Friday News Roundup — February 17, 2023
What’s the limit? That is our question of the week. In theory, every person has a limit. Certainly, every system has one. The U.S. government reached its debt limit ($31.4 trillion) on January 19. Since then, the U.S. Department of Treasury has been using “extraordinary measures” to keep expenditures under that limit. The Congressional Budget Office forecasted this week that these measures will reach their limit between July and September of this year. Raising the debt limit is a small problem for Congress compared to the task of reducing the federal deficit, which is near 100% of GDP and growing.
Moscow does not presently appear to have a limit on the carnage and suffering it is willing to inflict on the Ukrainian people — or on Russia itself. Here in the United States, the public generally supports U.S. efforts to help Ukraine defend itself, but recent polling showed there are limits to this support: support for arming Ukraine has dropped from 60% to 48% since May 2022. Today at the Munich Security Conference Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy asked Western defense ministers and diplomats to accelerate delivery of military and humanitarian aid to Ukraine. French President Emmanuel Macron echoed Zelenskyy’s call for increased support for Ukraine, saying, “The time is not for dialogue with Russia.” The Biden Administration sent Vice President Kamala Harris and Secretary of State Antony Blinken to Munich; Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer leads a bipartisan delegation of 30 senators at the conference.
There is a limit to the information the U.S. government has been able or willing to share on the origins of the mysterious objects it shot down over South Carolina, Lake Huron, the Yukon, and the Alaskan Arctic coast. Two White House press conferences including one by President Biden on February 16 have left reporters with many unanswered questions. This is because authorities are still searching for or analyzing debris, and/or it could be due to the need to protect national security secrets. Either way, this limited information has infuriated many observers within the general public and has created an opportunity for professional critics to accuse the Administration of a cover-up (or of over-reacting — take your pick).
Google and Microsoft launched AI bots to compete with ChatGPT (which Dan Mahaffee interviewed in the January 27 Roundup), prompting futurists to ask, “what will be the limits of AI in terms of its role in society and its ability to think for itself?” Thinking for ourselves is an underappreciated privilege — and a duty. It is a privilege because there are places like Moldova where Russia appears to be trying to exert control over its democratic system, as Gracie Jaime reports in this week’s roundup. It is a duty because citizens need to ask questions of their government, their politicians, and their media sources, in order to separate fiction from fact. This ability to think for ourselves — and to demand truth, transparency, and accountability — is essential to the strength of a democratic society. Without it, we limit ourselves and our nation’s potential.
This week the Diplomatic Courier published Joshua C. Huminski’s–the Director of the Mike Rogers Center for Intelligence & Global Affairs–review of “We Are All Targets” by Matt Potter. A Hunter S. Thompson meets Dr. Robot look at the origins of cyber war, Potter argues that to better understand the concept, one needs to look at the subject from bottom-up, rather than from the top down.
The Hill ran an OpEd by Veera Parko and former UK deputy national security advisor Beth Sizeland on national preparedness, especially on what an average family can do to prepare for a crisis or an emergency. In this week’s Roundup, Veera provides an update on Sweden and Finland’s steps toward NATO membership, Robert Gerber urges U.S. and EU negotiators to double down on clean tech trade, Ethan Brown looks at the challenges the U.S. military faces in transitioning to unmanned aircraft, and Hidetoshi Azuma revisits Japan’s lingering strategic ambiguity toward Russia ahead of the G7 summit in Hiroshima in May. We close with News You May Have Missed.
Clean Tech Trade Can Bridge the U.S.-EU Divide
Robert Gerber
The United States and EU are each other’s most important trading partners. And yet, there seems to always be a major trade irritant between these two powerful “cousins.” In 2021, U.S. officials registered “serious concerns” about new EU rules (which are now law) regulating digital platforms. And recently, European governments have reacted with great alarm to the tax breaks for U.S. clean energy manufacturing in the Inflation Reduction Act. But leaders really need to take a more dispassionate view. The EU is also subsidizing green energy industries, and some European officials have acknowledged they are pleased to see the United States focus on meeting its Paris climate change goals. At least the IRA has had the benefit of getting these two trade behemoths to talk to one another in earnest about Clean Energy Technology trade and investment. We need to double down on this sectoral dialogue, because Clean Energy Tech can be a means to bridge the U.S.-EU divide.
Clean Energy Tech or Green Tech could be a sizable area of growth for both Europe and the United States: both the EU and the United States have competitive advantages in this field; companies on both sides of the Atlantic are producing breakthroughs in areas like carbon capture, improved battery performance, battery recycling, sustainable aviation fuels, and other novel technologies. But companies need economies of scale and the right enabling environment to flourish, and here’s where governments come into play. Governments can fund R&D, they can provide market access by eliminating duties on green tech products, they can collaborate on standards and “conformity assessment” so companies can sell the same product in more than one market and avoid duplicative testing. If the United States and the EU work together to create green tech standards, and those become global standards, it helps us in the broader geotech competition with authoritarian China. The U.S.-EU Trade and Technology Council (TTC) has made some progress in this area — creating an agreement on EV charging technologies and setting up a taskforce to address EU complaints about the IRA. But at the Washington International Trade Conference this week, industry representatives said the TTC was not ambitious enough. One representative of a technology association called for eliminating “innovation stifling policies” and for better stakeholder engagement. TTC negotiators declared in December 2022 their intent to launch a new Transatlantic Initiative for Sustainable Trade “to advance our shared objective of achieving a green and sustainable future.” Assistant U.S. Trade Representative Kelly Milton told the Washington DC trade conference audience that USTR has backed a multilateral Environmental Goods and Services Agreement (negotiations appear to be on hold). The United States and EU should properly resource efforts like these. What we don’t need is another forum that doesn’t meet expectations. The benefits are clear — a growing and linked transatlantic ecosystem (Japan and South Korea are natural partners as well) for green tech trade is healthy for our shared economic prosperity, our energy security, and for safeguarding the environment.
We should be able to collaborate and compete with Europe at the same time. Competition on a level playing field is good for both teams. And we need to coordinate our approaches to subsidies. Sweden’s Ambassador to the United States Karin Olofsdottir said on February 15 “we can’t afford a rift…or a race to the bottom on subsidies.” Industrial policy has its shortcomings — it can be an inefficient way to allocate economic resources. But there is an argument to be made for jump-starting our domestic capacity for green tech manufacturing, just as we did with space tech, nuclear power, and our transportation network — especially when subsidized Chinese solar panels and raw materials processing dominate world markets. The key here is to ensure our allies can join our supply chains, not be excluded from them, and that governments allow innovation to flourish.
Russia Accused of Trying to Overthrow Moldova’s Government
Gracie Jaime
On February 13, Moldovan President Maia Sandu held a news conference to warn about Russia’s plan to overthrow the country’s democratic systems. The news came after Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had warned European Union leaders that he had obtained documents from Russian intelligence that indicate a plot to take over Moldova’s leadership. Sandu stated, “The purpose of these actions is to overthrow the constitutional order, to change the legitimate power from Chișinău to an illegitimate one that would put our country at Russia’s disposal to stop the European integration process, but also so that Moldova can be used by Russia in its war against Ukraine.” A part of the plan involved citizens of Russia, Montenegro, Belarus, and Serbia with military training partnering with local crime groups to exploit protests and attack government buildings.
This news follows the resignation of Moldovan Prime Minister Natalia Gavrilita on February 10. Gavrilita resigned amid an economy suffering from the results of the war in Ukraine — power cuts, a rise in inflation, and large numbers of refugees. The Transnistria region of Moldova remains under Russian control. Tensions rose in the past week as a Russian cruise missile passed through Moldova’s airspace, and there were reports of a surveillance balloon over Moldova, which caused the government to briefly close its airspace.
Sandu has nominated economist and former interior minister Dorin Recean as Gavrilita’s replacement. Recean said on Twitter, “As Moldova’s PM-designate, I vow to steer our nation towards EU accession and to contribute to regional security in the face of ongoing geopolitical difficulties. Moldova is committed to progress and reforms. Together, we forge ahead towards a prosperous and secure future.” Moldova had moved closer to Europe under Prime Minister Gavrilita: the EU offered Moldova candidate status in June 2022, and Moldova also works with NATO on various issues including contributing troops to NATO operations in Kosovo.
White House Spokesman John Kirby said the reports of a planned Russian-initiated coup in Moldova were “deeply concerning” and “certainly not outside the bounds of Russian behavior.” A Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson denied the allegations: “We strongly reject the insinuations about Russia’s alleged desire to destabilize the situation in Moldova…Unlike Western countries and Ukraine, we do not interfere in the domestic affairs of Moldova or any other country.”
Drones Won’t Offset Manpower Shortages or Unclear Strategic Vectors
Ethan Brown
Air Force Chief of Staff General “CQ” Brown made comments this week on future Air Force budget-building, stating that the force is “getting down the path to have much more capability for uncrewed aircraft. I think you’ll see as we start looking at our future budgets and the analysis we’re doing as part of the operational imperatives that we are committed to more uncrewed capability.”
The big pivot to uncrewed systems has dominated much of the defense posturing in recent years, made far more prevalent by service-branch strategy. The headliner for this endeavor is the Next-Generation Air Dominance platform, or “NGAD”, colloquially the 6th-generation fighter platform. In an era where flying hours are decreasing, the maintenance life-cycles for man and machine in the air domain are increasingly constrained (and still impacted by COVIDs repression of global supply chains as well as semiconductor shortages), the apparent solution is to emphasize the employment of unmanned technology integrated through multi-domain systems.
There is an inherent and predominant risk underlying this initiative. And it’s as simple as an inventory shortage of the nation’s most valuable asset — humans who are capable of piloting these advanced systems into combat. And of course, neither the Air Force nor the Navy are omitting the critical role of humans operating this advance flying death machines in favor of a wholly unmanned fleet, but there is a calculus which drives these strategic endeavors: there are not enough pilots to take up the charge of defending our skies, and the national defense enterprise needs to offset this shortage somehow, and it plans on asking machines to fill the gap.
This issue has been endemic to both the Air Force and Navy for years, and even the COVID-induced job shortages and limited mobility of separating pilots was hardly curtailed during the pandemic. The Navy has a brighter outlook than does the Aer Vis, predicting an end to its pilot shortage this year. Perhaps the release of “Top Gun: Maverick” has something to do with that (although that movie was thrilling to watch, it was rife with technical errors — 5th-gen fighters do not carry that much cannon ammo for one thing, and the whole APU-startup scene in the bunker was missing critical pre-flight checks for the geriatric F-14C). But the stark reality is no amount of short-term recruiting gimmicks will fix the DoDs terrible retention issue.
Retention and manpower shortages are one aspect of this readiness issue, the next step in this shift-to-unmanned strategy hinges on another key pillar of defense strategy: getting the All-Domain network ready to support these unmanned platforms when the next fight happens. The Army’s contribution to the Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2) initiative — Project Convergence — will skip 2023 for its annual readiness exercise as the collaborative systems are not yet ready to evolve iteratively for Army requirements. The Navy, meanwhile, is still focusing on connecting maritime vessels and its organic drone fleets, which is an important step forward in developing a functional cross-platform network of data sharing and integration, but has made limited progress in a Navy system which fuses with Army and Air Force systems. The Air Force sees this push to increase its unmanned platforms as a key nexus in advancing JADC2, and has been at the forefront of ADO-systems development for years. But with the shortage of 5th-gen platforms availability due to safety issues and subsequent grounding as more risks emerge, the likelihood of new and yet untested remote-controlled and AI-driven systems isn’t going to suddenly reverse course on this critical readiness shortfall.
Two key issues undermine this push — the stark loss of humans capable of driving the most advanced weapons ever developed, and a lack of cohesive strategy to vector the future command and control networks towards a service-agnostic solution. The latter issue is crucial, and another item which General Brown identified in his remarks: “get the data, put it into a cloud and then be able to access the data through applications and not do it service by service by service. [Do it] So we don’t have an Air Force Kill Chain, or have a Navy kill chain, a Marine Corps kill chain, [and an] Army kill chain.”
Notably, the CSAF pointed to Space Force having an absolutely critical role in this ‘fight’, understanding that the data sharing, the very networks of hardware upon which the DoD will rely, rests with the department’s youngest service. Fortunately, that service has met recruiting goals for 2022, but those are woefully low compared to the needs of the big four, whose numbers and manning requirements are the single-greatest risk to meeting readiness demands.
The role of unmanned assets and interconnected systems will be the inevitability of the defense enterprise in the near future, as the span of security concerns abroad is simply too great for the human inventory to manage alone. But in order to make functional unmanned systems a useful reality, the need to address and correct the shortfalls of the manned-force is critical, as is the network of systems upon which these future initiatives will rely.
Finland, Sweden and NATO — the latest
Veera Parko
The saga of Finland and Sweden´s bids to join NATO appears to have, again, taken a slight turn. However, it is hard to tell in which direction.
This week, Finnish politicians have been busy finalizing national legislation on joining NATO before national parliamentary elections in April. On February 17, the Finnish Parliament issued a report on Finland’s accession to NATO, and will most probably vote on national legislation necessary for NATO membership on February 28. After this, the President Niinistö will finalize the process by signing the legislation. Finland will then be ready to join, only pending ratification by Hungary and Türkiye. In Munich on Friday, President Niinistö stated that Finland and Sweden have a “common understanding” about both countries joining NATO as soon as possible. The rest, he said, is entirely in Türkiye’s hands. “Türkiye has its own understanding of the situation and the way forward.”
Sweden is also finalizing its own legislative process on membership. Meanwhile, the possibility for Finland to proceed to full membership without Sweden has been floated around both in international media and Finnish and Swedish national discussions, since Türkiye’s resistance seems to continue to be focused on Sweden. On February 15, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg´s comments were interpreted by many to mean that Finland could possibly join the Alliance first, if Türkiye keeps refusing to ratify Sweden´s membership. “It is for Türkiye to decide whether they ratify both — and I recommend that — or whether they ratify only one of the documents — that’s not a NATO decision, it’s a decision by Turkiye”, he said.
Stoltenberg´s comments have ignited speculation about what might happen if Türkiye and Hungary — the only two outstanding NATO members — ratify Finland´s but not Sweden’s accession. In a meeting with the Turkish Foreign Minister on February 16, Stoltenberg urged Erdogan´s government to ratify Finnish and Swedish bids, adding that the two countries had “delivered” everything they pledged to do in the trilateral Memorandum of Understanding signed in Madrid’s NATO summit last year.
Stoltenberg has also emphasized that NATO’s main goal is for Finland and Sweden to become full members as soon as possible, not on who will be joining first. Finland and Sweden have both made clear that their preference is to join at the same time and by the NATO summit in Lithuania in July. However, some analysts, especially in Finland, have argued that Finland joining a couple of months ahead of Sweden would not be the end of the world. Swedish discussion has, understandably, been more concerned about the repercussions of such a solution.
Whatever happens, the next weeks and months will be exciting times for those interested in Finland and Sweden’s path to NATO. Diplomacy behind the scenes will be intense, for sure. One can only hope the saga will continue with a NATO reinforced with two members by summer. By the way, at the Munich Security Conference this weekend, Finland and Sweden will receive this year’s Kleist Award for applying for NATO membership as a response to Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Neither Beast nor Bird: Japan’s Crippling Strategic Ambiguity toward Russia
Hidetoshi Azuma
As the first anniversary of Moscow’s expanded invasion of Ukraine fast approaches later this month, expectations soared high for a fundamental shift in Japan’s Russia policy as the Japanese prime minister Fumio Kishida appeared at the annual National Rally to Demand the Return of the Northern Territories on February 7. Yet, he effectively defied such expectations by reaffirming his resolve for patient engagement with the Kremlin toward the resolution of the lingering territorial dispute over the four southern Kuril islands and the ultimate signing of a peace treaty. Moreover, the Japanese prime minister reiterated the following day his commitment to the 1956 Soviet-Japanese Joint Declaration as agreed between the Russian president Vladimir Putin and the slain former prime minister Shinzo Abe. The significance of Kishida’s successive remarks on Russia was that he had essentially reneged on his own declared policy of confrontation in exchange for perpetuating his predecessor’s questionable legacy of rapprochement with Moscow. In fact, this was no surprise as strategic ambiguity had long colored his Russia policy since his tenure began in October 2021, culminating in his de facto aborted visit to Ukraine in January immediately followed by his aforementioned statements earlier this month. Kishida’s dubious balancing act with Russia could ironically threaten his own agenda of positioning Japan as a preeminent world leader of democratic countries ahead of the Group of Seven (G7) summit in his hometown of Hiroshima in May.
Kishida’s strategic ambiguity toward Russia has long been in the making. Despite hailing from the classical liberal, pro-US Kochikai faction of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), he has done little to effect fundamental changes to his predecessor’s policy of rapprochement apart from rhetorical criticism of Putin’s war of aggression in Ukraine and obligatory economic sanctions. Indeed, he has consistently sought a diplomatic breakthrough with Russia toward peace by preserving all of Abe’s various questionable legacies ranging from commitment to the 1956 Joint Declaration to even the ministerial post devoted to economic cooperation with the Kremlin while simultaneously seeking to confront Japan’s northern neighbor. This contradictory formula immediately reached its inevitable limits when Moscow began to weaponize its energy exports ahead of the 2022 winter. This led Tokyo to desperately seek to secure its oil and gas stakes in Sakhalin even in defiance of the accelerating G7 decoupling from Russian energy. In other words, Japan found itself effectively ensnared by Putin’s geostrategic power play with its neck choked by the proverbial rope with which to hang his enemies.
As a result, Moscow has successfully gained leverage over America’s most important ally in the Indo-Pacific, if not the entire world. While the growing focus of the US-Japan alliance these days is inevitably China’s looming aggression over Taiwan, Russia has steadily been driving a wedge in the bilateral relationship and the G7 unity. For example, Japan’s energy quandary over Sakhalin even forced Washington to exempt its Asian ally from the price cap mandate against Russian energy last year. This allowed Japan to continue to import Russian oil and gas from Sakhalin, pouring billions of dollars into the Kremlin’s war chest. In other words, Japan has emerged as the only G7 country to fund Putin’s war in Ukraine. This is no recipe for leading the world’s democratic solidarity against Russia. Indeed, Kishida himself de facto had his planned visit to Kyiv aborted by allowing his travel information to be leaked to the media. This was essentially his attempt to save his own face as the host for the upcoming G7 summit in his hometown of Hiroshima without upsetting the Kremlin. While his action itself did not disrupt the continuous flow of oil and gas from Sakhalin, it has done irreparable damage to Japan’s place among the world’s democracies.
Given the absence of a peace treaty resolving WWII in the Far East, Kishida’s strategic ambiguity may appear enigmatic, but is in fact a product of Russia’s decades-long influence operations on Japan. The shrewdness of Moscow’s influence operations is to be found in its singular focus on utilitarian approaches to Japan dating even from the 1950s. In other words, Moscow essentially removed politics from the equation, allowing economic engagement to drive the bilateral relationship. This signified the proliferation of special interests headed by pro-Russian politicians in Japan. For example, the Upper House lawmaker Muneo Suzuki epitomizes such a politician with entrenched economic interests in Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost prefecture directly facing the Russian Far East. Suzuki is notorious for his suspicious Kremlin connections, including Putin himself as well as many suspected intelligence operatives in Tokyo, such as the known SVR chief in Tokyo, Boris Smirnov. Backed by various special interests and even the Kremlin, Suzuki achieved a meteoric rise to Abe’s unofficial adviser on Russia, despite his convicted past. Suzuki is merely the tip of the iceberg of Japan’s pro-Russian elements with special interests, including even the national rally Kishida attended earlier this month. The significance of their presence is that it effectively constrains the Japanese prime minister’s perspective on Russia due to their influence on the LDP’s electability.
Yet, while Kishida may be just another Japanese prime minister constrained by domestic pro-Russian elements, the cold truth is that he is now a wartime leader tasked to lead the global democratic solidarity against Russia. Indeed, Japan and Russia are still de facto at war absent a peace treaty officially ending WWII for the two countries. In this respect, Ukraine’s troubled fate should resonate mostly closely with Japan among the world’s democracies. Yet, his continued failure to recognize his own newfound reality raises eyebrows on Tokyo’s ability to meet its various geopolitical challenges, including a potential Taiwan contingency. In fact, the common thread running through Kishida’s approaches to politics is superficiality. To be sure, he has declared to confront Russia and backed his words with economic sanctions. Yet, he has effectively reneged on his own promises by perpetuating Abe’s legacy policy of rapprochement with Russia, even threatening the G7 solidarity against Moscow’s aggression in Ukraine. Likewise, despite its vehement rhetoric, Kishida’s new national security strategy hardly addresses the obvious threat of Russia in the Far East even after the revelation of the Kremlin’s aborted plan to invade Hokkaido. Such divergences between rhetoric and action raises serious questions as to Tokyo’s ability to steer Japan’s course amid the ongoing great power competition.
Kishida’s lingering strategic ambiguity toward Russia is not just a problem of his leadership but also of geopolitical significance overshadowing the fate of democracies around the world. While his abiding concern may be the preservation of his own power at home by holding the line until the successful conclusion of the G7 summit in Hiroshima, geopolitics demands him to squarely face off Russia as it continues its predatory aggression in Ukraine and is now even eying Moldova for its next victim. After all, Japan is ultimately at war with Russia and shares its fate with Ukraine and other peripheral countries vulnerable to Moscow’s perennial expansionism. In this sense, Kishida’s present imperative is to prepare Japan for war, not peace, with Russia as a potential second front of the ongoing war in Ukraine. Failure to do so would mark the nadir of Japan’s foreign policy with future historians likely remembering him as the proverbial bat succumbing to its own irresolution between the beasts and the birds.
News You May Have Missed
Russia Reaches Agreement with Sudan Military
On February 11, the Sudanese Army announced that they reached an agreement with Russia to install a Russian naval base on the Red Sea in exchange for Russia giving weapons and training to the Sudanese military. The Red Sea has been the site of renewed naval interest — China installed a military base in Djibouti in 2017 and has announced a $1 billion deal to build a spaceport within the African country last month. The deal must be ratified by Sudan’s legislature which has not yet been re-formed since a coup in 2019.
Ethiopian Social Media Blocked In Wake of Church Schism
On February 10, Ethiopia blocked social media in response to anti-government protests that started from a schism in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. The ban includes apps like TikTok, Facebook, and Telegram. In January, church leaders in the regional state of Oromia convened a synod in favor of the practice of their faith in the regional language, Oromo. Participating clergy in the regional state were excommunicated by the Church and violent rallies in Oromia and Addis Ababa took place. Ethiopia is fraught with regional tensions since the ceasefire of the Tigray War in November of 2022.
Pakistan Implements Austerity Measures For IMF Loans
On February 13, Pakistan announced that it will increase taxes in order to obtain IMF funding to prevent economic disaster. Pakistan is dealing with a spiraling inflation crisis and is still recovering from the aftermath of 2022 floods that claimed the lives of about 1,500 Pakistanis. There is deep political turmoil in the country from a recent escalation of terror attacks and growing foreign debt, some of which is owed to China for Belt and Road Initiative projects. President Imran Khan said Pakistan’s debt problems could spell disaster like Sri Lanka’s debt crisis in May of 2022.