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

FA march How to Pave the Way for Diplomacy to End the War in Ukraine No Negotiations Yet—but It’s Time to Talk About Talking Samuel Charap and Jeremy Shapiro The Myth of Israel’s “Moral Army” The Failure of the IDF’s Targeting Protocols Is Producing Massive Civilian Casualties Avner Gvaryahu Germany’s Economic Reckoning The EU Needs Berlin to Get Its House in Order Sudha David-Wilp and Jacob Kirkegaard In Pakistan, the Military Is Still Running the Show Last Month’s Election Results Were a Surprise—but Not a Shock to the System Sarah Khan India’s Feet of Clay How Modi’s Supremacy Will Hinder His Country’s Rise Ramachandra Guha Israel Must Decide Where It’s Going—and Who Should Lead It There The Case for Early Elections Ehud Barak The Kremlin’s Strange Victory How Putin Exploits American Dysfunction and Fuels American Decline Fiona Hill Deterrence Lessons From Iraq Rationality Is Not the Only Key to Containment Amatzia Baram The Age of Amorality Can America Save the Liberal Order Through Illiberal Means? Hal Brands Ramachandra Guha Israel Must Decide Where It’s Going—and Who Should Lead It There The Case for Early Elections Ehud Barak The Kremlin’s Strange Victory How Putin Exploits American Dysfunction and Fuels American Decline Fiona Hill Deterrence Lessons From Iraq Rationality Is Not the Only Key to Containment Amatzia Baram Russia Is Burning Up Its Future How Putin’s Pursuit of Power Has Hollowed Out the Country and Its People By Andrei Kolesnikov March 7, 2024 Russian servicemen at a mobile recruitment center in Rostov-on-Don, Russia March 2024 From March 15 to 17, Russia will hold a presidential election to refresh Russian President Vladimir Putin’s hold on power. There have never been any real doubts about the outcome, which will herald his fifth term in office. But the Kremlin has taken extraordinary steps to make sure: On February 8, the Central Election Commission announced that the antiwar candidate Boris Nadezhdin was disqualified from running. Eight days later, Alexei Navalny died in an Arctic prison colony, an event widely blamed on the Russian state, eliminating Russia’s most prominent opposition leader. Navalny was not running in the election, but Russian politics had been until recently reduced to a Navalny-Putin confrontation. Now Putin is alone on the political Olympus. With such figures as Navalny and Nadezhdin out of the way, the vote can provide a resounding affirmation of Putin and his pet project, the war in Ukraine. Russia is neither stable nor normal. The presidential election brings to maturity the late-stage Putinism that began with the constitutional referendum in the summer of 2020, when Putin’s potential mandate was extended until 2036. There is more to this stage, however, than mere autocracy. Putin has made clear that Russia is fighting a permanent background war with the West, which gives him both an ideological raison d’être and a way for his ruling elite to maintain power. And to keep it all going, he must continually burn up the country’s resources, financial, human, political, and psychological. All of which points to the country’s political and economic fragility. Consider the financial and economic situation. Although it retains market fundamentals, the Russian economy is increasingly dependent on government investment. The military-industrial complex has become the overwhelming driver of this unhealthy and unproductive economy, as the 2024 budget makes clear: military expenditures will be 1.7 times higher even compared with last year’s inflated figures, to reach 25 percent of all spending. Meanwhile, Russian exports, primarily of oil and gas resources, are providing diminishing returns because of the closure of Western markets and discounted sales. Nonetheless, these nonrenewables are not exhausted yet, and Putin, at least, seems to hope they will be enough to last his lifetime. A larger problem is demography. Along with the long-term trend of population aging, the demand for soldiers and the collapse of migrant inflows are pitching the country into demographic crisis. Economists note that all these pressures will combine in the medium term to a decline in labor productivity. Although the artificial growth of wages through the military economy has improved the situation for now, it has also distorted it. Putin is preoccupied with raising the birth rate at any cost, but there are few signs this can be changed. A modernized and urban Russian society will not produce as many children as Putin needs to fuel the military-industrial complex. Besides, how can a Russian family plan for the future in a permanent state of war. One of the scarcest resources, however, is psychological. Unable to satisfy the public’s hunger for peace and normality, the regime has resorted to gigantic social expenditures and preferential treatment for the poor, turning Russia into Putin’s Barbieland. Russian society in turn has been reduced to adapting and surviving, rather than developing. But civil society, which is different from an indifferent society, unable to protest openly, has shown moral resistance: people openly stood in line to give their signatures for Nadezhdin; after Navalny’s death, they carried flowers and candles to memorials for the victims of Stalinist repressions. And the line to say goodbye to Navalny, the man who embodied an alternative to Putin, was enormous. Russia’s path to abnormality did not begin in 2022. Putin’s system has been moving in an authoritarian direction ever since it began more than two decades ago. Already in December 2000, Putin had brought back the old Stalinist anthem: the words might have been different, but the future autocrat was offering an early indication of where he intended to go. The difference was that back then, the regime’s antimodern authoritarianism was partly hidden; now, it is in full view. Quite simply, Putin and his team appear to assume that Russia will have enough reserves of all types—including the forbearance of its population—to last their own lifetimes. What happens after does not matter. AN ORDINARY KREMLIN Twenty years ago in these pages, Andrei Shleifer and Daniel Treisman called Russia a “normal country.” Noting the rise of a market economy and the beginnings of Western-style institutions, they argued that the Russian Federation was becoming a “typical middle-income capitalist democracy”—less than perfect, but far from the “evil empire” that had once threatened people “at home and abroad.” Ten years later, they published another article, “Normal Countries,” referring to the relative success of the larger group of the states of the former Eastern bloc. “Market reforms, attempts to build democracy, and struggles against corruption did not fail, although they remain incomplete,” they wrote. Given what has happened to Russia in the years since, these views might be considered naive. In any case, Russia certainly no longer qualifies as “normal.” But Shleifer and Treisman were not entirely wrong: they conceded that Russia might still follow an authoritarian path. As for other post-Soviet states in Eastern Europe, despite all the difficulties of their transitions to a market economy and democracy, that transition did happen, even if it wasn’t flawless. Moreover, in those countries, multiparty democracy and peaceful transfers of power have worked: Poland’s October 2023 election, which brought the liberal centrist Donald Tusk to power after years of rule by the right-wing Law and Justice Party, is proof of that. Russia’s path to abnormality began decades ago. But history tends to move in unpleasant ways. In Europe at the start of the twentieth century, for example, the first great era of global trade appeared to have taken the threat of war off the table. Then came 1914 and World War I. A similar reversal followed Russia’s early moves toward normalcy: the West cheered on the reforms of the 1990s and later put high hopes on Dmitry Medvedev, who during his single term as Russian president from 2008 to 2012 seemingly initiated a new wave of modernization efforts and even a “reset” of relations with the United States. Indeed, the mass pro-democracy protests that swept the country in 2011 and 2012 might have led Russia toward full democratization. For a time, that goal appeared to be within reach. But Putin’s return to the presidency in 2012 marked the beginning of a swift, brutal, and irrevocable shift toward autocracy. State and society became less, not more, normal. AUTHORITARIAN REFLEXES Back in 2004, Russia’s apparent emergence as a capitalist democracy was not a pure illusion. But it was precisely around the moment—the beginning of Putin’s second presidential term—that Russia began to lose its chances for normal development. In fact, the economic achievements that seemed so noteworthy at the time had nothing to do with Putin: they were the result of Russia’s earlier transition from socialism to capitalism, and of the radical economic reforms of the early 1990s. The real architect of those reforms, Yegor Gaidar—the economist who was, briefly, acting prime minister under President Boris Yeltsin—was cursed by the general public, who blamed him for destroying the Soviet economy and impoverishing the population. This allowed Putin to style himself as the true builder of the post-Soviet economy, though he had played no part in it. During his first two years in office, Putin did take economic reforms more or less seriously, but after that, he lost interest. What was really driving the Russian economy was the deluge of petrodollars that suddenly flooded the country—another factor he had nothing to do with. There were other early signs that Putin was no reformer. In 2001, the independent NTV television channel—a symbol of 1990s democratization and a frequent critic of Putin—was taken over by Gazprom and transformed into an arm of official state media. In 2003, the tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky was arrested and his enormously successful oil company, YUKOS, subsequently dismantled by the government in a series of forced sales. Business could be done and fortunes made but, for the biggest projects, only if you had the right political connections. Russia effectively became a one-party state following the defeat of the Union of Right Forces and Yabloko democratic parties in the 2003 parliamentary election, a vote that failed to meet democratic standards, according to both the Council of Europe and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. With the rise of the ruling United Russia party, the remaining major parties—the Communist Party and Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s populist Liberal Democratic Party of Russia—became appendages of the Kremlin. From this point on, the Duma ceased to function as an independent legislative body. Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow, January 2024 Maxim Shemetov / Reuters Authoritarian reflexes returned to the political system, which began to control more and more aspects of social life. For instance, in 2003, the Russian Public Opinion Research Center, or VTsIOM, the country’s main center for social research, was seized by the state, and brought under government control. (VTsIOM’s old team formed the independent Levada Center, named after its founder, Yuri Levada.) Already, the state was seeking to control Russians’ knowledge of themselves. Such a system could hardly be considered normal, but Russian elites and many in the West convinced themselves that it was. Many assumed that the authorities would not risk overt moves toward repression that might backfire and thus jeopardize their privileged lives. These assumptions persisted even after the Kremlin had neutralized all political competition and invaded Georgia in 2008. The West then staked its hopes for renewed liberalization on the new president, Medvedev, whom many assumed would break from Putin and become an independent figure. Around this time, Russia was also beginning a further stage of so-called authoritarian modernization—an approach that sought to emphasize technocratic economic reforms ahead of political liberalization, which the Kremlin generally regarded as unnecessary. In fact, Medvedev established a new center, the Institute of Modern Development, to oversee the cautious liberalizing not only of the economy, but also of politics, too, in what was supposed to be a road map for Russia’s future. But not much came of it. Simultaneously, more or less the same experts went on to prepare “Strategy 2020,” a plan to vault Russia into one of the world’s top economies by 2020. And even after Putin was preparing for his official fourth term, as late as 2016–2017, there was another modernization program, this one led by the former Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin. Each time, however, these efforts were thwarted by lack of political will, and it became clear that any attempt at authoritarian modernization would end simply in authoritarianism—without the modernization. It is symptomatic that many of the experts who led these efforts in the last two years have been pushed aside or forced to leave the country. CONSUMERS INTO CONFORMISTS In fact, Putin was by this point actively seeking the de-modernization of Russia. After his return to the presidency in 2012, he began dismantling democratic institutions and putting in place repressive laws. In 2014, he seized Crimea, which he justified by ultraconservative imperialist ideology. Economic reforms had stopped. By the 2018 presidential election, many Russians had become passive and were voting mechanically, realizing that they could not influence the situation. Still, Putin’s ratings suffered after the election when the government raised the retirement age, and then, the mere existence of the pandemic further eroded his popularity. It was time to take emergency measures. In the summer of 2020, he held a referendum to change the constitution, reset his presidential terms, and potentially extend his rule until 2036, and the conformist majority approved. Putin’s consolidation of a semi-totalitarian regime was symbolically complemented, just two months later, by the attempted poisoning of Putin’s main opponent, Alexei Navalny. But it was the next step that destroyed Russia’s modernization all the way down to its foundations: the war in Ukraine. In launching the “special military operation,” Putin was rejecting the democratic heritage of not only Boris Yeltsin, but also Mikhail Gorbachev. Everything that had been achieved in Russia since 1985—from the establishment of democratic institutions to the abolition of censorship and the reunification of Russian and European cultures—Putin swept off the table in one fell swoop. The war took the brakes off the regime, which in a short time crushed the remnants of these institutions and returned to Soviet-scale repression. Indeed, it would also involve breaking with the world order that had first emerged after 1945 and then become dominant after 1989. Astonishingly, during this 20-year descent into an autocratic abyss, the majority of Russians, not to mention the time-serving elites, were not overly disturbed. To them, each step along the way was just a new normal. Even after 2014, when all socioeconomic indicators—including real household income—began to stagnate, few Russians saw a direct link between the regime’s tightening grip and the country’s failing economy. In any case, many had given up the fight for modernization after Crimea, choosing instead to join in the national-imperialist euphoria that swept over the country. It is hard to swim against the tide. Few Russians saw a link between the regime’s tightening grip and the failing economy. There was still a political opposition in those years, with people taking to the streets and civil society groups swinging into action. Many took significant risks, including being labeled a “foreign agent”—a legal designation devised by the Kremlin in 2012 for anyone who receives support from outside Russia or otherwise appears to be influenced by external sources. But the fiercer people resisted, the harsher the government cracked down on them. In 2020, Navalny’s poisoning showed how far the authorities were ready to go; to avoid arrest, many opposition figures began to leave the country. Navalny’s return to Russia in early 2021 and his own arrest sparked a new wave of powerful protests. But the Putin system did not stop and no longer had any restraints. It was moving toward an external expansion and an internal war with what was left of civil society. The main social problem was that Russia’s market economy had turned Russians into garden-variety capitalist consumers without making them engaged citizens. Having adapted to the new market conditions during the post-Soviet transition, they did not see the inextricable connection between an open market and political democracy. In big cities, no one saw the point of democracy, the rotation of power, or human rights, because even under enlightened authoritarianism, many people felt just fine. Despite the decline in average real incomes and problems among the working classes, the consumerist boom continued. Middle-class Russians had gotten used to vacationing in Europe. Russians became discerning connoisseurs of French, Spanish, and Italian wines, and eagerly adopted the latest technologies—and then they were proclaimed by Putin the heirs of a great empire by taking Crimea without a shot fired. To many of them, it was easy to discount the importance of democracy in all this. Putin, in any case, never believed in modernization, so when he felt that it was not working, he made a conscious choice in favor of archaism and de-modernization instead. First the regime began to close itself off, and gradually it rejected everything that came from the West, reembracing the medieval concept of the “Russian path” that perceives European influence as heresy. NO MORE CHILDREN’S BOOKS Putin would be surprised to be called a Marxist. But he is at least partly an economic determinist, since his primary tactic for preserving power is maintaining a sufficient level of socioeconomic well-being—in particular, by buying the loyalty of the lower-middle classes with social support. If economic failures can be overcome through political repression and an archaic national-imperial ideology, it is possible to rule for a long time. Still, as the Russian demographer Anatoly Vishnevsky has argued, in the long term, demographics will always trump economics. It’s unlikely that Putin has read Vishnevsky; his government has certainly ignored Vishnevsky’s warnings about the risks to human capital caused by Russia’s long-term demographic trends. Putin is already failing in this most important area. The Kremlin now spends human capital profligately, as if it were a mere commodity. And all the while, the regime talks of “saving the people”—a phrase coined by the Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to mean respect for human life—appropriated by Putin as a hypocritical call for greater fertility. To further this goal, the Kremlin continues the fight against same-sex relationships and abortion, while promoting “traditional” families. It is no coincidence that Putin declared 2024 the Year of the Family and devoted much of the 2024 presidential address to supporting large families. But “saving the people” is an awkward promise for an architect of a deadly war to make. As the wives of men mobilized to fight in Ukraine have observed in a statement back in November 2023, “wives have been left wailing for their husbands, children are growing up without fathers, and many have been orphaned.” It is hard to escape the impression that Putin has begun a reverse demographic transition, in which a death for the Motherland has greater value than a life for the Motherland; in which death from “external causes”—a bureaucratic euphemism for deaths from road traffic accidents, alcohol, and probably, duty in the trenches—looms disproportionately large. (The actual figures for combat fatalities remain unknown.) Russians gathering at the funeral for opposition politician Alexei Navalny in Moscow, March 2024 Stringer / Reuters Both government statistics and indirect indicators show that the birth rate in Russia has been falling since 2016–2017. Book publishers, for example, complain of a vanishing audience for children’s books: by 2027, demographers predict a 23 percent reduction in the key age group of five- to nine-year-olds, based on the same decline in the zero-to-four age group between 2017 and 2022. Birth rates, of course, follow long-term trends, and one explanation is the inexorable demographic consequences of becoming a postindustrial country: Russian society started to become modern—with people moving to cities, becoming more educated, and having fewer children—back in the 1960s. But another reason Russia’s birth rate is so low today is that Putin needs soldiers and workers at military-industrial complex factories, and fewer Russians today want their children to grow up to become soldiers and workers. Meanwhile, the decline of the working-age population—primarily from population aging and smaller numbers entering the labor market—has already caused an enormous labor shortage. In 2023, there were two million more vacancies than there were workers. According to forecasts by labor market specialists and demographers, by 2035 there will be three million to four million fewer Russians employed, the proportion of young people in the labor market will steadily decline, and the level of education of the labor force will stagnate. Under the most pessimistic scenario modeled by the state statistics service, by 2046, the population of Russia (excluding the four territories whose annexation from Ukraine was announced by the Kremlin in September 2022) will shrink by a total of 15.4 million people, equivalent to an average annual population decline of 700,000. The government’s efforts to address this demographic time bomb are becoming more and more absurd. No ban on abortions—which are no more common in Russia than in developed European countries—is going to revive the birth rate. Nor will getting people to move to rural areas to live a “traditional life,” given that, far from cities and economic infrastructure it is even harder to support a larger family. Even Russians who can work have been compromised by the war: military demands have diverted money away from critical sectors such as health care and education. Russia faces a shortage of important medications such as insulin, and for the first time in many years, the rate of alcoholism has gone up, a testament to the stress brought on by the country’s abnormality. A FIGHT AGAINST THE FUTURE Building the economy around goals other than improving the quality of human life makes the economy unproductive. In 2022, labor productivity decreased by 3.6 percent over the previous year, according to government statistics. (Data for 2023 is not yet available.) Funded largely at taxpayer expense and by commodities revenues, the intensifying output of “metal goods”—the government’s euphemism for weapons—is making the economy more primitive. By now, a large share of Russia’s GDP growth—one-third, by some estimates—can be attributed to the military-industrial complex and related industries. Putin hopes that military industries will stimulate the development of civilian technologies. But this so-called conversion scheme already failed during the Soviet years and the early post-Soviet reform era. Putin started his war to change the world order and force everyone else to live by his rules. For that, he needed to position his country and its zone of geopolitical influence against the West and the modernizing project it represents. These goals account for Putin’s readiness to embark on territorial expansion: many other countries are moving forward, transitioning to other types of energy precisely so that there will be resources left for the future. But Russia is defending a dying model of development, one that requires a totalitarian and imperial ideology—and that necessitates using up resources now, including the same old oil and gas. For Putin, it appears to be a wager worth making: his costly project in Ukraine has laid a minefield under the country’s economic and demographic future, but it is entirely possible that these mines will explode only after he has left the scene. Call it the King Louis XV model of governance: Après moi, le déluge. (“After me, the flood.”) Putin’s war is a fight against the future. ANDREI KOLESNIKOV is a Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center. The Kremlin’s Strange Victory How Putin Exploits American Dysfunction and Fuels American Decline Fiona Hill A Ukrainian soldier near Robotyne, Ukraine, February 2024 A War Putin Still Can’t Win To Thwart Russia, America Needs a Long-Term Strategy—and Ukraine Needs Long-Range Weapons Lawrence D. Freedman Why Russia Might Put a Nuclear Weapon in Space The New Threat Behind an Old Idea By Aaron Bateman March 7, 2024 A Russian-crewed spacecraft blasting off to the International Space Station, Baikonur, Kazakhstan, September 2023 Maxim Shemetov / Reuters When Mike Turner, the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, issued a cryptic warning last week about the “serious national security threat” represented by a secret Russian military capability, the Republican representative from Ohio generated a wave of anxiety. Concern about Turner’s statement deepened when White House spokesperson John Kirby confirmed that Moscow is developing a “troubling” antisatellite weapon. Soon, multiple news outlets, such as The New York Times, were reporting that Moscow might be preparing to deploy a nuclear weapon in space. The purpose of such a weapon may well be to destroy the large-scale satellite constellations used for communications and reconnaissance. Obliterating these kinds of space systems could degrade the effectiveness of Ukrainian defense forces that heavily rely on commercial satellite communications and imagery. It would also reduce the effectiveness of the U.S. military and those of its allies, which are similarly dependent on these systems. Russia’s decision to detonate a nuclear weapon in space would almost certainly affect the Kremlin’s satellites, too. But even if Russia never used a nuclear space weapon, Moscow might view its deployment as a new source of leverage, a sword of Damocles it could dangle over every other state’s space systems. And it is hard to know the Russian calculus for employment. Moscow and Washington have tested antisatellite weapons since the Cold War, but if Russia deployed a nuclear weapon in space to attack other satellites, it would be an unprecedented development and a clear violation of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty. Yet for the Kremlin, the costs of a violation may well be outweighed by the benefits. The antisatellite weapons that Moscow has demonstrated are not capable of effectively destroying the large-scale satellite constellations owned and operated by private companies. A nuclear antisatellite weapon, however, could destroy large numbers of these satellites in one fell swoop. If Russian officials decide to deploy this capability, Washington has no good options for stopping them. BACK TO THE FUTURE Although anti-satellite space systems appear to be a futuristic class of weapons, Moscow and Washington already have decades of experience developing them. During the Cold War, Moscow deemed its nonnuclear, antisatellite weapons sufficient for being able to destroy key U.S. satellites. But in the post–Cold War period, the rise of much larger satellite constellations has likely rendered these nonnuclear antisatellite weapons less useful. Antisatellite weapons appeared soon after the dawn of the space age. Only two years after the Soviets launched Sputnik, in 1957, the United States tested an aircraft-launched antisatellite weapon that would have used a nuclear warhead to destroy its target. But it never became a part of the U.S. arsenal, thanks to the Eisenhower administration’s restrained approach to space weapons. His caution was prescient. Before the advent of more accurate missiles, a nuclear warhead was required to destroy satellites in orbit, and high-altitude nuclear detonations demonstrated that radiation in space was not discriminate in which objects it affected. In 1962, one such explosion, called Starfish Prime, damaged nearly one quarter of all satellites in orbit—including a British scientific satellite. In the early 1960s, U.S. policymakers became afraid that the Soviet Union would deploy orbital nuclear weapons in the form of a fractional orbital bombardment system—that is, launch a nuclear weapon into space on a southerly trajectory over the South Pole to avoid U.S. early warning radars positioned around the North Pole. Before completing an orbit, the weapon would reenter Earth’s atmosphere and hit its target. The Kennedy administration responded in 1963 by deploying nuclear-tipped missiles on Johnson Island in the Pacific that could destroy incoming nuclear weapons. But the escalating U.S. involvement in Vietnam squeezed defense budgets, and officials worried about the fact that radiation from nuclear antisatellite weapons would indiscriminately destroy U.S. and allied satellites. As a result, Program 437—the name of the project—was soon mothballed. In 1975, it was eliminated. Russia has significantly expanded its counterspace capabilities. High-altitude nuclear tests, Program 437, and fractional orbital bombardment systems all underscore that the boundary between nuclear weapons and space weapons is blurry. Although fears about nuclear weapons in space receded with the signing of the Outer Space Treaty in 1967—in which the United States, the Soviet Union, and other signatories pledged to use space for peaceful purposes and not to place nuclear weapons in orbit or on celestial bodies—this treaty, too, was ambiguous. It did not prohibit the deployment of nuclear-powered satellites. It also did not ban nonnuclear space weapons, such as land-based antisatellite missiles designed to eviscerate space systems. There was little consensus on how to even define what a space weapon is given how many technologies, including missile defense interceptors, can attack satellites. (That lack of consensus persists today.) These ambiguities became a problem almost as soon as the treaty was signed. In late 1967, reports emerged that Moscow was testing exactly the type of system that prompted President John F. Kennedy to station nuclear anti-satellite weapons in the Pacific. Publicly, the U.S. government declared that this new Soviet capability did not defy the Outer Space Treaty because its weapons did not complete an orbit around Earth before reentering the atmosphere. Privately, however, senior officials deemed it a violation. They opted not to confront the Kremlin, in large part because these orbital nuclear weapons were less accurate than traditional ballistic missiles. The Soviet Union proceeded apace to develop nonnuclear antisatellite weapons that were not restricted by the treaty. In 1969, the Kremlin began testing an antisatellite missile called istrebitel sputnikov, or “satellite killer,” designed to be launched into space, then maneuver close to a U.S. satellite and destroy it with a conventional warhead. Moscow carried out multiple tests of this system, declaring it operational in the 1970s. Other Soviet antisatellite weapons efforts sounded like they had been ripped from the pages of a Tom Clancy novel. In the 1970s and 1980s, Soviet design bureaus researched lasers that could be used to attack U.S. satellites. In 1987, they even launched such a laser, called Skif-DM, from a spaceport in Kazakhstan. It malfunctioned before reaching orbit. (After this failure, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev canceled the program as part of his broader effort to rein in defense spending.) The Soviet Union was not alone in developing counterspace weapons. In addition to the Johnston Island missiles, in 1977, the Pentagon drew up plans for a nonnuclear antisatellite weapon called the Miniature Homing Vehicle—designed to be fired off into space to destroy Soviet satellites—and an electronic warfare system designed to jam Soviet satellites. Moscow had fewer satellites than Washington, and it was not as reliant on them. The United States never went quite as far as its adversary in fielding a nonnuclear antisatellite weapon, canceling the Miniature Homing Vehicle in 1988. RETURN OF THE SATELLITE KILLERS At the end of the Cold War, both Moscow and Washington halted their antisatellite weapons programs. Rather than continuing to compete in space, the two governments began to collaborate, most prominently in the form of the International Space Station. The first section of the station was completed in 1998. To underscore that the two countries had entered a new, cooperative era, the Russian and American components of the station were designed to be interdependent. But the reprieve from space weapons did not last. In 2007, an emerging space power—China—launched a nonnuclear weapon into space and obliterated one of its own satellites. One year later, the United States used a modified SM-3 missile defense interceptor to destroy a malfunctioning U.S. satellite in low Earth orbit. And eventually, Moscow resurrected its own counterspace programs. Although it is not clear precisely when Russia did so, work seems to have been restarted by 2009. This revival was likely part of Moscow’s broader military reforms, not a response to foreign space weapons. But nonetheless, in the past 15 years, Russia has significantly expanded its counterspace capabilities. It appears to be developing both land-based and aircraft-launched antisatellite weapons. It is also making directed-energy capabilities, such as lasers that can blind imaging satellites. Russian military space operators have also been perfecting their ability to maneuver objects close to foreign satellites, which allows them to both surveil these objects and, if needed, destroy them. In 2019, General Jay Raymond, the first U.S. chief of space operations, warned that Russia was now stalking U.S. satellites in low Earth orbit. For Washington, these capabilities are concerning. Historically, the United States has fielded very sophisticated, large satellites, which former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General John Hyten described in 2017 as “juicy targets.” (Hyten was then the leader of U.S. Strategic Command.) Strikes against communications and reconnaissance satellites could, for example, have a detrimental effect on U.S. and allied military operations that depend on these space systems for command and control, navigation, and targeting. The debris produced from attacks on satellites creates hazards, as well. Only three months before Moscow’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Russia destroyed one of its own satellites in orbit using a ground-launched missile. The resulting debris forced astronauts and cosmonauts on the International Space Station to take shelter in their return capsules in case of serious damage to the station. Calls for space arms control measures will likely fall on deaf ears in the Kremlin. In the past, strikes against small numbers of satellites could have been debilitating for Washington. But the trend toward deploying proliferated constellations with hundreds or even thousands of satellites makes space systems more survivable. And the antisatellite capability that Russia demonstrated in 2021 is not well suited to destroying these large-scale satellite constellations; there are just too many satellites. Russia has tried to use electronic warfare to jam satellite constellations—specifically SpaceX’s Starlink, which provides Ukraine with vital communications. But it has had little effect. If Russia seeks a more dependable way to quickly eliminate large numbers of satellites, then the Kremlin might indeed want to field a space-based nuclear antisatellite weapon. The electromagnetic pulse from a nuclear explosion would fry the electronic components of many satellites in the vicinity, rendering them useless. It could achieve the same effect by setting off a nuclear weapon high in the atmosphere, but a nuclear weapon deployed in space would be harder to detect. It could therefore deprive other countries of warning that Russia might be getting ready to use it. And a surprise loss of communications and reconnaissance satellites could be catastrophic for countries that depend on space systems. For example, widespread loss of Starlink satellites would likely heavily degrade the ability of Ukrainian units to carry out coordinated strikes against Russian forces. Russia would be reticent to use such a weapon, given that many of its own satellites would probably be destroyed, as well. But even if Moscow never detonates a nuclear weapon in space, its mere presence in orbit would be cause for concern. The act of threatening to field such a weapon provides the Kremlin with another rung on its escalation ladder, which it could use to try to deter the United States from taking any actions it opposes. Similarly, threatening to deploy that capability might provide Russian officials with a bargaining chip in future arms control negotiations with the United States, which Moscow might use to exact concessions on issues that Washington has been reluctant to discuss, such as limits on national missile defenses. If Russia does decide to deploy a nuclear antisatellite weapon, there is very little that can be done to change its course. Taking unprecedented measures to deploy a space-based nuclear capability would signal that the Kremlin views proliferated constellations as such a clear and present danger to its national security that Moscow is willing to ignore the interests of other spacefaring states. Once the Kremlin has made up its mind, it is hard to imagine that even China, Russia’s “no limits” partner, could talk it down. Thankfully, it appears that Moscow has not yet made a firm decision, giving other governments an opportunity to try to dissuade it. The United States’ best option is to persuade China, India, and other spacefaring countries into collectively warding off the Kremlin for the welfare of their own satellites. But Washington, alone, will struggle to have an influence. With the U.S.-Russian arms control dialogue now frozen, bilateral calls for space arms control measures will likely fall on deaf ears in the Kremlin. And if the Kremlin has decided to deploy weapons designed to destroy large-scale satellite constellations, it will be very difficult to get Moscow to change its mind. AARON BATEMAN is Assistant Professor of History and International Affairs and a member of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University. He is the author of the forthcoming book Weapons in Space: Technology, Politics, and the Rise and Fall of the Strategic Defense Initiative. The Return of Nuclear Escalation How America’s Adversaries Have Hijacked Its Old Deterrence Strategy Keir A. Lieber and Daryl G. Press A Russian intercontinental ballistic missile system in Moscow, April 2023 Russia’s New Nuclear Normal How the Country Has Grown Dangerously Comfortable Brandishing Its Arsenal Dmitry Adamsky The Power Vacuum in the Middle East A Region Where No One’s in Charge By Gregg Carlstrom March 6, 2024 Southern Gaza, March 2024 Southern Gaza, March 2024 Amir Cohen / 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/middle-east/power-vacuum-middle-east Get Citation Request Reprint Permissions Download Article Wars can clarify, and wars can confuse. The conventional wisdom about the Six-Day War in 1967 holds that Israel swiftly crushed the wave of Arab nationalism that was sweeping the Middle East and toppling monarchs. According to the tale of the 2006 war in Lebanon, Hezbollah fought Israel to a draw and shattered the image of a seemingly invincible military at a time when Arab armies had long since abandoned the fight against Israel. Arab-Israeli conflicts have often seemed to be clarifying events. Days of war sweep away ideas that had prevailed for decades. Yet the stories that emerge from these wars can verge on their own sort of mythmaking. The story of 1967, while not entirely untrue, is too pat. Regimes such as Gamal Abdel Nasser’s in Egypt were always motivated more by narrow self-interest than lofty notions of pan-Arabism, merely deploying the latter when it served the former. Such leaders burdened their states with political and economic problems that persist to this day. The catastrophe they suffered in 1967 might have hastened their demise, but they would have crumbled under their own contradictions anyway. The same goes for the 2006 war against Hezbollah. It was not Israel’s first military defeat; witness its long occupation of south Lebanon, which ended just six years earlier with a humiliating unilateral withdrawal and the prompt collapse of Israel’s proxy force, the South Lebanon Army. Israel had only seemed invincible because its most serious foes had given up. But war was changing, at least in the Middle East, as battles between armies gave way to campaigns of attrition against nonstate actors. Israel, like the United States, was struggling to repurpose conventional tactics to meet an unconventional threat. Stay informed. In-depth analysis delivered weekly. It is too early to draw a full list of conclusions from the latest Arab-Israeli war. But five months of fighting between Israel and Hamas have already debunked some big myths: that the Palestinian cause was dead, that an emerging Israeli-Gulf alliance would provide a counterweight against Iran, that a region exhausted by conflict was going to focus on de-escalation and economic growth, and that a truly post-American Middle East had emerged. I CAN SEE CLEARLY NOW Until October 7, Israel’s longtime divide-and-rule strategy toward the Palestinians seemed successful. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did everything he could to undermine the Palestinian Authority, even as he made deals with Hamas and facilitated the transfer of billions of dollars to its government in the Gaza Strip; then he claimed that Israel had no negotiating partner on the Palestinian side because Hamas was the stronger party. There was an occasional weeklong round of fighting in Gaza or a spurt of lone wolf attacks in Jerusalem and the West Bank, but the conventional wisdom was that the Palestinians were too downtrodden and fractured to muster anything more. The world had lost interest in their cause. The United States no longer wanted to play mediator. China and India had other priorities. Even some Arab states were more interested in doing deals with Israeli high-tech firms than pushing for a Palestinian state. There was no pressure on Israel to end its occupation, which seemed as if it could be managed indefinitely at little cost. This was Netanyahu’s view, but it was shared by many others. Israelis of all stripes thought they could avoid the Palestinian issue. A decade ago, when Isaac Herzog (now Israel’s president) was Netanyahu’s main center-left challenger for prime minister, he spent more time talking about solar energy than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Polls showed that a plurality of Israeli Jews preferred to maintain the status quo rather than pursue a two-state solution. Netanyahu’s view was, of course, spectacularly wrong. It was surprising to many that the trigger for renewed conflict came from Gaza, which had seemed relatively quiet, and not the West Bank, which was (and still is) a tinderbox. Israel thought Hamas had lost interest in large-scale conflict: a year earlier, when Islamic Jihad, a militant Palestinian group, fired hundreds of rockets across the border, Hamas sat on the sidelines. Instead, it seemed focused on shoring up its rule in Gaza. And it was surprising—perhaps even to Hamas itself—that the terrorists who attacked Israel on October 7 were able to cause so much carnage. But no one should have been shocked that the region’s longest unresolved conflict would eventually roar back to life. Israelis of all stripes thought they could avoid the Palestinian issue. When it did, it exposed other fallacies. The quiet ties that emerged between Israel and Gulf states in the decade after 2010 were based on a mutual fear of Iran. A sense of shared interest led to the Abraham Accords of 2020, through which Israel established formal ties with Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, and to talk of normalization with Saudi Arabia. Desperate to escape the Middle East, Washington saw this as an opportunity: there would be less need for U.S. troops to contain Iran and its proxies if Israel and Gulf states could do the job themselves. Today, however, Israel and a U.S.-led coalition are fighting Iranian proxies in five places—Gaza, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen—and the Gulf states are nowhere to be found. They have instead doubled down on détente with Iran. The hope for an emerging regional security alliance overlooked a key fact about the Gulf states: they are soft targets. They rely on oil exports to fill their coffers, imports to feed their populations, and vulnerable infrastructure, such as desalination plants, to survive in an inhospitable region. In 2019, Iranian missiles and drones hit oil facilities in Saudi Arabia, temporarily disrupting half the kingdom’s oil output. The attack drove home just how vulnerable the Gulf states are. Despite the billions of dollars they spend on weapons—Saudi Arabia and Qatar are among the world’s five biggest arms importers—their armies are not very capable, having little battlefield experience. Arguably the one exception is the United Arab Emirates, whose army performed relatively well fighting in southern Yemen. Yet the Western officials who admiringly call this country “little Sparta” misunderstand it. The UAE is not a battle-hardened warrior society; it is an entrepôt that thrives on its reputation as an oasis of stability. It might have the most adept Arab military—a low bar to clear—but its government is loath to use that army in a conflict that might bring missiles raining down on Dubai’s five-star resorts. Officials in the Gulf made their own miscalculations. Until October 7, it was common to hear them talk of a multipolar Middle East. The United States was distracted by the war in Ukraine, competition with China, and messy domestic politics. It was a frustrating partner prone to erratic swings in policy. Russia, on the other hand, had proved itself a reliable and effective ally by saving the hide of Syria’s dictator, Bashar al-Assad, in 2015 when it intervened on behalf of the government in the Syrian civil war. China was not yet a military power in the Middle East, but it was a seemingly bottomless source of investment and, increasingly, weapons and technology. The United States was no longer so indispensable. Russia’s intervention in Syria was the high-water mark of its regional influence. Yet amid the region’s worst crisis in decades, Russia and China are all but invisible. They have used the conflict to highlight perceived Western hypocrisy, a charge that has found a receptive audience in the Middle East. But no one has looked to Moscow or Beijing to conduct diplomacy, supply aid, or shore up regional security. Even where their self-interest is affected, they cannot (or will not) play a significant role. China ought to care that the Houthis have attacked shipping in the Red Sea since November, which jeopardizes trade with Europe. But it has not sent warships to the region. Although China is Iran’s largest trading partner, Beijing has not used its influence to persuade the regime in Tehran to rein in the Houthis but instead has merely pleaded for them to allow Chinese ships to transit the Red Sea unmolested. Again, this should have been apparent before October 7. In hindsight, Russia’s intervention in Syria was the high-water mark of its regional influence. Three years later, it tried to help Khalifa Haftar, a Libyan warlord, seize Tripoli, only to see his offensive snuffed out by Turkish drones. Invading Ukraine further sapped Russia’s clout. It has fewer arms to sell to Arab autocrats and less money to invest in the region. Distracted in Europe, Moscow pays less attention to even its closest allies in the Middle East. “They’re losing Syria to Iran,” an Israeli official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk with reporters, told me in January. China’s only notable diplomatic achievement in the region was to nudge last year’s Iranian-Saudi rapprochement across the finish line, but most of the hard work was done elsewhere. That rapprochement was supposed to signal a new era of regional calm. Civil wars in Libya, Syria, and Yemen had ground into stalemates. The autocrats who survived the Arab Spring, or emerged from it, knew they had to focus on pocketbook issues, lest their restive populations rise up again. Many analysts thought that after decades of turmoil, everyone would set aside their differences and try to build and integrate their economies. U.S. officials bought into this hopeful vision, and Gulf monarchs promoted it. So much for that. Even before October 7, the new era of regional comity had proved itself short-lived: Sudan plunged into a gruesome civil war just weeks after the Iranian-Saudi deal. A region littered with failed and failing states and unresolved conflicts turned out to be barren soil for growing something new. NO SHERIFF IN TOWN Myths can be revealing, even if they are wrong. Some Gulf officials talked up the multipolar world because they were genuinely exasperated with the United States; others did so because they hoped it would convince the United States to stay in the Middle East. Washington put its hopes in a new security architecture because it wanted to leave. Israelis believed in an endless, low-cost occupation because the region’s biggest powers signaled it would be acceptable. The Middle East is changing, in other words, even if policymakers erred in their assessment of those changes. The United States’ influence is undeniably on the wane, but China and Russia are not yet Middle Eastern powers. Washington cannot persuade Israel to endorse a two-state solution or the return of the Palestinian Authority to Gaza. It is strong enough to dispatch two aircraft carrier groups to the eastern Mediterranean and fly B-1 bombers halfway around the globe to strike the Houthis and Iraqi militias, but not strong enough to deter those militias from attacking commercial shipping or U.S. troops. The United States did help to head off war between Israel and Hezbollah in the days after October 7, and its strikes on the Houthis may have temporarily degraded their stockpile of antiship missiles. Beyond that, however, the United States has little to show for its diplomatic and military efforts over the past five months. Even when it is a more active power in the region, it is a feckless one, playing whack-a-mole with Iranian proxies and pleading with a recalcitrant Israeli government. China and Russia are not yet Middle Eastern powers. If the United States was wrong to fantasize about an anti-Iranian coalition, Iran’s own alliance is showing strain. In interviews over the past four months, perhaps the only thing American, Arab, European, Iranian, and Israeli officials agreed on is that Hamas struck Israel without consulting its sponsors in Tehran. The regime has since refused to unleash its most powerful proxy, Hezbollah—which is under pressure in Lebanon, including from its own Shiite constituency—not to drag the country into war with Israel. Iran is also nervous about the actions of its proxies in Iraq and Yemen. That “axis of resistance” was meant to keep conflicts away from Iran’s borders: now, however, to use that axis is to risk bringing them home. Even though Gulf states are not siding with Israel against Iran, they are not lining up against Israel either. The UAE has maintained its diplomatic and commercial ties with Israel, to the point of keeping regular flights to Tel Aviv from Dubai and Abu Dhabi—even in the early days of the war, when the planes were nearly empty. (“Business as usual,” one Israeli businessman put it to me in January.) When I spoke off the record with an Emirati official, his talking points could have come from a hawkish Israeli. Bahrain has seen anti-Israeli protests, and its toothless parliament passed a symbolic resolution about severing ties with Israel, but its regime has ignored all that. The Saudis are still in a hurry to do their own normalization deal with Israel before the November election. The Palestinian cause is back on the agenda, at a cost of tens of thousands of dead, but it hardly seems to have advanced. The region finds itself in an interregnum. Forget talk of unipolarity or multipolarity: the Middle East is nonpolar. No one is in charge. The United States is an uninterested, ineffective hegemon, and its great-power rivals even more so. Fragile Gulf states cannot fill the void; Israel cannot, either; and Iran can only play spoiler and troublemaker. Everyone else is a spectator beset by economic problems and crises of legitimacy. That was the reality even before October 7. The war has merely swept away illusions. GREGG CARLSTROM is a Middle East Correspondent for The Economist. The Looming Famine in Gaza And How to Stop It Hardin Lang and Jeremy Konyndyk Devastation caused by Israeli strikes in Jabalia refugee camp, Gaza, February 2024 The Myth of Israel’s “Moral Army” The Failure of the IDF’s Targeting Protocols Is Producing Massive Civilian Casualties Avner Gvaryahu America’s New Twilight Struggle With Russia To Prevail, Washington Must Revive Containment By Max Bergmann, Michael Kimmage, Jeffrey Mankoff, and Maria Snegovaya March 6, 2024 Russian guards marching in a ceremony marking Defender of the Fatherland Day, Moscow, Russia, February 2024 Russia’s invasion of Ukraine forced Washington to rethink its fundamental assumptions about Moscow. Every U.S. president from Bill Clinton to Joe Biden had sought some degree of engagement with Russia. As late as 2021, Biden expressed hope that Russia and the United States could arrive at “a stable, predictable relationship.” But Russia’s brutal war on Ukraine has radically altered that assessment. It is now clear that the two countries will remain antagonists for years to come. The Kremlin possesses immense disruptive global power and is willing to take great risks to advance its geopolitical agenda. Coping with Russia will demand a long-term strategy, one that echoes containment, which guided the United States through the Cold War, or what President John F. Kennedy called a “long, twilight struggle” against the Soviet Union. More than 75 years have passed since the diplomat George Kennan first formulated that strategy in his famous Long Telegram from Moscow and then in Foreign Affairs under the pseudonym “X.” In his 1947 article, Kennan described containment as a political strategy reinforced by “the adroit and vigilant application of counterforce at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points.” The goal was to avoid direct conflict with the Soviet Union while halting the spread of Soviet power. A new containment strategy must account for the novelty of the present moment. It must lean on U.S. allies more than its twentieth-century antecedent did. And it must be sustained for the long haul—a task that will be harder without the bipartisan consensus that marked the Cold War fight against communism. The geography of containment will also differ. Kennan’s vision of containment focused primarily on Europe. Today, post-Soviet Eurasia and the rest of the world will be more central. A clearly articulated new containment strategy would presume that Russia will continue trying to dominate Ukraine. This strategy would signal to NATO allies and to Ukraine that the United States remains steadfastly committed to European security, while reassuring U.S. officials and American citizens worried about escalation. Ukraine’s defense is crucial for European stability and for preventing the spread of Russian power globally. Containing Russia in Ukraine means keeping the line of contact as close to the Russian border as possible, constraining Russia’s expansionist tendencies. But containment will remain necessary irrespective of how the war in Ukraine ends.As in Kennan’s day, a containment strategy enables Washington to check Moscow’s aggression without risking a direct conflict between two nuclear powers. But it is not enough to simply dust off Kennan’s prescriptions. New times call for new thinking. CONTAINMENT’S NEW MAP Cold War containment was never a single policy. Kennan emphasized political tools and the limited application of “counterforce.” Other Cold War strategists promoted a more militarized version. Paul Nitze, Kennan’s successor as director of the State Department’s Office of Policy Planning, called for “the rapid building up of the political, economic, and military strength of the free world.” Nitze favored military intervention against Soviet-backed insurgencies in what was then called the Third World. Old debates about containment still apply. Although the United States has marshaled military aid to Ukraine, checking Russian influence in Central Asia and Africa will require different tools, such as support for governance reform and trade. Containment will not look exactly as it did in the twentieth century. Geography marks the most important difference. Whereas the fault lines of the Cold War were in Germany, the flash points of today’s conflict with Russia are in Ukraine and other post-Soviet states on Russia’s western periphery. Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine are all likely to achieve varying levels of integration into Western institutions but will remain places of contestation. Some countries may hedge, working with both the United States and Russia. Without the stark ideological divides of the Cold War, countries in other regions will remain on the sidelines. Important regional powers such as India and South Africa have bad memories of Western colonialism and see the West’s invocation of a moral struggle as self-serving and hypocritical. A still larger number do not want to imperil their own economies by imposing sanctions or otherwise partaking in a conflict they do not see as theirs. For this reason, the United States should contest Russian influence outside Europe primarily through development assistance, trade, and investment rather than through military intervention. In the Sahel, for instance, the United States can counter the brutality and corruption of Russian-backed juntas by supporting locally led initiatives to bolster civil society. A BALANCE OF THREATS In the twenty-first century, the United States will not be able to orient its foreign and security policy solely around the struggle with Moscow. Any strategy for containing Russia must account for resource commitments to the Indo-Pacific and for the impact of U.S. policy on the Chinese-Russian relationship. That complicated reality requires U.S. allies, especially in Europe, to take on a larger share of directing the containment of Russia. Europe has shown its political and economic resilience in the face of Russian aggression. Yet militarily, the continent remains dependent on the United States. This dynamic must change, in part because the United States must commit more of its resources to Asia. The growth of European defense spending since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine is an encouraging step. In 2023, 11 NATO members hit their spending target, allocating at least two percent of GDP to national defense, up from just 7 members in 2022. The rest need to follow suit. Europe must also resolve the problem of coordination. Right now, the United States coordinates more than 25 militaries in Europe. While it must continue to do this in the short term, it must push individual European countries and the European Union to take over this role and to create a stronger European pillar in NATO. The goal should be for European states to provide at least 50 percent of funding, troops, and materiel for responding to a contingency under NATO’s Article 5. Facing threats from revisionist neighbors, Japan and South Korea see the sovereignty of Ukraine as a matter of their national interest. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has also connected Washington’s challenges in European and Asian theaters. Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan have all made important contributions to Ukraine’s struggle. China, by contrast, remains one of the most important diplomatic backers of Russia’s war. Beijing echoes Moscow’s talking points about NATO expansion as the main driver of the conflict. It has also provided navigation equipment, fighter jet parts, and drones, even as it tries to present itself as a potential broker and has held back from providing substantial lethal military assistance. Facing threats from revisionist neighbors, Japan, South Korea, and other Asian powers see the sovereignty of Ukraine as a matter of their national interest. Tokyo and Seoul have supplied humanitarian assistance and nonlethal military aid, such as helmets and bulletproof vests, and South Korea is emerging as a major arms supplier for European militaries. The tradeoffs inherent in confronting both China and Russia will be acute. Even if Russia remains the principal threat to the international order, the United States will have to increase its focus on China in the coming decades. A strategy of containment can enable the United States to deter Russia in Europe while still dedicating more resources to deterring China in Asia. A U.S. containment strategy toward Russia would pay additional dividends in Asia. Russia’s unprovoked war has been a quagmire. Washington’s continued support of Ukraine impedes Russia’s military ambitions and dilutes its potential to support Chinese aggression in the future. The war in Ukraine has made Moscow and Beijing more united than at any time since the days of Stalin and Mao. Biden and his immediate successors will not be able to peel Beijing away from Moscow the way that U.S. President Richard Nixon did following his 1972 visit to China; China and Russia are too tightly bound, and both see U.S. global leadership as a threat. The war has also deepened the relationship between Russia and North Korea, which has supplied Russian forces with weaponry and, with Moscow’s backing, may now feel emboldened to act on the Korean Peninsula with impunity. Still, the United States and its allies have leverage with China. Whereas Chinese-Russian trade stood at $240 billion in 2023, China’s trade with the EU amounted to about $800 billion, and China’s trade with the United States was more than $660 billion. China has more at stake in its economic relationships with the United States and the EU than it does with Russia. The EU has leveraged its economic relationship, blacklisting Chinese firms suspected of providing materiel to Russia. Maintaining this leverage is one reason the United States and the EU should be wary of economic decoupling from China. The war in Ukraine has made Moscow and Beijing more united than at any time since the days of Stalin and Mao. For much of the Cold War, a hypermilitarized version of containment backfired in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America. The United States intervened militarily in civil wars and tolerated or abetted abuses by anticommunist partners such as the shah of Iran and President Suharto of Indonesia, which created long-standing resentments in these countries and elsewhere. Today’s Russia exploits those resentments to stoke anti-Americanism and obscure its own past as an imperial power. A new containment strategy toward Russia must not repeat these mistakes. Many countries in the developing world will seek to hedge, by establishing productive relations with both Russia and the United States. Instead of pushing countries to take sides, Washington will have to avoid the “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” mentality that often colored Cold War strategy. To successfully counter the anti-American narratives that animate Russian diplomacy and disinformation, the United States must make support for democratic governance and civil society a centerpiece of its foreign policy. Special care should be taken with respect to the Middle East, which is home to major energy resources and trade corridors vital to U.S. national interests. U.S. policymakers must not underestimate the lengths Moscow is prepared to go to secure its influence in the region: its brutal military intervention in support of President Bashar al-Assad’s forces in the Syrian civil war is a case in point. As Washington has pulled back from two decades of military intervention in the region, Russia stands to benefit from doubts about the durability of U.S. commitments to Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates and from anger about U.S. support for Israel. Containing Russia in the Middle East will require the United States to reinforce its commitments to its regional partners through expanded defense and security cooperation. Washington should also work with these states to push for a negotiated peace in Gaza. This is a feat that Russia, although it styles itself a regional mediator, cannot accomplish. CONTAINMENT AND THE FATE OF UKRAINE Europe’s security hinges on the fate of Ukraine. If Moscow realizes that its war is a dead end, it could be compelled to admit failure. But even if Ukraine does not achieve total victory on the battlefield, it could nevertheless be integrated militarily and politically with the West. In the worst-case scenario, a large-scale forward movement of Russian forces in Ukraine would bring the Russian threat to NATO’s door, making containment more urgent but also more difficult. A new containment strategy does not depend on Ukrainian victory. Still, that strategy should retain Ukrainian victory as a long-term goal. Forcing Russia to abandon all or most of the territory it has occupied there will push the Russian threat farther from Europe’s borders, leaving the Kremlin to grapple with the consequences of a failed war of aggression—much as the Soviet Union did in the 1980s after its Afghanistan debacle. Ukrainian victory would embolden other countries to push back against Russian malign influence. A Ukrainian military victory will require larger and more sustained Western military assistance, including weapons with long-range strike capabilities. The EU recently stepped up with a $50 billion military assistance package. The United States needs to follow suit and pass the $60 billion in supplemental funding stalled in Congress. Two decades of war in the Middle East combined with domestic travails have sapped American public support for foreign engagements. Questions about U.S. staying power only embolden Russia (and other expansionist powers). It believes it can wait out the West in Ukraine, winning a victory that will mark the end of an era of U.S. preeminence. This situation is like the one the United States faced in the aftermath of World War II, when Soviet power was on the march in Europe. Just as during the Cold War, the United States can neither risk a direct conflict with a nuclear-armed Kremlin nor simply allow its aggression to go unchecked. Between these extremes, containment offers a middle path. Russia has transitioned to a war economy sustained by vast energy resources, particularly oil. A strategy of containment should prioritize defending Russia’s threatened neighbors, especially those that do not have a clear and immediate path to NATO membership. Apart from Ukraine, Russia’s most vulnerable neighbors include Armenia, Georgia, and Moldova—all of which remain outside the alliance. The United States should offer these countries training and weapons. It should also bolster these states’ resilience against Russian gray-zone threats, ranging from cyberattacks to election meddling. It should share intelligence with them and invest in critical infrastructure, such as power grids and data storage. The war in Ukraine has severed Russia from the West to a significant degree, but there remain critical linkages that serve the Kremlin’s aims. Although sanctions have imposed real costs on the Russian economy, Moscow has adapted, transitioning to a war economy sustained by vast energy resources, particularly oil. The United States has been reluctant to impose sanctions on Russia’s oil sector for fear of exacerbating inflation at home. But Russia’s dependence on oil is a vulnerability on which the United States should capitalize. Western policymakers should take more proactive measures to push down the price of Russian oil, following in the footsteps of Ronald Reagan’s early 1980s policy, which contributed to the economic crises the Soviet Union experienced in the 1980s. Any U.S. strategy toward Russia must recognize the peril of direct military confrontation. Washington must remain open to negotiating with Russia on arms control, cyberwarfare, and regional conflicts between each side’s allies. Without predicating these talks on large-scale political change in Russia, Washington must plainly demonstrate that the United States does not seek war with Russia and must even cooperate with Moscow on issues such as climate change and space exploration. Implementing a modern containment strategy will require bipartisan buy-in and a commitment to maintaining sufficient defense spending. In today’s polarized political and media environment, securing the kind of bipartisan consensus that sustained containment for much of the Cold War will demand political effort and creativity. Kennan acknowledged that Washington had to commit to containment for as long as necessary—until Soviet power had “mellowed” and no longer threatened global stability. Containing Russia today will require a similar commitment of time and resources. It will be another twilight struggle, though it will unfold in a world vastly different from that of the late 1940s. MAX BERGMANN is Director of the Europe, Russia, and Eurasia Program and the Stuart Center in Euro-Atlantic and Northern European Studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. MICHAEL KIMMAGE is Professor of History at the Catholic University of America and a Nonresident Senior Associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. He is the author of the forthcoming book Collisions: The Origins of the War in Ukraine and the New Global Instability. JEFFREY MANKOFF is a Distinguished Research Fellow at National Defense University’s Institute for National Strategic Studies and a Nonresident Senior Associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. He is the author of Empires of Eurasia: How Imperial Legacies Shape International Security. The views expressed here are his own. MARIA SNEGOVAYA is a Senior Fellow with the Europe, Russia, and Eurasia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a Postdoctoral Fellow with Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service. She is the author of When Left Moves Right: The Decline of the Left and the Rise of the Populist Right in Postcommunist Europe. MORE BY MAX BERGMANN MORE BY MICHAEL KIMMAGE MORE BY JEFFREY MANKOFF MORE BY MARIA SNEGOVAYA More: Russian Federation Geopolitics NATO Security Strategy & Conflict War & Military Strategy U.S. Foreign Policy Cold War War in Ukraine Most-Read Articles The Myth of Israel’s “Moral Army” The Failure of the IDF’s Targeting Protocols Is Producing Massive Civilian Casualties Avner Gvaryahu Germany’s Economic Reckoning The EU Needs Berlin to Get Its House in Order Sudha David-Wilp and Jacob Kirkegaard India’s Feet of Clay How Modi’s Supremacy Will Hinder His Country’s Rise Ramachandra Guha Israel Must Decide Where It’s Going—and Who Should Lead It There The Case for Early Elections Ehud Barak Recommended Articles A Ukrainian soldier near Robotyne, Ukraine, February 2024 A War Putin Still Can’t Win To Thwart Russia, America Needs a Long-Term Strategy—and Ukraine Needs Long-Range Weapons Lawrence D. Freedman A Ukrainian soldier covering his ear amid artillery fire in the Donetsk region, Ukraine, December 2023 The Ukraine-Taiwan Tradeoff U.S. Support for Ukraine Diverts Weapons From Taiwan but Demonstrates Resolve to China Michael Poznansky The Power Vacuum in the Middle East A Region Where No One’s in Charge By Gregg Carlstrom March 6, 2024 Gaza, March 2024 Wars can clarify, and wars can confuse. The conventional wisdom about the Six-Day War in 1967 holds that Israel swiftly crushed the wave of Arab nationalism that was sweeping the Middle East and toppling monarchs. According to the tale of the 2006 war in Lebanon, Hezbollah fought Israel to a draw and shattered the image of a seemingly invincible military at a time when Arab armies had long since abandoned the fight against Israel. Arab-Israeli conflicts have often seemed to be clarifying events. Days of war sweep away ideas that had prevailed for decades. Yet the stories that emerge from these wars can verge on their own sort of mythmaking. The story of 1967, while not entirely untrue, is too pat. Regimes such as Gamal Abdel Nasser’s in Egypt were always motivated more by narrow self-interest than lofty notions of pan-Arabism, merely deploying the latter when it served the former. Such leaders burdened their states with political and economic problems that persist to this day. The catastrophe they suffered in 1967 might have hastened their demise, but they would have crumbled under their own contradictions anyway. The same goes for the 2006 war against Hezbollah. It was not Israel’s first military defeat; witness its long occupation of south Lebanon, which ended just six years earlier with a humiliating unilateral withdrawal and the prompt collapse of Israel’s proxy force, the South Lebanon Army. Israel had only seemed invincible because its most serious foes had given up. But war was changing, at least in the Middle East, as battles between armies gave way to campaigns of attrition against nonstate actors. Israel, like the United States, was struggling to repurpose conventional tactics to meet an unconventional threat. It is too early to draw a full list of conclusions from the latest Arab-Israeli war. But five months of fighting between Israel and Hamas have already debunked some big myths: that the Palestinian cause was dead, that an emerging Israeli-Gulf alliance would provide a counterweight against Iran, that a region exhausted by conflict was going to focus on de-escalation and economic growth, and that a truly post-American Middle East had emerged. I CAN SEE CLEARLY NOW Until October 7, Israel’s longtime divide-and-rule strategy toward the Palestinians seemed successful. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did everything he could to undermine the Palestinian Authority (PA), even as he made deals with Hamas and facilitated the transfer of billions of dollars to its government in the Gaza Strip; then he claimed that Israel had no negotiating partner on the Palestinian side because Hamas was the stronger party. There might be an occasional weeklong round of fighting in Gaza or a spurt of lone wolf attacks in Jerusalem and the West Bank, but the conventional wisdom was that the Palestinians were too downtrodden and fractured to muster anything more. The world had lost interest in their cause. The United States no longer wanted to play mediator. China and India had other priorities. Even some Arab states were more interested in doing deals with Israeli high-tech firms than pushing for a Palestinian state. There was no pressure on Israel to end its occupation, which seemed like it could be managed indefinitely at little cost. This was Netanyahu’s view, but it was shared by many others. Israelis of all stripes thought they could avoid the Palestinian issue. A decade ago, when Isaac Herzog (now Israel’s president) was Netanyahu’s main center-left challenger for prime minister, he spent more time talking about solar energy than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Polls showed that a plurality of Israeli Jews preferred to maintain the status quo rather than pursue a two-state solution. Netanyahu’s view was, of course, spectacularly wrong. It was surprising to many that the trigger for renewed conflict came from Gaza, which had seemed relatively quiet, and not the West Bank, which was (and still is) a tinderbox. Israel thought Hamas had lost interest in large-scale conflict: a year earlier, when Islamic Jihad, a militant Palestinian group, fired hundreds of rockets across the border, Hamas sat on the sidelines. Instead, it seemed focused on shoring up its rule in Gaza. And it was surprising—perhaps even to Hamas itself—that the terrorists who attacked Israel on October 7 were able to cause so much carnage. But no one should have been shocked that the region’s longest unresolved conflict would eventually roar back to life. Israelis of all stripes thought they could avoid the Palestinian issue. When it did, it exposed other fallacies. The quiet ties that emerged between Israel and Gulf states in the decade after 2010 were based on a mutual fear of Iran. A sense of shared interest led to the Abraham Accords of 2020, through which Israel established formal ties with Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and to talk of normalization with Saudi Arabia. Desperate to escape the Middle East, Washington saw this as an opportunity: there would be less need for U.S. troops to contain Iran and its proxies if Israel and Gulf states could do the job themselves. Today, however, Israel and a U.S.-led coalition are fighting Iranian proxies in five places—Gaza, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen—and the Gulf states are nowhere to be found. They have instead doubled down on détente with Iran. The hope for an emerging regional security alliance overlooked a key fact about the Gulf states: they are soft targets. They rely on oil exports to fill their coffers, imports to feed their populations, and vulnerable infrastructure, such as desalination plants, to survive in an inhospitable region. In 2019, Iranian missiles and drones hit oil facilities in Saudi Arabia, temporarily disrupting half of the kingdom’s oil output. The attack drove home just how vulnerable the Gulf states are. Despite the billions of dollars they spend on weapons—Saudi Arabia and Qatar are among the world’s five biggest arms importers—their armies are not very capable, having little battlefield experience. Arguably the one exception is the UAE, whose army performed relatively well fighting in southern Yemen. Yet the Western officials who admiringly call this country “little Sparta” misunderstand it. The UAE is not a battle-hardened warrior society; it is an entrepôt that thrives on its reputation as an oasis of stability. It might have the most adept Arab military—a low bar to clear—but its government is loath to use that army in a conflict that might bring missiles raining down on Dubai’s five-star resorts. Officials in the Gulf made their own miscalculations. Until October 7, it was common to hear them talk of a multipolar Middle East. The United States was distracted by the war in Ukraine, competition with China, and messy domestic politics. It was a frustrating partner prone to erratic swings in policy. Russia, on the other hand, had proved itself a reliable and effective ally by saving the hide of Syria’s dictator, Bashar al-Assad, in 2015 when it intervened on behalf of the government in the Syrian civil war. China was not yet a military power in the Middle East, but it was a seemingly bottomless source of investment and, increasingly, weapons and technology. The United States was no longer so indispensable. Russia’s intervention in Syria was the high-water mark of its regional influence. Yet amid the region’s worst crisis in decades, Russia and China are all but invisible. They have used the conflict to highlight perceived Western hypocrisy, a charge that has found a receptive audience in the Middle East. But no one has looked to Moscow or Beijing to conduct diplomacy, supply aid, or shore up regional security. Even where their self-interest is affected, they cannot (or will not) play a significant role. China ought to care that the Houthis have attacked shipping in the Red Sea since November, which jeopardizes trade with Europe. But it has not sent warships to the region. Although China is Iran’s largest trading partner, Beijing has not used its influence to persuade the regime in Tehran to rein in the Houthis but instead has merely pleaded for them to allow Chinese ships to transit the Red Sea unmolested. Again, this should have been apparent before October 7. In hindsight, Russia’s intervention in Syria was the high-water mark of its regional influence. Three years later, it tried to help Khalifa Haftar, a Libyan warlord, seize Tripoli, only to see his offensive snuffed out by Turkish drones. Invading Ukraine further sapped Russia’s clout. It has fewer arms to sell to Arab autocrats and less money to invest in the region. Distracted in Europe, Moscow pays less attention to even its closest allies in the Middle East. “They’re losing Syria to Iran,” an Israeli official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk with reporters, told me in January. China’s only notable diplomatic achievement in the region was to nudge last year’s Saudi-Iranian rapprochement across the finish line, but most of the hard work was done elsewhere. That rapprochement was supposed to signal a new era of regional calm. Civil wars in Libya, Syria, and Yemen had ground into stalemates. The autocrats who survived the Arab Spring, or emerged from it, knew they had to focus on pocketbook issues, lest their restive populations rise up again. Many analysts thought that after decades of turmoil, everyone would set aside their differences and try to build and integrate their economies. U.S. officials bought into this hopeful vision, and Gulf monarchs promoted it. So much for that. Even before October 7, the new era of regional comity had proved itself short-lived: Sudan plunged into a gruesome civil war just weeks after the Saudi-Iranian deal. A region littered with failed and failing states and unresolved conflicts turned out to be barren soil for growing something new. NO SHERIFF IN TOWN Myths can be revealing, even if they are wrong. Some Gulf officials talked up the multipolar world because they were genuinely exasperated with the United States; others did so because they hoped it would convince the United States to stay in the Middle East. Washington put its hopes in a new security architecture because it wanted to leave. Israelis believed in an endless, low-cost occupation because the region’s biggest powers signaled it would be acceptable. The Middle East is changing, in other words, even if policymakers erred in their assessment of those changes. The United States’ influence is undeniably on the wane, but China and Russia are not yet Middle Eastern powers. Washington cannot persuade Israel to endorse a two-state solution or the return of the PA to Gaza. It is strong enough to dispatch two aircraft carrier groups to the eastern Mediterranean and fly B-1 bombers halfway around the globe to strike the Houthis and Iraqi militias, but not strong enough to deter those militias from attacking commercial shipping or U.S. troops. The United States did help to head off war between Israel and Hezbollah in the days after October 7, and its strikes on the Houthis may have temporarily degraded their stockpile of antiship missiles. Beyond that, however, the United States has little to show for its diplomatic and military efforts over the past five months. Even when it is a more active power in the region, it is a feckless one, playing whack-a-mole with Iranian proxies and pleading with a recalcitrant Israeli government. China and Russia are not yet Middle Eastern powers. If the United States was wrong to fantasize about an anti-Iranian coalition, Iran’s own alliance is showing strain. In interviews over the past four months, perhaps the only thing American, Arab, European, Iranian, and Israeli officials agreed on is that Hamas struck Israel without consulting its sponsors in Tehran. The regime has since refused to unleash its most powerful proxy, Hezbollah—which is under pressure in Lebanon, including from its own Shiite constituency—not to drag the country into war with Israel. Iran is also nervous about the actions of its proxies in Iraq and Yemen. That “axis of resistance” was meant to keep conflicts away from Iran’s borders: now, however, to use that axis is to risk bringing them home. Even though Gulf states are not siding with Israel against Iran, they are not lining up against Israel either. The UAE has maintained its diplomatic and commercial ties with Israel, to the point of keeping regular flights to Tel Aviv from Dubai and Abu Dhabi—even in the early days of the war, when the planes were nearly empty. (“Business as usual,” one Israeli businessman put it to me in January.) When I spoke off the record with an Emirati official, his talking points could have come from a hawkish Israeli. Bahrain has seen anti-Israeli protests, and its toothless parliament passed a symbolic resolution about severing ties with Israel, but its regime has ignored all that. The Saudis are still in a hurry to do their own normalization deal with Israel before the November election. The Palestinian cause is back on the agenda, at a cost of tens of thousands of dead, but it hardly seems to have advanced. The region finds itself in an interregnum. Forget talk of unipolarity or multipolarity: the Middle East is nonpolar. No one is in charge. The United States is an uninterested, ineffective hegemon, and its great-power rivals even more so. Fragile Gulf states cannot fill the void; Israel cannot, either; and Iran can only play spoiler and troublemaker. Everyone else is a spectator beset by economic problems and crises of legitimacy. That was the reality even before October 7. The war has merely swept away illusions. GREGG CARLSTROM is a Middle East Correspondent for The Economist. MORE BY GREGG CARLSTROM The Myth of Israel’s “Moral Army” The Failure of the IDF’s Targeting Protocols Is Producing Massive Civilian Casualties Avner Gvaryahu Germany’s Economic Reckoning The EU Needs Berlin to Get Its House in Order Sudha David-Wilp and Jacob Kirkegaard More: Middle East Geopolitics Foreign Policy Politics & Society Security Defense & Military War & Military Strategy Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Israel-Hamas War Most-Read Articles The Myth of Israel’s “Moral Army” The Failure of the IDF’s Targeting Protocols Is Producing Massive Civilian Casualties Avner Gvaryahu Germany’s Economic Reckoning The EU Needs Berlin to Get Its House in Order Sudha David-Wilp and Jacob Kirkegaard India’s Feet of Clay How Modi’s Supremacy Will Hinder His Country’s Rise Ramachandra Guha Israel Must Decide Where It’s Going—and Who Should Lead It There The Case for Early Elections Ehud Barak Recommended Articles Palestinian children waiting for food in Rafah, Gaza Strip, February 2024 The Looming Famine in Gaza And How to Stop It Hardin Lang and Jeremy Konyndyk Devastation caused by Israeli strikes in Jabalia refugee camp, Gaza, February 2024 The Myth of Israel’s “Moral Army” The Failure of the IDF’s Targeting Protocols Is Producing Massive Civilian Casualties Avner Gvaryahu How to Pave the Way for Diplomacy to End the War in Ukraine No Negotiations Yet—but It’s Time to Talk About Talking By Samuel Charap and Jeremy Shapiro March 5, 2024 Ukrainian flags fly over Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine, February 2024 Ukraine and its Western backers have precious little common ground with Russia. Yet all the key players seem to agree on one critical issue: the war in Ukraine will end in negotiations. As Russian President Vladimir Putin told the conservative broadcaster Tucker Carlson in a recent interview: “We are willing to negotiate.” A spokesman for the U.S. National Security Council, while casting doubt on Putin’s sincerity, retorted in a statement that “both we and President Zelensky have said numerous times that we believe this war will end through negotiations.” The absence of decisive battlefield outcomes over the past two years has made the alternative to a negotiated end (one side’s absolute victory) seem like a fantasy. Despite the absence of a viable alternative to eventual talks, there is no sign that the belligerents will start negotiations any time soon. Both sides believe that reaching an acceptable deal is currently impossible; each fears that the other won’t compromise or will use any pause to rest and refit for the next round of fighting. Even if a deal is currently out of the question, all parties should take steps now to bring about the possibility of talks in the future. In the middle of a war, it is hard to know whether an adversary is genuinely ready to end the fighting or cynically talks of peace only to further the aims of war. The challenge of discerning an adversary’s intentions is nearly impossible in the absence of dialogue. Therefore, it is necessary to open channels of communication so as to be in a position to take advantage of the opportunity to pursue peace when that opportunity comes. It is time to begin to build those channels. For Ukraine and its Western partners, that means “talking about talking,” or making conflict diplomacy a key subject of bilateral and multilateral interactions. And all parties should signal their openness to eventual negotiations. This will require the warring parties and their allies to take unilateral steps that convey their intentions to the other side. Such signals might include changes in rhetoric, the appointment of special envoys for negotiations, self-imposed limitations on deep strikes, and prisoner-of-war swaps. If neither side begins this process, the warring parties will likely remain stuck where they are today—fiercely battling over inches of territory, at a terrible cost to human life and regional stability, for years to come. AN UNTESTED PROPOSITION Mutual mistrust makes it hard to take the first step toward the negotiating table. The West sees Moscow as a font of propaganda and lies, so addicted to untruths that it lies even to itself. Nothing illustrates this phenomenon better than the official rhetoric in the run-up to the all-out invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, which numerous Russian representatives publicly and privately swore, and seemingly believed, would not happen. Moscow similarly sees the last 30 years as a series of broken Western promises. The prime example is the seemingly inexorable march of NATO enlargement, which numerous Western officials in the 1990s said, and seemingly believed, would not happen. Ukraine and Russia had a long history of mutual accusations of broken promises even before Moscow annexed Crimea and invaded the Donbas in 2014. After February 2022, trust became impossible. Yet mutual mistrust between belligerents is a feature of every war, and thus of every negotiation that ended those wars. If trust were a prerequisite for communicating, belligerents would never start talking. The parties can and should begin talking despite their mutual mistrust. But in this case, mistrust is compounded by pervasive assumptions of maximalist intentions. Kyiv believes that Moscow is still seeking to install a puppet government in Ukraine and will use any respite in the fighting to gather strength before opportunistically resuming the battle. Russia, as Putin recently noted, sees the West as intent on using Ukraine as an instrument to ensure Russia’s “strategic defeat.” If an adversary’s objectives are truly maximalist, one faces a simple choice between capitulation and continuing to fight. As a result, both sides appear resigned to the inevitability of a long, hugely destructive war that both claim not to want. It is possible that each side is right about the other’s maximalist goals. But neither side can know for sure without talking. In the absence of a channel of communication, any proposition about the other side’s true intentions is an untested one. Not testing this proposition comes at a very high cost. The war of attrition is killing enormous numbers of soldiers and civilians and grinding up military and financial resources. U.S. officials estimated in August 2023 that almost 500,000 Ukrainian and Russian troops have been killed or wounded since February 2022. The war is also disrupting international security in ways that serve no one. FIRST STEPS For Kyiv’s allies, the opening gambit is to begin talking about talking among themselves. Some will need convincing; others are already convinced and simply need a sign that diplomacy is no longer taboo. U.S. officials have repeatedly said they expect the war to end in a negotiated settlement. But they have not communicated to the other allies what that means in practice or explicitly oriented the strategy for ending the war around a negotiated outcome. Eventually, the discussion of conflict diplomacy needs to begin in North Atlantic Council and G-7 meetings, as well as bilateral engagements between allies at the highest levels. Talking about talking does not entail any changes in policy in the short term. Time and effort need to be spent on developing a diplomatic strategy long before negotiations actually start. In parallel to the intra-alliance discussion, the issue needs to be brought to the table in engagements between allies and Ukraine. Kyiv justifiably worries that a move toward negotiations will mean an end to military assistance. As they begin to talk with Kyiv about talking, allies should therefore keep up or even increase security assistance. The United States and its allies can start by soliciting Ukraine’s views on the subjects of communicating with the other side during the fighting and the nature of the war’s endgame. Right now, these issues are not on the agenda. Once Ukrainian officials begin to hear the same questions being asked by multiple interlocutors at multiple levels, they will engage in internal discussions to identify their preferences and approach to conflict diplomacy. Weaving the subject of talks into discussions concerning long-term military and financial assistance would also underscore an important reality: no amount of aid can ensure Ukraine’s security and prosperity without an end to the war. SIGNAL ACHIEVEMENT It is too early to begin real talks with Moscow. And Kyiv would have to be in the lead when they begin. But even today, the West can use signals to convey its intent to enable an eventual negotiated end to the war. Signals are unilateral actions, such as military deployments, public statements, sanctions, or diplomatic gestures, to convey a state’s intentions. Such signals are particularly useful when formal communication channels are closed, since they require no direct interaction with the other side in order to execute. Notably, these actions are reversible; the point is to credibly demonstrate intent and provide space for the other side to reciprocate. When signals work, they can reduce the uncertainty about the other side’s true intentions. Adjusting Western officials’ rhetorical emphasis in public statements would be a modest but important signal. For example, officials could restate their openness to conditional sanctions relief as part of a negotiated outcome to the war. But talk is cheap, and Moscow will likely not believe it. Therefore, the United States and the European Union should also consider appointing special representatives for conflict diplomacy. Even though these officials would spend months engaging with allies and Kyiv before talks with Moscow are even considered, the appointments themselves would signal to Russia that the United States and Europe are prepared to engage in eventual negotiations. Kyiv and Moscow have more opportunities for signaling, because they are the belligerents. Moscow, especially, needs to find ways to signal; Russia should indicate that its war aims are limited, that it is prepared to negotiate an end to the war, and that it will abide by the terms of a settlement. In addition to appointing a diplomatic point person to serve as a counterpart to the new U.S. and EU representatives, Moscow could suspend strikes on Ukrainian cities, indicate a willingness to enact an all-for-all prisoner-of-war swap, and cease its inflammatory rhetoric about the Ukrainian leadership. Kyiv, in turn, could soften the September 2022 presidential decree that established “the impossibility of conducting negotiations with the President of the Russian Federation, V. Putin.” Kyiv could clarify that the decree applies only to the Russian president and not to other representatives of the Russian government. And if Moscow stopped striking nonmilitary targets in Ukraine, Kyiv could reciprocate by ceasing strikes it has been conducting in Russia. These proposed efforts—talking about talking among allies and with Kyiv, and signaling to Moscow—would not represent a change in policy. They do not even represent a move to start negotiations. Rather, they would merely begin what is likely to be a long process of moving toward eventual talks. Getting to the table will not be easy, but the alternative is an endless, grinding war that no side claims to want and both sides lose by continuing to fight. SAMUEL CHARAP is a Senior Political Scientist at the RAND Corporation. JEREMY SHAPIRO is the Research Director of the European Council on Foreign Relations. MORE BY SAMUEL CHARAP MORE BY JEREMY SHAPIRO In Pakistan, the Military Is Still Running the Show Last Month’s Election Results Were a Surprise—but Not a Shock to the System By Sarah Khan March 5, 2024 People walking past a banner of Pakistan’s former Prime Minister Imran Khan in Lahore, Pakistan, February 2024 Pakistani voters want change. On February 8, they delivered a surprising rebuke to the powers that be in national elections. Independent candidates aligned with the imprisoned former Prime Minister Imran Khan and his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party (PTI) won a plurality of parliamentary seats, dealing a blow to the incumbent Pakistan Muslim League (PML-N) and its allies, as well as to the military, which supported the PML-N in the runup to the voting. Since then, the PML-N and the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) have come together to form a coalition government, with Shahbaz Sharif of the PML-N elected to serve a second term as prime minister on March 3. Whatever government emerges, observers saw last month’s election result as a verdict that went beyond the jockeying of rival political parties: in huge numbers, they claimed, Pakistanis were rejecting the implicit arrangement that allows the military to be the country’s de facto rulers. They did so with the odds stacked against them. As happens in many election cycles, the military worked to ensure that the vote was not an entirely fair one. It undermined the PTI’s chances through legal actions against its leadership, arrests of its workers and supporters, and restrictions on media coverage. In a decision upheld by the country’s Supreme Court, the Election Commission of Pakistan also announced that the PTI would no longer be able to use its electoral symbol. Election symbols enable voters to identify the candidates’ party affiliations on paper ballots. Forcing PTI-aligned candidates to run without their symbol weakens support for them and deprives the party of reserved seats for women and minorities that are allocated in proportion to the seats that parties win in the general election. Moreover, cellphone and mobile Internet services were shut down—ostensibly for security reasons—on polling day, depriving voters of information and the ability to coordinate. Despite these conditions, the PTI-aligned candidates won 101 of the 336 seats in the National Assembly, Parliament’s lower house, far more than anybody expected and certainly far more than the ruling establishment wanted them to win. Yet it would be risky to read too much into this seeming democratic success. All of Pakistan’s major political parties, including the PTI, keep an implicit bargain with the military whereby they tolerate, and indeed rely on, its interference in politics so they can take power and survive in office. This undergirds the country’s hybrid regime, in which political parties may genuinely compete but the winner ultimately serves as a junior partner to the military. Until the parties recognize that their interests are no longer served by embracing Pakistan’s military, even momentous elections like February’s vote will fail to deliver real change. TROUBLE AT THE POLLS Even a month after the election, the results remain contested. The PTI, citing rigged counts in several constituencies, is pursuing legal challenges and mounting popular protests. The party’s complaints seem credible: the independent Free and Fair Elections Network reported that its representatives were prevented from observing the compilation of results in several constituencies. The PML-N, which is now back in favor with the military, was once sensitive to questions of electoral interference. Indeed, in 2018 it ran on the slogan “Vote ko Izzat Do” (“Respect the Vote”). But this time around, it has been the beneficiary of the alleged interference in vote counts in several constituencies across the country. The scale of the vote for the PTI is being heralded by some analysts as an antiestablishment protest. Yet the PTI came to power with military backing. Many of the tactics deployed against the party in the lead-up to the 2024 election—including politically motivated legal cases against its leaders, arrests of its workers, and inducements to candidates to switch sides—were deployed in its favor against the PML-N before elections in 2018. Moreover, while in office, the PTI-led government supported the kind of actions against dissidents and opponents that are now being used against it. This included an amendment to the Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act in February 2022 that criminalized defamation of authorities, including the military and judiciary. The amendment was later struck down as unconstitutional by the Islamabad High Court. The military was in fact essential to Khan’s coming to national power in 2018. In response to the alleged rigging of that year’s elections, opposition parties including the PML-N and the PPP banded together under the banner of the Pakistan Democratic Movement in 2020 when a worsening economic crisis created an opening. The parties released a 26-point resolution and expressed “extreme concern” over the establishment’s role in distorting domestic politics. By 2022, however, Khan had lost the confidence of the generals, who supported his ouster in a vote of no confidence led by members of the PDM in parliament. The PDM’s president at the time, Maulana Fazal ur Rehman, confirmed last month that Khan’s ouster was engineered with guidance and support from the military, including General Qamar Javed Bajwa, who was then the army chief of staff. Rehman claimed that Bajwa and the former director general of Pakistan’s intelligence services, Lieutenant General Faiz Hameed, were in direct contact with the PDM about the vote of no confidence. Rehman has since partly retracted these remarks, but the PDM government has certainly reversed its earlier stance on the military. Since coming to power in April 2022, the government has passed bills amending the Army Act and Official Secrets Act in ways that broaden the military’s powers. POWER OVER PRINCIPLE Every major political party in Pakistan is willing to shift its position on the military if it helps it win office. This is a problem. When a democracy functions as it should, parties are accountable to voters and have an incentive to respond to their concerns. That is the way to win power. When the military controls the pathways to political power, however, as it does in Pakistan, democratic commitments matter less, and the parties’ connection with voters grows weaker. This means that Pakistani parties often behave in ways contrary to common-sense electoral imperatives. For example, parties do not invest in their internal organizations and regularly fail to introduce the policies that voters want. That is why Pakistani parties are weak by international standards. In the recent election, the PML-N did little to mobilize its own base. The national voter turnout in February was 48 percent, down from 51 percent in 2018. Notably, constituencies in the Central Punjab region—the PML-N’s traditional stronghold—registered the lowest turnout, 49 percent, within the province. Turnout in North, South and West Punjab was 52, 53 and 54 percent, respectively. This is unsurprising given the relatively lackluster campaign run by the PML-N. The PTI’s success in this election is certainly a reflection of Khan’s enduring popularity, the commitment of the party’s workers and supporters, and the party’s creative use of social media and digital technology to circumvent repressive restrictions on traditional modes of campaigning in the months leading up to the election. But at least in Punjab, it is just as much a story of the complacency of the PML-N. Another failure common to all the mainstream parties is an underinvestment in mobilizing female voters. Pakistan has one of the largest gender gaps in voter turnout among democracies worldwide. This is due not only to the reality that politics remains an overwhelmingly male-dominated enterprise but also to societal constraints on women’s autonomy and mobility. Between 2018 and 2024, over 11 million women were added to the electoral rolls, narrowing the gender gap in voter registration. A party thinking strategically would try to reach out to newly registered women and secure their votes. Yet no mainstream party highlighted women’s issues in this year’s campaign or undertook targeted drives to get women to the polls. In a country with high levels of gender inequality, policies aimed at closing this gap could go a long way. As a female voter told me in a focus group in Lahore in 2018, “No one talks to women when it comes to asking for votes—all the persuading and luring tactics are used on men.” This has not changed, as the static gender gap in voter turnout in 2024 shows. Indeed, in several constituencies, the gender gap in turnout far exceeded the margin of victory. Choosing not to pursue potential voters—whether in core constituencies or undermobilized social groups—only makes sense in a system where the ballot box is not the primary pathway to power. The route to national power in Pakistan goes through the most populous province, Punjab, which has the lion’s share of seats in parliament. The PTI, unusually, began as a grassroots-based party in the northwestern province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Without strong local networks in Punjab, the party ceased trying to build its organization in the lead-up to the 2013 elections, instead choosing to woo voters with military support and rely heavily on independent candidates who agreed to align themselves with the party. That strategy paid off with the PTI’s win in 2018. But the independent candidates it mobilized—many of whom were former ministers from other parties—starkly contradicted the party’s message of “change.” Although the party has since fallen out of military favor, the slate of PTI-affiliated candidates who emerged victorious last month still includes many of these luminaries, whom it would be absurd to classify as “antiestablishment.” GREEN SHOOTS OF HOPE Pakistani politics are stuck. No mainstream party can credibly claim to stand against the role of the military in politics, and many are convinced that doing so would be inimical to their political survival. Yet there are signs that this situation could be changing. The PML-N’s poor showing in 2024 shows that a complacent reliance on the military as kingmaker cannot guarantee a popular mandate. Although parties can neglect voter preferences under Pakistan’s hybrid regime, they ignore them at their own peril. The military is still strong: it enjoys high levels of public trust and consistently better approval ratings than any other institution—including the judiciary, media, or government—in opinion polls. Widespread public dissatisfaction with the military has not been seen since the fateful elections of 1970, in which voters signaled their rejection of the military with a historically high turnout of 63 percent in Pakistan’s first direct elections since independence. The ensuing 1971 war, which culminated in military defeat for then West Pakistan, and the independence of Bangladesh, was followed by concerted, and largely successful, efforts to restore military strength and public image, including through increased defense spending. It is too early to say whether the vote supporting the PTI over the military-backed option in this year’s election reflects a sea change in public opinion toward the army or a resolve to start punishing parties for serving the military’s imperatives. But analysts in foreign and local media outlets alike have highlighted anti-army protests that followed Khan’s arrest on corruption charges last year, as well as the 2024 vote, as evidence of exactly such a shift. Those developments may also signal a change of sentiment in Punjab, which is traditionally pro-military. Thus far, however, the PTI and its supporters remain wholly disconnected from the long-standing struggles and dissent against military excesses in Pakistan’s peripheries. The 2024 elections unfolded against a backdrop of mass protests over forced disappearances in Baluchistan Province, with convoys of demonstrators eventually reaching Islamabad. These forcible abductions and detentions, which violate international law, have systematically been used as a counterinsurgency tool by Pakistan’s security forces since the 1980s. Yet none of the parties vying for national office acknowledged the protesters or took ownership of the issue. As the human rights activist Mahrang Baloch wrote in February, “Not a single mainstream political party in this country has included the issue of missing persons in its political manifesto, because none of them want to offend the powerful army.” AN UNLIKELY COALITION All major political parties have lamented the military’s involvement in electoral politics at some point, only to benefit from it at another. None have taken seriously the grievances of those on the peripheries who have mobilized against the military’s excesses. Indeed, when in power themselves, parties tend to become complicit in repressing dissenting voices and all too eager to support security-based solutions that rely on the military and further entrench its role. The PTI is currently seeking legal recourse and mobilizing popular protests against electoral rigging in constituencies in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Punjab, and Sindh. The party leadership claims that it actually won more than 170 seats, enough to independently form a government, and vows to continue efforts to claim its rightful share. Meanwhile, parallel protests are being waged by Baluch and Pashtun ethnonationalist parties that also claim to have lost their rightful share of seats to vote rigging, although they receive far less media coverage. And tensions are high in Baluchistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, where electoral protests have been violently repressed. For example, the Pashtun nationalist leader Mohsin Dawar and fellow demonstrators were shot and wounded on February 10 in North Waziristan as they peacefully protested a delay in the release of local election results. If the PTI is truly willing to take a stand against the military, there is a real opening for building alliances with ethnonationalist parties and popular movements that have long been engaged in that struggle. This is the kind of coalition needed to put democratically elected politicians in a position of strength vis-à-vis the military. A party that sees beyond the civilian-military power struggle at the center and capitalizes on the potential in popular movements on the periphery could shift the balance of power in Pakistani politics. Though there is little in any mainstream party’s track record to suggest that this is a real possibility, it is the only possibility for those who still believe in the potential of democratic politics. The Urdu phrase “Umeed par dunya qaa’im hai” (“The world rests on hope”) may sound trite in translation, but delivery is everything. When uttered with a wry laugh between Pakistanis, it is at once an indictment of the current situation, an inside joke, and a survival strategy. SARAH KHAN is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Yale University. 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Surveys suggest that the incumbent, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, is very likely to win a third term in office. That triumph will further underline Modi’s singular stature. He bestrides the country like a colossus, and he promises Indians that they, too, are rising in the world. And yet the very nature of Modi’s authority, the aggressive control sought by the prime minister and his party over a staggeringly diverse and complicated country, threatens to scupper India’s great-power ambitions. A leader of enormous charisma from a modest background, Modi dominates the Indian political landscape as only two of his 15 predecessors have done: Jawaharlal Nehru, prime minister from Indian independence in 1947 until 1964, and Nehru’s daughter, Indira Gandhi, prime minister from 1966 to 1977 and then again from 1980 to 1984. In their pomp, both enjoyed wide popularity throughout India, cutting across barriers of class, gender, religion, and region, although—as so often with leaders who stay on too long—their last years in office were marked by political misjudgments that eroded their standing. Nehru and Indira Gandhi both belonged to the Indian National Congress, the party that led the country’s struggle for freedom from British colonial rule and stayed in power for three decades following independence. Modi, on the other hand, is a member of the Bharatiya Janata Party, which spent many years in opposition before becoming what it now appears to be, the natural party of governance. A major ideological difference between the Congress and the BJP is in their attitudes toward the relationship between faith and state. Particularly under Nehru, the Congress was committed to religious pluralism, in keeping with the Indian constitutional obligation to assure citizens “liberty of thought, expression, belief, faith and worship.” The BJP, on the other hand, wishes to make India a majoritarian state in which politics, public policy, and even everyday life are cast in a Hindu idiom. Modi is not the first BJP prime minister of India—that distinction belongs to Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who was in office in 1996 and from 1998 to 2004. But Modi can exercise a kind of power that was never available to Vajpayee, whose coalition government of more than a dozen parties forced him to accommodate diverse views and interests. By contrast, the BJP has enjoyed a parliamentary majority on its own for the last decade, and Modi is far more assertive than the understated Vajpayee ever was. Vajpayee delegated power to his cabinet ministers, consulted opposition leaders, and welcomed debate in Parliament. Modi, on the other hand, has centralized power in his office to an astonishing degree, undermined the independence of public institutions such as the judiciary and the media, built a cult of personality around himself, and pursued his party’s ideological goals with ruthless efficiency. Despite his dismantling of democratic institutions, Modi remains extremely popular. He is both incredibly hardworking and politically astute, able to read the pulse of the electorate and adapt his rhetoric and tactics accordingly. Left-wing intellectuals dismiss him as a mere demagogue. They are grievously mistaken. In terms of commitment and intelligence, he is far superior to his populist counterparts such as former U.S. President Donald Trump, former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, or former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Although his economic record is mixed, he has still won the trust of many poor people by supplying food and cooking gas at highly subsidized rates via schemes branded as Modi’s personal gifts to them. He has taken quickly to digital technologies, which have enabled the direct provision of welfare and the reduction of intermediary corruption. He has also presided over substantial progress in infrastructure development, with spanking new highways and airports seen as evidence of a rising India on the march under Modi’s leadership. Modi’s many supporters view his tenure as prime minister as nothing short of epochal. They claim that he has led India’s national resurgence. Under Modi, they note, India has surpassed its former ruler, the United Kingdom, to become the world’s fifth-largest economy; it will soon eclipse Japan and Germany, as well. It became the fourth country to land a spaceship on the moon. But Modi’s impact runs deeper than material achievements. His supporters proudly boast that India has rediscovered and reaffirmed its Hindu civilizational roots, leading to a successful decolonizing of the mind—a truer independence than even the freedom movement led by Mahatma Gandhi achieved. The prime minister’s speeches are peppered with claims that India is on the cusp of leading the world. In pursuit of its global ambitions, his government hosted the G-20 meeting in New Delhi last year, the event carefully choreographed to show Modi in the best possible light, standing splendidly alone at center stage as one by one, he welcomed world leaders, including U.S. President Joe Biden, and showed them to their seats. (The party was spoiled, only slightly, by the deliberate absence of the Chinese leader Xi Jinping, who may not have wanted to indulge Modi in his pageant of prestige.) Nonetheless, the future of the Indian republic looks considerably less rosy than the vision promised by Modi and his acolytes. His government has not assuaged—indeed, it has actively worked to intensify—conflicts along lines of both religion and region, which will further fray the country’s social fabric. The inability or unwillingness to check environmental abuse and degradation threatens public health and economic growth. The hollowing out of democratic institutions pushes India closer and closer to becoming a democracy only in name and an electoral autocracy in practice. Far from becoming the Vishwa Guru, or “teacher to the world”—as Modi’s boosters claim—India is altogether more likely to remain what it is today: a middling power with a vibrant entrepreneurial culture and mostly fair elections alongside malfunctioning public institutions and persisting cleavages of religion, gender, caste, and region. The façade of triumph and power that Modi has erected obscures a more fundamental truth: that a principal source of India’s survival as a democratic country, and of its recent economic success, has been its political and cultural pluralism, precisely those qualities that the prime minister and his party now seek to extinguish. PORTRAIT IN POWER Between 2004 and 2014, India was run by Congress-led coalition governments. The prime minister was the scholarly economist Manmohan Singh. By the end of his second term, Singh was 80 and unwell, so the task of running Congress’s campaign ahead of the 2014 general elections fell to the much younger Rahul Gandhi. Gandhi is the son of Sonia Gandhi, a former president of the Congress Party, and Rajiv Gandhi, who, like his mother, Indira Gandhi, and grandfather Nehru, had served as prime minister. In a brilliant political move, Modi, who had previously been chief minister of the important state of Gujarat for a decade, presented himself as an experienced, hard-working, and entirely self-made administrator, in stark contrast to Rahul Gandhi, a dynastic scion who had never held political office and whom Modi portrayed as entitled and effete. Sixty years of electoral democracy and three decades of market-led economic growth had made Indians increasingly distrustful of claims made on the basis of family lineage or privilege. It also helped that Modi was a more compelling orator than Rahul Gandhi and that the BJP made better use of the new media and digital technologies to reach remote corners of India. In the 2014 elections, the BJP won 282 seats, up from 116 five years earlier, while the Congress’s tally went down from 206 to a mere 44. The next general election, in 2019, again pitted Modi against Gandhi; the BJP won 303 seats to the Congress’s 52. With these emphatic victories, the BJP not only crushed and humiliated the Congress but also secured the legislative dominance of the party. In prior decades, Indian governments had typically been motley coalitions held together by compromise. The BJP’s healthy majority under Modi has given the prime minister broad latitude to act—and free rein to pursue his ambitions. Modi presents himself as the very embodiment of the party, the government, and the nation, as almost single-handedly fulfilling the hopes and ambitions of Indians. In the past decade, his elevation has taken many forms, including the construction of the world’s largest cricket stadium, named for Modi; the portrait of Modi on the COVID-19 vaccination certificates issued by the government of India (a practice followed by no other democracy in the world); the photo of Modi on all government schemes and welfare packages; a serving judge of the Supreme Court gushing that Modi is a “visionary” and a “genius”; and Modi’s own proclamation that he had been sent by god to emancipate India’s women. Modi’s supporters view his tenure as prime minister as epochal. In keeping with this gargantuan cult of personality, Modi has attempted, largely successfully, to make governance and administration an instrument of his personal will rather than a collaborative effort in which many institutions and individuals work together. In the Indian system, based on the British model, the prime minister is supposed to be merely first among equals. Cabinet ministers are meant to have relative autonomy in their own spheres of authority. Under Modi, however, most ministers and ministries take instructions directly from the prime minister’s office and from officials known to be personally loyal to him. Likewise, Parliament is no longer an active theater of debate, in which the views of the opposition are taken into account in forging legislation. Many bills are passed in minutes, by voice vote, with the speakers in both houses acting in an extremely partisan manner. Opposition members of Parliament have been suspended in the dozens—and in one recent case, in the hundreds—for demanding that the prime minister and home minister make statements about such important matters as bloody ethnic conflicts in India’s borderlands and security breaches in Parliament itself. Sadly, the Indian Supreme Court has done little to stem attacks on democratic freedoms. In past decades, the court had at least occasionally stood up for personal freedoms, and for the rights of the provinces, acting as a modest brake on the arbitrary exercise of state power. Since Modi took office, however, the Supreme Court has often given its tacit approval to the government’s misconduct, by, for example, failing to strike down punitive laws that clearly violate the Indian constitution. One such law is the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, under which it is almost impossible to get bail and which has been invoked to arrest and designate as “terrorists” hundreds of students and human rights activists for protesting peacefully on the streets against the majoritarian policies of the regime. The civil services and the diplomatic corps are also prone to obey the prime minister and his party, even when the demands clash with constitutional norms. So does the Election Commission, which organizes elections and frames election rules to facilitate the preferences of Modi and the BJP. Thus, elections in Jammu and Kashmir and to the municipal council of Mumbai, India’s richest city, have been delayed for years largely because the ruling party remains unsure of winning them. The Modi government has also worked systematically to narrow the spaces open for democratic dissent. Tax officials disproportionately target opposition politicians. Large sections of the press act as the mouthpiece of the ruling party for fear of losing government advertisements or facing vindictive tax raids. India currently ranks 161 out of 180 countries surveyed in the World Press Index, an analysis of levels of journalistic freedom. Free debate in India’s once vibrant public universities is discouraged; instead, the University Grants Commission has instructed vice chancellors to install “selfie points” on campuses to encourage students to take their photograph with an image of Modi. This story of the systematic weakening of India’s democratic foundations is increasingly well known outside the country, with watchdog groups bemoaning the backsliding of the world’s largest democracy. But another fundamental challenge to India has garnered less attention: the erosion of the country’s federal structure. India is a union of states whose constituent units have their own governments elected on the basis of universal adult franchise. As laid down in India’s constitution, some subjects, including defense, foreign affairs, and monetary policy, are the responsibility of the government in New Delhi. Others, including agriculture, health, and law and order, are the responsibility of the states. Still others, such as forests and education, are the joint responsibility of the central government and the states. This distribution of powers allows state governments considerable latitude in designing and implementing policies for their citizens. It explains the wide variation in policy outcomes across the country—why, for example, the southern states of Kerala and Tamil Nadu have a far better record with regard to health, education, and gender equity compared with northern states such as Uttar Pradesh. A Modi supporter in Ayodhya, India, December 2023 Anushree Fadnavis / Reuters As a large, sprawling federation of states, India resembles the United States. But India’s states are more varied in terms of culture, religion, and particularly language. In that sense, India is more akin to the European Union in the continental scale of its diversity. The Bengalis, the Kannadigas, the Keralites, the Odias, the Punjabis, and the Tamils, to name just a few peoples, all have extraordinarily rich literary and cultural histories, each distinct from one another and especially from that of the heartland states of northern India where the BJP is dominant. Coalition governments respected and nourished this heterogeneity, but under Modi, the BJP has sought to compel uniformity in three ways: through imposing the main language of the north, Hindi, in states where it is scarcely spoken and where it is seen as an unwelcome competitor to the local language; through promoting the cult of Modi as the only leader of any consequence in India; and through the legal and financial powers that being in office in New Delhi bestows on it. Since coming to power, the Modi government has assiduously undermined the autonomy of state governments run by parties other than the BJP. It has achieved this in part through the ostensibly nonpartisan office of the governor, who, in states not run by the BJP, has often acted as an agent of the ruling party in New Delhi. Laws in domains such as agriculture, nominally the realm of state governments, have been passed by the national Parliament without the consultation of the states. Since several important and populous states—including Kerala, Punjab, Tamil Nadu, Telangana, and West Bengal—are run by popularly elected parties other than the BJP, the Modi government’s undisguised hostility toward their autonomous functioning has created a great deal of bad blood. In this manner, in his decade in office, Modi has worked diligently to centralize and personalize political power. As chief minister of Gujarat, he gave his cabinet colleagues little to do, running the administration through bureaucrats loyal to him. He also worked persistently to tame civil society and the press in Gujarat. Since Modi became prime minister in 2014, this authoritarian approach to governance has been carried over to New Delhi. His authoritarianism has a precedent, however: the middle period of Indira Gandhi’s prime ministership, from 1971 to 1977, when she constructed a cult of personality and turned the party and government into an instrument of her will. But Modi’s subordination of institutions has gone even further. In his style of administration, he is Indira Gandhi on steroids. A HINDU KINGDOM For all their similarities in political style, Indira Gandhi and Modi differ markedly in terms of political ideology. Forged in the crucible of the Indian freedom struggle, inspired by the pluralistic ethos of its leader Mahatma Gandhi (who was not related to her) and of her father, Nehru, Indira Gandhi was deeply committed to the idea that India belonged equally to citizens of all faiths. For her, as for Nehru, India was not to be a Hindu version of Pakistan—a country designed to be a homeland for South Asia’s Muslims. India would not define statecraft or governance in accordance with the views of the majority religious community. India’s many minority religious groups—including Buddhists, Christians, Jains, Muslims, Parsis, and Sikhs—would all have the same status and material rights as Hindus. Modi has taken a different view. Raised as he was in the hardline milieu of the Hindu nationalist movement, he sees the cultural and civilizational character of India as defined by the demographic dominance—and long-suppressed destiny—of Hindus. The attempt to impose Hindu hegemony on India’s present and future has two complementary elements. The first is electoral, the creation of a consolidated Hindu vote bank. Hinduism does not have the singular structure of Abrahamic religions such as Christianity or Islam. It does not elevate one religious text (such as the Bible or the Koran) or one holy city (such as Rome or Mecca) to a particularly privileged status. In Hinduism, there are many gods, many holy places, and many styles of worship. But while the ritual universe of Hinduism is pluralistic, its social system is historically highly unequal, marked by hierarchically organized status groups known as castes, whose members rarely intermarry or even break bread with one another. The BJP under Modi has tried to overcome the pluralism of Hinduism by seeking to override caste and doctrinal differences between different groups of Hindus. It promises to construct a “Hindu Raj,” a state in which Hindus will reign supreme. Modi claims that before his ascendance, Hindus had suffered 1,200 years of slavery at the hands of Muslim rulers, such as the Mughal dynasty, and Christian rulers, such as the British—and that he will now restore Hindu pride and Hindu control over the land that is rightfully theirs. To aid this consolidation, Hindu nationalists have systematically demonized India’s large Muslim minority, painting Muslims as insufficiently apologetic for the crimes of the Muslim rulers of the past and as insufficiently loyal to the India of the present. Modi has worked diligently to centralize and personalize political power. Hindutva, or Hindu nationalism, is a belief system characterized by what I call “paranoid triumphalism.” It aims to make Hindus fearful so as to compel them to act together and ultimately dominate those Indians who are not Hindus. At election time, the BJP hopes to make Hindus vote as Hindus. Since Hindus constitute roughly 80 percent of the population, if 60 percent of them vote principally on the basis of their religious affiliation in India’s multiparty, first-past-the-post system, that amounts to 48 percent of the popular vote for the BJP—enough to get Modi and his party elected by a comfortable margin. Indeed, in the 2019 elections, the BJP won 56 percent of seats with 37 percent of the popular vote. So complete is the ruling party’s disregard for the political rights of India’s 200 million or so Muslims that, except when compelled to do so in the Muslim-majority region of Kashmir, it rarely picks Muslim candidates to compete in elections. And yet it can still comfortably win national contests. The BJP has 397 members in the two houses of the Indian parliament. Not one is a Muslim. Electoral victory has enabled the second element of Hindutva—the provision of an explicitly Hindu veneer to the character of the Indian state. Modi himself chose to contest the parliamentary elections from Varanasi, an ancient city with countless temples that is generally recognized as the most important center of Hindu identity. He has presented himself as a custodian of Hindu traditions, claiming that in his youth, he wandered and meditated in the forests of the Himalaya in the manner of the sages of the past. He has, for the first time, made Hindu rituals central to important secular occasions, such as the inauguration of a new Parliament building, which was conducted by him alone, flanked by a phalanx of chanting priests, but with the members of Parliament, the representatives of the people, conspicuously absent. He also presided, in similar fashion, over religious rituals in Varanasi, with the priests chanting, “Glory to the king.” In January, Modi was once again the star of the show as he opened a large temple in the city of Ayodhya on a site claimed to be the birthplace of the god Rama. Whenever television channels obediently broadcast such proceedings live across India, their cameras focus on the elegantly attired figure of Modi. The self-proclaimed Hindu monk of the past has thus become, in symbol if not in substance, the Hindu emperor of the present. THE BURDENS OF THE FUTURE The emperor benefits from having few plausible rivals. Modi’s enduring political success is in part enabled by a fractured and nepotistic opposition. In a belated bid to stall the BJP from winning a third term, as many as 28 parties have come together to fight the forthcoming general elections under a common umbrella. They have adopted the name the Indian National Development Inclusive Alliance, an unwieldy moniker that can be condensed to the crisp acronym INDIA. Some parties in this alliance are very strong in their own states. Others have a base among particular castes. But the only party in the alliance with pretensions to being a national party is the Congress. Despite his dismal political record, Rahul Gandhi remains the principal leader of the Congress. In public appearances, he is often flanked by his sister, who is the party’s general-secretary, or his mother, reinforcing his sense of entitlement. The major regional parties, with influence in states such as Bihar, Maharashtra, and Tamil Nadu, are also family firms, with leadership often passing from father to son. Although their local roots make them competitive in state elections, when it comes to a general election, the dynastic baggage they carry puts them at a distinct disadvantage against a party led by a self-made man such as Modi, who can present himself as devoted entirely and utterly to the welfare of his fellow citizens rather than as the bearer of family privilege. INDIA will struggle to unseat Modi and the BJP and may hope, at best, to dent their commanding majority in Parliament. The prime minister also faces little external pressure. In other contexts, one might expect a certain amount of critical scrutiny of Modi’s authoritarian ways from the leaders of Western democracies. But this has not happened, partly because of the ascendance of the Chinese leader Xi Jinping. Xi has mounted an aggressive challenge to Western hegemony and positioned China as a superpower deserving equal respect and an equal say in world affairs as the United States—moves that have worked entirely to Modi’s advantage. The Indian prime minister has played the U.S. establishment brilliantly, using the large and wealthy Indian diaspora to make his (and India’s) importance visible to the White House. In April 2023, India officially overtook China as the most populous country in the world. It has the fifth-largest economy. It has a large and reasonably well-equipped military. All these factors make it ever more appealing to the United States as a counterweight to China. Both the Trump and the Biden administrations have shown an extraordinary indulgence toward Modi, continuing to hail him as the leader of the “world’s largest democracy” even as that appellation becomes less credible under his rule. The attacks on minorities, the suppression of the press, and the arrest of civil rights activists have attracted scarcely a murmur of disapproval from the State Department or the White House. The recent allegations that the Indian government tried to assassinate a U.S. citizen of Sikh descent are likely to fade without any action or strong public criticism. Meanwhile, the leaders of France, Germany, and the United Kingdom, seeking a greater share of the Indian market (not least in sales of sophisticated weaponry), have all been unctuous in their flattery of Modi. In the old quarters of Delhi, January 2024 Adnan Abidi / Reuters Currently, Modi is dominant at home and immune from criticism from abroad. It is likely, however, that history and historians will judge his political and personal legacy somewhat less favorably than his currently supreme position might suggest. For one thing, he came into office in 2014 pledging to deliver a strong economy, but his economic record is at best mixed. On the positive side, the government has sped the impressive development of infrastructure and the process of formalizing the economy through digital technology. Yet economic inequalities have soared; while some business families close to the BJP have become extremely wealthy, unemployment rates are high, particularly among young Indians, and women’s labor participation rates are low. Regional disparities are large and growing, with the southern states having done far better than the northern ones in terms of both economic and social development. Notably, none of the five southern states are ruled by the BJP. The rampant environmental degradation across the country further threatens the sustainability of economic growth. Even in the absence of climate change, India would be an environmental disaster zone. Its cities have the highest rates of air pollution in the world. Many of its rivers are ecologically dead, killed by untreated industrial effluents and domestic sewage. Its underground aquifers are depleting rapidly. Much of its soil is contaminated with chemicals. Its forests are despoiled and in the process of becoming much less biodiverse, thanks to invasive nonnative weeds. This degradation has been enabled by an antiquated economic ideology that adheres to the mistaken belief that only rich countries need to behave responsibly toward nature. India, it is said, is too poor to be green. In fact, countries such as India, with their higher population densities and more fragile tropical ecologies, need to care as much, or more, about how to use natural resources wisely. But regimes led by both the Congress and the BJP have granted a free license to coal and petroleum extraction and other polluting industries. No government has so actively promoted destructive practices as Modi’s. It has eased environmental clearances for polluting industries and watered down various regulations. The environmental scholar Rohan D’ Souza has written that by 2018, “the slash and burn attitude of gutting and weakening existing environmental institutions, laws, and norms was extended to forests, coasts, wildlife, air, and even waste management.” When Modi came to power in 2014, India ranked 155 out of 178 countries assessed by the Environmental Performance Index, which estimates the sustainability of a country’s development in terms of the state of its air, water, soils, natural habitats, and so on. By 2022, India ranked last, 180 out of 180. The effects of these varied forms of environmental deterioration exact a horrific economic and social cost on hundreds of millions of people. Degradation of pastures and forests imperils the livelihoods of farmers. Unregulated mining for coal and bauxite displaces entire rural communities, making their people ecological refugees. Air pollution in cities endangers the health of children, who miss school, and of workers, whose productivity declines. Unchecked, these forms of environmental abuse will impose ever-greater burdens on Indians yet unborn. Modi has played the U.S. establishment brilliantly. These future generations of Indians will also have to bear the costs of the dismantling of democratic institutions overseen by Modi and his party. A free press, independent regulatory institutions, and an impartial and fearless judiciary are vital for political freedoms, for acting as a check on the abuse of state power, and for nurturing an atmosphere of trust among citizens. To create, or perhaps more accurately, re-create, them after Modi and the BJP finally relinquish power will be an arduous task. The strains placed on Indian federalism may boil over in 2026, when parliamentary seats are scheduled to be reallocated according to the next census, to be conducted in that year. Then, what is now merely a divergence between north and south might become an actual divide. In 2001, when a reallocation of seats based on population was proposed, the southern states argued that it would discriminate against them for following progressive health and education policies in prior decades that had reduced birth rates and enhanced women’s freedom. The BJP-led coalition government then in power recognized the merits of the south’s case and, with the consent of the opposition, proposed that the reallocation be delayed for a further 25 years. In 2026, the matter will be reopened. One proposed solution is to emulate the U.S. model, in which congressional districts reflect population size while each state has two seats in the Senate, irrespective of population. Perhaps having the Rajya Sabha, or upper house, of the Indian Parliament restructured on similar principles may help restore faith in federalism. But if Modi and the BJP are in power, they will almost certainly mandate the process of reallocation based on population in both the Lok Sabha, the lower house, and the Rajya Sabha, which will then substantially favor the more populous if economically lagging states of the north. The southern states are bound to protest. Indian federalism and unity will struggle to cope with the fallout. If the BJP achieves a third successive electoral victory in May, the creeping majoritarianism under Modi could turn into galloping majoritarianism, a trend that poses a fundamental challenge to Indian nationhood. Democratic- and pluralistic-minded Indians warn of the dangers of India becoming a country like Pakistan, defined by religious identity. A more salient cautionary tale might be Sri Lanka’s. With its educated population, good health care, relatively high position of women (compared with India and all other countries in South Asia), its capable and numerous professional class, and its attractiveness as a tourist destination, Sri Lanka was poised in the 1970s to join Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan as one of the so-called Asian Tigers. But then, a deadly mix of religious and linguistic majoritarianism reared its head. The Sinhala-speaking Buddhist majority chose to consolidate itself against the Tamil-speaking minority, who were themselves largely Hindus. Through the imposition of Sinhalese as the official language and Buddhism as the official religion, a deep division was created, provoking protests by the Tamils, peaceful at first but increasingly violent when crushed by the state. Three decades of bloody civil war ensued. The conflict formally ended in 2009, but the country has not remotely recovered, in social, economic, political, or psychological terms. Modi speaking in New Delhi, January 2024 Altaf Hussain / Reuters India will probably not go the way of Sri Lanka. A full-fledged civil war between Hindus and Muslims, or between north and south, is unlikely. But the Modi government is jeopardizing a key source of Indian strength: its varied forms of pluralism. One might usefully contrast Modi’s time in office with the years between 1989 and 2014, when neither the Congress nor the BJP had a majority in Parliament. In that period, prime ministers had to bring other parties into government, allocating important ministries to its leaders. This fostered a more inclusive and collaborative style of governance, more suitable to the size and diversity of the country itself. States run by parties other than the BJP or the Congress found representation at the center, their voices heard and their concerns taken into account. Federalism flourished, and so did the press and the courts, which had more room to follow an independent path. It may be no coincidence that it was in this period of coalition government that India experienced three decades of steady economic growth. When India became free from British rule in 1947, many skeptics thought it was too large and too diverse to survive as a single nation and its population too poor and illiterate to be trusted with a democratic system of governance. Many predicted that the country would Balkanize, become a military dictatorship, or experience mass famine. That those dire scenarios did not come to pass was largely because of the sagacity of India’s founding figures, who nurtured a pluralist ethos that respected the rights of religious and linguistic minorities and who sought to balance the rights of the individual and the state, as well as those of the central government and the provinces. This delicate calculus enabled the country to stay united and democratic and allowed its people to steadily overcome the historic burdens of poverty and discrimination. The last decade has witnessed the systematic erosion of those varied forms of pluralism. One party, the BJP, and within it, one man, the prime minister, are judged to represent India to itself and to the world. Modi’s charisma and popular appeal have consolidated this dominance, electorally speaking. Yet the costs are mounting. Hindus impose themselves on Muslims, the central government imposes itself on the provinces, the state further curtails the rights and freedoms of citizens. Meanwhile, the unthinking imitation of Western models of energy-intensive and capital-intensive industrialization is causing profound and, in many cases, irreversible environmental damage. Modi and the BJP seem poised to win their third general election in a row. This victory would further magnify the prime minister’s aura, enhancing his image as India’s redeemer. His supporters will boast that their man is assuredly taking his country toward becoming the Vishwa Guru, the teacher to the world. Yet such triumphalism cannot mask the deep fault lines underneath, which—unless recognized and addressed—will only widen in the years to come. RAMACHANDRA GUHA is Distinguished University Professor at Krea University and the author of India After Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy. Is India’s Rise Inevitable? The Roots of New Delhi’s Dysfunction Milan Vaishnav An armed Kuki man in Manipur, India, July 2023 Why Modi Can’t Make India a Great Power Government-Backed Intolerance Is Tearing the Country Apart Sushant Singh Germany’s Economic Reckoning The EU Needs Berlin to Get Its House in Order By Sudha David-Wilp and Jacob Kirkegaard March 4, 2024 German Chancellor Olaf Scholz visiting a BMW factory in Munich, Germany, December 2023 When Russian forces invaded Ukraine two years ago, Germany braced for a painful reckoning. The German military was underfunded and unprepared to respond to a security threat on this scale. Roughly half of Germany’s coal and natural gas, plus a third of its oil, was imported from Russia—a dependence Moscow could weaponize if it chose. Berlin had enjoyed the savings that came from keeping its armed forces small and purchasing inexpensive Russian gas. But Germany could no longer afford to neglect its military capacity, nor could it allow its reliance on Russian energy to give the Kremlin the power to undermine the German economy and divide Europe. Berlin has made progress on the military front. Just days after the Russian invasion, Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced a Zeitenwende, or turning point, to meet Germany’s new geopolitical challenges. The policy may not be perfectly executed—bureaucratic red tape and decision-making delays have slowed its implementation—but efforts to increase the German defense budget and modernize the country’s military are underway. With the help of a special allocation of 100 billion euros, Germany is on track to reach NATO’s defense spending target of two percent of GDP this year. Scholz has pledged to maintain this spending level over the long term, and his defense minister has suggested increasing the budget even further. Germany has come a long way from its paltry offer to send helmets to Ukraine at the start of the war—today, the country’s military assistance to Kyiv is second only to that of the United States. When it comes to the German economy, however, recent trends are more concerning. The loss of cheap Russian gas has undermined Germany’s industrial model. Although the initial spike in energy prices after the 2022 invasion has abated, costs are not expected to return to prewar levels any time soon. In 2023, Germany’s economy shrank by 0.3 percent. Vice Chancellor and Economy Minister Robert Habeck, warning of “rough waters” ahead, has projected that the country’s 2024 growth will reach a mere 0.2 percent. New pressures account for the recent contraction, but Germany’s economic problems run deeper. Over the last decade, Berlin has avoided making critical investments and reforms to attract skilled workers and adapt to a data-driven world. And Berlin has often insisted that what is good, restrained fiscal policy for Germany is also right for the EU—a prevailing mindset that, by limiting public investment in many member states, has prevented European economies from adapting to new conditions. Stay informed. In-depth analysis delivered weekly. Germany’s interests and the EU’s interests may not perfectly align, but Europe does need Germany to be an economic power. Germany is the third-largest economy in the world and the largest contributor to the EU budget. And although measures of the EU’s economic health, including its current account balance, productivity, and debt statistics, hardly give cause for alarm, if the German economy weakens, this picture may change. Europe could lose its ability to respond to crises, including the war in Ukraine or a second Trump presidency in the United States, and to advance ambitious policy programs, such as the expansion of the European defense industry or the acceleration of its green and digital transitions. The EU’s already waning influence on the world stage could degrade even further. Germany therefore needs a new growth agenda. It must direct the country’s resources toward green industries that will accelerate decarbonization and emerging technologies that will shape the future of the global economy. Berlin has to muster the political will to back migration policies that support economic growth. And it must do all of this in close coordination with Brussels. If revitalization efforts succeed, a strong German economy can boost European competitiveness and set up the EU to face the challenges ahead. BOOM TO BUST Germany was thriving for most of the last decade. Under Chancellor Angela Merkel, who served from 2005 to 2021, the country’s economy grew by 34 percent. High exports and windfall tax revenues gave the German economy enough of a cushion that it even made it through the pandemic relatively unscathed. But the boom times did not last. Today, in addition to high energy prices, Chinese competition in the automotive sector and an assertive U.S. industrial policy are causing economic harm. The subsidies and incentives included in the 2022 U.S. Inflation Reduction Act have German companies ready to transfer their production to the United States. The high-end automobile manufacturer Porsche, for example, is considering building a new battery factory across the Atlantic rather than in Baden-Württemberg, the state where the company was founded. As production components move out of Germany, supply chains become fragmented and crucial knowledge and skills are dispersed. Integrated environments are drivers of innovation; without them, Germany could lose this key advantage. Europe needs Germany to be an economic power. Offshoring is hardly Berlin’s only economic worry. Energy-intensive industries, including the chemical and steel sectors, have cut their output as energy prices rise, raising fears that Germany could lose control over end-to-end industrial supply chains. Rail and airport workers have organized frequent strikes, seeking higher wages amid a cost-of-living crisis. The disruption to transportation, not to mention the shrill whistles and rumbling of tractors that awakened Berliners as farmers protested planned subsidy cuts, have darkened the country’s already grim mood. Weak spots in the German economy were apparent well before the current leadership assumed power in late 2021. The country decided to phase out nuclear energy in 2002 and accelerated its timeline after the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011, but the transition to renewable energy sources to fill the gap has still proceeded slowly. Merkel’s vow to embrace digital technologies, too, never translated into significant action. When Scholz and his coalition partners took office, they introduced an ambitious agenda to accelerate the green transition, invest in education, and usher in digitalization. But Russia invaded Ukraine just a few months later. Since then, Berlin has shown leadership in terms of its financial and military contributions to Ukraine, but the crisis has also siphoned Berlin’s attention away from addressing structural weaknesses in the economy. A constitutional debt brake further complicates Berlin’s ability to restore the country’s economic fitness. By law, the federal government’s borrowing is capped at an amount corresponding to 0.35 percent of the country’s GDP. The measure is intended to ensure stability, but it has become a hindrance to the kinds of investment that Germany needs to transform its economy. Reform is sorely needed but unlikely to happen before Germany holds federal elections next year. In the meantime, Berlin can focus on addressing labor shortages, improving cooperation with EU partners, and streamlining bureaucratic processes. SHAPING UP Germany has turned its economy around before, and it can do so again. After a period of economic stagnation in the late 1990s, Chancellor Gerhard Schröder—a Social Democrat, like Scholz—introduced Agenda 2010, a set of hard-to-swallow labor reforms. Under Schröder’s successor, Merkel, the reforms bore fruit, and Germany’s growing economic strength made it possible for the country to serve as Europe’s creditor of last resort during the euro crisis. Germany played an outsize role in EU decision-making during this period, as Merkel used the country’s economic weight to steer Brussels’s policies on austerity measures, data privacy, and migration. Merkel’s efforts to wield influence in Brussels in service of German interests did not always win friends. The EU is still facing the consequences: Germany’s decision to wean itself off nuclear power and use natural gas as a bridge to renewable energy left not just Germany but much of Europe vulnerable to Russian threats to shut down gas pipelines in 2022. Now, with fossil fuel prices notably higher than those in the United States and EU-mandated carbon pricing putting pressure on the continent’s economies, Europe needs to complete its green transition as fast as possible. But the current German government is still following an old pattern. Although Berlin is a proud advocate for Europe’s net-zero emissions target, in practice it has tried to block the EU’s classification of nuclear power as a climate-friendly energy source, watered down a European Parliament–approved ban on internal combustion engines in a bid to protect the German car industry, and opposed an EU directive that would require large companies to conduct due diligence reports on the environmental harms of their supply chains. The German government is facing down a right-wing populist challenge at home, so its preference for limiting economic disruption is not entirely surprising. But erratic decision-making in Berlin introduces uncertainty to the EU’s regulatory environment, jeopardizing the bloc’s long-term plans for a green transition. Germany can still play a productive role in Brussels. It can identify industries that will help the European economy decarbonize and take steps to ramp up renewable energy production as quickly as possible, including by easing the German permit process for new grid transmission lines and for solar panel and wind power production. Not only will this effort alleviate Europe’s soaring energy costs; it will also leave Germany and the EU well positioned to compete with clean energy production in places such as China and the United States. Germany has turned its economy around before, and it can do so again. In addition to pursuing green energy, Germany—along with the rest of Europe—should build its capacity in biotechnology, quantum computing, and other emerging fields. Traditional sectors, such as chemicals and automobiles, still dominate German industry. German companies have been slow to adopt digital technologies, and sensitivity about data privacy makes it more difficult for German researchers to make breakthroughs in AI and machine learning. But with its wealth of engineering talent, Germany has the potential to be at the forefront of emerging technologies. Together with fellow EU member states, it should pool capital, research, and human resources to create the next generation of companies. Rather than have each country back its own AI champion—as Germany and France are now doing with the firms Aleph Alpha and Mistral AI, respectively—Berlin should encourage European capitals to consider joint ventures that can replicate the success of the aircraft manufacturer Airbus, which developed as a cooperative effort among France, Germany, Spain, and the United Kingdom. A pan-European AI unicorn is not guaranteed, but further work with artificial intelligence can bring other benefits. Germany, with its vast manufacturing knowledge, can help European companies use AI to increase efficiency. And Brussels can build on its first-mover advantage in AI regulation, ensuring that its values-driven approach (shaped, in part, by Germany) allows enough flexibility and adaptation to encourage the development of new European businesses. Germany will need to expand its skilled workforce if it is to take full advantage of new technologies. Yet the country’s population, like that of most of Europe, is aging. The obvious answer to this demographic problem is immigration, but the rise of right-wing populism across the continent makes it difficult for policymakers to advocate for legal avenues for skilled migration. Berlin, along with EU leaders in Brussels, must emphasize the economic case for attracting skilled knowledge workers from countries such as Egypt and India. A series of large weekend demonstrations across Germany, condemning the far right and calling for tolerance, has shown that such a change in political momentum is possible. Given that Germany’s traditional economic strengths lie in energy-intensive, fossil fuel–based industries, the upcoming transition will require large public and private investments. Right now, strict fiscal rules and divisions within the coalition government in Berlin are holding up reform on the scale that Germany needs. For now, though, there are steps that Germany can take to make its own economy—and Europe’s—more competitive. By advancing the green transition, attracting skilled immigrants, and eliminating bureaucratic chokepoints, Germany can remain a global leader in manufacturing and trade and an anchor for the European single market in the decades to come. SUDHA DAVID-WILP is Regional Director for Germany and a Senior Fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States. JACOB KIRKEGAARD is a Senior Fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States and a Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. Germany’s New Normal? The Surging Far-Right AfD Party Is Upending the Country’s Politics Liana Fix and Constanze Stelzenmüller German Chancellor Olaf Scholz during a television interview in Bali, Indonesia, November 2022 The Global Zeitenwende How to Avoid a New Cold War in a Multipolar Era Olaf Scholz The Myth of Israel’s “Moral Army” The Failure of the IDF’s Targeting Protocols Is Producing Massive Civilian Casualties By Avner Gvaryahu March 4, 2024 Devastation caused by Israeli strikes in Jabalia refugee camp, Gaza, February 2024 Devastation caused by Israeli strikes in Jabalia refugee camp, Gaza, February 2024 Mahmoud Issa / 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/myth-israels-moral-army Request Reprint Permissions Download Article The atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7 did not end that day. Over 130 Israelis are still held hostage in the Gaza Strip, many hundreds are in mourning, and the prospect of a similar attack keeps every Israeli family up at night. And yet the ongoing offensive in Gaza, ostensibly aimed at dismantling militant networks and making a repeat of Hamas’s attack impossible, does not promise to deliver any certainty for Israelis or their neighbors. It has dragged on with no end in sight, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu now insists that he wants to maintain an indefinite occupation of the Gaza Strip. The staggering Palestinian civilian death toll, which U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said had crossed 25,000 in late February, has even driven U.S. President Joe Biden—a staunch ally who responded to the October 7 attacks by extending Israel carte blanche to retaliate—to press Netanyahu to exercise restraint and to ensure that Israel’s military operations accord with the basic principles of just war and international law. Israel claims that it is doing everything in its power to minimize civilian casualties in Gaza—that it maintains complex targeting procedures aimed at ensuring that any military strike is proportionate and does not kill an excessive number of civilians. “The army,” Netanyahu insisted in October, “is the most moral army in the world.” When pressed on the issue of Palestinian deaths in November, Netanyahu said, “Any civilian death is a tragedy. And we shouldn’t have any because we’re doing everything we can to get the civilians out of harm’s way …. That’s what we’re trying to do: minimize civilian casualties.” In truth, Israel is not doing that. It has waged a brutal campaign in Gaza, only loosely upholding the protocols its armed forces are supposed to follow to minimize civilian deaths. But even those guidelines are insufficient: an investigation of prior campaigns in Gaza reveals the inadequacy of Israeli targeting guidelines, which do not truly curb civilian casualties. In the latest round of fighting in Gaza, Israel has failed to follow even those restrictions—leading to untold devastation and making a resolution to the conflict even harder to reach. Stay informed. In-depth analysis delivered weekly. PIERCING THE FOG OF WAR Past wars help pierce the fog of the present one. At the Israeli veterans’ group Breaking the Silence, we have spent years studying soldiers’ testimonies from previous military campaigns in Gaza, in 2008–9, 2012, 2014, and 2021. In those instances, Israel claimed that it was doing its best to avoid civilian casualties. This claim was based on three assertions: that Israel attacks only legitimate military targets, not civilian ones; that Israel operates with highly reliable intelligence, which enables it to avoid harm to civilians; and that Israel executes its attacks with precision, limiting harm to civilians. Our investigation of past wars revealed many reasons to doubt each of these claims. For one, not all of Israel’s targets in past campaigns can be deemed legitimate military targets. Although some certainly were—such as weapons storage facilities, Hamas headquarters, tunnels used by Hamas operatives, and sites for launching rockets—Israel also struck at a category of targets it called “militants’ houses.” These were mostly civilian homes and apartments that Israel insisted housed members of armed factions, usually Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Israel often razed entire buildings just because Israeli officials had tagged a single apartment within them as one used by militants. In these cases, neither the militants themselves nor anything that could reasonably be considered militant activity were the intended targets of the attacks; in fact, the militants were probably not at home at the time of the attacks. And yet the mere fact that a militant had resided there was enough for Israel to justify destroying an entire building. Early in the 2014 operation, the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem pointed out that striking the homes of militants is a violation of international humanitarian law since they are civilian homes, not military targets. Thereafter, a spokesperson for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) insisted that the militants’ houses were in fact “Hamas headquarters”—as in 2021, when Israeli forces bombed the houses of several Hamas members and destroyed a number of high-rise towers in Gaza. But soldiers who spoke with Breaking the Silence explained that these were in fact ordinary residences, not centers for militant operations. Israel’s distorted targeting rationale ends up razing an entire building just to get at a single apartment, in the process endangering dozens of civilians who have no involvement in the fighting. These ill-advised methods are made worse by faulty information. Israel’s intelligence has proved itself far from reliable. Between major operations, Israeli intelligence officers study the Gaza Strip and assess whether a particular location can be identified as an enemy target. Once they find a likely target, they come up with “collateral damage estimates”—calculations of the number of noncombatants expected to be killed in an attack—based on civilian population density, the specific weapon the IDF will use, and the kind of structure being targeted. These assessments inform the proportionality assessment made by IDF officers during conflict, which determines whether the military significance of the target is proportional to the expected damage to civilians. Israel has waged a brutal campaign in Gaza, only loosely upholding the protocols its armed forces are supposed to follow. One problem with this methodology is that the intelligence available to Israeli officers is often very limited—for instance, the IDF may determine that a location is an ammunition storage facility without knowing what type or amount of ammunition it stores. The military significance of 50 hand grenades, for example, is much smaller than that of 50 rockets, which could be fired toward Israeli cities. With such limited information, the military significance of the target cannot be fully determined, and therefore Israeli forces cannot make credible proportionality assessments. Moreover, intelligence can become outdated swiftly, and Israeli officers do not update the information frequently enough. The function of a particular structure can change, as can its surroundings. A new school may be built nearby, or a public facility could be repurposed. During large-scale conflicts, and to an even greater extent during the current war, Israel warns entire residential areas to evacuate, drastically changing the population density and daily routines in those neighborhoods and in other ones. In these circumstances, prior estimates of collateral damage become especially dubious and cannot be used to assess proportionality. In 2019, a failure to confirm intelligence regarding a target led to the killing of nine members of the al-Sawarkah family in Deir Al-Balah, in central Gaza. IDF intelligence officials believed that the complex in which the family lived was a military compound belonging to Palestinian Islamic Jihad. “The building where the family lived was on a list of potential targets,” Haaretz reported, “but Israeli defense officials confirmed to Haaretz that it had not been looked at over the past year or checked prior to the attack.” An intelligence officer explained to Haaretz that “mostly there is no significant intelligence activity dealing with a target that already exists, because it is more important to create new targets.” It is difficult to determine the total number of incidents in which civilians were killed or harmed because of the IDF practice of relying on outdated intelligence, but no doubt the pressure that officials now feel to approve attacks has led to many instances of the kind that killed the Sawarkahs. Even when the intelligence might be sound, Israel’s procedures for the execution of airstrikes do not prioritize the safety of civilians. In previous military campaigns, the imperative to carry out more strikes at a greater pace has led the IDF to grant lower-ranking officers the power to approve strikes that may result in significant collateral damage to civilians. In so doing, the military deprioritized the avoidance of civilian casualties. The frequency of strikes is also made possible by a new artificial intelligence system that generates new potential targets. A system designed to mass-produce targets inevitably compromises accuracy and increases harm to civilians, as evidenced by the staggering death tolls in Gaza in recent months. In past campaigns, Israel did try in some ways to reduce civilian casualties. It used a tactic known as “roof knocking,” which involves firing a small missile at the roof of a building to warn residents that a more severe Israeli strike is coming. To be sure, the IDF would not use this warning method when an intended target was in the building—it would deem the expected civilian deaths as legitimate collateral damage. The IDF uses roof knocking only when it seeks to target the structure itself and it does not consider the people inside permissible collateral damage. But even when it uses roof knocking, it still ends up killing civilians. Israeli officials often do not have clear information about the number of residents in a given building, nor do they always care to look for it. One soldier explained that although Israel has the technology to verify the exact location of the residents (by tracking their phones), it very rarely does so because such a procedure would demand too much time and resources and would invariably slow down the pace of the airstrikes. Despite a warning strike, many people may not be able to leave a building or cannot leave it in time—for instance, if they are sick or elderly. People occasionally mistake the warning missile for the attack itself, or think it is a bomb that landed nearby, and do not leave their homes. In the current war, Israel has significantly reduced its use of roof knocking, claiming that it is stretched too thin to bother with such warnings. Reducing the use of roof knocking is an admission by the IDF that it is less concerned now than in the past about avoiding civilian casualties. ROOT CAUSE In the past, Israel did not do enough to distinguish between civilians and militants in Gaza; in today’s war, Israel seems to be doing even less. In fact, The New York Times reported in December that in the current campaign, Israel has expanded its definition of “valuable targets” and its willingness to harm civilians. This is consistent with a recent report in CNN that during the first month of the war Israel dropped hundreds of 2,000-pound bombs capable of killing or wounding people more than 1,000 feet away from the impact, and that nearly half the Israeli munitions dropped on Gaza are imprecise “dumb” bombs. A campaign waged in this manner only gives credence to the accusations that Israel is as interested in exacting retribution in Gaza as it is in pursuing military objectives. The examples of the gratuitous killing of civilians in Gaza are already numerous, and further instances of the Israeli government’s relaxed attitude to the deaths of innocents will surely come to light after the war. By leveraging its political and military support for Israel, the United States can persuade Israeli forces to uphold international law in their campaigns and truly do what they can to minimize the deaths of civilians. There is no quick fix for Israel’s wrongdoings, since they are all symptoms of the same root cause: Israel’s absolute prioritization of “managing the conflict” and deferring any real solution, no matter how many civilians—Palestinian or Israeli—are harmed. It is this attitude that has led to habitual military campaigns in Gaza over the last 15 years, and it is this attitude that allows the Israeli government to plow forward with this war with no clear, attainable objective in sight. The only genuine way forward is recognizing each other’s humanity and seeking a path for both peoples not based solely on military might. The first necessary step is to end this war now. Hamas must return the hostages, and humanitarian aid must be provided to the people of Gaza. Only then might this catastrophe become a catalyst for change. AVNER GVARYAHU is Executive Director of Breaking the Silence, an Israeli nongovernmental organization formed by veterans of the Israel Defense Forces. Israel Must Decide Where It’s Going—and Who Should Lead It There The Case for Early Elections By Ehud Barak March 1, 2024 The Age of Amorality Can America Save the Liberal Order Through Illiberal Means? By Hal Brands March/April 2024 Published on February 20, 2024 Chloe Cushman “How much evil we must do in order to do good,” the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr wrote in 1946. “This, I think, is a very succinct statement of the human situation.” Niebuhr was writing after one global war had forced the victors to do great evil to prevent the incalculably greater evil of a world ruled by its most aggressive regimes. He was witnessing the onset of another global conflict in which the United States would periodically transgress its own values in order to defend them. But the fundamental question Niebuhr raised—how liberal states can reconcile worthy ends with the unsavory means needed to attain them—is timeless. It is among the most vexing dilemmas facing the United States today. U.S. President Joe Biden took office pledging to wage a fateful contest between democracy and autocracy. After Russia invaded Ukraine, he summoned like-minded nations to a struggle “between liberty and repression, between a rules-based order and one governed by brute force.” Biden’s team has indeed made big moves in its contest with China and Russia, strengthening solidarity among advanced democracies that want to protect freedom by keeping powerful tyrannies in check. But even before the war between Hamas and Israel presented its own thicket of problems, an administration that has emphasized the ideological nature of great-power rivalry was finding itself ensnared by a morally ambiguous world. In Asia, Biden has bent over backward to woo a backsliding India, a communist Vietnam, and other not so liberal states. In Europe, wartime exigencies have muted concerns about creeping authoritarianism on NATO’s eastern and southern fronts. In the Middle East, Biden has concluded that Arab dictators are not pariahs but vital partners. Defending a threatened order involves reviving the free-world community. It also, apparently, entails buttressing an arc of imperfect democracies and outright autocracies across much of the globe. Biden’s conflicted strategy reflects the realities of contemporary coalition building: when it comes to countering China and Russia, democratic alliances go only so far. Biden’s approach also reflects a deeper, more enduring tension. American interests are inextricably tied to American values: the United States typically enters into great-power competition because it fears mighty autocracies will otherwise make the world unsafe for democracy. But an age of conflict invariably becomes, to some degree, an age of amorality because the only way to protect a world fit for freedom is to court impure partners and engage in impure acts. Expect more of this. If the stakes of today’s rivalries are as high as Biden claims, Washington will engage in some breathtakingly cynical behavior to keep its foes contained. Yet an ethos of pure expediency is fraught with dangers, from domestic disillusion to the loss of the moral asymmetry that has long amplified U.S. influence in global affairs. Strategy, for a liberal superpower, is the art of balancing power without subverting democratic purpose. The United States is about to rediscover just how hard that can be. A DIRTY GAME Biden has consistently been right about one thing: clashes between great powers are clashes of ideas and interests alike. In the seventeenth century, the Thirty Years’ War was fueled by doctrinal differences no less than by the struggle for European primacy. In the late eighteenth century, the politics of revolutionary France upheaved the geopolitics of the entire continent. World War II was a collision of rival political traditions—democracy and totalitarianism—as well as rival alliances. “This was no accidental war,” German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop declared in 1940, “but a question of the determination of one system to destroy the other.” When great powers fight, they do so not just over land and glory. They fight over which ideas, which values, will chart humanity’s course. In this sense, U.S. competition with China and Russia is the latest round in a long struggle over whether the world will be shaped by liberal democracies or their autocratic enemies. In World War I, World War II, and the Cold War, autocracies in Eurasia sought global primacy by achieving preeminence within that central landmass. Three times, the United States intervened, not just to ensure its security but also to preserve a balance of power that permitted the survival and expansion of liberalism—to “make the world safe for democracy,” in U.S. President Woodrow Wilson’s words. President Franklin Roosevelt made a similar point in 1939, saying, “There comes a time in the affairs of men when they must prepare to defend, not their homes alone, but the tenets of faith and humanity on which their churches, their governments, and their very civilization are founded.” Yet as Roosevelt understood, balancing power is a dirty game. Western democracies prevailed in World War II only by helping an awful tyrant, Joseph Stalin, crush an even more awful foe, Adolf Hitler. They used tactics, such as fire-bombing and atomic-bombing enemy cities, that would have been abhorrent in less desperate times. The United States then waged the Cold War out of conviction, as President Harry Truman declared, that it was a conflict “between alternative ways of life”; the closest U.S. allies were fellow democracies that made up the Western world. Yet holding the line in a high-stakes struggle also involved some deeply questionable, even undemocratic, acts. Clashes between great powers are clashes of ideas and interests alike. In a Third World convulsed by instability, the United States employed right-wing tyrants as proxies; it suppressed communist influence through coups, covert and overt interventions, and counterinsurgencies with staggering death tolls. To deter aggression along a global perimeter, the Pentagon relied on the threat of using nuclear weapons so destructive that their actual employment could serve no constructive end. To close the ring around the Soviet Union, Washington eventually partnered with another homicidal communist, the Chinese leader Mao Zedong. And to ease the politics of containment, U.S. officials sometimes exaggerated the Soviet threat or simply deceived the American people about policies carried out in their name. Strategy involves setting priorities, and U.S. officials believed that lesser evils were needed to avoid greater ones, such as communism running riot in vital regions or democracies failing to find their strength and purpose before it was too late. The eventual payoff from the U.S. victory in the Cold War—a world safer from autocratic predation, and safer for human freedom, than ever before—suggests that they were, on balance, correct. Along the way, the fact that Washington was pursuing such a worthy objective, against such an unworthy opponent, provided a certain comfort with the conflict’s ethical ambiguities. As NSC-68, the influential strategy document Truman approved in 1950, put it (quoting Alexander Hamilton), “The means to be employed must be proportioned to the extent of the mischief.” When the West was facing a totalitarian enemy determined to remake humanity in its image, some pretty ugly means could, apparently, be justified. That comfort wasn’t infinite, however, and the Cold War saw fierce fights over whether the United States was getting its priorities right. In the 1950s, hawks took Washington to task for not doing enough to roll back communism in Eastern Europe, with the Republican Party platform of 1952 deriding containment as “negative, futile, and immoral.” In the 1960s and 1970s, an avalanche of amorality—a bloody and misbegotten war in Vietnam, support for a coterie of nasty dictators, revelations of CIA assassination plots—convinced many liberal critics that the United States was betraying the values it claimed to defend. Meanwhile, the pursuit of détente with the Soviet Union, a strategy that deemphasized ideological confrontation in search of diplomatic stability, led some conservatives to allege that Washington was abandoning the moral high ground. Throughout the 1970s and after, these debates whipsawed U.S. policy. Even in this most Manichean of contests, relating strategy to morality was a continual challenge. In fact, Cold War misdeeds gave rise to a complex of legal and administrative constraints—from prohibitions on political assassination to requirements to notify congressional committees about covert action—that mostly remain in place today. Since the Cold War, these restrictions have been complemented by curbs on aid to coup makers who topple elected governments and to military units that engage in gross violations of human rights. Americans clearly regretted some measures they had used to win the Cold War. The question is whether they can do without them as global rivalry heats up again. IDEAS MATTER Threats from autocratic enemies heighten ideological impulses in U.S. policy by underscoring the clash of ideas that often drives global tensions. Since taking office, Biden has defined the threat from U.S. rivals, particularly China, in starkly ideological terms. The world has reached an “inflection point,” Biden has repeatedly declared. In March 2021, he suggested that future historians would be studying “the issue of who succeeded: autocracy or democracy.” At root, Biden has argued, U.S.-Chinese competition is a test of which model can better meet the demands of the modern era. And if China becomes the world’s preeminent power, U.S. officials fear, it will entrench autocracy in friendly countries while coercing democratic governments in hostile ones. Just witness how Beijing has used economic leverage to punish criticism of its policies by democratic societies from Australia to Norway. In making the system safe for illiberalism, a dominant China would make it unsafe for liberalism in places near and far. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine reinforced Biden’s thesis. It offered a case study in autocratic aggression and atrocity and a warning that a world led by illiberal states would be lethally violent, not least for vulnerable democracies nearby. Coming weeks after Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin had sealed a “no limits” strategic partnership, the Ukraine invasion also raised the specter of a coordinated autocratic assault on the liberal international order. Ukraine, Biden explained, was the central front in a “larger fight for . . . essential democratic principles.” So the United States would rally the free world against “democracy’s mortal foes.” Biden delivering remarks in Warsaw, Poland, February 2023 Evelyn Hockstein / Reuters The shock of the Ukraine war, combined with the steadying hand of U.S. leadership, produced an expanded transatlantic union of democracies. Sweden and Finland sought membership in NATO; the West supported Ukraine and inflicted heavy costs on Russia. The Biden administration also sought to confine China by weaving a web of democratic ties around the country. It has upgraded bilateral alliances with the likes of Japan and Australia. It has improved the Quad (the security and diplomatic dialogue with Australia, India, and Japan) and established AUKUS (a military partnership with Australia and the United Kingdom). And it has repurposed existing multilateral bodies, such as the G-7, to meet the peril from Beijing. There are even whispers of a “three plus one” coalition—Australia, Japan, the United States, plus Taiwan—that would cooperate to defend that frontline democracy from Chinese assault. These ties transcend regional boundaries. Ukraine is getting aid from Asian democracies, such as South Korea, that understand that their security will suffer if the liberal order is fractured. Democracies from multiple continents have come together to confront China’s economic coercion, counter its military buildup, and constrict its access to high-end semiconductors. The principal problem for the United States is a loose alliance of revisionist powers pushing outward from the core of Eurasia. Biden’s answer is a cohering global coalition of democracies, pushing back from around the margins. Today, those advanced democracies are more unified than at any time in decades. In this respect, Biden has aligned the essential goal of U.S. strategy, defending an imperiled liberal order, with the methods and partners used to pursue it. Yet across Eurasia’s three key regions, the messier realities of rivalry are raising Niebuhr’s question anew. CONTROVERSIAL FRIENDS Consider the situation in Europe. NATO is mostly an alliance of democracies. But holding that pact together during the Ukraine war has required Biden to downplay the illiberal tendencies of a Polish government that—until its electoral defeat in October—was systematically eroding checks and balances. Securing its northern flank, by welcoming Finland and Sweden, has involved diplomatic horse-trading with Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who, in addition to frequently undercutting U.S. interests, has been steering his country toward autocratic rule. In Asia, the administration spent much of 2021 and 2022 carefully preserving U.S. ties to the Philippines, at the time led by Rodrigo Duterte, a man whose drug war had killed thousands. Biden has assiduously courted India as a bulwark against China, even though the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi has curbed speech, harassed opposition leaders, fanned religious grievances, and allegedly killed dissidents abroad. And after visiting New Delhi in September 2023, Biden traveled to Hanoi to sign a “comprehensive strategic partnership” with Vietnam’s one-party regime. Once again, the United States is using some communists to contain others. Then there is the Middle East, where Biden’s “free world” coalition is quite the motley crew. In 2020, Biden threatened to make Saudi Arabia a “pariah” over the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi. By 2023, his administration—panicked by Chinese inroads and rising gas prices—was trying to make that country Washington’s newest treaty ally instead. That initiative, moreover, was part of a concept, inherited from the Trump administration, in which regional stability would rest on rapprochement between Arab autocracies and an Israeli government with its own illiberal tendencies, while Palestinian aspirations were mostly pushed to the side. Not surprisingly, then, human rights and political freedoms receded in relations with countries from Egypt to the United Arab Emirates. Biden also did little to halt the strangulation of democracy in Tunisia—just as he had decided, effectively, to abandon Afghanistan’s endangered democracy in 2021. Indeed, if 2022 was a year of soaring rhetoric, 2023 was a year of awkward accommodation. References to the “battle between democracy and autocracy” became scarcer in Biden’s speeches, as the administration made big plays that defied that description of the world. Key human rights–related positions at the White House and the State Department sat vacant. The administration rolled back sanctions on Venezuela—an initiative described publicly as a bid to secure freer and fairer elections, but one that was mostly an effort to get an oppressive regime to stop exporting refugees and start exporting more oil. And when a junta toppled the elected government of Niger, U.S. officials waited for more than two months to call the coup a coup, for fear of triggering the cutoff of U.S. aid and thereby pushing the new regime into Moscow’s arms. Such compromises have always been part of foreign policy. But today, they testify to key dynamics U.S. officials must confront. THE DECISIVE DECADE First is the cruel math of Eurasian geopolitics. Advanced democracies possess a preponderance of power globally, but in every critical region, holding the frontline requires a more eclectic ensemble. Poland has had its domestic problems; it is also the logistical linchpin of the coalition backing Ukraine. Turkey is politically illiberal and, often, unhelpful; nonetheless, it holds the intersection of two continents and two seas. In South and Southeast Asia, the primary barrier to Chinese hegemony is a line of less-than-ideal partners running from India to Indonesia. In the Middle East, a picky superpower will be a lonely superpower. Democratic solidarity is great, but geography is stubborn. Across Eurasia, Washington needs illiberal friends to confine its illiberal foes. The ideological battlefield has also shifted in adverse ways. During the Cold War, anticommunism served as ideological glue between a democratic superpower and its autocratic allies, because the latter knew they were finished if the Soviet Union ever triumphed. Now, however, U.S. enemies feature a form of autocracy less existentially threatening to other nondemocracies: strongmen in the Persian Gulf, or in Hungary and Turkey, arguably have more in common with Xi and Putin than they do with Biden. The gap between “good” and “bad” authoritarians is narrower than it once was—which makes the United States work harder, and pay more, to keep illiberal partners imperfectly onside. High-stakes rivalries carry countries, and leaders, to places they never sought to go. Desperate times also call for morally dexterous measures. When Washington faced no serious strategic challengers after the Cold War, it paid a smaller penalty for foregrounding its values. As the margin of safety shrinks, the tradeoffs between power and principle grow. Right now, war—or the threat of it—menaces East Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. Biden says the 2020s will be the “decisive decade” for the world. As Winston Churchill quipped in 1941, “If Hitler invaded Hell, I would at least make a favorable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.” When threats are dire, democracies will do what it takes to rally coalitions and keep the enemy from breaking through. Thus, a central irony of Washington’s approach to competition is that the same challenges that activate its ideological energy make it harder to keep U.S. diplomacy pure. So far, the moral compromises of U.S. policy today are modest compared with those of World War II or the Cold War, in part because the constraints on unsavory methods are stronger than they were when Hitler and Stalin stalked the earth. But rules and norms can change as a country’s circumstances do. So Biden and his successors may soon face a daunting reality: high-stakes rivalries carry countries, and leaders, to places they never sought to go. When the Cold War started, few officials imagined that Washington would conduct covert interventions from Afghanistan to Angola. Just three years ago, hardly anyone predicted that the United States would soon fight a proxy war meant to bleed Putin’s army to death in Ukraine. As the present competitions intensify, the tactics used to wage them could become more extreme. Washington could find itself covertly trying to tip the balance in elections in some crucial swing state if the alternative is seeing that country shift hard toward Moscow or Beijing. It could use coercion to keep Latin America’s military facilities and other critical infrastructure out of Chinese hands. And if the United States is already ambivalent about acknowledging coups in out-of-the-way countries, perhaps it would excuse far greater atrocities committed by a more important partner in a more important place. Those who doubt that Washington will resort to dirty tricks have short memories and limited imaginations. If today’s competitions will truly shape the fate of humanity, why wouldn’t a vigilant superpower do almost anything to come out on top? DON’T LOSE YOURSELF There’s no reason to be unduly embarrassed about this. A country that lacks the self-confidence to defend its interests will lack the power to achieve any great purpose in global affairs. Put differently, the damage the United States does to its values by engaging dubious allies, and engaging in dubious behavior, is surely less than the damage that would be done if a hyperaggressive Russia or neototalitarian China spread its influence across Eurasia and beyond. As during the Cold War, the United States can eventually repay the moral debts it incurs in a lengthy struggle—if it successfully sustains a system in which democracy thrives because its fiercest enemies are suppressed. It would be dangerous to adopt a pure end-justifies-the-means mentality, however, because there is always a point at which foul means corrupt fair ends. Even short of that, serial amorality will prove politically corrosive: a country whose population has rallied to defend its values as well as its interests will not forever support a strategy that seems to cast those values aside. And ultimately, the greatest flaw of such a strategy is that it forfeits a potent U.S. advantage. During World War II, as the historian Richard Overy has argued, the Allied cause was widely seen to be more just and humane than the Axis cause, which is one reason the former alliance attracted so many more countries than the latter. In the Cold War, the sense that the United States stood, however imperfectly, for fundamental rights and liberties the Kremlin suppressed helped Washington appeal to other democratic societies—and even to dissidents within the Soviet bloc. The tactics of great-power competition must not obscure the central issue of that competition. If the world comes to see today’s rivalries as slugfests devoid of larger moral meaning, the United States will lose the asymmetry of legitimacy that has served it well. This is not some hypothetical dilemma. Since October 2023, Biden has rightly framed the Israel-Hamas war as a struggle between a flawed democracy and a tyrannical enemy seeking its destruction. There is strong justification, moral and strategic, for backing a U.S. ally against a vicious proxy of a U.S. enemy, Iran. Moreover, there is no serious ethical comparison between a terrorist group that rapes, tortures, kidnaps, and kills civilians and a country that mostly tries, within the limits war imposes, to protect them. Yet rightly or wrongly, large swaths of the global South view the war as a testament to American double standards: opposing occupation and appropriation of foreign territory by Russia but not by Israel, valuing the lives and liberties of some victims more than those of others. Russian and Chinese propagandists are amplifying these messages to drive a wedge between Washington and the developing world. This is why the Biden administration has tried, and sometimes struggled, to balance support for Israel with efforts to mitigate the harm the conflict brings—and why the war may presage renewed U.S. focus on the peace process with the Palestinians, as unpromising as that currently seems. The lesson here is that the merits of an issue may be disputed, but for a superpower that wears its values on its sleeve, the costs of perceived hypocrisy are very real. RULES FOR RIVALRY Succeeding in this round of rivalry will thus require calibrating the moral compromises inherent in foreign policy by finding an ethos that is sufficiently ruthless and realistic at the same time. Although there is no precise formula for this—the appropriateness of any action depends on its context—some guiding principles can help. First, morality is a compass, not a straitjacket. For political sustainability and strategic self-interest, American statecraft should point toward a world consistent with its values. But the United States cannot paralyze itself by trying to fully embody those values in every tactical decision. Nor—even at a moment when its own democracy faces internal threats—should it insist on purifying itself at home before exerting constructive influence abroad. If it does so, the system will be shaped by regimes that are more ruthless—and less shackled by their own imperfections. The United States should also avoid the fallacy of the false alternative. It must evaluate choices, and partners, against the plausible possibilities, not against the utopian ideal. The realistic alternative to maintaining ties to a military regime in Africa may be watching as murderous Russian mercenaries fill the void. The realistic alternative to engaging Modi’s India may be seeing South Asia fall further under the shadow of a China that assiduously exports illiberalism. Similarly, proximity to a Saudi regime that carves up its critics is deeply uncomfortable. But the realistic alternative to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is probably a regime that remains quite repressive—and is far less committed to empowering women, curbing religious zealots, and otherwise making the country a more open, tolerant place. In a world of lousy options, the crucial question is often: Lousy compared with what? Another guiding principle: good things don’t all come at once. Cold War policymakers sometimes justified coup making and support for repressive regimes on grounds that preventing Third World countries from going communist then preserved the possibility that they might go democratic later. That logic was suspiciously convenient—and, in many cases, correct. Countries in Latin America and other developing regions did eventually experience political openings as they reached higher levels of development, and democratic values radiated outward from the West. Morality is a compass, not a straitjacket. Today, unseemly bargains can sometimes lead to better outcomes. By not breaking the U.S.-Philippine alliance during Duterte’s drug war, Washington sustained the relationship until a more cooperative, less draconian government emerged. By staying close to a Polish government with some worrying tendencies, the United States bought time until, late last year, that country’s voters elected a coalition promising to strengthen its democratic institutions. The same argument could be made for staying engaged with other democracies where autocratic tendencies are pronounced but electoral mechanisms remain intact—Hungary, India, and Turkey, to name a few. More broadly, liberalism is most likely to flourish in a system led by a democracy. So simply forestalling the ascent of powerful autocracies may eventually help democratic values spread into once inhospitable places. Similarly, the United States should remember that taking the broad view is as vital as taking the long view. Support for democracy and human rights is not an all-or-nothing proposition. As Biden’s statecraft has shown, transactional deals with dictators can complement a strategy that stresses democratic cooperation at its core. Honoring American values, moreover, is more than a matter of hectoring repressive regimes. A foreign policy that raises international living standards through trade, addresses global problems such as food insecurity, and holds the line against great-power war serves the cause of human dignity very well. A strategy that emphasizes such efforts may actually be more appealing to countries, including developing democracies from Brazil to Indonesia, that resist democracy-versus-autocracy framing because they don’t want any part of a Manichean fight. Of course, these principles can seem like a recipe for rationalization—a way of excusing the grossest behavior by claiming it serves a greater cause. Another important principle, then, revives Hamilton’s dictum that the means must be proportioned to the mischief. The greater the compromise, the greater the payoff it provides—or the damage it avoids—must be. By this standard, the case for cooperation with an India or a Poland is clear-cut. These countries are troubled but mostly admirable democracies that play critical roles in raging competitions. Until the world contains only liberal democracies, Washington can hardly avoid seeking blemished friends. The United States should, however, be more cautious about courting countries that regularly engage in the very practices it deems most corrosive to the liberal order: systematic torture or murder of their people, coercion of their neighbors, or export of repression across borders, to name a few. A Saudi Arabia, for instance, that periodically engages in some of these practices is a troublesome partner. A Saudi Arabia that flagrantly and consistently commits such acts risks destroying the moral and diplomatic basis of its relationship with the United States. American officials should be more hesitant still to distort or destabilize the politics of other countries, especially other democracies, for strategic gain. If Washington is going to get back into the coup business in Latin America or Southeast Asia, the bad outcomes to be prevented must be truly severe—a major, potentially lasting shift in a key regional balance of power, perhaps—to justify policies so manifestly in tension with the causes the United States claims to defend. Chaos at the airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, August 2021 Sgt. Victor Mancilla / U.S. Marine Corps / Reuters Mitigating the harm to those causes means heeding a further principle: marginal improvement matters. Washington will not convince leaders in Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, or Vietnam to commit political suicide by abandoning their domestic model. But leverage works both ways in these relationships. Countries on the firing line need a superpower patron just as much as it needs them. U.S. officials can use that leverage to discourage extraterritorial repression, seek the release of political prisoners, make elections a bit freer and fairer, or otherwise obtain modest but meaningful changes. Doing so may be the price of keeping these relationships intact, by convincing proponents of human rights and democracy in Congress that the White House has not forgotten such issues altogether. This relates to an additional principle: the United States must be scrupulously honest with itself. American officials need to recognize that illiberal allies will be selective or unreliable allies because their domestic models put them at odds with important norms of the liberal order—and because they tend to generate resentment that may eventually cause an explosion. In the same vein, the problem with laws that mandate aid cutoffs to coup plotters is that they encourage self-deception. In cases in which Washington fears the strategic fallout from a break in relations, U.S. officials are motivated to pretend that a coup has not occurred. The better approach, in line with reforms approved by Congress in December 2022, is a framework that allows presidents to waive such cutoffs on national security grounds—but forces them to acknowledge and justify that choice. The work of making moral tradeoffs in foreign policy begins with admitting those tradeoffs exist. Some of these principles are in tension with others, which means their application in specific cases must always be a matter of judgment. But the issue of reconciling opposites relates to a final principle: soaring idealism and brutal realism can coexist. During the 1970s, moral debates ruptured the Cold War consensus. During the 1980s, U.S. President Ronald Reagan adequately repaired—but never fully restored—that consensus by combining flexibility of tactics with clarity of purpose. Reagan supported awful dictators, murderous militaries, and thuggish “freedom fighters” in the Third World, sometimes through ploys—such as the Iran-contra scandal—that were dodgy or simply illegal. Yet he also backed democratic movements from Chile to South Korea; he paired rhetorical condemnations of the Kremlin with ringing affirmations of Western ideals. The takeaway is that rough measures may be more tolerable if they are part of a larger package that emphasizes, in word and deed, the values that must anchor the United States’ approach to the world. Some will see this as heightening the hypocrisy. In reality, it is the best way to preserve the balance—political, moral, and strategic—that a democratic superpower requires. 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. 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Saddam Hussein, July 1983 Saddam Hussein, July 1983 Francois Lochon / Gamma-Rapho / Getty Images As Iran continues its pursuit of a nuclear capability, outside observers have debated just how worried the world should be. Optimists argue that since nuclear war would be suicidal, no government would ever risk it, and they think the Islamic Republic would be no exception. Pessimists argue that Iran's radical and unstable regime might behave in unpredictable ways and cannot be trusted. Both camps seem to agree that rationality is the key to deterrence; they disagree over whether a nuclear Iran would be rational.