After a diplomatic struggle during which service members on the ground were complaining they were being "held hostage," the Biden administration has announced that it is pulling up stakes in Niger at the ruling junta's request.
The junta, which seized power in a coup last August, said it wanted the U.S. out. This occurred last month after a reportedly disagreeable meeting between Niger and U.S. diplomatic officials. Washington has a drone base in Niger and 1,100 Army and Air Force members, who have been conducting counterterrorism operations and training there since the days of the Global War on Terror.
This week, it was reported in the Washington Post that one of those Air Force officers had written to Congress, telling them that service members there were being "held hostage" to the diplomatic back-and-forth and that intelligence on the ground had been withheld by U.S. embassy officials in order to buy time to successfully maintain permission for the American government to stay. This has been denied both the State Department and Pentagon.
The whistleblower also said that deployments had been extended beyond six months because the junta was no longer approving new visas for any Americans.
A woman who said her husband was currently stationed there, contacted RS on Thursday to concur with the whistleblower. She said planes had not been able to fly in or out of Niger for at least two weeks and that the only supplies were getting in via truck. Service members were concerned and told they were not leaving to come home as planned.
"So they're not being told anything other than it could be a few weeks or it could be a few months," she told me. "And that's terrible. Because we already have a problem with getting people to join the military. You might want to take care of the ones we got in."
The DoD press has not returned a request for comment as of this time.
It turns out her husband will be coming home after all, but it is not clear when the demobilization will occur. According to reports on Saturday, U.S. officials have offered no timeline for withdrawal besides talks set to start in the coming days about next steps.
The move will be a blow to the U.S military, which has prized its relationships with the countries of the Sahel and the footprint that comes with it. Washington has poured billions of dollars in aid and equipment into these militaries, but in recent times it has gone sour with coups by commanders who had likely been beneficiaries of American largess and training. Niger has also kicked the French military out, as has Mali. Meanwhile, some of these juntas, including Niger, have been turning to Russia and the Wagner Group for their security needs.
Alex Thurston, a regular RS contributor and non-resident fellow at the Quincy Institute, weighed in on potential impacts in March. "The critical question to ask will not be whether things get worse — security has steadily degraded since approximately 2015 in many parts of the central Sahel — but whether there is any proof that the presence or absence of vast American military expenditures makes any discernible difference."
Kelley Beaucar Vlahos is the Editorial Director of Responsible Statecraft.
Col. Ben Ibrahim, Niger Armed Forces (FAN) director of training, receives a briefing from Senior Master Sgt. Kyle Platt, 724th Expeditionary Air Base Squadron, Civil Engineer Flight, of the CE Flight operations at AB 201, Niger, March 11, 2023. (U.S. Air Force photo by Master Sgt. Michael Matkin)
UKRAINE MARCH 22, 2023: Ukrainian military practice assault tactics at the training ground before counteroffensive operation during Russo-Ukrainian War (Shutterstock/Dymtro Larin)
Ukraine War at 3: The victory we demanded and the attrition we got
The election of U.S. President Donald Trump changed U.S. policy toward Ukraine from “as long as it takes” to seeking a negotiated peace settlement. These negotiations will be driven by the battlefield reality. The side holding the biggest advantage gets to dictate the terms. This gets more complicated if there is no ceasefire during the negotiations and the battlefield remains dynamic. Belligerents may conduct offensive operations while negotiations are progressing to improve their bargaining position. Historically in many conflicts, peace negotiations lasted years, even as the war raged on, such as during the Korean and Vietnam wars. Thus, the balance of power, measured in resources, losses and quality of strategic leadership are critical to the outcome of negotiations.
For Western powers, this carries serious consequences. They have staked their reputation on this conflict and with it, the fate of the rules-based world order. The Global South and the multipolar world order is waiting in the wings to take over. Failure to achieve victory has the potential to fatally undermine that order and remove the West from global leadership, which it has enjoyed for the last several centuries.
The Nature of the Russia-Ukraine War of 2022
The war in Ukraine is now attritional. These types of wars are won not by capturing terrain, but by careful management of resources, preserving one’s own while destroying the enemy’s. The exchange rate of losses must not only be favorable to one side, but it must also account for the total reserves available to the enemy. The path to victory lies in the ability to replace losses while fielding new forces and sustaining the civilian economy and morale. Replacing losses isn’t simply putting men into uniforms and providing basic training. Army units must be collectively trained at multiple levels, which drives the unit cohesion. The more cohesive a unit is, the more complex maneuvers it can execute. Losing too many soldiers resets the unit cohesion until it's incapable of any maneuver except defending a trench.
For this war, terrain is far less important. Fighting is often centered on the same patch of ground with only a little movement until one side is no longer able to sustain the conflict. The Spanish Civil War and World War I are prime examples. These wars were mostly stationary right up to the last moment when one side capitulated. The Ukrainian war is running along the same trajectory.
Strategic leadership is vital because it guides the resource management of the conflict. Failure to identify strategic goals and wasting resources on irrelevant objectives causes the odds of victory slip away. Below is a brief summary of each side’s resource losses and capacity to maintain the conflict to date.
Military conditions of Russian forces
Once the initial blitzkrieg failed to deliver regime change in Kyiv in the first two months, Russian political and military leadership appears to have grasped the attritional nature of the conflict and the importance of preserving resources. They have gone out of their way to preserve their combat capabilities and on three occasions in 2022—at Kyiv, Kharkiv and Kherson—gave up land to save soldiers. These defeats were public relations nightmares, but they preserved experienced soldiers, who were used to form the core of the new army.
Russia appears to be able to replace its losses and still grow the size of its army. According to Mediazona and BBC’s Russian service, the Russian army appears to have suffered a total of slightly over 98,000 dead. This number only includes killed Russian soldiers identified by name and the real number is likely to be much higher. Mediazona itself estimates that the real number is about 165,000. At the same time they also do not count the losses of pro-Russian separatists, so another 20,000 needs to be added to the number, for a rough total of 120,000. This currently averages to about 3,600 dead per month. Historically, for every dead there are four wounded, so another 452,000 wounded needs to be added to the Russian count, which equates to a monthly loss of 14,400 or 18,000 total. However, the same data indicates that out of these, three quarters usually return to duty (RTD) after treatment. To break it down, Russian forces are suffering 7,200 permanent losses and 10,800 RTD per month. At the same time, Russians are recruiting 30,000 volunteers a month, plus the wounded who have recovered. This translates into growth of 24,000 soldiers every month, including RTD. Even if Russian losses are double what Mediazona was able to count, the Russian army is still expanding. Added to this number is a limited force of about 10,000-12,000 North Korea soldiers, who were deployed to help Russian forces drive Ukrainian forces out of Russia’s Kursk region. Russia also has force generation to its advantage. It still has a mandatory draft at 18. Although conscripts are not allowed to be sent into combat outside Russia’s borders, the system provides a year of basic training to every qualified male in Russia. When a Russian volunteers or is mobilized, he only needs a few months of individual refresher and collective training. Ukrainian soldiers must be trained from scratch. This gives Russia a massive advantage in forming new units. The challenge would come if volunteers ran out, as there is very little political appetite in the country for another round of mobilization.
Where the Russian army is weak is its general office corps at operational level. There is a “good old boy” system in the Russian army that does not hold incompetent officers accountable. While many are competent, corruption and lying is tolerated from those who are not. On the battlefield, this often results in commanders falsely claiming to capture objectives. They then launch an assault, without the benefit of firepower provided by higher echelons, to make false reports a reality, usually failing with heavy casualties. Yet even when these officers are caught by Russian military bloggers and the public pressures the Russian Ministry of Defense (MOD) to act, the perpetrators not only escape punishment, but are sometimes promoted to save face by the MOD. In contrast, when competent officers bring up serious issues at the front, they are punished. One example is Maj. Gen. Ivan Popov, the former commander of the 58th Army, who stopped the Ukrainian army’s Zaporizhzhia counteroffensive and is currently under arrest on what look like drummed up charges. These kinds of situations likely doubled the casualty rate inside the Russian Army, expending valuable resources in a self-inflicting wound.
Military conditions of Ukrainian forces
My view is that the Ukrainian senior political leadership has spent too much time trying to attain public relations objectives at a significant cost to military operations.1 The tremendous losses of resources, especially human, have significantly depleted Ukraine’s combat capability and places long term combat potential at risk. This is doubly challenging because Ukraine started out with fewer resources. Russia has three times the population of Ukraine, and in the case of artillery ammunition, it vastly outproduces not only Ukraine, but the entire West by a ratio of three to one.
The pattern of holding on to cities after they became indefensible or attacking even when there was no chance of success was visible across all operations, but two battles stood out the most. The first was the battle of Bakhmut in Ukraine’s Donetsk region from 2022 to 2023. The city had little operational, much less strategic value, in my view. Yet Ukrainian leadership insisted on holding the city to the bitter end. The Russian military used Wagner PMC, augmented by convicts, to assault the city, giving the Russian regular army time to absorb mobilized reservists and establish new formations. To stop them, Ukraine fed a steady stream of men into the city, many of them with little training. The life expectancy of the average Ukrainian soldier dropped to about four hours, according to former U.S. Marine Troy Offenbecker, who fought on the Ukrainian side. It is impossible to say how many died, but a Western journalist counted 250 wounded in one hospital over one day. There were three hospitals in Bakhmut, another in Soledar to the north and one in Chasiv Yar handling casualties south of the city. Using this data point, an average of 1,250 daily wounded can be extrapolated. The ratio of four wounded to one dead gives 312 dead a day for a range of 200 and 400 daily dead, with some reports putting surges to 500 fatalities a day. The battle lasted eight months, for a range of 48,000 to 96,000 Ukrainian dead. By contrast, over the same period, Russians lost about 1,800 PMC soldiers and 11,000 convicts, a 13,000 total. This is in line with the one to three exchange rate that Yevgeny Prigozhin, head of Wagner, claimed in a May 2023 interview. There is no military justification for such loss ratio over one town, especially since there is more defensible terrain behind the city. The only explanation is that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy made Bakhmut into a national symbol after giving the flag signed by Bakhmut defenders with much fanfare to the U.S. Congress and did not want to deal with the optics of losing this symbol. For this, at least 48,000 Ukrainians died, and the city fell anyway.
Later in 2023, at alleged British urging, Ukrainian senior leadership committed their Marine Corps into the most questionable operation yet: the battle of Krinki. The operation had zero chance of success, in my view. To achieve operational objectives and breakout toward Crimea, Ukraine would have had to capture a large bridge head and eventually push artillery on the other side of the river, which requires large quantities of heavy ammunition. To move it across the river, Ukrainians would need bridges over Dnipro, which would be immediately destroyed by robust Russian long-range fire. Ukrainians crossed the river anyway, and for the first month, managed to inflict heavy losses on Russian counterattacks, but afterward, the Russians dug in for a siege, and it was the Ukrainians’ turn for losses. Ukrainian resupply, replacements and casualty evacuation had to be carried out over the exposed Dnipro River, while Russians had the cover of the forests. The result was a deeply lobsided casualty ratio. By the time Ukraine finally called off the operation many months later, the Ukrainian Marine Corps was wiped out, along with two brigades’ worth of artillery. While the operation generated positive media in the West, it is impossible to militarily justify this colossal waste of men and resources.
The Ukrainian army has had some successes where military objective was put first. The Kharkiv offensive was masterfully planned and executed. The careful planning and preparation allowed the Ukrainian army to achieve the element of surprise, which was rapidly exploited.
Ukraine’s total losses are hard to assess. The Jamestown Foundation estimated that Ukraine had mobilized 2 million men back in July 2023, and the number should be approaching 3 million by now. Most estimates place the Ukrainian fielded army at about 1 million men, while Zelenskyy claimed to be fielding 880,000. The official Ukrainian losses of 43,000 are unrealistic in the light of previous numbers. For a more realistic estimate, the “Antiseptic” Telegram channel has one of the few databases that compare current and prewar satellite photos of select Ukrainian cemeteries. The limited nature of cemeteries may result in undercounting; for example, the city of Kharkiv has multiple cemeteries, but only cemetery #18 was surveyed. Soldiers buried in other city cemeteries are not counted. The chart below averages out the percent of prewar population lost by locality and then compares it to the total population of Ukraine. The final estimate is about 769,000 dead, and based on historical data, likely another 769,000 wounded who will never recover enough to go back to the front.
This matches the Jamestown Foundation’s estimate. Some 1.5 million are permanent losses, another 400,000-600,000 wounded recovering in hospitals, leaving 1 million to 800,000 still in the field.
This loss rate means that Ukraine is running out of trained, motivated formations. The problem was exacerbated by the Ukrainian political leadership’s decision to set up new formations instead of replacing losses in existing experienced units. As older formations lost their experienced personnel and combat effectiveness, new formations took extra casualties before they could gain enough experience to be useful. Ukrainians are seeking to change this, but it may be too late. The. experienced soldiers are replaced by men captured on the streets, who have no desire to fight. Last year, 100,000 Ukrainian soldiers deserted. The newly formed 155th Brigade lost over 1,700 of 6,000 men to desertion before it reached the front line. Without a miraculous source of experienced, motivated combat soldiers, the Ukrainian army may collapse in the next six to 12 months. Drafting 18-25 year olds will buy time, but it won’t solve the problem of motivation.
Equipment is also running out. The West, whose military support is keeping Ukraine in the fight, appears to have emptied out its equipment storage, and there is little left to give. Some Western governments have even stripped their own armies of equipment, and are currently non-mission capable. The same situation exists with long-range fires. The West appears to be out of all missiles except German Taurus. These are unlikely to make an impact where Storm Shadows failed.
The one place where Ukraine had been able to equip its forces is the drone warfare. These drones are having disproportionate military impact. FPV drones have essentially kept Ukraine alive for the last year. However, Russians have just as many, likely more, simply due to a larger industrial base and almost unrestricted imports from China. The balance between electronic warfare defense and attacking drones has been shifting back and forth for a while, but lately Russians have gained a clear edge with fiber cable drones, which can’t be jammed. Ukraine has the technology but does not appear to produce in sufficient numbers to match the Russians.
With mounting manpower and equipment shortfalls, it is difficult to see how Ukraine can hold on without the direct intervention of Western, and specifically U.S., forces. Especially with Ukrainian political leadership continuing to prioritize PR instead of military objectives.
For the West, all this carries strategic risk. Western global leadership rested on economic, military and soft power. Economic power is already shaken. Using Power Purchase Parity (PPP) GDP, which measures a nation’s total output instead of the monetary value of its economy, it’s clear that two out of three top global economies are unaligned Asian countries, not Western powers. Russia follows at number four, ahead of Japan and Germany. Western powers, especially their leaders, have staked much of their reputations and accepted economic sacrifices to win this war. A military defeat of Ukraine at Russian hands despite Western support would undermine both the military and soft power aspects of the liberal world order. The latter is already shaken by the Western response to the conflict in Gaza. The result would be the collapse of Western leadership and the replacement of the liberal world order by something else. It is difficult to determine the shape of the new world order, but the transition period is likely to be disruptive and violent as countries around the world realize that a military solution is back on the menu. It would also jeopardize the role of the U.S. dollar in global trade, whose weaponization has spooked many nations into seeking alternative paths. As U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said, “in five years … we won’t have the ability to sanction” as countries find ways around the dollar. This could help to explain why Trump’s team is so keen to end the war in Ukraine.
Conclusion
As of right now, Ukraine still holds cards at the negotiating table. Its army is still in the field, contesting every meter of ground. But time is running out for the Ukrainians. Ukraine has significant problems with manpower. The balance of power is shifting in Russia’s favor, and at some point, Ukrainians will start facing the collapse of the front. This outcome is more likely given the negative trend in decision making by Ukrainian political leadership. Unless they begin to conserve combat power, collapse is growing more likely. Ukraine needs a ceasefire now to gain breathing room for restoring its combat power and improving its standing at the peace negotiations.
The Russians are in the opposite situation. Russian advantages in manpower and equipment are growing. Russia is fielding an equivalent of two new divisions a month. Battlefield conditions and growing combat power mean that they are unlikely to accept any ceasefire until final peace terms are agreed, something they have already made clear. They are also likely to stretch out the negotiation process to improve their battlefield position. Time is on their side, and unless peace can be agreed to now, they are on a path to victory which could have devastating political and economic consequences for the rest of Europe.
Western powers have staked the liberal world order on the outcome of this war. Negotiated peace on Russian terms today would be bad, but betting on an unlikely improvement in battlefield conditions and losing would be far worse. The U.S. appears to be taking the former path, with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth signaling to the Russians that the U.S. is serious about negotiations by taking Ukrainian NATO membership off the table. The EU, however, chose the latter path by promising support as long as it takes and to negotiate from a “position of strength,” not realizing that strength is measured in combat and industrial power, not bold statements. The current trends on the battlefield are more supportive of the U.S. position. It gives the U.S. a chance to contain the fallout from the Ukrainian war to Europe and to preserve its global leadership, especially the dominant role of the U.S. dollar.
With the U.S. increasingly seeing the war as a liability, Ukraine’s negotiating position is at risk of unraveling. Even with U.S. support, Ukraine’s battlefield position is deteriorating. Without U.S. support, Ukraine’s chances of battlefield collapse are vastly higher, even with continued EU aid. Right now, Russians are demanding Crimea and four of Ukraine’s oblasts, a ban on Ukraine entering NATO and the EU and guaranteed rights for Russian-speakers. These demands are for regions where the Russian army already controls 60% or more of the territory. Should Ukraine collapse, the Russian army will surge forward, pushing the line of contact deeper into Ukraine and terms can get worse. There is a good chance that Russia will go for all of Novorossiya, adding Kharkiv, Odesa, Mykolaiv, Poltava and Dnipropetrovsk oblasts to its demands, as well as referendums on succession in Trans Carpathia, and if the political climate in Romania is favorable, for Northern Bukovina, and other Romanian-speaking areas as well, buying off select NATO members with territories to split the unity of alliance. This will reduce Ukraine to a landlocked rump state based around Kyiv, Chernihiv and Lviv.
The real question is: Can Ukraine gain an acceptable, if bitter, peace now, or will it keep fighting, risking a military collapse and a far worse Russian dictate later?
Top Photo: Russian small missile ships Sovetsk and Grad sail along the Neva river during a rehearsal for the Navy Day parade, in Saint Petersburg, Russia July 21, 2024. REUTERS/Anton Vaganov
Today, there are only three global naval powers: the United States, China, and Russia. The British Royal Navy is, sadly, reduced to a small regional naval power, able occasionally to deploy further afield. If Donald Trump wants European states to look after their own collective security, Britain might be better off keeping its handful of ships in the Atlantic.
European politicians and journalists talk constantly about the huge challenge in countering an apparently imminent Russian invasion, should the U.S. back away from NATO under President Trump. With Russia’s Black Sea fleet largely confined to the eastern Black Sea during the war, although still able to inflict severe damage on Ukraine, few people talk about the real Russian naval capacity to challenge Western dominance. Or, indeed, how this will increasingly come up against U.S. naval interests in the Pacific and, potentially, in the Arctic.
This was brought into sharp focus on April 22, when the Royal Navy deployed its Carrier Strike Group 25 on an eight-month deployment to the Indo-Pacific. Aboard the aircraft carrier, HMS The Prince of Wales, his battleship grey hair perfectly set like a character from a low-budget Top Gun movie, Prime Minister Keir Starmer said the deployment shows the UK’s “commitment to global stability. That is an incredible message to our adversaries. It is an incredible show of unity to our allies and our commitment to NATO.”
I wasn’t persuaded by this message. Supported by a frigate each from Canada, Norway, and Spain, almost half of Britain’s fighting ships embarked from Portsmouth and Devonport to much fanfare. When I say half of the ships, I mean, specifically, 1 aircraft carrier, 1 destroyer, 1 frigate, and 1 attack submarine. That’s right, four vessels.
That means the Royal Navy now has only one destroyer, two frigates (a third frigate is currently in Oman), and one attack submarine to defend British shores. Nine other ships are in dry docks, and another three are undergoing maintenance. Three of the Astute Class attack subs — only launched in 2014 — have been under repair for an average of two years each, and HMS Daring, “the world’s most advanced air defense destroyer,” has been in the dry dock since 2017.
If President Trump thought Britain could take more responsibility in Europe for naval security in the Atlantic, he would be wrong. The United Kingdom, the world’s first naval hegemon, now has nine fighting ships that are seaworthy, not including the nuclear missile submarines that are Britain’s Continuous At Sea Deterrent.
I’ve just finished reading “The Royal and Russian Navies, Cooperation, Competition and Confrontation,”written by Britain’s former Naval Attache to Moscow, (Ret.) Captain David Fields RN, and Robert Avery OBE, retired Principal Lecturer at the Defence Centre for Languages & Culture at the UK’s Defence Academy. The authors argue that while we have focused most of our attention on Russia’s army in Ukraine, its navy has rearmed at a fast clip. And thinking about Russia as a relic of its Cold War self is a huge mistake.
Despite being half the size of Britain, economically, laboring under sanctions and the tight fiscal constraints of the war in Ukraine, Russia’s naval yards have built new vessels non-stop for the past decade. Since 2011, Russia has taken delivery of 27 submarines, 6 frigates, 9 corvettes, 16 small missile ships, and other logistic support vessels. Many more are under construction and will arrive by the end of this decade. As the Russians say, “quantity has a quality all of its own.”
Russia now has a terrifying ability to threaten NATO countries through capabilities tested during the Ukraine war, such as its Kalibr Land Attack Cruise Missile, which has been used extensively against Ukrainian critical infrastructure. Its new ships are being fitted for the Tsirkon hypersonic missile and other innovations such as an underwater nuclear drone. I’ve been studying Russia long enough to remember the 2015 accidental (really, not accidental) TV leak of Russia’s plans for a nuclear torpedo.
The Royal Navy, on the other hand, has continued to shrink in the teeth of defense cuts, and each new efficiency drive makes it smaller. The two Albion-class landing vessels, in service for only 20 years, are laid up, and negotiations about their sale to Brazil are at an advanced stage. The increase in defense spending to 2.5% of GDP will mostly be swallowed by the MoD’s bloated procurement programs that are typically delayed and always over budget. It will not produce a rapid conveyor belt of ship-building that has seen Russia overtake Britain at a rapid pace since the Ukraine crisis started.
The book also underlines the importance of dialogue as a key component of deterrence and reminds the reader of the significant naval cooperation that took place between the two navies after the Cold War. When HMS Battleaxe sailed into Baltiysk in 1992, the first Royal Navy ship visit to modern-day Russia, it discovered the remnants of the Soviet Navy, most ships rusting over and unseaworthy, in a dilapidated dockyard. This was an allegory, perhaps, of the Royal Navy today. Fast forward to 2010, and the tide was already turning. The Russian Navy had become the main beneficiary of Russia’s state armament program, and a Russian admiral was saying the UK’s decision to give up the Nimrod Maritime Patrol Aircraft in 2010 made his “life easier.”
When Russia invaded Crimea in 2014, practically all direct engagement between the Royal and Russian navies was cut at the instigation of the UK government. Today, the UK and Russia have no serving military attachés in their respective embassies in London and Moscow for the first time since 1941. Our modern generation of seafarers are now only able to view Russians through binoculars, periscopes, and gun sights. And they have more guns than we do. Britain has literally watched a modernizing Russian navy sail off into a distant horizon as we’ve criticized Russia from an ivory conning tower.
From his ridiculous photo op on the deck of HMS The Prince of Wales, it’s not clear that Keir Starmer has understood that the world now contains just three global naval powers: the United States of America, China, and Russia.
Russian naval ambitions have now grown in the High North (Arctic) and in the Pacific.
While Britain’s modest Carrier Strike Group steams east, Russia has already been active in joint naval exercises with China and Iran, as well as ship visits to Myanmar and other locations. Britain has practically no scope to control Russia’s increasingly assertive naval posture in Asia.
This decade-long lack of engagement — not just by Britain but by America pre-Trump — has left us sailing blind on how Russian doctrine and tactics have shifted in the forge of war in Ukraine. It's clear to me that in this new world order of military burden sharing between America and Europe, Britain would be better placed keeping its handful of ships in the Atlantic, while America increasingly comes into contact with the Russian Navy in the Pacific.
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Top photo credit: Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky ( Maxim Elramsisy/Shutterstock)
In President Donald Trump’s first 100 days, his administration has arrested and detained, without due process, visa holders and other non-citizens in the U.S. for speaking out against Israel’s military actions in Gaza.
That’s not how the administration frames it, but that is the connective tissue in each of the cases.
On Wednesday, the same day Palestinian Columbia University student Mohsen Mahdawi was released on bail pending a Habeas hearing after a judge determined that he did not pose a risk to the public, Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky blasted the Congress for pushing new speech restrictions, particularly antisemitism measures that would restrict criticism of Israel on school campuses.
“We’re either a free society governed by the Constitution, or we’re not. We need to challenge hate with reason, not censorship.”
Paul was specifically addressing the Antisemitism Awareness Act which would codify a Trump-era executive order declaring that antisemitism is a prohibited form of discrimination in schools and universities, and would use the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism in assessing cases of antisemitic discrimination through the Department of Education.
Critics say that it would allow the government to conflate criticism of Zionism and the Israeli government with antisemitism and serve as a dangerous tool to shut down free speech. Paul wondered aloud if campus police would be used in enforcing new speech rules, and how.
As The Jewish Chronicle reported after the vote was postponed, Sen. Paul was part of “a testy hearing on Wednesday that covered objections to the bill ranging from whether a Christian would be barred from saying that Jews killed Jesus, to the acceptability of making contemporary political allusions to Nazi Germany and even the comedy of Jerry Seinfeld and Joan Rivers.”
Paul cited the landmark 1969 Brandenburg v. Ohio case, in which Ku Klux Klan member Clarence Brandenburg was convicted under two Ohio laws of allegedly inciting violence against Jews and African-Americans with his speech.
Brandenburg claimed that his punishment violated the First Amendment. The Supreme Court agreed with him.
“Brandenburg was a Nazi and an antisemite and he said horrible things,” Paul said. “And the First Amendment, the Constitution, the Supreme Court ruled that you can say terrible things.”
The senator compared the American concept of free speech with Europe’s recent crackdowns on speech.
“That’s unique about our country,” Paul said. “In Europe, you can’t say anything. In Europe, if you call a boy who thinks he’s a girl a boy, you can go to jail for that. If you say something about the Holocaust in Europe, you can go to jail.”
To Paul’s point, in 2019, 38-year-old Kate Scottow of Hertfordshire, England, was arrested for “misgendering” a transgender individual. Last year, 61-year-old Neal Lloyd of England was arrested over his Facebook posts about the Israel-Palestine conflict.
Do we want to replicate Europe’s speech laws in the U.S.? Paul raised the question.
“This is what we’re doing,” he insisted. “We’re codifying what Europe did to speech. It’s a terrible idea.”
The Congressional debate is taking place as non-citizen students have been snatched away ostensibly for what they said or wrote about Israel.
The State Department had accused Mahdawi, the former co-president of Columbia University’s Palestinian Student Union, of using “threatening rhetoric and intimidation” against Jewish students during a protest on campus in 2024. A 34-year-old permanent resident of the U.S. who was born and raised in a Palestinian refugee camp in the West Bank before moving to the U.S. and going to Columbia University, Mahdawi was detained by ICE agents while at his naturalization hearing in Vermont on April 14. He was never formally charged with a crime.
We don't know if the other non-citizen students detained by immigration authorities in the last month have actually been involved in threats or intimidation, or even genuine antisemitism, or real support for Hamas, because the administration has been deliberately vague about its reasons for detaining them. Secretary of State Marco Rubio says the administration has the right to deport non-citizens when their "presence and activities in the United States would have serious adverse foreign policy consequences and would compromise a compelling U.S. foreign policy interest."
Mahdawi may be the lucky one. Others are still in detention awaiting hearings.
Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil claims he was arrested on March 8 for a speech he gave during campus protests, though he too was never charged with anything. A judge has said the administration’s attempt to deport him will be decided in court.
Tufts University graduate student Rumeysa Ozturk was snatched off the street near her home in Somerville, Massachusetts, on March 25 for what appears to be an op-ed she wrote for the school newspaper criticizing Israel's war on Gaza, and still awaits potential deportation. Badar Khan Suri, a postdoctoral fellow at Georgetown and an Indian national, was arrested by federal agents in March. He has been accused by Department of Homeland Security officials of spreading Hamas propaganda, something his family and supporters vehemently deny.
In each of these cases, the detainees’ support for the Palestinians’ plight and criticism of Israel’s war in Gaza appear to be the primary reasons behind their arrests, which is illegal according to the U.S. Constitution.
But if America did ignore the First Amendment and allowed rigid UK-style speech laws instead, how far would it go? Do the purveyors of the new antisemitism speech legislation on Capitol Hill know that this could boomerang on them when their ideological opponents someday get back into power?
As journalist Glenn Greenwald observed about the antisemitism legislation, “this is not a hate speech code applying to foreign nationals. It's a hate speech code that applies to American citizens, American faculty members, where people can be punished for the expression of ideas on college campuses cheered for by the right wing faction that has long claimed there's nothing worse than hate speech codes and other forms of suppression of ideas on college campuses.”
Carving out one country in the world and making it forbidden to criticize its government is the complete antithesis of the Constitution’s protections and a betrayal of the American tradition. The First Amendment allows anyone on American soil to critique the U.S. government, but now condemning a foreign government could land you in jail or deported to another country?
On what grounds? By what logic? By whose laws?
Rand Paul is right. One would think that putting America first might include putting its First Amendment first, too.
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