Prominent artificial intelligence research organization OpenAI recently appointed newly retired U.S. Army General and former National Security Agency (NSA) director Paul M. Nakasone to its board of directors.
Nakasone will join the Board’s newly announced Safety and Security Committee, slated to advise OpenAI’s Board on critical safety- and security-related matters and decisions.
Established following an exodus of OpenAI higher-ups concerned about the company’s perceived de-prioritization of safety-related matters, the new Safety and Security Committee is OpenAI’s apparent effort to reestablish a safety-forward reputation with an increasingly wary public.
AI safety concerns are of the utmost importance, but OpenAI should not use them to ram through an appointment that appears poised to normalize AI’s militarization while spinning theever-revolving door between defense and intelligence agencies and Big Tech.
The ‘revolving door’ strikes again
Following his 38-year military career, including over five years headingU.S. Army Cyber Command, Nakasone’s post-retirement OpenAI appointment and shift to the corporate sector mimics the military-industrial complex’s ever-“revolving door” between senior defense or intelligence agency officials and private industry.
The phenomenon manifests itself in rampant conflicts of interest and massive military contracts alike: according to an April 2024 Costs of War report, U.S. military and intelligence contracts awarded to major tech firms had ceilings “worth at least $53 billion combined” between 2019 and 2022.
Quietly lifting language barring the military application of its tech from its website earlier this year, OpenAI apparently wants in on the cash. The company is currently collaborating with the Pentagon on cybersecurity-related tools to prevent veteran suicide.
A slippery slope
OpenAI remains adamant its tech cannot be used to develop or use weapons despite recent policy changes. But AI’s rapid wartime proliferation in Gaza and Ukraine highlights other industry players’ lack of restraint; failing to keep up could mean losing out on lucrative military contracts in a competitive and unpredictable industry.
Similarly, OpenAI’s current usage policies affirm that the company’s products cannot be used to “compromise the privacy of others,” especially in the forms of “[f]acilitating spyware, communications surveillance, or unauthorized monitoring of individuals.” But Nakasone’s previous role as director of the NSA, an organization infamous for illegally spying on Americans, suggests such policies may not hold water.
In NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden’s words: “There is only one reason for appointing an[NSA] Director to your board. This is a willful, calculated betrayal of the rights of every person on Earth.”
All things considered, Nakasone’s OpenAI appointment signals that a treacherous, more militarized road for OpenAI, as well as AI as a whole, likely lies ahead.
Stavroula Pabst is a reporter for Responsible Statecraft.
Director, General Paul Nakasone, National Security Agency, appears before a Senate Committee on Intelligence hearing to examine worldwide threats, in the Hart Senate Office Building in Washington, DC, USA, Wednesday, March 8, 2023. Photo by Rod Lamkey/CNP/ABACAPRESS.COM via REUTERS
The USS Carney intercepts Houthi missiles in the Red Sea on Oct. 19, 2023. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Aaron Lau/ Public domain)
Historic levels of air defense missiles were expended by U.S. Navy ships in the Middle East in defense of Israel and in protection of Red Sea shipping since October of 2023. This led Admiral James Kilby, Naval Operations acting chief, to testify in June that their ship-launched air defense interceptors — SM-3s — are being expended at an “alarming rate” in defense of Israel.
But just how alarmed should we really be?
To determine this we need to know how many missiles the U.S. had in its inventory prior to October of 2023, how many missiles were expended since then, and how many new missiles have been produced since the beginning of 2024 up through June of 2025.
First, the Navy released a report on how many standard missiles were expended from October 2023 to December 31, 2024 that allows us to make a reasonable guesstimate of how many standard missiles were used to defend Red Sea shipping against the Houthis in first six months of 2025 for a total from October 2023 of 168 SM-2s, 17 SM-3s and 112 SM-6s.
Meanwhile in 2024, Israel suffered two major attacks from Iran: 120 ballistic missiles in April and 180 ballistic missiles on Oct 1. Additional details revealed in this April USNI article, combined with the minimum number of interceptors launched per U.S. Navy interception, allows us to estimate that a total of 24 missiles were expended by a total of four different Arleigh Burke destroyers in 2024 to supplement Israel’s ballistic missile defense: let's say 12 SM-3s and 12 SM-6s.
To come up with an educated guesstimate of how many standard missiles were used to defend Israel during the 2025 12-day war, we will rely on a few plausible assumptions, with the overarching one being that Israel burned through many of its own interceptors in 2024.
This is what presumably led the U.S. Navy to increase the number of Arleigh Burke Destroyers protecting Israel from two in 2024, to five in 2025. We will also assume the destroyers tasked with protecting cities and military facilities many miles inland, were stocked with more than the normal loadout of missiles capable of intercepting ballistic missiles at long range, i.e. SM-3s and SM-6s.
Hence, for the purpose of this analysis, each the of the five destroyers would be loaded out with 30 SM-3s, 40 SM-6s, with the balance of their 96 vertical launch tubes filled with a mix of quad packs of ESSMs, Tomahawk land attack missiles (TLAMs), ASROCs, and of course SM-2s. This is far more SM-3s than the 4 -8 SM-3s these destroyers would normally carry, but given their tasking, it seems reasonable.
Using the above assumptions, and while reserving some for ship defense, the Navy would have collectively launched an estimated 130 SM-3s (though at least one report based on a U.S. official has that number at 80) and 150 SM-6s in defense of Israel in June. We will further guesstimate that the five ships launched at least 100 SM-2 in total to defend against Iranian drones and missile targeting Israeli facilities very near the coast.
Adding in the missiles we know were used to defend Israel in 2024 gives us an estimate of 100 SM-2s, 142 SM-3s and 168 SM-6s used to defend Israel since October 7, 2023.
Combining the numbers with the above estimates for the Red Sea conflict through June 2025, we can estimate a grand total of 268 SM-2s, 159 SM-3s, and 280 SM-6s used in the Middle East from October of 2023 through the end of June 2025.
These estimated numbers may or may not represent “alarming rates” of use depending on how many we started with and how many were produced during the same period. Fortunately, a Heritage Foundation report gives us a base number of missiles in the inventory as of October 2023: 9,100 SM-2s, 400 SM-3s and 1500 SM-6s. It should be noted that the SM-2 estimate could be optimistic due to some of the missiles in the inventory being too old to be cost-effectively upgraded.
To estimate the number of SM-2s, SM-3s and SM-6s produced from October of 2023 through June 30, 2025 we will use publicly available data plus a bit of estimating.
Regarding SM-2 production, it looks like the Pentagon is focusing on upgrading existing SM-2s while continuing to produce new SM-2s for foreign customers. Regarding SM-3 production, the CSIS put together a summary of when SM-3s will be delivered, with 51 SM-3s being delivered in 2024, 71 to be delivered in 2025 (36 by June 30) and 66 in 2026.
This works out to zero new SM-2s, 87 SM-3s and about 187 SM-6s produced for use by the Navy from Jan 1, 2024 through the end of June 2025. For the sake of simplifying, we are not estimating production for the last three months of 2023.
All told with the expenditures in the Red Sea and Israel, we could be looking at a 3% decrease in SM2s, 33% decrease in SM3s, and 17% decrease in SM6s in the U.S. stockpiles since 2023.
These are alarming numbers that become even more alarming if it turns out we expended even more missiles in the June defense of Israel than what we guesstimated above.
Then we have the issue of cost. An October 2024 Wall Street Journal article reported that the number of inceptors deployed since October 2023 cost the U.S. $1.8 billion. Given the level of activity in 2025, this could easily have been doubled by the end of June 2025.
But just looking at the costs in aggregate does not reveal a key problem that the Navy is facing — its per missile cost is too much! SM-3s, depending on the variant, cost between $12.5 million and $28.7 million each, SM-2s cost over $2.5 million, and SM-6s cost $4.3 million.
While we might be able to sustain this kind of exorbitant cost in a fight against a rebel force like the Houthis and a second-tier military like Iran, a fight with a power like China would see standard missile usage skyrocket by more than an order of magnitude.
And with each interception attempt requiring at least two missiles, and often more than that, thwarting a few missiles can easily end up costing more than it does to buy an F-35, making missile defense against a peer adversary seem unaffordable. Now that is truly alarming.
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Top image credit: Dennis MacDonald / Shutterstock.com
Eighty years ago today, August 6, 1945, the U.S. military dropped an atomic weapon nicknamed “Little Boy” on the city Hiroshima, Japan, resulting in a blast equivalent of 15 kilotons of TNT, killing approximately 66,000 people immediately and some 100,000 more, the vast majority civilians, by the end of 1945.
Three days later, the U.S. deployed another nuclear bomb — this one “Fat Man” — on the Japanese city of Nagasaki, leaving upwards of 80,000 people dead by the end of the year.
Japan surrendered in September, bringing a victory to the Allies in the Pacific theater and an end to World War II.
In the 80 years since, nine countries have acquired nuclear weapons arsenals, according to the American Federation of Scientists, which counts some 12,331 warheads (9,600 active) total. Russia and the U.S. have the most, with 5,449 and 5,277 respectively, as of 2023.
Despite fears to the contrary, no nuclear weapon has been used in conflict since Little Boy and Fat Man flattened two Japanese cities 80 years ago this week. This, despite a Cold War spanning decades between the world’s two great powers of the time, the United States and Soviet Union.
What primary lesson should we take away from this fact in our geopolitical history?
Does this mean nuclear deterrence among great powers actually works?
We asked a broad mix of historians, political scientists, anti-nuclear weapons activists and journalists this question, particularly as it relates to heightened fears of Great Power conflict and what appears to be a new era of nuclear proliferation today.
Andy Bacevich, co-founder and Emeritus Board Chair of the Quincy Institute.
Nuclear deterrence assumes rationality. It requires all parties possessing the "ultimate weapon" to recognize that they share a common interest in their continuing non-use. Just to take the American case, can we be certain today that decisions in Washington derive from a rational calculation of interests and the likely implications of action? Or do impulses, ideology, grudges, and the need to settle scores shape behavior?
For all of its flaws, the old (and now justly discredited) foreign policy "establishment" demonstrated a reassuring level of prudence on nuclear matters — at least it did after the Cuban Missile Crisis scared the wits out of everyone.
In retrospect, we can see that the October 1962 brush with Armageddon had a useful educational effect, especially in Washington and Moscow. Whether Donald Trump and his crew endorse or even understand the resulting lessons remains to be seen.
James Carden, editor of the Realist Review
Myths are the lifeblood of the national security establishment. And no myth remains more entrenched after 80 years than the efficacy of nuclear weapons. After all, many argue that President Truman’s decision to use them ended the war — except it didn’t.
Japan had been looking to surrender long before August 6, 1945. The war would have been won, says the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, by November 1st at the latest — even in the absence of an American invasion of the home islands.
Another myth is that nuclear deterrence “works” — well, until it doesn’t. What about the deterrence of conventional attacks? I was in Manhattan 25 years ago when the planes flew into the World Trade Center. Russia, possessor of the largest strategic and tactical nuclear arsenals, has found its weapons have not deterred attacks on its military bases and infrastructure. Nuclear-armed Israel sustained an attack on its own soil in October of 2023. Nuclear weapons pose an unacceptably large threat to the human environment, to global security, and to civilization itself. Let us be done with them.
Brandon Carr, studies associate at the Quincy Institute
The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki ushered in the nuclear age, ending a conflict that, fundamentally, relied on the grinding, attritional destruction of armies at mass scale.
Perhaps the most notable feature of the nuclear age — aside from the avoidance of military nuclear use — is the absence of another conventional great power war. Indeed, the Second World War’s end resulted in a power vacuum that was soon filled by the fierce bipolar competition between the United States and Soviet Union that, like the war that preceded it, was global in scope.
At numerous points during the Cold War and after, the world came exceedingly close to nuclear use that was avoided only by the collective skin of humanity’s teeth. Though the existence of nuclear weapons has not negated the sources of security competition, it has, at times, moderated it — furnishing a “ceiling,” of sorts, for escalation. The war in Ukraine is a clear example of this; throughout the war, but especially at the beginning, decisionmakers in Russia and the United States have plainly been aware of the risks and consequences of nuclear escalation and have worked assiduously to avoid that possible outcome. Whether that means nuclear deterrence is “working” (and will last) is not totally clear; it is a question with an answer that can change at any time. On the whole, however, it is difficult to argue that the existence of nuclear weapons is not a — or the — primary variable that has driven this relative peace between the great powers for nearly 80 years. It is a peace not without flaws but is nonetheless superior to those that came before it.
Emma Claire Foley, nuclear issues campaign director at Roots Action
My academic training, and my more general experience as a person who wants to understand the world, tells me that isolating and asserting specific causes and effects in a situation of infinite contingency — human life on Earth over an 80-year period — is junk thinking. Yet just this proposition, that eight decades with no nuclear war has proven that these weapons are a source of stability, not a profound liability, is constantly brought up as a justification for what appears to be a strong bipartisan consensus in the United States that nuclear weapons should exist into an indefinite future, and they should make us feel more, not less, safe.
A consideration of this question shaped by intellectual integrity and a serious consideration of the stakes of the question would instead acknowledge what we as a country and a world actually stand to lose should this ongoing case study we are all living through show that a world where nuclear weapons exist and countries are willing to use them will in fact experience nuclear war more often than one where they do not exist. Eighty years, by the standards of recorded human history and our much longer tenure on Earth as a species, is not very much time at all.
John Allen Gay, executive director of the John Quincy Adams Society
Nuclear deterrence has worked so far. We cannot know the odds of nuclear war; presumably they are small but not zero. We do know the costs of nuclear war: disaster. A small but nonzero risk of disaster merits our full attention.
So how do we reduce that risk? Many in the nuclear policy space do vital work on questions of nuclear force posture and nuclear doctrine. Yet this is not only a task for atomic wonks. Grand strategy shapes nuclear risk, too. Adding new allies means expanding the number of places we're willing to risk nuclear war. Keeping current alliances means accepting nuclear risks in those alliances. Entering confrontations, military or political, with other nuclear powers means increasing nuclear risk with those enemies. If nuclear risks turn into nuclear war, our posterity may rue our thoughtless commitments — if, that is, we have posterity at all.
Lyle Goldstein, Director of the Asia Program, Defense Priorities
Yes, nuclear weapons have helped to stabilize great power relations in the modern world. Now, the possibility of great power conflict is almost unimaginable. The Russia-Ukraine War stands as a clear example of this quite novel phenomenon. In the absence of nuclear weapons, the U.S. likely would have intervened directly. Nevertheless, all is not well. There are several dangerous tendencies extant in today’s world. Ideology, militarism, and the illusive search for “strategic superiority” all play a role in undermining peaceful relations among the great powers.
However, the biggest single problem with realizing “nuclear peace” is the failure of many foreign policy experts to accept the basic principle of “spheres of influence,” and how this natural principle of world politics accords with major nuclear arsenals. In other words, if Washington would simply accept that other major nuclear powers have their own sacrosanct spheres, global tensions, including nuclear tensions, would radically diminish.
William Hartung, senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute
The idea that the possession of nuclear weapons by major powers has kept the peace over the past 80 years is comforting. It is also dead wrong. Nuclear arsenals may have reduced the prospect of direct conflict among major powers, but they have also served as a shield allowing those same powers to intervene in the global south and on their own borders with near impunity.
Even more concerning is the fact that nuclear arms boosters are moving to define “deterrence” in the most aggressive terms possible.
Minimum deterrence, in which nuclear-armed powers maintain the smallest arsenals needed to dissuade an adversary from attacking them, is one thing. Building a new generation of nuclear weapons and rolling back measures to reduce nuclear risk in the name of deterrence is another. The only way we will absolutely be safe from a nuclear exchange is to get rid of these weapons altogether. In the meantime we should move towards the smallest possible arsenals consistent with deterrence and structure them to minimize the risk of an accidental launch or miscommunication.
Stephen Kinzer, senior fellow at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University
After India successfully tested nuclear weapons in 1998, the New York Times sent me to Pakistan to await its response. Less than two weeks later, Pakistan carried out its own nuclear test. Many Pakistanis I met asked the obvious question: “Why not us?”
Today that question is being asked in more than a few countries. Middle powers see nuclear weapons the way superpowers saw them in the Cold War — as deterrents. By bombing Iraq, Libya, and recently Iran while leaving North Korea alone, the United States has sent a clear message: nuclear weapons keep you safe, not having them makes you vulnerable.
The modern practice of geopolitics makes nuclear proliferation inevitable. We should face it the same way we should face climate change: by preparing to adapt to a new world, not by pretending it’s not coming.
Cynthia Lazaroff, founder of Women Transforming Our Nuclear Legacy andNuclearWakeUpCall.Earth
As we commemorate the 80th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it’s time to dispel the myth that we can count on deterrence to prevent nuclear war. The concept that nuclear powers will be deterred from starting a nuclear war because of the threat of retaliation and mutual annihilation is fundamentally flawed.
Ignoring millennia of human behavior, deterrence rests on the naive assumption that leaders will act rationally and resist the temptation to push the button first,100% of the time, even in peak crisis moments and the fog of war. Deterrence fails to address the risks of unintended escalation and accidental nuclear war including blunder, miscalculation, mistake, and false alarm. We have already had many false alarms and narrowly escaped Armageddon. The only way to avert nuclear war is to eliminate nuclear weapons before they eliminate us. The landmark Nuclear Ban Treaty offers an inspiring pathway forward.
Dan McCarthy, editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review
Nuclear deterrence works not only for great powers but for any country that possesses nuclear weapons. In a world without the bomb, the United States and Soviet Union would very likely have fought a conventional war in Europe sometime in the late 20th century, and today NATO would be directly at war with Russia. There would probably have been a second Korean War, too. On the other hand, “weapons of mass destruction” wouldn’t have served so well as a rationale for the Iraq War, and this year’s Iran crisis wouldn't have been the same, if it had happened at all.
If more states had nuclear weapons, would fewer wars be possible — or would the risk of these weapons being used again only rise? If war became more difficult to wage openly, would this lead to more state sponsorship of terrorism instead? The answer to all of these questions is simply “yes.”
Rajan Menon, Spitzer Professor of International Relations Emeritus at the City College of New York
Nuclear weapons haven’t been used in wartime since the American bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, which killed 110,000-210,000 people within three days. That’s no small matter, considering that there are now nine nuclear-armed states and an estimated 12,241 warheads, including those not deployed on missiles or aircraft (nearly 90% belong to the U.S. and Russia). Nuclear-armed states have traded gunfire and even fought brief wars recently (India and China, India and Pakistan), but those clashes didn’t careen into nuclear war.
Has the world escaped nuclear war for eight decades because deterrence works? Or is that due to sheer luck? Regardless, can the long streak continue indefinitely? There will be no shortage of opinions on these questions — but none that rest on hard facts. Moreover, though many measures are in place to prevent nuclear war, and more are feasible, none are foolproof.
Christopher Preble, senior fellow and director of the Stimson Center’s Reimagining U.S. Grand Strategy Program
If you had said to the scientists at Los Alamos, or to President Harry Truman, or his Secretary of War Henry Stimson, that we would make it 80 years without nuclear weapons having been detonated as an act of war, I think they would have been pleasantly surprised.
It's not accurate to say, however, that nuclear weapons have not been used since August 9, 1945. They have been brandished, much in the way that a handgun is used in a stick up. Some people claim that threats to use nuclear weapons have allowed certain states to achieve their objectives without resorting to war.
But just because we have avoided a nuclear war doesn’t mean we will in the future. We should strive, therefore, to understand the core elements of deterrence, and avoid purchasing more weapons than we need to keep our current streak going.
Max Hastings' “Retribution,” a history of the last year of the war in the Pacific, argues that Japan’s conduct of the war biased U.S. decision making toward use of the bombs.
Also with only a couple of weapons, reluctance to use one for demonstration purposes was to be expected. Despite evidence that some Japanese were noodling about surrender, the fact was that they didn’t actually do so. After 3-and-a-half years of war, and the costs inflicted by the Japanese on Iwo Jima, Okinawa, and Saipan, one could well understand why Truman decided to use the bomb. And it did end the war.
It’s easy to conceive of alternative endgames. The U.S. could simply have starved the Japanese into submission, continued to incinerate them in strategic fire bombing campaigns, let the Russians have a go, or take the risk that even in the absence of formal surrender, a U.S. invasion would be unopposed and bloodless. There were individuals who opposed the use of the bomb against Japan because they thought it would be immoral to punish civilians for the actions of their government. In retrospect, we naturally see them as having had the better argument. But during the summer of 1945, the picture looked very different.
Susi Snyder, programme coordinator, International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons
First, there have been over 2,000 nuclear detonations since the first one took place in New Mexico 80 years ago, and while there has not been another nuclear war since the U.S. bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, thousands of people have been harmed by nuclear weapons explosions in the last 80 years.
Second, nuclear deterrence is a scam. There is no evidence that nuclear weapons deter war beyond the correlation of their existence with the fact they have not been used in warfare since Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The absence of direct conflict between great powers could be attributed to dozens of other factors from integrated economies to the existence of the United Nations. There is no proof that nuclear deterrence works, only that its failure would cause cascading, cumulative, catastrophic consequences.
Finally, it is just not normal for nine countries to assert the right to cause catastrophic harm to every living thing on Earth at a moment’s notice. Nuclear deterrence doctrine is incredibly aggressive. It requires being ready at all times to use nuclear weapons, causing indiscriminate harm, including to people and countries that have nothing to do with the conflict. Fortunately, half of all nations have legally rejected the legitimacy of this concept through the U.N. Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.
Marcus Stanley, director of studies at the Quincy Institute
Today, the bombs the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 would be classified as "low yield" or "tactical" nuclear weapons, as many of the world’s existing arsenals contain many times more explosive power. However, those two bombs killed over 200,000 Japanese civilians and destroyed two cities.
These bombings were a continuation and expansion of World War II’s innovation of the terror bombing of civilian populations, such as the London Blitz and the firebombing of Dresden and Tokyo. But the destructive power of nuclear weapons marked an inflection point in the history of warfare. So far, the fear of nuclear weapons and the “balance of terror” created by opposing nuclear arsenals have prevented any use since 1945. But all we can say is that this truce has held since 1945, not that it will hold in the future.
We know of numerous close calls during the Cold War, some very public (the Cuban Missile Crisis) and others shrouded in secrecy. The current collapse of any infrastructure for international arms control agreements, the planned nuclear weapons build ups by the U.S. and other countries, and the increasing number of countries obtaining nuclear weapons in the belief that they are the only way to guarantee safety in a world where great powers do not respect the sovereignty of smaller nations, should all raise the fear that the nuclear truce will not last.
Michael Swaine, Senior Research Fellow in the Quincy Institute’s East Asia Program
The mass murder by the United States of many thousands of civilians using a horrendous weapon in order to reduce the number of casualties among American soldiers was at root immoral. It was presumably based on the notion that Japanese civilians of all ages would fight American soldiers and hence were in a sense “combatants,” and that only such a horrendous attack could convince the Japanese to surrender unconditionally. Both assumptions are highly contentious. As the Dresden fire bombings also showed, these acts triggered movement toward the development of international laws banning such mass murder of civilians in war. None of this detracts from the horrendous nature of the fascist Japanese and German governments that initiated a world war. But they do speak to the responsibility of combatant nations to avoid civilian casualties, not deliberately increase them exponentially.
Jake Werner, director of the East Asia Program at the Quincy Institute.
To the extent that nuclear deterrence kept the peace among the great powers during the Cold War — and we should remember that proxy wars nonetheless killed tens of millions of people — it rested on an arduously constructed foundation of bureaucratic oversight within the nuclear powers and robust diplomatic structures among them to advance arms control and monitoring. Nuclear deterrence “worked” not through unmediated apprehension, but through a complex apparatus that managed fear and communicated reassurance to all sides.
After the Cold War, the great powers aligned behind market-led globalization and enjoyed peace without such intensive efforts. But that same process led to the steady erosion of bureaucratic regularity of all kinds, including those around nuclear weapons. With the end of great power accord and a global system moving toward open predation, we face a new era of explosive international conflicts with neither bureaucratic safeguards nor market interests to restrain them. If antagonism continues to build, the use of nuclear weapons will very much be under consideration.
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Top image credit: Cameroonian President Paul Biya, July 26, 2022. Photo by Stephane Lemouton/Pool/ABACAPRESS.COM via REUTERS
A few weeks ago, 92-year-old Cameroonian President Paul Biya announced his intention to run for an eighth term in the country’s forthcoming election. This announcement, shocking, albeit widely anticipated, is already fueling fear that the country’s stability could be at risk, with wider implications for regional security.
The aged leader, who has ruled Cameroon with an iron fist since 1982, is easily the oldest president anywhere in the world. Indeed, only a few Cameroonians alive remember a time without Biya in power. Yet recent health scares seem to suggest that he may have reached the limit of his natural abilities. In 2008, his regime carried out a constitutional amendment to annul the two-term limit — clearing Biya’s path to rule for life through elections that, although regular, have been neither free nor fair.
Under his 43-year rule, the country of 29 million has gone from a period of relative stability to one of crisis and conflict. Approximately four in 10 Cameroonians live below the national poverty line, while unemployment, especially among school leavers, is high. This is in spite of Cameroon's rich endowment of natural resources, including oil and natural gas, aluminum and gold.
Since 2014, Cameroon has also come under attack by Boko Haram in the far north while a secessionist insurgency is devastating the country’s Anglophone regions. Cameroon is divided into French and English-speaking regions — a development rooted in the country’s colonial past. The conflict, now in its seventh year, was precipitated in late 2016 by the state’s mishandling of peaceful protests that erupted against the application of the French civil law system by courts in the Anglophone regions. The crisis has led to over 6,000 deaths and the displacement of a million people internally and to neighboring Nigeria.
In the same vein, the Boko Haram conflict has resulted in numerous deaths and the internal displacement of well over 300,000 people, not to mention the disruption of local economies that has led to widespread food insecurity.
To combat the threat, Biya, who is known for a non-aligned foreign approach that has permitted him to play off multiple great powers, recently has had to lean quite heavily on U.S. support for funding and training of the country’s elite Rapid Intervention Brigade (BIR), as well as troops from the Multinational Joint Task Force that Washington established with Cameroon’s neighbors, Nigeria and Chad. U.S. training of Cameroon’s military personnel is valued at $600,000 annually. Washington also has a drone base with approximately 200 personnel stationed in Garoua, a city in northeastern Cameroon, to support the military in its operations against extremism. Cameroon remains one of the diminishing number of former French colonies in sub-Saharan Africa that permits foreign military bases on its territory.
At the same time, Cameroon weighs heavily on Russian President Vladimir Putin’s expansionist aims in the Sahel and West Africa. The country recently renewed a military cooperation agreement with Moscow while playing host to Afrique Média, a Russia-linked news organization generally regarded as Putin’s mouthpiece in the region. Such great-power attention illustrates Cameroon’s potential strategic importance.
In the meantime, the integrity of the October 12 election is already in jeopardy. Out of 83 candidates who submitted applications to run for president, the electoral body, Elections Cameroon, only approved 13, disqualifying Biya’s main challenger, Maurice Kamto, who was the runner-up in the 2018 elections when he won 14.2 percent of the vote. Although those disqualified from the presidential race can file a legal challenge, many Cameroonians don’t believe that anything will come of it.
With Kamto’s exclusion, Biya and his Cameroon People's Democratic Movement (RDPC) party will face less popular candidates, including two of the president’s allies, former Prime Minister Bello Bouba Maigari and Issa Tchiroma Bakary, who resigned in early June as employment minister. Unsurprisingly, their qualification has sparked accusations that Biya and the RDPC are orchestrating another sham election to retain their hold on power.
The resulting situation has heightened political tensions and fueled fears of unrest. On June 12, the U.S. Embassy in Yaounde, the capital, called for respect for press freedom and urged all parties concerned with the electoral process to act in a manner that “promotes peace, respects the rule of law, and upholds democratic norms.” But the situation remains uncertain as security forces have been deployed in the economic hub, Douala, and Yaounde, especially around the headquarters of the electoral council in anticipation of protests.
Biya’s insistence on running is, to put it mildly, bewildering. In a now distant era, Africa’s longstanding aging leaders, such as Senegal’s Léopold Sédar Senghor or Kenya’s Daniel Arap Moi, planned for their succession to both ensure a peaceful transition and preserve their legacies.. Biya’s current gambit suggests he has no such plans. His apparent determination to continue to rule until he nearly turns 100 — presidential terms run seven years — spells trouble to many Cameroonians.
Indeed, in a country where more than 60% of the population is under 25, Biya’s ambition may prove too much for the public and for the ambitions of other members of the ruling elite as they jockey for position in a post-Biya period. To a growing number of analysts, the evolving situation, especially if public protests become widespread and militant, could create a pretext for a military coup. Historically, Cameroon’s army has been loyal to Biya who has only experienced a coup once early in his long rule. Reputed as a master-manipulator of the security forces, Biya has managed to keep ambition in check by keeping the armed forces fragmented and through regular reshuffling.
But as the developments witnessed in Gabon just two years ago show, the specter of coup cannot be fully discounted in a situation of political stasis. In August 2023, Gabonese elite presidential guard mounted a coup that ended the half-century rule of the Bongo dynasty. The irony was that the coup occurred just hours after then-President Ali Bongo had pulled out all the stops to win an unconstitutional third term through an election that all observers, local and foreign, agree was neither free nor fair.
Before matters reach that point in Cameroon, regional bodies, including the African Union, the Economic Community of Central African States, and the Central African Economic and Monetary Community (CEMAC) may be able to exert influence on the upcoming electoral process to ensure greater inclusivity and adherence to basic democratic norms in the runup to the October election. The forthcoming poll is not simply a matter for Cameroonians alone but an important question for the region as well.
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