• 352: “Rather than providing ATACMs in March, Reapers in June, and jets in September, NATO should go for a Big Bang. Plans to provide all these systems should be announced on February 24, 2023, the first anniversary of Putin’s invasion.”, submitted on 2023-02-14 03:04:15+08:00.
• 353: Friends in Need: What the War in Ukraine Has Revealed About Alliances - Stephen Walt, submitted on 2023-02-14 05:16:58+08:00.
• 354: What China Has Learned From the Ukraine War, submitted on 2023-02-15 00:59:45+08:00.
• 355: The Kremlin’s Grand Delusions - Fiona Hill and Angela Stent, submitted on 2023-02-16 23:44:23+08:00.
• 356: Kyiv and Moscow Are Fighting Two Different Wars - Lawrence Freedman, submitted on 2023-02-18 01:57:27+08:00.
• 357: Axis of Convenience, submitted on 2023-02-18 05:12:22+08:00.

352: “Rather than providing ATACMs in March, Reapers in June, and jets in September, NATO should go for a Big Bang. Plans to provide all these systems should be announced on February 24, 2023, the first anniversary of Putin’s invasion.”, submitted on 2023-02-14 03:04:15+08:00.

—– 352.1 —–2023-02-15 00:54:54+08:00:

Here is a free-access link

353: Friends in Need: What the War in Ukraine Has Revealed About Alliances - Stephen Walt, submitted on 2023-02-14 05:16:58+08:00.

—– 353.1 —–2023-02-14 05:17:30+08:00:

Submission statement: NATO was created to prevent a major war in Europe, a task it accomplished well for many decades. Apart from the brief Kosovo war in 1999, its members never had to fight together or coordinate a joint response to aggression—until a year ago, when Russia invaded Ukraine. NATO’s response thus offers fresh, real-world evidence about how contemporary alliances work in practice.

The recent behavior of Russia and the West confirms that states form alliances not to balance against power but to balance against threats. The way NATO has done so has also revealed much about both the alliance’s virtues and its enduring pathologies. The war may have given NATO a new lease on life and shown the value of its well-established procedures, but it also underscores the degree to which its European members remain dangerously dependent on the United States.

As the world moves toward multipolarity, alliances will only matter more. In an age when no single country stands unchallenged atop the international system, success will depend on rival powers’ ability to form a coherent and capable grouping and exercise power collectively. Above all, the invasion of Ukraine and its aftermath show that leaders court disaster if they fail to understand why alliances form and how they work.

354: What China Has Learned From the Ukraine War, submitted on 2023-02-15 00:59:45+08:00.

—– 354.1 —–2023-02-15 01:01:07+08:00:

From Evan Feigenbaum and Adam Szubin: When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, China’s leaders attempted to balance two fundamentally irreconcilable interests. First, they aimed to bolster China’s entente with Russia to counterbalance American power and alleviate growing strategic pressure from the West. Second, although they backed Moscow, they sought to avoid unilateral and coordinated sanctions aimed at China’s government, companies, and financial institutions.

For a year, China has been performing the “Beijing straddle,” tacking uncomfortably between these competing objectives under the white-hot light of international scrutiny. China has generally refused to sell arms to Russia and to circumvent sanctions on Moscow’s behalf because preserving global market access is more important to Beijing than any economic link to Russia. Simply put, China has no interest in being Russia’s proxy. But Beijing has also tried to have its cake and eat it, too, by endorsing Russia’s rationales for the conflict, coordinating with Moscow diplomatically while it cautiously abstains in United Nations votes, taking full advantage of discounted Russian oil, and enhancing economic linkages to Russia that do not violate Western sanctions. Indeed, China-Russia trade rose by a staggering 34.3 percent in 2022 to a record $190 billion.

Beijing has also learned important lessons even as it struggles to maintain this balance. Specifically, it has closely studied the Western-led sanctions campaign. And it knows that, if tensions with the West continue to intensify, these same economic weapons may well be turned against China. Over the last 20 years, China’s leaders have watched as Washington honed and more frequently deployed economic weaponry, including sanctions, export controls, investment restrictions, and tariffs. But the major Western sanctions campaigns have generally not applied to China because they targeted second-tier economies, such as Iran and Iraq, or more often, marginal economies such as Cuba, North Korea, and Sudan. The current Ukraine conflict has, at long last, given Beijing an opportunity to study the strategy, tactics, and capabilities of a Western sanctions coalition as it works to cripple one of the world’s largest economies.

Of course, in some ways, it is too soon for Beijing to draw the full range of lessons from the Western sanctions effort against Russia. The sanctions include both measures that have instant effect, such as asset freezes, and those that are designed to bite ever more deeply in the years to come. Among the latter are export controls on computer chips and advanced technologies and restrictions on helping Russia develop the deep-water, Arctic, and shale resources on which its future energy revenues depend. But China has already absorbed certain key lessons, some of which are sobering. Perhaps the most important has nothing to do with payment systems or oil tankers but is rather about the power of international partnerships.

355: The Kremlin’s Grand Delusions - Fiona Hill and Angela Stent, submitted on 2023-02-16 23:44:23+08:00.

—– 355.1 —–2023-02-16 23:45:18+08:00:

Short Summary: Despite a series of blunders, miscalculations, and battlefield reversals that would have surely seen him thrown out of office in most normal countries, President Vladimir Putin is still at the pinnacle of power in Russia. He continues to define the contours of his country’s war against Ukraine. He is micromanaging the invasion even as generals beneath him appear to be in charge of the battlefield. (This deputizing is done to protect him from blowback if something goes badly wrong in the war.) Putin and those immediately around him directly work to mobilize Russians on the home front and manipulate public views of the invasion abroad. He has in some ways succeeded in this information warfare.

The war has revealed the full extent of Putin’s personalized political system. After what is now 23 years at the helm of the Russian state, there are no obvious checks on his power. Institutions beyond the Kremlin count for little. “I would never have imagined that I would miss the Politburo,” said Rene Nyberg, the former Finnish ambassador to Moscow. “There is no political organization in Russia that has the power to hold the president and commander in chief accountable.” Diplomats, policymakers, and analysts are stuck in a doom loop—an endless back-and-forth argument among themselves—to figure out what Putin wants and how the West can shape his behavior.

Determining Putin’s actual objectives can be difficult; as an anti-Western autocrat, he has little to gain by publicly disclosing his intentions. But the last year has made some answers clear enough. Since February 2022, the world has learned that Putin wants to create a new version of the Russian empire based on his Soviet-era preoccupations and his interpretations of history. The launching of the invasion itself has shown that his views of past events can provoke him to cause massive human suffering. It has become clear that there is little other states and actors can do to deter Putin from prosecuting a war if he is determined to do so and that the Russian president will adapt old narratives as well as adopt new ones to suit his purposes.

But the events of 2022 and early 2023 have demonstrated that there are ways to constrain Putin, especially if a broad enough coalition of states gets involved. They have also underscored that the West will need to redouble its efforts at strengthening such a diplomatic and military coalition. Because even now, after a year of carnage, Putin is still convinced he can prevail.

356: Kyiv and Moscow Are Fighting Two Different Wars - Lawrence Freedman, submitted on 2023-02-18 01:57:27+08:00.

—– 356.1 —–2023-02-18 01:58:16+08:00:

Short Summary: Over the course of the war in Ukraine, the strategies of Russia and Ukraine have increasingly diverged. At first, Russia sought to catch Ukraine by surprise using a modern army engaged in some fast-moving maneuvers that would yield a rapid and decisive victory. But over time, its army has been seriously degraded, and it has increasingly been relying on artillery barrages and mass infantry assaults to achieve battlefield breakthroughs while stepping up its attacks on Ukrainian cities. In the areas its forces are occupying, it is seeking to impose “Russification” and has dealt harshly with those suspected of spying and sabotage, or simple dissent.

Ukraine has been more innovative in its tactics and more disciplined in their execution. Aided by a growing supply of Western weapons and an agile command, it has managed to recover some of the areas occupied by Russian forces. But it has also been fighting on its own territory and unable to reach far into Russia. So while Ukraine has limited itself to targeting Russia’s military, Russia is targeting Ukraine as a whole: its armed forces, its infrastructure, and its people.

These contrasting approaches—the “classic warfare” pursued by Ukraine and the “total warfare” adopted by Russia—have deep roots in the wars of the twentieth century. As the war in Ukraine reaches its one-year mark, it has begun to offer significant insights into how these two forms of warfare can cope in contemporary conflicts—and how they are likely to shape the contest between Kyiv and Moscow in the coming months.

357: Axis of Convenience, submitted on 2023-02-18 05:12:22+08:00.

—– 357.1 —–2023-02-19 14:35:05+08:00:

Here is a free-access link, if needed.