The Center for Security Policy — a controversial hawkish think tank led by conspiracy theorist Frank Gaffney — has been at the forefront of the anti-Iran nuclear deal campaign. CSP even received a$60,000 donation from an AIPAC affiliated group as part of that campaign back in 2015 to work against President Obama’s diplomatic efforts and the organization more recently has, for example, said the Biden administration should walk away from the negotiations to re-enter the JCPOA.
That’s why it’s a bit odd that CSP promoted a new poll last week finding that many of Americans support it.
A CSP article touted the poll it conducted in conjunction with TIPP as finding that “Americans overwhelmingly support a congressional review of a new Iran deal,” as the headline blared (a finding that isn’t all that significant seeing that it’s largely expected that Congress will indeed review any potential re-entry agreement).
But buried in the article, CSP noted that the same poll also found that a significant majority of those polled who said they are “closely” following news about the accord support rejoining the deal:
38% of respondents are “closely” following stories related to the Iran deal, while 53% are not. … 62% of those following the story support joining the deal, while 33% oppose it.
The reality at this point is that re-joining the Iran nuclear deal isn’t a matter of whether it will prevent Iran from building a nuclear weapon — we already know that the empirical evidenceshowsthatit will.
The main issue now as to whether the Biden administration re-joins the JCPOA appears to be a political one, and all CSP is doing here is reminding people that Americanssupportdoing just that.
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Frank Gaffney, Founder and Executive Chairman of the Center for Security Policy (Photo: Gage Skidmore)
Military industry mainstays and lawmakers alike are warning of imminent conflict with China in an effort to push support for controversial deep tech, especially controversial autonomous and AI-backed systems.
The conversation, which presupposed a war with Beijing sometime in the near future, took place Wednesday on Capitol Hill at a hearing of the Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) entitled, “The Imperative to Strengthen America's Defense Industrial Base and Workforce.”
“Planning, preparing, and then doing what is necessary as if we will be at war with China in the next three years is probably the best way to ensure that we will not be at war with China during this time,” said speaker Dr. William Greenwalt, a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI).
Similarly sounding the alarm, Anduril Industries Chief Strategy Officer Chris Brose suggested the U.S. would run out of weapons in under a week of war with China.
Positing that inaction may invite aggression from China, committee witnesses proclaimed that America cannot counter increasingly innovative adversaries without a radical transformation of its defense industrial base.
And in such a transformation, witnesses proclaimed that deep-tech innovations including AI, autonomy, software and adjacent tech are vital to both the development of state-of-the-art weaponry but also towards the “hyper-scaling” of production processes key towards developing competitive arsenals.
“Deterrence depends on an industrial base that can produceorders of magnitude more weapons and military platforms,” Brose said. “This is not possible on a relevant timeline with our traditional defense systems and their equally traditional means of production, but it is eminently achievable with new classes of autonomous vehicles and weapons.”
Ultimately, AI tech tools were lauded for their perceived centrality in Washington’s ability to compete amid a fraught geopolitical climate. Going unmentioned were growing ethics concerns, where, for example, AI-powered weapons and targeting systems have sparked controversy for their use in Gaza, often against civilians and for high rate of errors.
Critically, conflicts of interest also abound. Brose’s Anduril Industries has springboarded off venture capital funding from the likes of billionaire Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund into the forefront of the weapons industry. The organization has quickly forged close government ties, as showcased by Anduril co-founder Trae Stephens’ recent consideration by President-elect Trump for the deputy secretary of defense position, the second highest civilian post at the Pentagon
While Greenwalt’s AEI does not publicly disclose donor information, an AEI speaker likewise revealed in a 2023 talk that the organization receives funding from Pentagon Contractors like Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman.
And passing through the Pentagon-private sector “revolving door,” witness Halimah Najieb-Locke, vice president of policy and strategy for AI and computing company Entanglement, Inc., worked for the DoD as assistant secretary of defense for industrial base resilience until May of this year.
Meanwhile Najieb-Locke’s Entanglement, which focuses on AI, quantum computing, and algorithms, appears positioned to benefit from lawmakers’ positive response to the technology-forward hearing.
Indeed, lawmakers present were on the same page. “We need a healthy defense industrial base now to deter aggression and make sure the world’s dictators think again before dragging the U.S. and the world into yet another disastrous conflict,” Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Il.) said.
The hearing’s witnesses may well believe their efforts bolster America’s competitiveness and national security in increasingly tenuous times. And yet, their affiliations suggest their efforts also line their pockets, all while advancing contentious AI-backed and autonomous military production and weapons systems.
Altogether, the witnesses’ drive for ground-up defense industrial base transformation, especially when posed in tandem with what’s depicted as imminent war with China, steers congressional discourse towards a tech-forward war-footing.
Kyiv and Moscow both hinted this week at their shifting expectations and preparations for a potentially approaching conclusion to the Ukraine War, amid a frantic push from the Biden administration to “put Ukraine in the strongest possible position” ahead of President-elect Trump’s inauguration in January.
National security adviser Jake Sullivan reiterated this goal as part of a Dec. 2 White House announcement of $725 million in additional security assistance for Ukraine, which will include substantial artillery, rockets, drones, and land mines and will be delivered “rapidly” to Ukraine’s front lines. The Kremlin said on Tuesday that the new package shows that the Biden administration aims to “throw oil on the fire” of the war before exiting office.
Later in the week, House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters he has no plans to give in to a Biden administration request to include $24 billion in additional Ukraine aid as part of a short-term spending bill that Congress must pass by Dec. 20.
“It is not the place of Joe Biden to make that decision now,” Johnson said. “We have a newly elected president, and we’re going to wait and take the new commander-in-chief’s direction on all of that, so I don’t expect any Ukraine funding to come up now.”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s rhetoric made a subtle shift in the past week, signalling now that he is open to negotiating a peace deal. In an interview over the weekend, he suggested a potential cessation of the lands Russia has seized in exchange for a NATO invitation, with the hope of winning the rest of the territory back “in a diplomatic way.”
Kyiv made this known at a NATO foreign ministers meeting on Tuesday, saying it will not settle for anything less than NATO membership in any future negotiations. Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha referenced Ukraine’s pact with major powers 30 years ago exchanging its nuclear arms for security guarantees it has not received — and only would with NATO membership.
Diplomats sidestepped the call, with several officials saying there remains a lack of consensus in the alliance. Latvian Minister of Foreign Affairs Baiba Braze said NATO political leaders have agreed “in principle” for Ukraine to join the alliance, according to Al Jazeera, but are waiting on Trump’s administration to take office before moving forward.
Russian officials have increasingly hinted at the materialization of peace talks with Ukraine as well; on Monday, Valentina Matviyenko, the speaker of Russia’s upper house of parliament, said there could be attempts at peace talks with Ukraine next year.
Still, the Kremlin remains adamant that the conditions are not yet right for talks. Russian spokesperson Dmitry Peskov thanked Qatar and “many” other countries on Wednesday for their interest in hosting Ukraine peace talks, but said “there are no grounds for negotiations yet.”
Other Ukraine News This Week
Russian President Vladimir Putin approved a 2025-2027 Russian military budget, which includes a 25% increase in military spending, CNN reported. The budget allocates 32.5% of total government spending to the military, a total of $126 billion, for 2025 alone.
Russian and Ukrainian forces have continued heavy exchanges this week, principally in the form of drone attacks, according toAl Jazeera. Russian forces have attacked critical infrastructure The Russian Defence Ministry said this week that its military gained control over the towns of Illinka, Petrivka, Kurakhove, and Novodoarivka in eastern Ukraine.
ABC News reported that the Russian Navy tested new-generation hypersonic missiles, the Zirkon antiship missile and the Kalibr cruise missile, as part of a series of exercises in the eastern Mediterranean Sea on Tuesday. Putin told Russian state media the Zirkon weapon has “no analogues in any country in the world,” according to BBC.
NATO chief Mark Rutte told reporters on Tuesday ahead of the foreign ministers’ meeting that the alliance will step up intelligence sharing and infrastructure development to counter “hostile” acts by Russia and China including “sabotage, cyberattacks, disinformation and energy blackmail.”
NATO concerns about “hybrid” attacks connect to various events throughout the past several months, including an ongoing probe as to whether a Chinese freighter’s severing of two fiber-optic cables in the Baltic Sea last month was sabotage. According to Reuters, China has expressed readiness to assist in the investigation, and Russia has denied involvement in the incident as well as other accusations of sabotage.
From State Department Press Briefing on Dec. 2
State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said “Ukraine’s future is in NATO,” saying they’ve made “great progress” on the outlined path towards membership but also that there is more work they need to do.
“I don’t want to preview any actions that we will take at this meeting, but certainly every time we can get together as allies and to talk with our Ukrainian counterparts, it’s an important step along that road towards NATO membership,” Miller said.
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Top image credit: French President Emmanuel Macron appears on screen as he makes a television address to the nation after Prime Minister Michel Barnier's government was toppled in a no confidence vote in parliament, in Paris, France, December 5, 2024. REUTERS/Christian Hartmann
Two main lessons are to be drawn from the fall of Michel Barnier’s government in France.
The first is that talk of Europe massively re-arming itself and substituting for the U.S. as the chief backer of Ukraine while maintaining existing levels of health care and social security is idiocy. The money is simply not there. The second is that the effort by “mainstream” establishments to exclude populist parties from office is doomed in the long run, and in the short run is a recipe for repeated political crisis and increasing paralysis of government.
Two countries are central to the European Union, the European economy, European defense, and any hope of European strategic autonomy: France and Germany. Within a month of each other, both have seen their governments collapse due to battles over how to reduce their growing budget deficits. In both cases, their fiscal woes have been drastically worsened by a combination of economic stagnation and pressure on welfare budgets with the new costs of rearmament and support for Ukraine.
In both cases, fiscal crisis has fed into the decay of the mainstream political parties that alternated in power for generations — a phenomenon that is to be seen all over Europe (and in the U.S., insofar as Trump represents a revolt against the Republican establishment). This decay is being fed by the growing backlash against dictation by the EU and NATO that is occurring across wide swathes of Europe.
In the French presidential elections of 2017and 2022, Emmanuel Macron defeated the Front National (now the Rassemblement National) of Marine Le Pen by essentially uniting the remnants of all the centrist parties in a grand coalition behind himself. The problem with such grand coalitions of the center however is that they leave opposition nowhere to go but the extremes of Right and Left.
In the case of France, economic stagnation and resistance to Macron’s free market and austerity measures led in June of this year to crushing defeat for his bloc in European parliamentary elections. Macron then called snap French parliamentary elections in the hope that fear of Le Pen and the radical Left would terrify French voters back into support for him. The result however was that Le Pen won a plurality of the vote, and while electoral deals with the Left gave Macron’s bloc a plurality of seats, they are heavily outnumbered by deputies on the Right and Left.
Macron then ditched his left wing allies and stitched up an agreement whereby Le Pen would support a centrist-conservative government under Michel Barnier in return for concessions on immigration policy and other issues. Bizarrely however, this was combined with continued “lawfare” against the Rassemblement National, with the prosecution of Le Pen for allegedly diverting EU parliamentary funds to support her party’s deputies. This is something that looks rather like a technicality or peccadillo, given what we know of the past behavior of EU parliamentarians — but would mean that, if convicted, she would be barred from running for the presidency in 2027.
This of course gave Le Pen every incentive to bring down Barnier’s government in the hope that it will bring down Macron with it, and thereby lead to early presidential elections; and when Barnier’s austerity budget (pushed through by decree against parliamentary opposition) infuriated the Left, Le Pen seized her chance. Given the string of defeats that Macron has now suffered (and remembering that the far greater de Gaulle resigned in 1969 after a far lesser defeat), it would make sense for Macron to step down. This would most probably lead to a presidency of the Rassemblement National; but then again, this is also probable if presidential elections take place on schedule in 2027.
German politics are in certain respects tracking those of France, but some years behind. Not long ago one would have said a generation behind, but European political change is clearly speeding up. After the 2021 general elections, the decline in support for the Social Democratic party, and the rise of the right-wing populist Alternative fuer Deutchland (AfD) and the left-wing populist Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) forced the Social Democrats into an uneasy coalition with two deeply ideologically opposed partners, the Liberals (FDP) and the Greens.
As Germany’s economic position worsened, internal battles over the budget also worsened until the coalition eventually collapsed. Opinion polls indicate that the centrist conservative Christian Democrats will come first in elections due in February, but will be far short of an absolute majority. The result will be a grand coalition with the Social Democrats; but if that also falls short of an absolute majority, and the Liberals fail to pass the five percent threshold to enter the German parliament, then (assuming a continued determination to exclude AfD and BSW), the Greens will have to be included.
Not only will this replicate the internal weaknesses and divisions of the last coalition, but it will mean that if Germany’s economic woes continue and the coalition parties’ popularity slumps, AfD and BSW will be the only place for discontented voters to go. These parties, being newer, are not yet nearly as popular as their French equivalents. AfD still has to go much further in the process initiated by Le Pen in the Front National, of purging its more extreme elements; and of course there is the special German historical fear of the radical Right. Nonetheless, there are good reasons to think that the future German trajectory will resemble that of France.
Meanwhile, large parts of the European foreign and security establishments write and talk as if none of this were happening; as if in fact these establishments had been permanently appointed to their positions by Louis XIV and Frederick II, and given by those sovereigns an unlimited right to tax and conscript their subjects.
Thus in an article this week for Foreign Affairs, Elie Tenenbaum of the French Institute of International Relations in Paris and a colleague declare that in response to Trump’s election and in order to block a peace deal disadvantageous to Ukraine and “impose conditions of its own,” Europe must “force its way to the negotiating table.” A European coalition force of “at least four to five multinational brigades” should be deployed to eastern Ukraine to guarantee against further Russian aggression. European combat air patrols could be deployed “while the war is still underway.” And “if Russia remains unyielding, Europe must bear the bulk of the financial assistance to support Ukraine in a protracted conflict.”
Where the money and the public support for such a program is to come from is nowhere indicated.
I don’t know an appropriate and printable French response to these daydreams, but the Kremlin may reply with an old Russian saying: “Oh sure — when crabs learn to whistle.”
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