Connexion
From Eastern Europe to the Middle East, President Biden can’t kick his escalation addiction.
The Biden administration’s proclamations that the “adults are back in charge” in Washington ring hollow as the United States perpetuates devastating conflicts abroad rather than resolving them. Not only does America’s diplomatic credibility suffer, but so do those caught in the midst of these seemingly never-ending wars.
The latest example came just this month when President Biden unilaterally led the United States in conducting airstrikes on Yemen as Houthis attacked Red Sea ships in retaliation for the situation in Gaza. He justified these bombardments by stating the actions of the Houthis jeopardized trade and threatened freedom of navigation.
Yet, airstrikes are only further destabilizing the region. Iran subsequently lashed out by firing ballistic missiles through its proxies at U.S. facilities in northern Iraq. Similarly, nuclear-armed Pakistan, a major recipient of U.S. military aid, launched airstrikes against alleged militant hideouts inside Iran, which in turn provoked a drone attack on an American base that killed three U.S. servicemembers. These developments prove that conflicts in the Middle East are expanding, not diminishing, in a cycle of retaliatory action in the region after U.S. intervention.
Washington defaults to a militaristic response when faced with a world conflict: send weapons, fire missiles, or make grave threats. These “solutions” often fail to resolve anything and always risk inflaming conflicts further. As such, the United States must course correct, tapping into its underutilized but robust diplomatic capital.
Americans aren’t blind to the fundamental problems with Washington’s status quo foreign policy. In polling over the last few years, Concerned Veterans for America and YouGov found that 42 percent of Americans would like to see less military involvement abroad, 52 percent would oppose the president sending more troops to the Middle East, and only 15 percent of the American public support sending more military and financial aid to Ukraine.
Nevertheless, despite the inclinations of everyday Americans toward restraint, Washington continues to lead foreign policy efforts using the military.
In the case of the Middle East, such efforts are futile. As Trita Parsi of the Quincy Institute points out, Washington will not be able to achieve its objective of re-opening the crucial Red Sea lanes for international shipping since escalating tensions with the Houthis has actually bolstered the militant group’s ability to disrupt international shipping. In spite of the Houthis stating that attacks on Red Sea ships will end when a ceasefire is agreed upon in Gaza, the United States upped the ante by contributing to violence in the region.
Rather than establishing deterrence by bombing Yemen, the U.S. ensured that the Houthis would enjoy a newfound status as champions of the Palestinian cause. This follows a trend as the Houthis were also emboldened after Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries intervened in Yemen’s civil war in 2015 when the rebels seized the capital, San’a.
Washington should abandon such tactics and instead work diplomatically with Israel to forge terms for a long-term ceasefire in Gaza. Following the horrendous attack it suffered on October 7, 2023, Israel has the right to defend itself. Its target, however, is entrenched and difficult to defeat absolutely. Meanwhile, more than 25,000 Palestinians have been killed, more than 10,000 of them children and 1.9 million people have been displaced from their homes. The United States and Israel must accept that stabilization in the region will only come through diplomatic means.
Washington elites have only recently come to terms with the fact that only diplomacy will end the Russo–Ukrainian war. This is following the failure of Kiev’s summer counteroffensive, which produced few territorial gains and many Ukrainian casualties.
Unfortunately, diplomatic incentives for Moscow to come to a peace agreement have diminished following Ukraine’s failure to gain the upper hand, and now Moscow believes it has both the time and momentum to win. The prospects for peace were much better early in the war. Zelensky himself confirmed that Ukraine was prepared to agree to exchange a guarantee of “neutrality” for “security guarantees for Ukraine.” But rather than enabling Kiev to negotiate from a position of strength, North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) members, including the United States, encouraged Ukraine to fight for “as long as it takes.”
Washington could actually help Ukraine by advising Kiev that prolonging the war won’t bode well for Ukraine’s long-term prosperity. Russian President Vladimir Putin and Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergey Lavrov have expressed that they are open to peace talks on the condition that Ukraine becomes a neutral state with no aspirations of joining NATO. On the other hand, Ukraine is pushing for a 10-point peace place but insists it won’t discuss it with Russia. The United States, with its significant role in Ukraine’s defensive efforts, has the purchase and leverage to push Ukraine to compromise with Russia.
Following World War II, America’s most significant foreign policy successes were not wars waged, but diplomatic peace settlements skillfully brokered.
President Richard Nixon’s 1972 decision to end U.S. ostracism of China led to a fundamental breakthrough in U.S.-China relations. Nixon’s decision ended 25 years of China’s isolation from the West and laid the framework for President Carter to normalize diplomatic relations with China in January 1979. Nixon’s leadership enabled the United States to normalize relations with China and fostered China’s alignment with the United States, thus applying the pressure necessary to end the Cold War with the Soviet Union.
A more recent example of successful American diplomacy is the Iran nuclear deal or the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). After 20 months of negotiations, this landmark agreement resulted in Tehran agreeing to restrict its nuclear program and allowing for a regime of ongoing inspections. Following the Trump administration’s decision to withdraw from the agreement, however, the Iran nuclear crisis has worsened, with Iran now possessing enough fissile material for a nuclear weapon. Now, potential conflict between the U.S. and Iran is increasingly likely.
President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken have done little to exercise effective diplomacy. Biden’s instinct to end the war in Afghanistan has not translated into any new approach of restraint and diplomacy in conflicts abroad. In fact, Biden has done the opposite by encouraging Israel and Ukraine to chase maximalist objectives that have resulted in widespread death and suffering and put American interests in those regions at risk.
Blinken, who is supposed to be a seasoned diplomat with both Harvard and Columbia credentials, has fared no better. He mishandled critical 2021 talks with the Chinese in Anchorage, Alaska. Rather than quelling tensions between the two countries, the meeting fueled anti-American sentiments in China and put the two countries on a glide path for future bilateral tensions.
Additionally, Blinken’s failed approach to the situation in Gaza has left the conflict in a dire state with little to show for Washington’s enormous diplomatic leverage.
As conflicts rage in the Middle East and Europe, the world looks to the U.S. for support and leadership. Unfortunately, because Washington has depended on American militarism as the primary avenue of engagement, it has only exacerbated tensions. Despite promises to the contrary, the Biden administration reminds us that diplomacy is a lost art in Washington. Right now, that’s a dangerous place to be.
The post The ‘Adults’ Are Not Back in Charge of U.S. Foreign Policy appeared first on The American Conservative.
State of the Union: America’s migrant problem is growing worse by the day.
On the afternoon of Tuesday, January 9, the parents of James Madison High School in Brooklyn were notified that their children would be pivoting to remote learning the next day. Why? An oncoming storm was threatening a shelter housing thousands of illegal migrants. Nearly 2,000 of these undocumented people would be spending the night at James Madison High School.
In August, the Biden administration gave New York permission to house over 2,500 migrants and asylum seekers at Floyd Bennett Field, a historic airplane runway. The “shelter” in question, however, is just a cluster of large tents, which are not even properly secured—putting stakes into the ground is forbidden, but cramming thousands of illegal aliens on the airway is completely fine, according to the nonexistent logic of our federal overlords.
Students hate online learning, and it hurts their academic performance. Yet many outlets are not choosing the correct group to portray as victims in this situation. The New York Times highlighted the hardships of the migrants in their coverage of the story, throwing the worries and concerns of New Yorkers—actual American citizens—to the side. One of the migrants they interviewed said, “Our kids are asking us why they brought us here, and we tell them because they have to repair the tents…. The life of a migrant is hard.”
Nevertheless, the community surrounding James Madison High School (which is in a notably red district of blue Brooklyn) would not be silenced. Parents rallied outside the school on Wednesday, calling out the city and the school for putting the migrants, who had been moved back to Floyd Bennett Field at that point, before their children. One parent said, “Our kids are supposed to be here, feeling safe, and be able to learn.”
Councilwoman Inna Vernikov, a Republican, deemed the operation “unacceptable.”
“Our public schools are meant to be places of learning and growth for our children, and were never intended to be shelters or facilities for emergency housing,” she said.
Mayor Adams’s office has said that over 160,000 migrants have arrived in New York City since the middle of 2022. Back in September, the Mayor himself declared, “Let me tell you something, New Yorkers: never in my life have I had a problem that I did not see an ending to—I don’t see an ending to this…. This issue will destroy New York City.” And indeed, it might. 2023 was a record year for illegal immigration into the United States. But can this story reinvigorate interest in solving this nationwide problem?
Hopefully. Already, high-profile figures like Sen. J.D. Vance and Elon Musk have discussed the James Madison story on social media. Perhaps the reason for this is because, contrary to what the New York Times may say, the needs of young students were sacrificed in favor of thousands of criminals.
This event serves as a microcosm of the migrant crisis in America; will the fact that thousands of immigrants were simultaneously and blatantly favored over thousands of American children be enough to sway the narrative? Or will politicians who are too weak, inept, or stubborn to intervene continue to let the country go down this path?
The post Inside the Illegal Immigrant Situation at James Madison High School appeared first on The American Conservative.
The United States must set a clear timeline for Europe to assume the burdens of its own defense.
As of late, I have gained some notoriety in my admittedly niche and nerdy foreign policy circles. It all started with a Rolling Stone essay that argued that one of my obscure research briefs about reforming NATO has made it to the future Republican administration’s inner circle of debate.
“Trump’s idea reflects some of the arguments laid out in a policy brief, published in February by researcher and conservative writer Dr. Sumantra Maitra, titled ‘Pivoting the US Away from Europe to a Dormant NATO’,” the Rolling Stone essay said, adding, “Sources familiar with the matter say that this paper indeed circulated within Trump’s immediate circle earlier this year. ‘There were some ideas in it that the [former] president liked,’ says a former Trump administration official who remains in close contact with the 2024 campaign.”
The New York Times reported on it, citing Constanze Stelzenmüller, director of the Center on the United States and Europe at Brookings, who is worried about the second Trump administration’s position on NATO; followed by the Financial Times. All of them mentioned the concept “Dormant NATO” by name, without explaining it much. Here’s Sylvie Kaufmann at the Financial Times: “Trump-aligned think-tanks advising the US to pivot away from Europe and promoting the concept of a ‘dormant Nato’ have finally inspired brainstorming in Brussels about reinforcing the European pillar of the alliance. ‘Dormant Nato’ should be a wake-up call for Europe. There are only 11 months left.”
The effort to explain the position was slightly made in ECFR, which divided the Republicans into three tribes, “Primacists, Restrainers, and Prioritisers” (the clue is in the names) and categorized Dormant NATO within the restrainer side. “The restrainer’s alternative agenda is to create a new, non-US-centred security architecture in Europe. This would mean pulling out most US troops from Europe and revising NATO rules to create a ‘dormant NATO’, which is to say a NATO led by Europeans in which Americans play only a supporting role.”
But what is Dormant NATO, and why is it the only way forward for any Republican administration?
To understand that, we have to consider three assumptions.
Assumption one dictates that NATO is designed not just to defend Europe, but to neuter European great powers and deter any attempt of having a continental hegemon opposed to the United States. These aims are fundamentally contradictory. On one hand, Americans won’t allow their government to be subservient to any single power in the Western Hemisphere. It is not politically feasible and no candidate arguing for that will win an election. On the other hand, Americans are not socially designed for imperialism with a global imperial officer class, and are therefore not interested in paying the cost in blood and treasure that is required for empire, nor do they gain from any inept form of globalism that is currently practiced. That leaves the U.S. grand-strategists in a bind where reconciliation between these two aims—having Europe both whole and subservient, and having Europe defend itself with America being there only as a balancer of last resort—seems to be difficult.
Assumption two is that Europe is not united and never will be without force. The European Union is a potential trade and political rival of the U.S., and even though it is a political entity that inserts itself as an unwelcome guest in various multilateral forums, it is an entity that exists solely due to the material reality of American martial presence in the continent. That makes it doubly interesting when the E.U. wages punitive tariff wars on American companies or threatens to punish Twitter; it is essentially with tacit American regime approval.
In a world where there is no American military power acting as a glue to keep Europe united by force, the European Union will implode into several pieces, as older powers and territorial interests return to form. It is a doomsday scenario, but if the E.U. ever actually finds itself in a position to threaten the U.S., or plans to side with China in economic warfare against the U.S., all the U.S. has to do is pull the security rug from under Europe’s feet and let it disintegrate. The reason is simple. Rich but demographically weak Western Europe wants to buckpass the security burden onto the United States. Eastern Europe, on the other hand, wants to chain-gang the U.S. to its ethnic conflicts. The expansion of NATO did not just end ethnic European wars; it did so by neutering great powers and destroying “nationalism,” including that within the United States.
This brings us to assumption number three. The structural forces that allowed U.S. hegemony are now gone. America is hollowed out, with a $33 trillion debt: arguably the biggest threat in front of the United States. Put simply, America is on the verge of economic collapse, and a bloated government and defense budget are but one cause of it. That, added to the unprecedented rise of a peer rival in the East, means the challenge ahead of the U.S. is not going to be solved by singing paeans to decades past, but by means of a thorough restructuring of the established alliance system. Burden sharing is out. Burden shifting is in.
In that light, the idea of “Dormant NATO” is relevant. The brief is readily available for everyone to read. Contrary to consensus, it does not call for a total withdrawal of the U.S. from the European continent—far from it. It firmly keeps the U.S. nuclear umbrella over Europe by maintaining the airpower and bases in Germany, England, and Turkey (thereby keeping the button for ultimate deterrence firmly and solely in American hands), as well as the U.S. Navy tied to the European seas (thereby neutralizing any future threats to seaborne trade). What it does, however, is shift the burden.
A Dormant NATO stops all future NATO expansion. It keeps NATO on ice, as the name suggests, only to be activated in times of crisis. It defunds the woke NATO bureaucracy—bloated, independent, self-sustaining, and often hostile to conservative values and American interests. Most importantly, it coerces Europe by fixing a timeframe after which the armor, logistics, artillery, intel, and infantry pass on to European hands in both combination and command, with America staying only as a fireman to be called in times of need. Everything other than American nuclear and naval power will be the security burden of Europe.
This is the most realistic compromise possible, short of total withdrawal. Europe must understand that they cannot be sanctimonious about America while living under American prosperity and generosity.
Secretary Robert Gates was prophetic in 2011 when he warned,
The blunt reality is that there will be dwindling appetite and patience in the U.S. Congress—and in the American body politic writ large—to expend increasingly precious funds on behalf of nations that are apparently unwilling to devote the necessary resources or make the necessary changes to be serious and capable partners in their own defense. Nations apparently willing and eager for American taxpayers to assume the growing security burden left by reductions in European defense budgets. Indeed, if current trends in the decline of European defense capabilities are not halted and reversed, Future U.S. political leaders– those for whom the Cold War was not the formative experience that it was for me—may not consider the return on America’s investment in NATO worth the cost.
That time has already come and gone. The only reason Europeans are not paying their fair share in their defense is because Americans have so far only warned of a world without America in it, without specifying any timeline. “Dormant NATO” fills that gap and provides a last, workable alternative. Future American administrations might not be as generous.
The post The Path to a ‘Dormant NATO’ appeared first on The American Conservative.
The DHS secretary recently added Ecuadorians to the list of those nationalities to be rewarded for their propensity to enter the United States illegally.
Congress continues to do nothing to restrict the main tool enabling Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’s unlawful overreach: his abuse of the “humanitarian parole” authority to admit foreigners under a narrow exception in the Immigration and Nationality Act. The INA allows the president to admit selected foreigners who cannot obtain a visa but have a pressing need to enter the U.S., such as to receive medical treatment or take part in a court matter. Mayorkas has seized this authority as dynamite to blast open our national borders.
Earlier this year, Mayorkas used humanitarian parole as the pretext to invent immigration programs for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans (called “CHNV”) that permit 30,000 “legal” monthly admissions from those countries. Under the sketchy CHNV rules that Mayorkas created by diktat, the parolees from these four countries can self-select themselves; basically the sole requirements are having a sponsor and not being on a U.S. watchlist.
Mayorkas’s sleight of hand has also invented something he calls “Family Reunification Parole” (FRP), yet another scheme for speeding up the entry of those favored nationals he wants to let in now.
Under FRP, foreigners on the processing list for family-reunification immigrant visas (commonly called “chain migrants”) are no longer required to await their legal turn to be interviewed, medically examined, and vetted in their home countries. FRP will now permit Ecuadorians, who will join the special club of Colombians, El Salvadorans, Guatemalans, and Hondurans (plus Haitians and Cubans, who are covered by both programs) to simply ignore the waiting times required by American law and come directly into the U.S. as “parolees.”
Mayorkas’s improvisation again throws out the INA’s worldwide immigrant quota and vetting system, which in many cases would require these foreigners to wait years for their lawful chance to be processed as visa applicants. The fact that they are facing waiting periods, as is the case with some 4 million would-be chain migrants around the globe, does not mean the INA is treating them “unfairly,” nor is it a “broken” immigration system. Confronted by millions who want to come here, the law is working exactly as it was designed, restricting the number of immigrants each year to the quotas Congress approved.
Yet the current system, which is already overly generous in admitting annually more than a million legal immigrants, is not good enough for the Biden administration. In its announcement on Ecuadorians, DHS posted this paragraph:
The Family Reunification Parole process promotes family unity consistent with our laws and our values,” said Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro N. Mayorkas. “Establishing this process for certain Ecuadorian nationals will ensure more families can access lawful pathways rather than placing themselves at the mercy of smugglers to make the dangerous journey. Those who do not avail themselves of family reunification parole or other lawful, safe, and orderly pathways and attempt to enter the United States unlawfully will continue to face tough consequences.
Note that the announcement does not even threaten those Ecuadorians who “refuse to avail themselves of FRP” with deportation. When Mayorkas makes reference to “our values,” he is blatantly ignoring that those values are already clearly anchored in existing U.S. law. It is in fact fundamentally un-American to replace the rule of law by diktat; it is an incredible power grab and a national outrage even by modern Washington standards.
In favoring certain nationalities, Mayorkas is ignoring INA language that directly forbids it. The law asserts: “… no person shall receive any preference or priority or be discriminated against in the issuance of an immigrant visa because of the person’s race, sex, nationality, place of birth, or place of residence” (emphasis added) §1152(a)(1)(A).
While the parolees are technically entering the U.S. without a visa, they are still being clearly favored in immigration because of who they are and where they come from. By any fair reading of the law, this action is a direct violation of the non-favoritism standard established in the INA.
What is going on with the DHS General Counsel’s office? Is there a DHS Inspector General’s investigation underway on Mayorkas’s abuses? Most importantly, was this unlawful conduct not worthy of a House impeachment vote against Mayorkas?
Reckless with his unchecked power, Mayorkas is likely to announce next that Ecuadorians already illegally in the United States will be granted “Temporary Protected Status.” TPS was first enacted by a gullible Congress as a measure to allow foreign nationals to remain in the U.S. if their country was beset by armed conflict or national catastrophe. Democrat administrations have wildly stretched TPS into a backdoor to allow illegal migrants to remain indefinitely in the United States.
As with parole, Congress desperately needs to take back this abused TPS authority, which currently allows nationals from 16 countries, most with dubious claims of being in crisis, to remain in the United States. Despite a history of Democrat presidents expanding this backdoor open-border measure, Ecuador, so far, has been denied TPS. Even the Barack Obama administration refused in 2016 to cave to Ecuadorian pressure for TPS.
Of course, the government of Ecuador continues to lobby for its illegals to stay in the U.S., and it is probably only a matter of time before President Biden, urged on by Antony Blinken’s State Department, placates Quito by granting TPS.
Here is the classic example of Mayorkas enabling migrants from another continent to enter the U.S.: not because they are fleeing tyranny, but because they are seeking to better their economic circumstances. Ecuador is not a dictatorship, but simply a corrupt country with high crime rates that struggles economically. It is not unlike scores of other countries on the planet.
Illegal Ecuadorian migrants continue to come, and very few are deported. In the past year, American border authorities encountered some 100,000 trying to cross the southern frontier from Mexico. There are now over 480,000 Ecuadorians in the U.S., with at least half of those illegally present. It is estimated that the Ecuadorian diaspora, since arriving in the U.S., has birthed another 270,000 children, who are now dual nationals. They are already organizing politically. As one Ecuadorian who was caught explained, “It is my dream to enter the United States to improve my work situation, because in Ecuador there are no such opportunities or jobs. The government does nothing. That is not the case with the open-border Biden administration. “Ali” Mayorkas is riding to the rescue of all would-be economic migrants, hundreds of millions of whom are clamoring to come to the U.S.
Congress must stop him.
The post Mayorkas Opens the Border Again, Now to Ecuadorians appeared first on The American Conservative.
The uniparty in Washington bent on escalating the disastrous war in Ukraine has a new argument: Shoveling more billions into the conflict is the best possible use of taxpayer dollars.
The Biden administration has requested an additional $14 billion for Israel in the wake of the recent Hamas attacks, and Congress seems poised to meet, or even exceed, that request.
We are now accustomed to such reports of massive new military spending; given the deteriorating state of the American homeland, it is nevertheless extraordinary. Calls for fiscal accountability with regard to Pentagon spending are exceedingly rare, even on the “fiscally conservative” side of the aisle. After $113 billion already devoted to prolonging the catastrophic proxy war in Ukraine, with more billions recently pledged by the Biden administration and supported by the chickenhawks on Capitol Hill, do the American people believe they are getting their money’s worth?
Recent polling data show a marked turn in public opinion away from open-ended support for further military escalation of the bloody conflict, and no wonder. Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has pointed out that while President Biden offered a $700 payment per household to Maui survivors of the deadliest wildfire in recent history, he simultaneously requested an additional $25 billion in funding for the Ukraine war, which comes to the equivalent of $500,000 per Maui household. “That gives you some idea of what this nation is sacrificing to fund the war machine,” he writes.
It’s an argument that resonates with American voters weary of forever wars, but the uniparty in Washington bent on escalating the disastrous war in Ukraine has a new argument: Shoveling more billions into the conflict is the best possible use of taxpayer dollars.
“Russians are dying…. It’s the best money we’ve ever spent,” crows the Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.
“We’re getting our money’s worth on our Ukraine investment,” asserts the Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut.
“It’s the best national defense spending I think we’ve ever done” bragged his colleague, Utah’s Republican Mitt Romney. “We’re losing no lives in Ukraine…. We’re devastating the Russian military for a very small amount of money relative to what we spend on the rest of defense.”
Let’s leave aside for a moment the assertion that the war is actually weakening Russia, which is manifestly not the case. Let’s also leave aside the callous disregard for Ukrainian lives being sacrificed for U.S. geopolitical ends. These remarks also betray a striking ignorance of the relationship between U.S. funding of “forever wars” abroad and deteriorating conditions here at home.
The fact is that American taxpayers’ funding of endless foreign conflicts at the expense of urgent domestic needs extends far beyond the current crisis in Ukraine. American spending on the post-9/11 regime change (Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Syria, Libya) has been estimated at an eye-popping $8 trillion.
In the meantime, as Kennedy notes, conditions at home have measurably deteriorated over the past three decades, with “crumbling cities, antiquated railways, failing water systems, decaying infrastructure, and an ailing economy.… We maintain 800 military bases around the world. The peace dividend that was supposed to come after the Berlin Wall fell was never redeemed.”
The “peace dividend” Kennedy refers to is the savings in defense spending that was supposed to come with the conclusion of the Cold War and the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Eastern Europe. Finally, the peace economy would be restored. Defense spending as a proportion of GDP could return to the 1–2 percent levels that prevailed before WWII.
While military spending moderated in the 1990s, the promise of a peace dividend never materialized. Instead, the defense budget increased dramatically after 9/11, and it has remained high ever since.
Today, excluding veterans’ benefits and foreign aid spending, the annual defense budget is about $900 billion. In 2000 it was $294 billion. In constant dollars, that’s a 60 percent increase.
The threat of the Soviet Union was replaced with terrorism, and then, mere months after the inept American withdrawal from Afghanistan, a new source of defense contracts fell into the lap of the defense industry—the Ukraine war. The gravy train has chugged on uninterrupted.
What’s the next stop of the gravy train? Already the foreign policy establishment seems to be trying to engineer a war with China, using the same playbook. Bellicose rhetoric, provocative military maneuvers, encirclement, and economic warfare accompany the arming of Taiwan, the obvious vehicle for another Ukraine-style proxy war. Now Congress is promising yet more billions for a new conflict in the Middle East.
Americans’ willingness to finance the forever wars is wavering. Financially-strapped working-class families are going into credit card debt at record levels just to make ends meet. Americans’ credit card debt for the first time ever has surpassed $1 trillion, according to data by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
Now, with Ukraine in ruins, nuclear tensions with Russia escalating, and a decaying domestic economy plagued by exploding federal deficits, it is long past time to focus on healing our society and becoming strong again from the inside. Let’s broker peace wherever possible, end the Ukrainian conflict, and use the resulting peace dividend to address our problems here at home…before it’s too late.
The post RFK Jr. Is Right: America Needs a Long-Delayed ‘Peace Dividend’ appeared first on The American Conservative.
Will the advent of drone warfare result in a more defensive—and more peaceful—world?
“The future of warfare: A $400 drone killing a $2M tank.” That was the headline in Politico E.U. on October 26. That header tells us that the world’s military establishments have been caught flat-footed. As one Ukrainian drone-master, Pavlo Tsybenko, explained of his anti-Russian-tank weapons, “We made ours using microchips imported from China and details we bought on AliExpress. We made the carbon frame ourselves. And, yeah, the batteries are from Tesla. One car has like 1,100 batteries that can be used to power these little guys.” The parts of the Ukrainian drones are COTS, commercial-off-the-shelf. If the goal is quick and cheap, it often helps not to have a whole huge Pentagon-type procurement system.
And now we’re seeing the same mil-tech dynamic in Gaza. Hamas, too, has used drones to deadly effect on tanks, and the Israelis, who have even more expensive tanks than the Russians, are scrambling with the same jerry-rigged expedient, putting so-called cope cages atop their tanks, where their armor is thinnest. These hillbilly-looking contraptions seem to work against drones dropping from above, but they pose their own problem: They raise the silhouette of the vehicle, and so go against the the trend of tank design for the last century, which calls for going low to avoid more familiar direct-fire, line-of-sight anti-tank weapons.
Oh, and the cost of a U.S. Abrams tank is about $10 million (nothing about the Pentagon is cheap). We should also mention: An Abrams has a crew of four. So even if we factor out the ethical value of human life—we are talking warfare, after all—the dollar cost of the crew is expensive: how much it costs to train them, how much it costs to replace them, how much it costs in benefits to survivors. No doubt the next time the U.S. military deploys to some hot zone—and it’s always a “when,” as opposed to an “if”—our tanks, too, will have an anti-tank countermeasure grafted on. It’ll be a great emergency cost-plus deal for some defense contractor.
What we’ve seen here, drone vs. tank, is a case study in the never-ending revolution in military affairs—the perpetual cat-and-mouse that has, in the past, seen iron beat bronze, the musket defeat the sword, the machine gun massacre cavalry, and and on. It wasn’t that long ago that the Nazis used their tanks to blitzkrieg their way through defensive formations; now the defenders are blitzing back.
Yet even as we allow that war is hell, and that it’s hellaciously difficult to know what a determined foe has up his sleeve, we should acknowledge that militaries have been, by their bureaucratic nature, slow to grasp technological possibility, including the possibility that a toy drone could be made as deadly as the million- or billion-dollar products of the world’s military-industrial complexes.
Big militaries suffer a mirror-image fallacy; that is, they tend to assume that the enemy will be like them. During the Cold War, the Pentagon understandably focused on the Soviet Union, which was heavy with tanks and jets. And so Uncle Sam was unprepared for the Vietnam War, when the foe was not a mirror, but rather, was asymmetric— low-tech, swimming around the Americans like fish in the sea. American G.I.s said that they won every battle against the North Vietnamese, and that’s true; yet it’s undeniable who won the war. And the same held true for Afghanistan and Iraq; we ran up the body count against our enemies, but today, they’re still there, and we’re all gone.
Interestingly, it was during those last two wars that the U.S. upscaled its use of drones, most notably the Predator, which could launch Hellfire missiles. Yet if the U.S. started the drone chapter, the other team wrote its own coda. The Predator had a wingspan of 41 feet; it was, in a sense, an airplane, the sort of vehicle with which the U.S. Air Force would be fully familiar. Then, others figured out that a drone could be small and still be effective. Moreover, these microdrones could be made in the thousands and, who knows, maybe nanodrones can be made in the millions, even billions.
Such “particle-ized” warfare has not computed well with established militaries, because it calls into question the unchallenged verities of contemporary combat: that you need a tank (or other kind of artillery), or an airplane, or a submarine, to deliver kinetic force on the target. That is, the costly big-unit idea hasn’t yet given ground to the cheap small-unit idea. What tank driver, or pilot, or ship captain, wants to think that some tiny little robot can do the same job? Is it too cynical to say that it’s the military ego that’s blocking evolution? Perhaps. So maybe we should just point to a readily observable phenomenon, the mental tyranny of legacy systems: If it was optimal yesterday, then perforce it will be optimal today—and tomorrow. Yet reality eats legacy for breakfast. Today, weeks into the 10/7 fighting, Hamas rockets are overwhelming the vaunted Iron Dome, routinely hitting a broad range of targets in Israel.
So, mass quantities of drones and low-tech projectiles threaten everyone. We all need shelter from the swarm. So how to protect? Pavlo Tsybenko, the Ukrainian drone meister, has his answer: Drones are “almost impossible to shoot down,” he told Politico E.U. “Only a net can help. I predict that soon we will have to put up such nets above our cities, or at least government buildings, all over Europe.” Hmm.
If a city of nets seems unlikely, we can recall that 9/11 seemed unlikely—until it happened. On that day, of course, three hijacked jets crashed into three buildings, killing nearly 3,000. Yet we can’t say that we weren’t warned. As far back as 1974, a domestic terrorist committed murder as part of his plot to hijack a civilian passenger jet and crash it into the White House. In 1994, Tom Clancy wrote a best-selling novel about crashing a 747 into the Capitol, and that same year, a crazy man actually crashed a Cessna into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. (And yes, there were more proximate warnings, too, also ignored.)
So 9/11 took the Bush administration by surprise; it had been busy planning for missile defense, as well as, of course, for democracy in the Middle East. Belatedly, the White House and the Pentagon, as well as a few other potential targets, are now protected by anti-aircraft weapons and air patrols—at least against kamikaze airplanes. Yet a high-rise in any city in the country is no better protected than it was 22 years ago. And one wonders if the U.S. Secret Service really knows how to stop a bird-sized drone from flying into Marine One—or into the West Wing.
Nevertheless, even as the threat from drones has become obvious, it can be argued that a small drone can carry only a small payload. And that’s true, although we’re only beginning to grasp just how many drones can be launched at once. Little things can add up when there are a lot of them. Moreover, we’re always learning about new miracles of miniaturization, aren’t we?
So are we back to the idea of nets for buildings? For sure, we’re back to the need to start thinking. If nets aren’t a good idea, what is a good idea? Air defense is good, so long as we internalize that the attacking aerial vehicle might not be a bomber, or an ICBM, but rather, a man on a paraglider (as happened in Gaza), or a drone mimicking a sparrow—or maybe a bumblebee. Or it might just be a low-tech mortar round, or a bullet.
If we can’t imagine those things happening to the local skyline, then, well, we aren’t very good at imagining. And that’s okay—so long as any potential attacker is also not good at imagining.
But if we assume that there’s a kind of permanent tech arms race—involving not just nation states, but paramilitaries, narcogangs, terrorists, criminals, and geekily skilled psycho-thrillseekers—then we need to think about building up building defenses. Once again, it may seem improbable that anyone is going to attack a random condo or office tower, but the same can be said about high-rise fires—they’re rare, but structures have fire extinguishers and sprinklers anyway.
So other than nets, what might building defense look like? One can think of some broad categories: 1) forbidding drone flights—or even drones themselves—in certain areas; 2) jamming drone signals; 3) camouflage, including digital obscuring; 4) hardening the target; 5) shooting down drones as they approach, or blocking them, as with a force field.
To be sure, all of these expedients seem to sit somewhere between “daunting” and “ridiculous.” And so we might pray for 6) spiritual renewal that makes us less avid about innovative killing. But then we remember that the country is too diverse to permit that sort of shared goodness. And so we should mention 7) dispersion; and 8) bunkers—maybe the people building underground homes are thinking ahead.
So as we assess our list, we might see that 5), drone defense, has the most potential, at least for extant structures we’re attached to. In fact, one benefit of drone defense is that if we could master the technology, it would pay spinoff dividends all over. That is, defensive shields—defined as a directed-energy wall of electrons, or as a wall of copper, as in a hail of cheap projectiles, or whatever else an X-Prize might summon up—can be used in many different circumstances. Do we wish to defend ourselves against drones? Or sniper bullets Or carjackers? Or human intruders in our homes or across our borders? Against all these threats, there’s a common point: It helps to have a shield. Good fences make for good neighbors.
To be sure, the energy amounts required for such defenses are enormous; physicists debate exactly how much, but one estimate suggests that if the kinetic energy of a bullet is one kilojoule, it would take 175 kilowatts of force to stop it. That’s about 235 horsepower. So we’re talking a lot more energy than we’ll get from local windmills and solar panels. Fortunately, micro nuclear reactors are now a thing, and we’re also discovering white hydrogen everywhere. So the energy is there if we want it. We just need to ditch low-tech Luddism. If there’s one steady rule of civilization, it’s this: Every advance is a new kind of energy hog.
Moreover, if we start thinking about defense in new ways, we’ll reap a big upside: With enough substrate thinking about hearth and home, the superstructure of our national strategy might change. That is, if we start focusing on defense, there could be less focus on offense. As we know to our sorrow, for many decades, the U.S. military and its sidecar of armchair imperialists have been preoccupied with “force projection.” The mega-question they always seek to answer with their PowerPoints: How will Uncle Sam sally forth into the world to liberate, democratize and otherwise improve foreign peoples?
But the rest have learned two things: First, coercive Kantianism doesn’t achieve its stated objectives; and second, salivating about outbound “opportunities” comes at the expense of assessing inbound threats. So if we, the American people, were to demand more defensive thinking—against drones, of course, and while we’re at it, against other kinds of invaders, too—we might actually get to a consistent ethic of America First.
The post Shelter From the Swarm appeared first on The American Conservative.
The U.S. must consider encouraging a ceasefire before stumbling into another complicated large-scale conflict.
Limited war is a form of warfare constrained by the exercise of deliberate restraint in the application of force and the pursuit of political-military goals that exclude annihilation. In Ukraine, all sides shared an interest in avoiding the use of nuclear weapons, and contrary to the Western narrative, Moscow’s goals were arguably confined to the destruction of hostile Ukrainian forces (“denazification”) and the establishment of a neutral Ukrainian state.
In the Middle East, the situation is very different. When Hamas fighters attacked Israel’s heavily fortified border at daybreak on October 7, the first wave of roughly 1,000 fighters advanced behind a curtain of rocket fire using motorcycles, pickup trucks, paragliders, and speed boats, Israeli forces were surprised. Ali Baraka, a senior Hamas official, said in an interview on October 8, “We made them think that Hamas was busy with governing Gaza, and that it wanted to focus on the 2.5 million Palestinians [in Gaza] and has abandoned the resistance altogether.”
In the days that followed, 3,000 fighters, including an unknown number from the Palestine Islamic Jihad (PIJ), penetrated Israeli territory, killing at least 1,300 Israelis and wounding approximately 3,500. Subsequent cross-border raids into Gaza revealed that some of the Israelis who were kidnapped were executed after entering Gaza.
The speed, coordination, and effectiveness of the Hamas operation was unexpected, but the horrific damage the Hamas fighters inflicted on Israel’s population was not surprising. Hamas exists for one purpose: to terrorize and kill Jews with the goal of destroying the State of Israel.
In response, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared war and mobilized 360,000 reservists to form an army of between 470,000 and 500,000. Netanyahu is obviously determined to impart a lasting object lesson, one that will crush Hamas in Gaza and probably eliminate any more talk inside the Palestinian population of a “two-state solution.” Having already pulverized Gaza from the air, the stage is now set for a battle of annihilation. The question is: whose annihilation?
Israeli rage is justified and widely shared by Americans. Like the Israelis, Americans are inclined to see terrorism through the lens of 19th-century piracy: “no quarter given, none expected.” In this total war setting, the Geneva Convention cannot apply to Hamas’s terrorist forces. But how long can the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) wage total war, depriving Gaza’s Arab population of food and water, without creating an enormous humanitarian disaster that will play for years in the news?
Can Hamas and its leadership be destroyed without killing large numbers of civilians who may hate the Israelis but have nothing to do with Hamas? Does it not serve Hamas’s purpose for the IDF to become bogged down in an open-ended, full-scale ground invasion of Gaza because the urban conflict will unavoidably entail loss of innocent life? Does it not seem ominous that Hamas is urging the population of Northern Gaza to remain in the ruins of the city?
Americans stand behind Israel, but many are unconvinced that killing more Arabs in Gaza will solve Israel’s security problem. Americans also have doubts about the Israeli government’s ultranationalist officials, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir. These men are widely seen as emboldening Jewish extremists.
These questions and concerns may explain why Israel is rushing to carry the war into Gaza. If Russian forces arrive to help Egypt and Turkey establish a humanitarian corridor, there will be Russian and Turkish troops in Gaza to defend the distribution of humanitarian aid. Outpacing the arrival of Russians, Turks, and Egyptians makes sense.
These points notwithstanding, the Middle East today is very different from the Middle East in 1973. Technologies have altered the conduct of warfare, but more importantly, the societies and states of the Islamic world have also changed. Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Iran, and Turkey are different in character from what they were in the 1970s. None of the states bordering Israel will tolerate population shifts that introduce large numbers of Palestinian Arabs into their societies. Europeans want them even less.
Iran’s national leaders have already called on Islamic and Arab countries to form a united front against Israel, but Iran’s influence in these matters is more limited than most Americans realize. Iranian military power is largely restricted to Iran’s use of proxy militias like Hezbollah and their cooperation with the Pasdaran, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Iran is simply incapable of adding high-end conventional military forces to such a front. Tehran’s government also knows that the use of Iran’s formidable theater ballistic missile force against Israel risks almost certain Israeli nuclear retaliation.
The governments of Egypt, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, and Lebanon are very probably opposed to a general war against Israel, but their enraged populations could easily trap them into doing so. Scenes of celebration across the Middle East showing people waving Palestinian and Hamas flags, dancing, and singing in the streets are being shared on social media.
Turkey’s President Erdogan has offered to mediate between Hamas and Israel, but Erdoğan himself has warned that the war won’t just stop “in a week or two.” However, Turkey, a nation of more than 80 million, is the one actor in the region with the societal cohesion, martial culture, and military power to lead the Sunni Arab states in a confrontation with Israel.
In a regional war, Turkey can field large armies and air forces equipped with modern weapons, manned by disciplined and determined fighters. The advent of a regional Sunni Muslim alliance guided by Ankara and financed by Qatar resurrects the specter of advanced conventional warfare for the IDF, a form of warfare known to only a few of today’s IDF leaders.
Sadly, the region has not advanced much beyond the conditions described by Ramsay MacDonald, Britain’s Prime Minister in 1924 and again from 1929 to 1931:
We encouraged an Arab revolt against Turkey by promising to create an Arab Kingdom from the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire including Palestine. At the same time, we were encouraging the Jews to help us, by promising them that Palestine would be placed at their disposal for settlement and government, and, also at the same time, we were secretly making with France the Sykes-Picot agreement partitioning the territory which we had instructed our Governor-General of Egypt to promise to the Arabs. The story is one of crude duplicity, and we cannot expect to escape the reprobation which is its proper sequel.
Both the Jews and the Muslims continue to live inside civilizational conflicts that have defined Jerusalem since World War I.
With American offshore naval power, Washington is certainly poised to stumble into the conflict if it widens, but the use of American naval power will not end it. Although it is distasteful to the ruling political class in Washington, the Biden administration should consider taking the lead in supporting a ceasefire, even if it means cooperating with the Turks, Egyptians, and Russians to secure the arrival of humanitarian aid.
In Ukraine, Washington underestimated Russian resolve and military power. Washington should not repeat this mistake by underestimating the potential for a regional Muslim alliance that could threaten Israel’s existence. The possibility that Israel could end up like Ukraine should not be discounted.
The post Avoiding Armageddon appeared first on The American Conservative.
We shouldn’t rush to repeat the past’s mistakes because of the violence in Israel-Palestine.
Reacting to the horrific Hamas attacks on Israel, Rep. Dan Crenshaw of Texas, a Republican, tweeted, “This looks like it will be the war to end all wars. It’s different this time.” In so saying, Crenshaw committed two heresies for conservatives.
First, in speaking of a war to end all war, Crenshaw was quoting a utopian socialist, H.G. Wells. Wells will always be regarded as a great science fiction writer, but his Fabian geopolitics haven’t aged well. (The war-to-end-all-war phrase is often attributed to Woodrow Wilson, who actually shied away from it, although the twenty-eighth president did say that the Great War would be “the final triumph of justice.” In light of subsequent injustices, of course, the Great War had to be renamed as World War One.)
Second, Crenshaw used the eternally naive formulation, “it’s different this time.” The true conservative, like the wise Wall Street investor, knows that it’s never different. There is nothing new under the sun; the most we ever see is variations on themes, including the human propensity for folly. As Alfred North Whitehead said knowingly, all history is a footnote to Plato.
In fairness to Crenshaw, he was referring to the Middle East, although not everyone in U.S. politics is able to keep the United States and the Middle East distinct. For instance, Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley declared, “This is not just an attack on Israel—this was an attack on America.” And H.R. McMaster, a former national security advisor, went further, much further: “The United States and other nations need to join Israel in the response just as our allies did after 9/11. That response should be swift and devastating to the Iranian terrorist network and the source of this unadulterated evil.”
Yes, the level of fervor, at least in some quarters, is starting to resemble the feeling after 9/11. In the days thereafter, some 22 years ago, this author can remember watching former education secretary Bill Bennett say that, in response, the U.S. needed to carry the war to not only Afghanistan, but also Iraq, Syria, Iran—even China. And as we know, the U.S. did go to war against some of those countries, and the effort ended in disaster.
So before we make some more epic mistakes, let’s get a grip. Let’s put recent events in perspective.
Israel suffered a massive military defeat on 10/7. It will be a date that will live in infamy in that country, not just for the vicious nature of the attacks, but also for the incompetence of Israel’s vaunted defense forces. As Tennyson would say of an earlier military debacle, “someone had blundered.” Indeed, it appears that there were blunders on multiple fronts.
Clearly, aerial attack now has the upper hand over aerial defense. Around the world, attacks now consist of swarms of drones or missiles that overwhelm the defense with sheer numbers. To put that another way, it appears that offensive weapons can be made more cheaply than defensive weapons. In that same vein, air forces haven’t yet come to grips with the fact that remote-control swarms are more effective, in toto, than a relative handful of arduously trained human pilots and their aircraft. Military history is littered with instances in which generals and admirals were loth to admit that their treasured way of warfare—cavalry and battleships, for example—were obsolesced by newer, nimbler innovations. A deep rethink of air defense is needed, even if it means retiring the ultra-testosteronal top guns.
In addition, while the Israelis had admirable walls, they don’t seem to have guarded them. The watchtowers need watchmen. (And yes, the U.S. should pay particular attention here: On our border, we have neither walls nor watchmen.)
Moreover, there’s a deeper syndrome in Israel to which the U.S. might also be prey. The split over Prime Minister Netanyahu has been so wide that it led some reserve soldiers to declare that they wouldn’t serve under Bibi’s overall command. Whether that threat is still in force remains to be seen, and yet we can wonder whether that antipathy might have contributed to Israel’s ill-preparedness on 10/7, either by distraction or by intention. Once again, history is replete with instances of countries so split as to be unready; France in 1940 comes to mind; the left and the right both seemed to hate each other more than the invading Germans. ’Twas ever thus: The eminent historian Arnold Toynbee concluded that civilizations were more likely to crumble through internal divisions than external threat.
Of course, none of this necessarily takes Netanyahu himself off the hook. In the painful excavations to come, one wonders whether Israeli diggers will find a document as damning about their leader as was found about President George W. Bush. Five weeks prior to 9/11, the 43rd president was briefed, “Bin Ladin (sic) Determined To Strike in US.” These and other warnings were ping-ponging around the White House, and yet the administration stayed serenely focused on stem cell research, as well as, of course, the long-germinating liberation of Iraq.
Whatever happens in Israel and Gaza, the U.S. needs to absorb some lessons about its own defense.
Most immediately, no rush to war. That most reliable neocon hawk, Sen. Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina, has already suggested that the U.S. could join in on the attacks. (For some people, lamentably, it’s never different—it’s always the same hawkery.) Indeed, we are warned that the Authorization for the Use of Military Force, the Congressional war writ enacted on September 18, 2001, is still in effect, having been applied to twenty-two countries. Could we wake up one morning and find that the U.S. has gone to war again? As things stand now, that would be up to Joe Biden, who earlier in his career voted aye on not only the AUMF but also specifically to support the Iraq War.
In the meantime, whatever lessons the Israelis are learning about border security, we need to learn, too. We can add that the situation here is in its own way grotesque. Originally, the U.S. military defended U.S. borders. But then the Department of Defense got too involved overseas to worry about the U.S. itself, and so the mission was turned over to the Department of Homeland Security, which boasts plenty of military firepower. But as we know, DHS is not doing it. So do we need another outfit to protect the border? Or could we somehow yet entice DHS, or DOD, to recommit to border security? It’s possible, but as we know, the Biden administration is so confused about border security that even when DHS decides to start building a wall, the president denounces the plan.
In addition, the U.S. needs to think more about energy security. Thanks to fracking and Trumping, we made great strides in domestic energy production, mostly oil and natural gas, strides which the greens in the Biden administration sought to reverse and would love to reverse, even now. So if something happens to, say, Iranian oil facilities, what will happen to gas prices, and to the U.S, economy? It won’t be good.
Those with long memories will recall that this magazine was founded, back in 2002, in large measure to oppose the rush to foreign war. So now, here we are again, maybe. But then, as we know, there is nothing new under the sun.
The post Time to Keep Cool: This Time It’s Not Different appeared first on The American Conservative.
Canada and India are beefing. Our northern neighbor’s ridiculous head of government, Justin Trudeau, has claimed that Indian intelligence agents killed a Sikh Canadian who was allegedly involved from afar in a Sikh separatist movement in India. India has responded with predictable irritation, putting a halt to the processing of Canadian visas.
These things, in the main, are of little concern to the American people. It is worth noting, however, that it puts the lie to one of the dearly held fictions of our reliable lackey, the United Kingdom, with whom we have such a “special relationship” (another dearly held fiction): the “Commonwealth,” that face-saving non-entity for covering the British Crown’s nakedness in the wake of the dissolution of the Empire. Let’s lay aside the question of what the very word “commonwealth” means without political union, particularly when that “commonwealth” includes sovereign republics but is headed by a monarch. What kind of “commonwealth,” even in the most generous reading of that word, encompasses states that are actively falling out with each other diplomatically, with nary an appeal to the Crown?
The post Commonwealth of the Imagination appeared first on The American Conservative.
State of the Union: Rep. Warren Davidson continues his one-man crusade against government splurging in Ukraine.
In the year and a half since Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine, the public’s frustration with the U.S. government’s avid spending in and support of Ukraine has grown. According to a recent CNN poll, most Americans—55 percent—oppose sending more monetary and other aid to Ukraine. Additionally, 56 percent believe that the war and our involvement in it constitutes a significant threat to our national security. An overwhelming majority—82 percent of Democrats, 75 percent of independents, and 73 percent of Republicans—is worried that the war will continue indefinitely without resolution.
Given this disturbing reality, it would not be a far stretch to suggest that both Congress and the Biden administration should provide answers for the choices they have made regarding the over $100 billion of aid that has been sent overseas since the invasion.
Ohio’s Rep. Warren Davidson, a Republican, is seeking those answers with the “Define the Mission Act of 2023.” This bill would require President Biden to submit a report to congress that would contain a specific strategy for U.S. involvement in Ukraine. The report would include (1) a list of specific U.S. national interests which are currently at stake in the Russo–Ukrainian War, (2) goals that President Biden thinks must be accomplished to protect our interests, (3) “an estimate of the amount of time required to achieve the objective, with an explanation,” (4) a list of how much European members of NATO are expected to contribute to the war effort over the next year, and (5) “an assessment of the impact of the Russian Federation’s dominance of the natural gas market in Europe on the ability to resolve the ongoing conflict with Ukraine.”
Davidson’s commitment to transparency in regard to American involvement in Ukraine is an undoubtedly admirable effort. The deadline to sign the bill is September 26, so its future is still uncertain. If the Define the Mission Act of 2023 does go into effect, the Biden administration will be forced to reckon with the fact that it cannot hide its actions and decisions from the public forever, and that the American people deserve to be privy to the process that is sending their money overseas without their permission and enthusiasm.
The post Biden Must Justify This War appeared first on The American Conservative.
Ukraine’s is an attractive cause for many U.S. policymakers: Hence the willingness of some to play chicken with nuclear-armed Russia.
The Russo–Ukrainian war rages on. Last year, the presumed quick Russian victory went aglimmering. This year, the presumed grand Ukrainian victory vanished when Kiev’s counteroffensive failed to break Russia’s lines and recapture the Donbas and Crimea. Today, Ukraine looks closer than Russia to failure.
The Biden administration continues to escalate, but slowly. It fears Moscow’s response to policies that kill more Russian soldiers and destroy more Russian materiel. For all of its faults, Washington seems to not want to trigger war with Russia. Especially not the nuclear Armageddon threatened by Russian officials—“nuclear apocalypse,” as warned by former president Dmitry Medvedev, and “global catastrophe,” in the words of Vyacheslav Volodin, chairman of the State Duma.
Less concerned about a nuclear exchange are Kiev’s partisan defenders in Washington, as well as most Ukrainians, whether in or out of government. Indeed, Kiev’s fondest, though rarely explicitly articulated, desire is for the U.S. to enter the war. Last November, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky sought to lie America into the conflict, claiming that a Russian missile had struck Poland. In fact, the missile was Ukrainian. Zelensky’s actions revived international as well as American concern over potential nuclear escalation, despite the allies’ limited strategic interest in the current war’s outcome.
The American and European governments possess a decided economic and military advantage over Moscow. To counter its decided conventional weakness, Russia has set its nuclear threshold lower than in the West. Moscow long has professed to be less averse than America to using nukes. Explains Valeriy Akimenko of the Conflict Studies Research Centre: “Disagreements over the precise threshold for Russia to use nuclear weapons risk obscuring the key point that that threshold is far lower than for Western nuclear powers. Acceptance of the possibility of nuclear warfare permeates Russia’s military theory and practice.”
Some analysts predict that the disparity between the U.S. and Europe versus Russia will cause Moscow to rely even more heavily on tactical nukes in the future. Doing so would prevent the West from trusting its conventional superiority to yield victory. A similar dynamic is at play in the Ukraine conflict.
Russia’s invasion was unjust and has resulted in horrendous humanitarian consequences. Though it was not justified, it was provoked. The allies recklessly sought to enforce military primacy up to Russia’s borders. Had Moscow behaved similarly, expanding a hostile alliance and promoting regime change in the Western Hemisphere, the U.S. would have responded with aggressive, even provocative, action. For the Putin government, the current conflict is existential, which means that Russia is willing to spend and risk much more than Washington, for which the conflict, and especially such details as final territorial boundaries, are peripheral matters at most.
Although the U.S. has increased its contribution to the proxy war-plus against Moscow, so far the latter has responded guardedly. There has been no attempt at total war in Ukraine or any cross-border attacks on weapons shipments to Kiev. Most important, Moscow has not employed nuclear weapons, whether tactical or strategic, against Ukraine. Nevertheless, the possibility of the latter in particular continues to dissuade Washington from taking the “everything all the time” approach favored by Ukraine partisans.
Hence, ongoing demands that the U.S.—when it comes to nuclear policy, no one else in NATO is much relevant—toss caution to the wind and call what it hopes is Russia’s bluff. For instance, the Atlantic Council’s Olivia Yanchik recently complained that Moscow had caused “hesitation and procrastination” in arming Kiev. Moreover, she added, “Unless the West confronts Vladimir Putin’s nuclear intimidation, there is a very real chance that he will continue with such tactics. Inevitably, others will seek to emulate him. This could plunge the entire world into a new era of international instability as countries scramble to secure a nuclear deterrent of their own.”
Yet Yanchik’s call to arms is much too late. Since the development of nuclear weapons, governments have threatened to use them. Far from being an innocent ingenue beset by nuclear-laden bandits, Washington has routinely treated nukes as the ultimate means to both deter and compel behavior. This goes back to “massive retaliation,” a mirror image of Moscow’s present strategy, intended to deter a Soviet invasion of Western Europe when allied conventional forces were notably smaller than those fielded by the USSR. Israel, Pakistan, and North Korea also have either threatened to use nukes if threatened by superior force or allowed other governments to believe they might do so.
Moreover, the fact that nuclear weapons are the best deterrent to threats from the world’s premier conventional power, which routinely imposes regime change to enhance its political influence and/or commercial advantage, already creates a significant incentive for proliferation. For instance, Pyongyang’s intentions might well mix offensive and defensive objectives. Nevertheless, any North Korean leader relying on U.S. goodwill for his survival would be a fool. Once the North completes its deterrent with ICBMs capable of targeting the American homeland, Washington will have to be far more cautious with even conventional military involvement on the Korean peninsula.
Perhaps most importantly, Yanchik offers no solution, what she describes as “a decisive response from Ukraine’s partners.” It is hard to oppose “a decisive response” when it is unspecified. However, what should the West do to counter Russian nuclear threats? Add more economic sanctions, which so far have had only limited effect? Cajole Global South states to pass more resolutions criticizing Moscow? Lauren Sukin of the London School of Economics proposed: “Moscow ought to be certain that any use of nuclear weapons will not, in any way, be tolerated. If such a tragedy happens, it must be met with immediate, resounding, global condemnation, as well as a laundry list of accompanying punishments, from even more sanctions to Russian exclusion from international regimes.” However, these consequences would matter little if Moscow viewed the situation as warranting use of nuclear weapons.
What about more extreme “remedies”? Four years ago the Rand Corporation detailed a range of steps Washington could take to weaken and threaten Russia. Many were indirect and long-term, unlikely to offer much deterrent effect against the use of nuclear weapons. Others were expensive, further entangling the U.S. in the defense of a continent already far too reliant on Washington. Finally, some suggestions, most notably to destabilize the Putin regime, might encourage Moscow to take more extreme countermeasures.
Most extreme have been proposals to threaten war if Russia uses nukes against Ukraine. Or, worse, initiate hostilities, including use of nuclear weapons. The Ukraine hawks are frankly mad, with no sense of proportion. David Petraeus, a failed policy architect in Afghanistan who disclosed classified information to his biographer and mistress, proposed potentially full-scale conventional war against Moscow, apparently assuming that Putin would accept national and personal humiliation. It would be a wild and irresponsible gamble, especially since America’s stakes, in contrast to those of Ukraine, are at most a peripheral interest. Sen. Roger Wicker proposed that the U.S. consider intervening in the conflict with nuclear weapons even without Russian first use. It is hard to imagine how a murderous nuclear war could be prevented in such a case.
Nuclear threats naturally have deterrent effects. This is the foundation of deterrence theory and Mutual Assured Destruction, which governed U.S.-Soviet relations during the nuclear age. Moreover, the issue applies not just to Russia, since, “NATO is a nuclear Alliance.” NATO continues to rely on nukes to fulfill its promise to defend the indefensible, most notably the Baltic States, and the alliance’s access to nukes surely discourages Moscow from considering military action against them.
Russia’s nukes have a similar deterrent effect today. No doubt, nuclear powers have reason to bluff; however, not everything said is a bluff. LSE’s Sukin warns that such threats are serious: “States use nuclear threats to draw boundaries around the issues that they care most deeply about. Second, the frequency of threats matters. Even with a noisy baseline, periods with high volumes of threats see their messengers taking accompanying aggressive actions.” Moscow’s threats look especially credible given Russian nuclear doctrine.
No doubt, Putin does not want to be seen as unnecessarily unleashing nuclear weapons and doing so for frivolous purposes. Moreover, he undoubtedly recognizes that his government would pay a high price for becoming the first nation since the U.S. to use nuclear weapons. Nevertheless, circumstances highlight the serious nature of Russian threats. Military defeat, especially if resulting in territorial losses, such as in Crimea, likely would be seen as unduly costly politically and personally.
Indeed, last fall, a NATO publication observed:
Were Ukrainian forces able to reclaim territory in Crimea—which, at this point in time remains a matter of speculation, even with recent successes—Russian President Vladimir Putin may find himself under domestic pressure to take drastic action. In short, the ambiguity that exists in determining whether Russia now considers Crimea ‘status-quo’ territory could lead to miscalculation that produces nuclear escalation.
Assuming that the Russian Bear is actually a paper tiger is dangerous. Rather, caution, along with what Yanchik derides as “hesitation and procrastination,” are called for. Anything else would be utterly irresponsible, perhaps even suicidal. But Ukraine’s struggle against Russian aggression is an attractive cause for many U.S. policymakers: Hence the willingness of some to play chicken with nuclear-armed Russia, ignoring the very real threat of a potential nation-ending nuclear exchange.
The U.S. government’s top priority should be America’s interest. We see through a glass darkly, wrote the Apostle Paul. Surely that is the case regarding Vladimir Putin’s willingness to use nuclear weapons in his nation’s war against Ukraine. Nothing in that tragic conflict warrants U.S. involvement. And surely Washington should avoid risking a nuclear confrontation over issues which are of far greater significance to Moscow.
The post Friends Don’t Let Friends Play With Nukes appeared first on The American Conservative.
Recognizing that Ukraine might not win its war with Russia is the first step to formulating a better approach for America.
Even when President Joe Biden was visiting the fire-ravaged Hawaiian island of Maui, his attention was mostly on Ukraine, for which he was asking another $24 billion in assistance. His proposal hints of desperation. With Kiev’s highly anticipated counteroffensive running down with minimal success, Ukrainian officials are more loudly demanding more arms with which to revive their fortunes.
Indeed, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky sounds a bit like the Germans in 1944, who put their declining military hopes in “wunderwaffen,” or wonder weapons. German engineers achieved some notable successes, deploying jet aircraft and ballistic and cruise missiles, but technological miracles could not stem the irresistible flood of American, British, and Soviet forces. A Biden administration official addressed Ukrainian demands for F-16 aircraft and longer-range missiles: “The problem remains piercing Russia’s main defensive line, and there’s no evidence these systems would’ve been a panacea.”
The Zelensky government’s likelihood of achieving its stated aims, the defeat of Moscow and recovery of Ukrainian lands, including the Donbass and Crimea, looks increasingly small. For instance, reported the Washington Post: “The US intelligence community assesses that Ukraine’s counteroffensive will fail to reach the key southeastern city of Melitopol,” which, “should it prove correct, would mean Kyiv won’t fulfill its principal objective of severing Russia’s land bridge to Crimea in this year’s push.” Another news account found U.S. officials “increasingly critical of Ukraine’s counteroffensive strategy and gloomy about its prospect of success.” Ukraine’s efforts faintly echo the Battle of the Bulge, Nazi Germany’s last gasp offensive which consumed precious weapons, fuel, and manpower that could have helped delay the Red Army’s advance in the east.
At least Berlin didn’t suffer from allied armchair generals belittling its efforts. Kiev’s losses have been enormous, presumably greater than those of Russia, whose forces are displaying improved tactics, remaining on the defensive in prepared positions backed by superior artillery and air support. (Washington has long claimed that Russian casualties are higher, but allied assessments are dubious, relying on Ukraine’s carefully crafted estimates.) Especially gruesome has been the number of Ukrainians who have lost limbs, reminding observers of World War I.
Yet, unnamed U.S. officials complain that the Ukrainian authorities are too caring of their soldiers’ lives, unwilling to push mass attacks through mine fields and beneath artillery barrages. This despite recognition that Kiev’s forces were ill-prepared and ill-equipped to achieve their objectives: “When Ukraine launched its big counteroffensive this spring, Western military officials knew Kyiv didn’t have all the training or weapons—from shells to warplanes—that it needed to dislodge Russian forces. They hoped Ukrainian courage and resourcefulness would carry the day.” This sounds like a bizarre throwback World War I’s costly “cult of the offensive”.
The judgment that Ukrainians have been insufficiently aggressive, made in safety from across the Atlantic, is chilling:
American officials say they fear that Ukraine has become casualty averse, one reason it has been cautious about pressing ahead with the counteroffensive. Almost any big push against dug-in Russian defenders protected by minefields would result in huge numbers of losses. In just a year and a half, Ukraine’s military deaths have already surpassed the number of American troops who died during the nearly two decades US units were in Vietnam (roughly 58,000) and about equal the number of Afghan security forces killed over the entire war in Afghanistan, from 2001 to 2021 (around 69,000). … And across Ukraine, in big cities and rural villages, almost everyone knows a family that has lost someone in the fighting. Dry flowers from funerals litter quiet roads, and graveyards are filling up in every corner of the country.
Now even Kiev’s strongest partisans, who continue to insist on their country’s ultimate success, are talking about a conflict that will run into early next year and beyond. The Wall Street Journal reported: “Ukraine’s current campaign to retake territory occupied by Russian forces could still have many months to run. But military strategists and policy makers across the West are already starting to think about next year’s spring offensive. The shift reflects a deepening appreciation that, barring a major breakthrough, Ukraine’s fight to eject Russia’s invasion forces is likely to take a long time.”
This is perversely presented as a positive for Kiev, yet the war is destroying Ukraine. The war’s cost climbs daily, the economy is a wreck, the population has been depleted by mass refugee flows, the government survives only on Western handouts, the military has consumed much of its original Soviet-era arsenal, as well as the technological menagerie gifted by the allies, and the army has promiscuously sacrificed manpower both trained and raw. Finding replacements is becoming difficult, with a declining population, corrupt recruiting officers, and determined draft evaders. For all the wishful Western talk of a Russian collapse, given Moscow’s evident manifold challenges, catastrophic failure seems more likely in Kiev. Washington’s objective increasingly looks focused on doing ill to Russia rather than good to Ukraine.
Despite Washington’s and Brussels’s continued determination to defend their increasingly bedraggled party line that Kiev will set its own political objectives, win the military fight, and determine the peace, dissent is increasingly emerging. Observed Ted Galen Carpenter: “As yet, there are only a few trial balloons conveying that message, but they hint at the onset of an effort to prepare the American public for possible abandonment of a U.S. client.”
For instance, NATO members maintained their refusal not only to fight for Ukraine today but also in the future, rejecting alliance membership for Kiev. More dramatically, the chief of staff to the NATO secretary-general suggested that Ukraine trade territorial losses for alliance membership. That triggered wailing, gnashing of teeth, and rending of garments on a biblical scale, followed by the inevitable abject recantation of the proposal. However, with rising popular reluctance to spend more in both the U.S. and Europe on continuing large-scale aid to Ukraine, which Kiev’s partisans insist must quicken to ensure final victory over Russia, more pragmatic officials appeared to be searching for a diplomatic out.
Washington’s Ukraine partisans contend that Moscow is not ready to negotiate. But most of them actually oppose peace. Going to war was Vladimir Putin’s terrible decision. However, allied officials spent decades pushing Russia into hostile opposition and ultimately toward war. The expansion of NATO, dismemberment of Yugoslavia, promotion of “color revolutions” in Georgia and Ukraine, and support for a street putsch against the elected Ukrainian president in 2014 were not about American security but domination, the desire to impose a reverse Monroe Doctrine up to Russia’s border.
The process helped turn a once civil Putin, who indicated his willingness to accommodate the West in his 2001 Bundestag speech, into a hostile critic, reflected in his contentious address to the 2007 Munich Security Forum. The allies share the blame for causing a conflict which has caused horrendous human losses in Ukraine and Russia and created global economic havoc. Indeed, Washington’s reckless aggressiveness led to the Biden administration’s refusal to negotiate with Putin before the invasion and apparent allied effort to derail early negotiations between Kiev and Moscow, guaranteeing continued fighting.
Rather like in World War I, bloody combat has caused both sides to escalate their demands. Today, Kiev insists that Russia surrender all captured territory first. There also has been much talk among both Ukrainian and allied policymakers about making far more dramatic political demands—essentially regime change, nuclear disarmament, and de facto surrender. However, none are likely, especially after the failure of Ukraine’s latest military operations. With Kiev evidently unwilling to negotiate, the Putin government would look weak asking for terms.
Washington should make the first move. Which would be to recognize that America’s interests do not necessarily coincide with those of Ukraine—as the Rand Corporation observed, they “often align with but are not synonymous with Ukrainian interests.” The administration should quietly inform the Zelensky government that seemingly unlimited allied support has come to an end. Although Kiev is entitled to decide its own future, it is not entitled to allied support for whatever it chooses.
The U.S. has an interest in helping to preserve Ukraine’s independence. However, the latter’s final borders are of little interest to Americans, and not worth carrying on a proxy war-plus against a nuclear-armed power that is both expensive and dangerous. Especially since there is good reason to believe that a majority of Crimeans would prefer to stay in Russia.
The allies should engage Moscow over creating a realistic security structure for Europe, which respects essential Russian interests and reintegrates Moscow into the West while preserving Ukraine’s sovereignty and economic freedom to go west or east. It is essential not to allow the imagined perfect to be the enemy of the practical good.
More broadly, Washington’s failing attempt to use Ukraine to wreck Russia should spur a broad rethink of America’s destructive foreign policy. U.S. sanctimony is world class, with successive administrations wailing about democracy and aggression while invading Iraq based on a lie and arming Saudi Arabia in its unprovoked attack on Yemen, in both cases resulting in more deaths than caused by Russia in Ukraine. Washington’s wretched geopolitics degrades American security, pushing Moscow and Beijing together while encouraging nuclear proliferation among smaller states. And Uncle Sam’s international hubris threatens the country’s fiscal future. The U.S. is functionally bankrupt, its debt to GDP ratio now approaching the record set after World War II and heading toward nearly twice that level by mid-century.
No wonder the Biden administration is having such a difficult time articulating a convincing justification for squandering precious resources and courting war with a nuclear-armed power over peripheral stakes. Kiev’s political allies dismiss complaints that the average American household already has provided nearly $900 in Ukraine aid. After all, the CARES Act, presented as an antidote to the COVID pandemic, spent some $2 trillion, much of it conspicuously wasted. So what’s a few tens of billions more for Ukraine even if, predictably, the Europeans are yet again backtracking on their promises to do more for themselves?
The Russo-Ukraine war is terrible for many reasons. It is also dangerous for U.S. Washington policymakers to only see through a glass, darkly, relying on Kiev, which is ever-ready to drag America into the conflict by means both fair and foul. Recognizing that Ukraine might not win its war with Russia is the first step to formulating a better approach for America. Then reality might finally force itself on even the most deluded Washington policymaker.
The post Ukraine’s Vain Search for Wonder Weapons appeared first on The American Conservative.
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