How Is COVID-19 Reshaping China-India Relations?

By Rajeswari Pillai Rajagopalan

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India was the first non-communist country in Asia to establish diplomatic ties with the People’s Republic of China on April 1, 1950. But the plans for celebrating the 70th anniversary of the event have been hit by the coronavirus pandemic.

Despite the cancellation of 70th anniversary events, a senior Chinese official is reported to have said that the two countries “will emerge stronger and their relationship can scale new heights after the pandemic.” The presidents and the premiers on both sides have exchanged congratulatory messages and have made the expected euphoric statements about the two working together to “bring more benefits to the two countries and peoples and contribute more positive energy to Asia as well as the world.”

The Chinese Ambassador to India, Sun Weidong, tweeted Foreign Minister Wang Yi’s reference to the Panchsheel principles, “the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence, which is a historic contribution to the promotion of a new type of intl relations.” Considering Sino-Indian history, the Panchsheel may not have been the best reference, considering that Indian officials rarely invoke it because it is associated in Indian perceptions with the Sino-Indian war of 1962 and what is widely seen as Chinese betrayal. That aside, there are also questions about how the coronavirus pandemic will affect Sino-Indian ties.

Will the Afghan Army Disintegrate After U.S. Withdrawal?

by Arwin Rahi

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As the United States starts to pull out its troops from Afghanistan, its Afghan allies—primarily the Afghan army—are left to fend for themselves. While for the time being the Afghans are reassured of continued U.S. assistance, there’s little reason to believe the U.S. will keep its word. Once U.S. troops pull out completely—which is expected to happen by June 2021—the Afghan army’s fate will hang in the balance.

Since 1880, Afghanistan has tried three times to build a national army from scratch. All three attempts have been made with assistance from a major foreign power. When Amir Abdur Rahman Khan came to power in 1880, he needed a strong army to crush his opponents and restore order. Since Abdur Rahman Khan lacked the resources and funds to raise and maintain an army, the British came to his rescue. With British annual subsidies and arms supplies, Abdur Rahman Khan built a hundred thousand strong army.

Left alone by both the British and Russians to handle his domestic affairs (while the British retained control of his external affairs), Abdur Rahman began conquering all of Afghanistan. He used his well-supplied army to full effect, even conquering what Mahmud of Ghazni and Taimur Beg had failed to conquer: Kafiristan, the land of non-believers, in eastern Afghanistan. As Islam was introduced to Kafiristan, the Amir Abdur Rahman changed the region’s name from Kafiristan to Nooristan, the land of lights.

Takshashila Strategic Assessment: The Economics and Politics of Pakistan’s COVID-19 Response

By Sarthak Pradhan, Sakshi Arora, and Pranay Kotasthane

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Download the Strategic Assessment in PDF.

As of March 27th, Pakistan had the largest number of COVID-19 cases in the subcontinent. This outbreak is likely to slow down Pakistan’s economy and increase its dependence on China in the short-term. Domestically, this has the potential to tilt the balance of power in favour of the army and increase the likelihood of sectarian conflicts.

Nepal May Escape the Coronavirus but Not the Crash

BY ARUN BUDHATHOKI

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KATHMANDU, Nepal—Officially, there have been only five coronavirus cases in Nepal. But despite the tiny numbers, the country entered full lockdown on March 24 for at least a week—a decision the government made after finding only the second case, a Nepali student arriving home from France via Qatar. Flights and long-distance buses have been suspended, and the country’s borders are sealed—even to its own citizens.

Originally, Nepal treated the outbreak as a distant threat. The local jokes around the supposed immunity of Nepalis to the virus even caught on with government officials, who declared the country a “coronavirus-free zone” to boost the Visit Nepal 2020 tourism campaign.

As the coronavirus has spread worldwide, however, the mood in Nepal has become increasingly serious. The border closure is aimed in part at Nepali workers abroad—who are now stuck in foreign countries with little aid from their governments.

Data Security and U.S.-China Tech Entanglement

By Samm Sacks

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I stood at the witness table, my heart pounding, and raised my hand to take an oath. Sen. Josh Hawley had just berated Apple and TikTok for yet again declining his invitation to testify at the hearing. Flanked by their empty seats, I knew I was not going to be interrogated, but I also knew that what I had to say would not distill into sound bites that a crusading Hawley could use as props in his show.

That show built on Hawley’s declaration last fall that Apple and TikTok are “two sides of the same coin when it comes to data security: the danger of Chinese tech platforms’ entry into the U.S. market, and the danger of American tech companies’ operations in China.” He then introduced a draft bill that would prohibit companies from storing and transferring U.S. citizen data to countries of concern (identified as China, Russia or any country designated as such by the secretary of state).

There are data security risks posed by U.S.-China technology entanglement. As Hawley and others routinely say: Ultimately the Chinese government can compel companies to turn over their data. But this does not always happen. Compliance with Chinese law is a negotiation and is never black and white. Yet, if U.S. policymakers conclude that they cannot guarantee the protection of the data in China, why is it even important to understand that there is an internal push and pull, driven by different stakeholders with often-conflicting agendas?

China’s Global Influence Operation Goes Way Beyond the WHO

by Hal Brands 

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The viral video really does tell the story. Over the weekend, a senior adviser at the World Health Organization abruptly shut down an interview after being asked about Taiwan’s role in the organization. The episode has been interpreted correctly as a marker of how China has used the WHO as a tool in its diplomatic struggle to isolate and delegitimize a democratic Taiwan.

Yet China’s influence in the WHO is only a small part of a much larger story involving Beijing’s relationship to international organizations. For decades, U.S. officials hoped that bringing Beijing into those organizations would change China, by socializing it into the patterns of responsible global governance. They paid less attention to the danger that has now materialized — that China might change those organizations instead.

The logic behind America’s “responsible stakeholder” approach was that the best way to keep China from challenging the international order was to demonstrate that it could thrive within it. Encouraging Beijing to expand its role in international organizations — from the United Nations to the alphabet soup of bodies dealing with specific issues from international communications to civil air traffic — was crucial.

Western Media Falls Into China’s Propaganda Trap

by Helle Dale 

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The idea that some American and European news outlets are giving more credibility to the Chinese party line on the coronavirus than they do to their own governments is nothing less than bizarre. Yet, here we are.

Even in this time of national crisis, sheer hatred for the U.S. president causes many in the mainstream media to interpret his every action and statement as unacceptable.

On top of that, Beijing for years has been constructing the grid for information warfare against the United States, which it now is deploying full force. This combination has produced a shameful capitulation by the media establishment to China’s communist authoritarian regime.

This has been reflected in decisions by news outlets such as CNN, NBC, CBS, and ABC to cut away from President Donald Trump’s daily coronavirus briefings at the White House.

Ted Koppel, whose classic “Nightline” show was born out of the Iran hostage crisis in 1979, and who now is back on the air, has commented that statements by Trump that are unfiltered by journalists are not newsworthy.

Day after day, media pundits blast and malign Trump. Meanwhile, networks carry the daily briefings by New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a liberal Democrat, as if only the news from New York counts.

China Must Release the Secret Records of the Wuhan Biolabs

By Steven W. Mosher 

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The leaders of the Chinese Communist Party have a lot to answer for.

Clearly, it was the CCP’s coverup and incompetence that first allowed the Wuhan virus to reach epidemic proportions in China, and then spread around the world. A congressional resolution authored by Representative Jim Banks (R-Ind.) condemns China for these misdeeds. It should be an easy vote.

Clearly, it was the CCP’s coverup and incompetence that first allowed the Wuhan virus to reach epidemic proportions in China, and then spread around the world. A congressional resolution authored by Representative Jim Banks (R-Ind.) condemns China for these misdeeds. It should be an easy vote.

But what if China is responsible not only for the global spread of the Wuhan virus but also for the original infections?

There are many, myself included, who suspect that this particular coronavirus may have been under study at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and that it somehow escaped from the lab.

New COVID-19 Malware Will Wipe Your PC And Rewirite Your Computer’s Master Boot Record — In Essence, Destroying Your Laptop

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Thieves, con-artists, charlatans and others never let a good crisis go to waste. The security and technology website is reporting that cyber thieves/malcontents are using the COVID-19 crisis as an opportunity to make our lives more difficult in the digital universe. Catalin Cimpanu, writing for ZeroDay, posted an April 2, 2020 article to ZDNet, explaing how this new malware works and what it does.

Mr. Cimpuna writes that “with the help of the infosec community, ZDNet has identified at least five malware strains, some distributed in the wild, while others appear to have been created as tests, or jokes. The common theme among all four samples,” he adds, “is that they use a coronavirus-theme; and they’re geared towards destruction rather than financial gain.”

MBR-Rewriting Malware

“Of the four malware samples found by security researchers this past month, the most advanced were the two samples that rewrote the master-boot-record (MBR) sectors,” Mr. Cimpanu wrote. “Some advanced technological knowledge was needed to create these strains, as tinkering with a master-boot-record is no easy task,” he explains, “and could easily result in systems that do not boot at all.”

Data Security and U.S.-China Tech Entanglement

By Samm Sacks

Source Link

I stood at the witness table, my heart pounding, and raised my hand to take an oath. Sen. Josh Hawley had just berated Apple and TikTok for yet again declining his invitation to testify at the hearing. Flanked by their empty seats, I knew I was not going to be interrogated, but I also knew that what I had to say would not distill into sound bites that a crusading Hawley could use as props in his show.

That show built on Hawley’s declaration last fall that Apple and TikTok are “two sides of the same coin when it comes to data security: the danger of Chinese tech platforms’ entry into the U.S. market, and the danger of American tech companies’ operations in China.” He then introduced a draft bill that would prohibit companies from storing and transferring U.S. citizen data to countries of concern (identified as China, Russia or any country designated as such by the secretary of state).

There are data security risks posed by U.S.-China technology entanglement. As Hawley and others routinely say: Ultimately the Chinese government can compel companies to turn over their data. But this does not always happen. Compliance with Chinese law is a negotiation and is never black and white. Yet, if U.S. policymakers conclude that they cannot guarantee the protection of the data in China, why is it even important to understand that there is an internal push and pull, driven by different stakeholders with often-conflicting agendas?

Why A Coronavirus Vaccine May Be Years Away

by Jacob Heilbrunn 

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Jacob Heilbrunn: How does the COVID-19 crisis end?

Paul Offit: German chancellor Angela Merkel said it best: “We need to get to a doubling time of longer than ten days.” The number of hospital admissions and deaths caused by COVID-19, those doubling intervals, is more than ten days. For example, on March 26 we had one thousand deaths; on March 28, two thousand. That’s a doubling time of two days. By April 1 we had four thousand deaths. That means we had a doubling time of four days. If you can get to a ten-day doubling time, it is likely that hospital discharges will exceed admissions and you can say that you accomplished what you wanted—no longer overwhelming the healthcare system. That’s what you are worried about—not that you can’t take care of these patients, but that you can’t take care of any patients.

Once you get there, things can loosen up and you can go back to work even though there still may be cases and deaths. But that is not the goal. The goal is to not overwhelm the health system and allow us to go back to work. When do we get there? I’m going to predict that by the end of April, things start to look better and we start to see a gradual increase in our doubling times.

Heilbrunn: Do you think we are likely to reach the high end of the predictions of deaths? Or is that just unknowable?

A Navy Captain’s Brave Fight Against Coronavirus

James Stavridis

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James Stavridis is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He is a retired U.S. Navy admiral and former supreme allied commander of NATO, and dean emeritus of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. He is also an operating executive consultant at the Carlyle Group and chairs the board of counselors at McLarty Associates.

I have been a ship captain, a commodore in charge of a group of destroyers, and an admiral in command of a carrier strike group with a nuclear aircraft carrier, the USS Enterprise. In the course of my career, I made many hard choices at sea in both peace and combat — but I never faced the kind of hard choice that the captain of the carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt, Brett Crozier, just had to make.

Faced with the coronavirus sweeping through his 5,000-sailor crew, he reached out to his chain of command and requested permission to abort his assigned mission patrolling the Pacific and South China Sea, and come to all stop at Guam to disinfect his ship and save his crew from unnecessary medical risks. How should we evaluate his actions in the face of an invisible but deadly foe?

Failing to form a corona bond: do countries co-operate only in good times?

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But the response to the coronavirus pandemic has revealed the weakness of regional and international associations

President of European Commission, Ursula Von der Leyen at a mini plenary session of European Parliament in Brussels, Belgium, on March 26 mainly operated via video conference. 

Much ink has been spilled over the last two decades about the presumed importance of regional blocs. The European Union, the most famous of them all, seemed to be inexorably moving towards becoming a “United States of Europe”, as the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, once put it. The leaders of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) gathered in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia in late 2015 to launch the Asean Community, and there were serious suggestions that the ten-country grouping should refer to itself as such henceforth to signpost its ambition to emulate the EU, which had previously been named the European Community.

Those two, along with the Gulf Co-operation Council, were probably the best known, but there has been plenty of focus in international relations circles on the many others, from the Economic Community of West African States to the Organisation of American States and the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation.

Eye on China: Covid Special: China’s Recovery – G20 – Trump-Xi Call – EU’s Anger – S. Asia Focus

BY MANOJ KEWALRAMANI

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Eye on China is a weekly bulletin offering news and analysis related to the Middle Kingdom from an Indian interests perspective.

I. Recovery and Restrictions

There are many strands of the Covid-19 story within China, so I am going to just focus on some of the key areas. First, officially, the trend of new cases in China remains positive, with 1 local transmission reported on Thursday. Bulk of the cases reported in the mainland were imported. That’s eventually prompted a decision to essentially ban international flights. Caixin reports that starting from Sunday, all domestic airlines will be limited to flying one international flight per week to each country, the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) said. Foreign airlines were also ordered to limit their number of flights into China to no more than one per week. Shortly after the CAAC announcement, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and National Immigration Administration announced that foreign nationals with valid visas or residence permits would be temporarily banned from entering the country, starting Friday. 

Of course, this decision has sparked anger, given that Beijing had spent considerable energy in January and February lambasting countries for imposing travel restrictions.

Second, Xi Jinping on Friday chaired a Politburo meeting to discuss the coronavirus epidemic and the economy. Earlier in the week, he’d met with PSC members. Here are the important takeaways: 

U.S. NAVAL WAR COLLEGE - HUMANITARIAN RESPONSE PROGRAM - PANDEMIC RESPONSE: SELECT RESEARCH & GAME FINDINGS - APRIL 1, 2020

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Introduction

This document is a summary of 16 key research and game findings focused specifically on the characteristics of civil-military response to a pandemic scenario. The numbered bullets below correspond to more detailed explanations of findings presented later in the document. While these findings are in no way definitive or complete, they are a sampling of relevant guidance based on research, gaming and expert opinion. It is our hope that these 16 findings will contribute to improving civilian and military effectiveness in humanitarian assistance and disaster response operations.

Note on Urban Outbreak 2019

The document references “Urban Outbreak 2019,” which was an analytic war game designed, delivered and analyzed by NWC’s Humanitarian Response Program in collaboration with Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences (USUHS) - National Center for Disaster Medicine and Public Health (NCDMPH) and Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Lab. In September 2019, Urban Outbreak brought together 50 experts from five different sectors who averaged 10 years of humanitarian response experience. Over two days they gamed an infectious disease outbreak response in a notional but realistic city with a population of 21 million people. As part of the game, players individually voted for up to five essential organizations to which they needed access in order to complete the activities they deemed essential for success in the response. Histograms of those votes are offered in appendix I & II. The scenario-based aspects of the game that focused specifically on the unique characteristics of urban response in a widespread outbreak are also listed in appendix III.

Iran's Proxies Accelerate Soleimani's Campaign to Compel U.S. Withdrawal

by Katherine Lawlor and Brandon Wallace - Institute for the Study of War

Key Takeaway: Iran continues to escalate proxy attacks against the U.S. in Iraq, demonstrating that it remains undeterred despite the January 3 strike that killed IRGC - Quds Force Commander Qassem Soleimani and key Iraqi proxy leader Abu Mehdi al-Muhandis and subsequent U.S. strikes. Iran’s proxy network in Iraq is advancing its campaign to compel an American withdrawal by increasing the operational tempo of its attacks on U.S. and allied personnel. Iran’s proxies are responsible for at least 15 attacks on American and U.S.-led Coalition personnel since January 3. A new militia group, Usbat al-Thairen, claimed several recent attacks, indicating that the proxy network may be reorganizing in observance of the shared vision of Soleimani and Muhandis and that Iran may have reached a new phase in its campaign to expel U.S. forces form Iraq…

Read on.

Trump Is Wrong: Don't Call the Coronavirus Crisis a 'War'

by Paul R. Pillar

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The metaphor of war conveys a sense of extreme seriousness and a need for broad public support. For Americans, whose concept of what war ought to be like is modeled after World War II, the war metaphor also implies hope that, whatever sacrifices must be made in the interim, victory will eventually be achieved. But can it work longterm? Is it historically accurate? 

National leaders see multiple advantages in likening their major policy initiatives to war, regardless of whether the policies in question have anything to do with guns and battlefields. 

The metaphor of war conveys a sense of extreme seriousness and a need for broad public support. For Americans, whose concept of what war ought to be like is modeled after World War II, the war metaphor also implies hope that, whatever sacrifices must be made in the interim, victory will eventually be achieved. Retired General Stanley McChrystal, who has fought in some real wars, cites both these reasons in referring approvingly to how the metaphor is being applied to efforts to stem the COVID-19 pandemic. The application is by no means new, and the metaphor was part of the lexicon about past “wars” against poverty, drugs, and other undesirable things.

The Comeback Nation U.S. Economic Supremacy Has Repeatedly Proved Declinists Wrong

By Ruchir Sharma 

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As the 2020s dawn, it is hard to find any member of the U.S. foreign policy establishment who does not believe that the United States is in decline and that the waning of its influence has accelerated under a president who seems to revel in attacking U.S. allies and enemies alike. The debate is not over the fact of American decline but over how the United States should manage its diminishing status. 

Declinists take as a given that the U.S. share of global economic output has been decreasing for decades and that the United States has either already lost its status as the world’s largest economy to China or is fated to lose it within the next ten to 15 years. From these assumptions flow recommendations for resizing U.S. foreign policy to fit Washington’s shrinking power: accept the loss of primacy, adapt to regional spheres of influence led by China and Russia, and work to avoid the wars that could erupt between a declining empire such as the United States and a rising one such as China. 

Europe’s economic emergency is also a geopolitical one

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Seventy years ago, six European nations decided to pool their production of coal and steel, planting the seeds of the European project. In the aftermath of total devastation and war, European leaders were gambling on more than an improved economic situation: they were taking a political leap towards interdependence to create a different continent, and a model for the world.

They succeeded. But there was a catch: it is often said that the European Coal and Steel Community’s success—coming after the failure of military integration a few earlier—led to a depoliticized European model driven by technical integration rather than politics. Once more, as Europeans are debating the future of their economic integration in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis, the broader political arguments are missing from the conversation.

Despite early stumbles, European leaders should be commended for their cooperation in tackling the coronavirus crisis. The rules created over the past twenty years and in the wake of the last crisis have proved effective: the European Commission showed flexibility to allow for deficit spending, borders were re-imposed temporarily as enabled by the Schengen system, European leaders have started communicating and collaborating on medical equipment. Perhaps most importantly, the European Central Bank under Christine Lagarde is putting into practice former ECB President Mario Draghi’s promise of “whatever it takes.”

The Four Rules of Pandemic Economics

Derek Thompson

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With this tweet, President Donald Trump summarized a disturbingly common reaction to social-distancing measures. Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick expressed the same sentiment when he told Americans to “get back to work,” even if doing so means more death. Fox News commentators, likewise, have argued that Americans should break free of the shackles of quarantine to reboot the economy. 

Call it the gospel of growth: the notion that Americans cannot afford to save tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of lives, if it means sacrificing a quarter or two of gross domestic product. 

While this might sound like an economic argument, it enjoys little support among economists. In a recent University of Chicago survey of dozens of prominent economists, almost all of them agreed with the idea that the economy would suffer if the U.S. abandoned “severe lockdowns” while the infection risk remained high. 

Russia Scores Pandemic Propaganda Triumph With Medical Delivery to U.S.

BY AMY MACKINNON, ROBBIE GRAMER

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As top American officials bash the Russian government for spreading disinformation on the coronavirus pandemic, U.S. President Donald Trump is accepting a supply of medical equipment from Moscow. 

Russia is set to deliver a planeload of personal protective equipment and supplies to the United States on Wednesday following a phone call between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday, a senior administration official told Foreign Policy. “We will put into immediate use any needed items that are [Food and Drug Administration] approved. Likewise, the United States is sending equipment and supplies to many other countries and will continue to do more as we are able,” the official said. The official did not elaborate on what specific supplies were included in the delivery.

Trump himself welcomed the move as his administration works to scale up the amount of medical supplies being delivered to overburdened U.S. hospitals across the country, which face a dire shortage of medical supplies. “Russia sent us a very, very large planeload of things, medical equipment, which was very nice,” Trump said during a press conference on Monday—though the shipment had not yet been sent at that point.

Army Cyber Institute (ACI)

Cyber Defense Review, Spring 2020, v. 5, no. 1

A Framework of Partnership 

Civilians ‘Defending Forward’ in Cyberspace: Aligning Cyber Strategy and Cyber Operations 

Norms and Normalization 

Operational Decision-Making for Cyber Operations: In Search of a Model 

Overview of 5G Security and Vulnerabilities 

A Quest for Indicators of Security Debt 

Wargaming and the Education Gap: Why CyberWar: 2025 Was Created

Unpacking TikTok, Mobile Apps and National Security Risks

By Justin Sherman

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On March 12, Sen. Josh Hawley introduced a bill into the Senate to ban the downloading and use of TikTok, the Chinese social media app, on federal government devices. Hawley’s bill carves out exceptions for such activities as law enforcement investigations and intelligence collection, but holds that

no employee of the United States, officer of the United States, Member of Congress, congressional employee, or officer or employee of a government corporation may download or use TikTok or any successor application developed by ByteDance or any entity owned by ByteDance on any device issued by the United States or a government corporation.

Currently, the Transportation Security Administration and the U.S. Army have also banned the app on employee phones.

But what’s Hawley’s objection to an app used widely for dance challenges and lip-syncing?

Managing Escalation Under Layered Cyber Deterrence

By Brandon Valeriano

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Editor's note: This article is part of a series of short articles by analysts involved in the Cyberspace Solarium Commission, among others, highlighting and commenting upon aspects of the commission's findings and conclusion.

Those observing the cyber domain have strong beliefs regarding the potential for escalation in cyberspace. But, though understanding escalation is critical for managing risk as new cyber strategies are implemented, the community knows very little about escalation patterns in this domain. Without a firm grasp on the potential for escalation, the United States will be unable to contain the fallout when assertive operations are conducted.

Comprehending when action is risky and when factors might promote an increased risk of escalation is essential in the cyber domain. Under the strategy of layered cyber deterrence, the United States seeks to minimize the risk of escalation by maintaining forward defense, imposing costs to avoid action, seeking to create resilient defensive networks, and communicating shared standards and norms in the international system. The Cyberspace Solarium Commission considered escalation in designing its strategy, which seeks, in part, to minimize escalation risks in cyberspace.

What Is Cyber Escalation?

Prepare for War or Fight Coronavirus? U.S. Military Battles Competing Instincts

by Helene Cooper, Thomas Gibbons-Neff and Eric Schmitt - New York Times

One of the hallmarks of the United States military is its ability to project power around the world, often under the banner of slogans intended to strike fear in its adversaries. “Ready to fight tonight” for U.S. troops in South Korea; “America’s 911” for the Marine Corps expeditionary units at sea; the list goes on.

But now the foe is a novel coronavirus, and it has struck deep. More than 1,200 military personnel and their family members are affected, disabling a talisman of American military might — a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier — and leaving the Defense Department virtually at war with itself over two competing instincts: protecting troops from the virus and continuing its decades-old mission of patrolling the globe and engaging in combat, if ordered to do so.

The Navy is thus far refusing to completely evacuate an aircraft carrier where 93 service members have been confirmed to be infected with the coronavirus. Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper has put himself on the side of business as usual in maintaining readiness while also saying that force protection is a top priority. President Trump, for his part, threatened a familiar foe, tweeting on Wednesday that Iran would “pay a very heavy price” if its proxies attacked American troops or assets in Iraq. Other Defense Department officials continued to insist that the aircraft carrier, the Theodore Roosevelt, remain ready to carry out its missions…

Read on.