A new Kashmir rail bridge that could be a game-changer for India

Nikhil Inamdar

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The world’s highest single-arch rail bridge is set to connect the valley region in Indian-administered Kashmir with the rest of the country by train for the first time.

It took more than 20 years for the Indian railways to finish the bridge over the River Chenab in the Reasi district of Jammu.

The showpiece infrastructure project is 35m taller than the Eiffel Tower and the first train on the bridge is set to run soon between Bakkal and Kauri areas.

The bridge is part of a 272km (169 miles) all-weather railway line that will pass through Jammu, ultimately going all the way to the Kashmir valley (there is no definite timeline yet for the completion). Currently, the road link to Kashmir valley is often cut off during winter months when heavy snowfall leads to blockages on the highway from Jammu.

Experts say the new railway line will give India a strategic advantage along the troubled border region.

The Himalayan region of Kashmir has been a flashpoint between India and Pakistan for decades. The nuclear-armed neighbours have fought two wars over it since independence in 1947. Both claim Kashmir in full but control only parts of it.

An armed insurgency against Delhi's rule in the Indian-administered region since 1989 has claimed thousands of lives and there is heavy military presence in the area.

The bridge is part of a railway project aimed at connecting Kashmir valley with the rest of India

"The rail bridge will permit the transport of military personnel and equipment around the year to the border areas,” said Giridhar Rajagopalan, deputy managing director of Afcons Infrastructure, the contractor for the Indian railways that constructed the bridge.

This will help India exploit a “strategic goal of managing any adventurism by Pakistan and China [with whom it shares tense relations] on the western and northern borders”, said Shruti Pandalai, a strategic affairs expert.

Fracking Frenzy In India: A Water Crisis In The Making?

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India’s plans to scale up fracking operations without robust regulations could spell disaster for the country’s finely balanced water security, according to research from the University of Surrey.

India is positioning shale gas as a key transitional energy source and has announced 56 fracking projects across six states. Despite the promise of energy independence, Surrey’s study raises alarm bells about the country’s preparedness to handle the unique water risks posed by fracking.

Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, involves injecting high-pressure fluid into shale rock to release natural gas. This process has been controversial worldwide due to its significant environmental impacts, particularly on water resources. The study points out that India’s regulatory framework for fracking is currently based on rules designed for conventional drilling processes, which do not adequately address the distinct challenges fracking presents.

The Taliban and IS-K May Not Be Opposed After All

Sadiq Amini

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Earlier this month, three of Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour stops were canceled in Austria after officials announced that they had arrested two men accused of plotting a terrorist attack focused on the singer’s stadium shows. One of the men was a 19-year-old Austrian citizen who had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State online. There have been other recent attacks and plots targeting Western nations including the United States, United Kingdom, France, and Germany, as well as Pakistan, India, Iran, and Russia.

America’s Missed Chance in Afghanistan

Michael A. Cohen, Christopher A. Preble, and Monica Duffy Toft

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For many Americans, the dominant image of the United States’ 20-year war in Afghanistan came at the very end: terrified Afghans storming the Kabul airport, clinging to departing planes, some falling to their deaths, desperately trying to flee the country as Taliban insurgents closed in on the capital. Three years ago this month, the longest and most expensive war in U.S. history, a conflict that resulted in 2,459 dead American soldiers and 20,000 more wounded, had ended in spectacular failure.

Although accusations of American incompetence in Afghanistan now focus on those last days in August 2021, the real error had been made long before, at the moment of the United States’ greatest victory there: the fall of the Taliban in December 2001. Flush with success, hungry for vengeance, and confident of the Taliban’s complete defeat, the United States sought neither reconciliation nor compromise with Afghanistan’s former leaders. Instead, it sought to make an example of them. In doing so, the George W. Bush administration planted the seeds for the Taliban insurgency that would emerge and eventually wipe away two decades of sacrifice in Afghanistan.

Fall Of A Dictator In Bangladesh – OpEd

Ambassador Kazi Anwarul Masud

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Sheikh Hasina’s fall in Bangladesh shows history’s cruel irony. The ousting of the leader marks the end of a period characterized by the kind of oppression her father fought against in Bangladesh’s birth. While writing this article I had borrowed some segments by noted Indian analyst Commodore Uday Bhaskar and also partly from world famous British magazine The Economist. These references do not in any case detract from the essence of the article.

In unexpected and dramatic development plunged Bangladesh into turmoil on Monday as Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina abruptly resigned after 15 years in power and fled to India in a military aircraft. This ignominious exit followed weeks of student-led protests over the job quota system and brutal reprisals by security forces. Images of jubilant protesters ransacking the prime minister’s residence testify to the intensity of the anti-Hasina sentiment. This was reminiscent of what happened in Colombo in July 2022, when then-president Gotabaya Rajapaksa fled Sri Lanka amid similar protests and the ransacking of the presidential palace. Bangladesh is a relatively new nation. It was known as East Pakistan before being born as an independent nation in 1971 after a war of liberation from Pakistan in which India played a major role.

The unseating of Hasina has been described as the second liberation of Bangladesh. This is deeply ironic as Hasina’s father Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was the founding father of the fledgling nation and had fought against the oppressive, genocidal rule of the Pakistan army. The same charges are now being levelled against his daughter; the blood-soaked rhythms of history add to the trauma of Bangladesh and its collective memory.

Bangladesh army chief General Waker-uz-Zaman, who was appointed in June, has taken control of the troubled nation. He has assured the country that an interim government will soon be formed. The country’s parliament has been dissolved to pave the way for fresh elections which were among the key demands of the student protesters. The army, which has long played an influential role in Bangladesh’s politics, will continue to do so in an effort to control the current turbulence. It will oversee the formation of an interim government and prepare the country for free and fair elections, the kind that Hasina has neglected during the past decade.

Why China Shuns the Russia-North Korea Alliance

Victoria Herczegh

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Early this year, there was no greater advocate of a China-Russia-North Korea alliance than Kim Jong Un, the leader of North Korea for more than a decade. Trade with China would continue to normalize and grow after a sudden stop during the COVID-19 pandemic; Russia would exchange advanced military technology for North Korea’s spare ammunition and weaponry. Together, they would provide another layer of security for Kim’s regime. Russia, with its all-consuming focus on defeating Ukraine, was and is eager to upgrade relations with any country willing and able to support it, but China has conspicuously kept its distance from anything resembling a trilateral partnership. For Beijing, propping up Pyongyang is less important than mending ties with the United States, maintaining Chinese influence in the Indo-Pacific and containing the confrontation on the Korean Peninsula. Over the longer term, Moscow’s interest in Pyongyang will wane, and Kim’s regime will be driven back into Beijing’s arms.

Trade with China is the lifeblood of the North Korean economy. In 2023, after three years of economic contraction and pandemic-related border closures, North Korea and China resumed cross-border trade. Though it traded almost exclusively with China (the rest of the world accounted for less than 2 percent of North Korea’s trade by volume), the North Korean economy expanded by 3.1 percent for the year, its highest growth rate since 2016. Speaking in January, an exuberant Kim declared 2024 the “North Korea-China friendship year.” China’s president, Xi Jinping, appeared to reciprocate, emphasizing Beijing’s readiness to cooperate with Pyongyang and its “strategic and long-term perspective” on their relationship.

By mid-June, things had changed. For weeks, there were rumors of an imminent trilateral summit, during which Kim, Xi and Russian President Vladimir Putin were expected to sign a major defense agreement. Kim and Xi last met face to face in 2019, since which time Putin and Xi have become “all-weather friends.” But when the day arrived, only Kim and Putin were in attendance. While they signed a comprehensive strategic partnership treaty, Beijing seemed intent on distancing itself from whatever might transpire in Pyongyang, even scheduling meetings with South Korean officials for the same week.

Careful: The Next World War Could Start Small

Julian Spencer-Churchill

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We are now, once again, living in the preliminary phase of an international confrontation that will rapidly evolve into a world war if the democracies do not shore up nuclear and conventional deterrence against territorial conquest. Full spectrum nuclear and conventional deterrence and Soviet appreciation of the costs of war kept the Cold War stand-off from escalating into a Third World War. However, nuclear deterrence will not on its own prevent World War III (over either Ukraine, Taiwan, the Straits of Hormuz, or the Korean peninsula), just as the prospect of incendiary and nerve gas assault against European capitals by bomber fleets did not deter the outbreak of the Second World War.

Instead, German leader Adolf Hitler chose to fight by armored conquest, and all of his adversaries complied. World Wars are never an intention of foreign policy. Instead, they escalate from failed attempts at a quick land grab by authoritarian states in the face of an unprepared and slowly coalescing democratic coalition. Washington must be on the lookout for deterrence crises in these minor theatres, as war will not start with an immediate Russian attack on Poland or even a direct Chinese amphibious landing on Taiwan’s coast.

Despite the enormous death toll among soldiers and non-combatants, neither the First nor Second World Wars had actually satisfied the complete definition of total war or reached Karl von Clausewitz’s definition of an absolute war. The First World War began, for both the Central Powers and democratic Allies, as quick campaigns, primarily focused on Berlin blocking the interference of France in German Imperial designs in Ukraine. Neutral world opinion likely deterred the use of gas against population centers in 1915 and thereafter, despite the war resembling a total effort in almost every other respect.

China's rhetoric turns dangerously real for Taiwanese

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Calls to denounce “die hard" Taiwanese secessionists, a tipline to report them and punishments that include the death penalty for “ringleaders” – Beijing’s familiar rhetoric against Taiwan is turning dangerously real.

The democratically-governed island has grown used to China’s claims. Even the planes and ships that test its defences have become a routine provocation. But the recent moves to criminalise support for it are unnerving Taiwanese who live and work in China, and those back home.

“I am currently planning to speed up my departure,” a Taiwanese businesswoman based in China said – this was soon after the Supreme Court ushered in changes allowing life imprisonment and even the death penalty for those guilty of advocating for Taiwanese independence.

“I don’t think that is making a mountain out of a molehill. The line is now very unclear,” says Prof Chen Yu-Jie, a legal scholar at Taiwan’s Academia Sinica.

China’s Taiwan Affairs Office was quick to assure the 23 million Taiwanese that this is not targeted at them, but at an “extremely small number of hard-line independence activists”. The “vast majority of Taiwanese compatriots have nothing to fear,” the office said.

But wary Taiwanese say they don’t want to test that claim. The BBC has spoken to several Taiwanese who live and work in China who said they were either planning to leave soon or had already left. Few were willing to be interviewed on record; none wanted to be named.

“Any statement you make now could be misinterpreted and you could be reported. Even before this new law China was already encouraging people to report on others,” the businesswoman said.

China Launches Own Version of Starlink to Challenge US Dominance in Spac

Jon Sun and Michael Zhuang

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In its latest attempt to challenge the United States’ space dominance and SpaceX’s Starlink, China launched a low-orbit satellite constellation with surveillance capability.

According to Chinese state media, the first batch of 18 satellites in the constellation dubbed “Qianfan” or “thousand sails” was launched into orbit by state-controlled Shanghai Yuxin Satellite Technology Company on Aug. 6. The entire project is a future network of 14,000 satellites, offering multiple services, including direct-to-device connectivity. Half of those spacecraft will be launched by the end of next year and another half by the end of 2027.

Starlink, owned by the U.S. company SpaceX, has provided Ukraine with internet and communication services, a critical element to sustain the nation in its war with Russia. As of Aug. 2, the network had about 7,000 satellites in orbit, making it the largest low-orbit constellation in the world.

Starlink’s capability had attracted the attention of the U.S. Department of Defense, which contracted SpaceX in 2021 to create a network of satellites known as Starshield to serve America’s defense and intelligence agencies.

Chinese military researchers analyzed various capabilities of Starlink in 2022. They wrote that Starlink poses “potential dangers and challenges” to the CCP. The researchers called on the regime to develop new countermeasures that would include abilities “to disable some Starlink satellites and to disrupt the constellation’s operational system.”

Last year, scientists at the University of Aerospace Engineering, a PLA research university, proposed methods to “suppress” Starlink and Starshield’s communications, including electromagnetic interference and employing high-power microwaves or lasers to damage or destroy specific Starlink satellites.

The Era of Large U.S. Navy Surface Warships Is Over

Brandon J. Weichert

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Summary and Key Points: The era of large surface warships, particularly aircraft carriers, as primary tools of naval power projection is facing significant challenges due to the rise of anti-access/area-denial (A2/AD) capabilities, particularly from China.

-The cost of maintaining these warships, like the Ford-class carriers, is immense, yet they are increasingly vulnerable to cheaper, sophisticated missile systems like China’s Dong-Feng 26B.

History Teaches Us: The sinking of Russia’s Moskva by a Ukrainian drone highlights the vulnerability of large surface vessels. The U.S. Navy should shift focus towards expanding its submarine fleet and developing unmanned drones and hypersonic weapons to counter China's A2/AD strategies effectively, rather than continuing heavy investment in legacy systems.

Why the U.S. Navy Needs to Rethink Its Strategy Against China

For centuries, navies around the world have taken pride in their large surface warships. The dominance of these warships persisted even after the advent of submarines. In fact, during the Second World War, when submarines became a primary weapons platform for navies, the aircraft carrier stole all the headlines.

Today, however, things are changing.

A Sizeable Liability

The rise of anti-access/area-denial (A2/AD) means that the large surface warship’s days as the primary form of power projection in a naval fleet are coming to an end.

Consider that the Ford-class aircraft carrier, America’s newest, costs $13 billion per unit, plus hundreds of millions of dollars per year to maintain. The more numerous Nimitz-class aircraft carriers, while older than the Ford-class, are also very expensive.

The Indomitable IRGC How the Revolutionary Guards Prevent Iran’s President From Charting a New Course

Jon B. Alterman and Sanam Vakil

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The lot of Iranian presidents is not a happy one. They enter office as heroes, promising big changes to improve the lives of their fellow citizens. Almost without exception, they leave as broken men.

Iran’s problems frequently prove more intractable than its new leaders anticipate. But a bigger obstacle Iranian presidents face is that they have responsibility without authority. With large swaths of the government and the economy under the control of Iran’s clerical elite and thus beyond politicians’ reach, presidents are able to affect the tone more than the substance of Iranian life. Iran’s is a hybrid system, divided between elected and unelected leaders, and the latter almost always have the upper hand.

Masoud Pezeshkian’s July 5 victory in Iran’s snap presidential election nevertheless revived hope inside and outside the country that things might be different this time. Pezeshkian ran as a reformist, promising greater government transparency, economic growth, and personal autonomy. Early indications suggest that he is seeking a pragmatic path, building public enthusiasm for his agenda while showing unalloyed loyalty to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Pezeshkian’s bet seems to be that he will be able to wrest some concessions from the clerical establishment that will enhance Iranians’ daily lives.

Careful: The Next World War Could Start Small

Julian Spencer-Churchill 

Source Link

We are now, once again, living in the preliminary phase of an international confrontation that will rapidly evolve into a world war if the democracies do not shore up nuclear and conventional deterrence against territorial conquest. Full spectrum nuclear and conventional deterrence and Soviet appreciation of the costs of war kept the Cold War stand-off from escalating into a Third World War. However, nuclear deterrence will not on its own prevent World War III (over either Ukraine, Taiwan, the Straits of Hormuz, or the Korean peninsula), just as the prospect of incendiary and nerve gas assault against European capitals by bomber fleets did not deter the outbreak of the Second World War.

Instead, German leader Adolf Hitler chose to fight by armored conquest, and all of his adversaries complied. World Wars are never an intention of foreign policy. Instead, they escalate from failed attempts at a quick land grab by authoritarian states in the face of an unprepared and slowly coalescing democratic coalition. Washington must be on the lookout for deterrence crises in these minor theatres, as war will not start with an immediate Russian attack on Poland or even a direct Chinese amphibious landing on Taiwan’s coast.

Despite the enormous death toll among soldiers and non-combatants, neither the First nor Second World Wars had actually satisfied the complete definition of total war or reached Karl von Clausewitz’s definition of an absolute war. The First World War began, for both the Central Powers and democratic Allies, as quick campaigns, primarily focused on Berlin blocking the interference of France in German Imperial designs in Ukraine. Neutral world opinion likely deterred the use of gas against population centers in 1915 and thereafter, despite the war resembling a total effort in almost every other respect.

What Taiwan Can Learn from Ukraine’s Kursk Offensive Against Russia

Michael Rubin

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A U.S. Air Force F-16 Fighting Falcon assigned to the 56th Fighter Wing, Luke Air Force Base, Arizona, flies over Phoenix during the NASCAR Cup Series Championship Nov. 7, 2021. F-16 pilots assigned to the 56th and 944th FW, which train U.S. Air Force F-16 pilots, performed a 4-ship formation flyover at the conclusion of the U.S. National Anthem at the Phoenix Raceway to kick-off the championship race. Luke AFB continually bolsters partnerships with various organizations around Arizona, gaining support from the surrounding community.

What does Ukraine’s Offensive into Russia mean for a Future Taiwan-China War?: The foreign policy consensus that enabled the United States to win the Cold War is a distant memory. Most young partisans today cannot conceive of President Ronald Reagan’s relationship with House Speaker Thomas “Tip” O’Neill, Jr., to set sparring aside when necessary to find consensus.

Russia Invades Ukraine and the China Challenge

When Russia invaded Ukraine two and a half years ago, too many American partisans chose sides primarily because they relished the fight in Washington. President Donald Trump criticized the Zelensky government in Ukraine, and so many Trump followers questioned Washington’s support for Kyiv. Politicians from both the isolationist right and progressive left inverted responsibility for the invasion by suggesting either NATO expansion or Kyiv’s pivot toward Europe forced Russian President Vladimir Putin’s hands.

Among policy professionals, at least, Elbridge Colby, the blueblood grandson of the late Director of Central Intelligence William Colby, made one of the most persuasive arguments about supporting Ukraine. He argued that in an era of declining resources, the United States could not afford the distraction the Ukraine fight represented because the People’s Republic of China posed a much greater threat to the United States.

Ukraine on the Offensive

Nataliya Gumenyuk

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Launched on August 6, Ukraine’s surprise cross-border offensive into the Kursk region of Russia has startled the world. Not only is the operation far and away the largest Ukrainian attack into Russian territory since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022; it has also come at a time when Ukrainian forces were struggling to preserve their already stretched resources along the existing 3,300-mile front. Yet as of mid-August, Ukrainian forces had penetrated dozens of miles into Russia and gained control of 74 villages and towns in the Kursk region, according to Ukraine’s top military commander. Ukraine has also taken more than 100 Russian prisoners.

At this stage, it is too early to assess the success of the operation. So far Kyiv has said its primary aim is halting Russian artillery attacks from the Kursk region into Ukrainian territory. According to the Ukrainian government, more than 255 glide bombs and hundreds of missiles have been launched at Ukrainian towns from the region since the beginning of the summer. Kyiv also hopes to use the Russian POWs in a prisoner exchange to release Ukrainian soldiers from Russian captivity. Even more important, the operation could force the Kremlin to redeploy some of its troops from southern and eastern Ukraine. Previously, it was Ukraine that had to draw from its existing deployments to counter Russian attacks.

Politically, the Kursk offensive serves another purpose. It allows Kyiv to address its partners from a position of strength and puts the growing debate about potential cease-fire negotiations in a different light. Few Western observers expected any significant Ukrainian offensive this summer, let alone one that could penetrate well into Russia. If nothing else, Kyiv has demonstrated that it is very much still in the fight, easing recent concerns about its staying power. Moreover, Ukrainian troops have shown that they are capable of planning and unleashing a surprise large-scale offensive in total secrecy despite the presence of drones and satellites on the battlefield that can see almost everything.

The World Is Not Ready for the Next Pandemic

Michael T. Osterholm and Mark Olshaker

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Less than five years after the outbreak of COVID-19, the world remains vulnerable to another pandemic. Over the past five months, a mutated strain of the H5N1 influenza virus detected in dairy cattle poses a potential risk for a pandemic-causing virus. Yet governments and international organizations have done far too little to prepare for such a scenario, despite the lessons they should have learned from the global battle with COVID-19.

After the COVID-19 crisis revealed the shortcomings of the global public health response system, many assumed that governments and international organizations would strive to fix the most obvious problems. Given the catastrophic human and economic costs of the pandemic, countries had a strong incentive to start spending heavily on developing new generations of more protective influenza and coronavirus vaccines, as well as to greatly expand global manufacturing and distribution networks. But this has not happened. At current funding levels, it will likely take a decade or longer to develop more effective and longer-lasting vaccines. Although there are groups at work on new treatments and other antiviral initiatives, on the whole, global society does not appear to be much more prepared for a future coronavirus or influenza pandemic than it was five years ago.

The resurgence of H5N1 influenza in humans and animals has highlighted these failures. Although the virus was identified in the 1990s, over the last 20 years it has continued to mutate, reinventing itself over and over again. Today, it is infecting millions of birds, but it has also become more capable of spilling over into at least 40 species of mammals. It still cannot easily transmit between humans, but infections in dairy cattle, which have influenza receptors for both avian and human influenza viruses in their udders, demonstrate the risk for a new pandemic.

The Geopolitical Opportunity of Ukraine’s Kursk Offensiv

A. Wess Mitchell

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Ukrainian offensives onto Russian soil, such as the one currently underway in the Kursk region, present an opportunity to end the war more quickly as part of a wider strategy of sequencing the United States’ geopolitical challenges. Such a sequencing strategy, as I wrote in Foreign Policy on the second day of Russia’s invasion, is the best option for avoiding wars against China, Iran, and Russia simultaneously and on multiple fronts. By giving the Ukrainians the tools they need to consolidate and perhaps build on their recent gains, Washington has a chance to help Kyiv compel Moscow to the negotiating table, buy time for the West to rearm, and allow the United States to shift attention to the Indo-Pacific. But doing that will require U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration to remove restrictions on Ukraine’s use of U.S. weapons and define a clear and attainable end state for the conflict. While this is risky, it is preferable to the alternative of drip-feeding aid to Ukraine until China or Iran confronts the United States with a two-front war.

Swarm Wars: The Shaky Rise Of AI Drones In Ukraine – Analysis

Amos Chapple

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(RFE/RL) — A dystopian future in which swarms of killer drones hunt for human targets is drawing closer, but fully autonomous AI drones remain an elusive technology, at least on the battlefields of Ukraine.

“The issue of correct identification of enemy targets by drones still remains,” says a spokesperson at Brave1, a Ukrainian government organization involved in the development of military technology.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has fueled rapid advancement of drone technology that has enabled cheap, bomb-carrying quadcopters to take out targets worth millions of dollars. But in the arms race between drones and radio “jammers” that interrupt the signal between a drone and its controller, those defensive measures appear to be winning.

Ukrainian drone pilots are reported to be losing thousands of drones per month to Russian jamming devices. Russia’s recent use of a wire-guided drone indicates the invading army is also struggling to overcome electronic warfare systems.

Some developers in Ukraine are focused on swarming drone systems that allow one pilot to fly multiple weaponized drones as one, but the top priority for Ukrainian drone developers is “minimizing the impact of electronic warfare,” according to Brave1.

“Drones equipped with AI-assisted targeting modules do not require a connection to the operator during the engagement phase,” the Brave1 spokesperson told RFE/RL. “The operator locks onto the target, then the AI takes over the targeting process independently, making it immune to enemy electronic warfare interference.”

Such semi-autonomous drones could negate jamming measures. Once the AI tracking system takes over, the drone can cut its vulnerable radio signal between the drone and its controller and make its own “decisions.”

How to Decolonize Our Battle Against Climate Change – OpEd

Laurie Parsons

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Rich countries have exported climate breakdown through extractive industries, creating a “carbon colonialism.”

Almost everything we buy exploits the environment and the people who depend on it to a greater or lesser extent. Almost everything we buy contributes to climate breakdown through emissions, local environmental degradation, or, most commonly, both. Yet, in a world where greenwashing is so commonplace that almost every product proclaims ecological benefits, it tends not to be seen that way. In fact, it tends not to be seen at all.

Carbon emissions and pollution are a phase that we all pass through, meaning that the ability—and crucially the money—to avoid the ratcheting risks of climate change is something we have earned, and others too will earn as each nation continues inexorably along its separate curve. Wealthy countries accept this narrative because it is comfortable and provides a logical and moral explanation of the relative safety and health of the rich world.

But what if it wasn’t true? What if one place was devastated because the other was clean? Just as carbon emissions are not acts of God, neither is exposure to the results of those emissions. In other words, you can’t remove money from the geography of disaster risk.

This is carbon colonialism: the latest incarnation of an age-old system in which natural resources continue to be extracted, exported, and profited from far from the people they used to belong to. It is, in many ways, an old story, but what is new is the hidden cost of that extraction: the carbon bill footed in inverse relation to the resource feast.

Most colonial economies were organized around extraction, providing the raw materials that drove imperial growth. As a result, even when the imperial administration is taken out, the underlying economic structures put in place by colonizers are very difficult to get away from and continue to hold newly independent countries back.

Ukraine’s audacious move

Nigel Gould-Davies

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Russian territory is under occupation for the first time since 1944. Since launching a major incursion into Kursk on 6 August, Ukraine has taken about the same amount of Russian territory (approximately 1,000 square kilometres) as Russian forces have, at huge cost, taken from Ukraine since October 2023.

This is a major development. How it evolves will depend on Ukraine’s objectives for the operation and Russia’s decisions on how it musters forces to resist it. But it is already significant for what it tells us about the war and about Russia, and for its impact on the wider diplomacy of the conflict.

Significance for the war Ukraine’s incursion demonstrates the continuing unpredictability of the war. A dominant narrative – in this case, that Ukraine was struggling to prevent a steady Russian advance in the Donbas and has little prospect of making further gains of its own – has once again been broken. While Ukrainian positions in the Donbas remain under threat, its forces have seized the initiative with an audacious and well-executed combined-arms operation into Russia. Through a combination of concealment, deception and Russian complacency, Ukraine achieved complete strategic and operational surprise – confounding the view that uninhabited aerial vehicles (UAVs) have made the battlefield too transparent to achieve this.

Ukraine’s capacity for ingenious and unexpected moves – mirroring on land what it regularly demonstrates in the Black Sea – remains undiminished. This also confounds speculation that Oleksandr Syrsky, Ukraine’s armed-forces commander since February, would prove more conservative and ‘Soviet’ than his predecessor, Valerii Zaluzhny. Ukraine has consistently out-thought Russia in the war. By contrast, where Russia has made gains, this is due to superior mass, not skill. The contest of intelligence, in both senses, favours Ukraine. This reverses the dictum, attributed to Vladimir Lenin, that quantity has a quality all of its own.

Kursk and the Battle of Wills

Mick Ryan

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Today I had intended to publish a short article about the battle of wills that is ongoing in Kursk and the Donbas. The will of nations and their military institutions matters in wartime. The willingness and capacity to continue fighting demands good leadership, and importantly, the provision of purpose by national leaders. As Clausewitz wrote in Book 1, Chapter 1 of On War: “War is an act of violence intended to compel our opponent to fulfil our will.”

On one side, the Ukrainians are continuing to push forward in Kursk while also conducting a difficult defensive campaign in the Donbas. On the Russian side, the Russians are continuing to push on their main effort – the advance towards Pokrovsk – while seeking to redeploy forces from other areas to stem the advance of Ukrainian forces in Kursk.

Both sides are moving forward while at the same time sustaining terrible damage elsewhere. The remainder of this year, and possibly the trajectory of the war, will be determined by who blinks first and decides that focussing on the losses they are sustaining is more important than the gains they are making elsewhere. This is the ultimate expression of Clausewitz’s battle of wills.

Ukraine’s Incursion Into Russia Flips the Script on Putin

Anton Troianovski and Alina Lobzina

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Families fleeing invading Ukrainian troops sought shelter from strangers. Russian parents feared that their children might be sent into battle for the first time.

And in a televised crisis meeting on Monday, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia flipped through a white legal pad, reading aloud from handwritten notes, suggesting that his aides did not have the time to type up a speech for him as they usually do.

Ukraine’s surprise incursion into a sliver of Russia’s Kursk region last week has not shifted the overall course of the war, but it has already struck a blow well beyond the few hundred square miles of Russia that Ukraine now controls: It has thrust a Russian government and society that had largely adapted to war into a new phase of improvisation and uncertainty.

Mr. Putin has said nothing about the incursion since meeting with security and regional officials, a tense gathering in which the president at one point berated the Kursk governor for revealing the depth and breadth of Ukraine’s advance into Russia. Near the border, where, the authorities say, more than 130,000 people have fled or been evacuated, regional officials appeared unprepared for the crisis — prompting grass-roots aid initiatives to jump in.

The Geopolitical Opportunity of Ukraine’s Kursk Offensive

A. Wess Mitchell

Source Link

Ukrainian offensives onto Russian soil, such as the one currently underway in the Kursk region, present an opportunity to end the war more quickly as part of a wider strategy of sequencing the United States’ geopolitical challenges. Such a sequencing strategy, as I wrote in Foreign Policy on the second day of Russia’s invasion, is the best option for avoiding wars against China, Iran, and Russia simultaneously and on multiple fronts. By giving the Ukrainians the tools they need to consolidate and perhaps build on their recent gains, Washington has a chance to help Kyiv compel Moscow to the negotiating table, buy time for the West to rearm, and allow the United States to shift attention to the Indo-Pacific. But doing that will require U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration to remove restrictions on Ukraine’s use of U.S. weapons and define a clear and attainable end state for the conflict. While this is risky, it is preferable to the alternative of drip-feeding aid to Ukraine until China or Iran confronts the United States with a two-front war.

The World Is Not Ready for the Next Pandemic

Michael T. Osterholm and Mark Olshaker

Source Link

Less than five years after the outbreak of COVID-19, the world remains vulnerable to another pandemic. Over the past five months, a mutated strain of the H5N1 influenza virus detected in dairy cattle poses a potential risk for a pandemic-causing virus. Yet governments and international organizations have done far too little to prepare for such a scenario, despite the lessons they should have learned from the global battle with COVID-19.

After the COVID-19 crisis revealed the shortcomings of the global public health response system, many assumed that governments and international organizations would strive to fix the most obvious problems. Given the catastrophic human and economic costs of the pandemic, countries had a strong incentive to start spending heavily on developing new generations of more protective influenza and coronavirus vaccines, as well as to greatly expand global manufacturing and distribution networks. But this has not happened. At current funding levels, it will likely take a decade or longer to develop more effective and longer-lasting vaccines. Although there are groups at work on new treatments and other antiviral initiatives, on the whole, global society does not appear to be much more prepared for a future coronavirus or influenza pandemic than it was five years ago.

The resurgence of H5N1 influenza in humans and animals has highlighted these failures. Although the virus was identified in the 1990s, over the last 20 years it has continued to mutate, reinventing itself over and over again. Today, it is infecting millions of birds, but it has also become more capable of spilling over into at least 40 species of mammals. It still cannot easily transmit between humans, but infections in dairy cattle, which have influenza receptors for both avian and human influenza viruses in their udders, demonstrate the risk for a new pandemic.

Election turmoil in Venezuela: regional instability and global stakes

Irene Mia

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Venezuela has long held unique geopolitical significance in a region rarely seen as a major global player. While its vast oil reserves – the largest in the world – have traditionally underpinned its geo-economic clout, more recently its domestic dynamics have become a potent source of regional insecurity. Venezuela’s acute political and economic situation mean that re-integrating the country into the rules-based global community is now an international priority. Yet the interplay of domestic and geopolitical factors driving, and in turn, being driven by the Venezuela crisis complicate efforts towards this. The outcome of the 28 July presidential elections highlights the challenges at play.

Domestic crisis, regional insecurity and geopolitical tensions

Venezuela’s economic and political crisis under Nicolás Maduro’s increasingly authoritarian regime, coupled with its growing international isolation, has made it a flashpoint for regional insecurity. Poor economic management and widespread corruption, compounded by international sanctions, led to a dramatic shrinkage of almost 70% in Venezuela’s GDP between 2014 and 2020 amidst a period of hyperinflation starting in 2018. This economic collapse triggered the largest migration exodus in the Americas to date, with nearly 8 million Venezuelans fleeing, the majority to neighbouring countries. Beyond the humanitarian toll, the migration crisis has placed significant political and economic strains on destination countries, sparking bilateral and regional tensions. Additionally, the Maduro regime’s reliance on illicit economies and its protection of Colombian non-state armed groups have profoundly influenced regional armed conflict and insecurity dynamics.

Safeguarding Subsea Cables: Protecting Cyber Infrastructure amid Great Power Competition

Daniel F. Runde, Erin L. Murphy, and Thomas Bryja

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Subsea fiber-optic cables, a critical information and telecommunications technology (ICT) infrastructure carrying more than 95 percent of international data, are becoming a highly consequential theater of great power competition between the United States, China, and other state actors such as Russia. The roughly 600 cables planned or currently operational worldwide, spanning approximately 1.2 million kilometers, are the world’s information superhighways and provide the high-bandwidth connections necessary to support the rise of cloud computing and integrated 5G networks, transmitting everything from streaming videos and financial transactions to diplomatic communications and essential intelligence. The demand for data center computing and storage resources is also expected to increase in the wake of the artificial intelligence revolution. Training large language models takes enormous, distributed storage to compute, and if those networks are globally oriented, they will require additional subsea capacity to connect them. These geopolitical and technological stakes necessitate a consideration of the vulnerabilities of subsea systems and the steps the United States can take to fortify the digital rails of the future and safeguard this critical infrastructure.

Undersea Cables: Why Do They Matter?

Subsea cables are critical for nearly all aspects of commerce and business connectivity. For example, one major international bank moves an average of $3.9 trillion through these cable systems every workday. Cables are the backbone of global telecommunications and the internet, given that user data (e.g., e-mail, cloud drives, and application data) are often stored in data centers around the world. This infrastructure effectively facilitates daily personal use of the internet and broader societal functions. In addition, sensitive government communications also rely extensively on subsea infrastructure. While these communications are encrypted, they still pass through commercial internet lines as data traverses subsea infrastructure. Subsea cables carry a much larger bandwidth and are more efficient, cost-effective, and reliable than satellites; consequently, they have been credited with increasing access to high-speed internet worldwide, fueling economic growth, boosting employment, enabling innovation, and lowering barriers to trade. These networks are now indispensable links for the modern world and are pivotal to global development and digital inclusivity.