Crooked Bough News Round-up

— Election leaves Japan in a mess

 

at 10/29/24 9:09am

The Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which has ruled Japan for much of the past 70 years, lost its majority in the House of Representatives, which selects the prime minister. The leading opposition party, the Constitutional Democratic Party (CDP), picked up a lot of seats, but far from a majority. So conservatives in the LDP and liberals in the CDP will spend the next few days, or maybe weeks, trying to cobble together a governing coalition. When the dust finally settles, don’t expect to see any major change in Japan’s policy of dutifully following the United States to counter China’s rise. Komeito, the LDP’s once pacifist junior partner, has all but lost its pivotal role in Japanese politics. The new kingmakers in Tokyo tend to be anti-Beijing hawks. How did we get here? The LDP has been dogged by two major scandals. One had to do with the party’s significant ties to Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church, which became the target of media scrutiny after the assassination of Japan’s longest serving executive by a man who blamed the church for his family’s financial woes. “Moonies,” it turned out, had supplied campaign contributions and election workers for conservative pols. The other had to do with the failure of powerful party factions to report about $4 million in donations stored in illegal slush funds. The twin scandals led to the resignation of Fumio Kishida as LDP leader and prime minister. Eager to save their political lives, LDP pols chose a contrarian, Shigeru Ishiba, as new party leader and prime minister. He called the snap election, hoping that his clean reputation and relative popularity would save the day. Was he ever wrong! The right-wing LDP, which previously dominated the lower (but more important) house in parliament, lost 56 seats in Sunday’s election — falling from 247 to 191 seats in the 465-member body. Its partner, Komeito, also suffered a loss of eight seats (from 32 to 24). Together, they had enjoyed a supermajority that allowed them to pass legislation without much trouble. But no more. The CDP, Japan’s center-left party, gained 50 seats (from 98 to 148). An earlier version of CDP, the Democratic Party of Japan, ousted the LDP in 2009. But it had a rough ride in power, struggling first with U.S. complaints over its more autonomous foreign policy and then with the fallout from an earthquake and tsunami that led to a nuclear meltdown in northeastern Japan, a beleaguered economy, and lingering questions about the party’s leadership ability. Even after faring so well in Sunday’s election, the CDP may lack the magnetism to pull together a ruling coalition of 233 or more members. Yoshihiko Noda, the CDP leader, is negotiating with smaller parties. Ishiba, the LDP leader, also is bargaining — but in the short-run may have to rely on ad-hoc (policy by policy) compacts with other parties. Both are focused on Ishin (Japan Innovation Party), based in Osaka, which has become the third largest party with 38 seats, and the centrist Democratic Party for the People (DPP), which soared on Sunday from virtually nowhere to fourth largest (with 28 seats). The leaders of these two parties will probably decide the shape of Japan’s next government. Ishin is led by Nobuyuki Baba, who admires Donald Trump and embraces a populism that is left of the LDP on many economic and social issues (universal basic income, free education at all levels, same sex marriage, etc.) but aligned with the LDP on foreign policy. The party advocates higher defense spending to counter China and North Korea, as well as a possible revision of the country’s anti-war Constitution. In a poll before the election, Ishin candidates were the most likely (90 percent) to agree that “Japan should possess counter-attack capabilities.” Baba also believes the country should have greater control over U.S. nuclear weapons in Japan. DPP is led by Yuichiro Tamaki, a former finance ministry official who has tried to strike a balance between the LDP and CDP. The party campaigned on very concrete, mostly economic issues in this election, calling for air conditioners in school gyms and a cut in the consumption tax. On security issues, it quietly followed a hawkish line, favoring a stronger defense and a revision of the pacifist constitution. What this means is that Japan today is still dominated by relatively conservative politicians who, especially on foreign policy, want to maintain the status quo. One of the most overlooked results of Sunday’s election was the continued decline of Komeito, which has helped the LDP govern since 2012. It didn’t just lose a quarter of its seats; it also lost its leader, Keiichi Ishii, who failed to win re-election in a Tokyo suburb. Komeito, the political arm of Soka Gakkai, a controversial Buddhist sect, is the closest thing to a religious party in Japan. Although it eventually modified its ideology, it initially was ardently pacifist, favoring the anti-war constitution and opposing the dispatch of Japanese “self-defense forces” (or SDF, the euphemism for the nation’s military). As the LDP’s junior partner, Komeito provided a kind of brake on some of the leading party’s more hawkish positions. In every election cycle, the party produced thousands of loyal foot soldiers who helped get out the vote for both Komeito and LDP candidates. Last year however, Daisaku Ikeda, the party’s founder and Soka Gakkai’s longtime leader, died — sapping some of the movement’s enthusiasm. One wonders if Komeito will ever recover its political vitality, or if it will continue to check the government’s turn toward a more assertive if not outright aggressive foreign policy. We should know a lot more soon.

[Category: China, Japan]

— Israel bans the last lifeline of aid to Palestinians

 

at 10/29/24 7:12am

On Monday Israel’s parliamentary body known as the Knesset passed two laws banning the United Nations’ Palestinian refugee agency (UNRWA) from operating in Israel, and in regions under Israel’s control. This comes months after Israel claimed that members of UNRWA were either in Hamas or had Hamas connections, even asserting that some participated in the Oct. 7 attacks of last year. An independent review found that claims of widespread Hamas infiltration had no basis, but that some members did hold sympathies for Hamas, even as the organization pushed heavily for neutrality. These claims led the United States and other donor countries to pause funding to the organization back in January of 2024. Some of those countries have since reinstated funding. For its part, UNRWA is a vital aid service for Palestinian refugees in Gaza, the West Bank, Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan. The organization estimates that there are over 1.7 million Palestinian refugees across its areas of service. It provides social safety net assistance, maintaining Palestinian records, and seeking refugee empowerment. The organization claims that 202 personnel have been killed in Gaza ever since the recent war with Hamas began. American as well as UNRWA spokespeople have criticized the new Israeli laws.“The vote by the Israeli parliament against UNRWA this evening is unprecedented and sets a dangerous precedent,” said Philippe Lazzarini, UNRWA’s commissioner-general. “It opposes the UN Charter and violates the State of Israel’s obligations under international law." Echoing his concern, U.S. State Department spokesman Matthew Miller told reporters that UNRWA “plays an irreplaceable role in Gaza… there’s nobody who can replace them right now in the middle of the crisis.” He urged Israel to pause the implementation of this legislation.

[Category: Israel, Israel-palestine, Palestine, Unrwa, United nations, Qiosk, Gaza war]

— US, UN question Israel ban on aid org helping Palestinians

 

at 10/29/24 7:12am

On Monday Israel’s parliamentary body known as the Knesset passed two laws banning the United Nations’ Palestinian refugee agency (UNRWA) from operating in Israel, and in regions under Israel’s control. This comes months after Israel claimed that members of UNRWA were either in Hamas or had Hamas connections, even asserting that some participated in the Oct. 7 attacks of last year. An independent review found that claims of widespread Hamas infiltration had no basis, but that some members did hold sympathies for Hamas, even as the organization pushed heavily for neutrality. These claims led the United States and other donor countries to pause funding to the organization back in January of 2024. Some of those countries have since reinstated funding. For its part, UNRWA is a vital aid service for Palestinian refugees in Gaza, the West Bank, Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan. The organization estimates that there are over 1.7 million Palestinian refugees across its areas of service. It provides social safety net assistance, maintaining Palestinian records, and seeking refugee empowerment. The organization claims that 202 personnel have been killed in Gaza ever since the recent war with Hamas began. American as well as UNRWA spokespeople have criticized the new Israeli laws.“The vote by the Israeli parliament against UNRWA this evening is unprecedented and sets a dangerous precedent,” said Philippe Lazzarini, UNRWA’s commissioner-general. “It opposes the UN Charter and violates the State of Israel’s obligations under international law." Echoing his concern, U.S. State Department spokesman Matthew Miller told reporters that UNRWA “plays an irreplaceable role in Gaza… there’s nobody who can replace them right now in the middle of the crisis.” He urged Israel to pause the implementation of this legislation.

[Category: Israel, Israel-palestine, Palestine, Unrwa, United nations, Qiosk, Gaza war]

— The tightening Pacific web: A move toward Asian NATO?

 

at 10/28/24 10:05pm

The United States is undertaking a major effort to reinforce the imperial model that it has used to dominate Asia and the Pacific since the end of World War II.Focusing on its hub-and-spoke model, which it has used to keep itself positioned as the dominant hub of the Pacific, the United States is engaging in simultaneous efforts to facilitate cooperation among its spokes, particularly its allies and partners. U.S. officials are seeking greater multilateral coordination with the spokes, primarily by strengthening regional groupings such as the Quad and fortifying regional alliances such as its trilateral alliance with Japan and South Korea.U.S. efforts are aimed at building out the hub-and-spoke model in a way that strengthens U.S. dominance of the Indo-Pacific and clears a pathway for the creation of an Asian NATO.“Our hub-and-spoke model of security in the Indo-Pacific has become integrated so those individual spokes now cooperate and collaborate in a more systemic way,” State Department official Richard Verma explained in remarks to the Hudson Institute in September.The Hub-and-Spoke ModelSince the end of World War II, the United States has dominated Asia and the Pacific with a hub-and-spoke model. Under the model, the United States has functioned as a dominant hub that has projected its power through several spokes.According to U.S. officials, the spokes consist of U.S. treaty allies and partners. They include five U.S. treaty allies, which are Japan, Thailand, Australia, South Korea, and the Philippines. They also include leading U.S. partners, which the Biden administration identifies as Taiwan, India, Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam, Indonesia, Mongolia, New Zealand, and the Pacific Islands.Reinforcing the model are additional extensions of U.S. power, such as U.S. states, U.S. territories, U.S. military bases, and the compact states. A critical component of U.S. power is Hawaii, which is home to the headquarters of the Indo-Pacific Command. This military headquarters currently oversees 375,000 military and civilian personnel, who are spread out across the region.The hub-and-spoke model is the basis for an “informal empire” in Asia, as former U.S. official Victor Cha described it in his 2016 book Powerplay. Although Cha identified growing challenges to the model, particularly from China and its efforts to build China-centered regional structures, he insisted that the model remained the basis for U.S. regional power. He called it a “thread” that holds the regional architecture together.U.S. officials have long valued the hub-and-spoke model for securing U.S. dominance of the Pacific, but they have never viewed it as an equal to NATO. Whereas NATO provides the United States with the ability to coordinate actions across the North Atlantic region, the hub-and-spoke model impedes multilateral cooperation across the Pacific, as it is built around bilateral relationships with allies and partners that do not always share common interests.“We would like to see a good deal more cooperation among our allies and security partners—more multilateral ties in addition to hubs and spokes,” Robert Gates said in 2009, when he was secretary of defense in the Obama administration.With the goal of building more multilateral ties, U.S. officials have been working to bring the spokes into multilateral groupings that embrace multilateral cooperation. Comparing the hub-and-spoke model to the wheel of a bicycle, they have said that they are trying to build a tire around the spokes in a way that holds everything together under U.S. leadership.“We need to network better our alliances,” Cha advised Congress in 2017. “We need to build a tire around that hub and spokes.”The Biden Administration’s EffortsThe Biden administration has accelerated U.S. efforts to complete the tire. Not only has it been putting major emphasis on the importance of U.S. allies and partners, but it has been leading multiple efforts to facilitate cooperation among the spokes.One of the administration’s key moves has been to fortify a trilateral alliance among Japan, South Korea, and the United States. With both Japan and South Korea hosting tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers, the move enables the United States to more effectively coordinate its military activities across Northeast Asia.“Japan and the ROK are two of our strongest and closest allies in their own right, but when we work together trilaterally, we are even stronger,” State Department official Daniel Kritenbrink explained last year.In another major move, the Biden administration has elevated the Quad, a regional grouping that includes Japan, India, Australia, and the United States. All four countries are significant for having “big hammers in the militaries,” Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin noted earlier this year. The Quad also extends U.S. reach to India, stretching U.S. influence across a vast region that ranges “from Hollywood to Bollywood,” as Vice Admiral Andrew Tiongson recently described it.The highest-level officials in the Biden administration have repeatedly acknowledged they are working to build out the hub-and-spoke model. In May, Austin gave a major address in which he boasted that the United States is making progress in facilitating regional cooperation among the spokes. He marveled at what he called a “new convergence” that is “producing a stronger, more resilient, and more capable network of partnerships.”In August, Austin collaborated with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan on an op-ed in the Washington Post in which they explained that they had “upgraded” the hub-and-spoke model to create a new regional system that featured “an integrated, interconnected network of partnerships.” They presented their approach as a major improvement over the previously existing model, which had relied on individual partnerships. “Much like the hub and the spokes of a wheel, those individual partnerships didn’t overlap,” they explained.Laying the Foundation for an Asian NATOAs U.S. officials have worked to foster multilateral partnerships, some Asian leaders have taken things a step further, calling for the creation of an Asian NATO. Although the Biden administration has dismissed such proposals, knowing they could lead to pushback from China, Russia, and nonaligned countries, its actions indicate that it is laying the foundation for the creation of some kind of multilateral alliance system.By developing several regional groups that overlap and interconnect, the Biden administration is putting the United States into a position to eventually merge regional groupings into a single organization comparable to NATO.When Verma described U.S. efforts at the Hudson Institute in September, he boasted that the Biden administration is making significant progress in combining the spokes. The Quad “actually takes the individual spokes, ties four of them together,” Verma said. There are “a number of other examples where we are much more integrated.”Indeed, the Biden administration is confident that it is making progress in building out the hub-and-spoke model. Even with its focus on strengthening regional groupings, the administration is developing a network of overlapping partnerships that could lead to multilateral coordination among all the spokes.What the Biden administration is doing, in short, is pushing ahead with a longstanding effort to complete an imperial model that has long been at the heart of the American empire in the Pacific and may one day bring NATO-style domination to the entire area.This article has been republished with permission from Foreign Policy in Focus.

[Category: Pacific, Indo-pacific, Asia, Nato, China, Japan, South korea, Australia, Philippines, Biden, United states, Us military]

— Will Iran retaliate?

 

at 10/28/24 10:05pm

As Iran ponders its response to Israel’s October 26 aerial attack — conducted in retaliation for Iran’s strikes on Israel on October 1, the latest in an escalating spiral between the two foes — European leaders called on Tehran to forgo yet another response.British Prime Minister Keir Starmer urged both Iran and Israel to “show restraint” and “avoid further regional escalation,” but singled out Iran as the party that should not respond. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, in a similar vein, warned Iran that “such massive escalatory responses cannot go on forever. This has to stop now and presents an opportunity for a peaceful development in the Middle East.” Scholz took care to emphasize Israel’s “precise and targeted” attack in contrast to the “massive missile attack against Israel” (by Iran).These urgings, however, may go unheeded. For one, despite Scholz’s attempts to contrast the targeted Israeli strike with what he implied was reckless Iranian action, one casualty from falling debris resulted from the Iranian missile attack, while at least four people (reportedly all military personnel) were killed in the Israeli strikes on military targets in Tehran, Khuzestan, and Elam.Although there were no immediate vows of vengeance in Tehran — a contrast to what happened after Israel’s attack on the Iranian consulate in Damascus in April and the assassination of the Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran in July — its leadership has not ruled out retaliation. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei seemed to delegate the precise nature and scope of the response to military commanders. According to Amwaj.media, he insisted that while Israel “seeks to exaggerate the attack for its own goals, it would be wrong for us to downplay it.”Herein lies the key to understanding Iran’s predicament: it’s a delicate balancing act between the need to avoid an all-out war with Israel (and, potentially, the United States), and the political unpalatability of accepting the strikes on Tehran as a new normal — the first such strikes on Iran’s territory since the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s.Most Iranians are understandably wary of a broader conflict and would rather focus on the economy. Witness accounts from Tehran suggest that, in the immediate aftermath of the Israeli attack, life went back to normal, demonstrating the population’s resilience and perhaps hopes that a further escalation may still be avoided.However, refraining from action would project weakness to Iran’s allies in the region and to its own population: there is a fear that a normalization of attacks on Tehran and other Iranian cities would further erase whatever red lines existed and encourage Israel to treat Tehran the same way it does Damascus and Beirut; i.e., bomb it at will. While the strikes have so far only concerned the military targets, what is to dissuade, in this reading, Israel from targeting the economic infrastructure next time in the absence of a credible deterrence? A return to the “shadow war” between Iran and Israel, the status quo before October 7, 2023, may now seem insufficient from Tehran’s point of view given Israel’s increasing willingness to take risks and its weakening of Iran’s key allies, such as the Lebanese Shiite militia Hezbollah. These considerations suggest that some kind of Iranian retaliation by Iran is probable. A search for a restored deterrence also increases pressure on Ayatollah Khamenei to reconsider his fatwa (religious edict) that outlaws the development of weapons of mass destruction. With each new escalation, public sentiment appears to move towards favoring the weaponization of Iran’s nuclear program as the ultimate deterrent. Short of the nuclear option, delivering on Tehran’s threats to block the Strait of Hormuz, the key artery for the world oil trade, is another card Tehran holds up its sleeve in the event that the conflict escalates further. There is, however, a window of opportunity to avoid dreadful outcomes. By choosing to downplay the latest Israeli attack and delay its own response, Tehran may be able to leverage Western anxiety over the possibility of further escalation for a diplomatic breakthrough on Gaza and Lebanon. Accordingly, if Western leaders like the UK’s Starmer and Germany’s Scholz are truly concerned about the prospects for an ever-widening war in the Middle East, they should not simply call on Iran not to respond to Israel’s attacks, but also work diligently towards securing the single most important outcome — ceasefires in Gaza, and then Lebanon. That would not only stop the killing of civilians (more than 43,000 and counting in Gaza and, at a minimum, 1,200 in Lebanon) and the release of the Israeli hostages still being held by Hamas. It would also enable Tehran, by stopping the escalatory tit for tat, to claim a diplomatic success and remove the pressure to respond to Israel militarily. So far, the UK and Germany have provided nearly unconditional support for Israel’s right to self-defense while paying only lip service to the need to respect international law and the laws of war in its exercise. This will have to change, lest Starmer and Scholz’s one-sided exhortations to Iran will keep falling on deaf ears and condemning Europe to greater strategic and diplomatic irrelevance.

[Category: Israel-iran, Enewsletter, Hezbollah, Israel, Ayatollah khamenei, Gaza, Iran]

— Georgia: Election was just as much about the economy

 

at 10/28/24 10:05pm

Indignant western armchair pundits and politicians have fallen into collective rage, signallng that the general election result in Georgia equated to the theft of a European choice.The opposition to the apparent winner, the ruling Georgia Dream party, is now being joined by international voices, including the U.S., calling for an investigation into claims of election violations.But Western politicians, journalists, and NGOs have cynically, and in a way, willfully ignored the wider economic picture, and have instead spun up the election as an existential struggle between Europe (European Union) and Russia. There is so much nuance here that needs to be examined and is not.For one, study the vast amount of credible economic data and you’ll uncover the unpalatable truth that Georgia has been a net loser from closer EU economic ties thus far. And that the war in Ukraine, which the EU is helping to bankroll, has halted progress on key economic priorities in Georgia, including reducing unemployment. Taking a step back, Georgia has become an economic dynamo since 2012 through its sovereign endeavors. This small, proud nation with a population of 3.1 million, ranks number 7 in the World Bank’s ease of doing business index, ahead of the UK and every EU country except Denmark.Average economic growth has been a throaty 5.2%, 6.2% percent if you subtract the pandemic contraction in 2020. GDP per capita has increased by 79%. According to the World Bank, poverty reduced from 70.6% to 40.1% between 2010 and 2023, through sound macroeconomic management. There’s still more work to do to get it lower.Georgia’s economic growth performance has largely been driven by domestic investment. As a percentage of GDP, investment has averaged a brisk 26.6% per year since 1996, compared to the EU (21.8%) and the UK (18.8%). Yet signing the EU Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement (DCFTA) in 2014 didn’t unleash a tidal wave of new European investment into Georgia. EU foreign direct investment in 2024 was only $65k higher than in 2014, at an average 29.6% of total FDI in Georgia over that period. Russia is a significant but not key investment player, accounting for just 5.4% of FDI in 2023.If we look at trade, the signing of the DCFTA, in theory at least, should have driven a mutually beneficial surge in trade. But that simply hasn’t happened. The European Commission website proudly announces that Europe is Georgia’s biggest trade partner. But EU trade with Georgia accounts for just 20.9% of the total. And that is only because Georgia has been flooded with European exports since 2016. In fact, western European states have been eating Georgia’s lunch when it comes to trade. On average, Georgia’s eight largest western European trade partners (including the UK) now export four times as much to Georgia than they import. The biggest culprit is Germany which in 2022 exported 7.8 times more ($673 million) to Georgia than it received in imports ($86 million). European exports to Georgia had quadrupled to 3.6 billion Euros by 2023 and are still rising. Yet, Georgian exports to the EU have stood still. Why? Look on the EU website and you will find 58 separate trade defense investigations by Europe against Georgia since 2021, looking to restrict imports of everything from tires to tinplate and tableware. Europe actively places barriers against Georgian imports. Georgia has been accused of helping Russia evade export sanctions, but the evidence for that is weak. Look East and you will see a different picture. Bulgaria exports as much to Georgia as the powerful western EU nations combined, yet is the only EU trading nation that imports more from Georgia than it exports.Because trade is all about gravity. Sofia is much closer to Tbilisi than Strasbourg. Countries trade more with those countries closer to their borders because the cost of trade is lower. Through a mix of gravity and history, 62.2% of Georgia’s exports go to its eight biggest Eurasian trade partners (former Soviet states, Turkey, China and India). And the trade balance is more even than it is with Europe, as Eurasian states export 1.8 times more to Georgia than they import. Russia exported 2.9 times more than Georgia in 2022 because of a surge in fuel exports. However, Georgian exports to Russia have also increased by 56% since 2017 and now make up 9.4% of the total.The major economic shock Georgia has had to confront has been the war in Ukraine. A net 87,200 people from Russia, Ukraine and Belarus emigrated to Georgia between 2022 and 2023, two thirds of them Russian. Historically, Georgia had fairly even net migration, but the war-induced influx prompted unprecedented house price inflation of around 35% with rents up by as much as 50%. High inflation during the first two years of the Ukraine war appears to have been tamed by the National Bank of Georgia which hiked interest rates to their highest level since the Global Financial Crisis. An economic flip side, is that Georgia saw a much needed boost in its current account which recorded its only significant surplus since the Soviet period in the third quarter of 2022. This was driven by surging service exports, that is, foreign money spent by migrants in Georgia. Foreign Exchange reserves also rose to a post-Soviet high. But the influx of Russians fleeing the draft undoubtedly increased resentment and social tension in part driven by historical enmity, including around the 2008 Georgian war. But it runs deeper. Georgia’s impressive reduction in unemployment has also flat-lined, having dropped from 20.6% in 2009 to 11.6% in 2020. Worryingly, 26.7% of Georgia’s young people are unemployed, and have seen young, digitally nomadic, middle class Russians crowding out opportunities in high-valued-added sectors. The West has framed the election and its results in almost Manichean terms, a battle of light and dark, between Europe and Russia. They have positioned Georgia Dream’s founder Bidzina Ivanishvili, as a Kremlin stooge. Yes, Ivanishvili, like many oligarchs, gained his wealth during the chaos of Soviet collapse. His nationalism is rooted in a conservatism that has echoes of Putin’s Russia and Orban’s Hungary. But his economic approach in Georgia has been driven by specifically Georgian considerations. And elections always, ultimately, get tipped by domestic issues. By today’s election count, it would seem a majority of Georgian people chose prosperity over war. It’s time to let Georgia’s government get back to the task of strengthening their wonderful country still further.

[Category: Russia, Europe, Enewsletter, Georgia dream, Eu, Georgia]

— How the Cuba lobby lost its juice

 

at 10/28/24 10:05pm

From the early 1980s until President Barack Obama announced his intention to normalize U.S.-Cuban relations ten years ago on December 17, 2014, Cuban American voters in South Florida held a virtual veto over U.S. policy toward Cuba. Well organized and amply funded, the Cuba lobby could deliver a significant bloc of voters in a strategic swing state, voters who would cast their ballots for or against a candidate based on their position on Cuba. Presidential candidates of both parties felt compelled to seek their support—or at least avoid antagonizing them. That leverage, however, is waning. Last week, Florida International University’s Cuba Research Center released the fifteenth in its series of surveys of Cuban Americans in South Florida, providing an invaluable record of how the community’s views have evolved over time. It largely confirmed the results of the last several FIU polls. “There were no surprises,” co-author Guillermo Grenier said in his presentation of the results. A majority of Cuban American voters in South Florida are Republican partisans, outnumbering registered Democrats three-to-one, a gap that has grown since 2022. 59% describe themselves as conservative, only 25% as liberal. There are variations in attitudes depending on the respondent’s age, when they arrived in the United States, or were born in the United States, but not as much variation as FIU’s prior surveys found. From 1991 to 2016, the polls told a consistent story. The community’s deep anti-communist sympathies and vehement opposition to any U.S. engagement with Cuba gradually mellowed. As the generation of political refugees that left Cuba in the 1960s, when Fidel Castro declared the revolution socialist, gave way to a younger generation of more recent arrivals and U.S.-born citizens of Cuban heritage, the polls showed a steady increase in support for selling food and medicine to Cuba, traveling and sending remittances to family on the island, and even lifting the embargo. Even the Cuban American National Foundation, the group most identified lobbying for a hardline U.S. policy, moderated its positions to favor U.S. policies that fostered family ties across the Florida Strait. President Barack Obama recognized these changes and based his initial Cuba policy on family engagement, lifting all restrictions on family travel and remittances. By the time he and Raúl Castro announced the restoration of diplomatic relations, Obama was able to count on support from half the Cuban American community. But then the story took an unexpected turn. Donald Trump was able to re-energize the Cuban American right by promising to finally overthrow the Cuban government. He followed through with a policy of “maximum pressure,” the most intensive set of economic sanctions since the start of the embargo. Early signs of change in the Cuban American community were visible in the 2018 FIU poll, which for the first time reported some retreat from engagement, with support for ending the embargo falling back below 50%. The Democrats’ share of registered Cuban American voters was also slipping and in the 2018 mid-term elections, Cuban Americans preferred Republican candidates for governor, U.S. Senate, and House of Representatives by 70 to 30%.Yet this Republican landslide was not entirely attributable to Trump’s Cuba policies. In a list of ten major issues of concern mentioned in the FIU poll, Cuba ranked last. The top issues were the economy, healthcare, and gun control. The 2020 and 2022 FIU polls confirmed what the 2018 poll foreshadowed. Support for the embargo rose to over 60%, but Cuba still ranked no better than fourth among people’s priority issues. Both polls showed that Cuban American support for Trump and dislike of Biden were not issue-specific, but extended across the full range of policies. In the 2020 poll, approval of Trump’s handling of a variety of domestic and foreign policy issues was never below 62%. In 2022, Biden’s approval rating on similar questions never rose above 38 %. Notably, 72% of respondents disapproved of Biden’s Cuba policy even though it was not very different than Trump’s. In both 2020 and 2022, domestic issues topped the list of respondents’ major concerns, while Cuba policy was last out of six in 2020 and sixth out of nine in 2022. The most recent FIU poll underscores this new reality. Between 60% and 70% of Cuban Americans disapproved of every Biden policy, from Cuba to Gaza, China, Russia, and Ukraine. When asked, 68% of them said they would vote for Trump, rising to 94% among Republicans. Yet the issue of Cuba policy again ranked sixth out of nine in importance. And once again, the issues that concerned Cuban Americans most were the same ones that concern all Americans: the economy, health care, and immigration.The four FIU polls since 2018, have important implications for the domestic political calculations that have so long dominated U.S. policy toward Cuba. A solid majority of Cuban Americans identify as Republican partisans and they vote overwhelmingly along party lines, just like other partisans. Partisanship in Miami has become almost tribal, just as it has in so much of the United States. The Republican Party has come to be seen as the party of Cuban Americans, just as the Democratic Party is seen as the party of African Americans. A candidate’s position on Cuba is no longer the driving factor behind Cuban American voting. The salience of the Cuba issue has faded and it now ranks relatively low compared to domestic concerns. The issues that Cuban Americans cite as important to them are the same issues other voters cite. Conventional wisdom among Democratic politicians has been that if they mimic Republicans on Cuba, other issues more favorable to Democrats would come to the fore and win them a larger slice of the Cuban American electorate. Bill Clinton’s relative success among Cuban Americans in 1992 and 1996 seemed to confirm this strategy. Yet as those issues have come to the fore, Cuban Americans have voted Republican anyway — just like other registered Republicans.Even then, if Florida were still a swing state, it might make sense for a Democratic candidate to try to make small gains among this solidly Republican Cuban American electorate, just as both Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are currently trying to break off small pieces of their opponent’s coalition in states where the race will be decided by a fraction of a percentage point. Florida, however, is no longer a swing state and Cuban Americans are not a swing constituency. That’s why neither Harris nor Trump has spent time campaigning there and why Cuba has not been an issue in the campaign. Cuban Americans have become such loyal Republicans that they have lost their leverage with Democrats. The Democratic National Convention offered the most graphic evidence. While delegates from the swing states sat right in front of the stage, the Florida contingent was relegated to the very back of the hall.If Kamala Harris wins the election, she will owe no political debt to Cuban Americans in Miami and will not need to compromise her foreign policy toward Cuba to keep them happy. To be sure, there are prominent Cuban American Democrats who deserve a seat at the table because they can be valuable partners in fashioning a Cuba policy that serves the national interest of the United States rather than the parochial interests of Little Havana. But the majority of Cuban Americans have picked their side and, as President Obama said, elections have consequences.

[Category: Cuba, Donald trump, Lobbying, 2024 election, Latin america, Enewsletter, Latin america]

— The tightening Pacific web: a move toward Asian NATO?

 

at 10/28/24 10:05pm

The United States is undertaking a major effort to reinforce the imperial model that it has used to dominate Asia and the Pacific since the end of World War II.Focusing on its hub-and-spoke model, which it has used to keep itself positioned as the dominant hub of the Pacific, the United States is engaging in simultaneous efforts to facilitate cooperation among its spokes, particularly its allies and partners. U.S. officials are seeking greater multilateral coordination with the spokes, primarily by strengthening regional groupings such as the Quad and fortifying regional alliances such as its trilateral alliance with Japan and South Korea.U.S. efforts are aimed at building out the hub-and-spoke model in a way that strengthens U.S. dominance of the Indo-Pacific and clears a pathway for the creation of an Asian NATO.“Our hub-and-spoke model of security in the Indo-Pacific has become integrated so those individual spokes now cooperate and collaborate in a more systemic way,” State Department official Richard Verma explained in remarks to the Hudson Institute in September.The Hub-and-Spoke ModelSince the end of World War II, the United States has dominated Asia and the Pacific with a hub-and-spoke model. Under the model, the United States has functioned as a dominant hub that has projected its power through several spokes.According to U.S. officials, the spokes consist of U.S. treaty allies and partners. They include five U.S. treaty allies, which are Japan, Thailand, Australia, South Korea, and the Philippines. They also include leading U.S. partners, which the Biden administration identifies as Taiwan, India, Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam, Indonesia, Mongolia, New Zealand, and the Pacific Islands.Reinforcing the model are additional extensions of U.S. power, such as U.S. states, U.S. territories, U.S. military bases, and the compact states. A critical component of U.S. power is Hawaii, which is home to the headquarters of the Indo-Pacific Command. This military headquarters currently oversees 375,000 military and civilian personnel, who are spread out across the region.The hub-and-spoke model is the basis for an “informal empire” in Asia, as former U.S. official Victor Cha described it in his 2016 book Powerplay. Although Cha identified growing challenges to the model, particularly from China and its efforts to build China-centered regional structures, he insisted that the model remained the basis for U.S. regional power. He called it a “thread” that holds the regional architecture together.U.S. officials have long valued the hub-and-spoke model for securing U.S. dominance of the Pacific, but they have never viewed it as an equal to NATO. Whereas NATO provides the United States with the ability to coordinate actions across the North Atlantic region, the hub-and-spoke model impedes multilateral cooperation across the Pacific, as it is built around bilateral relationships with allies and partners that do not always share common interests.“We would like to see a good deal more cooperation among our allies and security partners—more multilateral ties in addition to hubs and spokes,” Robert Gates said in 2009, when he was secretary of defense in the Obama administration.With the goal of building more multilateral ties, U.S. officials have been working to bring the spokes into multilateral groupings that embrace multilateral cooperation. Comparing the hub-and-spoke model to the wheel of a bicycle, they have said that they are trying to build a tire around the spokes in a way that holds everything together under U.S. leadership.“We need to network better our alliances,” Cha advised Congress in 2017. “We need to build a tire around that hub and spokes.”The Biden Administration’s EffortsThe Biden administration has accelerated U.S. efforts to complete the tire. Not only has it been putting major emphasis on the importance of U.S. allies and partners, but it has been leading multiple efforts to facilitate cooperation among the spokes.One of the administration’s key moves has been to fortify a trilateral alliance among Japan, South Korea, and the United States. With both Japan and South Korea hosting tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers, the move enables the United States to more effectively coordinate its military activities across Northeast Asia.“Japan and the ROK are two of our strongest and closest allies in their own right, but when we work together trilaterally, we are even stronger,” State Department official Daniel Kritenbrink explained last year.In another major move, the Biden administration has elevated the Quad, a regional grouping that includes Japan, India, Australia, and the United States. All four countries are significant for having “big hammers in the militaries,” Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin noted earlier this year. The Quad also extends U.S. reach to India, stretching U.S. influence across a vast region that ranges “from Hollywood to Bollywood,” as Vice Admiral Andrew Tiongson recently described it.The highest-level officials in the Biden administration have repeatedly acknowledged they are working to build out the hub-and-spoke model. In May, Austin gave a major address in which he boasted that the United States is making progress in facilitating regional cooperation among the spokes. He marveled at what he called a “new convergence” that is “producing a stronger, more resilient, and more capable network of partnerships.”In August, Austin collaborated with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan on an op-ed in the Washington Post in which they explained that they had “upgraded” the hub-and-spoke model to create a new regional system that featured “an integrated, interconnected network of partnerships.” They presented their approach as a major improvement over the previously existing model, which had relied on individual partnerships. “Much like the hub and the spokes of a wheel, those individual partnerships didn’t overlap,” they explained.Laying the Foundation for an Asian NATOAs U.S. officials have worked to foster multilateral partnerships, some Asian leaders have taken things a step further, calling for the creation of an Asian NATO. Although the Biden administration has dismissed such proposals, knowing they could lead to pushback from China, Russia, and nonaligned countries, its actions indicate that it is laying the foundation for the creation of some kind of multilateral alliance system.By developing several regional groups that overlap and interconnect, the Biden administration is putting the United States into a position to eventually merge regional groupings into a single organization comparable to NATO.When Verma described U.S. efforts at the Hudson Institute in September, he boasted that the Biden administration is making significant progress in combining the spokes. The Quad “actually takes the individual spokes, ties four of them together,” Verma said. There are “a number of other examples where we are much more integrated.”Indeed, the Biden administration is confident that it is making progress in building out the hub-and-spoke model. Even with its focus on strengthening regional groupings, the administration is developing a network of overlapping partnerships that could lead to multilateral coordination among all the spokes.What the Biden administration is doing, in short, is pushing ahead with a longstanding effort to complete an imperial model that has long been at the heart of the American empire in the Pacific and may one day bring NATO-style domination to the entire area.This article has been republished with permission from Foreign Policy in Focus.

[Category: Pacific, Indo-pacific, Asia, Nato, China, Japan, South korea, Australia, Philippines, Biden, United states, Us military]

— A Return to the Classics: Harold Nicolson and a pattern for diplomatists

 

at 10/27/24 11:05pm

The best, and best written, book in English on the practice of diplomacy is by the late British diplomat (or as he would have said, diplomatist) Sir Harold Nicolson. It is also mercifully brief - by contrast, for example, with Henry Kissinger’s book of the same name that once served me as a pillow during an overnight train journey in Ukraine. The State Department and European foreign ministries should follow the example of the Soviet government, which translated this book into Russian and distributed it to all Soviet missions. The effect would be harsh but salutary. I don’t know how Soviet diplomats responded to its lessons; but I am pretty sure that few Western diplomats today would be pleased by the mirror it holds up to their services.Sir Harold Nicholson was the son of a British ambassador, and served as a British diplomat from 1909 to 1929. He was later an MP and a leading opponent of the appeasement of Nazi Germany. Married (in a relaxed kind of way) to the novelist Vita Sackville-West, he was an honorary member of the Bloomsbury set, and became a noted biographer, historian and diarist.A formative role in his views on diplomacy was played by the Versailles Peace Conference, which he attended and which is described vividly in his book “Peacemaking 1919.” This experience left him with an abiding hatred of petty and narrow nationalisms; of policies of national revenge; and of the pursuit of ideology in international affairs. His portrait of President Woodrow Wilson (“a theocrat”) is not wholly unsympathetic, but it is still damning: “His spiritual arrogance, the hard but narrow texture of his mind, is well illustrated by his apparent unawareness of [foreign] political reality…He informed the members of his delegation in a solemn address delivered on board the USS George Washington that not only would America be the only disinterested nation at the Conference, but that he himself was the only plenipotentiary possessed of a full mandate from the people.”While suspicious of professed idealism in diplomacy, much of his book is concerned with the personal principles and qualities that form the foundation of good diplomacy and good diplomats. This is a distinction that inhabitants of Washington would do well to keep in mind. Many parts of the world have swamps. Few have ones in which the alligators and snakes are quite so given to proclaiming their own collective goodness.In Nicolson’s words,“The worst kind of diplomatists are missionaries, fanatics and lawyers; the best kind are the reasonable and humane sceptics. Thus it is not religion or ideology which has been the main formative influence in diplomatic theory; it is common sense…[Ideal diplomacy] can be described as common sense and charity applied to international relations.”It will probably come as a surprise to most readers that Nicolson lays such emphasis on truthfulness:“By this is meant, not merely abstention from conscious misstatements, but a scrupulous care to avoid the suggestion of the false or the suppression of the true. A good diplomatist should be at pains not to leave any incorrect impressions whatsoever upon the minds of those with whom he negotiates.”Nicolson quotes the famous play on words by the 17th Century English diplomat Sir Henry Wotton, that “an ambassador is a man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country”, but points out that Sir Henry did indeed mean it as a joke; and when King James I heard about it, he never employed him again. By contrast, he quotes the French 18th century diplomat Francois de Callieres,“[A] lie always leaves in its wake a drop of poison…Even the most dazzling diplomatic triumphs which have been gained by deception are based upon insecure foundations. They leave the defeated party with a sense of indignation, a desire to be revenged and a resentment which will always be a danger.”Nicolson’s concern with truthfulness helps to explain his acute dislike of propaganda, or what is euphemistically described in the U.S. as “public diplomacy.” He describes radio as “this terrible invention.” As he points out, it is very difficult to cultivate reasonably good relations with another country if your own state-backed media are pumping out a constant stream of hostility backed by half-truths or outright inventions. On these grounds, it would also be a good idea (however impossible a one) to abolish the position of State Department spokesperson, and confine those of the White House to statements on domestic affairs. The spectacle of Matthew Miller, John Kirby and Karine Jean-Pierre lying blatantly and shamelessly about Biden administration policy towards the horrors of Gaza - when they know that their audiences know that they are lying - is not one to increase respect for the United States and U.S. officials among foreign populations.Connected to truthfulness on the part of the diplomat is reliability on the part of the state. Nicolson looks back to Congress’s repudiation of Wilson’s signature of the Treaty of the League of Nations. If he were writing today, he would doubtless condemn a whole series of treaties and agreements either rejected by Congress or canceled by subsequent administrations, from the Kyoto Protocol and the ABM Treaty to the JCPOA with Iran. Another key quality stressed by Nicolson is what Hans Morgenthau called the duty of empathy, grounded in a combination of study, curiosity and modesty. Nicolson quotes de Callieres,“It is essential that a negotiator should be able to divest himself of his own opinion in order to place himself in the position of the Prince with whom he is negotiating. He should be able, that is, to adopt the other’s personality, and to enter into his views and inclinations. And he should thus say to himself - “If I were in the place of that Prince, endowed with equal power, governed by identical prejudices and passions, what effect would my own representations make upon myself?”In my experience, only a very small number of Western diplomats are now capable of this - and of that number, most are prevented by fear for their careers from expressing their understanding, at least when the countries they are dealing with are perceived as adversaries of the West.Finally, Nicolson draws an absolutely crucial distinction about which most U.S. commentators are utterly confused, and that the U.S. system seems incapable by its very nature of following; namely, the distinction between foreign policy, which is formulated by governments, and diplomacy or negotiation, which should be conducted by professional, apolitical diplomats.It is not just that political appointments and Congressional interference have hopelessly muddled this distinction. In a style somewhat reminiscent of the imperial Chinese court, even conducting negotiations with other countries is often seen by the U.S. establishment as a great concession and a gracious favor - as well of course as an opportunity for domestic political attacks. As Nicolson writes, underlying this in the case of the U.S. is also a deep subconscious fear of foreign corruption and trickery. An unkind observer might be tempted to quote a passage from Nicolson on earlier approaches to diplomatic contact:“It must be remembered that in primitive society all foreigners were regarded as both dangerous and impure. When Justin II sent ambassadors to negotiate with the Seljuk Turks, they were first subjected to purification for the purpose of exorcising all harmful influence. The tribal wizards danced round them in a frenzy of ecstasy burning incense, beating tambourines and endeavouring by all known magic to mitigate the dangers of infection.”

[Category: Diplomatist, Harold, Nicolson, Book, Us, Classics, Diplomacy]

— Some 80% of Hill 'experts' take $$ from arms makers, foreign interests

 

at 10/27/24 10:05pm

A video on Congress.gov, overlayed with an uplifting guitar melody, explains what committee hearings are supposed to do; A hearing “provides a forum at which committee members and the public can hear about the strengths and weaknesses of a proposal from selected parties,” the disembodied voice says. If only it were that simple.In practice, hearings often give experts whose employers are funded by special interests a platform to publicly lobby Congress. From 2021 to 2024, 378 non-governmental witnesses testified before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, the House body that oversees foreign assistance, war powers, and arms exports, among other key foreign policy-making decisions. Just over one third of those witnesses — 137 of them — came from the world of think tanks. A Responsible Statecraft analysis of think tank annual reports and congressional witness lists shows that a majority of the think tanks represented on the witness list cash checks from weapons manufacturers and foreign governments. Eighty-nine percent of think tank affiliated witnesses work for organizations that accept foreign government funding. The number is only slightly lower for the arms industry; 79% of witnesses affiliated with think tanks represent organizations that take donations from the top 100 Pentagon contractors.In fact, less than 7% of think tank witnesses are affiliated with organizations that publish a list of their donors and say they do not accept funding from both Pentagon contractors and foreign governments. In other words, think tanks with Pentagon contractor or foreign government funding are called to testify nearly 14 times as often as think tanks without these financial ties.And, the money flowing from Pentagon contractors and foreign governments to these think tanks hasn’t been trivial. As documented in a forthcoming Quincy Institute brief on think tank funding, between 2021 and 2024, think tanks that were represented on the witness stand received at least $20 million dollars from the top 100 Pentagon contractors and $64 million from foreign governments. Though, the real number is likely much, much, higher, given the murky world of dark money think tanks, anonymous donors, and misleading funding ranges. Non-governmental congressional witnesses have to fill out a conflict of interest disclosure known as a “Truth in Testimony” form. The form asks witnesses to disclose funding from foreign governments and federal grants related to the hearing subject. Yet, many witnesses exploit a loophole that allows them to avoid disclosure if they declare they are simply testifying on their own behalf, even if they do just happen to work for an organization that receives considerable funding from special interests that could benefit from the witnesses’ recommendations. And, because there is a lack of enforcement, witnesses often simply leave these forms blank. In the House Armed Services Committee — the committee that oversees defense policy and the annual defense budget — the numbers were even more stark, albeit with a much smaller sample size. All but one of the 19 think tank witnesses appeared in front of the HASC on behalf of an organization that accepts Pentagon contractor funding.While all of this funding could lead to conflicts of interest at the witness stand, lawmakers and the public can at least follow the paper trail by looking at think tank annual reports. However, because there is no legal requirement for think tanks to disclose their donors, there are a host of witnesses that testify on national security that hail from “dark money” think tanks — think tanks that disclose no information about their funding sources. Eli Clifton, Senior Adviser and Investigative Journalist at the Quincy Institute, explained in an interview with RS that it can be difficult to know when some witnesses have a potential conflict of interest given the preponderance of dark money think tanks. Clifton previously documented how dark money think tanks dominate the witness table at House Foreign Affairs Committee hearings. In his investigation from 2017-2020, he found that only “30 percent of think tank affiliated witnesses appeared on behalf of institutions that fully disclose their donors.” Between 2021 and 2024, this figure remains largely unchanged as only 34% of think tank witnesses came from organizations that fully disclose their donors. Another third of witnesses hail from dark money think tanks, and the last third are affiliated with think tanks that are only partially transparent. Some of the top testifiers, such as the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Washington Institute for Near East Policy — all think tanks that often promote a more militaristic U.S. foreign policy — do not disclose any information about donors. “The idea that dark money think tanks are regularly testifying before Congress while providing no details about their funding is concerning. It undermines trust in think tanks and in experts,” said Clifton. An emerging body of scholarship indicates that think tank funding influences behavior and research products. Daniel Schuman, executive director of the American Governance Institute, explained in an interview with RS that “it’s basic human psychology that donors' generosity is often connected to people espousing certain viewpoints.” A 2014 New York Times exposé on foreign government funding of think tanks cited congressional testimony as evidence that “[t]he line between scholarly research and lobbying can sometimes be hard to discern.” If an expert testifies against the interests of major donors, they run the risk of having to find a new donor — or in some cases, a new job. The Times investigation also detailed an episode with Michele Dunne, then Director of the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East. Dunne broke with the Center’s funder, Bahaa Hariri, when she testified in front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the U.S. should suspend military aid to Egypt in 2013 in response to a coup led by Abdel Fatah el-Sisi. Hariri called the Atlantic Council to complain and within four months, Dunne was out of a job. Fred Kempe, the president of the Atlantic Council, said at the time that differences Dunne may have had with colleagues and donors were inevitable and “don’t touch our fierce defense of individual experts’ intellectual independence.” Less attention has been paid to Pentagon contractor-funded think tank experts on the witness stand. “About half of the defense budget lands on the gravy train to Pentagon contractors, which then use some of that money to fund researchers, academics, and think tank experts,” Schuman said. “Some of those scholars may then distance themselves from the funding by testifying in their personal capacity, but oftentimes their conclusions are indistinguishable from the interests of their donors.” At a September 19 hearing on Iran, for example, three witnesses who testified were affiliated with think tanks — the Center for a New American Security, the Atlantic Council, and the Council on Foreign Relations — that received funding from Pentagon contractor donors that could rake in profits from a military-first approach to Iran. One witness, Kirsten Fontenrose, even argued that the U.S. should pass an Authorization for the Use of Military Force. “The U.S. should make it clear to the leadership of Iran’s proxy, drone and missile programs that new capabilities now permit the U.S. and partners to dismantle their facilities and chains of command with low to no risk of negative secondary effects," she said. "Though ‘AUMF’ is a four letter word in Congress, an Authorized Use of Military Force could convey this quickly and clearly.” Fontenrose is also the president of Red Six Solutions, a red team defense consulting company and Pentagon contractor that prepares clients for threats against unmanned aerial systems.At a separate hearing on Iran in February, American Enterprise Institute Senior Fellow Kenneth Pollack argued that the U.S. should become more involved in Yemen’s civil war in arming, equipping, and training the anti-Houthi coalition. “It could mean employing American air power as well, as we did in support of Iraqi forces against ISIS in 2014 to 2018,” said Pollack. AEI does not publicly disclose its donors, but a staffer there let slip at an event last year that it is funded by Pentagon contractors. “We’d be remiss if we didn’t mention that both Lockheed and Northrop provide philanthropic support to AEI. We are grateful for that support,” an AEI moderator announced. Even with an incomplete picture due to dark money think tanks, it’s clear that Congress is almost exclusively hearing one side of the debate. If congressional hearings are meant to gather information and hear the “strengths and weaknesses” of proposals, lawmakers should look to diversify the witness list. If there is no countervailing voice, the status quo can lead to an entire sector singing in chorus at the witness stand for things that will serve the interests of Pentagon contractors and foreign governments, not the United States.

[Category: Foreign influence, Lobbying, Weapons industry, Think tanks]

— The day after Israeli strikes on Iran: What's next

 

at 10/26/24 5:42am

The Israeli attack is over, but the outcome remains unclear. Tehran is downplaying it — even mocking it — which may be more reflective of their desire to de-escalate than a true assessment of the damage Israel inflicted on Iran.Just as Israel kept the damage of Iran's Oct. 1 strikes secret, Iran will likely not disclose the full picture of Israel's strike, although Tehran has reported that the strikes killed two members of Iran's regular army (which is separate from the IRGC).But if Iran chooses to exercise restraint, as it did after Israel's limited strikes in April, then this chapter may be closed, yet the conflict will remain very much alive.Indeed, another red line was crossed in this Israeli attack, lowering the cost of crossing it going forward.Thus, while we may see some tactical de-escalation, the trajectory remains escalatory.The Biden team, however, may draw a sigh of relief if Iran exercises restraint, as a major conflict right before the elections may be evaded. But in the larger scheme of things, that may prove to be of little consolation if Biden wastes this pause once more by failing to use it to truly de-escalate the situation by forcing a ceasefire in Gaza and Lebanon.The U.S. has the leverage to stop Israel's slaughter, but Biden has thus far refused to exercise that leverage. How many rounds of bombings can Israel and Iran engage in before it blows up into a full-scale war that engulfs the entire region?

[Category: Israel, Hezbollah, Gaza, Iran]

— Report: Azeris demand lobbyists violate foreign agent law

 

at 10/25/24 8:52am

In May, the Department of Justice charged Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas) and his wife Imelda Cuellar with bribery and acting as unregistered foreign agents of Azerbaijan. Cuellar—who was the Co-Chair of the Congressional Azerbaijan Caucus—allegedly accepted at least $360,000 from companies controlled by Azerbaijan in exchange for, among other things, shooting down Congressional efforts to support Armenian separatists in the Nagorno-Karabakh region and “consulting representatives of Azerbaijan on their efforts to lobby the United States government.” Despite Cuellar’s indictment, Azerbaijan is still looking to skirt the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), the foreign influence law that requires lobbyists to register and disclose their work for foreign principals. POLITICO Influence reported on Thursday that Azerbaijan “recently asked Washington lobbyists that it was considering working with to not register under FARA for work they considered necessary to register for.” One lobbyist told POLITICO that they were being “asked to set up meetings that they believe would have violated FARA.” Azerbaijan’s brazen demand reportedly comes from a high-level official. Deputy Foreign Minister Elnur Mammadov told the firm that “the contact was contingent on there being no FARA registration,” causing the firm to back away from the deal and cancel a meeting at the Azerbaijani embassy. Had the firm complied, they would have risked breaking U.S. law and up to five years in prison. Friend or foe, no country is above the law. The Guardian reported in August that the Israeli government was also seeking to avoid FARA compliance. A legal strategy memo from the Israeli justice ministry revealed that officials discussed ways of avoiding FARA disclosure of a $8.6 million public relations campaign to counter critics in the U.S. The memo noted that registration “would damage the reputation of several American groups that receive funding and direction from Israel, and force them to meet onerous transparency requirements.” Azerbaijan’s Foreign Ministry is currently represented by the Friedlander Group, which received $833,330 in just six months, according to the latest available disclosure. However, according to the lobbyists approached by Azerbaijan, the country is “not happy” with the Friedlander Group’s “progress on issues important to Azerbaijan.” Ezra Friedlander, CEO of the Friedlander Group, told POLITICO that “In all my interactions the government of Azerbaijan has adhered to the highest ethical standards regarding FARA and all other issues pertaining to my representation.” Last August, Azerbaijan hired Rodney Dixon, an international legal expert, to publish a report defending Azerbaijan against allegations of genocide in the Nagorno-Karabakh region. Dixon promoted the report in U.S. media outlets and, led by Friedlander, met with six U.S. representatives and dozens of Congressional staffers—all without registering as a foreign agent. While some firms are rejecting working with Azerbaijan, citing pressure to skirt federal regulations, others are lining up to cash checks from the oil-rich Caucasus country. In June, two more firms registered to represent Azerbaijani interests. The Azerbaijani Embassy hired Skyline Capitol, led by former Rep. Chris Stewart (R-Utah), at a rate of $50,000 a month to target members of the Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees, coordinate Congressional delegations to Azerbaijan, and reinvigorate the Congressional Azerbaijan Caucus (an updated list of Congressional Membership Organizations does not list Cuellar as a Co-Chair).Azerbaijan’s other recent addition is Teneo Strategy, a public relations firm that is targeting global media outlets ahead of COP 29, a major environmental summit that will take place in Baku next month. The firm has contacted some 144 journalists as part of a $4.7 million contract. Teneo began its work in February but did not formally disclose its work under FARA until June, flouting a 10-day registration requirement.

[Category: Azerbaijan, Fara, Foreign agent, Lobbying, Qiosk, Foreign influence]

— Diplomacy Watch: Ukraine and allies reeling as war heats up

 

at 10/24/24 11:05pm

The course of the Ukraine War shifted considerably this week after U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin confirmed reports of the presence of North Korean troops in Russia and their possible deployment to Ukraine. This potentially adds to the Ukrainian military’s current struggles, as Russian forces continue to gain territory and impose costly defeats across Ukraine’s Donetsk region. The White House and State Department responded similarly on the matter throughout the week, describing Russia’s recruitment of the North Korean military as both desperate and escalatory. Specifically, U.S. officials said that 3,000 North Korean troops are in eastern Russia, and that those soldiers would be “fair game” if they enter combat operations in Ukraine. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy alleged in his nightly address on Tuesday that up to 12,000 North Korean soldiers are being prepared for deployment. “This is a challenge, but we know how to respond to this challenge. It is important that partners do not hide from this challenge as well,” Zelenskyy said. Earlier in the week, Austin visited Kyiv and spoke with Zelenskyy on matters of strategy, recruitment and additional funding. A senior defense official emphasized that the meeting was not a victory lap and that the Ukrainians are in a “very tough” spot against Russia as the winter approaches, despite heavy sanctions and surging U.S. aid. Austin addressed critics of the American expense sheet in Ukraine in his speech at the Kyiv Diplomatic Academy on Monday: “For anyone who thinks that American leadership is expensive — well, consider the price of American retreat. In the face of aggression, the price of principle is always dwarfed by the cost of capitulation. Our allies and partners know that. And I’ve been proud to watch the pro-Ukraine coalition dig deep.” Other Ukraine News This Week: The White House announced Wednesday, that the U.S. will provide $20 billion in loans of the $50 billion promised by the Group of Seven (G7) allies in June. The loans will be backed by interest earned on profits from Russia’s frozen central bank assets. Britain and Germany are “moving closer together,” said German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius Tuesday, as the two nations signed a defense pact that will see German submarine-hunting planes patrolling the North Atlantic Ocean from a base in Scotland. According to the Associated Press, officials said the move is in response to rising Russian aggression, with Pistorius also calling for the closing of “critical capability gaps, for instance in the field of long-range weapons” on NATO’s eastern flank. Russia hosted the 16th annual BRICS summit this week in the city of Kazan, with financial collaborations and the group’s expansion topping the agenda. Reuters reports that Chinese President Xi Jinping and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi presented their intentions for a closer diplomatic relationship on Wednesday after a recent history of tense relations. The Russian Defense Ministry announced that Russian forces have captured the Ukrainian villages of Serebrianka and Mykolaivka, according to reporting from Al Jazeera. The Ukrainian military did not acknowledge the fall of either village but said it has engaged in heavy fighting in several villages across the Donetsk region as Russian forces advance towards the key town of Pokrovsk. From White House Press Briefing on Oct. 23 National Security Communications Adviser John Kirby stepped into the White House briefing room Wednesday to give an update on U.S. confirmation of North Korean troops in Russia. He described U.S. assessments that North Korea moved at least 3,000 troops to multiple training sites in eastern Russia between early- to mid-October. He said it is unknown whether these soldiers will enter into combat in Ukraine, but that such a prospect “is certainly a highly concerning probability.” Kirby lauded a surge in American military aid to Ukraine in the past week, with $800 million in security assistance announced over the past week alone. He also commended President Biden’s aforementioned announcement of leveraging Russian assets to support Ukraine. “Now, this is unique. Never before has a multilateral coalition frozen the assets of an aggressor country and then harnessed the value of those assets to fund the defense of the aggrieved party, all while respecting the rule of law and maintaining solidarity,” Kirby said. From State Department Briefing on Oct. 22State Department spokesperson Vedant Patel was asked about U.N. Secretary General António Guterres’s decision to attend the BRICS summit this week despite refusing to attend a Ukraine peace summit in Switzerland in June. Patel highlighted that the U.S. respects the sovereignty and decisions of nations to associate with various groups, but also that “we will continue to … make clear to any country on the planet that it can no longer be business as usual with the Russian Federation.”Patel alluded to South Korea’s consideration of weapons funding for Ukraine in light of potential North Korean troop deployment as evidence that “Russia’s dangerous actions are not just a threat to Ukrainian security or European security; they are, of course, a threat to global security.”

[Category: Qiosk, Russia, North korea, Austin, Putin, Biden, Brics, Zelenskyy, State department, Patel, Kirby, Ukraine, Ukraine war]

— How the US-backed coup ended Guatemala's 'Ten Years of Spring'

 

at 10/24/24 10:05pm

The intertwined anniversaries this year of Guatemala’s 1944 Revolution and the 1954 coup that ended it provide an essential lens for understanding both Guatemala's history and U.S. geopolitical strategies in Latin America and the Global South more broadly.The "Ten Years of Spring" (1944-1954) was a brief period of reforms aimed at addressing deep inequalities in land distribution and labor rights, particularly for the majority indigenous populations. However, this momentum was abruptly halted by a U.S.-backed coup in 1954, leaving lasting scars on Guatemala and shaping U.S. interventionist policies in the region and beyond.The revolution and its reformsGuatemala, prior to 1944, was ruled by authoritarian leaders who prioritized economic growth through coffee exports, often at the expense of the indigenous majority. Leaders like Manuel Estrada Cabrera and Jorge Ubico deepened inequalities by granting land concessions to U.S. companies like United Fruit Company (UFCO) and enforcing labor exploitation. This led to a revolution in 1944 that ousted Ubico and ushered in democratic reforms under President Juan José Arévalo. His successor, Jacobo Árbenz, introduced Decree 900 in 1952, an ambitious land reform policy aimed at redistributing large unused estates to landless peasants, mainly benefiting indigenous workers.The reforms were met with fierce opposition from Guatemala's elite and the U.S. government, which had economic interests tied to UFCO. By 1953, Árbenz’s government had expropriated large amounts of UFCO’s unused land, angering U.S. officials who were closely linked to the company. The Eisenhower administration, influenced by Cold War fears of communism, decided to act.The U.S.-backed coup of 1954In 1954, the Central Intelligence Agency orchestrated a coup against Árbenz, known as Operation PBSUCCESS. Using psychological warfare, propaganda, and economic pressure, the CIA helped create a rebel army that toppled the Guatemalan government. The coup set a precedent for U.S. interventions throughout Latin America, exemplified in future actions in Cuba, Brazil, and Chile, and beyond.The coup was justified by claims of countering communism, but it largely served U.S. economic interests and demonstrated the growing influence of business on American foreign policy. U.S. companies, especially UFCO, lobbied for the coup to protect their holdings, reflecting the deep entanglement of business and government. The success of Operation PBSUCCESS emboldened the U.S. to use similar tactics in future interventions, ranging from covert actions to full-scale invasions.Long-term consequencesThe overthrow of Árbenz deepened Guatemala’s structural inequalities, sparking a civil war that lasted from 1960 to 1996 and resulted in over 200,000 deaths, mostly indigenous civilians. The war, largely fought between government forces and leftist guerrillas, saw brutal counterinsurgency tactics supported by the U.S. The violence culminated in the genocide of the Mayan Ixil population in the early 1980s, with U.S. backing for the Guatemalan military despite knowledge of human rights abuses.After decades of conflict, Guatemala transitioned to civilian rule in 1985, but the legacies of U.S. intervention remain. Despite official U.S. aid being suspended from 1977 to 1983 due to human rights abuses, covert CIA and Israeli support continued. U.S.-trained military forces, entrenched social inequality, corruption, and persistent economic dependency have left Guatemala vulnerable to the pressures of transnational capital and global warming. Poverty and malnutrition are widespread, worsened by climate change, which has ravaged the agricultural sector.U.S. foreign policy and Guatemala’s place in the global orderGuatemala's history serves as a case study in how U.S. geopolitical strategies have shaped the modern world, particularly in terms of economic domination and militarized governance. As journalist Vincent Bevins argues in "The Jakarta Method," U.S. interventions often create dependent, corrupt regimes that perpetuate cycles of violence and inequality. This pattern can be seen in many countries that fell under U.S. influence during the Cold War, from Guatemala to Indonesia and Brazil.Implications for todayReflecting on Guatemala's revolution and its violent suppression offers valuable lessons for today's geopolitical landscape. The resurgence of political figures like President Bernardo Arévalo, the son of former President Juan José Arévalo, signifies a return to the democratic ideals championed during Guatemala’s brief democratic spring. Arévalo’s anti-corruption platform resonates with indigenous communities still suffering from the legacies of U.S. intervention, suggesting a desire to revisit the unfinished business of Guatemala’s democratic revolution.Guatemala's struggle also underscores the broader global challenge of confronting U.S. militarism, which remains a significant driver of global inequality. The U.S. national security state, which has expanded dramatically since World War II, continues to prioritize military dominance over social welfare, exacerbating poverty, climate change, and social unrest worldwide.

[Category: Global south, Guatelmala]

— Advocates demand Biden de-classify Ukraine strategy

 

at 10/24/24 10:08am

On Tuesday, 13 humanitarian, faith-based, and foreign policy advocacy groups sent a letter to President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin urging them to release an unclassified version of America’s strategy on Ukraine. Sent as a response to the administration’s thus far refusal to release a declassified strategy, in compliance with Section 504 of the FY2024 National Security Supplemental Appropriations Act, the group — which includes the Quincy Institute, the publisher of Responsible Statecraft — calls on the White House to “set an example of democratic accountability” by fulfilling the requirements of the law. Tori Bateman, Advocacy Director of the Quincy Institute, said in a press release, “as the war in Ukraine persists without an end in sight, it’s clear Washington needs to put more thought into how the U.S. can best support Ukraine. We don’t want a situation where we’re engaged in a war without an achievable plan for victory. That’s not good for Ukraine or the United States.” Ursala Knudsen-Latta, Legislative Director for Peacebuilding Policy for the Friends Committee on National Legislation, another letter signatory, says the issue is about transparency “President Biden's refusal to fulfill the congressional mandate by releasing an unclassified strategy for U.S. engagement in Ukraine hampers the public's ability to know what their government is doing and to hold their government accountable to their values," she said in the press release. The Biden administration did release a report to three congressional committees, but it was classified, thus not fulfilling the congressional mandate or allowing the public to comment or review. Also highlighted in the letter is the humanitarian suffering experienced by the people of Ukraine. The war has created over six million refugees. An additional 10,000 civilians have been killed. Because of the conflict with Russia, Ukraine has lost an estimated 25% of the total population due to death, displacement, and emigration. “Women and girls have been disproportionately affected by sexual violence, horrifically weaponized as a tool of terror and control,” the letter says, adding, “civilians living in occupied territory are subject to torture, execution, and the suppression of civil liberties. Mines and explosive remnants of war have killed hundreds of civilians.” The 13 organizations called on President Biden to include “robust diplomatic engagement, clear objectives, and realistic plans” on Ukraine, while also pointing out that military aid alone will not achieve a “sovereign and prosperous future for Ukraine.” The signatories specifically point to President Biden’s language, saying “in a conflict framed by President Biden as a ‘battle between democracy and autocracy, between liberty and repression, between a rules-based order and one governed by brute force’, the United States should be setting the example of democratic accountability, not obscuring information from its citizens.”

[Category: Ukraine-russia, Diplomacy, Foreign aid, Biden administration, Ukraine crisis, Qiosk]

— Are North and South Korea escalating toward war?

 

at 10/23/24 10:05pm

A series of escalatory events on the Korean peninsula have intensified tensions between the two Koreas in recent weeks.On October 13, Seoul and Pyongyang exchanged harsh verbal threats of military action over alleged drone incursions from South Korea into the northern capital. According to North Korea’s claim, the South Korean drone scattered anti-regime propaganda leaflets across Pyongyang. Exactly who was behind the drone infiltrations remains unclear, but analysts have speculated that the South Korean military or South Korea-based anti-North activists could be involved. The incident prompted Pyongyang to order its border troops to prepare for military retaliation if South Korean drones were to infiltrate again, threatening a “horrible disaster.” In turn, Seoul also put its frontline military on high alert, with a defense ministry statement that “if North Korea inflicts any harm on the safety of South Koreans, that day will be the end of the North Korean regime.” The heated tensions continued to rise throughout the past week. On October 15, North Korea blew up parts of the roads connecting the two Koreas on its side of the border, which had been used for periodic economic and social exchanges when inter-Korean engagement was alive years ago. This might not be escalatory in a military sense, but it is nonetheless a politically escalatory provocation signaling a spiteful rejection of reconciliation with South Korea.Pyongyang’s messaging here, along with its public acknowledgment of a uranium enrichment facility in September, seems to be straightforward: it will continue to focus on advancing its nuclear program, and the next U.S. administration should not expect anything else.Talking 'trash'?Meanwhile, the latest drone affair is an extension of the ongoing trash balloon saga between the two Koreas that began earlier this year. In retaliation against anti-regime propaganda leaflet launches by South Korea-based activists, Pyongyang has been flying garbage-filled balloons into South Korea, indicating that it would stop sending the trash balloons only if South Korea halted its leaflet launches.Both Pyongyang and Seoul have their reasons to maintain a firm stance on the issue. For both, backing down would have negative implications for domestic political legitimacy. Neither side wants to look weak, or to be losing face with their own constituencies.Pyongyang is sensitive about balloons from South Korea, as they typically contain leaflets designed to humiliate the North Korean leadership and incite anti-regime sentiments in North Korea. From Pyongyang’s perspective, the South Korean balloons are a direct challenge to its regime’s legitimacy that requires a strong response.For Seoul, since the South Korean constitutional court nullified the existing law that criminalized leafleting last year, it has become politically more complicated to keep activists from ratcheting up their activities. The reputational cost of blocking leafleting can also be unappealing for President Yoon, who champions the idea of promoting freedom and human rights in North Korea, and politically relies on conservative voters with hostile views on North Korea — particularly so given his low approval rating today.The balloon confrontation has been downplayed by some in South Korea as psychological warfare and not posing a serious security threat in a physical sense. However, with the latest incident prompting more aggressive ultimatums and military posturing by both Pyongyang and Seoul, it seems evident that the balloon confrontation is more than just “trash talking.”Commenting on North Korea’s threat of force, Seoul’s national security advisor Shin Won-sik called Pyongyang’s bluff, saying that it “will not dare to start a suicidal war.”Shin is right; in facing a far superior U.S.-South Korea military alliance, the stakes of escalation are indeed high for North Korea. Nevertheless, Seoul should also recognize that Pyongyang may go up the escalation ladder precisely to “deter” a potentially costly crisis.What does this mean? The large military gap between North Korea and the U.S.-South Korea alliance necessitates Pyongyang to avoid war, but also to make sure it does not look vulnerable, as that can risk inviting more ambitious alliance efforts to challenge and weaken the regime.One example is North Korea’s nuclear test in September 2017. In light of former U.S. President Donald Trump’s threat to unleash “fire and fury” against North Korea and serious discussion of preventive war in the White House, Pyongyang climbed up the escalation ladder by conducting its largest and most explosive nuclear test yet. Pyongyang seemed to take Washington’s intensified threat signaling seriously and presumably recognized a growing risk of conflict, but it still opted for confrontation instead of backing down.Pyongyang has also proven willing to escalate using limited yet outright violence, as shown by its attacks on a South Korean naval vessel and the Yeonpyeong island in 2010. Pyongyang back then may have determined that a high-profile show of resolve was necessary in light of several negative concurrent events and trends — including a defeat from a maritime skirmish in November 2009, former leader Kim Jong Il’s deteriorating health, looming uncertainty about smooth leadership transition, and seemingly growing belief in Seoul and Washington about a possible regime collapse in North Korea.The Yoon administration’s military doctrine to retaliate “immediately, forcefully, until the end” is designed to discourage North Korean escalation. Yet Pyongyang, convinced that Seoul is more averse to casualties than it is, might dangerously gamble that Seoul would back down first in a limited military crisis. Even if Seoul has a genuine intent to escalate further, the very real possibility that Washington would intervene and keep Seoul from doing so in order to avoid a full-blown war — as it has before — can misguide Pyongyang to think that “escalating to de-escalate” is a worthwhile gamble.Seoul needs to acknowledge that the bizarre North Korean trash balloon launch might not be mere attention-seeking behavior but can pose a real danger of escalation and make efforts it can to defuse tensions. Seoul can tone down the rhetoric and do more to take advantage of the South Korean police act, which technically enables local law enforcement to restrain cross-border leafleting. Such South Korean gestures of de-escalation could allow room for Pyongyang to take reciprocal steps to de-escalate.So far, Washington has mostly remained a bystander while blaming Pyongyang for instigating tensions. However, with Pyongyang and Seoul seemingly drifting toward a more severe escalation, it is necessary for Washington to be a prudent mediator. In addition to calling on Pyongyang’s restraint, Washington alliance managers should come to mutual recognition with their counterparts in Seoul that South Korean actions have also contributed to tensions, and that it will require greater South Korean restraint as well to prevent a bigger crisis from emerging on the Korean peninsula.

[Category: North korea, South korea, Enewsletter, Trash balloons, Yoon suk-yeol, Kim jong un, Korea, Korean peninsula]

— Biden's 'leadership' is blowing the lid off two wars

 

at 10/23/24 10:05pm

President Joe Biden has called America “the world power,” and has referred to his “leadership in the world.” If Biden does indeed see himself as a, or the, world leader, then he has been disappointing in his job and has mismanaged it.The world today stands on the brink of larger wars, even potentially world wars, on two fronts simultaneously. That is, perhaps, a more precarious position than the world has found itself in in over half a century, since the Cuban Missile Crisis, and perhaps longer. Then, the danger came from a single front: today, there is danger on two or even three.The Biden administration seemingly subscribes to a foreign policy doctrine of nurturing wars while attempting to manage them so that they remain confined to America’s foreign policy interests and do not spill over into wider wars. But such fine calibrations are not easily done. War is sloppy and unpredictable. Though a nation’s plans may be well understood by its planners, calibration of what might push the enemy too far and cause a wider war depends equally on your enemy’s plans, calibrations, passions and red lines: all of which are harder to profile or understand. What is more, the contemporary culture of the U.S. foreign policy establishment seems dedicated precisely to excluding the kind of knowledge and empathy that allows one to understand an adversary’s mind, and instead to fostering ill-informed and hate-filled prejudice.Calibrating how far you can push militarily or politically without tipping the balance of containment and triggering full-scale war is dangerously worse than tricky. Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah badly miscalculated how far the calibrated strikes and responses with Israel could go before a controlled conflict became a larger war. The price of miscalculation was his life and a war in Lebanon.Successive U.S. and European governments, and the NATO Secretariat, calculated that they could, through a series of steps, expand NATO into the former Soviet space without triggering a military response from Russia. The result of this miscalculation has been a war that has been disastrous for Ukraine and severely damaging for Western interests and that risks ending in either Western humiliation or direct war between Russia and the West.Despite the fragility of such calibrations, they seem to have become the centerpiece of U.S. policy. In both the Middle East and Ukraine, the U.S. nurtured wars by sending weapons and discouraging diplomacy. And in both theaters, the U.S. prioritized containing the wars they were supporting and preventing them from becoming wider wars.In the Middle East, the focus has been on balancing supporting Israel and its right to defend itself with preventing the war from escalating into a wider regional war. Biden insists that “we’re going to do everything we can to keep a wider war from breaking out.” In Ukraine, the focus has been on providing Ukraine with whatever it needs for as long as it takes to attain the strongest position on the battlefield to win them their freedom, their sovereignty and their territorial integrity while preventing the war from escalating into a wider war with Russia. “We will not fight a war against Russia in Ukraine,” Biden has said. “Direct confrontation between NATO and Russia is World War Three, something we must strive to prevent.”But Biden’s strategy is on the precipice of disastrous failure on both fronts. On both fronts the calibrations have gone dangerously wrong. The war in Gaza has spread to Lebanon and is on a quivering edge in Iran. After Iran’s missile strikes on Israel on October 1, the world awaits, not only Israel’s response, but Iran’s response to that. The risk is not just an Israel-Iran war. With the U.S. sending, not only a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system, or THAAD, advanced missile defense system to Israel, but about 100 American troops to operate it, there is the risk of the U.S. being drawn into a war with Iran. If that’s not bad enough, that war could then, conceivably, draw in Russia.In Ukraine, too, the calibration quivers on the edge of a wider war. Zelenskyy daily lobbies the U.S. to erase all red lines and green light strikes deeper into Russian territory with Western supplied long range missile systems, that, as in Israel, would require U.S. involvement. Russian President Vladimir Putin warns that such a green light would “change the very essence, the very nature of the conflict dramatically” because it would “mean that NATO countries — the United States and European countries — are at war with Russia.” If Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin is correct that the U.S. is “seeing evidence” that South Korean and Ukrainian intelligence are right in their assertion that North Korea has sent 3,000 troops to Russia, then there is risk of a still wider war.The Biden administration’s policy of calibrating how far you can nurture a war before pushing it over the precipice of escalation has gone badly and placed the U.S. on the edge of two wider wars. If Biden is the leader of the world, then he has recklessly and dangerously mismanaged it.

[Category: Ukraine, Israel, Israel-palestine, Palestine, Gaza war, Russia, Ukraine war, Joe biden]

— N. Korean troops in Ukraine? Don't overreact.

 

at 10/23/24 8:38am

U.S. officials are now saying that North Korean troops may be fighting for the Russians in Ukraine. "There is evidence that there are DPRK troops in Russia," U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin told reporters in Rome, using North Korea's formal name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. "What exactly they are doing? Left to be seen. These are things that we need to sort out.” Austin called the situation a “very, very serious” one, saying that it will impact U.S. interests in both Europe and the Asia-Pacific region. The Ukrainian government said last week it had obtained intelligence that at least 10,000 troops were being prepared for dispatching to Russia’s front lines in Ukraine. Meanwhile, as of today, South Korea’s national spy agency said 3,000 North Korean special forces had already arrived in Russia, with more on the way. The South Korean and Ukrainian accusations prompted a wave of alarm throughout the West. Russia and North Korea have denied the claims, but Austin’s comments lend further credibility to the previous reports: a third player appears likely to enter the Ukraine War. How will the West respond? “This is a challenge, but we know how to respond to this challenge. It is important that partners do not hide from this challenge as well,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in last night’s video address to Ukrainian citizens, seemingly urging a strong American reaction.Concerns from U.S. allies with a more direct stake in these proceedings, such as South Korea and Ukraine, are very real and deserve to be heard. But, as research fellow at the Quincy Institute’s Eurasia program Mark Episkopos says, they also must be held against the backdrop of these states’ broader interests and how they differ from ours. “The Zelenskyy government has made it a foreign policy priority to draw the West into a direct conflict with Russia, because there is a recognition that this is the only way Ukraine can win, and now it falls to us in the West to determine whether or not getting into a direct war with Russia is in our interests,” Episkopos said.Prior to Austin’s comments this week, the story had proliferated in a manner similar to that of other rumors of rogue Russian actions over the past three years: several major Western media outlets wrote headlines already accepting the reports of North Korean troops fighting for Russia as absolute fact, Western officials expressed alarmist and threatening rhetoric, and Zelenskyy pushed for a “proper and fair response” from NATO and the U.S. Now that U.S. officials are giving credibility to these stories, a trend of tightening friendship between Russia and North Korea this year becomes even more evident. In June, the two signed a treaty that included commitments to each other’s security. There are credible reports that North Korea has been supplying Russia with various weapons systems for months. As this relationship has evolved, so have Western worries. In a New York Times article on Wednesday, North Korean expert and former member of President George W. Bush’s National Security Council Victor Cha warned that the connection between North Korea and Russia is now a “real ‘no-limits partnership’” and that “we are in a whole different era if North Korean soldiers are dying for Putin.” While this rhetoric can feed alarmism, the larger problem is not the premise of North Korean involvement itself, but in the ways American foreign policymakers may be inclined to respond. In terms of the U.S. and NATO’s overall security, experts say the external threat of North Korean battalions, Iranian bombs or Chinese intelligence in backing Russia’s Eastern European excursion pales in comparison to the self-induced threat of continuing to prolong the war and falling down an escalatory spiral with Russia and its allies. “We should be careful not to overreact to this alleged development in a way that would present the West with a very serious military quagmire,” said Episkopos. “If we were to take this as grounds for some kind of intervention, it would have catastrophic consequences for both Ukraine and the West.” While Russia, Iran, China, and North Korea are indeed helping each other, it is also true that an alliance of over 30 countries has been giving “unprecedented levels of support” to Ukraine since the war began, point out experts. Commentators and columnists visualizing the dawn of a new anti-Western axis as a metaphysical battle of ideological dominance — democracy versus authoritarianism, good versus evil — fail to recognize the simple reality that Russia is a rational state that can and will build alliances to protect its interests, just as the United States and its allies have. “The U.S. talks rightfully about the strength of its alliances, and that NATO is the greatest, and, by many standards, the most successful military alliance in the world,” Episkopos said. “But then we are somehow shocked and appalled to find that our adversaries have allies too, and their allies help them out in all sorts of ways, directly and indirectly. But that is the reality of this war and that has been the reality since 2022.” Episkopos called for a rational line of thinking amongst U.S. decision-makers, leaning away from an overemphasis on liberal internationalism that misrepresents Putin’s goals. “I'm afraid that we've returned to a similar understanding of our adversaries,” he continued, “that these are not complex, varied governments with a whole range of interests, but are simply evil, malignant actors who seek to destroy liberal democracy — and our only choice is to stand against them to the very end. This kind of framework should be rejected.”

[Category: North korea, Russia, Putin, Kim jong un, U.s., Nato, Military, Ukraine, Zelenskyy, Austin, South korea, Ukraine war, Qiosk]

— ​BRICS signals shift from US dominated financial system

 

at 10/22/24 11:05pm

Russia is touting the recently opened BRICS summit as the largest foreign policy event ever held in Russia and the key event for Russia’s presidency of BRICS in 2024. On Tuesday, Vladimir Putin welcomed leaders from 24 countries and delegations from a total of 32 nations. The 16th BRICS summit, running from October 22-24, is the first under the BRICS+ format and includes representatives from Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America. On the first day, the original BRICS members (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) officially welcomed Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) into the group. With this expansion, BRICS+ now represents over 40% of the global population, potentially positioning itself as a viable counterweight to the Western-dominated global system.While the main objectives of the gathering will focus on strengthening multilateralism, equitable global development, and security, attendees will also explore ways to deepen cooperation between BRICS nations and countries from the Global South. Specific issues discussed among BRICS will include a new BRICS payment system, de-dollarization, a BRICS digital currency, an alternative to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and a proposal for a new trade platform for grain.The chosen themes and issues accentuate and exacerbate the growing rift between the West’s existing global order and the Global South. BRICS, especially Russia, clearly intend to use the forum to display their vision of a multipolar economic and geopolitical architecture that starkly contrasts with the Western, primarily United States led, “rules-based” financial, economic, and political order. Prior to the summit, Russian State Duma Speaker Vyachaslav Volodin publicly underscored these sentiments on Telegram: “Today, BRICS unites 10 countries and 45% of the world's population. More than thirty states are showing interest in participating in it... The time of Washington and Brussels hegemony is passing." While BRICS+ countries are meeting in Kazan, the “rules-based order” and U.S. hegemony continue to be severely undermined by Israel’s ongoing Washington-backed military actions in Gaza and Lebanon. Israel has continued to exhibit an unwavering disrespect for United Nations resolutions, has attacked peacekeepers (referred to as UNIFIL in Lebanon), and even declared U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres persona non grata. Notably, Guterres is expected to attend in Kazan.Among these increasing Middle East tensions, Iran President Masoud Pezeshkian said that Tehran expects to complete the process of formalizing an agreement with Russia on strategic cooperation during the BRICS summit in Kazan. In mid-September, the Russian government reported the practical completion of the procedures necessary for signing a new interstate agreement on comprehensive strategic partnership between the Russian Federation and the Islamic Republic of Iran. However, it appears that Russia may want to delay the official signing date due to increased tensions between Iran and Israel and Russian apprehension of being drawn in too strongly on Iran’s side. Instead, Russia has sought to use the BRICS gathering as a forum to discuss the war in Gaza and Lebanon. For example, UAE President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed arrived in Moscow on Sunday to much fanfare for an official visit that included high-level talks centered on bilateral cooperation and the situation in the Middle East. Beyond geopolitics, one of the more prominent issues to be raised during the summit is Russia’s proposal for a BRICS payment system, BRICS Pay. According to Bloomberg, “Russia is proposing changes to cross-border payments conducted among BRICS countries aimed at circumventing the global financial system, as the heavily penalized country seeks to sanctions-proof its own economy.” Russia has recently experienced delays in international transactions with its trading partners, including BRICS member countries, as banks in these countries fear punitive actions from Western regulators.The proposal includes plans to create a network of commercial banks that would allow participating countries to process transactions in local currencies as well as establish direct links between central banks. Additionally, Russia is proposing a model based on digital ledger technology that would allow the use of tokens for settlement. The plan also included the creation of centers for mutual trade in commodities such as grain. Not surprisingly, this idea correlates with a Russian export trade plan introduced in September during the “Made in Russia” forum. Then, Russian government representatives spoke about the growth of the share of “friendly countries” in trade, about stimulating the export of medium and high value-added products, and about the need to supply more expensive agricultural products to foreign markets. Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin said that the share of national currencies in settlements with partners from “friendly countries” — defined as China, Turkey, India, and Egypt — currently amounts to 90%. Such exports in August were already estimated at 86% of the total export volume.Putin said BRICS countries should focus on the use of national currencies, new financial instruments, and the creation of an analogue of SWIFT. He called for a “cautious approach in creating a new reserve currency due to differences in the structure and quality of the economies of the BRICS member states.” Prior to the BRICS summit, however, Indian Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar said that India has no plan to target the U.S. dollar, an announcement that placed the country directly at odds with China and Russia.Despite objections from some BRICS+ members, it seems as though de-dollarization is slowly moving towards an economic reality. According to the Jerusalem Post, China has already unveiled plans to use a gold-backed yuan and Russia is trading in currencies tied to gold. Together with the significant gold accumulation by BRICS countries, these actions suggest a world shifting away from dollar reliance. For example, the divergence between treasuries and gold as safe havens has signaled investors’ heightened uncertainty given skyrocketing government debt and their preference for physical assets. Over the last 10 years, central bank purchases of gold have significantly outpaced purchases of U.S. Treasuries.The Kazan BRICS summit has demonstrated a considerably impressive level of ambition, no doubt fueled by Russia’s chairmanship and the many underlying financial and economic issues with which it is currently wrestling. Although Russian interests obviously are driving the current agenda, it is evident that the issues presented resonate strongly among a variety of countries, from global powers like China to nations throughout the Global South. They all share a common interest in navigating the emerging challenges presented by a rapidly developing multipolar architecture. Although BRICS 2024 is unlikely to implement immediate solutions to its economic and finance proposals, it has already successfully generated enthusiasm for alternative approaches to the post-World War II order. After several decades of war and harmful sanctions, BRICS+ nations are increasingly distrustful of the United States led “rules-based order” that favors the few at the expense of many. Western nations should take notice that while BRICS will not immediately bring down the existing global architecture, it is a looming threat to the unrivaled dominance of its institutions, which no longer maintain the trust or confidence of a growing majority of the world’s inhabitants.

[Category: Russia, China, South africa, India, Brazil, Uae, Iran, Global south, Economics, De-dollarization, Global order, Brics pay, Export, Finance, Sanction, Foreign policy, World order, Brics]

— Why Russia won’t save Iran

 

at 10/22/24 10:05pm

On October 11, a rare high-level international forum took place in Ashgabat, the capital of the Central Asian nation of Turkmenistan. Leveraging its permanently neutral status, enshrined in its constitution, Turkmenistan provided a suitable platform for Eurasian dialogue which brought together the presidents of Russia, Iran, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia, and Armenia, as well as high-level officials from China, Turkey, UAE, Oman, Bahrain, Iraq, among others. While these connections have their intrinsic value, the central stage was occupied by the meeting of the Russian and Iranian presidents, Vladimir Putin and Massoud Pezeshkian. There was a certain intrigue about it as it was their first meeting after the reformist Pezeshkian’s election in July following the death in an air accident of his hardline predecessor Ebrahim Raisi. As Russia’s relations with the West grow more hostile, Moscow tends to resent Iranian reformists’ attempts to diplomatically engage with the West. Although both sides were noticeably tight-lipped about what was discussed at the meeting, the situation in the Middle East, as Iran braces for Israel’s strike in retaliation for Iran’s October 1 barrage of missiles on Israel (themselves part of escalating exchange of blows between Iran and Israel), was certainly one of the main items. A few days later, Russia’s deputy foreign minister Sergey Ryabkov issued a stern warning to Israel “to not even consider attacking Iranian nuclear facilities.” In his words, “this would be a catastrophic development and a complete negation of all existing principles in the area of ensuring nuclear safety.” Politically, such statements vindicate Iranian hardliners’ view that the outreach to the West promoted by the reformist administration is both futile and foolhardy, whereas relations with Moscow is where Tehran ought to invest its diplomatic capital. When the foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, took to X (formerly Twitter) to inform about his exchanges with EU‘s High Representative on Foreign Policy Josep Borrell on the nature of Iran’s military-technical cooperation with Russia, the conservative journalist Fereshteh Sadeghi sniped that Aragchi should have instead told Borrell that Iran’s relations with Russia were none of the West’s business. Hardline lawmakers like Kamran Ghazanfari, meanwhile, are pushing for Pezeshkian’s impeachment based on alleged illegalities regarding the appointment of one of Iran’s chief proponents of dialogue with the West, former foreign minister Javad Zarif’s as vice president for strategic affairs.Meanwhile, the West is not helping matters. With the U.S. presidential elections a mere two weeks away, the two candidates are competing over who will out-hawk whom on Iran. The Democratic candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris, bizarrely claimed that Iran is America’s “greatest adversary”, blithely ignoring the olive branch Pezeshkian extended during his speech at the UN General Assembly in New York last month. The Republican contender and former president, Donald Trump, meanwhile, alternates messages suggesting openness to a more constructive relationship with Tehran, notably saying that he won’t seek regime change in Iran, with advising Israel to strike Iranian nuclear facilities. His real track record on Iran in office, however, squarely puts him in the hardline camp: it was Trump who recklessly withdrew from the nuclear deal with Iran in 2018 and brought the U.S. and Iran to the brink of war with the assassination of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Al-Qods commander Gen. Qassem Soleimani. The EU doesn’t seem any more eager to explore diplomatic opportunities with Iran than the U.S. While Borrell and the deputy secretary general of the European External Action Service he leads, Enrique Mora, are still engaged in dialogue with Araghchi, the EU last week imposed fresh sanctions on Iran for an alleged transfer of ballistic missiles to Russia. The hawkish president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, threatened more sanctions. Borrell is on his way out, to be replaced in a few weeks by the former Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas who is likely to look for more ways to punish Iran for its role in Russia’s war in Ukraine. The EU also pushed for more aggressive language on Iran’s regional ambitions at this week’s first EU summit with the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) – it is only thanks to the GCC countries’ own delicate diplomacy that, despite its past animosity, the importance of the “diplomatic engagement with Iran to pursue regional de-escalation” was finally agreed in the joint statement.That context inevitably pushes Tehran ever closer to Moscow and may even blunt the domestic political opposition to these ties. While hardliners welcome the EU’s hostility as a further evidence of the wisdom of their favored “Turn East” policy, reformists may reluctantly conclude that, in the absence of any Western interest in responding positively to their overtures, the concerns about regime survival leave Tehran with few realistic options other than to throw its lot with Moscow, at least for the foreseeable future.Where the reformists are on a surer footing is in being clear-eyed about Moscow’s real capabilities and limitations in helping Iran. One of the areas where Moscow and Tehran stepped up their cooperation is reportedly in the intelligence realm, particularly in regards to Israel – in parallel, with Moscow’s own deteriorating relationship with Jerusalem. However, being aware of Israel’s vulnerabilities is not the same as having sufficient capabilities to exploit them to a decisive effect. Iran can certainly step up its game, but the results, if any, will only be felt over a longer period of time. As to Iran’s immediate needs, Russia’s Su-35 fighters and S-400 missile systems could certainly boost its air defenses, but Russia still hesitates in delivering those despite years of speculations over the matter, and that is because it is careful not to antagonize its key partners in the Persian Gulf, like Saudi Arabia and UAE – notably, both pushed back at the EU’s insistence to align the EU and GCC positions on Russia, particularly on the EU’s criticisms of their role in circumventing Brussels’ Russia sanctions. Of note, neither Tehran nor Moscow are disclosing whether the ambitious strategic cooperation document they plan to sign in the near future will contain any security commitments.Russian expert on Iran Nikita Smagin went further and suggested that Moscow might even secretly be pleased with Israel’s strikes on Iran’s oil infrastructure, as it would remove a key competitor for Russian oil on the Chinese market, and thus provide a significant boost for Russia’s budget. The best Iran could hope for would be that the dust somehow settles after an exchange of blows with Israel, and a new administration is elected in Washington that is willing to pursue diplomacy with Tehran and restrain Israel’s excesses. That would widen Iran’s options while lessening incentives to support destructive forces in the Middle East and one-sided alignment with Russia. On current trajectory, however, there is preciously little hope that that would be happening. That sets Iran for what could at best be described as a deeply imperfect alignment with Russia, in the hope that it would accrue Tehran at least some benefits as Moscow juggles its own interests in the Middle East and beyond.

[Category: Russia, Iran, Defense agreement, Middle east, Russia iran]

— Harris embrace of Cheney goes back to World War I

 

at 10/22/24 10:05pm

"What's happened to the Democrats? They used to be antiwar!" Such is one of the many questions being bandied about by an online commentariat seeking to make sense of a litany of Republican endorsements of Kamala Harris, many of them made by party elites known for their hawkish foreign policy like former Wyoming Representative Liz Cheney and former Vice President Dick Cheney. One could find similar consternation with American liberals’ support for U.S. involvement in the Ukraine crisis. The confusion is based primarily on nostalgia, a selective view of history that obscures the Democratic Party’s longer, more complicated relationship with interventionism. The reality is quite different: what we are witnessing is the latest iteration of an ongoing intraparty struggle where the dominant liberal interventionist core asserts itself over a smaller progressive noninterventionist periphery. While the latter often dominates popular conceptions of the Democratic Party and its vision for American foreign affairs, the former drives the reality of party politics. This has been happening since the First World War, best encapsulated by the public debate between Columbia professor John Dewey and one of his students, writer Randolph Bourne. While both were considered liberals of a progressive stripe, they maintained opposing views on American entry into Europe's conflagration. Known for his adherence to philosophical pragmatism, Dewey asserted that the war could save the world from German militarism and be used to shepherd the American political economy toward a fairer, managed state. Bourne rejected this notion and argued that American entry into the war would undermine the egalitarianism of the larger progressive project and create a labyrinth of bureaucracies that would undermine democracy.While Dewey’s arguments held sway as the United States entered the war, American involvement in Europe’s quarrel, compounded by civil rights abuses at home, proved Bourne posthumously correct. Despite succumbing to the Spanish Flu in 1918, Bourne’s views of the war, bolstered by the posthumous publication of a collection of essays entitled Untimely Papers, found fertile soil in an American society horrified by the conflict. Chastened by the realities of the Western Front, interwar progressivism took on a solid strain of pacifism and opposition to centralized authority.While Bourne's sentiments survived the Great War and inspired a postwar mood of non-interventionism, they would not survive America's subsequent entry into World War II, which set the tone for the foreign policy of American liberalism and, by extension, the Democratic Party for the next 30 years. Liberal interventionism won out in the face of a threat posed by the distinctly right-wing geopolitical threat in the form of the Axis powers. Except for a few strident leftwing pacifists and a few dissident liberals who took refuge with the Republican Right, the bulk of the formerly pacifist left took up the cause of intervention in the name of antifascism. The tone set by the Second World War carried through into American liberalism's conduct of the Cold War. Beneath the din of anti-communism, one often amplified by conservatives, American foreign policy was shaped by a liberal understanding of recent history and the origins of communism. President Harry Truman's eponymously titled doctrine entangled the United States in Europe's security architecture.After the Eisenhower administration, which solidified the Truman doctrine and expanded it to the Middle East and Southeast Asia, the Cold War framework was thickened further still by a liberal cold warrior, President John F. Kennedy.Empowered by a materialist and universalistic view of human advancement and the belief that the U.S. had fallen behind the Soviets, JFK pursued a policy known as “flexible response” that expanded American military spending beyond the bounds of nuclear deterrence. These policy changes, maintained under his successor, President Lyndon Johnson, and coupled with a dramatic increase in foreign aid spending, expanded U.S. commitments throughout the postcolonial world. This combination of asymmetric warfare and economic development drastically raised the stakes of the Cold War and led directly to U.S. entry into the quagmire of the Vietnam War. Contrary to nostalgia present the Kennedy era as a missed path towards peace, in reality, JFK continued America on a path of war-making and militarization laid out by his predecessors and stretched well beyond the deaths of the slain Kennedy brothers.While the Vietnam War was the product of Cold War liberalism, it was also its undoing. The horrors of the war, coupled with the inequities of the draft and government secrecy revealed, inspired a mass antiwar movement among the heretofore latent progressive left that found a resonant audience on Capitol Hill. Earlier antiwar works from the left, including that of Randolph Bourne, were revived for a youth movement radicalized against the war. This movement similarly inspired subsequent debates during the late Cold War, particularly on the issue of the Reagan administration’s arming of the Contras in Nicaragua and intervention in the Angolan Civil War. The future seemed bright for a left-wing anti-war sensibility and its access to a Democratic Party that was amenable to its views. However, the collapse of the Soviet Union, internal changes within the Democratic Party, and the subsequent birth of a new logic for humanitarian interventionism subsumed the ruptures caused by the Vietnam War. While the Democrats indeed offered notable resistance to Operation Desert Storm, often invoking the specter of Vietnam, congressional Democrats provided significant support to U.S. operations in Somalia and interventions in the former Yugoslavia. During the Clinton administration, inspired by retrospectives on the Holocaust compounded by the Rwandan genocide, the notion of a “responsibility to protect,” the concept that the U.S. had the moral obligation to use force to prevent mass atrocity, took hold within elite liberal circles.Due to these competing impulses, Democratic opposition to the Global War on Terror was checkered and paired by a left-wing anti-war movement that, in retrospect, was a shadow of its Vietnam-era self. While, as with Iraq War I, Democrats posted noticeable opposition to Iraq War II, such opposition was overshadowed by the fact that Democratic leadership, especially in the Senate, acquiesced to a war spearheaded by a Republican administration. Three of the last five Democratic presidential nominees — then Senators John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden — voted in support of using military action against Iraq. President Obama won in 2008 in part because he publicly opposed war in Iraq before it began and campaigned on ending that war. While he advanced that sentiment by pursuing diplomacy with Iran and opening up to Cuba, he also launched interventions into Libya, Syria, and Yemen, often sold on the grounds of a “responsibility to protect.” Much like the liberal rationale of interventions past, American involvement was justified on humanitarian grounds and met largely with Democratic acquiescence in Congress and voter apathy. Liberalism has entered a new wave of internal strife regarding America’s role in the world. In a new era of great power competition, the progressive base of the Democratic Party has come out hard against unconditional U.S. support for Israel’s war in Gaza and Lebanon. It has also shown varying degrees of opposition to U.S. involvement in the Ukraine crisis. Yet, unlike the Vietnam era, this grassroots opposition has been unable to substantively influence Democratic politics, where a party elite clings to old views about upholding international norms and alliances, no matter how inconsistent or counterproductive those views in practice may be. Given this intraparty divide, it should not be surprising that the Harris campaign has courted the endorsement of hawkish Republicans. This history, however, should not be viewed as determinative of an inevitable path forward. The past has shown that these impulses are not static but held by individuals determined to shape the future.

[Category: Progressives, Democratic party, Democrats, Humanitarian invetervention, Antiwar, Kamala harris, Liz cheney, Enewsletter, Election 2024]

— Expert: Ukraine loses 25% of its population

 

at 10/22/24 4:32pm

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is over two years old, and Kyiv is facing a population crisis. According to Florence Bauer, the U.N. Population Fund’s head in Eastern Europe, Ukraine’s population has declined by around 10 million people, or about 25 percent, since the start of the conflict in 2014, with 8 million of those occurring after Russia began its full-scale invasion in 2022. This report comes a week after Ukrainian presidential adviser Serhiy Leshchenko revealed that American politicians were pushing Zelenskyy to mobilize men as young as 18. “Population challenges” were already evident before the conflict started, as it matched trends existing in Eastern Europe, but the war has exacerbated the problem. The 6.7 million refugees represent the largest share of this population shift. Bauer also cited a decline in fertility. “The birth rate plummeted to one child per woman – the lowest fertility rate in Europe and one of the lowest in the world,” she told reporters on Tuesday. Combat losses and civilian casualties have been hard to accurately tally, as Kyiv treats them as a state secret. Best estimates from late 2023 put the number around 70,000, and Bauer confirmed that they are in the “tens of thousands.” Further decline in Ukraine’s population will likely occur as the war drags on and includes draftees aged 18-25. According to Leshchenko, “American politicians from both parties are putting pressure on President Zelenskyy on the question of why there is no mobilization of those aged 18 to 25 in Ukraine.” When the war ends, Ukraine will need labor for rebuilding and continued losses are likely to have long-term consequences. George Beebe, Director of Grand Strategy at the Quincy Institute, says, “Demography is not necessarily destiny, but such shocking projections bode ill for Ukraine’s economic prosperity and societal dynamism,” Quincy Institute Director of Grand Strategy George Beebe wrote in RS last year. “The future they portend is a vicious circle of decline. Under such circumstances, simply manning a substantial standing army as a counter to much more populous Russia would be a challenge for Ukraine, let alone mastering and maintaining a large arsenal of NATO-standard weaponry.” Beebe added, “the more resources it must devote to its military, the fewer it will have for launching new commercial ventures and building a productive civilian economy.” Ukraine is already dealing with war fatigue, evident from shifts in polling, and in the report that a staggering 51,000 soldiers have deserted from the army this year. Beebe also points to a demographic study that predicts that Ukraine’s working-age population will decline by a third by 2040, with the number of children declining by half, and adds that “mounting damage is likely to discourage many refugees from returning to Ukraine anytime soon.”

[Category: Ukraine deaths, Ukraine war, Russia-ukraine, Qiosk]

As of 10/29/24 6:13pm. Last new 10/29/24 12:05pm.