FRIDAY NEWS ROUNDUP — DECEMBER 4, 2020
Stand with Australia, What’s Next with Iran, and News You May Have Missed
A good morning to you on a crisp Friday morning in Washington, D.C. Despite the chill in the air, it appears that there is some thawing in Covid relief negotiations on Capitol Hill. This comes as the disease numbers continue to spike in the long-dreaded winter wave, and the voices of small business owners and economic titans clamor alike for further aid. Meanwhile, at the White House, President Trump has continued to double down on his unproven allegations about the 2020 election, focusing on legal strategies that have so far been thrown out of court. In his tweets and a 46-minute address released by the White House on Wednesday, the president has delegitimized the 2020 election, casted doubt on our electoral processes, and mocked calls to cool heated rhetoric as the lives of election workers are threatened. While our institutions have held, we must ask ourselves what damage is being done as conspiracy theories proliferate and narratives of grievance are crafted.
While our current politics can be dispiriting, our Presidential Fellows and the careers they pursue in public service are a bright point of our work. This week, we’d like to highlight the excellent work of CSPC Fellows alum Christian Bale, of the 2013–14 fellows class from the College of William and Mary, whose analysis of presidential spending authorities was just published in the Duke Law Review.
CSPC Senior Advisor Andy Keiser also followed up to his earlier work on semiconductor security with this precis on how the Biden administration could address the security threat of our reliance on China and their programs to copy, steal, and surpass U.S. tech players.
In the Diplomatic Courier, Joshua reviewed Lionel Barber’s The Powerful and the Damned, his personal memoir of 2005–2020 covering time spent as editor of The Financial Times.
In this week’s roundup, Dan addresses China’s actions against our Australian allies and calls for democracies to stand together. Joshua and Michael cover the at the assassination of key Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, with Joshua breaking down operation while Michael looks at the looming challenge of Iran policy for the Biden administration. As always, we wrap with news you may have missed.
Stand with Australia
Dan Mahaffee
While most of us have been focused on the unfolding aftermath of the 2020 election, our friends in Australia are in an economic and diplomatic struggle with the Chinese regime. This struggle reveals the true nature of the Chinese regime and its view of other nations — and the United States needs to stand firmly with one of its closest allies.
Throughout 2020, tensions have been steadily rising between Beijing and Canberra. Like many nations, Australia has called for an investigation into the initial handling of the Covid-19 outbreak. The Australian government has also been a stalwart in blacklisting Chinese telecom providers — banning Huawei and ZTE since 2018. Australia is a long-time ally, and it is among the most capable of the U.S.’s military and intelligence partners, while also increasingly integrating the fellow “Quad” members Japan and India. Recent investigations and scandals in Australia have uncovered the depth and perniciousness of Chinese influence in the country, ranging from the nexus of gambling and money laundering to campus speech to a plot to install a Chinese asset as a Member of Parliament.
Throughout 2020, China has gradually ratcheted up the pressure on Australia, focusing largely on economic leverage — China is Australia’s largest trading partner. Chinese tariffs have been hiked on key exports like wine, beef, barely, and sorghum. In the case of wine, these tariffs are up to 212%.
While effectively shutting off Australia from key Chinese markets, Chinese diplomats have begun a war of words. In early November, the Chinese embassy in Canberra leaked to the media a list of 14 grievances, stating that “China is angry. If you make China the enemy, China will be the enemy.” These listed “grievances” included government funding for Australian think tanks researching China, decisions to block Chinese investment in strategic sectors of the Australian economy, the aforementioned 5G security measures, and a range of other policies from visas for Chinese students to Australian actions in multilateral fora addressing the status of Taiwan and abuses in Xinjiang and Hong Kong.
The war of words truly hit its nadir over the past week, as Chinese “wolf warrior diplomat” Zhao Lijian tweeted a doctored image of an Australian service member threatening an Afghan child — a reference to a recent scandal involving Australian forces in that conflict. Beijing refused to remove the tweet — as did Twitter — while Australian Prime Minister Morrison’s response on the Chinese social media site WeChat was promptly blocked.
What is laid bare by all of this is both the hypocrisy of the Chinese regime and the weaponization of its economic power. The grievances of the Chinese embassy present Australia with the choice of trade with China at the expense of an independent foreign policy, basic sovereignty, and open civil society. In spreading rank disinformation, Chinese diplomats threaten the security of ongoing, UN-backed international stability operations, as they try to equate abuses in counterterrorism operations to their wholesale genocide of ethnic minorities. Chinese censors can block and censor all the statements they wish, but they cannot deny the truth. The difference between our systems is clear — after all, any Australians who abuse human rights face investigation and courts martial, in China, they likely get a promotion.
For Washington and the incoming Biden administration, this Chinese behavior demonstrates the need to forcefully stand with our allies and present a common front to Chinese bullying. The Trump administration official National Security Council twitter account voiced one way of supporting Australia, while President-elect Biden’s National Security Advisor tweeted a more conventional statement.
While buying Australian goods to replace lost Chinese demand is one measure, the response of the government should be more than just asking Americans to change their holiday beverages. At the same time, while it is understandable that an incoming administration might not want to add to tensions with China, Mr. Sullivan’s words of support for Australia only go so far when he fails to specify why: Beijing’s bullying.
While we must find avenues of coexistence and cooperation with Beijing, values are non-negotiable. Rather than letting the Chinese prey on our partners, we should seek joint strategies to reduce our dependence on China and present a common front on matters of human rights, national security, and technology standards.
In many ways, the 14 grievances from the Chinese diplomats tell us exactly what governments should be doing: thoroughly reviewing Chinese investment deals, strategically securing supply chains, investing in think tank research on China, shining light on Chinese influence campaigns, and setting harmonized policies for engagement with China, grounded on reciprocity shown by Beijing. Common policies in areas such as sensitive intellectual property, student visas in sensitive fields, 5G network security, and supply chain security would be a powerful signal to Beijing that its current approach only inspires us to get tougher.
The true colors of the current Chinese regime are clear in the rhetoric of the wolf warrior diplomats. In this growing global contest of influence, the United States and its allies must stand united.
Iran’s Top Nuclear Scientist Killed Outside Tehran
Joshua Huminski
On 27 November, Iran’s top nuclear scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, was assassinated in Absard, east of Tehran. In an apparent ambush, the man who U.S. and Israeli officials describe as the mastermind of Iran’s nuclear program, was killed as he travelled with his wife and bodyguards. He was buried on Monday, was granted martyr status and given a full state funeral.
How Iran will respond remains unclear. At Fakhrizadeh’s memorial ceremony, Iran’s defense minister, Brig. Gen. Amir Hatami, warned “We chase the criminals to the end.” “No crime, no assassination and no stupid act will go unanswered by the Iranian people. They must know that they will be punished for their actions” Hatami said. For his part President Hassan Rouhani suggested that Iran may hold out until the end of the Trump administration and look to President Biden before acting. Speaking of Trump and Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, Rouhani said, “Their pressure era is coming to an end and the global conditions are changing.”
Following the killing of Major General Qassem Soleimani, the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps Quds Force, in Baghdad earlier this year, Iran launched a salvo of ballistic missiles at an American facility in Iraq. No lives were lost as there was forewarning of the attack. Iran later shot down a Ukrainian Air commercial aircraft it mistook for an American military plane, killing all aboard and possibly blunting their response.
What the assassination means for the incoming Biden administration is unclear (and is dealt with in far greater detail and expertise by Michael, below). In anticipation of a possible kinetic Iranian response, the United States withdrew some staff from its embassy in Baghdad as part of a “de-risking” effort. At least politically, Iran is already responding. The conservative-dominated parliament passed a law authorizing the country to increase its uranium enrichment beyond the levels approved under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action — the Iran nuclear deal — and to suspend international inspections, if sanctions were not removed by February 2021.
Undoubtedly the assassination will put pressure on the incoming Biden administration, but Iran finds itself in a difficult position. Tehran needs the sanctions to be withdrawn to stimulate the economy and consequently needs to be flexible on the nuclear program and attendant concessions, but domestic pressures mean it cannot allow the assassination (let alone the other killings, discussed below) to go without a response. Too much of a response will all but ensure that a nuclear deal will be off the table. Too little may not satisfy the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps or the public.
The assassination of Fakhrizadeh came after news broke that Abdullah Ahmed Abdullah, who went by the nom de guerre Abu Muhammad al-Masri, al-Qa’ida’s number two, was killed in August in Tehran. Allegedly shot by Israeli agents, al-Masri was killed with his wife, the widow of Hamza bin Laden, Osama bin Laden’s son. No country claimed responsibility for the killing and, interestingly, al-Qa’ida never announced al-Masri’s killing. Iran, for its part, was also quiet about the assassination, but this is less surprising as Tehran is unlikely to want to advertise the presence of al-Qa’ida leadership in the country.
Shortly after Fakhrizadeh was killed, another IRGC commander was also killed in a drone strike near the Iraq-Syria border. The killing of Fakhrizadeh, the hit on al-Masri, and the strike on the IRGC commander all reflect poorly on the IRGC itself and the government in Tehran. The IRGC is looking more impotent and less effective and may feel compelled to demonstrate its capabilities in a more visible fashion if nothing else to demonstrate to the Iranian public that it is still a force with which to be reckoned.
That the assassination took place is not surprising. Indeed, it is a logical evolution of the campaign to stall Iran’s nuclear program. Over the last decade there have been numerous attacks against Iran’s nuclear scientists alongside a concerted effort to undermine the program from the equipment and process side e.g. Stuxnet and the centrifuges. While equipment is more easily replaced, personnel and knowledge are not. Nuclear physics is as near to rocket science as possible, and while Fakhrizadeh may have been more of a manager of the program at this stage in his career, his assassination sends a signal to other would-be nuclear scientists and engineers.
How the ambush was carried out is unclear. Initial reports suggested that at least 12 attackers were involved along with a car bomb, which resulted in a firefight with the bodyguards.
Iran’s Fars News Agency — connected to the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps — later alleged that a remote-controlled machine gun, mounted on a pickup truck was used and then self-destructed.
This confusion over what actually happened is likely part of an internal battle between the various ministries within the Iranian government and the IRGC to avoid blame and responsibility for the security failure, and previous failures, as noted above. Neither the intelligence ministry nor the IRGC Intelligence arm want to take responsibility for Fakhrizadeh’s death and almost certainly both are seeking to leverage the crisis to advance their position vis-à-vis the other.
Ali Shamkhani, Secretary of the Supreme National Security Council of Iran told state TV that “This was a very complicated assassination that was carried out remotely with electronic devices.” He added, “We have some clues but surely the ‘Monafeghin’ group was involved and the criminal element behind it is the Zionist regime [Israel] and Mossad.” Monafeghin is a term used by the Iranian government to refer to the Paris-based National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), an umbrella bloc of Iranian opposition groups.
The use of a remotely operated weapons system is certainly not beyond the realm of possibility. Indeed, there are many such systems on the defense market today. These systems are typically used for area-denial, along borders, or other fixed locations where there are fewer variables and precision and timing are not as critical. One would also expect Iran to display the alleged system or parts of the system to accompany the claims. Iran was quick to display what was alleged to be a RQ-170 unmanned aerial vehicle that landed after a malfunction in the country.
Moreover, the margin for error and the countless variables that could go wrong in such a system would suggest that this is more Hollywood than reality. The suggestion of a Michael Bay-esque plot is more likely to be an attempt by Iran to deflect from the fact that there was either a foreign assassination team (or teams) in the country, that there are dissident Iranian groups operating domestically, and in either case that there was a massive security and intelligence failure on the part of the IRGC. This is to say nothing of the fact that it reports suggest Fakhrizadeh exited his bulletproof vehicle at the beginning of the ambush. Had he not done so, he would likely have survived the encounter.
Iran Will Be an Early Challenge for Biden
Michael Stecher
I cannot possibly improve on Joshua’s overview of the context, circumstances, and internal Iranian responses to the assassination of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, one of the most important members of the team that had been working on Iran’s nuclear weapons program. Pundits in the United States speculate that the Trump administration may have given tacit (or even explicit) approval for this Israeli operation and its timing in order to try to bind the hands of the incoming Biden administration. The thinking goes that when Iran retaliates, it will increase the political pressure on the new administration to regard Iran as untrustworthy and violent and make it harder to re-engage diplomatically.
Supporting this hypothesis was the fact that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who has largely controlled the “maximum pressure” portfolio was in Israel — including a visit to a winery in an Israeli settlement in the West Bank — in the days leading up to the attack. This is not just tinfoil hat conspiracy theorizing: Maj. Gen. (ret.) Amos Yadlin, the former chief of Israel’s military intelligence bureau and currently head of one of the leading defense think tanks in the country, not-so-obliquely remarked to an Israeli newspaper that, “apparently Pompeo didn’t come here to drink wine.”
This however does not tell the whole story. There have been a number of attacks in Iran or against Iranian targets undertaken by the United States and Israel this year. In addition to the ones that Joshua mentions, there was also an unexplained explosion at the Nantaz uranium enrichment facility — widely believed to be sabotage by Israeli agents — and numerous strikes against Iranian and Iranian proxy targets in Syria.
The Israeli government has long argued that the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) granted Iran much too favorable terms in exchange for suspending its nuclear program and will point to this as evidence. In this view, the combination of economic sanctions and military pressure in Iraq and Syria is deterring and containing Iran. Intelligence services in Israel and the United States have so thoroughly compromised Iran that they can identify secret, high-value targets related to the nuclear program and large teams can conduct complex operations targeting them. There is no need to grant the Iranian government any relief in exchange for stopping things that outside powers can already prevent.
As incoming National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan pointed out in remarks at the University of Minnesota recently, the Biden team is interested in the status quo ante with Iran in which both countries return to their commitments under the JCPOA and work from there to expand their negotiations beyond just the nuclear issue. Importantly, his comments implied that President-elect Biden will expect Iran to make the first move towards reestablishing compliance and developing a timeline from there.
Initial reports suggest that the Iranian government may not be interested in that sequence, or at least that they will not grant their compliance for free. On Wednesday, the Iranian legislature passed a law that would eliminate the remaining elements of Iran’s participation in the deal, by kicking out inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency and enriching some of its uranium stockpile closer to the level that could be used in a nuclear warhead. According to David Albright, the president of the Institute for Science and International Security, actually enriching the uranium could take six months, assuming that the Iranian government is serious about getting it done quickly, as opposed to merely being a signaling device, and that there are no outside complications like sabotage. Once enriched, that uranium supply could then be turned into weapons-grade levels in about another six months.
This new law, however, does not go into effect until February, making it pretty clear that at least some of this is posturing. The Iranian government very much needs the sanctions relief that it can only get from engaging with the United States, and being mid-breakout would make that engagement virtually impossible. The February date also makes it clear that Iran does not want to be left waiting for the Biden administration to work its way through their priorities at a leisurely pace: they want to be at the very top of the agenda.
This will pose a bandwidth problem for the incoming administration. President-elect Biden worked on the JCPOA when he was vice president, as did incoming Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry, and Jake Sullivan. Secretary of State nominee Tony Blinken was also working at the White House during the negotiations over the deal. All of these policy principals, however, will have a long list of priorities for policymaking and their organizations. Carving out the time to give the kind of attention Iran nuclear negotiations will require will be extremely difficult when the new administration is just getting started. Sub Cabinet-level officials who would do much of the working level interactions will likely not have even been confirmed yet, so there will also be a dearth of officials who can speak credibly on the Biden administration’s policy.
One way to get around this would be appointing a special envoy specifically for the Iran nuclear issue. Such an appointee would not need Senate confirmation and could take up their post with a supporting team immediately. While it is good practice for senior officials to go through Senate confirmation, the post could also be explicitly structured to just fill the gap until the relevant teams at State, Energy, and the White House are filled out. As careful watchers of the game of transition musical chairs can attest, President-elect Biden has a surfeit of highly qualified diplomats as advisors who could be chosen for such a role.
Managing this issue was always going to be a complicated one for the Biden administration. In 2015, Senator Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) published an open letter to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in which he warned Khamenei that an executive agreement like the JCPOA were not really binding on the United States because a future president could amend or suspend it. Khamenei has also recently argued that the United States cannot be trusted to implement sanctions relief, an interesting confluence of opinion. There is a lot of skepticism — on Capitol Hill and in Tehran, not to mention in Jerusalem and Riyadh — that these negotiations are advisable, but there is no doubt that the issue will be among the first challenges for the new administration: the Iranians will make sure of it.
News You May Have Missed
South Korea Passes “BTS Law”: World-Famous K-pop Artists Granted Conscription Deferment
Oscar Bellsolell
At this point in 2020, chances are you are acquainted with the K-Pop phenomenon. The concept is short for Korean pop, an increasingly popular music genre not only in Asia but worldwide. Kim Seok-jin is the oldest member of BTS — arguably the most famous K-pop boy band on the planet — and he is turning 28 today. This is big news in a country where conscription requires all men to interrupt their studies or careers and spend 20 months in military service before they turn that age. Luckily for Mr. Kim, who goes by the stage name Jin, South Korea’s National Assembly has just passed a revision of the country’s Military Service Act. To appreciate their role in elevating the country’s cultural influence worldwide through K-pop, the revised law allows tier-one K-pop artists to apply for a two-year deferment of their military service.
Hungarian MEP Resigns After “Sex Party” Scandal Amid Hypocrisy Accusations
Oscar Bellsolell
Last week, the Brussels police shut down a sex party with 20 men in violation of COVID-19 measures. Reports claimed that attendees to the gathering included several diplomats and a Member of the European Parliament, who allegedly tried to escape fleeing along a drainpipe before being caught by officers. The MEP in question was Jozsef Szajer, one of the founders and veteran members of Fidesz, the national-conservative party that rules in Hungary. Szajer, a close ally to Viktor Orban, was one of the main authors of the country’s existing constitution that defines marriage as a heterosexual institution, and he has played a key role in the passing of numerous legislation in Hungary that marginalizes and promotes hatred against the LGBT community. The MEP, who resigned on Sunday before the scandal was public, claimed in 2011 that he had written much of that constitution on his iPad on the train between the European parliament’s twin bases in Brussels and Strasbourg.
After Mass Protests, French Government to Rewrite Bill Restricting the Filming of Police
Eric Dai
After mounting public pressure and days of protests, French lawmakers have agreed to rewrite a controversial security bill that would have imposed limits on filming police officers. Although it did not ban filming police, the bill criminalized the sharing of police footage with the intention of “physically or mentally harming” officers, a provision that the bill’s critics saw as a way to intimidate bystanders witnessing police activity and shield officers from public accountability. Protests against the bill were fueled by the release of CCTV camera footage from Paris that showed a group of police officers beating an unarmed black man in his music studio for not wearing a face mask. In response to public anger against the bill, Christophe Castaner, the leader of President Macron’s party in the National Assembly, promised that the legislature would create a “completely new” version. He emphasized that it would only be revised, not discarded entirely.
Russia Deploys Air Defense System to Islands Claimed by Japan
Thomas Triedman
Russia announced Tuesday that it had installed a missile defense system on the island of Iterup, territory claimed by both the Russians and the Japanese — a dispute that remains unresolved despite former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s best efforts to compromise with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Iterup is one of the islands in the Southern Kuriles, which extend northeast from Hokkaido to Kamchatka. Ever since the Soviets seized these Kuril Islands at the end of World War II, Japan has been highly sensitive to Russian military developments there. Russia has claimed that this new deployment is “purely defensive” and is a response to Washington’s plans to deploy missiles in the Asia-Pacific region, as the positioning of these new missile defense systems would broaden and strengthen the Russian’s radar field. This deployment, however, will pose a direct threat to US and Japanese aircrafts operating legally in Japanese and international airspace.
The views of authors are their own, and not that of CSPC.