After an earthquake reportedly killed at least 1,000 people in Afghanistan on Wednesday, the international community, including the UK and European Union, kick-started its provision of aid. Even an Indian air force jet landed in Taliban-controlled Kabul with supplies marking a potential overture by New Delhi, which was a longtime critic of any negotiations with the Taliban.
Meanwhile, Pakistan dispatched convoys of essential aid. Iran also pledged to provide assistance. Our partners around the world are engaging with reality in Afghanistan. The regionalization of aid and humanitarian relief to the country should be welcomed by Western capitals because it is far more sustainable and efficient.
But Washington’s risk averse approach to engagement with Taliban-led Afghanistan falls short despite being the largest provider of aid.
As Afghanistan reels from the loss of life, Washington continues to further “assess” its aid options, signaling a continued resistance to working with the Taliban directly. Why doesn’t the U.S. government have a clear and immediate response to a human tragedy of this scale in a country we occupied for two decades? How can Americans and the world hope for a more engaged and nuanced U.S. diplomacy if Washington cannot respond with clarity to such black-and-white situation?
The potential influence of the United States should not be exaggerated. Even the previous Afghan government would have struggled to respond to an earthquake of this magnitude despite substantial support from the United States and its allies. The Taliban also have agency and have adopted policies that make it difficult for foreign governments to engage in good faith. But the chilling effect of U.S. sanctions hinder Afghanistan’s development and frozen foreign exchange reserves prevent the economy from stabilizing.
The White House’s hand-wringing over engagement with Taliban-led Afghanistan feels contrived when one considers that in the not so recent past, U.S. diplomats posed for photo ops with the Taliban, laughed together, and ultimately excluded the Afghan government from negotiations with them.
This earthquake presents a test for the Biden administration. Will it take additional steps to engage with Afghans at a moment of crisis, or will it sit on the sidelines as our partners and foes alike lend a helping hand?
Adam Weinstein is Deputy Director of the Middle East program at the Quincy Institute, whose current research focuses on security and rule of law in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq.
A Taliban helicopter takes off after bringing aid to the site of an earthquake in Gayan, Afghanistan, June 23, 2022. REUTERS/Ali Khara
Russia announced this week that its bilateral trade with China has almost completely moved away from using the U.S. dollar, highlighting the two countries’ commitment to reducing their reliance on the U.S.-led economic system.
Aside from reducing dependency on the Western-dominated global currency, these ‘de-dollarization’ efforts allow Russia and China to avoid the myriad sanctions now preventing Moscow from doing business on the international market.
Western sanctions have helped lead to a boom in trade between Moscow and Beijing since 2022, rising 26% to $240 billion this year. China has also become the world’s leading importer of Russian oil.
De-dollarization isn’t the only scheme Russia is deploying to avoid crushing sanctions. Russian officials announced last week at a United Nations meeting that the Kremlin is spending billions of dollars to dodge Western sanctions by developing new trade routes in Asia.
This plan includes two new transport corridors — one that would link Russia to Kyrgyzstan via the Caspian Sea, and another that would stretch from Belarus to Pakistan. The efforts build on previous plans to redirect trade, including the North-South Corridor, a railway route first conceived in 2000 that would connect Russia to the Indian Ocean via Iran.
After years of delays, Moscow loaned Tehran 1.3 billion euros last year to build its leg of the North-South route. Sergei Ivanov, Russia’s presidential envoy for environmental issues, said that the corridor gives Russia full access to the Persian Gulf, and that “no sanctions will affect it.” The newly announced routes would similarly allow Russia to bypass sanctions and access Asian markets.
Russia and Iran have also boosted their ability to transact with one another by linking their banking systems, as both face sanctions that limit their abilities to transact with the West.
The U.S. and European countries have heavily sanctioned Russia since its 2022 invasion of Ukraine, particularly hampering the Kremlin’s ability to export oil to the West and sell it at competitive market prices. If Russia transports goods through overland corridors that are outside of the jurisdiction of the sanctioning countries, it becomes much more difficult for Western powers to interdict, noted Markus Jaeger of the Atlantic Council.
“They want to reduce the dependency and vulnerability vis-a-vis unfriendly third parties,” Jaeger said.
But if history is any guide, Russia isn’t quite in the clear yet. Sanctions on Iran, including the maximum pressure sanctions imposed during the Trump administration, played a major role in slowing the development of the North-South route. Russia is now loaning money for construction to Iran and is expected to spend approximately $3.5 billion on the project by 2030, according to Russia’s Deputy Prime Minister Marat Khusnullin.
U.S. pressure has also complicated Russia’s economic rapprochement with China, which could face consequences from the West for its support of Moscow, according to Jaeger. He pointed to U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s planned visit to China this week, where he reportedly intends to warn Chinese President Xi Jinping that Washington is concerned about Beijing’s provision of aid to Russia’s military.
Jaeger said that, as China engages more economically with sanctioned countries or entities in Iran or Russia, the risk of becoming the target of European and American sanctions will increase.
“For the U.S., imposing secondary sanctions that affect Chinese entities is seen as a very antagonistic step by China, which risks leading to further tensions in U.S.-Chinese relations,” he said.
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Protesters hold a banner calling on U.S President Joe Biden not to trust Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during a demonstration. REUTERS
The Biden administration is breathing a sigh of relief that it has so far avoided a wider regional war between Israel and Iran. But that self-congratulation should be tempered with realization that it was a close call and that the incentives for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his hawkish governing coalition to provoke one are still present.
The Biden administration’s rhetorical outrage at Iran’s forewarned and well-choreographed symbolic missile and drone attacks on Israeli territory conflicts was absurd, as was its crowing that Israel, with U.S. and allied help, had already “won” by knocking down almost all the sequenced projectiles. American policy has long been so “in the bag” for its Israeli ally, no matter what its behavior, that such silly kabuki has been normalized.
Despite the U.S. declaration of victory, designed to dissuade Israel from a strong escalatory response to the Iranian strike, the Israeli leader came close to ordering a much larger “retaliatory” strike than the limited one the Israelis executed, according to the New York Times.
Although Hamas started the Gaza conflict with its heinous terrorist attack on Israel, Israel’s purposefully reckless attack on Iran’s embassy compound in Syria on April 1, 2024 — which killed seven Iranian military personnel, including three top Iranian generals — threatened to widen and escalate the conflict into a direct Israel-Iran war that easily could have dragged in the United States.
Internationally, overseas embassies are regarded as being the soil of the home country; thus, Israel’s attack on the Iranian embassy in Syria was the same as an attack on Iran itself. As a result, Iran retaliated with the symbolic missile and drone attack against Israeli territory.
Netanyahu and his hawkish governing coalition have blatantly rejected a two-state solution that would go a long way toward diminishing conflict in the region and enhancing Israel’s long-term security. Even before this pugnacious government took office, Israel has long desired to push the United States into a war with its Iranian rival to ensure Israeli regional dominance by severely diminishing Iran’s military capabilities.
This hidden agenda was clearly demonstrated by the Israeli government’s virulent opposition to the U.S.-led nuclear deal with Iran, which would have blocked pathways for Iran to build a nuclear weapon. One would have thought that Israel would have been wildly excited about an agreement that would have severely restrained Iran’s program. Yet, Israel knew that a reduction of tensions between Iran and the United States that the agreement, if it had been fully carried out, would have put any severely debilitating U.S. military attack on Iran’s conventional military capabilities and nuclear program in the deep freeze.
Fortunately, for the hawks in Israel, when President Donald Trump became president, he unilaterally terminated the nuclear deal, again raising the possibility that the United States might do the dirty work of militarily taking on Israel’s archrival.
Given that Netanyahu has foolishly worn a partisan preference for Trump and the Republicans on his sleeve, dragging President Biden, despite appearances, into war with Iran has been difficult.
Yet now may be Netanyahu’s golden opportunity. An even wider war, which includes direct U.S. military conflict with Iran, would help an unpopular, indicted prime minister who may need to stay in power to keep himself out of jail and divert attention from his wildly disproportionate military response and potential bog in Gaza.
America’s alliances and partnerships with other countries are only of value if they advance what should be the end goal — enhancing U.S. security. One issue — in addition to the free rider problem in which the dominant power (always the United States) bears the greater cost burden — is that smaller countries like Israel can have an incentive to be more aggressive with their neighbors when under the protective umbrella of the larger power.
Although intense U.S. and allied pressure on Israel to limit its “retaliatory” strike on Iran has, for the moment, prevented a wider regional war, Netanyahu’s political survival may depend on such escalation, especially if he needs to take the Israeli public’s attention away from the likely quagmire that poorly planned Gaza aftermath will likely bring forth — similar to the continuing counterinsurgency slog after an initial “win” by the United States in Iraq.
Netanyahu has already seen his low poll numbers go up during his dust-up with Iran after his reckless attack on the Iranian embassy. So why not a massive first strike on the Iranian-supported Hezbollah on Israel’s northern border to get the escalation ball rolling? New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof reported that one of his “scarier discussions with an Israeli official recently was his advocacy of a first strike on Hezbollah, and a poll found that 53 percent of Israeli Jews favor such an attack on Hezbollah.”
A lesson of history learned by the American founding generation that was forgotten by U.S. policymakers in their rush to acquire a Pax Americana after World War II: permanent and entangling alliances can commit a country to needless and costly faraway wars — especially a country like the United States that has the intrinsic security advantage of being far away from the world’s centers of conflict. The great powers of Europe also forgot the downside of alliances when those pacts dragged them into a cataclysmic war that none of them wanted: World War I.
To avoid being enmeshed in a wider war in the Middle East, Biden should threaten to cut off or reduce the billions of dollars in annual U.S. military aid to Israel if it does not stop its overheated actions in Gaza and its blatant attempts to widen the war to include Iran. Instead, the United States is in the process of vastly increasing the amount of that aid, further rewarding Israel for its irresponsible behavior.
Total military spending by nations reached a record high of $2.443 trillion in 2023, according to a new report released Monday by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, or SIPRI.
Across the globe, military expenditures increased by 6.8% in real terms over 2022, the steepest rise since 2009, according to the Swedish think tank which has tracked the military spending by countries based on open sources since the 1960s. Every region saw an increase, but Europe, Asia and Oceania, and the Middle East saw the greatest growth..
“The unprecedented rise in military spending is a direct response to the global deterioration in peace and security,” according to Nan Tian, the report’s senior author. “States are prioritizing military strength but they risk an action-reaction spiral in the increasingly volatile geopolitical and security landscape,” he added.
As in the recent past, the United States topped the list of military spenders at $916 billion. It was followed by China with an estimated $296 billion, Russia at an estimated $109 billion, and India at $83.6 billion.
A perennial major arms buyer, Saudi Arabia, at an estimated $75.8 billion, came in fifth, with the United Kingdom ($74.9 billion), Germany ($66.8 billion), Ukraine ($64.8 billion, not including an additional $35 billion in military aid from the U.S. and its NATO partners), and France ($61.3 billion), close behind.
As a percentage of global gross domestic product, or GDP, military spending rose by 2.3% in 2023, and world military spending per person was the highest since 1990, as the Cold War was coming to an end, at $306.
The total of nearly $2.5 trillion was roughly double the amount that the world committed to dealing with climate change which many governments in the Global South, in particular, consider the greatest threat to their security. Global climate-related financing reached a record high in 2021-2022, surpassing $1 trillion for the first time to nearly $1.3 trillion, according to a report issued by the Climate Policy Initiative late last year. The report, however, noted that increases fall far short of what will be needed to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.
Military spending by NATO’s 31 member states, according to the new SIPRI report, accounted for a total of $1.31 trillion dollars, or 55% of global military expenditures. The United States made up more than two-thirds (68%) of NATO’s total military budget, while European NATO members accounted for an additional 28%, the highest percentage in the past decade. Turkey and Canada made up the remaining 4%
A decade after NATO members committed themselves to spending at least 2% of their GDP on their militaries, 11 had met or surpassed that target in 2023, according to the report.
“For European NATO states, the past two years of war in Ukraine have fundamentally changed their security outlook,” according to one of the researchers, Lorenzo Scarazzato. “This shift in threat perception is reflected in growing shares of GDRP being directed toward military spending, with the NATO target of two percent increasingly being seen as a baseline rather than a threshold to reach.”
In 2023, Russian military spending increased by 24%, according to the report, capping a 57% increase since 2014, when Moscow annexed Crimea. The military budget accounted for 5.9% of GDP in 2023, a fraction of the 37% of GDP that Ukraine spent on its military, not including the external aid it received. If that aid is taken into account, the total amount devoted to Ukraine’s military reached around $100 billion, or 91% of Moscow’s military budget.
With an estimated nearly $300 billion military budget, China accounted for half of total military spending across the Asia and Oceania region in 2023, according to the report. That amount marked a 6% increase over 2022 and the 29th successive year of increases in Beijing’s military budget.
The report noted that several of China’s neighbors appear to be linking their own military spending to China’s. The world’s tenth biggest military spender in 2023, Japan increased its budget by 11% to $50.2 billion over 2022. Taiwan increased its military spending to $16.6 billion, also an 11% increase.
As for the Middle East, total military spending in 2023 increased by 9% overall, to $200 billion, the region’s highest annual growth rate of the past decade.
Israel increased its budget by 24% , to $27.5 billion, as a result of the war in Gaza, making it the world’s 15th largest military spender, just ahead of Canada, and well ahead of region’s third biggest spender, Turkey, which also increased its military budget, to nearly $16 billion. Iran’s spending increased only marginally (0.6%) to an estimated $10.3 billion, of which the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps was allocated 37%.
Military spending, according to the report, has also increased in the Americas, particularly as in Central America and Mexico whose governments have tried to beef up their security forces against organized crime over the past decade. The report stated that military budgets have grown by about 55% in those countries since 2014.
Brazil increased its military spending last year by 3.1% to nearly $23 billion, as its Congress has submitted a constitutional amendment that would increase the military budget to an annual minimum of 2% of GDP.