How Negotiators Failed for Two Decades to Bring Peace to Afghanistan

Andrew North

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Of the many missteps the United States made in its two-decade war in Afghanistan, one of the early ones involved a missed opportunity with the Taliban. In December 2001, just weeks after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, the Taliban made an offer to the Bush administration: Its fighters would be willing to lay down their arms, provided they could live “in dignity” in their homes without being pursued and detained.

China Reaches Demographic Point of No Return

Wang Feng

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In 2022, China experienced its first net population loss in more than six decades. Unlike the one it suffered during the Great Leap Forward famine when a starvation-induced population loss was quickly resolved by an ensuing baby boom, the COVID-driven population deficit has not seen such a rebound. To the contrary, China has embarked on a road of demographic no-return.

China’s current demographic downturn is deep and long-lasting. It is driven by forces that are fundamentally different from those during the Great Leap Forward famine, which spanned from 1959-1961. Instead of the sharp mortality spike that took as many as 30 million lives, population health in China has been increasing. Life expectancy at birth was 68 in 1990, and increased 10 years in three decades to reach 78 by 2020. At the same time, fertility has remained below what demographers call the “replacement level” of around two children per woman for more than three decades, even after China scrapped its long-held one-child policy. China has joined its East Asian neighbors as a country with ultra-low fertility—with no sign of a rebound.

How China and North Korea could reunite as comrades in war

Gordon G. Chang

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The next war in East Asia will consume the region. It will not be confined just to Taiwan, argue Markus Garlauskas and Matthew Kroenig in a new article in Foreign Policy.

Increased Chinese and North Korean military activity this month suggests that both regimes are contemplating going into battle. For instance, two days before Foreign Policy posted the piece, Kim Jong Un delivered a speech announcing the deployment of “250 new-type tactical ballistic missile launchers” to positions near the Demilitarized Zone.

Kim praised North Korea’s “munition industry workers” for developing the launchers “by their own efforts and technology.” However, Richard Fisher, a China military analyst with the International Assessment and Strategy Center, told me it is far more likely that the launchers are of Chinese origin and were built with Chinese parts and advice.

Chinese funded port reawakens Thailand's colonial ghosts

Hadley Spadaccini & Marc Makornwattana

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In 1907, the then Siamese government signed over the provinces of Battambang, Siem-reap, and Sisophon to French Cambodia. The treaty outlined the new land and sea borders between French Cambodia and Siam — now Cambodia and Thailand, respectively — whose interpretation became a point of contention between the two countries in 1972. Since then, relations between the Thai and Cambodian governments over the disputed maritime territories have been amicable, but Thai nationalist group pressure has stymied recent attempts to resolve the issue.

With the establishment of the Chinese-funded Ream port in Cambodia, there is increasing concern that the port could be converted to military use to strengthen Chinese naval power projection or be a competitor to Thailand’s Eastern Economic Corridor. The port and secrecy around its actual use are reigniting concerns first established in the 1907 treaty, and inflaming Thai worries about what the port means for its maritime territories, the stability of the Gulf of Thailand, and relations with China and the United States.

Sovereignty and anti-colonialism in Thailand

Thailand was the only Southeast Asian country to retain its independence in the face of Franco-English great power competition in the 19th and 20th centuries. Until the late 1800s, Siam had expanded its control over Laos, Cambodia, and the Malayan states as tributaries, with parts of those regions being under varying legal and administrative control of Siam.

China Is in Denial About the War in Ukraine

Jude Blanchette

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In the weeks following Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the Chinese government struck a tone of cautious support for Moscow. Spokespeople for the Chinese government repeatedly stressed that Russia had the right to conduct its affairs as it saw fit, alleged that the word “invasion” was a Western interpretation of events, and suggested that the United States had provoked Russian President Vladimir Putin by backing a NATO expansion. China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, expressed sympathy for Russia’s “legitimate concerns.”

Yet outside of the Chinese Communist Party leadership, the reaction was more concerned. Although the vast majority of universities and think tanks in China are state funded, the analysts and academics who work there still retain a degree of independence, and their views exert a measure of influence on the government. After the outbreak of war in Ukraine, these analysts openly fretted about how the conflict could damage China’s relationship with Europe and the United States, further fracture the global economy, and diminish the wealth and power of Russia, China’s most important partner. “The negative impact of the war on China [will be] huge,” Yan Xuetong, one of China’s foremost international relations scholars, argued in May 2022, warning that a protracted conflict would wreak havoc on the global economy and trigger “heightened tensions” between China and neighbors such as Japan. The West’s “unprecedentedly united” effort to sanction the Russian economy, as the international relations scholar Li Wei put it, surprised Chinese experts. Some, such as Wang Yongli, a former Bank of China vice president, worried that sanctions would threaten the globalization on which the Chinese economy depends.

America’s Middle East Defense Rests on Aircraft Carriers

Jack Detsch

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With the United States and Israel expecting a military response any minute now from Iran or its proxies for the recent deaths of Hamas’s political leader and Hezbollah’s second-in-command, the most visible presence of the U.S. military in the region is its hulking aircraft carriers.

Why the U.S. Military Needs to Imitate Ukraine’s Drone Force

Lorenz Meier and Niall Ferguson

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Imagine it is 2028 and there is a coordinated parallel attack executed by Russia on one of the Baltic states and by China on Taiwan. Under such a scenario, Russia would attempt to seize NATO territory and China would blockade Taiwan as a fait accompli to undermine alliance cohesion.

As things stand, NATO’s conventional forces would struggle to withstand such a Russian assault. And it would take weeks, if not months, to deploy American troops to the Indo-Pacific region.

The Cold War solution to this kind of problem involved the threat of using tactical nuclear weapons. Small tactical nuclear weapons made it highly risky to mass mechanized formations for a large-scale assault, as they would become a perfect target for such nukes. They were crucial to the official NATO plan to defend against a Soviet onslaught through the so-called Fulda Gap in western Germany.

Such an onslaught from the East is once again possible. Russia is now building up two new armies larger than the armies of half of NATO combined. Soon, armchair strategists will have to learn about the Suwalki Gap—the area around the Lithuanian-Polish border, which would be the shortest route from Belarus to the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad.

Resourcing the Ramp-Up: NATO and the Challenge of a Coherent Industrial Response to Russia's War in Ukraine

Stuart Dee, James Black, Lucia Retter

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In July, NATO leaders gathered in Washington to unveil a raft of new initiatives at the alliance's 75th Anniversary Summit. These included NATO taking over the coordination of aid to Ukraine—now described as on an “irreversible” path to membership—and an Industrial Capacity Expansion Pledge to boost production of arms and equipment, both to support Kyiv and to replenish depleted Western stockpiles after decades of low investment.

But near the top of the new NATO Secretary-General's in-tray will be an urgent question: why are efforts to mobilise the alliance's industrial base and ramp up production still yielding underwhelming results, over two years since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine? As allied leaders head home from the latest summit, a new RAND report shows that decades of fragmented and lacklustre investment in the industrial base and its underlying workforce skills, production lines, and supply chains will not yield to quick fixes.

Playing Catch-Up

Such has been the scale of bilateral and multilateral support to Ukraine that it has become increasingly difficult to track. The Kiel Institute currently assesses U.S. bilateral aid to be in the region of €75 billion, of which two thirds is military aid and the rest financial or humanitarian. Donations from EU institutions exceed €33 billion.

Without a Broader Strategic Goal, Israel's Military Successes Cannot Secure It a Victory | Opinion

M. A. Al-Asqalani

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Israel recently dealt Iran two significant blows with two assassinations at the highest levels of Iranian proxies. First, the IDF took out Fuad Shukr, a senior commander of Hezbollah. The next day, Ismail Haniyeh, chairman of the political bureau of Hamas, was assassinated in his guest house in Tehran. The assassinations join other tactical victories Israel has scored in its war against Hamas since the October 7 massacre. And yet, it's at this point undeniable these have come at the expense of its larger strategic goals.

Indeed, beyond simply winning its war with Hamas, what are the larger strategic objectives of the State of Israel? Restoring deterrence? Destroying Iranian proxies? Regime change in Tehran? The reason we can't say for certain is that the Israeli government has become fixated on the tactical aspect of this conflict, without developing a clear theory of strategic victory.

This also seems to be the conclusion drawn in a coordinated set of statements tweeted out Friday morning by the heads of Western states calling for deescalation, a hostage deal, and a pathway to a lasting peace. These are not things beyond Israel's capacity. I know this because in the not-so-distant past, Israel faced the same challenge, and made a very different choice, to prioritize strategic victory.

The Guns of August: Ukraine Blasts a Path Into Russia

Doug Livermore

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In early August, Ukraine did something predicted by no one — it ordered significant numbers of troops into Russia. That was enough to have Vladimir Putin and his aides meeting in a crisis session and his generals scrambling to find units to fight on the new front.

What does it signal? Is it a brilliant counterstroke, offering relief to Ukrainian forces forced into a series of retreats in Donbas, or a risky gamble using well-equipped units for little more than public relations bragging rights?

Here’s what can be said with certainty: Ukrainian offensive operations in Kursk Oblast demonstrate a capacity to conduct large-scale, combined arms operations on Russian territory. With great speed, surprise, and violence of action, Ukraine’s ongoing assault has now reportedly created a pocket measuring some 40 miles wide by up to 20 miles deep. Around 100,000 Russian civilians have been evacuated.

Putin the Resilient Predicting the Collapse of His Regime Is Wishful Thinking

Julian G. Waller

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The political regime that Russian President Vladimir Putin helms today is not the same as the one he started a war with in 2022. Russia has been an authoritarian country for years, with national elections heavily weighted in favor of Putin’s party and the ruling elite connected through long-standing patron-client networks. But since the invasion of Ukraine, Russia has turned into a true personalist dictatorship, with unchecked power in the hands of one man—Putin—and the rest of the country’s political institutions relegated to subordinate positions in the authoritarian hierarchy.

The German political theorist Carl Schmitt defined a sovereign ruler as “he who decides the exception,” a description well suited to Putin’s extraordinary wartime authority. As the war enters its third year, Putin’s regime is more closed than ever before, with elections largely functioning as displays of loyalty and a restrictive system of coercion and censorship maintaining social order. Institutions that even just nominally remain connected to the Russian electorate, such as the parliament or gubernatorial offices, have been pushed aside in favor of security agencies or elite, unelected council bodies, such as the Security Council, that serve Putin’s administration as an ersatz tsar’s court.

Russia launching more sophisticated phishing attacks, new report finds

Stephanie Kirchgaessner

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Russia’s state security agency is launching increasingly sophisticated phishing attacks against US, European and Russian civil society members, in some cases by impersonating individuals who are personally close to the targets of the attacks, according to a new investigation by security researchers.

A new report by the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto and Access Now comes as the FBI has separately launched an investigation into suspected hacking attempts by Iran targeting an adviser to Donald Trump and advisers to the Harris-Walz campaign.

State-sponsored hacking campaigns – including ones that seek to influence political campaigns – are not new: Hillary Clinton was targeted by hackers linked to the Russian government in the months before her unsuccessful presidential bid in 2016.

US Approves $20 Billion Arms Deal for Israel

Natalie Venegas AND Jon Jackson

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The United States on Tuesday approved more than $20 billion in weapons sales to Israel.

Reuters reported that the move was approved by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken. The deal reportedly includes F-15 fighter jets and nearly 33,000 tank cartridges.

According to the Associated Press (AP), Congress was notified about the sale prior to a public announcement from the U.S. Department of State. The sale is said to include more than 50 F-15 fighter jets; Advanced Medium Range Air-to-Air Missiles, or AMRAAMs; 120 mm tank ammunition and high explosive mortars; and military vehicles.

"The United States is committed to the security of Israel, and it is vital to U.S. national interests to assist Israel to develop and maintain a strong and ready self-defense capability," the State Department said in a statement about the sale. "This proposed sale is consistent with those objectives."

Carriers from space (part 2): Contemporary use of satellite imagery for open source intelligence

Dwayne A. Day

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During the Cold War, American reconnaissance satellites monitored Soviet aircraft carrier construction at the Mykolaiv shipyard in the Black Sea. By the 1980s, intelligence analysts looking at the photographs back in Washington noted that the Soviet Union was struggling to build large ships, with the fourth vessel of the Kiev-class taking almost twice as long to build as the first. By the 1990s, new Russian ship construction was almost nonexistent. It recovered slowly, but remains problem-plagued.

Whereas Russian shipbuilding languished for decades, by the 2000s and later, US intelligence analysts became increasingly aware of a dramatic increase in Chinese ship production, including aircraft carriers. The first Chinese aircraft carrier, Liaoning, was a heavily modified Soviet-era ship that was never completed and headed for the scrapyards when the Chinese acquired it via subterfuge. The Chinese rebuilt it and the ship entered service in 2012. The second Chinese carrier, Shandong, was a modified copy of Liaoning, and entered service in 2017. (See “Flattops from space: the once (and future?) meme of photographing aircraft carriers from orbit,” The Space Review, July 19, 2021.)

The third Chinese aircraft carrier was the first of China’s own design, and significantly bigger and more capable than the first two. China’s first two carriers can only deploy a small number of planes that have limited range and payload capability. The new ship will obviously significantly expand its embarked aircraft and have a greater ability to project power than Liaoning or Shandong. That new ship’s construction and early operations have been tracked by Westerners using commercial satellite imagery that has proliferated in the past decade.

We entered easily, say Ukrainian troops involved in Russia incursion

James Waterhouse

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While “Z” might be Russia’s symbol of its invasion, a triangle represents Ukraine’s most audacious attempt to repel it.

They are taped or painted on the sides of every supply truck, tank, or personnel carrier that heads towards the Russian border in the Sumy region.

It's an offensive that has seized hundreds of square kilometres of Russian territory and palpably restored momentum and morale to Ukraine’s war effort.

The Russian official in charge of the border region of Kursk has spoken of 28 settlements under Ukrainian control and almost 200,000 Russians have fled their homes.

Tomash has just returned from Ukraine’s cross-border mission along with his comrade “Accord”, who nonchalantly says it was “cool”.

Their drone unit had spent two days paving the way for the cross border incursion.

“We had orders to come here, but we didn’t know what that meant,” Tomash admits as he pauses for a coffee at a petrol station.

“We suppressed the enemy’s means of communication and surveillance in advance to clear the way.”

The Existential Fears Driving Israel’s Aggressive Military Action

David E. Rosenberg

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Even Israel’s friends overseas often have trouble understanding its conduct in the Israel-Hamas war and its ancillary conflicts with Hezbollah, Iran, and the Houthis. While some may be forgiving about the high numbers of civilian casualties as an inevitable part of urban warfare, it is harder for many to swallow Israel’s reluctance to allow enough humanitarian aid to reach Gaza or its seeming indifference to the massive collateral deaths involved in rescuing hostages and targeting Hamas leaders. Many are mystified by Israel’s willingness to risk what could be a devastating war with Lebanon’s Hezbollah or Iran. The back-to-back assassinations at the end of July of senior Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr and Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh were unusual displays of state violence by the standards of any government, much less one that regards itself as a liberal democracy.

Inside Putin’s Kremlin

Robbie Gramer

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John Sullivan had a rare front-row seat to the dramatic unraveling of U.S.-Russia relations as Washington’s ambassador to Moscow from 2020 to 2022, in the run-up to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to launch a massive war in Ukraine. Sullivan is one of just a handful of senior Trump administration appointees that President Joe Biden kept on after winning the White House, giving him a vantage point that spans two wildly different administrations’ foreign-policy strategies.

Russia's War Aims in Ukraine Objective-Setting and the Kremlin's Use of Force Abroad

Samuel Charap, Khrystyna Holynska

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R ussia’s war in Ukraine is Moscow’s most significant use of force outside its borders since World War II. Even in the early stages of its full-scale invasion, which began in February 2022, the operation entailed by far the largest commitment of ground forces in decades, and the scale of military resources devoted to the war has grown significantly since then. In short, the stakes for Russia could not be higher.

Despite these stakes, the Kremlin did not offer a coherent public narrative on the objectives of the operation. Often, goals were simply not articulated; when they were, vague concepts were used that allowed significant room for interpretation. Senior Russian leaders regularly made contradictory claims about the goals, often even contradicting themselves. It is true that statesmen often dissemble in public about what they hope to accomplish in foreign policy: In particular, Russian President Vladimir Putin is notorious for his untruths, particularly when denying his country’s violation of a commitment or norm. However, it is remarkable that the Russian leadership has not told either the public or the troops in clear terms what Moscow is trying to achieve in its most consequential use of force abroad in several generations.

Such confusion about objectives contradicts a core tenet of Russian strategy; namely, the necessity to link political goals and military action.

Why Ukraine’s Surprise Incursion on Russia Should Give Us Hope

Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, William Taylor, Barry McCaffrey, James Clapper and Stephen Henriques

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Ukraine is not about to seize Moscow, but its armed forces surprised many with its assault deep into Russian soil, now reportedly extending their reach from an initial six miles to more than 20. The recent counter-offensive by Ukrainian forces into Russia’s bordering Kursk region not only signifies the resolve of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, military leaders, and soldiers but also evokes important events in military history worth remembering.

In just a mere 24 hours, Ukraine's forces defeated two major lines of fortifications in the Kursk region that took Russia over two-and-a-half years and over $170 million to construct. Leading Kremlin critic, financier William Browder called this triumph is a profound humiliation for Putin’s aura of invincibility weakening his image before the Russian people.

While Ukraine’s advances are only slight in a geographical sense, they are significant in other ways that are equally, if not more, essential to finding success on the battlefield. Parallel moments in history show the strategic and symbolic implications of this campaign.

European Union defence ambitions: a reality cheque

Ester Sabatino

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European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen will begin in early September to select candidates for commissioners, including for an anticipated new dedicated defence position. The incumbent will face the Herculean task of reforming the continent’s still ineffective defence spending and underperforming defence-industrial base. How much power and financial clout the post-holder will have, or will hope to acquire, will help determine the extent of their success or failure over their five-year tenure.

Besides establishing a defence commissioner, von der Leyen’s goals for the 2024–2029 commission also include creating a European Defence Union to ‘support and coordinate efforts to strengthen the defence industry’.

Follow the money

A single market for defence remains von der Leyen’s vision, spelt out in her 18 July speech, but this long-sought goal has so far remained out of reach. A 2017 paper by the European Commission on the Future of European Defence noted that ‘systematic defence cooperation and integration … requires a true single market for defence’, but this call, nor previous others, resulted in marked progress. The cruel prompt of Russia’s brutal war of aggression in Ukraine may finally act as the required catalyst, and that is certainly von der Leyen’s hope.

Why Ukraine controls 1,000 km of Russian territory? It's about Art of War

Simantik Dowerah

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un Tzu's The Art of War is a timeless guide on military strategy emphasising the balance between offence and defence, the importance of adaptability and the significance of psychological warfare. Russia's recent military strategy and the vulnerabilities it has exposed show how a disproportionate focus on offence could lead to defensive weaknesses that Ukraine is now exploiting.

Overextension and the principle of strategic flexibility

Sun Tzu cautions against overextension noting that "he who is prudent and lies in wait for an enemy who is not, will be victorious." Russia's military campaign characterised by a rapid offensive push into Ukraine has demonstrated a clear overextension of its forces. Initially, Russia's strategy involved a multi-front assault aiming for quick and decisive victories. The goal was to overwhelm Ukrainian defences through sheer force capturing key cities like Kyiv and rapidly destabilising the Ukrainian government.

However, this strategy did not account for the resilience of Ukrainian forces or the logistical challenges of sustaining such a broad offensive. As the conflict dragged on, Russia found itself in a situation where its forces were spread thin, supply lines were overextended and the ability to effectively defend its own territory was compromised. This is precisely what Sun Tzu warns against—failing to maintain flexibility and overextending one's reach can lead to unforeseen vulnerabilities.

The US tried to fix its foreign military sales system. Did it work?

Noah Robertson

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Last summer when the Pentagon released its plan to fix its sprawling foreign military sales system, it also issued a warning.

Sasha Baker, then a top policy official and one of the co-chairs of the “tiger team” leading the effort, mentioned, pointedly, that they had tried this before. The U.S., she said, has tinkered with its foreign military system “roughly every 18 months for the last 20 years,” like a car in and out of the shop.

The goal this time, Baker said, was to make repairs that would last.

Little more than a year after their recommendations came out, though, it’s not clear whether the U.S. has succeeded.

All prompted by the war in Ukraine, the Pentagon, State Department and Congress launched their own efforts to reform their share of foreign military sales, or FMS. Having finished, they’re reporting different levels of progress.

Why a policy of targeted assassination is doomed to fail

Brahma Chellaney

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The recent assassinations in Beirut and Tehran of two of Israel’s foes — Fuad Shukr, a top Hezbollah commander, and Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s political chief — have put the Middle East on edge. The assassinations illustrate the shadow war waged for decades by Israel against Iran and its proxies. With the two nations locked in a dangerous cycle, the threat of a direct military confrontation looms ever larger.

Taking out senior figures does not destroy militant groups. Rather, it rather helps breathe new life into these groups by helping them win greater grassroots support. Yet extraterritorial assassinations have long been a favored tool of policy for Israel, just as they have been for the U.S. under successive administrations.

There has been a never-ending debate since then about the tenuous relationship of this practice with international law. The central issue, however, relates not to international law but rather to the political and military utility of a self-asserted license to kill.

Scientists are falling victim to deepfake AI video scams — here’s how to fight back

Linda Nordling

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Imagine Kgomotso Mathabe’s surprise when, in January, a colleague alerted her that a video of her promoting a fake drug to treat erectile dysfunction was doing the rounds on social media. She’d done no such thing.

“It was a video of me saying there’s this new drug based on research that I’ve been involved in,” says the South African urologist, who splits her time between the Steve Biko Academic Hospital in Pretoria and the University of Pretoria. It was realistic enough for family friends to begin asking why they saw her face every time they went on Facebook.

The video of Mathabe was a deepfake, generated using artificial intelligence (AI) technology trained on real video and audio material. Such videos have become difficult to distinguish from the real thing, as well as easier and cheaper to make, so their harmful use is a growing concern.

How, When, and Whether to Employ Non-Lethal Weapons in Diverse Contexts

Scott Savitz, Krista Romita Grocholski, Monika Cooper, Nancy Huerta, Keytin Palmer, Isabelle Winston

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Introduction

Background

Non-lethal weapons (NLWs) can be used to influence individuals’ behavior or to temporarily incapacitate either people or equipment, and NLWs employ a wide variety of effects to achieve these aims. For example, an acoustic hailing device (AHD) can be used to communicate or generate irritating sounds, an eye-safe ocular interrupter (OI) laser dazzler creates distracting glare, an Active Denial System (ADS) emits millimeter-wave energy to create a temporary heating sensation, and various electronic and mechanical systems can halt vehicles or vessels. NLWs are a subset of intermediate force capabilities (IFCs), which include other capabilities that might not have lethal effects, such as information operations, electronic warfare, and cyberwarfare.