On the evening of August 23rd, news broke of Wagner leader Yevgeny Prigozhin’s death after Russian aviation officials listed him as a member on a flight that suspiciously crashed north of Moscow. On this episode of The Eastern Front, Giselle, Dalibor, and Iulia convene to discuss what Prigozhin’s death could mean for the Wagner group’s legitimacy, the stability of Putin’s regime, and the fate of the Russia-Ukraine War. Are the Russians able to achieve anything in Ukraine without Wagner? Does Prigozhin’s death signal the end of political infighting within the Kremlin? The co-hosts also continue to discuss the problems with the Biden administration’s stance on Ukraine, particularly its failure to link Ukraine’s victory to US national interests and how that could affect support for Ukraine in the upcoming presidential elections.

Show notes: Sign up for The Eastern Front’s bi-weekly newsletter here and follow us on Twitter here. “Ukraine’s Forces and Firepower Are Misallocated, US Officials Say,” New York Times.

The post Prigozhin’s Out. Now What? appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

America is immersed in sharp security competitions with Russia and China. For both countries, nuclear weapons are central to their programs for regional expansion and their preparations for a potential showdown with the US. As Washington and its rivals joust for influence around the Eurasian periphery, they will come face-to-face in crises where nuclear weapons cast ominous shadows. To safely navigate the next great-power nuclear crisis, America will need to learn the lessons of this one.

At first glance, the lesson might seem to be that nukes don’t matter. Nuclear weapons haven’t saved Moscow from its Ukrainian quagmire. They haven’t deterred Kyiv from fighting back fiercely, or prevented the US and its allies from waging a ferocious proxy war that has killed tens of thousands of Russian invaders. If nuclear weapons can’t give Russia a decisive edge against a smaller, weaker neighbor, then are they really so important?

The short answer is yes. Nuclear weapons have profoundly influenced the war in Ukraine, albeit in subtle and sometimes hidden ways.

Without nuclear weapons and nuclear threats, Russia might well have lost the war by now. And without the backing of a US nuclear arsenal harnessed to the security of Washington’s allies, Ukraine might have lost, because Russia could have more brutally coerced the countries whose aid is keeping Kyiv alive. Uncomfortable as it may be to recognize, the primary lesson of the Ukraine war is that nuclear coercion will be essential to prevailing in the rivalries that define our age.

***

As Russian troops streamed into Ukraine in February 2022, Putin issued a chilling warning: “Whoever tries to impede us, let alone create threats for our country and its people, must know that the Russian response will be immediate and lead to the consequences you have never seen in history.” This was the first of many such threats Putin would issue, as part of his strategy to use nuclear coercion in the service of conventional aggression.

Since taking power two decades earlier, Putin had rebuilt Russia’s conventional military as a sword to be used against its smaller neighbors, while modernizing its nuclear forces as a shield against interference by a meddling superpower. The first time Putin invaded Ukraine, in 2014, he apparently prepared to raise Russia’s nuclear alert status to make sure Washington and its NATO allies stayed passive.

Putin’s vague nuclear threats in February 2022 were intended, likewise, to safeguard the spoils from what he thought would be a quick and easy victory. When the war went bad during late summer and fall, Putin again invoked Armageddon in a bid to freeze a deteriorating situation.

Putin and other Russian officials hinted at the use of nuclear or chemical weapons on the battlefield. In September, as Kyiv’s forces were liberating areas around Kharkiv and assaulting occupied Kherson, Putin announced plans to annex four Ukrainian regions. Russia would defend this land “with all the powers and means at our disposal,” he declared, adding that America’s use of nuclear weapons against Japan in 1945 had created a “precedent” others might follow.

These warnings caused concern in Washington that Putin might indeed use nuclear weapons if the alternative was the collapse of his military and, perhaps, his regime. According to National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, US officials threatened unspecified “catastrophic consequences” if Russia went nuclear. Other countries, namely China and India, also nudged Putin back from the brink. The crisis passed, with Putin saying there was “no need” for dramatic measures, but the nuclear menace hasn’t gone away.

Russia has now announced plans to deploy nuclear weapons to neighboring Belarus. Putin’s toadies have warned that “every day” Western powers aid Ukraine “brings the nuclear apocalypse closer.” Russian analysts, presumably writing with the tolerance if not necessarily the support of the Kremlin, have argued that Moscow must wage limited nuclear war against the West to get its way.

Nuclear weapons are the most devastating tools humanity has created. Since February 2022, Russia has been trying to exploit the fear they sow to end this conflict on its own terms.

***

One might be forgiven for thinking it hasn’t worked. Putin’s bluster hasn’t stopped the West from giving Ukraine money arms, and intelligence. US officials publicly say their goal is to “weaken” Russia by subjecting it to catastrophic losses.

Nor did Putin’s threats freeze the conflict: To this day, Ukraine continues to assault the “Russian” territory Moscow annexed. Those threats haven’t even prevented Kyiv from attacking Russia itself, by bombing airfields, conducting drone strikes on Moscow, and sponsoring cross-border raids. Whenever Putin talks about employing nuclear weapons, in fact, he faces condemnation by the West and opposition from his own allies and neutrals — raising the prospect that using Russia’s arsenal would complete Russia’s isolation.

If events in Ukraine are any guide, nuclear weapons aren’t that effective for consolidating territorial conquest, if that conquest is deemed illegitimate by one’s enemy and most of the world. They’re hard to use in ways that make a decisive difference on the battlefield but aren’t so devastating that they elicit international opprobrium out of proportion to the military gain. Nuclear weapons may be good insurance against invasion, but they aren’t a foolproof guarantee that a country fighting for survival won’t hit back with attacks on a nuclear-armed aggressor’s soil. The war, in all these respects, has underscored the difficulty of using nuclear weapons to underwrite aggression, especially against an opponent that refuses to give in because it believes the stakes are existential.

The effects of nuclear weapons in Ukraine have been limited — but they are hardly nonexistent. In fact, Russia is successfully using nuclear weapons to coerce the US. And the US is using its own nuclear arsenal to coerce Russia right back.

***

The best way to isolate this impact is to consider two counterfactual scenarios. First, imagine a world in which the US had nuclear weapons and Russia didn’t. In this world, America would probably be less restrained in aiding Ukraine, because it would have less anxiety about a devastating Russian riposte.

US aid to Ukraine has been generous but carefully circumscribed. Washington has discouraged Kyiv from attacking Russian soil (especially if those attacks use US weapons), even though Ukraine has every legal and moral right to do so. President Joe Biden has held back tools, such as ATACMS rockets, that can reach into Russia, largely for fear of breaching Putin’s red lines. America has been ambivalent about the idea of Ukraine forcibly retaking Crimea, encouraging it to use a squeeze-and-negotiate strategy instead. Wisely or not, Washington has asked Ukraine to fight with one arm behind its back, out of concern about entering a perilous spiral with a nuclear-armed regime.

If Russia lacked nuclear weapons, the US would lack its single most powerful reason for this restraint. It would also have greater incentive to intervene directly, the surest and speediest path to Russian defeat.

If this seems improbable — Biden has made avoiding war with Russia the “north star” of his policy — it is at least partly because we have become so accustomed to the specter of mutual assured destruction. Absent that danger, would the US really tolerate a ghastly forever war in Europe’s second-largest country? One that has roiled global food and energy markets, fomented violent instability on NATO’s doorstep, and threatened the vital norm against territorial aggrandizement by force? One that had the potential to shatter the strategic equilibrium in Western Eurasia had Putin’s gambit succeeded? One that so evoked the 20th century’s darkest patterns of aggression and atrocity that some of America’s European allies compared the invasion to Hitler’s destruction of Czechoslovakia before World War II?

America has fought to turn back lesser challenges to regional and global stability than this — its interventions in the Persian Gulf and Balkans in the 1990s, for instance. If Washington and its allies had only to defeat a Russian conventional military that was already bogged down and degraded, they might well have done so, knowing that Putin had few good options to respond.

Nuclear weapons have thus played a vital holding-the-ring function for Moscow, allowing it to fight a constrained Ukraine rather than a larger Western coalition. Nukes haven’t won the war for Putin. They have, however, helped him avoid defeat.

***

Now consider a second counterfactual: One in which Russia had nuclear weapons and the US and NATO did not. In this scenario, Ukraine might well be struggling to keep fighting, because Moscow would be far better positioned to intimidate the countries sustaining it.

The amount of Western interference Moscow is tolerating in its fight against Ukraine is rather remarkable. The US and its allies have turned countries just across the border from Ukraine, especially Poland, into hubs for the delivery of vital weapons and training grounds for Kyiv’s forces.

Biden has erected a powerful shield — a nuclear shield — around these activities, by pledging to defend “every inch” of NATO territory from Russian attack. If Russia possessed could make nuclear threats that Washington and its allies could not answer, that shield would be much weaker.

It seems doubtful that a Russia possessing this advantage would simply watch as its army was bled to death by a ceaseless flow of materiel from abroad. During the Vietnam War, the US attacked communist sanctuaries in Laos and Cambodia. In Afghanistan during the 1980s, Soviet forces periodically crossed into Pakistan to raid insurgent camps. Absent the strategic stalemate created by US nuclear weapons, Putin would surely be tempted to do likewise. And absent America’s extended nuclear deterrent, countries on NATO’s eastern front would be less likely to risk this scenario by incurring Putin’s wrath. Case in point: Earlier this year, Germany wouldn’t even permit re-export of its Leopard tanks to Ukraine without the explicit backing of its nuclear-armed superpower ally.

Russia’s inability to sever Ukraine from its Western backers doesn’t show the uselessness of nuclear weapons. It shows that nuclear coercion is working both ways. Nuclear weapons have probably helped rescue Ukraine from defeat — while also making Eastern Europe safer for the Kremlin’s brutal war.

***

One lesson from Ukraine, then, is that nuclear weapons — even when they aren’t used in battle — powerfully shape what happens in an ostensibly conventional fight. Another lesson is that the effects of these weapons are psychological at their core.

Russia’s nuclear capabilities haven’t changed since February 2022. But their impact on Western policy has changed, albeit subtly. Over the last 18 months, the US and its allies have gradually become bolder in giving Ukraine weapons — main battle tanks, F-16s, longer-range British and French missiles — that they were once more hesitant to provide. One reason for this is that Putin’s nuclear threats have been slowly losing credibility: The fact that he has so frequently brandished his bombs, without ever using them — even when Russian defenses around Kharkiv were crumbling — has caused Western officials to shed some earlier fear of escalation.

This dynamic raises an intriguing question: What would have happened had the West simply ignored Putin’s nuclear threats from the outset? In March 2022, Russian forces were stuck outside of Kyiv. The application of Western airpower would have devastated Putin’s overextended army. Putin’s only real recourse would have been limited nuclear strikes against targets in Ukraine or NATO countries in Eastern Europe.

Perhaps Putin would have chosen this option. Or perhaps he would have decided that losing a conventional war was better than starting a nuclear one. It’s hard to know what the US should have done in this instance for the same reason nuclear statecraft is always vexing: It requires us to climb inside the heads of our opponents and guess what they will do when the decisive moment comes, knowing that the price of guessing wrong could be utter catastrophe.

Yet the question requires asking, because the contest in coercion isn’t over. Barring some unexpected breakthrough on the battlefield, Ukraine will likely struggle to expel Russian forces without more — and more sophisticated — Western aid than it has received to date. It may not be able to convince Putin to call off the conflict until it has shown it can bring the fighting home to Russia in a more sustained, serious and politically damaging way.

It is even possible that at some point the US will have to choose between intervening militarily or letting Ukraine become a failed state, exporting refugees and insecurity to Europe for years to come. At some point, in other words, the US may be forced to test Russia’s red lines more aggressively or settle for an outcome that allows Putin to claim a very ugly, very partial victory.

An earlier generation of American policymakers would have understood this imperative well. During the early Cold War, the US repeatedly found itself in high-stakes nuclear crises with the Soviet Union. And it repeatedly threatened to wage nuclear war rather than see Moscow or its allies conquer Taiwan’s offshore islands, dislodge the Western powers from Berlin, or otherwise destabilize the global order.

“If you are scared to go to the brink, you are lost,” a respected secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, once explained. To modern ears, Dulles might sound like a maniac. At the time, most Americans agreed with him.

Perhaps America will be spared similar dilemmas in this round of global rivalry. But don’t count on it. In fact, if Ukraine is a precedent for how America handles crises with nuclear-armed great powers, the US is in big trouble in the Western Pacific.

One of the most important questions raised by this war is what Chinese President Xi Jinping makes of it. Maybe Xi has been impressed by the cohesion of the West and the subpar performance of an autocratic military — lessons that would reinforce the peace in the Taiwan Strait. Or maybe he has learned something different: That America won’t fight even a conventional war against a nuclear-armed rival.

Biden has said as much. “We will not fight a war against Russia in Ukraine,” he declared in March 2022, because that would mean “World War III.” It’s not clear why the US would be more willing to risk nuclear war for Taiwan — another strategically important but distant democracy — than it was for Ukraine. It is clear that America’s strategy in Ukraine — provision of supplies and other support short of war — won’t work as well in sustaining an island that lacks friendly countries next door. So if the US won’t intervene directly if China attacks, say goodbye to a free Taiwan.

Biden understands this: It’s presumably why he has said, several times, that the US won’t stand aside if China attacks. But would it really be so crazy for Xi to conclude, with Ukraine in mind, that America’s actions speak louder than its words? Nuclear statecraft is replete with ironies. One of them is that deterring a future war in the Western Pacific may require convincing China not to draw too many conclusions from the current war in Ukraine.

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Should that lesson close the door on discussions of reparations for other countries? Said another way — despite this history, can reparations ever serve a positive purpose? 

Here, Germany also provides an example.  

After World War II, Germany paid reparations. They both paid briefly to the victorious powers, largely in terms of manufacturing plants and machinery, and they paid to the remnants of the Jewish community they slaughtered. On the 70th anniversary of the Luxembourg Agreement that governed German compensation to Holocaust survivors, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz explained that the compensation agreements were “an attempt to assume moral responsibility for the failure of morality – the attempt to ensure that it was not inhumanity that had the last word, but humanity.” 

Rather than symbolize punishment, Germany’s acquiescence to reparations signaled its acceptance that the old order was evil, and its desire for a new beginning. Nor was Germany alone in embracing reparations as a way to turn definitively against the past. Japan paid reparations, not only to the United States, but also to many of the Asian countries and island nations it had colonized.

Moving forward to the present, the international community’s unwillingness to demand reparations from Russia and Turkey, two of the most irredentist and aggressive countries today, means neither country has incentive to come to terms with its past. Perhaps this is why not only each country’s dictatorial leaders, but also the bulk of their populations, continue to embrace racist narratives and justify aggression against neighbors and domestic minorities.

Treating Russia with Kid Gloves

In his masterful 2015 tome Winter is Coming, Garry Kasparov countered the notion that the West mistreated Russia after the end of the Cold War, thus justifying Russian President Vladimir Putin’s grievances. 

“Despite perpetual unfounded complaints about suffering humiliation at the hands of the victorious West, there was nothing in the way of reparations demanded by the winning side,” Kasparov noted, adding, “In fact, the United States and several other countries provided badly needed loan guarantees and other aid to Russia… Russia was even paid for bringing its troops back from Germany.” 

Putin owes his very career to the fact that there was no purge of Communist party officials or members of the Soviet intelligence apparatus. In this, post-war Russia stood in sharp contrast to the restrictions placed on Nazis and Schutzstaffel members after Germany’s World War II defeat, not to mention the de-Baathification process that disqualified top members of Saddam Hussein’s administration from the Iraqi political order after 2003. Removing nuclear weapons from each Soviet successor state except for Russia further privileged Moscow by preserving Russia’s power and prestige relative to the Soviet Union’s other former constituent republics.

It was by indulging the sense of entitlement that sits at the heart of Russian nationalism that the West encouraged Putin’s irredentism. The results manifested themselves first in Georgia in 2008, and later in Ukraine. Putin has now caused tens of billions of dollars in damages to Ukraine’s physical infrastructure alone. He is directly responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of people and the displacement of millions. 

Putin is not special. He is not the first Kremlin leader to engage in such behavior. He openly models himself after Joseph Stalin, a man responsible for millions of Ukrainian deaths. The recent rehabilitation of Stalin’s image reinforces the absence of fundamental change in Russian culture.

Bypassing reparations after the Cold War for the damage the Soviets did to Eastern Europe and the Caucasus did not bring peace or encourage liberalism. Rather, it allowed a generation of Russians to avoid confronting their own historical record.

The Trouble With Turkey

The same is true for Turkey. Almost a century ago, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk founded the Republic of Turkey upon the ashes of the Ottoman Empire. Rather than acknowledge the Armenian genocide, Atatürk and his top lieutenants, many of whom were complicit in that act, denied it and criminalized its discussion. They also sought to erase Kurdish cultural identity, and they systematically destroyed or cloistered Istanbul and Izmir’s once-thriving Greek communities. 

At best, Turks engaged in whataboutism, arguing that the expulsion of Turks from the Balkans offset their slaughter of the Greeks. That displacement was tragic, but it was neither equivalent nor an excuse for Turkey’s continued aggression against Greece and Greek communities in the Aegean and on Cyprus. Whether under Kemalist governments or President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Islamist dispensation, the Turkish government indoctrinates schoolchildren into an ethno-supremacist ideology. It then uses that ideology and false historical narratives to justify current aggression. Most recently, this manifested itself in the Turkish justification for an assault by its troops on British UN peacekeepers in Cyprus. 

Indeed, the more the West indulges Turkey and ignores the racism inherent in Erdogan’s actions, the more reckless Turkey’s behavior becomes — be it in Cyprus, Greece, Iraq, Syria, or with its support for the Islamic State. This is just one reason why any provision of F-16s or other heavy weaponry to Turkey is so dangerous.

What Should Reparations Look Like?

With its February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Russia crossed the Rubicon. Its two-week blitzkrieg is now a frozen conflict that has cost Russia dearly. Still, Putin will never surrender, nor will he negotiate. Neither is consistent with his ideology or conducive to his survival. Russia traditionally defaults to wars of attrition; it believes time will be on its side in any frozen conflict. So Putin will pursue his folly until he dies. It is then that the West should not only demand “never again,” but should kneecap Russia’s ability to pursue its irredentist dreams. Crippling financial sanctions might backfire, as they did after World War I, but there is utility to territorial adjustments. This might mean expanding Ukraine’s boundaries to pay in land what Russians cannot pay in cash. Preventing further Russian aggression might also mean breaking Russia apart.

The same holds true for reparations from Turkey. Ankara has gotten away with murder for too long. A sense of impunity now fuels its aggression. While it is easy to suggest a historical statute of limitations should cancel any consideration of reparations for the Armenian Genocide, Turkey’s continued denial of it, and its aggression toward Armenians, suggest a change of tack is necessary. Not only Mount Ararat, but also Armenia’s historical capitals to the west, might revert to Armenian control. A stigma today surrounds discussion of such reparations, but Turkey’s behavior merits at least starting the conversation. Turks must know the consequences of their current course of action.

Turkey’s targeting of ethnic Greeks is no different, and last week’s attack on peacekeepers in Pyla should be the last straw. Europe and the West must end the notion that Cypriot unity is negotiable, and insist that Turkey pay the price for its abuse of Cypriot sovereignty. By any calculation, Turkey today owes Cyprus billions of dollars.

Nor should Erdogan get away with his growing aggression toward Greek islands in the Aegean. His dismissal of the borders set by the Lausanne Treaty opens the door for territorial adjustments going the other direction, up to and including sovereignty over Smyrna. This need not mean population transfer, but in the old city it could follow the model of Jordan’s de facto sovereignty over the Temple Mount despite Israel’s control over Jerusalem. 

Kurds, too, deserve compensation. Once upon a time, Kurds might have agreed to remain inside Turkey or as members of a loose confederation. Indeed, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party dropped its separatism more than a decade ago. Erdogan’s racism, however, has convinced young Kurds they have no future inside Turkey. They see Diyarbakir not as a provincial capital, but as a future national one. 

Russians and Turks may complain bitterly. Some might grow even more radical. But until these nations face the consequences of their actions, there can never be peace. It is neither sophisticated nor wise to ignore justice and accountability.

So long as Russia and Turkey remain unwilling to confront their pasts in the way Germany and Japan have done, conflict and war will remain the norm. Perhaps there can be an argument to minimize or even waive reparations when countries and populations are sincere about a new beginning, but Russia and Turkey do not meet that threshold. It is therefore time to end the stigma about forcing Russia and Turkey to pay reparations, perhaps through cash, and more certainly with territory.  

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But observers would be wise to temper their pessimism. War does not proceed in a linear fashion. Defenders can hold for a long time and then suddenly break, allowing an attacker to make rapid gains before the defense solidifies further to the rear. The Ukrainians aim to generate exactly this effect — and there is reason to think they can. Ukraine’s offensive push is far from over. In fact, it is still in the early stages — just 10 weeks into what is likely to last at least four more months.

Penetrating a modern defense in depth such as the Russians established in southern Ukraine is a tall order for any military. The U.S. military has done it twice in modern memory, both times against Iraq. In 1991, after pummeling the Iraqi forces for 39 days from the air, a U.S.-led coalition of 650,000 troops penetrated and outflanked Iraqi defenses, crushing the Iraqi military in 100 hours. In 2003, a smaller U.S.-led force destroyed a badly degraded Iraqi military within a few weeks.

Read more in The Washington Post.

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Much will be said about Prigozhin’s colorful life: from restauranteur to Putin person chef to mercenary leader and businessman. Many will say his death does not surprise: no one crosses Putin, an ex-KGB operative, and survives. The real question was whether Prigozhin’s end would come via polonium tea, a high rise elevator shaft, or a surprisingly rickety stair.

What Happens Next in Putin’s Russia? 

The question now is what next? Prigozhin inspired loyalty. How else can anyone explain the willingness of nine other people to get on an aircraft with a dead man walking?

There are three possibilities in the weeks to come that will determine Russia’s future.

The first is that Wagner shifts its loyalty to Putin. There has long been analysis that Prigozhin is more the figurehead and investor than the group’s leader. If Wagner leadership lays elsewhere, it may not be a stretch to accept that they might shift their loyalty to Putin. As the late Al Qaeda leader Usama Bin Laden once quipped, “When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they will like the strong horse.” That logic holds true with Russia. Putin is undoubtedly strong, at least in the sense that he continues to call the shots and others continue to die as a result.

The second is that Wagner dissolves. This is less likely for two reasons: Wagner is a lucrative business. It has taken over the gold mines of the Central African Republic, and may soon get control over Niger’s uranium mines. The group also gives Putin plausible deniability for some of the dirty work he wants done.

The third is the most dangerous for Putin. Prigozhin was not alone in his June 2023 rebellion. Hundreds of battle-hardened Wagner veterans may feel they have no choice but to go to ground and avenge their late leader against the man who almost certainly ordered his death. If Russians worried about Ukrainian drones striking Crimea, Moscow, or other Russian cities, they may have just unleashed the Kraken. Putin may be out of reach as he hides behind the thick walls of his billion dollar-palaces, but not every Russian official is so lucky.

Imagine battle-hardened veterans hunting down policemen, mayors, deputies, and ministers throughout the country. Should Wagner go this route, it will slowly erode the foundation of Russia’s stability and bring a taste of civil war-era Lebanon to the country. Certainly, if Putin cronies begin to drop like flies, the image of invincibility surrounding the Russian leader will fade. The strong horse could become a hobbled pony.

Prigozhin may be dead, but Putin may soon come to rue his legacy.

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Since Ukraine launched its counteroffensive in early June, policymakers and analysts have criticized the Ukrainian military for underperforming. This past week, the Washington Post published an assessment by the US intelligence community that claimed Ukraine’s counteroffensive wouldn’t fulfill its principal objectives, despite “tens of billions of dollars” of Western equipment. On this episode of The Eastern Front, Giselle and Iulia speak with Mason Clark, senior analyst and Russia team lead at the Institute for the Study of War, to get his overall take on the counteroffensive—from both the Ukrainian and Russian angle—and response to claims about Ukraine’s underperformance. Did Ukraine set out to replicate its sweeping 2022 Kharkiv counteroffensive? Was its military actually given the forces and equipment to meet Western expectations? To what extent has the war impacted Russia’s military industrial base? What can we expect from both sides heading into the fall?

Show notes: Sign up for The Eastern Front’s bi-weekly newsletter here and follow us on Twitter here. “US Intelligence Says Ukraine Will Fail to Meet Offensive’s Key Goal,” Washington Post.

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Changing Priorities

Over the past five years, each Caucasian country has flipped its geopolitical orientation, and now India senses opportunity. As it solidifies ties with Yerevan, New Delhi is set to become a new diplomatic heavyweight in the region.

Consider how much the Caucasus region has changed. In the wake of the September 11, 2001 terror attacks, Azerbaijani President Heydar Aliyev, a former local KGB chief and Moscow-based politburo member, embraced the West. At that time, just 18 months before Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s rise, the United States and Europe saw Turkey as an ally and accepted at face value that Azerbaijan would be secular and Western-oriented. Under Aliyev’s son Ilham, however, Azerbaijan is erratic. Baku is willing to work fist-in-glove with Islamist terrorists and to pivot closer to Russia, for whom it is now a money-laundering lifeline.

Iran’s regional role is similar. For Armenia, Iran is less an ally of choice than one of necessity, a lifeline through which to export goods impossible to ship elsewhere because of Turkish and Azerbaijani blockades. For Azerbaijan, the opposite is true. Behind its recent antagonistic rhetoric toward Tehran, Azerbaijan helps Iran evade sanctions for the right price. 

Perhaps no country has changed as much as Armenia. Armenians are frustrated with Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, but they show no desire to return to the Russia-dominated status quo that prevailed before the large-scale protests of 2018. Georgia and Armenia have traded places. Georgia is backsliding into Russia’s orbit while Armenia breaks away.

The Ally Democracies Need

The 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh War confirmed this reorientation. Armenians turned on Russia for the failure of its peacekeepers to enforce the ceasefire. Armenians will never forgive the fact that, as Azerbaijan starves 120,000 Christians in Nagorno-Karabakh, Russian forces stand less than 50 meters from an illegal Azerbaijani checkpoint that blocks relief supplies. America, meanwhile, confuses statements with substance and disqualifies itself with bothsiderism against the backdrop of genocide.

Enter India, the world’s most populous country. Whereas India once focused its diplomatic efforts regionally or into the Non-Aligned Movement, today it is a diplomatic heavyweight farther afield.

In 2019, Pashinyan met Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly. Both promised greater ties, and they meant it. Pashinyan declared Armenia would side unequivocally with India on the Kashmir question. Law is on India’s side, but diplomatically Pakistan has no one to blame but itself. Out of religious animus and a desire to ingratiate itself to Turkey and Azerbaijan, Pakistan refuses even to recognize Armenia’s existence. India, meanwhile, accepts the nuances and complexities of the Nagorno-Karabakh problem.

As Armenia untangles its legacy military ties to Russia, India fills the gap. In March 2020, Yerevan signed a $40 million deal with India for four SWATHI radars to track incoming artillery, mortars, and rockets and pinpoint their launch sites. In June 2022, India agreed to sell Armenia drones. The U.S. should celebrate such purchases as Armenia bypasses Iran. 

Negotiations meanwhile continue for Pinaka multi-barrel rocket launchers, Nag anti-tank missiles, and anti-tank guided missiles. Armenian Defense Minister Suren Papikyan also visited his Indian counterpart Shri Rajnath Singh on the sidelines of India’s DefExpo 2022. 

The relationship is symbiotic, and extends beyond the military realm. Armenia provides India with a commercial hub from which India can ship goods through Georgia west to Europe or into Russia, and then eastward into Central Asia. Access to that region had been interrupted by the Taliban’s conquest of Afghanistan. Both countries have become IT powerhouses, and Armenia’s investment in its pharmaceutical sector increasingly interests India’s investors.

A common lamentation among democrats in the region is why the United States is effectively absent. Washington makes excuses, and remains absent when it counts. India’s presence now provides a new option for the region, one that Washington should encourage. A choice between Russia, Turkey, and Iran is akin to choosing between a heart attack, stroke, or cancer. India provides an antidote to dictatorship, rentierism, and extremism. The Caucasus are in flux. India could be the ally its democrats need. 

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On July 19, 2019, commandos from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps boarded the Stena Impero — a Swedish-owned, United Kingdom-flagged tanker traveling in the strait’s Omani waters — and seized the ship and crew.

Read the full article at Politico

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Almost 1,700 years after Gregory’s death, Artsakh’s Armenian community now faces extinction.

With his own economy in trouble, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev has turned to the usual toolkit of failing dictators, first fanning the flames of nationalism and racism, followed by military adventurism. In September 2020, this came to a head when Azerbaijan, with direct Turkish military support, attacked the self-governing but unrecognized Republic of Artsakh. Thousands died and Artsakh lost half its territory. Azerbaijan, which says Nagorno-Karabakh belongs solely to it despite the wishes of the territory’s population for self-determination, demands the remaining portion of Artsakh submits to its rule.

Nevertheless, Aliyev agreed to a ceasefire brokered by Russia that guaranteed safe, unimpeded transit between Armenia and Artsakh’s 120,000-person Armenian community through the so-called Lachin corridor.

In December 2022, Aliyev began a series of stunts to squeeze Artsakh into submission. “Environmental activists” blocked the road to protest Armenian mining effluent. This was hypocritical, given Azerbaijan’s hydrocarbon pollution. The charges were nonsense. Heightening the irony was the fact that Azerbaijan lacks independent civil society; analysts later identified the protesters as known Azeri secret service officers.

Azerbaijan next constructed an illicit checkpoint and refused most traffic, even turning away the International Committee of the Red Cross. While Azerbaijan claims Armenia was smuggling weapons and landmines into Artsakh, neither the peacekeepers nor international observers confirm this. The noose now tightens. Azerbaijan has cut its gas pipelines and even internet. Artsakh cannot access food or medicine. Azerbaijani snipers shoot at farmers in Artsakh to prevent cultivation. Artsakh’s Christian community starves.

Aliyev wants the territory, but he wants it empty. While Azerbaijan says it is religiously tolerant, this is an exaggeration: It wants minorities, but only as museum exhibits. This is the case with the Jewish community, three-quarters of whom have fled since Azerbaijan’s independence. Aliyev trots out those who remain to recite his talking points. Armenia’s Jewish community, in contrast, is free and now growing.

In order to shift blame from looming starvation, the Azerbaijani government now says it will allow food shipments to Nagorno-Karabakh through Aghdam, an Azeri town with no links to Armenia proper.

If President Joe Biden’s team sees this as a productive compromise, it is foolish. To trust Azerbaijan to feed a population it deliberately starves is akin to trusting World War II-era Germans to feed the Warsaw ghetto.

Aliyev treats food and supplies as weapons of subjugation. Rather than negotiate diplomatically over Nagorno-Karabakh’s fate, Aliyev seeks to use deliberate starvation to compel acceptance of his demands. Christians know that if they compromise today, Aliyev will only repeat the process tomorrow, perhaps demanding the closure of Armenian churches, monasteries, or schools as in Turkey.

Also at issue is the sanctity of agreements. Aliyev signed an agreement to a free corridor between Armenia and Artsakh through Lachin. Should Biden let him revise that unilaterally, he kills rather than encourages diplomacy by demonstrating that Aliyev’s signature is meaningless.

Nor is there any practical reason to accept Aliyev’s redirection of aid. Prior to Azerbaijan’s blockade, Artsakh was functional economically. The answer to its problems, therefore, is to end the embargo. If Aliyev then wants to open other trade routes into Artsakh and Armenia, even better. After all, the decades-long Azerbaijani and Turkish blockade of Armenia is an impediment to peace.

Rather than compromise with Aliyev’s new proposals, Biden should stand firm, deploying sanctions. He can stop military sales to Azerbaijan by imposing Section 907 sanctions. Nor is there any waiver to the Humanitarian Aid Corridors Act, which penalizes any country interfering with the provision of U.S. assistance. USAID convoys should be at Lachin now, ready to roll, American diplomats and congressional staff there to witness it.

With the latest genocide finding, Biden might even support an international indictment for Aliyev. “Never Again” must mean something.

The post A Christian Community Starves. Will Those Responsible Trick Biden? appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

The country’s fishermen had other ideas: they refused to leave waters to the south of the country and maintained a round-the-clock presence, thus preventing the Russian warships from carrying out the drill.

Read the Full Article at The Center for European Policy Analysis

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Brady Africk was nearly a year into his role as a media relations associate at AEI when Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine took place. Feeling struck by the wrongness of the war, as he puts it on the podcast, he decided to harness his interest in the intersection between foreign policy and tech by publishing satellite imagery that tracked Russia’s activities. Over a year later, Africk’s maps are now a monumental asset to the war, having been featured in major news outlets and used by both fellow experts and personnel on the frontlines. On this episode of The Eastern Front, Africk joins Giselle, Dalibor, and Iulia to discuss what satellite imagery has taught him about the battlefield, US support for Ukraine, and where Ukraine might be headed. Africk also shares how open-source intelligence has changed people’s understanding of the war—for better and for worse.

Show notes: Sign up for The Eastern Front‘s bi-weekly newsletter here and follow us on Twitter here. “Ukraine Maps Show the Price of Allies’ Hesitation” by Brady Africk.

The post How Open-Source Intelligence Is Shaping the Russia-Ukraine War (with Brady Africk) appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

Dönhoff was born – on 2 December 1909 ­– at her family’s East Prussian manor, Friedrichstein, near the city then known as Königsberg (now Kaliningrad). Young Marion was the youngest of eight children. Her mother had been a lady-in-waiting to Kaiserin Auguste Victoria and her father was a member of the Prussian parliament and former military officer. That made Marion a member of Prussia’s Junker intelligentsia: land-owning families, of lower or higher nobility, who considered it their civic duty not just to look after the land but also to participate in societal institutions. (Gräfin means Countess; in the German tradition an aristocratic title is placed between the Christian name and the surname.) Like Dönhoff’s father, male Junkers often served in the armed forces, or in diplomacy, the civil service or elected politics.

Like many daughters of this aristocratic intelligentsia, Dönhoff received a fine education that included not just how to run a large agricultural estate, but also the Abitur, the German academic-track secondary school education. She then attended university in Königsberg and Frankfurt am Main, where she gained a degree in economics in 1934. She went on to PhD studies in Basel, completing a doctoral thesis about the running of a large agricultural estate, using Friedrichstein as an example. When Germany invaded Poland, and Dönhoff’s brother Dietrich was called up for military service, she assumed the leadership of the estate: a rare blend of academic and on-hands agricultural expertise.

But like many other members of Prussia’s aristocratic intelligentsia, Dönhoff was also deeply uneasy about the Nazis; that’s why she transferred to Basel for her doctoral studies. Already by the time Germany invaded Poland, a number of them had begun gathering in small groups to discuss what a law-abiding citizen could do to prevent the Nazis from living out their murderous dreams. But carrying out opposition against a totalitarian dictatorship is so fiendishly difficult and dangerous as to be virtually impossible. The Scholl siblings and their fellow White Rose members were executed simply for disseminating leaflets. That was the challenge faced by the officers, diplomats, jurists, pastors and others in what was to become known as the 20 July group – and yet they made several assassination attempts on Hitler before the one on 20 July 1944, for which they were caught and executed. Dönhoff’s beloved cousin Heinrich Graf von Lehndorff-Steinort, the father of four young girls, was one of those who lost their lives. Despite all this, most of their contemporary Germans considered the 20 July plotters traitors, while many people outside Germany denounced them as having done too little, too late. That’s what Dönhoff set out to change with In Memoriam 20. Juli 1944. Den Freunden zum Gedächtnis (In Memoriam 20 July 1944: To the Memory of the Friends), a book published in a small number of copies for the first anniversary of 20 July that she later turned into Um der Ehre willen (published in 1994, the failed plot’s fiftieth anniversary).

In the spring of 1945, with the Red Army advancing through East Prussia, Dönhoff fled westwards on horseback, a journey she shared with hundreds of thousands of others, most of whom travelled by foot or in carriages with a few hastily assembled belongings. Dönhoff describes this journey through lands that were falling under Soviet occupation, and the extreme hardship endured by the people fleeing ahead of the Soviets (and those unable to flee), in Namen, die keiner mehr kennt, (Names that No One Knows anymore), published in 1962.

Despite possessing little experience as a writer, Dönhoff was then invited to join Die Zeit, a new publication being set up in the British occupation sector: there weren’t that many Germans of an intellectual bent unsoiled by Nazi collaboration, especially since the Nazis had executed thousands of them. Thus began Dönhoff’s decades-long association with the paper that was to see her appointed editor-in-chief in 1968.

And from her perch at Die Zeit, Dönhoff delivered wise thoughts on issues facing West Germany, the country that arose from the three Western-occupied sectors. Like the occupying powers, she thought it would be wrong for West Germany to recognise the Oder-Neisse Line that made East Prussia part of communist Poland, but later changed her position as part of her efforts to advance German-Polish reconciliation. She criticised the pervasive materialism that had come to dominate West Germany (and other Western countries). She argued in favour of Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik and for a more compassionate capitalism. After Helmut Schmidt lost West Germany’s chancellorship to Helmut Kohl, he joined Dönhoff at Die Zeit, and together they influenced the West German (and later German) public debate like few others. Indeed, even the title of Dönhoff’s book, Zivilisiert den Kapitalismus (‘Civilise Capitalism’) from 1992, is a statement I wager everyone could agree with. In my copy, I have marked passages on almost every page, for example: ‘We must humanise society and tame citizens’ greed. Without change, the liberal state based on the rule of law won’t survive. Perhaps we need a minor catastrophe in order to reduce people’s ballooning demands to more traditional proportions.’ Three decades later, we’re experiencing such a catastrophe, and it’s not minor: climate change risks destroying large parts of the planet. But not even this massive catastrophe is convincing people to reduce their demands on a convenient lifestyle.

There are, of course, many other writers and commentators who influence public opinion, but they usually trade in demagoguery and outrage, especially now that social media rewards such outbursts. Dönhoff, by contrast, influenced West Germany’s public discourse through sage and moderate observations. Thanks to her and a few others, West Germany managed to establish a new identity out of the ruins of the war. But it’s rare that an obvious public intellectual like Dönhoff simply emerges. Who are the thinkers and commentators today who could wisely guide public discourse? Is it even possible when moderation and conciliatory tones are not rewarded by readers, viewers and algorithms? Let’s hope so, and let’s reward thinkers and commentators who behave responsibly rather than giving further attention to attention-seeking demagogues.

Dönhoff received ample recognition: a string of honorary doctorates, the prestigious Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels, appointments to official boards and commissions. After her death in 2002, at the age of 92, countless schools, streets, bridges and university buildings – including in Poland – were named after her. She left a gaping hole in German public discourse, one that has not yet been properly filled. And like Germany, other Western countries – indeed, every liberal democracy – need personalities like Dönhoff who can steer the public debate. One doesn’t always need to agree with them, but their intellectual input is indispensable, and it’s the kind of input serving politicians can’t provide. Where are they?

The post Marion Dönhoff: The Very Best of Germany appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

But for the foreseeable future, the United States and its allies will face a dire threat: An axis of aging and nuclear-armed leaders who are running out of time to achieve their grandiose ambitions. As Mr. Putin’s misadventure in Ukraine has made clear, autocratic leaders don’t always peacefully fade away.

Aging dictators have less time to reshape the world — and more memories of being obeyed at home and dissed abroad for their conduct. They become increasingly repressive and aggressive as power goes to their heads. Surrounded by sycophants, they make disastrous decisions again and again. They start pondering their legacies and wondering why they haven’t received the global respect they think they deserve or achieved the glory that would etch their names among history’s greats. They may decide that they don’t want to go down as a merely transitional figure. It’s a combustible combination: an autocrat who is overconfident and aggrieved and in a hurry.

In his first few years in power in China, Mao Zedong envisioned that his plans to overtake the capitalist powers could take 50 to 75 years. But as he entered his mid-60s, he progressively shortened that timetable and in 1958 began the Great Leap Forward, a misguided scheme to quickly transform China into an industrial giant. At least 45 million people died of starvation or other causes as agriculture was neglected in the frenzy to meet his targets. Partly to rally the nation behind the campaign, he instigated an international crisis by shelling islands held by the Chinese Nationalist government on Taiwan. From 1966 to 1976, the aging Mao’s last-ditch effort to safeguard his rule and legacy resulted in the chaos of the Cultural Revolution.

Kim Il-sung of North Korea was another leader who acted aggressively in his later years. Emboldened by the U.S. quagmire in Vietnam and its subsequent military drawdown from Asia, he spent his third and fourth decades in power going from provocation to provocation. From 1968 to 1988, his regime seized a U.S. intelligence ship and its crew; shot down a U.S. reconnaissance aircraft, killing all 31 aboard; tried to assassinate a South Korean president on multiple occasions; killed dozens of South Korean officials, as well as the first lady; bombed a South Korean airliner, killing all 115 aboard; and dug tunnels sufficient to transport 30,000 troops per hour into South Korea.

Elderly dictators rarely mellow out even when they are firmly in charge. Joseph Stalin emerged from World War II victorious in his mid-60s. Yet instead of working with his wartime allies, he sought to dominate Eurasia and sent a new wave of prisoners to the gulag. Leonid Brezhnev initially pursued détente with the West. But ailing in his second decade in power, he took a more hostile stance, promoting Communist revolutions around the world, invading Afghanistan in 1979 and deploying advanced nuclear-tipped missiles aimed at Western Europe while awarding himself a chestful of medals.

Aging autocrats generally don’t change tack unless compelled to. Mao sought rapprochement with the United States only after the 1969 Sino-Soviet border conflict made it clear that China needed U.S. help to counter Moscow. Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi gave up his weapons of mass destruction in 2003 because of various factors, including pressure from the United States. The Chinese Nationalist generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek suppressed his yearning to conquer mainland China and the South Korean strongman Syngman Rhee grudgingly gave up on taking the rest of the Korean Peninsula in part because they feared the United States would abandon them.

Which brings us back to Mr. Xi and Mr. Putin.

Rather than easing toward retirement, both men have aggressively asserted vast territorial claims, ordered mass military mobilizations, strengthened ties with illiberal regimes like North Korea and Iran and built up their cults of personality. After invading Ukraine, Mr. Putin explicitly compared himself to Peter the Great, the modernizing conqueror who founded the Russian Empire. Chinese Communist propaganda describes Mr. Xi as the culmination of a glorious trinity: Under Mao, China stood up; under Deng Xiaoping, China grew rich; and under Xi, China will become mighty.

Both have made plain their ambitions to redraw the map of Eurasia. Mr. Putin says Ukraine doesn’t exist as an independent country and has implied that Moscow should reunite the “Russian world” — an area that roughly maps the old Soviet borders. China’s claims include Taiwan, most of the South China Sea and East China Sea and chunks of territory also claimed by India. “We cannot lose even one inch of the territory left behind by our ancestors,” Mr. Xi said in 2018.

Diplomacy did not dissuade Mr. Putin from invading Ukraine, and it is unlikely to alter Mr. Xi’s fixation on absorbing Taiwan, which he has framed as essential for realizing “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.” Revanchist dictators typically don’t respond to nice words. They must be blocked by alliances of powerful militaries and resilient economies.

Toward that end, the United States and its allies should accelerate arms transfers to frontline nations like Ukraine and Taiwan and forge an economic and security bloc to stockpile munitions and critical resources and protect international waters and allied territory. The West must band together to deprive Beijing and Moscow of any hope of easy wars of conquest.

During the Cold War, containment was designed to thwart Soviet expansion until internal decay forced Moscow to curtail its ambitions. That should be the same goal today, and it may not take half a century to get there. Russia is already in decline, China’s rise has stalled, and both countries have made their neighbors wary. The United States and its allies do not need to contain Russia and China forever — just until current trends play out. Eventually, their leaders’ dreams of dominance will start to appear fanciful, and their successors might decide to rectify their nations’ economic and strategic predicaments through geopolitical moderation and internal reform.

Until then, containing two aging dictators won’t be easy, but it provides the best hope of limiting the disruption they cause until they fade into the history books.

You can read the article at The New York Times.

The post No One Should Want to See a Dictator Get Old appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

Europeans seem to want to have it all: stringent environmental and regulatory standards to drive decarbonization; “strategic autonomy,” especially from powers such as Russia or China; and rising levels of economic prosperity. These goals form a policy trilemma. Europeans can pick two—or a limited combination of the three—but they cannot pursue all three at once. And that should be a warning to Americans.

Already, Europe’s growth record is deeply unflattering. Between 2000 and 2019, the EU’s economy expanded at an average annual rate of just 1.4 percent. If the United States became a member of the EU, it would be its third wealthiest member, right after Luxembourg and Ireland, whose national income statistics are skewed by the presence of headquarters of large multinational companies operating across the EU.

Read the full article at The Dispatch

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The past three months have each seen more than 600 AIS gaps by Russian-flagged vessels alone, up from just over 100 per month during the same period last year. (AIS is the automatic identification system, which virtually all commercial vessels are obliged to use; AIS gaps are the periods of time when a vessel’s system stops transmitting.) Russian and Iranian vessels traveling between the two countries are also conducting dark port calls—calling at ports with their AIS switched off—and some are even spoofing their location. Russia is entering the shadow economy.

On a recent day, 12 vessels traveling between Russia and Iran in the Caspian Sea were conducting dark port calls. (All were owned by Russian or Iranian entities, flying under Russian or Iranian flag, or both.)

Read the full story at Foreign Policy

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The disinformation surrounding Koran burnings in Sweden bear out philosopher Karl Popper’s warnings
A society believing so strongly in tolerance that it’s unwilling to defend tolerance against the onslaught of the intolerant risks destroying tolerance itself, Popper argued in The Open Society and its Enemies. When the Austrian-born philosopher wrote his most famous treatise during the second world war, he couldn’t have known the scale of the intolerance that decades later would befall western countries. He certainly could not have predicted the battle now taking place between a symbiotic alliance of a few attention-seeking Koran-burners in Scandinavia and a group of regimes and individuals itching for a fight with the west on one hand, and tolerant Sweden on the other.

Late last month, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation convened, at the behest of Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia, to condemn three recent Koran burnings in Sweden and Denmark. The IOC “deplores the recurrence of acts of desecration of al-Mus’haf ashSharif [the Koran], and deeply regrets the continued issuance by the authorities of a permit allowing that action to occur” the leaders’ final communique declared.

Read the full article at Financial Times

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On this episode of The Eastern Front, Giselle, Dalibor, and Iulia offer their take on events from the last several weeks and predict what lays ahead for Ukraine. They discuss Russia’s escalating attacks on Ukraine’s grain industry and what it suggests about President Vladimir Putin’s new offensive strategy, China’s growing stake in the conflict, how upcoming elections in Poland and Slovakia might impact the EU’s support for Ukraine, and whether this war is ultimately about preserving the status quo in Europe or creating a new balance of power.

Show notes: Sign up for The Eastern Front‘s biweekly newsletter here and follow us on Twitter here.

The post Round Up: Where Are We Now and Where Do We Go from Here? appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

“It is very simple,” Polish President Andrzej Duda told me last week. “Right now, Russian imperialism can be stopped cheaply, because American soldiers are not dying.” But if we don’t put a halt to Russian aggression now, “there will be a very high price to be paid.”

During an hour-long conversation in the Presidential Palace here, Duda noted that Poles have experienced 600 years of Russian efforts to subjugate them and their neighbors. In the 18th century, Russia helped partition Poland, wiping it off the map for 123 years. In 1920, the Bolsheviks attacked “in the hope of spreading communism across the whole of Europe” but were stopped by Polish forces in the Battle of Warsaw. In 1939, the Soviets attacked again alongside Nazi Germany and “Stalin seized half of Poland, bringing it under Soviet occupation” — until Hitler turned on his Soviet allies. Then in 1945, the Red Army retook Poland and “pushed the German occupiers out only to replace them with their own occupation,” resulting in “an additional 44 years behind the Iron Curtain.”

Continue reading in The Washington Post.

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The trend is likely to accelerate, as companies struggle to find insurance against the political risks of doing business in China. “We’re witnessing a sharp contraction in underwriter appetite,” a political-risk executive at a global insurance broker said. “Companies that have multiyear coverage can continue to utilize it, but companies that need new policies are struggling. A couple of private-market underwriters are willing to sell, but many have burdensome criteria lists and will only offer to companies in sectors they assess as very benign.”

Political-risk coverage, which insures companies against politically motivated calamities ranging from expropriation to war, is the lifeblood of the globalized economy. The demand for such policies declined during globalization’s most harmonious years, but in an unstable world, companies are deciding they need it again. Last year 68% of major corporations bought political-risk insurance, up from 25% in 2019, according to a report by WTW, an insurance broker.

Read the full article at The Wall Street Journal

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The quote, which was immediately seized upon by Russian propaganda as evidence of a fracture in Ukraine’s key relationship, came off the back of a spat between Warsaw and Kyiv over the ban on imports of Ukrainian grain to Poland. The policy is due to remain in place until at least mid-September, even as Ukraine’s maritime export infrastructure is being destroyed by Russian bombing.

Ukrainian protests against the ban prompted Marcin Przydacz, secretary of state in the chancellery of the Polish president, to question Ukraine’s gratitude for Poland’s support. In retaliation, Kyiv summoned Poland’s ambassador – one of the few Western diplomats who had remained in the city in the early days of the Russian invasion.

Read more at The Spectator

The post NATO Membership for Ukraine Would Guarantee Peace in Europe appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

Rather than replenish Russia’s treasury and arsenal with the spoils of war, Putin has drained it. 

The Toll on Russia

The country has likely lost 50,000 men, with perhaps three times that number wounded. The toll on Russia’s hardware has been equally devastating. Russia has lost more than 2,000 tanks, almost 1,000 armored fighting vehicles, more than 2,500 infantry fighting vehicles, and hundreds of artillery pieces. Ukrainian fighters have shot down or knocked out of commission more than 80 Russian jet fighters and nearly 100 helicopters, and sank or disabled more than a dozen naval ships, including the flagship of the Black Sea fleet. Today’s drone strike on a Russian naval base appears to have knocked an additional warship out of commission. 

The days of the Russian military ranking as the second most powerful are likely over; if it were not for Russia’s nuclear arsenal, it is increasingly unclear that Russia belongs among the top five.

Like a surgeon who has started an elective procedure only to have his patient start bleeding out, Russia is committed. To walk away would be a disaster. Rather, the war needs constant transfusions to keep not only the Russian military but also the regime itself alive.

Russia Courts North Korea for Weapons

During a visit to North Korea ostensibly to mark the 70th anniversary of the armistice that paused the Korean War, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu reportedly requested the Soviet client and the world’s most isolated regime provide Russia with more ammunition. National Security Council Spokesman John Kirby quipped, “This is yet another example of how desperate Mr. Putin has become … He is going through a vast amount of inventory to try to subjugate Ukraine, and he’s reaching out to countries like North Korea, like Iran, and certainly he’s been trying to reach out to China to get support for his war machine.”

The Ukraine conflict has become an international proxy conflict, if not a world war, albeit one fought almost exclusively on Ukrainian soil by Ukrainians and Russians. Still, it is spin over substance to claim that the United States and its European allies are not involved, especially as they ensure a flow of weaponry to Ukrainian forces working to expel Russia from all Ukrainian territory.

If the White House is committed to Ukraine’s victory, it must do two things. First, it must provide without preconditions the weaponry Ukraine needs to win. Neither President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, nor his chief deputy Jon Finer have served in the military; they must cease trying to micromanage Ukraine from 5,000 miles away.

Block the Flow

While Congress and Pentagon officials debate what weaponry they might provide Ukraine, there is a broader missing piece in U.S. strategy: Denial of weaponry to Russian forces. Any direct interceptions of weaponry from North Korea, China, or Iran is not feasible: Both North Korea and China border Russia, while Iran can transfer supplies by ship across the Caspian Sea or via Azerbaijan’s north-south corridor between Iran and Russia. There are other ways to prevent North Korea from providing ammunition, Iran from shipping drones, or China from providing armored fighting vehicles, however.

While Pyongyang, Tehran, and Beijing each wish to see Russia triumph over Ukraine, they also each put their own security ahead of Moscow’s. It is essential, therefore, to affect their own cost-benefit analysis to convince each country to keep its weaponry at home.

The response to Russian attempts to import North Korean ammunition should not be to finger wag or lecture, but rather to augment U.S. forces in South Korea and to deploy an additional U.S. carrier strike group or amphibious ready group to waters off the Korean Peninsula.

The Biden administration would be right to station U.S. Marines on commercial ships in the Persian Gulf, but as Iran’s military exports increase, it is essential to do more. Greater U.S. military presence near Iran’s shores and borders will give the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps reasons to ensure its stock of unmanned aerial vehicles remain accessible.

The same is true for China. While the open source intelligence on Chinese provision of weaponry to Russia is less certain, the White House presumably has clarity, especially as land border crossings and railheads capable of transporting such weaponry are limited.

A more aggressive U.S. posture in the region not only makes strategic sense for its own sake but also may cause some in the People’s Liberation Army to question the wisdom of sending equipment abroad.

There are certain difficulties: Arsenals are limited. Willpower matters. The United States might have industrial might on paper but for too long, the government has allowed competitors to outpace its military production. Absent a display of willpower, though, Russia’s allies will fill the gaps in its power and enable it to freeze and extend a conflict that today keeps Putin in power and risks broader regional security and the rules-based order.

If the goal is to allow the Russian patient to bleed out, it is time to end the transfusions. 

The post Russia Must Be Denied the Weapons It Needs to Fight Ukraine appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

In the second of The Eastern Front‘s two-part series on Black Sea security, Giselle, Dalibor, and Iulia speak with Admiral James Foggo (ret.), dean for the Center for Maritime Strategy, about strategies for enhancing freedom of navigation in the Black Sea. Are we currently experiencing a Russian blockade of the Black Sea? How should the US respond to Russian actions in order to deter future altercations, particularly against commercial ships? What should a NATO presence in the Black Sea look like? And what can NATO member states who are feeling the brunt of Russian attacks, such as Bulgaria and Romania, do to transition from small drone warfare to a fully-fledged maritime security deterrence posture?

Show notes: Sign up for The Eastern Front’s bi-weekly newsletter here and follow us on Twitter here.

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The U.S. desire to abandon Afghanistan led to a bad deal with the Taliban over the heads of the Afghan government that the United States spent more than 20 years and $2 trillion fostering. Wanting an end to U.S. involvement, the Trump administration negotiated directly with the Taliban—a terrorist organization—agreeing that U.S. forces would withdraw within 14 months in return for the Taliban “preventing terrorism” and not attacking U.S. troops. Both the Trump and Biden administrations continued with the abandonment of Afghanistan despite the Taliban not honoring the terms of the agreement, leaving the Kabul government further delegitimized and fighting a politically and militarily revived Taliban without U.S. support.

Today, there is a justifiable fear among Ukrainians and the United States’ European allies that the cost of supporting Ukraine, the political effort required to sustain congressional and public support (of which the administration has put in far too little), and the risk of escalation with Russia may cause Washington to abandon Kyiv to an ill-judged peace effort that threatens Ukraine’s long-term stability.

Read the full article in Foreign Policy here.

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