Russia clearly outweighed the risk. Taiwan is not Ukraine is not Taiwan.
BONUS II: Deterrence in Ukraine and Taiwan
The answer is one failed in Ukraine, one has kept the peace. The question is, going forward, is the model the strategic clarity of NATO’s Article 5 or the strategic ambiguity of the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act.
The principle of collective defense is at the very heart of NATO, created by a 1949 Treaty. Its history is embedded in WWII, when the Nazis gained a massive advantage in the earliest days of the war by playing the various European nations against each other, picking off territory while London and Paris bickered over what to do. NATO was be the solution. Article 5 of the NATO treaty says “An armed attack against one or more of the [signers] shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them… will assist the Party or Parties so attacked.” The critical points are that the treaty is inclusionary — all NATO members, large or small — and exclusionary in that it only applies to NATO members. An attack on NATO member Poland triggers Article 5. An attack on Ukraine or Taiwan, not NATO members, does not.
The 1979 Taiwan Relations Act (TRA; also the U.S.-PRC Joint Communique) grew out of Mainland China dictator Mao’s threat to “liberate” Taiwan and Nationalist dictator Chiang Kai-shek’s demand for U.S. support to reclaim the Mainland. With the Korean War sopping up American blood, Washington had no desire to join what would have been a land war to rival WWII. Instead, it established diplomatic relations with Taiwan, and signed a mutual defense treaty in 1954. That lasted until 1979, when the U.S. switched its diplomatic recognition from the people of Taiwan to the people of the Mainland (China; but note the diplomatic wording) and Congress enacted the Taiwan Relations Act. The TRA listed two obligations to Taiwan: to sell it arms and to maintain the U.S.’ capacity “to resist any resort to force or other forms of coercion” against Taiwan.
The actual wording in the TRA is instructive: “Peace and stability in the area are matters of international concern… any effort to determine the future of Taiwan by other than peaceful means, including by boycotts or embargoes is considered a threat to the peace and security of the Western Pacific area and of grave concern to the United States.” This represents diplomatic brilliance, and came to be known as “strategic ambiguity,” a policy understood to mean the U.S. doesn’t have to defend Taiwan, but it can. The circumstances and means of defense are left unspoken. China matched this with a policy of “strategic patience” (antagonists argue China will not wait forever, but China also understands the time between now and forever is long.)
The most important thing about the TRA is it works. The Mainland has not invaded Taiwan. Despite changes in leadership as dramatic as Mao (albeit in 1976) to Deng to Xi the Mainland has not invaded. Despite Taiwan changing from military dictatorship to democracy, the Mainland has not invaded. Despite global changes including the Korean and Vietnam wars where China and the U.S. fought each other directly, development of nuclear weapons by China, fall of the Soviet Union, the Mainland has not invaded. The Chinese military has gone from peasants with rifles to a blue water navy and the Mainland has not invaded. China has gone from agrarian isolation to an essential part of the industrialized global economy, and the Mainland has not invaded. Ukraine happened, and the Mainland has not invaded.
The irony is deterrence worked in Ukraine, at least from Putin’s point of view. It prevented the U.S. from getting involved in the shooting war between Russia and Ukraine. The NATO treaty was written to compel its signatories to act once someone moved against them (the treaty was obviously written with the Soviet Union in mind though Article 5 has only been invoked once, following 9/11, and then mostly for show.) As Putin readied to invade Ukraine, Biden threw away any trace elements of strategic ambiguity by declaring early and often NATO would not intervene and the U.S. would not unilaterally enter the fighting. It was as green a light as could be for Putin. ‘Round the other side of the world, Sino-Asia sleeps at peace knowing everything is on the table should the Mainland invade but nothing is at risk should it not. What better example of deterrence working?
The concern now is moves in both hemispheres to formalize redlines. Much talk will be devoted post-invasion as to whether Ukraine should join NATO, feign at joining NATO, or promise never to join NATO. Joining or something akin will be the wrong answer. It was in fact the rigidity of NATO’s promise that saw it fail, again, in Ukraine as in Crimea. Putin understands this and uses it — judo master that he is — against his adversary. NATO prescribes war whether the broader circumstances (of say energy dependence on Russian gas) make that seem wise. It is an exploitable flaw. The good news is Europe is again at a stasis point for the time being, Ukraine seemingly headed toward a resolution that provides Russia its buffer zone no matter what it is all spun as in the western media.
The risk lies in Asia, where bullish elements are tempted to disturb an equally functional power status quo, and jeez, it’s Joe “Regime Change” Biden and his gaffes again. At a CNN town hall in October 2021, the host asked Biden if the U.S. would defend Taiwan. He said “Yes, we have a commitment to do that,” another gaffe-erino which the White House quickly walked back into the realm of strategic ambiguity. But post-Ukraine, some hawks want that clarity and are pushing for a formal, Article 5-like declaration. In their perfect world, that Asian Article 5 would include not only Taiwan and the U.S., but also Japan, Korea, Australia, the Philippines, and maybe others (the U.S. has various types of self-defense treaties already with many Asian nations.)
The justifications for such moves often make no sense in the face of the current TRA strategy’s multi-decade success. Some say because Beijing ramped up its rhetoric and shipbuilding (a test of resolve!) we need to do something to match that. But wouldn’t a guarantee to go to war for Taiwan make those on Taiwan who want to declare independence that much more reckless? There are those in Congress who want a more formal agreement (if you think the Israel lobby is powerful, check how Taiwan’s punches above its weight.) The ever-pugilistic Council on Foreign Relations wants strategic unambiguity as a show of force.
Joe Biden will come under some pressure to “do something” (the scariest words in Washington) following the clusterflutz in Ukraine. This would be a very, very risky move. Remember, for deterrence to be credible, it does not need to depend on a willingness to commit anything like suicide in the face of a challenge, but rather must carry the risk that the deterrer is likely to do something that is “fraught with the danger of war.” Strategic ambiguity is enough. Article 5 and anything like it to come in the Pacific purposefully ties its signatories’ hands. The Taiwan Relations Act purposefully leaves all options open to deal with the complex realities of the Sino-Pacific. History shows which one works and which one does not. A more aggressive posture does not resolve the root issues across the Taiwan Strait, it only risks exacerbating them.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Posted in Biden, Democracy, Embassy/State, Military, Trump
April 8, 2022 // 4 Comments »
Does anyone know what the hell Joe Biden is doing in Ukraine? Americans must feel like a high school substitute teacher. America turns its back for five minutes after having won the Cold War, and Joe Biden has restarted it in the back row. No address to the nation, no white papers, just “Putin attacked Ukraine and it is an existential threat we must respond to.” Didn’t we used to vote on this kind of thing?
Engagement is a given. But what is the end point for Joe, the moment we announce we won? In Ukraine, no one knows. By starting this intervention with the promise not to send NATO into actual combat, Biden sent a clear signal to Putin — if you are willing with your overwhelming military advantage over Ukraine to spend the blood and treasure, you win. Putin’s goal is the creation of some sort of buffer state between him and NATO, so Putin can win whether Kiev physically stands or tumbles. A “win” for the US side requires Putin to retreat in shame. Breaking things is always easier than getting someone to admit they were wrong.
Biden has two weapons to deploy: guns and sanctions. Can either create a win?
While Ukraine has antitank weapons and rifles, Putin has hypersonic missiles and lots of tanks. If a win for him includes a scenario where Kiev is reduced to looking like Detroit, how will any of the weapons the US sends matter? Infantry-based proxy ground warfare can delay a mechanized army but not defeat it, forestall a Ukrainian defeat but not prevent it, when its only goal is greater destruction. Notice when Zelensky showcases photos of kids with guns and old women making Molotovs and then the Russians target “civilians” an apartment complex at a time?
Those are poor odds in a war of attrition. Ukraine boasts it destroyed 509 Russian tanks, almost all using shoulder fired missiles. Maybe; one of the techniques of modern propaganda is to throw out some outrageous number, challenge people to disprove it, and then shout “you can’t disprove it so I’m right.” So no proof. But history suggests 509 man-on-tank kills is ridiculous. During Gulf War 1.0, one of the largest tank battles of modern times at 73 Easting saw Coalition forces destroy only 160 Iraqi tanks, and that was using the M-1 tank with its sophisticated aiming tech and night vision. Even at the famed Battle of the Bulge only 700 tanks from both sides were destroyed.
There are similar reasons to be skeptical of Ukrainian claims of 15,000 dead Russians in three weeks. That would be double the number killed on Iwo Jima in five weeks of fighting, or at Gettysburg on both sides in the whole battle. It is about four times the total US losses in Iraq over 17 years. Ukraine also claims to have killed five Russian generals, five more general officers that have been killed in all the wars the United States have fought since WW II. Same for the claims Russia is running out of food, gas, and tires. Same for the social media war; how many divisions does Facebook control?
The theory of sanctions is that they will place such as squeeze on Russian oligarchs Putin will be forced to withdraw from Ukraine. Putin, otherwise portrayed as a dictator who answers to no one, will supposedly listen to these men complain someone seized their yacht and cause Putin to reverse a foreign policy that he otherwise believes benefits Russia in the long run. The US has been piling sanctions on these same oligarchs for decades, with a new, tougher, round each time Putin made his moves against Georgia, Grozny, and Crimea. None of those sanctions compelled a withdrawal and none have stopped Putin from making his subsequent move against Ukraine. Effective, no, but points for creativity: there’s a plan to strip Putin’s “Eva Braun” (you can’t make this up) of her old Olympic medals in hopes she’ll withhold nooky Lysistrata-like until Putin, sorry, withdraws.
Another problem with sanctions is they are nowhere near strong enough to actually hurt. Goofy yacht warfare aside, Biden’s ban on Russian petroproducts accounts for only some one percent of Russia’s output. NATO allies are not able to participate fully without crippling their own economies. But loopholes amid half-measures are only part of the problem. Having grown used to slapping sanctions casually against lesser countries like Cuba and North Korea, Biden has limited understanding of their effects against a globally-connected economy. Such sanctions have the potential to cause grave fallout because unlike say Cuba, Russia can fight back.
Though the goal of sanctions is to punish very specific Russians, known by name, in a position to influence Putin, concern on world markets drove up prices of crude oil, natural gas, wheat, copper, nickel, aluminum, fertilizers, and gold. A grain and metals shortage now looms, even in early days of this spillover effect. While the cost to oligarchs is unknown, the affect on economies the US should be courting, not hurting, is clear. Central Asia’s economies are now caught up in the sanctions shock. These former Soviet states are strongly connected to the Russian economy through trade and outward labor migration. They will be as likely to blame the US as Russia for their problems, converting potential US allies into adversaries. We have also yet to see what counter-moves Russia will make toward the West, to include nationalization of Western capital. Russian fertilizer export restrictions are putting pressure on global food production. Russia could also restrict exports of nickel, palladium, and industrial sapphires, the building blocks for batteries, catalytic converters, and microchips. Unlike supposedly targeted sanctions, these would spank global markets broadly.
Biden is in the process of discovering sanctions are a blunt instrument. It will be a diplomatic challenge he is not likely up to to keep economic fallout from spilling over into political dissention across a Europe already not sure where it stands on “tough” sanctions.
Bad as all that sounds, some of the worst blowback from Biden’s Ukraine policy is happening with China. During the only Cold War years Biden remembers, China was mostly a sideshow and certainly not vying to be the world’s largest economy. Without seemingly understanding the world is no longer bipolar, the West versus the Soviet bloc, Joe Biden actually may do even more harm than he understands right now.
Russia is a big country that has committed only a small portion of its military to Ukraine. It absolutely does not need Chinese help to prosecute the war, as Biden claims. Biden is unnecessarily antagonizing China, who should be more or less neutral in this but instead now is being positioned by Biden as an enemy of the United States and an ally of Russia. China buys oil from Russia but that does not translate into some sort of across-the-board support for Russian foreign policy a la 1975. Biden, by threatening China with sanctions of its own, by likening Ukraine to Taiwan, and by essentially demanding of Beijing that they are with us or against us threatens to turn China just the wrong way. Economic spillover from Russia is one thing; disturbing one of the world’s largest trading relationships is another.
As the Wall Street Journal points out, China’s basic approach of not endorsing Moscow’s aggression but resisting Western efforts to punish Russia has garnered global support. The South African president blames the war on NATO. Brazil’s president refused to condemn Russia. India and Vietnam, essential partners for any China strategy, are closer to China than the US in their approach to the war. Biden seems oblivious to the opportunities this gap creates for China.
In my own years as a diplomat I heard often from smaller countries’ representatives about the “America Tax,” the idea America’s foreign policy dalliances end up costing everyone something. Whether it is a small military contribution to the Iraq War effort, or a disruption in shipping, nobody gets away free when America is on a crusade. This cost is built in to those smaller nations’ foreign policy. But when the Big Dog starts in on sanctions which will impact globally against a target like Russia, the calculus changes from a knowing sigh (“The Americans are at it again…”) to real fear. Many nations the US needs as part of its alliances don’t trust its ability to manage economic consequences to protect them, even if America is even aware of those consequences. US moves against Russia’s central bank become a weapon they fear could one day be directed against them as America seeks to weaponize the global economic system. Russia can weather a nasty storm; a smaller economy cannot. Chinese propaganda about the need for alternative economic arrangements that limit Western power are significantly more influential now than a month ago.
So in the end were left with the question of what fundamental US interest is being served by Biden‘s intervention in Ukraine at what cost. There’s always the sort of silliness that fuels Washington, things like “send a message” or “stand up for what’s right,” ambiguous goals that tend to get people killed without accomplishing anything — strategic hubris. Biden has fallen deep into the Cold War trap, and cannot accept there is little that can be done, and back away from the Ukraine to spare further bloodshed. Every world problem is not America’s to resolve and every world problem cannot be resolved by America.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Posted in Biden, Democracy, Embassy/State, Military, Trump
April 6, 2022 // 3 Comments »
Has Joe Biden gone loco over Ukraine? In a speech in Warsaw, Biden proclaimed of Russian President Vladimir Putin “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.” Biden also called Putin a butcher.
Then in a meeting with the Polish president, Biden said the U.S. regards NATO’s Article 5 as a “sacred commitment.” Biden called Warsaw a “sacred place” in the history of Europe and in “humankind’s unending search for freedom.” Biden went on to describe the conflict in Ukraine as “a battle between democracy and autocracy, between liberty and repression, between a rules-based order and one governed by brute force.” Biden’s choice of historical antidotes was a bit disingenuous, as he cited the Nazi siege of Leningrad as equivalent to the evil in Ukraine but left out the equally brutal Soviet siege of Berlin. He also slipped in a sophomoric ruble and rubble joke which was less Churchillian then churlish. Biden’s talk about unity begged the question of why he was standing alone on that podium. Where were the French, British, and German leaders? And who promotes democracy by calling for a coup anyway?
That the White House later downplayed Biden’s remarks about regime change only underlined how out of touch Joe really is. Biden also made a multiple-part gaffe when addressing U.S. troops on the Ukrainian border, saying “And you’re going to see when you’re there, I don’t know if you’ve been there, you’re going to see women, young people, standing in the middle of the damn tank.”
For all his rhetoric in Warsaw, pretty much since Russia invaded Ukraine Biden has not said more than a word about inflation, the economy, unemployment, gas prices other than they are a price for all Americans to pay for a free Ukraine, Covid people, transpeople, black lives people, Hunter’s laptop, Ketanji Brown Jackson and her nomination hearings, Afghanistan, China except in the Ukrainian context, the Iran nuclear negotiations, unfulfilled promises about canceling student loans, January 6, or much of anything else.
The dog was been wagged. Again. From a cold start a month ago when few American spent a moment on “whither Ukraine” we as a nation are buying into the notion that nothing more important could exist. Invoking the term “sacred” twice in one speech, more than the Pope on a typical day, and claiming this all is a battle “between liberty and repression,” Biden is rallying Americans to a new Crusade. And once again, as it was in failures strewn across the Middle East, the goal is “regime change.” In other speeches Biden, with the Kennedy School chorus behind him, has threatened retaliation if Russia uses nuclear or chemical weapons, even in non-NATO Ukraine.
Our new bestest friend in this Crusade is being transformed into one of the goodest, a “sacred place” in “humankind’s unending search for freedom.” The real Poland does not exactly have a spotless record searching for freedom. Many Poles enthusiastically supported the Holocaust. Poland is currently ruled by a right-wing government people were calling Trumpian just a few weeks ago. Poland is buddies with Hungary, which opposes further sanctions and boasts a proudly illiberal prime minister hated by progressives. The European Court of Justice recently cleared the way to cut billions in aid to Poland on the grounds it failed to uphold the rule of law. Only a month before the invasion, Poland attended a Defend Europe conference seeking to shift attention from Putin to the pan-European issues of immigration and demographic decline. Poland maintains what it calls “LGBT-Free Zones.” So sacred space or not, Poland is no angel. What it is is the latest in a long line of paid vassals for American foreign policy, the new Pakistan, all faults over-looked, the recipient of billions, and depot for the new war.
Biden is claiming the benefits of a war-time president without most of the war, saber-rattling in a very dangerous way, as if no lessons had been learned over the last two decades. He is promoting once again regime change at America’s whim. But this time not with some scabby little state in the Middle East, but with the world’s largest nation, one armed with nuclear weapons, a still powerful economy, a massive conventional army, and diplomatic power from the UN to India to China to Iran to wield.
In laying out the evidence Biden has truly lost his mind, let’s examine the case for regime change in Russia. Certainly a month ago no one spoke of this, a clue Russia’s fundamentals are solid enough. Whatever happens in Ukraine is far below the threshold of overturning an otherwise stable government. Putin has been in power for 22 years, ironically installed in a coup that threw out the more or less pro-western Boris Yeltsin. Putin has had plenty of time to stock the ranks of the architects of any overthrow, the military and intelligence services, with plenty of loyalists. Reports of arrests in the army or in the intel services come exclusively from non-credible sources, anti-Soviet think tanks and propagandists. As for the oligarchs, how many divisions do they control?
Further to the madness there is also the threat of nuclear war. Biden just drew a new red line, not just at NATO’s border but by claiming he will retaliate if Russia uses nuclear or chemical weapons in Ukraine. It seems almost nostalgic to remember when we feared imminent nuclear war just because Trump sent a Tweet about Rocket Man. Had Trump demanded regime change in Russia they’d be talking 25th Amendment on Late Night with some justification.
The clearest evidence Biden has absolutely no idea what he is doing is how certain he is to fail. If regime change is the new U.S. foreign policy goal, and it does not happen, then Biden is the loser. Why would a sane man take the short term gain of looking like a wartime president with the certainty by the November midterms he will look like a failed president? Dude is loco.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Posted in Biden, Democracy, Embassy/State, Military, Trump
April 4, 2022 // 7 Comments »
The view that war is politics by other means, the realist idea nations pursue strategic goals with some sort of calculation behind them, is not for us. Americans must reduce everything to good versus evil, democracy versus autocracy, light versus dark. Leaders throughout history have sold wars with this b.s.; America’s problem is we seem to actually believe it’s true. Let’s see how it plays out in the real world.
Imagine facing an enemy who refuses to surrender despite overwhelming odds, leaving the other side the choice between a protracted urban war or an air attack to resolve the situation. In the case of Putin and Kiev, our nightly news is flooded with images of the targeting of civilians and screams from Washington of war crimes. The American answer in an earlier war, however, was the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, two targets at the end of a long and ugly war where women and children were casually incinerated to save we were told additional casualties on the ground. It was OK because America is basically good. If you twist that logic hard enough it comes out we did the Japs a favor by nuking their cities. The cries of “but it’s different!” because of whatever, Pearl Harbor, are left unanswered by the blackened ghosts of the Japanese who died not knowing what a favor the US did them.
And that action in 1945 (amplified by the destruction by policy of whole villages in Korea and Vietnam, never mind the scorched earth of Fallujah) leaves the United States in a unique position it pretends not to know about. As Putin and others may talk about nuclear threats, history records that we alone actually used nuclear weapons, against civilian targets. Little bitches like Putin or Kim may issue threats but only the United States has carried through with it. It’s a helluva basis for morality.
America’s simplistic morality means it cannot ascribe a legitimate strategic goal to an adversary; he must instead be crazy, insane, new Hitler, bonkers, thug, bully, war criminal, driven to restore Imperial Russia, a danger to his own people, bent on world domination, Saddam, Assad, Qaddafi, anything out of the Bond villian community. Local or regional problems thus self-inflate into existential threats to democracy. We can’t just beat Putin in Ukraine, we have to destroy his economy, regime change him, murder him outright to even the moral score since he dared challenge our world view. This causes us to make serious mistakes.
In Putin’s case, few allow that maybe he really is scared of NATO forces walking right to his border and seeks a buffer zone in the Ukraine. That is certainly what he has said (we don’t believe him.) At the end of the Cold War the west denuclearized new nation states like Ukraine, redrew their borders in line with western aims, and added Poland and the Balkan states to NATO. Most of all, with the fall of the Soviet Union, the west did not dismantle NATO. The alliance, formed for the collective defense of western Europe against the Soviets, was left not only to stand after the Soviet Union was gone, but thrust eastward, claiming territory that would have been among NATO’s first targets had the Cold War gone hot.
Imagine the reaction inside Moscow to its worst fears being shoved at it at its weakest moment, and if you can, you may understand Putin’s not-crazy goals. As the west turned up the heat instead of bringing Russia in from the cold, NATO went from a defensive alliance to a political cudgel. From Putin’s point of view, he faces an adversary which actually believes it has the moral responsibility to dictate global political arrangements, even in regions that are more important to him than they are to the Washington.
Putin tried to make his needs known, that Ukraine should stay neutral. His proffer was met by a coup (likely abetted by the US) which brought pro-US nationalists to power. The response was, almost had to have been, Putin’s invasion of Crimea. These are not wars of choice in the way say Putin invading Iraq might be, but wars of strategic necessity to him. Had the US had the philosophical ability to understand this, it might have found a reasonable negotiating strategy instead of poking the bear in one of his most sensitive areas until he reacted.
That is the background, but why attack Ukraine now? In its arrogance America has decided it all has to do with America, actually the least important factor here. So we hear about Trump and Putin’s bromance, wonder if Biden is weak, speculate the horrible ending in Afghanistan is at fault. But if you think like Putin, your focus is elsewhere. He looks at the warpigs in charge today, the same Obama team from the 2014 overthrow, Blinken, Sullivan, Nuland, and Susan Rice. And it was then-VP Biden who personally ran Obama’s Ukraine policy. He knows CIA paramilitaries are on the ground in Ukraine. Then in November 2021 the US and Ukraine signed the Charter on Strategic Partnership, asserting Kiev’s right to NATO membership. The Charter was a policy statement by the Biden administration, and an intolerable prospect for Russia. By imagining Putin as nothing but a megalomaniac, America unknowingly drew a red line for him. It is easy to imagine a future historian uncovering documents showing the planning for the current invasion began at that same time.
Convinced NATO will never reject Ukraine, Putin took his own steps to block it. By invading, he created a “frozen conflict” knowing NATO cannot realistically admit countries that don’t control their borders (how to apply Article Five when a country is already at war as it joins NATO?) Such frozen conflicts already cripple Georgia, Crimea, and Moldova, as well as the semi-independent areas of Donbas and Luhansk. Add now Ukraine to that list. If you understand this, you also know what happens next in Ukraine: not much apart from better defining borders and the new lines of control. No need to drive much further west, Putin has already got most of what he wanted. And no need to worry about nukes, they are not needed for Putin’s strategic purpose.
This is why sanctions won’t accomplish much besides raising the price of gas for Americans. Putin is chasing a goal which has eluded Russia for three decades. Sanctions will not cause him to give that up, any more than previous sanctions caused him to hesitate striking. Russia and America are talking past one another, identifying different motivations and different end games.
The sad news is Ukraine does not realize it is a pawn in a larger struggle. The Ukrainians bought the big lie in the 90s that if they denuclearized America would protect them. They now join the long list of countries goaded by the US into fighting to the last man in support of American foreign policy goals (ask the Iraqi Kurds, and later the Sunnis, how that worked out.) Ukrainians are very brave, but it was Americans that put them in harm’s way by using their country as a crush zone, with little consideration for the people now paying the price.
Biden wants all the points due a wartime president without actually going to war; he is practicing political opportunism not statecraft. That will collapse mightily on old Joe if Putin declares victory first. So soon enough Zelensky will get the call from the White House letting him know time is up, he’ll have to take a deal with Russia to reset the status quo for a faux “win.” Biden needs the war to end before it starts to look like he lost. Zelensky can reject this and go down hard, like Diem in Vietnam in the 1960s who didn’t realize his time in America’s lap was up, or he can leave Ukraine a “hero,” beaten but never broken, book and biopic movie deal, presidential medal ceremony in the White House, yada yada.
Biden at some point (it took decades in Afghanistan) will realize he misunderstood his adversary and seek to cut and run. It seems we are close. Zelensky’s propaganda campaign, the atrocity of the day/hero of the day scheme, has failed to bring NATO into the war. Americans get bored easily. He’s just about jumped the shark. If Russians bombing a children’s hospital isn’t enough, there is no enough.
International affairs researcher Matthew Waldman wrote, “‘strategic empathy’ isn’t about agreeing with an adversary’s position. It is about understanding it so you can fashion an appropriate response.” That is the key to some sort of resolution in Ukraine, and the key to a more effective foreign policy for the US going forward. This is all uncomfortable for most Americans, raised on a steady diet of if we do it is right and moral, if they do it it is evil. But given the dubious success record of this policy across US-supported dictatorships of the Middle East, and Central and South America, and failures in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen and likely soon, Ukraine, maybe a new way forward is worth a look.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Posted in Biden, Democracy, Embassy/State, Military, Trump
March 24, 2022 // 3 Comments »
The amount of disinformation coming out of the Ukraine war is unsurpassed in modern history. Unlike the glory days when outlets like CNN sent knowledgeable reporters into combat zones looking for actual information, today most MSM coverage is based on borrowed social media video, or just. made. up.
The problem with the former, video from social media, is it lacks context. Here’s eight seconds of a tank blowing up. Where was it shot? When? Was the explosion caused by a mine, a missile, or something internal to the tank? Is the tank Russian or Ukrainian? In most cases the media outlet has no real idea of the answers to those questions, never mind who shot the video towards what end. Even if they tumble on to the basic who-what-where, the exploding tank video is devoid of context. Was that the lead tank hit, stopping the Russian advance toward a village? Or was it a Russian tank that lingered in an open field and got picked off in a lucky shot, strategically without much consequence. At that point it is just war porn, a little jolt for the viewer. Such videos were immensely popular among the terrorists in Iraq; nearly every one captured had some random video on his phone of a US vehicle being blown apart by a roadside IED. Now the same thing is on MSNBC.
The bigger problem is the media’s willingness to make things up, and then reinforce each other’s “reporting” by agreeing on what they have made up. Let’s disassemble one such episode.
The media found online photos of a Russian convoy some 40 miles long. Within hours those images had become a story — the Russians had run out of gas just miles from Kiev, stalling their offensive. That soon led to think pieces claiming this was evidence of Russian military incompetency, corruption, and proof Ukraine would soon win. Soon enough Reuters was agreeing with CNN who agreed with NYT: stalled, no gas.
Leaving aside the idea that perhaps no one on earth absent some Russian generals actually knew why the convoy was not moving, the media created a reason and confirmed each other. If you follow the right people on Twitter you can sometimes watch them form these consensuses on issues, journalist all thousands of miles away from the scene with no information on hand nudging one another into the narrative. It’s kind of like watching a time-lapse film of water freezing into ice. So are the Russians out of gas?
Consider the lack of supporting evidence. Fuel travels through the same logistics chain that beans and bullets do, and the Russians do not seem to lack for ammunition. Artillery shells are big heavy things, and there seem to be plenty of those making it to the troops on the ground. The Russians have over a million men in the field and absent one blurry TikTok purportedly showing some shoplifting, seem to be feeding them. If a million men needed to shoplift three meals a day it would not be hard to discover. We have also seen no evidence Russians are looting fuel dumps as they make their way across Ukraine. Russians are flying some 200 air sorties a day, many of which are helicopter flights from inside Ukraine. Each can use hundreds of gallons of fuel a day, never mind ammunition and spare parts, all of which must be hauled in. And look past that single stalled convoy; Russian armored thrusts are moving across vast swaths of land to the south without any concern for fuel. The empirical evidence suggests if anything there is plenty of gas. If not, that “stalled” convoy on the outskirts of Kiev is only about 100 miles from the Belarus border, a very short transit for fuel trucks on paved roads Russia controls.
On the other side, if the Ukrainian forces had any information the Russians were low on gas their strategy would look different. You might see a full-on effort to attack fuel dumps, using Ukrainian air or drone forces, or even ground troops. You’d see Ukrainians blowing up gas stations and fuel handling facilities as they retreated. Instead of the exciting video of Javelins hitting tanks, you’d see everything from hand grenades to Molotovs blowing up fuel trucks. A tank without gas is already dead, what they military calls a soft kill, at much lower expense than destroying a modern tank. You might also see the Ukrainians trying for a much more mobile defense, ceding territory and making the Russians chase them until they run out of gas. There have been no signs of any of this, mostly the opposite actually as the Ukrainians set up static defensive lines on the outskirts of cities. There is literally nothing to support the MSM’s contention that the convoy ran out of gas.
There were also MSM reports the Ukrainians had made significant attacks against the parked vehicles. While no doubt some skirmishes must have taken place along the 40 mile stretch, the fact that the convoy remained bunched up nose-to-bumper and not dispersed suggests no one was very worried about being attacked. The soldiers openly slept on the ground, it is not clear from the photos that air defenses were aggressively deployed, and overall it looks more like soldiers killing time than soldiers preparing to repel attackers. Though the MSM was in no position to know anything about the soldiers’ morale, they commented on it endlessly.
Of course the convoy did start to move, and in a very predictable way. The textbook approach to using armor against an urban area is to surround it, besiege it, cut off food, water, power, and communications, and then if the defenders will not surrender, use artillery to either force them out or destroy them. Such an attack has to be coordinated 360 degrees so if some troops arrive early they must wait for the others to show up. This is what is happening now in the city of Mariupol. What is not done is to drive straight into town, where the narrow streets grant cover to defenders. The “stalled” convoy appears to have waited until Russian forces advancing from the south had made sufficient progress toward Kiev before spreading out west of the city and beginning bombardment.
One convoy and one falsely reported story matter little in the middle of a vast war. But they serve as a clear example of how far the media has fallen, to the point where outlets like the BBC have become little more than propaganda mouthpieces, creating a fake narrative out of whole cloth and peddling it to an increasingly non-critical western media consumer.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Posted in Biden, Democracy, Embassy/State, Military, Trump
March 21, 2022 // 5 Comments »
In the opening days of Iraq War 2.0, a wiser but not yet-General David Petraeus famously asked “Tell me how this ends.” Petraeus understood how wars end is more important than why they started or how they were carried out. So how does the current war in Ukraine end?
Petraeus, for his part, said with a straight face “Russia doesn’t have the numbers and beyond that everyone in the entire country hates them and most of the adults are willing to take action against them, whether it’s to take up weapons or to be human shields.” While accurately describing the roots of his own failure in Iraq, Petraeus misses the point. America’s goal was to create a neocon version of democracy in the Middle East. Putin seeks something much simpler: a classic buffer territory between him and NATO. He does not care about hearts and minds. He only has to break things.
The early days of the Ukraine war have been dominated by propaganda riven with sympathy for the plucky defenders. This purposefully created a false sense Russian setbacks and a misunderstanding of Russian strategy. The Russians are executing a standard mechanized warfare maneuver in line with their goals, attacking south from Belarus to link up with forces attacking northward from Crimea. When they link up south of Kiev, Ukraine will be split into two. Kiev may be bypassed, or it may be destroyed, but that is secondary to the larger strategic maneuver. Another Russian thrust from east to west seeks to cut the nation into quarters so Ukrainian forces cannot reinforce one another. Forget all the silliness about the Russians running out of gas; their supply lines are short (many Russian forces are within 70 miles of their own border), protected, and over decent roads. This is what is happening on the ground and Ukrainian forces are in no position to do anything but delay it. Watching war through a smartphone from a peaceful country may help you believe the Russian assault is going poorly but that is at odds with the facts. So here’s how that all ends.
The Best Case for Everyone is the Russians, perhaps under the guise of some humanitarian gesture, withdraw to the Russian-speaking areas of Ukraine and some strategic points, things like bridges and airports. Ukraine is essentially divided into two semi-states, the western half nominally under NATO control and the eastern half a Russian buffer zone with a new Iron Curtain in place. Putin settles back into his easy chair. His brush back pitch to Ukraine dealt out a serious spanking, he holds some new territory as a prize, he can announce victory at home, and his troops are better positioned if he needs to push west ever again. NATO meanwhile can also claim some measure of victory, validating all the propaganda about the valiant Ukrainian people. The status quo of Europe resets and after a decent interval the oil and gas restart flowing westward.
Putin made this strategy clear in his asks for a cease fire, that Ukraine accept demilitarization, declare itself neutral, and drop its bid to join NATO. He does not really want the cities, and he does not want to occupy a hostile population. That is why he agreed to safe corridors westward for refugees and why he has held back sustained shelling and rocketing of Kiev, for now. Depopulation aids Putin in neutering eastern Ukraine, and avoids later ethnic conflict between Ukrainian nationalists and the local Russian population.
The Next Best Case is NATO makes a secret agreement to keep Ukraine out of the alliance in return for Putin withdrawing in whole or in part (see above.) This is very tricky diplomacy, as it cannot appear NATO appeased Putin and it cannot seem in the eyes of the world that Putin “lost.” The Russians would be very tempted to leak the secret agreement to show they had achieved their goal, and the resulting denials from NATO and the US would seem shallow. The rest of eastern Europe would take note on who they could trust. This scenario is also unlikely, as it requires Russia to trade land for a promise from the West. Putin knows nothing short of a NATO strike can dislodge him from eastern Ukraine and thus has no incentive to leave.
A Very Bad Case would be a decision by Putin to occupy or destroy Ukraine, install a puppet government, and roll his army right to the Polish border as if it was 1975 all over again. Putin certainly is holding this out as a threat if Zelensky ignores western pleas to cut a deal. Russian troops are positioning to assault the cities. Ask people of Aleppo and Grozny if they think Putin would turn them loose.
The idea may prove tempting to Putin. He can claim full victory, be done forever with the Ukrainian problem, leave NATO looking emasculated, strike fear into the other former satellites, and leave Joe Biden out of a job in his self-proclaimed role as leader of the free world. Biden has overplayed his hand, not recognizing there is almost nothing he can do to affect the situation on the ground. Sanctions did not stop Putin from invading (Georgia, Crimea, Ukraine…) and sanctions will not cause Putin to retreat. Biden, like Putin, knows most Russian oil and gas exports are untouchable if he wants to keep the Europeans on the team.
But the biggest problem for Biden is history (and voters) remembering him as the president who watched the Iron Curtain rebuilt. Unlike Obama’s cool reaction to Putin invading Crimea in 2014, Biden has vowed to “save” Ukraine as if he was fighting Corn Pop again. By claiming in his State of the Union address that Putin had “shaken the very foundations of the free world,” Biden has created the impression he is going to put a stop to something of that scale. Such predictions carry an incredible political risk, especially for a commander in chief who also promised a weary America it is not going to war. As NBC’s Chuck Todd put it “I fear this is going to feel like a speech that didn’t age well.” Following the sad, embarrassing finale in Afghanistan, any ending in Ukraine that looks like a Putin win after all this saber rattling pretty much ends the effective portion of the Biden presidency.
That leaves only to consider The Horrible Case, where someone in NATO tries for a no-fly zone, or sets up a refugee protected zone, as was done in the former Yugoslavia. Ukrainian propaganda is aimed at making this happen; Zelensky knows partisans with rifles are only going to get him so far. He needs direct Western military intervention to survive. And a non-partisan 74 percent of Americans say NATO should impose a no-fly zone in Ukraine.
Consider the tinder in place. If you believe the CIA and US special forces are not on the ground already in Ukraine, parsing intel and advising, well… We know US spy planes and drones are overhead. Imagine an incident where an American is taken prisoner by the Russians. Imagine the US providing a weapons system that requires “trainers,” in the way Russian trainers manned ground-to-air facilities in past Cold War wars in South East Asia and the Middle East. Or maybe a border incident, real or imagined, with NATO member Poland to try and force NATO into the fight. Or a UN demand for some peacekeeping force stop Putin’s war crimes. Maybe a “one time surgical strike” for humanitarian reasons on a Russian column threatening a hospital?
Not on a menu is another Afghanistan (US or Soviet version) or some sort of open-ended Ukrainian insurgency. What Putin is doing is an old school war to grab territory, not changing allegiance among the Taliban. His supply routes are short, his troops fighting the modern battle they trained for, albeit outside Kiev and not in the Fulda Gap. Unlike Afghanistan, Ukraine has cities dependent on modern infrastructure, and cities are easily encircled, besieged and starved out, or just leveled.
Equally not going to happen is some sort of regime change inside Russia. Putin has been in charge for 22 years and controls the media, the military, and the intelligence services. Those were the people who brought Putin to power in Russia’s last coup. There is no means to the end the West wishes for, and no clear evidence the people of Russia want such as outcome in the first place. After all, a million pink hats in Washington accomplished… very little. A few protests scattered across the vastness of Russia are exaggerated for a Western audience. Western sanctions will not drive ordinary Russians to demand change. Remember how well US sanctions to bring about regime change have gone in Cuba, Venezuela, Iraq, Iran, and North Korea? Decades of sanctions have not changed Putin, and the new ones have no beef on them to change that. And as for the West’s dream of a coup, what could make life more interesting than the world’s second largest stockpile of nuclear weapons having no one firmly in charge?
Anything can happen, but Putin “losing” in Ukraine seems among the most unlikely of scenarios.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Posted in Biden, Democracy, Embassy/State, Military, Trump
March 18, 2022 // 7 Comments »
Deterrence works. Russia’s nukes are the only thing keeping the US from full-out war in Ukraine only six months after retreating from Afghanistan. So far, the unprecedented propaganda effort by the Ukraine and its helpers in the American mass media to drag the US and NATO directly into the fight has failed. But this struggle — for your mind space — is not over.
To understand what follows, you have to wipe away a lot of bullshit being slung your way. Putin is not insane, not a madman. He is carrying out a rational political-military strategy in Ukraine, seizing Russian-speaking territory such as Donbas, demilitarizing by force the eastern Ukraine, and most of all creating a physical buffer zone between himself and NATO. That zone may end at the Dnieper River with a loop around Odessa, or it may end at the Polish border, depending on how smoothly things go on the ground and on what level of “stay away” message Putin wishes to send to NATO. Putin is not making the first moves toward some greater conquest. All the bad takes saying “if we don’t stop Putin now, he’ll invade Moldova/Estonia/Poland/all Europe just like Hitler” ignores the part about the German military in WWII having some 18 million men under arms. The Russian army today has 1.3 million, the best of which are going to be in Ukraine for awhile.
Every war has its “is the juice worth the squeeze” question. In other words, is what you can realistically hope to achieve worth the cost of getting it? For Putin, that means solving his border problem at the cost of maybe a few thousand men killed and wounded and another dollop of weak sanctions. He understood the needs of Europe meant sanctions would never harm sales of the fossil fuels which make up most Russian exports. But no Paypal for you, comrade! Putin could also look to history and see how decades of sanctions have not changed much in Cuba, Venezuela, Iraq, Iran, and North Korea.
Putin most importantly also knew US/NATO would not fight him on the ground for fear of starting a nuclear war. That is exactly what nukes are for, and is the history of the Cold War in a sentence. I have nukes and that allows me to do certain things any way I want because they stay below the threshold of risking atomic war. This is why the US could destroy Quaddafi and Saddam (no nukes to deter) and why the US will never attack North Korea (nukes.) Being a nuclear superpower makes things easier; the US can fight all over Central America and the Middle East, and Russia in the ‘Stans, and none of that is important enough to consider using nukes to stop.
Putin knows that. Biden knows that, as does NATO. Ukraine, however, is still thinking it can change the game.
Ukraine knew on Day One no one was coming to its rescue, and its leaders know they don’t have enough men or weapons to defeat the Russians on their own. Their only hope to remain a unified nation (it is easy to imagine a divided Ukraine, Western Zone and Eastern (Russian) Zone as the end game) is outside help. A no-fly zone, some air strikes to blunt Russian advances. Something, anything.
That’s why every knucklehead in America right now is being blitzed with Ukrainian propaganda, and your brother-in-law is ready to head to Europe with his never-cleaned hunting rifle. The goal is to change public opinion such that a weak guy like Joe Biden starts to doubt himself. Ukrainian lobbyists from K Street take influential Senators to lunch, knowing they’ll return to their offices to find thousands of constituent emails demanding the US “do something.” The goal of Ukrainian propaganda is get Biden to take that Pentagon meeting laying out options for some limited bombing, or to listen to those analysts saying the US could set up a small no-fly zone on Ukraine’s western edge to show the Russians we mean business. Drop in some Special Forces. Something, anything. The goal of the propaganda is to get Biden to sign off on something (hopefully) small enough that it falls below the threshold of provoking a nuclear response. Is it necessary to say that is a very risky and delicate tasking?
The bad news is Ukrainian propaganda is working. A non-partisan
74 percent of Americans say NATO should impose a no-fly zone in Ukraine. And we are just getting started. We’ve had the hero phase with the non-existent Ghost of Kiev and the not surrendering but they surrendered brave Ukrainians, alongside the grandmas and supermodels with guns. We’ve had the Russians are going to kill us all phase, with the faux threat of invasion to the west and the faux scare the Russians were going to create a Chernobyl-like nuclear accident by shelling a power plant. We are currently moving into the not verifiable atrocities phase, where “reports” will claim the Russians are killing children, or using rape as a weapon, or targeting hospitals. Alongside it all is beef cake talk about Zelensky, the likes we haven’t seen since before the cancelations of Andrew Cuomo and Michael Avenatti. The fact-checking mania of Covid is history as America media removes all the filters on pro-Ukrainian content.
The quality of the propaganda is not important (any pile of scrap metal on snowy ground is breaking news of another Russian helo shot down, even if the metal has “Acme Junk Pile” written on it.) The quantity is important, the attempt to overwhelm American mindspace to the point where logic is shoved into the back corner. There is a growing cottage industry of “
experts” explaining how to can go to war without going to THAT kind of war.
Dissenting voices are few, and are often labeled as “Putin lovers,” with progressives and Late Night hurling homophobic slurs at them like high school kids.
It is not like America does not know how to step away from a fight which isn’t ours when we want to. Crimea, Chechnya, Rwanda, Hungary ’56, Czechoslovakia ’68, Afghanistan ’79, even to a certain extent in Syria 2016.
There are two battles now playing out over Ukraine. The one on the ground, and the one on your social media seeking to drag America into the mud. Only six months after the sad ending in Afghanistan, it is stunning to watch America again contemplate going to war for some abstract purpose far removed from our own core interests. And this time, with the risk of a nuclear exchange to remind us of our mistake, not just an inglorious departure from Kabul.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Posted in Biden, Democracy, Embassy/State, Military, Trump
