China, Russia, US Strategic Competition in Africa 2020:

Implications for World Order?

KB Teo

SYNOPSIS

The three superpowers are in a robust competition in Africa for influence and power.  President Trump is not taking a differentiated approach towards Beijing and Moscow. Will it turn China and Russia closer together?

COMMENTARY

US foreign policy is, by most accounts, in disarray. Headlines—including in these pages—proclaim the death of global American leadership. Famous columnists send regular dispatches from the frontlines of U.S. President Donald Trump’s supposed campaign against the postwar liberal order. The damage to Washington’s standing in the world, we are told, is irreparable, reported Foreign Affairs. 

1

Grand narratives about global affairs have a way of seizing Washington, D.C., with sudden force. Not long after World War II, the U.S. government settled on the mission of containing the Soviet Union. The War on Terror commenced within days of the 9/11 attacks. And now we’re in the early, heady days of a newly entrenched narrative, one with no less potential to transform the United States and the world than the policies that flowed from containment and counterterrorism, reported The Atlantic.

We find ourselves—as you will have heard in the corridors of power and conference rooms of think tanks, and read in the government’s strategy documents and the media’s coverage of international relations—in an era of “great-power competition.”

It has even achieved hallowed acronym status—GPC—following in the footsteps of CBRN, COIN, and CVID, to name a few. So how exactly did it come to pass that an “arcane term” as of a few years ago is now “approaching a cliché,” as Elbridge Colby, one of the people who popularized it, told me?

2

My inbox inundated with invitations to read op-eds about “How the Great-Power Competition Is Extending Into Space” and attend events on “Great-Power Competition and Water Security in Asia,” I set out to find an answer.

In the nation’s capital, over the past year and a half or so, great-power competition has become the animated construct guiding U.S. foreign policy, certainly the thinking … and increasingly the execution,” Ali Wyne of the Rand Corporation told me. Wyne has been urging officials and scholars to think through the implications of the framework before they fully endorse it.

When the Cold War subsided, the US entered an age that did not feature great-power rivalries. George Kennan pointed out in 1994. Americans were unused to living in such a world. Kennan cautioned against embracing “a single grand strategy” to “replace our fixation on the Soviet Union.” Bill Clinton’s administration more or less obliged, never really coming up with one. (Remember the “doctrine of enlargement”?)

3

As the 20th century gave way to the 21st, there was a faint sense that other behemoths, most notably China, were stirring. “The focus of great-power competition is likely to shift from Europe to Asia,” the defense strategist Andrew Krepinevich stated in 2000.

Concerns about the revenge of the great powers were eclipsed by the 9/11 attacks. Barack Obama, who in his 2006 book, The Audacity of Hope, had declared that the world of expansionist states and great-power competition “no longer exists,” campaigned on the notion that the new century’s threats—terrorism, climate change, pandemic disease—were transnational and thus could only be resolved by international cooperation, especially among the major powers. These views were not confined to the left. Richard Haass, a former official in the George W. Bush administration and, as president of the Council on Foreign Relations, a representative of the foreign-policy establishment, testified to the Senate in 2008 that “challenges derived from globalization will dominate the century” and that “great-power competition and conflict is no longer the driving force of international relations.”

4

Then came the ascension, in 2012, of Chinese President Xi Jinping, who quickly set about concentrating power at home and pursuing an ambitious, nationalistic agenda abroad, including laying claim to disputed territory in the South China Sea. Two years later, Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine and illegally annexed Crimea, putting Europe on notice that brute-force geopolitics had not been relegated to the past.

In spirit, if not at first in name, the concept of great-power competition began percolating within the waning Obama administration. In 2014, reflecting on Russia’s “state-on-state aggression” in Europe and “competition between rising powers” in the Asia-Pacific region, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel lamented that “enduring and emerging powers are challenging the world order that American leadership helped build after World War II.” By 2015, Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work was regularly using the phrase great-power competition in reference to his efforts to maintain military superiority against adversaries.

5

The big turning point came with the election of Donald Trump, who since the 1980s had been bluntly denouncing U.S. leaders for acting the lamb in a dog-eat-dog world. The military theorist H. R. McMaster, steeped in scholarship such as Jakub Grygiel and Wess Mitchell’s writings on Chinese, Russian, and Iranian challenges at the frontiers of American power, became national security adviser, shocking Washington sensibilities by designating the world as not a “global community,” but a competitive arena. Grygiel and Mitchell headed to the State Department. Work briefly stayed on at the Defense Department, and Colby joined him as the lead official developing the Pentagon’s “National Defense Strategy.” McMaster brought on Nadia Schadlow to lead the drafting of the Trump administration’s “National Security Strategy.”

6

The theme of great-power competition “was there from the beginning” of the process of developing the NSS, Schadlow, now a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, told me. The decision to make it central to the administration’s strategic vision won the support of the president, senior National Security Council officials, and leaders at the top national-security agencies.

The NSS portrayed a more competitive world beyond the contests among China, Russia, and the United States, but it was the notion of great-power competition that fast took root in Washington when the document was released in 2017, followed a year later by the publication of the “National Defense Strategy.” In publicizing the NDS, shortly after the liberation of the Islamic State strongholds of Mosul and Raqqa, then–Defense Secretary James Mattis proclaimed that “great-power competition—not terrorism—is now the primary focus of U.S. national security.”

7

The phrase is invoked from Aspen to Israel to South Korea, and by U.S. officials making the case for all sorts of policies. (“China and Russia seek to dominate and influence not just their own geographic regions,” but also the Middle East, Kenneth McKenzie, the commander of U.S. forces in the region, recently noted.) It has gained traction across otherwise-unbridgeable partisan divisions. Most Americans now view Russia as an adversary and China as a rival. Joe Biden, who a decade ago acknowledged the coming competition with China but rejected the idea that “the great struggle of our time will be between liberal democracies like the United States and autocracies like China and Russia,” now argues precisely that as a Democratic presidential candidate. The “new conventional wisdom if you’re a bright, young” Republican or Democratic staffer in Washington is that “the more anti-Chinese you can be, the better your future career,” the international-relations scholar Joseph Nye recently observed.

8

During a period of disruptive technological shifts, doubt about the future role of the United States in the world, and upheaval across Asia, Europe, and the Middle East, the rush to adopt the mantra is also “an attempt to impart some analytical coherence to, or at least distill the core characteristics of, what is a highly uncertain and unsettled geopolitical landscape,” Wyne told me.

The attempt is already having a substantial impact in terms of policies, from Trump’s multibillion-dollar trade war with China, to the billions of dollars the U.S. government is directing toward a new Space Force and the research and development of technologies for “deterring or defeating great-power aggression,” to the U.S. withdrawal from a nuclear-arms-control treaty with Russia that didn’t include China. And these changes could accelerate in the coming years; Trump’s newly confirmed defense secretary and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, for instance, have both thrown in their lot with the great-power-competition crowd.

9

Wyne worries that Washington is diving headlong into great-power competition without defining its terms and playing out the second- and third-order consequences of enshrining the so-far hazy worldview as U.S. grand strategy.

He warned, for example, that if the United States does not take differentiated approaches to the distinct challenges posed by China and Russia, great-power competition could end up driving Xi and Putin into each other’s arms.

10

————————————————————————————————-

KB Teo is a former diplomat with the Singapore Ministry of Foreign Affairs.  He attended the UN General Assembly as part of the MFA delegation.

Netanyahu and Israeli Elections 2020:

Impact and Implications?

KB Teo

SYNOPSIS

Bibi Netanyahu has been Israeli PM since 2009.  This is Israel’s third election in a year. He is a fervent Jewish patriot.  Netanyahu does not trust the Palestinians. He believes that the West Bank is Jewish land.

COMMENTARY

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has attacked the foundations of democracy. If he wins his 2020 reelection bid, things could get a lot worse, reported Vox.

On a cool November night in the West Bank, Murad Shteiwi walked me through the streets where he had been shot.  Shteiwi is an activist leader in the town of Kufr Qaddum, a quiet village near the northern city of Nablus. Israel closed the road between Kufr Qaddum and Nablus during the second intifada in the 2000s to prevent Palestinians from getting too close to the nearby Israeli settlement Qadumim. A drive to Nablus that should take 15 minutes takes closer to 40.

1

Shteiwi, a kind-faced, middle-aged man with a thin mustache, says he’s been shot twice by Israeli soldiers during these protests and jailed five times.

He insists that he’s not opposed to Israel’s existence — he describes his hope for ending up with “two states, neighbors” — but will not tolerate the continued presence of Israeli settlers on what he sees as his people’s historical land.  “We are human beings. We like life,” he says in fluent English. “Life with them, the man who steals my land, is impossible.”

In democracies, these disagreements are supposed to be settled through the ballot box. But Murad Shteiwi will not get to vote in Israel’s upcoming elections on March 2. The West Bank’s Palestinian residents, who live under the grinding realities of occupation, are not Israeli citizens and don’t have a voice in the policies that profoundly shape their lives. The Israeli settlers, many of whom moved to the West Bank with the explicit ideological purpose of seizing control of Palestinian land, do.

2

Israel is a democratic country within its internationally recognized borders, but it maintains a military occupation of land on which millions of people live while denying those people the right to vote. Under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, this inherent instability has started to tip toward outright authoritarianism throughout the territory under Israeli control. In a 2019 poll conducted by the nonpartisan Israeli Democracy Institute, a majority of Israelis (54 percent) said their democracy was “in grave danger.”

Since Netanyahu took office in 2009, the nationalist right has mounted an assault on liberal institutions and eroded democracy in Israel. The Israeli parliament has passed a bill formally defining Israel as a state for its Jewish citizens, implicitly slotting the sizable minority of Arab Muslim Israeli citizens into a form of second-class citizenship.

3

Another recent law, promoted as a funding transparency effort, makes it tougher for human rights groups to work in the country. A third allows Israeli officials to bar foreigners who advocate a boycott of Israel from entering the country. Last fall, the law was used to deport Omar Shakir, an American citizen and the director of Human Rights Watch’s Israel-Palestine division.

Netanyahu’s government has launched an attack on the court system. It has cultivated allies in the private sector, NGOs, and the right-wing press (funded by in part by wealthy Americans) that aim to stifle and delegitimize dissent. It has corrupted the mainstream media: Netanyahu allegedly struck a deal with a major newspaper to exchange political favors for favorable coverage.

When this scandal was exposed, Netanyahu was indicted on bribery charges; his response has been to attack the media that reported on the scandal, demonize the prosecutors who brought the case, and attempt to pass a law immunizing himself from prosecution while in office.

4

Israel is heading down a path already trod by countries like Turkey, Hungary, and Venezuela: former democracies whose elected leaders have, gradually and through mostly legal processes, twisted the state’s institutions to the point where the public no longer has a meaningful choice in who rules them. 

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his rival Benny Gantz were wrapping up another bitter election campaign on Sunday, a day before voters were to cast their ballots for the third time in 12 months, reported France24.

Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving leader, has been charged on several counts of corruption but is battling fiercely to maintain his grip on power.  After inconclusive elections in April and September, the latest opinion polls put the two opponents neck and neck in a gruelling political triathlon.

According to the projections, Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud and Gantz’s centrist Blue and White alliance would win 33 seats each in the 120-member Knesset, Israel’s parliament, in Monday’s polls.  That result would be almost identical to the previous round, after which each leader tried and failed to form a government.

5

In separate television interviews on Saturday evening, Gantz and Netanyahu ripped into each other.  Netanyahu told private Channel 12 that his opponent, a decorated former head of Israel’s armed forces, was “not fit to be prime minister” of Israel.  “He is weak, he’s not a leader,” the incumbent said.

The same interviewer earlier asked Gantz if he would join a coalition under Netanyahu if the third round also failed to produce a clear winner.  “There is no situation in which I will sit under Netanyahu as prime minister when he has three charges against him,” Gantz replied.

The opinion polls show that even with their respective allies – the right and Jewish Orthodox parties for Netanyahu and the centre-left for Gantz – neither side could gather the 61 seats necessary to form a viable coalition.

With a country largely jaded by three general elections in less than a year along with municipal polls in between, voter turnout is the great unknown.

6

That has forced candidates to put added energy into bolstering turnout.

“I am encouraging citizens to get out and vote,” Gantz told public radio Sunday.

“You can’t just sit at home clicking your tongue, saying, ‘Oy vey! What’s happening here?’ Voting is critical,” he said.

In the September election, turnout unexpectedly increased 1.5 percent to 70 percent compared to April, largely due to an unexpected surge in Arab votes.

Israeli Arab parties, united in the Joint List alliance, garnered 13 Knesset seats, making them the third-largest grouping, after Blue and White’s 33 and Likud’s 32.

This time around they hope to do better still, due to Arab voters’ opposition to US President Donald Trump’s controversial Middle East peace plan, which is supported by both Netanyahu and Gantz.

7

“We want the fall of Netanyahu because he is the greatest inciter against Arab citizens and the godfather of the ‘Deal of the Century’,” Joint List leader Ayman Odeh said, using a common nickname for the Trump plan.

The plan endorses the Jewish state’s major priorities at the expense of the Palestinians, who gave no input to the Trump initiative and rejected it immediately.

On Sunday Netanyahu pledged to annex key parts of the occupied West Bank within “weeks” if re-elected.

In an interview with Israeli public radio, he said annexation of the strategically crucial Jordan Valley and other parts of the West Bank was his top priority.

“That will happen within weeks, two months at the most, I hope,” he said in the interview aired 24 hours before polls were scheduled to open.

8

But former defence minister Avigdor Lieberman, also an ex-Netanyahu ally, publicly accused the prime minister of engaging in empty political rhetoric. 

Lieberman, who heads the nationalist Yisrael Beiteinu party and may again be in the position of kingmaker following Monday’s vote, said he had “ironclad information” that Netanyahu’s comments on the Jordan Valley were at least partly insincere.

“A few days ago, it became clear to me that he sent a message to (Jordan’s) King Abdullah, (saying) ‘Don’t worry, it’s just elections, there will be no annexation of the Jordan Valley’,” Lieberman said in a TV interview. 

Netanyahu’s graft trial opens on March 17 in Jerusalem. In November, the 70-year-old, who has spent 14 years as prime minister, became the only head of government in the history of Israel to be indicted while in office.

9

Accused of receiving improper gifts and offering a media mogul lucrative regulatory changes in exchange for favourable coverage, he was charged with corruption, embezzlement and breach of trust.

Research shows that Israeli voters, including Netanyahu supporters, care about the criminal allegations against him, said the president of the Israeli Democracy Institute think-tank, Yohanan Plesner.

“The numbers indicate that about a third of those who self-identify as right-wing voters are very uncomfortable, or think it is impossible, for someone to continue to serve as a prime minister after being indicted,” Plesner told AFP.

But that “does not necessarily mean that they are going to change their voting patterns,” he added, explaining that personal affinity for the prime minister and his policies may prove paramount.

10

Plesner explained that 70 percent of Likud supporters have simply rejected the indictments as baseless and “politically motivated.”  That position is “ludicrous,” he said, but noted that Netanyahu had skillfully managed to persuade some that he was engaged in legitimate political “wheeling and dealing,” not corruption.

At the Gantz rally in Tel Aviv, Avi Regev, a long-time Netanyahu supporter, explained why he had decided to switch sides and become a Blue and White activist.  “Bibi was a wonderful prime minister,” said Regev, using the premier’s nickname. But, Regev argued, Netanyahu had pivoted from being focused on Israel’s priorities to being consumed by his personal concerns, now including his corruption trial.

11

Avigdor Lieberman, his onetime defense minister and now a fearsome nemesis, announced his support for a law proposed by Gantz, a former army chief of staff, which would bar an indicted legislator from being appointed to form the government.  Such a law would eliminate any route to immediate political survival for Netanyahu, whose trial in three separate cases of bribery, fraud, and breach of trust is scheduled to open in Jerusalem District Court on 17 March 2020.

12

————————————————————————————————-

KB Teo is a former diplomat with the Singapore Ministry of Foreign Affairs.  He attended the UN General Assembly as part of the MFA delegation.