Diplomacy & Crisis News

Netanyahu’s latest reforms come straight from the autocrat’s playbook.

Can Moscow learn from its failures in Ukraine?

Turkey may have just experienced the most devastating natural disaster in its history. Ten provinces in the country’s southeast were flattened by powerful earthquakes in a matter of hours, resulting in tens of thousands of deaths. Temperatures are freezing and survivors are in danger of freezing to death before rescuers can dig them out of the rubble.

The disaster is still unfolding. There is now a massive homelessness problem. Even in cases where houses were not destroyed, many will be uninhabitable due to structural damage. The sheer level of urban destruction is so vast that, in addition to losing their homes, inhabitants of the region are likely to have lost their jobs too.

While natural disasters such as earthquakes are unpredictable, the Turkish government should and could have been better prepared to avoid this worst-case scenario. In the coming days, citizens and opposition politicians are going to demand answers to three uncomfortable questions.

The first relates to the availability of emergency funds, specifically intended for earthquake relief. Following a deadly earthquake in 1999, the state imposed a permanent tax on all Turkish homeowners to contribute to a fund, so that the country would be financially prepared for the next destructive earthquake. Estimates suggest that the state has collected close to $40 billion. Where are these funds? In 2020, reporters asked President Recep Tayyip Erdogan this very question. He replied with a non-answer, remarking “We spent the [funds] on what was necessary. I really do not have the time to explain what the money was spent on.” Since 2012, public disclosure of government spending has been censored, thereby making it virtually impossible to determine how these funds were spent.

The second question relates to building regulations. Following the 1999 quake, the state imposed more stringent building regulations, specifically designed to ensure that buildings are as resistant to earthquakes as much as possible. The destruction of entire city blocks in towns like Hatay, Antakya, and Iskenderun strongly indicates that buildings were not up to code. Who is responsible? The government will be tempted to vilify individual contractors and builders, but not the party officials that run municipalities and thus issue building and zoning permits. In other words, the Justice and Development Party (AKP) of Erdogan will do everything it can to escape the embarrassment and blame. It will be interesting to see how they pull that off in light of the public infrastructure that has also sustained severe damage. Scores of municipal buildings and hospitals have collapsed.

The last question focuses on the government’s emergency response, or lack thereof. Admittedly, the magnitude of the earthquakes was so vast that any prepared government would struggle to mount a meaningful response. Yet citizens in the affected areas are complaining about the total lack of emergency services, prompting some to ask, “where is the state?” In the initial forty-eight hours, the government hesitated to deploy the Turkish military, which has significant resources such as personnel and heavy lifting equipment. This hesitation may have resulted in the loss of thousands of lives Moreover, the country’s premier emergency response agency (AFAD) is under increasing public scrutiny. The organization is accused of mounting an unacceptably slow response to a major national disaster.

Right now, Erdogan’s primary concern appears to be political optics Two days after the disaster, Erdogan declared a state of emergency for two months in the affected areas. The timing is awkward, to put it mildly: the emergency will end one week before the intended date of Turkey’s national elections. Coincidentally, a state of emergency will allow the government to control the media—specifically, control over negative reporting that might lay the blame for subsequent rebuilding and humanitarian challenges on the government.

Erdogan likely understands that this earthquake may be his greatest political challenge yet. In a fiery public appearance, instead of acknowledging the level of public trauma the country was facing, Erdogan warned that he would target individuals “spreading lies” about the national disaster.

With so much devastation and so much at stake politically, Erdogan could try to pump the brakes on holding the elections slated for May 14. Many of the public buildings where citizens usually vote have been damaged. Even if they are intact, citizens will be primarily concerned with rebuilding their livelihoods. The government may thus try to exploit the situation and forestall what was slated to be a close election by citing citizens’ inability to participate in the voting process.

Such a strategy could backfire rather badly. The earthquake has gained international attention. Should the government fail to address the needs of the people and then attempt to cancel elections, this could be too much for the Turkish population to bear. And their frustrations will be obvious to the international community that is working overtime to raise funds for the beleaguered people of Turkey.

What well-wishers may not quite understand is that Erdogan and the AKP have been in power for twenty years. And while the political elite may not be responsible for a natural disaster, the aftershocks are as much political as they are seismic.

Sinan Ciddi is a non-resident senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), where he contributes to FDD’s Turkey Program and Center on Military and Political Power (CMPP). He is also an Associate Professor of Security Studies at the Command and Staff College-Marine Corps University and Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service.

Image: Mustafa Kirazli/Shutterstock.com.

Imagine, for a moment, that you are a Russian intelligence analyst. It is March 1, 2020. Your task is to determine why President Donald Trump authorized the Doha Agreement, a deal with the Taliban to withdraw U.S. forces from Afghanistan. Suppose you know the following facts:

1. Donald Trump is known to watch the television show Tucker Carlson Tonight.

2. Tucker Carlson has said that Afghanistan “is never going to become a civilized country.”

3. Donald Trump often echoes Tucker Carlson’s rhetoric about caring for Americans first.

Ergo, you conclude that Tucker Carlson is the intellectual architect of the Doha Agreement. You report that Carlson is “Trump’s Brain,” the grand strategist, the hidden hand in plain view.

Does this sound plausible? Carlson is not a policymaker, nor does he provide policy-relevant advice. Moreover, Trump had long advocated for a U.S. withdrawal himself. To attribute so much influence to a television host seems like an absurd leap in logic. And yet—over the past year, many political commentators have alleged that Alexander Dugin, a far-right Russian television personality, was the intellectual architect of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. His supposed influence on Putin and Russian elites has become a recurring theme in Western media coverage.

In the first half of 2022 alone, Dugin was mentioned in Foreign Affairs and featured in both The New York Times and The Washington Post. Smaller publications, like the left-leaning Jacobin, the center-right Bulwark, and the Jewish Tablet all ran similar stories. Even the YouTube-famous intellectual Jordan Peterson later claimed that Putin “collaborates in his thinking with a genuine philosopher, Alexander Dugin.” The assassination of Dugin’s daughter in August, allegedly by Ukrainian security forces, has since raised his profile even further.

What many commentators get wrong, besides overrating Dugin’s prominence, is the complex relationship between intellectuals and politics. They mistakenly assume that: 1) Patronage means proximity, 2) ideology equates to strategy, and 3) using a thinker’s favorite jargon means embracing his specific ideas. In reality, intellectuals peddling big ideas are rarely in the driver’s seat of politics—especially in autocracies without freedom of expression. Dugin is no exception.

Fallacy #1: Patronage Means Proximity

Before we get ahead of ourselves—who is Alexander Dugin? According to an influential Foreign Affairs article, he is “Putin’s Brain,” a “professor at Russia’s top university, Moscow State University, and the head of the national sociological organization Center for Conservative Studies” from 2008–2014. True enough, though he was only an adjunct, not a full professor, and his research center was national only in name. He was also abruptly fired from Moscow State after students protested his call to “Kill! Kill! Kill!” Ukrainians in the 2014 invasion of Donbas. Since then, he has worked as the editor of the pro-regime television channel, Tsargrad TV.

These posts strengthened Dugin’s reputation in the West as a philosopher and advisor to Putin. But a cursory look at his career reveals that he is just one of many pawns in Putin’s curated media ecosystem. The regime’s “political technologists” are known to impersonally employ thousands of media personalities like Dugin to shape public opinion. These personalities do not control their public profile, nor do their ideas necessarily even reflect official policy. The regime also sponsors extremists and pseudo-oppositionists to make itself look moderate in comparison.

Before his stint at Moscow State, Dugin had played some small television roles on Russia’s Channel One. Like everyone else, his profile waxed and waned depending on Putin’s needs. In the early 2000s, when Putin aligned with the United States in the Global War on Terror, ultra-nationalists like Dugin were given less airtime and pushed into the “opposition.” They were then somewhat rehabilitated after the Color Revolutions in Georgia (2003), Ukraine (2004), and Kyrgyzstan (2005) created a need for more nationalistic content. This was what increased Dugin’s notoriety. But there is no evidence that Dugin ever came in contact with Putin.

Indeed, Dugin has never claimed to have met Putin, nor has he spoken as though he has. In a rambling VKontakte post after his firing from Moscow State, Dugin wrote: “There are two identities to Putin - the patriotic, heroic (solar) and the one inclined toward liberalism and compromises of the West (lunar). Therefore it is impossible to rule out that the decision to dismiss me was taken by one half, obviously the lunar.” Such a man, who has played the role of an academic, opposition leader, talking head, and regime loyalist, seems much more like a court jester than an éminence grise. He too might profit from a window into Putin’s brain.

Fallacy #2: Ideology Equates to Strategy

Dugin’s current standing is often misinterpreted through his past intellectual achievements. In the 1990s, he found his first major patrons in Igor Rodionov (then head of the Russian General Staff Academy) and Leonid Ivashov (then head of defense cooperation with other post-Soviet states). Both generals supported the failed 1991 coup against Mikhail Gorbachev to forestall the USSR’s dissolution. Rodionov invited Dugin to lecture at the General Staff Academy from 1992–95 to fill the post-Soviet ideological vacuum, while Ivashov secured funding for Dugin to turn his lectures into a best-selling monograph, The Foundations of Geopolitics (1997).

Commentators have characterized Foundations as a strategic blueprint for the Putin era. But I sincerely doubt, as one writer alleges in The Washington Post, that Putin has followed the book’s “counsel to the letter.” Dugin’s chief contention is that the Cold War was only one phase of an eternal and occult struggle between civilizations of “land,” i.e. Russia, and “sea,” i.e. the United States and its allies. Russia’s destiny, he argues, is to build a multipolar order by re-uniting post-Soviet “Eurasia.” The framing is unusual but offers no new strategic insights. Neither Putin nor the generals needed Dugin to convince them that the USSR’s dissolution was a disaster.

More importantly, the book contains little intelligible counsel. It is several hundred pages of intellectual history and philosophical exegesis. Here is a representative quote: “Geopolitics as it exists today is certainly a secular, ‘profane’ and secularised science. But perhaps, among all the other modern sciences, it has preserved in itself the greatest connection with tradition and with traditional sciences. René Guénon said that modern chemistry is the result of the desacralization of the traditional science of alchemy, and modern physics is the result of magic. Similarly, modern geopolitics [results from] sacred geography.” What is Putin to do with this?

Strategy is about connecting means to ends. It involves calculating risk, deciding on the most prudent sequence of actions, and adapting to a changing environment. Dugin is not interested in any of this. When he offers advice in Foundations, he often proposes extravagant ideas like partitioning northern China with Japan while supporting Chinese expansion into Southeast Asia “as geopolitical compensation.” He never reflects on whether Russia has the means—the military capability, state capacity, and economic resources—to achieve these maximalist ends.

To be fair, Dugin does make one seemingly prescient suggestion—he encourages “separatism and ethnic, social, and racial conflicts” in the United States. Western observers have made much of this thought. Did Foundations influence Putin when he decided to meddle in the 2016 U.S. presidential election? Likely not. Besides being an unoriginal idea (fomenting civil unrest was a well-known Soviet tactic), the quote is also vague and impossibly hard to find, appearing in a single throwaway line in a twenty-page section about “space in the West of Eurasia.” Other famous recommendations are presented in equal abstraction. They reflect the imagination of an ideologist—not a strategist.

Fallacy #3: Using a Thinker’s Favorite Jargon Means Embracing His Specific Ideas

Nonetheless, some observers suggest that the increasing references to “Eurasia” in Russian foreign policy initiatives point to the influence of Dugin’s overall vision. For instance, in May 2014, three months after the Maidan Revolution in Ukraine, Russia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan signed a treaty forming the Eurasian Economic Union, a customs union meant to reduce trade barriers across post-Soviet states. The organization replaced the Eurasian Economic Community, an ineffectual predecessor founded in 2000 during the height of Dugin’s intellectual profile.

The attempt to establish a connection between Dugin’s ideas and Eurasian integration is highly dubious, to say the least. One useful window into the foreign policy debate in Russia at the turn of the millennium is Dmitri Trenin’s 2003 book, End of Eurasia. Although Trenin cites Dugin as an influential theorist of “Eurasia,” he also refers to a dozen other geopolitical thinkers working with the idea. Indeed, U.S. statesman Zbigniew Brzezinski had also outlined a strategic concept of “Eurasia” in his 1997 book The Grand Chessboard, which was translated into Russian in 1999.

There is a red herring during this period as Dugin does enter the halls of power in 1999—at least nominally—becoming an advisor to the Speaker of the Duma (the lower legislative house) and the chair of the geopolitical section of the Duma’s Advisory Council on National Security. But Russian foreign policy lies primarily in the hands of the executive. And though Boris Yeltsin was ineffectual, his deputy Yevgeny Primakov (foreign minister, 1996–98; prime minister, 1998–99) had been trying to restore Russian foreign policy to its old direction for several years.

In fact, Primakov had been expounding a Eurasian outlook as early as 1992. Speaking to the Moscow Institute of International Relations, he said: “Russia is both Europe and Asia, and this geopolitical location continues to play a tremendous role in the formulation of its foreign policy. Its [interests] include China, India, and Japan, and not just the United States or Europe. They also include the Middle East and the ‘Third World.’ Without such geopolitical scope, Russia cannot continue to be a great power and to play the positive role it has been destined to play.”

Given that Soviet security officials had conducted multi-theater planning from Afghanistan to Poland throughout the Cold War, the reemergence of a “Eurasian” outlook in Russian security circles should be rather unsurprising. When books allege that Dugin’s ideological “Eurasianism began to creep into mainstream discourse” because “a new set of foreign policy guidelines issued in 2000 described Russia’s most important strength as its ‘geopolitical position as the largest Eurasian state,’” one might ask when such ideas were not part of mainstream discourse.

An Old and Dangerous Temptation

Alexander Dugin does not exercise exceptional political influence in Putin’s Russia. A cursory analysis of his career, his writing, and the ideas around him reveals that he is just one career courtier among thousands. He is no Rasputin, no silver bullet, but one piece in a much larger puzzle. In this respect, the extensive coverage of Dugin offers a general lesson. It is tempting to look to intellectuals to make sense of opaque autocracies. Their crisp ideas seem to cut through the fog of palace intrigue and false opinion. But the insight they offer is almost always illusory.

This is an old and dangerous temptation. Eighty years ago, in trying to explain the Second World War, U.S. media outlets identified the Nazi-affiliated intellectual Karl Haushofer as the architect of Hitler’s grand strategy. Commentators pointed to his alleged academic postings, his musings on world domination, and apparent echoes of his ideas as proof of his influence. But Haushofer never made it into Hitler’s inner circle. The entire line of analysis was misplaced. We now know that Hitler changed his behavior depending on the strategic environment that the Allies created.

What we really need to know today—and hopefully Western intelligence agencies already do—is what Putin’s policy process looks like. How does he take counsel? What will make him think twice? It is important to get these answers right. Only then can one begin to determine what concrete actions might change Russian behavior. Simply identifying Russia as a philosophical enemy does not get us closer to a coherent strategic vision. To respond forcefully and effectively to Putin’s invasion, we must not conflate exercises in intellectual history for strategic analysis.

Alex Hu is a student at Yale University. He can be reached at alex.hu@yale.edu.

Image: Fars Media Corporation/Wikimedia Commons.

Oddsmakers in New York and Las Vegas give Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida a roughly one in four chance of being elected the next president of the United States. Those odds are as good as anybody’s right now. There is growing interest in what a DeSantis presidency might look like. But what are the governor’s public policy priorities? Is there a DeSantis doctrine? I’ll suggest there is, and it seems to have three main components:

1. Politically - govern effectively and win elections.

2. Domestically - preserve traditional freedoms and push back against the woke-industrial complex.

3. Internationally - guard against America’s self-described adversaries overseas.

Politically, the appeal of DeSantis is straightforward: he wins. Not only that, he does so by a large margin, while governing effectively. The governor won re-election in November by a landslide. He defeated his opponent Charlie Crist by almost 20 points. DeSantis won counties and constituencies that are not supposed to vote Republican. Miami-Dade county, typically a Democratic Party stronghold, cast its ballots for the governor. So did Hispanic voters throughout the state. DeSantis has shown he can win over swing constituents. A state once considered purple is now—Democrats worry—lost to them. For conservatives, it’s a promising indicator of what might be accomplished on the national level.

Of course, Republicans will first have to decide whether they want to win elections, govern effectively, and exercise political power on behalf of a conservative agenda. If the answer is no, then Florida’s governor may not be the guy.

Also worth noting is the DeSantis style of governance. By all accounts, he has an appetite for information, combined with skepticism toward the notion that the experts are always right. He pores over data and listens to a range of opinions, then decides for himself. It was exactly this approach that led him to reject the conventional wisdom during the early weeks and months of the pandemic shutdown, and correctly so. Of course, this was viewed as madness by liberal critics at the time. Nevertheless, he persisted, and was vindicated in the end.

DeSantis also revealed a similar administrative proficiency in his response to Hurricane Ian last year. Florida has over 22 million people, and it is an unusually big, diverse state possessing an economy larger than most countries. Governing it successfully is no small task. Proven executive skills from outside of the Beltway will be of interest to American voters in the coming year.

In terms of his domestic policy outlook, perhaps the most striking aspect of the governor’s approach is his willingness to directly take on what might be called the woke-industrial complex. Most conservatives understand that the ideology of left-wing identity politics now serves as a kind of substitute religion for powerful socioeconomic interests in this country. This was not true in Ronald Reagan’s time, but it is now. For that reason, while Reagan was an excellent president, his approach cannot simply be photocopied to face the challenges of today. DeSantis made this point explicitly in a fascinating address to the National Conservativism conference in Miami last September.

As the governor suggested in that address, a baseline conservative American commitment within the economic realm is to free enterprise, individual liberty, and material opportunity for ordinary citizens. Hard work should be rewarded, and self-destructive socialistic schemes avoided. Obviously, DeSantis has no objection to a market economy. As he put it, “I’m not a central planner.” Both his words and his actions as governor indicate his determination to create and safeguard a friendly environment for business entrepreneurship whether big or small. Florida has flourished as a result. It is a point of pride.

Where DeSantis departs from strict libertarians—and this is where you should watch his speech for yourself, rather than relying on hostile journalistic misrepresentations—is in calling out what he correctly identifies as the danger of woke capitalists, and then doing something about it.

As Vivek Ramaswamy argued persuasively in his book Woke, Inc., one of the most disturbing trends in American life during recent years has been the fusion of left-wing identity politics with large chunks of corporate power. Some prominent multinational business, industrial, and financial leaders in this country seem to feel the need to constantly signal their liberal virtue by picking sides in the Left’s never-ending culture war against the rest of us. Moreover, in certain cases, these leaders exercise what amounts to a monopoly, notably in high technology. This is where DeSantis comes in. As he said in his September address: “Corporatism is not free enterprise….They are trying to enforce an orthodoxy on this country.”

The truth is a good many American businessmen, bankers, and industrialists quietly despise this trend toward left-wing identity politics within their own ranks.

Governor DeSantis believes, and evidently is willing to act on the belief, that woke corporate power is a serious threat to traditional American liberties. For example, when a large multinational corporation acts in loose coordination on some controversial public matter alongside a network of social justice activists, Democratic Party politicians, liberal-leaning journalists, politically correct academics, and sympathetic bureaucrats borrowed inside the administrative state, this is not a strictly private matter. It is even less so when that same corporation simultaneously expects subsidies and tax breaks off the public teat. With that in mind, DeSantis has fought and won a series of dustups over a long list of issues including illegal immigration, criminal policing, judicial activism, K through 12 education, Florida’s university system, and gender ideology. The pattern has been the following:

1. The woke-industrial complex demands deference on some controversial issue at the state level inside Florida.

2. DeSantis informs himself on the matter, picks his fights carefully, takes a strong position, and refuses to defer.

3. As it turns out, the majority of Floridians agree with DeSantis. He wins.

4. Rinse and repeat.

Needless to say, this pattern drives woke establishmentarians up the wall. Who does DeSantis think he is! Doesn’t he understand that left-liberal elites get to play referee, even as they lead one team on the field in this country’s two-party system?

Still, the governor persists in standing up to the woke-industrial complex—and winning. His recent successful fight with the College Board over the teaching of African-American history is only the latest example. Should students learn African-American history? Yes, without any doubt. Taxpayer support for aggressively left-wing ideologies foisted on our students under the guise of said history? No.

This is a dramatic victory for a sane, welcome approach to higher education, as opposed to the fanatical nonsense we’ve seen from progressives over the past several years. DeSantis has now proposed that university DEI bureaucracies within the state of Florida should be defunded, allowing them to “wither on the vine.” This is how to do it. He is demonstrating that we need not accept some sort of left-wing Brezhnev doctrine inside the United States when it comes to rolling back woke insanity. Conservatives all around the country have noticed.

In the next installment of this series, I examine the DeSantis doctrine internationally.

Colin Dueck is a Professor in the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University, and a senior non-resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

Image: Hunter Crenian/Shutterstock.com.

Last year was a tumultuous one for the relationship between the United States and its key security partners in the Gulf. Each side was disappointed by the other, and the resulting disagreements spilled out into the public instead of being quietly resolved behind closed doors. Diplomatic differences have resonated politically in all capitals, further limiting the ability of each side to be seen as offering concessions to the other. It’s not difficult to imagine these long-enduring partnerships falling away completely in the coming years through neglect, if not intent. And yet, the circumstances may finally be right to achieve a longstanding objective—designing a system of integrated Gulf defenses that protects mutual national security interests on a sustainable basis. Leaders need to recognize this and take advantage of the opportunity.

During periods like these, it is important to recall the national security interests that have long bound the United States and the Gulf. Those fundamental interests have not changed, and the primary question before policymakers is whether chosen policies serve to secure those interests or undermine them.

The United States has a vital interest in ensuring that no regional adversary has both the capacity and the will to attack the U.S. homeland, Americans abroad, or the key security partners Washington relies on for local intelligence, placement, access, and diplomatic support to advance this and other core interests. This drives U.S. efforts to combat terrorism in the region and to deter adversaries from seeking weapons of mass destruction and otherwise employing destabilizing military capabilities. Today, the Iranian regime checks all the boxes: it’s the world’s most prominent state sponsor of terrorism, it’s pursuing an inherently threatening nuclear program, and—alone among all of the governments in the world—it routinely gives advanced precision weaponry to nonstate actors and directs them to target civilians across borders. The United States and its Gulf partners share a vital national security interest in combating these malign behaviors and have thus worked toward those ends ever since the 1979 revolution allowed the Iranian regime to seize power.

The United States also has a vital interest in the global price of oil, for reasons that span security considerations (oil’s centrality to the functioning of our military), economic considerations (the impact of oil prices on growth and inflation), geopolitical considerations (our partners elsewhere who depend on oil sourced from the Gulf) and political considerations (the impact of gas prices at home and abroad). Despite campaign trail rhetoric about American “energy independence,” once in office, U.S. presidents in both parties discover, to their frustration, that they must care deeply about oil prices, especially when they get too high or too low.

It is also a stubborn fact that the market price of this global commodity remains disproportionately driven by actions taken in the Gulf, especially by Saudi Arabia. This reality is unlikely to change materially for decades to come, even under the most optimistic energy transition scenarios. Given this, the United States long ago decided that protecting the free flow of oil from the Gulf to locations determined by market demand—a historically atypical anti-mercantilist approach—would best protect that core interest. Today, again, the primary threat to this interest is Tehran, which openly threatens—and, indeed, has used—military force against both energy production facilities and the vessels that carry oil out of the Gulf. And, once more, this U.S. policy has aligned with the vital interests of its partners in the region.

While these interests remain constant, both the threats to them and the means to protect them change over time. Thus, U.S. and Gulf policies also need to shift, both in response to and in anticipation of these evolving threats.

The most important change in the regional threat assessment is Iran’s homegrown development of highly capable precision weaponry that can be used to strike targets at a distance with pinpoint accuracy. This is what allowed Tehran to strike Saudi energy infrastructure in 2019 and allowed its proxy to kill innocents at the Abu Dhabi airport in 2022. The inherent value of these weapons was clearly demonstrated when Russia requested Iranian assistance in Ukraine, a remarkable break from Russia’s proud tradition of military self-reliance and a complete reversal of the situation in Syria in 2015, when Russian air power came to the aid of Iranian-backed ground forces. Moreover, these weapons’ precision serves to lower the threshold for their use in the Gulf, as we have already witnessed, thus raising the risk of unintended escalation.

Our partners in the Gulf are also building their own military capabilities. In the past, the United States was required to provide the near entirety of the military forces needed to protect the free flow of energy from the Gulf. Today, and even more so in the years ahead, our local partners will be increasingly capable of sharing this burden. Even more significantly, given the nature of these new weapons systems and the realities imposed by the region’s geography, U.S. partners in the Gulf have begun to appreciate the benefit—indeed the necessity—of launching a more cooperative approach toward defensive measures. For far too long, intra-Gulf rivalries prevented such an approach. But today, there is a growing recognition that each nation cannot unilaterally secure its own airspace and maritime interests. Moreover, the expansion of relations following the Abraham Accords and the transfer of the U.S. military area of responsibility for Israel from U.S. European Command to U.S. Central Command is driving new opportunities for security cooperation within the Gulf and beyond.

Given these dynamics, the door is finally open to build a multilateral, fully integrated air and missile defense system, and to achieve far greater multilateral cooperation within the established maritime security structures. U.S. military planners have long recognized the potential utility of such steps in protecting the above-mentioned national security interests, but the circumstances have not allowed them to proceed. Now they are.

Encouraging initial steps are already being taken at the most senior levels, but there is a very long way to go before the journey is anywhere close to complete. The U.S. Fifth Fleet launched Task Force 59 to integrate unmanned systems over a year ago, and secret talks reportedly took place last March among military leaders from Israel, the United States, and key Arab countries. Little is said publicly on the subject, but USCENTCOM commander Gen. Michael Kurilla has indicated that this subject is a priority, and Fifth Fleet commander Vice Adm. Brad Cooper has set a goal of having 100 unmanned surface vessels in the Gulf by this summer, only one-fifth of which will be from the United States. President Joe Biden privately raised the issue of integrated defenses during his trip to Israel and Saudi Arabia in July 2022, and reports have since been published about plans for a future Red Sands Integrated Experimentation Center and hopes for a proposed Middle East Air Defense Alliance. Moreover, the year ended with the Deterring Enemy Forces and Enabling National Defenses Act, driven by a bipartisan, bicameral group of lawmakers, which will provide the necessary funding for such an endeavor.

Of course, none of this progress has been lost on Tehran, which has issued public threats of a “decisive response to the nearest and most accessible targets” should the Gulf agree to “a joint defense pact in the region by the U.S. with [the] participation and hidden management of Zionists.” Of course, such threats are exactly why the United States and its partners should build a system of fully integrated defenses in the Gulf. Getting there will require four fundamental policy decisions.

The first and most critical policy decision is for the United States to commit to a future in which it remains intimately bound to Gulf security. In previous decades, such commitments could be made privately or remain within the purview of military and security professionals. Today, however, the single most important factor in the region, driving decisions by partners and adversaries alike, is the widespread perception of America’s withdrawal from the Gulf. Therefore, the above-mentioned quiet diplomacy on integrated air, missile, and maritime security is now insufficient. A public case needs to be made for a new security relationship between the United States and its Gulf partners, and it must be designed to receive bipartisan support.

Of course, American domestic politics makes doing so a tall order in the wake of an unsatisfying war in Iraq, a failed war in Afghanistan, the enduring resonance of the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, the involvement of Middle East leaders in U.S. domestic politics, and the continuing public sniping and policy differences between the U.S. and Gulf leaders. Unless these dynamics are reversed, they threaten to eventually turn the region’s expectation of a U.S. withdrawal into a self-fulfilling prophecy. But reversing this perception is nevertheless needed to protect U.S. interests. This cannot be accomplished if American presidents threaten to turn our partners into “pariahs” or openly question whether the United States should protect the free flow of energy.

Leaders in the Gulf also have fundamental policy decisions to make. Thus, the second critical policy decision to be made is a mirror of the first: Gulf leaders must openly commit to a future in which the United States remains their primary—and, in certain aspects, their sole—security partner. This would require them to cease their oft-repeated threats to turn to China or Russia to fill perceived security voids. In some cases, this decision should be relatively straightforward—most obviously for Bahrain, the longtime host of U.S. Fifth Fleet headquarters. For others, it remains an open question as to whether such a decision will be taken—especially for Saudi Arabia under its still relatively new leadership. Regional leaders will also need to recognize that such a commitment carries with it the need to ensure that American support remains bipartisan for decades to come. This is undercut every time decisions are made that are widely perceived to be advancing the interests of one American political party over another.

Third, Gulf leaders must make the decision to fully cooperate. If this was an easy task, it would have been accomplished long ago. Of course, the leaders of any state would naturally seek to avoid circumstances, if at all possible, in which they must rely on others to ensure their security. It is far preferable to jealously preserve complete freedom of action rather than allow one’s security to be dependent on any neighbor’s goodwill. Only after unilateral efforts to ensure security have proven inadequate do states typically consider cooperative mechanisms. And states that are in the midst of the heady process of building their own militaries or are led by individuals inexperienced in warfare are most prone to overestimate their own abilities to accomplish missions unilaterally, as we have seen in Yemen.

Compounding these generalities are the specific mistrusts and rivalries that have long kept the Gulf divided. There are many reasons why the Middle East doesn’t possess anything close to Europe’s interlocking matrix of multilateral cooperative mechanisms, and those realities won’t be blithely wished away. Only a few years ago, a much smaller subset of countries in the Gulf Cooperation Council went through years of an ill-conceived and largely ineffectual “Gulf Rift” that saw the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Saudi Arabia break ties with Qatar. Given this history, maximalist approaches to security cooperation are doomed to fail. Instead, integrative efforts should initially focus only on a small subset of countries—Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE—and only on a narrowly defined set of missions: air and maritime defenses.

And finally, a fourth fundamental policy decision must be made jointly by the United States and its Gulf partners. Working toward integrated defensive capabilities can be slow, dry, technocratic work that typically advances only incrementally and on generational timelines. If this work is left only to well-intentioned security experts, the risk remains high that perceptions will fall behind progress and reasons will be found to delay necessary additional program phases. When militaries look to work together, the typical pattern is first to work through the myriad of matters relating to questions of deconfliction; only after that is successful do the counties begin work to build cooperation. And then, once cooperative mechanisms have been established, governments can begin to consider questions of military integration. And finally, only after selected military capabilities have been integrated are governments interested in exploring the most sensitive subjects of building joint systems that are inherently interdependent.

But this project should begin, not end, with a clarion call for interdependence. Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and the United States should declare up front that this is the goal. They will be intentionally designing a future together in which they’re each practically incapable of achieving comprehensive air and maritime security in the Gulf without the others. The military systems being established won’t work for any if they don’t work for all. In doing so, the Gulf states will “lock in” the United States as their security partner, which should remove any remaining concerns about the long-term sustainability of the American regional presence.

The Gulf governments have all found it useful to issue vision documents that clearly outline the intended objectives of their policies. In 2008, both Manama and Abu Dhabi published Economic Vision 2030 plans, and Riyadh issued Saudi Vision 2030 in 2016. These three countries, together with the United States, should together issue a joint “Vision 2040 for Integrated Gulf Security,” laying out an ambitious path ahead toward a fully interdependent system of air and missile defenses and far greater multilateral cooperation within the established maritime security structures. With such a joint vision guiding the way, there will be no more questions about America’s withdrawal and Gulf hedging, and U.S. and partner vital interests will be increasingly secure—on a much more sustainable basis.

Will Wechsler is the senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Center and Middle East Programs, and the former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Combatting Terrorism.

Image: DVIDS.

Russia left the war-torn region with only a single border crossing—and it’s no longer open for aid.

An alarming blunder may convince the U.S. public to take Beijing’s threats seriously.

Au Forum de Davos en janvier comme lors de sa rencontre avec M. Donald Trump en novembre, le président chinois Xi Jinping a peaufiné son discours sur les vertus du libre-échange, quand son homologue a semblé défendre « l'Amérique d'abord » et le protectionnisme. Pékin s'est emparé de la mondialisation (...) / Chine, Capitalisme, Commerce international, Communisme, Économie, Finance, Géopolitique, Histoire, Industrie, Mondialisation, Relations internationales, Autoritarisme - 2017/12

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In December 2017, President Donald Trump issued his National Security Strategy (NSS), a landmark document that clarified the state of international relations. It recognized that the world had returned to its natural state of great power competition. In truth, great power competition never left, though the collapse of the Soviet Union had created what seemed like a new liberal order where the traditional tenets of realism no longer applied. The NSS noted that this unreal moment had passed and that “after being dismissed as a phenomenon of an earlier century, great power competition returned.”

President Joe Biden’s NSS, released in November 2022, continued this vision, stating: “the post-Cold War era is definitively over and a competition is underway between the major powers to shape what comes next.” Biden’s NSS was dressed up as a contest between democracy and autocracy, but it still contained all the elements of realism, from strengthening America’s defense industrial base and expanding alliances to managing the security aspects of trade and waging new kinds of war.

America’s rivals were clearly identified in Trump’s NSS: “China and Russia want to shape a world antithetical to U.S. values and interests. China seeks to displace the United States in the Indo-Pacific region, expand the reaches of its state-driven economic model, and reorder the region in its favor. Russia seeks to restore its great power status and establish spheres of influence near its borders.” China received more attention in the 2017 NSS because it is the stronger of the two rival powers, with an economic base larger than the Soviets ever had. Beijing’s break from Communism after its failure in the Soviet Union set it on a vigorous path of growth. But China was also aided by the naïve actions of American corporations fostered by the nostrums of liberal intellectuals who placed hope above history (which was supposedly ending). As Trump’s NSS observed, “[f]or decades, U.S. policy was rooted in the belief that support for China’s rise and for its integration into the post-war international order would liberalize China. Contrary to our hopes, China expanded its power at the expense of the sovereignty of others.”

As to Moscow, the 2017 NSS said, “Russia aims to weaken U.S. influence in the world and divide us from our allies and partners,” adding that “the combination of Russian ambition and growing military capabilities creates an unstable frontier in Eurasia, where the risk of conflict due to Russian miscalculation is growing.” We are in the midst of one of those “miscalculations” in Ukraine. As his invasion enters its second year, President Vladimir Putin appears determined to reverse the outcome of the Cold War and reestablish the Soviet Russian empire, whose collapse he believes was the worst tragedy of the twentieth century. 

Trump’s NSS foresaw the danger that Biden is confronting. “Although the menace of Soviet communism is gone, new threats test our will. Russia is using subversive measures to weaken the credibility of America’s commitment to Europe, undermine transatlantic unity, and weaken European institutions and governments. With its invasions of Georgia and Ukraine, Russia demonstrated its willingness to violate the sovereignty of states in the region. Russia continues to intimidate its neighbors with threatening behavior, such as nuclear posturing and the forward deployment of offensive capabilities.” Trump pushed for NATO members to increase their defense spending to the 2 percent of GDP level they had promised President Barack Obama. He took the issue public and got results. In 2019, NATO secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg stated, "I can report on the good progress on burden sharing … European Allies and Canada will have added much more than $100 billion since 2016.”

Trump also authorized the sale of "lethal" military equipment to Ukraine to combat Russian-armed separatists. Though the Ukraine Freedom Support Act of 2014 provided for such aid (after Russia had seized Crimea), Obama refused to send weapons to Kyiv, fearing that helping Ukraine defend itself would escalate the conflict. This is the old appeasement view that blames war not on aggression, but on resistance to aggression. Biden initially took an even more pacifist approach to the Russian threat in Europe. As Putin marched his troops around Belarus to test U.S. resolve, Biden assured him that Ukraine was outside the NATO defense perimeter and there would be no military response to Russian aggression. “Unprecedented” sanctions did not deter Moscow any more than they did after Obama declared that Putin’s seizure of Crimea “would not stand.”

The Russian military rolled through the open door, only to be stopped by valiant Ukrainians determined not to lose their freedom to Moscow again. This changed the moral and strategic situation, and the United States and NATO reacted, albeit slowly, to support Kyiv’s resistance. Yet, there are still those who oppose halting aggression in the strategic heart of Europe, and some of them are even in the party of Reagan and Trump. They claim they are “realists,” helping to hijack that term along with left-wing opponents of “imperialism” who want Americans to cease trying to shape the world to its advantage.

Hans J. Morgenthau’s declaration in Politics Among Nations that “international politics, like all politics, is a struggle for power” is considered the core of realism. As Morgenthau elaborated, “the struggle for power is universal in time and space and is an undeniable fact of experience. It cannot be denied that throughout historic time, regardless of social, economic and political conditions, states have met each other in contests for power.” In this history, he denounced Neville Chamberlain's appeasement policies, which “helped to make the Second World War inevitable, and to bring untold miseries to millions.” Yet, like so many liberal intellectuals, Morgenthau could not face the application of his theory in the real world. He came out against the Vietnam War (and the Cold War of which it was a part) and, in so doing, engaged in “radical rethinking” to redefine realism as abstaining from the “struggle for power.” This is called prudence, caution, or restraint by its proponents, but in the proper understanding of realism as the international struggle for power, it should be called impotence. Morgenthau advised, "Never put yourself in a position from which you cannot retreat without losing face, and from which you cannot advance without great risks." But what passive position does this permit that could have any chance of influencing events?

Rep. Bob Good (R-VA) was one of the “Gang of 20” who delayed Rep. Kevin McCarthy’s (R-CA) election as speaker of the House. He was also one of thirty-five Republicans who joined forty-five Democrats in voting against the 2023 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which passed with 350 bipartisan supporters. The NDAA authorized an increase of $80 billion in defense funding and contained a number of specific measures aimed at China and Russia. In his dissent, Good claimed that “we are sending billions of dollars of military equipment and weaponry to Ukraine with no plan or exit strategy.” The congressman knows the plan. Biden’s NSS states that “we will continue to stand with the people of Ukraine as they fight back against Russia’s naked aggression” and will “make Russia’s war on Ukraine a strategic failure.” These are solid, traditional realist objectives. Good’s desire is clearly for an exit strategy without reference to the war’s outcome.

In reaction to such putative conservatives who have gone wobbly on national security policy (and whose minority views are nevertheless spreading on outlets such as Fox and Newsmax), Douglas Murray wrote in National Review: “If you oppose sending American troops around the world, and you oppose arming countries fighting for their own survival, then do you have any remaining foreign policy at all? And if not, for how long do you expect America to remain the dominant power in the world?” In other words, how can you fulfill the proper mission of realism to prevail in great power competition?

And it is a global competition. As NATO’s Stoltenberg recently noted, China is watching the war in Ukraine closely. Chairman Xi Jinping is not happy that the quick victory promised by Putin has failed to materialize. Yet Beijing is testing the resolve of the U.S.-led alliance system not only with intensified military threats against Taiwan and Japan but also with its continued alignment with Moscow. China held joint naval exercises with Russia in September and December, and another is planned for February with the addition of South Africa. Beijing flew a joint “patrol” of strategic bombers with Russia in November that menaced both Japan and South Korea (and the U.S. forces stationed in both countries). China is supplying Russia with computer chips, drones, and other supplies that support Putin’s war effort while buying Russian oil to help finance it. Any wavering of Western resolve that allows Russia to advance in the struggle for power in Europe will have serious repercussions for peace and the balance of power in Asia. That is how the real world works.

William R. Hawkins is a former economics professor who served on the professional staff of the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee. He has written widely on international economics and national security issues for both professional and popular publications. 

Image: ID1974/Shutterstock.com.

The United States has gone twenty years without a new presidential doctrine being espoused. While such doctrines—declarations of key foreign policy strategies—are rarely directly declared by a given president, most have been fairly evident to outside observers, as they often represent major shifts in American foreign policy thinking. Generally, doctrines have defined either a single key policy decision a president makes—such as the Carter Doctrine, which declared that the United States would defend the Persian Gulf—or have acted as broad-based prisms through which all foreign policy decisions are made—such as the Nixon Doctrine, which determined the circumstances in which America would aid countries threatened by communism.

Presidential doctrines are not the end-all-be-all of U.S. foreign policy, but they are useful indicators of where America’s metaphorical head is at, especially since they oftentimes cut across ideological lines and are rarely disavowed by succeeding presidents after being declared. As such, when and why different doctrines have been declared have told the story of America’s foreign policy history—as has a lack of declarations.

When the Monroe Doctrine was first declared in the 1820s, announcing to Europe that the Americas were off-limits, no further doctrines were announced for 100 years because none were necessary. But since America became more active abroad in the twentieth century, doctrines have become commonplace: starting with Harry Truman, almost every U.S. president made one. But this nearly unbroken chain ended with George W. Bush. Since the Bush Doctrine, which equated terrorist-financing states with terrorists and approved of preventative war, pre-emptive war, and democracy promotion, no president has announced their own foreign policy doctrine. All three of his successors—Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden—explicitly ran against the Bush Doctrine, but all were ultimately unable to expunge it as none had a clear idea of how to replace it. Obama seemed constantly uncertain and was unable to articulate an Obama Doctrine in an interview for The Atlantic conducted at the end of his administration. The Trump administration, governing during a period of ideological realignment in the GOP, was split between interventionists like John Bolton and Elliot Abrams and the ascendant, internationalism-skeptical national conservatives; as a result, it never settled on a singular Trump Doctrine. At present, the Biden administration also seems uncertain as to what it wants, talking tough on China but declaring them only a competitor, while at the same time trying to be friendly with European states but targeting them with protectionist policies. Biden has talked of seeing the twenty-first century as a war between autocracy and democracy, which could eventually become a Biden Doctrine of sorts, but that view is beset with problems and, in many ways, is just the Bush Doctrine with “terrorism” swapped out for “autocracy.”

The Needs of a New Doctrine

Essentially, America’s foreign policy has been adrift since 2003, clinging to outdated doctrines. This has rendered America utterly unprepared for twenty-first-century threats, primarily the rise of China. But with the 2024 presidential now election beginning in earnest, and Biden acting as a self-declared “transitional” president, presidential candidates on both sides have a unique opportunity to rejuvenate America’s foreign policy with a new doctrine.

Any new doctrine must take a few matters into account. First and foremost, it must redirect attention to America’s national interest. During the Cold War, when the nation needed to be defended against an ideology that could jump borders without a shot fired, an ideologically driven foreign policy framework was more appropriate. But the “ideological” threat that Biden has identified, autocracy, is not a transferrable ideology like Soviet communism was. Nor is Chinese communism, which is in some ways being supplanted with Chinese nationalism—and is likewise non-transferrable.

Second, a new American foreign policy doctrine should also utilize old and existing alliances while reorienting them into being tools of America’s national interest—national interests should not be contorted to serve old alliances, as some would argue is currently happening. While the United States should seriously start focusing more on East Asia, should America totally renege on its treaty commitments and abandon its allies it will likely become impossible to create any meaningful ant-China coalition. Europe, already skeptical of angering China, would at best likely turn neutral, and America abandoning its European allies would guarantee that no smaller East Asian states would trust the word of the United States. The result could be Eurasia falling under China’s thumb (via a Sino-Russian bloc)—a shadow that would ultimately cross the oceans. America would be left attempting to play whack-a-mole with pro-Chinese South American governments.

Third, a new doctrine must be transferrable from administration to administration and be politically tenable to American voters. To win the twenty-first century, America cannot have a foreign policy that vacillates every four to eight years—it must be designed with the long term in mind. Doctrines that have been the most effective at staying relevant have been tied to geographic areas, not to a particular enemy leader or nation (the Truman Doctrine, which called for U.S. support of democracies under threat from communism, was for example clearly targeted at Greece and Turkey—but could be easily extended to include other states).

Finally, any new doctrine must be politically tenable on a domestic level. While presidential elections are rarely won on foreign policy issues, they can be lost on them. Americans will not want to become too withdrawn; the paleoconservative dream of pulling back entirely has never been a majority position. But a policy of going abroad in search of monsters to destroy will certainly wear out its welcome, especially—as we have seen—after two decades of protracted and bloody conflicts.

Monroe+

Merging the two American inclinations—toward pulling back and throwing itself forward—in one doctrine will be a difficult needle to thread. But it can be done by taking into consideration all that America has learned since it came out of its shell, while also going back to its first, and most enduring, presidential doctrine: the Monroe Doctrine.

Call the new doctrine Monroe+. While adding “plus” to well-known brands is currently in vogue in twenty-first-century parlance, it also connotates a further metaphorical and physical meaning. Metaphorically, it takes the original Monroe Doctrine and adds to it, à la Theodore Roosevelt’s corollary. Physically, it represents the geographic focus of the new doctrine; the “plus” addition is simple to understand and can be drawn on a map. When drawn over the Americas, it goes down to South America and across to the tips of Eurasia: Europe and East Asia. The United States should endeavor to keep these marked areas free of governmental anti-Americanism.

The Monroe Doctrine called for the rest of the world to stay out of Central and South American affairs. That is currently under threat, with China increasing its influence in South America. The original doctrine would therefore be a key part of Monroe+. Likewise, the ends of Eurasia staying free of being subsumed by an anti-American bloc—at the moment the most likely candidate being the Sino-Russian bloc, though that can change as time goes on—makes it less likely that America will eventually face a Eurasia united against it, a scenario which has long been the nightmare of American strategic planners.

This doctrine—clear, simple, wedded to national interest while allowing for an idealistic coating—checks every previously mentioned necessity.

For one, it redirects attention on America’s national interest by rejecting any grand global “War on [Ideological Concept].” It does not tie the United States into any sort of world-spanning battle. It simply seeks to protect America from geographic threats and keeps its influence in key geographic areas in case more is needed—both of which should be the main goals of America’s national interest.

It is also transferrable from administration to administration. Much like the Monroe Doctrine of old, Monroe+ could guide America for the rest of the century. Absent ideological threats to the United States like communism, America should prepare to face China, which by all accounts is a traditional rising power: nationalistic, expanding its influence, and gearing up for a potential war. A doctrine like this would prepare the United States properly. Different presidents may add their own tweaks and focus on different aspects of Monroe+, but it would ultimately remain consistent. This also makes it more politically tenable; it is fairly easy to understand why these areas should be kept free of anti-Americanism, and as a result, will not require tenuous political arguments to gain public support. This straightforwardness has another added benefit: by not basing America’s foreign policy around promoting an ideology, such as democracy promotion or a “war on autocracy,” future presidents will not fall into the trap of being rightfully tarred as hypocrites for being necessary allies with autocratic regimes.

Finally, Monroe+ takes advantage of existing alliances instead of simply discarding them. The European Union (EU), which is a close ally of the United States and comprises the vast majority of NATO members, currently holds something akin to vassal-lite status. It has steadily attempted to gain more independence from the United States, but, after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, now buys more liquid natural gas from America than it does Russia. This presents America a key advantage: it can utilize Europe’s desire for independence while keeping EU members from straying too far. In a break with the past, the new doctrine would therefore see America urge Europe to develop its own defense infrastructure. NATO could then be transformed into a two-power bloc, composed of the United States and the EU (along with the UK and Norway). The EU could then keep an eye on one end of the Sino-Russian bloc, Russia (with the voraciously anti-Russian Eastern European states ensuring the EU never switches sides), while America finally completes the long-discussed “Pivot to Asia” to keep an eye on the other end. Not only is a more united Europe going to be less susceptible to Chinese influence—keeping that end of Eurasia free of governmental anti-Americanism—but by staying true to older alliances (while forcing them to pick up the slack), it will make it easier for America to build stronger alliances in East Asia.

The name of such a new doctrine ultimately is not important. If a President Ron DeSantis were to declare it in 2025, the “DeSantis Doctrine” would work just as well. “Monroe+” as a name is much less important than what it connotates: a return to America’s earliest foreign policy philosophy, one which served the United States well for 100 years, while at the same time updating it for twenty-first-century threats. America no longer needs to embark upon globe-spanning ideological conflicts. But at the same time, there are threats that must be dealt with. Monroe+ would get America ready to do so.

Anthony J. Constantini is writing his Ph.D. on populism and early American democracy at the University of Vienna in Austria. Previously he received an M.A. in Arms Control and Strategic Studies from St. Petersburg State University, Russia. In 2016 he was the War Room Director for the NRSC.

Image: Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Peter Burghart/U.S. Navy Flickr.

On February 2, it was revealed by NBC News that the United States was tracking a huge Chinese balloon that traveled over the Aleutian Islands and western Canada, only to hover over 150 Minuteman III ICBM silos deployed around Malmstrom Air Force Base in central Montana for an extended period of time. The Chinese government claimed that the stratospheric balloon was a civilian airship, designed primarily for meteorological and weather research, that was blown off course. But the Pentagon disputed that explanation, saying it intentionally flew over sensitive U.S. military sites. It has since been revealed that the airship entered U.S. airspace on January 28 over Alaska and was spotted over Montana on January 31. The White House reportedly attempted to conceal this unprecedented intrusion of a Chinese military balloon into U.S. airspace from both the U.S. Congress and the public, which weren’t informed about it until it was sighted by the public days later.

This Chinese military airship was more alarming than the previous ones because it loitered over sensitive U.S. nuclear weapon sites. The Pentagon claims that, once the balloon was detected, measures were taken to prevent the balloon from transmitting any intelligence information gleaned from its proximity to the ICBM silos back to China. The Pentagon further revealed that the balloon was maneuverable and capable of changing the direction it was while moving.

Biden’s Baffling Response

Despite informing the public that the Chinese balloon did not pose a threat to Americans, the Biden administration responded by canceling Secretary of State Anthony Blinken’s planned trip to Beijing indefinitely. For its part, the U.S. Department of Defense scrambled F-22 fighters to intercept the balloon over Montana in case the orders were given to shoot it down with air-to-air missiles. The planes, however, were ordered to stand down. Days later, on February 4,  a U.S. F-22 fighter shot down the balloon using an air-to-air missile off the coast of South Carolina after it had circumnavigated the entire continental United States over the course of a week. The Pentagon reports it is attempting to salvage the remains of the balloon to help determine its true mission, find out what it was carrying, and determine what intelligence it may have relayed to China before it was downed. 

President Joe Biden subsequently stated that he ordered it shot down on February 1 as soon as safely possible. However, in the latest sign that the Biden administration is not serious about defending the United States of America which they have sworn to protect, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley—who infamously told his Chinese equivalent, General Li Zuocheng, that he would warn him if the United Tates were about to attack the People’s Republic of China—and General VanHerck, who serves as the commander of NORAD, reportedly advised Biden not to shoot it down until it had finished circumnavigating the continental United States. Their reported rationale was that it would pose an undue risk of civilian casualties from its debris—even when it was flying above central Montana, one of the least populated areas of the country.

This decision has to be considered a significant win for Beijing on the international stage and a missed opportunity to demonstrate America’s resolve in responding to Chinese threats against our own homeland. China's prestige received a huge boost as Biden made the decision not to shoot down a Chinese airship the size of three school buses while it was flying over the continental United States. If we had sent a U.S. airship over China, Beijing would have most assuredly shot it out of the sky long before it crossed into Chinese airspace. 

Congressional Republicans, led by Sen. Josh Hawley, are understandably calling for an immediate congressional investigation into Biden’s “baffling response” to this Chinese provocation in allowing a massive Chinese military airship to invade U.S. airspace and fly over the American homeland over the course of a one-week period. The Biden administration should have treated this Chinese airship like we would treat a Chinese nuclear bomber attempting to fly over our territory: warning Beijing to turn it around or we would destroy it. Shooting it down over Alaska would have sent a message to Beijing that the United Tates will not tolerate such potentially serious threats in our own airspace any more than they would if we did the same thing to them.

What Could Have the Balloon Done?

While it claimed the balloon did not pose a security threat and recommended Biden not to shoot it down until it was over the Atlantic Ocean, the Pentagon later revealed that the balloon was equipped with “a technology bay” with advanced sensor equipment and an estimated payload of several hundred pounds. This would provide the balloon, or a similar vehicle, with the capability to carry weapons of mass destruction. Such a huge Chinese airship would serve as a useful platform for a super Electromagnetic (EMP) weapon or high-yield nuclear weapon that could have killed tens of millions of Americans. On the less destructive side of things, the balloon could have perhaps carried some kind of jamming device that could potentially interfere with our nuclear command and control systems. The FBI previously identified such a device in Washington DC, believed to be capable of disrupting nuclear launch orders.

In addition, Beijing likely used the balloon to engage in strategic signaling: a warning to the United States not to interfere if a Chinese invasion of Taiwan were may happen later this year. If not, China would not hesitate to strike the U.S. homeland with nuclear and super EMP weapons, which could destroy our great nation.

No one can claim that this sort of threat was unforeseen. In a 2008 report, the Congressional EMP Commission warned that a comprehensive nationwide EMP attack could be conducted on the United States by means of such a stratospheric balloon. Likewise, the American Leadership & Policy Foundation indicated in a 2015 report that such a thing was possible. Paul Bedard explained in a Washington Examiner column:

High-altitude balloons, such as the one China has floated over mountain state military bases this week, are considered a key “delivery platform” for secret nuclear strikes on America’s electric grid, according to intelligence officials. The threat of balloon-launched electromagnetic pulse attacks was warned about by a congressional EMP commission and inside the military several years ago. In a 2015 report for the American Leadership & Policy Foundation, Air Force Maj. David Stuckenberg, one of the nation’s leading EMP experts, wrote extensively about the threat balloons carrying bombs pose to national security. “Using a balloon as a WMD/WME platform could provide adversaries with a pallet of altitudes and payload options with which to maximize offensive effects against the U.S.,” he wrote in the report. “There is nothing to prevent several hundred pounds of weapons material from being delivered to altitude,” he added. On Friday, he told [the Washington Examiner], “China’s recent balloon flyover of the United States is clearly a provocative and aggressive act. It was most likely a type of dry run meant to send a strategic message to the USA. We must not take this for granted.”

China came close to being in a position to pull this off. On February 3, Brigadier General Patrick S. Ryder, the Department of Defense’s press secretary, stated in an official press conference that the balloon was continuing to move eastward and fly over strategic U.S. military bases. He also revealed that it was flying over Missouri at the center of the United States, which is the optimal location to execute a super EMP attack on the U.S. homeland.

The balloon needn’t have carried an EMP weapon to have been effective either. Modern-day nuclear weapons can be easily miniaturized to weigh less than 200 pounds each. In fact, the smallest U.S. tactical nuclear weapons dating from the late 1950s weighed a mere fifty-six pounds. If armed with a nuclear weapon, such an airship could even be used to execute a decapitation strike on Washington DC, taking out America’s top political and military leadership in a single blow. Similarly, if it were armed with a biological weapon such as weaponized anthrax, the balloon could have been utilized to rain anthrax spores over the United States, affecting millions of Americans with a 90 percent kill rate. Yet another possibility is that the balloon could have been carrying a dirty radiological bomb, whose effects could be spread over a populated area.

The Fallout

All of these possibilities provide a compelling rationale for Biden to have ordered the airship shot down as soon as it began flying over the Aleutian islands on January 28, rather than one week later after it had crossed the entire country.

Ironically, the United States and Canada conducted Operation Noble Defender on Jan 15 through 31 to demonstrate the joint abilities of the U.S. and Canadian Air forces to defend our joint airspace. The Chinese balloon crossed over western Canada and Alaska during the last four days of this exercise, effectively highlighting major vulnerabilities in our air defense systems as well as the unwillingness of U.S. political and military leaders to act.

Biden’s failure to act to defend U.S. airspace from what could have potentially been an existential threat is in furtherance of his previous record of seemingly ignoring existential threats and pretending they don’t exist.  Last year, Russia placed its strategic nuclear arsenal on the highest alert level since the end of the Cold War and operationally deployed its multi-warhead Yars road-mobile missiles. Biden did not even bother to increase our nuclear readiness above DEFCON 5, which is our lowest state of readiness. His decision to leave the U.S. nuclear arsenal essentially vulnerable to a Russian nuclear surprise attack stood in marked contrast to previous presidents of both major political parties, who increased our nuclear alert statuses with Russia to show Moscow we were serious about defending America.

As if to add insult to injury, during a press conference held on February 6, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean Pierre stated that the National Security Council had sent out a TikTok to the press corps to explain why they waited seven days to shoot down the Chinese military spy airship. In other words, Biden’s national security council is using a known Chinese surveillance and spy tool to explain why the administration failed to shoot down a Chinese surveillance/spy airship until after it had completed its mission and collected seven days’ worth of sensitive surveillance data.

If anyone had doubts as to whether the Biden administration was at all concerned about U.S. national security in the wake of the Afghanistan debacle, its Ukraine war policy provoking an unnecessary, and likely nuclear, war with Russia, and the recent classified document scandal, then the administration’s decision to give a Chinese nuclear-capable weapon system a free pass across the entire country should dispel them.

A Failure of Leadership

The failure to defend U.S. airspace from a Chinese airship—which had the capability to carry weapons of mass destruction that could kill millions of Americans—signals that the United States would be unlikely to respond militarily to Chinese aggression against Taiwan. After all, if Biden won’t even act to defend our country, why would our nuclear-armed adversaries believe he would be willing to fight a direct war against them?

Biden’s decision also begs the question of how he would respond if the PRC revealed that the airship was, in fact, carrying a high-yield nuclear weapon or super EMP weapon, and threatened to detonate it if the United States attempted to shoot it down. One can only wonder how the president might respond to a potential Chinese blackmail attempt via nuclear-armed balloon; an effort to strong-arm the White House into accepting its demands, up to and including forcing America to take all three legs of its strategic nuclear triad off alert status—in effect destroying the credibility of our strategic nuclear deterrent and our ability to deter future Chinese attacks on the U.S. homeland.

Ultimately, I believe that the most important, game-changing intelligence this Chinese surveillance balloon will end up gathering is testing whether Biden would shoot down a Chinese nuclear-capable weapons platform while it was flying over our country. Sadly, Biden has failed this crucial test of presidential leadership, and in so doing severely damaged America’s credibility.

David T. Pyne, Esq. is a former U.S. Army combat arms and Headquarters staff officer, who was in charge of armaments cooperation with the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and the Americas from 2000–2003. He holds M.A. in National Security Studies from Georgetown University. He currently serves as Deputy Director of National Operations for the Task Force on National and Homeland Security, and is a contributor to Dr. Peter Pry’s book Blackout Warfare: Attacking The U.S. Electric Power Grid A Revolution In Military Affairs. He also serves as the Editor of “The Real War” newsletter. He may be reached at emptaskforce.ut@gmail.com.

Image: Shutterstock.

Chaque fois qu'on cherche à interpréter les motivations des djihadistes, le même affrontement semble monopoliser la scène : radicalisation religieuse liée à l'islam ou bien radicalisation politique qui prend l'islam pour prétexte ? Mais rares sont les spécialistes qui imaginent encore qu'une cause (...) / France, Islam, Jeunes, Religion, Société, Terrorisme, Fondamentalisme, Banlieue - 2017/12

Deciphering the way Moscow handles its ultimate weapon.

How months of protest forged an even more intransigent regime.