Indian Billionaires Bet Big on Head Start in Coronavirus Vaccine Race

By Jeffrey Gettleman

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PUNE, India — In early May, an extremely well-sealed steel box arrived at the cold room of the Serum Institute of India, the world’s largest vaccine maker.

Inside, packed in dry ice, sat a tiny 1-milliliter vial from Oxford, England, containing the cellular material for one of the world’s most promising coronavirus vaccines.

Scientists in white lab coats brought the vial to Building 14, carefully poured the contents into a flask, added a medium of vitamins and sugar and began growing billions of cells. Thus began one of the biggest gambles yet in the quest to find the vaccine that will bring the world’s Covid-19 nightmare to an end.

The Serum Institute, which is exclusively controlled by a small and fabulously rich Indian family and started out years ago as a horse farm, is doing what a few other companies in the race for a vaccine are doing: mass-producing hundreds of millions of doses of a vaccine candidate that is still in trials and might not even work.

The Challenges and Inconsistencies of the Iran-Pakistan Relationship

Nadeem Ahmed Moonakal

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Iran’s approach towards Pakistan has seen multiple changes over time because of the geopolitical shifts in the region as well as domestic changes within Iran. Iran became the first country to recognize the sovereign status of Pakistan after it was formed in 1947. The convergence of strategic objectives facilitated by the Anglo-American alliance during the Cold War also helped in building a foundation for a stable Iran-Pakistan relationship initially. However, over time the geopolitical challenges and domestic dynamics of both countries caused inconsistencies in their bilateral engagement.

In the 1950s, Iran and Pakistan came closer through the Baghdad Pact which aimed at preventing communist incursions in the region. The geographic proximity to the Soviet Union at the time of the Cold War pushed Iran to join the Western bloc and the skepticism towards India and the tensions in Afghanistan urged Pakistan to join the same alliance. Hence, both Iran and Pakistan were a part of the Western alliance for their own security and survival. Even in the 1970s, Iran maintained very close ties with Pakistan and this was apparent in Iran’s support to Pakistan during the 1971 India-Pakistan war. After the liberation of Bangladesh, Pakistan faced an economic crisis primarily due to the loss of markets in the then East Pakistan, and in the following years, the bilateral trade volume between Iran and Pakistan increased exponentially.

Beware the Guns of August—in Asia

By Kevin Rudd

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In just a few short months, the U.S.-Chinese relationship seems to have returned to an earlier, more primal age. In China, Mao Zedong is once again celebrated for having boldly gone to war against the Americans in Korea, fighting them to a truce. In the United States, Richard Nixon is denounced for creating a global Frankenstein by introducing Communist China to the wider world. It is as if the previous half century of U.S.-Chinese relations never happened.

The saber rattling from both Beijing and Washington has become strident, uncompromising, and seemingly unending. The relationship lurches from crisis to crisis—from the closures of consulates to the most recent feats of Chinese “wolf warrior” diplomacy to calls by U.S. officials for the overthrow of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The speed and intensity of it all has desensitized even seasoned observers to the scale and significance of change in the high politics of the U.S.-Chinese relationship. Unmoored from the strategic assumptions of the previous 50 years but without the anchor of any mutually agreed framework to replace them, the world now finds itself at the most dangerous moment in the relationship since the Taiwan Strait crises of the 1950s.

From Competition to Confrontation with China: The Major Shift in U.S. Policy

By Anthony H. Cordesman

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Over a period of a little more than a month, the U.S. has gone from a mixture of competition and cooperation with China to direct confrontation. This confrontation has also focused largely on the civil level – more specifically on ideology, economics, industrial espionage, cyberattacks on civil networks and databases, and disinformation campaigns.

Top Administration officials have given five major speeches which assert that China can no longer be treated as a state evolving towards a more liberal power that will pursue security and economic objectives on terms the U.S. and other states can accept. These speeches assert that China has become an authoritarian state that is driven by a Communist ideology, is seeking to become the world’s dominant power, and is using methods of competition that are illegal and violate international norms.

Secretary of State Pompeo made this clear in the last – and most definitive – of these five speeches by stating that,

… we have to admit a hard truth. We must admit a hard truth that should guide us in the years and decades to come, that if we want to have a free 21st century, and not the Chinese century of which Xi Jinping dreams, the old paradigm of blind engagement with China simply won’t get it done. We must not continue it and we must not return to it.

… We opened our arms to Chinese citizens, only to see the Chinese Communist Party exploit our free and open society. China sent propagandists into our press conferences, our research centers, our high-schools, our colleges, and even into our PTA meetings…We marginalized our friends in Taiwan, which later blossomed into a vigorous democracy…We gave the Chinese Communist Party and the regime itself special economic treatment, only to see the CCP insist on silence over its human rights abuses as the price of admission for Western companies entering China.

… we have to keep in mind that the CCP regime is a Marxist-Leninist regime. General Secretary Xi Jinping is a true believer in a bankrupt totalitarian ideology. It’s this ideology, it’s this ideology that informs his decades-long desire for global hegemony of Chinese communism. America can no longer ignore the fundamental political and ideological differences between our countries, just as the CCP has never ignored them.

U.S. moves against TikTok reflect a pushback against China’s rise as a tech power, expert says

Saheli Roy Choudhury

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TikTok is owned by Chinese tech firm ByteDance and has grown in popularity over the years, especially among younger users.

As of April, the app has been downloaded more than 2 billion times globally across Apple’s App Store and Google Play, according to data from Sensor Tower. 

U.S. officials have said Washington could ban the app from the United States. 

Microsoft this week confirmed it has held talks with ByteDance to acquire the U.S. operations of TikTok. 

The United States’ efforts to clamp down on the popular short video-sharing app, TikTok, can only be understood in the wider context of the fight for technological dominance with China, a cybersecurity expert said. 

TikTok is owned by Chinese tech firm ByteDance and has grown in popularity over the years, especially among younger users. As of April, the app has been downloaded more than 2 billion times globally across Apple’s App Store and Google Play, according to data from Sensor Tower. 

Last month, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said that the U.S. was looking at banning TikTok and other Chinese social media apps over national security concerns. 

Technological surveillance of religion in China

Chris Meserole

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Chairwoman Gayle Manchin, Vice Chair Tony Perkins, and Vice Chair Anurima Bhargava, thank you for the opportunity to speak this morning. The rise in digital authoritarianism and corresponding decline in human rights, including the right to worship freely, are two of the most pressing issues the world faces today. Nowhere do those issues enjoy greater urgency than in modern China, where the Xi regime and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) have relied on digital technologies to carry out human rights abuses and curtail religious freedom with unprecedented efficiency and scale.

DIGITAL AUTHORITARIANISM & THE CCP

Before turning to the Xi regime and religion, I should first lay out what I mean by digital authoritarianism more broadly. As with all political regimes, authoritarian leaders are obsessed with their survival. Yet staying in power is not easy: regimes need to closely monitor not only elite opinion and public opinion, but also potential dissidents and opposition groups. Digital technology offers a new way to solve that challenge. As the cost of storing, collecting, and analyzing data has plummeted, the capabilities of digital surveillance systems have grown exponentially. Regimes with sufficient technical expertise can now monitor both aggregate opinion and specific individuals with greater precision and detail than ever before. Digital authoritarianism refers to the use of such technologies to consolidate regime power and better ensure regime survival.

Big Tech and antitrust: Pay attention to the math behind the curtain

Tom Wheeler

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It was the “Wizard of Oz” in digital format as the four titans of Big Tech testified via video before the House Antitrust Subcommittee. Just like in the movie, what the subcommittee saw was controlled by a force hidden from view. The wizard in this case—the reason these four companies are so powerful—is the math that takes our private information and turns it into their corporate asset.

The hearing was the next step in the subcommittee’s year-long investigation of Big Tech’s effect on a competitive market and the effectiveness of America’s antitrust laws. The witnesses, subcommittee chairman David Cicilline (D-RI) said, were “gatekeepers to the economy…[with] the power to pick winners and losers, shake down small businesses and enrich themselves while choking off competitors.”

During nearly six hours of testimony the CEOs of Facebook, Amazon, Apple, and Alphabet (Google) dealt with a litany of diverse topics. Republicans saw an opportunity to work the referees and complain about alleged bias by social media. The subcommittee’s Democratic majority, however, was clearly prepared. The CEOs were forced to defend practices as diverse as their relationship with China, their acquisitions of other companies, and the myth that they protect consumer privacy.

US-China research benefited Chinese military efforts

By Matthew Strong

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TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — Cooperation between academics in the United States and Chinese universities with a military background benefited the modernization of China’s armed forces, a Hoover Institution report concluded Thursday (July 30).

“Global Engagement: Rethinking Risk in the Research Enterprise,” edited by historian Glenn Tiffert, found several issues overlooked during cooperation programs between an American academia guided by liberal values and a communist country like China. The study identified “diversions of U.S. research to PRC defense programs and weapons system development, which can undermine or eliminate U.S. military superiority,” as one of the key issues.

While only a limited number of cases had been reported, the Hoover Institution claims it has found more examples, showing that “U.S. scholars and research institutions have been contributing directly to the PRC’s military modernization.”

America’s Huawei Challenges

By Scott Kennedy and Shining Tan
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Few companies on this planet are as controversial as Huawei. Figuring out how Western industry and governments should respond to this daunting commercial and security challenge is no mean feat. This post discusses two kinds of challenges to developing and implementing an effective strategy. The first is the fact that just the mention of Huawei invokes strong passions, making it difficult to have a reasoned and dispassionate national debate. The second is insufficient familiarity with how Huawei has grown and evolved, especially over the last decade, complicating how one would effectively confront and manage the risks it poses.

Debating Huawei

Last year, we hosted a debate at CSIS, “Should the United States Severely Restrict Huawei’s Business?” Both sides made impressive arguments, but the in-person audience chose the “Yes Team” over the “No Team” 56% to 44%. A subsequent Twitter poll taken just after the event was even more definitive in favor of tough measures (82% yes, 18% no). In late April 2020, I again asked Twitter whether the United States should block the sale of semiconductors used in Huawei’s 5G equipment; respondents were still in favor of restrictions (59.8%), but at a rate closer to the in-person poll from a year prior than the first Twitter poll. Obviously, answers are affected by the way the question is posed and the evolving context. My sense is that the level of concern about Huawei in the United States is sky high, with general acceptance of doing almost anything in the name of protecting U.S. national security. But there still is no consensus on exactly how to proceed, in part because there is still insufficient information about Huawei in the public realm, and in part because the U.S. is struggling to develop a broader framework toward managing its relationship with China in which to fit the Huawei challenge.

China Is Now Working On a Deadly Kamikaze Drone Army

by Michael Peck
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China’s military is looking to buy suicide drones.

The military wants two types of suicide drones, according to an announcement posted on a Chinese military procurement Web site. The desired technical specifications of the drones, or the number to be purchased, is classified.

But Chinese drone manufacturers do have products that might satisfy the demands of the People’s Liberation Army. In 2018, China Aerospace unveiled the CH-901, which Chinese media described as being 4 feet long and weighing 20 pounds, with a speed of 150 kilometers (93 miles) per hour, a range of 15 kilometers (9 miles) and an endurance of two hours. The larger WS-43 is a 500-pound weapon with a range of 60 kilometers (37 miles) and an endurance of 30 minutes.

Either expendable attack drones or flying artillery shells, depending on how you look at them, suicide drones are lethal newcomers to the 21st Century battlefield. Called “loitering munitions” by military customers who are understandably reluctant to refer to them as suicidal, these weapons seek to bridge the gap between artillery shells – which can’t stay up in the air – and strike drones like America’s Reaper and Predator, which are big and expensive unmanned aircraft

How ISIS Made Money on Facebook

BY JENNA SCATENA

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One afternoon last winter, Adnan Al Mohamad sat across from me at an Istanbul cafe, wearing a tweed blazer and an oxford shirt embroidered with olive branches. He sipped tea from a tulip-shaped glass and recounted the years he’d spent risking his life trying to stop Syria’s artifact-trafficking networks. 

In 2012, he was living with his wife and children in Manbij, an agrarian region outside Aleppo. It was a beautiful place to raise a family: Ancient Roman roads laced through the farmland, a reminder of its legacy as a global trade route, and the hills surrounding Al Mohamad’s home grew barley, olives, and figs, some of Syria’s main exports at the time. Beneath the fertile topsoil lay a trove of ancient artifacts of the region’s long history: Byzantine mosaics, statues of Hittite goddesses, funerary busts, Roman tombs filled with gold coins.

ISIS and the Militant Jihad on Instagram

By Anne Speckhard

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The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria [ISIS] is notorious for its slick propaganda videos and effectiveness at online recruitment, particularly on social media, of men and women all over the world to fight for and live under their Caliphate. Now with the territorial defeat of ISIS, its recruiters continue to be prolific online, encouraging supporters to hope and work toward the Caliphate’s return and to seek revenge on those who destroyed it by mounting attacks at home. While ISIS’s activity on Facebook and Twitter, as well as encrypted apps like Telegram, has been studied extensively, there is a dearth of information about their activity on Instagram, a platform increasingly used by young people vulnerable to ISIS recruitment. This article provides a brief examination of ISIS supporters’ activity on Instagram, even in the face of takedown policies, and also briefly discusses the possibilities of using a counter narrative video ad campaign on the platform to intervene in and prevent ISIS recruitment.

What it will take to fix the Navy — and who can do it

David Ignatius

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Adm. Michael M. Gilday, the chief of naval operations, sent a bracing message to his admirals and chief petty officers in July after he toured the aftermath of the horrific fire aboard the USS Bonhomme Richard in San Diego.

“My gut tells me our Sailors met that challenge head on,” Gilday wrote to his senior staff. His advice: “Focus on the positive attributes — that will overcome the negatives we want to avoid.”

This is the kind of upbeat message that Navy commanders have for centuries delivered from the bridge while facing adversity. But is it enough? After a chain of accidents at sea, ethical lapses and instances of poor judgment over the past half-dozen years, the shipboard fire earlier this month offers another siren warning that the Navy is badly stressed — operating too hard, with too little training and too much political interference.

And fixing the Navy matters to the country: The era of ground combat in the Middle East is coming to an end, but the need to project sea power in Asia to contain a rising China is just beginning.

Alexander Vindman: Coming forward ended my career. I still believe doing what’s right matters.

by Alexander S. Vindman

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Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman (Ret.), a career U.S. Army officer, served on the National Security Council as the director for Eastern European, Caucasus and Russian affairs, as the Russia political-military affairs officer for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and as a military attaché in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow.

After 21 years, six months and 10 days of active military service, I am now a civilian. I made the difficult decision to retire because a campaign of bullying, intimidation and retaliation by President Trump and his allies forever limited the progression of my military career.

This experience has been painful, but I am not alone in this ignominious fate. The circumstances of my departure might have been more public, yet they are little different from those of dozens of other lifelong public servants who have left this administration with their integrity intact but their careers irreparably harmed.

A year ago, having served the nation in uniform in positions of critical importance, I was on the cusp of a career-topping promotion to colonel. A year ago, unknown to me, my concerns over the president’s conduct and the president’s efforts to undermine the very foundations of our democracy were precipitating tremors that would ultimately shake loose the facade of good governance and publicly expose the corruption of the Trump administration.

The Crisis in Mali Holds Important Lessons for Governments Everywhere

Blair Glencorse, Moussa Kondo 

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In recent weeks, Mali has been beset with mass protests against President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita’s government. At times, tens of thousands of people have poured into the streets of the capital, Bamako, to demand Keita’s resignation. The protests’ organizers, calling themselves the June 5 Movement after the date of the first demonstration, have brought together opposition political parties, religious groups, civil society organizations, trade unions and even members of the police. These disparate elements of Malian society are uniting around their deep anger at entrenched poverty and unemployment, the government’s ineffectual response to the coronavirus pandemic, and the rapid deterioration of security and governance across the country as it tries to tamp down a growing jihadist insurgency.

One focal point of the protests has been Mali’s controversial Constitutional Court, which threw out some provisional returns of long-delayed legislative elections this spring, helping install members of Keita’s party. The 75-year-old Keita, who has been in power since 2013, has offered some concessions to the June 5 Movement, including the dissolution of the Constitutional Court, but they have not assuaged demonstrators’ anger. Instead, a violent crackdown by security forces—which left at least 11 people dead, although protest leaders say the real death toll is higher—have only deepened their demands for change.

The Ideological Securitization of COVID-19: Perspectives from the Right and the Left

Ugo Gaudino

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Contesting the Meanings of Security

As many critical IR scholars widely recognize, security is an ‘essentially contested concept’. Imported in the field by Buzan (1991), this fortunate definition expresses how subjective a concept security is, grounded in ‘ideological or moral elements’ (Fierke, 2015:34) that eschew precise categorization and empirical evidences. In the wake of post-positivist research agendas in IR, securitization theories of first (Buzan, Waever and the Copenhagen School) and second generations (Paris School and the collective C.A.S.E., 2006) have become a well-established sub-field. Plenty of young scholars excavated how security is socially constructed in a given context by political agents with the goal to prioritize the urgency of an issue and the existential threat it poses to – most of the times – the survival of the State. Moreover, a heated debate began between critics of the alleged racial biases inherent in the theory and scholars upholding the application of securitization to debunk racial and ethnical biases inherent in domestic and international security policies.

Homeland Security Shuts Down ‘Intelligence’ Reports on Journalists

By Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Marc Tracy

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WASHINGTON — The acting secretary of homeland security said on Friday that he had shut down an intelligence examination of the work of reporters covering the government’s response to protests in Portland, Ore., beginning an investigation into what he suggested was an infringement on First Amendment rights.

The effort by the Department of Homeland Security’s intelligence and analysis directorate — first revealed by The Washington Post — in part targeted The New York Times’s release of an intelligence analysis indicating that even as federal agents in camouflage deployed to quell the protests in Portland, the administration had little understanding of what it was facing.

The acting secretary, Chad F. Wolf, “is committed to ensuring that all D.H.S. personnel uphold the principles of professionalism, impartiality and respect for civil rights and civil liberties, particularly as it relates to the exercise of First Amendment rights,” said Alexei Woltornist, the department’s spokesman.

The intelligence office issued three “open-source intelligence reports” in the past week that summarized the Twitter posts of a Times reporter and the editor in chief for the blog Lawfare, noting that they had published leaked unclassified documents.

Shifts In U.S. Trade Balance And Industrialization

St Louis Fed

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In a recent Regional Economist article, Assistant Vice President and Economist Yi Wen and Research Associate Brian Reinbold explored how industrialization may have affected the composition of U.S. trade and why certain trade patterns persisted in U.S. history.

Industrialization has historically had three phases, the authors wrote. They explained that phase 1 of industrialization involves labor-intensive mass production of light consumer goods, such as processed food and textiles. This phase took place in the U.S. from 1800 to 1870, during which the U.S. ran deficits in manufactured goods. During this time, the country could import capital goods to facilitate its industrialization, leading the U.S. into phase 2.

Phase 2 of industrialization features capital-intensive mass production of heavy industrial goods. Phase 3, which the authors referred to as the welfare revolution, features mass consumption in a service-oriented welfare state.

A Turning Point in the Trade Balance

The second phase of U.S. industrialization lasted from 1870 to 1970 and featured capital-intensive mass production of manufactured goods and machinery, the authors wrote. This shift - driven by increased sophistication and maturation of U.S. manufacturing - marked a turning point in the U.S. trade balance.

The authors broke down the category of manufactured goods into three types: manufactured foodstuffs (such as meat, sugar and processed fruits), semimanufactures (such as lumber, refined copper, and iron and steel plates) and finished manufactures (such as textile manufactures, machinery and equipment). By the mid-1870s, the U.S. began to run persistent trade surpluses in manufactured foodstuffs, Wen and Reinbold noted. In 1898, the U.S. began to run consistent surpluses in finished manufactures. By the turn of the century, it ran a full-fledged surplus in manufactured goods.

European Resurgence

by John Mauldin

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One of COVID-19’s many less-than-obvious consequences is the way it makes us look inward. Facing mortality has always done that, of course. West Texas Judge Roy Bean reportedly said, “Nothing focuses the mind like a good hanging." For the vulnerable and those of us of a certain age (ahem), this virus goes beyond the normal daily risks.

The difference this time is we are vulnerable based on proximity. The virus threatens us only if it is physically near. That’s one reason Americans didn’t take it seriously at first. It was far-way Chinese and Italian news. Like reading about the all-too-terrible prospect of China’s Three Gorges Dam collapsing, or the current famine in Africa. You know it’s bad, but it’s not in your backyard.

Then, as the virus spread here, our protective measures required heightened awareness of local conditions. Whether that stranger is getting too close to you may be more important than events overseas.

As a result, we haven’t paid enough attention to some important developments elsewhere. Big things have been brewing in Europe. The same continent that two years ago I said was going through “monetary drug withdrawal," is now set to outpace US growth by a wide margin. And US growth, which had led the world for years, now looks likely to lag it.

That turnaround has potential major market consequences, which can be either good or bad depending on the market. We need to pay attention. What happens around the world affects us and our markets. The global connectivity may be slightly less today, but it is not going away. Today we’ll review what is happening and what it could mean for you.

But first, we have to take a quick look at a few US numbers. From Peter Boockvar today:

Sunday Reading: Hiroshima

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This week marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. In 1946, William Shawn, who was then the deputy to Harold Ross, the editor of The New Yorker, asked John Hersey to travel to Japan and write about the horrific aftermath. Hersey’s report, “Hiroshima,” marked a radical departure from the conventional journalism of the day. In clear and supple prose, he described incomprehensible destruction on a human level. Hersey focussed on six survivors. (“Each knows that in the act of survival he lived a dozen lives and saw more death than he ever thought he would see.”) The magazine devoted its entire August 31st issue to the piece, and it was soon being read all over the world. Seventy-four years later, we’re bringing you Hersey’s celebrated work and a selection of related articles. In “Hiroshima: The Aftermath,” from 1985, Hersey revisits the survivors he profiled in his original report. In “Usher,” Eugene Kinkead encounters Paul W. Tibbets, Jr., the colonel who piloted the plane that unleashed the bomb. (“When the bomb was dropped, everyone craned his neck to watch the enormous black cloud that rose over the city—an effect quite different from anything any of them had ever seen. Then they flew back to the Marianas, eating ham sandwiches as they went.”) In “Atomic John,” David Samuels writes about a truck driver from Wisconsin who deciphered the secrets of the first nuclear bombs. Finally, in “John Hersey and the Art of Fact,” Nicholas Lemann profiles the New Yorker reporter and explores how his work helped transform magazine reporting. Taken together, these pieces offer a bracing reminder of the power of journalism to bear witness to even the most incomprehensible historical events.

Biden’s Big-Tent Strategy Seems to Be Working

By John Cassidy

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Earlier this week, there was a telling moment when Joe Biden spoke in Wilmington, Delaware, about the need to combat systemic racism and foster racial equality in the American economy. His speech was the latest in a series of public appearances in which the Presidential candidate has rolled out his Build Back Better economic agenda; earlier discussions were devoted to strengthening American manufacturing, addressing climate change, and building up the caring economy. “This election is not just about voting against Donald Trump,” Biden said. “It’s about rising to this moment of crisis, understanding people’s struggles, and building a future worthy of their courage and their ambition to overcome.”

The giveaway was the phrase “not just about.” Since capturing the Democratic nomination, Biden has repeatedly acknowledged, implicitly and explicitly, that, for many Americans, the 2020 election is mainly about getting rid of his opponent. This dynamic was clear during the primaries, when a majority of Democrats told pollsters that their top priority was selecting someone who could defeat Trump. It’s evident today in the endorsements that the former Vice-President has picked up, from groups ranging from the Lincoln Project, an organization of Never Trump Republicans that is running ads attacking the President and supporting Biden, to Indivisible, a group of progressive activists whose home page blares, “beat trump and save democracy.”

Infographic Of The Day: YouTube Moneymakers

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Everybody knows YouTube is where you find the best video content. Disagree? Just ask the millionaire YouTube celebrities who have built their fame on talking about what they love in front of their webcams. To help you discover the best that YouTube has to offer, Today's infographic illustrates a definitive list of the most popular individual YouTubers in nearly every country in the world.

When should cyber attacks be considered acts of war?

Shannon Corbeil

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In the past 15 years, state-sponsored cyber attacks have increased significantly, from hacking government and military computers to obtain information to shutting down or defacing websites to interfering with power stations.

And that's just what we know from the news, and in my experience (cyber threat analysis at the NSA), if something is public knowledge, then the classified story behind it is way more vast and comprehensive.

Make no mistake: countries like Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran are attacking the United States and other global players every day -- just ask Mattis...or Sony. I mean, we traced North Korean hacking during our last summit with North Korea.

So why aren't these cyber attacks considered acts of war? Let's get into it.

The United States, for example, knows that we're being targeted by cyber attacks. And we're really good at tracking down who is behind the intrusions. So, when a country like Russia targets the United States for a cyber attack, why isn't it considered an act of war?

Well, it can be. But it depends on the attack and how the law of war applies to it, even though those rules predate the invention of the internet. The United States government has identified cyberspace as an operational domain in which the armed forces must be able to defend and operate, just like land, sea, air, and space.

The Correlation Between Psychological and Cyber Warfare

By Milica D. Djekic
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The cyberspace is so suitable place for putting many different contents there. Those contents could get experts, funny as well as the part of some psychological campaigns. Practically, if you want to target someone’s mind and psyche – you can re-tell your story using any possible approach and style. In other words, in order to make someone gets your point – you can represent your concept applying so comic way or writing. Also, you can show everything as being so serious and your audience would also get satisfied with such an approach. Sometimes is funny writing equally impactful as so severely explained the news. Anyhow, whatever you use to share your ideas and findings – you need so well-developed skills in order to cause a certain effect to your readership. Everything including the expert’s analysis, funny talk or some serious overview – could deal with the piece of irony, criticism and silly thoughts. The cyberspace channels such as e-mail accounts, social media or communications lines could serve to transfer your message on.

For instance, if you want to criticize the level of corruption and bribe in, say, China, you need to prepare your story so skillfully and carefully and share it on the web relying on the websites, social media channels or any other methods of communications. The point in such a case is so clear – someone would use such propaganda to take some advantage and even make people believe everything coming from China is unreliable and untrusted. In addition, if we talk about a bit harder topics such as organized crime and terrorism – cyberspace could serve as a spot for leading the real psychological warfare within there.

When should cyber attacks be considered acts of war?

Shannon Corbeil

Source Link

In the past 15 years, state-sponsored cyber attacks have increased significantly, from hacking government and military computers to obtain information to shutting down or defacing websites to interfering with power stations.

And that's just what we know from the news, and in my experience (cyber threat analysis at the NSA), if something is public knowledge, then the classified story behind it is way more vast and comprehensive.

Make no mistake: countries like Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran are attacking the United States and other global players every day -- just ask Mattis...or Sony. I mean, we traced North Korean hacking during our last summit with North Korea.

The United States, for example, knows that we're being targeted by cyber attacks. And we're really good at tracking down who is behind the intrusions. So, when a country like Russia targets the United States for a cyber attack, why isn't it considered an act of war?

Well, it can be. But it depends on the attack and how the law of war applies to it, even though those rules predate the invention of the internet. The United States government has identified cyberspace as an operational domain in which the armed forces must be able to defend and operate, just like land, sea, air, and space.

The Chinese Town That Became the Self-Immolation Capital of the World

By Barbara Demick
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Tibetans encountered Chinese Communists for the first time during the Long March of the mid-1930s, when Mao’s Red Army evaded the Nationalist forces by heading west and north through the Tibetan plateau. The famished Chinese soldiers picked the fields bare. They stole yaks, sheep and grain (though some of them, reluctant to jettison the Communist principle of helping the rural poor, left i.o.u.s). They swept through monasteries, melting down copper urns for shrapnel, ripping up floorboards for firewood, sitting on sacred scroll paintings and eating boiled yak hide torn from temple drums. They were delighted to discover that tormas — votive offerings made of barley flour and butter — were also edible. Some tormas are sculpted in human form, and the soldiers, assuming they were committing a sacrilege but too hungry to care, believed they were eating statues of the Buddha.

Hence the title of “Eat the Buddha,” a brilliantly reported and eye-opening work of narrative nonfiction by Barbara Demick, the former Beijing bureau chief of The Los Angeles Times, on the history of Tibetan resistance to Chinese domination. Demick centers the book in and around the town of Ngaba, on the eastern plateau. I was initially disappointed to learn that Ngaba isn’t in the Tibet Autonomous Region — the territory, governed by China, whose capital is Lhasa and which most of us think of as Tibet — but rather in Sichuan, one of the four Chinese provinces in which the majority of Tibetans live. I assumed that Demick hadn’t focused on the TAR because of access problems: Visiting journalists must obtain permission from the Chinese government, which is rarely granted, and are usually required to travel with supervised tours. But it soon became apparent that Ngaba — which has access challenges of its own, though more surmountable ones — was exactly the right place to write about. Nowhere else, inside or outside the TAR, has been a more intense hotbed of Tibetan political unrest.

What Do US-Iran Talks Mean for Afghanistan?

By Rupert Stone

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After a tumultuous period marked by rising violence and delayed implementation of the U.S.-Taliban peace deal signed in Doha this year, finally the clouds seem to be breaking in Afghanistan. 

The Taliban and Afghan government look set to complete their long-overdue prisoner exchange and proceed to intra-Afghan talks, as outlined by the Doha agreement. The Taliban also announced a three-day ceasefire during the Muslim festival of Eid ul Adha.

Meanwhile, Afghanistan’s tortured relationship with Pakistan is continuing to improve. Chief Afghan peace negotiator Abdullah Abdullah is soon to visit Islamabad as part of his reconciliation efforts.

There is also good news regarding Afghanistan’s western neighbor, Iran. The United States and Iran have held rare talks on Afghan reconciliation. The meetings attracted little attention, but they could be crucial to ending the war.

Iran has strong ties to Afghanistan and the capacity to exert considerable influence there. It has long been argued that the U.S. will struggle to implement an effective peace deal without Iran’s cooperation.

Pakistan’s Bloodthirsty Blasphemy Law Needs to Be Repealed

By Kunwar Khuldune Shahid
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On Wednesday, Tahir Ahmad Naseem became the latest to be extrajudicially killed for blasphemy in Pakistan. The victim, who had formerly been an Ahmadi before leaving the community, had been under arrest inside Peshawar Central Jail since 2018 for claiming to be a prophet. He was facing trial for blasphemy, and was shot dead in the courtroom inside the Peshawar Judicial Complex.

There is gory symbolism in Pakistan’s latest blasphemy killing being committed inside a courtroom. It explains why, unlike Saudi Arabia or Iran – also among the 13 states that establish death as the penalty for sacrilege against Islam – vigilante justice is the norm in Pakistan. The country’s encouragement of mob violence is rooted in its paradoxical aspiration to be both a democratic republic and an Islamic state.

Where Saudi Arabia and Iran and continue to top the charts for executions, many of which are for “crimes against Islam,” the total number of judicial killings in Pakistan is zero. In fact, for seven years, 2008-2015, Pakistan simultaneously had a moratorium on the death penalty while upholding its codified capital punishment for blasphemy against Islam. It was during this period that Pakistan saw the most high-profile victim of its blasphemy law of the past two decades, when former Punjab Governor Salmaan Taseer was assassinated by his security guard in January 2011.

Countering China’s Influence Activities: Lessons from Australia

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This report is the Australia case study of an ambitious year-long CSIS initiative to analyze China’s influence activities in Australia and Japan and Russian influence activities in the United Kingdom and Germany. 

The Chinese Communist party-state under Xi Jinping has stepped up efforts to gain influence in Australian politics and society and interfere with Australia’s democratic institutions and outcomes, often through covert and manipulative means. Revelations in recent years of Beijing’s attempts to buy political access and influence, manipulate elite opinion, and coopt universities and the Chinese diaspora community-led Australia to push back against China’s interference efforts, even in the face of Beijing’s economic threats and retaliation. Dr. Amy Searight examines the evolution of Beijing’s playbook of interference efforts in Australia, the democratic traits that made Australia vulnerable to these malign influence activities, as well as the democratic strengths that led to Australia’s robust and wide-ranging policy response. 

This publication was made possible by the Global Engagement Center at the U.S. Department of State, through the Information Access Fund (IAF) administered by the DT Institute. The opinions, conclusions, or recommendations contained herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the view of the U.S. government or the IAF.

Take Me to the Cleaners: Negotiating with China

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There are periods in international relations when meaningful negotiation is not possible. The 1930s with Germany and the 1950s with the Soviet Union are examples. Authoritarian regimes who believe they are in the ascendant and their opponents are weak are not predisposed to agree to self-constrain, which is the essence of agreement. We are in such a period now.

China’s Communist Party shares the authoritarian heritage of the Germans and the Soviets. Anyone who has not negotiated in an official capacity with China may have an overly rosy view of the possibilities of reaching agreement with them. They are shrewd, tough, sensitive to perceived slights, and when pushed sufficiently, they can be chauvinistic and in some instances ideological. From a negotiator's perspective, these are compliments.

China has some of the best diplomats in the world. Putting aside the current generation of wolf-warrior diplomats, many senior Chinese negotiators are experienced and skilled. They are sometimes known in the West as "foreign devil handlers" given that one key function is to deflect Western criticism or demands. Party officials and military officers can be less urbane and more dogmatic, and in some negotiations, there is a palpable fear of displeasing the Party and suffering the consequences hanging over the Chinese side (especially those who are more junior). This can introduce a degree of rigidity in Chinese negotiating styles that can also make reaching agreement difficult.

Addressing Forced Labor in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region: Toward a Shared Agenda

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The forced labor of ethnic and religious minorities in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR), as part of a broader pattern of severe human rights abuses, is a significant and growing concern that demands the attention of governments and private-sector actors across the world. Products entering the United States, Europe, and other democracies are at risk of being affected by these forced labor practices, which often occur several steps away from global brands in supply chains. Companies cannot currently easily ensure that their products are not affected by XUAR-linked forced labor because brands often cannot trace their products to origin, and the XUAR’s important role in a number of sectors may require significant changes in sourcing practices. Moreover, global brands seeking to exert leverage on their Chinese suppliers with regard to XUAR sourcing are reportedly seen to intervene with internal political affairs. This brief explores what the XUAR produces, the sectors that are implicated, the resulting sourcing challenges, and the opportunities for collective action to be explored in further research.

Introduction

This brief is the first in a series that CSIS’s Human Rights Initiative (HRI) will produce to identify how businesses, governments, multilateral organizations, NGOs, and other actors can work together to address XUAR-linked forced labor. This brief enhances understanding of relevant supply chains and includes a deeper dive into forced labor risk in cotton production and supply chains in the XUAR. HRI’s work has focused less on labor transfers from the XUAR into the rest of China to avoid replicating the ongoing work of others. The brief does not provide recommendations but rather a starting point for a common understanding of relevant supply chains and labor risks, helping to ground further research and policy solutions.

China and Iran are about to Become Allies—Here’s What We Should Do about It

by Barry Pavel
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“Two ancient Asian cultures, two partners in the sectors of trade, economy, politics, culture and security with a similar outlook and many mutual bilateral and multilateral interests will consider one another strategic partners.” So begins a new secret bilateral agreement reportedly in its final stages between Chinese Communist Party leader Xi Jinping’s China and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s Iran. On the assumption that this agreement is implemented, it should cause U.S., European, and Asian strategic planners great alarm. Ultimately, it will require the United States to develop a vision for how to organize its allies and partners to work together on a global strategy for dealing with China. 

What are the first-order implications of this new agreement, in many ways an alliance between two of the world’s leading authoritarian systems that share and promote values that are entirely antithetical to the democratic world?

Why America Is Afraid of TikTok

BY MICHAEL SCHUMAN

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Zhang Yiming embodies what the United States wanted China to be. He is the founder and chief executive of a company, ByteDance, that owns a wildly popular social-media platform, TikTok. He is a serial entrepreneur, having built multiple apps and search engines. Zhang’s story is one not of a copycat or a cost-cutter—the tired stereotypes of the Chinese business owner—but of an innovator.

For most of the past half century, one of Washington’s primary foreign-policy goals was to create more Zhangs. The United States believed that it could transform Communist China into a society more like its own—wealthy, free, inventive, and open, a place where a nobody like Zhang, with little more than smarts and the tools of capitalism, could build the businesses and think of the ideas that would change the world.

To a degree, Zhang is proof that the U.S. succeeded. TikTok may be Chinese, but it has been embraced by Americans as their own. While Facebook is for sharing baby pictures, Twitter is for political ranting, and Instagram is for showing off how popular you are, TikTok has a certain silly simplicity—a forum where you can dance in your living room, lip-synch bad jokes, capture animal antics, and share other slivers of your personal life.

Beyond Borders: PLA Command and Control of Overseas Operations

By Phillip C. Saunders 

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Expanded Chinese economic interests and the higher priority given to maritime interests are driving People’s Liberation Army (PLA) efforts to develop power projection capabilities.

The reorganization of the Chinese military in late 2015 explicitly sought to give the Central Military Commission (CMC) and the theater commands responsibility for conducting operations and to relegate the services to force-building. However, the services are trying to maintain operational responsibilities, including for overseas operations.

The precise division of responsibilities and coordination mechanisms between the CMC, which controls nuclear weapons and likely other strategic capabilities, and the theater commands, which control ground, naval, air, and conventional missile forces, remains unclear, especially for large, high-intensity combat operations.

Existing command and control mechanisms are workable for now, but are likely to prove inadequate if PLA overseas operations become larger, require joint forces, last for extended periods of time, or occur in nonpermissive environments where deployed forces face significant threats from hostile state or nonstate actors.

Was Nixon Wrong About China?

Thomas Joscelyn

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Speaking at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in Yorba Linda, California, on July 23, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo attempted a difficult balancing act. On the one hand, Pompeo repudiated more than four decades of American policy toward China. Pompeo argued that the days of the U.S. holding out hope for political liberalization was over. And he called on free nations around the world to lock arms against the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) various schemes and threats.

On the other hand, Pompeo said he did not want to “seem too eager to tear down President Nixon’s legacy.” While Nixon’s presidency ended in disgrace, he is still widely considered something of a foreign policy success—the man who initiated America’s great opening to China. Pompeo didn’t want to directly undermine Nixon’s supposed accomplishment. “I want to be clear that he did what he believed was best for the American people at the time, and he may well have been right,” Pompeo said of Nixon’s diplomacy with the Chinese.

Pompeo’s use of the word “may” was telling. Maybe Nixon was right—or maybe he wasn’t. Given the substance of his speech, it is quite possible that Pompeo thinks Nixon was wrong.

More than any other Trump administration official, Pompeo has confronted the new, unintentional reality bequeathed by the opening of America’s relations with China: an aggressive, totalitarian Chinese regime that has benefited greatly from American naivete. And he outlined the various ways in which he and others in the administration have tackled the CCP’s menacing agenda. The U.S. government has countered Chinese aggression everywhere from the South China Sea to Texas. “Just this week, we announced the closure of the Chinese consulate in Houston because it was a hub of spying and intellectual property theft,” Pompeo said to applause from the audience.