Day: February 25, 2024

Azerbaijan looks to buy Pakistani JF-17 jets in record $1.6bn deal  defence-blog.com

Iran ready to ensure the strategic security of the South Caucasus given its red lines  Horizon Weekly

By Andrew Byers

The world is in turmoil. The war in Ukraine grinds on, with persistent calls for the United States to continue supplying Ukraine’s war effort. China may be poised to invade Taiwan in the coming years and assert its ambitions throughout the South China Sea and elsewhere in East Asia. Israel continues its war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, with no end in sight. US troops remain ensconced in Syria and Iraq, and continue to be attacked by Iranian proxies throughout the region.

This international turmoil, and the constant calls for US military intervention, ignore the very real costs and consequences to the United States. Supplying ever-more munitions to Ukraine has already induced critical shortages in US munitions and ignores the danger of escalating the war with Russia. Acting as though a new cold war with China is inevitableonly serves to make such a conflict more likely. Going to war to maintain the independence of Taiwan means risking nuclear war over a small island 7,000 miles from California. Keeping US soldiers in the Middle East, despite widespread opposition throughout the region, places these men and women at great risk for nebulous purposes and further destabilizes a region that is already in chaos.

The status quo American foreign policy — based on a desire for American global primacy — does not adequately promote American interests or prosperity, and in fact harms both. The United States is remarkably safe. It is surrounded by weak neighbors and two oceans and possesses a strong nuclear deterrent and overwhelming conventional military capabilities. The United States does not need to go abroad seeking enemies to destroy, to paraphrase John Quincy Adams. A new US foreign policy based on the principles of realism and restraint would serve American interests much better.

The many deleterious effects of the post-9/11 American foreign policy have become abundantly clear. By no standard were the long US military occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan a success, though the war in Afghanistan did enable the killing of al-Qaeda leaders. These forever wars led to tremendous costs in lives, treasure, and regional stability. The Global War on Terror in all its incarnations has produced not only foreign policy failures but also massive domestic surveillance programs and militarized law enforcementtactics, all of which seem to have become institutionalized. It has also significantly harmed American financial prosperity. Brown University’s Costs of War Project estimates that the post-9/11 wars have cost American taxpayers more than $8 trillion. This total does not include the many ongoing costs associated with subsidizing wealthy US allies’ security, the lingering healthcare costs for a generation of veterans, nor the many costs associated with current US trade policy, sanctions, and tariff regimes that are ineffective at producing behavioral change abroad.

How to change this seemingly intractable set of policies politically is a major challenge, but the path forward is clear. America’s burgeoning defense spending (the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act authorized $842 billion in spending for the Defense Department) is driven by needless foreign wars and military deployments spurred by nebulous but expansive “national interests.” To be sure, the United States should not allow other regional hegemons to emerge, but a weakened and declining Russia is not a viable candidate and China’s geography and domestic challenges make it far from inevitable that it will become a threat to the United States rather than a challenge to be managed. Rather, the United States must reorient away from the need for global military primacy and decrease military spending. It should stop subsidizing wealthy allies’ security (especially with Europe, South Korea, and Japan). If these allies are concerned about aggressive neighbors they can increase their own military spending to deter aggression rather than free ride on the United States. 

The US should pursue energy independence, which will have significant financial benefits and ease pressures to remain engaged in the Middle East (and invite attacks by Iran and non-state actors in the region). It must find ways to decrease tensions with China (the American goal must be to peacefully coexist with China) and head off a trade war and possible future military conflict. Lastly, it should stop using economic sanctions and similar means to harm other states; these instruments are ineffective and simply harm American economic interests without securing meaningful concessions from other powers.

While it seems unlikely that a second Biden administration would reverse course on its foreign policy, there is hope that a second Trump administration would follow Trump’s gut instincts — if his administration is not captured by hawkish policy advisors — and pursue a foreign policy that is grounded in realism, restraint, and prudence.

• About the author: Andrew Byers is currently a non-resident fellow at the Texas A&M University’s Albritton Center for Grand Strategy. He is a former professor in the history department at Duke University and former director of foreign policy at the Charles Koch Foundation.
• Source: This article was published by AIER

By Robert Beck

(FPRI) — When the Russian army rolled into Ukraine in late February of 2022, it was clear that the invasion would create serious political and security repercussions for countries across the region. In addition to the immediate threat to Ukraine’s independence, leaders in the West worried, rightly so, about the potential for Russian aggression against other allies in Central and Eastern Europe, including several North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) frontline states.

While Western fears of expanded Russian military adventure have yet to be realized, the Kremlin’s “special military operation” against its western Slavic neighbor has created other unforeseen consequences in the center of Europe. Chief among these reverberations is growing disunity in the Visegrád 4 (V4) group comprising Poland, the Czech Republic, the Slovak Republic, and Hungary. Because of starkly divergent views on how to respond to Moscow’s revanchist policies, substantive collaboration among the V4 states is now at an historic low.

Three Decades of Visegrád

The group’s founding declaration, signed in February of 1991 in Visegrád, Hungary, by the presidents of the then Czechoslovak Federal Republic, Poland, and Hungary, explicitly called for these states to collectively jettison their totalitarian past and obligatory obeisance to the Kremlin. Thus, in the early 1990s the group embarked on joint efforts to “return to Europe” as future members of both the European Union (EU) and NATO. 

One of the founders of the group, Czechoslovak President Václav Havel, planted the seeds for the V4 in a speech to the Polish Sejm on January 25, 1990, in the immediate aftermath of the 1989 revolutions that toppled communist governments throughout the former Warsaw Pact region. In his remarks, Havel proclaimed: 

We have an opportunity to transform Central Europe from what has been a mainly historical and spiritual phenomenon into a political phenomenon. We have an opportunity to take this wreath of European states—so recently colonized by the Soviet Union and now attempting to build a relationship with the nations of the Soviet Union based on equality—and fashion it into a special body. Then we can approach the richer nations of Western Europe, not as poor failures or helpless, recently amnestied prisoners, but as countries that can make a genuine contribution.

Emerging from the poisonous social, economic, moral, and political detritus of forty years of communist rule, the group expanded to four with the birth of the Slovak Republic in 1993. Despite fits and starts caused by sometimes contrastive politics, the V4 successfully collaborated during the 1990s to achieve the core raison d’etre of its founding fathers, membership in both NATO in 1999 (the Slovak Republic joined in 2004), and the EU in 2004. The irony, therefore, is particularly poignant that this Central European coalition of states, founded on a desire to collectively break with their Moscow-centric politics of the post World War-II era, now finds itself fraying at the seams over opposing views on Russia.

Common Ground in Defiance of the European Union

Since joining NATO and the EU, the Visegrád countries frequently found common ground in resistance to mandates from Brussels. In response to the European migrant crisis of 2015, the V4 manifest strong opposition to the EU’s common immigration policy, channeling the ethnocentric, often xenophobic rhetoric espoused at the time by many of the regions’ leading politicians. Furthermore, during 2010–2020, the group found common ground in their seeming disdain for many of the EU’s rule of law norms, particularly regarding judicial independence, freedom of the press, support to the LGBTQ community, and respect for the rights of political opponents. Poland’s Law and Justice party (PiS), Hungary’s Fidesz, Slovakia’s Smer, and the Czech Republic’s ANO party all actively opposed well-established EU rule of law standards, resulting in the denial of massive funding by Brussels to both Warsaw and Budapest in 2022. 

During the same decade, two of the four Visegrád members were on generally good terms with Moscow, with only Warsaw holding a consistently strident, anti-Russian view. Bratislava, under an earlier administration of the current populist prime minister, Robert Fico, broadly pursued a middle course between Moscow and Brussels. Nevertheless, Fico’s populist rule from 2012 to 2018 ended with massive anti-government street demonstrations as a result of the murder of a young journalist and his partner, who were investigating corruption at the highest level of the prime minister’s party.

In Prague, Prime Minister Andrej Babiš, by and large, maintained positive working relations with the Kremlin while the Czech president, Miloš Zeman, unapologetically pandered to Moscow, even when presented with incontrovertible evidence of Russian military intelligence involvement in the 2014 sabotage of an arms depot in Vrbe’tice. Despite the overwhelming evidence of Russian malfeasance in the case, Zeman sided with Russia’s Vladimir Putin over his own intelligence services. 

Further south along the Danube, Hungarian Prime Minister Orbán and his Fidesz party used the 2015 migrant crisis to strengthen the regime’s control over the courts, education, and the press, in the process following Putin’s autocratic playbook to the letter. Along the way, much like in Slovakia and Poland, Fidesz clamped down on the LGBTQ community and “otherized” immigrants and non-Hungarians as part of populist efforts to “cleanse” society. Furthermore, Orbán made a strategic choice to tie Hungary’s energy security to Moscow. 

War Highlights Strategic Differences

The Kremlin’s attempted blitzkrieg on Kyiv in 2022 sent political shockwaves, as well as millions of Ukrainian refugees, westward. This provided ample impetus for a more cohesive Central European stance. Much to Brussels’ chagrin and Moscow’s delight, the conflict has instead escalated tensions within the group. 

Warsaw, Prague, and Bratislava all shouldered significant financial and social burdens in their respective embrace of Ukrainian refugees fleeing the conflict. In fact, the three countries have been among the leaders, along with Germany, the Baltic states, and Scandinavian countries, in the amount of bilateral aid to Kyiv, including the costs of supporting refugees. Noticeably absent from the list of nations sacrificing for the benefit of Ukraine is Hungary, where, as of September 2023, fewer refugees had settled than in Montenegro.

When considering V4 military aid to Ukraine, the chasm between Hungary and the rest is even much deeper than on the humanitarian side. According to statistics from the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, between January 24, 2022, and October 31, 2023, Poland (3 billion Euros), the Czech Republic (1.1 billion Euros), and Slovakia (700 million Euros) provided critical military support to Kyiv. Conversely, Hungary did not make the list of top thirty-one donors.  

As the war progressed, populist and pro-Kremlin forces throughout the region used the conflagration to sow discord within the V4 states. These internal political struggles played out in recent elections in all four member countries. 

Recent Elections Deepen Fissures

The first post-invasion polls in the region occurred in April 2022 in Hungary where the incumbent Fidesz party cruised to an impressive victory, cementing Orbán’s fourth term as prime minister. Critical to Orbán’s campaign was his stance on the war, painting Fidesz as the “peace” party and refusing Hungarian military support to Kyiv. Orbán went so far as to mock Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky in his victory speech. In effect, Hungary chose cheap energy from Russia—at the time of the elections Russia was providing 90 percent of Hungary’s gas and 65 percent or its oil—over solidarity with his V4, NATO, and the EU colleagues.

This was a key juncture for the Visegrád group, as Hungary’s position vis-a-vis Moscow grievously compromised its ties with Warsaw, despite the two countries’ shared disdain for EU preaching on rule of law issues. For Poland, who had been sounding the alarm bells about potential Russian revanchism, Orbán’s pro-Russian leanings were unacceptable. Warsaw viewed Russian aggression as a fundamental threat, much more dangerous than meddlesome Brussels bureaucrats. Fidesz’s resounding electoral victory in the wake of Putin’s military gambit in Ukraine spawned a deep political fissure in relations between Warsaw and Budapest, a break that has yet to heal and that continues to cast a dark shadow over wider V4 activity. 

Prior to the eruption of hostilities in Ukraine, the Czechs had already started to leave behind a turbulent, populist era with the electoral defeat in October 2021 of its long-serving prime minister, Andrej Babiš. The new prime minister, Petr Fiala, was a moderate, much more skeptical than his predecessor of Moscow’s intentions in the region and decidedly pro-European in his views on many other policy issues, to include rule of law concerns that had previously caused tension between Prague and the EU. 

The Czech Republic solidified its return to the center in early 2023 with the election of former general Petr Pavel to the country’s presidency, replacing the aforementioned Russophile, Miloš Zeman, after ten years of Moscow-centric rhetoric emanating from the presidential palace at Hradčany. The significance of this election can not be overstated as Pavel’s opponent in the ballot was none other than Babiš, who campaigned, much like Orbán in Hungary, on a platform of a negotiated settlement in Ukraine. Near the end of the campaign, Babiš went so far as to implicitly question the Czech commitment to NATO, stating in an interview in January of 2023, “I want peace, I don’t want war. And in no case would I send our children and the children of our women to war.”

In the end, Pavel won decisively over Babiš in the presidential runoff at the end of January 2023, firmly placing the Czech Republic alongside Poland as staunch defenders of EU and NATO support to Kyiv, at the same time widening the strategic fault lines with Budapest.

Meanwhile, following Robert Fico’s precipitous fall in 2018, Slovakia’s political landscape was mired in uncertainty for five years under successive governments led by Prime Ministers Peter Pellegrini, Igor Matovič, Eduard Heger, and caretaker Ludovit Odor. Under the last two, from April 2021 until the fall of 2023, Slovakia pursued a strong pro-European policy, particularly following Moscow’s 2022 assault on Ukraine. Slovakia’s head of state, Zuzana Čaputová, emphasized Bratislava’s early support for Ukraine during a May 2022 visit to Kyiv. In a further sign of Slovak resistance to Russian aggression, Čaputová returned to Kyiv in a high profile joint visit with Czech President Pavel in April 2023. 

Bratislava’s unquestioned fealty to EU policy on Ukraine was not to last, however, as Robert Fico and his SMER party back regained power in early elections in September 2023. Fico ran on a decidedly illiberal, anti-war platform, in many ways mirroring his political soulmate in Budapest, Viktor Orbán. 

Since returning to the prime minister’s chair, Fico has kept Brussels guessing on Slovak intentions vis-a-vis EU support to Kyiv with mixed signals regarding the war. On January 20, 2024, Fico stated that Ukraine must give up territory to Russia to end the war, at the same time stressing his opposition to Ukraine’s membership in NATO. He also claimed on January 23, 2024, that “there was no war in Kyiv and life was totally normal.” Only a day later, however, during a meeting with his Ukrainian counterpart in Uzhhorod, near the Ukraine/Slovakia border, Fico reversed course, promising Slovakia’s continued support for Kyiv.

To the north of the High Tatry, the mountain range separating Slovakia from Poland, elections held in October 2023 ushered in a seismic change in Polish politics with the ascension to power of the former opposition parties to the long-serving, populist, conservative PiS government. The new centrist government, led by former Prime Minister Donald Tusk, immediately began a program of “de-PiS-ification” of the country’s media, courts, and economy in an effort to return the country to normative congruence with EU standards. In the process, the new Polish leadership put on ice the previous Warsaw-Budapest bromance in opposition to Brussels’ rule of law demands.

What Tusk’s new regime did not change, however, was the country’s staunch opposition to the Russian assault against Ukraine. Despite viscerally antithetical views on many policy areas, both the previous PiS government and Tusk’s newly-elected coalition agree on the existential threat posed by Moscow’s revanchist gambit in Ukraine. 

Bleak Future

As 2024 began, strategic differences reduced the Visegrád 4 to effectively a V2 +2, with only Warsaw and Prague still unequivocally committed to the Ukrainian cause. While Fico continues to wax hot and cold in support of Kyiv, Orbán persists as Europe’s most prominent opponent to EU policy on the war. His continued obstructionist stance, however, has come at the expense of any remaining V4 leadership solidarity. Underlining the political rupture in the group, on February 1, 2024, Tusk admonished Orbán for playing “games” with EU financial aid to Ukraine, adding that Brussels “does not have Ukraine fatigue, it has Orbán fatigue.”

Equally indicative of the pall the war has cast over the group, in a November 2023 television interview, Martin Dvořák, the Czech minister of European affairs, stated that “it is clear that the V4 is not a politically homogenous group” and that it “doesn’t have the strength nor ambition to even participate in negotiations on peace in Gaza or Ukraine.” He added that “the V4 brand is now toxic in Europe.” Those are damning sentiments coming from a key official in the country that currently holds the rotating presidency of the Visegrád group.

While the second half of 2023 saw some V4 accord in opposition to EU policy on the import of Ukrainian grain, the strategic underpinnings of the group have been severely weakened by Putin’s aggression. Consequently, absent a dramatic political U-turn by Orbán regarding the catastrophic war to his east, the deterioration of quadrilateral cooperation in the center of Europe will remain for the foreseeable future a pernicious consequence of the Kremlin’s military adventure in Ukraine.

---

The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and do not necessarily reflect the position of the Foreign Policy Research Institute, a non-partisan organization that seeks to publish well-argued, policy-oriented articles on American foreign policy and national security priorities.

• About the author:
• Source: This article was published by FPRI

By Abigaël Vasselier

Europe is at a crossroad—making choices about the future of its security architecture, its capacity to provide a sustainable future to its citizens, and building the capacity to push for a digital transformation. The time is critical because Europe finds itself in the midst of a polycrisis, and a world that is fragmented and uncomfortable with the future of the rules-based international order, while also having a war at its doorstep. The post-WWII world from which Europe has benefitted is disappearing to leave space for a transactional and interests-based reality in which norms and principles are increasingly questioned.

China’s political and economic rise has translated into increasing geopolitical competition, which has reshaped the political dynamics on the world stage. Its global ambitions are today driven by the conviction that China’s power should be at the centre of the world. As President Xi Jinping told Vladimir Putin at the doorstep of the Kremlin in March 2023, “right now there are changes, the likes of which we haven’t seen for 100 years. And we are the ones driving these changes together”. To accommodate its rise and ambitions, China’s efforts to reshape the international order—and with that the existing set of rules, norms, values and principles—come at the expense of the existing rules-based international order and an efficient multilateralism.

Europe’s capacity to deal with China, today, will have an impact on its own future, as well as its capacity to be a geopolitical player. There is a sense of urgency in responding to the China challenge for Europe, both for the future of European prosperity and security, but also for maintaining a functioning international rules-based order in which Europe can thrive.

Europe’s accelerated Long March towards recalibrating engagement and derisking 

Europe had gone through several phases before realising that it needs to deal with China in a complex and nuanced way. In 2016, when the decision on whether to grant China Market Economy Status came—which it was meant to be granted under the 2001 WTO Accession Protocol—it coincided with a series of hostile Chinese takeovers in Europe in strategic sectors. These were the first discussions in Europe about the balancing of economic opportunities with national security issues when it came to China. The trade war between the United States (US) and China pushed that conversation further. To consolidate its position, the European Commission presented its member states with a strategy in March 2019 that became a turning point in the European approach to China.

First, it acknowledged that Europe needs to become nuanced and complex in its dealings with China. On the basis of a European multifaceted approach, member states started to engage with China as a cooperation partner, a competitor, and a strategic rival. Second, this strategy acknowledged that the balance between challenges and opportunities had shifted, and Europe needed to urgently address the absence of reciprocity, lack of a level playing field and the asymmetries in the relationship.

China’s position on the Ukraine war and its No-Limits Partnership with Russia fostered a degree of realism, pragmatism and unity in European dealings with China. The war put an end to the illusion that China would have an offer for Europe. In addition, China’s support to Russia’s aggression against Ukraine has accelerated this sense of urgency that Europe needs to secure its supply chains, choose its dependencies, and reduce its vulnerabilities. The war reinforces the idea that Europe can both recalibrate its engagement with China and maintain open channels of communication, while de-risking at home from what the Union identified as risks or vulnerabilities vis-à-vis China.

The European methods in dealing with China 

Europe is in a delicate balancing act between recalibrating engagement with China while derisking. With 2.3 billion Euros exchanged between China and Europe on a daily basis, decoupling is not an option. Despite a difficult business environment, the European companies that have not left China still believe in the economic opportunities that the scale of the Chinese market can represent. In addition, there will be no fight against climate change or debt relief without China. This means that Europe has no alternative but to engage with a difficult partner with whom the value gap is growing together with the number of irritants and fundamental divergences.

Recalibrating European engagement vis-à-vis China is a difficult task. Engagement can take several forms, ranging from having channels of communication open to cooperating in sectors and areas in which interests converge. Over the past years, there has been a deterioration in the quality of the engagement due to a toughened European approach, China’s economic coercion of Lithuania, tit-for-tat attitudes over trade barriers, the closure of China during the pandemic, the question of Taiwan, the oversecuritisation of almost all issues, and China’s support to Russia.

Entangled in its perception of Europe only through the lens of Europe’s relations with the US, Beijing has also failed in coming up with a meaningful offer for Europe. This would entail China seriously considering the European asks and to appreciate that building the relationship is about give and take. Europe has come to China with ideas ranging from connectivity to climate change and the intention to address trade issues, but the level of Chinese commitment has not matched this ambition. Nonetheless, channels of communication have remained open, and this can be appreciated in light of the several crises that Europe-China relations has faced over the past years.

“Europe is derisking but not decoupling”. The mantra of the European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen to her Chinese counterpart became the mantra of many like-minded partners such as the US in their relations with China. Derisking means, in concrete terms, that Europe would carefully consider its relations with China, especially in the economic and trade domain, and reduce its vulnerabilities when a risk or an over-dependency is identified. This European effort to secure its future prosperity and security should not be confused with protectionism but with a realisation that if China places security as a comprehensive approach to all its policies, Europe has the legitimacy to do the same. It is indeed a calibrated response to the weaponisation of trade and dependency that Europe has experienced. Nonetheless, Europe will remain an actor that believes in free trade and for whom the role of the WTO is essential. So derisking can only take place for Europe as part of the existing rules-based international order.

Derisking has taken different forms, ranging from raising awareness of all stakeholders by preparing a large-scale risk assessment across Europe to developing a defensive toolbox based on security concerns that can be used when necessary. This has been coupled with an effort to partner for scaling up the offensive measures and the necessity to diversify European supply chains. The European trade strategy takes into account this necessity to secure and diversify. The challenge, now, is the articulation between derisking and economic security. While the European Commission has been proactive in articulating an economic security strategy with the efforts to derisk, the actors and stakeholders at national level, which would be responsible for taking forward the EU proposal, are lagging behind. At this stage, the real challenge for Europe on economic security is to remain united and spread the risks across the Union while working with partners on the best way forward.

Looking ahead in European China relations 

The European method in dealing with China with pragmatism and nuances has been successful. Few parameters are key to look ahead and assess the future of this trajectory. Internally, the European Union will go through elections and with that the creation of a new Commission. While there has been a degree of continuity in the European approach to China, elections are always the moment to rethink and question what the previous leadership has done. The second element is China itself. In a moment of domestic uncertainties and economic difficulties, Beijing is looking inward and the priority is to address issues at home. This means that the space for dealing with Europe and looking forward is limited, especially in a year of elections in the US. In fact, Zhongnanhai is looking at the dynamics in the US to constantly recalibrate its approach to Europe. This is the perfect window of opportunity for Europe to continue derisking and developing its economic security agenda while maintaining a limited but existent European offer to China.

---

• About the author: Abigaël Vasselier is Head of Foreign Relations at the Mercator Institute for China Studies, Germany
• Source: This article was published by the Observer Research Foundation