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Today, I signed up for Bluesky and Threads, taking a brief look at each of them, and announced my final departure from Twitter, to take place when Musk removes the Block feature[1]. Meanwhile I'm still using Mastodon as my main microblog along with CT and my personal blog for long-form blogging. I'm trying to maintain […]

In an April 11 testimony before the U.S. Senate Committee on Finance, University of Pennsylvania Professor Amol Navathe, MD, PhD, said that Medicare's current fee-for-service system is a key factor in producing fragmentation in care, particularly for patients with multiple chronic care conditions. "The focus isn't on producing more health, just on producing more health […]

Following the acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk academic social media has undergone a period of change and fragmentation. This review highlights the range of responses featured on the blog this year, from coverage of new and emerging platforms, to reflections on what made academic twitter good and why we even bothered with it in … Continued

Clark Packard


There's been a lot of very loose talk recently from the press, politicians and think tank wonks about "decoupling"—that is, entirely eliminating trade, investment and migration—the United States and Chinese economies. Proponents of decoupling the two economies never grapple with the enormity of the task and thus it's useful to consider what such an idea actually entails as well as the costs to the U.S. and global economies. In reality, a hard decoupling is not nearly as simple and painless as proponents argue. Washington bureaucrats and politicians one day flipping a switch and cutting off all economic ties between the world's two largest economies is as unworkable as it would be economically disastrous.
Practically speaking, in order to operationalize a hard economic break with China, the U.S. would need to hire dramatically more customs agents as well as export control and investment monitors to police everyday transactions. Furthermore, as Adam Posen, president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, recently noted in an excellent Foreign Policy essay,
A unilateral U.S. withdrawal from commerce with China would be partially offset by other economies taking up market share where the United States no longer operated. If anything, it would increase the arbitrage opportunities for other countries and for companies headquartered elsewhere to trade and invest where the United States ceased to do so.
[…] In order for such restrictions to succeed, the United States would have to become a commercial police state on an unprecedented scale. The United States would also have to monitor and prevent its own headquartered companies from moving activities abroad. Washington has done this, on a limited scale, on specific technology transfers. But scale matters, and current proposals would be an order of magnitude more ambitious and thus infeasible.

Even more daunting than the feasibility of administering such a regime are the tremendous economic costs of a hard decoupling.
When the Trump administration levied extensive tariffs on imports from China—nearly 70 percent of all imports are now covered by an average tariff of 20 percent, up from about 3 percent before the trade war began—the results were predictably bad. According to the New York Federal Reserve, the tariffs cost the average American household an estimated $830 per year when accounting for direct costs and efficiency losses and led to a staggering $1.7 trillion loss in market capitalization for businesses due to slowed investments. My Cato colleague Scott Lincicome and I estimate that the tariffs effectively nullified about half the average household's savings from the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017.











The tariffs likewise triggered inevitable retaliation from Beijing, which fell particularly hard on American farmers and ranchers, resulting in a massive taxpayer‐​funded bailout program for agriculture producers who lost vital market access in China. Moody's Analytics estimated that the trade war caused the loss of approximately 300,000 jobs. My Cato colleague Alfredo Carrillo Obregon and I recently documented some of the real‐​world harms from the Trump‐​Biden China tariffs, particularly the pain inflicted on a lot of small and medium‐​sized businesses in the United States.
Despite the tariffs, two‐​way goods trade between the United States and China reached an all‐​time high in 2022 on a nominal basis, perhaps owing a bit to U.S. inflation. (Real goods trade, meanwhile, was lower than in 2021, but still represented an increase from 2019 and 2020.) A total ban on trade, investment and migration between the United States and China would make the enormous costs of the Trump tariffs look rather quaint.
If the world economy were separated into disparate economic blocs—one led by the United States and one led by China—the global economy would suffer tremendously. Earlier this year, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) released a study on the economic impact of such a system. In an excellent essay for his own Substack, economist Bert Hoffman summarized the IMF paper's findings,
[T]he costs of investment fragmentation could lower global GDP by 1 percent, and double that for GDP in China. Trade and technology fragmentation can be more damaging still: the cost to the global output from trade fragmentation could range from 0.2 percent in a limited fragmentation scenario to up to 7 percent of GDP (in a severe fragmentation/​high‐​cost adjustment scenario). With additional technological decoupling, the loss in output could reach 8 to 12 percent in some countries. […] These are massive costs.

Indeed, this is not trivial—it's trillions of dollars on a yearly basis. Washington politicians, journalists and think tankers wouldn't bear the brunt of such a policy; as the IMF report notes, "[T]he unraveling of trade links would most adversely impact low‐​income countries and less well‐​off consumers in advanced economies." Meanwhile, economists at the World Trade Organization (WTO) estimate that such a fragmentation as envisioned by some members of Washington's political class would decrease real incomes around the world by 5.4 percent on average. It takes an immense amount of arrogance to simply hand waive away the costs of a hard decoupling.
Perhaps these costs would be worth it if a ban on trade, investment and migration forced Beijing to make holistic changes to its economic practices, but that almost certainly would not be the case. Recent history suggests that China will not change its troubling economic practices due to Washington's protectionism. In early 2018, on the eve of the trade war, other Cato scholars and I predicted that the tariffs would simply impose costs on Americans while doing virtually nothing to change Beijing's course. Sadly, our warnings were prescient: China's aggressive 21st‐​century mercantilism continues apace. Are we really to believe that cutting off all economic exchange between the United States and China will stop, say, Beijing‐​directed cyber hacking into U.S. commercial networks to steal trade secrets? Of course not.
While it is likely that some trade and investment between the United States and China will—and maybe should—decline in this era of strategic competition between near‐​peers, the reality is that a lot of two‐​way trade and investment is largely benign—and in no way "strategic," i.e., at the nexus of technology and national security. Sabine Weyand, the European Union's Director‐​General for Trade, recently noted in an essay for Internationale Politik Quarterly that 94 percent of EU trade with China is "unproblematic" and that only about six percent is the result of a one‐​sided dependency for EU member nations. A comparable analysis for the United States would almost certainly produce similar results.
To be clear, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is an increasingly illiberal actor: it is more aggressive on the world stage and repressive at home. Still, of the 1.4 billion people living in China, only about 100 million people have any connection to the CCP. The rest of China's citizens are not responsible for their government's relatively rapid and ill‐​advised turn away from liberalism. The United States desperately needs a thoughtful response to Beijing's economic practices, but mimicking Chinese protectionism and industrial policy is a recipe for stagnation. Last month, my Cato colleague Scott Lincicome and I released a policy analysis charting a better course to outcompete China in the 21st century—one that is much more practical to implement in a relatively globalized world.

The conjucture of the first few decades of the twenty-first century witnessed Alex Callinicos usefully mapping the contours of imperialism as set out in his pivotal book Imperialism and Global Political Economy. As somewhat of a successor text, this is now accompanied by The New Age of Catastrophe that seeks to address today's conjuncture of the multidimensional crisis (or polycrisis), the conditions of which are situated as immanent to capitalism as a totality. The creativity of Imperialism and Global Political Economy flowed from Callinicos offering an innovative reading of Nikolai Bukharin to propose a theory of imperialism at the intersection of two logics of power: capitalistic and territorial, or two forms of competition, economic and geopolitical. The book bears repeated revisiting. Indeed, I have done so recently in an article for the pages of International Affairs (see 'Mainstreaming Marxism', International Affairs 99: 3, 2023). There I demonstrate how unique Marxist approaches to both the structural theory of anarchy (drawing from Nikolai Bukharin) and racial capitalism (drawing from C.L.R. James) have been silenced by mainstream imitators (namely, Kenneth Waltz and E.H. Carr). There is also much wider engagement with Callinicos' theorising on capitalism and the state-system in Global Capitalism, Global War, Global Crisis (Cambridge University Press, 2018), co-authored with Andreas Bieler.

As an 'antechamber' to the present, the Introduction and Chapter 1 of The New Age of Catastrophe offers a theoretical framing of the argument by recovering and reasserting a discussion of totality as a category in order to overcome the atomisation and isolation-effect of capitalism. Drawing from Lukács and others the method of totality is legitimised in order to constitute capitalism as a comprehensive system of multiple mediations rather than as a set of separate, independent, isolated categories and facts. As Callinicos wonderfully puts it, 'even the best mainstream scholarship tends to fragment the totality' (p. 8). This reader was left wanting more on the methodological standard of totality as emblematic of a dialectical critique of the slicing-up and fragmentation of knowledge by mainstream perspectives.
In The New Age of Catastrophe Callinicos endeavours to engage with the developing totality of the crisis of capitalism through a set of conjunctural moments that encompass the destruction of the biosphere (concentrating on the metabolic rift with nature); economic stagnation (converging in the tendency for the rate of profit to fall); geopolitical conflict (focusing on inter-imperialist rivalry); political reaction (addressing contemporary right-wing populism); and ideological contestation (questioning gender and race as intersecting or interweaving forms of agency with class antagonisms). The book offers individual chapters on each of these five moments in the present conjuncture of the multidimensional crisis of capitalism.
The main theme to pick up on for the rest of this review is the recognition of the conjuncture as a fusion of different moments of crisis within the totality of capitalism and how contemporary right-wing populism and far-right politics is treated in the book. Throughout The New Age of Catastrophe the long-term trend of neoliberal authoritarianism is addressed, whether it be through some of the earlier work on authoritarian [...]
The post The new age of catastrophe appeared first on Progress in Political Economy (PPE).

Washington's latest efforts to ban TikTok are symptomatic of a deep dysfunction in thinking about China.
The Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, the bill now rapidly moving through Congress that would expropriate TikTok, does not address the core concerns that many Americans share about social media apps like TikTok, such as the loss of privacy and lack of protections for personal data, the targeting of children, or the addictive nature of social media. Any effort to address these real challenges — which exist on all networks, not just those with foreign ownership — would require comprehensive internet privacy legislation applying to all social media companies. Such an approach would not only confront the real problems, it would also address the security concerns around TikTok without singling out China in a way that exacerbates already alarming levels of hostility and xenophobia in the relationship between the world's two most powerful countries.
Instead, this effort gives the executive branch broad authority to restrict companies across the entire information technology sector if a minority owner or combination of owners holding as little as one-fifth of shares hail from an "adversary nation." Rather than providing evidence to the public of the harm that TikTok and other targets are doing to American security, backers of the bill point only to the formal legal possibility that the Chinese government could pressure the company to act in such a way.
And rather than demonstrating Chinese government control over TikTok, the bill simply waves away its burden of proof. The legislation defines "controlled by a foreign adversary" as nothing more than a company domiciled in one of the four countries that Donald Trump designated enemies of the United States two days before he left office. This advances the alarming contention — increasingly being institutionalized through legislation and policy — that all Chinese people are agents of the Chinese government. While the legislation does require the executive branch to provide a national security determination for any targets other than TikTok (which is automatically designated), it opens wide latitude for abuse in moments of national panic over foreign influence.
It also marks yet another example of U.S. leaders refusing to distinguish Chinese actions that are detrimental to American interests from those that are innocuous or even beneficial. If everyone and everything within China's borders is by definition under the control of a "foreign adversary," everything that Chinese people, firms, and agencies do is necessarily a national security risk.
The question of how the United States and China could coexist or work together on behalf of shared interests is ruled out of order and a simple conclusion follows: the only way to make America safe is to exclude China from U.S. activities. The campaign to expropriate TikTok will not be the reason that the two countries end up in potentially catastrophic conflict, but it exposes the insecurities, flawed assumptions, and inflated perceptions of threat that are currently moving us in that direction.
The potential damage goes beyond U.S.–China relations. To the limited extent the bill has been vetted — it passed a House Committee on Energy and Commerce markup on a 50–0 vote — no consideration has been given to how such measures could accelerate the fragmentation of the global information and communication technology market or what that would mean for U.S. businesses, allied relationships, American consumers, and other important interests.
Pushing the disintegration of global markets further could have detrimental effects internationally and domestically, including retaliatory bans on the use of U.S. software and communications technologies in foreign countries, which could accelerate the division of the world into rival information technology spheres protected by "great firewalls." The common rejoinder that "China started it" is certainly true, but it evades the question of how to solve the problem rather than make it worse. It also offers another instance of how the United States is remaking itself in the image of an authoritarian government it continues to denounce.
At a deeper level, as measures like this accumulate, bit by bit they repudiate the aspiration of a universally inclusive global system. Those seeking to transform an open global economy into an exclusionary and increasingly militarized battlefield between the great powers should make the case in public rather than taking us quietly in this ominous direction.
Given the massive risks posed by U.S.–China confrontation — whether an intensified trade war or a conflict over Taiwan — policymakers should be making every effort to build on the Biden administration's efforts to stabilize the relationship through constructive engagement while managing our real differences through dialogue and negotiation.
China plays a complex role in the serious social problems facing the United States. Seeking a false unity behind the exclusion of a foreign power does not confront those problems but papers them over while pushing us toward geopolitical conflict that would make our problems far worse.

In the Art of War, Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu said, "if you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle." This nugget of wisdom is as perceptive today as it was over 2,000 years ago. And it does not bode well for America.We clearly don't know our adversaries. We've been caught flat-footed, repeatedly, in recent years, from Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the almost instantaneous collapse of the Afghanistan government that we'd spent two decades supporting, to the recent Hamas attacks destabilizing the Middle East.The biggest question mark of all is if and when China might transition from nibbling on the margins of Asia to taking a big bite in the form of Taiwan. Perhaps even more worrisome, and far less excusable, is the fact that we don't know ourselves. In a world growing less stable by the day, the disconnect between our policymakers in Washington and the American public is frightening. While prominent national security experts of both parties seem to be coalescing around maximalist approaches toward the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza, and lobbying for a more confrontational stance toward China, the American public appears largely tuned out, instead focused on challenges closer to home, like paying bills, raising children, and navigating polarizing domestic politics. The disconnect between rhetoric and reality is breathtaking. On one hand Washington issues commitments to helping reclaim all Ukrainian territory, the "total destruction" of Hamas, and a robust defense of Taiwan. On the other hand the American public is either disengaged from (or divided on) these issues, our weapons stockpiles are shrinking, military recruitment numbers plunging, the deficit is ballooning, and the economy is uncertain.Meanwhile, the country continues to fracture along red and blue lines. Could we still unite in a time of war? It depends. If Russian paratroopers descended on Colorado like the 1984 cult classic Red Dawn, yes, I'm confident we'd come together and repel the existential threat of a foreign invasion. But am I convinced, in this toxic political climate, that farm boys from Kansas, warehouse workers from the Rust Belt, and college students from the Pac-12 would race to recruiting offices to help Taiwan repel a Chinese invasion? Or to deploy to the Middle East to dive into what looks like an intractable conflict with complicated roots dating back at least 75-years? Not really.It is also worth asking if America has the stomach for casualty numbers that would almost certainly dwarf the 7,057 U.S. servicemembers killed in action post-9/11 in a Great Power war. Russia continues to fight in Ukraine despite estimates of over 100,000 killed in just the past few years. We can't assume China wouldn't have a similar tolerance for heavy losses too.Despite these concerns, national security officials and foreign policy luminaries persist in advancing strategic postures that may require U.S. troops to deploy in greater numbers to three theaters (even if these deployments are under the guise of "deterrence") .
(While the principle of deterrence is sound in theory, the danger lies in assuming that appearing to be a superior force on paper will obviate the need to ever actually fight, overlooking the fact that credibility requires a willingness and capacity to do just that. Which brings us back to Sun Tzu. Can we answer the willingness and capacity question about ourselves with any degree of confidence? Have we ever taken it seriously?)Right now it seems like our strategy — to the extent we have one — is being developed in a vacuum, with little concern for minor details like who will fight, and with what degree of national commitment. This reflects, in part, a persistent tendency, to which we keep returning since the days of Robert McNamara's "Whiz Kids" of the Vietnam era, to view conflict as a technocratic exercise where victory and defeat are largely dependent on the amount, and quality, of sophisticated high-dollar weaponry. But as our experiences in Vietnam and Afghanistan should have taught us, collective will and resolve also matter. A lot. We must not overestimate (or fail to even consider) ours. Wars are still fought by people. And, to date, there has been no effort to secure the buy-in of the American public.We need to really ask: How many young Americans would volunteer to strap on a ruck, grab an M4, and go fight one of these distant wars if an adversary calls what they may see as a bluff? We must first accept that these would not be conflicts that could be handled by cobbling together the same people from a volunteer force and deploying them countless times over decades like we did during the "Global War on Terror." In fact, it is almost impossible to envision a scenario where our deterrent is credible, or where we could prevail in a world war, absent a draft.While a draft invokes images of Vietnam it may be time to revisit its upsides in the context of today's disconnect between citizen and military and citizen and government.At the most basic level, a draft would solve the personnel shortages we are struggling with. I'm aware that military leaders fear that a draft would hurt the professionalism of today's force. However, the lowering of recruiting requirements, as well offering big signing bonuses to impressionable high school students, is already diminishing standards. It would also serve as a powerful unifying force, bringing together young people of different races, belief systems, and geographic backgrounds in shared national service. This would help unify a generation that has experienced little but corrosive fragmentation for years. And since Americans would have skin in the game, a draft would also force politicians to abandon vapid, cliché-ridden rhetoric, and be forced to either convince Americans we need to be on wartime footing, or tone down their bellicose talk and develop creative and less militaristic strategies, starting with our approach to Ukraine, China, and now the Middle East.Finally, it would signal to the world that we are serious about a strong national defense. The perception would no longer be that we are a country in decline, anesthetized by popular culture and unwilling to sacrifice. Unfortunately, there seems to be no appetite for such a call to service on the part of the same leaders and pundits lobbying for a muscular, militarized foreign policy. It is remarkable to witness swaggering commitments to the potential use of force against Great Power adversaries on Capitol Hill but absolutely no willingness to discuss the national sacrifice that it would require. And so, if we conclude a draft won't happen, we'd be better off addressing the massive disconnect between Washington rhetoric and the extent of Americans' willingness to fight now, as opposed to after our leaders talk us into another, and possibly far more calamitous, war.

Tucked between Moldova and southwestern Ukraine is Transnistria, a Russian-backed separatist entity. Officially known as the Pridnestrovian Moldovan Republic, many describe this statelet as a Soviet time capsule. Transnistria's capital, Tiraspol, is filled with Lenin statues, Soviet era architecture, and streets named after Karl Marx and famous Soviets while the Transnistrian flag features a hammer and sickle. Existing within Moldova's internationally recognized borders, no U.N. member-state recognizes this breakaway republic's independence — not even Russia.Amid the USSR's implosion in the early 1990s, Russian-speaking separatists in Transnistria feared growing Moldovan nationalism and the possibility of Moldova, which had just declared independence, reunifying with Romania. Russian troops and Cossack fighters helped Transnistrian paramilitary groups fight Moldovan forces in the Transnistria War (1990-92), which killed up to 700 people.To this day the conflict remains frozen. Since 1992, officials in Moldova's capital, Chișinău, and Tiraspol have prevented military clashes. Over the past three decades, the Moldova-Transnistria file has not concerned Washington too much. That is until recently.

Peter Hermes Furian via shutterstock.comRussia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 raised concerns about this frozen conflict unfreezing. Given that 1,500 Russian soldiers have been present in Transnistria as "peacekeepers" and as part of the Operative Group of the Russian Troops since the 1990-92 war, some analysts warned of Transnistria opening a second front against Kyiv while intensifying pressure on Chișinău. Such a scenario would risk Romania, which is linguistically, ethnically, historically, and culturally tied to Moldova, clashing with Russia — a high-stakes confrontation considering Romania's NATO membership.In April 2022, the acting commander of Russia's Central Military District announced that Moscow sought to form a land bridge linking the Donbass to Transnistria. Doing so would have expanded the Ukraine war into Moldova's internationally recognized borders and cut the Kyiv government off from access to the Black Sea, landlocking Ukraine.Yet, Ukrainian forces prevented Russia from seizing Odessa and other parts of the would-be Donbass-Transnistria land bridge. Consequently, concerns in the West about Transnistria vis-à-vis the Ukraine war eased.Last month, however, Tiraspol asked Russia for protection from the perceived threat posed by Moldova's pro-EU government. In response to this call for Moscow's protection, Russia's Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Chișinău was "following in the footsteps of the Kyiv regime" by "canceling everything Russian" and "discriminating against the Russian language."On March 17, a drone hit a military site in Transnistria, destroying a helicopter, which according to Moldova's Bureau for Reintegration Policies "has not worked for several years," and ignited a fire. Authorities in Tiraspol claimed that the Ukrainians waged this attack from Odessa. Both Kyiv and Chișinău denied any involvement in the military site explosion. The Ukrainian government accused Moscow of being behind this "provocation in Transnistria with a kamikaze drone attack on a military base."Adding to this tension is the fact that on that same day a man threw two Molotov cocktails at the Russian embassy in Chișinău. At the time, Russian citizens in Moldova were at this diplomatic mission voting in their country's presidential election. Moldovan authorities detained the individual, who was identified as a dual Moldovan-Russian citizen.As of writing, the public has not been provided with any evidence to substantiate Tiraspol's claims about Kyiv being behind the attack on the helicopter. If Ukraine carried it out, perhaps it was Kyiv's warning to Moscow about the dangers of making any bold moves vis-à-vis Moldova-Transnistria in response to Tiraspol's request for Russian protection from the U.S.- and EU- backed government in Chișinău. However, it is important to again stress that Ukraine's responsibility for this episode has not been proven.Meanwhile, some experts maintain that if Russia prevails in Ukraine, Moldova would be the next Eastern European country that Moscow attacks. "[Russia] has long used Transnistria and the separatists there, just like the ones in Donbass, as instruments to keep Moldova off balance and there are many other ways that Russia has destabilized, or tried to destabilize, Moldova," Matthew Bryza, the former U.S. deputy assistant secretary of state for Europe and Eurasia, told RS."But Russia has no ability now to invade Moldova. Yes, it has a military base there. But I think Russia has enough on its plate right now in Ukraine and…unless it prevails Ukraine, it won't do something similar in Moldova. But if it does succeed in Ukraine, I fear Moldova would be next," added Bryza. However, the former U.S. diplomat emphasized that he does not expect Moscow to prevail in Ukraine.A Russian invasion of Moldova-Transnistria does not currently seem to be an option for the Kremlin. Transnistria, unlike Ukraine and Georgia, does not border Russia and Moscow lacks the manpower to take control of the Ukrainian regions of Mykolaiv and Odessa. Nikola Mikovic, a Belgrade-based political analyst, does not believe that Russia could do in Moldova-Transnistria what it did in Ukraine beginning in 2014."Under the current circumstances, when Russia has a hard time capturing villages around Avdiivka in the Donbass, seizing Odessa is extremely unlikely to happen. Therefore, Russia does not have capacity to turn Moldova-Transnistria into its 'next target,' while Chișinău, firmly backed by the West, can destabilize the breakaway region at any time," Mikovic told RS.Although difficult to predict how a second Donald Trump administration would respond to Russian moves on Moldova-Transnistria, it can probably be taken for granted that the Biden White House would strongly back Chișinău under such circumstances. "It's simply not possible with any degree of accuracy to predict now how the Biden administration would react if Russia invaded Moldova…other than the obvious which is there'd be strong U.S. support for Moldova and probably military assistance," said Bryza."Moldova occupies an important geopolitical location on the borders of NATO and the EU, and NATO is very concerned about checking any potential Russian expansion westward. Also, it would not bode well for Ukraine if it were suddenly to face even a small number of Russian troops attacking it from the west," John Feffer, the director of Foreign Policy in Focus, told RS."So, Moldova might become like Quemoy and Matsu, the tiny islands that Beijing tried to seize in the Taiwan Strait in 1958. Taiwan, like Ukraine, was the ultimate prize, but the islands were steppingstones, and the U.S. was determined to defend the little islands at all costs," added Feffer.Geography limits Russia's means to maneuver vis-à-vis Transnistria. Thus, keeping the Chișinău-Tiraspol conflict frozen best serves Russia's interests. Leveraging groups in Moldova with pro-Moscow sentiments such as the Gagauz minority to possibly change the government in Chișinău is a card which the Kremlin might possibly try to play. Either option could help Moscow further its agenda of preventing Moldova, which became an EU candidate in June 2022, from integrating into Western institutions, chiefly NATO."Russia wants to secure the perimeter of the 'Russian world.' But that doesn't have to be a firm border. It will be content to establish a zone of fragmentation that encompasses Georgia, Ukraine, and Moldova and that serves as a kind of moat to protect fortress Russia. This is not a reconstruction of the Soviet Union. It's not a bid to confront NATO directly. But it nevertheless exacts enormous costs on the people of those fragmented countries," offered Feffer.To preserve the status quo in Moldova-Transnistria, "the Kremlin will almost certainly have to continue making behind-the-scenes concessions to the West and Ukraine," commented Mikovic. "For instance, it's entirely possible that Moscow provided 'security guarantees' to Kyiv that it will not strike the so-called decision-making centers in the Ukrainian capital, in exchange for Ukraine's passive approach regarding Transnistria."The Serbian expert on Russian foreign policy noted that at any time NATO could coordinate with Kyiv to enable Moldova to bring Transnistria under Chișinău's control through force. "For me, it's a big mystery why Western policy makers and strategic planners have still not taken such an action," Mikovic told RS.A major win for Washington would be an unfreezing of the Moldova-Transnistria conflict with a potential joint Ukrainian-Moldovan operation defeating the Moscow-backed separatists. Yet, even if the West would back Kyiv and Chișinău in pursuit of such an outcome, there are no indicators that Moldova is considering such a military solution to this frozen conflict."For the foreseeable future, Chișinău will likely continue putting economic pressure on Tiraspol, aiming to weaken the breakaway region's de facto independence, and force it to reintegrate into Moldova," said Mikovic. "In the long-term, though, a military conflict should not be ruled out."

Against the backdrop of the ongoing Gaza war and an enraged Arab street, the future of 2,500 U.S. troops stationed in Iraq is once again in question. Despite a full withdrawal in 2011, the government of Iraq "invited" U.S. forces to return in 2014 to combat Daesh, or ISIS. But seven years after the "Caliphate" was pronounced defeated, the multinational Combined Joint Task Force-Operation Inherent Resolve maintains a large military presence in Iraq, ostensibly to "work by, with and through regional partners to militarily defeat the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, in order to enable whole-of-coalition governmental actions to increase regional stability."Despite those laudable intentions, attacks against U.S. military personnel have intensified and so has political pressure to conclude the mission, far beyond similar calls for expulsion following the targeting of Qassim Soleimani in 2020. The presence of foreign forces in general and the U.S. troops in particular is vexing to Iraq with its long history of occupation (although calling 2,500 non-combat forces an occupation is a bit of a stretch), but is also an opportunity, particularly among Iranian-backed political parties and militias, to create a strawman responsible for all of the country's ills.For many Iraqis the counter-ISIS coalition is like the guest who has overstayed his welcome."The presence of U.S. military forces on Iraqi soil has been increasingly causing problems to Iraq and its neighbors; it also gives a pretext to terrorists to resume their attacks on Iraqis," said Dhia Al-Asadi, former minister of state who headed the Al-Ahrar (Sadrist) Bloc in parliament. "These forces should withdraw immediately so that a legitimate, nationalist Iraqi government can take the lead and build its military and security capacity without unsolicited U.S. interference."Yet, not all Iraqis concur with those views."Despite the considerable strength of militia forces in Iraq, surpassing that of the Iraqi national army, their calls for the withdrawal of Americans and allies are primarily rhetorical," said Nahro Zagros, editor in chief of Kurdistan Chronicle and former vice president of Soran University in Erbil. "If the decision rested with the Iraqi populace, the majority would prefer the continued presence of Americans. However, Iraqi affairs are not under Iraqi control but influenced by neighboring powers."According to Falah Mustafa, a close adviser to the president of the Kurdistan Region on Foreign Policy Affairs, "any decision [on the future of the coalition forces] must be based on national consensus.""For the Kurdistan Region, certainly we are part of Iraq and we will abide by any decision that Iraq makes, but one single group of Iraqi society cannot determine this alone, because Iraq is a diverse country. Shias, Sunnis, Kurds, Turkmen, Chaldeans, Assyrians, and Christians, we all need to agree on this issue because it is about the stability, security of this country," he said.While the U.S. has sought to maintain a military presence in Iraq, arguments to keep them there do not stand up to scrutiny. There is an unspoken proposition that Iraq could be used as a launch platform for attacks against Iran or elsewhere, but this is specifically prohibited by the 2008 Strategic Framework Agreement, which remain the foundational document for the Iraq-U.S. relationship. It says, "The United States shall not use Iraqi land, sea, and air as a launching or transit point for attacks against other countries; nor seek or request permanent bases or a permanent military presence in Iraq."Besides, Iraq is not needed for this purpose. The U.S. currently has a major logistical base in Kuwait with over 13,000 army troops, a naval base in Bahrain housing the U.S. Fifth Fleet and Al Udeid Air Base in Doha is the largest military installation in the region with over 8,000 troops. The Persian Gulf can fit a Carrier Battle Group with ease. These, in addition to other bases in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Jordan and Turkey, maintain more than sufficient ground, air and naval assets to challenge any military force in the region. A second argument is the often-stated rhetorical trope that leaving Iraq would be a victory for the Iranians. While it may be a rhetorical victory for Iran, rhetoric should not be the basis for foreign policy. A military withdrawal from Iraq would be seen in Tehran as stabilizing Iran's western borders, but it must be acknowledged that the U.S. seeks the same outcome on its borders. The Monroe Doctrine has been the cornerstone of U.S. hemispheric policy for 200 years, just as Persian influence has driven similar aspirations towards Iraq for over a millennium. Former Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif famously said, "Look at the map. The U.S. military has travelled 10,000 kilometers to dot all our borders with its bases. There is a joke that it is Iran that put itself in the middle of U.S. bases."The U.S. argument conflates influence with interference. The economies and cultures of the two societies are vastly intermingled, shown most clearly with the hundreds of thousands of pilgrims which peacefully cross the borders annually to visit Qom and Najaf. Yet, the fundamental U.S. concern should not be one of Iranian influence but of Iranian interference, of which its insinuation into the political and economic structures will continue, regardless of the U.S. troop presence.Last, some would argue for a continued U.S. troop presence, asserting that the counter-ISIS mission is not finished, and ISIS remains a significant threat to both Iraq and the international community. While there may be some validity to this argument, it begs the question whether the Iraqis need continued foreign assistance or can accomplish this mission unilaterally. A U.S.-Iraq Higher Military Commission has recently been meeting to analyze these and other concerns to determine the rationale for a continued military mission. Mustafa, who previously served as head of KRG's Department of Foreign Relations, said it is important to remember that "this should not be emotional; it should not be affected by other factors.""Iraqis, the U.S. — the relevant people — need to sit down together, discuss and assess the situation on the ground, review the extent of engagement, assess the threats, Iraqi capabilities and determine together the nature and shape of future arrangements and future relations between Iraq and the U.S., and the rest of coalition countries," he said.According to Al-Asadi, "Daesh, like al-Qaida before it, will not cease to exist as a threat not only to Iraq but to the region and the entire world. Names, strategies and means may change, but the masterminds and beneficiaries of such groups will always keep them ready to strike, and sometimes they serve as a hired gun."However, he added: "Iraqi forces are qualified and capable of dealing with this threat. They may need some up-to-date technology, training and honest cooperation with regional and world countries who ought to share the same amount of concern about the growing danger of these terrorist groups."While the need for "up-to-date technology, training and honest cooperation" is important, it could be provided by other nations' forces, contractors or remotely, rather than by the physical presence of U.S. forces.A final argument suggests the continued presence of U.S. forces is an insurance against internal Iraqi threats. According to Zagros, "the most significant danger originates from within Iraq itself, where militia forces persist in attacking fellow Iraqis and opposing factions.""I firmly believe that without the presence of Americans and their allies, Iraq and the broader region face the risk of fragmentation and collapse," he said.Yet, those same militia forces are using the presence of U.S. forces as a casus belli to wage a deadly campaign against the forces of occupation, aligning themselves with the Iranian "Axis of Resistance" to receive equipment, training and funding from the Quds Force. Counterintuitively, the very presence of U.S. troops strengthens the hands of the militias and creates instability, especially when the United States unilaterally targets militia leaders and infringes on Iraqi territorial sovereignty to do so.These four factors, alone, imply that the U.S. troop presence comes at high costs and marginal benefits. The U.S. continues to be painted as an occupier, an aggressor, a foreign agitator and the cause of Iraqi society's near-collapse since the 2003 invasion.As Al-Asadi notes, "Why does the U.S. want to negotiate its withdrawal from Iraq? If they really want to stabilize Iraq and the region, they should withdraw their military troops first, then they can diplomatically negotiate their future relations with Iraq. Given the fragility of the situation and institutional dysfunctionality, we cannot hope for a better situation. The major denominator is the existence of foreign military troops in Iraq."Since October 7, U.S. support for Israel has aggravated the anger, and has brought the question of continued U.S. presence to the fore. While some arguments for remaining may exist, and Iraq is certainly more important than Otto von Bismarck's famous quote that the Balkans are not "worth the bones of a Pomeranian grenadier," the U.S. should reflect, clear-eyed, on the risk to American lives, the provocation to Iran, the almost paternalistic view that the Iraqi security establishment can't succeed against ISIS on its own, or can't find other alternatives, and the significant animosity against U.S. policy throughout the region. The Counter-ISIS Coalition performed brilliantly, but it is time to say, "Mission Accomplished."

For the Arab Gulf kingdoms, the Horn of Africa is a strategic perimeter. They want to minimize political threats — some are hostile to Islamists, all want to suppress democracy movements. Anticipating a post-carbon and food insecure world, the Gulf States want to possess rich farmlands. Each has its own vision of African client states that will do their bidding. This is a recipe for proxy wars, state fragmentation and autocracy in northeast Africa.For the Horn of Africa, today's crises are existential. War, dictatorship and famine are causing state collapse. The African Union is compromised, its peace and security system unravelling. The United Nations is retreating from peacemaking, increasingly reduced to a bare-bones humanitarian provider.The dangers were illuminated by the surprise New Year's Day deal between Abiy Ahmed, prime minister of Ethiopia, and Muse Bihi, president of the self-declared Republic of Somaliland, a breakaway region of northwest Somalia. Ethiopia has been renowned for careful diplomacy, including championing the inviolability of existing boundaries. After fighting wars with Somalia in the 1960s and '70s, Ethiopia had learned to be circumspect and consultative in its dealings with Mogadishu.Last week, Ethiopia upended that tradition. It promised to recognize Somaliland as an independent sovereign state, in return for Somaliland leasing it a 12-mile stretch of land, including a seaport, that will allow Ethiopia to establish a naval base. This in turn unleashed strong words from Somalia — which had not been informed ahead of time. The AU called for Ethiopia to treat Somalia with respect. Fears of new conflicts were stirred. Unsaid in public is that the UAE is widely suspected to be the patron of the deal.For the United States, crises in the Horn of Africa are a sidebar to the ongoing Israel-Gaza war and the confrontation with Iran. Gunboat diplomacy in the Red Sea — the warships deployed under Operation Prosperity Guardian to protect shipping from attacks from the Houthis in Yemen — is the priority.The narrow strip of water carries 12 percent of world seaborne trade. For sailors, the Red Sea is "a sea on the way to somewhere else," its shores at best an inconvenience, at worst a security threat.There's a global consensus on keeping the shipping lanes open. If the Red Sea shuts down — as happened following the 1967 Arab-Israeli war— the knock-on effects on trade between Europe and Asia would be economically severe. The EU-run Operation Atalanta runs an anti-piracy flotilla involving warships from 13 European nations, (including the UK, which provided the flagship until Brexit), working with ships from Ukraine, India, Korea and Colombia.After a few years the flotilla commanders concluded that the solution to piracy lay onshore, in the form of diplomacy to resolve Somalia's conflicts and economic assistance to provide livelihoods to impoverished fishermen. That was a step in the right direction.Saudi Arabia chairs a Red Sea Forum that includes eight littoral states (all except Israel), to tackle piracy, smuggling and marine resources — not political issues.Six years ago, Thabo Mbeki, the former president of South Africa who chairs the African Union High-Level Implementation Panel for the Horn of Africa, introduced the term "Red Sea Arena." The idea was to create a diplomatic forum that would include not just the littoral states, but all the other countries with vital interests in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden or with political and commercial links across the narrow strip of water.The former AU Commissioner for Peace and Security, Ramtane Lamamra explained: "The Red Sea has historically been a bridge rather than a divide, with the peoples on the two shores sharing culture, trade, and social relations." Egypt has millennia-old interests in the Nile Valley and both shores of the Red Sea. Ethiopia has a vital interest in access to the sea. The UAE, Qatar, Oman, and Turkey all have historic or current interests.Regional and global power struggles are played out in the Red Sea Arena. Seven nations including the U.S., China, Turkey and the UAE have naval bases there. Others, including Iran and Russia, have warships in the vicinity and are actively seeking bases. The port of Eilat in the Gulf of Aqaba is Israel's strategic back door, as the Houthi attacks on shipping have dramatically shown.The plan for a standing conference of Red Sea Arena states built on proposals contained in the World Peace Foundation report to the AU, "African Politics, African Peace" — for which Mbeki and veteran UN diplomat Lakhdar Brahimi co-authored the preface. The idea was that Middle Eastern states should sign on to the principles of the AU's peace and security architecture and establish joint mechanisms for cooperation.The AU failed to act on these proposals. Nor were they raised at the UN Security Council.Instead, Arabian Gulf states are increasingly assertive in the Horn, and they're bringing an aggressive form of transactional politics, including funding proxies to fight wars. The U.S. — whose security umbrella sheltered the Red Sea for decades — seems uninterested.Saudi Arabia has long seen the African shore of the Red Sea as part of its security perimeter. Qatar and Turkey sought influence in Sudan and Somalia, especially among the Islamists. Israel has discreetly sought a determining role in the region.But the key actor is the UAE. A small, rich state, it uses proxies to project power, and supports separatists in disregard of international norms. Abu Dhabi's clients include key players in Libya and Chad, and it is positioning itself as kingmaker in the Horn. The UAE supports and arms Ethiopia. It already controls many ports in the region — including, it is suspected, the proposed Ethiopian port and naval base in the land leased from Somaliland. But Abu Dhabi has yet to clarify its strategic goals for the Red Sea and the Horn of Africa.The UAE has long had a free pass in Washington. Only recently has the U.S. begun to criticize Abu Dhabi's adventurism in Sudan, calling out its arming of the murderous Rapid Support Forces there.The last decade has been a rollercoaster of hope and horror for the peoples of the Red Sea Arena. Popular uprisings in Yemen, Ethiopia and Sudan all descended into lethal brews of autocracy, war, atrocity, and famine, with local conflicts escalating into proxy wars. Guided by the short-term imperative of staying in power — and by the ambitions of cash-rich foreign sponsors — today's leaders are too often short-sighted and transactional.Under UN and AU guidance, a raft of peace agreements was crafted to serve as the threshold for democracy. Today a peace pact, such as the threadbare "Permanent Cessation of Hostilities" that ended Ethiopia's war in Tigray, may be no more than a truce. The principle of the primacy of politics — that served Africa's peace agenda well — has come to mean short-term transactionalism rather than a commitment to democracy, good governance, and inclusivity.A key African norm was "sovereignty as responsibility," developed by the Sudanese/South Sudanese lawyer and diplomat Francis Deng. Today we have its antithesis, decried as "neo-sovereigntism" by the Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe.Today's regression means that Eritrean President Isaias Afewerki is being rehabilitated. For 30 years, Isaias has ruled an iron fist, with no constitution let alone political parties or an open media, hoping that the tide of global liberalism would recede. He looks to be proven correct.Sudanese General Mohamed Hamdan Dagolo, known as "Hemedti," commander of the Rapid Support Forces, the insurgent paramilitaries notorious for their human rights abuses, is touring Africa in a Royal Jet airplane (an Emirati airline). He arrived in Addis Ababa last week where he met Prime Minister Abiy. Extending protocol to Emirati-backed disrupters is the new normal in the region.To the extent that it functions at all, the AU is becoming the face of illiberal multilateralism, veering away from its founding principles. The UN's practice of deferring to its regional partners leaves it eviscerated. The InterGovernmental Authority on Development — the eight-member northeast African bloc — is now deeply divided and approaching paralysis.With the Horn of Africa and Yemen slipping far down the priority list in Western foreign ministries, America and Europe are sending mid-ranking diplomats into the snake pit, woefully under-armed for the perils they encounter. Too easily intimidated by swaggering local despots, perhaps swayed by zombie "Pan Africanist" slogans that challenge their right to talk about human rights, they have left their countries irrelevant in the face of ruthless Gulf power-broking.Recent developments could not have been anticipated in detail. But American diplomats saw the broader challenge some years ago. In 2020, a bipartisan "senior study group" on the Red Sea convened by the United States Institute of Peace, prioritized a broad diplomatic strategy for the Red Sea Arena. The USIP report warned that conflicts in the region could threaten U.S. national security and proposed a high-level envoy with a broad mandate.The Biden administration quickly appointed a special envoy for the Horn of Africa, but the Africa Bureau at the State Department soon downgraded the position. The cost of this strategic neglect is becoming clear today.There's still a chance for a diplomatic forum that promotes collective security. Washington has lost its best opportunities to take a lead — any U.S. initiative today will arouse deep suspicions among others. Middle Eastern powers don't, as a rule, propose collective action, and the Gulf states are divided. The Europeans will follow, not lead.The onus of leadership then falls on Africa and on the United Nations. Acting together, they can create a consensus that brings on board America, Europe, China, and Russia in a forum framed by the agenda of a stable and cooperative Red Sea Arena.