Trump's 'Liberation Day' Tariffs: Fair trade or global trade war?

FA 2024.1.26 Michael KnightsThe Next Global War How Today’s Regional Conflicts Resemble the Ones That Produced World War II The Myths That Warp How America Sees Russia—and Vice Versa How Mutual Misunderstanding Breeds Tension and Conflict Michael Kimmage and Jeremy Shapiro Why the War in Gaza Makes a Nuclear Iran More Likely The Conflict Has Empowered Tehran—but Also Fueled Its Sense of Vulnerability Ali Vaez Ukraine Is Losing the Drone War How Kyiv Can Close the Innovation Gap With Russia Eric Schmidt Could Myanmar Come Apart? As the Rebels Gain Ground and the Junta Reels, the Country’s Future Is in Doubt Avinash Paliwal Iraq Is Quietly Falling Apart Iran’s Proxies Have Seized Power in Baghdad—and Are Gutting the State The ICJ Ruling’s Hidden Diplomacy How the Court’s Considered Measures Can Help America Restrain Israel By David Kaye January 26, 2024 Israel’s Deputy Attorney General Gilad Noam and British jurist Malcolm Shaw at the International Court of Justice, The Hague, Netherlands, January 2024 Israel’s Deputy Attorney General Gilad Noam and British jurist Malcolm Shaw at the International Court of Justice, The Hague, Netherlands, January 2024 Piroschka van de Wouw / 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/israel/icj-rulings-hidden-diplomacy Get Citation Request Reprint Permissions With one eye on the law and the other on its power, the International Court of Justice at The Hague has issued a preliminary ruling in favor of South Africa’s claim that Israel’s military assault on Gaza may plausibly be characterized as genocide. In a nearly unanimous vote, the court’s international panel of 17 judges ordered that Israel must do everything it can to prevent acts of genocide, clamp down on domestic incitement to genocide, and ensure immediate and effective humanitarian aid for Palestinians in Gaza. Some may read the ICJ’s order as a limited legal intervention that refuses South Africa’s principal request for a ruling that would end Israel’s devastating campaign. The judges even offered an olive branch to the Israeli government, pointedly emphasizing that all parties to the conflict in Gaza “are bound by international humanitarian law” and calling for the “immediate and unconditional release” of the more than 100 Israeli hostages that remain in the custody of Hamas and other groups in Gaza. But the court’s ruling also contains a hidden ambition: it challenges all states—and especially the United States—to take international law seriously at a time of increasing violence and conflict and decreasing respect for the authority of international legal institutions. Indeed, at a time when the Biden administration’s efforts to limit the war’s harm to civilians seem to be flailing, the court threw it a lifeline, a path to a new policy toward the conflict that is rooted in international norms. The White House should embrace the court’s ruling, deploying it as a new diplomatic tool to end Israel’s military operation and force Hamas to release the hostages it still cruelly and unconscionably holds in Gaza. Stay informed. In-depth analysis delivered weekly. A MOMENTOUS MIDDLE GROUND The January 26 ruling marks only the beginning of the ICJ case. South Africa’s claim against Israel will likely involve years of litigation over jurisdiction and the ultimate merits of the claim of genocide—litigation that the court has now authorized to go forward. In the meantime, how the United States and Europe respond to the court’s ruling is more important than the decision itself. If Washington and other Western powers simply circle around the Israeli flag, they risk doing further damage to international law and the so-called rules-based international order that they have embraced in previous ICJ cases, such as Ukraine’s 2022 claim against Russia’s aggression and the Gambia’s 2019 genocide claim against Myanmar for its treatment of the Rohingya. They also risk further alienating a large number of governments around the world, including much of the global South, that have supported the court in the past and that broadly back the South African case. Indeed, a rhetorical attack on the court’s ruling would have domestic political consequences for U.S. President Joe Biden as he begins a difficult election campaign, given the widespread disillusionment of the Arab-American community that has already resulted from the administration’s seemingly unconditional embrace of Israel since Hamas’s October 7 attack. The stakes are particularly high considering the relative restraint of the ICJ ruling and the middle ground it takes. A more aggressive order would have badly complicated a U.S. response. For instance, had the court acceded to South Africa’s request that it order an end to Israel’s military operation, Israel and the United States would have almost certainly dismissed the court and the measures it adopted. Although ICJ President Joan Donoghue’s careful reading of the judgment reflected the gravity of the situation in Gaza, she did so in tempered language, avoiding some of the vivid evocation of destruction and death that South Africa employed in its 84-page claim and in its three hours of oral argument before the court in mid-January. Alternatively, the court could have dismissed South Africa’s claim and adopted Israel’s moral outrage that it even had to answer to the claim of genocidal intent following Hamas’s atrocities—an approach that would have flown in the face of overwhelming world concern for the extraordinary loss of life in Gaza. Instead, as most close observers expected, the court rested its order on the cold black letters of its own law. It carefully located its own jurisprudence in the context of recent ICJ cases dealing with claims of genocide and issued six so-called preliminary measures—the courts version of injunctive relief—that broke no new legal ground and, in effect, restated Israel’s obligations under international law. On each of the major threshold questions the court followed its own rules closely. Drawing on the template of similar past cases, the judges agreed that South Africa had met the low burden of showing that the court would likely have jurisdiction to entertain a genocide claim against Israel while emphasizing that this finding did not mean that the court has established that any violations of the Genocide Convention have in fact occurred. More explosively, and yet equally rooted in ICJ jurisprudence, the court walked through a series of UN findings about the devastation in Gaza after more than three months of Israel’s campaign, finding that the “rights claimed by South Africa, and for which it is seeking protection, are plausible”—the low bar South Africa had to cross for the court to issue provisional measures. In reading the judgment, Donoghue also noted statements by “senior Israeli officials”—including Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and Israeli President Isaac Herzog—that South Africa and others characterized as dehumanizing if not genocidal. The court responded to South Africa’s claim of urgency, another threshold requirement in the jurisprudence, with perhaps its most serious statement: “In these circumstances, the court considers that the catastrophic humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip is at serious risk of deteriorating further before the court renders its final judgment.” The court’s order is, despite its apparent moderation, damning. It has allowed litigation to move forward on South Africa’s claim that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, placing a virtual sword of Damocles over not only Israel in its future conduct in Gaza, but also those, such as the United States, that have given it such strong support. It has found plausible South Africa’s assertion that Palestinian rights must be protected against genocidal acts. Even Israel's appointee to the court, Judge Aharon Barak, joined the demands that Israel must prevent public and direct incitement to genocide and take “immediate and effective measures” to enable humanitarian assistance. These are very serious outcomes that reflect global legal concern about the humanitarian situation in Gaza. At the same time, the power of the court’s ruling lies in the judges’ careful efforts to isolate it from the language of politics or advocacy and anchor it in legal precedent. And the court’s substantive decision not to seek what it genuinely has no power to enforce without UN Security Council backing—an end to Israel’s military operation—gives the measures it has called for all the more importance. The orders are binding on the parties, as the court notes. But what the court is demanding, in effect, is for Israel to uphold what many already recognize as its existing obligations under the Genocide Convention. WHAT WASHINGTON MUST DO In the weeks before the court’s January 26 ruling, the United States joined Israel in characterizing the South African case as without merit. The United States could make that argument in court, if it so decides, as an intervenor in the case as it moves forward. But the issue raised by the ICJ’s preliminary ruling is different. The Biden administration now faces an acute dilemma that cannot be resolved with superficial statements about the need for humanitarian access to Gaza. The court’s challenge to the United States is that geopolitics alone cannot be the means by which the conflict is wound down. International law must play a crucial role, and legal obligations have meaning. Failure by the United States to uphold these almost universally acknowledged legal standards, moreover, would seriously undercut its own legitimacy as a leader of the rules-based global order. The court has given the United States and Europe a new tool to demand that Israel change its approach in Gaza. The ruling offers the Biden administration an opportunity to emphasize its strong displeasure, backed by international law, with the dehumanizing rhetoric that has come from members of Israel’s right-wing cabinet. And it provides Washington with an opportunity to press Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to do more than merely restate Israel’s aims to “eradicate” Hamas and to hold accountable those in his coalition and in the military who use the language of destruction of Gaza and its Palestinian population. But more than that, the United States should respond to the decision by acknowledging the foundational point that Israel has an obligation to prevent acts that can be characterized as genocidal. The administration need not share South Africa’s view that Israeli acts are in fact genocidal—a view that the ICJ itself has not and ultimately may not uphold. But it does need to wrestle with the fact that the court, in a ruling backed by an overwhelming majority, has expressed serious legal concern with Israeli actions. Even as it supports Israel’s right to self-defense, the United States can bolster the court’s demands for concrete Israeli steps to prevent and punish violence against civilians in Gaza and the rampant destruction of the infrastructure that makes Gaza livable. The United States is no mere bystander, either to Israeli military action or to the enforcement of international law. Indeed, Washington has deployed the power of the ICJ’s authority in the past, launching the modern era’s use of the court for real-time international justice when it brought an ICJ claim against Iran in 1979, demanding that it release the American hostages held at the U.S. embassy in Tehran. The court has given the United States an opportunity to reaffirm that historic commitment, and the Biden administration should take it. You are reading a free article. Subscribe to Foreign Affairs to get unlimited access. Paywall-free reading of new articles and over a century of archives Unlock access to iOS/Android apps to save editions for offline reading Six issues a year in print, online, and audio editions DAVID KAYE is a Professor at the UC Irvine School of Law and and 2023–2024 Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Public International Law at Lund University in Sweden. MORE BY DAVID KAYE More: Israel Palestinian Territories International Institutions Human Rights Law Security Defense & Military Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Israel-Hamas War Most-Read Articles The Myths That Warp How America Sees Russia—and Vice Versa How Mutual Misunderstanding Breeds Tension and Conflict Michael Kimmage and Jeremy Shapiro Why the War in Gaza Makes a Nuclear Iran More Likely The Conflict Has Empowered Tehran—but Also Fueled Its Sense of Vulnerability Ali Vaez Ukraine Is Losing the Drone War How Kyiv Can Close the Innovation Gap With Russia Eric Schmidt Could Myanmar Come Apart? As the Rebels Gain Ground and the Junta Reels, the Country’s Future Is in Doubt Avinash Paliwal Recommended Articles Destroyed houses in Gaza, November 2023 Why Gaza Matters Since Antiquity, the Territory Has Shaped the Quest for Power in the Middle East Jean-Pierre Filiu At a pro-Palestinian protest in Tunis, Tunisia, October 2023 How the Israel-Hamas War in Gaza Is Changing Arab Views Support Is Falling for America and the Two-State Solution—but Rising for Iran and Violent Resistance Michael Robbins, MaryClare Roche, Amaney A. Jamal, Salma Al-Shami, and Mark Tessler Michael KnightsThe Next Global War How Today’s Regional Conflicts Resemble the Ones That Produced World War II By Hal Brands January 26, 2024 Ukrainian military cadets at a swearing-in ceremony in Kyiv, September 2023 Viacheslav Ratynskyi / Reuters The post-Cold War era began, in the early 1990s, with soaring visions of global peace. It is ending, three decades later, with surging risks of global war. Today, Europe is experiencing its most devastating military conflict in generations. A brutal fight between Israel and Hamas is sowing violence and instability across the Middle East. East Asia, fortunately, is not at war. But it isn’t exactly peaceful, either, as China coerces its neighbors and amasses military power at a historic rate. If many Americans don’t realize how close the world is to being ravaged by fierce, interlocking conflicts, perhaps that’s because they’ve forgotten how the last global war came about. When Americans think of global war, they typically think of World War II—or the part of the war that began with Japan’s strike on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. After that attack, and Adolf Hitler’s subsequent declaration of war against the United States, the conflict was a single, all-encompassing struggle between rival alliances on a global battlefield. But World War II began as a trio of loosely connected contests for primacy in key regions stretching from Europe to the Asia-Pacific—contests that eventually climaxed and coalesced in globally consuming ways. The history of this period reveals the darker aspects of strategic interdependence in a war-torn world. It also illustrates uncomfortable parallels to the situation Washington currently confronts. The United States isn’t facing a formalized alliance of adversaries, as it once did during World War II. It probably won’t see a replay of a scenario in which autocratic powers conquer giant swaths of Eurasia and its littoral regions. Yet with wars in eastern Europe and the Middle East already raging, and ties between revisionist states becoming more pronounced, all it would take is a clash in the contested western Pacific to bring about another awful scenario—one in which intense, interrelated regional struggles overwhelm the international system and create a crisis of global security unlike anything since 1945. A world at risk could become a world at war. And the United States isn’t remotely ready for the challenge. Stay informed. In-depth analysis delivered weekly. WAR AND REMEMBRANCE American memories of World War II are indelibly marked by two unique aspects of the U.S. experience. First, the United States entered the war very late—more than two years after Hitler rocked Europe by invading Poland, and more than four years after Japan initiated the Pacific War by invading China. Second, the United States joined the fight in both theaters simultaneously. World War II was thus globalized from the moment the United States entered it; from December 1941 onward, the conflict featured one multicontinent coalition, the Grand Alliance, fighting another multicontinent coalition, the Axis, on multiple fronts. (The exception was that the Soviet Union remained at peace with Japan from 1941 until 1945.) This was a world war in its fullest, most comprehensive sense. Yet history’s most terrible conflict didn’t start that way. World War II was the aggregation of three regional crises: Japan’s rampage in China and the Asia-Pacific; Italy’s bid for empire in Africa and the Mediterranean; and Germany’s push for hegemony in Europe and beyond. In some ways, these crises were always linked. Each was the work of an autocratic regime with a penchant for coercion and violence. Each involved a lunge for dominance in a globally significant region. Each contributed to what U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt, in 1937, called a spreading “epidemic of world lawlessness.” Even so, this wasn’t an integrated mega-conflict from the outset. The fascist powers initially had little in common except illiberal governance and a desire to shatter the status quo. In fact, the vicious racism that pervaded fascist ideology could work against the cohesion of this group: Hitler once derided the Japanese as “lacquered half-monkeys.” And although these countries, beginning in 1936, would seal a series of overlapping security pacts, through the late 1930s they were as often rivals as allies. Hitler’s Germany and Prime Minister Benito Mussolini’s Italy worked at cross-purposes in crises over Austria in 1934 and Ethiopia in 1935. As late as 1938, Germany was supporting China in its war of survival against Japan; the next year, it signed a tacit alliance with the Soviet Union, then fighting an undeclared conflict against Tokyo in Asia. (Moscow and Tokyo later signed a non-aggression pact in April 1941, which held until 1945.) Only gradually did regional crises merge, and rival coalitions cohere, because of factors that might sound familiar today. First, whatever their specific—and sometimes conflicting—aims, the fascist powers had a more fundamental similarity of purpose. All were seeking a dramatically transformed global order, in which “have not” powers carved out vast empires through brutal tactics—and in which brutal regimes surpassed the decadent democracies they despised. “In the battle between democracy and totalitarianism,” Japan’s foreign minister declared in 1940, “the latter . . . will without question win and will control the world.” There was a basic geopolitical and ideological solidarity among the world’s autocracies, which thrust them—and the conflicts they sowed—closer together over time. World War II began as a trio of loosely connected contests for primacy in key regions. Second, the world developed a perverse form of interdependence, as instability in one region exacerbated instability in another. By humiliating the League of Nations and showing that aggression could pay, Italy’s assault on Ethiopia in 1935 paved the way for Hitler’s remilitarization of the Rhineland in 1936. Germany then paid it forward in 1940 by crushing France, putting the United Kingdom on the brink, and creating a golden opportunity for Japanese expansion into Southeast Asia. Particular tactics also migrated from theater to theater; the use of terror from the air by Italian forces in Ethiopia, for instance, prefigured its use by German forces in Spain and Japanese forces in China. Not least, the sheer number of challenges to the existing order disoriented and debilitated its defenders: the United Kingdom had to tread carefully in dealing with Hitler in crises over Austria and Czechoslovakia in 1938 because Japan threatened its imperial holdings in Asia and its Mediterranean lifelines were vulnerable to Italy. These two factors contributed to a third, which was that programs of extreme aggression polarized the world and divided it into rival camps. In the late 1930s, Germany and Italy banded together for mutual protection against Western democracies that might try to frustrate their respective ambitions. In 1940, Japan joined the party in hopes of deterring the United States from interfering with its expansion in Asia. Through multiple, mutually reinforcing programs of regional revisionism, the three countries declared, they would create a “new order of things” in the world. This new Tripartite Pact didn’t ultimately deter Roosevelt, but it did convince him, as he wrote in 1941, that “the hostilities in Europe, in Africa, and in Asia are all parts of a single world conflict.” Indeed, as the Axis cohered and its aggression intensified, it gradually forced a vast array of countries into a rival alliance dedicated to frustrating those designs. When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, and Hitler declared war on Washington, they brought the United States into conflicts in Europe and the Pacific—and turned those regional clashes into a global struggle. PAST IS PRESENT The parallels between this earlier era and the present are striking. Today, as in the 1930s, the international system is facing three sharp regional challenges. China is rapidly amassing military might as part of its campaign to eject the United States from the western Pacific—and, perhaps, become the world’s preeminent power. Russia’s war in Ukraine is the murderous centerpiece of its long-standing effort to reclaim primacy in eastern Europe and the former Soviet space. In the Middle East, Iran and its coterie of proxies—Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and many others—are waging a bloody struggle for regional dominance against Israel, the Gulf monarchies, and the United States. Once again, the fundamental commonalities linking the revisionist states are autocratic governance and geopolitical grievance; in this case, a desire to break a U.S.-led order that deprives them of the greatness they desire. Beijing, Moscow, and Tehran are the new “have not” powers, struggling against the “haves”: Washington and its allies. Two of these challenges have already turned hot. The war in Ukraine is also a vicious proxy contest between Russia and the West; Russian President Vladimir Putin is buckling down for a long, grinding struggle that could last for years. Hamas’s attack on Israel last October—enabled, if perhaps not explicitly blessed, by Tehran—triggered an intense conflict that is creating violent spillover across that vital region. Iran, meanwhile, is creeping toward nuclear weapons, which could turbocharge its regional revisionism by indemnifying its regime against an Israeli or U.S. response. In the western Pacific and mainland Asia, China is still relying mostly on coercion short of war. But as the military balance shifts in sensitive spots such as the Taiwan Strait or the South China Sea, Beijing will have better options—and perhaps a bigger appetite—for aggression. As in the 1930s, the revisionist powers don’t always see eye-to-eye. Russia and China both seek preeminence in central Asia. They are also pushing into the Middle East, in ways that sometimes cut across Iran’s interests there. If the revisionists do eventually push their common enemy, the United States, out of Eurasia, they might end up fighting among themselves over the spoils—just as the Axis powers, had they somehow defeated their rivals, surely would have then turned on one another. Yet for now, the ties between revisionist powers are flourishing and Eurasia’s regional conflicts are becoming more tightly interlinked. Russia and China are drawing closer through their “no limits” strategic partnership, which features arms sales, deepening defense-technological cooperation, and displays of geopolitical solidarity such as military exercises in global hot spots. And just as the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of 1939 once allowed Germany and the Soviet Union to rampage through eastern Europe without risking conflict with each other, the Sino-Russian partnership has pacified what was once the world’s most militarized border and enabled both countries to focus on their contests with Washington and its friends. More recently, the war in Ukraine has also enhanced other Eurasian relationships—between Russia and Iran, and Russia and North Korea—while intensifying and interweaving the challenges the respective revisionists pose. Eurasia’s regional conflicts are becoming more tightly interlinked. Drones, artillery ammunition, and ballistic missiles provided by Tehran and Pyongyang—along with economic succor provided by Beijing—have sustained Moscow in its conflict against Kyiv and its Western backers. In exchange, Moscow appears to be transferring more sensitive military technology and know-how: selling advanced aircraft to Iran, reportedly offering aid to North Korea’s advanced weapons programs, perhaps even helping China build its next-generation attack submarine. Other regional tussles are revealing similar dynamics. In the Middle East, Hamas is fighting Israel with Chinese, Russian, Iranian, and North Korean weapons that it has been accumulating for years. Since October 7, Putin has declared that conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East are part of a single, larger struggle that “will decide the fate of Russia, and of the entire world.” And in another echo of the past, tensions across Eurasia’s key theaters stretch U.S. resources thin by confronting the superpower with multiple dilemmas simultaneously. The revisionist powers aid each other simply by doing their own things. One crucial difference between the 1930s and today is the scale of the revisionism. As bad as Putin and Iranian Ayatollah Ali Khamenei are, they haven’t devoured huge chunks of crucial regions. Another crucial difference is that East Asia still enjoys a tenuous peace. But with U.S. officials warning that China could become more belligerent as its capabilities mature—perhaps as soon as the second half of this decade—it is worth considering what would happen if that region erupted. Such a conflict would be catastrophic in multiple respects. Chinese aggression against Taiwan could well trigger a war with the United States, pitting the world’s two most powerful militaries—and their two nuclear arsenals—against each other. It would wrench global commerce in ways that make the dislocations provoked by the wars in Ukraine and Gaza look trivial. It would further polarize global politics as the United States seeks to rally the democratic world against Chinese aggression—pushing Beijing into a tighter embrace with Russia and other autocratic powers. Most critically, if combined with ongoing conflicts elsewhere, a war in East Asia could create a situation unlike anything since the 1940s, in which all three key regions of Eurasia are ablaze with large-scale violence at once. This might not become a single, all-encompassing world war. But it would make for a world plagued by war as the United States and other defenders of the existing order confronted multiple, interlocking conflicts spanning some of the most important strategic terrain on Earth. GATHERING STORMS There are lots of reasons that this scenario might not happen. East Asia could remain at peace, because the United States and China have immense incentives to avoid a horrific war. The fighting in Ukraine and the Middle East could subside. But thinking through the nightmare scenario is still worthwhile, since the world could be as little as one mishandled crisis away from pervasive Eurasian conflict—and because the United States is so unprepared for this eventuality. Right now, the United States is straining to support Israel and Ukraine simultaneously. The demands of these two wars—fights in which Washington is not yet a principal combatant—are stretching U.S. capabilities in areas such as artillery and missile defense. Deployments to the waters around the Middle East, meant to deter Iran and keep critical sea lanes open, are taxing the resources of the U.S. Navy. Strikes against Houthi targets in Yemen are consuming assets, such as Tomahawk missiles, that would be at a premium in a U.S.-Chinese conflict. These are all symptoms of a bigger problem: the shrinking ability and capacities of the U.S. military relative to its numerous, interrelated challenges. During the 2010s, the Pentagon gradually shifted away from a military strategy meant to defeat two rogue-state adversaries at the same time, opting instead for a one-war strategy aimed at defeating a single great-power rival, China, in a high-intensity fight. In one sense, this was a sensible response to the extreme demands such a conflict would entail. But it has also left the Pentagon ill equipped for a world in which a combination of hostile great powers and serious regional threats are menacing multiple theaters at once. It has also, perhaps, emboldened more aggressive U.S. adversaries, such as Russia and Iran, which surely realize that an overstretched superpower—with a military desperate to focus on China—has limited ability to respond to other probes. Of course, the United States wasn’t ready for global war in 1941, but it eventually prevailed through a world-beating mobilization of military and industrial might. President Joe Biden evoked that achievement late last year, saying the United States must again be the “arsenal of democracy.” His administration has invested in expanding the production of artillery ammunition, long-range missiles, and other important weapons. But the harsh reality is that the defense industrial base that won World War II and then the Cold War no longer exists, thanks to persistent underinvestment and the broader decline of U.S. manufacturing. Shortages and bottlenecks are pervasive; the Pentagon recently acknowledged “material gaps” in its ability to “rapidly scale production” in a crisis. Many allies have even weaker defense industrial bases. The world could be as little as one mishandled crisis away from pervasive Eurasian conflict. Thus, the United States would have great difficulty mobilizing for a multitheater war, or even mobilizing for protracted conflict in a single region while keeping allies supplied in others. It might struggle to generate the vast magazines of munitions needed for great-power conflict or to replace ships, planes, and submarines lost in the fighting. It would surely be hard-pressed to keep pace with its most potent rival in a potential war in the western Pacific; as a Pentagon report puts it, China is now “the global industrial powerhouse in many areas—from shipbuilding to critical minerals to microelectronics,” which could give it a crucial mobilization advantage in a contest with the United States. If war does engulf multiple theaters of Eurasia, Washington and its allies might not win. It isn’t helpful to pretend that there is an obvious, near-term solution to these problems. Focusing U.S. military power and strategic attention overwhelmingly on Asia, as some analysts advocate, would take a toll on American global leadership in any circumstances. At a time when the Middle East and Europe are already in such profound turmoil, it could be tantamount to superpower suicide. But although dramatically ramping up military spending to drive down global risk is strategically essential, it seems politically inexpedient, at least until the United States suffers a more jarring geopolitical shock. In any case, it would take time—time Washington and its friends might not have—for even sizable increases in defense outlays to have a tangible military effect. The Biden administration’s approach seems to involve muddling through in Ukraine and the Middle East, making only marginal, selective increases in military spending, and betting the house that China doesn’t become more bellicose—a policy that could work well enough, but could also fail disastrously. The international scene has darkened dramatically in recent years. In 2021, the Biden administration could envision a “stable and predictable” relationship with Russia—until that country invaded Ukraine in 2022. In 2023, U.S. officials deemed the Middle East quieter than at any time this century—just before a devastating, regionally destabilizing conflict broke out. U.S.-Chinese tensions aren’t particularly febrile at the moment, but sharpening rivalry and a shifting military balance make for a dangerous mix. Great catastrophes often seem unthinkable until they happen. As the strategic environment deteriorates, it’s time to recognize how eminently thinkable global conflict has become. You are reading a free article. Subscribe to Foreign Affairs to get unlimited access. Paywall-free reading of new articles and over a century of archives Unlock access to iOS/Android apps to save editions for offline reading Six issues a year in print, online, and audio editions HAL BRANDS is Henry A. Kissinger Distinguished Professor of Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He is a co-author of The Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China. MORE BY HAL BRANDS More: United States China Russian Federation World Geopolitics Security Strategy & Conflict War & Military Strategy U.S. Foreign Policy World War I War in Ukraine U.S.-Chinese Relations Most-Read Articles The Myths That Warp How America Sees Russia—and Vice Versa How Mutual Misunderstanding Breeds Tension and Conflict Michael Kimmage and Jeremy Shapiro Why the War in Gaza Makes a Nuclear Iran More Likely The Conflict Has Empowered Tehran—but Also Fueled Its Sense of Vulnerability Ali Vaez Ukraine Is Losing the Drone War How Kyiv Can Close the Innovation Gap With Russia Eric Schmidt Could Myanmar Come Apart? As the Rebels Gain Ground and the Junta Reels, the Country’s Future Is in Doubt Avinash Paliwal Recommended Articles Posters of the former Hamas leader Ahmad Yassin, the former chief of the Iranian Quds Force Qassem Soleimani, Lebanon’s Hezbollah chief Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah; and the Houthi leader Mahdi al-Mashat in Sanaa, Yemen, January 2024 How the War in Gaza Revived the Axis of Resistance Iran and Its Allies Are Fighting With Missiles and Memes Narges Bajoghli and Vali Nasr A joint U.S.–South Korean military exercise, Pohang, South Korea, March 2023 America Can’t Surpass China’s Power in Asia But It Can Still Prevent Chinese Hegemony Kelly A. Grieco and Jennifer Kavanagh The Myths That Warp How America Sees Russia—and Vice Versa How Mutual Misunderstanding Breeds Tension and Conflict By Michael Kimmage and Jeremy Shapiro January 25, 2024 Waving a Russian flag, Moscow, September 2023 “Mythology is not a lie,” wrote Joseph Campbell, the great scholar of myth and archetype. “It is metaphorical.” Myths and metaphors provide the narratives that inspire patriotic devotion, motivate soldiers to fight, and help explain the outside world. And the myths that nations cherish about themselves often reinforce the complementary myths that they adopt about others. Russia and the United States harbor especially powerful myths about each other. The myth that Russia believes about the United States is that it has vassals rather than allies—that it is a hegemonic power that hides ruthless ambition and self-interest behind appeals to liberal principles and legal order. Americans see Russia, meanwhile, as a country without domestic politics—the ultimate autocratic power whose malicious, unaccountable leader runs roughshod over what citizens want. As long ago as 1855, U.S. President Abraham Lincoln described Russia as a place “where despotism can be taken pure and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.” After more than a century of tension and conflict, the U.S.-Russian relationship is now structured around these myths. Myths weigh down that relationship, obscuring nuance and clear perception. And they have shaped, and will continue to shape, each country’s part in the war in Ukraine. The myth that many Russians hold of the United States is continually driving the Kremlin toward harmful belligerence. Stay informed. In-depth analysis delivered weekly. The myth that Americans hold of Russia is also a trap, leading policymakers to misread the Kremlin and to miss opportunities to weaken the regime or to find compromises. To minimize dangerous misinterpretations, U.S. leaders need to work harder to rise above these myths and archetypes. A better understanding of the United States’ own myths—and of Russia’s—would give U.S. policymakers more flexibility, help to foster strategic empathy, and anticipate future changes in the Russian body politic. HIDDEN FIGURE In Russia, it is conventional wisdom that the United States is power-mad. The American public, many Russians believe, is under the thumb of a megalomaniacal U.S. elite. Enthusiasm for a liberal international order gets little traction in Russia not because all Russians are realists but because their mythic view of the United States reduces the liberal international order to a vehicle of American ambition. Many Russians are convinced that U.S. leaders’ references to a supranational web of norms, laws, and partnerships are merely smokescreens for the cooptation that lies at the core of American foreign policy. The reigning Russian myth is of Soviet vintage. According to this myth, during the Cold War, American capitalist elites wanted to run the world and found innumerable military pretexts to exert their wishes. The nightmare purportedly began after World War II, when the United States rewired the political codes in Japan and Germany, pushed those countries into alliances dominated by the United States, used them as staging grounds for U.S. military operations, and compelled them to serve as cheerleaders for the U.S. national interest. To keep up, the Soviet Union had to build a bulwark of “friendly countries” in Eastern Europe and establish its own global footprint, lest the perfidious United States advance uncontested. For Moscow, Ukrainian hostility is simply the veiled extension of American hostility. The United States’ global influence during this era was real. But the Soviet characterization was a caricature—and one that proved enduring. Even after the Cold War ended, according to the Russian myth, the United States kept seducing others with false rhetoric, including Russia’s neighbors—countries such as Poland, Romania, and the Baltic states. In this telling, U.S. allies operate more as instruments of American power than as independent states. Where governments resisted—in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Serbia, and Syria, as well as in Ukraine before the 2014 Maidan uprising—regime change has been the American preference. Hegemony by invitation, hegemony at the barrel of gun: the means may vary, but the end is never in question. Moscow has paid a high price for holding onto this myth. It has obligated itself to contend with the American monster even at the expense of becoming more dependent on China. The EU’s Eastern Partnership program, which led to Ukraine’s Maidan uprising, was an authentic expression of idealism about the country’s European future, not a covert exercise of American hegemony. But the contention that the CIA had staged a coup in Ukraine was a lie that Russians had long been primed to believe. Even if Russia’s top leaders knew this claim was false, their public insistence on it closed off moderate responses (such as accommodating the new government in Kyiv) and made more extreme options (such as annexing Crimea) seem necessary. In general, the myth of a United States drunk on power and unwilling to stick to agreements makes it very hard for Moscow to negotiate over regional questions. Russians cannot imagine that the leaders of countries such as Ukraine have minds of their own. For Moscow, Ukrainian hostility is simply the veiled extension of American hostility, and American hostility toward Russia demands equal Russian hostility toward the United States. If the only language the United States understands is power, then negotiation, deliberation, and the granting of concessions all entail undue risk. MORAL HAZARD American myths about Russia have similarly deep historical roots. The U.S. image of Russia as an unadulterated autocracy dates to the nineteenth century. It flourished during the Soviet era and briefly retreated during Boris Yeltsin’s nine-year presidency. (Americans venerated Yeltsin as more democratic than he actually was.) Putin has restored the familiar image of Russia. The U.S. approach to the Cold War often had the fervor of a messianic struggle, and Putin once again inspires Americans’ moral indignation. The United States’ myth of Russia—that Russia is an evil and ambitious tyranny—has some domestic political uses. To interest inward-looking Americans in the outside world, Washington needs to conjure a single omnipotent villain. Americans want to believe that they are fighting an individual who can be killed rather than a whole country that must be subdued. In crisis after crisis, comparisons to Hitler are used to shock democracy-loving yet complacent Americans into action. Putin is simply the latest in a long line of autocratic leaders—Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic, Muammar al-Qaddafi, and Bashar al-Assad, to name a few—who are portrayed as single-handedly obstructing democracy and progress. Putin’s larger-than-life persona has exacerbated the view that autocratic Russia has no domestic politics and that whatever the ruler wants happens. Brian Jenkins, the senior adviser to the president at the RAND Corporation, summed up this view when he wrote, “At home, Putin faces no elections, no party or state institutions that threaten his rule, no domestic political opposition. He is Russia. And Russia is his.” If Putin is Russia, the only thing that needs to be understood about Russia is Putin’s psyche. Ukraine and its allies are fighting Putin’s war against Putin’s Russia. It is no surprise, then, that the U.S. intelligence community has reportedly made evaluating Putin’s state of mind its top analytical priority. The U.S. image of Russia as an unadulterated autocracy dates to the nineteenth century. Studying leaders matters for understanding one’s adversaries and particularly for understanding Russia; the Russian president clearly dominates his country. But Putin still faces dilemmas at home. He sits uncomfortably atop a complicated system of competing factions and interests. He needs to ensure that the warring cronies beneath him do not kill one another or rise up against him. At the same time, he must keep the public adequately enthusiastic about him. The biggest producer and consumer of sociological research in Russia is, in fact, the Russian government, which nervously follows minute alterations in public opinion. Washington’s various wars against evil dictators should, by now, have yielded some hard-won lessons. None of these leaders turned out to be all-powerful. Nor were they responsible for every problem in their polity, as the United States repeatedly discovered after expending enormous effort to remove them from the scene. For every such leader, including Putin, domestic politics set the parameters of their foreign policy. They rarely fought wars without their people behind them. Like democratic leaders, autocrats know how to bring their populations along when they go to war. Public opinion and the bureaucracy are both somewhat opaque in the dictatorship that Russia has become. But public opinion limits the way Putin wages war and the settlements the Kremlin can accept. Like any belligerent, the Russian government wants to be able to claim victory: if Russia demonstrably loses the Ukraine war, public frustration and outrage may well topple the government. Committed to the myth of a Russia without domestic politics, however, the United States struggles to interpret Russia. Its policymakers fail to see that many of the Kremlin’s actions are aimed at a domestic constituency. Take Putin’s sudden decision in September 2022 to annex territories in Ukraine, many of which Russia did not even control. Just a few months earlier, Putin had publicly mocked his intelligence chief for suggesting annexation. Putin’s turnabout baffled U.S. analysts, who interpreted it as part of a grand, if phantasmagoric, plan to subdue Ukraine. Was Putin losing his mind? In reality, these aspirational annexations may have been a rhetorical flourish for internal consumption, an opportunistic attempt to rally popular support behind a war veering out of control. EGO DISTORTION The burdens that these myths impose go beyond their distortions of reality. In international affairs, myths are dangerous because they entrench archetypes. The archetypal Russia is a malign autocracy, the archetypal United States a rapacious hegemon. Archetypes are the refined cousins of stereotypes, the problem of stereotypes being their negation of complexity. The country that believes its adversary can be understood in simple categories is likely to stop looking for subtle adjustments it could make to its policies and to cease trying to respond creatively to its adversary’s adjustments. Had American leaders better understood that Russian is not a monolith but is capable of fissuring, for instance, they may have been able to better exploit the 2023 mutiny of Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the Wagner paramilitary company, capitalizing on splits within the Russian elite and the military. An informed understanding of why those splits occurred could have allowed the United States and its allies to accentuate them, perhaps by highlighting Prigozhin’s attacks on the Russian air force or stressing the ways in which Putin was losing control of his security services. Instead, preoccupied with Putin’s power, Washington missed the signs of division and were bewildered by the mutiny. Washington could be missing similar vulnerabilities emerging ahead of Russia’s presidential election in March, which it presumes will merely be a ritual of autocratic self-congratulation. Putin will certainly win, but it will nonetheless be an important political moment as competing Russian political constituencies jockey for greater power and influence. The biggest problem posed by the myths that Russia and the United States have of each other is that they are mutually reinforcing. The more fanatical Moscow becomes about contesting putative acts of American hegemony, the more Russia resembles the maniacal autocracy of American myth. And the more Washington envisions Russia as the abiding and wicked “other” in U.S. foreign policy, the more militarized its relations to Europe are bound to become—and the more likely Moscow is to construe the United States’ aims as hegemonic. So far, the war in Ukraine has epitomized this cycle of progressively hardening preconceptions. With every passing month, each country sees its myths draw closer to the objective truth. Both America and Russia nourish their myths for a reason. Neither the United States nor Russia can easily dispel the myths that the other holds. Both countries nourish their myths for a reason. The Russian regime wants the United States—and everyone else—to think that it has no domestic politics and that Putinism and Russia are one. If the United States frames the war in Ukraine principally as a struggle for territorial integrity rather than as a good-versus-evil battle against a lone tyrant, Americans may lose interest. And even if leaders wanted to, it would be hard to dislodge the myths. The more actively Washington deployed public diplomacy to try to change Russian perceptions of the United States, the more Russians would perceive the United States to be manipulating their country. And to transform its image within the United States, the Russian government would have to divest itself of autocracy and pull back militarily from Europe—which has never been a winning recipe for ruling Russia. These myths will long be with us. But Washington must recognize them as such. If the United States could, in its own internal policy debates, challenge the myth of Russia’s unalloyed autocracy and uncover the ways in which domestic politics and public opinion constrain and construct Russian foreign policy, it might discover tools that could disrupt Russia’s war effort. It would also be more ready for a post-Putin political transition. Politically, Russia tends to change suddenly; its politics do not remain forever frozen. As they try to predict Russian behavior, U.S. leaders would also benefit from a greater awareness of the United States’ mythical status in the Kremlin, which is wildly at odds with Washington’s self-image. Russians believe that the timeless essence of the United States is the will to power: this clarifies the Kremlin’s decision to invade Ukraine, and it also explains Russia’s refusal to wind down its devastating war in Ukraine. Captivating as they are, myths mislead by obscuring the awesome complexity and open-endedness of reality. In all they reveal about human nature, myths admit endless interpretation. But at their heart, they are also static—and they get in the way of sound strategy and agile diplomacy. You are reading a free article. Subscribe to Foreign Affairs to get unlimited access. Paywall-free reading of new articles and over a century of archives Unlock access to iOS/Android apps to save editions for offline reading Six issues a year in print, online, and audio editions MICHAEL KIMMAGE is Professor of History at the Catholic University of America and a Nonresident Senior Associate in the Europe, Russia, and Eurasia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. From 2014 to 2016, he served on the Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. Department of State, where he held the Russia/Ukraine portfolio. His forthcoming book Collisions: The Origins of the War in Ukraine and the New Global Instability, will be published in March. JEREMY SHAPIRO is Research Director at the European Council on Foreign Relations. During the Obama administration, he served on the U.S. State Department’s Policy Planning Staff and as Senior Adviser to the Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs. MORE BY MICHAEL KIMMAGE MORE BY JEREMY SHAPIRO More: United States Ukraine Russian Federation Diplomacy Geopolitics Politics & Society Public Opinion U.S. Foreign Policy War in Ukraine Propaganda & Disinformation Most-Read Articles The Myths That Warp How America Sees Russia—and Vice Versa How Mutual Misunderstanding Breeds Tension and Conflict Michael Kimmage and Jeremy Shapiro Why the War in Gaza Makes a Nuclear Iran More Likely The Conflict Has Empowered Tehran—but Also Fueled Its Sense of Vulnerability Ali Vaez Ukraine Is Losing the Drone War How Kyiv Can Close the Innovation Gap With Russia Eric Schmidt Could Myanmar Come Apart? As the Rebels Gain Ground and the Junta Reels, the Country’s Future Is in Doubt Avinash Paliwal Recommended Articles The End of the Russian Idea What It Will Take to Break Putinism’s Grip Andrei Kolesnikov The Cold War Never Ended Ukraine, the China Challenge, and the Revival of the West Stephen Kotkin The Cold War Never Ended Ukraine, the China Challenge, and the Revival of the West By Stephen Kotkin May/June 2022 Published on April 6, 2022 Does anyone have a right to be surprised? A gangster regime in the Kremlin has declared that its security is threatened by a much smaller neighbor—which, the regime claims, is not a truly sovereign country but just a plaything of far more powerful Western states. To make itself more secure, the Kremlin insists, it needs to bite off some of its neighbor’s territory. Negotiations between the two sides break down; Moscow invades. The year was 1939. The regime in the Kremlin was led by Joseph Stalin, and the neighboring country was Finland. Stalin had offered to swap territory with America Can’t Win the Tech Race Alone Keeping Its Edge Over China Will Require U.S. Investment in Innovation Abroad By Christopher Thomas and Sarah Kreps January 26, 2024 Looking at a semiconductor device in Shanghai, March 2021 When it comes to global competition, according to Chinese leader Xi Jinping, “technological innovationhas become the main battleground.” In 2015, Beijing announced its Made in China 2025 plan, a policy that aimed to transform China into a high-tech manufacturing powerhouse and reduce its dependence on foreign technology and imports. China has also introduced the Digital Silk Road, a program in which Chinese infrastructure investment is linked to recipient countries’ adoption of Chinese technologies, as part of its Belt and Road Initiative. At the Belt and Road Forum in Beijing in October, Xi announced a new AI governance program and reiterated his support for international cooperation on science and technology. In some ways, the United States is mirroring China’s plans. Washington aims to accelerate innovation and stay as far ahead of Beijing as possible on artificial intelligence capabilities and advanced semiconductors. To spur domestic innovation and manufacturing, the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act committed $52.7 billion in U.S. semiconductor research, development, manufacturing, and workforce training. And in its tech policies abroad, the United States is taking what the government calls a “small yard, high fence” approach, using export controls and similar tools to limit the ability of Chinese companies to use foundational technologies such as AI chips and semiconductor equipment. In October, the United States upped the ante by closing gaps in a previous set of export controls, expanding licensing requirements, and subjecting additional Chinese companies to trade restrictions, tightening a policy that China had already referred to as a “technology blockade.” This reliance on subsidies and export controls has risks. China has responded by placing its own export restrictions on key materials in semiconductor and electric vehicle production and by limiting access to Chinese markets for Micron Technology, a U.S. semiconductor manufacturer. Moreover, the United States’ efforts to reshore production are hindered by bureaucratic red tape. Amid concerns about the environmental impact of new manufacturing sites and insufficient staff to process hundreds of project proposals, none of the funds allocated in the CHIPS and Science Act had been disbursed a year after its passage. Meanwhile, the domestic semiconductor industry faces a personnel challenge: too few Americans have the necessary education in STEM fields, and the United States loses many of the international students it educates to Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and other countries whose fast-tracked talent visas are more plentiful and less onerous than U.S. visa offerings. Stay informed. In-depth analysis delivered weekly. Washington’s technology strategy focuses narrowly on domestic investment, ignoring the fact that the real competition is happening beyond U.S.—and Chinese—borders. Technological ecosystems, not national industries, are the real competitors. The United States’ success therefore depends not only on innovation and production at home but also on the decisions made by corporations and entrepreneurs in Germany, India, Israel, Japan, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, and other countries across the world. To strengthen and integrate these critical components of its broader ecosystem, Washington needs to both invest directly and encourage private investment in technology development abroad. A new type of government-financed tech fund dedicated to this purpose would help the United States build mutually beneficial partnerships, resilient supply chains, and a network with the resources and innovative capacity to lead the world in the technologies of the future. CLASH OF ECOSYSTEMS Because technology competition is not just a race between two countries or two sets of companies, it will not be won by a government lab or a company delivering singular, specific technological capabilities. The mark of a successful technology is that it is delivered as a product or service to thousands of businesses or millions of consumers. Achieving this scale requires an ecosystem of companies working together. The world’s two emerging technology ecosystems, one U.S.-based and one Chinese-based, are global, fuzzily defined, and often overlapping networks of research, development, manufacturing, software, standards, and supply chains that collectively produce goods for governments, business, and consumers to use. In this complex competition, the winning ecosystem will be the one whose collective capabilities are the most technologically advanced, cost-effective, and reliable. The sheer volume of technology use and innovation happening outside the U.S. and Chinese hubs makes a networked approach necessary. The rest of the world accounts for more than 65 percent of all Internet and phone users, 60 percent of engineering graduates, and 50 percent of research and development expenditures. It is not only the United States and China that wish to stimulate their technology industries or stand at the forefront of progress in artificial intelligence and semiconductors. But governments and entrepreneurs in other parts of the world often face challenges in accessing capital—gaps they seek outside investment to fill. The United States and China are such dominant players in this field, too, that public- and private-sector technology actors elsewhere will need to pick a side when they choose which standards to follow, which software to deploy, which AI models to train, which semiconductor suppliers to use, and which customers to serve. The Chinese government is starting to cater to its global tech ecosystem rather than focus only on its national technology industry. The incentives built into the Digital Silk Road initiative, as well as loan guarantees and subsidies for technology purchases, are encouraging foreign governments across Africa, Central Asia, and the Middle East to adopt Chinese technologies. Meanwhile, China’s high-quality, low-cost 5G networks, electric vehicles, and smartphones are appealing to budget-conscious consumers around the world. For countries with ambitions to advance their digital and AI technologies, Chinese financing and foundational Chinese technologies are a welcome solution. TIME TO INVEST The U.S. government is not yet competing on the same level. Nor do its current institutions or traditional tools of economic statecraft give it the flexibility and capacity to do so. To step up its game, the United States will need a new investment fund with a new approach. A global tech fund with a mandate to support critical technologies would help Washington attract governments, private investors, and consumers around the world to the U.S. technology ecosystem and make this ecosystem’s supply chains more resilient. Current U.S. policies essentially amount to a subsidy program; the global tech fund, by contrast, would operate as an investment fund with an independent, professional, experienced team compensated at market rates. Modeled on successful public-private investment projects such as Digital Invest—a program implemented by the U.S. Agency for International Development that offers government seed funding to bring in private investment capital—the fund would align public investment and priorities with private development incentives. Through Digital Invest, the U.S. government has provided $8.45 million and raised $275 million for investments in digital finance and Internet service provision in emerging markets. The global tech fund would have a similarly self-sustaining structure that would include a mandate to earn an adequate return on investment for taxpayers. The fund, using a combination of venture capital, private equity, and debt financing, would take on the “tipping point” risk—providing the up-front capital outlay that gives an investment enough momentum to deliver results—for investments that improve the resilience of the United States’ and its partners’ electronics, semiconductor, battery, and green energy supply chains. These tipping point investments would support not just American technologies but also related research, development, and manufacturing abroad. To increase its impact and to ensure balance between public- and private-sector interests, every dollar the global tech fund invests should be matched by at least four dollars of co-investment from the private sector (or much more, following the model of the Digital Invest program). And while the fund would need the flexibility to take a long-term, market-driven investment approach, its performance would also be overseen by a cross-agency government advisory committee—ensuring it remains responsive to national tech priorities. As a preliminary estimate, the fund would likely need to invest $10 billion to $30 billion each year if it is to be competitive in the battle between the U.S.-based and Chinese-based tech ecosystems. By comparison, China invests more than $200 billion annually in capital expenditures for electronics manufacturing. A meaningful U.S. investment in alternative manufacturing locations—just one of many priority areas for the fund—would alone require billions of dollars in annual outlays. STRENGTHENING THE NETWORK When the United States issues subsidies and imposes market restrictions to support domestic industry, it often does so at the expense of countries and companies that play important roles in its wider tech ecosystem. With the global tech fund, however, Washington could forge win-win partnerships. For example, with the Inflation Reduction Act providing powerful financial incentives for electric vehicle batteries to be manufactured domestically, Japanese or Korean companies must adjust their supply chains in order to qualify for U.S. subsidies—an effort the global tech fund could support by pooling resources with Japanese and Korean investors. Similarly, the CHIPS and Science Act has prioritized U.S. manufacturing while ignoring the need for supply chain resilience among the United States’ European allies, whose overall economic health and ability to guard against foreign influence should both be matters of concern to Washington. The global tech fund and European companies and governments could jointly invest in European semiconductor supply chains that use American technologies and equipment. The global tech fund could also seek similar arrangements in parts of the world where U.S. economic and technology ties are not as deep as they are in East Asia or Europe. In Southeast Asia or Latin America, for instance, the fund could work with regional partners to invest in energy supply chains, focusing particularly on electric batteries and green energy. It could support the United Arab Emirates’ and Saudi Arabia’s AI investments to ensure that Arabic large language models run on American technologies. In any number of countries with top-tier electrical engineering programs, it could finance startups whose next-generation wireless encoding technologies could become the building blocks for 6G standards. It could invest in refining capacity in Australia, Indonesia, and other countries with reserves of critical minerals, such as graphite or germanium, to help the United States diversify its supplies away from China. All parties would benefit in these cases—technological integration based on U.S. standards and software would give the United States influence, the U.S. tech industry would become more resilient, and U.S. financing would help recipient countries position themselves for success in the tech economy. The global tech fund’s investment would also help the United States mitigate one of the downsides of tech competition: the loss of access to Chinese engineering, scientific expertise, and operational capability. For Chinese technical leaders and entrepreneurs looking to invest and move their companies outside of China, the fund could sponsor the transfer of research and development and manufacturing centers, business operations, and even company headquarters to U.S.-aligned countries. Such a program would be of considerable interest to Mexico, for example, given that the country is already an attractive location for electric battery and new energy component manufacturing. No nation today can achieve technological self-sufficiency. No nation can even assume it will maintain its current advantages indefinitely—whether those advantages lie in space technology, advanced semiconductor development, or generative AI models. To stay in the game, Washington needs more tools than are currently at its disposal. It needs to help key U.S. partners build technical capabilities and local capacity, ensuring that those partners make technology investments that are favorable to the United States. If the United States is to succeed in the competition between two globe-spanning tech ecosystems, investments of American capital and expertise cannot stop at the water’s edge. More: United States China Economics Business Economic Development Trade Science & Technology Xi Jinping U.S.-Chinese Relations Artificial Intelligence Most-Read Articles The Myths That Warp How America Sees Russia—and Vice Versa How Mutual Misunderstanding Breeds Tension and Conflict Michael Kimmage and Jeremy Shapiro Why the War in Gaza Makes a Nuclear Iran More Likely The Conflict Has Empowered Tehran—but Also Fueled Its Sense of Vulnerability Ali Vaez Ukraine Is Losing the Drone War How Kyiv Can Close the Innovation Gap With Russia Eric Schmidt Could Myanmar Come Apart? As the Rebels Gain Ground and the Junta Reels, the Country’s Future Is in Doubt Avinash Paliwal Recommended Articles A joint U.S.–South Korean military exercise, Pohang, South Korea, March 2023 America Can’t Surpass China’s Power in Asia But It Can Still Prevent Chinese Hegemony Kelly A. Grieco and Jennifer Kavanagh Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and U.S. President Joe Biden in New Delhi, September 2023. How to Thwart China’s Bid to Lead the Global South America Should See India as a Bridge to the Rest of the World Happymon Jacob The Myths That Warp How America Sees Russia—and Vice Versa How Mutual Misunderstanding Breeds Tension and Conflict By Michael Kimmage and Jeremy Shapiro January 25, 2024 Waving a Russian flag, Moscow, September 2023 “Mythology is not a lie,” wrote Joseph Campbell, the great scholar of myth and archetype. “It is metaphorical.” Myths and metaphors provide the narratives that inspire patriotic devotion, motivate soldiers to fight, and help explain the outside world. And the myths that nations cherish about themselves often reinforce the complementary myths that they adopt about others. Russia and the United States harbor especially powerful myths about each other. The myth that Russia believes about the United States is that it has vassals rather than allies—that it is a hegemonic power that hides ruthless ambition and self-interest behind appeals to liberal principles and legal order. Americans see Russia, meanwhile, as a country without domestic politics—the ultimate autocratic power whose malicious, unaccountable leader runs roughshod over what citizens want. As long ago as 1855, U.S. President Abraham Lincoln described Russia as a place “where despotism can be taken pure and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.” After more than a century of tension and conflict, the U.S.-Russian relationship is now structured around these myths. Myths weigh down that relationship, obscuring nuance and clear perception. And they have shaped, and will continue to shape, each country’s part in the war in Ukraine. The myth that many Russians hold of the United States is continually driving the Kremlin toward harmful belligerence. Stay informed. In-depth analysis delivered weekly. The myth that Americans hold of Russia is also a trap, leading policymakers to misread the Kremlin and to miss opportunities to weaken the regime or to find compromises. To minimize dangerous misinterpretations, U.S. leaders need to work harder to rise above these myths and archetypes. A better understanding of the United States’ own myths—and of Russia’s—would give U.S. policymakers more flexibility, help to foster strategic empathy, and anticipate future changes in the Russian body politic. HIDDEN FIGURE In Russia, it is conventional wisdom that the United States is power-mad. The American public, many Russians believe, is under the thumb of a megalomaniacal U.S. elite. Enthusiasm for a liberal international order gets little traction in Russia not because all Russians are realists but because their mythic view of the United States reduces the liberal international order to a vehicle of American ambition. Many Russians are convinced that U.S. leaders’ references to a supranational web of norms, laws, and partnerships are merely smokescreens for the cooptation that lies at the core of American foreign policy. The reigning Russian myth is of Soviet vintage. According to this myth, during the Cold War, American capitalist elites wanted to run the world and found innumerable military pretexts to exert their wishes. The nightmare purportedly began after World War II, when the United States rewired the political codes in Japan and Germany, pushed those countries into alliances dominated by the United States, used them as staging grounds for U.S. military operations, and compelled them to serve as cheerleaders for the U.S. national interest. To keep up, the Soviet Union had to build a bulwark of “friendly countries” in Eastern Europe and establish its own global footprint, lest the perfidious United States advance uncontested. For Moscow, Ukrainian hostility is simply the veiled extension of American hostility. The United States’ global influence during this era was real. But the Soviet characterization was a caricature—and one that proved enduring. Even after the Cold War ended, according to the Russian myth, the United States kept seducing others with false rhetoric, including Russia’s neighbors—countries such as Poland, Romania, and the Baltic states. In this telling, U.S. allies operate more as instruments of American power than as independent states. Where governments resisted—in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Serbia, and Syria, as well as in Ukraine before the 2014 Maidan uprising—regime change has been the American preference. Hegemony by invitation, hegemony at the barrel of gun: the means may vary, but the end is never in question. Moscow has paid a high price for holding onto this myth. It has obligated itself to contend with the American monster even at the expense of becoming more dependent on China. The EU’s Eastern Partnership program, which led to Ukraine’s Maidan uprising, was an authentic expression of idealism about the country’s European future, not a covert exercise of American hegemony. But the contention that the CIA had staged a coup in Ukraine was a lie that Russians had long been primed to believe. Even if Russia’s top leaders knew this claim was false, their public insistence on it closed off moderate responses (such as accommodating the new government in Kyiv) and made more extreme options (such as annexing Crimea) seem necessary. In general, the myth of a United States drunk on power and unwilling to stick to agreements makes it very hard for Moscow to negotiate over regional questions. Russians cannot imagine that the leaders of countries such as Ukraine have minds of their own. For Moscow, Ukrainian hostility is simply the veiled extension of American hostility, and American hostility toward Russia demands equal Russian hostility toward the United States. If the only language the United States understands is power, then negotiation, deliberation, and the granting of concessions all entail undue risk. MORAL HAZARD American myths about Russia have similarly deep historical roots. The U.S. image of Russia as an unadulterated autocracy dates to the nineteenth century. It flourished during the Soviet era and briefly retreated during Boris Yeltsin’s nine-year presidency. (Americans venerated Yeltsin as more democratic than he actually was.) Putin has restored the familiar image of Russia. The U.S. approach to the Cold War often had the fervor of a messianic struggle, and Putin once again inspires Americans’ moral indignation. The United States’ myth of Russia—that Russia is an evil and ambitious tyranny—has some domestic political uses. To interest inward-looking Americans in the outside world, Washington needs to conjure a single omnipotent villain. Americans want to believe that they are fighting an individual who can be killed rather than a whole country that must be subdued. In crisis after crisis, comparisons to Hitler are used to shock democracy-loving yet complacent Americans into action. Putin is simply the latest in a long line of autocratic leaders—Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic, Muammar al-Qaddafi, and Bashar al-Assad, to name a few—who are portrayed as single-handedly obstructing democracy and progress. Putin’s larger-than-life persona has exacerbated the view that autocratic Russia has no domestic politics and that whatever the ruler wants happens. Brian Jenkins, the senior adviser to the president at the RAND Corporation, summed up this view when he wrote, “At home, Putin faces no elections, no party or state institutions that threaten his rule, no domestic political opposition. He is Russia. And Russia is his.” If Putin is Russia, the only thing that needs to be understood about Russia is Putin’s psyche. Ukraine and its allies are fighting Putin’s war against Putin’s Russia. It is no surprise, then, that the U.S. intelligence community has reportedly made evaluating Putin’s state of mind its top analytical priority. The U.S. image of Russia as an unadulterated autocracy dates to the nineteenth century. Studying leaders matters for understanding one’s adversaries and particularly for understanding Russia; the Russian president clearly dominates his country. But Putin still faces dilemmas at home. He sits uncomfortably atop a complicated system of competing factions and interests. He needs to ensure that the warring cronies beneath him do not kill one another or rise up against him. At the same time, he must keep the public adequately enthusiastic about him. The biggest producer and consumer of sociological research in Russia is, in fact, the Russian government, which nervously follows minute alterations in public opinion. Washington’s various wars against evil dictators should, by now, have yielded some hard-won lessons. None of these leaders turned out to be all-powerful. Nor were they responsible for every problem in their polity, as the United States repeatedly discovered after expending enormous effort to remove them from the scene. For every such leader, including Putin, domestic politics set the parameters of their foreign policy. They rarely fought wars without their people behind them. Like democratic leaders, autocrats know how to bring their populations along when they go to war. Public opinion and the bureaucracy are both somewhat opaque in the dictatorship that Russia has become. But public opinion limits the way Putin wages war and the settlements the Kremlin can accept. Like any belligerent, the Russian government wants to be able to claim victory: if Russia demonstrably loses the Ukraine war, public frustration and outrage may well topple the government. Committed to the myth of a Russia without domestic politics, however, the United States struggles to interpret Russia. Its policymakers fail to see that many of the Kremlin’s actions are aimed at a domestic constituency. Take Putin’s sudden decision in September 2022 to annex territories in Ukraine, many of which Russia did not even control. Just a few months earlier, Putin had publicly mocked his intelligence chief for suggesting annexation. Putin’s turnabout baffled U.S. analysts, who interpreted it as part of a grand, if phantasmagoric, plan to subdue Ukraine. Was Putin losing his mind? In reality, these aspirational annexations may have been a rhetorical flourish for internal consumption, an opportunistic attempt to rally popular support behind a war veering out of control. EGO DISTORTION The burdens that these myths impose go beyond their distortions of reality. In international affairs, myths are dangerous because they entrench archetypes. The archetypal Russia is a malign autocracy, the archetypal United States a rapacious hegemon. Archetypes are the refined cousins of stereotypes, the problem of stereotypes being their negation of complexity. The country that believes its adversary can be understood in simple categories is likely to stop looking for subtle adjustments it could make to its policies and to cease trying to respond creatively to its adversary’s adjustments. Had American leaders better understood that Russian is not a monolith but is capable of fissuring, for instance, they may have been able to better exploit the 2023 mutiny of Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the Wagner paramilitary company, capitalizing on splits within the Russian elite and the military. An informed understanding of why those splits occurred could have allowed the United States and its allies to accentuate them, perhaps by highlighting Prigozhin’s attacks on the Russian air force or stressing the ways in which Putin was losing control of his security services. Instead, preoccupied with Putin’s power, Washington missed the signs of division and were bewildered by the mutiny. Washington could be missing similar vulnerabilities emerging ahead of Russia’s presidential election in March, which it presumes will merely be a ritual of autocratic self-congratulation. Putin will certainly win, but it will nonetheless be an important political moment as competing Russian political constituencies jockey for greater power and influence. The biggest problem posed by the myths that Russia and the United States have of each other is that they are mutually reinforcing. The more fanatical Moscow becomes about contesting putative acts of American hegemony, the more Russia resembles the maniacal autocracy of American myth. And the more Washington envisions Russia as the abiding and wicked “other” in U.S. foreign policy, the more militarized its relations to Europe are bound to become—and the more likely Moscow is to construe the United States’ aims as hegemonic. So far, the war in Ukraine has epitomized this cycle of progressively hardening preconceptions. With every passing month, each country sees its myths draw closer to the objective truth. Both America and Russia nourish their myths for a reason. Neither the United States nor Russia can easily dispel the myths that the other holds. Both countries nourish their myths for a reason. The Russian regime wants the United States—and everyone else—to think that it has no domestic politics and that Putinism and Russia are one. If the United States frames the war in Ukraine principally as a struggle for territorial integrity rather than as a good-versus-evil battle against a lone tyrant, Americans may lose interest. And even if leaders wanted to, it would be hard to dislodge the myths. The more actively Washington deployed public diplomacy to try to change Russian perceptions of the United States, the more Russians would perceive the United States to be manipulating their country. And to transform its image within the United States, the Russian government would have to divest itself of autocracy and pull back militarily from Europe—which has never been a winning recipe for ruling Russia. These myths will long be with us. But Washington must recognize them as such. If the United States could, in its own internal policy debates, challenge the myth of Russia’s unalloyed autocracy and uncover the ways in which domestic politics and public opinion constrain and construct Russian foreign policy, it might discover tools that could disrupt Russia’s war effort. It would also be more ready for a post-Putin political transition. Politically, Russia tends to change suddenly; its politics do not remain forever frozen. As they try to predict Russian behavior, U.S. leaders would also benefit from a greater awareness of the United States’ mythical status in the Kremlin, which is wildly at odds with Washington’s self-image. Russians believe that the timeless essence of the United States is the will to power: this clarifies the Kremlin’s decision to invade Ukraine, and it also explains Russia’s refusal to wind down its devastating war in Ukraine. Captivating as they are, myths mislead by obscuring the awesome complexity and open-endedness of reality. In all they reveal about human nature, myths admit endless interpretation. But at their heart, they are also static—and they get in the way of sound strategy and agile diplomacy. More: United States Ukraine Russian Federation Diplomacy Geopolitics Politics & Society Public Opinion U.S. Foreign Policy War in Ukraine Propaganda & Disinformation Most-Read Articles The Myths That Warp How America Sees Russia—and Vice Versa How Mutual Misunderstanding Breeds Tension and Conflict Michael Kimmage and Jeremy Shapiro Why the War in Gaza Makes a Nuclear Iran More Likely The Conflict Has Empowered Tehran—but Also Fueled Its Sense of Vulnerability Ali Vaez Ukraine Is Losing the Drone War How Kyiv Can Close the Innovation Gap With Russia Eric Schmidt Could Myanmar Come Apart? As the Rebels Gain Ground and the Junta Reels, the Country’s Future Is in Doubt Avinash Paliwal Recommended Articles The End of the Russian Idea What It Will Take to Break Putinism’s Grip Andrei Kolesnikov The Cold War Never Ended Ukraine, the China Challenge, and the Revival of the West Stephen Kotkin Why the War in Gaza Makes a Nuclear Iran More Likely The Conflict Has Empowered Tehran—but Also Fueled Its Sense of Vulnerability By Ali Vaez January 25, 2024 At a rally in support of Palestinians, Tehran, November 2023 Since the start of the war in the Gaza Strip, Iran’s government has sounded bullish, even triumphalist notes. “The Zionist regime’s defeat in this event is not just the defeat of the Zionist regime,” contended Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in a speech last month, referencing Israeli setbacks on the battlefield. “It is also the defeat of the U.S.” At the beginning of January, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi boasted that his country’s enemies “can see Iran’s power, and the whole world knows its strength and capabilities.” And a few days later, an Iranian foreign ministry spokesperson declared that the so-called axis of resistance—the network of partners and proxies Iran backs across the region—is more “coherent, resilient and united than ever.” It is easy to see why Tehran seems pleased. The war has bogged down its chief regional foe, Israel, in a protracted and perhaps unwinnable conflict. And it has forced Iran’s main global adversary, the United States, to focus on preventing that conflict from escalating, even as it fights off threats from Iran’s allied militias. Yet for Tehran, the ongoing conflict may not end in anything like the clear-cut victory it has already claimed. Iran wants to be the Middle East’s dominant power, but it has not been willing to capitalize on the war in Gaza by having the axis of resistance open major new fronts against Israel or the United States. Hezbollah—Tehran’s most capable ally—has lobbed missiles at Israel, but it has not sparked an all-out war on the country’s northern border. The Iran-backed Houthi militants in Yemen have repeatedly menaced international shipping and targeted Israel with their missiles and drones, but these attacks have done little to pull Israel out of Gaza. The overall message is clear: Iran can cause chaos, but it is not strong enough to go on a real offensive. It still needs its regional allies primarily to defend its own territory. Tehran may therefore conclude that this conflict has made it look weaker rather than stronger. It may, accordingly, feel more vulnerable. Stay informed. In-depth analysis delivered weekly. If that is the case, Tehran could make a final dash for the ultimate deterrent: nuclear weapons. Doing so would have risks, but it might provide Iran with the kind of immunity North Korea and Russia have enjoyed as they confront the West. A nuclear-armed Iran could also be more brazen in unleashing its partners across the Middle East, calculating that the backlash would be limited as its enemies work to avoid Armageddon. Should Tehran decide to go nuclear, it will be difficult to stop it. The government’s nuclear program is already quite advanced, and it is now subject to limited international oversight. The United States could order a military strike, but even if successful, that strike would, at best, delay Iran’s drive toward weaponization. Yet the consequences of a nuclear Iran are so perilous that it is still worth preventing, which means trying to restart diplomacy. MIXED BAG Hamas’s October 7 attack against Israel, in which it unconscionably murdered hundreds of civilians, broke the country’s aura of military invincibility. It marked the first time in decades that outside fighters successfully invaded Israeli territory, and it left many of the country’s residents feeling vulnerable and insecure. It showed that Israel’s intelligence apparatus, long reviled and feared by the country’s adversaries, was not nearly as omnipotent as it seemed. For Iran, this terrible attack was, almost by definition, something of a victory. Tehran has long been the subject of Israeli covert operations, including the assassination of top Iranian nuclear scientists and military commanders, and Israel has sabotaged Iran’s nuclear and military facilities. Iran thus got to see its principal antagonist immeasurably suffer. When Israel launched its campaign in Gaza, Tehran was able to portray itself as the flag bearer for the newly revived Palestinian cause, bolstering Iran’s reputation across the Middle East. Israel’s reputation, by contrast, tanked, as the war turned Gaza into a humanitarian catastrophe. The image of Israel’s Western patrons has also suffered. To people all over the world, Western criticisms of Russia’s war crimes in Ukraine now seem to reflect a hypocritical double standard. The war has helped Iran in other ways, too. The conflict has, at a minimum, delayed the normalization of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia, which could have reisolated Iran following the Chinese-brokered Iranian-Saudi détente last March. The axis of resistance has used the conflict to burnish its capabilities and wide reach. In addition to attacks by Hezbollah and the Houthis, Iraqi and Syrian paramilitary groups have launched well over 150 attacks against U.S. military and diplomatic facilities in Iraq and Syria. Deterrence is partly a mind game. Yet beneath this bullish exterior, Tehran has shown signs of strategic weakness. According to The New York Times, U.S. intelligence assessments indicate Iran was surprised by Hamas’s attack, which it viewed as premature. And Iran has done little to assist its supposed ally, even though Hamas dealt Israel its greatest defeat in half a century. The Times also reported that Khamenei ordered his military chiefs to practice “strategic patience” in order to avoid a direct confrontation with the United States. October 7 was, in theory, Iran’s time to shine—a moment when it had a chance to go all out and alter the political order in the Middle East, flexing its hard power via proxies. Instead, its actions have been impetuous and its rewards far from assured. To some extent, the reluctance to enter the fray in full force makes sense. Under Iran’s strategy, the axis of resistance is primarily aimed at deterring Israel and the United States from attacking Iran itself, something that has not yet happened. But although the Iranian homeland has not been struck by either country (it has been attacked by the Islamic State, or ISIS, and, in a retaliatory operation, by Pakistan), Iranian commanders and their allies have been hit by American and Israeli strikes. According to a Reuters report, for example, Israel killed one of Iran’s most senior commanders in Syria. Four intelligence officers from the Revolutionary Guards were killed in Damascus a few weeks later. Israel also killed a close Hamas contact based in Beirut and a senior Hezbollah commander in southern Lebanon. The United States, meanwhile, targeted a Shiite militia leader in Baghdad and has been bombing the Houthis in Yemen in response to their attacks in the Red Sea. And even if Israel and the United States had conducted no strikes, Iran’s restraint in response to Israel’s invasion of Gaza—relative, at least, to Tehran’s full capacity—would be noteworthy. Deterrence is partly a mind game in which adversaries must fear not just a state’s capabilities but also a state’s willingness to use them. Iran’s reluctance to sacrifice members of its network for the sake of saving Hamas is, therefore, a sign the country is not the mastermind or behemoth destabilizing the region. Instead, it is a reticent actor on its back foot. PLAYING WITH FIRE After U.S. President Joe Biden took office in 2021, Iran and the United States began holding indirect negotiations in hopes of reducing regional tensions, lightening U.S. sanctions, and, critically, constraining Iran’s nuclear program. The talks did not succeed in restoring the 2015 nuclear deal, but by the summer of 2023, they appeared to have reached a stopgap, de-escalatory understanding. Iranian proxies halted attacks against U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria, and Iran slowed its high-level enrichment for the first time since 2021. In exchange, the United States released some frozen Iranian funds. The two sides exchanged some prisoners in September 2023. Building on that progress, Iran and the United States were supposed to return to the negotiating table on October 18 in Oman, where they would start more expansive talks. But that small window of opportunity was shut down the minute Hamas militants paraglided into Israeli territory. With the U.S. entering a presidential election year and the Iranian regime now complicit in two wars against U.S. allies—Israel and Ukraine—there is no real prospect for serious diplomatic engagement. This breakdown comes as Iran inches ever closer to the ability to produce nuclear weapons. Today, it would take about a month for the country to produce enough enriched nuclear material for an arsenal of four to five nuclear warheads. It could manufacture a deliverable bomb perhaps just a few months later. The exact timing is difficult to predict, in part because the United Nations nuclear watchdog cannot fully monitor Tehran’s nuclear program. Iran no longer complies with the now defunct nuclear deal’s transparency measures, which allowed inspectors to monitor centrifuge production plants and undeclared nuclear facilities. As a result, Tehran can now potentially divert its production of highly enriched uranium to clandestine facilities. Tehran still has good reasons not to build a nuclear weapon or even to enrich uranium to weapons-grade levels and bar UN inspectors entirely. Merely crossing these thresholds, for instance, could prompt a preventive strike by Israel or the United States. If Iran manages to construct a weapon undetected, it risks triggering a regional nuclear arms race with its Gulf competitors, such as Saudi Arabia. And if Iran goes nuclear, it would likely anger China, far and away Iran’s most critical oil customer and an invaluable diplomatic partner. To stop a nuclear Iran, the United States has just one real option: diplomacy. Still, Tehran might decide that the benefits of going nuclear outweigh the risks. Iran has already paid the economic price for nuclear weapons after suffering from years of sanctions. It no longer believes that the West would be willing and able to offer effective and sustainable sanctions relief, even if it were to roll back its nuclear program. And unfortunately, the aftermath of October 7 makes nuclearization more likely. Tehran’s cautious response has exposed its vulnerability, weakening the credibility of its regional deterrence. Iranian leaders may see acquiring nuclear weapons as a way to gain newfound assurance that it won’t be attacked by Israel or the United States—freeing the axis of resistance to wreak far more havoc. Plus, Iranian officials who want the country to get a nuclear weapon (Tehran itself is likely divided on whether to go nuclear) could view this as a moment of great opportunity. Iran’s rivals, after all, are distracted by the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, competition with China, and elections. Even if the United States and its allies do catch Iran trying to go nuclear, they have no good way to stop it. They could attempt to take out some facilities or expertise with military strikes. But Iran and its allies would respond with attacks on U.S. assets, and Iran now has enough knowledge and talent that strikes alone would only delay Iranian nuclearization. If Tehran were to disperse its highly enriched uranium to secret facilities for further enrichment and weapons manufacturing, Washington would have to either carpet bomb the entire country or attempt regime change, either by invasion or internal revolt. None of these options seem plausible. Iran has a population nearly twice the size of Iraq’s, a landmass nearly four times as large, and a far more powerful military. The United States would struggle mightily to flatten the country or to take and hold it. The humanitarian consequences of an extended bombing campaign or an invasion would be ghastly. And as the Iranian regime’s crackdowns against repeated protests illustrated, Tehran retains a brutally effective grip on power. That leaves the United States with just one real option: diplomacy. It is the only thing that has curtailed Iran’s nuclear program in the past, and it is the only thing that stands a chance of doing so today. “Diplomacy, diplomacy, diplomacy, this is what we need,” declared the UN nuclear czar, Rafael Grossi, while speaking about Iran in January. “We need to prevent the situation deteriorating to a degree where it would be impossible to retrieve it.” But to avoid such a deterioration, countries need a policy that goes beyond just deterring Tehran from further escalating its nuclear program. That policy would, even in the best case, still leave Iran in a worryingly advanced position. Instead of merely focusing on not crossing the precipice, policymakers should aim to move away from it. Restarting talks will not be popular or easy in key Western capitals, where Iran is understandably more reviled than it has been in decades. It may also be hard to sell in Tehran, where policymakers are increasingly adversarial. But an atomic Iran could make an already volatile region a whole lot more explosive, and even if the odds are long, the West should still push Tehran to use its nuclear program as leverage at the negotiating table—rather than as a deterrent on the battlefield. As a 1970s antinuclear slogan put it: Better active today than radioactive tomorrow. Israel Palestinian Territories Iran Geopolitics Security Defense & Military Nuclear Weapons & Proliferation War & Military Strategy U.S. Foreign Policy Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Israel-Hamas War Most-Read Articles The Myths That Warp How America Sees Russia—and Vice Versa How Mutual Misunderstanding Breeds Tension and Conflict Michael Kimmage and Jeremy Shapiro Why the War in Gaza Makes a Nuclear Iran More Likely The Conflict Has Empowered Tehran—but Also Fueled Its Sense of Vulnerability Ali Vaez Ukraine Is Losing the Drone War How Kyiv Can Close the Innovation Gap With Russia Eric Schmidt Could Myanmar Come Apart? As the Rebels Gain Ground and the Junta Reels, the Country’s Future Is in Doubt Avinash Paliwal Recommended Articles Posters of the former Hamas leader Ahmad Yassin, the former chief of the Iranian Quds Force Qassem Soleimani, Lebanon’s Hezbollah chief Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah; and the Houthi leader Mahdi al-Mashat in Sanaa, Yemen, January 2024 How the War in Gaza Revived the Axis of Resistance Iran and Its Allies Are Fighting With Missiles and Memes Narges Bajoghli and Vali Nasr The War That Remade the Middle East How Washington Can Stabilize a Transformed Region Maria Fantappie and Vali Nasr Ukraine Is Losing the Drone War How Kyiv Can Close the Innovation Gap With Russia By Eric Schmidt January 22, 2024 Communal workers towing a damaged car in Dnipro, Ukraine, January 2024 It’s winter in Ukraine again. The snow is piling up, the temperature is dropping, and the days are short. During the long nights, nearly two years into the full-scale war, the skies above the entire 600-mile frontline are filled with Ukrainian and Russian drones. In past centuries, the machinery of war would grind to a halt when harsh conditions pushed human endurance to its limits. The two most famous military campaigns in this part of the world—Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812 and Hitler’s in 1941—succumbed to devastating casualties as the season changed. Today, the hapless infantry who still fill trenches and strongpoints across Ukraine are contending with the same unforgiving winter. But the drones that have come to dominate this war are limited only by their battery lives—shortened by the cold—and the availability of night-vision cameras. In the early months of the war, the frontlines shifted rapidly as Ukrainian forces pushed back the Russian offensive. Ukraine held the upper hand in drone warfare, adapting commercial technologies and introducing new weapons to keep Russian forces on the back foot. Since October 2022, however, little territory has changed hands. The Ukrainian army has scored some recent wins, including precise attacks on Russia’s Black Sea Fleet and on targets deep inside Russian territory. The Russian army, too, has faced headwinds, losing the equivalent of almost 90 percent of the soldiers and equipment it began the war with, according to some reports. But Russia has also adjusted its strategy, and the conflict is now moving in its favor. Moscow shifted its defense industry to a war footing, and current military spending is more than twice prewar levels. It has also launched thousands of drones—including the Iranian-designed Shahed model now assembled in both Iran and Russia—with new capabilities to target expensive Western-supplied defenses in Ukraine. After Russian troops first marched on Kyiv, Ukrainian forces were praised for the technological ingenuity that helped them thwart their more powerful invader. Now, Russia has caught up in the innovation contest and Ukraine is struggling to maintain the flow of military assistance from its external partners. In order to undercut Russia’s advantage in this phase of the war, Ukraine and its allies will need to not just ramp up defense production but also invest in developing and scaling technologies that can counter Russia’s formidable new drones. Stay informed. In-depth analysis delivered weekly. BATTLE IN THE SKIES I first visited Ukraine in September 2022 at the invitation of the Ukrainian-based Yalta European Strategy forum. Witnessing firsthand the devastation of the Russian invasion, I was blown away by the determination, resilience, and resourcefulness of the Ukrainian people, culture, and tech industry. The trip inspired me to dedicate time and resources to Ukraine’s battle for democracy, supporting both humanitarian causes and Ukraine’s tech ecosystem. I have since returned to Ukraine several times to learn from Ukrainian partners. Conversations during my most recent visit, in December 2023, emphasized the value technology has brought to Ukrainian offensives and the challenge presented by Russia’s new materiel and drone tactics. The use of drones has underpinned many of Ukraine’s recent successes on the battlefield. In its campaign in the Black Sea, the Ukrainian military has relied largely on drones and, as of November 17, claimed to have destroyed 15 Russian naval vessels and damaged 12 more since the initial 2022 invasion. Ukraine’s attacks on Russia’s maritime forces have kept sea lanes in the region clear enough for grain shipments, which are vital to Ukraine’s economy, to resume. The drone strikes have also denied Russia the option to fire missiles on Ukrainian territory from offshore ships and have weakened Russia’s defense of Crimea and position in the Black Sea—a symbolic, economic, and military victory for Ukraine. Ukrainian drone strikes have also reached deeper and deeper into Russia in recent months. Over one week in August, a series of attacks targeted six Russian regions and set a military airfield ablaze. Ukraine has proved that it is willing and able to extend the range of its military operations, and Ukrainian officials have warned that as the war continues they will take more of the fight to Russian territory. For now, drones are most heavily concentrated along the frontlines in eastern Ukraine. When asked to identify the best tank-killing weapon in their arsenals, Ukrainian commanders of all ranks give the same answer: first-person-view drones, which pilots on the ground maneuver while watching a live feed from an onboard camera. These drones have made tank-on-tank engagement a thing of the past. A Ukrainian battle commander also told me that FPV drones are more versatile than an artillery barrage at the opening of an attack. In a traditional attack, shelling must end as friendly troops approach the enemy trench line. But FPVs are so accurate that Ukrainian pilots can continue to strike Russian targets until their fellow soldiers are mere yards away from the enemy. THE TIDE TURNS In other ways, however, Kyiv has lost its advantages in the drone war. Russian forces have copied many of the tactics that Ukraine pioneered over the summer, including waging large coordinated attacks that use multiple types of drones. First, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance drones hover high above the ground to survey the battlefield and identify targets from afar. They then relay the enemy’s location to pilots operating low-flying, highly maneuverable FPV drones, which can launch precision strikes against both stationary and moving targets, all from a safe distance from the frontline. After these drones eliminate initial targets, military vehicles fight through minefields to begin the ground assault. Since late 2022, Russia has used a combination of two domestically produced drones, the Orlan-10 (a surveillance drone) and the Lancet (an attack drone), to destroy everything from high-value artillery systems to combat jets and tanks. Ukraine surpassed Russia in drone attacks early in the conflict, but it has no combination of drones that match Russia’s dangerous new duo. At the same time that the Orlan-Lancet team has become decisive in battle, Russia’s superior electronic warfare capabilities allow it to jam and spoof the signals between Ukrainian drones and their pilots. If Ukraine is to neutralize Russian drones, its forces will need the same capabilities. A limited number of Ukrainian brigades have acquired jamming equipment from U.S. suppliers or domestic startups. Without it, the combination of Russian attack drones and Russian jamming of Ukrainian drones threatens to push Ukrainian forces back into the territory that they fought so hard to free early in the war. Most Western-supplied weapons have fared poorly against Russia’s antiaircraft systems and electronic attacks. When missiles and attack drones are aimed at Russian sites, they are often spoofed or shot down. U.S. weapons in particular can often be thwarted via GPS jamming. A small number of U.S. F-16 fighter jets are set to arrive in Ukraine later this year, and they should quickly get to work targeting Russia’s own jets, which are currently devastating Ukrainian defenses with guided bombs. But it is not clear how even the F-16s will perform amid active electronic warfare and against the long-range missiles deployed by Russian aircraft. Russian forces have copied many of the tactics that Ukraine pioneered. Russia has ramped up its military offensives in spite of the harsh winter weather, and increased production capacity has played a big role in the latest advance. Ukrainian officials estimate that Russia can now produce or procure around 100,000 drones per month, whereas Ukraine can only churn out half that amount. International sanctions have not stopped other types of Russian military production, either. Russia has doubled the number of tanks built annually before the invasion, from 100 to 200. Russian companies are also manufacturing munitions far more cheaply than their Western counterparts, often compromising on safety to do so: a 152-millimeter artillery shell costs around $600 to produce in Russia, whereas a 155-millimeter shell costs up to ten times that much to produce in the West. This economic disadvantage will be difficult for Ukraine’s allies to overcome. After months of relative calm in Kyiv, Russia has also resumed regular drone attacks on Ukraine’s capital. So far, Ukrainian forces have managed to detect and shoot down nearly all the incoming aircraft, but this protection will be difficult to sustain as Moscow introduces technological upgrades to drones, increases domestic production, develops new ways to evade detection, and launches high-volume attacks that simply overwhelm Ukrainian air defenses. Here, too, Ukraine is at an economic disadvantage—one of Russia’s drones of choice, the Shahed, is far less expensive than the air defense systems required to neutralize it. Even though Russian cyberwarfare has had relatively little effect so far, the Ukrainian military’s reliance on mobile data and smartphones to coordinate operations leaves it vulnerable to future attacks. A recent uptick in Russian attempts to shut down cellular networks across Ukraine could have severe consequences. With Russian capacity expanding on multiple fronts in this fight, Ukrainian commanders have become less optimistic than they were just a few months ago. Their focus has turned from offensive operations to defending their current positions and keeping their forces intact. WINNING THE DRONE WAR The next few months will be difficult for Ukraine. When I visited Kyiv in December, the government officials and military officers I talked to shared their fear that Russian President Vladimir Putin would announce a second round of mass conscription and a major offensive in eastern Ukraine after Russia’s election in March. Russia’s resilient war economy, expanded materiel production, and population edge, combined with uncertainty about the West’s continued support of Ukraine—especially in a U.S. election year—give Putin reason to double down. Meanwhile, the home-field advantage that Ukraine enjoyed in the early days of the invasion has eroded. Russian troops have settled in on Ukrainian soil and littered eastern Ukraine with land mines, which injure and kill Ukrainian combatants and civilians alike even in areas that the Ukrainian army has won back. The growing strength of Russia’s defenses in eastern Ukraine helps explain the disappointing outcome of Ukraine’s long-heralded summer offensive, too. As Russian forces now probe parts of the frontline for weakness, the Ukrainian military has adopted an “active defense” position. It has been able to stymie Russian assaults, but that success often comes at a high cost. In this phase of the war, as the frontlines stabilize, the sky above will fill with ever-greater numbers of drones. Ukraine aims to acquire more than two million drones in 2024—half of which it plans to produce domestically—and Russia is on track to at least match that procurement. With so many aircraft deployed, any troops or equipment moving on the ground will become easy targets. Both armies will therefore focus more on eliminating each other’s weapons and engaging in drone-to-drone dogfights. As technological advances increase the range of drones, their operators and other support systems will be able to stay hundreds of miles from the battle. But remote operation of a drone-centric war will not necessarily lower the human cost. In fact, developments so far suggest that the opposite is true. As Ukrainian military officials explained to me in December in Avdiivka, a city in the Donetsk region, ground assaults remain an integral part of Russia’s drone targeting strategy. The Russian army sends groups of poorly trained draftees and convicts to attack the Ukrainian frontline, forcing Ukrainian troops to respond and reveal their camouflaged positions. Now visible to the drones overhead, the Ukrainian positions are then pounded by Russian artillery. I heard estimates of around 100 to 200 people dying on each side every day in this type of combat—and the number could rise as the lethality and quantity of drones increase. Russia and Ukraine will focus more on eliminating each other’s weapons and engaging in drone-to-drone dogfights. Meanwhile, in both Europe and the United States, war fatigue is setting in and support for Ukraine is beginning to crack. Waning financial and military aid from the West could turn the conflict’s fragile stalemate into an opening for Russia. Russia has enough ammunition stocks and production lines to continue fighting for at least another year; Ukraine will need to secure additional Western ammunition supplies if it is to plan that far into the future. Ukraine also needs antiaircraft and attack missiles to strike fast-moving airborne targets. Recognizing that U.S. weapons that rely on GPS may not stand up well to Russian electronic warfare, Ukrainian startups are working around the clock to develop advanced drones that can resist spoofing and jamming. Only with more and better weapons systems—both offensive and defensive—can Ukraine turn the tide on the battlefield. Filling this gap in innovation and procurement will require sustained financial and technical support from Kyiv’s allies. The prognosis could change with a decisive shift on the battlefield, but for now neither Russia nor Ukraine is expecting a swift end to the fighting. To avoid a protracted war, the West needs to back a concerted military effort to push back Russian forces and a diplomatic effort to bring the parties to the negotiating table. The alternative is years of further suffering for those in the war zone. While I was in Kyiv in December, ten Russian missiles were launched and intercepted by air defenses, including U.S.-supplied Patriot missiles, in the middle of the night. Fifty-two people in my neighborhood were injured by falling debris—including six children. Ukrainians’ deep love for their country fuels their resilience and determination, even as they face constant reminders of the deadly reality of war. Putin is betting that internal divisions and divided attention will turn Western capitals away from the Ukrainians’ fight for survival as the conflict enters a difficult new phase. Only by neutralizing the advantages that Russia has gained can Ukraine and its allies prove him wrong. More: Ukraine Russian Federation Geopolitics Security Defense & Military Strategy & Conflict War & Military Strategy War in Ukraine Most-Read Articles The Myths That Warp How America Sees Russia—and Vice Versa How Mutual Misunderstanding Breeds Tension and Conflict Michael Kimmage and Jeremy Shapiro Why the War in Gaza Makes a Nuclear Iran More Likely The Conflict Has Empowered Tehran—but Also Fueled Its Sense of Vulnerability Ali Vaez Ukraine Is Losing the Drone War How Kyiv Can Close the Innovation Gap With Russia Eric Schmidt Could Myanmar Come Apart? As the Rebels Gain Ground and the Junta Reels, the Country’s Future Is in Doubt Avinash Paliwal Recommended Articles Supporters of Russian President Vladimir Putin in Donetsk, Russian-occupied Ukraine, January 2024 The Quiet Transformation of Occupied Ukraine Away From the Frontlines, Russia Cements Its Conquest David Lewis Launching an attack drone near the city of Bakhmut, Ukraine, December 2023 How Ukraine Can Regain Its Edge Technology and the Element of Surprise Can Put Russia on the Back Foot Andriy Zagorodnyuk Could Myanmar Come Apart? As the Rebels Gain Ground and the Junta Reels, the Country’s Future Is in Doubt By Avinash Paliwal January 24, 2024 Myanmar's junta chief Senior General Min Aung Hlaing in Naypyidaw, Myanmar, March 2021 Since a military coup in 2021 toppled Myanmar’s democratic government, the country’s army has found itself contending with a tenacious and committed rebel insurgency. The military junta’s opponents are varied and various, including armed organizations representing Myanmar’s many ethnic minorities and militias loyal to the ousted government. Many observers had written off such resistance groups as too fractious and weak to present a genuine challenge to the junta. But that all has changed in recent months. Rebels have been strikingly successful in an offensive against the junta in the northern Shan State—which borders China—called Operation 1027, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba in Kyiv, January 2024 Gleb Garanich / Reuters PODCAST The Dangers of Defeatism for Ukraine A Conversation With Dmytro Kuleba January 25, 2024 Ukraine may be facing the toughest chapter of its war since the first days of Russia’s invasion. The frontlines have changed little over the past year. And, in November, Ukraine’s top general, Valery Zaluzhny, used the word “stalemate” to describe the situation on the battlefield. In the West, the political tides may be shifting—especially in the United States, where Republicans in Congress are holding up new aid, and Donald Trump, running for reelection, has said he’ll end the war in 24 hours if he returns to the White House. Since the war began, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba has been tirelessly and eloquently making a case for Ukrainian victory, both on the world stage and in the pages of Foreign Affairs. In a January 23 conversation with Editor Daniel Kurtz-Phelan, he discussed why the West should not give up on Ukraine, and the country’s prospects of victory in the months and years ahead. Sources: “There Is a Path to Victory in Ukraine” by Dmytro Kuleba “Why NATO Must Admit Ukraine” by Dmytro Kuleba “How Ukraine Will Win” by Dmytro Kuleba “Don’t Sell Out Ukraine” by Dmytro Kuleba “Ukraine Is Part of the West” by Dmytro Kuleba If you have feedback, email us at podcast@foreignaffairs.com. The Foreign Affairs Interview is produced by Kate Brannen, Julia Fleming-Dresser, and Molly McAnany; original music by Robin Hilton. Special thanks to Grace Finlayson, Nora Revenaugh, Caitlin Joseph, Asher Ross, Gabrielle Sierra, and Markus Zakaria.