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Saturday, January 20, 2024
On Our "Virtual Route 66" This Week: On the Week That Was (Updated)
We present a snapshot of the week courtesy of Crooked Media, The Institute for Policy Studies, the Financial Times of London, Heather Cox Richardson, Defense One, Palestine Chronicles, Sabato's Crystal Ball, and The Knowledge (with updates on the US Election scene and the war in the Middle East):
White House rhetoric has increasingly centered on preventing the war from expanding across the region, but the Biden administration’s actions in Yemen and the Red Sea are having exactly the opposite effect.
If we don’t act soon, we will ultimately hand the initiative to enemies of democracy, and the results will undoubtedly be grim.
IPS IN THE NEWS
A new Fortune analysis of stock ownership quotes Chuck Collins that all the growth in stocks has gone to the top 1 percent. “As much as wages have gone up, the rules of the economy have been tilted to asset owners at the expense of wage earners.”
"At a time when the United States and its allies often claim — inaccurately — to carry out precision killing with ‘surgical strikes,’ cluster bombs are imprecise by nature," Khury Petersen-Smith tells New Ideal.
Phyllis Bennis joins KPFA to discuss South Africa's genocide case against Israel.
Manuel Perez Rocha explains to Inside Climate News how wealthy corporations exploit investment agreements to try to prevent countries from stopping or outlawing harmful resource extraction processes like mining. "This system is like playing soccer on just half of the pitch, in which one team attacks and the other one can only defend itself, and that’s the game,” he says.
The Economist highlights findings from IPS's report on the true cost of billionaire philanthropy, which found that the combined assets held by the 73 living signers of the Giving Pledge rose from $348 billion to $828 billion in 2022.
Peter Certo tells Newsweek that ordinary Americans aren’t as divided as politicians would have them believe. “Poll after poll shows broad, bipartisan support for raising taxes on billionaires and cutting our military spending to fund investments in infrastructure, climate and social programs,” he says. “Vast bipartisan majorities tell pollsters they support a ceasefire in Gaza and think immigration is good.”
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"Ending Israel’s assault on Gaza remains the linchpin of any effort to calm the spreading regional violence. There is no military solution to military escalation in the Middle East: diplomacy is needed. And it needs to start with a cease-fire in Gaza now."
- Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) talking about House Republicans and, well, we couldn’t have said it better!
Violence continues to bubble over in the Middle East.
Pakistan launched retaliatory ballistic strikes against militants in Iran on Thursday, two days after Iran said it struck the headquarters of another group in Pakistani territory. Pakistan’s attack days earlier killed at least nine people, including four children. Iran’s foreign ministry said on Thursday it was committed to maintaining good relations with Pakistan, but called on the Pakistani government to prevent the establishment of “terrorist bases” within its borders. Both countries expressed the desire to avert further escalation.
In Washington, President Joe Biden said on Thursday that the clashes between Iran and Pakistan this week demonstrate that Iran, a U.S. adversary, is not well-liked in the region. Washington carried out its fifth round of airstrikes in Yemen on Thursday against Houthi militants. When asked by reporters if he thought the strikes against Houthi targets were working, Biden said: “Well, when you say, ‘working,’ are they stopping the Houthis? No. Are they gonna continue? Yes.” Well okay then! Pentagon Deputy Press Secretary Sabrina Singh later told reporters: “We are not at war with the Houthis. Actions we are taking are defensive in nature.”
Lebanese militant group Hezbollah rebuffed U.S. proposals that could lead to a cooldown in fighting with neighboring Israel, such as withdrawing its fighters further from the border. But the group said it remains open to American diplomacy to prevent a more damaging regional war. A senior Lebanese official said: “Hezbollah is ready to listen,” while at the same time emphasizing that the group feels the State Department’s latest round of proposals is unrealistic. Attacks from Yemen’s Houthi militants, who like Hezbollah are also backed by Iran, add to the urgency of these negotiations.
The recent spate of intensifying conflicts in the Middle East have in part sprung out of the catastrophic violence between Israel and Hamas that began on October 7. It shows no signs of slowing.
At a Thursday news conference, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu again rejected the proposal of a postwar peace plan that would result in the establishment of a sovereign Palestinian state. Even working towards such a goal, he said, was out of the question. “Israel must have security over all the territory west of the Jordan,” Netanyahu said, referring to the Jordan River. “This clashes with the idea of sovereignty. What can you do?” President Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken have made their support for a two-state solution clear, and Biden has suggested that a “revitalized” Palestinian Authority run post-Hamas Gaza, as it currently runs the West Bank.
A one-state solution, in which Israelis and Palestinians would live in one democratic state (incorporating Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza) with full rights for both groups, is favored by many Palestinians. But it’s opposed by many Israelis on the right, as under this plan, Jewish Israelis would be outnumbered by Arab Muslims. Netanyahu and other right-wing Israelis have tacitly or explicitly expressed support for a one-state solution of their own, which could involve annexation of the West Bank and the disenfranchisement of Palestinians—or simply forcing them out entirely. This option is rejected by not only virtually the whole world, but also most Israelis. In the past, Netanyahu has drawn criticism for declaring that Israel is “the national state, not of all its citizens, but only of the Jewish people.”
Netanyahu said he would not compromise on Israel’s goal of “total victory” over Hamas, and told the public to prepare for months more of fighting.
"Nearly 20,000 Palestinian babies have been born into war in the Gaza Strip, while 135,000 children under age two in the besieged enclave are at severe risk of malnutrition. 'That’s a baby born into this horrendous war every 10 minutes.''" - Tess Ingram, UNICEF.
"Our national football heroes continue to strive on the football pitch for Asian football glory, while their people are fighting a legendary battle against an Israeli genocide in Gaza.
"For Palestinians, football is not just about sports. It is about persistence, collective identity and hope." MORE
“If the UN requests it .. Italy could deploy the military to Gaza as part of a peacekeeping force in the Strip, led by an Arab country.” - Italy’s Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani.
"We have seen evidenced once more that women and children are the first victims of conflict. We are failing them. That failure, and the generational trauma inflicted on the Palestinian people over these 100 days and counting, will haunt all of us for generations to come." - UN Women Executive Director Sima
The B-21 Raider flew a test sortie from Edwards Air Force Base on Wednesday, marking another milestone in the development of the Pentagon’s new stealth bomber.
Not far from the Ukrainian front line, Finnish investor Jan-Erik Saarinen watched as a Ukrainian company demoed their latest drone—by bombing a Russian position.
This afternoon, Congress passed a new continuing resolution necessary to fund the government past the upcoming deadlines in the previous continuing resolution. Those deadlines were tomorrow (January 19) and February 2. The deadlines in the new measure are March 1 and March 8. This is the third continuing resolution passed in four months as extremist Republicans have refused to fund the government unless they get a wish list of concessions to their ideology.
Today’s vote was no exception. Eighteen Republican senators voted against the measure, while five Republicans did not vote (at least one, Chuck Grassley of Iowa, is ill). All the Democrats voted in favor. The final tally was 77 to 18, with five not voting.
In the House the vote was 314 to 108, with 11 not voting. Republicans were evenly split between supporting government funding and voting against it, threatening to shut down the government. They split 107 to 106. All but two Democrats voted in favor of government funding. (In the past, Jake Auchincloss of Massachusetts and MIke Quigley of Illinois have voted no on a continuing resolution to fund the government in protest that the measure did not include funding for Ukraine.)
This means that, like his predecessor Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) had to turn to Democrats to keep the government operating. The chair of the extremist House Freedom Caucus, Bob Good (R-VA), told reporters that before the House vote, Freedom Caucus members had tried to get Johnson to add to the measure the terms of their extremist border security bill. Such an addition would have tanked the bill, forcing a government shutdown, and Johnson refused.
“I always tell people back home beware of bipartisanship," Representative Warren Davidson (R-OH) said on the House floor during the debate. “The most bipartisan thing in Washington, D.C., is bankrupting our country, if not financially, morally…. It’s not just the spending, it’s all the terrible policies that are attached to the spending.”
Republican extremists in Congress are also doing the bidding of former president Donald Trump, blocking further aid to Ukraine in its struggle to fight off Russian aggression and standing in the way of a bipartisan immigration reform measure. Aid to Ukraine is widely popular both among the American people and among lawmakers. Immigration reform, which Republicans have demanded but are now opposing, would take away one of Trump’s only talking points before the 2024 election.
A piece today in the Washington Post by European affairs columnist Lee Hockstadter about the difficulties of reestablishing democracy in Poland after eight years under a right-wing leader illuminates this moment in the U.S. Hockstadter’s description of the party of former Polish leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski sounds familiar: the party “jury-rigged systems, rules and institutions to its own partisan advantage, seeding its allies in the courts, prosecutors’ offices, state-owned media and central bank. Kaczynski’s administration erected an intricate legal obstacle course designed to leave the party with a stranglehold on key levers of power even if it were ousted in elections.”
Although voters in Poland last fall reelected former prime minister Donald Tusk to reestablish democracy, his ability to rebuild the democratic and judicial norms torched by his predecessor have been hamstrung by his opponents, who make up an “irreconcilable opposition” and are trying to retain control over Poland through their seizure of key levers of government.
The U.S. was in a similar situation during Reconstruction, when in 1879, former Confederates in the Democratic Party tried to end the government protection of Black rights altogether by refusing to fund the government until the president, Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, withdrew all the U.S. troops from the South (it’s a myth that they left in 1877) and stopped trying to protect Black voting.
At the time, the president and House minority leader James A. Garfield refused to bow to the former Confederates. Five times, Hayes vetoed funding measures that carried the riders former Confederates wanted, writing that the Confederates’ policy was “radical, dangerous, and unconstitutional,” for it would allow a “bare majority” in the House to dictate its terms to the Senate and the President, thus destroying the balance of power in the American government.
In 1879, well aware of the stakes in the fight, newspapers made the case that the government was under assault. American voters listened, the former Confederates backed down, and Garfield somewhat unexpectedly was elected president in 1880 as a man who would champion the idea of the protection of Black rights and the country itself from those who wanted to establish that states were more powerful than the federal government.
Chastened, the leaders of the Democratic Party marginalized former Confederates and turned to northern cities to reestablish the party, beginning the transition to the party that would, fifty years later, usher in the New Deal.
CBO will release "The Budget and Economic Outlook: 2024 to 2034" at 2 p.m. EST on February 7.
A New Hampshire roadmap
The winnowing of the GOP presidential field both before (Chris Christie) and after (Vivek Ramaswamy) Donald Trump’s big victory in Iowa reduces the field of notable Republican presidential contenders to just three: Trump, along with Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis. Unlike Iowa, New Hampshire may produce a close finish. This would not be unusual for the Granite State: 3 of the last 6 competitive presidential primaries have been decided by fewer than 10 percentage points (Bernie Sanders edged out Pete Buttigieg in the 2020 Democratic primary, while both Hillary Clinton and John McCain won close victories in 2008). In the event that exit poll analysts declare the Granite State “too close to call,” what information should the savvy election observer seek as returns come in?
Just 4 of New Hampshire’s 10 counties—Hillsborough and Rockingham, on the Massachusetts border; Merrimack, which contains the state capital of Concord; and Strafford, home of the University of New Hampshire—will likely comprise 75% of the primary electorate. But aggregate, county-level results won’t be available until the wee hours of the morning, if not the day or two afterward. For in-the-moment analysis, psephologists have to zoom in on New Hampshire’s cities and towns in order to piece together a picture of the final results. The following is a guide to which New England hamlets will offer the best clues to the ultimate outcome on Tuesday, Jan. 23.
One factor that distinguishes this contest from previous ones is the degree to which voters already have sorted themselves along ideological lines. In the latest New Hampshire survey from Suffolk University, Trump enjoys the support of two-thirds of conservatives while a majority of moderates back Haley. This divergence speaks to Trump’s dominance of the Republican Party: As political scientists Daniel Hopkins and Hans Noel have demonstrated, voters define a person’s degree of conservatism these days, at least in part, by how they view the former president.
All of this should make it somewhat easier to identify key municipalities in New Hampshire that will offer solid clues to the primary’s outcome, based on previous elections here. The 2016 Republican primary, which Trump won with 35% of the vote, is such a proxy for next week’s contest. Although Trump’s range of outcomes across counties was modest (from a low of 29% in Grafton to a high of 39% in Rockingham), there were a handful of municipalities where he performed especially well or poorly (at least 5 percentage points better or worse than his statewide vote percentage). As a proxy for the strength of moderates in a municipality, I use the performance of 2016 second-place finisher John Kasich. The former Ohio governor, who preached the virtues of bipartisanship during his campaign, won 16% of the vote statewide, but almost doubled that support among moderates, according to exit polls.
With these two proxies in mind, let’s take a tour of the Granite State. Readers can use Map 1 as something of a guide: The left map shows the counties in the state, and the right map shows the 2016 results by city/town. Trump carried all 10 counties, but Kasich did win a smattering of places across the state at the city/town level. We’ll call out important towns and cities on the map in the text, when possible to do so.
Map 1: NH counties plus 2016 GOP primary results by town
Notes: On the city/town map on the right, 2016 Donald Trump wins are in shades of orange/brown and John Kasich wins are in shades of pink/red, with darker shades representing higher vote shares. Blue represents a tie (Trump got a single vote and Jeb Bush got a single vote in sparsely-populated Cambridge Township) and Ted Cruz (yellow) won a single, tiny township, Millsfield. Light grey means no votes were cast.
Source: Dave’s Redistricting App for county map, Dave Leip’s Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections for 2016 presidential primary map
Hillsborough County
Hillsborough, which contains the state’s two largest cities, Manchester and Nashua, represented nearly 30% of the primary vote in 2016. Both Trump and Kasich performed about as well in Hillsborough as they did statewide. But both also had particular pockets of strength. The eventual winner performed especially well in towns along the Massachusetts border, such as Pelham (52%), Hudson (43%) and New Ipswich (40%), some of which are in darker shades of Trump orange/brown along the southern border on the map; and rural towns in the county’s northwest corner, including Windsor (45%), Hillsborough (43%), and Deering (42%). Kasich, in contrast, was especially popular in towns west of Manchester along Route 101, which runs across the state’s southern tier. Expect Haley to do especially well in “Kasich towns” such as Sharon (32%, double his statewide percentage), Peterborough (23%), and Hancock (22%)—those three, running from south to north in the order listed above, are the three Kasich-shaded towns in the southern part of Map 1.
The town of Bedford could prove pivotal to the primary’s outcome. For one, its residents cast some 7,000 votes in 2016, the third-most in the county, behind only Manchester and Nashua. Just as importantly, Bedford is full of well-off, well-educated residents who were repelled by the Trump presidency. In 2016, Trump performed 7 points worse here than statewide. And in the 2020 general election, Joe Biden carried the town, historically one of the most Republican in the state. If Haley is to have a chance to pull off an upset, she has to win Bedford and upscale towns like it decisively. If Trump carries it, take it as a sign that a significant number of college-educated Republicans have joined his working-class base.
Rockingham County
Rockingham County, which sits in the southeastern corner of the state along the Massachusetts border, will almost match adjoining Hillsborough in turnout. In the 2016 primary, one out of four voters came from Rockingham. Eight years ago, Trump performed best here, carrying 39% of the vote. More than half of the voters in Seabrook, a working-class town that juts out toward the Atlantic Ocean, cast ballots for him, his second-best performance in the state. Trump’s greatest strength, however, was closer to Interstate 93 in the western half of the county, which contains both large, well-developed areas as well as smaller exurbs. In town after town there, Trump carried 40% or more of Republican voters. If Trump’s current poll numbers hold on primary day, expect him to win a majority in places such as Danville, Plaistow, Salem, Sandown, Raymond, Atkinson, Derry, Fremont, and Windham (note the darker Trump shades in the state’s southeastern corner). Conversely, if there is a Haley upset in the wind, expect her to hold her own here and keep Trump’s margins of victory narrow.
Republican Gov. Chris Sununu, Haley’s chief ally, lives on the other side of the county in Newfields, not far from the Seacoast. (Former state House Speaker Doug Scamman, another Haley endorser, owns a farm in nearby Stratham.) The eastern half of Rockingham, known for its old wealth and moderate Republican politics, contained some of Kasich’s best areas in 2016, such as Stratham, Greenland, the city of Portsmouth, Rye, Exeter, and New Castle (the little speck of Kasich pink along the eastern border in that part of the state). Haley should be able to establish a beachhead in Rockingham—but that will not be enough if Trump has a strong night on the western side of the county.
Strafford and Merrimack counties
North of Rockingham is Strafford County, home of the state’s University of New Hampshire. One of 12 Republican primary voters came from this county in 2016. Towns in the orbit of the state university—Durham, Lee, Madbury, and the city of Dover—which lean strongly Democratic in general elections, will be test cases for whether Democratic-leaning independents have elected to crash the GOP primary and cast votes for Haley (or in their minds, against Trump). Trump should be on firmer ground further north in the county, in small towns such as Farmington and Milton. Rochester and Somersworth, two small working-class cities, will be bellwethers to watch.
A similar dynamic between center and periphery should play out to the west of Strafford in neighboring Merrimack County, which contained 12% of Republican primary voters in 2016. Eight years ago, Kasich performed especially well in the state capital of Concord and towns in its environs, such as Bow and Hopkinton. Further away from the capital, Trump did especially well in small towns such as Allenstown and Northfield, as well as the city of Franklin. (Bear in mind, cities in New Hampshire are sometimes small entities; just 1,500 voters cast Republican ballots in Franklin in 2016.)
Northern and western New Hampshire
The remainder of the Republican primary vote—about 25%—is scattered across 6 other counties to the north and west. They are largely rural, but they are also a reminder that not all rural is equally friendly toward Trump. On the Vermont border in the Connecticut River Valley, Trump posted a strong performance (37%) in Sullivan County, in such areas as Newport and the city of Claremont. But north and south along the valley, Trump’s performance declined in counties containing institutions of higher learning. This trend was especially pronounced in Grafton County, home of Dartmouth College and Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center. Kasich’s best countywide performance was in Grafton (21%), especially so in the college town of Hanover and its environs (Lyme, Orford, and the city of Lebanon). These are the four Kasich-won municipalities along the state’s western border with Vermont, running Orford, Lyme, Hanover, and Lebanon from north to south.
Conclusion
A couple of weeks ago, Haley made what some saw as a gaffe when she suggested that New Hampshire would “correct” whatever Iowa did. As impolitic as that may have been, there is some truth to it. The last three non-incumbent Republican nominees—John McCain in 2008, Mitt Romney in 2012, and Donald Trump himself in 2016—all failed to win Iowa but then captured New Hampshire on the way to the nomination. This does also sometimes work the other way, though: The two non-incumbent winners before them, Bob Dole in 1996 and George W. Bush in 2000, won Iowa before stubbing their toes in New Hampshire. Clearly, winning both early-state contests is not a requirement to be the GOP nominee.
Eight years ago, New Hampshire persuaded me that Trump’s support was solid when I saw how well he performed across divisions of class and socioeconomic status in the Granite State. Next week’s primary results, coupled with those of the Iowa caucus, will tell us a lot about how seriously to take Haley’s challenge to the former president. For Kasich in 2016, New Hampshire turned out to be a cul-de-sac. His message of bipartisanship found a niche here among moderates and liberals in places like Hanover and Durham, but failed to resonate among mainstream conservatives, in New Hampshire and elsewhere. Ominously, Haley’s best performance in Iowa was in Johnson County, home of the University of Iowa. Next Tuesday may tell us whether she is a Dartmouth College professor’s ideal of a good Republican, or if she has laid the groundwork of a broader base of support in her party.
U.S. Capitol Police officers in gear, stand with the dome of the Capitol in the background as people gather at Union Square near the Capitol Reflecting Pool, facing the West Front of the U.S. Capitol Building for the Justice for J6 Rally on Saturday, Sept. 18, 2021 in Washington, DC. (Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)
The White House will soon relist the Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen as specially designated global terrorists, U.S. officials told the Associated Press on Tuesday.
Context: The militia (also known as “Ansarallah”) was delisted almost exactly three years ago as part of President Joe Biden’s campaign goal to de-escalate the Saudi-led war in Yemen, and free up humanitarian aid to millions of Yemenis in poverty. But almost three dozen Houthi missile attacks on commercial and military ships in the Red Sea since mid-November have reversed many U.S. lawmakers and now the White House’s interest in working with the Houthis toward some sort of peace deal in Yemen.
By the way: The U.S. military carried out another airstrike inside Yemen Tuesday, destroying four Houthi anti-ship ballistic missiles, Central Command officials announced afterward. “These missiles were prepared to launch from Houthi-controlled areas of Yemen and presented an imminent threat to both merchant and U.S. Navy ships in the region,” said CENTCOM in a short statement.
Worth noting: France did not take part in those “pre-emptive” airstrikes Tuesday because Paris wants to “avoid any escalation,” President Emmanuel Macron told reporters.
We live in an interconnected world where siloed thinking doesn’t just create inefficiencies, it threatens national security. We connect the dots for our customers, through cybersecurity, digital transformation, and cloud migration to provide them with the tools and experts they need to dominate the world’s toughest missions of consequence. Learn what it means to do the can’t be done at Peraton.com.
Capitol Hill reactions: The Houthis’ “actions clearly meet the definition of terrorism, and I strongly support designating them as a terrorist organization,” Sen. Jacky Rosen, D-Nevada, said Tuesday after the AP report.
“From day one, the Biden Administration met Iranian aggression with accommodation and squandered the credibility of American deterrence,” said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky. “It’s time for [President Biden] to explain how exactly he intends to compel Iran and its proxies to change their behavior,” he said.
“Removing [the Houthis] from the list of terror organizations was a deadly mistake and another failed attempt to appease the Ayatollah,” Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Arkansas, said. “Joe Biden’s weakness and poor judgement [sic] continues to put our security at risk,” he added.
“Now, the administration needs to take the next step and formally designate the Houthis as a Foreign Terrorist Organization,” said Sen. Deb Fischer, R-Nebraska.
You may wonder: What’s the difference between “specially designated terrorists” and a “foreign terrorist organization” label? The latter would include travel bans, immigration restrictions, and additional sanctions for anyone supporting the Houthis, which could be rather a lot of Yemeni citizens, AP points out. Read more, here.
What are your concerns when it comes to the Houthis and the future of Yemen? We’ll be tackling the topic in a future podcast episode, and would love to hear your thoughts via email.
Israel-Gaza
While Israel continues its brutal war on Hamas militants across Gaza,White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan spoke with several top officials from the Middle East Tuesday in Davos, including Qatari Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al Thani, Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani, and the Prime Minister of Iraq’s Kurdistan Region, Masrour Barzani.
Sullivan discussed Israel’s Gaza war with Al Thani, who told the Davos crowd Tuesday, “Gaza is not there anymore. I mean, there is nothing over there.” He also said Israel is being run by “extremists” who are blocking a two-state solution for peaceful co-existence with Palestinians. “We cannot leave this just at the hand of the Israelis,” he said.
Qatar’s PM also said he thinks Houthi attacks on the Red Sea will stop if the Gaza war stops. “We need to address the central issue, which is Gaza in order to get everything else defused...if we are just focusing on the symptoms and not treating the real issues, (solutions) will be temporary,” Al Thani said at Davos on Tuesday.
The White House’s Sullivan discussed Iran’s ballistic missile strikes inside Iraq on Monday with the two Iraqi leaders. Sullivan also stressed the need to stop attacks against U.S. personnel in Iraq and Syria in his conversation with PM al-Sudani; and he encouraged Kurdistan’s Barzani to export more oil.
After striking inside Iraq and Syria, Iran launched more cross-border strikes inside Pakistan on Tuesday. Iran attacked two bases of the militant group Jaish al Adl with drone and missile salvos that killed two children, Pakistani officials said. The group has previously attacked Iranian forces near the two countries’ border, Reuters reports. AP called Iran’s eastward attacks “unprecedented.” Officials in Islamabad described them as a “completely unacceptable” breach of Pakistan’s sovereignty, and formally withdrew their ambassador to Iran hours later.
Developing: Italy is urging the European Union to fast track approval of its own Red Sea maritime task force so it can be up and running by next week, which seems like an ambitious timeline, Reuters reported Wednesday from Rome. (Previous plans wouldn’t have established the unit until February 19.) More, here.
Biden’s aid meeting. The president will host Congressional leaders at the White House this afternoon to push his national security supplemental request, which includes aid for Ukraine and Israel, among other things, administration officials announced.
Senate Republicans are pressing House Speaker Johnson to take a Democrat-proffered deal that would take steps to reduce migrant flows into the southern United States in return for approving the supplemental, Politicoreported Tuesday.
Calling Germany: POTUS also discussed the Ukraine and Gaza wars with his German counterpart, Olaf Scholz, on Tuesday.
An unusual view of the Ukraine war.AP’s John Leicester flew on a French Airborne Warning and Control System, or AWACS, aircraft keeping watch. “With a powerful radar that rotates six times every minute on the fuselage and a bellyful of surveillance gear, the plane can spot missile launches, airborne bombing runs and other military activity in the conflict. Read on.
Russia’s sat gap. The belligerent in the Ukraine war has very few satellites, and they’re pretty old. Defence Industry Europe has this roundup.
New parts. Despite sanctions meant to reduce Moscow’s access to key components of weapons, Western companies sent Russia parts worth $2.9 billion in the first 10 months of 2023—by Kyiv’s count. (Reuters)
Latvia’s drone drive. The country’s defense chief said his nation is assembling a coalition of almost 20 countries to arm Ukrainian forces with “thousands” of new drones. (Bloomberg)
SecDef is back
After two weeks in the hospital, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin was released from Walter Reed National Military Medical Center on Monday. The following day, he called his Ukrainian counterpart, Rustem Umerov, in Kyiv. Austin will host the Pentagon’s latest virtual Ukraine Defense Contact Group on Tuesday.
ICYMI: The Daily Beast obtained audio of a phone call that seems to have triggered an ambulance driving the SecDef to Walter Reed in early January. Names were redacted from the recording, but the timing lines up pretty well, Shannon Vavra of TDB writes after submitting a Freedom of Information Act request. Read more, here.
And lastly: Don't miss the untold history of Air Force One’s secret fleet. Service officials do not acknowledge the existence of four of the world's most prominent Boeing 757s, presidential aircraft whose tail numbers—if little else—are well-known to practiced plane spotters. Marcus Weisgerber, in his final report for Defense One, explains.
We live in an interconnected world where siloed thinking doesn’t just create inefficiencies, it threatens national security. We connect the dots for our customers, through cybersecurity, digital transformation, and cloud migration to provide them with the tools and experts they need to dominate the world’s toughest missions of consequence. Learn what it means to do the can’t be done at Peraton.com.
We take stock of our last 12 months of interviews, featuring conversations with generals, White House officials, researchers, authors, our own reporters, and many more.
Pakistan’s military says it attacked separatists inside Iran with missiles and drones on Thursday, less than two days after Iran attacked insurgents inside Pakistan with its own missiles and drones, allegedly killing at least two people, including children, earlier this week. Iranian state-run media said Thursday that Pakistan’s attacks killed at least nine people, including four children.
Iran’s Tuesday strikes targeted Baloch militants from the group Jaish al-Adl, which is Sunni Muslim group based in Iran’s southeastern Sistan-Baluchistan province as well as the western Pakistani province of Balochistan. The militants advocate on behalf of greater rights and recognition for ethnic minority Baluchis, according to a U.S. intelligence assessment. But the group has attacked and ambushed Iranian security forces several times over the last few decades, including with suicide bombers, which led to the U.S. designating Jaish al-Adl as a foreign terrorist organization back in 2010. Iran, which is a predominantly Shia Muslim nation, executed the group’s leader the same year, but the organization still endures.
Pakistan, too, attacked what it said were different Baloch militants on Thursday based at a village in Iran’s Sistan-Baluchestan province. “Hideouts used by terrorist organisations namely Balochistan Liberation Army and Balochistan Liberation Front were successfully struck in an intelligence based operation [with the] code name 'Marg Bar Sarmachar',” Pakistan’s military said in a statement following the operation early Thursday.
“The precision strikes were carried out using killer drones, rockets, loitering munitions and stand-off weapons,” Pakistani defense officials said. Pakistan’s army was considerably saltier in its post-strike statement, warning, “We note and warn that whoever extends his finger towards us will return to it only amputated, and whoever thinks of attacking us will return reprehensible and defeated.”
Pakistan’s foreign ministry blamed Iran for inaction leading up to the Thursday strikes. “Pakistan also shared multiple dossiers with concrete evidence of the presence and activities of these terrorists,” Islamabad said in a separate statement Thursday. “However, because of lack of action on our serious concerns, these so-called Sarmachars continued to spill the blood of innocent Pakistanis with impunity,” the officials said, and emphasized they had received “credible intelligence of impending large scale terrorist activities,” which compelled Pakistan to attack.
However, “Iran is a brotherly country and the people of Pakistan have great respect and affection for the Iranian people,” said Islamabad’s diplomatic office, adding, “We have always emphasized dialogue and cooperation in confronting common challenges including the menace of terrorism.” The military echoed that message in its statement, which concluded, “Going forward, dialogue and cooperation is deemed prudent in resolving bilateral issues between the two neighbouring brotherly countries.”
Tehran condemned the Thursday attacks, and summoned Pakistan’s ambassador for an explanation, according to a particularly short statement Thursday from Iran’s foreign ministry.
Sidenote on Iran’s Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian: He claimed Wednesday in Davos that Iran has never supplied Russia with drones or missiles. Washington-based think tanker Jonathan Lord responded shortly afterward that the diplomat’s allegation is “Just an outright lie. I’ve held in my hands the remnants of [Iranian-made] Shahed drones that were taken off the field in Ukraine. The evidence of Iran’s lethal support to Russia’s illegal war is irrefutable,” he added, and linked to a recent public assessment from the Defense Intelligence Agency, which you can find (PDF) here.
Pakistan’s former military chief Khwaja Asif said he considered the Thursday strikes enough to both save face for Islamabad’s leaders, and to stop further escalation. “A measured response has been given and it was important,” he told Geo TV, according to Reuters. Next, he said, “There should be ongoing efforts on the side [so] that this doesn't escalate.”
An optimistic forecast: “My guess is [Iran] eases off, Pakistan refrains from another strike, and both sides jaw a bit more, but decide to let things be even-steven,” said U.S. Naval Academy historian W. W. S. Hsieh. “Remember [back in November 2015] when the Turks shot down a Russian Su-24? Usually cooler heads prevail after everyone's made their point,” he added.
A sobering review: “In the past week alone, the Middle East has seen an insane scale of cross-border conflict,”Charles Lister of the Washington-based Middle East Institute wrote on social media, and highlighted:
And the Iran-backed militia the Islamic Resistance in Iraq, which targeted Israel last Friday.
A second opinion: “These days,” said scholar Randa Slim, “the Middle East is too crazy, too unpredictable, too dangerous even for someone like me who lived during a bloody civil war and an Israeli invasion of Beirut.”
Has the U.S. “overlearned” lessons from the recent past in the Middle East? Perhaps, argued Steven Cook of the Council on Foreign Relations. He advocated in late December for U.S. strikes against Houthi capabilities, writing in Foreign Policy (emphasis added), “Critics will no doubt argue that this prescription risks ensnaring the United States in yet another open-ended conflict in the Middle East. Fair point, though the search for a risk-free policy is as close to a unicorn as one can get in foreign policy. Besides, disrupting or destroying the Houthis’ ability to disrupt shipping is hardly akin to the overambitious policies of the past aimed at regime change and remaking of societies. Rather, it’s a move to protect a vital national interest.” Read on, here.
New: The U.S. military struck suspected Houthi missile sites again overnight, targeting “14 Iran-backed Houthi missiles that were loaded to be fired in Houthi controlled areas in Yemen,” according to defense officials at Central Command. That operation is the fourth of its kind since Friday—though the last three have been considerably smaller in scope than the initial barrage with the Brits late last week.
Another preemptive self-defense strike: “These missiles on launch rails presented an imminent threat to merchant vessels and U.S. Navy ships in the region and could have been fired at any time, prompting U.S. forces to exercise their inherent right and obligation to defend themselves,” CENTCOM said, echoing a similar justification for different preemptive strikes inside Yemen on Tuesday.
Also new: The Houthis attacked another commercial ship late Wednesday, striking the U.S.-owned bulk carrier Genco Picardy with a kamikaze drone as the ship transited the Gulf of Aden. “There were no injuries and some damage reported,” but the ship was deemed “seaworthy” and continued on its way, according to CENTCOM. (You can see a few post-strike images here.)
However, the Indian navy says it rescued the 22-person crew of the Picardy, which included nine Indian nationals, according to Reuters. Read more about the effects of routing vessels away from the Red Sea and around southern Africa, which is “boosting demand for bunker fuel used by ships at far-flung ports,” here.
B-21 flight testing confirmed underway. The B-21 Raider bomber took its second officially confirmed flight on Wednesday from Edwards Air Force Base, California. D1’s Audrey Decker has a bit more, here.
And lastly: Some secret military programs are getting a little less secret. It’s a rare thing for the Pentagon to allow some of its most secret programs to be classified at a lower level, but that’s what’s going to happen in the wake of a memo from DepSecDef Kathleen Hicks.
The classified memo, which was signed at the end of 2023, “completely rewrites” internal guidance that was decades old, John Plumb, the Pentagon’s top space policy official, told reporters Wednesday.
The new guidance covers all levels of secrecy, including unclassified, and acknowledges “vast changes in publicly available information on space and space programs since the last classification guidance,” a DOD spokesperson told Defense One via email. Lauren William has more, here.
In the headlines
Rishi Sunak faced the largest rebellion of his premiership last night,as 60 Tory MPs voted for amendments seeking to toughen up his Rwanda bill. Lee Anderson and Brendan Clarke-Smith resigned as deputy party chairmen to do so. This evening’s vote, on the legislation as a whole, is expected to go more smoothly. Iran has launched airstrikes and drone attacks in Pakistani territory,apparently aimed at militants seeking independence for the cross-border Balochistan region. Pakistan says two children were killed in the strikes and that Tehran will face “serious consequences”. Temperatures fell to -14C in parts of Scotland last night, and tonight they could hit -15C. The cold snap has led to school closures as far south as Liverpool.
Comment
Taiwan’s president-elect William Lai. Annabelle Chih/Getty
Why Xi may hesitate over Taiwan
William Lai’s win in Taiwan’s presidential election on Saturday was a “victory for democracy”, says The Wall Street Journal. Lai, the current vice president, was the candidate “most disliked by Beijing”. The Chinese did everything they could to scare the Taiwanese into voting for the main opposition party, the more pro-China Kuomintang (KMT) – even sending spy balloons over the island ahead of the ballot to “intimidate” locals. But these efforts backfired, increasing support for candidates who projected “the strongest sense of Taiwanese identity”. While Lai won’t have a “blank check” – his ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) lost its legislative majority – his success is welcome proof that the Taiwanese people still believe in “democratic self-government”.
The big question is whether Lai’s win makes a Chinese invasion of Taiwan more likely, says Gideon Rachman in the FT. It may make Xi worry that he is running out of time to fulfil his long-held dream of reunifying Taiwan with the mainland. After eight years of DPP rule, this was meant to be the election where the pendulum swung to the KMT. But the “catastrophic costs” Russia has paid for its invasion of Ukraine will “surely give Xi pause”. Chinese officials argue that their own forces wouldn’t struggle in the same way because they are much larger and more formidable than those of Russia. But an amphibious invasion is much harder than a land incursion. And Putin’s troops were “battle-hardened” from operations in Syria, Georgia and Chechnya. “China has not gone to war since 1979.” For all his bluster, Xi may conclude that an invasion is simply “too risky”.
Nature
These “exquisite images”, says New Scientist, are of starlings swirling and swooping as one in “dramatic, cloud-like flocks known as murmurations”. They were taken by Søren Solkær, a Danish photographer best known for photographing musicians like Paul McCartney and Björk. He witnessed murmurations as a child growing up in southern Denmark, and has travelled around Europe taking photos of the phenomenon for his new book Starling.
Zeitgeist
When children were asked for their word of the year a decade ago, they “opted for something predictably childish”, says The Times: “minion”, a small, yellow creature from the animated film Despicable Me. But in recent years the chosen word – determined by an Oxford University Press survey – has become increasingly gloomy. In 2020 it was, inevitably, “coronavirus”; the following year yielded “anxiety”; and in 2022 it was “Queen”, after the monarch’s death. Last year’s pick? “Climate change”, followed closely by “war”.
Boris Johnson still appears to be pining for Downing Street, says the Daily Mail, so much so that he has apparently put in a bid for the £30,000 life-size replica of the No 10 door used in The Crown. The former PM reportedly put his offer in for the 13ft prop – which comes with the lantern, railings and boot-scrapers – “as soon as the lot went live”. To submit your own bid, click here.
Comment
An awkward encounter: Angela Merkel and Donald Trump in 2017. Sean Gallup/Getty
Trump is already shaping the future
World leaders are waking up to the fact that, a year from now, “Donald Trump could actually be returning to the White House”, says Graham Allison in Foreign Affairs. Some are starting to delay negotiating with the US in the hope that better deals will soon be available. Others are beginning to search for a “Trump hedge”, to minimise the ways in which his return will leave them worse off. Take the Ukraine war – if Vladimir Putin can drag the conflict out for another year, he may have a much friendlier Washington to deal with. Kyiv and Europe have the opposite problem. Germany, in particular, remembers Angela Merkel’s conclusion after her bruising encounters with the then US president: “We must fight for our future on our own.”
Trump’s possible return also had a strange effect on the mood at the recent COP28 climate summit in Dubai. Proceedings stretched “even further into fantasy” than they normally do – including an agreement to “transition away from fossil fuels” – in part because delegates know that if Trump returns, his promise to “drill, baby, drill” will render such pledges redundant. And the Biden administration is increasingly “handicapped” in negotiations with everyone from China’s Xi Jinping to Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman, as foreign leaders weigh the likelihood that they will be dealing with a “very different government” a year from now. Like it or not, the next US president will also be the world’s “most consequential leader”.
Gone viral
If you’re a Wordle fan, says Digg, you’ll enjoy Typeshift, a word game created by the online puzzle platform Puzzmo. To play, you move columns of letters up and down until they create a word horizontally. This turns the letters in that word black – the aim is to do the same for every letter on the grid. Have a go here.
Noted
Britain’s gas network is still reliant on aircraft engines stripped from fighter jets that were operating in the Cold War, says The Daily Telegraph. The UK’s conversion to North Sea gas in the 1960s and 1970s coincided with the decommissioning of the RAF’s Lightning fleet, so engineers “snapped up” their Rolls-Royce Avon engines and repurposed them to pump gas.
Last night, Florida governor Ron DeSantis dropped out of the race for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination and promptly endorsed former president Trump. DeSantis had tried to present himself as the alternative to Trump, but he put so little daylight between himself and the former president that he could never get traction.
DeSantis appeared to use his power as the governor of Florida to push measures he thought would boost his candidacy, many of which followed the pattern of Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, who has used his government to destroy democracy and assume autocratic powers. DeSantis pushed anti-LGBTQ+ laws, book bans, and the idea that businesses like Disney must answer to the moral positions of the government rather than market forces, and he flew migrants who were in the U.S. legally to Martha’s Vineyard in an apparent attempt to stand out as an anti-immigrant crusader.
But DeSantis never broke free of Trump’s orbit.
The Miami Herald editorial board noted that while DeSantis’s presidential bid had ended, “the damage of the laws he has pushed through in Florida, as he landed more appearances on Fox News, will live on. Without his political ambitions, there likely wouldn’t be ‘Don’t say gay,’ woke wars and the waste of state resources to fight meaningless battles against drag queen bars. These were efforts to appeal to Trump’s base but his supporters refused to leave the former president, especially after he was indicted.”
The New Hampshire primary is tomorrow, with former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley squaring off against Trump. It is not at all clear what daylight exists between the two of them, either, although Haley is perceived as the representative of the pre-Trump corporate Republican Party. Still, the contest is revealing the future in at least one way: today, New Hampshire voters are reporting that they have received robocalls with a deepfake of President Joe Biden’s voice telling them not to vote.
Republican party officials worry that while Trump is taking up tons of oxygen, the party itself has nothing to run on. Since taking control of the House in 2023, Republicans have very little to show for it except a lot of infighting. The last congressional session was “historically unproductive,” as Sahil Kapur of NBC News put it today. House Republicans’ investigations of President Joe Biden, hyped before the media, have fizzled, and now, after insisting that they would not pass funding for Ukraine, Israel, or Taiwan until the “crisis” at the border was addressed, they have backed off and now say they will not pass border legislation.
Meanwhile, radicals appear to be manufacturing a crisis on the border. On January 11, Michael Scherer and Dylan Wells of the Washington Post reported that political ads had used the word “border” 1,319 times since the start of the year, more than any other word including “approve” and “message,” standard disclaimer terms for political ads.
On Wednesday, January 17, state authorities began to arrest migrants at Shelby Park in Eagle Pass, Texas, as part of Governor Greg Abbott’s attempt to take control of immigration away from the federal government. When the government told Texas to stop blocking federal officials from the stretch of the Rio Grande where three migrants died last week, Texas attorney general Ken Paxton’s office responded: “Texas will not surrender.”
Today the U.S. Supreme Court decided that the federal government is authorized to remove the razor wire Texas has installed across the U.S.-Mexico border, although considering the federal government’s authority over border security is very well established, the fact that the vote was 5–4 is surprising. Far-right lawmakers were outraged nonetheless. Representative Chip Roy of Texas urged his House colleagues to defund the Department of Homeland Security, and Louisiana representative Clay Higgins said on social media that the federal government was “staging a civil war” and that “Texas should stand their ground.”
Meanwhile, on Friday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken hosted Mexican Foreign Secretary Alicia Bárcena to follow up on migration discussions the two countries had in meetings on December 27, 2023, in Mexico. In September 2023, Mexico eclipsed China as the largest trading partner of the U.S., and in the December meeting, Blinken, Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas, Homeland Security Advisor Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, U.S. ambassador to Mexico Ken Salazar, and National Security Council Coordinator for the Los Angeles Declaration Katie Tobin discussed cooperation to manage the border safely and humanely while also combating the drug smuggling and conditions that have been driving migration.
On January 8, Julia Ainsley of NBC News explained that the Biden administration has been pressuring Mexico to increase enforcement on its own southern border with Guatemala, deport more migrants from within Mexico, and take in more non-Mexican migrants back across the U.S. southern border. In exchange, Ainsley says, Mexico’s president—who is on the defensive at home because of corruption charges—has proposed that the U.S. invest more money in Latin America and Caribbean countries, suspend its blockade of Cuba, ease sanctions against Venezuela, and make it easier for migrants to work legally in the U.S.
On Friday, in Washington, D.C., the U.S. said that the coordinated efforts were having a positive effect on migration as officials have cracked down on smuggling networks, trains, and bus routes. “Migration is a hemispheric challenge,” State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said. “The United States is committed to work hand in hand with Mexico and countries across the region to address the root causes of migration and advance economic opportunities in the spirit of Los Angeles Declaration for Migration and Protection,” a landmark 2022 agreement in which the heads of twenty of the countries in the Americas agreed to embrace a regional approach to managing migration.
Today, on the anniversary of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision recognizing the constitutional right to abortion, Vice President Kamala Harris, who has made protecting reproductive rights key to her portfolio, and President Joe Biden noted that thanks to the “extreme decision” of today’s Supreme Court to overturn that decision has left tens of millions of American women “in states with extreme and dangerous abortion bans.”
“Because of Republican elected officials,” Biden said in a statement, “women’s health and lives are at risk…. Even as Americans…have resoundingly rejected attempts to limit reproductive freedom, Republican elected officials continue to push for a national ban and devastating new restrictions across the country.” He and Vice President Harris “are fighting to protect women’s reproductive freedom against Republicans officials’ dangerous, extreme, and out-of-touch agenda,” he said. “We stand with the vast majority of Americans who support a woman’s right to choose, and continue to call on Congress to restore the protections of Roe in federal law once and for all.”
This is a position embraced by 69% of Americans, and the Biden campaign has run videos with Trump bragging that he overturned Roe v. Wade and suggesting that women who obtain abortions should be punished.
Recently, the campaign released an ad in which a Texas woman who is herself an OBGYN talks about being unable to obtain an abortion for a planned pregnancy after a routine ultrasound revealed that the fetus could not survive. “Because of Donald Trump overturning Roe v. Wade,” she says, Texas “completely” took her choice away and put her life in danger. “It’s every woman’s worst nightmare and it was absolutely unbearable. We need leaders that will protect our rights and not take them away,” she says.
Finally, today, a historical moment: the Dow Jones Industrial Average, an average of the value of 30 leading companies, passed 38,000 for the first time.
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