Indian Strategic Studies

4 December 2022

The New National Defense Strategy Makes a Subtle Yet Significant Break From Its Predecessors

JENNIFER KAVANAGH

Across presidential administrations and regardless of the political party in power, the U.S. Department of Defense has continuously resisted shedding legacy commitments, tending to expand its role over time. At first glance, the recently released 2022 National Defense Strategy (NDS) is no different: it makes few real choices and even adds priorities, such as the Arctic and climate, to the DOD’s docket.

But a closer read suggests that this NDS begins to break from that habitual pattern, responding to an increasingly challenging security environment not by growing the DOD’s responsibilities, but by refining and focusing its commitments. It reveals several areas where the DOD signals an explicit intention to concentrate its own investments more narrowly on top priorities while delegating other responsibilities to interagency, private sector, and foreign partners—a tactic known as burden sharing. Though subtle, these changes are significant steps in the right direction in three key ways.

First, the 2022 NDS commits not just to cooperate with allies and partners, but to put them in the driver’s seat on issues of self-defense and regional security, freeing up U.S. forces for more important security demands. The desire to improve the integration of allies and partners with the U.S. military is a perennial one for the DOD, appearing in the 2018 NDS and other strategic planning documents. But this NDS moves beyond previous statements, defining specific areas where the DOD will expect more participation from allies and partners and placing itself in a supporting role.

What Makes France So Aggravating to the United States Is Also What Makes It So Valuable

CHRISTOPHER S. CHIVVIS, MATHIEU DROIN

On Thursday, U.S. President Joe Biden will welcome French President Emmanuel Macron to the White House with the full pomp of an official state visit. France and America need each other now more than ever, but history suggests that cooperation won’t be easy.

Macron’s visit is a chance for Washington to get over its hang-ups about his sometimes irascible foreign policy and realize that France’s independence is at the root of what makes it such a valuable ally. For its part, France needs to show that its transformative agenda for Europe and its role in the world can deliver concrete benefits for America.

Macron’s predecessors have been aggravating Washington for more than fifty years, starting with president Charles De Gaulle, who lambasted America for the Vietnam War, protested the U.S. dollar’s global dominance, built France’s own nuclear weapons, and distanced France from NATO. Macron has been no less frank. When he called NATO “brain dead” in 2019, heads exploded in the corridors of the Pentagon, CIA, and State Department. When the Biden administration announced new plans for military cooperation with Australia and Britain in 2021, U.S. officials were stunned by Paris’s sharp rebuke. Macron’s insistence on keeping a diplomatic channel open with Moscow after its invasion of Ukraine only made more steam blow from the ears of U.S. policy elites. Most of all, Macron’s energetic cheerleading for European “strategic autonomy”—by which he means that Europe needs the economic and military might to take on much more responsibility for its foreign policy—rankles ardent NATO backers here and in and Europe.

How cybercriminals have been affected by the war in Ukraine

Less extortion and theft, but more digital destruction. That is one of the ways in which the conflict in Ukraine is altering cybercrime. The shift, says Oleh Derevianko, chairman of issp, a Ukrainian computer-security firm, is striking. Recent years had seen a boom in the use of ransomware, which scrambles victims’ computer data until a payment is made. Now, Mr Derevianko says, the number of such attacks on issp’s corporate and government clients has dropped pretty-much to zero. Instead, many of those once involved in such enterprises seem to have been co-opted by Russia’s government and are focusing on “wiping” computers to damage Ukraine’s war effort by erasing whatever data they can reach.

The same is true of attacks on Russian computers by Ukrainians, says Olga Khmil, a researcher at Molfar, an intelligence firm in Kyiv. Such hackers now care less about stealing money and “more about the damage they can cause to the aggressor”.

Lessons from Russia’s cyber-war in Ukraine

Shaping the battlefield. Darius, king of Persia, did it in 331bc, with caltrops strewn where he thought his enemy Alexander the Great would advance. The Allies did it in 1944, with dummy aircraft and landing craft intended to fool Germany’s high command into thinking their invasion of France would be in the Pas de Calais, not Normandy. And Russia attempted it on February 24th, when, less than an hour before its tanks started rolling into Ukraine—on their way, they thought, to Kyiv—its computer hackers brought down the satellite communications system run by Viasat, an American firm, on which its opponents were relying.

Victor Zhora, head of Ukraine’s defensive cyber-security agency, said in March that the result was “a really huge loss in communications in the very beginning of war”. A Western former security official reckoned it took “a year or two of really, really serious preparation and effort”.

A Presidential Trojan Horse: The Inflation Reduction Act

by Lawrence Kadish

U.S Senator Joseph Manchin has been playing both sides against the middle for the past year and it appears that game is about to end.

This year Manchin offered his vote to pass the so called "Inflation Reduction Act" in return for Senate leadership support of legislation that would loosen regulations now impacting energy pipeline construction in his home state of West Virginia. In some earlier era in Washington, that kind of Capitol Hill give-and-get would have gone unnoticed, just another deal being cut with taxpayers' money before lunch in the Senate dining room.

That was then. This is now.

Manchin's vote essentially gave the Biden Administration a blank check, spending hundreds of billions of dollars wherever and whenever they want as the White House ramps up their reelection bid. If one is permitted to say so, a citizen would have to be beyond naïve to believe that this blizzard of federal cash will all be accounted for on behalf of projects that actually strengthen the republic. No one knows that better than Manchin, as he cut his deal with Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer in a scene from "Advice and Consent."

WhatsApp Files on Dark Web Show Millions of Records For Sale

Alessandro Mascellino

In mid-November, a threat actor posting on a dark web forum claimed to have stolen the personal information of almost 500 million WhatsApp users.

Now, Check Point Research (CPR) has published a new advisory analyzing the exposed files and confirming the leak includes 360 million phone numbers from 108 countries.

While CPR was unable to confirm the leaked numbers belonged to WhatsApp users, their analysis showed that the phone numbers varied in quantity among countries, ranging from 604 in Bosnia and Herzegovina to 35 million attributed to Italy.

According to the document, the whole list went on sale for four days and is now being distributed for free among dark web users.

"While the information on sale does not expose the content of any messages themselves, it is still worrying to see such a large volume of phone numbers for sale on the Dark Web. There is the potential that this information could be used as part of tailored phishing attacks in the future,” said Deryck Mitchelson, field CISO of EMEA at CPR.

Will Elon Musk’s lax Twitter content moderation help ignite violence around the world?

Benjamin Powers

Elon Musk’s decision to gut Twitter’s content moderation capacity is poised to hit hardest in countries where English is not the main language — opening the door to human rights abuses, along with hate speech and misinformation.

Since the billionaire took over Twitter on Oct. 28, he has eliminated most of its Trust and Safety team, ceased enforcing its covid-19 misinformation policy and reneged on promises to create a content moderation council. He’s also reinstated banned accounts, including that of former president Donald Trump — in that case, based on a single Twitter poll.

Civil society and human rights groups in countries like India, Poland and Nigeria say they’re frustrated that media attention and public debate over Musk’s dramatic reshaping of Twitter has largely focused on its effects in the United States, such as the restoration of Trump’s account. In a matter of weeks, Musk has reversed hard-fought gains in the site’s ability to moderate content in languages other than English in places where the social media site has previously been used to incite violence against minority groups or subvert protest movements.

“Since Musk has taken over Twitter, this situation has become perilous,” said Wendy Via, president of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism. “I’m sure you’ve seen the reports of how the U.S. has seen a sharp increase in hate speech, and that’s in English. Imagine what the other countries are experiencing. And banned users are now evading the system by setting up new accounts often successfully because there are no global staff to report violations and take action.”

Private-Sector Cyber Defense in Armed Conflict

By Stephanie Pell

Just hours before the first group of Russian tanks crossed into Ukraine in February 2022, Microsoft’s Threat Intelligence Center discovered a new piece of “wiper” malware known as Foxblade “aimed at the country’s government ministries and financial institutions” and capable of wiping data from their computers.

As the New York Times reported, Microsoft quickly updated its virus detection systems to block the malicious code, and it contacted Anne Neuberger, the U.S. deputy national security adviser for cyber and emerging technology.

Neuberger facilitated Microsoft’s sharing of information about the malicious code with other countries in order to prevent it from spreading and potentially “crippling the military alliance or hitting West European banks.” This early intervention was perhaps the first public indicator of how integral the private sector would become in both cyber defense and resilience during the course of Russia’s unlawful war of aggression against Ukraine.

As Susan Landau has observed, the interaction between Microsoft and Neuberger “represents an important change in the cooperation between the U.S. government and the tech industry”—the kind of cooperation that may not have seemed possible just a decade ago in the wake of the Edward Snowden disclosures.

NSA cyber director talks threats, opportunities

By JOHN SAKELLARIADIS

— Rob Joyce, director of NSA’s cybersecurity directorate, spoke with MC about his agency’s fight against ransomware, how not to defend the country’s essential infrastructure, a controversial new law in China and a whole lot more. It’s a special, Joyce-heavy edition of MC that’s tailor-made to cure your food coma.

HAPPY MONDAY, and welcome to Morning Cybersecurity! They used to say our Founding Fathers would recoil in horror if they saw modern America.

Then we played the Brits to a 0-0 tie in the group stage of the 2022 World Cup.

Enjoy a Sam Adams on us, Sam Adams. You’re welcome.

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RANSOMWARE

What’s next in cybersecurity

By Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchieraiarchive

In the world of cybersecurity, there is always one certainty: more hacks. That is the unavoidable constant in an industry that will spend an estimated $150 billion worldwide this year without being able, yet again, to actually stop hackers.

This past year has seen Russian government hacks aimed at Ukraine; more ransomware against hospitals and schools—and against whole governments too; a seemingly endless series of costly crypto hacks; and high-profile hacks of companies like Microsoft, Nvidia, and Grand Theft Auto maker Rockstar Games, the last hack allegedly carried out by teenagers.

All these types of hacks will continue next year and in the near future, according to cybersecurity experts who spoke to MIT Tech Review. Here’s what we expect to see more of in the coming year:

Russia continues its online operations against Ukraine

Ukraine was the big story of the year in cybersecurity as in other news. The industry turned its attention to the embattled country, which suffered several attacks by Russian government groups. One of the first ones hit Viasat, a US satellite communications company that was being used by civilians and troops in Ukraine. The hack caused “a really huge loss in communications in the very beginning of war,” according to Victor Zhora, the head of Ukraine’s defensive cybersecurity agency.

There have also been as many as six attacks against Ukrainian targets involving wiper malware, malicious computer code designed to destroy data.

WAR INDUSTRY LOOKING FORWARD TO “MULTIYEAR AUTHORITY” IN UKRAINE

Jeremy Scahill

GEN. MARK MILLEY, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently offered some matter-of-fact observations about the immense human suffering and death caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and placed the responsibility for ending the war squarely on Moscow’s shoulders. “There’s one guy that can stop it — and his name is Vladimir Putin,” Milley said. “He needs to stop it.”

But then Milley crossed what he most certainly never imagined to be a tripwire when he said, “And they need to get to the negotiating table.”

The general cited the multiyear death toll of 20 million during World War I — caused, he said, by the failure to negotiate an earlier end to the war — and went on to suggest that it would be better for the war in Ukraine to end soon in negotiation rather than continue on indefinitely.

“There has to be a mutual recognition that military victory is probably — in the true sense of the word — is maybe not achievable through military means, and therefore you have to turn to other means,” Milley said during the November 9 event at the Economic Club of New York. Referring to recent Russian setbacks at the hands of Ukrainian forces and the coming winter, Milley went on: “When there’s an opportunity to negotiate, when peace can be achieved, seize it. Seize the moment.”

DIGNITY AND RESPECT: AN EXCLUSIVE LOOK AT HOW THE ARMY IS TRAINING DRILL SERGEANTS FOR A NEW ERA

Alex Hollings

Drill sergeants with 2nd Battalion, 48th Infantry Regiment, welcome a new Soldier to Fort Leonard Wood on training day zero. (U.S. Army photo)

In fact, it was that very bias that led to my decision to write this story in the first person.

The fact of the matter is, I’m not an outsider at all. Since I first stepped foot on the yellow footprints of Parris Island in 2006 — some 16 years ago now — I’ve lived and breathed America’s military in a variety of capacities: from recruit to Marine; from Marine to veteran; from veteran to defense contractor; from defense contractor to journalist.

It’s because of my experiences, both in uniform and out, that I arrived at Fort Jackson believing the Army’s shift in training methodology might be more about managing Gen Z’s negative perceptions of service than truly about training recruits to become the most capable warfighters. But it’s similarly because of those experiences that my time in Fort Jackson, and subsequent research, have convinced me otherwise.

I’m now certain that Dignity and Respect isn’t just the right approach to training for the future… It’s the right approach to training, period.

SSG Devante McLean, the Drill Sergeant Academy’s 2022 Drill Sergeant of the Year, managed to recontextualize my entire perception of basic training and the “shark attack” early in my visit.

3 December 2022

China Is Deepening Its Military Foothold along the Indian Border at Pangong Tso

Matthew P. Funaiole, Brian Hart, Joseph S. Bermudez Jr., and Jennifer Jun

China’s recent willingness to tamp down tensions with India at their disputed Himalayan border belies Beijing’s broader strategic ambitions in the region. In September 2022, the two regional powers mutually began to move their troops back from key positions along the hotly contested Line of Actual Control (LAC) near the Gogra Hot Springs. Yet neither side is engaging in a broader pullback. In fact, satellite imagery reveals that China is investing in a significant, long-term military presence near Pangong Tso, a remote lake that straddles the LAC just 50 kilometers south of the Gogra Hot Springs.

Let’s Put the Pentagon’s China Report in Context

BY WILLIAM D. HARTUNG

The Pentagon released its annual report on Chinese military power this week, and hawks in Congress and the Pentagon will no doubt use it as evidence that China is on the march militarily, and that the U.S. should therefore continue its buildup in the Pacific and its development of a new generation of nuclear weapons. But a closer look at China’s military aspirations in the context of current U.S. capabilities tells a different story.

The report says that China likely possesses 400 nuclear warheads, and that if production stays on pace, the number could more than triple over the next decade. But the United States has over 5,400 warheads in its stockpile, including over 1,600 deployed on bombers, submarines, and long-range ballistic missiles. Even if the Pentagon’s assessment is correct, deterrence would hold; Beijing would be in no position to launch a nuclear strike on the United States or its allies without suffering a devastating attack in return.

Indeed, the disparity suggests that the Pentagon could forgo a significant portion of its three-decade, up-to-$2 trillion plan to build new nuclear-armed bombers, submarines, and missiles, along with new warheads to go with them. Instead of continuing a wasteful and destabilizing arms race, the United States could move towards a “deterrence-only” posture along the lines outlined by the organization Global Zero.

The Significant Hurdles Facing Pakistan’s New Army Chief

TIM WILLASEY-WILSEY

EXPERT PERSPECTIVE — Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif has made his decision and has chosen Lieutenant-General Asim Munir to be the next Chief of Army Staff (COAS). Sharif has agonised for weeks over this choice and even flew to London in early November to consult his brother, Nawaz, the former prime minister.

Both Nawaz and Shehbaz are still haunted by their near-fatal error in choosing Pervez Musharraf in 1998, only for the apparently mild-mannered general to mount a coup the following year and appoint himself president for the next eight years. Nawaz’s long periods of exile and prison serve as constant reminders of the perils of such decisions.

However, the choice seems to be a good one. Munir was the highest ranking General on the list and has a good pedigree. He has commanded a brigade on operations in the north-west and an army corps near the Indian border. He has run Military Intelligence (MI) the body which monitors the security of the army itself and Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) the powerful espionage and security agency which looks at external and internal threats to the state. The latter two appointments demonstrate that he has the total confidence of the outgoing chief, General Qamar Bajwa. After all, Bajwa needs someone to protect his back against any future political or judicial moves against his record in office.

Xi Jinping in His Own Words

By Matt Pottinger, Matthew Johnson, and David Feith

In October, at the 20th National Party Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), General Secretary Xi Jinping set himself up for another decade as China’s most powerful leader since Mao Zedong, replaced his most economically literate Politburo colleagues with a phalanx of loyalists, and enshrined the Stalinist-Maoist concept of “struggle” as a guiding principle in the Party Charter. The effect was to turn the page on “reform and opening,” the term the CCP uses to describe the economic liberalization that began in the late 1970s and led to the explosive growth of the Chinese economy in the past four decades.

At the party congress, Xi was granted a third term as the CCP’s top leader—an unprecedented development in the contemporary era and a crucial step in his effort to centralize authority. But perhaps even more significant was the way the congress served to codify a worldview that Xi has been developing over the past decade in carefully crafted official party communications: Chinese-language speeches, documentaries, and textbooks, many of which Beijing deliberately mistranslates for foreign audiences, when it translates them at all. These texts dispel much of the ambiguity that camouflages the regime’s aims and methods and offer a window into Xi’s ideology and motivations: a deep fear of subversion, hostility toward the United States, sympathy with Russia, a desire to unify mainland China and Taiwan, and, above all, confidence in the ultimate victory of communism over the capitalist West. The end state he is pursuing requires the remaking of global governance. His explicit objective is to replace the modern nation-state system with a new order featuring Beijing at its pinnacle.

China’s Middle Class May Be Xi Jinping’s Biggest Threat

Minxin Pei

Myths take years to propagate and only days to puncture. In addition to shocking China’s seemingly unprepared authorities, recent Covid protests in major Chinese cities have claimed two enduring myths about the People’s Republic.

One obviously is the purported superiority of China’s top-down authoritarian system. The ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has stuck to harsh Covid Zero policies mainly to demonstrate that it can do a better job than Western liberal democracies at suppressing the pandemic. With new infection rates rising to record levels and public anger growing, China’s strategy and the political system behind it are clearly failing, not succeeding.

The other debunked myth is that the CCP has successfully co-opted China’s middle-class. Given that young professionals and college students appear to have made up the bulk of the protesters, we need to ask whether the world was too quick to write off middle-class Chinese as a force for political change.

Jiang Zemin Helped China Become a Global Powerhouse

Victor Shih

When Chinese recall Jiang Zemin, who stepped down as general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 2002, they sometimes laugh about a well-known episode in 2000 when he berated a Hong Kong reporter for being “too simple, sometimes naive.” Jiang’s outsized response to an innocuous question about the next leader of Hong Kong spurred bemused murmurs and plenty of sarcasm. It epitomized a patronizing and bullying style of leadership stemming from the deep conviction of Jiang and other leaders that they knew best.

In truth, Jiang, who, according to official media, died on Nov. 30 in Shanghai at the age of 96, oversaw two crucial transitions that shaped and largely improved the lives of the people of China. First, he peacefully guided his country out of the shadow of China’s founding revolutionaries, who had spent decades purging one another and at times caused great pain and sorrow for everyone else. Second, although hesitant at first, Jiang came to embrace the market economy. As China struggles under the pressures of its zero-COVID policy, and after nationwide protests swept the country last weekend, Jiang’s rule now seems to many like a period of relative hope.

Technology propels China’s Gulf strategy forward

N Janardhan, and Gedaliah Afterman

A ‘flying car’ built by Chinese company Xpen Aeroht made its first public flight in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in October 2022. A few months earlier, China’s NWTN — a passenger transport company — announced that it would build an electric vehicle facility in Abu Dhabi. These technological headways show that US efforts to convince Gulf allies to restrict China’s influence have been unsuccessful.

Across the UAE’s borders, Huawei and the Saudi Digital Academy agreed in 2022 to advance local technological talent and realise the digital transformation — the use of artificial intelligence, cloud computing, cybersecurity and 5G — envisioned in Saudi Vision 2030, Riyadh’s blueprint for economic diversification. Despite US President Joe Biden explicitly arguing in July 2022 that improving US–Saudi relations is essential to ‘outcompete China’, it will be an uphill task with the intensification of the Gulf–China synergy.

China may get top ownership of US lithium mine

RYAN MORGAN

A Canadian company is hoping to get approval and federal funding for a new lithium mine in northern Nevada, but former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Republican lawmakers are raising concerns about the mining company’s largest shareholder, a Chinese firm. The mining company is going through with an effort to dilute this Chinese ownership, but concerns remain about China’s potential influence over the critical mineral mine at a time when China is seeking to overtake the U.S. as a dominant global power.

Lithium Americas, a Canadian-based company, has been trying to get approval from the U.S. federal government to proceed with its Thacker Pass mine in northern Nevada for years but is awaiting approval to begin mining. The company is already facing a variety of legal challenges to the new mining project — including from Native American and environmental groups — but the Republican politicians are also honing in on the mining company’s largest shareholder: China-based Ganfeng Lithium Co Ltd.

Lithium is a key material for electric batteries. Lithium Americas is trying to get approval for the Thacker Pass mine at a time when China controls roughly 60 percent of the world’s lithium resources and has a commanding position over the electric battery supply chain. Bloomberg Law reported the U.S. currently only has one lithium mine in operation at Albemarle’s Silver Peak in southwestern Nevada.

Reject the CCP’s Effort to Co-opt Buddhism

Michael Rubin

In 2001, the world was aghast when the Taliban dynamited the 1,500-year-old Bamiyan Buddhas, a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) world heritage site. The destruction of the Buddhas in Afghanistan was not the world’s worst assault on Buddhist heritage, however. That began in 1950 when the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) invaded Tibet. Nine years later, Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Mao Zedong began a twenty-year campaign to eliminate Buddhist heritage in Tibet. Chinese forces destroyed more than 99 percent of the country’s 6,000 monasteries and forced the Dalai Lama into exile in India.

The CCP’s role as the most destructive force to Buddhism since Genghis Khan makes Beijing’s attempt to leverage Buddhism to China’s diplomatic benefit even more cynical and audacious. It is akin to Turkey seeking to speak on behalf of Armenian culture or Serbia seeking to be the voice of Bosnian or Kosovar Muslims.

Where Realpolitik Went Wrong

FRED KAPLAN

It may be a sign of decline in John Mearsheimer’s mental acuity that, nine months after coming off quite badly in one Q&A by the New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner, he agreed to strap himself in for another round of grilling and emerged more battered still.

Professors of political science don’t generally cause a stir, but intellectual self-immolation is a rare spectacle. And Chotiner’s one-two torching of Mearsheimer is a barn-burner.

In the past year, to a degree rarely matched by academics in his field, Mearsheimer made a splash in the public debate. He has argued that NATO—and especially the United States—is “principally responsible” for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine; that Vladimir Putin’s aims in this war are limited to keeping Ukraine in Moscow’s orbit; that Putin has the right to make this claim; and that the U.S. should not only end the war quickly but form an alliance with Russia in broader geopolitical ventures. He is wrong on all these points, for reasons that go deeper than the obvious ones.

Why Isn’t Joe Biden Supporting Protests In China And Iran?

Michael Rubin

Biden Should Speak Out Forcefully for Chinese and Iranian Protestors: China’s protests caught the White House by surprise. America’s “near-peer” competitor and top military threat hobbled, at least temporarily, by widespread protests was not something the State Department or the intelligence community’s top China hands expected.

The Biden administration’s response was weak. “We’ve long said everyone has the right to peacefully protest, in the United States and around the world. This includes in the PRC [the People’s Republic of China],” a National Security Council statement read.

Once again, political appointees and professional diplomats responded as if by a computer algorithm rather than with an appreciation of the ideological battle in which the United States finds itself, the outcome of which will shape the fate of the rules-based order over the remainder of the century. The tepidness of the statement undermines any meaning it might have.

Washington’s Carthaginian Peace Collides With Reality

Douglas Macgregor

The national political and military leaders who committed America to wars of choice in Vietnam, the Balkans, Afghanistan, and Iraq, did so as a rule because they were convinced the fighting would be short and decisive. American presidents, presidential advisors, and senior military leaders never stopped to consider that national strategy, if it exists at all, consists of avoiding conflict unless the nation is attacked and compelled to fight.

The latest victim of this mentality is Ukraine. In the absence of a critical root-and-branch analysis of Russia’s national power and strategic interests, American senior military leaders and their political bosses viewed Russia through a narrowly focused lens that magnified U.S. and Ukrainian strengths but ignored Russia’s strategic advantages—geographic depth, almost limitless natural resources, high social cohesion, and the military-industrial capacity to rapidly scale up its military power.

Eurasia in Crisis

George Friedman

Demonstrations against Beijing’s zero-COVID policy have surged in the past week, with people voicing their frustration at not only the lockdown measures but also the government and President Xi Jinping himself. This kind of unrest is nearly unprecedented in the modern Chinese era and certainly cause for concern among the ruling elite.

Since the pandemic began, Beijing has consistently sought to contain COVID-19 by imposing city-wide lockdowns in which entry and exit were limited, if not forbidden, and in which activities were severely constrained. Why the government adopted such strict measures is unclear. No other countries imposed this degree of containment, largely because the costs of doing so were so high. Shanghai, the country’s most important financial hub, was shut down for weeks, while similar shutdowns occurred in smaller cities. And this is to say nothing of the impossibility of hermetically sealing large, densely populated and otherwise bustling Chinese cities.

How Joe Biden suckered Europe

Marwan Bishara

Europe is lost for answers.

Ever since Russia took Europe by surprise in Ukraine, America has taken its transatlantic partner for granted. With a new type of cold war emerging between Moscow and Washington, the continent has been left in the cold, literally and figuratively.

Dumbstruck and destabilised, the European Union has been divided over how to respond to this new superpower rivalry. Though determined to support Ukraine’s fight for freedom and independence from Russia, Europeans have also been trapped by its consequences.

Some, like Hungary, want some form of accommodation for Russia, while others, like Sweden and Poland, want greater accommodation for America. But the continent’s political and economic power brokers are seeking greater independence from both.

John Mearsheimer: We’re playing Russian roulette

FREDDIE SAYERS

Until the Russia-Ukraine crisis, Professor John Mearsheimer was mainly known in academic circles as a leading scholar in the “realist” school of foreign policy. That is to say, he takes an unsentimental view of world affairs as being a muscular competition between great powers for regional hegemony.

But with the Ukrainian “Maidan revolution” in 2014 and then the Russian invasion this February, he became a figurehead for the millions of people worldwide who have misgivings about the wisdom of Western actions in Ukraine. A single lecture delivered in 2015 entitled “Why is Ukraine the West’s fault” has been viewed a staggering 28 million times on YouTube.

His central argument, that by expanding Nato eastwards and inviting Ukraine to join the bloc, the West (and in particular the United States) created an intolerable situation for Vladimir Putin which would inevitably result in Russia taking action to “wreck” Ukraine, is politically unsayable today. His critics denounce him as a Putin apologist; his supporters, however, believe the invasion was proof that he was right all along.

The Fight Over Eurasia Will Determine the Destinies of the World

FRANCIS P. SEMPA

Two retired U.S. Army colonels and combat veterans, Daniel Davis and Douglas Macgregor, writing separately in 19FortyFive and the American Conservative, respectively, warn that Russia has deployed a half-million combat forces in southern Ukraine, Belarus, and western Russia, including 1,000 rocket artillery systems, hundreds of tactical ballistic and cruise missiles and drones, 5,000 armored vehicles, more than 1,000 tanks, and hundreds of bombers, helicopters, and fighter planes, poised to attack Ukrainian forces in the wake of recent devastating air attacks on Ukraine’s power grids, communications and transportation infrastructure, and energy production.

Macgregor opines that “[i]t is now possible to project that the new Russian armed forces that will evolve from the crucible of war in Ukraine will be designed to execute strategically decisive operations.” Davis adds that Russian President Vladimir Putin may use “every conventional tool in his military chest to subdue Ukraine” because, if he fails in this war, he may be forced from power in 2023.

Writing the Ukraine War history, as it happens

James Carden

Heading into its tenth month, the war in Ukraine, and the resulting political, social and economic upheavals brought about by Russia’s illegal invasion, have given rise to a narrative in Washington notable both for its ferocity and unanimity.

A coterie of neoconservative and liberal interventionist ‘thought-leaders’ with a direct line to the Biden National Security Council have ruled as out-of-bounds views which take into account the role the United States and NATO, or even Ukraine itself, may have played in bringing about the current crisis. Such views have been deemed largely irrelevant to what is seen as a global battle, in which Ukraine is currently the most important front, between an alliance of global authoritarians on the one hand (Russia, China, Iran) and the forces of freedom and democracy (Ukraine, the U.S., NATO) on the other.

The trouble with much of what passes for informed analysis on the current state of affairs in Ukraine is that it is clouded by what the Biden administration and its eager servants in the media wish to be true, rather than by what is actually true. That, as a recent Quincy Institute panel on the Global South demonstrated, enormous swathes of the world outside of Europe and the Anglophone North Atlantic do not share the NATO-centric view of Russian aggression seems rarely, if ever, taken into account by Washington’s foreign policy “Blob.” Yet, as the journalist and grand strategist Walter Lippmann once observed, “Where all think alike, no one thinks very much.”

Europe’s anti-American itch

MATTHEW KARNITSCHNIG

BERLIN — It’s gotten cold in Europe, the economy is tanking and the natives are getting restless. There’s only one answer: Blame America.

Pointing across the Atlantic has long been a favorite diversionary tactic for Europe’s political elites when things start to get dicey on the Continent.

Whether it’s the war in Ukraine (Washington shouldn’t have expanded NATO), natural disasters (too many American SUVs fueling climate change) or the demise of French as a lingua franca (cultureless Hollywood), America is inevitably the culprit.

In the latest instalment of this tedious tradition, European officials are trying to blame the greedy Americans for the Continent’s current funk, accusing them of placing the mighty dollar über alles, stooping so low as to even take advantage of the war in Ukraine.

Warfare Unmanned

ibrahim al-marashi

On November 3, 2002, an unmanned U.S. Predator drone fired a Hellfire missile at an automobile in Yemen, carrying Al-Qaeda operative Qaed Salim Sinan al-Harethi, and five other men. All of them were killed. The strike was the first time the US killed a member of Al-Qaeda outside of Afghanistan. It was also the first time a drone had successfully killed its intended target.

Exactly twenty years later, this weapon platform proves to be an addictive means for the US to project death from a distance. It serves as a politically expedient tactical measure for Washington. However, when the US introduced weaponized drones in the region, it would lead others to adopt and adapt these weapons, resulting in their proliferation, from armed hobby drones used by the Islamic State to domestically produced drones in Iran that even Russia has used as low-cost cruise missiles in Ukraine.

Two decades ago, the US ushered in the drone wars, and this conflict will continue to evolve. The technology has already been coupled with artificial intelligence to create a flying killer robot, the threshold of a new phase of digital warfare. Not only would such a technology give the leadership of any country the ability to wage war without the need for human pilots, and thus human oversight, but such technology can be turned within the borders of any state against its own civilians, either for surveillance or crushing domestic dissent.

Counterterrorism Yearbook 2022

Katja Theodorakis and Gill Savage

The Road from 9/11

It’s been its been over two decades since the 9/11 attacks when two planes hit the World Trade Center, one hit the Pentagon and a fourth crashed in Pennsylvania. Close to 3,000 people died and many others were injured, and even more people were traumatised by the experience and the loss of loved ones. Today’s release of the Counterterrorism (CT) yearbook 2022 coincides with the anniversary of the November 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks and the deaths of 174 people. These and other acts of terror have left an indelible mark and shaped the years that followed.

Australia’s overall security environment is increasingly challenging to navigate. Emerging threats such as information operation campaigns, cyberattacks and climate change are increasing the complexity of the world. In 2022, major geopolitical events including Russia’s war on Ukraine and China’s continuing coercive operations and aggression, occupied a significant space in national discourse. Foreign interference and espionage have continued to rise to the forefront of intelligence agencies priorities.

2 December 2022

India, US Armies Hold Exercises Close to Disputed China Border

Rishi Lekhi and Manish Swarup

Indian and U.S. troops on Tuesday participated in a high-altitude training exercise in a cold, mountainous terrain near India’s disputed border with China, at a time both countries are trying to manage rising tensions with Beijing.

During the exercise, Indian soldiers were dropped from helicopters to flush out gunmen from a house in a demonstration of unarmed combat skills. Other drills involved sniffer dogs and unmanned bomb-disposing vehicles, and trained kites were deployed to destroy small enemy drones.

“Overall, it has been a great learning experience. There has been sharing of best practices between both the armies,” said Brig. Pankaj Verma of the Indian Army.

Pakistan Taliban Ends Ceasefire With Govt, Vows New Attacks

Munir Ahmed

The Pakistani Taliban on Monday ended a months-long cease-fire with the government in Islamabad, ordering its fighters to resume attacks across the country, where scores of deadly attacks have been blamed on the insurgent group.

In a statement, the outlawed Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan said it decided to end the five month ceasefire after Pakistan’s army stepped up operations against them in former northwestern tribal areas and elsewhere in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, which borders Afghanistan.

Pakistan and the TTP had agreed to an indefinite cease-fire in May after talks in Afghanistan’s capital, Kabul.

Pakistani Taliban Suicide Bomber Targets Police Protecting Polio Teams

Abdul Sattar and Munir Ahmed

A suicide bomber blew himself up near a truck carrying police officers on their way to protect polio workers near Quetta Wednesday, killing a police officer and three civilians from the same family who were traveling nearby in a car. The bombing also wounded 23 others, mostly policemen, officials said.

Ghulam Azfer Mehser, a senior police officer, said the attack happened as the policemen were heading to the polio workers, part of a nationwide vaccination drive launched Monday.

The blast was so powerful that it toppled the truck carrying police officers into a ravine, he said, adding that the bombing also damaged a nearby car carrying members of a family.

He said that the anti-polio campaign will continue even after the bombing.

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