Friday News Roundup — April 5, 2024
With the world order continuing to be riled by wars and instability, this week foreign affairs dominated the focus in Washington, D.C. With U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen arriving in China (see below), President Biden spoke with Chinese leader Xi Jinping by phone in what aides described as a “check in” call to keep an increasingly tense relationship between the two most powerful nations in the world from spinning out of control. Contentious topics reportedly discussed included war in the Middle East, China’s support for Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, wrongfully detained U.S. citizens, a proposed ban on TikTok in the United States, as well as a perennial point of disagreement — unfair trade policies.
Israel’s tragic killing of seven aid workers associated with the World Central Kitchen in Gaza this week brought a reckoning in that escalating conflict, with many world leaders denouncing the killings and Israel issuing a rare mea culpa. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel “deeply regrets” the deadly strikes, and an Israeli military investigation admitted to a “grave mistake stemming from a serious failure due to mistaken identification.” The tragedy led to an unusually tense, 30-minute call between President Joe Biden and Netanyahu, during which Biden for the first time threatened to withhold U.S. aid unless Israel implemented a “series of specific, concrete and measurable steps to address civilian harm, humanitarian suffering, and the safety of aid workers,” according to a White House readout of the conversation. Netanyahu responded by promising to increase aid deliveries to Gaza, and to empower Israeli negotiators seeking to broker a temporary cease-fire deal in exchange for a release by Hamas of Israeli hostages.
Meeting in Brussels on NATO’s 75th anniversary, NATO Secretary Jens Stoltenberg proposed this week that the alliance create a $108 billion fund for long-term military assistance to Ukraine. NATO member states have been coordinating military aid through a U.S.-led Ukraine Contact Group, but with a $60 billion U.S. aid package held up in the U.S. House for many months, and with growing doubts about former President and Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s willingness to support Ukraine in the long term if reelected, the proposed NATO fund is seen by many observers as an attempt to stabilize Ukraine support within the Western alliance.
This week CSPC has released a new report analyzing the intensifying Geotech competition between the United States and its allies and China (see below). On Friday, CSPC Senior Fellow James Kitfield joined other experts on National Public Radio’s 1A Program, during the Friday News Roundup, International hour.
New CSPC Report Examines U.S.-China “Geotech” Competition in an Election Year
By Andy Keiser and James Kitfield
This week U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen arrived in China to issue a pointed warning. The United States and its allies are increasingly worried that Chinese industrial policies heavily subsidizing “green technology” products, from electric cars to solar panels, may cripple domestic production in these critical technologies. It was just the latest trade dispute in an intensifying “Geotech” competition for supremacy in the technologies that promise to shape the future.
In the just-released report “Geotech Competition Pathways 2024,” the Center for the Study of the Presidency & Congress (CSPC) details the many substantive steps the U.S. government has recently taken to level the playing field in that competition, and in this presidential election year it recommends further steps the next administration can take to position the country for long-term success.
As the report notes, the Biden administration national security team and key Members of Congress have already implemented a number of important measures impacting trade with China, including increased domestic technology investments, export controls and reviews, outbound investment limitations, supply chain security initiatives with allies, as well as public shaming of private sector actors investing in firms with links to Chinese military capabilities. The United States is now moving into a second phase of trade adjustments following earlier passage of the Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors for America (CHIPS) Act, the Inflation Reduction Act, and other measures to address domestic economic security concerns.
At the end of 2023, the House Select Committee on the Competition with the Communist Party of China (China Select Committee) also released an extensive series of recommendations on how best to shape the U.S.-China trade relationship in critical technologies. Taken together these recommendations may read like a wish list for the “China Hawks” on Capitol Hill, and many proposals, such as those impacting Wall Street, face very long odds of ever being enacted. Other proposals such as the legislation involving TikTok, however, are finding legs at least in the House of Representatives. Like the 2012 House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence’s report on the national security threats from Huawei and ZTE, the China Select Committee product is a serious, bipartisan report that will likely be used and cited for years to come.
The CSPC report looks beyond current trade measures towards the need for an overarching U.S. strategy for this Geotech competition, and it analyzes the likelihood of progress towards such a strategy as a potential second Biden term, or possible second Trump term, looms over the horizon in 2025.
Should President Biden prevail in November, the report argues that the likely result will be continuation of a steady relationship with China, a confrontational approach towards Russia, and a consensus-driven, don’t-rock-the-boat foreign policy more broadly. The Biden Administration is likely to continue to try to maintain high-level dialogue with Chinese leadership as they did successfully during Biden’s first term, though major concessions remain unlikely given the consistently high level of tension over a possible conflict over Taiwan.
As for President Trump, the report posits that former United States Trade Representative (USTR) Robert Lighthizer will likely be a driving force in former President Trump’s trade policy if he is elected again in November. Expect Mr. Trump to focus on trade in a second term as an issue upon which he can make progress without Congressional action.
First up on a likely Trump trade agenda could be completion of the Section 301 investigation begun by President Biden’s U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai into illegal or unfair Chinese subsidies, and the economic harm to America’s economy that result.
Expect President Trump to also maintain a dialogue with Chinese President Xi Jinping, as both sides recognize the U.S.-China relationship is the most important bilateral relationship in the world. Former President Trump likes the limelight and making deals, and he is unlikely to miss the chance to command the world’s attention by engaging in high-stakes diplomacy.
Mr. Trump has said that if he wins the 2024 presidential election, he will raise tariffs across the board by 10%. If the White House could find a way to do this under current presidential authorities, such an action would most certainly fuel inflation, spur painful retaliation by countries that import U.S. goods, and set back progress made in the vital U.S.-European Union (EU) relationship. If Mr. Trump is re-elected it is also more likely that he will reactivate the Section 301 investigation of China’s subsidies, with the goal of adding more items to the 2017 and 2018 list of Chinese products subject to higher tariffs. His trade policy will likely be determined more by transactional factors and trade imbalances than by ideological differences or even traditional security considerations.
Though 2024 is a presidential election year, policymakers in Washington realize the threats emanating from China have not abated and are not dependent on the U.S. political calendar. This presents an opportunity to build on the overwhelming bipartisan consensus on the nature of the China threat in order to find common solutions and expand cooperation with allies. Members of Congress and other policymakers would thus be smart to focus on building productive, consensus-based measures that promote military, economic, and diplomatic strength in our relationship with China, while avoiding actions that destabilize an already unstable world order currently coping with challenging economic conditions and the ramifications of at least two major hot wars.
Andy Keiser is a Senior Advisor, and James Kitfield a Senior Fellow, at CSPC.
U.S. Navy is missing the point with new recruiting incentives
Ethan Brown
In an effort to overcome flagging recruitments over the last two annual cycles, the U.S. Navy has taken steps to dramatically expand its recruiter base… but not exactly, literally, or effectively.
In an attempt to garner new recruits, the Navy has made recent revisions to the “every sailor is a recruiter” initiative, (which actually began in 2022). Briefly, the initiative provides sailors with the opportunity to earn up to two flag letters of Commendation–essentially the most ostentatious versions of getting a sticker–a luxury which provides one weighted promotion point (per letter, maximum of two total) to be applied in the sailors next board for each sailor-referred candidate who enlists. The new roll-out of capabilities for the Navy’s 343,000~ sailors is the e-Toolbox which is, simply, a digitized version of a recruiter’s office.
Cynically, it is similar enough to remind one of Great Britain’s World War I “Pals Brigades,” where you could sign up as a group of friends and ensure that you could all serve together. Junior enlisted aren’t going to be handing out QR codes to stuffy recruiting materials on their weekends, liberty leave, or downtime. Mid-career enlisted and officers are too busy being the literal backbone of the military to do anything more than the already-incredible and increasing demands placed on them by their service. And Senior leaders… Well, this e-Toolbox expansion pack was their idea of addressing the recruiting crisis… an initiative which fails to address the comprehensive problems facing the U.S. military’s efforts to bring in the next generation of all-volunteer service members (by the way, I’ve explained in detail what those comprehensive problems are).
Sailors in today’s Navy (read: the entire U.S. military writ large) are already overworked, so the likelihood that a service member is going to sacrifice personal or recovery time to go out and actively recruit new Sailors is, to be succinct, highly unlikely. The “Every Sailor” initiative hasn’t borne positive fruit either, exhibited by the fact that the Navy was 7,000+ recruits short of its 2023 recruiting goals. Much like the rest of the service branches came in below their target thresholds; save the Marines and Space Force, who met goals but for very particular reasons like the former lowering said targets at the 11th hour or the Space Force only needing a few hundred recruits which it can and often does poach from the other services.
Examining the new e-Toolbox in detail brings up multiple concerning issues with how the service is trying to double-down on this initiative. First, it fails to address what is arguably the most difficult component to the military’s recruiting problem: making national service more compelling than opportunities in the civilian marketplace, in an economy which has been in slow, but steady recovery since we emerged from the COVID-19 pandemic. There are a lot of poster-links to cool Navy jobs (with some patently cringey stock photos depicting as much, and of course Special Warfare and pilots have the only moderately enticing pictures), but none of these jobs are explained. What exactly does a “Nuclear Propulsion Officer Candidate” do, and how can an ambitious “Every Sailor” convey such technical content to a curious listener who happened to click on their provided link?
This column does not aim to strictly criticize the initiative or the fact that the Navy is exploring all options to its recruiting problems (although the e-Toolbox is, at best, a super-reddit for promotional material and little more). Rather, this analysis aims to point to the underlying problem, and the point which the Navy, like its sister services, is missing: young Americans simply do not see the use-value, long-term benefits, or feel the same compulsion to serve this country as previous generations. Much of this is owed to our wayward grand strategy and policies which drug American’s through two decades of endless wars under the GWOT banner (and its myriad name changes: Enduring/Iraqi Freedom, New Dawn, Inherent Resolve, Resolute Support, Freedom’s Sentinel, and the list goes on into some obscurity). More still is owed to the care and treatment of veterans in their post-service life cycle and the emerging recognition of the health risks incumbent with service, flawed transition programs resulting in ineffectual reintegration procedures for veterans entering the civilian supra-system, post-service stigma (better expressed as “mission injury”), and the fact that fewer Americans know someone who has served, and fewer still know veterans who would recommend military service to younger generations.
The Navy, and the DoD as a whole, can’t keep putting band-aids on the broken bone of its recruiting problems. Expecting it’s already over-tasked and thinly-stretched personnel to take on the highly technical, nuanced, and unique challenge of being a recruiter while thinking that paltry promotion points will turn up the initiative, is a narrow-minded approach to a very broad, complex, and compounding problem.
Ethan Brown is a Senior Fellow at CSPC and author of the “Visual Friendlies, Tally Target” trilogy of books on air power in the Global War on Terror.
NEWS YOU MAY HAVE MISSED
Spain Plans to Recognize Palestinian Statehood
By Greyson Hunziker
While on a trip visiting Jordan, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez announced this week that Spain will recognize Palestinian statehood. There has been widespread global support for a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine for decades, including from many members of the European Union (E.U.), though the union as an organization lacks an official position on the matter. With little progress towards a two-state solution for many years, Spain sees recognition as the next logical step to advance the cause, hoping other E.U. members will follow suit.
If Spain follows through it would be the second E.U. country to recognize Palestine after Sweden. While other states are open to recognition, they are hesitant to do so unilaterally or without some kind of broader support. German officials, for example, have stated that they would need the position to be part of an Israeli and Palestinian-backed two-state solution. Spain’s announcement comes amid increasing civilian casualties and an intensifying humanitarian crisis in Palestine due to the Israel-Hamas war.
U.S.-Mexico Cooperation on Semiconductors
By Greyson Hunziker
The U.S. State Department announced a new partnership with Mexico to explore semiconductor supply chain opportunities late last week. The initiative will begin with work with Mexican state governments and research institutions, as well as with the Mexican Secretariat of the Economy, to assess Mexico’s workforce, infrastructure, and regulatory framework. The partnership falls under the $500 million International Technology Security and Innovation Fund (ITSI) created by the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022. ITSI aims to “to promote…trustworthy telecommunications networks and ensure semiconductor supply chain security and diversification through new programs and initiatives with our allies and partners.” The CHIPS Act also provided tens of billions of dollars for research and development, manufacturing, and incentives for American semiconductor capabilities.
Mexico has tremendous potential in the semiconductor sector, and the cooperative initiative presents a major opportunity for economic growth there. Cooperation also has the potential of added security for the U.S. supply chain by diversifying away from the other major semiconductor producers such as China and Taiwan. The announcement follows the North American Semiconductor Conference in 2023 hosted by the Semiconductor Industry Association and Arizona State University, at which the United States, Mexico, and Canada committed to growing the North American semiconductor ecosystem.
Greyson is a student intern at CSPC.