Indian Strategic Studies

17 August 2024

Ethiopia, Egypt And South Africa: Pursuing Relationships Within And Beyond BRICS – Analysis

Professor Maurice Okoli

Introduction

Ultimately, BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) has established itself as an informal association pursuing a comprehensive and multi-dimensional cooperation. It has also, in the course of its operations, created the platform for discussing important topics relating to economic growth, developing trade and economic exchanges, ensuring security as well as promoting education and culture. According to several previous summit reports, the economic power is shifting from the West to the Global South. One of the landmarked achievements was the ascension of three African countries: Ethiopia and Egypt (Jan. 2024) and South Africa (2010). Russia is chairing the association this year. The main event of 2024 for BRICS will be the summit, which will be held in Kazan in October.

Under Russia’s chairmanship, integrating more new members into BRICS has been suspended, although the ‘strategic expansion’ was considered as an explicit testament to the association’s remarkable growing attraction and its commitment to reshaping the global economic landscape.

Why Chinese Investment Should Be Encouraged In India, Albeit Security Concerns? – Analysis

Subrata Majumder

At present, Chinese investment is almost barred in India in the wake of security concerns. All Chinese investments are subject to government approvals. They are not permitted through the window of Automatic Approval under the Foreign Investment policy of India.

Nevertheless, recently there was a turnaround in the outlook towards Chinese investment in India. Leaving aside security concern, a new thought was evoked in favour of Chinese investment.

Economic Survey 2023-24 – one of the important official documents for economic policy – advocated Chinese investment in India with the perspective of growth in manufacturing. It emphasized that partnership with China was imperative to increase manufacturing and boost supply chain. It intended to unfold a new chapter in India’s foreign Investment policy, where focus should be made on FDI as an weapon to reduce imports . China is the biggest import source of imports for India.

“Nehru’s Bandung: Non-Alignment and Regional Order in Indian Cold War Strategy” by Andrea Benvenuti

Francis P Sempa

The late British historian Paul Johnson devoted an entire chapter of his 1983 classic Modern Times to what he called the “Bandung Generation”—the leaders of former European colonies in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia who in April 1955 gathered in Bandung, Indonesia to form a non-aligned movement in the midst of the Cold War rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union. Johnson dismissed the group as a collection of moral poseurs “adept at words, but not much else”. Andrea Benvenuti, an associate professor of international relations at the University of South Wales, is not as dismissive about Bandung and its organizers as Johnson was, but he, too, concludes that Bandung failed to bring about its professed goal of “Afro-Asian solidarity”.

Benvenuti’s book, however, is not about Bandung in general, but rather its role in Indian foreign policy as envisioned by its prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru. Nehru was at first quite skeptical about convening such a conference. His vision for Indian foreign policy was to create a “zone of peace” in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East which would be free of Cold War alignments. Nehru opposed US efforts to organize anti-communist alliances in Asia and the Middle East. He viewed the US-led Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) and Central Treaty Organization (CENTO) as dangerous to peace. The backdrop for Bandung included the Korean and Indochina Wars, the Geneva Conference, and the crisis in the Taiwan Strait. Nehru saw the United States as a greater threat to peace than the Soviet Union or China. Benvenuti quotes a Commonwealth Relations Office assessment that Nehru had an “utter distrust” of the United States, and considered it an “ignorant power” that was “drunk and hopelessly unreliable”. SEATO and CENTO were viewed as an attempt to “encircle” India. Even worse from India’s perspective, was warming relations between the US and Pakistan.

Taliban Marks Three Years In Power By Showing Off American Military Equipment At Former US Base

Jake Smith

After taking over Afghanistan three years prior, the Taliban hosted a demonstration on Wednesday at a former U.S. airbase featuring an extensive display of American military equipment.

The Taliban seized control of Afghanistan almost immediately after the Biden administration withdrew U.S. forces from the region in 2021, in what was widely criticized as a chaotic operation that left 13 troops dead. On the third anniversary of the U.S. withdrawal, members of the Taliban celebrated at the former U.S. Bagram air base on Wednesday and declared that they had restored “peace and security” to the country, even as the Afghani people continue to suffer under their rule, according to multiple reports.

A video of the demonstration at the base depicted Taliban fighters driving scores of U.S. combat and armored vehicles along an airstrip while helicopters fly by. Photos of the event showed a motorcycle convoy and fighters carrying weapons such as rifles and launchers.

Over $7 billion worth of U.S. military equipment, including vehicles, weapons, and logistical and tactical assets, were left behind in Afghanistan when the Biden administration withdrew U.S. forces in 2021. The Bagram base, which served as the essential site for the U.S. troops operating in the region during the 20-year Afghanistan war, cost the U.S. tens of billions of dollars in construction and renovations.

Pakistan Uses Russian UAVs To Spy On India; Developer Says Supercam Drones Witness Massive Demand

Ashish Dangwal

This announcement came from the Unmanned Systems Group, the developer of the Supercam drones, during the ongoing Army-2024 International Military-Technical Forum. The event is being held from August 12 to 14, 2024, at the Patriot Convention and Exhibition Center in Moscow.

The Unmanned Systems group said that the Supercam drones were experiencing significant demand not only in Russia but also among former Soviet Union countries like Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan.

In particular, the Supercam S150 has been supplied to the Armed Forces of Belarus, where it plays a vital role in various operations. The drone is utilized in command and staff exercises, border security, and other military activities, showcasing its versatility and effectiveness.

The Supercam S150 is designed as a multipurpose platform equipped to handle a wide range of tasks. Its functionalities include mapping, patrolling, monitoring, search operations, and surveying large areas.

Bangladesh Is In A Politico-Economic Quagmire – OpEd

P. K. Balachandran

Nobel Laureate Dr. Muhammad Yunus, the de facto Prime Minister of Bangladesh, enjoys popular acclaim. But he is also subjected to great expectations from Bangladesh’s 172 million people who had suffered political and economic deprivation for a decade and a half under Sheikh Hasina’s tutelage.

Restoration of law and order will of course be the most urgent task. Rules and regulations governing politics, administration and the running of the economy, will also have to formulated quickly and to the satisfaction of the powerful students’ coordinating committee.

Writing in The Daily Star, the UN Special Rapporteur on freedom of opinion and expression Irene Khan warned that as the Arab Spring had shown, failure to meet the expectations of the protestors could pull back the Bangladeshi struggle for democracy by decades.

“The selection, prioritisation and delivery of those reforms will determine whether this moment in our country’s history is a new dawn or a false one,” Khan, who is a Bangladeshi, said.

Does China’s Defiance Show The Limits Of US Deterrence In The South China Sea? – Analysis

Collins Chong Yew Keat

This year’s annual Balikatan joint military exercises between the Philippines and the United States from April 22 to May 10 was groundbreaking. So was China’s response to it. The exercise areas and the arms deployed to the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait hotspots were more complex, prompting a surge in Chinese vessel presence in Manila’s western exclusive economic zone and another violent sea incident over a contested reef – exposing Beijing’s defiance amid the Philippine-U.S. alliance’s show of force. The tit-for-tat shows of force escalated tensions in choppy waters and raised questions about the drill’s deterrent value. The symbolism and messages show how parties are digging in, accepting more risk, and shrinking space for diplomacy.

Expanded and evolved allied show of force

The 39th Balikatan exercise was billed as the “most effective, most ambitious, and most complicated.” It builds on advances made in past iterations editions of the annual drill, which has become a laboratory for testing new defense concepts and weapons in the field. In 2022, U.S.-made Patriot missiles were inserted by land and sea in Cagayan, one of the Philippines’ northernmost provinces opposite Taiwan.

Last year, live-fire demonstrations of Patriot and Avenger missiles occurred in Zambales, a coastal province facing the West Philippine Sea. For the first time, a sinking exercise (SINKEX) was also conducted with a decommissioned corvette as a mock target hit by volleys from land, air, and sea platforms. The event was also held off Zambales, 235 kilometers from Scarborough Shoal, a contested feature between Manila and Beijing.

The geopolitics of water: how the Brahmaputra River could shape India–China security competition

Neely Haby

Although hydroelectricity can be transported thousands of miles away from its origin, the impact it has on servicing the immediate region in which a hydropower plant is built begins with construction.9 The installation of hydroelectric systems builds communities by bringing electricity, highways, energy and commerce.10 China repeatedly uses village building to consolidate the central government’s control over the country’s periphery, moving interior Chinese populations to the country’s frontiers.11 Hydroelectric infrastructure is an indicator of Chinese efforts to build and support larger Chinese communities in territory disputed with India.

The strategic value for Beijing in establishing infrastructure and communities in its borderlands extends beyond the consolidation of domestic political control.12 It could also be used to substantiate China’s claims in disputed territory. The annual report released by the Pentagon on China’s military power in 2021 stated that ‘Sometime in 2020, the PRC built a large 100-home civilian village inside disputed territory between the PRC’s Tibet Autonomous Region and India’s Arunachal Pradesh state in the eastern sector of the Line of Actual Control.’13 Populating disputed territory with civilians and infrastructure gives Beijing a better negotiating position in border talks to refuse the removal of ‘local’ populations.14 China is working to silently, and irreversibly, legitimise its control of its borderlands, including territory disputed with India.

An Intricate Fabric Of Bad Actors Working Hand-In-Hand: So Is War Inevitable? – OpEd

Alastair Crooke

Now 61, Kirn has a newsletter on Substack and co-hosts a lively podcast devoted in large part to critiquing ‘establishment liberalism’. His contrarian drift has made him more vocal about his distrust of élite institutions – as he wrote in 2022: “For years now, the answer, in every situation—‘Russiagate,’ COVID, Ukraine—has been more censorship, more silencing, more division, more scapegoating. It’s almost as if these are goals in themselves – and the cascade of emergencies mere excuses for them. Hate is always the way,”

Kirn’s politics, a friend of his suggested, was “old-school liberal,” underscoring that it was the other ‘so-called liberals’ who had changed: “I’ve been told repeatedly in the last year that free speech is a right-wing issue; I wouldn’t call [Kirn] Conservative. I would just say he’s a free-thinker, nonconformist, iconoclastic”, the friend said.

To understand Kirn’s contrarian turn – and to make sense of today’s form of American politics – it is necessary to understand one key term. It is not found in standard textbooks, but is central to the new playbook of power: the “whole of society”.

Israel is the future of the Middle East

Spengler

United Nations’ demographers project that, by the end of this century, Turkey’s labor force will fall by half and Iran’s will fall by two-fifths while Israel’s will double.

Turkish women in 2023 were estimated to have an average of just 1.5 children over their lifetime, half of Israel’s total fertility rate of 3 children per woman. The World Bank puts Iran’s 2022 fertility rate at 1.7.

Improbable as it may seem, the core scenario according to present trends will make Israel the economic center of the Middle East sometime toward the end of the century.

The race is not to the swift nor the battle to the strong, Damon Runyon offered, but that’s how the smart money bets. Any number of things could upend a linear projection of present trends. The exercise nonetheless leads to striking conclusions.

Israel’s per capita GDP is now about US$55,000, or five times Turkey’s $11,000. One might quibble about the yardstick, but there is no doubt that Israelis produce more than Turks do. If these trends continue, Israel’s GDP will exceed Turkey’s by sometime in the middle of the present century.

Ukraine’s audacious move

Nigel Gould-Davies

Russian territory is under occupation for the first time since 1944. Since launching a major incursion into Kursk on 6 August, Ukraine has taken about the same amount of Russian territory (approximately 1,000 square kilometres) as Russian forces have, at huge cost, taken from Ukraine since October 2023.

This is a major development. How it evolves will depend on Ukraine’s objectives for the operation and Russia’s decisions on how it musters forces to resist it. But it is already significant for what it tells us about the war and about Russia, and for its impact on the wider diplomacy of the conflict.

Significance for the war

Ukraine’s incursion demonstrates the continuing unpredictability of the war. A dominant narrative – in this case, that Ukraine was struggling to prevent a steady Russian advance in the Donbas and has little prospect of making further gains of its own – has once again been broken. While Ukrainian positions in the Donbas remain under threat, its forces have seized the initiative with an audacious and well-executed combined-arms operation into Russia. Through a combination of concealment, deception and Russian complacency, Ukraine achieved complete strategic and operational surprise – confounding the view that uninhabited aerial vehicles (UAVs) have made the battlefield too transparent to achieve this.

Intelligence, US-Provided Weapons Key To Ukraine’s Kursk Offensive

Kateryna Besedina

Superb Ukrainian intelligence and U.S.-provided weaponry are being credited for enabling the rapid advance of Ukrainian forces into Russian territory over the past week. Some analysts believe they could move even faster if Washington allowed them to use the most sophisticated weapons at their disposal.

The Ukrainian troops continued their advance through the Kursk region on Wednesday, Day 9 of the first such incursion onto Russian soil since World War II. Ukrainian forces now control up to 1,000 square kilometers of land and more than 70 settlements inside Russia.

“The grouping of defense forces continues to conduct an offensive operation on the territory of the Kursk region,” Ukraine’s top military commander, General Oleksandr Syrskyi, told President Volodymyr Zelenskyy during a video conference on Wednesday. “Since the beginning of this day, Ukrainian troops have advanced from one to two kilometers.”

Vladislav Seleznyov, a former spokesman for the Ukrainian armed forces’ general staff, told VOA’s Russian Service that Ukrainian intelligence and the U.S.-provided High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, known as HIMARS, had been critical to the stunning advance.

We Need a Real Marine Corps To Fight a Two Front War

Gary Anderson

The term "axis of evil" (AOE) originally coined by President George W Bush in response to the attacks on September 11th, 2001, included adversarial foreign governments that sponsored terrorism and sought weapons of mass destruction, namely Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. Certainly not a Warsaw Pact-like organization. However, today's axis of evil may come closer to threatening the U.S. with a multi-front war, a war we are not ready for.

The new AOE, if it exists, consists of China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia. US intelligence suggests there are plans afoot to coordinate any Chinese attack against Taiwan, East China Sea or South China Sea with military action elsewhere. The most likely candidate is Iran. Russia is otherwise engaged, and North Koreas is not ready to engage in a major regional conflict (MRC),

Until 2019, the United States was reasonably well positioned to wage a two-front war, The theory was win-hold-win, Win in the major theater (in this case China). Hold in the secondary theater (Iran here); then win in MRC 2.

The key to the two MRC strategy was the United States Marine Corps. The Marine Corps had several capabilities vital to the second MRC.

Russia Building Trenches In Kursk To Defend Against Ukrainian Advances

Howard Altman

In a sign that it is digging in to blunt Ukraine’s now nine-day-old invasion of Kursk Oblast, Russia is building trenches near the town of Lgov, about 30 miles north of the border, according to Maxar satellite imagery provided to The War Zone on Wednesday. The construction comes as Ukrainian forces are pushing their way northward from the area of territory they currently control.

Lgov is about 13 miles north of the most recently geolocated position of Ukrainian troop concentrations, according to imagery analyzed on Tuesday by the Institute for the Study of War. It is also about 15 miles to the west of the Kursk Nuclear Power Plant in Kurchetov. The trenches are being built parallel to the E38 highway, according to Maxar. That is a key east-west artery cutting across the middle of Kursk and connects Lgov to Kurchetov.

Maxar captured the images on Aug. 12. There aren’t any apparent additional fortifications associated with the trenches, which were constructed in the last week. However, it appears to be less extensive than the massive networks Russia was able to build up in the year leading to last year’s failed Ukrainian counteroffensive which played a big role in halting it. Given that Ukrainian forces are still a good distance away, the area is most likely not yet mined, but that can’t be assessed from the satellite images. However, should Ukraine reach this far, it will have control of a great deal more territory than it does now.

Russia is paying up to $4,000 a month for people to dig trenches to hold back Ukraine's offensive

Tom Porter

Job websites in Russia are advertising trench-digger roles in Kursk province as Russia hastily seeks to boost its defenses.

According to job adverts, first reported by the BCC, the postings call for "general workers" who can dig fortifications in the border region of Kursk.

The roles pay between 150,000-371,000 rubles (around $1,600-$4,000) a month.

It comes after Ukraine launched an audacious cross-border attack on Kursk last week, taking the Russian military by surprise. Ukraine says it has now advanced 390 square miles into Russian territory.

According to experts, Russia's response to the attack has been hampered by confused command structures and inexperienced troops.

But it's deploying extra soldiers to the region and building fortifications to stop Ukraine from advancing any further.

Trump or Not, NATO Must Change

James H. Armstead

In 1952 General Hastings Lionel Ismay, the first NATO Secretary General, was asked why the North Atlantic alliance was necessary and responded with an acerbic quip oft repeated in the intervening years. “To keep the Soviets out, the Germans down and the Americans in,” Churchill’s former military secretary wryly explained.

That original formula, with a few modifications and a lot of diplomacy, has essentially remained unchanged and been successful throughout the remainder of the 20th Century and into our current era.

The Atlantic alliance has forestalled a land war in Continental Europe between major powers for eight decades and has also provided the strategic space for the development of the European Community into the European Union (EU), the world’s most successful international federated economic union.

The Kursk Offensive and the Risk of a Wider War

James W. Carden

As the Kursk offensive heads into its second week, Ukrainian forces now claim to control nearly 30 Russian villages comprising 1,000 square miles of Russian territory. In a meeting with security advisers at his residence in Novo-Ogaryovo on Monday, Russian President Vladimir Putin directed his ire at Ukraine’s sponsors, claiming, “The West is fighting us with the hands of the Ukrainians.” The Kursk offensive marks a significant escalation in the two-and-a-half-year-long conflict.

So, what are some of the broader implications of the Kursk offensive?

A few observations:

The Kursk offensive highlights, among other things, the inherent risk of what I would call “non-allied allyship.” Washington has no treaty of alliance with Ukraine, yet the Biden administration persists in acting as though Ukraine is not just a treaty ally—it acts as though Ukraine’s survival in the form it took for three short decades (1992–2022) is essential to the national security of the United States. Washington’s granting of non-allied allyship to Ukraine has led Kiev to act in ways that are detrimental to its own survival—including through Kiev’s refusal to implement agreed-upon provisions of the Minsk Accords, which, if implemented, would probably have demonstrated to the Russians that waging a war of choice was unnecessary.
The Kursk offensive also shows, once again, that the idea that “if the Russians are not stopped in Ukraine they will go on to conquer Eastern Europe” is patently absurd. Russia could not conquer Kiev in 2022 and has been fighting a costly war of attrition even since.

Ukraine Advances: How the West Can Help

Kurt Volker

Vladimir Putin has become the first Russian leader since World War II to have provoked an invasion of his own country and to have lost sovereign territory. Having previously compared himself to Peter and Catherine the Great, Putin may end up looking more like the final czar, Nicholas II.

Ukraine’s Kursk offensive has already achieved several goals. It has:

Demonstrated that Russian forces are stretched to the maximum of their abilities, incapable of both attacking Ukraine and protecting Russia simultaneously, and incapable of escalating their war effort.
Proved that Western fears of Russian escalation are unfounded: The Kremlin has no ability to escalate.
Forced Russia to pull some forces out of Ukraine in order to defend inside Russia.
Destroyed Putin’s narrative that Russia’s war of aggression is merely a “special military operation” with no real costs to Russia. (Over 200,000 Russian civilians have had to be evacuated.)
Demonstrated that billions of dollars in Western military and financial assistance are being put to good use.
Given a much-needed morale boost to the Ukrainian people.
And undermined the assumption that future peace negotiations are only about how much territory Ukraine cedes to Russia. (Now it is about mutual force withdrawals.)

Despite these tactical gains, however, we are still far from an end to the fighting, let alone a just and lasting peace. Russia bombs Ukrainian cities and civilian infrastructure on a daily basis, attacks along the front line in eastern Ukraine, occupies significant Ukrainian territory (around 20%) and insists on eradicating Ukraine as a people and as an independent state.

As Kyiv makes gains in Kursk, Russia strikes back in Donetsk

Veronika Melkozerova

Russia is evacuating another district in its Kursk region, the regional governor announced overnight, as Ukraine's forces continue to make gains in the area.

Ukrainian forces have secured their hold on Sudzha, the administrative center of the Sudzhansky district in Kursk, and advanced several kilometers further into Russian territory. Overnight, acting regional Governor Alexei Smirnov said in a Telegram statement that the Glushkovsky district in Kursk, which has a population of 20,000, was being evacuated.

Kyiv forces took six more settlements in Russia over the past day. Ukraine currently controls more than 80 settlements in Kursk region, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in a statement. Kyiv currently controls 1,152 square kilometers of Russian territory, Ukrainian Army Commander in Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi added at a defense staff meeting with government officials.

Ukraine captured 102 Russian soldiers in the Kursk region on Wednesday — a record number for a single day, a high-ranking official from the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) who was granted anonymity to share the update, told POLITICO.

Deception and a Gamble: How Ukrainian Troops Invaded Russia

Kim Barker, Anton Troianovski, Andrew E. Kramer, Constant Méheut, Alina Lobzina, Eric Schmitt and Sanjana Varghese

The scenes were decidedly Russian. A Gazprom facility. Flags with the country’s signature three horizontal stripes of white, blue and red. A Pyatyorochka supermarket.

The soldiers posting the videos, verified by The New York Times, were Ukrainian, almost giddily showing off just how easily they had pushed over the border and through Russian lines of defense in the past week.

In the Russian town of Sverdlikovo, a Ukrainian soldier climbed onto another’s shoulders, broke off the wooden post anchored to a town council building and threw the Russian flag to the ground. In Daryino, a town five miles to the west, other soldiers also grabbed a Russian flag. “Just throw it away,” a Ukrainian soldier said, grinning, as another flexed his muscles.

On Aug. 6, Ukraine launched an audacious military offensive, planned and executed in secrecy, with the aim of upending the dynamics of a war it has appeared to be losing, town by town, as Russian troops have ground forward in the east. The operation surprised even Kyiv’s closest allies, including the United States, and has pushed the limits of how Western military equipment would be permitted to be used inside Russian territory.

The ‘Axis of Evil’ Is Overhyped

Daniel R. DePetris

Speaking at the Aspen Security Forum in July, longtime U.S. intelligence official John McLaughlin described the threat posed by China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia as “the distinguishing characteristic of our world right now.” McLaughlin, the former acting director of the CIA, warned that the United States’ adversaries had “formed a group” and were increasingly cooperating against Washington and its allies.

What next after Ukraine’s shock invasion of Russia?

UKRAINE’S LIGHTNING incursion into the Russian province of Kursk has exceeded the expectations of even those who planned it. On August 12th General Oleksandr Syrsky, Ukraine’s commander-in-chief, claimed that his forces controlled roughly 1,000 square kilometres of Russian territory. “Control” may be an overstatement. But in seven days the Ukrainians have seized almost as much territory as Russia has managed, at huge cost, to take from them since the start of the year (1,175 square kilometres). In the next few days the incursion will probably culminate, as troops tire and supply lines become stretched. The question is whether Ukraine can translate short-term gains into lasting strategic advantage.

Ukraine gambled on an incursion deep into Russian territory. The bold move changed the battlefield

Ukraine's stunning incursion into Russia's Kursk border region was a bold gamble for the country's military commanders, who committed their limited resources to a risky assault on a nuclear-armed enemy with no assurance of success.

After the first signs of progress, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy broke his silence and spelled out Kyiv's daily advances to his war-weary public. By Wednesday, Ukrainian officials said they controlled 1,000 square kilometers (386 square miles) of enemy territory, including at least 74 settlements and hundreds of Russian prisoners of war.

But a week after it began, the overall aim of the daring operation is still unclear: Will Ukraine dig in and keep the conquered territory, advance further into Russian territory or pull back?

What is clear is that the incursion has changed the battlefield. The shock of Ukraine's thunder run revealed chinks in the armor of its powerful adversary. The attack also risked aggravating Ukraine's own weaknesses by extending the front line and committing new troops at a time when military leaders are short on manpower.

National Defense University PressJoint Force Quarterly (JFQ), no. 113, April 2024

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Hacking minds and machines

Nad’a Kovalčíková

In today’s security landscape, foreign interference (1) has become a pervasive threat. Hostile actors are infiltrating everything from social media to government websites, targeting trade secrets, and posing an increasing risk to critical infrastructure systems. This requires heightened vigilance and concerted efforts to detect, expose and counter these malign activities. The impact of intentional and harmful interference operations is amplified when wielded simultaneously across diverse societal sectors. Therefore, it is crucial to devise cross-sectoral frameworks, tools and responses and examine specific incidents of foreign interference, in order to address critical threat vectors.

In April this year, with the US presidential elections looming on the horizon and Russia’s war against Ukraine having entered its third year, yet another episode of foreign interference was detected. The viral clip, containing false claims about a Kyiv troll farm attempting to interfere in the US elections (2), aimed to discredit the Ukrainian authorities. This incident was part of a larger campaign conducted by a group of disinformation experts connected to Russia’s Internet Research Agency. These hostile actors are deploying increasingly sophisticated technology to disrupt Western democracies and their allies, and fabricating and spreading manipulated audio-video content online.

16 August 2024

How Negotiators Failed for Two Decades to Bring Peace to Afghanistan

Andrew North

Of the many missteps the United States made in its two-decade war in Afghanistan, one of the early ones involved a missed opportunity with the Taliban. In December 2001, just weeks after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, the Taliban made an offer to the Bush administration: Its fighters would be willing to lay down their arms, provided they could live “in dignity” in their homes without being pursued and detained.

China Reaches Demographic Point of No Return

Wang Feng

In 2022, China experienced its first net population loss in more than six decades. Unlike the one it suffered during the Great Leap Forward famine when a starvation-induced population loss was quickly resolved by an ensuing baby boom, the COVID-driven population deficit has not seen such a rebound. To the contrary, China has embarked on a road of demographic no-return.

China’s current demographic downturn is deep and long-lasting. It is driven by forces that are fundamentally different from those during the Great Leap Forward famine, which spanned from 1959-1961. Instead of the sharp mortality spike that took as many as 30 million lives, population health in China has been increasing. Life expectancy at birth was 68 in 1990, and increased 10 years in three decades to reach 78 by 2020. At the same time, fertility has remained below what demographers call the “replacement level” of around two children per woman for more than three decades, even after China scrapped its long-held one-child policy. China has joined its East Asian neighbors as a country with ultra-low fertility—with no sign of a rebound.

How China and North Korea could reunite as comrades in war

Gordon G. Chang

The next war in East Asia will consume the region. It will not be confined just to Taiwan, argue Markus Garlauskas and Matthew Kroenig in a new article in Foreign Policy.

Increased Chinese and North Korean military activity this month suggests that both regimes are contemplating going into battle. For instance, two days before Foreign Policy posted the piece, Kim Jong Un delivered a speech announcing the deployment of “250 new-type tactical ballistic missile launchers” to positions near the Demilitarized Zone.

Kim praised North Korea’s “munition industry workers” for developing the launchers “by their own efforts and technology.” However, Richard Fisher, a China military analyst with the International Assessment and Strategy Center, told me it is far more likely that the launchers are of Chinese origin and were built with Chinese parts and advice.

Chinese funded port reawakens Thailand's colonial ghosts

Hadley Spadaccini & Marc Makornwattana

In 1907, the then Siamese government signed over the provinces of Battambang, Siem-reap, and Sisophon to French Cambodia. The treaty outlined the new land and sea borders between French Cambodia and Siam — now Cambodia and Thailand, respectively — whose interpretation became a point of contention between the two countries in 1972. Since then, relations between the Thai and Cambodian governments over the disputed maritime territories have been amicable, but Thai nationalist group pressure has stymied recent attempts to resolve the issue.

With the establishment of the Chinese-funded Ream port in Cambodia, there is increasing concern that the port could be converted to military use to strengthen Chinese naval power projection or be a competitor to Thailand’s Eastern Economic Corridor. The port and secrecy around its actual use are reigniting concerns first established in the 1907 treaty, and inflaming Thai worries about what the port means for its maritime territories, the stability of the Gulf of Thailand, and relations with China and the United States.

Sovereignty and anti-colonialism in Thailand

Thailand was the only Southeast Asian country to retain its independence in the face of Franco-English great power competition in the 19th and 20th centuries. Until the late 1800s, Siam had expanded its control over Laos, Cambodia, and the Malayan states as tributaries, with parts of those regions being under varying legal and administrative control of Siam.

China Is in Denial About the War in Ukraine

Jude Blanchette

In the weeks following Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the Chinese government struck a tone of cautious support for Moscow. Spokespeople for the Chinese government repeatedly stressed that Russia had the right to conduct its affairs as it saw fit, alleged that the word “invasion” was a Western interpretation of events, and suggested that the United States had provoked Russian President Vladimir Putin by backing a NATO expansion. China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, expressed sympathy for Russia’s “legitimate concerns.”

Yet outside of the Chinese Communist Party leadership, the reaction was more concerned. Although the vast majority of universities and think tanks in China are state funded, the analysts and academics who work there still retain a degree of independence, and their views exert a measure of influence on the government. After the outbreak of war in Ukraine, these analysts openly fretted about how the conflict could damage China’s relationship with Europe and the United States, further fracture the global economy, and diminish the wealth and power of Russia, China’s most important partner. “The negative impact of the war on China [will be] huge,” Yan Xuetong, one of China’s foremost international relations scholars, argued in May 2022, warning that a protracted conflict would wreak havoc on the global economy and trigger “heightened tensions” between China and neighbors such as Japan. The West’s “unprecedentedly united” effort to sanction the Russian economy, as the international relations scholar Li Wei put it, surprised Chinese experts. Some, such as Wang Yongli, a former Bank of China vice president, worried that sanctions would threaten the globalization on which the Chinese economy depends.

America’s Middle East Defense Rests on Aircraft Carriers

Jack Detsch

With the United States and Israel expecting a military response any minute now from Iran or its proxies for the recent deaths of Hamas’s political leader and Hezbollah’s second-in-command, the most visible presence of the U.S. military in the region is its hulking aircraft carriers.

Why the U.S. Military Needs to Imitate Ukraine’s Drone Force

Lorenz Meier and Niall Ferguson

Imagine it is 2028 and there is a coordinated parallel attack executed by Russia on one of the Baltic states and by China on Taiwan. Under such a scenario, Russia would attempt to seize NATO territory and China would blockade Taiwan as a fait accompli to undermine alliance cohesion.

As things stand, NATO’s conventional forces would struggle to withstand such a Russian assault. And it would take weeks, if not months, to deploy American troops to the Indo-Pacific region.

The Cold War solution to this kind of problem involved the threat of using tactical nuclear weapons. Small tactical nuclear weapons made it highly risky to mass mechanized formations for a large-scale assault, as they would become a perfect target for such nukes. They were crucial to the official NATO plan to defend against a Soviet onslaught through the so-called Fulda Gap in western Germany.

Such an onslaught from the East is once again possible. Russia is now building up two new armies larger than the armies of half of NATO combined. Soon, armchair strategists will have to learn about the Suwalki Gap—the area around the Lithuanian-Polish border, which would be the shortest route from Belarus to the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad.

Resourcing the Ramp-Up: NATO and the Challenge of a Coherent Industrial Response to Russia's War in Ukraine

Stuart Dee, James Black, Lucia Retter

In July, NATO leaders gathered in Washington to unveil a raft of new initiatives at the alliance's 75th Anniversary Summit. These included NATO taking over the coordination of aid to Ukraine—now described as on an “irreversible” path to membership—and an Industrial Capacity Expansion Pledge to boost production of arms and equipment, both to support Kyiv and to replenish depleted Western stockpiles after decades of low investment.

But near the top of the new NATO Secretary-General's in-tray will be an urgent question: why are efforts to mobilise the alliance's industrial base and ramp up production still yielding underwhelming results, over two years since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine? As allied leaders head home from the latest summit, a new RAND report shows that decades of fragmented and lacklustre investment in the industrial base and its underlying workforce skills, production lines, and supply chains will not yield to quick fixes.

Playing Catch-Up

Such has been the scale of bilateral and multilateral support to Ukraine that it has become increasingly difficult to track. The Kiel Institute currently assesses U.S. bilateral aid to be in the region of €75 billion, of which two thirds is military aid and the rest financial or humanitarian. Donations from EU institutions exceed €33 billion.

Without a Broader Strategic Goal, Israel's Military Successes Cannot Secure It a Victory | Opinion

M. A. Al-Asqalani

Israel recently dealt Iran two significant blows with two assassinations at the highest levels of Iranian proxies. First, the IDF took out Fuad Shukr, a senior commander of Hezbollah. The next day, Ismail Haniyeh, chairman of the political bureau of Hamas, was assassinated in his guest house in Tehran. The assassinations join other tactical victories Israel has scored in its war against Hamas since the October 7 massacre. And yet, it's at this point undeniable these have come at the expense of its larger strategic goals.

Indeed, beyond simply winning its war with Hamas, what are the larger strategic objectives of the State of Israel? Restoring deterrence? Destroying Iranian proxies? Regime change in Tehran? The reason we can't say for certain is that the Israeli government has become fixated on the tactical aspect of this conflict, without developing a clear theory of strategic victory.

This also seems to be the conclusion drawn in a coordinated set of statements tweeted out Friday morning by the heads of Western states calling for deescalation, a hostage deal, and a pathway to a lasting peace. These are not things beyond Israel's capacity. I know this because in the not-so-distant past, Israel faced the same challenge, and made a very different choice, to prioritize strategic victory.

The Guns of August: Ukraine Blasts a Path Into Russia

Doug Livermore

In early August, Ukraine did something predicted by no one — it ordered significant numbers of troops into Russia. That was enough to have Vladimir Putin and his aides meeting in a crisis session and his generals scrambling to find units to fight on the new front.

What does it signal? Is it a brilliant counterstroke, offering relief to Ukrainian forces forced into a series of retreats in Donbas, or a risky gamble using well-equipped units for little more than public relations bragging rights?

Here’s what can be said with certainty: Ukrainian offensive operations in Kursk Oblast demonstrate a capacity to conduct large-scale, combined arms operations on Russian territory. With great speed, surprise, and violence of action, Ukraine’s ongoing assault has now reportedly created a pocket measuring some 40 miles wide by up to 20 miles deep. Around 100,000 Russian civilians have been evacuated.

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