THE US AND ISRAEL’S SCHISM OVER RAFAH
It sort of feels like not that much has happened since the last time I did one of these round-ups. The US election is limping forward. (I have a piece up on Persuasion on media coverage of Trump’s most recent outrage.) And Israel is still circling around, waiting for the moment to strike in Rafah.
What is becoming more clear is that Rafah is the red line for Israel’s allies. The notion — which I broadly share — is that Israel had to act after 10/7, had to reduce Hamas’ military capacity and had to make clear its capacity for deterrence. But a war like that involved some inherent sense of proportion — maintaining humanitarian supply for Gaza and having the political maturity to acknowledge a limit.
That assumed an Israeli government that was operating in a place of realpolitik, measuring the need to, at the least, maintain international alliances against the desire for revenge. But it’s becoming increasingly evident that that’s not the case. The Netanyahu administration is only interested in ‘victory’ — which in this case, as the Americans more than suspect, really means Netanyahu’s political survival.
In a phone call, Biden told Netanyahu that a major ground operation in Rafah would be a “mistake.” He has indicated that he has lost the ability to rein in Netanyahu — with “close associates” revealing that “Netanyahu is giving him hell.” And Chuck Schumer was clearly channeling the administration’s position when he said in the Senate, “I believe Prime Minister Netanyahu has lost his way by allowing his political survival to take precedence over the best interests of Israel” and called for immediate elections, contending, “The Netanyahu coalition no longer fits the needs of Israel after October 7.”
The US’ frustration is clearly shared by senior figures within Israel, with former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert writing to Schumer: “I thank you on behalf of myself and many others in Israel, for the courage that you have showed in saying what so many of us Jews across the world and traditional supporters of Israel feel today….The prime minister of Israel is not worthy of the responsibilities bestowed upon him.”
Netanyahu’s response to all this — the near-total desertion of Israel’s allies — has been to decide that….he just doesn’t care. In remarks to the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, he said: “We have a disagreement with the Americans about the need to enter Rafah. Not about the need to eliminate Hamas — the need to enter Rafah. We do not see a way to eliminate Hamas militarily without destroying these remaining battalions. We are determined to do it.” And he said that he had said as much to Biden.
So that’s where we are. The US in the position of a very fed-up babysitter with a charge that keeps wanting to invade Rafah and the babysitter without quite the leverage to make them not do it. Foreign Affairs puts together a list of ‘pressure points’ that the US can exert to get tough on Israel, but all of them (except maybe slow-walking armaments deliveries) are less-than-convincing. If Israel wants to burn its remaining bridges internationally, and place all of its political capital on the Rafah attack, then there’s not much that can be done to stop it — and probably, eventually, the alliance with the US will be mended.
The question, obviously, is if that’s in Israel’s best interest. Netanyahu claims, somewhat plausibly, that Israel is still short of its military goals. “You can’t say, ‘We’ll destroy 80 percent of Hamas, we’ll [leave] 20%,’ because that 20% will reorganize and retake the Strip,” he told the Knesset committee. But the attack would lead to a massive spike in civilian casualties. It would make Israel a pariah state — even, to some extent, for the US. It would be the sort of memory that may never be undone in the international community’s perception of Israel. And it would bring Israel no closer to a ‘day after’ strategy.
The rational end to the conflict is more or less in sight — ceasefire in exchange for hostage return. But it’s not at all clear that we’re operating in the domain of rationality. More and more, I’m realizing that the conflict is about the survival of two figures — Yahya Sinwar and Benjamin Netanyahu. Israel is (for understandable reasons) very reluctant to wind down the conflict with Sinwar still at large, and Netanyahu clearly perceives continued large-scale hostilities to be in his political interest. The fantasy is for elections and a Gantz government that is more interested in finding a workable ceasefire and in repairing international relations, but that seems to be a fantasy — Netanyahu has other ideas.
THE CIA’S LONGSTANDING TIES WITH UKRAINE
I’m very eager to talk about The New York Times’ report of CIA involvement in Ukraine prior to 2022, which is one of these bombshell pieces that seem to have been dropped into the media culture without anybody paying particular attention to it.
The conclusion is that US intelligence ties in Ukraine were deeper than anybody had realized. These really do explain a great deal of Ukraine’s success early in the war but also provide context that’s been missing from Western narratives of how the war started. In the most significant line in the piece, The New York Times reports:
Mr. Putin was weighing whether to launch his full-scale invasion [in late 2021] when he met with the head of one of Russia’s main spy services, who told him that the C.I.A., together with Britain’s MI6, were controlling Ukraine and turning it into a beachhead for operations against Moscow.
In other words, it was this intelligence tie that, more than anything, pushed Putin over the edge into the invasion. And that tie — which appears to have been profound — more or less corroborates Putin’s case for the war, long categorically denied in the West, that Ukraine before 2022 had become a satellite state for the U.S.
It is worth taking this in. It certainly complicates the initial view of February 24th — that it was unilateral and wholly-unprovoked, that Putin had more or less just swallowed his own propaganda about Ukraine.
On reflection, though, the revelation doesn’t really change my underlying understanding of the war. As The Times writes: “Mr. Putin and his advisers misread a critical dynamic. The C.I.A. didn’t push its way into Ukraine. A tight circle of Ukrainian intelligence officials assiduously courted the C.I.A. and gradually made themselves vital to the Americans.” That may sound like spin and as a nuance would have been unlikely to reduce blood pressure in the Kremlin, but it is an important part of the picture.
For the Ukrainians, the war did not start in 2022. It started in 2014. The events of 2014 completed a generational and ideological shift in Ukraine. Ukrainians came to see Russia as inherently inimical to their national interest — this was clear enough through Putin’s support of puppet governments even prior to the incursions into Crimea and Donbas — and Ukraine went searching for new allies. “They had no connection with Russia,” said General Valeriy Kondratiuk, one of the architects of Ukraine’s new strategy, of the younger intelligence officers working with him. “They didn’t even know what the Soviet Union was.”
That opportunistic alliance with the U.S. accords with my basic view of how the war should be understood — as a pivotal moment in Ukraine’s nation-building. Ukrainian society had genuinely been very divided about the country’s direction in the period 1991-2014, but Putin’s actions in Crimea and Donbas made up their mind for them. Remaining ties with Russia were scorched. Ukraine was willing to go through a very perilous period of estrangement, with membership in the EU and potentially NATO as the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
But there is no question that Ukraine was really playing with fire — the extent of which hadn’t been clear until the US and Ukrainian intelligence communities decided to share details of the partnership with The Times. The CIA had helped build twelve bases on the Russian border — with each one “running networks of agents who gathered intelligence inside Russia.” Ukraine, as a whole, was turned, in The New York Times’ words, “into an intelligence-gathering hub.” Commandos, with CIA training, carried out assassinations against Russian separatist commanders in eastern Ukraine as well as raids on Crimea. In each case — this is getting to be a theme — the US was attempting to hold back an unruly charge but without success. In one trenchant anecdote, CIA superiors in 2016 “lost their minds” when hearing about a planned cross-border raid into Russia that the Kyiv station chief had signed off on. The US kept insisting on “red lines,” but as the Ukrainian officials who spoke with The Times noted, the “red lines were never precisely clear” — they attempted to limit “offensive lethal operations” but that was a tricky distinction in an ongoing shadow war.
I could imagine somebody like
reading The Times piece and arguing that it confirms all possible criticisms of US foreign policy — the US allowing itself to be drawn far beyond its natural sphere of influence, provoking Russia into full-blown conflict, and doing so for the somewhat dubious benefit of being able to improve its intelligence-gathering apparatus within Russia. I still don’t agree, though. These analyses always miss Ukraine’s agency and self-determination. Ukraine badly wanted US support, did so by providing the bait of high-quality intelligence, and was willing (far more than the US) to provoke full-on invasion. I don’t know if it was wise of the Ukrainians. But it was in keeping with what was perceived to be in the broad strategic interest of Ukraine — a decisive repudiation of the influence of Russia and a (somewhat inchoate, somewhat uncharted) turn towards the West.A BAN FOR TIKTOK? 🤷♀️
I had long ago given up on Congress having the ability to pass any meaningful legislation, so it’s a pleasant surprise, if nothing else, for the House to get it together to pass a TikTok ban and, with it, risking howls of teenybopper outrage in an election year.
It’s a tricky piece of legislation, and I could be persuaded either way on it. In any case, what it seems to represent is a sea change in the US government’s approach to tech — the end of the era of laissez-faire and a new preoccupation with national security.
gives the argument that the TikTok ban is a Trojan Horse for the national security state. The bill would grant a president “unprecedented powers to censor and control the internet,” writes Taibbi, noting similarities in it to the creep that followed the Homeland Security Act in 2002. And I take Taibbi’s point. The bill seems like something of a mirror to the ‘foreign agent law’ that Russia has adopted and then started to promulgate in its sphere of influence; and to Canada’s proposed Online Harms Act, which I’m really surprised isn’t better known and includes ‘life imprisonment’ for the rather nebulous crime of “advocating genocide.”This is a real concern. Governments worldwide are tightening the screws on online expression. Anytime tech leaders are hauled before Congress, they get berated on why they don’t have tighter content moderation.
But there is a line somewhere, and I do think TikTok is exactly it. TikTok really is a tool of the Chinese government. As David French puts it in The New York Times, it “both vacuums up the personal information of its more than 150 million American users and gives [China] the opportunity to shape and mold the information those users receive.”
TikTok has a history of censoring videos that mention Tiananman Square, Falun Gong, Tibetan independence, persecution of Uighurs, as well as a whole raft of topics that are deemed inimical to Chinese strategic interests. The conviction of Western security agencies for a while has been that Chinese espionage is broader and deeper than is widely understood — and that TikTok makes it almost too easy, with ByteDance (TikTok’s Beijing-based parent company) acting as a vehicle to secure private data as well as to tweak political messaging.
Governments are supposed to protect the rights of citizens but they also supposed to govern, and recognizing and acting upon external threats is kind of the whole point of electing representatives in the first place. As French writes, “This is exactly what a nation should do when it’s getting serious about the national security threat posed by the People’s Republic of China.”
A ban, or forced divestment, of a tech company isn’t exactly optimal, but the reality is that we are in a revamped Cold War and that China has been exactly playing this sort of cultural hardball for years. As Bethany Allen puts it on the Persuasion podcast, China “is like a global sanctions regime that is highly effective against anyone, anything or any country that is trying to make money in China.” China has been very willing to forego economic interests in order to shut out foreign companies that portrayed China in anything other a positive light. And the US probably does need to adapt to the new reality. Unrestricted global trade was a nice dream while it lasted. But in an era of escalating great-power tensions, the US government does have an obligation to protect its borders, including those in cyberspace.
HAITI’S INSURGENCY
At the moment there are two major international crisis that barely create any media ripple. One is Sudan. The other is Haiti. Part of the reason is that there just seem to be very few journalists on the ground in either country. And then there’s a complete dearth of bright ideas — the general sense is of broken countries spiraling towards utter dysfunction.
Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the US’ ambassador to the United Nations, has a moving appeal to the international community, above all the UN, to end its silence on Sudan. 18 million Sudanese face acute hunger, the UN has done remarkably little to help, and the international community has been “largely quiet,” but, as Thomas-Greenfield acknowledges, it’s hard even to know what to do: “combatants on both sides of the war have deliberately undermined the efforts…of humanitarian aid workers,” she writes.
Meanwhile, in Haiti, a coup has driven Ariel Henry from power, ending a thin veneer of legitimate government. This is mostly being called “gang violence,” but, as Alexander Causwell writes in Foreign Policy, it is a “full-blown insurgency.” The point is that the gangs, which have long been a feature of life in Haiti, achieved unity and became stronger than the nominal government.
Foreign Policy somewhat optimistically calls for the establishment of a “multinational force to help stabilize the country,” but at this stage it’s far from clear who would lead it or who the governmental partner would be on the Haitian side. UN Peacekeeping is out after the failed mission that ended in 2017. US intervention is likely out. Henry had placed his hopes in a mission led by Kenya, but that now appears to be out.
Henry traveled to Kenya to finalize the deal, at which point the gangs simply decided to oust Henry. “The gangs have been hearing about this Kenyan-led force for years,” said Louis-Henri Mars to The New York Times. “Then they saw that it was finally coming, so they launched a pre-emptive strike.” The gangs seized the airport, attacked police stations, and organized prison breaks freeing thousands of prisoners. Henry found himself as a sort of living metaphor for Haiti’s instability — his plane marooned in the sky, unable to touch down anywhere.
As best as anyone can tell, the reason for the gangs’ newfound unity was that they had fallen in line behind Jimmy “Barbecue” Chérizier, a figure with the right sort of brutal charisma to prevail in a political vacuum. In The New Yorker last year, Jon Lee Anderson painted an indelible portrait of Barbecue — and both the charm and menace of him are obvious. He has a long list of figures he admires, including Martin Luther King Jr, although, as Chérizier quickly noted, “He didn’t like fighting with guns, and I fight with guns.” The more trenchant influence on Chérizier appears to be Papa Doc Duvalier, and, somewhat chillingly, Chérizier indicated what his leadership style would likely be — expropriating wealth from what he calls “the Lebanese,” Haitians of Middle Eastern descent. “It’s those people we need to eliminate and come with another group in our country, who are credible—who are Haitian above all,” he told Anderson. “Those people aren’t Haitians, and they don’t even like Haitians.”
A neo-Duvalier with a history of massacres, the support of a confederation of gangs, and a vision of expropriation along racial lines is, probably, the worst possible situation all around in Haiti — and, at the moment, also the most likely. Henry never had any real support within Haiti and fell quickly. The situation between the gangs, police, and police-backed vigilante groups is clearly highly unstable (but Chérizier, a former policeman, would appear to be in the best position to broker whatever consensus takes hold). A multi-national peacekeeping force is clearly a faint hope. As in Sudan, when it is far from clear who the legitimate government is, it is very difficult even to know who to prop up.
Can any real discussion on Ukraine avoid including the role and aspirations of Victoria Nuland as the chaos agent in charge of this debacle and subsequently removed from office? Matt Taibbi’s reporting on the censorship apparatus being built over the last decade inside the security state probably frames the Tik Tok ban in a much better and more clearly understandable configuration than just a couple paragraphs. A nuanced and evolving trap is slowly being constructed inside yet another adversarial “threat matrix”. Does anyone recall, only a few months ago, the Russia threat, which has now basically disappeared - it wasn’t that long ago that Russians were hiding under every American bed and posed an imminent threat to electoral integrity at every ballot box. When does it become clear that with every “threat” comes more surveillance, more data collection, more security state budget increases and monitoring powers with no real oversight. It’s like we’ve forgotten how slippery slopes work and the solution is to grease up the toboggan and enjoy the ride instead.
"These analyses always miss Ukraine’s agency and self-determination." The most common mistake when analyzing this war, it seems.