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Former CIA analyst: ‘A costly and prolonged cold war now seems a certainty’

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‘No one knows how the war in Ukraine will end, but there is one post-war certainty: there will be a prolonged and costly Cold War between the United States and Russia,’ – predicts Melvin A. Goodman, a former CIA analyst, now a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and a professor of government at Johns Hopkins University.

He writes: In an interview with David Ignatius of the Washington Post, who has been doing the bidding of the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency for several decades, Secretary of State Antony Blinken emphasized the importance of a “long-term goal of deterrence.” Ignatius took this to mean that the Biden administration will make sure that Russia “should not be able to rest, regroup and reattack.”

In addition to this year’s record defense budget that found the Congress providing $45 billion more than the Pentagon requested, a so-called “emergency” provision will lay the foundation for adding scarce resources to defense spending in the coming year. This provision will allow multiyear, noncompetitive agreements to produce such ordinary weaponry as rockets and munitions.

According to the Washington Post, the Pentagon will now have a way to replenish its stockpiles that will provide a “new golden age” for military contractors.

The Biden administration’s gift to the military-industrial complex rivals what the Reagan administration provided in the 1980s and ensures the country’s rich market for weapons sales. Nearly half of the record defense spending of $858 billion goes to military contractors.

The House and Senate Armed Services Committees made sure that these spending spigots remain open by naming individuals with ties to the weapons industry to a commission that will review the Biden National Defense Strategy. The chairwoman of the commission, former Representative Jane Harman, protected Lockheed-Martin when she served on the Hill and currently is on the board of a military contractor that recently received a seven-year $800 million contract from the Pentagon.

The increased defense spending and the new emergency provision coincide with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s creation of a new committee — the House Select Committee on Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party. In view of the recent rise in anti-Asian violence in the United States, it can only be hoped that Democrats appoint members to the committee who understand the domestic consequences of hyping the threat from China at this particular time.

Our China policy is not working, and the exaggeration of the China threat comes just in time for the hawks in the political aviary who fear that the severe deficiencies of the Russian military in Ukraine is making it more difficult to exaggerate the Russia threat. I’ve been calling attention to the exaggeration of the Russian threat for the past 50 years.

But the policy community, the bipartisan congressional community, and the pundit community can’t let go of the idea that the Soviet Union and Russia present a ‘threat to the national security of the United States’.

The Biden policy ensures a robust military presence on the Russian border that will worsen Cold War 2.0. There will be prolonged and unnecessary increases in defense spending, and the absence of a diplomatic dialogue in those important areas where there is Russian-American agreement.

These areas include a variety of arms control and disarmament issues, such as stopping the proliferation of nuclear weaponry and limiting the use of space in the military competition as well as dealing with insurgencies and terrorism; environmental degradation; and future pandemics.

It is hard to imagine any Russian government willing to pursue diplomatic solutions with a United States that has sponsored a NATO with more than 30 members; a military base in Poland; a regional missile defense in Poland and Romania; and the use of Romanian military facilities close by Russian forces and the Black Sea.

This serious turning point is being ignored by the policy community as well as the pundit and academic communities.”

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Foreign Affairs: What sanctions on Russia can and cannot achieve

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“U.S. policymakers began planning major sanctions on Russia in late 2021” (before the beginning of Ukrainian conflict!), recognizes ‘Foreign Affairs’.

Over the past decade, economic sanctions emerged as Washington’s preferred policy tool to deal with a range of concerns, from adversarial governments in Iran and Venezuela to international drug trafficking. Sanctions became popular because officials saw them as a low-cost tool that could hurt the United States’ foes, writes ‘Foreign Affairs’.

The United States and its allies slammed Russia with a raft of sanctions and other economic restrictions. But a year later, the effectiveness of these measures offers important lessons on their limits. Sanctions and export controls have been useful in undermining Russia’s financial resources and industrial base, but they have done little to change the Kremlin’s strategic calculus.

As Western policymakers dig in for both a protracted conflict with Russia and an era of geopolitical great-power competition with China, they should recognize that sanctions can do real damage to their targets but rarely succeed in making those targets change course.

U.S. policymakers began planning major sanctions on Russia in late 2021 (before the beginning of Ukrainian conflict!), as U.S. President Joe Biden grew concerned about the prospect of a wide-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Sanctions initially rattled markets, with the ruble plunging and Russia forced to double domestic interest rates to stem capital flight. Export controls had a compounding effect on Russian military-industrial production over the course of last year.

But by late 2022, it was increasingly apparent that Russia had weathered the initial economic storm better than many Western officials and experts had expected: Russia’s economy contracted by more than two percent in 2022, a sharp reversal from the five percent growth in 2021, but a dip not nearly as severe as some initial estimates of a ten percent or greater decline in GDP.

Russia’s economy proved resilient.

In the years leading up to the war, Russia had worked to insulate itself from Western sanctions. Moscow withdrew its reserves from the U.S. financial system in 2018 and bolstered holdings of gold. It built domestic interbank transfer and payment mechanisms that proved successful at handling domestic payments and those between Russia and its allies. Russia deepened diplomatic relations with China, India, and countries in the Middle East, providing new outlets after trade with the West collapsed.

And once sanctions were imposed, Russia adopted macroeconomic policies, such as capital controls and bailouts to firms hit by sanctions, to blunt the shock.

Yet policymakers should recognize that sanctions and export controls are not going to affect Putin’s strategic calculus, which will be shaped much more heavily by events on the battlefield.

The primary lesson of Western sanctions on Russia is one that sanctions experts and practitioners have long noted: officials should not rely too much on such measures, stresses Foreign Affairs.

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Elsie Initiative Fund: call for proposals to continue investing in women’s meaningful participation in peacekeeping

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Image source: Elsie Initiative Fund elsiefund.org

At an event that brought together more than 350 representatives from Member States, UN organizations, academia and civil society, the Elsie Initiative Fund (EIF) launched a third call for funding proposals to support the meaningful participation of uniformed women in UN peace operations.

“A more gender-responsive mission builds trust with the communities they serve and improves its effectiveness,” said UN Women’s Executive Director Sima Bahous while opening the event. Further, she highlighted the vital role women play in today’s multidimensional peacekeeping missions and stressed the need to ensure women’s equal participation. UN Under-Secretary-General for Peace Operations Jean-Pierre Lacroix called on Member States to continue promoting women’s meaningful participation in peacekeeping. “Our gender parity efforts are also a matter of justice – there should be no limitation on the grounds of gender to what women can achieve, in all roles and at all levels,”he stressed in his opening remarks.

Since its creation in 2019, the EIF has awarded over USD $17 million in grants to 20 projects. Among the recipients, the Ghanaian Armed Forces and the Senegalese Police and Gendarmerie have deployed four gender-strong units comprising of 1,277 personnel with 18 per cent women across all ranks. 14 EIF-supported security institutions have surveyed 3,689 personnel to examine barriers limiting women’s participation and committed to implementing evidence-based solutions to address identified barriers.

Meanwhile, the Togolese Armed Forces and the Senegalese Police raised awareness among 5,000 people on challenging gender stereotypes and encouraging women to join security institutions as part of large-scale recruitment campaigns. Five EIF-funded projects are creating inclusive environments for women, including through the construction of gender-sensitive accommodation and facilities in Jordan, Senegal, and Togo and improving deployment conditions for their uniformed women peacekeepers deployed to UN peace operations in Mali and Lebanon.

Commending the impact of the EIF, British Minister of State Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon announced an additional contribution of £1 million (USD $1.23 million) to the EIF. “It is wonderful to see how projects supported by the EIF are already tackling obstacles to participation. More investment will mean the Fund can scale up that impact and make gender parity a future reality,” he said at the event. The Republic of Korea also announced an additional contribution of USD $500,000. Meanwhile, Canada’s Ambassador for Women, Peace and Security Jacqueline O’Neill announced that the EIF’s lifespan has been extended to 31 December 2025 as “Canada is committed to continuing to support the EIF.”

Representatives of the Ghanaian and the Uruguayan Armed Forces also spoke at the event about innovative practices developed with EIF funding, including piloting gender – and family – friendly policies and providing cross – training to prepare military women for all roles and functions.

Through this third programming round, the Elsie Initiative Fund can accept Letters of Interest from current and potential Troop and Police Contributing Countries and as UN organizations. Three funding modalities are available: (1) barrier assessment (2) flexible project funding and (3) gender-strong unit premium. For more information on applying to the EIF, visit elsiefund.org/call-for-proposals to download the Letter of Interest Form and supporting resources.

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What Beijing’s Iran-Saudi deal means

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Musaad al-Aiban, a Saudi minister of state (left), and Ali Shamkhani, Iran’s secretary of the National Security Council, in Beijing. Photo: Saudi Press Agency

The agreement to reestablish diplomatic relations between Tehran and Riyadh was no “peace deal,” but the rivals did decide to cool tensions and reopen embassies after a seven-year lapse. China’s role in facilitating the deal raised the most consternation in Washington, leading some to declare that “a new era of geopolitics” had begun and assert that the agreement topped “anything the U.S. has been able to achieve in the region since Biden came to office,writes Grant Rumley, a Goldberger Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

Reports on the new agreement suggest that both sides were readily able to reach consensus on important issues, at least on paper. Riyadh apparently agreed to soften coverage on Iran International, the London-based media outlet funded by Saudis, which Tehran has depicted as the leading anti-regime instigator throughout the recent protest movement. In return, Iran reportedly agreed to encourage its Houthi allies in Yemen to maintain the current year-long truce. Since that war began in 2015, Saudi Arabia has spent millions of dollars defending its territory against Houthi missile and drone attacks, which have often targeted major civilian sites. In short, Riyadh and Tehran already had strong incentives to take at least a few initial diplomatic steps to bolster their internal stability.

According to the trilateral statement issued on March 10, Iran and Saudi Arabia agreed to “resume diplomatic relations” and reopen their embassies within two months. They also affirmed their “respect for the sovereignty of states and…non-interference in internal affairs,” as well as their intention to implement their 2001 security cooperation agreement and their 1998 deal covering economic, cultural, and scientific cooperation.

Yet the 2001 security cooperation agreement includes generic language encouraging information sharing and joint training to counter organized crime, terrorism, and drug trafficking, it does not provide a specific path toward initiating such cooperation. Moreover, the trilateral statement makes painstakingly clear that China’s role was “hosting and sponsoring talks,” and it may host another regional summit later this year.

Washington should therefore be clear-eyed about what Beijing’s mediation means — and what it doesn’t.

China’s investment in the Middle East will likely continue growing; after all, it is the region’s dominant economic force and has long sought to match its diplomatic standing with its sizable economic footprint.

Until  now, its diplomatic reputation in the region has not been challenged by realities on the ground. Getting Iran and Saudi Arabia to publicly agree on a de-escalation accord is a win to be sure.

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