FA 2024
The Best of 2023
Our Editors’ Top Picks From Print and Web
How Israel Could Lose America
Netanyahu Risks Letting the War in Gaza Jeopardize an Essential Alliance
Shalom Lipner
Disunited Kingdom
Will Nationalism Break Britain?
Fintan O’Toole
The Medicis of the Middle East?
How the United Arab Emirates Is Plotting Its Rise
Neil Quilliam and Sanam Vakil
The Treacherous Path to a Better Russia
Ukraine’s Future and Putin’s Fate
Andrea Kendall-Taylor and Erica Frantz
Artificial Intelligence’s Threat to Democracy
How to Safeguard U.S. Elections From AI-Powered Misinformation and Cyberattacks
By Jen Easterly, Scott Schwab, and Cait Conley
January 3, 2024
People waiting to vote in Phoenix, Arizona, November 2022
Brian Snyder / Reuters
Generative artificial intelligence—AI that can create new text, images, and other media out of existing data—is one of the most disruptive technologies in centuries. With this technology now more available and powerful than ever, its malicious use is poised to test the security of the United States’ electoral process by giving nefarious actors intent on undermining American democracy—including China, Iran, and Russia—the ability to supercharge their tactics. Specifically, generative AI will amplify cybersecurity risks and make it easier, faster, and cheaper to flood the country with fake content.
Although the technology won’t introduce fundamentally new risks in the 2024 election—bad actors have used cyberthreats and disinformation for years to try to undermine the American electoral process—it will intensify existing risks. Generative AI in the hands of adversaries could threaten each part of the electoral process, including the registration of voters, the casting of votes, and the reporting of results. In large part, responsibility for meeting this threat will fall to the country’s state and local election officials. For nearly 250 years, these officials have protected the electoral process from foreign adversaries, wars, natural disasters, pandemics, and disruptive technologies.
But these officials need support, especially because of the intense pressure they have faced since the 2020 election and the baseless allegations of voter fraud that followed it. Federal agencies, manufacturers of voting equipment, generative AI companies, the media, and voters need to do their part by giving these officials the resources, capabilities, information, and trust they need to bolster the security of election infrastructure. Election officials also need to be allowed to safely perform their duties, from the opening of voting through to final vote verification. Generative AI companies in particular can help by developing and making available tools for identifying AI-generated content, and by ensuring that their capabilities are designed, developed, and deployed with security as the top priority to prevent them from being misused by nefarious actors. At stake is nothing less than the foundation of American democracy.
FAKE IT TILL YOU BREAK IT
Generative AI software creates original text, images, and other types of media using statistical models that generalize the patterns and structures from existing data. Applications that run on large language models, such as ChatGPT, take text in as a prompt and produce new text as an output. This form of generative AI can craft emails, standup routines, recipes, or college term papers in seconds. Other applications can take text inputs and create synthetic media outputs (often called deepfakes), like the viral fake photo of Pope Francis wearing a puffer jacket. AI can also generate voice-cloned audio files based on a mere snippet of recorded voice. In September, for example, a fake audio recording popped up on Facebook just two days before Slovakia’s elections; it used voice cloning to portray an interview between the leader of one of Slovakia’s political parties and a Slovakian journalist in which the progressive party leader appeared to be discussing how to rig the election.
These technologies to generate synthetic text, speech, image, and video have become increasingly accessible, lowering the barriers for those wishing to meddle in U.S. elections. In recent years, foreign adversaries have attempted to undermine the security and integrity of U.S. elections by launching cyber-intrusions, carrying out hack-and-leak operations, and leveraging troll farms and networks of social media bots to spread falsehoods. Notably, an increasing number of foreign actors are entering this space, with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence making public in December that the scale and scope of foreign activity targeting the 2022 U.S. midterm elections exceeded what the U.S. government detected during the 2018 election cycle. “The involvement of more foreign actors probably reflects shifting geopolitical risk calculus, perceptions that election influence activity has been normalized, [and] the low cost but potentially high reward of such activities,” the ODNI report said. So, although these threats are not new, today’s generative AI capabilities will make these activities cheaper and more effective. Specifically, AI-enabled translation services, account creation tools, and data aggregation will allow bad actors to automate their processes and target individuals and organizations more precisely and at scale.
As the U.S. presidential election approaches, federal and state officials are acutely aware of the disruptive potential for generative AI. Although we did not observe any malicious use of generative AI in the state, local, and municipal elections held in over 30 states on November 7, we have seen the technology used in American political campaigning and in the Slovak election as noted above, as well as the November Argentine presidential election. As adversaries familiarize themselves with these increasingly accessible and powerful tools, it should be assumed they will be used more often.
THREAT ASSESSMENT
More than two billion people—one quarter of the planet—are expected to vote in various elections in 2024. With people going to the polls across the globe, concerns over generative AI’s effect on elections are not limited to the United States. As the United Kingdom’s National Cyber Security Centre has noted, this year’s British general election will be the first to take place against the backdrop of significant advances in AI. The center warned that “large language models will almost certainly be used to generate fabricated content, AI-created hyper-realistic bots will make the spread of disinformation easier, and the manipulation of media for use in deepfake campaigns will likely become more advanced.”
AI allows for easier and more comprehensive data aggregation, which in turn empowers malicious actors to undertake tailored cyberattacks, including spearphishing attacks targeting specific individuals or organizations. When this is combined with high-quality AI-generated content, even the most vigilant of Internet users may be vulnerable. Generative AI can also help create strains of malware that are better at evading detection. Moreover, by helping to optimize the coordination and timing of botnet attacks, AI could enable more effective “distributed denial-of-service attacks,” where an attacker overwhelms a server with Internet traffic, which could take down election-related websites by flooding them with massive amounts of data. Similarly, AI-enhanced tools could be used to overwhelm communications at election offices—whether through robocalls, texts, or emails. Although such attacks wouldn’t affect election-related data, they could delay or prevent election officials from responding to actual voter inquiries and undermine voter confidence in the elections process.
Generative AI could also make other forms of digital attacks, including online harassment, easier. U.S. election officials already face an unprecedented level of hostility. Concerns over personal safety—including the fear that their home addresses and other personal information will be made publicly available, a practice known as doxing—have been one of the primary drivers behind a wave of resignations by experienced election officials across the country. Generative AI tools can significantly enhance harassment to include tactics like doxing by enabling the rapid and large-scale creation of content featuring personal information, fake compromising pictures, or threats.
Well before ChatGPT emerged, foreign actors used disinformation to target U.S. elections and those around the world. With generative AI, the United States can expect an increase in the scale and sophistication of these efforts across a wide range of tactics: misleading voters about candidates by using false messaging or altered images; targeted voter suppression campaigns using generative AI to impersonate election officials to spread incorrect information about voting center locations and hours of operation; and deepfake images or videos of election workers casting and counting fake ballots, to name just a few. The hypothetical scenarios are endless, but the intention behind them is always the same: to undermine the American public’s trust in the outcome of the election.
HUMANS VS. MACHINES
Despite heightened concerns, the United States has the power to head off the threat the malicious use of generative AI poses to its democracy. The American electoral process is resilient, thanks in large part to the dedication of state and local election officials who work every day to administer, manage, and secure it. Election officials serving across some 8,800 election jurisdictions work tirelessly to identify, detect, and mitigate risks. Even before the advent of generative AI, election officials effectively defended election systems from the full range of cyber, physical, and operational risks, as well as the threat from foreign malign influence operations and disinformation. As a result, there is no evidence that any voting system lost any votes—or was compromised in any other way—in any national election since election infrastructure was designated as critical infrastructure in 2017, and a dedicated effort was organized at the federal, state, and local levels to track the effect of security threats on the integrity of the voting process.
Indeed, election officials frequently highlight that the only constant in election administration is to expect the unexpected. Natural-born crisis managers, they are practiced in the art of adapting to any situation and finding creative solutions. Just look to Lee County, Florida, during the 2022 midterm election. Weeks before Election Day, the county was ravaged by Hurricane Ian, the costliest hurricane in Florida’s history and the third costliest weather disaster in U.S. history. With scores of displaced voters, decimated supply chains, and significant infrastructure damage, election officials rallied and, despite all of this, were able to successfully administer the election even though only 12 of the usual 97 polling locations were functional. Although these threats are clearly different in kind from the malicious use of AI, they demonstrate how election officials continue to overcome the myriad of complex challenges to the electoral process.
Over the past seven years, since the designation of election infrastructure as critical, election officials have moved aggressively to establish strong digital and physical controls on election systems and networks. They have implemented security measures to detect malicious activity more rapidly, and they have worked to reduce supply chain risk throughout election infrastructure by mandating that vendors take certain security precautions. They have migrated election websites to more secure “.gov” domain websites to prevent spoofing—directing users to fake websites—and make it easier for users to realize when they have been redirected to an outside website. Election officials have also partnered with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to take advantage of threat information sharing, cyber-scanning services that identify vulnerabilities, cyber and physical security assessments, and incident response assistance.
More than two billion people are expected to vote in elections in 2024.
For generative AI cyberthreats, there are steps—many of which are the same security best practices experts have recommended for years—that will help mitigate these risks. Specifically, state and local officials can make it more difficult for adversaries by enabling multifactor authentication throughout their networks; deactivating or deleting user profiles no longer in use and ensuring that users have only those accesses necessary for their specific roles; and using what’s known as “endpoint detection and response” software to continuously alert on and enable rapid reaction to cyberthreats such as malware or unauthorized access. To combat increasingly sophisticated phishing attempts, election officials can also use email authentication protocols that help verify the authenticity of the sender and decrease the danger of malicious emails. To protect against doxing and other forms of targeted harassment, election officials should remove any personally identifying information from public-facing profiles, make personal accounts private to reduce access to photo imagery, and regularly request that personal information be removed from public records websites.
To protect against AI-generated voice cloning, election officials should establish practices where, before sensitive information is shared, even internally, requests are confirmed through secondary challenges that provide identity verification, including for real-time communications. One common low-tech best practice involves incorporating private passphrases known to election officials and which change on specified time intervals. These phrases must then be provided during calls before any sensitive information is relayed to the person on the other end of the line who can confirm the passphrase and thus the authenticity of the official. Separately, implementing technical controls on websites where the public can submit questions—such as public records requests—can help limit the number of AI-generated, inauthentic requests while preserving pathways for authentic human requests. Human authentication tools such as CAPTCHA, which can be integrated relatively easily into standard website operations, can also help differentiate legitimate human inquiries from automated inquiries. While these tools are not perfect and can in some instances be defeated, they can help thwart adversaries looking to exploit paths of least resistance.
Perhaps the most important action state and local election officials can take to reduce the effect of foreign influence and disinformation operations, including those enhanced by generative AI, is to communicate transparently and consistently with the public, solidifying their role as authoritative voices and strengthening their relationships with local media, community leaders, and constituents—well in advance of Election Day. In this context, the National Association of Secretaries of State #TrustedInfo2024 initiative is an important public education effort to promote election officials as the trusted sources of election information and drive voters directly to election officials’ websites and social media pages to ensure they get the most accurate information. In support of these efforts, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency continues to use the Rumor vs. Reality website launched several years ago to ensure voters have the most accurate information related to election infrastructure security.
The key to mitigating against potential AI-enhanced threats, however, is situational awareness and operational preparedness. Election offices, other state and local offices, vendors of voting equipment, and critical enablers like Internet service providers must all work together to ensure they understand the risks and their roles in mitigating those risks, including how to get operations back up and running after an incident. To succeed, all parties involved in elections must continuously share information and train together frequently using tools like tabletop exercises to rehearse contingency operations from established playbooks.
OF THE PEOPLE, BY THE PEOPLE
Generative AI is complicating the jobs of election offices at a time when many of them remain under-resourced and understaffed. The high turnover of experienced election administration professionals across the country has only exacerbated the problem. Although this year will be a very challenging one for election officials, time and again they have risen to the challenge. The federal government will continue to support them with resources, information, and security services. Today, all 50 states and over 3,700 local jurisdictions and private-sector organizations are members of the Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center, an initiative that provides 24-hour threat monitoring, election infrastructure cyberthreat analysis, and assistance with incident response. The Election Assistance Commission, a U.S. government agency, also offers resources such as voting system security measures and best practices local election officials can follow to secure voting systems.
The private sector, including Internet service providers, cloud service providers, and cybersecurity firms, as well as election vendors and companies that provide voting equipment, also has a role to play. In previous election cycles, such vendors and service providers stepped up to provide local and state election offices with enhanced security measures and support services. But any company providing critical services to election offices should ask what more it can do to reduce the cyber, physical, and operational risks to election infrastructure going into the election season. In particular, generative AI companies should consider how they can support election officials, both by ensuring the overall secure design of their products and in particular by developing methods for identifying AI-generated content. Last year, a number of leading AI companies made voluntary commitments with the White House to help advance the development of safe, secure, and transparent AI, including by making available technical mechanisms to ensure that users know when content is AI generated. These tools and others used in establishing digital authenticity, such as digital watermarking, could be extremely helpful in the year ahead as election officials seek to distinguish AI-generated content from human-generated content, protect against tampering by demonstrating when content was altered after digital credentials were created, and help the public verify official content. While versions of these capabilities exist today, companies should commit to continuously improving the quality and security of these authenticity products because researchers have demonstrated that such products, too, can be vulnerable to exploitation.
It is also important for the media to be aware of the threat posed by the malicious use of AI in this election cycle. Journalists should help ensure the information they relay comes from trusted, official sources; when incorrect information is circulating, they should make accurate information available. Sophisticated foreign influence operations could quickly overwhelm local election offices and exceed their ability to respond. This is where the media can be key, amplifying election officials as trusted sources of information and helping ensure that accurate information is being shared with the public.
Voters can do their part, too. There is always the opportunity to serve as a poll worker or as an election observer. And everyone can support their state and local election officials by being careful not to amplify or exacerbate the actions of nefarious actors who want to undermine the security and integrity of American democracy. Election security should not be a matter of politics or partisanship but rather preserving the integrity of the country’s most sacred democratic process. Americans must work together so that the malicious use of generative AI is just another line in a long list of challenges that the American electoral process can and has overcome.
JEN EASTERLY is Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
SCOTT SCHWAB is Secretary of State of Kansas. In this role, he also serves as the state’s Chief Election Official.
CAIT CONLEY is Senior Election Security Adviser at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
MORE BY JEN EASTERLY
MORE BY SCOTT SCHWAB
MORE BY CAIT CONLEY
More:
United States Campaigns & Elections Politics & Society Civil Society Science & Technology Security U.S. Politics Artificial Intelligence Automation Democracy
Most-Read Articles
Why Gaza Matters
Since Antiquity, the Territory Has Shaped the Quest for Power in the Middle East
Jean-Pierre Filiu
The Medicis of the Middle East?
How the United Arab Emirates Is Plotting Its Rise
Neil Quilliam and Sanam Vakil
How Israel Could Lose America
Netanyahu Risks Letting the War in Gaza Jeopardize an Essential Alliance
Shalom Lipner
The Best of 2023
Our Editors’ Top Picks From Print and Web
Recommended Articles
A polling station in Baltimore, Maryland, October 2020
How to Protect American Democracy
U.S. Elections Are Still Vulnerable to Enemies Foreign and Domestic
Lawrence Norden and Derek Tisler
At the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai, July 2023
How AI Could Upend Geopolitics
A Conversation With Ian Bremmer and Mustafa Suleyman
Podcast
The War in Ukraine Is Not a Stalemate
Last Year’s Counteroffensive Failed—but the West Can Prevent a Russian Victory This Year
By Jack Watling
January 3, 2024
JACK WATLING is Senior Research Fellow for Land Warfare at the Royal United Services Institute, a London-based think tank.
A Ukrainian soldier near Bakhmut, Ukraine, December 2023
Viacheslav Ratynskyi / Reuters
Since the failure of offensives in 2023 by both Ukraine and Russia, a narrative is coalescing that the war in Ukraine has reached a stalemate. The perception of an indefinite but static conflict is causing a sense of fatigue in the capitals of Ukraine’s partners: if neither side is likely to make substantial progress, the status quo appears stable, demanding little urgent policy attention.
This perception of stalemate, however, is deeply flawed. Both Moscow and Kyiv are in a race to rebuild offensive combat power. In a conflict of this scale, that process will take time. While the first half of 2024 may bring few changes in control of Ukrainian territory, the materiel, personnel training, and casualties that each side accrues in the next few months will determine the long-term trajectory of the conflict. The West in fact faces a crucial choice right now: support Ukraine so that its leaders can defend their territory and prepare for a 2025 offensive or cede an irrecoverable advantage to Russia.
Uncertainty about the long-term provision of aid to Ukraine not only risks giving Russia advantages on the battlefield but also emboldening Moscow further. It has already undermined the goal to push Russia to the negotiating table because the Kremlin now believes it can outlast the West’s will. Unless clear commitments are made in early 2024, the Kremlin’s resolve will only harden.
What the United States and Europe do over the next six months will determine one of two futures. In one, Ukraine can build up its forces to renew offensive operations and degrade Russian military strength to the degree that Kyiv can enter negotiations with the leverage to impose a lasting peace. In the other, a shortage of supplies and trained personnel will mire Ukraine in an attritional struggle that will leave it exhausted and facing eventual subjugation.
Ukraine’s international partners must remember that the first outcome is desirable not only to Ukrainians. It is necessary to protect the international norm that states do not change their borders by force. A mobilized and emboldened Russia would pose a sustained threat to NATO, requiring the United States to indefinitely underwrite deterrence in Europe. That would constrain the United States’ capacity to project force in the Indo-Pacific and substantially increase the danger of conflict over Taiwan. The West can choose which direction history takes. But first it must acknowledge the gravity of the decision it currently faces.
TIME DEFICIT
If the Ukrainian military’s 2023 offensive had gone according to plan, its forces would have punched through Russia’s so-called Surovikin Line in Zaporizhzhia Province and liberated Melitopol, severing the roads connecting Russia to Crimea. Combined with Ukrainian naval operations, that would have put Crimea under siege. This objective was ambitious but achievable. The foremost reason it failed was that the Ukrainian units assigned to lead the offensive had insufficient time to train and prepare.
In July 2022, the United Kingdom, alongside other Ukrainian partners, established Operation Interflex to train Ukrainian troops. At the time, Ukraine desperately needed more units to hold defensive positions, so Interflex set the training program at five weeks, prioritizing skills vital to defensive operations. That five-week regimen still exists, but the mission has fundamentally changed.
During World War II, the British military considered 22 weeks the minimum time necessary to prepare a soldier for infantry combat. After this initial period, soldiers would be assigned to units and take part in collective training in battalions. Even before May 2023, it was evident that Ukraine’s troops were undertrained for offensive operations and had barely had time to learn how to operate newly donated equipment. But as Russian forces strengthened their defensive positions, the offensive could not be delayed.
The foremost reason Ukraine’s counteroffensive failed was that its forces had too little time to train.
Ukrainian personnel also had too little opportunity to train collectively. The number of troops deployed is not the only thing that matters in war: the potency of an army’s manpower is a function of how well small units coordinate, even while dispersed across a broad area. Ukraine’s geography demands especially skilled coordination because tree lines prevent units from being able to see one another. The threat of artillery further drives dispersion, so that companies are often spread over nearly two miles of front. The terrain in Zaporizhzhia particularly encourages commanders to fight with isolated companies. In this geographic context, a capacity to synchronize activity beyond each unit’s line of sight is needed so units can support one another and exploit each other’s gains.
Collective training in the Ukrainian military has rarely taken place above the company level, however, and the need to staff new units has also left most short of experienced officers. Over the course of the war, the number of active Ukrainian troops has quintupled with no significant rise in the number of trained staff officers. In a theater that requires Ukrainian officers to synchronize widely dispersed infantry maneuvers with artillery fire, drone orbits, and acts of electronic warfare, a shortage of field-grade officers means an inability to stitch together large-scale operations.
During the 2023 offensive, Ukrainian operations were largely fought by pairs of companies under the close management of an understaffed brigade command post. The result was that while Ukrainian soldiers often succeeded in taking enemy positions, they were rarely able to exploit the breaches they made or to quickly reinforce their gains. Instead, they had to stop and plan, giving Russian forces time to reset. If the Ukrainian military cannot expand the scale at which it operates, this experience risks being repeated. Delivering the proper training, however, will need time.
WHEN THE BEST DEFENSE IS A GOOD OFFENSE
Reforms in Ukrainian troops’ training are necessary for more effective offensive operations. But better training would not diminish Kyiv’s need for materiel. The Ukrainian military is likely to face significant equipment shortages over the coming year: at the height of its 2023 offensive, Ukraine was firing up to 7,000 artillery rounds per day, accounting for up to 80 percent of Russia’s combat losses. By the end of 2023, however, Ukrainian forces were firing closer to 2,000 rounds per day. Russia’s artillery capacity, meanwhile, has turned a corner, with Russian forces now firing up around 10,000 rounds per day. Unless Ukraine can again create localized conditions of artillery superiority, any new offensive operations will result in unsustainable losses of Ukrainian troops.
Indeed, without achieving such areas of localized artillery superiority, Ukraine will struggle to blunt Russian attacks. Russia currently fields about 340,000 troops in southern Ukraine. For much of the war, those troops’ offensive potential was limited by logistical constraints. But Russia was also hobbled by the high level of casualties inflicted by Ukraine—up to 1,000 dead and wounded per day during the heaviest periods of fighting. Incurring so many casualties forced Russia to send undertrained personnel to the front line. While that did not stop Moscow from attempting offensive maneuvers, it limited their effectiveness.
The challenge for Ukraine is that even while it maintains a defensive posture, it must continue to mount localized offensives. If Russia sustains fewer losses, the capabilities of its forces in the field will improve. Diminishing pressure on the front lines would offer Russia other advantages, too. Moscow would be able to divert experienced troops to train recruits, potentially allowing it to open new offensive axes in the second half of 2024. Russian forces could also concentrate on sectors where they can establish a more favorable battlefield geometry and inflict heavier losses on Ukraine. If Ukraine leaves large sections of the front quiet, Russian forces may also be able to significantly expand their fortifications, making any future Ukrainian offensive operations harder to carry out. Even while it holds a defensive posture, the Ukrainian military must seek to maximize Russia’s rate of attrition.
WHICH COMES FIRST?
It is essential that Kyiv and its partners establish a realistic shared understanding of what materiel and training can be provided, and when. Over the past two years, Kyiv’s Western allies wasted the time advantages they did have, squandering much of 2022 and 2023 basking in the euphoria of Russia’s early setbacks and imagining that they could avoid a protracted conflict. Rather than seeking to expand industrial capacity in NATO member states, Kyiv’s friends mainly sourced munitions from national stockpiles and the international market and channeled them to Ukraine.
Now these stockpiles of munitions are running low. To continue to achieve localized artillery superiority, Ukraine will need about 2.4 million rounds of ammunition per year. But Ukraine’s international partners, including the United States, will struggle to provide half of that in 2024.
Ukraine’s shortage of artillery shells gets the most attention. But its resource limitations are by no means confined to ammunition. To regenerate offensive capacity and defend itself against Russian attacks, Ukraine will need approximately 1,800 replacement artillery barrels per year. The handful of barrel machines in Europe cannot meet this demand. The numerous fleets of vehicles gifted to Kyiv over the past two years also need a reliable supply of spare parts. Air defense interceptors will be a persistent requirement, too: Russia is now producing over 100 cruise and ballistic missiles and 300 attack drones per month. To contain the damage from these weapons, Ukraine will need resupplies of Western air-defense systems. If Western countries do not increase their capacity to produce these systems, Russia will gain the upper hand.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, fearing that U.S. support will end with the upcoming American presidential election, has declared that all Ukrainian territory occupied by Russia must be liberated by October 2024. This is not achievable, given the materiel available to Ukraine or the time that its military needs to properly train its troops. But it is not reasonable for Kyiv’s Western allies to demand that Ukraine’s generals create a detailed longer-term plan before they commit to offering new support. Without being sure of what equipment they can rely on receiving, Ukraine’s military leaders cannot determine what kind of operations they can mount, and when. In short, preparing for the next phase of the war has become a chicken-and-egg problem between Kyiv and Washington.
VALUE FOR MONEY
A realistic plan would involve resourcing Kyiv to maintain a defensive posture throughout most of 2024 while units are trained and equipped to mount offensive operations in 2025. Beyond the certainty this plan would offer Ukraine’s generals, it would also signal to the Kremlin that it cannot count on winning a years-long war of attrition against an increasingly thinly resourced Ukraine. A U.S. commitment to supporting Ukraine through 2024 would also shift European allies’ incentives toward investing more deeply in increasing the capacity of their weapons industries, reducing the burden on the United States through 2025.
Western leaders must emphasize that longer-term investment in manufacturing capacity is both affordable and ultimately benefits Ukraine’s allies. The total defense budgets of the 54 countries supporting Ukraine well exceed $100 billion per month. By contrast, current support for Ukraine costs those states less than $6 billion monthly.
The biggest barriers to ensuring that Ukraine does not lose the war are political. Funding Ukraine has often been framed as merely giving money to Kyiv. This is, however, deeply misleading. Much of the aid that Ukraine will need constitutes an investment by its partners in their own domestic defense manufacturing and will be spent at home. A significant proportion of aid to Ukraine will eventually be recovered by the recipient in taxes while boosting manufacturing jobs across NATO’s member countries. At a time of economic strain, such investment should be widely welcomed by publics in countries supporting Kyiv.
It has also often been suggested that U.S. support for Ukraine comes at the expense of the American military’s readiness to deter China. But if China sees that the United States is unable to sustain a military effort, whether in Europe or Asia, deterrence is eroded, so expanding manufacturing to meet Ukraine’s needs is vital.
The United States has a treaty obligation to come to the defense of its European allies. Europe’s defense production does not match Russia’s, especially as Russia has moved to a war footing. In time, U.S. leaders must push Europe to reduce its dependency on the United States so that the U.S. military can prioritize deterrence in the Indo-Pacific. But this must be a managed transition. If that transition comes at the cost of Ukraine’s defeat, the United States risks having to support a Europe unable to defend its eastern flank while China simultaneously escalates tensions in the Taiwan Strait.
DECISION POINT
Some leaders in Western capitals now argue that it is time to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine. This line of thinking, however, misses both the extent of Russia’s goals and what the Kremlin would realistically offer. Moscow is not interested in simply seizing some Ukrainian territory: Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly stated that he wants to change the logic of the international system.
If the United States asks its partners to make concessions to Russia to obtain a token cease-fire, two things will likely happen. First, Russia will persistently breach the cease-fire, as it did with all iterations of the 2015 Minsk agreements, while rebuilding its military to finish the task of occupying Kyiv. Second, Russia will argue to its allies that the United States can be beaten through perseverance. This will likely lead many U.S. security partners to seek an insurance policy, reducing the United States’ influence around the world.
Russia does not want a direct conflict with NATO, but the Kremlin is increasingly looking to expand the scope of its indirect confrontations with the West. Since Yevgeny Prigozhin, the former head of the Wagner paramilitary company, halted his June 2023 mutiny, Russia has only doubled down on its ambition to compete with the West globally. In fact, Prigozhin’s failed rebellion may have advanced these ambitions: the remnants of Wagner have now been reorganized into an “expeditionary corps” under the direct control of the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence agency. Since the summer of 2023, Russia has been engaging extensively with governments in western and central Africa, promising them military support in exchange for the expulsion of Western forces and economic interests.
The United States and its European allies face a choice. They can either make an immediate plan to bolster the training they provide to the Ukrainian military, clarify to their publics and to Ukraine that the October 2024 deadline to liberate territory must be extended, and underwrite Ukraine’s materiel needs through 2025, or they can continue to falsely believe the war is in a stalemate, dithering and ceding the advantage to Russia. This would be a terrible mistake: in addition to expanding its partnerships in Africa, Russia is strengthening its collaboration with China, Iran, and North Korea. And if a loss in Ukraine ends up demonstrating that the West cannot meet a single challenge to the world’s security architecture, its adversaries will hardly believe it can deal with multiple crises at once.
Russia’s War on Woke
Putin Is Trying to Unite the Far Right and Undermine the West
By Mikhail Zygar
January 2, 2024
Russian President Vladimir Putin shaking hands with French far-right leader Marine Le Pen, Moscow, March 2017
Mikhail Klimentyev / Sputnik / Kremlin / Reuters
In March of this year, Russia will hold presidential elections. The contest, like ones past, will be highly choreographed, and its outcome is preordained. President Vladimir Putin, who has ruled Russia for more than 23 years, will dominate the race from the beginning. Every media outlet in Russia will promote his candidacy and praise his performance. His nominal opponents will, in fact, be government loyalists lined up to make the contest appear competitive. When all the ballots are counted, he will easily win.
Yet even though the election will be a farce, it is worth watching. That is because it is an opportunity for Putin to signal his plans for the next six years and, relatedly, to test different messaging strategies. Analysts can therefore expect him to do two main things. One is to play up Russia’s struggle against the West. But the other is something that Westerners will find familiar from domestic politics: decrying socially liberal, or “woke,” policies. Putin will, for example, talk a lot about family values, arguing that Russians should have traditional two-parent households with lots of children. He will denounce the so-called “LGBT movement” as a foreign campaign to undermine Russian life. And he will rail against abortions, even though most Russians support the right to have them.
The parallels with the American right are not coincidental. Putin and his advisers have adopted the views and rhetoric of conservative American firebrands, such as anchors on the Fox News channel. The Kremlin has done so because, by embracing the culture wars, it believes it can win over support from populist politicians in Washington and elsewhere. In fact, Russia has already won international right-wing fans. Conservative leaders across the United States and Europe, including former U.S. President Donald Trump, have praised Putin. Some of them have suggested they are happy to compromise over Ukraine’s future.
Stay informed.
In-depth analysis delivered weekly.
Putin’s far-right rhetoric and policies are thus a form of statecraft. By championing such causes, the president appears to believe he can undermine Western societies from within. He likely thinks he can thereby tear down the rules-based international order. And he probably hopes he can replace it with a new, conservative global system with the Kremlin at its center.
THE POWER OF HATE
When Putin first came to power, he was not a culture warrior. In fact, until 2012, the Kremlin was driven by a moderate agenda. Under his first deputy chief of staff, Vladislav Surkov, Putin focused on economic development. Although Surkov was an apologist for Putin’s authoritarian system, he did not despise queer people, immigrants, or women. Instead, he believed that the best base of support for Putin would be cosmopolitan middle-class voters, who tend to be relatively socially liberal.
But Surkov’s theory was incorrect. Russia’s middle class may have supported Putin at first, but as his rule dragged on and became increasingly autocratic, this demographic became critical of the president. During his run for a third presidential term in 2012, hundreds of thousands of middle-class Russians even took to the streets in protest.
Putin won nonetheless. But the demonstrations were a turning point in how he thought about power. He felt betrayed, so he sidelined Surkov. His new chief political strategist, Vyacheslav Volodin, was a conservative ideologue who prompted Putin to focus on enlisting the support of Russia’s poor and its working class, who were considered more religious and conservative. As a result, Putin’s rhetoric and policies began to shift away from the economy and the middle class and toward cultural issues, playing up so-called traditional values and skewering a supposedly decadent West.
One of the first symbols of this reversal was a 2013 law, passed and signed at Volodin’s suggestion, that banned LGBTQ “propaganda.” In effect, the bill made it illegal for the media to describe nontraditional relationships in a positive fashion, and it banned gay characters from appearing in movies or television shows that might be viewed by anyone under 18. The law was not the only way Putin’s new regime worked to stigmatize the queer community. Kremlin-controlled media outlets also began branding LGBTQ people as both dangerous to society and inherently sinful. In August 2013, for example, Dmitry Kiselyov, the host of Russian state television’s evening news show, demanded that the government ban heart transplants from gay men killed in accidents. Instead, he said, their hearts should be burned.
Putin and his advisers have adopted the views and rhetoric of conservative American firebrands.
At the time, such vitriol was still unusual in Russia, so Kiselyov’s statements created a scandal. But Putin seemed happy. In December 2013, he created a new state-owned news agency and named Kiselyov its head. Kiselyov’s promotion helped symbolize the changing nature of Russia’s media outlets. Before Putin’s third term, state television was dull and sedate. In 2012, however, state broadcasters began behaving as if they were on Fox News, the right-wing U.S. television channel known for drumming up outrage. According to a senior former official in Russian state television, who asked to remain anonymous out of concern about his safety, journalists were told to watch and mimic what they saw on the channel. Kiselyov, for his part, started acting like the Fox News star Bill O’Reilly, who was famous for his angry diatribes. That O’Reilly was no fan of Putin—he once called Russia’s president “the devil”—was of no concern to Russian anchors. What mattered, as the former official told me, was that O’Reilly had “the flames of hatred bursting from his eyes”: his news programs were exciting, with fury, fights, and shouting. Now, so were Kiselyov’s.
The state broadcaster was not the only Russian outlet to borrow from Fox News. At the end of 2013, Jack Hanick, a longtime Fox News producer, came to Russia to help the businessman Konstantin Malofeev launch Tsargrad TV, a private far-right channel with ties to the Russian Orthodox Church. In the spring of 2014, Malofeev funded Igor Girkin, then a Russian military commander, as Girkin helped lead Russia’s invasion of eastern Ukraine.
Ironically, and much like many conservative politicians in the United States, Russia’s leaders are hardly paragons of right-wing principles. Putin, for instance, divorced his wife in 2014. Putin has not remarried, but he appears to have been involved with Alina Kabaeva, the former Olympic rhythmic gymnastics champion, since at least 2008. They are widely thought to have children together.
Many of Putin’s cronies are also divorced. Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin divorced his first wife in 2011 and his second in 2017. Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin divorced in 2014. Arkady Rotenberg, Putin’s close friend and a major Russian businessman, divorced in 2013. If these were Soviet times, the separations would have damaged these men’s careers; the Soviet Communist Party was ardently against divorce. But today, separations do not matter at all. Russia has, for many years, been among the world champions in divorce. Its current rate—3.9 divorces per 1,000 inhabitants—is one of the highest in the world, well above the global average of 1.8. (The rate in the United States is 2.5.)
FEAR AND LOATHING
Putin’s culture war has not stopped at Russia’s borders. Beginning in the 2010s, for example, Russian politicians and propagandists began to bemoan the influx of migrants and refugees into Europe, declaring that the continent had lost its identity, culture, and spirituality to people from Africa and the Middle East. “Many Euro-Atlantic countries have actually gone down the path of abandoning their roots, including Christian values that form the basis of Western civilization,” Putin declared in a 2013 speech. Europeans, he said, have been “unable to ensure the integration of foreign languages and foreign cultural elements into their societies.”
Moscow has also waded into U.S. politics. When the Black Lives Matter movement took off in 2020, the Kremlin said the cause was a catastrophe for the United States. “American elites themselves undermine the statehood of their country,” Nikolai Patrushev, the secretary of Russia’s security council, said in an article. “They use street movements in their own interests. They flirt with marginalized people who rob stores under noble slogans.” Patrushev even suggested that there were places in the United States “where whites are forbidden to enter, and local gangs will take over the police functions.” Such remarks could easily have been written by the right-wing media personality and former Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson.
Moscow’s anti-woke diatribes have, of course, come to feature Ukraine. In a 2022 speech celebrating Russia’s illegal annexation of four Ukrainian regions, Putin avowed that his country was fighting to protect “our children and our grandchildren” from “sexual deviation” and “satanism.” In this view, Kyiv is now a vehicle for the West, spreading its corrupt liberal values into Russia’s rightful sphere of influence, and Moscow’s aggression is actually a defense of tradition. It is a way to make sure that every Russian child would have a “mom and dad,” not “parent number one, parent number two, and parent number three,” as Putin put it in September 2022.
In the Kremlin’s view, trans people—the supposed “parent number one, parent number two, and parent number three”—are especially threatening. As a result, they are now the target of extremely repressive legislation. In July, Russia passed a hastily drafted bill that banned hormone therapy and gender reassignment surgery. It also prohibited people from changing their gender identification on passports, annulled any marriage in which one person has changed gender, and deprived transgender adults of the right to adopt children.
At a Russian Supreme Court hearing on whether to designate the “LGBT movement” as extremist, Moscow, November 2023
Maxim Shemetov / Reuters
Gay cisgender Russians have not been quite so marginalized. But they have faced heavy repression, as well. In November, the Russian Ministry of Justice pronounced the “international LGBT social movement” to be an “extremist organization” and banned it. This law might seem to be of little consequence, given that there is no such formal movement. But in practice, the move has criminalized any show of support for gay rights and the very act of being gay in public. Today, any outward display of queer behavior in Russia can lead to a prison sentence of at least five years.
Moscow’s new right-wing measures are not just targeted at LGBTQ Russians. The Kremlin has also launched attacks on women, in part by promoting restrictions on abortion. At a recent public event, both Putin and Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, criticized abortion, arguing that the country needed more native-born Russians to prevent the country from being overrun by migrants. At the end of the event, both leaders listened as a mother of ten made an orchestrated call to ban the procedure.
So far, no one has drafted a bill outlawing abortion, and the speaker of the Russian Senate, Valentina Matvienko, has promised that the country will not totally ban the right to choose. But regional governments have started prohibiting private clinics from offering abortions. Such restrictions on private clinics might expand in the years ahead.
FAR-RIGHT INTERNATIONAL
Putin’s right-wing policies may play well at home, helping to justify his continued rule and the invasion of Ukraine. But domestic politics alone cannot explain his war on woke—and not just because it includes attacks on European immigration and the racial justice movement in the United States. Contrary to what Putin suggests, Russia is not a fundamentally conservative society. According to surveys by the Levada Center, for example, only one percent of Russians attend church weekly, and more than 65 percent of Russians say that religion does not play a significant role in their lives. According to other Levada surveys, roughly 65 percent of Russians support the right to abortion. Transgender people, meanwhile, make up only a tiny fraction of the country’s populace. Before Putin launched his attacks, they attracted almost no public attention.
Instead, Putin’s rants appear to be aimed less at a domestic audience and more at right-wingers abroad. They seem to be targeted at Europe and North America in particular, the two places where Moscow has lost the most support over Putin’s last decade in power. In both regions, mainstream leaders who have isolated Moscow are struggling to fight off insurgent right-wing politicians who support ostensibly Christian values. Increasingly, these populist conservatives are winning. And by embracing their rhetoric, Putin believes he can gain their support and, with it, find a way to improve Russia’s international position.
It is easy to see why the Kremlin believes such an approach is necessary—and why it will succeed. After Russia occupied Crimea in 2014, the West slapped sanctions on the country, and Putin found it harder (although not impossible) to do business with his usual partners in Europe. But the continent’s far right remained receptive. The French right-wing leader Marine Le Pen, for example, praised the annexation. She has also asserted that Putin is “looking after the interests of his own country and defending its identity.” Russian banks, perhaps not coincidentally, have provided loans to her party. It has proved to be a smart investment: In 2017 and 2022, Le Pen was the runner-up in France’s presidential elections.
Putin’s rants appear to be aimed less at a domestic audience and more at right-wingers abroad.
Le Pen is hardly the only conservative Western politician who developed a loose alliance with the Kremlin. The surging far-right party Alternative for Germany has also been warmly received by the Kremlin, and many of that party’s senior officials have spoken fondly of Moscow. One regional leader, for instance, described Putin as an “authentic guy, a real man with a healthy framework of values.” Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who likes to rail against “woke” policies and the LGBTQ community, has become a committed Putin partner. Orban even blocked European Union aid to Kyiv, aiding Moscow’s war efforts.
But none of these parties or politicians is as valuable to Putin as former U.S. President Donald Trump. As a candidate and as president, Trump repeatedly complimented Putin, and should Trump win power again in 2024, he has suggested he might stop aiding Ukraine. Trump himself has never cited Putin’s policies as the reason he likes Russia’s president—instead, he has pointed to Putin’s supposed strength—but Trump’s advisers have. Steve Bannon, Trump’s onetime chief strategist, praised Russia’s president for being “anti-woke.” Carlson, perhaps Trump’s foremost media booster, delivered a speech in Budapest in which he said that U.S. elites hate Russia “because it is a Christian country.”
For Putin, then, far-right policies and rhetoric are an effective means of building international support. He is, in essence, forming a kind of Far-Right International, similar to the Communist International, which promoted the Soviet revolution in the first half of the twentieth century. As with the Soviet Union, which never practiced communism’s philosophical tenets, it does not matter that Putin and his entourage violate their espoused principles. What matters is that those principles help him gain friends and undermine the liberal order.
Even if Putin’s vision does not come to full fruition, a “far-right international” would help strengthen his hand. He hopes that it might prompt Western states to weaken sanctions, for example, or to cut back on support for Kyiv. The result might be a more durable Kremlin regime. And for Putin, that in itself would be a win.
MIKHAIL ZYGAR is a columnist at Der Spiegel, founding Editor in Chief of the independent Russian television channel TV Rain, and the author of War and Punishment: Putin, Zelensky, and the Path to Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine.
The Problem With De-Risking
Transitioning to Clean Energy Requires Trade With China
By Henry Sanderson
January 2, 2024
An electric vehicle production line in Hefei, China, March 2021
Aly Song / Reuters
During the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic, former U.S. President Donald Trump called for a complete “decoupling” from China. Similar proposals came from Europe and Japan, where there was also a growing desire to re-shore supply chains, to end reliance on China for medical equipment such as masks and personal protective equipment. Western leaders no longer speak in these terms. Now they have agreed, instead, to “de-risk” global supply chains linked to China. This means maintaining trading ties and being open to cooperation with Beijing in multiple areas such as climate change while also giving government support and protection to essential homegrown industries. One of those critical industries, it has become clear, is clean energy technologies, an area that China dominates.
But when it comes to clean energy, the difficulty of successfully de-risking with respect to China has not been adequately understood by Western leaders or communicated to the public. Ever-larger subsidies and financial support has been offered to companies to stimulate domestic manufacturing. Although the aim of accelerating clean energy manufacturing is welcome, the strategy is not sustainable. The West needs a more refined approach, and the answer cannot be subsidies alone. If Western governments begin an all-out subsidy war against each other, that will only shift investment to the highest bidder. Nor would subsidies achieve their purpose. Attempting to compete with China on cost in every sector would likely waste taxpayer money, delay the energy transition, and lead to greater damage from climate change, with minimal geopolitical gain. Instead, Western governments should think carefully about how to compete with Beijing for the long haul.
To do so, the West should clarify which sectors it must absolutely support at a loss in order to reduce its reliance on China for national security reasons. These sectors include rare earths, for example, which have military uses. For other sectors, careful thought will be required to determine how to compete with China on costs. The answer cannot simply be subsidizing the cost difference with taxpayer money or banning Chinese imports; those actions will just increase the cost of clean energy. Tariffs on Chinese solar panel imports, for example, have helped support domestic suppliers, by restricting price competition, but have also increased the price of solar installations in the United States. To compete with China, low-cost, scalable, and sustainable innovations are required in mining, processing, and manufacturing, and these must be supported by customers rather than just subsidies.
When it comes to clean energy industries, the West lags far behind China. China is at the forefront not just in production and deployment of clean energy technologies but also now in innovation. If that situation continues, the world will be reliant on China for not only current technologies but future ones, too—and the West will lose out in one of this century’s largest economic opportunities. The West is right to focus on de-risking its supply chains with China. But a subsidy war between countries and direct competition with China, especially in terms of cost, in every area, are not contests that the West can win. It must, instead, focus on priority areas in which it relies excessively on China or sectors in which it can realistically compete. Finally, the West must push customers and the market to support Western supply chains rather than relying on government subsidies alone to support homegrown producers.
WHEN THE WEST LOST ITS CHANCE
It did not have to be this way. The West invented all the key clean energy technologies: the silicon solar cell was produced at Bell Labs in the United States in 1954; the lithium-ion battery was pioneered at ExxonMobil and the University of Oxford in the 1970s and 1980s; the wind turbine industry was developed in Denmark; and General Motors helped invent the rare-earth permanent magnet, which is used in electric motors, in the 1980s. But the West never truly capitalized on these inventions, squandering its early lead.
This was not because of a lack of popular interest in these technologies. In fact, as oil prices soared in the 1970s, there was strong support for clean energy among governments and the public. But that support dried up when oil prices fell in the 1980s. The oil companies, the major investors in solar power, exited the sector and began to spread disinformation about climate change. Exxon got rid of its battery efforts in the early 1980s, and GM’s rare-earth permanent magnet business was sold to China in 1995. Production of the magnets in the United States ended soon after.
Not only did the West squander its lead in clean energy technologies but it also helped China—then a poor developing country—get started in that sector. In the 1980s, a Danish government grant supported the building of wind turbines in Xinjiang. In the early 2000s, German companies went to Chinese solar plants to teach them how to produce solar cells and modules. China, having taken advantage of Western knowledge, then began to innovate just as the West began to lose enthusiasm for climate action. The Obama administration’s 2009 Recovery Act earmarked more than $90 billion for clean energy initiatives, out of a total of around $800 billion. But Congress frustrated the administration’s attempts to pass climate legislation, and many of the era’s startups went bankrupt and were bought by Chinese companies. The United States’ opportunity was lost.
De-risking with China is not adequately understood by Western leaders.
In contrast, Beijing proactively stimulated its domestic market. The government heavily subsidized electric vehicles and domestic solar installations. The result is China’s current position as a leader in the manufacture and deployment of both technologies. But that feat is not solely a result of subsidies. In many cases, the Chinese scaled up and manufactured better products than Western companies. Some Chinese firms have been pioneers: the manufacturing company BYD launched its first plug-in hybrid electric vehicle in 2008, at a time when most global automakers believed electric vehicles to be a costly fantasy.
Recent Western tariffs and import restrictions have done little to dent Beijing’s dominance in clean energy manufacturing. China is simply too far ahead now and its advantage in critical minerals and solar power is too great to make meaningful decoupling possible in this decade. China produces almost 70 percent of the world’s graphite for batteries, processes over 90 percent of the manganese for batteries, produces most of the world’s polysilicon for solar cells, and manufactures almost 90 percent of the world’s permanent rare-earth magnets. The main material used in an electric vehicle battery by volume is graphite—and over 90 percent of the type used in such batteries is made in China.
China believes that its dominance enables it to overpower Western competition, and the country’s leader, Xi Jinping, has already acted to take advantage of this situation. This year, he announced tighter export restrictions on certain minerals needed for clean energy industries, including gallium, germanium, and graphite. Beijing has also increased rare-earth production quotas, despite declining prices. China has built up significant capacity and investment in clean energy supply chains—enough to provide the whole world with batteries and solar panels for a decade. That excess capacity will put further pressure on prices, making it even harder for Western companies to compete. It will also increase the pressure on Chinese companies to invest overseas and seek new markets, encouraging them to find loopholes in Western policies designed to keep them out.
LESS MONEY, MORE SUCCESS
There is a fundamental tension in the clean energy economy between what is good for the planet and what is good for business. Lower prices for batteries, solar module panels, and wind turbines help drive down the costs of clean energy. But they reduce margins for producers, making it impossible for many such companies in the West to succeed. Europe’s solar industry, in particular, is being overwhelmed by a flood of solar modules from China. The industry’s main lobbying group recently appealed to the European Commission for help, citing “a deeply precarious situation for European solar PV [photovoltaic] manufacturers.” The Obama administration faced a similar situation in the 2010s, when Chinese solar panels overwhelmed global markets. As former U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu has said, even a subsidized plant will not be profitable if the supply is not needed by the market. “A finished solar factory, due to overinvestment, it’s not going to be used,” he said in 2020.
Even with subsidies, a Western company will struggle to compete. For example, if China produces 90 percent of a processed mineral needed for electric vehicles and has a 10-to-15-year head start, then entering that market as a Western startup will be difficult. A Western company would need to raise funds for upfront costs at a time of higher interest rates. And in any case, it would likely take two to three years for a customer such as a major automaker to test and qualify any new material as safe and of sufficient quality to be used in mass production. Adding in the time necessary to get permits, it is unlikely that this company could meet U.S. and European demand until the latter half of the decade. By that time, Chinese production may have moved further down the cost curve.
Automakers, then, must choose whether to spend money buying cheaper materials from China to produce lower-cost electric vehicles now, helping the world reduce emissions, or bet on new Western plants with unproven results. At the moment, cost is winning out. As a result, companies are incentivized to hide their Chinese involvement so they can get the materials. Instead of greenwashing, the practice of marketing oneself as more green than one actually is, companies will engage in “China-washing.” They will carefully arrange their equity ownership shares or shift their investments to certain eligible countries to comply with U.S. and European subsidies, but without reducing their dependence on Chinese products.
MAKING UP FOR LOST TIME
In the battle over clean energy technologies, the West has a few advantages. Countries such as Canada, Norway, and Sweden rely on electricity from hydropower that can lower the cost as well as the carbon footprint of producing clean energy technologies and processing critical minerals. Although Chinese companies are increasingly relocating to provinces with hydropower resources, it will take many years to change their large, incumbent industry. Western companies also have the advantage that, when planning a new plant, they do not need to copy the technology that China uses, which can be damaging to the environment. Battery production and processing of battery materials in China is often energy-intensive and in the case of critical minerals such as graphite, uses environmentally harmful chemicals including hydrofluoric acid. In the West, minerals can be processed without acids, and batteries produced without certain energy-intensive processes. This makes Western manufacturing more environmentally sustainable and, potentially, cost efficient. If the West can scale up technologies in which innovation results in a reduction in the cost of producing an existing technology, then that would give its companies a strong competitive edge. It could also reduce the environmental cost of producing clean energy.
Still, innovations that are insufficiently cost competitive will not succeed. Consumers will not pay a high premium just to support a homegrown producer, and they should not be expected to. But Western governments can use industrial policy to enable their markets to pay slightly more for a more sustainable supply chain. This should also help lower the cost of capital for its clean energy companies. The European Union has adopted this approach by mandating sustainability and recycling criteria for batteries imported or produced in Europe. The market must then move toward introducing a green premium, whereby buyers pay slightly more for a greener product. Of course, China can do the same and also improve the sustainability of its supply chain, but this will take time, and many Chinese customers may be unwilling to pay a premium for a lower-carbon product. Western automotive companies, by contrast, are already starting to advertise the environmental footprint of their vehicles and their use of responsibly sourced minerals.
The West faces a conundrum: it cannot decarbonize without China. To achieve its climate aims, the West needs to buy goods from a country that it views as a key strategic competitor. At the same time, if Western taxpayer money is spent with nothing to show for it, or if Western government money merely ends up in the coffers of Chinese companies, there will be a voter backlash. There are already ominous signs that Western consumers may be unwilling to bear the costs of incentivizing a shift toward clean energy: earlier this year, the United Kingdom watered down its climate targets to pander to voters uninterested in bearing the costs of the climate transition. In Germany, too, there is opposition and the right-wing party Alternative for Germany has criticized green government policies as “eco-dictatorship.”
To create hundreds of thousands of new green jobs, Western governments will need to make viable investments in clean energy manufacturing that are supported by the market and customers. That is the only way to really build up popular backing for climate action. Starting a clean energy trade war, which would likely provoke China into taking retaliatory action, or overpromising on industrial policies is not the solution. The West should keep in mind this tricky balancing act when designing a strategy for China.
HENRY SANDERSON is Executive Editor at Benchmark Mineral Intelligence and the author of Volt Rush: The Winners and Losers in the Race to Go Green.
MORE BY HENRY SANDERSON
More:
China Economics Business Environment Energy Politics & Society Science & Technology
Why Gaza Matters
Since Antiquity, the Territory Has Shaped the Quest for Power in the Middle East
By Jean-Pierre Filiu
January 1, 2024
Destroyed houses in Gaza, November 2023
Abed Sabah / Reuters
After nearly three months of Israel’s war on Gaza, one thing is beyond dispute: the long-isolated territory has returned to the center of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. For much of the past two decades, as Israel imposed an air, sea, and land blockade on Gaza, international leaders and bodies seemed to assume that the dense enclave of 2.3 million Palestinians could be indefinitely excluded from the regional equation. Catching Israel and much of the wider world completely off guard, Hamas’s October 7 attack exposed the enormous flaws in that assumption. Indeed, the war has now reset the entire Palestinian question, putting Gaza and its people squarely at the center of any future Israeli-Palestinian negotiation.
But Gaza’s sudden new prominence should hardly come as a surprise. Although little of it is remembered today, the territory’s 4,000-year history makes clear that the last 16 years were an anomaly; the Gaza Strip has almost always played a pivotal part in the region’s political dynamics, as well as its age-old struggles over religion and military power. Since the British Mandate period in the early twentieth century, the territory has also been at the heart of Palestinian nationalism.
Therefore, any attempt at rebuilding Gaza after such a devastating war will be unlikely to succeed if it does not take account of the territory’s strategic position in the region. The demilitarization of this enclave can be achieved only by lifting the disastrous siege and putting forward a positive vision for its economic development. Rather than trying to cut off the territory or isolate it politically, international powers must work together to allow Gaza to reclaim its historic role as a flourishing oasis and a thriving crossroads, connecting the Mediterranean with North Africa and the Levant. The United States and its allies must recognize that Gaza will need to have a central part in any lasting solution to the Palestinian struggle.
Stay informed.
In-depth analysis delivered weekly.
THE JEWEL IN THE CROWN
In stark contrast to its present-day reality of impoverishment, extreme water shortages, and unending human misery, the oasis of Gaza, or Wadi Ghazza, was celebrated for centuries for the lushness of its vegetation and the coolness of its shade. As important, however, was its strategic value, for Gaza connects Egypt to the Levant. Its advantageous position has meant that the land has been contested since the seventeenth century BC, when the Hyksos invaded the Nile Delta from Gaza, only to be later defeated and repelled by a Theban-based dynasty of pharaohs. Eventually, the pharaohs had to abandon Gaza to the Sea Peoples—known as Philistines—who in the twelfth century BC established a five-city federation that included Gaza and the now Israeli cities of Ashkelon, Ashdod, Ekron, and Gath.
Violent tensions erupted over access to the sea between the Philistines and the neighboring Jewish tribes and then kingdoms. Thus the biblical story of Samson, the legendary Israelite warrior who sets out to defeat the Philistines. As his formidable strength depends on his hair never being cut, he is rendered powerless when he falls under the spell of Delilah, who has his head shaved during his sleep, and winds up in a Gaza prison. While in captivity, however, his hair grows back, restoring his strength, and when he is finally dragged out of his cell to be ridiculed in a Philistine temple, he brings down the pillars of the building, killing himself along with his enemies. In a similar vein, it is after killing the Philistine Goliath that young David begins his effort to unify the kingdoms of Judah and Israel.
In later antiquity, Gaza’s coveted geography made it a crucial battleground between some of the epoch’s greatest hegemons. After passing through the hands of the Assyrians and the Babylonians, Gaza was captured by Cyrus the Great’s Persia in the mid-sixth century. But the real shock came two centuries later, in 332 BC, when Alexander the Great of Macedonia launched a devastating hundred-day siege of Gaza on his way to Egypt. During this gruesome war, both sides fortified their positions by digging numerous tunnels beneath Gaza’s loose soil—providing a historic antecedent to Hamas’s strategy against Israel today. In the end, Alexander’s forces came out on top, but at a high cost to all sides. Alexander was injured during the siege and took terrible revenge on the defeated Gazans: much of the male population was slaughtered, and the women and children reduced to slavery.
But Gaza’s importance extended beyond its military value. Having become a city-state during the Hellenistic period, it later became a major religious center in the early centuries of first Christianity and then Islam. In 407 AD, Porphyry, the Christian bishop of Gaza, managed to impose a church on the ruins of Gaza’s main pagan temple to Zeus. Even more famous was another local saint, Hilarion (291–371), who founded an important monastic community in Gaza and whose tomb became a hugely popular pilgrimage site. One of the prophet Muhammad’s great-grandfathers was a merchant from Mecca named Hashem ibn Abd Manaf, who died in Gaza around 525. As a result, after the territory was conquered by Muslim armies in the seventh century, Muslims respectfully referred to it as “Hashem’s Gaza.” (In the nineteenth century, the Ottomans built the Hashem Mosque in Gaza City to mark the site of Hashem’s mausoleum.)
Any attempt at rebuilding Gaza will be unlikely to succeed if it does not take account of the territory’s strategic position.
Between the medieval period and the nineteenth century, Gaza continued to serve as a coveted prize in the region’s major power struggles. It seesawed between Christian crusaders and Muslim defenders in the twelfth century and Mamluk generals and Mongol invaders in the thirteenth. During two and a half centuries under the Mamluks—Turkic rulers who controlled medieval Egypt and Syria—Gaza entered a kind of golden age. The territory was endowed with numerous mosques, libraries, and palaces, and it prospered from the renewed coastal trade routes. In 1387, a fortified caravanseray or khan, a kind of trading and market hub, was established at the southern end of Gaza and soon grew into a city of its own, Khan Yunis.
Gaza was absorbed by the Ottoman Empire in 1517 and conquered, briefly, by Napoleon Bonaparte’s army, after it invaded Egypt in 1798. For much of this span, Gaza was renowned for its fruitful climate, congenial natives, and high quality of life. In 1659, one French traveler described it as “a very cheerful and agreeable place”; two centuries later, another, the French writer Pierre Loti, marveled at its “vast fields of barley all clothed in green.”
When the border was drawn in 1906 to separate British-controlled Egypt from Ottoman Palestine, it ran through the city of Rafah to create a de facto free trade zone between the two empires. But during World War I, the border was fiercely contested by British and Ottoman forces; after three attempts, the British Army finally broke through Ottoman lines in 1917. General Edmund Allenby entered the devastated city of Gaza on November 9, the same day his government made public the Balfour Declaration and its commitment to “the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine.” This endorsement of the Zionist program was later incorporated into the mandate that the League of Nations granted Britain to administer Palestine.
Although Gaza was one of the areas of Palestine least targeted by Zionist settlement, it became a stronghold of Palestinian nationalism, especially during the Great Arab Revolt of 1936–39, in which Palestinian Arabs rose up against the British and fought unsuccessfully for an independent Arab state. Instead, in November 1947, the United Nations endorsed a partition plan in which Palestine would be divided between an Arab state and a Jewish one—the original two-state solution—with Gaza joining the Arab state.
SEEDS OF STRUGGLE
Crucially, what became known as the Gaza Strip was shaped by the pivotal traumas of 1948. First came the failure of the UN’s partition plan, which, although welcomed by the Zionist leadership, was flatly rejected by Palestinian nationalists and the Arab states, setting off an armed conflict between Jews and Arabs. Soon, the first waves of Arab refugees, mainly from the Jaffa area, were arriving in Gaza; in a bitter anticipation of today’s international dilemma, the British suggested that the area would have better access to humanitarian relief overland from Cairo. Then, following the Zionist leader David Ben-Gurion’s proclamation of the state of Israel in May 1948, neighboring Arab states attacked, with 10,000 Egyptian soldiers moving into Gaza. But the Egyptians never made it farther than Ashdod, some 20 miles north of Gaza, where they were soon pushed back by a daring Israeli operation.
By January 1949, the Israelis had not only defeated the Arab armies but also driven some 750,000 Palestinians from their homes, in what became known as the nakba, or catastrophe. The armistice signed between Israel and Egypt under UN auspices in February of that year created the Gaza Strip, a territory under Egyptian administration and defined by the cease-fire lines in the north and east and by the 1906 border with Egypt in the south. After centuries as a strategic crossroads and vital commercial hub for regional trade, Gaza had been reduced to a “strip” of land, cornered by the desert, and cut off from what had been Palestine. On top of that, the local population of some 80,000 was now overwhelmed by some 200,000 refugees from all over Palestine who then described the Gaza Strip as their “Noah’s ark.”
There was no infrastructure to welcome these refugees, and during the first winter of 1948–49, the International Committee of the Red Cross estimated that ten children died every day from cold, hunger, or disease. The immensity of the Sinai Desert forced the survivors to remain in the enclave. Indeed, 25 percent of the Arab population of British Mandate Palestine was now confined in the Gaza Strip to just one percent of its former territory, with Israel absorbing 77 percent of that territory and the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan another 22 percent, through its annexation of East Jerusalem and the West Bank.
Such was the magnitude of the nakba that the United Nations created a special body, the UN Relief for Palestinian Refugees (UNRPR), to deal with the humanitarian crisis. For Palestinians, the terrible upheaval also planted the seeds of a new struggle that would continue to the present day. In December 1948, the same UN General Assembly that had approved the failed partition plan a year earlier enshrined the Palestinian refugees’ “right of return”—whether by way of actual repatriation or mere monetary compensation—a concept that has been central to Palestinian aspirations ever since. It had special meaning in Gaza, given the extraordinary number of refugees there, and since Egypt had no territorial claim on the strip, the enclave became a natural incubator for Palestinian nationalism.
A man hanging a Palestinian flag on the ruins of his house in Khan Younis, Gaza Strip, November 2023
Mohammed Salem / Reuters
As Israel’s first leader, Ben-Gurion understood the long-term threat Gaza posed before almost any of his fellow Israelis. At the UN peace conference in Lausanne, in 1949, he proposed annexing the Gaza Strip and allowing 100,000 Palestinian refugees into their former homes in Israel. But the plan generated an uproar in both Israel, where there was enormous opposition to any return of Palestinians, and Egypt, where the defense of Gaza had become a national cause. As a result, the UN admitted its impotence to settle the Arab-Israeli dispute, terminating the Lausanne conference and establishing open-ended “interim” institutions instead. Thus, the UNRPR was turned into the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which ever since has been the main employer and main provider of social services in Gaza. Eight refugee camps were founded in the enclave, the largest ones being Jabalya, in the far north, and the Beach Camp, on the shoreline of Gaza City—the same camps that have now been destroyed by the Israeli onslaught.
In fact, it took some years before Gazan refugees turned to militant activism. At first, both Israel and Egypt managed to tamp down on the so-called fedayeen—guerrilla fighters mainly drawn from the camps in Gaza who sought to infiltrate Israel. But by the mid-1950s, the Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser began using them for proxy raids against Israel, thus beginning the cycle of attacks and reprisals that is so closely associated with the territory today. In April 1956, the security officer of a kibbutz close to the Palestinian enclave was killed by infiltrators from Gaza, causing Moshe Dayan, the Israeli chief of staff, to warn Israelis of the unresolved grievances simmering in the territory: “Let us not, today, cast the blame on the murderers,” Dayan said. “For eight years now, they have sat in the refugee camps in Gaza, and before their eyes we have turned their lands and villages, where they and their fathers dwelt, into our home.”
Eradicating the fedayeen presence from Gaza became a top priority for Ben-Gurion and Dayan. In November 1956, the Israeli army took control of the strip as part of a coordinated offensive with France and the United Kingdom against Nasser’s Egypt. During four months of occupation, around a thousand Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces (including two massacres documented by UNRWA in which at least 275 were executed in Khan Yunis and 111 in Rafah). The trauma was so profound that when the Israelis withdrew under U.S. pressure, the Palestinian population called for the return of Egyptian rule instead of the UN trusteeship that had initially been envisioned. A historic opportunity to build a Palestinian entity that could evolve into a state had been lost. Meanwhile, the fedayeen fled to Kuwait, where they founded, in 1959, the Palestinian Liberation Movement, known as Fatah, with Yasser Arafat as its leader.
Israel’s second occupation of Gaza started in June 1967, after the Israeli triumph in the Six-Day War. Dayan, now minister of defense, with the future prime minister Yitzhak Rabin as his chief of staff, erased any trace of the border between Gaza and Israel, betting that the attraction of the Israeli labor market would dissolve Palestinian nationalism. But the local population nonetheless supported for four years a low-intensity guerrilla war, until Ariel Sharon, the Israeli commander for the region (also later prime minister), bulldozed parts of the refugee camps and broke the back of the insurgency. Today, the Israeli army is using the very same map that Sharon did to distinguish the so-called “safe areas” from the combat zones in the ongoing offensive.
MAKING A MONSTER
Israel’s more visionary leaders had long recognized that the Gaza refugee problem would not go away. In 1974—following Ben-Gurion—Sharon proposed resettling tens of thousands of Palestinian refugees in Israel to address Palestinian grievances, at least symbolically. But once again, the idea was rejected. Instead, Israel started to play off the Muslim Brothers in Gaza, led by Sheikh Yassin, against the now Fatah-controlled nationalists of the mainstream Palestinian Liberation Organization. Notably, the Israeli military governor attended the inauguration of Yassin’s mosque in Gaza in 1973, and six years later, Israel allowed the Islamists to receive foreign funds while repressing any established connection with the PLO.
For a time, this divide-and-conquer policy seemed to work well for Israel in Gaza, with clashes flaring between nationalists and Islamists in 1980. But by the late 1980s, an entire generation had grown up under the constant pressure of the Israeli settlers who, though numbering only in the low thousands, led the occupying army to exclude the already cramped Gazan population from one-fourth of the enclave. It was in Gaza’s Jabalya refugee camp that the first intifada began, in December 1987, from which it soon spread to the whole strip and then to the West Bank. Young Palestinians defied the Israeli military with their stones and slingshots but also forced Arafat and the PLO to endorse the two-state solution. In response, Yassin transformed his organization into Hamas (an acronym for the “Movement for Islamic Resistance”) accusing the PLO of having betrayed the “holy” duty to “liberate Palestine.” Once again, Israeli intelligence played on those tensions to weaken the intifada and waited until May 1989 to imprison Yassin. But the popular uprising went on until support for peace in Israel brought Rabin to office as prime minister, in July 1992.
In opening secret talks with the PLO, Rabin’s priority was to disengage Israel from the Gaza Strip yet still protect the Israeli settlers there. The Oslo accords, signed in September 1993, created a Palestinian Authority to take charge of territories evacuated by Israel. Arafat moved into Gaza ten months later, believing he had himself liberated the territory, or at least the portion under Palestinian control, while the local population was convinced it had paid the hardest price for such a liberation. This misunderstanding, along with the rampant corruption of the PA, played directly into the hands of Hamas. In 1997, a botched Israeli intelligence operation against the Hamas leader Khalid Meshal in Jordan led to the arrest of Israeli agents. To secure their release, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was forced to hand over Yassin, who had been serving a life sentence in Israel and who returned triumphantly to Gaza.
Hamas’s growing aggressiveness and the crisis of the peace process led to the eruption of the second intifada in September 2000. The shocking wave of suicide attacks helped bring Sharon to power in a February 2001 landslide. After laying siege to Arafat in Ramallah and killing Yassin in Gaza, Sharon believed that his victory would be complete only after the Israeli evacuation of the Gaza Strip. Such a unilateral withdrawal was meant to secure a new Israeli defense line around the enclave and was carried out without any consultation with Mahmoud Abbas, who had succeeded Arafat as head of the PLO and the PA. But Sharon’s gamble ruined the ambitious $3 billion development plan for Gaza that James Wolfensohn, the special envoy of the Quartet for the Middle East (Russia, the United States, the European Union, and the United Nations) had designed.
Hamas naturally claimed the Israeli withdrawal as a victory and went on to win the internationally sponsored parliamentary elections a few months later, in January 2006. Embarrassed by the unforeseen outcome, the United States and the European Union decided to boycott Hamas until it recognized Israel and renounced violence. But by the following year, the unreformed Hamas, having killed hundreds of its rivals, had gained total control of the strip, which was then put under full Israeli blockade (with the cooperation of Egypt, which controls the Rafah crossing point in the south). In many ways, Israeli policies had brought Hamas to power in Gaza, a power that the blockade has only consolidated since then.
A PATH TO PEACE?
A legacy of the policies that have been followed since 2006, the current war between Israel and Hamas is also a result of the denial of Gaza’s rich historical identity. During the past 16 years, Israeli leaders thought they had found the optimal formula for sidelining Gaza entirely: more than two million Palestinians could be excluded from the demographic equation between the Jewish and Arab populations in Israel, East Jerusalem, and the West Bank; and the PA, blinded by its bitter feud with Hamas, resisted any effort to alleviate the blockade in Gaza, an approach that further undermined the PA’s already waning legitimacy. Meanwhile, the division of the Palestinian leadership doomed any effort to revive the peace process and allowed the Israeli settlements to steadily expand in the West Bank. From time to time, Israel engaged in what counterterrorism experts described as “lawn-mowing” wars on Gaza, with, from its point of view, a sustainable ratio of largely military casualties, although the Palestinian killed were mainly civilians. In 2009, 13 Israeli soldiers were killed, and 1,417 Palestinians. In 2012, the ratio was six Israelis to 166 Palestinians. In 2014 it was 72 Israelis to 2,251 Palestinians, and in 2021, 15 to 256. Meanwhile, the European Union and the Gulf states were always ready to foot the bill to reconstruct the ruins in the strip.
But the idea that the terrible human reality of Gaza could be simply ignored was a delusion. On October 7, 2023, the status quo collapsed in Hamas’s horrific killing spree. The unprecedented violence that Israel has been unleashing on Gaza ever since, in which more than 21,000 Palestinians have so far been killed—and, in a cruel replay of the memories of the nakba, an overwhelming majority of its 2.3 million inhabitants have been uprooted from their homes—has sent shock waves through the Middle East and beyond. Netanyahu’s declared war aim—the “eradication” of Hamas—echoes those of Ben-Gurion in 1956, only on a much larger scale and with the whole world watching. Even supposing such a goal can be accomplished, there will be no Nasser to bring order to the enclave after the Israeli withdrawal. So Israel seems destined to be haunted by the very “Gaza Strip” it created in 1948, with the continuing cycle of wars and occupation leading only to more radical Palestinian activism.
For the Israelis and the Palestinians to ultimately enjoy the peace and security they so deeply deserve, Gaza must once again return to its roots as the prosperous crossroads it was for centuries. To start with, the policy of siege and blockade must end, allowing the territory to finally reconnect with the rest of the region. At the same time, drawing on Gaza’s historic role as a major trading hub, a concerted strategy of redevelopment, echoing Wolfensohn’s 2005 plan, must be put in place to allow Gaza to move from international assistance to a self-generating economy. This is the key for the territory to be demilitarized under international supervision and in the framework of a two-state solution.
Of course, it will be extremely difficult to make any of this happen, particularly after a ruthless war that threatens to spawn a new generation of Palestinian militancy. But there are no easy solutions left. This strategy might be the only way out of the current murderous spiral. As it has been for centuries, Gaza is once again at the center of a major war but also the key to peace and prosperity in the Middle East.
JEAN-PIERRE FILIU is Professor of Middle East Studies at Sciences Po in Paris and is the author of Gaza: A History and The Middle East.
The Problem With De-Risking
Transitioning to Clean Energy Requires Trade With China
By Henry Sanderson
January 2, 2024
An electric vehicle production line in Hefei, China, March 2021
An electric vehicle production line in Hefei, China, March 2021
Aly Song / Reuters
Sign in and save to read later
Print this article
Send by email
Share on Twitter
Share on Facebook
Share on LinkedIn
Get a link
Page url
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/china/problem-risking
Request Reprint Permissions
During the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic, former U.S. President Donald Trump called for a complete “decoupling” from China. Similar proposals came from Europe and Japan, where there was also a growing desire to re-shore supply chains, to end reliance on China for medical equipment such as masks and personal protective equipment. Western leaders no longer speak in these terms. Now they have agreed, instead, to “de-risk” global supply chains linked to China. This means maintaining trading ties and being open to cooperation with Beijing in multiple areas such as climate change while also giving government support and protection to essential homegrown industries. One of those critical industries, it has become clear, is clean energy technologies, an area that China dominates.
But when it comes to clean energy, the difficulty of successfully de-risking with respect to China has not been adequately understood by Western leaders or communicated to the public. Ever-larger subsidies and financial support has been offered to companies to stimulate domestic manufacturing. Although the aim of accelerating clean energy manufacturing is welcome, the strategy is not sustainable. The West needs a more refined approach, and the answer cannot be subsidies alone. If Western governments begin an all-out subsidy war against each other, that will only shift investment to the highest bidder. Nor would subsidies achieve their purpose. Attempting to compete with China on cost in every sector would likely waste taxpayer money, delay the energy transition, and lead to greater damage from climate change, with minimal geopolitical gain. Instead, Western governments should think carefully about how to compete with Beijing for the long haul.
To do so, the West should clarify which sectors it must absolutely support at a loss in order to reduce its reliance on China for national security reasons. These sectors include rare earths, for example, which have military uses. For other sectors, careful thought will be required to determine how to compete with China on costs. The answer cannot simply be subsidizing the cost difference with taxpayer money or banning Chinese imports; those actions will just increase the cost of clean energy. Tariffs on Chinese solar panel imports, for example, have helped support domestic suppliers, by restricting price competition, but have also increased the price of solar installations in the United States. To compete with China, low-cost, scalable, and sustainable innovations are required in mining, processing, and manufacturing, and these must be supported by customers rather than just subsidies.
Stay informed.
In-depth analysis delivered weekly.
When it comes to clean energy industries, the West lags far behind China. China is at the forefront not just in production and deployment of clean energy technologies but also now in innovation. If that situation continues, the world will be reliant on China for not only current technologies but future ones, too—and the West will lose out in one of this century’s largest economic opportunities. The West is right to focus on de-risking its supply chains with China. But a subsidy war between countries and direct competition with China, especially in terms of cost, in every area, are not contests that the West can win. It must, instead, focus on priority areas in which it relies excessively on China or sectors in which it can realistically compete. Finally, the West must push customers and the market to support Western supply chains rather than relying on government subsidies alone to support homegrown producers.
WHEN THE WEST LOST ITS CHANCE
It did not have to be this way. The West invented all the key clean energy technologies: the silicon solar cell was produced at Bell Labs in the United States in 1954; the lithium-ion battery was pioneered at ExxonMobil and the University of Oxford in the 1970s and 1980s; the wind turbine industry was developed in Denmark; and General Motors helped invent the rare-earth permanent magnet, which is used in electric motors, in the 1980s. But the West never truly capitalized on these inventions, squandering its early lead.
This was not because of a lack of popular interest in these technologies. In fact, as oil prices soared in the 1970s, there was strong support for clean energy among governments and the public. But that support dried up when oil prices fell in the 1980s. The oil companies, the major investors in solar power, exited the sector and began to spread disinformation about climate change. Exxon got rid of its battery efforts in the early 1980s, and GM’s rare-earth permanent magnet business was sold to China in 1995. Production of the magnets in the United States ended soon after.
Not only did the West squander its lead in clean energy technologies but it also helped China—then a poor developing country—get started in that sector. In the 1980s, a Danish government grant supported the building of wind turbines in Xinjiang. In the early 2000s, German companies went to Chinese solar plants to teach them how to produce solar cells and modules. China, having taken advantage of Western knowledge, then began to innovate just as the West began to lose enthusiasm for climate action. The Obama administration’s 2009 Recovery Act earmarked more than $90 billion for clean energy initiatives, out of a total of around $800 billion. But Congress frustrated the administration’s attempts to pass climate legislation, and many of the era’s startups went bankrupt and were bought by Chinese companies. The United States’ opportunity was lost.
De-risking with China is not adequately understood by Western leaders.
In contrast, Beijing proactively stimulated its domestic market. The government heavily subsidized electric vehicles and domestic solar installations. The result is China’s current position as a leader in the manufacture and deployment of both technologies. But that feat is not solely a result of subsidies. In many cases, the Chinese scaled up and manufactured better products than Western companies. Some Chinese firms have been pioneers: the manufacturing company BYD launched its first plug-in hybrid electric vehicle in 2008, at a time when most global automakers believed electric vehicles to be a costly fantasy.
Recent Western tariffs and import restrictions have done little to dent Beijing’s dominance in clean energy manufacturing. China is simply too far ahead now and its advantage in critical minerals and solar power is too great to make meaningful decoupling possible in this decade. China produces almost 70 percent of the world’s graphite for batteries, processes over 90 percent of the manganese for batteries, produces most of the world’s polysilicon for solar cells, and manufactures almost 90 percent of the world’s permanent rare-earth magnets. The main material used in an electric vehicle battery by volume is graphite—and over 90 percent of the type used in such batteries is made in China.
China believes that its dominance enables it to overpower Western competition, and the country’s leader, Xi Jinping, has already acted to take advantage of this situation. This year, he announced tighter export restrictions on certain minerals needed for clean energy industries, including gallium, germanium, and graphite. Beijing has also increased rare-earth production quotas, despite declining prices. China has built up significant capacity and investment in clean energy supply chains—enough to provide the whole world with batteries and solar panels for a decade. That excess capacity will put further pressure on prices, making it even harder for Western companies to compete. It will also increase the pressure on Chinese companies to invest overseas and seek new markets, encouraging them to find loopholes in Western policies designed to keep them out.
LESS MONEY, MORE SUCCESS
There is a fundamental tension in the clean energy economy between what is good for the planet and what is good for business. Lower prices for batteries, solar module panels, and wind turbines help drive down the costs of clean energy. But they reduce margins for producers, making it impossible for many such companies in the West to succeed. Europe’s solar industry, in particular, is being overwhelmed by a flood of solar modules from China. The industry’s main lobbying group recently appealed to the European Commission for help, citing “a deeply precarious situation for European solar PV [photovoltaic] manufacturers.” The Obama administration faced a similar situation in the 2010s, when Chinese solar panels overwhelmed global markets. As former U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu has said, even a subsidized plant will not be profitable if the supply is not needed by the market. “A finished solar factory, due to overinvestment, it’s not going to be used,” he said in 2020.
Even with subsidies, a Western company will struggle to compete. For example, if China produces 90 percent of a processed mineral needed for electric vehicles and has a 10-to-15-year head start, then entering that market as a Western startup will be difficult. A Western company would need to raise funds for upfront costs at a time of higher interest rates. And in any case, it would likely take two to three years for a customer such as a major automaker to test and qualify any new material as safe and of sufficient quality to be used in mass production. Adding in the time necessary to get permits, it is unlikely that this company could meet U.S. and European demand until the latter half of the decade. By that time, Chinese production may have moved further down the cost curve.
Automakers, then, must choose whether to spend money buying cheaper materials from China to produce lower-cost electric vehicles now, helping the world reduce emissions, or bet on new Western plants with unproven results. At the moment, cost is winning out. As a result, companies are incentivized to hide their Chinese involvement so they can get the materials. Instead of greenwashing, the practice of marketing oneself as more green than one actually is, companies will engage in “China-washing.” They will carefully arrange their equity ownership shares or shift their investments to certain eligible countries to comply with U.S. and European subsidies, but without reducing their dependence on Chinese products.
MAKING UP FOR LOST TIME
In the battle over clean energy technologies, the West has a few advantages. Countries such as Canada, Norway, and Sweden rely on electricity from hydropower that can lower the cost as well as the carbon footprint of producing clean energy technologies and processing critical minerals. Although Chinese companies are increasingly relocating to provinces with hydropower resources, it will take many years to change their large, incumbent industry. Western companies also have the advantage that, when planning a new plant, they do not need to copy the technology that China uses, which can be damaging to the environment. Battery production and processing of battery materials in China is often energy-intensive and in the case of critical minerals such as graphite, uses environmentally harmful chemicals including hydrofluoric acid. In the West, minerals can be processed without acids, and batteries produced without certain energy-intensive processes. This makes Western manufacturing more environmentally sustainable and, potentially, cost efficient. If the West can scale up technologies in which innovation results in a reduction in the cost of producing an existing technology, then that would give its companies a strong competitive edge. It could also reduce the environmental cost of producing clean energy.
Still, innovations that are insufficiently cost competitive will not succeed. Consumers will not pay a high premium just to support a homegrown producer, and they should not be expected to. But Western governments can use industrial policy to enable their markets to pay slightly more for a more sustainable supply chain. This should also help lower the cost of capital for its clean energy companies. The European Union has adopted this approach by mandating sustainability and recycling criteria for batteries imported or produced in Europe. The market must then move toward introducing a green premium, whereby buyers pay slightly more for a greener product. Of course, China can do the same and also improve the sustainability of its supply chain, but this will take time, and many Chinese customers may be unwilling to pay a premium for a lower-carbon product. Western automotive companies, by contrast, are already starting to advertise the environmental footprint of their vehicles and their use of responsibly sourced minerals.
The West faces a conundrum: it cannot decarbonize without China. To achieve its climate aims, the West needs to buy goods from a country that it views as a key strategic competitor. At the same time, if Western taxpayer money is spent with nothing to show for it, or if Western government money merely ends up in the coffers of Chinese companies, there will be a voter backlash. There are already ominous signs that Western consumers may be unwilling to bear the costs of incentivizing a shift toward clean energy: earlier this year, the United Kingdom watered down its climate targets to pander to voters uninterested in bearing the costs of the climate transition. In Germany, too, there is opposition and the right-wing party Alternative for Germany has criticized green government policies as “eco-dictatorship.”
To create hundreds of thousands of new green jobs, Western governments will need to make viable investments in clean energy manufacturing that are supported by the market and customers. That is the only way to really build up popular backing for climate action. Starting a clean energy trade war, which would likely provoke China into taking retaliatory action, or overpromising on industrial policies is not the solution. The West should keep in mind this tricky balancing act when designing a strategy for China.
HENRY SANDERSON is Executive Editor at Benchmark Mineral Intelligence and the author of Volt Rush: The Winners and Losers in the Race to Go Green.
MORE BY HENRY SANDERSON
More:
China Economics Business Environment Energy Politics & Society Science & Technology
Most-Read Articles
The Best of 2023
Our Editors’ Top Picks From Print and Web
How Israel Could Lose America
Netanyahu Risks Letting the War in Gaza Jeopardize an Essential Alliance
Shalom Lipner
Disunited Kingdom
Will Nationalism Break Britain?
Fintan O’Toole
The Medicis of the Middle East?
How the United Arab Emirates Is Plotting Its Rise
Neil Quilliam and Sanam Vakil
Recommended Articles
The Big One
Preparing for a Long War With China
Andrew F. Krepinevich, Jr.
U.S. dollar and Chinese yuan banknotes, January 2023
How to China-Proof the Global Economy
America Needs a More Targeted Strategy
Peter E. Harrell
How Israel Could Lose America
Netanyahu Risks Letting the War in Gaza Jeopardize an Essential Alliance
By Shalom Lipner
December 29, 2023
An Israeli armored personnel carrier driving along the Gazan-Israeli border, December 2023
An Israeli armored personnel carrier driving along the Gazan-Israeli border, December 2023
Clodagh Kilcoyne / Reuters
Sign in and save to read later
Print this article
Send by email
Share on Twitter
Share on Facebook
Share on LinkedIn
Get a link
Page url
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/how-israel-could-lose-america
Get Citation
Request Reprint Permissions
Download Article
Israelis are still reeling from the devastating effects of the most colossal intelligence and operational failure in their country’s 75-year history. Israel’s long-held assumption that “smart fences” and the generous flow of foreign money would keep Hamas contained has unraveled. The October 7 raid on southern Israel left staggering numbers of victims—almost 1,200 dead, thousands wounded, more than 240 abducted and taken to the Gaza Strip as hostages, and hundreds of thousands displaced. Israel’s national trauma will endure for the foreseeable future.
In the immediate aftermath of the assault, the Israeli government declared an emergency mobilization of the Israel Defense Forces, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu committing to “finish” a war that Israelis “didn’t want.” Now approaching its three-month mark, Operation Swords of Iron—as the Israeli military action in Gaza was initially dubbed—continues unabated, after a brief hiatus in late November during which 105 civilians were freed from Hamas captivity. Netanyahu has announced that the campaign’s aims are to eliminate Hamas, recover all the kidnapped Israeli citizens, and ensure that no element in Gaza can threaten Israel again. But the timetable for the completion of the ambitious IDF offensive remains nebulous, as do the contours of a feasible endgame for Gaza.
What is abundantly clear, however, is that Israel’s latitude to pursue its stated war objectives would be vastly constrained were it not for the emphatic support of the United States. As the fighting persists and gaps emerge between the U.S. and the Israeli positions, Israel has strong reasons to invest in keeping its primary alliance intact. To ensure that its bond with the United States survives this war, Israel must not only manage the current military campaign judiciously but also tackle domestic political problems and determine once and for all how it plans to settle its conflict with the Palestinians.
Stay informed.
In-depth analysis delivered weekly.
SWITCHING GEARS
The present chapter in the decades-long relationship between Netanyahu, who returned for his latest stint as Israel’s prime minister last December, and U.S. President Joe Biden got off to a rocky start. Biden—who has often recalled signing a photo for Netanyahu with the words “I don’t agree with a damn thing you say but I love you”—waited four conspicuous weeks after his inauguration before calling the Israeli leader. Many viewed the delay as payback for Netanyahu’s procrastination in congratulating Biden for defeating President Donald Trump in 2020. (When Netanyahu finally called Biden, Trump blasted the prime minister for exhibiting a lack of loyalty.)
The Biden administration made no secret of its dissatisfaction with Netanyahu’s choice of coalition partners from Israel’s extreme right—most notably, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich—promising to hold the prime minister personally accountable for the actions of his government. It was not long before Washington acted on that pledge. In January 2023, when Ben-Gvir ascended the Temple Mount, a sensitive religious site that houses the al Aqsa mosque, during his first days in office, U.S. officials sharply condemned the move and eschewed direct engagement with Ben-Gvir. Tensions escalated later that same week, after Justice Minister Yariv Levin unveiled controversial plans for a drastic overhaul of Israel’s judicial system.
Fallout from the apparent disconnect between the U.S. and Israeli governments was particularly embarrassing to Netanyahu, a politician who prides himself on a superior understanding of American politics. The premier was left waiting by his mailbox for a coveted invitation to the White House; he is the first Israeli prime minister in more than 50 years to have been denied an Oval Office meeting during the first year of his term. Smotrich, for his part, was treated as persona non grata when he visited Washington in March. He and Ben-Gvir have been shunned by bipartisan congressional delegations to Israel and, together with other members of their factions, excluded from the guest list for the annual Fourth of July reception hosted by the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem.
Clashes between the Netanyahu government and the Biden administration over the intended transformation of Israel’s judiciary also spilled regularly into public view. In January 2023, Secretary of State Antony Blinken—on his first trip to Israel since the country’s November 2022 election—added quality time with civil society representatives to his itinerary, giving a morale boost to critics of Netanyahu’s agenda and delivering a not-so-subtle hint of U.S. concern about the fate of Israeli democracy.
Israel’s latitude would be constrained were it not for emphatic U.S. support.
The White House expressed similar misgivings. Speaking in June at a celebration of Israel’s 75 years of independence, Vice President Kamala Harris pointedly highlighted “strong institutions, checks and balances, and . . . an independent judiciary” as pillars of democracy in both the United States and Israel. Eli Cohen, Israel’s foreign minister, retorted hours later that Harris probably had not even read the proposed law and that she would not be able to identify a single component of the reform that “bothers her.”
The brutal events of October 7 reset this caustic cycle. Animosities between Biden and Netanyahu did not disappear, but sympathy for Israel’s predicament overrode lingering disagreements. Biden, arriving in Israel on October 18 as the first-ever U.S. president to visit the country amid a war, promised the people of Israel that the United States would “stand with” them. “We’ll walk beside you in those dark days, and we’ll walk beside you in the good days to come,” Biden vowed.
On the whole, U.S. officials have maintained their backing of IDF operations in Gaza, deferring often to Israeli prerogatives. Blinken, asked on December 10 when he expected the IDF to conclude its military campaign, responded bluntly, “These are decisions for Israel to make.” On December 8, casting a veto of a UN Security Council resolution calling for an immediate cease-fire, the U.S. deputy ambassador reasoned that such a halt would “only plant the seeds for the next war, because Hamas has no desire to see a durable peace.” Washington has issued periodic admonitions, such as Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin’s assertion on December 2 that “protecting Palestinian civilians in Gaza is both a moral duty and a strategic imperative.” But such comments have not diluted the overall impact of a U.S. policy that—as Austin also confirmed—upholds “Israel’s bedrock right to defend itself.”
Biden has preferred to embrace Israel in public and convey U.S. reservations in private conversations with Israeli leaders, evidently reckoning that this strategy grants him more influence over Israel’s calculus than a confrontational approach would. The president’s personal appeals have yielded some results by, for example, helping persuade Israel to abort plans for a preemptive strike against Hezbollah in Lebanon in the days after Hamas’s initial attack. Skeptics of Biden’s methods point to the scale of the destruction the IDF has inflicted in Gaza, despite the efforts of U.S. backroom diplomacy—but the United States is also acting on its vested interest in Israel’s success at routing Hamas, which Washington has designated as a terrorist organization. Either way, Israel has benefited significantly from its ally’s friendship.
FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES
The United States’ attachment to Israel has evolved gradually since President Harry Truman’s recognition of the Jewish state on May 14, 1948. It was not until the 1960s, under President John F. Kennedy, that Washington began to provide military hardware to Israel. Shipments of Hawk antimissile batteries were soon followed, under Kennedy’s successor, President Lyndon Johnson, by M-48 Patton battle tanks, A-4 Skyhawk light attack aircraft, and F-4 Phantom fighter-bombers. The first explicit U.S. pledge to maintain Israel’s qualitative military edge—an assurance of Israel’s military superiority over its rivals—came in a 1982 letter from President Ronald Reagan to Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin.
U.S.-Israeli cooperation has been turbulent at times, but it has maintained a steady upward trajectory. U.S. security, diplomatic, and economic assistance has bolstered Israel’s position in a volatile region. Having a “big brother” over its shoulder has enabled Israel to punch above its demographic weight and geographic size, projecting strength well beyond its borders. And the United States’ commitment to Israel has endured through both Democratic and Republican presidents, including the most recent holders of that office.
As president, Trump formally acknowledged Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and the Golan Heights as sovereign Israeli territory. His actions affirmed a broad consensus among Israelis and sent a formidable message to neighboring countries about U.S. support for Israel. Trump’s “Vision for Peace, Prosperity, and a Brighter Future for Israel and the Palestinian People”—a plan that most Israelis expected to fail—never led to U.S. acceptance of the Netanyahu government’s aspiration to extend Israeli sovereignty throughout the West Bank, but it became the catalyst for the Abraham Accords, which brought Israel’s surreptitious ties with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain into the open. Yousef al-Otaiba, the UAE’s ambassador to the United States and an engineer of the deal, explained the logic in 2021: “The reason it happened, the way it happened, at the time it happened was to prevent annexation.”
Pro-Palestine demonstrators at a protest in Washington, D.C., December 2023
Tom Brenner / REUTERS
This is not to say U.S.-Israeli relations were without problems. In 2017, Trump divulged Israeli intelligence to Russia, possibly revealing sensitive collection methods. He repeatedly accused American Jews who vote for Democratic candidates of being “disloyal to Jewish people and very disloyal to Israel,” not only entrenching Israel as a wedge issue and jeopardizing bipartisan sponsorship of close U.S.-Israeli ties but also stoking anti-Semitism. And his unilateral withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal without an alternative plan to stymie Iran’s race to acquire nuclear weapons only accelerated Tehran’s progress. Netanyahu encouraged Trump’s decision at the time, but that move has, arguably, made Israel less secure today.
Despite early frictions, the Biden administration’s support for Israel since October 7—expressed in words and deeds—has been uncontestable. U.S. civilian and military officials have been constant fixtures in Israel, often participating in consultations with Israel’s war cabinet. The United States has sent Israel multiple airlifts of bombs and other munitions to replace its depleted inventories. Washington has also intervened to block UN Security Council resolutions that would sanction Israel or insist that the IDF end its mission in Gaza, called attention to the plight of the hostages being held by Hamas, and worked to secure their freedom. It has demanded that other countries condemn the acts of sexual violence that Hamas’s fighters committed against Israeli girls and women.
Speaking at the White House on October 10, Biden warned Israel’s enemies not to join forces with Hamas. “To any country, any organization, anyone thinking of taking advantage of this situation,” he said, “I have one word: Don’t.” Among the chorus of world leaders who have urged similar caution, Biden was the only one who deployed two aircraft carrier strike groups and other military assets to reinforce the warning. The president’s steadfast support has been all the more remarkable as the United States enters an election year, given the vocal criticism of Biden’s Israel policy in some quarters of his own party.
Biden has preferred to embrace Israel in public and convey U.S. reservations in private.
On the other hand, differences have begun to emerge between U.S. perspectives and Israel’s operational priorities. As the fighting in Gaza continues, the United States has lobbied on behalf of “tactical humanitarian pauses,” which—as happened during the truce from November 24 to December 1—would give Hamas time to reestablish internal lines of communication and reposition its forces for additional attacks on IDF troops and missile launches on Israeli cities. (Israel’s government has been amenable to these pauses, another of which is now under negotiation, only for the sake of facilitating hostage releases.) Hamas has also exploited U.S. appeals for Israel to allow more food, fuel, and other aid into Gaza. Although civilian needs are pressing, the terrorist group has been caught commandeering this aid to sustain its hold on power. Biden’s objections to “indiscriminate bombing” by the Israeli Air Force and to the high numbers of civilian casualties in Gaza have compelled Israel to recalibrate the IDF offensive, which some Israeli leaders allege has prolonged its duration and exposed Israeli soldiers to heightened danger.
Overall, however, Israel has gained much from its partnership with the United States. The Abraham Accords advanced the formal integration of Israel into the Middle East, altering the regional map in ways that enhance Israel’s security. Although combat in Gaza has slowed the pace of normalization, Bahrain, Morocco, and the UAE have all indicated that they do not intend to abandon their connections with Israel. And Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, in a meeting with U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan on December 13, expressed interest in the idea of eventually joining their ranks.
The United States’ material and political cover has also been essential to Israel’s ability to restore its lost deterrence after the disaster of October 7. “You may be strong enough on your own to defend yourself—but as long as America exists, you will never, ever have to,” Blinken said in a message to the Israeli people on October 12. The secretary’s precise balance between validating Israel’s independent capabilities and reaffirming the United States’ commitment to its welfare illustrates why Israel cannot afford to lose its best friend.
NO GUARANTEES
Israelis have always attributed staunch U.S. support for their country to a set of shared values—including freedom, pluralism, and democracy—and interests, such as the promotion of peace and stability. That ground is shifting now, especially as younger Americans express dramatically less affinity for Israel than older generations. Joe Biden, who has asserted often that “you don’t have to be a Jew to be a Zionist,” may well be the last Democratic president with impeccable pro-Israeli credentials.
This trend should, and does, worry Israel. The stark reality is that the country has no viable alternative to the succor of the United States. Hedging its bets, as other Middle Eastern countries have done, by building relationships with China and Russia—permanent members of the UN Security Council that have both taken the side of Hamas—is not an option for Israel. And lately, even Biden himself has begun to qualify his statements about the war in Gaza. In a speech on December 12, he affirmed that “Israel’s security can rest on the United States,” but he added that Israel is “starting to lose” its support in other parts of the world. Harris, meanwhile, has advocated a “tougher” line in Washington’s dealings with Netanyahu.
Rather than trying to close this distance from the United States, Netanyahu might actually be seeking to spark a row with Washington in order to improve his own job prospects as his approval ratings plummet. “A prime minister who cannot withstand American pressure should not enter the prime minister’s office,” Netanyahu announced to the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee on December 11. But engaging in public brawls with the United States is the last thing Israel needs right now. To avoid a future in which Israel is forced to resist existential perils without recourse to U.S. military arsenals or UN Security Council vetoes, Israeli policymakers must change tack.
Israel has no viable alternative to the succor of the United States.
First, they must take care in prosecuting the Gaza campaign. The inclusion of opposition party members in the war cabinet was a responsible step in that direction. As the war proceeds, the IDF should pursue its aims—which Israelis overwhelmingly endorse—as quickly as possible while minimizing collateral damage and the injury of innocents. To that end, the IDF chain of command should be meticulous in identifying legitimate operational targets, authorizing attacks only when those standards are met. It should also continue to implement ethical protocols for combat. Demonstrating professionalism and integrity will help Israel avoid a repeat of the 2006 war in Lebanon, when the absence of an unambiguous Israeli victory prompted U.S. President George W. Bush to conclude that Israel “mishandled [its] opportunity” to land a decisive blow against Hezbollah and its masters in Iran and Syria.
Israel desperately needs to prioritize national security over politics. A supplementary 2023 budget passed on December 14, which was meant to cover the unanticipated expense of the war in Gaza, diverted precious funds to unrelated bureaucracies—including the Ministry of Jerusalem and Heritage and the Ministry of Settlement and National Missions—to satisfy key constituencies of the Netanyahu coalition instead. There is widespread concern that the 2024 budget will follow the same pattern of allocating resources for political patronage to religious parties at the same time that the United States is being called on to help offset the costs of the war.
Netanyahu also canceled cabinet votes to approve the transfer of tax revenues to the Palestinian Authority and to allow Palestinian laborers from the West Bank to return to work in Israel—the IDF; the Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security agency; and the National Security Council all favor the employment measure, under certain stipulations—in order to avoid tangling with hard-line ministers whose incendiary statements and actions he generally tolerates. The prime minister’s own use of inflammatory rhetoric to shore up his lagging poll numbers, moreover, is sowing divisiveness while Israelis mourn their dead. Repairing Israel’s broken social contract, which had previously enabled its diverse society to coalesce around shared Jewish and democratic principles, and holding new parliamentary elections as soon as the security situation permits are two obvious ways to restore confidence in the country’s elected leadership among both Israeli citizens and Israel’s external backers.
Israel desperately needs to prioritize national security over politics.
Finally, and most urgently, Israel needs to formulate a clear position on the Palestinian issue. When the state of Israel was created 75 years ago, it had to fight off threats to its survival; today, Israel’s stewards must articulate a coherent vision of its ultimate destination. Otherwise, they will struggle to convince the United States and other countries to remain by Israel’s side. Netanyahu must lift his embargo on genuine discussion—within his government and with the Biden administration—of what will come after the Gaza conflict, and define not only what Israel will not countenance but also what outcomes it will accept. The prime minister has rebuffed attempts to have this conversation for fear of destabilizing his ruling coalition. Biden has expressed his frustration with this situation, commenting on December 12 that Netanyahu “has to change,” but the “government in Israel is making it very difficult.”
Whether Israel wants one state, two states, or something else, its leaders and citizens need to decide on a course soon. They should recognize also that, no matter what their decision—and it is their decision alone to make—it will have consequences not only for Israel itself but also for its essential relationship with the United States. If the United States were to become sufficiently disenchanted with Israeli policies that Washington imposed conditions on the provision of U.S. military assistance, Israel could find its operating environment drastically restricted. The Biden administration’s recent delay of the export of more than 20,000 M-16 rifles intended for Israeli civil defense teams because of U.S. concerns about settler violence in the West Bank could be a harbinger of further impediments.
With Hamas vowing to replicate the savagery of October 7 until Israel is “annihilated,” Hezbollah escalating its attacks across Israel’s border with Lebanon, Yemen’s Houthis disrupting Israeli shipping in the Red Sea, and Saudi Arabia still dangling the prospect of normalization, Israel’s next moves could be the difference between deepening violence and progress toward peace.
SHALOM LIPNER is Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative at the Atlantic Council. From 1990 to 2016, he served seven consecutive premiers at the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office.
The Rebirth of Russian Spycraft
How the Ukraine War Has Changed the Game for the Kremlin’s Operatives—and Their Western Rivals
By Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan
December 27, 2023
A partial solar eclipse and the Russian coat of arms in Moscow, October 2022
A partial solar eclipse and the Russian coat of arms in Moscow, October 2022
Shamil Zhumatov / Reuters
Sign in and save to read later
Print this article
Send by email
Share on Twitter
Share on Facebook
Share on LinkedIn
Get a link
Page url
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/russian-federation/rebirth-russian-spycraft
Get Citation
Request Reprint Permissions
Download Article
In April 2023, a prominent Russian national with suspected ties to Russian intelligence pulled off an impressive escape from Italian authorities. Artem Uss, a Russian businessman and the son of a former Russian governor, had been detained in Milan a few months earlier on charges of smuggling sensitive U.S. military technology to Russia. According to an indictment issued by a federal court in Brooklyn, New York, in October 2022, Uss had illegally trafficked in the semiconductors needed to build ballistic missiles and a variety of other weapons, some of which were being used in the war in Ukraine. But while Uss was awaiting extradition to the United States, he was exfiltrated from Italy with the help of a Serbian criminal gang and returned to Russia.
The escape, which was reported in The Wall Street Journal last spring, was only one of a series of recent incidents suggesting how much Russia’s intelligence forces have regrouped since the start of the war in Ukraine. Back in the spring of 2022, in the months after Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his invasion, the Russian intelligence agencies had seemed disoriented and confused. One by one, European countries had kicked out Russia’s diplomats; according to one British estimate, some 600 Russian officials were expelled from Europe, of which perhaps 400 were believed to be spies. The FSB, Russia’s internal security service, had also badly misjudged the kind of resistance that Russian forces would face in Ukraine, assuming that Russia could quickly take Kyiv. This contributed to Russia’s humiliating performance.
Now, Russia’s foreign intelligence network appears to be back with a vengeance. And it is becoming more inventive, increasingly relying on foreign nationals—such as the Serbian gang that assisted Uss, for instance—to help it get around restrictions on Russians. Before the war, Western intelligence agencies mostly dealt with Russian operations being carried out by Russian nationals. That is no longer the case. Today, Russian intelligence activities draw on a range of foreign nationals, and that includes not only spying on the West and tracking arms shipments to Ukraine but also applying growing pressure on Russian exiles and opponents of the Putin regime who have fled abroad since the war started. Evidence of such activity is turning up everywhere from Georgia and Serbia to NATO countries such as Bulgaria and Poland. In early 2023, for example, British officials arrested five Bulgarians who were accused of spying for Russia, including in an effort to keep tabs on Russian exiles in London.
Stay informed.
In-depth analysis delivered weekly.
At the same time, Russia’s spy agencies also appear to have shifted their orientation. Before the war, there was a division of labor among the three principal intelligence services—the SVR (foreign intelligence), the GRU (military intelligence), and the FSB (domestic security). In the past, it was generally understood that the SVR mostly focused on political and industrial espionage and the GRU on military issues, while the FSB was primarily focused on Russia itself, using its foreign branch mainly to conduct operations against Russians abroad and to keep friendly regimes in neighboring countries in power. Now, these distinctions are no longer so clear: all three agencies are deeply involved in the war in Ukraine, and all three have been actively recruiting new assets among Russia’s most recent exiles abroad.
The return of Moscow’s spying apparatus has significant implications for the West in its efforts to counter Russian meddling and Russian intelligence operations. If recent indications are correct, Russian intelligence activities in Europe and elsewhere may pose a significantly greater threat than had been assumed in the early stages of the war. At the same time, these changes offer insight into Putin’s own wartime regime and the extent to which it is increasingly rebuilding Russia’s spy agencies according to earlier models from the Soviet decades. Putin is not only attempting to make up for the Soviet KGB’s failure in its confrontation with the West in the late twentieth century. He is also trying to restore the glory of Stalin’s formidable secret service, which had considerable success against the West in the decades from the Bolshevik Revolution to World War II.
THE HUNDRED YEARS’ WAR
Before Russia began its full-scale war in Ukraine in 2022, the country’s intelligence services looked fairly weak. They had long suffered from interagency infighting and turf wars, as well as from a breakdown in trust between the generals and the rank and file, which led to significant delays and failures in getting information from the ground to the top level. Russian intelligence operations, meanwhile, increasingly became known chiefly for their sloppiness, as in the cases of the botched poisonings of the former Russian military officer Sergei Skripal in the United Kingdom in 2018 and the opposition leader Alexei Navalny in 2020. In short, the Russian spy services seemed to have lost much of their former luster, a problem that burst into the open with the embarrassing misreading of Ukraine in the planning for Russia’s invasion.
But as the war in Ukraine entered its second year, the Russian intelligence agencies regrouped and found a new sense of purpose. Instead of dwelling on their mistakes and questioning why they had so utterly failed to anticipate Ukrainian resistance in the initial invasion, the agencies moved on, taking new strength from the fact that they were withstanding a confrontation with the entire West. They have not only increased their activities in Europe and in neighboring countries; the FSB has also stepped up its efforts to fight back Ukrainian ops on Russian soil. That Putin did not make any radical changes in the security services despite the catastrophe of 2022 has been seen as a virtue: since the tumultuous 1990s, there has been a widely shared view both among the intelligence leadership and the rank and file that any attempt to overhaul the agencies will weaken their capabilities.
Underlying this new activity, however, has also been a larger goal: revitalizing Russia’s overall intelligence war against the West. This is a war that for the main Russian agencies goes back to the earliest years of the Soviet era. As Russian intelligence officials see it, the war in Ukraine has launched the third round of a great spy war that has been playing out since 1917.
Putin is trying to restore the glory of Stalin’s formidable secret service.
The first round of this struggle, in which early Soviet operatives faced off primarily against their British counterparts, started soon after the Bolshevik Revolution. In that original conflict, Soviet agents successfully compromised any chance of fomenting resistance to the Bolshevik regime from abroad. They did this by conducting a massive and very successful false-flag operation, code-named Trust, in which they lured politically active Russian émigrés, as well as British spies, to the Soviet Union to help a fake anti-Bolshevik organization. These anti-Soviet activists were in this way identified and killed. The conflict reached its peak during World War II, when Russian spies successfully penetrated British intelligence and, in the United States, got access to the Manhattan Project and stole the secrets of the atomic bomb. Overall, Soviet officials believed they won this first round with the West.
The second round of the intelligence war, however, did not end so well for Moscow. During the Cold War, the KGB failed to save the Soviet regime it swore to protect. Then, in the early 1990s, the agency was nearly destroyed after being split apart and dismembered. The collapse left lasting scars on Putin, who witnessed it firsthand, and his security elite, as they struggled to rebuild a Russian state that had lost its former power. (Putin ultimately built the FSB on the KGB’s former foundations.)
Now, with the onset of a new grand conflict with the West, Russia’s intelligence agencies are seeking to reverse the setbacks that unfolded at the end of the Cold War. And they sense a new opportunity, seeing the war in Ukraine as the opening salvo in the third round of the intelligence war. The sense of continuity with their Soviet predecessors has even taken visible form in Russia: in September, Sergei Naryshkin, Russia’s head of foreign intelligence, inaugurated a new statue to the founder of the Soviet secret police in the courtyard of the SVR’s Moscow headquarters. And in November, the FSB reinforced that message by celebrating the 100th anniversary of the OGPU, the Soviet secret police, and stressing the role of the OGPU in crushing political émigré organizations.
But the continuity goes well beyond celebrating early Soviet exploits. In the run-up to the war and since, Putin has made notable use of former KGB generals who share his eagerness to avenge the humiliation of the Soviet collapse. Nikolai Gribin, who in the 1980s served as deputy head of foreign disinformation operations at the KGB’s foreign intelligence branch, has a lead role in a new Russian think tank launched in 2021, the National Research Institute for the Development of Communications, which seeks to shape pro-Kremlin opinion in countries near Russia, with a particular focus on Belarus. (Gribin himself has written several research reports on public opinion in Belarus.) In the 1980s, Alexander Mikhailov served in the KGB’s infamous Fifth Directorate—the branch given the task of rooting out ideological subversion, including dissidents, musicians, and church leaders—and ran disinformation operations for the FSB in the 1990s. Since the fall of 2021, a few months before the invasion, Mikhailov has been the FSB’s unofficial mouthpiece for the Russian media, promoting the agency’s view of events in Ukraine. As Russian intelligence portrays it, the war pits the United States and Europe against Russia, with the Ukrainians serving merely as the puppets of their Western spymasters.
Putin giving a speech near the FSB's headquarters in Moscow, June 2022
Aleksey Nikolskyi / Sputnik / Kremlin / Reuters
Along with Putin, Russia’s spy agencies have also drawn some important lessons from the earlier Soviet intelligence wars. Because it pitted Russia directly against the West, the war in Ukraine has prompted the Kremlin and its spy agencies to rethink several major national security questions that had not been closely studied since 1991. For example, there was the question of Russia’s borders and whether to close them. The Kremlin decided against doing so, and that has benefited the intelligence services, which can use the new exodus of Russian nationals to Europe and other neighboring countries to help make up for the expulsions of Russian diplomats from European capitals. Putin has clearly set out to avoid the mistakes made during the Cold War, when the Soviets significantly restrained the cross-border movement of people, hampering Soviet intelligence.
But there was another pressing problem for the Kremlin: how to enforce discipline within the ranks. Putin could have followed Stalin’s approach, embarking on large-scale purges and mass repressions. But he seems to have learned that those measures ultimately backfired for the Soviets. Putin understands that instilling fear is a useful tool but that outright purges would hurt the agencies—as they did in the 1930s when the Soviets’ foreign intelligence lost its most talented agents. Thus, the head of the FSB’s foreign intelligence branch, Sergei Beseda, was initially detained and held incommunicado after the first disastrous days of the Ukraine invasion. But after several weeks, he was reinstated, and the broader purges in military intelligence and the FSB that many expected after Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the Wagner paramilitary company, led a mutiny in June 2023 never materialized.
Overall, Putin has taken a flexible, pragmatic approach to his intelligence services, playing between the ever-present fear of purges and encouraging the agencies to be more innovative at regaining ground in the West. One result seems to have been a noticeable rise in more ambitious foreign operations over the past year, including alleged sabotage operations, as well as the exfiltration of the Russian operative in Italy and stepped up recruitment efforts in several NATO countries, as is apparent in the case of a member of Germany’s BND intelligence agency who was arrested in December 2022 on charges of allegedly transferring highly classified information to the Russian government, and is now on trial for treason.
SPIES LIKE US
In staging their comeback, Russia’s spy agencies have also internalized another important lesson from the Soviet years: the strategic use of ideology. In the 1930s, Moscow was able to win over many Westerners to the Soviet cause by aiming its arguments at Western deficiencies rather than promoting Marxist doctrine. At the time, Soviet agents learned that they did not really need to sell a full-fledged communist ideology; instead, they could portray the Soviet Union as an alternative to Western imperialism, emphasizing the West’s double standards and hypocrisy and offering in contrast a leader who stood up against global powers. These ideas are exactly what Russian agencies can now pedal to potential allies and recruits in Russia’s new intelligence war with the West.
As Russia prepares to enter a third year of war, its intelligence agencies know that the Kremlin supports them and shares their paranoia and prejudices. This reality suggests that the spy services can count on the Kremlin’s protection. But it does not mean that Putin himself is more secure in power.
For much of the past 20 years, Putin has struggled with the challenge of how to control his vast security and intelligence community, spread over an enormous country and abroad. In the early 2000s, he destroyed former President Boris Yeltsin’s concept of competing spy services, making the FSB the top agency. After Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, Putin tried to bring his intelligence forces to heel by sending several middle-rank officers to jail on corruption charges. But this did not result in tighter Kremlin control of the agencies. Now, with the war in Ukraine, Putin has tried to avoid the mistakes of the past and keep his intelligence forces loyal. He has also succeeded in making them stronger, for the time being, than at any previous point in the war.
But it is unclear if any of this has improved his control over them. And so far, Putin has done nothing to fix the problem: he is unwilling to repeat Stalin’s mistakes of purging his agencies on an industrial scale, but he also understands that unlike during the Soviet years, when the Communist Party controlled the KGB, he has few other ways to rein them in. If things began to go badly for Russia in the war, this one-sided dynamic could mean that Putin’s spies might be in no rush to save him.
ANDREI SOLDATOV is a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis and Co-Founder and Editor of Agentura.ru, a watchdog of the Russian secret services’ activities.
IRINA BOROGAN is a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis and Co-Founder and Deputy Editor of Agentura.ru.
They are the co-authors of The Compatriots: The Russian Exiles Who Fought Against the Kremlin.
- 获取链接
- X
- 电子邮件
- 其他应用
评论
发表评论