• 312: The Sources of Russian Misconduct: A Diplomat Defects From the Kremlin, submitted on 2022-10-17 21:43:13+08:00.
• 313: Big Tech Goes to War: To Help Ukraine, Washington and Silicon Valley Must Work Together, submitted on 2022-10-21 05:55:07+08:00.
• 314: The Beginning of the End of the Islamic Republic: Iranians Have Had Enough of Theocracy, submitted on 2022-10-21 21:29:05+08:00.

312: The Sources of Russian Misconduct: A Diplomat Defects From the Kremlin, submitted on 2022-10-17 21:43:13+08:00.

—– 312.1 —–2022-10-17 21:47:51+08:00:

[SS from the essay by Boris Bondarev. He worked as a diplomat in the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs from 2002 to 2022, most recently as a counsellor at the Russian Mission to the United Nations Office in Geneva. He resigned in May to protest the invasion of Ukraine.]

The invasion of Ukraine made it impossible to deny just how brutal and repressive Russia had become. It was an unspeakable act of cruelty, designed to subjugate a neighbor and erase its ethnic identity. It gave Moscow an excuse to crush any domestic opposition. Now, the government is sending thousands upon thousands of drafted men to go kill Ukrainians. The war shows that Russia is no longer just dictatorial and aggressive; it has become a fascist state.
But for me, one of the invasion’s central lessons had to do with something I had witnessed over the preceding two decades: what happens when a government is slowly warped by its own propaganda. For years, Russian diplomats were made to confront Washington and defend the country’s meddling abroad with lies and non sequiturs. We were taught to embrace bombastic rhetoric and to uncritically parrot to other states what the Kremlin said to us. But eventually, the target audience for this propaganda was not just foreign countries; it was our own leadership. In cables and statements, we were made to tell the Kremlin that we had sold the world on Russian greatness and demolished the West’s arguments. We had to withhold any criticism about the president’s dangerous plans. This performance took place even at the ministry’s highest levels. My colleagues in the Kremlin repeatedly told me that Putin likes his foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, because he is “comfortable” to work with, always saying yes to the president and telling him what he wants to hear. Small wonder, then, that Putin thought he would have no trouble defeating Kyiv.

313: Big Tech Goes to War: To Help Ukraine, Washington and Silicon Valley Must Work Together, submitted on 2022-10-21 05:55:07+08:00.

—– 313.1 —–2022-10-21 06:01:36+08:00:

[SS from Christine H. Fox, who served as Acting U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense from 2013 to 2014; and Emelia S. Probasco, Senior Fellow at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology.]

“Starlink service is now active in Ukraine,” Musk tweeted that same day. This was a coup for Ukraine: it facilitated Ukrainian communications in the conflict. Starlink later helped fend off Russian jamming attacks against its service to Ukraine with a quick and relatively simple code update. Now, however, Musk has gone back and forth on whether the company will continue funding the Starlink satellite service that has kept Ukraine and its military online during the war.
The tensions and uncertainty Musk is injecting into the war effort demonstrate the challenges that can emerge when companies play a key role in military conflict. Technology companies ranging from Microsoft to Silicon Valley startups have provided cyberdefense, surveillance, and reconnaissance services—not by direction of a government contract or even as a part of a government plan but instead through the independent decision-making of individual companies. These companies’ efforts have rightly garnered respect and recognition; their involvement, after all, were often pro bono and could have provoked Russian attacks on their networks, or even their people, in retaliation.

But this is new territory for U.S. companies and for the U.S. government. The Biden administration must now figure out how to harness the power and willingness of these companies in ways that will help, and not harm, strategic interests going forward. To do that, policymakers should carefully consider why companies are getting involved and what the government can do to more meaningfully partner with them to serve U.S. foreign policy interests.

314: The Beginning of the End of the Islamic Republic: Iranians Have Had Enough of Theocracy, submitted on 2022-10-21 21:29:05+08:00.

—– 314.1 —–2022-10-21 21:44:24+08:00:

[SS from the essay by Masih Alinejad, an Iranian American journalist and activist. In 2014, she launched a campaign against compulsory hijab laws in Iran. She is the author of The Wind in My Hair: My Fight for Freedom in Modern Iran.]

The protests in Iran put the West in an awkward position. The Biden administration has tried hard to restore some version of the nuclear deal that the Trump administration jettisoned. But this deal cannot be salvaged. The Islamic Republic is not an honest broker: it has a track record of cheating (failing, for instance, in May to answer International Atomic Energy Agency probes about unexplained traces of uranium at three undeclared sites) and it has yet to fully come clean on its past attempts to develop a nuclear program with potential military uses. And worse, should U.S. President Joe Biden manage to reach some compromise with Iran, a new deal would fly in the face of his forceful condemnation of the regime’s crackdown on protesters. Any deal would likely release billions of dollars to the Iranian government, funding the same authorities who are viciously attacking citizens in the streets.
Instead, Biden needs to take a clear and forthright stand. He should use the bully pulpit of his office to deliver a major address on Iran—speaking to its people, its diaspora, and the world. Biden should applaud the democratic ambitions of the Iranian people and move beyond the White House’s narrow focus on the nuclear issue to demand that the human rights of protesters be respected. The administration has made the contest between autocracy and democracy a central theme of its foreign policy. Iran should be part of that policy. It is time to encourage the Iranian people to fulfill their democratic aspirations.