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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.

The Biden administration's foreign policy record in 2023 won't give the president much to boast about in next year's election. The U.S. is even more overstretched at the end of 2023 than it was at the beginning, and the president has had very few policy successes. For most of the year, there weren't any major debacles, but that changed over the last two months as the president gave the Israeli government a blank check to wage a brutal war in Gaza. The president committed Washington to support another foreign war in the wake of the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel while the conflict in Ukraine settled into a stalemate. Even though the U.S. was under no obligation to support this war, the president made a point of turning it into one of his signature policies and linked it closely with support for Ukraine in his public rhetoric. Biden did not, and has not made a compelling case that unconditional support for Israel's campaign is in the best interests of the United States, and the costs of that support have been rising ever since. Furthermore, backing the war exposed U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria to renewed attacks from local militias, and it has also led to increasing risks for U.S. ships in the Red Sea as the Houthis have been launching attacks on commercial shipping to protest the war. The risks that the conflict could escalate and spread into other parts of the region have been growing, and so has the risk that the U.S. could become directly involved in a multi-front war. The president's instinct to back Israel to the hilt has made a wider war more likely and it has put U.S. forces in greater danger.U.S. support for Israel in Gaza has not only overshadowed the rest of Biden's foreign policy agenda, but it has also tied the U.S. to an indiscriminate bombing campaign and a punishing siege that is driving hundreds of thousands of Palestinian civilians into famine conditions. The Biden administration has not only torched whatever remained of Washington's credibility on human rights and international law, but it has closely associated the U.S. with the war crimes committed against Palestinian civilians.The damage to America's reputation has already been considerable, and the damage to American interests in the Middle East and beyond over the longer term will likely be significant.The setback for Biden's own agenda has been undeniable. The administration's biggest diplomatic initiative of 2023 — the ill-advised pursuit of Saudi-Israeli normalization — stalled when the war in Gaza showed the administration's understanding of the region to be fundamentally flawed. Having bought into the false assumption that U.S.-facilitated normalization agreements between Israel and Arab clients would stabilize the region, the administration failed to recognize how bad things were getting in occupied Palestine. Like their predecessors, the Biden administration did nothing to keep Netanyahu's coalition government in check as it pursued its creeping annexation of the West Bank. Believing that the Palestinians could be safely sidelined and that their grievances could be ignored, the administration was trying to find out what inducements it would take to get Mohammed bin Salman to endorse normalization. If they had been successful, it would have meant another security commitment and more costs for the United States, so it was just as well that this policy was derailed.It isn't clear how much of a factor the push for Saudi normalization was in contributing to Hamas' decision to attack, but it clearly wasn't helpful for the U.S. to waste so much effort on trying to entice the Saudis into a deal while tensions between Israel and the Palestinians was about to explode. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan's infamous line uttered shortly before the start of the war about how the region was quieter than it had been in decades reflected how much the administration had come to believe its own press releases. Support for the war has cost the U.S. a lot of goodwill in countries of the Global South, and the administration's stubborn opposition to a ceasefire has left the U.S. as deeply isolated at the United Nations as it has ever been on a major issue. The administration had earlier emphasized the importance of competing for influence with other major powers in Africa, Latin America, and Asia, but with its hardline position on Gaza it seems to have frittered away most of whatever gains it has made. Especially for an administration that constantly talks about the importance of America's leadership role, it has outdone itself in alienating and driving the rest of the world away from the U.S. on this issue.U.S. support for the war in Ukraine has been undermined by backing for the war in Gaza in two ways. First, it has diverted U.S. attention and resources away from Ukraine as the U.S. has turned its focus once again to the Middle East. It has also made a mockery of the administration's rhetoric in support of Ukraine. The U.S. spent the better part of two years extolling the importance of international law to rally support for Ukraine, and then demonstrated that the U.S. doesn't hold its own clients and partners to the same standard that it expects from other states. The Biden record this year wasn't all bad. On the plus side, the U.S. made some modest progress in stabilizing relations with China near the end of the year after months of deteriorating ties in the wake of the spy balloon incident in February. There was a small diplomatic breakthrough with Iran in the summer that led to the release of five Americans that had been wrongfully detained by the Iranian government. Unfortunately, the administration then reneged on releasing Iranian funds that had been frozen under "maximum pressure" sanctions because they didn't want to be seen as "rewarding" Iran following Hamas' attack.The administration also recently secured another prisoner release agreement with the Venezuelan government. While these were positive results, they were also hardly earth-shattering.The Biden administration had more success in working with established allies. They further developed the technology-sharing AUKUS arrangement with Australia and Britain, and they took advantage of a temporary improvement in relations between South Korea and Japan to strengthen ties with both. In both cases, the administration was pushing on an open door, and it is questionable whether either arrangement will endure, but they can at least point to these things as examples of advancing Biden's agenda. Even more than in previous years, the Biden administration's foreign policy in 2023 has been defined by too much reliance on military tools and too little effort put into diplomatic engagement. That may be one of the reasons why the public now broadly disapproves of Biden's handling of foreign policy. Both for his own sake and for the sake of U.S. interests, the president needs to make some major course changes in 2024 in Gaza and in his overall approach to the world.

With presidential elections in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) scheduled for December, concerns about pre-election human rights violations are already being raised in Washington. Given the alleged role the United States played in anointing the election victor in 2019, many expect the U.S. to be influential again, even if its original decision to recognize Félix Tshisekedi tipped the scales of that contested election. Many are hoping U.S. influence will result in an election period more respectful of human rights. In the five years since Tshisekedi was declared the winner, much-anticipated human rights reforms have not materialized. Still, the U.S. has an opportunity, and obligation, to center human rights in its relationship with the DRC, especially amid increasing human rights violations in the pre-election period. Failure to do so would expose the hard reality that the Biden administration continues to fail at following through on its human rights agenda. A New Partnership Since Tshisekedi assumed the presidency, the U.S.'s working relationship with the DRC has warmed. Almost immediately upon taking office, President Tshisekedi visited Washington and quickly joined the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS. He further solidified his position as a strong ally by voting with the U.S. in the U.N. General Assembly. In return, the U.S. increased its bilateral aid to the DRC, resumed military cooperation, and explored new opportunities for U.S. investment, including in the mining sector. Both Secretary of State Antony Blinken and acting Deputy Secretary Victoria Nuland have proffered coveted visits to Tshisekedi, demonstrating a strong and privileged relationship. The upcoming elections present an urgent opportunity for the U.S. to demonstrate a commitment to human rights by pushing their protection in the pre-election period and setting policy priorities that will benefit people living in the DRC regardless of the election outcome. The Congolese people should have a government committed to protecting their rights, after years of violence, abuses, impunity, and plunder of resources at the expense of human rights protections. The US-Congo Bilateral RelationshipThe relationship between the U.S. and the DRC is a complicated one — made more so by the DRC's rich deposit of critical minerals the U.S. government wants to access and that the Chinese government currently dominates. While the U.S.'s engagement with the DRC has rarely centered on human rights, it has engaged on these issues across several administrations as human rights violations became harder to ignore. This renewed focus has led to concrete actions. In 2006 President Bush established an Executive Order to sanction those fueling the conflict, and accompanying human rights abuses. He also met with the leaders of both the DRC and Rwanda to press them to end violence in the east. The U.S. Congress also played a critical role in driving policies aimed at protecting human rights, most prominently by passing legislation such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo Relief, Security, and Democracy Promotion Act of 2006 and section 1502 of the Dodd Frank Act in 2010. While imperfect, these policies have sought to protect the rights of the Congolese people to their own wealth and elevate human rights when under threat. Human Rights Context Leading into the Elections While Tshisekedi's election was touted as one of change by both Trump and Biden officials, the reality for many Congolese is that little has changed. Tshisekedi came into office committing to critical security services reforms, judicial reforms, civic space expansion, and anti-corruption efforts. However, few of these have been implemented. In addition, demonstrable examples exist of shrinking civic space. Take the "State of Siege" which has been in place in eastern DRC since May 2021. Under this measure there are restrictions on civilians gathering and the military has taken over all aspects of civilian governance. Amnesty International found that under the "State of Siege," the security situation has deteriorated further while authorities have used it to silence critics. The crackdown on freedom of expression goes beyond eastern DRC with Amnesty that two years into the Tshisekedi administration there was an increase in oppression against journalists. This has only escalated in the pre-election period. What US Policy Should Do About It While some may argue that human rights concerns are less important than the domestic need for access to clean energy minerals, this is a false dichotomy. Ignoring human rights violations for the sake of investment not only hurts the Congolese people who first and foremost should be benefitting from the wealth but does little to secure access long term. Tshisekedi may still make deals with other countries giving better offers. Furthermore, U.S. companies would benefit from the confidence in their investments created by a government committed to anti-corruption, human rights, and to ensuring that communities thrive alongside companies. It is in the long-term interest of the U.S. to promote a rights-first approach. Furthermore, the U.S.'s credibility will be lost if it does not leverage its partnership it has cultivated with the Tshisekedi administration to secure respect for human rights. Instead, civil society and the Congolese people will see another example where the U.S. meddles in the country's affairs but fails to center human rights in its diplomacy. In the spirit of a rights-forward relationship, there is much Washington can do to help ensure rights are respected in the pre-election period. U.S. officials should take advantage of their close relationship to have candid conversations about necessary human rights actions and reforms. First, there are already instances in the pre-election period where Congolese security forces have disproportionately reacted to opposition rallies and protests. Meanwhile journalists are increasingly harassed and arbitrarily arrested. Despite this, the U.S. has remained largely silent publicly, giving the impression to civil society and citizens that they are accepting of a violent and repressive pre-election environment. The United States has also not issued a single public statement condemning the "State of Siege" despite repeated pleas by Congolese and other human rights organizations. The Biden administration must publicly call for an end to this measure, which is in violation of the Congolese constitution and international human rights law, before any more criticism is silenced or people are denied their rights to freedom of speech or assembly. Finally, the Biden administration must center its relationship with the DRC moving forward around human rights, justice, and accountability. Indeed, much of the instability can be addressed if those involved stop focusing on a military response and instead focus on ending impunity and ensuring justice. The U.S. can do that by funding programs that address impunity and build the capacity of the Congolese justice system. When Blinken launched his foreign policy he argued that human rights would be central. Yet in the DRC the Biden administration has been silent as its partner has failed to implement promised reforms and instead further restricted the rights of the Congolese people. There is still time for the U.S. and DRC to work together and solidify respect for the rights for the Congolese people. Washington must not miss this opportunity.

The situation on the Lebanese-Israeli front is escalating as Hezbollah and the Israeli military engage in daily tit-for-tat exchanges. These clashes have led to a rising death toll on both sides, sparking fears of a new war front as Israel continues its campaign against the Palestinian Hamas movement in Gaza.Against this backdrop, senior U.S. officials continue to warn against Hezbollah opening a new front with Israel. This fear, however, reflects a misunderstanding of Hezbollah's approach to the current conflict. The Lebanese Shiite movement's operations on the southern border should rather be seen as what it perceives as "an act of necessity" to preserve itself.Hezbollah's current military strategy vis-a-vis IsraelFollowing operation "Al-Aqsa Storm," in which Hamas killed some 1,400 Israeli and foreign citizens and abducted more than 200 others, Hezbollah declared that it would not be a bystander as Israel initiated its response.Addressing a rally in Beirut, the head of the movement's executive committee, Hashem Safiedine, underscored that Hezbollah was not a neutral party in the ongoing hostilities. The Shiite movement also launched a cross-border attack on Israeli military positions in the disputed area of Shebaa Farms, describing the operation as an act of solidarity with the Palestinians.While the cross-border exchanges between Hezbollah and Israel have intensified in the weeks that have followed, they have remained contained to the border region. The Shiite movement has carefully chosen its targets, focusing on Israeli military posts in the area. Israel's retaliatory action on the Lebanese front has likewise been measured and restricted to the border region.Well-informed sources close to Hezbollah emphasize that the movement's scope of operations thus far appear to rebut the notion that it intends to open a full-on second front against Israel. "If Hezbollah wanted to take advantage, it would have done so right after the Hamas operation as Israel was still in a vulnerable position," said one source who spoke on condition of anonymity."All sides are keen on avoiding an all-out war" he added, affirming that this stance applies very much to Hezbollah. "A full-blown war now would prove costly, with Israel amassing troops in the north and the United States sending aircraft carriers to the region," he stressed.Senior officials from the Lebanese Shiite movement have characterized its cross-border operations as designed to both demonstrate its solidarity with Hamas and distract the Israeli military. The movement's second-in-command, Naim Qassem, stated that the goal is to weaken the Israeli side.A second source close to Hezbollah's leadership confirmed that the movement is trying to overstretch the Israeli military in the midst of its campaign in Gaza."What is taking place is a war of attrition," explained the source, who asked not to be named. "Hezbollah is forcing Israel to divert military resources to the northern front in order to weaken its military operations in Gaza," he added.Hezbollah's red linesAccording to the second source, however, Hezbollah's strategy could change if Israel launches a major ground offensive into Gaza as reportedly planned."All options are on the table if Israel goes ahead with a ground invasion into Gaza" he emphasized.Israel has in fact launched ground operations into Gaza in what it has described as the next stage in its campaign. However, it has yet to launch a full-scale invasion of the coastal enclave. As of this writing, Hezbollah has not escalated beyond targeting Israeli military positions in the border area. Ultimately, Hezbollah's future course of action will likely be determined by how the situation on the ground evolves. The first source underscored that the declared Israeli objective of annihilating Hamas constitutes a red line for the movement."If Israel appears on the verge of destroying Hamas, Hezbollah, along with the Houthis in Yemen and other regional players, will intervene to prevent that scenario," he added.The movement's red line stems from concerns that it may be next on Israel's list should the latter appear to be achieving its declared mission against Hamas. Asked if that was indeed Hezbollah's approach, the first source responded, "Certainly."Indeed, these concerns appear warranted to some degree amid reports that Israel's defense minister and its top military brass were pushing for a pre-emptive attack against Hezbollah in parallel with the campaign against Hamas. According to these reports, these voices were overruled by Prime Minister Netanyahu at the urging of the United States. The destruction of Hamas, however, would free up Israeli resources and possibly upset the mutual deterrence that has preserved the calm on the Lebanese-Israeli front since the July 2006 war. Under such a scenario, Israeli political leaders could deem it less risky to launch a full-scale military campaign against Hezbollah.Biden's dilemmaThe Lebanese Shiite movement's red lines threaten to put the Biden administration in a bind. The White House approach to the current conflict rests on two major pillars: throwing its full weight behind Israel's goal of annihilating Hamas while seeking to prevent a broader conflict from erupting.Hezbollah's strategy makes achieving both goals very difficult, if not impossible. As noted above, an imminent Hamas defeat in Gaza will likely trigger escalation not just from Hezbollah itself, but also from its allies in Yemen. Iraq's Popular Mobilization Units are also likely to enter the fray under such a scenario.This is due to the influence the Lebanese movement enjoys with these groups as a result of both ideological affinity and battlefield support, as Hezbollah has provided assistance to both Yemen's Houthis in their war against the Saudi-led coalition, and to the predominantly Shiite militias in Iraq in their campaign against ISIS. Like Hezbollah, both the Houthis and the Iraqi militias have received significant assistance from Iran.Possible scenariosGiven Hezbollah's assessment that the annihilation of Hamas would be a prelude to an existential threat against the movement itself, U.S. warnings are unlikely to deter the group should such a scenario unfold. Despite the deployment of two U.S. aircraft carrier strike groups to the region, Hezbollah has continued its cross-border operations against Israel.Meanwhile, former senior U.S. officials like the Quincy Institute's Steve Simon believe that direct U.S. military action against Hezbollah is unlikely. "The U.S. will be in a position to intervene if it chooses to do so," said Simon, a former Obama Administration senior advisor for the Middle East and North Africa, in an email exchange. "But I doubt they will or that the Israelis will want them to," he added. Reports have nevertheless emerged that U.S. military action against the Lebanese movement has been discussed at senior levels in government. But American military operations against Hezbollah would also almost certainly lead to intensifying attacks on U.S. troops by the Lebanese movement's ideological allies, including the Houthis in Yemen and Iranian-backed militias in Iraq. This would effectively mean a regional war in which U.S. forces will find themselves once again under fire.

With about 120 days remaining until Taiwanese voters head to the polls for the January 2024 presidential election, it's evident that Lai Ching-te, the candidate of the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), has established a clear lead over each individual contender (although not when the combined strength of the others is taken into account). Although some public opinion polling has shown a strong sentiment for change in 2024, Lai has been consistently ahead with support fluctuating at around 35 percent, while his opponents have scored an aggregate of around 50 percent since May. And his prospects have improved even more since the founder of electronics manufacturing giant Foxconn, Terry Gou, formally declared his candidacy in late August, further fragmenting Lai's opposition by creating a third opposition candidate alongside Ko Wen-je of the Taiwan People's Party (TPP) and Hou Yu-ih from the Kuomintang (KMT). Even though Hou, Ko, and Gou have all declared a readiness to forge a coalition — a strategy that has emerged as the only plausible possibility of thwarting Lai's occupancy of the presidential palace – the prospect of each assuming a subordinate role in another's campaign likely remains highly unattractive to them, especially to Gou. Moreover, should any party display a willingness to make concessions, reaching consensus will likely require meticulous, confidential, and protracted negotiations. Given the current trend, a critical question looms large regarding the future of U.S.-China relations: Are Washington and Beijing prepared for another DPP administration in Taiwan led by Lai Ching-te, the self-proclaimed "political worker of Taiwan Independence?" Are the two powers ready for the unique set of risks that a Lai-led government in Taiwan could pose to their bilateral relations?As an avid baseball fan, Lai used to describe himself as a "relief pitcher" on the political mound, an observation elaborated by President Tsai Ing-wen, who praised Lai as a "skillful pitcher." Unfortunately, however, in terms of stability across the Taiwan Strait, what Lai could be skillful at is possibly delivering a "strikeout" scenario to the already fragile Sino-U.S.-Taiwan triangle.Lai's "strike one" could very well exhaust Beijing's strategic patience regarding peaceful unification. While discussions swirl about the possibility of Beijing having set a reunification deadline — some U.S. analysts argued for a 2027 timeline, others a 2035 deadline for forceful unification — these predictions often overlook the role that Taiwan's domestic politics could play in affecting Beijing's calculations. Beijing would likely be hesitant to confront a Taiwan leadership aligned with the "92 consensus" should the KMT's Hou pull off next year's presidential election. However, a third consecutive triumph for the DPP's presidential bid led by one of the mainland's least favorite Taiwanese politicians might lead Beijing to conclude that Taiwan's public sentiment has irreversibly shifted in favor of formal independence. If so, the prospects for much greater Chinese pressure on Taiwan – perhaps even a coercive takeover – could increase considerably."Strike two" on Lai's part would be the impact of his policies on the efficacy of Washington's longstanding "dual deterrence" strategy regarding the Taiwan Strait, an approach intended to discourage unilateral changes to the status quo by both Beijing and Taipei. Within the DPP, Lai is seen as a political figure deeply aligned with pro-independence forces, as witnessed by the more extreme stance he took during his challenge to President Tsai in the DPP primary in 2019. Lai's label, promoted at the time as the "golden grandson of Taiwan Independence" frequently evokes parallels with former Taiwan president Chen Shui-bian's moniker of "son of Taiwan."In recent months, some in the United States have seemed to cast doubt on Lai's stated intention to maintain the status quo. However, there is also strong support for Lai's pro-independence stance in Washington, especially in Congress. A Lai victory in next year's election would likely embolden support for Taiwan Independence in Congress and elsewhere and encourage him to alter President Tsai's relatively cautious stance on cross-strait issues and adopt more assertive pro-independence policies, thus undermining Washington's "dual deterrence" strategy.Lai's "strike three" would be the blow that he could deliver to Taiwan's economic prosperity. Despite President Tsai's effort to pursue economic diversification from China through initiatives such as the "New Southbound Policy," Taiwan's economic growth still largely relies on China. As Taiwan's biggest trading partner, China (Hong Kong included) accounted for nearly 40 percent of Taiwan's total trade in 2022. Taiwan's trade surplus with the mainland and Hong Kong even surged to $100.43 billion in 2022 from $66.66 billion in 2016. Such growth could be explained by China's tireless effort to woo Taiwan through economic incentives, as well as the geographically and culturally entwined relationship between Taiwan and the mainland.However, China has also been active in using economic disincentives, by stifling trade and exchanges on certain targeted commodities, to pressure Taiwan. Concerns have recently surfaced about China's possible intention to terminate the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA) with Taiwan if Lai were to be elected. Although many argue that such a move itself would have only a limited impact on Taiwan's economy, the deeper implications for Taiwan could be substantially negative, as Taiwan's prosperity relies on investors' faith in a secure and stable environment.Of course, Lai rejects the notion that his presidency would constitute a "strikeout" for Taiwan. In a Bloomberg interview in August, Lai stressed his commitment to peace and the importance of upholding the status quo. In late August, he even playfully conveyed his willingness to share shrimp fried rice and bubble tea with Chinese President Xi Jinping in what was intended as a goodwill gesture.. In early September, Lai stated that he would "fight for peace" and seek cooperation with China if elected. In the eyes of many in Taiwan and across the globe, Lai's rebuttals present a compelling case. There are valid concerns regarding the KMT's pro-Beijing stance and the relative inexperience of the four-year-old TPP's ability to run a national government. These concerns revolve around the potential consequences: either strengthening China's sway and influence within Taiwan if the KMT should win, or weakening Taiwan's governance under the TPP at a time when the need for internal strength and unity is paramount in countering China's mounting pressure. Terry Gou's candidacy raises even more pronounced concerns, primarily stemming from the fact that Foxconn, the multinational company he founded, possesses billions of dollars in assets located within mainland China. This substantial economic stake potentially provides Beijing with significant leverage over a President Gou.These concerns have led many observers to view a government led by Lai as the least risky option, albeit not without its challenges.But a Lai victory in January 2024 will clearly pose major challenges to both Washington and Beijing. It is imperative that both capitals carefully think through the possible consequences that could result from such a development and consider policies designed to avert them. Doubling down on extreme opposition to a President Lai through coercive means (by Beijing) or greater political support for his pro-independence instincts (by Washington) could prove disastrous.

Relations among the European backers of Ukraine have been roiled by recent battlefield developments indicating momentum may have passed to Russia amid stalled American funding for military support to Ukraine.The Franco-German "tandem," which has underpinned European integration for decades, has been disturbed by obvious disagreements between French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz. The recent friction comes from the continued refusal by Scholz to consider providing long-range Taurus cruise missiles to Ukraine and from Macron's highly contested declaration on February 26 that the deployment of NATO forces in Ukraine should not be excluded. The next day, Scholz categorically ruled out any deployment of German or NATO forces in Ukraine.Over the past two years of war, Germany has surprised critics by rising to second place behind the U.S. as a supplier of weapons for Ukraine. In recent weeks, however, Germany has returned to whipping-boy status, as Scholz has refused to grant Ukraine's long-standing request for Taurus missiles. This seems to be a replay of the 2022 debate over supplying German Leopard tanks, but the then-hopeful prospects for eventual Ukrainian victory have faded considerably. Scholz's objection to providing the Taurus missile is contested within his governing coalition (which includes the Greens and the liberal Free Democrats, as well as his own Social Democrats). He has stated, most recently on March 4, that his main reservation is that the Taurus missile could not be used by Ukraine except with the help and presence on Ukrainian soil of some German military personnel. A public opinion poll published on February 27 showed that 56% of Germans opposed sending the Taurus missile to Ukraine. A plurality of SPD supporters opposed the deployment (46% versus 41%), while a plurality of FDP supported it (48% to 46%). Among the governing parties, the Greens were the only party supporters who favored sending the missiles by a majority (52% to 34%). Surprisingly, more respondents who identified with the main center-right opposition Christian Democrats opposed the deployment than supported it (48% versus 45%), despite the support of their parliamentary delegation for providing the missiles. Finally, a huge majority (87%) who identified with the populist far-right AfD opposed the proposed deployment.Russian leak of air force officers on Taurus deploymentA conversation of Luftwaffe chief General Ingo Gerwartz and three other senior German air force officers on February 19 was intercepted and published online on March 1. The conversation dealt extensively with how Taurus missiles could be deployed without having German military personnel on-site. The officers were preparing a briefing for Defense Minister Boris Pistorius addressing the feasibility, timing, and practicalities of the deployment, but not clearly endorsing or opposing it.
The officers discussed how Taurus missiles could be used to destroy the Kerch Bridge, but did not themselves advocate the selection of this target. Their discussion reached no conclusion about how Germany could deploy the missiles effectively without breaching the political red line about a German military presence in Ukraine.
Moreover, Gerwartz indicated that the destruction of the Kerch Bridge, while technically achievable, was unlikely to change the course of the war. The transcript of this conversation was published by the Russian state broadcaster RT and is presumed to have been intercepted by Russian intelligence. The Russian official press has falsely characterized the officers' conversation as amounting to a plot being hatched to ensure the missiles are deployed, and to force the hand of the chancellor.
Pistorius has called the release of the transcript a case of Russian information warfare intended to sow discord among the Western supporters of Ukraine. The German domestic debate on this scandal has mainly focused on assigning responsibility for the egregious failure of communications security. Advocates of deploying the Taurus have used the incident to redouble their efforts to force Scholz to change his mind.
Since the release of the conversation, Scholz has reiterated that the problem of providing Taurus missiles boils down to the insuperable problem of how to ensure effective use of the Taurus missiles without itself becoming a party to the conflict. The leaked conversation alluded to the alleged presence and involvement of UK and French military personnel in the operation of the Storm Shadow and Scalp cruise missiles provided to Ukraine by Britain and France, respectively. Both countries have expressed outrage at the lax security that permitted the conversation's interception.Macron rises to the occasion?With Germany locked in its characteristic caution, French President Macron launched an effort to mobilize a united European drive to re-vitalize support for Ukraine by convening a hastily organized meeting of European leaders on the defense of Ukraine in Paris on February 26.
This followed on the heels of the fairly downbeat mood about the prospects of reviving Ukraine's military fortunes that prevailed at the annual Munich Security Conference the previous week. At the closing press conference of the Paris meeting, Macron made his surprising assertion that the deployment of NATO troops should not be ruled out, though he acknowledged that "no consensus" had yet formed around this idea. Macron seems to have in mind the deployment of French or NATO troops in non-combatant roles, such as de-mining. This idea has nevertheless come under fire from much of the political opposition in France.
The leaders at the conference decided to pursue a Czech proposal to increase European bilateral funding to buy 800,000 artillery shells for Ukraine from non-EU countries to make up for the inadequate supplies of shells in Europe. Macron traveled to Prague on March 5 to explore this idea further and insisted that eventual deployment of NATO forces should not be ruled out, and that allies should not be "cowardly." Germany's Pistorius quickly called this language unhelpful.It is galling to Germans that France, which has given far less military support to Ukraine than Germany, should chide others for being timid. The Ukraine Support Tracker at the Kiel Institute in Germany (last updated on January 15) puts German military aid commitments at $17.7 billion and the U.S. at $42.2 billion, with France well down the list at $0.6 billion. Paris has challenged Kiel's methodology.Why it mattersThe New York Times' Roger Cohen recently noted that, without any obvious attempt to build advance support for his initiative, Macron sought to reinject confidence among European supporters of Ukraine and produce "strategic ambiguity" to shake Russian confidence. Instead, he laid bare the divisions among allies about how far they are willing to go in defense of Ukraine and provoked an open breach with Germany. Macron's own twisted path toward his latest hawkish incarnation limits his credibility to mobilize Europe behind him.
German resistance to providing Taurus missiles is directly related to its alarm at what it sees as Macron's reckless stance on eventual NATO deployments in Ukraine. Germany apparently remains determined not to cross the line between assisting Ukraine in its self-defense and becoming a party to the conflict. The opposition to deploying the Taurus from the German public across the political spectrum (with the Greens as the noteworthy exception) bolsters Scholz's stance.
Even if Macron's initiative seems to have divided rather than mobilized a united European front to defend Ukraine, his activism demonstrates the dawning awareness that Europe will have more responsibility for arming Ukraine due to the stalled American aid package and the approaching U.S. elections.
The unfortunate upshot of these recent developments is to hobble the Franco-German tandem that has been crucial to the effective functioning of the EU for decades. This open rift is unwelcome when the EU as a whole is groping toward a more unified, coordinated, and generously funded rearmament, in which Berlin and Paris must be leading players.

It was hard to know whether to laugh or cry in response to recent press reports suggesting that the Biden administration is gearing up for a "sustained bombing campaign" against the Houthis in Yemen. Unsurprisingly, the initial coalition strikes against the Houthis apparently did not destroy the Houthi arsenal being launched at commercial vessels in the Red Sea.As was the case in the great jihadi hunt across Southwest Asia stretching over nearly a quarter century, the United States today finds itself at war in a conflict with no defined political objective and a clearly unachievable military objective against an enemy that is nested in a complex political and strategic circumstance that is completely unfamiliar to the United States. Sound familiar?It is also a war with no apparent timeline in which the application of force is linked to ill-defined benchmarks, suggesting that we could launch our bombs and missiles indefinitely or until we run out of ammunition — to no strategic purpose. Have we learned nothing from our follies of the last 25 years in which we proved incapable of clearly relating ends, ways, and means in making decisions on when and under what circumstances to use force? For those states that can afford them, standoff weapons and bombs have become the preferred method of policing the international system. Yet it's hard to remember any of these strikes having any sort of lasting positive impact once the headlines and videos faded. Strangely, these tools of war maintain a hold on government and the popular imagination as some sort of "decisive" action that curiously demonstrates strength, commitment, and resolve.The reality is that strike warfare — long range strikes by planes and missiles — has rarely achieved its advertised political and strategic consequence. Yet it remains a dangerous, drug-like chimera to countries like the United States desperately searching for some sort of easy, low-cost way of maintaining global influence, control, and primacy in a chaotic world. Like all drugs, the initial rush feels great, but the long-range addiction is, in the end, far more destructive, dangerous, and difficult (if not impossible) to kick.We tell ourselves that the state/bad guy on the receiving end (in this case the Houthis) will feel the wrath of our (duly proportionate) strikes and reconsider continuing their attacks. Yet, of course, the Houthis in public pronouncements seem to have welcomed the chance to start shooting directly at the United States. Moreover, we have limited knowledge of the Houthi anti-ship weapon arsenal in its entirety, let alone the political motivations that surround their own use of force. The truth is we have no knowledge or understanding of whether and under what circumstances the Houthis will cease fire, but blithely assume that our missiles and bombs will make them behave. The history of America's fetishOpen-ended military strikes regrettably have become an ill-considered American fetish. We told ourselves the same thing in December 1998, in the three-day fusillade against Iraq known as Operation Desert Fox, when Washington wanted to stress its disapproval of Saddam Hussein's recalcitrance toward UN weapons inspectors. And, of course, Desert Fox was really just the exclamation point on a campaign of long-range strikes during the 1990s that sought to control the Iraqi dictator's non-existent WMD programs.My favorite strike of the 1990s was the 1996 cruise missile strike to warn Saddam off attacking the Kurds in northern Iraq. He did not. But the strategic consequences of those strikes went unrecognized at the time, and they had little to do with Saddam. Following those strikes, the U.S. took on the role of protecting the Kurds and tacitly endorsed their dream of statehood — a decision that today continues to shape the region in ways that may or may not support our interests. In the end, the era of the 1990s culminating in Desert Fox proved to be little else but the bridge to the next phase of the U.S. war on Iraq.We told ourselves the same thing in the opening phases of the shock and awe campaign of the invasion of Iraq in 2003 as we blasted away in our creative targeting against Saddam's armies under the rubric of "shock and awe" and "effects-based operations." Sure enough, Saddam's armies indeed melted away from our initial bombing and our advancing armies, only to regroup and morph into something much more dangerous and deadly that is still shaping the landscape of the Middle East today.We told ourselves that same thing in Afghanistan, as we unleashed a fusillade of strikes called in by CIA jawbreaker teams that sent the Taliban scurrying over the border into Pakistan in 2001 to rest and refit. Once they had done that, they slipped back across the border to resume the war — a conflict they would eventually win 20 years later — forcing the United States to retreat and leaving the Taliban in control of the country.We told ourselves the same thing in Libya in 2011, when we believed that a few well-placed missiles and bombs would enable a peaceful transition of power from Qadafi to someone more amenable to, well, us. Of course, as was the case in Iraq, the strikes were only the opening round in an ongoing struggle for political power and authority that continues to this day.As was the case in Iraq and Afghanistan, the second-order effects of the strikes in Libya ended up being of far greater strategic consequences than was anticipated at the time. The current Biden national security team, which engineered these strikes, obviously learned nothing from the experience.We've told ourselves the same thing in the global war on terror, where we have sent our robots and special forces hunting for sought-after "high value targets" all over the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia. We have surely rained death and destruction on these enemies (and killed lots of innocent people who were at the wrong place at the wrong time) with our Hellfire missiles, but did we win any of these wars?Yet we remain addicted Despite these uncertain results and even colossal failures, we remain addicted to strike warfare, telling ourselves that we can police the politics on the ground by dropping bombs from on high. The reality is, of course, different. Targeting people and property with high explosives tends to make them angry and fight harder. Just ask the Houthis, who have endured years of U.S.-sponsored and supported airstrikes by the Saudis and others in the Yemeni civil war. Obviously, the Houthis were not bombed into submission.Therein lies the strategic dilemma for the West, which has invested billions in the strike, information, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities designed to blow things up at long range with little advertised collateral damage. The revolution in military affairs (and billions of taxpayer dollars) indeed delivered the strike complex — much to the delight of political leaders, who saw in it a low-cost substitute for sending armies to the four corners of the globe to police local political disputes. As described above, this is largely a myth.The Houthis have indicated they'll stop shooting when the Gaza War ends. Perhaps Secretary Blinken should stop by Sana'a on his next trip to the region for consultations. Even more importantly, maybe the Biden Administration should listen to the Houthis and others and take decisive steps to end the war in Gaza instead of becoming enmeshed in the conflict's wider fires to no strategic purpose.Surrounded by the wreckage around the world wrought by strikes stretching back over half a century, you'd think that it was time for us to get into the rehab center and confront our addiction, yet this latest round of strikes tells us that our habit depressingly remains as strong as ever.

The Houthis are creating a global shipping crisis as they draw support and tribute from other Muslim countries and peoples for standing up for Palestinians in Gaza. But how far will it go before the West punches back in defense of "world trade" and regional security?On December 18, the Department of Defense announced the formation of Operation Prosperity Guardian. The ten-nation force aims to ensure maritime security in the Red Sea and the Bab al-Mandeb, which is a shipping chokepoint between the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden. Since October 7, the Houthis have launched more than a hundred armed drone and missile attacks — including several aimed at US warships on Saturday — claiming that they are targeting any and all vessels with links to Israel.These threats have caused global shipping companies to divert away from the Red Sea. Many are now sailing around the Cape of Good Hope, which can add over a week to sailing times and as much as 20% to shipping costs. The diversions are also impacting Egypt's fragile economy. Tolls from the Suez Canal are a significant source of hard currency for the Egyptian government. Additionally, the Israeli port of Eilat has seen its revenues decline by 80%. While the global costs of the Houthis' attacks on shipping are steadily increasing, the attacks are paying hefty political and even strategic dividends for the Houthis, who appear to be winning on the public relations front both in and outside Yemen. In Yemen, support for the Houthis, even among some enemies, has increased. In many other Muslim nations, the Houthis are viewed as being "the only Muslim group standing against Israeli aggression." The high profile attacks, including the hijacking of the Galaxy Leader, have stoked national pride among many Yemenis. The Houthis' sophisticated strategic communications operations draw all of these attacks to the attention of domestic and international audiences. According to Yemeni sources who spoke to this author, this has supercharged recruitment for the Houthis and has also led to an influx of donations to the war effort from Yemeni businesses and individual citizens. The attacks are also a demonstration of the Houthis' geographical reach and of their emergence as a regional power.The only negative consequence of the anti-Israel campaign, at least so far, has been a reduction of the number of ships docking in the Houthi-controlled ports of Hodeidah and Salif. Yemen imports well over 90% of its food and a majority of the imports arrive via Hodeidah. Duties and taxes arising from the port are an important source of revenue for the Houthis. Reduced dockings at Hodeidah and rising maritime insurance costs will begin to bite, too.However, it is the Yemeni people who will pay the heaviest price. The Houthis enjoy multiple revenue streams which include everything from a range of efficiently collected taxes, the seizure of businesses and properties, to interests in illicit activities that range from human and arms trafficking to the manufacture and distribution of various drugs.The Houthis are hardwired for resilience and adaptability. Nearly two decades of war have honed the Houthis' war fighting capabilities. After the effective fall of the Yemeni government in September 2014, the Houthis further enhanced these capabilities by grafting their organization into what remained of the Yemeni military and intelligence services. Since 2014, the Houthis have systematically taken over almost every aspect of civil governance, security, education, and the economy in northwest Yemen.While the Houthis were and remain one of the finest guerrilla fighting forces in the region, if not the world, their success on and off the battlefield in Yemen has been aided by the ineptitude and disunity of their enemies. Yemen's Internationally Recognized Government (IRG) and the cobbled together Presidential Leadership Council (PLC) have consistently failed to unify the dozens of militias that operate in those areas outside Houthi control. Additionally, the IRG has failed to reign in endemic corruption. A considerable portion of the Houthis' arms and materiel comes from what Saudi Arabia and the UAE provide to their proxies in Yemen. Many of these Saudi and Emirati supported militias sell weaponry into Yemen's thriving arms market where the Houthis or their agents buy the weapons. This is not to argue that there isn't corruption within the Houthi organization. There is. However, the corruption is managed and largely limited to senior members of the organization. The Houthis exercise tight command and control over their arsenals, weapons assembly facilities, government ministries, and a burgeoning economic empire in Yemen. Northwest Yemen has never had a more efficient or brutal government than the current Houthi-led regime.Since October 7, the U.S. and its allies have focused on defensive measures aimed at intercepting the Houthis missiles and drones. The costs of these measures are steadily increasing. The U.S. and its allies cannot easily continue to expend large numbers of scarce multimillion-dollar missiles to take out drones that can cost as little as a thousand dollars. The Houthis have factories, many of which are located in hard-to-target dense urban areas, which can manufacture — supplies permitting—dozens to hundreds of low-end drones per week. More sophisticated drones are produced at a slower pace, but the Houthis can still assemble several hundred of these over the course of a few months. While the Houthis have and continue to receive assistance and materiel from Iran, almost all the Houthis' drones and missiles are assembled in Yemen. The Houthis are also increasingly focused on modifying and adapting Iranian designs for missiles and drones to suite their own particular requirements.To date, the Houthis have only used a fraction of the armed drones and missiles that they currently possess. Nor have the Houthis made use of their more sophisticated longer-range drones and missiles. The Houthis also possess large numbers of naval mines, including hard to detect influence mines.The U.S.-led collation of ships that is now assembled in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden, combined with the on-shore assets in neighboring countries, possesses enough firepower to degrade the Houthis' military capabilities, at least over the short term. However, such a campaign will need to be sustained for what could be months and will come at a tremendous cost for all involved. The Houthis are masters of asymmetric warfare—as clearly evidenced by their Red Sea campaign—and will respond to U.S.-led strikes by attacking energy infrastructure in Saudi Arabia and the UAE. The Houthis will also deploy more sophisticated missiles and armed drones. While U.S. and coalition warships will likely be able to defend themselves against these weapons, commercial shipping, especially tankers, will be increasingly vulnerable. The Houthis have already effectively closed the Bab al-Mandeb to many global shipping companies. Higher-intensity conflict in and around the Bab al-Mandeb could mean that Red Sea shipping traffic is diminished—or even stopped altogether—for months. The Houthis have largely achieved their objectives: impose costs on Israel and its allies, demonstrate their regional reach, and bolster domestic support. The U.S. and its allies have no good options when it comes to dealing with the Houthis. Apart from acting to constrain Israel's unrelenting offensive in Gaza, the only way of avoiding entering an escalatory loop is for the U.S. to continue to support Saudi and Omani led efforts aimed at reining in the Houthi's threats and attacks. Yet, at the same time, the Houthis only respect force. The current U.S. response is viewed as toothless by the Houthis, and many other nations and non-state groups will view the response or lack thereof in the same way. The conflict in the Red Sea is a harbinger of what the future holds as the diffusion of low-cost but increasingly capable weapons systems continues. The U.S. and its allies are inevitably going to face more and more situations in which there are no good options as the asymmetry between high and low-cost weapons systems increases.

As one of America's closest allies, Israel has remained heavily dependent on the US —politically, economically, and militarily—since its creation in 1948.US arms supplies, mostly provided gratis, are channeled via US Foreign Military Financing (FMF), Military Assistance Program (MAP) and Excess Defense Articles (EDA).According to the Congressional Research Service (CRS), the US has provided more foreign assistance to Israel since World War II than to any other country.The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) documented that the United States supplied 79 percent of all weapons transferred to Israel from 2018-2022.No one else was even close – the next closest suppliers were Germany with 20 percent and Italy with just 0.2 percent.A Fact Sheet released October 2023, by the US State Department's Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, provides a detailed official breakdown on the unrestrained American security assistance to Israel.Steadfast support for Israel's security has been a cornerstone of American foreign policy for every U.S. Administration since the presidency of Harry S. Truman.Since Israel's founding in 1948, the State Department said, the United States has provided Israel with over $130 billion in bilateral assistance focused on addressing new and complex security threats, bridging Israel's capability gaps through security assistance and cooperation, increasing interoperability through joint exercises, and helping Israel maintain its Qualitative Military Edge (QME).This assistance, says the State Department, has helped transform the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) into "one of the world's most capable, effective militaries and turned the Israeli military industry and technology sector into one of the largest exporters of military capabilities worldwide."In the current war, Israel's overwhelming fire power has resulted in the killings of thousands of Palestinian civilians in Gaza and the destruction of entire cities—mostly with US supplied weapons.Dr. Natalie J. Goldring, a Visiting Professor of the Practice in the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University, told IPS the October 7 Hamas attacks were horrendous acts and should be condemned as such."Even so, the Israeli responses to those attacks have been indiscriminate – intentionally so," she said.Two days after the Hamas attacks, Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant declared that Israel would carry out a "complete siege" of Gaza, including blocking the supply of water, food, and fuel, while also stopping the supply of electricity. And Israeli forces have done so, she pointed out."The US government bears a special responsibility for the continuing Israeli attacks. It has supplied Israel with massive quantities of military aid and weaponry, and Israel has ignored US restrictions on the use of those weapons".This supply of weapons and ammunition allows the Israeli military to continue its indiscriminate attacks in Gaza," said Dr Goldring, who also represents the Acronym Institute at the United Nations, on conventional weapons and arms trade issues."A key first step in reducing the human cost of this war is for the US government to call for an immediate ceasefire. The US government should also halt supplies of weapons and ammunition to Israel, whether from the US itself or from prepositioned stocks elsewhere."Since 1983, the United States and Israel have met regularly via the Joint Political-Military Group (JPMG) to promote shared policies, address common threats and concerns, and identify new areas for security cooperation.According to the State Department, Israel is the leading global recipient of Title 22 U.S. security assistance under the Foreign Military Financing (FMF) program. This has been formalized by a 10-year (2019-2028) Memorandum of Understanding (MOU).Consistent with the MOU, the United States annually provides $3.3 billion in FMF and $500 million for cooperative programs for missile defense. Since FY 2009, the United States has provided Israel with $3.4 billion in funding for missile defense, including $1.3 billion for Iron Dome support starting in FY 2011.Through FMF, the United States provides Israel with access to some of the most advanced military equipment in the world, including the F-35 Stealth fighter aircraft.Israel is eligible for Cash Flow Financing and is authorized to use its annual FMF allocation to procure defense articles, services, and training through the Foreign Military Sales (FMS) system, Direct Commercial Contract agreements – which are FMF-funded Direct Commercial Sales procurements – and through Off Shore Procurement (OSP).Via OSP the current MOU allows Israel to spend a portion of its FMF on Israeli-origin rather than U.S.-origin defense articles. This was 25 percent in FY 2019 but is set to phase-out and decrease to zero in FY 2028.Elaborating further Dr Goldring said: "Unfortunately, the situation in Gaza bears similarities to the documented uses of US weapons by the Saudi-led coalition in attacks on civilians in Yemen"She said: "Our response should be the same in both cases. These countries have failed to honor the conditions of US weapons transfers, and should be ineligible for further transfers until they are in compliance.""US arms transfer decision-making gives too much weight to the judgment of government officials and politicians who frequently fail to consider the full human costs of these transfers," she argued."Earlier this year, the Biden Administration released a new Conventional Arms Transfer policy. They claimed that arms transfers would not be approved when their analysis concluded that "it is more likely than not" that the arms transferred would be used to commit or facilitate the commission of serious violations of international humanitarian or human rights law."The actions of the Israeli and Saudi militaries are examples of ways in which this standard is not being met, declared Dr Goldring.As of October 2023, the United States has 599 active Foreign Military Sales (FMS) cases, valued at $23.8 billion, with Israel. FMS cases notified to Congress are listed here; priority initiatives include: F-35 Joint Strike Fighter Aircraft; CH-53K Heavy Lift Helicopters; KC-46A Aerial Refueling Tankers; and precision-guided munitions.From FY 2018 through FY 2022, the U.S. has also authorized the permanent export of over $5.7billion in defense articles to Israel via the Direct Commercial Sales (DCS) process.The top categories of DCS to Israel were XIX-Toxicological Agents, including Chemical Agents, Biological Agents, and Associated Equipment (this includes detection equipment ((f)), vaccines ((g)-(h)) and modeling software ((i)); IV- Launch Vehicles, Guided Missiles, Ballistic Missiles, Rockets, Torpedoes, Bombs, and Mines; and VII- Aircraft.Since 1992, the United States has provided Israel with $6.6 billion worth of equipment under the Excess Defense Articles program, including weapons, spare parts, weapons, and simulators.U.S. European Command also maintains in Israel the U.S. War Reserve Stockpile, which can be used to boost Israeli defenses in the case of a significant military emergency.In addition to security assistance and arms sales, the United States participates in a variety of exchanges with Israel, including military exercises like Juniper Oak and Juniper Falcon, as well as joint research, and weapons development.The United States and Israel have signed multiple bilateral defense cooperation agreements, to include: a Mutual Defense Assistance Agreement (1952); a General Security of Information Agreement (1982); a Mutual Logistics Support Agreement (1991); and a Status of Forces Agreement (1994), according to the State Department.Since 2011, the United States has also invested more than $8 million in Conventional Weapons Destruction programs in the West Bank to improve regional and human security through the survey and clearance of undisputed minefields.Following years of negotiations with the Palestinians and Israelis, humanitarian mine action activities began in April 2014 – this represents the first humanitarian clearance of landmine contamination in nearly five decades.Israel has also been designated as a U.S. Major Non-NATO Ally under U.S. law. This status provides foreign partners with certain benefits in the areas of defense trade and security cooperation and is a powerful symbol of their close relationship with the United States.This piece has been republished with permission from Inter Press Service.

China and the United States, like sports captains picking sides, have been engaged in a considered effort to enlist partners. In the recruitment rush, the Biden administration has given short shrift to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and its much vaunted balancing, or "centrality" in the Asia Pacific. Washington, like Beijing, has favored certain ASEAN members over others, frustrated no doubt by the group's lack of cohesion and effectiveness. But in the new multipolar world, these hinge countries and their groupings can be as important as power poles. There has been a lot of coalition building lately. In August, the BRICS bloc — Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa — invited six new members to join at the start of 2024. In March, Iran and Saudi Arabia reestablished ties after years of antagonism in a deal brokered by Beijing. In July, China signed an accord on law enforcement and security with the Solomon Islands and announced a strategic partnership with Georgia. This month, China upgraded its relationship with American bugaboo Venezuela to an "all-weather" partnership.The U.S. has been similarly busy — perhaps more so to make up for Beijing's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) bridge-building over the past decade. In August, President Joe Biden and his Japanese and South Korean counterparts launched a trilateral grouping at Camp David. The U.S. and the Philippines in February revived an agreement giving increased American access to Filipino military facilities. In May, the U.S. and Papua New Guinea concluded a defense pact. At the G20 summit in New Delhi this month, the leaders of the U.S., the European Union, India, Saudi Arabia and other countries committed to developing an India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor for cooperation on clean energy, power grids and telecommunications. After the G20, Biden traveled to Hanoi where the U.S. and Vietnam announced that they were elevating relations to a "comprehensive strategic partnership," deepening cooperation in cloud computing, semiconductors and artificial intelligence — all areas of contention between Washington and Beijing. In a 2021 lecture, Biden's national security adviser Jake Sullivan described how the administration was assembling a "latticework of alliances and partnerships globally." This was "not just about refurbishing the old bilateral alliances," he explained, "but modernizing those elements of the latticework and adding new components." Sullivan cited as examples the upgrading of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, known as the Quad (Australia, India, Japan, and the U.S.), to leader level and the creation of AUKUS, the partnership among Australia, the United Kingdom and the U.S. to provide nuclear-powered submarines to Canberra and collaborate on advanced technologies.Both Washington and Beijing say they are not forcing countries to pick sides, though the impression that they do just that is unavoidable. Beijing has applied economic pressure on states for actions that it perceives to hew too closely to American positions — Canada, Australia, South Korea and Japan have had to deal with such coercion. In network building, the U.S. has offered more carrots than sticks, particularly when it comes to courting pivotal states that Washington deems to have distinct geostrategic importance and — more to the point — the capacity to contribute to countering or containing China. In the Indo-Pacific, India, the Philippines and Vietnam have been the chief recipients of American courtship. But what about ASEAN? Washington insists that it values ASEAN centrality, but the proof of its perspective is in its actions. Biden skipped ASEAN's annual leaders' jamboree with dialogue partners, leaving it to his vice president to go to Jakarta, but squeezed in a visit to Hanoi just days later. The president's participation in the G20 was a not-to-be-missed opportunity to butter up Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who only in June had been feted at the White House. India is the most-prized pivot country in the Indo-Pacific (that status so obvious in the term). Under Modi, it sees itself as a power pole in its own right. New Delhi has proven its multi-alignment credentials, with its participation in the Quad, the BRICS and the China/Russia-conceived Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), and its refusal to turn against traditional ally Moscow since the Ukraine war broke out. Biden is oiling the Indian hinge so it swings more Washington's way — and may be succeeding, given India's border clashes with China and its participation in joint military activities in the Pacific, Quad initiatives and Biden's Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity (IPEF).ASEAN should be as critical a hinge player if not to win over, at least to keep "central" as the region's balancer — a crucial section of the lattice that would act as a security blanket for peace and stability. Some member states, worried that the China-U.S. rivalry undermines their agency, have warned the two great powers against forcing them to choose sides. ASEAN has not bought into the American Indo-Pacific construct, merely articulating an "outlook" on the concept. Southeast Asian nations will profit more not by putting on any one team's jersey, but instead playing the field as something of a referee or honest broker in good stead with both sides, however heated the competition.U.S. administrations have never taken the centrality of ASEAN seriously, largely because member states themselves have failed to show what it means to be the region's ballast. It is a systemic problem — ASEAN is no EU in either form or practice. Even though it has launched an "economic community" and has sought to address thorny problems, such as Myanmar and the South China Sea, as a group, it remains a politically divided, economically diverse collection of states, with a reputation for glacial progress and ineffectiveness. It was born this way, though it was successful in its founding mission to be a bulwark against communism's spread.But ASEAN has strengths beyond being the world's fifth largest economy. Its convening power is unmatched, reaching across economic and strategic spheres. Its ASEAN Regional Forum and ASEAN Defense Ministers Meeting-Plus are as evolved and inclusive a strategic framework for the region as is possible. ASEAN-led platforms offer a neutral space for the great powers to interact on a wide range of issues. By lavishing attention on certain ASEAN members — the Philippines, Vietnam and Singapore (host of a U.S. military facility) — Washington is mimicking the Chinese divide-and-conquer approach (Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar are reckoned to be on Team Beijing). But even small gaps weaken a lattice. The ASEAN way may be slow and plodding — negotiations with Beijing on a code of conduct in the South China Sea have dragged on for years — but this tortoise cannot be written off.In a speech on September 13 outlining "the power and purpose of American diplomacy," U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken tellingly never mentioned ASEAN. Yet, the Biden administration may be smartening up. Seven of the ASEAN 10 are part of the IPEF, the American answer to the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), from which the U.S. withdrew, and the ASEAN-China concocted Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) trade accord. And guess who's coming to the White House for a bilateral with Biden in November? Indonesian President Joko Widodo, the very leader whom Biden "snubbed" in favor of one night in Vietnam. With its sizable population, strategic geographical position, participation in China's BRI, a maritime dispute of its own with Beijing, a growing strategic relationship with Washington, and a critical presidential election next year, Indonesia is the key hinge power in Southeast Asia. Like India, it has proven its agency and pragmatism, particularly in vital areas such as data security standards and infrastructure development. Giving Jakarta more attention would bolster ASEAN's position in the American Indo-Pacific latticework, especially with Laos, a country that tilts towards Beijing and is taking over from Indonesia as ASEAN chair next year.

Three and a half years ago, the ASI published a position paper and draft law proposing a "UK Free Speech Act" which would, if enacted, forever remove the regulation of nonviolent political discussion from the remit of law enforcement in the United Kingdom.The censorship provisions of the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021 (the "Hate Crime Act"), entering into force this week, are deeply offensive to freedom of expression, and the only way to stop them is to implicitly repeal these new rules with UK-wide protection for freedom of speech.The Hate Crime Act contains three provisions in particular – "aggravation of offences by prejudice," "racially aggravated harassment" and "stirring up hatred" – which are, at least as-described, descriptions of the sort of speech that most members of polite society would rightly oppose as a personal, moral matter. However, if we look at the substance of the language employed by the new laws and its derivation from similar, viewpoint-neutral English rules – in the case of the stirring-up offence and the "racially aggravated harassment" offences,  the "alarm or distress" language from the English Public Order Act 1986, and in the case of the stirring-up offence only, the historic "threatening, abusive, or insulting" language from that same law – we know that these rules have proven capable of extremely overbroad application in England, and these new rules will prove just as terrible, if not more so, if allowed to stand in Scotland.The position, outlined in a 2020 paper for the ASI, and the applicable English legal rules, remains entirely unchanged. It suffices for present purposes to note that existing English laws, which are nowhere near as intrusive as the new Scottish ones, have already been used in England to, variously: ·      threaten a schoolboy with prosecution for nonviolently holding up a sign calling the Church of Scientology a dangerous cult;·      arrest republican protestors in the vicinity of King Charles' coronation for nonviolent picketing;·      convict a protestor for nonviolently saying David Cameron had "blood on his hands" for cutting disability benefit at an event where the then-PM was speaking;·      convict protestors against the war in Iraq for nonviolently expressing their points of view in front of soldiers of the British Army returning home from that war;·      arrest students for nonviolently saying "woof" to a dog;·      arrest a woman for nonviolently praying silently; and·      arrest a preacher for nonviolently reading from the Bible, in public, verbatim.The existing rules should have been repealed years ago, but few UK lawyers, being unaccustomed to an American perspective on free speech jurisprudence and thus unable to see that the frog was starting to boil, seemed to notice very much as the English judiciary lost its way after issuing its landmark, pro-free speech decision of Redmond-Bate [1999] EWHC Admin 733. In a few short years, the English courts went from protecting controversial speech to routinely acquiescing to the criminalization of what, pre-1999 at least, would have been entirely lawful, if somewhat controversial, expression (see: Norwood v DPP [2003] EWHC 1564, and Abdul v. DPP  [2011] EWHC 247). The provisions of Article 10 of the European Convention concerning freedom of expression, enshrined in domestic law by the UK Human Rights Act, are little better than window-dressing. They have been of no assistance whatsoever in protecting English speakers of controversial ideas since that law's enactment; indeed, the Human Rights Act may have harmed the cause of free speech in the country by formalising the broad derogations from that right permitted under Article 10(2) which have been abused, time and again, to stifle discourse. Put another way, our experience with the English rules, in particular the Public Order Act 1986 but also the Malicious Communications Act 1988, and Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003, is that their application, especially in the last 25 years, has been subjective, unpredictable, inconsistent, politically-motivated, sometimes capricious, and thoroughly chilling to speech.The Scottish law turbocharges all of these problems by abandoning viewpoint-neutrality and expressly targeting "culture war" issues around questions of identity within the four corners of the statute. This is particularly the case when we look at the "aggravation of offences by prejudice" law, which states that age, disability, national or ethnic origin, sexual orientation, and transgender identity are all to be considered when sentencing people in Scotland for criminal offences. The problem with this, of course, is that merely talking about these issues and causing offence is already capable of constituting a public order offence, both in England and substantially equivalent legislation in Scotland, and these provisions were used in both England and Scotland to suppress speech even before the Hate Crime Act entered into force.Only last month transgender activists sought to have J.K. Rowling arrested there after English prosecutors declined to prosecute her for prior "gender critical" remarks. The Hate Crime Act now requires Scottish judges to take into account Rowling's motivations when judging her speech, which we think would be fairly described as emanating from the identitarian, and therefore definitionally "prejudicial," ideology known as second-wave feminism, and would require, in a public order or malicious communications-based prosecution for those feminist remarks, for a Scottish judge to consider a sentencing enhancement.It makes no sense to criminalise these conversations. Indeed it makes sense to expressly legalise them, given that national politics seems, increasingly, to cluster around identity issues and, in a democratic society, require their open discussion in order for these disputes around the proper ordering of society to be satisfactorily resolved. On the gender theory question, in particular, the debate seems to be between, on one side, critical theory-informed intersectional activists who seek to view all power relationships through the lens of what they call immutable characteristics, and on the other, we see a coalition of classical liberals and religiously-minded traditionalists from the usual suspects like the Catholic Church but also newly aggrieved groups such as traditionalist Muslim parents of schoolchildren. As the fact that the Prime Minister himself felt the need to chime in on these matters this week plainly evidences, identity issues, whether we like it or not, now sit squarely at the centre of contemporary UK political discourse. We take no view on the merits of either "side" here, because taking a viewpoint does not matter and, in any case, is inadvisable, to the extent anyone here at the Institute plans on ever setting foot in Scotland again. This is because it is now quite unsafe, legally speaking, to take a vigorously-defended public position on these questions in Scotland from any perspective, as long as there is a hearer who is offended enough to file a police report against the hearer's perceived political enemies, or calculating enough to pretend to be so offended. To see how the Hate Crime Act potentially cuts in all directions, we need look no further than criminal complaints which have already been made under the new law. See, for example, the fact that Scottish First Minister Humza Yousaf, the law's primary advocate and promoter, was immediately reported by the Indian Council of Scotland to the police for thoughtcrime contained in a speech he himself delivered in Scottish Parliament in 2023 as soon as the Hate Crime Act entered into force. Under the new regime, even the First Minister will need to take care not to express those same thoughts in the same manner again.There are not many reasonable people who wish to live in a country where the first response to any political disagreement is to call for a speaker's arrest. Nonviolent speech should never warrant a violent response. Yet, as was proven on day 1 of this new law, we already see that the Scottish law will be used, and is being used, to call down state-sanctioned violence, namely arrests and imprisonment, to suppress broad swathes of viewpoints from all political quarters. To the few back-benchers who are engaged by this pertinent issue: This is the hill to die on. Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister, has said he opposes the Scottish law. Push the Prime Minister to back up that opposition with decisive action. Permanently abolish political censorship enforced at gunpoint. Enact the UK Free Speech Act.

The latest Houthi strike in the Red Sea has for the first time killed civilians — three workers on a Barbados-flagged cargo ship — underscoring the ineffectiveness of the Biden military response after five long months of militant attacks there. It also shows how elusive the goal is for ending the nearly decade-long war in Yemen.Just two weeks after assuming the presidency in January 2021, Joe Biden took three key steps in hopes of ending the war in Yemen. First, he removed the Houthis from the Foreign Terrorist Organization designation that was announced in the last days of Donald Trump's tenure. Second, he appointed Tim Lenderking as Special Envoy to Yemen. Finally, he announced that Washington would stop supporting Saudi offensive operations in Yemen, and declared that the war in Yemen had to end. Ending the war in Yemen has remained a major policy objective of his administration.By the time of these announcements, the Saudi regime, under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, or MBS, had begun extracting itself from the Yemeni quagmire, so the new U.S. position was not received with the hostility from Riyadh it might have expected; indeed, it was formally "'welcomed" in the hope that Washington's diplomatic involvement might assist this process. Since then, Lenderking has actively joined UN Special Envoy Hans Grundberg in his efforts to bring about an end to the war in Yemen, although the impact of his involvement remains unclear. Major developments took place in April 2022 with the announcement by Grundberg of a truce between the Houthis and the Saudi-led coalition. (While that truce officially expired the following October, fighting since then has been small scale, and neither the Saudis nor the Emiratis have conducted air strikes against the Houthis.) A few days after Grundberg's announcement, the president of Yemen's internationally recognized government (IRG), Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi, who had clung to that post since 2012, was unceremoniously replaced by a Presidential Leadership Council (PLC) at a meeting in Riyadh hosted by MBS. Much like the resignation statement announced by Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri in Riyadh in 2017, Hadi's renunciation was read in circumstances that suggested duress.The PLC consists of eight men -- Rashad al Alimi, the former Interior Minister who ascended to the presidency, and leaders of the various anti-Houthi military factions as vice presidents, some of them aligned with the Saudis and others with the Emiratis. When handing over his authority, Hadi gave them the mandate to negotiate "with (Ansar Allah) the Houthis for a permanent ceasefire throughout the republic and sit at the negotiating table to reach a final and comprehensive political solution that includes a transitional phase that will move Yemen from a state of war to a state of peace." Predictably, given the composition of the council, its members have since spent more energy disagreeing with each other than fighting the Houthis. Another major development later in 2022 was the start of direct and publicly acknowledged negotiations between the Saudis and the Houthis, resulting in the effective marginalization of both the UN-sponsored process and the PLC, but opening space for Omani mediation. During most of 2023, those talks progressed with two major markers: in April, an official trip to Sana'a, the Houthi-controlled capital, by a senior Saudi delegation, followed in September by a return visit to the Kingdom by senior Houthis. On both occasions there were widespread rumors that an agreement was on the verge of being reached. Indeed, PLC members were summoned to Riyadh on both occasions to be informed of the situation, rather than consulted. Similarly, the UN Special Envoy was, at best, informed of developments. The draft agreement involved a six-month cease-fire, to be followed by three months of intra-Yemeni discussions in preparation for a two-year transition phase. The Houthis' main concession was that the Saudis would sign as "mediators" rather than "participants" thus reducing the possibility of war crimes charges against Riyadh stemming from its highly destructive bombing campaign during earlier years in the conflict. In return, the Saudis agreed to pay the salaries of all government staff, including the Houthis' military and security personnel, for at least six months. The expected culmination would have been an event where the Houthis and the IRG, which had a great deal to lose by such an agreement, including generous Saudi subsidization, would sign as participants a document witnessed by the Saudis and likely the Omanis as mediators. It would have formalized Saudi Arabia's exit from the Yemen conflict while leaving to UN mediation the more difficult task of addressing the intra-Yemeni struggles.More recent developments in the Red Sea, however, have made it increasingly difficult to continue negotiations, let alone conclude the pending agreement. The Houthi seizure of the Galaxy Leader on November 19 was followed by a series of attacks on Israeli-connected shipping out of what Houthis said was solidarity with the Palestinian civilians in Gaza. The initial U.S. response was timid, largely because of the Biden administration's remaining hope that a public event formalizing the "end" of the Yemen war, would enable it to claim a major foreign policy success in an election year. While this hope explains Washington's restraint, it doesn't explain why the administration failed to consult with its major allies in Europe. As a result, when the U.S. established the ineffective Prosperity Guardian operation on December 18, it gained meager international support and a rapid disavowal by major European countries who announced their own operation in mid-February 2024.In the absence of a formal agreement, UN Special Envoy Grundberg, on December 23, announced a roadmap towards peace which includes "the parties' commitment to implement a nationwide ceasefire, pay all public sector salaries, resume oil exports, open roads in Taiz and other parts of Yemen, and further ease restrictions on Sana'a airport and the Hudaydah port…. and prepare for a Yemeni-owned political process under UN auspices." The IRG's welcoming of the announcement was, to say the least, muted. Regional states, particularly Saudi Arabia, were more positive, and both the UAE and the six-member Gulf Cooperation Council expressed support. Grundberg has tried to move his road map forward, but the escalations that have taken place in the Red Sea increasingly threaten those efforts. On January 11, the U.S. and UK initiated Operation Poseidon Archer against targets on the Yemeni mainland for the first time, intending to downgrade the Houthis' capability to launch missiles and drones. Initially presented as a "one-off," the strikes have become almost daily, and, by the end of February, had hit 230 sites throughout the country. The number of Houthi attacks, however, has not diminished. While few ships are hit, and those that have been have suffered only minor damage, the Rubymar, a British-owned ship struck on February 18 sank two weeks later, polluting the sea with fertilizer and a massive oil slick. There is no sign of an end to Houthi attacks: despite weeks of strikes, the U.S. officials remain unclear about their impact due to lack of information about Houthi stocks of projectiles. Meanwhile, the majority of Yemenis support Houthi actions in support of Palestine, even if they are unhappy with Houthi governance. The only explicit support for U.S. and UK strikes within Yemen comes from the IRG, a number of whose leaders have asked for the strikes to be complemented by materiel, training and other military support to fight and somehow defeat the Houthis. Widely seen as acting in defense of the Palestinians, however, the Houthis' popularity appears to have risen sharply both domestically and abroad, especially in Arab and predominantly Muslim countries. Should the U.S. and UK escalate their involvement in the Yemen conflict — a possibility made more likely by Wednesday's fatal Houthi strike— prospects for a worsening of the situation loom, increasingly reminiscent of Iraq or Afghanistan decades ago. While the Saudi involvement in the Yemen war appears to have ended, however informally, Yemenis are now facing the prospect of a new form of international intervention in their crisis, alongside the already worsening economic situation and humanitarian crisis which, between 2015 and until recently was considered the "world's worst" by the United Nations. Unfortunately, in the absence of any immediate likelihood of an end to Israel's catastrophic destruction of Gaza, prospects for peace in Yemen appear increasingly remote.

On Sunday, Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva criticized Israel's actions in Gaza in the strongest possible terms. "What is happening in the Gaza Strip with the Palestinian people has no parallel in any other historical moment," Lula said to a gathering of reporters in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. After a beat, the head of Latin America's largest nation added that, actually, there was a similar episode worth recalling: "when Hitler decided to kill the Jews." Lula's comments in Ethiopia came after a brief visit to Egypt, where he addressed the Arab League. Both African nations are new members of the BRICS — a growing geopolitical grouping originally composed of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. While Lula's visit emphasized past ties and future opportunities, his comments on Hitler eclipsed whatever other message he may have hoped to convey. The fallout opened a new line of attack against him at home, undermining his administration's domestic policy goals at least temporarily. The practical result abroad, however, is unlikely to add up to very much. If anything, the newly pronounced enmity between the Lula and Netanyahu governments is clarifying. The differences between this historical moment and World War II so vastly outweigh the similarities that it is hardly worth debating the merits of the comparison that Lula drew. The more intriguing question is whether Lula's comment signaled any kind of shift in Brazil's position on the issue of Israel-Palestine. There are multiple ways of reading his intentions. Many foreign critics pilloried him for invoking the Holocaust to make a political point. Netanyahu called Lula's remarks "shameful and serious," suggesting the Brazilian president aimed to "harm the Jewish people and Israel's right to defend itself." For Netanyahu, who has faced mounting legal troubles and popular opposition at home while overseeing a military campaign plausibly accused of acts of genocide, Lula's words "cross[ed] a red line."Standing alongside Brazil's ambassador to Israel at Yad Vashem, Foreign Minister Israel Katz on Monday declared: "We will not forget nor forgive. It is a serious antisemitic attack. In my name, and in the name of all Israeli citizens, tell President Lula that he is persona non grata in Israel until he retracts his statements."At home, opposition forces have mounted a quixotic impeachment effort that has nevertheless garnered significant support, including from some members of Lula's governing coalition. Lula was hammered in several of Brazil's mainstream press outlets for purportedly isolating his country on the world stage, supporting Hamas, or trivializing the murder of 6 million Jews between 1941 and 1945.A more charitable interpretation of what happened is that Lula simply spoke off the cuff and made a bad historical analogy. After all, nothing had fundamentally changed up to that point in his government's position, which was to work with the Israeli government even as it strongly criticizes what it sees as unconscionable excesses in its war against Hamas. Before this weekend, Brazil had not gone as far as other countries in Latin America in reconsidering its ties with Israel.Moreover, it's unclear why Lula would make a calculated decision to stake so much on an extemporized comparison between the Netanyahu government and the Third Reich. He surely would have known that the fallout, entirely predictable as it has been, would be extremely inconvenient in political terms. For example, the week ahead promises even more troubling legal news for former president Jair Bolsonaro, the leading counterweight to Lula in terms of Brazil's national politics. Rather than allowing the media narrative this week to focus on Bolsonaro, the Lula government has had to expend time and energy on addressing criticisms of the president's remarks. In so doing, it has established the contours of a new, much more openly hostile relationship with the Netanyahu government.On Monday, Lula recalled the Brazilian ambassador to Israel for consultations. Celso Amorim, Lula's former foreign minister and close current adviser, said the president would not apologize for his comments. "Israel is the one placing itself in a condition of increasing isolation," he insisted. According to journalist Eliane Oliveira, the Lula government is annoyed with what it sees as Netanyahu's eagerness to make hay of the Brazilian president's remarks and use them to his own political benefit. In that regard, it is worth noting that Bolsonaro was a close Netanyahu ally. The prime minister even endorsed Bolsonaro in his 2022 race against Lula, indicating that there was already a vast political divide between Lula and his Israeli counterpart. On Monday night, Alexandre Padilha, Brazil's Minister of Institutional Relations, spoke at length about Lula's comments during a televised interview, asserting that the president's critique constituted a passionate reaction against the Netanyahu government, not a criticism of Israel per se and certainly not of Jews worldwide.Since last year, Lula has strongly criticized Israel's assault on Gaza, calling it "as grave" as the Hamas attack on October 7. Before that, Brazil secured overwhelming support within the United Nations Security Council for a resolution that called for "humanitarian pauses" in Israel's bombing to allow for aid and supplies to enter Gaza, but the measure was vetoed by the United States. The implosion of Brazil's relationship with the Netanyahu government is unsurprising given the politics of the Brazilian left that makes up Lula's base and the broader landscape of Latin America. Countries like Colombia, Bolivia, and Chile, which has the largest Palestinian refugee population outside the Arab world, have been more strident and willing to act on their criticism of Israel's military campaign in Gaza, so the continued degradation of the Brazil-Israel relationship should surprise no one.On Tuesday morning, Amorim doubled down on the argument that Lula's comparison, attributed to a sense of visceral outrage, might push the international community to take firmer action on the matter: "Lula's speech shook the world and triggered a swirl of emotions that could help resolve an issue that the coldness of political interests has been unable to resolve." The fact that the Lula administration has closed the door on any public apology to the Netanyahu government is telling and is, in fact, what seems to have changed the nature of the bilateral relationship. It signals that the Brazilians have decided they are comfortable, if not entirely pleased, with where they've landed vis-à-vis Israel after the weekend. Since returning to the world stage for a third term in January of last year, Lula has rekindled his country's independent streak, steadfastly refusing to embrace the U.S. line on a host of key geopolitical issues even while working assiduously with Washington on matters of mutual interest. As I have argued previously in these pages, Lula insists on cultivating ties across ideological and political lines in pursuit of greater Brazilian influence over a shifting world order.It is not entirely clear whether a firm break with Israel is actually in the offing. As far as Brasilia is concerned, a meeting between Foreign Minister Mauro Vieira and Israel's ambassador on Monday constituted the end point of current tensions. No more escalation is expected from the Lula government, which now sees the ball as being in Netanyahu's court, according to journalist Guilherme Amado.The Israeli government, however, seems unlikely to tone down its criticisms of Lula. On Tuesday afternoon, the country's official X account accused Lula of Holocaust denialism and, in a post written in Portuguese on the same platform, Israel's foreign minister reiterated that Lula was persona non grata until he issued an apology, something the Brazilian government has said it will not do. So will Brazil break with Israel over its sustained bombardment of the Gaza Strip? A great deal of other Global South players have been there for some time. Brazil may well arrive there now, too.Either way, Lula is unlikely to garner any political benefit at home from this row, especially considering that those likely to welcome escalating tensions with Netanyahu already saw Lula as a staunch ally of the Palestinian cause. Given the challenges facing his political agenda, the last thing Lula needs is a muddled diplomatic crisis like this to galvanize opposition forces. The Israeli prime minister, on the other hand, may well benefit from having the Brazilian as a foil — which, from a Brazilian perspective, is precisely why Lula should have been more careful on that stage in Addis Ababa.

Since Joe Biden described Israel as "starting to lose support" due to "indiscriminate bombing" in Gaza, news media around the world have described the United States as pushing, unsuccessfully, for Israel to change both its tactics in Gaza and its preferred political arrangements for when the fighting ends. To date, that supposed pressure does not appear to have had much effect, which has led to "tail wags dog" arguments about how the U.S. is either unable, or unwilling, to force a shift in Israeli policy.Of course, it is impossible to know what, if any, threats are being made behind the scenes by the parade of U.S. officials who have been shuttling to Jerusalem over the past few weeks. However, given the nature of Prime Minister Netanyahu's governing coalition, one might imagine that any such threats might have been leaked to the media. Moreover, if one looks at what the two sides are disagreeing over — when precisely the bombing campaign should end, or how, down the road, some hypothetical third party would temporarily administer Gaza — there is, as a practical matter, precious little daylight between the U.S. and Israel. This is abundantly clear from the various news conferences given in recent days at the White House, the State Department, and the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem, notably on the issue of how a Security Council resolution had to be worded to avoid yet another American veto.But the strongest reason to doubt that very much pressure is being applied is the Holmesian dog that did not bark: Put simply, the people who run U.S. foreign policy show no indication of viewing a shift in Israeli policy as a matter of national interest for the United States. For the fact of the matter is that when U.S. officials perceive the national interest as being at stake, they are more than willing to change policy, including overriding close allies. The classic example is the 1956 Suez crisis when President Eisenhower threatened the United Kingdom financially and humiliated his old companion in arms, Anthony Eden. Other examples include President Kennedy's withdrawal of Jupiter missiles from its NATO allies Turkey and Italy as part of the Cuban Missile Crisis deal; President Nixon's squeezing of South Vietnamese President Thieu over the Paris Peace Accords; President George W. Bush's bypassing of Thatcher and Mitterrand regarding German reunification; and, most recently, President Trump's sanctioning of Turkey over its offensive in northern Syria.If, therefore, there are no signs of the U.S. threatening Israel over Gaza, it is unlikely due to White House qualms about facing down Netanyahu and company; rather, it is because the Administration sees little U.S. cost in slow-walking a modest policy change. Put simply, there is just not enough at stake to warrant the use of pressure. Both in terms of international relations and of domestic politics, the status quo is not significantly unsatisfactory. To see this, consider each of these factors.The "humanitarian situation" in Gaza, as a so-called "senior administration official" put it, is not perceived by Biden and his advisers as putting the United States in a position that requires a notable change in policy. I refer here not to the private views of these individuals, but to how they see the international status of the U.S. as affected by its support of what Israel is doing in Gaza. The answer is, not much. For example, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, after characterizing the plight of the people in Gaza as "gut-wrenching," added immediately that this was why Israel's "operations" should be seen "through to completion quickly, effectively, and doing everything possible to minimize the harm to those caught in a crossfire of Hamas's making." Another unnamed official described the diplomatic "cost" as "intangible" and making it "harder to win support on issues we care about." And when journalists ask about the U.S. being isolated because of its Gaza policy, the questions are blandly dismissed.One might imagine that this downplaying of discontent from other countries' governments or public opinion is due to a realpolitik sense that human rights and humanitarian concerns, even during genocides, are secondary. Evidence for this claim would cite President Clinton's maneuvers to prevent UN intervention in Rwanda, continue with President Reagan's support of Gen. Rios Montt in Guatemala and Presidents Ford and Carter's de facto backing of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and stretch back as far as President Roosevelt's refusal to bomb the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. However, the point has to do with perceived pressure from outside the U.S.: Viewed from Washington, neither massive killings nor most other situations give rise to pressure significant enough to change U.S. policy. In part, this is because the United States is in a unique position: Most of its adversaries are economically too weak to threaten the U.S., whereas those with economic weight are for the most part its allies or clients.But it is also due to a more fundamental feature of American foreign policy. When policy makers choose a course of action, they tend to discount longer-term negative consequences. A classic case in point is the July 1965 decision to send 200,000 ground troops to South Vietnam. When Under Secretary of State George Ball argued that the U.S. would end up like the French, his points were dismissed with Micawber-like platitudes. So too it was with Truman's decision to send troops north of the 38th parallel, and with Bush's decisions to invade Iraq and dissolve Saddam Hussein's military. Given this tendency, claims about future diplomatic damage for failure to crack down hard enough on Israel are no doubt met with reactions akin to Keynes's famous line about the long run.In this regard, it is significant that the cases cited above in which the U.S. cracked down on its allies involved reactions to current events, not a long-term calculation. Thus, U.S. policy over Suez was spurred by a sense of being in a life-or-death battle with the Soviet Union for the favors of countries in Africa and Asia; to side with the colonial powers and Israel who had occupied the canal was an immediate threat to U.S. interests (this is also why the Eisenhower White House supported civil rights at home). Similarly, the pressure on Thieu to go along with the Paris accords was, as Henry Kissinger infamously put it, in pursuit of a "decent interval." For U.S. policy makers, the response to discontent from abroad over their Gaza policy is akin to Scarlett O'Hara's views in "Gone With the Wind:" Tomorrow is another day.What of domestic U.S. politics? Here, multiple strands of argument lead to the same conclusion: For Biden and his advisers, there are no clear political reasons to switch U.S. policy on Gaza. To start with, it is very likely that within the policy-making group, there are strong norms against bringing up domestic politics, the assumption being that Biden, as a long-time professional, is capable of making such judgments on his own. Those judgments, second, are likely to be that current policy already is triangulated correctly between hawks and doves; that the latter, if faced in the end with a choice between Trump and Biden, will swallow hard and vote Democratic; and that in any case, elections are almost never won or lost on foreign policy issues. These calculations, of course, leave little room for error: Even a small increase in abstention rates among core Democratic constituencies could prove fatal in various swing states. For that reason, a non-veto in the Security Council, repeated emphasis on "targeted operations," humanitarian issues, and a two-state solution, and, most importantly, well-publicized criticisms of Netanyahu by close Biden allies are attempts to reframe U.S. policy as less anti-Palestinian. As the war drags on, it is possible that the White House will agree to modest conditions on the use of military aid, albeit with waiver language included so that push never comes to shove.These kabuki-like moves show clearly that U.S. policy makers feel little pressure, whether domestic or foreign, to change their policy on Gaza. Absent additional, immediate moves, such as organized abstention in presidential primaries, the most likely scenario is continued death for thousands and despair for millions.

Since the death of Yevgeny Prigozhin on August 23, much ink has been spilled on the future of his private military company (PMC), Wagner Group, and its affiliated companies. Most attention remains on Ukraine, where the PMC has not been formally active since Prigozhin declared victory in Bakhmut on May 20. Meanwhile, Wagner continues to conduct military operations in both Mali and the Central African Republic (CAR).On November 14, the Malian Armed Forces (FAMA), backed by Wagner, took the separatist stronghold of Kidal. Despite entering a town nearly abandoned, the capture was undeniably a symbolic victory for Mali's Interim President, Colonel Assimi Goïta, and his military regime. There is a significant risk that FAMA's March on Kidal will further exacerbate humanitarian crises in the region, all at a time when the international community is stepping back from the Sahel. This is a mistake. The Sahel has become the epicenter of the West's, including the United States', two great threat narratives: jihadist terrorism and the expansion of Russian influence. Their accompanying containment narratives almost ensure counterproductive, knee-jerk reactions to future events on the ground.To avoid these pitfalls, the international community must focus today on creative solutions that account for Russia's presence in Africa.BackgroundThe past five years have seen a popular backlash against peacekeeping and humanitarian-military operations in central Africa and the Sahel. While politicized, the criticism has not been without merit. Peacekeeping missions have undoubtedly improved the lives of many. They have also often empowered the most violent and produced more, not less, armed groups. Yet it was Wagner Group's interventions in Sudan and CAR that turbocharged the criticism.
The structure of Wagner's 2017 intervention in Sudan initially followed standard practices for Africa's private security sector: training and security provision in exchange for mineral concessions. (A notable exception was the political consulting and media operations Prigozhin's team also offered.) In Sudan, the structure stayed consistent. In CAR, events on the ground shaped the nature of Wagner's intervention. In 2018, Prigozhin's men became diplomats.Wagner's diplomacy in CARIn February 2019, the CAR government and 14 major armed groups signed the Khartoum Agreement — a peace deal hailed by the United Nations. A considerable contribution to this process belonged to Prigozhin's working group, although experts from various Russian government entities also participated.
For Prigozhin, the prospect of peace would translate into increased access to mining concessions. It would also deliver a win to Moscow and increase the chances for Kremlin subsidies to fund his Africa gambit. For armed group leaders, the Agreement was a chance to obtain lucrative ministerial positions, while President Faustin-Archange Touadéra could shore up his vulnerable position vis-à-vis the armed groups.
The significance of the Agreement was immense, but unfortunately most walked away with the wrong conclusions. The international community felt it could finally distance itself from CAR's seemingly endless problems. The CAR government and Prigozhin, victims of their own success, felt they could abandon notions of an inclusive government. All seemed unable to account for the return of the largest potential spoiler of the peace, former president François Bozizé, and his decision to run in the 2020 presidential elections.
Despite rising tension between Touadéra and Bozizé, the CAR government, Wagner, and the international community pushed elections at all costs, even as a new coalition of armed groups — nominally led by Bozizé and including six of the fourteen Khartoum Agreement signatories — advanced on Bangui, the capital.
As a result of the rebellion, Wagner's mandate changed from that of a training mission to a military operation. The resulting counteroffensive brought nearly all major towns under government control.
The partial victory — armed groups are down but not out — led to overconfidence within Wagner's ranks: Military solutions were possible. The PMC came to view the Khartoum Agreement through a cynical lens as insiders reframed it as a clever way to weaken and divide the armed opposition, rather than the genuine effort at conflict resolution it was at the time.Wagner began to fashion itself as Russia's "security solution," Moscow's most successful export to Africa. Back then, Prigozhin had the ear of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Taking advantage of Moscow's light footprint on the continent, Wagner's boss could define what Moscow's interests in Africa were.Wagner's military solution in the SahelBy 2020, all actors recognized the value of the "Wagner threat" to Africa; not least African governments which leveraged narratives of "cooperating with" or "countering" Wagner to extract concessions or support from both Russia and the West.
Cold War containment narratives became a self-fulfilling prophecy in 2021 when, after a second coup, tensions between Colonel Goïta and France resulted in French military withdrawal from Mali and Wagner's arrival. Goïta's grievances with Paris were first political: He wanted France to recognize his government. Second, anti-French rhetoric helped build political legitimacy for the military regime.
The rhetoric tapped into genuine grievances with France's Operation Barkhane, especially among Mali's military class. At the top of the list was France's quiet cooperation with Tuareg separatists to oust the jihadists in northern Mali. Bamako saw that cooperation as a violation of sovereignty. Intervenors and those intervened upon could not agree on who the terrorists were.
Wagner's arrival in Mali further revealed the conflict's separate realities. Western analysts focused on human rights abuses and the territorial expansion of Jama'at Nusrat al-Islam wal Muslimin (JNIM) and the Islamic State of the Greater Sahara (ISIS-GS) to prove Wagner's intervention a failure.
Goïta's circle was far less focused than western analysts on controlling territory outside the capital. The potential for another coup in Bamako was more important, and the government relied on internet influencers and political entrepreneurs to shore up its popularity. In turn, it became a prisoner of its own jingoistic claims to return Kidal to the fold.The resulting Wagner-backed operation has enjoyed more success than predicted. The Malian army has demonstrated increased combat capability and coordination between branches of the armed forces. Wagner's operations in Mali also reflect a new level of cooperation with the Russian Ministry of Defense. Russian officers are involved in planning military operations and acting as advisors. Wagner mercenaries participate in ground operations, but, unlike in CAR, they are always embedded within FAMA.A return to diplomacyFAMA does not have the ability or capacity to fight both separatists and jihadists. Indeed, FAMA and Wagner are on the path to an unwinnable counterinsurgency in the north. Interaction between Tuareg separatists and JNIM suggest the jihadi group is not quite neutral in the conflict, and its role could grow.Despite the current success of Wagner's military solution, it is evident that only peace talks, a process of reconciliation, and the equitable distribution of power and resources between Bamako and the provinces can end the conflict.The victory in Kidal puts the government in Bamako in a stronger position to negotiate with separatists. But given the prospect of an unwinnable war in the north, the continued threat of jihadist groups, and a host of economic woes, the window for "cashing in" on victory will be short.Of course, the Malian government has demonstrated little interest in serious negotiation to date. Few outside powers have leverage over its decision-making. Russia, and the Wagner Group in Mali, have more influence than most. For Russian diplomats, efforts to bring peace to Mali would reinforce Moscow's growing prominence in the Sahel. Wagner Group, too, has consistently engaged in diplomacy when it sees greater potential for profit in peace than open warfare.The international community has leveraged the presence of Wagner Group in Mali as a pretext to step away from the conflict. Yet the crisis in Mali, and the Sahel more generally, cannot be ignored. Efforts should be made to create at least conditions for a negotiating process.The West's exceptional concentration on the war in Ukraine and its support for Israeli operations in Gaza have damaged its credibility in the Global South. Competing with or trying to contain Russia (or China, for that matter) in Africa only does further damage to that credibility. Limited, compartmentalized work with all partners in the Sahel will show that the U.S. can view issues in the Global South outside these prisms.Russia is here to stay in Africa. Mali, and the Sahel more generally, should be an opportunity to engage in geopolitical deconfliction rather than competition.