With Ukraine-Russia tensions reaching a boiling point, the Senate is poised to vote this afternoon on a bill championed by Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) to sanction Russian businesses associated with the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline. If completed the pipeline would allow Russia to circumvent Ukraine and export natural gas directly to Germany, a move Ukrainian interests fiercely oppose as, amongst other issues, it will cost the country hundreds-of-millions in energy transit fees it receives every year under the current pipeline system.
While the vote and seemingly all things Ukraine-Russia have garnered front-page headlines, behind the scenes, Ukraine has launched a multi-million dollar lobbying push to steer U.S. foreign policy on this, and other issues, in its direction.
In just the past year, the Ukrainian government and other interests in Ukraine have hired nine firms that registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Most prominently, Yorktown Solutions, has reportedreceiving more than $1 million from Ukraine clients in 2021 and contacted congressional offices hundreds of times on behalf of the Ukraine Federation of the Employers of the Oil and Gas Industry (UFEOGI), including at least one meeting between these lobbyists and Senator Cruz himself. Yesterday, the firm sent a “Nord Stream 2 pipeline - Facts on the Ground” brief in support of Cruz’s bill to hundreds of congressional offices.
Additionally, UFEOGI inked deals with Karv Communications and Arent Fox in the summer of 2021, which, respectively received nearly $120,000 and more than $300,000 from UFEOGI to advocate against Nord Stream 2. Karv has focused heavily on media outreach related to the pipeline, and reported meeting with journalists at the Wall Street Journal, CNN, Reuters, and others on UFEOGI’s behalf. Arent Fox has played more of an inside game for UFEOGI, focusing its efforts on influence at the State Department.
These and many more details about the Ukraine lobby in the United States will be chronicled in a forthcoming Quincy Institute report on the topic. And, as for the vote today, even if Cruz’s bill isn’t passed as is expected, it’s well worth noting that Ukraine’s lobbyists and public relations professionals were a vital reason the bill even made it this far.
Ben Freeman is Director of the Democratizing Foreign Policy program at the Quincy Institute. He investigates money in politics, defense spending, and foreign influence in America. He is the author of The Foreign Policy Auction, which was the first book to systematically analyze the foreign influence industry in the United States.
The new British “National Security Strategy” is not really a strategy at all, but a mess of conflicting (and often fantastical) goals and unexamined assumptions.
For this, two things above all are responsible. The first is the unexamined tension between, on the one hand, the strategy’s promise of a “systematic approach to pursuing national interests,” and, on the other, the repeated assertion that these interests are totally and inextricably bound up with Britain’s alliances. For it should be clear by now that “allies” cannot necessarily be relied on, and that in certain circumstances the agendas of allies are not a security asset but rather a source of greatly increased danger to Britain.
The second fundamental problem, one that has plagued Britain for many years, is the tension between the professed commitments set out in the “Strategy” and the practical limits on Britain’s resources. The authors should have paid attention to the famous maxim of former French prime minister Pierre Mendes-France: “To govern is to choose.”
When, however, the choices involved are difficult and painful, to choose requires not just knowledge and intelligence but also moral courage. In this case, the authors do not understand or have chosen to ignore the meaning of the word “priority.” Having set one “priority” in NATO and the alleged Russian threat, they then add more and more “priorities.” The new “strategy” promises to bring ambitions and resources into alignment through a huge increase in military spending and military industry; but even if this happens — and there are good reasons to think that it is fiscally impossible — it will not be remotely enough to achieve all the conflicting goals set out in this document.
For almost 70 years, the British establishment has sought to maintain its posture as a great power on the shoulders of the United States. The result in the case of this “Strategy” is that it is suffused with U.S. language, U.S. assumptions, and U.S. (and Israeli) agendas. Thus, Western democracies are threatened by “authoritarian aggression,” the “rules-based order” is threatened by Russia, Chinese, Iranian and North Korean “revisionists,” and “European and Indo-Pacific security are inextricably linked.”
This document sets out a legitimate national interest argument for British defense co-operation with Australia in terms of a boost to British military shipbuilding, through the “Aukus” agreement under which the US, UK and Australia will co-operate to build a new generation of nuclear attack submarines to be delivered — hopefully — about 20 years from now. This project would create about 7,000 new jobs in the UK.
The problem is that, echoing the discourse of Washington, it wraps this in hostile language about China that goes far beyond any real Chinese threat to Australia or international trade, and impossibly far beyond any Chinese threat to Britain. It is not just that this adds a completely unnecessary element of tension to Anglo-Chinese relations; it also ignores the fact that, if there were a serious Chinese military threat to Australia, there would be almost nothing the British armed forces could do about it.
One aspect of the would-be British role in the “Indo-Pacific” is symbolized, literally, by the little image of a British aircraft carrier next to the priority of “developing relationships in new domains.” One of Britain’s two carriers, HMS Prince of Wales, has indeed just been sent on a temporary deployment to the Indian and Pacific Oceans as part of a British carrier “strike group.”
According to the British government, one objective of the mission is “to declare the Queen Elizabeth-class carriers with all their constituent parts fully operational.” But the British carriers are well knownnot to be “fully operational.” Both have suffered repeated technical problems. They are unable to carry their full complement of (U.S.) fighters. The Royal Navy claims that the Indo-Pacific task force is “international by design,” but in actual fact it is international by necessity, since Britain cannot provide enough escort vessels.
Oddest of all is the statement that this Pacific deployment is also intended to “reaffirm the UK’s commitment to NATO.” NATO stands for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, not the Indo-Pacific Treaty Organization. With one British carrier at sea, the other is effectively immobilized for lack of aircraft, escort vessels and spare parts. How then is the Royal Navy to play its promised leading part in deterring or fighting the Russian threat that the National Security Strategy repeatedly identifies as the greatest direct threat to Britain and Europe? One of the three escorting frigates is provided by Norway, which has only four frigates. What has become of the supposed Russian threat to Norway?
On the part of the Norwegians, this is simply a continuation of the old European trick of making purely symbolic contributions to U.S. operations elsewhere in the world to try to persuade Washington to remain committed to European security. If so, however, this is a mission on autopilot, for Undersecretary of Defense Elbridge Colby (echoing a widespread view in Washington) has reportedly told the British that they are not really needed in the Pacific and should concentrate on the defense of Europe.
But the British establishment simply cannot let go of the desire to play a role, any role, on the world stage. Thus on page 23 of the “Strategy” we read that,
“Sovereignty over the Overseas Territories must be protected against all challenges so that, for those who live in the Territories as British nationals, their right of self-determination is upheld…We will maintain our military presence in Gibraltar, the Sovereign Base Areas of Akrotiri & Dhekelia, Ascension Island, the Falkland Islands and South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands to deliver UK defence objectives.”
We should all of course support the right of the British Nationals of South Georgia and the South Sandwiches to self-determination — if such people existed. Alas, the only residents are seabirds and penguins. Then again, it would be a great deal less dangerous for the Royal Navy to spend its time protecting the British penguins’ Sandwiches than poking China in the eye. As for Gibraltar and the bases on Cyprus, the only conceivable “challenges” to them are from Spain and Turkey — both fellow NATO members.
Even this “Strategy” cannot quite manage to turn Russia into a threat to the British Sandwiches; though not, one suspects, for want of trying. But if Antarctic penguins, 8,000 miles from Britain’s shores, are “British nationals,” then it is easier to swallow the strategy’s statement that Ukraine — a mere 1,000 miles away — is Britain’s “neighbor.”
The British government and its National Security Strategy seek to justify the huge increase in British military spending to the British public (at a time of economic stagnation and severe fiscal pressure) above all on the basis of an alleged direct, serious and imminent Russian threat to Britain itself. The inconsistency here should be obvious. If such a threat really exists, then - as in the years before the First World War - Britain should be reducing its commitments elsewhere in the world in order to concentrate them closer to home. Deployments to the Indo-Pacific and Ukraine should both be off the table. Instead, Britain is declaring a “100 year” pact with Ukraine, and proposing a leading and permanent British military presence as part of a European “reassurance force.”
And while the “Strategy” is permeated with veiled anxiety about the unreliability of America as an ally, the policies being adopted by the British establishment towards Russia and the Ukraine War make Britain more and more dependent on Washington. Should Britain actually send troops to Ukraine, that dependence would become absolute, for as Prime Minister Keir Starmer has himself stated, such a force would rely totally on U.S. backup and protection.
It seems deeply foolish for Britain to choose to rely more on an unreliable U.S. This reliance will make it more and more difficult for Britain to distance itself from U.S. agendas elsewhere, especially in the Middle East. The language of the British “Strategy” simply parrots the U.S. in repeatedly portraying Iran and unspecified terrorists as the threat to order in the region. The word “Israel” never appears. The document talks of the need for Britain to exploit its diplomatic links to Commonwealth countries – but the great majority of those countries would regard the picture of Middle Eastern security set out here as a gross and immoral falsification.
For as the events of recent months have made clear, it is Israeli actions and ambitions that pose the greatest threat to order and security in the Middle East, to British interests and British lives in the Gulf, and to social peace and political stability within Britain itself. But what can the “Strategy” — or any British government — do about this if the U.S. establishment is completely subservient to Israel and the British establishment is totally reliant on the U.S.?
House Speaker Mike Johnson took part in a private meeting with pro-Israel leaders from a variety of organizations on Capitol Hill last Wednesday during which he reportedly expressed concern about growing “isolationism” in the GOP.
Speaking to several individuals who attended the meeting, Jewish Insider reported, “Johnson, who described himself to the group as a ‘Reagan Republican’ focused on ‘peace through strength,’ acknowledged that isolationism is rising in the Republican Party, and that the party is likely bound for a major debate on the issue after President Donald Trump leaves office.”
The report added, “And Johnson told the group that, in his candidate recruiting efforts, he’s working to filter out isolationists to prevent that wing of the party from growing larger in the House, four people who attended the meeting said.”
While it’s unclear what Johnson meant by “isolationists,” it’s likely, given his audience, that he’s referring to those who don’t support the far-right pro-Israel view, oppose Israel’s war in Gaza and/or advocate for Palestinian rights. The term is also often used by neoconservatives and other proponents of American militarism more generally to smear advocates of restraint.
In any case, the “major debate” on GOP foreign policy — particularly about Israel — that is supposed to take place after Trump leaves office has been wellunderway for some time. And Johnson’s crusade to root out the so-called “isolationists” — meaning those anti-war Republicans who are increasingly critical of Israel — is not new.
Almost three decades ago, when Pat Buchanan defeated the GOP establishment candidate, Sen. Robert Dole, in the 1996 Republican New Hampshire presidential primary, party heads worked feverishly to make sure that’s as far as he got.
When my former boss, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), ran for the U.S. Senate in 2010, the GOP brass didn’t want the son of Ron Paul anywhere near Capitol Hill. Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) handpicked his own primary candidate who received the endorsements of American war machine boosters like former Vice President Dick Cheney and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani.
Cheney didn’t endorse in any other GOP primary that year but insisted that Paul’s more hawkish opponent was the “real conservative” in that race.
After Paul won the general election in a landslide, former George W. Bush speechwriter and prominent neoconservative David Frum lamented, "How is it that the GOP has lost its antibodies against a candidate like Rand Paul?"
The senator’s father — himself a former member of Congress — never got anywhere near the White House in his two Republican presidential runs in 2008 and 2012, but he did help inspire a sizable anti-war populist movement, the popularity of which has worried the old guard for decades.
Ever since Donald Trump declared that the George W. Bush administration lied about the Iraq war on a Republican presidential debate stage in 2016, and went on to win the election, GOP foreign policy debates almost immediately expanded beyond the parameters of a military first approach.
It became okay to be “America First,” meaning prioritizing the interests of one’s own nation above those of others, whether it be foreign funding or foreign wars, which was kryptonite to those intent on making the world safe for democracy, as neocons often claimed they were doing.
So if Speaker Johnson is worried about internal debates on the direction the GOP is going on Israel and wants to nip that in the bud, he’s too late.
Indeed, polling has shown that Republicans are increasingly moving away from their traditional reflexive support for Israel. On the Gaza war, a new Associated Press-NORC poll revealed “a bipartisan uptick in Americans finding Israel’s military response has ‘gone too far.’”
“About 7 in 10 Democrats say this now, up from 58% in November 2023,” the report noted. “And roughly half of independents say the same, compared with about 4 in 10 in the earlier measure.”
“Republicans have also moved slightly, from 18% to 24%,” the AP noted.
A late August poll showed that 14% of Republicans had become comfortable calling Israel’s actions in Gaza a “genocide.” As RS observed three weeks ago, “The view that Washington’s support has enabled Israeli actions in Gaza was transpartisan. Nearly three out of four Democrats (72%) agreed with that proposition, as did 57% of Republicans, and 63% of self-identified independents.”
Another poll in June found that 53% of Trump voters didn’t think at the time that the U.S. military should get involved in the conflict between Iran and Israel. The poll also found that 63 percent of Trump voters said the U.S. should “engage in negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program” while just 18% said the U.S. should not.
And before Israel launched its 12-day war on Iran this summer — that Trump later joined — a whopping 64% of Republicans said in another poll that they supported negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program.
This is why AIPAC — the powerful pro-Israel lobby group that works to keep Washington in line — is ponying up hundreds of thousands of dollars to oppose restrainers like Reps. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.). Johnson appears worried that they and a handful of other GOP restrainers might grow in number in the mid-terms, and pro-Israel leaders are being promised that this increasing “isolationism” will be stopped. Massie and others have acknowledged exactly what is happening to them.
All this is making Mike Johnson simply the latest establishment champion for war in his party’s never ending battle against any Republican who might prevent it.
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Top image credit: Brian Jason and Alessia Pierdomenico via shutterstock.com
On Monday, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced a framework agreement with He Lifeng, China’s top economic official, to save TikTok despite a 2024 law aimed at banning it from Americans’ phones. Donald Trump and Xi Jinping are scheduled to speak on Friday to finalize the deal.
The announcement raised hopes not just for preserving Americans’ access to one of the most popular apps in the world, but also for real progress in the fraught relationship between the world’s two most powerful countries — a relationship that seemed headed toward serious conflict just five months ago.
Then, on Wednesday, reports emerged that Chinese regulators had directed China’s major tech companies to stop purchasing Nvidia-made AI chips. Suddenly the possibility of productive relations was again thrown into doubt.
It’s certainly too soon to proclaim a new start to the relationship. But it’s also premature to accept the self-serving contention of those pushing conflict that China holds only ill intent. Trump could all too easily return to the Biden administration’s strategy — the same one that most of his advisers support — which would lead to a permanent rupture and a new era of great power conflict. But Trump could still choose a modus vivendi with China, if he is willing to focus his diplomats on a new framework for trade and investment on both sides.
The origins of the TikTok expropriation bill lie in the hothouse atmosphere of bipartisan China animosity that dominated thinking in the prior two U.S. administrations. Officials in the first Trump term, taking advantage of their boss’s trade grievances, seized their opening to press a very different agenda of systematic geopolitical confrontation. Where Trump merely wanted to shift the terms of trade toward the United States and display his own power, his neoconservative and militarist advisers believed that the U.S. and China are locked in an existential struggle for control over the global system.
The Biden administration assumed that same framework — institutionalizing it, extending it, and pressuring U.S. allies to join it. To Biden officials, restricting and excluding China was not only essential to maintaining American primacy but also the key to renewing American economic dynamism and marginalizing populist challengers of the right and left.
Once thinking in both parties defined China as an irredeemable adversary, politicians started competing to advance the most antagonistic measures. In 2023, members of Congress introduced an average of 3.5 bills each day aimed at restricting, discrediting, or undermining China, over 600 in all. This was against a single piece of legislation encouraging a constructive relationship — a bill that would have restored the Fulbright educational exchange program.
One of those 600 hostile bills established the House’s China Select Committee. Chaired by the energetic Republican Mike Gallagher from Wisconsin, who coordinated closely with Democratic ranking member Raja Krishnamoorthi, the Select Committee became a fount of belligerent hearings meant to impress upon the American people the need for conflict with China. It also acted as an assembly line formulating anti-China legislation. (Gallagher subsequently quit Congress for a more lucrative job at Palantir, though he continues to argue alongside Trump 1 China chief Matt Pottinger that the U.S. goal should be “winning the cold war with China” by destabilizing the Chinese government.)
The Gallagher–Krishnamoorthi committee wrote the TikTok expropriation bill, introduced it in March last year, and eight days later carried it to a crushing victory in the House on a vote of 197–15 among Republicans and 155–50 among Democrats. Gallagher branded TikTok “digital fentanyl” in reference to another conspiracy theory, that the Chinese government is sending fentanyl to the U.S. to kill Americans.
Biden signed a slightly modified version of the bill into law just over a month later. The Biden administration had never prioritized the issue, but since its domestic and foreign policies revolved around amplifying the China threat, it made no effort to stop the rush to suppress TikTok.
This outcome illustrates larger patterns in China policy under Biden. First, attacking China was regularly a substitute for broader policies — in this case, regulating all social media companies regardless of the nationality of their owners — that alone would have addressed the problems blamed on China. With political leaders unwilling to confront entrenched corporate power and dysfunctional political institutions, ineffectual and counterproductive policy was the only “realistic” option.
Second, the frantic anti-China environment in Washington made U.S. leaders assume that anything Beijing opposes must be good for the United States. But U.S. public opinion, insulated from the mania in Washington, rarely shared that unanimity. In the case of TikTok, only a third of the population supports the ban, another third is unsure, and one-third opposes it. The longer the issue is under discussion, the higher opposition has risen.
It turns out that Americans are right to be skeptical. Rep. Sara Jacobs (D-Calif.), after hearing the Biden administration’s case, said: “Not a single thing that we heard in today’s classified briefing was unique to TikTok. It was things that happen on every single social media platform.”
When asked if China is currently using the app in “untoward ways,” Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.) referenced his classified access as ranking member on the House Intelligence Committee and replied: “It’s not. Full stop. It’s not.”
Indeed, when the Biden administration presented its argument to the Supreme Court, it only pointed to threatening measures that China could take, nothing it was actually doing.
Trump was more sensitive to the politics of the issue, as well as to the contributions of billionaire TikTok investor Jeff Yass. He has also stubbornly refused to sign on to the DC consensus on China conflict. After his initial efforts to force China into submission spectacularly backfired, leading China to prove its own leverage over the American economy, Trump recognized Xi Jinping as a peer and accepted Xi’s demand for a negotiating framework. The TikTok agreement seems to be the first positive outcome of this newly civil atmosphere.
China’s Nvidia ban shows how fragile relations remain. It would be a mistake, however, to read China’s actions as revealing the impossibility of great power coexistence. Once the conditions in Washington described above are taken into consideration, Beijing’s aim of weaning Chinese companies off U.S. technology seems little more than a prudent measure to guard against an unremittingly hostile power.
Although Trump is serious about forging a deal with China, it can be quite difficult in Beijing to take him seriously. Trump refuses to subordinate U.S. business interests to national security absolutism, but at the same time he is negotiating with other countries to exclude China from global economic networks. He defers to Chinese sensitivities on Taiwan but his Pentagon is pushing Biden-era containment measures in an even moreaggressivedirection. Just this week, Trump offhandedly claimed he is negotiating with the Taliban to restore U.S. control over Bagram Air Base because “it’s an hour away from where China makes its nuclear weapons.” Such inconstancy might flummox U.S. allies into significant concessions, but it’s ruinous in the China relationship.
If Trump were serious about a deal, he could start by focusing his administration on a breakthrough agreement to bring large-scale Chinese investment into crucial industries like battery manufacturing through joint ventures with U.S. companies. With proper national security safeguards and binding conditions to guarantee the hiring of local workers, a union neutrality agreement, and technology transfer, Chinese companies would regain access to the world’s largest market and the American economy would regenerate vital industrial capacities.
But “focus” is the key word here. China will accept the loss of the U.S. market and continue preparing for open conflict if Trump cannot clearly reorient the United States. And given the continuing commitment to conflict in both parties, the DC establishment would happily carry us into such a disastrous conflict.
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