Though it will be difficult for Israel’s critics to concede this, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has delivered the Middle East an inflection point to reshape the regional order around normalization and integration, based on a shared commitment to economic modernization, political moderation, and religious tolerance.  

For decades, the Islamic Republic of Iran and its theocracy have cast a disruptive shadow across the Middle East. They’ve done that through nuclear brinkmanship, ideological extremism, and exporting revolution through Iran’s network of proxies: Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, the Houthis in Yemen, and Shia militias in Iraq.

Israel’s latest strikes are not just about defending its borders and ensuring its existence. They are also about removing whatever remaining ability Iran has to disrupt Arab-Israeli reconciliation.  

For too long, Tehran has been allowed to play arsonist to any real peace process—from the Camp David Accords to the Abraham Accords. It was no accident that Hamas struck Israel on October 7, 2023, just as negotiations toward Saudi-Israeli normalization were near completion.

Seizing the opportunity

This week may advance an alignment that has been emerging between a number of forward-looking countries in the region that understand the enormous dividends regional integration can bring and know that Israel needs to be included in that integration. We at the Atlantic Council have been calling this group the N7—Israel, Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, and (pre-civil war) Sudan, a combination of Abraham Accords countries and those that had previously normalized relations with Israel.

To support this regional alignment, the Atlantic Council launched its N7 Initiative in partnership with the Jeffrey M. Talpins Foundation in 2021. This initiative aims to broaden and deepen collaboration among these countries by supporting initiatives that unlock the economic, political, and security benefits of integration. Since its founding, the N7 Initiative has engaged more than twenty-five countries and hundreds of world leaders while advancing new policy initiatives and partnerships. Even this week, the N7 Initiative is hosting a bipartisan group of US representatives in the Middle East.

The N7 began as an aspiration, daring to imagine an integrated region that was fundamentally different than what had existed before. Violent spoilers, led by Iran and its proxies, sought to upend those aspirations. But when Iran directly attacked Israel twice last year, the United States worked with its partners, including several N7 governments, on joint air defenses. In the end, Israel’s military action may hasten more open economic and security alignments. Over time, this could open the way for regional equivalents to the European Union or even NATO, which I wrote about here in November 2023. 

If that sounds far-fetched, think about how Europe during the post–World War II years put an end to centuries of conflict by bringing together combatants in institutions, first in the European Coal and Steel Community, the precursor to the European Union, and then NATO. “I would be one of the first people that would endorse a Middle East NATO,” Jordan’s King Abdullah II said in a June 2022 interview with CNBC.

Thus, the Trump administration has a historic opportunity, if it thinks more like an architect than a firefighter and if it acts more with political resolve than with restraint. The Abraham Accords, executed in the first Trump administration, showed what could happen when Iran and its proxies were weakened. Imagine what a second Trump administration could achieve if Iran’s revolutionary regime is more existentially endangered.

I recently spoke with an individual who is close to the Trump administration and had recently traveled to Iran. He compared the atmosphere on the streets and the mood among those he met to those of perestroika in the latter days of the Soviet Union. It was a period when all the Soviet institutions of repression remained in place, and no one was predicting Soviet collapse, but the Soviet public was paying less attention to their repressors, who in turn were acting with less confidence.

This individual’s conclusion was that the right set of circumstances could destabilize the regime and confound conventional analysts. The Iranians he spoke with talked about everything from democratic change to the return of monarchical rule.

Connecting the dots

On December 18 of last year, under the headline “The stage is set for Trump’s global leadership moment,” I wrote: “Connect the dots across the factors that brought about the collapse of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad last week and you’ll see glaring new evidence of Russian and Iranian weaknesses. These dramatic vulnerabilities provide President-elect Donald Trump with a historic opportunity of global consequence early in his second term.”

Iranian proxy Hamas’s attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023, had seemed to underscore profound Israeli security, military, and intelligence vulnerabilities. A series of events that followed—most dramatically the Israeli strike that killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah on September 27, 2024—dramatically turned the tables, setting the stage for Israel’s most recent strikes.

History will remember this moment less for the Israeli strikes themselves and more for what follows. The violence may continue for some time to come, and it’s unclear what impact this week’s events will have on Gaza. When the dust settles, however, the most important matter will be whether Israel has catalyzed a reordering of the Middle East.

That would be an inflection point for the ages.

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on X: @FredKempe.

This edition is part of Frederick Kempe’s Inflection Points newsletter, a column of dispatches from a world in transition. To receive this newsletter throughout the week, sign up here.

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On the eve of the eighty-first anniversary of D-Day, the Allied invasion at Normandy that marked the beginning of Europe’s liberation from Adolf Hitler, newly elected German Chancellor Friedrich Merz brought a message to the White House that no American should ignore.

Merz made reference to the anniversary, in the context of Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine, as marking a day “when the Americans once ended a war in Europe.”

Caught off-guard, the US president quipped that D-Day wasn’t a pleasant day for Germany.

“Well, in the long run, Mr. President,” Merz replied calmly, “this was the liberation of my country from Nazi dictatorship.”

Trump paused to digest what he’d just heard, a good German thanking Americans for defeating a criminal one, then he answered, “That’s true. That’s true.”

What came next was the most significant message US allies could send to the Trump administration as another criminal regime tests allied resolve.

“And we know what we owe you,” Merz went on. “But this is the reason why I’m saying that America is, again, in a very strong position to do something on this war and ending this war.” Merz asked Trump to talk about what they could do jointly “for more pressure on Russia,” placing the war’s blame unambiguously where it belongs.

It’s worth calling out that Merz-Trump exchange, which came in the twenty-seventh minute of their Oval Office session with reporters, after Trump comments on his travel ban, prospects for a China trade deal, his relationship with his erstwhile adviser Musk, and the presidential protocol of when to use an autopen signature.

Given the Ukraine war’s gravity and Merz’s reference to World War II, Trump’s comments that followed must have been disconcerting to Merz. The German chancellor was well enough rehearsed not to show it. When asked by a reporter when he would impose more sanctions on Russia, Trump talked about his over two-hour conversation with Putin, during which he compared the war to “two young children fighting like crazy . . . Sometimes you’re better off letting them fight for a while and then pulling them apart.”

With nearly a million and a half casualties already in this schoolyard brawl, a reporter asked Merz whether he agreed with the analogy.

Merz was at his best. He said both Germany and the United States agree on how terrible war is, and both are looking for ways to stop it soon. “And I told the president before we came in,” said Merz, “that he is the key person in the world who can really do that now by putting pressure on Russia.”

As Merz spoke of the children Russia has kidnapped from Ukraine, Trump described disturbing satellite pictures of the war—“bodies, arms, heads, legs all over the place. You’ve never seen anything like it. It’s so ridiculous.” Merz then added, “And this is only by Russian weapons against Ukraine. This had never happened with [Ukrainian] weapons against Russia, never . . . So, this is the difference, and that’s the reason why we are trying to do more on Russia.”

In the past two weeks, Trump has appeared to be losing patience with Putin, suggesting that he knows Putin is playing him for time and wondering whether Putin’s relentless attacks on civilians demonstrate that the Russian president has “gone absolutely CRAZY.” Beyond that, Trump has been quoted as calling Ukraine’s drone attacks last weekend on Russian strategic bombers “badass.”

All that history will remember, however, is whether Trump was the US president who contributed to Putin’s defeat and brought Ukraine a lasting peace—or whether he stood by as Putin escalates further, targeting civilians and their infrastructure. In all the news noise of a typical Trump administration week, it is worth listening closer to the German chancellor’s D-Day appeal that it will take much more US pressure on Russia to end this European war.

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on X: @FredKempe.

This edition is part of Frederick Kempe’s Inflection Points newsletter, a column of dispatches from a world in transition. To receive this newsletter throughout the week, sign up here.

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Imagine a world in which Ukraine, working alongside European and North American partners, so convincingly wields advanced technological and defense capabilities that Putin stops his murderous war and agrees to a sustainable peace. That also would send an unmistakable message of transatlantic common cause to Russia’s partners: China, North Korea, and Iran.

However, that outcome can only be achieved if the European Union (EU), after decades of neglect, turns Ukrainian inspiration and a flood of new defense spending announcements into real capabilities and technological innovation. It will also require that the Trump administration unambiguously back its European allies at the June 24-25 NATO Summit in The Hague as the Alliance makes new spending and defense production commitments.

‘A fusion of World War I and World War III’

The good news is that most NATO countries appear ready to agree at the summit to increase their defense spending to 3.5 percent of gross domestic product by 2035, along with an additional 1.5 percent for defense- and security-related infrastructure. For its part, the EU has already approved 800 billion euros in new defense spending across the bloc over the next four years.

The bad news comes in three categories: production, policies, and politics. First, even a great deal more money won’t necessarily result in the production, innovation, and capabilities required to deter Russia. Second, policies and regulations on both sides of the Atlantic provide impediments to effective defense industrial cooperation. Third, political strains and distrust have increased across the Atlantic over US President Donald Trump’s trade wars and his administration’s decision to withhold arms and intelligence from Ukraine for about a week in March. 

Trump’s phone call with Putin yesterday, after which he said without comment that the Russian leader felt a strong need to respond to Ukraine’s strikes inside Russia, didn’t help. Ukraine and its European partners would have preferred clear recognition that Putin started the war, has the power to end it, and should do so now.

Even with all of that said, Europe’s most immediate and important task is to demonstrate that it can provide for its own security, given the Trump administration’s understandable reluctance to do more for US allies than they are willing to do for themselves. 

“Ukraine has shown that modern warfare is a fusion of World War I and World War III—combining trench warfare with cutting-edge technologies,” write Ann Mettler and Mark Boris Andrijanič in a must-read piece in Euractiv. “Unless Europe learns to master both, its security, sovereignty, and very survival will be at stake.” 

Few know the stakes better than Mettler, a former director-general at the European Commission, and Andrijanič, a former Slovenian minister for digital transformation and a current Atlantic Council Europe Center senior fellow. They outline a compelling course of action to reverse EU security weaknesses.

“As Russia’s aggression edges closer to EU borders and the transatlantic alliance weakens,” they write, “Europe stands at an inflection point.” European defense budgets are finally increasing, they note, “but if past performance is any indication of future results, there is cause for concern.”

For example, despite hundreds of billions of euros of investments into digital and green agendas, the EU remains reliant on American software and Chinese hardware, from solar panels to batteries. “This reveals a harsh truth,” they write, “spending alone doesn’t guarantee innovation. And in defence, failure won’t just be costly—it could be fatal.” 

‘Something we should have done years ago’

I came away from a recent Atlantic Council delegation trip to Brussels, where we met with top NATO and EU defense planners, with new hope for European security but also growing concern about transatlantic division in the face of persistent Russian threats. 

It’s clear that Europe has been shocked into action by two leaders: Putin and Trump. The Russian president’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 was a wake-up call for a complacent Europe. Yet it was only Trump’s return to the presidency this year that injected Europe with a greater sense of urgency.

It’s telling that Mettler and Andrijanič don’t include a transatlantic dimension in their proposals in Euractiv. I asked Andrijanič about this omission, and he said, “Unless Europe gets serious about defense, we can’t be a credible partner for the United States.” He added, “Suddenly we are doing something we should have done years ago. Europe is now laser-focused on developing as many critical capabilities as possible—and doing it fast.”

In their Euractiv article, Mettler and Andrijanič list as their priority the creation of a common market for defense, stretching from the EU to partners such as the United Kingdom, Norway, Switzerland, and, in particular, Ukraine. For the moment, the only European-headquartered company among the global top ten defense firms is the United Kingdom’s BAE Systems.

The authors also call for new EU regulatory guidance that would remove the stigma against defense and dual-use investments to unlock private and institutional capital. They also want to shake up Europe’s “sluggish defense procurement rules and procedures.” 

To achieve greater innovation, the authors want to create a European ecosystem of “established industry players, startups and scaleups, investors, governments, and research institutions.” One intriguing proposal is for a dedicated collaboration platform to create a “wall of drones” along Europe’s eastern flank, so that Ukraine’s weekend success isn’t a one-off but is underpinned by “a coordinated deployment of autonomous drone swarms for surveillance and defense.” 

The authors seize upon two successful US models to accelerate this European effort. One would be the creation of a European DARPA, modeled on the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which has focused on developing emerging technologies for national security. They would do that through transforming the existing European Defence Fund into “a better-resourced, more agile, and mission-driven institution.”

A second idea would be to use the US Defense Innovation Board, first chaired by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, as a model for a European Defence Innovation Council. This high-level, independent group would provide strategic advice to the EU and member states on defense-related tech.

Write the authors, “The good news for Europe is that the world’s leading defence innovator is already among us, and on our side—Ukraine. Despite intense wartime pressures, the country has emerged as a frontrunner in drone technology, cyber warfare, and the integration of artificial intelligence on the battlefield. In contrast to Europe’s slow and costly model of incremental innovation, Ukraine excels in frugal innovation to rapidly deliver scalable, cost-effective, and highly impactful solutions.”

Two awful words

One way or the other, the upcoming NATO Summit will be one of historic importance. What’s positive is an Alliance-wide commitment, after pressure from Trump, for greater spending aimed at producing cutting-edge capabilities. What’s negative is insufficient recognition that transatlantic common cause on Ukraine and beyond is more crucial than ever.

Speaking to the NATO Parliamentary Assembly in Dayton, Ohio, last week, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte put it this way: “Russia has teamed up with China, North Korea, and Iran. They are expanding their militaries and their capabilities. They are preparing for long-term confrontation.”

Quoting Winston Churchill from 1936, Rutte asked, “Will there be time to put our defenses in order? . . . Will there be time to make these necessary efforts, or will the awful words ‘too late’ be recorded?” 

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on X: @FredKempe.

This edition is part of Frederick Kempe’s Inflection Points newsletter, a column of dispatches from a world in transition. To receive this newsletter throughout the week, sign up here.

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If Trump wants to stop Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war, and he has made that an administration priority, then he should reflect on what it took to finally stop Serbian President Slobodan Milošević in 1995—after nearly four years of killing and more than 100,000 dead, including the massacre at Srebrenica, Europe’s worst genocide since the Holocaust.

A deal required relentless US diplomatic engagement backed by a demonstrated military threat and carried out alongside unified European allies. It also took twenty-one days of intensive negotiations in Dayton—not involving then US President Bill Clinton until the end—while all parties were cloistered from media and outside influences at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.

Marking the Dayton anniversary, Ohio Congressman Mike Turner brought the NATO Parliamentary Assembly here last week, gathering delegates from the thirty-two allies as well as from partner countries. They joined leaders from the Western Balkans, assorted experts, and even the Sarajevo Philharmonic, which performed for participants in a giant hangar stocked with presidential aircraft in the National Museum of the US Air Force.

Though I came to commemorate history, I left having interrogated its architects. My aim was to gain clues that might help the Trump administration in its still-fruitless quest for an end to Russia’s war on Ukraine. 

It would be easy to discount the lessons for Ukraine and Russia now, where the stakes are so much higher, from Bosnia-Herzegovina and Serbia then. Nuclear-armed Russia has two hundred times the land mass of Serbia and more than twenty times its population. And Ukraine, with its pre-war population of forty million and France-sized territory, is more than ten times larger in geographic size and population than Bosnia-Herzegovina. In my view, that makes the lessons only more compelling.           

The first lesson? “Peace agreements are extremely rare,” former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt, the European Union’s special representative at the talks thirty years ago, said in a session of former officials that I moderated. “In modern European history, there are only two really: Dayton and the Good Friday Agreement,” which in 1998 ended a thirty-year conflict in Northern Ireland known as “the Troubles.”

Both were forged in the aftermath of horrific violence, which is also the case in Ukraine. Yet both also required something that is still lacking today: determined, focused, and creative US leadership in lockstep with European partners. Both also succeeded through disciplined diplomacy, military leverage, and the unglamorous work of compromise.

Beyond that, winning peace in Dayton demanded US credibility but not neutrality. At Dayton, the United States was not an impartial mediator but rather a focused powerbroker, using whatever muscle was necessary to shape the outcome. No lasting deal can reward Putin’s aggression, just as Dayton didn’t knuckle under to reward Milošević.

Another lesson is that building peace is as crucial as ending war. Dayton and Belfast were both followed by years of international engagement, economic aid, and security commitments. Peace might have collapsed had those efforts not continued.

Most importantly, the United States led but did not go it alone. Peace that endures requires multilateral support. Dayton hasn’t worked perfectly, but without the European Union and NATO it wouldn’t have worked at all. “Only when the international actors can get together with a uniform message and policy can results be achieved,” said Bildt, who is also an Atlantic Council International Advisory Board member. “There was success in Dayton, yes. But it should also be said that there was massive failure prior to Dayton due to disagreements across the Atlantic, disagreements in Europe, and disagreements in the United States.”

US General Wesley Clark, who at the time was the military right hand to Richard Holbrooke, the chief US negotiator, took away a different lesson: “Don’t be timid,” Clark, a member of the Atlantic Council Board of Directors, said to the NATO parliamentarians. “We are going to have to be unified. And we are going to have to be forceful enough to convince Putin he will not win. Right now, he thinks he’s winning.”

In a slap across the face of Trump’s efforts to broker peace, Putin from last Friday to Sunday launched what Ukrainian officials called the largest combined aerial assault of the conflict, including some nine hundred drones and dozens of missiles of various types. That prompted a frustrated Trump to write on Truth Social about Putin that “something has happened to him. He has gone absolutely CRAZY!” The US president added that “missiles and drones are being shot into Cities in Ukraine, for no reason whatsoever.” 

The problem is that there’s nothing crazy about Putin’s calculations, and his reasons are obvious. He’s trying to wear down Ukraine and its partners, and he’s betting that he has more staying power. He sees US military and diplomatic support in retreat, European efforts as insufficient, and Ukraine as weary. Trump has belatedly acknowledged that Putin has been “tapping” him along. 

With all that in mind, Washington will have to try far harder now than it did then to change a murderous despot’s mind—or resign itself to accepting Putin’s ongoing war and its ambition to redraw the European map. 

Until Washington stood up to Milošević in 1995, Clark said, the Serb leader thought he could pull the wool over Europe’s eyes with his small army overrunning Bosnia. When he bid farewell to Milošević at the end of the talks, Clark remembers the Balkan leader saying, “We Serbs never had a chance against your NATO, your airplanes, your missiles.”

Speaking with me at the same NATO session, Christopher R. Hill, who was part of the Holbrooke delegation in Dayton, added another important lesson—that the parties must be ready to end the war. “I am not sure Russia is ready for peace,” he said. “They should be, but they don’t seem to be. I think until they are, we have got to help Ukraine because a hundred years from now . . . our grandchildren, our great-grandchildren, will be thinking about what we did to deal with this crisis.”

The Dayton Accords were not perfect, but they were proof of what US leadership can achieve when properly applied. Speaking in Bosnia-Herzegovina shortly after the agreement was finalized, the then US president explained why the United States had chosen to lead, rather than cut and run from the European conflict. 

“Around the world, people look to America not just because of our size and strength but because of what we stand for and what we’re willing to stand against,” Clinton said. “And though it imposes extra burdens on us, people trust us to help them share in the blessings of peace. We can’t be everywhere . . . But where we can make a difference, where our values and our interests are at stake, we must act.”

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on X: @FredKempe.

This edition is part of Frederick Kempe’s Inflection Points newsletter, a column of dispatches from a world in transition. To receive this newsletter throughout the week, sign up here.

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The quote is sometimes attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte, but it might as well also be the working motto of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

This past week, Erdoğan strung together a trio of geopolitical wins that underscored his success in leveraging his country’s size, military capability, and—perhaps most of all—geographic position to achieve outsize influence.

Erdoğan did this despite facing some of the biggest political protests he has weathered in years following the imprisonment of his political rival, Istanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu. It’s no wonder Erdoğan is harnessing international gains to shore up his domestic position.

The first victory was US President Donald Trump’s decision to lift sanctions on Syria’s new government. Turkey played a catalytic role in the December ouster of Bashar al-Assad, Erdoğan’s nemesis who had ruled Syria since 2000, when he succeeded his father. It was fitting that Trump included Erdoğan by phone in his meeting this week in Riyadh with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa.

Second, the Kurdish militant group known as the PKK announced this week that it will disband and end its armed struggle after months of Turkish backchannel diplomacy. There’s still a risk that the PKK could fragment into smaller groups that attack Turkey, but for now, the development is a win for the country’s security.

Third, Istanbul played host to the first direct peace talks between Ukrainian and Russian officials since March 2022, with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio also flying in from a meeting of NATO foreign ministers in the Turkish town of Antalya. Russian President Vladimir Putin was a no-show, which kept Trump from traveling to Turkey as well, and the two-hour meeting appears to have been fruitless. Yet it underscored Erdoğan’s ability to navigate both Moscow and Kyiv even while providing Ukraine with armed drones.

For years, some Western officials and analysts have dismissed Erdoğan as a populist authoritarian whose inflation-ridden economy was troubled and whose geopolitical ambitions were fantasy. But it now rings truer when Erdoğan says, as he did in December, “Turkey is bigger than Turkey. As a nation, we cannot limit our horizon to 782,000 square kilometers.”

None of this week’s wins are permanent. The jury is out on whether Syria’s new leadership can hold the country together. The PKK peace is fragile. Ukraine-Russia talks still don’t seem to be going anywhere. And other pressing questions remain unresolved, such as whether Erdoğan will be able to successfully manage relations with Israel given Israeli security concerns about the expanded Turkish military presence in Syria. However all that turns out, Erdoğan’s focus remains on protecting both his legacy and longevity after more than twenty years as prime minister and then president.

We might be a long way from a Pax Turcica. For now, however, Erdoğan and Turkey have gained relevance as an indispensable player from the Black Sea to the Levant, and from Central Asia to Europe, where the Turkish military will play a crucial role if Europe is to have the wherewithal to provide for Ukraine’s security—and its own.

What I’m reading

• With doubts growing within NATO about the US nuclear umbrella, French President Emmanuel Macron specified three conditions for extending the protection of France’s nuclear weapons to European allies. We’ll keep monitoring the Trump transatlantic fallout.

• “How do you know the day that you become old?” legendary investor Warren Buffett this week asked the Wall Street Journal as he announced he was stepping back at age ninety-four (for him, it was at age ninety).

• We interrupt this report for an inflection point in US baseball, my non-geopolitical passion. Call me old-fashioned, but I hope the Hall of Fame won’t ever induct baseball’s all-time hits leader Pete Rose, who passed away last September, given his gambling on baseball. That said, I wish he’d lived to see Major League Baseball lift its banishment of “Charlie Hustle” from the game. 

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on X: @FredKempe.

This edition is part of Frederick Kempe’s Inflection Points newsletter, a column of dispatches from a world in transition. To receive this newsletter throughout the week, sign up here.

The post A remarkable week for a rising Turkey appeared first on Atlantic Council.

Here’s how to look at this historic opportunity.

Trump’s surprise decision to lift US sanctions on post-Assad Syria should be seen in combination with his administration’s less-ballyhooed move to remove curbs on the sale of advanced artificial intelligence (AI) semiconductor chips to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Saudi Arabia. Both are smart moves of underappreciated consequence on a global chessboard.

First, let’s talk Syria.

Trump had nothing to do with the December 8 fall of dictator Bashar al-Assad, which came in the final days of the Biden administration, ending fifty years of repressive Assad family rule. For Trump, it also marked an unanticipated geopolitical inflection point, whose origins I explained here a few days later. It was a powerful setback to Iranian leaders and Putin, who had saved the Assad regime through direct military intervention since 2015.

By lifting sanctions now in such high-profile fashion in Riyadh, Trump has seized high diplomatic ground at low cost. He rewarded both Middle Eastern and European allies—particularly the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey—who had urged him to make the move. At the same time, he can slam the door on any Russian attempt to regain regional influence.

Moscow spent years propping up the Assad regime, but it collapsed anyway, in no small part because Russia moved military assets from Syria to support its Ukraine war. Russia didn’t just lose a client in al-Assad; it also lost global standing by giving up a Middle East foothold through which it exercised regional influence. Trump should follow up by proposing a regional security pact excluding Russia and China—and building upon his Abraham Accords.

Now, let’s talk artificial intelligence.

What do advanced computer chips have to do with Syrian sanctions relief? If the Syria move is about checkmating Russia, then the chip move is about outmaneuvering China. Do both at the same time, and you frustrate the “no limits partnership” that Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping declared in opposition to Washington back in February 2022.

President Joe Biden’s move late in his administration to limit UAE and Saudi access to the United States’ most advanced chips via the “AI Diffusion Rule” was designed to limit the technology’s proliferation to China. But in the region it was perceived as a slap in the face of countries willing to invest tens of billions of dollars in American AI companies and their infrastructure. A Gulf official told me some colleagues in his country wondered whether they had made the right bet as they confronted US restrictions, even as DeepSeek raised concerns that China over time could match or surpass US capabilities.

Both Trump moves are calculated gambles with sound logic behind them.

Regarding Syria, Trump has reckoned it’s worth taking a chance on the new leadership in Damascus and giving it a “fresh start.” That’s even though new President Ahmed al-Sharaa, who led the offensive against Assad, was designated by the United States as a terrorist alongside his Hayat Tahrir al-Sham movement, given their historic ties to al-Qaeda. Al-Sharaa renounced his ties to al-Qaeda in 2016 and now commits that his regime will be inclusive and respect all his country’s religious and ethnic sects.

The jury is out—but a good outcome is more likely with Washington involved.

Regarding artificial intelligence, Trump is betting that the Emiratis and Saudis will protect cutting-edge US technology from leaking to China, as the Biden administration feared. What he’s gained in return are arguably the deepest-pocketed investors in the world—who at the same time hope to maintain close ties to Beijing, their largest fossil fuel customer.

With an accelerating tech race this uncertain and with the stakes so high, give Trump credit for deciding rather than dithering.

A third news story this week may seem unrelated—that of the first direct peace talks between Ukrainian and Russian officials in Istanbul—but it’s not. Trump has expressed concern that Putin may be “tapping [him] along.” That’s a welcome, if belated, sign that he and his administration recognize that they are being played by a wily adversary who believes all of Ukraine will fall to him if he can buy time and neutralize US support for Kyiv.

It’s time to call Putin’s bluff amid his failure to engage seriously in peace talks that would preserve Ukraine’s sovereignty, security, and freedom to join Western institutions. Good next moves would be more sanctions against Russia, more weapons for Ukraine, and a backstop for European military support for Ukrainian security guarantees.

A Putin failure in Ukraine, coming on the heels of his Syria failure, would be a geopolitical triumph of historic consequence and perhaps even worth a Nobel Peace Prize for Trump, something I wrote about late last year.

Not long after I wrote that, a Middle East official told me that by upending the geopolitical chessboard, Trump has the opportunity to achieve unanticipated gains, particularly in great power politics. The danger, he said, was that Trump pays too little attention to the secondary consequences of his decisions. The economic cost of his “liberation day” tariffs, and his decision to back off their most extreme version, underscored both this Trump peril and his ability to self-correct.

If Trump will now also self-correct on Russia, he can again confound his critics, showing that he can be disruptive, transactional, convention-defying, and geopolitically shrewd, all at the same time. Trump shouldn’t miss this historic opportunity.

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on X: @FredKempe.

This edition is part of Frederick Kempe’s Inflection Points newsletter, a column of dispatches from a world in transition. To receive this newsletter throughout the week, sign up here.

The post Trump can cement his Middle East successes by calling Putin’s bluff appeared first on Atlantic Council.

This week, success will be measured not in conventional diplomacy, peace deals, or arms sales, although Donald Trump did make some news by lifting sanctions on the Syrian leadership, urging Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to join the Abraham Accords by normalizing relations with Israel, and agreeing to a $142 billion weapons package for Riyadh.  

What sets Trump’s visit apart is the greater focus on the hundreds of billions of dollars of new Middle Eastern investments into the United States ($600 billion from Saudi Arabia alone). Gulf partners will measure success by the Trump administration’s willingness to lift restrictions on the sale of hundreds of thousands of advanced semiconductor chips to the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. Trump will also measure success by his ability to outmaneuver China in securing a closer relationship with Gulf monarchies than the Chinese have, even though Beijing is their biggest fossil-fuel customer.

It’s not that Middle East security threats or peace negotiations have gone away. There’s the war in Gaza, and this week’s release of the American hostage Edan Alexander. There are new efforts to rein in Iran’s nuclear-weapons potential through negotiations. And there’s Trump’s dream of finding a path to Saudi-Israeli diplomatic normalization (and ongoing progress toward a civilian nuclear deal with the kingdom).

However, my conversations with senior Middle Eastern officials involved in planning Trump’s trip underscored that the overwhelming focus has been on doing deals. The Trump administration would rather swim in a stream of Gulf investments than get bogged down in the region’s enduring problems.

In an extraordinary speech in Riyadh that set the tone for all that will follow, Trump said: “Before our eyes, a new generation of leaders is transcending the ancient conflicts and tired divisions of the past, and forging a future where the Middle East is defined by commerce, not chaos; where it exports technology, not terrorism; and where people of different nations, religions, and creeds are building cities together—not bombing each other out of existence.”

The contest for Gulf money is also about gaining the upper hand in the Trump administration’s ongoing trade standoff and technology contest with Beijing. That remains Washington’s overriding objective, notwithstanding the dramatic news Monday morning that the two countries would de-escalate their confrontation by reducing tariffs from 145 percent to 30 percent on the US side and from 125 percent to 10 percent on the Chinese side during a ninety-day pause for further negotiations.

In that spirit, one piece of major news that’s flying under the radar is Trump’s decision to rescind the Biden administration’s “AI Diffusion Rule,” which imposed restrictions on the export of advanced semiconductor chips to countries that included the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia—as well as India, Mexico, Israel, Poland, and others—due to the danger that they could be “leaked” to adversarial nations, in particular China.

The New York Times reported that, in conjunction with the rule change, the Trump administration is considering a deal that would send hundreds of thousands of the most advanced US-designed artificial intelligence (AI) chips to G42, an Emirati AI firm that cut its links to Chinese partners in order to partner with US companies.

“The negotiations, which are ongoing, highlight a major shift in US tech policy ahead of President Trump’s visit,” the New York Times reported, noting tension within the administration between those who are eager to advance the US trade and technological edge over China and national security officials who continue to worry about leakage of critical technologies to Beijing.

On Tuesday, the White House also unveiled deals with Saudi Arabia that included a commitment by Riyadh’s new state-owned AI company, Humain, to build AI infrastructure using several hundred thousand advanced Nvidia chips over the next five years. Humain and Amazon Web Services also announced plans to invest more than five billion dollars in a strategic partnership to build a first-of-its-kind “AI Zone” in the kingdom—part of Riyadh’s evolving ambitions to be a global AI leader.

What seems to be winning out is the Emirati and Saudi argument that if they are going to throw in their lot with the United States, and if they are to restrict their advanced technology relationships with China in the global AI arms race, Washington needs to do its part and remove the restrictions placed upon its tech.

During Trump’s first term and during the Biden administration, there was a long-running debate within the US government around whether the United States should seek to block China from getting advanced chips or instead just try to stay one or two generations ahead of the Chinese technologically. That debate has been settled: China—as demonstrated most visibly by DeepSeek—will find a way to sidestep US restrictions to make major strides. For the United States to stay a step or two ahead in the AI race, it will require new investments and partnerships. That shift is at the heart of what we’re witnessing this week in the Middle East.

Trump’s moves this week underscore his seriousness of purpose, but the battle has been far from won. Trump the aspirational peacemaker will still try to strike deals on Gaza and Iran, as uncertain as they are, but Trump the dealmaker has a clearer path to closing artificial intelligence and investment deals that this week are higher and more achievable priorities.

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on X: @FredKempe.

This edition is part of Frederick Kempe’s Inflection Points newsletter, a column of dispatches from a world in transition. To receive this newsletter throughout the week, sign up here.

The post Trump’s remarkable Middle East tour is all about striking megadeals and outfoxing China appeared first on Atlantic Council.

In his “order of the day” as the supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force, Eisenhower spoke of the need to continue cooperation far into the future, warning against “profitless quarrels” over which country or service won “the European war.”

Speaking of fallen Allied soldiers, Eisenhower said: “No monument of stone, no memorial of whatever magnitude could so well express our respect and veneration of their sacrifice as would the perpetuation of the spirit of comradeship in which they died.”

Eighty years after VE Day, it’s hard not to think about Ukraine’s current struggle against Russia’s murderous aggression in that spirit. “As we celebrate victory in Europe,” Eisenhower said then, “let us remind ourselves that our common problems of the immediate and distant future can be best solved in the same conception of cooperation and devotion to the cause of human freedom as have made this Expeditionary Force such a mighty engine of righteous destruction.”

Perhaps the most significant foreign policy debate swirling around the Trump administration concerns the lessons of the last eighty years and how best to build upon them—or not.

There is a group, and I would count myself among them, that believes this epoch has shown the United States at its best, engaging with partners and allies to produce one of the greatest periods of prosperity and peace among great powers that the world has ever known.

With all its flaws—and no era of history is without them—this extended period since World War II has resulted in enormous benefits and prosperity for Americans, it’s helped lift billions of people around the world from poverty, and it’s helped prevent the outbreak of war between nuclear-armed great powers.

There is another line of argument that the United States has carried an unfair burden all these years, that it has shouldered too much of the cost for the defense of its allies, and that global trading arrangements have taken advantage of the United States economically (to be rectified by President Donald Trump’s tariffs).

Some making those arguments look at the last eighty years not as a legacy to be built upon, but rather as a trajectory to be ended. They argue that the rules-based international system that emerged after World War II is a thing of the past and that we have moved into an era of a more transactional, interest-based, “America first” approach to international politics.  

“I believe this is a false choice,” Stephen J. Hadley, former national security advisor for President George W. Bush and an Atlantic Council executive vice chair, tells me. “To be sure, America has interests beyond simply promoting its values of freedom, democracy, rule of law, and human rights. In particular situations, there will be a trade-off between advancing our values and pursuing these other interests and a choice will have to be made. But at the highest level, it is overwhelmingly in America’s interest that it advance its values. A world based on those values will be more congenial to Americans and better ensure their safety, security, and prosperity.”

Hadley has worked for, with, or closely observed every US presidency since Lyndon Johnson’s. “I believe they all thought they were putting America first,” he says. “What linked them was an enlightened vision of American interests. They believed that working with America’s friends and allies—and helping them to become more democratic, prosperous, and secure—made America stronger.”

The world has changed dramatically in the past eighty years, and even in the three decades since the Cold War’s end. For example, China’s position on the world stage—given its economic weight, technological capability, and global presence—is nothing like that of the Soviet Union. Clinging to the status quo isn’t a policy designed for the future. Europeans recognize that they must carry more of their own security burden, and US partners are re-examining trading relationships.

“There is no institution, process, or policy on earth that cannot be improved,” says Hadley. “The goal is to convert a period of disruption into a vehicle for progress and positive change. That is the challenge of the present moment.”

Two decades after the war, Eisenhower visited Omaha Beach, when the tide had turned against authoritarianism. “I think and hope and pray that humanity will learn more than we had learned up to that time,” he said. For him, the war, its destruction, and the role of Americans remained a lesson for the present. He said of the dead, “these people gave us a chance, and they bought time for us, so that we can do better than we have before.”

That lesson still applies today. 

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on X: @FredKempe.

This edition is part of Frederick Kempe’s Inflection Points newsletter, a column of dispatches from a world in transition. To receive this newsletter throughout the week, sign up here.

Editors’ note: At tonight’s annual Atlantic Council Distinguished Leadership Awards dinner, marking the eightieth anniversary of VE Day, our organization will honor Croatian Prime Minister Andrej Plenković; General John W. Raymond, the first chief of space operations for the US Space Force; legendary singer-songwriter and humanitarian Judy Collins; and Ukrainian businessman and philanthropist Victor Pinchuk. We’ll also pay tribute to nine Ukrainian military heroes attending in person, who represent the millions of Ukrainians defending their country against Russian aggression. The Atlantic Council will present a rarely given Distinguished Service Award to Stephen J. Hadley for his service to the organization and its values throughout his career. It has been presented to only five other individuals: Henry Kissinger, Brent Scowcroft, General James L. Jones, Adrienne Arsht, and Bahaa Hariri.

The post The lesson of VE Day 80 years later: Discard the ‘false choice’ between US values and interests appeared first on Atlantic Council.

“America’s present need is not heroics but healing,” Harding said, “not nostrums but normalcy; not revolution but restoration; not agitation but adjustment; not surgery but serenity; not the dramatic, but the dispassionate . . . ” 

It was certainly unintentional, but I heard echoes of Harding when Valdis Dombrovskis, a Latvian who serves as an executive vice president for the European Commission, came to the Atlantic Council yesterday in defense of “boring” predictability.  While mentioning US President Donald Trump only once in his opening remarks, he underscored what Europe has long seen as its shared virtues with its American partners.  

“You see our fundamental values, individual liberties, democracy, and the rule of law often painted as weakness by authoritarian regimes to prey upon,” said Dombrovskis, who previously served as the European Union’s (EU’s) trade negotiator and is one of Europe’s longest-serving commissioners.* “However, in times of turmoil, predictability, the rule of law, and willingness to uphold the rules-based international order become Europe’s greatest assets. We are committed to doing whatever it takes to defend our ‘boring’ democracies, because boring brings certainty and a safe haven when a rules-based order is questioned elsewhere. Our processes allow for debates and consultations to take place, building buy-in from our key stakeholders and enabling us all to pull in the same direction.”

This week’s meetings of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank in Washington, DC, are arguably the most important since the financial crisis of 2008-2009, because the Trump administration is seeking fundamental changes to the world trading and financial system not seen since the Bretton Woods agreement of 1944. In that year, the United States and its partners brought down protectionist trade barriers, established a new international monetary system, and laid a foundation for post-World War II global economic cooperation. One of the results was the creation of the IMF and the World Bank.

The last thing the Trump administration appears to want is a return to the normalcy of the eighty years that followed that agreement, arguing that the United States has been taken advantage of by its trading partners and that international system. One can say many things about Trump’s first hundred days in power, but “boring” certainly isn’t one of them.  

Many of the world’s economic elites in town for this week’s IMF-World Bank meetings appear to be yearning for the first Trump administration, during which the rhetoric was often more extreme than the policies that emerged. Investors appear to agree with them, driving up markets Tuesday when Trump said that he wasn’t planning on removing Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell from office and US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent signaled that the United States wanted a trade deal with China.

Yesterday brought fresh reports, most notably in the Wall Street Journal, of Trump’s willingness to dial back China tariffs, while Bessent had harsh words for China’s export-driven economic model even as he hinted at a deal. “China needs to change,” he told the Institute of International Finance. “Everyone knows it needs to change. And we want to help it change—because we need rebalancing too.” 

As I’ve argued previously in Inflection Points, the Trump administration this time around is more determined to bring about lasting changes than most investors and trading partners recognize. “The revolution,” I wrote, “is about breaking what Trump administration officials believe needs to be fixed, whether it is foreign assistance or international trade, because previous experience has shown that reforms aren’t possible.”

In his Atlantic Council remarks, Dombrovskis showed that he understands the European status quo also needs to change, but that it should be achieved by building upon the rules-based system that has served it so well since World War II. 

He spoke of accelerating efforts to build European defense and about the need to support Ukraine against Russian aggression as “Ukraine is central to Europe’s security considerations.” He spoke about deepening the European single market (“our main economic asset”) of 450 million consumers and about tackling “a longstanding problem of bureaucracy and red tape” by reducing administrative costs for European companies by 25 percent.

He also spoke about expanding the EU’s growing network of economic partnerships and about tapping growing international demand for euro-denominated assets. First and foremost, he played up European predictability as a core strength. What was understood, but not said, was that the EU now sees its “boring” predictability as a competitive advantage when measured against the United States.

Make no mistake: the EU would much prefer to do a damage-reducing deal with the Trump administration, but Dombrovskis’s tone was that of someone who knows he’s entered a time of transatlantic uncertainty when that’s not an outcome he can bet on.

The wording Dombrovskis chose was telling, saying that the EU “isn’t giving up on our closest, deepest, and most important partnership,” with an economic and trade relationship of $9.5 trillion per year, including a services trade estimated at $475 billion in 2024.

He spoke about the EU’s readiness to buy more US liquefied natural gas and offered to negotiate down to zero tariffs on all industrial goods. At the same time, he reminded the audience that the EU would escalate, if necessary, and that a first, 21-billion-euro package of countertariffs was put on hold following the Trump administration’s ninety-day pause on its own “reciprocal” tariffs.

Dombrovskis’s message was a clear one: that the EU “is determined not to let this crisis go to waste,” and it wants to make “inroads to help shape new strands of the global economy.” As for how the EU can reach a deal with the country that was both the host and at the heart of the Bretton Woods agreement eighty years ago, he regretted that “so far we also don’t have clear responses” to EU offers on a path forward.  

It’s far too early to know whether “boring” can win the day and whether American voters will return to Warren Harding territory. That said, Dombrovskis yesterday laid out a sound—and even compelling—approach for a continent where rules-based international order has been an antidote to its bloody past.

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on X: @FredKempe.

This edition is part of Frederick Kempe’s Inflection Points newsletter, a column of dispatches from a world in transition. To receive this newsletter throughout the week, sign up here.

Note: An earlier version of this article inaccurately referred to Dombrovskis as the EU’s current trade negotiator. This essay has been updated to note that he is a former EU trade negotiator, as Dombrovskis left that position in December 2024.

The post In defense of ‘boring’: A European leader’s message to Trump appeared first on Atlantic Council.

Call it piquant editorial juxtaposition.

The Financial Times places an op-ed by Peter Navarro, Trump’s tariff czar, on how his boss’s tariffs “will fix a broken system” directly above columnist Gideon Rachman’s noticing of “a distinct whiff of Don Corleone” in the Oval Office’s approach to trade.

Writes Navarro: “The international trade system is broken—and Donald Trump’s reciprocal tariff doctrine will fix it. This long-overdue restructuring will make both the US and global economies more resilient and prosperous by restoring fairness and balance to a system rigged against America.”

By contrast, Rachman paints Trump as the godfather-in-chief. “Like a movie mob boss,” he writes, “Trump knows how to switch between menace and magnanimity. Treat him with respect and he might invite you to his house, where you can mingle with his family. But the menace never disappears.” 

Nothing could better illustrate the escalating dispute between Trump and much of the rest of the world on tariffs than this Navarro-Rachman divide. 

Navarro senses a unique and historic opportunity to right a wrong, a cumulative US trade deficit since 1976 that has “transferred over $20tn of American wealth into foreign hands. . . . Foreign interests have taken over vast swaths of US farmland, housing, tech companies, and even parts of our food supply.”

Rachman’s response is that Trump won’t prevail in a war where he lacks allies. 

“There are simply too many actors involved for Trump’s mob boss tactics to work,” he writes. “There are all the investors who have rushed to sell their shares, causing stock markets to tank. There are the manufacturers who simply cannot do business under the conditions created by Trump—and who are shutting down production lines. And, as for Chinese President Xi Jinping’s mob, they have decided to fire back rather than buckle. This is getting extremely messy.”

The Atlantic Council’s Josh Lipsky puts it this way today: “US President Donald Trump has launched a global economic war without any allies. That’s why—unlike previous economic crises in this century—there is no one coming to save the global economy if the situation starts to unravel.”

Global markets still hope this is all part of Trump’s “art of the deal,” a strategy that isn’t really about breaking the system, but is instead about getting better trade conditions through negotiations. 

When an unverified post on the social media platform X falsely claimed yesterday morning that Kevin Hassett, director of the White House National Economic Council, had said Trump was considering a ninety-day pause on tariffs, major indexes soared, delivering a two-trillion-dollar gain in value. Markets gave up those gains when the White House refuted the post as “fake news.”

“This is not a negotiation,” Navarro writes. “For the US, it is a national emergency triggered by trade deficits caused by a rigged system. President Trump is always willing to listen. But to those world leaders who, after decades of cheating, are suddenly offering to lower tariffs—know this: that’s just the beginning.” 

In her own column this past Friday, a touching salute to US relations with Canada, the Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan also draws upon the film The Godfather to describe where the United States and the world now stand.

During the peace summit Don Corleone hosts with heads of the five mafia families after the outbreak of a mob war and a string of retaliatory killings, he asks, “How did things ever get so far? . . . It was so unfortunate, so unnecessary.”

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on X: @FredKempe.

This edition is part of Frederick Kempe’s Inflection Points newsletter, a column of dispatches from a world in transition. To receive this newsletter throughout the week, sign up here.

The post ‘How did things ever get so far? It was so unfortunate, so unnecessary.’ appeared first on Atlantic Council.

Global investors’ repeated miscalculation of US President Donald Trump’s far-reaching intentions regarding tariffs has left them playing a chaotic game of catch-up. The result has been four trillion dollars in value wiped off the S&P 500 since its peak in February.

That was before the further losses that will come now, as investors come to terms with the president’s determination to undo an eighty-year era of globalization and replace it with, as today’s lead Wall Street Journal editorial put it, “Trump’s New Protectionist Age.”

Trump’s Rose Garden announcement Wednesday of “liberation day” tariffs of 10 percent on all foreign nations—with higher levies on many top trading partners—marks one of the most significant US economic policy moves in decades, perhaps the most dramatic shift since the protectionist-busting 1944 Bretton Woods agreement itself. If the plan goes into effect next week as scheduled, then it will result in the highest effective US tariff rate in a century.

It’s long past time to understand what’s driving the president—and what’s liberating him.

Here’s a short list of what most investors missed until recently:

1. Trump’s approach in his second term, similar to the logic DOGE has brought to federal spending, is that the global trading system wasn’t working for the United States, couldn’t be reformed, and therefore needed to be broken. Short-term stock market pain would be an acceptable price for wholesale change.
2. Drawing on the experience of Trump’s first term, investors expected Trump’s tariffs to be primarily a tactic to negotiate better trade deals, which still might be the case regarding China. But overall, Trump’s new tariffs appear instead to be aimed, over the short term, at bringing in more federal revenue to offset tax cut renewals. Over the longer term, the US president said he wants tariffs to encourage companies to reshore manufacturing and other businesses, creating jobs and generating corporate taxes. To complicate matters further, Trump is also using some tariffs as punishment, like sanctions, against countries for reasons that range from not controlling immigration to failing to stop fentanyl trafficking.
3. Investors also overlooked the liberating impact on Trump’s freedom of decision through a new set of advisers who are more likely to encourage than to second guess him. During Trump’s first term, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn seem to have acted as a brake on Trump’s tariff passions. Today, however, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett appear to play more of a background role to trade advisor Peter Navarro and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who encourage the president’s course.
4. Global investors were thinking incrementally, calculating how best to trade on each day’s news, instead of recognizing the president’s audacious ambitions. “Assuming the policy sticks—and we hope it doesn’t,” wrote the Wall Street Journal editorial board, “the effort amounts to an attempt to remake the US economy and the world trading system.”        

Investors are not the only ones who have taken note. World leaders are reeling from Trump’s actions, and more than a few are concluding that the president, intentionally or not, could undo all the good that the Bretton Woods agreement did against the rampant protectionism that preceded World War II.  

As Josh Lipsky, senior director of the Atlantic Council GeoEconomics Center, told me, “The protectionism of the 1930s led to rival trade blocks, which unfortunately only ended with the calamity of war and the creation of the Bretton Woods system. Not to overstate the stakes, because we need to see what happens and how countries respond after Wednesday’s announcements, but the risks of miscalculation and escalation are high.”

The Trump administration is betting that countries won’t retaliate because it is not in their economic interest, given the massive economic leverage of the US economy. After a period of disruption, the Trump administration is calculating that its tariff approach will lead to the greater stability of a fairer trading system with benefits for the US economy and the American worker.

To encourage foreign partners not to retaliate and escalate, Bessent said this week that the new tariffs would be a ceiling, from which they could be lowered over time. “One of the messages that I’d like to get out tonight,” Bessent told CNN on Wednesday, “is everybody sit back, take a deep breath, don’t immediately retaliate, let’s see where this goes. Because if you retaliate, that’s how we get escalation.”

Other countries aren’t buying this message that the United States is starting at a ceiling, and some will likely retaliate both for economic and for domestic political reasons. “The US certainly has economic leverage,” said Lipsky. “But countries are looking at where they can hurt the US in ways not commonly thought of in a trade war. They’ve had six years to think about this.”

So, watch China go after US tech companies, and watch the European Union go after tech and services, where the United States has a considerable surplus.

With Wednesday’s announcement by Trump, the world is returning to pre-World War II protectionism—but at a time when the United States is much more exposed than it was then to the global economy. Imports today are nearly 15 percent of US gross domestic product, compared to only 5 percent then.

History’s lessons are clear. Trade wars are costly and nobody wins. Trump has a habit of confounding critics, so there’s always a risk in betting against him. That said, global investors did just that today, driving markets down, chastened by the mistakes they’ve made thus far in underestimating how far the president was determined to go. 

One sign of this has been how the US dollar fell against most other currencies in Asian and European markets today. The WSJ Dollar Index, which is based on a basket of global currencies, is down 5 percent this year and below where it was before Trump’s November 2024 election. Some investors argue that “US economic aggression against allies is eroding the dollar’s ‘global reserve’ status,” explained the Wall Street Journal’s Jon Sindreu. 

Trump called Wednesday’s tariff announcement “our declaration of economic independence.”

World leaders and investors can continue to ignore the president’s revolutionary intentions if they’d like, but it will be at their own ever-growing expense. 

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on X: @FredKempe.

This edition is part of Frederick Kempe’s Inflection Points newsletter, a column of dispatches from a world in transition. To receive this newsletter throughout the week, sign up here.

Trump Tariff Tracker

The second Trump administration has embarked on a novel and aggressive tariff policy to address a range of economic and national security concerns. This tracker monitors the evolution of these tariffs and provides expert context on the economic conditions driving their creation—along with their real-world impact.

The post Why the markets keep getting Trump wrong appeared first on Atlantic Council.

The nonstop use of the word “unprecedented” is justified, but it fails to capture the gravity of what’s happening. As one Trump ally put it to me this past week, the president’s critics have underestimated his determination to deliver on what he has called “a revolution of common sense,” one that will upend everything from transatlantic relations and the future of the Middle East to US foreign assistance and executive authority.

“The genie is out of the bottle,” a senior official from a NATO country told me this past week. He shared that a growing list of European allies are seeking self-sufficiency, concluding that, after eighty years, the era of reliable US security in Europe following World War II is irrevocably over. 

I disagreed with the finality of that observation, as NATO remains in place alongside its cornerstone Article 5, obligating all allied nations to come to the assistance of an attacked member. Greater European defense spending, I argued, is one of the more positive outcomes of the Trump administration’s first weeks.

Yet there’s not a conversation I have with European officials these days in which they aren’t asking fundamental questions: Do they now need their own nuclear weapons? Do they need to expand trade relations with China? Can they defend Ukraine from Russia? Can they help allied Denmark keep control of its autonomous territory of Greenland?

“Woke, weak, and freeloading”

One European ambassador, weary from countless meetings over Trump’s tariffs, summed up the thinking of the Trump officials he meets with: “The consensus is that Europe is woke, weak, and freeloading,” he said. “It’s not a minority view.”

Again this past week, US Vice President JD Vance emerged as the Europe-basher-in-chief through an extraordinary Signal chat among top administration officials that inadvertently included Atlantic Editor in Chief Jeffrey Goldberg, who reported out its details.

In the chat, Vance questioned Trump’s willingness to strike Houthi rebels in Yemen who have been disrupting global shipping that passes through the Red Sea. Vance’s reasoning was that this waterway, through which flows more than 10 percent of global trade, serves Europe more than the United States.

“I just hate bailing Europe out again,” he wrote, to which US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth replied, “I fully share your loathing of European free-loading. It’s PATHETIC.”

You can read more about what the Wall Street Journal called the administration’s accelerating “anti-Europeanism” in the cover story of its latest Weekend Review section, “What Does MAGA Have Against Europe?”

“Europeans,” write authors David Luhnow and Marcus Walker, “even those who thought they were prepared for a second Trump presidency, have been stunned by the speed of events.” 

They cite the Trump administration’s European Union–targeted tariffs, embrace of Russia’s misleading talking points on Ukraine, sidelining of Europeans in peace talks about their own continent, and “watered down” security commitments to allies. 

By Friday, Vance added a new concern for Europe with his visit to Greenland with his wife, Usha, National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, and Secretary of Energy Chris Wright. He endorsed Trump’s ambition to annex this autonomous territory of the Kingdom of Denmark, without mentioning that it is already part of the traditionally US-led NATO alliance. 

Speaking at a US space base above the Arctic Circle, with US military members arrayed behind him, Vance told Greenlanders, “I think that you’d be a lot better coming under the United States’ security umbrella than you have been under Denmark’s security umbrella.” 

This was the same US vice president who a few weeks earlier had stunned Europeans at the Munich Security Conference through his de facto endorsement of the far-right Alternative for Germany political party just days ahead of that country’s election, and through his contention that Europe’s “threat from within” from suppressing free speech was larger than the threats from China or Russia.

“No turning back”

Amid all this, you could be forgiven if you missed last Thursday’s statement by Mark Carney, Canada’s new prime minister, that “the United States is no longer a reliable partner,” a situation from which there was “no turning back.” That came a day before Carney’s call with Trump that the Canadian government praised as “constructive.” The two leaders agreed to negotiate a new economic and security relationship after Canada’s April 28 elections.

Then on Friday, the Trump administration finalized the long-signaled dismantling of the United States Agency for International Development, the government’s primary agency for distributing foreign aid, and fired almost all of the employees at the headquarters of the congressionally funded US Institute of Peace.

If you’re a Wall Street investor, however, you paid more attention this past week to falling consumer settlement, rising inflation, and a new set of 25 percent tariffs on vehicles and auto parts. That was prologue to what Trump has referred to as this coming week’s “liberation day,” the culmination of more tariffs making up his “America First Trade Policy” aimed at revitalizing US manufacturing. That’s likely to exacerbate the markets’ dismal March, which is on pace to be the worst month for US stock performance since December 2022.

In a Truth Social post foreshadowing next week’s announcements, Trump wrote, “For DECADES we have been ripped off and abused by every nation in the world, both friend and foe. Now it is finally time for the Gold Ol’ USA to get some of that MONEY, and RESPECT, BACK.”

Meanwhile Ukraine, the country whose stakes in the United States’ policy directions are existential, received a new draft economic agreement this week from the Trump Treasury Department that would give the United States sweeping powers over the country’s critical minerals and other natural resources. The Wall Street Journal has reported that the fifty-five-page draft is much tougher than the version left unsigned after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s tumultuous, televised Oval Office meeting on February 28.

A senior Ukrainian official told me that Kyiv has come to terms with Washington’s shift from being its leading ally during the Biden administration—when Ukraine’s primary complaint was about the pace, quantity, and quality of the weapons being provided—to being at best a neutral mediator.

“Every revolution has its own logic”

I asked a Trump ally, someone I’ve known for some time, to help me understand the underlying logic of this flurry of activity and the president’s end game. He reminded me of my time as a Wall Street Journal reporter covering the rise of Solidarity in Poland, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the collapse of the Soviet Union.

“What you’re witnessing is a revolution,” he said, “and as you know every revolution has its own logic, its own rules, and its own confusion.” A couple of other acquaintances in Trump world agreed with that assessment, though they added that the more transactional and pragmatic Trump isn’t as revolutionary as some others in the administration who are seeking to drive events.

What we’re experiencing is a revolution against a range of perceived adversaries that vary depending on who you talk to in Trump world. There’s “the Deep State,” which is understood as some mixture of the Central Intelligence Agency, the military, and other long-serving government officials. There’s woke ideology in general in the United States, which is seen to have taken root after eight years of President Barack Obama and four years of President Joe Biden. Similarly, but more pointedly, there is the liberal media. These perceived adversaries also overlap with long-standing grievances, such as those regarding regulatory excesses of the administrative state, federal waste and overspending, and trading partners and military allies that seem to take advantage of US largesse.

Perhaps most important, the revolution is about breaking what Trump administration officials believe needs to be fixed, whether it is foreign assistance or international trade, because previous experience has shown that reforms aren’t possible.

One word of warning here: History shows that revolutions rarely achieve all their goals. But they do inevitably leave behind a great deal of change—some of it lasting and some of it less so. In the short term, the revolutionaries are willing to accept a great deal of intended and unintended harm, whether it be to stock-market values or to federal workers’ livelihoods.

For a deeper understanding of the revolution, a Trump administration official referred me to a new book by Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts, with a forward by Vance, called Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America. (The more inflammatory original title spoke of “Burning Down Washington to Save America” and included a burning match on its cover.)

The promotional language on the publisher’s website says that Roberts is outlining a peaceful “Second American Revolution” for voters looking to shift power back into the hands of the people. “A corrupt and incompetent elite has uprooted our way of life and is brainwashing the next generation. Many so-called conservatives are as culpable as their progressive counterparts . . . Global elites — your time is up.”

“A grand celebration”

How this Trump “revolution” unfolds, if that’s what it is, will depend on many factors, including how the US economy fares, how US voters respond through the 2026 midterm elections, and how US courts and Congress respond to presidential decisions and executive orders that are contested as constitutional overreach.

One Trump administration official urges me to pay particular attention to next year’s 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, for which ambitious plans are already coming together that will make the tall ships of the two hundredth anniversary pale in comparison. There’s already an executive order about that, calling for “a grand celebration worthy of the occasion.”

Trump has never been understated about his intentions.

Just three days after his inauguration, Trump announced before the bastion of global elites, the World Economic Forum in Davos, the beginning of “a Golden Age of America.” Said Trump, “What the world has witnessed in the past seventy-two hours is nothing less than a revolution of common sense. Our country will soon be stronger, wealthier, and more united than ever before, and the entire planet will be more peaceful and prosperous as a result of this incredible momentum, and what we’re doing and going to do.”

History, however, won’t judge him on that audacious rhetoric but rather on his results. What’s at stake is whether his unfolding revolution leaves the United States, its allies, and the world in a better place than he found it. That’s a scorecard of generational consequence.

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on X: @FredKempe.

This edition is part of Frederick Kempe’s Inflection Points newsletter, a column of dispatches from a world in transition. To receive this newsletter throughout the week, sign up here.

The post ‘What you’re witnessing is a revolution.’ Making sense of Trump’s head-spinning moves. appeared first on Atlantic Council.

Trump administration officials will better achieve a just and lasting end to Russia’s unprovoked, illegal, and murderous (all facts) war in Ukraine if they first agree on what motivated Russian President Vladimir Putin to act. It was a revanchist desire to regain a lost empire that begins but doesn’t end with Ukraine. For Putin, any agreement he signs must serve that purpose.

Second, Trump administration officials need to be clear on what Putin is trying to achieve beyond that, beginning with the subjugation of other countries that once belonged to the Soviet bloc, including current members of NATO.

Putin is determined, working in a “no limits” partnership with Beijing, to roll back US global influence and replace it with a world order of Russia and China’s own making. Putin has said so plainly, as has Chinese President Xi Jinping, who has remarked to the Russian leader, “Now there are changes that haven’t happened in a hundred years. When we are together, we drive these changes.”

Peace through strength

With that as context, the best war-ending formula publicly available, one that begins with a deep understanding of those immutable facts, was published in Foreign Affairs this past Friday as “A Plan for Peace Through Strength in Ukraine.” Its authors are consistently wise voices on the United States’ role in the world: Stephen Hadley, a former US national security advisor; Daniel Fried, a former US ambassador to Poland; and Franklin D. Kramer, a former senior Pentagon official.*

The essay’s two most crucial paragraphs suggest a course correction in the Trump administration’s current approach, one involving both Europe and the possibility of NATO membership for Ukraine. This shift is necessary, the authors argue, if the president wants to avoid the fate of “the Biden administration’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan.” 

President Donald Trump was factually correct in his recent address to Congress in saying that then President Joe Biden’s botched withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 demonstrated weakness, which then encouraged Putin to launch his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in early 2022. One can draw a clear line. Building on that lesson, the authors argue that Trump accepting Russia’s “apparent terms for ending the war” risks demonstrating a similar weakness with similar outcomes.

“The best path to end the war will instead follow a ‘peace through strength’ approach,” write the authors. “Such an approach would substantially enhance Europe’s role in supporting Ukraine militarily and economically, with a limited but important backup role for the United States; accept the current lines of control between Russian and Ukrainian forces, without recognizing Russian annexation or sovereignty over Russian-occupied areas; and prepare the path for a negotiated settlement—all while considering, in the likely event that negotiations fail, how to achieve a cease-fire through unilateral action.”

Those last few words regarding the potential need for unilateral action are significant, as Putin is unlikely to accept any deal that would ensure outcomes that would serve Ukrainian, US, and allied interests. 

So, it’s not too early for Trump administration officials to conjure a robust war-ending option absent Russia’s agreement, if Trump wants his place in history to be that of a global hero, worthy of a Nobel Peace Prize. The alternative is to risk falling into the trap of emboldening Putin, à la Biden.

“To pave this path,” the authors write, “Ukraine, Europe, and the United States must focus on four priorities: strengthening Ukraine militarily, applying additional economic pressure on Russia (but relaxing sanctions if it complies with an agreement), addressing Ukrainian security and economic needs through EU membership, and deterring Russia by granting Ukraine NATO membership.”

Nothing in the Foreign Affairs essay is more controversial or necessary than the deterrence value of offering Ukraine NATO membership if the country’s lasting security can’t be guaranteed through a ceasefire and peace agreement—or if Russia breaks an agreement that it signs, which it has a habit of doing.

The authors don’t mention that US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth seemed to take Ukraine’s NATO membership off the table on February 12. It’s unclear whether US negotiators have yet done the same. If so, they should put NATO membership back into the mix, both because history has shown it is the region’s most effective security guarantee and because it provides Trump with powerful leverage.

The author of Trump: The Art of the Deal recently lectured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office that he was playing weak cards. No one understands better than Trump how foolish it would be to throw away your best cards at the beginning of a negotiation.

The Foreign Affairs authors are arguing that it is only the prospect of Alliance membership, should Putin continue to threaten Ukraine or not live by any agreement’s requirements, that would compel him to comply with peace terms. Finnish President Alexander Stubb has made a similar argument.

Write the authors: “A negotiating position based on these four priorities”—Ukraine’s military strength, economic pressure on Moscow, EU membership for Ukraine, and the deterrence value of NATO membership—“will give Ukrainians the confidence to negotiate and Putin the incentive to make negotiations successful.”

Beyond that, they write, to reach an agreement, “U.S. negotiators will have to avoid falling into a Russian trap that focuses first on improving U.S.-Russian relations while deferring the issue of Ukraine so that Russian forces have more time to take more Ukrainian territory.” 

The hard truth about hard power

It’s worth considering other facts as US negotiators proceed.

There is a false notion that NATO provoked Russian intervention in Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014 by agreeing in Bucharest in 2008 that both countries would someday become Alliance members. 

Hadley was on the ground in Bucharest negotiating the agreement on behalf of the Bush administration with recalcitrant German and French officials, who balked at giving those countries firmer and faster guarantees. It was that mushy middle ground that doomed them.

Want proof? Look at the former Soviet bloc countries that did become NATO members after the Cold War. They have remained stable and secure ever since, and they will do so as long as Russia believes that the United States and its NATO allies stand by their “all for one and one for all” security guarantee under the North Atlantic Treaty’s Article 5.

Under the headline “The real reason Russia invaded Ukraine (hint: it’s not NATO expansion),” the Atlantic Council’s Andrew A. Michta writes that much of the public debate about the war in Ukraine “seems increasingly disconnected from reality. The responsibility for the invasion and the carnage is unequivocally Russian President Vladimir Putin’s, and this simple fact ought to be the departure point for any rational path to ending the conflict.”

Michta argues, “The West is responsible not because it sought to redefine the security architecture of Europe’s historical crush zone in a way that favors its interests and the region’s stability and security, but rather because it failed to take the second fundamental step: the West failed to back up the new security architecture with hard power.”

Unlike in the aftermath of World War II, Michta writes, when the United States brought massive amounts of power to stabilize and rebuild Europe and deter any attempts at Soviet aggression against the free world, “the post-Cold War settlement was accompanied by a bewildering degree of disarmament across the collective West.”

Michta worries about a Ukraine deal that not only confirms Russia’s territorial gains, possibly allowing it to absorb the country over time, but also frees Russia to seek further gains, regionally and elsewhere, in its increasingly close partnership with China. 

“Add to this the strategic myopia of key European politicians who, instead of recognizing what their weakness has wrought, speak instead about ‘being abandoned by America,’ and you have the perfect storm brewing just over the horizon,” writes Michta.

Michta usefully reminds readers that deterrence requires both military capabilities and the willingness to use them. “If you have neither,” he writes, “the correct term is ‘appeasement,’ with all that this is likely to entail down the line.”

Put most simply, the Trump administration’s negotiations with Russia will either deter or appease Putin’s well-telegraphed ambitions. The peace plan outlined in Foreign Affairs is a good place to start if Trump wants to avoid appeasement. 

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on X: @FredKempe.

This edition is part of Frederick Kempe’s Inflection Points newsletter, a column of dispatches from a world in transition. To receive this newsletter throughout the week, sign up here.

Note: Stephen Hadley is an executive vice chair of the Atlantic Council board of directors, Daniel Fried the Council’s Weiser family distinguished fellow, and Franklin D. Kramer a board member.

The post Here’s a Ukraine peace plan Trump can use to deter—not appease—Putin appeared first on Atlantic Council.

Speaking with Kelly Evans on CNBC’s The Exchange as the meeting transpired, I said that it was “highest-level geopolitics as reality TV.” It all would have been so very entertaining, if the stakes weren’t of generational importance. That seemed to have been lost in the room where it happened. 

Others will write about how Zelenskyy should respond now and what mistakes he, Trump, and Vance might have made. It’s uncertain now whether the Ukraine-US link is irrevocably broken (I hope not) and whether Kyiv and Washington can find their way back to a critical minerals deal that had been mostly negotiated (I hope so).

As British Prime Minister Keir Starmer convenes eighteen European leaders in London on Sunday, the larger and more significant question, just forty days and forty nights (why not pick a biblical framing?) into Trump 2.0, is this: What does the Oval Office bust-up tell us about what pundits already are framing as the Trump World Order? We all sense something has dramatically changed in Trump’s transformation of how the United States views its global role. US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s move this weekend to order up to three thousand additional troops to the US southern border, including twenty-ton Stryker combat vehicles, provides further evidence, but of what exactly?

Since the inauguration

Those paid to think great thoughts are at pains to describe what’s unfolding in some understood analytical construct.

I’m reluctant to do so myself yet, as I don’t think Trump himself thinks in a deeply philosophical way about global order. It’s also far from certain that he can sustain his current course of domestic disruption and international change.

Conversations I had this week with three significant Trump campaign donors, who understandably spoke anonymously, underscored a growing concern among Republican ranks about the early chaos they discern in the administration’s actions.

They all mentioned how optimistic they had been a month ago, ready to do anything to support Trump’s pro-growth and deregulatory agenda. Now, they told me, they and other business leaders are slowing investments, rethinking the timing of acquisitions and initial public offerings, and withholding public support. They are also expressing concern to GOP senators and House members and individuals close to Trump.

They worry about federal layoffs, some with national-security consequences, which could build an anti-Trump constituency among hard-working, patriotic, effective federal workers. They also are concerned about Trump’s announced tariffs and threats of future ones, which they say have already driven up their costs and fueled inflation. And they don’t believe Trump’s advisers have yet dared to share with him the extent of the economic harm such policies could cause.

Markets, which are said to be Trump’s scorecard, are skittish. In February, the Dow Jones Industrial Average and S&P 500 fell by around 2 percent, while the Nasdaq Composite lost 4 percent. In contrast, European markets rose moderately in February, and, following a surge of optimism about Chinese startup DeepSeek’s artificial intelligence model, the Hang Seng Index ended the month up more than 13 percent.

“Wouldn’t it be ironic if the 2025 Trump trade was an anti-Trump trade, buying stocks in the places President Trump targets?” wrote James Mackintosh in the Wall Street Journal on Friday. “This year, Canadian, Colombian, Mexican, European, and Chinese technology stocks are all outpacing the S&P 500, the dollar is down and the Magnificent Seven big tech companies—five of whose CEOs stood behind the president at his inauguration—have stopped leading the US market up and turned into laggards.”

Trump World Order 101

As I wrote from Dubai in mid-February, geopolitics traditionally has been about three-dimensional chessboards and calculated moves by skilled statesman and diplomats, who achieve sometimes marginal and sometimes significant gains. This approach was embodied by long-time (and now late) Atlantic Council board members Henry Kissinger, Brent Scowcroft, and Zbigniew Brzezinski. 

Today, that chessboard is toppled, and readers should be wary of anyone who claims to be certain where the pieces will land. But with that warning, here are some initial musings about the Trump World Order worth considering as the future takes shape. 

Writing in Foreign Policy, author and thinker Robert D. Kaplan calls Trump “ahistorical,” ready to cast off the long-accepted foreign policy traditions, forged through World War II and its aftermath, that made the United States the world’s preeminent power.

The United States was a country with leaders, by and large, ready to make sacrifices, however imperfectly, that they hoped would be for the sake of a better world. Most significantly, writes Kaplan, US leaders were out to “achieve the Wilsonian ideal of establishing a bastion of freedom and democracy in a large part of the European continent.”

Trump is “unappreciative of the postwar saga of the West,” Kaplan writes, and thus the US president has no intellectual starting point that would lead him to embrace, emotionally or intellectually, Zelenskyy’s existential battle for freedom, which is so consistent with what the United States has supported for the past eighty years.

Writes Kaplan: “NATO is a mere acronym to him, not a connotation of humankind’s largest ever military alliance, which emerged out of the struggle against Nazi fascism.”

At a press conference this past week that foreshadowed the Zelenskyy showdown, Trump himself proudly boasted, “My administration is making a decisive break with the foreign policy values of the past administration and, frankly, the past.”

So, if that past doesn’t provide his moorings, what does?

Alex Younger, the former chief of British foreign intelligence service MI6, said in a much-noticed exchange last week on BBC’s Newsnight, “We are in a new era where, by and large, international relations aren’t going to be determined by rules and multilateral institutions. They are going to be determined by strongmen and deals.” 

Younger, quoted in Ishaan Tharoor’s compelling Washington Post column, notes that that’s a mindset Trump shares with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping.

If you agree with Younger, then it’s easier to fathom why the Trump administration so easily set aside all post–World War II tradition at the United Nations last Monday by voting alongside Russia, North Korea, Belarus, and, as Tharoor puts it, “a clutch of West African juntas.” The United States joined this unsavory group in voting against a resolution condemning Russian aggression on the third anniversary of Putin’s illegal, unprovoked war on Ukraine.

The Wilson Center’s Michael Kimmage, a historian and Russia scholar, writes in the newest issue of Foreign Affairs: “In this geopolitical environment, the already tenuous idea of ‘the West’ will recede even further—and consequently, so will the status of Europe, which in the post–Cold War era had been Washington’s partner in representing ‘the Western world.’” 

Like Younger, Kimmage sees the Trump World Order as a throwback favoring nationalist strongmen, like Putin, Xi, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Zelenskyy, by this measure, doesn’t make the Trump table, despite his wartime heroics. This means that the Ukrainian president can be dismissed, as he was by Trump on Friday, as a poker player without the right cards.  

“They are self-styled strongmen who place little stock in rules-based systems, alliances, or multinational forums,” writes Kimmage. “They embrace the once and future glory of the countries they govern, asserting an almost mystical mandate for their rule.”

One helpful recent reference Trump has made to history has been his admiration for William McKinley, the twenty-fifth US president, who served from 1897 until his assassination in 1901. Trump appears to admire this little-remembered president for his realignment of the Republican Party, his economic nationalism (read: tariffs), and his territorial expansion, including the annexation of Puerto Rico, Guam, the Philippines, and Hawaii.

If Ukraine fails

Back at the World Economic Forum, in the first days of the Trump administration, I observed that Trump was as much a symptom as a driver of our times. The post–Cold War period, I wrote, is giving way to “global fragmentation, protectionist trends, greater instability (including wars in Europe and the Middle East), and a rising tide of government involvement in picking winners and losers.” As Nir Bar Dea, CEO of Bridgewater Associates, told me then, “What people in Davos understand is that, today, what’s in this one person’s mind will be massively important.”

With every new day in his second administration, Trump becomes less symptom and more driver. Friday morning, I was ready to declare on CNBC a stunning reversal of Ukraine-US relations, from Trump’s declaring Zelenskyy a “dictator” and embracing the murderous autocrat Putin to Trump’s signing a long-term investment in a free Ukraine’s future. The Atlantic Council’s John Herbst, a former US ambassador to Ukraine, shared that assessment.

Was that wishful thinking?

I’m not ready yet to join the parade of pundits declaring the demise of Ukraine, the end of the transatlantic alliance, or the beginning of an American strongman. I’m not ready to accept a United States that would abandon Ukraine in its existential struggle, which is as much in the United States’ interests as it is in Ukraine’s.

What’s clear to me, however, is that it’s time for those around Trump who believe in Ukraine and in the United States’ transatlantic mission to argue their case strongly, before defeatist punditry becomes unfortunate reality. 

The Wall Street Journal, in a powerful lead editorial on Saturday, wrote that the point of what it called the “Oval Office Spectacle” was supposed to have been “progress toward an honorable peace for Ukraine, and in the event the winner was Russia’s Vladimir Putin.” Continued the editorial board, “Turning Ukraine over to Mr. Putin would be catastrophic for that country and Europe, but it would be a political calamity for Mr. Trump, too.”

A free Ukraine has always been about more than Ukraine, just as a free West Berlin was always about more than Germany during the Cold War. If Ukraine fails, everything the United States achieved through World War II and the Cold War to create a freer, more prosperous, more secure, and more democratic world is in jeopardy. 

One can only hope that the next episode in this geopolitical reality show produces a plot twist that puts the United States, the transatlantic community, and a free Ukraine back on course.

Trump loves to confound critics who underestimate him. This is still his script to write. Here’s hoping the “ahistorical” president seizes the historic moment.

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on X: @FredKempe.

This edition is part of Frederick Kempe’s Inflection Points newsletter, a column of dispatches from a world in transition. To receive this newsletter throughout the week, sign up here.

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While US President Donald Trump’s first weeks in office have his allies reeling and Americans uncertain as they sort out his torrent of executive orders, Beijing is orchestrating a masterclass of reinvention and resolve.

It all began in late January with artificial intelligence (AI) startup DeepSeek’s surprising debut, which jolted US stock markets. That was followed this past week by Chinese President Xi Jinping’s public mending of fences with his country’s sidelined business elites, and an ongoing surge in Chinese capital-market prices, driven by tech stocks. And that has been accompanied by a surprisingly cordial beginning with the new Trump administration despite Beijing’s unsettling military assertiveness.

To be sure, none of China’s underlying problems have vanished. Its economy is growing too slowly, and its debt issues continue to cast a cloud over the property sector. Few serious experts think that the Chinese economy will reach its 5 percent growth target this year. In addition, Beijing’s demographic problems are a generational challenge. And Xi’s insistence on strict Chinese Communist Party control remains a disincentive for investment.

At this moment, two stories are being told about China, RAND researcher Gerard DiPippo pointed out in a recent analysis. China is racing ahead as an economic and technological powerhouse, and China’s economy is slowing under the weight of its mounting problems. “Although these narratives appear contradictory, both are true,” DiPippo argues.

Seek the limelight

No development marked a more powerful shift in the global mood toward China than the release and immediate success of DeepSeek’s reasoning model. Once shrouded in mystery, the breakthrough is now the symbol of China’s potential to rival the United States at less cost and despite export controls on the most advanced US microchips. 

In areas where many have assumed that US companies are in the lead—AI, data analytics, quantum computing—Beijing has declared “game on.” Countries that have been betting tens of billions of dollars on the United States’ technological edge are now left wondering just how quickly China will be able to close any technological gap.  

If DeepSeek caught investors off guard about Chinese capability to compete on AI, Xi surprised them again on February 17 with a high-profile, deeply choreographed meeting with Chinese business leaders. It was a shift by Xi, who had sidelined some of these leaders in recent years as he consolidated power, sensing that their growing success might be a threat to party and state control.

The most unexpected attendee at Xi’s meeting was Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma, who had fallen afoul of the party after he publicly complained about overregulation in October 2020. It remains a safe bet that Xi doesn’t intend to cede state control to the private sector, but his urgent need for economic growth means that he must provide it more leash. At the same time, he is sending a message to markets.  

Take the lead

Global investors have responded with one of the biggest market surprises of 2025: the comeback of the Chinese tech sector, which many global investors had abandoned in recent years due to Xi’s regulatory crackdown.

The Hang Seng Tech Index, which tracks Chinese stocks traded in Hong Kong, surged 6.5 percent alone this past Friday. Shares of Alibaba, now with more official blessing, rose 15 percent that same day after robust sales growth. Since the beginning of the year, Chinese stocks have outperformed many of their US counterparts. 

Many global investors are now willing to place bets on Beijing’s new direction, even as they begin to hedge on uncertainties related to the Trump administration’s actions and potential US inflation.

Washington’s recalibration

Trump himself is fueling this change of mood regarding China. Having threatened tariffs as high as 60 percent against China during his presidential campaign, his softening of tone as president has soothed Chinese nerves. Trump’s gestures have included an invitation to Xi to attend his inauguration, an executive order that has brought a reprieve to the banning of TikTok, and an imposition of a relatively modest 10 percent tariff on China that Chinese leaders seem to have received with more relief than disdain.

If relations between China and the United States in recent months seemed to be a powder keg ready to ignite, then Trump appears to have pulled the fuse. He has done this through his willingness to engage with Beijing and his apparent lack of concern for Xi’s gathering autocratic challenge to US global leadership, including China increasingly acting in concert with Russia, Iran, and North Korea.

Trump’s dramatic recalibration this past week regarding Russian President Vladimir Putin further boosted Xi—someone whom Trump, only days earlier in Davos, had blamed for complicity in Russia’s war against Ukraine. While the Biden administration often warned that losing Ukraine would only encourage China in its aspirations to gain control of Taiwan, the Trump administration appears less convinced of the connection.  

China also rightly senses a potential opening among Washington’s European allies and even with Ukraine. Despite China’s support for Putin’s war, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has been careful not to close the door to engaging with Beijing. China has even signaled its willingness to provide troops for a peacekeeping role in Ukraine, while Trump has ruled out the use of US soldiers for such purposes.

Beijing’s maneuvers

China may sense another opening, as well. Beijing’s military moves in the past month underscore that Xi sees little downside to greater military assertiveness in the first days of the new Trump administration.

Last week, New Zealand’s government said that the Chinese navy held live-fire drills in international waters off its coast. This came just a day after Chinese vessels staged a similar drill off Australia’s southwestern coast that forced some commercial airlines to divert their flights.

During the recent Lunar New Year celebrations, China’s People’s Liberation Army increased military maneuvers around Taiwan. And on February 18, a Chinese navy helicopter flew within ten feet of a Philippine patrol plane in an effort to force it out of disputed skies.

“You are flying too close, you are very dangerous,” the Philippine pilot warned by radio.

It adds up to a remarkable start of the year for China. The emergence of DeepSeek, Xi’s olive branch to Ma and others, an ongoing market rally led by tech stocks, Trump’s conciliatory approach amid Beijing’s muscular military posturing—all contribute to increased Chinese confidence in 2025, which is the Year of the Snake, symbolizing transformation and the shedding of negativity.

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on X: @FredKempe.

This edition is part of Frederick Kempe’s Inflection Points newsletter, a column of dispatches from a world in transition. To receive this newsletter throughout the week, sign up here.

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Americans alongside allies defeated Imperial Germany in World War I and Nazi Germany in World War II, only thereafter to help rebuild and democratize West Germany, or the Federal Republic, laying the groundwork for its peaceful reunification in 1990 as both a NATO and European Union member.

It’s only with that as context that one hears the weight of likely next German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s election-night mention of the need for “independence” from Washington, even before the final vote results were in. It’s worth reading his full quote.

“My absolute priority will be to strengthen Europe as quickly as possible so that, step by step, we can really achieve independence from the USA,” said Merz, one of the most authentic Atlanticists I’ve known. “I never thought I would have to say something like this on a television program. But after Donald Trump’s statements last week at the latest, it is clear that Americans, at least this part of the Americans, this administration, are largely indifferent to the fate of Europe.”

It’s also with an understanding of Germany’s centrality to European history over the past two centuries—both its worst and best parts—that one can fully digest Merz’s warning the day after the election that it is “five minutes to midnight” in Europe.

With that, Merz underscored the immediacy of the economic, security, and geopolitical challenges facing Germany and Europe.

Merz may be the most pro-business chancellor Germans have elected since World War II, but his Christian Democrats face the country’s near-zero growth with just 28.6 percent of the vote, their second worst outcome since the war. Their likely coalition partners, the Social Democrats, at 16.4 percent, scored their worst result since 1887, even worse than March 1933, when Adolf Hitler came to power.

The real winners this week were the far-right Alternative for Germany party, or AfD, which doubled its vote to 20.8 percent, and the far-left Die Linke, with 8.8 percent. With a third of all the votes in the Bundestag resting with the far right and the far left, they have the power to block the sort of constitutional changes Merz would need to spur the growth and defense spending Germany can only achieve through lifting its debt brake.

Are things as bad in the transatlantic relationship as Merz suggests? 

One hopes not, and US President Donald Trump can change rhetoric and policy on a pfennig. However, it would be short-sighted for European leaders not to grasp the urgent need for greater self-reliance, particularly as the United States today voted against a United Nations General Assembly resolution condemning Russia on the third anniversary of its war of aggression on Ukraine—going against all the European allies and siding with Russia and its friends. 

Is the clock ticking down as fast as Merz says on European security and economic threats? 

Merz is a keen enough observer to know the severity of the situation. He’s also a good enough politician to realize that he’ll only have the leverage to address it if voters recognize the gathering dangers.

Most importantly, Merz knows that if he and his prospective coalition partners don’t act decisively now, those far-right and far-left numbers will grow, and German history shows us where that leads. 

What Merz has identified is the historic moment. The coming months will determine how he rises to it.

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on X: @FredKempe.

This edition is part of Frederick Kempe’s Inflection Points newsletter, a column of dispatches from a world in transition. To receive this newsletter throughout the week, sign up here.

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In a conversation with me on the sidelines of the Munich gathering, Stubb focused on the long game while other European leaders were still reeling from US Vice President JD Vance’s broadside attack on European democracy and his de facto endorsement of Germany’s furthest right party ahead of the country’s elections on Sunday. 

“We rationalize the past, overdramatize the present, and underestimate the future,” he told me, laying out his thinking on how to responsibly end Russia’s war in Ukraine in the days ahead. He envisioned a process in three distinct stages. First pre-negotiations would focus on strengthening Ukraine’s position. A ceasefire would follow that establishes a line of contact, confidence-building measures, security arrangements, and peace modalities. Then, and only then, peace negotiations would take place that not only end the war but also ensure Ukrainian sovereignty, independence, and integration into Western institutions.   

Yet Stubb’s step-by-step thinking about the future was quickly overwhelmed this week by the inescapable dramas of the present—a flurry of events and exchanges as jarring as going from a sauna to a cold bath. The developments of recent days have underscored discord in US-European relations amid peril to Ukraine, all without offering a convincing path forward and at a moment when common cause is urgently needed.  

The drama began with meetings of US and Russian officials in Saudi Arabia aimed at ending the war in Ukraine and repairing the relationship between the two countries, included a gathering of European officials in Paris who were excluded from Riyadh, and featured an unfortunate spat between US President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. 

In a Truth Social post, Trump echoed Kremlin propaganda in branding the freely elected Ukrainian president as “A Dictator without Elections” and asserting that “Zelenskyy better move fast or he is not going to have a Country left.” That followed Zelenskyy’s comment that Trump is operating in a “disinformation space,” a response to Trump blaming Ukraine for starting Russian President Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked and illegal war.

While all that was unfolding, speculation also circulated that China might consider deploying its soldiers in a peacekeeping role as part of a ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine, stepping into a vacuum US and many European leaders appear unwilling to fill. Such an outcome could grant China an unprecedented role in Europe. 

In our conversation, Stubb zoomed out from all this. He echoed my own frequent argument in this space that we are confronting an inflection point of historic dimensions—what I have referred to as the fourth such moment since the end of World War I.   

“This is the 1918, 1945, and 1989 moment of our generation,” he said, later repeating that view in a must-read Foreign Policy interview.  

If one assesses and responds to the current moment in the wrong ways, as the United States did after World War I, the consequences could be equally devastating. In that case, what followed was the spread of fascism, the Holocaust, and World War II. With the memory of those two wars front of mind, US and allied leaders got the period after 1945 right, creating the global institutions and practices that brought the world an unprecedented period of prosperity and peace among major powers.     

Stubb sees the post–Cold War period that began in 1989 as one of intellectual “laziness.” Referencing the political scientist Francis Fukuyama and his book The End of History and the Last Man, the Finnish president regrets that period’s assumption that liberal democracy and globalization had triumphed, which prompted leaders to neglect doing what was necessary to sustain and build upon their historic gains.

At the World Economic Forum in January 2024, Jake Sullivan, then serving as national security advisor in the Biden administration, took a stab at describing the era currently dawning as one of “strategic competition in an age of interdependence.” Others have branded it an “age of unpeace” and “an era of disorder.” It’s too early to know what to call our emerging times, but the present period already threatens to be a dangerous interregnum as an old order dies before another is born.    

Into this historic moment—featuring war in Europe, ongoing conflict in the Middle East, tensions with China, and a historic contest for the commanding heights of artificial intelligence and other disruptive technologies—American voters brought Trump back to office. He is a commander-in-chief who is as impatient with ponderous discussions about history as he is eager to shape it as one of its consequential figures.  

Trump does have an opportunity to cement his place in history and preserve the hard-won gains of the post–World War II era. But his next steps are crucial. To achieve the best possible outcome, three underlying principles should guide the US president.

1. There is no world in which a weaker, more fragmented transatlantic community preoccupied with infighting is in the interest of either the United States or Europe. No relationship is more foundational to shaping the global future.
2. There is no world in which a slow-growing, over-regulated, insufficiently innovative Europe—unable to sufficiently defend itself from a revanchist Russia—is in either European or US interests. Europeans refer to the Trump administration’s attacks as a wake-up call on all these fronts, but the alarm can only ring so many times before Europe pays the price of irrelevance for failing to respond. 
3. There is no world in which inviting China into a peacekeeping role in Ukraine is prudent. China’s potential willingness to step into such a role should be a wake-up call to Trump and European leaders to settle their dispute quickly. Chinese involvement in maintaining peace in Ukraine would be like giving the henhouse to a fox, as without Beijing’s support Putin would have been unable to sustain his murderous war.     

Perhaps Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski described the historic test for Trump most succinctly, speaking to an Atlantic Council event in Munich. “The credibility of the United States depends on how this war ends. Not just the Trump administration, the United States itself,” he said.

Any perceived or actual sellout to Russia’s despot would leave an indelible stain on the Trump administration and US global leadership with generational consequences. 

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on X: @FredKempe.

This edition is part of Frederick Kempe’s Inflection Points newsletter, a column of dispatches from a world in transition. To receive this newsletter throughout the week, sign up here.

The post The week that shook Europe—and the historic test ahead appeared first on Atlantic Council.

At the same time, I reflected on the dramatic changes in global affairs in the more than thirty years since the Cold War’s end, which have included a rising China, a revanchist Russia, closer relations among US adversaries, an intensifying competition for technology’s commanding heights in the age of artificial intelligence, and so much more. 

The Atlantic Council’s mission of “shaping the global future” alongside partners and allies has not just endured through all these changes but also become even more essential. We’ve grown and remained relevant—and, in some matters, preeminent—because we’ve responded to global challenges that have become more complex and multifaceted. To do so, we’ve expanded our regional programs to reach most corners of the globe. We’ve also expanded our substantive work by deepening our global focus on issues that include technology, energy, economics, and interlocking security issues, which have always been a particular strength.  

We have grown our work alongside the US government as well amid questions around whether and how the United States will continue to lead as it faces advancing rivals. It is in this context that we have responded to the Trump administration’s decision through executive order on January 20 to pause US foreign assistance for ninety days.  

First and foremost, it’s not surprising that President Donald Trump, following his electoral victory, is insisting that such assistance be aligned with US interests and his own foreign policy goals. Beyond that, Trump isn’t the first US president who has wanted to reduce federal waste and increase government efficiency, though the speed, tools, and means with which he is doing so may be unprecedented.  

We hope that after this pause and review, the Trump administration will green light ongoing work that advances US interests. We are committed to working with the Trump administration to further those interests, just as we have worked with the previous twelve US presidential administrations since the Atlantic Council’s founding in 1961. That includes our work during the first Trump administration, on high-priority issues such as responding to a new era of sharper great power competition with China, deepening diplomatic normalization in the Middle East through the Abraham Accords, enhancing economic engagement between the United States and Africa, making sure the United States remains at the forefront of artificial intelligence, and countering the increasing influence of authoritarian adversaries around the world in a digital age.

We welcome Trump administration scrutiny because we firmly believe that our work advances US economic, geopolitical, and national security interests, consistent with the administration’s goals. As a nonprofit and nonpartisan organization, the Atlantic Council always strives to execute its work in the public interest, not for shareholders or profits. Although federal funds comprise a relatively small amount of the Atlantic Council’s total funding, they support some of our most robust and meaningful work.

As a result of stop-work orders, for example, we have had to suspend projects on top Trump administration priorities, such as countering the malign influence of the Chinese Communist Party, increasing pressure on Iran, and ensuring US technological leadership. 

In Latin America, we have paused the training of local journalists to better monitor Chinese Communist Party actions, including corruption, influence campaigns, and problematic infrastructure projects. We also have paused a planned project to counter Chinese intellectual-property theft of advanced technologies in Europe and the Indo-Pacific, as well as another project to reduce growing Chinese financial influence in the Western Balkans. 

Additionally, we have paused work that applies pressure on Iran for its repression at home and malign activities abroad, including Tehran’s targeting of US nationals who speak out against its actions. This initiative expands efforts to hold Iran and its officials accountable by isolating them on the international stage. Another paused project focuses on investigating and documenting evidence of Tehran’s criminal activities in Syria—work that has heightened importance after the fall of the Assad regime and as a new Syrian government takes power, ideally stripped of malign Iranian influence. 

We have halted multiple programs aimed at advancing US leadership in an era of rapid technological change in places around the world where the way that China designs, funds, and governs technology is gaining ground. These programs help align partners with the United States, build capacity in emerging markets to adopt US technology, and demonstrate the high stakes of tech competition in an age of artificial intelligence—with each outcome critical to US security and prosperity. 

In these cases and others, we often are chosen for these awards due to our capability to effectively and economically support US policy goals. At a time when China has been increasing its overseas spending to disrupt US leadership around the world, permanently cutting off funding for this sort of independent research, engagement, and action would only weaken US influence. China, Iran, Russia, and other adversaries would be the biggest winners. Alternatively, a continuation of these programs will allow us to enhance and promote US interests abroad in line with the administration’s policy goals.

Trump’s second term comes at a far more perilous moment than his first. He confronts a war in Europe, a continued conflict in the Middle East, and increasing tensions with China. At the same time, he must rise to an ever-fiercer contest over technological change and a coalition of aggressors—China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran—that have made clear they are working in common cause. Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping have boasted of a “no limits” partnership designed to counter and ultimately replace US global leadership.

As a nonpartisan organization, the Atlantic Council steers clear of party politics, but we have never been shy about advocating for US interests. We equip policymakers with the insights and analysis necessary to make informed decisions in an increasingly complex global environment.

We are driven by our enduring mission of galvanizing constructive US leadership and engagement in the world, in partnership with allies and partners, to shape solutions to generational challenges. In that spirit, we embrace the US president’s view, expressed in his World Economic Forum speech in 2018 and repeated since then: “‘America first’ does not mean ‘America alone.’”

Though we are nonpartisan, we are not neutral. We have always been guided by enduring US values and principles, such as a strong national defense and strong alliances, respect for individual rights, free and fair market economies, and rule of law. Our work reflects the complexity of the issues we address, and the Atlantic Council maintains strict intellectual independence for all of its projects and publications. Our experts are sometimes constructively critical of the policies of both Democratic and Republican administrations, while working alongside elected leaders to bring about the best possible outcomes. We seek to provide light, not heat. We have carried out this work for more than six decades, through presidential assassination, wars, impeachments, a pandemic, and civil strife. This is who we are.

Whatever is decided following the ninety-day pause in foreign-assistance funding, we will double down on our efforts at this challenging moment in history to work alongside the Trump administration to advance US interests in a better, freer, fairer, safer, and more prosperous world.

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on X: @FredKempe.

This edition is part of Frederick Kempe’s Inflection Points newsletter, a column of dispatches from a world in transition. To receive this newsletter throughout the week, sign up here.

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Putin’s infamous speech attacking the “unipolar world,” which he blamed the United States for creating, signaled the start of a more confrontational Russian approach to the collective West. 

“What is a unipolar world?” the Russian leader asked his audience in Munich. “It is a world in which there is one master, one sovereign,” said Putin, looking toward the shocked Americans in the audience. “And at the end of the day this is pernicious not only for all those within this system, but also for the sovereign itself because it destroys itself from within . . . The unipolar model is not only unacceptable but also impossible in today’s world.” 

What followed his speech in 2007 has had murderous, generational consequences. Russian boys born in that year are now old enough to be conscripted and sent off to fight in what US President Donald Trump recently called the “killing fields” in Ukraine. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, more than one million Ukrainians and Russians have been killed or injured. 

Putin never hid his direction—the 2008 invasion of Georgia, then the seizure of Ukraine’s Crimea in 2014 and an intervention in Syria that kept dictator Bashar al-Assad in power. No wonder Putin thinks he can get away with his rogue behavior again in the face of a distracted and inconsistent democratic community.

Learning from history

The Munich conference convenes again this year, for its sixty-first time, at a similarly significant moment. And the conference’s participants may yet again witness history, set in motion by the newly reelected Trump and a flurry of activity aimed at ending Putin’s illegal, unprovoked three-year-old war on Ukraine.

In this Bavarian capital and beyond, it’s become something of a cliché to warn those tempted to appease despots not to become a contemporary Neville Chamberlain, in reference to the British prime minister who signed the Munich Agreement on September 30, 1938. That pact ceded the German-speaking Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia to Adolf Hitler’s Germany.

So it’s not surprising that some European officials arriving in town are worried that Trump risks walking into the same sort of trap after his ninety-minute call with Putin this week. They fear that by negotiating away the 20 percent of Ukrainian territory that Russia has occupied, the US president will bring about an end to the immediate hostilities but not to Putin’s expansionist ambitions.    

However, if Trump digests the lessons of Munich 2007 and 1938, he could build upon and not reverse hard-won, US-backed gains in Europe after World War II and the Cold War. That is the assignment of the moment.

The lesson of 2007 is to take Putin at his word when he says that he intends to remake the European order and make Ukraine his own. The lesson of 1938 is that Trump must focus on what he rightly calls “peace through strength,” knowing that appeasing despots never ends well.

Making history

For those in Munich or watching the conference from afar, it’s worth studying the Trump administration’s whirlwind of activity in recent days toward negotiating an end to Moscow’s aggression in Ukraine. There are both encouraging and concerning signals.

Among the positive signs is one that has received little attention: Trump dispatched Scott Bessent, the new secretary of the Treasury, to Ukraine to explore a possible deal that reportedly involves US military aid in exchange for Ukrainian rare-earth and other critical minerals—resources that increasingly make up the supply chain of modern influence and power in the world.

“The prospect of a deal between Ukraine and the US regarding arms for Ukrainian minerals may actually be more important than other developments,” John Herbst, a former US ambassador to Ukraine and now the Atlantic Council’s most significant voice on the conflict as senior director of its Eurasia Center, told me. Estimates suggest that Ukraine has trillions of dollars’ worth of rare-earth and other critical minerals, he notes. “That gives Trump reason to send Ukraine arms now, which would be a clear signal to Putin that further military operations may be fruitless, but also to make sure that any peace deal vouchsafes the security and economic viability of Ukraine.”

As for causes for concern, critics argue that the president and his cabinet are ceding too many negotiating points before peace talks start. US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said during a meeting of NATO defense ministers that Ukraine has to abandon its dreams of joining the Alliance and “illusionary goal” of recovering all territory lost to Russia since 2014 as part of a peace deal.

“It’s certainly an innovative approach to a negotiation to make very major concessions even before they have started,” Carl Bildt, an Atlantic Council International Advisory Board member and a former Swedish prime minister, wrote on social media on Wednesday. 

The fact that Trump first phoned Putin and only afterward spoke to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy also raises concerns. So too does the notion that Trump’s peace negotiations will start “immediately” and bilaterally with the Russians.

Writes the Washington Post’s David Ignatius, “The chummy tone of the American and Russian statements led some Ukraine supporters to worry that Trump and Putin might be ready to do a deal over Kyiv’s head—with concessions that reward Russian aggression and leave Ukraine vulnerable to future attacks.”

At the same time, Ignatius points to encouraging signs beyond Bessent’s deal-making—namely Hegseth expressing support for “a sovereign and prosperous Ukraine” and stating that any peace deal “must include robust security guarantees to ensure that the war will not begin again,” backed by capable European and non-European (though not US) troops.

Sorting signal from noise, the Atlantic Council’s Dan Fried, a former US assistant secretary of state for Europe, assesses that “the administration’s emerging Ukraine strategy could still be the basis for a decent outcome if the United States resists recognition of Russian illegal aggression against Ukraine, if it keeps NATO membership for Ukraine on the table and refuses to negotiate it with Russia, and if the United States and Europe can work out a military plan to support a backup force inside Ukraine.”

Hence why, as the Munich Security Conference opens, there is a palpable sense here that the city might again be a place where history is made—with US Vice President JD Vance, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and a large US congressional delegation all on hand.   

To paraphrase the philosopher George Santayana, Trump can best avoid repeating Munich’s tragic history by remembering it.  

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on X: @FredKempe.

This edition is part of Frederick Kempe’s Inflection Points newsletter, a column of dispatches from a world in transition. To receive this newsletter throughout the week, sign up here.

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On the sidelines of the World Governments Summit (WGS) here, a senior Middle Eastern official smiles and says that US President Donald Trump seems determined to upend that board early in his second term, then rearrange the pieces for an accelerated competition with rules of his own making.

Between the optimists and the pessimists

For those here who view this shift optimistically, Trump is a leader whose nonideological, transactional pragmatism could result in “great-power deconfliction” at a moment when it is most needed. Trump can, the thinking goes, negotiate better arrangements with Iran, China, and Russia that could defuse interlocking dangers across three regions that have made 2025 one of the most perilous years of our lifetimes. 

For the pessimists, Trump’s failure to consider the second-order impacts from his flurry of early actions and pronouncements is perilous stuff. He’s undervaluing alliances and important partnerships, they say, through ill-considered tariffs and proposals aimed at emptying Gaza, which could send large numbers of Palestinian refugees into neighboring countries. That could produce instability in the region, prompt some friends to hedge their bets, and encourage adversaries to seek advantage.

WGS, an annual event that this year includes some four thousand participants from 150 countries, is a good place to sound out the response to the early days of the Trump administration and its potential geopolitical consequences. (I came to Dubai as part of the Atlantic Council’s knowledge partnership with WGS, where the Council is hosting the Geotechnology and Policy Forum, focused this year on commercial space issues.)

For the optimists, Trump’s determination to end Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine, a “killing field,” as the US president vividly described it at the World Economic Forum in Davos, could help stabilize Europe. If he achieved an end to the war properly, Trump could secure Ukrainian sovereignty and its Western integration, though at the cost of some territory.

His willingness to engage with China to find a better trade and economic outcome is particularly popular in this region, where Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) are among China’s top energy suppliers. Middle Eastern officials see as olive branches Trump’s relatively modest 10 percent tariffs on China, instead of the threatened 60 percent, his invitation to Chinese President Xi Jinping to attend his inauguration, and his executive order pausing the TikTok ban.

The officials I have spoken with here see an additional positive signal regarding China from the influence wielded by billionaire businessman Elon Musk, who will be speaking here by video link on Thursday. Musk has deep investments in the country and ties to Chinese leadership.

On Iran, a country that for the first time this month sent four navy vessels to the UAE for a meeting with Emirati naval vessels, officials here note that Trump has said that he would prefer a deal with Iran to “bombing the hell out of it.” Though no officials here would say this on the record, they much prefer the tougher Trump approach to Iran over what they’ve seen in Democratic administrations, but sans military escalation.

Great expectations for AI

The problem here comes with a growing perception that countries in the region, including Saudi Arabia and the UAE, can’t rely on a consistent US commitment. The consensus view is that US focus on the region has been in relative decline since the Obama administration, except for a surge of military and political support for Israel after the October 7, 2023, Hamas terror attacks.

At the same time, the desire for US consistency and commitment grows in rough proportion to each additional investment from the two countries. Saudi Arabia and the UAE have invested tens of billions of dollars—soon to be hundreds of billions of dollars—in US companies, and artificial intelligence (AI) ventures in particular.

The UAE has made clear its intention to be a global AI investment and development leader. Just this week, Bloomberg reported that MGX, the UAE’s tech investment vehicle that has already invested in OpenAI and xAI, is in talks to invest in San Francisco–based Anthropic, which developed the popular chatbot named Claude. What once was regional dependence on US security guarantees has now become a big bet on AI, at the expense of building deeper relationships with China.

A tale of two Trump experiences

The Middle East has seen Trump both let it down and exceed expectations. On the disappointment front, officials harken back to when the Trump administration failed to respond in September 2019 after Iranian-made drones attacked oil-processing facilities in Abqaiq and Khurais in eastern Saudi Arabia.

Yet just a few months later, in January 2020, Trump ordered an audacious drone strike that killed Qasem Soleimani, an Iranian commander who was thought to be the second most powerful individual in the country. When it announced his death, the Pentagon said that Soleimani was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of US and coalition soldiers.

Middle Eastern officials took away from those two experiences that the Trump administration would act decisively to defend what it interpreted as its own interests—but not to respond to an attack on its ally’s oil facilities.

Two years later, in January 2022, US-UAE relations hit a new low, Middle Eastern officials say, when US President Joe Biden at first failed either to call UAE leaders or to offer assistance following an attack on Abu Dhabi by the Houthi movement, an Iranian terrorist proxy group, using missiles and drones that killed three people and injured six others.

What gave the region the most confidence in the Trump administration was its successful efforts, alongside the Emiratis, to bring about the Abraham Accords, which began in September 2020 as bilateral normalization agreements between the UAE and Israel, and Bahrain and Israel.

Officials here describe their experience in concluding these agreements, which were brokered by the Trump administration, as mercifully free of the cumbersome bureaucracy they generally experience in dealing with Washington.

While officials I spoke with here understand how a degree of unpredictability can serve Trump in his relationship with adversaries, they are looking for more steadiness of purpose in security and economic relations. When it comes to AI, the question is just how far the United States will go in providing the Emiratis its most advanced technologies and GPUs, the graphics processing units crucial to AI advancement.

There is a sense here in Dubai that the new rules of the game—Trump’s rules—are clearer in his second term than they were in the first. The optimists here are quickly stepping up to invest in that expectation. The pessimists, however, linger in the background, asking their more optimistic friends whether it’s prudent to bet their future on the hope that Trump’s “America first” policies will also prioritize their interests and not just those of the United States.

The optimists like to quote Trump from his first Davos speech in 2018, when he said, “‘America first’ does not mean America alone.” Seven years later, they are wagering hundreds of billions of dollars that he means it.

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on X: @FredKempe.

This edition is part of Frederick Kempe’s Inflection Points newsletter, a column of dispatches from a world in transition. To receive this newsletter throughout the week, sign up here.

The post Dispatch from Dubai: Trump is seeking to upend the global chessboard appeared first on Atlantic Council.

It’s a fair bet that a century from now, Trump’s early emphasis on immigrant deportations, tariffs, Greenland, and Panama won’t be as long-remembered as whether he undermines, sustains, or increases the United States’ global standing in relation to China and its autocratic allies.

Little will be more significant in that effort than whether the United States can rule the commanding heights of technological change. It’s that question that should weigh most heavily on Trump as he considers how to manage the artificial intelligence (AI) race with China following this week’s news that the Chinese company DeepSeek has achieved AI results as good or better than some American models at lower cost and apparently without the most advanced chips.

A couple of days before Trump’s inauguration, outgoing National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan talked with Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen of Axios about the catastrophic risk in losing this contest. Their interview didn’t get the attention it deserved, so read about it here now if you haven’t already.

What VandeHei and Allen took away from the conversation with Sullivan was that “[s]taying ahead in the AI arms race makes the Manhattan Project during World War II seem tiny, and conventional national security debates small. It’s potentially existential with implications for every nation and company.”

Sullivan would be the first to concede the flaws in the comparison between the AI race and the race to a nuclear weapon. The Manhattan Project involved an array of technical problems that were frontier physics with a clear government coordinator, whereas with AI, the challenges are largely being solved in universities or commercial research labs, without the power of the US government coordinating.

That said, the point of the comparison is that the outcome of the race could have generational consequences of similar magnitude around what country or set of countries sets the rules for the future. 

Distilling Sullivan’s comments, the Axios authors add: “America must quickly perfect a technology that many believe will be smarter and more capable than humans. We need to do this without decimating U.S. jobs, and inadvertently unleashing something we didn’t anticipate or prepare for. We need both to beat China on the technology and in shaping and setting global usage and monitoring of it, so bad actors don’t use it catastrophically. Oh, and it can only be done with unprecedented government-private sector collaboration—and probably difficult, but vital, cooperation with China.”

There are some Chinese advantages, underscored by DeepSeek, that the United States will find difficult to match. As Yuan Gao and Vlad Savov of Bloomberg explain, “The country has a deep pool of highly skilled software engineers, a vast domestic market and government support in the form of subsidies as well as funding for research institutes. It also has a pressing necessity to find a way to do more with fewer resources.” They could have added that China’s principal advantage is massive, unfettered data access without any of the complications of privacy concerns.

Most of all, the Chinese government and its private companies work hand in glove. This is perhaps the biggest challenge for the United States, and it is also the biggest difference between now and during the Manhattan Project.

Sullivan told Axios that unlike previous tech breakthroughs where the United States found a way to lead—atomic weapons, space travel, and the internet—AI development “sits in the hands of private companies with the power of nation-states,” VandeHei and Allen write.

What does this difference mean? To begin with, the US government will have to work more effectively with private tech companies than ever before if the country is to sustain its early AI lead and shape global regulations around it. Trump will also need his democratic allies on board. Unfortunately, many of these allies are busy at the moment hatching approaches to counter Trump’s tariff threats and, in Europe, weighing how to respond to his aspirations to gain control of Greenland, an autonomous territory of the Kingdom of Denmark.

It doesn’t take cutting-edge AI to decipher that the new administration already has daunting and far-reaching choices before it.

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on X: @FredKempe.

This edition is part of Frederick Kempe’s Inflection Points newsletter, a column of dispatches from a world in transition. To receive this newsletter throughout the week, sign up here.

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That is my takeaway from the first week of Trump’s second presidency and my thirtieth visit to Davos, Switzerland, for the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting. It remains the most consequential gathering of global political, business, and civil society elites, this year boasting more than three thousand participants from 130 countries.

In my three decades of attending the forum, never has a single individual dominated discussions like Trump did this past week.

That was true even before Trump arrived with a splash last Thursday, though only virtually, delivering his speech to a standing-room-only audience from a colossal screen. More than any of some fifty heads of state and government who spoke this week, he held the attention of his mostly skeptical audience with his self-congratulation, comic timing, derision of former US President Joe Biden, and audacious appeals to global elites for deals and deference.  

Trump pronounced his comeback win “the most consequential election victory in 129 years,” ushering in “the golden age of America” that would be characterized by “a revolution of common sense.” 

He goaded Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, “who is a fantastic guy,” to lower oil prices (which also would help end Russia’s war in Ukraine) and boost Riyadh’s offer of $600 billion of new US investment to one trillion dollars. “I think they’ll do that because we’ve been very good to them,” he said.

Trump chided Russian President Vladimir Putin for his war in Ukraine, which he repeated would never have happened under his presidency. It is a “killing field” that has to stop, he said, making clear that it was Putin, and not the Ukrainians, blocking the path to peace talks.

Trump told Chinese President Xi Jinping that he liked him, but Xi would have to stop his unfair trade practices and help to end Putin’s murderous war. “They have a great deal of power over that situation, and we’ll work with them,” Trump said.

He told all the CEOs in the room to make their products in the United States and enjoy some of the world’s lowest taxes—or choose not to, and that would result in tariffs against them. “Under the Trump administration, there will be no better place on Earth to create jobs, build factories, or grow a company than right here in the good old USA.”   

Nir Bar Dea, CEO of Bridgewater Associates, the world’s largest hedge fund, told me that we shouldn’t be surprised by the world’s Trump fixation. It goes far beyond Trump’s determination to trigger change to the unique circumstances that give him leverage.

That leverage includes narrow control of both houses of Congress and a conservative majority on the Supreme Court. It also includes the United States’ current economic dominance, with more than 25 percent of global gross domestic product and with US equities accounting for approximately 76 percent of the MSCI World Index, a benchmark for global stock market capitalization. Add to this existing leverage an emerging era of government intervention, which was hastened by the COVID-19 pandemic but has continued to unfold since then.

“At this time of modern mercantilism comes the rise of Trump,” said Bar Dea of the activist president determined to make a historic mark. “The rise of China, the unequal distribution of globalization gains and the political shifts that followed, the supply chain vulnerabilities realized since COVID, and the wars in Europe and the Middle East—all of this resulted in a total reversal of global dynamics. What people in Davos understand is that, today, what’s in this one person’s mind will be massively important.”

Bar Dea said Trump’s election coincides with “a 180-degree turn” from a post–Cold War era of expanding globalization, free trade, relative global stability, and the retreat of government influence and intervention. 

That period has been replaced by global fragmentation, protectionist trends, greater instability (including wars in Europe and the Middle East), and a rising tide of government involvement in picking winners and losers. 

That was already the case with the Biden administration’s embrace of national industrial policy through such measures as the Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS Act. Trump will build on that interventionist trajectory with “America first” determination.  

The mood on the mountain

All that provided the context for the week in Davos, where the response of participants to the early days of Trump 2.0 ranged from celebration to dread, with a wide range of emotions in between. 

The celebrants included a good number of CEOs (American and otherwise), and a smattering of government officials, who regard the tax-cutting, job-creating, energy-loving, artificial intelligence-supporting, cryptocurrency-embracing, peace deal-seeking, anti-woke commander-in-chief as just the tonic for our times.

At the same time, the dread is widespread, emerging from concerns about Trump’s “above the law” practices, represented by his pardons of some 1,500 people charged with crimes for the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol. It also stems from Trump’s economic policies that lean so heavily toward punitive tariffs, and from his threats to the sovereignty of Panama (over its canal) and Denmark (over Greenland) that many here fear will only encourage autocrats like Putin who harbor territorial ambitions.

First, listen to the celebrants, who range from cryptocurrency purveyors to European business leaders yearning for more growth and less regulation to Argentine President Javier Milei, who had been the warm-up act for Trump earlier on Thursday with his anti-woke homily.

Also on Thursday, Trump signed an executive order to promote cryptocurrencies in the United States and work toward a digital asset stockpile. That followed the Security and Exchange Commission’s announcement Tuesday that it would create a task force to advance a digital asset policy overhaul, including both cryptocurrencies and stablecoins, which are pegged to the dollar.

“We see great things happening,” said Denelle Dixon, CEO and executive director of the Stellar Development Foundation. Her organization oversees a network based on blockchain technology whose purpose is to expand cross-border payments and the tokenization of real-world assets by supporting developers and communities building on the Stellar blockchain. “You’re going to see a lot more usage,” she said. 

At the same time, she hopes that the industry stays focused on “utility and growth” rather than on flooding the market with new products that are more speculative in nature—like the new $MELANIA and $TRUMP coins, which she said have a place in the ecosystem but are more like “trading cards,” as they don’t really showcase the utility of the technology.

Another industry executive was less generous, telling me that Trump was encouraging “legalized grifting” through his self-interested crypto embrace. “We’ve gone too far too quickly,” he said, “from an administration that was far too unfriendly to business to one that may be too excessive in its friendliness.” 

On the energy front, Josu Jon Imaz, the CEO of the Spanish energy company Repsol, said the Trump administration may bring advantages to the energy sector and deliver a wake-up call to Europe.

Imaz said Trump could even bring unanticipated climate benefits, particularly for the Global South, with the potential shifts from coal to less emissions-intensive liquefied natural gas as the United States increases production and lifts Biden administration export controls.

Regarding the European Union, Imaz said of Trump, “He’s pushing us to look at ourselves in the mirror” and recognize that it is high time to address Europe’s slow growth, excessive regulation, and high energy prices.

“Europe reacts well when we are in real trouble,” Imaz said, pointing to the shift away from Russian energy after Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 or the response to the pandemic. “We must react. At the same time, a weak and divided Europe is also risky for Washington and a temptation for China.”

The question of sovereignty

Those concerned about Trump’s course were less vocal publicly during the past week in Davos than they were at the beginning of his first term. However, their concerns went to the heart of what the United States has represented to them since World War II—a benevolent proponent for the common good rather than a power acting only for its own interests. 

“I belong to the rather worried crowd,” former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt told me, calling Trump’s early international moves “dangerous and destabilizing.”

Bildt sees Trump’s early threats regarding Greenland and the Panama Canal as legitimizing the sorts of threats to national sovereignty that have been involved in Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

“Does he know the consequences of what he says?” Bildt asked me. “This is dangerous stuff. It really undermines the rules-based world order. The sanctity of borders isn’t a rule. It’s the rule.”

Bildt mentioned reports that a portrait of General Mark Milley, the former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff who locked horns with Trump, was removed from a Pentagon wall, and he regarded it as something unprecedented in the United States and more reminiscent of Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union.  

Another senior European official spoke to me with deep concern about Trump’s phone call this week with Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen over his desire to acquire the autonomous Danish territory of Greenland. 

Having been briefed on the call, the official told me that Frederiksen at first tried to engage Trump in a conversation about greater access to Greenland’s rich resources and strategic position, but that Trump was adamant that he wanted full control. It was, the official said, “a forty-seven-minute call with plenty of expletives,” adding, “the Danes are now in crisis mode.”

What this European official really wanted, along with so many others I met with in Davos, was advice about how his country could best manage the United States’ new reality. The most frequent answer in Davos paraphrases the Silicon Valley entrepreneur Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, who told media at the National Press Club ahead of Trump’s first election that American voters took him seriously but not literally.

Eight years later, with Trump far more prominent on the global stage than ever before, Davos participants know he must be taken more seriously than ever before, and perhaps even more literally, as both a symptom and an architect of our changing times.

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on X: @FredKempe.

This edition is part of Frederick Kempe’s Inflection Points newsletter, a column of dispatches from a world in transition. To receive this newsletter throughout the week, sign up here.

Note: Nir Bar Dea, Carl Bildt, and Josu Jon Imaz are members of the Atlantic Council’s International Advisory Board, and Stellar Development Foundation is a partner of the Council’s GeoEconomics Center.

The post Dispatch from Davos: Trump is both symptom and driver of our new geopolitical era appeared first on Atlantic Council.

The timing was as significant as the Russian-Iranian “comprehensive partnership agreement” itself.

Three days before the US inauguration, Pezeshkian and Putin met in Moscow to sign the deal that covers trade, military cooperation, science, education, culture, and more. It also underscores the growing four-way relationship of China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea—an “axis of aggressors” whose combined challenge the US president-elect has not yet acknowledged as a priority.

Yet nothing sets apart Trump’s first-term challenges from those of his second term more than this axis’s burgeoning defense industrial, economic, and political cooperation. “This treaty is not only a key turning point that strengthens our bilateral ties,” said Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi on Telegram. “This is not just a political agreement; it’s the road map to the future.”

Russia, Iran, and China have been growing steadily closer since Putin’s invasion of Ukraine nearly three years ago. Iran has sent short-range ballistic missiles, as well as drones and drone technology, to Russia. A CNN investigation in December found that a factory in Russia’s southern Tatarstan region is mass producing Iranian-designed Shahed drones with Chinese components. In the first nine months of 2024, the factory manufactured nearly six thousand Shahed drones, more than double what it had the year before.

In June 2024, Putin signed a partnership agreement with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. Pyongyang followed this in November by providing Moscow with ten thousand troops to fight the Ukrainian offensive in Russia’s Kursk region. Earlier this month, two North Korean soldiers were captured by Ukrainian forces near the border. Then in December, Putin concluded a security treaty with Belarus that included the Russian deployment of tactical nuclear weapons in the country.

That followed the continued expansion and enhancement of the “no limits” partnership that Putin concluded with Chinese President Xi Jinping shortly before Russia’s Ukraine invasion in February 2022. China’s leadership has resisted all efforts by both European and US officials to persuade Beijing to reduce its support for Russia, without which Moscow would not have been able to sustain its military campaign.

For all of Trump’s recent focus on regaining the Panama Canal, acquiring Greenland, and adding Canada as a fifty-first state, how he addresses the China-Russia-Iran-North Korea collaboration will be of infinitely greater historic and geopolitical consequence.

Yet the newest Iran-Russia deal is as much about the weaknesses among the four partners as it is about their combined strength, which offers Trump opportunities to disrupt their common cause. Iran hasn’t been this weak economically and militarily in thirty years. Its proxies Hamas and Hezbollah are decimated, its air defenses are eroded, and its unprecedented missile strikes on Israel last year failed to weaken Israel militarily. It’s telling that Russia didn’t provide Iran the mutual defense deal that was part of its agreements with Belarus and North Korea. 

The Russians have “a great nose for someone in trouble,” Jon Alterman, a Middle East expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told CNN. He added that Moscow could be thinking “we can help them a little bit, but we can get them where we need them and extract more from them that we want.”

So how will Trump respond to this pre-inaugural gift? One of US President Joe Biden’s failings was excessive caution in addressing the rising Russia-China challenge, alongside Iran and North Korea, though he was ground-breaking in diagnosing the “inflection point” that such autocratic collaboration signaled. Trump may be more willing than Biden to take action to enforce US interests, but I will be listening to his inaugural speech for an early indication of how he diagnoses the largest global challenges.

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on X: @FredKempe.

This edition is part of Frederick Kempe’s Inflection Points newsletter, a column of dispatches from a world in transition. To receive this newsletter throughout the week, sign up here.

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Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s last scheduled speech as the United States’ top diplomat, delivered at the Atlantic Council yesterday, was one of hope for the Middle East.

Yes, you read that correctly.

It was a bell-ringer of a farewell, an audacious exit that challenges all Middle East parties to seize the historic opportunities before them to achieve lasting peace and regional integration. It came one day before Israel and Hamas agreed to a cease-fire and hostage deal.

Beyond that, the US secretary of state laid out a detailed postwar plan for Gaza’s reconstruction. Perhaps most importantly of all, and despite ongoing war and the conventional wisdom of despair, he said that the Middle East was coming closer to a more promising and enduring path of economic and security integration.

‘No such thing as a hereditary enemy’

“What we’ve done over the past four years,” Blinken said, “building on the Abraham Accords, was to try to get to their ultimate realization, which is normalization between Saudi Arabia and Israel. . . . And as we sit here, it’s ready to go. That could move forward tomorrow. But it requires two things. It requires an end of the conflict in Gaza, and it requires a credible pathway to a Palestinian state.”

Speaking from an Atlantic Council stage, it seemed natural that he would reflect on centuries of European wars and grievances that ultimately resulted in grand reconciliation, therein drawing out a lesson for pessimists about the Middle East.

“As always happens in conflicts,” he said, referring to Israelis and Palestinians, “the more people suffer, the less they feel empathy for the suffering of those on the other side.”

Yet in a discussion with me on stage following his speech, Blinken said: “One of the things I believe strongly, Fred, from my own experience over the last thirty years and looking at the sweep of history, is that there’s no such thing as a hereditary enemy; that we are not fated to conflict or animosity; and even what seemed to be the most virulent and violent hatreds can go away, can change.” 

Blinken laughed to himself and added: “These last four years, probably two of my closest partners—two of our closest partners—have been Germany and Japan. Not very long ago, it was a very different world. We take that for granted. We shouldn’t. We need to be reminded of that, motivated by that, because it tells us that none of this is fated or predetermined.”

It’s worth reading every word of one of the most significant speeches of the Biden administration, which you can access here. It doesn’t spare in its criticism of Israel or the Palestinians, nor is it in any way naïve about the difficulties of achieving breakthrough outcomes for the region of the sort that occurred in Europe following World War II and the Cold War.

“Throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds,” Blinken said, “large majorities believe that October 7th didn’t happen—or if it did, that it was a legitimate attack on Israel’s military. In Israel, there is almost no reporting on the conditions in Gaza and what people there endure every day.

“This dehumanization is one of the greatest tragedies of this conflict,” Blinken said. “The late Cardinal [Carlo Maria] Martini once spoke of our need to be able to experience shared sorrow. It helps us salvage from moments of loss and despair a sense of common humanity. Without it, we lose one of the most crucial foundations for reconciliation—and eventually coexistence.”

Seize the historic moment

News gatherers will focus on the details for a postwar Gaza that the US secretary of state outlined, and they are important. They focus on several crucial principles: “a Gaza never again ruled by Hamas or used as a platform for terrorist or other violent attacks. New Palestinian-led governments—with Gaza united with the West Bank under the Palestinian Authority. No Israeli military occupation of Gaza or reduction of Gaza’s territory. No attempt after the conflict to besiege or block it. And no forcible displacement of Gaza’s population.” 

Others will focus on Blinken’s comment that much of the heavy lifting is complete for a Saudi-Israeli normalization agreement, including a strategic alliance agreement that establishes Saudi Arabia as a US treaty ally and a defense cooperation agreement between Washington and Riyadh that enhances military coordination and integration. Negotiations have also made progress on an energy agreement that includes civil-nuclear cooperation and an economic agreement that bolsters trade and investment, Blinken said. 

For me, however, the most significant message of the speech was the unique opportunity to seize a historic moment and put the Middle East on a more positive trajectory. Above all, that’s because Iran, long the primary impediment to progress, is on its back foot, weaker than at any point in the past thirty years.

Iran’s proxies are reeling. The terrorist masterminds behind Hamas’s October 7 attack have been killed, and the group’s military capacity has been decimated. Hezbollah, Iran’s most significant proxy, has seen its leadership eliminated along with much of its military potential. The Assad regime in Syria has collapsed, with Iranian forces having largely retreated from the country. Beyond that, Iran’s two unprecedented direct missile attacks on Israel were met by US and Israeli countermeasures, which resulted in Tehran inflicting relatively little damage. At the same time, Iran’s own air defenses have proven porous.

What’s necessary now, Blinken said, is for Israel “to accept reuniting Gaza and the West Bank” under the leadership of a reformed Palestinian Authority. Beyond that, he argued, “all must embrace a time-bound, conditions-based path toward forming an independent Palestinian state.” 

Building on each other’s successes

Here’s what also gives me hope from the US side as a new administration comes into office.

The Biden administration saw that it was prudent to build upon what was arguably the first Trump administration’s single biggest foreign policy accomplishment, the Abraham Accords. In doing so, the Biden administration brought Saudi Arabia and Israel within sight of normalization. (Blinken said that the timing of the Hamas attack was “no accident,” and that notes recovered from top Hamas officials showed they sought a regional war “to derail this agreement.”)

It’s difficult for me to imagine that incoming US President Donald Trump would want to do anything other than build upon his own Abraham Accords to achieve a further-reaching economic and security integration among Israel and the Arab neighbors with whom it has achieved normalization.

It’s encouraging as well that Jake Sullivan, the Biden administration’s national security advisor, is coordinating closely with Mike Waltz, who will take his seat in the Trump administration. Brett McGurk, Biden’s Middle East negotiator, was in Qatar engaging in cease-fire and hostage release talks alongside the incoming Trump administration’s Steve Witkoff, too. Our own N7 Initiative, a partnership between the Atlantic Council and the Jeffrey M. Talpins Foundation, sees much potential ahead with the incoming administration.

Out of the horrors of the period following October 7, 2023, some historic good could yet emerge in the Middle East, and it could come because of the Biden and Trump administrations building on each other’s successes. 

“I believe that if leaders make the difficult decisions to walk that path [toward greater integration and opportunity],” said Blinken, “they will not only have America by their side, but a power that no adversary can match: generations of young people determined to reject the idea that conflict is inevitable and that enmity is inherited . . . and brave enough to embrace peaceful coexistence.”

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on X: @FredKempe.

This edition is part of Frederick Kempe’s Inflection Points newsletter, a column of dispatches from a world in transition. To receive this newsletter throughout the week, sign up here.

The post Blinken’s audacious final message for the Middle East appeared first on Atlantic Council.

The Wall Street Journal’s Yaroslav Trofimov writes that now those two US allies, whose relations have grown far worse since the war in Gaza began last year, are set on “a collision course” in Syria and beyond.   

Assessing what Israel hopes to get out of the dramatic geopolitical realignment of the Middle East isn’t hard, as its national interests are well known and existential in nature. Its decisions are driven by its need for security, by its desire to maintain military and technological superiority, and by its enduring need to deter, contain, and counter Iran and its proxies.

Events of the past few weeks, which have so deeply weakened Iran and the armed groups that it supports across the region, have put Israel in its strongest security position in recent memory. In a powerful interview with the Wall Street Journal, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recounts the key decision points that produced that outcome. “Power isn’t merely guns, missiles, tanks, and aircraft,” Netanyahu says. “It’s the will to fight and seize the initiative.” Now, Israel’s leaders are reflecting on how best to leverage and extend their gains.

Until now, the world hasn’t focused as much on Turkey’s own aspirations, but President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan isn’t shy about discussing them. “Every event in our region, and especially Syria, reminds us that Turkey is bigger than Turkey itself,” Erdoğan said this week. “The Turkish nation cannot escape from its destiny.”

Erdoğan frames that “destiny” in civilizational terms, positioning the “new Turkey” as a continuation of its Ottoman legacy and an Islamic world leader. This notion is sparking concern not only in Israel, but among Gulf monarchies and the United States, too.

“For Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Israel, the shift in Damascus is a gamechanger that could pit them against a regional rival,” Hassan Hassan, the founder and editor-in-chief of New Lines Magazine, writes in the Guardian. “For western policymakers, views of Ankara’s growing assertiveness range from concerns over its Islamist ties to recognition of its centrality to Middle Eastern politics. This plays into Ankara’s hands, as it is a marked difference to Iran’s power projection that was unanimously challenged in the west and the region.”

Turkey’s rise, writes Hassan, disrupts Riyadh’s narrative depicting itself as the undisputed leader of the Sunni Muslim world, countering Shia Iran. “Ankara’s Islamist-leaning policies resonate with a broad swath of Sunni Muslims and political Islamists, offering an alternative to the Gulf monarchies,” he writes.

At a time when Israelis can sigh in relief at the diminished threat from Shia Iran, they are expressing new worries about a Turkish-led group of Sunni Islamists. Meanwhile, European and US diplomats are meeting in Damascus with Ahmed al-Shara, the leader of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which led the recent push that ousted the Assad regime.

On Friday, US Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Barbara Leaf met with Shara and announced that the United States will drop a ten million dollar bounty it had offered for his capture. Leaf also said that the HTS leader agreed on the need to prevent terrorist groups from operating in Syria.

Shara says that he wants to build his country and not start new fights, but he’s still designated by the United States as a terrorist bearing the nom de guerre Muhammad al-Jawlani. 

Where will all of this land? With so much in motion, one can’t be sure.

What’s clear is Turkey will have the most important voice in Damascus in the period ahead, and an increasingly large voice far beyond. Writes Trofimov: “This brings Erdoğan closer than ever to reaching his ambition for a sphere of influence that stretches across former Ottoman lands, all the way to Libya and Somalia.”

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on X: @FredKempe.

This edition is part of Frederick Kempe’s Inflection Points newsletter, a column of dispatches from a world in transition. To receive this newsletter throughout the week, sign up here.

The post The Middle East’s shifting balance of power favors Turkey and Israel appeared first on Atlantic Council.

My recent conversations with US and Middle East officials, conducted on the condition of anonymity, provide rich insights into the interconnections of events in the Middle East and beyond over the past several weeks. Most importantly, they offer a roadmap for the incoming Trump administration to counter an emerging “axis of aggressors”: China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea.

History has shown that even the most fearsome of dictatorships have underlying weaknesses that make apparently impregnable autocrats suddenly vulnerable. Such was the case with Assad, who fled his country for Russia this month after his family’s half century of despotic leadership. Now it also could be the case for Assad’s autocratic allies, which previously had saved and propped up his regime.

For the incoming Trump administration to effectively respond to this axis, however, the proudly transactional president-elect will need to discover his inner Henry Kissinger. Trump should respond strategically, alongside US partners and allies, in a manner that could shape the future decisively and for the next generation.

The road to Damascus

Let’s start with the lessons US and Middle East officials have gleaned from recent events in the region, beginning with the November 27 ceasefire agreement signed by Lebanon, Israel, and several mediating countries, including the United States.

A source familiar with Turkish actions says that President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, in direct response to this agreement, provided Syrian rebels the “go signal” for their attack on Aleppo the following day. (Some Turkish officials have denied that the government green-lit the offensive, while Trump has claimed that Erdoğan mounted an “unfriendly takeover” of Syria.) By November 30, the Turkish-backed forces, in lightning-like manner, had captured most of the city amid the collapse of Syrian government forces.

Following that, Syrian rebels took the Hama Governorate countryside, bordering on Aleppo. By December 5, the entire city of Hama, just 130 miles from Damascus, had fallen to them. Then, without encountering any real opposition, they made their way another thirty miles from Hama to Homs, down the M5 highway, the central link between the country’s interior cities. From there, it was on to Damascus.

On December 8, the Assad regime collapsed during a major rebel offensive spearheaded by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the Sunni political and military organization—and former offshoot of al-Qaeda in Syria, the Nusra Front—that led the revolt and is supported by the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army. The capture of Damascus ended the brutal rule of the Assad family, which had governed Syria since Bashar’s father, Hafez al-Assad, took complete power as president in 1971.

Turkey saw a turning point

What’s important for the incoming Trump administration to understand is why Turkey moved so quickly after so many years of relentless civil war. Erdoğan’s decision, informed by the Turkish National Intelligence Organization and its director, İbrahim Kalın, stemmed from their assessment of new Iranian and Russian weakness. They concluded that they had a window of opportunity to act—one they feared might close if the rebels didn’t strike swiftly and decisively. 

The Israel-Lebanon ceasefire deal had changed the situation. What the Turks saw in the thirteen-point agreement—including its prohibition on Hezbollah and other groups attacking Israel from Lebanon or storing weapons south of the Litani River—was that Iran was no longer capable of intervening to support Hezbollah, and thus wouldn’t act to support Assad either. Hezbollah had lost the ability to defend Iran’s interests in Lebanon following Israel’s devastating attacks, which included the precision airstrike on September 27 that killed its sixty-four-year-old leader, Hassan Nasrallah, among the most consequential of Israel’s targeted killings of adversaries in memory.

In advance of the offensive, Turkey and its Syrian allies also had observed signs of Russian vulnerability: The Kremlin had pulled a large number of its planes and vast amounts of its heavy military equipment from its Syrian bases in order to support its escalating war against Ukraine. 

Had Russia maintained its usual military presence in Syria, it likely would have hit rebel troops on the roads they traveled from Aleppo to Hama, Homs, and then on to Damascus. US and Middle East officials regarded the fall of Assad as a demonstration of how weak Russia has become in its ability to project power.

A lesson that took too long to learn

The US officials I spoke with also believe that the past month’s events mark a turning point for Russia—one where it abandoned its role as a Middle East and global power. Moscow seems to have grasped that even its regional power role is at stake in Ukraine, so the fight there has to take precedence. The fall of Assad put an end to Russia’s commanding role in Syria, which began in 2011 as the Syrian civil war was starting and gathered steam in 2015, when Russian President Vladimir Putin, sensing the lack of resolve of the Obama administration, intervened militarily to save the Assad regime. 

The Kremlin’s military deployment to Syria marked the first time that Moscow involved itself in an armed conflict outside of Soviet Union boundaries since the Cold War’s end in 1991. “Now that Russia has moved most of its toys outside of Syria, that period has ended,” one individual familiar with the situation told me.

Though it was not decisive in Assad’s fall, it’s also worth noting the involvement of Ukrainian intelligence and the country’s military in the setback that Iran and Russia suffered in Syria. As the Washington Post’s David Ignatius chronicled in a recent column, Ukrainian intelligence operatives provided twenty experienced drone operators and about 150 first-person-view drones to the Syrian rebels who overthrew Assad. 

Whatever role this played in Damascus, wrote Ignatius, “it was notable as part of a broader Ukrainian effort to strike covertly at Russian operations in the Middle East, Africa, and inside Russia itself.” Most dramatically this week, Ukrainian operatives in Moscow killed Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov, the head of Russia’s nuclear, chemical, and biological defense forces, taking a page from Israel’s covert attacks on Iranians inside their own country.

What US officials have taken too long to learn: As long as Russia’s aspirations remain global and aimed above all at Washington, there is a benefit to frustrating them anywhere.

Risk and reward in the Middle East

US officials hadn’t anticipated that Lebanon would become the linchpin to so much of what is now transpiring, but as they connect the dots themselves, they are recognizing how transformational Israeli actions there have been.

US officials weren’t informed in advance about the Israeli attack on Nasrallah, a strike they assess was high-risk but ultimately high-return, and which came at a time when they were trying to rein in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s military offensive in Lebanon.

If Israel had failed to kill Nasrallah, that might have had devastating consequences, particularly if only Lebanese civilians had been killed in the strike. But the Israeli effort was a success. It shifted the Biden administration from trying to constrain Israel’s operations in Lebanon to leveraging its military success for a more lasting and positive outcome for the country.

What’s also connected to the factors that prompted the ceasefire in Lebanon—Israeli strength, Iranian weakness, and Hezbollah’s devastation—is recent progress toward negotiating a Gaza agreement that would include Hamas releasing its hostages.

US officials hedge their increased optimism about the chances for a Gaza agreement with Hamas due to multiple disappointments over the past year. At the same time, they feel that Hamas is more willing to reach agreement now as it recognizes that it has lost Hezbollah and Iran as effective allies, with neither sticking by Hamas as the group had expected. Hamas is also still reeling from Israel killing its leader, Yahya Sinwar, on October 16.

Trump’s three historic opportunities

So where does all that leave the incoming US administration? 

Trump is inheriting a far more dangerous world from the Biden administration than what he confronted during his first term. But the new dangers are not simply ongoing wars in the Middle East and Europe and heightened tensions regarding China and Taiwan. Most dramatically different is a change that Trump hasn’t yet publicly addressed: the “axis of aggressors” he confronts.

“At a structural level,” writes the Atlantic Council’s Andrew Michta, “an alliance hostile to the United States and its allies in Europe and Asia has coalesced, with Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea forming a new ‘Axis of Dictatorships’ to support and enable each other at speed and scale, with Russia benefitting both economically and in terms of weapons and munitions supplies—and, of late, also manpower—to press for advantage in Ukraine. Our world is unraveling before our eyes, with regional power balances in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia on the verge of imploding.” 

Against this backdrop, Trump’s opportunities are three-fold.

First, Trump should support Israel in confronting an Iran that Biden administration officials believe is at its weakest point in decades. Iran’s proxies in Lebanon and Gaza—Hezbollah and Hamas—have been defeated militarily and are severely weakened politically, while Tehran’s Syrian ally is now out of power as well. Its Shia militias in Iraq, also now more vulnerable, were unwilling to come to the assistance of their Syrian partners.

Iran’s air defenses are down following precise, targeted Israeli air strikes on October 25. Since then, sources familiar with the matter say, Israeli or US planes (or really those of any other country) could fly over Iran almost with impunity. That includes Turkey, an apparent new enemy of Iran, which at the same time has humiliated Moscow through its role in ensuring Assad’s fall.

Moreover, Iran’s missile attacks this year have shown it incapable of seriously damaging Israel, and Middle East and US sources tell me that Iran’s production of new missiles since then has been reduced to one per week, down from two every day. An individual familiar with intelligence reports on the matter tells me that there are increasing disputes within Iran between the military and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps over who is responsible for Iran’s mounting difficulties.

Israel has re-established itself, in the words of one observer, as the regional superpower. It also has expanded its territorial hold by taking Mount Hermon and the surrounding area in the United Nations-administered buffer zone between Israel and Syria that was established following the 1973 war. It’s hard to imagine Israel giving up these hard-won gains any time soon, given that what comes next in Syria, and who will control territory along the Syrian side of the border, remains a question mark.

On the other side is Iran, which has lost two parts of its triple threat against Israel. It has lost the axis of militias that were its frontline deterrent, and it has lost the missile-production capacity that had given it confidence that it could launch a devastating attack against Israel. What remains is the threat of it possessing nuclear weapons.

Should Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, take decisive steps toward nuclear weaponization—something he has said he will not do because it is “anti-Islamic”—Biden administration officials have said to me that US forces could strike Iran’s nuclear facilities, and the officials are confident that the strike would succeed. In other words, the one action Iran’s leadership could take now to reestablish its military credibility and deterrence could, once the dust has cleared, set back Iran even further.

Second, the Trump administration confronts a Russia that in the Middle East has demonstrated that it’s far weaker than its recent gains in Ukraine would suggest. The incoming US administration also has a potential ally in Ukraine, which has shown itself to be a proven, capable, and resourceful military actor, if NATO and the European Union embrace the country.

In Ukraine, Russian forces have made advances, even if at the cost of devastating human losses, in the past three months, during which they have captured more than 600 square miles of Ukraine and recaptured 190 square miles in Russia’s Kursk oblast, where Ukrainian forces had taken territory.

It would be a mistake, however, for the incoming Trump administration to interpret these gains as enduring strength. Writing for TIME, Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, the Atlantic Council’s John Herbst, Atlantic Council lifetime board director Robert Hormats, and Stephen Henriques raise the possibility that the latest developments in Syria might be the beginning of a “reverse domino effect” that could topple Russia’s imperialist ambitions.

“Vladimir Putin,” they write, “is running out of time with his crumbling economy and overstretched, faltering army trying to advance his ill-advised invasion of Ukraine, while attempting to suppress pro-democracy activities in several nations around his intended sphere of influence.” Now the Russian president is betting on Trump’s return to the White House to turn the tide in his favor.

“It need not happen that way,” they argue. While incoming Trump administration officials agree on taking a tougher approach to Iran, they are divided on Russia. A greater realization of Moscow’s expansive intentions and growing vulnerability should settle this debate in Ukraine’s favor.

Third, with Iran and Russia both looking weak, it’s a good moment for US officials to drive home to their Chinese counterparts the cost of linking themselves to what Stephen Hadley, who was national security advisor under President George W. Bush, calls an “axis of losers” in a recent Foreign Affairs essay.

Writes Hadley, who is also executive vice chairman of the Atlantic Council’s board: “China has made its prestige hostage to the success of its axis partners. If they should be seen to be failing in their respective efforts to impose their will on their neighbors by force, it would become clear to the world that Beijing has cast its lot with losers. That would not only undermine China’s effort to project itself as the global leader of a new kind of international order; it would also damage Xi’s personal standing, at home and abroad.”

Though China’s vulnerabilities aren’t as apparent as those of Iran and Russia, concerns about its slowing economy are growing, despite its recent efforts at stimulus, reflected by a continuing plunge in its sovereign debt yields. “In reality, businesses are struggling to keep their lights on, people are having severe difficulty in finding jobs, and municipalities are struggling in debt,” writes the Wall Street Journal’s Lingling Wei this week. Beijing, she adds, “is facing a crisis over policy credibility.”

That provides one more reason why this is a good moment for Trump to take on this “axis of aggressors.”

With regard to the fourth member of this axis, North Korea, Hadley calls upon the United States to demonstrate that Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons won’t provide it the ability to bully its neighbors. That would require Washington strengthening the diplomatic, economic, and military capabilities of Australia, Japan, and South Korea—“all with the aim of continued progress toward a free, open, and peaceful Indo-Pacific.”

That’s a lot to expect of any incoming president, much less one who has many isolationist advisors around him who hope to restrain him from pushing for geopolitical advantage due to their perceptions of the risk and the cost of doing so. But at this time of historic opportunity, underscored by unfolding events in the Middle East, the greater military risk and long-term cost would be a failure to act.

As Michta concludes, “The world is at a critical juncture, one that will require the United States to restore its regional power balances so as to avoid an all-out war . . . It’s a time to return to realism in US national security policy, putting hard power considerations and geopolitics front and center. There is no time to waste.”

History is in motion as President Joe Biden leaves office and Trump assumes control. If the incoming president connects the dots and ignores advisors who aren’t willing to do so, the scene is set for Trump’s defining leadership moment on the world stage.

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on X: @FredKempe.

This edition is part of Frederick Kempe’s Inflection Points newsletter, a column of dispatches from a world in transition. To receive this newsletter throughout the week, sign up here.

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This first installment of the tracker involves China, Iran, Ukraine, and NATO. Positive changes in any of those realms would be welcome, as they are all at the center of the struggle over what set of principles and actors will shape the global future. 

Let’s start with China. Trump has invited Chinese leader Xi Jinping to his inauguration next month—in an unprecedented gesture to an adversarial leader. The incoming White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, told Fox News on Thursday that Trump would personally engage with adversaries and allies, just as he did during his first term. “He is willing to talk to anyone, and he will always put America’s interests first,” she said.

On Iran, the Wall Street Journal reports that members of Trump’s transition team are putting the option to launch a military strike on the country’s three major nuclear facilities “under more serious review.” Israel has helped see to it that Iran is at its weakest point in three decades, with its proxies slammed and its air defenses down. The fall of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad this past week has only added to Tehran’s problems. A senior US official tells me that due to this weakness, the danger has increased that Iran may conclude it needs to break out to a nuclear weapons capability to restore some credibility, so the Trump team’s review makes sense.

On Ukraine, Trump signaled during his recent trip to France, where he met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and French President Emmanuel Macron, that he wants Europe to carry more weight in defending and supporting Ukraine. Officials briefed on the meeting made clear that while he’s no friend of Ukraine’s NATO membership aspirations, Trump does want the country to emerge from the war well-armed and strong.

On that score, it’s perhaps not surprising that NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, the first European to visit the US president-elect at Mar-a-Lago after Trump’s election, wants Europeans at the Alliance’s summit in The Hague this coming summer to pony up more defense spending. As the Financial Times reports, confidential talks that began with foreign ministers in Brussels last week envisage a short-term pledge by members to spend 2.5 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) on defense, with the possibility of a 3 percent goal by 2030. Rutte wouldn’t discuss the specific numbers, but he agreed that it should be “much more” than the current goal of 2 percent of GDP, which twenty-three of the Alliance’s thirty-two members will hit this year.

Those who remember Trump’s first term will recall that he had a knack for capturing daily news cycles. Few, if any, presidents have done it so long before their inauguration. Inflection Points will track what impact the incoming president’s unique approach will produce over time. There is no doubt that China, Iran, Ukraine, and NATO are excellent places to start.

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on X: @FredKempe.

This edition is part of Frederick Kempe’s Inflection Points newsletter, a column of dispatches from a world in transition. To receive this newsletter throughout the week, sign up here.

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It’s hard to dispute that there’s federal fat to be trimmed, and Trump’s calling for cuts resonates with Americans well beyond his base. At what point, however, do those cuts hit the muscle and bone required for US global leadership at a far more dangerous time than Trump faced during his first presidency?

With wars in the Middle East and Europe, with escalating tensions with China, and with an accelerating contest for technology’s commanding heights, the answer is simple: A purge of career intelligence professionals would have far-reaching negative consequences at a moment when the United States needs even more capable, confident, and motivated espionage agencies.

That was the context today for the New York Times’ lead essay by John Sipher, an Atlantic Council senior fellow and twenty-eight-year veteran of the Central Intelligence Agency’s National Clandestine Service, and Michael V. Hayden, an Atlantic Council board member and former director of the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency. They worry “that Mr. Trump may be interested in wrecking the operation of the intelligence community.” 

Write Sipher and Hayden: “Needless to say, the notion that the intelligence community is disloyal is false. The community is filled with skilled professionals committed to providing the president—any president—with the best possible intelligence, often at great personal sacrifice.”

In today’s Wall Street Journal, hardly a newspaper that echoes the New York Times’ opinions, the lead editorial questions Trump’s nomination of Tulsi Gabbard, former member of Congress and military officer, to lead his intelligence agencies at such a challenging moment.

The Journal’s editorial board based its concerns heavily on Gabbard’s record of opposition to policies that worked in the first Trump administration, so this piece might resonate more at Mar-a-Lago than Sipher and Hayden’s.

“Ms. Gabbard is on ample record as a dogmatic opponent of the policies that made Mr. Trump’s first-term foreign policy a success and that Democrats resisted,” the editorial board writes under the headline “How Tulsi Gabbard Sees the World.” “The former Democrat would be a risky fit as director of national intelligence.”

The editorial board based that judgment on the argument that the Director of National Intelligence’s job is to “convey intelligence fairly,” and that her “record suggests she is as likely to reject new intel and muddy the waters.”

The piece reminds readers that she defended Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad against findings of chemical weapons use, about which Trump had no doubts. It notes that Gabbard accused Trump of wanting war with Iran, when his “maximum pressure” campaign achieved the opposite. She accused Trump, through his strike killing Iranian military commander Qasem Soleimani, of “pushing our nation headlong into a war with Iran.” Wrong again. 

The editorial board argues that supporters of Trump’s foreign policy will “think twice about confirming her.” 

Sipher and Hayden remind us that Trump’s promises to destroy “the deep state” predate his first term in the White House. His nominations and rhetoric underscore that he might be more determined to achieve that outcome in his second term.

Trump is right that the world has grown far too dangerous and unstable. History will judge him on how he addresses that reality. The incoming president’s dilemma is that this more perilous world will require him to lean on the proven patriots in intelligence and also those in the military whom he has disparaged in the past.

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on X: @FredKempe.

This edition is part of Frederick Kempe’s Inflection Points newsletter, a column of dispatches from a world in transition. To receive this newsletter throughout the week, sign up here.

The post Trump’s ‘deep state’ dilemma appeared first on Atlantic Council.

It’s hard to overestimate how great a difference his Ukraine-related decisions in the coming weeks will make to the trajectory of his second term. Beyond that, Trump can either assert or undermine US global leadership for an emerging era of great-power competition that will stretch far beyond his four years in office.

Done in the wrong way, Trump’s decisions will signal to Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran—the evolving “axis of aggressors”—that the United States is divided, distracted, and prepared to cede the global leadership that it has assumed since World War II, whether intentionally or by default.

Done in the right way, Trump’s decisions can confound his critics, who see some of his early nominations for cabinet positions as evidence that he’s more interested in disruption and retribution than in building a legacy equal to that of great US presidents of the past.

What could bring sweeter satisfaction for Trump than, for example, a Nobel Peace Prize? And history’s oddities present him with that opportunity right at the start of his new term in office.

The contours of such a deal are already apparent. Ukraine would give up for now most of the 20 percent of its territory currently occupied by Russia in exchange for iron-clad security guarantees, including a path certain (at best, immediate) to NATO membership and, separately, to European Union membership.

For that kind of deal, Trump will have to abandon his campaign rhetoric about bringing the war to an end in twenty-four hours, as Putin for the moment believes the military and political momentum is with him.

In so many words, that’s the message new NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte delivered to Trump when Rutte visited Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Florida White House, as the first European leader to meet him following the election.

Credit Rutte, who as Dutch prime minister worked effectively with Trump during his first term, with understanding the president-elect’s proclivity for personal diplomacy, not to mention the value of being among the first in line. 

“We have a strong relationship,” Rutte told the Financial Times this week. “We liked each other when I was in my previous role when he was president. And I sense that we can work from the same basis. And it helps that you find it’s genuinely a pleasure to work together.”

Speaking ahead of a NATO foreign ministers’ meeting on Tuesday, Rutte said he told Trump that he needs to consider how the outcome of the Ukraine conflict could be interpreted by the quartet of US adversaries—China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. “They are all working together,” Rutte told reporters ahead of the meeting. This collaboration is something Trump has not yet publicly acknowledged as a reality or a problem.

Speaking to the Financial Times, Rutte put it in language that both appeals to Trump and captures the historic moment. “We cannot have a solution where we have Kim Jong Un and the Russian leader and Xi Jinping and Iran high-fiving because we came to a deal which is not good for Ukraine, because long-term that will be a dire security threat not only to Europe but also to the US.” 

Someone else who understands the value of personal diplomacy with Trump is Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who met with Trump personally in September during the campaign and spoke with the president-elect just after the election. Zelenskyy also knows that 2025 will be a decisive year in the peace effort, and that Trump holds many of the cards necessary for his success, which Trump still might play in all the wrong ways.

Zelenskyy has changed his tune in recent days from demands that Ukraine keep fighting until it regains the territory that Moscow now controls or occupies. “Our army lacks the strength to do that,” he told Kyodo News of Japan. “We do have to find diplomatic solutions.”

Zelenskyy now says he could accept a ceasefire that would leave some Ukrainian territory in Putin’s hands if the rest of Ukraine’s territory gained NATO’s protection. It remains a long way from Trump’s campaign statements on Ukraine and the doubts he has previously expressed about NATO to a willingness to provide Kyiv with Alliance protection, much less membership.

Rutte, though not ready to discuss Ukraine’s NATO membership prospects with media this week, did discuss a path that would begin with greater Western military support now and a less immediate emphasis on the peace process.

“The main issue with Ukraine has to be, ‘How do we get more military aid into Ukraine?’ That’s priority number one, two, and three,” Rutte said. “In the meantime, that bridge to NATO membership is being built,” he added, through bilateral security deals with NATO member countries.

My last column, “Biden’s Ukraine moves are a gift to Trump,” focused on how President Joe Biden has provided the president-elect badly needed negotiating leverage. Biden did this by deciding to allow Ukraine to use longer-range US missile systems to hit targets inside Russia, by providing Kyiv with antipersonnel landmines to slow Moscow’s advance, and by applying new US sanctions on Gazprombank.

What’s entirely unclear thus far, however, is whether Trump, the author of The Art of the Deal, intends to build upon that leverage and use it for historic purposes—for example by arming Ukraine to the teeth if Putin is unwilling to negotiate. 

Presidents rarely get to choose the crises that define their presidencies. Stopping Putin’s aggression in Ukraine will be Trump 2.0’s first test and opportunity, one that will have further-reaching consequences than the president-elect has yet recognized.

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on X: @FredKempe.

This edition is part of Frederick Kempe’s Inflection Points newsletter, a column of dispatches from a world in transition. To receive this newsletter throughout the week, sign up here.

The post Trump’s Nobel Peace Prize opportunity in Ukraine appeared first on Atlantic Council.

The Biden administration, in coordination with partners and allies, has worked to free up military support for Ukraine in its final weeks. Emergency assistance aimed at helping to restore Ukraine’s energy system, which is being so heavily hit by Russian attacks, should be seen in the same light.

Bottom line: The United States and other partners of Ukraine need to increase their support to Kyiv now to improve Trump’s chances at negotiating a Ukraine deal worth having. It’s particularly encouraging that the Biden administration is stepping up instead of self-deterring in the face of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision this week to change his doctrine for nuclear weapons use.

What Putin did was lower the threshold for potential nuclear use from threats to the existence of the Russian state to what it considers attacks on its “sovereignty and/or territorial integrity.” Hence, the new doctrine says weapons used by one ally in Russian territory, ostensibly including the US weaponry wielded by Ukrainians, implicates the whole Alliance, suggesting that Russia could now hit any NATO ally with a nuclear weapon in response.

Putin followed that up by launching a new, nuclear-capable intermediate-range ballistic missile on Ukraine. Though it carried only conventional warheads, Putin’s message was clear.

Understanding Putin’s playbook

By playing the nuclear scare-the-hell-out-of-you card, Putin is hoping that the United States and its partners will once again self-deter. Sadly, this approach has worked before, prompting the Biden administration more than once to slow-roll decisions on providing crucial weaponry to Ukraine. It’s also the reason why this week’s decision to relax the rules under which Ukraine could use longer-range US missiles only came months after the weapons would have been most effective. For example, Russia has used the delay to move many of its assets out of the missiles’ range.

“Well, better late than never,” said Congressman Michael McCaul, the Texas Republican who chairs the House Foreign Affairs Committee, speaking at the Atlantic Council on Thursday. Ukraine, McCaul said, “has to be in the strongest possible position with the most leverage to get the best negotiation at the table. Right now, they’re not there because of the slowness . . . in delivering these weapons.”

History shows that only a clear demonstration of strength will deter Putin. When Putin smells weakness, he acts upon it. That is what he did with his invasion of Georgia in 2008, which came at the end of the George W. Bush administration. It’s what he did with his invasion of eastern Ukraine and Crimea in 2014, following then President Barack Obama’s failure to enforce his red line on Syria’s chemical weapons use. And it’s what he did in his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, which followed the Biden administration’s botched withdrawal from Afghanistan.

For the dealmaker Trump, who during his campaign said that he could stop the war in Ukraine in twenty-four hours, it’s important to understand that Putin has never seen diplomacy as the principal vehicle for his revanchist pursuit of Ukraine. Nothing would be worse for the incoming president than a bad deal with Putin, showing Trump to be weak in the face of an autocratic adversary.

Unless Ukraine and its friends can demonstrate that Putin’s military efforts are failing, don’t expect Trump’s potential negotiations to be anything other than the continuation of Putin’s war aims through other means. Anyone who thinks the United States can conduct successful diplomacy from the standpoint of military weakness doesn’t understand the Putin playbook.

Last weekend’s Russian attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, the largest of their kind since this past summer, underscore two realities.

First, Putin has heard enough questioning of US support for Ukraine from the Trump campaign this year to smell blood in the water. He perceives signs of US weakness that are encouragement for him to strike. Despite reports that Trump told the Russian president in a phone call last week not to escalate—a call the Kremlin still insists didn’t happen—Putin presses on.

“[Putin] has not taken the president-elect’s advice,” said McCaul, reminding his audience that he told his fellow members of Congress that they faced a choice when voting on additional Ukraine aid earlier this year. The representatives were deciding, McCaul said, whether they wanted to be Winston Churchill, the World War II hero, or Neville Chamberlain, the appeaser of Germany’s dictator.

That same historic choice now confronts Trump.

Second, Putin sees a golden opportunity in the Trump transition to break the will of the Ukrainian people, who have also been concerned by indications that US support could evaporate in 2025. There is no planet on which any perceived Ukrainian defeat doesn’t embolden adversaries around the world and send a message of Trump weakness in the early days of his second term.

Some in the Trump camp don’t accept this, but there are also other prominent Republican voices who understand the historic moment and the rising challenge from the “axis of aggressors”—Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea.

“They are all in it together,” McCaul said on Thursday. “When I gave my closing argument on the emergency wartime supplemental [spending bill], I had a picture. There they were, all four—Putin and Chairman Xi [Jinping] and the ayatollah and Kim Jong Un . . . You cannot separate them. What happens in Ukraine will forecast the Indo-Pacific.”

Negotiating from a position of strength

Where Trump is right is that both Kyiv and Moscow need a negotiated end to the war, and Ukrainians seem ready as well to explore alternatives. It’s likely that 2025, early in Trump’s second term, will be a time for such talks, hence the need to provide Ukraine with the strongest possible negotiating position.

By providing Ukraine greater support now, it will demonstrate to Putin that the cost of ongoing war isn’t sustainable for him either. According to recent estimates, he’s lost between 100,000 and 200,000 Russian soldiers, with perhaps another 500,000 wounded, alongside a half million Russians who have left the country. North Korean troops arriving is troubling, but that they are needed underscores Russian weakness.

What could be the contours of such an agreement, if negotiated from a position of strength?

James Stavridis, a retired US Navy admiral and former NATO supreme allied commander Europe, offered one potential solution in a compelling Bloomberg Opinion column this week.

He proposes a meaningful ceasefire by forging a demilitarized zone, perhaps five to ten miles wide, between territory currently held by each side, using the model of the Korean peninsula, where such a zone has been in place for seventy years following the Korean War. The opposing parties could patrol the area, or a neutral force of United Nations peacekeepers could be brought in.

Stavridis says that the next necessary step would be security guarantees for Ukraine that would prevent Putin from reinvading. NATO membership isn’t realistic, but Stavridis sees “the possibility of a defined level of NATO engagement in training and equipping the Ukrainians, short of membership.” He suggests that a starting point for negotiations would be putting the possibility of European Union membership off for five years and NATO membership for ten.

Stavridis provides Finland as a model. The Soviet Union invaded Finland in 1939 in the Winter War. “The Finns fought the Russians to a standstill, but ultimately traded about 10% of their land for peace and pledged neutrality. Now, they are vital members of NATO.”

Ukraine could have a similar or better outcome, but only if Trump embraces the Biden administration’s gift of leverage, which the self-described dealmaker knows is the most important starting point for any such negotiation. History will treat Trump badly if he agrees to any deal that shows him to be weak or naïve in facing Putin—or indecisive in supporting Ukraine.

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on X: @FredKempe.

This edition is part of Frederick Kempe’s Inflection Points newsletter, a column of dispatches from a world in transition. To receive this newsletter throughout the week, sign up here.

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Could it be true, as some reports on social media indicated, that the Islamic Republic of Iran would soon announce that its eighty-five-year-old supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was in a coma? If so, it would have far-reaching consequences, as Khamenei has been the most prominent purveyor of his country’s most odious policies: “Death to America,” “Death to Israel,” and the development of a nuclear program to advance both goals (not to mention its ban on uncovered women).

The instability that typically accompanies authoritarian succession would be magnified by three other major setbacks for the Middle East’s most disruptive power. Since September, Israel has decapitated and degraded Tehran’s proxy forces Hezbollah and Hamas, killing the leaders of both groups. In late October, Israel penetrated and took down Iran’s Soviet-made air defenses, and earlier that month Israel’s air defenses (deployed alongside those of the United States and others) intercepted or rendered harmless hundreds of Iranian missiles.

The rumors about Khamenei’s imminent demise proved untrue. However, what is true is that the long-formidable Islamic Republic of Iran—after spending decades building proxies, manufacturing ballistic missiles, and developing nuclear capabilities—is reeling from Israel’s military successes and its own vulnerabilities.

Iran’s new problems are already yielding knock-on benefits for the West’s unfolding contest with the “axis of aggressors”—China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. Strikes on Iran’s manufacturing facilities have reportedly interrupted its supply of missiles to Russia for the Kremlin’s war on Ukraine. Tehran is also reportedly pleading with Moscow for urgent replenishment of its air defenses, at a time when the Kremlin itself may be running short of these systems.

Iran hasn’t been this weak in more than two decades: almost naked defensively from air attack, its proxies unable to retaliate effectively against Israel, and its advanced weaponry unable to reliably penetrate Israeli and US air defenses. Tehran may even lack the air-defense capability to defend its nuclear-related facilities, tempting some to wonder whether now might be the moment to strike them.

What all that adds up to is a potential gift and challenge for President-elect Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who already have spoken at least three times since Trump’s election. It is also a test for the presidential transition from the Biden administration to the Trump administration, as one group of officials passes to the other its analysis of the risks and opportunities regarding Iran.

Western officials say Netanyahu regards this moment as a window of opportunity—one that might not reemerge—to neutralize or significantly set back Iran’s existential threat to Israel, which would be even more menacing should Tehran obtain deliverable nuclear weapons.

For the dealmaker Trump, who has declared time and again that Iran will never deploy a nuclear weapon on his watch, this moment provides a chance to either participate in a preemptive strike on Iran’s nuclear sites or use the threat of doing so to negotiate a far better deal than anyone has reached with Iran previously.

Trump might now be able to go beyond the Obama administration’s Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action signed in 2015, the aim of which was to limit Tehran’s nuclear capabilities, and beyond renewing the “maximum pressure” campaign of his first term. Given Iran’s current weakness, the incoming US president could try to press Tehran to agree, in exchange for economic relief, not only to abandon its nuclear program but also to cease its support for the proxies and terrorist groups that have destabilized the Middle East and beyond for decades.

The reported meeting last week between billionaire Trump confidant Elon Musk and Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations, which was apparently not coordinated with the Biden administration but almost certainly was held with Trump’s approval, suggests that the president-elect senses this opportunity and wants to explore whether there’s a chance for an early win.

The consensus among experts and officials here is that a Trump administration would bring the president-elect’s characteristic unpredictability to the Middle East, with options ranging from Trump bombing Iran to him showing up in Tehran to negotiate with its leadership.

Given that in his first term Trump ordered the assassination of Qasem Soleimani, the head of the Quds Force of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), and given US intelligence reports revealing that Tehran has in turn tried to assassinate Trump, the stage is set for just the sort of high-stakes drama the president-elect savors.

The new Trump administration is probably months away from updating the National Security Strategy that it published back in 2017. The new document will wrestle with a landscape far more dangerous than that of Trump’s first term: wars in Europe and the Middle East, rising tensions with China, and an accelerating battle for technology’s commanding heights in the era of artificial intelligence. What’s also new are some ten thousand North Korean troops in Russia, underscoring the expanded military and defense-industrial cooperation among China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea.

Iran’s recent setbacks make it the weakest link in this anti-American axis.

Speaking to the United Nations General Assembly in September, President Joe Biden said, “The United States is clear: We will not allow Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon.” Beyond that, I am told that if US intelligence showed that Iran is crossing the nuclear-weapons threshold, the Biden administration has developed a plan that it would execute to take out Iran’s entire nuclear infrastructure. US forces have the bunker-busting bombs to do it and the heavy bombers to execute the strikes. In a clear signal to Tehran, US military forces demonstrated as much on October 16, when US Air Force B-2 bombers conducted precision strikes against five hardened underground weapons storage locations in areas of Yemen controlled by the Houthis, Iran’s proxies in the country.

Given US capability, Israeli opportunism, and Iranian vulnerability, some experts here speculated about whether the preternaturally cautious Biden administration might revisit its own reluctance to hit Iran. The consensus is that the president won’t strike unless Iran shows it has crossed the nuclear-weapons threshold, something that US officials say they would be able to discern.

Whatever Iran’s external vulnerabilities, US and regional experts believe Iran’s religious leadership and revolutionary guards face no serious threat from domestic opposition, which has been successfully repressed and remains divided. Should the supreme leader die soon, these experts wager that he would be replaced by his fifty-five-year-old son Mojtaba, though it is also possible that the IRGC could gain more power and influence in any post-Khamenei scenario.

Pessimism has always been the safest bet at times like this in the Middle East, particularly following Hamas’s terrorist attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023, the brutal Israeli war in Gaza that has followed, and the expanded conflict in Lebanon that has followed that. Carnage begets carnage.

Yet there is also an opportunity to defang Iran. If the incoming Trump administration isn’t distracted by deporting immigrants and purging perceived enemies in the US military, judiciary, and intelligence services, then it can apply a mixture of negotiations and military means to press Tehran, and thus advance the peace efforts that it pioneered during its first term through the Abraham Accords.

It’s hard to imagine a more compelling start for Trump 2.0, one that would confound his critics and seize early geopolitical momentum for his second term.

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on X: @FredKempe.

This edition is part of Frederick Kempe’s Inflection Points newsletter, a column of dispatches from a world in transition. To receive this newsletter throughout the week, sign up here.

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Chinese leader Xi Jinping and US President Joe Biden will both visit the region this week for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum in Lima, Peru, followed by the Group of Twenty (G20) summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, but there’s no doubt about which of the two leaders’ countries is ascendant in the region.

In a must-read Wall Street Journal feature, rich with graphics and photos, reporters James T. Areddy, Ryan Dubé, and Roque Ruiz note that China has replaced the United States as the dominant trading partner for all the region’s major economies, except for Mexico and Colombia. “Beijing has signed up most of Latin America and the Caribbean to an infrastructure program that excludes the U.S.,” they write.

Peru, the host country for APEC this year, with great fanfare will inaugurate the Port of Chancay today as the embodiment of this regional shift. The megaport opening underscores the greater attention Beijing has showered on the region in the face of comparative US indifference about its southern neighbors. US officials worry that Chinese warships could use the port, posing a strategic challenge.

Writes the Financial Times journalist Joe Daniels from the port, on the eve of its opening: “Chinese-made ZPMC unmanned cranes line the quay. BYD pick-up trucks sit ready to shuttle engineers around, while Huawei 5G internet towers have been freshly constructed to handle the automated operation.”

Mario de las Cases, the public affairs manager of the port for COSCO shipping, the Chinese state-owned company that will operate Chancay, said, “Everything is made in China. This is a huge opportunity not just for Peru but for the whole region.”

In contrast, Biden’s trip comes “at the tail end of four years marked by geopolitical conflicts in Europe and the Middle East, which steered his administration’s foreign policy focus away from Latin America,” write the Atlantic Council’s Martin Cassinelli and Caroline Costello. “Biden will arrive in Lima and Rio with little of substance to offer.”

In January, Trump will begin his second term determined to take a tougher approach to China, particularly when it comes to economic competition and trade. However, in Latin America and the Caribbean—with its thirty-three nations and 660 million people—he’ll confront the reality that the United States has already lost much ground. As General Laura Richardson, the then commander of US Southern Command, warned last year, China “is on the 20-yard-line, in the red zone to our homeland.” Trump’s promise of higher tariffs and tougher immigration controls won’t be the play call to address that challenge.

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on X: @FredKempe.

This edition is part of Frederick Kempe’s Inflection Points newsletter, a column of dispatches from a world in transition. To receive this newsletter throughout the week, sign up here.

The post China’s advances in Latin America should concern Trump appeared first on Atlantic Council.

What’s new as well is a burgeoning defense industrial and political alignment among four autocratic partners—China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran. Even as Trump recruits his national security team, fifty thousand Russian and North Korean soldiers are poised for battle on Russian soil against Ukraine.

None of these challenges would have been any different if Vice President Kamala Harris had been elected president.

The dramatic difference will be in how Trump confronts these generational challenges, deploying his proudly unpredictable and disruptive leadership style alongside his more transactional approach to allies and adversaries alike.

Trump has never been one to think about the world in Kissingerian terms, and he’s unlikely now to speak to the American public in the lofty terms of “grand strategy.” That’s what academics call the approach to how a country can stitch together military and nonmilitary means to achieve national interests designed for longer-term outcomes.

Yet that is precisely what’s required as the United States navigates the opening years of a new era that began before Trump’s reelection and likely will continue after it. To prevail, it will take grand strategy’s combination of military doctrine, force structure, alliances, economic relations, diplomatic behavior, technological leadership, societal strengths, and the mobilization of sufficient methods and resources.

Though it’s always tempting to think about what can be achieved in a single presidential term, such eras are more often defined through several presidencies and the opposing powers and events that punctuate them.

The last time the United States confronted such an opposing group of autocrats was in the opening years of the Cold War, when the country and its allies faced off against Nikita Khrushchev’s Soviet Union, its Warsaw Pact allies, and Mao Zedong’s Communist China.

That era’s central conflict was resolved by the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, when the Soviet Union stepped back from the brink of a potential nuclear conflict. It then took nearly three decades more of relatively steady US commitment and allied common cause to win the Cold War, following the Berlin Wall’s fall and the Soviet Union’s collapse.

Before that in the late 1930s, three autocratic powers—Hitler’s Germany, Mussolini’s Italy, and Imperial Japan—combined their efforts in far less coordinated terms than today’s “axis of aggressors.” That period ended only after the United States’ entry into World War II in December 1941, which was followed by Italy’s surrender in September 1943, Germany’s surrender in May 1945, and then Japan’s surrender in September 1945, after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The lesson of both those experiences is that such conflicts don’t resolve themselves. In both cases, the decisions of US presidents were crucial to the outcomes, as will be the case again. (See my October 19 Inflection Points column explaining why it is that Americans were electing a “wartime president.”)

If previous experience is any guide, Trump is likely to take on this emerging era more tactically than strategically, dealing with China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea as individual challenges. Even some former Trump administration officials don’t believe that will be sufficient for the much-altered geopolitical landscape.

A former Trump White House official, quoted in the Wall Street Journal on November 9, said, “With North Korean soldiers serving with the Russians to kill Ukrainians using Iranian missiles, who are selling their oil to the Chinese, just the interconnectedness of all these different policy areas is something we didn’t have. We could have a discrete North Korea policy. We could have a discrete Iran policy. Now it’s got to be done more holistically.”

That said, Trump also brings instincts and approaches that could help disrupt this axis of aggressors, even if executed on a tactical basis.

Trump is likely to take a far tougher approach than President Joe Biden toward Iran, against which Trump pursued a “maximum pressure” campaign of sanctions and other measures in his first term. He is also likely to be more supportive of Israeli actions against Iran. That may be even more the case after the Justice Department disclosed on Friday that the Federal Bureau of Investigation had foiled an Iranian plot to assassinate Trump before the election.

Regarding Russia, Trump will bring an element of personal diplomacy with Russian President Vladimir Putin that Biden has lacked since their last direct conversation in February 2022.

The question for Ukraine is whether that is a bad or good thing. The advisers with Trump’s ear range from those who believe he should drastically reduce support for Ukraine to those who believe he needs to do far more.

On Thursday, Trump spoke by phone with Putin, and a person familiar with the call has told reporters that the president-elect advised the Russian leader not to escalate the war in Ukraine and reminded him of Washington’s large military presence in Europe. (The Kremlin denied the conversation took place.) Trump reportedly expressed interest in follow-up conversations to seek an early resolution of the war.

The war in Ukraine stands out as the most significant of the immediate challenges Trump faces, as failure there will only encourage China in its ambitions to forcefully absorb Taiwan—and also encourage Putin to press his advantage elsewhere.

“The greatest national security threat to the United States, its fellow NATO members, and other US allies is the increasingly aggressive partnership of Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea,” the Atlantic Council’s John Herbst, former US ambassador to Ukraine, wrote last week. “It is not clear that Trump fully acknowledges this challenge,” Herbst added. “But whether he understands it or not, his administration will have to deal with it and its most dangerous point of confrontation: Ukraine.”

One group of Trump advisers is advocating for sharply reduced aid to Ukraine, “clueless about the danger of a Kremlin victory,” wrote Herbst. Another, Reaganesque camp recognizes the broader global impact that would result from abandoning Ukraine. The appointments Trump makes to top national security positions will be telling on where the administration will ultimately fall. So far, Trump has selected Representative Mike Waltz as his national security advisor, while reports indicate that Senator Marco Rubio could be his nominee for secretary of state.

Trump has been “far tougher on Russia” than he is often given credit for in Washington, Waltz said during an Atlantic Council event on October 28. On Ukraine, Trump has a “different strategic focus on ending the war, versus this vague notion of what does winning look like, which despite three years of war now . . . I still cannot get a clear definition from the Biden administration.”

Regarding China, Trump is planning to ramp up economic threats and incentives—and increase deterrence.

Asked by Wall Street Journal editors whether he would use military force to defend Taiwan against a Beijing blockade, Trump said it would never come to that because Chinese leader Xi Jinping wouldn’t risk it. “I wouldn’t have to [use military force] because he respects me and he knows I’m f— crazy,” he said, underscoring his personal unpredictability as a deterrent.

The China that Trump faces will be far weaker economically than it was in his first term, but it is also less dependent on the US market, where China’s share of US imports has dropped to 13 percent from 20 percent over the past six years. That said, China’s domestic economic difficulties have made it more dependent on exports, and that will make Beijing more vulnerable to any threat to its exports.

At a time when the United States will need allied support more than ever for a more cohesive strategy toward the axis of aggressors, Trump is nevertheless more likely to continue the transactional approach of his first term to NATO and other allies.

Speaking to European leaders in Budapest on November 7, French President Emmanuel Macron warned against “a naïve form of transatlanticism” and said Trump “will defend American interests, which is a legitimate and good thing. The question is whether we are ready to defend the interests of Europeans.”

The even greater question is whether there is a form of “Trump-Atlanticism” through which the United States, Canada, and Europe can rally around any common cause to shape the dangerous new era they are confronting together. The alternative is every country for itself—a recipe that is unlikely to shape the coming era in the United States’ interest.

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on X: @FredKempe.

This edition is part of Frederick Kempe’s Inflection Points newsletter, a column of dispatches from a world in transition. To receive this newsletter throughout the week, sign up here.

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Less colorfully, he explains that this refers to “the burgeoning cooperation among China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia,” a challenge serious enough that experts fear it could plunge the world into either World War III or “a slew of separate conflicts scattered around the globe.”

At the Atlantic Council, where Hadley serves as the chair of our International Advisory Board and an executive vice chair of the Board of Directors, we’ve been debating what to call this quartet of autocrats, which some compare in its potential to the German-Italian-Japanese axis of World War II, or worse.

“Axis of Evil” already has been used. “Axis of Chaos” understates their common cause. “Axis of Autocrats” suggests all authoritarian leaders agree with them (and they certainly don’t). “Tryst of Tyrants” alliterates but trivializes. In my own writings, I’ve chosen “Axis of Aggressors,” so Hadley’s new entry in the naming stakes intrigued me.

However, what’s significant about the piece isn’t the clever turn of phrase. What makes it a must-read for the next US president is Hadley’s compelling recipe for a response.

Hadley starts with the premise that China is both the most significant long-term concern for Washington among these four actors and, at the same time, the only one—the others being rogue states in their regions—that is so deeply integrated into the global economy.

The logic follows that the United States ought to try to peel off (my words) China due to its self-interest. Hadley, however, instead quotes former US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who proposed to me in an interview recently at the Atlantic Council Global Future Forum that policymakers “slam them together and make them deal with the consequences of the fact they don’t actually have that much in common.”

Writes Hadley: “Washington’s aim should be to make clear to Chinese President Xi Jinping how counterproductive and costly to Beijing’s interests these new relationships will turn out to be. That means effectively countering Iran, North Korea, and Russia in their own regions, thereby demonstrating to China that tethering itself to a bunch of losers is hardly a path to global influence.”

That’s easier written than done. Still, it is an approach that has the benefit of being logical and pragmatic. It could summon allies’ support, and either of the dramatically different US presidential candidates could embrace it.

Hadley outlines how this goal could be accomplished. Here’s a brief rendition.

With Russia, it would mean preventing Russian President Vladimir Putin from winning in Ukraine, and that would require sustained Western diplomatic, economic, and military support. The goal would be to integrate Ukraine into institutions, such as the European Union and NATO, as a democratic, secure, prosperous, noncorrupt, and sovereign state.

It’s significant that Hadley starts with Russia. If the next US president abandons Ukraine or provides insufficient support, the rest of the “Axis of Losers” strategy falls apart.

With Iran, it would mean “quashing Tehran’s hegemonic ambitions in the Middle East,” which the United States and its allies currently have the greatest chance in decades to do. That would require support for Israel as it gains momentum in delivering blows against Iran and its proxies.

At the same time, it would mean achieving greater regional stability through continued reconciliation between Israel and its Arab neighbors, a more promising future for the Palestinians, and a chance for Lebanon to free itself from Hezbollah’s domination.

With North Korea, it would require deterring Pyongyang by strengthening the diplomatic, economic, and military capabilities of the United States’ regional allies—Australia, Japan, and South Korea—“all with the aim of continued progress toward a free, open, and peaceful Indo-Pacific.”

The US foreign policy community keeps looking for a contemporary equivalent of the timely clarity of the “X Article,” written by George F. Kennan and published under the pseudonym “X” in the July 1947 issue of Foreign Affairs magazine, where the new Hadley essay appears.

Entitled “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” the piece introduced the term “containment” to widespread use. It built on a confidential February 1946 cable from Kennan’s Moscow posting on how to address the emerging challenges of that era, which became known as “the long telegram” because of its, well, 8,000-word length.

Hadley would be too humble to embrace my comparison of his essay, “Xi Jinping’s Axis of Losers: The Right Way to Thwart the New Autocratic Convergence,” with Kennan’s. That said, like Kennan, Hadley provides a significant contribution at the early stages of a new era in describing its perils and in prescribing an achievable response.

Kennan’s essay set the stage for the Cold War that would follow, but it’s worth remembering that Cold War’s resolution only came more than forty years later with the Berlin Wall’s fall and Soviet collapse.  

Whether Vice President Kamala Harris or former President Donald Trump is elected this week, Hadley’s essay could help the next US president navigate a dangerous new era that is emerging.  

“The right U.S. strategy could make Xi understand that he can best serve his own interests by breaking with the axis of losers,” concludes Hadley.

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on X: @FredKempe.

This edition is part of Frederick Kempe’s Inflection Points newsletter, a column of dispatches from a world in transition. To receive this newsletter throughout the week, sign up here.

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Putin’s risky move to bring thousands of North Korean soldiers to Russia to fight Ukraine, and his doubling down to push for pro-Kremlin electoral outcomes in Georgia and Moldova, all come as Washington is neither likely to respond in any meaningful way nor rally its allies in a manner that is sufficient for the challenge.

American neglect couldn’t come at a more perilous time. Autocratic aggressors are acting in increasing common cause, particularly through unprecedented defense-industrial cooperation, recognizing a rare chance to reshape the international order to their advantage, with the Biden administration losing steam and the two US presidential candidates focused more on defeating each other than any external foe.

“Western security officials have warned for months of growing cooperation between an ‘axis of adversaries,’ made up of Russia, North Korea, Iran, and China,” writes columnist Gideon Rachman in the Financial Times. “North Korean support for Russia is the most dramatic evidence yet of that axis in action.” Yet it has also been the most disregarded until now.

Rachman warns the West about its mistaken tendency to treat North Korea as an international joke, “a land of ill-fitting suits and bad haircuts that is more likely to launch a comic meme than a nuclear weapon,” rather than as part of a rising threat that is fielding advanced offensive cyber capabilities, had already delivered millions of shells and dozens of ballistic missiles to Russia, and now is providing thousands of its best forces.

“Like [Chinese leader Xi Jinping] and Putin, Kim Jong Un seems to be convinced that the US is in long-term decline,” writes Rachman. “He may sense a historic opportunity to prevail over his enemies, as part of a broader global realignment that Xi has hailed as ‘great changes unseen in a century.’”

Should Kim then turn his attention to aggression against South Korea, Putin many conclude that he owes him one.

New NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, who only became the Alliance’s top official this month, confirmed this week that North Korean military units have been deployed to Russia’s Kursk region for potential battle with Ukrainian troops, who have seized territory there. Pentagon officials estimate that as many as ten thousand North Korean soldiers have been sent to Russia for military training, among them the country’s elite special forces.

Even as Russia escalates militarily against Ukraine, it has deployed disinformation, influence operations, and money in Moldova and Georgia, working to turn back pro-Western majorities in both countries that favor eventual integration into the European Union (EU) and other Western institutions.

In Moldova, a pro-EU referendum won far more narrowly than anticipated, nevertheless enshrining the goal of joining the EU into the constitution, despite an extensive Russian influence campaign. That said, the pro-Western president, Maia Sandu, will face a runoff against a pro-Kremlin candidate on November 3 due to her failure to cross the 50 percent threshold in the first round.

In Georgia, the Kremlin-friendly Georgian Dream party is defending a declared but disputed victory last weekend against street protests and widespread charges of fraud. On Monday, tens of thousands of Georgians protested outside the nation’s parliament, many draped in EU and Georgian flags, responding to pro-Western President Salome Zourabichvili’s call to annul the “totally falsified” results.

“I do not recognize these elections,” Zourabichvili said. “Recognizing them would be tantamount to legitimizing Russia’s takeover of Georgia.” Describing documented evidence of ballot stuffing, bribery, and voter manipulation, she added, “We cannot surrender our European future for the sake of future generations.”

The Atlantic Council’s Brian Whitmore sees three potential outcomes: a peaceful pro-democracy revolution akin to Georgia’s 2003 Rose Revolution, a violent crackdown and suppression of the democratic opposition with covert Russian assistance, or direct Russian intervention.

“More than two decades after Georgian civil society came of age in the Rose Revolution,” writes Whitmore, “the country is headed for another decisive round. This weekend’s deeply flawed election was just the opening bell.”

Last week, BBC reporter Steve Rosenberg pressed the Russian president on whether his actions over the last two and a half years had increased or decreased security and stability. A defiant Putin launched into a bitter attack against Western institutions. “We want to change this, and we will change it,” he said.

That leaves the United States, Europe, and their allies with a difficult choice, writes Rachman: “Allow Russia to defeat Ukraine with North Korean assistance—and then contemplate the changed security picture in Europe and Asia. Or sharply increase their own support for Ukraine and their willingness to take risks in confronting an axis of adversaries.” For the moment, the greatest peril is US risk aversion in the face of increasing aggression. History hangs in the balance.

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on X: @FredKempe.

This edition is part of Frederick Kempe’s Inflection Points newsletter, a column of dispatches from a world in transition. To receive this newsletter throughout the week, sign up here.

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The danger would be to underestimate what that meeting says about the world that the next US president will inherit after the November elections. It is one where adversaries are likely to test a new president, allies will hedge, and a rising power like India will go its own way.

This is going to require a president with the skills to navigate a fast-changing geopolitical landscape on a three-dimensional chessboard where many of the moves will be more difficult to direct or decode.     

Modi and Xi’s meeting came Wednesday in Kazan, Russia, on the sidelines of the BRICS summit, named for its core members Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. The thaw in their countries’ frosty relationship calls for more nuance in US thinking about the global landscape—and particularly about how to manage relations with India, the world’s most populous democracy.

For years, Washington has viewed most large and medium powers in the world through the prism of its own strategic ambitions. India is the mother of all swing states, so bringing it onto the US and Western side in a contest for the future of the global order could be a game changer if it weren’t so unlikely a near-term outcome.

The better approach will be to understand how India is defining its own global strategic purpose as a country whose influence will only grow in the years ahead. It will be neither pro-American nor anti-Chinese. It will act according to how it calculates its own national interests. Understanding those interests will make it easier for Washington to improve its relations with India.

Wall Street Journal reporters Austin Ramzy and Tripti Lahiri write that “for India, which has been drawing closer to the U.S. and has benefited from Washington’s rivalry with China, easing the standoff on the Himalayan border would reduce pressure on its defense budget and allow it to focus on other arenas of geopolitical competition with its neighbor—such as the Indian Ocean. It also needs to redouble its efforts to build an industrial economy.”

In 2021, I met with India’s external affairs minister and one of the world’s most perceptive geopolitical thinkers, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar. He spoke with me about an emerging period of US “strategic contraction,” after several decades of unrivaled US global leadership. He saw it as one of the four factors shaping our times.

The other three: increased Chinese relevance in almost every corner of the world; the rise of middle-sized powers with regional and international influence (India being atop that list); and the evolution of new, interest-based “shareholder groups,” such as the BRICS group. They won’t supplant existing alliances but will complement them.

Going forward, Jaishankar said, the United States “will still be the premier power by a large margin, but one more realistic and open to working with others. . . . The contraction actually helps create a transitional order” from the Cold War period, past the post-Cold War era of US dominance, to a new geopolitical configuration.

As Modi and Xi were meeting in Kazan, Russian President Vladimir Putin was boasting about a “new world order.” In the emerging geopolitical era, Putin wants US strategic contraction to mean a weaker, less relevant United States. It will fall on the shoulders of whichever candidate is elected on November 5 to make sure that is not the case.

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on X: @FredKempe.

This edition is part of Frederick Kempe’s Inflection Points newsletter, a column of dispatches from a world in transition. To receive this newsletter throughout the week, sign up here.

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Neither candidate has yet spoken plainly enough to the American people about the perils represented by the growing geopolitical and defense industrial collaboration among China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. This axis of aggressors may be unprecedented in the potential peril it represents.

Neither candidate has outlined the sort of generational strategy that will be required by the United States to address this challenge. Irrespective of whether former President Donald Trump or Vice President Kamala Harris is elected, this will be the unavoidable context of their presidency. One will become commander-in-chief at the most perilous geopolitical moment since the Cold War—and perhaps since World War II.

In that spirit, Washington Post columnist George F. Will this week compared the 2024 US elections to the 1940 US elections, when the United States hadn’t yet formally declared war on Imperial Japan, Hitler’s Germany, or Mussolini’s Italy.

What was different then was that one of the two candidates, incumbent President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, sensed he was about to become a wartime president and was acting like it. FDR, wrote Will, “was nudging a mostly isolationist nation toward involvement in a global conflict” with his 1937 “quarantine speech” on aggressor nations and through his subsequent military buildup.

FDR’s opponent was Republican businessman Wendell Willkie, who like FDR was more internationalist than isolationist, in the tradition of his party’s elites of that time. “In three weeks,” Will writes, “Americans will not have a comparably reassuring choice when they select the president who will determine the nation’s conduct during World War III, which has begun.”

The point is that just as World War II began with “a cascade of crises,” initiated by the coalescing axis of Japan, Germany, and Italy, so today there is a similar axis—China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. Will reckons our current global crisis began no later than Russia’s 2014 seizure of Crimea.

This isn’t the first time that I have quoted diplomat-historian Philip Zelikow in this column. Writing in Texas National Security Review this summer, Zelikow reckoned that the next president has a 20-30 percent chance of being involved in worldwide warfare, which he differentiates from a world war in that not all parties will be involved in every aspect or region.

Zelikow, who recently expanded on these ideas among experts at the Atlantic Council, reckons that the next three years mark a moment of maximum danger. Should the United States navigate this period successfully, alongside global allies and partners, the underlying strengths of the American economy, defense industry, tech, and society should kick in and show their edge over those of the authoritarians.

The problem in the short term is that the United States is facing challengers in Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping, who may see a window of opportunity in the United States’ domestic distractions, a defense sector not yet adequate for emerging challenges, and an electorate that questions the value and necessity of US international engagement. Both leaders might calculate that acting more forcefully against Ukraine and Taiwan now could produce a greater chance of success than a few years in the future.

Wrote George Will: “From Russia’s western border to the waters where China is aggressively encroaching on Philippine sovereignty, the theater of today’s wars and almost-war episodes spans six of the globe’s 24 time zones.” He says this is what “the gathering storm” of world war looks like, borrowing the title of the first volume of Winston Churchill’s World War II memoirs.

Will charges the two presidential candidates with “reckless disregard” for failing to provide voters “any evidence of awareness, let alone serious thinking about, the growing global conflagration.”

If that sounds like hyperbole to you, it’s worth reading FDR’s third inaugural address in January 1941, almost a year before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, which prompted Congress to declare war on Japan the following day.

“To us there has come a time,” said Roosevelt, “in the midst of swift happenings, to pause for a moment and take stock—to recall what our place in history has been, and to rediscover what we are and what we may be. If we do not, we risk the real peril of isolation, the real peril of inaction. Lives of nations are determined not by the count of years, but by the lifetime of the human spirit.”

War isn’t inevitable now any more than it was then. When disregarded, however, gathering storms of the sort we’re navigating gain strength.

“In the face of great perils never before encountered,” Roosevelt concluded, “our strong purpose is to protect and to perpetuate the integrity of democracy. For this we muster the spirit of America, and the faith of America.”

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on X: @FredKempe.

This edition is part of Frederick Kempe’s Inflection Points newsletter, a column of dispatches from a world in transition. To receive this newsletter throughout the week, sign up here.

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“I know something bad is going to happen in the next year,” says one business executive, who like others I met with this past week spoke not for attribution. “I just don’t know what it is. As Turks, we can only have a mindset and not a plan.”

The half dozen others around the table—former diplomats and current business leaders—nod their assent. The discussion is lively on matters of urgency to them all. They speak with the authority of a centuries-old culture navigating a new world.

They speculate on how hard Israel will hit Iran. We debate the wisdom of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s embrace of Hamas and growing condemnation of Israel. We discuss, as well, the contradictions as Turkey navigates the war in Ukraine. There, Turkish-made drones are killing Russian soldiers, even as Erdoğan meets with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who in turn supports Turkey’s economy with cheap gas, oil for its refineries, and Russian tourists for its hotels.

Turkey, a country of some 85 million people, sits at the middle of a rough neighborhood. To its north are Russia and Ukraine, with which it shares the Black Sea coast. To its immediate east lies Iran, and to its south are Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Israel, and the Mediterranean. “Life would be easier but less interesting if Canada and Mexico were our neighbors,” an energy company executive says.

Conversations about what US officials call the world’s greatest geopolitical threats since the Cold War feel more urgent in Istanbul than from the safer distance of Washington. Our evening dinner ended my week of similar exchanges on the sidelines of the Atlantic Council’s Regional Conference on Clean and Secure Energy.

Turkish business leaders heap praise upon Mehmet Şimsek, their treasury and finance minister, who has calmed runaway inflation and convinced Erdoğan that low interest rates only made the situation worse. They are happy that Şimsek’s increased rates have reduced inflation in the past year to 49 percent as of September from its high above 85 percent in October 2022. They estimate that inflation, as long as Şimsek remains in office, will settle to 25 percent next year. They compare notes on how to best design businesses for Turkey’s economic and political roller coaster.

During my week in Istanbul, I found that even discussions about the upcoming US elections were well-informed and not academic. A financial company leader told me that he would prefer Vice President Kamala Harris as US president because the escalating dangers of the world require someone who would be more willing to deftly navigate them in cooperation with allies and other multilateral bodies.

However, a retired diplomat volunteered that former US President Donald Trump’s vaunted unpredictability, and his penchant for strongman relationships with the likes of Erdoğan, might be a better tonic to avoid war and serve Turkish national interests.

Small talk can provide large insights.

My dinner companions spoke of the growing number of Turks, and also Chinese, who are buying property in neighboring Greece at bargain prices to gain access to a European Union (EU) “golden visa.” With Turkey’s long-standing EU membership dreams on ice, they see it as an affordable way to gain some of the EU’s many advantages by proxy.

They discussed Turks’ unique talent at navigating ambiguity, underscored when one interlocutor showed me a list of the 250 largest global construction companies and where they operated. Turkish firms were perhaps second only to China in terms of how many operate in some of the world’s dodgiest geographies.

National security geeks in Washington refer to Turkey as a “swing state”—meaning that given its size and shifting loyalties, where it lands has outsize consequences. That’s particularly true as a result of its significance in several key and contested regions: the Middle East, the Black Sea, Central Asia, the Caucasus, and, yes, even Europe.

Where does this “swing state” belong? Astride the European Union, NATO, and the United States? Or is it among the BRICS grouping of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, along with more authoritarian-leaning powers?

The rough consensus among those with whom I spoke during the week was that Turkey firmly belongs in the West. But with the EU refusing membership to the country and the United States restricting what military products it will sell Turkey, economic and political reality requires some hedging.

Conversations in Istanbul inevitably turn to Israel. Opinions differ on Erdoğan’s embrace of Hamas and escalating criticism of Israel. While I was in Istanbul, Erdoğan told Turkish media, “Israel is the most concrete threat to regional and global peace. . . . It is essential that Russia, Iran, and Syria take more effective measures against this situation.”

Over lunch at one of Istanbul’s many new restaurants in its bustling commercial buildings, one Turkish interlocutor with a long history in government and business showed me a map on his phone that he said demonstrated Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s true aim of creating “greater Israel.” Its depicted borders took up all of Lebanon and swallowed a large swath of Saudi Arabia and most of Syria.

When I dismissed that far-fetched possibility, noting that Israel’s small population had its hands full with Gaza and the West Bank, he frowned and said that I needed to take the concern more seriously.

However, another business leader told me that, absent the Palestinian casualties, Israel’s weakening of Hamas, decapitation of Hezbollah leadership, and challenges to Iran overlap with Turkey’s interests. “It’s not in our interests to have a nuclear Iran,” the business leader said.

Turkish business leaders regret a world in which so much of their business is circumscribed by politics. Erdoğan has sanctioned Israel, the United States and EU have sanctioned Russia and Iran, and Russia’s war in Ukraine has made it unsafe to continue many Turkish projects in that country.

Yet somehow Turkish companies continue to expand their reach, turn profits, and navigate uncertainty. Instead of wringing their hands about the dangerous world that surrounds them, Turks seek its opportunities.

“Hope keeps us alive,” one energy executive told me. “And resilience keeps us in business.”

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on X: @FredKempe.

This edition is part of Frederick Kempe’s Inflection Points newsletter, a column of dispatches from a world in transition. To receive this newsletter throughout the week, sign up here.

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First, the news:

Investors walloped Chinese equities yesterday as the pullback continued from the market rally inspired by China’s stimulus measures. The benchmark Shanghai Composite index fell more than 6 percent. That followed Tuesday’s plunge of the Nasdaq Golden Dragon China index, which tracks US-listed Chinese companies, by 6.85 percent, its biggest drop since October 2022. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index continued to fall as well yesterday, by 1.4 percent, after its 9 percent drop on Tuesday.

In short, reality is sinking in after the misplaced euphoria that followed China’s announcement of its major stimulus package on September 24. The problem with what China announced is that it didn’t do anything to address the reality that Chinese leader Xi Jinping doesn’t believe in the market or economically sensible reforms, and thus investors shouldn’t believe in him.

After delaying major policy moves in 2023, China announced a major slate of reforms at the Third Plenum of the Chinese Communist Party in July 2024. More recently, the People’s Bank of China took the largest steps since the start of the pandemic to stabilize the economy by offering new funding and interest-rate cuts. Still, China faces enormous challenges that thus far have gone unaddressed: lackluster growth, continued property-sector woes, and growing foreign pushback against manufacturing overcapacity and the treatment of foreign firms. 

The China Pathfinder Project, in summarizing its key findings, states: “In nearly every area we have tracked—financial system development, market competition, innovation, trade, and direct and portfolio investment—China’s progress has stalled or, in some cases, backslid. The initial hope that China would adopt more transparent and market-oriented policies has given way to a reality in which systemic state intervention and opaque decision-making continue to dominate.”

It goes on: “The lack of clarity around China’s decision-making is now seen as a source of global economic risk. The Chinese Communist Party’s growing role in the economy stifles the private sector’s dynamism and fosters a dangerous environment of uncertainty for investors. The decline of the property sector and the correlated focus on manufacturing have raised alarm bells worldwide about a second China trade shock.”

In her exclusive reporting on China Pathfinder, the Wall Street Journal’s Lingling Wei writes in her weekly newsletter: “As China faces its worst economic downturn in decades, Xi has fortified the country against foreign influence. It remains to be seen whether he can take a page from the Chinese classic ‘Journey to the West’—a Ming dynasty tale about a monk’s pilgrimage to collect knowledge in foreign parts—and venture out of his comfort zone.”

I’m not betting on that, and neither should you.

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on X: @FredKempe.

This edition is part of Frederick Kempe’s Inflection Points newsletter, a column of dispatches from a world in transition. To receive this newsletter throughout the week, sign up here.

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Over the past six weeks, however, a series of setbacks for Iran has put history on fast-forward. One year after Israel absorbed the trauma of Hamas’s terrorist attacks against it on October 7, 2023, it has decapitated Hezbollah in Lebanon, severely weakened Hamas in Gaza (though at a terribly high cost of Palestinian civilian casualties), and weathered a recent barrage of some 180 Iranian ballistic missiles with limited damage.

Now Israel, writes David Ignatius in the Washington Post, has “gained what military strategists call ‘escalation dominance’ over Iran and its proxies: striking its adversaries at will and suffering only minor damage in response.” That being the case, Israeli leaders are asking themselves whether it is the moment not only to press their current advantages within Lebanon, but also to strike a blow against Iran of enduring significance.

This is in the context of a conviction Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu shared with individuals he interacted with during the recent United Nations General Assembly, which they then shared with me. Israeli intelligence is aware, he told them, of an Iranian plan to annihilate Israel by 2040. If not now, Netanyahu seemed to be suggesting to his interlocutors, then when?

Iran’s economy is weak, its ruling ayatollah is aging, the head of its Quds Force may not be alive, and Hezbollah, its insurance policy against Israel, is significantly weakened. Israeli leaders fear this good an opportunity to more seriously degrade Iranian capabilities may not come again if they don’t seize it now.

While US President Joe Biden calls for a proportional response to Iran’s latest effort to strike Israel with ballistic missiles, Netanyahu is instead weighing whether he has a historic opportunity to do much more. The targets he’s likely considering include Iranian oil infrastructure, striking at Iran’s already hobbled economy, or, more significantly, missile factories, which are producing tens of thousands of short-range and long-range ballistic missiles.

The most significant of all Iranian targets, however, would be the hardest to disrupt or destroy: the nuclear infrastructure involved in Tehran’s efforts to produce weapons. Israel knows these targets would be the most difficult to hit, as they are nearly a thousand miles from Israel and hardened to withstand attack. Natanz is buried and protected by reinforced concrete, and Fordow is built into the side of a mountain. 

On the other hand, the moment that Iran breaks out as a nuclear weapons power, it will become an even more existential threat to Israel that will be more difficult, and perhaps impossible, to deter. With its defense industrial cooperation rapidly growing with China, Russia, and North Korea, Iran also could join them as a destabilizing nuclear weapons quartet with global ramifications.

Writing for Foreign Policy, under the headline “The Case for Destroying Iran’s Nuclear Program Now,” the Atlantic Council’s Matthew Kroenig argues that Biden should reconsider his opposition to an Israeli strike on Iranian nuclear sites. “Indeed, now is an ideal opportunity to destroy Iran’s nuclear program,” he writes, listing several factors to explain why that’s the case.

First, he argues, Iran’s breakout timeline to one bomb’s worth of weapons-grade material is one to two weeks, so “we are out of time.” Second, its escalating conflict with Israel is likely to accelerate Iran’s weapons development efforts even further. Third, Israel has drastically reduced Hamas’s capabilities and radically diminished Hezbollah’s ability to retaliate, though the extent to which Israel has diminished Hezbollah’s vast missile inventory is unclear. Fourth, there is no prospect on the horizon for a diplomatic solution, a far more desirable but perhaps implausible outcome.

Finally, if the United States agrees that an Iranian nuclear state is an unacceptable risk, which is a consistent and bipartisan conviction, it for the moment lacks any better strategy than to seize upon the opportunity provided by the past month’s reestablishment of Israeli “escalation dominance.”

“The plan appears to be to hope that Iran does not take the final steps to weaponize its advanced nuclear program,” writes Kroenig. “That means that without a major outside intervention, the world is on a path to stand by and watch as Iran becomes a nuclear power.”

Whether Vice President Kamala Harris or former President Donald Trump is elected in four weeks, they will face the growing urgency of dealing with the Iran question that now presents itself. The consequences of a rush to Israeli military action on Iran, which poses a risk of staggering civilian causalities and unpredictable potential for escalation, should incentivize the search for alternatives.

With that in mind, the Atlantic Council has produced an impressive, bipartisan roadmap for the next administration entitled “The future of US strategy toward Iran.”

Says the report: “The advances Tehran is making in its nuclear program, and its spurning of efforts to negotiate a new deal, urgently require a reinvigorated US strategy to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear-weapons state.” It calls for a “multilateral campaign of economic, political, and military pressure to demonstrate US seriousness about preventing Iran from crossing the nuclear-weapons threshold.”

Report

Oct 8, 2024

A bipartisan Iran strategy for the next US administration—and the next two decades

As tensions spike in the Middle East, how should the next US president approach Iran and its network of proxies including Hezbollah and Hamas? With a strategy that can be maintained for decades, by administrations of either party. A bipartisan, expert working group lays out the details.

Iran Middle East

In one of the report’s more powerful paragraphs, it argues, “The United States needs to maintain a declaratory policy, explicitly enunciated by the president, that it will not tolerate Iran getting a nuclear weapon and will use military force to prevent this development if all other measures fail. To support this policy, the United States should refrain from stressing that it does not seek conflict with Iran; announce that it will conduct yearly joint exercises with Israel, such as Juniper Oak; and seek additional funding in the next budget cycle to speed research and development of next-generation military hardware capable of destroying Iran’s nuclear program.”

The question is whether Israel’s sense of historic moment will provide the patience to wait for the next US budget cycle. And if not, what is Israel capable of militarily on its own, and what would the US approach be should Israel decide to press its advantage?

The eighty-five-page report is an ambitious and welcome effort, as Iran Strategy Project Director Jonathan Panikoff writes in the foreword, to provide the next US president with “a strategic, holistic, and bipartisan US strategy toward Iran.”

The report was written by both Republicans and Democrats, and the bipartisan nature of its recommendations is an impressive feat in a Washington bereft of such examples. It is also a precondition for a lasting approach to Iran. The last decade of US policy toward Iran has been characterized by partisan policy swings from the Obama administration’s focus on negotiations with Iran, to the Trump administration’s “maximum pressure” campaign, and then to the Biden administration’s failed attempt to return to nuclear negotiations, followed by policy drift. That inconsistency has confused partners and provided space for Iran to advance its malign regional influence and nuclear ambitions. A strategy that outlasts more than one administration is now more crucial than ever.

Even as the two dozen individuals involved in the report were finalizing it, they knew that unfolding events in the Middle East might accelerate the timeline for dealing with Iran. But they also recognized that no matter Israel’s tactical success in retaliating for Iran’s early October strikes, a holistic strategy would still be needed to address the nuclear challenge that Iran poses, as well as its regional malign influence, hostage-taking, and global assassination campaigns.

For the United States as well, a long-term strategy is required to ensure Hezbollah is permanently diminished—not temporarily, as it was after the 2006 war—so that this episode does not simply repeat in a decade. In addition, a US strategy should focus on restoring deterrence against Iran and its proxies not only by Israel, but also by the United States by responding to every attack, and on making sure that global commerce isn’t permanently held hostage by the Houthis as they attack vessels in the Red Sea.

History has come unstuck regarding Iran’s future ability to destabilize the Middle East. The risks of taking on Iran’s nuclear capability are enormous and difficult to predict. However, the risks of passing up this chance to contain Iran militarily and put its nuclear aspirations into reverse are predictable and, perhaps, even greater.

Is the greater risk being too early or too late in frustrating Iran’s nuclear weapons ambitions? In Israel, the answer is obvious and existential. For the United States, domestic electoral priorities are clouding the urgency of this consequential moment with Iran, but that doesn’t change its undeniable reality.

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on X: @FredKempe.

This edition is part of Frederick Kempe’s Inflection Points newsletter, a column of dispatches from a world in transition. To receive this newsletter throughout the week, sign up here.

The post Israel’s dramatic gains on Iran present a historic chance—and enormous risks appeared first on Atlantic Council.

Israel’s killing of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah—made possible by rock-solid intelligence and a lethal payload of as many as eighty bombs that penetrated his Beirut bunker—has escalated a collision course between two dramatically different visions of the Middle East’s future.

One is driven by Iran and its proxies, including Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, and Hamas in Gaza. It’s characterized by the continuation of violent conflict, and its goal is the destruction of Israel and the triumph of a radical, extremist, and revolutionary form of Islam.

The second course finally seizes the initiative to counter and contain Iran’s ambitions, disrupts and degrades its proxies’ military potential, and lays the groundwork for the eventual emergence of a dynamic, peaceful, modernizing Middle East.

This vision foresees a more integrated region over time, with new economic and security arrangements built off of the Abraham Accords. Most importantly, it would include Israeli-Saudi normalization and a path certain toward Palestinian statehood.

Taking the long view

This more positive track might seem an impossible dream, given the real and immediate threats of a wider war. On Monday, Israel announced the start of a “limited” ground operation in Lebanon. Then today, Iran struck Israel with what the Israel Defense Forces said was 180 missiles, many of which were intercepted. More escalation could be on the way in the near term. It’s important, however, not to lose sight of this historic upside potential as Israel, Iran, Iran’s proxies, and other regional and outside actors weigh their next moves.

It’s crucial to recall that Europe only built its more positive path after centuries of conflict and on the rubble of two world wars. With Russia’s ongoing war against Ukrainian freedom and independence, Europe’s story of peaceful integration is far from over, but it has advanced far beyond Cold War-era expectations.

It was only through a patient, consistent approach by the United States and its allies to contain and counter the Soviet Union that Western Europe was able to deter Moscow militarily and eventually expand its community of peace and prosperity. It took more than forty years of effort to achieve Cold War triumph.

The approach now toward Iran should take inspiration from that model, countering, deterring, and isolating Tehran so that, over time, the Iranian people will demand change in the face of the growing attraction of the economic, societal, and political successes of the wider Middle East.

It would be premature to declare the death of Nasrallah as the tipping point toward this future. It would be short-sighted, however, not to see this moment as an opportunity to be seized in the struggle against the regional ambitions of Iran and its proxies.

What makes the stakes even larger is the global context of Iran’s increased common cause with Russia, China, and North Korea. Together they seek to undermine the global order that the United States and its partners so painstakingly constructed after World War II. Iran’s new deliveries of short-range ballistic missiles and ongoing supply of armed drones to Russia for its war on Ukraine underscore the global stakes involved.

Reasons for hope

Amid all the present escalation, several factors provide longer-term hope.

First is the seminal importance of Nasrallah’s death to disrupting Iran’s decades-old use of proxies against its enemies.

“In his 32 years at the helm of Hizbollah,” Financial Times reporter Raya Jalabi wrote in Nasrallah’s obituary, “the 64-year-old cleric was credited with making it the pre-eminent force in Iran’s regional network of proxies known as the axis of resistance.”

After the US assassination of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani in 2020, Nasrallah was second in importance in that axis only to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. In nearly four decades of Israel battling Hezbollah with limited success, as it continued to build its arsenal as the point edge of Iran’s proxy spear, his death marks the best opportunity yet to turn the tide on Iran.

Second is Iran’s economic fragility and its instinct for self-preservation.

The Atlantic Council’s Jonathan Panikoff explains that Iran is split internally about how hard to respond to Israel. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the multiservice branch of Iran’s armed services, and other hard-liners are likely advocating for a more aggressive response to restore deterrence and shore up Hezbollah. They are almost certainly the factions that pushed for today’s ballistic missile strike on Israel.

However, Masoud Pezeshkian, Iran’s reformist president who took office in July, has spoken of Israel’s escalation as “a trap” to draw Tehran into a wider war that it cannot win. Avoiding direct conflict with Israel is crucial to Iran’s desire to repair its ailing economy and ease Western sanctions against it.

Israel has put Iran in a no-win situation. If it fails to escalate and strike Israel, it loses credibility with its proxies, which believe it hasn’t done enough to help them. Yet escalation could result in retaliatory strikes from Israel on Iran itself, up to and including its nuclear facilities.

Today’s strike looks like something of a compromise, enough of an attack to assuage hard-liners and buy Iran’s leadership time without going so far as to trigger a wider war with Israel or, even worse, with the United States.   

Importantly, Israel’s recent actions have restored the aura of its intelligence capability and strengthened its ability to deter its enemies. Both had been called into question following Hamas’s terrorist attack on October 7, 2023, which left 1,200 dead in Israel and triggered a conflict that has now resulted in an estimated 40,000 dead in Gaza.

It has been the remarkable quality and depth of Israeli intelligence, and probably also its vast mining of data, that has allowed its change of course with Hezbollah. Accurate and precise intelligence is what allowed Israel to take out Fuad Shukr, one of Nasrallah’s most crucial lieutenants, in late July and to sabotage thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies in September. It was necessary to pinpoint the location of Nasrallah and it will be valuable in planning its ground operations in Lebanon.

Significantly as well, the countries that signed the Abraham Accords with Israel haven’t abandoned hope of returning to the course of normalization, which will be crucial if Israel is to turn the tide on what has become the most existential threat to the Jewish state since the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

None has cut off relations with Israel, nor disassociated themselves from the accords. And while many, including the United Arab Emirates, have sought to calm tensions with Iran, they do so with eyes wide open on the continuing threat Iran represents and with the steadfast belief that over the long term, Israel will be more integrated into the Middle East, not less as Iran desires. What they don’t yet share is an agreed-upon pathway to achieve that, and they have vehemently opposed Israel’s approach to Gaza and beyond.

It’s a far distance from where we are today to a new order for the Middle East. It’s that vision, however, that should animate responses to the current crisis, turning gathering threats into historic opportunity.

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on X: @FredKempe.

This edition is part of Frederick Kempe’s Inflection Points newsletter, a column of dispatches from a world in transition. To receive this newsletter throughout the week, sign up here.

The post The Israeli offensive and Iranian missile attack test two visions for the Middle East’s future appeared first on Atlantic Council.

With just thirty-seven days to go before one of the most divisive and decisive US elections in memory, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s fraught visit to the United States in recent days underscored both the historic stakes of our election and the perils involved in maneuvering around all parties.

As the Atlantic Council’s John Herbst writes, Zelenskyy’s trip had a dual purpose. First, he wanted to get permission from President Joe Biden to use US Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) to hit military targets in Russia—something he again failed to achieve despite all the logic in his favor (for more on the White House’s misguided caution regarding Ukraine, read my column from earlier this month).

Second, he wanted to meet with both presidential candidates, Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, to ensure that US support for his country—in its fight against Russia’s murderous and illegal war—isn’t lost in our electoral scrum.

That’s where the problems began.

Zelenskyy caused what Herbst calls “a firestorm in Republican circles” through actions early in his trip.

First, he visited a US Army ammunition plant in Scranton, Pennsylvania, to express his gratitude to workers for making armaments, particularly 155-millimeter Howitzer rounds, for his country’s defense. Then he presided over the signing of an ambitious cooperation agreement between Democratic Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro and counterparts from the southeastern Ukrainian regional administration of Zaporizhzhia. Ahead of the trip, Zelenskyy also gave an interview to the New Yorker where he spoke of vice-presidential candidate JD Vance’s “radical” views on Ukraine.

Zelenskyy’s trip threatened to blow up in his face, with House Speaker Mike Johnson demanding that Zelenskyy fire his ambassador in Washington and the Trump campaign refraining from confirming a long-anticipated meeting with the Ukrainian leader. The backdrop for the newly erupting anger was memories of the July 2019 Trump-Zelenskyy phone call that figured in the former president’s first impeachment process.

Herbst is a former US ambassador to Ukraine and one of the most influential and well-informed voices on why US support for Kyiv is in the US national interest and the global interest. So it’s worth reading his account of how Trump and Zelenskyy finally managed to meet on Friday—and heal some wounds.

They jointly spoke to the media thereafter and described their meeting in positive ways. The fast-escalating Republican criticism of Zelenskyy came to a screeching stop, influenced as well by 800,000 Polish-American and Ukrainian-American voters to be won over in Pennsylvania, perhaps the most crucial electoral prize this year.

“Whatever the explanation for this turn of events,” writes Herbst, “it is bad news for the naifs on the political right who see no problem in abandoning Ukraine to Putin’s tender mercies. And that is good for the United States.”

If you like Herbst’s account, it’s worth reading as well his two dispatches from recent trips to Ukraine—one on the country’s upbeat mood after its Kursk offensive and another on how Ukraine’s incursion into Russia has changed the war.

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on X: @FredKempe.

This edition is part of Frederick Kempe’s Inflection Points newsletter, a column of dispatches from a world in transition. To receive this newsletter throughout the week, sign up here.

The post Zelenskyy and the challenge of navigating election-year America appeared first on Atlantic Council.

It’s impossible to separate the two issues, as the disruptive dangers of the Chinese-Russian combination—sustaining Russia’s war in Ukraine, fueling the threats of Iran and its proxies in the Middle East, and escalating tensions in Asia—can only be contested and contained by steady, confident, far-sighted US leadership alongside partners and allies.

Speaking to the inaugural Atlantic Council Global Future Forum in New York this week, former US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told me during an on-stage interview that she considered our emerging era to be more dangerous than the Cold War. That’s due to the gathering global threats running up against the perils of what she called “the four horsemen of the Apocalypse—populism, nativism, isolationism, and protectionism.”

The United States, Rice explained, “has got to make both a statement and a reality of America’s willingness to remain engaged in the world, because great powers don’t mind their own business. And if we don’t shape the international environment, then others will . . . powers like China and Russia.”

“I just hope that we in the United States can recognize it as such,” she added, “and not fall into a sense that we can simply leave the world to itself.”

‘We’re determined to stop this’

Hypocrisy is nothing new in global affairs, but it’s hard to compete with China’s lip service to the pre-eminence of national sovereignty when weighed against its leading role in Russia’s efforts to crush Ukraine. Without Beijing, senior US officials believe Russian President Vladimir Putin would not be able to sustain his murderous, criminal, ongoing full-scale war in Ukraine, now in its third year.

Senior US and European officials find their Chinese counterparts immovable when confronted with demands that they reduce their support for Russia’s war, far more so than they are on almost any other issue. A high-ranking US official I recently spoke with estimated that Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Putin have had more than sixty personal meetings and a thousand hours of conversation as leaders of their countries. That has allowed them to advance their common cause of undermining US global leadership despite lingering historic grievances and tensions between their nations.

Senior Biden administration officials, speaking to global partners on the margins of the United Nations General Assembly this week, are sharing with whomever will listen intelligence that confirms China’s disconcerting doubling-down in its support for Russia’s war in Ukraine.  

Though it seems that China has not yet provided weapons themselves, its support for Russia’s defense industry includes the myriad components and semiconductor chips for Russia’s weaponry, the chemical components for its explosives, the machine tools for its defense industrial machine, and advanced technology that kills Ukrainian civilians and destroys their cities and infrastructure. Moreover, some components provided by US companies to Chinese companies are being resold to other Chinese companies, which then send them off to Russia.

China’s backing makes all the difference. One senior US official told me, for example, that Chinese assistance has allowed Russia to ramp up its tank production from one hundred to one thousand per year.

“We’re determined to stop this,” Nicholas Burns, the US ambassador to China, told the Transatlantic Forum on GeoEconomics, which was also held this week in New York and cohosted by the Atlantic Council and the German think tank Atlantik-Brücke.

“We sanctioned over three hundred Chinese firms over the last several months,” said Burns. “Unfortunately, we’ve not seen a change in Chinese behavior. And so they should expect that we’ll continue in this punitive effort to make our voice clear that we’re not going to stand by as China significantly helps Russia strengthen [not only] its armaments potential, but also its defense industrial base.”

The Russia-China connection isn’t just an issue for US leaders, but also for US partners around the world. It is Russian-Chinese support for Tehran, and through Iran for its proxies, which has imperiled Israel and made the Middle East a more dangerous place as the region faces the threat of a wider war. It is Russian and Chinese support for Pyongyang that is making North Korea an even more dangerous nuclear weapons state.

In the meantime, Pyongyang is providing train loads of ammunition and ballistic missiles to Moscow, and Tehran is providing short-range ballistic missiles and armed drones. Together, this tryst of tyrants not only threatens Ukraine but also Asia and the Middle East.

Outgoing Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida told Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin this week that aggressive dictatorships in Asia such as China and North Korea will be emboldened if Russia is allowed to violate Ukraine’s sovereignty with impunity.

“That is why I have been saying that today’s Ukraine could be East Asia tomorrow,” Kishida told Rogin. “And that is the very reason why I have also repeated that the security of the Euro-Atlantic and the Indo-Pacific are inseparable.”

‘Slam them together’

What can the United States and others do about this gathering threat?  

Classic geopolitical tradecraft would suggest that one must either peel off China or Russia through incentives and diplomacy, as then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger did with China in the 1970s, or frustrate and drive up the cost of their ambitions.

At the Global Future Forum, Rice laid out an approach for whomever is elected US president in November. 

Instead of trying to pull China and Russia apart, she instead would “slam them together” and not only make them face the consequences of their actions, but also expose how little they have in common beyond their common cause against the United States and its allies.

Russia’s leaders can’t be pleased that China is supplanting them in Central Asia, Rice said, nor can China be happy that the Houthis, Iran’s proxies, are disrupting sea lanes that above all are moving Chinese goods. 

Beyond that, she said, “Chinese banks that are supporting what the Chinese are doing in support of the Russian effort, let’s not let them get away with that. . . . We have to start to impose consequences on this collaboration.”

Whichever US presidential candidate is elected in November will face the same global context, so the only question is the extent to which the newly elected president understands and responds to it. History’s lesson on that is a sobering one.

Ahead of World War II, said Rice, “I don’t think Hitler’s Germany and Imperial Japan and Mussolini’s Italy were all that friendly, really. But they made a lot of trouble in the meantime.” She sees China, Russia, and Iran in that context, and thus argues that they must be “held accountable.”

Rice concluded that the real question for the next US president is whether Russia and China shape the global future or the United States does with its allies. For all the confusing noise of the ongoing presidential campaign, this will be the most crucial, generational challenge for the incoming commander in chief.

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on X: @FredKempe.

This edition is part of Frederick Kempe’s Inflection Points newsletter, a column of dispatches from a world in transition. To receive this newsletter throughout the week, sign up here.

The post The US confronts two global threats: China-Russia and itself appeared first on Atlantic Council.

Little did we know at the time that this encounter would play a modest but, it turns out, vital role in gaining Evan’s release.

At some point the book should be written, one hopes by Evan himself, on his shameful and unjustified 491-day imprisonment and ultimate conviction on espionage charges, which called for a sixteen-year sentence.

The book will include President Vladimir Putin’s choice to hold Evan for entirely cynical reasons, intending to provide a pawn for a future prisoner exchange to recover mislaid Russian chess pieces.

The final exchange, one of historical dimensions both in the number of those released and the complexity of the negotiation, involved a host of actors that included Scholz, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and Slovenian Prime Minister Robert Golob. It also involved Almar Latour, publisher of the Wall Street Journal and CEO of Dow Jones (and an Atlantic Council board member); Wall Street Journal Editor in Chief Emma Tucker; Dow Jones general counsel Jason Conti; private lawyers at WilmerHale engaged by Dow Jones; US President Joe Biden; National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan; Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs Roger Carstens; and Evan’s parents, Ella Milman and Mikhail Gershkovich, among others.

Wall Street Journal reporters Joe Parkinson, Drew Hinshaw, Bojan Pancevski, and Aruna Viswanatha told the story in a compelling reconstruction on August 1, but it will take further investigation to reveal all the elements and stages of this true-life thriller.

Here’s the inside story on the Atlantic Council’s part in the drama.

Black-tie back channel

For more than a year, multiparty negotiations for the release of Evan and other prisoners held in Russia had taken place behind the scenes. Our role in this story began almost from the day of Evan’s imprisonment. It included a number of public and private support efforts, most prominently the launching of a regular convening called Reporters at Risk, an initiative of Atlantic Council Board Executive Vice Chair Adrienne Arsht and our Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security. Each event contained an element shining a light on Evan’s plight and rallying support, including a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal.

At the Global Citizen Awards dinner in September 2023, we honored Scholz alongside Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, and Hong Kong business leader Victor Chu. Latour asked me to invite Evan’s parents to our awards dinner in the hope that we could introduce them to Scholz.

Just an hour before the event, WilmerHale lawyer Robert Kimmitt—the former US ambassador to Germany, deputy secretary of the US Treasury, and long-time friend of mine—phoned me to request that Evan’s parents be invited into a small gathering of the honorees and their introducers that included Scholz.  

“It was there where [Scholz] expressed his support for Evan—a key moment in a lengthy saga that culminated in last week’s prisoner exchange,” Latour wrote me days after Evan was freed in August 2024. Latour said that moment reflected the Atlantic Council’s “essential strengths and accomplishments: its global community of leaders who trust the organization and use it as a platform to connect with one another.” Perhaps the most crucial piece that unlocked Russian willingness to make the deal was Scholz’s willingness to trade Vadim Krasikov, a convicted killer who gunned down an opponent of the Russian regime who was seeking asylum in Germany. It was a courageous move by Scholz, one that would put domestic political heat on him but save lives.

The decision, said Scholz, was based on “balancing the interest of the state in enforcing the sentence with the freedom and the risks to the health and, in some cases, to the lives of innocent people detained in Russia.” The most tragic moment in this saga for those most deeply involved came in February 2024, when news broke that Russian dissident Alexei Navalny had died in a Russian prison, as negotiators were working to include him in an exchange. He was the individual whom German leaders most wanted free—and whose freedom posed the greatest potential political threat to Putin.

The true nature of his death might never be known. But one of those involved in the final prisoner exchange, speaking on the condition of anonymity, shared with me Navalny’s potential involvement in a prisoner release and well-founded suspicions that Putin had Navalny killed to remove that option from the chessboard.

When the final exchange took place nearly six months later, those involved whom Putin wanted free included Russian security services hit man Krasikov, hackers Vladislav Klyushin and Roman Seleznev, and spies Artem Dultsev and Anna Dultseva. Those whose freedom was gained by Western negotiators included Evan, former Marine Paul Whelan, journalist Alsu Kurmasheva, and opposition figure Vladimir Kara-Murza.

An unfair trade

Latour understood what Evan’s release, in particular, meant to me as a veteran of more than twenty-five years at the Wall Street Journal. It was during my leadership as editor and associate publisher at the Wall Street Journal Europe that my reporting colleague Daniel Pearl was taken hostage by terrorists in Pakistan and ultimately beheaded. I will never stop asking whether I and others could have done more to save him from that horror.

Perhaps not, but the question was motivation enough in this far different situation, involving a sovereign state, for Latour—who as a young news assistant sat a few desks away from Pearl at the Journal bureau in Washington, DC—the Dow Jones leadership team, and many others to leave no stone unturned. That included frequent visits by Latour and others to the White House and the State Department, flying Evan’s parents to Davos for the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting, where they met with media and Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and a trip to Berlin where Latour, Conti, and a WilmerHale lawyer engaged with Wolfgang Schmidt, Scholz’s influential head of chancellery and federal minister for special affairs, building on the New York exchange.

I’m delighted our modest role helped. I was deeply touched by Latour’s personal letter to me, which said: “As a veteran of multiple decades at the Journal, you made many contributions to the world’s greatest news organization,” adding that through the Atlantic Council’s contributions to Evan’s release, “[you] perhaps made your greatest contribution yet to your former newsroom.” 

We are all overjoyed that Evan, Paul, Alsu, Vladimir, and others are home. But it’s worth remembering that this was an inherently unfair trade—killers and criminals for innocents and freedom fighters. It released bad people who will continue to do bad things and good people who now can continue to contribute to a better world. The worst part of it is that our willingness in civilized societies to care so much for our unfairly imprisoned provides only greater motivation for further misbehavior. Government leaders and those of us in civil society must continue to reflect and develop ideas on how to break this dangerous cycle.

When the Global Citizen Awards convene again on Monday in New York, we’ll honor Ghanaian President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, and South Korean-American entertainment executive Miky Lee. On Tuesday, we will host another Reporters at Risk event at our Global Future Forum in New York, featuring Jason Rezaian, the Washington Post journalist who was unjustly imprisoned in Iran.

Perhaps nothing quite so significant will take place this year at our annual gathering in New York. From the stage at the Global Citizen Awards, we’ll make mention of Evan’s parents’ presence the year before in our front row and their not-so-chance meeting with Scholz. We’ll then join in applauding Evan’s character, courage, and resilience—and his return to practicing the pursuit of truth.

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on X: @FredKempe.

This edition is part of Frederick Kempe’s Inflection Points newsletter, a column of dispatches from a world in transition. To receive this newsletter throughout the week, sign up here.

The post How the Atlantic Council contributed to Evan Gershkovich’s release appeared first on Atlantic Council.

What’s most disappointing about this is that Biden has done more than any other global leader to define the challenges we face from an increasingly tight tryst of tyrannical regimes—China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran. He also deserves enormous credit for the consistency and scale of US and allied support for Ukraine since Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s February 2022 full-scale invasion, without which Kyiv might already be lost.

That said, think about Biden as you would assess the doctor who has accurately diagnosed your disease, but who is fearful of the side effects if he applies the full treatment necessary to cure it. In this case, the greatest of those side effects is Russian escalation. Ironically, it is precisely Biden’s caution that has encouraged continued Russian, Chinese, North Korean, and Iranian misbehavior. The US and allied response to the increased cooperation among these countries continues to fall short of actions that would frustrate their common cause.  

Last week, during meetings with UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Biden balked again at giving Ukraine the green light to use long-range weapons—such as the British-French Storm Shadow or US Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS)—to hit targets deep inside Russia for fear of escalating the fight. Yet failing to remove these restrictions severely limits Ukraine’s capability to hit the source of Russia’s mounting attacks, which are destroying its infrastructure, killing its civilians, and severely limiting its ability to prevail.  

“There cannot be long-range restrictions in Ukraine when terrorists do not have such restrictions,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy recently said on Telegram. “America, Britain, France, other partners have the power to help us stop terror.”  

History will remember Biden for accurately defining our era as an “inflection point” in an unfolding struggle between democracy and a small handful of autocratic tyrants, something he began to do even during the 2020 presidential campaign prior to taking office.

Speaking from the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office on October 19, 2023, he went even further and powerfully connected the dots between ongoing wars in Europe and the Middle East. Said Biden: “We’re facing an inflection point in history, one of those moments where the decisions we make today are going to determine the future for decades to come.”

He also was clear about what connected the two distant battlegrounds. “Hamas and Putin represent different threats, but they share this in common,” he said. “They both want to completely annihilate a neighboring democracy—completely annihilate it.” He could just as well have named Iran alongside Hamas in that quote, as that’s where the fundamental regional danger rests, with its global connections.

What’s evolved during the Biden presidency—and has escalated since Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and Hamas’s terrorist attack on Israel in October 2023—has been an unprecedented geopolitical and defense-industrial cooperation among China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea.

Whether Vice President Kamala Harris or former President Donald Trump is elected in November, the next US president will have to address this gathering challenge.

“The coalescing partnership of autocracies led by China and Russia will impose strategic choices on Western democracies, no matter who wins the US presidential election,” wrote Yaroslav Trofimov in the Wall Street Journal recently. “Can the US and allies deter all these rivals—including Iran and North Korea—at the same time, given the decay in the West’s military industrial base and the unwillingness of voters to spend more dramatically on defense? And if not, should, and could, an accommodation be sought with one of the rival great powers? If so, which one—and at what cost?”

Underscoring the rising dangers posed by this fast-evolving autocratic partnership, Secretary of State Antony Blinken last week revealed that Iran has sent Russia short-range ballistic missiles, which will threaten Ukraine alongside Iranian drones and North Korean ballistic missiles. Hours later, the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and Germany announced new sanctions on people and entities with ties to the Iranian missile supply, along with Iran Air, the Islamic Republic’s commercial airline.

Said Blinken: “We’ve warned Tehran publicly, we’ve warned Tehran privately, that taking this step would be a dangerous escalation.”

Central Intelligence Agency Director William J. Burns and Chief of the UK Secret Intelligence Service Richard Moore wrote an op-ed in the Financial Times that laid out the stakes of our times, in an unprecedented public statement by the two intelligence service chiefs.

“There is no question,” they wrote, “that the international world order—the balanced system that has led to relative peace and stability and delivered rising living standards, opportunities and prosperity—is under threat in a way we haven’t seen since the cold war.”

The historian and diplomat Philip Zelikow, writing in the Texas National Security Review, put it this way: “The United States faces a purposeful set of powerful adversaries in a rapidly changing and militarized period of history, short of all-out war.”

He notes that this is the third time the United States has confronted such a situation.

“The first was between 1937 and 1941 and was resolved by American entry into World War II,” he writes. “The second was between 1948 and 1962, implicating the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China,” and that ended with the Cuban Missile Crisis in late 1962, after which the Soviet Union “relaxed its stance in the central confrontation in Europe.”

Put simply, such eras don’t resolve themselves.

“During the next two or three years,” Zelikow writes, “the situation will probably settle more durably in one direction or another: wider war or uneasy peace.” He gives the possibility of “worldwide warfare only in the 20-30 percent range.” That’s not a reassuring calculus.

A newly elected Harris or a re-elected Trump will inherit that risk. Biden may be older and less scrappy than was Alexander Hamilton in the musical, but he still has a shot at the history books and at making his successor’s job easier if he uses his next four months to strengthen Ukraine at the front line of this global contest.

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on X: @FredKempe.

This edition is part of Frederick Kempe’s Inflection Points newsletter, a column of dispatches from a world in transition. To receive this newsletter throughout the week, sign up here.

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We at the Atlantic Council are overjoyed and relieved that Evan has been released after 491 days of wrongful imprisonment in Russia. This is a great day for Evan, his family, and his colleagues at the Wall Street Journal, who worked tirelessly to secure his release. However, it doesn’t diminish our need to speak out against Russia’s crimes not only against Evan but against free speech more broadly.

As Almar Latour, Wall Street Journal publisher and Dow Jones CEO, said at the Atlantic Council’s Distinguished Leadership Awards in May 2023, “Evan’s arrest is a symbolic reminder of the fight that we find ourselves in today. It’s autocrats versus the power of the pen—disinformation versus reliable information as the bedrock of free society.”

Latour’s point was underscored by those released with Evan: two other Americans wrongfully detained—journalist Alsu Kurmasheva and former US Marine Paul Whelan—as well as Russian political dissident and Pulitzer Prize winner Vladimir Kara-Murza, among others. In exchange, a contemptible lot, including a convicted murderer and several hackers and spies, was welcomed back to Russia by President Vladimir Putin.

Watch Latour’s full speech below:

Evan’s resilience and steadfastness are testament to the courage of journalists worldwide who take risks every day in service to freer societies. In partnership with Adrienne Arsht, the Atlantic Council has been proud to champion Evan’s cause through our “Reporters at Risk” series, which highlights those dangers and underscores the importance of supporting their critical work.

The Atlantic Council remains committed to press freedom and defending the safety of reporters at risk like Evan. As a twenty-five-year veteran of the Wall Street Journal, I welcome him home as a colleague. On behalf of the Atlantic Council, we commit ourselves to defending the freedoms he and reporters like him around the world represent.

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on Twitter: @FredKempe.

This edition is part of Frederick Kempe’s Inflection Points Today newsletter, a column of quick-hit insights on a world in transition. To receive this newsletter throughout the week, sign up here.

The post Welcome home, Evan appeared first on Atlantic Council.

The Opening Ceremony tomorrow evening will abandon the usual constraints of a stadium for a parade of athletes down the River Seine, with boats carrying national delegations. With eighty giant screens set up around the city, and with cameras capturing the action on every vessel, the largest in-person audience ever will cheer 10,500 athletes as they make their winding, six-kilometer way to the Place du Trocadéro, with the Eiffel Tower directly facing it, for the Olympic protocol and torch lighting.

The Paris Olympics thus will serve as a refreshing, democratic (small d) antidote to several recent authoritarian-hosted Games. It will be a celebration of the individual and the freedom-drenched collective, in the country of the 1789 French Revolution and the Age of Enlightenment’s notions of “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité.”

By comparison, the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics unfolded just before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and just after Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin entered their bloody, “no limits” partnership. The 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics were tarnished by revelations of Russia’s state-sponsored doping program and set the stage for Russia’s annexation of Crimea. The 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics before them signaled Xi’s rise as China’s most powerful and autocratic leader since Mao Zedong, and Putin’s Russia invaded neighboring Georgia during the Games.

The Olympics never take place in a political vacuum, and this year’s context is chilling: wars in Europe and the Middle East and growing tensions in Asia, all of which contribute to the biggest threats to global order since the 1930s.

“The world is really longing for something unifying among all these tensions and confrontations,” International Olympic Committee (IOC) President Thomas Bach noted in a recent must-read Washington Post feature. Bach added that the Paris Olympics could be that something. Speaking last November at the United Nations, the IOC president worried that the world was in a “dangerous downward spiral . . . Political, social, and economic divisions are gaining more ground.”

The Washington Post’s Les Carpenter writes, “Many in the Olympic world are hoping these Games will do what Los Angeles did 40 years ago” at the 1984 Summer Games.

Those Olympics followed the US-led boycott, joined by more than sixty countries, of the 1980 Moscow Summer Games to protest the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan. The Los Angeles Games also set the stage for one of the most dramatic expansions of democracy in history.

They transpired toward the end of US President Ronald Reagan’s first term and five short years before the Berlin Wall’s fall, which was followed by the Soviet Union’s collapse. They were a demonstration of a vibrant US democracy, full of confidence and determined to shape its times.

The games also marked a new, successful business model for the Olympic movement. They were run by a young travel executive named Peter Ueberroth, who introduced rich television deals and corporate sponsorships that produced more than two hundred million dollars in profit. The Soviets and many of their allies boycotted, and US athletes won four times more gold medals than anyone else.

It’s hard to say what legacy the Paris Games might have, though their context feels less promising than Reagan’s “morning in America.” From tomorrow through August 11, the Paris Olympics will coexist with the continued reverberations from French President Emmanuel Macron’s call for snap parliamentary elections, which resulted on July 7 in victory for the New Popular Front, a broad alliance of left-wing parties, and an unexpected defeat for the far right, with a prime minister yet to be chosen.

In the United States, a particularly divisive and decisive election will follow in November, amid an assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden’s withdrawal as a candidate.

There have been worse contexts for Olympics.

In 1936, Adolf Hitler used the Berlin Games to rally fascism ahead of World War II; five Games have been cancelled due to wars; Munich’s 1972 Olympics were blighted by a terrorist attack that killed Israeli athletes. Putin has launched invasions of northern Georgia, Crimea, and eastern Ukraine during the period of “Olympic truce,” when for the week ahead of the Games and the week after world leaders agree not to attack other countries.

Here’s the 2024 backdrop: The years that followed the Los Angeles Games saw more countries than ever become democratic—a formidable wave of democracy that lasted more than two decades. This stopped around 2006, and democracy has been in relative decline since then, according to Freedom House, the V-Dem Institute, and the Atlantic Council’s own Freedom and Prosperity Indexes.

When the final medal is awarded and the last athlete departs, the Paris Olympics will likely have reflected more than shaped our geopolitical scrum. They won’t signal autocratic rise, as did those in Beijing and Moscow before them, but it’s probably too much to expect that, like Los Angeles, they will be followed by a positive wave of democratic change.

The good news is that the next five Olympic Games, including both winter and summer, are in Milan-Cortina, Los Angeles, the French Alps, Brisbane, and Salt Lake City. Each will be held in a country that democratically elects its government, and each can be a milestone to measure if democracies are on a winning trajectory.

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on Twitter @FredKempe.

This edition is part of Frederick Kempe’s Inflection Points newsletter, a column of dispatches from a world in transition. To receive this newsletter throughout the week, sign up here.

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That legacy, however, depends importantly on something he can no longer control: Ukraine’s ability over time to prevail against Russia’s criminal war.

That includes the inextricably linked question of whether the US president has contributed decisively to the United States’ ability, alongside its allies, to counter an emerging “axis of resistance” consisting of China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea.

Those countries are determined to prevent Ukraine’s success. More to the point, they seem to view Russia’s subjugation of Ukraine as a crucial step in remaking the global system of rules and institutions that the United States and its partners forged after World War II.

Biden, who on Sunday announced his decision to abandon his presidential campaign, will likely be remembered by historians for defining the enormous stakes of the era we’re entering. He called it an “inflection point,” which I’ve been doing in this space since 2018, having previously been introduced to the term through the US intelligence community.

“We’re facing an inflection point in history—one of those moments where the decisions we make today are going to determine the future for decades to come,” Biden declared this past October, in only his second speech to the nation from behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office.

Significantly, in that speech he connected the dots between Russia’s war in Ukraine and Hamas’s terrorist attack on Israel, which was only possible with the support of Iran. “Hamas and Putin represent different threats, but they share this in common,” he said. “They both want to completely annihilate a neighboring democracy—completely annihilate it.”

Historians may praise Biden for defining the historic stakes in such unmistakable terms. However, the coming months and years will determine whether he fell short in delivering the remedies by too cautiously supporting Ukraine due to his fears of Russian nuclear escalation.

The result was self-deterrence, where the United States provided Kyiv the weaponry it most urgently requested too slowly and in insufficient numbers. The Biden administration also worsened the situation by restricting Kyiv’s freedom to use US weapons, particularly longer-range fires, against military targets in Russia, from which deadly attacks on Ukrainians were being launched. When the US Congress held up aid for Ukraine last year and into this one, it made Ukraine’s challenges far more dangerous.

Many Republican leaders agree that Biden was mistaken in holding back crucial support and permissions for Ukraine, but they weren’t the ones nominated for president or vice president at the Republican National Convention last week. For the moment, the gathering in Milwaukee indicated the party’s desire to do less for Ukraine.

Many Republicans have wanted to meld former President Donald Trump’s populism with former President Ronald Reagan’s larger global purpose, which contributed to the United States’ Cold War victory against the Soviet Union without a shot being fired. That seems to be the furthest thing from the intentions of the Trump-Vance ticket, though Trump has been known to change direction on a dime, as he did to free up congressional funding for Ukraine.

John Bolton, who was Trump’s national security advisor from 2018 to 2019, wrote in the Telegraph that both Trump and his running mate JD Vance “are disinterested, or openly disdainful, of assisting Kyiv’s defense against Russia’s unprovoked aggression. For Vance, the US lacks both the military assets and the defense-industrial base to be a global power, meaning it must concentrate its resources to defend against China.”

My own view is that the best way to “defend against China” would be to counter Beijing’s unflinching and even increasing support for Russia’s war in Ukraine. At their seventy-fifth anniversary summit in Washington, NATO leaders called China a “decisive enabler” of that war by providing the wherewithal without which Moscow could not continue to wage it.

If the Republican Party truly believes Democratic leaders have provided inadequate defense budgets to address emerging challenges, “Trump should work to correct these deficiencies, not treat them as excuses for further reductions, thereby abandoning even more international positions of strength,” writes Bolton.

Instead, in a recent interview with Bloomberg Businessweek, Trump signaled that he may not be willing to defend Taiwan, likely the first place to fall next if Ukraine falters. “Taiwan doesn’t give us anything,” Trump said, noting that the island is 9,500 miles away from the United States and less than a hundred miles from China. “Taiwan should pay us for defense. You know, we’re no different than an insurance company.”

Where the Trump administration better understood the dynamics of this emerging autocratic axis was in its “maximum pressure” approach to Iran. The Biden administration, by contrast, at first hoped to resume nuclear talks with Iran and work over time to manage its threats to the region. Tehran then demonstrated its determination to disrupt the Middle East and threaten Israel, not with nuclear weaponry but through its proxies, including Hamas, the Houthis, and Hezbollah.

Where the Trump administration fell short, and where the Trump campaign seems to be doing so again, is in its underestimation of the advantages provided to the United States through alliances and common cause at a moment of such significant and historic challenge.

At the NATO Summit in Washington, I had the chance to speak with officials from across the Alliance, as well as those from Indo-Pacific partner states Australia, Japan, New Zealand, and South Korea. I found that there is consensus about one matter: They miss the certainty of the Cold War years, from the end of World War II to the fall of the Berlin Wall, when US foreign policy remained relatively consistent through Republican and Democratic administrations. During that period, US leaders were resolute in the belief that they faced a long-term struggle against Soviet communism and its confederates.  

Without US agreement in diagnosing the emerging autocratic challenge, which Biden has done well, and without US prescriptions for an allied and global response to address it, which he has done less well, the officials I spoke with expect a period of testing by US adversaries and hedging by US allies.

Biden defined the emerging geopolitical contest confronting the United States. He still has six months to give Ukraine the best chance of victory, including by removing restrictions on Ukrainian forces striking military targets in Russia. The outcome of the war and the larger contest, however, will increasingly be determined by forces that he can’t control, both within his own party and among Republicans, and among allies and adversaries around the world.

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on Twitter @FredKempe.

This edition is part of Frederick Kempe’s Inflection Points newsletter, a column of dispatches from a world in transition. To receive this newsletter throughout the week, sign up here.

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Yet the Third Plenum of the Twentieth Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party this past week in Beijing was perhaps more consequential, as a doubling down of Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s determination to put party and state control ahead of economic growth and consumers.

In that spirit, the meeting’s communiqué deployed the Chinese word for persist, jianchi, seventeen times. As the Wall Street Journal’s Rebecca Feng and Chun Han Wong wrote, it was “an echo of state-media messaging that casts resistance to Xi’s vision as proof that his changes are necessary.”

For the uninitiated, the Third Plenum often is the most significant moment in China’s five-year political cycle.

Back in 1978, the party embraced then-leader Deng Xiaoping’s insight that “initiative cannot be aroused without economic means,” which led to reforms that set the stage for decades of economic growth. In 2013, the Third Plenum loosened the country’s one-child policy and embraced the market’s role in the Chinese economy—though the market-friendly promises were not really implemented.

The last time a Third Plenum was held, in 2018, it was accompanied by a constitutional change abolishing term limits and ensuring Xi’s continued autocratic rule. This was accompanied by a deepening of tensions with the West, including the European Union’s labeling of China as a “systemic rival” the following year.

China delayed this year’s Third Plenum, which was due to be held last autumn, without explanation, which raised speculation that the leaders of the world’s second largest economy didn’t yet have their ducks in a row.

“As China grapples with a property crisis, high youth unemployment, tumbling business and consumer confidence, and an ocean of local government debt, one might expect the government to put everything it has into plans to pull the country out of the economic doldrums,” wrote the Atlantic Council’s Jeremy Mark recently.

This week’s proceedings focused a lot on concepts of “reform” and “modernization,” but not of the kind that Chinese or foreign investors would embrace. Rather, China will focus even more on building industries needed for its confrontation with the United States, particularly in high-tech, and it will reinforce the party’s hold. A decade ago, the Chinese economy was growing well above 7 percent per year. Now, however, the Chinese government has set 5 percent as a growth target for 2024, and even that will be a significant stretch.

And here’s where the Third Plenum outcome differs wildly from the Republican convention’s stated ambitions to shake up Washington. As the Wall Street Journal reporters wrote, the plan Chinese leaders put forward after this week’s meetings “suggests a future that looks more or less like the present.”

Just like several of its predecessors, the Third Plenum will be consequential, but this time in its resistance to change, despite signs that the party is doubling down on an economic approach that investors and markets see as unsustainable. As is often the case in an autocracy, in which dear leader must come across as infallible, the plenum didn’t offer any plan B if the markets are right.

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on Twitter: @FredKempe.

This edition is part of Frederick Kempe’s Inflection Points Today newsletter, a column of quick-hit insights on a world in transition. To receive this newsletter throughout the week, sign up here.

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Over a decade of remarkable leadership, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg has navigated an unruly Alliance of flawed democracies through some of their greatest historical challenges, including Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine. In my on-stage interview with him at the NATO Public Forum, which the Atlantic Council co-hosted, Stoltenberg addressed doubts over whether NATO will continue to forge common cause, as he prepares to step down on October 1.  

“The reality is that despite all these differences, which are part of NATO, we have proven extremely resilient and strong,” he said. “Because when we face the reality, all these different governments and politicians and parliamentarians, they realize that we are safer and stronger together . . . That’s the reason why this Alliance prevails again and again.”

These new concerns over the direction of the United States were made all the more urgent by the Alliance’s recognition that NATO now faces a new axis of authoritarians—with China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea in the lead—that are working more closely together on defense-industrial issues than any such grouping before them, including Germany, Italy, and Japan in the 1930s and the Soviet Union and China in the 1950s.

The NATO Summit was expected to focus on Russia’s brutal war on Ukraine, and so it did, in ways that were both encouraging and disappointing. What was encouraging was that the Alliance did well in providing Ukraine additional military and financial support and even a devoted Alliance command, based in Wiesbaden, Germany. It fell far short by dodging two issues crucial to Ukraine’s immediate and long-term security.

First, and for reasons increasingly difficult to defend—especially in a week when Putin greeted the NATO Summit by striking a Kyiv children’s hospital in a deadly missile barrage—the Biden administration stubbornly refuses to let Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy use US missiles to hit military targets in Russian territory that are killing his people. Second, Biden also continues to stand in the way of any language promising a more certain and time-defined path to NATO membership for Ukraine, even though membership is what will provide Ukraine lasting security.

The less anticipated development of this past week—and the one with the most historic importance—was the summit’s remarkable consensus that the world has fundamentally changed since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. NATO now acknowledges the need to better address an axis of autocrats bent on revising the global order: China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea.

As Stoltenberg wrote in Foreign Affairs ahead of the summit, foreshadowing its decisions, “Putin shows no intention of ending this war any time soon, and he is increasingly aligned with other authoritarian powers, including China, that wish to see the United States fail, Europe fracture, and NATO falter. This shows that in today’s world, security is not a regional matter but a global one. Europe’s security affects Asia, and Asia’s security affects Europe.”

That’s powerful stuff—and a significant rethink of the threats facing this transatlantic Alliance.

The bottom line, though not quite stated that way, was: Our autocratic adversaries have joined in common cause globally against us, and thus we must do more ourselves to address this gathering threat. The alternative is to live in denial until the threats advance past the point of being able to address them.

No more having it both ways

One of the more concise NATO Summit declarations I’ve read, which is worth reading to gain an overall feeling of the landscape, lambasted the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as a “decisive enabler” of Putin’s war. Beyond that, it focused on significantly deepening relations with the so-called Indo-Pacific Four (IP4): Australia, Japan, New Zealand, and South Korea, all of which were represented for the third consecutive NATO Summit.

Thirty-two allies met with their Indo-Pacific partners in encouraging harmony about the challenges China poses. The declaration’s tough, unprecedented language on the PRC is worth reading in full, but note the unusual clarity in its call to action, coming from a multilateral Alliance in which language negotiations can be stultifying: “We call on the PRC . . . to cease all political and military support to Russia’s war effort. This includes the transfer of dual-use materials, such as weapons components, equipment, and raw materials that serve as inputs for Russia’s defence sector.”

In my interview with Stoltenberg, he said that although Iran and North Korea were growing more important to Russia’s war effort, “China is the main enabler.” The PRC, he said, is “delivering the tools—the dual-use equipment, the microelectronics, everything Russia needs to build the missiles, the bombs, the aircraft, and all the other systems they use against Ukraine.”

The declaration said: “The PRC cannot enable the largest war in Europe in recent history without this negatively impacting its interests and reputation.” In his swan song summit as NATO leader, Stoltenberg told me that China “cannot have it both ways,” meaning it cannot maintain “a kind of normal relationship with NATO allies” while fueling the North Atlantic’s “biggest security challenge” since World War II.

It’s fair criticism that for all the growing recognition of China’s crucial enabling role in Russia’s war, around which there is now a welcome NATO consensus, there isn’t any agreement on what to do about it.

The sad truth, one worth saying out loud several times to recognize the gravity of the situation, is that for the moment the PRC is having it both ways. It is threatening Europe and profiting from Europe at the same time.

The world has changed much more dramatically in terms of autocratic common cause since February 2022 than Western leaders and voters have digested.

Still, this past week is a good beginning.

“I think it’s important that we recognize the reality [of China’s role], and that’s the first step toward any action,” Stoltenberg told me. “Let’s see how far we’re willing to go as allies.”

Ukraine is the new West Berlin

Stoltenberg stressed that despite the presence in Washington this week of the IP4, “there will not be a global NATO. NATO will be for North America and Europe.” But, he added, the North Atlantic region faces global threats, from terrorism to cyber to space. “And, of course, the threats and challenges that China poses to our security [are] a global challenge.”

Perhaps Stoltenberg is right that there won’t be a global NATO, but this week marked the significant beginning of a NATO that understands that its global responsibilities and threats are inescapable. That realization might have started with international terrorism after 9/11, but the increasingly close China-Russia strategic relationship is now at the core of it.

Speaking to the NATO Public Forum, Senator James E. Risch, the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, guided the Alliance to a newly published report from the committee’s Republican staff, “Next Steps to Defend the Transatlantic Alliance from Chinese Aggression.”

It lays out a powerful list of recommendations for the transatlantic community, including increased national and local collaboration on countering malign influence and interference from China, as well as improving institutional knowledge about everything from the workings of the Chinese Communist Party to the operational capacity of the People’s Liberation Army.

In the spirit of NATO’s growing Indo-Pacific focus, the Atlantic Council’s Matthew Kroenig and Jeffrey Cimmino recently published a “Memo to NATO heads of state and government” on the importance of engaging with the region.

“Some analysts argue that the United States should disengage from Europe and pivot to the Indo-Pacific, while European countries take on greater responsibility in Europe,” they write. This is the “wrong answer,” Kroenig and Cimmino explain. “Instead, Washington should continue to lead in both theaters. European countries should take on greater responsibilities for defending Europe, but they should also assist Washington to counter China and address threats emanating from the Indo-Pacific.”

With all that as context, this week’s NATO Summit perhaps should have done even more to ensure that Ukraine prevails and Russia fails. But allies did at least more clearly recognize that Putin’s criminal war on Ukraine isn’t just a national or even primarily a European security matter. Ukraine is the front line of a global struggle, a role that West Berlin played during the Cold War and a fact that China and Russia long ago acknowledged in their “no limits” partnership on the eve of the 2022 invasion.

Now comes the hard part

This past week, the contours unfolded for what might be NATO’s greatest struggle yet, after seventy-five years of existence.

Republican Congressman Mike Turner, the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, told me on the sidelines of the summit this week that the burden allies share isn’t only a question of defense spending but also whether they still have the political will to defend democracy and freedom.

Having this week recognized the challenge as global and focused on Russia and China, having more closely embraced Indo-Pacific partners, now comes the hard part for the world’s most enduring and successful Alliance.

What does NATO do next?

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on Twitter @FredKempe.

This edition is part of Frederick Kempe’s Inflection Points newsletter, a column of dispatches from a world in transition. To receive this newsletter throughout the week, sign up here.

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Another screen shows a NATO leader, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, paying homage to Chinese leader Xi Jinping in Beijing, following his visit with Putin in Moscow. The next screen shows the leader of the world’s most populous democracy, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, making his first visit to Moscow since Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022. Yet another screen shows US President Joe Biden looking lost in his presidential debate, raising new concerns about what his health means for NATO’s future.

No one can convince me it was a coincidence that Putin chose Monday, the eve of the NATO Summit, to launch one of his largest recent barrages of missiles on Ukraine. The leaders of Hungary and India both knew the significance of the timing of their visits—one by the Alliance’s most rogue member and the other by a major power keen to underscore its autonomy of action.

It’s appropriate that today’s opening day for the NATO Summit will be marked by a Ukrainian day of mourning for the at least forty-one individuals who died and the more than 170 who were injured in Monday’s attack, not to mention the wrecked hospital infrastructure that would have saved countless other lives. It seems that Putin hasn’t read Article 18 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, ratified by the United Nations after World War II, which prohibits attacks on civilian hospitals.

Ukrainians’ shock and anger at the strike on the children’s hospital in Kyiv could give way to dismay as they watch NATO stand by in Washington. The United States has not yet fully freed up the Ukrainians to use the longer-range Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) that could hit the Russian sites from which deadly missiles are fired. NATO allies once again will likely put off a decision about when exactly Ukraine will join the Alliance, which is the only outcome that will provide the country the long-term security its neighbors in the Baltics, Poland, Romania, and Hungary enjoy.

Orbán’s rogue relations with Russia and China come as he takes over the rotating presidency of the Council of the European Union, something Xi acknowledged as an opportunity, just days after the European Union kicked off new tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles. Orbán stopped in Moscow before he flew on to Beijing.

During his visit to Moscow, Modi called Russia an “all-weather friend” and a “trusted ally.” Putin reciprocated the sentiment by welcoming his “dear friend” to his official residence.

Underpinning the Russia-India partnership is energy. India is the third-biggest crude oil importer in the world, and Russia is its single largest source of seaborne oil, accounting for around 40 percent of imports in recent months, up from just 2 percent in 2021.

Modi would have known that choosing to make the trip during the NATO anniversary summit would rub some US officials the wrong way. However, he, like Orbán, knew there will be little price to pay from Western partners after the trip.

NATO began its mission seventy-five years ago amid an inflection point in history, a story former US Secretary of State Dean Acheson chronicled in his memoir Present at the Creation. Putin and Xi would very much like to be present at the conclusion of NATO and the US-led international order. But they will only be successful if allies don’t respond and if partners go out of their way to back these revisionist autocrats.

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on Twitter: @FredKempe.

This edition is part of Frederick Kempe’s Inflection Points Today newsletter, a column of quick-hit insights on a world in transition. To receive this newsletter throughout the week, sign up here.

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The SCO’s ten member countries, led by China and Russia, reached twenty-five agreements on enhancing cooperation in energy, security, trade, finance, and information security, including the adoption of something expansively called the “Initiative on World Unity for Just Peace, Harmony, and Development.”

Western leaders often roll their eyes at the lofty language and empty agreements of the SCO, which was invented in 2001. However, it would be a mistake to ignore the intention behind the SCO’s ambition to be a counterweight to NATO and a piece of Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s larger goals to supplant the existing global order of rules and institutions with something more to their own liking.

It’s no accident that the SCO meeting came a week ahead of the Alliance summit, but perhaps a coincidence that it was on the Fourth of July.

“SCO members should consolidate unity and jointly oppose external interference,” Xi said, warning against the West’s “Cold War mentality,” according to Xinhua, China’s state-run news agency.

In his address to the SCO, Putin called for “a new architecture of cooperation, indivisible security, and development in Eurasia, designed to replace the outdated Eurocentric and Euro-Atlantic models, which gave unilateral advantages only to certain states.”

Putin didn’t need to mention the United States, as the SCO’s members all knew which country he meant. The organization has expanded beyond its original five members—China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan—to include India, Iran, Pakistan, and Uzbekistan. Last week, Belarus joined as the tenth member, and there are another sixteen partners and observers.

Confronting a confluence of threats

Even if one sets the SCO meeting entirely to the side, NATO leaders this week confront three simultaneous but underestimated threats, none of them explicitly on their agenda.

These threats are: (1) considerably increased coordination, particularly in the defense-industrial realm, among adversarial autocracies; (2) continued and growing weaknesses among democracies (underscored in the Atlantic Council’s newest edition of its Freedom and Prosperity Indexes); and (3) insufficient recognition among NATO’s thirty-two members of the gravity of the historic moment, reflected in their still-inadequate backing for Ukraine.

“Like a lightning strike illuminating a dim landscape,” wrote Jonathan Rauch in the Atlantic last week, “the twin invasions of Israel and Ukraine have brought a sudden recognition: What appeared to be, until now, disparate and disorganized challenges to the United States and its allies is actually something broader, more integrated, more aggressive, and more dangerous.”

China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea—working with others—haven’t formed “a NATO-like formal structure,” but instead what Rauch calls an “Axis of Resistance.” This axis, he explains, “relies on loose coordination and opportunistic cooperation among its member states and its network of militias, proxies, and syndicates.” Unable to match the United States and NATO directly, “it instead seeks to exhaust and demoralize the U.S. and its allies by harrying them relentlessly, much as hyenas harry and exhaust a lion.”

Meanwhile, writes Patrick Quirk, a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council: “The security of the United States, democratic partners and allies, and humanity’s future depends significantly on the state of democracy worldwide. Yet, over the past seventeen years, if we look at indices like those published by the Atlantic Council’s Freedom and Prosperity Center, authoritarianism has risen globally, while democracy shows alarming decline in regions of importance to the United States.”  

Quirk, in a significant new report for the Atlantic Council, examines the challenges and offers solutions. They range from supercharging efforts to counter China’s malign influence to shoring up key democratic institutions in strategically important countries. He concludes with a compelling set of recommendations for the US Congress and whomever is elected US president in November—recommendations as difficult to execute as they are necessary.

Building the “bridge”

The most immediate issue for NATO this week is how best to deal with defending Ukraine and offering it a path to Alliance membership. These are decisions that will underscore whether NATO allies recognize the historic context and significance of the Ukraine challenge.

The Atlantic Council, in partnership with the Estonian foreign ministry, conducted a series of major tabletop exercises this spring to examine future Russia-Ukraine conflict scenarios and their implications for Western security.

“The results of the exercises were unequivocal,” write the Atlantic Council’s Matthew Kroenig and Estonian Ambassador to the United States Kristjan Prikk. “Europe is more stable and secure with Ukraine in NATO. Russia did not choose to escalate when Ukraine was offered NATO membership, and in all scenarios, Russia was much more cautious in its interactions with Ukraine once it was a member of NATO.”

The Alliance this week is expected to offer Ukraine a “bridge to membership,” but it will stop far short of a membership assurance. According to reports ahead of the summit, the bridge will be constructed out of increased coordination of military assistance, a pledge of long-term support, more investment in Ukraine’s defense industry, and bilateral security agreements—all measures intended to strengthen Ukraine.

Kroenig and Prikk say the lesson coming out of our exercises is clear: “[For] the sake of a better future for the entire Alliance, the bridge must be short, it must be made of steel, and it should end with a firm invitation for Ukraine to join NATO.”

That invitation is unlikely to be this week’s outcome, but a proper understanding of the historic moment requires nothing less.

Atlantic Council at the NATO Summit in Washington

Live commentary, authoritative analysis, and high-level events covering NATO’s Washington summit, courtesy of our experts.

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on Twitter @FredKempe.

This edition is part of Frederick Kempe’s Inflection Points newsletter, a column of dispatches from a world in transition. To receive this newsletter throughout the week, sign up here.

The post The NATO Summit faces three simultaneous threats appeared first on Atlantic Council.

This week, three of the Western world’s most significant leaders are suffering from self-inflicted wounds that are likely to have long-term political and economic consequences.

They are US President Joe Biden, French President Emmanuel Macron, and outgoing British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, and this is no small story as their countries are all nuclear powers that represent the world’s first-, sixth-, and seventh-largest economies.

What I mean by self-inflicted is that Macron took a gamble on staging snap parliamentary elections, whose second and final round is on Sunday, in hopes of getting a fresh mandate after his party’s humiliating drubbing in European Parliament elections. He’ll pay a price with, at best, a hung parliament. At worst, he will enter into what the French call “cohabitation” with a far-right prime minister.

Sunak had until the end of the year to call elections in the United Kingdom, but picked July 4. He and his party have now been ousted, ending fourteen years of Conservative rule that has brought Brexit, historically low productivity gains, and growth levels below the European Union (EU) average.

Some Biden allies have been saying quietly since this time last year that he could best cement his legacy by stepping aside and letting a younger candidate take on former President Donald Trump. Instead, Biden has gambled on being able to arrest his own aging process—and then convince voters he has done so—a far more difficult prospect following last week’s debate.

It’s telling that these stories are coming together in a single week, with Western democracies all in anti-incumbent moods, often despite their own economic interests, which is especially the case in France.

Macron’s decision to hold these elections three years earlier than was necessary was based on the convoluted logic that voters would come to their senses and give him a fresh mandate rather than face the prospect of extreme-right rule.

Instead, the far-right National Rally is likely to produce the largest percentage of the vote in the second round of parliamentary voting on Sunday, closely followed by the newly united, left-wing New Popular Front, which includes everyone from center-left socialists to La France Insoumise, led by a former Trotskyite.

This week, more than two hundred candidates dropped out of the second round of French elections as Macron’s camp and the left are coordinating to stop National Rally from winning an absolute majority and thus the right to put in place a prime minister for three years of uncomfortable cohabitation with Macron, whose term doesn’t end until 2027. The most likely outcome on Sunday is a hung parliament, but one with a great deal of far-left and far-right leverage.

That puts at risk seven years of economic progress under Macron, during which France has cut business and wealth taxes, reformed employment and pensions to encourage hiring, and thus created two million new jobs and six million new businesses.

“The market could see both the extreme right and the extreme left promising to reverse cost-saving measures taken by the incumbent government (such as pension reform) without offsetting these with new sources of income,” write Sophia Busch and Charles Lichfield at the Atlantic Council.

This comes at a time when France’s finances are already fragile, with an annual budget deficit above 5 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) and public debt worth some 110 percent of GDP. In June, the European Commission named France as one of seven EU members states in violation of its new fiscal rules. The Paris Olympics starting later this month, with the sparkling new venues and train lines, might be less a celebration than a denouement.

The British Labour Party’s sweeping victory, which left the Conservative Party with its lowest number of seats in Parliament in nearly 200 years, is less an endorsement of Keir Starmer’s leadership than it is a condemnation of fourteen years of Conservative rule. The Economist, hardly a fan of the British left’s proclivity for state intervention, endorsed Labour because “it has the greatest chance of tackling the biggest problem that Britain faces: a chronic and debilitating lack of economic growth.”

Starmer’s biggest success has been to quickly change course from predecessor Jeremy Corbyn’s leftist dogma to make the party electable. However, if he can’t address the country’s stagnant productivity, find new growth through investments and trade, and steer away from his party’s statist instincts, he won’t succeed.

The stakes are highest in the United States for November’s elections, as capital markets continue to shrug off the country’s dysfunctional domestic politics and growing geopolitical risks with yet another record high NASDAQ result this week.

Biden must decide within the next month whether to say in the race, and he’ll have to mull over the choice while his presidential duties carry on. Next week, the seventy-fifth NATO Summit kicks off. He will host heads of state and government from the Alliance’s thirty-one other members in Washington, DC, amid wars in Europe and the Middle East and tensions in Asia. The stakes have seldom been higher.

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on Twitter: @FredKempe.

This edition is part of Frederick Kempe’s Inflection Points Today newsletter, a column of quick-hit insights on a world in transition. To receive this newsletter throughout the week, sign up here.

The post What do Biden, Macron, and Sunak have in common? They brought it on themselves.  appeared first on Atlantic Council.

The differences are clear enough between at-risk Taiwan and at-war Ukraine. There’s also a world of contrast between the understated Lai, the physician-turned-politician in his Western business suit, and Zelenskyy, the entertainer-turned-leader in his trademark military green fatigues.

Beyond that, however, the similarities between the dangers confronting the two leaders are striking. Both stand on the front lines of the most defining geopolitical showdowns in our fast-unfolding contest over what principles, rules, and countries will define the global future.

Though not yet in a kinetic war, Lai, like Zelenskyy, is managing an escalating conflict against a zealous autocrat—one with a much larger country and military force—who threatens his country’s freedom and democracy in the name of national destiny. And Lai, also like Zelenskyy, recognizes that his survival depends on international military, political, and economic support, and in particular the support of the United States.

And while Kyiv is some five thousand miles away from Taipei as the drone flies, that far-away war has altered Taiwanese risk perceptions.

Rising conflict in the gray zone

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion in 2022 shook the Taiwanese into a greater and more urgent realization of their own vulnerability. They have digested Ukraine’s lesson that a much smaller country and military can resist forced annexation with sufficient bravery, preparation, and will. The Taiwanese ask themselves, “Are we made of the same stuff?”

Russian aggression has underscored another lesson for Taiwan’s leaders: Ukraine could not have survived into this third year since Putin’s full-scale invasion without significant, costly, and sustained support from international partners.

It is more challenging for Taiwan to win that level of support than it is for Ukraine, given Taiwan’s contested political status and China’s relentless international campaign against it.

The People’s Republic of China (PRC) hasn’t ruled out force to bring about unification, while Taiwan insists on continuing the status quo, which is de facto, if undeclared, independence. Under pressure from Beijing, only eleven out of 193 countries in the United Nations, along with the Holy See, provide Taiwan formal diplomatic recognition, while 182 recognize Ukraine.

Still, Taiwan’s leaders are heartened by the democratic world’s growing recognition of their shared plight with Ukraine in the face of an increasingly close confederation of China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran. Taiwan already is consulting more closely on security issues with European, Asian, and North American countries than it was previously, but Taiwanese officials wonder whether that will be sufficient.

“The strength of the authoritarian camp is even greater than it was during the Cold War and World War II,” a Taiwanese official told our visiting Atlantic Council delegation, which included former Latvian President Egils Levits and former Czech Foreign Minister Tomáš Petříček.

“The greatest challenge is that the democratic camp hasn’t come together sufficiently,” the official said. “Not all democracies are willing to give up their economic interests to face the authoritarian threat together.”

Taiwanese officials see the intensity of China’s efforts to annex Taiwan as both increasing and changing, with much of it falling under what the Taiwanese refer to as “gray-zone coercion.”

That includes a variety of methods to alter the cross-strait status quo, including military threats, disinformation, economic coercion, and the obstruction of Taiwan’s participation in international organizations and forums. Taiwanese officials also speak of twenty years of Chinese efforts to infiltrate Taiwanese society, media, and political parties, which has even included working with organized crime.

“Taiwan is making the best possible preparations for the worst possible scenarios,” the official told us.

Most insidiously, the PRC has argued falsely that through United Nations General Assembly Resolution 2758, which allowed Communist China to join the United Nations in 1971, the international community accepted that Taiwan is part of China and thus lacks the right to participate in international organizations.

Taiwanese officials have rejected not only that interpretation but also Beijing’s claim that Taipei agreed to its view of “one China” when forming the “1992 consensus” at a semiofficial meeting in Hong Kong that year. The “consensus” term was artificially coined nearly a decade after the meeting. There was no actual consensus, even according to Taiwan’s president in 1992, between Beijing and Taipei about the status of Taiwan with respect to the PRC.

In his powerful inaugural address on May 20, Lai put Taiwan in its global context. “Today, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and conflict between Israel and Hamas continue to shake the whole world,” he said. “And China’s military actions and gray-zone coercion are considered the greatest strategic challenges to global peace and stability.”

Avoiding silent strangulation

One significant takeaway from a week of meetings with Taiwanese government leaders, military planners, economic policymakers, and business executives is that they worry less about a sudden Chinese military invasion, which they are working hard to deter, than about slow strangulation, against which they lack international support and their own answers.

Joseph Wu, the secretary-general of the National Security Council, held up maps as visual aids to illustrate the military choke hold that the PRC is trying to demonstrate to the Taiwanese and their international supporters. The maps show the persistent daily activity of Chinese ships and planes encircling Taiwan.

“The purpose is not to initiate a military attack on Taiwan anytime soon,” Wu explained. “That is not imminent or inevitable. What they wish to do is force us into submission. They want to crush the enemy without a fight, to strangle us, though we cannot rule out the possibility of war.”

“The purpose is to wear out our resources, so that we are less prepared for an invasion,” he added.

In a compelling new essay in Foreign Affairs, Isaac Kardon and Jennifer Kavanagh write that Taiwan’s major military investments “in recent years—including fighter aircraft, tanks, and an indigenously produced submarine—are not well aligned with the insidious nature of the gray-zone threat.”

They suggest, among other measures, greater efforts to harden communications infrastructure and accelerate foreign direct investment to build economic links that are more resilient against Chinese disruption.

The authors maintain that if the United States and its allies don’t determine better ways to challenge Beijing’s “gray-zone campaign,” then they could find Taiwan’s autonomy and the United States’ credibility “both greatly diminished,” even without war.

Much has been made of the so-called “Davidson window,” named for US Admiral Philip Davidson, who testified to the Senate Armed Services Committee in 2021 that China was accelerating its timeline to unify with Taiwan by amphibious invasion by 2027, the hundredth anniversary of the People’s Liberation Army. Since then, that notion of an accelerated timeline has driven US strategy and interactions with Taipei.

But Kardon and Kavanagh argue that the United States must “break its fixation on the prospect of an invasion and become more alert to the dangers posed by a slow strangulation of Taiwan.”

“If Washington cannot alter its single-minded outlook,” the authors warn, “it could end up as a bystander as Taiwan slips under creeping Chinese control in a silent fait accompli.”

Just as Russia’s methods to win in Ukraine are different than those China is employing against Taiwan, so must the United States and its allies adjust their own response for what’s likely to be an extended contest with as many nonmilitary as military challenges.

As the Taiwanese official put it, “China is not just Taiwan’s problem. It is the whole world’s problem.”

Note: The Atlantic Council delegation’s visit to Taiwan was supported by the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office (TECRO).

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on Twitter @FredKempe.

This edition is part of Frederick Kempe’s Inflection Points newsletter, a column of dispatches from a world in transition. To receive this newsletter throughout the week, sign up here.

The post Dispatch from Taiwan: Countering the Beijing strangler appeared first on Atlantic Council.

It isn’t so much the contents of the new Putin-Kim agreement, which depending on who you listen to is either a mutual defense “alliance” (the North Korean leader’s characterization) or something far less. Putin said Russia “does not exclude” military-technical cooperation and that the agreement provides for “mutual assistance in the event of aggression against one of the parties.”

It isn’t even the ride-through-the-town-together bromance atmospherics of a relationship that not so long ago was frosty over Pyongyang’s nuclear breakout. Putin’s arrival gift to Kim was a Russian limousine because he knew the forty-year-old fellow autocrat likes a snazzy ride. Kim’s gift to Putin was a North Korean portrait of the Russian leader himself, Kim’s assessment of how best to endear himself to Putin.

In fact, the most terrifying point is that Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 should have left the leader isolated and weaker due to Russia’s heavy military losses and the storm of sanctions that followed. It has instead resulted in the closest defense-industrial confederation of autocrats—Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran—perhaps ever.

For details on the whole picture, read today’s front page Wall Street Journal story, based on sourcing from US defense and intelligence officials, on how “Russia’s military cooperation with Iran, North Korea, and China has expanded into the sharing of sensitive technologies that could threaten the [United States] and its allies long after the Ukraine war ends.”

For a narrower but no less revealing view of the consequences of North Korea’s burgeoning relationship with Russia, I turned to the Atlantic Council’s own Markus Garlauskas, the director of our Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security’s Indo-Pacific Security Initiative.

He previously served in the US government for two decades, including as the national intelligence officer for North Korea. It was a job in which, among other things, he provided direct analytical support to then President Donald Trump for his meetings with Kim in Singapore and Hanoi. Garlauskas knows his stuff.

What worries him isn’t just the military wherewithal that North Korea is providing Russia, which has concerned US intelligence officials so much that that they recently chose to expose sensitive details of what they have unearthed. According to the latest figures released by the US State Department this week, North Korea’s support to Russia in recent months has included more than 11,000 containers of munitions, which range from run-of-the-mill artillery to dozens of ballistic missiles.

Beyond the capabilities North Korea has given Putin to kill more Ukrainians and sustain his illegal war, Putin’s embrace of Pyongyang is “making North Korea a far more challenging problem,” says Garlauskas.

Putin’s support for Kim, he says, is allowing North Korea to more effectively evade United Nations resolutions and sanctions on its weapons capabilities, providing Pyongyang greater access to dual-use technology and badly needed access to hard currency.

Russian support is emboldening Kim, through the robust embrace of a United Nations Security Council member, to be more aggressive against South Korea and the United States. In effect, Putin is protecting the back of one of the world’s premier rogue actors from the consequences of his nuclear saber-rattling and missile launches.

Beyond that, Russia’s use of North Korean ballistic missiles against Ukraine is providing Kim a live-fire opportunity to refine his weapons’ capabilities and improve his tactics and techniques against US-designed missile defenses. The world usually notices and responds when North Korea fires off one of its ballistic missiles, but now the weapons are being lost in the fog of the Ukraine war.

What brings me and Garlauskas to Taiwan is a high-level Atlantic Council delegation, one that includes former Latvian President Egils Levits, former Czech Foreign Minister Tomáš Petříček, former US Defense Intelligence Agency Director Scott Berrier, and Matthew Kroenig, who runs our Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security.

A future missive will report on Taiwan and Ukraine’s role as the front-line states that this fast-evolving confederation of autocracies has in its sights. Putin’s Pyongyang gambit is all a part of this effort, and its relevance and significance are easy to see from our delegation’s view, one thousand miles to the south.

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on Twitter: @FredKempe.

This edition is part of Frederick Kempe’s Inflection Points Today newsletter, a column of quick-hit insights on a world in transition. To receive this newsletter throughout the week, sign up here.

The post The troubling significance of Putin’s Pyongyang deal appeared first on Atlantic Council.

“He wants nothing more than to rain on our parade,” one senior US official recently told me. Some administration officials are considering potential scenarios and possible responses, though giving Ukraine full focus is difficult with the Middle East war and so much else in play.

There is a broad range of possibilities. Putin might, for example, launch an even fiercer and wider summer military offensive in Ukraine than the one currently underway. He may unleash new weaponry, perhaps even a space-based weapon. At the same time, he may advance a more determined (but still disingenuous) peace proposal or ceasefire effort designed mainly to appeal to global opinion, even as NATO members are providing Ukraine more military heft.

Given Putin’s past behavior around major global events, a summer surprise would seem, well, not so surprising. Russia’s invasion of Georgia in 2008 was timed to coincide with the Beijing Summer Olympics; its invasion of Ukraine in 2014 took place during the Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia; and its second invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 followed a meeting between Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping ahead of the Beijing Winter Olympics that year.

Beyond Putin’s fondness for the global spotlight at such moments, there are other reasons to be concerned that this could be a summer of maximum danger for Ukraine, and thus also for the NATO Alliance just days before the Republican and Democratic political conventions in the United States.

Putin appears determined, even though his position is not enviable. Over the space of several weeks, the US Congress finally approved its big aid package and several countries agreed that Ukraine could use their weapons to target military sites in Russia. France, meanwhile, is quickly developing an initiative to deploy soldiers as trainers in Ukraine. But there is no evidence that any of this has persuaded Putin to reconsider his aggressive plans for Ukraine. Instead, he seems to have decided that he should redouble his offensive this summer, before more US war materiel arrives. Ukraine’s air defenses will remain vulnerable for many weeks to come.

There has been no slowdown in Russia’s ongoing offensive around Kharkiv—even as there has been almost no forward movement for weeks—and Putin’s relentless attacks on Ukraine’s power sources and infrastructure continue to do substantial damage. The Kremlin still has substantial reserves that can be sent into the Kharkiv offensive, to expand the thus far unsuccessful campaign in the Donbas to take Chasiv Yar, or to start a new offensive in the north toward Sumy.

Besides these reserves, there are other factors that encourage Putin. Kyiv continues to face a manpower shortage due principally to a culture that believes young men should not be drafted before reaching their late twenties. The Zelenskyy administration and the Rada recently took a step to solve this problem by lowering the draft age by two years to twenty-five, but this politically difficult decision does not solve the problem of overused frontline troops.

Putin also takes comfort from his reelection in March and his two-day meeting with Xi in Beijing last month. At the same time, he must see the crisis in Gaza and the US election campaign as welcome distractions for US leadership. That’s why a senior US official told me that Putin feels a measure of confidence.

At age seventy-one, Putin has cemented his grip on Russian power, with official results showing that he took 87 percent of the vote in March, an outcome he is using to further justify his war on Ukraine. His new six-year term, should he complete it, would enable him to surpass Joseph Stalin as Russia’s longest-serving leader in two centuries. The subtext: The world will have to deal with an emboldened Russia for the foreseeable future.

Putin’s meeting with Xi in May underscored the Chinese leader’s determination to double down on his support of his Russian counterpart. Xi is doing so despite growing US and European criticism and increased leaks regarding the specifics of how China is enabling and empowering Russia’s continued war.

Speaking about the Ukraine war, Putin thanked Xi for “those initiatives it was putting forward to regulate this problem.” Said Putin, “This partnership is without a doubt exemplary for how the relationship between neighboring states should be.”

“The China-Russia relationship today is hard-earned, and the two sides need to cherish and nurture it,” said Xi.

US President Joe Biden’s recent measures to loosen the restrictions on Ukraine’s use of US weaponry to hit targets inside of Russia would have raised more concerns in Russia had it not been for the limited nature of the lifted restrictions, applying only to areas in Russia from which the eastern city of Kharkiv is being hit.

During his speech commemorating the eightieth anniversary of D-Day last week, Biden drew a direct connection between the fight against fascism in World War II and the Ukraine war. He said the United States would “not walk away” from the conflict. “Because if we do,” he explained, “Ukraine will be subjugated, and it will not end there. Ukraine’s neighbors will be threatened. All of Europe will be threatened.”

Yet Russia’s experience is that Biden’s rhetoric is tougher than his readiness to provide US arms in a manner that would increase Ukraine’s chance of not just survival but victory.

Putin can also be reassured by Biden’s continued reluctance to support Ukraine’s membership in NATO, articulated again in a recent interview with the US president in TIME magazine. Biden’s comments opposing, in his words, the “NATOization of Ukraine” were a preemptive move by the US president before the upcoming NATO Summit. Alliance members will likely provide “a bridge” to NATO for Ukraine but not a time-determined path toward full membership and, with it, the security guarantee that has proven its worth for allies that border Russia.

The same Biden administration officials who worry about a summer surprise are hoping that Ukrainian forces can hold their defensive lines against the Russians in 2024 and then launch a new military offensive in 2025 with replenished supplies of munitions and soldiers. Then Ukraine might regain enough territory to improve its negotiating position.

The best way to answer—even better, to preempt—any potential Putin summer surprise would be through a surprise of NATO’s own at its summit, one that demonstrates a level of unity and purposefulness that would force Putin to rethink his Ukraine ambitions. One such surprise could be a more sharply defined and delineated Ukrainian path to Alliance membership, making clear to Putin that he can’t block that outcome through continued war. Another would be to lift all restrictions on Ukraine’s use of US and other allied weapons, removing once and for all any safe haven for Russian aggressors.

It’s time for Ukraine’s friends, at this moment of maximum danger, to steal the initiative from Putin through policies and practices that shake his confidence and restore Ukrainian momentum.

Wishful thinking remains an inadequate strategy to defeat Putin.

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on Twitter: @FredKempe.

This edition is part of Frederick Kempe’s Inflection Points Today newsletter, a column of quick-hit insights on a world in transition. To receive this newsletter throughout the week, sign up here.

The post A Putin summer surprise for NATO? Worries are growing. appeared first on Atlantic Council.

To refresh memories: Cameron promised voters in January 2013 that if they brought Conservatives back to power, then he would give them a referendum on the United Kingdom’s European Union membership. He lost the referendum for a host of reasons, not least of them because he failed to convince his own party faithful and underestimated the Leave campaign’s ability to mobilize supporters.

Cameron was willing to take a high-stakes, long-term political gamble, one that would shape the very nature of his country and the European Union, to achieve what he had concluded was a short-term political necessity. Macron is doing the same today.

The French president appears to be betting on one of two outcomes:

1. For Macron, the best outcome would be if snap election voters reverse their votes of last Sunday, which gave Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally 31.37 percent of the vote, more than twice the share that voted for Macron’s party (14.6 percent). This is also the least likely outcome. Macron’s own supporters consider a victory in either the first round, on June 30, or the second round, on July 7, doubtful. Macron is unpopular, France’s unemployment rate is high, immigration concerns have mobilized many citizens to support opposition parties, and there is growing estrangement between voters and France’s political leadership.
2. The more likely outcome is that throughout the rest of his presidential term, which runs until 2027, Macron will have to govern with a National Rally prime minister in what the French call “co-habitation.” Though National Rally is unlikely to win an absolute majority of the 577-seat National Assembly, it quite likely could emerge as the strongest party. Le Pen, who has her eye on succeeding Macron as president in 2027, would put forward as prime minister her protégé, the twenty-eight-year-old Jordan Bardella. Bardella, the popular son of an Italian immigrant, led the European Parliament campaign and has rallied the anti-immigrant vote with the slogan, “France is disappearing.”
   

Writes Roger Cohen in a must-read analysis in the New York Times, “France would then be confronted with the consecration through high political office of the extreme right, an idea held unthinkable ever since the Vichy government ruled France in collaboration with the Nazis between 1940 and 1944.”

Why is Macron willing to throw the dice on France’s future in this manner, shocking the country, its stock market, the French media, and his own party just six weeks before Paris hosts the Olympic Games? Cohen quoted Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo as being “stunned” by the “unsettling” decision. 

Macron is gambling that National Rally will perform so badly in office over the next three years that voters will reject any notion of Marine Le Pen as president in 2027. French voters could then put to rest the notion that the far right can run France. (Macron himself is term limited and will be unable to run.)

Macron could have responded in many ways to Sunday’s humiliation in European elections. His options ranged from toughening immigration policies to shaking up his government.

He’s taken perhaps the riskiest course available. “The rise of nationalists, of demagogues, is a danger for our nation,” Macron said on Sunday. “And also for Europe, for France’s position in Europe and in the world.” He portrayed himself as a leader rising to the demands of his times, rather than being history’s victim.

Time will determine whether Macron’s response this week is visionary or reckless. If the Cameron experience has any lesson, it is that the gambler has limited control of the outcome.

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on Twitter: @FredKempe.

This edition is part of Frederick Kempe’s Inflection Points Today newsletter, a column of quick-hit insights on a world in transition. To receive this newsletter throughout the week, sign up here.

The post Macron rolls the dice on France’s future appeared first on Atlantic Council.

Now, however, the United States and its allies must turn to the clear and present dangers posed by an even more potent and more coordinated group of “new axis” powers that has emerged. It isn’t enough that leaders of Allied nations now supporting Ukraine were there on the beaches in remembrance, standing alongside Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Symbolically absent were Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin, now at the heart of this new, fast-evolving, adversarial axis.

It’s time to recognize collectively, as the historian and diplomat Philip Zelikow writes in a new, must-read essay in Texas National Security Review, that the United States and its allies confront “a purposeful set of powerful adversaries” in China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. They have increased their common cause after Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 in a manner that Zelikow reckons poses “a serious possibility of worldwide warfare.” 

He puts that likelihood “only in the 20-30 percent range. But that assessment is not reassuring.”

This column focuses on “inflection points,” and Zelikow puts our current one in compelling, historical context.

“This is the third time the United States has been confronted with such a situation,” Zelikow writes in a piece first brought to my attention, given its significance, by Atlantic Council board member Kostas Pantazopoulos.

“The first was between 1937 and 1941 and was resolved by American entry into World War II,” writes Zelikow. “The second was between 1948 and 1962, implicating the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China. Thankfully, world war was avoided and in November 1962 the Soviet Union relaxed its stance in the central confrontation in Europe,” but not before the Cuban Missile Crisis brought us to the brink.

How the current period lands will depend on how deftly the United States navigates with its partners the unfolding areas of tension—wars in Europe and the Middle East and tensions around China. However, it will also rest on how this adversarial axis interprets the events around it—and the opportunities those events provide—to displace US global leadership and remake the global order.

“In the past, these changes occurred for reasons that outsiders often did not understand or expect,” Zelikow writes. “Enemy leaders changed course, sometimes sharply, as they saw successes or reverses in other parts of the world. This suggests that the outcome of the war in Ukraine might strongly affect the wider course of world history.”

That last sentence is worth lingering upon. We ignore it at our collective peril.

What’s perhaps least well understood—and most concerning—is that Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea are already acting more collaboratively than Germany, Italy, and Japan ever did in the run-up to World War II.

“The old Axis was slow to come together tightly,” writes Zelikow. “By contrast, today in 2024, key countries in the anti-American partnership have been working quite closely together in defense-industrial cooperation—extending across Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea. They have now been cooperating for a longer time, and in more ways, than was the case among any of the future Axis countries of the 1930s.”

There’s cause for medium- and long-term optimism about history’s trajectory, given the fundamental political, economic, societal, and technological strengths of the United States and its global partners. Zelikow sees the period of maximum danger as being in the next one to three years, as members of the new axis—correctly or incorrectly—may perceive a moment of historic opportunity in the West’s lack of military preparedness and political will.

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on Twitter: @FredKempe.

This edition is part of Frederick Kempe’s Inflection Points Today newsletter, a column of quick-hit insights on a world in transition. To receive this newsletter throughout the week, sign up here.

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Raisi’s death, at age sixty-three, “is rather unlikely to alter Iran’s strategic direction in either domestic or foreign policy,” argues the Atlantic Council’s Jonathan Panikoff, noting that “ultimate power” rests with Iran’s supreme leader. What his passing does inevitably influence is Iranian succession, with the odds now shifting from Raisi to favor Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s fifty-five-year-old son, the Shia cleric Mojtaba Khamenei.

Of greater short-term importance, though lost in much of the international media coverage in recent days, is the new threat to Netanyahu’s political survival from opposition figure and retired general Benny Gantz.

In a televised statement on Saturday, Gantz said that he would leave Netanyahu’s coalition by June 8 if the prime minister doesn’t agree to a six-point plan that includes a template for Gaza’s post-war governance.

The departure of Gantz’s National Unity party, which polls predict would become the biggest group in the Knesset following new elections, wouldn’t necessarily topple Netanyahu’s government. However, it is another significant sign that Netanyahu’s inability to lay out a strategic plan for Gaza’s future and Israel’s security has not only caused greater strains with the United States, as I argued in this space last week, but is also further eroding his tenuous hold on power in Israel.

Never was that more evident than last week, when Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant gave voice to those mounting doubts on behalf of the country’s national security establishment.

“I call on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu,” he said, “to make a decision and declare that Israel will not establish civilian control over the Gaza Strip, that Israel will not establish military governance in the Gaza Strip, and that a governing alternative to Hamas in the Gaza Strip will be advanced immediately.”

Yet even as domestic pressure mounts on Netanyahu to change course, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Karim Khan, inadvertently prompted even the prime minister’s critics to circle the wagons on Monday by seeking arrest warrants for him and Gallant, along with three Hamas leaders, on accusations of war crimes.

US President Joe Biden—who called Khan’s application for arrest warrants “outrageous”—has taken sharp criticism for having backed Netanyahu too unconditionally. But it’s clear that his increasingly open questioning of the Israeli leader’s course, including threatening to withhold additional arms shipments, has opened space for the likes of Gantz and Gallant.

It’s in that context that White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan met Monday with Gallant, War Cabinet members Gantz and Gadi Eizenkot, opposition leader Yair Lapid, and Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi. A day earlier, he had met with Palestinian leaders, and before that he met top Saudi leaders in Riyadh.

Importantly, Sullivan, in his meeting on Sunday with Netanyahu, urged the Israeli leader to connect his war efforts to a “political strategy that can ensure the lasting defeat of Hamas, the release of all hostages, and a better future for Gaza.”

It shouldn’t be necessary to add: Netanyahu’s political survival increasingly rests on his ability to think and act more strategically about the connected futures of Gaza, Israel, and the wider Middle East.

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on Twitter: @FredKempe.

This edition is part of Frederick Kempe’s Inflection Points Today newsletter, a column of quick-hit insights on a world in transition. To receive this newsletter throughout the week, sign up here.

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So, it was a poignant moment at the PEN America Literary Gala, which I attended Thursday evening in New York, when Almar Latour, Dow Jones CEO and Wall Street Journal publisher, spoke about how the long-sought release of his reporter Evan Gershkovich from Russia’s dreaded Lefortovo Prison matters “on a macro level.”

“The grim reality is that there are Evans everywhere,” said Latour, who is also an Atlantic Council board member. “Journalists around the world face increasing resistance and hostility for just trying to do their jobs.”

More than a hundred journalists and photojournalists were killed in the past year, mostly in Gaza and Ukraine, and more than three hundred others were imprisoned for their work by one autocratic regime or another. Through our “Reporters at Risk” events, the Atlantic Council has worked to raise these issues for policymakers and the public. So too has Latour, who listed the names of many of the journalists behind bars, and he included Jimmy Lai, the Hong Kong media tycoon and pro-democracy advocate charged with endangering Chinese national security with his weapon of truth. One of the evening’s awardees sits in a Vietnamese prison for her critiques of state repression, the writer Pham Doan Trang.

It would have been easy in an evening that honored the music legend Paul Simon—who played his “American Tune” on acoustic guitar just a few feet away from me—to lose the singular and symbolic importance of one reporter’s imprisonment. 

With talk show host Seth Meyers as MC, with Malcolm Gladwell and other authors as presenters and speakers, and with PEN America at the center of controversies over whether Israeli and Palestinian free speech are created equal, one might, for a moment, forget Evan.

Amid the noise and glitter and controversy, however, there was a bigger story to be told. I scribbled down on my napkin Latour’s closing quote: “Russia may be an ocean and a continent away, but the distance between authoritarianism and a free society is measured by the strength of a free press.”

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on Twitter: @FredKempe.

This edition is part of Frederick Kempe’s Inflection Points Today newsletter, a column of quick-hit insights on a world in transition. To receive this newsletter throughout the week, sign up here.

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One of the first German words they taught me was “fleissig,” which means diligent, industrious, assiduous, and hard-working—all wrapped up into one word.

They would be shocked to learn that Germany today has the shortest average working hours of any advanced economy in the world, per Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development statistics for 2022. The average number of hours worked by Germans has fallen by 30 percent in the last half century, and it is a full 25 percent below US levels.

That has become a serious enough drag on the German economy that the country’s government is cobbling together tax breaks on overtime hours, reports the Financial Times, and an overhaul on jobless benefits to shift incentives toward those that favor hard work. This “growth plan” could be unveiled as soon as next month.

The context is a concerning one: Germany was once the growth engine of Europe, but it’s currently the world’s weakest major economy, with negative growth last year of 0.2 percent and only 0.2 percent positive growth in the first quarter of this year. Germany is Europe’s biggest economy, accounting for a quarter of the European Union’s eighteen-trillion-dollar gross domestic product (GDP). So, how Germany goes, so goes Europe.

“Germany is struggling,” Kevin Fletcher, Harri Kemp, and Galen Sher, all economists in the International Monetary Fund’s Europe Department, wrote in late March. “It was the only G7 economy to shrink last year and is set to be the group’s slowest growing economy again this year, according to our latest projections.”

They call for ambitious reforms to take on what they consider German economic challenges that don’t get enough attention: aging, labor and skills shortages, underinvestment, and too much red tape. Less important, they argue, are areas getting more attention: higher energy prices and concerns about deindustrialization, which the economists call “overstated.”

Christian Lindner, the country’s finance minister, has stressed reforms aimed at restoring longer working hours as a crucial part of the picture. “In Italy, France, and elsewhere, there is significantly more work done than here,” the Financial Times quoted Lindner as saying at recent IMF-World Bank meetings in Washington.

My parents might well question whether state incentives will solve the problem. We may soon find out, as the federal government is engineering policies aimed at increasing economic dynamism.

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on Twitter: @FredKempe.

This edition is part of Frederick Kempe’s Inflection Points Today newsletter, a column of quick-hit insights on a world in transition. To receive this newsletter throughout the week, sign up here.

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They are about prevention in that the sweeping tariff increases across a range of strategic industries include a whopping 100 percent tariff on electric vehicles (EVs), although these vehicles account for only 1 percent of the US market.

“Fundamentally,” says Josh Lipsky, senior director of the Atlantic Council GeoEconomics Center, “Biden administration officials are trying to avoid repeating the mistakes of past decades, when the United States and its allies did not do enough to counter China’s unfair trade practices until it was too late and Chinese products flooded markets and cost jobs. So this is about the future and not about now.”

The tariffs are also about Biden administration resignation that China isn’t going to converge with the market-driven trade model or adopt fairer trade practices in the foreseeable future.

Biden not only kept all the Trump administration’s tariffs on China, after long months of studying them, but now has added to them as well. That’s intended to counter both direct and indirect harm to US supply chains generated by Beijing’s manufacturing overcapacity.

China has a long history of overproducing and then dumping those products on foreign markets. What is new, however, is that this is now hitting sectors considered critical for US national security. Watch next for US coordination even with countries, such as Brazil, that are generally skeptical of Washington. They have grown concerned about Chinese overcapacity as well.  

The new tariffs impact EVs, lithium-ion batteries, semiconductors, solar panels, medical products, aluminum and steel, and more. US officials expect China to respond, but they reckon it will do so in a manner that might only accelerate what the Biden administration hopes to achieve: the de-risking and friendshoring of US supply chains.

“The trillion-dollar question,” says Lipsky, is whether Europe and Japan match or mirror US policies at their Group of Seven (G7) summit this June in Italy. If they don’t, expect Chinese EVs and other products to flood their markets—with Beijing concluding that its problem is primarily with Washington.

Most unfortunate is that both political parties in the United States continue to balk at new trade negotiations and agreements, while China continues to strike trade deals all around the world. That leaves Washington with plenty of sticks but few carrots.

“We’re fighting this battle with one hand tied behind our back,” says David Shullman, senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Global China Hub.

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on Twitter: @FredKempe.

This edition is part of Frederick Kempe’s Inflection Points Today newsletter, a column of quick-hit insights on a world in transition. To receive this newsletter throughout the week, sign up here.

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Two individuals familiar with the administration’s thinking recently spoke to me on condition of anonymity and summed up the situation. US President Joe Biden, the first individual explained, believes that the Israeli leader is “confusing tactics with strategy in a manner that is neither sustainable nor supportable.”

“What’s the end game?” asked the second individual. “What’s the pathway to stability?” Netanyahu has, the individual said, failed to answer these questions in a way that persuades the Biden administration, which has prompted the US president to send a stronger and unmistakable message.

That, in the end, resulted in the most serious US-Israeli dispute in a generation: Biden’s decision to pause a shipment of 3,500 bombs to Israel and his vow to block other offensive arms if Israeli forces mount a full-scale ground invasion of Rafah.

The administration’s criticism is that Netanyahu, at the expense of strategy, is focusing entirely on tactics. Those tactics include freeing hostages, which he’s done with only partial success, and killing Hamas fighters and leaders, which Netanyahu has done in a manner that has increased international opposition and taken unnecessary casualties, while leaving Hamas’s top leadership intact.

Biden’s rift with the Israeli leader is particularly dramatic, as it was the US president who flew to Israel in a courageous and dramatic demonstration of support after Hamas’s terrorist attacks on October 7, 2023. “I come to Israel with a single message,” he said then. “You are not alone.”

Though tensions over Israel’s looming attack on Rafah began in February, Biden administration officials’ frustrations dramatically grew when Netanyahu failed to adjust course after the April 13 defense of his country from more than three hundred Iranian missiles and drones.

The combined defensive operation involved the United States, France, the United Kingdom, and Jordan, and it significantly included quiet help from Saudi Arabia. This historic demonstration that Arab nations, working alongside the United States, would help defend Israel from Iranian attack underscored the potential to “re-engineer the architecture of the region,” a US official told me.

US officials believe Israel-Saudi normalization, combined with closer security cooperation with other Arab countries that have signed the Abraham Accords, would give Israel a more reliable and sustainable pathway to stability than even the most successful Rafah operation against Hamas could provide.

To underscore their view regarding the futility of a full-scale Rafah operation, US officials speak of how they see Hamas fighters re-appearing in areas of Gaza that Israeli forces had cleared militarily, such as Khan Younis, where Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, believed to be the architect of the October 7 attack, is rumored to be hiding.

US officials see the makings of a strategy that would have the following elements: Israel seals the Egyptian border with Gaza. It then painstakingly hunts down Hamas’s leaders without large-scale operations that result in unnecessary casualties. Next, an international force, or possibly an Arab-only force, provides security in Gaza, while Israel works with others to bring about a Palestinian leadership structure that squeezes Hamas out. All parties then agree on a pathway to a Palestinian state, and efforts accelerate toward Saudi normalization and a re-engineered regional security architecture.

None of this would be easy to achieve.

All of it demands Netanyahu shift from his focus on short-term tactics to a more promising, long-game strategy. Until he does, expect more tensions with Biden.

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on Twitter: @FredKempe.

This edition is part of Frederick Kempe’s Inflection Points Today newsletter, a column of quick-hit insights on a world in transition. To receive this newsletter throughout the week, sign up here.

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That’s the view of Jörn Fleck, who runs the Atlantic Council’s Europe Center, reckoning that both sides have some soul-searching to do before they’ll be able to restore trust and better manage their growing list of disputes.

Europe’s increased concerns about China’s malign influence on politics and business across the continent form the backdrop for the six-day trip, even as many countries are just as eager to safeguard and expand trade and investment.

Several recent arrests and charges of espionage have given Europeans a glimpse into China’s shadowy activities. Last week alone, six individuals in three separate cases, four in Germany and two in the United Kingdom, were charged with spying on behalf of China.

Last month, European Union (EU) competition regulators raided the Polish and Dutch offices of Chinese security company Nuctech, which is a leader in providing European airport security scanning devices. (US authorities blacklisted Nuctech in 2020.)

That is part of a growing European Commission crackdown on companies believed to be receiving unfair Chinese state subsidies. European officials, like their US counterparts, are increasingly concerned about China exporting its excess capacity. EU Trade Commissioner Valdis Dombrovskis told POLITICO’s Brussels Playbook this week that the EU investigation of Chinese subsidies for electric vehicles is “advancing,” and he hinted that new tariffs could come before summer.

On the other hand, the Wall Street Journal reported over the weekend that Germany, with its own stagnating growth as context, is considering rolling back plans to increase government scrutiny of Chinese investments through a foreign investment-screening law.

That brings us to the “moment of truth.”

For the European Union, it’s whether its members can remain united in addressing Beijing’s malign actions, while at the same time not unnecessarily losing economic opportunity. On that score, it’s a good sign that French President Emmanuel Macron has invited European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen to join him in Paris, where he will do a solo and a joint meeting with Xi.

But across Europe and in Washington the French president’s messaging will also be watched closely for any talk of a European “third way,” which would undermine European and transatlantic unity.

For China, the moment of truth is whether Xi recognizes that it’s his country’s own actions that have Europe on edge toward Beijing. The Chinese leader could address that through reducing his support for Russia’s war effort, addressing manufacturing overcapacity, reining in industrial and political spying, and ending efforts to divide and conquer the continent.

In that respect, how Xi has chosen his European stops is concerning, with France being followed by Serbia and Hungary, two countries that have been coziest with China. Hungary, which just marked twenty years as an EU member, has been opposed to Brussels’ tougher approach to China and has willingly played into Beijing’s divide-and-conquer tactics.

With Xi unlikely to mend his ways in Europe, it will take all the unity Europe can muster to convince him otherwise.

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on Twitter: @FredKempe.

This edition is part of Frederick Kempe’s Inflection Points Today newsletter, a column of quick-hit insights on a world in transition. To receive this newsletter throughout the week, sign up here.

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The emergence of India as a rising, global power is one of the most significant events of our times, one too easily overlooked with all the attention on China’s expanded influence, the United States’ struggle to sustain its world role, and wars in Europe and the Middle East that have kept attention elsewhere. 

Yet as Indians continue to go to the polls this month in the largest democratic election ever (some 970 million registered voters in a country of 1.4 billion), it’s worth reflecting not only on who will win. It seems a foregone conclusion that Prime Minister Narendra Modi will gain a third five-year term. More important is understanding what difference Modi’s India will make on the global stage as its economy and ambitions grow.

Will it be the India that has expanded its economic relationship, and particularly its oil purchases, with autocratic Russia, having significantly increased its trade with the country since the Kremlin launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022? Or will it be the India that is deepening relations and security links with the United States through the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (known as the Quad) and myriad other agreements?

The answer is that it intends to be both, or vishwa mitra.  

A senior Gulf official tells me that India already punches above its weight on the world stage, where it is increasingly present in almost all corners. This is in part because India doesn’t stir up the antibodies that both Chinese and US presence can (except, of course, with Pakistan and China). The strength of the US-India relationship depends in no small part on how Washington will balance its strategic ambitions with India’s determination to remain an independent actor.

With that as context, read the Economist’s cover story this week, kicking off a special report on the country by asking, “How strong is India’s economy?” The more compelling question is: What specific goals and ambitions will India bring with its de facto leadership of the Global South and its role as the world’s most populous democracy?

What we know is that India is the world’s fifth-largest economy and is on track to be number three by 2027. Its growth rate of around 7 percent per year remains the fastest among large countries. India’s stock market is already the fourth largest in the world, and its business confidence is higher than at any time since 2010.

“Rising wealth means more geopolitical heft,” writes the Economist, mentioning that India deployed ten warships to the Middle East after Houthi attacks disrupted traffic through the Suez Canal. Being the friend of everyone, sustaining vishwa mitra, is going to be more difficult as India’s global influence grows.

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on Twitter: @FredKempe.

This edition is part of Frederick Kempe’s Inflection Points Today newsletter, a column of quick-hit insights on a world in transition. To receive this newsletter throughout the week, sign up here.

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Let’s start with Saturday’s vote in the US House of Representatives, passing a sweeping ninety-five-billion-dollar package to aid allies and partners—most importantly, in my view, Ukraine. The vote demonstrated continued US leadership at a moment when the world is facing the greatest threats to global order since the 1930s.

Most crucial was House Speaker Mike Johnson’s gamble, with his right flank threatening to oust him, in bringing the package to the floor with Democratic support. The Senate will consider the measures early this week, and President Joe Biden is expected to sign the bill, but it’s Johnson’s shift that has been the most striking.

“The speaker’s torturous path to embracing Ukraine aid is the result of many factors,” write the Washington Post’s Leigh Ann Caldwell and Marianna Sotomayor in a fascinating Sunday report on “The evolution of Mike Johnson on Ukraine.” It included, they explain, “high-level intelligence briefings as a House leader, his faith, the counsel of three committee chairs named Mike, and a realization that the GOP would never unite on Ukraine.”

One might breeze past faith on that list, but that would be a mistake. Johnson’s awareness of Russia’s widespread persecution of Protestants in occupied Ukraine must have had a powerful influence. Ukrainian evangelical pastor Pavlo Unguryan met with the speaker recently, and as word of Russia’s actions spread, some American evangelicals called on the House to act.

The reporters go on to quote an emotional Johnson, responding last week to a question from the Washington Post at a press conference: “Look, history judges us for what we do. This is a critical time right now, critical time on the world stage. I could make a selfish decision and do something that’s different, but I’m doing here what I believe to be the right thing.”

Johnson did do the right thing, and to do so he had to rely on unanimous Democratic backing against opposition from just over half (112, precisely) of his Republican colleagues. History will thank him. Some of his short-sighted colleagues will not. One way or the other, he has avoided what I warned last week could be “geopolitical malpractice.”

Now it’s time for the United States to take the lead alongside allies in ensuring Ukraine’s territorial integrity, democracy, and security, up to and including a concrete path to NATO membership.

On the Middle East, it’s worth going back to my Inflection Points column on November 18 of last year, less than six weeks after Hamas’s terrorist attack on Israel. I wrote: “There’s an immediate need for moderate, modernizing Arab countries and Israel to quietly begin laying the groundwork for a NATO-like collective security organization and a European Union-like economic body. These institutions would unlock the region’s potential by countering its relentless cycles of violence.”

On that score, the region came a step closer last week, as you’ll gather from reading the brilliant analysis and reporting by the Washington Post’s David Ignatius under the headline, “The unspoken story of why Israel didn’t clobber Iran.”

Writes Ignatius, “In its measured response, [Israel] appeared to be weighing the interest of its allies in this coalition—Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan—which all provided quiet help in last weekend’s shoot-down. It’s playing the long game, in other words.”

Here the United States has been crucial, using the leverage that only it has to push for normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia, an aim that Hamas intentionally targeted with its October 7 attack. On Friday, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Biden administration is now making a fresh push toward a deal, under which the Israelis would accept a new commitment to Palestinian statehood in exchange for Saudi normalization.

What would Saudi Arabia get? A more robust defense and security relationship with the United States, assistance in acquiring civil nuclear power, and new momentum toward a Palestinian state, which are, again, matters only Washington can provide. The package is “in the final stages of negotiating,” according to the Wall Street Journal reporters.

This course of action recognizes that the best way to defeat Iran over time is to solidify the cooperation of the countries its extremism and proxies threaten, much as the Soviet Union was contained by a coalition of like-minded countries that provided better outcomes for their people.

One week of good news doesn’t add up to a strategic shift, either in Europe or the Middle East. Yet the past week provides the opportunity for a momentum shift in both theaters that the United States and its partners should seize.

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on Twitter: @FredKempe.

This edition is part of Frederick Kempe’s Inflection Points Today newsletter, a column of quick-hit insights on a world in transition. To receive this newsletter throughout the week, sign up here.

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There are two problems with that proposition: First, Churchill scholars can’t show evidence that the legendary British statesman and orator ever said that, though there’s proof that he felt it often enough. Second, it’s by no means clear that House Speaker Mike Johnson can rally his unruly ranks to do the right thing—with the extreme right threatening to oust him and Democratic votes required for success.

Even if Johnson does succeed, the Biden administration still needs to release the weapons Ukrainians most urgently need to turn the tide, with permission to use them deep into Russia. It’s right to praise the Biden administration for its consistent support of Ukraine since 2022, even while questioning its reluctance to provide Kyiv with the full range of weapons that it needs faster and in sufficient quantity.

“Will America Let Ukraine Collapse?” the lead Wall Street Journal editorial asked in Thursday’s paper. It was accompanied by President Joe Biden’s op-ed appealing for congressional support for “urgent national-security legislation” supporting Ukraine and Israel, and providing humanitarian aid to Palestinians in Gaza.

The latest news update is that a faction of House Republicans, led by Georgia’s Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Kentucky’s Rep. Thomas Massie, is threatening to oust Johnson over the vote. This group, says the Wall Street Journal editorial, believes it can then “return without consequence to pounding Joe Biden about the crisis at the southern border. They are wrong, and the sad irony is that such delusions about the world are usually reserved for the progressive left.”

Determining the “outlines”

For that errant minority to understand how deeply US interests are linked to Ukraine’s ability to resist Moscow, it’s worth reading the Washington Post’s front-page scoop Thursday on a secret 2023 Russian Foreign Ministry document.

Provided to the paper by a European intelligence service, it codifies efforts by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s government to leverage the Ukraine war to “forge a global order free from what it sees as American dominance,” writes reporter Catherine Belton.

The document is a secret addendum, dated April 11, 2023, which was later added to the blander, published official document of March 31, entitled “The Foreign Policy Concept of the Russian Federation.” The addendum says the outcome of Russia’s war in Ukraine will “to a great degree determine the outlines of the future world order.”

The documents are all the confirmation the United States and its allies should need to show that Russia is actively working to disrupt domestic politics in the United States and other countries that support Ukraine. At the same time, Russia is working to shift the global balance of power through closer relations with China, Iran, North Korea, and other like-minded nations.

With the stakes this undeniably high, any dithering in support for Ukraine is geopolitical malpractice.

“Can we hold our ground?”

The situation couldn’t be more urgent, with Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine entering its third summer. Putin plans to press his growing advantage with a major offensive to achieve as much gain as possible while the United States is distracted by its upcoming elections. He’s calculating that a re-elected President Donald Trump will be less willing to continue military and financial support for Ukraine.

Ukraine’s top military commander, General Oleksandr Syrsky, said in a statement last weekend that the Ukrainian army’s positions on the eastern front have “worsened significantly in recent days.” Russian forces are pushing hard to take advantage of Ukraine’s shortages of ammunition, air defenses, and well-trained troops.

Speaking in Kyiv to visiting PBS NewsHour anchor Amna Nawaz this week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy laid down the stakes for this weekend’s congressional vote. “I can tell you, frankly, without this support, we will have no chance of winning,” he said.

He explained that Ukraine’s ratio of artillery shells to that of Russia is one-to-ten. “Can we hold our ground?” Zelenskyy asked Nawaz. “No . . . they will be pushing us back every day.”

He drew an uncomfortable contrast between military support for Ukraine and for Israel, both non-NATO countries, following the remarkable allied success in defending Israel from last weekend’s Iranian barrage.

“Israel, by itself, wouldn’t be able to protect against such a numerous, powerful strike,” he said, later adding, “Israel is not a NATO country. The NATO allies, including NATO countries, have been defending Israel. They showed the Iranian forces that Israel was not alone.” His point: NATO countries should also be able to more actively defend Ukraine as well.

Anne Applebaum, writing in the Atlantic, explains differently why European and US forces scramble to defend Israel but not Ukraine. Russia’s threat of using nuclear weapons “has made the US and Europe reluctant to enter the skies over Ukraine.” Israel is also a nuclear power, but that cuts differently, as “the US, Europe, and even some Arab states are eager to make sure Israel is never provoked enough to use” a nuclear weapon against Iran.

More to the point, she writes, while Republican legislators and politicians have been impervious to Iranian propaganda, they have been more sympathetic to Russia, up to and including their presidential candidate, often repeating Moscow’s talking points.

Coming back to Churchill, one quote that is accurate came from a letter he wrote to his brother about the United States: “This is a very great country my dear Jack. Not pretty or romantic but great and utilitarian. There seems to be no such thing as reverence or tradition. Everything is eminently practical, and things are judged from a matter of fact standpoint.”

The facts demand that the US House act this weekend to approve some sixty billion dollars of military and other support for Ukraine. The facts also demand that the Biden administration, without whom Kyiv would not have been able to defend itself so effectively thus far, release many of the restrictions on the sort of weapons provided and their use.

Putin has made clear, through the secret memorandum reported in the Washington Post, and beyond, that he understands the stakes in Ukraine. He has no chance of victory if the United States and its European allies, which have economies and defense budgets multiple times the size of Russia’s, act in common cause, understanding the historic moment.

As Biden wrote in Thursday’s Wall Street Journal: “Mr. Putin has tried relentlessly to break the will of the Ukrainian people. He has failed. Now he’s trying to break the will of the West. We cannot let him succeed. There are moments in history that call for leadership and courage. This is one of them.”

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on Twitter: @FredKempe.

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The challenge for the Biden administration and its allies is that they can’t cherry-pick. The issues are interrelated. Lack of determination in defending Ukraine will inevitably signal to China that Taiwan is fair game. At the same time, the bilateral challenge that’s likely to define our times is the US-China one.

With that as context, read an important recent speech by one of the world’s leading China experts, Kevin Rudd, formerly Australia’s prime minister and currently its ambassador to Washington. Delivered last week at the US Naval Academy, it was his first extended lecture as ambassador, and it is a must read.

He argues that, notwithstanding the stabilization of the US-China relationship since last November’s summit between President Joe Biden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping in San Francisco, nothing has changed in terms of Chinese strategic intentions toward Taiwan.

“Specifically on Taiwan,” says Rudd, “it has been made plain through Xi’s statements that national reunification must be achieved by the time China’s national rejuvenation is to be complete, namely 2049, the centenary of the establishment of the People’s Republic of China.”

That might seem a long way off in our short-attention-span culture, but “if a relatively low-cost opportunity arose,” says Rudd, “Xi could be minded to seek to secure Taiwan’s return within his own political tenure.”

For the record, Xi, who is now seventy years old, had himself named to a precedent-breaking third five-year term as party general secretary in October 2022, which by my calculations means he might well want to swallow Taiwan whole before the end of 2027.

Rudd concludes that Chinese leaders are calculated risk-takers over Taiwan, and not reckless risk-takers. It follows that Xi will only back off his historic intentions toward Taiwan during his current term if he concludes, in Rudd’s words, that “it is still too risky to embark upon unilateral military action against Taiwan.”

No wonder Rudd refers to the period ahead as “the decade of living dangerously.”

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on Twitter: @FredKempe.

This edition is part of Frederick Kempe’s Inflection Points Today newsletter, a column of quick-hit insights on a world in transition. To receive this newsletter throughout the week, sign up here.

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“You got a win,” US President Joe Biden told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over the weekend, as reported by Axios from a White House source. “Take the win.”

Translate that into a strong US suggestion, straight from the Oval Office, that Israel demonstrate restraint in its response and refrain from attacking Iranian territory to avoid further escalation. To drive his point home, Biden also told the Israeli prime minister that US forces wouldn’t participate in any reprisal attack.

Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant provided his answer to Biden on Sunday, when he told US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin that his country cannot allow ballistic missiles to be launched against its territory without a response. So, the question now is what Israel’s response will be.

The Atlantic Council’s Matthew Kroenig suggests that the United States and Israel should together strike Iran’s nuclear fuel-cycle facilities. This would, he said to me, “exact a steep price on Iran and restore deterrence in the region. Indeed, this may be the world’s last best chance to keep Tehran from the bomb.”

Reading the White House tea leaves, that seems highly unlikely. That said, Kroenig’s arguments in favor of a more decisive response are compelling. It goes entirely against the rules of deterrence if Iran doesn’t see the costs of hitting Israel as far outweighing the benefits.

The White House has operated with a similar de-escalation narrative in withholding from Ukraine certain capabilities since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion. Even now, it refuses to send certain longer-range strike capabilities, such as three-hundred-kilometer ATACMs (a long-range guided missile). It not only denies Ukraine the right to use US-supplied weapons against targets in Russia, but also urges Ukraine not to hit any targets in Russia—even with its own weapons—including military installations from which the Kremlin is attacking civilians in Ukraine.

That underscores a larger issue at stake that applies to Russian President Vladimir Putin in Ukraine, to Chinese leader Xi Jinping as he considers next steps regarding Taiwan, and to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. These rulers are acting in increasing common cause to undermine the global leadership of the United States alongside its partners and allies.

The Atlantic Council’s Will Wechsler, who runs our Middle East Programs, explains the danger of Iran creating “a new normal” in the region.

“The precedent is that Iran can attack Israel directly, that it can do so from Iranian soil, and that it can target civilians inside Israel,” Wechsler writes. That follows a well-practiced Iranian playbook of “experimenting with a new set of malign actions,” and then putting those actions into practice if the pushback against them proves insufficient.

Reluctance to respond over the years to Tehran’s malign behavior has left Iran as “the only country in the world that routinely gives precision weapons to nonstate proxies and instructs them to target civilians across borders.”

Wechsler proposes a menu of forceful options to respond against this weekend’s attack other than an immediate retaliatory strike on Iranian territory. One option, for example, is for the United States to declare a new doctrine: Any attack by an Iranian partner or proxy on Americans will be treated as if it were an attack by Iran itself.

Whatever response one prefers, it’s time to discard the myth that the de-escalation impulse actually results in a safer world. The October 7 attacks by Hamas disproved that, following years of enabling Iran; as did Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, following his successful invasion of Georgia in 2008 and his occupation and annexation of Crimea in 2014.

The world will only grow safer when it isn’t the Iranians and Russians who set the rules for their regions. It won’t be de-escalation that will save lives after Iran’s unprecedented weekend attack, but a more determined and unmistakable deterrence.

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on Twitter: @FredKempe.

This edition is part of Frederick Kempe’s Inflection Points Today newsletter, a column of quick-hit insights on a world in transition. To receive this newsletter throughout the week, sign up here.

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As IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva said at the Atlantic Council yesterday, inflation is going down and global growth is increasing, driven by the United States and many emerging market economies. Also helping are increases in household consumption and business investment—and the easing of supply chain problems.

“We have avoided a global recession and a period of stagflation—as some had predicted,” said Georgieva. “But there are still plenty of things to worry about.”

The problem: Geopolitical risk is rising in a way that’s hard to measure, difficult to manage, and almost impossible to predict.

“Geopolitical tensions increase the risks of fragmentation of the world economy,” she said. “And, as we learned over the past few years, we operate in a world in which we must expect the unexpected.”

For example, this decade has already had a worldwide COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, a full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and a Hamas terrorist attack in 2023, followed by a still-ongoing Gaza war. 

From the moderator’s seat, I asked Georgieva whether she thought this level of geopolitical volatility was the new normal. “I think we have to buckle up for more to come,” she said, “because it is a more diverse world, and it is a world in which we have seen divergence, not just in economic fortunes, but also divergence in objectives.”

So how does the IMF manage that divergence?

Georgieva replied: It does so through the quality of its analysis, through the confidence that emerges from its financial strength, and through its staff’s ability to “quickly shift gears toward what the most important priority is.”

Oh, yes, the IMF also runs “think of the unthinkable” analyses, Georgieva said. The goal of which, she explained, was to “come up with the hypothesis of something that looks, you know, absurd and impossible, and what are we going to do if the impossible becomes a reality.”

Don’t miss the entirety of Georgieva’s compelling speech and discussion, rich with graphics and charts. She shared her insights on issues ranging from how artificial intelligence could reshape economies to why China’s current economic policy course is unsustainable.

China’s leadership is aware of that unsustainability, she noted. How Beijing changes course next is of global consequence, she explained, given that the country is contributing one third of global growth this year. “China making good choices would be good for everybody.”

It starts with tackling manufacturing overcapacity, which Georgieva pointed to as a significant issue. Expect to hear much more about that in the days ahead, as Chinese exports have become a key off-the-agenda topic for the ministers to debate next week.

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on Twitter: @FredKempe.

This edition is part of Frederick Kempe’s Inflection Points Today newsletter, a column of quick-hit insights on a world in transition. To receive this newsletter throughout the week, sign up here.

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The Israeli attack—killing Mohammad Reza Zahedi, reportedly the IRGC Quds Force commander for Syria and Lebanon—was either strikingly bold or recklessly provocative, depending on your perspective. The Biden administration has insisted it had no advance knowledge of the airstrike.

US officials said they had gathered intelligence indicating that Iran would launch a retaliatory attack, although the timing and target remain unknown; reports said that the attack would likely unfold sometime before the end of Ramadan, which Iranians are celebrating today. For its part, Israel has put its forces on high alert and could strike back again at Iran, depending on Tehran’s next move.

It’s tempting to contribute to the breathless speculation, which I’ll do only by reminding readers that Tehran is unlikely to respond in any manner that would trigger a direct Israeli or US attack on its soil. Iran has been the biggest beneficiary of the war thus far, so why would it take unnecessary risk?

Most mystifying about all the reporting following Hamas’ horrifying October 7 terrorist attack on Israel and the six months of bloody war in Gaza that has followed is how little focus has been placed on Iran’s complicity, gains, and thinking.   

“The post-October 7 strategic landscape in the Middle East is one that was largely created by Iran and that plays to its strengths,” writes Brookings’ Suzanne Maloney in a must-read Foreign Affairs essay. “Tehran sees opportunity in chaos. Iranian leaders are exploiting and escalating the war in Gaza to elevate their regime’s stature, weaken and delegitimize Israel, undermine US interests, and further shape the regional order in their favor. The truth is that the Islamic Republic is now in a better position than ever to dominate the Middle East.”     

Given that, it’s worth remembering that the most effective way to address Iran’s regional ambitions, which require little more than continued violence and chaos, is to return as quickly as possible to the path of normalization between Israel and modernizing Arab states—in particular Saudi Arabia. 

As the Atlantic Council’s Jonathan Panikoff writes, “Resolving the conflict would enhance Israel’s security against its true existential threat, Iran, by enabling Israel to normalize relations with almost all of its Arab neighbors, not just a few.”

Perhaps here is the real point: If left unchecked, the perils of despotic regimes like Iran and Russia grow. Failure to act only encourages their common cause, from the Middle East to Ukraine. In the Middle East, China, Russia, and Iran recently held live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Oman. In Ukraine, Chinese and Iranian support for the Russian war effort is expanding.

There’s no wishing away this gathering danger, which only gains momentum from neglect.

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on Twitter: @FredKempe.

This edition is part of Frederick Kempe’s Inflection Points Today newsletter, a column of quick-hit insights on a world in transition. To receive this newsletter throughout the week, sign up here.

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A senior administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity, outlined for me the concerning scale of Beijing’s growing support for Moscow’s war effort. “China is dangerous,” the official said, and the administration is determined to show allies evidence of Beijing’s growing role in Russia’s threats to Europeans’ security.

The official said “90 percent of the reason” Russia has been able to sustain the war effort and reconstitute its economy, despite sanctions, is due to a “massive effort” by China that ranges from geospatial assistance for Russian targeting to dual-use optics and propellants used in everything from tanks to missiles.

China-Russia trade soared to $240 billion last year from $108 billion in 2020. Research from my colleagues at the Atlantic Council’s GeoEconomics Center shows that China now exports more to Russia than the European Union did before the COVID-19 pandemic. With both consumer goods (which make up nearly half of the goods exports) and industrial supplies, China is helping keep Russia’s economy afloat.

This alarm bell has been ringing at the highest levels of the US government over the past week: US Secretary of State Antony Blinken sent the message to European allies in Brussels, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warned officials in Beijing, and President Joe Biden raised the issue directly with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in a conversation last Tuesday.

European Union and NATO foreign ministers, meeting in Brussels, said Blinken delivered the message in striking, explicit terms. According to the Financial Times, they saw it as a significant shift, not dissimilar to the sharing of intelligence ahead of Russia’s 2022 invasion.

For her part, Yellen said in China this weekend: “We’ve been clear with China that we see Russia as gaining support from goods that Chinese firms are supplying to Russia . . . They understand how serious an issue that is to us.”

To drive her point home, the US Treasury followed Yellen’s Friday and Saturday discussions by warning of “significant consequences” if Chinese companies provided “material support for Russia’s war against Ukraine,” an unusually sharp message.

Administration officials hope that forcefully and publicly pushing back on China, in concert with allies, will cause Beijing to think twice about continuing to aid Moscow, prompt allies to apply new pressures, and buy time for more Western arms to arrive to Ukraine. The Biden administration is growing increasingly concerned that delayed US support for Ukraine—combined with increased support for Russia from China, Iran, and North Korea—could result in a Russian offensive this summer that endangers major cities, perhaps even Kyiv.  

Administration officials believe that Russia remains vulnerable if Kyiv gets the military and economic support it needs, but that the coming months will be increasingly perilous without that support.

The worst period could come just as NATO leaders convene in Washington in July for their seventy-fifth anniversary summit, just days ahead of the Republican and Democratic party conventions. Not much time remains to ensure that Russia, with the growing support of China, does not spoil the Alliance’s celebration.    

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on Twitter: @FredKempe.

This edition is part of Frederick Kempe’s Inflection Points Today newsletter, a column of quick-hit insights on a world in transition. To receive this newsletter throughout the week, sign up here.

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All of them had experienced the horrors of World War II, and a great many of them also personally knew the ravages of World War I. So they understood the urgency of their moment.

That deficit of memory is the greatest peril of 2024. It is one that has resulted in allied dithering and insufficient measures to counter Russian despot Vladimir Putin and his like-minded partners in China, Iran, North Korea, and elsewhere.     

One cannot change the historical experience of today’s NATO leaders and their electorates. Even President Joe Biden, now age eighty-one, was only two years old when Germany surrendered in May 1945 and Japan followed in September.  The best one can do today is ask them to listen to President Harry S. Truman’s address on the occasion of the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty on April 4, 1949, then hope they heed its warnings.

They can read it here, listen to it here in full, or watch an excerpt here.

“Twice in recent years, nations have felt the sickening blow of unprovoked aggression,” Truman said. “Our peoples, to whom our governments are responsible, demand that these things shall not happen again. We are determined that they shall not happen again.”

That founding treaty was signed by just twelve nations then, but it continues to be the north star document for NATO’s thirty-two members now, with Finland and Sweden the latest to join.

“This treaty is a simple document,” Truman said, likening it to a homeowners’ agreement to protect the neighborhood. Its signatories agreed to “maintain friendly relations and economic cooperation with one another, to consult together whenever the territory or independence of any of them is threatened, and to come to the aid of any one of them who may be attacked.”

Continued Truman, “It is a simple document, but if it had existed in 1914 and in 1939, supported by the nations who are represented here today, I believe it would have prevented the acts of aggression which led to two world wars.”

Apply that logic now. With the world facing the greatest threat to global order since the 1930s, the Alliance must do everything in its power to defend Ukraine and, as soon as the seventy-fifth anniversary NATO Summit in Washington this July, provide Ukraine an accelerated path to Alliance membership.

History has taught that the risks of inaction are greater than those of action. We have learned that appeased dictators grow more dangerous.

It was fitting that NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken participated this week as an eight-foot bronze statue of Truman was unveiled in Brussels at the residence of the US ambassador to NATO.

Back in 1949, Truman said this, “We do not believe that there are blind tides of history which sweep men one way or another. In our own time, we have seen brave men overcome obstacles that seemed insurmountable and forces that seemed overwhelming. Men with courage and vision can still determine their own destiny.”

The Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Biden and his allies can best mark this NATO anniversary by summoning memory, sustaining the Alliance, and countering today’s despots.

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on Twitter: @FredKempe.

This edition is part of Frederick Kempe’s Inflection Points Today newsletter, a column of quick-hit insights on a world in transition. To receive this newsletter throughout the week, sign up here.

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Among them, you’ll find the courageous, the indomitable, and the committed.     

Count Alexei Navalny, the lawyer and opposition leader who died in prison a little more than a month ago at age forty-seven, in the first category. The Ukrainian people, now into their third year of a criminal full-scale war, represent indomitable resistance to murderous, territorial expansion.

Never forget, however, the armies of the committed, individuals whose lives and work run up against autocratic whim, individuals who collectively form the civil society that fuels democracy and threatens despots.

The Wall Street Journal honored one such individual, thirty-two-year-old Evan Gershkovich, in dramatic fashion today. It is the first anniversary of Russia’s imprisonment of Gershkovich, an accredited reporter who stands falsely accused of espionage. His value to Russian President Vladimir Putin is as a hostage for eventual trade—and as a deterrent to Western media, many of which have pulled their reporters from Russia or severely limited their work.

The five-column, page-one, all-caps headline read “ONE YEAR STOLEN: HIS STORY SHOULD BE HERE.” Beneath it, down most of the page and across five full columns, is only white space, a monument to the buoyant spirit of Gershkovich and, of course, so many others. As another story that anchored the bottom of the page reports, “Authoritarians Threaten Journalists Around Globe.”

“His Story Should Be Here”

Today’s front page of The Wall Street Journal.

One year stolen. We will not rest until Evan Gershkovich is free.#IStandWithEvan pic.twitter.com/SVsezqwzS7

— WSJ Communications (@WSJPR) March 29, 2024

Today’s edition makes for an inspiration and a collector’s item for all those who love freedom. Perhaps more important, don’t miss the investigative page-one story from yesterday’s edition. It reported on Oval Office talks between US President Joe Biden and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz aimed at freeing Evan as part of a prisoner swap that would have included Navalny in exchange for Vadim Krasikov, a Russian hit man serving a life sentence in Germany.

One week after that meeting, word of which reached the Kremlin through an intermediary, Navalny died of what only the most cynical would call natural causes.

“It happens,” Putin remarked to reporters the night after Russia’s presidential election. “There is nothing you can do about it. It’s life.”

I spent a quarter of a century working for the Wall Street Journal, much of it reporting from the front lines of freedom, including Moscow, Warsaw, Berlin, Beijing, Kabul, Beirut, Baghdad, and Panama City. Everything I learned tells me this: Forgetting Evan would be as short-sighted as abandoning Ukraine.

The forces of good won the Cold War because of a consistent US and allied effort. That’s precisely what’s lacking now, in the face of a gathering threat. The United States and its partners have the tools to build upon the Cold War’s victory, but it’s not yet clear they have the will.

One can only hope the Wall Street Journal can fill that white space soon with more uplifting stories about the courageous, the indomitable, and the committed. The future depends on it.

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on Twitter: @FredKempe.

This edition is part of Frederick Kempe’s Inflection Points Today newsletter, a column of quick-hit insights on a world in transition. To receive this newsletter throughout the week, sign up here.

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What’s surprising is that the same House Republican minority that has blocked Ukraine funding for more than five months hasn’t made this connection. What might help this group is a close reading of the recently released “Annual Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community”—and Peggy Noonan’s latest Wall Street Journal column.

News reports have focused public attention on the new intelligence report primarily because of its assessment of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s “viability as a leader” as being “in jeopardy.” Even more important, however, are the links it draws between regional conflicts in Europe and the Middle East and our unfolding, generational contest with China to shape the future.

“During the next year,” the assessment explains, “the United States faces an increasingly fragile global order strained by accelerating strategic competition among major powers, more intense and unpredictable transnational challenges, and multiple regional conflicts with far-reaching implications.”

Regarding Beijing, the assessment underscores China’s growing efforts online, resembling the long-standing Moscow playbook, “to exploit perceived US societal divisions . . . for influence operations.” That includes experimentation with artificial intelligence. TikTok accounts run by a Chinese government propaganda arm “reportedly targeted candidates from both political parties during the US midterm election cycle in 2022,” it notes, something the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab was the first to show through an open-source investigation.

In a valuable new report, the Atlantic Council’s own analysts stopped short of calling for a breakup or ban of TikTok as a means of addressing the platform’s threats to US national security. “TikTok: Hate the Game, Not the Player” argues that an exclusive focus on the Chinese app overlooks “broader security vulnerabilities in the US information ecosystem.”

Peggy Noonan makes a compelling case for why the United States should nevertheless target TikTok. “It uses algorithms to suck up information about America’s 170 million users, giving it the potential to create dossiers,” she writes. Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Christopher Wray, Noonan adds, has warned that China “has the ability to control software on millions of devices in the US.”

That brings me to Ukraine.

It’s difficult to gather hard evidence to illustrate how the Chinese government is deploying the TikTok weapon, yet the existing and potential dangers were sufficient to prompt a bipartisan House vote against it of 352-65, unifying members of Congress such as Democrat Nancy Pelosi and Republican Elise Stefanik, who are more often poles apart.

By comparison, the evidence of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s murderous intentions is incontestable. Russian forces are advancing, and US dithering is costing Ukrainian lives. It’s also encouraging an increasingly close autocratic partnership built on the shared belief that now is the moment to test US and Western staying power and resolve.

“Russia’s strengthening ties with China, Iran, and North Korea to bolster its defense production and economy are a major challenge for the West and its partners,” says the new report by the US intelligence community. On Tuesday, Reuters reported that Putin will visit Chinese leader Xi Jinping in May, building upon what he has called their “no limits” partnership.

Weeks ago, a large Senate majority voted in favor of an aid package that would bring $60 billion in aid to Ukraine alongside support for Israel and Taiwan. A similar House majority would support that, but thus far a small Republican minority in the lower chamber has blocked a vote. This needs to be fixed quickly either by Speaker Mike Johnson permitting a floor vote, or through a discharge petition signed by a bipartisan majority.

With the stakes of such a historic nature, the United States and its allies should address both Russia’s military threats, with Chinese support, and Chinese influence operations, with Russian inspiration.

It’s not one or the other—but both. And now.

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on Twitter: @FredKempe.

This edition is part of Frederick Kempe’s Inflection Points Today newsletter, a column of quick-hit insights on a world in transition. To receive this newsletter throughout the week, sign up here.

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Polish Foreign Minister Radosław “Radek” Sikorski, speaking yesterday at the Atlantic Council, appealed to US House Speaker Mike Johnson to “let democracy take its course” and bring to a vote the Senate’s bill that would bring more than sixty billion dollars in crucially needed military and financial aid to Ukraine.

“I’d like him to know that the whole world is watching what he would do,” said Sikorski. “And if this supplemental were not to pass and Ukraine were to suffer reversals on the battlefield, it will be his responsibility.”

Sikorski spoke with a clarity that cut through the sometimes mushy rhetoric of Washington that fails to connect the despotic dots that some US lawmakers ignore at our peril. Having grown up in a Poland under Soviet communist rule, Sikorski sees the battle as one against a new array of autocrats.

“The murderous invasion of Ukraine is aided and abetted by a crime family of dictators from Iran [and] North Korea,” Sikorski said, “but also lauded by, among others, those ruling Cuba, Venezuela, and Syria. [Russian President Vladimir] Putin, in turn, helps his fellow despots fuel chaos in the Middle East, Asia, and here on [the US] southern border. He welcomes Hamas in Moscow, and his propaganda supports those terrorists.”

He continued: “China helps Russia economically, and in turn benefits from cheap oil and gas that Putin is selling to fund his war machine. They all desire to destroy the stability of America and to create victory where it is not deserved.”

Read every word of his powerful speech, as it not only lays out the historic stakes; it also delivers the solution and explains why providing Ukraine financing now is a tremendous bargain for a US defense budget that has seldom spent so effectively.

Sikorski reported that the United States has contributed roughly five percent of its annual defense budget to security assistance for Ukraine, “and with that money, Ukraine has already managed to destroy Putin’s combat capacity by 50 percent—without any American troops firing a single shot. A truly stunning return on investment.”

According to Sikorski, most of that investment is spent in the United States: “Up to 90 percent goes directly to [creating] American jobs on American soil,” he cited, explaining that newly made equipment in the United States replaces stockpiles of older US weaponry being sent to Ukraine.

Most important is the vision Sikorski lays out for “the path to security in the twenty-first century,” where the combined scale of investment in security across the Atlantic “dwarfs” what Putin and other dictators can summon. He concedes Europe had been slow to spend sufficiently, but that it has turned a corner—and has responded to US criticism.

The bottom line from Sikorski:

“Whether we want it or not, Putin’s decision to start the biggest war in Europe since the defeat of Nazi Germany has already changed the course of history. It is up to us to decide if we want to shape that course ourselves, or let it be shaped by others—in Moscow, Tehran, or Beijing.”

Last weekend, Sikorski spoke on CNN with Fareed Zakaria on how, during his childhood in a small village in Poland, he learned from Voice of America about the benefits of freedom and the oppression of what he called his Soviet colony of Poland. Now, this Voice of Poland is reminding Americans of their global purpose and of why “helping Ukraine by defeating Putin is the right thing to do in the broadest sense of the word.”

“It is morally sound, strategically wise, militarily justified, and economically beneficial,” he said. “Now is the moment to act. Let’s get this done.”

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on Twitter: @FredKempe.

This edition is part of Frederick Kempe’s Inflection Points Today newsletter, a column of quick-hit insights on a world in transition. To receive this newsletter throughout the week, sign up here.

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It was then that British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, meeting with Nazi leader Adolf Hitler and their French Republican and Italian fascist counterparts, signed off on the Third Reich’s annexation of the Western part of Czechoslovakia (which the Germans called Sudetenland), naively hoping that would allow them to avoid a larger European war.

With the two-year mark of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine coming up this week—and with his ongoing war and occupation of sovereign Ukrainian territory—it’s worth reflecting on the dynamics behind the 1938 Munich Agreement and Chamberlain’s subsequent “Peace for Our Time” speech, as they may hold lessons for US lawmakers in the House of Representatives who continue to balk at approving urgently needed support for Ukraine after four months of dithering in Congress.

Hitler had threatened to unleash a European war unless the leaders of Britain, France, and Italy agreed to German annexation of the Sudetenland, a border region with an ethnic German majority. “My good friends,” Chamberlain said in a statement in front of 10 Downing Street, “for the second time in our history, a British prime minister has returned from Germany bringing peace with honor. I believe it is a peace for our time . . . Go home and get a nice quiet sleep.”

Echoes of history

There are plenty of differences between then and now, but one shouldn’t overlook the striking similarities.

First, Hitler had annexed German-speaking Austria in March 1938, and he was determined to swallow up the German-speaking Sudeten region of Czechoslovakia next. Today, Putin has already occupied and annexed portions of Ukraine with sizable numbers of Russian speakers—areas that he considers to be his property: Crimea, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, and Donetsk. 

Hitler wrote at length about his warped historic, genetic, and anti-Semitic notions in Mein Kampf, providing a copy of his national best-seller to every young marrying couple in Third Reich Germany. By comparison, Putin most recently shared his own twisted justifications for denying Ukrainian statehood, dating back to the ninth century, with American media personality Tucker Carlson—not such a bizarre vehicle if one considers Carlson’s influence on a Republican minority in the House that is currently standing in the way of approving additional aid for Ukraine.

And just as in 1938, when the focus of debate was on the future of Czechoslovakia and when commentaries praised the country’s bravery and resilience, so too now is the focus on Ukraine. Back then, the more appropriate focus should have been on the dictator responsible for the threat and on how to stop him. Today, the more appropriate focus is no different.

One more similarity between 1938 and today is the gradual alignment of authoritarian powers. Shortly after Chamberlain’s infamous Munich Agreement, a fascist-nationalist German-Italian-Japanese axis of nations emerged. Today, European and US leaders alike have observed an increasingly close alignment among Russian, Chinese, Iranian, and North Korean authoritarian leaders.

A morose Munich

The Munich Security Conference this week, which marked the convening’s sixtieth anniversary, is as good a measure of the transatlantic zeitgeist as any.

Yet four news events that unfolded outside of Munich soured the mood: Former US President Donald Trump’s campaign trail statement that he would let Russians “do whatever the hell they want” to NATO allies not paying enough for defense; the death in prison of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny; the biggest Russian battlefield victory in months in the Ukrainian city of Avdiivka; and leaked reports of Moscow’s plans to develop a nuclear space weapon, which the Atlantic Council’s John Cookson suggested could be a “Sputnuke” moment.  

On Trump’s statement, a range of Republican supporters of Trump in Munich were at pains to explain why their presidential candidate should be taken seriously but not literally, as US military support for Ukraine, Poland, and NATO increased during his administration. Their argument that Trump simply wants Europeans to carry more of their own defense still left allies worried that they are in for a long period of US unpredictability.

Regarding Navalny, his wife Yulia (who was in Munich to speak on his behalf) provided a courageous first response to reports of his death, accusing Putin of killing him and vowing that the Russian dictator would pay for it. Some long-time Munich conference participants, who heard Putin’s initial declaration of war on the West there in 2007, speculated that he might well have timed Navalny’s death with the Munich gathering to send an unmistakable message of the West’s powerlessness to stop such outrages.

“It sounds like Putin might have done it for our benefit,” said Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski. “I’m not prone to conspiracy theory, but I understand conspiracy practice.”

It is impossible not to link Russian advances in Ukraine with the long delay in US congressional support for new weapons deliveries, as the outgunned and outmanned Ukrainians struggle to hold the line against Russian forces commanded by Putin, who is willing to suffer outsized casualties. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that in the battle for Avdiivka, Russia’s losses were seven times those of Ukraine.

If “Ukraine is left alone, Russia will destroy us,” Zelenskyy told the Munich conference. “If we don’t act now, Putin will succeed in turning the next few years into a catastrophe—not only for Ukraine but for others as well.”

On “Sputnuke,” the consensus in Munich was a resigned European shrug as Russia marches on, develops asymmetric advanced weaponry that could take down European communications in space, and shifts to a war footing that Europe’s democracies will never match.

Writing for the Washington Post, David Ignatius pointed out Russia’s motivation for developing such weaponry: “Ironically, it’s the Ukraine conflict—and the role of space systems in helping Kyiv survive the initial Russian onslaught in 2022—that likely triggered Russia to rush development of its new space tactics.”

Four causes for concern

The concerns and fears at Munich this year, which far overwhelmed rare voices of optimism, broke down into four mutually reinforcing categories.  

The first fear was about Russia’s resilience and Putin’s increasing confidence, which contributed to a growing conviction that Russia will remain a problem for the West for some years to come.

The second concern stemmed from the possibility that Ukraine might lose the war, with a growing danger that it could be overwhelmed by Russian military mass, and from an assessment of the repercussions of that scenario most immediately for other former Soviet bloc states, from Poland to the Baltics, but also globally, from the United States to the Middle East and Asia.

The third concern, one that pervaded almost every conversation at the conference this weekend, was about the potential for a reduced US commitment not only to Ukraine but also to the nearly eighty-year-old transatlantic bond, particularly should Trump be elected in November.

The fourth fear, closely connected to the third, was that Europe still lacks the military industrial capacity and the political will to defend itself, let alone defend Ukraine. Though Europe is ramping up its defense industrial production and increasing its spending, it would take years for European countries to replace US capacity, if they ever could.

The past three Munich Security Conferences have all focused on Ukraine, and each year the conventional wisdom has missed the mark. One can only hope that is true again.

In 2022, there were growing concerns that Putin would invade Ukraine, which did happen, but there was also a consensus that Ukraine would be overrun within days by such a military offensive. In 2023, the mood was more positive, with many voices believing that Ukraine’s remarkable performance in the previous year could lead to a stunning counteroffensive that would help Kyiv regain territory occupied by Russia.  

The collective view is that 2024 will be a moment of truth in Ukraine. Without US congressional approval for additional support soon, the thinking goes, the odds are that Russia will continue to make gains and that some could be dramatic by the time of the seventy-fifth NATO Summit in July in Washington, DC—just ahead of US elections.

It is worth remembering the calls of “shame” from the House of Commons galleries, as Chamberlain defended his Munich arrangements in 1938. “I have nothing to be ashamed of,” he answered back. “Let those who have hang their heads.”

Not too late—yet

It’s worth reading what Chamberlain said after returning from Munich as a warning to all who are tempted to sell Ukraine short, underestimate Putin and other emerging despots, and retreat into the most dangerous of all responses: naive complacency.

“The path which leads to appeasement is long and bristles with obstacles,” said Chamberlain. “The question of Czechoslovakia is the latest and perhaps the most dangerous. Now that we have got past it, I feel it may be possible to make further progress along the road to sanity.”

There is an oft-repeated quote that says “insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” 

It’s not too late for the US House of Representatives to change course, to bring a vote on a Senate bill providing Ukraine aid to the floor, and to provide Ukraine the support it urgently needs to do the free world’s bidding against Putin. Should this fail, Europe would need to greatly accelerate its ramp-up of defense production and its support for Ukraine.

The lesson of Munich, then and now, is that the cost of countering a despot will only grow the longer democracies wait to do so. As Sikorski said in Munich, “I have more doubts about us than the Ukrainians.” If the United States fails to step up to the moment this year, he said, “it could affect the national-security calculations of every country on Earth. We are at a dramatic moment, one of terrible foreboding.”

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on Twitter @FredKempe.

THE WEEK’S TOP READS

#1 Why Russia Killed Navalny

Anne Applebaum | THE ATLANTIC

In this powerful reflection on Alexei Navalny’s life, Anne Applebaum argues that the specific details of his death “don’t matter,” whether he was murdered or died from months of ill health, because “the Russian state killed him,” she writes. “Putin killed him—because of his political success, because of his ability to reach people with the truth, and because of his talent for breaking through the fog of propaganda that now blinds his countrymen, and some of ours as well.”

Despite Navalny’s death, Applebaum remains optimistic. “Even behind bars Navalny was a real threat to Putin because he was living proof that courage is possible, that truth exists, that Russia could be a different kind of country,” she writes. “For a dictator who survives thanks to lies and violence, that kind of challenge was intolerable. Now Putin will be forced to fight against Navalny’s memory, and that is a battle he will never win.” Read more →

#2 Opinion: Is This a Sputnik Moment?

Kari A. Bingen and Heather W. Williams | NEW YORK TIMES

In this compelling analysis, Kari Bingen and Heather Williams evaluate the parallels between Thursday’s announcement of a new Russian antisatellite capability, suspected of being a space-based nuclear weapon, and the 1957 launch of Soviet satellite Sputnik.

“If it is what the White House suggests, we may now find ourselves facing this generation’s Sputnik moment,” they write. “In 1957, when the former Soviet Union launched the world’s first satellite and shocked Americans, the Eisenhower administration had known about the Soviets’ satellite capabilities for almost two years. Now that we know what Russia is planning, the United States cannot afford to be slow to act.” Read more →

#3 ‘The war has become the background of life’—Andrey Kurkov on Ukraine two years on

Andrey Kurkov | FINANCIAL TIMES

Writing in the Financial Times, Ukrainian novelist Andrey Kurkov presents a striking portrait of Ukrainian life as Russia’s war continues.  

“Ukrainians may be responding to journalists less optimistically than they did a year ago, but there is no pessimism either,” Kurkov writes. “The time has come for realism—an understanding that this war will last for a long time, that we must learn to live with it. The effort to keep on ‘keeping on’ that has been a form of resistance for civilians since the all-out invasion now requires a little more energy. For those Ukrainians who are not at the front, the war has become the background of life, and the daily air raid alerts are noted alongside the weather forecast.”

Kurkov’s piece also serves as a warning that if Western support does not come through, life in Ukraine may stop altogether. Read more →

#4 The Arsenal of Autocracy

Jonathan Corrado and Markus Garlauskas | FOREIGN AFFAIRS

Read every word of this smart analysis by the Korea Society’s Jonathan Corrado and the Atlantic Council’s Markus Garlauskas on why North Korea continues to be a massive threat to the United States and global security, especially in moments of global upheaval.

“As wars rage in the Middle East, Europe, and Africa, Pyongyang has seized its opportunity to spread death and destruction through arms sales,” Corrado and Garlauskas write. “Although the Kim regime has been systematically isolated from the international community, regularly denies that it is supplying weapons overseas, and is prohibited by UN Security Council resolutions from buying or selling various arms, it has nonetheless become a de facto arsenal for the United States’ adversaries.”

To stop this trade, they argue, “the United States must mobilize a coalition to increase international awareness of the scale of the problem, and strengthen detection, oversight, and sanctions compliance. If these steps are not taken, then North Korea will be able to finance further weapons testing and development, gain access to dangerous new technologies, launder its ill-gotten profits, and spread mayhem and destruction.” Read more →

#5 Remarks by President Biden on the Reported Death of Aleksey Navalny

Joe Biden | THE WHITE HOUSE

Speaking shortly after reports of Alexei Navalny’s death, US President Joe Biden linked the brutality Navalny faced to Russia’s continued assault on Ukraine and the United States’ continuing failure to provide urgently needed military and financial support. 

“What has happened to Navalny is yet more proof of Putin’s brutality,” Biden said. “No one should be fooled—not in Russia, not at home, not anywhere in the world. Putin does not only target [the] citizens of other countries, as we’ve seen what’s going on in Ukraine right now, he also inflicts terrible crimes on his own people.”

Biden addressed US responsibility to continue Navalny’s fight: “This tragedy reminds us of the stakes of this moment. We have to provide the funding so Ukraine can keep defending itself against Putin’s vicious onslaughts and war crimes.” Read more →

Atlantic Council top reads

The post Dispatch from Munich: The lessons of appeasement for US lawmakers withholding support for Ukraine appeared first on Atlantic Council.

To lose there—or even to settle for stalemate—would have influence on all other theaters. If Russia’s Vladimir Putin prevails, then China, Iran, North Korea, and others would accelerate their efforts to shift regional and global orders to their benefit. The failure of the countries supporting Ukraine, despite having a combined gross domestic product that is twenty-five times that of Russia, would deliver a generational wallop.

In that context, today’s op-ed in the Wall Street Journal by the Atlantic Council’s Stephen Hadley (a former US national security advisor) and Matthew Kroenig is a must-read for its diagnosis but most of all for its prescribed treatment.

“The war in Ukraine has reached a critical point,” they write. “The goal remains for it to emerge as an independent, prosperous country within internationally recognized borders and able to defend itself. That will require accelerating the delivery of advanced weapons and technology and pursuing a new military and diplomatic strategy to defend Ukrainian territory, increase Ukraine’s defense production, enhance its air defenses, and step up attacks against Russia’s supply lines and vulnerable military position in Crimea.”

They continue: “If the Biden administration embraces this approach, it could address congressional reluctance to provide more aid to Ukraine absent a clear strategy.”

One can only hope.

History will record that the Biden administration, fearing Putin’s potential nuclear escalation, adopted a policy of self-deterrence in 2022 and 2023, withholding the quality and quantity of weaponry that might have decisively shifted Putin’s war in Ukraine’s favor before his troops could dig in. Now, a rogue group of myopic House Republicans has blocked weapons deliveries at a time when Kyiv most needs them. (Here, all praise for the European Union in approving its own $54 billion Ukraine funding package last Thursday, overcoming its own rogue element, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán.)

The Hadley-Kroenig remedy is a smart one, as Russia’s war nears its second anniversary later this month. It deserves close reading by the Biden administration and members of Congress. The real success, however, can only come if US leaders across ideological lines remind Americans of history’s enduring lesson: dithering before despots can only produce disaster.

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on Twitter: @FredKempe.

This edition is part of Frederick Kempe’s Inflection Points Today newsletter, a column of quick-hit insights on a world in transition. To receive this newsletter throughout the week, sign up here.

The post The Ukraine imperative for global security appeared first on Atlantic Council.

“Tell me how this ends,” Ignatius asked, borrowing the question that General David Petraeus posed at the outset of the Iraq War.

Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al-Thani had just arrived in Washington from Paris, where he had spent the weekend with US Central Intelligence Agency Director Bill Burns and his Israeli and Egyptian counterparts.

He told Andrea Mitchell of NBC News, who was conducting the interview alongside Ignatius, that she was “well-informed” in saying that the parties had hammered out a framework through which the remaining hundred hostages would be released—women and children first—in exchange for a phased pause in the fighting. This would continue in phases, with aid flowing into Gaza as well.

What’s far from clear is whether Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, apparently deep underground somewhere in Gaza, will accept the plan. Hamas previously demanded a permanent and immediate ceasefire for any of the hostages to be released.

Al-Thani sounded hopeful, saying Hamas had moved on from that absolutist demand and that he was relaying the proposal to them, hoping “to get them to a place where they engage positively and constructively in the process, because we think that in today’s world… that’s the only game in town now.”

It was a rare moment to hear the determined but soft-spoken Al-Thani on the record. He is known for his leadership in conflict mediation, including the release of more than a hundred hostages held by Hamas, a US-Iran prisoner exchange, the release of ten American hostages in Venezuela, and the freeing of Ukrainian children from Russia. (You can watch the full interview here or read the transcript here.)

Among those with the most at stake in Al-Thani’s success are the hostage families, a few of which joined our audience after being represented in a meeting earlier in the day with the prime minister. Their sons, among as many as six Americans being held hostage, include Edan Alexander, a twenty-year-old recent high school graduate from New Jersey; Omer Neutra, a twenty-two-year-old sports team captain from Long Island, New York; and Itay Chen, a nineteen-year-old former professional basketball player, whose family is also from New York.

As for Ignatius’s question of how this all ends, including how the Middle East might look in five years, Al-Thani conceded that there is a path that could lead to an even bigger war, but the opposite could also be true. The success of his mediation will be a leading indicator of what is possible.

“Just picture this,” he said. “If we can put an end [to] this conflict that’s been lasting for decades, the entire face of the region will change.”

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on Twitter: @FredKempe.

This edition is part of Frederick Kempe’s Inflection Points Today newsletter, a column of quick-hit insights on a world in transition. To receive this newsletter throughout the week, sign up here.

The post The Qatari prime minister on what this weekend’s hostage negotiations say about the future of the Middle East appeared first on Atlantic Council.

What I’ve tried to do in this column is find the best ways to understand the perils and (where possible) provide the best ideas for solutions. If you’re in search of more works of diagnosis—especially ones with rich historical perspective—read every word of Hal Brands’s “The Next Global War,” hot off the press at Foreign Affairs.

He usefully looks back on the runup to World War II, long before US involvement in that conflict, which saw the “aggregation of three regional crises: Japan’s rampage in China and the Asia-Pacific; Italy’s bid for empire in Africa and the Mediterranean; and Germany’s push for hegemony in Europe and beyond.”

Fast forward to today.

We also face three perilous regional challenges and autocratic powers who are growing dangerously close to each other, also unified mostly by their determination to blow up the status quo. China wants to replace the United States as the leading global power and push it out of the western Pacific; meanwhile, Russia wants to retake territory and influence lost with Soviet collapse, most immediately in Ukraine. In the Middle East, Iran and its proxies (among them Hamas, the Houthis, and Hezbollah) are bent on the annihilation of Israel and are struggling for regional dominance against Gulf monarchies and the United States. This struggle was on display most recently when an Iran-backed militant group launched a drone attack on a US base in Jordan this weekend, killing three US troops and injuring dozens.

“Beijing, Moscow, and Tehran,” writes Brands, “are the new ‘have not’ powers, struggling against the ‘haves’: Washington and its allies.”

Also in an echo of the present, the fascist countries that eventually teamed up as the Axis powers during World War II at first “had little in common except illiberal governance and a desire to shatter the status quo.” In 1937, US President Franklin D. Roosevelt called what was unfolding, long before Washington joined the war, an “epidemic of world lawlessness.”

Brands is a sophisticated thinker, and he draws nuanced comparisons—instead of leaping to conclusions. “But thinking through the nightmare scenario is still worthwhile,” he writes, “since the world could be as little as one mishandled crisis away from pervasive Eurasian conflict—and because the United States is so unprepared for this eventuality.”

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on Twitter: @FredKempe.

This edition is part of Frederick Kempe’s Inflection Points Today newsletter, a column of quick-hit insights on a world in transition. To receive this newsletter throughout the week, sign up here.

The post The United States is unprepared for this nightmare scenario appeared first on Atlantic Council.

“Some foreign governments are increasingly factoring into their relationship with the United States what may come to be known as the ‘Trump put’—delaying choices in the expectation they will be able to negotiate better deals with Washington a year from now because Trump will effectively establish a floor on how bad things can get for them,” writes Allison in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs.

At the top of this list of foreign officials strategically watching the upcoming US election is Russian President Vladimir Putin, who is calculating that his chances in the Ukraine war (which Trump has promised to end “in one day”) could improve dramatically. That expectation drives Putin to play for stalemate this year while wagering on European and American fatigue in addition to Trump’s election, which might set the Russian leader up for victory thereafter.

“Others, by contrast,” writes Allison, “are beginning to search for what might be called a ‘Trump hedge’—analyzing the ways in which his return will likely leave them with worse options and preparing accordingly.”

Count in this camp Ukraine and its European NATO supporters. There’s a healthy side to this, as European countries are looking for better ways to defend Ukraine and themselves.

The downside? Trump’s campaign website calls for “fundamentally reevaluating NATO’s purpose and NATO’s mission,” so existing NATO members and new ones—Finland and soon Sweden—may find alliance security guarantees less secure.

Look around the world, and you’ll find dozens of examples of the Trump hedge and put—from climate-related issues to trade matters, where the former president describes himself as “the Tariff Man,” promising to impose a ten percent duty on all imports.

“This year promises to be a year of danger as countries around the world watch US politics with a combination of disbelief, fascination, horror, and hope,” writes Allison.

What he doesn’t write is that perhaps never in the past have the United States’ allies and adversaries begun to hedge and put this far ahead of our elections. The consistency of US foreign policy across the Cold War years is becoming a thing of the past.

What one national leader in Davos told me he misses most regarding relations with the United States is the degree of predictability needed to make his country’s own policies. “It’s not good or bad,” he said, “it’s just the reality that is our starting point.”

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on Twitter: @FredKempe.

This edition is part of Frederick Kempe’s Inflection Points Today newsletter, a column of quick-hit insights on a world in transition. To receive this newsletter throughout the week, sign up here.

The post How the prospect of a second Trump presidency is already shaping geopolitics appeared first on Atlantic Council.

Georgieva reminded a select group of global political, business, and civil society leaders of Keynes’ words from a 1930 essay, written against the backdrop of the Great Depression, the rise of communism and fascism, and national and international despair (the meeting was off-record, but Georgieva approved this to be shared publicly):

“I predict that both of the two opposed errors of pessimism which now make so much noise in the world will be proved wrong over time: the pessimism of the revolutionaries who think that things are so bad that nothing can save us but violent change, and the pessimism of the reactionaries who consider the balance of our economic and social life so precarious that we must risk no experiments.” 

For argument’s sake, let’s consider as today’s “revolutionary pessimists” Russian President Vladimir Putin, his enablers in Beijing, and his authoritarian brethren in North Korea and Iran—plus Tehran’s Mideast proxies Hamas, the Houthis, and Hezbollah. Pursuing violent change is their calling card.

Standing opposite them are countries Keynes might classify as the risk-averse “pessimistic reactionaries”: the United States, Europe, and other global forces for good. Fearing Russian escalation, they haven’t been sufficiently bold in providing Ukraine the scale or nature of military support it needs to win. In the Mideast and beyond, they have thus failed to develop concepts or marshal coalitions equal to what European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen called “the greatest risk to global order” since World War II.

A new era dawning

My own case for geopolitical optimism, drawn from my week in Davos, starts with US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan’s statement here that “we’re in the early years of a new era,” and that the United States and its global partners have all the tools to shape it, if only they can summon common cause and political will.

At such times of shifting geopolitical tectonic plates, levels of volatility are typically matched by the potential to leverage unfolding crises and challenges to steer history. Our times are no exception. It’s leadership that makes the difference—and it will be so again.

On that score, it’s worth reflecting on the first years of a new era that became known as the Cold War, from the end of World War II in 1945 to the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. It was relative US consistency of action alongside allies, and prudent but bold action, that allowed the United States and United Kingdom to break the Soviet blockade of Berlin in 1948, to keep West Berlin free despite the Berlin Wall’s construction in 1961, and finally to avoid nuclear war over Cuba in 1962.

In those same years, Washington alongside its partners built the transatlantic, European, and global institutions that would bring the world decades of expanding democracy and prosperity, as well as nearly eighty years without major-power conflict. 

Sullivan defined our now-unfolding, post-Cold War era as one that is “marked by a simple thing to say but a very complex reality, which is strategic competition in an age of interdependence.” It’s not as catchy as “the Cold War,” and it’s far more complex, but it will be no less decisive.

“We’re at the start of something new,” said Sullivan. “We have the capacity to shape what it looks like. . . We have the tools to do it. The question is, are we prepared to put those to work? That is a question of political will within our countries and then across our countries. And those who are working to summon that political will need to band together to produce a common, coherent response to the great challenges that we face in 2024.”

Those 2024 geopolitical challenges are to head off the political threats to US and European military and economic support for Ukraine; to rapidly return the Mideast from war to “regionalizing” security efforts and expanding normalization with Israel; and to further stabilize relations with China so as to allow a fierce competition for the global future, but one that is free of violent conflict.

In Davos, another geopolitical uncertainty dominated a great many conversations, given the crucial nature of US leadership, and that was how elections this November will contribute to the United States’ appetite and capability to galvanize common cause—as it did after World War II but failed to do after World War I (with disastrous consequences).

Momentum for Ukraine

On geopolitics, the danger in 2024 is that American, European, and Ukrainian fatigue—combined with unexpected Russian resilience in the face of economic sanctions and some 350,000 casualties—would dramatically reduce military and economic support for Kyiv. That, in turn, would favor Putin and all the global bad actors he represents, who would be encouraged by the failure of Western resolve.

For me, one of the great surprises of Davos week was a positive shift in pro-Kyiv momentum. Both US and European politicians assured Ukrainians that their legislatures in the coming days would overcome minority opposition—from Hungary’s Viktor Orbán in Europe and a Republican minority in the US House—to funding packages for Ukraine that together would exceed $100 billion.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy probably got the biggest ovation here, having substituted a black outfit for his usual olive fatigues. Applause meters don’t win wars, but he had his audience when he said of Putin, “Regimes like his exist as long as they wage wars. And we—we all in the free world—exist as long as we can defend ourselves.”

Without naming countries, he urged those who had held back certain weapons systems because they feared Putin’s response to see now that the greater risk is in failing to give Ukraine what it needs to prevail. “Because of ‘don’t escalate,’” he said, “time was lost. The lives of many of our most experienced warriors, who fought since 2014, were lost. Some opportunities were lost.”

All over town, US, European, and Ukrainian officials pushed back on the narrative that Ukraine wasn’t making progress and Putin was gaining. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken stressed that Ukraine had retaken half of the territory Russia had gained, that it had opened the Black Sea and pushed back the Russian navy, and that Russia was weaker economically, diplomatically, and militarily (having lost half of its conventional capability as of last summer). While Putin wanted to divide NATO, he instead had unified it and enlarged it to Finland and soon Sweden. Ukraine in December began its European Union (EU) membership talks.

There is also growing political support from both sides of the Atlantic for providing Russia’s $300 billion of frozen assets to Ukraine. Given that the combined gross domestic products and defense budgets of Ukraine’s supporters are many times larger than Russia’s, with the right political will, it would not be difficult over time to prevail over Moscow.

Hidden Mideast opportunities

The source of my contrarian Mideast optimism—even amid this week’s US strikes on the Houthis and a Pakistani-Iranian exchange of military blows—comes from the lack of any good alternative. One American business leader, with a long history in the Middle East, told me he thought Israel and its neighbors had a shot at a comprehensive peace deal and regional security arrangement that could endure for a century.    

Israelis will come to recognize that even if they can eradicate Hamas, they won’t ever be secure without a regional security agreement and expanded normalization with their Arab neighbors, building upon the Abraham Accords. And that won’t be possible without a path-certain to a Palestinian state.

“You now have something you didn’t have before,” Blinken told the New York Times’ Tom Friedman on stage here, “and that is Arab countries and Muslim countries even beyond the region that are prepared to have a relationship with Israel in terms of its integration, its normalization, its security, that they were never prepared to have before. . . to make the necessary commitments and guarantees, so that Israel is not only integrated but it can feel secure.”

Despite the growing regional uproar against Israel’s Gaza war, which has resulted in more than twenty thousand Palestinian deaths, Saudi Foreign Minister Faisal Bin Farhan told the World Economic Forum that his country remains committed to normalization with clear terms and commitment to a Palestinian state. 

Stabilizing relations with China

On China-US relations, the pessimists fear the recently stabilized relationship will inevitably veer off the rails, given the fundamental differences between Washington and Beijing. The goal here must be to give the short-term gains of the past year, culminating in the Joe Biden-Xi Jinping meeting in San Francisco, a more lasting nature that will allow the fundamental strengths of the United States and its partners to win out over time.

Here Blinken underscored the greater US “position of strength” through its domestic investments (such as the Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS and Science Act), the reenergizing of partnerships and alliances (the Quad and South Korean-Japanese-US relations), and a greater convergence with other countries—particularly in Europe—in recognizing the perils posed by China.

The Trump question

On the issue of the US election, the Davos consensus (drawn from my own conversations and several requests to raise hands during meetings to indicate opinion) was that former President Donald Trump would win and that would be a bad thing for the historic moment. It was only toward week’s end that Europeans’ fear about being left alone to deal with Putin turned toward a more reasonable faith in American democracy and in their own need to rise to the historic challenge.        

“We should refrain from treating elections, whether in Europe or in the US, as a source of insecurity and instability, as a problem,” Austrian Foreign Minister Alexander Schallenberg said, according to Politico. “Elections are the very heart of our democratic system.”

Said EU Trade Commissioner Valdis Dombrovskis, who served three terms as Latvian prime minister, “We need to ramp up our own capabilities. We need to clearly be at a much higher level of preparedness as regards military capabilities but also as regards economic security and economic resilience.”

Returning to Keynes, what gives me concern is that his essay came at the front end of a decade that ended catastrophically: with World War II and the Holocaust. It was only after seeing those horrors that the United States and its partners rose to create the institutions and invent the rules-based order that produced so much peace and prosperity for decades thereafter.

For the case for optimism to succeed, those faced with the weightiest decisions must recognize the long-term consequences of inaction. The failure to take greater risks in arming Ukraine or to replace failed Mideast approaches with more innovative solutions would be the riskiest course of all.

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on Twitter @FredKempe.

THE WEEK’S TOP READS

#1 Global Risks Report 2024
World Economic Forum

For an understanding of what the world faces in 2024 and beyond, look no further than the World Economic Forum’s meticulously researched “Global Risks Report.”

This year’s report found that “the majority of respondents [to a WEF survey] (54%) anticipate some instability and a moderate risk of global catastrophes, while another 30% expect even more turbulent conditions. The outlook is markedly more negative over the 10-year time horizon, with nearly two-thirds of respondents expecting a stormy or turbulent outlook.”

The report also identified the biggest risk for the next two years to be “misinformation and disinformation,” but over the next ten years, climate-related crises will become the dominant risks. Read more →

#2 A ‘multipolar’ world defies the ‘rules-based’ order
Gideon Rachman | FINANCIAL TIMES

Part of the Financial Times’ must-read collection on “The World 2024,” Gideon Rachman’s insightful analysis examines the rhetoric of global power distribution.

“In the battle for global influence, all sides have their jargon,” Rachman claims. “The US and allies talk of the ‘rules-based international order’ (RBIO). Russia and China prefer a ‘multipolar’ world. Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, India’s astute foreign minister, recently split the difference by talking about the need for a ‘multilateral rules-based international order.’”

Rachman writes, “In different ways, the wars in Ukraine and Gaza—as well as the tensions in the South China Sea and the battle for opinion in the Global South—all involve this rhetorical struggle to shape the world order and the power realities that underpin it.” Read more →

#3 2024 Edelman Trust Barometer Global Report
Edelman Trust Institute

This year’s Trust Barometer reveals a fascinating trend as trust in non-governmental organizations, business, government, and media hovers at 56 percent globally—but with a big divide between the developed and developing worlds. In developing countries, 63 percent of citizens trust those institutions, while that figure stands at 49 percent in developed countries. In the past year, trust among US citizens has dropped from 48 percent to 46 percent.

As the world heads into a year in which half the population votes, this report highlights concerning trends of declining faith in governments and institutions among liberal democracies. (Note: Edelman CEO Richard Edelman serves on the Atlantic Council board of directors.) Read more →

#4 The Quiet Transformation of Occupied Ukraine
David Lewis | FOREIGN AFFAIRS

In this urgent piece, David Lewis calls attention not to Ukraine’s frontline, but to its occupied territory.

“This administrative occupation is less well known than the violence and human rights abuses that accompany it,” Lewis writes. “But Russia’s war in Ukraine extends well beyond its ruthless missile and drone strikes, its legions of soldiers, and its bellicose rhetoric. In occupied Ukraine, bureaucrats have been effective at enforcing the compliance of locals. Even as some people resist, authorities impose Russian education, cultural indoctrination, and economic and legal systems to rope these lands ever more tightly to Russia. The longer Russia occupies these territories, the harder it will be for Ukraine to get them back.”

As the West continues to “squabble” over aid to Ukraine, this piece is a reminder that Russia is ardently continuing its war. Read more →

#5 Geopolitical risks overshadow economic optimism in Davos
Sam Fleming | FINANCIAL TIMES

To understand the anxiety that pervaded this year’s World Economic Forum, read Sam Fleming’s smart reporting, which uncovers its origins, among them the US presidential election in November, continuing conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East, and the overall shift in priority towards national security and resilience rather than economic efficiency.

“The economic backdrop to this week’s Davos meetings was far more promising than many anticipated a year ago,” Fleming writes. “But if the tone of discussions at the World Economic Forum is anything to go by, nobody is ready to celebrate.” Read more →

Atlantic Council top reads

New Atlanticist Jan 18, 2024

Experts react: What’s really going on with Pakistan and Iran exchanging attacks?

By Atlantic Council experts

Pakistan just conducted airstrikes in southeastern Iran, two days after Iran used missiles and drones to strike western Pakistan. Atlantic Council experts explain what’s going on.

Conflict Iran

New Atlanticist Jan 18, 2024

What Bangladesh’s widely boycotted election reveals about its future 

By Ali Riaz

The election results were a foregone conclusion, as there were no opposition parties contesting. But the results reveal a deeper entrenchment of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s party.

Civil Society Elections

Atlantic Council Strategy Paper Series Jan 17, 2024

Global Foresight 2024

In this year’s Global Foresight edition, our experts identify the top risks and opportunities for 2024. Our foresight team spots “snow leopards” that could have major unexpected impacts in 2024 and beyond. And we share findings from our survey of global strategists and foresight practitioners on how human affairs could unfold over the next decade.

The post Davos Dispatch: The case for optimism amid global upheaval appeared first on Atlantic Council.

On the flight to Davos, my thoughts turned to Taiwan’s elections, which took place on January 13. As these elections approached, many wrote about Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s growing threats to Taiwan’s vibrant, free-market democracy. But I had been struck by how these elections have exposed Xi’s greater concern: authoritarian failure at home.

If Chinese Communist Party leadership was working, Xi would have had a more benign view of Taiwan’s elections, shrugging his shoulders at the race rather than his government calling it “a choice between war and peace.”

What goes unsaid is that China faces some of the lowest growth and highest youth unemployment since Xi took over as paramount leader in 2012. At the same time, Xi is purging the People’s Liberation Army, ostensibly over corruption but always about control. Just as China’s economy is sputtering, Taiwan—through semiconductor manufacturing and beyond—is now a global economic power player.

Xi has made the purpose of his leadership that of national revival, which was at the core of his New Year’s speech. The harder that looks to achieve at home, the more tempting it may become to force Taiwan, with its population of about 24 million people, into China’s embrace, with its population of 1.4 billion.

Despite the risks, Xi may lose patience with the failed conviction that China’s economic miracle over time would be the irresistible force for Taiwan’s unification. The Wall Street Journal’s Lingling Wei, in a compelling slideshow previewing the election, argues that Beijing’s rising pressure on Taiwan “indicates its strong desire to change the status quo—even as polls on the island say that the status quo is exactly what people there desire.”

Beijing has made no secret of its opposition to the election’s winner, the physician Lai Ching-te, also known as William Lai. He’s the current vice president, representing the independence-minded Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), but his smart approach is that Taiwan’s de facto independence requires no further declaration. A son of a coalminer, who died when he was little, he has a master’s degree in public health from Harvard and a passion for the disadvantaged.

But regardless of who is Taiwan’s president, writes Lingling Wei, “the uneasy coexistence between China and Taiwan for more than seven decades is likely to get more unstable in the months and years to come.”

That’s because the danger to Xi isn’t Taiwan but himself. Taiwan’s free vote that took place this weekend is an uncomfortable reminder that Xi will never enjoy democratic legitimacy. His legacy thus rests on delivering greater prosperity (increasingly difficult) or on whether he achieves—or fosters a perception that he achieved—a forced unification (heaven forbid).

Xi’s destructive policies at home—choking the private sector and silencing free speech—and his evisceration of Hong Kong’s autonomy have taught the Taiwanese that any form of unification would end their democratic freedoms.

One thing is certain as I approach the World Economic Forum in Davos. Taiwan’s status will remain the primary flashpoint in US-China relations, and one of the greatest global risks, for the foreseeable future.

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on Twitter: @FredKempe.

This edition is part of Frederick Kempe’s Inflection Points Today newsletter, a column of quick-hit insights on a world in transition. To receive this newsletter throughout the week, sign up here.

The post Xi’s biggest problem isn’t Taiwan appeared first on Atlantic Council.

That’s the somber mood music, detailed in the World Bank’s latest Global Economic Prospects report, that faces global movers and shakers heading for next week’s World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, arguably the world’s most important annual gathering of political, business, and civil-society leaders.

I’ll be there slogging through the snow with them, hoping to hear their smartest plans to navigate the higher borrowing costs and geopolitical tensions that are dragging down growth.

When growth slows, political volatility tends to follow. That comes at a time when the world is already facing wars in Europe and the Middle East—and increasing tensions in East Asia—without a lasting solution in sight.

The WEF was born to galvanize common cause to improve the state of the world, but its own Global Risks Report 2024 is a stark look at what the world is up against, concluding that “weakened economies and societies may only require the smallest shock to edge past the tipping point.”

WEF’s survey shows that for the next two years, “the majority of respondents (54 [percent]) anticipate some instability and moderate risk of global catastrophes, while another 30 [percent] expect even more turbulent conditions.” Over a ten-year timeframe, it is looking even gloomier, with two-thirds of respondents expecting a “stormy or turbulent outlook.”

Josh Lipsky, senior director of the Atlantic Council’s GeoEconomics Center, compares the current global economy to an unstable Jenga tower, with missing pieces representing major economic disruptions that could range from shipping disruptions in the Red Sea to trade disputes with China.

“If you look from above, the tower seems tall and sturdy. That’s indeed what’s forecasted for [the] year—modest but consistent global growth,” Lipsky writes. “But if you pan the camera down and look at the sides of the Jenga tower, you see all the missing pieces. Each one is hollowing out the structure and you never know just how much instability the tower can take before it topples over.”

My only solace is that the Davos conventional wisdom often proves wrong. A hedge fund manager friend of mine says he goes to Davos each year so as to bet against this conventional wisdom.

It would be more prudent to follow the World Bank’s advice, which is to accelerate per capita investment growth and then sustain it for six or more years, reducing poverty and increasing productivity. The World Bank concedes that’s hard work, but developing economies have done it before, and the alternative is more wasted opportunity.

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on Twitter @FredKempe.

This edition is part of Frederick Kempe’s Inflection Points Today newsletter, a column of quick-hit insights on a world in transition. To receive this newsletter throughout the week, sign up here.

The post Davos and ‘the decade of wasted opportunity’ appeared first on Atlantic Council.

Never in recent memory have so many significant events unfolded simultaneously: wars in Europe and the Middle East, simmering US-China tensions, accelerating technological competition (not just over artificial intelligence), and a jam-packed global electoral calendar with a particularly divisive and decisive US presidential election in November.

Capturing the generational stakes in 2024 requires going beyond the annual exercise of listing and assessing top risks in the year ahead. Instead, senior officials in the Biden administration, who I spoke with in the final days of 2023, are connecting the dots among the challenges, knowing they will have to manage them all to navigate the year successfully.

Administration officials, who requested anonymity to speak candidly, break down the issues into roughly five categories. What makes managing the coming year so complex is that none of these issues can be easily separated from the other—and none can be neglected without paying a heavy price. Here’s my understanding of how administration officials are thinking about these challenges.

Read the below, and you might share my view that the historic moment calls for even more ambitious thinking and action. Without that, either adversaries or chaos could define the future. Listening to senior administration officials who are grappling with this unruly world, however, provides more insight into how they perceive limits to their actions.

1. Russia and Ukraine

In the view of these officials, Ukraine needs to regain battlefield momentum in the third year of Russia’s full-scale war against it by better sustaining and focusing its military resources on the south, the Black Sea, and Crimea. Officials I spoke with believe that Ukraine is unlikely to win its war in 2024, so in the meantime it must avoid losing while making some real gains. Above all, it must transform the Moscow-held Crimean Peninsula from a Russian strategic asset into a vulnerability. To help achieve that, Kyiv should expand its recent gains in the Black Sea and make one concerted military effort in the south, while holding and defending its north and east. This level of success requires continued and sustained US and European financial and military support, without which Ukraine’s options will become purely defensive.

2. China and East Asia

According to Biden administration officials, the United States must try to further stabilize its relationship with China, following gains made over the past year, while continuing to build stronger ties with all US regional partners. One senior official referred to the effort as “holding serve.” To do so, the United States at the same time will need to navigate a series of dangers, with North Korea testing an intercontinental ballistic missile in the week ahead of Christmas, with next week’s Taiwan elections potentially stirring a Chinese reaction, and with the always-present possibility of a “nonlinear” event in the South China Sea (such as the sinking of a ship or testing of disputed boundaries) and the potential blowback.

3. Israel, Gaza, and the wider Middle East

At a minimum, Washington must avoid an escalation of the Israel-Hamas conflict that would more deeply draw in the United States or Iran—and that itself won’t be easy, as shown by the tensions in the Red Sea this week, which included the US Navy sinking the vessels of Iran-backed Houthi rebels and Tehran deploying a warship to the area. But beyond that minimum, Biden administration officials want to return Israel and Saudi Arabia to the normalization path that was abandoned after Hamas’s October 7 terrorist attacks. To achieve this outcome, Israel would need to accept a formula for a future Palestinian state that would defuse the current crisis. For Israel to accept that, it would have to realize that its long-term sustainability as a state depends as much on reaching lasting peace and normalization with its moderate Arab neighbors as it does on eradicating Hamas. One Biden administration official sees 2024 as “a ticking clock to run this normalization play.” The closer a US election comes, the less flexible Israeli leadership under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu might become, especially if the Israeli side anticipates a victory by Donald Trump.

4. The technology race

The Biden administration is confident that the United States can win the artificial-intelligence race (given dramatic advances in 2023) in a manner that protects US jobs and values, while working with global partners to establish common regulatory standards for the technology. Where Biden administration officials remain more worried, and thus will apply greater efforts in 2024, is in addressing what they consider China’s lead in clean technologies, ranging from electric vehicles to solar energy to advanced batteries—and control of the critical minerals to keep it all going. US officials believe that the country has made progress in addressing this gap through the Inflation Reduction Act and other measures, but that the United States remains far from closing it.

5. Electoral challenges

There is hardly a conversation Biden administration officials have with their international partners that doesn’t include some sort of handicapping of the 2024 US elections and the impact they will have on a full range of global issues. Adversaries such as Russian President Vladimir Putin will try to wait out 2024 in the hope that US support for Ukraine will continue to flag. Many European countries worry about a Trump victory, given his skepticism about NATO and criticisms of European partners more generally. Most countries’ diplomats will find themselves jockeying to meet with whoever might be most influential in a Republican administration while maintaining the closest ties possible to the Biden crowd.

I’ve been one of those who have argued that the administration isn’t acting boldly enough or with sufficient vision, given the historic stakes of these challenges, or quickly enough, given that Joe Biden could be a one-term president. These officials argue that, in contrast to the period after World War II and even the Cold War, several factors that previously allowed the United States to dictate events are no longer present.

At the end of World War II, for example, the United States had half the world’s gross domestic product, its two major adversaries were in ruins (as was much of Europe), the Global South wasn’t the political force it is now, and global industrialization favored the United States.

“Give me that hand to play with, and I can make some money at the poker table,” one senior US official told me.

With the hand the United States has now, the official argued, it’s possible to manage 2024 successfully and to shape positively what Biden frequently calls a historic inflection point. “To make it work,” the official said, “we have to fight like hell for every inch. We can still win with some cunning, some luck, and some elbow grease.”

The challenges range from accessing reliable sources of cobalt in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to keeping Red Sea shipping lanes open, and from leveraging World Bank lending to support the Global South to working with Congress to avoid Ukrainian defeat.

The bottom line: 2024 could be one of the most consequential years—for the United States, its allies, their interests, and global rules and institutions—since the end of World War II. It’s possible to prevail, but only with a recognition of the importance of this year, new and more innovative forms of coordination with partners and allies, heightened focus on execution and outcomes, and a single-minded effort that rises to the generational stakes.

I can’t escape thinking, however, that the United States still needs more of the post-World War II ambition that shaped the decades the followed, even while recognizing that world’s increasing complexities require an entirely new set of skills, approaches, and consistency of purpose.

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on Twitter @FredKempe.

THE WEEK’S TOP READS

#1 ‘I want to live’: Russians defect to Ukraine by calling army hotline
Christopher Miller | FINANCIAL TIMES

For a fascinating look at a successful Ukrainian information campaign, read this Financial Times feature on the “I want to live” hotline used by Ukraine to corral Russian defectors.

Christopher Miller reports that since Ukraine’s military intelligence agency (GUR) set up the call system in September 2022, some 220 Russian soldiers have given themselves up through the hotline, with more than one thousand cases pending.

“Both Ukraine and Russia have employed information campaigns, or what [Vitaliy Matvienko, spokesperson for GUR’s department for prisoners of war,] called ‘psyops,’ meaning psychological operations,” wrote Miller. “They target the other side with leaflets dropped from the air, mass text messages, radio and television ads, and even shouting from trench to trench.”

Commenting on the high number of defections, Matvienko says, “The Russian army is essentially a Soviet army. As you know, in the Soviet army, the price of a soldier’s life was zero.” Read more →

#2 Opinion: Can the spread of war be stopped?
David Ignatius | THE WASHINGTON POST

Going into a year already laden with conflict, the Washington Post’s David Ignatius calls for a different approach to preventing war.

“At the dawn of 2024, we should recognize that violence is ravaging our planet and the mechanisms to prevent it are failing badly,” Ignatius writes. United Nations “peacekeeping resolutions are routinely vetoed by combatants or their protectors; ‘deterrence’ doesn’t deter Russia, Hamas, or the Houthis. The ‘rules-based order’ that President Biden proclaims has become a slogan rather than a fact.”

To fix this, Ignatius writes, “We need new rules at the United Nations to stop wars and a new framework for crisis management with allies and adversaries.” Read more →

#3 Elections to Watch in 2024
Allison Meakem | FOREIGN POLICY

Allison Meakem of Foreign Policy calls 2024 the biggest global election year in history. Read her guide to gain a better understanding of what is on the ballot.

This coming year “will see a global battle between democracy and autocracy play out literally, at the polls,” Meakem writes. “And not just in the United States, which will hold its first presidential election since a deadly right-wing insurrection sought to block Biden from taking office three years ago: Seven of the world’s ten most populous countries are expected to vote on national leadership this year.” Read more →

#4 The ‘CEO’ of Hamas Who Found the Money to Attack Israel
Rory Jones, Benoit Faucon, Ian Talley, and Abeer Ayyoub | WALL STREET JOURNAL

This compelling investigation uncovers the life of Zaher Jabarin, the fifty-five-year-old militant who oversees the financial empire that funds Hamas’s operations against Israel.

“Jabarin has built relationships with people close to President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan that Israeli security officials say helped Hamas procure weapons and funding,” the Wall Street Journal reports. “Jabarin has helped maintain Hamas’s relationship in Lebanon with Iranian proxy Hezbollah, working with money changers there, according to US officials who have tracked the financial flows.”

Most importantly, though, Jabarin manages Hamas’s financial relationship with its main benefactor, Iran, and “handles how Tehran gets cash to the Gaza Strip.”

Uzi Shaya, a former Israeli security official, told the WSJ, “Jabarin is the CEO of Hamas.” Read more →

#5 The Pentagon Is Trying to Rebuild the Arsenal of Democracy
Jack Detsch | FOREIGN POLICY

Ahead of US involvement in World War II and in the face of heightening German and Japanese aggression, former US President Franklin D. Roosevelt said in one of his famous fireside chats, “We must have more ships, more guns, more plans—more of everything. We must be the great arsenal of democracy.”

Now, Foreign Policy’s Jack Detsch asks if the United States can once again successfully mobilize for a world war.

In this must-read investigation, Foreign Policy comes to an alarming conclusion: “The United States can only prod and pray—the Pentagon’s own soon-to-be-released industrial strategy indicates that defense companies wouldn’t be able to respond fast enough for the US military to fight a modern war.” Read more →

Atlantic Council top reads

UkraineAlert Jan 2, 2024

Ukraine needs urgent air defense aid as Putin launches bombing campaign

By Peter Dickinson

As Russia launches a long-awaited new bombing campaign against Ukrainian cities, fears are mounting that deadlock over continued US and EU military aid may soon leave Ukraine facing critical air defense shortages, writes Peter Dickinson.

Conflict Defense Technologies

MENASource Jan 4, 2024

Here’s how Hezbollah will likely respond to Israel’s assassination of Saleh Al-Arouri

By David Daoud

What Hezbollah has not been seeking is opening a full-scale war with Israel. However, Hezbollah has other indirect options that it may activate.

Israel Lebanon

New Atlanticist Jan 5, 2024

Overstretched and undersupplied: Can the US afford its global security blanket?

By Kathryn Levantovscaia

The hollowing out of the broader US manufacturing base has made defense companies dependent on supply chains originating in, of all places, China.

Defense Industry Defense Policy

The post Inside the Biden administration’s thinking for 2024 appeared first on Atlantic Council.

That might sound hyperbolic. What’s undeniable is that the world will see more significant elections, embracing more democratic countries in the world, than I can ever remember. It’s also happening at a time when democracies have been on the defensive and autocracies (China, Russia, and Iran, to name three) have been acting more boldly.

Some two billion people will vote in 2024; that’s about half the world’s adult population, representing more than 60 percent of global gross domestic product, by Bank of America calculations. The FT reports that seventy countries will be holding elections, including eight of the world’s ten most populous countries.

That might sound like reason for celebration, underscoring the enduring attraction of democracy. Instead, it is more a time of peril, when democracies need to find ways to counteract a recession in democratic rights and freedoms that has been under way globally since 2006, according to Freedom House. This also comes at a time when innovative technologies like artificial intelligence can provide even more effective tools for surveillance and control.

Writes the FT’s Alec Russell in a compelling read on what lies ahead: “These elections take place against a backdrop of spreading illiberalism around the world, the weakening of independent institutions in a number of big democracies, and a creeping disillusionment among younger people about the very point of elections.”

There is no easy fix. The challenges democracies face are as diverse as the countries themselves. However, a good start would be to address the partisanship, hypocrisy, and ineffectiveness that turn off voters and erode institutional effectiveness.

Amid all the world’s voting in 2024, it will be the perceived health of US democracy that will be most decisive for the global democratic order. This year the world will ask, is the United States offering a model to emulate or to avoid?

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on Twitter @FredKempe.

This edition is part of Frederick Kempe’s Inflection Points Today newsletter, a column of quick-hit insights on a world in transition. To receive this newsletter throughout the week, sign up here.

The post Democracy’s decisive year—globally appeared first on Atlantic Council.

Xi’s tone was that of a leader who won’t ever have the satisfaction of democratic legitimacy, but who both craves and is increasingly uncertain about public support, given increases in youth unemployment, slow growth, and military purges that raise questions about party unity. He acknowledged that the country has “gone through the test of winds and rains” in recent years—bringing to mind China’s mounting economic difficulties and its severe COVID-19 restrictions—before launching into a laundry list of accomplishments.

The Financial Times reported yesterday that China’s BYD supplanted Tesla in the past quarter as the world’s biggest electric car maker. Xi could now add that to his speech’s inventory of shiny objects: The C919 jumbo passenger airliner entered service, Shenzhou spaceships continued their missions, the Fendouzhe submersible reached the deepest ocean trench, Chinese-made mobile phones were “instant market [successes],” and lithium batteries and photovoltaic products have become a “testimony to China’s manufacturing prowess.”

“Products designed and made in China, especially trendy brands, are highly popular with consumers,” he boasted.

Xi’s speech was bathed in patriotism and nostalgia about China’s “great civilization,” noting that next year would mark the seventy-fifth anniversary of the People’s Republic of China. “The mighty Yellow River and Yangtze River never fail to inspire us,” he said, and new discoveries from archeological sites “tell us much about the dawn of Chinese civilization… And all this is the source from which our confidence and strength are derived.”

The Western press understandably focused on Xi’s brief comments about his slowing economy and his references to unification with Taiwan, both coming late in the short speech, which was only twelve minutes.

On the economy, he conceded, “Some enterprises had a tough time. Some people had difficulty finding jobs and meeting basic needs.” Could that tee up some economic liberalization in 2024? Probably not, if it’s at the price of party control.

On Taiwan, he said, after praising Hong Kong and Macao integration (and ahead of Taiwan’s elections next week): “China will surely be reunified, and all Chinese on both sides of the Taiwan Strait should be bound by a common sense of purpose and share in the glory of the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.”

What Xi didn’t talk about were his relentless purges, now reaching further into China’s military establishment, which have the increasing feel of Mao’s “continuous revolution.” Xi has now punished an estimated five million people, and counting, for abuses large and small.

It’s worth reading Xi’s speech in full to understand China as a country with a baffling mix of weaknesses and strengths, run by an autocratic leader who is looking at 2024 with more than a little concern.

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on Twitter @FredKempe.

This edition is part of Frederick Kempe’s Inflection Points Today newsletter, a column of quick-hit insights on a world in transition. To receive this newsletter throughout the week, sign up here.

The post Xi Jinping’s real New Year’s message appeared first on Atlantic Council.

Hamas’s terrorist strike on October 7 wouldn’t have happened without Iran’s years of funding and military support to the group. The Houthis’ attacks on global shipping—threatening a waterway through which a third of the world’s containers pass—require Iranian support and weaponry. Hezbollah, which is also heavily backed by Iran, has launched more than a thousand rockets on Israel’s north since October 7. And it is Iranian-backed militias in Syria and Iraq that are attacking US bases.

So far, Hamas’s attacks and the war in Gaza that has followed haven’t resulted in a wider Middle East conflict. The concern now is that the US Navy attack on three Houthi vessels last weekend (killing ten) and the subsequent arrival of an Iranian destroyer in the Red Sea increase the risk of an expanded war.

What should worry Americans, as I argued yesterday on CNBC, is the rising cost of Iran’s unchecked regional and global misbehavior. Virtually unnoticed amid the Gaza war is that Iran has tripled production of nearly weapons-grade uranium. International Atomic Energy Agency Director General Rafael Grossi said his inspectors had confirmed in December increased production of highly enriched uranium at both of Iran’s main nuclear facilities.

That means Iran is perilously close to a nuclear weapons capability. The Wall Street Journal reports experts as saying Iran already has sufficient stock of highly enriched uranium (which could be converted into weapons grade in less than two weeks) for three weapons. This is unfolding in an Iran that has been growing far closer to China and, through its arms deliveries, has been playing a crucial role in Russia’s war effort in Ukraine.

Former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett compares today’s Iran to the Cold War’s Soviet Union. “The Soviet Union collapsed from internal rot coupled with external pressure applied by the US,” he writes, arguing that the same would weaken Tehran.

Iran is supplying the rot. What’s remains lacking is external pressure commensurate to the threat.

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on Twitter @FredKempe.

This edition is part of Frederick Kempe’s Inflection Points Today newsletter, a column of quick-hit insights on a world in transition. To receive this newsletter throughout the week, sign up here.

The post An ugly truth in the Middle East appeared first on Atlantic Council.

Yes, that would be Washington.

His spirits were high and his mood buoyant when I met with him and a small group of others for a background chat Monday evening at the Ukrainian embassy ahead of his meetings Tuesday with US President Joe Biden, Speaker of the House of Representatives Mike Johnson, and key Senate Republicans.

He talked about the tragedy that would result, both for his military operations and his country’s morale, if the United States did not sustain its support. He talked in detail about what weaponry was lacking, the need to further isolate Russia internationally, Ukraine’s geopolitical benefit for NATO, his country’s underestimated successes in the Black Sea, and why a frozen conflict only serves Moscow.

Biden held out hope that Zelenskyy could deploy his charm and star power to get Republican holdouts to support a supplemental spending bill that includes a long-delayed and urgently needed $50 billion in US security aid for Ukraine. Instead, for the moment, Zelenskyy has gotten stuck in the trenches of Republican demands to include border-security measures as part of the spending package.

Idealists argue that linking these two issues is cynical and underestimates the global and generational consequences of a Ukrainian defeat.

As Max Boot has written, “It’s like saying to President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1941: We won’t support aid to Britain as it battles the Nazis unless Democrats repeal the Social Security Act or rewrite the labor laws.”

That was then, however, and this is now.

Those Republicans blocking aid to Ukraine might be geopolitically short-sighted, but the Biden administration’s actions also have fallen short of the historic moment.

Fearful of provoking military escalation by Russian President Vladimir Putin, the administration has often provided Ukraine the weapons and defense systems it needed months after they would have been most useful, and not with the ranges or in the quantities required.

All sides will find compromise faster if they first agree that this fight isn’t only about Ukraine, but also about the global future as well as US interests.

As US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said on Monday, “I do not think it’s hyperbole to say that basically the security of Europe is at stake, and therefore the risk of American men and women having to go deal with another massive war in Europe, as we have before, if we don’t work with Ukraine to stop Russia in Ukraine.”

What’s unfolding is the most dangerous moment in Europe since the end of World War II colliding with one of the most dysfunctional and divisive moments for US domestic politics in recent memory.

Strike a deal in Congress now, even if it involves border security, or we all will pay later. Should no deal emerge, history will remember Zelenskyy’s visit for all the wrong reasons.

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on Twitter @FredKempe.

This edition is part of Frederick Kempe’s Inflection Points Today newsletter, a column of quick-hit insights on a world in transition. To receive this newsletter throughout the week, sign up here.

The post Zelenskyy visits the front line that could decide his country’s war appeared first on Atlantic Council.

Dubai was established in the eighteenth century as a fishing village, where a good living could be made from trade and pearl diving. By the time the COP28 climate conference kicked off here, it had become one of the world’s richest cities, with the world’s tallest building and more five-star hotels than any city except London, the result of oil revenue, tourism, real estate, and sovereign investment.

Dubai was host to climate action over the past week, gathering almost one hundred thousand people from nearly two hundred countries. The public and private sectors drew closer than ever before to a consensus that addressing the perils of a warming planet was both a matter of urgency and business opportunity.

That does not fix the problem, but there is no solution without vast amounts of private-sector financing and investments in climate solutions from renewables to nuclear energy, and from decarbonization to green tech.

Many climate activists opposed opening the doors to industry, particularly those producing fossil fuels, but the result has been a flurry of unprecedented agreements that, if executed and sustained, have the potential for tens of billions of new dollars to address the climate crisis.

For example, there is the $700 million in loss and damage support for the Global South. There is also the $30 billion  “Alterra” fund, launched by the United Arab Emirates—and with private-sector giants Blackrock, Brookfield, and TPG—whose aim is to generate $250 billion of capital by 2030 for climate investments in the Global South.

Some fifty oil and gas companies, including Saudi Aramco and twenty-nine national oil companies, agreed to reduce their emissions to zero by 2050 and to reduce methane emissions to zero by 2030. At other points of the convening, countries joined together in agreeing to triple renewables, also by 2030, and to triple emissions-free nuclear energy by 2050. Achieving both goals will require the participation of the private sector.

Negotiators are squabbling over the text of the final COP28 agreement. Politico reports that a draft it has seen has expanded to twenty-seven pages and includes five different options on how to manage disputes over “phasing down” or “phasing out” fossil fuels. The battle could get ugly before the conference closes on Tuesday.

Whatever the outcome, veterans of the UN climate process believe this year’s sharply increased level of private-sector engagement could be the game changer to address challenges beyond the capacity of governments alone. Says Jorge Gastelumendi, a veteran of sixteen COPs who runs the Atlantic Council’s Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center: “After twenty-eight COPs, we have finally seen the private sector arrive in the climate space with full force and commitment. Without them, we will not be able to solve the climate crisis.”

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on Twitter @FredKempe.

This edition is part of Frederick Kempe’s Inflection Points Today newsletter, a column of quick-hit insights on a world in transition. To receive this newsletter throughout the week, sign up here.

The post The private sector’s role in the climate crisis appeared first on Atlantic Council.

“This conflict should be a doubling down on reminding us that if we don’t go towards regional integration, peace, and security, this is the alternative,” Hochstein told me during an interview at the Atlantic Council’s Global Energy Forum, held in Dubai alongside the United Nations’ COP28 climate conference. For that reason, he said, the Biden administration is still working not only on Saudi-Israel ties but also on broader regional integration.

On November 18, I called for just that, writing, “There is an immediate need for moderate, modernizing Arab countries and Israel to quietly begin laying the groundwork for a NATO-like collective security organization and European Union-like economic body. These institutions would unlock the region’s potential by countering its relentless cycles of violence.”

That proposition prompted a few emails from readers arguing how those hopes are deeply unrealistic now, when they couldn’t even be achieved before the October 7 attacks.

Hochstein’s response: “The United States has always wanted to see, throughout multiple generations and administrations, a normalization of relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel.” He added, “I think that not every road is a straight road, and sometimes we have to go in different directions first. But the goal is still the same. And we remain as committed to that goal of regional integration. And it’s not just about Saudi Arabia and Israel. It has to be much broader than that.”

It’s time to connect the dots globally. Before it’s too late, we must build and defend the architecture of the future, whether in Europe (with Ukraine) or in the Middle East. The alternative is to stand by while the forces of the past tear it down.

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on Twitter @FredKempe.

This edition is part of Frederick Kempe’s Inflection Points Today newsletter, a column of quick-hit insights on a world in transition. To receive this newsletter throughout the week, sign up here.

The post The crooked road to a better Middle East appeared first on Atlantic Council.

People from all corners of the world packed the room, and it was standing room only at our COP28 Resilience Hub, where she held court as the Atlantic Council’s Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center (Arsht-Rock) ambassador for heat, health, and gender.

“Extreme heat has to be viewed as one of the most dangerous results of the changing climate,” she said, recounting a trip to India, where she saw the harm done to livelihoods, particularly those of women working outdoors as farmers, street vendors, waste collectors, and salt pan and construction workers. “This is not just a health issue,” Clinton warned. “It’s an economic issue, a social issue, [and] a political issue.”

Working with Clinton and with Reema Nanavaty, director of the nearly three-million-member Self-Employed Women’s Association, the Atlantic Council has been implementing a parametric insurance program as a part of Arsht-Rock’s Extreme Heat Protection Initiative. This program protects women working in India’s informal sector from having to make an impossible choice: pausing their work during heat waves (to protect their health) or continuing to work and earn money, while putting their wellbeing at risk.

What has been winning the headlines here so far at this twenty-eighth United Nations Climate Change Conference has been the announcement on the first day of a landmark, $400-milllion loss and damage fund, a mechanism that provides financial assistance to the countries most affected by, but often least responsible for, the climate crisis. There has also been media attention on the hydrocarbon companies that have come to this conference in greater numbers than ever before—many with concrete commitments and plans to reduce emissions.

With over seventy thousand delegates and observers at COP28, actions that aim to improve lives—such as insurance programs to support workers in the informal economy, many of them women—deserve notice. For these workers especially, “their lives and livelihoods are at stake,” said Eleni Myrivili, the global chief heat officer for United Nations-Habitat and Arsht-Rock.

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on Twitter @FredKempe.

This edition is part of Frederick Kempe’s Inflection Points Today newsletter, a column of quick-hit insights on a world in transition. To receive this newsletter throughout the week, sign up here.

The post A big idea to address the biggest killer of the climate crisis appeared first on Atlantic Council.

There is an immediate need for moderate, modernizing Arab countries and Israel to quietly begin laying the groundwork for a NATO-like collective security organization and a European Union (EU)-like economic body. These institutions would unlock the region’s potential by countering its relentless cycles of violence.

Amid the horrors of Hamas’s terrorist attack of October 7 and Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza, such notions may sound like a naïve fantasy. However, some senior officials in the Middle East are already thinking in these terms, arguing to me that such an approach would be the most effective way to counter Iran’s proxy warfare and ideological extremism, without which the Hamas attacks don’t happen.

These officials, who requested anonymity to speak most candidly, point to Europe as their example. The continent had been wracked by centuries of inter-state and religious violence culminating in two catastrophic world wars. The EU and NATO have succeeded in bringing a period of unprecedented peace to the region. The only major European wars since their creation have occurred in countries outside these institutions—Ukraine, Georgia, and Yugoslavia.

Given the Middle East’s historical and geographic peculiarities, whatever its countries conjure up would evolve differently. Where the European lesson applies is that it’s best to begin with a small core of committed countries, and then expand from there. NATO was born in 1949 with just a dozen countries, including the United States and Canada from outside of Europe, and it now includes thirty-one members. The European Coal and Steel Community was founded in 1952 with six countries, serving as the precursor to the EU’s now twenty-seven members.

As was the case in Europe, moderate Arab states and Israel should begin with collective security, including the United States, Canada, and perhaps also India and select and willing European countries. One senior Arab official told me that the Abraham Accords countries plus Egypt and Jordan—all countries that have normalized relations with Israel with the support of the United States—would be the most obvious candidates in the first stage.

“I would be one of the first people that would endorse a Middle East NATO,” said Jordan’s King Abdullah II in a 2022 interview with CNBC. Jordan already works closely with NATO and has fought “shoulder-to-shoulder” with Alliance forces for decades, the king noted. While the current conflict makes such views sound remote, the danger of escalation makes the concept all the more urgently necessary.

One can only hope that it won’t take the expansion of the current conflict into a world war-like level of death and destruction, as it did in Europe, to galvanize common cause behind such an initiative. First and foremost, another senior Arab leader tells me, it will require Israel to recognize that it is “playing into Iran’s hands” through the nature of its Gaza invasion. “We all need to play the long game,” he said.

Israel has no choice but to conduct the war against Hamas and seek to destroy its ability to govern Gaza and conduct another 10/7 attack. That said, even if Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is able to “eradicate” Hamas’s military threat, that won’t address the source of regional instability: Iran, its extremist ideology, and its support for proxies—Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, and the Houthis in Yemen.

Without a lasting solution with the Palestinians, including the potential establishment of a Palestinian state, either Hamas will regenerate, or a similarly disruptive group will emerge. What’s needed isn’t just a smarter day-after approach toward and with responsible Palestinians, however, but also a day-after approach for the region.

Iran’s despotic rulers, with their goal of destroying Israel and defeating the United States and its like-minded partners, thrive in the chaos and violence that Hamas’s terrorist attacks and their aftermath have produced. It is in that atmosphere that Iranian rulers can best control their population and continue to build upon their greatly expanded influence across the Middle East, which over time has been born out of conflicts in Lebanon, in Yemen, in Syria, and between Palestinians and Israel.

The best way to counter this Iran-induced instability would be if the moderate Arab states of the Gulf and the region, building upon the Abraham Accords, deepen their security cooperation while simultaneously expanding their security, technological, economic, and investment cooperation to produce more stability, prosperity, and hope for their own people.

The outcome of increased regional cooperation over the next decade, the second Arab official says, would echo what happened in Europe. Iran’s rulers would confront the growing dissatisfaction of citizens paying attention to the progress of neighboring countries, much as the citizens of the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact countries were while confronting NATO and the EU during the Cold War.

To win this struggle, eradicating Hamas is necessary but insufficient, when the real need is to defeat Iran, which neither Israel, moderate Arab states, nor the United States is prepared to do militarily. When one looks at all the alternatives for countering Iran and building a modern, sustainable, prosperous Middle East, the option of constructing common security and economic architecture is the most attractive of them.

What that would require is a recognition by the parties involved that Iran has achieved its current standing in the region through their complacency and unwillingness to counter its revolutionary leadership at each stage of its expanded influence. Arab officials privately praise the Trump administration’s strike on one of the most heinous of Iran’s revolutionary masterminds, Iranian major general Qasem Soleimani, in 2020. If the strike had been followed by a more resolute US approach to Tehran, then it would have shown Iran the limits to its efforts at stoking regional mayhem, even as Tehran works to develop nuclear weapons.

The notion of a closer regional security system, working with the United States, isn’t an entirely new one. Efforts include Arab League members’ interventions in Yemen, the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), and the Middle East Strategic Alliance of 2017. Operation Desert Storm, which liberated Kuwait in 1991, was the most successful instance of security collaboration and involved thirty-five states, among them seven Arab countries. There have also been efforts at greater economic integration through the GCC. Though it went largely unnoticed in the aftermath of October 7, the GCC recently announced a unified tourist visa that would allow travelers easy movement between Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.

Yet all these measures and institutions have lacked sufficient ambition to bring about permanent change in the region that also embraced Israel. As difficult as it will be to create sufficient trust between Israel and Arab states, particularly now, previous efforts have also stumbled on distrust among Arab states. The process of building these new institutions and gaining agreement to their aims could help address this trust deficit in a more permanent, institutional, and treaty-bound manner.

Saudi officials still hope to find their way back to a normalization process with Israel, involving security guarantees from the United States, which had been far advanced before October 7. Such a step would be far more meaningful and lasting if it was embedded in a larger regional effort at security and economic integration.

For now, the ball is in Israel’s court to manage its war with Hamas in a manner that does not close the door to these possibilities. As soon as possible, Israeli leaders need to get back to working with the Arab states with whom they had so greatly improved relations. Only in this way can Israel turn the horrors of Hamas’s terrorist attacks into a more lasting peace that even a complete defeat of Hamas cannot deliver.

If Israel and moderate Arab states can ultimately leverage this crisis for generational good, they could put their region on a more positive and sustainable glide path. If the region fails to seize this opportunity, expect the ideological extremism and violence to spread, perhaps endangering the moderate Arab states themselves.

Though this may not seem the right time for this long-term thinking, it’s worth remembering that Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Churchill signed the Atlantic Charter in August 1941, with World War II raging.

With the stakes this high and the dangers this extreme in the Middle East today, the vision needs to be commensurate to the historic moment.

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on Twitter @FredKempe.

THE WEEK’S TOP READS

#1 America Is a Heartbeat Away From a War It Could Lose
A. Wess Mitchell | FOREIGN POLICY

Wess Mitchell’s provocative look at the growing dangers of world war is required reading for anyone interested in assessing the greatest threats to global order since the 1930s.

“The worst-case scenario is an escalating war in at least three far-flung theaters,” explains Mitchell, “fought by a thinly stretched U.S. military alongside ill-equipped allies that are mostly unable to defend themselves against large industrial powers with the resolve, resources, and ruthlessness to sustain a long conflict.”

Writes Mitchell, a former US assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs: “Waging this fight would require a scale of national unity, resource mobilization, and willingness to sacrifice that Americans and their allies have not seen in generations.” Read more →

#2 The West Must Defeat Russia
Anne Applebaum | THE ATLANTIC

Anne Applebaum begins on an optimistic note: “They planned to take Kyiv in three days, the rest of Ukraine in six weeks. More than 21 months later, Russian forces have withdrawn from half the territory they occupied in February of last year.”

Yet Applebaum worries that those gains could now be lost.

“If we abandon what we have achieved so far and we give up support for Ukraine, the result could still be the military or political conquest of Ukraine,” Applebaum writes. “The conquest of Ukraine could still empower Iran, Venezuela, Syria, and the rest of [Vladimir] Putin’s allies. It could still encourage China to invade Taiwan. It could still lead to a new kind of Europe, one in which Poland, the Baltic states, and even Germany are under constant physical threat, with all of the attendant consequences for trade and prosperity.”

With stakes this high, it’s disturbing that US legislators would hesitate even for a moment to provide the support necessary to bring Ukrainian victory. Read more →

#3 In Talks With Biden, Xi Seeks to Assure and Assert at the Same Time
Vivian Wang and David Pierson | THE NEW YORK TIMES

This brilliantly reported piece captures the duality of Xi’s visit to the United States.

“Mr. Xi wants to convince Washington, and the world, that he is willing to engage with the United States, in part to lure back foreign investment to bolster China’s ailing economy,” write Wang and Pierson in the New York Times. “But he also wants to demonstrate to the Chinese people that he strongly defended Beijing’s interests, and burnished its image as a world power on a par with the United States, not a secondary one making concessions.” Read more →

#4 Putin the Ideologue
Maria Snegovaya, Michael Kimmage, and Jade McGlynn | FOREIGN AFFAIRS

This fascinating Foreign Affairs piece is worth reading for anyone hoping to make sense of Putin’s staying power in Russia. Snegovaya, Kimmage, and McGlynn argue that it all comes down to ideology.

“The Kremlin has succeeded in crafting a worldview that explains why Russians must endure war-related challenges and allows them to make sense of their circumstances. This ideology has become an enduring feature of Putin’s regime,” they write.

The authors emphasize that the Kremlin’s latest push to codify state ideology is only its most recent endeavor to standardize how Russians conceptualize their reality: “Moscow has overhauled the country’s education system as part of that same ideological effort, standardizing modern history textbooks to fit the official propagandist line, requiring that every Russian school have a counselor to facilitate the civic and patriotic upbringing of students, instructing all schools to hold a flag-raising ceremony every week, and other such measures. These steps constitute a widespread effort to inculcate a top-down ideology, anchored by a vision of Russia as a distinct civilization.” Read more →

#5 Only the U.S. Can Restore World Order
Nadia Schadlow | WALL STREET JOURNAL

Nadia Schadlow’s recent Wall Street Journal piece is a must-read for this week and perhaps for years to come.

“Chaos is spreading throughout the world as a direct consequence of America’s failure to deter Russia, Iran and China,” writes Schadlow, a former US deputy national security adviser for strategy. “The balance of power in key regions is faltering, leading to instability and global disorder. Like it or not, the U.S. is the only force that can restore equilibrium.” Read more →

Atlantic Council top reads

New Atlanticist Nov 15, 2023

Experts react: What did Biden and Xi’s ‘candid’ meeting accomplish?

By Atlantic Council experts

Atlantic Council experts break down the US and Chinese leaders’ four-hour summit and what’s coming next.

China Economy & Business

UkraineAlert Nov 13, 2023

Ukraine braces for another winter of Russian attacks on power grid

By Aura Sabadus

While the Ukrainian authorities have had over half a year to prepare for a new wave of Russian air strikes, the country’s civilian energy infrastructure remains vulnerable, writes Aura Sabadus.

Conflict Drones

MENASource Nov 17, 2023

Iraq’s parliamentary speaker was removed. What’s next for the country?

By Abbas Kadhim

The current crisis dates back to May 2022, when Mohamed al-Halbousi removed one of his bloc’s members from parliament.

Elections Iraq

The post The best antidote to surging Mideast violence and Iranian extremism? Regional versions of NATO and the EU. appeared first on Atlantic Council.

It has the potential to be the most significant of his presidency, and it was choreographed to be seen as such. It was only the second time he has chosen to speak from behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office, and he did it with the backdrop of wars in Ukraine and Israel and simmering tensions around Taiwan.

Beyond that, the eighty-year-old commander in chief, who had been in Israel just a day earlier, looked sharp and spoke with the vigor of a man who understands the historic moment and his role in it. He connected the dots between Russia’s criminal war in Ukraine and Hamas’s terrorist attack on Israel, assisted by Iran.

“We’re facing an inflection point in history,” he said, “one of those moments where the decisions we make today are going to determine the future for decades to come.”

He was also clear about what connects the two, seemingly disparate conflicts. “Hamas and Putin represent different threats, but they share this in common,” he said. “They both want to completely annihilate a neighboring democracy—completely annihilate it.”

Importantly, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen was sending much the same message earlier the same evening, speaking in Washington at the Hudson Institute. She argued that Russia and Hamas, supported by Iran, want to “wipe from the map” both Ukraine and Israel, and that free countries could not allow that.

“Our democracies are under sustained and systemic attack by those who abhor freedom because it threatens their rule,” said von der Leyen. “For more than six hundred days, our friends in Ukraine have been fighting and dying for their freedom against Russian aggression. And now Israel has suffered the worst terrorist attack in its history, and the worst mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust. These two crises, however different, call on Europe and America to take a stand—and to stand together.”

As if scripted by a grand dramatist, Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin were meeting in China as Biden traveled to Israel, doubling down on their common cause to rewrite the rules of the global order.

Xi leveraged a gathering of representatives from nearly 150 developing countries, the Belt and Road Forum, to put forward China’s vision as an alternative to US leadership. “What we stand against are unilateral sanctions, economic coercion and decoupling and supply chain disruption,” he said, in advancing what he called a “fairer, multipolar world.”

Xi feted Putin as his guest of honor, meeting with him for three hours on Wednesday and making sure to be photographed frequently by his side. The two leaders neither condemned Hamas nor mourned Israeli losses.

Putin also connected the wars in Ukraine and Israel, saying that he had discussed both “in detail” with Xi. “All these external factors are common threats,” Putin said, “and they strengthen Russian-Chinese relations.”

At the same time that Putin was in Beijing, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov was in North Korea, hailing the “qualitatively new, strategic level of relations.” That builds on North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s recent visit to see Putin at the Vostochny Cosmodrome, followed by the delivery of more than a thousand containers of military equipment and arms to support Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Add Iran to the mix, and you have a toxic brew of autocrats. As Biden told Americans this week, “Iran is supporting Russia in Ukraine, and it’s supporting Hamas and other terrorist groups in the region. And we’ll continue to hold them accountable.”

Now that Biden has identified this inflection point and its actors, it’s worth reflecting on what the term means—and what it demands from the United States and its global partners.

What inflection points have in common is that they are plastic moments in history where individuals and groups of leaders can have outsize influence in shaping the future, for good or ill.

I consider Biden’s inflection point to be the fourth since the early twentieth century. The previous ones set the stage for the periods after both world wars (1918-1945 and 1945-1990), the period after the Cold War (1990-2022), and now the period beginning with Russia’s war in Ukraine.

As was the case previously, expect this defining “moment” in history to open up an era that could stretch for three decades or more, perhaps until 2050.

It’s clear that the period after World War I was marked by failures, including the badly constructed Versailles Treaty ending the war and the ill-fated League of Nations that was meant to bring the world together to prevent future wars. What the world ended up with instead was the rise of fascism, the emergence of Hitler’s Third Reich, and then the Holocaust and World War II, leaving more than seventy million dead.

The period after World War II was a success, in no small part due to what leaders then had learned from their mistakes. The United States replaced its misguided isolationism with purposeful internationalism. Washington worked with European partners and others to construct what we now know as the international liberal order of rules and institutions, including the United Nations, the Bretton Woods institutions, NATO, and the European Coal and Steel Community.

The third inflection point ushered in the post-Cold War period, which proved not to be the “end of history,” a term that Francis Fukuyama coined. He argued that Western liberal democracy’s ascendency after Soviet collapse marked “the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”

What’s true is that NATO and the European Union both expanded democracy’s realm, joined by previously Soviet bloc countries that embraced pluralism and free markets. What the West didn’t anticipate was the staying power of autocratic China and its ruling Communist Party, despite globalization and economic growth, and the emergence of a revanchist Russia.

After the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States, NATO countries rallied around Washington with their Article 5 commitment to common defense. However, the long wars that followed in Afghanistan and Iraq failed to seize upon that galvanizing opportunity.

I launched this column and newsletter in 2018 under the title of Inflection Points, sensing that we were at one of those defining moments in history when US leadership alongside partners and allies would be decisive. My introduction to that term was as early as 2012, when the National Intelligence Council employed it in “Global Trends 2030.”

That report offered up four potential worlds, including one where the risk of interstate conflict increases and the United States retrenches and another, at the other extreme, involving “a newly rebalanced and fused world in which social, economic, technological and political progress is widespread.” The two other scenarios were a “Gini-Out-of-the-Bottle” world—one in which inequalities within states and between states dominate, and another, nonstate world in which nonstate actors, from multilateral corporations to terrorists, flourish both for good and bad.

“None of these outcomes is inevitable,” wrote Mathew Burrows, the author of the report. “The future world order will be shaped by human agency as much as unfolding trends and unanticipated events.”

Biden will find that identifying this period as an inflection point is easier than shaping the future. But his speech this past week is a good start, including its focus on our divisions at home. “We can’t let petty, partisan, angry politics get in the way of our responsibilities as a great nation,” the president declared. The other point that Biden made, true across all four inflection points, is that the costs of action are far less than those of inaction. “History has taught us that when terrorists don’t pay a price for their terror, when dictators don’t pay a price for their aggression, they cause more chaos and death and more destruction. They keep going, and the cost and the threats to America and to the world keep rising.”

In short, pay now or pay more later.

Perhaps Biden should have added: History’s sobering lesson about inflection points is that working together with partners and allies through constructive engagement can change the world for the better, as shown through the peaceful end of the Cold War. However, the costs of getting it wrong also escalate, where the price of miscalculation and isolationism in the 1930s resulted in world war.

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on Twitter @FredKempe.

THE WEEK’S TOP READS

#1 Remarks by President Biden on the Unites States’ Response to Hamas’s Terrorist Attacks Against Israel and Russia’s Ongoing Brutal War Against Ukraine
THE WHITE HOUSE

Read Biden’s speech to see how he connected the dots between the crises in Israel and Ukraine. Harkening back to the internationalist rhetoric of presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan, Biden makes the case for American unity and leadership as the global order reaches an inflection point.

“American leadership is what holds the world together. American alliances are what keep us, America, safe. American values are what make us a partner that other nations want to work with. To put all that at risk if we walk away from Ukraine, if we turn our backs on Israel, it’s just not worth it,” Biden said. “That’s why, tomorrow, I’m going to send to Congress an urgent budget request to fund America’s national security needs, to support our critical partners, including Israel and Ukraine.”

As his speech came to an end, Biden issued a plea for unity: “Tonight, there are innocent people all over the world who hope because of us, who believe in a better life because of us, who are desperate not be forgotten by us, and who are waiting for us. But time is of the essence. I know we have our divisions at home. We have to get past them. We can’t let petty, partisan, angry politics get in the way of our responsibilities as a great nation.” Read more →

#2 A World Without American Deterrence
Walter Russell Mead | WALL STREET JOURNAL  

In this important piece, Walter Russell Mead makes the case against “strategic passivity,” arguing that declining US “power to deter” encourages actors to challenge American power across the world.

“Mr. Biden has yet to grapple with the painful truth that America’s core problem in the Middle East is the march of an unappeasable Iran toward regional power regardless of moral or human cost,” Mead writes. “That is not the only thing Mr. Biden and his team don’t seem to have grasped. The Middle East firestorm is merely one hot spot in a world spinning out of control.”

Pointing to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Iran’s support for Hamas, and China’s increasing aggression in the South China Sea, Mead comes to the powerful conclusion that “if President Biden’s response to Hamas and its patron Iran fails to restore respect for American power, wisdom and will, our enemies everywhere will draw conclusions and take steps that we and our allies won’t like.” Read more →

#3 The Week When Biden Hugged Bibi
Susan B. Glasser | THE NEW YORKER

In the New Yorker, Susan Glasser dissects Biden’s busy week—from his wartime visit to Israel to his primetime address on Thursday night. She accurately characterized Biden’s speech as “a lecture from a family patriarch to a fractious brood that didn’t necessarily want to hear it: Grow up. The world is counting on us.”

“For years, Biden has warned about the current geopolitical moment as a brewing conflict between the democracies of the world and rising autocracies, such as Russia and China, calling this an ‘inflection point’ in apocalyptic language that suggests a new global conflict like the two World Wars of the twentieth century,” Glasser writes. “In the past, it might have been possible to dismiss some of that as hyperbole from a politician who grew up in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. But events of the past year and a half—and especially during this trying past couple of weeks—have reinforced the urgency of Biden’s most consistent foreign-policy message.” Read more →

#4 Yes, the U.S. Can Afford to Help Its Allies
David Frum | THE ATLANTIC

After Biden’s budget request for Ukraine and Israel, David Frum preemptively addresses sticker shock and the coming debate about “whether the United States is doing too much.” Read this thoughtful piece to understand exactly what it takes to support allies and why the United States can’t afford not to.

“Thanks to its remarkable rebound from the coronavirus pandemic, the American economy will this year produce $27 trillion in goods and services,” Frum writes. “In the fiscal year that ended on September 30, the U.S. spent about $850 billion of that $27 trillion on national defense. That rounds out at a little more than 3 percent of GDP. That’s only about half of the burden of defense spending that the U.S. shouldered during the final decade of the Cold War.”

Frum argues that costs must be measured against benefits: “The money to Ukraine is buying a powerful reinforcement of peace in Europe and across the world. The money to Israel will buy a similar deterrent to rogue aggression in the Middle East.” Read more →

#5 America’s Middle East Imperative: Contain Iran
Reuel Marc Gerecht and Ray Takeyh | WALL STREET JOURNAL

This deep dive into Iran’s involvement in Hamas’s attack on Israel is a must-read for anyone hoping to understand the rising tensions throughout the Middle East and the role of the United States.

“The fact is that both Iran and Hamas wanted to abort a regional alignment that threatened to integrate Israel more into the Middle East,” Gerecht and Takeyh write. “American and Israeli diplomacy operated on the hubristic assumption that Iran didn’t have veto rights on this process. And regardless of Israeli-Saudi-U.S. diplomatic initiatives, the clerical regime and Hamas take pleasure in watching Israelis die.”

Gerecht and Takeyh argue that while “the shadow of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan hang uneasily over Washington,” the events of this week “ought to make it unmistakably clear that the U.S. cannot leave the Middle East and pivot to more promising pastures. The region has a way of dragging reluctant powers back into its morass.” Read more →

Atlantic Council top reads

New Atlanticist Oct 19, 2023

Experts react to Biden’s ‘inflection point’ address on Ukraine and Israel

By Atlantic Council experts

Biden tied together the conflicts in Israel and Ukraine as part of a larger struggle for democracy and freedom. Here’s what Atlantic Council experts had to say about the Oval Office address.

Conflict Europe & Eurasia

IranSource Oct 19, 2023

Israel misread Iran’s way of war. A proper understanding could help predict Hezbollah’s next moves.

By David Daoud

Iran—through Hezbollah—has spent almost two decades and considerable effort and funds building the Gaza Strip into the Axis of Resistance’s Southern Front against Israel.

Iran Israel

New Atlanticist Oct 18, 2023

Experts react: Will Venezuela now hold freer elections and get sanctions relief?

By Atlantic Council experts

On October 17, Venezuela’s government and members of the opposition signed a deal to work toward making next year’s presidential elections more free and fair. Sanctions relief could be next.

Democratic Transitions Economy & Business

The post Biden’s inflection point and history’s sobering lessons appeared first on Atlantic Council.

Hamas’s horrifying attack on Israel on October 7, resulting in Biden’s powerful and unambiguous statement of support for Israel this week, would appear to have put Ukraine on the back burner for the moment, replaced by a war that might appear more urgent.

But viewing these wars as entirely distinct from each other would be a mistake.

When Biden does get around to making his speech on Ukraine, he should expand his message and tell Americans, and at the same time our partners around the world, that together we face the greatest threat to global order since the 1930s.

What the wars in Ukraine and Israel have in common is that they are both the result of state-sponsored terrorism. In Ukraine’s case, Russia is acting brazenly and directly. In the case of Israel, Iran is acting through Hamas and others. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said Tuesday that although there is no direct evidence that Iran was involved in the planning or execution of the attack, it was “complicit.” Indeed, the alarming scale and competence of Hamas’s attacks couldn’t have happened without Iran’s funding, weaponry, training, and intelligence. And without its deepening partnership with Russia and China, Iran would be a far less potent actor.

Beyond that, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping declared a “no limits partnership” before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Then in March of this year, they spoke together in Moscow of their intention to replace the fraying global system of rules and institutions, established by the United States and its partners after World War II, with something more to their own liking.

Xi told Putin at the time, “Right now there are changes of the likes of which we haven’t seen for a hundred years. And we are the ones driving these changes together.”

“The strategic and political point is that the return of war against Israel isn’t an isolated event,” wrote the Wall Street Journal in a lead editorial on Monday, under the provocative headline “Wake Up, Washington.” “It’s the latest installment in the unraveling of global order as American political will and military primacy are called into question.”

Anne Applebaum wrote this week in the Atlantic, “The Russian invasion of Ukraine and Hamas surprise attack on Israeli citizens are both blatant rejections of [the] rules-based order, and they herald something new. Both aggressors have developed a sophisticated, militarized, modern form of terrorism, and they do not feel apologetic or embarrassed about this at all.”

With the global stakes in mind, a chorus of Democratic and Republican members of Congress had been calling for months for Biden to deliver a major address to Americans, ideally from the Oval Office, on why it is crucial to continue supporting Ukraine.

Administration officials have now said Biden’s speech on Ukraine might have to wait at least until after House Republicans elect their new speaker. Some argue that a Ukraine speech should wait even longer, not wanting it to be lost amid new concerns regarding Israel, where US commitment has longer and deeper historic roots.

Biden shouldn’t wait to deliver his Ukraine speech, and he should broaden it to connect the dots to Israel, making clear that in both cases international crimes are being committed by two countries that need to be held to account. He also needs to warn that China, which is supporting both Russia and Iran, may choose to exploit this moment of perceived US weakness in the Pacific, with a specific danger to Taiwan.

It also would be a good time to underscore the national security dangers posed by our toxic political divisions in Washington. A small minority of Republicans in Congress was almost able to shut down the government. A minority again—just eight Republicans voting with Democrats—ousted the speaker. A similar minority could threaten continued support for Ukraine, although majorities in both the House and the Senate and among the American people continue to back Ukraine.

Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, writing in Foreign Affairs, provided the disturbing global context for this domestic dysfunction, which on current trajectory will grow only worse in our 2024 election year.

“The United States now confronts graver threats to its security that it has in decades, perhaps ever,” he writes. “Never before has it faced four allied antagonists at the same time—Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran—whose collective nuclear arsenal could within a few years be nearly double the size of its own.”

Gates worries “that at the very moment that events demand strong and coherent response from the United States, the country cannot provide one.”

There’s perhaps a silver lining in this tragic week. As Winston Churchill worked with the United States to create the United Nations after World War II, he famously said, “Never let a good crisis go to waste.”

The reality of war in Israel, with the terrifying images of Hamas’s atrocities, may make it more difficult for an extreme minority to block government spending packages, when it’s clear so many lives are at stake. House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul (R-TX) has floated the idea of a package that would include aid for Israel, assistance for Ukraine, “maybe Taiwan funding and finally border security funding. To me that would be a good package.”

Sullivan has said the president will make request to Congress regarding Israel and would renew its request for Ukraine, though he didn’t link them.

Whatever Congress does, it’s time for US leaders to look at the threat to global order more comprehensively. Until last weekend, Israel’s domestic politics was even more toxically divided than that of the United States. It took the Hamas attack to pull Israelis together, at least temporarily.

One hopes the United States won’t require that sort of wake-up call before it recognizes the threats to Ukraine and Israel are related and that they require a coherent, coordinated, and sustained response.

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on Twitter @FredKempe.

THE WEEK’S TOP READS

#1 Jake Sullivan’s Trial by Combat
Susan B. Glasser | THE NEW YORKER

Susan Glasser’s New Yorker opus is the smartest profile I’ve read anywhere on National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and his role on Ukraine and elsewhere.

“As a child of the eighties and ‘Rocky’ and ‘Red Dawn,’ I believe in freedom fighters and I believe in righteous causes, and I believe the Ukrainians have one,” Sullivan told Glasser. “There are very few conflicts that I have seen—maybe none—in the post-Cold War era . . . where there’s such a clear good guy and bad guy. And we’re on the side of the good guy, and we have to do a lot for that person.”

Glasser writes that the task of leading the White House through the “treacherous politics” of the war in Ukraine has fallen to Sullivan, who, when he was appointed at the age of forty-four, was “the youngest national-security adviser since McGeorge Bundy held the job, during the Vietnam War.” Read more →

#2 There Are No Rules
Anne Applebaum | THE ATLANTIC  

Anne Applebaum also draws the crucial connection between Russia’s war on Ukraine and Hamas’s surprise attack on Israel: Both actions completely disregard the “rules-based world order,” whose origins and purpose she describes in rich detail.

“Both aggressors have deployed a sophisticated, militarized, modern form of terrorism, and they do not feel apologetic or embarrassed about this at all,” Applebaum writes. “Terrorists, by definition, are not fighting conventional wars and do not obey the laws of war. Instead, they deliberately create fear and chaos among civilian populations.” Read more →

#3 The Dysfunctional Superpower
Robert Gates | FOREIGN AFFAIRS

The recent ousting of Speaker Kevin McCarthy from his leadership role in the House of Representatives was only the latest act in the circus of US domestic politics. Former US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates argues that the bigger problem is that the United States’ internal divisions and the ensuing dysfunction have become a national security threat.

“The United States finds itself in a uniquely treacherous position: facing aggressive adversaries with a propensity to miscalculate yet incapable of mustering the unity and strength necessary to dissuade them,” Gates writes. “Successfully deterring leaders such as Xi and Putin depends on the certainty of commitments and constancy of response. Yet instead, dysfunction has made American power erratic and unreliable, practically inviting risk-prone autocrats to place dangerous bets—with potentially catastrophic effects.” Read more →

#4 Wake Up, Washington
The Editorial Board | WALL STREET JOURNAL

Following Hamas’s assault on Israel, the Wall Street Journal published a powerful lead editorial, arguing that Washington is in need of an alarm clock.

“The invasion, planned with an assist from Iran, ought to wake up both parties in Washington,” the Editorial Board writes. “The world is awash in threats that will inevitably wash up on our shore if America doesn’t get its act together.”

“The growing global disorder is a result in part of American retreat, not least Mr. Biden’s departure from Afghanistan that told the world’s rogues the United States was preoccupied with its internal divisions. But too many Republicans are also falling for the siren song of isolationism and floating a defense cut in the name of fiscal restraint. The Hamas invasion should blow up dreams the United States can ‘focus on China’ and write off other parts of the world.” Read more →

#5 Israel Has Never Needed to Be Smarter Than in This Moment
Thomas L. Friedman | NEW YORK TIMES

Tom Friedman draws on his rich, Pulitzer Prize-winning experience in the Middle East to provide some advice.

Friedman outlines how the United States can best help Israel: “First, I hope the president is asking Israel to ask itself this question as it considers what to do next in Gaza: What do my worst enemies want me to do—and how can I do just the opposite?”

“I hope Biden is telling Netanyahu that America will do everything it can to help democratic Israel defend itself from the theocratic fascists of Hamas—and their soul brothers of Hezbollah in Lebanon, should they enter the fight,” Friedman writes. Read more →

Atlantic Council top reads

New Atlanticist Oct 10, 2023

What will Hezbollah do next? Here’s how the Hamas-Israel conflict could engulf the region.

By Nicholas Blanford

Neither Israel nor Hezbollah appears to want an escalation, but the risks are high for a disastrous miscalculation. 

Conflict Crisis Management

New Atlanticist Oct 10, 2023

Live expertise: Get the latest insight on the Israel-Hamas war

By Atlantic Council experts

Atlantic Council experts are analyzing the rapidly unfolding events in the Middle East as they happen. Find the latest here.

Conflict Extremism

Report Oct 4, 2023

Running out of road: China Pathfinder 2023 annual scorecard

By Atlantic Council GeoEconomics Center and Rhodium Group

The China Pathfinder project examines whether China’s economy is converging or diverging with the world’s leading open market economies.

China Digital Policy

The post Israel, Ukraine, and how Biden should connect the dots appeared first on Atlantic Council.

Both may be true.

Opinions also vary on whether an economically weaker and geopolitically challenged China should be feared or embraced. On one hand, China’s slowdown reduces its resources and constrains its global ambitions. On the other hand, an insecure China might be more prone to lash out, particularly when it comes to Taiwan, using nationalist fervor to distract its 1.4 billion people from slowing growth and rising unemployment.

Both these arguments could also be true.

Here’s what to remember as the seventy-eighth session of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) opens this week in New York. The world is in the beginning of a new global era, one in which the United States has begun a strategic contraction, and China has greatly increased its influence in most parts of the world. At the same time, middle powers are rising—India chief and most significant among them—with their own aspirations, while telling Washington they don’t want to pick sides.

The international order of rules and institutions has never been a neat one, but the global scrum is growing a lot messier with a host of regional and ad hoc groups ranging from BRICS and the QUAD to the Group of Seven and Group of Twenty (G20)—and countless others. No one quite knows what will emerge from this scrum, or which blocs and countries will gain influence. It won’t be a time of nonalignment, but more one of muddled multi-alignment.

In this new era, the question is how the United States should best manage its relations with China, which has decided that Washington is out to strangle its access to technology, contest its leadership in its own region, and undermine its rise.

In crafting its strategy, the United States should begin with a geopolitical serenity prayer, seeking the wisdom to distinguish between what it can and cannot change. By focusing sharply on what it can control, it may also have considerable influence on what it can’t determine—that is, China’s trajectory.

The United States should give urgent and ongoing attention to four broad categories: winning in Ukraine; reinvigorating alliances and reassuring allies; harnessing technological change for good; and, perhaps most difficult of all, addressing its own domestic, democratic weaknesses.

It’s important not to ignore the ever-shifting Chinese context. China’s economic slowdown has stunned investors, even as its military buildup and weapons advances worry strategists. Chinese leader Xi Jinping is shaking up his leadership, with a defense minister gone missing weeks ago, a little more than a month after Xi removed his foreign minister and the army’s top two generals.

Don’t let all that distract you. Here are the areas that will produce the best outcomes.

Ukraine

The stakes are as high for the United States in Ukraine as they were in West Berlin during the Cold War. The two situations are different in many respects, including the fact that US soldiers aren’t in Ukraine though their presence in Berlin was an ever-present deterrent to Moscow.

The situations are similar in that the security and freedom of West Berliners was crucial to the positive Cold War outcome: an expansion of democratic rule and open markets, the enlargement of the European Union and NATO, and (for a while, at least) economic globalization and expanding prosperity.

The security and freedom of Ukrainians will have no less an impact on the period ahead. It’s understandable that US President Joe Biden would want to avoid the downstream dangers of being drawn into the war in Ukraine or doing anything that would prompt Russia to use tactical nuclear weapons. At the same time, Biden needs to focus more on the historical advantages of Ukraine prevailing, which far outweigh such dangers.

Nothing could serve his legacy more. Success in Ukraine may have the added benefit of deterring China from aggression in Taiwan.

Alliances and allies

The United States’ strengths include a solid set of global allies and a NATO alliance that China can’t match. This is, however, a time to both modernize those alliances and reassure their members of US purpose.

Biden’s recent meeting at Camp David, bringing together South Korean and Japanese leaders, was a crucial breakthrough for the trilateral partnership—one which can be built upon. NATO’s seventy-fifth-anniversary summit in Washington next July provides a significant moment to prepare the Alliance for the future, by inviting Ukraine to join, deepening global partnerships, and advancing technological cooperation and capabilities.

In the game of alliances, China has only harmed itself by disengaging from the G20 and will continue that harm by failing to attend UNGA this week.

Harnessing technology

Imagine for a moment how different the world would be today if the Third Reich produced J. Robert Oppenheimer and got to the Manhattan Project first. What if the Soviet Union had invented the internet, produced Silicon Valley, or developed the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which put the United States at the forefront of military technologies?

The race for the commanding heights of new technologies—artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and bioengineering, to name a few—will perhaps be even more significant in shaping the new era. There’s an accompanying need to work cooperatively and globally to establish the rules and set the standards to harness technological change for good.

Domestic affairs

Nothing hobbles China more than its one-party rule and its increasingly autocratic leadership. Xi won’t be able to produce the growth his country requires without loosening state control of his economy. However, he fears that relaxing that control could be the Communist Party’s undoing.

Just as China’s future depends on how it manages its autocracy, the United States’ future requires attention to the threats to its democracy.

These threats are not new, as Karl Rove powerfully wrote recently in the Wall Street Journal. “It’s bad today, but it’s been worse before, and it will be better ahead. Change is coming. We don’t know precisely when, but it’s coming. The better angels of our nature as Americans will emerge and win out.”

One hopes he is right, but only Americans themselves can ensure that.

The United States’ friends are scratching their heads over how the United States, with its vast human resources, could be facing a 2024 election of historic consequence between an aging, 80-year-old Biden and a four-times-indicted, 77-year-old former President Donald Trump.

In a week when Americans needed inspiration, Senator Mitt Romney (R-UT) provided it through his announcement that he wouldn’t run for re-election at age 77. At the same time, he suggested Biden and Trump follow his lead. He’s not betting they will listen.

The United States can watch the pendulum swing on China without concern if it acts with greater purpose and consistency in supporting Ukraine, shoring up its alliances, advancing its critical technologies, and fixing its democracy.

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on Twitter @FredKempe.

THE WEEK’S TOP READS

#1 Xi’s Tight Control Hampers Stronger Response to China’s Slowdown
Lingling Wei and Stella Yifan Xie | WALL STREET JOURNAL

Read this smart analysis to understand how Xi’s authoritarianism hampers China from fixing its economy.

“Officials in charge of day-to-day economic affairs have been holding increasingly urgent meetings in recent months to discuss ways to address the deteriorating outlook, people familiar with the matter said,” Wei and Yifan Xie wrote. “Yet despite advice from leading Chinese economists to take bolder action, the people said, senior Chinese officials have been unable to roll out major stimulus or make significant policy changes because they don’t have sufficient authority to do so, with economic decision-making increasingly controlled by Xi himself.”

Minxin Pei, a scholar and writer on China, told the Wall Street Journal reporters: “Xi’s centralization of power has caused a crisis of confidence in China’s economy not seen since 1978,” after Mao Zedong’s death. Read more →

#2 Deterrence in Taiwan Is Failing
Hal Brands | FOREIGN POLICY  

Hal Brands argues in Foreign Policy that a clash between China and the United States over Taiwan would be “the war everyone saw coming.”

“Biden knows the threat is rising—he recently called China a ‘ticking time bomb’—which is why he has repeatedly said Washington won’t stand aside if Beijing strikes,” Brands writes “But make no mistake: A great-power war over Taiwan would be cataclysmic. It would feature combat more vicious than anything the United States has experienced in generations. It would fragment the global economy and pose real risks of nuclear escalation. So the crucial question is whether Washington can deter a conflict it hopes never to fight.”

“The United States and its friends are making real, even historic progress,” writes Brands, before concluding, “alas, they are still struggling to get ahead of the threat.” Read more →

#3 The China Model Is Dead
Michael Schuman | THE ATLANTIC

“The vaunted China model—the mix of liberalization and state control that generated the country’s hypersonic growth—has entered its death throes,” Michael Schuman, a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, writes in his latest essay.

“Economists and even Chinese policymakers have warned for years that the China model was fundamentally flawed and would inevitably break down. But Xi was too consumed with shoring up his own power to undertake the necessary reforms to fix it. Now the problems run so deep, and the repairs would be so costly, that the time for a turnaround may have passed.”

Despite this grim prognosis, Schuman warns against mistaking China’s downturn for an economic win for the United States. “China may turn out to be a less formidable competitor than once imagined and offer a less attractive model of development for the rest of the world,” he writes. “But economic failure could also heighten Xi’s determination to overcome American dominance—if not by becoming richer, then through other, possibly more destabilizing means.” Read more →

#4 President Biden should not run again in 2024
David Ignatius | THE WASHINGTON POST 

This Ignatius column had the White House stirring this week.

As the 2024 election approaches, Ignatius lays out the strongest argument yet against Biden’s candidacy, one that even a growing number of the president’s friends are reportedly making in private. “Biden risks undoing his greatest achievement,” writes Ignatius, “which was stopping Trump.”

“Biden has never been good at saying no,” writes Ignatius. “He should have resisted the choice of Harris, who was a colleague of his beloved son Beau when they were both state attorneys general. He should have blocked then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan, which has done considerable damage to the island’s security. He should have stopped his son Hunter from joining the board of a Ukrainian gas company and representing companies in China—and he certainly should have resisted Hunter’s attempts to impress clients by getting Dad on the phone.”

Now, Ignatius argues, “Biden has another chance to say no—to himself, this time—by withdrawing from the 2024 race. It might not be in character for Biden, but it would be a wise choice for the country.” Read more →

#5 As India Rises, the G20 Reveals a Shifting World Order
Walter Russell Mead | WALL STREET JOURNAL 

Last week’s G20 summit in New Delhi was no historical landmark. However, Mead argues in the Wall Street Journal, “it reflected three important continuing shifts.” 

“The first and, from an American standpoint, the most beneficial of these developments is the emergence of India as one of the world’s leading powers and as an increasingly close partner of the US,” Mead writes. “The G20 summit was a personal diplomatic triumph for Prime Minister Narendra Modi. With both the Chinese and Russian leaders absent, Modi dominated center stage at a world gathering just weeks after India joined the elite club of countries that have landed probes on the moon.” 

The second trend that Mead points out is not as positive for the United States. “China, Russia and some of their partners are stepping up their opposition to the American-led world order that has dominated global politics since World War II.” The third trend, Europe’s waning global influence, is similarly disruptive to a US-dominated world order. Read more →

Atlantic Council top reads

New Atlanticist Sep 13, 2023

Twenty questions (and expert answers) about Iran one year after Mahsa Amini’s death

By Atlantic Council

A year after the twenty-two-year-old Kurdish-Iranian woman died following her arrest by authorities, Iran has changed—and is still changing—in important ways.

Civil Society Human Rights

New Atlanticist Sep 13, 2023

Bahrain’s new strategic pact with the US is just the beginning for the Gulf

By Adam Ereli

The newly signed security and economic pact between the United States and Bahrain will have far-reaching consequences for the Gulf and beyond.

Economy & Business Politics & Diplomacy

New Atlanticist Sep 13, 2023

What the Putin-Kim authoritarian get-together means for Russia’s war and North Korea’s capabilities

By Atlantic Council experts

Experts react to Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un meeting at the Vostochny Cosmodrome in Russia.

China Conflict

The post On China, grant the US the wisdom to distinguish between what it can and cannot change appeared first on Atlantic Council.

But that wasn’t the case this week. The NATO Summit in Lithuania will be remembered both for the public fireworks over Ukraine’s aspirations for Alliance membership and outcomes that included a breakthrough on Swedish membership, the most detailed and robust defense plans since the Cold War, and unprecedented Group of Seven (G7) defense commitments to Kyiv.

Let’s start with the fireworks, unusual in a consensus-driven Alliance that values decorum and discretion, and end with the historic outcomes.

Tensions began simmering long before the summit among Biden administration officials and other NATO allies—with Ukraine lobbing arguments from the outside—over just how far to go in committing the Alliance to a time-linked invitation and roadmap for Ukraine’s membership.

For the Biden administration, it was a matter of geopolitical prudence to oppose any fixed timeline for an invitation for fear it would draw NATO, and hence the United States, into a direct conflict with Russia. With one eye on the 2024 US presidential election and the other on Russian President Vladimir Putin’s nuclear capabilities, why take the risk, particularly as full Ukrainian membership wasn’t likely to come before the war ended anyway?

For Ukraine’s more impatient supporters—particularly, but not exclusively, those geographically closer to the Russian threat—it was a matter of strategic imperative and moral obligation to draft language that provided more clarity on the pathway and potential timing of a NATO membership invitation than Washington considered acceptable. Several of those supporters had previously been occupied and repressed by Moscow, so they understand the value of NATO security guarantees.

Even if membership itself wouldn’t come for some time, they wanted to demonstrate maximum common cause for a people who miraculously and at enormous human cost are countering Russia’s war and revanchist ambitions.

The behind-the-scenes simmer boiled over when Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, apparently having read a draft of the summit communiqué about to be released, threw a Twitter bomb into the negotiating room.

What he objected to was text at the end of paragraph eleven, which read: “We will be in a position to extend an invitation to Ukraine to join the Alliance when allies agree and conditions are met.”

Zelenskyy shot back before the draft could be released:

“It’s unprecedented and absurd when time frame is not set neither for the invitation nor for Ukraine’s membership. While at the same time vague wording about ‘conditions’ is added even for inviting Ukraine. It seems there is no readiness neither to invite Ukraine to NATO nor to make it a member of the Alliance. This means that a window of opportunity is being left to bargain Ukraine’s membership in NATO in negotiations with Russia. And for Russia, this means motivation to continue its terror. Uncertainty is weakness. And I will openly discuss this at the summit.”

Before long, word spread in Vilnius that at least one ally had “broken silence,” which in NATO-speak means that during an agreed period after the communiqué has been finalized and before it is publicly released, any ally may come back with an objection and reopen negotiations.

Though it’s unclear what transpired next, officials involved in the negotiations described scenes during the summit in which US President Joe Biden and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan stood over the document and hand-drafted changes. In the end, the US stance on Ukrainian membership proved immovable, even resisting attempts by at least one other ally to at the very least state that it was NATO’s intention to explore ways to invite Ukraine to join the Alliance as soon as the seventy-fifth-anniversary summit in Washington next July.

Given all that, there was more than a little buzz when Biden, in his fiery speech in Vilnius—in which he hailed the “unbroken” Ukrainian people—neglected to mention or encourage their NATO  membership aspirations. 

Even after NATO made the communiqué public, tensions still simmered.

At the NATO Public Forum, (a side event for the summit that the Atlantic Council co-hosted), Daria Kaleniuk, a Ukrainian anti-corruption activist, provocatively asked Sullivan how to explain to her young son, who is sleeping in their corridor due to air raids, that Biden isn’t ready to accept Ukraine into NATO. She suggested it might be “because he is afraid of Russia, afraid of Russia losing, afraid Ukraine winning,” or even suggested, “because there are back-channel negotiations with Russia” that ostensibly had Ukraine’s NATO hopes as a bargaining chip.

Sullivan was warm but firm to his questioner, acknowledging that the world stands in “awe” at the way Ukrainians have made sacrifices with “hell raining down from the skies” around them. At the same time, he scolded Kaleniuk for making “insinuations” that were “unfounded and unjustified” and asked that those insinuations “get checked at the door, so that we can talk to one another in goodwill and good faith.”

Beyond that, Sullivan added, “I think the American people do deserve a degree of gratitude” from both the US government and the rest of the world “for their willingness to step up” to provide such plentiful military assistance to Ukraine.

With tensions high, British Defense Minister Ben Wallace hit a similar theme, “providing a slight word of caution” that Ukraine should express more appreciation to its supporters.

When asked by reporters for his response to Wallace, Zelenskyy replied, “he can write to me about how he wants to be thanked.”

Were it not for the fireworks, the world’s focus would have been more singularly on the summit’s results.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan dropped his objections to Sweden’s membership, opening the way for it to join the Alliance. That leaves Putin facing a bigger and more unified NATO, strengthening defense in the Baltic states and the High North.

Real progress also came through a pledge by G7 countries (all in NATO except Japan), although it is not binding, to provide Ukraine “enduring” support—which each country will determine individually—including more defense equipment, increased intelligence sharing, and expanded training, dramatically reducing the likelihood of eroding resolve.

There was plenty more in the NATO Summit communiqué on defense plans, strengthened commitments to defense investment, and deeper global partnerships, particularly with leaders on hand from Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and South Korea; there was also robust language on China and warnings not to provide lethal support to its Russian friends for their Ukraine war.   

By summit’s end, and by the convening of the renamed and reconstituted NATO-Ukraine Council, tempers had calmed some and diplomacy had intervened on the Ukraine issue, though some bad blood will likely linger.

Zelenskyy went home not with a NATO invitation but with family photo-like pictures alongside NATO leaders, as mentioned in my Inflection Points column last week, and a dramatically different tone than his earlier missive, as shown in a video he tweeted from his train ride home to Kyiv:

“We are returning home with a good result for our country and, very importantly, for our warriors… For the first time since independence, we have formed a security foundation for Ukraine on its way to NATO. These are concrete security guarantees that are confirmed by the top seven democracies in the world. Never before have we had such a security foundation, and this is the level of the G7… Very importantly, during these two days of the [NATO] Summit, we have put to rest any doubts and ambiguities about whether Ukraine will be in NATO. It will! For the first time, not only do all the allies agree on this, but a significant majority in the alliance is vigorously pushing for it.”

At a closing session for the NATO Public Forum, I asked Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis how history would remember the Vilnius summit.

“Strategically, we won,” he said. “We committed ourselves to Ukrainian membership in NATO.” Unlike the 2008 commitment at the Bucharest NATO Summit that had no follow up, Landsbergis said the Alliance and Ukraine this time won’t waste another day, because of the urgency that Putin’s war had placed on everyone.

The Vilnius summit “was not the last stop,” he said. “We have to see it as a bridge. And the next stop is Washington. So, we have a full year. Lots to do…. Washington can actually be even more historic than Vilnius.”

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on Twitter @FredKempe.

THE WEEK’S TOP READS

#1 NATO’s promises to Ukraine mark real progress
ECONOMIST

The Economist reports that although NATO allies could have done more at this week’s summit in Vilnius, they dealt a number of blows to Putin that went far beyond Ukraine.

“Putin’s first defeat was over a different expansion of NATO,” the Economist writes. “Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, said he is dropping his objections to Sweden’s membership, enabling it to follow its Nordic neighbor, Finland, into the alliance. That will strengthen the Baltic states and the High North, and tie up more of Putin’s resources should he attempt mischief against NATO anywhere along its frontier.”

Further, with increased military assistance from G7 countries, it will become harder for Putin to maintain his resolve. “The G7 members promise that this will be an ‘enduring’ commitment, and that each country will, individually, craft its own security guarantees for Ukraine that will give it a ‘sustainable force capable of defending Ukraine now and deterring Russian aggression in the future.’… This matters because it helps disabuse Putin and his elites of the belief that Western resolve will crumble if only Russia clings on.”

Although delaying Ukraine’s NATO membership process until after the war will likely give Russia incentive to prolong the war, the Economist argues, the additional military assistance should prevent that from happening. “That is where the summit made real progress.” Read more →

#2 The ‘Israel Model’ Won’t Work for Ukraine
Eliot A. Cohen | ATLANTIC

In this important Atlantic piece, Eliot Cohen argues that the “Israel model”—in which the West would arm Ukraine to the teeth to guarantee its ability to defeat any credible military threat—is a poor policy choice based on flawed reasoning.

Cohen writes that the main difference between 1973 Israel and 2023 Ukraine is that Israel had a military edge over its neighbors, which Ukraine currently lacks over Russia. “Israel staged bombing raids against targets deep in Syria and Egypt, including their capitals, from the 1960s forward, and unlike the Ukrainian drones flying to Moscow, these were not mere symbolic strikes. The Six Day War, in 1967, was an overwhelming Israeli victory, which involved the annihilation of its neighbors’ air forces and the advance of Israeli armor and infantry across the de facto 1949 border. The 1973 war similarly ended with Israeli forces within artillery range of Damascus and on the verge of destroying half the Egyptian force that had crossed the Suez Canal.”

Most provocatively, Cohen writes about the difference between an Israel with a nuclear arsenal and a Ukraine that gave up its nuclear weapons in 1994 in a deal under which Moscow promised to safeguard its sovereignty and security. “Unless, of course,” Cohen warns in his conclusion, “[Biden] prefers to be the father of the Ukrainian atom bomb.” Read more →

#3 Russia’s Nuclear Option Hangs Over Ukraine and NATO
Robbie Gramer | FOREIGN POLICY

To gain an understanding of how fears of nuclear conflict played into this week’s decision, read Robbie Gramer in Foreign Policy.

“The nuclear question is an existential one for the alliance,” he writes, “one that’s driven Washington’s calculations on what military aid to send to Ukraine and when, and it has also influenced the debate on when and how to allow Ukraine to join the military alliance as a full-fledged member.”

According to Gramer, US and allied officials are divided over the validity of Russian threats. “Some US and other NATO defense officials believe there could be an increased risk of Russia launching a limited nuclear strike with a low-yield tactical nuclear weapon to stave off a major battlefield defeat if its forces look to be on the verge of a rout, or if Ukraine appears poised to capture Crimea and large swaths of occupied territory in southern and eastern Ukraine. Others say that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s nuclear saber-rattling won’t go further than that, and bowing to such threats will only embolden Russia to use such ‘nuclear blackmail’ in the future.”

“At the same time, Ukrainian and Western officials also fear that Russia could mount an attack on Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant to attempt to trigger a major radiological event, irrespective of whether it launches a nuclear strike—though it’s unclear how successful those efforts would be.” Read more →

#4 Biden Pledges Long-Term Backing for Ukraine, but a U.S. Election Looms
Zolan Kanno-Youngs | NEW YORK TIMES

For insight into the role of US domestic politics on the NATO summit and Biden’s decision making, look no further than Zolan Kanno-Youngs’s reporting in the New York Times.

“Despite Biden’s repeated promises of staying by Ukraine’s side in its war against Russia, questions about the shelf life of support among American people and lawmakers hung over the summit of Western allies,” Kanno-Youngs writes. “Even as the US president was giving a long-term commitment, a group of far-right Republican lawmakers in Washington was pushing legislation that would scale back aid to Ukraine, exposing fractures in the Republican Party and raising doubts about its commitment should it capture the White House next year.”

According to Kanno-Youngs, to sway domestic public opinion to favor providing aid to Ukraine, Biden has framed the war as an existential battle between democracy and autocracy. In Vilnius, Biden was determined to address the doubts about continued US support for Ukraine. “We will not waver,” Biden said. “I mean that. Our commitment to Ukraine will not weaken.” Read more →

#5 Should Ukraine Negotiate with Russia?
Dmytro Natalukha; Alina Polyakova and Daniel Fried; Angela Stent; Samuel Charap | FOREIGN AFFAIRS

In dialogue with Samuel Charap, who previously urged the use of diplomacy as a tool to end the war with Ukraine, Dmytro Natalukha, Alina Polyakova and Daniel Fried (an Atlantic Council distinguished fellow), and Angela Stent argue that negotiations with Russia are bound to fail. Read this multifaceted analysis to understand the pros and cons of negotiation with Russia.

Natalukha claimed that the only way to secure Ukraine’s future is to remove Putin from power. “If the goal is to prevent Russia from threatening democracies around the world, allowing it to reach an armistice with Ukraine won’t do much good,” he writes. “Ukraine and its allies must aim to make Russia less anti-Western. Regardless of what happens at the negotiating table, therefore, Putin cannot remain in power.”

Polyakova and Fried believe that although negotiation will most likely happen, the battlefield is Ukraine’s best position from which to win the war: “A military stalemate is indeed possible. And at some point, negotiations with Russia will be needed to end this war. But Ukraine should start negotiating only when it is in the strongest possible position; it should not be rushed into talks when Russia shows no interest in any settlement terms other than Ukraine’s surrender. Starting negotiations now would mean accepting Putin’s maximalist terms. If Russia suffers further setbacks on the battlefield, however, talks could proceed from a better starting place.”

Polyakova and Fried continue, “The most important point, which Ukraine’s allies agree on, is that Ukraine must define the right moment for negotiations. That may or may not be when all of Ukraine’s territory is liberated. The key is for Ukraine to maintain flexibility in its decisions about its territory and the path toward a just peace.” Read more →

Atlantic Council top reads

New Atlanticist Jul 11, 2023

Experts react: What NATO’s Vilnius summit means for Ukraine and the Alliance’s future

By Atlantic Council experts

Atlantic Council experts decode the summit’s implications for Ukraine’s membership, NATO’s approach to China, and more.

Belarus Central Europe

UkraineAlert Jul 11, 2023

NATO summit leaves Ukrainians frustrated

By Peter Dickinson

The 2023 NATO summit failed to deliver on hopes for a clear commitment on future Ukrainian membership, leaving many in Ukraine deeply frustrated by the apparent lack of urgency among the country’s allies, writes Peter Dickinson.

Conflict Corruption

New Atlanticist Jul 10, 2023

Experts react: Erdogan just agreed to support Sweden’s NATO bid. What does that mean for Turkey, Sweden, and the Alliance?

By Atlantic Council experts

Atlantic Council experts weigh in on what’s behind this dramatic and consequential turnabout from Erdoğan and what to expect next.

Europe & Eurasia European Union

The post Dispatch from Vilnius: Inside a NATO Summit of high drama on Ukraine—and historic opportunity appeared first on Atlantic Council.

“The summit has only one essential outcome,” Doug Lute, a former US ambassador to NATO and member of the Atlantic Council’s board of directors, told me.  “Whatever the agreements on supporting Ukraine, this year it is essential that Zelenskyy be in the photo, capturing vividly that NATO has his back and reminding the world that Russia has no such support.”  

Beyond that, if the Ukrainian leader is photographed standing among the thirty-one NATO heads of state, Zelenskyy more than likely got enough of what he needed to make the trip to Lithuania. When I met with him recently in Kyiv, as part of an Atlantic Council delegation, he said anything short of security guarantees and a clear roadmap to NATO membership for Ukraine would be seen as a betrayal of Ukrainians’ sacrifice.

If Zelenskyy doesn’t come to Vilnius, allied leaders will have missed a crucial opportunity to signal to Ukrainians and the world their unflinching commitment to defeating Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s criminal war and revanchist designs in Europe—at a crucible moment in the five-hundred-day-old war.

Zelenskyy was in Turkey on Saturday as part of a pre-summit European tour, shoring up support from Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who is still withholding his support for Sweden’s membership in NATO. Regarding Kyiv, however, Erdoğan said: “There is no doubt that Ukraine deserves NATO membership.”

Though much still could change before the summit opens on Tuesday, Central European alliance members say that the Biden administration has led the recalcitrance to a stronger, time-linked roadmap to NATO membership for Ukraine.

One Central European senior official, who asked that his name and that of his country not be named, compared the tone coming from the White House to that of Jacques Chirac in 2003, when the French president lectured Central Europeans who were supporting the United States on Iraq that they had “missed a good opportunity to shut up.”

What’s on the table for Ukraine thus far in Vilnius is, among other measures, the renaming of a NATO consultative group to give it more weight, security assurances similar to those the United States has with Israel, and the removal of the bureaucracy of a membership action plan (MAP)—though US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said on Friday that Ukraine “needs to take additional reforms,” hinting that it will still face a MAP-like process. Zelenskyy told us in Kyiv that such moves would be insufficient given his country’s service to democracies everywhere.

To be sure, the Biden administration deserves high praise for its handling of Russia’s war thus far, starting with its early leaking of intelligence predicting the invasion so that Ukraine and Europe were forewarned (not to mention China). Without concerted US military and financial support, Ukraine likely would have failed.

 At the same time, if Ukrainians had received the weaponry and equipment they wanted faster and in greater quantities, thousands of Ukrainians would still be alive and the battlefield gains would have been greater.    

Softening the potential blow of a disappointing summit outcome for Ukraine, the Biden administration cleared the way this week to provide Ukrainians with the cluster munitions they have long sought, prompting Zelenskyy to praise Biden’s “decisive steps.”

A form of air-dropped or ground-launched explosives that release smaller submunitions, cluster munitions have been widely used by Russia but are outlawed by many allies, though not by the United States. With Ukraine running low on 155 mm artillery shells, which are in low supply globally, cluster munitions are the fastest, most plentiful way to flush out dug-in Russian positions that are blocking the Ukrainian counteroffensive.

The Biden administration’s green light for cluster munitions has followed a pattern: The White House at first blocks the provision of certain weapons, from High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS) and Abrams tanks to Patriot air defenses, only to agree to their provision months later. The administration’s go-slow approach to Ukraine’s NATO membership aspirations reflects that caution, born of a desire to defend Ukraine without provoking greater Russian escalation, including tactical nuclear weapons use.

All NATO summits have to balance the longer-term needs of the Alliance with immediate demands. However, officials from non-US NATO member countries who I spoke to last week said there are several reasons why Ukraine’s immediate needs should take on greater priority:

1. Mercenary leader Yevgeniy Prigozhin’s short-lived rebellion in June underscored both the fissures in Russia’s leadership and the low morale and discipline of its military. It’s thus an ideal time to double down on support for Ukraine, recognizing that only significant ground gains can force useful negotiations.
2. Despite the economic and military cost of supporting Ukraine, the costs will grow exponentially if Putin prevails, and the threats go beyond Ukraine. One Biden administration official told me that the geopolitical importance of Ukraine to Washington is far greater than either Afghanistan or Iraq ever was, yet Ukraine can stop Russia at far lower cost and without risking American or other allied soldiers.
3. To argue that NATO membership for Ukraine can only come after the war ends and Russia leaves Ukrainian territory only provides Moscow an incentive to continue the war. Holding back due to concern about Russian nukes rewards Putin’s nuclear blackmail—and will encourage other unsavory leaders to acquire nukes as well.
4. Much is said about why Ukraine needs NATO, but not enough is said about why the Alliance needs Ukraine, now one of the strongest and most battle-hardened militaries in the world. The lesson of NATO in Central and Eastern Europe is that it brings stability to its neighbors and more peaceful and secure relations with Russia. The countries that Russia invaded—Georgia and Ukraine—were gray zones outside any military alliance. “Gray zones are green lights” for Putin, argues former US ambassador to NATO Kurt Volker.
5. Putin thus far has been wrong to count on Ukrainian failure and Western fatigue, but the dangers will grow in 2024 when the United States and much of Europe face elections. Bold decisions that can be made in 2023 will be much more difficult to achieve next year. Ukraine’s biggest threat might be the election year of 2024, and not just in the United States.

“We don’t any longer have the luxury of time,” one senior European official told me. “We certainly don’t have the luxury of getting it wrong. The stakes are too large—they are generational and go far beyond NATO’s borders.”   

Frederick Kempe is president and chief executive officer of the Atlantic Council. You can follow him on Twitter @FredKempe.

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