The PLA’s Developing Cyber Warfare Capabilities and India's Options

Maj Gen P K Mallick, VSM (Retd)

Introduction 

Chinese President Xi Jinping has made it clear that his objective for China is to emerge as a ‘cyber superpower’. China wants to be the world’s largest nation in cyberspace and also one of the most powerful. The information technology revolution has produced both momentous opportunities and likely vulnerabilities for china. China is home of largest number of ‘netizens’ in the world. It also hosts some of the world’s most vibrant and successful technology companies. It also remains a major victim of cyber crime. 

Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) believes that with the rise of the Information Age future wars will be contests in the ability to exploit information. Wars will be decided by the side who is more capable to generate, gather, transmit, analyse and exploit information.

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China’s Nuclear and Missile Capabilities: An Overview

Maj Gen PK Mallick, VSM (Retd)

Since China first conducted a nuclear weapon test in 1964, its nuclear doctrine has remained unchanged and is underpinned by two principles: a minimum deterrent doctrine and a No First Use (NFU) policy. China’s 2019 defence white paper states, “China is always committed to a nuclear policy of NFU of nuclear weapons at any time and under any circumstances, and not using or threatening to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear-weapon states or nuclear-weapon-free zones unconditionally.”

However, a recent U.S. Department of Defence (DoD) report claims that the scope of China’s nuclear modernisation and its lack of transparency “raise concern that China is not only shifting its requirements for what constitutes a minimal deterrence but that it could shift away from its longstanding minimalist force posture.” The data available show that China is modernising and expanding virtually every element of its nuclear forces, including each aspect of its nuclear weapons and missile, sea, and air delivery systems. What is not clear are China’s current and planned holdings of nuclear weapons, China’s future plans for deploying additional delivery systems, its commitment to some form of NFU, first preemption, or launch on warning, and the extent to which it will accept what might be called a form of ‘minimum assured destruction.

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How India Is Modernizing its Deadly Nuclear Weapons Arsenal

Michael Peck

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Here's What You Need to Remember: India is also developing the Nirbhay ground-launched cruise missile, similar to the U.S. Tomahawk. In addition, there is Dhanush sea-based, short-range ballistic missile, which is fired from two specially-configured patrol vessels. The report estimates that India is building three or four nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines, which will be equipped with a short-range missile, or a bigger missile with a range of 2,000 miles.

“India is estimated to have produced enough military plutonium for 150 to 200 nuclear warheads, but has likely produced only 130 to 140,” according to Hans Kristensen and Matt Korda of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists. “Nonetheless, additional plutonium will be required to produce warheads for missiles now under development, and India is reportedly building several new plutonium production facilities.”

With the Militias in Afghanistan

Lynne O’Donnell

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CHARKINT, Afghanistan—On the gold and green plains of northern Afghanistan’s Balkh province, the days seem peaceful; the nights are anything but. Once darkness falls, armed gunmen speed out of Taliban-occupied villages like motorcycle gangs on the rampage, charging checkpoints manned by citizen militias intent on protecting themselves from an insurgent onslaught.

Firefights can last a few hours or all night. “Their aim is to keep us up, keep us vigilant, and to exhaust us,” said Mohammad Amir, the head of the Uprising Commission in Charkint district, an hour’s drive south of the provincial capital, Mazar-i-Sharif. That makes him the ­­­head of logistics for about 350 local men who have taken it upon themselves to stop the Taliban’s advance across their corner of Afghanistan.

At their head is Salima Mazari, a 40-year-old district governor and one of the few women to have ever reached this position in Afghanistan’s male-dominated political landscape. She said that for the three-and-half-years she has been in the post, 80 percent of her time has been spent fighting the war as the Taliban attempt to drive out the 32,000 Hazara and Uzbek people who live here.

The Quadrilateral Security Dialogue Is Consolidating Its Power Against China

Robert A. Manning, James Przystup

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Is Asian multilateralism being stealthily redefined? The Biden administration has placed the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (known as the Quad), a revitalized grouping of the United States, Japan, Australia, and India at the center of its Indo-Pacific strategy.

This represents a potential paradigm shift, from ceremonial, process-centered multilateral institutions [e.g.; ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF), ASEAN Defense Minister’s Meeting (ADMM) and the East Asian Summit (EAS)] to a functional, results-oriented problem-solving institution, reflected in the Quad’s pragmatic humanitarian disaster relief origins. The United States has broken the eggs and is now trying to figure out how best to make an omelet.

In a region of staid, ritualized, bureaucratically inert multilateral institutions, this shift to functional collective action is transformational. It is based on a simple principle: form follows function. Who sits at the table, is based on being willing and able to bring something to the table. The Six-Party talks on North Korea and the 5+1 Iran nuclear talks were examples of this approach. Yet the Quad is a source of apprehension to other Asian partners not included, especially ASEAN and South Korea. Many are wondering, what are the pieces and how do they fit together?

After a Hundred Years, What Has China’s Communist Party Learned?

Evan Osnos

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Not so long ago, the Communist Party of China—which celebrates its hundredth anniversary this week—believed in the power of eclectic influences. In 1980, the Party’s propaganda chiefs approved the first broadcast of an American television series in the People’s Republic of China: “Man from Atlantis,” which featured Patrick Duffy, with webbed hands and feet and clad in yellow swimming trunks, as the lone survivor of an undersea civilization. In the United States, the show had been cancelled after one season—the Washington Post panned it as “thinner than water”—but the Communists in Beijing had embarked on an “open door” policy of experimentation. They knew that the political chaos of the Cultural Revolution had left China impoverished and weak—it was poorer than North Korea—and were acquiring whatever foreign culture they could afford, in order to close the gap with the rest of the world. After “Man from Atlantis,” Chinese television viewers were shown “My Favorite Martian” (though the laugh track was lost in the dubbing process, so there were long, puzzling pauses) and the capitalist soap operas “Falcon Crest,” “Dallas,” and “Dynasty.”

After 100 years, China’s Communist Party remains a black box

ROBERT DALY

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Welcome, China Watchers. This week’s guest host is Robert Daly, director of the Kissinger Institute on China and the United States at the Wilson Center. He served as cultural exchange officer at the American Embassy in Beijing in the late ’80s and early ’90s and has spent 12 years in China. He has testified before Congress, interpreted for Chinese and American leaders, and worked on China programs at Syracuse, Cornell, Johns Hopkins and the University of Maryland. He is a board member of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations and a member of the Asia Society’s Task Force on U.S.-China Policy. Over to you, Robert. — John Yearwood, global news editor

In five years, the United States will mark its sestercentennial. There will be patriotic bluster, fireworks, rock anthems and apple pie, but there will also be introspection about America’s missteps and debates about what the Spirit of ’76 meant, whether we’ve upheld it and whether we should. Many Americans will go about their business without noticing the milestone.

Does China Weaponize Lending?

Robert Farley

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How does China weaponize the lending of money to the developing world? A recent study from the team of Anna Gelpern, Sebastian Horn, Scott Morris, Brad Parks, and Christoph Trebesch investigated a sample of China’s overseas lending contracts, finding that Beijing has a standardized approach to lending that sets it apart from other major creditors. The study sought to find concrete evidence to help discern whether or not Chinese lending is characterized by mechanisms that enable Beijing to squeeze debtor countries, or at least squeeze them beyond the international standard for such coercion. What many have guessed about Chinese lending appears to be true: China has built-in coercive mechanisms in its loan contracts that enable Beijing to apply a wave of different coercive effects on recalcitrant debtors.

The study assembled a dataset of 100 debt contracts, including borrowers in 24 countries and amounting to $36.6 billion, out of a universe of some 2,000 contracts over the last 20 years. They found that China tends to employ a standardized set of loan contracts that have a series of commonalities. The standardized contracts they study included extensive confidentiality clauses, reducing transparency and making study difficult. These contracts shroud China’s lending practices in a cloak of confidentiality, making it difficult for evaluators and monitoring agencies to get a good sense of how the loans perform. The contracts require different treatment for Chinese debts during periods of debt restructuring; Chinese debts have preference over other kinds of debt even when the international community deems it necessary to come to agreement with a government that has become over indebted. Finally, China’s contracts have a variety of cancellation, acceleration, and stabilization clauses that enable China to apply pressure to debtors who run into trouble.

War Questions: How Effective Is the Iron Dome?

Michael Peck

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Here's What You Need to Remember: Critics have questioned the accuracy of the IDF’s Iron Dome statistics during the 2014 Gaza conflict. But with four Israeli civilians dead (though one was hit by an anti-tank missile fired directly from Gaza), even Israelis are expressing doubts about the system.

Israel’s Iron Dome is more than a missile defense system. It’s practically an icon, a symbol of how technological creativity can enable one rocket to knock another rocket out of the sky.

But did the system fail earlier this month? And what does this mean for the U.S. military’s planned buy of Iron Dome?

Any thoughts of an invulnerable missile shield evaporated when Hamas fired six-hundred-and-ninety rockets and mortar shells from Gaza into Israel earlier this month. Out of that six-hundred-and-ninety total, ninety never managed to cross into Israel, according to Israeli figures. Iron Dome intercepted two-hundred-and-forty, of which the Israel Defense Forces claim an 86 percent kill rate, with thirty-five rockets landing in populated areas.

The Iran Nuclear Deal Isn’t the Problem. Iran Is.

James Jeffrey and Dennis Ross

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About the authors: James Jeffrey is the Chair of the Middle East program at the Wilson Center, and a former U.S. ambassador to Turkey and Iraq. Dennis Ross, a former special assistant to President Barack Obama, is the counselor and William Davidson Distinguished Fellow at the Washington Institute.

Ebrahim Raisi’s election as president of Iran came as no surprise. All those who might have been a threat to him were disqualified. He was the choice of the supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, and small wonder: Few people better embody the ideology of the Islamic Republic. He will not open Iran up to the outside world, and will certainly not look to accommodate the United States in any way. As for Iran’s behavior in the Middle East, he has made clear that it is “not negotiable.”

The Israel-Hamas conflict last month was a reminder that nearly everything in the Middle East is connected—and whether we’re talking about Hamas rockets, the ongoing calamity in Yemen, or the Iran nuclear deal, Tehran’s destabilizing role in the region is the common factor.

The Palestinians Will Not—and Cannot—Be Ignored

Rashid Khalidi

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The intense violence in Israel and Palestine in May resembled similar episodes in recent decades. But it also had several distinct features, chief among them the newfound unity of Palestinians everywhere. Palestinians rose up together in the face of the divisions that Israel has imposed on them and those created by the shortsighted partisanship of their leaders. They mounted demonstrations throughout the country in response to Israel’s heavy-handed repression in the neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah and the al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem and its bombardments of Gaza that killed over 250 people. Israel tried to squash these protests, leading to eruptions of mob violence mainly directed against Palestinians in cities inside Israel such as Acre, Haifa, and Jaffa. Israeli forces killed dozens of Palestinian protesters in the West Bank. Then on May 18, Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem, inside Israel, and in diaspora communities in Lebanon, Jordan, and elsewhere mounted a general strike, the first to encompass all of historic Palestine since the six-month general strike of 1936.

The deck remains stacked against the Palestinians, however, and a new Israeli government seems no more likely than its predecessor to cease its abuses and the policies that have made

Can America Lose to China?

Kishore Mahbubani

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THE DEMONIZATION of China has gained momentum in the American body politic. Not a day goes by without some major figure warning about the China threat. In April, a 281-page bill entitled “Strategic Competition Act of 2021” was tabled in the U.S. Congress. All this cacophony on China would give the casual observer the impression that America is not underestimating the China threat. Actually, it is. The real danger of the demonization of China is that it leads even thoughtful Americans to believe that an open society like America has many natural advantages over a closed autocratic system like China’s. By framing it in this way, Americans cannot even conceive of the possibility of losing out to China.

This mental inability to even think of the possibility of losing means that Americans are seriously underestimating the challenge from China. Having recently experienced the most painful century in Chinese history, the century of humiliation unleashed on China by Western and Japanese forces, the Chinese believe that the American assault was the last effort by a Western power to keep China down and prevent it from occupying its rightful place in the world. The biggest conceptual mistake that American policymakers are making is a simple one. They assume that their strategic competitor is the Chinese Communist Party. This explains the American confidence that American democracy will triumph. Yet the real strategic competitor of the young American republic is a four-thousand-year-old civilization. As a friend of America, I can only marvel at the sheer strategic complacency with which it is jejunely plunging into a contest that it may well lose.

US Firms Cannot Ignore the Growing Risks of a Possible China-US Military Conflict

Sara Hsu

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As if the China-U.S. trade war wasn’t enough, tensions between the two nations continue to rise. The specter of China-U.S. conflict over Taiwan is looming larger than ever. This does not mean that military engagement will result in a war, but there are signs that risks are escalating. Businesses cannot afford to ignore them.

What are the signs of rising risks? In a speech marking the 100th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party, Xi Jinping stated that China has an “unshakeable commitment” to reunification with Taiwan and that he would “never allow anyone to bully, oppress or subjugate China.” Xi went on to state, “Anyone who dares try to do that will have their heads bashed bloody against the Great Wall of Steel forged by over 1.4 billion Chinese people.”

This rhetoric may have teeth. China carried out live fire military exercises that it termed “combat drills“ around Taiwan in April and has been ramping up the flight of warplanes into Taiwan’s Air Defense Identification Zone in recent months. A Japanese defense official warned the United States of a potential Chinese attack on Hawaii based on evidence of joint Russian and Chinese military exercises in the region. Meanwhile, the U.S. and Japan have been conducting joint military exercises in order to counter a Chinese takeover of Taiwan.

U.S. Security Policy Under Biden

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Despite entering office under an “America First” banner that seemed to herald a new era of isolationism, former President Donald Trump made less dramatic shifts on U.S. security policy than anticipated. He did manage to withdraw U.S. forces from Somalia, but only to see them restationed elsewhere in the region. Meanwhile, U.S. troops were still deployed in Syria and Afghanistan when he left office. And though he hinted at military interventions in Venezuela and Iran, Trump proved reluctant to commit U.S. forces to another conflict. His major legacy, in fact, may be the damage he did to relationships with long-standing allies and partners, including Europe, South Korea and Japan.

This explains why President Joe Biden made it a priority to reassure European allies of America’s ongoing security commitments, promising them shortly after taking office, “America is back. The trans-Atlantic alliance is back.” That may not offer European leaders the comfort Biden thinks it will. In the wake of Trump’s presidency and facing challenges that include a revanchist Russia as well as domestic and international terror threats, Europe is eager to assert its autonomy. A key question for the Biden presidency is whether a more autonomous Europe will be a more useful partner to the U.S., or simply further widen the gulf Trump created between the allies.

Assessing the Responsibility of EU Officials for Crimes Against Migrants in Libya

Pat Rubio Bertran

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The International Criminal Court (ICC) has had an open investigation in Libya since 2011, following a unanimous referral by the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) (ICC, 2011). The investigation has involved charges that include crimes against humanity (murder, imprisonment, torture, persecution, and other inhumane acts) (ICC, 2011).On 8 May 2017, the Prosecutor of the ICC, Fatou Bensouda, told the UNSC that her office was examining the feasibility of opening an investigation into migrant-related crimes in Libya (ICC 2017). Crimes against humanity, as per the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, means any of the following acts when committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population with knowledge of the attack: murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation or forcible transfer of population, imprisonment, torture, rape and other forms of sexual violence, persecution, enforced disappearance, the crime of apartheid, and other inhumane acts (ICC 1998).

SolarWinds: How Russian spies hacked the Justice, State, Treasury, Energy and Commerce Departments

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When Presidents Biden and Putin met in Geneva last month – it was the first time that the threat of cyber war eclipsed that of nuclear war between the two old super-powers… and "SolarWinds" was one big reason why. Last year, in perhaps the most audacious cyber attack in history, Russian military hackers sabotaged a tiny piece of computer code buried in a popular piece of software called SolarWinds. As we first reported in February, the hidden virus spread to 18,000 government and private computer networks by way of one of those software updates we all take for granted. After it was installed, Russian agents went rummaging through the digital files of the U.S. departments of Justice, State, Treasury, Energy, and Commerce –among others—and for nine months, they had unfettered access to top-level communications, court documents, even nuclear secrets.

Brad Smith: I think from a software engineering perspective, it's probably fair to say that this is the largest and most sophisticated attack the world has ever seen.

Brad Smith is president of Microsoft. He learned about the hack after the presidential election this past November. By that time, the stealthy intruders had spread throughout the tech giants' computer network and stolen some of its proprietary source code used to build its software products. More alarming: how the hackers got in… piggy-backing on a piece of third party software used to connect, manage and monitor computer networks.

FUTURE OF AI: DATA WON’T BE ENOUGH

Craig Vachon

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The enthusiastic embracing of AI as the go-to technology for solving specific problems is both undeniable and remarkable. But while there is still much progress being achieved every day through the most popular AI approaches like supervised learning or reinforcement learning, the often monolithic way in which those classic approaches are used may also be the very thing that holds AI back.

While AI is increasingly successful in a growing number of fields, it still operates primarily as a tool to execute narrow-focus tasks, or as a simple form of automation, rather than a supporting partner in a relationship with human users. It largely relies on carefully curated or annotated, mostly historical, data, and only very indirectly learns from human users. AI has remarkable predictive power in some cases, yet is incapable of the adaptive prowess routinely demonstrated by humans from their infancy. It simply is not (yet) able to extrapolate on data that it has never encountered quite like humans can. Additionally, the need for more accuracy is leading to ever larger and complex models, compute-intensive training, and engineering challenges that hinder the trustworthiness, transferability, and scalability we seek in AI-based solutions.

A zero-trust approach

DAVID MORRIS

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Amid the steady deterioration of the US–China relationship in recent years, China has become the focus of a new narrative on cyber risks, with one company targeted in particular, China’s champion of 5G technology, Huawei.

Australia was the first country to ban Huawei from a 5G rollout, in 2018. At the time, the intelligence advice was that Australia lacked capabilities to mitigate the elevated risks of 5G connectivity. To be sure, new tech connecting smart devices and networks at high speed will generate many more points of vulnerability to cyberattacks.

Might there be better ways to manage the complex risks of an interconnected digital future?

Following the Australian decision, the United States not only banned Huawei on (as yet unproven) claims of espionage, but embarked on a campaign to block supplies of advanced semiconductors to many Chinese firms and is advocating wholesale decoupling from Chinese tech.

The Potential for Low-Cost and Open Source Hardware Solutions to Scale

Anne Bowser, Alexandra Novak, Alison Parker

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Hardware is the foundation of many scientific disciplines. In fact, access to hardware can be the limiting factor for the speed and quality of research. Innovations related to low-cost and open source practices create tools that accelerate and democratize science. Open source tools promise additional benefits, for example enabling customization and making it easier to fix broken devices, including by manufacturing replacement parts.

Realizing the goals of low-cost and open source hardware requires attention to how these tools can scale. One type of scale happens through production, when more tools are designed, manufactured, and used. A second type of scale happens when the enhanced availability of tools enables new and more diverse audiences to contribute to science.

Low-cost and open source hardware challenges traditional product development processes, and thus requires different approaches to enable scale. In order to understand how low-cost and open source hardware scales, traditional innovation and product development processes are compared to low-cost and open source approaches. This white paper then unpacks scale from both the participation and production perspective, with the goal of elucidating recommendations for accelerating scale of low-cost and open source hardware.

Strengthening the EU’s Role in Cybersecurity

Aleksandra Kozioł

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In December 2020, the European Commission and the High Representative for Foreign Affairs unveiled a new cybersecurity strategy that aims to strengthen collective resilience against cyberthreats and ensure the protection of digital services and tools in the EU. Its implementation is also intended to ensure the Union a leading role in setting international norms and standards in cyberspace.

Together with the strategy, two legislative proposals were published. They include the so-called NIS 2 Directive, which concerns increasing the cyber resilience of the Union, and the directive on the resilience of critical entities. The new regulations are to improve cooperation and information exchange at national and EU levels, they also expand the catalogue of sectors important for cybersecurity by digital services, health and space, among others. Their advantage is a comprehensive approach, combining protection against cyberattacks with the prevention of traditional threats such as crime and natural disasters.

Foreign War Has Not Made America a Garrison State

Michael Lind

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THE FEAR that a country’s foreign policy can warp its internal social order is a perennial anxiety, in the United States and elsewhere. Usually, it takes the form of the claim that warfare or imperialism will trigger the militarization and regimentation of society at home, transforming the homeland into what the political scientist Harold Lasswell, in an influential 1941 article, called “The Garrison State.”

The perception that domestic social order can be shaped by a country’s interactions with the rest of the world is correct and profoundly important. Curiously, however, this subject has been neglected in traditional Western political philosophy. Typically, Western political philosophers have promoted an ideal political regime, usually a slightly idealized version of their own—the polis for Aristotle, the bureaucratic monarchy for Hegel, liberal democracy for John Rawls. Questions of war, diplomacy, and trade have been afterthoughts.

Future Wars Will Be Fought on the ‘Hyperactive Battlefield’

Kris Osborn

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Precision weaponry, artificial intelligence-enabled data processing, electronic warfare, space-traveling hypersonic weapons, and borderless geographically unknown cyber-attacks continue to reshape modern war in ways that have not been anticipated, inspiring a massive Pentagon modernization push to include efforts to find the best and most impactful warfare innovations.

Future wars will likely be decided in the realm of “high-speed information-networking,” software upgrades that include artificial intelligence, long-range sensing, stealth, precision weapons and, perhaps most of all, sensor-to-shooter decision cycles. Army Futures Command Commander Gen. John Murray has often said that the future of warfare is expected to be what he called a “hyperactive battlefield.”

Part of the lens through which futurists view warfare decades from now also pertains to certain enduring principles which, despite technological change and the evolution of society, remain as timeless pillars of thought fundamental to winning wars. One of them is “mass.” Sheer size. Ultimately an enemy force will need to be contained, subdued, destroyed, or demoralized to the point of losing a will to fight. Large formations may indeed always be necessary to accomplish this.

George Marshall: Architect of American Victory (He Won World War II?)

Michael D. Hull

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Key Point: On April 23 (St. George’s Day), 1939, FDR made one of the most significant choices of his presidency.

Shortly after the infamous accord on September 29, the president instituted a series of White House meetings at which he and his military advisers discussed the ominous situation in Europe. One of the early formal sessions was attended by the Assistant Secretary of War, the Solicitor General, the Secretary of the Treasury, the Army and Air Corps Chiefs of Staff, and a tall, blue-eyed, and courtly brigadier general named George C. Marshall, who had recently been appointed the Army Deputy Chief of Staff and head of the War Plans Division.

An Army Smaller Than Portugal’s

FDR unveiled an ambitious program for building 10,000 military aircraft a year with no increase in supporting forces. As the proceedings drew to a close, the president summed up his plan and turned to Marshall, whom he scarcely knew. “Don’t you think so, George?” he asked. Marshall replied, “I am sorry, Mr. President, but I don’t agree with that at all.” The general was painfully aware of the state of America’s defenses and knew that it would require much more than airplanes to rectify the situation. The U.S. Army, numbering only 174,000 men, was ranked 19th in the world, just behind that of tiny Portugal.

Army to set in stone the importance of information advantage, with new capabilities on deck

Mark Pomerleau

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WASHINGTON — One of the biggest undertakings for the Army’s cyber operational and training arms in the last two years is shifting the service’s thinking and approach to the broader concept of information advantage. Now, the service is on the heels of making that concept official doctrine.

“I think the biggest progress is we got all of the senior officers in the Army together to discuss this,” said Maj. Gen. Neil Hersey, the outgoing commander of the Cyber Center of Excellence, which leads the doctrine portion for the Army in this area.

“We laid everything out and we gained agreement on the framework that will lead to doctrine being written, which is in progress now. That will create information advantage within FM 3.0, which is the Army’s operations manual. It will be a major element synchronized with the other elements of combat power,” he told C4ISRNET during a June interview about the Army’s progress over the last 18 months to develop the concept of information advantage.

Foreign Policy’s Summer Reading List

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As many Foreign Policy readers embark on vacations—or, in the Southern Hemisphere, continue their commutes—we asked our columnists to recommend some good books. Their picks included histories, biographies, and a couple of novels. Beach reads for us international relations nerds, in other words. Scroll down to pick up your next page-turner.

How Britain Ends: English Nationalism and the Rebirth of Four Nations

GAVIN ESLER, APOLLO, 320 PP., 4.99 POUNDS ($6.90), FEBRUARY 2021

Recommended by Mina Al-Oraibi, FP columnist and the editor in chief of the National

Five years after the vote that led to Britain’s exit from the European Union, it is worth looking at what comes after Brexit. In How Britain Ends, Gavin Esler delves into English nationalism and the issues of power-sharing, identity, legacy, and planning for an uncertain future. In today’s fluctuating world, agreeing on the best way to govern and negotiating how different communities live together is crucial to the success—and sheer survival—of any country.

Oilcraft: The Myths of Scarcity and Security That Haunt U.S. Energy Policy

ROBERT VITALIS, STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 240 PP., $24, JULY 2020

Recommended by Emma Ashford, FP columnist and senior fellow at the New American Engagement Initiative at the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security