Eine dauerhafte Verfügbarkeit ist nicht garantiert und liegt vollumfänglich in den Händen der Herausgeber:innen. Bitte erstellen Sie sich selbständig eine Kopie falls Sie diese Quelle zitieren möchten.
Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine has entered its third year. American political battles in Congress have slowed aid to Ukraine, leaving the country to struggle against a more powerful adversary. The war has become one of attrition, in which Russia appears to have an advantage in manpower and ammunition and has adapted to the battlefield. There is no appetite for ceasefires or meaningful negotiations, as each side's terms for a peace deal are incompatible. Russian-Western relations are at an all-time low and will likely remain in a Cold War-style state of relations for the foreseeable future. Based on the reality of the new security environment, it is necessary to plan for long-term security in Europe through increased investment in defense, understanding that there may not be any definitive conclusion to the war. What the United States decides to do in Ukraine this year will have substantial impact on the outcome of the war and for the future of European security. The best deterrent against further aggression, both in Ukraine and elsewhere, would be a major battlefield setback for Russia, sustained Western military support for Ukraine, and a militarily capable Europe. The State of the War and Future ProspectsUkraine's highly anticipated counteroffensive in 2023 was mostly unsuccessful. This is due to a number of reasons such as insufficient training of new battalions, the transparency of the battlefield from the use of drones, Russia's entrenched and highly mined defense fortifications and technological adaptation, Ukraine's lack of long-range missiles to degrade Russian supply lines, and difficulty conducting combined arms operations.[1] Ukraine has also had some important successes, which include partially degrading Russia's Black Sea fleet, leading some of its ships to move to other ports, effectively breaking the Russian naval blockade of Ukrainian grain. Moscow has dramatically increased its military output and receives strategically important weapons—such as drones, ammunition, and ballistic missiles—from partners like North Korea and Iran. It has managed to bolster its weapons manufacturing by increasing trade with China, which allows it to acquire dual-use technology. At this stage, Russia outmans and outguns Ukraine. It is producing ammunition at a much faster rate than NATO countries.[2] Russia's now wartime economy can replace lost capabilities at a faster rate than the West is replacing Ukrainian capabilities.[3] Because this is a war of attrition, whichever side manages to replace capabilities faster, adapt to the battlefield faster, and degrade the capabilities of the other faster is the side that will have the advantage. It is still possible for Ukraine to achieve a battlefield victory through persistent attrition, battlefield adaptation, technological innovation, and force structure improvements.[4] Of course, Ukraine is far likelier to succeed with increased support from the West, particularly the United States. Because Ukraine doesn't have the capacity to mount another offensive this year, it should focus on defense in 2024, which is less costly but can still wear the opponent down and allow time to prepare for offensive action in 2025. Meanwhile, Russia appears to be able to maintain its war efforts for the foreseeable future. The Russian economy has adapted quite well to sanctions by circumventing them through third countries like China and countries in Central Asia.[5] Russia also continues to maintain strong trade ties with the Global South, enabling its connection to the global economy outside of the political West. The Russian economy continues to grow at a steady pace, though inflation is high.[6]The Kremlin has been able to maintain high levels of popular support for the war by providing payments to families of deceased soldiers and redistributing rents to elites.[7] Moreover, increased domestic repression has suppressed dissent and many of those against the war have fled the country. Unemployment is at a record low in Russia, wages are higher, and targeted social spending schemes have been set up, all to mitigate the domestic impacts of excess spending on the military.[8]However, questions remain on how sustainable these measures are. The Kremlin has refocused this war as a larger contest against the West, a narrative which has effectively mobilized continuous public support, especially given the Kremlin's total control over the flow of information. About half a million new recruits have been successfully added through campaigns last year without imposing a new wave of partial mobilization, an effort which will continue throughout 2024.[9] Nevertheless, support for the war may wane if Russia starts to experience increasing setbacks. No Real Prospects for PeaceA negotiated settlement is unrealistic today, particularly because Russia and Ukraine are unlikely to reach any agreements on territorial disputes. Also, public opinion in both Ukraine and Russia is rather hawkish. Ceding territory or relinquishing conquests will appear treasonous to the public and affect public support of political leaders.[10] Many wars do not see definite conclusions, and this war may be no different. Several frozen conflicts continue to exist in the post-Soviet space, including in Georgia and Moldova. The Korean peninsula faces a similar reality. In the Korean armistice, the de facto situation does not necessarily reflect the position advanced by either South Korea or North Korea, as both officially assert claims to the entire peninsula, despite the clear line of demarcation between their areas of control. The war in Ukraine may face a similar future, after one side manages to wear the other one down and achieves long-term deterrence through a partial victory. Despite these realities, advocates for a peace deal insist that a settlement is still viable in Ukraine today. Such arguments posit that because Russia seems to have the advantage, Ukraine is on its way to collapsing and therefore needs to accept a deal.[11] This argument is based on a number of assumptions, including Ukraine's inability to adapt to the battlefield, Western incapacity to manage weapon stock depletions, the importance of manpower over battlefield adaptation and technological innovation, and the desirability of a settlement among all parties. It misses the reality that the West and Russia are in a new Cold War that has the potential of turning hot, a state of relations that is likely to persist while the current regime is still in power, if not beyond. And most obviously, the argument ignores the fact that Ukraine will never accept occupation of any of its territory, let alone negotiate with the current regime in Russia. Arguments for a negotiated settlement also tend to overestimate the bargaining potential of Ukraine's NATO membership bid in a potential agreement. While such a bargaining chip may have been useful in the prevention of all-out conflict, once the war developed into the long war of today, it becomes redundant and obsolete. While Ukraine may not be an official NATO member, it receives significant military aid from NATO to fight off Russia, rendering it de facto part of the Western military bloc. Therefore, a promise to keep Ukraine out of NATO doesn't lead to any substantial gains for Russia in a negotiation because such levels of military cooperation would be maintained or even increased as part of future "security guarantees" for Ukraine. Moreover, because territorial disputes are unlikely to be resolved in the event of a ceasefire, official NATO membership remains complicated for Ukraine, as their resolution would be a prerequisite for membership. Since NATO's level of support for Ukraine is not enough to act as an effective deterrent, it needs to make the war costlier for Russia to endure. Bolstering support for Ukraine will also be necessary to maintain a long-lasting ceasefire after gaining a battlefield advantage. In an eventual discussion on security guarantees for Ukraine's future, providing Ukraine with what it needs to achieve that advantage would be the most effective practical step. US Aid to Ukraine and Long-Term Security in EuropeWhat the United States decides to do in Ukraine this year will have substantial impact on the outcome of the war and for the future of European security. It can either help Ukraine rebuild its offensive forces and build solid defense lines or it can cede an irreversible advantage to Russia. Should the United States decide to reduce or halt further aid to Ukraine, it is likely that the Russians will advance in Ukraine and seize more territory. Ukraine will likely lose the war in this scenario, which could lead to its eventual subjugation. A subjugated Ukraine has no chance of integrating into the European Union, which would send a negative signal to other aspiring nations such as Moldova. This would make it seem as though the United States does not prioritize stemming Russian influence in Eastern Europe, a force which has arguably stalled political reforms in this region. Countries that are already politically vulnerable to Russian influence would become more vulnerable to Russian influence and coercive diplomacy. The Russia of today poses an increased political and military threat to the continent as it has consolidated an anti-Western stance through the development of deep resentment for its perceived grievances and is actively fighting a war with the West, using Ukraine as the battlefield. Reducing aid to Ukraine would make the United States look like an unreliable partner to its European allies and international partners. This would send a strong signal that the United States is not fully prepared to back another partner for "as long as it takes" should, say, China attempt to invade Taiwan. Many such American partners in the Indo-Pacific may choose to hedge against American reluctance and align with China instead. The West needs to shift to a longer-term plan in Ukraine to successfully attrit Russian forces. This plan should prioritize not ceding the advantage to Russia this year through a strong defense, militarily outproducing Russia in the long run, and achieving an important battlefield advantage over time. Training of new battalions in Ukraine will need to be longer, more effective, and prioritize battlefield adaptation. Ukraine will also have to incorporate younger, more capable soldiers. The West will have to continue maintaining lines of communication with Moscow to monitor for escalation, which has so far been manageable. Sending the right weapons to Ukraine will bolster its ability to seize its needed advantage on the battlefield. Long-range missiles have contributed to Ukraine's success by degrading Russian logistics and capabilities and have so far not resulted in disproportionate retaliation despite initial fears. In addition, the issue of long-term security in Europe needs to be urgently re-prioritized. The longer the war goes on and the more antagonistic relations become between the West and Russia, the greater the strategic necessity arises to build military capabilities as a deterrent. If Europe does not re-arm while Russia continues to do so during and after the war, it will face a much larger and better-armed adversary on its doorstep. This will be especially threatening if Russia achieves victory in Ukraine.European NATO members need to plan for long-term security and stability in Europe, understanding there is no return to normalization of relations between the West and Russia for the foreseeable future. Re-arming Europe has also become a necessity and an immediate priority to serve as a potential hedge against a United States either distracted by other security demands or retreating into an isolationist posture. The model for a robust defense system in Europe that is most likely to succeed and be accepted by transatlantic partners is that of a "European pillar in NATO."[12] This model would address the need for Europeans to assume more responsibility for their own security, act independently if necessary and include the important role of the United Kingdom in European defense. In the event of a regional war, Europe currently lacks the resources and capabilities to effectively counter a peer adversary without the United States. Europe should aim to be the defender of first resort for any threat to the continent and have the United States be its defender of last resort. According to a recent RAND report, a robust NATO posture in Eastern Europe after the war's end could cause significant strategic instability, both in the event of a favorable outcome to the war and in the event of an unfavorable one.[13] The report's central argument relies on the assumption that Russia only reacts aggressively in response to assertive Western military policy but not out of opportunistic aggression. But this assumption misses the new strategic reality in Europe. Russia has plans to expand its military force in the coming years and is investing as much as 6% of its GDP into the military.[14] According to Estonia's Foreign Intelligence Service, Russia is preparing for a military confrontation with the West within the next decade. This assessment is based on Russian plans to double the number of forces stationed along its northwestern border with NATO.[15] Even if this constitutes mere preparation rather than concrete plans to militarily confront the West, advising NATO not to adopt similar preparations is reckless. In Russia's preparations for a possible confrontation with the West, it may employ coercive tactics or military aggression against non-NATO neighboring countries to be able to position its forces and capabilities closer to NATO countries, as doing so would increase its strategic advantage in the event of a regional war. After more than 30 years of building up grievances as a result of its perception of being sidelined by the West, it would be a grave error to assume that Russia would willingly give up its military plans for the idea of stabilizing Europe. The Russian regime will not repeat what it perceives were mistakes in its approach to the West during the post-Cold War era. Assertive policies are here to stay, regardless of the outcome of the war. Europe has no choice but to apply more hardline policies towards its defense and accept the reality of a new Cold War with Russia. The strongest future deterrent to any further instance of Russian aggression is for Russia to face a loss in Ukraine, sustained Western commitment to Ukraine, and a militarily capable Europe. A weakened Russia, next to a stronger Europe, would be less capable of rebuilding its military, coercing neighboring countries, and re-invading Ukraine. ConclusionA loss in Ukraine will show adversaries of the United States that it cannot handle multiple challenges at once. If it backs down from supporting its partners, it will be admitting that it can no longer achieve its objectives in areas of strategic interests—and a European security theater with an emboldened Russia will create a host of new problems.To ensure long-term stability in Europe, the United States needs to back Ukraine for as long as it takes, even in a long war of attrition. To achieve proper deterrence, the West needs to support Ukraine in seizing a clear advantage on the battlefield, ensure its long-term protection, and invest in a European pillar in NATO. To be prepared to handle the uncertainty that comes with a new Cold War, proper defense in Europe has become a necessity. And no matter how the war unfolds in Ukraine or how political battles get resolved in the United States, Europe needs to confront the glaring need to develop its own strong military capacity. The alternative is an uncertain and unstable future where Europe may need to bend to Russia's will or face an increasingly distracted or isolationist partner on the other side of the Atlantic. [1] Michael Kofman and Rob Lee, "Perseverance and Adaptation: Ukraine's Counteroffensive at Three Months," War on the Rocks, September 4, 2023, https://warontherocks.com/2023/09/perseverance-and-adaptation-ukraines-counteroffensive-at-three-months/ [2] Erin Snodgrass, "Russian Manufacturers Are Making up to 7 Times as much Ammunition as Western Arms Makers, Estonian Defense Official Says," Business Insider, September 13, 2023, https://www.businessinsider.com/russia-ammunition-manufacturing-ukraine-west-officials-2023-9 [3] Kofman and Lee, "Perseverance and Adaptation"; and Michael Kofman, Rob Lee, and Dara Massicot, "Hold, Build, and Strike: A Vision for Rebuilding Ukraine's Advantage in 2024," War on the Rocks, January 26, 2024, https://warontherocks.com/2024/01/hold-build-and-strike-a-vision-for-rebuilding-ukraines-advantage-in-2024/ [4] Franz-Stefan Gady and Michael Kofman, "Making Attrition Work: A Viable Theory of Victory for Ukraine," Survival 66, no. 1 (February 6, 2024): 7–24, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00396338.2024.2309068 [5] Joby Warrick, "In Central Asia, a Hidden Pipeline Supplies Russia with Banned Tech," Washington Post, July 18, 2023, https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/07/18/russia-sanctions-weapons-china-drones/ [6] Alexander Marrow, "Russia's Economic Growth to Slow in 2024 as High Interest Rates Linger, Reuters Poll Shows," Reuters, December 22, 2023, https://www.reuters.com/markets/europe/russias-economic-growth-slow-2024-high-interest-rates-linger-2023-12-22/ [7] "Families of Russian Soldiers Killed in Ukraine to Be Paid over 7 mln Rubles Lump Sum—Putin," Interfax International Information Group, March 3, 2022, https://interfax.com/newsroom/top-stories/75349/; and Max Bergmann, Maria Snegovaya, and Michael Kimmage, "Aid to Ukraine and the Future of the War with Michael Kofman," Russian Roulette (podcast), CSIS, January 11, 2024, https://www.csis.org/podcasts/russian-roulette/aid-ukraine-and-future-war-michael-kofman [8] Daniel Harper, "Russia Approves Record Spend for its Military in New 2024 Budget," Euronews, November 28, 2023, https://www.euronews.com/business/2023/11/28/russia-approves-record-spend-for-military-in-new-budget [9] Farida Rustamova, "How Russian Officials Plan to Recruit 400K New Contract Soldiers in 2024," Moscow Times, December 22, 2023, https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2023/12/22/how-russian-officials-plan-to-recruit-400k-new-contract-soldiers-in-2024-a83509 [10] Rustamova, "How Russian Officials Plan to Recruit 400K New Contract Soldiers."[11] Anatol Lieven and George Beebe, The Diplomatic Path to a Secure Ukraine (Washington, DC: Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, February 2024), https://quincyinst.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/QUINCY-PAPER-NO.-13-%E2%80%94-BEEBE-LIEVEN-3.pdf [12] Anna Wieslander, "How France, Germany, and the UK Can Build a European Pillar of NATO," Atlantic Council, November 23, 2020, https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/commentary/article/how-france-germany-and-the-uk-can-build-a-european-pillar-of-nato/[13] Samuel Charap and Miranda Priebe, Planning for the Aftermath Assessing Options for U.S. Strategy Toward Russia after the Ukraine War (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, February 9, 2024), https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/RRA2500/RRA2510-2/RAND_RRA2510-2.pdf [14] Agence France-Presse, "Boosted by Military Orders, Russia's Economy Grows by 3.6%," SCMP, February 8, 2024, https://www.scmp.com/news/world/russia-central-asia/article/3251357/boosted-military-orders-russias-economy-grows-36 [15] Andrius Sytas, "Russia Preparing for Military Confrontation with West, Says Estonia," Reuters, February 13, 2024, https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russia-preparing-military-confrontation-with-west-says-estonia-2024-02-13/
Eine dauerhafte Verfügbarkeit ist nicht garantiert und liegt vollumfänglich in den Händen der Herausgeber:innen. Bitte erstellen Sie sich selbständig eine Kopie falls Sie diese Quelle zitieren möchten.
Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine has entered its third year. American political battles in Congress have slowed aid to Ukraine, leaving the country to struggle against a more powerful adversary. The war has become one of attrition, in which Russia appears to have an advantage in manpower and ammunition and has adapted to the battlefield. There is no appetite for ceasefires or meaningful negotiations, as each side's terms for a peace deal are incompatible. Russian-Western relations are at an all-time low and will likely remain in a Cold War-style state of relations for the foreseeable future. Based on the reality of the new security environment, it is necessary to plan for long-term security in Europe through increased investment in defense, understanding that there may not be any definitive conclusion to the war. What the United States decides to do in Ukraine this year will have substantial impact on the outcome of the war and for the future of European security. The best deterrent against further aggression, both in Ukraine and elsewhere, would be a major battlefield setback for Russia, sustained Western military support for Ukraine, and a militarily capable Europe. The State of the War and Future ProspectsUkraine's highly anticipated counteroffensive in 2023 was mostly unsuccessful. This is due to a number of reasons such as insufficient training of new battalions, the transparency of the battlefield from the use of drones, Russia's entrenched and highly mined defense fortifications and technological adaptation, Ukraine's lack of long-range missiles to degrade Russian supply lines, and difficulty conducting combined arms operations.[1] Ukraine has also had some important successes, which include partially degrading Russia's Black Sea fleet, leading some of its ships to move to other ports, effectively breaking the Russian naval blockade of Ukrainian grain. Moscow has dramatically increased its military output and receives strategically important weapons—such as drones, ammunition, and ballistic missiles—from partners like North Korea and Iran. It has managed to bolster its weapons manufacturing by increasing trade with China, which allows it to acquire dual-use technology. At this stage, Russia outmans and outguns Ukraine. It is producing ammunition at a much faster rate than NATO countries.[2] Russia's now wartime economy can replace lost capabilities at a faster rate than the West is replacing Ukrainian capabilities.[3] Because this is a war of attrition, whichever side manages to replace capabilities faster, adapt to the battlefield faster, and degrade the capabilities of the other faster is the side that will have the advantage. It is still possible for Ukraine to achieve a battlefield victory through persistent attrition, battlefield adaptation, technological innovation, and force structure improvements.[4] Of course, Ukraine is far likelier to succeed with increased support from the West, particularly the United States. Because Ukraine doesn't have the capacity to mount another offensive this year, it should focus on defense in 2024, which is less costly but can still wear the opponent down and allow time to prepare for offensive action in 2025. Meanwhile, Russia appears to be able to maintain its war efforts for the foreseeable future. The Russian economy has adapted quite well to sanctions by circumventing them through third countries like China and countries in Central Asia.[5] Russia also continues to maintain strong trade ties with the Global South, enabling its connection to the global economy outside of the political West. The Russian economy continues to grow at a steady pace, though inflation is high.[6]The Kremlin has been able to maintain high levels of popular support for the war by providing payments to families of deceased soldiers and redistributing rents to elites.[7] Moreover, increased domestic repression has suppressed dissent and many of those against the war have fled the country. Unemployment is at a record low in Russia, wages are higher, and targeted social spending schemes have been set up, all to mitigate the domestic impacts of excess spending on the military.[8]However, questions remain on how sustainable these measures are. The Kremlin has refocused this war as a larger contest against the West, a narrative which has effectively mobilized continuous public support, especially given the Kremlin's total control over the flow of information. About half a million new recruits have been successfully added through campaigns last year without imposing a new wave of partial mobilization, an effort which will continue throughout 2024.[9] Nevertheless, support for the war may wane if Russia starts to experience increasing setbacks. No Real Prospects for PeaceA negotiated settlement is unrealistic today, particularly because Russia and Ukraine are unlikely to reach any agreements on territorial disputes. Also, public opinion in both Ukraine and Russia is rather hawkish. Ceding territory or relinquishing conquests will appear treasonous to the public and affect public support of political leaders.[10] Many wars do not see definite conclusions, and this war may be no different. Several frozen conflicts continue to exist in the post-Soviet space, including in Georgia and Moldova. The Korean peninsula faces a similar reality. In the Korean armistice, the de facto situation does not necessarily reflect the position advanced by either South Korea or North Korea, as both officially assert claims to the entire peninsula, despite the clear line of demarcation between their areas of control. The war in Ukraine may face a similar future, after one side manages to wear the other one down and achieves long-term deterrence through a partial victory. Despite these realities, advocates for a peace deal insist that a settlement is still viable in Ukraine today. Such arguments posit that because Russia seems to have the advantage, Ukraine is on its way to collapsing and therefore needs to accept a deal.[11] This argument is based on a number of assumptions, including Ukraine's inability to adapt to the battlefield, Western incapacity to manage weapon stock depletions, the importance of manpower over battlefield adaptation and technological innovation, and the desirability of a settlement among all parties. It misses the reality that the West and Russia are in a new Cold War that has the potential of turning hot, a state of relations that is likely to persist while the current regime is still in power, if not beyond. And most obviously, the argument ignores the fact that Ukraine will never accept occupation of any of its territory, let alone negotiate with the current regime in Russia. Arguments for a negotiated settlement also tend to overestimate the bargaining potential of Ukraine's NATO membership bid in a potential agreement. While such a bargaining chip may have been useful in the prevention of all-out conflict, once the war developed into the long war of today, it becomes redundant and obsolete. While Ukraine may not be an official NATO member, it receives significant military aid from NATO to fight off Russia, rendering it de facto part of the Western military bloc. Therefore, a promise to keep Ukraine out of NATO doesn't lead to any substantial gains for Russia in a negotiation because such levels of military cooperation would be maintained or even increased as part of future "security guarantees" for Ukraine. Moreover, because territorial disputes are unlikely to be resolved in the event of a ceasefire, official NATO membership remains complicated for Ukraine, as their resolution would be a prerequisite for membership. Since NATO's level of support for Ukraine is not enough to act as an effective deterrent, it needs to make the war costlier for Russia to endure. Bolstering support for Ukraine will also be necessary to maintain a long-lasting ceasefire after gaining a battlefield advantage. In an eventual discussion on security guarantees for Ukraine's future, providing Ukraine with what it needs to achieve that advantage would be the most effective practical step. US Aid to Ukraine and Long-Term Security in EuropeWhat the United States decides to do in Ukraine this year will have substantial impact on the outcome of the war and for the future of European security. It can either help Ukraine rebuild its offensive forces and build solid defense lines or it can cede an irreversible advantage to Russia. Should the United States decide to reduce or halt further aid to Ukraine, it is likely that the Russians will advance in Ukraine and seize more territory. Ukraine will likely lose the war in this scenario, which could lead to its eventual subjugation. A subjugated Ukraine has no chance of integrating into the European Union, which would send a negative signal to other aspiring nations such as Moldova. This would make it seem as though the United States does not prioritize stemming Russian influence in Eastern Europe, a force which has arguably stalled political reforms in this region. Countries that are already politically vulnerable to Russian influence would become more vulnerable to Russian influence and coercive diplomacy. The Russia of today poses an increased political and military threat to the continent as it has consolidated an anti-Western stance through the development of deep resentment for its perceived grievances and is actively fighting a war with the West, using Ukraine as the battlefield. Reducing aid to Ukraine would make the United States look like an unreliable partner to its European allies and international partners. This would send a strong signal that the United States is not fully prepared to back another partner for "as long as it takes" should, say, China attempt to invade Taiwan. Many such American partners in the Indo-Pacific may choose to hedge against American reluctance and align with China instead. The West needs to shift to a longer-term plan in Ukraine to successfully attrit Russian forces. This plan should prioritize not ceding the advantage to Russia this year through a strong defense, militarily outproducing Russia in the long run, and achieving an important battlefield advantage over time. Training of new battalions in Ukraine will need to be longer, more effective, and prioritize battlefield adaptation. Ukraine will also have to incorporate younger, more capable soldiers. The West will have to continue maintaining lines of communication with Moscow to monitor for escalation, which has so far been manageable. Sending the right weapons to Ukraine will bolster its ability to seize its needed advantage on the battlefield. Long-range missiles have contributed to Ukraine's success by degrading Russian logistics and capabilities and have so far not resulted in disproportionate retaliation despite initial fears. In addition, the issue of long-term security in Europe needs to be urgently re-prioritized. The longer the war goes on and the more antagonistic relations become between the West and Russia, the greater the strategic necessity arises to build military capabilities as a deterrent. If Europe does not re-arm while Russia continues to do so during and after the war, it will face a much larger and better-armed adversary on its doorstep. This will be especially threatening if Russia achieves victory in Ukraine.European NATO members need to plan for long-term security and stability in Europe, understanding there is no return to normalization of relations between the West and Russia for the foreseeable future. Re-arming Europe has also become a necessity and an immediate priority to serve as a potential hedge against a United States either distracted by other security demands or retreating into an isolationist posture. The model for a robust defense system in Europe that is most likely to succeed and be accepted by transatlantic partners is that of a "European pillar in NATO."[12] This model would address the need for Europeans to assume more responsibility for their own security, act independently if necessary and include the important role of the United Kingdom in European defense. In the event of a regional war, Europe currently lacks the resources and capabilities to effectively counter a peer adversary without the United States. Europe should aim to be the defender of first resort for any threat to the continent and have the United States be its defender of last resort. According to a recent RAND report, a robust NATO posture in Eastern Europe after the war's end could cause significant strategic instability, both in the event of a favorable outcome to the war and in the event of an unfavorable one.[13] The report's central argument relies on the assumption that Russia only reacts aggressively in response to assertive Western military policy but not out of opportunistic aggression. But this assumption misses the new strategic reality in Europe. Russia has plans to expand its military force in the coming years and is investing as much as 6% of its GDP into the military.[14] According to Estonia's Foreign Intelligence Service, Russia is preparing for a military confrontation with the West within the next decade. This assessment is based on Russian plans to double the number of forces stationed along its northwestern border with NATO.[15] Even if this constitutes mere preparation rather than concrete plans to militarily confront the West, advising NATO not to adopt similar preparations is reckless. In Russia's preparations for a possible confrontation with the West, it may employ coercive tactics or military aggression against non-NATO neighboring countries to be able to position its forces and capabilities closer to NATO countries, as doing so would increase its strategic advantage in the event of a regional war. After more than 30 years of building up grievances as a result of its perception of being sidelined by the West, it would be a grave error to assume that Russia would willingly give up its military plans for the idea of stabilizing Europe. The Russian regime will not repeat what it perceives were mistakes in its approach to the West during the post-Cold War era. Assertive policies are here to stay, regardless of the outcome of the war. Europe has no choice but to apply more hardline policies towards its defense and accept the reality of a new Cold War with Russia. The strongest future deterrent to any further instance of Russian aggression is for Russia to face a loss in Ukraine, sustained Western commitment to Ukraine, and a militarily capable Europe. A weakened Russia, next to a stronger Europe, would be less capable of rebuilding its military, coercing neighboring countries, and re-invading Ukraine. ConclusionA loss in Ukraine will show adversaries of the United States that it cannot handle multiple challenges at once. If it backs down from supporting its partners, it will be admitting that it can no longer achieve its objectives in areas of strategic interests—and a European security theater with an emboldened Russia will create a host of new problems.To ensure long-term stability in Europe, the United States needs to back Ukraine for as long as it takes, even in a long war of attrition. To achieve proper deterrence, the West needs to support Ukraine in seizing a clear advantage on the battlefield, ensure its long-term protection, and invest in a European pillar in NATO. To be prepared to handle the uncertainty that comes with a new Cold War, proper defense in Europe has become a necessity. And no matter how the war unfolds in Ukraine or how political battles get resolved in the United States, Europe needs to confront the glaring need to develop its own strong military capacity. The alternative is an uncertain and unstable future where Europe may need to bend to Russia's will or face an increasingly distracted or isolationist partner on the other side of the Atlantic. [1] Michael Kofman and Rob Lee, "Perseverance and Adaptation: Ukraine's Counteroffensive at Three Months," War on the Rocks, September 4, 2023, https://warontherocks.com/2023/09/perseverance-and-adaptation-ukraines-counteroffensive-at-three-months/ [2] Erin Snodgrass, "Russian Manufacturers Are Making up to 7 Times as much Ammunition as Western Arms Makers, Estonian Defense Official Says," Business Insider, September 13, 2023, https://www.businessinsider.com/russia-ammunition-manufacturing-ukraine-west-officials-2023-9 [3] Kofman and Lee, "Perseverance and Adaptation"; and Michael Kofman, Rob Lee, and Dara Massicot, "Hold, Build, and Strike: A Vision for Rebuilding Ukraine's Advantage in 2024," War on the Rocks, January 26, 2024, https://warontherocks.com/2024/01/hold-build-and-strike-a-vision-for-rebuilding-ukraines-advantage-in-2024/ [4] Franz-Stefan Gady and Michael Kofman, "Making Attrition Work: A Viable Theory of Victory for Ukraine," Survival 66, no. 1 (February 6, 2024): 7–24, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00396338.2024.2309068 [5] Joby Warrick, "In Central Asia, a Hidden Pipeline Supplies Russia with Banned Tech," Washington Post, July 18, 2023, https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/07/18/russia-sanctions-weapons-china-drones/ [6] Alexander Marrow, "Russia's Economic Growth to Slow in 2024 as High Interest Rates Linger, Reuters Poll Shows," Reuters, December 22, 2023, https://www.reuters.com/markets/europe/russias-economic-growth-slow-2024-high-interest-rates-linger-2023-12-22/ [7] "Families of Russian Soldiers Killed in Ukraine to Be Paid over 7 mln Rubles Lump Sum—Putin," Interfax International Information Group, March 3, 2022, https://interfax.com/newsroom/top-stories/75349/; and Max Bergmann, Maria Snegovaya, and Michael Kimmage, "Aid to Ukraine and the Future of the War with Michael Kofman," Russian Roulette (podcast), CSIS, January 11, 2024, https://www.csis.org/podcasts/russian-roulette/aid-ukraine-and-future-war-michael-kofman [8] Daniel Harper, "Russia Approves Record Spend for its Military in New 2024 Budget," Euronews, November 28, 2023, https://www.euronews.com/business/2023/11/28/russia-approves-record-spend-for-military-in-new-budget [9] Farida Rustamova, "How Russian Officials Plan to Recruit 400K New Contract Soldiers in 2024," Moscow Times, December 22, 2023, https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2023/12/22/how-russian-officials-plan-to-recruit-400k-new-contract-soldiers-in-2024-a83509 [10] Rustamova, "How Russian Officials Plan to Recruit 400K New Contract Soldiers."[11] Anatol Lieven and George Beebe, The Diplomatic Path to a Secure Ukraine (Washington, DC: Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, February 2024), https://quincyinst.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/QUINCY-PAPER-NO.-13-%E2%80%94-BEEBE-LIEVEN-3.pdf [12] Anna Wieslander, "How France, Germany, and the UK Can Build a European Pillar of NATO," Atlantic Council, November 23, 2020, https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/commentary/article/how-france-germany-and-the-uk-can-build-a-european-pillar-of-nato/[13] Samuel Charap and Miranda Priebe, Planning for the Aftermath Assessing Options for U.S. Strategy Toward Russia after the Ukraine War (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, February 9, 2024), https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/RRA2500/RRA2510-2/RAND_RRA2510-2.pdf [14] Agence France-Presse, "Boosted by Military Orders, Russia's Economy Grows by 3.6%," SCMP, February 8, 2024, https://www.scmp.com/news/world/russia-central-asia/article/3251357/boosted-military-orders-russias-economy-grows-36 [15] Andrius Sytas, "Russia Preparing for Military Confrontation with West, Says Estonia," Reuters, February 13, 2024, https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russia-preparing-military-confrontation-with-west-says-estonia-2024-02-13/
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Theory Talk #75: Tarak Barkawi on IR after the West, and why the best work in IR is often found at its marginsIn this Talk, Tarak Barkawi discusses the importance of the archive and real-world experiences, at a time of growing institutional constraints. He reflects on the growing rationalization and "schoolification" of the academy, a disciplinary and epistemological politics institutionalized within a university audit culture, and the future of IR in a post-COVID world. He also discusses IR's contorted relationship to the archive, and explore future sites of critical innovation and inquiry, including the value of knowledge production outside of the academy. PDF version of this TalkSo what is, or should be, according to you, the biggest challenge, or principal debate in critical social sciences and history?Right now, despite thinking about it, I don't have an answer to that question. Had you asked me five years ago, I would have said, without hesitation, Eurocentrism. There's a line in Chakrabarty's Provincializing Europe where he remarks that Europe has already been provincialized by history, but we still needed to provincialize it intellectually in the social sciences. Both sides of this equation have intensified in recent years. Amid a pandemic, in the wreckage of neoliberalism, in the wake of financial crisis, the defeats in Iraq and Afghanistan, the events of the Trump Presidency, and the return of the far right, the West feels fundamentally reduced in stature. The academy, meanwhile, has moved on from the postcolonial to the decolonial with its focus on alternative epistemologies, about which I am more ambivalent intellectually and politically. Western states and societies are powerful and rich, their freedoms attractive, and most of them will rebound. But what does it mean for the social sciences and other Western intellectual traditions which trace their heritage to the European Enlightenments that the West may no longer be 'the West', no longer the metropole of a global order more or less controlled by its leading states? What kind of implications does the disassembling of the West in world history have for social and political inquiry? I don't have an answer to that. Speaking more specifically about IR, we are dealing now with conservative appropriations of Eurocentrism, with the rise of other civilizational IRs (Chinese, European, Indian). These kinds of moves, like the decolonial one, foreground ultimately incommensurable systems of knowing and valuing, at best, and at worst are Eurocentrism with the signs reversed, usually to China. I do not think what we should be doing right now in the academy is having Chinese social sciences, Islamic social sciences, Indian social sciences, and so on. But that's definitely one way in which the collapse of the West is playing out intellectually. How did you arrive at where you currently are in your thinking about International Relations?By the time you get to my age you have a lot of debt, mostly to students, to old teachers and supervisors, and to colleagues and friends. University scholars tend not to have very exciting lives, so I don't have much to offer in the way of events. But I can give you an experience that I do keep revisiting when I reflect on the directions I've taken and the things I've been interested in. When I was in high school, I took a university course taught by Daniel Ellsberg, of the Pentagon Papers. As many will know, before he became involved in the Vietnam War, and later in opposing it, he worked on game theory and nuclear strategy. I grew up in Southern California, in Orange County, and there was a program that let you take courses at the University of California, Irvine. I took one on the history of the Roman Empire and then a pair of courses on nuclear weapons that culminated with one taught by Ellsberg himself. I actually had no idea who he was but the topic interested me. Nuclear war was in the air in the early 1980s. Activist graduate students taught the preparatory course. They were good teachers and I learned all about the history and politics of nuclear weapons. But I also came to realize that these teachers were trying to shape (what I would now call) my political subjectivity. Sometimes they were ham handed, like the old ball bearings in the tin can trick: turn the lights out in the room, and put one ball bearing in the can for each nuclear warhead in the world, in 1945 this many; in 1955 this many; and so on. In retrospect, that's where I got hooked on the idea of graduate school. I was aware that Ellsberg was regarded as an important personage. He taught in a large lecture hall. At every session, a kind of loyal corps of new and old activists turned out, many in some version of '60s attire. The father of a high school friend was desperate to get Ellsberg's autograph, and sent his son along with me to the lecture one night to get it. It was political instruction of the first order to figure out that this suburban dad had been a physics PhD at Berkley in the late '60s and early '70s, demonstrating against the Vietnam War. But now he worked for a major aerospace defense contractor. He had a hot tub in his backyard. Meanwhile, Ellsberg cancelled class one week because he'd been arrested demonstrating at a major arms fair in Los Angeles. "We stopped the arms race for a few hours," he told the class after. I schooled myself on who Ellsberg was and Vietnam, the Cold War, and much else came into view. Meanwhile, he gave a master class in nuclear weapons and foreign policy, cheekily naming his course after Kissinger's book, I later came to appreciate. I learned about RAND, the utility of madness for making nuclear threats, and how close we'd come to nuclear war since 1945. My high school had actually been built to double as a fallout shelter, at a time when civil defense was taken seriously as an aspect of a credible threat of second strike. It was low slung, stoutly built, with high iron fences that could be closed to create a cantonment. We were not far from Seal Beach Naval Weapons Station and a range of other likely targets. All of this sank in as I progressed in these courses. Then one day at a strip mall bookstore, I discovered Noam Chomsky's US foreign policy books and never looked back. At Cambridge, I caught the tail end of the old Centre of International Studies, originally started by an intelligence historian and explicitly multi-disciplinary. It had, in my time, historians, lawyers, area studies, development studies, political theory and history of thought, and IR scholars and political scientists. Boundaries certainly existed out there in the disciplines. But there weren't substantial institutional obstacles to thinking across them, while interdisciplinary environments gave you lots of local resources (i.e. colleagues and students) for thinking and reading creatively. What would a student need to become a kind of specialist in your kind of area or field or to understand the world in a global way? Lots of history, especially other peoples' histories; to experience what it's like to see the world from a different place than where you grew up, so that the foreign is not an abstraction to you. I think another route that can create very interesting scholars is to have a practitioner career first, in development, the military, a diplomatic corps, NGOs, whatever. Even only five years doing something like that not only teaches people how the world works, it is intellectually fecund, creative. People just out of operational posts are often full of ideas, and can access interesting resources for research, like professional networks. How, in your view, should IR responding to the shifting geopolitical landscape? The fate I think we want to avoid is carrying on with what Stanley Hoffmann called the "American social science": the IR invented out of imperial crisis and world war by Anglo-American officials, foundations and thinkers. Very broadly speaking, and with variations, this was a new world combination of realism and positivism. This discipline was intended as the intellectual counterpart to the American-centered world order, designed, among other things, to disappear the question of race in the century of the global color line. The way it conceived the national/international world obscured how US world power worked in practice. That power operated in and through formally sovereign, independent states—an empire by invitation, in the somewhat rosy view of Geir Lundestad—trialed in Latin America and well suited to a decolonizing world. It was an anti-colonial imperium. Political science divided up this world between IR and comparative politics. This kind of IR is cortically connected to the American-centered world fading away before our eyes. It is a kind of zombie discipline where we teach students about world politics as if we were still sitting with the great power peacemakers of 1919 and 1944-45. It is still studying how to make states cooperate under a hegemon or how to make credible deterrence threats in various circumstances. Interestingly, I think one of the ways the collapse of US power is shaping the discipline was identified by Walt and Mearsheimer in their 2013 article on the decline of theory in IR. In the US especially but not only, IR is increasingly indistinguishable from political science as a universal positivist enterprise mostly interested in applying highly evolved, quantitative or experimental approaches to more or less minor questions. Go too far down this road and IR disappears as a distinct disciplinary space, it becomes just a subject matter, a site of empiricist inquiry. Instead, the best work in IR mostly occurs on the edges of the discipline. IR often serves as cover for diverse and interdisciplinary work on transboundary relations. Those relations fall outside the core objects of analysis of the main social science and humanities disciplines but are IR's distinctive focus. The mainstream, inter-paradigm discipline, for me, has never been a convincing social science of the international and is not something I teach or think much about these days. But the classical inheritances of the discipline help IR retain significant historical, philosophical and normative dimensions. Add in a pluralist disposition towards methodology, and IR can be a unique intellectual space capable of producing scholars and scholarship that operate across disciplines. The new materialism, or political ecology, is one area in which this is really happening right now. IR is also a receptive home for debating the questions thrown up by the decolonial turn. These are two big themes in contemporary intellectual life, in and beyond the academy. IR potentially offers distinct perspectives on them which can push debates forward in unexpected ways, in part because we retain a focus on the political and the state, which too easily drop out of sight in global turns in other disciplines. In exchange, topics like the new materialism and the decolonial offer IR the chance to connect with world politics in these new times, after the American century. In my view, and it is not one that I think is widely shared, IR should become the "studies" discipline that centers on the transboundary. How do we re-imagine IR as the interdisciplinary site for the study of transboundary relations as a distinct social and political space? That's a question of general interest in a global world, but one which few traditions of thought are as well-equipped to reflect on and push forward as we are.That's an interesting and forceful critique which also brings us back to a common thread throughout your work: questions of power and knowledge and specifically the relation between power and knowledge in IR and social science. I'm interested in exploring this point further, because so much of your critique has been centered on how profoundly Eurocentric IR is and as a product of Western power. Well, IR's development as a discipline has been closely tied to Western state power. It would seem that it has to change, given the shifts underway in the world. It's like Wile E. Coyote in the Road Runner cartoons - he's run off the cliff. His legs are still moving, but he hasn't dropped, yet. That said, there's no singularly determinate relation between power and the historical development of intellectual traditions. Who knows what kind of new ideas and re-imagining of IR's concepts we might see? As I say, I think one reflection of these changes is that we're already seeing North American IR start to fade into universal quantitative social science. As Hoffmann observed, part of IR's appeal was that the Americans were running the world, that's why you started a social science concerned with things like bipolarity and deterrence, and with analyzing the foreign policy of a great power and its interests and conflicts around the world. Nowadays the Americans are at a late Roman stage of imperial decline. Thinking from the command posts of US foreign policy doesn't look so attractive or convincing when Emperor Nero is running the show, or something altogether darker is waiting in the wings. IR is supposed to be in command of world politics, analyzing them from on high. But what I've seen over the course of my education and career is the way world politics commands IR. The end of the Cold War torpedoed many careers and projects; the 1990s created corps of scholars concerned with development, civil war and humanitarian intervention; in the 2000s, we produced terrorism experts (and critical terrorism studies) and counterinsurgency specialists and critics, along with many scholars concerned in one way or another with Islam. What I have always found fascinating, and deeply indicative, about IR is the relative absence until relatively recently of serious inquiry into power/knowledge relations or the sociology of knowledge. In 1998 when Ole Waever goes to look at some of these questions, he notes how little there was to work from then, before Oren, Vitalis, Guilhot and others published. It's an astounding observation. In area studies, in anthropology, in the history of science, in development studies, in all of these areas of inquiry so closely entangled with imperial and state power, there are long-running, well developed traditions of inquiry into power/knowledge relations. It's a well-recognized area of inquiry, not some fringe activity, and it's heavily empirical, primary sourced based, as well as interesting conceptually. In recent decades you've seen really significant work come out about the role of the Second World War in the development of game theory, and its continuing entwinement with the nuclear contest of the Cold War. I'm thinking here of S.M. Amadae, Paul Erickson, and Philip Mirowski among others. The knowledge forms the American social science used to study world politics were part and parcel of world politics, they were internal to histories of geopolitics rather than in command of them. Of course, for a social science that models itself on natural science, with methodologies that produce so-called objective knowledge, the idea that scientific knowledge itself is historical and power-ridden, well, you can't really make sense of that. You'd be put in the incoherent position of studying it objectively, as it were, with the same tools. IR arises from the terminal crisis of the British Empire; its political presuppositions and much else were fundamentally shaped by the worldwide anti-communist project of the US Cold War state; and it removed race as a term of inquiry into world politics during the century of the global color line. All this, and but for Hoffmann's essay, IR has no tradition of power/knowledge inquiry into its own house until recently? It's not credible intellectually. Anthropologists should be brought in to teach us how to do this kind of thing. You've been at the forefront of the notion of historical IR, and in investigating the relationship between history and theory – why is history important for IR?Well, I think I'd start with the question of what do we mean when we say history? For mainstream social science, it means facts in the past against which to test theories and explanations. For critical IR scholars, it usually means historicism, as that term is understood in social theory: social phenomena are historical, shaped by time and place. Class, state, race, nation, empire, war, these are all different in different contexts. While I think this is a very significant insight and one that I agree with, on its own it tends to imply that historical knowledge is available, that it can be found by reading historians. In fact, for both empiricism and historicism there is a presumption that you can pretty reliably find out what happened in the past. For me, this ignores a second kind of historicism, the historicism of history writing itself, the historiographical. The questions historians ask, how they inquire into them, the particular archives they use, the ways in which they construct meaning and significance in their narratives, the questions they don't ask, that about which they are silent, all of these, shape history writing, the history that we know about. The upshot is that the past is not stable; it keeps changing as these two meanings of historicism intertwine. We understand the Haitian revolution now, or the indigenous peoples of the Americas, entirely differently than we did just a few decades ago.That raises another twist to this problem. Many IR scholars access history through reading historians or through synthetic accounts; they encounter history by and large through secondary sources. One consequence is that they are often a generation or more behind university historians. Think of how Gaddis, for instance, remains a go to authority on the history of the Cold War in IR. In other disciplines, from the 1980s on, there was a historical turn that took scholars into the archives. Anthropologists and literary scholars used historians' tools to answers their own questions. The result was not just a bunch of history books, but entirely new readings of core questions. The classic example is the historical Shakespeare that Stephen Greenblatt found in the archives, rather than the one whose texts had been read by generations of students in English departments. My point here is that working in archives was conceptually, theoretically significant for these disciplines and the subjects they studied. For example, historical anthropology has given us new perspectives on imperialism. While there is some archival work in IR of course, especially in disciplinary history, it is not central to disciplinary debates and the purpose is usually theory testing in which the past appears as merely a bag of facts. In sum, when I say history and theory, I don't just mean thinking historically. I mean actually doing history, being an historian—which means archives—and in so doing becoming a better theorist. Could you expand on these points by telling us about your recent work on military history? I think that military history is particularly interesting because it is a site where war is reproduced and shaped. Military history participates in that which it purports only to study. Popular military histories shape the identities of publics. Staff college versions are about learning lessons and fighting war better the next time. People who grow up wanting to be soldiers often read about them in history books. So our historical knowledge of war, and war as a social and historical process, are wrapped up together. I hope some sense of the promise of power/knowledge studies for larger questions comes through here. I'm saying that part of what war is as a social phenomenon is history writing about it. It's in this kind of context that the fact that a great deal of military history is actually written by veterans, often of the very campaigns of which they write, becomes interesting. Battle produces its own historians. This is a tradition that goes back to European antiquity, soldiers and commanders returning to write histories, the histories, of the wars they fought in. So this question of veterans' history writing is in constitutive relations with warfare, and with the West and its nations and armies. My shorthand for the particular area of this I want to look into is what I call "White men's military histories". That is, Western military history in the modern era is racialized, not just about enemies but about the White identities constructed in and through it. And I want to look at the way this is done in campaigns against racialized others, particularly situations where defeats and reverses were inflicted on the Westerners. How were such events and experiences made sense of historically? How were they mediated in and through military history? I think defeats are particularly productive, incitements to discourse and sense making. To think about these questions, I want to look at the place of veterans in the production of military histories, as authors, sources, communities of interpretation. My sandbox is the tumultuous first year of the Korean War, where US forces suffered publically-evident reverses and risked being pushed into the sea. In a variety of ways, veterans shape military history, through their questions, their grievances, their struggles over reputation, their memories. This happens at many different sites and scales, including official and popular histories, and the networks of veterans behind them as well as other, independently published works. Over the course of veterans' lives, their war throws up questions and issues that become the subject of sometimes dueling and contradictory accounts. Through their history writing, they connect their war experience to Western traditions of battle historiography. They make their war speak to other wars. This is what military history is, and how it can come to produce and reproduce practices of war-making, at least in Anglo-American context. Of course, much of this history writing, like narrations of experience generally, reflects dominant ideologies, in this case discourses of the US Cold War in Asia. But counter-historians are also to be found among soldiers. The shocks and tragic absurdities of any given war produce research questions of their own. At risk of mixing metaphors, the veterans know where the skeletons are buried. They bear resentments and grievances about how their war was conducted that become research topics, and they often have the networks and wherewithal to produce informed and systematic accounts. So as well as reproducing hegemonic discourses, soldier historians are also interesting as a new critical resource for understanding war.This shouldn't be that surprising. In other areas of inquiry, amateur and practitioner scholars have often been a source of critical innovation. LGBTQ history starts outside the academy, among activists who turned their apartments into archives. Much of what we now call postcolonial scholarship also began outside the academy, among colonized intellectuals involved in anti-imperial struggles. Let me close this off by going back to the archive. There are really rich sources for this kind of project. Military historians of all kinds leave behind papers full of their research materials and correspondence. The commanders and others they wrote about often waged extended epistolary campaigns concerned with correcting and shaping the historical record. But more than this, by situating archival sources alongside what later became researched and published histories, what drops out and what goes in to military history comes into view. What is silenced, and what is given voice? We can then see how the violent and forlorn episodes of war are turned into narrated events with military meaning. What is the process by which war experience becomes military history?Given the interdisciplinary nature of your work, what field you place yourself in? And are there any problems have you encountered when writing and thinking across scholarly boundaries?In my head I live in a kind of idealized interdisciplinary war studies, and my field is the intersection of war and empire. Sort of Michael Howard meets Critical Theory and Frantz Fanon. This has given me a particular voice in critical IR broadly conceived, and a distinctive place from which to engage the discipline. The mostly UK departments I've been in have been broadly hospitable places in practice for interdisciplinary scholarship and teaching, so long as you published rather than perished. Of course, interdisciplinary is a complicated word. It is one thing to be multi-disciplinary, to publish in the core journals of more than one discipline and to be recognized and read by scholars in more than one discipline. But work that falls between disciplinary centers, which takes up questions and offers answers recognized centrally by no discipline, that's something harder to deal with. I thought after Soldiers of Empire won prizes in two disciplines that I'd have an easier time getting funding for the project I described earlier in the interview. But I've gotten nowhere, despite years of applications to a variety of US, UK, and European funders. Of course, this may be because it is a bad project! My point, though, is that disciplines necessarily, and even rightly, privilege work that speaks to central questions; that's the work that naturally takes on significance in disciplinary contexts, as in many grant or scholarship panels. I think another point here is the nature of the times. Understandably, no one is particularly interested right now in White men's military histories. What I think has really empowered disciplines during my time in the UK academy has been the intersection with audit culture and university management. Repeated waves of rationalization have washed over the UK academy, which have emphasized discipline as a unit of measurement and management even as departments themselves were often "schoolified" into more or less odd combinations of disciplines. Schoolification helped to break down old solidarities and identities, while audit culture needed something on which to base its measures. The great victory of neoliberalism over the academy is evident in the way it is just accepted now that performance has to be assessed by various public criteria. This is where top disciplinary journals enter the picture, as unquestionable (and quantifiable) indicators of excellence. Interdisciplinary journals don't have the same recognition, constituency, or obvious significance. To put it in IR terms, Environment and Planning D or Comparative Studies in Society and History, to take two top journals that interdisciplinary IR types publish in, will never have the same weight as, say, ISQ or APSR. That that seems natural is an indicator of change—when I started, RIS—traditionally welcoming of interdisciplinary scholarship—was seen as just as good a place to publish as any US journal. Now RIS is perceived as merely a "national" journal while ISQ and APSR are "international" or world-class. This kind of thing has consequences for careers and the make-up of departments. What I'm drawing attention to is not so much an intellectual or academic debate; scholars always disagree on what good scholarship is, which is how it is supposed to be. It is rather the combination of discipline with the suffocating culture of petty management that pervades so much of British life. Get your disciplinary and epistemological politics institutionalized in an audit culture environment, and you can really expand. For example, the professionalization of methods training in the UK has worked as a kind of Trojan Horse for quantitative and positivist approaches within disciplines. In IR, in the potted geographic lingo we use, that has meant more US style work. Disappearing is the idea of IR as an "inter-discipline," where departments have multi-disciplinary identities like I described above. The US idea that IR is part of political science is much more the common sense now than it was in the UK. Another dimension of the eclipse of interdisciplinary IR has been the rise of quantitative European political science, boosted by large, multiyear grants from the ERC and national research councils. It's pretty crazy, strategically speaking, for the UK to establish a civilizational scale where you're always behind the US or its European counterparts. You'll never do North American IR as well as the North Americans do, especially given the disparity in resources. You'll always be trending second or third tier. The British do like to beat themselves up. Meanwhile, making US political science journals the practical standard for "international excellence" threatens to make the environment toxic for the very scholarship that has made British IR distinctive and attractive globally. The upshot of that will be another wave of émigré scholars, which the British academy's crises and reform initiatives produce from time to time. Think of the generation of UK IR scholars who decamped to Australia, an academy poised to prosper in the post-covid world (if the government there can get its vaccination program on track) and a major site right now of really innovative IR scholarship. To return to what you mentioned earlier regarding the hesitancy to go to the archives, this is also mirrored in a hesitancy to do serious ethnography, I think as well. Or there's this "doing ethnography" that involves a three-day field trip. This kind of sweet-shop 'pick and mix' has come to characterize some methodologies, because of these constraints that you highlight…A lot of what I'm talking about has happened within universities, it's not externally imposed or a direct consequence of the various government-run assessment exercises. Academics, eagerly assisted by university managers, have done a lot of this to themselves and their students. The implications can be far reaching for the kind of scholarship that departments foster, from PhDs on up. More and more of the UK PhD is taken up with research methods courses, largely oriented around positivism even if they have critical components. Already this gives a directionality to ideas. The advantage of the traditional UK PhD—working on your own with a supervisor to produce a piece of research—has been intellectual freedom, even when the supervisor wasn't doing their job properly. It's not great, but the possibility for creative, innovative, even field changing scholarship was retained. PhD students weren't disciplined, so to speak. What happens now is that PhD students are subject to a very strict four year deadline, often only partially funded, their universities caring mainly about timely completion not placement and preparation for a scholarly career, a classic case of the measurement displacing the substantive value. The formal coursework they get is methods driven. You can supervise interdisciplinary PhD research in this kind of environment, but it's not easy and poses real risks and creates myriad obstacles for the student. A strange consequence of this, as many of my master's students will tell you, is that I often advise them to consider US PhDs, just in other disciplines. That way, they get the benefit of rigorous PhD level coursework beyond methods. They can do so in disciplines like history or anthropology that are currently receptive both to the critical and the transnational/transboundary. That is not a great outcome for UK IR, even if it may be for critically-minded students. Outside of a very few institutions and scattered individuals, US political science, of course, has largely cleansed itself of the critical and alternative approaches that had started to flower in the glasnost era of the 1990s. That is not something we should be seeking to emulate in the UK.So yes, there's much to say here, about how the four year PhD has materially shaped scholarship in the UK. There is generally very little funding for field work. Universities worried about liability have put all kinds of obstacles in the way of students trying to get to field work sites. Requirements like insisting that students be in residence for their fourth year in order to write up and submit on time further limit the possibilities for field work. The upshot is to make the PhD dissertation more a library exercise or to favor the kind of quantitative, data science work that fits more easily into these time constraints and structures. Again, quite obviously, power sculpts knowledge. It becomes simply impossible, within the PhD, to do the kinds of things associated with serious qualitative scholarship, like learn languages, spend long time periods in field sites and to visit them more than once, to develop real networks there. Over time this shapes the academy, often in unintended ways. I think this is one of the reasons that IR in the UK has been so theoretic in character—what else can people do but read books, think and write in this kind of environment? As I say, the other kind of thing they can do is quantitative work, which takes us right back to the fate Walt and Mearsheimer sensed befalling IR as political science. Watch for IR and Data Science joint degrees as the next step in this evolution. Political Science in the US starts teaching methods at the freshman level. They get them young. We have discussed the rather grim state of affairs for the future of critical social science scholarship, at least in the UK and US. To conclude – what prospects for hope in the future are there?Well, if I had a public relations consultant pack, this is the point at which it would advise talking about children and the power of science to save us. I think the environment for universities, political, financial, and otherwise may get considerably more difficult. Little is untouchable in Western public life right now, it is only a question of when and in what ways they will come for us. The nationalist and far-right turns in Western politics feed off transgressing boundaries. There's no reason to suspect universities will be immune from this, and they haven't been. In the UK, as a consequence of Brexit, we are having to nationalise, and de-European-ise our scholarships and admissions processes. We are administratively enacting the surrender of cosmopolitan achievements in world politics and in academic life. This is not a plot but in no small measure the outcome of democratic will, registered in the large majority Boris Johnson's Conservatives won at the last general election. It will have far reaching consequences for UK university life. This is all pretty scary if you think, as I do, that we are nearer the beginning then the end of the rise of the right. Covid will supercharge some of these processes of de-globalization. I can already see an unholy alliance forming of university managers and introvert academics who will want to keep in place various dimensions of the online academic life that has taken shape since spring 2020. Often this will be justified by reference to environmental concerns and by the increased, if degraded, access that online events make possible. We are going to have a serious fight on our hands to retain our travel budgets at anywhere near pre-pandemic levels. I'm hoping that this generation of students, subjected to online education, will become warriors for in-person teaching. All of this said, it's hard to imagine a more interesting time to be teaching, thinking and writing about world politics. Politics quite evidently retains its capacity to turn the world upside down. Had you told US citizens where they would be on January 6th, 2021 in 2016, they would have called you alarmist if not outlandish. I think we're in for more moments like that. Tarak Barkawi is a professor of International Relations at LSE. He uses interdisciplinary approaches to imperial and military archives to re-imagine relations between war, armed forces and society in modern times. He has written on the pivotal place of armed force in globalization, imperialism, and modernization, and on the neglected significance of war in social and political theory and in histories of empire. His most recent book, Soldiers of Empire, examined the multicultural armies of British Asia in the Second World War, reconceiving Indian and British soldiers in cosmopolitan rather than national terms. Currently, he is working on the Korean War and the American experience of military defeat at the hands of those regarded as racially inferior. This new project explores soldiers' history writing as a site for war's constitutive presence in society and politics.PDF version of this Talk
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Hamas's attack into Israel and massacre of Israelis, followed by Israel's war of obliteration on Gaza backed by the United States, is a political earthquake in the Middle East. Its tremors are shaking up the politics of the Horn of Africa, bringing down an already tottering peace and security architecture. It's too early to discern the shape of the rubble, but we can already see the direction in which some of the pillars will fall.The most obvious impact is that the Israel-Palestine war has legitimized and invigorated protest across the wider region. Hamas showed that Israel was not invincible, and Palestine would no longer be invisible. Many in the Arab street — and Muslims more widely — are ready to overlook Hamas's atrocious record as a public authority and its embrace of terror, because it dared stand up to Israel, America, and Europe.Hamas's boldness has given a shot in the arm to Islamists, such as Somalia's al-Shabaab. As the African Union peacekeeping operation in Somalia draws down, al-Shabaab remains a threat— and will likely be emboldened to intensify its operations both in Somalia and neighboring Kenya.Kenyan President William Ruto gave strong backing to Israel while also calling for a ceasefire. For the U.S. and Europe, Kenya is now the anchor state for security in the Horn — but it desperately needs financial aid if it is to shoulder that burden.The war is consuming Egyptian attention and terrifies President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who is treading a fine line between sponsoring pro-Palestinian protests and suppressing them.Red Sea SecurityThe Red Sea is strategic for Israel. One quarter of Israel's maritime trade is handled in its port of Eilat on the Gulf of Aqaba, an inlet of the Red Sea. Eilat is Israel's back door, vital in case the Mediterranean coast is under threat. Israel has long seen the littoral countries of the Red Sea — Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Sudan, Eritrea, Djibouti and Somalia — as pieces in the jigsaw of its extended security frontier.Historically, Egypt has shared the same concern. Last year, revenues from the Suez Canal were $9.4 billion— its third largest foreign currency earner after remittances from Egyptians working in the Gulf States and tourism. Neither Israel nor Egypt can afford a disruption to maritime security from Suez and Eilat to the Gulf of Aden.The Red Sea is also the buckle on China's Belt and Road Initiative, with China's first overseas military base — strictly speaking a "facility" — in the port of Djibouti near the Bab al-Mandab, the narrow straits between the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea. More than 10 percent of world maritime trade is carried on 25,000 ships through these straits every year.Having long neglected its Red Sea coastline, Saudi Arabia has reawakened to its significance in the last decade. In the 1980s, amid fears that Iran might block tanker traffic through the Persian Gulf, Saudi Arabia built an east-west pipeline from the Aqaig oil fields to the Red Sea port of Yanbu al Bahr. Its strategic significance is back in focus.In parallel, the United Arab Emirates is well on track to securing a monopoly over the ports of the Gulf of Aden, which forms the eastern approaches to the Red Sea. It has de facto annexed the Yemeni island of Socotra for a naval base. The UAE is looking for a foothold in the Red Sea proper, and a string of satellite states on the African shore.All these factors intensify the scramble for securing naval bases in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden. Djibouti is already host to the U.S.'s Camp Lemonnier along with French, Italian, Japanese, and Chinese facilities. Turkey and Russia are actively seeking bases too, focusing on Port Sudan and Eritrea's long coastline.Empowered Gulf StatesWell before the recent crisis, the Horn of Africa was becoming dominated by Middle Eastern powers. This process is now intensified. Decades of competition between Saudi Arabia and Iran for alignment of Sudan and Eritrea has swung different ways. Sudan's General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, formerly political partner of Benjamin Netanyahu and signatory to the Abraham Accord, cut an ill-timed deal with Iran in early October, to obtain weapons, which has embarrassed his outreach to Egypt and Saudi Arabia. More recently, Turkey and Qatar's regional ambitions have clashed with Riyadh and Abu Dhabi, especially over the Muslim Brothers — supported by the former, opposed by the latter. The latest emerging rivalry is between Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.Saudi Arabia has positioned itself as the regional anchor. While running for president, Joe Biden called Saudi Arabia a "pariah." But it is now indispensable to the U.S.Among the Arab states. the UAE has been the most restrained in condemning Israel for its actions in Gaza. It has also said that it doesn't mix trade and politics— meaning that it will continue to implement the economic cooperation agreements it signed with Israel following on from the Abraham Accords. The UAE is also positioned at the center of the U.S.-sponsored India-Middle East-Europe Corridor (IMEC), unveiled at the September G20 summit in India as a response to China's Belt and Road Initiative.The UAE also has a free hand in the Horn of Africa, and in the last five years it has moved more rapidly and decisively than Saudi Arabia.Sudan's Fate between Riyadh and Abu DhabiAfter the eruption of war in Sudan in April, the joint Saudi-American mediation was in large part a gift from Washington to try to mend fences with the Kingdom. Talks in Jeddah resumed in late October, with the modest agenda of a ceasefire and humanitarian access, and a pro forma "civilian track" delegated to the African Union, which has shown neither commitment nor competence.Meanwhile, the Emiratis are backing General Mohamed Hamdan Dagolo, known as "Hemedti," who is currently driving the Sudan Armed Forces out of their remaining redoubts in Khartoum. This followed more than six months of fighting in which Hemedti's Rapid Support Forces gained a reputation for military prowess and utter disregard for the dignity and rights of civilians. Despite widespread revulsion against the RSF, especially among middle class Sudanese, UAE President Mohamed bin Zayed al Nahyan, known as MBZ, stuck with his man.In charge of the ruins of Sudan's capital city, Hemedti will soon be in a position to declare a government, perhaps inviting civilians for the sake of a veneer of legitimacy. What's holding him back is the ceasefire talks in Jeddah. His rival, Gen. al-Burhan is meanwhile floating a plan to form a government based in Port Sudan — raising the prospect of two rival governments, as in Libya. The real negotiations there are between Riyadh and Abu Dhabi. If the two capitals agree on a formula, the U.S. and the African Union will applaud, and the Sudanese will be presented with a fait accompli.Ethiopia Goes RogueIn Ethiopia, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed's rule is underwritten by Emirati treasure. MBZ has reportedly paid for Abiy's vast new palace, a vanity project whose $ 10 billion price tag is paid for entirely off-budget. Abiy told lawmakers that this bill was none of their business as it was funded by private donations, directly to him. Other megaprojects in and around the capital Addis Ababa, such as glitzy museums and theme parks, have similarly opaque finances.Ethiopia's wars have depended on largesse from the UAE. Ethiopian federal forces prevailed against Tigray, forcing the latter into an abject surrender a year ago, on account of an arsenal — especially drones — supplied by the UAE. Abiy is currently rattling his saber against his erstwhile ally, Eritrea, demanding that landlocked Ethiopia be given a port, or it will take one by force. The likely target is Assab in Eritrea, though other neighbors such as Djibouti and Somalia have been rattled too.Eritrea unexpectedly finds itself as a status quo power and is relishing this role, tersely expressing its refusal to join in the confusing discourse from Addis Ababa. It suddenly has allies in Djibouti, Somaliland, Somalia and even Kenya — all of them threatened by Abiy's bellicosity.If Abiy does invade Eritrea, he will violate the basic international norm — the inviolability of state boundaries — and risk plunging his already failing economy deeper into disaster. This will pose a sharp dilemma for the UAE. It is ready to override multilateral principles, but whether it would bail out its errant client in Addis Ababa, and jeopardize its winning position in Sudan, is a different matter. It would also present Saudi Arabia with the dilemma of whether to back Eritrea's notorious dictator, President Isaias Afewerki.America and the Pax AfricanaPeace and security in the Horn of Africa isn't a priority for the Biden administration. Despite a rhetorical commitment to a rule-based international order, Washington has neither protected Africa's painstakingly-constructed peace and security architecture nor brought the Ethiopian and Sudanese crises to the U.N. Security Council.While the American security umbrella was in place over the Arabian Peninsula, the countries of the Horn of Africa had the chance to develop their own peace and security system, based on a layered multilateral structure involving the regional organization, the InterGovernmental Authority on Development, the African Union, and United Nations, with peacekeepers and peace missions funded by the Europeans. This emergent Pax Africana was already imperiled as the U.S. drew down and the Middle Eastern middle powers became more assertive. President Donald Trump authorized his favored intermediaries — Egypt, Israel, Saudi Arabia and the UAE — to pursue their interests across the Horn of Africa. The Biden administration has not pulled that back.It's possible that the administration cares about peace, security and human rights in Africa. But for as long as the U.S.'s Horn of Africa policy is handled by the Africa Bureau at the State Department — whose diplomats scarcely get the time of day from their counterparts in the Gulf Kingdoms — Washington's views will remain all-but-irrelevant. The Horn of Africa doesn't make the cut when staffers prepare talking points for President Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken or national security adviser Jake Sullivan to speak to their Arab counterparts. It's a prioritization that leaves the region in a deepening crisis, at the mercy of ruthless transactional politics.America's well-established practice of treating Israel as an exception to international law is rubbing off on Israel's allies and apologists across the Middle East, who are actively dismantling the already-tottering pillars of Africa's norm-based peace and security system. Those African countries most in need of principled multilateralism are paying the price.
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No, not a rock band, but my past few days of hanging out with super-smart folks and the folks who fund them and me. The Humboldt Foundation held a meeting for awardees, which involved lots of Franconian food (oh my), several amazing lectures, and meeting these folks. It is held in Bamberg where the spirit of Humboldt apparently lives. Let me explain.Despite Humboldt being a dead rich guy, the foundation is not what he created with his will, but by the German government to foster engagement with foreign scientists after World War II. It funds, among other things, foreign scholars to spend time in Germany working with German scholars. This foundation is why I am spending three months in Berlin this year and three months next year. The range of scholarship that is funded is pretty breathtaking, as our meeting includes philosophers and classisists (classics scholars, whatever they are called) and physicists and engineers and material scientists and folks in between. I have been to such a multidisciplinary event although it did remind me of a conference in 1990ish where Dave and I served as rapporteurs but that was mostly physicists and nuclear engineers and the like. The program here involved opening presentations about Bamberg and Humboldt, lectures on optical networks, philosophical rationality, climate change, and the human genome and mutation (now the X-men are on my mind). We also had small group organized by discipline-ish. My group of 20 covered the humanities and social sciences. And we had some excellent meals that exemplified the food of this region (heavy, really heavy). I was my first real European rail trip since my college days (except for some trips between Amsterdam and the Hague), and, yowza, are the rails smooth here. Great tank country. Anyhow, I got here a bit early on the first day so I walked around the town. Bamberg is, well, really old and mostly undamaged. It was founded around 1070 as the home to Holy Roman emperor types, and it was not bombed in World War II, which makes for a really amazing old city. It is famous for a specific kind of beer: smokey!The first evening started with a bit of history about Humboldt. He was one of two sons of a rich family, and he really, really wanted to explore and engage in some serious botany and other scientific investigations. Which he did once his mother died. He documented heaps of nature in Latin America and in Europe. His scientific interests were all over the place, so naming this foundation after him makes a great deal of sense. Alex said once: "Knowledge and insight are the joy and entitlement of humankind." Indeed.The first section of the first morning was by Polina Bayvel of University College London on optical networks. She did an excellent job of talking to folks who were a range of sharp hard physicists and curious social scientists--she made the optics of fiber and of the cloud and the internet most clear. The history of philosophy and religion prof lost me. In the afternoon, our roundtable was partly aimed at introductions so that maybe folks might find some people to work with down the road. The person at the table closest to me was... a former colleague. Vincent Pouloit, who was hired at McG in my sixth year or so there, is also here. That was a fun surprise as neither of us knew we are Humboldting this year until we read the program for the event. The group talked a bit about a variety of issues affecting contemporary social science including AI in the classroom.And then there was the award ceremony. It was really touching to have every awardee introduced and given a certificate. I will be most proud to frame it and put it on my office wall. I felt very outclassed here as some of the folks here are making tremendous contributions to science, but I am, of course, quite proud to be among them. Vincent!!!The meals, other than the heaviness of the food, have been the best part. The first night our table happened to be me and a sociologist and three super enthusiastic physicists who so much loved talking about their stuff and using their hands like fighter pilots to explain their concepts. Last night, as it was before the ceremony, there were some friends/guests of the Humbodlt Foundation at the dinner. So, I sat next to a very inquisitive chemist who asked me about NATO and other stuff, and explained his work--zapping things with lasers including ... coffee! The first presentation of the second day was by Tiffany Shaw (a Canadian!) who talked about Predicting Climate Change. It was a fascinating talk about some of the dynamics of climate change and where the uncertainty is. Nope, no uncertainty about it being caused by humans and that it is getting worse. One of the things I had not known is that the temperature change was essentially additive--that the temperatures are rising in a relatively linear fashion but the effect on precipitation is non-linear. That means it is getting to get much, much wetter. Oh my. I asked a question about 2023 since she had it on her final slide but didn't talk about how last year was beyond the predictions or at least at the outer end of the range of predictions. She suggested this year might actually not be quite as hot as there were some specific dynamics last year that were temporary that pushed things hotter than the general trends. She finished by saying how this was an exciting time to be doing this kind of work, which reminded me of how I left about doing the International Relations of Ethnic Conflict in the 1990s--exciting but scary and depressing. The next presentation was about the genome and mutation. The first big surprise is that most/all mutation is bad--making it more likely for someone to die. And, well, that ran against all the years of X-Men and Homo Superior. Magneto had the wrong idea about mutation? It turns out that what we think about evolution is wrong--it is not really progressive and more by chance! That mutations tend to be selected out in a large population (like yeast?!) but may remain in smaller populations like elephants these days or homonids way back when. This nearly neutral model of evolution has really shook things up even as it has not made it out of the genome scholars and into the popular understanding. I didn't stick around for the q&a as I had to get to a pharmacy before it closed. And then I explored more of Bamberg, going into various museums and super old buildings.My quest for life-changing strudel continues, alas, without success. It was fine. We have one last dinner, and then tomorrow, I take the train back to Berlin to prepare for my next adventure: skiing in the Alps! Hopefully, the wifi will be better in Zurs, but, of course, I will need it less as I will be out and about on many slopes and chair lifts!Once again, I am thinking--better to be lucky than good. This winter has been amazing--my time in Berlin and Vienna has been fantastic. I can now add my Bamberg adventure. Just a terrific time, learning a lot, and enjoying the Humboldt Spirit™.
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"America was ready for renewal. The world was there to remake. There were at least two more years to get it done."So concludes Alex Ward's recent book "The Internationalists: The Fight to Restore American Foreign Policy after Trump," a detailed account of President Joe Biden's first two years in office. Ward's deeply reported narrative ends in late April of 2023, with national security adviser Jake Sullivan delivering a speech at the Brookings Institution that symbolically brought the neoliberal era to an end.The story that Ward — national security reporter at Politico — tells is a compelling one. Biden's foreign policy team — led by consummate DC insiders who dubbed themselves "the A-team" — understood their mandate as working to bring Washington out of the abyss of the Trump years. Watching Donald Trump win the White House had led to a soul-searching moment for Democrats in the foreign policy establishment, pushing those who eventually became Biden's braintrust to embrace a new paradigm. "Sullivan had changed during the Trump years after working to define a progressive foreign policy, one that would appeal to denizens of the heartland as well as the well-heeled and well-intentioned urban elites," writes Ward. "The Democratic candidate, having watched his opponent in the Oval Office and the campaign trail, had also come to the conclusion that the usual message on foreign policy needed a first-page rewrite." The party would work to overturn what they perceived as the ills of Trumpism by re-embracing international allies and partners, and restoring American global leadership of the global "rules-based order." But, Ward writes, "force would be used only when the foundations of the world that the United State had helped build since 1945 were at risk. Otherwise, the guns would be holstered." The theme that Sullivan and others settled on to define Biden's foreign policy was "a foreign policy for the middle class." At times, Ward treats this approach with a critical eye, pointing to a number of inconsistencies in administration policy. But the ultimate narrative arc in the book is more clean: After a rocky start, with the nadir being the courageous but poorly managed conclusion to the United States' two-decade war in Afghanistan, the Biden administration recovered its mojo with its response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.Despite some bumps in the road, Biden and his team had begun to rebuild U.S. foreign policy, with a renewed focus on working with allies, upholding democratic norms, and protecting the so-called rules-based international order.That story has changed dramatically since the book's conclusion, which brings the reader up to April 2023, nearly a year ago. A lot has happened since then, and not so much in favor of Ward's narrative arc. If it were a classic VH-1 Face the Music episode, this is the exact point where the clouds roll in on our A-Team and everything goes careening off track, perhaps forever.And so, the response to the war in Ukraine is presented by Ward as a success. The methodical and comprehensive preparations in the months leading up to the invasion serve as a foil to the haphazard approach that marked the withdrawal from Afghanistan. According to Ward, the Biden team prepared for many possible contingencies, even though the political leadership in Ukraine was doubtful of U.S. intelligence that suggested an invasion was likely.The final chapter of "The Internationalists," before the epilogue that lays out Sullivan's speech at Brookings, features Biden's triumphant visit to Kyiv. During his address in the Ukrainian capital, says Ward, the president "wanted to prove that Bidenism worked — and the world just needed more of it." For Biden, Russia's invasion had served as a global test of democracy, and democracy had prevailed. Over the last year, however, the war has reached a "stalemate" — others say a war of attrition, with Moscow winning it. Despite these changing realities, the Biden administration has proven unwilling and unable to shift its strategy or messaging away from an understanding of the war as a fight for democracy that can only be won through military means. The message is losing favor in Washington, particularly among congressional Republicans, and politics in Washington have moved slowly against continued aid for Ukraine.Meanwhile, in its reaction to the Hamas incursion into Israel on October 7, the Biden administration has squandered any global legitimacy and consistency it had built in its first two-plus years in power, and undermined its message on the war in Ukraine. In just over five months, the White House has laid bare the hypocrisy and inconsistency of its stated commitment to human rights and the international order and left Washington isolated on the world stage. Things were different in May 2021 when war broke out in Gaza. Just like today, Biden chose to fully back Israel's war publicly while reportedly pressuring the Israeli prime minister behind closed doors. Biden chose to negotiate "methodically and quietly" with Benjamin Netanyahu and opted against playing a significant public role. The White House, according to Ward, welcomed the pressure from their left flank that played a role in the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, reached after 11 days of conflict. It was, according to the author, indicative of Biden's broader foreign policy vision: "Core issues that challenge the world order or America's leadership get his full effort. Everything else, the United States will help if it can."The response to that war is treated by the administration as a success, as it helped keep the conflict relatively short and contained. The opposite has resulted from that strategy today. Biden continues to publicly back Israel's war, both rhetorically and materially. Despite a breathless string of reports that Washington has privately expressed its "frustration" or "concern" with Tel Aviv, Israel's war continues seemingly without restriction as the Palestinian death toll surpasses 30,000. The White House has been largely dismissive of progressives calling for a sustainable ceasefire, and the risk of a regional conflagration persists.The Biden administration's response to what is happening in Gaza has also blatantly betrayed any ostensible commitment to human rights and international law, which had been so important to the White House when it came to Ukraine. "The reason the administration was set to dive headfirst into intense preparations was to defend the rules-based international order," Ward writes about Biden's mindset after receiving intelligence that Russia might go into Ukraine in late 2021. "If Putin succeeded in wiping Ukraine off the map, the world America helped build would crumble on this administration's watch." The White House has consistently made the case that the stakes of Russia's invasion of Ukraine are the future of democracy itself. The Biden administration has lambasted Moscow's violations of international law. In April 2022, Biden even accused Vladimir Putin of committing genocide in Ukraine. Yet when the International Court of Justice ruled earlier this year that it was "plausible" that Israel was carrying out a genocide in Gaza, the White House called the accusation "unfounded." Administration officials have consistently refused to condemn alleged Israeli war crimes, including the bombing of hospitals and the forced displacement and starvation of the civilian population. Instead of pushing for a ceasefire, the U.S. has continued to support Israel's war. Biden himself often ties the wars in Ukraine and Gaza into one larger, global project, including the ongoing effort to pass a spending package that combines $60 billion in aid for Kyiv with $17 billion for Tel Aviv.In addition to Joe Biden's campaign slogan of "a foreign policy for the middle class," Ward tries to tack on a few more principles that could define the president's approach. "He had developed a doctrine of sorts over two years in office," Ward writes. "Stand true with allies. Defend democracy. Avoid escalatory conflict. Preserve the rules-based order." On almost every count, he has failed to live up to those lofty goals.
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In an interview with Le Figaro published on August 16 and based on his new book, former French President Nicolas Sarkozy laid out what has been missing from Western thinking on the war in Ukraine: a diplomatic Plan B in case the present Ukrainian offensive fails.
If it does fail, as seems increasingly probable, the most likely alternative to a diplomatic solution is an indefinite and bloody war of attrition along roughly the present battle lines.
Quite apart from the threats of disastrous escalation and a NATO-Russia war described by Sarkozy, Westerners who are or claim to be friends of Ukraine should consider the consequences of an unending war on that country. These include a continuation of dreadful human losses and continued destruction of the Ukrainian economy, with no certainty at all over who will pay to rebuild it. They would also entail the indefinite postponement of the process of EU accession, which would have offered Ukraine its best chance of truly joining the West and the inability of Ukrainian refugees to return home, leading to a catastrophic and permanent decline in Ukraine's population.
In addition to all of this: the possibility that a Ukrainian army exhausted and bled white by years of failed offensives will eventually fall victim to a Russian counter-attack, leading to territorial losses far greater than Ukraine has suffered so far.
This being so, one might think that even those who disagree with Sarkozy's specific recommendations would welcome the chance to hold a serious public debate on ways forward. Instead, the response from the great majority of Western (including French) politicians and commentators has followed the wearisomely familiar path of denunciations of the former president as a "Russian influencer" and "friend of Putin" whose remarks were "shameful" and "shocking."
A survey of Western "news" reports (mostly in fact veiled and hostile opinion pieces) is interesting in this regard. Of the ten top stories about the interview resulting from a Google search, only two focused on Sarkozy's remarks themselves. All the others, in their content and headlines (like "'Shameful' Nicolas Sarkozy Under Fire for Defending Putin" in The Guardian), highlighted and quoted at length the angry attacks on Sarkozy.
What Sarkozy actually said is the following:
"Without compromise, nothing will be possible and we run the risk that the situation will degenerate at any moment. This powder keg could have frightful consequences…
The Ukrainians... will want to reconquer what has been unjustly taken from them. But if they can't manage it completely, the choice will be between a frozen conflict... or taking the high road out with referenda [in territories occupied by Russia since 2014] strictly overseen by the international community… any return to the way things were before [ie Ukrainian rule over Crimea] is an illusion. An incontestable referendum... will be needed to solidify the current state of affairs.
On the question of NATO membership for Ukraine, Sarkozy said that:
"Russia has to renounce all military action against its neighbors … Ukraine must pledge to remain neutral … NATO could at the same time affirm its willingness to respect and take into account Russia's historic fear of being encircled by unfriendly neighbors."
He also described as unrealistic and hypocritical suggestions that Ukraine can join the European Union in the foreseeable future, comparing this to Turkey's hopeless decades-long efforts: "We are selling fallacious promises that will not be kept to."
On French President Emmanuel Macron's previous efforts to negotiate with Putin, Sarkozy said that these had been correct, but that Macron had failed to follow up with any concrete proposals for compromise, partly "due to pressure from eastern Europeans."
Sarkozy asked Europeans to remember that, like it or not, Russia will always remain part of Europe and a neighbor of the EU, with which it will be necessary to co-exist. Therefore, "European interests aren't aligned with American interests this time."
Despite the near-universal vilification Sarkozy's interview has provoked, much of what he said has in fact been stated on background by some U.S. and European officials, and quoted in the Western media. In February, unnamed Biden administration officials told the New York Times that the U.S. goal should not be for Ukraine to retake Crimea (something that they judged both extremely difficult military and a risk for Russian escalation towards nuclear war) but instead to "credibly threaten" the Russian military hold on the peninsula, so as to "strengthen Kyiv's position in future negotiations."
This however leads – or should lead – to the obvious question: Future negotiations about what? Unlike Sarkozy, these U.S. officials and their European counterparts have not been willing to state the obvious conclusion: that if Ukraine could achieve such a military success without actually reconquering Crimea, the resulting negotiations would have to be about returning to Ukraine the territories it has lost since last year, while leaving Crimea (and probably the eastern Donbas, also in practice held by Russia since 2014) in Russian hands.
Nor have they addressed the question of how such a peace settlement could be internationally legitimized. Here Sarkozy has suggested a democratic solution that has also been proposed by Thomas Graham and others, but has been rigorously ignored by the governments of Western democracies: to place the decision in the hands of the populations of the areas concerned through internationally supervised referenda.
At present however — and as the Pentagon correctly in advance warned was likely — the Ukrainian army is still very far from being able to retake Crimea, and will very likely never be in that position. The probable failure of the present Ukrainian offensive is now being widely discussed by Western official and unofficial analysts. Once again, however, few have drawn the obvious conclusion that the result will be a prolonged war of attrition, leading either to an eventual ceasefire along present lines or — possibly — to a new Russian victory.
Even fewer have echoed Sarkozy in arguing that the eventual result will have to be a compromise peace, and suggested what the terms of that peace should be.
As to Ukrainian EU membership, EU officials and analysts with whom I talked in Brussels last autumn echoed in private Sarkozy's profound skepticism that this would be possible for a very long time to come. This is partly because the costs of Ukrainian reconstruction would place unprecedented and colossal strain on EU budgets. Six months ago, the World Bank estimated that the cost of this reconstruction would already be around $411 billion — two and a half times Ukraine's GDP for 2022 and more than twelve times the EU's entire present annual spending on aid to its poorer members.
Severe doubts were also expressed to me about Ukraine's ability to achieve the kind of internal reforms that would enable it to even begin to meet the conditions of the EU's Acquis Communautaire. President Macron believes that even if peace can be achieved, it will take Ukraine "several decades" to qualify. In these unfavorable circumstances for Ukraine and the West, to reject Sarkozy's remarks reflexively and without discussion seems the height of irresponsibility, hypocrisy, and moral cowardice, and also does not serve the real interests of Ukraine.
In 1916 and 1917, as the Western front congealed into a horrendously bloody stalemate and Russia sank into revolution and civil war, dissident voices began to be raised in the European combatants calling for a compromise peace. And in all these countries, these voices were also described as "shameful" and silenced by accusations of "treason" and "surrender."
The result was that three great European states were destroyed, the victors (with the exception of the United States) were irrevocably crippled, and the grounds were laid for Fascism, Stalinism, and the even greater calamity of World War II.
One hundred and six years later, very few historians today would describe those advocates of peace as "shameful," or their critics as correct. What are historians one hundred years from now likely to say about present Western witch hunts against those who propose peace in Ukraine?
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I was recently asked whether I'd like to share my thoughts on monetary policy in a post-pandemic world. Sure, why not? Thanks to Jan Eckhout for thinking of me. The panel was hosted by the European Economic Association last month and moderated by Diane Coyle. I was honored to speak alongside Ricardo Reis and Beata Javorcik, both of whom provided riveting presentations. For what it's worth, I thought I'd provide a transcript of my remarks here. Lunch Panel EEA-ESEM CopenhagenAugust 25, 2021I want to focus my discussion on the U.S. economy and from the perspective of a Fed official concerned with the challenges the Fed may face in fulfilling its Congressional mandates in a post-pandemic world.
First, to provide a bit of context, let me offer a bit of history on policy and, in particular, on what I think were some policy mistakes. Let me begin with the 2008-09 financial crisis, which is something I think most people would agree should never have happened. Whether a sufficiently aggressive Fed lender-of-last-resort operation would have averted the crisis remains a open question. Even if it had been successful, such an operation would have had costs. It may, for example, have elicited an even greater political backlash than we saw at the time--and who knows how this may have manifested itself as undesirable changes to the FRA. As well, such an intervention may have just pushed mounting structural problems down the road. In particular, while it's now clear that some private sector lending practices needed to change, it's not clear where the incentive to do so would have come from absent a crisis. In any case, the crisis happened. How was it managed?
The ensuing recession was deep and the recovery dynamic very slow. The prime-age employment-to-population ratio did not reach its pre-pandemic level until 2019, a full decade later. Nevertheless, on the whole, I think the Fed followed an appropriate interest rate policy. There were one or two times the FOMC exhibited a little too much enthusiasm for "normalizing" policy, but I think the slow recovery dynamic had more to do with insufficient fiscal stimulus—especially at the state and local level—rather than a consequence of inappropriate monetary policy. The evidence for this can also be seen by the fact that inflation remained below the Fed's 2% target for most of the time the policy rate was close to its ELB. The Fed has interpreted this low inflation episode as partly a monetary policy mistake, something its new AIT regime is designed to address. But my own view is that persistently low inflation—and the low money market yields that go along with it—have more to do with the supply and demand for U.S. Treasury securities. This is something the Fed does not have very much direct control over.
I know many people are skeptical of fiscal theories of the price-level, but in virtually every economic model I know, a fiscal anchor is necessary to pin down the long-run rate of inflation. Monetary policy—specifically, interest rate policy—can, of course, influence the price-level, so monetary policy can influence inflation dynamics. But it can do so only in the "short run." Interest rate policy alone cannot, in my view, determine the long-run rate of inflation, at least, not without appropriate fiscal support.
Now, I know many of you may be asking how I can think fiscal policy has very much to do with inflation given how rapidly the debt has risen since the financial crisis and again with the C-19 crisis, all with little apparent pressure on long-run inflation expectations and on long-term bond yields. We should, however, keep in mind that an observed change in the quantity of an object may entail both supply and demand considerations. And one can easily point to several forces that have contributed to increases in the global demand for UST securities in recent decades. For example, the growing use of USTs as collateral in repo and credit derivatives markets beginning in the 1970s and accelerating through the 1980s. The growing demand for USTs as a safe store of value from EMEs. The evaporation of private-label safe assets during the financial crisis that left a gaping hole for USTs to fill. Next, we had a large increase in the regulatory demand for USTs coming out of Dodd-Frank and Basel III. The Fed's SRF and FIMA facility should further enhance the demand for USTs. On top of all this, we've witnessed an emergent class of money funds called "stablecoins" that are further contributing to the demand for USTs. These forces have been disinflationary, leading bond investors to revise down their expectation of the future path of policy interest rates. It is interesting to ponder a counterfactual here. In particular, think of what may have transpired absent an accommodating U.S. fiscal policy. We may very well have experienced the mother of all deflations. If this is correct, then an elevated debt-to-GDP ratio, given a relatively stable inflation and interest rate structure, reflects an elevated real demand for outside assets. The problem is not that the debt-to-GDP ratio is going up. The problem is what disruptions might occur if it goes down owing to a sudden and unexpected inflation.
The recent rise in inflation is concentrated in durable goods, and I think is mostly attributable to ongoing supply-chain issues associated with the pandemic. This effect is likely to reverse itself, the way lumber prices recently have. Some of what I think is temporarily high inflation may not reverse itself, leading to a permanently higher price-level. In this case, households will worry whether their wages will keep pace with the higher the cost of living. There is even the possibility—though I think less likely—that the rate of inflation itself will remain elevated and that inflation expectations will rise well above the Fed's 2% target. This may happen, for example, if the traditional bipartisan support for fiscal anchoring in the new generation of Congressional representatives is perceived to wane, or if the global demand for safe assets slows. If either or both of these things happen and are persistent, then the Fed may find itself faced with what Sargent and Wallace phrase an "unpleasant monetarist arithmetic." That paper, which was published exactly 40 years ago, warned how tightening monetary policy without fiscal support might actually make inflation go higher rather than lower.
The implications for U.S. monetary policy are quite interesting should an event like this unfold. A determined Fed may try to fight inflation by raising its policy rate. The result is likely to be a temporary disinflation and recession. Should fiscal policy remain unaltered, the logic provided by Sargent and Wallace implies that inflation will return even higher than before as the deficit must increase to finance a larger interest expense on the debt. The best the Fed can do in this case is to lower its policy rate, announce a temporarily higher inflation target, and hope that the fiscal authority gets its house in order. The notion that a Volcker-like policy would lower the long-run rate of inflation depends on fiscal capitulation. This capitulation to some extent did happen under Volcker, although keep in mind he had considerable Congressional support from both sides of the aisle. I do not think this type of political support is something one can count on, especially given today's political climate. So, you may want to buckle up, as we may be in for some interesting times ahead.Related Readings:Is it Time for Some Unpleasant Monetarist Arithmetic? Link to blog post. Link to paper.
"Aryanization" is the Nazi term for the cheap purchase of Jewish firms during the Third Reich with the ultimate goal of eliminating Jews from the German economy. Eleven of the largest such companies in Germany are examined in this dissertation and a noticeable pattern becomes evident. In an atmosphere of anti-Semitism, conservative non-Nazi businessmen approached Germany's three largest banks to request that they withdraw existing loans from the Hermann Tietz department store chain. Although this study focuses on the large Hermann Tietz and Leonhard Tietz retailers, it presents a new paradigm of Aryanization through analyses of the patterns of acquisition of massive publishing houses, as well as an enormous private bank, brewery, and gun manufacturer. The financial institutions participated because they earned fees, appointed bank executives to the formerly Jewish firms' Supervisory Boards and became the house bank conducting all future transactions. Courts were unwilling to intervene in the coerced acquisitions, because they shared the same conservative mindset as the businessmen and financial institutions. By focusing on the Jewish enterprises, it appears that the largest enterprises were frequently purchased in 1933-1935, whereas the tiny "Mom-and-Pop-shops" usually went out-of-business in 1938. This insight has not been noticed by the traditional model, since it does not differentiate between large and small companies. The cheap purchase of Jewish-owned companies occurred throughout the 1933 through 1938 timeframe. Saul Friedländer keenly observed a radical break in its implementation during these six pre-war years, with the pre-1936 period being a time of "relative moderation." He discerned a "new phase on the internal German scene" in 1936 in its manner of actualization, which had profound consequences. The 1936 break in the style of execution occurred due to Germany's economic growth and return to full employment as well as Göring's appointment to the Four Year Plan to prepare the nation for war. With regard to the Jewish citizens, the resulting "internal radicalization" in 1936 necessitated that in the opinion of the Reich "their assets [be] impounded for the benefit of German rearmament." Furthermore, Schacht's dismissal in 1938 also contributed to the Government replacing private opportunists as the key player in Aryanization. There were two periods of Aryanization. The 1933-1935 period, discussed in this dissertation, was characterized by an ad-hoc private initiative perpetrated by non-Nazi businessmen. In contrast, the 1936-1938 period was an organized state activity leading to the exclusion of Jewish businessmen from the German economy.Many historians have successfully elucidated the later 1936 through 1938 period of Aryanization directed from Berlin for the benefit of the state or private parties. By observing that the largest of Jewish-owned companies were taken during the earlier 1933 through 1935 period, this dissertation would like to make a contribution to scholarship. The responsibility for the 1933-1935 Aryanizations is placed firmly on the private sector, rather than on either the Nazi political party or on the central government in Berlin as has been characterized for the 1936-1938 timeframe. Another comprehensive break in the Aryanization process was the later focus on tens of thousands of mid-sized and small businesses as contrasted with the earlier conglomerates. The later timeframe additionally also concentrated on houses, apartments, acreage and even synagogues. This coincides with Friedländer's far-reaching break between the two periods of Aryanization. Although the following quotation concerns the difference between the prices paid for large versus small firms, perhaps Friedländer could accept my interpretative inclusions, which coincide with my perspective: "As noted in chapter 1 , recent research indicates that the considerable scope of [later] Aryanization at the medium- and small-business level was not indicative of the [earlier] situation at the higher level of the economy." The interpretive adaptation of Friedländer illustrates that although this dissertation is indebted to him for an Aryanization paradigm, with a thoroughgoing differentiation before and after 1936, there are some significant contributions in this research. Another such example concerns the role of Conservatives in the process of expropriating Jewish companies. Friedländer viewed Conservatives, such as Schacht, as a protection for the continuation of Jewish ownership or at least that fair market value would be offered. However, research uncovered in this dissertation indicated that in the earlier 1933-1935 period, Conservative businessmen without any capital were extended loans by Conservative bankers to coerce a sale in which Conservative judges were unwilling to ensure that justice was achieved. For the most part, one does not find documentation in the archives concerning the earlier 1933-1935 intervention by Adolf Hitler, Hermann Goering, or Rudolf Hess in the seizure of large Jewish-owned department stores, publishing houses, banks, and breweries. Instead, the key participants in the acquisition of such non-Gentile firms are non-NSDAP Party members, such as Joachim Tiburtius, Georg Karg, Max Winkler, Walther Frisch and Herbert Hoffmann. In Chapter III Section B4, this Dissertation has discovered and extrapolated on the venomous feature articles and lampoons beginning in December 1927 by Propaganda Minister Goebbels. However, my research process actually began by means of a different approach. In 2010, Business Historian Jeff Fear recommended that I begin my Aryanization research by reading microfilm on Hermann Göring's Four Year Plan. Two significant differences immediately emerged between my 1933-1935 bottom-up approach in the investigation of seizing Jewish firms and a later top-down procedure. First, I discovered that in building his financial colossus, Göring had not depended upon acquiring firms from the consumer sector as the private Aryanizers did. Göring's NSDAP-inspired technique involved acquiring control over firms in the Autobahn construction, car manufacturing and synthetic fuel and fiber replacement industries. Second, following Friedländer's observation, Göring's Four Year Plan commenced in 1936, which was after the timeframe from 1933 to 1935 in which the major Jewish companies had been "purchased." Private "purchases" of Jewish-owned businesses for personal benefit occurred years before Göring's acquisition of war-related industries for the state's benefit. The Dissertation does not seek to answer the question of whether comparatively smaller private sector Aryanizations influenced the later NSDAP's public infrastructure acquisitions. In addition, neither Friedländer nor I attempt to address the quantitative issues of what percentage of rearmament funding originated with Hjalmar Schacht's Metallurgische Forschungsgesellschaft promissory notes (also known as Mefo bills) as opposed to the requisition of Jewish assets. The hesitancy to be more quantitatively precise in both Aryanization and the funding of German rearmament is indirectly acknowledged by Friedländer's admission: "It is difficult to assess what was paid. to the tens of thousands of Jewish owners." This dissertation merely seeks to contribute to the understanding of early Aryanization. Neither the Aryanization by the state or by private individuals in the later 1936-1938 period are addressed. Numerous other economic issues remain for future research, including other private to public transitions such as the private pre-1933 building of the Autobahn to the later Organisation Todt construction of the roads. One of the three largest financial organizations was the Dresdner Bank. Its executive Karl Rasche was made a scapegoat by his firm in the subsequent war-crimes trials at Nuremberg. In contrast, little is known about other Dresdner Bank executives, not to mention the numerous local bank managers who organized lists of local businessmen seeking a quick profit. Similarly, little is known about German businessmen, who were not Nazi Party members, but who nevertheless took advantage of the political circumstances to enrich themselves. Germans viewed post-war de-Nazification proceedings as "victor justice," and thus these post-war processes are replete with whitewashed assessments of how German businessmen acquired Jewish firms. Since the original Jewish proprietors were usually unaware of the confidential negotiations between the three banks and the new Gentile owners, the restitution trials are often unhelpful to the historian. Nevertheless the common perspective of a "perpetrator" as one carrying a weapon, is expanded to include "ordinary" non-Nazi businessmen who enriched themselves at Jewish expense.
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On the day the U.N. Security Council passed a resolution demanding a ceasefire in Gaza, U.S. State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller deflected press questions about whether the U.S. would compel Israel to comply by saying that the resolution was "non-binding."He went on to say that "it's nonbinding in that it does not impose any new obligations on the parties, but we do believe it should be respected, that it carries weight, and that it should be implemented, as has always been our belief when it comes to UN Security Council resolutions."Contrary to the U.S. position, U.N. ambassadors from China and Mozambique, as well as the UK's former U.N. envoy, have publicly stated that it is binding, along with U.N. Secretary General spokesperson Farhan Haq, who said "all the resolutions of the Security Council are international law, so to that extent, they are as binding as international law is."The resolution, which passed last week with 14 votes in favor and one abstention from the U.S., primarily demands an immediate ceasefire for the month of Ramadan, the immediate and unconditional release of all hostages, and guaranteed humanitarian access to address their medical and other humanitarian needs.Resolutions are formal expressions of the will of the Security Council and are backed by the power of international law. Experts who spoke with RS counter the U.S. position, saying that implicit in the resolution is an obligation for the parties involved to comply. Meanwhile, they say it is understood that member states, collectively or on their own, can take measures that will compel parties to comply. More importantly, experts complain that Washington appears to be selectively interpreting international law to favor its political objectives — in this case to protect Israel — an action that could have consequences for its legitimacy in the eyes of the rest of the world moving forward. International law scholar and Yale Law School professor Asli Bâli said Article 25 of the U.N. Charter suggests that all the council's decisions are to be deemed binding. It states that U.N. members "agree to accept and carry out the decisions of the Security Council in accordance with the present Charter." Some argue that this passage only applies to resolutions that reference Chapter 7 of the charter, which outlines the powers the council has to respond to security threats. Bâli disagrees, citing a 1970 decision from the International Court of Justice in which the justices agreed with the broader reading of the U.N. charter.Another dispute over what constitutes a binding resolution has to do with what language is being used. Eran Sthoeger, a lawyer and adviser on international law, says that along with clear reference to Chapter 7 and Article 39 of the charter, which empowers the Security Council to assess threats to international peace and security, the Security Council uses the term "decides'' when it wants to be clear that a resolution is binding. Since none of these elements are present in the ceasefire resolution, it should not be considered binding on members, Sthoeger argues. However, international law scholar and Washburn University Professor Craig Martin told RS that, while this resolution does not use the exact word "decide," the language of making a "demand" similarly creates an obligation on member states."It's hard to understand how anyone could suggest there is any ambiguity or uncertainty of the obligation this creates," he said.Bâli cites previous resolutions passed by the council that demonstrate that the use of the word "decide" is not needed for a resolution to be treated as binding and enforceable. One example is Resolution 678, passed in 1990 in order to provide Iraq with a final chance to withdraw forces from Kuwait, in which the council "demand[ed] that Iraq comply fully with resolution 660 (1990) and all subsequent relevant resolutions." Iraq's failure to comply with that resolution triggered military action from member states, led by the U.S.Ian Hurd, a professor at Northwestern University who focuses on international law, said retroactive disputes over whether the resolution is binding are reflective of the U.S. attempting to interpret international law in a way that advances its interests."The U.S. is trying to split the difference between its friends and its enemies and find its own advantageous path," Hurd told RS. Bâli adds that the U.S. claiming the resolution is non-binding means that it can defend supplying arms to Israel. The U.S. position is not without potential consequences. Washington's insistence that this resolution is non-binding in the face of well-established interpretation of charter provisions and Security Council precedent "is once again eroding the normative power of the international legal system," Martin said, adding that it contributes to a growing perception that international law is an instrument of political power for the U.S. and its allies.By abstaining on the ceasefire vote, Hurd says, the U.S. nonetheless increased its pressure on Israel to protect civilians and to follow humanitarian law in Gaza. How the U.S. responds if Israel does not comply with this resolution will reveal whether Washington intends to take a firmer stance on this issue, or not.
The article presents an analysis of the peace initiative to resolve the Ukrainian crisis put forward by People's Republic of China (PRC) in February 2023. The initiative has attracted notable international attention and has been widely discussed both in the media and expert circles, as well as at political consultations of the world leaders. The article aims to show the significance of this peace initiative for China's broader foreign policy and international relations and to demonstrate a major increase in China's foreign policy activity and international influence observed in recent years. In particular, by launching this and several other diplomatic initiatives in 2022–2023, Beijing has sought to put into practice the provisions on "responsibility for the future of the world" declared by Chairman Xi Jinping. The PRC's peace plan for Ukraine is one of the important components of the "Global Security Initiative" concept proposed by Xi Jinping. The concept marks a new stage in China's foreign policy by positioning it as one of the world's largest powers with global interests. The article also assesses the prospects of China's peace initiative in terms of its impact on resolving the Ukrainian crisis. 中国对乌克兰的和平方案是该国外交政策的体现 这篇文章是对中华人民共和国领导人于2023年2月提出关于乌克兰危机的和平方案的分析。该倡议已成为一个突出的国际事件，在媒体和专家界以及世界领导人的政治磋商层面得到广泛讨论。文章旨在说明中国的和平倡议对中国外交政策和国际关系发展的意义，并在此背景下展示近年来中国外交政策活动和国际影响力的显着增长。特别是，通过这一倡议和2022-2023年提出的其他一些外交倡议，北京正在寻求将中国领导人习近平提出的"对世界未来的责任"的规定付诸实践。中国提出的关于乌克兰危机的和平方案是习近平提出的"全球安全倡议"构想的重要组成部分之一。该和平方案标志着中国外交政策的一个新阶段，即把自己定位为一个具有全球利益的世界大国。本文还评估了中国和平倡议对解决乌克兰危机前景的影响。
