Indian Strategic Studies: 06/08/22

8 June 2022

The New Energy Order How Governments Will Transform Energy Markets

Jason Bordoff and Meghan L. O'Sullivan

In the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the world appears to be at an inflection point. Business leaders have declared the acceleration of deglobalization and sounded the alarm about a new period of stagflation. Academics have decried the return of conquest and hailed the renewal of transatlantic ties. And countries are rethinking almost every aspect of their foreign policies, including trade, defense spending, and military alliances.

These dramatic shifts have overshadowed another profound transformation in the global energy system. For the last two decades, the urgent need to reduce carbon emissions has gradually reshaped the global energy order. Now, as a result of the war in Ukraine, energy security has returned to the fore, joining climate change as a top concern for policymakers. Together, these dual priorities are poised to reshape national energy planning, energy trade flows, and the broader global economy. Countries will increasingly look inward, prioritizing domestic energy production and regional cooperation even as they seek to transition to net-zero carbon emissions. If countries retreat into strategic energy blocs, a multidecade trend toward more energy interconnectedness risks giving way to an age of energy fragmentation.

Hybrid CoE Working Paper 18: Defending critical infrastructure: The challenge of securing industrial control systems

Vytautas Butrimas

Cyberattacks against industrial operations and the technologies used to monitor and control physical processes that provide vital services represent a significant escalation in the level of severity of modern conflict. There is, however, an unmet challenge in protecting industrial control systems (ICS) that support critical infrastructure against cyber threats. This Hybrid CoE Working Paper illuminates the role of ICSs in critical infrastructure, demonstrates the vulnerabilities of industrial operations to cyber incidents, and presents ways to develop more effective policies.

Working Paper

A medium-length paper covering work in progress. Develops and shares ideas on Hybrid CoE’s ongoing research/workstrand themes, or analyzes actors, events or concepts that are relevant from the point of view of hybrid threats.

DETERRING A CHINESE INVASION OF TAIWAN: UPHOLDING THE STATUS QUO?

PETER HARRIS

KEY POINTS

The U.S. has a goal to avoid a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, but the overriding U.S. interest is to avoid a ruinous war with China. The imperative to avoid a conflict with China should take priority for U.S. leaders.

Proposals to deter China by bolstering U.S. military deployments in the Western Pacific are unlikely to succeed and fraught with danger. China has advantages in terms of geographical proximity to Taiwan and superior commitment to resolving the issue on favorable terms. The United States should not commit to fighting a great-power war at a time of China’s choosing.

The Taiwanese obviously have the strongest interest in deterring a Chinese invasion of their island. Regional powers such as Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Australia have the next-strongest interests in preserving stability in East Asia. These actors should do the heavy lifting in deterring China.

Western Extremists and the Russian Invasion of Ukraine in 2022

The Russia-Ukraine war has been attracting foreign fighters/volunteers since 2014. Initially, the number of foreign individuals joining the conflict was limited. However, the invasion of Ukraine by Russia on February 24, 2022 provided a seemingly seismic shift in this field with up to 20,000 foreigners expressing an interest in joining the Ukrainian war effort.

Foreign fighters that joined the conflict initially after 2014 hailed from various ideological backgrounds—including from the far right, far left, or red-brown national communists—and fought on both the Ukrainian and Russian/pro-Russian sides of the conflict. The 2022 foreign volunteers, however, seem less radical and politicized in nature. Their mobilization is conducted mainly through official channels of the Ukrainian government and less through informal channels setup by non-state-linked “volunteer battalions” and militias, as was the case in 2014.

Post-Mortem: Russian and Chinese COVID-19 Information Operations

Edward Lucas, Ben Dubow, James Lamond and Jake Morris

Executive Summary

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has spread disinformation about the efficacy of vaccines and the virus’s origins, a shift from Beijing’s previous disinformation campaigns, which had a narrower focus on China-specific issues such as Tibet, Hong Kong, Xinjiang, and Taiwan. Most of Beijing’s COVID-19 narratives aimed at shaping perceptions of China’s response to the pandemic and only rarely targeted other countries specifically. Russia recycled previous narratives and exacerbated tensions in Western society while attempting some propaganda about Russian scientific prowess. Russia’s approach evolved little; it recycled previous narratives, spreading a broad range of COVID-19 disinformation.

Evidence supports the theory that Russia seeks to strengthen itself in relative terms by weakening the West, while China seeks to strengthen itself in absolute terms.

How can digital public technologies accelerate progress on the Sustainable Development Goals?

George Ingram, John W. McArthur, and Priya Vora

Rapid shifts in digital technologies are changing the context for pursuing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In the best cases, these technologies have contributed to massive improvements in access to public services and economic opportunities for millions of people. In the worst cases, they have opened the door to new forms of government surveillance, exacerbated inequalities, and encouraged social divisions. Many private firms also have enormous influence in shaping the interface between digital technology and societal well-being. Against this backdrop, a growing movement is emphasizing the need for digital public goods and digital public infrastructure.

This paper focuses on “digital public technology” (DPT), meaning digital assets that create a level playing field for broad access or use—by virtue of being publicly owned, publicly regulated, or open source. We consider how they could support greater progress toward the SDGs’ overarching 2030 deadline, with an emphasis on issues of extreme deprivation and basic needs. None of the relevant SDG indicators are fully on course for success by 2030, although some—like child mortality, access to electricity, access to sanitation, and access to drinking water—are on track to achieve gains for more than half the relevant populations in need. Some indicators are on a path to less than half the needed gains, including stunting, extreme income poverty, maternal mortality, access to family planning, primary school completion, and non-communicable disease mortality. Other issues like undernourishment and children overweight are moving backwards.

Quad AI Assessing AI-related Collaboration between the United States, Australia, India, and Japan

Husanjot Chahal, Ngor Luong, Sara Abdulla and Margarita Konaev

Executive Summary

The Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, commonly known as the Quad, is a semi-formal but strategically significant grouping of four countries—the United States, Australia, India, and Japan. Cooperation on critical and emerging technologies is a key element of the Quad’s agenda, and all four nations have a particular interest in strengthening cooperation on responsible development of artificial intelligence (AI).1 Their desire to collaborate stems not only from recognizing AI’s transformative economic, societal, and national security potential, but also the importance of ensuring that technological innovation is shaped by their shared democratic values and respect for human rights.2 The Quad could offer an alternative to China’s techno-authoritarian model of technology development and use, setting the standard for a multilateral approach to countering the malicious use of AI for surveillance, censorship, and misinformation.3 The group, however, faces non-negligible barriers to effective technology cooperation, including different approaches to data governance, varying economic and technological capabilities, and divergent geopolitical priorities.

China's messaging on the Ukraine conflict

Samantha Hoffman and Matthew Knight

In the early days of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, social media posts by Chinese diplomats on US platforms almost exclusively blamed the US, NATO and the West for the conflict. Chinese diplomats amplified Russian disinformation about US biological weapon labs in Ukraine, linking this narrative with conspiracy theories about the origins of COVID-19. Chinese state media mirrored these narratives, as well as replicating the Kremlin’s language describing the invasion as a ‘special military operation’.

ASPI found that China’s diplomatic messaging was distributed in multiple languages, with its framing tailored to different regions. In the early stage of the conflict, tweets about Ukraine by Chinese diplomats performed better than unrelated content, particularly when the content attacked or blamed the West. ASPI’s research suggests that, in terms of its international facing propaganda, the Russia–Ukraine conflict initially offered the party-state’s international-facing propaganda system an opportunity to reassert enduring preoccupations that the Chinese Communist Party perceives as fundamental to its political security.

Toward a framework for transatlantic cooperation on non-state armed groups

Lauren Mooney and Patrick Quirk

Introduction

Non-state armed groups (NSAGs) pose a thorny policy dilemma for US and European officials trying to stabilize fragile states.1 NSAGs are far from homogenous in their motivations, tactics, and structure, resulting in highly varied roles in either perpetrating or mitigating violence, with many playing a part in both. On one side, NSAGs can create instability by using violence to advance a range of interests, from political influence and financial gain to challenging a central government’s legitimacy or territorial control. Many NSAGs are directly responsible for civilian harm, including perpetrating targeted violence, persecuting, killing and committing brutal abuses against citizens.2 There is no shortage of examples of NSAGs that fit this mold. From Boko Haram in Northeast Nigeria to Katibat Macina in Mali, armed groups have wreaked havoc on the lives of civilians as well as US and European security interests.

In other contexts, however, the picture is not as clear-cut. Some armed groups play a role in maintaining security and protecting citizens from other violent actors, including the state. NSAGs can also provide services, collect taxes, resolve disputes, and establish governance systems in areas where they exercise control. The pandemic has shed light on how the governing authority of NSAGs can be utilized to manage the spread of COVID-19: for example, in Myanmar, non-state armed groups established health checks and restricted travel.3 Depending on the various roles they play in a community, such actors may be viewed as locally legitimate in the eyes of the population. NSAGs, even those with a history of using coercive power, can fill a governance gap and might be the only viable partner for the government and its international supporters trying to stabilize a conflict-affected area.

The New Taleban’s Opium Ban: The same political strategy 20 years on?

Jelena Bjelica • Kate Clark

Seven and a half months after they took power in Afghanistan, the Taleban have officially banned opium. Observers had been waiting to see if they would implement their promise to ban narcotics made shortly after they captured Kabul. The ban has come at the beginning of the opium harvest and at a time when Afghans across the country are already suffering under the strain of economic collapse triggered by the Taleban’s military capture of power. The cultivation of opium and export of opiates is hugely important for the Afghan economy as a whole and any implementation of the ban will have wide-ranging consequences, says AAN’s Jelena Bjelica (with input from Kate Clark) as they probe the Taleban’s possible motives for banning opium and the similarities between this ban and the one the Taleban implemented in July 2000 when they were last in power.

The Booming Export of Authoritarianism

Amy Mackinnon and Mary Yang

An increasing number of governments around the world are reaching across borders in an attempt to harass and silence critics, according to a new report released today by the U.S.-based nonprofit Freedom House.

The group documented 735 incidents of governments physically targeting dissidents abroad using attempted assassination, assault, deportation, and rendition between 2014 and 2021. These extreme measures are likely only the tip of the iceberg; authoritarian regimes have increasingly used local proxies and cyberattacks in a bid to stifle dissent beyond their borders as new technologies have opened up a host of possibilities for what scholars term transnational repression.

“What we’re seeing in transnational repression is the export of authoritarianism,” said Yana Gorokhovskaia, a senior research analyst with Freedom House and one of the report’s authors. “It is the spreading of authoritarian practices beyond the borders of autocrats.”

Egypt’s Remilitarized Sinai Is a Future Powder Keg

David Schenker

In early May, the Islamic State-Sinai Province killed 11 Egyptian soldiers and damaged a natural gas pipeline. Far from demonstrating the Islamic State’s power in the strategic peninsula, the attack was the first major incident in almost a year, a far cry from the full-blown jihadi insurgency that had gripped Sinai only a few years ago. The Egyptian military finally appears to be making progress in rolling back the group. Not only have there been fewer attacks, but Cairo’s funneling of economic development funds to the peninsula has also generated some goodwill among the long-restive population. In March 2021, a coalition of Bedouin tribesmen, armed civilians, and Egyptian military killed the region’s Islamic State leader.

Egypt’s apparent success has been, in part, a result of Cairo’s shift away from a heavy-handed military approach replete with collateral destruction and civilian casualties to a nimbler counterinsurgency strategy with a heavy emphasis on checkpoints and curfews. Israeli tactical air support has also played an important, if less publicized, role. Egyptian-Israeli cooperation contributed in another even more important way: by mutually agreeing to substantial violations of their 1978 peace treaty—or, more precisely, the treaty’s security annex limiting Sinai’s militarization. Not only has Egypt allowed Israel to operate over Egyptian territory, but Israel also allowed Cairo to flood Sinai with troops and heavy equipment substantially in excess of the treaty’s limits.

Finnish President: Putin Took NATO Application News ‘Very, Very Calmly’

Amy Mackinnon

War with Russia is no abstract concept for Finland. The country declared its independence from Moscow in 1917 and fought two wars against the Soviet Union during the period of World II. Finland remained militarily nonaligned during the Cold War, joined the European Union in 1995, and gradually deepened its cooperation with NATO.

Still, the country’s decision to apply for NATO membership last month came as a surprise to many people around the world. Sauli Niinisto has been in office as Finland’s president for a decade and has clocked more hours with Russian President Vladimir Putin, either by phone or in person, than most European leaders.

In a recent interview with Foreign Policy, Niinisto said he called Putin last month to tell him Finland would be joining NATO. Putin’s response was surprisingly subdued.

New Defense-Focused Survey Finds Military Personnel Increasingly Concerned About Communications Keeping Pace with Adversaries

WASHINGTON and CARLSBAD, Calif., May 10, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Viasat Inc., (NASDAQ: VSAT) a global communications company, today announced results from its Annual State of Military Communications study conducted by the Government Business Council (GBC), the research division of Government Executive Media Group. Despite signs of improving U.S. defense communications reliability, the survey points to growing concern among Department of Defense (DoD) personnel about U.S. military communications' capabilities being surpassed by adversaries and a lack of current action being taken to address this challenge. A copy of the complete survey report can be found here.

According to the third annual survey, more than two-thirds (68%) of respondents said they believe near-peer adversaries will match or surpass U.S. military communications capabilities within five years, including 36% believing this will happen in the next two years. In addition, nearly three-quarters (73%) of DoD respondents believe that U.S. defense communication technologies are on par with or falling behind those used by adversaries, which represents a 13-percentage point increase from 2020.

Estonia’s Prime Minister: ‘We Need to Help Ukraine Win’

Benjamin Bathke

Perhaps no European politician (other than Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky) has taken a more uncompromising stance on Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked war of aggression against Ukraine than Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas. Her resolute attitude and clear convictions, including that Putin ought to be tried as a war criminal, as well as the unmatched per capita support of the Baltic nation for Ukraine have caused Kallas’s popularity to soar.

While she is eager to remind the world of the repression and brutality her small country had to endure at the hands of its neighbor to the east, Kallas has not only been tough on Putin: She has also sharply criticized efforts by French President Emmanuel Macron and other leaders to keep in touch with the Russian president. Yet she’s also been careful to stress the unity, not the divisions, that have characterized the European Union and NATO since the beginning of Putin’s war.

Biden’s Saudi Trip May Be Too Little, Too Late

Michael Hirsh

U.S. President Joe Biden’s planned attempt to mend relations with Saudi Arabia, a nation he once called a “pariah,” is an eleventh-hour effort to find his way out of a terrible political bind. Biden wants the Saudis to raise oil production to help him address what he has called his biggest political problem: runaway inflation led by soaring energy prices. But experts say it’s probably too little, too late.

Biden and other Western leaders are trying to pursue several conflicting agendas at once. They aim to curtail climate change by slashing the use of fossil fuels while also halting Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which has led to energy shortages that have fueled inflation. That, in turn, has undermined political support at home and will make everything else harder to achieve.

War in Ukraine Is a Boon for NATO

NATO was the product of a particular time and strategic landscape – a bipolar world characterized by two extremely antagonistic powers. Most of NATO’s expansion since the end of the Cold War in 1991 occurred from 1999 to 2004 and centered on former Warsaw Pact or Soviet states seeking to anchor themselves in the West and lock in security guarantees against Russia.

As the threat from Russia declined, NATO’s purpose and future became less clear. In the past five years in particular, U.S.-European relations shifted dramatically. By 2017, the U.S. had made clear that NATO was no longer as important has it had been and that the trans-Atlantic relationship would take a back seat to trans-Pacific issues.

Fear grows that US military satellite communications are falling behind: Study

THERESA HITCHENS

WASHINGTON: Despite growing more reliable, military operators fret that Defense Department satellite communications (SATCOM) capabilities are not keeping apace with either growing needs or adversary challenges, according to a new study.

The vast majority of respondents (eight out of 10) from across the services said that improving US military SATCOM should be a high priority, and a large majority (some 77%) pointed to the fact that advanced capabilities would be key to Joint All Domain Command and Control (JADC2), the Government Business Council’s “State of Military Communications Technologies” study finds.

However, the study shows, only about a third believed that the Pentagon was moving quickly enough to adopt commercial technology and streamlined acquisition rules to be able to make necessary upgrades quickly.

Time to start operationalizing wearable technology in the DoD

GABE S. ARRINGTON and CHRISTOPHER P. MULDER

The 2022 National Defense Authorization Act directs the Department of Defense to develop a digital health strategy to incorporate new and emerging technologies — including wearable devices that could utilize big data and predictive analytics to bring a value-added capability to personnel across the DoD. While initial efforts will focus on improving the delivery of clinical care, health services, and the patient experience, wearable devices should quickly transition to other operational settings as well.

Using data from humanity’s eight billion people creates the opportunity to enable new medical technologies, healthier living conditions, and optimally engineered work environments. Even a slice of that greater population, such as the two million US servicemembers, would provide valuable insights and be a game changer in operationalizing wearable technology. Clearly, expanding the use of wearable technology in the DoD could have positive implications for both military capability and general health research.

Musk’s SpaceX Starlink internet saving Ukraine from Russian propaganda: Zelensky

Heather Hamilton, Social Media Reporter

SpaceX's Starlink satellite system is being credited with helping the Ukrainian people overcome Russian propaganda.

As his country entered its 100th day since Russia invaded in February, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky praised SpaceX CEO Elon Musk’s satellite internet coverage, saying it has been “very effective” in war-torn and otherwise disconnected areas of Ukraine where cell towers have been destroyed.

"It helped us a lot, in many moments related to the blockade of our cities, towns, and related to the occupied territories," Zelensky told Wired.

Zelensky noted that at times, his leadership “completely lost communication” with certain areas.

Russian ministry site hacked, latest cyber attack against Moscow since Ukraine invasion

As the invasion of Ukraine completed 100 days and Russia renewed strikes on Kyiv, resistance in the form of cyber attacks persisted as the Russian Ministry of Construction, Housing and Utilities website appeared to have been hacked. Reports said that an attempt to open the website through an internet search led to a “Glory to Ukraine” sign in Ukrainian.

Massive cyber-attacks from Russian-sponsored threat actors commenced on the day Ukraine was invaded, prompting Kyiv to assemble an ‘IT army’. The ‘IT Army’, also endorsed by Ukrainian officials, sought help from technology leaders to fight these cyber attacks.

“We are creating an IT army. We need digital talents. There will be tasks for everyone. We continue to fight on the cyber front. The first task is on the channel for cyber specialists,” tweeted Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s Vice Prime Minister and Minister for Digital Transformation.

The Last Days of the Afghan Embassy

Robbie Gramer

In January 2002, shortly after the fall of the first Taliban government in Kabul, then-Afghan interim leader Hamid Karzai flew to Washington. There, he met with then-U.S. President George W. Bush, visited Afghan diaspora groups, and attended the opening of Afghanistan’s embassy, which had been closed since 1997.

Standing outside the embassy in the quiet, upscale neighborhood of Kalorama, Karzai celebrated its opening as a turning point in U.S.-Afghan relations. “It’s a thrilling moment for us to have Afghanistan recognized again as a nation state [and] as a government,” he said. The Taliban’s rule in Afghanistan had been marked by brutal crackdowns, public executions, repression against minorities and women, and the destruction of cultural monuments. With the embassy open and the United States as partners, it was time to rebuild Afghanistan into a functioning and stable democracy.

But after two decades, the Afghan Embassy, and the flag raised above its curved driveway and red brick walls stand for a government that no longer exists. When the Taliban took control of Afghanistan for the first time in two decades last August, no countries agreed to open formal diplomatic relations with the new Taliban regime. And in March, the United States became among the first Western countries to force the closure of its Afghan Embassy.

The Surreal Case of a C.I.A. Hacker’s Revenge

Nestled west of Washington, D.C., amid the bland northern Virginia suburbs, are generic-looking office parks that hide secret government installations in plain sight. Employees in civilian dress get out of their cars, clutching their Starbucks, and disappear into the buildings. To the casual observer, they resemble anonymous corporate drones. In fact, they hold Top Secret clearances and work in defense and intelligence. One of these buildings, at an address that is itself a secret, houses the cyberintelligence division of the Central Intelligence Agency. The facility is surrounded by a high fence and monitored by guards armed with military-grade weapons. When employees enter the building, they must badge in and pass through a full-body turnstile. Inside, on the ninth floor, through another door that requires badge access, is a C.I.A. office with an ostentatiously bland name: the Operations Support Branch. It is the agency’s secret hacker unit, in which a cadre of élite engineers create cyberweapons.

What If Ukraine Wins?

Liana Fix and Michael Kimmage

In recent days, many Western observers of the war in Ukraine have begun to worry that the tide is turning in Russia’s favor. Massive artillery fire is yielding incremental Russian gains in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region, and Russia is bringing in new forces. Ukrainian troops are drained and exhausted. Russia is trying to create a fait accompli and to make reality conform to its imperial ambitions through “passportization”—the quick provision of Russian passports to Ukrainian citizens in Russian-occupied areas—and the forced introduction of Russian administrative structures in Ukrainian territory. The Kremlin likely intends to occupy eastern and southern Ukraine indefinitely and to eventually move on Odessa, a major port city in southern Ukraine and a hub of commerce that connects Ukraine to the outside world.

Russian General Reported Killed in Ukraine

Russian General Roman Kutuzov has been killed on the battlefield in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region, Russian state-owned media reported Sunday.

If confirmed by the Russian military, Kutuzov would be at least the fourth Russian general killed in more than three months of fighting in Ukraine.

“The general had led soldiers into attack, as if there are not enough colonels,” said Alexander Sladkov, a war correspondent for state-owned Russian media.

“On the other hand, Roman was a commander like everyone else, albeit with a higher rank,” Sladkov wrote on his Telegram channel.

The Hacker Gold Rush That’s Poised to Eclipse Ransomware

RANSOMWARE ATTACKS, INCLUDING those of the massively disruptive and dangerous variety, have proved difficult to combat comprehensively. Hospitals, government agencies, schools, and even critical infrastructure companies continue to face debilitating attacks and large ransom demands from hackers. But as governments around the world and law enforcement in the United States have grown serious about cracking down on ransomware and have started to make some progress, researchers are trying to stay a step ahead of attackers and anticipate where ransomware gangs may turn next if their main hustle becomes impractical.

At the RSA security conference in San Francisco on Monday, longtime digital scams researcher Crane Hassold will present findings that warn it would be logical for ransomware actors to eventually convert their operations to business email compromise (BEC) attacks as ransomware becomes less profitable or carries a higher risk for attackers. In the US, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has repeatedly found that total money stolen in BEC scams far exceeds that pilfered in ransomware attacks—though ransomware attacks can be more visible and cause more disruption and associated losses.

How The Air Force Plans To Kill The A-10 Warthog

Peter Suciu

Yes, the A-10 Warthog is one amazing plane built to mow down any enemy forces on the ground – clearly the ultimate Cold War air support plane of its day. However, the A-10 is getting old and many in the U.S. Air Force want to see it head into retirement for good. Will it happen? The warthog is the only pig species that has adapted to grazing and savanna habitats, and its diet consists of grasses, bark, berries and at times carrion. Even in droughts, the hardy animals can subsist on bulbs, rhizomes and nutritious roots.

In other words, the warthog is a hard animal to starve.

That bit of background on the creature is noteworthy as the United States Air Force is now in essence trying to starve out its fleet of Warthog aircraft.

The Next Challenge for Solid-State Batteries? Making Lots of Them

FOR DECADES, SCIENTISTS have wondered what to do with the liquid inside a lithium-ion battery. This electrolyte is key to how batteries work, shuttling ions from one end of the cell to the other. But it’s also cumbersome, adding weight and bulk that limit how far electric vehicles can go on a charge—on top of which, it can catch fire when a battery shorts. A perfect fix would be replacing that liquid with a solid—ideally one that’s light and airy. But the trick lies in making that switch while preserving all the other qualities a battery should have. A solid-state battery not only needs to send you farther down the road on each charge, it also has to juice up quickly and work in all sorts of weather. Getting all that right in one go is among the hardest questions in materials science.

In recent months, startups working on solid-state batteries have made steady progress towards those goals. Little battery cells that once sputtered after being charged are growing up into bigger ones that go much longer. There’s still a ways to go until those cells are road-ready, but progress is setting up the next challenge: Once you’ve built a good-enough battery under painstaking lab conditions, how do you build millions of them quickly? “These companies are going to have to have a massive mindset change, going from being R&D companies to manufacturing companies,” says Venkat Srinivasan, director of the Argonne Collaborative Center for Energy Storage Science. “It’s not going to be simple.”

How the West miscalculated its ability to punish Russia

ADRIEL KASONTA

He is a senior fellow and director of the Troubled Currencies Project at the Cato Institute in Washington, DC, a senior adviser at the Renmin University of China’s International Monetary Research Institute in Beijing, and a special counselor to the Center for Financial Stability in New York.

Hanke is a well-known currency-reform advocate, and a currency and commodity trader. He served on the late US president Ronald Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers, has been an adviser to five foreign heads of state and five foreign cabinet ministers, and has held a cabinet-level rank as a state counselor in both Lithuania and Montenegro.

He has been awarded seven honorary doctorate degrees and is an honorary professor at four foreign institutions.

This is no time to hesitate in Ukraine

Max Boot

History is littered with nations that launched wars in the expectation of a quick and painless victory, only to bog down in a conflict far more protracted and far less successful than anticipated. Think of Napoleon in Spain and Russia, Germany in World War I and II, North Korea in the Korean War, Iraq in the Iran-Iraq War, the United States in Afghanistan and Iraq. Once the initial spasm of optimism faded, these conflicts all turned into wars of attrition in which the side that could endure and inflict the most punishment prevailed.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine, now more than 100 days old, has followed this pattern. Russian dictator Vladimir Putin gambled on a bungled blitzkrieg toward Kyiv that failed. In those heady, early days, the world marveled at Ukrainian heroism, symbolized by the troops who responded to a Russian demand for surrender with the immortal words: “Russian warship, go f--- yourself.” Pictures of Ukrainian tractors dragging captured Russian tanks become an Internet sensation.

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