Has Anyone Noticed What BRICS+ Is Telling Us About A New World Order? – opEd

Jean-Daniel Ruch

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In the beginning, there were four: Brazil, China, India and Russia. Following their first summit in 2009, they expanded to become BRICS with the accession of South Africa in 2011 and then nine in January 2024. At the sixteenth BRICS summit this October in Kazan, Russia, two African countries, Egypt and Ethiopia, and two Middle Eastern countries, the United Arab Emirates and Iran, made up what people now refer to as BRICS+.

Thirteen among the more than thirty countries that have formally expressed their interest in membership are now associated with BRICS+: four Southeast Asian countries (Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam), two Latin American countries (Cuba and Bolivia), three African countries (Algeria, Nigeria, Uganda), two Central Asian countries (Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan) and two European countries (Belarus and NATO member Turkey). They were given the status of “partner states” in Kazan.

To say that the Americans are not enthusiastic about the appeal of this new global club would be an understatement. Should the success of the summit in Kazan be interpreted as a sign of the failure of their strategy to isolate Russia? Worse still, are we witnessing the beginning of the end of the American century?

Mao's Mastery of Irregular Warfare: Lessons from the Revolution

Monte Erfourth

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Introduction

The People's Republic of China, a powerful nation whose rise to global prominence commands significant international attention, was not forged through conventional means. Instead, its foundation was built through a series of calculated, asymmetric maneuvers, a style of warfare that Mao Zedong perfected in his struggle against the Kuomintang (KMT) during the Chinese Civil War. The roots of China's current embrace of irregular warfare (IW) as a critical part of its national defense strategy can be traced back to Mao’s revolutionary tactics. Mao's emphasis on the combination of irregular and conventional warfare and his belief in winning over the population provides a framework that helps to explain how and why the modern People's Liberation Army (PLA) is so adept at irregular strategies today.

The Foundations of Mao's Irregular Warfare

Mao Zedong’s approach to irregular warfare was deeply rooted in his understanding of China’s socio-political landscape and the realities of its military capabilities. From 1927 to 1949, China was engulfed in an intense civil conflict that saw Mao’s Communist Party of China (CPC) pitted against the numerically and technologically superior forces of Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang. Recognizing the disparity between the CPC and the KMT, Mao embraced irregular warfare, shifting away from large, direct engagements and instead prioritizing guerilla tactics.

Where Does China Stand With the Next White House?

James Palmer

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The highlights this week: Questions remain about U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s China policy, Chinese authorities shut down a spontaneous nighttime cycling movement, and Taiwan seeks to curry favor with the next White House by pitching an arms deal.

How China is preparing for Trump’s face-changing act - Opinion

David Lampton

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The Chinese cultural performance of “face-changing” (bian lian), the theatre art of rapidly switching operatic masks to convey radically different feelings and characters by a single actor, is something to behold. US president-elect Donald Trump, whether by instinct or calculation, has been, and continues, practising this art against China and others.

Will Trump turn out to be the transactional businessman bent on making deals aimed at achieving principally economic gains and relief from America’s protracted wars? Or will he turn out to be a captive of what is shaping up to be a national security team still wedded to a Cold War framework in which Taiwan and other legacy issues loom large in its geopolitical and ideological thinking? Like the opera actor, he is likely to show both faces, possibly in rapid succession, confounding friends and enemies alike.

U.S. commandos retool for China war

Bill Gertz

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The Army Special Operations Command at Fort Liberty, North Carolina — possibly soon to be renamed back to Fort Bragg, its previous name — is retooling its 35,000 commandos for operations against China.

Last spring, some of the command’s 35,000 special operations forces took part in an unprecedented military deployment to Taiwan’s Kinmen island, about 3 miles from the Chinese mainland, the online military blog SOFREP reported. The commandos were training with Taiwanese military forces under provisions of the 2023 defense authorization law that calls for U.S. military advisers to work with their counterparts on the self-ruled island.

According to SOFREP, the exercises involved U.S. training for the Taiwanese military use of the Black Hornet Nano, a small military unmanned aerial vehicle. The cooperation suggests the outlying Taiwan islands could be used as part of what the commander of the Indo-Pacific Command calls the “Hellscape” strategy.

Restoring Deterrence Will Prevent Endless Wars

Victor Davis Hanson

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On January 3, 2020, the Trump administration conducted a drone strike near Baghdad International Airport, killing Iranian Major General Qassem Soleimani.

Soleimani had a long record of waging surrogate wars against Americans, especially during the Iraq conflict and its aftermath.

After the Trump cancellation of the Iran Deal, followed by U.S. sanctions, Soleimani reportedly stepped up violence against regional American bases -- most of which Trump himself ironically wished to remove.

A few days later, Iran staged a performance-art retaliatory strike against Americans in Iraq and Syria, assuming Trump had no desire for a wider Middle East war.

So, Iran launched 12 missiles that hit two U.S. airbases in Iraq. Supposedly, Tehran had warned the Trump administration of the impending attacks that killed no Americans. Later reports, however, suggested that some Americans suffered concussions, while more damage was done to the bases than was initially disclosed.

Elon Musk Met With Iran’s U.N. Ambassador, Iranian Officials Say

Farnaz Fassihi

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Elon Musk, a close adviser to President-elect Donald J. Trump, met with Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations on Monday in New York in a session that two Iranian officials described as a discussion of how to defuse tensions between Iran and the United States.

The Iranians said the meeting between Mr. Musk and Ambassador Amir Saeid Iravani lasted more than an hour and was held at a secret location. The Iranians, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss policy publicly, described the meeting as “positive” and “good news.”

Asked about whether there was such a session, Steven Cheung, Mr. Trump’s communications director, said, “We do not comment on reports of private meetings that did or did not occur.” Mr. Musk did not respond to a request for comment.

Elon Musk’s efficiency department is highly inefficient

Kathryn Anne Edwards

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After spending US$118 million of his personal wealth on the campaign to re-elect Donald Trump as United States president, billionaire Elon Musk has been tapped to lead a new Department of Government Efficiency in the new administration with Vivek Ramaswamy, the chief executive officer of a pharmaceutical company and (very) brief Republican presidential candidate.

It’s no coincidence that the acronym for this new department is DOGE, which happens to be the name of a cryptocurrency hawked by Musk.

Musk might find this amusing, but for the rest of us it can be downright Orwellian, the notion that the path to efficiency is through additional administrative bureaucracy, especially when that bureaucracy that will have tenuous, if any, authority.

You see, Congress controls spending, not an executive agency, and actions it tries to implement will likely be met with significant legal challenges.

There Are No ‘Easy Wars’ Left To Fight, But Do Not Mistake The Longing For One – OpEd

Alastair Crooke

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Israelis, as a whole, are exhibiting a rosy assurance that they can harness Trump, if not to the full annexation of the Occupied Territories (Trump in his first term did not support such annexation), but rather, to ensnare him into a war on Iran. Many (even most) Israelis are raring for war on Iran and an aggrandisement of their territory (devoid of Arabs). They are believing the puffery that Iran ‘lies naked’, staggeringly vulnerable, before a U.S. and Israeli military strike.

Trump’s Team nominations, so far, reveal a foreign policy squad of fierce supporters of Israel and of passionate hostility to Iran. The Israeli media term it a ‘dream team’ for Netanyahu. It certainly looks that way.

The Israel Lobby could not have asked for more. They have got it. And with the new CIA chief, they get a known ultra China hawk as a bonus.

US finalises up to US$6.6 billion funding for chip giant TSM

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The United States will award Taiwanese chip giant TSMC up to US$6.6 billion in direct funding to help build several plants on US soil, officials said on Friday (Nov 15), finalising the deal before Donald Trump's administration enters the White House.

"Today's final agreement with TSMC - the world's leading manufacturer of advanced semiconductors - will spur US$65 billion of private investment to build three state-of-the-art facilities in Arizona," said President Joe Biden in a statement.

The Biden administration's announcement comes shortly before President-elect Donald Trump takes office.

Trump has recently criticised the CHIPS Act, a major law passed during Biden's tenure aimed at strengthening the US semiconductor industry and reducing the country's reliance on Asian suppliers, including Taiwan.

Trump’s Dealmaking Record Could Be Bad News for Ukraine

Carl Bildt

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Is U.S. President-elect Donald Trump the accomplished dealmaker he boasts to be, with the Russia-Ukraine war about to come to a peaceful end? We should take him on his word when he says he’s not keen on starting any new wars—but that’s not at all the same as crafting a settlement in an ongoing conflict.

During his first term, Trump faced three situations that might offer some clues to his practical peacemaking skills.

Scientists Have Pushed the Schrödinger’s Cat Paradox to New Limits

Marta Musso

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In the world of quantum physics, another record appears to have just been broken. In a paper listed on the preprint site ArXiv, researchers at the University of Science and Technology of China claim to have observed atoms in a state of quantum superposition for 23 minutes. Being able to keep quantum states stable for such a long time could help make quantum devices more durable and discover strange new effects in quantum physics, they argue.

Superposition is a phenomenon where an object at a given moment has the potential to occupy multiple different states, but the object’s actual state is unknown. Very small objects, such as photons or electrons, demonstrate this behavior; they behave like waves, potentially occupying a range of positions at any one time, rather than like particles with a singular position. Crucially, when an object in superposition is observed, its condition collapses and it’s seen in only one of its potential states. You can think of this like a coin being flipped—while spinning in the air, it is potentially both heads or tails at the same time, but when you look at it after it’s landed, it can be only one or the other.

At COP29, the Sun Sets on U.S. Climate Leadershi

Elizabeth Kolbert

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On Monday, a new round of international climate talks will open in Azerbaijan, a country that earns ninety per cent of its export income selling fossil fuels. Depending on how you look at things, this situation is either farcical or grimly appropriate. Last week, in the run-up to the conference, Copernicus, the earth-observation arm of the European Union, reported that global temperatures this year will, for the first time, average more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) higher than pre-industrial levels. Also last week, the United States elected a climate denier as President.

“We have more liquid gold than any country in the world, more than Saudi Arabia,” Donald Trump crowed in his victory speech, apparently referring to oil. (According to most reliable sources, including the C.I.A., America’s oil reserves are actually only one-seventh the size of Saudi Arabia’s.) In response to Trump’s election, Michael E. Mann, a climate scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, declared the U.S. a nascent “petrostate” and predicted that the country “will, in short order, join an alliance of petrostate bad actors” to “block meaningful progress” on climate change.

Noam Chomsky Has Been Proved Right

Stephen M. Walt

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For more than half a century, Noam Chomsky has been arguably the world’s most persistent, uncompromising, and intellectually respected critic of contemporary U.S. foreign policy. In a steady stream of books, articles, interviews, and speeches, he has repeatedly sought to expose Washington’s costly and inhumane approach to the rest of the world, an approach he believes has harmed millions and is contrary to the United States’ professed values. As co-author Nathan J. Robinson writes in the preface, The Myth of American Idealism was written to “draw insights from across [Chomsky’s] body of work into a single volume that could introduce people to his central critiques of U.S. foreign policy.” It accomplishes that task admirably.

As the title suggests, the central target of the book is the claim that U.S. foreign policy is guided by the lofty ideals of democracy, freedom, the rule of law, human rights, etc. For those who subscribe to this view, the damage the United States has sometimes inflicted on other countries was the unintended and much regretted result of actions taken for noble purposes and with the best of intentions. Americans are constantly reminded by their leaders that they are an “indispensable nation” and “the greatest force for freedom the world has ever known,” and assured that moral principles will be at the “center of U.S. foreign policy.” Such self-congratulatory justifications are then endlessly echoed by a chorus of politicians and establishment intellectuals.

The Musk-Ramaswamy Opportunity

NEWT GINGRICH

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When President Trump announced he would create a Department of Government Efficiency and ask Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to lead it, he created a potentially enormous opportunity to rethink and modernize government.

As Trump said, “Together, these two wonderful Americans will pave the way for my Administration to dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure federal agencies.”

Israel Is Fighting a Different War Now

Eliot A. Cohen

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Over the past year, after suffering a devastating surprise and brutal losses, Israel has achieved remarkable military successes. Yahya Sinwar, mastermind of the greatest slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, is dead. So, too, are most of his senior subordinates and military commanders. Hamas guerrillas harass Israeli soldiers in Gaza, but what had been an army of tens of thousands—organized into five light infantry brigades and more than two dozen battalions—has been shattered, with half of the fighters dead, by Israeli estimates, and many others wounded or in captivity.

Up north, the successes are no less dramatic. The charismatic and shrewd head of Lebanese Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, is dead. So is his successor. So is Fuad Shukr, Hezbollah’s most important military figure. And so is most of the rest of the high command. Thousands of exploding pagers, walkie-talkies, and laptops have killed or disabled their users in Hezbollah’s army, which was perhaps double the size of Hamas’s.

Most of Hezbollah’s inventory of 150,000 missiles and rockets has been destroyed—more than 80 percent, according to the Israelis—and the group’s ability to coordinate has been so fractured that instead of the feared volleys of 1,000 projectiles a day, it struggles to launch 50 or 100. The area along Israel’s border, in which Israeli soldiers have found stockpiles of anti-tank missiles and other weaponry in many of the houses, has been painstakingly cleared. Here, too, guerrillas are attacking Israel Defense Forces soldiers, but Hezbollah can no longer muster the large, complex military formations that were formerly more numerous, better trained, better equipped, and better led than their Hamas counterparts.

The Big Five - 16 November edition

Mick Ryan

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As is every week these days, it was a fascinating week in war and international affairs. In this week’s update, I will focus mainly on the war in Ukraine but also provide an update on affairs in the Pacific as well.

Ukraine

The war in Ukraine and Russia continues to centre on two main campaigns - Kursk and the Donbas. However, more recently the Russians have begun an offensive in southern Ukraine and small raids into Kharkiv.

The Campaign in Kursk. This week the Ukrainians continued to inflict significant casualties on Russian attacking forces in Kursk. But the overall trend in this campaign is favourable to the Russians (and their North Korean allies). They have retaken about a quarter of the territory Ukraine seized in its August offensive. And while Ukraine has recently been able to retake a small amount of territory, the overall trend here is one of the Russians slowly grinding out advances in a manner similar to their eastern offensive over the past year.

Can Europe Compensate for Dwindling U.S. Support to Ukraine?

Fabian Hoffmann

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We don’t yet know exactly how U.S. policy toward Ukraine will evolve under the incoming President Trump and his new Administration.

While the worst-case scenario—where the United States completely cuts off Ukraine from additional aid—is by no means the most likely scenario, there is a good chance that Trump will reduce the level of support for Ukraine or use it as a bargaining chip with Europe.

The implications of this will vary across different areas, with Europe better positioned to compensate in some respects than in others. The following presents a short discussion of where Europe is relatively better and worse placed to step in. While not constituting a comprehensive analysis, it can provide some pointers for how Europe can approach the Trump Administration in an effort to future-proof military assistance to Ukraine.

Peter Thiel and the Triumph of the Counter-Elites

Bari Weiss

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On Tuesday night, Donald Trump announced that the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, along with the entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, will head a new initiative in the Trump administration: the Department of Government Efficiency, or “DOGE.”

Internet meme culture has now landed in the White House. Dogecoin is a memecoin—and if you don’t understand that sentence, fear not—I am sure Nellie will cover it in TGIF tomorrow.

But what the announcement solidifies—if Trump’s win hadn’t already—is the triumph of the counter-elite.

A bunch of oddball outsiders ran against an insular band of out-of-touch elites supported by every celebrity in Hollywood—and they won. They are about to reshape not just the government, but also the culture in ways we can’t imagine.

How they did that—and why—is a question that I’ve been thinking about nonstop since Tuesday.

And there was one person, more than any other, who I wanted to discuss it with. He is the vanguard of those antiestablishment counter-elites: Peter Thiel.

America’s Last Chance With the Global South

Leslie Vinjamuri and Max Yoeli

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The United States is failing in the global South. Its popularity and influence have waned, and policies that recent U.S. administrations have designed to close the gap have fallen short. Allegations of hypocrisy that countries in the global South now make—centered on the claim that the United States has supported Ukraine but has been complicit in mass death and suffering in Gaza and Lebanon—reflect historic skepticism that Washington’s advocacy for international norms reflects a commitment to humanitarian principles rather than self-interest, and a growing perception that developing countries bear the cost of uneven U.S. leadership.

Will the Department of Government Efficiency Tackle the Pentagon?

William Hartung

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President-elect Donald Trump has pledged to create a “Department of Government Efficiency,” co-chaired by businessman Elon Musk and former political rival Vivek Ramaswamy. Both have pledged deep cuts.

In a September 2023 speech in Los Angeles, Ramaswamy pledged to shut down the FBI, IRS, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and Department of Education. Just to drive home the point, Ramaswamy said that “[m]ass layoffs are absolutely what I would bring to Washington DC.”

Ramaswamy has failed to explain how the government will be able to carry out basic functions like collecting revenue, enforcing the law, dealing with pandemics, or preventing nuclear accidents once his targeted agencies are no more.

Biden’s escalation paralysis has devastated Ukraine

Jonathan Sweet and Mark Toth

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Bob Woodward’s new book “War” provides a harrowing glimpse into the Biden administration’s national security decisionmaking process. Established early in the war, the White House created its own self-fulfilling prophecy.

President Biden’s self-imposed red line was his evergreen fear of Russian use of tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine.

Then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley inexplicably told the Kremlin all it needed to know when he asked his counterpart in Russia, Gen. Valery Gerasimov, “under what conditions would you use nuclear weapons?”

Milley was basically asking the Russians, “How far are we allowed to go? What are our limits?” He thus allowed Russian President Vladimir Putin to establish our rules.

Gerasimov’s response was this: “If there’s an attack on Russia that threatens the stability of the regime — condition one. Second, is if a foreign power attacks Russia with a weapon of mass destruction — so that’s chemical, biological or nuclear. Third, Russia reserves the right to use tactical nuclear weapons in the event of catastrophic battlefield loss.”

A Critical Analysis of the US Army’s Security Force Assistance Mission During the War on Terror

John A. Nagl

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Introduction

In 2014, the Iraqi army, into which tens of billions of American taxpayer dollars had been invested, collapsed in the face of an offensive by the terror group the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Only a major coalition intervention prevented the fall of Baghdad. In 2021, within just a few months of the American withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Afghan National Army (ANA) collapsed in the face of an offensive by the Taliban. Between 2002 and 2021, some $88 billion had been invested in the ANA. In both cases, the U.S. military had devoted vast amounts of time and money to the training of the host-nation’s security forces. Yet, with a few notable exceptions (the Iraqi Counter Terrorism Force and some units of Afghan commandos), both armies severely underperformed once they could no longer rely on extensive American air, ground, and logistical support. Why did the U.S. effort to train and advise these forces fail so spectacularly?

The disorganization and lack of priority given to the training of host-nation forces by the military are major factors. The U.S. Army failed to prioritize the creation of permanent security force assistance (SFA) formations because, as an institution, its focus has always been on the conduct of large-scale conventional warfare. Even when it turned toward counter-insurgency missions during the War on Terror, the U.S. Army concentrated on its own fighting role rather than preparing host-nation troops to take charge. At lower levels, capable U.S. officers preferred and sought combat assignments leading U.S. forces rather than serving in advisory posts. Leaders also had incentives to place poorly performing personnel into advisor teams, effectively removing them from their units. All these factors combined to make the creation of a capable force to train and advise the Iraqi and Afghan security forces more difficult.

Beyond Communication: The Strategic and Cognitive Value of SOF Language Training in an AI World

Duc DuClos

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Introduction

In an era where artificial intelligence can translate languages almost instantly, the question inevitably arises: Is there still value in human language training? AI-driven language tools like real-time translators have indeed streamlined basic communication, leading some to question the substantial investment in human language acquisition. As machine translation capabilities grow more sophisticated, military planners and policymakers face increasing pressure to justify the time, resources, and effort devoted to human language training. However, this technological focus obscures a crucial reality: language learning develops capabilities that transcend mere translation, creating cognitive and strategic advantages that AI cannot replicate.

This reality is particularly significant in special operations, where success often depends on more than just the ability to communicate words. The complexity of modern operational environments demands operators who can think flexibly, adapt quickly, and build genuine human connections—capabilities that emerge from more than just knowing a language but also the transformative process that happens in the process of learning it. Language training cultivates neural pathways, promotes innovative thinking, and fosters cultural understanding in ways that no AI system can match.

Proxy is Not a Pejorative

Amos Fox

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Let’s begin by stating in the affirmative that the word proxy is not a pejorative. This includes the ideas of proxy war, proxies (i.e., the actors), proxy strategy, and principal-proxy relationships. Now having cleared the collective air, let’s explore why this is the case.

The highly contested and emotionally charged nature of proxy wars, which is also known as “conflict delegation,” is an emotionally charged concept in war, has led to two dominant perspectives in how it is studied and discussed by scholars, institutions, and other researchers.

Some scholars approach the subject from an impassive position of causal identification and realistic assessments of the proxy dynamics. Scholar Tony Pfaff offers another way of thinking about this approach. He states that researchers can approach the subject from a morally neutral position, and just focus on structural causality. Others, however, take an emotional position. These scholars, institutions, and other researchers focus on idealizing the proxy and ignoring how the structural of principal-proxy dyads impacts the character of the relationship between the dyad’s two actors, and advocate for fanciful language that lightens the ostensible negativity associated with the term proxy.