foreignpolicy--2020-08-05--Russia Is Winning the Information War in Afghanistan

Russia Is Winning the Information War in Afghanistan Since 2015 , when Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev suspended Moscow ’ s participation in the Northern Distribution Network supply route , which facilitated the transit of food , fuel , and hardware for U.S. forces in Afghanistan , Russia has transformed from an inconsistent partner to a multipronged adversary of the United States in Afghanistan .
To expedite a U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and once again establish a geopolitical foothold in the war-torn country , Russia allegedly supplied light weaponry to the Taliban and hosted alternative peace negotiations , which undermined @ @ @ @ @ @ @ authority .
The controversy surrounding U.S. President Donald Trump ’ s nonchalant response to Russia ’ s alleged payment of bounties to Afghan militants targeting U.S. forces has inspired a flurry of news stories about Moscow ’ s relationship with the Taliban , but media outlets have paid little attention to a similarly insidious threat to U.S. national security : Russia ’ s information war against U.S. forces in Afghanistan .
Although Russian news channels have highlighted speculative accounts of U.S. criminality in Afghanistan for over a decade , Russia ’ s information @ @ @ @ @ @ @ after Moscow strengthened its security ties with the Taliban in 2015 .
Russia ’ s disinformation , which is transmitted through radio broadcasts and Kremlin-backed online media outlets , seeks to influence Afghan public opinion of the United States .
In particular , Russia ’ s disinformation seeks to increase Afghan support for the complete withdrawal of U.S. forces and fuel suspicions about the intentions of the residual U.S. security force presence in postwar Afghanistan .
By promoting anti-American conspiracies on Russian-owned state media outlets that reach an Afghan audience in their native @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and lending support to these stories in official statements , the Kremlin has retooled its well-documented array of political interference strategies against Western democracies into a weapon of war in Afghanistan .
Although memories of the Soviet-Afghanistan War of 1979-1989 continue to fuel anti-Russian feelings in Afghanistan , Russia ’ s infrastructure investments and construction of educational institutions have improved its image among young Afghans , who view the United States as an occupying power .
The improvement of Russia ’ s image and growth of anti-American sentiment has bolstered the traction of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ boasts over 275,000 followers on Facebook , who receive multiple daily updates with stories condemning U.S. conduct in Afghanistan .
Much like Russia ’ s efforts to sow distrust of liberal democracy in Western societies , Moscow ’ s disinformation tactics in Afghanistan have been characterized by their ideological fluidity and diverse—and sometimes contradictory—array of messages .
Russia has largely promoted two narratives about U.S. conduct in Afghanistan .
The first is that the United States is the primary contributor to instability and extremism in Afghanistan , and the second is that the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , which have prolonged its military presence and will be completely unmasked as soon as the war ends .
The narrative that the United States has destabilized Afghanistan through passivity toward terrorism or active support of extremist networks , such as the Islamic State , is a central theme of Russian state media coverage of Afghanistan .
In an October 2017 interview with RT , former Afghan President Hamid Karzai , who has been Kremlin-friendly since he endorsed Russia ’ s annexation of Crimea in 2014 , described the Islamic State in Afghanistan @ @ @ @ @ @ @ United States uses to advance its broader regional goals .
In a February 2018 interview with Sputnik Dari , Ahmad Wahid Mozhda , a former mujahideen commander and Afghan political analyst , stated that many Afghans believed a “ mysterious foreign hand ” was supporting the Islamic State .
As clarified later in the interview , this foreign hand was a direct reference to the United States .
To reinforce the credibility of these assertions , Russian media outlets have highlighted the alleged U.S.-Islamic State alliance as an international phenomenon , which also @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s legitimate authority and Iran ’ s geopolitical influence in Iraq .
Russian officials have repeatedly endorsed these allegations in public statements and interviews with Russian state media outlets .
In August 2018 , the Russian foreign ministry claimed that “ unidentified helicopters ” were delivering weapons to the Islamic State in Afghanistan .
This assertion built on Sputnik ’ s prior interview with former Afghan Gen. Atiqullah Amarkhel , which alluded to the possibility of U.S. planes helping Islamic State fighters smuggle precious stones and narcotics from Afghanistan .
This disinformation @ @ @ @ @ @ @ offered to serve as a guarantor for a U.S.-Taliban peace agreement .
In September 2019 , Sergey Beseda , a senior Russian intelligence official , accused the United States of transferring Islamic State militants to northern Afghanistan .
On July 4 , Russia ’ s special envoy to Afghanistan , Zamir Kabulov , claimed that U.S. collusion with Afghanistan ’ s narcotics trade is an “ open secret ” and that in Kabul “ everyone is sick and tired of it and dismisses it as a given.
” The regular participation of Afghan @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as Karzai , in the Moscow-approved talks provides further evidence that Russia is seeking to burnish the credibility of these opinions among the Afghan population .
In addition to portraying the U.S. government as a supporter of extremism and instability on Russia ’ s southern flank , Russian media outlets have propagated unsubstantiated rumors about a secret U.S. neocolonial agenda in Afghanistan .
In June 2017 , Sputnik Dari quoted a member of the Afghan parliament from Helmand province , who said that U.S. forces were smuggling uranium from the region , instead @ @ @ @ @ @ @ cited anonymous local residents , who accused the United States of carrying out “ robbery and theft.
” In February 2018 , Karzai told Sputnik that the U.S. saw “ Afghanistan only as a tool for implementing their geopolitical plans in the region.
” Citing Akhtar Shakh Hamdard , an Afghan political scientist , the Russian state broadcaster RIA Novosti claimed that the United States has long-term strategic plans in Afghanistan , as it allows the United States to exploit Central Asia ’ s mineral resources and access Iran ’ s untapped reserves @ @ @ @ @ @ @ conspiracies about U.S. hegemonic ambitions in Afghanistan abound , Russian state media outlets frequently downplay China ’ s extractive ambitions in the region , as they highlight Beijing ’ s satisfaction with Russia ’ s security policy in Central Asia and the constructive elements of the Belt and Road Initiative .
As the U.S. military has taken steps toward a withdrawal from Afghanistan , Russian media outlets have pivoted toward stories on residual intelligence or private security personnel in the country , portraying them as a permanent occupation force .
Allegations of U.S. @ @ @ @ @ @ @ along with the revelations of Russia allegedly paying bounties to the Taliban .
In a Sputnik article that described the bounty scandal as RussiaGate 3.0 , Mohammed Daud Miraki , an Afghan activist , was quoted as saying , “ The war in Afghanistan is a milk cow for the U.S. establishment and NATO that they refused to lose.
” Russian officials have endorsed these narratives about U.S. conduct .
In March 2018 , Kabulov argued that U.S. military operations in Afghanistan were part of its broader geopolitical struggle against Russia and China @ @ @ @ @ @ @ encourage Afghan forces to divest from Russian weaponry as proof of a hegemonic agenda .
These allegations swiftly followed Sputnik Dari ’ s interview with Afghan army spokesman Gen. Dawlat Waziri , which described the replacement of Russian weapons with U.S. arms as a “ crime against the Afghan army ” and proof that the Afghan army was a “ human shield ” of the United States .
The Russian foreign ministry has also accused the United States of postponing the 2019 Afghan elections in order to advance its own interests , which @ @ @ @ @ @ @ depict the Afghan government as a U.S. puppet .
Beyond their potential threat to U.S. forces , Russian state media outlets could also bolster Moscow ’ s influence over postwar Afghanistan .
Sputnik regularly emphasizes Russia ’ s willingness to invest in Afghanistan ’ s postwar reconstruction and highlights comments from anti-American politicians , such as Afghan Ambassador to Moscow Abdul Qayyum Kochai , who praise Moscow ’ s prospective peacekeeping role .
These news stories support Russia ’ s soft power campaign in Afghanistan , which began with the pledged construction of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in 2014 and , more recently , has extended to Kremlin-sponsored educational initiatives .
Moreover , the depiction of Ghani ’ s government as U.S.-dependent and ineffectual in Russian state media outlets strengthens his Kremlin-friendly opponents , which include anti-systemic figures , such as Gulbuddin Hekmatyar , who is the leader of the Islamist Hezb-e Islami Gulbuddin party , and “ trustworthy elements ” of the Taliban .
A boost in Afghan public support for these figures and the co-option of the Taliban into a coalition with Afghanistan ’ s internationally recognized government @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in Afghanistan and provide Moscow with local partners to look out for its security interests .
Moscow ’ s ongoing information war against U.S. forces is a threat that deserves much more attention .
The United States should recognize that Russia ’ s disinformation is not just a threat to liberal democracy but also a prospective danger to the security of U.S. forces in war zones , such as Afghanistan .
The Trump administration ’ s efforts to undermine the cohesion and independence of U.S. counterweights to Russia ’ s disinformation campaigns , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ compound the damage and should cease immediately .
If U.S. officials do not address the threat posed by Russia ’ s information war in Afghanistan , Moscow could escalate its use of disinformation against the U.S. military in other settings , which would threaten U.S. soldiers and undermine vital local support for counterterrorism campaigns .

Since 2015, when Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev suspended Moscow’s participation in the Northern Distribution Network supply route , which facilitated the transit of food, fuel, and hardware for U.S. forces in Afghanistan, Russia has transformed from an inconsistent partner to a multipronged adversary of the United States in Afghanistan.
Since 2015, when Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev suspended Moscow’s participation in the Northern Distribution Network supply route, which facilitated the transit of food, fuel, and hardware for U.S. forces in Afghanistan, Russia has transformed from an inconsistent partner to a multipronged adversary of the United States in Afghanistan.
To expedite a U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and once again establish a geopolitical foothold in the war-torn country, Russia allegedly supplied light weaponry to the Taliban and hosted alternative peace negotiations, which undermined Afghan President Ashraf Ghani’s sovereign authority.
The controversy surrounding U.S. President Donald Trump’s nonchalant response to Russia’s alleged payment of bounties to Afghan militants targeting U.S. forces has inspired a flurry of news stories about Moscow’s relationship with the Taliban, but media outlets have paid little attention to a similarly insidious threat to U.S. national security: Russia’s information war against U.S. forces in Afghanistan.
Although Russian news channels have highlighted speculative accounts of U.S. criminality in Afghanistan for over a decade, Russia’s information war against U.S. forces in Afghanistan intensified after Moscow strengthened its security ties with the Taliban in 2015. Russia’s disinformation, which is transmitted through radio broadcasts and Kremlin-backed online media outlets, seeks to influence Afghan public opinion of the United States.
In particular, Russia’s disinformation seeks to increase Afghan support for the complete withdrawal of U.S. forces and fuel suspicions about the intentions of the residual U.S. security force presence in postwar Afghanistan.
By promoting anti-American conspiracies on Russian-owned state media outlets that reach an Afghan audience in their native language, such as Sputnik Dari, and lending support to these stories in official statements, the Kremlin has retooled its well-documented array of political interference strategies against Western democracies into a weapon of war in Afghanistan.
Although memories of the Soviet-Afghanistan War of 1979-1989 continue to fuel anti-Russian feelings in Afghanistan, Russia’s infrastructure investments and construction of educational institutions have improved its image among young Afghans, who view the United States as an occupying power. The improvement of Russia’s image and growth of anti-American sentiment has bolstered the traction of Russian disinformation in Afghanistan. Sputnik Dari boasts over 275,000 followers on Facebook, who receive multiple daily updates with stories condemning U.S. conduct in Afghanistan.
Much like Russia’s efforts to sow distrust of liberal democracy in Western societies, Moscow’s disinformation tactics in Afghanistan have been characterized by their ideological fluidity and diverse—and sometimes contradictory—array of messages. Russia has largely promoted two narratives about U.S. conduct in Afghanistan. The first is that the United States is the primary contributor to instability and extremism in Afghanistan, and the second is that the U.S. government has neocolonial ambitions in Afghanistan, which have prolonged its military presence and will be completely unmasked as soon as the war ends.
The narrative that the United States has destabilized Afghanistan through passivity toward terrorism or active support of extremist networks, such as the Islamic State, is a central theme of Russian state media coverage of Afghanistan. In an October 2017 interview with RT, former Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who has been Kremlin-friendly since he endorsed Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, described the Islamic State in Afghanistan as a “tool” that the United States uses to advance its broader regional goals.
In a February 2018 interview with Sputnik Dari, Ahmad Wahid Mozhda, a former mujahideen commander and Afghan political analyst, stated that many Afghans believed a “mysterious foreign hand” was supporting the Islamic State. As clarified later in the interview, this foreign hand was a direct reference to the United States. To reinforce the credibility of these assertions, Russian media outlets have highlighted the alleged U.S.-Islamic State alliance as an international phenomenon, which also seeks to undermine Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s legitimate authority and Iran’s geopolitical influence in Iraq.
Russian officials have repeatedly endorsed these allegations in public statements and interviews with Russian state media outlets. In August 2018, the Russian foreign ministry claimed that “unidentified helicopters” were delivering weapons to the Islamic State in Afghanistan. This assertion built on Sputnik’s prior interview with former Afghan Gen. Atiqullah Amarkhel, which alluded to the possibility of U.S. planes helping Islamic State fighters smuggle precious stones and narcotics from Afghanistan.
This disinformation narrative continued unabated, even as Russia offered to serve as a guarantor for a U.S.-Taliban peace agreement. In September 2019, Sergey Beseda, a senior Russian intelligence official, accused the United States of transferring Islamic State militants to northern Afghanistan.
On July 4, Russia’s special envoy to Afghanistan, Zamir Kabulov, claimed that U.S. collusion with Afghanistan’s narcotics trade is an “open secret” and that in Kabul “everyone is sick and tired of it and dismisses it as a given.” The regular participation of Afghan politicians who propagate anti-U.S. conspiracies, such as Karzai, in the Moscow-approved talks provides further evidence that Russia is seeking to burnish the credibility of these opinions among the Afghan population.
In addition to portraying the U.S. government as a supporter of extremism and instability on Russia’s southern flank, Russian media outlets have propagated unsubstantiated rumors about a secret U.S. neocolonial agenda in Afghanistan. In June 2017, Sputnik Dari quoted a member of the Afghan parliament from Helmand province, who said that U.S. forces were smuggling uranium from the region, instead of partaking in counterterrorism operations, and cited anonymous local residents, who accused the United States of carrying out “robbery and theft.”
In February 2018, Karzai told Sputnik that the U.S. saw “Afghanistan only as a tool for implementing their geopolitical plans in the region.” Citing Akhtar Shakh Hamdard, an Afghan political scientist, the Russian state broadcaster RIA Novosti claimed that the United States has long-term strategic plans in Afghanistan, as it allows the United States to exploit Central Asia’s mineral resources and access Iran’s untapped reserves of oil and natural gas. Although conspiracies about U.S. hegemonic ambitions in Afghanistan abound, Russian state media outlets frequently downplay China’s extractive ambitions in the region, as they highlight Beijing’s satisfaction with Russia’s security policy in Central Asia and the constructive elements of the Belt and Road Initiative.
As the U.S. military has taken steps toward a withdrawal from Afghanistan, Russian media outlets have pivoted toward stories on residual intelligence or private security personnel in the country, portraying them as a permanent occupation force. Allegations of U.S. hegemonic ambitions in Afghanistan have also surfaced along with the revelations of Russia allegedly paying bounties to the Taliban. In a Sputnik article that described the bounty scandal as RussiaGate 3.0, Mohammed Daud Miraki, an Afghan activist, was quoted as saying, “The war in Afghanistan is a milk cow for the U.S. establishment and NATO that they refused to lose.”
Russian officials have endorsed these narratives about U.S. conduct. In March 2018, Kabulov argued that U.S. military operations in Afghanistan were part of its broader geopolitical struggle against Russia and China, and he cited U.S. efforts to encourage Afghan forces to divest from Russian weaponry as proof of a hegemonic agenda.
These allegations swiftly followed Sputnik Dari’s interview with Afghan army spokesman Gen. Dawlat Waziri, which described the replacement of Russian weapons with U.S. arms as a “crime against the Afghan army” and proof that the Afghan army was a “human shield” of the United States. The Russian foreign ministry has also accused the United States of postponing the 2019 Afghan elections in order to advance its own interests, which built on Russian state media efforts to depict the Afghan government as a U.S. puppet.
Beyond their potential threat to U.S. forces, Russian state media outlets could also bolster Moscow’s influence over postwar Afghanistan. Sputnik regularly emphasizes Russia’s willingness to invest in Afghanistan’s postwar reconstruction and highlights comments from anti-American politicians, such as Afghan Ambassador to Moscow Abdul Qayyum Kochai, who praise Moscow’s prospective peacekeeping role.
These news stories support Russia’s soft power campaign in Afghanistan, which began with the pledged construction of a $20 million Russian cultural center in 2014 and, more recently, has extended to Kremlin-sponsored educational initiatives. Moreover, the depiction of Ghani’s government as U.S.-dependent and ineffectual in Russian state media outlets strengthens his Kremlin-friendly opponents, which include anti-systemic figures, such as Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who is the leader of the Islamist Hezb-e Islami Gulbuddin party, and “trustworthy elements” of the Taliban.
A boost in Afghan public support for these figures and the co-option of the Taliban into a coalition with Afghanistan’s internationally recognized government would amplify Russia’s long-term leverage in Afghanistan and provide Moscow with local partners to look out for its security interests.
Moscow’s ongoing information war against U.S. forces is a threat that deserves much more attention. The United States should recognize that Russia’s disinformation is not just a threat to liberal democracy but also a prospective danger to the security of U.S. forces in war zones, such as Afghanistan.
The Trump administration’s efforts to undermine the cohesion and independence of U.S. counterweights to Russia’s disinformation campaigns, such as Voice of America, only compound the damage and should cease immediately. If U.S. officials do not address the threat posed by Russia’s information war in Afghanistan, Moscow could escalate its use of disinformation against the U.S. military in other settings, which would threaten U.S. soldiers and undermine vital local support for counterterrorism campaigns.


foreignpolicy--2020-08-06--The COVID-19 Global Response Index

The COVID-19 Global Response Index

As governments around the world continue to grapple with the pandemic , FP Analytics has developed the COVID-19 Global Response Index to track countries ’ responses to the novel coronavirus according to key metrics .
While country rankings have been published by other organizations and publications , the Index is the first effort to track national leaders ’ responses in critical policy areas , including public health directives , financial responses , and fact-based public communications—and is doing so on an ongoing basis .
FPA ’ s COVID-19 Global Response Index covers an initial set of 36 countries , including @ @ @ @ @ @ @ developing and middle-income countries that experts and epidemiologists have identified as having notable experiences with respect to COVID-19 .
This group represents an initial set of countries for which there is reasonably robust data availability as well as global geographic distribution and socio-economic and political diversity .
While notable gaps in data and reporting remain , this Index endeavors to provide a framework to track government responses across multiple categories and will continue to be refined and expanded as more consistently tracked and disaggregated datasets become available and understanding of the virus can @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and associated country profiles are based on global data tracked from December 31 , 2019 through August 1 , 2020 .
They are intended to illuminate major actions taken by governments to contain the spread of the virus , identify areas for improvement , and highlight promising practices to inform countries ’ ongoing responses .
The Index includes policy choices and actions across three ( 3 ) categories and produces a composite score .
The composite score reflects actions taken not only to contain the virus , but to provide financial support amid @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , fact-based information to the public .
Data availability and reporting continues to be a challenge ; nonetheless , this project seeks to provide a more holistic view of countries ’ responses to the pandemic across distinct variables .
The data is supplemented with contextual information for each country to help paint a fuller picture of the dynamics affecting both leaders ’ decisions and the virus ’ spread .
FPA ’ s COVID-19 Global Response Index will be updated periodically , adding to FP ’ s international COVID-19 coverage , expert dialogues , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ leaders in global health , policy , and security from around the world .
The Index was developed with insights from social scientists , public health experts , and leading epidemiologists working at the forefront of the pandemic response , including those from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention , the University of Oxford , the University of Michigan , the University of Maryland , the University of Massachusetts , UC-Irvine , and UC-Davis ’ collaboration with USAID ’ s Emerging Pandemic Threats project , among others .
We are grateful for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ available to members of FP Insider .

Updated: March 29, 2021 | Published: Aug. 5, 2020
As governments around the world continue to grapple with the pandemic, FP Analytics has developed the COVID-19 Global Response Index to track countries’ responses to the novel coronavirus according to key metrics. While country rankings have been published by other organizations and publications, the Index is the first effort to track national leaders’ responses in critical policy areas, including public health directives, financial responses, and fact-based public communications—and is doing so on an ongoing basis. Initially released on August 5th, 2020, the Index has been updated periodically. The latest update reflects country-level and vaccine data as of March 15, 2021.
FPA’s COVID-19 Global Response Index covers a set of 36 countries, including G20 nations as well as several other developing and middle-income countries that experts and epidemiologists have identified as having notable experiences with respect to COVID-19. This group represents a set of countries for which there is reasonably robust data availability as well as global geographic distribution and socio-economic and political diversity. While notable gaps in data and reporting remain, this Index endeavors to provide a framework to track government responses across multiple categories and will continue to be refined and expanded as more consistently tracked and disaggregated datasets become available and understanding of the virus can inform further Index weighting.
The Index and associated country profiles are based on global data tracked from December 31, 2019 through March 15, 2021. They are intended to illuminate major actions taken by governments to contain the spread of the virus, identify areas for improvement, and highlight promising practices to inform countries’ ongoing responses. The Index includes policy choices and actions across three (3) categories and produces a composite score that reflects more than containment of the virus, but also financial support for domestic economies amid the global economic shock and commitment to fact-based communication among leaders. Data availability and reporting continues to be a challenge; nonetheless, this project seeks to provide a more holistic view of countries’ responses to the pandemic across variables and inclusive of contextual information. FPA’s COVID-19 Global Response Index supplements The Global Race to Vaccinate report and FP’s international COVID-19 coverage, expert dialogues, and special events that are convening pre-eminent leaders in global health, policy, and security from around the world.
The Index was developed with insights from social scientists, public health experts, and leading epidemiologists working at the forefront of the pandemic response, including those from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the University of Oxford, the University of Michigan, the University of Maryland, the University of Massachusetts, UC-Irvine, and UC-Davis’ collaboration with USAID’s Emerging Pandemic Threats project, among others. We are grateful for their contributions.


foreignpolicy--2020-08-06--Auf Wiedersehen to a Mostly Successful, Sometimes Rocky Arranged Marriage

Auf Wiedersehen to a Mostly Successful , Sometimes Rocky Arranged Marriage U.S. President Donald Trump recently announced that he was going forward on an earlier decision to move 11,900 troops out of bases in Germany , citing as justification Germany ’ s ongoing failure to pay its share of NATO costs , among other issues .
“ We don ’ t want to be the suckers anymore , ” he declared .
Trump ’ s decision is generating bipartisan opposition in the U.S. Congress , where it has been condemned as a gift to Vladimir Putin ’ s Russia .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ Germany , whose ambassador to Washington tweeted that her country has been “ proud to host US troops ” and is the “ 3rd largest contributor to [ NATO ’ s ] budget.
” The widespread outrage over Trump ’ s troop-withdrawal decision notwithstanding , this move is not unprecedented in recent times .
( In 2011 , then-President Barack Obama pulled two combat brigades out of Germany for redeployment in Afghanistan . )
Nor is it unprecedented that there should be rifts over the dimensions and costs of America ’ s military @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is the highly combative tone in which the initiative has been issued , along with an ancillary questioning of NATO ’ s necessity , America ’ s participation in that alliance , and the value of close U.S.-German ties .
The history of U.S. troop deployment in postwar Germany shows that its meaning to Germans , other Europeans , and Americans isn ’ t simply what it has seemed on the surface .
The enterprise has always been about helping to buttress the post-World War II order by reassuring the British and Europeans @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and enduring investment in European stability—that Washington was keeping a close eye on the Germans while making the Russians think twice about undertaking any violent disruptions of this new Pax Americana .
The U.S. military presence in Germany also went to the very heart of the German-U.S. relationship , endeavoring to sow mutual trust , valuable cultural exchange , and economic vitality in areas where the troops were stationed .
Fortunately , this military contingent has not had to go into full-scale battle .
But it has never ceased to be a deterrent @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ambassadorial service that has been beneficial to all parties involved .
It was not a mission that the United States actively sought at the end of World War II .
By the end of December 1945 , U.S. troop strength in the vanquished Reich had been pared to three armored and seven infantry divisions .
The purpose of this much-reduced contingent was to police Germany and help enforce Washington ’ s de-Nazification and demilitarization campaigns .
But the size and purpose of America ’ s military presence in Germany quickly changed with the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in Germany by the Soviet blockade of West Berlin starting in June 1948 .
In the wake of this dangerous challenge to its position in divided Germany , Washington embarked on a hasty buildup of U.S. forces and altered their mission to one of maintaining internal security in their occupation zone while also deterring the Soviets from making further threats to that region ’ s security .
In April 1949 the American troops began operating within the confines of the newly created NATO alliance , whose purpose with respect to Germany was best @ @ @ @ @ @ @ secretary-general : “ to keep the Soviets out , the Americans in , and the Germans down.
” For the Americans , this impulse to keep the Germans “ down , ” which had already been receding in the late 1940s , ebbed further with the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950 , which was perceived in Washington as a challenge to not only the U.S. position in Asia but also in Germany , another nation divided along ideological lines .
U.S. President Harry S. Truman dispatched thousands of ground troops @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Germany to defend that state in case of a Korean-style invasion by Soviet-backed East German troops .
Truman had wide support for that action , but once the threat of a proxy war in Germany dissipated , he faced pressure at home to significantly reduce the size of America ’ s military presence in West Germany and elsewhere in Europe .
Soon West Germany itself would become part of that Western alliance as Washington , over the objections of Britain and France , succeeded by the mid-1950s in rearming West Germany and integrating @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was no way that President Dwight D. Eisenhower could have managed this feat without maintaining a strong U.S. troop presence in West Germany .
Britain and France would have dug in their heels against this momentous development , and West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer made it part of his price for pursuing rearmament against bitter opposition from the Social Democrats and far-right elements at home .
The size and costs of America ’ s military force in Germany had been a major factor in the Senate ’ s debate on strategic commitments in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in the mid-1960s and early ’ 70s , when Sen. Mike Mansfield , a Democrat , introduced resolutions calling for massive cuts in U.S. troop deployments in West Germany and elsewhere in Europe .
During this period , as the once-mighty dollar came under pressure and the United States faced growing balance-of-payments deficits , “ burden-sharing ” became a major bone of contention between Washington and the West German government in Bonn .
Even Eisenhower , before leaving office in 1961 , threatened to reduce the level of America ’ s military commitment @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a greater portion of the maintenance costs .
His successor , John F. Kennedy , did not threaten troop withdrawals , but he too saw burden-sharing as imperative and therefore demanded higher offset payments by Bonn , which required West Germany to buy American goods to offset the costs of Washington ’ s Germany-based troop deployment .
Bonn reluctantly acceded to the offset payments , because its leaders considered the U.S. security commitment to West Germany too vital to be endangered by economic discord .
Washington , for its part , also deemed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ NATO so crucial that it would not allow the demands of the Vietnam War or domestic political pressures to prompt a significant reduction of U.S. forces in West Germany .
In the 1970s the U.S. troop presence in West Germany was beleaguered by a host of internal problems .
Numbering between 250,000 and 300,000 personnel , the U.S. contingent had become a seemingly permanent fixture in West German life and society , but the U.S. military colony ’ s relationship with the Germans had been in flux since occupation times .
Early on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ than their German hosts , but during the late ’ 50s and early ’ 60 that wealth gap narrowed , and by the ’ 70s , soldiers often felt poor and socially disempowered , including in their attempts to socialize with German women .
Moreover , the civil rights movement fueled racial strife among the American military contingent in West Germany and , together with the Vietnam War , sparked condemnation from young Germans .
For all their high-mindedness , though , those same Germans were also worried about the growth of Black @ @ @ @ @ @ @ their midst .
In their list of possible violent threats to the Munich 1972 Summer Olympics , West German security officials included Black service members deployed in Bavaria .
The 1980s brought another surprising and troubling change .
Whereas heretofore it had been mainly American politicians and newspaper pundits calling for downsizing their country ’ s military contribution to West Germany ( and Europe ) , in that decade it was segments of the German public and left-leaning politicians making this demand .
The reason for this largely had to do with a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ weapons at the Americans ’ disposal .
In the 1950s , West Germans had fretted over the stationing of nuclear arms on their soil ; now , in the 1980s , they were protesting over the U.S. military ’ s deployment of Pershing II missiles and cruise missiles on West German territory .
The West German peace movement of the 1980s was rife with an anti-Americanism even stronger than that of the “ sixty-eighters ” of the Vietnam War days .
Yet throughout all the strife , Bonn ’ s governments , first @ @ @ @ @ @ @ then the Christian Democrat Helmut Kohl , insisted that the Western alliance remain intact and that the Yanks stay in place .
There was no significant downsizing .
German reunification in 1990 did not initially lead to a lessening of German support for a strong U.S. military contingent in their land .
On the contrary , Kohl understood that there could be no reunited Germany without Washington ’ s reassurances to Britain ’ s Margaret Thatcher and France ’ s François Mitterrand that the Americans would stay on and hold the fort—not so @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the newly united Germans .
Of course , the reunited Germans did not return to aggressive old ways , and soon the chief complaint about them from their Western partners was that , once again , they were not paying their fair share of allied security costs .
Partly in response to that supposed delinquency , but even more to shifting global security threats , Washington began drawing down its German-based forces in the 1990s and early 2000s .
In 2006 it began executing another big drawdown , from 72,400 to 33,250 by @ @ @ @ @ @ @ contingent .
Still , the reduced force remained important to the German-U.S. relationship and especially to the economic and cultural makeup of the villages and towns near U.S. bases .
Germans had learned much , and earned much , from their American military friends , just as many American learned from the Germans and profited from their stay there .
They brought back to the United States something of what they had picked up in Deutschland .
The story of America ’ s military presence in Germany from the end of World War @ @ @ @ @ @ @ U.S. contingent there , along with a united NATO and a strong U.S.-German relationship , have survived a host of challenges from both sides of the Atlantic .
The question now is whether that relationship , a crucial anchor of the trans-Atlantic partnership , will weather this latest storm churned up by America ’ s own leadership .
This question is important because , buffeted as it has been by the winds of change over the past 75 years , the American troop presence in Germany has been one of the more dependable @ @ @ @ @ @ @ no investment the United States has made in postwar Europe has achieved greater returns .
This commitment has not been rendered “ obsolete ” ( as some have charged ) either by Germany ’ s own rearmament or the end of the Cold War .
The woefully underequipped and underfunded Bundeswehr remains dependent on the U.S. military forces there for access to certain armaments ( especially atomic ) and larger-scale deployment capabilities .
And , as we all know , Russia under Putin is back as a major threat to European and world @ @ @ @ @ @ @ believe .

U.S. President Donald Trump recently announced that he was going forward on an earlier decision to move 11,900 troops out of bases in Germany, citing as justification Germany’s ongoing failure to pay its share of NATO costs, among other issues. “We don’t want to be the suckers anymore,” he declared. Trump’s decision is generating bipartisan opposition in the U.S. Congress, where it has been condemned as a gift to Vladimir Putin’s Russia. The move has also caused consternation in Germany, whose ambassador to Washington tweeted that her country has been “proud to host US troops” and is the “3rd largest contributor to [NATO’s] budget.”
U.S. President Donald Trump recently announced that he was going forward on an earlier decision to move 11,900 troops out of bases in Germany, citing as justification Germany’s ongoing failure to pay its share of NATO costs, among other issues. “We don’t want to be the suckers anymore,” he declared. Trump’s decision is generating bipartisan opposition in the U.S. Congress, where it has been condemned as a gift to Vladimir Putin’s Russia. The move has also caused consternation in Germany, whose ambassador to Washington tweeted that her country has been “proud to host US troops” and is the “3rd largest contributor to [NATO’s] budget.”
The widespread outrage over Trump’s troop-withdrawal decision notwithstanding, this move is not unprecedented in recent times. (In 2011, then-President Barack Obama pulled two combat brigades out of Germany for redeployment in Afghanistan.) Nor is it unprecedented that there should be rifts over the dimensions and costs of America’s military presence in Germany. What is new is the highly combative tone in which the initiative has been issued, along with an ancillary questioning of NATO’s necessity, America’s participation in that alliance, and the value of close U.S.-German ties.
The history of U.S. troop deployment in postwar Germany shows that its meaning to Germans, other Europeans, and Americans isn’t simply what it has seemed on the surface. The enterprise has always been about helping to buttress the post-World War II order by reassuring the British and Europeans that the United States had a meaningful and enduring investment in European stability—that Washington was keeping a close eye on the Germans while making the Russians think twice about undertaking any violent disruptions of this new Pax Americana. The U.S. military presence in Germany also went to the very heart of the German-U.S. relationship, endeavoring to sow mutual trust, valuable cultural exchange, and economic vitality in areas where the troops were stationed.
Fortunately, this military contingent has not had to go into full-scale battle. But it has never ceased to be a deterrent to possible aggression and a form of ambassadorial service that has been beneficial to all parties involved.
It was not a mission that the United States actively sought at the end of World War II. By the end of December 1945, U.S. troop strength in the vanquished Reich had been pared to three armored and seven infantry divisions. The purpose of this much-reduced contingent was to police Germany and help enforce Washington’s de-Nazification and demilitarization campaigns. But the size and purpose of America’s military presence in Germany quickly changed with the onset of the Cold War, highlighted in Germany by the Soviet blockade of West Berlin starting in June 1948. In the wake of this dangerous challenge to its position in divided Germany, Washington embarked on a hasty buildup of U.S. forces and altered their mission to one of maintaining internal security in their occupation zone while also deterring the Soviets from making further threats to that region’s security. In April 1949 the American troops began operating within the confines of the newly created NATO alliance, whose purpose with respect to Germany was best described by Hastings Ismay, its first secretary-general: “to keep the Soviets out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.”
For the Americans, this impulse to keep the Germans “down,” which had already been receding in the late 1940s, ebbed further with the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950, which was perceived in Washington as a challenge to not only the U.S. position in Asia but also in Germany, another nation divided along ideological lines. U.S. President Harry S. Truman dispatched thousands of ground troops to the newly created Federal Republic of Germany to defend that state in case of a Korean-style invasion by Soviet-backed East German troops. Truman had wide support for that action, but once the threat of a proxy war in Germany dissipated, he faced pressure at home to significantly reduce the size of America’s military presence in West Germany and elsewhere in Europe.
Soon West Germany itself would become part of that Western alliance as Washington, over the objections of Britain and France, succeeded by the mid-1950s in rearming West Germany and integrating its new Bundeswehr into NATO. There was no way that President Dwight D. Eisenhower could have managed this feat without maintaining a strong U.S. troop presence in West Germany. Britain and France would have dug in their heels against this momentous development, and West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer made it part of his price for pursuing rearmament against bitter opposition from the Social Democrats and far-right elements at home.
The size and costs of America’s military force in Germany had been a major factor in the Senate’s debate on strategic commitments in 1951, and they became so again in the mid-1960s and early ’70s, when Sen. Mike Mansfield, a Democrat, introduced resolutions calling for massive cuts in U.S. troop deployments in West Germany and elsewhere in Europe. During this period, as the once-mighty dollar came under pressure and the United States faced growing balance-of-payments deficits, “burden-sharing” became a major bone of contention between Washington and the West German government in Bonn. Even Eisenhower, before leaving office in 1961, threatened to reduce the level of America’s military commitment to West Germany unless that nation paid a greater portion of the maintenance costs. His successor, John F. Kennedy, did not threaten troop withdrawals, but he too saw burden-sharing as imperative and therefore demanded higher offset payments by Bonn, which required West Germany to buy American goods to offset the costs of Washington’s Germany-based troop deployment. Bonn reluctantly acceded to the offset payments, because its leaders considered the U.S. security commitment to West Germany too vital to be endangered by economic discord. Washington, for its part, also deemed the German tie and the viability of NATO so crucial that it would not allow the demands of the Vietnam War or domestic political pressures to prompt a significant reduction of U.S. forces in West Germany.
In the 1970s the U.S. troop presence in West Germany was beleaguered by a host of internal problems. Numbering between 250,000 and 300,000 personnel, the U.S. contingent had become a seemingly permanent fixture in West German life and society, but the U.S. military colony’s relationship with the Germans had been in flux since occupation times. Early on, the American troops were much wealthier than their German hosts, but during the late ’50s and early ’60 that wealth gap narrowed, and by the ’70s, soldiers often felt poor and socially disempowered, including in their attempts to socialize with German women. Moreover, the civil rights movement fueled racial strife among the American military contingent in West Germany and, together with the Vietnam War, sparked condemnation from young Germans. For all their high-mindedness, though, those same Germans were also worried about the growth of Black nationalism among African American troops stationed in their midst. In their list of possible violent threats to the Munich 1972 Summer Olympics, West German security officials included Black service members deployed in Bavaria.
The 1980s brought another surprising and troubling change. Whereas heretofore it had been mainly American politicians and newspaper pundits calling for downsizing their country’s military contribution to West Germany (and Europe), in that decade it was segments of the German public and left-leaning politicians making this demand. The reason for this largely had to do with a fierce trans-Atlantic battle over the kinds of weapons at the Americans’ disposal. In the 1950s, West Germans had fretted over the stationing of nuclear arms on their soil; now, in the 1980s, they were protesting over the U.S. military’s deployment of Pershing II missiles and cruise missiles on West German territory. The West German peace movement of the 1980s was rife with an anti-Americanism even stronger than that of the “sixty-eighters” of the Vietnam War days. Yet throughout all the strife, Bonn’s governments, first under the Social Democrat Helmut Schmidt and then the Christian Democrat Helmut Kohl, insisted that the Western alliance remain intact and that the Yanks stay in place. There was no significant downsizing.
German reunification in 1990 did not initially lead to a lessening of German support for a strong U.S. military contingent in their land. On the contrary, Kohl understood that there could be no reunited Germany without Washington’s reassurances to Britain’s Margaret Thatcher and France’s François Mitterrand that the Americans would stay on and hold the fort—not so much against the newly non-communist Russians as the newly united Germans.
Of course, the reunited Germans did not return to aggressive old ways, and soon the chief complaint about them from their Western partners was that, once again, they were not paying their fair share of allied security costs. Partly in response to that supposed delinquency, but even more to shifting global security threats, Washington began drawing down its German-based forces in the 1990s and early 2000s. In 2006 it began executing another big drawdown, from 72,400 to 33,250 by 2018, thus more than halving the contingent. Still, the reduced force remained important to the German-U.S. relationship and especially to the economic and cultural makeup of the villages and towns near U.S. bases. Germans had learned much, and earned much, from their American military friends, just as many American learned from the Germans and profited from their stay there. They brought back to the United States something of what they had picked up in Deutschland.
The story of America’s military presence in Germany from the end of World War II to the present shows that the U.S. contingent there, along with a united NATO and a strong U.S.-German relationship, have survived a host of challenges from both sides of the Atlantic. The question now is whether that relationship, a crucial anchor of the trans-Atlantic partnership, will weather this latest storm churned up by America’s own leadership. This question is important because, buffeted as it has been by the winds of change over the past 75 years, the American troop presence in Germany has been one of the more dependable fundaments in the trans-Atlantic architecture. Probably no investment the United States has made in postwar Europe has achieved greater returns. This commitment has not been rendered “obsolete” (as some have charged) either by Germany’s own rearmament or the end of the Cold War. The woefully underequipped and underfunded Bundeswehr remains dependent on the U.S. military forces there for access to certain armaments (especially atomic) and larger-scale deployment capabilities. And, as we all know, Russia under Putin is back as a major threat to European and world security, whatever Trump would have us believe.


foreignpolicy--2020-08-06--Beirut Blast Puts More Pressure on the Lebanese Government

Beirut Blast Puts More Pressure on the Lebanese Government Here is today ’ s Foreign Policy brief : Lebanese citizens seek answers and accountability in the aftermath of deadly explosions in Beirut , FP Analytics publishes a new report tracking different countries ’ responses to the COVID-19 pandemic , and the United States announces its highest-level meeting with Taiwan in decades .
Correction : Yesterday ’ s newsletter misstated the number of deaths caused by the Aug. 4 Beirut explosions .
At least 137 people were killed by the blasts , according to the latest figures .
We welcome your @ @ @ @ @ @ @ efforts continued on Wednesday as Lebanon struggles to come to terms with a deadly pair of explosions that ripped apart the capital city of Beirut on Tuesday .
Casualty figures continue to climb .
The death toll now sits at 137 , along with more than 5,000 injured .
These figures are expected to rise .
The damage to infrastructure was severe , and Health Minister Hamad Hassan reported that up to 250,000 people were left homeless .
Writing in Foreign Policy , Anchal Vohra described the experience from her home in Beirut @ @ @ @ @ @ @ wondered if Lebanon was at war , ” she wrote .
The cause of the explosion is still unknown , but its ferocity was due largely to the presence of 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate stored nearby .
Ammonium nitrate is a highly explosive material that is often used in bomb-making .
President Michel Aoun echoed the public feelings of hurt and anger , saying in an address that “ no words can describe the horror that has hit Beirut last night , turning it into a disaster-stricken city.
” Where did the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , Aoun confirmed that the ammonium nitrate had been stored in Beirut since 2014 after Lebanese officials seized a large shipment from a vessel trying to gain entry into the city ’ s port .
Described as a “ floating bomb , ” contemporary media reports suggested that the ship was a Russian vessel with a Ukrainian crew , though the shipment ’ s final destination was unclear .
The cargo was never moved after its seizure , despite concerns raised by some officials .
According to a report from the Guardian , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ adequately dealt with , it could “ blow up all of Beirut.
” Those warnings went unheeded .
Looking for culprits .
For the public , the government ’ s apparent negligence is the latest sign that endemic corruption renders it unresponsive to the needs of the public .
As public criticism mounts , the government has moved quickly to place port officials tasked with storing and guarding the material since 2014 under house arrest , and an investigation is now underway .
Writing in Foreign Policy about the negligence and corruption that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ compares the incident to the Chernobyl disaster .
Too little , too late .
But the government ’ s punishment of port officials may not be enough to quell public anger .
It has come under immense pressure since October after protesters took to the streets demanding an end to sectarian politics and corruption .
The outbreak of the pandemic coupled with the collapse of the economy in recent weeks have further inflamed those feelings of discontent , and Tuesday ’ s accident could prove to be the tipping point , regardless of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Analytics , the independent research division of Foreign Policy , published its COVID-19 Global Response Index today , a first-of-its-kind report assessing several governments ’ responses to the pandemic across key policy areas .
The index includes 36 countries , including all of the G-20 members along with several developing and middle-income countries .
It includes policy choices and actions across three categories and produces a composite score for each country .
The index was developed using insights from experts at the forefront of fighting , studying , and understanding the virus—including those @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and Prevention , USAID ’ s Emerging Pandemic Threats project , and several leading universities .
Key takeaways .
Governments that acted quickly , were adequately prepared , and implemented targeted responses scored highest .
These indicators were considered more important than a country ’ s socioeconomic and health security , which did boost responses but were not enough to manage the crisis on their own .
In some countries , past experiences with deadly epidemics meant the infrastructure was already in place to combat the virus , leading to better results .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ top 10 highest-performing countries , women led the governments of half of them .
U.S. deficiencies .
It is little surprise that the United States ranked with China , Iran , Mexico , Indonesia , and Turkey as one of the six worst-performing countries .
The report noted that high levels of inequality , low numbers of hospital beds , and high debt levels all contributed to the conditions that helped the pandemic spread .
High levels of misinformation also played their part .
Bottom of the barrel .
China scored last in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ this was driven by its low investment in healthcare services , its minimal financial response , and the government ’ s effort to obscure and suppress information during the early stages of the outbreak .
Although the report acknowledged that Beijing ’ s early response likely helped curb the rate of deaths and cases , figures supplied by the Chinese Communist Party are unreliable .
The full index is available to members of FP Insider .
Click here to become a member and access this and other reports by the FP Analytics team @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s content and newsletters .
Saber-rattling over Taiwan .
On Wednesday , the United States announced its highest-level meeting with Taiwan in decades , a move sure to provoke anger in Beijing as relations between the world ’ s two largest economies continue to worsen .
Alex Azar , the U.S. secretary of health and human services , will lead a delegation to the island in the coming days , during which he will meet with Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen and other senior officials to discuss ongoing pandemic relief efforts .
China @ @ @ @ @ @ @ wrong signals to Taiwanese secessionists.
” Emergency lockdown in Scotland .
Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon moved quickly to impose a partial lockdown in the city of Aberdeen on Wednesday , after 54 new cases of COVID-19 were reported .
The outbreak was linked to a bar , leading Sturgeon to close all pubs in the city and impose a ban on all non-essential travel .
Sturgeon told reporters that the lockdown was a necessary measure .
“ We need to take decisive action now in order to prevent a larger outbreak and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ said .
Bulgarian prime minister on the ropes .
Protesters in Bulgaria are close to bringing the government down .
After weeks of demonstrations , Bulgarian Prime Minister Boyko Borissov told party activists on Wednesday that he was prepared to resign , but stressed that he wanted the rest of the cabinet to stay in place to continue fighting the coronavirus and the economic problems caused by the pandemic .
Critics of the government say Borissov ’ s resignation won ’ t be enough to end the demonstrations , meaning they are likely @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Zimbabwe protests go global .
International figures including U.S. celebrities Ice Cube , Lecrae , and Tinashe have joined the chorus of those denouncing Zimbabwean President Emmerson Mnangagwa and his poor human rights record in the country .
Activists have been lobbying the U.S. government to speak out on the issue for years , but the situation reached a crisis point on Friday when security forces moved to crack down on activists planning anti-government demonstrations in the country ’ s capital , Harare .
Their efforts have helped internationalize the # ZimbabweanLivesMatter campaign @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States .
Explosion in North Korea .
A deadly explosion rocked the North Korean town of Hyesan , in Yanggang Province .
Video footage of the explosion , which was visible from across the border in China , emerged soon after the blast .
According to Daily NK , a Seoul-based outlet that covers North Korea , nine people were killed and 30 were injured .
A local source said that gasoline stored inside a house ignited , which caused a liquid petroleum gas @ @ @ @ @ @ @ nearby houses also exploded , causing a series of several blasts that destroyed much of the town .
The owner of the home where the fire started has been arrested as part of an investigation , though details have yet to emerge .
Pakistan stands behind Kashmir .
On the first anniversary of the Indian government ’ s decision to revoke Kashmir ’ s special autonomous status , Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan heaped criticism on his Indian counterpart , Narendra Modi , and reiterated his support for Kashmiri self-determination .
In a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the region since the move a “ crime against humanity , ” and in a subsequent address to the legislative assembly , he said Modi has been “ exposed in the world.
” One year later , as FP ’ s Kathryn Salam writes , the region is still saturated with troops , communications are slow , and arrests are a routine part of daily life .
He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named .
Anti-government protests took place in Thailand earlier this week as demands for limits on the power of the monarchy grow .
Due to strict @ @ @ @ @ @ @ demonstrations featured a happy twist .
Many of the 200 activists showed up dressed as Harry Potter and other characters from the popular book and film series in an effort to draw parallels between their fight against the government and Harry Potter ’ s battle against the totalitarianism of Lord Voldemort .
For more from FP , visit foreignpolicy.com , subscribe here , or sign up for our other newsletters .
Send your tips , comments , questions , or corrections to morningbrief @ foreignpolicy.com .

Here is today’s Foreign Policy brief: Lebanese citizens seek answers and accountability in the aftermath of deadly explosions in Beirut , FP Analytics publishes a new report tracking different countries' responses to the COVID-19 pandemic , and the United States announces its highest-level meeting with Taiwan in decades.
Here is today’s Foreign Policy brief: Lebanese citizens seek answers and accountability in the aftermath of deadly explosions in Beirut, FP Analytics publishes a new report tracking different countries’ responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, and the United States announces its highest-level meeting with Taiwan in decades.
Correction: Yesterday’s newsletter misstated the number of deaths caused by the Aug. 4 Beirut explosions. At least 137 people were killed by the blasts, according to the latest figures.
We welcome your feedback at morningbrief@foreignpolicy.com.
Still Reeling From Blast, Lebanon Seeks Answers
Rescue efforts continued on Wednesday as Lebanon struggles to come to terms with a deadly pair of explosions that ripped apart the capital city of Beirut on Tuesday. Casualty figures continue to climb. The death toll now sits at 137, along with more than 5,000 injured. These figures are expected to rise.
The damage to infrastructure was severe, and Health Minister Hamad Hassan reported that up to 250,000 people were left homeless. Writing in Foreign Policy, Anchal Vohra described the experience from her home in Beirut. “Terrified and shocked, we wondered if Lebanon was at war,” she wrote.
The cause of the explosion is still unknown, but its ferocity was due largely to the presence of 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate stored nearby. Ammonium nitrate is a highly explosive material that is often used in bomb-making. President Michel Aoun echoed the public feelings of hurt and anger, saying in an address that “no words can describe the horror that has hit Beirut last night, turning it into a disaster-stricken city.”
Where did the explosives come from? In his address, Aoun confirmed that the ammonium nitrate had been stored in Beirut since 2014 after Lebanese officials seized a large shipment from a vessel trying to gain entry into the city’s port. Described as a “floating bomb,” contemporary media reports suggested that the ship was a Russian vessel with a Ukrainian crew, though the shipment’s final destination was unclear.
The cargo was never moved after its seizure, despite concerns raised by some officials. According to a report from the Guardian, inspectors warned that if it was not adequately dealt with, it could “blow up all of Beirut.” Those warnings went unheeded.
Looking for culprits. For the public, the government’s apparent negligence is the latest sign that endemic corruption renders it unresponsive to the needs of the public. As public criticism mounts, the government has moved quickly to place port officials tasked with storing and guarding the material since 2014 under house arrest, and an investigation is now underway. Writing in Foreign Policy about the negligence and corruption that led to the explosion, Oz Katerji compares the incident to the Chernobyl disaster.
Too little, too late. But the government’s punishment of port officials may not be enough to quell public anger. It has come under immense pressure since October after protesters took to the streets demanding an end to sectarian politics and corruption. The outbreak of the pandemic coupled with the collapse of the economy in recent weeks have further inflamed those feelings of discontent, and Tuesday’s accident could prove to be the tipping point, regardless of the government’s efforts.
Tracking the Pandemic Response
FP Analytics, the independent research division of Foreign Policy, published its COVID-19 Global Response Index today, a first-of-its-kind report assessing several governments’ responses to the pandemic across key policy areas. The index includes 36 countries, including all of the G-20 members along with several developing and middle-income countries. It includes policy choices and actions across three categories and produces a composite score for each country.
The index was developed using insights from experts at the forefront of fighting, studying, and understanding the virus—including those from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, USAID’s Emerging Pandemic Threats project, and several leading universities.
Key takeaways. Governments that acted quickly, were adequately prepared, and implemented targeted responses scored highest. These indicators were considered more important than a country’s socioeconomic and health security, which did boost responses but were not enough to manage the crisis on their own. In some countries, past experiences with deadly epidemics meant the infrastructure was already in place to combat the virus, leading to better results. The index also found that among the top 10 highest-performing countries, women led the governments of half of them.
U.S. deficiencies. It is little surprise that the United States ranked with China, Iran, Mexico, Indonesia, and Turkey as one of the six worst-performing countries. The report noted that high levels of inequality, low numbers of hospital beds, and high debt levels all contributed to the conditions that helped the pandemic spread. High levels of misinformation also played their part.
Bottom of the barrel. China scored last in the index. The report notes that this was driven by its low investment in healthcare services, its minimal financial response, and the government’s effort to obscure and suppress information during the early stages of the outbreak. Although the report acknowledged that Beijing’s early response likely helped curb the rate of deaths and cases, figures supplied by the Chinese Communist Party are unreliable.
The full index is available to members of FP Insider. Click here to become a member and access this and other reports by the FP Analytics team, in addition to all of FP’s content and newsletters.
What We’re Following Today
Saber-rattling over Taiwan. On Wednesday, the United States announced its highest-level meeting with Taiwan in decades, a move sure to provoke anger in Beijing as relations between the world’s two largest economies continue to worsen. Alex Azar, the U.S. secretary of health and human services, will lead a delegation to the island in the coming days, during which he will meet with Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen and other senior officials to discuss ongoing pandemic relief efforts. China urged Washington “not to send the wrong signals to Taiwanese secessionists.”
Emergency lockdown in Scotland. Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon moved quickly to impose a partial lockdown in the city of Aberdeen on Wednesday, after 54 new cases of COVID-19 were reported. The outbreak was linked to a bar, leading Sturgeon to close all pubs in the city and impose a ban on all non-essential travel. Sturgeon told reporters that the lockdown was a necessary measure. “We need to take decisive action now in order to prevent a larger outbreak and further harm later on,” she said.
Bulgarian prime minister on the ropes. Protesters in Bulgaria are close to bringing the government down. After weeks of demonstrations, Bulgarian Prime Minister Boyko Borissov told party activists on Wednesday that he was prepared to resign, but stressed that he wanted the rest of the cabinet to stay in place to continue fighting the coronavirus and the economic problems caused by the pandemic. Critics of the government say Borissov’s resignation won’t be enough to end the demonstrations, meaning they are likely to continue into the foreseeable future.
Keep an Eye On
Zimbabwe protests go global. International figures including U.S. celebrities Ice Cube, Lecrae, and Tinashe have joined the chorus of those denouncing Zimbabwean President Emmerson Mnangagwa and his poor human rights record in the country. Activists have been lobbying the U.S. government to speak out on the issue for years, but the situation reached a crisis point on Friday when security forces moved to crack down on activists planning anti-government demonstrations in the country’s capital, Harare. Their efforts have helped internationalize the #ZimbabweanLivesMatter campaign on social media, itself a response to the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States.
Explosion in North Korea. A deadly explosion rocked the North Korean town of Hyesan, in Yanggang Province. Video footage of the explosion, which was visible from across the border in China, emerged soon after the blast. According to Daily NK, a Seoul-based outlet that covers North Korea, nine people were killed and 30 were injured. A local source said that gasoline stored inside a house ignited, which caused a liquid petroleum gas cylinder to explode. Similar cylinders in nearby houses also exploded, causing a series of several blasts that destroyed much of the town. The owner of the home where the fire started has been arrested as part of an investigation, though details have yet to emerge.
Pakistan stands behind Kashmir. On the first anniversary of the Indian government’s decision to revoke Kashmir’s special autonomous status, Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan heaped criticism on his Indian counterpart, Narendra Modi, and reiterated his support for Kashmiri self-determination. In a statement, Khan called Indian activity in the region since the move a “crime against humanity,” and in a subsequent address to the legislative assembly, he said Modi has been “exposed in the world.” One year later, as FP’s Kathryn Salam writes, the region is still saturated with troops, communications are slow, and arrests are a routine part of daily life.
Odds and Ends
He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named. Anti-government protests took place in Thailand earlier this week as demands for limits on the power of the monarchy grow. Due to strict laws forbidding criticism of royals, the demonstrations featured a happy twist. Many of the 200 activists showed up dressed as Harry Potter and other characters from the popular book and film series in an effort to draw parallels between their fight against the government and Harry Potter’s battle against the totalitarianism of Lord Voldemort.
That’s it for today.
For more from FP, visit foreignpolicy.com, subscribe here, or sign up for our other newsletters. Send your tips, comments, questions, or corrections to morningbrief@foreignpolicy.com.
Photo: Anwar Amro/AFP/Getty Images


The Hiroshima Effect

“ Why is it night already ?
Why did our house fall down ?
What happened ?
” The befuddlement of 5-year-old Myeko Nakamura moments after the first atomic bomb fell at 8:15 on the morning of Aug. 6 , 1945 , as related in John Hersey ’ s classic account Hiroshima , remains to a large extent our befuddlement today .
Seventy-five years after about 80,000 of Myeko ’ s neighbors died in an instant , we are , like that little girl , grateful to be alive but somewhat mystified about how it happened—and what surviving in the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ we are mystified that today ’ s leaders aren ’ t doing more to prevent a greater horror than Hiroshima ; if anything , led by America ’ s history-shredding president , Donald Trump , they are making that prospect more likely .
Even so , there are reasons to turn this baleful anniversary into a moment , however brief , of self-congratulation .
Despite several close calls in the past 75 years—some notorious , like the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 , others known to only a few—nuclear weapons were never again @ @ @ @ @ @ @ fell on Nagasaki three days after Hiroshima .
The day-to-day balance of terror that defined the 40-year Cold War between the two nuclear superpowers , the United States and Soviet Union , is long over .
Despite renewed tensions between the major nuclear powers and the advent of scary new technologies , no one touts the benefits of a nuclear first strike , as those satirized in the war room of black comedies like Dr. Strangelove once did .
And with the exception of rogue nations such as North Korea and Iran , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a growing threat ; everyone is thankful that no terrorist group seems close to getting the bomb .
But three-quarters of a century is also an eye-blink in the history of human conflict .
And if we open our eyes wide enough now we ought to be more than a little worried .
“ The fact that we have made it 75 years without another nuclear detonation as an act of war is nothing short of a miracle , ” said Alexandra Bell , a former senior Obama administration official now at the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ Our forays to the edge of the nuclear abyss have been more frequent than the average person knows—or possibly cares to know .
Unfortunately , time and the law of odds is not on our side .
There are around 14,000 nuclear weapons left in the world.
” Trump , who has demonstrated repeatedly that he has little knowledge of or respect for the lessons of history—having brazenly themed his administration along the lines of the “ America first ” isolationism that prevailed before Pearl Harbor—is now worsening those odds , according @ @ @ @ @ @ @ specialists .
Trump “ is the only president in 60 years with no real accomplishment in reducing nuclear threats after four years in office , ” Bell said .
On the contrary , Trump is pushing pell-mell for a $ 1.7 trillion modernization of America ’ s nuclear arsenal that almost guarantees a new arms race .
He ’ s building new intercontinental ballistic missiles , artifacts of a past era in an age of submarine-launched missiles , bombers , and hypersonic missiles launched from ships and planes .
Bit by bit , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ over decades .
Building on President George W. Bush ’ s withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2001 , Trump renounced the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty , which sought to pull back from the hair-trigger calculus implicit in having NATO missiles on the edge of the Soviet bloc .
More recently , Trump said he would abandon the 1992 Open Skies Treaty , which allows signatories to fly observation flights to collect data on military forces and activities .
He ’ s failed to renew the New START treaty , which @ @ @ @ @ @ @ provides mutual verification .
The treaty , if no further action is taken , will expire in February 2021—unless Joe Biden renews it , as he has promised , if he is elected president .
And the new arms race has already begun in some respects .
“ Russia has re-embraced nuclear weapons with a scary declaratory policy of ‘ escalate to de-escalate ’ and the development of new strategic systems—nuclear powered cruise missiles , hypersonic glide vehicles , trans-oceanic nuclear-armed torpedoes—and more low-yield nuclear weapons , most designed to evade U.S. [ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a long way from providing effective defense against any sophisticated ballistic missile attack , ” said Robert Gallucci , former U.S. ambassador-at-large and special envoy for the State Department on the non-proliferation of ballistic missiles and weapons of mass destruction .
“ So now the Trump Administration is focused on countering the Russian threat with new , low-yield nuclear weapons.
” All Trump ’ s moves , with no replacement treaties in the offing , could leave governments once more in the dark about what the other side is building , as they @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Cold War .
China until now has been restrained about tipping its long-range missiles with nuclear warheads , of which it is believed to possess up to 300 , about as many as France .
That restraint could fade if tensions rise and no treaty is in place to contain the threat of nuclear weapons .
None has been proposed by this president .
“ President Trump ’ s irresponsible approach to nuclear weapons has increased , not decreased , the dangers of nuclear proliferation and nuclear war , ” said Matthew Bunn @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s Project on Managing the Atom .
“ He has encouraged U.S. allies such as South Korea and Japan to get their own nuclear weapons and publicly threatened not to defend U.S. allies , raising the risk that nuclear weapons will spread , putting more fingers on the nuclear button .
He has ripped up the nuclear deal with Iran without achieving any deal to replace it , leaving Iran closer to the bomb than it was before .
He has provoked a dangerous crisis with nuclear-armed North Korea , then rewarded @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , leaving North Korea continuing to build up its deadly nuclear force .
He has withdrawn from the INF Treaty without any plan for how to address the resulting dangers .
He has announced a plan for walking out of the Open Skies treaty , and he has refused ( so far ) to extend the New START treaty—the last agreement imposing any limits on U.S. and Russian nuclear forces .
All of these steps have made the nuclear world a more dangerous place , ” Bunn said .
“ The real new @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , ” said Gallucci , the retired dean of the Georgetown School of Foreign Service .
“ In other words , what with cyber warfare , anti-satellite warfare and all this new offense to overcome non-existent effective defense , we will be giving over launch authority to AI [ artificial intelligence ] in the interest of preserving a launch on warning , or launch under attack capability—which could get us into a nuclear war nobody intended.
” There is , however , some reassuring news on the nuclear arms front .
For one @ @ @ @ @ @ @ often exaggerated .
A quarter-century ago , as the Cold War was coming to a close , there were nine nuclear states—the United States , Russia , China , France , Britain , India , Pakistan , Israel , and South Africa .
Today there are still nine , all the same , save South Africa ’ s renunciation of the bomb ( the only nation to have built one and then voluntarily dismantled it ) and the arrival of a dangerous and threatening nuclear North Korea .
The threat of loose nukes @ @ @ @ @ @ @ blunted .
Secret programs like the one begun by ousted Libyan dictator Muammar al-Qaddafi and fed by the rogue Pakistani scientist A.Q .
Khan have been mostly dismantled through international cooperation .
As Gallucci once told me , proliferation fears were much greater only 25 years ago , when Gallucci was a senior arms-control negotiator in the Clinton administration .
Then , U.S. officials routinely feared 50 to 60 countries might go nuclear .
But a largely successful joint U.S.-Russian effort to roll up much of the old Soviet arsenal , a slew @ @ @ @ @ @ @ technology , and the crown jewel of international arms-control agreements—the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty—have together made it very difficult , expensive , and risky to seek to build a nuclear weapon .
Few countries have tried .
Despite new fears of an AI-prompted accidental launch , there ’ s also some cause for optimism in the march of technology .
Just as chemical weapons were once cutting-edge 75 years ago before becoming largely obsolete , nuclear arms may also someday become a footnote , some experts suggest .
“ That was the last killer @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the time you get to 1990 , 75 years later , it doesn ’ t look like a killer app any more , ” said Henry Sokolski , the executive director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center and a former deputy for nonproliferation policy in the George H.W .
Bush administration .
“ Military advances in precision guidance and targeting are making the targeting of cities ( the massive murder of innocents ) far less attractive or necessary , as is the idea of new generations of warfare including cyber and gray operations.
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ carriers once required tactical nuclear weapons to take out ; today , precision missiles with conventional warheads can do the job , if cyberattacks and electronic warfare don ’ t do it first .
“ It ’ s not hard to imagine a world where the advanced nations have pushed their nuclear weapons into the background , ” Sokolski said .
Some experts also argue that the nuclear bombing of cities is now technically prohibited by international law under the Geneva Conventions of 1949 and the 1977 Additional Protocols , as well as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ targeting civilians and require the avoidance of harm to innocents .
But that ’ s in the advanced countries .
That same technological development has opened new opportunities for nuclear also-rans .
“ The bad news , ” Sokolski said , “ is that the same revolution in precision guidance is putting long range accurate missiles into the hands of relatively weak states that might next be drawn to nuclear weapons.
” Most experts focus on North Korea and Iran .
But Sokolski also raises worries about South Korea , Turkey , Egypt @ @ @ @ @ @ @ fear that Japan , faced with a rising threat from China , might consider embracing the technology that seared its national soul 75 years ago and prompted it to forswear war .
And what of Japan , the only nation to experience what nuclear war is really like ?
The Japanese response to Hiroshima and Nagasaki—as well as the firebombings that devastated 67 Japanese cities during World War II , killing far more than the atom bombs did—remains paradoxical even to this day .
A visit to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ A-Bomb Dome ” nearby , is a disorienting experience .
Even today , most of the museum ’ s exhibits make it seem as if the bomb came out of nowhere—as if the aggression and atrocities of the Japanese imperial state had not preceded and led to President Harry S. Truman ’ s decision to drop “ Little Boy ” on Hiroshima that fateful morning .
Other nations , in particular China and South Korea , remain outraged by meager expressions of war guilt from Tokyo .
And yet World War II @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and Nagasaki , transformed Japan in a more profound way than any nation , except perhaps postwar Germany .
Though some recent prime ministers such as Shinzo Abe have expressed more nationalist sentiments , the far-right remains marginalized in Japan , and Tokyo is still largely content to exist under the U.S. defense umbrella .
“ One of the immediate reactions the Japanese people was to hold their own government responsible for the catastrophe , and that was important , ” said Marc Gallicchio , the author of the new book Unconditional : @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
“ Certainly the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki felt they were victims of a kind of unconscionable act by the Americans , but at same time they understood they had wound up in that position because of fecklessness of their own government and its stubborn refusal to surrender .
That then provided momentum for development of peace education in Japan , which is pretty prevalent even today , ” he said .
Indeed , Japan ’ s aversion to armed aggression , and to developing a nuclear arsenal that it is easily @ @ @ @ @ @ @ part of the national character—and constitution .
The nuclear bombings also transformed and traumatized the United States , making it averse to ever using nuclear weapons again , especially in Asia , Gallicchio argues .
Neither nation , in other words , ever completely recovered from that terrible day 75 years ago .
Perhaps that ’ s the best and most hopeful thing one can say about this anniversary .

“Why is it night already? Why did our house fall down? What happened?” The befuddlement of 5-year-old Myeko Nakamura moments after the first atomic bomb fell at 8:15 on the morning of Aug. 6, 1945, as related in John Hersey’s classic account Hiroshima , remains to a large extent our befuddlement today. Seventy-five years after about 80,000 of Myeko’s neighbors died in an instant, we are, like that little girl, grateful to be alive but somewhat mystified about how it happened—and what surviving in the nuclear age really means.
“Why is it night already? Why did our house fall down? What happened?” The befuddlement of 5-year-old Myeko Nakamura moments after the first atomic bomb fell at 8:15 on the morning of Aug. 6, 1945, as related in John Hersey’s classic account Hiroshima, remains to a large extent our befuddlement today. Seventy-five years after about 80,000 of Myeko’s neighbors died in an instant, we are, like that little girl, grateful to be alive but somewhat mystified about how it happened—and what surviving in the nuclear age really means.
Above all we are mystified that today’s leaders aren’t doing more to prevent a greater horror than Hiroshima; if anything, led by America’s history-shredding president, Donald Trump, they are making that prospect more likely.
True, there are reasons to turn this baleful anniversary into a moment, however brief, of self-congratulation. Despite several close calls in the past 75 years—some notorious, like the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, others known to only a few—nuclear weapons were never again used in anger after the second bomb fell on Nagasaki three days after Hiroshima. The day-to-day balance of terror that defined the 40-year Cold War between the two nuclear superpowers, the United States and Soviet Union, is long over. Despite renewed tensions between the major nuclear powers and the advent of scary new technologies, no one touts the benefits of a nuclear first strike, as those satirized in the war room of black comedies like Dr. Strangelove once did. And with the exception of rogue nations such as North Korea and Iran, nuclear proliferation does not seem to be a growing threat; everyone is thankful that no terrorist group seems close to getting the bomb.
But three-quarters of a century is also an eye-blink in the history of human conflict. And if we open our eyes wide enough now we ought to be more than a little worried.
“The fact that we have made it 75 years without another nuclear detonation as an act of war is nothing short of a miracle,” said Alexandra Bell, a former senior Obama administration official now at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. “Our forays to the edge of the nuclear abyss have been more frequent than the average person knows—or possibly cares to know. Unfortunately, time and the law of odds is not on our side. There are around 14,000 nuclear weapons left in the world.”
Trump, who has demonstrated repeatedly that he has little knowledge of or respect for the lessons of history—having brazenly themed his administration along the lines of the “America first” isolationism that prevailed before Pearl Harbor—is now worsening those odds, according to Bell and many other nuclear weapons specialists. Trump “is the only president in 60 years with no real accomplishment in reducing nuclear threats after four years in office,” Bell said.
On the contrary, Trump is pushing pell-mell for a $1.7 trillion modernization of America’s nuclear arsenal that almost guarantees a new arms race. He’s building new intercontinental ballistic missiles, artifacts of a past era in an age of submarine-launched missiles, bombers, and hypersonic missiles launched from ships and planes. Bit by bit, Trump has dismantled the nonproliferation architecture erected over decades. Building on President George W. Bush’s withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2001, Trump renounced the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which sought to pull back from the hair-trigger calculus implicit in having NATO missiles on the edge of the Soviet bloc. More recently, Trump said he would abandon the 1992 Open Skies Treaty, which allows signatories to fly observation flights to collect data on military forces and activities. He’s failed to renew the New START treaty, which limits U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals and provides mutual verification. The treaty, if no further action is taken, will expire in February 2021—unless Joe Biden renews it, as he has promised, if he is elected president.
And the new arms race has already begun in some respects. “Russia has re-embraced nuclear weapons with a scary declaratory policy of ‘escalate to de-escalate’ and the development of new strategic systems—nuclear powered cruise missiles, hypersonic glide vehicles, trans-oceanic nuclear-armed torpedoes—and more low-yield nuclear weapons, most designed to evade U.S. [missile defense], which is still a long way from providing effective defense against any sophisticated ballistic missile attack,” said Robert Gallucci, former U.S. ambassador-at-large and special envoy for the State Department on the non-proliferation of ballistic missiles and weapons of mass destruction. “So now the Trump Administration is focused on countering the Russian threat with new, low-yield nuclear weapons.”
All Trump’s moves, with no replacement treaties in the offing, could leave governments once more in the dark about what the other side is building, as they were during the worst days of the Cold War. China until now has been restrained about tipping its long-range missiles with nuclear warheads, of which it is believed to possess up to 300, about as many as France. That restraint could fade if tensions rise and no treaty is in place to contain the threat of nuclear weapons. None has been proposed by this president.
“President Trump’s irresponsible approach to nuclear weapons has increased, not decreased, the dangers of nuclear proliferation and nuclear war,” said Matthew Bunn, the co-principal investigator at Harvard University’s Project on Managing the Atom.
“He has encouraged U.S. allies such as South Korea and Japan to get their own nuclear weapons and publicly threatened not to defend U.S. allies, raising the risk that nuclear weapons will spread, putting more fingers on the nuclear button. He has ripped up the nuclear deal with Iran without achieving any deal to replace it, leaving Iran closer to the bomb than it was before. He has provoked a dangerous crisis with nuclear-armed North Korea, then rewarded its leader with summits with little preparation, leaving North Korea continuing to build up its deadly nuclear force. He has withdrawn from the INF Treaty without any plan for how to address the resulting dangers. He has announced a plan for walking out of the Open Skies treaty, and he has refused (so far) to extend the New START treaty—the last agreement imposing any limits on U.S. and Russian nuclear forces. All of these steps have made the nuclear world a more dangerous place,” Bunn said.
“The real new threat is accidental launch or unauthorized launch,” said Gallucci, the retired dean of the Georgetown School of Foreign Service. “In other words, what with cyber warfare, anti-satellite warfare and all this new offense to overcome non-existent effective defense, we will be giving over launch authority to AI [artificial intelligence] in the interest of preserving a launch on warning, or launch under attack capability—which could get us into a nuclear war nobody intended.”
There is, however, some reassuring news on the nuclear arms front. For one, the dangers of nuclear proliferation are often exaggerated. Shortly after the Cold War came to a close, there were nine nuclear states—the United States, Russia, China, France, Britain, India, Israel, Pakistan (which tested its first device in 1998) and South Africa. Today there are still nine, all the same, save South Africa’s renunciation of the bomb (the only nation to have built one and then voluntarily dismantled it) and the arrival of a dangerous and threatening nuclear North Korea.
The threat of loose nukes and nuclear black markets has also been blunted. Secret programs like the one begun by ousted Libyan dictator Muammar al-Qaddafi and fed by the rogue Pakistani scientist A.Q. Khan have been mostly dismantled through international cooperation. As Gallucci once told me, proliferation fears were much greater only 25 years ago, when Gallucci was a senior arms-control negotiator in the Clinton administration. Then, U.S. officials routinely feared 50 to 60 countries might go nuclear.
But a largely successful joint U.S.-Russian effort to roll up much of the old Soviet arsenal, a slew of tough export control agreements on dual-use technology, and the crown jewel of international arms-control agreements—the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty—have together made it very difficult, expensive, and risky to seek to build a nuclear weapon. Few countries have tried.
Despite new fears of an AI-prompted accidental launch, there’s also some cause for optimism in the march of technology. Just as chemical weapons were once cutting-edge 75 years ago before becoming largely obsolete, nuclear arms may also someday become a footnote, some experts suggest.
Left: U.S. Air Force Col. Paul W. Tibbets, Jr., pilot of the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, waves August 6, 1945, from his cockpit before takeoff. Right: In 1947, a Japanese casualty shows the keloid scars he received from flash burns during the attack on Hiroshima. National
“That was the last killer app, chemical weapons, and by the time you get to 1990, 75 years later, it doesn’t look like a killer app any more,” said Henry Sokolski, the executive director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center and a former deputy for nonproliferation policy in the George H.W. Bush administration. “Military advances in precision guidance and targeting are making the targeting of cities (the massive murder of innocents) far less attractive or necessary, as is the idea of new generations of warfare including cyber and gray operations.” Big targets like airfields and aircraft carriers once required tactical nuclear weapons to take out; today, precision missiles with conventional warheads can do the job, if cyberattacks and electronic warfare don’t do it first.
“It’s not hard to imagine a world where the advanced nations have pushed their nuclear weapons into the background,” Sokolski said. Some experts also argue that the nuclear bombing of cities is now technically prohibited by international law under the Geneva Conventions of 1949 and the 1977 Additional Protocols, as well as U.S. Defense Department regulations that ban intentionally targeting civilians and require the avoidance of harm to innocents.
But that’s in the advanced countries. That same technological development has opened new opportunities for nuclear also-rans.
“The bad news,” Sokolski said, “is that the same revolution in precision guidance is putting long range accurate missiles into the hands of relatively weak states that might next be drawn to nuclear weapons.” Most experts focus on North Korea and Iran. But Sokolski also raises worries about South Korea, Turkey, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia. Some even fear that Japan, faced with a rising threat from China, might consider embracing the technology that seared its national soul 75 years ago and prompted it to forswear war.
And what of Japan, the only nation to experience what nuclear war is really like?
The Japanese response to Hiroshima and Nagasaki—as well as the firebombings that devastated 67 Japanese cities during World War II, killing far more than the atom bombs did—remains paradoxical even to this day. A visit to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, with the blackened husk of the famed “A-Bomb Dome” nearby, is a disorienting experience. Even today, most of the museum’s exhibits make it seem as if the bomb came out of nowhere—as if the aggression and atrocities of the Japanese imperial state had not preceded and led to President Harry Truman’s decision to drop “Little Boy” on Hiroshima that fateful morning. Other nations, in particular China and South Korea, remain outraged by meager expressions of war guilt from Tokyo.
And yet World War II, and its terrifying finish in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, transformed Japan in a more profound way than any nation, except perhaps postwar Germany. Though some recent prime ministers such as Shinzo Abe have expressed more nationalist sentiments, the far-right remains marginalized in Japan, and Tokyo is still largely content to exist under the U.S. defense umbrella. “One of the immediate reactions the Japanese people was to hold their own government responsible for the catastrophe, and that was important,” said Marc Gallicchio, the author of the new book Unconditional: The Japanese Surrender in World War II.
“Certainly the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki felt they were victims of a kind of unconscionable act by the Americans, but at same time they understood they had wound up in that position because of fecklessness of their own government and its stubborn refusal to surrender. That then provided momentum for development of peace education in Japan, which is pretty prevalent even today,” he said.
Indeed, Japan’s aversion to armed aggression, and to developing a nuclear arsenal that it is easily capable of achieving, has almost become part of the national character—and constitution. The nuclear bombings also transformed and traumatized the United States, making it averse to ever using nuclear weapons again, especially in Asia, Gallicchio argues.
Neither nation, in other words, ever completely recovered from that terrible day 75 years ago. Perhaps that’s the best and most hopeful thing one can say about this anniversary.