The Best of 2023 - Our Editors' Top Picks From Print and Web

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Best of 2023
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MARCH/APRIL
What Russia Got Wrong 6

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MARCH/APRIL
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What the West Gets Wrong About Hedging
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MAY/JUNE
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foreign affairs 1
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The Myth of Multipolarity 58

American Power’s Staying Power
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JULY/AUGUST
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Ukraine’s Future and Putin’s Fate
andrea kendall-taylor and erica frantz
JULY/AUGUST
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Global Equality and Its Discontents
branko milanovic
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Why the World Still Needs Trade 97

The Case for Reimagining—Not Abandoning—Globalization
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SEP TEMBER/OCTOBER
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The Return of Nuclear Escalation 120

How America’s Adversaries Have Hijacked Its Old Deterrence Strategy
keir a. lieber and daryl g. press
foreign affairs 2
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foreign affairs 3
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foreign affairs 4
Mar c h / ap r i l
What Russia
Got Wrong
Can Moscow Learn From
Its Failures in Ukraine?
Dara Massicot
T
hree months before Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine,
CIA Director William Burns and U.S. Ambassador to Rus-
sia John Sullivan met in Moscow with Nikolai Patrushev,
an ultra-hawkish adviser to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Burns
and Sullivan informed Patrushev that they knew of Russia’s invasion
plans and that the West would respond with severe consequences if
Russia proceeded. According to Burns, Patrushev said nothing about
the invasion. Instead, he looked them in the eye, conveying what Burns
took as a message: the Russian military could achieve what it wanted.
Once home, the two Americans informed U.S. President Joe Biden
that Moscow had made up its mind. Not long after, Washington began
publicly warning the world that Russia would attack Ukraine. Three
months ahead of the invasion, the Kremlin knew that the United States
had discovered its war plans and that the world would be primed for an
DARA MASSICOT is a Senior Policy Researcher at the RAND Corporation. Before

joining RAND, she served as a senior analyst for Russian military capabilities at the
Department of Defense.
foreign affairs 6
What Russia Got Wrong
assault—yet Putin decided to deny his intentions to Russia’s own troops

and most of its senior leaders. They did not learn of the invasion until
several days or even hours before it began. The secrecy was a mistake.
By orchestrating the attack with just a small group of advisers, Putin
undercut many of the advantages his country should have had.
These strengths were substantial. Before the invasion, Russia’s
military was larger and better equipped than Ukraine’s. Its forces
had more combat experience than did Kyiv’s, even though both had
fought in Ukraine’s eastern territories. Most Western analysts there-
fore assumed that if Russian forces used their advantages wisely, the
Ukrainians could not withstand the attack for long.
Why Russia did not prevail—why it was instead stopped in its
tracks, routed outside major cities, and put on the defensive—has
become one of the most important questions in both U.S. foreign policy
and international security more broadly. The answer has many com-
ponents. The excessive internal secrecy gave troops and commanders
little time to prepare, leading to heavy losses. Russia created an inva-
sion plan that was riddled with faulty assumptions, arbitrary political
guidance, and planning errors that departed from key Russian military
principles. The initial invasion called for multiple lines of attack with
no follow-on force, tethering the military to operational objectives
that were overly ambitious for the size of its forces. And the Kremlin
erroneously believed that its war plans were sound, that Ukraine would
not put up much resistance, and that the West’s support would not be
strong enough to make a difference. As a result, Russia was shocked
when its troops ran into a determined Ukraine backed by Western
intelligence and weapons. Russian forces were then repeatedly beaten.
But as the war drags on into its second year, analysts must not focus
only on Russia’s failures. The story of Russia’s military performance
is far more nuanced than many early narratives about the war have
suggested. The Russian armed forces are not wholly incompetent or
incapable of learning. They can execute some types of complex oper-
ations—such as mass strikes that disable Ukraine’s critical infrastruc-
ture—which they had eschewed during the first part of the invasion,
when Moscow hoped to capture the Ukrainian state largely intact.
The Russian military has learned from its mistakes and made big
adjustments, such as downsizing its objectives and mobilizing new
personnel, as well as tactical ones, such as using electronic warfare tools
that jam Ukrainian military communications without affecting its own.
foreign affairs 7
Russian forces can also sustain higher combat intensity than most
other militaries; as of December, they were firing an impressive 20,000
rounds of artillery per day or more (although, according to CNN, in early
2023, that figure had dropped to 5,000). And they have been operating
with more consistency and stability since shifting to the defensive in
late 2022, making it harder for Ukrainian troops to advance.
Russia has still not been able to break Ukraine’s will to fight or
impede the West’s materiel and intelligence support. It is unlikely to
achieve its initial goal of turning Ukraine into a puppet state. But it
could continue to adjust its strategy and solidify its occupied holdings
in the south and east, eventually snatching a diminished variant of
victory from the jaws of defeat.
TOO MUCH AND NOT ENOUGH

Before the war in Ukraine began, the Russian military had several
known structural problems, each of which undermined its ability to
conduct a large invasion. Over a decade ago, Moscow deliberately dis-
mantled its army and turned it into a smaller force designed for rapid
response operations. The transformation required massive changes.
After World War II, the Soviet Union maintained an enormous force
designed to wage protracted, vast conflicts in Europe by conscripting
millions of soldiers and creating a huge defense industry to menace
NATO and enforce communist rule in allied states. The Soviet military
suffered from endemic corruption, and it struggled to produce equip-
ment on par with the West’s. But its size and sprawling footprint made
it a formidable Cold War challenge.
When the Soviet regime collapsed, Russian leaders could not man-
age or justify such a large military. The prospect of a land battle with
NATO was fading into the past. In response, starting in the early 1990s,
Russia’s leaders began a reform and modernization process. The goal
was to create a military that would be smaller but more professional
and nimble, ready to quickly suppress flare-ups on Russia’s periphery.
This process continued, on and off, into the new millennium.
In 2008, the Russian military announced a comprehensive reform
program called “New Look” that intended to restructure the force
by disbanding units, retiring officers, overhauling training pro-
grams and military education, and allocating more funds—
including to expand the ranks of professional enlisted soldiers and
to acquire newer weapons. As part of this process, Russia replaced
foreign affairs 8
sizable Soviet divisions designed to fight major land wars with less-
cumbersome brigades and battalion tactical groups (BTGs). Moscow also
worked to reduce its dependence on conscripts.
By 2020, it seemed as if the military had met many of its bench-
marks. Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu declared that 70
percent of his country’s equipment was new or had been modernized.
The country had a growing arsenal of conventional precision munitions,
and the military possessed more professional enlisted personnel than
conscripts. Russia had conducted two successful operations, one in
Syria—to prop up the regime of Bashar al-Assad—and another to
take territory in eastern Ukraine.
But the 2022 wholesale invasion of Ukraine exposed these reforms as
insufficient. The modernization effort neglected, for example, the mobi-
lization system. Russia’s attempts to build better weapons and improve
training did not translate into increased proficiency on the battlefield.
Some of the ostensibly new gear that left Russian factories is seriously
flawed. Russia’s missile failure rates are high, and many of its tanks
lack proper self-defense equipment, making them highly vulnerable
to antitank weapons. Meanwhile, there is little evidence that Russia
modified its training programs ahead of its February 2022 invasion
to prepare troops for the tasks they would later face in Ukraine. In
fact, the steps Russia did take to prepare made proper training more
difficult. By deploying many units near the Ukrainian border almost a
year before the war and keeping equipment in the field, the Russian
military deprived its soldiers of the ability to practice appropriate skills
and conduct required equipment maintenance.
Russia’s modernization efforts also failed to root out corruption,
which still afflicts multiple aspects of Russian military life. The coun-
try’s armed forces frequently inflated the number of prewar personnel
in individual units to meet recruiting quotas, allowing some com-
manders to steal surplus funds. The military is plagued by missing
supplies. It generally has unreliable and opaque reporting up and
down the command chain, which possibly led Russia’s leadership to
believe its forces were better, quantitatively and qualitatively, than
they really were at the start of the invasion.
Modernization may have helped Russia in its smaller, 2014 invasion
of Ukraine and its air campaigns in Syria. But it does not appear to
have learned from its operational experience in either conflict. In both,
for instance, Russia had many ground-based special forces teams to
foreign affairs 9
guide incoming strikes, something it has lacked in the current war.

Russia also had a unified operational command, which it did not create
for the current invasion until several months after it began.
In at least one case, the modernization effort was actively incom-
patible with high-intensity warfare. As part of its scheme to culti-
vate trust with the Russian population after its wars in Chechnya, the
Kremlin largely prohibited new conscripts from serving in war zones.
This meant that Russia pulled professional soldiers from most units
across the country and deployed them as BTGs to staff its Ukraine inva-
sion. The move was itself a questionable decision: even a fully staffed
and equipped BTG is not capable of protracted, intense combat along
an extended frontline, as many experts, including U.S. Army analysts
Charles Bartles and Lester Grau, have noted. On top of that, according
to documents recovered from the invasion by the Ukrainian military,
plenty of these units were understaffed when they invaded Ukraine.
Personnel shortages also meant that Russia’s technically more modern
and capable equipment did not perform at its full potential, as many
pieces were only partly crewed. And the country did not have enough
dismounted infantry or intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance
forces to effectively clear routes and avoid ambushes.
The resulting failures may have surprised much of the world. But they
did not come as a shock to many of the experts who watch the Rus-
sian military. They knew from assessing the country’s force structure
that it was ill suited to send a force of 190,000 personnel into a large
neighboring state across multiple lines of advance. They were therefore
astonished as the Kremlin commanded the military to do exactly that.
GREAT EXPECTATIONS
To understand how Russia’s bad planning undermined its perfor-
mance and advantages, it is helpful to imagine how the invasion of
Ukraine would have started if Moscow had followed its prescribed
military strategy. According to Russian doctrine, an interstate war
such as this one should begin with weeks of air and missile attacks
against an enemy’s military and critical infrastructure during what
strategists call “the initial period of war.” Russia’s planners consider
this the decisive period of warfare, with air force operations and
missile strikes, lasting between four and six weeks, designed to erode
the opposing country’s military capabilities and capacity to resist.
According to Russia’s theory, ground forces are typically deployed
foreign affairs 10
to secure objectives only after air forces and missile attacks have
achieved many of their objectives.
The Russian Aerospace Forces (VKS) did conduct strikes against
Ukrainian positions at the war’s beginning. But it did not system-
atically attack critical infrastructure, possibly because the Russians
believed they would need to quickly administer Ukraine and wanted
to keep its leadership facilities intact, its power grid online, and
the Ukrainian population apathetic. Fatefully, the Russian military
committed its ground troops on day one rather than waiting until
it had managed to clear roads and suppress Ukrainian units. The
result was catastrophic. Russian forces, rushing to meet what they
believed were orders to arrive in certain areas by set times, overran
their logistics and found themselves hemmed in to specific routes by
Ukrainian units. They were then relentlessly bombarded by artillery
and antiarmor weapons.
Moscow also decided to commit nearly all its professional ground
and airborne forces to one multiaxis attack, counter to the Russian
military’s tradition of keeping forces from Siberia and the Russian
Far East as a second echelon or a strategic reserve. This decision made
little military sense. By attempting to seize several parts of Ukraine
simultaneously, Russia stretched its logistics and support systems to
the breaking point. Had Russia launched air and missile strikes days
or weeks before committing ground forces, attacked along a smaller
frontline, and maintained a large reserve force, its invasion might have
looked different. In this case, Russia would have had simpler logistics,
concentrated fires, and reduced exposure for its advancing units. It might
even have overwhelmed local groups of Ukrainian air defenses.
It is difficult to know exactly why Russia deviated so wildly from
its military doctrine (and from common sense). But one reason seems
clear: the Kremlin’s political interference. According to information
obtained by reporters from The Washington Post, the war was planned
only by Russian President Vladimir Putin and his closest confidants in
the intelligence services, the armed forces, and the Kremlin. Based on
these accounts, this team advocated for a rapid invasion on multiple
fronts, a mad dash to Kyiv to neutralize Ukrainian President Volodymyr
Zelensky through assassination or kidnapping, and the installation of a
network of collaborators who would administer a new government—
steps that a broader, more experienced collection of planners might
have explained would not work.
foreign affairs 11
The Kremlin’s ideas were obviously ineffective. Yet it delayed import-

ant course corrections, likely because it believed they would be politi-
cally unpopular at home. For example, the Kremlin tried to entice ad
hoc volunteers in the early summer to plug holes created by severe
battlefield losses, but this effort attracted far too few personnel. Only
after the September collapse of the military’s front in Kharkiv did
Moscow order a mobilization. Later, the Kremlin did not allow a
retreat from the city of Kherson until months after their positions
became untenable, risking thousands of troops.
HOW RUSSIA PLAYED ITSELF

Before and during wars, countries rely on operational security, or
OPSEC, to keep crucial aspects of their plans secret and to reduce vul-
nerabilities for their own forces. In some cases, that entails deception.
In World War II, for instance, the Allies stationed troops and decoys
on a range of beaches in the southern United Kingdom to confuse
the Nazis as to which location would be used to launch an attack. In
other instances, OPSEC involves limiting the internal dissemination
of war plans to lower the risk that they will go public. For example,
in preparation for Operation Desert Storm, U.S. pilots who would
later be assigned to eliminate Iraqi air defenses trained for months
to conduct such strikes but were not told about their specific targets
until days before the attack began.
The Kremlin’s war plans, of course, were made public months
before the war. As a number of news outlets have reported, including
The New York Times and The Washington Post, U.S. intelligence agen-
cies uncovered detailed and accurate outlines of Russia’s plans and
then shared them with the media, as well as with allies and partners.
Rather than abort the invasion, the Kremlin insisted to journalists and
diplomats that the large contingents of troops massed on Ukraine’s
borders were there for training and that it had no intention of attack-
ing its neighbor. These claims did not fool the West, but they did fool
most Russians—including those in the armed forces. The Kremlin
withheld its war plans from military stakeholders at many levels, from
individual soldiers and pilots to general officers, and many troops and
officials were surprised when they received orders to invade. A recent
report by the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), a British defense
and security think tank, which was based on extensive fieldwork and
interviews with Ukrainian officials, found that even senior members
foreign affairs 12
of the Russian general staff were kept in the dark about the invasion
plans until shortly before it started.
Because most military leaders were not brought into the planning
effort until the last minute, they could not correct major mistakes. The
government did not appear to undergo what is referred to in Russian
strategy as a “special period”—a time of categorizing, stockpiling, and
organizing resources for a major war—because its planners did not
know they needed to get ready for one. The excessive secrecy also
meant that Moscow missed several key opportunities to prepare
the defense industry to produce and store essential ammunition.
Even after they were stationed near Ukraine, Russian units were not staffed
or supplied at appropriate levels, likely because planners believed the troops
were conducting training exercises. And because the military did not have
time to coordinate its electronic warfare systems, when Russian forces
attempted to jam Ukraine’s communications, they also jammed their own.
Prewar secrecy led to problems that were especially pronounced in
the air. Before the invasion, Russian pilots had experience fighting in
Syria, but operations there had taken place over uncontested territory,
most often in the desert. The pilots had virtually no experience fighting
over a larger, forested country, let alone against an adversary capable of
hitting their jets with layers of air defenses. They were given little to no
training in such tactics before the invasion. That inexperience is partly
why, despite sometimes flying hundreds of missions per day, Russia has
been unable to dismantle Ukraine’s air force or air defenses. Another
factor was how Russia decided to employ its forces. Because Russia’s
ground troops were in grave danger within days, the VKS was quickly
reassigned from suppressing Ukrainian air defenses to providing close
air support, according to RUSI analysis. This adjustment helped prevent
Russia from establishing air supremacy, and it forced the Russians to fly
at low altitudes, within reach of Ukraine’s Stinger missiles. As a result,
they lost many helicopters and fighter jets.
Prewar secrecy and lies were not the only ways that the Kremlin
played itself. Once troops began rushing toward Kyiv, Moscow could
no longer deny the fact of its invasion. But for months, it continued
to obscure the conflict or delay important decisions in ways that hurt
its own operations. At a basic level, Russia has refused to classify
the invasion as a war, instead calling it a “special military opera-
tion.” This decision, made either to mollify the Russian population
or because the Kremlin assumed the conflict would end quickly,
foreign affairs 13
prevented the country from implementing administrative rules that

would have allowed it to gain quick access to the legal, economic,
and material resources it needed to support the invasion. For at least
the first six months, the false classification also made it easy for soldiers
to resign or refuse to fight without facing desertion charges.
Pay no heed
The Russian government appears to have assumed that the Ukrainians
would not resist, that the Ukrainian army would fade away, and that
the West would not be able to help Kyiv in time. These conclusions
were not entirely unsupported. According to The Washington Post,
the Russian intelligence services had their own prewar covert polling
suggesting that only 48 percent of the population was “ready to defend”
Ukraine. Zelensky’s approval rating was less than 30 percent on the eve
of the war. Russia’s intelligence agencies had an extensive spy network
inside Ukraine to set up a collaborationist government. (Ukraine later
arrested and charged 651 people for treason and collaboration, includ-
ing several officials in its security services.) Russian planners may also
have assumed that Ukraine’s forces would not be ready because the
Ukrainian government did not move to a war footing until a few weeks
before the invasion. They likely thought that Ukraine’s artillery muni-
tions would quickly run out. Based on the West’s response to Russia’s
annexation of Crimea in 2014 and its relatively small arms provisions
during the run-up to the war in 2022, Moscow might reasonably have
assumed that the United States and Europe would not provide major
support for Ukraine, or at least not in time.
But the Kremlin was evaluating data points that simply allowed it
to see what it wished to see. The same intelligence services poll, for
instance, suggested that 84 percent of Ukrainian respondents would
consider Russian forces to be occupiers, not liberators. The United
States and its allies broadcast Russia’s plans and various attempts to
generate a pretext for invasion, and they warned Russia privately and
publicly that the country would face enormous repercussions if it
started a war. Yet apparently, no one in Putin’s inner circle convinced
him that he should revise Russia’s approach and prepare for a differ-
ent, harder type of conflict: one in which Ukrainians fought back and
received substantial Western assistance.
Such a conflict is exactly what happened. The Ukrainians rallied to
defend their sovereignty, enlisting in the military and creating territorial
foreign affairs 14
defense units that have resisted the Russians. Zelensky, domestically

unpopular before the invasion, saw his approval ratings skyrocket and
became a globally recognized wartime leader. And the Ukrainian gov-
ernment succeeded in getting historic amounts of aid from the West.
As of late January 2023, the United States has provided $26.8 billion
in security assistance to Ukraine since Russia’s invasion, and Euro-
pean states have contributed billions more. The Ukrainians have been
stocked with body armor, air defense systems, helicopters, M777 artil-
lery, and High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS). They are
receiving Western tanks. The massive and diverse weapons provisions
enabled Ukrainian forces to gain a qualitative edge over Moscow’s
troops in terms of battlefield awareness during Russia’s initial push to
Kyiv, and it allowed Ukraine to conduct precision strikes on Russian
logistics depots and command centers in its eastern regions.
Washington also began providing a stream of what U.S. Deputy
Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks described as “vital” and “high-
end” intelligence to Kyiv. The director of the U.S. Defense Intelli-
gence Agency claimed that intelligence sharing with Ukraine has
been “revolutionary” in nature, and the director of the National
Security Administration and U.S. Cyber Command testified that
he had never seen a better example of intelligence sharing in his 35
years of government service. (According to the Pentagon, the United
States does not provide intelligence on senior leader locations or
participate in Ukrainian targeting decisions.)
This intelligence sharing has mattered at several pivotal points in the
war. In congressional testimony, CIA director Burns said he informed
Zelensky about the attack on Kyiv before the war, and U.S. Secretary of
State Antony Blinken warned Zelensky about Russian threats to him
personally. These alerts gave Ukraine time to prepare a defense that was
essential to protecting both the capital and Zelensky. According to senior
defense officials, the United States also provided planning and war-
gaming support for Ukraine’s September counteroffensives in Kharkiv
and Kherson, both of which ended with tremendous success.
THE BEAR IS LEARNING

Ukraine’s supporters have had many reasons to celebrate in 2022, and
joyful scenes have emerged from recently liberated Ukrainian land.
But difficult scenes followed. Ukrainian and international investigators
have uncovered evidence of war crimes in recently liberated cities such
foreign affairs 15
as Bucha, Izyum, and Kherson. And despite hopes to the contrary, it

is too soon to say that Russia’s campaign will collapse. Putin is cer-
tainly digging in for the long haul, and although wounded, the Rus-
sian military is still capable of complex operations, adaptive learning,
and withstanding a level of combat that few militaries in the world
can. Sustained high-intensity, high-attrition combined-arms warfare is
extraordinarily difficult, and Russia and Ukraine now have more recent
experience with it than any other country in the world.
Take, for example, the VKS. Although its pilots have failed to sup-
press Ukraine’s air defenses, analysts must remember that such missions
are notoriously time-consuming and difficult, as U.S. pilots have noted.
The VKS is learning, and rather than continuing to waste aircraft by
flying more-conservative and less-effective missions, it is trying to wear
down Ukrainian air defenses by using empty Soviet-era missiles and
Shaheed drones purchased from Iran.
The Russian military also appears to be getting better at performing
one of the most dangerous army maneuvers of all: crossing rivers under
fire. Such operations require planned withdrawals, discipline, force pro-
tection plans, and tight sequencing that few others demand. When
these operations are executed poorly, many soldiers can die; in May
2022, the Ukrainian military destroyed a Russian BTG as it attempted
to cross the Donets River. But the military’s November withdrawal
across the Dnieper River was comparatively smooth, partly because it
was better planned. Despite coming under artillery fire, thousands of
Russian forces successfully retreated east.
Russia has learned to correct for past mistakes in other areas, as well.
In late spring, Russian forces finally succeeded in jamming Ukrainian
communications without jamming their own. During September,
the Kremlin declared a partial mobilization to compensate for per-
sonnel shortages, pulling 300,000 draftees into the armed forces.
The process was chaotic, and these new soldiers have not received
good training. But now, these new forces are inside eastern Ukraine,
where they have shored up defensive positions and helped depleted
units with basic but important tasks. The government is also
incrementally putting the Russian economy on a wartime footing,
helping the state get ready for a long conflict.
These modifications are starting to show results. Russia’s defense
industrial base may be straining under sanctions and import restric-
tions, but its factories are intact and working around the clock to try
foreign affairs 16
to keep up with demand. Although Russia is running low on missiles,

it has expanded its inventory by repurposing antiship cruise missiles
and air-defense missiles. The Russian military has not yet improved
its battle damage assessment process or its ability to strike moving
targets, but it is now hitting Ukraine’s electrical grid with precision.
As of January 2023, Russian strikes have damaged roughly 40 percent
of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, at one point knocking out power
for more than 10 million people.
The Ukrainians’ learning curve has also been steep, and through
experimentation, they have been able to keep Russian forces off balance.
The military has shown creativity in its planning, and it has hit Rus-
sian air bases and the Black Sea Fleet. Ukraine’s pilots and soldiers,
like Russia’s, have garnered remarkable and unique combat experience.
Ukraine has benefited more from external support than has Russia.
But Russian forces have successfully adapted and experimented as they
have assumed a defensive posture. After weeks of devastating HIMARS
attacks during the summer of 2022, Russia moved its command sites and
many logistics depots out of range. Russian forces have shown more com-
petence on the defensive than on the offensive, particularly in the south,
where they created layered defenses that were difficult for Ukrainian
forces to fight through. General Sergey Surovikin, who was named Rus-
sia’s overall commander in October, was previously the commander of
the southern operational group, and he brought this experience to other
regions that Russia partly occupies. Troops have dug extensive trenches
and created other defensive positions.
Notably, Russia withdrew from the city of Kherson and transi-
tioned to defense only after Surovikin was appointed as the war’s
commander. Putin also began admitting that the conflict will be
challenging once Surovikin assumed charge. These changes suggest
that Putin may have received more realistic appraisals of the situation
in Ukraine under Surovikin’s tenure.
Yet in January 2023, Surovikin was demoted in favor of General
Valeriy Gerasimov. Although the reasons for this command change are
unclear, palace intrigue and cronyism may be behind it rather than any
specific failure of Surovikin’s leadership. And no Russian commander
has been able to break Ukraine’s will to fight even though Russia con-
tinues to launch missiles that inflict suffering on the Ukrainian peo-
ple. But the bombings and entrenchment may well degrade Ukraine’s
capacity, making it harder for the country to reclaim more of its land.
foreign affairs 17
KNOWN UNKNOWNS
The Kremlin, however, aspires to do more than just hold the land
it has already taken. Putin has made it clear that he wants all four
provinces that Moscow illegally annexed in September—Donetsk,
Kherson, Luhansk, and Zaporizhzhia—and in a televised meeting
last December, he indicated that he is prepared to undergo “a long
process” to get them. Putin’s downsized objectives and sudden candor
about the campaign’s length show that the Kremlin can adapt to its
weakened position and condition its population for a long war. Russia,
then, is either evolving or buying time until it can regenerate its forces.
The question is whether its changes will be enough.
There are reasons to think the shifts will not salvage the war for
Russia, partly because so many things need to change; no single factor
explains why the war has gone so poorly for Russia thus far. The expla-
nations include problems that are not easy to address because they
are intractable parts of the Russian system, such as the self-defeating
deceit illustrated by the Kremlin’s decision to prioritize secrecy and
domestic stability over adequate planning. And Moscow has, if any-
thing, doubled down on silencing frank discussion of the conflict,
even going so far as to criminalize assessments of combat deaths
and forecasts about how the war might unfold. Although officials
can safely talk about some problems—for example, Russian military
leaders have called for an expansion of the armed forces—others
remain decidedly off-limits, including the larger issues of incompe-
tence and the poor command climate that has led to the military’s
horrific problems inside Ukraine. This censorship makes it hard for
the Kremlin to get good information on what is going wrong in the
war, complicating efforts to correct course.
Some of the major issues for Russia are largely beyond Moscow’s
control. Ukrainian resolve has hardened against Russia, something
the Russian military, for all its brutality, cannot undo. Russia has
also been unable or unwilling to interdict Western weapons flows
or intelligence to Ukraine. As long as these two factors—Ukrainian
resolve and Western support—remain in place, the Kremlin cannot
turn Ukraine into a puppet state, as it originally sought to do.
The Russian military has, however, corrected certain important
problems. To overcome a bad plan, it fixed its command structure
and changed many of its tactics. It has consolidated its positions
in Ukraine after heavy losses while adding more personnel, which
foreign affairs 18
will make Ukrainian counteroffensives more costly. Russian mili-

tary leaders announced their intention to bring back many of the
larger divisions from before the 2008 reforms to partly correct
for force structure problems. As the Russian economy mobilizes,
the defense base could better produce more equipment to make
up for wartime losses. Western defense industries, meanwhile, are
straining under the demands of replenishing Ukraine. Russia may
calculate that it can shore up its position while biding time until
Western supplies are exhausted or the world moves on.
But analysts should be careful about forecasting outcomes. The
classic adage still holds: in war, the first reports are often wrong
or fragmentary. Only time will tell whether Russia can salvage its
invasion or whether Ukrainian forces will prevail. The conflict has
already followed an unpredictable course, and so the West should
avoid making hasty judgments about what went wrong with Russia’s
campaign, lest it learn the wrong lessons, devise incorrect strategies,
or acquire the wrong types of weapons. Just as the West overesti-
mated Russia’s capabilities before the invasion, it could now under-
estimate them. And it could overestimate a similarly closed system,
such as the Chinese military. It takes time for analysts to learn how
a combatant adapts and changes its tactics.
Experts should not, however, toss out the tools they now use to
evaluate military power. Many standard metrics—such as the way a
force is structured, the technical specifications of its weapons, and the
quality of its training programs—are still valid. But although these
factors, along with a military’s doctrine and previous operations, are
important, they are not necessarily predictive. As this war and other
recent conflicts have shown, analysts need better ways to measure the
intangible elements of military capability—such as the military’s cul-
ture, its ability to learn, its level of corruption, and its will to fight—if
they want to accurately forecast power and plan for future conflicts.
Unfortunately, analysts will likely have plenty of time to develop
and hone such metrics. Because for all the uncertainty, this much is
clear: as Russia continues to mobilize and Kyiv and its supporters
dig in, the war is poised to continue.
foreign affairs 19
Mar c h / ap r i l
Disunited Kingdom
Will Nationalism Break Britain?
Fintan O ’ Toole
I
n September 2022, the body of Queen Elizabeth was driven across
Scotland from Balmoral Castle, where she died, to the royal pal-
ace of Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh. The coffin was draped in
the Royal Standard of Scotland and carried by members of the Royal
Regiment of Scotland, who wore tartan kilts. For the first six days after
her death, the queen’s passing seemed a very Scottish affair indeed.
Only then was her body flown south to London, where the rest of the
United Kingdom got to show its respects.
This last journey echoed another royal passage, prompted by the
death of a previous Elizabeth, that can reasonably be taken as a
point of origin for the United Kingdom itself. In April 1603, King
James VI of Scotland, then just 36, began a much slower ride from
Edinburgh to London, where he would succeed the childless Queen
Elizabeth I as James I of England and Wales. A year later, in his
Fintan O ’ Toole is Milberg Professor of Irish Letters at Princeton. He is the author of

We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland.
foreign affairs 20
Disunited Kingdom
first address to the English Parliament, he compared the union of

his two kingdoms to a marriage from which there could be no divorce:
“What God hath conjoined then, let no man separate. I am the hus-
band, and all the whole isle is my lawful wife.” Taking the hint, James’s
court dramatist, William Shakespeare, wrote his most terrifying play,
King Lear. It warns of all the dreadful things that can happen if a
united kingdom is foolishly broken up.
Anxiety about the future of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and
Ireland is not new. It goes back to the beginning of the story. Yet for many
British citizens, the death of Queen Elizabeth II has given a sharp new
edge to these old apprehensions. The stability she embodied for so long
has been, as Shakespeare might have put it, interred with her bones.
Liz Truss, the prime minister whom the queen swore in two days before
she died, plunged the United Kingdom almost immediately into a fiscal
crisis and was gone just weeks later. Since then, the country has faced
soaring energy prices, widespread strikes, and what will likely be the
worst economic contraction in decades. Having abandoned Europe,
the British government now finds itself not only less influential in the
world but also increasingly at odds with Scotland and Northern Ireland,
where large majorities voted to stay in the EU. And the monarchy, once
an imposing symbol of British influence and British identity, is now
the breeding ground for lurid tabloid tales of petty fratricidal wars and
princes mired in scandal and enmity.
Of course, the United Kingdom has endured existential crises before.
Formally inaugurated in 1707, when Scotland dissolved its own parlia-
ment and joined with England and Wales, the kingdom has grown and
shrunk over the centuries, with the addition of all of Ireland in 1801
and the loss of most of it in 1922. Yet this peculiar multinational state
persists. The first modern book on the topic of dissolution—The Breakup
of Britain, by the brilliant Scottish socialist intellectual Tom Nairn—
was published in 1977. Nairn asserted with absolute confidence, “There
is no doubt that the old British state is going down.” Nearly a half
century later, it is still afloat.
Although Nairn’s dire prognosis may have been premature, it could
nonetheless have been quite prescient. He described the end of the
United Kingdom as “a slow foundering rather than the Titanic-type
disaster so often predicted”—a useful metaphor for the way the good
ship Britannia now seems to be holed below the waterline. Scottish
politics are now dominated by the Scottish National Party (SNP), for
foreign affairs 21
Disunited Kingdom
which leaving the kingdom is a defining mission. For the first time,
Northern Ireland has lost the Protestant majority that for more
than a century has formed the backbone of its union with Britain;
demography alone suggests that its population will, over the coming
decades, be ever more inclined toward unification with the Republic
of Ireland. Even Wales, which England annexed as far back as 1284,
has become increasingly distinct from it. In December, the interim
report of the Independent Commission on the Constitutional Future
of Wales, established by the devolved government in Cardiff, found
that current political arrangements with London are not sustain-
able. The commission pointed to more radical options, including the
possibility of Wales becoming a fully independent country.
Most intriguing, as popular support for Brexit revealed, English
voters themselves are increasingly asserting an English nationalism
that was previously buried under British and imperial identities.
These multiplying challenges leave the United Kingdom unsure about
not just its place in the international order but also whether it can
continue to be regarded as a single place. A polity that once shaped
the world may no longer be able to hold its own shape.
Shaky Legs
The United Kingdom may still stand, but its foundations are shallower
than they have been for many centuries. The first of those foundations
was empire. To create one, England needed peace on its home island
and control over its troublesome and fractious near neighbor, Ireland.
It needed to know that if it went to war with Spain or France, it would
not be attacked from the north by claymore-wielding Scots and that
its European rivals could not use Ireland as a base from which to
invade the homeland. Conversely, especially for the Scottish elites,
England could offer a lucrative share in its rapidly growing mercantile
power. The bargain made sense for both sides: England could dom-
inate the island of Great Britain, but by joining it, Scotland could
help it dominate the world.
Second, there was Protestantism. In the sixteenth century, the Ref-
ormation took different forms in the various British nations. Over time,
Scotland became typically Presbyterian, Wales strongly Methodist,
and England loyal to the official Episcopalian church that grew out
of Henry VIII’s split with Rome. The tensions between these faiths
were bitter. Ultimately, however, they carried much less weight than
foreign affairs 22
Disunited Kingdom
the imperative of not being Catholic. Ireland, where the majority held
on to a strongly Catholic identity, was therefore a perpetually fraught
presence in the United Kingdom. But Protestantism solidified the sense
of commonality among the other nations.
A third footing was provided by the industrial revolution. Until the
1980s, anyone traveling around the United Kingdom would have been
struck by the deep shared history of physical labor that encompassed
the Welsh coalfields, the potteries of the English Midlands, the cotton
mills of Manchester, the ironworks of Glasgow, and the shipyards of
Belfast. This world forged its own bond of unity—the trade unions
and the Labour Party that came, in the twentieth century, to rep-
resent a national working class that cut across regional divisions.
Labour may have been, at least some of the time, radically reformist,
but in terms of national identity, it was also deeply conservative. It
gave ordinary people a powerful sense of common political purpose.
The welfare state it created after World War II, buttressed by com-
mon institutions like the National Health Service, provided the same
benefits to ordinary people regardless of what part of the United
Kingdom they inhabited.
Finally, there was prestige. Britishness was a winning brand. The
subject peoples of the empire may not have felt the same way, but for
the denizens of the mother country, the “great” in Great Britain came
to seem, even more than a geographic qualification, an obvious expres-
sion of moral and political supremacy. After the rather unfortunate
business of the loss of the American colonies, the United Kingdom
had an amazing run of successes: crushing Napoleon; smashing (with
a violence it was rather good at forgetting) revolts in Africa, the Carib-
bean, Ireland, India, and elsewhere; defeating Russia in the Crimean
War; humiliating China; and winning two world wars.
Even during its postwar decline, when the empire was dissolving
and the United Kingdom was settling into its role as junior partner
to the new Anglophone world power across the Atlantic, the country
was extraordinarily good at replacing hard power with soft. Its sclerotic
Establishment was slow to appreciate them, but the Beatles and the
Rolling Stones, Judi Dench, and Monty Python cast a spell of glamour
over Britishness. The physical empire was replaced by a cultural realm.
In the arts and entertainment, in science and thought, Britishness
retained a cachet for British citizens themselves as well as for foreigners.
Rule Britannia became Cool Britannia.
foreign affairs 23
Disunited Kingdom
The success of this branding lay in the ability to encompass two

kinds of coolness. The idea of a chic, dynamic pop culture was twinned
with the self-image of phlegmatic Brits. Like James Bond’s martinis,
the British people could be shaken by world events—the Suez Crisis of
1956, the collapse of the pound sterling in 1992—but they would never
be stirred enough to make their own system of government, rooted in
the mysteries of its unwritten constitution, truly volatile.
These are deep foundations. Many countries that now seem quite
stable have shakier legs to stand on. The weakening of one, or even two,
of the United Kingdom’s pillars would not seem to pose an existential
threat to the country. But how about all four? For on any objective
analysis, it is impossible to believe that any of these underpinnings of
Britishness remain firmly in place today.
The Setting Sun

The death of Queen Elizabeth II marked, in a belated way, the demise
of empire. When she ascended the throne in 1952, her subjects consti-
tuted more than a quarter of the world’s population. When she died, the
United Kingdom had scarcely more than a dozen overseas territories,
most of them island tax havens. Even the Commonwealth—long a con-
venient way to sustain a more symbolic form of cultural imperium—has
lost much of its meaning. Such prominent members as Australia and
New Zealand are considering following Barbados, which became a
republic in 2021, in ditching the British monarch as head of state. The
carnival of empire is now, at best, a nostalgic display. At worst, and
arguably more realistically, it is a nightmare of unfinished business:
the wages of slavery, racism, and savage brutality. (Recent work, such
as Caroline Elkins’s Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire,
make one marvel at the United Kingdom’s ability to sustain for so long
its self-image as a benign and civilized colonizer.) One of the attrac-
tions of Scottish or Welsh nationalism is the distance it creates between
those nations and the guilt of imperialism: shame can be attributed to
the United Kingdom and sloughed off as the country is left behind.
As for Protestant identity, the 2021 British census provides a rude
awakening. For the first time ever, less than half the country’s 67 million
citizens—46 percent—describe themselves as Christian, a staggering
decline from 2001, when 72 percent did. Never mind the historic divide
between Protestants and Catholics; basic Christian identity no longer
serves as a marker of Britishness.
foreign affairs 24
Disunited Kingdom
The United Kingdom’s prime minister throughout the 1980s,

Margaret Thatcher, smashed Britain’s industrial base along with its
trade unions. During her decade in power, manufacturing output
grew by 21 percent in France, 50 percent in Japan, and 17 percent in
the United States. In the United Kingdom, it fell by nine percent.
This decline began a decisive collapse from which the United King-
dom’s reputation as an industrial powerhouse has never recovered.
Manufacturing now represents ten percent of the country’s economic
output and just eight percent of its jobs.
For one part of Thatcher’s agenda—breaking organized labor—
this was a triumph. But for another—the reassertion of British-
ness—it was a long-term problem. As long as the Cold War was still
a dominant narrative, Thatcher’s projection of Britain as a warrior
nation facing down enemies from Berlin to the Falklands compen-
sated for the real loss of industrial power. A mythically militant
Britishness could mask the day-to-day experience of decline. But
only for so long. Thatcher was simultaneously pumping up a British
national identity and eroding its social foundations. Over time, this
contradiction was bound to have consequences for the viability of
the United Kingdom. When Thatcher carpet-bombed the working
class’s political base, the collateral damage was a once potent sense
of shared belonging that is now greatly diminished. The common
culture in which huge numbers of people in England, Scotland, and
Wales did the same jobs, belonged to the same unions, and voted for
the same party (Labour) is almost gone.
Since the turn of this century, the prestige of Britishness has had
to compete with the emergence of new centers of power in Scot-
land, Wales, and—albeit in more complex ways—Northern Ireland.
Tony Blair’s Labour government, elected in 1997, gambled that the
establishment of devolved administrations in Edinburgh, Cardiff, and
Belfast would be enough to mollify all but the most fervent Scottish,
Welsh, and Irish nationalists. Yet at least in Scotland and Wales, the
very existence of those elected assemblies, and of ministers and lead-
ers who behave like governments, has created a sense that significant
political spaces, with their own agendas and discourses, exist beyond
the reach of the London-based elites.
Meanwhile, the tradition of British military élan has finally lost its
luster. During the Iraq invasion in 2003, when he stood shoulder to
shoulder with U.S. President George W. Bush, Blair imagined that
foreign affairs 25
Disunited Kingdom
he could use, as Thatcher had done, military victory to consolidate a

sense of shared British patriotism. But even within the larger disaster
of Bush’s wars, Britain’s experience was a stark tale of hubris and nem-
esis. In 2016, at the release of his official inquiry into the Iraq war, the
career civil servant John Chilcot issued a blunt assessment of British
power: “From 2006, the U.K. military was conducting two enduring
campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. It did not have sufficient resources
to do so.” Chilcot described the country’s “humiliating” performance in
the city of Basra, where British forces had to make deals with the same
local militias that were attacking them. After these painful failures, it is
no longer possible to see military might as part of the allure of British-
ness. The United Kingdom still has important military and intelligence
capacities, and former Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s moral and prac-
tical support for Ukraine had a very real impact. But it is striking that
Truss’s signature promise to increase the military budget to three percent
of GDP evaporated along with her ill-fated premiership. Even among
conservative hawks, there is almost no appetite in London for fantasies
about renewed global military power and no sense that glory of arms on
foreign fields can ever again paper over the cracks on the home front.
Littler England
Brexit was in part an attempt to compensate for the waning of British
hard power. As the former Conservative cabinet minister Jacob Rees-
Mogg framed it at his party’s conference in October 2017, a break
with Brussels would be a continuation of historical English triumphs
on the continent: “It’s Waterloo! It’s Crécy! It’s Agincourt! We win all
these things!” Well, not all of them. If Brexit was intended to provide a
great psychological victory over the European Union, it instead swept
away any notion of British immunity to a politics of mass delusion.
Amid mounting evidence that leaving Europe has made the United
Kingdom’s long-term economic problems both deeper and more acute,
the political pantomime performed by five different prime ministers
in the six years since the Brexit referendum has destroyed all notions
of British calm, competence, or coherence.
For a while, the English (although certainly not the Scots or
the Welsh) entertained themselves with the spectacle of Johnson’s
knowingly ironic clowning, but the joke ceased to be funny after the
COVID-19 outbreak. As Johnson and his circle dithered and broke the
lockdown rules they had imposed on the public, the devolved regional
foreign affairs 26
Disunited Kingdom
administrations appeared far more capable. For the first time in many
centuries, in the face of a common threat, people in Scotland looked
to Edinburgh for leadership, and those in Wales looked to Cardiff. The
bitter truth was that their respective first ministers, Nicola Sturgeon
and Mark Drakeford, did not have to be spectacularly brilliant to seem
impressive compared with the chaos-inducing Johnson.
Beneath the political farce of Brexit lies the mundane tragedy of
impoverishment. “The truth is we just got a lot poorer,” Paul Johnson,
the director of the London-based Institute for Fiscal Studies, said,
after the British government announced its latest budget assessment
this past November. He likened the country’s disastrous recent poli-
cies—a list that includes, along with Brexit itself, ill-considered cuts to
education and other social investments—to “a series of economic own
goals.” According to the independent spending watchdog the Office
for Budget Responsibility, living standards are expected to fall by an
alarming seven percent over the next two years, with the country’s
economic contraction nearly on par with Russia’s. This harm can rea-
sonably be called self-inflicted, but employing that description raises
the awkward question of which national self is being talked about.
After all, Brexit was decisively rejected by the people of Scotland and
Northern Ireland, who have good reason to think that the ensuing
economic debacle was needlessly imposed on them by the English.
Indeed, at least since the 1980s, the smaller nations in the United
Kingdom have been thinking about Europe very differently from their
English counterparts. Before the United Kingdom joined what was
then called the European Economic Community in 1973, almost all
nationalists—English, Northern Irish, Scottish, and Welsh—distrusted
and feared it as a burgeoning superstate that would destroy their indi-
viduality. (In 1975, when the United Kingdom held its first referen-
dum on continuing EEC membership, the SNP claimed that staying in
Europe would “strike a death blow to [Scotland’s] very existence as a
nation.”) As the EU expanded and became ever more multilingual, how-
ever, it began to offer the United Kingdom’s non-English constituencies
a new kind of buffer from London: an international body in which they
could advocate for their own interests and remain connected to bigger
powers without being dominated by them. Thus, in the EU era, the SNP
promoted the rapid expansion of trade and professional ties between
Scotland and the continent, allowing it to ditch its image as a throw-
back and project itself as modern, open, cosmopolitan, and European.
foreign affairs 27
Disunited Kingdom
English nationalists, to the contrary, tended to see any pooling of

sovereignty with Brussels as a betrayal of their own superior destiny.
As Enoch Powell, the highly influential former cabinet minister and
right-wing member of Parliament, put it in 1977, “submission to
laws this nation has not made” raised the haunting prospect “that we
. . . will soon have nothing left to die for.” It was not accidental that
Powell—and such political heirs as former UK Independence Party
leader Nigel Farage—combined opposition to EU membership with
rage against immigrants: both stood for the surrender of English
greatness to foreign interference.
In this sense, English nationalism today has become an out-
lier among nationalist movements in the United Kingdom: more
obviously right-wing, anti-immigrant, nostalgic for past greatness,
and, above all, anti-European. It is also in part driven by a justified
resentment at the way in which England was left without its own
specific political identity during Tony Blair’s devolution. Unlike its
Scottish, Northern Irish, and Welsh counterparts, Englishness was
given no positive expression in political life. It remained incoherent
and poorly articulated—until, of course, the Brexit referendum gave
it a cause and an opportunity. This was what almost no one who was
thinking about the future unity of the United Kingdom had consid-
ered: that its most successful nationalist eruption might come not
on the Celtic fringes but in the English heartland.
You Can Check Out, But You Can ’ t Leave

Driven as it was by English politicians and English voters, Brexit
could only increase disaffection from the United Kingdom in both
Northern Ireland and Scotland. According to the most recent report
of the authoritative British Attitudes Survey, more than half the
population of Scotland—52 percent—now say they favor Scottish
independence—even though just 45 percent voted for it in the 2014
referendum. Likewise, the proportion of people in Northern Ireland
wishing to leave the United Kingdom and join with the rest of Ireland,
which before Brexit rarely exceeded 20 percent, has risen dramati-
cally. Now, as many as 30 percent favor a united Ireland, and only 49
percent—no longer a majority—support remaining in the United
Kingdom, with the rest undecided and arguably persuadable either
way. Especially remarkable is the growing overlap between those
who voted to remain in the EU and those who are now drifting away
foreign affairs 28
Disunited Kingdom
from Britishness. In Scotland in 2016, only 44 percent of Remainers

favored independence; now, 65 percent do so. In Northern Ireland,
64 percent of those who voted Remain wanted to stay in the United
Kingdom. Now, just 37 percent do so.
This drift is not just a matter of sentiment. In legal fact, Brexit
has set in train a process of detaching Northern Ireland from Great
Britain. In November 2022, British Foreign Minister James Cleverly
told a House of Commons committee that Northern Ireland was as
integral to the United Kingdom as was his own constituency in the
east of England. “Northern Ireland. North Essex. They are part of the
U.K.,” he said. But Brexit has already made Northern Ireland quite
unlike North Essex: Northern Ireland has stayed in the EU’s single
market and customs union, thanks to the controversial Northern
Ireland Protocol of the United Kingdom’s withdrawal agreement,
whereas North Essex has, along with the rest of the country, left them.
This sets an extraordinary precedent. No polity that was confident
about its future integrity would allow one of its constituent parts to be
governed by a very different international regime, and both Johnson
and his immediate predecessor, May, had strenuously disavowed the
possibility of such an arrangement. But in the end, the need to, in
Johnson’s words, “get Brexit done” trumped the imperative of pre-
serving the union of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
There is, however, a further irony in the effects of Brexit on national
identities within the United Kingdom. In another play that Shake-
speare wrote for James I, Macbeth, the porter jokes about the effects
of alcohol on “lechery”: “it provokes the desire, but it takes away
the performance.” Brexit has greatly enhanced the desire for inde-
pendence among the United Kingdom’s constituent parts, especially
Scotland. But it makes the performance a lot more difficult. Before
Brexit, political, economic, and trade relations between England and
an independent Scotland would have been eased by the continuity
of shared participation in Brussels’s structures and processes. Now,
were England to remain outside the EU and Scotland to rejoin it, the
barriers between the two nations would be formidable. Brexit may
have inclined the Scots more toward independence, but it has also
provided a rather scary example of how hard it is to leave a union,
whether European or British. And whereas the United Kingdom
was in the EU for less than 50 years, Scotland has been in the United
Kingdom for more than three centuries.
foreign affairs 29
Disunited Kingdom
Even the mechanics of holding another vote on independence are

fraught. In November 2022, the British supreme court unanimously
ruled that “the Scottish Parliament does not have the power to leg-
islate for a referendum on Scottish independence.” This means that
no such plebiscite can be lawful unless the British government in
London agrees to it. Sturgeon is too canny to press ahead in these
circumstances, her natural wariness no doubt reinforced by the bit-
ter experience of the Catalan government, which in 2017 staged an
unconstitutional and ultimately abortive referendum on indepen-
dence from Spain. Her response to the ruling has been to declare
that Scotland’s vote in the next British general election will be a
“de facto” independence referendum. But this approach, too, is rife
with uncertainties: a general election is not a referendum, and if
pro-independence parties win a majority, it would still not be clear
how their aims could be put into effect without London’s consent.
Nor is a serious push for a united Ireland likely to take place
soon. There may no longer be a unionist majority in Northern Ire-
land, but there is no nationalist majority either. The most notable
political trend is the large number of Northern Irish voters who
say they are open-minded about the future but in no hurry to leave
the United Kingdom. Over the long term, the prosperity of Ireland,
the dynamic effects of Northern Ireland’s alignment with the EU,
and its changing demography will make Irish unity increasingly
likely—but not in the next decade.
REFORM OR DIE
What all of this means is that there may yet be a chance for the
United Kingdom to save itself. Everything will depend on who
forms the next British government—the next general election must
take place no later than January 2025—and what that government
does about constitutional reform. The current prime minister, Rishi
Sunak, is a technocrat at heart and seems to have little interest
in identity politics. Yet if the economic reality continues to look
grim, his party may have little option but to double down on the
defense of an archaic Britishness. An intransigent Conservative
party that somehow wins reelection by appealing to English voters
to stand firm against the rebellious Scots and rally around the exist-
ing political order could turn a slow process of dissolution into an
immediate crisis. It is not hard to imagine that, amid a deepening
foreign affairs 30
Disunited Kingdom
economic recession and with Sturgeon already a hate figure for the
Tory press in England (in December 2022, one column in Rupert
Murdoch’s tabloid The Sun compared her to the mass murderer
Rosemary West), some Conservatives might actually relish a “patri-
otic” rhetorical war against Scottish and Welsh nationalists. The
result, however, would be merely to exacerbate divisions and speed
up the end of the United Kingdom.
The current likelihood, however, is that Labour leader Keir Starmer
will be the next prime minister. Starmer has endorsed a plan, drawn up
by a commission headed by former Prime Minister (and proud Scot)
Gordon Brown, to clean up the British Parliament, replace the unelected
House of Lords with an elected second chamber of “nations and
regions,” and devolve more power to local governments in what
Brown calls “the biggest transfer of power out of Westminster . . .
that our country has seen.” If Starmer does achieve power, he may
not be quite so enthusiastic about giving it away. And even these
reforms may not be enough to save the United Kingdom. The case
for the creation of a fully federal state seems strong. It has worked
well for the former British dominions of Canada and Australia. If
Quebec, which came very close to voting for independence in 1995,
has settled down as a distinct society within a larger union, might
not the same be possible for Scotland and Wales? But the English
habit of muddling through—what Winston Churchill called KBO, for
“keep buggering on”—is a powerful force for inertia.
The United Kingdom created a beta version of democracy in the
eighteenth century: innovative and progressive in its day but long
since surpassed by newer models. The country has, however, been
extremely reluctant to abandon even the most egregious anachro-
nisms. The biggest transformation in its governance was joining the
European Union, and that has been reversed. It now has to make a
momentous and existential choice—between a radically reimagined
United Kingdom and a stubborn adherence to KBO. If it chooses the
latter, it will muddle on toward its own extinction.
foreign affairs 31
may / jun e
In Defense of the
Fence Sitters
What the West Gets Wrong
About Hedging
Matias Spektor
A
s countries in the global South refuse to take a side in the war
in Ukraine, many in the West are struggling to understand
why. Some speculate that these countries have opted for neu-
trality out of economic interest. Others see ideological alignments with
Moscow and Beijing behind their unwillingness to take a stand—or
even a lack of morals. But the behavior of large developing countries
can be explained by something much simpler: the desire to avoid being
trampled in a brawl among China, Russia, and the United States.
Across the globe, from India to Indonesia, Brazil to Turkey, Nigeria
to South Africa, developing countries are increasingly seeking to avoid
costly entanglements with the major powers, trying to keep all their
options open for maximum flexibility. These countries are pursuing a
strategy of hedging because they see the future distribution of global
power as uncertain and wish to avoid commitments that will be hard
MATIAS SPEKTOR is Professor of International Relations at Fundação Getulio Vargas in

São Paulo, a Nonresident Scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and
a Visiting Scholar at Princeton University.
foreign affairs 32
In Defense of the Fence Sitters
to discharge. With limited resources with which to influence global

politics, developing countries want to be able to quickly adapt their
foreign policies to unpredictable circumstances.
In the context of the war in Ukraine, hedgers reason that it is too
early to dismiss Russia’s staying power. By invading its neighbor, Russia
may have made a mistake that will accelerate its long-term decline, but
the country will remain a major force to reckon with in the foreseeable
future and a necessary player in negotiating an end to the war. Most
countries in the global South also see a total Russian defeat as unde-
sirable, contending that a broken Russia would open a power vacuum
wide enough to destabilize countries far beyond Europe.
Western countries have been too quick to dismiss this rationale for
neutrality, viewing it as an implicit defense of Russia or as an excuse to
normalize aggression. In Washington and various European capitals,
the global South’s response to the war in Ukraine is seen as making
an already difficult problem harder. But such frustrations with hedgers
are misguided—the West is ignoring the opportunity created by large
developing countries’ growing disillusionment with the policies of Bei-
jing and Moscow. As long as these countries feel a need to hedge their
bets, the West will have an opportunity to court them. But to improve
relations with developing countries and manage the evolving global
order, the West must take the concerns of the global South—on climate
change, trade, and much else—seriously.
ONE FOOT IN
Hedging is not a new strategy. Secondary powers have long used it
to manage risks. But in recent years, a growing number of influential
states from the postcolonial world have embraced this approach. Indian
Prime Minister Narendra Modi, for example, has developed strong
diplomatic and commercial ties with China, Russia, and the United
States simultaneously. For Modi, hedging acts as an insurance policy.
Should conflict erupt among the major powers, India could profit by
aligning with the most powerful side or joining a coalition of weaker
states to deter the strongest one.
As a strategy for managing a multipolar world, hedging entails keep-
ing the channels of communication open with all the players. This is
easier said than done. Under President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, for
example, Brazil has condemned Russia’s unlawful invasion of Ukraine
but has also declined European requests to send military equipment to
foreign affairs 33
Kyiv. Lula reasoned that refusing to criticize Moscow would impede

dialogue with U.S. President Joe Biden, and selling weapons to the
Western coalition would undermine his ability to talk to Russian Pres-
ident Vladimir Putin. As a result, Brazilian officials have made boiler-
plate calls for an end to the fighting without doing anything that might
trigger a backlash from either Washington or Moscow.
Hedging can be difficult to sustain over time, and a state’s ability to
do so often depends on its domestic politics. Political constituencies
can jeopardize hedging strategies when their economic interests are at
stake. In 2019, for example, Lula’s predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro, sought
to counterbalance Brazil’s growing dependence on China by courting
support from U.S. President Donald Trump. In response, the powerful
farming caucus in the Brazilian Congress stopped Bolsonaro in his
tracks, anticipating that farmers would lose market access in China if
the president pressed ahead with his pivot.
Hedging also inevitably involves disappointing allies when national
interests are at stake. For instance, Turkish President Recep Tayyip
Erdogan has publicly affirmed support for Ukraine’s territorial integrity
and sent Kyiv humanitarian aid. But his government has avoided being
drawn into the conflict, despite Turkey being a NATO member with
strong and valuable ties to the United States and the EU. Erdogan rec-
ognizes that Turkey cannot afford to alienate Russia because Moscow
wields influence over areas of major interest to Ankara, including the
Caucasus, Nagorno-Karabakh, and Syria.
Hedgers are wary of economic interdependence because it weakens
their sovereignty. As a result, they seek to strengthen domestic markets
and national self-reliance, promoting industrialization and building
up vital sectors such as transportation, energy, and defense. This has
been the approach taken by Southeast Asia’s largest economy. Indo-
nesia under President Joko Widodo has courted Chinese and West-
ern investment to reverse two decades of deindustrialization. Because
taking sides in the war in Ukraine could jeopardize these plans, he has
studiously sought to stand above the fray. In 2022, he was one of only
a few world leaders to have met with Biden, Putin, Chinese President
Xi Jinping, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Since hedgers value freedom of action, they may form partnerships
of convenience to pursue specific foreign policy objectives, but they are
unlikely to forge general alliances. This differentiates today’s hedgers
from nonaligned countries during the Cold War. Amid the bipolar
foreign affairs 34
competition of that era, nonaligned developing states rallied around a

shared identity to demand greater economic justice, racial equality, and
the end of colonial rule. To that end, they formed enduring coalitions in
multilateral institutions. By contrast, hedging today is about avoiding
the pressure to choose between China, Russia, and the United States.
It is a response to the rise of a new, multipolar world.
DO AS I SAY, NOT AS I DO
For countries in the global South, hedging is not just a way to extract
material concessions. The strategy is informed by these countries’ histo-
ries with the great powers and their conviction that the United States,
in particular, has been hypocritical in its dealings with the developing
world. Consider the reaction of many in the global South to a speech by
U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris at the Munich Security Conference
in February. Harris told an audience of Western leaders that Russia’s
atrocities were “an attack on our common humanity.” She described the
horrors of war and the forced deportation of hundreds of thousands
of Ukrainians, some of whom were separated from their children. “No
nation is safe in a world where . . . a country with imperialist ambitions
can go unchecked,” she added. Ukraine, Harris declared, should be seen
as a test for the “international rules-based order.”
Across the global South, leaders know that Russia’s behavior in
Ukraine has been barbaric and inhumane. Yet from their vantage point,
Harris’s speech only underscored Western hypocrisy. As the Chilean
diplomat Jorge Heine pointed out, the United States cannot expect
other countries to sanction Russia for its brutality in Ukraine when
Washington is supplying weapons to Saudi Arabia for its proxy war
against Iran in Yemen, which has resulted in the unlawful killing of
thousands of civilians, the destruction of a rich cultural heritage, and
the displacement of millions of people. The moral high ground requires
consistency between values and actions.
Furthermore, most countries in the global South find it difficult to
accept Western claims of a “rules-based order” when the United States
and its allies frequently violate the rules—committing atrocities in their
various wars, mistreating migrants, dodging internationally binding
rules to curb carbon emissions, and undermining decades of multilat-
eral efforts to promote trade and reduce protectionism, for instance.
Western calls for developing nations to be “responsible stakeholders”
ring hollow in much of the global South.
foreign affairs 35
The developing world also sees hypocrisy in Washington’s framing of

its competition with Beijing and Moscow as a battle between democracy
and autocracy. After all, the United States continues to selectively back
authoritarian governments when it serves U.S. interests. Of the 50 coun-
tries that Freedom House counts as “dictatorships,” 35 received military
aid from the U.S. government in 2021. It should be no surprise, then, that
many in the global South view the West’s pro-democracy rhetoric as moti-
vated by self-interest rather than a genuine commitment to liberal values.
As frustrating as it is to countries in the global South, Western
hypocrisy has an upside: it gives developing countries a lever they can
pull to effect change. Because the United States and its European
allies appeal to moral principles to justify many of their decisions, third
parties can publicly criticize them and demand reparation when those
principles are inconsistently applied. Developing countries have no
such leverage over China and Russia since neither couches its foreign
policy preferences in terms of universal moral values.
THE MORE, THE MERRIER?

Many in the West associate a multipolar world order with conflict and
instability, preferring a dominant United States, as was the case after
the collapse of the Soviet Union. Not so among countries in the global
South, where the prevailing view is that multipolarity could serve as
a stable foundation for international order in the twenty-first century.
Part of this reasoning is informed by recent memory. People in devel-
oping countries remember the post–Cold War unipolar moment as a
violent time—with wars in Afghanistan, the Balkans, and Iraq. Uni-
polarity also coincided with the unsettling influx of global capital into
eastern Europe, Latin America, and Southeast Asia. As the scholar
Nuno Monteiro warned, when U.S. hegemony is unchecked, Wash-
ington becomes capricious, picking fights against recalcitrant states or
letting peripheral regional conflicts fester.
Memories of bipolarity in the global South are no better. From the
perspective of many developing countries, the Cold War was cold only
in that it did not lead to an earth-extinguishing confrontation between
two nuclear-armed superpowers. Outside Europe and North America,
the second half of the twentieth century was red hot, with political
violence spreading across and within many countries. Bipolarity was
not marked by stable competition along the Iron Curtain but by bloody
superpower interventions in the peripheries of the globe.
foreign affairs 36
Yet hedgers from the global South are optimistic about multipolarity
for reasons beyond history. One prevalent belief is that a diffusion of
power will give developing countries more breathing space since intense
security competition among the great powers will make it harder for
the strong to impose their will on weaker states. Another common
view is that rivalries among the great powers will make them more
responsive to appeals for justice and equality from smaller states, since
the strong must win the global South’s favor to compete with their
rivals. A third view is that diffuse power will open opportunities for
small states to voice their opinions in international institutions, such
as the United Nations and the World Trade Organization. When they
do, global institutions will begin to reflect a wider range of perspectives,
increasing the overall legitimacy of these international bodies.
But such optimism about the prospects of a multipolar order may
be unwarranted. Security competition in multipolar systems may push
the great powers to create stricter hierarchies around them, limiting
chances for smaller states to express their preferences. For example, the
United States has cajoled many countries into pushing back against
Chinese influence, shrinking their freedom of action. Furthermore,
the great powers might act in concert to repress calls for justice and
equality from smaller countries, as the so-called Holy Alliance among
Austria, Prussia, and Russia did in the nineteenth century, when it
quashed nationalist and liberal grassroots movements across Europe.
In the past, great powers have maintained their authority by exclud-
ing and imposing their will on others. The victors of World War II,
for example, appointed themselves as the five permanent mem-
bers of the UN Security Council, cementing their power within
multilateral institutions. It is far from obvious that develop-
ing countries will fare better under multipolarity than they did
under previous global orders.
RISE OF THE MIDDLEMEN

The prevalence of hedging among the major countries of the global
South presents both a challenge and an opportunity for the United
States. The challenge is that hedging could magnify security competi-
tion among Beijing, Moscow, and Washington, as developing countries
play the three great powers off one another. As a result, the United
States may need to offer more concessions than it has in the past to
persuade developing countries to cooperate and strike bargains.
foreign affairs 37
The opportunity for Washington is that hedgers are unlikely to per-

manently join forces with Beijing or Moscow. Across the global South,
moreover, people are increasingly open to engagement with the West.
The populations of most developing countries are young, energetic, and
impatient, striving to create a world order in which they can thrive.
Among the global South’s cultural and economic elites and grassroots
movements, influential voices are pushing for progressive reforms that
could provide a foundation for cooperation with the West.
To win friends in a multipolar world, the United States should start
taking the concerns of the global South more seriously. Adopting a
condescending stance or, worse, shutting these countries out of the
conversation entirely is a recipe for trouble. Major developing countries
are not only indispensable partners in tackling climate change and
preventing global economic turmoil but also in managing China’s rise
and Russia’s reassertion of power.
Engaging these countries will take humility and empathy on the
part of U.S. policymakers, who are not used to either. Crucially, the
United States should pay close attention to the global South’s griev-
ances with China. Rather than pressuring countries to sever ties
with Beijing, Washington should quietly encourage them to test the
limits of Chinese friendship for themselves. Developing countries
increasingly recognize that China can be just as much of a bully as
established Western powers.
The United States must also drop the expectation that the global
South will automatically follow the West. Large and influential devel-
oping countries can never be true insiders in the liberal international
order. They will, therefore, seek to pursue their own interests and values
within international institutions and contest Western understandings
of legitimacy and fairness.
But the West and the global South can still cooperate. History
provides a guide. For the better part of the twentieth century, postco-
lonial countries challenged the West on a number of issues, pushing
for decolonization, racial equality, and economic justice. Relations were
tense. Yet a commitment to diplomacy ensured that the West and the
developing world could jointly benefit from international norms and
institutions governing topics as varied as trade, human rights, naviga-
tion of the seas, and the environment. Today, the West and the global
South do not need to aim for total consensus, but they should work
together to reach mutually beneficial outcomes.
foreign affairs 38
One promising area for cooperation is adaptation to and mitigation

of climate change. The United States and EU countries have made rapid
progress within their own borders, opening a window of opportunity
for engaging large developing states. Another area ripe for partnership
between the West and the global South is international trade, an arena
in which more balanced relationships are possible.
The countries of the global South are poised to hedge their way into
the mid-twenty-first century. They hedge not only to gain material con-
cessions but also to raise their status, and they embrace multipolarity
as an opportunity to move up in the international order. If it wants to
remain first among the great powers in a multipolar world, the United
States must meet the global South on its own terms.
foreign affairs 39
may / jun e
Blundering
on the Brink
The Secret History and Unlearned
Lessons of the Cuban Missile Crisis
Sergey Radchenko and Vladislav Zubok
T
here aren’t enough palm trees, the Soviet general thought to
himself. It was July 1962, and Igor Statsenko, the 43-year-old
Ukrainian-born commander of the Red Army’s missile divi-
sion, found himself inside a helicopter, flying over central and western
Cuba. Below him lay a rugged landscape, with few roads and little for-
est. Seven weeks earlier, his superior—Sergei Biryuzov, the commander
of the Soviet Strategic Missile Forces—had traveled to Cuba disguised
as an agricultural expert. Biryuzov had met with the country’s prime
minister, Fidel Castro, and shared with him an extraordinary proposal
from the Soviet Union’s leader, Nikita Khrushchev, to station ballistic
nuclear missiles on Cuban soil. Biryuzov, an artilleryman by training
who knew little about missiles, returned to the Soviet Union to tell
Sergey Radchenko is the Wilson E. Schmidt Distinguished Professor at the Johns

Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and the author of the forthcoming
book To Run the World: The Kremlin’s Cold War Bid for Global Power.
Vladislav Zubok is Professor of International History at the London School of
Economics and the author of Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union.
foreign affairs 40
Blundering on the Brink
Khrushchev that the missiles could be safely hidden under the foliage
of the island’s plentiful palm trees.
But when Statsenko, a no-nonsense professional, surveyed the Cuban
sites from the air, he realized the idea was hogwash. He and the other
Soviet military officers on the reconnaissance team immediately raised
the problem with their superiors. In the areas where the missile bases
were supposed to go, they pointed out, the palm trees stood 40 to 50 feet
apart and covered only one-sixteenth of the ground. There would be no
way to hide the weapons from the superpower 90 miles to the north.
But the news apparently never reached Khrushchev, who moved
forward with his scheme in the belief that the operation would remain
secret until the missiles were in place. It was a fateful delusion. In
October, an American high-altitude U-2 reconnaissance plane spot-
ted the launch sites, and what became known as “the Cuban missile
crisis” began. For a week, U.S. President John F. Kennedy and his
advisers debated in secret about how to respond. Ultimately, Kennedy
chose not to launch a preemptive attack to destroy the Soviet sites
and instead declared a naval blockade of Cuba to give Moscow a
chance to back off. Over the course of 13 frightening days, the world
stood on the brink of nuclear war, with Kennedy and Khrushchev
facing off “eyeball to eyeball,” in the memorable words of Secretary
of State Dean Rusk. The crisis ended when Khrushchev capitulated
and withdrew missiles from Cuba in return for Kennedy’s public
promise to not invade the island and a secret agreement to withdraw
American nuclear-tipped missiles from Turkey.
The details of the palm tree fiasco are just some of the revelations
in the hundreds of pages of newly released top-secret documents
about Soviet decision-making and military planning. Some come
from the archives of the Soviet Communist Party and were declas-
sified before the war in Ukraine; others were quietly declassified by
the Russian Ministry of Defense in May 2022, in the run-up to the
sixtieth anniversary of the Cuban missile crisis. The decision to release
these documents, without redaction, is just one of many paradoxes
of President Vladimir Putin’s Russia, where state archives continue
to release vast troves of evidence about the Soviet past even as the
regime cracks down on free inquiry and spreads ahistorical propa-
ganda. We were fortunate to obtain these documents when we did;
the ongoing tightening of screws in Russia will likely reverse recent
strides in declassification.
foreign affairs 41
The documents shed new light on the most hair-raising of Cold

War crises, challenging many assumptions about what motivated
the Soviets’ massive operation in Cuba and why it failed so spec-
tacularly. At a time of escalating tensions with another brash leader
in the Kremlin, the story of the crisis offers a chilling message
about the risks of brinkmanship. It also illustrates the degree to
which the difference between catastrophe and peace often comes
down not to considered strategies but to pure chance.
The evidence shows that Khrushchev’s idea to send missiles to
Cuba was a remarkably poorly thought-through gamble whose
success depended on improbably good luck. Far from being a bold
chess move motivated by cold-blooded realpolitik, the Soviet
operation was a consequence of Khrushchev’s resentment of U.S.
assertiveness in Europe and his fear that Kennedy would order
an invasion of Cuba, overthrowing Castro and humiliating Mos-
cow in the process. And far from being an impressive display of
Soviet cunning and power, the operation was plagued by a profound
lack of understanding of on-the-ground conditions in Cuba. The
palm tree fiasco was just one of many blunders the Soviets made
throughout the summer and fall of 1962.
The revelations have special resonance at a time when, once
again, a leader in the Kremlin is engaged in a risky foreign gambit,
confronting the West as the specter of nuclear war lurks in the
background. Now, as then, Russian decision-making is driven by
hubris and a sense of humiliation. Now, as then, the military brass
in Moscow is staying silent about the massive gap between the oper-
ation the leader had in mind and the reality of its implementation.
At a question-and-answer session he held in October, Putin
was asked about parallels between the current crisis and the one
Moscow faced 60 years earlier. He responded cryptically. “I cannot
imagine myself in the role of Khrushchev,” he said. “No way.” But
if Putin cannot see the similarities between Khrushchev’s pre-
dicament and the one he now faces, then he truly is an amateur
historian. Russia, it seems, still has not learned the lesson of the
Cuban missile crisis: that the whims of an autocratic ruler can
lead his country into a geopolitical cul-de-sac—and the world to
the edge of calamity.
In 1962, Khrushchev reversed course and found a way out. Putin has
yet to do the same.
foreign affairs 42
A MODEST PROPOSAL
“Our whole operation was to deter the USA so they don’t attack
Cuba,” Khrushchev told his top political and military leaders on
October 22, 1962, after learning from the Soviet embassy in Wash-
ington that Kennedy was about to address the American people.
Khrushchev’s words are preserved in the detailed minutes of the
meeting, recently declassified in the Soviet Communist Party
archives. The United States had nuclear missiles in Turkey and Italy.
Why couldn’t the Soviet Union have them in Cuba? He went on:
“In their time, the USA did the same thing, having encircled our
country with missile bases. This deterred us.” Khrushchev expected
the United States to simply put up with Soviet deterrence, just as
he had put up with U.S. deterrence.
Khrushchev had gotten the idea to send missiles to Cuba months
earlier, in May, when he concluded that the CIA’s failed Bay of Pigs
invasion in April 1961 had been just a trial run. An American takeover
of Cuba, he recognized, would deal a serious blow to the Soviet leader’s
credibility and expose him to charges of ineptitude in Moscow. But as
the minutes of the October 22 meeting make clear, there was more to
Khrushchev’s decision-making than concerns about Cuba. Khrushchev
deeply resented what he perceived as unequal treatment by the United
States. And contrary to the conventional story, he was equally wor-
ried about China, which he feared would exploit a defeat in Cuba to
challenge his claim to leadership of the global communist movement.
Khrushchev entrusted the implementation of his daring idea to
three top military commanders—Biryuzov, Rodion Malinovsky (the
defense minister), and Matvei Zakharov (the head of the general
staff )—and the whole operation was planned by a handful of officers
in the general staff working in utmost secrecy. One of the key newly
released documents is a formal proposal for the operation prepared
by the military and signed by Malinovsky and Zakharov. It is dated
May 24, 1962—just three days after Khrushchev broached his idea
of putting missiles in Cuba at the Defense Council, the supreme
military-political body he chaired.
According to the proposal, the Soviet army would send to Cuba
the 51st Missile Division, consisting of five regiments: all of the
group’s officers and soldiers, about 8,000 men, would leave their
base in western Ukraine and be permanently stationed in Cuba.
They would bring with them 60 ballistic missiles: 36 medium-range
foreign affairs 43
R-12s and 24 intermediate-range R-14s. The R-14s were a particular

challenge: at 80 feet long and 86 metric tons, the missiles required a
host of construction engineers and technicians, as well as dozens of
tracks, cranes, bulldozers, excavators, and cement mixers to install
them on launching pads in Cuba. The troops of the missile division
would be joined by many other soldiers and equipment in Cuba:
two antiaircraft divisions, one regiment of IL-28 bombers, one air
force squadron of MiG fighters, three regiments with helicopters
and cruise missiles, four infantry regiments with tanks, and support
and logistics troops. The list of these units filled five pages of the
proposal on May 24: 44,000 men in uniform, plus 1,800 construc-
tion and engineering specialists.
Soviet generals had never before deployed a full missile division and
so many troops by sea, and now they had to send them to another hemi-
sphere. Unfazed, the military planners christened the operation with the
code name “Anadyr,” after the Arctic river, across the Bering Sea from
Alaska—geographical misdirection designed to confuse U.S. intelligence.
At the top of the proposal, Khrushchev wrote the word “agree”
and signed his name. Some distance below are the signatures of 15
other senior leaders. If the operation failed, Khrushchev wanted
to make sure no other members of the leadership could distance
themselves from it. He had successfully browbeaten his colleagues
into literally signing on to his hare-brained scheme. A strikingly
similar scene would repeat itself 60 years later, when, days before
the invasion of Ukraine, Putin forced members of his security coun-
cil, one by one, to speak out loud and endorse his “special military
operation” at a televised meeting.
OPERATION ANADYR
On May 29, 1962, Biryuzov arrived in Cuba with a Soviet delegation
and posed as an agricultural engineer by the name of Petrov. When he
conveyed Khrushchev’s proposal to Castro, the Cuban leader’s eyes lit
up. Castro embraced Soviet missiles as a service to the entire socialist
camp, a Cuban contribution to the struggle against American impe-
rialism. It was during this trip that Biryuzov also reached his pivotal
conclusion that palm trees could camouflage the missiles.
In June, when Khrushchev met with the military again, Aleksei
Dementyev, a Soviet military adviser in Cuba who was summoned to
Moscow, emerged as a lonely voice of caution. As he began to say that
foreign affairs 44
it was impossible to hide the missiles from the American U-2s, Mali-
novsky kicked his subordinate under the table to make him shut up.
The operation had already been decided; it was too late to challenge it,
much less to Khrushchev’s face. By now, there was no stopping Anadyr.
In late June, Castro sent his brother Raúl, the defense minister, to
Moscow to discuss a mutual defense agreement that would legitimize
Soviet military deployments in Cuba. With Raúl, Khrushchev was
full of bombast, even promising to send a military flotilla to Cuba to
demonstrate Soviet resolve in the United States’ backyard. Kennedy,
he boasted, would do nothing. Yet behind the usual bluster lay fear.
Khrushchev wanted to keep Anadyr secret for as long as possible,
lest the U.S. intervene and upend his ambitious plans. And so the
Soviet-Cuban military agreement was never published.
Top Soviet commanders also wanted to conceal the true purpose
of Operation Anadyr—even from much of the rest of the Soviet mil-
itary. The official documents, part of the recently declassified trove,
referred to the operation as an “exercise.” Thus, the greatest gamble
in nuclear history was presented to the rest of the military as routine
training. In a striking parallel, Putin’s misadventure in Ukraine was
also billed as an “exercise,” with unit-level commanders being left in
the dark until the last moment.
Operation Anadyr began in earnest in July. On the 7th, Malinovsky
reported to Khrushchev that all the missiles and personnel were ready
to leave for Cuba. The expedition was named the Group of Soviet
Forces in Cuba, and its commander was Issa Pliev, a grizzled, 59-year-
old cavalry general, a veteran of both the Russian Civil War and World
War II. The same day, Khrushchev met with him, Statsenko, and 60
other generals, senior officers, and commanders of units as they pre-
pared to depart. Their mission was to fly to Cuba for reconnaissance
to prepare everything for the arrival of the armada with missiles and
troops in the following months. On July 12, the group arrived in Cuba
aboard an Aeroflot passenger plane. A week later, a hundred additional
officers arrived on two more flights.
The hasty journey was rife with mishaps. The rest of Soviet official-
dom botched the cover story for the reconnaissance group: in newspa-
pers, the passengers on the Aeroflot planes were called “specialists in
civil aviation,” even though in Cuba, they had been billed as “specialists
in agriculture.” When one flight landed in Havana, no one greeted the
passengers, so the officers poked around the airport for three hours
foreign affairs 45
before finally being whisked away. Another flight ran into storms and
had to divert to Nassau, the Bahamas, where curious American tourists
snapped pictures of the Soviet plane and its passengers.
Statsenko arrived on July 12. From July 21 to 25, he and other Soviet
officers crisscrossed the island, wearing Cuban army uniforms and
accompanied by Castro’s personal bodyguards. They inspected the sites
that had been selected for the deployment of five missile regiments,
all in western and central Cuba in keeping with Biryuzov’s optimistic
report. Statsenko wasn’t just disturbed by the sparsity of palm trees. As he
later complained in a report—another recently released document—the
Soviet team lacked even basic knowledge of the conditions in Cuba. No
one provided them with briefing materials on the geography, climate,
and economic conditions of the tropical island. They didn’t even have
maps; those were scheduled to arrive later by ship. Heat and humidity
hit the team hard. Castro sent a few of his staff officers to help with the
inspections, but there were no interpreters, so the reconnaissance team
had to take a crash course in elementary Spanish. What little Spanish
the officers had picked up in a few days did not get them far.
With the initial missile sites hopelessly exposed, Pliev, the man
in charge, ordered the reconnaissance teams to find better locations,
in remote areas protected by hills and forests. (According to Castro’s
instructions, they also had to find sites that would not require the large-
scale resettlement of peasants.) Twice, Pliev asked the general staff back
in Moscow if he could move some missile locations to more suitable
areas. Each time, Moscow rejected the initiative. Some new areas were
rejected because they “were in the area of international flights”—a
sensible precaution to avoid the possibility of Soviet surface-to-air
missiles accidentally shooting down civilian aircraft. But other locations
were rejected because they “did not correspond to the directive of the
general staff ”—in other words, the planners in Moscow did not want
to change what their superiors had already approved. In the end, the
missiles were assigned to exposed areas.
Apart from the unexpected difficulties siting the missiles, the
Soviets encountered other surprises in Cuba. Pliev and other gen-
erals planned to dig underground shelters for the troops, but Cuban
soil proved too rocky. Soviet electrical equipment, meanwhile, was
incompatible with the Cuban electricity supply, which operated on
the North American standard of 120 volts and 60 hertz. The Soviet
planners had also forgotten to consider the weather: hurricane season
foreign affairs 46
in Cuba runs from June through November, precisely when the

missiles and troops had to be deployed, and the unceasing rains
impeded transportation and construction. Soviet electronics and
engines, designed for the cold and temperate climates of Europe,
quickly corroded in the sweltering humidity. Only in September,
well after the operation began, did the general staff send instructions
for operating and maintaining weaponry in tropical conditions.
“All this should have been known before the reconnaissance work
started,” Statsenko told his superiors two months after the crisis
ended, his memo dripping with irritation. He took planners to task
for knowing so little about Cuba. “The whole operation should have
been preceded at least by a minimal acquaintance and study—by those
who were supposed to carry out the task—of the economic capabili-
ties of the state, the local geographic conditions, and the military and
political situation in the country.” He did not dare mention Biryuzov
by name, but at any rate, it was clear to all that the real culprit was
Khrushchev, who had left his military no time to prepare.
PRECIOUS CARGO
For all the fumbles, Anadyr was a considerable logistical accom-
plishment. The scale of the shipments was enormous, as the newly
declassified documents detail. Hundreds of trains brought troops
and missiles to eight Soviet ports of departure, among them Sev-
astopol in Crimea, Baltiysk in Kaliningrad, and Liepaja in Latvia.
Nikolayev—today, the Ukrainian city of Mykolayiv—on the Black
Sea served as the main shipping hub for the missiles because of its
giant port facilities and railroad connections. Since the port’s cranes
were too small to load the bigger rockets, a floating 100-ton crane
was brought in to do the job. The loading proceeded at night and
usually took two or three days per missile. Everything was done for
the first time, and Soviet engineers had to solve countless problems on
the fly. They figured out how to strap missiles inside ships that were
normally used to transport grain or cement and how to store liquid
rocket fuel safely inside the hold. Two hundred and fifty-six railroad
cars delivered 3,810 metric tons of munitions. Some 8,000 trucks
and cars, 500 trailers, and 100 tractors were sent, along with 31,000
metric tons of fuel for cars, aircraft, ships, and, of course, missiles. The
military dispatched 24,500 metric tons of food. The Soviets planned
to stay in Cuba for a long time.
foreign affairs 47
From July to October, the armada of 85 ships ferried men and

supplies from the Black Sea, through the Mediterranean, and across
the Atlantic Ocean. The ships’ crews could see that their vessels were
not going unnoticed. As declassified reports from captains, military
officers, and KGB officers reveal, planes—some from NATO countries,
others unidentified—flew over the ships more than 50 times. Accord-
ing to a declassified Soviet report, one of the planes even crashed
into the sea. Some of the ships were followed by the U.S. Navy. Each
Soviet vessel was armed with two double-barreled heavy machine
guns. Secret instructions from Moscow allowed the troops on board
to fire if their ship was about to be boarded; if it was on the verge of
being seized, they were to move all men to rafts, destroy all docu-
ments, and sink the ship with its cargo. But a potential emergency was
just one of many worries. Some troops traveled by passenger ship, in
relative comfort, but most sailed on merchant ships that the Soviets
had assigned to the operation. These troops faced an ordeal: they
huddled in cramped cargo holds that they shared with equipment,
metal parts, and lumber. Often, they fell sick. Some of the men died
en route and were buried at sea.
But the ships got lucky and reached Cuba without incident. On
September 9, the first six R-12 missiles, stowed inside the cargo ship
Omsk, arrived in the port of Casilda, on Cuba’s southern coast. Others
arrived later in Mariel, just west of Havana. The missiles were offloaded
secretly at night, between 12 and 5 am. The construction workers who
were supposed to build pads for the heavier R-14 missiles had not yet
arrived, so the soldiers on hand had to do all the work. Soviet military
boats and scuba divers secured the nautical zone. Everyone changed
into Cuban uniforms. Speaking Russian, according to the instructions
of the general staff, was “categorically forbidden.”
Three hundred Cuban soldiers and even some “specially tested
and selected fishermen” were charged with protecting the ports
where the missiles were to be brought in. The Cuban army and
police cordoned the roads and even staged fake car accidents along
the route from the port to the missile sites to keep the local pop-
ulation away. A spot west of Havana that would serve as a launch
site for R-14 missiles was impossible to conceal, so it was presented
to the Cuban public as “the construction site for a Cuban military
training center.” Very few Cubans knew about the missiles. In fact,
only 14 Cuban officials had a complete view of the operation: Fidel,
foreign affairs 48
Raúl, the Argentine revolutionary Che Guevara (then one of Fidel’s

top advisers), Pedro Luis Rodríguez (the head of Cuban military
intelligence), and ten other senior military officers.
There were now about 42,000 Soviet military personnel on Cuban
soil. Those from Statsenko’s missile division focused on constructing
launching pads for R-12 missiles. Others manned the bombers, surface-
to-air missiles, fighter jets, and other weaponry that Moscow had sent
to the island. Once again, however, tropical conditions slowed progress.
Rain, humidity, and mosquitoes descended on the arriving regiments.
Soldiers slept in soaked tents. Temperatures exceeded 100 Fahrenheit.
The camouflage remained an unsolvable problem: among the sparse
palm trees, the tents, like the missiles, were impossible to conceal. Com-
manders draped the equipment in camouflage nets, the new documents
reveal, but the color of the nets matched the green foliage of Russia and
stood out sharply against the sun-scorched Cuban landscape.
The Soviet general staff wanted the R-12 launch pads completed
by November 1. From September through the first half of October,
the crews worked overtime to meet this deadline, but again they
were delayed by snafus. The construction crews that were supposed
to install R-14 missiles, for example, spent a whole month in Cuba
waiting for their equipment to arrive. Some of the parts for the R-12
launchers were weeks late. By mid-October, none of the missile sites
was ready. The one that was closest to completion—the R-12 site
near Calabazar de Sagua, in central Cuba—was plagued by commu-
nications problems, with no reliable radio link between it and the
headquarters in Havana. And then came October 14.
CAUGHT RED-HANDED
That morning, an American U-2 spy plane, flying at 72,500 feet and
equipped with a large-format camera, passed over some of the con-
struction sites. Two days later, the photographs were on Kennedy’s desk.
In retrospect, it is remarkable that it took so long for the Americans
to discover the missiles, given the extent of Soviet blunders in Cuba.
Luck played a large role. The storms that hindered the Soviet troops
also protected them from American snooping since the dense cloud
cover prevented aerial photography. And as it happened, the CIA made
a blunder of its own. Although the agency had detected the arrival of
Soviet antiaircraft weaponry in late August, it failed to draw the obvi-
ous conclusion as to what the Soviet forces were so keen to protect,
foreign affairs 49
concluding instead that the weapons were merely for Cuba’s conven-
tional defense, despite the suspicions of CIA Director John McCone.
For several days, Kennedy deliberated with his top advisers about
how to respond to what he viewed as a blatant act of provocation.
Many in the group, known as EXCOMM, favored an all-out attack
on Cuba to obliterate the Soviet bases. Kennedy instead opted
for a more cautious response: a naval blockade, or “quarantine,” of
Cuba. His caution was warranted, for no one could guarantee that
all the missiles would be wiped out.
This caution stemmed partly from another source of uncertainty:
whether any of the missiles were ready. In fact, as the newly declassi-
fied documents reveal, only on October 20 did the first site—one with
eight R-12 launchers—become operational. By October 25, two more
sites were readied, although again in less-than-ideal circumstances:
the rockets had to share fueling equipment, and the Soviets had to
cannibalize personnel from regiments originally intended to operate
the R-14s. By nightfall of October 27, all 24 launchers for the R-12s,
eight per regiment, were ready.
Or rather, almost ready. The storage facility for the R-12 nuclear
warheads was located at a considerable distance from the missile sites:
70 miles from one regiment, 90 miles from another, and 300 miles
from another. If Moscow gave an order to fire the missiles at U.S. tar-
gets, the Soviet commanders in Cuba would need between 14 and 24
hours to truck the warheads across miles of often treacherous terrain.
Recognizing that this was too long a lead time, Statsenko, on October
27, ordered some of the warheads moved closer to the farthest regi-
ment, shrinking the lead time to ten hours. Kennedy knew nothing
about these logistical challenges. But their existence suggests yet again
the role of luck. Had EXCOMM learned of these difficulties, the hawks
would have had a stronger argument in favor of an all-out strike on
Cuba—which would probably have disabled the missiles but could
have led to a war with the Soviet Union, whether in Cuba or Europe.
It is now clear that the Soviet troops in Cuba had no predelegated
authority to launch nuclear missiles at the United States; any order
had to come from Moscow. It is also doubtful that the Soviets in Cuba
had the authority to use shorter-range tactical nuclear weapons in
the event of a U.S. invasion. Those weapons included nuclear-armed
coastal cruise missiles and short-range rockets that had been shipped
to Cuba with Statsenko’s division. During a long meeting in the
foreign affairs 50
Kremlin that began on the evening of October 22 and lasted until

the wee hours of October 23, the Soviet leaders debated whether the
Americans would invade Cuba and, if so, whether the Soviet troops
should use tactical nuclear weapons to repel them. Khrushchev never
admitted that the entire operation was folly, but he did speak about
grave mistakes. The upshot of this meeting—which coincided with
Kennedy’s speech announcing the naval blockade—was an order to
Pliev to refrain from using either strategic or tactical nuclear weap-
ons except when ordered by Moscow.
There was no American invasion, and the order to fire the missiles
never came. If it had, however, it would undoubtedly have been fol-
lowed to the letter. Statsenko’s report noted that he and those under
his command “were prepared to give their lives and honorably carry
out any order of the Communist Party and the Soviet government.”
His words highlight the fallacy that military leaders might act as a check
on political leaders bent on starting a nuclear war: military officials in
Cuba were never going to countermand political authorities in Moscow.
“ THE ABSENCE OF BRAINS ”

Although Khrushchev raved and raged in the first two days after
Kennedy declared the naval blockade, accusing the United States of
duplicity and “outright piracy,” on October 25, he changed his tune.
That day, he dictated a letter to Kennedy in which he promised to
withdraw the missiles in exchange for an American pledge of non-
intervention in Cuba. Two days later, he added the removal of U.S.
Jupiter missiles in Turkey to his wish list, confusing Kennedy and
dragging out the crisis. In the end, Kennedy decided to take the offer.
He instructed his brother Robert, the attorney general, to meet with
Anatolii Dobrynin, the Soviet ambassador in Washington.
On the evening of October 27, Robert Kennedy made an informal
pledge to remove the Jupiter missiles from Turkey but insisted that
the concession had to remain secret. Newly available cables from
Moscow to Dobrynin show how important this assurance was to
Khrushchev. The ambassador was specifically instructed to extract
the word “agreement” from Kennedy, presumably so Khrushchev
could sell the deal as an American capitulation to his inner circle. By
creating the impression that Kennedy was also making concessions,
the word “agreement” would help rebrand a surrender as a victory,
a Cuba-for-Turkey exchange.
foreign affairs 51
By this point, however, Khrushchev was eager for a deal. He had

been spooked by a series of disturbing events. On the morning of
the 27th, an American U-2 had been shot down over Cuba by a
Soviet-supplied surface-to-air missile on the orders of senior Soviet
officers in Cuba. The Soviets in Cuba always assumed that there
would be a U.S. invasion, and they blamed the Cubans for failing to
detect the American reconnaissance flights before the crisis. Accord-
ingly, as the declassified files reveal, Malinovsky presented the down-
ing of the U-2 to Khrushchev as a necessary measure to prevent the
Americans from taking more photographs of Soviet bases. He regis-
tered no awareness in his missive to Khrushchev that the shoot-down
could have become a prelude for World War III. Nor did Statsenko,
when he later reported the shootdown matter-of-factly, likewise
portraying it as a routine response that the Soviet military was
trained and entitled to do.
In the middle of the day, there had been another incident involving
an American U-2: a plane sent to the Arctic to sample the atmo-
sphere for radiation got lost and accidentally flew into Soviet airspace.
The Soviet military dutifully mapped its progress on now declassi-
fied maps, which also showed the number of hours American planes
would need to reach targets in Soviet territory.
The most disturbing development of all, however, was a plea Castro
had sent early in the morning of October 27, Havana time, in which
he asked Khrushchev to launch a preemptive nuclear strike against the
United States if the Americans dared to invade Cuba. Historians have
long been aware of this plea, but thanks to the new documents, we
now know more about what Khrushchev thought of it. “What is it—a
temporary madness or the absence of brains?” he fumed on October
30, according to a declassified dictation taken by his secretary.
Khrushchev was an emotional man, but at the hour of greatest
danger, he pulled back from the brink. As he put it to an Indian visitor
on October 26, according to the newly released documents, “From
the experience of my life, I know that war is like a card game, though
I myself never played and never play cards.” That final qualification
wasn’t entirely truthful: to Khrushchev, the whole Cuban operation
was one big poker match, which he thought he could win by bluffing.
But at least he knew when to fold. On October 28, he announced that
he would dismantle the missiles.
foreign affairs 52
LEARNING AND FORGETTING

Since 1962, historians, political scientists, and game theorists have
endlessly rehashed the Cuban missile crisis. Volumes of documents
have been published, and countless conferences and war games have
been held. Graham Allison’s classic account of the crisis, Essence
of Decision, was published in 1971 and updated in 1999 with the
help of Philip Zelikow. One of the original book’s conclusions, also
included in the revised edition, has stood the test of time: the crisis
was “the defining event of the nuclear age and the most dangerous
moment in recorded history.”
But the declassified Soviet documents make some important
corrections to the conventional view, highlighting the Achilles’ heel
of the Kremlin’s decision-making process, which persists to this day:
a broken feedback mechanism. Soviet military leaders had minimal
expertise on Cuba, deceived themselves about their ability to hide
their operation, overlooked the dangers of U.S. aerial reconnais-
sance, and ignored the warnings of experts. A small coterie of high
officials who knew nothing about Cuba, acting in extreme secrecy,
drew up a sloppy plan for an operation that was doomed to fail and
never allowed anyone else to question their assumptions.
Indeed, it was the failure of the feedback mechanism that led to
the immediate cause of the crisis, the poorly camouflaged missiles.
Allison and Zelikow concluded that this oversight was not the result
of incompetence but a consequence of the Soviet military mind-
lessly following its standard operating procedures, which had been
“designed for settings in which camouflage had never been required.”
In this view, the Soviet forces failed to adequately camouflage the
missiles simply because they had never done so before.
The new evidence gives a different answer. The Soviets fully
appreciated the importance of hiding the missiles, and Khrushchev’s
entire strategy was in fact predicated on the flawed assumption that
they would be able to do just that. The Soviet military officers in
Cuba were also aware of the importance of concealing the missiles.
They recognized the danger of U.S. aerial reconnaissance, tried
to address it by proposing better sites, and still failed. The core
of the problem was the original carelessness and incompetence
of Biryuzov. His offhand conclusion that the missiles could be
hidden under the palm trees was passed on as an unimpeachable
truth. Military experts far below him in the hierarchy noted that
foreign affairs 53
the missiles would be exposed to U-2 overflights and duly reported

the problem up the chain of command. Yet the planners in the
general staff never corrected it, unwilling to bother their superiors
or question the idea of the entire operation. Operation Anadyr
failed not because the Soviet rocket forces were too wedded to their
standard procedures but because the military’s hypercentralization
prevented the feedback mechanisms from working properly.
In their first reports analyzing the crisis—part of the new trove
of documents—Soviet military leaders engaged in a blame game.
Ignoring his own culpability, Biryuzov pointed the finger at “the
excessive centralization of management” of the operation “at all
stages in the hands of the general staff, which chained the initiative
below and reduced the quality of decision-making on specific ques-
tions” on site in Cuba. He never admitted the lack of camouflage
as the main flaw of Anadyr, although his political superiors imme-
diately recognized it as such.
Anastas Mikoyan, a member of the Presidium whom Khrushchev
had dispatched to Havana to arrange the withdrawal of missiles,
spoke to the Soviet officers in Cuba in November. He tried to turn
the lack of camouflage into a joke. “The Soviet rockets stood out like
during a parade on the Red Square—but erect,” he told Pliev and his
comrades. “Our rocket men apparently decided to give Americans
a middle finger in this way.” Mikoyan even soothed their anguish
about the missiles’ discovery, saying that it was West German intel-
ligence, not the U-2, that discovered the Soviet missiles. (In fact, the
West Germans had picked up some evidence but hardly the smoking
gun that the U-2 flight uncovered.) And he alleged that once the
Soviet missiles were spotted, they no longer served any purpose of
deterrence—a preposterous claim, given that the United States could
hardly be deterred by missiles it didn’t know about. Despite Mikoyan’s
best efforts, Soviet commanders and officers took the order to leave
Cuba as a humiliating retreat. Many of them had to recover from
nervous breakdowns, recuperating at Black Sea resorts not too far
from the ports from which they had sailed to Cuba.
Khrushchev was eager to cover his own retreat. He deliberately
avoided any criticism of the Soviet military’s performance in Cuba.
Although the errors in planning were plain to see, the Soviet leader was
more interested in depicting the debacle as a victory than in assigning
responsibility for the mishaps. In this, his interests overlapped with those
foreign affairs 54
of the Soviet supreme command, which wanted to avoid responsibility,

and so the secret fumbles of Operation Anadyr were swept under the
rug. Documents about the operation were boxed up and sent to gather
dust in the archives, where they remained sealed until last year. Biryuzov
was promoted to the head of the general staff, and his career remained
untarnished until his death in 1964, when he perished in a plane crash
five days after Khrushchev was overthrown by his Presidium colleagues.
Soviet military officials viewed operation Anadyr not as a colos-
sal failure but as a shrewd ploy that almost worked. The lessons they
learned were simple: had the Soviets done a better job of coping
with the enormous logistical challenges, had they tried harder to
hide the missiles, or had they shot down U.S. reconnaissance planes
earlier, with a little bit of luck, Operation Anadyr could indeed have
succeeded. Statsenko, for all his insights, became fixated on U-2s
and recommended in his report that the Soviets urgently develop
a technology—“invisible rays”—which would allow them to “dis-
tort” the images captured by the reconnaissance planes or perhaps
just expose the film they carried. Apparently, it never occurred to
him that the whole operation was a bad idea from the start. In
fact, the entire point of his postmortem was to explore ways to
send strategic missiles “to any distance and deploy them on short
notice,” that is, do the same thing again, but do it better. Perhaps
Statsenko deemed it above his pay grade to question the bright
ideas sent from on high.
Only in the late 1980s, during the era of Mikhail Gorbachev’s “new
thinking,” did a different view of the crisis emerge within the Soviet
Union. Inspired largely by the American literature on the episode,
Moscow came to see the crisis as an unacceptably dangerous moment.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union, however, fears of a nuclear
conflict receded, and for Russia, the Cuban missile crisis lost imme-
diate political relevance and became plain old history. Veterans of the
crisis embraced heroic narratives of their exploits. Anatoly Gribkov,
a general who helped plan Operation Anadyr, declared in his assess-
ment of the crisis, written in the first decade of this century, that the
Soviet military’s performance was “an example of the finest military
art.” Embarrassing failures were mostly forgotten. Castro, who had
horrified Khrushchev by proposing to nuke the United States, later
strenuously denied having done so. But all agreed that the Cuban
missile crisis was never to be repeated.
foreign affairs 55
BACK ON THE BRINK

Until now. Although Russia in theory remains committed to avoiding
a nuclear war, Putin seems to be stoking fears of just such a conflict.
Like Khrushchev in his time, Putin is rattling the nuclear saber to
prove to everyone—and perhaps above all to himself—that Moscow
will not be defeated. Also like Khrushchev, Putin is a gambler, and
his misadventure in Ukraine suffers from the same feedback failures,
excessive secrecy, and hypercentralization that plagued Khrushchev’s in
Cuba. Just as Khrushchev’s lieutenants failed to question his rationale
for aiding Cuba, so Putin’s top ministers and advisers did not resist his
claim that Ukrainians and Russians were one people and therefore
Ukraine had to be “returned” to Russia, by force if need be.
Facing no pushback, Putin turned to Sergei Shoigu, his minister
of defense, and Valery Gerasimov, the head of the general staff, to
carry out his will. They failed even more spectacularly than their pre-
decessors had in 1962, hobbled by the same structural impediments
that ruined Operation Anadyr. It is apparent that the general staff
has never digested the awkward details of the story of Khrushchev’s
failure, even with the declassification of this new batch of documents.
As he peered uneasily over the brink of nuclear apocalypse,
Khrushchev found time to act as a mediator in the monthlong
Sino-Indian War, which broke out during the Cuban missile crisis.
“History tells us that in order to stop a conflict, one should begin not
by exploring the reasons why it happened but by pursuing a cease-
fire,” he explained to that Indian visitor on October 26. He added,
“What’s important is not to cry for the dead or to avenge them, but
to save those who might die if the conflict continues.” He could well
have been referring to his own fears about the events brewing that
day in the Caribbean.
Terrified by those developments, Khrushchev understood at last
that his reckless gamble had failed and ordered a retreat. Kennedy, too,
opted for a compromise. In the end, neither leader proved willing to
test the other’s redlines, probably because they did not know where
exactly those redlines lay. Khrushchev’s hubris and resentment led
him to the worst misadventure of his political career. But his—and
Kennedy’s—caution led to a negotiated solution.
Their prudence holds lessons for today, when so many commentators
in Russia and in the West are calling for a resolute victory of one side
or the other in Ukraine. Some Americans and Europeans assume that
foreign affairs 56
the use of nuclear weapons in the current crisis is completely out of the
question and thus that the West can safely push the Kremlin into the
corner by obtaining a comprehensive victory for Ukraine. But plenty of
people in Russia, especially around Putin and among his propagandists,
defiantly say that there would be “no world without Russia,” meaning
that Moscow should prefer a nuclear Armageddon to defeat.
If such voices had prevailed in 1962, we’d all be dead now.
foreign affairs 57
May / jun e
The Myth of
Multipolarity
American Power’s Staying Power
Stephen G. Brooks and William C. Wohlforth
I
n the 1990s and the early years of this century, the United
States’ global dominance could scarcely be questioned. No mat-
ter which metric of power one looked at, it showed a dramatic
American lead. Never since the birth of the modern state system
in the mid-seventeenth century had any country been so far ahead
in the military, economic, and technological realms simultaneously.
Allied with the United States, meanwhile, were the vast majority of
the world’s richest countries, and they were tied together by a set of
international institutions that Washington had played the lead role in
constructing. The United States could conduct its foreign policy under
fewer external constraints than any leading state in modern history.
And as dissatisfied as China, Russia, and other aspiring powers were with
their status in the system, they realized they could do nothing to overturn it.
Stephen G. Brooks is a Professor of Government at Dartmouth College and a

Guest Professor at Stockholm University.
William C. Wohlforth is Daniel Webster Professor at Dartmouth College.
foreign affairs 58
The Myth of Multipolarity
That was then. Now, American power seems much diminished.

In the intervening two decades, the United States has suffered costly,
failed interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, a devastating financial crisis,
deepening political polarization, and, in Donald Trump, four years of a
president with isolationist impulses. All the while, China continued its
remarkable economic ascent and grew more assertive than ever. To many,
Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine sounded the death knell for U.S. pri-
macy, a sign that the United States could no longer hold back the forces
of revisionism and enforce the international order it had built.
According to most observers, the unipolar moment has come to a
definitive end. Pointing to the size of China’s economy, many analysts
have declared the world bipolar. But most go even further, arguing
that the world is on the verge of transitioning to multipolarity or has
already done so. China, Iran, and Russia all endorse this view, one in
which they, the leading anti-American revisionists, finally have the
power to shape the system to their liking. India and many other coun-
tries in the global South have reached the same conclusion, contending
that after decades of superpower dominance, they are at last free to
chart their own course. Even many Americans take it for granted that
the world is now multipolar. Successive reports from the U.S. National
Intelligence Council have proclaimed as much, as have figures on the
left and right who favor a more modest U.S. foreign policy. There is
perhaps no more widely accepted truth about the world today than
the idea that it is no longer unipolar.
But this view is wrong. The world is neither bipolar nor multipolar,
and it is not about to become either. Yes, the United States has become
less dominant over the past 20 years, but it remains at the top of the
global power hierarchy—safely above China and far, far above every
other country. No longer can one pick any metric to see this reality, but
it becomes clear when the right ones are used. And the persistence of
unipolarity becomes even more evident when one considers that the
world is still largely devoid of a force that shaped great-power politics
in times of multipolarity and bipolarity, from the beginning of the
modern state system through the Cold War: balancing. Other coun-
tries simply cannot match the power of the United States by joining
alliances or building up their militaries.
American power still casts a large shadow across the globe, but it is
admittedly smaller than before. Yet this development should be put in per-
spective. What is at issue is only the nature of unipolarity—not its existence.
foreign affairs 59
MINOR THIRD
During the Cold War, the world was undeniably bipolar, defined
above all by the competition between the United States and the
Soviet Union. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the world
turned unipolar, with the United States clearly standing alone at the
top. Many who proclaim multipolarity seem to think of power as
influence—that is, the ability to get others to do what you want. Since
the United States could not pacify Afghanistan or Iraq and cannot
solve many other global problems, the argument runs, the world must
be multipolar. But polarity centers on a different meaning of power,
one that is measurable: power as resources, especially military might
and economic heft. And indeed, at the root of most multipolarity
talk these days is the idea that scholarly pioneers of the concept had
in mind: that international politics works differently depending on
how resources are distributed among the biggest states.
For the system to be multipolar, however, its workings must be
shaped largely by the three or more roughly matched states at the top.
The United States and China are undoubtedly the two most powerful
countries, but at least one more country must be roughly in their league
for multipolarity to exist. This is where claims of multipolarity fall apart.
Every country that could plausibly rank third—France, Germany, India,
Japan, Russia, the United Kingdom—is in no way a rough peer of the
United States or China.
That is true no matter which metric one uses. Polarity is often
still measured using the indicators fashionable in the mid-twentieth
century, chiefly military outlays and economic output. Even by those
crude measures, however, the system is not multipolar, and it is a sure
bet that it won’t be for many decades. A simple tabulation makes
this clear: barring an outright collapse of either the United States or
China, the gap between those countries and any of the also-rans will
not close anytime soon. All but India are too small in population to
ever be in the same league, while India is too poor; it cannot possibly
attain this status until much later in this century.
These stark differences between today’s material realities and a
reasonable understanding of multipolarity point to another problem
with any talk of its return: the equally stark contrast between today’s
international politics and the workings of the multipolar systems in
centuries past. Before 1945, multipolarity was the norm. International
politics featured constantly shifting alliances among roughly matched
foreign affairs 60
great powers. The alliance game was played mainly among the great
powers, not between them and lesser states. Coalition arithmetic was
the lodestar of statecraft: shifts in alliances could upset the balance
of power overnight, as the gain or loss of a great power in an alli-
ance dwarfed what any one state could do internally to augment
its own power in the short run. In 1801, for example, the Russian
emperor Paul I seriously contemplated allying with rather than
against Napoleon, heightening fears in the United Kingdom about
the prospect of French hegemony in Europe—worries that may
have, according to some historians, led the British to play a role in
Paul’s assassination that same year.
Today, almost all the world’s real alliances (the ones that entail
security guarantees) bind smaller states to Washington, and the main
dynamic is the expansion of that alliance system. Because the United
States still has the most material power and so many allies, unless it
abrogates its own alliances wholesale, the fate of great-power politics
does not hinge on any country’s choice of partners.
In multipolar eras, the relatively equal distribution of capabilities
meant that states were often surpassing one another in power, lead-
ing to long periods of transition in which many powers claimed to be
number one, and it wasn’t clear which deserved the title. Immediately
before World War I, for example, the United Kingdom could claim to be
number one on the basis of its global navy and massive colonial holdings,
yet its economy and army were smaller than those of Germany, which
itself had a smaller army than Russia—and all three countries’ economies
were dwarfed by that of the United States. The easily replicable nature of
technology, meanwhile, made it possible for one great power to quickly
close the gap with a superior rival by imitating its advantages. Thus, in
the early twentieth century, when Germany’s leaders sought to take the
United Kingdom down a peg, they had little trouble rapidly building
a fleet that was technologically competitive with the Royal Navy. The
situation today is very different. For one thing, there is one clear leader
and one clear aspirant. For another, the nature of military technology
and the structure of the global economy slow the process of the aspirant
overtaking the leader. The most powerful weapons today are formidably
complex, and the United States and its allies control many of the tech-
nologies needed to produce them.
The multipolar world was an ugly world. Great-power wars broke
out constantly—more than once a decade from 1500 to 1945. With
foreign affairs 61
frightening regularity, all or most of the strongest states would fight

one another in horrific, all-consuming conflicts: the Thirty Years’ War,
the Wars of Louis XIV, the Seven Years’ War, the Napoleonic Wars,
World War I, and World War II. The shifting, hugely consequential,
and decidedly uncertain alliance politics of multipolarity contributed to
these conflicts. So did the system’s frequent power transitions and the
fleeting nature of leading states’ grasp on their status. Fraught though
the current international environment may be compared with the hal-
cyon days of the 1990s, it lacks these inducements to conflict and so
bears no meaningful resemblance to the age of multipolarity.
DON ’ T BET ON BIPOLARITY

Using GDP and military spending, some analysts might make a plausi-
ble case for an emergent bipolarity. But that argument dissolves when
one uses metrics that properly account for the profound changes in the
sources of state power wrought by multiple technological revolutions.
More accurate measures suggest that the United States and China
remain in fundamentally different categories and will stay there for a
long time, especially in the military and technological realms.
No metric is invoked more frequently by the heralds of a polarity
shift than GDP, but analysts in and outside China have long questioned
the country’s official economic data. Using satellite-collected data about
the intensity of lights at night—electricity use correlates with economic
activity—the economist Luis Martinez has estimated that Chinese GDP
growth in recent decades has been about one-third lower than the offi-
cially reported statistics. According to leaked U.S. diplomatic cables,
in 2007, Li Keqiang, a provincial official who would go on to become
China’s premier, told the U.S. ambassador to China that he himself did
not trust his country’s “man-made” GDP figures. Instead, he relied on
proxies, such as electricity use. Since Xi took power, reliable data on the
Chinese economy has gotten even harder to come by because the Chi-
nese government has ceased publishing tens of thousands of economic
statistics that were once used to estimate China’s true GDP.
But some indicators cannot be faked. To evaluate China’s economic
capacity, for example, consider the proportion of worldwide profits
in a given industry that one country’s firms account for. Building
on the work of the political economist Sean Starrs, research by one
of us (Brooks) has found that of the top 2,000 corporations in the
world, U.S. firms are ranked first in global profit shares in 74 percent
foreign affairs 62
of sectors, whereas Chinese firms are ranked first in just 11 percent

of sectors. The data on high-tech sectors is even more telling: U.S.
firms now have a 53 percent profit share in these crucial industries,
and every other country with a significant high-tech sector has a
profit share in the single digits. ( Japan comes in second at seven
percent, China comes in third at six percent, and Taiwan comes in
fourth at five percent.)
The best way to measure technological capacity is to look at payments
for the use of intellectual property—technology so valuable that others
are willing to spend money on it. This data shows that China’s extensive
R & D investments over the past decade are bearing fruit, with Chinese
patent royalties having grown from less than $1 billion in 2014 to almost
$12 billion in 2021. But even now, China still receives less than a tenth
of what the United States does each year ($125 billion), and it even lags
far behind Germany ($59 billion) and Japan ($47 billion).
Militarily, meanwhile, most analysts still see China as far from being
a global peer of the United States, despite the rapid modernization
of Chinese forces. How significant and lasting is the U.S. advantage?
Consider the capabilities that give the United States what the political
scientist Barry Posen has called “command of the commons”—that is,
control over the air, the open sea, and space. Command of the com-
mons is what makes the United States a true global military power.
Until China can contest the United States’ dominance in this domain,
it will remain merely a regional military power. We have counted
13 categories of systems as underlying this ability—everything from
nuclear submarines to satellites to aircraft carriers to heavy transport
planes—and China is below 20 percent of the U.S. level in all but five
of these capabilities, and in only two areas (cruisers and destroyers;
military satellites) does China have more than a third of the U.S. capa-
bility. The United States remains so far ahead because it has devoted
immense resources to developing these systems over many decades;
closing these gaps would also require decades of effort. The disparity
becomes even greater when one moves beyond a raw count and factors
in quality. The United States’ 68 nuclear submarines, for example, are
too quiet for China to track, whereas China’s 12 nuclear submarines
remain noisy enough for the U.S. Navy’s advanced antisubmarine war-
fare sensors to track them in deep water.
A comparison with the Soviet Union is instructive. The Red Army
was a real peer of the U.S. military during the Cold War in a way
foreign affairs 63
that the Chinese military is not. The Soviets enjoyed three advantages
that China lacks. First was favorable geography: with the conquest
of Eastern Europe in World War II, the Soviets could base massive
military force in the heart of Europe, a region that comprised a huge
chunk of the world’s economic output. Second was a large commit-
ment to guns over butter in a command economy geared toward the
production of military power: the percentage of GDP that Moscow
devoted to defense remained in the double digits throughout the Cold
War, an unprecedented share for a modern great power in peacetime.
Third was the relatively uncomplicated nature of military technology:
for most of the Cold War, the Soviets could command their com-
paratively weak economy to swiftly match the United States’ nuclear
and missile capability and arguably outmatch its conventional forces.
Only in the last decade of the Cold War did the Soviets run into
the same problem that China faces today: how to produce complex
weapons that are competitive with those emerging from a techno-
logically dynamic America with a huge military R & D budget (now
$140 billion a year).
Bipolarity arose from unusual circumstances. World War II left
the Soviet Union in a position to dominate Eurasia, and with all
the other major powers save the United States battered from World
War II, only Washington had the wherewithal to assemble a bal-
ancing coalition to contain Moscow. Hence the intense rivalry of
the Cold War: the arms race, the ceaseless competition in the Third
World, the periodic superpower crises around the globe from Berlin
to Cuba. Compared with multipolarity, it was a simpler system, with
only one pair of states at the top and so only one potential power
transition worth worrying about.
With the demise of the Soviet Union and the shift from bipolarity
to unipolarity, the system transformed from one historically
unprecedented situation to another. Now, there is one dominant
power and one dominant alliance system, not two. Unlike the
Soviet Union, China has not already conquered key territory cru-
cial to the global balance. Nor has Xi shown the same willingness
as Soviet leaders to trade butter for guns (with China long devoting
a steady two percent of GDP to military spending). Nor can
he command his economy to match U.S. military power in a
matter of years, given the complexity of modern weaponry.
foreign affairs 64
partially unipolar
To argue that today’s system is not multipolar or bipolar is not to deny
that power relations have changed. China has risen, especially in the
economic realm, and great-power competition has returned after a
post–Cold War lull. Gone are the days when the United States’ across-
the-board primacy was unambiguous. But the world’s largest-ever
power gap will take a long time to close, and not all elements of this
gap will narrow at the same rate. China has indeed done a lot to shrink
the gap in the economic realm, but it has done far less when it comes
to military capacity and especially technology.
As a result, the distribution of power today remains closer to uni-
polarity than to either bipolarity or multipolarity. Because the world
has never experienced unipolarity before the current spell, no terminol-
ogy exists to describe changes to such a world, which is perhaps why
many have inappropriately latched on to the concept of multipolarity
to convey their sense of a smaller American lead. Narrowed though it
is, that lead is still substantial, which is why the distribution of power
today is best described as “partial unipolarity,” as compared with the
“total unipolarity” that existed after the Cold War.
The end of total unipolarity explains why Beijing, Moscow, and other
dissatisfied powers are now more willing to act on their dissatisfaction,
accepting some risk of attracting the focused enmity of the United
States. But their efforts show that the world remains sufficiently unipo-
lar that the prospect of being balanced against is a far stiffer constraint
on the United States’ rivals than it is on the United States itself.
Ukraine is a case in point. In going to war, Russia showed a willingness
to test its revisionist potential. But the very fact that Russian President
Vladimir Putin felt the need to invade is itself a sign of weakness. In the
1990s, if you had told his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, that in 2023, Russia
would be fighting a war to sustain its sphere of influence over Ukraine,
which Russian officials back then assumed would end up as a reliable
ally, he would scarcely have believed that Moscow could sink so low. It is
ironic that now, when unipolarity’s end is so frequently declared, Russia
is struggling to try to get something it thought it already had when U.S.
primacy was at its peak. And if you had told Yeltsin that Russia would not
be winning that war against a country with an economy one-tenth the size
of Russia’s, he would have been all the more incredulous. The misadventure
in Ukraine, moreover, has greatly undermined Russia’s long-term economic
prospects, thanks to the massive wave of sanctions the West has unleashed.
foreign affairs 65
But even if Russia had swiftly captured Kyiv and installed a

pro-Russian government, as Putin expected, that would have had little
bearing on the global distribution of power. There is no denying that
the outcome of the war in Ukraine matters greatly for the future of
that country’s sovereignty and the strength of the global norm against
forceful land grabs. But in the narrow, cold-hearted calculus of global
material power, Ukraine’s small economy—about the same size as that
of Kansas—means that it ultimately matters little whether Ukraine
is aligned with NATO, Russia, or neither side. Further, Ukraine is not
in fact a U.S. ally. Russia would be very unlikely to dare attack one of
those. Given how the United States has reacted when Russia attacked a
country that is not a U.S. ally—funneling arms, aid, and intelligence to
the Ukrainians and imposing stiff sanctions—the Kremlin surely knows
that the Americans would do much more to protect an actual ally.
China’s revisionism is backed up by much more overall capabil-
ity, but as with Russia, its successes are astonishingly modest in the
broad sweep of history. So far, China has altered the territorial status
quo only in the South China Sea, where it has built some artificial
islands. But these small and exposed possessions could easily be ren-
dered inoperative in wartime by the U.S. military. And even if China
could secure all the contested portions of the South China Sea for
itself, the overall economic significance of the resources there—mainly
fish—is tiny. Most of the oil and gas resources in the South China Sea lie
in uncontested areas close to various countries’ shorelines.
Unless the U.S. Navy withdraws from Asia, China’s revisionist ambi-
tions can currently extend no farther than the first island chain—the
string of Pacific archipelagoes that includes Japan, the Philippines,
and Taiwan. That cannot change anytime soon: it would take decades,
not years, for China to develop the full range of capabilities needed to
contest the U.S. military’s command of the commons. Also, China may
not even bother to seek such a capacity. However aggravating Chinese
policymakers find their rival’s behavior, U.S. foreign policy is unlikely
to engender the level of fear that motivated the costly development of
Washington’s global power-projection capability during the Cold War.
For now, there is effectively only one place where China could scratch
its revisionist itch: in Taiwan. China’s interest in the island is clearly
growing, with Xi having declared in 2022 that “the complete reunifi-
cation of the motherland must be achieved.” The prospect of a Chi-
nese attack on Taiwan is indeed a real change from the heyday of total
foreign affairs 66
unipolarity, when China was too weak for anyone to worry about this
scenario. But it is important to keep in mind that Beijing’s yearnings
for Taiwan are a far cry from revisionist challenges of the past, such as
those mounted by Japan and Germany in the first half of the twentieth
century or the Soviet Union in the second; each of those countries
conquered and occupied vast territory across great distances. And if
China did manage to put Taiwan in its column, even the strongest pro-
ponents of the island’s strategic significance do not see it as so valuable
that changing its alignment would generate a dramatic swing in the
distribution of power of the kind that made multipolarity so dangerous.
What about the flourishing partnership between China and Russia?
It definitely matters; it creates problems for Washington and its allies.
But it holds no promise of a systemic power shift. When the aim is to
balance against a superpower whose leadership and extensive alliances
are deeply embedded in the status quo, the counteralliance needs to be
similarly significant. On that score, Chinese-Russian relations fail the
test. There is a reason the two parties do not call it a formal alliance.
Apart from purchasing oil, China did little to help Russia in Ukraine
during the first year of the conflict. A truly consequential partnership
would involve sustained cooperation across a wide variety of areas, not
shallow cooperation largely born of convenience. And even if China
and Russia upgraded their relations, each is still merely a regional mil-
itary power. Putting together two powers capable of regional balancing
does not equate to global balancing. Achieving that would require
military capabilities that Russia and China individually and collectively
do not have—and cannot have anytime soon.
ROUGH TIMES FOR REVISIONISM

All this might seem cold comfort, given that even the limited revisionist
quests of China and Russia could still spark a great-power war, with its
frightening potential to go nuclear. But it is important to put the system’s
stability in historical perspective. During the Cold War, each superpower
feared that if all of Germany fell to the other, the global balance of power
would shift decisively. (And with good reason: in 1970, West Germany’s
economy was about one-quarter the size of the United States’ and two-
thirds the size of the Soviet Union’s.) Because each superpower was so
close to such an economically valuable object, and because the prize was
literally split between them, the result was an intense security competi-
tion in which each based hundreds of thousands of troops in their half
foreign affairs 67
of Germany. The prospect of brinkmanship crises over Germany’s fate

loomed in the background and occasionally came to the foreground,
as in the 1961 crisis over the status of Berlin.
Or compare the present situation to the multipolar 1930s, when, in
less than a decade, Germany went from being a disarmed, constrained
power to nearly conquering all of Eurasia. But Germany was able to do
so thanks to two advantages that do not exist today. First, a great power
could build up substantial military projection power in only a few
years back then, since the weapons systems of the day were relatively
uncomplicated. Second, Germany had a geographically and econom-
ically viable option to augment its power by conquering neighboring
countries. In 1939, the Nazis first added the economic resources of
Czechoslovakia (around ten percent the size of Germany’s) and then
Poland (17 percent). They used these victories as a springboard for more
conquests in 1940, including Belgium (11 percent), the Netherlands (ten
percent), and France (51 percent). China doesn’t have anything like the
same opportunity. For one thing, Taiwan’s GDP is less than five percent
of China’s. For another, the island is separated from the mainland by a
formidable expanse of water. As the MIT research scientist Owen Cote
has underscored, because China lacks command of the sea surface, it
simply “cannot safeguard a properly sized, seaborne invasion force and
the follow-on shipping necessary to support it during multiple tran-
sits across the 100-plus mile-wide Taiwan Straits.” Consider that the
English Channel was a fifth of the width but still enough of a barrier
to stop the Nazis from conquering the United Kingdom.
Japan and South Korea are the only other large economic prizes
nearby, but Beijing is in no position to take a run at them militarily,
either. And because Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan have econo-
mies that are knowledge-based and highly integrated with the global
economy, their wealth cannot be effectively extracted through con-
quest. The Nazis could, for example, commandeer the Czech arms
manufacturer Skoda Works to enhance the German war machine,
but China could not so easily exploit the Taiwan Semiconductor
Manufacturing Company. Its operation depends on employees with
specialized knowledge who could flee in the event of an invasion and
on a pipeline of inputs from around the globe that war would cut off.
Today’s revisionists face another obstacle: while they are confined to
regional balancing, the United States can hit back globally. For instance,
the United States is not meeting Russia directly on the battlefield but
foreign affairs 68
is instead using its global position to punish the country through a set
of devastating economic sanctions and a massive flow of conventional
weaponry, intelligence, and other forms of military assistance to Kyiv.
The United States could likewise “go global” if China tried to take Tai-
wan, imposing a comprehensive naval blockade far from China’s shores
to curtail its access to the global economy. Such a blockade would ravage
the country’s economy (which relies greatly on technological imports
and largely plays an assembly role in global production chains) while
harming the U.S. economy far less.
Because the United States has so much influence in the global
economy, it can use economic levers to punish other countries with-
out worrying much about what they might do in response. If China
tried to conquer Taiwan, and the United States imposed a distant
blockade on China, Beijing would certainly try to retaliate econom-
ically. But the strongest economic arrow in its quiver wouldn’t do
much damage. China could, as many have feared, sell some or all of
its massive holdings of U.S. Treasury securities in an attempt to raise
borrowing costs in the United States. Yet the U.S. Federal Reserve
could just purchase all the securities. As the economist Brad Setser has
put it, “The U.S. ultimately holds the high cards here: the Fed is the
one actor in the world that can buy more than China can ever sell.”
Today’s international norms also hinder revisionists. That is no
accident, since many of these standards of behavior were created by
the United States and its allies after World War II. For example,
Washington promulgated the proscription against the use of force to
alter international boundaries not only to prevent major conflicts but
also to lock in place the postwar status quo from which it benefited.
Russia has experienced such strong pushback for invading Ukraine
in part because it has so blatantly violated this norm. In norms as in
other areas, the global landscape is favorable terrain for the United
States and rough for revisionists.
AMERICA ’ S CHOICE
The political scientist Kenneth Waltz distinguished between the
truly systemic feature of the distribution of capabilities, on the one
hand, and the alliances that states form, on the other. Although
countries could not choose how much power they had, he argued,
they could pick their team. The U.S.-centric alliance system that
defines so much of international politics, now entering its eighth
foreign affairs 69
decade, has attained something of a structural character, but Waltz’s

distinction still holds. The current international order emerged not
from power alone but also from choices made by the United States
and its allies—to cooperate deeply in the economic and security
realms, first to contain the Soviet Union and then to advance a
global order that made it easier to trade and cooperate. Their choices
still matter. If they make the right ones, then bipolarity or multi-
polarity will remain a distant eventuality, and the partial unipolar
system of today will last for decades to come.
Most consequentially, the United States should not step back from
its alliances and security commitments in Europe or Asia. The United
States derives significant benefits from its security leadership in these
regions. If America came home, a more dangerous, unstable world would
emerge. There would also be less cooperation on the global economy and
other important issues that Washington cannot solve on its own.
Indeed, in the era of partial unipolarity, alliances are all the more
valuable. Revisionism demands punishment, and with fewer unilateral
options on the table, there is a greater need for the United States to
respond in concert with its allies. Yet Washington still has substantial
power to shape such cooperation. Cooperation among self-interested
states can emerge without leadership, but it is more likely to do so
when Washington guides the process. And American proposals fre-
quently become the focal point around which its partners rally.
Keeping U.S. alliances in Asia and Europe intact hardly means that
Washington should sign a blank check: its friends can and should
do more to properly defend themselves. Not only will they need to
spend more; they will need to spend more wisely, too. U.S. allies in
Europe should increase their capacity for territorial defense in areas
where the United States can do less while not trying to duplicate
areas of U.S. strength. In practice, this means focusing on the simple
task of fielding more ground troops. In Asia, U.S. allies would be wise
to prioritize defensive systems and strategies, especially with respect
to Taiwan. Fortunately, after more than a decade of ignoring calls to
prioritize a defensive strategy for securing the island—turning it into
a difficult-to-swallow “porcupine”—Taipei appears to have finally
awakened to this need, thanks to Ukraine.
In economic policy, Washington should resist the temptation to
always drive the hardest bargain with its allies. The best leaders have
willing followers, not ones that must be coaxed or coerced. At the heart
foreign affairs 70
of today’s international order is an implicit pledge that has served the

United States well: although the country gains certain unique benefits
from its dominance of the system, it doesn’t abuse its position to extract
undue returns from its allies. Maintaining this arrangement requires
policies that are less protectionist than the ones pursued by either the
Trump or the Biden administration. When it comes to trade, instead of
thinking just about what it wants, Washington should also consider
what its allies want. For most, the answer is simple: access to the U.S.
market. Accordingly, the United States should put real trade deals on
the table for its partners in Asia and Europe that would lower trade
barriers. Done properly, market access can be improved in ways that
not only please U.S. allies but also create enough benefits for Ameri-
cans that politicians can overcome political constraints.
The United States must also resist the temptation to use its military to
change the status quo. The 20-year nation-building exercise in Afghanistan
and the invasion of Iraq were self-inflicted wounds. The lesson should be
easy enough to remember: no occupations ever again. Any proposal to use
U.S. military force outside Asia and Europe should be deeply interrogated,
and the default response should be “no.” Preventing China and Russia from
changing the status quo in Asia and Europe was once relatively easy, but
now it is a full-time job. That is where the U.S. military’s focus should lie.
Ultimately, the world in the age of partial unipolarity retains many of
the characteristics it exhibited in the age of total unipolarity, just in mod-
ified form. International norms and institutions still constrain revisionists,
but these states are more willing to challenge them. The United States still
has command of the commons and a unique capacity to project military
power across the globe, but China has created a fiercely contested zone
near its shores. The United States still possesses vast economic leverage,
but it has a greater need to act in concert with its allies to make sanctions
effective. It still has a unique leadership capacity for promoting cooper-
ation, but its scope for unilateral action is reduced. Yes, America faces
limits it did not face right after the Soviet Union’s collapse. But the myth
of multipolarity obscures just how much power it still has.
foreign affairs 71
july / augu st
The Treacherous Path

to a Better Russia
Ukraine’s Future and Putin’s Fate
Andrea Kendall-Taylor and Erica Frantz
F
“ or God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power,” U.S. President
Joe Biden said of his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin,
a month after Russia launched a brutal invasion of Ukraine
in February 2022. Biden’s off-the-cuff remark, which his adminis-
tration swiftly sought to walk back, did not merely reflect anger at
the destruction unleashed by Putin’s war of choice. It also revealed
the deeply held assumption that relations between Russia and the
West cannot improve as long as Putin is in office. Such a sentiment
is widely shared among officials in the transatlantic alliance and
Ukraine, most volubly by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky
ANDREA KENDALL-TAYLOR is Senior Fellow and Director of the Transatlantic

Security Program at the Center for a New American Security. From 2015 to 2018, she
was deputy national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia at the National Intelligence
Council in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
ERICA FRANTZ is Associate Professor of Political Science at Michigan State University.
They are the co-authors, with Natasha Lindstaedt, of Democracies and Authoritarian Regimes.
foreign affairs 72
The Treacherous Path to a Better Russia
himself, who last September ruled out peace talks until a new Russian
leader is in place.
There is good reason to be pessimistic about the prospects of
Russia’s changing course under Putin. He has taken his country
in a darker, more authoritarian direction, a turn intensified by the
invasion of Ukraine. The wrongful detention of The Wall Street Jour-
nal reporter Evan Gershkovich in March and the sentencing of
the opposition activist Vladimir Kara-Murza to a 25-year prison
term in April, for example, are eerily reminiscent of measures from
Soviet times. Once leaders grow to rely on repression, they become
reluctant to exercise restraint for fear that doing so could suggest
weakness and embolden their critics and challengers. If anything,
Putin is moving Russia more and more toward totalitarianism as he
attempts to mobilize Russian society in support of not just his war
on Ukraine but also his antipathy to the West.
If the West’s relations with Russia are unlikely to change while
Putin is in power, perhaps things could improve were he to depart.
But the track record of political transitions that follow the exits of
longtime authoritarian leaders offers little room for optimism. The
path to a better Russia is not just narrow—it is treacherous. Authori-
tarian leaders rarely lose power while still waging a war they initiated.
As long as the war continues, Putin’s position is more secure, making
positive change less likely. What is more, authoritarian regimes most
often survive in the wake of the departure of longtime leaders such
as Putin; were Putin to die in office or be removed by insiders, the
regime would most likely endure intact. In such a case, the contours of
Russian foreign policy would stay largely the same, with the Kremlin
locked in a period of protracted confrontation with the West.
One development, however, could spark more substantive change
in Russia: a Ukrainian victory. Kyiv’s triumph in the war raises the
possibility, even if only slightly, that Putin could be forced out of
office, creating an opening for a new style of Russian government.
A Russian defeat in the war could galvanize the kind of bottom-up
pressure that is needed to upend Putin’s regime. Such a development
carries risks—of violence, chaos, and even the chance of a more hard-
line government emerging in the Kremlin—but it also opens the
possibility of a more hopeful future for Russia and for its relations
with its neighbors and the West. Although fraught, the most likely
path to a better Russia now runs through Ukrainian success.
foreign affairs 73
The Persistence of Putin

The first barrier to a post-Putin Russia is, of course, Putin him-
self. After 23 years in power and despite the challenges that have
mounted since his invasion of Ukraine, Putin looks set to retain
power until at least 2036—the end of his constitutional term limit—
perhaps even longer. Since the end of the Cold War, the typi-
cal autocrat who had governed a country for 20 years and was at
least 65 years old (Putin is 70) ended up ruling for about 30 years.
When such leaders governed personalist autocracies—where power
is concentrated in the leader, rather than in a party, junta, or royal
family—their typical tenure lasted even longer, as much as 36 years.
Of course, not all autocrats are so durable; just a quarter of
post–Cold War autocrats have ruled for 20 years or more. Putin’s
durability stems from the creation in Russia of what the political
scientist Milan Svolik calls an “established autocracy,” in which
regime officials and political and economic elites are fully dependent
on the leader and invested in maintaining a status quo from which
they benefit. The longer such established autocrats are in power,
the less likely they are to be removed by the regime’s insiders. A
strong consensus among governing officials about the need to use
repression to maintain stability, as is currently on full display in
Putin’s Russia, further reduces the likelihood that the leader will
be removed against his will.
Russia’s war in Ukraine has done little to change Putin’s outlook.
His grip on power has tightened and will remain strong for as long
as the fighting continues. Wars encourage people to rally around the
flag, suppressing disagreement and dissent for the sake of national
solidarity; polls have shown that Putin’s approval rating shot up ten
points after he launched the invasion. As a wartime president, Putin
has felt empowered to clamp down on critics and quash reporting by
independent media outlets and nongovernmental organizations. Per-
haps more important, the war has better insulated him from potential
challengers from within. A stretched military lacks the bandwidth to
mount a coup. In any case, the security services have profited from the
war and have little incentive to throw in their lot with coup plotters.
For these reasons, the dynamics created by the war and Putin’s own
actions have made him more rather than less likely to retain power
as the war rages on, further deferring political change in Russia.
foreign affairs 74
The Tsar is Dead, Long Live the Tsar

Still, Putin will not rule forever. At some point, there will be a
post-Putin Russia, even if it arrives only after his death. Since the end
of the Cold War, 40 percent of longtime leaders (those rulers in power
20 years or more) of personalist autocracies have relinquished power
by dying. Putin appears set to remain in office until the bitter end.
The extreme personalization of the political system, including the
absence of a strong ruling party apparatus in Russia, makes Putin’s
passing a potentially perilous period. The most likely scenario is that
power will pass to the prime minister, currently Mikhail Mishustin,
who would become the acting president, as the formal rules dictate.
The upper house of Russia’s parliament would then have two weeks to
schedule an election. During that time, the Russian elite would battle
to determine who would replace Putin. The transition process could
be chaotic as key actors vie for power and try to position themselves
in ways that maximize and secure their political influence. The list of
regime insiders that would battle it out is long and includes the likes
of former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev; Sergey Kiriyenko,
Putin’s first deputy chief of staff; and Dmitry Patrushev, Russia’s agri-
culture minister, whose father, Nikolai, is the head of the Security
Council. Others outside the regime, such as Yevgeny Prigozhin, the
head of the Wagner mercenary recruitment firm, could add turbulence
to the transition. But ultimately, the fractious elites would most likely
converge on a technocrat, someone in the vein of Mishustin or Mos-
cow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin, or another seemingly weak consensus
candidate whom all players believe can be controlled and who will
preserve the regime that benefits them.
Once the dust settles, Russia will almost certainly remain an author-
itarian country. Since the end of the Cold War, authoritarian regimes
have outlasted 89 percent of the longtime leaders who died in office.
And in every instance in which an authoritarian leader’s death led to the
collapse of his regime, its replacement was also authoritarian. Even in
personalist autocracies, where the question of succession is considerably
fraught, the same regime has survived the leader’s death 83 percent of
the time. Occasionally, an authoritarian leader’s death in office can shift
the political landscape in liberalizing ways, as when Lansana Conté died
in Guinea in 2008, and free and fair elections were held in 2010 for the
first time since that country’s independence. More often, however, an
authoritarian leader’s death in office is a remarkably unremarkable event.
foreign affairs 75
When leaders are ousted through a coup or unseated in elections,

it is safe to assume that some portion of the elite and the citizenry
have lost faith in them. That disgruntlement places the regime itself
in jeopardy. But when leaders die of natural causes, no political
machinations underlie their demise. The rudiments of the regime
remain as they were, and elites have little interest in rocking the boat.
Although they may feud behind closed doors about who should
take over the leadership, they usually get in line behind whichever
individual they deem the safest bet for the regime’s survival.
Were Putin to die in office, his successor would probably change
little about the Russian regime and its external relations. Successors
who deviate from the status quo invite fierce resistance from the old
guard, who maintain considerable control over the levers of power in
the system. New leaders who inherit office from deceased autocrats
therefore tend to adhere to the previous program. When they try
to go off track, demonstrating a tentative interest in liberalizing
reform—as did Bashar al-Assad in Syria and Shavkat Mirziyoyev in
Uzbekistan during their first terms in office—the organs of the state
loyal to their predecessors usually pressure them to revert to more
traditionally repressive practices.
Successors of deceased autocrats also tend to keep waging their
predecessors’ wars even when such wars are going badly. The political
scientist Sarah Croco has found that successors who come from within
the regime are likely to continue the conflicts they inherit, given that
they would be seen as culpable for a wartime defeat. In other words,
even if Putin’s successor does not share the same wartime aims, this
leader will be concerned that any settlement that looks like defeat
would abruptly bring his tenure to an end. Beyond figuring out how
to end the war, Putin’s successor will be saddled with a long list of
vexing problems, including how to settle the status of illegally annexed
territories such as Crimea, whether to pay Ukraine wartime reparations,
and whether to accept accountability for war crimes committed in
Ukraine. As such, should Putin die in office, Russia’s relations with
the United States and Europe will likely remain complicated, at best.
A SHOCK TO THE SYSTEM

The war has strengthened Putin’s hold on power, and even his death
may not usher in significant change. At this point, only a seis-
mic shift in the political landscape could set Russia on a different
foreign affairs 76
path. A Ukrainian triumph, however, could precipitate such a shift.

The clearest victory for Ukraine would entail the restoration of its inter-
nationally recognized 1991 borders, including the territory of Crimea
that Russia annexed in 2014. Battlefield realities will make such a
comprehensive victory difficult to accomplish, but lesser outcomes that
see Russia lose parts of Ukraine that it held before the February 2022
invasion would still send an unambiguous signal of Putin’s incompetence
as a leader, one the Kremlin cannot readily suppress for domestic audi-
ences. Such outcomes would raise the prospect, even if only slightly, of
Putin’s ouster and a greater reckoning in the Kremlin. The most probable
path to political change in Russia, then, runs through Ukraine.
A Russian defeat will not easily translate into a change at the top.
The personalist nature of Putin’s regime creates particularly strong
resistance to change. Personalist dictatorships have few institutional
mechanisms to facilitate coordination among potential challengers, and
the elite tend to view their own fates as intertwined with that of the
leader; these dynamics help personalist rulers withstand military losses.
But even personalist authoritarians are not immune to the fallout
of a poor military performance. The political scientists Giacomo Chi-
ozza and H. E. Goemans find that from 1919 to 2003, just under half
of all rulers who lost wars also lost power shortly thereafter. As with
other seismic events such as economic or natural disasters, military
defeats can expose leaders as incompetent, shattering their aura of
invincibility. Shocks can create a focal point for mobilization, opening
the way for the collective action necessary to dislodge entrenched
authoritarian rulers. In such systems, citizens who want reform often
exist in larger numbers than assumed but keep their preferences hid-
den. Operating frequently in a distorted and unreliable information
environment, they know little about whether others share their views,
leading to a situation in which everyone keeps their heads down, and
opposition remains private. But a triggering event such as a military
defeat can change calculations, encouraging reformist citizens (even
if they are only a small minority) to go public with their positions
and leading to a cascade effect in which more and more citizens do
the same. Put simply, a defeat in the war could serve as the spark that
mobilizes opposition to Putin’s rule.
Crucially, in the event of a Russian defeat, moves against Putin
will most likely not come directly from his inner circle. In personal-
ist systems such as Putin’s Russia, regime insiders tend to struggle to
foreign affairs 77
coordinate an effective challenge to the leader, not least because the

leader seeks to play them off one another. The Russian elite are split
into what the Russian analyst Tatiana Stanovaya calls the “technocrats,”
who are senior bureaucrats, regional governors, and other implementers
of Putin’s policies, and the “patriots,” who are the heads of the security
services, senior officials in Putin’s United Russia party, and the likes
of Prigozhin. These groups hold different visions for solving Russia’s
problems and shaping the country’s future. There is therefore a very real
risk that a move by one group would not be supported by the other,
potentially bringing down the whole system from which they all benefit.
Such dangers create high barriers to any challenge to Putin from the
inside. Even if some members of the elite wanted to punish Putin for
wartime failure, they would have a hard time mustering a united front.
Putin has sought to divide his officials to better insulate himself
from a coup. For example, the patriot camp—comprising Russia’s
security services and the most likely origin of an elite move against
Putin—is intentionally segmented into the Federal Guard Service,
the National Guard, and the Federal Security Service, hindering
the sort of unity and coordination necessary for a coup. The current
absence of a viable alternative to Putin also means there is no center
of gravity around which a challenge could coalesce. His ability to use
the security services to monitor dissent (including using one service
to monitor another) and the high costs that come with the detection
of dissent further lessen the chances of an elite rebellion from within.
The data confirm that longtime authoritarian leaders face little risk
of coups. Among post–Cold War authoritarian leaders in power for
20 years or more, only ten percent have been ousted in a coup. And,
tellingly, no longtime personalist authoritarian leader over 65 (such
as Putin) has been ousted in a coup in this period.
But forces originating outside the regime could unseat Putin
and meaningfully change Russia’s approach to the world. Given the
lack of effective institutions to channel dissent in today’s Russia,
opposition to Putin could spill over, creating a groundswell that
could dislodge him. In fact, in cases in which longtime personalist
authoritarian leaders do not die in office, the most common way that
they are pushed out of power is by pressure from outside the regime.
Since the end of the Cold War, a third of personalist dictators who
were in power for 20 years or more were toppled by popular protests
or armed rebellions.
foreign affairs 78
Putin’s actions since the invasion raise the possibility of such pres-
sure. Traditionally, autocrats seek to create an apathetic, demobilized
citizenry that they can easily control. Until the invasion, Putin pre-
sided over Russia this way. Since he began the war, however, he has
been forced to announce a “partial mobilization,” calling up 300,000
Russians to fight in Ukraine. He has placed Russia on a wartime
footing. As the Russian writer Andrei Kolesnikov has observed, it is
no longer possible for Russians to stay disengaged. “More and more,
Russians who are economically dependent on the state are finding
that they have to be active Putinists,” he noted in these pages. Public
acts of support for the regime have become more common, as have
incidents in which Russians report on the “antipatriotic” activities of
their fellow citizens. But a more mobilized society could ultimately
prove difficult for the regime to control.
MASS APPEAL
A bottom-up challenge to Putin’s rule would create the possibility
of political change in Russia but is not without risks. Pressure from
below brings with it the potential for chaos and violence should it
culminate in an armed rebellion, for example. In Russia, efforts by
ethnic minorities to push for greater sovereignty, as they did after the
fall of the Soviet Union, could further delegitimize Putin and even
lead to his ouster. Several factors work against such centrifugal forces.
Putin has increased his influence over regional leaders by making
them more dependent on Moscow; patriotic pride in the Russian
state remains strong in the republics; and the cause of secession is
not especially popular anywhere in Russia’s sprawl of republics. Yet
the comparative data suggest it should not be dismissed. The political
scientist Alexander Taaning Grundholm has shown that although
the personalization of an autocracy makes a leader less vulnerable to
internal threats such as coups, it does so at the expense of raising the
risk of civil war. In the post–Cold War era, 13 percent of longtime
personalist leaders were ousted through civil wars.
Already, Russia’s regions have borne the brunt of the costs of
Putin’s war in Ukraine. The Kremlin has relied disproportionately
on fighters from Russia’s poorest regions composed of large pop-
ulations of ethnic minorities, including once rebellious republics
such as Chechnya and provinces such as Buryatia and Tuva. In
Tuva, for instance, one of every 3,300 adults has died fighting in
foreign affairs 79
Ukraine. (The comparable figure for Moscow is one of every 480,000

adults.) In other regions such as Khabarovsk, people have been dis-
illusioned with Moscow for some time, as evidenced by antigovern-
ment protests there in 2020 after the Kremlin arrested the region’s
popular governor. Another round of mobilization concentrated in
the regions, coupled with mounting economic hardship, could feed
secessionist sentiment.
A military defeat for Russia could be the catalyst to set the pro-
cess in motion. A Ukrainian victory would signal further weakness
in Russia’s central authority and in the Russian military, increasing
the likelihood that secessionist groups see the moment as ripe for
taking up arms. The return to Russia’s regions of now veteran fighters
with access to weapons but few economic prospects would further
facilitate such movements. Political entrepreneurs, such as Prigozhin,
may also factor into these dynamics. Prigozhin’s efforts to upset the
power balance in the Putin regime could ignite conflict between the
Wagner paramilitary company and the Russian armed forces and
security services, and flare into outright insurgency.
The Kremlin would, of course, meet any secessionist bids with
violence, as it did during Russia’s two wars with Chechnya. It is
impossible to predict whether such moves for independence could
succeed or whether a leadership change at the top, forced by this
growing debacle, could prompt a national reckoning and lead Rus-
sians to abjure their country’s imperialist designs on their neighbors.
What is more certain, however, is that violent upheaval tends
to beget more violence. When post–Cold War autocrats have been
ousted as a result of civil war, their departures have virtually guaran-
teed the establishment of new dictatorships or, even worse, outright
state failure. Examples include the emergence of the Kabila family’s
regime in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) after
the overthrow of Mobutu Sese Soko in 1997 and the breakdown
of the state in Libya after Muammar al-Qaddafi’s ouster in 2011.
Should an armed insurgency unseat Putin, not only would the after-
math be violent, but the odds of a new dictatorship coming to power
would also be high.
But there is another, less bloody form of bottom-up pressure
that could usher in a more liberal Russia: popular protests. Twenty
percent of longtime personalist authoritarian leaders in the post–
Cold War era have been ousted by mass protests. Of course, such a
foreign affairs 80
movement faces incredible obstacles in today’s Russia: high levels

of repression, the Kremlin’s dismantling of the opposition, and the
exodus of hundreds of thousands of (often liberal) Russians since
the invasion who might have otherwise taken to the streets. And
even if dissenters could crowd public squares in large numbers, large-
scale protests are by no means guaranteed to topple Putin, given
that authoritarian regimes can generally ride out such movements.
Consider, for example, the experience of Iran this year, Belarus in
2020 (and in 2010), and Russia itself after controversial elections
in 2011 and 2012. In each case, an authoritarian regime suddenly
seemed vulnerable in the face of mass protests, only to reassert its
control, often violently.
The aftermath of the mass protests that ousted Hosni Mubarak in
Egypt in 2011 and Omar al-Bashir in Sudan in 2019 reveal that such
movements can also bring new, and potentially worse, authoritarian
regimes to power. The military coup that toppled the democratically
elected leader Mohamed Morsi in Egypt in 2013 illustrates well
that powerful security apparatuses do not simply go away when
authoritarian regimes lose power. Should these actors conclude that
democracy does not suit their interests, they can simply use force
to snuff it out. Even worse, events in Sudan this year make clear
that the security apparatus itself is often not unified after the end
of personalist rule. Once a strongman is no longer at the helm,
his divide-and-conquer strategies can pave the way for conflict to
explode among different factions. The security forces in Russia are
certainly powerful enough to mount a formidable challenge to any
leader who threatens their interest. And their division into distinct
groups increases the chance that they might come to blows with one
another. Successful mass protests are not, in other words, guaranteed
to produce a better Russia.
Nevertheless, popular protests provide the most promising path
to a more liberal Russia. Since the end of the Cold War, there have
been seven instances in which an authoritarian leader who had been
in power for 20 years or more was unseated through protests. In three
of those—in Indonesia in 1998, Tunisia in 2011, and Burkina Faso in
2014—the countries staged democratic elections within two years.
Those odds may seem low (and young democracies can backslide),
but consider that there are no examples of democratization after the
departure of similar authoritarians who died in office or were over-
foreign affairs 81
thrown via a coup or civil war. Other routes to a better, democratic

future simply do not exist. Put simply, Russians themselves have the
best chance of bringing about a better Russia.
PREPARING FOR A POST-PUTIN RUSSIA

No matter how he leaves office, Putin’s exit will likely occur with
little warning. His departure will spur significant debate about how
best to approach a post-Putin Russia, not just within policymaking
circles in Washington but within the transatlantic alliance more
broadly. Some allies will view Putin’s demise as an opportunity to
reset relations with Moscow. Others will remain adamant in their
view that Russia is incapable of change. The United States must
therefore consult allies now about the best approach to a post-Putin
Russia to avoid the prospect that his departure becomes divisive.
The unity of the alliance will continue to be critical to managing
relations with a future Russia.
In any scenario, it will be difficult to discern the intentions of a
new Russian leader, even one who comes to power with the backing
of the Russian people. Rather than seeking to decipher Kremlin
intentions—which a new leader will have an incentive to misrep-
resent to secure concessions from the West—the United States and
European countries should be prepared to clearly articulate their
conditions for an improved relationship. Such conditions should
include, at a minimum, Russia’s full withdrawal from Ukraine, repa-
rations for wartime damage, and accountability for its human rights
violations. As much as the United States and European countries
will want to stabilize relations with a post-Putin Russia, Moscow
must also be interested in the proposition.
Given the dim prospects for and the uncertain outcome of any
future protests, the expectation of U.S. and European officials should
be that Russia will remain an autocracy even after Putin departs.
Since the end of the Cold War, authoritarianism has persisted
beyond the departure of a longtime autocratic leader in 76 percent
of cases. When such leaders are also older personalist autocrats,
authoritarianism endures (or states fail) 92 percent of the time. Such
leaders deeply entrench authoritarian institutions and practices,
casting a long shadow over the countries they rule.
Managing relations with Moscow therefore requires a long-
term and sustainable strategy to constrain Russia and its ability
foreign affairs 82
to wage aggression beyond its borders. Such a strategy should also

aim to weaken the grip of authoritarianism in Russia over time.
Corruption has been a key enabler of the Putin regime; illicit net-
works entrench regime interests and prevent individuals outside
the regime from gaining influence within the system. To weaken
these barriers, Washington must properly enforce sanctions on the
Kremlin’s cronies in the business world, combat money laundering,
make financial and real estate markets in the United States and
Europe more transparent, and support investigative journalists in
their bid to uncover such corruption. The United States can also
bolster Russian civil society, an important force in forging a more
liberal and democratic country, beginning with supporting the work
of the many actors in Russian civil society—including journalists
and members of the opposition—who have fled the country since
the start of the war in February 2022. Backing them now would help
lay the groundwork for a better relationship between the United
States and a post-Putin Russia.
Ultimately, however, Washington and its allies can do little to
directly shape Russia’s political trajectory. A better Russia can
be produced only by a clear and stark Ukrainian victory, which
is the most viable catalyst for a popular challenge to Putin. Such
a resounding defeat is also required to enable Russians to shed
their imperialist ambitions and to teach the country’s future elites
a valuable lesson about the limits of military power. Support for
Ukraine—in the form of sustained military assistance and efforts to
anchor the country in the West through membership in the Euro-
pean Union and NATO—will pave the way for improved relations
with a new Russia. Getting there will be hard. But the more deci-
sive Russia’s defeat in Ukraine, the more likely it is that Russia will
experience profound political change, one hopes for the better.
foreign affairs 83
july / augu st
The Great
Convergence
Global Equality and Its Discontents
Branko Milanovic
W
e live in an age of inequality—or so we’re frequently told.
Across the globe, but especially in the wealthy economies
of the West, the gap between the rich and the rest has
widened year after year and become a chasm, spreading anxiety, stoking
resentment, and roiling politics. It is to blame for everything from the
rise of former U.S. President Donald Trump and for the Brexit vote in
the United Kingdom to the “yellow vest” movement in France and the
recent protests of retirees in China, which has one of the world’s highest
rates of income inequality. Globalization, the argument goes, may have
enriched certain elites, but it hurt many other people, ravaging one-time
industrial heartlands and making people susceptible to populist politics.
There is much that is true about such narratives—if you look only at
each country on its own. Zoom out beyond the level of the nation-state
to the entire globe, and the picture looks different. At that scale, the
BRANKO MILANOVIC is a Senior Scholar at the Stone Center on Socio-Economic

Inequality at the CUNY Graduate Center and the author of the forthcoming book
Visions of Inequality: From the French Revolution to the End of the Cold War.
foreign affairs 84
The Great Convergence
story of inequality in the twenty-first century is the reverse: the world

is growing more equal than it has been for over 100 years.
The term “global inequality” refers to the income disparity between
all citizens of the world at a given time, adjusted for the differences in
prices between countries. It is commonly measured by the Gini coeffi-
cient, which runs from zero, a hypothetical case of full equality in which
every person earned the same amount, to 100, another hypothetical case
in which a single individual made all the income. Thanks to the empirical
work of many researchers, economists can draw the overall contours of
the change in estimated global inequality over the past two centuries.
From the advent of the Industrial Revolution in the early nineteenth
century to about the middle of the twentieth century, global inequality
rose as wealth became concentrated in Western industrialized coun-
tries. It peaked during the Cold War, when the globe was commonly
divided into the “First World,” the “Second World,” and the “Third
World,” denoting three levels of economic development. But then,
around 20 years ago, global inequality began to fall, largely thanks to
the economic rise of China, which until recently was the world’s most
populous country. Global inequality reached its height on the Gini
index of 69.4 in 1988. It dropped to 60.1 in 2018, a level not seen since
the end of the nineteenth century.
Progress toward greater global equality is not inevitable. China has
now grown too wealthy to help meaningfully reduce global inequality,
and big countries such as India may not grow to the extent necessary to
have the kind of effect China did. Much will depend on how countries
in Africa fare; the continent could power the next great reduction in
global poverty and inequality. But even if global inequality falls, that
does not mean that the social and political turmoil in individual coun-
tries will diminish—if anything, the opposite is true. Because of vast
differences in global wages, poor Westerners for decades have ranked
among the highest-earning people in the world. That will no longer
be the case as non-Westerners with rising incomes will displace poor
and middle-class Westerners from their lofty perches. Such a shift will
underscore the polarization in rich countries, between those who are
wealthy by global standards and those who are not.
THE THREE AGES OF INEQUALITY

The first era of global inequality stretches from roughly 1820 to
1950, a period characterized by the steady rise of inequality. Around
foreign affairs 85
The Ages of Global Inequality

Estimated global income inequality, 1820–2018
70
Gini Index
65
60
55
50
The Industrial Revolution and the rise of the West The “Three Worlds” The rise of Asia
45
1850 1900 1950 2000
Sources: “Inequality Among World Citizens: 1890-1922,” American Economic Review, François Bourguignon
and Christian Morrisson, 2002; “Global Income Distribution: From the Fall of the Berlin Wall to the Great
Recession,” The World Bank Economic Review, Christoph Lakner and Branko Milanovic, 2016; “After the
Financial Crisis: The Evolution of the Global Income Distribution Between 2008 and 2013,” The Review of
Income and Wealth, Milanovic, 2021; unpublished data, Milanovic, 2022.
the time of the Industrial Revolution (approximately 1820), global

inequality was rather modest. The GDP of the richest country (the
United Kingdom) was five times greater than that of the poorest
country (Nepal) in 1820. (The equivalent ratio between the GDPs of
the richest and poorest countries today is more than 100 to 1.) An
overall Gini score of 50 in 1820 is typical of very unequal countries
today, such as Brazil and Colombia, but when considering the world
writ large, such a level of inequality is actually rather low. (For per-
spective, the United States currently has a Gini score of 41 while
Denmark, a social democracy that prides itself on its egalitarianism,
has a score of 27.)
The growth of global inequality during the nineteenth century
and the first half of the twentieth century was driven both by wid-
ening gaps between various countries (measured by the differences
in their per capita GDPs) and by greater inequalities within countries
foreign affairs 86
(measured by the differences in citizens’ incomes in a given coun-

try). The country-to-country differences reflected what economic
historians call the Great Divergence, the growing disparity between,
on the one hand, the industrializing countries of western Europe,
North America, and, later, Japan, and, on the other hand, China,
India, the African subcontinent, the Middle East, and Latin Amer-
ica, where per capita incomes stagnated or even declined. This
economic divergence had a political and military corollary, with
rising imperial states leaving moribund or conquered ones in the
dust. This period coincided with the European conquest of most of
Africa, the colonization of India and Southeast Asia, and the partial
colonization of China.
The second era extends over the latter half of the twentieth cen-
tury. It featured very high global inequality, fluctuating between 67
and 70 Gini points. Inequality among countries was extremely high:
in 1952, for instance, the United States boasted a per capita GDP
15 times that of China; with six percent of the world’s population,
the United States produced 40 percent of global output. Inequality
within countries, however, was falling nearly everywhere. It fell in
the United States as higher education became more broad-based and
affordable for the middle classes and the rudiments of a welfare state
emerged; it fell in communist China with the nationalization of large
private assets in the 1950s and then the compulsive egalitarianism
of the Cultural Revolution; and it fell in the Soviet Union as the
Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s reforms cut the excessively high
wages and perks of the Stalinist nomenklatura.
The second half of the twentieth century—the time of highest
global inequality—was also the time of the “Three Worlds”: the First
World of rich capitalist countries, mostly in western Europe and
North America; the Second World of the somewhat poorer socialist
countries, including the Soviet Union and eastern Europe; and the
Third World of poor countries, most in Africa and Asia and many
just emerging from colonization. Latin American countries are often
added to this last group, even though they were, on average, richer
than other Third World countries and had enjoyed independence
since the early nineteenth century.
That era continued in the decade following the end of the Cold
War but gave way to a new phase at the turn of the twenty-first
century. Global inequality began to dip about two decades ago and
foreign affairs 87
continues to do so today. It has dropped from 70 Gini points around

the year 2000 to 60 Gini points two decades later. This decrease in
global inequality, having occurred over the short span of 20 years, is
more precipitous than was the increase in global inequality during
the nineteenth century. The decrease is driven by the rise of Asia,
particularly China. The country made a massive contribution to the
reduction in global inequality for a number of reasons: its economy
started from a low base and could thus grow at a spectacular rate for
two generations, and by virtue of the country’s population, the growth
touched between one-fourth and one-fifth of all people on earth.
Both by dint of its large population and its relative poverty, India,
the world’s most populous country, could play a role similar to the
one China has played over the last 20 years. If more Indians become
wealthier in the coming decades, they will help drive down overall
global inequality. Many uncertainties cloud the future of the Indian
economy, but its gains in recent decades are indisputable. In the 1970s,
India’s share of global GDP was less than three percent, whereas that
of Germany, a major industrial power, was seven percent. By 2021,
those proportions had been swapped.
But even as overall global inequality has dropped since the turn of
the century, inequality has risen in many big countries, including China,
India, Russia, the United States, and even the welfare states of conti-
nental Europe. Only Latin America has bucked the trend by reducing
its high inequality through broad redistributive programs in Bolivia,
Brazil, Mexico, and elsewhere. The third era mirrors the first: it has seen
the rise of incomes in one part of the world and their relative decline
in another. In the first era, it was the industrialization of the West and
the concurrent deindustrialization of India (then under the thumb of
the British, who suppressed local industries); in the third, it was the
industrialization of China and, to some extent, the deindustrialization
of the West. But the current era has seen the opposite effect on global
inequality. In the nineteenth century, the rise of the West led to growing
inequalities between countries. In the more recent period, the rise of
Asia has led to a decline in global inequality. The first period was one
of divergence; the current period is one of convergence.
NOT SO LONELY AT THE TOP

Drill down to the level of a single person, and what becomes appar-
ent is probably the greatest reshuffling of individual positions on the
foreign affairs 88
global income ladder since the Industrial Revolution. Of course, peo-

ple tend to care about their status in relation to those around them,
not necessarily with respect to others far away, whom they will rarely
meet. But slipping in the global income rankings does have real costs.
Many globally priced goods and experiences may become increas-
ingly unavailable to middle-class people in the West: for example,
the ability to attend international sporting or art events, vacation in
exotic locations, buy the newest smartphone, or watch a new TV series
may all become financially out of reach. A German worker may have
to substitute a four-week vacation in Thailand with a shorter one in
another, perhaps less attractive location. A hard-pressed Italian owner
of an apartment in Venice may not be able to enjoy it because he needs
to rent it out year-round to supplement his income.
People in the lower-income groups of rich countries have histor-
ically ranked high in the global income distribution. But they are
now being overtaken, in terms of their incomes, by people in Asia.
China’s rapid growth has reshaped all aspects of the global income
distribution, but the change is most pronounced around the middle
and upper-middle of the global rankings, the part typically full of
working-class people in Western countries. Higher up, in the top
five percent of income earners in the world, Chinese growth has
made less of an impact because not enough Chinese have become so
rich as to displace the richest Westerners, in particular Americans,
who have historically dominated the very top of the global income
pyramid in the past 150 to 200 years.
The graph below, which demonstrates how global income rankings
have changed for people in different countries, shows the positions of
Chinese urban deciles (each decile is composed of ten percent of that
country’s population, ranked from the poorest to the richest) com-
pared with Italian deciles in 1988 and 2018. I use data for Chinese city
dwellers because China conducts separate household surveys for urban
and rural areas and because China’s urban population (now over 900
million people) is much more strongly integrated with the rest of the
world than its rural population. Urban Chinese moved up between
24 and 29 global percentiles, meaning that people in a given Chinese
urban decile leapfrogged over one-fourth or more of the world’s pop-
ulation in just 30 years. For example, in 1988, a person with the median
urban Chinese income would have ranked around the 45th income
percentile globally. By 2018, such a person would have advanced to the
foreign affairs 89
CHANGING FORTUNES
How segments of various populations shifted positions on the global
income distribution between 1988 and 2018
U r ban C h in a Italy
100% 100%
90
80
Global income percentile

80
60
70
40
1988 60 1988
2018 2018
20
50
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
National decile National decile
Ger m any Uni t ed S tat e s
100% 100%
95
90
90
80
85
70
80 1993 1988
2018 2018
60
75
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
National decile National decile
Sources: “Global Income Distribution,” Lakner and Milanovic, 2016; “After the Financial Crisis,” Milanovic,
2021; unpublished data, Milanovic 2022.
foreign affairs 90
70th percentile. This is no surprise in light of the extraordinarily high

per capita GDP growth rate in China over that period—an average of
around eight percent per year. But the growing standing of Chinese
earners has resulted in the relative decline of those in other countries.
Italy provides the clearest example of this effect. Between 1988 and
2018, average Italians in the country’s bottom decile have seen their
global ranking slide by 20 percentiles. The second and the third lowest
Italian deciles have fallen globally by six and two percentiles, respec-
tively. The global position of wealthy Italians, meanwhile, has barely
been affected by the rise of China: wealthier Italians, it turns out, tend
to sit above the part of the global distribution where Chinese growth
has wrought tremendous change. The changes observed in Italy are not
unique to that country. The average German in his country’s poorest
income decile has slipped from the 81st percentile globally in 1993 to
the 75th percentile in 2018. In the United States, the average person in
the poorest decile has moved down between 1988 and 2018 from the
74th to the 67th global percentile. But rich Germans and Americans
have remained where they were before: at the top.
The data reveal a striking story, one that is hard to detect when
looking only at national studies of inequality: Western countries are
increasingly composed of people who belong to very different parts of
the global income distribution. Different global income positions cor-
respond to different consumption patterns, and these patterns are influ-
enced by global fashions. As a result, the sense of widening inequality in
Western countries may become acute as their populations increasingly
belong, measured by income levels, to very different parts of a global
income hierarchy. The social polarization that would ensue would make
Western societies resemble those of many Latin American countries,
where gulfs in wealth and lifestyle are incredibly pronounced.
Unlike the middle of the global income distribution, the composi-
tion of the top has remained much the same over the previous three
decades: dominated by Westerners. In 1988, 207 million people made
up the top five percent of earners in the world; in 2018, that number
was 330 million, reflecting both the increase in the world population
and the broadening of available data. They represent a group of people
that can be called the “globally affluent,” sitting a rung beneath the
more rarefied global top one percent.
Americans make up the plurality of this group. In both 1988 and
2018, over 40 percent of the globally affluent were U.S. citizens.
foreign affairs 91
British, Japanese, and German citizens come next. Overall, Westerners

(including Japan) account for almost 80 percent of the group. Urban
Chinese broke into the globally affluent only more recently. Their share
has gone up from 1.6 percent in 2008 to 5.0 percent in 2018.
From Asian countries (excluding Japan), only urban Chinese really
register among that group. The shares of urban Indians and Indonesians
in the global top five percent were insignificant in 1988. These numbers
rose only a little between 2008 and 2018: in the case of India, from 1.3 to
1.5 percent; Indonesia, from 0.3 to 0.5 percent. These proportions remain
small. The same is true of people in other parts of the world, including
Africa, Latin America, and eastern Europe, that, with the exception
of people from Brazil and Russia, never had a significant participation
among the globally affluent. The top of the global income distribution
thus remains dominated by Westerners, especially by Americans. But
if the gap in growth rates between East Asia, especially China, and
the West persists, the national composition of the globally affluent will
change, too. That change is indicative of the evolving balance of economic
and political power in the world. What these individual-level data show
is, as in the past, the rise of some powers and the relative decline of others.
CATCHING UP
The future direction of global inequality is hard to predict. Three external
shocks make the current period unlike any that preceded it: the COVID-19
pandemic, which slashed countries’ growth rates (India’s, for instance,
was negative eight percent in 2020); the deterioration of U.S.-Chinese
relations, which, given that the United States and China account for
over a third of global GDP, will invariably affect global inequality; and
the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which has raised food and energy
prices around the world and shaken the global economy.
These shocks and their uncertain legacies make forecasting the
future of global inequality an unenviable task for economists. Yet cer-
tain developments seem likely. For one, China’s increased wealth will
limit its ability to lower global inequality, and its upper-middle and
upper classes will start entering in great numbers the top of the global
income distribution. The increased incomes of other Asians, from coun-
tries such as India and Indonesia, will have a similar effect.
At some point in the coming decades, the shares of Chinese and
American populations among the globally affluent might become
approximately the same—that is, there may be as many wealthy people
foreign affairs 92
in China by global standards as there are in the United States. Such a

development is important because it would reflect a wider shift of eco-
nomic, technological, and even cultural power in the world.
To determine exactly when this could happen requires a fairly compli-
cated calculation based on many assumptions, including about the future
growth rates of the two economies, changes in internal income distribu-
tions, demographic trends, and the ongoing urbanization of China. But
the most important factor in determining when the number of globally
affluent Chinese people will equal the number of globally affluent Amer-
icans is the difference in GDP per capita growth rates between a more
rapidly expanding China and the United States. That difference (known
as “the growth gap”) was six percentage points in the 1980s and seven
percentage points in the 1990s but rose to nine percentage points in the
period between China’s accession to the World Trade Organization in
2001 and the global financial crisis in 2008. The difference has since
decreased to about four and a half percentage points. That gap might
shrink further to between two and four percentage points, as Chinese
growth will likely decelerate in the coming years. Likewise, the population
growth rates of the two countries may not differ much even if the United
States currently boasts a slightly higher rate than China’s.
With all that in mind, it is possible to estimate when the absolute
number of Chinese people who earn incomes equal to or higher than the
U.S. median income will match the absolute number of such Americans.
(The latter are, by definition, one-half of the U.S. population.)
At present, just under 40 million Chinese people fulfill that condition
(as opposed to about 165 million Americans). But with a growth gap
of around three percent per year, in 20 years the two groups would be
of equal size; if the growth gap is smaller (say, only two percent per
year), parity would be achieved a decade later.
A generation or a generation and a half from now is less than the
time that has elapsed from the opening of China in the 1980s to
the present. China is tantalizingly close to something that no one
would have predicted when Mao died in 1976: that in 70 years, the
then impoverished country would have as many rich citizens as does
the United States.
THE AFRICAN ENGINE

As a result of this dramatic transformation, China will no longer
contribute to the decline in global inequality. African countries,
foreign affairs 93
however, may drive its future reduction. African countries need to

grow faster than the rest of the world, especially faster than the
rich countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and
Development and China, to achieve that goal. They play a crucial
role here not only because they are mostly poor but also because as
birthrates are dropping below replacement levels around the world,
Africa’s population is expected to grow in this century and perhaps
even into the next.
It seems unlikely, however, that Africa can replicate the recent eco-
nomic success of Asia. Africa’s post-1950 record provides few grounds
for optimism. Take as a hypothetical objective the rate of growth of five
percent per capita maintained over at least five years, which is ambi-
tious but not unattainable: only six African countries have succeeded in
achieving it in the past 70 years. These exceptional episodes of growth
involved in all but one case very small countries (in terms of population)
and those whose growth depended on an export commodity (oil in the
case of Gabon and Equatorial Guinea, and cocoa in the case of Côte
d’Ivoire). Botswana and Cape Verde managed it, too, but they are very
small countries. Ethiopia was the only populous country (with more
than 100 million people) that sustained a high rate of growth, which
it did for 13 consecutive years, from 2005 to 2017. This trend has since
ended, owing to the outbreak of a new civil war in 2020 and renewed
conflict with Eritrea.
This simple exercise suggests that the most populous African
countries—Nigeria, Ethiopia, Egypt, the Democratic Republic of
the Congo, Tanzania, and South Africa—will have to buck historic
trends to play the role that China has in recent decades in reducing
global inequality. Of course, many observers thought it unlikely that
Asia would see tremendous economic growth. The Swedish economist
and Nobel Prize winner Gunnar Myrdal, for example, predicted in
his 1968 book, Asian Drama: An Inquiry Into the Poverty of Nations,
that Asia would remain poor for the foreseeable future, given its
apparent overpopulation and limited technological progress. But just
a decade after the publication of Myrdal’s book, the region began to
register exceptionally high rates of growth and became a leader in
some areas of technology.
Aid is unlikely to be a significant driver of growth. The previous six
decades of experience with Western aid to Africa unmistakably show
that such support does not guarantee development in the country.
foreign affairs 94
Aid is both insufficient and irrelevant. It is insufficient because rich

countries have never devoted much of their GDPs to foreign aid; the
United States, the richest country in the world, currently gives away
only 0.18 percent of its GDP in aid, and a significant portion of that
is classified as “security related” and used for purchases of U.S. mil-
itary equipment. But even if aid totals were greater, they would be
irrelevant. The track record of African recipients of aid suggests that
such support fails to generate meaningful economic growth. Aid is
often misallocated and even stolen. It produces effects like those of
the “resource curse,” in which a country blessed with a particularly
valuable commodity still underperforms: it experiences tremendous
initial gains without any meaningful follow-up or more sustainable,
broadly shared prosperity.
If Africa continues to languish, such stagnation will keep driving
many people to migrate. After all, the gains from migration are enor-
mous: a person with a median income in Tunisia who moves to France
and starts earning there at, say, the 20th French income percentile
would still have multiplied his earnings by almost three, in addition
to creating better life chances for his children. Sub-Saharan Africans
can gain even more by moving to Europe: a person earning the median
income in Uganda who moves to Norway and earns at the level of the
Norwegian 20th percentile will have multiplied his earnings 18-fold.
The inability of African economies to catch up with wealthier peers
(and thus fail to produce a future reduction in global income inequal-
ity) will spur more migration and may strengthen xenophobic, nativist
political parties in rich countries, especially in Europe.
Africa’s abundance of natural resources combined with its persistent
poverty and weak governments will lead dominant global powers to
vie over the continent. Although the West neglected Africa after the
end of the Cold War, recent Chinese investments in the continent
have alerted the United States and others to its importance. The U.S.
Agency for International Development has indirectly flattered China
by not only shifting its attention to Africa but also deciding to focus on
more “brick and mortar” infrastructure projects, akin to those favored
by China. African countries are learning that great-power competi-
tion might not be so bad for them after all, since they can play one
superpower off another. But there is a grimmer scenario, in which the
continent divides into allies and foes, who in turn compete or even go
to war. That chaos would make the ideal of an African common market
foreign affairs 95
that could replicate the success of the European Economic Community

even more remote. The prospect of an African growth surge that could
meaningfully suppress global inequality in the coming years is slim.
THE WORLD TO COME

Whatever direction global inequality takes, considerable change
lies ahead. Unless Chinese growth slows substantially, the share
of Chinese citizens among the upper reaches of the global income
distribution will continue to rise, and correspondingly, the share of
Westerners in that group will decrease. This shift will represent a
marked change from the situation that has existed since the Industrial
Revolution, with people from the West overwhelmingly represented
at the top of the global income pyramid and even poor Westerners
ranked high in global terms. The gradual slide in the global income
position of the lower and lower-middle classes in the West creates
a new source of domestic polarization: the rich in a given Western
country will remain rich in global terms, but the poor in that country
will slide down the global pecking order. As for the downward trend
in global inequality, it requires strong economic growth in popu-
lous African countries—but that remains unlikely. Migration out of
Africa, great-power competition over the continent’s resources, and
the persistence of poverty and weak governments will probably lie
in Africa’s future as they have in its past.
And yet a more equal world remains a salutary objective. Few thinkers
better grasped the importance of equality among countries than the
eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher Adam Smith, the founder
of political economy. In his magnum opus, The Wealth of Nations, he
observed how the gulf in wealth and power between the West and the
rest of the world led to colonization and unjust wars: “The superiority
of force [was] . . . so great on the side of the Europeans that they
were enabled to commit with impunity every sort of injustice in those
remote countries,” he wrote. Great disparities fueled violence and
inhumanity, but Smith still saw reason for hope. “Hereafter, perhaps,
the natives of those countries may grow stronger, or those of Europe
may grow weaker,” Smith imagined. “And the inhabitants of all
the different quarters of the world may arrive at that equality of
courage and force which, by inspiring mutual fear, can alone overawe
the injustice of independent nations into some sort of respect for the
rights of one another.”
foreign affairs 96
july / augu st
Why the World

Still Needs Trade
The Case for Reimagining—Not
Abandoning—Globalization
Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala
T
he international economic architecture built after 1945 was
based on a powerful idea: economic interdependence is crucial,
if insufficient, for global peace and prosperity. The International
Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the predecessor to the World Trade
Organization were founded in response to the three preceding decades
of ceaseless instability, when the world had been devastated by two world
wars, the Great Depression, and political extremism. It had also been a
period of deglobalization, in which countries retreated into increasingly
isolated trading blocs. In the rubble of World War II, governments sought
to construct a new system that, by linking countries in a dense web of
economic ties, would consign such chaos and division to history.
For much of the past 75 years, policymakers from across the world
recognized the power of economic interdependence. Countries tore down
trade barriers, opening their economies to one another. On balance, their
record was impressive. Closer economic integration went hand in hand
NGOZI OKONJO-IWEALA is Director General of the World Trade Organization.
foreign affairs 97
Why the World Still Needs Trade
with rising global prosperity, an unprecedented reduction in poverty,

and an unusually long period of great-power peace. Since 1990, the
share of the world’s population living in extreme poverty has fallen by
three-quarters. At the center of this great leap in human well-being was
a 20-fold increase in international trade volumes, which helped lift per
capita incomes by a factor of 27 over the last six decades.
This economic vision is now under attack, and its achievements are
in danger. A series of shocks in the space of 15 years—first the global
financial crisis, then the COVID-19 pandemic, and now the war in
Ukraine—have created an alternative narrative about globalization. Far
from making countries economically stronger, this new line of thinking
goes, globalization exposes them to excessive risks. Economic interde-
pendence is no longer seen as a virtue; it is seen as a vice. The new mantra
is that what countries need is not interdependence but independence,
with integration limited at best to a small circle of friendly nations.
But dismantling economic globalization and the structures that sup-
port it would be a mistake. That is because, despite persistent rhetoric
to the contrary, countries and people rely on trade more than ever in
this age of “polycrisis.” Moreover, international cooperation, including
on trade, is necessary to meet challenges to the global commons, such
as climate change, inequality, and pandemics. Globalization is not over,
nor should anyone wish for it to be. But it needs to be improved and
reimagined for the age ahead.
THE END OF AN ERA?

The drift away from ever-closer economic integration was reshap-
ing trade policy even before COVID-19. Rising geopolitical tensions
between the world’s two biggest economies, the United States and
China, saw the imposition of tit-for-tat tariffs. But the events of the
past few years have supercharged the trend. The pandemic and the
war in Ukraine exposed genuine vulnerabilities in global trade, caus-
ing product shortages and supply bottlenecks that harmed businesses
and households alike. Talk of “decoupling” became widespread. More
recently, governments have enacted a growing number of export restric-
tions, particularly for goods deemed strategically important, such as
semiconductors and critical minerals. They have also revived industrial
policies aimed at promoting domestic production.
That said, talk of deglobalization remains at odds with the trade
data. In fact, global merchandise trade hit record levels in 2022.
foreign affairs 98
Over three-quarters of that trade was conducted on the basic

“most-favored nation” tariff terms that governments extend to all World
Trade Organization (WTO) members, suggesting that the multilat-
eral rulebook still plays a defining role in international commerce.
According to data from the U.S. Department of Commerce, total trade
between the United States and China reached an all-time high of $691
billion in 2022, which is 24 percent higher than it was in 2019. The
share of intermediate inputs—goods used to produce other goods—in
world exports remains roughly constant, suggesting that there has been
no mass reshoring of international supply chains. Companies still make
sourcing decisions based on cost and quality considerations. Policy
measures could yet alter this calculus, but not overnight.
The experience of COVID-19 also showcased the power of inter-
national trade as a shock absorber. Early in the pandemic, as demand
for medical products such as masks, gloves, and nasal swabs spiked,
some of the disruptions were made worse by export restrictions on such
goods. But trade swiftly became a vital means for ramping up access
to desperately needed supplies, from personal protective equipment to
pulse oximeters to, eventually, vaccines. Even as the value of global
merchandise trade shrank by nearly eight percent in 2020, trade in
medical products grew by 16 percent. Trade in cloth facemasks nearly
quintupled. After COVID-19 vaccines were developed, billions of doses
were manufactured in supply chains cutting across as many as 19 coun-
tries. Without trade, the recovery from the pandemic—from both the
immediate public health crisis and the resulting economic crisis—would
have been much slower.
In other words, despite the growing movement to dismantle the sys-
tem underpinning globalization, people and businesses rely on it more
than ever. Advocates of deglobalization are effectively calling for the
disruption of the roughly 30 percent of all global output that depends on
trade, a move that would only add to the downward pressure on peoples’
purchasing power across the world. In light of the strong rebound in
trade that helped economies recover and kept most pandemic-induced
shortages temporary, it is clear that the fundamental problem is not
interdependence per se but an overconcentration of some trading rela-
tionships for certain vital products. And if the goal is more resilient
supply networks that are less susceptible to weaponization by rivals, there
is a better way forward.
foreign affairs 99
DON ’ T DEGLOBALIZE, REGLOBALIZE

Deeper, deconcentrated, and more diversified global supply chains—what
we at the WTO call “reglobalization”—offer a route to interdependence
without overdependence. The problems exposed over the last three years
can be turned into an opportunity to give countries and communities that
have so far been excluded from global value chains a way in.
In a handful of sectors, some reshoring or near-shoring looks inev-
itable. But beyond these limited areas, such measures could come at
enormous economic cost. Researchers at the WTO have estimated that if
the world splits into two separate economic blocs, the resulting reduc-
tion in international trade and loss of productivity from specialization
and scale economies would reduce real incomes over the long term by
at least five percent on average from the current trend. The output losses
would be far greater than those caused by the 2008–9 global financial
crisis. Low-income countries would see real incomes drop by as much
as 12 percent, dealing a massive blow to their development prospects.
What is more, large-scale reshoring could backfire by making sup-
ply chains less, not more, resilient. Negative supply shocks are likely
to become more frequent in the years ahead as droughts, heat waves,
and flooding wreak havoc with production and transport. Closing the
door to trade would increase countries’ exposure to such shocks. In
contrast, a reglobalized world economy would offer countries more
outside supply options and thus more resilience.
In 2022, the United States saw firsthand that domestic production alone
cannot ensure supply resilience when it experienced a shortage of baby for-
mula. Nearly all formula sold in the United States was made domestically,
and when one of the four major manufacturers had to stop production at
one of its plants because of bacterial contamination, heart-rending shortages
ensued. What ultimately mitigated the crisis was trade: the Food and Drug
Administration authorized imports of formula on an emergency basis.
“Friend shoring,” the notion of moving production to geopolitical
allies, is no panacea, either. Whenever someone proposes “friend shoring,”
I always ask, “Who is a friend?” History has plenty of examples of friends
behaving in unfriendly ways, especially when it comes to each other’s
exports. Trade tensions can arise even among allies.
TRADING GREEN
But the case for reglobalization goes further than such practicalities.
It springs from the fact that the world needs international trade to
foreign affairs 100

overcome the most pressing challenges of the day, such as climate

change, poverty, inequality, and war. It is often said that global problems
demand global solutions. Too frequently, however, cooperation on trade
is omitted from the list of those solutions.
The WTO is doing its part to rectify that omission. Last June, at our
12th ministerial conference, the organization’s 164 members agreed to
cut tens of billions of dollars in harmful fisheries subsidies, helping ease
pressure on overexploited marine fish stocks while boosting the liveli-
hoods of the millions of people who depend on healthy oceans. Members
committed to preventing emergency food aid purchases from getting
bogged down in export restrictions. They also pledged to keep food and
medical supplies moving around the world, helping ensure availability
and reductions in price volatility. When the war in Ukraine disrupted
the supply of food, feed, and fertilizer, the WTO stepped up monitoring
of related trade policies and urged members to stick to their pledges to
keep markets open. As of early May 2023, around 63 of the 100 or so
export-restricting measures that countries had introduced on food, feed,
and fertilizer since the start of the war were still in place. Although there
is much room for improvement, things are headed in the right direction.
The existential imperative of climate change is another area where trade
can—and must—be part of the solution. Trade is often portrayed as dam-
aging the environment, with concerns about emissions related to shipping,
air freight, and trucking spawning initiatives to “buy local.” It is true that
transportation, like other carbon-intensive sectors, needs to reduce its
emissions, and indeed, researchers are hard at work on alternative fuels,
such as green hydrogen and green ammonia, to power cargo ships. But
what critics miss is that the world cannot decarbonize without trade. It is
an indispensable channel through which green technologies can be dissem-
inated and countries can access the goods and services they need to recover
from extreme weather events and adapt to a changing climate. The
competition and scale efficiencies made possible by international trade and
value chains are critical for driving down the costs of renewable energy
technologies, accelerating progress toward the goal of net-zero emissions.
Moreover, international trade can help reduce emissions related to
goods by allowing countries to specialize. Just as countries can reap eco-
nomic gains by focusing on what they are relatively good at, the world
can reap environmental gains if countries focus on what they are relatively
green at. From the perspective of the planet, it makes sense to import
energy-intensive products from places with abundant low-carbon energy
foreign affairs 101

or water-intensive products from places with abundant water. For example,

a recent World Bank report noted that abundant wind and sun put Latin
America and the Caribbean in a good position to produce green hydrogen.
But this sort of environmental comparative advantage works only
when the right policy incentives are in place, so that the environmental
costs of a given activity are taken into account—“internalized,” in the
language of economists. Here, too, cooperation on trade has a critical role
to play. As more governments take serious climate action, divergence in
their policies could give rise to serious trade frictions and concerns about
lost competitiveness. If these tensions go unchecked, countries could end
up introducing trade restrictions and retaliating in kind to the restrictions
of others. This would increase uncertainty for businesses, thus discourag-
ing low-carbon investment. Higher trade barriers and lower investment
would in turn combine to raise the cost of decarbonization—the exact
opposite of what the world needs. Governments can avoid this scenario
by reaching a shared understanding of how to assess and compare the
equivalence of each other’s climate policies—whether taxes, regulations,
or subsidies—with a view to helping preempt trade conflict associated
with climate measures. The WTO is at work on potential approaches
that could inform this kind of global carbon pricing framework, as are
the International Monetary Fund, the Organization for Economic Co
operation and Development, and the World Bank.
Trade can help the world achieve environmental objectives in other
ways, too. Many WTO members are looking at reforming and reduc-
ing the subsidies that governments give to fossil fuel producers and
consumers, and some are considering lowering trade barriers to envi-
ronmental goods and services such as technologies to manage air and
water pollution. Parallel to these efforts, some members are taking bold
steps to incentivize investment in green technology. Although the WTO
rulebook supports efforts to decarbonize, it encourages members to do
so in ways that do not discriminate against others or lead to subsidy
races in which trading partners are harmed. There are ways to go green
and to subsidize, including by supporting research and innovation, that
do not undermine a level playing field.
CLOSING THE GAP

Trade has long been a powerful force for poverty reduction as well. It
permits countries with small or poor home markets to take advantage of
external demand to shift people and resources out of subsistence activities
foreign affairs 102

and into more productive work in manufacturing, services, and agriculture.

In the decades before the COVID-19 pandemic, trade played an
instrumental role in lifting over one billion people out of extreme pov-
erty. This was not just a story of China’s economic ascent. The share of
the global population living on less than the equivalent of $1.90 a day
declined from 36 percent in 1990 to around nine percent in 2018. Tak-
ing China out of the equation, that share over the same period still fell
substantially—from 28 percent to 11 percent. The result of this boom
was a dramatic rise in living standards almost everywhere. In the quarter
century leading up to 2019, the gap between incomes in poor countries
and those in rich economies began to narrow for the first time since the
Industrial Revolution, 200 years earlier.
These trends have now been thrown into reverse. The World Bank
has estimated that the pandemic and the war in Ukraine have pushed as
many as 90 million more people into extreme poverty. Rich economies,
which enjoyed early access to vaccines and the resources to rescue their
economies through big fiscal stimulus packages, are once again leaving
poor countries behind. Without global trade, it will be impossible to put
development and poverty reduction back on track.
But the world needs a different, reimagined type of trade, because
not all people and not all countries shared adequately in the progress
of recent decades. Although the overall trends were impressive, the
top-line numbers hid a darker story. Many poor countries—most notably
in Africa—lagged behind their counterparts elsewhere, even during the
pre-pandemic era of convergence. Many poor people and regions in rich
countries also lagged behind, since the opportunities created by better
access to international markets were not always, or not often, in the same
regions or sectors hurt by attendant import competition.
Even as economic inequality declined between countries and across
the global population as a whole, inequality within many advanced
economies increased. Trade was one of several factors at play, including
technological changes that favored skilled workers and replaced many
manufacturing jobs with machines. Tax, labor, and antitrust policy
choices also shaped these changes, which is why inequality increased much
more in some countries than in others. When the financial crisis and the
painfully slow labor-market recovery that followed fed populist extrem-
ism, trade and immigrants became easy scapegoats. The political disrup-
tions of recent years underscore the importance of cushioning the impacts
of trade and technological changes on people’s lives and livelihoods.
foreign affairs 103

By introducing active labor-market and social policies, governments can

ensure that the gains from trade and technology are broadly shared while
their disruptive effects are softened.
There is surely scope to bring more people and places from the mar-
gins of global production and trade networks to the mainstream. This
is already starting to happen. Multinational companies are diversifying
their supplier bases in pursuit of cost savings and better risk manage-
ment. Bangladesh, Cambodia, Morocco, and Vietnam are expanding
their participation in regional and global value chains. From Barbados
to Bali to Ohio, remote services work is creating opportunities and
breathing new life into struggling communities.
Taking this reglobalization process further to encompass more places
and draw in more small and women-owned businesses would yield con-
siderable dividends. It would promote growth and reduce poverty in the
parts of Africa, Asia, and Latin America that have good macroeconomic
and business environments but weak connections to the most dynamic
sectors of the global economy. It would lead to greater socioeconomic
inclusion for sections of society that typically register higher rates of
poverty and underemployment. And it would increase the depth, security,
and flexibility of supply chains.
A strong, open, multilateral trading system is necessary for this
potential next wave of trade-driven growth. But reglobalization will
look different from the export-led industrialization that transformed
East Asia. With advances in automation making manufacturing a some-
what weaker engine for job creation than it used to be, services will have
to play a major role alongside manufacturing and agricultural production
and processing. Services are increasingly important drivers of growth
and trade, expanding faster than trade in goods. This is especially true
for services delivered digitally—everything from streaming games to
consulting by videoconference. Cross-border trade in these services grew
by an average of 8.1 percent between 2005 and 2022, compared with 5.6
percent for goods. In 2022, digitally delivered service exports reached
$3.8 trillion in value, equivalent to 12 percent of all goods and services
trade, up from eight percent a decade earlier.
To support this process of reglobalization, the international trade
regime will need to adapt by setting forth clear rules on digital trade
and promoting deeper cooperation on services trade. Gaps in existing
trade rules—or the absence of shared global rules altogether—result
in uncertainty and transaction costs that weigh heaviest on smaller
foreign affairs 104

businesses. Members of the WTO have been taking steps in the right
direction. In 2021, a group of members accounting for over 90 percent
of global trade in services struck an agreement on reducing regulatory
barriers to services trade, and nearly 90 members, including China, the
United States, and the European Union, are currently negotiating a
basic set of global rules for digital trade. Regional initiatives to lower
trade barriers and build connective infrastructure, such as the African
Continental Free Trade Area, are also useful.
Finally, maintaining peace and security is particularly salient these
days. The increasing weaponization of trade relations and policy has
cast doubt on the long-standing proposition that trade brings peace.
Countries are understandably worried about becoming dependent on
potential adversaries for critical goods. But as has been made clear,
limiting trade to a few partners comes with opportunity costs: higher
prices, diminished export options, less productive resource allocation,
and new kinds of supply vulnerabilities.
Meanwhile, deep and diversified markets make it harder to weapon-
ize international trade, by reducing countries’ dependence on any single
source of supply. When the war in Ukraine cut off nearly all of Ethiopia’s
wheat imports from that country, Ethiopia was able to fill the gap with
imports from Argentina and the United States. Europe has made up for
the loss of piped Russian gas with imports of liquefied natural gas from
other sources. In a reglobalized world economy, a diffuse produc-
tion base for all manner of goods would mean even fewer potential
chokepoints. One prerequisite for reglobalization is a broadly open
and predictable global economy, anchored in a strong, rules-based
multilateral trading system.
A FORCE FOR PEACE

International trade is neither the silver bullet that can solve all security
problems nor the Achilles’ heel of the current security architecture. To
abandon the many benefits that come with international trade would
be foolhardy. There are real problems with the current trading system,
but the counterfactual scenario is almost certainly worse: it is difficult
to believe that international security would be better served if leading
powers had no economic stake in one another’s stability and prosper-
ity and no shared institutions in which to engage. Trade between the
United States and China benefits people and businesses in both coun-
tries enormously and binds the superpowers together, both bilaterally
foreign affairs 105

and in international forums, providing an incentive to cooperate where

possible and avoid conflict.
Strategic competition is a reality of the modern world. But that world
will become unlivable unless there is also strategic cooperation. The
WTO’s ministerial meeting last summer offered hope that the two can
go together. The agreements reached there had the support of all WTO
members. They worked across geopolitical and policy fault lines, each
perceiving a national interest in reinforcing the world trading system.
In the three-quarters of a century since the world first embraced mul-
tilateral cooperation on trade, the trading system has underpinned ris-
ing—if still uneven—global prosperity. It has achieved its original goal of
helping governments keep markets open in turbulent times. In the face of
mighty shocks, from the global financial crisis to the pandemic, the world
did not repeat the 1930s spiral of protectionism and depression, instead
allowing cross-border demand and supply to be an engine for recovery.
Today, the multilateral trading system is part of the solution to
major global challenges, from climate change to conflict to pandemic
preparedness. And a reformed WTO, fit for the twenty-first century,
is needed now more than ever, with rules that underpin the stability,
predictability, and openness of the global trading system. If the past
15 years have taught us anything, it is that unforeseen crises surely lie
ahead and that without the stabilizing force of trade, the world will
almost certainly be less able to weather them.
foreign affairs 106

s ep t ember / o c tober
Xi’s Age of
Stagnation
The Great Walling-Off of China
Ian Johnson
I
n the early months of 2023, some Chinese thinkers were expect-
ing that Chinese President Xi Jinping would be forced to pause
or even abandon significant parts of his decadelong march toward
centralization. Over the previous year, they had watched the gov-
ernment lurch from crisis to crisis. First, the Chinese Communist
Party had stubbornly stuck to its “zero COVID’’ strategy with vast
lockdowns of some of China’s biggest cities, even as most other
countries had long since ended ineffective hard controls in favor of
cutting-edge vaccines. The government’s inflexibility eventually trig-
gered a backlash: in November 2022, antigovernment protests broke
out in Chengdu, Guangzhou, Shanghai, and Beijing, an astounding
development in Xi’s China. Then, in early December, the government
IAN JOHNSON is Stephen A. Schwarzman Senior Fellow for China studies at the
Council on Foreign Relations and the author of the forthcoming book Sparks: China’s
Underground Historians and Their Battle for the Future. A Beijing-based correspondent for
The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and other publications for 20 years, he was
awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on China in 2001.
foreign affairs 107

Xi’s Age of Stagnation
suddenly abandoned zero COVID without vaccinating more of the

elderly or stockpiling medicine. Within a few weeks, the virus had
run rampant through the population, and although the government
has not provided reliable data, many independent experts have con-
cluded that it caused more than one million deaths. Meanwhile, the
country had lost much of the dynamic growth that for decades has
sustained the party’s hold on power.
Given the multiplying pressures, many Chinese intellectuals
assumed that Xi would be forced to loosen his iron grip over the
economy and society. Even though he had recently won an unprece-
dented third term as party general secretary and president and seemed
set to rule for life, public mistrust was higher than at any previous
point in his decade in power. China’s dominant twentieth-century
leaders, Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping, had adjusted their
approach when they encountered setbacks; surely Xi and his closest
advisers would, too. “I was thinking that they would have to change
course,” the editor of one of China’s most influential business jour-
nals told me in Beijing in May. “Not just the COVID policy but a lot
of things, like the policy against private enterprise and [the] harsh
treatment of social groups.”
But none of that happened. Although the zero-COVID measures
are gone, Beijing has clung to a strategy of accelerating government
intervention in Chinese life. Dozens of the young people who pro-
tested last fall have been detained and given lengthy prison sentences.
Speech is more restricted than ever. Community activities and social
groups are strictly regulated and monitored by the authorities. And
for foreigners, the arbitrary detention of businesspeople and raids on
foreign consulting firms have—for the first time in decades—added
a sense of risk to doing business in the country.
For more than a year, economists have argued that China is
embarking on a period of slowing economic growth. To account
for this, they have cited demographic changes, government debt,
and lower gains in productivity, as well as a lack of market-oriented
reforms. Some have talked of “peak China,” arguing that the coun-
try’s economic trajectory has already or will soon reach its apex
and may never significantly overtake that of the United States. The
implication is often that if only Beijing would tweak its economic
management, it could mitigate the worst outcomes and avoid a
more dangerous decline.
foreign affairs 108

What this analysis overlooks is the extent to which these economic

problems are part of a broader process of political ossification and ideo-
logical hardening. For anyone who has observed the country closely
over the past few decades, it is difficult to miss the signs of a new
national stasis, or what Chinese people call neijuan. Often translated
as “involution,” it refers to life twisting inward without real progress.
The government has created its own universe of mobile phone apps
and software, an impressive feat but one that is aimed at insulating
Chinese people from the outside world rather than connecting them to
it. Religious groups that once enjoyed relative autonomy—even those
favored by the state—must now contend with onerous restrictions.
Universities and research centers, including many with global ambi-
tions, are increasingly cut off from their international counterparts. And
China’s small but once flourishing communities of independent writers,
thinkers, artists, and critics have been driven completely underground,
much like their twentieth-century Soviet counterparts.
The deeper effects of this walling-off are unlikely to be felt over-
night. Chinese society is still filled with creative, well-educated, and
dynamic people, and the Chinese government is still run by a highly
competent bureaucracy. Since Xi came to power in 2012, it has pulled
off some impressive feats, among them completing a nationwide high-
speed rail network, developing a commanding lead in renewable energy
technologies, and building one of the world’s most advanced militaries.
Yet neijuan now permeates all aspects of life in Xi’s China, leaving the
country more isolated and stagnant than during any extended period
since Deng launched the reform era in the late 1970s.
In the months since Beijing ended its COVID restrictions, foreign
journalists, policy experts, and scholars have begun to return to the
country to assess the future of China’s government, economy, and
foreign relations. Many have tended to focus on elites in the capital
and have related China’s isolation and economic slowdown to frictions
between Washington and Beijing or to the effects of the pandemic.
Speaking to people from different regions and classes, however, offers
a different view. Over several weeks in China this spring, I spoke to
a few big-picture thinkers, such as the business journal editor. But I
decided to spend most of my time with a much broader cross section
of Chinese people—doctors, business owners, bus drivers, carpenters,
nuns, and students—whom I have known for years. Their experiences,
along with broader trends in civil society and government, suggest
foreign affairs 109

that China’s leaders have begun to sacrifice technocratic progress and

even popular support in their pursuit of stability. Beijing’s bet seems
to be that in order to withstand the pressures of an uncertain world,
it must turn inward and succeed on its own. In doing so, however, it
may instead be repeating the mistakes of its Eastern bloc predecessors
in the middle decades of the Cold War.
MOVING MOUNTAINS, BUILDING FORTRESSES

The Xi administration’s obsession with control might seem to be
something that mainly hurts intellectuals or urban professionals.
And it is true that ever more pervasive restrictions on civil society
have shuttered magazines, driven artists out of the country, and
caused hundreds of thousands of middle-class people to emigrate.
Yet the tightening is having a deep impact on ordinary Chinese peo-
ple as well. Consider the experience of participants in an annual folk
religion pilgrimage to a holy mountain near Beijing. Mao’s zealots
destroyed many of the original temples in the 1960s, but in the late
1980s, the mountain’s mainly working-class visitors raised money
to rebuild them, and for more than 30 years, the annual 15-day
event was largely self-managed and self-financed. Over the past two
decades, authorities encouraged this traditional communal activity,
which drew on Han Chinese folk practices, as a useful counter-
weight to religions such as Christianity, which they view as foreign
and subject to outside influence. Officials showered the pilgrimage
with positive media coverage, allowing it to grow rapidly into one
of the country’s largest religious festivals, attracting hundreds of
thousands of visitors.
But state sponsorship has now brought state supervision. Over
the past decade, the government has imposed rules on religious sites
across China, closing down unauthorized places of worship, forbid-
ding minors from attending religious services, and even insisting that
religious sites fly the national flag. In the case of the holy mountain
near Beijing, the government transferred management of the site’s
temple complex to a state-owned company, which has deployed pri-
vate security guards and uniformed police to patrol the shrines and
has cluttered the mountain with party propaganda. Near the top, next
to a shrine to the Buddhist goddess of mercy, managers from the state
enterprise erected a giant billboard emblazoned with hammers and
sickles. One panel displays the oath of allegiance that new members
foreign affairs 110

must take when they join the party. Another panel announces in huge
characters: “The Party is in my heart. Eternally follow the Party line.”
As a result of this overt politicization, the number of visitors is
down, and on some days this spring, no pilgrims came at all. Many
people who attend the temple or work there are intensely patriotic
and support the party line on many issues. Bring up the United States,
the war in Ukraine, or a possible invasion of Taiwan, and they will
passionately argue that the Americans seek to contain China, that
Washington is to blame for Russia’s assault on Ukraine, and that
Taiwan must reunite with China or face invasion. But they are also
dismayed by the slowing economy, the government’s handling of the
pandemic, and political “study sessions” at work—even bus drivers
must now listen to lectures on “Xi Jinping Thought” and download
mobile phone apps that instruct users on party ideology. Observing
a squad of police officers march past, one manager who has worked
on the mountain since the 1990s expressed disappointment at how
much the pilgrimage has changed. “In China today,” he said, “you can’t
do anything without taking care of one thing first: national security.”
Still more consequential may be the state’s now ubiquitous pres-
ence in Chinese intellectual life. Chinese leaders have always viewed
universities somewhat suspiciously, installing party secretaries to
oversee them and surrounding them with walls. Still, for decades,
universities were also home to freethinking academics, and their gates
were rarely shut to visitors. Since Xi came to power, however, these
freedoms have gradually been eliminated. In 2012, the government
began to impose bans on teaching subjects such as media freedom,
judicial independence, promoting civil society, and independent his-
torical inquiry. Then, with the onset of the pandemic, the government
expanded surveillance and added new security measures that have
since become permanent, transforming universities into fortresses.
One day in May, I arranged to meet a professor and four of his
graduate students at Minzu University of China, a leafy campus on
the western side of Beijing founded to train new leaders among the
country’s 55 recognized non-Han ethnic minorities, such as Tibetans,
Uighurs, and Mongolians. Before the pandemic, I usually met him at
a university canteen or café. Now, visitors entering the campus must
present their faces to a camera at a turnstile so that the authorities
know precisely who is entering. The professor suggested that we
convene off campus at a Mongolian restaurant, and we used a private
foreign affairs 111

room to avoid eavesdroppers. “Maybe it’s better that they don’t know
we’re meeting,” he said.
The professor was hardly a dissident. He strongly supports unifi-
cation with Taiwan and has researched the shared cultural roots of
mainland Chinese and Taiwanese society. With the help of local offi-
cials, he rebuilt a traditional meeting place for members of a clan in
his hometown in southeastern China. In earlier years, he also traveled
widely and held fellowships abroad, and he is now working on a book
about a religious movement that took hold in China in the 1920s.
Over the past decade, however, the government has incrementally
stymied much of his research. He now needs approval to attend
conferences abroad and must submit his writing for vetting before
publishing it. His new book cannot be published in China because
discussions of religious life, even that of a century ago, are considered
sensitive. And state authorities have so thoroughly obstructed the
anthropology journal he has been editing that he has resigned his
post. Over the past three years, the journal has prepared 12 issues,
but only one has made it past the censors.
Outside universities, the boundaries of what can be published
have similarly narrowed, even affecting analysis of initiatives and
ideas that Xi supports. In the first decade of this century, for exam-
ple, one public intellectual I know wrote several groundbreaking
books on old Beijing. Although Xi is widely seen as a champion
of the capital’s old city, the writer now avoids the issue, and pub-
lishers will not reprint his earlier works because they discuss the
endemic corruption that underlies the destruction of historic
areas. Instead, he has reverted to seemingly distant and apolitical
subjects in order to obliquely criticize the present situation. His new
focus: Beijing’s thirteenth-century history under Genghis Khan,
which he portrays as an open, multicultural time—in implicit con-
trast to today. “It’s easier to write about the Mongolians,” he said.
“Most censors don’t see the parallels.”
WHAT MISTAKES?
Ordinary Chinese workers have a different set of concerns, mostly
relating to the economy and the pandemic. During the first quarter
of 2023, China’s slowing economy barely reached the government
growth target of five percent, and it achieved that level only with
heavy state spending. The youth unemployment rate is over 20 percent,
foreign affairs 112

and many people wonder how their children will be able to get mar-
ried if they cannot afford to buy an apartment. Figures for the second
quarter were slightly better, but only compared with the second quar-
ter of last year, when the economy was nearly brought to a standstill by
COVID lockdowns. A variety of indicators show growing vulnerabilities
in a range of sectors, and many Chinese feel they are in a recession.
A group of textile manufacturers from Wenzhou in coastal Zhe-
jiang Province told me that sales across China are down 20 percent
this year, forcing them to lay off staff. They believe the economy will
recover, but they also think that the go-go years are gone. “We’re in
a cloudier era,” one of them said.
Many business owners point to the sharp decline in foreign visitors.
The plunge is partly due to COVID travel restrictions, which have been
relaxed only recently, but it is also a reflection of how difficult it has
become to move around the country. To visit China today is to enter a
parallel universe of apps and websites that control access to daily life.
For outsiders, ordering a cab, buying a train ticket, and purchasing
almost any goods requires a Chinese mobile phone, Chinese apps, and
often a Chinese credit card. (Some apps now accommodate foreign
credit cards, but not all vendors accept them.) Even a simple visit to
a tourist site now requires scanning a QR code on a Chinese app and
filling out a Chinese-language form. On one level, these hindrances
are trivial, but they are also symptomatic of a government that seems
almost unaware of the extent to which its ever more expansive cen-
tralization is closing the country off from the outside world.
The whiplash course of the pandemic in China—from months-
long closures to the uncontrolled spread when the harsh measures
ended—has also left lasting scars. Although much of the inter-
national coverage focused on the lockdowns in big cosmopolitan
cities such as Shanghai, rural areas were hit particularly hard by
the subsequent wave of infections. Outside urban centers, medical
services are often rudimentary, and when the authorities suddenly
began ignoring the disease, many people succumbed to it. One doc-
tor who works in an emergency ward in a rural district near Beijing
said he was stunned by the number of elderly people who died in
the weeks after the controls were lifted. “We were told that it was
normal that old people died,” he said. “But aren’t we supposed to
be a civilization that is especially respectful of the elderly? I was so
angry. I guess I still am.”
foreign affairs 113

In elite circles closer to the government, it is common to hear

such concerns downplayed or brushed off. In May, the editors of
the Beijing Cultural Review, a mainstream media publication, told
me that the government’s handling of the pandemic may have been
a bit heavy-handed and that officials underestimated the economic
damage caused by zero COVID. But now that they had reversed
course, they said, the economy would soon bounce back. “Maybe
it’ll take three years,” an editor told me. “But it will recover, and
people will move on.”
That’s not necessarily a Pollyannish view. Over its nearly 75 years
in power, the government has withstood a series of major crises: the
Great Famine of 1958–61 and the Cultural Revolution of 1966–76,
which together led to tens of millions of deaths; the Tiananmen Square
massacre of 1989, in which the government unleashed the military on
peaceful student demonstrators with the world watching; the Falun
Gong crackdown of 1999–2001, in which the authorities killed more
than 100 protesters and sent thousands to labor camps; and the Sichuan
earthquake of 2008, in which more than 60,000 people died—in sig-
nificant measure because of faulty government construction, especially
of public schools. These incidents riveted the country and led some to
wonder whether China’s leaders could escape repercussions.
Especially over the past 40 years, the party’s control of the media
and its ability to maintain fast-paced growth allowed it to quickly
tamp down grievances. After the Falun Gong protests, for example,
the government’s portrayal of the group as a cult became part of the
historical narrative; at the same time, the authorities loosened control
over folk religious groups as long as they avoided politics. In 2001,
China joined the World Trade Organization, and under a techno-
cratic leadership that encouraged international investment and private
enterprise, the country enjoyed double-digit economic growth.
It is possible that such techniques can still work. As the Chinese
astrophysicist and dissident Fang Lizhi observed in 1990, “About
once each decade, the true face of history is thoroughly erased from
the memory of Chinese society.” Likewise, if faster growth returns,
the current crises could quickly be forgotten, making the immediate
post-COVID era just another blip in the party’s relatively stable control
of China over the past nearly half century. At least that may be the
government’s assessment, helping explain why it has not changed
course despite the recent upheavals.
foreign affairs 114

But such comforting assumptions ignore a key lesson of the past:

that the party also survived by adapting and experimenting. After Mao
died, for example, party elders around Deng realized that the party
confronted a crisis of legitimacy. They introduced market reforms and
relaxed the party’s grip on society. Likewise, after the 1989 Tiananmen
massacre and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Deng and his
immediate successors came to believe that a lack of economic progress
underpinned both events and pushed through wide-ranging reforms
that transformed China into an emerging economic superpower.
This adaptive authoritarianism can be attributed in part to a gener-
ation of leaders who saw the People’s Republic as a work in progress
that could be continually improved rather than as a fixed political
system that had to be preserved at all costs. Leaders such as Deng
had helped found the new country in 1949, but they knew that it was
prone to large-scale crises that needed correction. In the aftermath
of the Mao years, they also realized that their rule was precarious.
Relinquishing political control was off the table, but most other things
were open for discussion. Today it’s almost shocking to read govern-
ment policy documents from the Deng era. For example, the 1982
party directive Document 19 explicitly allowed religious practices
that are now increasingly banned, such as home-based preaching
and baptism. Underground religious movements were to be treated
gently because the state had “used violent measures against religion
that forced religious movements underground,” the document said.
There are few signs today of such self-critical reflection. Although
it is difficult for outside observers to know the inner workings of the
current leadership, the about-face by fiat on zero COVID is in keeping
with Xi’s overall approach. In decades past, if accidents or disasters
occurred that reflected poorly on the party, leaders such as former
president Hu Jintao and former prime minister Wen Jiabao visited
the locales in question to show they cared, drawing on much the
same playbook as their Western counterparts in such situations. Xi
also travels often around China, but rarely to express condolences, let
alone to take implicit government responsibility for failures. Instead,
he mostly visits local communities to exhort them to comply with
party doctrine and government policy. This feeds into the impression
among many Chinese people of an increasingly remote leadership that
allows few dissenting viewpoints, shuns internal debate, and feels no
compulsion to explain itself to the public.
foreign affairs 115

THE BERLIN TRAP

For many who live in this era of neijuan, the question is how long
it will last. Although the Chinese Communist Party of today differs
from its historical counterparts in other countries, some Chinese
thinkers see broad parallels between China’s inward turn and the
stifling atmosphere of Eastern bloc countries during the height of
the Cold War. One striking analogy that some mention is the Berlin
Wall. When it was first erected in 1961, this symbol of communist
oppression consisted of rolls of barbed wire strung down the middle
of the street; it only gradually acquired its final form as an all but
impermeable series of concrete barriers buttressed by a network of
watchtowers and searchlights. From the start, it seemed to demon-
strate the inherent failure of the East German state to build a desir-
able place to live, and many saw it as an anachronistic effort to lock
people in their own country. Yet it was also remarkably successful,
allowing the regime to stabilize itself and survive for another three
decades. The wall couldn’t save the German Democratic Republic,
but it bought the leadership time.
Now, China’s rulers seem to be building and perfecting their own
twenty-first-century version of the Berlin Wall. Although tens of
thousands of Chinese citizens languish in prisons or house arrest for
their views, the barrier is not primarily physical. Instead, state power
is exercised through an increasingly complete system of censorship
of speech and thought, whether on the Internet or television or in
textbooks, movies, exhibitions, or even video games, to create a widely
accepted historical narrative that makes the party seem essential for
China’s survival. It also now includes the idea that China should build
all key technologies on its own, rejecting the principles of compar-
ative advantage that have been the bedrock of globalization. These
efforts amount to a more subtle form of control, giving people the
illusion of freedom while guiding them away from anything that
would challenge the regime.
But like its East German counterpart, China’s wall is intended to
forestall an existential challenge. Just as East Germany faced collapse
from uncontrolled emigration in the 1950s, China was facing its own
crisis in the two decades before Xi took the helm as new technol-
ogies such as the Internet helped foster the first nationwide move-
ment against the party. The source of dissent was not an organization
with members and bylaws but a loose alliance of critical intellectuals,
foreign affairs 116

victims of party abuse, and ordinary citizens unhappy with local con-
ditions. Condemnation of one-party rule began appearing in the
media, online, and in underground magazines and documentary films.
Leaders such as Hu and Wen had to respond.
At first, they did so by allowing a public discussion of national
crises and sometimes by undertaking reforms in response. In 2003, for
example, after the death of a student who had been beaten by police
caused a national outcry, Wen announced an immediate modification
of police custody laws. But fearful that too much citizen oversight
could challenge the party’s authority, leaders soon resorted to new
social controls. A turning point came in late 2008, after the Bei-
jing Summer Olympics had ended and the world’s spotlight was off
China. The government arrested the dissident writer and future Nobel
Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo and soon implemented greater sur-
veillance of social media. Xi ramped up this trend and systematized
it. To cap it off, he oversaw the rewriting of the party’s official history
in 2021, downplaying past debacles such as the Cultural Revolution
and glorifying his own policies. Using the tools of the digital age,
Xi transformed China’s wall from an ad hoc assembly of rules and
regulations into a sleek, powerful apparatus.
As in East Germany, this tactic has been successful—at least up
to now. Many people have internalized the party’s version of history:
in that telling, its leaders saved China from foreign domination and
made China strong and powerful, and therefore only the party, even
if it has a few flaws, can lead the people into the future. This belief
system, however, relies on the party’s efficient management of China’s
many challenges. That was relatively easy over 45 years of remarkably
durable economic growth, which allowed people to set aside their
objections to the long arm of the party-state; as in most countries, it
is difficult to organize against a regime that is bringing rapid gains
in standards of living. In the communist states of Eastern Europe,
the general prosperity of the immediate post–World War II era had
diminished by the 1970s, causing many to look to dissidents and
critics for explanations of their new reality. Could this happen in a
China entering a similar long-term stagnation?
THE WAITING GAME

The differences between Xi’s China today and the Eastern bloc of
the 1960s and 1970s are many. In those years, the countries in the
foreign affairs 117

Soviet sphere experienced a shortage economy, with lines for bread

and years-long waits to buy automobiles. There are no signs of such
privation in China today. Nonetheless, the government’s pursuit of
total control has set the country on a path of slower growth and
created multiplying pockets of dissatisfaction. Critics of the regime
point out that Beijing’s restrictions on information very likely cre-
ated the conditions that led to the COVID-19 crisis: in late 2019,
local officials hushed up early warnings of the virus because they
feared that bad news would reflect poorly on them. That silence
allowed the virus to gain a foothold and spread around the world.
Although censorship keeps these and other government-induced
problems out of the public eye, it also cuts off some of the smartest
citizens from global trends and the latest research. Such knowledge
barriers, as they become self-reinforcing, can only hurt China. If
even the United States is dependent on other lands, such as the
Netherlands and Taiwan, for advanced chips and other technologies,
one wonders whether China can really go it alone, as its leaders
now seem to imagine.
The party can control and weaponize information, but dissenters
are also surprisingly well entrenched. Aided by digital technology,
they are also far more nimble than their Soviet-era counterparts.
Among China’s educated elite, many persist in opposing the
regime’s version of reality. Even though they are banned, virtual
private networks, which allow users to bypass Internet controls, are
now widespread. Underground filmmakers are still working on new
documentaries, and samizdat magazine publishers are still produc-
ing works distributed by basic digital tools such as PDFs, email, and
thumb drives. These efforts are a far cry from the street protests and
other forms of public opposition that attract media attention, but
they are crucial in establishing and maintaining the person-to-person
networks that pose a long-term challenge to the regime.
In May, I visited the editor of an underground magazine in a
relatively remote part of south Beijing. He publishes a fortnightly
journal featuring contributions by academics across China, who
often use pen names to protect their identities. Their articles
challenge the party’s account of key crises in its history, filling
in events that have been whitewashed. Some of the editing work
is now done by Chinese graduate students working abroad. This
model of underground digital publishing was adopted last year by
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protesters, who used VPNs to upload videos to Twitter, YouTube,

and other banned sites. Such online platforms function as store-
houses, allowing Chinese people to download information that the
state is trying to suppress.
In this case, the editor commissions the articles, edits them, and
sends them abroad for safekeeping in case the authorities raid his
office. The journal’s layout is also created abroad, and volunteers
inside and outside China email each issue to thousands of pub-
lic intellectuals across China. The magazine is part of a growing
community that has been systematically documenting the party’s
misrule, from past famines to the COVID pandemic. Although his
journal and similar efforts may ordinarily reach only tens of thou-
sands of people in China, the articles can have a much larger impact
when the government errs. During the COVID crisis, for example, the
magazine’s editor and his colleagues noticed a spike in readership,
and others found that their essays were even going viral. In good
times, this pursuit of the truth might have seemed quixotic; now, for
many of the Chinese, it is beginning to seem vital. As they spread,
these anonymous informal networks have opened a new front in the
party’s battle against opposition, the control of which now requires
far more than simply throwing dissidents in jail.
I sat with the editor in his garden for a couple of hours, under
trellises of grapes he uses to make wine. The skies were deep blue, and
the sun was strong. The cicadas of a Beijing summer day drowned
out the background noise. For a while, it felt as if we could be any-
where, maybe even in France, a place that the editor has enjoyed
visiting. He has published the journal for more than a decade and
has now handed off most of the work to younger colleagues in China
and abroad. He was relaxed and confident.
“You can’t do anything publicly in China,” he said. “But we still
work and wait. We have time. They do not.”
foreign affairs 119

nov ember / dec ember
The Return of
Nuclear Escalation
How America’s Adversaries Have
Hijacked Its Old Deterrence Strategy
Keir A. Lieber and Daryl G. Press
N
uclear weapons once again loom large in international politics,
and a dangerous pattern is emerging. In the regions most likely
to draw the United States into conflict—the Korean Peninsula,
the Taiwan Strait, eastern Europe, and the Persian Gulf—U.S. adversaries
appear to be acquiring, enhancing, or threatening to use nuclear weapons.
North Korea is developing intercontinental ballistic missiles that can
reach the United States; China is doubling the size of its arsenal; Russia
is threatening to use nuclear weapons in its war in Ukraine; and according
to U.S. officials, Iran has amassed enough fissile material for a bomb.
Many people hoped that once the Cold War ended, nuclear weapons
would recede into irrelevance. Instead, many countries are relying on
them to make up for the weakness of their conventional military forces.
KEIR A. LIEBER is a Professor in the School of Foreign Service and the Department of
Government at Georgetown University.
DARYL G. PRESS is Director of the Initiative for Global Security at the Dickey Center
for International Understanding and Professor of Government at Dartmouth College.
foreign affairs 120

The Return of Nuclear Escalation
Still, optimists in the United States argue that the risk of nuclear
war remains low. Their reasoning is straightforward: the countries that
are building up and brandishing their nuclear capabilities are bluffing.
Nuclear weapons cannot paper over conventional military weakness
because threats to escalate—even by a desperate enemy—are not cred-
ible. According to the optimists, giving credence to the nuclear bluster
of weak enemies is misguided and plays squarely into their hands.
Unfortunately, the optimists are wrong. The risk of nuclear escalation
during conventional war is much greater than is generally appreci-
ated. The conundrum that U.S. adversaries face today—how to con-
vincingly threaten escalation and bring a nuclear-armed opponent to
a stalemate—was solved decades ago by the United States and its
NATO allies. Back then, the West developed a strategy of coercive
nuclear escalation to convince the Soviet Union that NATO allies would
actually use nuclear weapons if they were invaded. Today, U.S. rivals
have adopted NATO’s old nuclear strategy and developed their own
options for credible escalation. The United States must take seriously
the nuclear capabilities and resolve of its foes. It would be tragic for
Washington to stumble into nuclear war because it discounted the very
strategy that it invented decades ago.
NATO’S NUCLEAR PLAYBOOK

In the late 1950s, the forces of the Warsaw Pact, an alliance of the Soviet
Union and seven other satellite states, outnumbered those of NATO in
terms of manpower by about three to one. Up to that point, NATO’s
response to Soviet conventional superiority had been simple. If the Sovi-
ets invaded Western Europe, the United States would launch an all-out
nuclear bombing campaign against the Soviet Union. The message to
Moscow was brutal but credible: the Soviets might have conventional
superiority, but the next European war would not remain conventional.
But this strategy began to fall apart merely a decade into the Cold
War. The Soviet Union was on the cusp of fielding a strong nuclear
arsenal of its own, a vast improvement over the small and vulnerable
force it had deployed up to that point. Soon, NATO’s strategy would no
longer make sense. The alliance could not credibly threaten to respond
to a conventional invasion with a full-blown nuclear strike on the Soviet
Union because the Soviets would have the capability to retaliate in kind.
During a war, NATO would face a lose-lose choice: lose a fight with con-
ventional weapons or initiate a mutually catastrophic nuclear exchange.
foreign affairs 121

In other words, in the latter decades of the Cold War, NATO faced the
same challenge that many U.S. adversaries face today: it had little hope of
prevailing in a conventional war, and no hope of winning a nuclear one.
NATO found an answer to this problem. The alliance made plans to
use nuclear weapons in the event of war, but in a different way. Instead of
relying solely on the threat of a massive U.S. nuclear strike on the Soviet
Union, NATO would respond to an invasion by using nuclear weapons
coercively. That is, it would launch a few nuclear weapons—probably
tactical ones, which have small yields and short ranges—against military
targets to convince Soviet leaders that the war was spinning out of con-
trol, pressuring them to stop the invasion. Such a use of nuclear weapons
could deliver a heavy blow to a Soviet advance, but more important, it
would demonstrate to Soviet leaders that they were courting nuclear
disaster. NATO had solved what had seemed to be an intractable prob-
lem: how to use nuclear threats to stalemate an enemy it could not beat
at the conventional or nuclear level.
To back up this strategy, the United States deployed thousands of
tactical nuclear weapons to Europe so that Washington could escalate
in a manner that was distinguishable from an all-out strike on the
Soviet Union. The alliance also created a “nuclear sharing” arrangement,
whereby U.S. weapons based in Europe would be given to several NATO
allies during a war, so that the countries the Soviet Union hoped to
overrun would have their own nuclear defenses.
The details of NATO’s strategy evolved over time, but the core ratio-
nale remained constant. NATO would not keep its nuclear weapons
holstered as its member states were being conquered; nor would it
launch a suicidal nuclear strike on the Soviet Union. Instead, the alli-
ance would escalate gradually and coercively, ensuring that the risks of
continuing the conflict were too great for the Soviets to bear.
At the time, analysts criticized many aspects of NATO’s strategy.
They argued, for example, that nuclear strikes on Soviet military tar-
gets would trigger retaliation against NATO’s forces, thus negating any
advantage of using nuclear weapons in the first place. But the point of
NATO’s escalation was not to change the military balance per se, but
to use the shock of nuclear strikes to generate fear and compel the
Soviets to accept a cease-fire. Other critics asked why NATO should
expect that, once both sides escalated, the Soviets would be the party
to blink first. But deterrence strategists noted that in a defensive war,
the NATO allies would care more about defending their own freedom
foreign affairs 122

and territorial independence than the Soviets would care about waging
a war of aggression. In contests of resolve, after all, the side that cares
the most has the advantage.
Critics disapproved of NATO’s strategy for other reasons—threat-
ening to start a potentially civilization-ending nuclear war seemed
immoral, and assuming that escalation could be controlled once started
appeared foolish. NATO leaders could not allay such criticisms, but
the alliance nevertheless relied on the logic of deliberate escalation to
defend itself from an otherwise overwhelming foe. NATO’s strategy
made nuclear weapons the ultimate weapons of the weak, the perfect
tool for holding off powerful rivals.
COPYCATS
This strategy of nuclear escalation did not disappear when the Cold
War ended. Around the world today, several nuclear-armed countries
that find themselves outmatched at the conventional military level lean
on nuclear weapons to stave off catastrophic military defeat.
Pakistan is a prime example. Its principal adversary, India, has five
times the population, nine times the GDP, and spends six times as much
on its military. To make matters worse, most of Pakistan’s largest cities
are less than 100 miles from the Indian border, and the terrain in the
most likely corridors of an Indian invasion is difficult to defend. Unable
to build sufficient conventional defenses, Pakistan’s leaders worry that
a major war would lead to the destruction of its army and the seizure
or isolation of its major cities. And so they rely on nuclear weapons to
keep their next-door neighbor at bay.
Pakistan has approximately 170 nuclear warheads, a third of which
are tactical. Pakistani officials have made clear that the country’s
nuclear posture is designed to deter or halt an Indian invasion. The
former head of Pakistan’s Strategic Plans Division, Lieutenant General
Khalid Kidwai, explained in 2015 that “by introducing the variety of
tactical nuclear weapons in Pakistan’s inventory, . . . we have blocked
the avenues for serious military operations by the other side.” In May
2023, he reiterated that the purpose of Pakistan’s diverse arsenal is
to give it a “strategic shield” to blunt India’s conventional military
superiority. To this end, Pakistan has focused on being able to rapidly
assemble, mobilize, and disperse nuclear weapons at the outset of
any conflict. Of course, Pakistan could not hope to win a nuclear war
against India—which has a comparable number of nuclear warheads
foreign affairs 123

and sophisticated delivery systems capable of retaliation—but Pakistan

could inflict tremendous pain on its neighbor, coercing India to halt
a conventional military campaign.
North Korea has adopted a similar strategy. Pyongyang’s conven-
tional military is vastly outmatched by the combined forces of South
Korea and the United States. North Korea’s army is large, but its
military equipment is decrepit, and its troops rarely conduct training
beyond simple small-unit exercises. Lacking the resources to compete
militarily, Pyongyang leans heavily on its nuclear weapons. As the
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un explained in 2022, although the
primary mission of his country’s nuclear arsenal is to deter an attack,
he would use nuclear weapons to repel an attack if deterrence failed.
“If any forces try to violate the fundamental interests of our state, our
nuclear forces will have to decisively accomplish [this] unexpected
second mission,” Kim said.
U.S. and South Korean military planners, like their Indian coun-
terparts, must now grapple with the same problem the Soviets once
faced: how to capitalize on conventional military advantages against an
enemy that may be willing to use nuclear weapons. The United States
has more than enough nuclear weapons to respond to North Korean
nuclear escalation, as leaders in Pyongyang surely know. But if there
is a war on the Korean Peninsula, North Korea will be desperate. The
country’s leaders fear succumbing to the same fate as recent rulers who
lost conventional wars, such as Saddam Hussein in Iraq and Muammar
al-Qaddafi in Libya, who were killed after being ousted. With their
regime and lives on the line, Pyongyang’s leaders would face enormous
pressure to start a perilous tit-for-tat nuclear exchange—at first striking
targets in the region, and then possibly in the United States—to compel
their opponents in Seoul and Washington to accept a cease-fire.
Unlike Pakistan and North Korea, China has declined to use
nuclear threats to compensate for its conventional military inferi-
ority relative to the United States. China’s reluctance to depend on
nuclear threats is particularly notable given the high stakes of a major
war over Taiwan. Defeat in such a conflict might lead to formal
independence for the island—a major blow to China’s conception
of its sovereignty. Perhaps more important, the loss of Taiwan would
humiliate the Chinese Communist Party and could stoke a nation-
alist backlash or internal coup. Nevertheless, China has focused on
improving its conventional military rather than readying its nuclear
foreign affairs 124

arsenal for wartime coercion. In fact, Beijing asserts that it will never
be the first side in a conflict to use nuclear weapons.
To be clear, China’s nuclear doctrine is not as simple as it sounds.
According to Chinese military documents, Beijing would consider excep-
tions to its no-first-use policy if China faced a major military defeat in a
high-stakes conventional war. And Chinese strategists have considered
how low-yield nuclear weapons could be used coercively. Additionally,
around 2019 China began updating its nuclear forces in ways that would
support a coercive strategy. It has increased the size, readiness, and diversity
of its arsenal to increase its survivability; this would allow Beijing to initi-
ate wartime escalation without fear that the United States could respond
by destroying its nuclear force. Finally, China’s leaders could change their
official stance during a war and use nuclear weapons if a conflict against
the United States went badly. But as of now, China remains committed in
its rhetoric to eschewing a nuclear first use and in addressing its military
weaknesses by strengthening its conventional military power.
China’s current no-first-use policy aside, the pattern is dangerous
to ignore: nuclear-armed countries that fear catastrophic military
defeat frequently adopt escalatory doctrines to keep their enemies at
bay. For NATO during the Cold War, Pakistan or North Korea today,
and perhaps even China in the future, nuclear escalation on the bat-
tlefield makes sense if the only alternative is a regime-threatening
defeat. Coercive nuclear escalation is a competition in pain—both
inflicting it and suffering it—which is a type of conflict that invari-
ably favors the desperate.
ALL IN
Russia is another country that embraces the strategy of coercive nuclear
escalation. When the Cold War ended, the Western allies—suddenly
freed from the fear of major military defeat in Europe—quickly soured
on nuclear forces. Russia, acutely aware of its newfound conventional
military inferiority, did the opposite, adapting NATO’s old ideas about
nuclear escalation to Russia’s new circumstances.
Analysts debate the details of Russia’s current nuclear doctrine, but
most agree that it calls for escalation to deter or stop the most serious
military threats to Russian security. Like other conventionally weak
but nuclear-armed countries, Russia has integrated into its conven-
tional war-fighting plans and exercises many tactical nuclear weapons,
including air-delivered bombs, cruise missiles, and short-range ballistic
foreign affairs 125

missiles. If the fighting in Ukraine shifts significantly in favor of Kyiv,

and Russian President Vladimir Putin decides that defeat in Ukraine
threatens his regime, Russia appears capable—and likely willing—to
initiate a coercive nuclear war.
Putin has always portrayed the war in Ukraine as a core national
security interest, based on historic territorial claims and the perceived
threat of Ukraine’s membership in NATO. He has publicly framed
the war in nearly existential terms. Perhaps most important, complete
defeat in Ukraine would be humiliating and particularly dangerous to
a leader who has built his power on a reputation for strength, acumen,
and restoring Russian greatness. Preventing military catastrophe would
be of paramount importance to Putin, and nuclear escalation would be
one of his few remaining cards to play. No enemy army stands poised
to invade Russia. But if Putin believes that complete defeat in Ukraine
will lead to his being toppled—and killed or detained—he will likely
see the stakes as sufficiently high to use nuclear weapons.
Russian leaders have made the links between the war in Ukraine
and nuclear escalation clear. One of Russia’s most senior defense
officials and former president, Dmitry Medvedev, said in July 2023
that Russia “would have to use nuclear weapons” if Ukraine’s coun-
teroffensive succeeded in retaking Russian-held territory. “There
simply wouldn’t be any other solution,” he said. Putin claimed in
February 2023 that Western countries “intend to transform a local
conflict into a phase of global confrontation,” adding that Russia
“will react accordingly, because in this case we are talking about
the existence of our country.” And in September 2022, he said that
Russia would use “all means at its disposal” to defend its territorial
annexations in Ukraine.
Perhaps these nuclear threats are mere bluffs aimed at convinc-
ing the West to end its support for Ukraine. In fact, some West-
ern observers discount the plausibility of escalation, noting that
if Russia’s military position in Ukraine starts to collapse, nuclear
escalation would not solve Moscow’s problem. Ukraine’s military
forces are dispersed, so even a handful of Russian tactical nuclear
strikes would do limited damage to Kyiv’s forces. Moreover, Russian
escalation would only make the Kremlin’s problems worse because
NATO would probably respond with conventional attacks against
Russian forces in Ukraine. In short, according to the skeptics, Rus-
sia’s nuclear threats are hollow.
foreign affairs 126

Those who downplay Russia’s nuclear options misunderstand the logic

of coercive escalation. Russia’s goal would not be to rectify the conven-
tional military imbalance but to demonstrate in a shocking fashion that
the war is spinning out of control and must be ended immediately. The
aim would be to raise the prospect of a wider nuclear war and convince
people and their leaders in the West that given what is at stake for Rus-
sian leaders, Moscow will keep inflicting pain to forestall defeat.
If Russian escalation triggered a large-scale conventional NATO attack
on Russia’s forces in Ukraine, as many analysts expect it would, Moscow
could just use nuclear weapons again—much as NATO would have done
in the face of a Soviet invasion. Had the Soviet Union invaded a NATO
member, the balance of wills would have favored NATO because the allies
would have been fighting to protect their own freedom and territory. Now,
if defeat in Ukraine endangers Putin’s regime, the Kremlin would have
the most to lose. The reasoning behind escalation is brutal, similar to that
for blackmail or torture. But self-interested leaders facing a defeat that
could cost them their lives may have no other option.
To be sure, Russian nuclear escalation is only one possible course.
The current battlefield stalemate may drag on until the two sides grudg-
ingly agree to a cease-fire. Perhaps Russian forces will regain the ini-
tiative and seize larger swaths of Ukrainian territory. Or maybe Putin’s
domestic opponents will remove him from power, opening the door
to a better settlement for Ukraine. It is even possible that if Russia’s
leaders order nuclear escalation, military commanders may refuse to
carry it out, instead launching a coup to end Putin’s regime. The future
of the conflict is uncertain, but the logic and history of the nuclear age
is clear: when a conventionally superior army backs a nuclear-armed
enemy against a wall, it risks nuclear war.
TABLES TURNED
Hawkish policy analysts suggest that the United States can stare
down its adversaries’ nuclear threats if Washington has enough mil-
itary power, a resolute mindset, and a strong nuclear deterrent. But
those attributes will not deter an enemy that is cornered. The United
States will be in grave danger if it underestimates the will of desper-
ate, nuclear-armed adversaries.
The good news is that the Biden administration appears to under-
stand the risk of escalation in the Ukraine war. Early statements made
by U.S. President Joe Biden suggesting that Putin “cannot remain
foreign affairs 127

in power” have been replaced with more moderate rhetoric, and U.S.
leaders have limited the kinds of weapons they provide Ukraine in
large part to manage the dangers of escalation. Similarly, U.S. planners
have encouraged their South Korean allies to consider wartime objec-
tives far short of complete victory, to avoid pushing the Kim regime
to the edge of nuclear war. For example, if North Korea launches a
major artillery attack on South Korea, the wisest response may be to
destroy or seize those artillery positions but not continue the cam-
paign north to Pyongyang.
But it is impossible to know for sure how an enemy will react in
war, especially because leaders are incentivized to misrepresent their
actual redlines. Fighting nuclear-armed adversaries is a dangerous
game of brinkmanship. There are military steps the United States can
take to reduce these dangers. For potential conflicts on the Korean
Peninsula and across the Taiwan Strait, the U.S. military should
be developing strategies for waging conventional war in a manner
designed to reduce the risks of escalation. For example, the U.S.
military should minimize attacks that undermine an enemy lead-
ership’s situational awareness and hold on power, such as strikes on
national command-and-control networks, nuclear forces, and lead-
ership targets themselves. Enemies who rely on nuclear weapons to
stalemate U.S. military power will, of course, adapt as well; they will
likely entangle the conventional and nuclear domains to prevent the
United States from safely waging a conventional war. But the United
States can make plans to escalate conventionally without threatening
the survival of an enemy regime, thereby reducing the risk that a
desperate leader will employ a nuclear weapon.
The United States must take the growing threat of coercive nuclear
escalation seriously. After the Cold War, the United States became
more ambitious in its foreign policy objectives. It spread Western polit-
ical values and free markets and forged military ties around the world.
But such objectives are opposed by nuclear-armed adversaries in China,
North Korea, Russia, and perhaps soon in Iran. U.S. policymakers
would be wise to not discount the potential power of their enemies.
And if they need to be reminded of what their foes may be able to do,
they need turn only to their own history.
foreign affairs 128

F e bruary 1
How Russians Learned

to Stop Worrying and
Love the War
The Pliant Majority Sustaining Putin’s Rule
Andrei Kolesnikov
I
n the late Soviet era, only twice did Moscow’s military interrupt
the daily lives of ordinary citizens. The first occasion was the inva-
sion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, which went largely unnoticed
by many Russians because few knew what was going on. The second
was the invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, which had far greater con-
sequences. For many people, the sight of zinc coffins being flown back
from a distant southern country, even as Marxism-Leninism was losing
currency at home, shattered the moral foundations of the Soviet project.
In 2022, Moscow’s military once again interrupted the lives of ordi-
nary citizens with an invasion, and the result has been even worse
than either of those previous events: Russia has just lived through the
most terrifying year in post-Soviet history. Yet despite growing loss of
life and stark moral defeats, there has been no shattering of national
foundations. Sure, Russians are becoming divided, and their opinions
Andrei Kolesnikov is a Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center.
foreign affairs 130

How Russians Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the War
polarized, as people grow tired of war. But far from weakening Putin’s
hold on power, the “special military operation” has only strengthened it.
Those who fear Putin have either fled the country or are silent.
The regime has a formidable arsenal of instruments to deploy against
anyone who speaks out or otherwise expresses opposition. It has used
the legal system to crush any dissent, handing down Stalinist prison
terms to antiwar activists. It has invented its own equivalent of yellow
stars to harass, threaten, and intimidate those deemed “foreign agents.”
(I had the honor of receiving such a designation in late December.)
It has closed down or blocked access to virtually all independent media.
And it has pinned the unofficial label of “national traitor” on anyone
who does not express delight at the state’s ramping up of repression,
the war, and the increasingly personal military-police-state regime
that is driving it.
And so, instead of protesting, most Russians have made clear that
they prefer to adapt. Even fleeing the country is not necessarily a form
of protest: for many, it is simply a pragmatic answer to the problem of
how to avoid being killed or becoming a killer. It is true that the popu-
lation is more anxious than ever. According to opinion surveys, anxiety
among Russians reached new heights in 2022, although it returned to
more or less tolerable levels when the threat of mobilization tempo-
rarily receded. But adaptation has become the overriding Russian trait.
Where will it end? For the moment, it seems that there is no limit.
DEATH AND DEPENDENCY

Putin is building a new empire, but it is not going well. People are flee-
ing it in droves. One of the mainstays of the Soviet empire was gran-
diloquent Communist building projects. But today’s emperor has set
about restoring Moscow’s empire by destroying those same Communist
projects with Russian missiles: a significant part of the Ukrainian infra-
structure that Putin has been attacking was built by his own twentieth-
century predecessors. Consider the TEC-5 power plant in Kharkiv.
Built by the Soviets in the 1970s, it provided electricity to millions
of people and became Ukraine’s second-largest thermal power plant.
In September 2022, it was hit by a Russian strike, leaving a fire that
raged for weeks and cutting off power to a large swath of the country.
It is hard not to see the difference: the previous empire launched the
first manmade satellite, Sputnik, and the first human, Yuri Gagarin,
into space; Putin launches deadly missiles into a neighboring country.
foreign affairs 131

This is the difference between soft power, which at a certain stage was
characteristic even of the Soviet Union, and Putin’s power, which is
not at all soft.
Still, 2022—a year of war, a year of permanent shock—has done
little to change popular acquiescence for the regime. This is not just a
defense reflex on the part of ordinary Russians—“My country, right or
wrong” or “Our leaders know best, since they have more information
than we do.” Instead, it is a double-edged response that seeks to keep
reality at bay. On the one hand, it is expressed in desire for vengeance
against the enemy, who are no longer even seen as human beings. On
the other hand, it is grounded in the fantasy that normal times can
continue in a country in which committing violence against outsiders
and sacrificing oneself in a heroic death on the battlefield are becoming
socially accepted norms.
This form of emotional protection explains why most Russians see
2022 as a very difficult year—but less difficult than the first year of the
COVID-19 pandemic or the chaos of the early 1990s. According to
polls by the independent Levada Center, by the end of 2022, fears of
mass repression, arbitrary rule, and a government crackdown had actu-
ally receded from a few months earlier. All those tools of tyranny were
used with increasing force during the year, and yet people said that they
were less concerned about them than before. That declining concern
is not only an effect of the pressure to sustain wartime unity; it is a
conscious unwillingness to acknowledge that anything has changed—a
desire for self-deception. Incidentally, according to polling data, the
only major fear that people express at the same high level as previously
is the prospect of another world war. That seems to be the only thing
average Russians are not deceiving themselves about.
A significant part of the population has all but overlooked Putin’s
violation of the very social contract that he laid down years before the
“special operation” began. From the beginning, officials asserted that
they were just military professionals doing their job and promised Rus-
sians that, as long as they supported the regime, basic needs would be
met and normal life would continue. Now, of course, that promise can no
longer hold. Putin requires the nation to share in what he has embarked
on, and it turns out he needs the bodies of Russians themselves to offer
up in sacrifice. This shift has been justified by the promise that death
in this manner will eclipse all their earthly sins, as Patriarch Kirill,
the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, once said. Sometimes the
foreign affairs 132

more terrible the lie and the more outlandish the justification of horrors,
the more easily the majority choose to believe it.
It helps that many Russians are utterly beholden to the state.
According to official statistics, the proportion of social payments in
the real incomes of the population is greater now than it was in Soviet
times. Despite the emergence of a market economy and a significant
class of self-sufficient people, Putin has done everything he can to
ensure that the economic role of the state remains as large as possible.
And he has used the influx of petrodollars to further that goal.
People who depend on the state are obedient, above all politically,
and the direction of the Russian economy in recent years has reinforced
that reality. Only a small percentage of the population gets its income
from business activity, whereas salaries from the public sector and social
payments command a large portion of people’s income. According to
data from the 2021 census, one out of three Russians—33 percent—
depend on social payments as a source of income. In addition, a quarter
of all Russians are materially dependent on someone else. Even taking
into account that the quality of the 2021 census data is the worst in the
country’s post-Soviet history, these figures are shocking.
For the time being, Putin is making his new demands for cannon
fodder against a relatively calm socioeconomic backdrop. But this could
change as the economy plummets. Given the inevitable drop in federal
budget revenues because of restrictions on oil and gas exports, fading
economic activity, and significant spending on defense and security, the
state will have fewer opportunities to buy the loyalty of the population
in the coming months. Still, it is likely that Putin will pull it off. For
one thing, security and law-enforcement agencies, from the army and
police to the special services, will continue to be well funded, and it is
they who will enforce loyalty. No one has canceled the carrot-and-stick
method, but the value of the stick is increasing.
ORWELL IN MOSCOW
Russian prosecution data gives some indication of both the extent of
overt opposition to Putin and the official response to it. In 2022, 20,467
people were detained on political grounds, mainly for expressing anti-
war sentiment in public; and 378 people were criminally prosecuted
for “discrediting or spreading fake news about the Russian army”—in
other words, for taking an antiwar position. Of those 378, fifty-one
have already been sentenced. Attracting the most attention have been
foreign affairs 133

the cases against Moscow municipal deputy Alexei Gorinov and liberal
politician Ilya Yashin. In July, Gorinov was given nearly seven years
in jail for spreading “knowingly false information” about the army. In
December, Yashin was sentenced to eight and a half years in prison
on similar grounds, in particular for mentioning the Bucha massacre.
Also in 2022, 176 individuals and organizations were declared “for-
eign agents,” and the Russian parliament passed 22 new laws aimed
at enhancing the state’s repressive powers. Among these were a new
law targeting lgbtq “propaganda” and one giving the state drastically
expanded powers over so-called foreign agents.
Equally striking has been the growing use of censorship. In 2022, the
authorities blocked more than 210,000 websites and Putin’s machine
effectively silenced any remotely independent media left in Russia.
Yet many of the media outlets that have been blocked or shut down
are managing to do their job efficiently from outside the country (and
sometimes even from within the country: Novaya Gazeta, for example,
is trying to promote new projects, and the former Echo of Moscow
radio broadcasts on YouTube partly from Moscow). Russians who want
to watch, listen to, or read alternative information and opinions can
use a virtual private network (vpn) to do so. Many exiled independent
media also broadcast on YouTube, which the Russian government is
reluctant to block for fear of invoking the wrath of the platform’s huge
numbers of depoliticized users.
In fact, as high as these numbers are, the tally of political prosecutions
and blocked websites reveals only what is on the surface. Anger at Putin
and with the war is far broader. Many who remain in Russia are afraid
to speak out; many have fled the country, voting with their feet against
Putin. And still others have returned to the late Soviet-era practice of
“kitchen democracy,” discussing and condemning Putin’s war at home
or quietly in cafés. Notably popular in Russia right now are classic works
of literature that contain subtle antiwar messages. The most read book at
the beginning of last year was George Orwell’s 1984. Other books selling
well include those about everyday life in 1930s Germany, in which peo-
ple recognize themselves and their fears. Intellectual publishing houses
are also reissuing antiwar books that are difficult for the authorities to
object to, such as the 1945 lectures of the German Swiss philosopher
Karl Jaspers on the collective guilt and responsibility of the Germans
and Leo Tolstoy’s blistering articles against war. These writers, too, are
expressing sentiments that many Russians today can identify with.
foreign affairs 134

Given the scale of the repression, it is unrealistic to expect a mass

uprising against Putin, especially since most ordinary Russians prefer
to bury their heads in the sand and find some bizarre rationality and
truth in the regime’s logic. People do not want to be on the side of evil,
so they designate evil as good, thereby forcing themselves to believe
that Putin is bringing peace. As one Kremlin spin doctor put it, the
president is launching “missiles of righteousness.” Otherwise, Rus-
sians tell themselves, NATO would crush them and dismember their
country—even if there was not a shred of evidence of that happening
before February 2022. Putin knows best.
DISAPPEARING ACT
Putin and his Kremlin ideologues love to talk about the West’s desire
to wipe Russia off the map. For their part, they would like to see Rus-
sia take up a much bigger place on the map by building an enormous
empire. They want a return to the distant past. The irony is that, as Rus-
sia has—at least in the Kremlin’s own imagined geography—expanded
its physical extent in its brutal war against Ukraine, it has effectively
disappeared from the political map.
The West once saw Russia as a country on the path to democracy.
Now it regards it as an international pariah and a failed state. Russia’s
former Soviet neighbors—members of the Commonwealth of Inde-
pendent States—are frightened and have politely distanced themselves
from Moscow; some of them are successfully exploiting the labor force
that has fled Putin. (In 2022, 2.9 million Russians went to Kazakhstan
alone, and nearly 150,000 obtained identification papers needed to
work there.) China and India, while remaining on friendly terms with
Russia at the rhetorical and economic level, have watched in disbelief
as Putin descends into a vortex of irrational self-destruction, taking his
nation’s economy, workforce, dignity, and soft power with him.
In March 2022, 80 percent of Russians “definitely supported” or
“mostly supported” Russia’s war, according to a Levada Center poll.
To be precise, they supported “the actions of the Russian armed forces
in Ukraine.” Back then, public opinion was not ready to consider it
a “war,” and not only because people could be prosecuted for calling
it that: they assumed that it would be a short military campaign. By
December, the terms had changed. There was no longer any doubt
that Russia was fighting a war, to the point that top officials, seeking
to justify the army’s serial failures, were calling it a “war with NATO.”
foreign affairs 135

(They were not, of course, calling it a war with brotherly Ukraine, which
was apparently being used by the West to destroy Russia.) By that
point, whatever Putin was perpetrating still had the general support
of 71 percent of respondents, but the portion of the population who
“definitely supported” it had dropped from 52 percent in March to
just 41 percent in December. Among those who are most dismayed by
Putin’s bloodbath are younger Russians and people who get their infor-
mation from the Internet rather than Russian television. In December,
50 percent of respondents favored peace talks, against just 40 percent
who thought it was better to keep fighting. (Russian support for peace
talks peaked, unsurprisingly, during Putin’s partial mobilization in Sep-
tember and October, when it reached 57 percent.) Society is divided.
But what about taking responsibility for Putin’s meat grinder?
Around May 2022, when it became clear that the war would not be
over as quickly as planned—and Russians themselves were not yet
directly ensnared in the fighting—the number of respondents who
expressed a sense of moral responsibility for the deaths of people in
Ukraine briefly increased. After that, however, it stabilized as a marginal
phenomenon: currently, only about one in four Russians expresses some
degree of responsibility for the war, and just one in ten Russians con-
sider themselves “definitely” responsible. By contrast, about six out of
ten absolve themselves of any responsibility whatsoever for the deaths
of people from a fraternal nation in which many of them have relatives
and acquaintances.
When people are being killed and cities and essential civilian infra-
structure are being razed, disavowing responsibility is both infantile
and amoral. But Russians’ acceptance of collective responsibility, not
to mention guilt, will have to come later—if at all. For the foreseeable
future, the brutal authoritarian regime under which they live imposes
certain norms of behavior and has no intention of disappearing, toning
down its repression and propaganda, or bringing an end to the war.
Of course, the obedient, if weary, population will accept with gratitude
whatever the autocrat gives—even peace.
Sometimes it seems as though Russia really has disappeared from
the map or has been illegally annexed by its own government. In less
than a year, Putin and his team have managed to discredit everything
Russian, even Russian culture. Russia’s image has not taken such a
battering since the days of Stalin. The Soviet Union in its later years
had a lot more global respect than Russia does now.
foreign affairs 136

In one sense, everything that happened since Russia invaded Ukraine

is captured in the vicious circle of the country’s political history. My
grandfather was arrested on political grounds in 1938, the year of the
Great Terror, which meant that at the age of nine, my mother became
the daughter of an “enemy of the people.” She died over 20 years ago,
confident that her country was at last on the path to normal demo-
cratic development. She did not live to see her son labeled a “foreign
agent,” for such was the state’s gift to me on December 24, 2022. Out
of three generations, therefore, two found themselves enemies of auto-
cratic regimes. Separating an “enemy of the people” grandfather and
his “foreign agent” grandson were more than eight decades of difficult
Soviet and Russian history, including three in which the country was
liberalizing: under Khrushchev, Gorbachev, and Yeltsin. Indeed, accord-
ing to one version of the political proverb attributed to Pyotr Stolypin,
the prerevolutionary prime minister of the Russian Empire, in a year,
everything in the country changes; in a century, nothing changes.
foreign affairs 137

F e bruary 2
The Long Twilight of

the Islamic Republic
Iran’s Transformational Season of Protest
Ali Vaez
F
or most Iranian Americans, the past four months have been
unspeakably harrowing. Since the tragic death of Mahsa Amini
at the brutal hands of Tehran’s “morality police” in September,
we have watched thousands of videos of young protesters, armed with
nothing but their bravery, standing up to a regime bereft of mercy. We
have shuddered in horror at the killing of nearly 500 people—includ-
ing more than 60 children—with live ammunition, the blinding of
hundreds of protesters with rubber bullets and metal pellets, and the
execution of four protesters after tortured confessions and sham trials.
We have cried as so many loving young men and women have had
their lives cut short to prolong an oppressive gerontocracy. We have
been awed by the grit of schoolgirls who are burning their mandatory
headscarves, and we have had our hearts broken as we watched these
girls sob on their loved ones’ graves. We fear the worst for the thousands
ali vaez is Director of the Iran Project at the International Crisis Group and an Adjunct
Professor at Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service.
foreign affairs 138

The Long Twilight of the Islamic Republic
who have been arrested, and we have been relieved about the ones who
have been freed. And given that all of the past protest movements
against the so-called Islamic Republic have ended in grief, we dread
that this could become another turning point in Iranian history where
history fails to turn.
The uprising has lost some momentum in the past few weeks. The
protests have been scattered and relatively shallow. But the regime
remains too resolved to cling to power, too fearsome, and too totalizing
in its control over the airwaves and cyberspace. The protests fell short,
for now, of a revolution in the streets.
But they nonetheless constitute the most widespread and sustained
challenge to the Islamic Republic in decades. More than 160 cities
were rocked by demonstrations that transcended social, ethnic, and
sectarian fault lines, all in pursuit of a single objective: toppling the
existing political order. And a revolution has already happened in the
minds of the Iranian people. Iranians now share a broad-based con-
sensus that something in the regime is broken and cannot be mended.
Gone are any illusions of reforms, fantasies of redeemers, hopes for
economic miracles, and patience for better days. What was once an
anguished whim or a distant wish, which had turned into ravaging
despair, has now turned into an irrevocable demand for fundamental
political change and freedom.
The Islamic Republic is now where the Soviet Union was in the early
1980s. The system is ideologically bankrupt, at a political dead end, and
incapable of addressing its structural economic and societal troubles.
It still has the will to fight, as evidenced by its brutal response to the
uprisings. But no amount of force will end the standoff with its people,
which is primarily the result of the regime’s failures across the board.
There is little left of the promises made during the 1979 revolution to
build a shining, pious city on a hill. In practice, the regime has cre-
ated a militarized republic of fear in which mediocrity is glorified and
mendacity institutionalized. The Islamic Republic’s architects vowed
there would be egalitarian prosperity for all, but instead, they delivered
affluence for a few and ruined what was once a booming economy. They
promised paradise on earth and then dried out the land and polluted
the air, imperiling a civilization that has survived for 7,000 years.
The Islamic Republic is now a hollow misnomer. It is a theocracy
that has inadvertently secularized the population. It is a republic that
has demolished the participatory base it once used to legitimize its
foreign affairs 139

rule. By gradually tightening his circle of insiders, Supreme Leader

Ali Khamenei has sidelined an increasing number of the original rev-
olutionaries and other politicians who sought to put the system on a
better path. Khamenei elevated sycophants over skilled experts and
loyalists over loyal critics, prompting a crisis of competence that has
brought the country to the brink of socioeconomic and environmental
disaster. There is no one left with political heft, acumen, or gravitas to
deliver hard truths to Khamenei, who will soon turn 84.
The regime’s primary failure is to understand and evolve with its own
society, which has grown in size and sophistication. In 1976, Iran was
home to 34 million people, more than half of whom lived in rural areas.
In 2016, the country had a population of 80 million, with 75 percent
living in cities. In 1976, one in every 230,000 Iranians was a university
student; in 2016, that ratio was one in 20. Today, more than half of
university graduates are women, but their unemployment rate is twice
that of men. This more urbanized and educated population is facing
dire living conditions as a result of calamitous mismanagement, ram-
pant corruption, and stifling sanctions. One in every five Iranians now
lives under the poverty line. Economic growth in the past decade has
been the worst the country has experienced since the 1950s. The Iranian
Parliament’s research center has projected that even if Iran’s economy
were to grow at a rate of eight percent—which is nearly impossible to
fathom—it would take until 2026 for it to return to where it was in
2011. Not surprisingly, hopelessness has become endemic.
Government surveys show that 83 percent of Iranians are dissatis-
fied about their quality of life. But rather than liberalize the economy
(as China did in past decades) or widen social freedoms (as Saudi
Arabia has done recently) to distract from political repression and
economic malaise, the Islamic Republic’s custodians continually sty-
mied reforms and stonewalled opportunities to revive the nuclear deal,
which would have ushered in sanctions relief. They closed Iran’s political
space, including to the country’s more pragmatic forces, eliminating any
channel through which people could air pent-up grievances and affect
policy. The regime then doubled down on harassing half the population
by enforcing a policy that was already a lost cause: the mandatory hijab,
which constituted one of the pillars of the Islamic Republic’s identity.
The hijab crackdown came after several years of de facto liberaliza-
tion under the administration of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani,
who governed from 2013 to 2021. Polling data showed that in 2018,
foreign affairs 140

70 percent of women were wearing the hijab “improperly.” Losing

this newly tasted liberty under current president Ebrahim Raisi was
thus especially painful. Iranian people were clearly provoked when, last
summer, images circulated of a desperate mother blocking a Guid-
ance Patrol van and begging the country’s police not to take her sick
daughter, who allegedly disregarded the Islamic dress code, to a “reed-
ucation center.” They were again angered when they saw a coerced
televised confession of a visibly tortured 28-year-old artist accused of
immodest clothing. When Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman, died
in the custody of the Guidance Patrol on September 16, it unleashed an
avalanche of fury.
HEAVEN AND EARTH

Iranian women’s struggle for emancipation is not of recent vintage.
From Tahirih, a poet who unveiled herself in an assembly of men in
1848, through the resistance against compulsory unveiling during Reza
Shah Pahlavi’s reign in the 1930s up to the protests today, the struggle
has survived the test of time.
So has broader opposition to theocratic policies. The current regime’s
failure to Islamize Iranian society in its own likeness burst into the
open on a night in November 1997, less than two decades after the
revolution. On that cold evening, Iran claimed the final spot in the
following summer’s World Cup after a tense match against Australia. A
tidal wave of celebration swept across the country. People drove around
honking their horns and blasting loud Persian pop music produced in
Los Angeles. Women dropped their scarves and danced with men in
the public arena.
At the time, I was a 17-year-old high school student living a double
life—conforming to Iran’s religious strictures outdoors while existing
by liberal standards indoors. A common witticism was that, before the
revolution, people prayed inside and partied outside, whereas after the
revolution, they prayed outside and partied inside. But on that night,
such piety fell by the wayside. Suddenly, a country that was still emerg-
ing from the ravages of war with Iraq, in which there was little color
and no air, was blooming with life and energy. A clear, palpable desire
for secularism and normality coursed through the country, overtaking
whatever remained of Islamic and revolutionary zeal.
The political manifestation of those demands was the upset victory
of Iranian President Mohammad Khatami, who came to power with
foreign affairs 141

an overwhelming mandate for sociopolitical reforms earlier in 1997.

In my first time voting, I cast my vote for him, and I hoped for a new
dawn through evolutionary, not revolutionary, change. But Khamenei
and the unelected institutions under his supervision, including the
Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (irgc), moved aggressively to
sabotage and obstruct his agenda. When, in 1999, the regime muzzled
the press that Khatami had cautiously freed, it sparked a Tiananmen
Square moment for Iran. Along with thousands of other university
students, I took to the streets to protest the Islamic Republic’s oppres-
sion. But security forces and right-wing vigilantes violently crushed
our movement. They raided our dorms and beat the demonstrators.
A few students were even thrown off the roof.
After graduating, I faced a difficult decision: whether I should stay
or leave. Iran was my home and the only country I knew. But it was a
country that did not allow for political participation, could not meet
my professional aspirations, and incessantly harassed me for my beliefs
and lifestyle. Ultimately, I left and moved to Switzerland in 2002 for
my graduate studies. Hundreds of thousands of university graduates
emigrate from Iran every year, making that same decision. Accord-
ing to a recent survey, 71 percent of the country’s university students
have grim views on Iran’s future, and 85 percent want to move abroad.
During the recent protests, someone wrote on a wall: “we have nothing
to lose, other than our shackles,” capturing this bleak perspective.
Iranians continued to struggle, of course, after my departure. In
2006, Iranian women worked to collect one million signatures for a
petition that demanded the country repeal various discriminatory laws.
The regime—brooking not even the most civil form of protest—pros-
ecuted the movement’s activists and leaders, eventually destroying it.
A few years later, the unelected Guardian Council, which supervises
elections, rigged the 2009 presidential contest to ensure ultraconserva-
tive Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was reelected, resulting
in eight months of widespread demonstrations. In these protests’ early
days, three million people silently marched on the streets of Tehran.
But the regime once again brought down its iron fist, and what became
known as the Green Movement eventually faltered. Its leaders were
put under house arrest, where they remain today.
I also took to the streets in 2009, but in Boston, where I was com-
pleting a postdoctoral fellowship. I wanted the Obama administration
to abandon negotiations with Tehran over its nuclear program and
foreign affairs 142

increase the pressure on Iran. I was also becoming newly attentive to

U.S. politics, and I watched as Israel and the United States mulled
attacking Iran to curb its rapidly expanding nuclear program. I worried
that such an action would kick-start a deadly and devastating war that
would allow the regime’s most hard-line elements to change the subject
away from domestic issues and consolidate power as they did during Iraq’s
invasion of Iran in 1980. I shifted from an academic career in science to
working in the field of Iran policy, where I hoped I could help my host
country avoid the mistakes it committed in Afghanistan and Iraq.
My career shift came in parallel with a shift in Iran’s calculus.
Khamenei, spooked by the Arab Spring in 2011, sought to rehabili-
tate the political system’s ailing legitimacy by allowing a competitive
presidential election (by the Islamic Republic’s standards) in 2013.
The contest was won by Rouhani, a loyal insider but also a relative
moderate who was critical of Ahmadinejad’s radical ways. In 2015,
he signed a nuclear deal with China, France, Germany, Russia, the
United Kingdom, and the United States, helping ease the sanctions
that had afflicted Iran’s economy. But under Rouhani, as under Khat-
ami years before, unelected institutions blocked any further hopes for
better ties with the West or for socioeconomic reforms. The irgc’s
cooperation with Russia in Syria to preserve the Assad regime, the
arrest of U.S. sailors whose boats had drifted into Iran’s territorial
waters, and provocative ballistic missile tests dampened the mood.
Rouhani could neither deliver on his promise of releasing the Green
Movement’s leaders nor tax conglomerates affiliated with the irgc or the
supreme leader’s office.
That year, I visited Iran to discuss nuclear and regional diplomacy
with Iranian officials and experts in my capacity as the representative of
an international conflict prevention organization. My close friend Sia-
mak Namazi also traveled to Iran to visit his family. I returned to the
United States after a week, but Namazi did not. While in Tehran, he
was arrested on bogus charges of conspiring to overthrow the govern-
ment and sent to Iran’s notorious Evin prison. He has been there ever
since, making him Iran’s longest-held American detainee. His arrest
was a warning shot to me and anyone else who hoped that the nuclear
deal would be the floor, not the ceiling, of the Islamic Republic’s will-
ingness to make peace with the outside world.
My home country’s door was therefore shut to me. When I lost
my father to cancer three years later, I could not go back. The regime’s
foreign affairs 143

cancerous paranoia about dual nationals deprived me, like many others,
of seeing a parent before his death, being with family in dark times,
and attending a loved one’s funeral.
OWN WORST ENEMY

The election of Donald Trump to the White House ushered in a newly
hostile era of U.S.-Iranian relations—and a more difficult time for the
Iranian people. Trump withdrew from the nuclear deal in 2018, reim-
posed sanctions on Iran, and brought the two countries to the verge of
conflict as he sought to present the regime with a binary choice: either
make sweeping concessions to the United States on foreign and domes-
tic policies or face economic implosion. His administration’s approach,
more vendetta than strategy, employed indiscriminate coercive tools to
achieve unrealistic strategic ends. It impoverished Iranians while dis-
crediting the more pragmatic forces within the country’s government,
in turn empowering and entrenching the hard-liners.
Benefiting from U.S. mistakes, Khamenei tried once again to
monopolize power. He seemed to conclude that Ahmadinejad’s fail-
ure, which led to economic ruin and Iran’s isolation, was due not to
a defective concept but to a flawed character. In the 2021 elections,
instead of a self-made demagogue who owed little to the man at the
helm, he chose a tested apparatchik who owed everything to him: Raisi.
And unlike 2009, in 2021, the Guardian Council rigged the elections
before the polls, barring all serious challengers to Raisi to make sure
Khamenei’s chosen candidate was assured of victory. It was the last nail
in the coffin for the institution of Iranian elections.
In the background, Iranian society was still fighting for its funda-
mental rights. In 2017, the 32-year-old activist Vida Movahed stood
bareheaded on a utility box on Tehran’s Enghelab Street, silently waving
her white headscarf. She was imprisoned, but thousands of women
followed suit, posting their photos on social media in what became
the Girls of Enghelab protests. In 2019, Iranians protested in reac-
tion to an overnight spike in gas prices. According to Amnesty Inter-
national, the regime killed more than 300 protesters in three days;
some estimates go far higher. The brutality was shocking to Iranians,
but instead of terrorizing people into submission, the state’s response
catalyzed more fury.
Then came a moment of moral convulsion: the downing of Ukraine
International Airlines Flight 752 by the Revolutionary Guards on
foreign affairs 144

January 8, 2020, which killed all 176—mostly Iranian—passengers and

crew. The government initially blamed the crash on a technical issue
with the plane. The price of this lie was more lies. It was only after three
days and intense international scrutiny that the irgc shifted to blaming
“human error,” announcing that they mistakenly took the flight for
an incoming U.S. cruise missile aimed at the supreme leader’s office
in retaliation for Iran’s ballistic missiles attack on U.S. bases in Iraq,
itself a retaliatory act for the U.S. killing of top Iranian general Qasem
Soleimani in Baghdad a few days earlier. The incident and attempted
cover up irredeemably deepened society’s mistrust toward the state.
To this day, the regime has failed to bring those responsible to justice.
Once again, protests broke out; once again, the regime put them down.
But this kind of victory does not make a victor. With its electoral
legitimacy in ruins, public trust in Iran’s institutions plummeted as
moral indignation grew. And yet the Islamic Republic continued to
undermine itself. Faezeh Hashemi Rafsanjani, the daughter of one of
the regime’s key founding fathers, claimed that the shah’s repression
paled in comparison with what the Islamic Republic has done so far.
(She was arrested in September.) A regime that glorified its defense
of the country against an “imposed war,” when former Iraqi Presi-
dent Saddam Hussein invaded Iran in an act of aggression, claimed
that nato would eventually have attacked Russia if Russian President
Vladimir had not preemptively attacked Ukraine—going further than
Putin himself. A country that was the victim of Iraq’s chemical weap-
ons looked the other way when its Syrian ally did the same against its
own people. The Islamic Republic’s characterization of regional foes
as “child-killing regimes” now rings hollow given the number of chil-
dren that have fallen victim to its heavy-handedness.
By stubbornly refusing to listen to its own people, by believing its
own propaganda, and by not allowing any pathway for change other
than protest, the Islamic Republic brought itself to a point of social
upheaval. It shows, however, no sign of splintering at the top. The
regime has experienced no significant defections. Unlike the shah’s
government, the Islamic Republic’s elite do not have villas in the Côte
d’Azur, the Swiss Alps, or southern California where they can flee.
There is also no one promising them a way out or amnesty in a post–
Islamic Republic era. It is easier for the regime to simply double down
on claims that the protests are a massive foreign-orchestrated plot than
to hold up a mirror to itself.
foreign affairs 145

WILL YOU JOIN IN OUR CRUSADE?

On the other hand, there are the people of Iran. They can be divided
into four different groups.
At the forefront are the revolutionaries. Mostly in their teens and
early 20s, this is a generation that has thrown caution to the wind
and its headscarves to the flames. Even though they appear to be a
minority, they seem unwilling to yield. They are not as risk-averse as
my generation, whose parents remembered the revolution and knew
radical change often ends in grief. In fact, they seem determined to
be cleansed of their fathers’ and grandfathers’ failure to confront the
regime, which deprived them of their future.
Bred in the crucible of despair, this generation now seeks to reclaim
their world from zealots they see as enemies. The demonstrators’ man-
tra—“our enemy is right here; they lie when they say it is the United
States”—captures this sentiment. They have displayed a remarkable
degree of creativity in their protests, creating a movement that is leader-
less, spontaneous, amorphous, and atomized, which has made crushing
it akin to a game of whack-a-mole for the regime’s forces.
In the second group are the people who empathize with the young
revolutionaries but have yet to fully mobilize. It is composed mostly
of the middle class, which is increasingly middle-aged and, as a result,
harbors deep reservations about radical change in the absence of a
viable alternative. It frets over the possible consequences of fighting
the regime in the streets, in part because it has little cushion left after
years of sanctions and mismanagement and can therefore ill afford a
prolonged and costly confrontation with the state. This is, for the most
part, a generation that, in the French novelist Victor Hugo’s words,
“asks nothing but repose; it thirsts for but one thing, peace. . . . Of
great events, great hazards, great adventures, great men . . . we have
seen enough.”
This group has created a mathematical dilemma for the movement.
If the protests do not reach a critical mass and develop a positive vision
for the future, the silent majority is unlikely to join. Reaching that
threshold, however, will not be possible unless they join. In the near
future, another trigger could alter the calculus, bringing this generation
out to the streets. But that point has not yet been reached.
Finally, there are the diaspora Iranians. They have come together in
ways not seen in the past four decades to support compatriots inside
their tormented homeland. They have shed a bright light on horrors
foreign affairs 146

committed against the Iranian people and have garnered interna-

tional backing for the protesters’ cause. Yet for some of the loudest
voices among them, this is a fight to topple the regime, regardless of
the cost. In a visceral environment, they turn against anyone who would
dare harbor views that differ in the slightest from theirs on how Iran
should transition to democracy while containing the Islamic Republic’s
greatest threats to international peace and security. Their failure to be
the Iran they want to see—and to adopt a big-tent approach in the
fight against the Islamic Republic—has led to fragmentation among
the Iranian opposition.
A movement whose core mantra could not be more pluralist and pro-
gressive (“Women! Life! Freedom!”) is being instrumentalized by some
in the diaspora who are advancing a vengeful campaign against other
expats they wrongly accuse of being regime collaborators. Cyber-vig-
ilantes abusively troll pundits and policymakers as the exiles turn on
one another to settle scores and jockey for the messiah’s mantle. I rec-
ognize that they might smear and slander me for this article, too, but
this group’s intolerance and penchant for undemocratic means mimics
the authoritarianism that has long plagued Iran. It also risks helping
this culture of tyranny outlive the Islamic Republic.
It is unclear how much support exists within the country for the objec-
tives the diaspora is pursuing. Iranian protesters, for example, do not
appear to be demanding that Western states stop nuclear talks with Iran or
that they expel Iranian diplomats. Conversely, the protesters’ demand for
a referendum on Iran’s political order is not reflected externally.
Many Iranian exiles want the United States to do more, replicating
what the West did in the early 1990s to midwife democracy in South
Africa. They do not consider that the apartheid regime relied on, rather
than defied, the West, or that today’s Iran has no Nelson Mandela or,
just as important, a Frederik Willem de Klerk. Nor do they consider
that revolutionary change in Iran in 1979, Tunisia in 2011, and Egypt in
2011 did not result from U.S. sanctions or imposed isolation. Conversely,
Washington’s express desire to get rid of leaders in Syria in 2011 and
in Venezuela in 2019 did not succeed. The United States’ attempt to
manufacture a new order in Iraq was arguably an abject disaster.
The uncomfortable truth is that the Iranian people’s cause for their
emancipation stands or falls on its own. Foreigners are mostly bystanders.
That is not to say there is nothing the United States can do to
help, and the Biden administration has taken important actions. It has
foreign affairs 147

consistently expressed solidarity with Iranian protesters at the highest

levels, shed light on their plight in international forums, and isolated
Iran globally. Washington has used sanctions both to punish the regime
and to help ordinary Iranians: tightening restrictions against human
rights violators and relaxing them to facilitate the Iranian people’s
access to information amid the government’s efforts to cut its people
off. The Biden administration has sought to strike a delicate balance.
It did not stand aside as the Obama administration did in 2009, but it
also did not jump in the middle of the fray as the Trump administration
did in 2019 with its thinly veiled pursuit of regime change.
The United States also has other considerations in Iran. It cannot
afford to ignore Tehran’s nuclear program, which is now closer than
ever to creating nuclear weapons, or the fate of the three U.S. citizens
who remain Iranian hostages. Yet if Washington deals with the custo-
dians of the Islamic Republic, critics at home and abroad will admonish
the United States for rescuing a regime seen to be on the ropes. At
the same time, not engaging in diplomacy might push Iran to cross
the Rubicon and develop a nuclear weapon as the ultimate deterrent
against perceived threats to the regime, which will serve neither global
peace nor the cause of democracy in Iran. A U.S. or Israeli military
intervention to stop Iran’s dash toward nuclear weapons could also
make the regime more determined to acquire them, further securitize
and militarize Iran’s domestic space, and destabilize the region as a
wounded government strikes back—hoping for a rally-round-the-flag
effect to staunch the loss of legitimacy it has brought on itself. It is
hard to see how the nuclear crisis coming to a head will help transition
Iran into a democracy.
CERTAIN UNCERTAINTY
Predicting what comes next is a fool’s errand. The regime has
tried everything to stop the demonstrations. It has waited in
the hope that the movement will fizzle out, and it has carried
out violent clampdowns to prevent mass gatherings. It has
tried to radicalize the peripheral provinces—where Iran’s mis-
treated minorities largely reside—to deepen fears of civil strife.
It has attempted to divide and conquer the movement through
dialogue with some reformist figures and by fueling infight-
ing among the exiled opposition. It has executed, or as the un has
characterized it, engaged in the “state-sanctioned killing of ” protesters to
foreign affairs 148

instill fear. But all of these efforts, at best, buy the regime time until the
next inevitable confrontation between the state and society.
The Iranian people have changed over the past 44 years. But the
Islamic Republic has not kept up. It is incapable of admitting its mis-
takes and rectifying itself because it fears that conceding under pressure
will only invite more pressure—both from the bottom up and from
the outside. For its part, the exiled opposition admits that the struggle
against the regime is likely to be a marathon, not a sprint. This opposi-
tion seeks a campaign of ultimate pressure and isolation in the hope of
accelerating the regime’s demise. What all this pressure on the Iranian
people—from above, by the regime, and from outside—will do to the
fabric of the country’s society seems to be an afterthought to either side.
There are also no obvious off-ramps from Iran’s deteriorating relations
with the West, as both sides continue to climb the escalatory ladder:
Iran by ratcheting up its nuclear program and assisting Russia in its war
of aggression against Ukraine, and the West by tightening sanctions.
I now fear that my dream of a more pluralistic, prosperous, and
free Iran moves farther away with every new hanging at the gallows,
new sanction, and the growing politics of hatred. I hope against
all hope that this moment neither ends in horror nor becomes an
unending horror. But there is one thing I am certain of: nothing
will ever be the same.
foreign affairs 149

Mar c h 2 2
A New Order in the

Middle East?
Iran and Saudi Arabia’s Rapprochement
Could Transform the Region
Maria Fantappie and Vali Nasr
O
n March 6, 2023, representatives from Iran and Saudi Arabia
met in Beijing for discussions brokered by China. Four days
later, Riyadh and Tehran announced that they had decided
to normalize relations. This landmark agreement has the potential to
transform the Middle East by realigning its major powers, replacing
the current Arab-Iranian divide with a complex web of relationships,
and weaving the region into China’s global ambitions. For Beijing, the
announcement was a great leap forward in its rivalry with Washington.
It was not supposed to be this way. It was the United States that
had encouraged Iran and Saudi Arabia to start discussions, in 2021, in
an effort to reduce tensions between the Gulf rivals, advance nuclear
talks, and bring an end to the conflict in Yemen. Tehran and Riyadh
held five rounds of direct talks, and informal conversations continued
thereafter. Then, during his visit to Saudi Arabia in July 2022, U.S.
MARIA FANTAPPIE is an Associate Fellow at the Istituto Affari Internazionali in Rome.

VALI NASR is Majid Khadduri Professor of International Affairs and Middle East Studies
at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies.
foreign affairs 150

A New Order in the Middle East?
President Joe Biden urged the Gulf Cooperation Council (gcc)—

an intergovernmental union of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi
Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates—to join with Israel to contain
Iran. But the Saudi government turned to China instead, viewing Pres-
ident Xi Jinping as a better mediator with Tehran. Involving China, the
Saudis believed, was the surest guarantee that a deal with Iran would
last, since Tehran would be unlikely to risk jeopardizing its relations
with Beijing by violating such a deal. Xi discussed the issue with Saudi
Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman during his visit to Riyadh in
December 2022 and then met with Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi
in Beijing in February 2023. Intense discussions between Iran and
Saudi Arabia followed, during which the two sides agreed to bury the
hatchet and normalize relations. For both countries, Xi’s personal inter-
vention was critical. Both have long-standing political and economic
ties with Beijing, and the Chinese president was, therefore, able to act
as a trusted broker between them.
If the deal is fully implemented, Tehran and Riyadh will be closely
aligned once more. It was only in 2016 that diplomatic ties between
the countries were severed, after a mob torched the Saudi embassy in
Tehran. Now, according to the new agreement, both sides will reopen
embassies, and the Saudi government will end its support for the Iran
International television channel that Tehran holds responsible for
domestic dissent. Both sides will uphold the April 2022 cease-fire
in Yemen and begin work on a formal peace agreement to end the
civil war in that country. Iran will cease supplying Houthi rebels with
arms and persuade them to halt their missile attacks on Saudi Arabia.
In addition, the deal calls for enhanced economic and diplomatic ties
between Iran and the gcc countries, and for Iran and its Arab partners
to begin discussions on building a new regional security framework.
Moreover, China will continue to oversee all of these steps.
The Iranian-Saudi deal has the potential to end one of the region’s
most significant rivalries and extend economic ties across the Gulf.
No longer will Iran stand alone to confront an alliance of Arabs and
Israelis, which the United States hoped would do the difficult job of
containing it. Instead, the deal has the potential to bring Iran closer
to its Arab neighbors and gradually stabilize its relations in the region.
Underscoring this promise, the Saudi finance minister, Mohammed
al-Jadaan, has pledged that, if all goes to plan, Saudi Arabia is ready
to invest in Iran’s economy. Raisi has already accepted an invitation
foreign affairs 151

to visit Riyadh at an unspecified date, in a further sign of both sides’

intention to strengthen ties. The consequences for the region of such
a rapidly developing relationship may be profound.
TEHRAN LOOKS EAST

Both Tehran and Riyadh believe that they will benefit from working
through China to restore regional ties. For both countries, working with
Beijing is a new development. In 2015, Iran’s priority was improving
relations with the United States and Europe. It viewed negotiations
with its neighbors as secondary. The result was the Joint Comprehensive
Plan of Action—the nuclear deal with the United States and its fellow
permanent members of the un Security Council, plus Germany—
which curtailed Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief.
After U.S. President Donald Trump withdrew American support for
the jcpoa in 2018, Saudi Arabia and the gcc drifted closer to Israel, a
move that was accelerated by an Iranian attack on Saudi oil facilities
in 2019. Iran in turn then changed its focus, giving new emphasis to
improving relations with its neighbors and to regional trade. To that
end, Tehran reestablished full diplomatic ties with Kuwait and the uae
in 2022. But the Beijing deal with the Saudis is the larger prize Iran
has sought—a true opening to the Arab world, which could soon be
extended to Bahrain and Egypt.
Tehran welcomes China’s deepening role in the Middle East
because it weakens U.S. influence in the region and undermines the
U.S.-led sanctions regime that has crippled Iran’s economy. To that
end, better ties with gcc countries will lessen the threat posed by the
Trump administration–brokered Abraham Accords, which initiated
closer intelligence and military coordination between Israel, Saudi
Arabia, and the uae (and later extended to Morocco and Sudan),
thereby extending the shadow war between Iran and Israel to the Gulf.
Although Tehran might be willing to accept bilateral ties between
the gcc and Israel, it could not tolerate a U.S.-backed Arab-Israeli
military alliance against it. Such an alliance would be all the more
threatening to Tehran in the aftermath of failed nuclear talks with
the Biden administration, domestic political protests, a growing Israeli
presence in Azerbaijan and Iraq, and an increasing willingness by
Israel’s new right-wing government to contemplate war in order to
stop Iran’s nuclear program.
foreign affairs 152

RIYADH ’ S BALANCING ACT

For Saudi Arabia, the Beijing-led agreement constitutes a more auda-
cious strategic shift. Relations between Riyadh and Washington are
at a historic low. Saudi Arabian satisfaction with U.S. policy in the
region has been declining since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Riyadh was
unhappy with the dismantling of Iraq’s government, troubled by the
nuclear deal, angry with U.S. unwillingness to support Saudi Arabian
interests against Iran in Syria and Yemen, and concerned by its failure
to defend the kingdom when its oil facilities were attacked by Iran in
2019. Riyadh believes that the United States—once its stalwart ally—is
focused on other priorities, and it does not believe that Washington has
a clear plan for regional security in the wake of the stalled nuclear talks
with Iran. Saudi leaders are also dissatisfied with the current leadership
in Washington. Biden was slow to repair relations after pledging as a
candidate to treat the regime as a “pariah,” following the murder of the
journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018.
Lacking the advanced military capabilities of its larger and more
aggressive neighbors, Saudi Arabia has always been obsessed with its
own defense. Reducing tensions with Tehran will not end these con-
cerns, but it buys Riyadh more time to shore up its security and diver-
sify its strategic options. The desire for security led Saudi Arabia to
seek ties with Israel over the past decade, and the same desire is now
motivating its cultivation of China. Saudi Arabia’s strategy is intended
to guarantee its security. By assembling a broad network of partners,
including China, Israel, and the United States and by improving rela-
tions with adversaries such as Iran, Syria, and Turkey, the Saudi regime
hopes to shore up its long-term stability.
Saudi Arabia has set the ambitious goal of becoming an advanced
industrial economy, as well as a cultural and tourism hub, by 2030.
Achieving this will require U.S. military support, Israeli security and
technology, trade with Europe and China, and domestic stability. The
Saudi strategy is at odds with Washington’s conception of regional
security, which favors isolating Iran and does not rule out war, though
there is no clear U.S. plan to manage it. The United States has also
struggled to recognize that it cannot claim that nothing has changed in
its commitments to its Middle Eastern partners while also making clear
that it is pivoting away from the region. In effect, Riyadh is showing
that if U.S. policy does not serve Saudi interests, then the Saudis will
not be beholden to the alliance.
foreign affairs 153

Washington has also been slow to realize that Saudi Arabia sees itself
not as a security vassal of the United States but as a regional power
capable of playing an independent role in world politics. Riyadh
believes that the old paradigm of “U.S. security in exchange for low oil
prices”—as one Saudi official put it—is dead. Saudi Arabia’s vision of
strategic autonomy is not simply a reaction to diminishing U.S. engage-
ment in the Middle East but a statement of the kingdom’s ambitions.
Riyadh wants close and independent ties with the United States, as
well as with Russia and China. It also sees itself as playing a crucial
role in the region, balancing Egypt, Iran, Israel, and Turkey to protect
its own security and wield regional influence. To hold that coveted
position, Saudi Arabia must nurture relations with all its neighbors.
In 2022, Riyadh restored ties with Turkey; now it is doing the same
with Iran. Next it will be Israel’s turn. Relations with Iran will give the
Saudis much-needed political cover with their allies, meaning that a
deal with Israel can be presented as a bilateral agreement, rather than
a military axis against another Muslim country. The Beijing deal both
affirms Riyadh’s view of its status in the Middle East and demonstrates
its strategic autonomy.
SILK ROAD SECURITY

China’s involvement is perhaps the most troubling dimension of the
Iranian-Saudi rapprochement. Beijing had previously been careful to
avoid entanglement in the Middle East. But its burgeoning economic
interests there have necessitated taking on a diplomatic role, as well. The
region is important to China’s Belt and Road Initiative; the Chinese
government has needed to ensure, for example, that its investments in
the Saudi energy sector are not threatened by Houthi missiles. More-
over, China has been steadily expanding its economic footprint in
Iran, and it is interested in supporting Moscow’s plan to develop a
transit corridor through Iran that would allow Russian trade to reach
global markets without using the Suez Canal. The development of this
corridor would also allow China to circumvent the Strait of Malacca
in the face of the formidable armada that the United States and its
allies are building. To advance these strategic priorities, Beijing is now
preparing to challenge Washington for influence in the Middle East.
The convergence of the broader strategic interests of China, Iran,
and Saudi Arabia suggests that Beijing’s breakthrough with Iran and
Saudi Arabia is likely to serve as the foundation of a new geopolitical
foreign affairs 154

reality in the Middle East. This transformation presents a historic

challenge for the United States. No longer can Washington simply
demand that its Arab allies decouple from China and unite behind its
leadership to combat Iran. That approach is out of date and out of step
with its allies’ current needs. As one Saudi official put it, “The United
States fails to understand that we cannot be allies at the expenses of
our interests.” Saudis do not see their interests served by either war
with Iran or confrontation with China.
What happened in Beijing by no means lessens the threat posed by
Iran’s nuclear and regional policies. In the short run, however, Wash-
ington should welcome the lowering of tensions in the Middle East,
which enables the United States to focus on other global priorities
without the pretense of a steadfast commitment to the region. The
United States should also encourage Saudi Arabia and the gcc to
explore a broader regional security architecture that will reduce the risk
of war in the region, provide for maritime security, and cooperate to
end long-running regional conflicts. Washington must also formulate
policies that are in tune with how the region now sees its own inter-
ests. Otherwise, it will continue to lose influence to China and Russia,
and the region will drift into nonalignment. Any U.S. reappraisal of
its regional strategy must start with understanding the pressures and
opportunities that brought Riyadh’s leadership to Beijing’s doorstep.
foreign affairs 155

M ay 1
America’s Bad
Bet on India
New Delhi Won’t Side With
Washington Against Beijing
Ashley J. Tellis
F
or the past two decades, Washington has made an enormous
bet in the Indo-Pacific—that treating India as a key partner will
help the United States in its geopolitical rivalry with China.
From George W. Bush onward, successive U.S. presidents have bol-
stered India’s capabilities on the assumption that doing so automatically
strengthens the forces that favor freedom in Asia.
The administration of President Joe Biden has enthusiastically
embraced this playbook. In fact, it has taken it one step further: the
administration has launched an ambitious new initiative to expand
India’s access to cutting-edge technologies, further deepened defense
cooperation, and made the Quad (Quadrilateral Security Dialogue),
which includes Australia, India, Japan, and the United States, a pillar of
its regional strategy. It has also overlooked India’s democratic erosion
and its unhelpful foreign policy choices, such as its refusal to condemn
ASHLEY J. TELLIS is the Tata Chair for Strategic Affairs and a Senior Fellow at the
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
foreign affairs 156

America’s Bad Bet on India
Moscow’s ongoing aggression in Ukraine. It has done all of this on the

presumption that New Delhi will respond favorably when Washington
calls in a favor during a regional crisis involving China.
Washington’s current expectations of India are misplaced. India’s
significant weaknesses compared with China, and its inescapable prox-
imity to it, guarantee that New Delhi will never involve itself in any
U.S. confrontation with Beijing that does not directly threaten its own
security. India values cooperation with Washington for the tangible
benefits it brings but does not believe that it must, in turn, materially
support the United States in any crisis—even one involving a common
threat such as China.
The fundamental problem is that the United States and India have
divergent ambitions for their security partnership. As it has done with
allies across the globe, Washington has sought to strengthen India’s
standing within the liberal international order and, when necessary,
solicit its contributions toward coalition defense. Yet New Delhi sees
things differently. It does not harbor any innate allegiance toward pre-
serving the liberal international order and retains an enduring aversion
toward participating in mutual defense. It seeks to acquire advanced
technologies from the United States to bolster its own economic and
military capabilities and thus facilitate its rise as a great power capable
of balancing China independently, but it does not presume that Amer-
ican assistance imposes any further obligations on itself.
As the Biden administration proceeds to expand its investment in
India, it should base its policies on a realistic assessment of Indian
strategy and not on any delusions of New Delhi becoming a comrade-
in-arms during some future crisis with Beijing.
FAST FRIENDS
For most of the Cold War, India and the United States did not engage in
any serious conversations on national defense, as New Delhi attempted
to escape the entanglements of joining either the U.S. or the Soviet
bloc. The two countries’ security relationship only flourished after Bush
offered India a transformative civil nuclear agreement.
Thanks to that breakthrough, U.S.-Indian security cooperation today
is breathtaking in its intensity and scope. The first and most visible
aspect is defense consultations. The two countries’ civilian leaders, as
well as their bureaucracies, maintain a regular dialogue on a variety of
topics, including China policy, India’s procurement of advanced U.S.
foreign affairs 157

military technologies, maritime surveillance, and undersea warfare.

These conversations vary in quality and depth but are critical for
reviewing strategic assessments, defining the parameters of desired
cooperation, and devising tools for policy implementation. As a result,
the United States and India work together in ways that would have
been unimaginable during the Cold War. For example, they cooperate
to monitor China’s economic and military activities throughout the
wider Indian Ocean region and have recently invested in mechanisms
to share near-real-time information about shipping movements in the
Indo-Pacific region with other littoral states.
A second area of success has been military-to-military collabora-
tion, much of which takes place outside public view. The programs
for senior officer visits, bilateral or multilateral military exercises, and
reciprocal military training have all expanded dramatically during
the past two decades. High-profile exercises most visibly exemplify
the scale and diversity of this expanded relationship: the annual
Malabar exercises, which bring together the U.S. and Indian navies,
have now expanded to permanently include Japan and Australia;
the Cope India exercises provide an opportunity for the U.S. and
Indian air forces to practice advanced air operations; and the Yudh
Abhyas series involves the land forces in both command post and
field training activities.
Finally, U.S. firms have enjoyed notable success in penetrating
the Indian defense market. India’s military has gone from having
virtually no U.S. weapons in its inventory some two decades ago
to now featuring American transport and maritime aircraft, utility
and combat helicopters, and antiship missiles and artillery guns.
U.S.-Indian defense trade, which was negligible around the turn of
the century, reached over $20 billion in 2020.
But the era of major platform acquisitions from the United
States has probably run its course. U.S. companies remain con-
tenders in several outstanding Indian procurement programs, but
it seems unlikely that they will ever enjoy a dominant market share
in India’s defense imports. The problems are entirely structural. For
all of India’s intensifying security threats, its defense procurement
budget is still modest in comparison with the overall Western mar-
ket. The demands of economic development have prevented India’s
elected governments from increasing defense expenditures in ways
that might permit vastly expanded military acquisitions from the
foreign affairs 158

United States. The cost of U.S. defense systems is generally higher

than that of other suppliers because of their advanced technology, an
advantage that is not always sufficiently attractive for India. Finally,
New Delhi’s demand that U.S. companies shift from selling equip-
ment to producing it with local partners in India—requiring the
transfer of intellectual property—often proves to be commercially
unattractive, given the small Indian defense market.
INDIA GOES IT ALONE

While U.S.-Indian security cooperation has enjoyed marked success,
the larger defense partnership still faces important challenges. Both
nations seek to leverage their deepening ties to limit China’s asser-
tiveness, but there is still a significant divide in how they aim to
accomplish that purpose.
The U.S. goal in military-to-military cooperation is interopera-
bility: the Pentagon wants to be able to integrate a foreign military
in combined operations as part of coalition warfare. India, however,
rejects the idea that its armed forces will participate in any combined
military operation outside of a un umbrella. Consequently, it has
resisted investing in meaningful operational integration, especially
with the U.S. armed forces, because it fears jeopardizing its politi-
cal autonomy or signaling a shift toward a tight political alignment
with Washington. As a result, the bilateral military exercises may
improve the tactical proficiency of the units involved but do not
expand interoperability to the level that would be required in major
combined operations against a capable adversary.
India’s view of military cooperation, which emphasizes nurturing
diversified international ties, represents a further challenge. India treats
military exercises more as political symbols than investments in increas-
ing operational proficiency and, as a result, practices with numerous
partners at varying levels of sophistication. On the other hand, the
United States emphasizes relatively intense military exercises with a
smaller set of counterparts.
India’s priority has been to receive American assistance in build-
ing up its own national capabilities so it can deal with threats inde-
pendently. The two sides have come a long way on this by, for example,
bolstering India’s intelligence capabilities about Chinese military activ-
ities along the Himalayan border and in the Indian Ocean region. The
existing arrangements for intelligence sharing are formally structured
foreign affairs 159

for reciprocity, and New Delhi does share whatever it believes to be

useful. But because U.S. collection capabilities are so superior, the flow
of usable information often ends up being one way.
Under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, India has increasingly
focused on defense industrial cooperation as the key driver of its secu-
rity partnership with the United States. Its underlying objective is to
secure technological autonomy: ever since its founding as a modern
state, India has sought to achieve mastery over all critical defense,
dual-use, and civilian technologies and, toward that end, built up large
public sector enterprises that were intended to become global leaders.
Because this dream still remains unrealized, New Delhi has now pri-
oritized Washington’s support for its defense industrial ambitions in
tandem with similar partnerships forged with France, Israel, Russia,
and other friendly states.
For over a decade, Washington has attempted to help India improve
its defense technology base, but these efforts have often proved futile.
During President Barack Obama’s administration, the two countries
launched the Defense Trade and Technology Initiative, which aimed to
promote technology exchange and the coproduction of defense systems.
Indian officials visualized the initiative as enabling them to procure
many advanced U.S. military technologies, such as those related to jet
engines, surveillance and reconnaissance platforms, and stealth capabil-
ities, so that they could be manufactured or codeveloped in India. But
Washington’s hesitation about clearing such transfers was matched by
U.S. defense firms’ reluctance to part with their intellectual property
and make commercial investments for what were ultimately meager
business opportunities.
WASHINGTON’S BIG BET

The Biden administration is now going to great lengths to reverse
the failure of the Defense Trade and Technology Initiative. Last year,
it announced the Initiative on Critical and Emerging Technology,
which aims to fundamentally transform cooperation between the two
countries’ governments, businesses, and research entities pertaining
to technology development. This endeavor encompasses a wide vari-
ety of fields, including semiconductors, space, artificial intelligence,
next-generation telecommunications, high-performance computing,
and quantum technologies, all of which have defense applications but
are not restricted to them.
foreign affairs 160

For all its potential, however, the Initiative on Critical and Emerging
Technology does not guarantee any specific outcomes. The U.S. gov-
ernment can make or break the initiative, as it controls the release of
the licenses that many joint ventures will require. Although the Biden
administration seems inclined to be more liberal on this compared
with its predecessors, only time will tell whether the initiative delivers
on India’s aspirations for greater access to advanced U.S. technology
in support of Modi’s “Make in India, Make for World” drive, which
aims to transform India into a major global manufacturing hub that
could one day compete with, if not supplant, China as the workshop
of the world.
The bigger question, however, is whether Washington’s generosity
toward India will help accomplish its strategic aims. During the Bush
and Obama administrations, U.S. ambitions centered largely on help-
ing build India’s power in order to prevent China from dominating
Asia. As U.S.-China relations steadily deteriorated during the Trump
administration—when Sino-Indian relations hit rock bottom as well—
Washington began to entertain the more expansive notion that its
support for New Delhi would gradually induce India to play a greater
military role in containing China’s growing power.
There are reasons to believe it will not. India has displayed a will-
ingness to join the United States and its Quad partners in some areas
of low politics, such as vaccine distribution, infrastructure investments,
and supply chain diversification, even as it insists that none of these
initiatives are directed against China. But on the most burdensome
challenge facing Washington in the Indo-Pacific—securing meaningful
military contributions to defeat any potential Chinese aggression—
India will likely refuse to play a role in situations where its own security
is not directly threatened. In such circumstances, New Delhi may at
best offer tacit support.
Although China is clearly India’s most intimidating adversary, New
Delhi still seeks to avoid doing anything that results in an irrevocable
rupture with Beijing. Indian policymakers are acutely conscious of the
stark disparity in Chinese and Indian national power, which will not be
corrected any time soon. New Delhi’s relative weakness compels it to avoid
provoking Beijing, as joining a U.S.-led military campaign against it cer-
tainly would. India also cannot escape its physical proximity to China. The
two countries share a long border, so Beijing can threaten Indian security
in significant ways—a capability that has only increased in recent years.
foreign affairs 161

Consequently, India’s security partnership with the United States

will remain fundamentally asymmetrical for a long time to come. New
Delhi desires American support in its own confrontation with China
while at the same time intending to shy away from any U.S.-China
confrontation that does not directly affect its own equities. Should a
major conflict between Washington and Beijing erupt in East Asia or
the South China Sea, India would certainly want the United States to
prevail. But it is unlikely to embroil itself in the fight.
New Delhi’s deepening defense ties with Washington, therefore,
must not be interpreted as driven by either strong support for the
liberal international order or the desire to participate in collective
defense against Chinese aggression. Rather, the intensifying security
relationship is conceived by Indian policymakers as a means of bol-
stering India’s own national defense capabilities but does not include
any obligation to support the United States in other global crises. Even
as this partnership has grown by leaps and bounds, there remains an
unbridgeable gap between the two countries, given India’s consistent
desire to avoid becoming the junior partner—or even a confederate—
of any great power.
The United States should certainly help India to the degree com-
patible with American interests. But it should harbor no illusions
that its support, no matter how generous, will entice India to join it
in any military coalition against China. The relationship with India
is fundamentally unlike those that the United States enjoys with its
allies. The Biden administration should recognize this reality rather
than try to alter it.
foreign affairs 162

May 5
Orders of Disorder
Who Disbanded Iraq’s Army and
De-Baathified Its Bureaucracy?
Garrett M. Graff
T
he history of Iraq was already being rewritten by L. Paul
Bremer on his flight into Baghdad. It was May 2003,
and Bremer, an experienced former ambassador and bureau-
cratic player—he’d served as Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s chief
of staff—was just weeks into his new role as presidential envoy to the
freshly liberated country. After a flurry of briefings in Washington and
a final Oval Office meeting with President George W. Bush, “Jerry,” as
everyone called Bremer, had flown into Qatar and on to Kuwait and
then Iraq. Bremer’s diplomatic career had taken him to most Middle
Eastern capitals, but this was the first time he’d ever seen Baghdad. He
had spent the previous two weeks trying to learn as much as he could
about the country he would now rule.
Aboard the U.S. Air Force C-130, Bremer edited two draft doc-
uments he intended to issue when he arrived. One provided for
“de-Baathification,” prohibiting senior officials from Saddam Hussein’s
GARRETT M. GRAFF is the author of Watergate: A New History.
foreign affairs 163

Orders of Disorder
party from participating in the new Iraq. The other disbanded the
Iraqi army and other security organs. Looking out the plane windows,
Bremer and his deputy, Clay McManaway, saw fire after fire stretching
toward the horizon. “Industrial-strength looting,” McManaway yelled
over the churn of the propellers. “Lots of old scores to settle.”
In a way no one on the flight could have realized, these succinct
observations would go a long way toward explaining the ultimate con-
sequences of the documents in Bremer’s briefcase. Over the last 20 years,
as the United States has reckoned with the human toll and costly legacy
of its disastrous war of choice in the Middle East, those two infamous
decisions of Bremer’s Coalition Provisional Authority—cpa Order 1,
de-Baathifying the Iraqi state, and cpa Order 2, dissolving the Iraqi
military—have been held up as some of the worst mistakes of the war.
They are seen as sparks that would ignite the insurgency to come and
set Iraq aflame for years, a period of disorder that would claim the lives
of thousands of U.S. troops and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians.
And yet the orders that paved the way for all that chaos and blood-
shed have remained shrouded in mystery. At the time, not even senior
U.S. leaders such as cia Director George Tenet and Secretary of State
Colin Powell understood where they had come from or who had
approved them. Two decades later, after piecing together memoirs from
key participants, archival documents, and fresh interviews with a dozen
former top U.S. officials, a more complete origin story is finally available.
The two orders, it turns out, had very different backstories and very
different paths through the policymaking process. Although both
were drafted by relatively unknown mid-level Pentagon officials, the
de-Baathification order emerged from the murky world of Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s office, whereas the order disbanding the
country’s military and security apparatus was finalized on the ground in
Iraq. Perhaps surprisingly, although both orders overturned the White
House’s prewar plans, neither was seen as a particularly big deal at
the time by those who rolled out the new approach. Like much of the
U.S. misadventure in Iraq, the story of cpa Orders 1 and 2 is a tale of
belated planning, misplaced assumptions, and bungled execution—all
occurring amid a rapidly deteriorating situation on the ground.
THE WORST-LAID PLANS

Exactly why the United States chose to go to war in Iraq is a question
that can never be fully resolved. A complex mix of factors drove U.S.
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Orders of Disorder
officials: varying personal worldviews, genuinely held strategic theo-

ries, self-interested lobbying by Iraqi exiles, long-standing grievances
against Saddam, post–Cold War hubris, dubious intelligence, and the
climate of fear and patriotism induced by the 9/11 attacks.
Publicly, however, the war was justified on the straightforward
grounds that Saddam was continuing to develop weapons of mass
destruction. After 9/11, the possibility that a dictator with a history of
warring with his country’s neighbors and sheltering terrorist groups
might someday possess a chemical, biological, or nuclear weapon was
deemed unacceptable. Indeed, proposals to invade Iraq were bandied
about in the Bush administration as early as the days after September
11, while fires still burned at the Pentagon and the World Trade Center.
On the night of 9/11, in fact, Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of
defense and a co-author of a 1997 Weekly Standard article about Saddam
titled “Overthrow Him,” asked for intelligence about Iraq’s ties to ter-
rorists. By the summer of 2002, an invasion seemed all but inevitable.
A rough plan had been decided on and shared with the public:
the war would be quick and largely bloodless (at least for the United
States), and the oil revenues of the newly freed Iraq would pay for the
reconstruction. There was little appetite inside the Bush administra-
tion for any Marshall Plan–style nation building. Instead, it hoped to
mimic the approach that had seemed to work in Afghanistan: a fast
and overwhelming invasion followed by a quick transition to friendly
local leaders. In Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, a Taliban critic living
in exile, was chosen as the country’s interim leader within weeks of
the U.S. invasion. In Iraq, many in the Bush administration saw the
most promising equivalent as Ahmed Chalabi, an exiled opponent of
Saddam who was close with several neoconservatives.
By early 2003, as invasion forces gathered in the Middle East, Pen-
tagon officials were working through plans for that light-touch occupa-
tion, what they called “Phase IV” operations—phases one through three
focusing on the buildup and initial combat operations. This postwar
planning project, code-named Eclipse II, was modeled after Project
Eclipse, the Allied plan for Germany after World War II. The archetype
had taken years to develop, starting in 1943, when victory was hardly
even in sight. But work on the 2003 version was rushed and poorly
resourced, a last-minute effort to imagine a post-Saddam Iraq that did
not begin until tanks and troops were already crossing the Atlantic.
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As army planners grappled with the question of how to handle the

thousands of mostly Sunni officials who made up the Baath Party,
they found a clear parallel in postwar Germany. During World War II,
officials had quickly realized that any effort to “de-Nazify” the defeated
country had to be narrowly implemented. Some ten percent of all Ger-
mans formally belonged to the Nazi Party and millions more to other
Nazi-aligned labor and professional associations. Because getting rid
of all of them was administratively untenable, U.S. officials decided to
remove and punish the worst actors while leaving untouched the less
zealous bureaucrats who had joined the Nazi Party for mere career
purposes. In keeping with this precedent, early drafts of Eclipse II
envisioned a similarly narrow de-Baathification in Iraq.
AFTER VICTORY
The job of overseeing Phase IV fell to Jay Garner, a retired U.S. Army
general who headed the Office for Reconstruction and Humanitarian
Assistance, or orha, a caretaker administration for Iraq established on
the eve of the invasion. Garner had a celebrated history in the country.
At the end of the Gulf War, he commanded a task force there aimed
at helping the Kurdish population. But his new mission was much
harder. Appointed only in January 2003, he had just weeks to assemble
a working plan to govern 25 million Iraqis and a country the size of
California.
Orha started almost from scratch, even though across the Potomac
from the Pentagon, the State Department had spent most of 2002
drawing up its own extensive postwar plan—a 13-volume, 1,200-page
report developed at a cost of $5 million and with the help of more
than 200 Iraqi exiles, including lawyers, engineers, and doctors, divided
into 17 working groups. The State Department effort, known as the
Future of Iraq Project and overseen by Thomas Warrick, harshly crit-
icized Chalabi and—seemingly as a result—was all but sidelined by
the Pentagon. Garner said later that he was told by Rumsfeld to ignore
the Future of Iraq Project. His request to add Warrick to his team was
denied.
Instead, the Pentagon’s new and hurried collective postwar plans,
such as they were, were presented to the National Security Council on
March 10, 2003, just a week before the invasion. Called “mega brief
four,” the presentation was overseen by Frank Miller, the nsc’s senior
director for defense policy and arms control. Miller’s sprawling briefing
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covered de-Baathification as well as the future of Iraq’s foreign ministry,

intelligence services, police, judiciary, and military. It even envisioned
a truth and reconciliation commission modeled on the one that South
Africa had established after apartheid.
Like de-Nazification, officials decided, de-Baathification would focus
on the party elite while leaving the lower echelons intact. Garner’s view
was that the United States could probably succeed by removing just the
top two leaders from each ministry or agency. “We were talking about a
pretty limited number, something like the top one-and-a-half percent,”
recalled Larry Di Rita, one of Rumsfeld’s top aides. Miller remem-
bered it the same way: “What we recommended was de-Baathification
was to be carried out with a light hand.”
To Douglas Feith, the Pentagon’s undersecretary of defense for pol-
icy, the planners’ decisions about de-Baathification appeared straight-
forward amid the run-up to the war. To him, the proposed measure for a
narrowly targeted removal of Baathist officials seemed modest and sen-
sible. “Nobody said they should be killed, imprisoned, or dispossessed,”
Feith recalled in an interview. “The penalty was that you couldn’t work
in the new government. It wasn’t enormously draconian, given that
the Baath Party had done a lot of terrible things.” In Feith’s recollec-
tion, the decision attracted little interagency debate amid the many
other harder policy questions. “The things I remember are the things
that were controversial,” he said. “I don’t remember de-Baathification
being in that category. It was handled by an interagency group,
and there was consensus.”
Garner didn’t think de-Baathification would be a major issue for
the United States either. His prediction was based on his experience
during the Gulf War, when Kurds and Shiites rose up and killed large
numbers of Baathists. As he recalled in an interview, he assumed that
once again, they would eliminate the worst officials themselves. “A lot
of the bad guys will be dead,” he remembered thinking. Garner talked
with Rumsfeld about a loose plan to retain the technocrats, with some
vetting, and Rumsfeld agreed.
Much more challenging, however, was the issue that Feith him-
self presented in “mega-brief four”: what to do about the Iraqi army.
It was, participants recall, one of the hardest postwar questions they
confronted. The Iraqi military was huge—estimated at around a half-
million regular and irregular troops, in addition to a bloated officer
corps that included thousands of generals. The enlisted ranks were
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composed mostly of Shiites, who were overseen by a predominantly

Sunni officer corps loyal to Saddam. Training was poor; discipline,
brutal. It was an open question whether the army was salvageable or
whether it would be best to disband it altogether and replace it with a
new army built from scratch according to Western standards and no
longer segregated along sectarian lines. “There were strong arguments
on both sides of the debate—both reform and dissolve,” Feith said. “It
wasn’t obvious to me what the right answer was.”
After studying the issue, U.S. planners decided to keep the mili-
tary, assuming they’d be able to use its organizational structure, bases,
personnel, and equipment as a foundation of reconstruction efforts.
Besides, in the Gulf War, the Iraqi military had surrendered en masse.
Tens of thousands of prisoners of war had been placed in the custody
of U.S. forces, and U.S. planners expected that something similar would
happen again, and this time the soldiers turned prisoners could be put
to work on reconstruction.
As part of those March meetings, Rumsfeld asked Feith to brief
Bush and the nsc on Garner’s conclusion that the army was worth
salvaging. As Feith recalled, “We had an enormous job to do on recon-
struction, and the Iraqi military has facilities, it has transportation, it
has personnel with skills.” Among its ranks were experts on commu-
nications technology, roads, construction, and so on. “Those were all
things Garner stressed we would need to draw on for reconstruction.”
The Pentagon even lined up a northern Virginia defense contractor,
Military Professional Resources Inc., which had helped rebuild the
Croatian army in the 1990s, to oversee the effort to reform the Iraqi
army. “I left with the approval of both Rumsfeld and the president to
bring the Army back,” Garner recalled. “Our thought was not to bring
the generals back—maybe just one or two—and vet the colonels well,
but from the rank of lieutenant colonel down, we wanted to bring
them all back.”
Meeting with reporters at the Pentagon on March 11, Garner out-
lined the conversations that week at the White House, telling the press
that the United States hoped to quickly hand back control to the Iraqis.
“We intend to immediately start turning some things over, and every
day, we’ll turn over more things,” he said. He went on to explain that
the Iraqi military would be kept intact and used for reconstruction—in
part, he pointed out, to avoid putting so many jobless men on the street.
The goal, he said, was to hand Iraq back to Iraqis within “months.”
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On the eve of war, there was a broad consensus among top officials
in the White House and the Pentagon: de-Baathification would be
narrowly tailored, and the Iraqi army would be kept intact. No one of
prominence was arguing otherwise.
FACTS ON THE GROUND

The invasion began on March 20, and in just three weeks, the U.S.-led
coalition surged into Baghdad and the Iraqi government collapsed.
Nearly everything had gone according to plan—perhaps even better
than planners had anticipated. But the pictures from the capital quickly
turned alarming. Looting was widespread, and the U.S. military seemed
almost invisible as Iraqi government buildings burned. U.S. officials dis-
missed the civil unrest as a temporary phase—even a sign of strength,
as Iraqis were able to make new personal choices. “Freedom’s untidy,
and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do
bad things,” Rumsfeld famously told reporters. “Stuff happens.”
As the days passed, however, the scenes from Baghdad only got
messier, and Garner never got a chance to put his plans into action.
He clashed with Chalabi, who was backed by Feith, Rumsfeld, and
Vice President Dick Cheney and who sought to wrest control of the
country for himself. (“We met in Nasiriyah on the 15th of April and
immediately despised each other,” Garner recalled.) Garner was also
confronting the problem that the United States had no detailed plan
for how to handle post-invasion Iraq, nor did it have anywhere near
enough troops to maintain order. The assumptions of Eclipse II had
turned out to be wildly optimistic, and there were no contingency plans
for dealing with a suddenly lawless country.
Garner thought that time was running out; the United States was,
bafflingly, already pulling troops out of the country, back to Kuwait,
even as security remained shaky. On his first day in Baghdad, he met
with the local U.S. commander, who told him that U.S. forces were
stretched thin protecting nearly 250 different sites across the country.
As Garner saw it, “Right now, we’re liberators, and at some point the
window for liberation closes, and our job is to slow that close.” He
went on: “When it closes, we’re then occupiers, and we can’t do what
we need to do if we’re occupiers.”
But Garner’s group, orha, was severely understaffed, in part because
Rumsfeld had opposed assigning many State Department staffers,
including Warrick, to it. Garner tried to move ahead as best he could, but
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he was being deliberately kept out of the loop by higher-up U.S. officials
at the Pentagon who were now rethinking some of the basic decisions
that had been made about postwar Iraq. As the rand Corporation’s
official history of the occupation later concluded, “No one in Wash-
ington had kept Garner apprised of the major changes in approach
to the occupation being considered there, in part because no one in
Washington short of Secretary Rumsfeld had been charged with keep-
ing Garner so informed.”
Blamed for failing to bring order quickly to Iraq, Garner had fallen
out of favor in D.C. On April 24, on one of the first days that Garner
was actually in Baghdad, Rumsfeld called Garner and told him that he
was being replaced by Bremer as the presidential envoy to Iraq. Garner
had always known he would eventually be replaced—as he’d joked to
Feith, Bush wanted a “person of stature” to run Iraq—but he never
imagined his appointment would last only days. Garner was a victim
of not only D.C. bureaucratic politics but also Iraqi realities. The light
touch envisioned for orha was a pipe dream—the organization’s very
name, emphasizing “reconstruction and humanitarian assistance,” now
seemed wildly optimistic, given that what Iraq needed above all was
any sign of a functioning authority.
THE NEW SHERIFF

Bremer would represent a fresh start for the United States in Iraq, and
he would lead a stronger and higher-stature organization, something
now called the Coalition Provisional Authority, the successor to orha.
In a sign of the shoot-from-the-hip decision-making of that time, when
the Bush administration established the cpa, it never bothered to issue
an actual order closing orha; the office just functionally ceased to exist.
Bremer’s appointment surprised almost everyone in Washington. The
real decision-making circles at the time were so small—largely confined
to the offices of Cheney and Rumsfeld—that even top administration
officials learned the news at the same time as the public. Driving to cia
headquarters after the announcement, Tenet phoned Powell, asking,
“What do you know about this guy, Paul Bremer?” But the appoint-
ment—and the massive mandate that went with it—was consistent with
the evolving approach of Rumsfeld and Cheney. As Robert Grenier,
who represented the cia in the interagency process for Iraq, recalled,
“I remember very specifically the vice president saying, ‘It’s a choice
between legitimacy and control, and we should opt for control.’”
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From his pre-departure meetings in Washington, Bremer concluded

that Iraq needed a tougher approach and more sweeping reforms than
what Garner had sought. The briefings made him feel as if he were
headed for a country falling apart. Iraqis were facing electricity and
water shortages, and looters prowled the streets. The security apparatus
hadn’t surrendered en masse; it had simply melted away. Iraq needed
a firmer hand—and fast.
As far as Bremer could tell, every assumption that the United States
had made about Phase IV was proving false. The hope had been that
the Iraqi state would largely survive the invasion intact and the United
States could step in gently to provide food and aid, secure the oil
infrastructure, and then hand the keys back to Iraqis. “It was import-
ant to remember the name of Jay Garner’s orha—the Organization
for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance,” Bremer recalled in
an interview. “The assumption behind that title was that we’d face the
same situation we faced after the first Gulf War: mass attacks on the
oil fields, mass humanitarian and refugee movement.”
Walter Slocombe, one of Bremer’s top aides, participated in the hur-
ried briefings in D.C. as he and his boss prepared to head to Baghdad.
He recalled being astounded by what he learned: Iraq had no func-
tioning government or military, and its economy and infrastructure
were crippled by sanctions, corruption, and mismanagement. Every
Baath Party office and military base had been destroyed or looted by
fleeing soldiers and opportunistic Iraqis. Virtually all the equipment
was gone. “They took the wiring out of the walls,” Slocombe recalled.
“They even stole the urinals.”
It only seemed logical, then, that Bremer and Slocombe recom-
mended scrapping the earlier plans for retaining the Iraqi army in favor
of training up a new army. After the two presented their new plan to
Rumsfeld, who approved it, Slocombe and others at the Pentagon
began to draft what would become the fateful order to dissolve the
Iraqi army. “We decided, ‘Let’s start from the ground up,’” Slocombe
said. “If the army was intact, the whole story would be different. I don’t
know how, but it would be different.”
WHOSE ORDER?
And then there was the Baathist problem. On May 1, the day Bush
declared the end of major combat operations in front of a banner
reading “Mission Accomplished,” Bremer was beginning his meetings
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in D.C. That morning, an article appeared in The New York Times

by the reporter Judith Miller. It quoted Chalabi criticizing Garner’s
limited approach to de-Baathification and reported that the Iraqi
exile had been lobbying the Bush administration for a more thorough
cleansing. Further complaints came in the following days, as Garner’s
team appointed a controversial former party official to be minister of
health and reinstalled old Baath Party leaders at Baghdad Univer-
sity—conscious choices made by the team in Iraq and justified on the
grounds that any rebuilding effort required functioning institutions
in the meantime.
On May 9, bowing to the pressure, Rumsfeld publicly promised a
more extensive vetting process. That same day, during a meeting at the
Pentagon, Feith handed Bremer an order for a broader de-Baathification
than originally envisioned, an order that Feith said had been signed
off by the interagency process. To Bremer, it was a small, insignificant
moment in a time of much harder questions; he was merely being
given a fait accompli to announce at the right time. “Since Feith was
handing me the paper, I had assumed it was written somewhere inside
the Pentagon,” Bremer recalled. “I looked at it, and Feith told me the
decree had been cleared through the interagency process.”
The problem was, no one outside of a small circle of aides seems to
have seen the document before Feith handed it to Bremer. There was,
in fact, no formal interagency process at all. “It didn’t come from the
White House,” Miller, of the nsc, said. “It would have come from my
desk or from my people if that was true.”
Instead, the draft order appears to have originated from the office
of William Luti, the deputy undersecretary of defense for Near East-
ern and South Asian affairs. Specifically, the proposed order would
have been overseen inside Luti’s office by a special policy section
known as the Office of Special Plans. A team of roughly 15 people,
the Office of Special Plans was led by Abram Shulsky, a veteran of
the Reagan administration. Although it was deliberately given an
oblique name, the group focused primarily on Iraq and Iran. Luti
declined to be interviewed for this article, but Shulsky recalled in
an interview that the draft order didn’t follow any normal process.
“There was not a real interagency process,” Shulsky said. “It would
have been informal at that point.”
As Shulsky recalled, the order’s more far-reaching language was
influenced in part by memories of the aftermath of the Gulf War, when
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the United States had encouraged a Shiite uprising against Saddam

but then backed away from supporting efforts to overthrow the regime.
This time, Washington would make sure that the Shiites understood
that Saddam’s regime was gone for good.
The original order handed to Bremer had applied some rough
math about how much of the bureaucracy had to be removed—math
influenced not just by postwar Germany but also by the experience of
rebuilding eastern European countries such as Poland after the fall of the
Iron Curtain.The draft order envisioned that the top three layers of Baathist
leaders would be excised from Iraq’s future officialdom and that those
in the fourth layer would be considered on a case-by-case basis.
As Bremer prepared for his trip to Iraq, he felt confident that he
had been empowered with great presidential authority and that his
mission was to achieve lasting change in Iraq. The original, far more
optimistic U.S. plans for postwar Iraq had been scrapped, but he and
other officials were confident that success was still within reach.
MISSION CREEP
When Bremer arrived in Iraq aboard that air force cargo plane, he was
fixated above all on the country’s toppled dictator. Even as U.S. troops
occupied most of the country, Saddam and many of his top officials,
including his two sons, Uday and Qusay, remained on the run. Against
this backdrop, the modest de-Baathification efforts proposed over the
winter in Washington seemed inadequate. U.S. officials feared that
the Baath Party might not yet be consigned to the ash heap of his-
tory. So did ordinary Iraqis, who worried that the Americans would
quickly depart, allowing Saddam to rise from the ashes, return to power,
and punish anyone who had cooperated with the invaders. As Bremer
recalled of the dictator on the lam, “He was a presence—or an absence,
more accurately—in everything we were doing.” Hence the draft order
for a broad de-Baathification that Bremer carried in his briefcase, a
measure that would demonstrate that Saddam and his party had no
path to resurrection.
Bremer wanted to come out of the gate with “high-octane orders,”
recalled Di Rita, the Rumsfeld aide, who shared a temporary room with
Bremer in Baghdad. But when Bremer circulated the draft de-Baath-
ification order with other U.S. military leaders on the ground, he met
immediate resistance. It reached far deeper into the Iraqi bureaucracy
than anything the White House had originally debated and approved
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in March. Now, all senior party members would be removed from

their positions and banned from future employment. Worse, officials
occupying the top three layers of leadership in every ministry and all
other government institutions, including universities and hospitals,
would be interrogated for any links to the Baath Party and subject to
possible criminal investigation.
What had once been a narrowly targeted effort to remove Saddam’s
cabinet and inner circle now had the potential to touch every local
government building in the country. Garner, who had agreed to remain
in place for a brief transition to Bremer, was not happy with the order.
Minutes after reading the draft order, Garner recalled, he and the cia
station chief in Baghdad, Charles Seidel, descended on Bremer’s office
to protest. “You’re not going to be able to run the country,” Garner
said. “Mr. Ambassador,” Seidel added, “you’ll have 50,000 enemies
in this city before the sun sets.” But as Bremer saw it, he had been
given an order by Washington; it was his job to follow it. On May 16,
Bremer signed cpa Order 1.
The other draft order, the one disbanding the Iraqi army, also seemed
justified to Bremer, Slocombe, and Feith in light of the on-the-ground
reality. Bremer could see that, although some of Iraq’s civil minis-
tries still functioned, its security organs—military, internal security,
and intelligence forces—were a different matter. The early hopes that
Iraq’s army might help with reconstruction and humanitarian relief had
proved hollow. Instead, the military was gone: its personnel had melted
away and its facilities and materiel had been looted or destroyed. “There
was never a question of keeping the Iraqi army intact,” Slocombe said.
“In Pentagon jargon, they had ‘self-demobilized.’”
By now, it seemed to Bremer that it would be just as hard to recon-
stitute the old Iraqi army as it would be to start from scratch. But a fresh
start would avoid saddling the force with the unnecessary baggage of
ties to Saddam and a sectarian hierarchy. Feith explained how his and
others’ thinking had changed since the winter: “All the arguments in
favor of keeping the military—facilities, transportation—those argu-
ments had disappeared. There were new facts on the ground.”
Other participants dispute that the Iraqi army was really gone for
good. Miller, for example, pointed out that the Americans had dropped
leaflets and handed out flyers encouraging Iraqi soldiers to go home
and wait for orders to return to their bases. “We told people, ‘Go away,
and we’ll call you back,’” he said. The U.S. military had already initiated
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conversations with friendly Iraqi officers about reconstituting the force.

One of Garner’s aides, a colonel named Paul Hughes, was hard at
work contacting old units. As Garner recalled, “We had about 40,000
soldiers ready to come back.”
Bremer’s decision would cut off those discussions and ultimately
create lasting bitterness among Iraq’s erstwhile officer corps.
AN INTERAGENCY MYSTERY
Like the de-Baathification order, the idea of disbanding the Iraqi
military met resistance on the ground in Iraq. Garner and his
team felt that it would undo everything they had been working on.
“There was new Iraqi leadership that had emerged saying, ‘We’re willing
to work with you,’” recalled Michael Barron, then an army colonel who
served as a senior adviser to the cpa. “We were looking to bring back
those security forces—the army and the police—under new leadership
working with the American-led coalition. Order no. 2 took the rug out
from under all that.”
Garner, along with Seidel and some U.S. military personnel, favored
involving friendly Iraqi generals in the new force. But Bremer and
Slocombe concluded that doing so was impractical. In their view, the
oppressed Shiite conscripts who had happily gone home during the
invasion were not going to rally to the summons of a bunch of Sunni
senior officers tied to the ancien régime.
Although there was no typical formal interagency process for
approving cpa Order 2, Slocombe remembered informing everyone
necessary in both Washington and Baghdad of the plan to disband
the army. Communications technology in 2003 in Iraq was still dicey,
but the draft was sent to the Pentagon, and Slocombe said he spent
many phone calls pacing up and down outside the Republican Palace in
Baghdad where the cpa was setting up shop, listening to final changes
to the document.
“I can vividly remember standing outside in 120-degree heat going
over, on a shaky satellite link, ‘happy-to-glad’ changes with people
in the Pentagon,” he said, using the bureaucratic parlance for minor
edits. “The draft of the order was cleared in Baghdad, including by the
senior military leadership. The mere fact that someone says, ‘I concur,’
doesn’t mean they think it’s a good idea, but they can’t say they didn’t
know about it.”
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The top civilian leaders at the Pentagon, who had received the
presidential OK back in March to keep the military intact, were on
board with Bremer’s new vision, accepting the same arguments he
did about the changed circumstances. Grenier recalled a conversation
with a staffer in Luti’s office who deadpanned, “If we bring back the
leadership of the Iraqi army, it will be to shoot them.” Yet even though
Defense Department officials carefully reviewed the order—Slocombe
recalled the text kicking around the cpa offices for about a week before
Bremer pushed the team to finalize it—they don’t appear to have ever
shared it with principals outside the Pentagon.
When Bremer announced the pending order on a video conference
with the national security team back at the White House, the revela-
tion stunned other leaders in the administration. “No one else around
the table—excluding Don Rumsfeld and Doug Feith and possibly the
vice president—knew what was going on,” Miller explained. “This was
presented to the war cabinet as, ‘This is what we’re going to do.’” Even
the president seemed taken aback. After ten or so seconds of silence,
Bush said to Bremer, “Jerry, you’re the guy on the ground.”
IN THEORY AND IN PRACTICE

To Feith, it was a signature moment in the war, a key indication of how
the next phase of the occupation would unfold. Rumsfeld and Bush
both wanted to give Bremer space to make decisions, particularly as he
was just getting started. Rumsfeld was in some respects a microman-
ager, Feith recalled, but the defense secretary’s inclination stopped at
the water’s edge, and he tended to defer to people running operations
on the other side of the world. As Feith put it, “He wanted to protect
Jerry Bremer from people wielding, as the saying goes, ‘five-thousand-
mile screwdrivers.’”
Looking back, Bremer said his regret about cpa Order 2 stems
primarily from not having readied what he saw as the second stage
of the order: a plan for paying the disbanded army. He and Slocombe
never intended to turn the entire Iraqi military out on the street but
envisioned issuing the former soldiers some form of a stipend. (As
Slocombe put it, “We know if you don’t pay the army, someone else
will.”) But amid the post-invasion chaos, the mechanisms to do so
weren’t in place yet, as both Bremer and Slocombe were the first to
admit. The cpa had no reliable records of the military’s ranks, nor was
the oil revenue flowing yet to pay them. Runaway inflation of the Iraqi
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dinar further complicated whatever back pay, retirement pensions, or

stipends the cpa might want to institute. Plus, Slocombe said, it would
have been politically awkward to pay ex-regime soldiers before there
was any sort of process in place to compensate their victims.
As if on cue, soon after the edict was issued, disbanded soldiers
across the country protested for pay. Behind the scenes, the cpa scram-
bled to assemble an order of battle for the Iraqi army. Bremer said he
recalls the very moment in mid-June when Meghan O’Sullivan, one
of his aides, walked into his palace office with a giant spreadsheet
at last outlining the Iraqi military—the first step in starting up the
payments to former soldiers, which ultimately lagged cpa Order 2 by
more than a month. “One of my regrets was that we didn’t at the same
time announce a plan to put all those people on pensions,” Bremer said.
“We delayed the announcement of the pay, because we didn’t have the
money. That was a mistake.” When the payments did begin, he pointed
out, they quickly quieted the soldiers’ protests.
Cpa Order 1 faced its own implementation problems. In the months
that followed, de-Baathification proved even more extreme and prob-
lematic than what the text of the order called for. Chalabi and his allies
had seized control of the process—a process for which the United
States had offered no clear guidelines. By April 2004, Bremer himself
publicly admitted that the order had been “poorly implemented” and
applied “unevenly and unjustly.”
Slocombe confessed that he and others were surprised at how
de-Baathification worked out. “In practice, it was abused and it was
used as a device to get rid of people, like school superintendents in mid-
size cities,” he said. “It was our failure to recognize that in any society,
there’d be a considerable amount of score settling and favor trading.”
But, Slocombe maintained, that does not mean it was the wrong thing
to do. “No one said dissolving the Nazi Party was a big mistake.”
THE BEGINNING OF THE END

Bremer’s two signature orders marked a turning point in the Bush
administration’s adventure in Iraq. Gone were any illusions of a quick
in-and-out operation; now, the orders signaled, the United States
would be staying for a long occupation aimed at fundamentally
remaking Iraq. A rapid handover had been replaced by an open-ended
rebuilding. “The irony of cpa 1 and cpa 2 is that Bremer completely
overturned the president’s vision for Iraq,” Miller said. “I don’t know
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Orders of Disorder
if we would have ever been able to be in and out quickly, but we never
had the opportunity to try.”
A quick and easy war was unrealistic from inception, however. Many
of those who participated in the policymaking process at the time sug-
gested that the actual effect of cpa Orders 1 and 2 has been overblown.
The orders themselves weren’t the real problem; they were a symptom
of the utter lack of planning before the invasion and lack of a clear
decision-making process after. “Everything was designed by people in
Washington who had never been to Iraq,” Garner recalled. “It was a
poorly conceived and poorly thought-out series of orders.”
The orders were in fact also symptoms of an even larger problem:
the nearly impossible challenge that the United States had taken on in
choosing to invade Iraq. The collapse of Saddam’s regime demanded
some sort of replacement, and the process of devising a replacement
would inevitably involve endless hard choices, unexpected obstacles, and
unintended consequences—no matter how much planning Washington
did. Although the slapdash planning and undersized U.S. military foot-
print certainly left no margin for error, wiser decisions might not have
been enough. It is impossible to prove a counterfactual, but although a
narrow de-Baathification plan and a concerted effort to save the Iraqi
army might have been better policies, they certainly would have been
no guarantee of peace in Iraq.
The two orders were the first of what would ultimately end up being
100 such edicts from the cpa, which lasted 14 months, until June 2004,
when authority was finally handed over to an interim Iraqi government.
By the fall of 2003, the insurgency—made up of former regime ele-
ments and disbanded soldiers—was in full swing. The rest is history: the
Abu Ghraib scandal and other revelations of U.S. war crimes, the U.S.
troop surge, the American withdrawal, the rise of the Islamic State, all
against the backdrop of persistent political instability and violence and
the growing influence of Iran, the leading U.S. adversary in the region.
With the benefit of 20 years of hindsight, cpa Orders 1 and 2
are best thought of not as errors that, if avoided, could have saved
Iraq. Instead, they were early indicators that the Bush administra-
tion’s grand visions for the country were merely paper wishes, out of
touch with the post-invasion reality. The orders’ murky origins were
emblematic of a chaotic policymaking process that led to a war that
was both needless and poorly planned. In truth, the Iraq war was
doomed before the first American soldier crossed the border.
foreign affairs 178

May 15
Why America Is
Struggling to Stop the
Fentanyl Epidemic
The New Geopolitics of Synthetic Opioids
Vanda Felbab-Brown
T
he United States is suffering the deadliest drug epidemic in
its history. Overdoses claimed the lives of more than 100,000
Americans between August 2021 and August 2022 alone. Over
the span of just a few years, drug deaths have doubled. Most of these over-
doses involve fentanyl, which now kills around 200 Americans every day.
To address the crisis, the U.S. government is not only deploying law
enforcement to crack down on fentanyl dealers but also taking steps
to prevent and treat substance use and the harms it produces. But the
continued growth of the fentanyl epidemic makes clear that these
measures are not enough. Since all fentanyl used in the United States
is produced abroad, stemming the flow of the drug into the country
is essential as well.
So far, such supply-side efforts have run aground. For one thing,
synthetic opioids such as fentanyl can be produced from a wide array
VANDA FELBAB-BROWN is Director of the Initiative on Nonstate Armed Actors and a

Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution.
foreign affairs 179

Why America Is Struggling to Stop the Fentanyl Epidemic
of chemicals, many of which also have legitimate commercial uses.

That means restricting the supply of these chemicals is difficult and
impractical. What is more, when regulators ban or restrict synthetic
opioids or their ingredients, producers simply tweak their recipes.
Less talked about, but just as consequential, are the geopolitical
obstacles that make it so hard for the U.S. government to plug the
supply channels. Most of the world’s fentanyl and its precursor chemi-
cals come from China or Mexico, countries whose current policies and
priorities make effective control of fentanyl production very difficult.
U.S. law enforcement cooperation with China, which was limited to
begin with, has in recent years collapsed altogether. Absent a reset in
U.S.-Chinese relations, that is unlikely to change. The Mexican govern-
ment, too, has eviscerated law enforcement cooperation with the United
States. Although a series of high-level bilateral meetings in April may
have opened a path to increased cooperation down the line, it is far from
clear if they will lead to substantive action from Mexican authorities.
But there is much more that the Biden administration can do. Wash-
ington still has unexplored options at its disposal to induce stronger
cooperation from Chinese and Mexican authorities, for instance by
combining constructive proposals with the threat of sanctions against
state and private actors in those countries. It can also adopt additional
intelligence and law enforcement measures of its own, with or without
foreign cooperation. It is high time that Washington take action on
this front. If it does not, the record death rates that fentanyl is causing
today will be eclipsed by even higher ones tomorrow.
MADE IN CHINA
U.S. officials have long understood that cutting off fentanyl produc-
tion at its source means cutting it off in China. Since 2015, they have
pushed Beijing to tighten controls on fentanyl-class drugs and to get
serious about enforcing them. Initially, those efforts seemed to bear
fruit. In 2019, China began to place restrictions on the entire class of
synthetic opioids, and it has since extended those laws to the main
precursor chemicals used in synthetic opioid production. For a while,
the United States and China even worked together on drug busts. In
2019, Chinese authorities in Hebei Province used U.S. intelligence
to arrest and convict nine traffickers for mailing fentanyl straight to
consumers and dealers in the United States.
foreign affairs 180

Since then, however, Chinese traffickers have evaded controls by

rerouting their operations through Mexico. Unlike drugs such as meth-
amphetamine, which remain firmly in the hands of Chinese organized
crime syndicates, the production chain for fentanyl often starts with
small and middle-level players in the country’s chemical and phar-
maceutical industries, including the odd mom-and-pop outfit. These
seemingly legitimate businesses ship fentanyl precursors to Chinese or
Mexican drug cartels. The cartels synthesize the chemicals into finished
fentanyl and then move it onto the U.S. market.
It is hard for outsiders to get a clear view of the current state of Chi-
na’s domestic drug enforcement. But there have been no high-profile
Chinese prosecutions since the 2019 trial in Hebei; neither does Beijing
appear to be doing anything to stem the flow of precursor chemicals
to Mexican cartels. This inaction is no accident. The arrests in Hebei
took place when Beijing still hoped for a broader thaw in relations with
Washington. As that hope has eroded, so has China’s willingness to
coordinate with U.S. authorities on the opioid front. Put simply, Beijing
thinks of counternarcotics collaboration as downstream from its geo-
strategic relations. Unlike the U.S. government, which seeks to delink
the issue from geopolitics, China views the fentanyl crisis through the
lens of its growing rivalry with the United States. It did so even before
last year’s visit by then U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to Taiwan,
after which China formally ended all law enforcement cooperation
with the United States. U.S. punitive measures against China, such as
sanctions and indictments, are unlikely to change this. Even in South-
east Asia and the Pacific, where Beijing takes drug trafficking very
seriously, its engagement with foreign authorities tends to be highly
selective, self-serving, and subordinated to its geopolitical interests.
At home and abroad, the Chinese government rarely takes action
against the top echelons of crime syndicates unless they infringe on
a narrow set of core state interests. These criminal groups provide a
variety of services to legal businesses, including to firms with ties to
government officials and the Chinese Communist Party. Efforts to
better regulate precursor chemicals and fentanyl analogs are also ham-
pered by systemic corruption and the incentive structures within which
Chinese officials operate.
Taken together, these conditions leave plenty of room for Chinese
criminal networks to expand their scope and reach, including in the
Americas. There are signs that Chinese fishing vessels in Latin Amer-
foreign affairs 181

ican waters sometimes carry drugs and precursor chemicals. What is

clear is that Chinese actors play a significant role in laundering money
for Mexican cartels through informal financial and trade networks. Of
particular note is the rise of payment in kind: in exchange for drug
precursors, Mexican cartels provide Chinese traffickers with coveted
black-market products, especially timber and protected wildlife. The
potential damage to economic sustainability, food security, and global
biodiversity is severe—not to mention the potential for the global
spread of zoonotic diseases.
STUCK IN THE FIFTIES

Although relations with Mexico have not deteriorated to the same
degree, U.S. drug policy there faces serious obstacles as well. The col-
lapse of the rule of law in Mexico goes far beyond the human toll of
its drug war, which has killed more than 30,000 Mexicans every year
since 2017—not counting the more than 112,000 people that went
missing during the same period. In addition to controlling the drug
trade, the cartels have expanded their extortion rackets and have even
come to dominate parts of the country’s formal economy. They now
have a hand in agriculture, fisheries, logging, mining, and the water
supply. Their assault on state power and civil society has taken on new,
more brazen forms, too, including increasingly aggressive attempts to
influence elections and infiltrate state institutions.
Upon taking office in 2018, Mexican President Andrés Manuel
López Obrador pledged that he would address the spiraling crisis
with “hugs, not bullets.” By this, he meant social and economic
measures to better address the structural forces driving many young
people into the hands of the cartels. But besides creating a new
National Guard—the latest in a long series of haphazard institu-
tional reshuffles in the Mexican security forces—López Obrador has
never articulated any clear vision of how to stabilize the situation
in the shorter term.
The Mexican government’s hope, it seems, is that if it lets the cartels
duke it out among themselves, they will eventually reach a balance of
forces and the violence will subside. But the conflict that is causing
much of the bloodshed—a brutal war for primacy between the Sinaloa
Cartel and its main rival, the Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación—has
not abated. If anything, it has intensified and spread to other parts of
Latin America, even as far as Chile.
foreign affairs 182

To make matters worse, Mexico has systematically hollowed out

cooperation with U.S. law enforcement. López Obrador blames U.S.
pressure on the cartels for fanning the violence, and his 1950s vision
of politics and foreign affairs revolves around limiting any noneco-
nomic U.S. presence in his country. In 2020, when the United States
arrested Salvador Cienfuegos, Mexico’s former secretary of defense,
for colluding with a vicious drug cartel, López Obrador threatened to
expel all U.S. law enforcement personnel and end all cooperation with
U.S. authorities. Washington bent backward to assuage him, handing
Cienfuegos back to Mexico, where he was promptly acquitted. But
the Mexican government has since passed a national-security law that
further hobbles cooperation with U.S. agents. In March, López Obra-
dor started claiming that no fentanyl is cooked in Mexico, a falsehood
roundly debunked not just by the U.S. Justice Department but also by
parts of his own government. In recent weeks, he once again threatened
to expel U.S. agents from Mexico.
With the Mexican government also threatening to withdraw from
the Mérida Initiative, a bilateral framework for security cooperation that
had been in place since December 2008, the U.S. government worked
hard to negotiate a successor agreement. Mexican officials, however,
have interpreted the new framework very narrowly: the United States
should reduce domestic drug demand, arrest more Mexican fugitives
on U.S. soil, and keep weapons and illicit money from flowing south
into Mexico, while Mexico does what it wants on its side of the border
without letting the United States in on it.
The Mexican government has offered only limited and intermittent
cooperation ever since. Whereas Mexican authorities have kept the U.S.
Drug Enforcement Administration in a deep freeze on their territory,
they have allowed for occasional intelligence sharing and have at times
worked with the investigative branch of the U.S. Department of Home-
land Security. Ultimately, however, the Mexican government is not tak-
ing on the criminal groups and their fentanyl trade. Instead, as a recent
Reuters investigation revealed, it is cooking its reports about fentanyl
lab busts to placate Washington. In any case, the Trump administration
taught Mexico a valuable, albeit unfortunate, lesson: the United States
will give up on a wide range of interests as long as Mexico suppresses
migration flows to the U.S. border. The Biden administration has not
reversed that lesson.
foreign affairs 183

CLOSING THE FLOODGATES

At present, the odds of getting more cooperation from either China or
Mexico in the fight against the fentanyl trade are slim. But Washington
must keep on trying. When it comes to Beijing, U.S. diplomats should
play to its desire to be a global counternarcotics leader in the eyes of
the world. China likes to project an image of being tough on drugs. But
it has come under fire from countries in Southeast Asia for the steady
flow of Chinese methamphetamine precursors into the region, which
has set off a devastating drug epidemic. The United States could team
up with these countries, as well as with Australia and New Zealand, to
pressure China in multilateral forums. Concerted calls on Beijing to
take action against synthetic drugs, implement better monitoring sys-
tems even for dual-use nonscheduled chemicals, and set best practices
for its chemical firms could finally induce China to act.
Among the best practices the United States and others should push
for are self-regulation systems to detect and police suspicious activities
and “know your customers” policies. It should continue demanding
that China take down websites that illegally sell synthetic opioids to
Americans or to Mexican criminal groups. And it should encourage
China to adopt more robust anti-money-laundering standards in its
banking and financial systems and trading practices. Washington can
underpin such requests with the threat of sanctions. Punitive measures
could include cutting off noncompliant Chinese firms from the U.S.
market and targeting prominent pharmaceutical and chemical indus-
try officials. U.S. law enforcement, meanwhile, should indict as many
Chinese traffickers and their companies as possible.
In Mexico, too, U.S. policy can still make a difference, although not all
current proposals are workable. U.S. politicians, such as South Carolina
Senator Lindsey Graham, have recommended that the U.S. govern-
ment designate Mexican cartels as foreign terrorist organizations on
top of their current designation as transnational criminal organizations.
Doing so would open the door to more intelligence gathering and even to
U.S. military strikes on fentanyl labs. But the number of realistic tar-
gets would be limited, and striking them would not hobble the cartels
for long. Nor would the fto designation add anything to the regime
of sanctions and financial intelligence tools already in place. In fact,
it would only complicate U.S. policies in Mexico.
Instead, the United States could intensify border inspections, even
at the risk of substantially slowing down the legal trade and causing
foreign affairs 184

serious problems for perishable Mexican agricultural exports. Ideally,

U.S.-Mexico law enforcement cooperation would be robust enough to
keep legal border crossings efficient and enable joint inspections far
from the border. But if Mexico refuses to act as a reliable partner, the
United States should intensify border inspections on its own initiative.
The economic cost of the opioid epidemic—to leave aside its immea-
surable human toll—is simply too enormous to countenance inaction.
In 2020, estimates put that cost at nearly $1.5 trillion. In contrast, in
2019, U.S. goods and services trade with Mexico totaled only $677.3
billion, with imports from Mexico at $387.8 billion. As with China,
Washington should develop packages of leverage to underwrite its
demands, including indictment portfolios against Mexican officials and
politicians who sabotage cooperation with the United States. Instead
of shying away from holding to account criminal officials such as Cien-
fuegos, the former Mexican defense minister, the United States should
be arresting more of them.
HIT THEM WHERE IT HURTS

At the same time, U.S. officials should rethink their own measures
against criminal actors involved in the fentanyl business. Given the
diversified economic portfolios of Mexican and Chinese criminal net-
works nowadays, more drug seizures simply will not do. Authorities
need to take aim at the traffickers’ entire business empires and try to
cut off their revenue streams wholesale, whether that means going after
poaching and wildlife trafficking, illegal fishing, or other illicit activities.
That requires bringing on board a wide range of U.S. departments
and agencies for a whole-of-government approach, starting with the
U.S. intelligence agencies, the Department of State, the Department
of Defense, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. By taking a bet-
ter look at the various offshoots of the fentanyl trade—the wildlife
trafficking, the illegal fishing, and so forth—the United States would
also get a better picture of the linkages between organized crime and
foreign governments, including China. Greater intelligence sharing
within the U.S. government would help, as would increasing the role
of Fish and Wildlife special agents in joint anti-organized-crime task
forces. Alongside this effort, wildlife trafficking should be designated as
a predicate offense for wiretap authorizations, which would empower
authorities to start gathering intelligence without having to prove a
link to other crimes a priori.
foreign affairs 185

May 26
Sudan and the New

Age of Conflict
How Regional Power Politics Are
Fueling Deadly Wars
Comfort Ero and Richard Atwood
F
or the past year, much of the world’s attention has been focused
on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and rising tensions between
the United States and China over Taiwan—flash points that
could trigger direct or even nuclear confrontation between the major
powers. But the outbreak of fighting in Sudan should also give world
leaders pause: it threatens to be the latest in a wave of devastating wars
in Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia that over the past decade
have ushered in a new era of instability and strife. Mostly because
of conflicts, more people are displaced (100 million) or in need of
humanitarian aid (339 million) than at any point since World War II.
Since fighting erupted in April between Sudan’s armed forces and
a paramilitary group notorious for atrocities committed two decades
ago in Darfur, at least 700,000 people have been forced to flee their
homes, hundreds have been killed, and thousands more injured. Street
COMFORT ERO is President and CEO of the International Crisis Group.

RICHARD ATWOOD is Executive Vice President of the International Crisis Group.
foreign affairs 186

Sudan and the New Age of Conflict
battles, explosions, and aerial bombardments are devastating the cap-

ital, Khartoum, as the two factions vie for control over this north-
eastern African country of 45 million. In Darfur, tribal militias have
entered the fray, raising fears of a wider conflagration. Cease-fires have
repeatedly broken down.
The dynamics at play in Sudan’s crisis mirror those of many wars in
this recent wave. The roots of these conflicts lie in struggles to shake off
decades of dictatorial rule, they disproportionately affect civilians, and
they are prone to foreign meddling. The involvement of an ever-larger
cast of outside actors—not only major powers but also so-called mid-
dle powers such as Iran, Turkey, and the Gulf monarchies—has fueled
and prolonged this latest spate of wars, as regional powers compete for
influence amid uncertainty about the future of the global order.
In Sudan, a diverse crowd of foreign actors had a hand in the coun-
try’s derailed transition to democracy following longtime dictator
Omar al-Bashir’s ouster in 2019. Several could now get sucked into
the fighting. At a time when most recent wars have dragged on for
years without resolution, both the Sudanese Armed Forces (saf), led
by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the paramilitary Rapid Sup-
port Forces (rsf), helmed by Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as
Hemedti, seem to be settling in for a long and bloody slog—one that
could reverberate far beyond the country’s borders.
CONFLICTS ON THE RISE

In the years following the end of the Cold War, the global outlook
seemed less gloomy. According to the Uppsala Conflict Data Program,
the number of active wars declined throughout the 1990s. So, too, did
the number of people killed in conflicts each year (with the notable
exception of 1994, when the Rwandan genocide occurred). Although
battle deaths don’t tell the whole story—conflicts often kill more peo-
ple indirectly, through starvation or preventable disease—overall, a
more peaceful future beckoned, buoyed in part by favorable geopolitics.
Major powers at the United Nations mostly agreed on sending peace-
keepers and envoys to help settle wars in the Balkans, West Africa,
and elsewhere. The decade of optimism about liberal democracy and
capitalism that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union was also one
of un activism and a burgeoning peacemaking industry, which likely
contributed to the global decline in conflicts.
foreign affairs 187

Then came the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the United States’ invasions
of Afghanistan and Iraq. These wars did not, according to Uppsala’s
data, reverse the global dip in armed conflicts. But they did set the
stage for what was to come by eroding Washington’s international
credibility. The war in Iraq, moreover, upset the regional balance of
power between Iran and the Gulf monarchies and paved the way for
a resurgent Islamist militancy and, ultimately, the rise of the Islamic
State, also known as isis.
Since about 2010, the number of conflicts and battle deaths has crept
back up. Wars triggered by the 2010–11 Arab uprisings in Libya, Syria,
and Yemen and new conflicts in Africa, some shaped by spillover from
the Arab conflicts, initially fueled the uptick. These new wars were not
originally part of the United States’ post-9/11 struggle against al Qaeda,
but as Islamist militants including isis profited from the chaos, Western
counterterrorism operations overlaid other feuds. More recently, fresh
bouts of fighting have broken out between Armenia and Azerbaijan
over the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, in Ethiopia’s northern Tigray
region, and in Myanmar. According to Uppsala's latest data, contem-
porary conflicts are now killing more than three times as many people
per year around the world as wars did two decades ago.
THE ROAD TO CHAOS

These new conflicts have several things in common. The first is that sev-
eral stem from thwarted efforts to escape authoritarian rule. In Libya,
Myanmar, Syria, Yemen, and to some degree Ethiopia, movements
began with social unrest and rousing street protests—often triggered
by economic hardship or fury at autocratic and inept rule—but ended
in chaos. In some cases, regimes fought back; in Syria, for instance,
President Bashar al-Assad has clung to power. In others, dictators fell,
but institutions they had hollowed out and societies they had divided
couldn’t withstand the ensuing contests for power. These struggles fol-
low a recurring pattern: people expect change; the old guard seeks to
preserve its privilege; new armed factions want a share. Uncorked eth-
nic, religious, or racial tensions fuel division. Settlements that divvy up
power and resources in an equitable or satisfactory way prove elusive.
Seen in this light, Sudan’s story is all too familiar. After an inspiring
countrywide protest movement overthrew Bashir, Sudan has fallen
victim to the autocrat’s own legacy. Hemedti is a warlord from Darfur
who aided Bashir’s genocidal war against rebels in the region starting in
foreign affairs 188

2003. In 2013, Bashir banded various Janjaweed militias together under

Hemedti and renamed them the Rapid Support Forces, empowering
the paramilitary’s units as a hedge against an army takeover and using
them repeatedly to suppress uprisings in western Sudan. The other
belligerent in the country’s conflict, Burhan, is a career military officer
who participated with Hemedti in the Darfur campaigns and whose
aversion to civilian rule has obstructed Sudan’s democratic transition.
The rsf and the saf united briefly to overthrow Bashir and then kicked
out the civilian leaders with whom they had pledged to share power.
Eventually, Hemedti and Burhan turned on each other.
Although the violence was ostensibly triggered by Hemedti’s refusal
to put his paramilitaries under saf command, the power struggle runs
deeper than that. Ultimately, Sudan’s transition ran aground because
neither Burhan and his fellow generals nor Hemedti and his allies
would relinquish power and risk losing their grip on the country’s
resources or facing justice for earlier atrocities.
A second hallmark of recent conflicts present in Sudan is the dis-
proportionate suffering of civilians. Belligerents of the past decade
have shown scant regard for international law. Although the 1990s and
early 2000s also saw their share of horror—indeed, the United States’
conduct in its own wars in Iraq and elsewhere likely contributed to the
sense of lawlessness that currently reigns on many battlefields—today’s
conflicts display a striking degree of impunity. Warring parties of all
stripes appear to have thrown the rule book out the window.
Deliberate assaults on civilians—including the aerial destruction
of cities; attacks on hospitals, clinics, and schools; the obstruction of
aid; and the weaponization of hunger and famine—have become com-
monplace. In Syria, the Assad regime’s routine use of barrel bombs
and chemical weapons was exceptionally barbaric. But in Afghanistan,
Ethiopia, Yemen, and elsewhere, governments and rebels alike have
purposefully or recklessly targeted civilians or denied them the medical
care, food, water, and shelter they need to survive.
The signs in Sudan are already troubling. The country has suffered
atrocities against civilians in the past, but the sustained urban warfare
this time around is unprecedented. The sudden escalation of street
fighting in Khartoum left residents unprepared. Millions have been
caught in the crossfire, trapped in their homes and struggling to get
food, water, and other essentials. Hemedti has sent tens of thousands
of fighters from the hinterlands into the capital, where they shelter
foreign affairs 189

among civilians, commandeer houses, and loot to survive as supply

lines break down. As for the army, its shelling in densely populated
parts of Khartoum appears indiscriminate. Its refusal to stop fighting
shows it cares more for safeguarding its power and privilege than for
the war’s human toll.
AVOIDING A PROXY FREE-FOR-ALL

The third and perhaps biggest shift in crises over the past decade has
been the changing nature of foreign involvement. Outside meddling
in wars is nothing new. But today, more foreign powers, particularly
non-Western midsize powers, are jockeying for influence in unsta-
ble political arenas. This dynamic has helped fuel the deadliest wars
of the past decade.
These entanglements are symptomatic of larger shifts in global
power. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States was
left with unmatched power in what is known as the unipolar moment.
Too much nostalgia for Western hegemony would be misplaced; the
bloody wars in Somalia and the former Yugoslavia, the Rwandan geno-
cide, the brutal conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the
Afghan and Iraq wars, and even previous wars in Sudan all happened
at a time of American predominance (and, in some cases, because of it).
Nonetheless, the emergence of a strong and confident West, along with
the United States’ growing network of alliances and security guarantees,
played an outsize role in structuring global affairs.
The extent to which one assesses the unipolar moment as over
depends, to some degree, on the metrics used to measure. (The United
States remains the only country that can project military power on a
global scale, for example.) Nonetheless, governments around the world
no longer see the United States as a lone hegemon and are recalibrat-
ing accordingly. The uncertainty they sense about what comes next
is destabilizing. Regional powers are jostling and probing to see how
far they can go. Many sense a vacuum of influence and see a need to
cultivate proxies in weaker states to protect their interests or stop rivals
from advancing their own (as, they would argue, big powers have long
done). Their forays into power projection have often been as counter-
productive and disruptive as the U.S.-led efforts that preceded them.
The Middle East’s major fault lines—notably, a bitter contest for
regional influence between Iran and Saudi Arabia and its allies and
a competition pitting Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and
foreign affairs 190

Egypt against Qatar and Turkey—have proved especially destructive.

For years, these rivalries have upended democratic transitions and
prolonged conflicts, mostly in the Arab world but also in the Horn
of Africa, as competing powers pitched in behind local allies. Some
geopolitical struggles have been less zero-sum: Russia and Turkey, for
instance, back opposing sides in Libya, Syria, and, to some degree,
the South Caucasus but maintain reasonably cordial bilateral ties and
have even cooperated to broker cease-fires in Syria. Overall, though,
increased outside involvement has complicated efforts to end wars.
In Sudan, as well, a wider array of foreign powers is enmeshed than
might have been the case some decades ago. Both Hemedti and Bur-
han have ties to the Gulf, with Saudi Arabia and the uae shoring up
Sudan’s security forces after Bashir’s fall. Hemedti’s paramilitary units
have fought for Gulf powers in Yemen, an arrangement that has earned
Hemedti wealth and power, and he has ties to powerful actors in Chad,
the Central African Republic, and across the Sahel. He has also been
linked to the Wagner paramilitary group and the Libyan commander
Khalifa Haftar, who may have funneled weapons his way in the early
days of the fighting in Khartoum. Burhan and the saf, on the other
hand, are backed by neighboring Egypt.
Western powers have also played a role in the unfolding Suda-
nese tragedy. Sudanese activists accuse Washington of picking favor-
ites among civilian leaders and leaving others, notably the resistance
committees that championed the revolution, out of the negotiations
during the transition. Western powers clearly missed opportunities
to support civilian authority and waited too long to unlock aid in the
wake of the 2019 revolution. The United States was also too slow to
lift its anachronistic designation of Sudan as a state sponsor of terror-
ism—a step that might have empowered civilian leaders when they
ostensibly held power with the security forces. But whether Western
governments could actually have nudged Hemedti and Burhan aside,
as some analysts argue, is unclear, given their powerful militaries and
the support they enjoyed from outside.
Sudan’s transition to democracy would have always faced an uphill
battle given its troubled domestic politics—namely, Bashir’s autocratic
legacy and the difficulty of finding a modus vivendi among the remain-
ing political actors. But foreign involvement and the external support
granted to both the saf and the rsf made it harder still.
foreign affairs 191

A BLOODY SLOG
The Sudan crisis, like other recent ones, has many of the ingredients of
a protracted war. According to the International Rescue Committee,
wars now last on average about twice as long as they did 20 years ago
and four times longer than they did during the Cold War. No end is
in sight for conflicts in the Sahel, for example, where fighting between
Islamists, rival militias, and security forces engulfs ever-larger tracts of
the countryside, or in Myanmar, which is still in the throes of a calamity
triggered by the 2021 coup. Even in places where bloodshed has declined
recently—such as Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, and Yemen—the lull has
not produced any real settlements or ended long-standing humanitarian
disasters. The question is whether Sudan will now join this list.
Today’s conflicts often persist in part because they tend to be more
complex than in the past, often involving not only more foreign powers
but multiple battling parties. Warlords can now more easily tap global
criminal networks and markets to sustain their campaigns. In many
war zones, jihadis are among the main protagonists, which complicates
peacemaking: militants’ demands are hard to accommodate, many
leaders refuse to engage in talks with them, and counterterrorism
operations hinder diplomacy.
Alarmingly, these dynamics are nearly all potentially at play in
Sudan. For now, the struggle is a two-sided confrontation between
the saf and the rsf—but other parties may well get dragged in. For-
mer rebels and other militias, which thus far have mostly sat out the
conflict and refused to pick sides, could mobilize to defend themselves.
The longer the crisis lasts, the graver the danger that militants with
links to al Qaeda or isis—which hold sway on several other African
battlefields—move in.
The saf and the rsf seem determined to fight on until one side
gains a decisive upper hand, paving the way for talks in which the victor
dictates the terms. In neighboring Ethiopia, the war in Tigray ended
largely because Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s federal forces prevailed
on the battlefield, and the outgunned Tigrayans were forced to accept
a settlement largely on Abiy’s terms. But Sudan is not Ethiopia. After
decades of Bashir’s misrule, Burhan’s army is weak and divided. It will
struggle to root out the tens of thousands of rsf fighters entrenched in
parts of Khartoum, including in the presidential palace, in government
buildings, and elsewhere. A decisive triumph for either side seems
unlikely—and would certainly come at an enormous civilian cost.
foreign affairs 192

A protracted war in Sudan would be devastating. Even before today’s

conflict, about a third of Sudanese—more than 15 million people—
relied on emergency aid. Should the humanitarian crisis devolve into
a full-blown catastrophe, the instability could well spill over into
neighboring countries, which are themselves ill equipped to manage
an accelerated exodus of Sudanese fleeing violence or fighters flowing
across borders. Moreover, the strategic location of Sudan’s coastline
along one of the world’s most vital waterways, with an estimated 10
percent of global trade passing through the Red Sea each year, means
the country’s collapse would reverberate even farther afield.
WATCHING AND WAITING

There is, perhaps, a sliver of hope in the geopolitics of Sudan’s crisis.
The mood in Arab capitals is more measured than it was a few years
ago. Riyadh, in particular, has recalibrated, turning the page on its
2017 spat with Qatar and even seeking to reestablish diplomatic rela-
tions with Iran, including through a deal brokered by China in March.
Moreover, the regional powers most involved in Sudan—Saudi Ara-
bia, the uae, and Egypt—belong to what has traditionally been the
same bloc. The Saudis, whose development plans hinge on stability
around the Red Sea, have especially strong motives to halt the fighting.
Riyadh’s influence with both Burhan and Hemedti and its close ties
to the uae and Egypt probably give it the best shot of reining in the
warring parties, particularly with U.S. support.
Whether Saudi leaders can restrain Egypt and the uae from provid-
ing support to Burhan and Hemedti, respectively, is not clear. There are
signs of strain in the usually friendly relations between Riyadh, Cairo,
and Abu Dhabi. Nor are Arab capitals the only ones that could weigh
in; neighboring Ethiopia and Eritrea fret about instability along their
borders and may intervene more directly if Egypt does so. So far, all
outside powers, seemingly fearful of an all-out war, appear to be acting
with some restraint—but if one outside party makes a move, others
will follow.
For now, continued fighting seems the likeliest scenario. Both Bur-
han and Hemedti see the conflict as existential—and saf officers as
a group are bent on wiping out the rsf. Even if the two parties were
to pause hostilities, the dispute over control of the rsf’s future that
sparked the fighting in the first place would remain. Although today’s
crisis makes the prospect of the two generals stepping aside seemingly
foreign affairs 193

unlikely, moving away from military rule is essential, all the more
so given the public revulsion at the battling forces in the Sudanese
capital. Talks convened by the United States and Saudi Arabia in
Jeddah in May involve only representatives from the two warring
factions; wider dialogue that includes civilians, perhaps led by the
African Union, is urgently needed to forge common ground even as
cease-fires break down. The array of actors with influence and compet-
ing interests makes coordination among Arab, African, and Western
actors crucial. Critically, as efforts to stop the fighting continue, more
concerted diplomacy, including from the United States, is necessary
to avert a proxy free-for-all among outside powers that would stifle
all hope of a settlement anytime soon.
No one should underestimate how disastrous a slide toward a pro-
tracted, all-out conflict in Sudan would be—primarily for the Sudanese
but also more broadly. At a time when other crises are stretching the
world’s humanitarian system to the breaking point and many capitals
are consumed by the conflict in Ukraine or its knock-on effects, the
world can ill afford another catastrophic war.
foreign affairs 194

june 2
The Illusion of
China’s AI Prowess
Regulating AI Will Not Set America
Back in the Technology Race
Helen Toner, Jenny Xiao, and Jeffrey Ding
T
he artificial intelligence revolution has reached Congress.
The staggering potential of powerful AI systems, such as
OpenAI’s text-based ChatGPT, has alarmed legislators, who
worry about how advances in this fast-moving technology might
remake economic and social life. Recent months have seen a flurry
of hearings and behind-the-scenes negotiations on Capitol Hill as
lawmakers and regulators try to determine how best to impose limits
on the technology. But some fear that any regulation of the ai indus-
try will incur a geopolitical cost. In a May hearing at the U.S. Senate,
HELEN TONER is Director of Strategy and Foundational Research Grants at Georgetown

University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, and she also serves on OpenAI’s
Board of Directors.
JENNY XIAO is a venture capitalist investing in AI startups and a Ph.D. candidate at
Columbia University.
JEFFREY DING is Assistant Professor of Political Science at George Washington University.
foreign affairs 195

The Illusion of China’s AI Prowess
Sam Altman, the ceo of OpenAI, warned that “a peril” of ai regulation

is that “you slow down American industry in such a way that China or
somebody else makes faster progress.” That same month, ai entrepre-
neur Alexandr Wang insisted that “the United States is in a relatively
precarious position, and we have to make sure we move fastest on the
technology.” Indeed, the notion that Washington’s propensity for red
tape could hurt it in the competition with Beijing has long occupied
figures in government and in the private sector. Former Google ceo
Eric Schmidt claimed in 2021 that “China is not busy stopping things
because of regulation.” According to this thinking, if the United States
places guardrails around ai, it could end up surrendering international
ai leadership to China.
In the abstract, these concerns make sense. It would not serve U.S.
interests if a regulatory crackdown crippled the domestic ai industry
while Chinese ai companies, unshackled, could flourish. But a closer
look at the development of ai in China—especially that of large lan-
guage models (llms), the text generation systems that underlie applica-
tions such as ChatGPT—shows that such fears are overblown. Chinese
llms lag behind their U.S. counterparts and still depend in large part
on American research and technology. Moreover, Chinese AI develop-
ers already face a far more stringent and limiting political, regulatory,
and economic environment than do their U.S. counterparts. Even if it
were true that new regulations would slow innovation in the United
States—and it very well may not be—China does not appear poised
to surge ahead.
U.S. companies are building and deploying ai tools at an unprece-
dented pace, so much so that even they are actively seeking guidance
from Washington. This means that policymakers considering how to
regulate the technology are in a position of strength, not one of weakness.
Left untended, the harms from today’s ai systems will continue to multi-
ply while the new dangers produced by future systems will go unchecked.
An inflated impression of Chinese prowess should not prevent the
United States from taking meaningful and necessary action now.
THE SINCEREST FORM OF FLATTERY

Over the past three years, Chinese labs have rapidly followed in the
footsteps of U.S. and British companies, building ai systems similar
to OpenAI’s GPT-3 (the forerunner to ChatGPT), Google’s PaLM,
and DeepMind’s Chinchilla. But in many cases, the hype surrounding
foreign affairs 196

Chinese models has masked a lack of real substance. Chinese ai

researchers we have spoken with believe that Chinese llms are at least
two or three years behind their state-of-the-art counterparts in the
United States—perhaps even more. Worse, AI advances in China rely
a great deal on reproducing and tweaking research published abroad, a
dependence that could make it hard for Chinese companies to assume
a leading role in the field. If the pace of innovation slackened elsewhere,
China’s efforts to build llms—like a slower cyclist coasting in the
leaders’ slipstream—would likely decelerate.
Take, for instance, the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence’s
WuDao 2.0 model. After its release in the summer of 2021, Forbes
thrilled at the model as an example of “bigger, stronger, faster ai,”
largely because WuDao 2.0 boasted ten times more parameters—the
numbers inside an ai model that determine how it processes informa-
tion—than GPT-3. But this assessment was misleading in several ways.
Merely having more parameters does not make one ai system better
than another, especially if not matched by corresponding increases in
data and computing power. In this case, comparing parameter counts
was especially unwarranted given that WuDao 2.0 worked by combin-
ing predictions from a series of models rather than as a single language
model, a design that artificially inflated the parameter count. What’s
more, the way researchers posed questions to the model helped its
performance in certain trials appear stronger than it actually was.
Baidu’s “Ernie Bot” also disappointed. Touted as China’s answer
to ChatGPT, the development of Ernie Bot was clearly—like that
of WuDao 2.0—spurred by pressure to keep up with a high-profile
breakthrough in the United States. The Chinese bot failed to live up
to aspirations. Baidu’s launch event included only prerecorded exam-
ples of its operation, a telltale sign that the chatbot was unlikely to
perform well in live interactions. Reviews from users who have since
gained access to Ernie Bot have been mediocre at best, with the chatbot
stumbling on simple tasks such as basic math or translation questions.
Chinese ai developers struggle with the pressure to keep up with
their U.S. counterparts. In August 2021, more than 100 researchers at
Stanford collaborated on a major paper about the future of so-called
foundation models, a category of ai systems that includes llms. Seven
months later, the Beijing Academy of ai released a similarly lengthy
literature review on a related subject, with almost as many co-authors.
But within a few weeks, a researcher at Google discovered that large
foreign affairs 197

sections of the Chinese paper had been plagiarized from a handful of

international papers—perhaps, Chinese-language media speculated,
because the graduate students involved in drafting the paper faced
extreme pressure and were up against very short deadlines.
Americans should not be haunted by the specter of an imminent
Chinese surge in llm development. Chinese ai teams are fighting—
and often failing—to keep up with the blistering speed of new research
and products emerging elsewhere. When it comes to llms, China trails
years, not months, behind its international competitors.
HEADWINDS AND HANDICAPS

Forces external to the ai industry also impede the pace of innovation
in China. Because of the outsize computational demands of llms, the
international competition over semiconductors inevitably affects ai
research and development. The Chinese semiconductor industry can
only produce chips several generations behind the latest cutting-edge
ones, forcing many Chinese labs to rely on high-end chips devel-
oped by U.S. firms. In recent research analyzing Chinese llms, we
found 17 models that used chips produced by the California-based
firm nvidia; by contrast, we identified only three models built with
Chinese-made chips.
Huawei’s PanGu-α, released in 2021, was one of the three exceptions.
Trained using Huawei’s in-house Ascend processors, the model appears
to have been developed with significantly less computational power
than best practices would recommend. Although it is currently perfectly
legal for Chinese research groups to access cutting-edge U.S. chips by
renting hardware from cloud providers such as Amazon or Microsoft,
Beijing must be worried that the intensifying rhetoric and restrictions
around semiconductors will hobble its ai companies and researchers.
More broadly, pessimism about the overall economic and techno-
logical outlook in China may hamper domestic ai efforts. In response
to a wave of regulatory scrutiny and a significant economic slowdown
in the country, many Chinese startups are now opting to base their
operations overseas and sell to an international market instead of sell-
ing primarily to the Chinese market. This shift has been driven by the
increasing desire among Chinese entrepreneurs to gain easier access to
foreign investment and to escape China’s stringent regulatory environ-
ment—while also skirting restrictions imposed on Chinese companies
by the United States.
foreign affairs 198

HAL, MEET BIG BROTHER

China’s thicket of restrictions on speech also pose a unique challenge
to the development and deployment of llms. The freewheeling way in
which llms operate—following the user’s lead to produce text on any
topic, in any style—is a poor fit for China’s strict censorship rules. In a
private conversation with one of us (Xiao), one Chinese ceo quipped
that China’s llms are not even allowed to count to ten, as that would
include the numbers eight and nine—a reference to the state’s sensi-
tivity about the number 89 and any discussion of the 1989 Tiananmen
Square protests.
Because the inner workings of llms are poorly understood—even
by their creators—existing methods for putting boundaries around
what they can and cannot say function more like sledgehammers than
scalpels. This means that companies face a stark tradeoff between how
useful the ai’s responses are and how well they avoid undesirable topics.
Llm providers everywhere are still figuring out how to navigate this
tradeoff, but the potentially severe ramifications of a misstep in China
force companies there to choose a more conservative approach. Popular
products such as the Microsoft spinout XiaoIce are prohibited from
discussing politically sensitive topics such as the Tiananmen Square
protests or the Chinese leader Xi Jinping. Some users we spoke to
even claim that XiaoIce has gotten less functional over time, perhaps
as Microsoft has added additional guardrails. Journalists have likewise
found that Baidu’s Ernie Bot gives canned answers to questions about
Xi and refuses to respond on other politically charged topics. Given
the wide range of censored opinions and subjects in China—from the
health of the Chinese economy to the progress of the war in Ukraine
to the definition of “democracy”—developers will struggle to make
chatbots that do not cross redlines while still being able to answer most
questions normally and effectively.
In addition to these political constraints on speech, Chinese ai com-
panies are also subject to the country’s unusually detailed and demand-
ing regulatory regime for ai. One set of rules came into force in January
2023 and applies to providers of online services that use generative ai,
including llms. A draft of further requirements, which would apply
to research and development practices in addition to ai products, was
released for comment in April.
Some of the rules are straightforward, such as requiring that sensitive
data be handled according to China’s broader data governance regime.
foreign affairs 199

Other provisions may prove quite onerous. The January regulations,

for instance, oblige providers to “dispel rumors” spread using content
generated by their products, meaning that companies are on the hook
if their ai tools produce information or opinions that go against the
Chinese Communist Party line. The April draft would go further still,
forcing llm developers to verify the truth and accuracy not just of what
the AI programs produce but also of the material used to train the pro-
grams in the first place. This requirement could be a serious headache
in a field that relies on massive stores of data scraped from the Web.
When carefully designed, regulation need not obstruct innovation.
But so far, the ccp’s approach to regulating llms and other generative ai
technology appears so heavy-handed that it could prove a real impediment
to Chinese firms and researchers.
FEAR OF THE CHIMERA

Despite the difficulties it currently faces, Chinese ai development may
yet turn a corner and establish a greater track record of success and
innovation. Americans, however, have a history of overestimating the
technological prowess of their competitors. During the Cold War,
bloated estimates of Soviet capabilities led U.S. officials to make pol-
icy on the basis of a hypothesized “bomber gap” and then “missile gap,”
both of which were later proved to be fictional. A similarly groundless
sense of anxiety should not determine the course of ai regulation in
the United States. After all, where social media companies resisted
regulation, ai firms have already asked for it. Five years ago, Facebook
founder Mark Zuckerberg warned Congress that breaking up his social
media company would only strengthen Chinese counterparts. In ai, by
contrast, industry leaders are proactively calling for regulation.
If anything, regulation is the area where the United States most
risks falling behind in ai. China’s recent regulations on generative ai
build on top of existing rules and a detailed data governance regime.
The European Union, for its part, is well on its way to passing new
rules about ai, in the form of the ai Act, which would categorize lev-
els of risk and impose additional requirements for llms. The United
States has not yet matched such regulatory efforts, but even here,
U.S. policymakers are in better shape than often assumed. The fed-
eral government has already drafted thorough frameworks for man-
aging ai risks and harms, including the White House’s Blueprint
for an ai Bill of Rights and the National Institute for Standards and
foreign affairs 200

Technology’s ai Risk Management Framework. These documents pro-

vide in-depth guidance on how to navigate the multifaceted risks and
harms—as well as benefits—of this general-purpose technology. What
is needed now is legislation that allows the enforcement of the key
tenets of these frameworks, in order to protect the rights of citizens
and place guardrails around the rapid advance of ai research.
There are still plenty of issues to work through, including where
new regulatory authorities should be housed, what role third-party
auditors can play, what transparency requirements should look like,
and how to apportion liability when things go wrong. These are thorny,
urgent questions that will shape the future of the technology, and they
deserve to receive serious effort and policy attention. If the chimera of
Chinese ai mastery dissuades policymakers from pursuing regulation
of the industry, they will only be hurting U.S. interests and imperiling
the country’s prosperity.
foreign affairs 201

Oc tober 1 4
An Invasion of Gaza Would

Be a Disaster for Israel
America Must Prevail on Its Ally
to Step Back From the Brink
Marc Lynch
I
n the early morning of October 13, the Israeli military issued a
warning to the 1.2 million Palestinians of northern Gaza: they
must evacuate within 24 hours, in advance of a probable ground
invasion. Such an Israeli assault would have the avowed goal of end-
ing Hamas as an organization in retaliation for its shocking October
7 surprise attack into southern Israel, where it massacred over 1,000
Israeli citizens and seized over a hundred hostages.
An Israeli ground campaign has seemed inevitable from the moment
Hamas breached the security perimeter surrounding the Gaza Strip.
Washington has fully backed Israeli plans, notably refraining from urg-
ing restraint. In an overheated political environment, the loudest voices
in the United States have been those urging extreme measures against
Hamas. In some cases, commentators have even called for military
action against Iran for its alleged sponsorship of Hamas’s operation.
marc lynch is Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at George

Washington University.
foreign affairs 202

An Invasion of Gaza Would Be a Disaster for Israel
But this is precisely the time that Washington must be the cooler
head and save Israel from itself. The impending invasion of Gaza will
be a humanitarian, moral, and strategic catastrophe. It will not only
badly harm Israel’s long-term security and inflict unfathomable human
costs on Palestinians but also threaten core U.S. interests in the Middle
East, in Ukraine, and in Washington’s competition with China over the
Indo-Pacific order. Only the Biden administration—channeling the
United States’ unique leverage and the White House’s demonstrated
close support for Israeli security—can now stop Israel from making
a disastrous mistake. Now that it has shown its sympathy with Israel,
Washington must pivot toward demanding that its ally fully comply
with the laws of war. It must insist that Israel find ways to take the
fight to Hamas that do not entail the displacement and mass killing
of innocent Palestinian civilians.
UNSTEADY STATE
The Hamas attack upended the set of assumptions that have defined
the status quo between Israel and Gaza of nearly two decades. In 2005,
Israel unilaterally withdrew from the Gaza Strip but did not end its
de facto occupation. It retained full control over Gaza’s borders and
airspace, and it continued exercising tight control (in close cooperation
with Egypt) from outside the security perimeter over the movement of
Gaza’s people, goods, electricity, and money. Hamas assumed power in
2006 following its victory in legislative elections, and it consolidated
its grip in 2007 after a failed U.S.-backed effort to replace the group
with the Palestinian Authority.
Since 2007, Israel and Hamas have maintained an uneasy arrange-
ment. Israel keeps up a stifling blockade over Gaza, which severely
restricts the territory’s economy and imposes great human costs while
also empowering Hamas by diverting all economic activity to the tun-
nels and black markets it controls. During the episodic outbreaks of
conflict—in 2008, 2014, and again in 2021—Israel massively bom-
barded the densely populated Gazan urban centers, destroying infra-
structure and killing thousands of civilians while degrading Hamas’s
military capabilities and establishing the price to be paid for provoca-
tions. All of this did little to loosen Hamas’s grip on power.
Israeli leaders had come to think that this equilibrium could last
indefinitely. They believed that Hamas had learned the lessons of
past adventurism through Israel’s massively disproportionate military
foreign affairs 203

responses and that Hamas was now content to maintain its rule in Gaza
even if that meant controlling the provocations of smaller militant
factions, such as Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The difficulties the Israeli
Defense Forces (idf) experienced in a brief ground offensive in 2014
tempered its ambitions to attempt more. Israeli officials waved off
perennial complaints about the humanitarian effects of the blockade.
Instead, the country was content to keep Gaza on the back burner while
accelerating its increasingly provocative moves to expand its settlements
and control over the West Bank.
Hamas had other ideas. Although many analysts have attributed its
shifting strategy to Iranian influence, Hamas had its own reasons to
change its behavior and attack Israel. Its 2018 gambit to challenge the
blockade through mass nonviolent mobilization—popularly known as
the “Great March of Return”—ended with massive bloodshed as Israeli
soldiers opened fire on the protesters. In 2021, by contrast, Hamas
leaders believed that they scored significant political gains with the
broader Palestinian public by firing missiles at Israel during intense
clashes in Jerusalem over Israeli confiscation of Palestinian homes and
over Israeli leaders’ provocations in the al Aqsa mosque complex: one
of Islam’s holiest sites, which some Israeli extremists want to tear down
to build a Jewish temple.
More recently, the steady escalation of Israeli land grabs and military-
backed settler attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank created an
angry, mobilized public, one that the United States—and the Israel-
backed Palestinian Authority—seemed unable and unwilling to address.
Highly public U.S. moves to broker an Israeli-Saudi normalization
deal may also have appeared like a closing window of opportunity for
Hamas to act decisively, before regional conditions turned inexorably
against it. And, perhaps, the Israeli uprising against Prime Minis-
ter Benjamin Netanyahu’s judicial reforms led Hamas to anticipate a
divided and distracted adversary.
It is still unclear the extent to which Iran motivated the timing or
nature of the surprise attack. Certainly, Iran has increased its support
to Hamas in recent years and sought to coordinate activities across its
“axis of resistance” of Shiite militias and other actors opposed to the
U.S.- and Israeli-backed regional order. But it would be an enormous
mistake to ignore the broader, local political context within which
Hamas made its move.
foreign affairs 204

TIPPING POINT
Israel initially responded to the Hamas attack with an even more
intense bombing campaign than normal, along with an even
more intense blockade, where it cut off food, water, and energy. Israel
mobilized its military reserves, bringing some 300,000 troops to the
border and preparing for an imminent ground campaign. And Israel
has called on Gaza’s civilians to leave the north within 24 hours. This
is an impossible demand. Gazans have nowhere to go. Highways are
destroyed, infrastructure is in rubble, there is little remaining electricity
or power, and the few hospitals and relief facilities are all in the north-
ern target zone. Even if Gazans wanted to leave the strip, the Rafah
crossing to Egypt has been bombed—and Egyptian President Abdel
Fattah el-Sisi has shown few signs of offering a friendly refuge.
Gazans are aware of these facts. They do not see the call to evacuate
as a humanitarian gesture. They believe that Israel’s intention is to
carry out another nakba, or “catastrophe”: the forced displacement of
Palestinians from Israel during the 1948 war. They do not believe—
nor should they believe—that they will be allowed to return to Gaza
after the fighting. This is why the Biden administration’s push for a
humanitarian corridor to allow Gazan civilians to flee the fighting is
such a uniquely bad idea. To the extent that a humanitarian corridor
accomplishes anything, it would be to accelerate the depopulation of
Gaza and the creation of a new wave of permanent refugees. It would
also, fairly clearly, offer the right-wing extremists in Netanyahu’s
government a clear road map for doing the same in Jerusalem and
the West Bank.
This Israeli response to the Hamas attack comes from public out-
rage and has thus far generated political plaudits from leaders at home
and around the world. But there is little evidence that any of these
politicians have given serious thought to the potential implications
of a war in Gaza, in the West Bank, or in the broader region. Neither
is there any sign of serious grappling with an endgame in Gaza once
the fighting begins. Least of all is there any sign of thinking about the
moral and legal implications of the collective punishment of Gazan
civilians and the inevitable human devastation to come.
The invasion of Gaza itself will be laced with uncertainties. Hamas
surely anticipated such an Israeli response and is well prepared to fight
a long-term urban insurgency against advancing Israeli forces. It likely
hopes to inflict significant casualties against a military that has not
foreign affairs 205

engaged in such combat in many years. (Israel’s recent military expe-

riences are limited to profoundly one-sided operations, such as last
July’s attack on the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank.) Hamas
has already signaled gruesome plans to use its hostages as a deterrent
against Israeli actions. Israel could win a quick victory, but it seems
unlikely; moves that might accelerate the country’s campaign, such as
bombing cities to the ground and depopulating the north, would come
with major reputational costs. And the longer the war grinds on, the
more the world will be bombarded with images of dead and injured
Israelis and Palestinians, and the more opportunities there will be for
unexpected disruptive events.
Even if Israel does succeed in toppling Hamas, it will then be faced
with the challenge of governing the territory it abandoned in 2005
and then mercilessly blockaded and bombed in the intervening years.
Gaza’s young population will not welcome the idf as liberators. There
will be no flowers and candy on offer. Israel’s best-case scenario is a
protracted counterinsurgency in a uniquely hostile environment where
it has a history of failure and in which people have nothing left to lose.
In a worst-case scenario, the conflict will not remain confined to
Gaza. And unfortunately, such an expansion is likely. A protracted
invasion of Gaza will generate tremendous pressures in the West Bank,
which President Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority may be
unable—or, perhaps, unwilling—to contain. Over the last year, Israel’s
relentless encroachment on West Bank land, and the violent provoca-
tions of the settlers, has already brought Palestinian anger and frustra-
tion to a boil. The Gaza invasion could push West Bank Palestinians
over the edge.
Despite overwhelming Israeli anger at Netanyahu for his govern-
ment’s nearly unprecedented strategic failure, opposition leader Benny
Gantz has helped solve Netanyahu’s major political problems at no
evident cost by joining a national unity war cabinet without the removal
of the right-wing extremists Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich.
This decision is significant because it suggests that the provocations in
the West Bank and Jerusalem, which Ben-Gvir and Smotrich spear-
headed last year, will only continue in this unsettled environment. In
fact, it could accelerate, as the settler movement seeks to take advantage
of the moment to attempt to annex some or all of the West Bank and
displace its Palestinian residents. Nothing could be more dangerous.
foreign affairs 206

Serious conflict in the West Bank—whether in the form of a new

intifada or an Israeli settler land grab—alongside the devastation of
Gaza, would have massive repercussions. It would lay bare the grim
truth of Israel’s one-state reality to a point where even the last die-
hards could not deny it. The conflict could trigger another Palestinian
forced exodus, a new wave of refugees cast into already dangerously
overburdened Jordan and Lebanon or forcibly contained by Egypt in
enclaves in the Sinai Peninsula.
BEYOND THE PALE

Arab leaders are realists by nature, preoccupied with their own survival
and their own national interests. Nobody expects them to sacrifice for
Palestine, an assumption that has driven American and Israeli policy
under both former U.S. President Donald Trump and U.S. President
Joe Biden. But there are limits to their ability to stand up to a furiously
mobilized mass public, particularly when it comes to Palestine. Saudi
Arabia might very well normalize relations with Israel, that curious
obsession of the Biden administration, when there are few political
costs to doing so. It is less likely to do so when the Arab public is
bombarded with gruesome images from Palestine.
In years past, Arab leaders routinely allowed anti-Israel protests as a
way to let off steam, diverting popular anger toward an external enemy
to avoid criticism of their own dismal records. They will likely do so
again, leading cynics to wave off mass marches and angry op-eds. But
the Arab uprisings of 2011 proved conclusively how easily and quickly
protests can spiral from something local and contained into a regional
wave capable of toppling long-ruling autocratic regimes. Arab leaders
will not need to be reminded that letting citizens take to the streets in
massive numbers threatens their power. They will not want to be seen
taking Israel’s side.
Their reluctance, in this climate, to cozy up to Israel is not simply a
question of regime survival. Arab regimes pursue their interests across
multiple playing fields, regionally and globally, as well as at home.
Ambitious leaders seeking to expand their influence and claim leader-
ship of the Arab world can read the prevailing winds. The last few years
have already revealed the extent to which regional powers such as Saudi
Arabia and Turkey have been willing to defy the United States on its
most critical issues: hedging on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, keeping
oil prices high, building stronger relations with China. These decisions
foreign affairs 207

suggest that Washington should not take their continued loyalties for
granted, particularly if U.S. officials are seen as unequivocally backing
extreme Israeli actions in Palestine.
Arab distancing is far from the only regional shift the United States
risks if it continues down this path. And it is far from the most fright-
ening: Hezbollah could also easily be drawn into the war. Thus far, the
organization has carefully calibrated its response to avoid provoca-
tion. But the invasion of Gaza may well be a redline that would force
Hezbollah to act. Escalation in the West Bank and Jerusalem almost
certainly would be. The United States and Israel have sought to deter
Hezbollah from entering the fight, but such threats will only go so
far if the idf continuously escalates. And should Hezbollah enter the
fray with its formidable arsenal of missiles, Israel would face its first
two-front war in half a century. Such a situation would be bad not just
for Israel. It is not clear that Lebanon, already laid low by last year’s
port explosion and economic meltdown, could survive another Israeli
retaliatory bombing campaign.
Some U.S. and Israeli politicians and pundits seem to welcome a
wider war. They have, in particular, been advocating for an attack on
Iran. Although most of those advocating for bombing Iran have taken
that position for years, allegations of an Iranian role in the Hamas attack
could widen the coalition of those willing to start a conflict with Tehran.
But expanding the war to Iran would pose enormous risks, not
only in the form of Iranian retaliation against Israel but also in attacks
against oil shipping in the Gulf and potential escalation across Iraq,
Yemen, and other fronts where Iranian allies hold sway. Recognition
of those risks has thus far restrained even the most enthusiastic Iran
hawks, as when Trump opted against retaliation for the attack on Saudi
Arabia’s Abqaiq refineries in 2019. Even today, a steady stream of leaks
from U.S. and Israeli officials downplaying Iran’s role suggests an inter-
est in avoiding escalation. But despite those efforts, the dynamics of
protracted war are deeply unpredictable. The world has rarely been
closer to disaster.
CRIMES ARE CRIMES

Those urging Israel to invade Gaza with maximalist goals are pushing
their ally into a strategic and political catastrophe. The potential costs
are extraordinarily high, whether counted in Israeli and Palestinian
deaths, the likelihood of a protracted quagmire, or mass displacement of
foreign affairs 208

Palestinians. The risk of the conflict spreading is also alarmingly large,

particularly in the West Bank and Lebanon but potentially far wider.
And the potential gains—beyond satisfying demands for revenge—are
remarkably low. Not since the American invasion of Iraq has there been
such clarity in advance about the fiasco to come.
Nor have the moral issues been so clear. There is no question that
Hamas committed grave war crimes in its brutal attacks on Israeli
citizens, and it should be held accountable. But there is also no ques-
tion that the collective punishment of Gaza, through blockades and
bombing and the forced displacement of its population, represents
grave war crimes. Here, too, there should be accountability—or, better
yet, respect for international law.
Although these rules may not trouble Israeli leaders, they pose a
significant strategic challenge to the United States in terms of its other
highest priorities. It is difficult to reconcile the United States’ promo-
tion of international norms and the laws of war in defense of Ukraine
from Russia’s brutal invasion with its cavalier disregard for the same
norms in Gaza. The states and peoples of the global South far beyond
the Middle East will notice.
The Biden administration has made very clear that it supports Israel
in its response to the Hamas attack. But now is the time for it to use the
strength of that relationship to stop Israel from creating a remarkable
disaster. Washington’s current approach is encouraging Israel to launch
a profoundly misbegotten war, promising protection from its conse-
quences by deterring others from entering the battle and by blocking
any efforts at imposing accountability through international law. But
the United States does this at the cost of its own global standing and
its own regional interests. Should Israel’s invasion of Gaza take its most
likely course, with all its carnage and escalation, the Biden administra-
tion will come to regret its choices.
foreign affairs 209

Oc tober 25
What Palestinians
Really Think of Hamas
Before the War, Gaza’s Leaders Were
Deeply Unpopular—but an Israeli Crackdown
Could Change That
Amaney A. Jamal and Michael Robbins
S
ince Hamas’s atrocious attacks on October 7 left more than 1,400
Israelis dead in a single day, Israel’s response has exacted a heavy
toll on the population of Gaza. According to the Palestinian Min-
istry of Health, so far more than 6,000 Gazans have been killed and
more than 17,000 injured in Israel’s aerial bombardment. The casualties
could quickly climb much higher if Israel goes ahead with its expected
ground invasion. Israeli President Isaac Herzog, Prime Minister Ben-
jamin Netanyahu, Knesset member Ariel Kallner, and other prominent
officials have called for a military campaign that covers the entire terri-
tory of Gaza. Israeli missiles have already destroyed around five percent
of all buildings in Gaza, including in areas where Palestinians sought
shelter after heeding Israeli calls to evacuate their homes. Some of
AMANEY A. JAMAL is Co-Founder and Co-Principal Investigator at Arab Barometer,

Dean of the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs, and Edwards S.
Sanford Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University.
MICHAEL ROBBINS is Director and Co-Principal Investigator at Arab Barometer.
foreign affairs 210

What Palestinians Really Think of Hamas
Israel’s top officials, invoking Hamas’s success in the 2006 Palestinian

parliamentary elections, have in effect declared that all Gazans are part
of Hamas’s terrorist infrastructure and complicit in the group’s atroci-
ties—and are therefore legitimate targets of Israeli retaliation.
The argument that the entire population of Gaza can be held respon-
sible for Hamas’s actions is quickly discredited when one looks at the
facts. Arab Barometer, a research network where we serve as co-principal
investigators, conducted a survey in Gaza and the West Bank days
before the Israel-Hamas war broke out. The findings, published here
for the first time, reveal that rather than supporting Hamas, the vast
majority of Gazans have been frustrated with the armed group’s inef-
fective governance as they endure extreme economic hardship. Most
Gazans do not align themselves with Hamas’s ideology, either. Unlike
Hamas, whose goal is to destroy the Israeli state, the majority of survey
respondents favored a two-state solution with an independent Palestine
and Israel existing side by side.
Continued violence will not bring the future most Gazans hope
for any closer. Instead of stamping out sympathy for terrorism, past
Israeli crackdowns that make life more difficult for ordinary Gazans
have increased support for Hamas. If the current military campaign in
Gaza has a similar effect on Palestinian public opinion, it will further
set back the cause of long-term peace.
MOUNTING FRUSTRATION
Arab Barometer’s survey of the West Bank and Gaza, conducted in
partnership with the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research
and with the support of the National Endowment for Democracy,
provides a snapshot of the views of ordinary citizens on the eve of the
latest conflict. The longest-running and most comprehensive public
opinion project in the region, Arab Barometer has run eight waves of
surveys covering 16 countries in the Middle East and North Africa
since 2006. All surveys are designed to be nationally representative,
most of them (including the latest survey in the West Bank and Gaza)
are conducted in face-to-face interviews in the respondents’ places of
residence, and the collected data is made publicly available. In each
country, survey questions aim to measure respondents’ attitudes and
values about a variety of economic, political, and international issues.
Our most recent interviews were carried out between September 28
and October 8, surveying 790 respondents in the West Bank and 399 in
foreign affairs 211

LITTLE TRUST IN HAMAS

How much trust do you have in the Hamas-led government?
A great deal
Quite a lot Ages 30+

Ages 18–29
Not a lot
None at all
Don’t know /
refuse to answer
0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50%
Source: Arab Barometer Wave VIII, Gaza (2023).
Gaza. (Interviews in Gaza were completed on October 6.) The survey’s

findings reveal that Gazans had very little confidence in their Hamas-
led government. Asked to identify the amount of trust they had in the
Hamas authorities, a plurality of respondents (44 percent) said they had
no trust at all; “not a lot of trust” was the second most common response,
at 23 percent. Only 29 percent of Gazans expressed either “a great deal”
or “quite a lot” of trust in their government. Furthermore, 72 percent said
there was a large (34 percent) or medium (38 percent) amount of corrup-
tion in government institutions, and a minority thought the government
was taking meaningful steps to address the problem.
When asked how they would vote if presidential elections were held in
Gaza and the ballot featured Ismail Haniyeh, the leader of Hamas, Mah-
moud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, and Marwan
Barghouti, an imprisoned member of the central committee of Fatah,
the party led by Abbas, only 24 percent of respondents said they would
vote for Haniyeh. Barghouti received the largest share of support at 32
percent and Abbas received 12 percent. Thirty percent of respondents said
they would not participate. Gazans’ opinions of the pa, which governs the
West Bank, are not much better. A slight majority (52 percent) believe
the pa is a burden on the Palestinian people, and 67 percent would like
to see Abbas resign. The people of Gaza are disillusioned not only with
Hamas but with the entire Palestinian leadership.
foreign affairs 212

The salience of Gaza’s economic troubles also came through clearly

in the survey results. According to the World Bank, the poverty rate in
Gaza rose from 39 percent in 2011 to 59 percent in 2021. Many Gazans
have struggled to secure basic necessities because of both scarcity and
cost. Among survey respondents, 78 percent said that the availability of
food was a moderate or severe problem in Gaza, whereas just five percent
said it was not a problem at all. A similar proportion (75 percent) reported
moderate to severe difficulty affording food even when it was available;
only six percent said food affordability was not a problem.
Gazan households have felt the impact of food shortages keenly.
Seventy-five percent of respondents reported that they had run out of
food and lacked the money to buy more at some point during the pre-
vious 30 days. By comparison, in a 2021 Arab Barometer survey, only 51
percent said the same. This change over just two years is alarming. Gazans
have been forced to adjust their habits to try to make ends meet, with 75
percent saying they had started buying less preferred or less expensive
food and 69 percent saying they had reduced the size of their meals.
Most Gazans attributed the lack of food to internal problems rather
than to external sanctions. Israel and Egypt have imposed a blockade
on Gaza since 2005, limiting the flow of people and goods into and
out of the territory. The strength of the blockade has varied, but it grew
notably stricter after Hamas took control of Gaza in 2007. Neverthe-
less, a plurality of survey respondents (31 percent) identified government
mismanagement as the primary cause of food insecurity in Gaza and 26
percent blamed inflation. Only 16 percent blamed externally imposed
economic sanctions. In short, Gazans were more likely to blame their
material predicament on Hamas’s leadership than on Israel’s economic
blockade. Since the time of the survey, however, this perception may
have changed. Israel cut off water, food, fuel, and electricity supplies to
Gaza following the October 7 attacks, plunging the territory into a deep
humanitarian crisis. Some international aid has entered Gaza since, but
the suffering the Palestinians have experienced has likely hardened their
attitudes in ways that could undermine long-term peace and stability.
NO MORE POLITICS AS USUAL

Overall, the survey responses indicate that Gazans desire political
change. In an eight-point decline since 2021, just 26 percent said the
government was very (three percent) or largely (23 percent) responsive
to the needs of the people. When asked what is the most effective
foreign affairs 213

DIM VIEWS OF HOW HAMAS GOVERNS

How responsive is the Hamas-led government to what people want?
Very
responsive
Largely
responsive
Not very
responsive
Not responsive
at all
Don’t know /
refuse to answer
0% 10% 20% 30% 40%
What is the most effective way to influence a Hamas-led

government decision?
Contact officials
on social media
Work through
personal connections
Contact members
of the media
Form a group with
other people
Work through a
political party
Protest, strike,
or boycott
Participate in a social
media campaign
Nothing is
effective
Don’t know /
refuse to answer
0% 10% 20% 30% 40%
foreign affairs 214

HAMAS ’ S MODEST BASE OF SUPPORT

Which party, if any, do you feel closest to?
Fatah
Hamas
Palestinian
Islamic Jihad
Other
No party
Don’t know /
refuse to answer
0% 10% 20% 30%
way for ordinary people to influence the government, a plurality said

“nothing is effective.” The next most popular answer was to use per-
sonal connections to reach a government official. Most Gazans saw
no avenue for publicly expressing their grievances with the Hamas-
led government. Only 40 percent said that freedom of expression was
guaranteed to a great or moderate extent, and 68 percent believed that
the right to participate in a peaceful protest was not protected or was
protected only to a limited extent under Hamas rule.
About half of Gazans expressed support for democracy: 48 percent
affirmed that “democracy is always preferable to any other kind of
government.” A smaller proportion of respondents (23 percent) indi-
cated a lack of faith in any type of regime, agreeing with the statement,
“For people like me, it doesn’t matter what kind of government we
have.” Only 26 percent agreed that “under some circumstances, a non-
democratic government can be preferable.” (This last finding is similar
to poll results in the United States, where in a 2022 survey, one in five
adults aged 41 or younger agreed with the statement, “Dictatorship
could be good in certain circumstances.”)
Given the low opinion most Gazans hold of their government, it
is unsurprising that their disapproval extends to Hamas as a political
party. Just 27 percent of respondents selected Hamas as their preferred
party, slightly less than the proportion who favored Fatah (30 percent),
foreign affairs 215

the party that is led by Abbas and that governs the West Bank. Hamas’s
popularity in Gaza has slipped as well, falling from 34 percent support
in the 2021 survey. There is notable demographic variation in the recent
responses, too. Thirty-three percent of adults under 30 expressed sup-
port for Hamas, compared with 23 percent of those 30 and older. And
poorer Gazans were less likely than their wealthier counterparts to
support Hamas. Among those who cannot cover their basic expenses,
just 25 percent favored the party in power. Among those who can, the
figure rose to 33 percent. The fact that the people most affected by dire
economic conditions and those who remember life before Hamas rule
were more likely to reject the party underlines the limits of Gazans’
support for Hamas’s movement.
VISIONS FOR THE FUTURE

Leadership style is not the only thing Gazans find objectionable about
Hamas. By and large, Gazans do not share Hamas’s goal of eliminating
the state of Israel. When presented with three possible solutions to the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict (as well as an option to choose “other”), the
majority of survey respondents (54 percent) favored the two-state solu-
tion outlined in the 1993 Oslo accords. In this scenario, the state of
Palestine would sit alongside the state of Israel, their borders based on
the de facto boundary that existed before the 1967 Six-Day War. The
level of support for this resolution has not changed much since 2021;
in that survey, 58 percent of respondents in Gaza selected
the two-state solution.
It is somewhat surprising how little traction alternative political
arrangements had gained among Gazans before the onset of recent hos-
tilities, given how implausible a two-state solution now seems. The survey
presented two other options: an Israeli-Palestinian confederation—in
which both states are independent but remain deeply linked and permit
the free movement of citizens—and a single state for both Jews and
Arabs. These garnered 10 percent and nine percent support, respectively.
Overall, 73 percent of Gazans favored a peaceful settlement to the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict. On the eve of Hamas’s October 7 attack, just
20 percent of Gazans favored a military solution that could result in the
destruction of the state of Israel. A clear majority (77 percent) of those
who provided this response were also supporters of Hamas, amounting to
around 15 percent of the adult population. Among the remaining respon-
dents who favored armed action, 13 percent reported no political affiliation.
foreign affairs 216

Gazans’ views on the normalization of relations between Arab states

and Israel, meanwhile, have been consistently negative. Only 10 percent
expressed approval of this initiative in the most recent survey—the same
percentage as in 2021. Many Gazans likely recognize that Arab solidar-
ity is key to securing a political arrangement that includes an indepen-
dent Palestinian state. If Arab countries were to settle their differences
with Israel without making the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict a precondition for normalization, any lingering hopes for a
two-state solution would evaporate.
Before Hamas’s attack on Israel, Gazans’ foreign policy views sug-
gested both alignment with certain U.S. policy priorities and mistrust
of the United States. Seventy-one percent opposed Russia’s invasion
of Ukraine. Twenty-six percent expressed a wish for Gaza to develop
stronger economic ties to the United States—slightly lower than the
proportion that wanted to deepen economic relations with Iran or
Russia (32 percent in both cases). Only 15 percent of Gazans, however,
believed that U.S. President Joe Biden’s policies had been good or very
good for the Arab world. And in the past few weeks, approval of both
Biden and the United States has certainly declined, given the broad
perception in Gaza, the West Bank, and in the region’s Arab countries
that Washington has come to the aid of Israel at the expense of Gaza.
A final finding—now backed by countless media reports of Gazans’
anguish as escalating violence forces them to flee their homes—is the
strength of people’s connection to the land on which they live. The vast
majority of Gazans surveyed—69 percent—said they have never consid-
ered leaving their homeland. This is a higher proportion than residents
of Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Sudan, and Tunisia who were asked
the same question. (For all of these countries, the most recent available
data comes from Arab Barometer’s 2021–22 survey wave.) Gazans face a
series of challenges, from a worsening economic crisis to an unresponsive
government and a seemingly impossible path to independent statehood,
but they are steadfast in their desire to remain in Gaza.
BREAK THE CYCLE

The results of the Arab Barometer survey paint a bleak picture of Gaza
in the days before the October 7 attacks. The Hamas government,
unable to address citizens’ vital concerns, had lost the public’s confi-
dence. Few Gazans supported Hamas’s goal of destroying the state of
Israel, which left Gaza’s leaders and its population divided over the
foreign affairs 217

future direction of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The vast majority of

Gazans strongly favored a peaceful solution, and they yearned for lead-
ers who could both deliver such a solution and improve Gazans’ overall
quality of life. So far, however, the policies of their own government
and of the Israeli government have prevented progress on both fronts.
Living conditions for Palestinians are better in the West Bank than
they are in Gaza, but the economic and political situation is still grim.
Nearly half of survey respondents in the West Bank (47 percent) reported
going hungry in the last month, and just 19 percent trusted the West
Bank government led by Fatah—an even lower percentage than that of
Gazans who trusted Hamas’s government. Yet governance failures have
not driven West Bank Palestinians to back Hamas. When asked which
party they feel closest to, just 17 percent of respondents in the West
Bank reported support for Hamas. The amount of support for Fatah
was the same as in Gaza (30 percent). With regard to individual leaders,
however, the responses of West Bank residents reflected widespread dis-
affection—and particular dissatisfaction with Abbas. In a hypothetical
presidential election, Barghouti was their top choice, as he was in Gaza,
at 35 percent, while only 11 percent picked Haniyeh, the Hamas leader,
and six percent chose Abbas, the incumbent leader in the West Bank.
Nearly half of respondents—47 percent—said they would not participate.
In terms of attitudes toward the Israeli-Palestinian peace process,
support for the two-state solution in the West Bank was slightly
lower than in Gaza (49 percent versus 54 percent), and opposition to
Arab-Israeli normalization was slightly higher. Only five percent of
respondents in the West Bank approved of the regional rapprochement,
compared with ten percent of Gazans. Although the differences were
small, these relatively hardened attitudes in the West Bank were likely
a result of tensions between Palestinians and Israeli settlers and soldiers
in recent months. The survey’s finding that roughly half of Palestinians
still support the two-state solution may offer some hope for peace
in the long term, but the results do not inspire much confidence in
short-term stability. The deep unpopularity of Palestinian leadership,
in the West Bank in particular, calls into question the feasibility of
reestablishing the Palestinian Authority’s control over Gaza, which
some media outlets have suggested as the next step in reconstruction
after Israel’s military campaign against Hamas is complete.
As Israel’s operations in Gaza escalate, the war will take an unfath-
omable toll on civilians. But even if Israel were to “level Gaza,” as some
foreign affairs 218

hawkish politicians in the United States have called for, it would fail
in its mission to wipe out Hamas. Our research has shown that Israeli
crackdowns in Gaza most often lead to increasing support and sym-
pathy for Hamas among ordinary Gazans. Hamas won 44.5 percent
of the Palestinian vote in parliamentary elections in 2006, but support
for the group plummeted after a military conflict between Hamas
and Fatah in June 2007 ended in Hamas’s takeover of Gaza. In a poll
conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research in
December 2007, just 24 percent of Gazans expressed favorable attitudes
toward Hamas. Over the next few years, as Israel tightened its block-
ade of Gaza and ordinary Gazans felt the effects, approval of Hamas
increased, reaching about 40 percent in 2010. Israel partially eased the
blockade the same year, and Hamas’s support in Gaza leveled off before
declining to 35 percent in 2014. In periods when Israel cracks down
on Gaza, Hamas’s hardline ideology seems to hold greater appeal for
Gazans. Thus, rather than moving the Israelis and Palestinians toward a
peaceful solution, Israeli policies that inflict pain on Gaza in the name
of rooting out Hamas are likely to perpetuate the cycle of violence.
To break the cycle, the Israeli government must now exercise
restraint. The Hamas-led government may be uninterested in peace,
but it is empirically wrong for Israeli political leaders to accuse all
Gazans of the same. In fact, most Gazans are open to a permanent,
peaceful solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Yet the views of
the people who live in Gaza are still often misrepresented in public
discourse, even as surveys such as Arab Barometer consistently show
how different these narratives are from reality.
In the immediate term, Israeli and especially U.S. leaders need to
secure the safety of Gazan civilians, 1.4 million of whom have already
been displaced. The United States should partner with the United
Nations to create clear humanitarian corridors and protected zones,
and Washington should contribute to the un’s appeal for $300 million
in aid to protect Palestinian civilians—a step dozens of U.S. senators
have said they will support. Finally, Israel and the United States must
recognize that the Palestinian people are essential partners in finding
a lasting political settlement, not an obstacle in the way of that worthy
goal. If the two countries seek only military solutions, they will likely
drive Gazans into the arms of Hamas, guaranteeing renewed violence
in the years ahead.
foreign affairs 219

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ou r ed i t o rs ’ t o p pi c k s f rom pri n t a n d w eb

What Russia Got Wrong 6

In Defense of the Fence Sitters 32

Blundering on the Brink 40

The Myth of Multipolarity 58

The Treacherous Path to a Better Russia 72

The Great Convergence 84

Why the World Still Needs Trade 97

Xi’s Age of Stagnation 107

The Return of Nuclear Escalation 120

How Russians Learned to Stop 130

The Long Twilight of the Islamic Republic 138

A New Order in the Middle East? 150

America’s Bad Bet on India 156

Orders of Disorder 163

Why America Is Struggling to 179

Sudan and the New Age of Conflict 186

The Illusion of China’s AI Prowess 195

An Invasion of Gaza Would Be a Disaster for Israel 202

What Palestinians Really Think of Hamas 210

DARA MASSICOT is a Senior Policy Researcher at the RAND Corporation. Before

assault—yet Putin decided to deny his intentions to Russia’s own troops

TOO MUCH AND NOT ENOUGH

guide incoming strikes, something it has lacked in the current war.

The Kremlin’s ideas were obviously ineffective. Yet it delayed import-

HOW RUSSIA PLAYED ITSELF

prevented the country from implementing administrative rules that

defense units that have resisted the Russians. Zelensky, domestically

THE BEAR IS LEARNING

as Bucha, Izyum, and Kherson. And despite hopes to the contrary, it

to keep up with demand. Although Russia is running low on missiles,

will make Ukrainian counteroffensives more costly. Russian mili-

Fintan O ’ Toole is Milberg Professor of Irish Letters at Princeton. He is the author of

first address to the English Parliament, he compared the union of

The success of this branding lay in the ability to encompass two

The Setting Sun

The United Kingdom’s prime minister throughout the 1980s,

he could use, as Thatcher had done, military victory to consolidate a

English nationalists, to the contrary, tended to see any pooling of

You Can Check Out, But You Can ’ t Leave

from Britishness. In Scotland in 2016, only 44 percent of Remainers

Even the mechanics of holding another vote on independence are

MATIAS SPEKTOR is Professor of International Relations at Fundação Getulio Vargas in

to discharge. With limited resources with which to influence global

Kyiv. Lula reasoned that refusing to criticize Moscow would impede

competition of that era, nonaligned developing states rallied around a

The developing world also sees hypocrisy in Washington’s framing of

THE MORE, THE MERRIER?

RISE OF THE MIDDLEMEN

The opportunity for Washington is that hedgers are unlikely to per-

One promising area for cooperation is adaptation to and mitigation

Sergey Radchenko is the Wilson E. Schmidt Distinguished Professor at the Johns

The documents shed new light on the most hair-raising of Cold

R-12s and 24 intermediate-range R-14s. The R-14s were a particular

in Cuba runs from June through November, precisely when the

From July to October, the armada of 85 ships ferried men and

Raúl, the Argentine revolutionary Che Guevara (then one of Fidel’s

Kremlin that began on the evening of October 22 and lasted until

“ THE ABSENCE OF BRAINS ”

The Best of 2023 - Our Editors' Top Picks From Print and Web

The Best of 2023 - Our Editors' Top Picks From Print and Web

The Best of 2023 - Our Editors' Top Picks From Print and Web