Friday News Roundup — February 23, 2024
This week Washington slept, with the House still in recess and the post-World War II international order that America has underwritten for more than a century trembling.
At the two-year anniversary of Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, exhausted and under-resourced Ukrainian forces suffered a debilitating defeat in Avdiivka, retreating this week before Russian forces after four months of grueling combat to defend the town. Because desperately needed military aid passed overwhelmingly by the U.S. Senate remains bottled up in the House, Ukrainian forces face a dire shortage of artillery, allowing them to fire just one artillery round for every five Russian discharges.
This week President Joe Biden did issue 500 new sanctions against Russia in response to the death in prison of heroic opposition leader Alexei Navalny, the latest in a long line of domestic opponents of President Vladimir Putin to meet an untimely and mysterious death. In announcing the sanctions targeting people connected to Navalny’s imprisonment and Russia’s war machine, Biden called on the House to finally bring the Ukraine aid bill to a vote and send a message to Putin. “History is watching,” he noted. “The failure to support Ukraine at this critical moment will not be forgotten.”
In related news, U.S. intelligence agencies recently told Congress and allies that Moscow may be preparing to launch a nuclear anti-satellite weapon into space this year.
On the eve of the South Carolina primary this weekend, Republican presidential frontrunner and former president Donald Trump continued to urge House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., to reject the support package for Ukraine and Israel. After recently roiling the NATO alliance with his comments suggesting that he would encourage Russia to attack allies who failed to reach the alliance’s spending targets, Trump this week compared his many legal troubles to the persecution of Navalny, who before he died in an Arctic gulag was poisoned with a nerve agent. Also this week, a former Russian helicopter pilot who had earlier defected to Ukraine was shot multiple times and run over by a car in an apparent assassination in Spain.
This week media reports also exposed an eight-year, Chinese cyber hacking campaign that U.S. officials say has targeted government agencies and American companies, as well as allies throughout Asia. The prolonged cyber-attack was reportedly launched by China’s top spy agency, the Ministry of State Security, and it employed private sector companies in China. Besides targeting foreign agencies and companies, the campaign also reportedly spied on Chinese citizens both at home and abroad.
Meanwhile, Israel’s war in Gaza against the Hamas terrorists who launched the devastating October 7, 2023 attack continues to grind on. According to Gaza health officials, more than 29,000 Palestinians have been killed in the fighting in Gaza, and an estimated 1.7 million displaced. This week CIA Director William Burns thus traveled to Paris to meet with senior officials from Israel, Egypt and Qatar in an attempt to reach a cease-fire deal with Hamas that includes the release of more than 100 hostages held in Gaza. Earlier this week U.S. officials vetoed a U.N. Security Council resolution calling for an immediate cease-fire in Gaza, calling it premature.
Decoding Fumio Kishida’s Japan
The Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida strolls with the US President Joe Biden at the White House on January 13, 2023 (Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons)
By Hidetoshi Azuma
The perennial Churchillian epigram of “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma” ironically appears to be the most fitting description of America’s foremost Asian ally today: Japan. Indeed, Japan under the incumbent prime minister Fumio Kishida has accomplished the most consequential transformation in its security normalization in history despite his plummeting popular support. This paradox is palpable in Kishida’s another historic low of a meager 14% support rate as reported by Mainichi Shimbun on February 18 just ahead of his upcoming summit with the US President Joe Biden and his highly-touted address to the joint session of Congress in April. This emerging reality defies the conventional wisdom that a pro-US orientation alone would guarantee popular support by default. In fact, such common sense no longer applies to Kishida’s Japan and requires new thinking on its internal political dynamics.
In fact, Kishida has frequently proven himself to be an iconoclast. His premiership originally emerged as a compromise in October 2021 among competing factions with the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). As a result, he astutely recognized factional dynamics as his own source of power and proceeded to manipulate them for his own advantage. The upshot was the resurgence of his own pro-US mainstream conservative faction, the Kochikai faction. The Kochikai’s sudden resurrection under Kishida was a watershed moment in the LDP’s history because factionalism had previously been virtually non-existent due to the monopolistic status of its key rival, the Seiwakai, since 2001. In other words, Kishida disrupted the internal factional dynamics for the first time in two decades, and the unceremonious demise of the Seiwakai’s former chief, the former prime minister Shinzo Abe, only aided his emerging political strategy.
Simultaneously, Kishida has firmly consolidated himself as Japan’s foremost pro-US politician. His peculiarity is to be found in his subservience to the Biden administration marked by his fawning enthusiasm for implementing whatever comes his way from Washington. For example, Biden publicly revealed, albeit in a Freudian slip, that he had successfully persuaded Kishida to double Japan’s defense spending sometime in 2022, which immediately became Tokyo’s official policy by the year’s end. Another noteworthy example of Kishida’s servility to Washington is the passing of the controversial LGBT legislation in June 2023. Despite the nationwide opposition, including even several LGBT rights advocacy groups, Kishida forced the passing of the contentious legislation, especially following the US Ambassador Rahm Emanuel’s growing pressure on the Japanese prime minister, which further exacerbated the public discontent.
The real significance of Kishida’s radical pro-US orientation is to be found in his extreme willingness to exploit American power for his own political gains. To be sure, such behavior is nothing new, and many of Kishida’s predecessors astutely leveraged their ties to the US for self-aggrandizement. Indeed, the historical Japanese prime ministers often received criticisms for signing Faustian pacts with the US in exchange for their own political longevity. Yet, their pro-US policies almost nítrele revolved around defense and trade issues. By contrast, Kishida has gone out of his way to support Washington’s agendas for Japan even if they could disrupt the country’s very social fabrics. Indeed, the unspoken rule governing the US-Japan relations for decades had been that both countries would refrain from interfering in each other’s culture. Kishida broke this tacit rule with the forced passage of the LGBT legislation last year and ironically secured Washington’s confidence in his expected political longevity. In doing so, he has irreversibly altered the nature of the bilateral relationship, effectively eliminating many of the shibboleths guiding it.
As a result, Kishida remains to this day widely unpopular among the population despite his unrivaled track record of policy reforms. This reality does affect his calculus in Japan’s parliamentary democracy in which the LDP’s ruling status hinges on popular support despite Washington’s growing confidence in the Japanese leader. Increasingly feeling the pinch of his plummeting public support, Kishida then did the unthinkable last month: the dissolution of his own faction, the Kochikai. Factions emerged in Japanese politics as a means to streamline fundraising efforts under charismatic factional leaders. In other words, Kishida’s premiership is fundamentally a product of factionalism, and he himself thrived in the LDP’s tribal politics. Therefore, his decision to dismantle the Kochikai seemed baffling, if not suicidal, given his historical reliance on factionalism for his own political rise. Yet, the timing of his decision could not be more auspicious for the Japanese prime minister as the ongoing special investigation on the LDP’s slush funds led to a domino effect toppling his rival factions, including the Seiwakai. In other words, aided by fortuitous timing, Kishida has opened the Pandora’s Box shaking the very foundation of the LDP. Therefore, Kishida has remarkably emerged even more powerful than ever especially because only the two factions, namely the Aso faction and the Motegi faction, which supported his premiership in 2021 survived.
The successive dissolution of the LDP’s major factions last month ushered in a new era of Japanese politics driven by kingmakers. Indeed, Kishida himself is powerless, let alone popular. He derives his power from his patronage by senior LDP elder statesmen, especially the former prime minister Taro Aso, apart from Washington’s growing confidence in the incumbent Japanese leader. Contrary to the popular belief, Kishida remains loyal to Aso and continues to receive blessings from Japan’s foremost kingmaker. Indeed, Aso is the main beneficiary of Kishida’s decision to dissolve the Kochikai because it now allows the former Japanese prime minister to pursue his vision for a “Greater Kochikai” by expanding his own Aso faction. Meanwhile, the dissolution of major LDP factions has also been a boon for Aso’s archnemesis, the former prime minister Yoshihide Suga, who has been leading his own coalition of independents ever since his tenure in 2021. The upshot of Kishida’s fateful decision last month so far has been the rise of kingmaker politics in Japan driven by decisions made in smoke-filled rooms of the LDP headquarters in Nagatacho.
Given this emerging reality, Kishida will most likely survive as long as Biden and Aso remain in power to support him. With meager 14% support rate, the very continuation of his premiership is nothing but a miracle, if not an enigma, but only underscores the undeniable influence of Washington and kingmakers in Tokyo. In other words, Kishida has ironically sealed his own fate by dissolving the Kochikai and now walks on a political tightrope toward his inevitable exit. His iconoclasm has so far disrupted the very foundation of Japanese politics, but could now threaten his own future. Barring Kishida’s demise, how and when such an eventuality will arrive is a question largely left for Biden and Aso to answer. For now, Kishida stands at the height of his power with no credible opposition inside or outside the LDP ready to challenge him. In this sense, popular will appears to have no room in Japan in the era of kingmaker politics, but the country’s growing metamorphosis into a rising military power on his watch is exactly what Washington has ordered.
Hidetoshi Azuma is a Senior Fellow at CSPC.
American Immigration Policy Part II: A Crisis Without Reform
By Greyson Hunziker
In Part I, I provided a brief history of American immigration policy up to the present. Today, America faces a crisis: record numbers of migrants and a broken immigration system. Although illegal crossings from Mexico dropped by 50 percent in January, there have been record numbers of U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) encounters under the Biden administration. According to a Pew Research report based on government statistics, the number in January was nearly 125,000, down from the record 249,735 in December. Years of monthly numbers exceeding 150,000 preceded December. These levels are a relatively new development. From the late 2000s, CBP encounters never exceeded 100,000 per month and were often under 50,000. In May 2019, there was a spike to over 130,000, but this fell to about 15,000 in April 2020 due to harsh pandemic policies. For almost all of the Biden administration, encounters have been over 100,000 per month, often above 150,000.
Numbers like these overwhelm every part of the system, especially lacking a real plan to deal with them. Local resources are stressed. New York City is currently housing around 65,000 migrants, for instance, having received 3,600 per week in December and 1,600 per week in January. There is a backlog of asylum applications, with over one million pending cases and wait times that exceed four years.
Many people who want to live and work in America lack an easy way to do so, further contributing to increased asylum claims. Claiming asylum at least guarantees their case will be heard. There are many unauthorized immigrants without a path forward, including Dreamers, who have lived in the U.S. for years but have to defer their deportation every two years under DACA because they were brought in illegally as children. Reform is essential, but the U.S. government has a history of failure here.
The last major immigration bill was passed in 1986. The Immigration Reform and Control Act was a compromise between those who were concerned about protecting illegal immigrants residing in the United States, and those who wanted to curb illegal immigration. While the bill granted amnesty to many who entered illegally, its attempts to restrict businesses’ hiring of illegal immigrants did little to curb unauthorized entries. A similar type of compromise was attempted in 2013. In 2009, the DREAM Act that would legalize Dreamers failed to pass the U.S. House. Although President Obama in 2012 used executive action to implement DACA, allowing work permits and deferred deportation for Dreamers, this remained an issue. The 2013 compromise drawn up by a bipartisan “Gang of Eight” senators would have provided legal status and a path to citizenship for many unauthorized migrants while making it harder to hire illegal immigrants. This bill also failed.
In 2024, Senators James Lankford (R-OK), Chris Murphy (D-CT), and Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ) released a bill they had negotiated for months. It was unique in that it did not include provisions concerning the legal status of Dreamers or other unauthorized migrants. In this case, the immigration policies were tied to foreign aid. Republicans have blocked Ukraine aid, arguing that something must be done about the southern border first. After presumptive nominee and former President Donald Trump came out against the bill, Speaker Johnson assured that it would be dead in the House, and then Republicans blocked it in the Senate.
This bill would have provided $20 billion in border security funding, added 250,000 family and employment visas over five years, and guaranteed child immigrants counsel. It would have increased asylum restrictions and speeded removal of denied applicants while aiming at reaching asylum decisions in only six months. Further, it would have mandated a border shutdown if crossings exceeded 5,000 daily for a week, or 8,500 in one day. The president would have an option to shut down the border at 4,000 daily, and the bill would allow 1,400 immigrants to qualify for asylum daily. With the bill’s failure, Biden is considering executive actions such as increasing the difficulty of acquiring asylum.
As the White House recognizes, executive action will not be enough. Congressional reform is required. While the 2024 bill may have addressed many current issues, it would have only been a start. There needs to be a better way for workers and family members to immigrate, and there needs to be a system to take care of current and future Dreamers. Furthermore, the United States must be forward-looking in its approach to immigration reform. Rather than waiting for a crisis to ensue, America must strategically anticipate immigration waves based on political and economic instability elsewhere. While build-up from the pandemic era and views that President Biden is softer on border enforcement have contributed to the recent migrant wave, the nation is also experiencing changes in global migration trends. CBP encounters have increasingly been with migrant families as opposed to individuals. Migrants are also increasingly arriving from countries other than Mexico and the Northern Triangle of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. In December 2023, there were around 47,000 encounters with Venezuelans and 6,000 with Chinese citizens, compared to just 6,000 and 900 a year earlier, respectively. Climate change will only exacerbate the pressures leading to mass migrations. However, before any change can occur, Americans must put aside ideological partisanship and work together to solve this pressing crisis.
Greyson Hunziker is a student intern at CSPC.
NEWS YOU MAY HAVE MISSED
Musk’s SpaceX Forges Tighter Links With U.S. Spy and Military Agencies
By Kurt Johnston
On Tuesday, The Wall Street Journal reported that SpaceX had signed a classified $1.8 billion contract with the U.S. government in 2021, signaling the Elon Musk-led company’s commitment to military projects. SpaceX’s Starlink internet service has been used extensively during the war in Ukraine, although the Ukrainian government has claimed Russian troops are also accessing the service. More relevant to the Pentagon are SpaceX’s Starshield satellites, which provide “secure communications” and similar services to government agencies. Space has become a contentious arena in international politics, with China, Russia, India, and Japan each expanding their space programs in recent years. This week’s announcement of a potential Russian nuclear weapon in space only solidifies the strategic partnership between the American government and companies like SpaceX.
Australia to Build Biggest Navy Since World War II to Meet China threat
By Kurt Johnston
In response to China–US competition in the Indo-Pacific, Australia has pledged over $7 billion to its navy. The new fleet will include “11 new frigates and six new large vessels with long-range missile capability,” a sign of Australia’s naval commitment. The latter ships can also be controlled remotely, boosting the navy’s technological capabilities. This shift is parallel to the 2021 AUKUS security agreement, in which the United States has promised nuclear-powered submarines to Western Australia. In total, the Australian government has allocated $35 billion over the next ten years to revamp its Pacific capacity and shipbuilding industry. However, some experts have argued this expenditure will not concern China, which has amassed an impressive anti-naval artillery.
Kurt Johnston is a student intern at CSPC.