Author: Shana

Reading the climate change articles this week, I felt that the disproportionate challenges faced by the Global South – which is comprised by countries that were not the major polluters responsible for the escalation of climate change in the 20^th century – were addressed only briefly. I also was surprised that none of the articles really made the case for policies of managed retreat to higher ground alongside more transformative technological solutions like sucking carbon out of the air, carbon taxes, etc.

Climate change is recognized as an urgent security problem on a global scale, but its effects will be felt most immediately and acutely by communities of the Global South. An uptick in droughts and major storm events, combined with inadequate infrastructure and high reliance on the agricultural sector have left the region particularly exposed to this threat. Major cities in this region are commonly located on coasts or major waterways and thus face the immediate impacts of rising seas. Urban centers are primary destinations for climate refugees escaping the drought, deforestation, and food insecurity increasingly faced by rural and agricultural economies – contributing to existing problems of overcrowding, slum expansion, and insufficient housing supply in cities.  As the region grapples with a changing climate, the science suggests the brunt of these changes will impact the region’s most vulnerable: women and children, the poor, and those with low levels of mobility.

The urban poor are most vulnerable to rising temperatures. The poor are most likely to live in insecure structures without proper heating or cooling infrastructure and are least likely to have ready access to clean water or green space that serves to offset rising temperatures. Further, the development of informal housing in dangerous or risk-prone areas is often encouraged by regulations and zoning laws that restrict housing supply and deny poor communities land tenure. As a result, already overcrowded slums are overflowing as migrants arrive from coastal areas ravaged by climate change’s most immediate effects, or from agricultural communities where changes to weather patterns have devastated their crops and ability to make a living. As new arrivals to cities, migrants find access to affordable housing and transportation is limited, and many migrants struggle to gain employment as they lack formal education and skills translatable to the urban economy. In this way, it is easy to see how environmental degradation can lead to security threats and conflict over scarce resources – particularly among populations already suffering from various forms of deprivation.

In the face of rising sea levels, some scientists and scholars have suggested that the response should be a systematic retreat to higher ground or mass movement to climate resilient terrain. Moving inland, they argue, is not a defeatist measure; it is simply a practical one. This approach has not gained a great deal of traction in climate change policy conversations, primarily because relocation is drastic, complicated, and costly, and would mean moving local communities – often the poorest and most vulnerable – from the places they call home. Programs of this nature would require a particularly high level of buy-in from policymakers and communities, which the concept does not currently enjoy.  However, proponents of retreat say these policies are framed as prohibitively difficult until they are deemed inevitable, pointing to islands of the South Pacific and Indian Ocean that have hastily adopted policies of retreat and relocation, recognizing that their environments will soon be underwater. These scholars contend that, if well-managed, retreat would be a prudent, proactive measure to head-off an inevitable reality that many communities will face down the line. Such policies are not only prudent for communities of the Global South but also low-lying and coastal communities in the United States. New York has experimented with such policies in the wake of Hurricane Sandy in parts of  Long Island and Staten Island, offering to buy damaged homes for pre-storm value in exchange for owners moving to less vulnerable areas.

I put managed retreat in the category of adaptive solutions rather than the transformative solutions needed to address the problem on a global scale, but both need to be discussed side by side by policymakers.

The Trump administration’s continued refusal to give President-elect Biden and his Transition Team access to the Presidential Daily Briefing is unsurprising in its pettiness but stunning in its abject disregard for national security – particularly at the height of a public health crisis and corresponding economic downturn that has left the United States especially vulnerable. At the direction of the president, the head of the General Services Administration has refused to certify the results of the presidential election, blocking Biden’s access to daily briefings and classified intelligence.

Vice President-elect Harris is in a strange position given that she is a sitting senator and receives regular classified briefings but is bound by congressional rules not to share the information with Biden – creating an unprecedented information gap between the two. Luckily, Biden has access to some of the best minds in the world of policy and academia (Rice, Powers, Blinken, McCrystal, and a deep bench of experts who served the Obama and Clinton administrations). Nonetheless, these experts are not currently serving in government and thus have no access to real-time classified reports or cable traffic.

This is extremely unsettling amidst a shake up and purging of top officials at the Pentagon, DHS, and intelligence agencies, a drawdown in Afghanistan, and reports that Trump was seriously considering (though apparently dissuaded from) a strike on Iran to cap off four turbulent years in office. To say nothing of the need for close coordination to combat COVID-19 and organize a countrywide vaccine distribution.

I recognize this has subject has little connection to the readings assigned for this week, however, it’s a pressing security issue of immediate concern. There is a deep and tragic irony that in an election year in which we saw so little foreign meddling, the U.S. has managed to do so much harm to itself by sowing distrust in the democratic process, disregarding norms, and dispensing with decency.

The era of impunity for Saudi Arabia may be coming to an end as the Biden administration prepares to take office. The new administration will no doubt take a harder line on Saudi’s human rights record and its calamitous war in Yemen. The Biden administration also says it wishes to rejoin the JCPOA, which may be a legal and logistical challenge, but nonetheless signals an intention to calm tensions with Iran.  The new administration will have to skillfully thread the needle by doing so while maintaining a strong relationship with Israel and its Gulf allies.

A shift in U.S. policy may lead Saudi to further cozy up to China, particularly to expand its civilian nuclear program. Saudi recently employed a Chinese company to build a facility for extracting yellowcake from uranium ore, and U.S. officials are increasingly concerned about Saudi plans for a nuclear weapons program.

The Kingdom’s fear of Iran in combination with its massive resources, hawkish leadership, and fear of U.S. abandonment could certainly fuel its nuclear ambitions and escalate an arms race in the Middle East.

This seems an apt moment to consider biological weapons as the Covid-19 pandemic continues to ravage the globe and the United States faces a record number of infections. The virus is known to have originated in Wuhan, China and some have advanced the – unsubstantiated and unproven – conspiracy theory that it was actually released as a deliberate act of bioterrorism by the Chinese government.

This Forbes piece examines whether the Covid-19 virus makes a “good” bioweapon from the perspective of medical and biodefense experts. It explains that an effective bioweapon is easy to access and manufacture; it is stable in the atmosphere; it is highly contagious; it makes a high number of infected people ill, and it causes mass panic. Also, users of the bioweapon have protections against it.

While Covid-19 spreads very quickly and widely – and it has certainly generated panic – it does not hold up as a bioweapon by other key measures. For one thing, it is not very stable in the atmosphere and does not survive very well outdoors or in sunlight, allowing for activities like distanced gatherings and outdoor dining. Covid-19 also fails the test for a “good” bioweapon given that there were no known protections for users of Covid-19 as a bioweapon at the time it emerged. Though several countries say they are on the brink of approving and disseminating a vaccine – and Russia claimed to have one as of late summer – there was no known vaccine or antidote back in late 2019/early 2020, making it fairly implausible that the virus was deliberately released as a bioweapon.

The article concludes that, while Covid-19 “has some desirable properties of a bioweapon, it would probably not be good choice for military purposes.” Nonetheless, the pandemic has reminded us of our extreme vulnerability and how unpredictable the results of a public health crisis can be. The ease with which such crises can spin out of control is part of the reason the U.S. stopped its biological warfare program in 1969 and focused its efforts on prevention.  The disaster that has been the United States’ Covid-19 response is an obvious argument for greater investment in defensive capabilities against killer pathogens, no matter their origin.

Sharing this recent Vox interview with Markus Garlauskas who served as national intelligence officer for North Korea on the National Intelligence Council from 2014 to  2020.  Garlauskas discusses the Trump administration’s DPRK policy over the last four years – particularly what he felt was done right and how the next administration should handle Kim Jung Un.

One of Garlauskas’s more unexpected takes was that the threat of war with North Korea in 2017 (amid “fire and fury” threats from the White House) was vastly overstated. He said that the gap between Trump’s rhetoric and reality was significant, and that the U.S. had actually come closer to war in 1994 and in 2015 under the Obama administration. Garlauskas said that Trump’s tough rhetoric reflected his administration’s position that “some degree of  posturing was necessary to show North Korea it was serious, and that they were not going to indefinitely tolerate this level of activity.” He framed Trump’s bellicose messages as conscious and strategic rather than haphazard 3 AM tweets.

Garlauskas also praised Trump for not accepting a bad deal in Hanoi that would commit the U.S. to near full sanctions relief for DPRK. He said that Kim offered too little and asked too much at that summit. Critically, Kim wouldn’t commit to the full denuclearization of DPRK on paper. He said Trump was right to walk away.

Garlauskas says that the next president will have to make DPRK a toppling priority, demand a halt to weapons testing, and can’t be afraid of confrontation: “There has to be a willingness to confront Kim militarily — not to initiate war, not to do a bloody nose strike, but basically to make it clear to him that there are limits to what we will tolerate. And we need to make clear that if he crosses into initiating a war, the outcome will be the end of him and his regime. That’s one of the things President Trump said differently than I would have said it, but it needed to be said, frankly, in 2017.”

An interesting read from a former  advisor who doesn’t come off as a total apologist for the Trump administration but makes the case that it did more right than wrong on DPRK.

Just a quick one this week. I found this short Washington Post piece to be interesting as we consider Israel’s recent peace deals with Bahrain and UAE and other deals looming on the horizon (e.g. Sudan and Saudi Arabia, likely after U.S. elections). The piece looks at Arab public opinion of  normalizing relations with Israel and concludes, somewhat predictably, that even though the deals are historic steps, they do not enjoy widespread public support in the Arab states. Lack of public buy-in could be a serious obstacle to peace in the long term.

The article explains that based on survey data, much of the Arab Street feels the move is “aimed at pressuring Palestinians to accept a state without sovereignty, while granting authoritarian Arab Persian Gulf nations international legitimacy and greater access to new technologies for repression.” It also describes how UAE and Bahrain rolled out their new Israel policies alongside reminders that it is illegal to publicly disagree with policies of the ruling families there.

While I believe that normalization of relations between Israel and its neighbors is deeply important, it has to go much further than trade, technology, and military cooperation. There has to be a parallel effort to strengthen people-to-people ties or these peace deals may just be pieces of paper that do not result in a warmer feeling between Arabs and Israelis on the ground – especially if Israeli technology is used to further target dissidents and curb free speech in the Gulf states.

I’ve always thought “maximum pressure” was inappropriate branding for a foreign policy campaign that isolates the United States from its allies. Wouldn’t maximum pressure look like the international community firmly united in its approach to preventing a nuclear Iran?  Maximum pressure, so-called, has rendered very little in the way of meaningful results. Economic sanctions have been devastating to the average Iranian but haven’t changed the behavior of the regime. Iran has continued to stockpile enriched uranium and repress its citizens while the U.S. has been left isolated at the UN and other international fora.

This WaPo article is an interesting look at U.S. sanctions toward Iran through a historical lens. It cites numerous examples of the United States imposing economic sanctions in the Middle East to limited effect. It recalls economic sanctions on Saddam Hussein and Moammar Gaddafi that succeeded in constraining their nuclear ambitions but failed to result in regime change or a loosening of their grip on power. Similarly, sanctions imposed on Syria in 2011 have devastated the local economy but have not resulted in the ouster of dictator Bashar al Assad. In each of these cases, authoritarian rulers have been unwilling to give up power in exchange for economic relief for their people – the central logic underlying the imposition of economic sanctions. In a similar vein, the article describes the January 2020 attack on Qassim Soleimani as an impressive show of muscle, but an action that has done nothing to change the behavior of the Iranian regime and has only made U.S. troops in the Middle East more unsafe and vulnerable to attack.

Having lived in southern Iraq in 2015-16 on the heels on the signing of the JCPOA, I can attest that an opening of dialogue between the United States and Iran did result in a more permissive security environment for U.S. personnel living, working, and interacting with Iraqis in the country’s Shia heartland (basically in Iran’s backyard). By contrast, the U.S consulate in southern Iraq was recently closed in 2018  – due in part to a deteriorating security environment and threats emanating from Iranian-backed Shia militias. I wonder what might have been if the U.S. had remained in the JCPOA. The U.S. might still be flying a flag in Basra today.  In its absence, others will surely fill the gap.

As we consider the viability of the United Nations, it’s worth noting that the UN World Food Program just won the 2020 Nobel Peace Prize for its assistance to nearly 100 million people facing food insecurity worldwide . The WFP has not been free of controversy or allegations of corruption, but overall, the agency is a UN success story. It is able to operate swiftly and effectively in war zones and conflict-affected countries, from Yemen and Syria to South Sudan and even North Korea. Its work has been even more critical amid the coronavirus pandemic that has worsened the problem of food insecurity in some of the world’s poorest and most turbulent regions. The work of the WFP is a hopeful reminder of what can be achieved through multilateral cooperation.

David Beasley, Executive Director of the WFP, is a former Republican governor and vocal supporter of President Trump. Nonetheless, he has strongly cautioned against cuts to the UN and particularly the WFP, saying “This is my message to President Trump and his friends and allies: Proposed massive cuts to food assistance would do long-term harm to our national security interests.”

It is common, even fashionable, for politicians to bash the UN for being bloated, elitist, and largely toothless. But the WFP is definitely the best-placed and resourced agency for addressing global hunger, especially when crisis strikes. I am glad the Nobel Committee recognized the WFP as a success of multilateralism amid a marked uptick in nationalism and populism around the world. I think the agency is richly deserving of the 2020 Nobel Peace Prize.

Perhaps this reveals some personal bias on my part, but I found Hong Yu’s piece on the motivation behind China’s One Belt One Road (OBOR) initiative to be overly effusive while overlooking some of the more problematic aspects of the endeavor. Yu’s article makes brief reference to preferential loans for infrastructure in Africa and South Asia but doesn’t really interrogate the notion that China is engaged in serious debt diplomacy in the developing world. Yu frames OBOR as an initiative to foster economic cooperation and connectivity and increase trade and investment but focuses little on China’s predatory lending practices.

This is an old Foreign Policy article, but it offers some emblematic examples of Chinese debt diplomacy:

“Unable to repay China for a loan used to build a new port in the city of Hambantota, in 2017 Sri Lanka signed over to China a 99-year lease for its use, potentially as a strategic base for China’s navy. In Djibouti, public debt has risen to roughly 80 percent of the country’s GDP (and China owns the lion’s share), placing the country at high risk of debt distress. That China’s first and only overseas military base is located in Djibouti is a consequence, not a coincidence.”

Beyond its problematic and non-transparent lending practices, China is also promoting a “Digital Silk Road.” This is ostensibly to enhance digital connectivity in the developing world and expand the reach of Chinese tech and telecom companies, but it is easy to see how a Digital Silk Road might undermine democracy and human rights, particular given the PRC’s recent actions in Hong Kong and toward the Uighurs. I find myself wondering: Will the world face a “Digital Curtain” in the future?

But perhaps I’m just another American engaged in unnecessary handwringing over the rise of China.

https://www.politico.eu/article/why-putin-hasnt-won-the-game-in-belarus/

Belarus is top of mind at the moment as we consider the geopolitical rivalry between Russia and the West. President Lukashenko of Belarus – known as “Europe’s last dictator” – won reelection by a landslide in August, spurring mass protests by the Belarusian opposition amid accusations of election fraud and foreign meddling. Demonstrations gave way to violence and to mass arrests of protestors, garnering unprecedented international attention for Minsk. Amid the unrest, Lukashenko claimed protests were a Western-backed plot to end his rule and expand NATO influence eastward.

Belarus, of course, has deep and longstanding ties with Russia – historical, cultural, political, and economic. Russia has long wanted to absorb Belarus into a union state and is deeply enmeshed with the Belarussian security state. Lukashenko has flirted with the West at times when it’s suited him but has always tacked back toward Russia in an effort to retain power. Last month Belarus secured a 1.5 billion loan from Russia, following a meeting between Lukashenko and Putin.

This Politico article discusses the EU’s role and how it might coax Belarus toward the West.  The article acknowledges that the EU has limited cards to play given that it doesn’t enjoy the strong ties with Belarus that Russia can claim. However, the article suggests that the EU may exert some influence on the people of Belarus by providing humanitarian support to political refugees and to victims of state-backed violence.  Essentially it recommends an EU appeal to Belarusian hearts and minds.

Frankly, I am not convinced that Belarus can be moved in the direction of the West in the short term – particularly given the Russian Federation’s economic leverage – but I will be watching intently.