John and Sergei in Paris: No Progress on Ukraine

Secretary of State John Kerry made a last-minute diversion on his flight home from the Mid-East Saturday night for an emergency meeting with his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov for crisis talks on Ukraine Sunday in Paris.  Judging from the after-meeting conference, he should have spared the trip. 

Russia remained set on their position that the annexation of Crimea was a fait accompli and brushed aside US demands that they pull back the tens of thousands of Russian troops massed along Ukraine's eastern border, saying the troops are merely participating in a routine military exercise and adding that Russia has “no plans” to invade Ukraine.  Kerry, meanwhile, turned down Russian demands that Ukraine adopt a “federal” form of government – where each of Ukraine's regions would be a de facto state, capable of making their own laws, collecting taxes and conducting foreign relations, while also maintaining broad autonomy for their ethnic minorities.  Kerry rejected the demand on the crazy notion that choosing Ukraine's form of government is a decision that the Ukrainians themselves should make.

The demand for a federalized form of government is emerging as the key to resolving the conflict from the Russian side.  Lavrov contended that a federal state was the only way that the rights and interests of ethnic Russians living in Ukraine could truly be protected.  Lavrov is continuing the idea pushed by the Putin government since the removal of President Viktor Yanukovych in February, that being a Russian living in Ukraine in 2014 is about the same as being a Jew living in Poland in 1940, while offering scant evidence to support the claim that the provisional government in Kiev is actually threatening the safety of Ukraine's Russian population.  This notion of an impending threat was the justification Russia used for its intervention in Crimea. 

The real reason behind Russia's push for the federalization of Ukraine though is to ensure that the country would be basically ungovernable from Kiev and to diminish Ukraine's prospects of having a prosperous future.  As explained in this earlier post, Putin's biggest fear over Ukraine is that the government that will take power after the upcoming elections in May will finally get their act together and put the country on the path to developing as a Western European-style market economy with an open and representative government.  To have a country so culturally tied to Russia successfully follow the post-Soviet path of development that has been seen in Poland and the Baltic nations of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, would undercut the foundations of Putinism.  Russia, therefore, has a vested interest in making sure that Ukraine fails, the push for federalism is simply the latest attempt from Moscow to make this happen.  

Kids 'n' Guns

Imagine a contest that brings together young scholars from different parts of a country, what do you suppose an appropriate prize would be for the winners? A new iPad? A scholarship of some sort? A set of encyclopedias? Well, if the country is Somalia and the group sponsoring the event is the Islamic insurgent group al-Shabaab, the correct answer is cash, and an AK-47.

According to a report on the BBC, those were some of the prizes awarded to boys aged 10-17 in a Koran-reciting contest for children from Shabaab-controlled areas of Somalia. The winners received the equivalent of $700 and an AK-47, second place won $500, and an AK-47, while the third place team received $400 and a pair of hand grenades (yeah, still trying to figure out the logic of that one). The prizes were in keeping with al-Shabaab's philosophy that young men should study the Koran with one hand and hold a gun with the other.

Sadly, child soldiers are nothing new for Somalia. Children are employed as fighters not only by insurgent groups like al-Shabaab, but also by the US-backed Somali Transitional Federal Government, the supposed legitimate rulers of Somalia. Still, potentially giving a 10-year old an automatic weapon as a prize for scholarly achievement is pretty screwed up no matter the reality of the situation. According to the BBC, a similar contest in the Shabaab-controlled port city of Kismayo gave out a rocket-propelled grenade as a top prize.

Chinese Carrier Kerfuffle

China made headlines this week with the launch of their first aircraft carrier. The move also made waves on op-ed pages as a host of columnists pointed to the launch as yet another sign of China's growing international clout, military might and territorial ambitions. Launching an aircraft carrier is being seen as a direct challenge to American control of the seas, since the United States has dominated the aircraft carrier field since the end of World War II; the US State Department added a little fuel to this fire on Wednesday by sending a formal request to China to explain why they feel the need for “this type of equipment”.

The ship in question is “Chinese” inasmuch as China currently owns it, but the ship began life back in the old Soviet Union as the Varyag. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the Varyag spent years rusting away in a Ukrainian shipyard until being sold and towed to China (the Ukrainians sold the Varyag less its engines) where it sat rusting in another shipyard, possibly to become a floating casino in Macau, before the Chinese decided to refurbish it and put it into service as their very first aircraft carrier. Given that lineage, the Chinese aircraft carrier starts to sound a lot less intimidating. Add to that account two other stories from earlier in the year: an account from the Washington Post in January about how the Chinese air force remains dependent on Russian-built jet engines since the domestically-made versions just don't perform as well, and reports that the crews of the ships the People's Liberation Army Navy sent to participate in anti-piracy operations off of Somalia reported severe morale and supply problems due to the length and distance of their mission; the Chinese navy sounds even less formitable still.

The Varyag, or whatever the Chinese eventually decide to call her, isn't itself a game-changer in terms of naval power around the globe, but it plays nicely into an existing narrative of a China growing in economic/industrial power and a China that is becoming more aggressive with its neighbors. According to reports, the Chinese plan to field three carrier battlegroups by 2050. Of course 2050 is a long way off, forty years from now the aircraft carrier as a ship design may very well be obsolete. It also supposes that China will continue on an unbroken path as an emerging superpower, which is a pretty big assumption. It is easy to look at China, which recently became the world's second-largest economy, and presume that this is what will happen. But it ignores potentially serious problems within China that could derail their ascendancy: climbing rates of inflation, a potential economic housing bubble, a growing disparity between rich and poor and simmering ethnic tensions. In his new book, The Next Decade, George Friedman of the geopolitical risk group Stratfor makes a compelling case for the idea that China may now be near its peak of power, with internal problems dragging the country backward by the end of the decade.

It is a viewpoint to consider while reading tales about China's second-hand carrier.

From The Horn Of Africa, Vows Of Revenge

The Islamic Militant community was initially quiet following the death of Osama bin Laden on May 1, but they're starting to make up for lost time with statements vowing revenge for the killing of their spiritual head, and now the top Islamist group in the Horn of Africa has weighed in. According to regional media reports, Somalia's al-Shabaab (“the youth”) has said they will “take revenge for him [bin Laden]” in a videotaped statement by their media wing. Al-Shabaab's likely target won't be the United States or its forces but rather the “non-Muslim invaders” in Somalia – troops from the African Union's peacekeeping mission to the failed state.

One country that has been growing more wary of al-Shabaab is neighboring Kenya, which fears that the instability in Somalia could spread, both through direct terror attacks launched by al-Shabaab and through Somali refugees fleeing to Kenya to avoid fighting between al-Shabaab, the African Union peacekeepers and the militias supporting Somalia's Transitional Federal Government (TFG) - the internationally-backed attempt to bring governance back to Somalia after a two decade absence. Last month, Kenya offered their support to “Jubaland”, a new autonomous region in southern Somalia, which borders Kenya. In announcing their semi-independence, the government, so to speak, of Jubaland also pledged their determination to fight al-Shabaab. According to Kenya's Daily Nation newspaper though, Jubaland is less of an expression of self-governance than it is an attempt by Kenya to create a “buffer zone” within Somalia proper between Kenya and the forces of al-Shabaab. “The Jubaland initiative will be Kenya’s first major attempt to reassert its influence in a country that has posed a major social and security nightmare for the last two decades,” said Elias Bare Shil, a former member of Kenya's parliament, adding that Jubaland could not only help Kenya with security but also reopen a trade route to the Somali port city, Kismayu, which fell into al-Shabaab's hands several months ago.

Kenya's willingness to so overtly interfere in Somalia's internal operations is an expression of frustration over how long the international community has allowed the Somali situation to fester. While the TFG is a sincere attempt to establish a working government in Somalia, it has been underfunded by the international community and under-supported by the African Union, which has had difficulty in even finding member nations to send troops to the peacekeeping mission. As a result, the TFG militias and AU troops have had a difficult time just keeping control of just Mogadishu, Somalia's capital city, and have been wholly unable to bring law and order to the rest of the nation.

Kenya will likely face a stiff fight from al-Shabaab for control of Jubaland, while al-Shabaab will also look to make good on their public declaration of revenge in the name of bin Laden. It seems like it will be a tense next few months in the Horn of Africa.

Pirates 3 a.m.

Back in the 2008 Democratic primaries, then candidate Hillary Clinton suggested that fellow candidate Barrack Obama wouldn't be ready as president to answer the emergency phone call that comes into the White House at three in the morning; now according to former George W. Bush press flack Ari Fleischer that call has come, in the form of Somali pirates.

“4 Americans killed by pirates. This is the 3:00am call that Hillary warned about. If O [Pres. Obama] doesn't want more killed, he must strike back,” Fleischer tweeted according to ABC News. Fleischer was of course referring to the four Americans aboard a hijacked yacht in the Indian Ocean on Tuesday at the hands of Somali pirates that had captured the ship over the weekend – though frankly a few things about that story don't make a lot of sense. Supposedly the pirates were negotiating with the FBI when gunshots were heard. Navy SEALS were dispatched from a nearby US warship only to find the hostages dead; two pirates were then killed in a shootout, two others wounded and 13 taken into custody. The problems I have with this story though are why would the pirates decide to shoot their hostages in the middle of negotiations? And 21 people seems like a lot for a 58-foot yacht... Perhaps a more plausible explanation is that this was a Navy-led hostage rescue attempt gone wrong.

But getting back to Fleischer, he went on to tweet: “If I was a Somali pirate & if O doesn't retaliate, I'd keep taking hostages. If crime/terror pays, there will be more crime/terror.” Fleischer is apparently unaware that the current wave of piracy off the coast of Somalia has been going on in earnest since 2008 and that literally dozens of ships have been captured so far and tens of millions paid in ransom. Equally as tone-deaf was Donald Trump at the recent CPAC convention when he said that all we needed to solve the piracy problem was a few ships and a couple of good admirals; again apparently unaware that at any given time there is a flotilla of roughly two dozen warships from navies around the globe, the US Navy included, engaged in anti-piracy operations off the coast of Somalia. The problem is that given the fact Somali pirates now range across several million square miles of ocean, to effectively combat the problem more than 100 warships would be needed. (Frankly it's also a little hard to believe that with protests roiling North Africa and the Persian Gulf, Fleischer keyed in on Somali pirates as Obama's “3 a.m. moment”.)

Fleischer's comments are likely a new conservative line of attack on Obama's foreign policy, slamming him over a fairly intractable problem that the global community has been happy to ignore for the past two decades; namely the lawless state that is Somalia. An increased naval presence in the Indian Ocean could help to battle the pirates, but the only real solution to ending piracy in Somalia lies onshore. A stopgap measure would be to put troops on land to capture and secure pirate port cities like Haradhere and Eyl; the only way to permanently solve the problem would be to restore security a functioning government to Somalia as a nation, which has essentially been lawless since the overthrow of Mohamed Siad Barre in 1991. But the international community is reluctant to even offer financial support to the African Union peacekeeping mission that is maintaining a tenuous foothold in the capital, Mogadishu for Somalia's Transitional Federal Government, let alone doing anything bold like supplying equipment or troops to the mission. So until the international community gets serious about restoring Somalia to the ranks of functioning nation-states around the world, the piracy problem will continue, no matter how many tweets Ari Fleischer writes.

Finally, to wrap up on a more ominous note, this week Somali pirates operating out of the port of Haradhere agreed essentially to pay a “tax” to Somalia's main Islamic militant group, al-Shabaab. While there has long been a fear that Somali piracy was being used to fund the Islamic militancy in the country, the Islamists had only a slight involvement in piracy, while the Somali pirates were happy to spend their ransom money on women, alcohol and drugs – all things forbidden under the strict version of Islam pushed by groups like al-Shabaab. Late in December, militants moved into Haradhere, one of the main Somali pirate ports. Now under terms of the agreement, Somali pirates will kickback 20% of any future ransoms to al-Shabaab – a revenue stream of potentially millions of dollars, in addition to a one-time payment said to be in the millions as well.

Russia, Japan and the Kurils Faceoff

The Falklands Island War between Great Britain and Argentina in 1981 was once described as making as much sense as “two bald men fighting over a comb.” That same description could be applied to the recent spat between Russia and Japan over the Kuril Islands. The Kurils are a chain of rocky, barren, sparsely-populated islands that stretch from Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula almost to Japan's northernmost main island, Hokkaido. In the dying days of World War II, Soviet troops seized the four southernmost islands in the Kuril chain and have held them ever since; Japan, meanwhile has long demanded that Russia return the islands to Japanese ownership. This dispute has prevented the two countries from formally signing a treaty to officially end World War II, even though the two nations have long had full diplomatic relations.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev caused a stir late last year when he became the first Russian leader to set foot on the Kurils. Now he's making waves again by declaring that Russia will deploy “modern” weapons to defend the Kurils which he then went on to claim were “an inseparable part” of Russia. His comments came just after February 7, which is Northern Territories Day in Japan, a day when the Japanese annually assert their claims of ownership over the four islands seized at the end of World War II.

A bigger question is why the two nations are engaging in such a high-profile spat over these islands in the first place. Of course ownership of them also gives one country of the other the right to use the rich fishing grounds around the islands and to explore the seabed for potential deposits of natural gas. But the dispute also threatens to derail Russo-Japanese relations; the two countries recently signed a joint deal to build a Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) plant on Russia's Sakhalin Island to supply Japan with natural gas, Russia also expects Japan to be a market for Siberian crude oil once their East Siberia Pacific Ocean (ESPO) pipeline becomes fully operational in 2013.

Past the mineral wealth attached to the Kurils, the reason for the dispute over the islands seems to be more tied up with notions of national pride more than anything else. Writing in the Moscow Times, author Richard Lourie argues that in addition to controlling the mineral wealth the islands may or may not contain, Russia wants to keep control of the entire Kuril chain since that bit of territory completes the encirclement of a remote branch of the Northern Pacific known as the Sea of Okhotsk – you may have heard of this body of water (probably the only reason you've heard of this body of water) was because of last month's operation by the Russian Navy to rescue four icebound fishing trawlers, which gives you a pretty good idea of what life is like on the Sea of Okhotsk. Without being encircled by Russian territory, it could be argued that the Sea of Okhotsk was an international body of water, something Moscow apparently does not want. For Japan, the Kurils are the second island dispute they've been involved in during the just past year alone. The other was a faceoff with China over a collection of rocks in the South China Sea that the Japanese call the Senkakus and the Chinese call the Diaoyutai. That dispute led to a collision at-sea between Japanese and Chinese boats and a strong-arm Chinese embargo of rare earth elements to Japan (rare earths are vital in the production of a host of high-tech goods, which are the cornerstone of the Japanese economy).

With Russia's President Dmitry Medvedev looking to burnish his tough guy credentials in the light of his ruling tandem buddy, the International Man of Action, Vladimir Putin, and with the Japanese not wanting to lose face, again, over an island dispute, both sides seem set to dig in their heels over the Kurils, even if it makes as much sense as bald men fighting for a comb.

Airport Bombing Rocks Russia

By now you have probably heard about the suicide bombing at Moscow's Domodedovo Airport that has killed at least 35 and wounded 180 others, many of them seriously. The attack was the worst act of terror in Russia since a suicide bombing in the Moscow Metro killed 40 last March. While no one has yet claimed responsibility for the blast, it's probably not a stretch to assume that terrorists from Russia's restive North Caucasus region are responsible.

I think that the attacks are especially interesting in the light of a news report circulating in the Russian media last week that militant Chechen leader Doku Umarov had been killed in an operation by Russian special forces soldiers. Officially, the Russian government isn't offering any proof of Umarov's death and have been somewhat downplaying the reports, noting that Umarov's demise has been falsely reported before. But at the same time, they are saying that, for all they know, Umarov could be dead. The timing of the Domodedovo bombing then becomes very interesting, could it be a statement by the terrorists that they are still a lethal force, despite the loss of their most public leader?

It will also be interesting to see what the political fallout from the attack will be for Russia's ruling tandem of Dmitry Medvedev and Vladimir Putin. Medvedev has already made the usual statements leaders make at times like this about bringing perpetrators to justice, etc., though for nearly a decade now Russia has failed to find a solution to their North Caucasus problem. Even the subcontracting of the security situation to Chechnya's President/Warlord Ramzan Kadyrov seems now to have been a failure since the problem of Chechen terror has simply migrated to neighboring republics like Ingushetia and Dagestan, which see terror attacks (albeit smaller-scale ones than Domodedovo) on a near-daily basis. Last year Medvedev correctly noted that a big factor behind the growth of militancy in the North Caucasus was the grinding poverty and lack of development in the region, but the Domodedovo attack coming on the heels of last month's murder of Russian soccer fan Yegor Sviridov by a group of men from the North Caucasus – an act which sparked several riots in Moscow – isn't likely to leave many Russian wanting to offer aid and support to their North Caucasus countrymen. What could further hurt Medvedev/Putin are reports that Russia's state security force, the FSB, were tracking what we'd call in the United States several “persons of interest” in the days before the attack, yet security levels at the airport were not raised. Among the comments posted online that I read yesterday was one from a Moscow resident saying that the FSB was more concerned about breaking up political opposition rallies than they were about actually protecting the citizens of Russia.

One final note – kudos to the BBC for their coverage of the airport attack yesterday, which included a constantly-updated ticker of breaking news.

Update - The Guardian newspaper is now reporting that a Chechen "Black Widow" female suicide bomber is suspected to have carried out the Domodedovo attack. Dmitry Medvedev also slammed officals for the lax state of security at the airport.

A Somali Union

There's news from Somalia that two of the rival factions struggling for control of the county have decided to set aside their differences and unite. Unfortunately it's two of the really bad factions that have decided to unite – the rival Islamist militias of al-Shabaab and Hizbul Islam. Previously, the two groups had been battling for control of the capital, Mogadishu, as well as for a few port cities along the long, and lawless, Somali coast. But the two groups decided to set aside their differences and unite to fight what they see as their common enemy – Somalia's Transitional Federal Government (the TFG) and the 20,000 troops from the African Union that are helping the TFG to keep their tenuous toehold in Mogadishu. While the AU troops aren't a particularly strong fighting force, they have been enough to keep al-Shabaab and Hizbul Islam from overrunning the capital – especially since al-Shabaab and Hizbul Islam have spent more time fighting each other than they have the AU forces.

One factor behind the linkage of the two insurgent groups could be the fact that lately, Hizbul has been getting the worst of the battle with al-Shabaab and there are signs that Hizbul itself could split in two. That's the result of a failed offensive Hizbul launched recently against al-Shabaab troops in Mogadishu. Members of Hizbul from southern Somalia were angered that Hizbul's commanders – who come from clans based in the northern part of Somalia – decided to let Hizbul's southern Somalis make up the majority of the attacking force, and to thus take the bulk of the casualties. But for the moment, the two groups seem to be satisfied to let bygones be bygones; they handled their new union the way that two rival corporations would – with a press conference to announce the merger and explanations of who would serve in what leadership roles and that the new group would continue to do business under the al-Shabaab name – after all, why mess with a successful brand?

Joking aside, the militant merger could make things worse in Somalia. With the two groups not fighting against each other, they may in fact do a better job of battling the AU troops, a situation that won't be good for the Somali TFG. And at the press conference, the new al-Shabaab threatened stepped-up terror attacks outside of Somalia, even promising attacks in the United States if President Obama didn't lead the nation to a mass conversion to Islam (apparently word of the “Birthers” and the other fringe groups who think that Obama already is a Muslim haven't reached Somalia yet). It may be a mistake though to dismiss these claims as mere bluster. In July an al-Shabaab terror bombing killed more than 70 people who gathered outside the Ugandan capital, Kampala, to watch the World Cup; Kenyan authorities are pointing at al-Shabaab as the force behind a December 21 bombing that killed one (the bomber) and wounded 40 others on a Uganda-bound bus. Al-Shabaab has vowed to attack Uganda and Ugandans particularly because troops from that country make up the bulk of the African Union forces operating in Mogadishu.

Meanwhile a mysterious private security firm has been hired by the TFG to provide security in Mogadishu. Saracen International is the same private militia recently hired by the northern Somali region of Puntland to head up “anti-piracy operations”, a mission they will somehow do without boats (as I speculated in this earlier post, Saracen's real mission in Puntland is more likely to protect prospective oil and gas fields ashore rather than hunting pirates at-sea). Saracen is being funded by an unnamed Persian Gulf state, though neither Puntland nor the TFG are willing to disclose exactly who; international observers are concerned about who is supporting Saracen along with believing that the group's operations could be in violation of various arms embargoes against Somalia.

Somalia's Mystery Militia

This story caught my eye last week, Foreign Policy picked up on a piece originally in the Washington Post about a 1,000 member militia being trained in the Puntland region of Somalia, a militia mysteriously funded by an unnamed “Islamic nation”, likely from the Persian Gulf region, and employing at least one former GW Bush-era diplomat along with a former CIA agent. Supposedly the militia is meant to fight the Somali pirates who operate in the Gulf of Aden north of Puntland as well as in the Indian Ocean; Foreign Policy even headlined their story describing the militia as an anti-pirate force.

But the details of the story make that explanation a little suspect. Puntland is an autonomous region of Somalia that has at least something of a functioning government - unlike the southern two-thirds of the nation. And while there is piracy in the Gulf of Aden, the best-known pirate strongholds are along Somalia's lawless Indian Ocean coast; these are the ports where the big ships – the cargo vessels and tankers – seized by the pirates are held for multi-million dollar ransoms. Then there's the matter of the militia's make-up. According to the Washington Post, the militia's equipment includes several airplanes and more than 100 up-armored pickup trucks, but no boats, something you would expect to be necessary equipment for battling pirates.

People involved with the militia here repeat a true assessment of the Somali situation: that piracy will be defeated ashore by taking away the pirate safe-havens, not by chasing speedboats across a million square miles of ocean. But the “ashore” strategy means strengthening Somali civil society, installing a functioning national government and bringing law to these now lawless ports; something 1,000 men in 100 armed trucks can't do. What they can do however is provide security in a specific area of the nation, and that's where the story gets interesting. Officials with the Puntland government say that the anti-piracy militia's first target will be an Islamist militia operating in the mountains 100 miles inland; a militia tied to the more powerful al-Shabaab Islamist force menacing the Somali capital Mogadishu and with ties to arms smugglers from Yemen and Eritrea, but with no apparent links to pirates. This militia operates in an area of Puntland believed to hold oil and natural gas reserves – something 1,000 men in armed trucks could do a good job at protecting.

If that's the real intent of the Puntland militia, then fine, if Puntland has natural resources they can develop, and if developing these resources can help the region to become more secure and to develop economically, all the better; but it is cynical (not to mention inaccurate) to portray this force as an “anti-pirate militia.”

Would The US Bomb Argentina?

The setup to that question deals with the British government, which last week as part of a fiscal austerity program announced across-the-board budget cuts that included the Ministry of Defense, which will see its budget cut by 8%. To put that in some perspective that would equal a roughly $56 billion dollar cut in current US defense spending (and to put that in perspective, that figure is nearly equal to Great Britain's entire defense budget). Bearing the brunt of the MoD cuts is the Air Wing of the Royal Navy. The Royal Navy is planning to add two state-of-the-art aircraft carriers to the fleet this decade; the Queen Elizabeth and the Prince of Wales. Normally when budgets are cut, proposed weapons systems are the first to go, but the British government found that because of the way the shipbuilding contracts for the carriers is written, it would actually be cheaper to build the carriers than to cancel the project outright. This has put the MoD in the odd position of announcing that the Queen Elizabeth will be built and put into service in 2016 without aircraft (which is kind of the whole purpose of an aircraft carrier...) for about three years until the Prince of Wales is finished; the Queen Elizabeth will then be retired in almost new condition. To make matters worse, the Royal Navy will retire their two existing carriers by 2014, leaving them without any aircraft carriers in service for three years and without any with actual airplanes aboard ship for almost six.

This situation has some in Britain – pundits, defense analysts, and judging by the comment boards of English newssites a fair number of average citizens – quite upset. The question being asked is how Great Britain can consider itself a world power without a way of projecting that power around the globe in the way that only a fully functioning aircraft carrier can. More specifically, some are asking how (or even if) Great Britain will be able to protect some of their last remaining far-flung bits of Empire, and here talk generally falls on the Falkland Islands. In 1981 a British fleet sailed halfway across the globe to wrestle the Falklands away from an invading force from Argentina (the two countries have spent nearly a century and a half of wrangling over possession of the islands, for a more detailed history, check this earlier post about the Falklands situation). Now, critics in Britain say that the MoD cuts would make a repeat of the 1981 flotilla an impossibility, while also noting that reclaiming the Falklands (or Las Malvinas as the Argentineans call them) is a recurring motif in Argentine politics and that the islands themselves may sit on rich oil and natural gas reserves, making them potentially very valuable real estate.

Some in America are upset by the British cuts as well since the British have been arguably the most active and most valuable members of the military coalitions assembled by the United States in recent years – the 1999 bombing campaign against Serbia, the first Gulf War, the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the ongoing GWOT mission in Afghanistan. The MoD cuts though make it less likely that the British will be able to participate in future American-led coalitions like they have in the past, a fact upsetting the military minds in the United States.

And all of that brings us to the question asked in the headline; does that kind of partnership go both ways? In none of the coalition examples listed before was there a direct threat to the British homeland, people or interests abroad, yet Great Britain was an active and valued participant in what were essentially American military campaigns (particularly the “Global War on Terror” and the 2003 Iraq War). So what if the British asked the United States to join in a military campaign to defend their interests, would we join? For the sake of argument, let's assume that its 2015 and after a quick naval landing Argentina has retaken the Falkland Islands. The British government has vowed to retake the islands and has assembled another armada for the long sail across the Atlantic, just as they did in 1981. The difference is in 2015 the British don't have a functioning aircraft carrier, meaning they can't protect the armada from the air or support their Marines in a landing to retake the Falklands; in modern military terms, this makes the British mission nearly suicidal. The British ask the United States to join their coalition by adding one of our aircraft carriers to the fleet and providing air support. What would our answer be?

Almost certainly, it would be no. In terms of the Falklands/Malvinas issue, the United States historically has not taken a position – not wanting to offend either our long-standing allies the British, nor wanting to upset the nations of Latin America (or to provide any anti-colonial fodder for Latin America's more leftists leaders like Hugo Chavez by backing the British claim). Since the United States has spent the last century telling the two sides to “talk” about the Falklands/Malvinas issue and didn't support the British in the 1981 operation, it's impossible to see the US agreeing to go to war with Argentina on Britain's behalf.

Of course, from the British side you'd have to wonder what was the point of backing America on all of those earlier military coalitions if the US isn't going to support you when you need them the most. It is an interesting foreign policy question indeed...

Borat and Chechnya

Remember in the movie Borat when after traveling across the country to meet his dreamgirl, model/actress Pamela Anderson, he decides to propose marriage in the “traditional Kazak manner” by tossing her into a giant sack and hauling her off over his shoulder? It was a pretty funny scene. What's not funny (and frankly almost not believable) is that this tradition of bride-napping is actually practiced, and as the BBC reports with growing frequency, in Chechnya; what's even less funny is the official response to this problem from the Chechen government.

It seems that in Chechnya if you're a man who sees an attractive woman walking on the street, it's culturally permissible for you (or for goons hired on your behalf) to grab her, toss her in the back of a car and drive off – in effect kidnapping her. British filmmaker Lucy Ash, who recently made a film on the bride-stealing tradition, said she has footage of such bride-nappings occurring in broad daylight on the streets of the capital, Grozny. What typically happens next is stranger still – usually the abducted girls' family contacts the abductors, typically using a local mullah as an intermediary, not to demand the return of the girl, but to negotiate a settlement for her. Abducted brides can find themselves married off to their kidnapper within a few days.

Bride-napping was supposedly part of Chechnya's rough-and-tumble past, but Ash reports for the BBC that most indications in Grozny are that the trend is increasing. And Chechen officials seem to not be too concerned about the problem. Punishment for bride-napping had been a fine of about $1,000. Recently the punishment was increased to a fine of about $40,000 – a sharp increase to be sure, but as one Chechen businessman told the BBC, it is an amount a rich man would likely be willing to pay if the girl he fancied was pretty enough.

It is yet another in a long list of human rights violations in this little corner of Russia, and it's unlikely the officials in Moscow will do anything to stop it. As I discussed in this post from last year; Moscow struck a deal with Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov – so long as he kept terrorism quiet in Chechnya (by whatever means necessary), Moscow would generally stay out of his hair. So far, they've kept up the bargain and looked the other way over numerous human rights violations, many of which have nothing to do with fighting terrorism. Before the two Chechen-Russian conflicts, which began in the mid-1990s and “officially” ended last year, Chechnya practiced a fairly moderate brand of Islam. The Chechen opposition though became radicalized during the second conflict, which saw their leaders change their demands from independence for Chechnya to a desire to carve a fundamentalist Islamic caliphate out of southern Russia. Since brutally suppressing the insurgency, Kadyrov himself has introduced a more fundamentalist strain of Islam into Chechnya, partially to try to win over the now-radical militants and partially to solidify his own grip on the republic. Under his rule things like polygamy and honor killings have become acceptable in Chechnya, even though they are direct violations of Russian law.

The BBC piece ends with a story that since the summer unknown assailants have been shooting paintball guns at women who go around the streets of Grozny with their heads uncovered, a “warning” the gunmen say. Kadyrov took to Chechen television, not to condemn the attacks but rather to “express [his] gratitude” towards the attackers.

Russia’s Retiring Jihadi

It’s a strange story that gets stranger. Two weeks ago, Russia’s most-wanted terrorist, Chechen warlord Doku Umarov announced via the Internet that he was retiring as the leader of the jihad in Russia’s southern Caucasus region, even going so far as to appoint a successor. Late last week Umarov seemed to have a change of heart and announced he was “unretiring” and would now continue in his role as the self-styled “Emir of the Caucasus Emirate.” Just to make things more bizarre, in his second tape Umarov claimed he was in “good health” after saying a week and a half earlier that he was stepping down because of poor health.

Umarov rose from low-level jihadi to become head the Chechen insurgency in 2006. He shifted the movement’s focus from a struggle for independence from Russian rule to participating in the al-Qaeda-inspired global jihad, with the goal of creating a pure fundamentalist Islamic state along Russia’s southern flank. He also claimed responsibility for the highest profile terrorist attacks in Russia in the past five years: the twin suicide bombings of the Moscow subway system in March that killed 39 and the bombing of the Nevsky Express – a luxury, high-speed train linking Moscow and St. Petersburg – in November 2009, which killed 26 (though there is some doubt over Umarov’s claim to this attack).

The Wall Street Journal though reports that Umarov’s retirement/unretirement could signal a divide growing within the Chechen rebel movement. While Umarov came to embrace the idea of global jihad (ironically when Umarov joined the Chechen rebels in the 90s he said he did not even know how to pray properly), others within the movement want to refocus their struggle back from trying to create a Caucasus Emirate and back towards the more modest goal of winning independence for Chechnya. The short-lived successor to Umarov’s role, a militant named Aslambek Vadalov, is believed to represent this more nationalistic wing of the rebel movement.

In recent years the Chechen rebels have been more active in the neighboring Russian republics of Dagestan and Ingushetia than they have in Chechnya itself; thanks in large part to the iron-fisted tactics of the current (and Moscow friendly) Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov. In exchange for his loyalty, Moscow has give Kadyrov a generally freehand in running Chechnya. This has included Kadyrov operating his own militia that has been accused by human rights organizations, both inside and outside of Russia, of conducting kidnappings and assassinations of not only alleged militants, but of their families as well (along with anyone else Kadyrov feels is a threat to his rule).

Spies Like Us

The ten Russians recently expelled from the United States on charges that they were spying for the Motherland recently had an important visitor, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. The BBC reported on Sunday that Putin visited with 10 of the 11 deported Russians, including perhaps the world’s most famous redhead, Anna Chapman – it’s of course worth noting here that Putin began his career as an officer in that most quintessential spy agency, the KGB. Putin apparently removed any doubt that the ten deportees were engaged in espionage, the BBC quotes the Prime Minister as saying in part: “…(to) do what are you told to do for the interest of your motherland for many years without counting on diplomatic immunity.” Putin also threw in a couple of ominous notes – he said that they all sang “patriotic” songs from the Soviet-era (not exactly the sort of thing that you want to do when you’re trying to play down the Cold War feeling of this whole incident…) and that the ten were exposed by an act of “betrayal,” noting that in the spy world betrayers usually meet bad ends. When asked if this meant the Russian government planned any more official action in the case, Putin said no, adding that: “they [spies, presumably] live by their own laws, and all special services are well aware of these laws.”

Of course it is entirely possible that a lot of Putin’s tough talk was meant for consumption at home, where the spies – well, Chapman at least – have been embraced by the country. Russia’s RIA Novosti news agency reported that Anna Chapman’s Facebook page was the single most-visited social networking site in Russia last month, with many Russians leaving messages and words of support for her. Meanwhile, a newspaper in Chapman’s hometown of Volgograd is sponsoring a songwriting contest for ballads in her honor. There were also rumors last week that Chapman was trying to sell a story of her life, something she denied. Part of the agreement that saw her, and the others, swapped and sent back to Russia was that none of them would be able to profit financially by selling their stories.

Spy Ring Follies

The big news last week was the apparent Russian spy ring uncovered operating in the United States; since then pundits, bloggers (myself included), security experts, etc., have all been trying to figure out just what the purpose of the spy ring was, along with running many gratuitous stories about the lovely Anna Chapman (pictured later in this post).

On one hand, those involved in the ring seem to be the worst collection of Russian spies since Boris and Natasha pursued “moose and squirrel.” Two of the ring’s members, living as a couple in suburban Montclair, New Jersey, were taped by the FBI having a long argument with their superiors in Moscow over the merits of home ownership (they were told they could buy a house, but Moscow, not them, would own it). Several other alleged spies maintained profiles on social networking sites like Facebook and the Russia-based Odnoklassniki (“Classmates”, a sort of never-ending online class reunion). One of the ring’s main missions apparently was to attempt to infiltrate American think-tanks to gain access to key “policy-makers”; a colleague of mine gave me at least some conformation of this idea. Of course, by their very nature think-tanks are public bodies whose goal is to promote and distribute their work; you hardly need a spy ring to learn about their goings-on, and you can usually make a good guess on how a think-tank will react to a certain issue just by reading their “About Us” page.

Two articles in Forbes and the Asia Times make the case that the Russian Spy Ring was likely just a make-work project for the SRV, Russia’s foreign intelligence service. During the Cold War, the SRV operated teams of spies all over the United States, but in the post-Soviet world, the value of these efforts dropped considerably. Of course to admit so would put some SRV handlers out of their jobs, so they continued to operate their American rings, not expecting them to turn up much useful info and thus not caring too much when they didn’t (in a way this is all starting to resemble Graham Greene’s “Our Man in Havana”).

The other big topic being discussed – along with Anna Chapman’s Facebook photos, failed marriage and real estate career – was the timing of the FBI raids that took down the “ring”. Speculation has ranged from a desire by hardliners within the FBI to embarrass Barack Obama and derail improving US-Russian relations following his apparently warm meeting with President Dmitry Medvedev, to the flip side of that argument: that the FBI scheduled the take-down now following a good US-Russian summit and before talks resumed on nuclear arms reduction and Russia’s World Trade Organization candidacy to lessen any possible political damage. The FBI’s official explanation was that they feared certain members of the ring were preparing to leave the country so they had to act.

But that explanation doesn’t wash – several of the suspected spies had traveled abroad in the past year, and the FBI hadn’t felt compelled to move in on them then. My speculation is that the FBI’s own incredibly poor spycraft managed to burn their own decade-long investigation. The spark that kicked the whole cycle of arrests into motion was the passing of a counterfeit passport to Anna Chapman. The FBI touted this as an example of just how fully they had penetrated the workings of the ring – they contacted Chapman and had her meet with a “Russian contact”, actually an FBI agent, who passed her a forged passport.

Apparently though this handoff was so clumsily managed, and Chapman so freaked out by the incident, that she took the forged passport to her local New York Police Dept. precinct. She and the rest of the alleged spies were arrested by the FBI the next day. So obviously Chapman knew there was something quite odd about the passport the faux-Russian foisted upon her, not a real endorsement of the FBI’s counter-espionage efforts. And it’s worth noting that none of the alleged spies are actually being charged with espionage, the usual charge levied against spies, but rather as acting as agents for a foreign government. You would think after a decade of investigation, the FBI could make an espionage charge stick, all of which makes me feel like there’s actually a lot less to this story than meets the eye... It also brings to mind the various “terrorist” cells busted with much fanfare in the past few years – all touted as great victories in the War on Terror, until the details start to come out; that the plans were laughably comedic (like the guy who planned to bring down the Brooklyn Bridge by cutting its cables with a blowtorch), or that the only “terrorists” the accused ever interacted with were FBI agents, or both.

Bush, Obama and Losing Eastern Europe

Is Obama’s foreign policy signaling the end of America’s role as the world’s last superpower? That was the question discussed at a very interesting debate I attended last week, and while I enjoyed the back-and-forth of the participants, I couldn’t help but think that the whole premise of their debate was flawed. First, we have to admit that others (China, Europe and Russia to name a few) are rising as world powers; and when it comes to discussing America’s decline, there’s more than enough blame to go around. On that note, I take a look at how both Presidents Bush and Obama had a hand in diminishing America’s influence in Eastern Europe during the past few years. For the whole argument, check out my post at The Mantle here.

Iran, Brazil And The Quest For The A-Bomb

The United States and key European powers are continuing their push for sanctions against Iran over their nuclear development program, even as talk of a possible deal to ship enriched nuclear fuel out of Iran emerged this morning. Iran’s claim is that they are trying to develop a domestic nuclear program so that they can begin to switch the country over to nuclear power, looking forward to the day when their oil runs out; the US/Europe say this explanation is nonsense. That’s why it’s useful to take a look at this magazine ad dug up by the folks over at RealClearWorld. Printed sometime in the 1970s – and before the Three Mile Island accident, when nuclear power was still seen as the wave of the future – it’s aimed at city managers in the United States; the pitch says that since the Shah of Iran is planning to build nuclear power plants for the day when his country runs out of oil, then you too should consider nuclear for your city’s future.

So the question is that if 30-plus years ago, the Shah of Iran’s plan to build nuclear power plants made so much sense it merited an ad campaign in American magazines, why is it such a ridiculous idea today? Critics will respond by saying that much of the same knowledge/technology you need to build a nuclear power plant is also the same knowledge/tech you need to build an atomic bomb, so the Iranian nuclear power plant plan is just a cover story to hide a nefarious A-bomb production scheme.

They may be right, that Iran’s stated desire for nuclear power may just be an elaborate ruse, but that brings us to the second half of this story, via Der Spiegel magazine. In their May 7 issue they asked the question: “Is Brazil Developing the Bomb?” Three times in their history, Brazil has had secret programs to develop nuclear weapons – each was eventually abandoned. Late in 2008, Brazil released their National Defense Strategy, which called for “mastery of the nuclear fuel cycle” (the same goal Iran has been pursuing) for the eventual goal of building a fleet of Brazilian nuclear submarines. Since then, according to Der Spiegel, Brazil has done its best to keep its nuclear program out of the eyes of international inspectors – much like Iran has done with their program.

And while we’re drawing parallels with Iran, Brazil’s stated goal – mastery of nuclear production to build nuclear submarines - is also a bit sketchy. The purpose of having a nuclear reactor aboard a submarine is to give that vessel the ability to sail for years without refueling (really, the only thing that limits the time a nuclear sub can spend at sea is the amount of food it can carry for the crew). A key mission for the nuclear subs the US and Soviet Union built was to hide out under the ice of the Arctic Circle, perhaps for months at a time, ready to launch missiles should a nuclear war ever break out. It’s true that Brazil has thousands of miles of ocean coastline to patrol, but that mission could be accomplished more simply, and probably more effectively, by diesel-electric submarines that Brazil could build with the technological expertise that they have today. It makes for another dubious rationale for a nuclear program, pair that up with an air of secrecy and you have a situation much like the one we currently have with Iran, yet there has been no similar call for sanctions against Brazil to get them to drop their nuclear program.

Just something to ponder on a Monday.

Delayed Criticism On Prompt Global Strike

It’s always nice to see the New York Times pick up on a story we covered here a couple of weeks earlier…

On Thursday, the Times published a long story on the proposed weapons system called “Prompt Global Strike”, something we covered here as part of the post on the signing of the new START treaty between the United States and Russia. MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow and nuclear reduction advocate Joseph Cirincione also picked up the story of Prompt Global Strike late in the week.

To recap PGS – the project would replace the nuclear warheads on some of the Untied States’ arsenal of Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) with conventional ones, with the goal of being able to deliver a non-nuclear strike against a target anywhere in the world within an hour or two. The “target” described in PGS launch scenarios is one that is highly mobile and that won’t remain in place long enough for the US to strike with other weapons in the arsenal - say like cave-hopping Osama bin Laden (that is if the US ever got a bead on his location in the first place). Advocates say that only PGS could deliver a strike in a short enough time to take out such a target.

Critics, meanwhile, say that such a scenario is highly unlikely to occur and that the United States has such a military presence around the world it’s hard to imagine that there wouldn’t be other US forces in the region ready to strike a highly-mobile target using other means. The bigger problem, they say, is that it would be impossible for another nuclear power – particularly Russia or China – to know that a sudden American ICBM launch was really a PGS strike against some other adversary and not the prelude to a sneak attack against them, which could prompt them to launch their ICBMs at the US in reply. Such a scenario almost unfolded in January 1995, when Russia’s missile defense system almost mistook the launch of a scientific research rocket from northern Norway for the launch of an ICBM from an American submarine under the polar icecap. Only a quick decision by a Russian officer in their nuclear chain of command prevented the Russians from launching a retaliatory strike against the United States. According to the Times, the Obama administration would allow Russia and other interested countries to inspect PGS missile silos to ensure that there were not nuclear warheads aboard the missiles, though in the same article the Times also reports that the administration is looking at basing some PGS weapons on US submarines, which would negate the whole spot inspection idea.

And others wonder if PGS would be yet another case of the Pentagon throwing billions of dollars at a weapons system without knowing if it will ever work. That’s the gist of Cirincione’s piece in Foreign Policy magazine, where he reports that officials in the Pentagon have the PGS concept down, but really don’t know what the final weapon will look like. Both FP and the Times are reporting that the PGS vehicle would be some sort of “space plane” that would be able to maneuver in orbit and would carry a weapons payload that it would drop on its target. That has me wondering if PGS has anything to do with the launch of the Air Force’s super-secret X-37B (artist rendition above) earlier this week. The X-37B is described as a computer-guided mini-Space Shuttle. Like the Shuttle it is suppose to be reusable and can carry a payload within its cargo bay; but unlike the Shuttle it is entirely computer-guided, Air Force officials even claim to not know “when it’s coming back.” Since the Air Force is being so vague and since the X-37B fits the speculation surrounding the PGS so well, you have to wonder if the two are related.

Were Drugs Behind The Kyrgyzstan Revolution?

It’s clear that Russia was putting pressure on the regime of former President Kurmanbek Bakiyev in the weeks and months before his government collapsed – Russia held back several billion dollars worth of foreign aid, while coverage of the Bakiyev government turned decidedly negative in the Russian press (something that likely would not have happened without an official blessing from the Kremlin), and the catalyst for the April 6 uprising that drove him from power was Russia’s decision to enact a tariff on gas and oil imports, something that caused a dramatic spike in fuel prices in Kyrgyzstan. So far the conventional wisdom has been that Russia pushed Bakiyev out because he was trying to develop a relationship with the United States. But could drugs be the real reason Russia soured on Bakiyev?

It is a question worth pondering. On Monday Russia’s RIA Novosti reported that along with rampant corruption and human rights problems, Bakiyev’s regime also had close ties to drug lords operating in the southern part of Kyrgyzstan (not coincidentally a stronghold of support for Bakiyev). These connections were also part of a feature story on the drug trade in Central Asia in the current issue of the World Policy Journal. Currently, Russia is dealing with an utter epidemic of heroin abuse in many of their major cities, causing a public health crisis across the country. The heroin is flooding into Russia from the poppy fields of Afghanistan, and Kyrgyzstan has been cited as one of the major transshipment points for the drug. According to RIA Novosti, fear that Bakiyev and his supporters could gain control over the Osh region in southern Kyrgyzstan and turn it into a quasi-independent narco-state is the reason why Moscow was so quick to offer its support to the interim government in Bishkek. Of course you can take that logic a step further and wonder if Moscow didn’t try to force Bakiyev out in the first place as a way of trying to stop the flow of cheap Afghani heroin into Russia?

Kyrgyzstan Update

Even though the reports of unrest from Kyrgyzstan have already dropped from the headlines in the United States just two weeks after a street protest drove the government from power, things in the Central Asian nation are still tense.

While President Kurmanbek Bakiyev has fled the country for exile in Kazakhstan, his supporters staged a huge rally on Saturday in the southern Kyrgyz town of Jalalabad (long a stronghold of Bakiyev backers), seizing control of several buildings, including the studios of the local television station. And more troubling to the fledgling new government of Kyrgyzstan, the rally in Jalalabad included members of the police force and the former Defense Minister, all protesting against the uprising that deposed Bakiyev on April 7. Meanwhile the new Kyrgyz government is telling their neighbors they expect that Bakiyev will be returned to them for possible criminal prosecution and not treated as a political refugee.

Among the charges that Bakiyev would likely face is embezzlement. Kyrgyzstan’s interim leader Roza Otunbayeva told the UK’s Guardian newspaper that Bakiyev plundered the Kyrgyz budget, leaving behind a grand total of $80 million in the national coffers – not a lot to run a country on. Much of the theft came in the form of sweetheart deals between the Bakiyev-led government and the Bakiyev family and a close circle of supporters. One of those deals now under scrutiny is a contract between a company called Mina Corp. and the United States government to supply fuel to US aircraft based at Manas Air Base in Kyrgyzstan. Manas is central to US military operations in Afghanistan; the new Kyrgyz government though alleges that Mina Corp. was owned by members of the Bakiyev family, including the former president himself and that the deal was little more than a way to funnel government funds to the Bakiyev family. They would like to know what exactly the United States knew about the operation of Mina Corp. and its ties to the Bakiyev clan.

There’s also some question on whether the United States will be allowed to even continue operating at Manas. Immediately after coming to power, the interim Kyrgyz government assured the US they would honor the lease agreement for Manas signed by Bakiyev last year, but in recent days other members of the new government have talked about reexamining (and maybe ending) the agreement. Russia was quite displeased by the lease agreement between Kyrgyzstan and the United States for Manas, since the overthrow of Bakiyev, Russia has been actively courting the new government, which could lead to pressure to end the lease on Manas. That ties in with reporting from the Asia Times the change in government could have a wider affect on US-Kyrgyz relations, especially when it comes to US military activity in their country. The Times says that in addition to supplying Afghanistan, the United States also used Manas to spy into China’s Xinjiang Region. Xinjiang has been in the news lately because of the ongoing conflicts between Beijing and the Uighur ethnic group (something we've followed here), but Xinjiang is also home to a number of sites related to China’s ballistic missile program. Since Kyrgyzstan also has a Uighur population, speculation in the Asia Times is that the United States may have hoped to use the Uighurs for covert operations within China, plans that are likely derailed due to the change in the Kyrgyz government.

The Dear Leader's Birthday

North Korea’s President and “Dear Leader” Kim Jong-Il turned 69 on Tuesday (or maybe 68, like most things in the world’s most secretive nation even the president’s age is something of a mystery). And despite the massive public celebrations, the day sparked another round of speculation on what will happen once Mr. Kim finally leaves the stage for good.

The question on who will follow Kim Jong-Il took on a new urgency in mid-2008 when the Dear Leader suffered a serious health problem, now widely believed to have been a major stroke – for months there was even a strong belief that Kim was actually dead. Since then Kim has made a series of public appearances, but it is clear that his health has taken a decided turn for the worse.

Running North Korea has been a Kim family tradition since the nation split in two in 1950. Kim Jong-Il took over from North Korea’s “Eternal President”, his father Kim Il Sung following the elder Kim’s death. It was assumed that pattern would continue when Dear Leader Kim passes away as well. But Kim Jong-Il apparently thinks his eldest son is too dumb for the job (Kim Jong-Nam once tried to sneak into Japan on a fake passport to go to Disneyland Tokyo), and his second-eldest son “too effeminate”, thus passing the mantle to his twenty-something son, Kim Jong-Un. The problem is that in North Korea’s cloistered web of leadership, Kim Jong-Un has virtually no experience. According to South Korean watchers, this has led Kim Jong-Il’s sister Kim Kyong-Hui assuming more of a leadership role by taking over a portion of the Korean Workers Party, one of the state agencies that wields power within North Korea. Kim Kyong-Hui had once held a powerful position within the North Korean leadership, but had fallen out of power due to infighting within the Kim regime.

And if all of that sounds just a little too Byzantine, this week Foreign Policy magazine published a piece on their website claiming that the United States has few plans to deal with North Korea once Kim Jong-Il passes away. It’s feared that Kim’s death will spark a battle for succession within the ranks of North Korea’s leadership, which is split among the military, the Communist Party and the Kim family. In turn that could likely spark a wave of refugees fleeing from the chaos in North Korea and possibly even a conflict with South Korea. But FP argues that despite these fears, the United States has few plans in place to promote regional security or to protect our allies, the South Koreans.