By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, LinkedIn, Facebook) May 28, 2023; see related ongoing Twitter thread and related articles by Brian from May 13 The Importance of The Effort to Eject Erdoğan Goes Far Beyond Turkey and from May 10 graciously published by The UnPopulist: Turkey’s Best Shot for Defeating its Illiberal President Is This Sunday (and feel free to hit that heart like button there!); because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023, but I still need your help, please keep sharing my work and consider also donating! Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request at its discretion.

SILVER SPRING—Journalism is often mainly about distinguishing about what we do know, what we do not know, and what questions we must ask to move things in the second category into the first category.  Few things are as important when it comes to all this as elections, and in an exclusive dataset that I compiled for all of Türkiye’s 81 provinces and overseas voting that raises serious questions, there is clear evidence that officials overseeing the May 14 first-round Turkish election acted in a biased way, rejecting significantly more ballots outright and as a percentage in regions strongly favoring opposition presidential candidate Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu as leader of the Republican People’s Party (CHP) than in regions strongly favoring incumbent President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan as leader of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) in addition to fostering a lower turnout environment for opposition strongholds.

At first glance, there does not appear to be much afoot.  Looking at all 51 provinces Erdoğan won along with his win of overseas voters, 2% of ballots in those voting regions were rejected and turnout was 84.5% compared with looking at the 30 regions Kılıçdaroğlu won with a 1.8% ballot rejection rate and 88.9% turnout.  But such an overall look can be deceiving, as some of these regions were split very closely.  In districts Erdoğan won by 10 points or more, there was a rejected ballot rate of 2% and turnout was 84% compared with a ballot rejection rate of 2.2% and voter turnout of 87.3% in provinces Kılıçdaroğlu won by 10 or more points.  Still not much to see, but there are still a lot of Erdoğan votes proportionately in these places.

But what if we look at the 15, 10, and 5 places each candidate won by the most points?  For Erdoğan’s 15, 10, and 5 largest-win-margin locations, the ballot rejection rates were 2.1%, 2%, and 2% with 87.6%, 87.7%, and 87.4% turnout, respectively.  For Kılıçdaroğlu, his 15, 10, and 5 widest-margin-victory provinces saw 2.3%, 2.2% and 3.3% ballot rejection rates and turnout of 86.6%, 86.8%, and 83.1%, respectively.  Overall, 558,683 invalid votes came from places Kılıçdaroğlu won compared with just 478,418 in places Erdoğan won, a difference of 80,265 votes favoring regions Erdoğan won, a more than 16.1% difference.  Part of this is because Erdoğan is more popular in rural areas, but still, the consistent contrasts in ballot rejection rates in the areas going heavily for Erdogan and areas going heavily for Kılıçdaroğlu—especially the 3.3% to 2% rejection rate (a 60.6% increase) and the 83.1% versus the 87.4% turnout difference for five provinces with the highest victory margins for Kılıçdaroğlu and Erdoğan, respectively—do suggest something more than just coincidence, namely an organized effort by election officials to reject more Kılıçdaroğlu than Erdoğan ballots and voter suppression of opposition strongholds.

While this favoring of Erdoğan was not enough to change the outcome from May 14, in a closer election it would have been and it also begs the question of how much rigging and suppression beforehand can be factored into the results, a question impossible to answer with quantitative precision.  But questions we can try to answer to at least are what factors explain the significant difference in ballot rejection rates between the candidates’ highest-performing provinces and the difference in voter turnout rates in their very highest performing provinces.  While a number of factors could possibly explain these gaps, this does not pass the smell test.  I may add data from today’s vote and see what that may indicate, and further exploration of data from the nearly 1,000 districts the 81 provinces are divided into and possibly even looking at overseas results from individual nations may yield even more telling results, but that would be quite an undertaking…

As the final votes come in as I write this giving Erdoğan a relatively narrow victory of about 52%-48% over Kılıçdaroğlu to propel him to his third term as president, these questions are precisely the ones vital for keeping Turkish democracy from being smothered by Erdoğan’s cheating illiberal authoritarianism, as I noted here.  But, of course, they are precisely the kind of questions Erdoğan and his people will want to avoid answering, or at least answering truthfully (these folks are people who incredibly blamed what were ISIS or ISIS-inspired suicide bombings on Kurdish militants).  In contrast, Local and international NGOs and investigators should pursue the answers to these questions with vigor.

With such a deeply uneven playing field over not just the current five-year presidential term but even before, Turkish officials were careful not to cheat so much on election day as to create outrage, avoiding significant tampering on the actual voting day of May 14 and presumably (but not certainly) May 28, but just enough so that if the election were razor-thin, it would give their man Erdoğan the decisive edge.  That was not needed in the end, and it really seems as if the best bet for the opposition was to pass 50% of the vote with a more crowded field during the May 14 vote.  The likelihood of the opposition triumphing was even less on the May 28 second-round runoff election, and Erdoğan has walked away with a win, Turkish democracy subserviently on his leash and unlikely to break free anytime soon, sadly for both Turks and for democracy.  His victory is not only a major blow to Turkish democracy but democracy in the region as a whole and even globally, as I argued earlier. 

If you are a member of a news organization or an academic or research institution, or if you are a well-established freelancer who would like to license this dataset with further categories, datapoints, and calculations not discussed in this article for credited use, please do not hesitate to contact me.  I also respect hustlers like myself and will be willing to entertain different terms for more independent, less-established journalists and researchers, and would especially like to engage and assist if you are members of or support the Turkish opposition CHP or the much-repressed Kurdish political party, the People’s Democratic Party (HDP).  If you are any of these, please contact me as soon as possible to discuss.  And let us all hope for a free Türkiye with free and fair campaigns and elections.

© 2023 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see Brian’s eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here).

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023. Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request at its discretion.

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, LinkedIn, Facebook) May 18, 2023; see related ongoing Twitter thread and related articles by Brian from May 13 The Importance of The Effort to Eject Erdoğan Goes Far Beyond Turkey and from May 10 graciously published by The UnPopulist: Turkey’s Best Shot for Defeating its Illiberal President Is This Sunday (and feel free to hit that heart like button there!); because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023, but I still need your help, please keep sharing my work and consider also donating! Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request at its discretion.

SILVER SPRING—I have compiled a dataset on Turkey’s (known formally as Türkiye) May 14, 2023 presidential elections in comparison with the June 24, 2018 presidential elections.  I was able to take the raw totals from 81 provinces and their regional groupings along with the overseas vote.  It is mostly completed but still a work in progress, but the data raises some serious questions about the fairness and integrity of the elections.  I have made my own calculations about the change in support over 5 years for incumbent Justice and Development Party (AKP) President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the margins between him and his main challenger in Republican People’s Party (CHP) candidate Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, the change in turnout from 2018, the number of rejected ballots, the rate of rejected ballots, and the change in rejected ballots form 2018.  This data has painstakingly been or is nearly compiled for all 81 provinces, the 7 regions into which they are organized, and the overseas voting.

While I will be producing my own analysis on the meaning of this dataset along with some of the statistics therein, as an independent journalist and researcher, it is important to me that I find a proper way to bring my geopolitical intelligence product to the attention of reputable organizations that can use this dataset to provide higher quality coverage, research, and analysis of these elections.  I am in process of engaging in talks to license the dataset to reputable institutions, news outlets, or individuals, as I was shocked to find no other similar presentation, calculation, or analysis of the Turkish elections, no CNN-style “Magic Wall” comparing the change in results and other data points from one election to the other.  I felt not having this was a huge gap in the election coverage, and I am still confounded by the lack of interest by other outlets, particularly regional outlets close to Türkiye (in Türkiye’s repressed media environment-which I recently discussed for The UnPopulist—I kind of understand why this data is not being highlighted).

Thus, this unique service I have provided as a solo freelancer, when much larger news outlets and institutions or more established individuals did not put together what I have, should be put forward in a way where other commercial-driven organizations or well-funded research institutions are not benefitting commercially or prestige-wise from my effort without due credit and/or compensation.  When major organizations put such data together for U.S. and other elections, the people doing so and calculating and compiling the data points are compensated well for their efforts.

Thus, while I will not hold back on soon providing my own analysis on what this data means—including potential foul play by Turkish authorities under Erdoğan government, I am for now not publicly posting my dataset—which I may expand to include the coming May 28 runoff election—in the hopes of licensing to interested third-parties that I am shocked did not do this on their own.

More to come soon, but if you are a member of a news organization or an academic or research institution, or if you are a well-established freelancer who would like to license this dataset for credited use, please do not hesitate to contact me.  I also respect hustlers like myself and will be willing to entertain different terms for more independent, less-established journalists and researchers, and would especially like to engage and assist if you are members of or support the Turkish opposition CHP or the much-repressed Kurdish political party, the People’s Democratic Party (HDP).  If you are any of these, please contact me as soon as possible to discuss.  And let us all hope for a free Türkiye with free and fair campaigns and elections.

© 2023 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see Brian’s eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here).

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023. Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request at its discretion.

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, LinkedIn, Facebook) May 13, 2023; see directly related May 10 article by Brian graciously published by The UnPopulist: Turkey’s Best Shot for Defeating its Illiberal President Is This Sunday (and feel free to hit that heart like button there!); because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023, but I still need your help, please keep sharing my work and consider also donating! Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request at its discretion.

SILVER SPRING—With a crucial and dramatic if murky election tomorrow in NATO-member Turkey, there is a rare chance for genuine, possibly lasting change in a democracy in the Middle East for the better with the prospect of the ouster of Turkey’s controversial President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, in power since 2003.

Troubling Erdoğan’s Troubling Türkiye in a Troubling Region

In a recent guest article for The UnPopulist I highly recommend you read to get a grasp on the current Turkish election, I explored the domestic situation inside Turkey and prospects for Turkey’s opposition—led by Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu of the Republican People’s Party (CHP) at the head of a coalition of opposition parties known as the Nation Alliance—to finally topple Erdoğan.  But it is also important to note that this election will have serious ramifications not just for the region, but also the world.  Türkiye—renamed officially from Turkey by Erdoğan late in 2021—is far from the most oppressive country in the Middle East/North Africa region and Erdoğan is far from the worst or most oppressive leader.  His misrule is not as horrific as the ayatollahs of Iran, as oppressive as that of the Saudi Royal family or a number of other dictators in the region, or as corrupt and dysfunctional as Lebanon’s paralyzed democracy.  But in part of the world that already has too many right-wing, misogynistic, homophobic, “traditional Muslim values”-focused leaders and governments, the fact that Erdoğan embodies these flaws and has already brought down what has long been the healthiest Muslim-majority democracy in the region into borderline non-democratic territory is especially concerning.  Should he be awarded another five-year term, he will be in a unique position to deal democracy, freedom, and human rights major blows.  For this and other reasons, he is hardly the man to lead Türkiye further into the twenty-first century as it lumbers through multiple crises.

I noted that Türkiye’s democracy has for some time been the healthiest for a Muslim-majority country in the region, but that is not to say that Turkish democracy has been particularly healthy: it has not, as there have been numerous coups and weaknesses before our current era, to be sure.  A whole series of questions are posed by Erdoğan’s governance with troubling implications, not least of which is political Islam (or any political movement rooted in religious conservatism) in any form compatible with democracy in practice, not just theory, as other forms have thus far failed, perhaps most notably Hamas in Gaza and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, but such are questions for another time.  The point here is that, for all its flaws, Türkiye has over time been the sole Muslim-majority country in the region that can be said to have had anything like democracy prior to the Arab Spring or the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s Stalinist Iraqi regime, the sole exception being Lebanon, and while Tunisia post-Arab Spring gave some hope for a while, that hope, too, has faded; Iraq, though slowly improving, is also hardly a poster-child of success for democracy at the moment.

What is import to note is that democracy in the region hangs by a thread (and, yes, I say that as someone more aware than most of Trump’s fascist danger here in the U.S.).  Even Israel—which domestically is still a credible, often robust democracy within its internationally recognized borders, though hardly in its de facto apartheid system it has imposed for decades on Palestinians in territory outside Israel’s internationally recognized borders—is convulsing under the illiberal threat of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his extremist allies, with “Bibi,” as Netanyahu is often called, taking pages from both Trump and Erdogan in veering Israel into dangerously undemocratic territory.  As one of the only democracies in the region and with no country nearby able to seriously or credibly exert moral pressure on Israel as far as human rights and with its own left in shambles for some two decades, Israel drifting into right-wing ethnonationalist illiberalism makes more sense when viewed through a broader regional lens.  Yes, Israel is different from other countries for some striking reasons—some good, some bad—but perhaps it is time to view it more as part of the region than as a singularity or apart from it.

Because of the lack of democracy in the region, Erdoğan’s steady regression on human rights coupled with increasing illiberal oppression pose particularly serious and increasing problems to a Middle East in which a Türkiye committed to and improving its record on democracy and human rights could actually exert some moral pressure throughout the region, buttressing the region’s beleaguered democracy advocates.  Arabs in particular are wary of the West, and give the West’s blunders in the region over many decades and even centuries, this is understandable.  That is not to imply that Türkiye does not have its own history of imperialist crimes, it certainly does.  But as a Muslim and non-Western country, a Türkiye committed to promoting democracy, human rights, and civil society in the region could find resonance and trust in ways the West has not.  And a Turkey not persistently busy oppressing its Kurdish ethnic minority as well as, more recently, Kurds in northern Syria (thanks, Trump!) might be taken more seriously when it points a finger at Israel for oppression of Palestinians.

A Defining Moment Democracy

If Erdoğan—so eager to undo Turkish founding father Atatürk’s secular, relatively democratic legacy—is not ousted from power in this election, the prospects for human rights and democracy will suffer greatly, not just in Turkey, not just outside its borders for Kurds in northern Syria, but in the region overall and, indeed, the world.  Strong democracy has had a tough time taking root outside the West, and there are many democracies far less stable in the non-Western World than Turkey.  Yet another reelection of Erdoğan intensifying his illiberal, oppressive regime will embolden and boost leaders with authoritarian tendencies throughout other non-Western struggling democracies (even some within the West), from Prime Minister Narendra Modi in India to President AMLO (Andrés Manuel López Obrador) in Mexico and many others throughout Asia, Africa, and Latin America.  And even if the Turkish opposition does win, there is nothing preventing Erdoğan from making a comeback if things do not go well or the coalition fractures (see the dreadful return of Netanyahu now looking to rig the Israeli system in his favor, sparking the largest sustained protests in Israel’s history as nation turns seventy-five).

Shortly after Trump’s inauguration, I wrote that Russian President Vladimir Putin was a major orchestrator and supporter of a drift towards democratic fascism throughout the world: governments that were coming to power democratically, then destroying those democracies from within with right-wing populist agendas that mobilized voters to remake the system to favor themselves over “the others” and limit both fairness in elections and freedom in society overall to those ends.  Trump is a major member of this movement, but so is Erdoğan, leading the nineteenth-strongest economy in the world and the nearly eighty-seven million people of Türkiye into a fascist ditch.  Let us remember that Trump turned a blind eye and silently held back criticism when members of Erdoğan’s personal security detail assaulted American citizens protesting the Turkish president in Washington just after his visit to meet Trump at the White House in 2019.  We should hope both will fail in their bids for more time in power along with all their illiberal ilk.  Democracy finds itself beset globally and has for years now, and a defeat for Erdoğan would be a win not just for Türkiye and the Middle East, but for the entire world, a major setback for the forces of populist fascism and some much-needed succor for those anywhere fighting for ruled-based representative democracies that respect minority rights and the principles of freedom, fairness, and free debate that preserve the rights of all.

See directly related May 10 article by Brian graciously published by The UnPopulist: Turkey’s Best Shot for Defeating its Illiberal President Is This Sunday (and feel free to hit that heart like button there!)

© 2023 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see Brian’s eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here).

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023. Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request at its discretion.

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) April 15, 2021; see my relevant Twitter thread on the Natanz attack

Minor spoilers for Clone Wars, some moderate spoilers for the Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, Rogue One, and Original Trilogy

SILVER SPRING—They may not center on massive battles, lightsaber duels, or major developments for the most well-known Star Wars characters, but “Heroes on Both Sides” and “Pursuit of Peace,” episodes 10 and 11 in the Third Season of Clone Wars, bear some remarkable similarities to situation the world is still trying to understand surrounding the mysterious attack against Iran’s premier nuclear research and development facility at Natanz.

Real-World Background

On early Sunday local time, the power system within the secretive, isolated, and secure nuclear facility at Natanz in Iran was “completely destroyed” in an explosion both Israeli and American intelligence officials have confirmed Israel is at least partly (perhaps and probably mostly) behind, in what may not or may yet be determined to be a cyberattack.

Iran is asserting what it sees as its right to pursue nuclear technology, and Israel is pursuing what it sees as its right of self-defense against what it sees as an existential threat: a nuclear-weapons-armed Iran. 

Iran has claimed that its intentions are purely for civilian nuclear power, an explanation Israeli dismisses as a lie, and Iran has long been hostile to Israel, with the two having engaged in proxy conflict against each other among Palestinians and, currently, in Syria and Lebanon, which both border Israel (it should also be mentioned here that it is the worse kept secret in the Middle East that Israel is the only nuclear weapons power of all the countries in that region).  Even if Iran is lying about its nuclear intentions and fully plans to develop nuclear weapons, it is entirely possible that it wants them for purely defensive and deterrent reasons (every nuclear power since after Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 has refrained from offensive use, or any use in war, for that matter, and Iran’s enemies have openly debated military campaigns against it), yet Israel’s people and military have been targets of Iranian-sponsored terrorism in the past.

Still, this concern about Iran’s nuclear intentions and ambitions is one shared by most world powers, to the degree that Iran and the five permanent-veto-wielding members of the United Nations (UN) Security Council—the U.S., the UK, France, Russia, and China—as well as Germany and the European Union (EU) all signed an agreement to severely limit nuclear activity on the part of Iran in exchange for partial relief of sanctions on Iran for much of Iran’s rogue activity involving military buildups, terrorism, and interference in the affairs of other countries in the Middle East.

Israel’s political leadership under long-serving Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a right-wing hawk with much in common with former U.S. President Donald Trump’s leadership style (which I noted in detail several times) was bitterly opposed to this deal, seeking to undermine anything that could benefit Iran without a total dismantling of Iran’s nuclear program.  Furthermore, Israel has in the past put the kibosh on hostile regional powers’ nuclear ambitions with airstrikes against then-under-construction nuclear reactors in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 1981 (ironically with Iran’s help) and Bashar al-Assad’s Syria in 2007.  To thwart Iran’s project, Israel has carried out a series of operations—including sabotage, assassinations, and cyberattacks—against Iran’s nuclear program and nuclear personnel, Sunday’s only being the latest.  And it has long sought, and failed, to push the U.S. into militarily attacking Iran and, especially, its nuclear program.

But Israel did get both the Bush and Obama Administration’s help in carrying out Operation Olympic Games’ Stuxnet cyberwarfare attack against Natanz, an attack that took out many of Iran’s centrifuges used to enrich material needed for nuclear advancements and set back Iran’s nuclear development as much as two years, and to get both American administrations to engaged in other cyberwarfare with Iran (those wanting to know about this and cyberwarfare in general should check out Nicole Perlroth’s indispensable recent book on cyberwarfare, This is How They Tell Me the World Ends).

With its nuclear program sabotaged after Stuxnet and facing increasing economic sanctions as part of intense pressure from the international community organized and led by the Obama Administration, Iran agreed to the aforementioned nuclear deal in 2015.  But after Obama’s successor Trump withdrew from the deal in 2018 (even though Iran had been in full compliance according to the most intrusive nuclear inspections in the history of such nuclear monitoring agreements, and, I would argue, foolishly withdrew, as the agreement was the only realistic, logical option), Iran has since begun activities beyond the agreement that move it closer towards (though not close to) nuclear weapons capability.  Saturday it was poised to make serious advances along this path until its Natanz facility was devastated Sunday.

Complicated Clone Wars

“OK, Brian, what the HELL does this have to do with Star Wars?” you may be asking.  By now, you’ve probably heard of, hopefully even seen, the stellar show Star Wars: The Clone Wars, the final season of which dominated streaming during our pandemic summer and, as I have noted, involves some of the best Star Wars ever made including the best movies (and far better than any of the Disney Star Wars movies); if not, get to it (especially before Bad Batch premieres on May the Fourth)!

The series takes place during the Clone War(s), which begin at the end of 2002’s Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones and ends during 2005’s Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith and are mainly a series of confusing battles and campaigns between the Galactic Republic and its breakaway Separatist Alliance.  The Republic is served by a religious order known as the Jedi—including Yoda, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and Anakin Skywalker—whose members operate traditionally as peacekeepers and now generals, while the Separatist Alliance in Star Wars is clearly the side of “the bad guys,” led by Count Dooku, an ex-Jedi turned Sith Lord (the Sith are the ancient enemy of the Jedi).

Dooku and key Separatist military leaders are clearly evil and clearly carry out war crimes and atrocities the Republic takes pains to avoid.  While most but hardly all of the soldiers for the Separatists are droids and, thus, not usually moral actors, it is very different for the political leaders and citizens of the planets that voted to leave the Republic and form the Separatist Alliance (a.k.a. Confederacy of Independent Systems), as noted by famous Republic Senator Padmé Amidala in Clone Wars’s “Heroes on Both Sides.”

Padmé is Naboo’s now former queen from 1999’s Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, and is thus one of the most famous senators of the Galactic Senate (her new role after stepping down as queen).  She is also secretly married to Anakin Skywalker as of the end of Attack of the Clones, a big no-no for a Jedi and a senator.

After a debate on the war’s politics in the Senate, Anakin suggests his secret wife Padmé teach Ashoka Tano—his padawan apprentice (and now a rising superstar in the Star Wars universe)—about politics.  Anakin keeps talking, and presents a black-and-white view of the conflict with the Separatists, with which Padmé expresses disagreement and then takes Ahsoka under her wing, take up Anakin on his earlier suggestion.

Shortly after, we hear Padmé tell Ahsoka that she has friends who are Separatists, that they are not simply evil “pawns” in Dooku’s war.  She complains that she is not able to talk or meet with them because the Senate has made any formal negotiations with the Separatists illegal for fear of legitimizing their secession and cause, noting Ashoka with her clearance as a Jedi could get Padmé to neutral Mandalore, from which they could travel to Raxus to see her old mentor and current Separatist Senator Mina Bonteri.  Up for breaking the rules to help Padmé initiate peace talks, Ahsoka travels undercover with Padmé to see Bonteri on the Separatist capital of Raxus while the Separatist Senate is in session.

In a discussion with Bonteri and Padmé, Ahsoka learns that many Separatists view the Republic (and the Jedi) as the bad guys and that far from being all mindless droids or heartless killers like General Grievous and Asajj Ventress, many Separatist are real people with families who fight—and die—to defend their families and their worlds as well as their right to separate from the Republic.  Among those who died fighting Republic forces were Mina’s husband and father to their son Lux, with whom Ahsoka has humanizing exchange: he and her mom are the first Separatists besides military officers like Grievous and Ventress Ahsoka has met, she the first Jedi he has met.

When Padmé reveals there are many Republic senators eager to explore peace, despite their sharp differences of opinion, Mina decides to introduce a motion to her Separatist Senate to begin formal peace negotiations with the Republic, a motion that easily passes, Dooku himself presiding remotely over the session.

Greedy members of the Trade Federation, Banking Clan, and Techno Union are distressed by this news, as an end to the war is bad for their business interests (in which they get to play both sides off of each other [SPOILERS: as the Sith are doing]), but Dooku assures them an attack is being planned against Coruscant, the Republic’s capital world where the Senate is located, that will derail the peace process and ensure the war will continue. 

In fact, it was even in motion before the possibility of peace talks, apparently timed to ensure a vote to allow deregulation of banks so that the Republic can obtain more funding to produce and purchase more clone troopers (the bulk of the Republic’s fighting forces) would pass after the obvious outrage and bloodlust such an attack would inspire.  The special droid units that will carry out the attack have been designed to look just like the Republic cleaning droids that service one of Coruscant’s main power generators, right by the Senate.  These droids also have been given security passes that will allow them to bypass security.  All in all, it’s a pretty sophisticated plan, utilizing information obtained from the inside and obviously planned long before we find out about it.

Shortly before the deregulation vote, when Padmé tells Supreme Chancellor Palpatine, the leader of the Republic (from her planet Naboo and a senator from there before becoming Chancellor, with Padmé’s help, at the end of The Phantom Menace), that they should give the Separatist offer to engage in peace talks a serious chance, he responds by saying “I can see why you would want so badly to believe that the Separatists. desire peace…In the past whenever we’ve reached out our hands in peace, they’ve been slapped away.  Can we believe that they’re ready to sue for peace so easily?” (such is a common refrain from many in the real world arguing against peace talks or diplomacy).

In response, Padmé confides to Palpatine that she knows the offer is genuine because she “been in contact” with her “old friend” Mina Bonteri and that Bonteri is the sponsor of the proposal.  The Chancellor takes special note of remembering it was Bonteri, (SPOILER) as he is secretly Dooku’s Sith Lord master, orchestrating the war from both sides so his power can rise and the Jedi can fall both in public opinion and from their position of power in the Republic, to be cute down and wiped out (we already see the war, from Lux’s point of view, has damaged the reputation of the Jedi for many regular Separatist citizens).

Just as voting begins in light of the new Separatist peace proposal, the Separatists droids, which have been smuggled into Coruscant and the nearby power station, change form from their cleaning droid disguises to instruments of death and destruction, killing the generator workers and then turning themselves into bombs for a “suicide bombing” (as the intro the next episode calls it) that destroys the power station, plunging that sector of the capital into chaos as the power goes off for millions (maybe even billions) of people and explosions rock the area, terrifying civilians.

Sirens wail inside the Senate as eerie red emergency lighting kicks in, and it doesn’t take long for some Senators realize (or are told?) it is a Separatist attack.  Outraged, they begin calling for revenge and to pass the bill to deregulate the banks so they can pay for more clones.  Padmé pleads with her fellow senators that the peace proposal is serious, an argument not well-received by the panicked and angry Senate.  “Obviously a tactic to lower our defenses and launch this attack,” responds Palpatine’s right-hand man.

On their way out of the main Senate chamber and still bathed in the emergency lighting, Ahsoka and Padmé are approached by Anakin in the hallway, scolding them for their unsanctioned diplomacy, but Ashoka closes out the episode by admitting that while maybe she had gone too far, “I did realize something: the politics of this war and not as black and white as I once thought they were.”

The next episode, “Pursuit of Peace,” we learn that the Senate in their anger has “overwhelmingly” passed the bill to deregulate the banks so they can move forward on new loans for more clones and an intensification of the war effort, but Padmé isn’t giving up on her pursuit of peace. 

But many of her colleagues feel differently.  A Senator (a Kaminoan, the species responsible for manufacturing the clones) proposes legislation to purchase five million more clones from the Kaminoan government and to raise the funds from the Banking Clan (now free to charge exorbitant interest that would bankrupt the Republic) to make the purchase.  When Padmé states she’d rather “stop the war, not escalate it,” the Senate erupts, many calling her a traitor and a Separatist.

The Naboo senator hardly backs down: “Whoever attacked the power grid wants us to continue the fight.  It’s a calculated attempt to destroy the peace process,” she pleads earnestly to the Senate.  Almost immediately after, a message is received and played from Count Dooku, informing the Senate that an apparent Republic attack has killed Mina Bonteri and that he is formally withdrawing the peace proposal as a result.

Padmé is crushed; the Chancellor tries to contain a smile.

Leaving the Senate chamber, her ally Senator Bail Organa (later the adoptive father of Anakin’s and Padmé daughter, Leia) approaches Padmé to let her know Republic spies found out that Dooku’s people were the ones who killed her friend, Mina, making Dooku’s message pure gaslighting (SOILERS: what many viewers will know but which probably only Dooku and Palpatine will know in the Star Wars universe is that Palpatine would have been the one to pass onto Dooku that Bonteri was responsible for the peace process on the Separatist side after Padmé confided this to Palpatine and Palpatine’s telling reaction to this information, such that Palpatine clearly instructed Dooku to silence Bonteri to derail the peace process on the Separatist side).

Aside from Senators who genuinely want to increase the war effort, Bonteri’s death—though she is a Separatist—has a chilling, intimidating effect on those in the Republic Senate who are undecided or wanting to vote against the proposed legislation.  Furthermore, Dooku has hired underworld elements to intimidate (even beat) key Senators wavering or against the bill, including Organa, and to eventually try to assassinate Padmé (and let us not forget that, in our own world, former President Trump clearly tried just a few months ago to incite a violent insurrectionist mob to intimidate Congress into overturning the results of an election he lost, members of whom wanted to assassinate Vice President Pence, Speaker Pelosi, and others).  This is a great episode where a lot of important things happen, but for our purposes we can end this review by noting Padmé, after just barely surviving an assassination attempt, ends up delivering on the Senate floor one of the best speeches of the whole series, preventing the passage of the bill that would bankrupt the Republic and escalate the war effort.  But the chance for peace has been dashed and the war will go on and on.

Real-World Debates and Another Attack on a Power System

Back to our own world.

The tactic to time an attack to derail diplomacy or undermine one or more factions, and the responses to those seeking peace that “we cannot take the other side seriously because diplomacy didn’t work last time” or that “negotiations themselves are a ploy meant to get us to let our guard down” are extremely common in real life; so is questioning the loyalty of those wanting peace, or calling them traitors who side with the enemy.

As far as the situation in the Middle East there is some important context to what very much seems to be the Israeli (or at least Israeli-led) attack on Natanz and its power station.  The day before, Iran had just introduced and announced putting into operation advanced centrifuges at Natanz.  Just a few days later would be Israel’s Independence Day.  And the week before, negotiations between the original nuclear deal signatories were beginning in Vienna.  Netanyahu has made no secret of his longstanding opposition to the Iran nuclear deal, opposition shared by most Israelis but that fails to recognize the constraints of reality.  Though it was a top priority of the Obama Administration, Netanyahu actively campaigned against it, even both challenging it in a direct address to the U.S. Congress in 2015 and claiming in 2018 to have convinced Trump to follow through on his pledged to scrap it. 

Apart from symbolically playing to a domestic audience just before Israel Independence Day and hitting Iran’s centrifuges just as Iran was celebrating their upgrades, then, there is the far more substantive timing-related goals of Netanyahu’s to derail the restart of the diplomatic process with Iran that Biden and many others hope will resurrect the nuclear deal Trump destroyed and to sabotage Iran’s program until it can be destroyed or ended.

Clearly, Netanyahu prefers confrontation and war (ideally, for him, led by the U.S.) that will rid Iran both of its nuclear program and its current regime entirely, a preference shared by his new Gulf friends in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, who have been brought together through their hatred of Iran and at Trump’s encouragement; in essence, a Sunni-Shiite Cold War led by Saudi Arabia on one side and Iran on the other has merged into the longstanding hostilities between Israel and Iran and the U.S. and Iran, making for some strange yet enthusiastic bedfellows.

So, much like Dooku, Netanyahu seems to have launched an attack that hit a power station that was about more about attacking a power station.  Like the attack on Coruscant, a big part of the rationale for the attack on Natanz was derailing promising diplomatic negotiations, to destroy trust between the parties, and provoke a reaction that will make good-faith negotiations much, much harder.  As in Clone Wars with the Republic, Iran sees this as a terrorist attack.  Like the Separatists and the Republic, there are complicated factions and rivalries both on and under the surface: segments allied and in relationships with or part of the parties meeting in Vienna that are not fully on board with the negotiations and want them to fail whether or not they say so publicly, and who supported an attack and will want the other side to think those with whom they are negotiating supported the attack, too.

In fact, there is vigorous debate in both America and Iran, as we saw in the Republic and Separatist Senates, about pursuing war vs. diplomacy, with moderate and liberal camps in each emphasizing diplomacy and hardliners in both camps preferring confrontation.  To some degree, the U.S. as Israel’s closest ally is tainted by this attack regardless of whether it was for or against it or took part in it or not; at the same time, those in the Iranian diplomatic delegation know that they, too, may be painted by Iran’s response if it is deemed to go “too far.”

Still, unlike with the Separatists successfully derailing peace negotiations, it is very likely the nuclear negotiations will continue (indeed, they have already resumed with Iranian officials, as of today) and that a breakthrough will be reached eventually, as, unlike the Separatists, Iran has few friends and no massive Separatist Alliance spread throughout the galaxy, let alone a Sith Lord like Dooku to lead it; Iran, thus, is in a far weaker position than the Separatists, one only further weakened now that this attack is estimated to have set Iran’s nuclear program back around nine months, undermining its position for negotiations.

As Clone Wars teaches us, things are not “always as black and white” as we think or as straightforward as they seem, Natanz being a prime example.  As in “Heroes on Both Sides” and “Pursuit of Peace” demonstrate, conflict can often be complex and multilayered, so we should look at the Natanz attack and its motivations and surrounding issues as complex and multilayered, and avoid simplistic criticism or reductionism in most cases.  Only then can we begin to truly understand the broader strategic and tactical calculations at work in the minds of the various parties here.

Padmé, Portman, Politics, and Blowback

I would also like to note that I remember seeing this pair of episodes for the first time and realizing how perfectly these roles for Padmé would suit Natalie Portman, who played Padmé in the live-action movies (nothing against the excellent Catherine Taber, who voices her in Clone Wars).

I say this because Portman as a young Jewish, Israeli-born adult became quite a vocal defender of Israel at a time when Israel became one of the centers of world politics as the Second Intifada (the second main grassroots rebellion of Palestinians against Israeli occupation and their own ineffective leaders) raged.  And yet, in more recent years, she has not shied away from criticizing the Israeli government and Prime Minister Netanyahu for their right-wing (in her words, “racist”) policies, to the degree that she even refused to accept an the Israeli Genesis Award, often referred to as Israel’s version of the Nobel Peace Prize.  For this, an Israeli government minister said that “Natalie Portman’s actions border on anti-Semitism,” that she “played into the hands of the haters of Israel and those who aspire to destroy the State of Israel,” sounding an awful lot like Padmé’s fellow senators’ criticism of her in the “Pursuit of Peace” episode. 

The politically active and passionate Portman, then, is someone who could appreciate both sides of a conflict and would have appreciated her character’s role in these Clone Wars episodes that mirror not only the Natanz attack today but other issues that were fairly common in the past in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with Portman’s own life perhaps influencing at least a little the showrunners’ interpretation of Padmé in Clone Wars.

(Minor SPOILERS next two paragraphs) It is also worth noting that, in the following season, we find Lux Bonteri has become radicalized after the death of his mother and seeks out an alliance with an extremist Mandalorian terrorist group—the Death Watch—to plot revenge against Dooku for ordering his mother to be murdered… kind of like happens so many times in war or counterterrorism operations, when collateral damage turns family and friends of the wounded and dead into violent extremists who support and/or join terrorist or insurgent movements all around the world.

In the following season, Lux has joined a rebel movement to overthrow a Separatist-controlled government on his homeworld of Onderon.  A key member of this rebel group is Saw Gerrera, who is radicalized further in this fight after the death of his sister, Steela, and would be instrumental in the future in helping the Rebel Alliance from the Original Trilogy get off its feet and, in particular, in the events that led to the Rebels discovering the secret weakness of the Empire’s first Death Star in Rogue One, a discovery that allowed Luke Skywalker to destroy the Death Star at the end of the very first Star Wars movie, Star Wars: Episode IV: A New Hope.  The willingness of Palpatine and Dooku to use Lux’s mother and the people of Onderon as pawns in their game would end up leading, over many years, to the Sith’s undoing.

The lesson here?  It’s always worth considering the less-anticipated potential effects of any particular action.  In our present, Iran, Israel, and the U.S. may find their actions will come to haunt them in unimaginable ways for years to come if they are not careful.

Dooku Disclaimers

I want to be clear: I am not claiming the Israelis are just like the Separatists or that Netanyahu is an evil Sith Lord (nor, for that matter, am I claiming that Iran is like the Republic in any general, overall sense).  I am in no way claiming the Jewish people or Israelis are like “the bad guys” in Star Wars, just simply noting how specific plot and thematic elements from these Clone Wars episodes fit illustratively into the current events discussed (and even in Clone Wars, we can see that most of the civilian Separatists dislike the Republic, understandably, for its very real corruption on display in these episodes more than usual and that they take their ideals and independence seriously).

Count Dooku and Chancellor Palpatine could in part certainly fit the descriptions in longstanding anti-Semitic stereotypes and conspiracy theories—shadowy, big-nosed, behind-the-scenes manipulators in dark robes practicing the occult and controlling financial interests—but that is not the at all the intent of George Lucas or the showrunner Dave Filoni, nor the producers, cast, and staff of Clone Wars, nor is that how we should read into any of this.  And yes, the Banking Clan is led by the Muun species that has big noses, but it’s a stretch to claim they are supposed to represent or denigrate Jewish people: they are aliens who look like… aliens. 

At a time of rising anti-Semitism in the United States and elsewhere, it is crucial to note that there is no serious hint at Dooku, Palpatine, or the Muuns being Jewish or that the intent of portraying the Sith Lords or Muuns in these ways is to try to equate them with or make them resemble Jews or associate their factions with the real-world Jewish state of Israel.  Anyone who really thinks this is what Star Wars is getting at simply does not understand the true spirit of Star Wars or the artists’ intent, though it’s understandable some would interpret this differently in our hyper-politicized, hyper-racialized times.  At its heart, Star Wars celebrates diversity, with waking carpets, humans of different colors and genders, and even robots coming together to fight for freedom and justice throughout the galaxy.

Yet as “Heroes on Both Sides” and “Pursuit of Peace” demonstrate, conflict can get ugly and complicated, whether in Star Wars or our current Earth, including the attack at Natanz.  I lived for over five years in the Middle East, from 2014-2019, studied abroad there briefly in 2011, studied the region from afar for many other years.  And I can tell you that, while, yes, some things are pretty black-and-white—say, ISIS is terrible—other things are a lot more complicated.  As examples:

• Iran is seen by many as a bad-guy pariah in the region, yet the current pretty awful government only came to power in the Islamic Revolution of 1979 after, and in reaction to, the U.S. and British orchestrating the overthrow of the democratically-elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in a 1953 coup that saw a far more monarchical and repressive government put in its place, and while expanding its power through supporting various Shiite Islamic militias throughout the Middle East that many view as terrorists, it is important to remember that Iran is only serious Shiite Muslim power and that Shiite Islam has been oppressed by Sunni Muslim leaders throughout the region for centuries (Sunnis are by far the largest bloc of Muslims, Shiites being the one major minority), to the degree that, without Shiite militias and Iran’s support for them in places like Iraq, Lebanon, and Yemen, often few if any people stick up for the rights and dignity of Shiite Muslims.
• Saudi Arabia is one of America’s oldest allies in the Middle East and supplies much of the world with oil, but has a terrible human rights record and when it comes to Islamic extremism, the Saudis are, to quote Brookings scholar William McCants from an amazing article by the amazing journalist Scott Shane, “both the arsonists and the firefighters.”
• Israel and Turkey are two other longtime regional allies of the U.S., Israel a fellow democracy and Turkey a longtime member of the de-facto-U.S.-led NATO Alliance, but both have been veering hard to the right under right-wing leaders (Turkey into dictatorship territory) and actively oppressing the region’s Palestinians and Kurds, respectively. 
• And while America promotes human rights throughout the Middle East—even saving Yazidis from Genocide in 2014 with anti-ISIS airstrikes and coordination with Kurdish forces on the ground ordered by Obama—it has often supported oppressive dictators and kings, such as Saddam Hussein when he was willing to fight Iran (until we didn’t, eventually overthrowing him in a disastrous war launched in 2003), even as it still confronts its own domestic injustices in the present. 

I could go on, but the point is, there are a lot of complicated motivations and behaviors going on, often many good and many bad acts being committed by the same leader or country, and even many of the more destabilizing and violent actors have their own very legitimate grievances while some of the actors with the best of intentions inflict incredible amounts of harm.  There is often plenty of blame to go around.  As just one example, Israel deserves a lot of the criticism directed at it, while at the same time, a lot of the criticism direct at Israel is outlandishly unfair and anti-Semitic; the context and specifics of each specific criticism need to be evaluated separately. 

This is hardly to claim that all the parties involved in this Natanz drama are morally equal or moral equivalents (far from it), but we’re not going to focus on such questions (which I have dealt with elsewhere) here; the main takeaway is that Ahsoka’s lesson from “Heroes on Both Sides” is quite applicable to our current drama.

In the end, I am simply noting the similarities in details and context between some events from two great episodes of Clone Wars and our own reality, how pondering the fictional galaxy from a long time ago and far, far away can shed light on our real world, how a Star Wars cartoon can surprisingly teach us lessons about nuclear intrigue and Middle East diplomacy in 2021 as well as about our past and even our future.

© 2021 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see Brian’s Twitter thread on the Natanz attack and his eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here), and be sure to check out my podcast interview with Georgia election officials Brad Raffensperger and Gabriel Sterling, both cited in Trump’s second Senate trial!

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981)

• 1-A Brief, Non-Comprehensive Survey of Bioweapons, Biowarfare, and Bioterrorism History in Light of the Coronavirus Pandemic
• 3-Why the Coronavirus Pandemic and America’s Disastrous Response Will Inspire Future Use of Bioweapons
• 4-The Harsh Truths Coronavirus Has Exposed
• 5-Coronavirus and History, Russia and Italy, the War for Reality, and the Nexus of It All
• See also my proposal for a Cabinet-level Department of Pandemic Preparedness and Response (DPPR)

Not bad for a little furball, there’s only one left.

—Gen. Han Solo to Princess Leia Organa after a tiny Ewok lured three Imperial Scout Troopers away from guarding the Death Star II’s shield generator’s rear entrance on Endor’s moon, in George Lucas’s Star Wars: Episode VI: Return of the Jedi (1983)

Ironically, as Historian Max Boot noted, “today, we’re used to having American soldiers be the forces of the government. And, of course, in our revolution, we were the insurgents and the British were the role of the counterinsurgents, and, in fact, many of the strategies which the American rebels used against the British are similar in many ways to the strategies now being used against us around the world.”  There’s a reason for that current state of affairs, and it’s about our unmatched power.

America’s military might—by far the greatest on earth—is both a blessing and a curse. 

It is a blessing in that nobody can take us on militarily directly, nor can any plausible coalition of nations, especially when factoring in our massive alliance system, an “empire of trust;” this combination of hard and soft power is unlike anything in history since ancient Rome.

Yet this very power means that smart enemies do not even try to take us on in a traditional military sense; conventional, symmetric responses are, essentially, suicidal for our enemies, who, instead, opt for unconventional and asymmetric means. In the words of Gen. H.R. McMaster, “There are basically two ways to fight the US military: asymmetrically and stupid.”  Thus, mostly all our recent conflicts have been a.) primarily unconventional in that, for the bulk of the fighting, we are operating against forces that are not regular state military units in standard-range uniforms behaving within more traditional norms of warfare and  b.) primarily asymmetric in that this unconventional organization, equipment, tactics, and strategy on the part of our adversaries are products of those adversaries accepting the power imbalance between our stronger forces and their weaker ones and are designed to address this imbalance

And when facing unconventional and asymmetric warfare in recent decades, America’s track record is actually pretty poor.  Without a doubt, biowarfare falls under the category of unconventional since it involves illegal, rare, and atypically deployed weapons and is also asymmetric because few things besides bioweapons can reduce the advantages of a more powerful enemy with such relatively low cost and easy access. Thus, as our current coronavirus pandemic has many implications for bioterrorism and biowarfare, so, too, should the below analysis offer much food for thought on biodefense in the coronavirus era.

1.) A Brief History of America in Unconventional, Asymmetric Conflict

Throughout our history, it was basically in campaigns marked by sustained brutality—including massive forced population transfers and the killing of civilians—that American colonists and later the U.S. Army defeated Native Americans over several centuries, who themselves often employed what we would call unconventional and asymmetric tactics, as well as brutal ones.

Ironically considering our later history, we used unconventional, asymmetric tactics to great success against the British in our Revolution. 

But it was in massive failure that U.S. Army troops defending both civil rights for freed slaves and legitimate biracial state governments withdrew from the Reconstructed South (the final troops leaving in 1877) as white supremacist terrorist campaigns destroyed every one of those governments in the postwar South.  The Ku Klux Klan and others carried on an insurgency lasting years of unconventional, asymmetric warfare and terrorism against U.S. forces, local troops, state governments, the rule of law itself, and those citizens who worked with and supported the new order, whether they were white or black (and in this sense, their campaigns were hardly different from the terrorist insurgencies in Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan).  The more just society being built in relatively modern terms was destroyed, and the ensuing Jim Crow reign of terror of the Klan, the noose, and corrupted local judicial systems in the American South and sometimes beyond would not begin to be seriously dismantled until the 1960s.  Thus, with the Civil War, the U.S. won the war in four years but lost the peace for about a century after.

With the massive unconventional and asymmetric insurrection in the Philippines, which the U.S. occupied in 1898 in the Spanish-American War, it was back to brutality and murder to achieve victory.  That is not to say that, to its credit, the U.S. did not start with a softer hand there, but that proved to be ineffective at stopping the Filipino rebels, and it was only when harsher and more robust measures were taken that the insurgents were truly defeated.

While American forces in the Vietnam war won all the actual big battles against the conventional North Vietnamese Army, the unconventional Viet Cong above all else eventually broke America’s will to keep fighting in Vietnam with an unconventional, asymmetric approach.  Our collective withdrawal from South Vietnam and, eventually, Saigon was an ignominious disaster for U.S. interests in the region and those of our South Vietnamese allies.  Leaving aside any debates on a “road not taken” and military tactical successes, the U.S. was, simply, defeated.  America won the battles, yet lost the war.

In Lebanon and Somalia, American leaders rapidly drew down their involvement after a series of high-profile Hezbollah bombings in Beirut in 1983 and the notorious “Black Hawk Down” incident in Mogadishu in 1993 despite both missions having substantial international support.  Key humanitarian aims of the mission in Somalia were actually fairly well-accomplished and saved hundreds of thousands of lives before the withdrawal, and even in Lebanon with our problematic mission there, significant humanitarian achievements still occurred.

In between the unconventional, asymmetric challenges in Lebanon and Somalia, our overwhelming triumph in the conventional 1991 Gulf War actually helped lead us to be overconfident and over-reliant when it came to our conventional military abilities (and, to a lesser extent, the same could be said of the two air campaigns in the Balkans), setting us up for even greater failures in ensuing decades.  “Black Hawk Down” would be the first buzzkill of our post-Gulf War high, just the first of many setbacks in the wars to come.  And in the cases of both Lebanon and Somalia, terrorists—Hezbollah and al-Qaeda—took inspiration for future terrorist attacks from our withdrawals, with both Lebanon and Somalia devolving into prolonged periods of war that killed many people and terribly destabilized their respective regions.

As for al-Qaeda, its Osama bin Laden had several basic goals behind its asymmetric, unconventional 9/11 attacks that would come years later.  They looked at the world relevant to them as being divided into two major camps: the “near enemy”—all the regimes ruling Muslim populations that were not run by Islamic principles as defined by al-Qaeda: the monarchs, dictators, and democracies from Saudi Arabia to Egypt to Indonesia—and the “far enemy”—foreign governments propping up the near enemy, especially the United States.

With 9/11, bin Laden wanted to recreate for America the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan.  As he saw it, the Soviet invasion galvanized Muslims from around the world to fight off the atheist communist infidel invader, who got bogged down over years in a conflict that sapped its treasure and strength and led to the Soviet Union’s final collapse; with the invaders ousted from Afghanistan, an Islamic regime in al-Qaeda’s mold—the Taliban—came to power. 

Osama bin Laden’s dream with 9/11, then, was to bait the U.S. into one or more wars of attrition, rally Muslims from around the world to his banner to fight the occupying invader, force an American withdrawal after it expended so much blood and treasure, see the U.S. sour on supporting allied governments in the Middle East in the aftermath, and pull its bases out as a result or as a result of additional conflict with and attacks from al-Qaeda, flushed with recruits after already beating the Americans in one war.  In short, the endgame was to remove the presence and influence of the “far enemy”—namely America—in the Middle East and then topple the “near enemy” regimes there and elsewhere ruling over the Muslim world.   

As we know, 9/11 helped bin Laden goad the U.S. into two such wars, not just in Afghanistan but also in Iraq, and while we withdrew from Iraq after seven-and-a-half years on terms far better than the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam, extremists’ policies against their own people on the parts of both the Syrian government and our allied Iraqi government empowered the unconventional and asymmetric ISIS—Zarqawi’s al Qaeda in Iraq’s rebirth and successor—to create a “caliphate” that ate up large parts of territory in both countries, forcing the U.S. reentry into Iraq and intensifying involvement in Syria.  While bin Laden expected us to invade Afghanistan, Iraq was something of a gift to him. 

The Iraq War resulted in the removal of Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq, meaning Iran became our biggest enemy in the region.  But while in the beginning this was due mainly to a process of elimination, shortly after, it would also be because Iran grew considerably in power as a result of our actions, eventually playing dominant roles in Iraq and Syria and having major influence in Yemen, too, in, addition to having its longstanding leverage in Lebanon.  In short, Iran was the main victor of our Iraq War.  But especially considering how dynamics played out as war raged in Syria and up through today, Iran is hardly the only major U.S. foe to benefit from recent U.S. missteps and missed opportunities: the chief global U.S. antagonist, Russia, is also far stronger in the Middle East today at the expense of the U.S. (not to mention elsewhere around the globe). 

Ironically, as I have noted, counterinsurgency (COIN) worked well in the Iraq War after the negligent leadership of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and its gains held well until late 2013 in spite of a U.S. withdrawal that had been completed before the end of 2011.  Much of this effort was overseen by Rumsfeld’s replacement, Sec. Robert Gates, and the man in uniform he tapped to execute the mission, Gen. David Petraeus. But the earlier blunders of the U.S. had pushed to the center stage of a frightened, increasingly sectarian Iraq one Nuri Kamal al-Maliki as Iraq’s prime minister, who fed off division and increased it at the same time, playing somewhat nice while U.S. troops were still in-country but becoming increasingly unshackled as time went on and especially after the U.S. pullout.  Rather than the Obama Administration’s withdrawal, then, it was Maliki’s oppressive governing style that wiped out U.S. security gains and soon had ISIS governing a “caliphate” that included large portions of Iraqi territory right up to the gates of Baghdad by mid-2014, a situation demanding U.S. entry into the conflict to prevent a terrible situation from becoming far worse and far more genocidal, in spite of the Obama Administration’s reluctance to reinsert U.S. forces into Iraq after withdrawing them just a few years earlier.

The same Obama Administration, reluctant to appear political in an election year, responded abysmally in 2016 to Russia’s game-changing asymmetric unconventional election interference that relied on propaganda, disinformation, hacking, and social media.  In short, we lost what I dubbed the (First) Russo-American Cyberwar, and it is worth noting (and I have noted) that, from the media to the government to the public, we are making many of the same mistakes we did in the 2016 election cycle in the 2020 election cycle, to some degree even willfully.  Russia is beating us at unconventional asymmetric cyberwarfare with advanced, pioneering approaches; the Second Russo-American Cyberwar is already underway and America is already losing.

And while the Obama Administration took a relatively large degree of care to avoid alienating local populations and inflicting civilian casualties while staying true to allies in its fight against ISIS, the Trump Administration has pretty much taken an anything-but approach—killing far more civilians—even as it relaxed its assault against ISIS when the group was close to losing all its territory in Syria and Iraq, allowing for ISIS to make something of a comeback.  Even worse, in October, 2019, the Trump Administration abandoned our true allies there—the Kurds and others fighting alongside and inside the Syrian Democratic Forces (S.D.F.)–who had worked together for years against both ISIS and Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad’s regime.  This betrayal was carried out so suddenly, and in such a way, that it dramatically undermined our ability to fight unconventional asymmetric warfare in the region, an ability that is so heavily dependent on trust and partnering with non-state actors on the ground who have longstanding, intimate relationships with the locals as members of their communities and know the landscape as only locals can.  This withdrawal was also done in a way that undermined our entire regional position, ceding much territory and influence to actors working against many of our interests: to an “ally” we could not trust (Turkey, seeking to pulverize both Kurdish forces that had fought alongside us and Kurdish autonomy as well as engage in “demographic engineering” against the Kurds) and our main rivals in the region (Russia and Iran, Assad’s top allies).  This withdrawal minimized what was already a minimal deployment (far from a costly or expensive one, especially relative to so many recent deployments) that was giving us an amazing payoff for the small amount of resources allocated.

As for the Afghanistan war, that “other” war that bin Laden’s 9/11 prodded us into, it has been a mess for nearly its entirety and still is, waxing and waning to one degree or another in its state of messiness, Afghanistan having been at war for decades before the U.S. toppled the Taliban.  Here, too, unconventional and asymmetric tactics wore down American will after American leadership’s initial projections of swift “victory” set up inevitable cynicism and disappointment, with Alec Worsnop highlighting for the Modern War Institute at West Point (MWI)  the Taliban’s particular skill at asymmetry.  Though the Obama Administration tapped Gen. Petraeus to recreate his successes in Iraq in Afghanistan with another surge, the far lower degree of national development there combined with U.S. political leadership not being committed to the resourcing required to achieve our stated aims—let alone try to sell Americans on a longer-term commitment—meant that, with that Petraeus surge or without it, that war would remain what it has been for years: an exercise in futility apart from preventing an unstable, violent status quo from becoming far worse.  Another surge under the Trump Administration also failed to significantly alter the overall negative dynamics on the ground for the better.  However President Trump describes his intent to pull out U.S. forces now, it is hard to objectively consider American disengagement after so many years as anything but a victory to the Taliban unless the Taliban suddenly becomes the opposite of what it has consistently been for the entirety of the conflicted, which is an extremist religious group that resorts to extreme methods to achieve its aims, relying almost wholly on violence and terror to “govern” and one that cannot be trusted to upholds agreements of any sort, let alone the type the Trump Administration is trying to reach with it. 

There has not anytime recently been and will not be the political will for a significantly better-resourced, medium-to-longer-term international effort in Afghanistan, the best approach to give that country its best chance to transition to overall to higher levels of stability and one that I advocated for in writing in 2009 as a graduate student. But that hardly means the failures in Afghanistan are all on the political-leadership side and that the military does not also shoulder significant blame, as the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan from 2003-2005, Gen. David Barno, wrote in 2019.  Still, senior military leaders seem to have been more careful with their use of language compared to political leaders, and it was the political leadership that either set expectations and parameters that were unrealistic or simply avoided engaging with the public on the war, hoping more to avoid having the war cause them political damage than have any seriously honest national public dialogue about Afghanistan.

What we have been engaging in there in an overall sense—open-ended long-term stalemate that prevents a worst-case scenario—can be a hard sell as the best option (not that it has been generally honestly sold as that), but that does not necessarily make it bad policy.  To quote Gen. Petraeus in a recent piece (one he penned with security-policy hand Vance Serchuk): “This strategy has been costly and unsatisfying—but also reasonably successful.”

Yet, just as was the case in Syria, President Trump seems ready to just walk away in a way that leaves America, along with our local allies, exposed and weakened.

2.) UNDERSTANDING OUR FAILURE AGAINST NONTRADITIONAL THREATS AND HOW THAT RELATES TO THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC

There’s an old saying in Tennessee—I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee—that says, fool me once, shame on—shame on you. Fool me—you can’t get fooled again.

—President George W. Bush, September 17, 2002

Patterns and Themes of Failure

As Gen. Petraeus and Serchuk concluded in their piece on Afghanistan: “More broadly, history suggests that capitulation in the name of peace rarely succeeds in either curbing an adversary’s ambitions or moderating its behavior—at least not for long.”  Far more often than not, this has been proven repeatedly by rapid U.S disengagement in Lebanon, Somalia, and Syria, each of which preceded further disasters.

If one thinks of long-term American objectives in the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia as they have stood over several decades now, the net results of our two massive wars there are massive setbacks right and left and up and down throughout those regions.  To a large extent, we did exactly what bin Laden wanted us to do: while he may have not have gotten the full collapse of the U.S. and long-lasting caliphate of which he dreamed, he still played us like a harp and saw huge portions of his goals realized from our myopia, not just in the Muslim world but also in how our two 9/11-prodded wars changed America by dividing Americans, draining national resources in a way that helped generate an economic near-collapse in 2008, and weakening our domestic democratic politics and institutions.  So perhaps, domestically, bin Laden’s plan is still a posthumous work-in-progress; we may very well make it out of these dark times with our system intact, but that is not guaranteed, and if we do not, 9/11 will surely be looked at as the catalyst for a chain of self-destructive events and trends that were accelerating well-before this current pandemic.  And the dynamics behind many of those events and trends are tied directly or indirectly with our failure to address non-traditional threats successfully. 

At the time of the peak of the “surge” COIN campaign that dramatically improved security conditions in Iraq, it might have been harder (though hardly impossible) to see possible failure and far harder to see an ISIS “caliphate” peaking some seven years later, but, conversely, at this peak of ISIS’s territorial gains, it is hard to look back at the surge and think that it ever had a chance to produce long-term success.  Perhaps the sectarianism and violence unleashed during Sec. Rumsfeld’s tenure, then, meant any positive impact from Sec. Gates and Gen. Petraeus, no matter how right-headed and brilliant they were, was doomed not to be as transformative as we wished, and probably from the start, especially since those Rumsfeldian dynamics installed Maliki in Iraq before the surge and well before the time we withdrew, helping him stay in power even when his heavier worsened.  Or, perhaps the surge era-effort was not doomed; to his credit, Gen. Petraeus saw, writing in late October 2013, that “this is a time for [American and Iraqi leaders of the surge] to work together to help Iraqi leaders take the initiative, especially in terms of reaching across the sectarian and ethnic divides that have widened in such a worrisome manner.  It is not too late for such action, but time is running short.”  He was all too right: time was running very short, as it was just matter of a few months until it would all come crashing down.   

I included the discussion and points in the previous paragraph here to illustrate the larger point that such is often how the U.S. finds itself: fighting demons of its own making, never really getting away enough from those demons to have a fresh start, succeed, and reach its ideals, however genuine those ideals may be.  If Sec. Gates and Gen. Petraeus were, in many ways, prisoners of the mistakes of the early years of the U.S. in Iraq and Sec. Rumsfeld’s legacy, then Obama and his team, as well as Iraq and Iraqis overall, were, in a similar sense, prisoners of the Bush Administration’s legacy.  In this world we live in, the U.S. is hardly unique here except perhaps sometimes in matters of degree, as other nations, whole peoples, even ourselves as individuals are often prisoners of our own past or those of our parents and ancestors.  We fall prey to the demons of the past and, in doing so, create demons of our own, ensnaring our very children, and their children, and so on, a generational, tragic spiral of trauma.  Indeed, trauma has a nasty habit of outliving its immediate effects (and exponentially so, at that).  It literally embeds itself into our very beings, down to our genes.

And our demons of failure with unconventional and asymmetric threats haunt us today and will for some time: the American government simply does not seem to get how to deal with the irregular and non-traditional.  For MWI nonresident fellow Max Brooks, there is something of a cultural deficiency in America that pushes us in this direction; in a mid-March interview discussing the problems with our current coronavirus response, Brooks remarked that “American culture has always had strengths and weaknesses, and one of our weaknesses has always been putting our head in the sand.  Not reacting to coronavirus—that’s just the latest one—but 9/11, Sputnik, Pearl Harbor … Americans are always the worst at proactive response.  That’s our weakness.”

So when confronted with such threats, the U.S. has failed and failed pretty miserably in a larger sense since the 1960s.  From the terrorism of the Taliban to the cyberwarfare of Russia, there are certain common denominators present in these asymmetric, unconventional situations to which we are not properly adjusting, ensuing that we keep losing again and again and again, allowing our own strengths and divisions to be played to cripple democracy at home (Russia’s election interference in 2016) and sometimes seeing the unraveling of our own notable own successes (the rise of ISIS in Iraq in 2014 negating the 2007 surge) or even undoing them ourselves (missions having positive impact turning into rapid withdrawals in 1984 in Lebanon, 1994 in Somalia, and 2019 in Syria).

COVID-19’s Deadly Impact Magnified by Recent U.S. Failures Facing Unconventional, Asymmetric Crises

If this seems unrelated to coronavirus, think again.

That withdrawal of most of a tiny contingent of U.S. troops in northern Syria has not only led to a reinvigorated ISIS but also a massive humanitarian crisis.  Millions of Syrians there are caught in what one article’s headline calls “the world’s worst game of Risk.”  In fact, even though Syria is now getting far less attention in the media because of coronavirus and a general ennui for Syria among other factors, the current situation in Syria is the worst humanitarian crisis of the entire decade-long war, with more people being driven from their homes than at any other time of the war.

The Idlib governorate on Turkey’s border is the last major rebel stronghold in Syria and has some three million people living in it now, but half those are Syrians internally displaced from their homes (IDPs) because of the war.  With the latest round of fighting in Idlib, some one million people have been recently displaced there, many not for the first time.  To make matters even worse, the region is experiencing an unusually harsh winter and displaced children are freezing to death in the cold. 

On top of war, a lack of supplies and aid coming in, and harsh conditions, now these desperate people must face coronavirus, a threat well-represented by the title of a recent Refugees International briefing, “A Crisis on Top of a Crisis: COVID-19 Looms over War-Ravaged Idlib,” which describes the situation there regarding coronavirus as being “like a tinderbox waiting for the match.”  The disease is spreading elsewhere in Syria and Turkey, surrounding Idlib, but conditions in northern Syria—with Syrian, Iranian, Russian, Kurdish, Turkish, S.D.F., and ISIS forces operating among other groups in a chaotic theater—mean tracking and treating the virus are themselves Herculean tasks.  Reporting on the virus can be slow, and that is if authorities are cooperating and being transparent, which in Syria and elsewhere in the region is hardly a given; in other words, we really have no idea how bad coronavirus is spreading in the area.  Furthermore, it is incredibly difficult getting aid into Idlib with all the fighting as the Syrian Civil War rages with the Assad regime’s forces’ latest offensive into Idlib, supported by Russian and Iranian forces; attacks against civilians are rampant.  The Syrian government is even blocking the transport of medical supplies to where they are needed, finding a way to weaponize the coronavirus even as aid workers and local medical staff are flat-out warning that they are not equipped or prepared to deal with coronavirus, with medical equipment and supplies being scarce in the area.

Even before this COVID-19 crisis, the local healthcare infrastructure had been decimated by the war, with some 80 hospitals taken out of commission in Idlib alone.  This has been by design, as, throughout the war, Assad regime forces with Russian backing have been deliberately targeting hospitals and other key civilian infrastructure related to food and water, as has the Russian Air Force.  Displaced civilians were already extremely vulnerable in Idlib, and now they face a pandemic with great uncertainty as to whether they will have the necessary aid to survive it alongside a host of other threats in a warzone (you can help them here).  The virus will certainly make (and already has made) their already extremely difficult lives significantly worse even if it does not infect or kill them.

These civilians in Idlib are often fleeing the Syrian’s government’s offensive to a Turkish border that has been sealed off to them—Turkey, already hosting some 3.7 million refugees, refuses to take in any more—with masses of people trapped with nowhere to go, a situation ripe for a coronavirus outbreak as they cannot practice social distancing since they live in crowded tents (if they even have shelter), nor do they have the ability to practice good hygiene since they lack proper amounts of soap and easy access to water.  Refugee camps there and elsewhere in the Middle East are teeming with people and short on necessary supplies, meaning they are potential disasters-in-the-making.

This conflict has only greatly intensified in Syria’s north lately in the absence of a stabilizing U.S. presence after the recent U.S. withdrawal discussed earlier.  It was because of that withdrawal that Turkey was able to carry out its destabilizing invasion of northern Syria, an invasion that itself displaced hundreds of thousands of people.  After its reckless invasion and engaging directly against Assad’s forces, Turkey—a NATO member state—has been furious that NATO is not supporting it as it takes casualties from attacks from Syrian forces getting support from the Russian government.  To pressure NATO states, Turkey is actively encouraging thousands of refugees it is hosting to migrate to Greece and Europe, even transporting them to the no-man’s land separating the Turkish and Greek borders—where desperate refugees caught as pawns have even clashed with Greek border guards—in a naked play to use these refugees as leverage against European NATO countries.  Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has made his intent in this regard explicit and clear and does not even try to deny he is weaponizing the refugees for political purposes.  If refugees in Turkey come down with COVID-19, this would be a far more ominous context for the dangerous game Turkey is playing with Europe.  For now, with coronavirus spreading in Turkey and Greece and refugees in camps in Greece coming down with the virus, the Turkish government late in March evacuated the makeshift camp that had popped up for the refugees it had sent to the Greek border and quarantined the refugees for two weeks. Those being released from the quarantine often end up sleeping in the streets, caught in limbo amid coronavirus, with Turkey indicating it will recklessly resend them to the closed Greek border once the pandemic subsides.

In Syria, Turkey, Greece, and all over the world, aid operations were forced to undergo massive, disruptive adjustments are being cut back drastically because of COVID-19, and with a field that was already spread thin amid a record number of people being displaced globally, the vulnerable populations the aid field was servicing cannot afford to be deprioritized.

But in particular, in northern Syria, President Trump’s Syrian withdrawal was the catalyst for the sad chain of events that has the situation there where it is now: far worse than it would have been otherwise and guaranteed to get even worse yet in the midst of a global pandemic.  The difference this all will cause in the number of dead from COVID-19 and its spillover effects will likely be in the thousands as U.S. incompetence in the face of one unconventional, asymmetric threat amplifies the harm from another unconventional, asymmetric threat.  Though the second is not man-made, the increase in the damage it will do is.

America’s Own COVID-19 Failures Mirror Its Failures in Fighting Nontraditional Threats

The issues surrounding the conflicts in Vietnam, Lebanon, Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria were complicated and difficult to understand, and many Americans preferred moving on and forgetting.  After all, most Americans could live their lives and not be affected by the nature of unconventional, asymmetric warfare in a distant land.  But the unconventional, asymmetric threats posed by coronavirus, pandemics in general, biowarfare, and bioterrorism are not something from which Americans can conveniently shrink away: they are dangerous to us here at home all over the country, not just a small portion of volunteer military personnel deployed thousands of miles away or one city or several targeted in a particular al-Qaeda/ISIS-style “normal” terrorist attack.  Thus, the approach that has created a pattern of failure for America regarding unconventional, asymmetric threats in the past is even more inappropriate, problematic, and unacceptable for our present pandemic and similar biothreats.

Whether in Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan, our leaders early on projected a supreme level of confidence and a belief in total victory even as they understood little about the nature of the threats they faced and what would be required to actually come out on top.  As these conflicts unfolded in their earlier phases, the political leaders initiating and running our military involvement never communicated to the public how truly difficult, open-ended, and indefinite our missions could or would be.  Because of these characterizations, proper resourcing was often a huge problem, especially given the tendencies to downplay the challenges we faced in these conflicts.  Instead, what we were told was that victory was usually just around the corner.  Furthermore, by focusing on short-term accomplishments for the sake of trying to boost public opinion, they very accomplishments themselves were made shallower and more likely to depress public opinion over time since they were more likely to come undone.  In the end, this meant that relatively short-term, technically successful increases in military deployments—ones leaders signaled ahead of time would be short-term and the goal of which was to improve security and stability enough for politics on-the-ground to move significantly in the right direction and not backslide—were always going to have a risk of history repeating itself just after or not long after the shorter-term surges; when these deployments’ effects wore off (or, even worse, the deployment itself failed to have the desired effect), it would be time for another deployment, with new deployments increasing frustration for a public that had been told we were “winning” and, over time, damaging that public’s willingness to support our military efforts as well as the Confidence of our local allies so crucial to the fight. 

Tragically, that is what happened in both of the major wars al-Qaeda sucked America into, with the same man (Gen. Petraeus) leading roughly the same surge strategy in both countries—first in Iraq, then later in Afghanistan—but the eventual hoped-for political resolutions never coming from local actors, who, having seen America’s inconsistency and mistakes up close, were more interested in sectarian and tribal agendas to bolster their positions than either allowing the U.S. to claim victory or making concessions necessary for multi-ethnic, religiously pluralistic territories to truly come together under one flag.

At the end of Invisible Armies, his seminal history on guerrilla warfare, Max Boot presents a series of major lessons from his study. One is that “most insurgencies are long-lasting; attempts to win a quick victory backfire”: 

The fact that low-intensity conflict tends to be “long, arduous and protracted,” in the words of Sir Robert Thompson, can be a source of frustration for both sides, but attempts to short-circuit the process to achieve a quick victory usually backfire.  The United States tried to do just that in the early years of the Vietnam and Iraq wars by using its conventional might to hunt down insurgents in a push for what John Paul Vann rightly decried as “fast, superficial results.”  It was only when the United States gave up hopes of quick victory, ironically, that it started to get results by implementing the tried-and-true tenets of population-centric counterinsurgency.  In Vietnam, it was already too late, but in Iraq the patient provision of security came just in time.

A particularly seductive version of the “quick win” strategy is to try to eliminate the insurgency’s leadership. …there are just…many examples where leaders were eliminated but the movement went on, sometimes stronger than ever—as both Hezbollah and Al Qaeda in Iraq did. High-level “decapitation” strategies work best when a movement is weak organizationally and focused around a cult of personality. Even then leadership targeting is most effective if integrated into a broader counterinsurgency effort designed to separate the insurgents from the population. If conducted in isolation, leadership raids are about as effective as mowing the lawn; the targeted organization can usually regenerate itself.

I have literally lost track of how many times the number-two or number-whatever leader of al-Qaeda or an affiliate or ISIS was proudly announced as killed by the U.S. (often from a drone strike), and I remember that political leaders and whichever-Administration spokespeople were usually quite eager to broadcast this as some sort of major accomplishment or an indication that things were going well even when they clearly were not.  The emphasis our government places on this tactic from a public-relations perspective when considering its ineffectiveness betrays that eagerness to present the public with quick fixes to complex problems that has so hampered our efforts in unconventional, asymmetric warfare.

Another lesson of Boot’s is that “conventional tactics don’t work against an unconventional threat”: 

Regular soldiers often assume that they will have no difficulty besting ragtag fighters who lack the firepower or discipline of a professional fighting force.  Their mindset was summed up by General George Decker, U.S. Army chief of staff from 1960 to 1962, who said, “Any good soldier can handle guerrillas.”  The Vietnam War and countless other conflicts have disproven this bromide. Big-unit, firepower-intensive operations snare few guerrillas and alienate many civilians.  To defeat insurgents, soldiers must take a different approach that focuses not on chasing insurgents but on securing the population.  This is the difference between “search and destroy” and “clear and hold.”  The latter approach is hardly pacifistic.  It too requires the application of violence and coercion but in carefully calibrated and intelligently targeted doses.  As an Israeli general told me, “Better to fight terror with an M-16 than an F-16.”

In this sense, too often we have favored the F-16, the metaphor for heavy firepower and advanced technology, including drones, missiles, and bombers, as a substitute for long-term policy, and, indeed, one of Boot’s lessons is that “technology has been less important in guerrilla war than in conventional war,” since

all guerrilla and terrorist tactics, from suicide bombing to hostage taking and roadside ambushes, are designed to negate the firepower advantage of conventional forces.  In this type of war, technology counts for less than in conventional conflict.  Even the possession of nuclear bombs, the ultimate weapon, has not prevented the Soviet Union and the United States from suffering ignominious defeat at guerrilla hands.  To the extent that technology has mattered in low-insurgency conflicts, it has often been the nonshooting kind.  As T. E. Lawrence famously said, “The printing press is the greatest weapon in the armory of the modern commander.”  A present-day rebel might substitute “the Internet” for “the printing press,” but the essential insight remains valid.

In an interview, Boot also notes our amnesia with these types of conflicts, how

this is a recurring problem, that armies do not like fighting guerrilla wars. They regard it as being beneath them, because they don’t regard guerrillas as being worthy enemies. Unfortunately, they keep getting forced into these guerrilla wars and what normally happens is they do learn how to fight after a period of trial and error, and after suffering costly defeats. But then as soon as they leave that war behind, they tend to forget what they’ve learned.

Former U.S. Army Lt. Col. Christopher Holshek—an old professor of mine in a class I took in Liberia, studying the United Nations peacekeeping mission there—perfectly summed up our failures in these conflicts in an article for Foreign Policy:

The phase-four [post-conflict stabilization and reconstruction] fates of Operations Iraqi and Enduring Freedom [the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, respectively] were due more to the sins of omission than of commission.  The U.S. government, in its haste to do in months what takes years, threw billions at hearts-and-minds boondoggles and into ministries yielding corruption, roads to nowhere, and teacher-less schools, among other counterproductive outcomes.  The vast waste has led to the current conventional wisdom that development, coded as “nation-building,” doesn’t work.  Of course it doesn’t, if you don’t do it right.

(In a way that should offer us no consolation whatsoever, it is worth noting that a large part of his article was demonstrating how ISIS was far worse at phase four than we were).

As then-President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Jessica Tuchman Mathews wrote about the Iraq surge in late 2007, “for America’s larger strategic interests, buying more time to continue the same strategy can achieve nothing. To do so is to ask American troops to fight to create breathing space for a corpse.”  In the short-term, that was not the case: the gains made in security from the surge were significant and improved and lasted over the next few years, but beyond that, it is impossible to deny that the political breakthroughs the surge was designed to encourage did not materialize nearly enough and that all the security successes came undone between the actions of Maliki and ISIS by 2014.  And unfortunately, Matthews’s quote reverberates far beyond Iraq and can sum up so many of our strategic failures in the era after World War II.

Our leaders were simply just not honest about what we were up against or did not know themselves, and, as a result, the public never really grasped what was going on and why things went the way they did.  When the productive measures were taken, they would often be too little and/or too late, with far more death and destruction happening in the long-run as a result.  As a society and a nation, we failed to properly address these threats, at great cost for ourselves and others.  Shorter-term commitments were advertised as quick fixes that were really just false fantasies, increasing and extending the pain and perhaps dooming us to repeat ourselves in wasteful, frustrating cycles that left us demoralized, diminished, and depleted.

Conclusion

If reading this, you are asking yourself if this sounds familiar and eerily current somehow, well, yes, it should, as our response to the unconventional coronavirus pandemic fits frighteningly and maddeningly all too well—even exactly—into these patterns and obviously so.  You can practically substitute “coronavirus” for “Iraq” or “Vietnam” and the same analysis would often apply.

When confronting potentially difficult and long struggles, yes, there is something to be said for optimism and a can-do spirit, but not being straight-up with the American people about the potential costs, pitfalls, and durations of major threats—whether pandemics or insurgencies—sets America up to have little appetite or commitment when things turn out much tougher than advertised and also erodes our government’s overall credibility and our trust in, and willingness to listen to, it.  These combine to set us up for failure and far more painful struggles because we do not set ourselves up with the right approach in the beginning, and, as we know with so much in life, starting off on the wrong foot only makes everything that comes after that much more difficult.  False hope births a false sense of security and only makes us more vulnerable, whether we are talking about our soldiers in Iraq or our citizens being out in public catching coronavirus, unafraid of a spreading pandemic because leaders did not signify the appropriate level of concern people should have by not ordering lockdowns early.

Now, because of early missteps, our experience with COVID-19 is going to look more like the Iraq War than the Gulf War.  Therefore, as we try to overcome this threat, understanding our past missteps and failures against unconventional, asymmetric threats is crucial.

© 2020 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

See Brian’s full coronavirus coverage here and his latest eBook version of the full special report,Coronavirus the Revealer: How the Coronavirus Pandemic Exposes America As Unprepared for Biowarfare & Bioterrorism, Highlighting Traditional U.S. Weakness in Unconventional, Asymmetric Warfare, available in Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook, and EPUB editions.

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By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) May 26, 2020

This is a very complex, layered exploration, but patience in taking the time to go through these components to see how they fit together in the end will be rewarded. By looking at the history of biowarfare and bioterrorism, then looking at the history of our own failures at unconventional and asymmetric warfare and the patterns those failures reveal, we lay the groundwork for understanding both why the coronavirus pandemic is very similar to unconventional, asymmetric threats and why America has had such a spectacularly bad response to the coronavirus relative to many other countries. We can then understand how, even more terrifyingly, the coronavirus era has made bioweapons both more attractive to our enemies and more likely to be used by them, all this on top of the development of recent groundbreaking technology destroying so many barriers to making bioweapons and acquiring the material needed to do so. After that, we can understand how the coronavirus pandemic has exposed our weaknesses in ways that demonstrate how existentially vulnerable we are to anything worse, be it a natural pandemic or a man-made bioassault. Finally, we can see in the epilogue how all this comes together, including how history, coronavirus, and political warfare during the 2020 election are creating a true test for our democracy, our society, and our citizens, and how not only systemic structural shifts are necessary to protect our people and our democracy from these threats, but cultural and societal ones, too.

Bernard Lowe: We retired the two hosts in question.  You taught me how to make them, but not how hard it is to turn them off.

Dr. Robert Ford: You can’t play god without being acquainted with the devil.  There’s something else bothering you, Bernard.  I know how that head of yours works.

Lowe: The photograph alone couldn’t have caused that level of damage to Abernathy, not without some other, ah, outside interference.

Ford: You think it’s sabotage?  You imagine someone’s been diddling with our creations?

Lowe: It’s the simplest solution.

Ford: Ah, Mr. Ockam’s razor.  The problem, Bernard, is that what you and I do is…so complicated.  We practice witchcraft.  We speak the right words.  Then we create life itself…out of chaos.  William of Ockam was a 13th century monk.  He can’t help us now, Bernard.  He would have us burned at the stake.

—Westworld, “Chestnut,” Season 1, Episode 2 by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy (2016)

SILVER SPRING—As the world witnesses the terrifying spiraling effects of the gaping void in competent early-intervention leadership in what looks to potentially and likely be the worst global pandemic since the misnamed 1918 “Spanish” flu killed as many as 100 million people (up to six percent of the world’s population at the time), perhaps the biggest fear we should harbor has little to do with actual coronavirus. 

Part of why this virus and its disease is so terrifying is that it is new and confounding, with varied effects.  It might roughly be thought of as a megaflu/superpneumonia-like whole body virus, but even that description does not do justice to the novel (i.e., new) coronavirus, also known as SARS-CoV-2, about which there is quite a lot (so much) we do not know and for which there is currently no vaccine and against which no vetted medicine has yet proven in rigorous testing to be effective, nor even safe to use (remdesivir, the antiviral drug seems to speed recovery from the virus and has just been given a special exception by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration [FDA] for emergency use, still has not been properly tested, has not been formally approved by the FDA, and may damage the liver).   Even with a viable vaccine in the future, this is a rapidly branching, evolving, and mutating virus, and the coronavirus family of viruses has proven exceptionally difficult for vaccines, with the FDA never having approved an effective human-use vaccine for any type of coronavirus.  In short, there is no guarantee that such an initial vaccine or any vaccine would provide mass protection anywhere near the degree to which we would hope.

Yet just imagine that the current disease rapidly spreading was actually far worse and far deadlier than COVID-19, the sickness brought about by coronavirus and now creating so many fatal complications for so many people and hospitalizing so many others all around the world. 

Such a mental exercise would hardly be just an act of imaginative fiction: Richard Preston—author of the famous 1990s bestselling seminal book The Hot Zone that awoke the national consciousness of America to the threat of emerging infectious diseases—and other numerous experts and public figures have raised the alarm about potential pandemics for years, with Preston himself just recently warning that the next pandemic could easily be worse than this current coronavirus one.

Going back to our thought experiment, now imagine this even worse disease ravaging humanity was no act of nature, but a deliberate act of war or terrorism.

The horrible reality is there are, in fact, far worse things out there that mother nature has in store for us than this coronavirus, and, even scarier, as is always the case, is man’s perversion of nature.  As Iain Pears wrote in his poetic novel The Dream of Scipio: “…we are worse than beasts. Animals are constrained by their limitations and their lack of imagination. We are not.”

And in this case of perverting nature, we are talking about the weaponization and modification of infectious diseases by humans—as servants of governments or terrorists—to kill people, many people, in no way discriminating between military and civilian, adult and child, strong or weak, healthy or sick.  And in a world where such a threat exists, and where a natural pandemic has exposed glaring weaknesses that must be addressed, a dramatic change in policy is warranted.

We do not have to even try hard imagine such malintent: as one example, the FBI has found that American white supremacists want to pass on this very coronavirus deliberately as a bioweapon to target groups they do not like, a clear form of terrorism.  U.S. defense and intelligence officials are also worried about a more organized potential effort to weaponize coronavirus.

Yet the biological threats that have been and could be used as deliberate weapons against us are hardly limited to our currently omnipresent SARS-CoV-2 strain of coronavirus.

And so, as with understanding any issue, a little history is in order, as biowarfare and bioterrorism does not begin or with the above example, nor, sadly, will it end with it.

I.) A Brief, Non-Comprehensive Survey of Bioweapons, Biowarfare, and Bioterrorism History

Like the medieval system before it, science is starting not to fit the world any more.  Science has attained so much power that its practical limits begin to be apparent.  Largely through science, billions of us live in one small world, densely packed and intercommunicating.  But science cannot help us decide what to do with that world, or how to live.  Science can make a nuclear reactor, but it cannot tell us not to build it.  Science can make pesticide, but cannot tell us not to use it.  And our world starts to seem polluted in fundamental ways-air, and water, and land-because of ungovernable science.  This much is obvious to everyone.

—Dr. Ian Malcolm, in Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park (1990)

Premodern Biowarfare

The weaponization of disease goes back to the ancient world.  The behavior of modern primitive tribes dabbing their arrows in decaying biological matter (animal or human), in part, indicates that even before recorded history, humans were likely deliberately trying to infect other humans as a tactic.

The first recorded example is in the fourteenth century B.C.E. with the ancient Hittites—the scourge of ancient Egypt—sending sick animals (rams) to their enemies’ lands the hopes of spreading sickness there.

Ancient Romans and Persians sometimes poisoned the wells of their enemies by dumping dead animals into the water, allowing sickness to spread.

The bubonic plague came to Europe because a Mongol-led army that had been suffering from plague in its siege in the mid-1340s of a Genovese-settlement in Crimea decided to turn their disadvantage to their advantage by catapulting their plague-riddled dead into the city.  When some of the Genovese, fearing the mysterious disease that was afflicting their city under siege, fled to Italy, they brought the plague with them and the rest is history, the history of the Black Death, which spread to all of Europe and had killed at least a third of the continent’s population, some twenty-five million people at a minimum).  The Mongol-led army using artillery to hurl those dead plague-ridden bodies at enemy forces in Crimea was “a landmark in the history of” biowarfare, a technique for which we have decent evidence of repetition a few subsequent times, including 1422 in by the Lithuanians in Bohemia and by the Russians against the Swedes in 1710 and 1718.

Another fairly unique historical example is closer to home.  Besieged by Chief Pontiac’s Native American warriors, it seems a British-led garrison defending Fort Pitt (now Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) in 1763 gave blankets infested with smallpox as “gifts” to the Native Americans with the intention of infecting them with the highly deadly disease for military purposes.  British forces apparently did something similar in 1789 in Australia with that continent’s Aborigines.

At the height of the U.S. Civil War, one rebel Southern agent (and future Kentucky governor)—Dr. Luke Blackburn, a medical doctor with serious expertise and experience in treating fellow fever—hatched and set in motion a plot to infect Union military positions, Northern cities, and even President Abraham Lincoln himself with the deadly disease by trying to pass on clothing and bedding of people who had suffered and perished from the disease.  The plot was unsuccessful since, at the time, it was not known that people’s fluids did not spread the fever and that mosquitos were the vehicle of transmission.  It seems smallpox may also have been involved, and that aspect might have killed one Union soldier.

Despite suspicions of other similar incidents, evidence is mainly scant for other deliberate uses of biological warfare from this period and the centuries just before and after, with suspicious incidents more often than not seeming to be natural in origin and not deliberate, despite accusations to the contrary.

Modern Biowarfare

Dr. Robert Ford: I don’t think God rested on the seventh day… I think he reveled in his creation knowing that someday it would all be destroyed.

—Westworld, “Les Écorchés,” Season 2, Episode 7 by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy (2018)

It is in the twentieth century that we see the first large, organized, national-level government biowarfare programs.  Scientific advances in the late nineteenth century gave humans far more knowledge and ability to combat human disease but also to manipulate potential bioagents, including for military use.  Seeing what was to come, there were two international declarations coming out of Brussels in 1874 and 1899 banning the use of poison weapons on the battlefield, but there were no enforcing or inspections mechanisms. 

Germany during World War I by far had the biggest biowarfare program, though not much was put successfully to use as their culmination was in small and ineffective covert attacks targeting mainly animal populations crucial to war efforts in enemy nations using glanders and anthrax (a bacterial agent that can infect both people and animals but that is not contagious, i.e., able to spread person-to-person, so its spread is limited by where those using it as a weapon deploy it).  France engaged in research but did not attempt to implement any of it.

The use of chemical weapons on the battlefield during World War I—such as mustard gas, chlorine gas, and phosgene—produced a revulsion that led to have their use banned on the battlefield, along with that of bioweapons, with the 1925 ratification of the Geneva Protocol for the Prohibition of the Use in War of Asphyxiating, Poisonous or Other Gases, and of Bacteriological Methods of Warfare, though their research and production were not banned.  The Protocol also had no binding enforcement or verification provisions, but still, here, we had the first explicit ban on the use of bioweapons in war for signatories.

All the major powers in World War II would engage in bioweapons research programs, the Western Allies, in particular, investing energy into anthrax research and production.  These programs often focused more on targeting beasts of burden and livestock, which were still so crucial to both the transportation and feeding of armies.  The efforts were not a top priority, and a joint U.S.-UK-Canadian anthrax program was never finished.  Despite concerns of a German bioweapons program, it seems the Nazi regime never prioritized such weapons.

It was Imperial Japan’s government that, by far, had the most extensive program during the war, led by Imperial Army Units 731 and 100 and one that ran for years, staffed by thousands of people in twenty-six centers and performing live experiments on prisoners that killed thousands of them, testing twenty-five different bioagents to see the effects of diseases on both prisoners and even, without their knowledge, Chinese civilians.  Up to 600 prisoners were killed per year in bioagent testing at just one of these facilities.  Outside of the biowarfare facilities, the Japanese Imperial Army dumped cholera and typhus into over 1,000 wells in Chinese villages to study the effects of the diseases.  Japanese planes dropped plague-carrying fleas onto Chinese cities or had agents spread the same to Chinese rice fields and roads.  The effects were so devastating that plague outbreaks were still killing tens of thousands of Chinese several years after World War II had ended.  The Japanese also used bioagents against Soviet troops, but available information on the effects of these attacks are inconclusive and these attempts may have been ineffective.  At the very end of the war, Japan was exploring a plan to spread plague into California using submarines and Kamikaze pilots, but the war ended before the plan’s start date of September 22, 1945.  One major member of the program even published scientific articles on his “research” in respectable journals and just referred to the human victims as “monkeys” to hide the atrocities.  While the Soviets convicted some Japanese biowarfare program personnel of war crimes, the U.S. offered amnesty and freedom to all the relevant staff under their jurisdiction in exchange for the data on their experiments.

This brings us to the U.S. program, which became much more robust after World War II, though its main beginnings were at Fort Detrick, Maryland, in 1943.  Activity increased in response to the Korean War and grew rapidly over the next few decades, becoming quite robust, producing many tons of bioagents and weapons systems to deliver them.  This reflected the Cold War-era shift from bioweapons being conceived of more as tools of sabotage to weapons of mass destruction (WMD).  In particular, the U.S. Air Force would have some of its aircraft equipped with highly sophisticated aerosol delivery systems such that a single B-52 bomber attack run could spread a biological agent over some 10,000 square miles while other systems for fighter-bomber aircraft could disperse bioweapons over 25,000-50,000 square miles in a single run.  Besides lethal bioagents, incapacitating and anti-crop agents were also major priorities.  Production capacity at just one major facility—the Pine Bluff Arsenal—would be 650 tons of bacterial agent a month, though that level of production never occurred.

Though the U.S. program worked on a wide variety of bioagent research and weaponization, it seems to have focused more on bacterial agents.  In the 1950s and 1960s, mass tests were conducted on unsuspecting American civilian populations, and while the intention was to use harmless agents, sometimes complications produced casualties.  One of the largest examples of this involved the U.S. Navy dispersing into the air off the coast of San Francisco enormous quantities of what it though was a harmless bacteria—Serratia marcescens—over the course of nearly a week in September 1950.  The idea was to see the degree to how an enemy bioweapon might disperse and be spread by releasing it into the air off the coast of a major U.S. city.  The bacteria spread with and into San Francisco’s famous fog and saturated the whole metro area, exposing some 800,000 people heavily to the bacteria unbeknownst to them.  At least eleven people were hospitalized with major urinary tract infections and another man, recovering from prostate surgery, died from heart complications when the bacteria infected his heart valves.  The public would not learn of this test until 1976.  Another major test involved the New York City subway system in 1966.  These were only two of the largest out of hundreds of similar secret U.S. tests carried out on domestic public populations without their consent in the 1950s and 1960s.

Alarmed by the real possibility of biowarfare and the relative ease with which non-superpowers could develop and engage in it, American President Richard Nixon halted the U.S. offensive bioweapons program in 1969 and had the U.S. sign the Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production and Stockpiling of Bacteriological (Biological) and Toxin Weapons and on their Destruction (BTWC or BWC) in 1972.  The Convention banned the use of biological and chemical weapons and bioweapons research.  Signatories also committed to destroying their existing bioweapons stockpiles and were prohibited from researching offensive dispersal technologies, though there were no enforced verification or control mechanisms.  Over 100 other nations initially signed along with the U.S., including the Soviet Union, and today, almost every nation in the world is a signatory.

But even as the Soviet Union signed the treaty, it was secretly ramping up its own biowarfare program into overdrive.  The Soviets had had an offensive biowarfare program going back to the 1920s, which greatly expanded in the 1930s and may have approached the Japanese program in scale, but it seems Soviet leader Joseph Stalin’s purges disrupted it.  There is a small number of unverified claims of Soviet use of bioweapons in World War II as well as similar theories that Soviet-backed partisan guerrillas that used bioagents against occupying Germans obtained their bioweapons from the Soviets.  Additionally, it seems some Soviet agents spread typhus-carrying lice in a German-occupied Ukrainian town.  These operations killed dozens of Germans, but, still, in general and certainly compared to the Japanese, Soviet use of biological weapons during the war seems extremely rare and of minimal impact.

The USSR took biowarfare experts from Japan (like the U.S.) and industrial equipment from Germany as booty from the Second World War to help advance their program.  As the Korean War approached and unfolded, Stalin worried that the increasing U.S. bioweapons program would be a real threat to the Soviets, and they continued to lag behind the U.S. likely until the 1970s.  In early post-Cold War years, the Soviets developed weapons programs targeting crop and livestock and even developed sophisticated assassination methods with bioagents.  There was even a plan to assassinate Yugoslavia’s leader Josip Broz Tito using plague, but Stalin died before the plot was carried out.  During this period, fear of the U.S. bioweapons program motivated the Soviets to create a robust system to help spot and stop outbreaks of infectious diseases.

Still, in part because of its subscribing to incorrect biological scientific theories and a stifling bureaucracy, not much seemed to have progressed with the Soviet biowarfare program in the decades after World War II.  Soviet leaders, aware they were lagging behind the U.S., finally deferred to scientific experts (with correct, Western scientific theories backing their thinking) and decided to launch a major new biowarfare program, Biopreparat, that would take off just as the U.S. was winding its program down.  Thus, beginning in the 1970s, Biopreparat became the largest, most advanced biowarfare program in the history of the world, employing up to 60,000 people at its height; the civilian side of the program alone would end up having “10 research and development institutes, 14 production and mobilization plants, and 8 special weapons and facility design units,” and, combined with its military facilities, Biopreparat was capable of producing several thousand tons of biological agents per year.  The program developed technology to have plague, anthrax, and smallpox placed in intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBSMs)—with smallpox, maintaining a constantly refreshed egg-incubated stockpile of twenty tons—keeping some weapons loaded with agents and ready to be deployed or launched, and had the capacity to produce 1,800 tons of anthrax annually.  Overall, Biopreparat worked with about fifty different bioagents, including the highly deadly Ebola-like Marburg virus. 

Perhaps most disturbingly, the Soviet biowarfare program even engaged in genetic engineering to create new strains of existing diseases that would be stronger and resist known treatment—man-made super-strains of anthrax, plague, tularemia, smallpox, and others—as well as new agents altogether, combining some of the worst aspects of multiple diseases; by 1991, the program was researching adding genes from Venezuelan equine encephalitis, Ebola, and Marburg into smallpox.

The highly secretive Soviet Biopreparat program was unknown to U.S. intelligence until a member of the program defected to the West in 1989, two others following in 1992, the third being the second-in-command of Biopreparat, who had become terrified of what his program could unleash on the world.

After these revelations, Russia (the Soviet Union was now in the dustbin of history) admitted it had carried out a program in violation of the 1972 BWC treaty and President Boris Yeltsin pledged to end the program, but his pledge was quite controversial within Russian power circles and he faced stiff opposition.  Just a few years later, Russia was backing off some its admissions, and after Vladimir Putin ascended to the Russian presidency in 1999, he changed the official policy of Russia to one that actively and specifically denied that the Soviet Union or Russia has ever had an offensive biowarfare program. 

Russia, then, simply has not come clean on its biowarfare program.  Putin himself even publicly called for developing “genetic” weapons in 2012, and, since then, there has been a frenzy of construction activity at over two dozen old biowarfare program sites, which still remain as secretive and sealed-off as they were during Soviet times.  To this day, little is known about what became of the massive Biopreparat program or its enormous stockpiles.  Even in 2016, the Obama Administration was noting that Russia still had not come clean about what it had done with its biological stockpiles and delivery systems, and it is hard to believe that Russia is not violating the 1972 BWC treaty even today.  Furthermore, with serious security issues at Russian installations and with the immediate 1990s in Russia being something of an insanely chaotic, corrupt Wild West-like environment where it would hardly have been unthinkable that money and bioagents changed hands, we have no way of knowing which struggling scientists might have smuggled bioagents or their designs to which buyers, let alone where elements of Russia’s biological weapons stockpile are today.

In fact, some of the Soviet Union’s smallpox cache seems to have somehow gotten lost and made its way to North Korea during the tumultuous time of the USSR’s final collapse.  And a U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency report from 1994 stated that in the late 1980s or early 1990, the USSR or Russia had supplied North Korea with smallpox, too, which may or not be the same as the stocks of which Russia apparently lost track.  But that rogue nation would also have had its own stocks (though likely less potent) as part of its suspected longstanding biowarfare program, decades old but one about which few concrete details are known due to the secretive and sealed-off nature of the regime.  Despite this lack of information, many experts contend North Korea’s biowarfare program is a substantial and advanced one, and it seems the government of the country’s leader, Kim Jong-Un (if he is still leading, or even alive, amid his current disappearance) is trying to expand its program and bioweapons research and production capabilities.  One North Korean soldier who defected a few years ago tested positive for anthrax antibodies, suggesting (though not proving) the possibility anthrax is an active part of its arsenal.  North Korea’s military is thought to be vaccinated for both smallpox and anthrax, making both those potential bioweapons attractive to them.  And our own troops stationed in South Korea (and in general) are, overall, underequipped and unprepared for a biowarfare attack.  Experts believe the government is more likely to use bioweapons than nuclear ones and, the volatile, desperate, risky, unconventional, and sometimes unpredictable nature of the North Korean regime mean its bioweapons program may be one of the world’s programs that poses the largest threat, not least because a desperate and cash-strapped North Korean government could be willing to sell parts of this program and bioweapons expertise in general to other rogue regimes or non-state terrorist groups (it has supported terrorism across the world in the past), as it has already done with its chemical and nuclear programs and related expertise for Syria, which is also is known to have a bioweapons program.

As for other countries, a number had programs rise and fall during the Cold War, and other have clear capabilities of having or jumpstarting a program even if no evidence exists that they current do have a program.  Others still have programs today: Israel, for example, has long had a bioweapons program, but very few details are known about its current status.  China is thought to also have a program, but likely a small one and practically nothing is known about it, with experts emphasizing China’s dual-use capabilities more than actually any robust current program.  Iran is in a similar category.

It is notable that Iraq had a robust program for a number of years not too long ago under Saddam Hussein, one about which we know a lot and that really kicked into high developmental gear from the middle of the Iran-Iraq War until the Gulf War and subsequent demands and inspections from the powers who defeated Saddam’s government and severely disrupted his program at its peak.  At that peak, the program was in its early stages of being operational, but it does not seem the regime ever used its bioweapons.  The earlier DIA assessment from 1994 that concluded Russia had supplied North Korea with smallpox concluded Russia had also supplied Iraq with the virus around the same time, but Iraq likely also had its own stocks and there is evidence supporting the idea it was weaponizing smallpox, perhaps using camelpox research as a cover.  Until the mid-1990s, even under the scrutiny of international inspections, the regime was still trying to salvage its program, but after renewed and intensified international actions, Hussein’s government in 1996 may have largely abandoned serious efforts to reconstitute its biowarfare program.  The post-Saddam era has thankfully seen Iraqi governments that have abandoned all WMD pursuits.

Bioterrorism

I’ll tell you the problem with engineers and scientists.  Scientists have an elaborate line of bullshit about how they are seeking to know the truth about nature.  Which is true, but that’s not what drives them. Nobody is driven by abstractions like “seeking truth.”

Scientists are actually preoccupied with accomplishment.  So they are focused on whether they can do something.  They never stop to ask if they should do something.  They conveniently define such considerations as pointless.  If they don’t do it, someone else will.  Discovery, they believe, is inevitable.  So they just try to do it first.  That’s the game in science. Even pure scientific discovery is an aggressive, penetrative act.  It takes big equipment, and it literally changes the world afterward.  Particle accelerators sear the land, and leave radioactive byproducts.  Astronauts leave trash on the moon.  There is always some proof that scientists were there, making their discoveries.  Discovery is always a rape of the natural world. Always.

The scientists want it that way.  They have to stick their instruments in.  They have to leave their mark. They can’t just watch.  They can’t just appreciate.  They can’t just fit into the natural order. They have to make something unnatural happen.  That is the scientist’s job, and now we have whole societies that try to be scientific.

—Dr. Ian Malcolm, in Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park (1990)

Besides states, there are, of course, the terrorists seeking to develop and use these weapons.

Besides the occasional partisans/guerillas who, as mentioned, used bioweapons against occupying German troops during World War II, there are, thankfully, only a few major examples of bioterrorism in general throughout history.  In the modern era, there is the strange case of a religious cult in America deliberately poisoning restaurant salad bars with Salmonella in Oregon in 1984, sickening hundreds of people, dozens of them seriously.  While Japan’s Aum Shinrikyo cult is famous for its sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway in 1995, it was also planning to carry out biological attacks before those plots were discovered and foiled.

Just after the September 11^th, 2001 al-Qaeda attacks in the U.S., there was the strange incident of the anthrax mail attacks that infected twenty-two people and killed five.  The case was quite murky and the best available explanation is that the attacks seems to have been an example of domestic terrorism by particular a government scientist who was an expert on, and worked with, anthrax, one who committed suicide and whose possible motives have not been definitively determined by investigators but that most likely would seem to have amounted to creating a false flag attack to raise awareness about bioterrorism and boost funding for biodefense.  Even so, the evidence is far from conclusive and some questions remains as to the identity of the terrorist(s), let alone any motives.

Al-Qaeda itself harbored serious ambitions for developing bioweapons capabilities, in particular one major plot in the years before 9/11 focusing on anthrax to carry out a large-scale attack on U.S. soil run by the organization’s second-in-command (and still current leader), the surgeon Ayman al-Zawahiri.  In the months prior to the 9/11 attacks, multiple al-Qaeda operatives were looking into crop-dusting airplanes, a tool that would make an exceptional delivery mechanism for a bioagent.  One of these operatives was Mohammad Atta, a 9/11 ringleader and a successful hijacker on 9/11, who was trying to get a loan to buy a crop duster in Florida but was rejected.  Another was Zacarias Moussaoui, caught before 9/11 and later convicted in court on 9/11 related terrorism charges, thought to maybe be designated as a hijacker (possibly of another plane that was supposed to hit the White House) but also perhaps, instead, to have been tasked with carrying out other attacks after 9/11.  An associate of Moussaoui’s who entered the U.S. with him was detained in possession of biology textbooks while Moussaoui had in his possession crop-dusting aircraft manuals.

After the 9/11 attacks, U.S. forces in Afghanistan would destroy what U.S. intelligence officials said was an under-construction facility to produce anthrax in Kandahar, and anthrax powder was found in Zawahiri’s house in the country.  Zawahiri had even recruited a Pakistani government scientist to work on advancing al-Qaeda’s bioweapons program at that Kandahar lab.  Extremist nuclear scientists in Pakistan also formed an NGO (with a former head of Pakistan’s notoriously-extremist-sympathizing ISI intelligence service and a former head of Pakistan’s Khushab nuclear reactor on its board) that was a front for supporting terrorists, including al-Qaeda and, specifically, bioterrorism plans were found in the organization’s office in Kabul shortly after 9/11.  Al-Qaeda also had a cell in Saudi Arabia that was planning biological attacks.

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s al-Qaeda affiliate, al-Qaeda in Iraq/Mesopotamia—which would later, during the Iraq War, evolve into ISIS—was even trying to develop, train with, and use bioweapons before the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq.

More recently, in 2014, a laptop that belonged to an ISIS operative with an academic background in science was apparently recovered from an ISIS safehouse.  Files on the computer showed the group was putting energy into looking at developing bioweapons and carrying out bioterrorist attacks, with specific documents outlining techniques for testing agents and carrying out attacks in public areas, directing that biological agents be disseminated into the air using air conditioning systems, and explaining how to weaponize plague.  There was also discussion of theological justifications for biological attacks and of the advantages of biological weapons being cheap to create and able to kill large numbers of people.  While its “caliphate” was at its height, ISIS even established a lab in Mosul for chemical and biological weapons research and development that employed a team of scientific experts dedicated to the cause.

Additionally, Kenyan police stopped a anthrax plot with big ambitions in 2016 concocted by an ISIS-linked terror group.  And in 2018, a Lebanese citizen was arrested by anti-terrorism police in Italy for plotting a terrorist attack that would have included anthrax he was seeking to obtain, taking ISIS for inspiration.  Overall, European officials worry that ISIS attacks utilizing bioagents are being planned for European targets and could be executed soon, perhaps even using drones.

Having looked at the unconventional bioweapons ambitions arrayed against us, it is now time to look at America’s sad overall history with unconventional threats to get a sense of how our performance can inform our response to current and future unconventional threats, including from pandemics and bioweapons.

II.) America’s History of Failure in Unconventional and Asymmetric Warfare

Not bad for a little furball, there’s only one left.

—Gen. Han Solo to Princess Leia Organa after a tiny Ewok lured three Imperial Scout Troopers away from guarding the Death Star II’s shield generator’s rear entrance on Endor’s moon, in George Lucas’s Star Wars: Episode VI: Return of the Jedi (1983)

Ironically, as Historian Max Boot noted, “today, we’re used to having American soldiers be the forces of the government. And, of course, in our revolution, we were the insurgents and the British were the role of the counterinsurgents, and, in fact, many of the strategies which the American rebels used against the British are similar in many ways to the strategies now being used against us around the world.”  There’s a reason for that current state of affairs, and it’s about our unmatched power.

America’s military might—by far the greatest on earth—is both a blessing and a curse. 

It is a blessing in that nobody can take us on militarily directly, nor can any plausible coalition of nations, especially when factoring in our massive alliance system, an “empire of trust;” this combination of hard and soft power is unlike anything in history since ancient Rome.

Yet this very power means that smart enemies do not even try to take us on in a traditional military sense; conventional, symmetric responses are, essentially, suicidal for our enemies, who, instead, opt for unconventional and asymmetric means.  In the words of Gen. H.R. McMaster, “There are basically two ways to fight the US military: asymmetrically and stupid.”  Thus, mostly all our recent conflicts have been a.) primarily unconventional in that, for the bulk of the fighting, we are operating against forces that are not regular state military units in standard-range uniforms behaving within more traditional norms of warfare and  b.) primarily asymmetric in that this unconventional organization, equipment, tactics, and strategy on the part of our adversaries are products of those adversaries accepting the power imbalance between our stronger forces and their weaker ones and are designed to address this imbalance

And when facing unconventional and asymmetric warfare in recent decades, America’s track record is actually pretty poor.  Without a doubt, biowarfare falls under the category of unconventional since it involves illegal, rare, and atypically deployed weapons and is also asymmetric because few things besides bioweapons can reduce the advantages of a more powerful enemy with such relatively low cost and easy access. 

Throughout our history, it was basically in campaigns marked by sustained brutality—including massive forced population transfers and the killing of civilians—that American colonists and later the U.S. Army defeated Native Americans over several centuries, who themselves often employed what we would call unconventional and asymmetric tactics, as well as brutal ones.

Ironically considering our later history, we used unconventional, asymmetric tactics to great success against the British in our Revolution. 

But it was in massive failure that U.S. Army troops defending both civil rights for freed slaves and legitimate biracial state governments withdrew from the Reconstructed South (the final troops leaving in 1877) as white supremacist terrorist campaigns destroyed every one of those governments in the postwar South.  The Ku Klux Klan and others carried on an insurgency lasting years of unconventional, asymmetric warfare and terrorism against U.S. forces, local troops, state governments, the rule of law itself, and those citizens who worked with and supported the new order, them whether white or black (and in this sense, their campaigns were hardly different from the terrorist insurgencies in Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan).  The more just society being built in relatively modern terms was destroyed, and the ensuing Jim Crow reign of terror of the Klan, the noose, and corrupted local judicial systems in the American South and sometimes beyond would not begin to be seriously dismantled until the 1960.  Thus, with the Civil War, the U.S. won the war in four years but lost the peace for about a century after.

With the massive unconventional and asymmetric insurrection in the Philippines, which the U.S. occupied in 1898 in the Spanish-American War, it was back to brutality and murder to achieve victory.  That is not to say that, to its credit, the U.S. did not start with a softer hand there, but that proved to be ineffective at stopping the Filipino rebels, and it was only when harsher and more robust measures were taken that the insurgents were truly defeated.

While American forces in the Vietnam war won all the actual big battles against the conventional North Vietnamese Army, the unconventional Viet Cong above all else eventually broke America’s will to keep fighting in Vietnam with an unconventional, asymmetric approach.  Our collective withdrawal from South Vietnam and, eventually, Saigon was an ignominious disaster for U.S. interests in the region and those of our South Vietnamese allies.  Leaving aside any debates on a “road not taken” and military tactical successes, the U.S. was, simply, defeated.  America won the battles, yet lost the war.

In Lebanon and Somalia, American leaders rapidly drew down their involvement after a series of high-profile Hezbollah bombings in Beirut in 1983 and the notorious “Black Hawk Down” incident in Mogadishu in 1993 despite both missions having substantial international support.  Key humanitarian aims of the mission in Somalia were actually fairly well-accomplished and saved hundreds of thousands of lives before the withdrawal, and even in Lebanon with our problematic mission there, significant humanitarian achievements still occurred.

In between the unconventional, asymmetric challenges in Lebanon and Somalia, our overwhelming triumph in the conventional 1991 Gulf War actually helped lead us to be overconfident and over-reliant when it came to our conventional military abilities (and, to a lesser extent, the same could be said of the two air campaigns in the Balkans), setting us up for even greater failures in ensuing decades.  “Black Hawk Down” would be first buzzkill of our post-Gulf War high, just the first of many setbacks in the wars to come.  And in the cases of both Lebanon and Somalia, terrorists—Hezbollah and al-Qaeda—took inspiration for future terrorist attacks from our withdrawals, with both Lebanon and Somalia devolving into prolonged periods of war that killed many people and terribly destabilized their respective regions.

As for al-Qaeda, its Osama bin Laden had several basic goals behind their asymmetric, unconventional 9/11 attacks that would come years later.  They looked at the world relevant to them as being divided into two major camps: the “near enemy”—all the regimes ruling Muslim populations that were not run by Islamic principles as defined by al-Qaeda: the monarchs, dictators, and democracies from Saudi Arabia to Egypt to Indonesia—and the “far enemy”—foreign governments propping up the near enemy, especially the United States.

With 9/11, bin Laden wanted to recreate for America the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan.  As he saw it, the Soviet invasion galvanized Muslims from around the world to fight off the atheist communist infidel invader, who got bogged down over years in a conflict that sapped its treasure and strength and led to the Soviet Union’s final collapse; with the invaders ousted from Afghanistan, an Islamic regime in al-Qaeda’s mold—the Taliban—came to power. 

Osama bin Laden’s dream with 9/11, then, was to bait the U.S. into one or more wars of attrition, rally Muslims from around the world to his banner to fight the occupying invader, force an American withdrawal after it expended so much blood and treasure, seethe U.S. sour on supporting allied governments in the Middle East in the aftermath, and pull its bases out as a result or as a result of additional conflict with and attacks from al-Qaeda, flushed with recruits after already beating the Americans in one war.  In short, the endgame was to remove the presence and influence of the “far enemy”—namely America—in the Middle East and then topple the “near enemy” regimes there and elsewhere ruling over the Muslim world.   

As we know, 9/11 helped bin Laden goad the U.S. into two such wars, not just in Afghanistan but also in Iraq, and while we withdrew from Iraq after seven-and-a-half years on terms far better than the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam, extremists’ policies against their own people on the parts of both the Syrian government and our allied Iraqi government empowered the unconventional and asymmetric ISIS—Zarqawi’s al Qaeda in Iraq’s rebirth and successor—to create a “caliphate” that ate up large parts of territory in both countries, forcing the U.S. reentry into Iraq and intensifying involvement in Syria.  While bin Laden expected us to invade Afghanistan, Iraq was something of a gift to him. 

The Iraq War resulted in the removal of Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq, meaning Iran became our biggest enemy in the region.  But while in the beginning this was due mainly to a process of elimination, shortly after, it would also be because Iran grew considerably in power as a result of our actions, eventually playing dominant roles in Iraq and Syria and having major influence in Yemen, too, in, addition to having its longstanding leverage in Lebanon.  In short, Iran was the main victor of our Iraq War.  But especially considering how dynamics played out as war raged in Syria and up through today, Iran is hardly the only major U.S. foe to benefit from recent U.S. missteps and missed opportunities: the chief global U.S. antagonist, Russia, is also far stronger in the Middle East today at the expense of the U.S. (not to mention elsewhere around the globe). 

Ironically, as I have noted, counterinsurgency (COIN) worked well in the Iraq War after the negligent leadership of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and its gains held well until late 2013 in spite of a U.S. withdrawal that had been completed before the end of 2011.  Much of this effort was overseen by Rumsfeld’s replacement, Sec. Robert Gates, and the man in uniform he tapped to execute the mission, Gen. David Petraeus. But the earlier blunders of the U.S. had pushed to the center stage of a frightened, increasingly sectarian Iraq one Nuri Kamal al-Maliki as Iraq’s prime minister, who fed off division and increased it at the same time, playing somewhat nice while U.S. troops were still in-country but becoming increasingly unshackled as time went on and especially after the U.S. pullout.  Rather than the Obama Administration’s withdrawal, then, it was Maliki’s oppressive governing style that wiped out U.S. security gains and soon had ISIS governing a “caliphate” that included large portions of Iraqi territory right up to the gates of Baghdad by mid-2014, a situation demanding U.S. entry into the conflict to prevent a terrible situation from becoming far worse and far more genocidal, in spite of the Obama Administration’s reluctance to reinsert U.S. forces into Iraq after withdrawing them just a few years earlier.

The same Obama Administration, reluctant to appear political in an election year, responded abysmally in 2016 to Russia’s game-changing asymmetric unconventional election interference that relied on propaganda, disinformation, hacking, and social media.  In short, we lost what I dubbed the (First) Russo-American Cyberwar, and it is worth noting (and I have noted) that, from the media to the government to the public, we are making many of the same mistakes we did in the 2016 election cycle in the 2020 election cycle, to some degree even willfully.  Russia is beating us at unconventional asymmetric cyberwarfare with advanced, pioneering approaches; the Second Russo-American Cyberwar is already underway and America is already losing.

And while the Obama Administration took a relatively large degree of care to avoid alienating local populations and inflicting civilian casualties while staying true to allies in its fight against ISIS, the Trump Administration has pretty much taken an anything-but approach—killing far more civilians—even as it relaxed its assault against ISIS when the group was close to losing all its territory in Syria and Iraq, allowing for ISIS to make something of a comeback.  Even worse, in October, 2019, the Trump Administration abandoned our true allies there—the Kurds and others fighting alongside and inside the Syrian Democratic Forces (S.D.F.)–who had worked together for years against both ISIS and Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad’s regime.  This betrayal was carried out so suddenly, and in such a way, that it dramatically undermined our ability to fight unconventional asymmetric warfare in the region, an ability that is so heavily dependent on trust and partnering with non-state actors on the ground who have longstanding, intimate relationships with the locals as members of their communities and know the landscape as only locals can.  This withdrawal was also done in a way that undermined our entire regional position, ceding much territory and influence to actors working against many of our interests: to an “ally” we could not trust (Turkey, seeking to pulverize both Kurdish forces that had fought alongside us and Kurdish autonomy as well as engage in “demographic engineering” against the Kurds) and our main rivals in the region (Russia and Iran, Assad’s top allies).  This withdrawal minimized what was already a minimal deployment (far from a costly or expensive one, especially relative to so many recent deployments) that was giving us an amazing payoff for the small amount of resources allocated.

As for the Afghanistan war, that “other” war that bin Laden’s 9/11 prodded us into, it has been a mess for nearly its entirety and still is, waxing and waning to one degree or another in its state of messiness, Afghanistan having been at war for decades before the U.S. toppled the Taliban.  Here, too, unconventional and asymmetric tactics wore down American will after American leadership’s initial projections of swift “victory” set up inevitable cynicism and disappointment, with Alec Worsnop highlighting for the Modern War Institute at West Point (MWI)  the Taliban’s particular skill at asymmetry.  Though the Obama Administration tapped Gen. Petraeus to recreate his successes in Iraq in Afghanistan with another surge, the far lower degree of national development there combined with U.S. political leadership not being committed to the resourcing required to achieve our stated aims—let alone try to sell Americans on a longer-term commitment—meant that, with that Petraeus surge or without it, that war would remain what it has been for years: an exercise in futility apart from preventing an unstable, violent status quo from becoming far worse.  Another surge under the Trump Administration also failed to significantly alter the overall negative dynamics on the ground for the better.  However President Trump describes his intent to pull out U.S. forces now, it is hard to objectively consider American disengagement after so many years as anything but a victory to the Taliban unless the Taliban suddenly becomes the opposite of what it has consistently been for the entirety of the conflicted, which is an extremist religious group that resorts to extreme methods to achieve its aims, relying almost wholly on violence and terror to “govern” and one that cannot be trusted to upholds agreements of any sort, let alone the type the Trump Administration is trying to reach with it. 

There has not anytime recently been and will not be the political will for a significantly better-resourced, medium-to-longer-term international effort in Afghanistan, the best approach to give that country its best chance to transition to overall to higher levels of stability and one that I advocated for in writing in 2009 as a graduate student. But that hardly means the failures in Afghanistan are all on the political-leadership side and that the military does not also shoulder significant blame, as the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan from 2003-2005, Gen. David Barno, wrote in 2019.  Still, senior military leaders seem to have been more careful with their use of language compared to political leaders, and it was the political leadership that either set expectations and parameters that were unrealistic or simply avoided engaging with the public on the war, hoping more to avoid having the war cause them political damage than have any seriously honest national public dialogue about Afghanistan.

What we have been engaging in there in an overall sense—open-ended long-term stalemate that prevents a worst-case scenario—can be a hard sell as the best option (not that it has been generally honestly sold as that), but that does not necessarily make it bad policy.  To quote Gen. Petraeus in a recent piece (one he penned with security-policy hand Vance Serchuk): “This strategy has been costly and unsatisfying—but also reasonably successful.”

Yet, just as was the case in Syria, President Trump seems ready to just walk away in a way that leaves America, along with our local allies, exposed and weakened.

III.) Understanding Our Failure Against Nontraditional Threats and How That Relates to the COVID-19 Pandemic

There’s an old saying in Tennessee—I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee—that says, fool me once, shame on—shame on you. Fool me—you can’t get fooled again.

—President George W. Bush, September 17, 2002

Patterns and Themes of Failure

As Gen. Petraeus and Serchuk concluded in their piece on Afghanistan: “More broadly, history suggests that capitulation in the name of peace rarely succeeds in either curbing an adversary’s ambitions or moderating its behavior—at least not for long.”  Far more often than not, this has been proven repeatedly by rapid U.S disengagement in Lebanon, Somalia, and Syria, each of which preceded further disasters.

If one thinks of long-term American objectives in the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia as they have stood over several decades now, the net results of our two massive wars there are massive setbacks right and left and up and down throughout those regions.  To a large extent, we did exactly what bin Laden wanted us to do: while he may have not have gotten the full collapse of the U.S. and long-lasting caliphate of which he dreamed, he still played us like a harp and saw huge portions of his goals realized from our myopia, not just in the Muslim world but also in how our two 9/11-prodded wars changed America by dividing Americans, draining national resources in a way that helped generate an economic near-collapse in 2008, and weakening our domestic democratic politics and institutions.  So perhaps, domestically, bin Laden’s plan is still a posthumous work-in-progress; we may very well make it out of these dark times with our system intact, but that is not guaranteed, and if we do not, 9/11 will surely be looked at as the catalyst for a chain of self-destructive events and trends that were accelerating well-before this current pandemic.  And the dynamics behind many of those events and trends are tied directly or indirectly with our failure to address non-traditional threats successfully. 

At the time of the peak of the “surge” COIN campaign that dramatically improved security conditions in Iraq, it might have been harder (though hardly impossible) to see possible failure and far harder to see an ISIS “caliphate” peaking some seven years later, but, conversely, at this peak of ISIS’s territorial gains, it is hard to look back at the surge and think that it ever had a chance to produce long-term success.  Perhaps the sectarianism and violence unleashed during Sec. Rumsfeld’s tenure, then, meant any positive impact from Sec. Gates and Gen. Petraeus, no matter how right-headed and brilliant they were, was doomed not to be as transformative as we wished, and probably from the start, especially since those Rumsfeldian dynamics installed Maliki in Iraq before the surge and well before the time we withdrew, helping him stay in power even when his heavier worsened.  Or, perhaps the surge era-effort was not doomed; to his credit, Gen. Petraeus saw, writing in late October 2013, that “this is a time for [American and Iraqi leaders of the surge] to work together to help Iraqi leaders take the initiative, especially in terms of reaching across the sectarian and ethnic divides that have widened in such a worrisome manner.  It is not too late for such action, but time is running short.”  He was all too right: time was running very short, as it was just matter of a few months until it would all come crashing down.   

I included the discussion and points in the previous paragraph here to illustrate the larger point that such is often how the U.S. finds itself: fighting demons of its own making, never really getting away enough from those demons to have a fresh start, succeed, and reach its ideals, however genuine those ideals may be.  If Sec. Gates and Gen. Petraeus were, in many ways, prisoners of the mistakes of the early years of the U.S. in Iraq and Sec. Rumsfeld’s legacy, then Obama and his team, as well as Iraq and Iraqis overall, were, in a similar sense, prisoners of the Bush Administration’s legacy.  In this world we live in, the U.S. is hardly unique here except perhaps sometimes in matters of degree, as other nations, whole peoples, even ourselves as individuals are often prisoners of our own past or those of our parents and ancestors.  We fall prey to the demons of the past and, in doing so, create demons of our own, ensnaring our very children, and their children, and so on, a generational, tragic spiral of trauma.  Indeed, trauma has a nasty habit of outliving its immediate effects (and exponentially so, at that).  It literally embeds itself into our very beings, down to our genes.

And our demons of failure with unconventional and asymmetric threats haunt us today and will for some time: the American government simply does not seem to get how to deal with the irregular and non-traditional.  For MWI nonresident fellow Max Brooks, there is something of a cultural deficiency in America that pushes us in this direction; in a mid-March interview discussing the problems with our current coronavirus response, Brooks remarked that “American culture has always had strengths and weaknesses, and one of our weaknesses has always been putting our head in the sand.  Not reacting to coronavirus—that’s just the latest one—but 9/11, Sputnik, Pearl Harbor … Americans are always the worst at proactive response.  That’s our weakness.”

So when confronted with such threats, the U.S. has failed and failed pretty miserably in a larger sense since the 1960s.  From the terrorism of the Taliban to the cyberwarfare of Russia, there are certain common denominators present in these asymmetric, unconventional situations to which we are not properly adjusting, ensuing that we keep losing again and again and again, allowing our own strengths and divisions to be played to cripple democracy at home (Russia’s election interference in 2016) and sometimes seeing the unraveling of our own notable own successes (the rise of ISIS in Iraq in 2014 negating the 2007 surge) or even undoing them ourselves (missions having positive impact turning into rapid withdrawals in 1984 in Lebanon, 1994 in Somalia, and 2019 in Syria).

COVID-19’s Deadly Impact Magnified by Recent U.S. Failures Facing Unconventional, Asymmetric Crises

If this seems unrelated to coronavirus, think again.

That withdrawal of most of a tiny contingent of U.S. troops in northern Syria has not only led to a reinvigorated ISIS but also a massive humanitarian crisis.  Millions of Syrians there are caught in what one article’s headline calls “the world’s worst game of Risk.”  In fact, even though Syria is now getting far less attention in the media because of coronavirus and a general ennui for Syria among other factors, the current situation in Syria is the worst humanitarian crisis of the entire decade-long war, with more people being driven from their homes than at any other time of the war.

The Idlib governorate on Turkey’s border is the last major rebel stronghold in Syria and has some three million people living in it now, but half those are Syrians internally displaced from their homes (IDPs) because of the war.  With the latest round of fighting in Idlib, some one million people have been recently displaced there, many not for the first time.  To make matters even worse, the region is experiencing an unusually harsh winter and displaced children are freezing to death in the cold. 

On top of war, a lack of supplies and aid coming in, and harsh conditions, now these desperate people must face coronavirus, a threat well-represented by the title of a recent Refugees International briefing, “A Crisis on Top of a Crisis: COVID-19 Looms over War-Ravaged Idlib,” which describes the situation there regarding coronavirus as being “like a tinderbox waiting for the match.”  The disease is spreading elsewhere in Syria and Turkey, surrounding Idlib, but conditions in northern Syria—with Syrian, Iranian, Russian, Kurdish, Turkish, S.D.F., and ISIS forces operating among other groups in a chaotic theater—mean tracking and treating the virus are themselves Herculean tasks.  Reporting on the virus can be slow, and that is if authorities are cooperating and being transparent, which in Syria and elsewhere in the region is hardly a given; in other words, we really have no idea how bad coronavirus is spreading in the area.  Furthermore, it is incredibly difficult getting aid into Idlib with all the fighting as the Syrian Civil War rages with the Assad regime’s forces’ latest offensive into Idlib, supported by Russian and Iranian forces; attacks against civilians are rampant.  The Syrian government is even blocking the transport of medical supplies to where they are needed, finding a way to weaponize the coronavirus even as aid workers and local medical staff are flat-out warning that they are not equipped or prepared to deal with coronavirus, with medical equipment and supplies being scarce in the area.

Even before this COVID-19 crisis, the local healthcare infrastructure had been decimated by the war, with some 80 hospitals taken out of commission in Idlib alone.  This has been by design, as, throughout the war, Assad regime forces with Russian backing have been deliberately targeting hospitals and other key civilian infrastructure related to food and water, as has the Russian Air Force.  Displaced civilians were already extremely vulnerable in Idlib, and now they face a pandemic with great uncertainty as to whether they will have the necessary aid to survive it alongside a host of other threats in a warzone (you can help them here).  The virus will certainly make (and already has made) their already extremely difficult lives significantly worse even if it does not infect or kill them.

These civilians in Idlib are often fleeing the Syrian’s government’s offensive to a Turkish border that has been sealed off to them—Turkey, already hosting some 3.7 million refugees, refuses to take in any more—with masses of people trapped with nowhere to go, a situation ripe for a coronavirus outbreak as they cannot practice social distancing since they live in crowded tents (if they even have shelter), nor do they have the ability to practice good hygiene since they lack proper amounts of soap and easy access to water.  Refugee camps there and elsewhere in the Middle East are teeming with people and short on necessary supplies, meaning they are potential disasters-in-the-making.

This conflict has only greatly intensified in Syria’s north lately in the absence of a stabilizing U.S. presence after the recent U.S. withdrawal discussed earlier.  It was because of that withdrawal that Turkey was able to carry out its destabilizing invasion of northern Syria, an invasion that itself displaced hundreds of thousands of people.  After its reckless invasion and engaging directly against Assad’s forces, Turkey—a NATO member state—has been furious that NATO is not supporting it as it takes casualties from attacks from Syrian forces getting support from the Russian government.  To pressure NATO states, Turkey is actively encouraging thousands of refugees it is hosting to migrate to Greece and Europe, even transporting them to the no-man’s land separating the Turkish and Greek borders—where desperate refugees caught as pawns have even clashed with Greek border guards—in a naked play to use these refugees as leverage against European NATO countries.  Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has made his intent in this regard explicit and clear and does not even try to deny he is weaponizing the refugees for political purposes.  If refugees in Turkey come down with COVID-19, this would be a far more ominous context for the dangerous game Turkey is playing with Europe.  For now, with coronavirus spreading in Turkey and Greece and refugees in camps in Greece coming down with the virus, the Turkish government late in March evacuated the makeshift camp that had popped up for the refugees it had sent to the Greek border and quarantined the refugees for two weeks. Those being released from the quarantine often end up sleeping in the streets, caught in limbo amid coronavirus, with Turkey indicating it will recklessly resend them to the closed Greek border once the pandemic subsides.

In Syria, Turkey, Greece, and all over the world, aid operations were forced to undergo massive, disruptive adjustments are being cut back drastically because of COVID-19, and with a field that was already spread thin amid a record number of people being displaced globally, the vulnerable populations the aid field was servicing cannot afford to be deprioritized.

But in particular, in northern Syria, President Trump’s Syrian withdrawal was the catalyst for the sad chain of events that has the situation there where it is now: far worse than it would have been otherwise and guaranteed to get even worse yet in the midst of a global pandemic.  The difference this all will cause in the number of dead from COVID-19 and its spillover effects will likely be in the thousands as U.S. incompetence in the face of one unconventional, asymmetric threat amplifies the harm from another unconventional, asymmetric threat.  Though the second is not man-made, the increase in the damage it will do is.

America’s Own COVID-19 Failures Mirror Its Failures in Fighting Nontraditional Threats

The issues surrounding the conflicts in Vietnam, Lebanon, Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria were complicated and difficult to understand, and many Americans preferred moving on and forgetting.  After all, most Americans could live their lives and not be affected by the nature of unconventional, asymmetric warfare in a distant land.  But the unconventional, asymmetric threats posed by coronavirus, pandemics in general, biowarfare, and bioterrorism are not something from which Americans can conveniently shrink away: they are dangerous to us here at home all over the country, not just a small portion of volunteer military personnel deployed thousands of miles away or one city or several targeted in a particular al-Qaeda/ISIS-style “normal” terrorist attack.  Thus, the approach that has created a pattern of failure for America regarding unconventional, asymmetric threats in the past is even more inappropriate, problematic, and unacceptable for our present pandemic and similar biothreats.

Whether in Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan, our leaders early on projected a supreme level of confidence and a belief in total victory even as they understood little about the nature of the threats they faced and what would be required to actually come out on top.  As these conflicts unfolded in their earlier phases, the political leaders initiating and running our military involvement never communicated to the public how truly difficult, open-ended, and indefinite our missions could or would be.  Because of these characterizations, proper resourcing was often a huge problem, especially given the tendencies to downplay the challenges we faced in these conflicts.  Instead, what we were told was that victory was usually just around the corner.  Furthermore, by focusing on short-term accomplishments for the sake of trying to boost public opinion, they very accomplishments themselves were made shallower and more likely to depress public opinion over time since they were more likely to come undone.  In the end, this meant that relatively short-term, technically successful increases in military deployments—ones leaders signaled ahead of time would be short-term and the goal of which was to improve security and stability enough for politics on-the-ground to move significantly in the right direction and not backslide—were always going to have a risk of history repeating itself just after or not long after the shorter-term surges; when these deployments’ effects wore off (or, even worse, the deployment itself failed to have the desired effect), it would be time for another deployment, with new deployments increasing frustration for a public that had been told we were “winning” and, over time, damaging that public’s willingness to support our military efforts as well as the Confidence of our local allies so crucial to the fight. 

Tragically, that is what happened in both of the major wars al-Qaeda sucked America into, with the same man (Gen. Petraeus) leading roughly the same surge strategy in both countries—first in Iraq, then later in Afghanistan—but the eventual hoped-for political resolutions never coming from local actors, who, having seen America’s inconsistency and mistakes up close, were more interested in sectarian and tribal agendas to bolster their positions than either allowing the U.S. to claim victory or making concessions necessary for multi-ethnic, religiously pluralistic territories to truly come together under one flag.

At the end of Invisible Armies, his seminal history on guerrilla warfare, Max Boot presents a series of major lessons from his study. One is that “most insurgencies are long-lasting; attempts to win a quick victory backfire”: 

The fact that low-intensity conflict tends to be “long, arduous and protracted,” in the words of Sir Robert Thompson, can be a source of frustration for both sides, but attempts to short-circuit the process to achieve a quick victory usually backfire.  The United States tried to do just that in the early years of the Vietnam and Iraq wars by using its conventional might to hunt down insurgents in a push for what John Paul Vann rightly decried as “fast, superficial results.”  It was only when the United States gave up hopes of quick victory, ironically, that it started to get results by implementing the tried-and-true tenets of population-centric counterinsurgency.  In Vietnam, it was already too late, but in Iraq the patient provision of security came just in time.

A particularly seductive version of the “quick win” strategy is to try to eliminate the insurgency’s leadership. …there are just…many examples where leaders were eliminated but the movement went on, sometimes stronger than ever—as both Hezbollah and Al Qaeda in Iraq did. High-level “decapitation” strategies work best when a movement is weak organizationally and focused around a cult of personality. Even then leadership targeting is most effective if integrated into a broader counterinsurgency effort designed to separate the insurgents from the population. If conducted in isolation, leadership raids are about as effective as mowing the lawn; the targeted organization can usually regenerate itself.

I have literally lost track of how many times the number-two or number-whatever leader of al-Qaeda or an affiliate or ISIS was proudly announced as killed by the U.S. (often from a drone strike), and I remember that political leaders and whichever-Administration spokespeople were usually quite eager to broadcast this as some sort of major accomplishment or an indication that things were going well even when they clearly were not.  The emphasis our government places on this tactic from a public-relations perspective when considering its ineffectiveness betrays that eagerness to present the public with quick fixes to complex problems that has so hampered our efforts in unconventional, asymmetric warfare.

Another lesson of Boot’s is that “conventional tactics don’t work against an unconventional threat”: 

Regular soldiers often assume that they will have no difficulty besting ragtag fighters who lack the firepower or discipline of a professional fighting force.  Their mindset was summed up by General George Decker, U.S. Army chief of staff from 1960 to 1962, who said, “Any good soldier can handle guerrillas.”  The Vietnam War and countless other conflicts have disproven this bromide. Big-unit, firepower-intensive operations snare few guerrillas and alienate many civilians.  To defeat insurgents, soldiers must take a different approach that focuses not on chasing insurgents but on securing the population.  This is the difference between “search and destroy” and “clear and hold.”  The latter approach is hardly pacifistic.  It too requires the application of violence and coercion but in carefully calibrated and intelligently targeted doses.  As an Israeli general told me, “Better to fight terror with an M-16 than an F-16.”

In this sense, too often we have favored the F-16, the metaphor for heavy firepower and advanced technology, including drones, missiles, and bombers, as a substitute for long-term policy, and, indeed, one of Boot’s lessons is that “technology has been less important in guerrilla war than in conventional war,” since

all guerrilla and terrorist tactics, from suicide bombing to hostage taking and roadside ambushes, are designed to negate the firepower advantage of conventional forces.  In this type of war, technology counts for less than in conventional conflict.  Even the possession of nuclear bombs, the ultimate weapon, has not prevented the Soviet Union and the United States from suffering ignominious defeat at guerrilla hands.  To the extent that technology has mattered in low-insurgency conflicts, it has often been the nonshooting kind.  As T. E. Lawrence famously said, “The printing press is the greatest weapon in the armory of the modern commander.”  A present-day rebel might substitute “the Internet” for “the printing press,” but the essential insight remains valid.

In an interview, Boot also notes our amnesia with these types of conflicts, how

this is a recurring problem, that armies do not like fighting guerrilla wars. They regard it as being beneath them, because they don’t regard guerrillas as being worthy enemies. Unfortunately, they keep getting forced into these guerrilla wars and what normally happens is they do learn how to fight after a period of trial and error, and after suffering costly defeats. But then as soon as they leave that war behind, they tend to forget what they’ve learned.

Former U.S. Army Lt. Col. Christopher Holshek—an old professor of mine in a class I took in Liberia, studying the United Nations peacekeeping mission there—perfectly summed up our failures in these conflicts in an article for Foreign Policy:

The phase-four [post-conflict stabilization and reconstruction] fates of Operations Iraqi and Enduring Freedom [the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, respectively] were due more to the sins of omission than of commission.  The U.S. government, in its haste to do in months what takes years, threw billions at hearts-and-minds boondoggles and into ministries yielding corruption, roads to nowhere, and teacher-less schools, among other counterproductive outcomes.  The vast waste has led to the current conventional wisdom that development, coded as “nation-building,” doesn’t work.  Of course it doesn’t, if you don’t do it right.

(In a way that should offer us no consolation whatsoever, it is worth noting that a large part of his article was demonstrating how ISIS was far worse at phase four than we were).

As then-President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Jessica Tuchman Mathews wrote about the Iraq surge in late 2007, “for America’s larger strategic interests, buying more time to continue the same strategy can achieve nothing. To do so is to ask American troops to fight to create breathing space for a corpse.”  In the short-term, that was not the case: the gains made in security from the surge were significant and improved and lasted over the next few years, but beyond that, it is impossible to deny that that the political breakthroughs the surge was designed to encourage did not materialize nearly enough and that all the security successes came undone between the actions of Maliki and ISIS by 2014.  And unfortunately, Matthews’s quote reverberates far beyond Iraq and can sum up so many of our strategic failures in the era after World War II.

Our leaders were simply just not honest about what we were up against or did not know themselves, and, as a result, the public never really grasped what was going on and why things went the way they did.  When the productive measures were taken, they would often too little and/or too late, with far more death and destruction happening in the long-run as a result.  As a society and a nation, we failed to properly address these threats, at great cost for ourselves and others.  Shorter-term commitments were advertised as quick fixes that were really just false fantasies, increasing and extending the pain and perhaps dooming us to repeat ourselves in wasteful, frustrating cycles that left us demoralized, diminished, and depleted.

If reading this, you are asking yourself if this sounds familiar and eerily current somehow, well, yes, it should, as our response to the unconventional coronavirus pandemic fits frighteningly and maddeningly all too well—even exactly—into these patterns and obviously so.

IV.) The World Fails on Coronavirus, Led by America

Living systems are not like mechanical systems.  Living systems are never in equilibrium.  They are inherently unstable.  They may seem stable, but they’re not.  Everything is moving and changing.  In a sense, everything is on the edge of collapse.

—John Arnold, in Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park (1990)

When asked recently “where” we went “wrong” specifically as far as the coronavirus pandemic but also generally, if there  was an “exact moment,” journalist Masha Gessen replied by saying “I think there are many moments.  But certainly, our responses, as a nation, to 9-11 and to the financial crisis of 2008, paved the ground for this, as has our persistent disregard for the climate crisis.”

We must hope that, in the long-run, we do not respond to the coronavirus in incredibly self-destructive ways that echo our responses to 9/11 and the other unconventional, asymmetric threats we failed to properly understand and handle as outlined above. Depressingly, though, the signs are already dire.

One of the most depressing things about this pandemic is that, as an American who had little faith in our leadership or system to significantly mitigate this looming disaster, I looked to countries with far more competent leadership and more centralized and robust health systems than ours to be beacons in the night of this pandemic, especially for democratic countries to beam in this true trial not just for humanity, but Western democracy, which has been teetering of late.  I saw a few slivers of light for effective coronavirus programs so far—South Korea especially above all but also Israel, Germany, plucky Ireland, and, at least through the present and perhaps still to be, Japan—but, overwhelmingly, I saw darkness where I expected light in Europe from technocratic establishments and national health systems that (mostly) did not have buffoons in charge or the gaping holes of America’s health system that this pandemic has displayed all-too glaringly.  Italy, Spain, and France are obvious disasters, along with the Netherlands and the UK (whose Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, led the way with poor choices both personally and as a leader and found himself hospitalized in an intensive care unit; and just look at this thread delving into differences between the UK and Ireland). Even Sweden seems like it could be an example of bad-practice: like the other mentioned countries, it did not take proper precautions for long after it should have.  Some of these countries are regular fountains of inspiration for Americans who expect more from their government, but these nations failed here along with us to varying degrees.  In the absence of traditional U.S. global-level leadership, then, there essentially was no global leadership. 

Much of the developing world has yet to be hard hit, but there is great potential for the tolls there to be devastating.  The terrible government response in Brazil–exemplified by the country’s president, Jair Bolsonaro—seems to be setting up a tidal wave of infections, which were recently likely twelve times higher than officially reported numbers.  In Ecuador, a country with little ability to conduct proper testing to determine the full extent of the virus, the death toll recently seemed to be fifteen times higher than what officials there had been able to determine.  If the coronavirus spreads intensely in Africa, the prospects there are also looking quite grim.  In many poorer nations around the world, social distancing is a privilege and a luxury that for a great many is impossible (not even getting into the situation of earlier-discussed refugees).  And already terrible social and economic conditions in many developing nations are only being made exponentially worse by COVID-19, meaning that hunger is now going to be a much larger problem globally, rising to affect 265 million people after factoring in coronavirus, nearly doubling the pre-pandemic figures.  Other sad realities coronavirus will exponentially inflate include, but are hardly limited to, domestic abuse, human trafficking, and suicide.  The threat to the developing world is only exacerbated by the recent inexcusable, despicable, “incredibly stupid,” and needless U.S. announcement that it will halt funding for the World Health Organization (WHO) in the midst of a global pandemic, a decision that for many in the world’s poorest nations that sorely lack vital resources amounts to a death sentence if that funding is not replaced soon from elsewhere; as if that was not enough, the Trump Administration is seeking to do long-term damage to the WHO beyond just defunding it.

Despite plenty of poor responses globally, that top national leadership in America seems to have stood out in failing miserably is not in serious dispute for anyone attempting objectivity.  This was even obvious fairly early, before most American were concerned, with top government officials warning the president repeatedly in January and February about the extraordinary nature of the coronavirus threat and bringing it to the attention of the White House’s National Security Council even earlier.  Others outside the current Administration also sounded the alarm early, including former Vice President Joe Biden—the now-clear Democratic presidential nominee-to-be set to challenge the incumbent president for the White House—who even wrote an op-ed published on January 27 warning of the seriousness of the coronavirus threat and how ill-prepared we were to confront it.  As Richard Haas, President of the Council on Foreign Relations, made painfully clear, “putting off the decision to go on the offensive against COVID-19–treating a war of necessity as a war of choice–has proved extraordinarily costly in terms of lives lost and economic destruction.”  In a pandemic in which timing has perhaps been the most important factor or at least as important as any, our leaders at the top sat passively—even stubbornly—and refused to look at the rising viral tsunami heading in our direction, let alone acknowledge it as the hundred-year plague it was.

Even the military has been seriously affected, one notable example being the Navy having to semi-abandon one of our aircraft carriers in mid-deployment, another being that recruitment has been hampered.

And while books could be and articles already have been written that demonstrate America’s failure clearly even for the most fanatically partisan supporters of the current leadership, here will be shared just this excellent, highly informative, regularly updated chart from The Financial Timesthat shows the U.S. is, literally, the worst at “flattening the curve” (the main format has been changed but there is an interactive version of the below chart here that lets you set up your own comparisons):

That phrase “flattening the curve” (or “bending the curve” as a precursor) was only understood by a handful of people a few months ago but is now well-known coronavirus-era lingo for taking collective action to limit the spread and death-toll of the virus, to lower the height of the curve (bend it) over and then keep it from increasing (flattening it) so that our medical systems can better care for those infected (with bending again all the way down after flattening as the endgame). Clearly, our American curve stands out in the above chart as both the most stridently upward-trending arc and the arc that took the longest to be pulled down relative to other nations grappling with serious coronavirus outbreaks over a similar timeframe.  Case/infection-counts are highly problematic for a variety of reasons, but the deaths statistic is far clearer as to its weight, meaning, and finality, the above chart highlighting quite well that statistic and how well countries are at slowing deaths (even if globally across the board there is a serious problem of unintentional undercounting and underattributing deaths from coronavirus, tracking deaths is still far less ambiguous than tracking overall cases/infections). 

So, relatively speaking, despite massive daily disinformation to the contrary, the U.S seems to have done the worst job of flattening the curve of coronavirus deaths out of countries with significant levels of infection that have experienced fighting coronavirus for a similar amount of time, and this would seem to be the case even for allowing for countries like China (from which this pandemic originated) and Russia, which are virtually certainly deliberately underreporting their coronavirus case numbers and deaths and also allowing for serious questions about developing countries with poor means of tracking the virus, as discussed earlier.  And while the U.S. is hardly the worst in terms of deaths per capita, the above chart shows with the available data that it is still the worst of any country with a major outbreak at slowing the level of death (and preventive measures like lockdowns seem collectively to be a much more important variable than population size or density, anyway).

And the chart just takes into account the deaths we know about; there are “almost certainly” Americans dying from coronavirus not being counted as coronavirus-related deaths because of testing issues, reporting issues, and other shortcomings, with this hardly being the situation only in the U.S. 

In the U.S. in particular, the lack of testing has emerged as one of the premier failings regarding coronavirus, making our sense of how many are truly infected by (and, to a lesser extent, dying from) the virus woefully incomplete and greatly hampering our ability to accurately model the spread of the virus.  And this, in turn, makes it very difficult for leaders to plan ahead beyond the short-term.  Especially because of our lack of testing—one of the most crucial aspects of coronavirus response—we are essentially on a ship at night in heavy fog, trying to see what obstacles lie ahead and how to avoid them but unable to see far in front because of that fog and unable to have any solid sense of when the fog will lift or if or when it will return.  Under those conditions, crashing into an iceberg and sinking is far more likely.  A military counterinsurgency analogy is also apt, as not having enough testing is like trying to neuter an insurgency without having intelligence or enough regular patrols to get a lay of the land before, say, sending a major convoy through enemy territory: with few pieces of intelligence and fewer teams gathering intelligence, the chances the enemy can launch a successful ambush on that convoy when it is sent out are far greater than if you had a much larger number of troops getting much more intelligence on the enemy territory.  Intelligence helps to lift the fog of war, then, while testing helps to lift the fog of pandemics.

Considering a detailed, highly-credibly report from last year ranked America, by relatively far, as the best-prepared nation in the world for a pandemic, the failure in U.S. leadership is even more stunningly spectacular and inexcusable; it is like losing a race in which you started ahead of everyone or if you were, say, someone who inherited millions and were already working in a lucrative field (maybe real estate in Manhattan in the 1980s) and then still managed to go bankrupt six times.

In the words of Max Brooks from another interview, this one from late March:

I think that we have been disastrously slow and disorganized from day one.  I think the notion that we were caught unaware of this pandemic is just an onion of layered lies.  That is not true at all.  We have been preparing for this since the 1918 influenza pandemic.  No excuse…The knowledge was out.  We knew.  We did not prepare.  This is on us.

…All of this panic could have been prevented if the federal government had done what it was supposed to do before the crisis became a crisis.  Because the way to stop panic is with knowledge, and if the president had been working since January to get the organs of government ready for this, we as citizens could have been calmed down knowing that the people that we trust to protect us are doing that.

A friend of mine, Ellen Adair (an actress who played a top senator’s chief of staff in Homeland in its previous season while that universe’s America was facing nontraditional, asymmetric threats similar to the types we are currently facing from Russia), pointed out a specific article from a few years back that saw all too much of this coming: writing in the summer of 2018 for The Atlantic, Ed Yong terrifyingly accurately predicts not only America’s general unpreparedness for a pandemic, but why this current administration would be particularly ill-suited for handling one (his late March, 2020, predictions for how this will end—made when the U.S. outbreak was starting to really pick up steam and yet was still a fraction as bad as it is now—should also be of interest).  While the entire piece from before COVID-19 even existed feels exceedingly current and sickeningly prescient, I felt particular chills reading these words:

Perhaps most important, the U.S. is prone to the same forgetfulness and shortsightedness that befall all nations, rich and poor—and the myopia has worsened considerably in recent years.  Public-health programs are low on money; hospitals are stretched perilously thin; crucial funding is being slashed.  And while we tend to think of science when we think of pandemic response, the worse the situation, the more the defense depends on political leadership.

…Preparing for a pandemic ultimately boils down to real people and tangible things: A busy doctor who raises an eyebrow when a patient presents with an unfamiliar fever.  A nurse who takes a travel history. A hospital wing in which patients can be isolated.  A warehouse where protective masks are stockpiled. A factory that churns out vaccines.  A line on a budget.  A vote in Congress.  “It’s like a chain—one weak link and the whole thing falls apart,” says Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.  “You need no weak links.”

Right now, we look bad, and the idea of the U.S. leading the world when it cannot lead itself anymore is indeed going to be problematic for many who used to be comfortable with U.S. leadership or, at least, tacitly accepted it.  That does not mean there will be a new world order overnight, but it sure will be harder for not just millions, but likely hundreds of millions or even billions of people to see the U.S. as a leader after our failures with this virus are literally broadcast every day for global public consumption.

Of course, there is plenty of blame to go around in America, from governors’ mansions to various media outlets, from our very own American culture to ourselves, from individual institutions to local leaders.  One standout in that last group is the Wisconsin Assembly Speaker telling people during the recent controversially-held dangerous April 7^th elections in his state to go outside and vote after he himself worked to stop both extending absentee voting and delaying the election despite the pandemic, saying this to Wisconsinites this while wearing what seems to be a hospital-quality mask, gloves, and gown set.  Dysfunction and division is not just present at the federal level and between states and the federal government, then, but within states, between governors and mayors or others all throughout the country: in South Dakota, there is even a dispute between the governor and Sioux tribal authorities.

But in dire emergencies like this, the national leaders set the tone for the nation as a whole, with many others farther down the totem pole taking their cues from national leadership, none more so than the top national leader, be it a president, prime minister, or king.  And this is the way it should be.  When we were attacked at Pearl Harbor all the way back in 1941, we did not have dozens of regional, state, city, county, and town war policies operating independently from one another: we had a coordinated national effort, and fighting deadly national and global pandemics should be no different.  In the 1940s, we were able to triumph in our finest national hour even as were caught off-guard.  That clearly has not happened with coronavirus, and our “collective” “national” response can be said to be anything but a single one with unity of purpose.

In stunning displays of hubris and lack of preparation, Napoleon in 1812 and Hitler in 1941 famously sent their armies towards Russia in June, months away from the famed Russian winter, with no winter clothing.  Now we can similarly say that, in 2020, the American President allowed our medical first-line responders to face off against coronavirus without nearly enough proper protective gear despite having weeks and months to take proper action to equip them.

We could have approached this coronavirus threat with the mentality of the Starks in Game of Thrones, whose mantra is “winter is coming”: be prepared, get ready, unite, take this threat very seriously, take nothing for granted.  Instead, (spoilers for the show/books in this sentence) our leaders were more like Queen Cersei Lannister in the final seasons: warned repeatedly and with a zombie-wight coming at her face-to-face, she still did not prioritize dealing with the Army of the Dead and, instead, took the crisis as an opportunity to advance her personal and political interests, to settle scores and amass power for herself.

Wherever blame should or should not be placed, this novel (new) coronavirus has brought the world to its knees.  Socially and economically, a huge portion of global activity has come to screeching halt or, at least, a vastly reduced intensity.  Something this sudden on a global scale is new for humanity, and we have no idea even when this pandemic will really end (other than an increasing understanding that the end will probably not be soon), if it will end, how soon other waves will come or how bad those waves will be (they may be worse).  The virus’s national and overall global spread even seems to be increasing several months into the pandemic, not decreasing.  We do not know how many people will die (today, there will be over 350,000 worldwide and over 100,000 in the U.S. for just the recorded COVID-19 deaths), except that earlier rosier predictions are now clearly way off the mark.  People are deeply fearful of a deeply uncertain future and what the world will look like after this virus leaves its initial mark.  Thus, this novel coronavirus is not only engendering a sense of fear throughout the human race, but also terror.

But the true terror is to come.

V.) A Far More Worrisome Future

The death wish of the theocratic totalitarians, for themselves and others, is too impressive to overlook.

—Christopher Hitchens, “Terrorism: Notes toward a definition,” Slate, November 18, 2002

Ultimately, humanity might not end with a bang but with a feeble cough.

—Max Brooks, “The Next Pandemic Might Not Be Natural,” Foreign Policy, April 20, 2020

Despite the examples listed earlier in our brief biowarfare and bioterrorism survey and other acts not included therein, both biological warfare and bioterrorism have been exceedingly rare in history.

One obvious reason for this is that it is hard to ensure that such weapons only infect the enemy and not also the people attempting to do the infecting and their compatriots (Japanese forces, for example, incurred thousands of casualties from their own bioweapons use in China).  In other words, bioagents are so dangerous that they have mostly been felt to be too dangerous to use, especially on a larger scale.

The idea that is supposed to give us comfort is that, in theory, it is not rational to use such weapons.  Yet the country with the largest bioweapons program in history—the Soviet Union—was regarded as insecure, famously concerned with self-preservation and constrained by rational realpolitik as a result, making it fairly predictable.  Sure, the Soviets did not use these weapons, but they still put smallpox in ICBMS and worked to create disease even worse than Mother Nature has been able to create.

Rather than us being able to trust in some solid proof of human rationality—the concept of which, as an overall rule, is highly debatable at best—then, I feel the non-use of biological weapons (similar to the situation with nuclear weapons after 1945) is less a natural product of human wisdom or design but, instead, is a product of the small-N problem, that dilemma of comparative studies and of politics in general: that there is such a small number of relevant actors with bioweapons capabilities that we cannot draw rock-solid proof from those weapons’ non-use that this is non-use some sort of “natural” outcome.  In short, we have likely just “lucked out” biological (and nuclear) weapons have not been used because only a handful of governments have had serious capabilities and the technology was advanced enough to the degree that it was hard to have anyone other than governments and specialized scientists develop them, and of these small samples, only a handful of those had the will to actually pursue these weapons, with an even far smaller number pursuing their use.

As any basic statistics primer would tell you, though, the more actors that develop such capabilities, the greater the chance that such capabilities will eventually be used, with that probability increasing being a mathematical certainty.

And therein lies one of the major current problems.  For, even before now, technology had advanced in recent years to a degree that has made it far easier for governments, organizations, and individuals to research, produce, and deploy these weapons: the internet has made the information on how to do all that more available than ever before; logistics technology have made the ability to obtain and transport necessary materials easier than ever before; and advances in medical science and technology have opened up bioengineering and made creating biolabs easier, by far, than ever before. 

So that “small-N (number)” reality an ally in perpetuating the non-use of bioweapons, that bulwark that so few people had access or ability when it came to what was needed to operationalize bioweapons, has been dramatically weakened in recent years as the breadth of actors with the ability to research, develop, and deploy bioweapons has grown exponentially in recent years with the latest remarkable advances of human civilization. 

The math, then, has changed: that probability that the small-N problem kept so low is now dramatically higher.

Even putting aside the small-N problem being a more likely explanation for general non-use of bioweapons up through the present than our own supposed rationality—even if we accept, in principle, that it is our rationality that is to be credited for the lack of biowarfare and bioterrorism and could take comfort in that—the future still looks comparatively bleak.  And the reason for that is because, relative to the rest of the modern era, we ae seeing an explosion in those swelling the ranks of apocalyptic-minded groups of religiously-motivated violent extremists.  Indeed, our era has seen a sharp increase in the number of terrorists willing to sacrifice themselves, their people, and countless innocent civilians in pursuit of their apocalyptic goals.   Such terrorists are possessed with end-times-oriented mindsets that are hell-bent on accelerating the arrival of the apocalypse, with ISIS as the flagship movement.

If we add to that equation the possibility of governments using newer science—especially genetic engineering and advanced vaccination programs—to perfect a way to immunize their own militaries and people against a weapon they could then feel safe to deploy against others and therefore confident to weaponize and develop, then the threat of bioweapons being used against America and others is only increasing by yet another factor.  If you think this sounds too much like science fiction, recall how a mass biological test on the part of the U.S. government infected the whole San Francisco metropolitan area in 1950 and how the public never learned about it until 1976.  In other words, if another government wanted to immunize its population against something pretty nasty without drawing attention to that nasty something, there are more than a few ways to immunize people without people even knowing they are being immunized (slipping in with other standard immunizations, perhaps adding into the water or food supply, manufacturing a controlled “outbreak” that would give cover for a mass immunization, etc.), especially for a government motivated enough to carry out and plan years in advance a biological first strike with a deadly bioweapon.

But there are other technological multipliers that have yet to have their potential impact be anywhere near realized that make the future look even less comforting.  Technology has just recently been advancing, and is continuing to advance, rapidly in such a way that it is only going to exponentially increase the number of actors able to carry out biological attacks, and that is even in addition to the exponential increase that has already occurred recently.  And perhaps the foremost reason for this coming exponential growth in potential biothreats and actors is a new genetic engineering technique known as CRISPR—Clustered Regularly Interspersed Short Palindromic Repeats—that makes it far easier and cheaper to create bioweapons than ever before.

To put this into perspective, some CRISPR kits were selling for under $150 even in 2017.  A United Nations panel even characterized this CRISPR threat as do-it-yourself bioweapons creation (“DIY biological labs”).  One post from a leading bioresearch and development company that has led on, and sells, CISPR tools and material ended by noting CRISPR’s “usefulness for genome locus-specific recruitment of proteins will likely only be limited by our imagination.”  And if we recall that Dream of Scipio quote from the introduction about how man is worse than beast because beasts are constrained by their lack of imagination but men are not, well, that is where this gets truly terrifying.  Indeed, the alarm has been soundly rung by many an expert on the soon-to-be-clear and present danger of this CRISPR technology’s ability to empower those with the most malevolent of imaginations.  We are, then, being presented with a brave new world of bioterrorism.

Thus, the guardrails—supposed or real—that may have offered protection from the use of bioweapons before are simply not as strong as they used to be.  Even if we accept human rationality as a bulwark, some of the biggest increases in terrorism involve suicide attackers and those embracing apocalyptic theology hoping to bring about a final world-ending confrontation, comforted by an ideology that tells them if they die as martyrs fighting for their cause they will ascend to heaven with a special spot waiting for them, with a degree of terrorists and terrorist groups concerned less with temporal self-preservation than at any other time in the modern era.  And whatever their motives, the modern world has not only already made bioweapons more accessible than ever to them, but will also dramatically expand this greater accessibility with the newest CRISPR technology that will itself spread rapidly.  Thus, we have both terrorists increasingly less worried about doing damage to themselves and a far greater number of actors that will be dabbling in bioweapons.

I had earlier discussed Max Boot’s lesson on technology at the end of his book Invisible Armies (“technology has been less important in guerrilla war than in conventional war”), but I left out the second part of his lesson’s heading, “but that may be changing,” to save it for here.  He does not mean the usefulness of technology on our end, either; he is talking about a change in favor of terrorists:

The role of weapons in this type of war [i.e. unconventional] could grow in the future if insurgents get their hands on chemical, biological, or especially nuclear weapons. A small terrorist cell the size of a platoon might then have more killing capacity than the entire army of a nonnuclear state like Brazil or Egypt.  That is a sobering thought.  It suggests that in the future low-intensity conflict could pose even greater problems for the world’s leading powers than it has in the past.  And, as we have seen, the problems of the past were substantial and varied.

And the type of weapons which are seeing the most rapid advancement in technology and ease of access are not chemical or nuclear, but biological.

In fact, as Karl Johnson, one veteran of fighting Ebola outbreaks, mentioned over a quarter-century ago:

It’s only a matter of months—years, at most—before people nail down the genes for virulence and airborne transmission in influenza, Ebola, Lassa, you name it.  And then any crackpot with a few thousand dollars’ worth of equipment and a college biology education under his belt could manufacture bugs that would make Ebola look like a walk around the park.

For Max Brooks, “Johnson’s prediction is right around the corner. With a little dark-web information and some secondhand lab equipment, anyone will soon be able to generate do-it-yourself blights in a basement lab and then release them back into the general population.”

Brooks echoes the earlier sentiments expressed herein that public policy attention given to threats posed by nuclear weapons are overemphasized relative those given to biological weapons.  As Brooks writes in Foreign Policy:

Genetic manipulation is the most dangerous threat humanity has ever faced because it allows anyone to spin straw into lethal gold. Unlike the hypothetical nuclear terrorist whom we’ve spent untold fortunes preparing for but who can’t act without acquiring precious, rare, and heavily guarded fissile material, the biohacker will be able to harvest germs from anywhere.  And unlike the nuclear terrorist, who gets only one shot at destruction, the biohacker’s bomb can copy itself over and over again.

If we look at the present and the future, then, without a doubt, terrorists and governments that have been and are pursuing the research and development of arsenals of bioweapons will only be doing so under even more favorable conditions to their goals as the future unfolds, including the near-future.  For these biowarrior wannabes, they are seeing what just something superflu/superpneumonia-ish like this coronavirus can do and are thinking of the damage and havoc they can wreak with far worse diseases.  And not only them but those who were on the fence about or reluctant to consider pursuing bioweapons programs will be seriously thinking that now.  Because the logical conclusion anyone contemplating biowarfare would draw from our current pandemic is that if coronavirus can do what it is doing now to America and the world, a deliberate, competent bioattack at a certain level could destroy the world as we know it.  We must realize that, to the degree that we are unsettled and shaken by looking at the state of our nation, our enemies are emboldened and more confident in their ability to do us harm.

Just imagine a brand new virus engineered to kill thirty percent—let alone fifty or seventy-five percent—of victims and that incapacitates most of the rest, one that spreads like wildfire, for which we have no immunity and no cure, which could cripple nations in days (not weeks), wiping out some people in key leadership positions along with millions of others, and incapacitating for days or weeks even those that survive.  Imagine the people unleashing such a disease are religious terrorists with apocalyptic death-wishes (plenty of those) or military officials from a government that has developed a secret immunity that only they and their countrymen have.  Imagine, while we are crippled, our enemy then offers the immunity it to allies or potentially new allies in the moment of crises, allowing it to destroy the nations as we know them that it deems enemies, remaking a world order with our successful enemy at the top.  Even staunch allies of ours would be tempted to fold in the face of a weapon for which the only defense comes with joining the new order. 

Think about the decades to come, in a world far more crowded where living space will literally be an issue, imagine an invasion by troops immune to the virus; with our leaders, government, and society—including the military—largely wiped out or crippled by the disease, how would an effective resistance—military or medical—to a simultaneous military and viral invasion be able to be mounted in the face of an organized enemy largely escaping the effects of such a disease?  And if the enemy offers immunity for a disease for which we have no cure and have no hope of dealing with medically in time in exchange for surrender, if the choice is between surrender and death, what happens to us and America as we know it?  The sixteenth-century Spanish conquistadors did not plan to use the smallpox virus as a biological weapon to mostly wipe out the mighty armies of the Aztecs and the Incas and bring their societies to their knees with it in the span of a blink of a historical eye, but smallpox obliged anyway, and the Spanish wiped those Empires easily from the face of the earth as a result.  The same devastating effects with the right cocktail of virus can happen today.

One case study shows how a just single person can easily cause over a dozen new coronavirus infections; imagine how few infected people would be required to mass-transmit a far worse virus like the hypothetical engineered one described a few paragraphs above. 

Now consider that out current coronavirus has already weakened and damaged democracy in some places —including in the U.S.—pushed it to the brink in others, and, at least in the case of Hungary, seems to have destroyed it.  And that does not even get to authoritarians and the authoritarian-leaning, for whom the virus has been an excellent excuse to crack down on freedoms.

The simple truth is, we are not prepared even for a naturally occurring pandemic like coronavirus, let alone a worse one than coronavirus, let alone even more so bioagents designed to as a weapon by our human enemies to kill us and crush our society.

How we appear now matters to our enemies, and not only was the U.S. caught off-guard, its overall response has exposed our weaknesses to the world (and hopefully ourselves).

VI.) The Harsh Truths Coronavirus Has Exposed

Every morning in the endless month of March, Americans woke up to find themselves citizens of a failed state.

—George Packer, “We Are Living in a Failed State/Underlying Conditions,” The Atlantic, June 2020 issue preview

I met fellow American Coco Tang years ago in Amman, Jordan, while she was on a Fulbright.  When not working as a consultant, she moonlights as a medic in some of the world’s worst hotspots.  Her postings have found her supporting as a medic both Iraqi Special Forces during the battle of Mosul against ISIS and OSCE patrols in Eastern Ukraine, working in refugee camps in Syria and Bangladesh, working in a clinic in Afghanistan, treating vulnerable women in the South Kivu region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, assessing local health in Ethiopia, and working in Sierra Leone as part of the Ebola response there.  She goes to some of the most dangerous places in the world to offer medical support, often in extreme humanitarian and medical emergencies.

And now she finds herself offering medical support in New York City during a pandemic, deployed by a medical company to the front lines in the war against COVID-19 here at home.

“When I worked in Iraq or Syria, there was an expectation of austerity. When you work in NYC, the austerity feels surreal.  Experiencing it in a place like NYC reminds me that COVID, in a lot of ways, is a great equalizer.”

That is what makes bioweapons as a weapon of war or terrorism so terrifying to powerful countries like America: it reduces the conventional operational planes in a way that is so unconventional and asymmetric that its extreme asymmetry rips the powerful far from their accustomed, advantaged positions.  

Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz just recently remarked that the U.S. coronavirus response makes it look like “like a third-world country.”  Tang has experienced a similar feeling in New York: “People expect pandemics to be a third-world problem. People expect problems like PPE [personal protective equipment] shortages to be a third-world problem.”  And, yet, here she was, grappling with serious equipment shortages during a pandemic here the U.S., and not in Appalachia, but in New York City, in Manhattan.  “COVID exposes that we aren’t any better than those countries we always look down on.  That at the end of the day, America is just a homeless person wearing fancy clothes.”

Tang was not even being asked about bioweapons when she made that statement, but she still nailed one of the central issues in biowarfare and unconventional warfare and how COVID-19 relates to it.  As mentioned earlier, Max Boot wrote that “all guerrilla and terrorist tactics…are designed to negate the firepower advantage of conventional forces.”  Bioweapons just do this on a deeper, more frightening scale, and coronavirus is showing us that natural pandemics can have the same effect.  In many ways, our current pandemic is a preview of a major bioweapons attack, and it has exposed us as woefully unprepared, with our government having been shown to be unable to protect us, thought of by many to be the primary role of government.  It could have, but it did not.  Americans’ faith in institutions has already been crumbling for some time, and now that level of faith will be even lower.

Feeling the need to explain why she was writing her article in March for The Atlantic, Anne Applebaum made her case in stark terms that reflected Tang’s imagery:

I am writing this so that Americans understand that our government is producing some of the same outcomes as Chinese communism.  This means that our political system is in far, far worse shape than we have hitherto understood.

…The United States, long accustomed to thinking of itself as the best, most efficient, and most technologically advanced society in the world, is about to be proved an unclothed emperor.

George Packer also wrote for The Atlantic, echoing Tang, Applebaum, and Stiglitz in a pieced titled “We Are Living in a Failed State” with the lead “The coronavirus didn’t break America. It revealed what was already broken.”  Packer does not hold back as he opens his article’s body:

When the virus came here, it found a country with serious underlying conditions, and it exploited them ruthlessly.  Chronic ills—a corrupt political class, a sclerotic bureaucracy, a heartless economy, a divided and distracted public—had gone untreated for years.  We had learned to live, uncomfortably, with the symptoms.  It took the scale and intimacy of a pandemic to expose their severity—to shock Americans with the recognition that we are in the high-risk category.

The crisis demanded a response that was swift, rational, and collective.  The United States reacted instead like Pakistan or Belarus—like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering.

…With no national plan—no coherent instructions at all—families, schools, and offices were left to decide on their own whether to shut down and take shelter.

Explaining how we got to this state, Packer writes that “all the programs defunded, stockpiles depleted, and plans scrapped meant that we had become a second-rate nation. Then came the virus and this strange defeat.”  Not only are we losing this war, this war is forcing us to see our national ugliness by relentlessly shining a spotlight onto it and forcing us to look nonstop.  Packer, again, puts it eloquently: “If the pandemic really is a kind of war, it’s the first to be fought on this soil in a century and a half.  Invasion and occupation expose a society’s fault lines, exaggerating what goes unnoticed or accepted in peacetime, clarifying essential truths, raising the smell of buried rot.”

In periods of pestilence, there is a tendency for those fault lines to be racial, ethnic, and religious, with those types of hatreds being only too eagerly released and minority groups being blamed for the outbreaks.

Just to name one foreign example for today, in Hindu chauvinist Narendra Modi’s India, anti-Islamic bigotry is becoming mixed up in the country’s response to coronavirus.

If we go back in time, ignorant and/or covetous Christians in fourteenth-century Europe blamed Jews for the Black Death and massacred many thousands of them across the continent, destroying whole communities and ethnically cleansing Jews from entire regions (just in Mainz alone, over 6,000 Jews perished from a plague-inspired pogrom in 1349).  If we fast-forward to today, Jews are also being blamed in very anti-Semitic fashion by a range of extremists around the world (including in America) for unleashing coronavirus as some sort of organized plot, bringing down “God’s” vengeance in the form of the virus, or of profiting off the pandemic (or a combination of these); billionaire Jewish philanthropist George Soros is even frequently accused of creating the virus.

In the U.S., Asian-Americans and Asians are also being attacked—including physically—and blamed for the virus “because” of the virus’s Chinese origin, with anti-Asian hate crimes very much on the rise, yet the federal government is not being proactive in pushing back against this hate, with problematic language coming from the White House itself only adding fuel to the fire.

There is also the persistent racism and pervasive inequality that long-plagued American society, with socioeconomic status, harsher living and working conditions, and unequal access to quality healthcare experienced disproportionately by certain groups of people contributing to their having chronic health issues that make the virus more serious and more deadly for them than for members of more advantaged communities.  Inequality also makes it far harder for some disadvantaged groups to take appropriate actions to protect themselves; in the words of Charles Blow writing for The New York Times, “Staying at home is a privilege.  Social distancing is a privilege.  The people who can’t must make terrible choices: Stay home and risk starvation or go to work and risk contagion.”  Problems of race, ethnicity, and class are only made worse by coronavirus.

In particular, the inequalities that have long been inflicted upon African-Americans have been resulting in incredibly disproportionately high deaths and serious infections from COVID-19 for African-Americans.  Just in Chicago, by the end of the first week of April, African-Americans had accounted for seventy percent of COVID-19 deaths even though they just made up thirty percent of the population.  And Chicago is hardly alone, with major disparities for black Americans in terms of coronavirus being the norm across the country.

Other groups in America are also suffering disproportionately from this pandemic.  Long-neglected Native Americans are also particularly vulnerable and experiencing extremely high rates of coronavirus problems.  Latinos are also quite disproportionately affected by COVID-19.  And lower-income people of all backgrounds have relatively borne the brunt of not only the virus itself, but also the massive economic harm inflicted by the pandemic.

As Brooks noted in that mid-March interview, “All of these terrible, terrible trends that we’ve been sowing for so long are coming back to haunt us right at this minute.”

Our unending, longstanding American divisions—politically partisan and otherwise—are only intensified by this unconventional, asymmetric pandemic, much like the unconventional, asymmetric threats from the Vietnam and Iraq Wars and Russian election interference aggravated existing American societal fault lines.  The virus, rather than showing our ability to unite, is instead exposing—even more than recent politics—our capacity for coming apart.  For Packer,

the virus should have united Americans against a common threat. With different leadership, it might have. Instead, even as it spread from blue to red areas, attitudes broke down along familiar partisan lines.  The virus also should have been a great leveler. You don’t have to be in the military or in debt to be a target—you just have to be human.  But from the start, its effects have been skewed by the inequality that we’ve tolerated for so long.

Then there is the black hole where our coordinated national response should have been.

The most extreme example of this has manifested itself in a disturbing, unprecedented, and stunning situation that just unfolded in Maryland, exemplifying a breakdown in the constitutional order and national fabric not seen since the era of desegregation.  This stunning incident hints at China’s twentieth-century warlord era, when the Qing Dynasty’s central government broke down and basically melted away in so many places to such levels that China de facto became a relatively large number of separate states run by warlords who had to step up and provide leadership in the void left by the Qing.  They also had to contend with the Chinese Nationalists and Chinese Communists as everyone fought each other, with the Japanese Imperial Army and WWII eventually merging into the conflicts; dysfunction and chaos reigned (and incidentally, remember, this situation would eventually see the most extensive use of bioweapons in the history of warfare).  To return to the American present, in the absence of timely or coherent support from the federal government, Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland and his wife, Maryland First Lady Yumi Hogan—of Korean descent—negotiated with South Korea to obtain 500,000 coronavirus tests.  The process took twenty-two days and the tests were flown over from South Korea, with the Korea Air passenger plane—which would normally have landed at Dulles International Airport in Virginia, just outside Washington, DC—being diverted to Baltimore-Washington International airport in Maryland, the first time that airline has ever flown to that the airport.  This was done purposefully to prevent the seizure of the tests by the federal government, which had earlier seized three million protective masks ordered by Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker for his state, among other seizures from governors taking matters into their own hands because of the Trump Administration’s unwillingness to directly supply the states with necessary quantities of emergency supplies.  It is remarkable that states that had asked for federal aid, had their requests denied or unfulfilled, then followed the Administration’s advice to procure their own supplies then saw federal authorities seize those very supplies.  It is also worth noting that both Govs. Hogan and Baker are Republicans along with Trump, not to say that should make a difference but to point out how even fellow Republicans are unable to work with the current Administration.  Also out fear of the tests being seized at the airport, Hogan had “a large contingent” of Maryland National Guard troops and State Police sent to secure the tests and transport them to “an undisclosed location” that is purposely being kept secret from the federal government. Those tests are still being guarded by Maryland National Guard and State Police at that location to protect them from possible federal seizure, with Hogan saying the cargo “was like Fort Knox to us” since the tests were “going to save the lives of thousands of our citizens” and noting the earlier federal seizures of supplies ordered by other states.

In effect, Maryland’s sitting governor—in the same political party as the president—ran a clandestine operation to prevent life-saving equipment Maryland taxpayers had bought and paid for from falling into the clutches of the Trump Administration after that administration had failed to provide Maryland with requested aid and those coronavirus tests are still being guarded at a secret location by security forces under the command of the governor. 

In case this is not clear, that is a total breakdown of the relationship between Maryland and the federal government, with Maryland essentially rebelling against the Trump Administration’s potential designs and actual authority.  Gov. Hogan essentially became a de facto rogue governor—much like warlords in China after the Qing dynasty disintegrated and left a power vacuum of chaos in its wake—when it came to securing and protecting coronavirus tests for Marylanders.  One can only hope this is the first and last example of anything like this happening during the pandemic, but that hope is not carried with any certainty.

To add to Maryland’s woes, the state just canceled a $12.5 million order for other important emergency equipment—1.5 million protective masks and 110 ventilators—from a brand-new firm founded by two Republican political operatives.  The company was drastically overcharging for the masks and the items were supposed to ship by mid-April, but there is no indication they have shipped, and despite repeated requests from Maryland on the order status, no information on the shipping has been provided, prompting the cancellation at a time when Maryland is seeing a surge in cases and deaths.

Yes, right now, we are seeing states, the private sector, and the Executive Branch beg for, haggle, and tussle over urgently-needed PPE and other lifesaving supplies.  In other words, too much is being left to chance, the market, the whims of suppliers, and the relative means of various states even in the middle of a pandemic, with the private sector playing a mighty role, one that involves price and bidding wars.  The result of this top-down-driven logistical nightmare is that vital medical supplies and equipment are in short supply in too many places in America fighting this pandemic.  People, both patients and healthcare workers, are getting sick and dying after being in situations where they did not have what they should have had.

Even if the vaunted Defense Production Act—a Korean War-era law greatly empowering the government to direct industry in times of emergency—had been robustly and properly executed (and it still has not), a tremendous amount of the logistics would still have come down to an ad hoc approach.  And the ad hoc approach is only adding to the confusion and chaos.  As Gen. Russel Honoré (who helped lead America’s response in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina) explained about this current crisis, the main choices for logistics are between the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA, a civilian agency under the Department of Homeland Security, or DHS) and the military.  But, as he also explained, FEMA is designed to handle one or several localized emergencies at once, not a full-fledged national one; it simply does not have the capacity to run as the point organization for this pandemic.  At the same time, the military does not have any recent experience managing national operations across most or all U.S. states at once (or operating withing domestic local, state, and federal legal systems) and much of the military’s operations would have to be also handled in an ad hoc way, with dozens of senior officers having to liaise with dozens of governors and far more local officials to coordinate efforts in addition to private-sector entities; they would rely heavily on their civilian counterparts, most of whom would have little or no training or understanding of how to respond to such a situation or work with military officials; one hopes coronavirus will swiftly bring about a filling-in of these gaps in expertise).  Writing for MWI, Mississippi National Guard Maj. Dennis Bittle notes that National Guard troops have been deployed as part of coronavirus responses in all fifty states, the District of Columbia, and multiple U.S. territories, yet the existing frameworks for Guard deployments to be robust parts of these local responses are far from ideal in this unprecedented situation.  Specifically, federalizing Guard units would be highly problematic since so many Guard personnel are much-needed local first-responders in their civilian roles.

Without proper supplies allocated, distribution networks and equipment, and the personnel to run and move under the direction of the government, as noted, individual states are having to compete in bidding wars and fights over supplies with each other, businesses, the federal government, and even foreign countries just to get desperately needed life-saving supplies.  In what Gen. Honoré called a supply chain situation that he has “never heard…before in my life [that]… look[s] like they have let the literal wolf inside the henhouse,” states are being bypassed for direct aid by the federal government for corporations to then sell to states and, overall, there is little to no oversight, no singular body distributing supplies nationally based on objective needs-based criteria (by mid-April, Montana, with few cases, was getting over $300,000 in federal aid per case, while New York, the epicenter of coronavirus in America, was just getting $12,000 per case). 

There is even at least the appearance that federal disbursement and non-disbursement is happening as a form of political favoritism, as quid pro quos.  On top of all this, the federal government’s own stockpile was nearly empty as of early April apart from federally-confiscated supplies bought and paid for (and needed) by private hospitals and state and local authorities, activity we delved into earlier with the shocking case from Maryland.  Together these factors are just further amplifying senses of desperation, helplessness, and violation of trust. 

Adding to those panicked feelings are how the White House has handled communications: as U.S. Army Reserve Maj. Wonny Kim writes also for MWI, all this is further exacerbated “by public communications that has been haphazard, to say the least,” and in visible ways for all to see that undermine America’s standing in the world and encourage our authoritarian adversaries.  Our own officials have even concluded that Russian intelligence is even “likely” using the pandemic to gain information on U.S. logistical weaknesses.

Sadly, we have seen with the federal response and in other responses that political leaders are free to ignore or contradict the advice of medical and intelligence experts, and suppress or remove truth-tellers from important positions, thus, simply having expert advisors does not cut it; to some degree, both voting populations and politicians will have to take seriously the need for familiarity with pandemic response; voters should be choosing those with a demonstrated and committed deference both to experts and to self-learning and voters must then hold those leaders accountable; if they do not, they will be rewarding non-seriousness with high office, encouraging other politicians to follow suit.  These are, after all, the basics of democracy, and if voters do not reward competence, seriousness, and expertise, a great many of them will, to some degree, reap what they so after failing in their role as citizens.  In this time of pandemic, for Masha Gessen, “it’s very important to continue to notice the ways in which our government is failing us, even if those ways have become familiar and exhausting.”  The hope is that this pandemic will teach voters to take their votes more seriously, as George Packer recognizes: “We can learn from these dreadful days that stupidity and injustice are lethal; that, in a democracy, being a citizen is essential work; that the alternative to solidarity is death. After we’ve come out of hiding and taken off our masks, we should not forget what it was like to be alone.”

Brooks agrees that, ultimately, we as citizens in a democracy are the ones who are responsible:

Everything that goes wrong in China with this virus is directly laid at the feet of Xi Jinping.  He has all the power, so he has all the responsibility.  Every death is on his hands.

But, by the same token, we are responsible for our own deaths in this country.  If we don’t like our leaders—well, then, look in the mirror; we put them there. We voted for them.  If we don’t like the way the CDC is handling this virus, well, who voted to defund the CDC?  Who didn’t listen to the cries of health professionals saying, “Wait a minute, they’re defunding the CDC!”?  We didn’t listen.  We were like, “Oh, my god.  Friends is on Netflix.  I have bingeing to do!  I have things!  There’s an app where I can put bunny ears on myself and send it out!”

In a dictatorship like China, you can blame the top.  In a democracy, in a republic, we have to blame [who we see in] the mirror.

But the main national election is still a while away as the pandemic rages.  Given the systemic failures, just allowing the military to take over the response is tempting—whether now or in the future—and while that carries with it its own issues, it is clear the current civilian structures do not have the capacity to handle this type of threat, except maybe if our leaders are extraordinary, and most of the time, that is not the quality of leadership we empower.

At the same time, coronavirus is exposing the military’s own shortcomings within itself, with Army Reserve Capt. James Long noting in another MWI piece that “our lack of preparation, in the form of adaptive digital networks and robust connective tissue with civilian partners,” is further adding to the damage being done by the virus.  And, while Dr. Jacob Stoil and Army Maj. Bethany Landeck noted in an additional MWI article that, in past major wars, large-scale epidemic response was an important part of U.S. military operations, that has not been the case for decades.  Thus, though the civilian apparatuses have in many ways failed in the current crisis, we cannot expect the current military to be a replacement.  This sentiment is echoed in yet another MWI piece penned by U.S. Air Force Center for Strategic Deterrence Studies Director Al Mauroni titled “The Military Is Not the Nation’s Emergency Room Doctor.” For him, the military should be ready to support civilian efforts in a pandemic, but not to take them over.

In another piece, I will release my proposal to reform the government to put us in a far better position to deal with biodefense: the creation of a Cabinet-level Department of Pandemic Preparedness and Response (DPPR).  But for now, we will simply leave this section with a recognition of how woefully inadequate the current structure of the government is to deal with these type of threats and how dependent the it is on having exceptional leadership that is able to quickly make all the right decisions on an ad hoc basis, an overall unlikely outcome.

VII.) Epilogue: Coronavirus and History, Russia and Italy, the War for Reality, and the Nexus of It All

We will never find an explanation…for the evils done by people against other people, or for the love that drove the doctors to bring smallpox to an end.  Yet after all they had done, we still held smallpox in our hands, with a grip of death that would never let it go.  All I knew was that the dream of total eradication had failed.  The virus’s last strategy for survival was to bewitch its host and become a source of power.  We could eradicate smallpox from nature, but we could not uproot the virus from the human heart.

—Richard Preston (author of The Hot Zone), The Demon in the Freezer (2002)

Eradication

It was one of the most inspiring moments of the entire Cold War.

In what has been acknowledged by many to be “the single most important triumph of public health in human history,” on December 9, 1979, the WHO certified smallpox eradicated from nature, and, to much fanfare at the May, 1980 session of the World Health Assembly (the WHO’s governing body) formally celebrated this achievement publicly with a unified declaration acknowledging the singular triumph.  The disease—terrorizing humanity for thousands of years and responsible for more deaths than any single other disease—may have wiped 300-500 million people in the twentieth century alone, but now, no more.

This triumph was the culmination of two decades of effort from the global healthcare community led by the WHO, first with an effort inspired and proposed by a top Soviet scientist in 1959 that fell far short, with many very skeptical that any disease could be “eradicated,” so support for the efforts was lukewarm and halfhearted.  Still, the effort did drastically reduce infection and mortality of the disease.  Some did not give up on the dream of total eradication , though.  A second effort picked up where the first faltered, with the Intensified Smallpox Eradication Program beginning in 1967, a year in which some two million died from the disease out of 10-15 million cases (rapid vaccination saved many infected before symptoms worsened, reducing the death rate, and these figures were down from some 50 million cases annually in the 1950s).

For the next decade, doctors and medical staff scoured the globe—braving even natural disasters and civil wars—to find all cases of smallpox and then ring-vaccinate everyone around the cases, much like cutting down trees in a forest on fire to stop the spread of the fire.  The technique worked extremely well, and the last recorded case of naturally-occurring smallpox in world history was in 1977 in Somalia.  The following year, another person died because of a mishap at a university lab that was studying smallpox.  Efforts were kept up to keep the virus from making a comeback, and they were successful: by the end of 1979, the virus was certified to be extinct from nature—the first and last disease thus far to suffer that fate—and there has not been a known case since.

In the words of Richard Preston, those carrying out the campaign

had forged themselves into an army of peace.  With a weapon in their hands, a needle with two points, they had searched the corners of the earth for the virus, opening every door and lifting every scrap of cloth.  They would not rest, they would not stand aside, and they gave all they had until variola [i.e., smallpox] was gone.  No greater deed was ever done in medicine, and no better thing ever came from the human spirit.

At the height of the Cold War, the two rivals tearing the world apart—the United States and the Soviet Union—came together to lead one of the great services for humanity that history has ever known.  Two bitter foes that were constantly threatening each other with nuclear annihilation proved that, even amid the greatest of disputes and tensions, enemies could still work together to make the word a better place, to save lives and put their common interest and those of humanity as a whole ahead of their differences.  There are few examples in history of anything like this, and nothing that matches the amount of lives saved by this common effort during a global geopolitical conflict between the two lead actors.

Eventually , smallpox would only be only officially preserved in two facilities: America’s CDC in Atlanta and Russia’s Vector Institute (the Russian State Research Center of Virology and Biotechnology VECTOR that was a major facility of the Soviet biowarfare program known, as discussed, as Biopreparat) in Koltsovo, Russia, the top  government disease research facilities in America and Russia, respectively.

By the time Preston would write his 2002 book on smallpox, The Demon in the Freezer, the then-top scientist at the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USARMRIID, at Fort Detrick, Maryland, where the U.S. earlier had located a big chunk of its now-defunct biowarfare program), Dr. Peter Jahrling (played by Topher Grace in last year’s NetGeo miniseries, The Hot Zone, based on Preston’s book), would frequently quip:  “If you believe smallpox is sitting in only two freezers, I have a bridge for you to buy. The genie is out of the lamp.” 

Weaponization

As mentioned earlier, since the Eradication and at the end of the Cold War, because of high-level defectors from Biopreparat, the world learned that the Soviet Union even at the height of the Eradication has a massive biowarfare program that included smallpox, and the Soviets were not the only ones pursuing bioweapons and smallpox stocks, also as discussed earlier.  Additionally, it became clear that the Soviets were working with smallpox outside the designated Vector Institute.

At the same time, with the increasing concerns about global warming in the 1990s, we get into the possibility of smallpox in the bodies of long-dead victims frozen in the now melting tundra permafrost, smallpox that could be unleashed and infect yet again from nature.

But the main concern is not the tundra smallpox.

Now we see how the Soviets got their lamp and genie.

We learned from the highest-level Biopreparat defector (Col. Kanatjan Alibekov, now “Ken Alibek”) that when there were raging epidemics of smallpox in India during the Eradication in the 1960s, the Soviets had a medical team operating there in 1967, helping to push back the spread of the disease there.  That team was accompanied by agents of the K.G.B., the Soviets’ notorious intelligence and security service.  They were on a mission to find a particularly nasty strain of smallpox, which they did in 1967, bringing the super-sub-strain—known as India-1 or India-1967—back to the Soviet Union with them.  This sub-strain was a far more virulent and stable sub-strain than other strains of variola major (already the far deadlier of two main smallpox strains, the weaker one being variola minor) and one that has a far shorter incubation period and was harder to diagnose, making it ideal for bioweapons relative to existing variola major stockpiles the Soviets had at the time.  Within a few years, India-1 was their flagship strain for smallpox bioweapons, with twenty tons of it being produced every year to keep it as fresh and deadly as possible. 

The K.G.B has used the well-intentioned Eradication program as a cover to find the raw materials for a nightmare bioweapon, and it succeeded in keeping this secret from the West for two decades, during which it carried out intense research, development, and testing with the sub-strain.

We should still be thankful for the visionaries and dedicated health professionals from the Soviet Union who helped make Eradication a reality, and for the Soviet Government’s generous donations of enormous amounts of smallpox vaccine to fuel the effort.  The sincerity of these health workers should not be questioned. 

However, as is so often in the world, even where there are good actors and motives, there can be bad ones right alongside them, and this was the case with the Soviet Eradication effort.  As Preston notes:

We will never find an explanation…for the evils done by people against other people, or for the love that drove the doctors to bring smallpox to an end.  Yet after all they had done, we still held smallpox in our hands, with a grip of death that would never let it go.  All I knew was that the dream of total eradication had failed.  The virus’s last strategy for survival was to bewitch its host and become a source of power.  We could eradicate smallpox from nature, but we could not uproot the virus from the human heart.

2020: A Year of Threat Convergences

If we jump forward to Italy now during its terrible coronavirus outbreak, we may be seeing a repeat of history.

As noted earlier, Italy was requesting U.S. assistance from our troops stationed there since World War II because we had not been proactive in offering help to our beleaguered NATO ally.  But President Vladimir Putin of Russia beat us to the punch, embarrassingly preempting significant U.S. military aid by nearly a month and one-upping us in a public relations nightmare by sending a military medical aid convoy to Italy, to much Russian fanfare and broadcast constantly with gusto by Russian media to the rest of the world.  The mission was dubbed “From Russia with Love” (sharing a title with one of the most famous James Bond films and novels) with that phrase written in Italian on a graphic of two hearts—one colored in the colors Russia’s flag, one in Italy’s—placed on the Russian military vehicles delivering the aid.  “From Russia with Love” was also, tellingly, written on the graphic in English above the Italian even though the aid was being delivered to Italy.  In the wider context of the geopolitical tug-of-war for Europe between Russia and the U.S., Russia scored another win, again beating the U.S. in a form of unconventional, asymmetric warfare.

But not all was as advertised.

The highly respected Italian daily La Stampa—one of Italy’s oldest newspapers—did some digging, and found that, according to anonymous Italian government officials, the aid Russia sent was not particularly helpful and the whole effort was more about public-relations and an effort to undermine NATO, with one official saying that “Eighty percent of Russian supplies are totally useless or of little use to Italy” and two Italian military officials echoing that sentiment. 

Unsurprisingly, the Russian Defence Ministry directly attacked and seemed to threaten La Stampa and the journalist behind the story, Jacopo Iacoboni, calling his story “fake news,” making sure to post the smear in English.  Even in this delicate situation, the Italian Defense and Foreign Affairs Ministries, while thanking Russia for its aid, condemned the Russian Defence Ministry’s attacks on the Italian free press.  The mission is now winding down, seemingly not having been very effective.

The disinformational, propagandistic aspects of the whole operation only became more evident when Italy revealed that it had received only 150 ventilators from Russia (not the 600 the Russian Ambassador to Italy claimed) and mysterious WhatsApp groups surfaced offering 200 euros to Italians to make and post videos praising the Russian “aid” effort on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram (less but still some money for posts with just text).

Along with the aid, Russia sent over 120 of its top officers from one of Russia’s main Radiological, Chemical and Biological Weapons Defense (RChBD) military units.  If one buys Russia’s stated aim for this outing, it is somewhat strange that it sent biowarfare specialists to Italy, which is supposed to have some of the best personnel, equipment, and expertise in when it comes to nuclear, biological, and chemical unit capacities.  The unit is also suspiciously being led in Gen. Sergey Kikot, the number-two commander of all of Russia’s RChBD forces.

Gen. Kikot is perhaps most famous internationally for being one of Russia’s most prominent disinformationists and apologists for Assad’s regime as part of Russia’s overall Syria disinformation operations and support for Assad, with Kikot issuing strong denials that Assad used chemical weapons against his own people and that the White Helmets—the brave Syrian civilian volunteers who try to save other civilians in the immediate aftermath of Syrian regime and Russian military attacks—were staging fake footage of such attacks, absurd statements which have gone against the findings of NATO allies, experts, human rights groups, and watchdogs, including the United Nations-associated Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), the chief international chemical weapons inspections authority.

It would be unthinkable in this kind of a situation for there not to be intelligence officers from Russia’s military intelligence branch, the G.R.U., embedded within Russia’s unit in Italy.  In this case, being deployed in a NATO country during a pandemic is an invaluable opportunity for intelligence collection and even for intelligence operations. 

But it is also worth noting that the G.R.U. is often the tip of Putin’s spear in both the Kremlin’s conventional and unconventional operations.  The G.R.U. has been active on the ground in Russia’s invasion, occupation, and illegal annexation of Crimea and its support for rebels in Eastern Ukraine.  It also has had its commandos—Russia’s elite Spetsnaz special forces—play important roles on the battlefield in Syria, including in Aleppo and Palmyra; it was even overseeing the Russian mercenaries who attacked a joint U.S.-S.D.F. position in Syria in February, 2018.  Furthermore, the G.R.U. has been one of Putin’s point organizations in his war on Western democracy, engaging in cyberwarfare, destabilization, and disinformation efforts against NATO countries in Europe and other U.S. allies, in addition to its infamous efforts against the U.S. during the 2016 election (what I have called the First Russo-American Cyberwar). 

But when thinking about why elite Russian biowarfare specialists and G.R.U. intelligence operatives would be in Italy, we should perhaps think less about 2016 and more about 1967, when the K.G.B. accompanied medical teams to India during the Smallpox Eradication Program.

The G.R.U. is one of the successor agencies to the K.G.B.

It is uncertain what all the precise activity the Russian biowarfare units and any G.R.U. operatives in Italy have been up to, but this scenario seems awfully familiar.  Whatever their purpose, this whole episode should serve as a reminder of the ability of the Russians to see unconventional opportunities in all situations, including public health crises, and to reinforce how unprepared we are in general to stand up to such efforts.  Years from now, we hopefully will not be caught off guard if we discover the Russians have engineered some sort of supercoronavirus, nor, on a far simpler level, allow Russia or another rival to upstage our efforts to assist our allies and friends abroad during a pandemic.

We also must hope that we are better prepared here at home in a far deeper sense than adding to and reorganizing our federal government’s organizational chart.  My soon-to-be-released proposal for a Cabinet-level Department of Pandemic Preparedness and Response would be a major leap forward in a big-picture national policy sense, but there is so much more that needs to be done throughout our society.  For it was not just our government that failed us, but different aspects of our media, our business sector, our religious institutions across faiths, celebrities and various other elites, plenty of rank-and-file Americans along with them, our very culture itself.  And it is the societal failings that are embedded deep in our society that have not only been major factors in making our response to COVID-19 so shockingly poor, but have also have contributed significantly to many of our failures in unconventional, asymmetric warfare over decades.  It is those societal failings that were so brilliantly exploited by Russia in 2016, too, but Russia has also used our weaknesses to help amplify and perpetuate our failing coronavirus response, finding plenty of existing conspiracy theories, mistrust, and hate in America to amplify and plenty of Americans willing to believe and peddle Russia’s own false narratives, whether in 2016 or today in our current coronavirus climate.

In other words, at each step of the way, millions of Americans were gleefully along for the ride, the very definitions of useful idiots, taking Russia’s disinformation and making it their misinformation.  That is happening even now, in our 2020 election.

Putin is himself former K.G.B., and part of his genius is that he and his intelligence-crowd’s longstanding K.G.B.-inspired techniques accurately assessed our domestic weaknesses, figuring out how to magnify many of them with their own operations in a variety of settings, from elections to pandemics: they look for anything and anyone that will help divide America and make us weaker, with this pandemic just being a “gift” of an opportunity for the Kremlin.

America certainly had its own strains of ignorance without any Russian meddling (to quote the great J. G. A. Pocock, “it is notorious that American culture is haunted by myths, many of which arise out of the attempt to escape history and then regenerate it”), but Russian disinformation and cyberwarfare thrives on this ignorance.  As part of Moscow’s campaign to knowingly falsely blame the U.S. for a multitude of things—from the downing of civilian airliner MH17 (shot down over Ukraine in 2014 by a Russian missile given by Russia to pro-Russian Ukrainian separatists_ to the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster in the then-Soviet Union—Russia is now blaming the U.S. for engineering the coronavirus as a bioweapon (or sometimes 5G is to blame; yeah, the Russians are a huge part of that, too).  This follows similar efforts to blame the U.S. for spreading Ebola, HIV/AIDS, even swine flu.  The Kremlin has also been boosting America’s dangerous anti-vaxxer movement.  Overall, when it comes to health, Russia has engaged in campaigns to stoke Americans’ fears of diseases, make us more susceptible to disease, and weaken our overall trust in U.S. healthcare and medical expertise, trust that is essential for any kind of response to a public health crisis in a democracy to be effective.

The same organs of disinformation behind Russia’s “firehose of falsehood” (to quote a RAND report) for all recent disinformation campaigns are being utilized in this latest coronavirus campaign, and, like the other campaigns, it is achieving results: a recent Pew study showed that close to a third of Americans believe in the totally unsubstantiated conspiracy theory that coronavirus was man-made in some sort of lab and is not natural, with one quarter saying they are not sure either way.  To be fair, top elements of the Trump Administration are pushing an unfounded conspiracy theory that the new coronavirus was created in a Chinese lab in Wuhan, where the outbreak originated, and China has been joining Russia in promoting the idea that the U.S. is behind the virus.  While the survey does not specify where the virus originated or who was behind it, the right-wing in America has been pushing the Chinese lab theory and, as noted earlier, anti-Semitic explanations and sentiments regarding the virus.  The Chinese lab theory is now favored by the president himself, along with Sec. of State Mike Pompeo and top Trump trade and China advisor Peter Navarro.  Apart from numerous and varied other widespread disinformation campaigns and misinformation vectors, very active and present Russian disinformation still makes up an important portion of the overall disinformation being bandied about, contributing to an overall atmosphere of conspiracy, distrust, confusion, fear, and just plain bad information, casting doubt and adding more non-reality based noise to the conversation, so regardless of whether Americans—who are being widely exposed to these conspiracy theories—are convinced by Russian propaganda or not that the U.S. that “created” the virus, the Russian efforts still contribute substantially to a deteriorating informational climate.  Specifically, these efforts further feed an atmosphere suggesting specifically that coronavirus was created in a lab somewhere while generally helping to saturate that atmosphere with bad information, muddying the waters and obfuscating the truth for many Americans.   It certainly does not help that the top current U.S. political leaders and many lower-level politicians in addition to media outlets in the country are embracing similar false theories even if the culprits “making” the virus vary.  And three other factors serve as additional amplifiers poisoning the atmosphere here: that Americans are increasingly subscribing to fantastical conspiracy theories in general, that conspiracy theories are more attractive and powerful in times of crisis, and that studies confirm a large portion of Americans are simply bad at discerning fact from fiction and are easily confused.

These dynamics are as good as any at illustrating how Russian efforts and homegrown efforts and attitudes play together like a symphony orchestra performance conducted by Putin to play to his ends.  The last concert he conducted, with his Kremlin Symphony Orchestra performing original Putin works, did not go very well for us, and this new one could very well be worse.

In the midst of Russia’s coronavirus disinformation and 2020 election interference efforts targeting the U.S., as another example of both ends feeding into Russian interests, the Trump Administration allowed Russia—even as a hostile actor—to deliver coronavirus aid to us on American soil in a publicized way, a shocking yet par-for-the-course act for the current administration. 

And so Russia keeps up its public relations stunts and disinformation, hoping to deflect attention from incriminating events at home as coronavirus infections soar to make Russia alternate with Brazil as the third and second-most infected country in the world even by the official numbers, with the reality being that there are virtually certainly government efforts to suppress a far grimmer actual toll (some medical staff are reportedly being instructed not to record coronavirus deaths as caused by coronavirus).  There have even been three Russian medical professionals questioning or distraught by Russia’s coronavirus response who “fell” out of windows in just two weeks, two dying and one critically injured; such “accidents” or worse tend to befall a wide variety or whistleblowers, journalists, critics of the Putin, and others Putin wants to make disappear.

What will not disappear are the threats posed by Russian disinformation, cyberwarfare, election interference, and the Kremlin’s undisclosed biowarfare program.

Unless the U.S. has since obtained direct and continued intelligence on the exact nature of the genetically engineered strains and man-made Frankenstein viruses described by top defectors—highly unlikely—it is almost certain that the U.S. would be defenseless against such bioagents deliberately designed to overcome existing vaccines, medicine, and treatment.  Looking at how much coronavirus has crippled the U.S., if America was not able to work on specific remedies designed to counter these Russian superagents by directly studying them over time directly and rigorously testing biodefense measures—new vaccines, medicine—against these new agents, it would be impossible for us to come up with anything that could effectively protect Americans from them, let alone have the remedies mass-manufactured and ready for distribution and safe usage.  A first strike with such weapons would likely be the only strike necessary to incapacitate most of America’s defenses and to destroy America as we know it.  As discussed, apocalyptic-minded bioterrorists would be more likely to use a nightmare bioweapon.  Yet however unlikely such a strike from a state like Russia would be, being ill-prepared will only increase that likelihood.

The current international Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) treaty prohibiting offensive bioweapons and related research—to which Russia is a signatory—is a legal one, but without any verification or control mechanisms.  We must absolutely have a more forceful international bioweapons inspections system and use all peaceful means to force Russia into compliance.  Ideally, this would be through the United Nations, except Russia will clearly veto such binding frameworks and resolutions, or, even if it did not, would surely veto any Security Council efforts to specifically hold Russia to account or to submit to and/or comply with robust inspections.  It will instead fall on the U.S., Canada, the EU, Japan, and other allied and like-minded nations to collectively impose their own sanctions on Russia to force compliance or demonstrate a stiff economic price for non-compliance, much like was the case after Russia’s invasions of Ukraine’s eastern and Crimean regions.  Setting an example with Russia would set a proper tone for the unfolding century, and other rogue states would also see the costs of pursuing bioweapons and be more inclined to play by the rules if Russia is brought to heel.  And each state that is brought to heel can be part of a mandatory coalition to combat bioterrorism as part of their respective arrangements, with the BWC being rewritten to include robust counterbioterrorism provisions and severe penalties for supporting or failing to act against bioterrorism or for failing to properly secure sensitive materials involving deadly disease research.

A Collective Responsibility to Do Better

The actions suggested just above constitute dealing with unconventional, asymmetric warfare at the highest levels.

But the lowest levels are just as important.

We must also deal with our societal ills that make us so susceptible to disinformation, Russian or otherwise.  To a significant degree, preparing for unconventional, asymmetric information warfare and cyberwarfare also prepares us for pandemics, biowarfare, and bioterrorism: at the core of each is a willingness to defer to experts and to cultivate our minds to be able to properly vet what is coming from a position of factual vetting and properly understanding who and what is targeting us to take advantage of our weaknesses, biases, and predispositions.  Leaving our minds susceptible to disinformation and misinformation—whether it is about our elections and candidates or our public health system and information on a deadly disease—is like allowing our computer networks to go without security software, allowing our enemies to manipulate us and take advantage of our weaknesses to weaken our nation.  Thus, whether dealing with coronavirus, bioweapons, or Russian disinformation, taking concrete steps to tackle one will often pay off in our fight against the others.  And we have little reason to doubt that Russia will integrate coronavirus into its ambitious 2020 election interference—or, more aptly termed, Second Russo-American Cyberwar—or doubt that Russia is looking at and developing ways to turn coronavirus into a bioweapon as it did with smallpox and so many other bioagents in the past. 

Hence, biosecurity, disinformation security, and election security come together as part of the larger unconventional, asymmetric landscape.

In her conclusion to her must-read article “Disinformation, Democracy, and the Rule of Law,” former FBI counterintelligence agent and current Yale University senior lecturer on national security Asha Rangappa notes the complex, multidimensional aspects of Russia’s unconventional, asymmetric warfare against the United States:

Much of the public discussion on Russia’s disinformation operations in the U.S. has focused on their impact on the 2016 election and how they might affect elections in the future.  But the damage that Russia seeks to inflict through its disinformation campaign isn’t limited to electoral contests.  Rather, its long-term strategy has been to erode faith in the primary pillars upon which our democracy is based—including the rule of law and the institutions that support it.  So far, Russia’s efforts are yielding fruit, and technological and legislative fixes alone will be insufficient to counter them.  Defending against Russian disinformation in the long term will require a strategy to fortify America’s social fabric with an understanding of shared civic values that can serve as a prophylactic against Russia’s future attacks. 

She makes it all too clear that the government alone cannot save us from the manipulations of Russia’s disinformation and other techniques of division:

The framing of the Russian disinformation threat as a cybersecurity issue makes it tempting to look to the government, or to social media companies, to fix the problem. Regulatory and technological solutions are needed, and may well make it harder for Russia to employ the kinds of information warfare that it used in 2016.  But they will not address the fundamental vulnerability which Russia successfully exploited, which is the increasing social and political fissures in society and the resulting erosion of social trust in the U.S. over the past decades.

As a solution, Rangappa exhorts us to shore up the American weaknesses Russia exploits with a rebirth and renewal of citizenship, community, and civic life:

A model to rebuild social capital in America—and strengthen social trust—can feel unsatisfying, since it is intangible, difficult to measure, and disperses responsibility on us, as citizens.  At the same time, however, it can be empowering, as it offers a way for Americans to take ownership of a large part of the solution.  Russia’s attack on our democracy is an invitation for us to examine our relationship with fellow citizens, and how technology has affected the way we engage with them online and in real life.  By reclaiming democratic values that transcend political differences, and leveraging the most effective vehicles we have to disseminate them (including social media!), the U.S. can generate an immunity to Russia’s destabilization efforts which will endure over the long term.

In the syllabus for one of her classes that is very much an extension of her essay, Professor Rangappa provides a road map for the way forward with a robust list of materials, including:

1. Orwell’s legendary 1984 (to help bolster our defenses against not only totalitarianism and groupthink but also Orwellian disinformation and the manipulation of language so endemic in its use by troublemakers both at home and abroad)
2. The singular de Tocqueville’s ever-relevant, ever-insightful, ever-enduring Democracy in America (to understand our unique historical strengths and weaknesses and how they have factored into our democracy)
3. Amu Chua’s Political Tribes, an account of American tribalism (a force that we must understand and fight against more effectively, as it is tearing our country apart)
4. Robert Putnam’s seminal Bowling Alone (to understand how important social capital and civic engagement are in creating and maintaining a strong society)
5. The documentary Active Measures (to properly understand the methods by which Putin is attacking and harming our democracy)
6. Schoolhouse Rock(the episodes on American government and history, to show how learning about civics can be fun and also appeal to young Americans)

Professor Rangappa’s cocktail of learning is a foundation for a national societal strategy:

1. Understand how anti-democratic forces work to distort reality and language, along with rewriting history, in a war on reality we have to win
2. Know ourselves from an objective perspective (the good, the bad, and the ugly)
3. Understand how corrosive our own tribalism in America is and how we can fight it even before taking into account foreign efforts to exploit it
4. Gain a newfound appreciation for social capital and civic engagement so that we can restructure society to prioritize these vital pillars of healthy democracy
5. Know our chief foreign enemy, Vladimir Putin, and his methods, as well as how and why he has been successful in damaging America
6. Remember how important it is to start with civics and understanding our history and system overall and at a young age so that we may revive our moribund civics curricula for all American students going forward

Ultimately, such a strategy and priority-resetting will help us revive and further realize our Founding Fathers’ vision for America.

Virtue, then, along with biodefense and information warfare, is also a national security issue.

If you are rolling your eyes a bit with the serious suggestion that “we as individuals must be better and do more,” know that this consideration of virtue was of primary concern to the Founding Fathers and many great men before and after them.  They might not have used the term “national security” the way we do and I just did, but it was still a primary national security issue for our Founders nonetheless.

Few have articulated this sentiment as well and with such authority, and perhaps none better, then James Madison himself—eventual fourth president and architect and overall author of the U.S. Constitution—when he was making the case to the public in 1788, in writing and anonymously, for the adoption of that Constitution in The Federalist, in “No. 55,” to be exact:

As there is a degree of depravity in mankind which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust, so there are other qualities in human nature which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence.  Republican government presupposes the existence of these qualities in a higher degree than any other form.  Were the pictures which have been drawn by the political jealousy of some among us faithful likenesses of the human character, the inference would be, that there is not sufficient virtue among men for self-government; and that nothing less than the chains of despotism can restrain them from destroying and devouring one another.

In other words, “We the People” must be worthy enough as a people—enough of us individually so that it is true in a collective sense—or this whole democracy thing is not going to work out so well.

Yes, in the short term, we must act boldly at the highest levels of our government and international bodies to prepare for the next pandemic and our first major bioawarfare or bioterrorist attack.  But in the long-run, we must fix our ailing society which produced such an unconscionable, unforgivable response to the novel coronavirus in the first place.  And as ambitious as my Cabinet-level Department of Pandemic Preparedness and Response proposal will be demonstrated to be, it will be that second task that will be the far more challenging one.

Cassandra: Even then I told my people all the grief to come…

Aieeeee! —
the pain, the terror! the birth-pang of the seer 
who tells the truth — 
                                     it whirls me, oh, 
the storm comes again, the crashing chords!…

Leader[/Chorus]: Poor creature, you 
and the end you see so clearly. I pity you.

—Agamemnon, 1216-1344, by Aeschylus (458 BCE), Robert Fagles translation

Correction appended: Gen. Russel Honoré’s name was previously misspelled.

In the interest of full disclosure, Brian interned for Joe Biden from September-December, 2006. He is currently in no way professionally affiliated with the Biden 2020 campaign, nor is receiving any compensation from it nor the Democratic Party nor any related super-PACs, campaigns, or other political groups involved in the 2020 nominating contests and elections.

© 2020 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

This article is also available to be read as five separate articles:

• 1-A Brief, Non-Comprehensive Survey of Bioweapons, Biowarfare, and Bioterrorism History in Light of the Coronavirus Pandemic
• 2-America’s History of Failure in Unconventional and Asymmetric Warfare Is Instructive for Our War with the Coronavirus
• 3-Why the Coronavirus Pandemic and America’s Disastrous Response Will Inspire Future Use of Bioweapons
• 4-The Harsh Truths Coronavirus Has Exposed
• 5-Coronavirus and History, Russia and Italy, the War for Reality, and the Nexus of It All

Brian E. Frydenborg is an American freelance writer, academic, and consultant from the New York City area. You can follow and contact him on Twitter: @bfry1981.  He also just recently authored A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia.

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here and, of course, please share the hell out of this article!!

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) January 5, 2020

Here is the unedited version of an article published today by Al Bawaba where major edits drastically changing the focus of the piece were made without consultation or my approval. The editorial line felt discussing Trump’s unfitness for office and the Cuban Missile Crisis were “asides” that were “highly subjective” (Game of Thrones? Maybe, but the points are well-accented by that reference, too), but since such considerations are objectively important and specifically central to this article I felt the need to publish in full here.

“The truest cause (alêthestatê prophasis) I consider to be the one that was least evident in public discussion (logos). I believe that the Athenians, because they had grown in power and terrified the Spartans, made war inevitable (anankasai).” Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 1.23

WASHINGTON—The past week has been a week of incredibly dramatic and historic escalations between Iran and the U.S. in the Middle East—specifically in Iraq—that have put both countries dramatically closer to war than at any time in years, possibly decades.

Climate of Escalation in an Increasingly Unstable Arena

After some relatively banal but escalating tit-for-tat, first came what were dramatic attacks against the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, Iraq, involving pro-Iranian militias and almost certainly orchestrated by Iran.  This was a very bold move on the part of Iran, to say the least.  They may or may not have been inspired in part by Trump being under siege from the U.S. House of Representatives and its impeachment of him, and with Trump, we know domestic concerns are rarely far from his foreign policy moves (hell, that’s exactly why Trump has been impeached).

Just as dramatic an escalation, perhaps even more so, was American President Donald Trump’s ordering a strike to kill one of Iran’s top generals and almost certainly a man involved in orchestrating the attacks against the U.S. Embassy: Major-General Qassem Soleimani, commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps’s Quds Force and the mastermind behind Iran’s military adventures abroad, especially in Iraq and Syria.  Over many years, he at times targeted American military personnel (killing hundreds and injuring thousands), other times he targeted ISIS.

Make no mistake about it: not only is the entire region from Yemen and Saudi Arabia through Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, the Persian Gulf, Iran, and Afghanistan all ripe like tinder before a conflagration, that conflagration may have already started and there may be little to no chance of putting it out before it spreads and consumes much.  In fact, it is hard to see how things do not erupt.

Before these latest developments, things were already terrible in the region:

• Yemen was a horror-show of a mess.
• Israel’s political leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, is facing an existential domestic politics crisis even as escalation between Israeli forces on one side and Iran and its proxies on the other had been occurring all throughout 2019; throughout the same period, Palestinian areas simmered with opposition to the status quo of Israel’s illegal occupation and settlement expansion in the West Bank along with the siege of Gaza.
• Lebanon is facing historic protests and frustration with its typically paralyzed government, of which Hezbollah—Iran’s primary proxy militia—is a part.
• Syria is still dealing with its long, brutal civil war, now seeming to wind down even as new intrigue has developed with a massive Turkish incursion and a dramatic, sudden, irresponsible partial U.S. withdrawal that betrayed key Kurdish allies who had been fighting ISIS, a withdrawal that may now allow a resurgence of ISIS.
• Iraq is reeling from major unrest and frustration from its own people directed at the government, forcing the recent resignation of its prime minister; key issues were corruption and many Iraqis feeling like their leaders were selling them out to Iran, and it seems Iranian-backed forces were behind much of the killing of hundreds of protesters.
• Iran has itself been in the midst of its largest violent protests since the Islamic Revolution of 1979; the current round has seen some 1,500 people killed.  Iran is also enriching Uranium at high levels again since the collapse of the Obama Administration’s nuclear deal, a collapse irrationally instigated by the Trump Administration.
• In Afghanistan, the Taliban is resurgent and Trump has signaled he wants out of Afghanistan as major reporting from The Washington Post suggests U.S. officials for years may have been less than forthcoming about the level of progress being made there.

A Horrible Game of Chicken

In the context of the above Iraq situation, Iran was clearly hoping to drum up anti-American sentiment to counter anti-Iranian sentiment that had been boiling over.  Whatever Iranian leaders thought America might do in response, they probably figured that a senior government official like Soleimani was off limits; they are probably as surprised as anyone else.

Soleimani has been pretty much the only Iranian military official you would see with any regularity in news reports: in other words, Iran has no replacement of his stature, ability, and experience, and his death is a devastating blow to Iran’s senior leadership and its political, intelligence, and military objectives as Soleimani was perhaps the most effective operator in the Middle East.

We are in that Great Events of History realm where things tend to take on momentum and will of their own, where managing what happens becomes more difficult and far messier.  During the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, we had serious minds with U.S. President John F. Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev exercising leadership and guiding events, each acting against pressure for further escalation from their own hardliners, a situation that still nearly plunged the world into nuclear war.  Before the dust on this current crisis settles, we must be prepared to be forced to watch as helpless bystanders watching powerful people make bad decision after bad decision (even a good decision taken in a vacuum often becomes a bad one).

The current U.S. Commander in Chief is facing his greatest test by far right now, and there is little in his acts as president prior to now that should reassure anyone in this moment: his public statements and the corroborated reporting that comes from sources within his own Administration (many of whom have parted ways with that Administration) speak for themselves and demolish the idea that the perception of the President of the United States as unfit for office has anything to do with partisanship.  The man whom his own top chosen advisors have repeatedly called him unfit for office is now in charge of managing a dangerous crisis he knows little about that may already be a war.

At the same time, the Iranian leadership has shown its willingness to gamble irresponsibly and increasingly so, behavior the nuclear deal Trump had abandoned was designed to mitigate.  After scrapping the deal, Trump and his Administration only offered threats to Iran, and Iran responded with its own increasing hostility, increasing its aggressiveness in Yemen and against U.S. allies Israel and Saudi Arabia (who knows where we would be if there had been sustained, robust engagement after that deal had been implemented, not to say necessarily crises would have been avoided, but better to try to avoid them than instigate them).

Thus, both American and Iranian leadership have shown predilections that shun de-escalation and opt for escalation and surprise.  But in the geopolitical situation just described, surprise is the last thing those hoping for peace and stability should want, and such sudden, dramatic escalations ring of the series of unfortunate events that escalated into World War I.  A year ago, I wrote for West Point’s Modern War Institute of the urgent lessons of WWI precisely with scenarios like our current one in mind, and I fear that the lessons I noted as urgent are going unheeded by leadership on both sides of this unfolding struggle.

Clear Acts, Unclear Consequences

The collateral damage will be severe and not geographically contained.

Like never before, Iraq is about to become (even more so) a battlefield between the U.S. and Iran, threatening to undermine everything that the U.S. has tried to build there since 2003.  There are places in Iraq where U.S. troops are vulnerable, and this is also true in the few places where U.S. troops remain in Syria.

Let us also not forget that Russia and Iran are allies, even if uneasy ones: Soleimani had briefed Russia’s leadership in Moscow before Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to militarily intervene in Syria, the Iranian becoming an important factor in convincing the Russians to intervene and in planning their military support of the Assad regime, a close ally of both Iran and Russia; Soleimani even met personally with Putin and continued to coordinate with Russian military leaders after Russian forces began fighting in Syria.  Those Russian military forces are deployed throughout Syria, sometimes between spots where Iranian and Iranian-supported forces may try to take on U.S. forces and their remaining allies.  Russia—which is itself engaged in clearly hostile actions against the United States—could accidentally and/or deliberately be drawn into this fight explicitly and/or covertly, adding yet another perilous dimension to all this.

If this is good news for anyone, it’s ISIS.  The main fighters against ISIS were the U.S., the Kurds, and Iran.  The U.S. and Iran will now focus their attention on each other, and Trump’s sad withdrawal from northern Syria means the Kurds are reeling and trying to defend themselves from the Turks now more than ISIS.  The terrorist group will most certainly exploit this situation to further its comeback, a dimension that only makes this mess even messier.

Consider, too, that U.S., Israeli, Lebanese, Iraqi, and Iranian leaders are all facing domestic political crises even (mostly) without war within their borders, and that, especially in the cases of President Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a conflict with Iran would be desirable politically as each are facing concerted threats to remove them from office through extraelectoral means and they would be eager to rally their publics to focus on external threats, diverting attention from their own misconduct.

Iran, likewise, would love to quell its domestic unrest by focusing on a conflict with the U.S.

Conversely, the hapless leaders of Lebanon and Iraq are at this moment terrified of their countries being torn asunder as proxy battlegrounds and will very much be at the mercy of the decisions of Washington and Tehran.  Conflicts in Yemen and Afghanistan (the latter on Iran’s border and with plenty of vulnerable U.S. troops) would also see further escalation and intervention as Iran and the U.S. will seek to harm each other wherever they can, and we have not even gotten to the global reach of Hezbollah.

After such a move as the assassination of Qassem Soleimani, it would be politically impossible for Iran not to respond massively.  And it will be politically impossible for the U.S. to not respond to that.  I have written of the general pressures of the anarchic interstate system before, and we have here a moment where pressure classically reduces the options of the belligerents.  We really may be in a Thucydides trap, where war is almost inevitable and takes on a mind and momentum of its own, a reference to the ancient Greek historian Thucydides’s opinion that the fear of one power (Sparta) concerning the rise in power of another (Athens) made war inevitable (1.23).

Another piece I wrote for the Modern War Institute at West Point looked at the chaos of the final season of Game of Thrones as instructive for reality, and we are certainly staring at chaos now even as we help to unleash it.  The question is, will leaders look at chaos as a “ladder,” as Lord “Littlefinger” Petyr Baelish did, or as something to be avoided, “a gaping pit,” as Lord Varys did?  The Varyses seem few and far between when it comes to those leaders driving current events.

A Gaping Pit

One would hope leaders on both sides are considering all these things, and have plans for how to deal with these multiple varied flashpoints.  History has shown that such hope is often misplaced, that the cooler heads of the Cuban Missile Crisis are more the exception than the norm.  The above axes I have mentioned are by no means all the fronts on which a regional conflict could quickly become a more widespread war and even a global one, one which may even involve Russia, Israel, Turkey, multiple terrorist groups, and crucial oil shipping routes, with leaders mixing domestic politics and foreign policy in ways not for the better of either.  From the 2020 election to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, to the security of Jordan and a further inflaming of the Sunni-Shiite conflict, there are a number of fronts beyond the direct confrontation between the U.S. and Iran that could be consumed by the chaos unfolding before our very eyes, “swallowed” by its “gaping pit.”

Actions in the next days, weeks, and months could set the board for the next century, much in the way World War I did and, in many ways, set the map for many of the preexisting conflicts into which this American-Iranian conflict will play and which will play into it.  Every step, every act, every missile right now carries a weight that, if not properly respected (and it seems clear it will not be) risks throwing not just the Middle East, but the world into chaos, bloodshed, displacement, and recession that will make most recent conflicts seem quaint by comparison.

For all the talk of how the U.S. might fall into a Thucydides trap with  China, here it is in one now, with Iran.  Nothing was inevitable about coming to this point, but now that we are here, some disturbing events are now inevitable.  This is, of course, the most likely outcome from the beginning since the Trump Administration abandoned the nuclear deal that was stemming most if not all (but perhaps even all) of the current dynamics leading to this juncture.  One would hope a “lesson” to not casually abandon logical diplomacy would emerge, but then perhaps the bar is so low as to be meaningless?

In Trump, we have a brutal reminder about how history can be dangerously ignored at will to the peril of all.  He will not read this article, nor any of the countless others calling for reflection on the sheer weightiness of this moment.  Will we read thoughtful pieces?  Will our voting public?  Iran will now inevitably be front-and-center in the 2020 election, forcing voters to at least partly realize they are not just voting on Trump, but on the kind of U.S. foreign policy they want, the kind of world they want to help create.  How any of this turns out remains to be seen, but simply hoping for cooler heads to prevail, as was the case with the brink of nuclear war in 1962, seems today naïve at best and irresponsible at worst, with our current cast of characters misstepping from Mar-a-Lago to Persia and altogether too many other locations in a conflict that will refuse to be contained.

© 2020 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Brian E. Frydenborg is an American freelance writer, academic, and consultant from the New York City area. You can follow and contact him on Twitter: @bfry1981 and on his news website, Real Context News.  He also just recently authored A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia.

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

 Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse August 19, 2016 

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) August 19th, 2016 UPDATED August 21st to include information on “evidence” against Gülen

tccb.gov.tr

AMMAN — Since the failure of the dramatic coup attempt in Turkey, we are witnessing the methodical destruction of everything democratic about Turkey, save the exception of the majority’s ability to impose its will on the nation as a whole through periodic voting: a true Tocquevillian “tyranny of the majority”  empowered and sustained through Orwellian means.

Erdoğan’s Mob Rule: The Tyranny of the AKP Majority

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is increasingly using rhetoric that credits he and the people with “victory” over the coup plotters.  The lesson: Erdoğan is the people, and the people are him; they are one: he speaks for them, they speak for him.

Using such rhetoric, Erdoğan for weeks exhorted his followers to engage in nightly demonstrations since the coup failed, providing free public transportation to—and free food and water at—the rallies throughout to encourage mass attendance and culminating in series of final, massive rallies in 80 cities on Sunday, August 8th, including one with millions of people in Istanbul that might have been the nation’s largest rally ever. Though these rallies received robust support and encouragement from the government, the country’s main Kurdish political party—the HDP, the third-largest party in Turkey’s parliament—was excluded.  Considering that many other demonstrations not favorable to Erdoğan’s agenda are banned and met with force at the hands of the police, considering that Erdoğan’s ruling AKP party is using government funds to stage repeated, continuous political rallies that exclude a major party representing a minority with which the government is in a brewing mini-civil war (or insurgency, if you like, which is claiming lives even now) in Turkey’s southeast, this must certainly be considered an improper use of power in a country that is supposedly a “democracy.”  

Kayhan Ozer/Presidential Press Service via AP

The again, this should not be a surprise, as Erdoğan is a man who seems to have deliberately stoked violent conflict with the Kurds as a way to reverse his party’s June 2015 electoral setback in which it lost its parliamentary majority, and the country’s Kurdish HDP won seats for the first time; in response to this, the Turkish president campaigned on fear and offering to be a strongman for Turks against the Kurdish militants (whom he falsely blamed for ISIS attacks); he and his party reveled in the ensuing divisiveness and conflict and the ploy would succeed in increasing support for the AKP in time for new elections. 

The new elections came about because a coalition failed to form in time after the June elections for the first time in Turkish history, and many saw Erdoğan violating the constitutionally-mandated neutrality the president is supposed to observe during the coalition-forming process, as he aggressively pushed for new elections (an unprecedented move) rather than exhaust the options for coalition-building, declining to ask the main opposition party to form a coalition after his own party failed to do so, clearly hoping that his AKP would perform better if given another chance in snap elections.  His AKP was able to erase those setbacks to the tune of catapulting itself to a solid majority in the ensuing November 2015 elections while the Kurdish party lost some seats.  Notably, that election’s legitimacy was questioned both in terms of the run-up to the election suffering from a climate of government hostility to Erdoğan’s and his party’s critics in the press and in terms of violence in the country’s southeast, which made it difficult for many of the country’s Kurds to vote.

The recent post-coup rallies were also taking on a sort of cult-like quality, as the populist overtones merged with a passionate devotion to the singular man, Erdoğan, with signs at the rally held by participants displaying such slogans as “You are a gift from god, Erdoğan” and “Order us to die and we will do it.”  Official banners advertising the rally, besides emphasizing the free transportation, noted “The triumph is democracy’s, the squares are the people’s,” a slogan also emblazoned on massive banners hung from major buildings and bridges.  In texts to his supporters, Erdoğan has made it explicitly clear he wanted these rallies to “To teach the traitor, the terrorist, a lesson,” referring to Gülen’s supporters and Gülen himself, whose movement Erdoğan has for some time dubiously labeled a terrorist one.  The lesson is clear: Democracy and the people have “won,” they support Erdoğan, and the people and Erdoğan together now own the public square and have a monopoly on acceptable discourse and demonstrations; the message behind all that is that those with a different message are not welcome and are being put on notice, including Gülenists and Kurds, together consisting of a huge chunk of the existing opposition to Erdoğan’s politics.

As expected, these rallies and this message have had a chilling effect on Turkish citizens who don’t support Erdoğan and his brand of populist, religious, and chauvinistic nationalism.  As Tocqueville wrote two centuries ago:

“Monarchs had, so to speak, materialized oppression; the democratic republics of the present day have rendered it as entirely an affair of the mind as the will which it is intended to coerce. Under the absolute sway of one man the body was attacked in order to subdue the soul; but the soul escaped the blows which were directed against it and rose proudly superior. Such is not the course adopted by tyranny in democratic republics; there the body is left free, and the soul is enslaved. The master no longer says: “You shall think as I do or you shall die”; but he says: “You are free to think differently from me and to retain your life, your property, and all that you possess; but you are henceforth a stranger among your people. You may retain your civil rights, but they will be useless to you, for you will never be chosen by your fellow citizens if you solicit their votes; and they will affect to scorn you if you ask for their esteem. You will remain among men, but you will be deprived of the rights of mankind. Your fellow creatures will shun you like an impure being; and even those who believe in your innocence will abandon you, lest they should be shunned in their turn. Go in peace! I have given you your life, but it is an existence worse than death.””

The Recently-Unprecedented Numbers of Turkey’s Purge

CNN

Even more ominously, these rallies are also set against the backdrop of a massive purge, a crackdown not seen in the world for years and not seen in a democracy for much longer, one drawing comparisons to the purges in more (relatively) recent history of Mao’s Cultural Revolution in China and following Iran’s 1979 revolution.  As of August 2nd:

• Almost 9,000 police have been fired
• Over 10,000 soldiers have been detained and almost half of the top generals and admirals have been arrested or fired
• Over 2,700 members of the judiciary have been suspended
• Some 21,000 private school teachers have been suspended
• Some 21,700 staff members of the Ministry of Education have been fired
• Some 1,500 university deans—every university dean in Turkey—have been made to resign
• Some academics who added their names to a petition calling for an end to Turkey’s war against Kurds were suspended
• Over 100 news media outlets were forced to close
• Over 1,500 ministry of finance officials were suspended

Overall, about 35,000 people have been held for questioning, with about half of those undergoing formal arrests and facing trials and over 81,000 officials have been suspended or fired from their positions.  The aforementioned major Kurdish political party has had its offices raided and some its people detained, as well.  The arrests are continuous and ongoing, include non-servile religious clerics, and as of just this Monday, the judiciary’s preeminent Palace of Justice was raided, with well over 100 people there being detained, and the same is just now beginning to happen to dozens of private-sector businesses, with well over 100 executives now being sought to be put in detention.

And the thing is, all this has been planned for years.

A Far-Reaching Purge Long-Planned

Erdoğan’s people have been anticipating potential coups for years, even claiming this recent one has been something that has been building up for decades.  Whatever their assertions, what is less debatable is that Erdoğan’s people in the government have for years had plans and lists of people ready to be acted upon were just such an event like the recent coup to occur, and possibly even in its absence (indeed, Turkish officials admit preparation was already underway before the coup).

In other worse, this purge is not a natural, organic reaction to a surprise event. Erdoğan even referred to the coup attempt as “a gift from God,” which makes total sense once you understand what he is doing with Turkey’s current purge.

The ostensible targets are people who seem to support, no matter how vaguely or minutely, the movement of reclusive Muslim cleric Fethullah Gülen, who lives in a sort of self-imposed exile in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania and whose movement the Turkish government accuses of a massive, society-and-government-wide fifth column infiltration of Turkey, with the government using rhetoric reminiscent of Josef Stalin’s manner of describing vast conspiracies of supposed enemies of the Soviet State.  In reality, the current Turkish purges go far beyond coup plotters to anyone who is pro-Gülen and clearly even beyond that—all this is even by Turkish officials’ admission—and Erdoğan is clearly using the purge to blunt opposition and cement his own hold on power.  Even nearly 100 Turkish soccer referees have been accused of being coup plotters, and drama around the coup has even ensnared one of Turkey’s soccer greats who was key in Turkey’s remarkable 3rd-place finish in the 2002 World Cup as well as a Turkish NBA basketball star, with Turkey recently issuing an arrest warrant for the former.  

In fact, so many people are being arrested that Turkey has decided to release tens of thousands of non-violent criminals from prison to make room for all the judges, teachers, lawyers, journalists and others who have been arrested as part of the purge, since the prison system is now newly over-capacity because of the purge.

Gülen and Erdoğan: From Allies to Enemies

Selahattin Sevi / Zaman Daily News via EPA

Ironically, Gülen and his movement were allied with Erdoğan and his AKP years ago; each side operated on a platform of religious reformers pushing back against Turkey’s longstanding secular establishment elite in the early ’00s, and Erdogan and his party needed Gülen’s and his movement to get enough public support, to have the bodies to carry out purges of many of the secularists, to provide the manpower to replace those purged.  

However, the more restrained and more moderately-Islamist Gülenists eventually became alarmed at Erdoğan’s lurch towards authoritarianism and when they moved to prosecute close allies of Erdogan for very real corruption in 2013 (the largest corruption scandal in recent Turkish history), the two had a massive falling out, with Erdoğan’s government since questionably labeling Gülen’s movement as terrorist group.  

It seems in Erdoğan’s Turkey, there is no room for rivals or shared credit: in seeking to discredit Gülen’s movement, Erdoğan is trying to rewrite the narrative of history that saw Gülen and his movement work hand in hand with Erdoğan and his AKP to reshape Turkey and wrest control of it from the secular elite establishment put in place by Atatürk when he founded the modern Turkish state from the post-WWI ashes of the Ottoman Empire; much like the ancient Roman occasional tradition of damnatio memoriae of trying to wipe disgraced (or sometimes just rival-to-the-new-ruler) figures from history, Erdoğan is seeing to it Gülen and his followers are removed from the story in any positive light, that only he and his AKP supporters (“the people,” as the pro-Erdoğan language characterizes them, as if there are not patriotic Turks who are against Erdoğan) will be seen as the founders, builders, and saviors of the new Turkey.  As Orwell wrote in early 1944, “The really frightening thing about totalitarianism is not that it commits atrocities but that it attacks the concept of objective truth: it claims to control the past as well as the future.”

Having now pushed Gülenists out of the public sphere and electrified his base, Turkey’s president can rely on his supporters, then, to help stifle current and future dissent through social pressure, easing the burden on the government, which, of course, will still be there to use force when social pressure fails.  The failed coup has given Erdoğan and his rather unlettered, chauvinist, now loudly-assertive AKP crowd the ability to control even more so Turkish education, police, courts, media, even the military—essentially, all the tools needed to have a stranglehold on societal mechanisms used to form public opinion—so that over time, the ease and ability to stridently go against the majority will be limited, indeed (in case you’re wondering, the government already had a strong dominance over the country’s clerical religious establishment).  For Tocqueville: 

“When an opinion has taken root among a democratic people and established itself in the minds of the bulk of the community, it afterwards persists by itself and is maintained without effort, because no one attacks it. Those who at first rejected it as false ultimately receive it as the general impression, and those who still dispute it in their hearts conceal their dissent; they are careful not to engage in a dangerous and useless conflict.”

Gülen’s Extradition: A (Useful) Excuse for Anti-Americanism

The fact that Gülen is living in Pennsylvania is extremely convenient for Erdoğan, who has decided to play the anti-Western, anti-American card for fairly full effect in Turkey.  Most Turks actually think that the U.S. government was behind the coup, a belief amply fed by senior Turkish officials directly accusing the U.S. of supporting the coup, by wild reports in the Turkish media, and by even Erdoğan himself implying the U.S. at least supported it in some ways: the Turkish president  went so far as to accuse a top U.S. general of “siding with coup plotters” and to exclaim that “This coup attempt has actors inside Turkey, but its script was written outside. Unfortunately, the West is supporting terrorism and stands by coup plotters” (ironic because it is Turkey that seems to actually be supporting terrorism, according to evidence).  Such accusations made by Erdoğan are more or less red meat for his base, and he has been rhetorically issuing ultimatums to the U.S. government, offering a stark choice: hand Gülen over to Turkish authorities or lose your relationship with Turkey.  

Erdoğan’s repeated calls for the U.S. to hand Gülen over are basically a well-orchestrated ploy to drum up anti-Americanism in Turkey: the U.S., of course, will only seriously consider a formal extradition request with compelling evidence, and Erdoğan can keep repeating these calls without submitting a formal extradition request and keep fomenting anti-Americanism in the process.  In fact, Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yıldırım even explicitly linked the future level of anti-Americanism in Turkey to whether or not the U.S. handed over Gülen, saying “Whether or not the anti-Americanism in Turkey will continue is…dependent on this.”   There is certainly some truth to this, but it is also hard to imagine Turks suddenly having a dramatically more favorable opinion of the U.S. just because the U.S. would hand over the government’s prime suspect in a coup for which America is being blamed as a major player anyway.

What is certain is that there is no shortage of people who will be absolutely convinced that the U.S. is siding with Gülen and that it support the coup, and America not immediately handing him over only adds fuel to that fire.  This is a winning situation for Erdoğan: he gets to keep fanning anti-Gülen and anti-American sentiment, and especially since Gülen is still safe in Pennsylvania, Erdoğan can keep Turkey on a crisis footing, allowing him to easily continue his abuse of power, since Gülen, shielded by American non-extradition, can be framed by Erdoğan as a continual threat justifying extreme measures.  Clearly, then, Gülen is infinitely more useful to Erdoğan as a distant, U.S.-residing boogeyman than as a vanquished (possibly even executed) “traitor” in Turkey.  

August 21st UPDATE: Thus far, while Turkey has submitted documents related to Gülen, the U.S. did not consider the first batch it has reviewed to comprise a formal extradition request, and, in the words of one Justice Department official, those documents only detail “allegations of certain alleged criminal activities that pre-date the coup” effort, that “[a]t this point, Turkish authorities have not put forward a formal extradition request based on evidence that he was involved in the coup” plot; in other words, zero evidence about Gülen’s involvement in the failed coup has been provided.

While it is theoretically possible that Turkey will be able to provide a formal extradition request with evidence sufficient to merit the U.S. honoring an extradition request, I would wager that this will not happen.  For one thing, there may be no such evidence in existence; another point to consider is that if Turkey did have such documents, Erdoğan and other Turkish officials would not likely be so intensely publicly pressuring the U.S. to hand Gülen over; if they had a rock solid case, it would be an unnecessary rocking of the boat.  Instead, because they are seeming to lack the appropriate evidence, Turkey’s president may be hoping that his leverage on issues related to Syrian refugees, to ISIS, and to NATO will be enough to get the U.S. to cave in under pressure (thinking that is likely hubristic and a course of action that is not likely to happen without evidence).

Then again, maybe Erdoğan seeks anti-Americanism and drama with NATO for its own sake…

In NATO Marriage, Erdoğan (Turkey’s Putin) Flirts with Putin

Photo by Pool photo by Alexei Nikolsky

Another more devious game would be that Erdoğan might even be seeking to court Russian favor; if Erdoğan is not delusional, he has to realize his increasing authoritarianism may very well eventually earn Turkey an expulsion from NATO, at which U.S. Sec. of State John Kerry recently hinted.  The Turkish president is already making nice with Putin even after Russo-Turkish relations reached a nadir late last year when Turkey shot down a Russian combat jet after a series of repeated Russian violations of Turkish airspace on the Syrian border.  It should not go unnoticed that the pilots who shot down Russia’s jet were arrested shortly after the coup for allegedly being part of it, with the arrests announced after Putin had earlier quite forcefully condemned the attempted coup and had personally called Erdoğan to offer his support.  Perhaps this was a quid pro quo that lay the ground for their August in-person meeting, in which both leaders signaled the beginning of a new, more positive phase in their relationship.  Perhaps Erdoğan is warming up to another potential ally—one very similar to himself—in Putin, even as he distances himself from current allies that are very dissimilar to him.  In in the next few years, if I read that Turkey has left or been forced out of NATO and joined a military alliance with Russia (which would only be a dream come true for Russia on so many levels), I will hardly be surprised.

Make no mistake, Erdoğan is Turkey’s Putin now, just more impatient and without Putin’s relative charm and subtlety.  No wonder the two seem to be patching up their differences and coming together: they operate in very similar ways.

Conclusion: In Erdoğan, A Tyranny Orwell Would Recognize All Too Well (and One that Is Here to Stay)

Chris Mcgrath/Getty Images

For now, Turkey is clearly becoming a repressive society, and the moment of the failed coup marks a decidedly rapid increase in Erdoğan’s program of centralization, consolidation, repression, Islamicization, and anti-Westernism/anti-Americanism.

Last year, in between the two Turkish parliamentary elections, we saw how professional official investigators were stating certain attacks were very likely ISIS attacks, while Erdoğan claimed they could be the work of Kurds and/or the Assad regime, twisting the facts to suit his own end and contradicting his own officials in his own government.  I would not at all be shocked if it turns out those law enforcement officials have just been purged, and Erdoğan will almost surely make sure that now, any government official will speak one thing and one thing only: whatever Erdoğan wants to be said.  Now, when there are terrorism attacks in Turkey, the world should not give much credibility to whatever information comes from official Turkish channels; those interested in the truth are gone from the picture, because those remaining, as the propaganda slogans remind us, are there to serve Erdoğan, because his will is the people’s will and those who don’t agree, who are not on board with the program, are traitors and terrorists.  Just like Gülen and anyone who even sympathizes with them…

It seems again appropriate to return to Orwell, who was only too well aware that dictators will do everything they can to control language.  In his famous “Politics and the English Language” essay, Orwell remarked that “Political language—and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists—is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”  This purge shows that that is exactly what Erdoğan is doing, and I, for one, won’t be trusting much of anything the Turkish government says from now on because I know I won’t be hearing the words of professional public servants, but acolytes to Erdoğan’s increasingly Stalinist-like cult, all while Erdoğan seeks to eclipse Atatürk both as the preeminent modern Turk and and as the embodiment of Turkey itself, a Turkey he is now successfully remaking in his autocratic, religious image, pushing aside the democratic, secular values of Atatürk.

Orwell realized that systematically attacking basic freedoms of expression was, in effect, a demonstration of contempt for rights and people in general when he wrote that “Threats to freedom of speech, writing and action, though often trivial in isolation, are cumulative in their effect and, unless checked, lead to a general disrespect for the rights of the citizen.”

Before the outcome was certain, the coup attempt was, I noted at the time, the definitive battle for the soul of Turkey and its future.  Well, for the foreseeable future, that soul and that future will be embodied by Erdoğan and be devoid of most democratic norms, respect for human and minority rights, a free press, and honest political discourse.  We seem more and more surely to be approaching a point where it will be impossible to say otherwise about Turkey, if we have not already arrived at or passed by it.

Long after the Roman Republic’s political functionality and integrity had crumbled, Caesar was said to have remarked that “The Republic is nothing—just a name, without substance or form” (Seutonius Lives of the Caesars The Deified Julius Caesar 77).  Today, the substance and form of Turkey’s republic is in dire straits, the prospects for its survival quite poor, its future for anyone concerned with democracy bleak; such is Erdoğan’s Turkey.  For me, Erdoğan’s resilience and increasing power was one of the big stories of 2015, and I noted at the beginning of the year that Turkey’s would-be sultan was poised to be quite a problem in 2016, and thus far, he has certainly exceeded even my grim expectations.

See related article: The Definitive Battle for the Soul of Turkey & Its Future Is Happening Right Now & It Is This Coup

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here. 

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This military coup is the defining moment for post-Cold War Turkey.  Whatever happens here, the trajectory of Turkey for decades to come will be set: an emerging dictatorship under the increasingly autocratic Putin-wannabe Erdoğan or a chance at a democratic reset at the cost of both democratic procedure and a military takeover.

 Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse July 15-16, 2016   

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) July 15th-16th, 2016

Emrah Gurel

AMMAN — There are a few things to consider as we watch the astounding scenes unfolding in Turkey—including fighting on the streets of a major European city: Istanbul, one of the world’s great cities—of that country’s first military coup since 1980.  I did note at the beginning of this year that Turkey’s controversial President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s destabilizing policies were one of the great political risks for 2016, but I certainly did not anticipate a coup when I wrote those words.

The first thing to understand is that this is the seminal movement of Turkish history of the post-Cold War era.  Turkey will be defined for decades (perhaps many decades) by what happens there in the next few hours, days, and weeks.

It is a battle between Erdoğan and his opponents, between the religious and the secular, between conflict and peace, between authoritarianism and democracy, between oppression and freedom, between moving backwards and moving forwards.

Right now, we are looking at a pretty binary set of outcomes: either this coup will fail, or it will succeed.

Burhan Ozbilici

If the coup fails, Erdoğan will use this coup as an excuse to do everything he can to increase his own power, dismantle Turkey’s democratic civil liberties protections, crack down on all his opposition (political or journalistic), continue to flirt with the Islamicization of Turkey, and, in short, set the stage for a Turkish dictatorship.  If you doubt this, just remember that Erdoğan blamed terrorist attacks in Turkey that were very likely carried out by ISIS on Kurds so that, after suffering a major political setback in which Erdoğan’s party lost its majority in the Turkish parliament, he was able to exploit those attacks to generate conflict with the Kurds, weaken his political oppositionand Turkey’s main Kurdish party, and mount a political comeback victory for his party just months after its major defeat.

This is a man who allows his government to prosecute and convict a man for comparing Erdoğan to The Lord of the Rings’ Gollum.

Reuters

And tonight? Erdoğan pretty much said tonight that he is going to begin a massive crackdown in response to this coup, and is repeating this live to a crowd of thousands of supporters as I write.

*****

A broader philosophical question will also be asked: at what point are undemocratic means justified to save democracy from itself?  The suicidal tendencies in democracy are as old as democracy itself, stretching back into the ancient world and of primary concern to America’s Founding Fathers.  If an abusive and autocratic leader uses democratic means to come to power, then uses that power and fear to destroy democratic values over time, can a coup be justified?  What is worse?  Allowing a would-be tyrant and the poor choices of the people to give their own democracy an assisted suicide, or allowing a military coup to depose a legally elected government to hypocritically save a democracy from these very things?  There are hardly simple questions, but what is clear is that too much democracy—a simply brute-force rule of a “tyranny of the majority” with little respect for minority rights, due process, or the rule of law—creates fertile ground for tyranny, a point recognized over time by Plato and Cicero, American Founding Fathers and early Presidents John Adams and James Madison, Alexis de Tocqueville and, most recently, Andrew Sullivan just about a month ago.

Burhan Ozbilici

At this point, there is still a lot of confusion over what is happening, especially in Ankara, the political seat of power in Turkey, but the best Turkey can hope for is a reset with the ouster of Erdoğan, whom coup plotters are correct to identify as the main threat to Turkish democracy, but with a minimal amount of bloodshed.  Any kind of prolonged conflict or unrest would be a disaster for Turkey, already enmeshed with conflict with its and the region’s Kurds, with ISIS, with the Assad regime in Syria, reeling from a dramatic spike in terrorism, and dealing with a major influx of millions of refugees.  But perhaps an even worse disaster would be Mr. Erdoğan retaining power; with a new mandate after surviving a coup, he would be empowered to shape Turkish politics and its military to make it all but impossible to stop him or reverse the undemocratic trajectory on which he has set his nation.

Erdoğan has already done much to weaken Turkey’s democracy.  If he stays in power, he will be stronger than ever and will certainly move forcefully in the same directions he’s been moving in for years.

Any chance of Turkey becoming part of the EU is dead for now with this coup, period, and possibly for some time if Erdoğan stays in power.

If the coup somehow prevails, Turkish democracy and stability will also be weakened, but will have stopped Erdoğan from becoming a firm Turkish Putin while giving democracy a chance with a reset.

I’d take a chance with a reset on democracy with the hope it can improve rather than continue but in an accelerated way the slow death march of Turkish democracy under Erdoğan.

Whatever becomes of this coup, there are no easy answers, not after this night; the young people in Turkey today will have to tell their children that this coup was the moment when the main battle for the soul of Turkey was fought and won (or lost).  Who will be the victor of that battle, and how that will shape Turkey, its society, and its democracy, remains to be seen.

Ismail Coskun – AP 

Read follow up article: Erdogan Leads Turkey’s Democracy on a Populist Death March After Failed Coup

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here. 

Here are many more articles by Brian E. Frydenborg.  If you think your site or another would be a good place for this content please do not hesitate to reach out to him! Feel free to share and repost on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter (you can follow him there at @bfry1981)  

Sudden, shocking, disturbing, and largely self-propelled trends in America and Europe are doing more damage to Western democracy today than Soviet armies or nuclear missiles ever did during the Cold War

Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse March 17, 2016 

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) March 17th, 2016

Clockwise: Photo/Agencies, Cheryl Evans/The Republic, AP

AMMAN — Roughly a quarter-century ago, the world seemed poised for a triumph of democracy and human rights unprecedented in human history. As Francis Fukuyama famously noted in “The End of History,” the end of the Cold War marked the end of thousands of years of ideological struggle, and the spread of Western democratic capitalist ideals all around the world was inevitable with the demise of the Soviet Union. It was the end of history as we knew it: nothing could stand anymore in the way of the West and its triumphant march forward through history.

Except, apparently, the West itself.

*****

Not a New Problem

The West and democracy being their own worst enemy is hardly a new thing.

As one historian wrote:

“The pattern of routine partisanship and factionalism, and, as a result, of all other vicious practices had arisen…It was the result of peace and an abundance of those things that mortals consider most important. I say this, because, before the destruction of…[our chief rival power], mutual consideration and restraint between the people and the…[governing elites] characterized the government…Fear of a foreign enemy preserved good political practices. But when that fear was no longer on their minds, self-indulgence and arrogance, attitudes that prosperity loves, took over. As a result the tranquility they had longed for in difficult times proved, when they got it, to be more cruel and bitter than adversity…every man acted on his own behalf, stealing, robbing, plundering. In this way all political life was torn apart between two parties, and [our political system], which had been our common ground, was mutilated…And so, joined with power, greed without moderation or measure invaded, polluted, and devastated everything, considered nothing valuable or sacred, until it brought about its own collapse.”

The above quotation is not from a Western historian of the twentieth or twenty-first centuries; rather, it is the ancient Roman historian Sallust writing in the first century B.C.E. in his The Jurgurthine War (41.1-10). He was writing of the slow self-destruction of the democratic Roman Republic, which lasted nearly 500 years, after its final triumph over Carthage. He lived to see his Republic crumble politically, dying a few years before Octavian would become first of the Roman emperors.

HBO

American Founding Father and (second) President John Adams wrote in the early nineteenth-century of democracy being its own worst enemy:

“Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide. It is in vain to say that democracy is less vain, less proud, less selfish, less ambitious, or less avaricious than aristocracy or monarchy. It is not true, in fact, and nowhere appears in history. Those passions are the same in all men, under all forms of simple government, and when unchecked, produce the same effects of fraud, violence, and cruelty.”

*****

“Flet victus, victor interiit” (The conquered mourns, the conqueror is undone)—Latin proverb

Much like ancient Rome, the West today exercised relative restraint in domestic affairs when faced with a mighty foe as the Soviet Union functioned as its Carthage. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union, the United States seemed poised to dominate the world for the foreseeable future and the European Union was on its way to producing a unified Europe that would also be a dominant global power, working in tandem with the United States to spread and maintain peace, democracy, and capitalism.

Lionel Cironneau/AP

Just a few decades later, in 2016, that vision appear to be fading.

In the United States, the presidency of George W. Bush squandered a massive budgetary surplus, the result of a prosperity not seen since the years after WWII, when Eisenhower gave America a globally-unprecedented highway system and a military that ensured it would be the dominant player in the Cold War; Bush opted to use America’s prosperity to pay for lopsided tax cuts for the wealthy and then prosecuted two disastrous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, whose costs he added to the deficit and debt, and the latter of which destabilized the Middle East more than any event since the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire after WWI.

At home, his administration (and other officials) failed miserably in addressing Hurricane Katrina as it humbled and partly destroyed New Orleans, a great American city, and did nothing to prevent the onset of the greatest global financial and economic crisis since the Great Depression (barely managing to address it in time to prevent a possible total meltdown of the global financial and economic systems).

Now, America’s first non-white president, Barack Obama, has encountered a level of obstructionism and partisanship from Congress unseen since the Civil War; the elation and hope of the election results of 2008 has given way to a level of dysfunction and gridlock that calls into question America’s ability to govern itself regardless of who sits in the White House.  As of now, the U.S. may have a vacant seat on its Supreme Court for close to, or more than, a year, the longest vacancy since the 1840s and the result of partisan obstruction on the part of the Republican Party.

Over the last few months, that Republican Party, one of America’s two main political parties since the elections of 1856, appeared on the verge of melting down in the face of the candidacy of businessman and TV personality Donald Trump; just a few days ago, it seems it reluctantly accepted that he is near-certain to be its nominee. In a few months, the United States might be able to be said to have gone in a mere-quarter century from victor of the Cold War to electing a President Trump.

Jan Kruger/Getty Images

In Europe, even in the 1990s it was demonstrated twice in the Balkans that Europe was incapable of dealing with major conflicts in its own backyard without help and, more importantly, leadership from the United States. Since then, it has failed to effectively deal with conflict in Libya, Ukraine, and Syria, all within or near its periphery. The situation in Syria has led to refugee and migrant crises unseen in the world or Europe since WWII; Europe’s response has been grossly inadequate and the influx of refugees has been one of the main catalysts for the dramatic rise all over Europe of far-right political parties that border on being fascist; they are often against the European Union and are forcefully hostile to immigrants and refugees.

Leaders like Angela Merkel of Germany, trying to show kindness and compassion to refugees, may be ousted sooner by politics rather than later for her troubles, and other governments balk at attempts to coordinate regional refugee and economic policies. In France, a rising far-right party funded by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s government may possibly come to control France in the coming years. Poland seems to be in the process of destroying its democracy.

A series of complacent governments in places like Greece, Italy, and Spain set off dramatic economic, finance, and debt crises that have severely weakened confidence in the European Union as well. There was, and still is, talk of a Greek exit (“Grexit”) from the EU. Now, there is talk of a “Brexit,” as, even after unprecedented concessions by the EU to Britain (concessions that severely undermined the EU), Britain’s public may still vote to leave the EU in a matter of months. The United Kingdom itself only recently narrowly avoided disintegration by secession from it by Scotland, a possibility which, it was just announced, will be pursued again.

AP

Even in Israel, considered a bastion of Western democracy in the Middle East, the public and government are becoming increasingly okay with the erosion of democratic values and a deeply undemocratic military occupation of the West Bank as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict stifles Israel’s left and drives its people further to the right. The assault on democratic norms in Turkey by its government is far worse. Still worse in that region, the Arab Spring has, in general, become a massive tragedy.

Archive

Additionally, democracy by no means appears stable or secure overall in either Sub-Saharan Africa or in Latin America.

Failing the Test?

Fighting in Ukraine in 2015—Mstyslav Chernov/Wikimedia Commons

As The Economist pointed out, Europe has its “little Trumps;” America might install its Trump as president. A deeply divided American public is desperate for functionality from its government, but seems incapable of electing a Congress that can produce this; after only a few years of near-total gridlock, it may turn to Trump. If there is an ensuing period of longer dysfunction, it is terrifying to imagine what Americans might opt for then.

Likewise, in Europe, as leftist leaders are challenged, weakened, and/or ousted one-by-one and are replaced by governments whose missions are resisting pressures of EU policy, as racial, ethnic, and religious tension, fears of Islamic terrorism, nativism, and demagogues become ever more commonplace, it is terrifying to envision its future, too. An autocratic Russia sits on Europe’s edge, poking and prodding from the outside, funding right-wing extremist parties in Europe that look to Putin’s Russia as a model, even while that democratic model has become a farce.

Make no mistake, Western Democracy is on trial; if Hillary Clinton does not enter the White House this next January, who or what, then, will encourage Europe to rethink its own rightward march, and what will keep America’s Trump-led “house divided against itself” from following, even encouraging, Europe’s lead? What will that ultimately mean for democracy and its viability worldwide as this century progresses? 

That is not to say that it is certain Mrs. Clinton can solve all of these problems.  But at least with her, there will be a sincere effort from the most powerful nation on earth to push back against the downward spiral on both sides of the Atlantic; with Mr. Trump, that downward spiral will only be encouraged and accelerated.

AP

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Here are many more articles by Brian E. Frydenborg.  If you think your site or another would be a good place for this content please do not hesitate to reach out to him! Feel free to share and repost on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter (you can follow him there at @bfry1981)

If people thought 2015 was bad, 2016 shows no sign of letting on up on risk.  The Middle East, China, Europe, Central Africa, even the United States will all raise serious questions about risk in 2016.

Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse January 7, 2016  

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) January 7th, 2016 (Altered version posted on Global Risk Insights January 26th)

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AMMAN — The year 2016 will pose a number of major risks for the international community, and many of these risks were already major issues in 2015.  Not only typically high-risk areas like the Middle East and Africa are highlighted, but also China, Europe, and America.  Here are five of the largest ones that will be headlining the news throughout the year.

1.) Middle East Morass

Pat Bagley/Salt Lake Tribune

The greater-Middle East will continue to present a number of challenges to the world in 2016.  While the situation with Iran moving towards de-escalation over nuclear tensions and a lifting of sanctions that could happen as early as January is indeed welcome, there is little else occurring in the region that is reassuring.  The general Sunni-Shiite divide will continue to present problems.  Though ISIS has been gradually pushed back throughout the year and lost some territory in Iraq (including, most recently, Ramadi) and Syria, there is no guarantee that ISIS will not be able to retake what it just lost as the dynamics in its spheres of operations are incredibly complicated.  There is reason to fear that Russia’s recent foray into Syria will continue to bolster Assad’s brutal regime and make things worse for non-ISIS rebels as well as Syrian civilians, all while having at best a minimal effect on ISIS itself; Putin has not shown any indication as of yet that he will be changing what Russia’s military forces are doing there. 

Not much will come out of Turkey’s shooting-down of a Russian military jet that will have larger effects beyond either country, except that both Putin and Erdoğan will be able to use this to bolster their support at home.  With Turkey having long been an example of secular democracy of a sort in the Middle East, the world can only disappointingly expect the recently further empowered Erdoğan to continue his country’s march towards increasingly Islamic and authoritarian single-party rule (he just recently cited Hitler’s Germany as an “effective” political system) as well as conflict escalation with Turkey’s own and the region’s Kurds.  Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also seems set to continue his country’s slower march to eroding liberal democratic values in favor of more theocratic, Jewish-ethnocentric laws, practices, and regulations while simultaneously provoking Palestinians into higher-levels of violence with increased settlement building and occupation coupled with no serious attempt to engage with Palestinians on a two-state solution.  This, in turn, will eventually provoke more serious military responses from Israel, which will only further empower extremists like Hamas or worse at the expense of the apparently crumbling Palestinian Authority and its president, Mahmoud Abbas, in turn only further empowering Israeli extremists.  As if also reading from a similar card, Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi seems set on pursuing a path of oppression against Islamists which will only see further violence and escalation in an already escalating mini-insurgency of sorts.  Former Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki was cut in the same vein as these leaders, but thankfully the Obama Administration, Iraqi Shiites, and even Iran all worked together to nudge him aside in favor of the far less sectarian Dr. Haider al-Abadi in 2014.  The retaking of Ramadi—without civilian-casualty-intensive tactics—by Iraq is a significant victory for Abadi’s government, but it remains to be seen if this success is one that can be maintained and to what degree if any Abadi’s situation stabilizes enough for the Iraqi government to make any further gains, let alone prevent fresh losses, though as of now the trends are positive, and Ramadi could be a sign that Obama’s strategy for dealing with ISIS is beginning to pay off; only time will tell and the most difficult fights are yet to come either way. 

Jordan and Lebanon have done a surprisingly good job of holding togetherunder the enormous pressures refugees have been exerting on their state systems, but there is no guarantee 2016 will not produce a tipping point or points for either or both of these smaller states.  Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia and its coalition seem capable only of mismanagement in their Yemen war, where they have been careless in inflicting civilian casualties, while Libya, too, remains problematic and is now having to deal with a growing ISIS presence in its territory.  And refugees keep pouring not only into places like Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey, but also, now, into Europe.  Which brings the reader to the next big risk issue for 2016…

2.) Big tests for Europe’s Union

Sean Gallup/Getty Images

While talk of the European Union’s demise is incredibly premature, 2016 opens with the EU facing several challenging trends, and its response to them could well define it for years, perhaps decades.  The welfare-state system as it now exists has shown itself to be unsustainable and there are more than a few ailing economies that present problems for the whole Union, Greece, of course, being the worst but not the only economic thorn in the EU’s side. 

Just these economic problems alone would be an enormous challenge, but, unfortunately for the EU, it is also facing several other crises.  The influx of refugees into Europe, including many Syrians, comes at the worst possible time.  Before this new wave of refugees, Europe was already seeing a rightward tilt politically speaking; a smattering of terrorist incidents in 2015, which peaked with the spectacular attacks in Paris this November, have only naturally added a large dousing of fuel to the right’s fire of anti-immigrant demagoguery.  Unsurprisingly, the tinder of anti-immigrant sentiment and fears of terrorism have created quite the pyre for rightists to illuminate themselves attractively to European voters, and all over Europe right-wing parties are gaining significant power or are even coming to lead governments.  This is making it exceedingly difficult for the European Union to come up with any sort of a coherent policy on refugee migrants, and when leaders and governments try to accept more refugees, the political cost is a zero-sum one that penalizes them and rewards the right-wing parties with more public support (and this from the continent that has been the banner carrier for liberal values for some time). 

If all this was not enough, voters in key EU economic trouble spots like Greece, Spain, and Portugal seem to be rejecting the EU’s economic prescriptions and a degree of political chaos is ensuing.  If the EU cannot collectively create and enforce policies on major issues like refugees and the economy, and if its efforts to do so are soundly rejected by voters in key EU nations, 2016 will likely raise serious questions about what the EU actually is and what it wants to be in the future.  However, political chaos is hardly limited to the eastern side of the Atlantic Ocean…

3.) America’s semi-chaotic election year

REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson

Between Europe and America, Democratic systems are hardly playing their A-game these days.  The rise of Donald Trump and the more unhinged wing of the Republican Party supporting the likes of him and obstructionist (and demonstrable charlatan) Ted Cruz (a first-time senator largely responsible for the 2013 government shutdown who has caused much political chaos and has no serious legislative accomplishments under his belt), as well as Dr. Ben Carson (a medical doctor with no relevant political experience or expertise), have made this political race the most unpredictable in recent memory.  Many accuse Trump of being racist and bigoted, but a more astute observer would look at similar politicians in Europe and see that he is playing a very smart game, leveraging Americans’ inflated fears about both terrorism and immigration to channel populist angst and ride that wave for all it is worth.  Sadly, this is as American as apple pie; even President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a champion of liberal values and the architect of victory over both the depression and the Axis powers in WWII, interned well over 100,000 residents and citizens of Japanese descent; Trump even cited this action of FDR’s as a precedent. 

Such outside the system wild-cards like Trump, Cruz, and Carson looking more and more likely to become the Republican Party’s nominee for the president of the world’s oldest and most powerful democracy is hardly a reassuring thing for the rest of the world.  Many Americans seem to have always naturally had a disdain for the political class throughout American history, but this election cycle may see the most dramatic materialization of this trend in American history.  Though likely Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton seems quite likely to defeat such a challenge, nothing is certain in American politics these days, and the unraveling of one of America’s two political parties cannot be shrugged off; even if Clinton were to win, America’s two-party system does not function when both parties are roughly the same size and one is not interested in governing (just ask Barack Obama).  What this means for the global economy and for international relations is one huge question mark of political risk.

4.) Asian economic woes

Reuters/VOA

The slowing of the Chinese economic juggernaut to its lowest officially announced growth since early 2009 was a big surprise in 2015; perhaps less surprising was Japan coming very close to entering a recession in the third quarter of this year (only escaping this label after revised numbers were released), struggling with an ageing population and low birthrate.  How the two economic giants of East Asia (and two largest economies in the world after the U.S.) tackle their economic challenges—or fail to do so—will be big narratives for the year 2016.  While nothing catastrophic is expected to happen in terms of Japan, if there is little good news coming out of that nation in 2016, that will not help the rest of the world deal with its economic funk.  China, though, is of larger concern: if things were to get dramatically worse, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which has already had a difficult time dealing with public unrest from democracy-oriented mass protests in Hong Kong to worker dissatisfaction to Muslim Uighur unrest in Xinjiang will have a tough time keeping order with a Chinese public that has grown to be bolder and more frequent in voicing dissatisfaction with the government over the past few years.  There have already been tremendous ripple effects from China’s economic downturn, not the least of which is contributing to the falling price of oil since China’s enormous demand for that energy source has weakened along with its economy, but if China’s stability were to even remotely become an issue, investors and markets around the world would react far more negatively than they already have.  CCP officials have done a fine job of transitioning China from the anarchy of the Cultural Revolution in the 1970s to the wild success of its economy over the past few decades, so there is some reason to hope for a competent response; at the same time, that this is happening at all suggests CCP leaders are not so sure about how to manage this crisis, and it remains to be seen if 2016 will see the situation improve or become even worse.  And, of course, there are the concerns over the how various territorial disputes with other Asian nations and with Taiwan could factor into a politically less stable environment….

2016 has already started off very badly for China; just today, China halted stock trading for the day (for the second time this week!) as Chinese stocks fell more than 7% in just 29 minutes.

5.) Recipe for conflict in Africa’s Great Lakes region

REUTERS/Jean Pierre Aime Harerimana

If Rwanda’s internal ethnic problems served as a catalyst for the series of conflicts known as Africa’s World War (the deadliest conflict in the world since WWII and one that is still ongoing), current problems that are spiraling rapidly out of control in Burundi threaten to plunge the region into conflict again.  In Rwanda in 1994, that country’s Tutsi minority was almost wiped out in a genocide carried out by the majority Hutus.  The government that came to power in the subsequent revolution led by Paul Kagame was one of Tutsis, and Kagame is still in power now.  He has shown a willingness to aggressively project Rwandan military power outside of his own borders, and the UN even accused his forces of possibly committing a countergenocide against Hutus.  Kagame successfully changed his system be able to keep himself in power after pledging he would step down, something Burundi’s Hutu President Pierre Nkurunziza did by running for, and winning in July, a third term in violation of that country’s constitution.  When protests erupted in Burundi in response, the government began a crackdown that just this December began to look a lot like Tutsis were being targeted.  Burundi’s military is led by both Hutus and Tutsi officers, but recently Tutsi officers have been forming rebel groups and the president has been pushing Tutsi officers out of major positions of power or has sidelined them from more important missions.  Tensions are already rising between Burundi and Rwanda, and if Burundi erupts into civil war, Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda may find themselves sucked in in one way or another, and the simmering but quieting Congo conflict, involving Hutus and Tutsis in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, could also flare back up as well.  Ethnic conflict and hatred could well embroil this region again if events continue on their current trajectories.

*****

There are certainly other trends to watch in 2016, but these are very likely to dominate headlines for quite some time in the new year.  Only time will tell if these trends will improve or get worse, but for now, there are appropriately-high degrees of concern and worry about these trends.

Related article: 2015 Year in Risk Review: Risky Business

If you think your site or another would be a good place for this content please do not hesitate to reach out to me! Please feel free to share and repost on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter (you can follow me there at@bfry1981)

Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse January 4, 2016  

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) January 4th, 2016; alternate version published on Global Risk Insights

AMMAN — The year 2015 very much seemed to be, and will likely be remembered as, a year of transition, and not generally for the better, filled with many surprises. Below is a list of topics related to risk that defined the year, with five negative trends and one surprisingly positive one. The list is hardly comprehensive, but it would also be hard to not include any of them in any discussion of the major developments of 2015, even if one argue that others also deserve inclusion/recognition.

1.) The staying power of the Islamic State

YouTube

Perhaps even more shocking that the initial rise and onslaught of the group now known as ISIS (The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria/al-Sham) is their staying power: under not insignificant military pressure from the U.S., Iraq, Syria, several European/NATO states, various rebels groups and nominally Russia (which is targeting mainly non-ISIS groups) and some (minor) action from Arab nations, ISIS has not only survived but thrived. This is the case even as it has lost some of its gains from its peak territorial power (Iraq only just recently—apparently—managed to retake the city of Ramadi from ISIS, which has held it for most of the year, and is not even close to regaining sovereignty in much of Western Iraq, let alone the situation in Syria), so even as ISIS has suffered some setbacks in Iraq and Syria, it has seen its power increase in Libya, Egypt’s Sinai, and elsewhere, and has also demonstrated its global reach as far away as Paris, France, and San Bernardino, California, in the United States. Though the favored political rhetoric involves talk of “eradicating” and “destroying” ISIS, such talk is not only wildly premature, it borders on the farcically ridiculous. The unfortunate truth is that ISIS is here to for the foreseeable future, in one form or another. With the death of Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda receding somewhat into the background, the West might have thought that terrorism was not much of a global problem, but a regional one successfully contained in places far away; instead, ISIS has made clear that that terrorism is not fading away, and perhaps its greatest success is to direct the attention of large portions of the population of countries like France and the United States to consider ISIS/terrorism a—or the—major issue they face, whereas before few French or Americans would have prioritized such so highly.

2.) China’s economy comes back down to earth

Agence France-Presse

After decades of remarkably consistent and robust economic growth, the Chinese economic juggernaut has plummeted down from the celestial heavens and had taken on a far more earthly, vulnerable quality. Hitting the lowest officially announced levels since the world economic/financial crisis was in full gear early in 2009, China said its GDP growth rate slowed to 6.9% in 2015’s third quarter, but there is plenty of suspicion surrounding that figure, as some experts and indicators point towards what could actually be a (significantly?) lower number. Furthermore, the overall trend this year thus far has been a significantly downward one compared to 2014 and earlier years. All this affects all manner of global economic indicators, as China’s massive economic engine consumes and outputs many things; global oil prices are but one of the casualties of China’s slowing economy. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been able to fairly easily deal with both labor and political unrest while its economy was doing better, but one thing to watch in 2016 will be how the CCP handles what will surely be growing unrest as the economy in China is expected to continue to slow down. Another thing to watch will be how China’s crisis will further affect the global economy. Finally, how this crisis affects China’s effort to shift from an economy driven on manufacturing exports to a domestic consumer-based economy will also be telling. All-in-all, China and its leadership is looking at a challenging 2016.

3.) The resurgence of refugees

There is something deeply disturbing about the fact that seventy years after the end of WWII, the world is seeing the largest global displacement of human beings from their homes since the end of that conflict which was in absolute terms the most destructive the world has ever seen. At the end of 2014, the number of refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs: those who fled their homes but did not leave their countries) was nearly sixty million, and that number has only increased this year, so that roughly one out of every 122 people in the world has been forced to flee home. That the international community has been unable—no, to be honest, unwilling—to 1.) stem the tide of increasing refugees and/or 2.) settle existing refugees with any zeal or energy proportionate to the crisis is a testament to the failure of said community to live up to the hopes and dreams that characterized the founding of the United Nations just a few months after the end of WWII. This failure has produced pathetically tragic results. From Jordan to Italy, waves of displaced bring considerable risk and possibility of destabilization. Specifically, the wave of migrants into Europe (particularly from Syria) has been a major catalyst for a number of developments there, which launches into the next main theme of 2015…

4.) EU in crisis mode and lurching to the right

Reuters

Though hardly unforeseeable, the refugee flow into Europe has touched off a series of crises that has meant steep challenges to the European Union as a political entity, though, as usual, predictions of the EU’s demise are wildly premature. Apart from the crisis of dealing with some 1,000,000 refugees entering Europe (with the EU only formally settling a startlingly mere 190 of them so far) the refugee influx has invigorated Europe’s far right and helped it to rise to newfound positions of power. In Germany, the EU’s most powerful state, Chancellor Angela Merkel is “under fire” for her liberal refugee policy there and a right-wing party is polling ahead of all others in Sweden, which threatens Sweden’s position as a bastion of liberal immigration policy. The earlier economic crises have laid open rifts within the European polity that were only made wider in 2015, and while some may take a degree of inspiration in the rise of new populist parties in Spain, the political chaos this has fostered must also be acknowledged. Voters there and in Portugal and Greece seemed to reject the collective EU solutions for their economic crises (even after a third massive bailout for Greece!), casting doubt on the ability of the EU to move forward collectively economically. Another election has empowered the far right in Poland, and right-wing parties are performing extremely well in places like Austria and even Denmark. And in the wake of the ISIS attacks in Paris, only a unifying of socialists and conservatives headed off a major victory by France’s main far-right party. Not only in these places, but throughout Europe, the sharp rise of the right is undeniable. Even some leftist European leaders are now flirting with and mimicking, to a degree, those on the far-right. To coin The Economist’s phrase, this is “[t]he march of Europe’s little Trumps,” which brings the reader to the next main development…

5.) Political chaos in the United States

AP Images

In case Americans are not aware of this fact, let it be clear: the rest of the world, from Europe to the Middle East, is paying attention to the American two-party political race just enough to shocked and dismayed at the one-man-phenomenon known as Donald Trump, who has been the Republican front-runner since July and will still be the front-runner going into 2016, something very few political-powers-that-be predicted. Many a punditclaimed that his campaign would implode almost as soon as he entered the race, but yours truly wrote only a few weeks after he had taken the lead that it would be foolish to dismiss Trump too easily or too quickly. The world’s most powerful nation with the most powerful military (one which it has shown it is not afraid to use aggressively) is showing a degree of political chaos and unpredictability not seen in generations. While smart money would be on Hillary Clinton beating Trump or any of the more extremist Republican political candidates who have been doing well in polling of late, one thing is for certain: the world is watching with a degree of fear and horror at what is coming out of the American presidential race, at least on the Republican side, and the political unraveling of the Republican Party in 2015 may yet move global mountains in the not too distant future, for better or for worse.

BONUS: Iran!

While it is too early to make any surefire long-term claims about Iran and its regional proxies, 2015 at the very least will be remembered as a year when Iran made it clear that it would not be sidelined, will be there to defend Shiite leaders and people, and is eager to play a larger role in the greater-Middle East. 2015 saw the U.S. reach out to both Iran and Cuba in ways unprecedented for decades; a big-loser here was non-engagement. Another big loser in the long-run is Sunni extremism: from Yemen and Lebanon to Iraq and Syria, Iran is a force supporting Shiite interests that Sunni leaders are now undoubtedly going to have to reckon with; unlike in many instances before when Sunni leaders avoided politics in the hope that U.S. support or military action would help them crush enemies they should otherwise accommodate or co-opt, America reaching out to Iran and helping to forge a major international nuclear agreement with global powers is a signal that the Sunni world better start getting on the same page; a regional cold war fought with proxy-militias and terrorist groups is fraught with peril for all sides and could turn the whole region into Syria if tensions are not reduced and conflict not mitigated.

For those who are naysayers, it should be pointed out that there is, simply, no better realistic alternative than this agreement and that Iran-sponsored militant Shiite Islam and its accompanying terrorist, militia, and rebel groups have for years not come anywhere close to the (scale of) brutality ofSunni Islamist extremist groups like ISIS, its al-Qaeda in Iraq precursor, Boko Haram, the Taliban, etc. Hezbollah and the Houthis are not taking sex slaves by the thousands, chopping people’s heads off regularly for internet mass consumption, destroying the world’s great antiquities, or executing civilians and prisoners by thousands. In fact, they seem rather quaint compared with the mass brutality of ISIS and its affiliates. And under Iran’s leadership, Hezbollah has turned from firing its rockets at Israel to firing them at ISIS. In fact, the Iranian military and Hezbollah have put much more of their military might into fighting ISIS than any Sunni-led states surrounding Syria or Iraq have. That is a fact that must be acknowledged, not dismissed. Compared to the Saudi-led Sunni status quo in the region, there are indications that the ascendance of Iran and its Shiite proxies would not only not be worse than, but that such an ascendancy might push the region in some positive, less extreme directions. An Iran eclipsing Saudi Arabia in power and influence, then, may not be a bad thing overall. That in itself says much about the dire depths to which the region has sunk, but it is true nonetheless.

If one wants to contest this, ask this question: would anyone prefer to be captured by ISIS instead of Hezbollah?

*****

Such was the year 2015 that the empowerment of Iran can be seen as a relative positive. As to how 2016 turns out, all of the important trends outlined here will have significant bearing on whether or not there is a more positive feel to 2016.

Honorable mentions: the resilience and growth in power of Russia’s Putin and Turkey’s Erdoğan, despite the fact that they are taking their nationsbackwards and down dangerous paths… democracy in Burma and oh, Canada too! Also, Bibi Netanyahu has been slowly entangling his Israelis—and the Palestinians along with them—into the ditch of conflict and no tow truck is on the horizon, plus security problems in Afghanistan. And, finally, as the world became more dependent on the Internet/mobile devices in 2015, cybersecurity was still lacking for both the private sector and government…

Vogue

Vogue

AP     

Happy(yier?) New Year!(?)

Related article: Happy—Wait, No—Risky New Year

If you think your site or another would be a good place for this content please do not hesitate to reach out to me! Please feel free to share and repost on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter (you can follow me there at@bfry1981)

Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse November 25, 2015   

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) November 25th, 2015

Getty Images

A much shorter version of this piece focusing on Putin’s mentality/political calculus was published by Global Risk Insights. This was also published by by the Russian International Affairs Council (RIAC) here and was “Post of the Month” for December/January.

What the Hell Happened?

AMMAN — After weeks of increasing tension between Russia and Turkey, yesterday, Turkey shot down a Russian fighter-bomber jet that Turkey alleges violated its airspace.  The Russian jet had been bombing Turkmen positions/villages—part of a series of Russian bombings in recent days that have targeted Turkmen—on the border area of Turkey and Syria.  Turkey is supporting these Turkmen rebels against Assad that Russia is bombing, and had previously asked Russia not to bomb them.  Turkey also claims it warned the plane ten times before it fired, but Russia denies this.  The alleged violation of Turkey’s airspace comes after several earlier violations and a clear pattern of Russia flagrantly violating NATO and other American allies’ airspace over the past several years, and after clear warnings from Turkey that this behavior would not be tolerated.  The Turkmen who had been bombed by the Russian place killed the pilot, who had ejected from the plan and landed in the Syrian area controlled by the Turkmen.  The plane’s navigator was rescued by Russian and Syrian special forces, but one Russian contract marine was killed in the process and a Russian helicopter was downed as well.

Don’t Expect WWIII Out of This

While this is hardly good news, we should also hardly expect a Russo-Turkish war, a Russian-NATO war, or WWIII in the coming days.  As with the situation in Ukraine, both NATO and Russia should avoid panic.  For one thing, Turkey and Russia have very close economic ties, both in terms of tourism in Turkey and in terms of energy exports from Russia; these ties are very profitable for each nation and for both Putin’s and Erdoğan’s regimes and would not be scrapped lightly over such an incident.  Secondly, and this is something less talked about, Russia and Putin fear NATO greatly; this has been a driving force behind first Soviet and then Russian policy for many decades, as NATO dwarfs Russia both in terms of military and economic power.  It is helpful to think of all of Putin’s posturing, including his airspace violations, and akin to the guy driving the gigantic hummer with huge tires and fire designs spray-painted onto its sides: this is all undertaken to overcompensate for an insecurity.  Putin has been smart to calculate that the U.S. and NATO will not risk a war with Russia over Georgia, Ukraine, or Syria; he is certainly smart enough to not start a war with Turkey and, by consequence, NATO now even after such an incident as this. Putin is not stupid, and he is hardly not in control; the repeated violations of NATO and others’ airspace is unquestioningly a series of deliberate provocations directed by Putin.  Sure, one or two may be an honest mistake by a pilot, but there have been far too many violations by Russia over time that these violations, in general, are no accident.  For the sake of argument, let’s say this one was an accident; Putin still knows he made his own bed with these previous violations, and he knows he has no grounds for starting a serious military confrontation over this as a result.  And deep down, Putin probably respects Erdoğan’s move as a fellow hardball politician: Putin called Turkey’s warning a bluff, but Erdoğan demonstrated he was not bluffing.  This is the language Putin understands.

Putin may be miscalculating here in general, but he is certainly smart enough to know a war with Turkey, and therefore NATO and the West, is not at all in Russia’s interests right now.

Why, Mr. Putin?

AFP

Coming off of all this, many questions arise as to the risk-gain, cost-benefit analysis going on inside Mr. Putin’s head.  One must hope that Mr. Putin’s actions in Syria are not going to continue to be as either myopic or as cynical as the best possible explanations indicate they thus far been. 

On the myopic side, you have Putin thinking that risking the ire of almost all the Sunni governments, Sunni people, and Sunni jihadists by helping Shiite Alawite Assad massacre mainly Sunni rebels and civilians with the help of Shiite Hezbollah and Shiite Iran just for Russia’s having a naval base on Syria’s coast and a few new bases inside Syria as well as a client in Syrian President Bashar al-Assad who accounts for roughly 10% of global Russian arms sales is worth it (oh, and there’s knee-jerk opposing American and Western aims in Syria partly out of spite, from which I would also wonder what Putin thinks he will gain).  Over the longer term, Putin is playing a game to win over the more despotic regimes in the Middle East, letting them know that America may abandon you if you give up all pretense at democratic reform and massacre your own people, but Russia will not (see Putin and Assad as BFFs).  One of the big prizes Russia is eyeing here is Egypt and Hosni Mubarak’s second–(perhaps harsher) coming, Gen. Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.  The gamble here is that Egypt’s restive population will tolerate an Egypt aligning itself with Shiite-led Syria, Iran, and Hezbollah and that Egypt’s own explosive and volatile domestic security situation with its own people and an ISIS franchise running amok in the Sinai (one which apparently was able to blow up a Russian airliner) will not be major liabilities.  Egypt has a large population but is mainly devoid of resources that Russia would find useful.  Sure, Russia can increase arms sales to Egypt, but that does not seem to be so great of a prize.  If Putin thinks that the real prize—Saudi Arabia—will be aligning itself with Russia anytime soon, that may have been a possibility without Russia’s forceful backing of Assad and linking up with Iran and Hezbollah, but now that possibility seems as remote as ever even as the U.S. and the Saudis put some distance between them and their relationship cools; a cool relationship with the U.S. still yields a lot more for Saudi Arabia than a new alliance with Russia ever could.  In general, Russia hardly has a strong position in the Middle East; Putin’s desperation to help Assad, his one main ally in the region (it would be a stretch to say that Iran and Russia are general allies even as they are allies in the Syrian Civil War), even at the expense of empowering ISIS, is a reflection of this weakness. And as Putin cozies up to dictators like Assad and Sisi, he risks severely undermining any chance of real long-term gains where he and Russians seek them the most: in Europe.  Democracy-loving Europe will not sit and has not sat idly by while Russia has provoked war and secessionist rebellion in European and democratic Ukraine while fighting against rebels in authoritarian Syria in a way that intensifies the war there. 

Thus, the term myopic is particularly appropriate for Putin’s strategy because his methods of pursuing whatever gains he seeks pose risks that threaten to harm Russia’s interests more than those gains would help them: Russia is particularly vulnerable to Sunni extremist terrorism for a number of clear reasons and its moves in Syria, as I have written before, are only going to expose Russia to further attacks.  If Russia is so concerned with 10% of its arms sales and access to a few military bases in Syria, I am certain the West would work out a deal to ensure these interests are preserved by a new Syrian government if Russia would agree to push for Assad’s ouster, as this would be a reasonable price to pay to see a realistic possibility of an end to this incredibly destructive and lethal war.

On the cynical side, there is the ability for confrontation with the West and Turkey in Syria to help Putin sell his narrative to his own people and the extremist gullible conspiracy-theorists who are intense RT.com and Sputnikconsumers; no doubt the shooting down of a Russian jet by Turkey and the related casualties will galvanize popular support among the Russian people who famously rally behind Putin whenever he is challenged from the outside; thus, provoking a crisis with Turkey and NATO certainly serves to increase Putin’s power at home.  And yet, he is so popular there already, one must either question this as a solid basis for his actions or question the level of paranoia inside the Russia ruler’s mind.  Therefore, it is harder to accept this explanation on its own but we cannot rule it completely out.  Is it some kind of combination of the myopia and the cynicism?  That is a difficult question to answer.  My own gut tells me that to ascribe this mainly to Putin playing a domestic political game seems is quite an intense assumption to make. 

We know that Ukraine and Moldova are prizes Putin has been eyeing, in one form or another, for quite some time, although trying to guess how he will play the European theater and Middle Eastern theater in terms of each other is mainly speculative at this point.  If there is some big move Putin is planning in Europe, it will be interesting to see what it is, but my money is on the idea that Western sanctions (coupled with falling oil prices) have constrained Putin’s behavior there and that this will continue to be the case, even in light of this incident.  Putin hay have been having fun time routinely violating NATO and other American allies’ airspace over the past few years without any serious consequences, but Turkey sure put an end to that, and while I am no fan of Turkey’s President Tayyip Recep Erdoğan for numerous and significant reasons, given Putin’s track record of airspace violations, I am willing to believe that Turkey would not risk shooting down a Russian plane unless it actually did violate Turkish airspace and that the Russian had been warned.

What will be interesting to see is if Putin is now willing to continue to risk the lives of brave Russian pilots to play political chicken with his rivals, and even more interesting will be trying to figure out what he hopes to gain should he pursue such a course. 

And yet, Putin is not the only actor here: Turkey and the U.S. have been flirting with a call for no-fly zones in parts of Syria, including the Turkish-Syrian border; if Russia pushes Turkey and NATO too far, this will only increase the odds of NATO no-fly zones that would severely limit Russia’s freedom of action in Syria and the region.

Time to End the Kabuki Theater Charade and Join the Big Boys on the Main Stage

Perhaps most frustrating of all in this situation is that if Russia actually took a broader, less myopic view of its interests, and actually behaved in a way that matched its deeds with its stated purpose, there is a tremendous amount of room for mutually beneficial cooperation.

See, Russia framed its intervention in Syria as primarily one aimed at striking against ISIS terrorists; then, despite its heroic efforts to dissembleand deceive through the propaganda of its foreign ministry and state-funded media operations RT.com and Sputnik that present contrary “information,” Russia used over 90% of its military strikes to hit non-ISIS, often Western-backed rebels fighting Assad’s regime, strikes most often occurring where ISIS had no presence and not even anywhere near to where ISIS had any presence.  The strikes have even helped ISIS gain more territory at the expense of these other rebel groups.  Strikes like these are the ones that led to the incident yesterday, as Russia was bombing Turkmen who are not fighting for and are nowhere near ISIS.

The New York Times

I get it.  Russia likes Assad, and since ISIS is mainly between Kurdish rebels on one side and non-ISIS other rebels no the other, and that second group of rebels is the group near most of the Syrian regime’s zones of control, it makes some sense for Russia to attack those groups that are more threatening to Assad.  Yet Russia keeps propagandizing these attacks as attacks against ISIS in its public statements.  Sure, Russians inside Russia and avid RT/Sputnik readers might unquestioningly buy up these claims, but the fact is this: Russia is inside Syria to pursue its own war against mainly non-ISIS targets, whatever public relations fantasies it wants to sell.  Few people around the world are buying what Russia wants to sell, so any idea that Russian actions in Syria would buy Russia some goodwill from Europe has been dispelled since Russia is not doing what it claims to be doing.

Institute for the Study of War

It Putin was smarter, he’d shift gears.  The thing is, not too long ago it seems an ISIS affiliate blew up a Russian airliner killing 224 people, almost all of them Russians.  ISIS has fertile ground in and around Russia to recruit terrorists and carry out attacks against Russians.  It is manifestly in Russia’s interests to join the current anti-ISIS coalition and to focus on ISIS now, not the other rebels, as even with its small percentage of attacks being against ISIS, Russia has still become a object of ISIS’s wrath.  If Russia were to at least mostly suspend its campaign against non-ISIS rebels and cooperate with the U.S., France, Turkey, and others against ISIS, it would win a tremendous amount of goodwill from the West, which would welcome a helping hand.  Instead, blatantly lying about targeting ISIS, bombing rebels that are allies with Western powers and Turkey, and violating Turkey’s airspace will do nothing to improve relations with the wider world, reduce crippling economic sanctions, or combat the jihadist threat now facing Russians all over the world.  If we could truly join together in common purpose in Syria—ending the war and seeing Assad step aside, and all with the support of Russia—it is difficult to imagine that the West would not work to preserve Russia’s currently existing interests in Syria in exchange for their support and the end of their intransigence.

But if Putin wants to turn everything into a he said/she said contestbetween the Western media and RT/Sputnik (a tactic that has not worked in Ukraine and is not working in Syria), if Putin wants to keep his attention focused away from ISIS even though ISIS has now killed many Russian civilians, Putin only leaves himself and his nation more isolated, more weak, more vulnerable.  The old playbook of being against the West for the sake of being against the West is not going to work.  Putin has already gained a lot in Ukraine by annexing Crimea; he has shown that if his interests are not considered in a final settlement in Syria that he is prepared to use military means to secure them; if Putin would just deescalate in Ukraine and start focusing on ISIS in Syria, there is a very real chance that both sanctions relief could be on the table and that a final peace deal that removes Assad would see Russian strategic and arms trade interests preserved.  Yet if he continues down his current path, he risks destroying important relationships with Turkey and Europe, increased sanctions, a future Syria that will do everything it can to expel Russian influence and a Russian presence, more dead Russian military personnel through incidents like the one yesterday, and more dead Russian civilians from terrorist attacks in a war that will not end anytime soon and keeps empowering ISIS, in part thanks to Russia’s actions in Syria.

The choice is clear for Mr. Putin: stop the charade and begin real cooperation with the NATO and other powers against ISIS, or go down a much more difficult path of pain, confrontation, and isolation.  Russia could have taken former approach some time ago, and avoided yesterday’s regrettable incident.  Even now Russia just made clear it will keep bombing the Turkmen, but it does not have to be this way.  To Putin we must say, there is another way, and not everything needs to be zero-sum.  Whether he listens, well, that is up to him.

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Contrary to critics, the decision of Obama’s to deploy Special Operations troops to Syria is neither a giant step forward into a quagmire nor a meaningless symbolic gesture.  In fact, as far as bang-for-the-buck analysis, Obama (again) demonstrates his ability to minimize risk and maximize benefit.

Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse November 3, 2015  

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) November 3rd, 2015

U.S. Army

This is a version of an article published by Global Risk Insights, republished with permission here and also published by Business Insider andStupidparty Math v. Myth

AMMAN — President Obama’s recent decision to deploy a small number (“fewer than 50”) of Special Operations troops to Syria is certainly raising quite a lot of discussion.  To the president’s left, cries of “mission creep,” “escalation,” and “quagmire” are raising the specter of wider war and American military misadventures past and present.  To his right, the criticism is that this is “too little too late,” a move of timidity and weakness that diminishes the presidency and America.  Talk of “Golidocks” and “just right” may be presumptuous, but there is little reason to panic and every reason to think that this move on the part of Obama—whose foreign policy (particularly regarding Syria) has been characterized by risk aversion and caution more than any president in recent memory—will continue his trend of finding shrewd ways to increase America’s effectiveness and impact while only exposing American interests and personnel to minimal risks, in line with his recent decision to robustly supply non-ISIS rebels with tank-busting TOW missiles.

As of now, the mission for these several dozen Special Operations troops is not to engage in combat alongside rebels but to train, advise, and assist.  To start, they will be deployed at a single headquarters location for the opposition in northern Syria, away from where Russian jets have been bombing targets, though officials acknowledged that this limited geographic scope could very well change in the future.  This means that most of the American troops’ efforts—and possibly all—will initially be collaborating with Syria’s Kurdish forces, who control most of Syria’s northernmost regions and whose zones of control border ISIS—not Syrian government—zones.  Thus, for now, the U.S. troops will be focusing their efforts on anti-ISIS operations, not anti-Assad ones, and officials have framed the deployment as a move against ISIS.  The deployment to this region, which borders Turkey, will also likely act as a check on the increasing hostilities between Turkey and the Kurds, as having U.S. forces embedded there will limit Turkey’s ability to strike freely.  This will be welcome, as it seems that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has used recent terrorist attacks as an excuse to go after Kurds in Turkey, Syria, and Iraq, especially after the main Kurdish political party in Turkey dealt him a major electoral setback in a recent election, despite the fact that his own investigators say ISIS, not Kurds, are the likely culprit (in any event, Erdogan’s cynical approach seems to have won: his party won enough seats to govern alone, while the Kurdish party lost a bit, in a new election held just days ago).  Finally, U.S. Special Operations troops in Syria’s north will make it easier to begin implementing any eventual safe havens for civilians and/or no-fly zones.

Republican hawks making noise that borders on warmongering and whose ideas consist of exposing American troops to high-risk situations unnecessarily while removing the burden of regional actors to clean upmesses in their own backyard seem to lack an appreciation of just how effective even small numbers of Special Operations forces can be.  Those on the left, meanwhile, who cry foul and see Vietnam and Iraq over their shoulder and accuse Obama of warmongering are not recognizing how severely limited this deployment is. 

Split into very small groups or even as individuals, Special Operations troops will be able to support dozens of allied rebel units and dramatically increase their effectiveness.  With even just one troop embedded with an entire rebel unit of hundreds—perhaps even more—of fighters, those fighters and their commanders now have some of the most valuable assets in the world: a direct line to the intelligence of the U.S. government and to American warplanes and those of its coalition partners.  State of the art technology means single operative can be able to relay critical information form the broadest and deepest intelligence community the world has ever seen.  This drastically improves these rebel units’ ability to keep their own people safe, stay well supplied, find more opportune targets under less risky conditions, and generally stay one step ahead of ISIS (and potentially other) forces eager to destroy them; conversely, this setup also makes all those enemies of the rebels far more vulnerable, either opening them up to more devastating attacks or confining their freedom of action.  These are no small advantages in a war as tangled, convoluted, and capriciously see-sawas this one.  Finally, the rebels will have the advantages of being trained by some of the most professional, talented, vetted, and well-equipped personnel within the entire U.S. Military.

Sure, in addition to ISIS, the rebels still face a daunting alliance of Syria’s government forces, Iranian and Russian forces, and the near-army like militia of Lebanon’s Hezbollah.  And yet, the rebels having the advantage of being tapped into the U.S. intelligence community combined with the benefits of having U.S. military personnel embedded with them on the ground training them and being able to relay U.S. intelligence in real time before, during, and after operations, all the while also being armed by the U.S. with advanced anti-tank missiles, put the rebels in a relatively better position than before.  In addition, the quality of U.S. intelligence will also improve with as many as dozens of on-the-ground American military sources of local intelligence in various locations with various units inside Syria, which will mean even better information going to the rebels in a kind of positive feedback loop, making the rebels a much more formidable force that acts and reacts with far more access the big picture than ever before.

Any subsequent American leader will hardly find him/herself constrained in either escalating or ending involvement as a result of Obama’s limited deployment.  With this deployment, the U.S. gains better intelligence, will see its allies perform better, will see its influence increased, and will place a check on rising hostilities between Turkey and the Kurds, both allies of America.   The biggest risk involved is a small number of casualties, yet Special Operations troops by definition sign up for missions that are far more risky and dangerous than normal missions but are also better trained to handle them, and the possibility that a large number of them become casualties is quite remote indeed.  After President Bush’s “Go Big, Lose Big” approach, perhaps people should appreciate Obama’s “Go Small, Win Small-to-to-Medium” approach.

If you think your site or another would be a good place for this content please do not hesitate to reach out to me! Please feel free to share and repost on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter (you can follow me there at@bfry1981)

Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse August 3, 2015 

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) August 3rd, 2015

Reuters

This piece has also been published by the Russian International Affairs Council (RIAC).

Those who argue that the Obama Administration’s overall Middle East strategy is a total failure have no sense of strategy themselves and dangerously substitute tactical-here-and-nows and pointless posturing for real strategy (especially Republicans). That’s not to say some of the Obama Administration’s Middle East policies aren’t lacking, but overall the Administration has more progress and sound approaches to point to than failures and mismanagement. Below, all of the Obama Administration’s major Middle East policies are broken down and given a letter grade. Here, then, is a look at all the major efforts of the Obama Administration in the Middle East, and as it covers a lot of territory this has been broken up into three parts, this being Part II and covering the Syrian Civil War.

Other articles in this series:

Grading Obama’s Middle East Strategy (Sensibly): Part I

4.) Dealing with Syria’s Civil War

AMMAN — Amidst a sea of Middle Eastern conflicts, the civil war raging in Syria is currently the largest and deadliest. Here, as in other situations, we have a crisis in which we must be careful not to blame Obama too much but must also note the missed opportunities where his substantive leadership could have made a huge difference, though not without some risk involved. So, right from the start, it must be acknowledged both that America could have done a lot more in regards to Syria, potentially helping to dramatically lessen the violence and perhaps even ending the war on the one hand, but, on the other, that America bears little responsibility for causing or contributing to the overall Syrian tragedy.

First, let’s examine the history of this war and the Obama Administration’s response to it, starting from the very beginning.

Of Arms and Assad I Sing

REUTERS/Mahmoud Hassano

Once upon a time in 2011, there was an uprising in Syria of many of the country’s own people who wanted Syria’s President (dictator) Bashar al-Assad to step down so they could change the system and have more freedom. They were inspired by their Arab brethren in the happier days of the Arab Spring in 2011. This was, generally, a struggle for freedom, representation, human rights, and democracy in a country ruled by an authoritarian, repressive, undemocratic Syrian regime with an Alawite (a word describing a subsect of Shia Islam that is only roughly 12% of Syria’s population) ruling family and many other Alawites at the top, ruling over mostly Sunni Muslims, though the regime and its supporters are by no means exclusively Alawite. While in 2011, people power brought down long-ruling autocrats in Tunisia, Egypt, and Yemen, and American-led NATO intervention rescued a revolution in Libya from massacre and disaster and helped overthrow Libya’s dictator, Muammar el-Qaddafi, Syria had no such luck with its people power or Western intervention. Qaddafi, alone and isolated and ruling over a far smaller population, was a relatively easy target. Compared to Qaddafi’s regime, Assad’s military was much stronger and, unlike Qaddafi’s, had strong patrons in Russia and Iran who would complicate and increase the costs of any Western intervention and made the prospects of any success for the Syrian people on their own quite dim.

Some powers talked of intervening in Syria, but with the U.S. signaling no appetite for direct military involvement, no other Western governments put their militaries in action against the Assad regime, nor did any regional governments. Still, Obama did call for Assad to step down in August 2011, and moved to increase sanctions and economic pressure on the regime at the same time. There was also a robust debate within the Obama administration about arming the Syrian rebels. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, then-CIA chief and later Gates’ successor Leon Panetta, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (also former president Bill Clinton) all agreed on arming significant numbers of moderate Syrian rebels, but they were unable to persuade President Obama in the end. If moderate rebels had been robustly supported early in the conflict, when an increasing stream of Syrian Army officers(including generals) and soldiers were defecting to the rebel cause, perhaps the regime could have been brought to its knees and would have been willing to enter serious negotiations; perhaps Assad would have been willing to leave if given immunity. The U.S. and West could have made a huge difference in the conflict with direct intervention by degrading the Assad regime’s military capabilities and limiting the shipments of weapons into Syria with a combination of naval blockades, no-fly-zones, and the U.S. specifically partnering with its allies Iraq and (NATO member) Turkey to use drones, reconnaissance flights, and other high-tech monitoring equipment to lock down Syria’s land borders with both nations. NATO could have played a significant role in such an operation, too, not terribly dissimilar to its role in the operation in Libya.

Karam Al-Masri/AFP/Getty Images

But no serious action was taken along these lines and in this absence of action, into the fray came Islamist extremist jihadists—including ISIS—even more murderous than Assad’s thugs. Suddenly, the moderate homegrown Syrian revolutionary rebels, who were having a difficult enough time holding their own with little international support against Assad’s well-and-Russian-armed forces, found themselves having to compete with and also fight well-armed, well-funded foreign jihadist extremists. Many of the moderate rebels lost heart and quit; still others defected to the more successful and more robustly-backed Islamists. At the same time, other Shiites were coming to the aid of Assad’s Shiite Alawite-led regime: the Iranian government was sending some of its elite military units and leaders, while Lebanese Hezbollah’s well-trained militia forces were also coming and making a big difference in favor of Assad at this time, each supporting and fighting for Assad on Syrian soil.

Instead of being supported by the international community and slowly and surely gaining territory, credibility, and influence, the Syrian moderates were themselves losing territory, credibility, and influence to the better-supported Islamists and their more extreme tactics. Almost all the factions became more radicalized, more violent. A major attack in July 2012 in Damascus that killed top regime insiders, including the defense minister and Assad’s brother-in-law—still the most spectacular attack to date carried out against the regime—was claimed by both moderate and extremist rebels, with some noting evidence that pointed to Islamists, and still others saying it was an inside job of the regime itself.

Narciso Contreras, Associated Press

Whoever carried it out, after this bombing, the conflict became even more deadly and brutal in Syria, with both 2012 and 2013 each seeing extreme escalations in violence and lethality. Foreign Shiite militias joined the Iranian government’s and Lebanese Hezbollah’s well-trained militia forces (both Shiite as well) already aiding and fighting for Assad in Syria. As the situation kept deteriorating, at some points in 2012 the CIA began helping U.S. allies Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar vet and identify rebels moderate enough to recommend them for military support and Obama secretly authorized both covert non-lethal support from the U.S. for some Syrian rebels and a program to militarily train some of them, too, though these efforts were to be very limited in nature; even when they were “sharply increased” early and later in 2013, respectively, the programs had been so small to begin with that they still remained very limited.  Obama also politically recognized Syria’s main opposition group (the Syrian Opposition/National Coalition) at the end of 2012, though without recognizing it as the legitimate government of Syria. But when the rebels suffered serious losses, in the middle of 2013 the Obama Administration and select Congressional Committees finally decided to have America itself arm Syrian rebels with “lethal military aid,” allowing the CIA to arm vetted Syrian rebels directly (though not with any advanced or heavy weaponry), and those weapons finally began to be delivered at the very end of the summer of 2013.

As the conflict continued to worsen and concerns about Assad’s chemical weapons of mass destruction (WMD) program—one of the largest in the world—were raised, Obama even repeatedly and publicly warned Assad that if his regime was found to be readying or using “a whole bunch” of chemical weapons that this would constitute a “red line” that would mean a severe response from the U.S., even possibly including military action. Throughout this period, rumors and reports of the use of chemical weapons use began to trickle out of Syria, culminating in the summer of 2013 with reports of a massive chemical WMD sarin gas attack—the largest chemical attack in the world in a quarter-century since Saddam Hussein gassed Iraqi Kurds in 1988—near Damascus. Unlike previous reports, these highlighted an attack that was both of an unprecedented scale for this conflict—it killed about 1,400 people—and confirmed publicly by several major Western governments (including that of the United States), Human Rights Watch, and later by the United Nations. As to who was the culprit, as I pointed out at the time, the signs clearly pointed to elements of the Assad regime carrying out the attack.

To Strike or Not to Strike, That Was the Question

Horrified by the attack and seeing this “red line” crossed with impunity, first Kerry and then Obama made an impassioned case to the American people that a military response against Assad’s regime was both necessary and proper and began to move the machinery of the American government and its allies towards this end. Yet the American people, weary of war after the disasters of the (W.) Bush Administration, began to see Obama’s moves to engage in limited strikes in Syria as all too similar to Bush’s moves to invade Iraq; they failed to see, as I myself made clear, that Syria 2013 was not Iraq 2003, and that Obama is not Bush, for despite the support of both the top Republican in the U.S. House of Representatives, Speaker of the House John Boehner, and the top Democrat in the same body, Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, few others of either party in Congress emerged to support Obama’s plan to strike Assad’s regime and far more came out against it. Even as opposition began growing at home, the House of Commons of the British Parliament shockingly rejected Prime Minister David Cameron’s motion to support pending American strikes and then Cameron himself stated he would respect the vote and not join the U.S.were it to initiate strikes against Assad’s regime. Soon after this setback, opposition to the Obama Administration’s plans for military strikes gained traction very quickly both at home and abroad.

With Obama himself never too eager to intervene militarily and with both his own party and America’s most stalwart foreign ally for military interventions uncharacteristically declining to join the fray, Obama publicly announced he would seek Congressional approval. In some ways, this could be considered a welcome move, coming after the Bush Administration often showed little more than contempt for opposition sentiment in Congress after the early months of near unquestioning-support from much of Congress just after the September 11th attacks faded to the more acrimonious, partisan atmosphere that characterized the end of Bush’s first term and all of his second (this poisonous political atmosphere only got worse after Obama was elected). Furthermore, if Obama was able to muster Congressional support, it would empower him that much more in the public and political senses. And yet, Obama’s putting so much power and influence in the hands of Congress on so crucial an action showed that he had learned almost nothing at all from his previous interactions with Congress, whether with insecure Democrats nervous about retaining their seats or with an implacable Tea Party-driven Republican majority in the House that was determined to avoid cooperation with the president at nearly all costs. To allow Congress to vote against his plan was to invite it to be weakened and to drive any international support to significantly lower levels, if not destroying it entirely. That President Obama did not realize that this outcome was far more likely from the beginning reveals a remarkable naïveté for a president in his second term dealing with factions that had more than established who they were and how they would behave. Never mind that Obama was perfectly within his Constitutional and legal rights to do so, and that there are ample precedents in American history dating back to the Administrations of Presidents Adams (for military action short of war) and Jefferson (for military action overseas without Congressional authorization), our second and third presidents, respectively, because being undermined in such a serious way politically would itself carry grave real-world consequences.

Obama’s s attempt to rally support failed miserably, as in the days that followed public opposition in the U.S. became widespread, vocal, and bipartisan. Obama’s idealistic attempt to engage the elected representatives of the people weakened his position considerably, for, despite some support from the most relevant Committees in Congress, the overall trends in both the House and the Senate showed that the Obama Administration had little to no chance of either the full House of the full Senate passing a resolution either approving or authorizing military action in Syria against Assad. Basically, instead of leading decisively, Obama decided to say “wait, let’s have a discussion” at this critical juncture after there had already been weeks of mulling over what to do, preferring to pass at least some of the responsibility and maybe even some of the authority from the Executive Branch to the Legislative Branch. Even the rebels and the government in Syria both strangely united in questioning this move of Obama’s. Again, such an action is one that works better in the abstract than in practice, and it was at such a juncture, with the very presidency stalling and losing altitude on such a critical military issue, that Russia and Vladimir Putin waded into the fray, seizing on a single comment by Secretary of State John Kerry—that Assad could avoid strikes if he gave up his chemical WMD—to propose a plan facilitate just that. This was, to use my own label, after Russia’s long stint as the obstructionist Tea Party of international politics and also after Putin’s farcical, blithely hypocritical New York Times op-ed calling for a diplomatic, non-violent solution even though, less than a year later, he sent Russian troops pouring into Ukraine, when violence as a means suited his ends there, and did the same five years earlier in Georgia. Still, while virtually anything that would significantly reduce Assad’s WMD stockpile has to be objectively seen as a positive, on one level the ensuing deal left Obama and the U.S presidency significantly emasculated. On another level, it was clear that the threat of U.S. strikes was the only thing that prodded Russia into doing anything that was either significant or productive in relation to this conflict. And yet, as I wrote at the time, on another, grander level, Putin’s move was entirely in his self-interest, as the deal itself was something of an insurance policy he took out on Assad’s regime, a significant ally of Russia’s that was both a major buyer of Russian arms and the host of Russia’s only military base outside of the former Soviet Union.

In any event, after Obama declined to strike the Assad regime and Russia’s proposal—which had become the UN’s—was accepted by Syria, seeing Syria’s 1,300 tons of declared chemical weapons painstakingly removed from Syria (there is now, disturbingly, new evidence that Assad may have kept some undeclared top-grade chemical WMD hidden from inspectors to be used in more desperate times), what I predicted—that this would do nothing to stem the drivers of the conflict and that the war in Syria would only continue and continue to get worse like some sort of vortex—came to pass, with 2014 being the deadliest year of the conflict thus far and no end in sight. Now, Syria truly is a vortex, becoming inflated and conflated with so many other conflicts that it has metastasized into one big megaconflict. Syria’s neighbors, as I predicted in the fall of 2013, are also suffering from an increasingly destabilizing burden as a result of the conflict—none more so than Iraq as ISIS broke off from al-Qaeda and proceeded to shock the world with its march from Syria into Iraq in 2014—and the more than four million registered refugees it has produced.

UNHCR

Still, as mentioned, even before the chemical weapons attacks, the Obama Administration had signaled and had taken steps—albeit very miniscule ones—to support rebels fighting to overthrow Assad’s regime. Yet, in addition to Obama’s natural caution and the lack of political and public support for robust involvement in Syria, a classified 2012-2013 CIA study found very little success with past CIA covert armings of rebel groups in various conflicts over nearly seventy years unless Americans were on the ground working with rebels where they were fighting (something the Obama Administration was clear it wanted to avoid at the time); this means that even up through the publishing of this article at the beginning of August 2015, the Administration’s anti-Assad efforts when it comes to supporting rebels actively fighting against Assad have been half-hearted, tepid, and ineffective at best. As the CIA training program for vetted moderate rebels encountered difficulties, stalled, produced limited results, and is now having a significant part of its funding cut, the Obama Administration began to shift responsibility to the U.S. Military by giving it a new program to train Syrian rebels; but whereas the CIA program was concocted to produce forces to fight Assad’s regime, the U.S. Military’s program will focus on producing fighters to go after ISIS. Obama asked Congress to approve $500 million in funding for the new program in the summer of 2014, and by the end of the year, Congress had approved an over $720 million package for the program, demonstrating both the shift in the U.S. view from Assad to ISIS as the major threat and the seriousness with which ISIS was being viewed (Assad may even be playing into this shift by deliberately aiding ISIS in an effort to empower the terrorist group as a way to further deflect Western attention away from itself to ISIS and stoke further fears of what would happen should the Assad regime fall, making leaders more reluctant to push for his ouster). The military training program began this spring, but as of early July had only managed to train less than sixty rebels, a paltry figure by any standards. To make matters worse, even before the end of July, al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria and ISIS rival, Jabhat al-Nusra/the Nusra Front, had embarrassingly captured one of the U.S-trained-rebels’ senior commanders and his deputy and then later attacked the U.S.-trained rebel group.  Another embarrassing development is that the Assad regime has been resorting to the regular use of makeshift chemical weapons—the regime’s infamous barrel bombs with chlorine gas added to their payload—against civilians. While these more improvised chlorine chemical weapons do not reach the level of lethality of the WMD attack from the summer of 2013 (an attack that multiple investigations confirmed involved highly-deadly sarin gas), the blatant and repeated violation of the international norm against the use of chemical weapons without any serious consequences is a development that begs their future use by both Assad’s regime and others who share its lack of concern for international norms and human life.

Additionally, just over the past week, after Turkey’s long opposition to Assad by way of supporting Islamist extremists—including, at least tacitly (and sometimes more directly), ISIS and the al-Qaeda-affiliated Nusra Front—backfired recently with the worst terrorist attack in Turkey against civilians in years and carried out by a Turkish citizen with reported tied to ISIS, there is, apparently, a new level of cooperation between Turkey and the United States, including plans to establish a “safe zone” corridor in Syria along the country’s border with Turkey using American air power and both Turkish and rebel ground forces. The plan reportedly calls for ISIS to be cleared from a zone inside Syria extending sixty miles from Turkey’s border and which would also serve as a safe haven for civilians, though U.S. officials later denied such a plan has been agreed upon. I called for at least a similar robust corridor back in the fall of 2013 as a starting point from which moderate rebels, supported by the West, could further expand control and as one of the only realistic ways for an intervention to have an impact on driving down the drivers of conflict and moving in any way towards an end to the Syrian Civil war and the mass killing associated with it (as neither Assad’s chemical weapons nor ISIS are the reasons behind the Syrian Civil War and its perpetuation). However, it remains to be seen if this talk will turn into action and enough of such action to make a real difference. Especially with Obama close to leaving office and an election season well underway, there are reasons to doubt this safe corridor will actually come into being anytime soon if at all, at least in a significant way. Then again, Obama has shown a boldness and a willingness to take the risks required for big payoffs in recent months, most especially with Cuba and Iran, so such talk should also not be immediately written off. Furthermore, there is at least a chance that the recent agreement with Iran will spur further cooperation between Iran and the United States, with Syria perhaps being the most pressing and obvious case for such cooperation apart from the problem of ISIS. Only time will tell, especially given the conflicting messages coming out of media and official sources. But if some sort of a safe-zone is established by two (or more) NATO countries like the U.S. and Turkey, it could be a game changer for Assad, and not to his benefit. If such action expands, the successful NATO air-war in Kosovo could be seen as something of a loose blueprint. A Syria free of Assad and with ISIS tamed could be a starting point for peace and a new future for the Syrian people. What is happening now is a starting point for nothing but death and destruction.

While the U.S. may be significantly and substantively stepping up the fight against ISIS in Syria, having now been directly striking ISIS targets inside Syria with a respectable-sized coalition of air power for some time (and reportedly maybe indirectly communicating with Assad’s regime about those strikes), and while talk of creating a humanitarian corridor is certainly welcome, even allowing for those developments, there is very little of substance the U.S. has done to stem the long-term drivers of the Syrian Civil War and thus, very little it has done little to bring about an end to this conflict and a stop to the mass killing involved with it. As peace talks pushed by the U.S. between the regime and the opposition, each with goals wholly incompatible to the other, have accomplished nothing and seem all but certain to go nowhere for the foreseeable future, the focus on ISIS and on chemical weapons has obscured the fact that the Assad regime and the war in general slaughters civilians on a mass scale and that little has been done to stop this by anyone.

Bold “What Ifs” vs. “Do No Harm”

Having traced the Syrian Civil War from its inception through now and the U.S. role (or lack thereof) in it during this same period, how the U.S. could even be judged or graded on its involvement must also be discussed.

Since the United States: 1.) was not, an occupying power in Syria—like France was was from the end of WWI through 1946—and bears no serious responsibility for the initial homegrown protests in Syria that prompted a brutal, murderous government response that, in turn, provoked an uprising which led to the Syrian Civil War, 2.) was not even not the among first Western nations formally recognizing the opposition, 3.) has been very lightly involved compared with other major international meddlers in this conflict (e.g. Russia, Iran, Hezbollah, the Gulf states…), and 4.) since the overall post-2003 Iraq mess, for which the U.S. does bear a majority of overall responsibility, was actually at its best levels of security all throughout the first two years of the protests/fighting in Syria, we cannot even begin to argue that the U.S. destabilizing Iraq is one of the major reasons why the Syrian Civil War got so out of control. If anything, the situation in Syria eventually did much more to destabilize Iraq than the other way around. That is no to say that our actions in Libya (which will be discussed in Part III) did not possibly serve to foster a hope within dissident Syrians that the U.S./NATO/the West would intervene on their behalf, but using that possibility to assign major blame to the U.S. for Syria’s conflict falls far short of a logical conclusion.

Reuters/Muzaffar Salman

However, as demonstrated, the U.S. had major opportunities to help make major differences and assist the Syrian people and their homegrown revolutionaries in overthrowing Assad. This the U.S. (and the world) declined to do, except in only very minor ways and quite belatedly, making the war in Syria a heavyweight fight between Ba’athist authoritarianism and jihadist theocracy, with the local Syrian moderates being left to waste away in the face of multiple competing factions and multiple threats. As in otherrelatively recent situations of mass killing (e.g., Rwanda, Bosnia, the Congo, the ongoing genocide in Darfur), it is disappointing that, absent U.S. leadership, no other nation stepped up to lead and significantly help the people (in this case local, moderate rebels), and that so many people have, are, and will continue to die as a result, so the blame for inaction on Syria is hardly on the U.S. alone. But especially after Obama’s waffling and inaction on his chemical weapons “red line” (a true low point of Obama’s presidency, which even his then-Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta acknowledges was a huge mistake) and after Russia’s Syrian WMD deal, Assad has felt secure and undaunted when it comes to the West, while the extremist jihadists are ascendant at the expense of the moderate rebels as much as at the expense of the regime, if not more so. And it seems, sadly, that, without U.S. leadership, there is no end to this brutal war in sight.

But with less than eighteen months left in Obama’s presidency, and with ISIS now being the priority target before Assad (though Obama reiterated earlier in July that it still his and the U.S. Government’s official position that Assad needs to step down), it is very unlikely that Assad will be gone before Obama leaves office in January 2017 or anytime soon after that, given the lack of real action the U.S. and other world powers have taken to bring this about. Obama’s current Secretary of Defense, Ashton Carter, bluntly admitted this recently during a Senate hearing. Still, the new U.S. training program for moderate rebels and new talk of a “safe zone” should not be prematurely dismissed, although nor, conversely, should any chicks be counted before the eggs are hatched.

But one final point must also be made: given America’s recent decade-and-then-some of misadventures, Obama does deserve some credit for notinserting America in a huge, destructive, or counterproductive way into the morass of the Syrian Civil War.

Grade: Overall C, more recently C+

Baraa Al-Halabi

For these reasons, the Obama Administration cannot be given lower than a C on Syria because, as discussed, the U.S. has not been a major player in Syria historically or recently and therefore cannot be said to be one those parties most at fault for the creation or perpetuation of the Syrian Civil War or its frightening metastasization and mass casualties totaling nearly a quarter of a million killed. Furthermore, contrary to recent years, the U.S. now has avoided inserting itself blunderingly and destructively into a major quicksand-like ground role in the war. It also avoided its Cold War modus operandi of blindly aiding extremist groups killing many civilians and committing many atrocities.  So, to its credit, the Administration avoiding a repeat of Iraq in 2003 as well as many of America’s misadventures from the Cold War. Yet so much more could have been done to mitigate or possibly end the war over the last four years, so many tens of thousands (or more) of lives could have been saved, and though the U.S. is far from alone in being blamed for inaction, it still could have done so much more than the very, very little it ended up doing, its embarrassing “red line” moment perhaps the most obvious example of this, when the correct and better arguments for intervention quickly fell to the side without the wind of political will to keep them aloft. To be fair to the Obama Administration, these winds of political will were absent from all significant concerned parties, with the U.S. hardly being the party with either the most responsibility to act or the most interests at stake. While recent reports suggest a very belated better-far-too-late-than-never increase in efforts to help moderate rebels, the results and the seriousness of these efforts remain to be seen, and as moderate rebels generally stand now, they have been all but pushed aside and are languishing in near-irrelevance as the conflict has devolved mainly into a conflict between Assad’s autocratic, oppressive regime and Islamist extremists intent on building a caliphate. So, even as the Administration cannot be given lower than a C, it also cannot be given higher than a C. Thus, an “average” grade of C it is, with + being added for the more recent months on the hope that recent moves, deliberations, and talk prove more fruitful and productive than the meager and disappointing efforts of the Obama Administration thus far.

Narciso Contreras/Associated Press

That’s it for Part II, coming up next the (overall) Arab Spring, ISIS, reducing America’s dependency on Mideast oil, and Iran (saving the more positive for last). If you think your site or another would be a good place for this content please do not hesitate to reach out to me! Please feel free to share and repost on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter (you can follow me there at@bfry1981)