Tag Archive for: Russia

The emergence of a post-fact world

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One of the more striking developments of 2016 and its highly unusual politics was the emergence of a ‘post-fact’ world, in which virtually all authoritative information sources were called into question and challenged by contrary facts of dubious quality and provenance.

The emergence of the Internet and the World Wide Web in the 1990s was greeted as a moment of liberation and a great boon for democracy worldwide. Information constitutes a form of power, and to the extent that information was becoming cheaper and more accessible, democratic publics would be able to participate in domains from which they had been hitherto excluded.

The development of social media in the early 2000s appeared to accelerate this trend, permitting the mass mobilization that fueled various democratic ‘color revolutions’ around the world, from Ukraine to Burma (Myanmar) to Egypt. In a world of peer-to-peer communication, the old gatekeepers of information, largely seen to be oppressive authoritarian states, could now be bypassed.

While there was some truth to this positive narrative, another, darker one was also taking shape. Those old authoritarian forces were responding in dialectical fashion, learning to control the Internet, as in China with its tens of thousands of censors, or through the recruitment of legions of trolls and unleashing of bots that could flood social media with bad information, as in the case of Russia. These trends all came together in a hugely visible way during 2016, in ways that bridged foreign and domestic politics.

The premier manipulator of social media turned out to be Russia. The Russian government has put out blatant falsehoods like the ‘fact’ that Ukrainian nationalists were crucifying small children, or that Ukrainian government forces shot down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 in 2014. These same sources contributed to the debates on Scottish independence, Brexit, and the Dutch referendum on the EU’s Association Agreement with Ukraine, amplifying any dubious fact that would weaken pro-EU forces.

Use of bad information as a weapon by authoritarian powers would be bad enough, but the practice took root big time during the US election campaign. All politicians lie or, more charitably, spin the truth for their own benefit; but Donald Trump took the practice to new and unprecedented heights. This began several years ago with his promotion of ‘birtherism,’ the accusation that President Barack Obama was not born in the US, which Trump continued to propagate even after Obama produced a birth certificate showing that he was.

In the recent US presidential debates, Trump insisted that he had never supported the Iraq War and never called climate change a hoax. After the election, he asserted that he had won even the popular vote (which he lost by more than two million), because of fraudulent voting. These were not simply shadings of facts, but outright lies whose falsehood could be easily demonstrated. That he asserted them was bad enough; what was worse was that he appeared to suffer no penalty from Republican voters for his repeated and egregious mendacity.

The traditional remedy for bad information, according to freedom-of-information advocates, is simply to put out good information, which in a marketplace of ideas will rise to the top. This solution, unfortunately, works much less well in a social-media world of trolls and bots. There are estimates that as many as a third to a quarter of Twitter users fall into this category. The Internet was supposed to liberate us from gatekeepers; and, indeed, information now comes at us from all possible sources, all with equal credibility. There is no reason to think that good information will win out over bad information.

There is a more serious problem than these individual falsehoods and their effect on the election outcome. Why do we believe in the authority of any fact, given that few of us are in a position to verify most of them? The reason is that there are impartial institutions tasked with producing factual information that we trust. Americans get crime statistics from the US Department of Justice, and unemployment data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Mainstream media outlets like the New York Times were indeed biased against Trump, yet they have systems in place to prevent egregious factual errors from appearing in their copy. I seriously doubt that Matt Drudge or Breitbart News have legions of fact-checkers verifying the accuracy of material posted on their websites.

In Trump’s world, by contrast, everything is politicized. In the course of the campaign, he suggested that Janet Yellen’s Federal Reserve was working for Hillary Clinton’s campaign, that the election would be rigged, that official sources were deliberately underreporting crime, and that the FBI’s refusal to indict Clinton reflected her campaign’s corruption of FBI Director James Comey. He also refused to accept the authority of the intelligence agencies blaming Russia for hacking the Democratic National Committee. And, of course, Trump and his supporters have eagerly denigrated all reporting by the ‘mainstream media’ as hopelessly biased.

The inability to agree on the most basic of facts is the direct product of an across-the-board assault on democratic institutions—in the US, in Britain, and throughout the world. And this is where the democracies are headed for real trouble. In the US, there has in fact been real institutional decay, whereby powerful interest groups have been able to protect themselves through a system of unlimited campaign finance. The primary locus of this decay is Congress, and the bad behavior is for the most part as legal as it is widespread. So ordinary people are right to be upset.

And yet, the election campaign has shifted the ground to a general belief that everything has been rigged or politicized, and that outright bribery is rampant. If the election authorities certify that your favored candidate is not the victor, or if the other candidate seemed to do better in the debate, it must be the result of an elaborate conspiracy by the other side to corrupt the outcome. The belief in the corruptibility of all institutions leads to a dead end of universal distrust. American democracy, all democracy, will not survive a lack of belief in the possibility of impartial institutions; instead, partisan political combat will come to pervade every aspect of life.

The return of containment

Image courtesy of Flickr user tom_allan.

‘The main element of any US policy towards the Soviet Union must be that of a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment,’ the US diplomat George Kennan wrote in 1947 in a Foreign Affairs article, famously signed ‘X.’ Replace ‘Soviet Union’ with ‘Russia,’ and Kennan’s ‘containment policy’ makes perfect sense today. It is almost as if, in nearly 70 years, nothing has changed, even as everything has.

Of course, the Soviet Union has been, one might say, permanently contained. But Russia is showing the same ‘expansive tendencies’ of which Kennan warned. In fact, today, the level of trust between Russia and the ‘West’ is at its lowest point since at least the end of the Cold War. According to Vitaly I. Churkin, Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations, the current tensions ‘are probably the worst since 1973,’ when the Yom Kippur War brought the United States and the Soviet Union closer to a nuclear confrontation than at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Such pessimism is warranted. This year alone, the sources of discord with Russia have multiplied and deepened. Russia has withdrawn from a number of nuclear agreements, and the Kremlin recently placed Iskander missiles, which can transport medium-range nuclear devices, in Kaliningrad, near the Polish border.

Moreover, the Ukrainian crisis is far from resolved: the Minsk ceasefire agreements are not respected, and armed conflict may escalate at any moment. And it seems likely that Russia has been intervening directly in the internal politics of Western democracies, using leaks of sensitive documents and financing right-wing populists, from Marine Le Pen to Donald Trump, who would be supportive of the Kremlin.

Then there is Russia’s role in Syria. The ink was barely dry on a ceasefire agreement negotiated with the US when Russia, along with its ally, President Bashar al-Assad’s regime, began to carry out massive bombings that decimated Aleppo. When the US expressed its anger, Russia shot back that the Americans were being hypocrites. After all, they are not protesting Saudi Arabia’s bombings of Sana’a, Yemen’s capital, which is controlled by Iran-backed Houthis. (To engage in some macabre accounting, the difference is that hundreds of thousands have died in Syria, versus a few thousand in Yemen.)

It seems clear that the West needs to impose some limits on Russia. But how? It is a question that inspires deep divisions among European countries along geographic, historical, political and commercial lines. Even within countries, the question generates considerable tensions.

In Germany, which is preparing for a federal election next year, the Social Democrat Party (SPD) seems to be thinking in terms of détente, while Chancellor Angela Merkel and her Christian Democratic Union takes a tougher line. For the SPD—which seems to be nostalgic for the early 1970s, when the party was led by the charismatic Willy Brandt—this distinction might work well; public opinion polls show that Germans tend to be much closer to the SPD than to Merkel on Russia.

In France, both Le Pen’s far-right National Front and the far left, led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, support Russia. But, closer to the political center, the differences are significant. On the right, the difference between the moderate but firm line of Alain Juppé—the clear favorite to win next year’s presidential election—and the ‘understanding’ advocated by Nicolas Sarkozy and François Fillon goes beyond nuance. On the left, President François Hollande’s stance—clear in content, but sometimes incoherent in approach—is far less positive toward Russia than that of, say, former Defense Minister Jean-Pierre Chevènement.

All of this disagreement raises doubts about the capability of the West to define a ‘long term, patient but firm’ strategy to contain Russian President Vladimir Putin’s dangerous behavior. In fact, Putin himself seems convinced that the West has no such capacity. In his view, the West is far too weak, divided, and obsessed with national electoral calendars to offer anything more than harsh words and ineffective action.

Some in the West argue that the key to handling Putin is to capitalize on Russia’s economic weakness, just as Putin has capitalized on the West’s political weakness. It certainly sounds rational, especially compared to a more diplomatic approach of lifting some economic sanctions in exchange for, say, cooperation in Syria. Responding to Russia’s razing of Aleppo with carrots would amount to paying tribute to a cynical, criminal policy.

But the stick option—reinforcing the sanctions regime against Russia—may not do the trick, either. For Russia’s wealthy and powerful, sanctions have little impact. It is ordinary Russians who suffer—and the Kremlin has made it very clear that it does not care much about what happens to ordinary Russians. In any case, Europe and the US are nowhere close to a consensus on toughening sanctions.

If the West is to halt Russia’s dangerous rush into the unknown, it must find something to agree on. It should, at least, begin to respond to the Kremlin’s shrewd and highly professional disinformation strategy with far more clarity and candor. Such a policy should be relatively uncontroversial, at least as compared to more concrete foreign-policy moves.

If it is to succeed, the West must recognize the advantages that Russia already wields—namely, Putin’s understanding of the Western psyche and political circumstances. On the international stage, Putin is tapping anti-American sentiment, which exists whether the US is strong or weak. Within countries, he is encouraging anti-elitist and anti-globalization movements.

Toward the end of the Soviet era, Russian leaders looked like the rearguard of a lost ideological cause. Today, by contrast, they can be perceived as the avant-garde of a movement toward isolationism, jingoism, and even hyper-nationalism. It is precisely because Western countries have now been swept up in this movement that it is so critical for rational leaders to stand up and advocate coherent strategies for containing Russia.

Cyber wrap

 

Last Tuesday the G7 announced that they have agreed to new ‘non-binding principles’ to protect the global financial system from cyber threats such as last year’s SWIFT hacking incident in Bangladesh. A US Treasury official told Reuters that the principles are an effort to encourage both regulators and companies to take a risk management approach to cyber security. Among other things, the G7 principles recommend that governments and banks share threat information and cooperate to manage incidents. Of course banks and regulators are already sharing information, with news from the UK this week noting that UK banks have reported 75 incidents so far this year to the Financial Conduct Authority, but that’s probably just the tip of the iceberg.

On Monday WikiLeaks let the world know that Julian Assange isn’t dead (as some rumours suggested), but his internet connection is. WikiLeaks originally blamed a ‘state actor’ for cutting Assange’s internet access, and while they were right, it probably wasn’t who they expected. Assange’s Ecuadorian hosts cut him off from the world after WikiLeaks released more leaked Hillary Clinton emails, yet another move which violates Ecuador’s principle of non-intervention in the affairs of other states. While Ecuador hasn’t backed away from its commitment to protect Assange, it seems they may be getting a bit tired of their guest.

Back in Australia, Senate Estimates have seen interesting exchanges about cyber security issues, highlighting the increasing prominence of cyber security in political circles, and its potential to embarrass the government. Most prominent was the examination of the use of encrypted messaging app WhatsApp by Cabinet ministers and advisers. While the app isn’t on ASD’s list of approved communications and messaging services for sensitive or classified communications, the PM’s Cyber Security Adviser Alastair MacGibbon told estimates that ASD had approved the use of WhatsApp by Ministers for unclassified messages. In another exchange, the Parliamentary Services CIO was quizzed on whether a smart watch that had been given to a government MP had been connected to the parliamentary network. The watch attracted interest because it was manufactured by Chinese firm Huawei, notable in Australia for being banned from providing NBN infrastructure on security grounds.

The Australian government has also taken another step forward in its digital transformation agenda, transferring the IT procurement, project management and policy function from the Finance Department to the Digital Transformation Office, which will become the Digital Transformation Agency. Also announced was the formation of a Digital Transformation Advisory Board of public and private sector experts to advise government on the rollout of digital government services. The DTO, formed by PM Malcolm Turnbull when he was Communications Minister, has been charged with improving the delivery of government services online, including improvements to the myGov portal and its expansion to state government services.

Telstra, Australia’s largest telco, is looking for a new Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) after incumbent Mike Burgess announced his move into private consultancy from early November. Burgess, formerly a Deputy Director at ASD has spent four years managing Telstra’s cyber security. IT News noted that this was the fifth ‘big CISO move’ this year, with CISO vacancies at Telstra and Qantas, and new appointments at Australia Post, AGL Energy, the National Australia Bank and the Department of Human Services.

Internet services in Syria and Lebanon have suffered from a series of outages caused by a spike in routing instability according to US internet monitor Dyn. While the group was careful to point out that correlation doesn’t necessarily imply causation, Dyn has noted that the outages and instability have occurred since the arrival of Russian research vessel Yantar off the Syrian coast. Yantar is equipped with two autonomous submersible craft, and it’s been suggested that the ship has been using these to tap submarine cables or seek out uncharted cables used for classified information. In September last year the ship was in Cuban waters, and similar claims were made in some US media outlets that the ship was spying on US submarines and tapping submarine cables. However cable industry experts have told War is Boring that tapping submarine cables underwater is an unlikely method for the Russians to employ when tapping the cables on land is easier. Interestingly the Russian Navy plans to deploy a similar ship, the Almaz, to the Pacific Ocean by 2019.

And finally, if you’re looking for a gift for the special cryptanalyst in your life, perhaps consider GCHQ’s new puzzle book. GCHQ will be donating all proceeds from the book to mental illness awareness charity Heads Together.

Bombing and civilians—then and now

There’s been a slew of criticism recently of Russian and Saudi bombing of civilian areas during Middle East conflicts. And there’s evidence that the Russian bombing campaign in particular isn’t going out of its way to avoid destruction of civilian targets, with a predictable loss of life. If we can take Russian supplied videos of bombing missions over Syria at face value, the delivery of a stick of unguided ‘gravity bombs’ is a long way from precision targeting of targets identified by intelligence as terrorist related.

In contrast, it hasn’t been unusual for missions flown by the US and its allies to return with unreleased precision weapons because targets couldn’t be reliably identified. Even with recent more permissive rules of engagement, weapons release is authorised only against IS or its support elements.

That’s not to say that western air strikes haven’t also hit civilian targets in both Iraq/Syria and Afghanistan, killing non-combatants in the process. And in at least one incident, when a Doctors without Borders hospital in Kunduz was attacked by a USAF gunship, the litany of errors involved in the coordination of the attack doesn’t inspire confidence in the supporting decision making processes.

That’s not to draw a moral equivalence between the Russian and coalition activities. Hitting the wrong target with precision weaponry, however tragic the outcome, is clearly less reckless and less dismissive of the established norms of warfare than delivering unguided weaponry into civilian areas. But the level of restraint shown by western forces in recent conflicts hasn’t always been the case. And it’s salutary to ponder the approach taken in the strategic bombing offensive during WW2, if only to remind ourselves how even a principled society can shift from the higher moral ground.

I was taken down this line of thought by a remark made to me by an aviation writer friend recently, that the only bomber in production in Britain by 1944 should have been the De Havilland Mosquito. We’d been talking about the cost effectiveness of weapons delivery at the time, and he pointed out that the twin-engined Mosquito could deliver a significant tonnage of bombs more accurately and with fewer losses per ton of bombs delivered than the larger (and thus more resource intensive) four-engined Lancasters and Halifaxes that formed the bulk of the RAF’s Bomber Command. As well, the Mosquito had a crew of two, versus seven in the ‘heavies’.

He was right, as the RAF’s own data (in a 1944 paper Note on the employment of the Mosquito aircraft in the strategic bomber offensive, reprinted in this book) shows:

‘Weight for weight, the small losses at present being incurred by Mosquito bombers give them an outstanding advantage over the heavy bomber. Mosquitoes dropped 203 tons of bombs per aircraft missing… the figure for the heavy bomber was 70 tons. [In terms of] aircrew missing per tons dropped [the advantage is ten to one]’.

The Mosquito also had superior availability due to lower maintenance requirements and could fly twice as many sorties per month per aircraft. They were also capable of higher precision than the heavy bombers—which is why Mosquitoes were often used as ‘pathfinders’, laying flares to guide the other aircraft to the target.

So why wasn’t my friend right—why was the significantly less efficient heavy bomber force kept flying right to the end of the war in Europe? One answer might be that it would disrupt production to swap types being produced in the aircraft factories, but the much lower materiel input requirements for Mosquito production would tend to offset that. The RAF’s answer can be found in the same document:

‘The Mosquito is not at present capable of carrying a useful load of incendiary bombs. Up to 70% of the damage in area attacks is caused by fire and the attack of cities by [high explosives] alone would normally be unprofitable.’

In other words, the Mosquito was less useful when the aim was to raze a city to the ground, killing and displacing its civilian population, rather than directly attacking military targets and industrial plants producing weapons. Britain started WW2 believing that bombing civilians was wrong. But in the first years of the war British bombers struggled to find German cities, let alone conduct strikes against industrial areas within them. So the strategic bombing campaign evolved into a campaign to level German cities, destroying industrial capacity in the process and, by killing a great many people, to break the will of the German people to resist. While there was a big effect on industrial output, civilians paid a high price. The aptly named 1943 Operation Gomorrah created a firestorm that killed 40,000 people in Hamburg, and as late as February 1945 another firestorm killed 30,000 people in Dresden.

Physicist Freeman Dyson, who worked for Bomber Command in operations analysis, describes how far the British moral compass had swung (video interview here):

‘The Germans had good air raid shelters and warning systems and did what they were told. As a result, only a few thousand people were killed in a typical major attack. But when there was a firestorm, people were asphyxiated or roasted inside their shelters, and the number killed was more than 10 times greater. Every time Bomber Command attacked a city, we were trying to raise a firestorm…’

So in opting against a Mosquito-based force, Bomber Command effectively opted for the widespread destruction of civilian areas over a more focused approach of attacking war-supporting industrial targets, even when the technical means to do so had emerged.

That all happened in a time of total war against an iniquitous enemy, and while we might think we’re better than that now (and I think we’re right to criticise the Russian approach in Syria), we don’t know what might happen in a ‘backs to the wall’ war. The lessons of history tell us that we need to be on guard, because it’s possible to slip into a regime where the proscriptions against abhorrent behaviour give way.

Russia and China: colluding on a South China Sea policy?

 

Image courtesy of Flickr user aidorian.

At the G20 Hangzhou summit earlier this month, China made clear that Russian president Vladimir Putin was a top guest. Both China and Russia claim that their bilateral relations are the ‘best ever’ and demonstrate an ‘unprecedentedly high level of trust’. Putin described the relationships as a ‘comprehensive partnership and strategic collaboration’.

The China–Russia relationship is based on a mutual wish to push back against the United States, for its expansion of NATO in Europe and its rebalance in the Asia–Pacific. Sanctions imposed on Russia by the US and Europe have hurt the Russian economy, and Russia needs markets for its energy exports, especially gas. China has signed a major deal to import Russian gas and it is a large market for Russian manufactured weapons and technology.

However, Russian and Chinese interests always aren’t congruent. Russia is suspicious of Xi Jinping’s ‘One Belt, One Road’, which aims to expand into Central Asia. Moscow also faces the difficult challenge of improving relations with China while at the same time not undermining its traditional ties with India and Vietnam, which both feel pressure from Beijing.

That tension is manifested in Russian positions on the South China Sea. The first is that it takes no side in disputes and supports freedom of navigation, including overflight and the peaceful settlement of disputes directly between the parties concerned on the basis of international law. But Russia concurrently opposes the involvement by third parties outside the region because their involvement, according to Putin, ‘will only hurt the resolution of these issues… [and] is detrimental and counterproductive’.

Putin supported China’s position on the recent Arbitral Tribunal ruling on the grounds that it was conducted without China being present or China’s views being considered. Putin argued that it was a legal rather than a political matter. In fact, he is ill- informed about (or is choosing to ignore) the procedures established under Annex VII of UNCLOS, Article 9 of which makes clear that the ‘absence of a party or failure of a party to defend its case shall not constitute a bar to the proceedings’.

The conclusion to be drawn is that Putin’s definitely trying to curry favour with China, even at a cost to its long-standing friends in the region. Russia and Vietnam are in agreement that territorial disputes in the South China Sea should be resolved peacefully by the parties concerned. But Russia hasn’t respected Vietnam’s position that when the interests of third parties in the region are involved, those third parties must be included in discussions. Vietnam takes note of the interests of third parties outside the region, especially relating to freedom of navigation and overflight.

China’s excessive claims in the South China Sea and its artificial islands are aimed a dominating the South China and ultimately restricting the movement of US (and other) naval ships. In other words, China’s actions in both those respects threaten freedom of navigation and overflight by regional and external powers. So Russia is being duplicitous, because in practice the interests of third parties outside the region are the freedom of navigation and overflight threatened by China. Putin supports freedom of navigation for the Russian Navy but is unconcerned if China makes it difficult for the US Navy.

Despite their new found closeness, both Russia and China have been careful not to use the word alliance to describe their political and military relations. Formal alliances are usually directed at a third party and involve a commitment by the signatories to meet and take joint action in certain circumstances, such as an armed attack on one of the parties. Clearly a China-Russia alliance would be aimed at the US and its allies and would in effect bring about a new Cold War.

And it’d likely be counterproductive. A Russia–China alliance would result in a reinvigoration of the US alliance system in both Europe and in the Asia–Pacific. Individual members of ASEAN would come under great pressure to take sides to bolster their security. Finally, such a hypothetical alliance would likely provoke a global arms race, heighten tensions and raise the risk of conflict in the East and South China seas, where three major powers have material interests.

China and Russia will continue to work together when it suits them, coordinating actions and cooperating on security and strategic matters that affect them, most notably against US ballistic missile defence in Europe and THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Air Defence) in South Korea. But they’ll cooperate with the United States as well if it suits them. Russia and the US are working together to resolve the conflict in Syria (however difficult that may turn out to be), while China and the US cooperate on a wide variety of international issues, from climate change to non-proliferation by North Korea. What we’re seeing can therefore be more accurately described as a transient confluence of limited interests, rather than a deep strategic commitment between Russia and China.

A China–Russia maritime confluence in littoral Asia

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There’s a growing intimacy between two of Asia’s big naval powers and it’s causing disquiet among regional watchers and maritime policymakers. Russia and China are growing closer in the nautical realm, much to the chagrin of Indian, American and Southeast Asian analysts who feel that their growing bilateral synergy could impact the balance of power in Asia.

The trigger for the latest bout of anxiety is ‘Joint Sea-2016’— a joint Sino-Russian naval exercise featuring surface ships, submarines, fixed-wing aircraft, ship-borne helicopters and amphibious vessels navies. China has announced that its biggest naval drill with Russia will include the People’s Liberation Army Navy’s (PLA-N’s) Nanhai fleet, and will involve, among other exercises, anti-submarine and amphibious missions.

This is the first time Russian and Chinese naval contingents are meeting for combat drills in the South China Sea (though reportedly not in a contested part of the region), however there’s been visible evidence of a growing synergy in other parts of maritime Eurasia. In August last year, the two navies carried out ‘Joint Sea 2015 II’, a high-end naval exercise in the Sea of Japan, featuring live-firing drills, anti-submarine operations and close-support combat drills. During an earlier exercise in the Mediterranean Sea and Black Sea in May the same year, senior commanders made statements challenging America’s strategic dominance of Eurasia. Russian and Chinese leaders believe that the US is the central destabilising factor in the region’s geopolitics, and is engaged in a systemic containment of Moscow and Beijing. By staging close-combat naval exercises, they hope to warn Washington that its primacy in maritime Asia is at an end.

The prospect of joint amphibious exercises near the South China Sea has alarmed regional watchers. Many fear a repeat of the August 2015 drills, when the Russian and Chinese navies simulated a mock ground assault in which 400 PLA marines landed on an island in Russia’s Far East. Indeed, since May 2015—when China’s Military Strategy white paper announced an expeditionary template of operations—amphibious missions and airborne landings have been a standard feature of China–Russia joint naval exercises.This time, Beijing’s gone a step further and announced an ‘island-seizing’ exercise involving a sizeable contingent of the PLA Marine Corps.

To be sure, China and Russia have their share of political differences. Russia’s had concerns about Chinese encroachments in the Russian Far-East and the loss of Central Asia to China’s growing influence. Following Moscow’s annexation of Crimea, however, President Vladimir Putin’s had to accommodate growing Chinese ambitions in Russia’s zone of influence. To diversify Russia’s energy export markets away from Europe, Putin has acquiesced to an asymmetric relationship with China, by allowing Beijing to extract the greater share of benefits through a ‘special’ ally status.

Moscow is reassured by China’s continuing dependence on Russia for defence technology. Since December 1992, when the two countries signed an agreement on military technology cooperation, China has purchased more defence items from the Russian Federation than from any other country. These include Kilo-class submarines, Su-27 aircraft, Sovremenny-class destroyers, and many varieties of munitions and missiles. Despite a relative reduction in military sales in the past few years, Russia has continued the supply of vital maritime stores and equipment. The growing maritime cooperation is a manifestation of an essentially robust defence relationship.

Even so, the trajectory of recent maritime interactions suggests that the partnership is beginning to outgrow the original template of military cooperation. Not only has the size of participating contingents grown, the quality of exercises has substantially improved. The military relationship has benefited from a huge political investment from Putin, who’s taken a personal interest in nurturing the partnership. Beijing, in search of an ally to counter-balance the US Navy, has been happy to play along.

The nautical synergy also reveals an enduring correlation between geopolitics and maritime strategy. The Sino–Russian maritime relationship seems driven by political motivations and a desire to jointly counter US military pressure. Putin’s statement during the recent G20 summit supporting China’s rejection of the ruling by the Hague tribunal on the South China Sea is clear evidence that the maritime strategy is being driven by regional politics. Notably, many in Moscow are beginning to view Chinese island infrastructure in the South China Sea as protection for Russia against a US attack. It hasn’t surprised anyone that the Russian Navy has co-opted China as a ‘core partner’ in its new maritime doctrine, signaling a desire for greater maritime influence in the Asia–Pacific.

For New Delhi, the picture of Russia and China holding hands at sea isn’t a pretty one. China’s inclusion of Gwadar port in a US$46 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), as well as the announcement of the transfer of eight Yuan-class submarines to Pakistan, has already caused heartburn in India. But Indian policymakers also worry about Russia’s warming defence relationship with Pakistan. After waiving its arms embargo on Pakistan in June 2014, Moscow signed a bilateral defence cooperation agreement with Islamabad, even agreeing to sell Mi-35 helicopters to the Pakistan Army. What really has Indian policymakers worried, however, is Russia’s decision to import Klimov RD-93 engines for the JF-17 aircraft it jointly manufactures with China. In addition, a recent report has suggested Russia and Pakistan are slated to hold their first ever joint military drill in the coming months.

With a friendly Pakistan at hand, if the Sino-Russian nautical concord pushes into the Indian Ocean Region—as is being widely anticipated in the wake of India’s logistics agreement with the US—New Delhi knows it may be hard to reverse the shift in the regional balance of maritime power.

China coming between old friends

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‘President Putin… hailed the role of Vietnam in Southeast Asia and confirmed that Vietnam is one of the external priorities of Russia in the Asian-Pacific region… Russia also supports ASEAN and China to jointly build a Code of Conduct in the East Sea (COC)’. So said Vietnam’s Thanh Nien News when the country’s new Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc made his first overseas visit as PM to Sochi in Russia.

The story highlighted the traditional friendship of the two nations, however the joint Russia–China patrols in the South China Sea beginning Monday and President Putin’s comments at the G20 might dampen such sentiments. He sided with China over the Hague tribunal ruling, taking the Chinese view that arbitration must involve both sides. Vietnam hasn’t reacted yet, but it can’t be happy that its first strategic partner has moved away from its previous stance of professed neutrality.

When I wrote about how Russia–China South China Sea patrols might affect Russia–Vietnam relations for The Huffington Post in August, I noted that this potentially destabilising action was being undertaken by Vietnam’s two most important partners, both of which have a comprehensive strategic partnership with Vietnam. The South China Sea’s been a flashpoint in the Vietnam–China relationship for some time, but until now relations with Russia haven’t suffered any setbacks.

Keeping up with Vietnam’s foreign relations takes some doing; the nation values multilateralism and its representatives are often off somewhere or hosting someone. Vietnam pursues relations with all permanent members of the Security Council and has diverse strategic partnerships with many nations, including the Philippines, Italy and Japan. It also works its most important relationships. Vietnam’s defence minister General Ngo Xuan Lich went to China at the end of August, ostensibly to deepen defence ties and to talk about peace and stability in the region (likely of the contested maritime variety).

Vietnam’s just added India to the top tier ‘comprehensive strategic partnership’ list, after an early September visit by Narendra Modi. The Modi visit yielded 12 bilateral agreements and a US$500 million line of defence credit. Vietnam and India’s friendship goes back a way (there’s an Indira Gandhi park in Hanoi, with a very nice lake) and there’s been areas of cooperation for a while, however the recent upgrade seems to signify India’s unease with a growing China.

This expansion of high-level ties comes at a time when they might be useful. The Russia relationship is well regarded, but these days does seem to have a strong rhetorical component to it.

There’s a long history of cooperation in technology and education with Russia, and once there were strong fellow feelings too; people even named their pets for Russia’s Olympic bear, Misha. Of more strategic importance was the Soviets’ long-time use of the deep water port of Cam Ranh Bay. The current areas of cooperation are diverse, including defence (Vietnam’s new subs are Russian kilo-class), oil and gas, tourism, education and nuclear power—but they aren’t especially deep, save defence sales, which will probably remain important despite the lifting of the US embargo. Trade amounts to just US$4 billion annually.

Vietnam is Russia’s only real friend in ASEAN and one of only two in Asia, the other being long-time rival China, although there’s cooperation and a history of friendship with Laos. Russia’s been trying to expand its Asian influence by developing better ties with Cambodia.

Anton Tsvetov, a Moscow-based Southeast Asia scholar worth reading, told me that, ‘Strategically, there is no closer partner for Russia than Vietnam in Southeast Asia, as manifested by the special port call arrangements for Cam Ranh Bay and Vietnam’s FTA with the Eurasian Economic Union’. But he qualified that by suggesting that in reality there’s been no serious interdependence since the 1980s.  Trade wise there’s a US$1 billion dairy investment project in Russia from Vietnam’s TH True Milk, which has helped Russia absorb shocks from western sanctions.  In other words, there’s a strong enough friendship between Vietnam and Russia, but Hanoi might well be wondering what Russia’s doing with China.

A recent piece from Russia Beyond the Headlines (a Russian version of China Watch and also printed by Fairfax) goes some way to explaining the situation. It notes that Russia’s official position is neutral but it has much to gain should China’s influence in the region grow enough to challenge the US. One military expert and regular RBTH contributor Viktor Litovkin said, ‘The construction of Chinese military infrastructure will provide Russia with protection in the area against USN ships and the Aegis system and SM-3 and Tomahawk missiles’.

The Russia–China non-alliance has annoyed the US already and it’s worth remembering that the first patrols were in the East Sea and designed as a rebuke against Japan. Vietnam’s surely been watching since then and is aware that the US pivot to Asia was always going to create other bedfellows—like Russia and China—even as Chinese aggression has pushed Vietnam closer to the US. It seems Vietnam’s picked a good time to expand its highest-level partnerships with other old friends.

From the bookshelf: The Maisky Diaries

The Maisky Diaries: Red Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s 1932-1943, edited by Gabriel Gorodetsky.

Fitzroy MacLean’s superb autobiography, Eastern Approaches, is most famously recalled for his exploits in the Balkans, during the Second World War, as a British military attaché working with Josip Broz Tito’s Partisans.

But MacLean had earlier served during the previous decade as a diplomat in the British Embassy in Moscow, a time during which he was an observer in The Trial of the Twenty One, the Stalinist show trial of 1938. Stalin’s principal target (and victim) was the gifted and influential Marxist theoretician, Nikolai Bukharin.

The trial was open to the diplomatic corps and to foreign media, and was filmed under lights. At one point, a technician moving a heavy lamp stumbled, revealing J. V. Stalin’s unmistakeable profile in the shadows of the court room. Stalin was personally observing Bukharin’s performance in evidence from an alcove.

This offers an illuminating backdrop to Ivan Maisky’s years in London as the Soviet Ambassador, over the landmark years 1932–43 in the Europe of the Dictators. He was constantly under close scrutiny, from Stalin and Foreign Minister V.M. Molotov in Moscow, through to NKVD informants in the Embassy in London. At any time, a telegram could recall the Ambassador, as were so many of the Soviet diplomatic corps, during the purges from 1936–38. Most of those recalled ended their careers in the cellars of the Lubyanka Prison.

Maisky survived and left diaries of his time in the UK, arguing the Soviet Cause in peace and war, with figures as different as Neville Chamberlain and Winston Churchill; Anthony Eden and Lord Halifax; Lloyd George and Lord Beaverbrook; Nancy Astor, H.G. Wells and Sidney and Beatrice Webb. In so doing, he was highly successful and this engrossing account of his London mission explains why he survived. He became indispensable to Stalin, for his range of British contacts; for his effective advocacy and for his judgement, which was finely balanced, yet acute.

At any time Stalin could have recalled Maisky and had him liquidated, without trial. For Maisky’s revolutionary past wasn’t so much chequered, as seriously stained. He had been a Menshevik, who had had to make an obsequious peace with the Bolshevik victors of the Russian Revolution of 1917.

Ivan Mikhailovich Maisky (‘Man of May’–his nom de plume) was born on 7 January 1884 into a comfortable bourgeois family of Polish/Jewish ancestry. His father became a medical officer in Omsk, Siberia, which was where the young and radical Maisky joined the Menshevik wing of the Russian Social Democrats. Exiled for his part in the failed 1905 Revolution, Maisky eventually landed in London, where he informed the Webbs that he had been inspired by their landmark History of Trade Unionism. This Fabian tendency never left Maisky’s politics. He would argue a view but he was also a good listener, receptive to ideas, born of an intellectual curiosity.

It was the growing friendship in this period with Georgy Chicherin and M.M. Litvinov that later shaped Maisky’s diplomatic life. Chicherin and Litvinov were both Soviet Commissars for Foreign Affairs. Both were to sponsor and shield Maisky over the years.

Gabriel Gorodetsky has achieved a first class historian’s result in bringing these insightful and engaging diaries to light. Maisky’s official memoirs are best described as dry. But these diaries are lively and brisk. The reader is carried along by Maisky’s powers of observation and analysis, which is persuasive testimony to what the editor has discarded.

Gorodetsky is a noted academic at Oxford and Tel Aviv Universities, who has written extensively on Soviet and Russian foreign policy, including the illuminating Grand Delusion: Stalin and the German Invasion of Russia.

Maisky’s diaries surfaced almost by accident, being given to Gorodetsky in 1991 while he was working on a book on Soviet–Israeli relations. The responsible archivist at the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs did a great service to our understanding of Anglo–Soviet relations through tense and difficult times, from the Spanish Civil War and the Ribbentrop–Molotov Pact to Barbarossa and the Grand Alliance.

Maisky was a most unusual Soviet Ambassador. Unlike his unimpressive predecessor, Grigory Sokolnikov, who appears to have spent much of his Ambassadorial time in the Reading Room of the British Museum, Maisky was outgoing and determined to build as wide a British network of supporters and interlocutors, including Conservatives, as was possible.

To this end his affability, and the charming personality of his wife, Agniya, to whom Maisky was utterly devoted, proved decisive assets. Litvinov had convinced Stalin of the need for a plenipotentiary with such skills; the initiative worked.

The weakness in Maisky’s Diaries is that they were written, of course, to be read, in all probability by investigators from ‘The Organs’ (NKVD). So along with the anecdotes and amusing vignettes, there are the occasional lapses into the obligatory praise of Comrade Stalin as a great wartime leader, and the USSR as close to paradise.

Nonetheless, the joke Maisky was told by Jan Masaryk, a Czech diplomat, about Berlin in 1950 still produces a smile as do the Ambassador’s raised eyebrows at the idiosyncrasies of the British ruling class. And the tale of George Bernard Shaw’s May Day meeting with Friedrich Engels is marvellous.

This is a valuable book, saying much about the period 1932–43 which is both original and unique in its perspective. The surprise of the Nazi–Soviet pact; the tension of the Blitz on London; the pressure for a Second Front and the horrific crime at Katyn Wood all tested Maisky’s diplomatic skills to the limits of ingenuity and endurance.

Maisky knew he was at a great turning point in history. But the Ambassador understood his own role was actually to be part of shaping that history.

Why Russia is a threat to the international order

Image courtesy of Flickr user Republic of Korea

Almost a quarter of a century after the demise of the USSR, Russia is back on the world stage and in a familiar threatening manner. Some are describing the resurgence of Russia as a return to a new Cold War; others are predicting a coming war with Russia. The Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Joseph Dunford, has described Russia as presenting ‘the greatest threat to our national security’; US Defense Secretary Ashton Carter has accused Russia of endangering world order and making threatening statements about its potential use of nuclear weapons; Zbigniew Brzezinski proclaims that we’re already in a Cold War, but that an accommodation should be negotiated to assure Russia that Ukraine won’t become a member of NATO.

What are we to make off all these serious and disturbing allegations? There is no doubt that Putin’s Russia is now seeking to reassert itself as a major power. The outward symbols of this occurred as long ago as 2008, when Russia used military force against Georgia, although not very impressively. While Russian forces succeeded in their strategic aim of humiliating Georgia and reinforcing Russian control of Georgia’s separatist regions, there were many tactical and operational problems.

According to Gustav Gressel, the poor performance of the Russian armed forces in Georgia demonstrated the need for real defence reform. It isn’t generally understood in the West just how far-reaching Russian defence reforms have been, even though we have witnessed the results since March 2014 in Crimea, Ukraine and Syria. It’s worth noting here Gressel’s conclusion that the Russian armed forces now have the ability to react quickly and strike without warning. Russia is now a military power that could overwhelm any of its neighbours if they were isolated from Western support.

However, it isn’t merely a matter of Russia’s improved military capabilities and training, as significant as they arguably are. The most important political factor is the role of President Vladimir Putin, who’s determined to reassert Russia’s major-power status and recover its standing in the Eurasian geopolitical space. As former British Ambassador to Russia Roderic Lyne explains, President Putin’s ‘new model Russia’ is that of an independent great power resuming its geopolitical position on its own terms. Lyne states that this reflects a deep sense of insecurity and a fear that Russia’s interests would be threatened if it were to lose control of its neighbourhood.

Putin speaks of Russia’s civilising mission on the Eurasian continent but he also paints a picture of Russia as a victim of the West: ‘They are constantly trying to sweep us into a corner’ and, when the USSR broke up, Russia ‘was not simply robbed, it was plundered’.

It’s not only Putin who regrets the demise of the USSR: many educated Russians today mourn the loss of Russia’s international status. The Soviet Union was a country to be respected and feared, if not liked. President Putin plays on this by appealing to their sense of nationalism and by beating up ultranationalist sentiment over issues such as the recovery of Crimea and the historical memories of ‘the gathering of the Russian lands’.

Great power revisionism has now returned, and two great authoritarian powers, China and Russia, are fundamentally challenging the established order. Both coercion and the use, or threatened use, of military power is back in vogue. Russia is seeking to carve out a sphere of influence in what it terms the ‘near abroad’ in Europe, and China is using coercion in the South and East China seas to assert its rising great power status. While Russia and China are very different actors, they are leagued together in their rejection of what they see as US hegemony and their view that the West has imposed on them the current international order, which must now be rewritten. We run the risk in the second decade of the 21st century of a confrontation between two new power blocs: the authoritarian continental powers of China and Russia and the Western democratic maritime states led by America.

The bottom line for the West is that the shape of the international order isn’t encouraging. The problems that bedevil present-day relations between the West and Russia aren’t simply the product of Cold War mindsets. Today’s Russian state has inherited a culture derived from both Soviet and tsarist times that bear the imprint of doctrines, disciplines and habits acquired over a considerable period of time in its relations with neighbouring states.

The re-emergence of Russia as an expansionist, revisionist actor on Europe’s eastern border has profound strategic consequences for Europe. Some Russians consider that the paths for Europe and Russia are seriously diverging and will remain so for a long time, ‘probably for decades to come’. Russia has neither the will nor the capacity to compete with the West on a global scale these days; however, even if it can’t shape the international order, it may be able to spoil it.

Given these strategic implications, it’s important for Australia to take the Russian threat more seriously and be better informed about developments in Russia. Our current security priorities focus on terrorism in the Middle East and the rise of China, as if nothing else is of national security concern. A Russia that’s willing to use military force around its periphery, especially in Europe, will further distract the US from its rebalance to the Asia–Pacific—to the serious detriment of Australia’s defence policy. For us in the West, a new era of confrontation with a heavily armed and belligerent Russia will introduce tensions into the international system that at the least will be extremely destabilising and, at worst, might well return us to the geopolitical brinkmanship and dangers of the Cold War.

Cyber wrap

Image courtesy of Flickr user Christiaan Colen

Last week, the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet confirmed that Australia’s new cyber strategy will be released this Thursday. The update will be the first since the release of the 2009 strategy. Expect to see a big focus on skills, private sector collaboration and information sharing—and an increased focus on how Australia can leverage the international components of its cyber relations and engagements. Check back on The Strategist from Thursday afternoon for in-depth coverage of the Strategy from the ICPC team.

The Strategy’s launch was announced at the Australian Cyber Security Centre’s annual conference held last week. The ACSC conference is one of the few of its kind, bringing together both technical and policy experts from government and the private sector. This year over a thousand people attended the conference to hear numerous interesting presentations from government and private sector leaders. It was particularly refreshing to see such candidness from leaders representing both sectors as to the type of online challenges they face each day, and how they go about trying to tackle them.

The UK Cabinet Office has released its final Annual Report on the UK Cyber Security Strategy 2011–2016. The Annual Report, which is presented to Parliament by the Minister for the Cabinet Office, is an opportunity for the government to outline how it is working to achieve the key objectives laid out in the original strategy. It shares practical information on program outcomes and achievements and details funding allocated to each thematic area over the five year program. Unsurprisingly, defence took the largest piece of the funding cake with AU$815.5 million dedicated to National Sovereign capability to detect and defeat high end threats. Law enforcement and cybercrime prevention efforts received $215.9 million and international engagement and capacity building $14.3 million. The Government is currently producing the UK’s next cyber strategy which is expected to be released later this year.

Last week President Obama alluded to US operations taking place online against ISIS. While this is the first time the President has acknowledged the US is carrying out cyber operations against ISIS, he was non-descript about what form those operations took. This week US Defense officials were more forthcoming, sharing with the Daily Beast that the operations have moved beyond basic disruption—such as the blocking of encrypted communication channels—to more targeted campaigns. That includes the infiltration of individual members’ computers via spear phishing and the gathering of intelligence on their networks using malware.

The US and Russia are set to carry out a high level bilateral meeting on cyber issues this week, but that won’t affect the wider freeze in dialogue between the two countries following Russia’s annexation of Crimea. The US State Department was quick to stress that the talks—which will take place in Geneva with representatives from the White House, State Department and FBI—weren’t a restart of the stalled Bilateral Presidential Commission working group. It appears that the US is keen to keep dialogue open on cyber issues—in particular the 2013 Bilateral US–Russia Cyber confidence-building measures that led to the installation of the ‘Cyber hotline’ that exists between both counties among other measures.

Bangladeshi police, working in collaboration with INTERPOL, believe they’ve identified 20 individuals involved in the theft of over US$80 million dollars from the Bangladesh Central Bank. The robbery, which was carried out by a group of hackers from the Philippines and Sri Lanka, is estimated to be one of the largest ever bank heists. The hackers’ details have been shared with counterpart police forces, and the Philippines Senate has already begun an inquiry as to how ‘the money stolen from the Bangladesh central bank wound up with two casinos and a junket operator in the country’.

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