The Password Isn’t Dead Yet. You Need a Hardware Key

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IN AUGUST, THE internet infrastructure company Cloudflare was one of hundreds of targets in a massive criminal phishing spree that succeeded in breaching numerous tech companies. While some Cloudflare employees were tricked by the phishing messages, the attackers couldn't burrow deeper into the company's systems. That's because, as part of Cloudflare's security controls, every employee must use a physical security key to prove their identity while logging into all applications. Weeks later, the company announced a collaboration with the hardware authentication token-maker Yubikey to offer discounted keys to Cloudflare customers.

Cloudflare wasn't the only company high on the security protection of hardware tokens, though. Earlier this month, Apple announced hardware key support for Apple IDs, seven years after first rolling out two-factor authentication on user accounts. And two weeks ago, the Vivaldi browser announced hardware key support for Android.

The protection isn't new, and many major platforms and companies have for years supported hardware key adoption and required that employees use them as Cloudflare did. But this latest surge in interest and implementation comes in response to an array of escalating digital threats.

A Portrait of Carl von Clausewitz as a Senior Officer: The Question of Military Regulations and the Role of Routine and Creativity in Military Conduct

Vanya Eftimova Bellinger

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In the realm of Clausewitzian scholarship, the 1820s represent a conundrum. On the one hand, this was when Carl von Clausewitz wrote most of his treatise On War. On the other hand, despite the period's undoubted significance for the military theorist’s legacy, we know relatively little about his life, career, and writing process. For modern national security professionals, this knowledge gap is particularly unfortunate, as it tends to, first, reinforce the mistaken impression that Clausewitz's efforts to write a theory of war were an exoteric process separated from his experience in war or his performance as a senior officer. As a result, it is also easier to brush aside the need for reflection and the continuous study of war, politics, and society Clausewitz thought central for the business of war.

The reasons for this decade-long knowledge gap are manifold. First and foremost is the lack of correspondence between Clausewitz and his wife Marie as they lived together; although other letters are preserved, their number is not as great nor their content as candid and detailed as their correspondence as a couple. Furthermore, the military theorist spent most of this period drafting On War, and the prolonged and secluded nature of that writing process offers a less compelling narrative to scholars and audiences. Following the riveting accounts of the Napoleonic Wars, the realities of peace and the Restoration Era's stifling climate additionally constrain interest in the period. Thus, biographies tend to describe the 1820s in broad strokes, often squeezing the decade Clausewitz dedicated to writing On War into a single chapter.

COGNITIVE WARFARE”: NATO IS PLANNING A WAR FOR PEOPLE'S MINDS

Jonas Tögel

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Since 2020, NATO has pursued plans for psychological warfare that must stand on an equal footing with the military alliance's five previous areas of operation (land, water, air, space, cyberspace). It is the battleground of public opinion. NATO documents speak of “cognitive warfare”, i.e.: mental warfare. How concrete is the project, what steps have been taken so far, and who is it aimed at?

To be victorious in war, one must also win the battle for public opinion. This has been carried out for more than 100 years with increasingly modern tools, the so-called soft power techniques. These describe all those psychological tools of influence by which people can be guided in such a way that they themselves are not aware of this control. The American political scientist Joseph Nye thus defines soft power as “the ability to persuade others to do what one wants without using violence or coercion”.

Distrust of governments and the military is increasing, while NATO is stepping up its efforts to use increasingly sophisticated psychological warfare in the battle for people's minds and hearts. The main program for this is “Cognitive Warfare”. With the psychological weapons of this program, man himself is to be declared the new theater of war, the so-called “Human Domain” (human sphere).

Return of Big War: Military expert on why the invasion of Ukraine will change conflicts to come

Stephen Stewart

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Russia’s invasion of Ukraine suggests “big war is back” with large-scale conflict between nations likely to shape world politics for years to come, according to a military expert.

Ben Barry, senior fellow for land warfare at the respected International Institute for Strategic Studies thinktank, said the conflict had transformed contemporary warfare.

The former British Army brigadier said Ukraine was more like major wars such as the Korean War, the Bosnian conflict or the Iran-Iraq War than a smaller-scale “special military operation” as it was initially described by Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Strategists in the UK and the US have been too preoccupied with counterinsurgency involving campaigns of unconventional, irregular and special operations warfare in countries such as Afghanistan but Ukraine has shifted the focus, Barry said.

He said: “Big War is back. Perhaps the most important facet of the war is that what was planned as a short ‘special military operation’ against an inferior enemy has turned into a large-scale conflict between states in which prolonged fighting has been at a high intensity and over a wide geographical area.

PATRIOT MISSILES, NATO, AND UKRAINE: TACTICAL WEAPONS WITH STRATEGIC IMPACTS

Peter Mitchell

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In his address to Congress, Ukrainian Volodymyr Zelensky unsurprisingly asked for additional weapons, support, and funding for Ukraine’s ongoing efforts to repel the Russian invasion. He specifically named one weapon: the MIM-104 Patriot. “If your Patriots stop the Russian terror against our cities, it will let Ukrainian patriots work to the full to defend our freedom.” Shortly thereafter, the Department of Defense announced Patriots were headed to Ukraine as part of ongoing efforts to support Ukraine. Following the training of Ukrainian servicemembers at the Grafenwoehr Training Area in Germany, Patriot batteries will likely be deployed around critical defended areas within Ukraine itself. This move by the Pentagon—although of limited tactical importance—marks a seismic strategic shift in intra-NATO cooperation and sets the stage for long-term NATO-Ukrainian partnership.

Training a Patriot Battery

Long-range air defense systems are complicated machines, and the Patriot is no exception. While most photographs of the Patriot focus on the M901 launching station, the system also comprises of four other components. The eyes of the system, a C-band radar, feeds information to the brains, the engagement control station. Firing data is sent to the muscles, the launcher, and coordination is conducted with the battalion information control center and to other elements using Link 16. Powering the battery is a truck-mounted generator. Each component is unique and requires intensive individual training and constant maintenance to remain mission ready.

European SCAF programme heads to Phase 1B ramp up

Richard Thomas

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European aerospace and defence prime Airbus outlined its upcoming technological roadmap for the Future Combat Air System (FCAS/SCAF) programme, including shedding greater light on the Loyal Wingman platforms that will accompany the Next Generation Fighter (NGF) element of the project once in service.

Providing the updates during a trade media briefing on 12 December, Airbus officials detailed the programme timeline of the SCAF, which will see ramp up into Phase 1B by the end of the year, as work continues on demonstrator development efforts related to the NGF, Loyal Wingman platforms, combat cloud architecture, and technology maturation.

Phase 1B and Phase 2 are expected to continue until the 2027 timeframe, at which point the main development phase, known as Phase 3, is due to begin. The main development phase will also see flight demonstrations by early NGF and Loyal Wingman platforms in the 2028-2029 timeframe ahead of a production phase beginning in 2030.

Entry into service for SCAF, comprising the NGF, which is being led by European industrial duo Airbus and Dassault, and Loyal Wingman platforms, is scheduled for 2040. The timeline is further to the right to the rival UK-Italy-Japan Global Combat Air Platform (GCAP) programme, likely in part due to acquisition timelines that do not see the NGF replacing existing 4.5 generation-era fighters currently in service with Germany, France, and Spain.

AFGHANISTAN: IMPLICATIONS OF TALIBAN RULE

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As part of our ongoing transparency efforts to enhance public understanding of the Intelligence Community’s (IC) work and to provide insights on national security issues, ODNI today is releasing this unclassified IC product dated June 2022.

About the National Intelligence Council:

The National Intelligence Council (NIC) plays a central role in coordinating intelligence products and is responsible for leading analysis across the IC to inform immediate and long-term policy deliberations. National Intelligence Officers (NIOs) serve as the principal subject matter experts to the DNI and national security decision makers on all aspects of analysis related to their regional and functional roles.

Transboundary Water Governance is a Regional Security Issue in Asia

Genevieve Donnellon and Zhang Hongzhou

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The Tibetan Plateau and the surrounding Hindu Kush-Himalayan regions, also known as the “Asian water tower,” is the source of 10 major Asian rivers. Abundant glacier ice reservoirs and alpine lakes feed an extended river system encompassing the Yellow, Yangtze, Indus, Mekong, Salween, Ganges, Yarlung Zangbo, Amu Darya, Syr Darya and Tarim rivers, supplying freshwater to downstream areas. Holding the world’s third-largest global reservoir of snow and ice after the Arctic and Antarctica, the area provides nearly 2 billion people with freshwater, meaning that around 25 percent of the Earth’s population depends on the region.

Climate Threats

Recent studies demonstrate that climate change is significantly affecting the region, not just in the short term but also causing significant long-term hydrological, socio-economic, humanitarian, and security challenges. The region has warmed at rates considerably higher than the global average, disrupting the water cycle. Annual and seasonal temperatures have increased more at higher elevation zones, while precipitation patterns have shifted, rising in the northwest but decreasing in the south. At the same time, glaciers are shrinking, groundwater is depleting, permafrost is degrading, and snow cover days are dwindling.

China and the US: On collision course for war over Taiwan

Richard Walker

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"We can only avoid a war by preparing for a war," said Taiwan's president, Tsai Ing-wen, approaching the end of 2022 with a stern message for her people.

"Taiwan needs to strengthen our ability to defend ourselves," Tsai said, announcing that from 2024, compulsory military service would be extended from four months to a full year.

"No one wants war," she said. "But, my fellow countrymen, peace will not fall from the sky."

The Chinese threat

The Taiwan dispute has festered since the end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949, when the defeated nationalists fled to the island. The victorious Communists have been determined to take it ever since.

Now, the threat of war has seemed closer than at any time in decades.

In August 2022, China launched its largest military exercises in a generation — seen by many as a rehearsal for a blockade or even invasion.

Problems with Revisionism: A Conceptual Framework for Assessing Chinese Intentions

Michael Breger

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For as long as policymakers and scholars of international relations have sought to understand the actions of actors on the global stage, they have also debated the intentions of governments and the role those intentions play in statecraft. In a new article in the Journal of Chinese Political Science, Center Fellow Oriana Skylar Mastro proposes a new research agenda for deciphering Chinese intentions. She argues that the current treatment of intentions in international relations is not granular enough to allow for a nuanced understanding of what China wants, how it plans to achieve it, and what the implications will be for the United States and the U.S.-led world order.

Mastro suggests that there are theoretical and empirical issues with how existing scholarly accounts have defined, measured, and operationalized intentions in the context of understanding China’s rise. She presents five propositions that should drive research moving forward.

Her first point in advancing a theory of intentions requires a definition distinct from aspirations, motives, preferences, objectives, goals, and grand strategy. She argues that “intentions consist of purposefully designing or manipulating means to achieve some end,” implying “clear formulation and deliberateness.”

China’s covid data is bad. An epidemiologist says that is making the surge nearly impossible to track.

Jonathan Lambert

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China’s zero-covid policies created a coronavirus tinderbox; it may have just ignited. But accurately tracking this conflagration of covid has become virtually impossible.

Years of strict lockdowns kept infections down but also prevented the buildup of immunity via infection. That immunity hole could have been filled by a robust vaccination campaign, but the country used less effective vaccines than other parts of the world and failed to reach those at highest risk of serious disease.

Now, as China’s government abandons covid control measures, the country with perhaps the largest population of immunologically susceptible people on the planet is facing a potentially catastrophic situation.

Earlier this month, China dismantled much of its testing system, and last week the government stopped reporting daily covid data, forcing epidemiologists to rely on anecdotal reports to understand where in the country the virus is spreading, and the damage left in its wake.

Full Text: 2023 New Year Address by President Xi Jinping

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BEIJING, Dec. 31 (Xinhua) -- On New Year's eve, President Xi Jinping delivered his 2023 New Year Address through China Media Group and the Internet. The following is the full text of the address:

Greetings to you all. The year 2023 is approaching. From Beijing, I extend my best New Year wishes to all of you.

In 2022, we successfully convened the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC). An ambitious blueprint has been drawn for building a modern socialist country in all respects and advancing the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation on all fronts through a Chinese path to modernization, sounding a clarion call of the times for us forging ahead on a new journey.

The Chinese economy has remained the second largest in the world and enjoyed sound development. GDP for the whole year is expected to exceed 120 trillion yuan. Despite a global food crisis, we have secured a bumper harvest for the 19th year in a row, putting us in a stronger position to ensure the food supply of the Chinese people. We have consolidated our gains in poverty elimination and advanced rural revitalization across the board. We have introduced tax and fee cuts and other measures to ease the burden on businesses, and made active efforts to solve the most pressing difficulties of high concern to the people.

The Illusion of Controls: Unilateral Attempts to Contain China’s Technology Ambitions Will Fail

Sarah Bauerle Danzman and Emily Kilcrease

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In October, the Biden administration announced a series of new, unilaterally imposed export controls designed to freeze China’s advanced chip production and supercomputing capabilities. The strengthened rules came less than a month after National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan announced a major change in U.S. technology competition strategy. Previously, the United States sought to deny the export of chips or other technologies to China if such items were designed or likely to be used for military purposes, or if the transfer would impair the U.S. ability to maintain an advantage over competitors in cutting-edge commercial technologies that might also have military applications. Now, Sullivan said, “we must maintain as large of a lead as possible” in certain technology areas as a whole, for all intents and purposes erasing the line between civilian and military applications in the advanced chip production and supercomputing sectors.

A narrative quickly took hold that these export controls, and especially the “foreign direct product rule” provisions that allow the United States to apply its controls extraterritorially under certain circumstances—such as preventing companies outside the United States from selling semiconductors to China if they were produced using U.S. equipment—were a sign that the U.S. was “weaponizing” its influential position in the semiconductor supply chain. The United States, this argument went, enjoys market dominance in certain kinds of software and equipment used to design and manufacture semiconductors, as well as certain advanced chips critical for artificial intelligence, and it can use this privileged position to stymie China’s attempts to develop its own microelectronic and supercomputing capabilities. In a similar way, the United States has used the centrality of the U.S. dollar to freeze individuals and governments out of the global financial system.

5 Ways the U.S.-China Cold War Will Be Different From the Last One

Jo Inge Bekkevold

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2022 was arguably the most turbulent and transformative year in international politics since the revolutions of 1989. It was turbulent because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the crisis over Taiwan, but it was transformative in the way the United States acknowledged China as a superpower rival. In the U.S. National Security Strategy issued in October, the Biden administration not only identified China as its most important security challenge, but also declared unequivocally that the post-Cold War era is over. If the United States’ unipolar power position was the defining feature of the post-Cold War era, the shift to a U.S.-Chinese bipolar power structure will shape a new world order.

Ultimately, decisions on war and peace will be made by individual leaders. But to better understand how the new bipolar era might unfold, we must look at its structure: the balance of power, the new system’s origin, and the geographic setting. The U.S.-Chinese rivalry is unique in many ways, and its nature provides us with salient information on the new world order, its stability, and the role that might be played by statesmanship.

In terms of balance of power, the U.S.-China rivalry resembles the Cold War, another antagonism between two superpowers. This is why former Obama administration Asia-Pacific advisor Evan Medeiros called the November meeting between U.S. President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping in Bali, Indonesia, “the first superpower summit of the Cold War Version 2.0.” This has raised concerns, particularly in Europe, about the reemergence of competing blocs, and among developing countries about being stuck in the proverbial middle.

The Inevitable U.S. Return and the Future of Great Power Competition in South Asia

Thomas F. Lynch III Strategic Perspectives 

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Executive Summary

More than a year after America’s painful Afghanistan withdrawal, the future of U.S. and Western security interests in South Asia no longer relates mainly to the terrorism threat from Salafi jihadism, which has receded and reoriented there to be most menacing toward Pakistan and China. Instead, American security interests now require the proper posture for long-term Great Power competition (GPC) with China. Such a posture in South Asia requires patient, persistent growth in the slowly maturing, overt strategic security partnership with India and a quiet regeneration of a transactional one with Pakistan.

The Indo-Pakistani security dilemma will continue to color Indo-Pakistani security perspectives across South Asia. The United States can have no doubts that this situation will persist. Yet Washington and its Indo-Pacific allies can navigate Indo-Pakistani bilateral tensions and enhance a growing geopolitical partnership with India while simultaneously regenerating a limited, tactical counterterrorism modus vivendi with Pakistan. India’s advancement as an important regional security partner against Chinese strategic encroachment has been stolid: slow but steady and without need for major course correction. Pakistan’s role has been rightfully questioned for some time.

But Pakistan now is ripe for cultivation as an American transactional security partner again despite its posture as a historic Chinese strategic partner. Throughout 2022, Pakistan— and particularly its military-intelligence leadership in Rawalpindi—has demonstrated that it seeks to sustain China’s strategic partnership, but not to the point of wearing a Chinese strategic straitjacket. Its behavior is in keeping with its historic pursuit of its own peculiar national security interests by strategic tacking between the United States, the Gulf Arab states, and China. Pakistani leaders in the military and intelligence services today actively seek American assistance and support to balance its increasingly tense economic and security relationships with Beijing. They seek to leverage American technological prowess and to eliminate mutually threatening Salafi jihadist terrorists beyond Pakistan’s reach.

Iran: A Model or a Warning?

Amir Taheri

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Since the revolution, the percentage of Iranians living below "absolute poverty" has increased from 7 percent in 1977 to 18.4 percent in 2022. The nation's labor market has plunged from one crisis to another.

There are several areas in which the Iran is world number one.

According to International Monetary Fund, with over 150,000 highly-educated Iranians choosing exile each year, it is number one in the brain drain league.

It is also number-one, relative to population, in the number of executions each year.

More importantly, perhaps, the ruling elite consist largely of a network of around 200 families with clerical, military-security and bazaar backgrounds.

It may be that there is no other country where the ruling elite, a caste apart, is so unlike the people it dominates by force and propaganda.

Ayatollah Khamenei believes or pretends that his regime is a model for "all nations". The many Iranians now in open rebellion believe that it is a curse for their nation and a warning to others.

EMP: The Biggest Military Threat America Faces Today?

Christian Orr

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Back on August 20, 2022 (coincidentally my birthday), I was saddened to learn of the passing of a great American patriot, Dr. Peter Vincent Pry. While I didn’t know Peter quite well enough to call him a true friend, we definitely had a mutually respectful professional acquaintanceship. Dr. Pry’s passing was a devastating blow to patriotic Americans everywhere concerned about securing our nation’s grid infrastructure from the threat of an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) strike, as he was one of our most tireless advocates for this vital national security issue.

A successful EMP strike against the U.S. would be a catastrophe beyond measure or comprehension, essentially ushering in “The End of the World as We Know It” (TEOTWAWKI), Yet, the Biden Administration is failing to do anything about it.

EMP Defined and Explained

Michaela Dodge and her colleagues at the Heritage Foundation have provided us with a very useful breakdown of the EMP threat in layman’s terms:

(1) A thermonuclear weapon is detonated at an altitude of 25 miles or more above the Earth’s atmosphere, releasing a burst of gamma radiation;

(2) These gamma rays impact air molecules, stripping off electrons, and driving these negatively charged particles to approximately 90 percent the speed of light (at higher altitudes, the reduced air density enables the electrons to move more freely and maximize EMP intensity);

U.S. Pours Money Into Chips, but Even Soaring Spending Has Limits

Don Clark and Ana Swanson

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In September, the chip giant Intel gathered officials at a patch of land near Columbus, Ohio, where it pledged to invest at least $20 billion in two new factories to make semiconductors.

A month later, Micron Technology celebrated a new manufacturing site near Syracuse, N.Y., where the chip company expected to spend $20 billion by the end of the decade and eventually perhaps five times that.

And in December, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company hosted a shindig in Phoenix, where it plans to triple its investment to $40 billion and build a second new factory to create advanced chips.

The pledges are part of an enormous ramp-up in U.S. chip-making plans over the past 18 months, the scale of which has been likened to Cold War-era investments in the space race. The boom has implications for global technological leadership and geopolitics, with the United States aiming to prevent China from becoming an advanced power in chips, the slices of silicon that have driven the creation of innovative computing devices like smartphones and virtual-reality goggles.

Today, chips are an essential part of modern life even beyond the tech industry’s creations, from military gear and cars to kitchen appliances and toys.

U.S. Scrambles to Stop Iran From Providing Drones for Russia

David E. Sanger, Julian E. Barnes and Eric Schmitt

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WASHINGTON — The Biden administration has embarked on a broad effort to halt Iran’s ability to produce and deliver drones to Russia for use in the war in Ukraine, an endeavor that has echoes of its yearslong program to cut off Tehran’s access to nuclear technology.

In interviews in the United States, Europe and the Middle East, a range of intelligence, military and national security officials have described an expanding U.S. program that aims to choke off Iran’s ability to manufacture the drones, make it harder for the Russians to launch the unmanned “kamikaze” aircraft and — if all else fails — to provide the Ukrainians with the defenses necessary to shoot them out of the sky.

The breadth of the effort has become clearer in recent weeks. The administration has accelerated its moves to deprive Iran of the Western-made components needed to manufacture the drones being sold to Russia after it became apparent from examining the wreckage of intercepted drones that they are stuffed with made-in-America technology.

U.S. forces are helping Ukraine’s military to target the sites where the drones are being prepared for launch — a difficult task because the Russians are moving the launch sites around, from soccer fields to parking lots. And the Americans are rushing in new technologies designed to give early warning of approaching drone swarms, to improve Ukraine’s chances of bringing them down, with everything from gunfire to missiles.

Ukraine War: Why The Optimists May Be Correct

Dr. Philip Dandolov

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Almost a year has passed since the beginning of what experts have characterized as the largest military conflict in Europe since the Second World War, so it seems natural to ponder the viability of a number of potential scenarios that could bring about an end to the war in Ukraine.

Bulgarian political scientist Ivan Krastev identifies three distinct camps with regard to the underlying philosophies in relation to the desired endpoint of the crisis. The realists generally express a belief that Russia’s actions are attributable to valid security concerns and also raise the alarm pertaining to the prospect of an apocalyptic end game in Ukraine, possibly entailing a nuclear exchange, unless a quick diplomatic solution to the conflict is prioritized, even if it ultimately turns out to be at the expense of some core Ukrainian national interests. The optimists profess that there are many signs that a decisive Ukrainian victory is on the horizon, which may conceivably also spell the end of Vladimir Putin’s regime. The revisionists go a step further, apportioning blame for the war not only to the Putin administration but also to wider Russian society, and thus advocate for policies (in the aftermath of the war) that would knock Russia out of the ranks of the great powers and bring about a disintegration of the country.

While at this stage it would still be premature to make any definitive assessments or predictions, there seem to be solid grounds to assume that the scenario envisioned by the optimists (even though optimism can be a bit of a misnomer given the terrible price being paid in terms of human casualties by the Ukrainians) is likely to materialize.

YEARBOOK OF EUROPEAN SECURITY 2022

Daniel Fiott, Linnéa Cullman

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The 2022 Yearbook of European Security provides an overview of events in 2021 that were significant for European security. The book charts major developments in the EU’s external action and security and defence policy.

Divided into region and issue-specific sections, this Yearbook contains entries on the EU’s multilateral efforts and work in security and defence, as well as specific geographical sections on North Africa and the Middle East, Sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas.

The section on security and defence provides comprehensive information about EU defence tools such as the Permanent Structured Cooperation (PESCO) initiative, and an overview of security issues such as space, cybersecurity, terrorism, border management, hybrid threats and more.

To enrich the reading experience, the document contains references to key EU texts, various EUISS analytical publications, an index and informative infographics.

Moscow's Invasion Of Ukraine Triggers 'Soul-Searching' At Western Universities As Scholars Rethink Russian Studies

Todd Prince

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When more than 2,000 Slavic, East European, and Eurasian studies specialists from around the world gather in Philadelphia later this year for their largest annual conference, Russia's invasion of Ukraine will dominate the discussion -- or loom large over the proceedings, at the very least.

In Ukraine, Moscow's unprovoked war has killed tens of thousands of people and laid cities and towns to waste. At universities across the West, it has thrust Russia's history of imperialism and colonialism to the forefront of Slavic and Eurasian academic discussion -- from history and political science to art and literature.

The war is forcing scholars, departments, and university officials to question how they teach the history of Russia, the former Soviet Union, and the region, what textbooks and sources they use, whom they hire, which archives they mine for information, and even what departments should be named.

The Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) has made "decolonization" -- which it describes as "a profoundly political act of re-evaluating long-established and often internalized hierarchies, of relinquishing and taking back power" -- the theme of its 2023 conference.

What the Wars and Crises of 2022 Foreshadow for 2023

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In the late twentieth century, the American psychic Jeane Dixon, nicknamed the Seeress of Washington, won a huge following after predicting, in a 1956 magazine article, that a man resembling John F. Kennedy would be elected President four years later—and then die in office. But she also said that the Third World War would begin in 1958 and that the Soviet Union would land the first man on the moon. Soothsaying is not science.

Yet some of the trend lines for the world in 2023 are already visible; the wars and crises of 2022 will shape the challenges of the New Year. Among them, ruthless autocrats are exerting their might in ways that strain the diplomatic bandwidth, financial resources, and arms stockpiles of democracies. None of the world’s most troubling crises—Vladimir Putin’s gruesome invasion of Ukraine, Xi Jinping’s unprecedented military drills around Taiwan, Iran’s nuclear advances and arms sales to Russia, Kim Jong Un’s record missile provocations, the Taliban’s increasingly draconian rule in Afghanistan, the takeover of Haiti by hundreds of gangs, and the spread of isis franchises across Africa—seem likely to abate anytime soon.

Three decades after the fall of the Soviet Union marked the so-called end of history, 2022 marked the “return of history,” Richard Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, noted this month. It’s a sobering reflection of the trajectory of humanity. The globalizing interdependence of the early twenty-first century has not prevented a resurgence of aggression that has already killed tens of thousands. Global organizations—most notably the United Nations, formed after the previous century’s two devastating World Wars—have appeared largely powerless to stop the bloodshed. As 2022 ended, roughly half of the world’s democracies were in decline, according to the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, in Sweden. Polarized societies didn’t trust elections. Corruption had become intractable. Civil liberties and press freedoms were threatened.

Is the UK Turning into Something Extremely Different?

Mohshin Habib

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In 2013, British journalist Vincent Cooper wrote: "By the year 2050, in a mere 37 years, Britain will be a majority Muslim nation."

Religion seems a far more important part of life for Muslims than for other Britons: it appears central to their sense of identity. According to a report from 2006: "Thirty percent of British Muslims would prefer to live under Sharia (Islamic religious) law than under British law.... Twenty-eight percent hope for the U.K. one day to become a fundamentalist Islamic state."

The question is: What teachings are the Muslims across the world, including in the UK, receiving from studying the Quran?

On December 1, 2022, Britain's Office for National Statistics released the latest 10-yearly census, carried out in 2021, showing that the fastest-growing population in England and Wales is Muslims. According to the census:

"For the first time in a census of England and Wales, less than half of the population (46.2%, 27.5 million people) described themselves as 'Christian'..."

Tweaking the Inflation Reduction Act Can Strengthen Democracies’ Hand

John Austin, Elaine Dezenski

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By all appearances, French president Emmanuel Macron’s recent visit to Washington has reknit the relationship between the United States and its oldest ally—strained when the United States and other allies pulled the rug out from under France’s submarine sales to Australia last year.

The one notable remaining fly in the Franco-U.S. ointment—Joe Biden and Congressional Democrats’ Inflation Reduction Act, which boxed France and other European allies out of expanded U.S. electric vehicle and other clean energy products’ development—got a Biden pledge to make a “tweak”. The president made no apologies for actions to create more American manufacturing jobs, but promised not to do so “at the expense of Europe.”

Should the president find a way to follow through on this promise, either through executive action or amended legislation, it would boost ongoing efforts among Western democracies to pull closer together and work in concert to counter the economic and political threats from Russia and China.

As we have written before, a more geopolitically potent path than trying to onshore everything, if democracies are to outcompete authoritarians for economic and political leadership, is an ally-shoring strategy. Ally-shoring means selectively leaning into and rewiring supply chains and increasing co-production arrangements with friends who share our democratic values and global interests. A lot of this is happening organically, as countries and global companies burned by Russia’s attack on Ukraine, and skittish about relying on China for products and components (for both political and supply-chain reliability issues), seek both reliable and politically friendly environments that support economic stability, the rule of law, and intellectual property protections.

Yes, Blame Putin For The Ukraine War (But The West Isn’t Blameless)

Doug Bandow

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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky enjoyed a reception akin to that of a Roman conqueror during his brief but packed visit to Washington. He made a pitch for more aid with a carefully crafted speech that touched multiple American emotions. Congress responded by approving another $45 billion in aid—more than most NATO countries spend on their militaries in a year or, in some cases, in a decade.

The Wall Street Journal, which has never covered a war that it did not favor, lauded Capitol Hill’s response, arguing: “The U.S. would be far worse off today if Putin had conquered Ukraine.” That’s true, but incomplete. It would have been much better had the U.S. not helped set the stage for the terrible war now raging between Ukraine and Russia. And it would be so much better if the U.S. and Russia don’t end up lobbing nuclear weapons at each other before the current conflict ends.

Where to start with the “what ifs?”

The U.S. would be far better off today had successive administrations lived up to the promises made to both Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin that NATO would not expand forever eastward. Although much obviously went into Putin’s decision to attack Ukraine, there is no evidence that he is a Hitler wannabe bent on world conquest, or even on reassembling the Soviet Union. Adolf Hitler hit the zenith of his conquests within a decade; Putin’s territorial acquisitions after two decades in power were Crimea and influence over a handful of statelets: Abkhazia, South Ossetia, and separatist states in the Donbas. He is no friend of liberty or democracy, but compare Putin’s conciliatory 2001 speech to Germany’s Bundestag with his accusatory tone at the Munich Security Dialogue in 2007. Much changed in his attitude toward the West, without which February’s action is highly unlikely, if not inconceivable.

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Artificial intelligence is transforming our world — it is on all of us to make sure that it goes well

Max Roser

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Why should you care about the development of artificial intelligence?

Think about what the alternative would look like. If you and the wider public do not get informed and engaged, then we leave it to a few entrepreneurs and engineers to decide how this technology will transform our world.

That is the status quo. This small number of people at a few tech firms directly working on artificial intelligence (AI) do understand how extraordinarily powerful this technology is becoming. If the rest of society does not become engaged, then it will be this small elite who decides how this technology will change our lives.

To change this status quo, I want to answer three questions in this article: Why is it hard to take the prospect of a world transformed by AI seriously? How can we imagine such a world? And what is at stake as this technology becomes more powerful?

Why is it hard to take the prospect of a world transformed by artificial intelligence seriously?

Information Laundering via Baltnews on Telegram: How Russian State-Sponsored Media Evade Sanctions and Narrate the War

Martha Stolze

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Information has long been used as a foreign policy tool by the Kremlin. Most recently, the Russian attack on Ukraine has prompted a new wave of research into the way pro-Kremlin messaging is spread in Western countries and to what effect. This study uncovers a specific form of information influence campaigns: Information Laundering (IL) and reveals that apart from increasingly amplifying Kremlin-official media since February 2022, like Sputnik, RT or RIA Novosti, the Baltnews Telegram channel has also increasingly spread cases of IL, by nature a more covert technique of audience manipulation. In the process of IL, information of Western news articles was manipulated and spread on Russian-domain websites, later reaching Nordic-Baltic websites and the Baltnews Telegram channel. The study thus demonstrates how Russian-domain and Kremlin-official media systematically draw from and amplify content published in the Western press that can be made to align with their own messaging as part of information influence campaigns.

Cyber Brief: GRU Cyber Operations

Michael Martelle

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The central questions of this thesis are whether Russian cyber capabilities reflect an investment in offensive or defensive cyber weapons and whether Russia's cyber technology, doctrine, and policy indicate an offensive or defensive cyber posture. The discussion of Russian cyber capability includes several case studies of Russian cyber activity.

Department of Homeland Security and Federal Bureau of Investigation, Joint Analysis Report, GRIZZLY STEPPE - Malicious Cyber Activity, December 29, 2016. Unclassified.

This report presents the information that the U.S. government is willing to make public concerning the "the tools and infrastructure used by the Russian civilian and military intelligence Services (RIS) to compromise and exploit networks and endpoints associated with the U.S. election, as well as a range of U.S. Government, political, and private sectors entities."

James R. Clapper, Marcel Lettre, Admiral Michael S. Rogers, Joint Statement for the Record to the Senate Armed Services Committee, "Foreign Cyber Threats to the United States," January 5, 2017. Unclassified.

In their joint statement, the DNI, Under Secretary Defense for Intelligence, and the Director of NSA/Commander, U.S. Cyber Command, discuss a variety of consequences of cyber threats - physical, commercial, psychological consequences - on cyber policy, diplomacy, and warfare. In addition, the statement discusses a number of cyber threat actors - nation states (Russia, China, North Korea, Iran), terrorists, and criminals - and responses to cyber threats.

The WIRED Guide to 5G

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THE FUTURE DEPENDS on connectivity. From artificial intelligence and self-driving cars, to telemedicine and mixed reality, to as yet undreamed technologies, all the things we hope will make our lives easier, safer, and healthier require high-speed, always-on internet connections. To keep up with the demand, the mobile industry introduced 5G—so named because it's the fifth generation of wireless networking technology.

5G brings faster speeds of up to 10 gigabits per second (Gbps) to your phone. That's fast enough to download a 4K movie in 25 seconds. But 5G is not just about faster connections. It also delivers lower latency and allows for more devices to be connected simultaneously.

What is 5G?

As the fifth generation of cellular networks, 5G is a global wireless standard. All cellular networks send encoded data through radio waves. Radio waves have different frequencies and are divided into bands. Previous generations, like 4G, operated on low- and mid-band frequencies, but 5G can operate on low-, mid-, and high-band (also known as millimeter wave) frequencies. Lower frequencies can travel farther and penetrate through obstacles but offer relatively low speeds, while higher frequencies are much faster but have a limited range and struggle to pass through objects.

Joint Forces and Integrated Deterrence: Rebalancing China in the Western Pacific

Douglas A. Borer and Shannon C. Houck

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Since the mid-1970s, defending the Asia-Pacific Area of Responsibility has fallen primarily to the US Navy. Having no war to fight in theater since Korea and Vietnam, the conventional US Army and Marine Corp assumed a supporting role for intermittent troop surges in Iraq and Afghanistan. However, during the last twenty years, the U.S. Special Operations Forces (SOF) have been highly active in the counter-terrorism fight throughout Asia while simultaneously building foreign partnership capacity across the region. Today, in late 2022, with the rise of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as a Naval power, the conventional US Army, Marine Corps, and SOF must all show their relevance to the Navy-lead Joint Force as it prepares for a peer-to-peer fight with a PRC that now has more ships than the U.S. Distributed and networked land-based forces, mostly consisting of very small units, should be seen as platforms of integrated deterrence in the same manner that surface ships, submarines, and aircraft are viewed today.

‘Geography is destiny’ has driven military force planning for ages. On 7 December 1941, Japan launched its attack on Pearl Harbor, aiming to dismantle America’s power-projection capability in the Pacific. The attack succeeded in destroying what was then perceived the premier strategic warfighting platform: the battleship. With the benefit of hindsight, we know that the main power projection platform was actually the aircraft carrier. Luckily, all the American carriers were at sea when the attack came. In the ‘war of platforms’ American industry simply overwhelmed the enemy, building over 100 carriers by end of the conflict. In comparison, Japan produced and lost 25 carriers before surrendering. This numerical imbalance, combined with similar ratios of airplanes and submarines (not to mention superior American intelligence and logistics) set the stage for the ultimate expression of superior American power: the two atomic bombs which ended the war on 2 September 1945. Aircraft carriers and submarines have since been the locus of American military strategy in the Pacific.

To Deter China, Taiwan Must Prepare for War

Ethan Kessler

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China’s threat to take Taiwan by force looks more credible by the day as Beijing’s military power grows. The U.S. is taking the lead in response. But that needs to change if Taiwan wants to secure itself from invasion.

China’s Communist Party promised in 1949 to absorb Taiwan, where the Chinese Nationalists had fled in defeat. For most of the seven decades since, China’s lackluster military capabilities meant it couldn’t enforce the claim. That has changed. Following years of increased military spending and modernization, China is gaining the capacity to blockade and even invade Taiwan. From 2012 to 2021, Beijing nearly doubled its military spending to about $210 billion a year, according to a recent Pentagon estimate. This increased spending has bought enhanced air, naval, missile and amphibious-assault capabilities.

In response, Washington wants to make Taiwan more defensible. The National Defense Authorization Act, which President Biden signed last Friday, provides $10 billion in new security assistance to Taiwan over the next five years. And like the Trump administration, the Biden administration has pressed Taipei to steer its arms purchases and force structure toward an asymmetric defense strategy aimed at offsetting Taiwan’s weaknesses with relatively cheap, easily distributed weapons.

If China Cracked U.S. Encryption, Why Would It Tell Us?

Georgianna Shea Annie Fixler 

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When Alan Turing cracked the Enigma code during the Second World War, neither the United Kingdom nor the United States immediately published a paper announcing the achievement. Instead, they kept it to themselves so they could keep reading Nazi messages encrypted using Engima machines. Last month, in contrast, Chinese academics from government-run laboratories and research organizations published a paper claiming to have developed a new mathematical strategy to break RSA encryption, today’s standard.

If the Chinese government can crack RSA encryption, then they can break into every U.S. government and private sector system, seeing and exfiltrating anything and everything, achieving true information dominance over Washington and its allies and partners.

There are reasons to doubt the accuracy of the paper’s claims, however, and even more reasons to question why Chinese researchers would show their hand if they really cracked our codes.

Some day, computer scientists will break RSA encryption. But before that happens, they will need to have the right tools. Based on the current understanding of math, breaking RSA encryption will require quantum computers, which harness the principles of quantum physics to accelerate problem-solving exponentially.

The race to quantum computing is well underway. In November, IBM launched the largest quantum computer yet, the Osprey. This milestone “brings us a step closer” to “the coming era of quantum-centric supercomputing,” IBM’s director of research said. But the Osprey cannot yet solve the complex mathematical problems facing those who want to break RSA encryption. Beijing, however, claims it can break RSA encryption with a hybrid approach combining classical computing and quantum computing using a smaller quantum computer.

China’s Brute Force Economics: Waking Up from the Dream of a Level Playing Field

Liza Tobin

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In 2017, China’s chief justice, Zhou Qiang, told legal officials in Beijing to resist “erroneous” ideas from the West like “constitutional democracy,” “separation of powers,” and “independence of the judiciary.” His statements shocked some Western observers who had watched in cautious optimism as Zhou, a well-educated jurist with a reputation as a reformer, spearheaded efforts to make China’s courts more professional.1 Behind Zhou’s words was a hard truth: Reforms could only go so far before they collided with the reality that, in the People’s Republic of China, the judiciary is subordinate to the Chinese Communist Party.

This dynamic matters beyond China’s borders. Cooperative trading relations require a common set of rules or expectations that ensure that economic competition occurs on a level playing field. Beijing’s rejection of the rule of law as a fundamental operating principle means that the normative commercial structures upon which modern trade depends are at the mercy of a powerful and ideologically motivated political party. The Chinese Communist Party’s ruthless pursuit of techno-economic dominance in a range of strategic sectors has distorted activities that are usually thought of as positive sum — trade and technology cooperation — into zero-sum games.

The time has come for the United States and its allies to abandon the notion that competing on a level playing field with China’s state-led economy is possible and confront the reality of what I am calling the country’s brute force economics. I use this term as an analytic frame to summarize the aggressive, evolving, and often opaque web of policies and tactics that Beijing employs to give its national champions — corporations acting to advance government policy — an advantage and seize a dominant global market share in strategic sectors. The litany of specific practices is long: market access restrictions in strategic sectors, massive subsidies that fuel domestic overcapacity and enable Chinese firms to wipe out foreign competition, requirements for foreign firms to transfer technology in order to access the Chinese market, economic coercion, intellectual property theft, cyber- and human-enabled espionage, and forced labor. China’s brute force economics playbook puts competing firms out of business and destroys entire industries in rival nations. Once international competitors to Chinese national champions are either acquired or eliminated, trade partners have no choice but to rely on Chinese firms for critical technology products or inputs.

How China Is Using Vladimir Putin

Michael Schuman

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Back in the 1960s, China and Russia squandered their chance to defeat the West when they became bitter rivals during the Cold War. Today, their presidents—who are expected to confer again this week—are trying to correct that fateful error. The world’s most powerful autocracies have joined forces for an assault on the liberal order led by the United States and its allies—a threat made all too real when Russia invaded democratic Ukraine in February with Chinese support. Authoritarianism was again on the march, and the world’s major democracies faced a grave challenge to their unity and resolve.

As 2022 has unfolded and the true nature of the Russia-China relationship has become more apparent, the danger it poses seems less acute. What has emerged is nothing like an axis of autocrats, but a lopsided partnership in which the terms are defined by its alpha member, Xi Jinping, primarily to serve China’s interests. This tells us a lot about the foreign-policy principles of China’s leaders and how those ideas may hamper Beijing’s quest to reshape the world order.

Historically, relations between China and Russia have been fraught with distrust and confrontation. The two came frighteningly close to nuclear war in the late 1960s, at the height of their Cold War schism. More recently, though, Beijing and Moscow have found common cause. Economically, they are mutually beneficial trading partners, with China’s industrial machine importing Russian oil, gas, coal, and other raw materials in exchange for high-tech Chinese goods.