Category Archives: United States

Britain, China, Defence, Government, National Security, United States

The Chinese spy balloon: we cannot dismiss the storms

NATIONAL SECURITY: DEFENCE

Tobias Ellwood, Chairman of the Commons Defence Select Committee, has written on the need to thwart China and Russia’s mission to splinter our world into two. He was writing following the shooting down of a Chinese spy balloon by a US fighter jet off the coast of North Carolina.

Mr Elwood asks us to consider if it was the other way around had a US balloon gone into Chinese airspace. The Beijing regime would not have hesitated in shooting it down.

For too long, Ellwood says, America has dithered. With the West preoccupied with helping Ukraine, the diplomatic stand-off that has ensued between Washington and Beijing comes at a time when there is significantly more choreography occurring between the leaders of China and Russia.

Having enjoyed decades of relative peace, those two countries are fully aware that the West has become complacent and have lost its appetite to defend fledgling democracies such as in Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Libya and Yemen.

It is no coincidence, either, that ahead of the invasion of Ukraine almost a year ago, Russia began its immediate military build-up not long after America and NATO retreated from Afghanistan.

Mr Ellwood asserts that together, China and Russia are not just openly pioneering a more authoritarian approach to governance, but are also encouraging other countries to follow suit, as they hope to see not just America but the entire West weakened.

China’s balloon over Montana should prompt another pivotal moment in history: a realisation that a China-Russia axis is looking ever more likely, and that we in the West are ill-prepared for the looming geo-strategic threats that the next decade will throw at us.

During his commentary, Ellwood says that the incident reminds him of what happened in October 1957, when millions of Americans looked to the skies in unprecedented panic after the Soviet Union launched the world’s first satellite.

The feat was awesome. It lapped the world every 98 minutes, and was assumed to be peering down with sinister aims.

While Vladimir Putin poses the single largest threat to European security as he leverages Russia’s ability to endure hardship and drag out the Ukraine conflict, China’s President Xi poses a greater geopolitical challenge as he competes with America for global economic and technological dominance. Since gaining office in 2013, he has expanded the Chinese military to become the largest in the world and used Covid as an excuse to build the most advanced domestic surveillance system.

Xi is now starting to flex his muscles. China has taken clusters of rocks deep in international waters south of neighbouring Taiwan and turned them into military fortresses. All illegal under international maritime law – but unimpeded by the West.

Ellwood’s view that this is no time for strategic ambiguity is well stated. We need a clear plan, he says, to check both Russia and China’s destabilising agendas. We must accept that they are bent on a mission to see our world splinter into two spheres of dangerously competing influence. We urgently need to craft a strategy which influences Beijing’s behaviour, rather than one which prompts a reaction each time Xi pushes the envelope further.

Without a coherent approach, the risk of sudden escalation is increasingly likely.

TOUGH QUESTIONS

OF COURSE, all this raises some tough questions for the UK, too. We helped design the post-war security architecture, much of which still functions today.

Our efforts and actions earned us a permanent seat at the UN Security Council created in 1945. Nearly eight decades later, the world has changed. Do we still deserve this seat? And do we still want it?

If the answer is “Yes” – which our actions in Ukraine suggest – we must urgently upgrade our foreign policy, defence posture and international statecraft not only to justify our place at the table, but to anticipate what is coming over the horizon.

It may have been just a weather balloon – but the storms it forecasted are not so easily dismissed.

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European Union, Kosovo, NATO, Serbia, United States

NATO needs to strengthen its hand in Kosovo

KOSOVO

Intro: Two decades since NATO intervened in Kosovo, and almost 15 years since the country declared independence, Serbia’s refusal to accept Kosovo’s sovereignty is increasing the possibility of renewed conflict in the region

EARLY last month, ethnic Serbs in northern Kosovo – near the Serbian border – started setting up roadblocks. They were protesting against the arrest of an ethnic Serb former police officer. The situation soon escalated into a dangerous impasse between Kosovo and Serbia, with Pristina calling on NATO-led international peacekeeping forces in Kosovo (KFOR) to intervene, and Belgrade announcing its forces was on “the highest level of combat readiness” due to tensions at the border.

Following dialogue between Serbia’s President Alexandar Vucic and Kosovo’s Western partners that no arrest would be made over the incident, the protesters eventually started dismantling the roadblocks on December 29.

With the reopening of border crossings, the crisis appeared to come to an end. But the escalation in December was not the first incident that almost pushed Serbia and Kosovo into open conflict. It is unlikely it will be the last. The fragile relationship between the two neighbouring countries has been on the verge of collapse since last summer, when Kosovo’s government started taking steps to exercise sovereignty over the country’s entire territory. This included the demand that all citizens of Kosovo (including ethnic Serbs) start carrying IDs and using licence plates issued by Kosovo. In response, ethnic Serbs in the north barricaded roads and threatened violence, leading KFOR forces to start patrolling the streets in the region. A few days later, following mediation by the EU and US, Pristina and Belgrade reached a deal on ID documents but left the issue of licence plates to be resolved at a later date. That was resolved in November, with a signing of a deal that required Serbia to stop issuing licence plates with markings indicating Kosovo cities and Kosovo to cease its demands for reregistration of vehicles carrying Serbian plates.

The latest standoff at the borders came just a few weeks after this landmark deal, demonstrating quite clearly that the tensions between Kosovo and Serbia are chronic. They will not be truly resolved until mutual recognition is achieved.

Recent escalations between Serbia and Kosovo have followed a clear pattern. Kosovo attempts to exercise sovereignty over its whole territory; Belgrade responds by stoking unrest using the ethnic Serbs in the north as its proxies. The EU steps in, brokers a deal and stops the unrest from escalating into cross-border conflict. Then the cycle is repeated.

All of this shows that the recurring tensions have little to do with the practicalities of governance (such as licence plates), and everything to do with one core issue: Kosovo’s independence.

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European Union, Government, Politics, Russia, Society, Ukraine, United States

Eastern Europe is growing stronger amid the war in Ukraine

EUROPEAN UNION

Intro: The balance of power in the European Union is shifting eastward

AS 2022 draws to a close, Russia’s war in Ukraine rages unabated. Russian President Vladimir Putin sees what he still calls a “special military operation” as a life-or-death contest with the United States and its NATO allies. The West, for its part, considers the war a threat to its own security and has thrown its weight behind the defence of Ukraine’s territorial sovereignty.

There is an inherent problem, however, with framing the war as a clash between the US and Russia. It underplays the spirit, resilience, and enormous daily sacrifices of Ukrainian’s in resisting their mighty neighbour bent on re-creating a Moscow-centred imperial order. Had there been no resolve among Ukrainians to fight back aggression and revanchism then no amount of military and financial aid for Kyiv would have been sufficient to thwart the Kremlin’s ambition. 

That Eastern European countries and nations have agency and are more than pawns in the power struggles of larger players is imperative to understand. And it goes well beyond the example of Ukraine.

Poland has become a much more significant and influential player in European defence than it ever was. It is not just the fact that it is a front-line country which takes in many displaced refugees fleeing war from Ukraine, nor that it provides a land route to supply its neighbour with weapons and humanitarian aid, but, strategically, Poland is also ramping up its defence spending from 2.2 per cent of its gross domestic product to a record 3 per cent in 2023. That is one of the highest rates within NATO. The money will go into modernising and expanding its military forces and could make the Polish army one of the largest on the continent.

Warsaw is purchasing tanks and self-propelled howitzers from South Korea in a deal worth $5.8bn and will acquire state-of-the-art F35 fighter jets from the US in the future.

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