Diplomacy & Crisis News

Unless its wildfires cause the skies in New York City to turn the color of a sci-fi dystopia, Americans tend not to think much about Canada. But you know who has not forgotten about our neighbor to the north? China’s ruler, Xi Jinping.

As part of China’s unfriendly competition with the West, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) chairman appears to have overseen a far-reaching and complicated effort to advance Beijing’s interests through direct interference in Canada’s 2019 and 2021 federal elections.

Those elections were conducted amidst a hostage crisis. In 2018, China kidnapped two Canadian nationals in response to Ottawa’s decision to detain the chief financial officer of Huawei at the Trump administration’s request. Public reporting suggests the People’s Republic of China’s covert operations were aimed at defeating anti-Chinese candidates for office, “grooming” future political stars in the Vancouver municipal elections, and securing a government led by Justin Trudeau—but a weakened one, reliant on minor parties for confidence and supply (as it happened, the actual result).

The rest of the world only knows about these distressing allegations due to an anonymous source in the Canadian intelligence services, whose identity and true motivations remain unknown. But if these allegations are even remotely true, it would do more than merely rock the Trudeau government; it would be yet another data point that China is embarking on a full-spectrum drive against the democratic West, including by targeting Western publics. To put it mildly, more than Canadian interests are at stake in getting to answers.

At first, it seemed as if we all might soon get clarity. The prime minister ordered two closed-door probes into Chinese chicanery, and then appointed an independent special rapporteur to conduct his own review and make a determination on whether to hold a public inquiry. This is a robust process where a commission is imbued with authoritative power (including subpoena authority and the ability to call witnesses) to pursue a mission of public enlightenment on a thorny and vital issue. Given that the most troubling allegations of Chinese interference seemed to hew in the direction of benefitting Trudeau’s Liberals, such an approach seemed amply warranted and was generally expected.

Despite not having a parliamentary system, we Americans know the value of such independent commissions. After the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, President George W. Bush and Congress agreed to empanel a bipartisan commission to ferret out answers as to how such a horror could have happened. A body so composed and with such a writ, backed by the ability to take testimony and issue subpoenas, was the right call. The 9/11 Commission proceeded to ultimately put together both the definitive history of the attacks and a series of substantive recommendations for precluding future mass casualty terror in America. More than Americans benefited from this process—the entire civilized world was better informed about the Al Qaeda threat as a result.

Bush could have taken a different path—indeed, the president was initially resistant to an independent review. The White House could have insisted on an executive branch investigation instead, perhaps headed by a luminary and family friend such as James A. Baker III. The administration could have assured Congress that Baker would issue regular public reports and hold public hearings, notwithstanding his lack of power to issue compulsory process or to compel testimony.

This hypothetical Baker review could have been couched as being necessary to preserve executive privilege and to avoid the unnecessary difficulty of discussing classified information in a public forum. Such a review would have undoubtedly come under intense criticism, and even if it had reached the same conclusions as the 9/11 Commission, likely would never have achieved purchase as an authoritative account.

Such a “family friend review” is precisely the approach that the Canadian government initially took—with possibly even worse results than might have met a hypothetical “Baker inquiry.” Trudeau appointed David Johnston as special rapporteur. Johnston is a former governor-general, ski-trip companion and friend of Trudeau’s father, and recent associate of the Pierre Trudeau Foundation, an entity which—astoundingly—has just been embroiled in a CCP-backed donation scandal. Nor did Johnston take steps to improve this appearance of bias. Instead, he employed as his right hand a lawyer with a donation history to the Liberal Party, secured crisis management services from the same company assisting former Liberal minister of parliament Han Dong (who was named in one of the more salacious allegations of this l’affaire Cathay), and appears to have failed to interview former Conservative leader Erin O’Toole until after he had already principally drafted his initial report on the crisis.

That report, issued at the end of May, more or less dismissed the public allegations, exonerated the Trudeau government of direct knowledge or wrongdoing, and concluded, despite conceding that Chinese interference existed, that the government should not open a public inquiry into China’s attack on Canada. (Johnston cited the difficulty of discussing classified information in such an inquiry.) By declining to ask for a public inquiry, Johnston ensured that he would remain in control of the government’s public-facing review of China’s election interference. Unsurprisingly, Johnston’s report was quite expectedly received as if the rapporteur was merely providing top cover for the government.

The opposition parties in Parliament—including the left-wing New Democracy Party that holds the balance of power—reacted fast and furious. Johnston was hauled into Commons for a three-hour grilling—which suggested a potentially serious gap between the facts about Chinese targeting of the Tories in 2021 and the content of his report. The Commons also passed a non-binding motion that he be replaced and a public inquiry be opened. Polling found that nearly 60 percent of Canadians disagreed with Johnston on the question—the public demanded a public inquiry.

Johnston and Trudeau initially resisted the backlash, but ultimately, the special rapporteur resigned on Friday. The next day, the government signaled that it was now open to a public inquiry. Chinese political espionage against Canada may yet get the public airing and exacting review that it deserves. And the American people will also benefit from such a course.

Perhaps Xi views Canada as a proving ground for tactics that might be wielded in the 2024 U.S. presidential election, or as a soft underbelly into Five Eyes, or simply as a democratic roadblock to his dream of creating a “Community of Common Destiny for All-Mankind.” The United States needs to know—preferably without relying on decontextualized leaks from our intelligence partner spilling over onto the pages of the Globe and Mail and filtering down into the American media ecosystem.

The scale, scope, and intentions of the Chinese government’s covert electoral operations against our ally’s political system matter, both in terms of truly understanding Beijing’s ambitions and figuring out how to re-establish deterrence against such operations there, here, and throughout the Western democracies. A public inquiry—a “9/11 Commission” for Canada—will have the salutary side effect of helping the American people know what they are up against as they politically organize and associate with one another throughout civil society.

Because we can be sure of one thing: what happens to Ottawa will not stay in Ottawa.

Zac Morgan is an attorney specializing in First Amendment and campaign finance law. He previously worked for the Institute for Free Speech, and currently serves as counsel to Commissioner Allen Dickerson of the Federal Election Commission.

The views expressed in this article are his own and do not express an official view of the U.S. government.

The U.S. Marine Corp’s Force Design 2030 (FD2030), the service branch’s restructuring plan to prepare for a future conflict with near-peer adversaries, includes Littoral Regiments. These could possibly pose a threat to any aggressor’s actions in limited areas of the Western Pacific. They theoretically extend American striking power into areas where our enemies hope to dominate and use as access points into open ocean areas critical to America and its allies.

A legitimate threat is something our enemies will not ignore in a conflict. They will target and strike Littoral Regiments deployed on the small islands that threaten the enemy’s access to the region. Once the regiments’ equipment is destroyed, the enemy can cut off and bypass the island, leaving the Marines to “die on the vine” like Japan’s powerful base at Rabaul in World War II. Therein lies the undiscussed challenge facing Force Design 2030 and the Littoral Regiment concept: how to survive and sustain the regiments against a well-armed, air and missile-equipped enemy.

In today’s world, a threat can be found and struck rapidly from afar. So the regiments must either enjoy significant integrated air and missile defense support or adopt a maritime equivalent to artillery’s “shoot and scoot” tactics. That is, insert quickly, target and shoot and then deploy rapidly to another location. Otherwise, the regiments will suffer the same fate as America’s Wake Island defenders and Japan’s Rabaul and many of its island garrisons in World War II.

A recent exercise at Twentynine Palms, California, reportedly has shown the regiments have a reasonable capability to withstand a combined arms assault. However, has anyone simulated the most likely enemy response to a Littoral Regiment attack, a retaliatory air and missile strike? What air and missile defenses will the regiments enjoy? If China is the enemy, expect those attacks to involve precision strikes U.S. forces have not experienced in years, if not ever. What tools does the regiment or Joint Task Force Commander have to address that problem? Hardening against attacks from above takes time and expense, neither of which exists in abundance once the conflict starts. Dispersal and constant shifting of positions around the island seem wiser, particularly if the regiment adroitly executes camouflage and deception.

Many of the Marines will survive those strikes, but the same cannot be said for the equipment. Without missiles, radars, and other combat systems, the regiment becomes an impotent maritime force that must be reinforced, reconstituted, and logistically supported. Near-peer state opponents have the technology to isolate and re-strike the regiments as required to conduct that state’s operational and strategic objectives. An isolated garrison that can neither strike nor impede enemy operations will be bypassed, monitored and occasionally struck again for training if not operational purposes. That is the fate of unsupported Littoral Regiments that stay in place.

This is not to say such regiments may have no impact or purpose. Their deployment during a crisis could strengthen the deterrence of any U.S. and allied actions. It could also complicate the aggressor’s operations and plans. Suddenly, its access outward may be constrained and the regiments’ presence at or near maritime chokepoints enhances the U.S. and allied ability to enter areas the aggressor hopes to restrict to its own use. However, combatant and Marine commanders need to consider the likely enemy actions against those regiments if the aggressor chooses to launch a war. Island garrisons are only as valuable as their ability to impede enemy operations and that necessitates supporting them against enemy action.

So far, the Navy has not properly supported the Marines Force Design 2030. Proposing a fourteen-knot modified merchant ship does not an amphibious maneuver force make. Instead, naval planners should be working with the Marines to address the regiments’ mission challenges and requirements. The concept is potentially attractive if it addresses all the operational requirements needed for success. Rapid movement and re-deployment will be essential. The Littoral Combat Ships (LCSs) largely are an open-ocean warfare disaster waiting to happen, but they should be considered for the rapid transport mission the Marines need. In World War II, the U.S. Navy modified obsolete destroyers to serve as high-speed amphibious transports. The forty-five-knot Independence-class LCSs can transport the Marines and helo-transportable equipment to and from deployment sites. The heavier equipment will require a platform with greater lift, either an air cushion vehicle the LCS can transport or a seaplane. The Navy-Marine team should examine both if their leaders are serious about the Littoral Regiment concept.

Seaplanes may offer a better solution. They are faster and offer more flexible deployment options. Unfortunately, none with appropriate capabilities are in service now but the Special Operations Community is examining the development of kits to make some C-130 aircraft into ad hoc seaplanes. What will work for special operations forces will work for the Marines. The Littoral Regiments’ radars and other equipment can be transported in C-130s. If shoot and scoot are what one needs, seaplanes are a better option than any ship.

Force Design 2030 has sacrificed the Marine Corps’ overall broad mission capabilities, promising to transform the Marine Corps into an innovative and relevant twenty-first-century warfare force. Making that promise reality will require a great deal more study and thought that has appeared so far in public discourse. The enemy gets a vote in war and so far the FD2030 concept and debate have ignored that potential vote. Neither the Marine Corps nor this nation can afford that oversight to continue.

Looking beyond its combat concept, America also cannot afford FD2030’s impact on the Marine Corps’s broad overall combat capabilities. History has not been kind to single-mission forces and the narrowing of Marine Corps mission focus and capabilities comes at the expense of the missions at which it excels, rapidly responding to the needs of Americans in danger or populations hit by natural or manmade calamities. The Navy-Marine Corps team owes the American people a better plan than that presented in FD2030.

Captain (USN) Carl O. Schuster is a career naval officer who served on a variety of U.S. and allied warships before transferring to intelligence at mid-career. He has extensive experience as a planner at the amphibious group to the theater command level and finished his career as the director of operations at the U.S. Pacific Command’s Joint Intelligence Center.

Image: Courtesy of the U.S. Marine Corps.

Political gridlock is often the result of brutal polarization, ineptitude, or a combination of both. Those following Lebanon understand this reality more than most, especially following the Lebanese parliament’s failure to elect a president for the twelfth time since former President Michel Aoun vacated the post at the end of his term in October 2022. The vote, held on June 14, further illuminates in stark terms the small Mediterranean country’s ongoing political nightmare—one that will prove critical to resolving in the near term amidst what can reasonably be described as a fairly modest step forward in the recent vote.

While a “modest step forward” should be expressed with a particularly grainy piece of salt, the advancement of former finance minister and current senior International Monetary Fund official Jihad Azour as a counterweight to the Hezbollah and Amal-backed Suleiman Frangieh marks a crucial moment in the search for a new Lebanese president. The vote resulted in fifty-nine votes for Azour and fifty-one for Frangieh. The remaining votes included blank ballots, protest votes, or votes for smaller candidates such as General Joseph Aoun and Ziad Baroud, ultimately operating as spoilers to any 65-vote threshold required for a second-round victory.

Still, the outcome is significant, even if it did not produce a new president. Azour enjoys the unique and surprising support of every major Lebanese Christian party—a notoriously fractured voting bloc that includes notable heavy-hitters like the anti-Hezbollah Lebanese Forces, the formerly Hezbollah-aligned Free Patriotic Movement (FPM), and the newly pro-reform Kataeb party. These stakeholders, alongside many of the independent members of parliament (MPs) and some smaller parties, form the backbone of Azour’s leading vote total in the parliamentary session. As a result of the final count, the pro-Frangieh camp’s walkout broke the quorum and close the session after the vote.

Kataeb leader Samy Gemayel described the session and walkout in stark terms, arguing “What happened today was a real uprising of Lebanese MPs… who said no to diktats and threats.” He added, “Today it was obvious that those who ran out of parliament after the first round are those who lost.” Unsurprisingly, the Hezbollah/Amal camp aimed to frame the session as a victory for their bloc, with Amal MP Ali Hassan Khalil claiming “any kind of imposition of a candidate on us will not achieve any results. Dialogue is the only way to elect a president. We have emerged politically victorious.”

It should not be lost on any observers that neither bloc will allow a second-round vote or admit they are aiming to dictate the outcome of the presidency on their own terms. Frangieh is a non-starter for the Christian parties, and unrealistic without FPM support. At present, FPM chief Gebran Bassil does not support Frangieh’s candidacy, and his party will mostly follow his lead in this regard. That being said, Bassil has made clear that support for Azour is not entrenched, just as other Christian leaders continue to re-iterate their differences with FPM while citing a “convergence” around the presidency at this time.

Thus, the Christian parties are trying their hand at particularly bold political gamesmanship. The bloc surrounding Azour—and especially FPM—likely view his candidacy as a mechanism for forcing genuine negotiations around a true consensus candidate for the presidency. Bassil gave an interview shortly after endorsing Azour that confirms his thinking in this regard, expressing that “if we are invited to an election session, we can vote for [Azour]. But will this make him president? If the other side does not agree on him, unfortunately, no.” He went on to say that “we should keep having intensive talks to reach a consensus.”

One can be excused for viewing Bassi’s comments as altruistic. The senior politician and former FPM golden boy was once believed to be a shoo-in for the presidency, widely thought to be Aoun’s natural successor given FPM’s political strength before the recent parliamentary elections. Rather, a long career of energy-sector corruption and sanctions, alongside a close and potentially harmful Hezbollah alliance, caught up with him. He is widely regarded as one of the most hated politicians in Lebanon today.

Regardless, Bassil understands the political game being played. He likely expected Hezbollah to support his nomination upon Aoun’s departure—something that was simply never going to happen given the sanctions issue. Rather than risk a political liability in Bassil, Hezbollah opted for what they believe is a less controversial candidate in Frangieh. This ultimately pushed Bassil away, broadening a rift in the alliance that had been developing since last year—largely over the role of the cabinet and government without a presidency.

Bassil could still be aiming for the presidency in his recent moves, although this approach is likely folly for the reasons already stated. Still, his call for talks and signals to the Hezbollah camp expressing his flexibility is probably not lost on the Lebanese armed group. Ultimately, Bassil’s rhetoric is up to interpretation at present—whether he is still gunning for the presidency or trying to play dealmaker to clean up his image with the Lebanese populace and international community remains to be seen.

Ultimately, the makeup of Lebanon’s political system makes it nearly impossible for one political bloc to impose a candidate. This requires true dialogue that either bridges the divide between the two core political blocs or manages to pull in the necessary spoilers needed to reach sixty-five votes, although the latter option fails to address the quorum issue. This dynamic is unlikely to be resolved soon and will probably and unfortunately require international influence to resolve.

Whether or not new regional dynamics play a role here remains to be seen. The French play a major role here, and the Saudi crown prince’s visit to Paris on June 16 included talks on Beirut and calls to resolve the presidential impasse. Additionally, the Iran-Saudi Arabia deal brokered by China is thought to be an opportunity for resolving Beirut’s political impasse. Yet while this is certainly a reasonable analysis of the situation, the deal has yet to foster any noticeable progress in Lebanon today, especially relative to Syria and, to a lesser extent, Yemen. Still, Tehran and Riyadh likely did discuss Lebanon’s political troubles in great detail during the Saudi foreign minister’s historic visit to Iran on June 17.

Should the historic rivals truly hope to expand on their historic deal, all roads could lead to Beirut. But no one should count their bets on this outcome yet, leaving Lebanon and the Lebanese stuck in their ongoing political stalemate for the foreseeable future, even after some consolidation around two core candidates that constitute a small advancement in 2023.

Alexander Langlois is a foreign policy analyst focused on the Middle East and North Africa. He holds an M.A. in International Affairs from American University’s School of International Service. Follow him at @langloisajl.

Image: Shutterstock.

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In recent months, the flagship Taiwanese tech firm, the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), has been a focus of discussions about a potential Chinese invasion of Taiwan. For instance, Nikkei published a piece by Jared M. McKinney, a professor at the U.S. Air Force War College. McKinney argues that Taiwan should destroy TSMC’s world-leading chip foundries to prevent them from falling into PRC hands.

After China gets its hands on the advanced extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) machines, McKinney contends, it could then proceed to develop its own alternative chip-making capacity; “Once it got through short-term disruptions, China could emerge as a semiconductor superpower that is essentially self-reliant.” It follows that threatening to destroy the machines would help deter an invasion, and “It is in Taiwan's interest to make clear that China will not gain access to TSMC's EUV machines and semiconductor foundries if it invades.”

However, the truth is simple: TSMC is irrelevant.

Long before TSMC emerged as a semiconductor colossus, Chinese leaders claimed Taiwan as a sovereign territory of the People’s Republic. The claim exists irrespective of Taiwan’s economic prowess. Although McKinney does not argue the TSMC drives the PRC’s annexation dreams, other commentators like Marc Kennis have argued this explicitly. If TSMC disappeared tomorrow, Beijing would go right on pretending Taiwan has always been part of China.

Prior to 1942, as Alan Wachman observed in Why Taiwan? Geostrategic Rationales for China’s Territorial Integrity both the Nationalist (KMT) and Communist (CCP) leaderships were indifferent to Taiwan during the interwar period. Comments from elites, youth publications, and government intelligence reports treated Taiwan as lying outside China’s traditional domain and assumed that the island’s inhabitants would one day form an independent state.

After Japan brought the US into World War II, Chinese elites began considering what territories would be up for grabs following the conflict. The KMT government under Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek started to rewrite the history of China to include Taiwan, and the Communists followed suit when they took power in 1949. With a zeal whose strength is as great as its historical foundation is false, the Party leadership has internalized the doctored history behind unification as a key strategic objective. In 2000, long before TSMC had become a household name and the darling of would-be George Kennans on the internet, then Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji snarled on the eve of Taiwan’s presidential election: “no matter who comes to power in Taiwan, Taiwan will never be allowed to be independent.”

TSMC is thus irrelevant to the PRC’s desire to annex Taiwan. It is just as unrelated to Chinese objectives following a hypothetical war and occupation.

First, the advanced lithography machines at TSMC will quickly become useless in the event of war. Should they go offline for even a few days, they will accumulate dust and other contaminants and require extensive cleaning. But any war in the Straits will likely go on for weeks. Once the machines go offline, as electricity, labor, and water systems collapse, they will quickly become useless. Dormant machines will require disassembly, refurbishing, or reconstruction once. I have heard from experts that it is unclear whether TSMC staff could do that without foreign inputs, even in peacetime. The war itself will destroy them without Taiwanese sabotage.

TSMC is dependent on supply chains that stretch across national boundaries. Numerous Japanese firms, such as Resonac, which supplies a compound used to polish the silicon wafers, and Shin-Etsu Chemical, help keep the assembly lines rolling. This flow of material imports would dry up instantly in the event of invasion.

The same would go for the hundreds of smaller firms that populate the upstream and downstream of TSMC’s logistics stream. The skilled workers may be conscripted into the army or flee the island. An exodus of essential foreign technicians and migrant laborers is also on the cards. How many will return to work under the PRC’s authoritarian rule?

If the PLA captures TSMC, its technological advantages will quickly fade as new chip manufacturers emerge elsewhere to meet global demand. China, for years, has been cut off from cutting-edge chip-making technology, and its own attempts to forge a world-beating chip industry have foundered on its strict information controls. Not by coincidence, the world’s leading chip firms have emerged in societies where skilled labor and information circulate freely. Hence, when TSMC becomes Chinese, it will fall out of the mainstream of global chip production.

Moreover, practical issues abound. McKinney and others imagine a world where events will quickly return to normal once the war ends. That is not our world. In recent years Taiwan has suffered from chronic drought. In response, TSMC has acquired a fleet of trucks to supply it with over 150,000 tons of water daily. Though generally ignored in invasion hypotheticals, Taiwan's creaky water system is vulnerable to missile attacks or sabotage on dams, pipes, and reservoirs.

Not only is the water supply to TSMC likely to fail and not be easily restored, but its fleet of trucks will be critical war equipment subject to requisition by the government. “In war,” a local city planner once told me, “there will be no private property.” Nor is China, learning from Ukraine, going to leave Taiwan’s electricity systems in operation. The PLA’s artillery, drones, and missiles would target prime movers of every kind, along with buses, public transport systems, trains, roads, bridges, and tunnels (where Taiwan will likely stash its mobile weapons systems). In occupied Taiwan, transportation infrastructure will be scarred for years.

Beijing is well aware of all this. The truth is that TSMC is leverage, but only for China. As long as Taiwan’s fabs are intact and functioning, the PRC gains from threatening to destroy them (“surrender, or we’ll devastate your economy!”), while Taiwan gains nothing from destroying them. Beijing will simply shrug. Indeed, that their destruction might demoralize Taiwan’s population and hurt its export economy is a good reason Beijing might just go ahead and destroy them. The symbolic meaning of Taiwan’s tech industry as the basis of its free existence makes the island’s chip factories targets as tempting as the former mosques in Xinjiang.

Recall that Beijing does not merely want to annex Taiwan: it wants to annihilate the whole idea of an independent, democratic, high-functioning, free Taiwan. Its democracy is a daily refutation of the CCP’s claim that only the party can rule the people it deems “Chinese.” Behavior ranging from the occupation of Hong Kong to the CCP’s strict controls on Chinese firms—and mandatory party appointees in foreign ones—all show that economic gains are less important to the Party than political dominance.

Want to help the US defend Taiwan? Stop talking about TSMC, and start talking about rebuilding the US defense industrial base, cultivating alliances with Japan and other Asian nations, and, most urgently, putting more vertical launching systems on the water to counter the PRC’s massive navy.

After all, those fabs are hothouse flowers that, one way or another, will die the moment the heat of war scorches Taiwan.

Michael Turton is a columnist for the Taipei Times.

Image: Shutterstock.

On June 14, the U.S. Air Force deployed fifth-generation F-22 Raptors to Syria to deter what U.S. Central Command described as “increasingly unsafe and unprofessional behavior by Russian aircraft in the region.” The Raptor, an advanced air-superiority fighter that is renowned for its stealth capabilities, is intended to increase the U.S. military’s ability to defend the 900 U.S. servicemembers that remain deployed in the war-torn country.

The last time the United States sent F-22 fighters to the Middle East was last year, when the combat jets flew to the United Arab Emirates in a show of force following drone and missile attacks by Yemen’s Houthis. However, it is not the aircraft’s first stint in Syria. In the spring of 2018, the F-22 provided “defensive counterair” capabilities by holding Syrian air defense assets at risk during the U.S.-led, multinational strikes against Syrian military targets in response to Damascus’ suspected chemical weapons attacks. Then, in the fall, the F-22 completed its first “combat surge” in Syria, in which U.S. Raptor pilots flew “deep into Syrian territory, facing both enemy fighters and surface-to-air missile systems” and deterred nearly 600 Syrian, Iranian, and Russian combat aircraft from threatening U.S. military personnel.

The F-22 has its work cut out for it in Syria, whether in deterring the Russian military or aiding the broader U.S. military mission. Indeed, despite these deployments in defense of the years-long U.S. military presence on the ground, the Air Force reports that Russia has stopped adhering to agreed-upon deconfliction agreements in Syria’s busy skies and that Russian aircraft are harassing U.S. personnel with increasing frequency. The United States has long been concerned about Russian harassment of U.S. forces but has recently observed a “significant spike” in Russian aerial aggression in Syria. On the ground, too, U.S. servicemembers face a variety of threats from Russian forces, which have physically harassed and threatened Americans across the country.

Russia maintains over 2,500 military personnel in Syria in support of its ally, Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, which for all intents and purposes has won his country’s civil war after more than a decade of conflict. Russia and Syria have long disparaged U.S. troops as “occupiers” and insisted that they leave the country. The U.S. refusal has put Americans in harm’s way, and not just from Moscow and Damascus. Iran, another Syrian and Russian ally, has regularly targeted the U.S. military as well. As recently as last March, for instance, a drone attack of “Iranian origin” killed one U.S. contractor and wounded six others in Syria, raising questions about the logic and sustainability of a U.S. presence that has persisted in Syria since 2015.

The United States government consistently points to the threats posed by the remnants of the Islamic State when it justifies the U.S. presence in Syria. To be sure, even after losing its territorial holdings in Iraq and Syria, the terrorist group’s resiliency continues to pose a complex challenge for the U.S.-led multinational coalition, which carried out 313 anti-ISIS operations in 2022. Yet the United States faces more and direr threats from Russia, Iran, and the Syrian government than ISIS itself, which has lost its once-formidable capability to carry out coordinated offensive operations in the Middle East or farther abroad.

In fact, ISIS cannot be defeated by military action alone: tens of thousands of ISIS prisoners, including many foreign fighters and their families, are languishing in Iraqi and Syrian detention centers and prisons. Until these people are repatriated to their countries of origin, they will be at risk of radicalization and recruitment by jihadists, and ISIS will continue to target the prisons in its efforts to free its comrades. As U.S. policymakers should have learned from the U.S. war efforts against Al Qaeda or the Taliban, ISIS is not a problem that the United States can kill its way out of.

However, much like the Taliban has proven its commitment to fighting ISIS even after the United States left Afghanistan, there is reason to believe that Syria, Iran, and Russia will not tolerate ISIS in the Middle East either. Americans should recall that Iran was instrumental in the U.S.-supported fight against ISIS in Iraq and opposed the same terrorist presence in Afghanistan, while Russia has fought ISIS in its efforts to secure Assad’s rule.

It is additionally worth remembering that when President Donald Trump ordered a snap withdrawal from Syria in 2019, it was Russia who moved its troops into the abandoned U.S. outposts and called for de-escalation between the Kurds and Turkey in the northeast. Moscow’s subsequent, fruitful negotiations with Turkey then led to an agreement that prevented a Turkish military operation against the Kurds in exchange for the latter retreating from the Syrian-Turkish border. Turkey, which was responsible for killing ISIS’s latest leader last month, is committed to combatting the same Syrian Kurds that the United States has been supporting since 2014—greatly straining the U.S.-Turkish relationship. This is just one more Gordian knot that the United States has been trying to untie in Syria—without much success.

The fact of the matter is that the United States is an outsider with few friends in Syria. As an uninvited guest in the country, it remains a target of Syrian, Russian, and Iranian military pressure. Its own allies and partners, from the United Arab Emirates to Saudi Arabia and the broader Arab League, have begun welcoming Damascus back into the regional fold with open arms. Its policy of regime change, which began under the Obama administration but has continued in different forms, has long failed. Far from Russia being isolated—even after its invasion of Ukraine—Moscow continues to be an indispensable player in Syria, for Damascus and Tehran as much as Jerusalem and Ankara. The countries of the Middle East understand that the United States will not stay in Syria indefinitely, and they are hedging their bets accordingly. But America has not adapted in kind; instead, it has stayed the course, enduring casualties while vainly searching for a way out. But after nine years of war, only one thing is clear: no amount of F-22s can help America defeat the consequences of its own policy failings.

Adam Lammon is a former executive editor at The National Interest and an analyst of Middle Eastern affairs based in Washington, DC. The opinions expressed in this article are his own. Follow him on Twitter @AdamLammon.

Image: Image courtesy of the U.S. Air Force.

After the initial near-euphoria about Large Language Models, or LLMs, that power generative artificial intelligence (AI), the mood has gone sour. The spotlight shines now on doomsday scenarios where LLMs become self-aware, go out of control, and extinguish humanity.

Fear of sentient robots is hardly new. In an 1899 short story, Ambrose Bierce conjured a robot created by an inventor named Moxon. It looked like a person, if a dour one, but it wasn’t smart enough even to beat Moxon at chess. And when it lost, the robot revealed deep wells of uncontrolled emotion: it murdered Moxon.

This fear has maintained its popularity ever since in books, plays, and movies. Some bad robots appeared simply as machine systems, like homicidal HAL in Stanley Kubrick’s classic 2001: A Space Odyssey. Some robots look human, like the Terminators. And beyond the murderous robots, there are sometimes big networks of robotic systems, such as in The Matrix, whose aim is to enslave humanity. Even Isaac Asimov, who tried to rein in robots with three laws that forbade doing harm to humans, worried that robots could circumvent such strictures.

ChatGPT and Bard are two prominent examples of LLMs that amaze with sophisticated answers to questions. These systems have sparked a huge wave of investment in new services powered by LLMs. And they have unleashed a torrent of anxiety about how their proneness to “hallucinate” (make stuff up) might create havoc with fake news, stolen elections, massive job losses, undermined trust in business, or even destabilization of national security. The worst fears concern the potential for the machines to become sentient and subjugate or exterminate us. A chorus of leading voices from the worlds of high tech and politics has made a case, best summed up by Henry Kissinger, that current advances in AI have put the world in a “mad race for some catastrophe.”

Our assessment is that the furor over the extinction prophecy has gotten the better of us and is distracting from the important work of learning how to use an extremely valuable but inherently error-prone technology safely.

The core of ChatGPT is a huge artificial neural network of 96 layers and 175 billion parameters, trained on hundreds of gigabytes of text from the Internet. When presented with a query (prompt), it responds with a list of the most probable next words. A post-processor chooses one of the words according to their listed probabilities. That word is appended to the prompt and the cycle repeated. What emerges is a fluent string of words that are statistically associated with the prompt.

These strings of words are drawn from multiple text documents in the training set, but the strings do not appear in any single document. ChatGPT is incapable of verifying whether a response is truthful. Its responses that make no sense are called “hallucinations” when all they are is statistical inference from the training data.

Despite their unreliability, LLMs can be useful for amusement and for initial drafts of documents, speeches, research projects, and code. The smart thing is to use them for these purposes but not in any application where harm can result from invalid answers. In fact, it is not hard to imagine harnessing the machine impartiality of ChatGPT to solve contentious problems. For example, we think a robotic approach to gerrymandering would be a great way to build confidence in AI. Task competing LLMs with designing congressional districts that look like simple geometric forms rather than exotic reptiles. The main guidance would be that the districts would have to be as balanced as possible between the registered voters of the two major parties. Our bet is that bots will succeed wildly where humans have failed.

What about the fears of sentience? Can LLMs eventually absorb so much text that they possess all human knowledge and are smarter than any of us? Are they the end of history? The answer is a clear no. The claim that all human knowledge can eventually be captured into machines makes no sense. We can only put into machines knowledge that can be represented by strings of bits. Performance skills like sports, music, master carpentry, or creative writing are prime examples of knowledge that cannot be precisely described and recorded; descriptions of skill do not confer a capability to perform. Even if it could be represented, performance skill is in forms that are inaccessible for recording—our thoughts and reflections, our neuronal memory states, and our neuro-muscular chemical patterns. The sheer volume of all such nonrecorded—and unrecordable—information goes well beyond what might be possible to store in a machine database. Whatever functions can be performed by LLMs are small compared to human capabilities.

In addition to this, statistical inference is surely not the whole story of human cooperation, creativity, coordination, and competition. Have we become so mesmerized by Large Language Models that we do not see the rest of what we do in language? We build relationships. We take care of each other. We recognize and navigate our moods. We build and exercise power. We make commitments and follow through with them. We build organizations and societies. We create traditions and histories. We take responsibility for actions. We build trust. We cultivate wisdom. We love. We imagine what has never been imagined before. We smell the flowers and celebrate with our loved ones. None of these is statistical. There is a great chasm between the capabilities of LLMs and those of human beings.

And beyond LLMs, there is no sign on the horizon of a more advanced, close to intelligent, technology.

So, let’s take a sober attitude toward LLMs, starting by curbing the sensational talk. What if we use the phrase “statistical model of language” instead of “Large Language Model”? Notice how much less threatening, even silly, the extinction prophecy sounds when expressed as, “Humanity goes extinct because of its inability to control statistical models of language.”

Tamping down unreasonable fears will allow us to attend to the serious matters of the economic and social impacts of the latest advances in artificial intelligence, and of LLMs’ penchant for inaccuracy and unreliability. Let us also address the geopolitical stresses between the United States, China, and Russia, which could be exacerbated by an unbridled military arms race in AI that might make going to war seem more thinkable—and which would actually heighten the risks of nuclear escalation by the side losing a machine-based conflict. In this respect, we concur with Kissinger that advanced AI could catalyze a human catastrophe.

Above all, as with previous periods that featured major technological advances, the challenge now is to chart a wise path around fear and hype.

John Arquilla and Peter Denning are distinguished professors at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School. John Arquilla’s latest book is Bitskrieg: The New Challenge of Cyberwarfare (Polity, 2021). Peter Denning most recently co-authored Computational Thinking (MIT Press, 2019).

The views expressed in this article are solely theirs.

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