One of the world’s foremost nuclear security and policy experts, Sig Hecker has spent much of an illustrious career working to enhance cooperation among US and Russian scientists and their governments in hopes of reducing nuclear risk. In fact, Hecker has literally edited the book on the subject, Doomed to Cooperate: How American and Russian scientists joined forces to avert some of the greatest post-Cold War nuclear dangers.

Read the rest at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

This commentary first appeared in Foreign Policy.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has been a double disaster for President Vladimir Putin, as he faces a poorly performing military combined with an inability to shield his country from economic punishment. Both of these possibilities historically have also been sources of apprehension for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). But China’s leadership turned its anxiety into action about 10 years ago, deliberately working to fix many of the problems and minimize the risks currently plaguing Russia in Ukraine.

One result is that the Chinese military is more likely to perform well even though it has not fought a war since 1979, when it lost thousands of troops in a punitive but brief invasion of Vietnam. Adding to that, China’s economy is both far larger and deliberately more diversified than Russia’s. A sanctions effort like the one presently aimed at Russia would be much harder to sustain against China. These two observations do not mean deterrence won’t hold, only that the unfolding events in Ukraine will likely do little to make Beijing more cautious.

Nearly everyone overestimated Russia’s military capabilities—including probably Putin himself. During its invasion of Ukraine, Russia’s air-ground coordination has been ineffective, and Russian forces have shown risk-adverse tendencies in the air. Russia has also struggled with logistics and keeping its military supplied. Notably, it appears that Russia acted on bad intelligence and therefore did not believe initial strikes that maxed out its firepower were necessary. Furthermore, many Russian weapons platforms are outdated (for example, its Cold War-era tanks), and modern Su-57 fighter jets and T-14 Armata tanks only exist in comparatively small numbers.

The Chinese military used to clearly exhibit the same deficiencies. But over the past decade, it has embraced significant reforms, creating a much more capable fighting force that should give even the United States pause.

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First, while Russia allowed its conventional capabilities to atrophy, Chinese military spending has exploded over the past three decades, increasing by 740 percent (in comparison to Russia’s 69 percent) from 1992 to 2017. According to data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, China spent almost four times on its military in 2020 than Russia ($244.9 billion to $66.8 billion). In 1999, less than 2 percent of its fighter jets were fourth-generation, 4 percent of its attack submarines were modern, and none of its surface ships were. Twenty years later, not only did China have much more of everything, but the majority was the most advanced, modern versions available—with China exhibiting advantages over Russia, even in combat aircraft, a traditional area of weakness for China.

Indeed, People’s Liberation Army (PLA) commentators often refer to China’s economic might as one of the reasons their military would outperform Russia’s—Russia has been “stingy” with its military modernization and production of precision-guided munitions primarily because of a lack of resources. By contrast, China has more than 2,200 conventionally armed ballistic and cruise missiles, making the PLA Rocket Force the world’s largest ground-based missile force. Estimates place the number of missiles positioned against Taiwan alone at around 1,000.

Russia’s poor performance does remind us that it takes more than just a lot of fancy systems to win a war (though having more advanced systems and more of them surely would have helped). The human element of Russia’s failures is front and center. Putin probably did not have an open and honest communication channel with the military, which was fearful of providing unfavorable information to the erratic leader. Russian troops were largely considered incompetent, but Putin thought superior technology could overcome human deficiencies.

Chinese President Xi Jinping identified similar training and competency issues in the PLA 10 years ago. But under his command, the PLA has been proactively implementing significant reforms to avoid similar pitfalls. And unlike Putin, who apparently believed technology could overcome deficiencies in personnel, Xi came to the opposite conclusion. When he came to power, he took one look at the military and recognized that with all its fancy equipment, the PLA probably could not fight and win wars and perform the missions it had been assigned. Of particular importance, according to China’s national military strategy, was to fight local wars under informationalized conditions. This meant that the network between platforms and people—the ease of connectivity—was the main feature of modern warfare. China needed the best equipment; an advanced command, control, computers, communication, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (C4ISR) network; and tons of precision-guided munitions. But perhaps most importantly, it needed troops that could leverage these systems to conduct seamless operations across services and top-down through the chain of command.

What followed was a series of slogans—the two incompatibles, two inabilities, two big gaps, the five incapables—all designed to point out the organizational and personnel issues of the military and focus leadership attention and resources on fixing the issue. A massive military reorganization followed with moves such as reorganizing effective combat units to be smaller so that they can mobilize more quickly and can remain self-sufficient for long periods of time. This means, in contrast with the Russian military, the PLA will likely have less reliance on generals at the front lines. China also established theater commands to facilitate joint operations and prioritized realism in its military exercises to help it prepare for real combat. Part of all of this was Xi’s demand that the military communicate its failures and weaknesses so that they could be addressed. Moreover, to improve command and control, China has moved toward engaging in multidomain joint operations all while standing up a new joint operations center that will ensure that, unlike with the Russian military, orders will be communicated and understood at the lowest levels. Indeed, the main reason that Xi has not yet made a play for Taiwan is likely his desire to hone this command and control structure and practice joint operations in realistic conditions for a few more years—a cautious and pragmatic approach that the situation in Ukraine only encourages further.

The PLA itself acknowledges that it still has some distance to go with training, particularly with regard to joint operations, but it looks as if the hard work is paying off. The complexity and scale of China’s national military exercises are eye-opening. It takes a great deal of planning, synchronization, and coordination to take service-level operations to the joint level. China appears to have made great strides in this area. The United States has observed, for example, China executing deep-attack air operations in its exercises that have combined intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) with multi-domain strike; lift for rapid mobility and advanced fighter manuevers. Russia has relied heavily on artillery and tanks, now and historically, while the PLA is showing a more balanced approach to combined arms operations.

For all these reasons, we should not expect the Chinese military to perform as poorly in its first real military operation since 1979. The PLA is structurally superior to the Russian military. And the Chinese know it. Granted, it’s hard to know whether some of the outlandish claims in the Chinese media are true—that the PLA Air Force would actually “be able to take out the Ukrainian air force in one hour.” But one thing is for certain—the Chinese military is learning lessons from Ukraine, whether it is to stockpile more precision-guided munitions, ensure solid command and control, or cut off internet access to prevent the leaking of information to the West, which will only serve to improve its warfighting capability in the future.

On February 24, the first day of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, large parts of American satellite company Viasat’s KA-SAT network of high speed satellite services experienced disruptions resulting in partial network outages throughout Ukraine and several European countries. Tens of thousands of terminals suffered permanent damage and many were still offline more than two weeks later. Viktor Zhora, deputy chief of Ukraine’s State Service of Special Communication and Information Protection, described the satellite outage as “a really huge loss in communications in the very beginning of war.” Among others relying on KA-SAT are Ukraine’s military, intelligence, and police units.

Read the rest at The National Interest

While Ukrainians fight or flee Russia’s bombardment of their cities, many Europeans feel a palpable, renewed nuclear fear. Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the country’s nuclear forces on high alert. Russian troops forced Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant employees to work a 600-hour shift at gun point. They also attacked the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, causing structural damage and starting a fire. Meanwhile, Romanians have spent millions for the emergency production of radiation-blocking iodine pills, Poland has signaled its willingness to host US tactical nuclear weapons, and officials from the Baltics have urged NATO to commit to intervene if Russia uses weapons of mass destruction.

Read the rest at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

Russia’s unprovoked and unjustified war on Ukraine has run nearly seven weeks. Defeated in its effort to take Kyiv, the Russian army has withdrawn from northern Ukraine and is orienting itself toward a new offensive in Donbas in the country’s east.

Moscow thus far has not engaged in serious negotiations, and revelations about the massacres of civilians by Russian forces likely have hardened attitudes in Kyiv. Still, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has made clear his readiness to seek a settlement to end the fighting. He has offered to accept neutrality, provided that a neutral Ukraine receives security guarantees. If things reach that point, Kyiv will want to seek the right security guarantees.

Read the rest at The Hill.

First published in The Hill.

While China now innovates in many of these technologies, it also continues to acquire Western intellectual property through a coordinated assault that represents what former NSA Director General Keith Alexander calls “the greatest transfer of wealth in human history.” And every technological innovation that China can possibly militarize it does, through a strategy of “civil-military fusion.” With this accumulated power, Beijing plans to force Asia’s most vibrant liberal democracy, Taiwan, to “reunify with the motherland.” It also seeks to establish unilateral Chinese control over the resources and sea lanes of the South China Sea, and then gradually to push the United States out of Asia.

Russia’s aggression must be understood in this broader context of authoritarian coordination and ambition, challenging the values and norms of the liberal international order, compromising the societal (and where possible, governmental) institutions of rival political systems, and portraying Western democracies — and therefore, really, democracy itself — as weak, decadent, ineffectual, and irresolute. In this telling, the democracies of Europe, Asia, and North America — especially the United States — are too commercially driven, too culturally fractured, too riven by internal and alliance divisions, too weak and effeminate, to put up much of a fight.

At the same time, China, Russia, and other autocracies have been denouncing the geopolitical arrogance of the world’s democracies and confidently declaring an end to the era in which democracies could “intervene in the internal affairs of other countries” by raising uncomfortable questions about human rights. 

On the eve of the Beijing Winter Olympics on February 4, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping issued a joint statement denouncing Western alliances and declaring that there were no limits to the strategic partnership between their two countries. Many analysts believe Putin told Xi then that he was about to invade Ukraine and that Xi probably said, okay, just wait till the Olympics are over and make it quick. 

Four days after Xi’s closing Olympics fireworks display, Putin launched his own fireworks by invading Ukraine. It has been anything but successful or quick. Xi cannot possibly be pleased by the bloody mess that Putin has made of this, which helps to explain why China twice abstained in crucial UN votes condemning the Russian invasion, rather than join the short list of countries that stood squarely with Russia in voting no: Belarus, Eritrea, Syria, and North Korea. Xi must think that Putin’s shockingly inept and wantonly cruel invasion is giving authoritarianism a bad name.

It is also costing China a lot of money in global trade at a time when China’s economic growth rate has slowed dramatically. And it’s undermining the narrative China was trying to push that the autocracies know what they are doing and represent the wave of the future. Moreover, this is coming at a moment when one of China’s two most important cities, Shanghai, is gripped by panic and a substantial lockdown over the Covid-19 virus, which Xi’s regime has no other means to control except lockdown, because it has refused to admit that the vaccines it developed are largely ineffective against the current strains of Covid, and instead import the vaccines that work.

All of this explains why this moment could represent a possible hinge in history as significant as the 1989-91 period that ended the Cold War. 2021 marked the fifteenth consecutive year of a deepening democratic recession. In both the older democracies of the West and the newer ones of the global South and East, the reputation of democracy has taken a beating. A narrative has been gathering that democracies are corrupt and worn out, lacking in energy, purpose, capacity, and self-confidence. And this has been fed by real-world developments, including the reckless and incompetent US invasion of Iraq, the 2008 financial crisis, steadily rising levels of economic inequality, widespread job losses, economic insecurity and status anxiety due to globalization and technological change, and the challenges of managing cultural diversity amid expanding immigration. These factors have fed or at least facilitated the rise of populist challengers to liberal democracy and the decay of democratic norms and institutions across many democracies — rich, poor, and middle-income. 

The Germans have a word for these trends in the global narrative:  “zeitgeist” — the spirit of the times, or the dominant mood and beliefs of a historical era. In the roughly 75 years since WWII, we have seen five historical periods, each with their own dominant mood. From the mid-1940s to the early 60s, the mood had a strong pro-democracy flavor that went with decolonization. It gave way in the mid-1960s to post-colonial military and executive coups, the polarization and waste of the Vietnam War, and a swing back to realism, with its readiness to embrace dictatorships that took “our side” in the Cold War. Then, third, came a swing back to democracy in southern Europe, Latin America, and East Asia, and a new wave of democracy, from the mid-1970s to around 1990. That period of expanding democracy was then supercharged by a decisively pro-democratic zeitgeist from 1990 to 2005, the so-called unipolar moment in which one liberal democracy, the U.S., predominated. That period ended in the Iraq debacle, and for the last 15 years, we have been in the tightening grip of a democratic recession and a nascent authoritarian zeitgeist. 

Could Russia’s criminal, blundering invasion of Ukraine launch a new wave of democratic progress and a liberal and anti-authoritarian zeitgeist? It could, but it will require the following things.

First, Russia must fail in its bid to conquer and extinguish Ukraine. The United States and NATO must do everything possible, and much more than we are doing now, to arm and assist Ukraine militarily, and to punish Russia financially and economically.

Second, we must wage a more effective and comprehensive battle of information and ideas to expose Russia’s mendacity and criminality and to document its war crimes, not only before the court of public opinion, but in ways that reach individual Russians directly and creatively. We need an intense campaign of technological innovation to circumvent authoritarian censorship and empower Russian, Chinese, and other sources that are trying to report the truth about what is happening and to promote critical thinking and the values of the open society. In general, we need to promote democratic narratives and values much more imaginatively and resourcefully. The message of the Russian debacle in Ukraine is an old one and should not be difficult to tell: autocracies are corrupt and prone to massive policy failures precisely because they suppress scrutiny, independent information, and policy debate. Democracies may not be the swiftest decision makers, but they are over time the most reliable and resilient performers.

Third, we must ensure that we perform more effectively as democracies, and with greater coordination among democracies, to meet the challenges of developing and harnessing new technologies, creating new jobs, and reducing social and economic inequalities.

Fourth, to win the technological race, for example in semiconductors, artificial intelligence, biomedicine, and many other fields of science, engineering, and production, we must open our doors more widely to the best talent from all over, including China. We URGENTLY need immigration reform to facilitate this. As our late colleague George Shultz said:  Admit the best talent from all over the world to our graduate programs in science and engineering, and then staple green cards to their diplomas.

Finally, we have to reform and defend our democracy in the United States so that it can function effectively to address our major domestic and international challenges, and so that American democracy can once again be seen as a model worth emulating. We cannot do this without reforming the current electoral system of "first-past-the-post" voting and low-turnout party primaries, which has become a kind of death spiral of political polarization, distrust, and defection from democratic norms.

I believe we entered a new historical era on Feb 24. What the Ukrainian people have suffered already in these seven weeks has been horrific, and it will get worse. But the courage and tenacity of their struggle should renew our commitment not only to them but also to ourselves—that freedom is worth fighting for, and that democracy, with all its faults, remains the best form of government.

Steven Pifer: President [Volodymyr] Zelenskyy, his government, but also the Rada, Ukraine’s parliament, continue to defiantly work in Kyiv, and they’re showing the determination that you’ve seen over the last two and a half weeks by the Ukrainians to resist the Russian attack. 

Read the rest at Brookings

All wars come to an end.  One side may be conquered, the attacker may give up and withdraw, or the warring parties can negotiate a settlement.  Whether Russia’s unjustified war on Ukraine gets to a genuine negotiation depends first on whether Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin adjust their demands.  Lack of success on the battlefield may give reason to do so, but the Kremlin has yet to show real readiness to engage.  Even if Moscow gets serious, the negotiation will prove difficult.

A Failing Offensive?

Russian forces invaded Ukraine on February 24.  To the surprise of many in Moscow, Ukrainian armed forces have waged a stubborn, determined and effective defense.  Russian officials claim that military operations are proceeding according to plan, but few share that view.

Russia’s armed forces have clearly underperformed.  They failed to occupy Kyiv, believed to be their top objective.  Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city sited just 20 miles from the Russian border, remains in Ukrainian hands.  The Russians continue to struggle to gain Mariupol, which they have subjected to brutal bombardment.  Moscow says it has lost 1,351 soldiers killed in action, but NATO officials estimate the true number lies between 7,000 and 15,000.

In what may be implicit acknowledgment of the difficulties the Russian military has encountered, Russian officials have said their main goal now is “the liberation” of Donbas in Ukraine’s east.  The Russian ministry of defense claimed to be withdrawing some forces near Kyiv, but U.S. officials questioned whether they intended a withdrawal or planned simply to reposition forces, perhaps to take part in operations in Donbas.

Negotiating Positions on the Table

Moscow earlier in the war advanced maximalist demands:  denazification, demilitarization, neutrality, recognition of Crimea as part of Russia, and recognition of the so-called Donetsk and Luhansk “people’s republics” as independent states.  On March 29 in Istanbul, Ukrainian negotiators put forward Kyiv’s proposals.  On March 30, Kremlin spokesperson Peskov downplayed the proposals, saying they were not “too promising.”

If—still an if question—Moscow decides to engage seriously, tough negotiations would ensue. 

One Russian demand is denazification, which seems a code phrase for a change in government in Kyiv, a government headed by a Jewish president.  In view of Ukraine’s performance on the battlefield, there is no reason to think President Zelensky or his government would agree.

A second Russian demand is demilitarization.  By one account, the Kremlin wants Ukraine to cut its armed forces to no more than 50,000.  The Ukrainian government has little incentive to reduce its military, as doing so would leave the country open to a future Russian invasion.

The third demand—neutrality for Ukraine—at first glance appears negotiable.  Zelensky has said Kyiv should accept that NATO membership is not on offer.  His negotiators have proposed neutral status, no hosting of foreign bases, and no pursuit of nuclear weapons, but they want security guarantees in return, including a commitment to use armed force in Ukraine’s defense.

Would Western countries with meaningful military power commit to a possible future armed conflict with Russia?  And would Moscow consent to a settlement with guarantees entailing the possibility of such future intervention?

Moreover, how does the Kremlin define “neutrality?”  Two weeks ago, Peskov indicated that Austria and Sweden might offer models for Ukrainian neutrality.  Both are European Union members.  Would Moscow agree to that possibility for Ukraine?  Kyiv has made clear its continued interest in EU membership.

Moscow’s fourth demand is that Kyiv recognize Crimea as part of Russia.  In 2014, Russia used military force to seize Crimea and annexed it following a sham referendum.  Many Ukrainians likely understand that they lack the leverage to secure the peninsula’s return.  However, formally acknowledging that could cause a domestic political backlash.  Kyiv has offered to agree not to use force to secure Crimea’s return and to settle the peninsula’s status within 15 years.  Russian officials say that Crimea’s status is not on the table.

The final Russian demand is that Kyiv recognize the Donetsk and Luhansk “people’s republics” as independent states.  That could also be tough for Kyiv domestically, particularly as Moscow recognized the statelets’ independence in their Ukrainian oblast borders.  Prior to February 24, Russian and Russian proxy forces controlled only 35 percent of the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts.  Kyiv has proposed that this question be resolved directly between Zelensky and Putin.

Leave the Decision to Kyiv

Kyiv’s proposals offer a serious bid to end the war.  Zelensky clearly wants a halt to the fighting, as more Ukrainians die each day, but he is not prepared to give away the store.  Any negotiation will require tough decisions on the settlement terms—decisions that should be made by Zelensky and his government, as any compromises could prove controversial in a country that has united against the Russian aggressor.

U.S. officials believe the West should not press Kyiv to accept any particular outcome but should leave those decisions to the Ukrainians.  The White House made that clear on March 29.  That is the correct approach for Washington and the West.

However, no real negotiation will be possible unless and until the Kremlin recognizes that it cannot achieve its objectives by force and that it will have to back off of its maximalist demands.  If and when matters reach that point, the hard bargaining will begin.

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