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In a recent interview, Pope Francis took stock of the war in Ukraine. "The strongest one is the one who looks at the situation, thinks about the people and has the courage of the white flag, and negotiates," the pope told Swiss media. The comment led to derision from Ukraine and its Western supporters, who saw in the pontiff's message a call to capitulate. (We'll leave aside the fact that, behind closed doors, some European diplomats are reportedly warming to the idea of a negotiated end to the war.)Pope Francis offered an easy target for criticism by referring to a white flag, the traditional symbol of surrender. But one of his key messages actually was, "Don't be ashamed to negotiate before things get worse." Pope Francis has often referred to the Ukrainian people as martyrs in this war; suggestions that his words are a gift to Putin are misguided and confuse his anti-war instincts for support of Russia's war effort.Pope Francis noted that "the word negotiate is a courageous word." Pierre Hazan, a senior adviser with the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue and author of a new book on conflict mediation, would probably agree. Hazan cut his teeth as a journalist covering the Bosnia War and other conflicts before putting down the pen to take an active role in armed conflict negotiations. One of these was the peace process in the Basque Country that led the terrorist group Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA) to lay down its arms. In "Negotiating with the Devil: Inside the World of Armed Conflict Mediation," the Swiss mediator mounts a strong defense of the importance of negotiation in the middle of a conflict.Before extolling the virtues of talks, Hazan acknowledges the potential pitfalls. Among other things, negotiations risk being manipulated by one of the parties. The author provides the example of the Munich Conference in 1938, which became the antechamber of Adolf Hitler's march on the European continent. There is also the possibility that talks become a smokescreen for violence. Hazan mentions here the Norwegian-led mediation between the Sri Lanka government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), a group of ruthless insurgents fighting for a Tamil state. When the Sri Lankan government wiped out the LTTE in a final offensive in 2009, it also killed around 40,000 civilians in the process. On rare occasions, the problem is not that negotiations end up facilitating carnage but that there is simply no partner willing to talk. That is the case of ISIS or the extinct Shining Path in Peru, explains the Swiss mediator.These difficulties notwithstanding, for Hazan, the key question remains whether "negotiating with war criminals—including the worst of them—might save lives." To this, he replies that "with very few exceptions, the answer is yes, of course." Those who mediate in armed conflicts are forced to consider possibilities that are far removed from ideals of justice in the search for the least bad option, argues Hazan. This became more complicated after the 9/11 attacks, when President Bush declared a "War on Terror," and the room for negotiations with warring states, rebel groups, or terrorist organizations narrowed down dramatically. In this new context, remarks Hazan, "mediation, previously lauded, was pushed aside in favour of military solutions."If total victory over terrorists and rogue states was, as Bush suggested, both just and within reach, then there was little need for negotiation in this new world. If the goal was to export democracy and eliminate terrorism once and for all, Bush failed spectacularly on both accounts. By then, however, the world had already been defined in good-versus-evil terms. Thus, to conduct badly needed talks with the evil side of this simplistic equation (be it Iran, North Korea, or the Taliban) would have been seen as treason to our highest ideals. The U.S., with European countries often following suit, promoted a new paradigm according to which mediation was "perceived as an admission of weakness," writes Hazan.These dynamics can be observed in the case of former United Nations diplomat Álvaro de Soto, who resigned his position as envoy for the Middle East Peace Process in May 2007. After Hamas won the 2006 Palestinian elections, the international community halted direct funding to the Palestinian Authority. The rationale was that this would apply pressure on Hamas to recognize the state of Israel and renounce violence. The consequence was not a moderation in Hamas' positions but a steep increase in poverty among Palestinians and a deterioration of public services.De Soto opposed the aid blockade on Palestinians but had little room to maneuver, as the Peruvian diplomat himself explained in a secret report written before handing in his resignation. In the (subsequently leaked) report, de Soto argued U.S. pressure had "pummelled into submission" the U.N.'s role as a neutral mediator in the Middle East. As Hazan explains, one of the biggest obstacles for de Soto was that his superiors forbade him to continue talks with Hamas or the Syrian government.Hazan added a preface to the original French edition of his book to cover the events that followed Hamas' attack against Israel on October 7, when the militant group killed 1,200 people and took 240 hostages. Since then, Israel's military operation in the Gaza Strip has resulted in the death of at least 31,000 people. Hazan reflects on the Qatar-mediated ceasefire in Gaza that lasted for a week at the end of November 2023. The ceasefire, the author argues, was a historical development for at least two reasons. First, it was probably an unprecedented agreement, as hostages were directly exchanged for ceasefire days. And second, Qatar's role exemplified "the end of Western hegemony over the international system."Whether Western hegemony will be followed by something better is up for debate. However, when Hazan points to Turkey's role in the mediation of the grain deal between Russia and Ukraine, or to China's diplomatic efforts leading to the resumption of ties between Iran and Saudi Arabia, it is easy to recognize a pattern towards a broader plurality in the mediation scene.Hazan offered an interview last month discussing the latest developments in the Ukraine war, which are not included in the book. Hazan explained that he sees two main scenarios for a mediated solution in Ukraine. In the first one, a precarious calm would prevail and there would be a limited ceasefire with Russia and Ukraine technically at war for the foreseeable future. In the second one, what he calls the "Korean model," there would be a demilitarized zone between the two sides with Ukraine obtaining security guarantees and NATO/European Union membership. A more robust mediation process and peace agreement will only happen "if the military or the political situation changes radically either way," he argued.Based on his long-time experience, Hazan notes that "peace is a messy, chaotic business, as is the road that leads to it." There is no sense in negotiating only for negotiations' sake, and mediation is fraught with dangers.Yet experts should not be swayed by the supposed moral certitude of refusing to come to the table. Outright negation of the possibility of talks carries the risk of missing opportunities to settle for the lesser evil even as the greater good fades into the distance.

There is no way that the floating causeway the U.S. military wants to build connecting to the beach at Gaza won't require "boots on the ground" say experts, putting another major question mark on the humanitarian surge project announced by the administration last week.Details have emerged in recent days that the Pentagon plans to build a floating "trident" style causeway out of modular pieces that are en route from Ft. Eustis, Virginia, to Cyprus as we speak. But according to experts like Sal Mercogliano, a former merchant mariner, professor, and host of the "What's Going on with Shipping" podcast, the floating causeway project is going to be a massive endeavor to build and will require daily maintenance from personnel on the beach once put into place."The problem with this one it is not as durable (as a permanent non-floating elevated causeway system) and it has to be maintained. You can't just set it up and leave it alone, you got to be constantly monitoring it, resetting anchors on it. It takes a lot to keep this system up and running. It is not something you just set up and walk away. You also got to have people ashore for it," he said on an earlier podcast before the Trident floating option was actually confirmed by the Pentagon."I'm not sure how the DoD is going to get away with this without having people on the beach," he continued. "There's got to be some interaction here. You can have some people maybe do it for you, but I'm telling you, to do this right, and professionally, you got to put people ashore."There have been numerous reports that private contractor Fog Bow has been tapped to help "organize the movement of aid after it arrives on the Gaza shore." This has not been confirmed by the DoD and the press office did not return a request for comment by RS. Fog Bow, which is run by retired Marine Corps Lt. General Sam Mundy, and Mick Mulroy, former CIA and Assistant Secretary of Defense for the Middle East under the Trump administration, has been mentioned in several stories as talking with the Biden administration (if not already on board), and already raising money to start assisting with both private and government aid deliveries to Gaza.Looking at its team page, Fog Bow certainly has the background for providing logistics and even security for deliveries, but the question remains who might be providing the construction and maintenance support for the floating causeway on the beach that Mercogliano mentioned in his podcast.Another big question mark is the timing. As Mercogliano mentioned, there are are series of Army cargo watercraft sailing what will be an arduous journey from the U.S. to Cyprus. The craft are weighed down with supplies for the construction and will take at least 30 days to arrive (the clock started ticking on March 12). There are two massive Army ships called Landing Support Vehicles (Besson and Loux) which are traveling at about nine knots to Cyprus and are being accompanied by three smaller Landing Craft Utility ships carrying equipment (most likely the modules) and a roll-on roll off vessel that can also serve as a "mother ship," according to Mercogliano. Timing for the project depends on the ships with the slowest speeds and those are the big LCVs.Once the ships get to Cyprus, they will have to be inspected no doubt before the construction process — for the floating pier two miles off the Gaza coast, and then the floating causeway at the beach — can take place. Then there are the security issues, which Mercogliano says are real and haven't been fully accounted for in any Pentagon briefing. Right now there is no guarantee that Hamas will not attempt to attack the pier and no clear answer of who, if U.S. troops won't be on the ground, will be providing that security. Fog Bow? Another private contracting outfit? Biden said last week that Israel was to provide the security but that has yet to be confirmed by Israeli officials. Then this report Friday indicated that Israel was also exploring the use of private security contractors, with the U.S. Neither side would confirm that.It makes one ask, why all the trouble? Why not get the Israelis to open up and let in the upward of 2,500 aid trucks waiting at the Al-Arish gate in Rafah (as witnessed by Gen. Michael Kurilla, US. Central Command, on March 7)? Why wait 60 days or more to build structures and create new security dilemmas when the population in Gaza is slipping into famine as each day goes by?"It is not easy. It's going to take a long time to do we're talking about weeks if not months to set this up. It's going to be expensive," said Mercogliano. "This is going to be millions of dollars to go ahead and get this up, let alone the food supply. And then there's the security issue, the risk, because even though you heard (DoD spokesman) Gen. Ryder say they're not gonna put American, you know, boots on the ground, they're gonna be right there There's a lot of issues associated with this."Interestingly, both Republican and Democratic members of the Senate Armed Services Committee were raising concerns last week about the lack of information provided by the military."I hate to say it, but I think this decision was politically driven by the president after Michigan," said Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Ala.) said noting the president's poor showing in the primary elections there. "And he's trying to be forward-leaning to try to do something to help the folks in Gaza from a humanitarian standpoint, but this is moving really fast and nobody can explain how it's gonna work."Sen. Richard Blumenthal, senior Democratic member of the committee from Connecticut, said he is "convinced that this kind of humanitarian effort is absolutely necessary," but he has "very serious questions about how the construction will be done, with the assurance of safety to our troops."Nonetheless, hundreds of Army soldiers from the 7th Transportation Brigade, left on Mar. 12, from Newport News, Virginia. The orders came as a "shock" to families. Chief Warrant Officer Three Jason West shared what he told his three children, ages 15, 9 and 6. "We told them that we're going to provide humanitarian aid for people that are in need. And that we're going across the ocean. We'll be back as soon as we're done."

This past Wednesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin sat down for an interview in which he yet again made clear that, despite the insistence of pro-diplomacy voices in the West, he was not ready to negotiate an end to the Ukraine war, because Kyiv's uncertain battlefield prospects meant Russia could secure further advances by continuing the war. "It would be ridiculous for us to start negotiating with Ukraine just because it's running out of ammunition," Putin told interviewer Dmitry Kiselyov, according to one particularly viral and widely cited tweet by Wall Street Journal chief foreign affairs correspondent Yaroslav Trofimov. Except that's not what Putin said. In fact, by reading the full text and seeing the quote in context instead of as a selectively edited soundbite, it's clear he was putting out the exact opposite message: "For us to hold negotiations now just because they are running out of ammunition would be ridiculous. Nevertheless, we are open to a serious discussion, and we are eager to resolve all conflicts, especially this one, by peaceful means."What is true is that Putin once more restated the more stringent conditions for peace talks he adopted last year, namely that Moscow will not give up the four regions it officially annexed in September 2022 and that, given the state of the battlefield, Ukraine will have to accept the loss of this territory. "Are we ready to negotiate? We sure are," he said. "But we are definitely not ready for talks that are based on some kind of 'wishful thinking' which comes after the use of psychotropic drugs, but we are ready for talks based on the realities that have developed, as they say in such cases, on the ground."This didn't stop the truncated version of the first quote from being spread far and wide on social media and being held up, often by reporters at top newspapers like Trofimov and other authoritative voices, as definitive proof that negotiations to end the war were impossible and that prolonged war is the only option. "Republican leadership of the House cutting off military supplies to Ukraine has made Putin drop his pretense about desiring peace talks. He wants it all," was Trofimov's summary of the interview. "Putin indicated he won't discuss surrendering territory annexed from Ukraine and appeared confident Russia's army could advance further," the Financial Times Moscow bureau chief Max Seddon reported, before offering the clipped quote as evidence. "Russia spreads rumors about negotiations. Uncritical people write naive articles. US cuts off aid to Ukraine. Putin says — thanks, with your help I'll win the war [and] destroy Ukraine," wrote historian Timothy Snyder, citing Trofminov's summary. "War criminal Putin doesn't want to negotiate, only to rape, murder & pilage innocent Ukrainians," tweeted Belgian MEP Guy Verhofstadt. "The only way this war ends is if we step up and give Ukrainians what they ask for. Those in the West calling for negotiations serve this monster."Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.) used it to claim the GOP's hold-up of military aid was "fueling Putin's aggression and the Russian war effort." Identical arguments — that the truncated quote showed Putin's talk of negotiations was a smokescreen, and that the only way to get to a peaceful end to the war is to double down on a military solution — were, and still are today, being spread by a wide variety of prominent, influential and often hawkish voices, largely piggybacking off Trofimov and Seddon's misrepresentation of the remarks. It's not been much better outside of social media. Putin's comments about negotiations were left entirely out of Western media reports on his interview at Reuters, the Associated Press, PBS and Voice of America. Only CNBC included the comments with the full quote; CNN also reported that "Putin said Russia would be willing to negotiate," though citing only his remark about "realities on the ground." Others double down on using the shortened quote for a misleading framing, such as this Washington Examiner headline, or this Telegraph report. The latter went beyond merely the headline and opened by telling readers that Putin "has ruled out opening peace talks with Ukraine," before putting together a composite quote from the interview that deliberately skipped over his remark that Moscow was open to talks and eager to resolve the conflicts diplomatically.Why is this important? Hawks would charge that simply daring to correct the record here is a sign of suspicious pro-Putin sympathies. But willingness to negotiate has nothing to do with moral virtue: the violently repressive Saudi government, which recently went on an execution spree, also eventually negotiated an end to its horrific war on Yemen despite the horror it had unleashed on the country. More recently, Hamas has shown a willingness to negotiate throughout the Israeli assault on Gaza, talks that bore fruit back in November with a ceasefire and hostage swap, none of which absolves it for the atrocities of October 7 or renders its members model citizens. Just as in those cases, one does not need to trust in Putin here, an authoritarian and practiced politician, to proceed with talks. Peace negotiations are, by their very nature, carried out between parties without ample reserves of faith in and goodwill towards each other, and part of any talks involves devising a mechanism with acceptable security guarantees for each party that removes the need to rely on mere trust. The surest way to verify if someone is serious about such negotiations is to actually try them. The fact that Putin insists he's open to negotiations, albeit with major territorial concessions from the Ukrainian side, should be encouraging news for anyone who genuinely cares about Ukraine. The RAND Institute argued in January last year that the economic and social damage caused by a longer war outweighed the possible benefits of military reconquest of lost territory. Indeed, the effects of prolonging the war in search of a morally satisfying military victory have been devastating for the country: tens of thousands killed and wounded, widespread destruction of infrastructure, a demographic crisis, and massive debt that will leave the country vulnerable to rapacious creditors. Many thousands of Ukrainians are desperately dodging conscription to avoid dying in the war, with a plurality of 48 percent of Ukrainian men admitting they are not prepared to fight. These remarks by Putin are only the latest signal that Moscow is ready to enter talks. Putin similarly told Tucker Carlson in February several times that Russia was "ready" to negotiate. More importantly, three separate reports in the New York Times, Bloomberg and Reuters have revealed behind-the-scenes overtures by Moscow, reportedly as early as last September, to Washington for peace talks, which the Biden administration has so far not acted on. We can't know for sure if Putin's remarks are serious until they're tested in negotiations. But that doesn't give journalists and commentators free rein to mislead the public that they don't exist, all for the purpose of undermining the possibility of peacefully ending a war that more and more Ukrainians don't want to fight in.

There is little secret that proponents of total victory in Ukraine have trained their focus on ensuring that a $60 billion Ukraine military aid package, introduced by the Biden administration late last year, is passed by Congress. Its backers claim this aid is of vital, even existential importance, but what effects could this package actually have on the battlefronts in Ukraine and what is really at stake in the debate over Ukraine aid more broadly?
The funding, part of a larger $95 billion supplemental package for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, allocates $20 billion to replenish Department of Defense stockpiles after previous rounds of Ukraine aid, around $14 billion for Ukraine to purchase weapons from U.S. entities, $15 billion in support including intelligence services and military training, and $8 billion in direct budget support for the Ukrainian government. This sum, though prodigious in an absolute sense, pales in comparison to the $113 billion in Ukraine aid approved by Congress in 2022 during a time in the war when the balance of forces was much more favorable to the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) than it is now.
The AFU faces a cascade of critical challenges; prime among them are its growing shortage of troops and its dire munitions deficit in what, according to Ukrainian officials, has become an "artillery war." The aid package strives to alleviate Ukraine's mounting shell hunger, but money does not directly translate into readily-available munitions. It is not clear how many shells, and how quickly, the U.S. can send Ukraine even if the supplemental was approved today. Russia, according to estimates by RUSI from earlier this year, fires 10,000 artillery rounds per day. Consider, for a sense of scale, that European annual production by February 2023 totaled just 300,000 rounds — or roughly what Russia has spent every month in Ukraine. Russia — which is believed to have made around 2 million artillery shells in 2023 — outproduced its Western counterparts at a rate of seven to one, according to an Estonian intelligence assessment from last year.
Josep Borrell, Europe's top diplomat, noted that Europe cannot shoulder the burden of supporting Ukraine on its own, but there are signs that Washington could struggle to backfill some of Ukraine's core needs even with ample political will on both sides of the aisle. Indeed, there is no immediate fix for revamping the U.S. defense-industrial base to support the staggering scale of Ukrainian munitions expenditures. U.S. officials have announced plans for an incremental production ramp peaking at 100,000 shells per month, but this target will not be fully met until at least October 2025. Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said Ukraine needs 2.5 million shells this year — or roughly 208,000 per month — to sustain its war effort, suggesting a shell usage rate that the West simply cannot underwrite in the short to medium term even with the supplemental funding bill.
Kyiv's severe materiel deficits are accompanied by equally serious manpower shortages, a problem that the West cannot alleviate short of direct military intervention in Ukraine. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has struggled to craft a viable mobilization strategy amid spiking domestic divisions even as the number of foreign volunteers has declined from its peak of 20,000 in early 2022. These shortages are driven not only by Ukrainian casualties, which reportedly exceed the 31,000 total combat deaths claimed by Zelenskyy last month, but by depopulation trends so stark as to verge on demographic collapse. Kyiv must likewise grapple with the second-order effects of waging a prolonged and costly total war; a more expansive mobilization program would take even more people out of the labor force, further straining Ukraine's limping wartime economy.
Moscow is not a static actor in this unfolding drama. The Russians keenly perceive Ukraine's weaknesses and are racing to exploit them to the fullest extent, leveraging their vast manpower and firepower advantages to apply pressure all along the line of contact in Eastern-South Eastern Ukraine in the aftermath of Avdiivka's fall.
In short, the Ukrainian war effort is on life support. Its collapse is, for the first time since the Russian invasion commenced in 2022, now a distinct possibility. What can the $60 billion aid package achieve in light of these grim realities? It will undoubtedly help Ukraine impose costs on and slow the pace of Russian advances. Though it will not forestall the continued threat of a collapse, it will likely give the AFU a lease on life through the coming months. But, as Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) accurately observed, it "is not going to fundamentally change the reality on the battlefield."
Importantly, to acknowledge the limits of Western aid is not the same as suggesting that there is absolutely no value in continuing to support Ukraine. Indeed, a scenario in which the AFU collapses and Ukraine gets steamrolled by Russian forces would be dangerous for everyone involved and make it more difficult to reach a durable settlement. But it is equally true that any plan to support Ukraine must be coupled with a sober assessment of what can and cannot be achieved at this stage in the war.
Prospects of continued Western aid to Ukraine are an important, if not principal, source of leverage vis-a-vis Moscow in this war, but leverage tends to dissipate if left untapped. The problem is not aid as such but, rather, a continued insistence on maximalist war aims that are increasingly detached from this war's realities.
Proposals to sustain Ukraine's defense through 2024 in a bid to push Kyiv toward a new counteroffensive in 2025 are setting the AFU up for a re-enactment of the disastrous 2023 counteroffensive, if not worse. Plans involving NATO boots on the ground in Ukraine have wisely been ruled out by most Western leaders.
Advocates of maximalist war aims in Ukraine have been remarkably successful over the last two years in affecting their policies both on and off the battlefield. From HIMARS rocket launchers and SCALP cruise missiles to Patriot missile systems and Leopard 2A6 main battle tanks, Ukraine has been saturated with a vast and potent array of Western weaponry. The international sanctions regime on Russia is by far the largest in history and growing, with the EU now on its thirteenth package of restrictive measures while the U.S. Treasury Department constantly looks for opportunities to further tighten the screws on Moscow.
The $60 billion supplemental is the latest such measure, but the issue has never been a lack of action — it's the absence of a viable endgame in Ukraine. Speaker Mike Johnson has called on the Biden administration to articulate "a clear strategy in Ukraine, a path to resolving the conflict." Indeed, it is vitally important to re-center the Ukraine debate on achieving consensus around a realistic framework for war termination.

Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is vowing to launch an invasion of Rafah, a city located along the Gaza-Egypt border where more than 1.5 million Palestinians currently shelter.Egypt's stakes are extremely high given how much spillover from Gaza into the Sinai Peninsula could be destabilizing. Cairo understandably wants this war to be over immediately.A massive refugee influx into the Sinai from Gaza could result in Palestinians waging an armed resistance against Israel from Egyptian soil — a nightmarish scenario from Cairo's perspective. Egypt also does not want to be seen as accepting Palestinian refugees in exchange for money from the U.S., which would contribute to perceptions on the "Arab Street" that President Abdel Fatah el-Sisi's government is complicit in a "Nakba 2.0."Understanding Egypt's vulnerability to spillover from Gaza requires considering Cairo's other foreign policy challenges too. The Gaza war's spread into the Red Sea has harmed Egypt's economy in the form of lost Suez Canal revenue with ships rerouting to avoid the body of water altogether. Additionally, Rafah isn't the only border security crisis concerning Egyptian officials. "They've got Sudan in the south, which is a mess. To the west, Libya is a mess. So basically, everywhere Egypt looks now is a problem. There's also the issue of the Renaissance Dam," noted Kenneth Katzman, a Senior Fellow at the Soufan Center, in an interview with RS.The U.S. RoleSince October, Egyptian diplomacy has been key to efforts aimed at implementing a ceasefire, negotiating hostage-prisoner swaps, and delivering Gaza humanitarian assistance. As a result, the Biden administration perceives Egypt to be more indispensable than ever. Notably, Biden and his team haven't recently criticized the Sisi government's human rights record — a major contrast to Biden's rhetoric as a presidential candidate.The White House understands Cairo's concerns and Biden's public position is that Israel should not wage a full-scale assault on Rafah without ensuring the safety of Palestinians sheltering there. But Egypt continues to be frustrated with Biden's refusal to deploy Washington's leverage to pressure Israel into actually changing its conduct on the ground."Washington's support [for Egypt on this front has been] confined to making clear its opposition to any full-scale transfer of refugees, forced, unforced, permanent, or temporary," Charles Dunne, a former U.S. diplomat who served in Cairo and Jerusalem, told RS. "It is pushing back on talk in Israel — so far unofficial — that a mass population transfer could be part of the solution to Israel's Gaza problem," he added."My personal conclusion is that [U.S. officials] probably made the point [to their Egyptian counterparts] that some of the Gazans would inevitably be needed to be let into Egypt in order to prevent a greater humanitarian catastrophe as the Israelis move military operations closer to Rafah," Dave DesRoches, an assistant professor at the National Defense University in Washington, DC, told RS. "My guess is the Egyptians are concerned both that the Gazan presence would become permanent as well as that Egypt would be seen as abetting the Israeli military operations," he added.If Israel wages an all-out assault on Rafah and there is a massive displacement of Palestinians into Egypt, Washington would probably financially assist Cairo. But Katzman belives the White House is likely more focused on trying to prevent that from happening. "My impression is that [the Biden] administration is not really tackling the idea of what if there is a flood of refugees into the Sinai, while I think [its] strategy is to make sure that doesn't happen in the first place," he told RS.Katzman added, "The U.S. is encouraging Israel to coordinate with Egypt to the extent possible, which I think is happening. But beyond that, I don't think the administration has done any planning because they don't expect that worst case scenario to happen.""Cairo worries that even entertaining the idea for emergency planning purposes could be seen as a green light to the IDF. That appears to be where we are for now, and Cairo has focused on building a fortified buffer zone along the border with Gaza to prevent a refugee crisis," said Dunne.Red Sea CrisisAnother important aspect of U.S.-Egypt relations amid the Gaza war and its regionalization is the Red Sea security crisis. Since November, the Houthis have been launching missiles and drones at ships off Yemen's coast, claiming to support Gaza by targeting vessels linked to Israel, the U.S., and the UK. As of last month, Egypt's Suez Canal revenue had decreased by 40 to 50 percent throughout the crisis, according to Sisi.Gordon Gray, the former U.S. ambassador to Tunisia, told RS that there is "strong incentive for Egypt to assist the U.S. efforts to guarantee freedom of the seas" given what is at stake for Egypt in terms of Suez Canal fees amid Houthi maritime attacks.But despite economic setbacks from the Red Sea security crisis, Egypt did not join Operation Prosperity Guardian (OPG) and Cairo has played no official role in the Washington-led bombing campaign against the Houthis that began almost two months ago. This is not because Cairo doesn't share the West's concerns about the Houthi attacks on vessels. To the contrary, Egypt and the U.S. strongly agree that no Yemeni group should be allowed to disrupt maritime shipping in the region. In fact, when Saudi Arabia launched Operation Decisive Storm in March 2015, Egypt committed its naval forces to provide security in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden. At that time, Sisi referred to the Red Sea as an "Arab lake" and identified the Bab al-Mandab as important to "Egyptian and Arab national security."Public opinion at home mostly explains Cairo not joining OPG nor formally supporting the U.S.-UK strikes. Many Egyptians would now see their government overtly aligning with Washington and London against the Houthis as Cairo facilitating Israel's war on Gaza."Egypt has refused to join [OPG] and, while it's possible that Egypt is making some behind-the-scenes contribution, any such contribution is pretty much invisible to the naked eye at the moment. If anything, it's the very least they can get away with doing," according to Dunne.DesRoches believes that the Egyptians have probably been allowing London to use Egyptian airspace for bombing Houthi targets in Yemen. "Extrapolating, I'm confident that U.S. support, intelligence, and resupply flights are probably transiting Egyptian airspace," he told RS. "I have a slightly lower degree of confidence that the Egyptians share intelligence and the common operating picture from their various assets to locate missile tracks and launch sites. This is probably limited more by the lack of Egyptian capacity than by any policy decision to not cooperate." Ultimately, the U.S.-Egypt alliance remains strong. But Cairo must approach this relationship with more caution given Washington's role in Gaza's destruction and its growing isolation in the Arab-Islamic world.

With no ceasefire in the war between Israel and Hamas in sight and Houthi forces in Yemen still firing missiles and drones at commercial shipping in the Red Sea, the EU's efforts at addressing conflict in Gaza and its broader regional ramifications keep flailing.After weeks of discussions, the EU officially launched its naval operation in the Red Sea on February 19 to protect international commercial shipping from Houthi attacks. The Houthis claim they wantto force a ceasefire in Gaza. Yet, while the ceasefire remains elusive, the attacks impose real costs on EU members: the EU commissioner for economy Paolo Gentiloni recently estimated that the rerouting of shipping from the Red Sea has increased delivery times for shipments between Asia and the EU by 10 to 15 days and the consequent costs by around 400%. Around 40% of the EU's total trade with the Middle East and Asia passes through the Red Sea.Protecting that shipping route thus is an important collective economic and security interest for the EU. Yet only four countries — France, Germany, Italy and Belgium — out of the 27 member states have agreed to provide warships for the new operation. Spain, which refrained from using its veto power to block the initiative, nonetheless declined to participate, having expressed concerns from the outset that any armed operation would reduce pressure on Israel to agree to a ceasefire in Gaza. A bigger question is how effective this new EU operation will be in countering the Houthi threat given its purely defensive mandate to provide "situational awareness, accompany vessels and protect them against possible attacks at sea." Accordingly, the participating EU warships will be authorized to fire on Houthi targets only if they themselves or commercial vessels they are to protect are attacked. That rules out pre-emptive action against Houthi missile batteries or related targets.The defensive nature of the operation, however, may not be enough to convince the Houthis to refrain from attacking the European ships. In fact, Houthi leaders warned Italy, one of the new operation's chief promoters, that it will become "a target if it participates in attacks on the Houthis." If this threat comes to fruition, will the EU authorize offensive action against the Houthis, potentially drawing itself into a wider conflict? Will it rely on U.S. hard power for protection given that Washington is already engaged against the Houthis through "Operation Prosperity Guardian," in which a few EU nations – Denmark, Netherlands and Greece, as well as non-EU NATO members Britain and Norway -- are also participating? Would such developments not lead to a de facto merging of the U.S. and EU-led operations under Washington's lead — an outcome Europeans sought to avoid and which is the very reason why they launched their own mission in the first place? That these are not abstract questions is underscored by the failure, so far, of scores of U.S.- and UK-led strikes to degrade the Houthis' capabilities to the point where they would no longer pose a significant threat. Indeed, just as the EU announced its mission, the Houthis hit a British cargo ship which was at risk of sinking in the Gulf of Aden in what the Yemeni rebels claimed was their biggest attack yet. The United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations confirmed the incident, though it did not name the ship.Ironically, the safest way for the EU to avoid a direct military engagement with the Houthis, apart from testing their vow to stop attacking shipping if Israel ends its Gaza offensive, would be to reduce the number of targets in the Red Sea by encouraging ships to reroute. But such an outcome would, of course, vindicate the Houthi strategy to impose costs on the Western powers for the failure to stop the war in Gaza.And that brings us back to the mother of all conflicts in the Middle East: the continuing war in Gaza. The EU's approach so far has been to delink Gaza from the crisis in the Red Sea and the broader escalation in the region, including clashes between Israel and Lebanon's Hezbollah. Yet mounting tensions on that front show that its approach is not working. Some actors in the EU understand the urgent need for a ceasefire in Gaza as a necessary condition for regional de-escalation. The EU high representative on foreign policy Josep Borrell has been particularly vocal in his criticism of Israel. He suggested limiting arms sales to Tel Aviv on the grounds that such transfers violate EU guidelines that ban sales to countries accused of violations of the international humanitarian law. A Dutch appeals court recently ordered a halt to exports of F-35 jet parts to Israel on the same grounds. However, it is highly unlikely that the EU as a whole would adopt such a position, given that a number of countries – especially Germany, Austria, Czech Republic, Hungary – strongly support Israel.A stronger point of leverage could be to suspend fully or partially the association agreement between the EU and Israel. The EU is Israel's largest trading partner. In 2023, that agreement enabled 46.8 billion euros worth of bilateral trade. The prime ministers of Spain and Ireland, Pedro Sanchez and Leo Varadkar, respectively, asked the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, to "urgently review" whether Israel is violating the human rights clauses included in that agreement. On February 19, the Spanish foreign minister, Jose Manuel Albares, insisted that the review should be completed in time for the next EU foreign ministers meeting on March 18.A full suspension of the agreement seems very unlikely even if the Commission finds Israel to have violated its human rights obligations because that would call for a unanimous decision by all member states. A partial suspension would require a qualified majority: 55% of member states (or 15 out of 27) representing 65% of the EU's total population. Notably, the only precedent for taking such an action came in 2011 when the EU suspended an association agreement with Syria in response to mass violations of human rights by the Bashar al-Assad regime. Meanwhile, the EU proved unable last week to issue even an official appeal to Israel not to follow through with its plans to carry out a ground invasion of Rafah, the southernmost city in Gaza, which has become the last refuge of nearly a million refugees from elsewhere in the enclave. In the face of a veto threat by Hungary, the other 26 member states instead issued a joint statement warning of the catastrophic humanitarian consequences should Israel move ahead with such an invasion. Notably, however, Hungary was isolated in its opposition to the appeal as Germany and other member states that have traditionally been reluctant to criticize Israel's conduct of war were on board. That is a step forward, but it's too little and it comes too late. As long as the EU keeps avoiding imposing real consequences on Israel for its conduct, it will keep losing influence in the Middle East.

Russia's invasion of Ukraine opened with a march toward Kyiv. The northern thrust of this push came from Belarusian territory. To this day, Belarus remains a hub for Russian attacks on its southern neighbor. Worryingly, the country now hosts Russian tactical nuclear weapons, a situation unthinkable a few years earlier. Why did Belarus, previously keeping its distance from Russian power, throw in its lot with Moscow? Could the United States have prevented such an outcome?Since its independence, Belarus has had close relations with Russia but always stayed out of the Kremlin's overwhelming shadow. Following the 2008 Russo-Georgian War, Minsk refused to recognize the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, despite Russia's insistence. A dispute over dairy product exports led to the 2009 "Milk War." Relations became so poor that Russian TV channels aired programs presenting President Alexander Lukashenko as a despicable tyrant, something unimaginable today.Before 2014, Americans and Europeans had little sympathy for "Europe's last dictatorship." But the Crimean annexation, the Donbas war, and the Russian threat's resurrection changed the West's outlook. Some envisioned pulling Belarus away from Russia's orbit and associating it with Europe instead. Western capitals put democracy promotion on hold for dialogue's sake. Belarus, too, felt an existential threat and pursued better relations with the West. It became defiant toward Moscow and tried to limit Russian influence over the national military.Belarus released all its political prisoners in 2015 to please the United States. In turn, Washington ended some sanctions on the regime. While the Russians pushed hard to establish an air base, the Belarusians resisted. They also distanced themselves from Russia's most confrontational policies. For instance, Lukashenko invited NATO observers to the massive 2017 Russian-led Zapad military maneuvers, fearing the exercises would scare away its Western neighbors.Bilateral U.S.-Belarus relations kept improving. In October 2018, Assistant Secretary of State Wess Mitchell was the first senior American diplomat to travel to Belarus and meet Lukashenko in over a decade. Diplomatic contacts intensified, and the two countries signed a bilateral "Open Skies" agreement, a sign of increasing trust. Then-national security adviser John Bolton visited Minsk in August 2019. Lukashenko responded enthusiastically to American openings, encouraging him to resist Russian pressure to accelerate political and economic integration in the supranational "Union State." That year also saw Belarus take significant steps to hedge against the Russian risk. Minsk introduced a policy of "Belarusianization" to mobilize the populace's nationalism and insulate it from Russian societal influence while introducing a visa-free regime for EU and American citizens' short-term travels. The country intensified its efforts to modernize the military and sent security cooperation feelers toward Lithuania, Poland, and Ukraine, all countries at odds with Russia. Minsk expressed hope for building up ties with NATO.In February 2020, then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo visited Belarus. Never had U.S.-Belarus relations been so cordial, and never had Russia-Belarus relations been so poor. When Belarus faced an oil price dispute with Russia, Pompeo quickly agreed to sell it oil, justifying that this deal "strengthens Belarusian sovereignty and independence," a wise policy if one fears Russian influence. But the U.S.-Belarusian honeymoon was not to last, and the Russians soon gained more than they ever bargained for.In 2020, Lukashenko's decision to run for the upcoming presidential election profoundly disgruntled the liberal opposition, as the election would likely be rigged in his favor. Indeed, he won the August election in a landslide. This engendered a mass protest movement against the regime. Following the EU, the United States refused to recognize Lukashenko's victory, sanctioned his regime, and openly sided with the opposition. U.S.-Belarus ties became nonexistent. After relations with the West collapsed, Belarus threw in its lot with Moscow. Sensing the opportunity, Putin was quick to congratulate Lukashenko for his victory. He assured Minsk he would deploy Russian security forces if the protest movement got out of control. Now in the Kremlin's debt, Lukashenko and Putin had a flurry of conversations and meetings, and Lukashenko accelerated the Union State integration process in exchange for Russian money. In retaliation to the West's hostility, Minsk engineered a migrant crisis by pushing large numbers of refugees toward the Polish border. Throughout 2021 and early 2022, military cooperation reached a height unseen before, which we know in hindsight was preparation for Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The two countries' air defense units started joint combat duties, and Belarus finally agreed to host the Russian air force. In November 2021, Lukashenko promised to intervene in a future war in Ukraine and acknowledged Russian sovereignty over Crimea. Belarus also decided to amend its constitution to introduce Russian nuclear weapons. Previously, Russian forces could enter Belarus only during prearranged exercises. But pretexting military maneuvers, Russian troops arrived en masse. Ultimately, Belarus received the West's opprobrium for accepting that Russian forces use its territory to attack Ukraine on February 24, 2022.This sequence shows that adroit statecraft can accomplish much at little cost and that ideology can create widespread, unforeseen damage to U.S. interests. Minsk resisted aligning with Moscow until 2020 despite intense Russian pressure. Indeed, the U.S. and European engagement policy after the 2014 Ukrainian crisis offered Belarus leverage over the Kremlin. However, following the 2020 elections, Washington abandoned engagement and opted for maximum pressure, perceived as regime change. Out of options, Lukashenko requested Russian help. Now forced to do Putin's bidding, he accepted the Russian military on his soil, enabled the thrust toward Kyiv in early 2022, and now even hosts Russian nuclear weapons. Washington had no direct interest in openly siding with the opposition against Lukashenko. Had the protesters seized power, it could have endorsed them. Had Lukashenko triumphed, it could have maintained the course of strengthening Belarus's hand against Russia. But America's urge to support the losing side for ideological motives sank U.S.-Belarus relations to the bottom and made it impossible for Minsk to play the West against Russia. Lukashenko was then forced to follow the orders of Putin, his last backer, ultimately leading to Belarusian support for Russia's invasion of Ukraine.Now under Russian military control, independent Belarus's race is run. The current regime might remain in office as a Russian satrap. But the Kremlin will probably conclude that annexing the country represents the safest option to guarantee long-term domination and grow Russia's power base. Counterfactuals are always risky, but Moscow would have struggled to subjugate Lukashenko had the United States not jettisoned engagement for maximum pressure in 2020.Although Belarus's fate is sealed, Washington must not repeat the same mistake elsewhere. Many potential partners to counterbalance Russian and Chinese power are unsavory authoritarian states. Preaching non-proliferation and liberalization, legacy neoconservative policies pushed North Korea toward Beijing despite Pyongyang expressing fear of China's rise. While Iran traditionally eschewed great power alignment, American intransigence and Trump's abandonment of the 2015 nuclear deal encouraged Tehran to embrace China and Russia, even supporting Putin's war effort. Washington can continue growing Beijing and Moscow's spheres of influence by letting ideology drive American foreign policy. In that case, China and Russia will gain additional means to threaten the United States and its allies. Otherwise, it could use efficient statecraft, such as its pre-2020 Belarus policy, to secure new partners and limit its rivals' opportunities. Of prudence or ideology, which will prevail?

Deaths from terrorism in Africa have skyrocketed more than 100,000 percent during the U.S. war on terror according to a new study by Africa Center for Strategic Studies, a Pentagon research institution. These findings contradict claims by U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) that it is thwarting terrorist threats on the continent and promoting security and stability.Throughout all of Africa, the State Department counted a total of just nine terrorist attacks in 2002 and 2003, resulting in a combined 23 casualties. At that time, the U.S. was just beginning a decades-long effort to provide billions of dollars in security assistance, train many thousands of African military personnel, set up dozens of outposts, dispatch its own commandos on a wide range of missions, create proxy forces, launch drone strikes, and even engage in ground combat with militants in Africa. Most Americans, including members of Congress, are unaware of the extent of these operations — or how little they have done to protect African lives.Last year, fatalities from militant Islamist violence in Africa rose by 20 percent — from 19,412 in 2022 to 23,322 — reaching "a record level of lethal violence," according to the Africa Center. This represents almost a doubling in deaths since 2021 and a 101,300 percent jump since 2002-2003.For decades, U.S. counter-terrorism efforts in Africa have been centered on two main fronts: Somalia and the West African Sahel. Each saw significant spikes in terrorism last year.U.S. Special Operations forces were first dispatched to Somalia in 2002, followed by military aid, advisers, and private contractors. More than 20 years later, U.S. troops are still conducting counterterrorism operations there, primarily against the Islamist militant group al-Shabaab. To this end, Washington has provided billions of dollars in counterterrorism assistance, according to a 2023 report by the Costs of War Project at Brown University. Americans have also conducted more than 280 air strikes and commando raids there and created numerous proxy forces to conduct low-profile military operations.Somalia saw, according to the Africa Center, "a 22-percent increase in fatalities in 2023 — reaching a record high of 7,643 deaths." This represents a tripling of fatalities since 2020.The findings are even more damning for the Sahel. In 2002 and 2003, the State Department counted a total of just nine terrorist attacks in Africa. Today, the nations of the West African Sahel are plagued by terrorist groups that have grown, evolved, splintered, and reconstituted themselves. Under the black banners of jihadist militancy, men on motorcycles — wearing sunglasses and turbans and armed with AK-47s — rumble into villages to impose their harsh brand of Sharia law and terrorize, assault, and kill civilians. Relentless attacks by these jihadis have destabilized Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger. "Fatalities in the Sahel represent a near threefold increase from the levels seen in 2020," according to the Africa Center report. "Fatalities in the Sahel amounted to 50 percent of all militant Islamist-linked fatalities reported on the continent in 2023."At least 15 officers who benefited from U.S. security assistance have been involved in 12 coups in West Africa and the greater Sahel during the war on terror. The list includes officers from Burkina Faso (2014, 2015, and twice in 2022); Chad (2021); Gambia (2014); Guinea (2021); Mali (2012, 2020, and 2021); Mauritania (2008); and Niger (2023). At least five leaders of the Nigerien junta, for example, received American assistance, according to a U.S. official. They, in turn, appointed five U.S.-trained members of the Nigerien security forces to serve as that country's governors.Such military coups have undermined American aims of providing stability and security to Africans, yet the United States has been hesitant to cut ties with these rogue regimes. Despite the Nigerien coup, for example, the United States continues to garrison troops at, and conduct missions from, its large drone base there. Juntas have also amped up atrocities. Take Colonel Assimi Goïta, who worked with U.S. Special Operations forces, participated in U.S. training exercises, and attended the Joint Special Operations University in Florida before overthrowing Mali's government in 2020. Goïta then took the job of vice president in a transitional government officially charged with returning the country to civilian rule, only to seize power again in 2021.That same year, Goita's junta reportedly authorized the deployment of Russia-linked Wagner mercenary forces to fight Islamist militants after close to two decades of failed Western-backed counterterrorism efforts. Wagner — a paramilitary group founded by the late Yevgeny Prigozhin, a former hot-dog vendor turned warlord — went on to be implicated in hundreds of human rights abuses alongside the longtime U.S.-backed Malian military, including a 2022 massacre that killed 500 civilians.U.S. law generally restricts countries from receiving military aid following military coups, but the U.S. has continued to provide assistance to Sahelian juntas. While Goïta's 2020 and 2021 coups triggered prohibitions on some forms of U.S. security assistance, American tax dollars have continued to fund his forces. According to the State Department, the U.S. provided more than $16 million in security aid to Mali in 2020 and almost $5 million in 2021. As of July 2023, the department's Bureau of Counterterrorism was waiting on congressional approval to transfer an additional $2 million to Mali. (The State Department did not reply to Responsible Statecraft's request for an update on the status of that funding.)Similarly, Burkina Faso's military killed scores of civilians in drone strikes last year, according to a recent report released by Human Rights Watch. The attacks, targeting Islamist militants in crowded marketplaces and at a funeral, left at least 60 civilians dead and dozens more injured. For more than a decade, the U.S. poured tens of millions of dollars into security aid to Burkina Faso. U.S. Africa Command or AFRICOM is, according to spokesperson Kelly Cahalan, "not currently providing assistance to Burkina Faso." But she did not respond to questions clarifying what, exactly, that means. Last year, in fact, AFRICOM commander Gen. Michael Langley admitted that the U.S. has continued to provide military training to Burkinabè forces. Those troops, for example, took part in Flintlock 2023, an annual training exercise sponsored by U.S. Special Operations Command Africa. Still, Burkina Faso suffered 67 percent of the militant Islamist-related fatalities in the Sahel (7,762) in 2023, according to the Africa Center.U.S. Africa Command touts that it "counters transnational threats and malign actors" and promotes "regional security, stability and prosperity" helping its African partners to ensure the "security and safety" of their people. The fact that civilian deaths from militant Islamist violence have reached record levels, according to the Africa Center, and spiked 101,300 percent during the war on terror demonstrates the opposite.AFRICOM directed queries on the findings of the Africa Center's new report to the Office of the Secretary of Defense. The Pentagon did not respond to the questions prior to publication.

With Israel's invasion of Gaza inching toward the possibility of a long-term ceasefire, if not a formal resolution, we can begin to draw certain conclusions about the strategic course of the latest Middle Eastern conflagration. Above all, despite inflicting widespread destruction on the impoverished Gaza Strip, Israel's stated maximalist objective of destroying Hamas appears firmly out of reach. While part of this failure to strike a decisive blow follows from the inherent difficulty of counterinsurgency operations, Hamas's major allies — Iran, Hezbollah, Yemen's Houthis, and Shia Islamist militias in Iraq — also played a significant role. Crucially, these forces, constituting a loose coalition called the Axis of Resistance, are pressuring Washington to push Israel to the bargaining table by striking American weak points in the Middle East.Central to the Axis of Resistance's apparent logic in the latest conflict, and its struggle against the U.S.-Israel alliance more generally, lies the inescapable fact that its enemies possess overwhelming military, technological, and economic advantages. Yet the very global primacy of the United States that underlies this disproportion can make Washington uniquely vulnerable to smaller, more tactically nimble opponents.The regional ripples of the current war make this vulnerability especially clear. Rather than face the U.S. and Israel head-on, Iran and its allies took advantage of the overstretched American position in the Middle East. The efforts of Yemen's Houthis in the Red Sea provide perhaps the most dramatic illustration of this asymmetrical strategy. Central to the United States' international status is its naval dominance, which has allowed American policymakers to confer on their nation the mantle once worn by Britain in its imperial heyday: global manager and guardian of seaborne commerce.With just a few cheap drones and missiles, the Houthis instituted an effective blockade of the Red Sea, thus challenging this U.S. claim to be the worldwide arbiter of freedom of navigation. While U.S. forces have apparently proven relatively effective in destroying Houthi projectiles once launched, even President Joe Biden has admitted that U.S-UK airstrikes on Houthi positions in Yemen have largely failed to degrade the group's capacity for action. According to one metric, as of this writing the volume of traffic moving through the Red Sea's Bab al-Mandeb strait, as measured by weight, remains less than half of what it was this time last year.Elsewhere in the Middle East, other members of the Axis of Resistance similarly turned building blocks of American global preeminence into liabilities for Washington. In Iraq, Islamist Shia militias, formally integrated into the country's military as components of the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) even as they sustain close links with Iran, have maintained a steady stream of attacks against U.S. military infrastructure. Though the U.S. withdrew from Iraq in 2011, its forces returned in 2014 as part of the battle against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). In the minds of American planners, the bases thus established both bolster the U.S. presence in the world's major oil-producing region and its efforts to contain Iran. Now, though, they look more like sitting ducks than strategic assets. In fact, reflecting the entwinement of the Axis's goal of relieving pressure on Hamas with the narrower interests of its constituent parts, the consistent series of militia attacks likely contributed to Washington's recent ascension to formal negotiations with Iraq over a phased withdrawal of American troops — 2,500 of which remain in the country despite a 2020 resolution by the Iraqi parliament calling for their removal.The international struggle against ISIS also presented the U.S. an opportunity to gain a foothold in conflict-torn Syria, where American arms and training for rebel factions helped fuel a brutal civil war. The main U.S. presence in Syria is concentrated in the country's oil-rich northeast, though American forces also control the strategically vital al-Tanf border crossing with Iraq.The roughly 900 American troops in the country assist U.S.-allied Kurdish forces and allow Washington to deprive the Syrian state of critical oil revenue. But, like their counterparts in Iraq, they have lately been at the mercy of drone and rocket strikes, largely from the aforementioned Iraqi PMF. Indeed, analogous to the situation in Iraq, the precarity of U.S. positions in Syria as driven home by these assaults has reportedly spurred debate within the Biden administration about an American departure from that country as well.While such attacks in the Red Sea, Iraq, and Syria demonstrate the upside of the Axis of Resistance's regional campaign, its asymmetrical calculus is not without risks. Perhaps the best illustration of this was a recent drone strike, undertaken by Iraqi militia, against a secretive U.S. base in Jordan, near that country's tri-border region with Iraq and Syria. The attack killed three American troops, the first U.S. combat casualties in the present conflict.This result set off alarm bells in Tehran (and prompted the most wide-ranging series of American strikes yet against targets in Iraq and Syria). Central to the Axis's overall strategy, coordinated, if not — as many Western commentators insist — wholly directed, by Iran's national security apparatus, is the need to avoid full-scale conventional war with the United States. Without even factoring in the massive power disparity with the U.S., Iran's elite, in particular, can ill afford such a confrontation right now. The state is beset by a crisis of legitimacy, enflamed by its propensity for repression, and the nation's economy faces deep-rooted challenges, due in part to punishing American sanctions. As a result, Iran has taken steps to, temporarily at least, mitigate the chance of open conflict with the U.S. — most notably by curtailing strikes by PMF groups against American targets in Iraq.Yet, in taking that step, Iran's leaders likely feel secure in the knowledge that, despite the delicate balance required to tiptoe around the possibility of full-blown escalation, the Axis of Resistance's regional calculus has paid off significantly. In undertaking their broader campaign against the U.S., Hamas's regional allies leveraged Israel's intense dependence on its American patron. Without American support, Israel cannot hope to continue any major military campaign for very long — it is thus critically susceptible to pressure from Washington. While public opinion also plays a major role, the shower of blows rained upon American positions in the Middle East over the past few months has likely factored into U.S. policymakers' efforts to steer Israel away from its most maximalist aims and toward negotiations.Enabling both Israel's brutal assault on Gaza and the Axis of Resistance's ability to exert pressure on Tel Aviv through the U.S. are, of course, Washington's imperial ambitions. Iran and its allies have, unwittingly, presented American policymakers with a precious opportunity to pivot away from the kind of unilateralist overreach that, in large part, structures the present conflict. In doing so, they could begin to craft the kind of constructive foreign policy that puts the needs of U.S. citizens first — precious few Americans, after all, want to stumble into another Middle Eastern "forever war" just because of a few drones launched by Iraqi militias. And, perhaps most crucially, such a shift could perhaps prevent the kind of destruction unleashed on Gaza over the last few months — its scale a horrifying corollary to the depth of hubris that fuels American great power pretensions.

Like 9/11, the raid on Israel by the paramilitary wing of Hamas on October 7 is frequently held to be a game changer — an "inflection point." But, like 9/11, it seems instead to have been a desperate foray by an increasingly irrelevant group that got horribly lucky.After the attack, many in the United States, including President Joe Biden, urged the Israelis not to repeat the mistakes the U.S. made after 9/11. Those mistakes included exaggerating the strategic significance of the terrible event and of the capacities of those perpetrating it, and then understandably but counterproductively reacting in anger to the provocation in a manner that resulted in far more damage than the initiating event and created far more dedicated enemies than had existed before.9/11The 9/11 attack was horrific — indeed, scarcely any terrorist act in history, in war zones or outside them, has inflicted even ten percent as much total destruction.However, although the attacks were in many respects clever and well planned, their success was more the result of luck than of ingenuity. Before 9/11, al-Qaeda, a fringe group at the time, had launched several terrorist attacks, but even those that succeeded were laced with screw-ups, and there were many missteps in the execution of the 9/11 plot — participants took unauthorized foreign trips, failed to get trained, and loudly bragged about how they would soon be famous.In fact, it is not at all clear that the planners truly appreciated how successful they would be or why. Indeed, the 9/11 planners had been working on a "second wave" of hijackings, suggesting they were oblivious to the fact that the first attack would make a "second wave" vastly more difficult, and likely impossible because, as pilot Patrick Smith points out, "Any hijacker would face a planeload of angry and frightened people ready to fight back."Despite widespread fears (including that the group would get nuclear weapons), al-Qaeda central proved to be unable to do much of anything after 2001 except to issue videos full of sound and fury. Even under siege, it is difficult to see why it could not have organized attacks at least as costly and shocking as the shooting rampages (organized by different extremist group, Lashkar-e-Taiba) that took place in Mumbai, India in 2008.Nonetheless, the United States, often envisioning the group to pose an existential threat, reacted by launching two unnecessary wars that led to more than 100 times the number of deaths (including twice as many American ones) than the impelling event. The wars also served to motivate a generation of dedicated enemies. Overwhelmingly, for example, Islamist terrorists in the U.S. after 9/11 were motivated not by any sort of ideological "radicalization," but rather by an intense hostility to U.S. military activities in the Middle East which they saw as a murderous effort to destroy Islam. And others abroad were generated by, and drawn to, America's new occupations.10/7Direct wars between Israel and neighboring states have substantially subsided. There were four of these between 1948 and 1973, but none in the last half-century. Instead, a number of key Arab states have made their peace with Israel, albeit sometimes grudgingly, starting with Egypt, then Jordan, and more recently with the Abraham Accords states, which might even have come to include Saudi Arabia.As present events make all too dramatically clear, Israel still has to deal with substate paramilitary groups like Hamas in Gaza. But increasingly, international pressure on such groups had been building, effectively urging them to get a life, to stop bashing their heads against the Israeli rock, and to get used to coexistence—a message rejected by many outraged Palestinians.Hamas, in particular, also seemed to have been losing support among Palestinians. Polls conducted before its October 7 raid into Israel suggest that majorities in Gaza and the West Bank had come to be put off by its incompetence and corruption and did not support its eliminationist agenda for Israel.The destructiveness of the raid itself, like 9/11, was due more to luck than to adept planning and seems to have surprised even the perpetrators. As it happened, Israel's defenses on the Gaza border were undermanned, out of position, poorly organized, and operating under the conclusion that Hamas was neither interested in nor capable of launching such an invasion. About half of the soldiers were away, and just two days earlier the Israelis had transferred two commando companies to the West Bank. Moreover, the music festival where Hamas found half of its civilian victims had continued past its scheduled end the day before.Intelligence obviously underestimated the ability of Hamas to breach Israel's security fence and to rampage in the area for some time. However, the attack failed if, as some have suggested, Hamas's goals were broader — to inspire Palestinians and Arab populations to rise up or to even take over Israeli cities and storm military bases. The raiders did manage to take over all or parts of an important nearby military base at Re'im, but they were pushed out in a few hours.On the other hand, if Hamas's goal was, as one of its leaders put it, simply to show that it still exists and that its interests "must remain on the table," the group can claim a degree of success. And if the raid was motivated importantly by a desire to rally Palestinians to Hamas's cause and to stall or reverse the Abraham Accords process, Israel's outraged overreaction has played into Hamas's hands.9/11, 10/7, and the futureWhatever the plans and justifications, the Israeli military is now fully alerted to the danger, and any repetition will be much less effective and consequential. That is, like 9/11, the attack is more likely to prove to be an aberration than a harbinger. Apparently without really knowing it, Hamas exploited an opening, but that condition is unlikely to be repeated.Like the United States after 9/11, Israel enjoyed worldwide sympathy at first. But, ignoring American advice derived from its disastrous 9/11 experience, that sympathy has eroded as Israel propels itself into a massively destructive effort to "eliminate" an extremist group with limited capabilities. That effort has thus far resulted in upwards of 20 times more civilian deaths than the attack on Israel, and it is, as U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin suggests, essentially based on "irresponsible rhetoric." And, as he further notes, if you drive civilians "into the arms of the enemy, you replace a tactical victory with a strategic defeat."That outcome seems to be in the cards as Palestinians' support for Hamas grows and as governments in the area, under intense pressure from their citizenries, rally once more behind the Palestinian cause. In particular, the Israeli overreaction could lead to the creation of a generation or more of fighters (many of them currently children) who are bitterly determined to exact revenge against Israel. Like the destructive American overreaction to 9/11, the Israeli one after 10/7 may be, as many contend, in some sense immoral. But it may also prove to be profoundly stupid.

The United States is investing in Ukraine's defense industry for the long haul, even if direct Ukraine aid dwindles in 2024. President Biden's most recent drawdown of weapons from U.S. stockpiles is the last he can approve. Other U.S. military assistance to the country now depends on Congress, which has yet to authorize emergency spending that Biden requested in late October.But U.S. military contractors don't need congressional approval to co-produce weapons with Ukrainian companies, and the administration is encouraging it to help grow the Ukrainian defense industry. If the U.S. government isn't careful, however, taxpayers could end up footing the bill to expand weapon production capacity in Ukraine for years to come.The scale of investment required to establish and expand manufacturing capacity in Ukraine is massive. And contractors are reluctant to make capital investments in general — the data show that their priority is paying their shareholders. So it's hard to imagine U.S. contractors setting up shop in Ukraine without guaranteed financing from the United States government, even with a partner's support. The risk of escalating tensions with Russia is also serious.Still, co-weapon production may relieve the White House from facing political headwinds on direct Ukraine aid — and on U.S. strategy in Ukraine writ large, though there are signs the administration is considering a more defensive posture. One of the White House's stated long-term goals is "to advance a robust and self-reliant Ukrainian defense industrial base," which according to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, has been "an important opportunity for partnership with our own defense industrial base." In December, the administration hosted the U.S.-Ukraine Defense Industrial Base Conference in DC. The White House reported that about 350 government and industry representatives from the United States, Ukraine, and European allied countries convened "to focus on significantly increasing weapons production" in support of Ukraine's fight against Russia. There, DOD signed a Statement of Intent on Co-Production and Technical Data Exchange with the Ukrainian Ministries of Defense and Strategic Industries to speed up investment in Ukraine's defense industry.The Biden administration also established the interagency Ukraine Deal Team, "consisting of representatives from the Departments of State, Defense, and Commerce." Penny Pritzler, U.S. special representative for Ukraine's economic recovery, said that the team will "deploy all available U.S. government tools, including resources and expertise, to help U.S. companies compete and succeed in the Ukrainian defense industry." Some U.S. military contractors reportedly already committed to co-producing weapons with Ukraine in the fall preceding a conference in Kyiv, and the administration has been promoting what it calls "co-development, co-production, and co-sustainment" for months. So, while there are certainly operational security concerns with manufacturing in a country at war, there are few details about which U.S. companies will help produce what weapons in Ukraine — especially considering that the U.S. government plans to commit so many resources to the endeavor.National security adviser Jake Sullivan recently indicated that co-production efforts may start with repair and sustainment activities, but "will eventually involve brick and mortar 'Ukrainian outfits with Ukrainian expertise relying upon those licenses and tech transfer — and so forth — from U.S. companies and European companies.'" But Ukraine needs a lot of money to create new production lines, and it remains unclear how exactly the United States will support Kyiv in that process. In the past, U.S. industry has expressed its hesitation about working in Ukraine while the war continues. Reuters recently reported that "two leading American companies" have agreed to co-produce 155 mm artillery shells in Ukraine, starting in 2025 at the earliest. It's possible companies are waiting for the war to end to get down to business in Ukraine, but when asked by Responsible Statecraft, the Pentagon neither confirmed nor denied whether it's shaping or planning to shape these reported agreements. One can only assume it will, given its role in the Ukraine Deal Team. The Pentagon also declined to clarify whether joint production agreements between U.S. and Ukrainian contractors will be subject to any standards for U.S. economic impact, like for example, a certain level of American labor. Military spending is, of course, a terrible jobs producer. But long-term co-production with Ukraine further challenges predominant thinking that military spending (about half of which goes to contractors) is good for U.S. workers and the economy seeing that many of these jobs would go to Ukrainians or other non-American workers.Contractors committed to joint production with Ukraine nearly four months ago, but the administration is holding its cards close about facilitating co-production agreements despite indications that co-production efforts have already begun. Ukraine's ambassador to the United States, Oksana Markarova, said at the December conference that with the help of technical data from the Pentagon and U.S. defense industry, production of FrankenSAM (surface to air missile) systems has already begun in Ukraine. The country produces its own missiles, drones, artillery, and ammunition as well, but there are still severe shortfalls, especially on ammunition. The Pentagon neither confirmed nor denied whether it awarded U.S. companies any Ukraine-related contracts to establish manufacturing capacity in the country prior to the conference in early December. Instead, Pentagon spokesperson Jeff Jurgensen said that "although we have no specific announcements to make at this time, the Department of Defense is actively working with interagency partners and industry to explore approaches for aiding Ukraine in expanding the capacity and capability of its domestic industrial base for the long-term." The United States is not alone in that pursuit.European contractors are pursuing joint weapons production with Ukraine, too. With the approval of the German government, Rheinmetall is helping Ukraine repair armored vehicles, and by the end of the year it'll be producing them in country. According to Euromaidan Press, Rheinmetall invested about 200 million euros to build a new factory in Ukraine, "while Ukraine provided the ground, buildings, and connection to the power grid for free." British contractor BAE Systems established a local presence in the country as well, with the ultimate goal of producing 105 mm light guns in Ukraine. Radio Free Europe reported the Kremlin responding to BAE's announcement by saying that "such a venture would in no way contribute to an easing of hostilities between the two countries," adding that any weapon production facility would garner "special attention" from Russia's military.In an ideal co-production agreement, Ukrainian contractors would bear the costs of operating, maintaining, and protecting production facilities. The Pentagon and U.S. defense industry would share technical know-how, and Ukraine would handle the heavy lifting. But U.S. defense contractors have little if any financial incentive to help their Ukrainian partners operate and thrive independently. Either way, companies need to protect their investments. Weapon production facilities are already Russian targets. New and expanded production facilities in Ukraine will inevitably attract Russia's attention, and the cost to protect them will be great. If Ukraine ultimately can't cover the costs of operating, maintaining, and protecting plants that U.S. contractors help build, contractors are sure to step in on the U.S. government's dime. The administration and Ukraine Deal Team must ensure that co-production agreements explicitly outline how U.S. contractors will transfer to Ukrainian companies financial ownership of operations, maintenance, and protection processes. The administration's goal may be to help Ukraine develop a self-reliant defense industrial base, but that certainly wouldn't be in the financial interests of U.S. military contractors.

Advice to Republican Gov. Jeff Landry and the
Louisiana Legislature when it comes to the state's higher education institutions
concerning the anti-Semitic
Trojan Horse of diversity, equity, and inclusion policy and personnel: don't
trust them but make them earn your trust through well-designed legislation.

While DEI could be as innocuous and benign as
ensuring laws are followed against well-defined discriminatory practices, in
practice in academia it has become an insidious worldview that alleges people
not of color who allegedly control government, business, and societal institutions
use that power, whether consciously, allegedly to oppress all others through any
practice, whether in law, that in terms of outcomes in the distribution of
resources, whether tangible or monetary, generally leaves all others with relatively
fewer that for redress demands policies to redistribute those resources to
those others. Increasingly it has come under scrutiny for its demonizing of whites
as oppressors by inclination solely by their racial identification, its efforts
to grant preferential treatment to non-whites, and its propagation as
foundational in educating across all disciplines starting from the moment a
child begins schooling.

Landry and a number of legislators ran against
allowing DEI as a worldview to infect educational institutions, and a number of
returning legislators had backed, some publicly, a measure last year that would
have made higher education institutions report spending on DEI that
unfortunately didn't pass. Their concerns are part of a larger trend among the
states that have passed legislation to curtail DEI ideology's propagation on
campuses in their classrooms and administrations.

That has gotten the attention of state university and
colleges. Last
spring, I reviewed all of the state's campuses for DEI infrastructure and
noted that among senior institutions, with notable exceptions, all had at least
one administrator with duties identified with DEI and several had an administrative
structure specifically designated for DEI with multiple personnel. Some went
further, with individual college employees, whether faculty, having such
duties. The one exception was the least diverse set of institutions,
historically black universities and colleges.

Louisiana State University had the most extensive
apparatus, with dedicated associate deans in colleges to the task. But perhaps
no more, reports
the pro-DEI leftist media outlet Louisiana Illuminator, which notes that
Pres. William Tate IV recently had renamed bureaucracies to remove words
associated with diversity, equity, and inclusion, explaining last year that
language would be changed but would not interfere with principles and couched
in what was "legally defensible." Nor do colleges there appear any more to list
associate deans with having related DEI responsibilities, and other DEI-related
materials on its website have disappeared.

A similar, perhaps diluted, dynamic is playing out
at other University of Louisiana System schools. Looking at the largest, my
alma mater the University of New Orleans doesn't even list, with one exception,
anything to do with DEI, the exception being an employee award where DEI is
a criterion for its awarding. It's harder to scrub its past news feed,
however, which at one time trumpets winning
a $1.2 million grant to create a "center for equity and diversity" in the
hard science of engineering, where you figure critical thinking and mathematics
mostly would matter. But almost 18 months later, the website makes no
indication that the center exists. At Louisiana Tech University, its college of
business has put on five DEI in
the Workplace forums although it's not indicated whether there will be one
in 2024 as of this writing, but doesn't offer much else other than its
Multicultural Affairs office.

It seems the University of Louisiana Lafayette was
in the running to compete with LSU as the most DEI-oriented campus in the
state, having an Office for Campus Diversity
with several employees located in the office of its president that had a plan
from 2019-22 to move the campus towards greater facility to DEI that asked,
among others thing, to "Review, assess and develop internal policies and procedures
throughout the University's operations that support diversity, equity and
inclusion" that may have led to a ratings
instrument of employees attempting to measure their fidelity to DEI, as
well as featured an attempt to construct "Principles
of Community." However, activity seems to have dropped off in the past year,
its website indicates.

Don't be fooled. By its nature, academia is full
of behind-the-scenes jockeying and is well- versed in presenting a public face
that resembles one side of Janus. DEI has infiltrated
academia extensively, and many in academia, especially at the
administrative level, flatter themselves as a kind of resistance to whatever
powers-that-be they may imagine to keep on with furtive missions out of public
view that validate their worldviews. If they are pulling back because they see
Landry and a legislative majority in opposition to their agenda, the pullback
is strategic and, in their minds, temporary but doesn't stop attempts to
advance the agenda from continuing in the shadows and in less obtrusive ways.

To prevent this subversion, DEI has to be pulled
out by its roots in Louisiana. Model legislation in Texas and Florida, among
other states, provide the means to best accomplish this. These, among other
things, prohibit public universities from creating diversity offices, hiring
employees to conduct DEI work, requiring any related DEI training, or asking
for diversity statements from students and employees – which can weigh the
required confessionals equally with measurements of merit for hiring and
retention that half of all institutions nationally already use. Also, legislation
should ban public universities from spending state or federal funds for DEI
programs and activities that support or engage in political or social activism
unless required by an outside accrediting body.

DEI cloaked in instruction is trickier to handle.
Even as the assumptions behind DEI are neo-racist wolves posing as anti-racist
sheep, students benefit from understanding the flaws behind those which
requires exposure to the tenets of DEI even if they comprise a thinly-veiled hate
speech. Abuse of students by ascribing to them unsavory characteristics merely because
of their race, sex, disability status, or religious background (or lack
thereof) doesn't serve a legitimate instructional purpose in and of itself.

Legislation could address this not by banning all discussion
of DEI-based worldviews in the classroom, but by mandating that any worldview
taught that denigrates groups of people defined by protected classes under
civil rights law – such as DEI's arguing that white people by virtue of being genetically
white naturally oppress non-whites in allegedly how government, business, and
society are structured that only can be overcome through DEI reprogramming –
must also be critiqued honestly in the presentation of material, with a
statement required in course syllabi informing students of this. More and more robust
explicatory material is what sets the stage for sharpening critical thinking ability
among students.

As
Landry noted in his inaugural speech, genuine learning rather than
indoctrination should guide education in Louisiana, and he and legislators
should make it a priority to pass legislation guaranteeing this regardless of
what words higher education institutions use to clarify or obscure their preferences
and agendas.

Russian progress in the Ukraine war is pushing the United States toward a painful choice. If we want a prosperous Ukraine with a viable path toward liberal governance and European Union membership, we will have to concede that it cannot be a NATO or U.S. ally, and that this neutral Ukraine must have verifiable limits on the types and quantities of weapons it may hold. If we refuse to agree to those terms, Russia will quite probably turn Ukraine into a dysfunctional wreck incapable of rebuilding itself, allying with the West, or constituting a military threat to Russia. Russian progress is not yet evident on the map, where the battle lines have not moved appreciably over the past year. Ukraine's counteroffensive failed to break through Russian defenses, and Russia has not pushed Ukrainian forces significantly westward. An observer comparing territorial holdings in January 2023 with January 2024 might reasonably conclude that the war has become a stalemate. But this picture is misleading. The Kremlin is almost certainly not seeking such a breakthrough, at least not yet. Rather, it is methodically grinding down Ukraine's capacity not only to wage war, but also to reconstitute a post-war military, by killing and wounding enormous numbers of Ukrainian soldiers and exhausting Ukrainian and Western arsenals of arms and ammunition. Ukraine is running short of artillery shells, and the U.S. and Europe cannot manufacture new ones quickly enough to meet Ukraine's needs. Russian barrages of long-range air and missile strikes are increasingly overwhelming the capacity of Ukrainian air defenses, and the West simply lacks the ability to continue providing Patriot missiles or other advanced air defense systems. It is quite true, as the Biden administration has warned, that ending U.S. aid to Kyiv would quickly result in Ukraine's collapse. Sufficient aid to help Ukraine to stand successfully on the defensive should therefore continue. But what U.S. policymakers need to understand and honestly acknowledge is that absent a compromise peace settlement, massive levels of aid will have to continue not just for the coming year, but indefinitely. There is very little realistic chance of the West being able to outlast Russia and force it to accept peace on Ukrainian terms. The controversies in Congress over aid to Ukraine reflect these realities and are unlikely to diminish. Under such circumstances, for the Biden administration to pledge American support to Ukraine for "as long as it takes" to defeat Russia is unwise, and even dishonest. It is widely believed in Washington that the failure of Ukraine's counteroffensive means that the West has no choice but to back Ukraine's fight against Russia for many years to come. Seeking compromise with Moscow is regarded as not only undesirable but also futile. Lacking alternatives, we must stay the present course, hoping that time will improve Ukraine's position. But time is not on Ukraine's side, either militarily or economically, and so Ukraine's position in any future negotiations may well be very much worse than at present. Russia's population is at least four times that of Ukraine and its GDP 14 times. The Russian army is far better led and more tactically adept than it was at the start of the war, and Western sanctions show no signs of being able to cripple the Russian economy, which is more and more geared for war. And whatever Brussels may say, as long as the war continues it is exceptionally unlikely that Ukraine will be able to develop economically and begin the extremely difficult process of joining the European Union.Most importantly, the United States has not tested the assumption that Russian President Vladimir Putin has no interest in talking. It is indeed very likely that Putin believes Russia now has the upper hand in the war and can afford to wait. Nonetheless, Putin has repeatedly insisted that Russia is ready to talk, and also that Washington – not Kyiv – makes the key decisions in the war and therefore it is for Washington to engage in talks. This may be posturing; but it is also possible that Putin recognizes that absent a settlement, Russia is headed toward the dangers of a permanently volatile confrontation with the West, an economy distorted by the demands of military production, and a constricting degree of dependence on China. Russians' concerns about these problems are likely to grow as their fears they may lose the war in Ukraine diminish. It is further alleged that Putin believes that a future Donald Trump presidency would be the Kremlin's best hope for a settlement on Russian terms. However, Trump's first term produced some friendly rhetoric but much hostile action toward Moscow, including withdrawal from nuclear arms agreements and increased flows of U.S. weapons and training for the Ukrainian army. Moreover, given the animosity toward Trump evident in Congress and the U.S. foreign and security policy establishment, Putin has little reason for confidence that Trump could actually deliver any deal. By 2020, Russians were thoroughly disillusioned with Trump. As the leading Russian foreign policy thinker Fyodor Lukyanov told Radio Liberty about the 2020 elections, "Why should Russians care? I don't believe anyone here expects any change regardless of who will win." Given that Russia now has the advantage on the battlefield and senses that time is on its side, to get Putin to end the war and end his ambition to subjugate Ukraine or seize more territory, Washington will have to offer some serious incentives. These will need to include showing that the U.S. is prepared to meet Russian concerns about the U.S. and NATO security threat to Russia (concerns that are genuinely held throughout the Russian establishment). This will mean agreement to a Ukrainian treaty of neutrality, with security guarantees for Ukraine, that will allow that country to follow neutral Finland and Austria during the Cold War and develop as a free market democracy. Western sanctions against Russia would need at least to be eased if not suspended, but with a binding commitment that they would automatically resume if Russia launched new aggression.On the issue of the territories presently occupied by Russia, the only possible way forward is to defer this question for future talks under United Nations auspices, while putting the maximum possible security measures in place to prevent a resumption of war.An agreement along these lines would be extremely painful for both Ukraine and the Biden administration. However, we should see preserving the independence of 80 percent of Ukraine as a real victory, even if not a complete one. It is certainly far better than what appears to be the alternative: a war of attrition with dreadful losses for Ukraine, leading sooner or later to a far greater Ukrainian defeat.Sophia Ampgkarian contributed to the research for this article.

Yesterday, a bluesky discussion focused on whether the Federation of Planets was essentially the UN with US domination or something else.  While I have written far more here about Star Wars, I have actually used Star Trek more in my teaching, and I have watched far more Trek (there is simply many more hours of Trek content).  Plus having written about NATO (the ebook is less than $18!), I have a few views on the matter.To start, what is the United Federation of Planets and what is Starfleet?  The Federation is an alliance of planets, more so than it is a true federation a la the US.  Not even a confederation like Canada.  How so?  The planets still have their own foreign policies--we see plenty of meetings of diplomats from members to various proceedings.  Note, diplomats, not just leaders or representatives.  Just as I always like to make fun of Texas secessionists for having their embassy in Texas when it should be in Washington, DC or London or some place beyond the territory of the "country" it is representing, federal units (with the funky exception of Quebec) don't have embassies and ambassadors.  This is a short cut, a bit of evidence, for the basic idea that the units in the federation are more independent, more akin to nation-states than they are to units in a federal country.  So, yeah, the name is deceptive.  Starfleet adds to the confusion because it is the military (despite denials) of the Federation.  This would make the Federation appear more like a country if it had a monopoly--if Starfleet was the only armed force within the federation.  However, I seem to remember various planets within the fed having their own armed starships including Vulcan.  So, despite the name, the Federation is not akin to a single country.  It is easier to dispense with the idea that the Federation is the European Union.  How much of the series and movies are about economic regulations and subsidizing agriculture?  Ok, more directly, the European Union, despite many attempts, does not really have a military, and it does not have a common foreign policy.  The EU forces that have shown up in Bosnia and elsewhere only do so (this will be brutal, sorry) after NATO has done all of the heavy lifting. It was NATO that ended the Bosnia conflict, it was NATO that compelled Serbia to let peacekeepers into Kosovo, it is NATO deterring the Russians from attacking the Baltics, and so on.  In trade negotiations, the EU acts as a single actor and with great power.  In other stuff?  Not so much. Which leaves the United Nations and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.  Clearly, from the name and from Gene Roddenberry's idealism, the United Federation of Planets is just a spacey UN, right?*  The stuff above that makes the Federation not a country but many countries or nation-states works toward the UN idea--a bunch of different sovereign entities constantly negotiating, sending diplomats hither and yon to settle all kinds of issues.  The big questions are what is the Federation for and what is Starfleet for?  The classic answer is collective security: to deter aggression by any member against any member by providing assurances that any target of aggression will receive assistance from the rest of the community.  Until Alexander Wendt has his way, the entire imagination of the role of the UN is focused on members.  The UN is a universal organization...on Earth--the only countries that are not in the UN are Taiwan and ... depending on how you count the Vatican and Palestine and various unrecognized separatist folks.  The key things about this notion of collective defense are that no member is excluded from its protection, and it is not aimed at any particular aggressor.  The UN does not have a standing military, but has "sent" massive interventions when the membership have agreed, to thwart North Korea's aggression in 1950 (because the Soviet diplomats were stupidly boycotting the UN Security Council at the time) and Iraq's in 1990-91.  In both cases, it was really the US military and some allies under a UN banner in the former and nearly so in the latter.  One could argue that Starfleet is mostly a Terran/American endeavor and its activities are simply under a federation banner.  But again, the aim is at members.  In the original Trek, maybe some of it was aimed at fostering peace among members, but for most of Trek's history, Starfleet was aimed at protecting its members from non-members.Which gets us to NATO, which is not really a collective security organization, but a collective defense organization.  It is not so much aimed at protecting Greece from Turkey, but all of the members from external threats--mostly the Soviet Union/Russia but also terrorism, maybe China, etc.  "An attack on one is an attack on all", Article V, the heart of the alliance, is aimed at outsiders. All of NATO's military endeavors have been on the border of or entirely outside the territory of its members.  Kind of like how much of Starfleet's activities are at the borders, patrolling nearby neutral zones, or going beyond to intervene, despite the Prime Directive, in non-members.  How many episodes are akin to the Kosovo effort?  A boodle. Of course, the parallel is not perfect, since Starfleet is a coherent military organization from the academy to the command staff and in between, which NATO is not.  Its captains may buck orders (Kirk more so than others, but all of them did so), but not because their home country/planet had different rules than the Federation for operating in place x or y.  That is, the Steve and Dave book on the Federation would focus far less on the political systems of members states and far more on the personalities of individual ship captains, compared to our work on NATO (our book and articles focused mostly on whether countries had coalition governments or not, what kinds of coalitions they had, and personality of presidents and prime ministers only kicked in if there were no coalitional bargaining).Of course, there is no perfect parallel between the Federation and an existing Terran international organization, but given the focus of the Federation and the activities of Starfleet, NATO appears to be the closest, and I didn't even discuss enlargement.   *  I'd argue that Babylon 5 comes a lot closer to that, but that is a post for another day.   

A mounting maritime dispute between China and the Philippines, underwritten by spiraling U.S.-China tensions, threatens to ignite the South China Sea. "China-Philippines relations are at a crossroads," Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi warned his Philippine counterpart Enrique Manalo in a call on Dec. 20 following a string of contentious encounters in the South China Sea, including allegations that Chinese boats rammed a Philippine coast guard ship and fired water cannons at a resupply vessel. China, Wang Yi told Manalo, will "definitely safeguard its rights" and "respond resolutely" if the Philippines "colludes with malicious external forces to continue causing trouble and chaos." Wang's warning comes on the heels of Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr's announcement earlier this year that his government is mulling a tripartite security pact with the U.S. and Japan. The Philippines and its treaty ally, the United States, have repeatedly accused China of harassing Philippine vessels in the South China Sea. "We condemn, once again, China's latest unprovoked acts of coercion and dangerous maneuvers against a legitimate and routine Philippine rotation and resupply mission," said Jay Tarriela, spokesperson for the National Task Force for the West Philippine Sea (NTF-WPS), on the heels of a confrontation earlier this month near the Second Thomas Shoal. "These actions reflect not only reckless disregard for the safety and livelihoods of Filipinos, but also for international law," State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said in a Dec. 10 statement."The United States stands with our Philippine allies in the face of these dangerous and unlawful actions. We reaffirm that Article IV of the 1951 U.S.-Philippines Mutual Defense Treaty extends to armed attacks on Philippine armed forces, public vessels, or aircraft – including those of its Coast Guard – anywhere in the South China Sea," Miller added.China, which claims sovereignty over most of the South China Sea, previously accused Philippine coast guard ships of trespassing in what it describes as Chinese waters. A 2016 Permanent Court of Arbitration ruling found China's maritime claims in the South China Sea — commonly referred to as the nine-dash line — to be legally baseless. Beijing, which rejected the court ruling as "ill-founded" and "naturally null and void," has persisted in vigorously defending its expansive claims as part of a larger delimitation dispute also involving Brunei, Malaysia, Vietnam, and Taiwan. What exactly is at stake for China in its intensifying dispute with Manila and, by extension, its U.S. ally? "I think a lot of people in southeast Asia are mystified by why China is so pushy on this question," said Sarang Shidore, Director of the Global South Program at QI, adding that the unresolved issue of Taiwan's status is far more important to Beijing. "The South China Sea, these tiny features and islands, their economic potential is relatively small, there's fishing, but none of this rises to the level where you'd think China would be risking so much by pushing a very expansive claim," Shidore added. There are fishing and maritime disputes across the world, even including between allies, noted Lyle Goldstein, Director of Asia Engagement at Defense Priorities. "We have a major maritime territorial dispute with Canada… France and Britain go at it all the time over fisheries. It's fairly normal activity even among friends," Lyle told RS. The China-Philippines squall is far from the only theater in Beijing's ongoing maritime disputes, but it has escalated to a greater degree than many of the others due to Manila's readiness to push back against China's pressure tactics. Beijing has not engaged in an escalatory spiral with Malaysia and Brunei, despite their conflicting maritime claims, because these two states "are unlikely to make an issue of Chinese incidents and they don't really even talk about them," said Shidore, adding that their desire to preserve economic ties with China makes them "willing to absorb some costs." The Philippines has taken a more strident approach vis-à-vis Beijing than others in the South China Sea, said Shidore, partly as a byproduct of American presence in the region. "I think U.S. involvement is a big reason —the fact that the U.S. is present in the theater, and there is an alliance commitment, makes the situation not just a China-Philippines issue but a China-U.S. issue, and that's when everything changes from the Chinese perspective," he added. "The Chinese, I think, are more concerned about the U.S., at this point, than the Philippines," continued Shidore, "the U.S. presence is making them see red and emboldening all the nationalist and hawkish forces in the Chinese structures." American obligations under the 1951 U.S.-Philippines Mutual Defense Treaty have raised concerns that Washington could find itself embroiled in a war in the South China Sea in the event of a direct military confrontation between China and the Philippines. "I think, unfortunately, all the signs are there for an escalating conflict," Goldstein said. "They [the Chinese] perceive that the stakes for them are very high," Goldstein explained. "I believe all this tension with the Philippines is an outgrowth of Taiwan tension," he said, noting that the Luzon strait, situated just south of Taiwan, has become an increasingly important fixture in U.S. preparations for a Taiwan contingency following the sharp spike in cross-strait tensions accompanying Nancy Pelosi's 2022 visit to Taipei. "The U.S. has been trying to put in place the groundwork to prepare for a day when they have to surge forces in a major way into Luzon," he said. Beijing, in reaction to these developments, has sought to dial up the pressure on Manila with threats and maritime shows of force. "The subtext is: if you are going to cooperate with the U.S. on the Taiwan scenario, your interests will suffer badly, and that, I think, is why this bullying is occurring," Goldstein said. Shidore said the White House, in light of growing regional tensions, should "pull back in being so frontal on this issue, whether rhetorically or materially, in terms of its presence in the theater." The U.S. has an active interest in exercising its substantial leverage over Manila "to nudge its more vulnerable partner to be more restrained in some of its actions," Shidore wrote in a piece published by The Diplomat last week. "We shouldn't be encouraging the Philippines to get into a fight with China — they are likely to lose that fight," said Goldstein. "We do have a treaty with the Philippines… but that treaty should be read very narrowly. It should be read as, we defend the main islands of the Philippines — if they are threatened acutely, we will be there," he added. "And if it means we need to put some defensive forces in those areas to reassure the Philippines, I'm okay with that. But my view is that we should not even consider going to war over rocks and reefs or different interpretations of the law of the sea. That would be extremely foolish and reckless, and it would be very hard to explain to American taxpayers." The China-Philippines maritime dispute does not, in of itself, reflect anything approaching an existential conflict. It has, however, become an increasingly dangerous proxy and potential flashpoint for underlying China-U.S. tensions in the South China Sea.