issue: Foreign Policy & Defense

Jacoby for Forbes: Bound By The Rule Of Law, Europe Wrestles With Escalating Hybrid Warfare

Posted on by Alex Terr

Looking back, Estonian officials are confident that they handled the May 2024 buoy incident about as well as it could be handled. Estonian border guards caught the Russian theft on video: a handful of uniformed men in patrol boats moving slowly up the river between the two countries, systematically removing 25 of the 50 buoys laid down by Estonia to mark the frontier. “Moscow is testing our reaction,” director general of the Estonian police and border guard Egert Belitšev tells me as we watch the tape. “When we don’t react, they go further.”

A tiny country of 1.4 million, formerly occupied by the Soviet Union, Estonia has long seen itself as the front line between Russia and the West, and Estonians are used to the so-called “hybrid” aggression that has been escalating elsewhere in Europe in recent months. The day after the buoy incident, the foreign minister summoned Moscow’s top diplomat in Tallinn and told him in no uncertain terms that the theft was unacceptable. Will that be enough to deter similar sabotage this year? Belitšev shrugs off the question. “We couldn’t follow the provocation,” he explains. “We do not enter Russian territory. Our job is to keep Estonians safe, not provoke World War III.”

It has taken the rest of Europe several years to recognize the growing challenge posed by Moscow’s shadow warfare. But with the provocations increasingly frequent and increasingly menacing—not just cyberattacks and disinformation but bomb threats, arson, and a foiled assassination attempt last year—officials across the continent are wrestling with how to react.

Western countries’ commitment to the rule of law generally prohibits responding in kind—what separates us from the Russians, after all, if not our commitment to a rules-based international order? But it’s not clear that the tools we have at hand are enough to deter Moscow from further aggression. In Western Europe, as in Ukraine, Vladimir Putin believes might makes right, and the civilized world has been largely unable to come up with a counterargument.

Read more in Forbes.

PPI Statement on Biden’s Decision to Block Nippon Steel Purchase of U.S. Steel

Posted on by Alyssa Brown

Today, PPI issued the following statement in response to President Biden’s decision on Nippon Steel’s purchase of U.S. Steel:

“President Biden’s decision this morning to block Nippon Steel’s purchase of U.S. Steel is a bad mistake on the merits, and the White House’s explanation of the reasons is so opaque and so lacking in substance as to suggest that it knows this. Here is the core of the release (with ellipses stripping out some legal language):

‘(a) There is credible evidence that leads me to believe that … Nippon Steel Corporation … through the proposed acquisition of United States Steel Corporation … might take action that threatens to impair the national security of the United States; and

‘(b) Provisions of law, other than section 721 and the International Emergency Economic Powers Act … do not, in my judgment, provide adequate and appropriate authority for me to protect the national security in this matter.’

“Nothing in the release hints in any way as to what ‘action’ Nippon Steel might take and how it might differ from the actions of the company’s steelmaking facilities in Alabama for over a decade. Neither does it suggest what the ‘credible evidence’ the statement mentions might involve. Still, less does the release offer any way to resolve the questions raised if this mutually agreed-upon transaction doesn’t go ahead:

  • Will U.S. Steel now follow through on its statement earlier this year that blocking the transaction would lead to the closure of western Pennsylvania steel mills? If so, how would the administration explain its decision to the affected communities and workers?
  • How does the administration view the possibility of a blast-furnace steel monopoly emerging as a result of an alternative purchase, and its impact on downstream industries such as auto production?
  • Does the administration, in general, feel that foreign investors from allied countries such as Japan, Korea, the European Union, Canada, and the U.K., who employ a quarter of all U.S. manufacturing workers, are unreliable?

“Looking forward, it is very likely to have set a bad precedent for future CFIUS (Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States) decisions on sensitive transactions, which up to now have been civil-service driven and based on objective criteria. As such, it does a disservice to U.S. businesses, to foreign firms interested in manufacturing and employing skilled workers in the United States, and to consumers and unions sharing an interest in transparent decision-making with a clear statutory basis. It also creates deep uncertainty about the future of U.S. Steel, and in particular, its Pennsylvania operations.

“Little about the rationale for this very controversial decision, with its attendant damage to an important alliance and its potential harm to American heavy industry, is clear. The Biden administration owes the country a better explanation, and we hope it will provide one in its remaining days.”

The Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) is a catalyst for policy innovation and political reform based in Washington, D.C. Its mission is to create radically pragmatic ideas for moving America beyond ideological and partisan deadlock. Learn more about PPI by visiting progressivepolicy.org. Find an expert at PPI and follow us on Twitter.

Follow the Progressive Policy Institute.

###

Media Contact: Ian O’Keefe, iokeefe@ppionline.org

Jacoby Interview for The Big Picture With Edwin Eisendrath

Posted on by Max Sherrill

Edwin talks to Tamar Jacoby, director of the New Ukraine Project at the Progressive Policy Institute.

Jacoby, who is based in Kyiv, talked about the mood there, after almost three years of war in the country. “People are tired,” she said, “and that word doesn’t quite even capture it. Kyiv is far from the front, and life goes on in Kyiv. People go to restaurants and bars, and do live their lives, but just about everybody knows or is related to somebody who’s fighting, and indeed, most have casualties in their circle of a family or acquaintances. And the war is coming increasingly to Kyiv and to the west of the country because of the intensified missile and drone strikes.”

Check out the full episode.

Juul in The Hill: Progressives align with DOGE on defense cuts: ‘Let’s play ball’

Posted on by Max Sherrill

Peter Juul, director of national security at the Progressive Policy Institute, a center-left think tank, said the defense budget should increase given the dangerous state of the world, even though he agreed the Pentagon could be more efficient.

“It’s hard to see where you can do that right at this point, unless you’re [proposing] a massive personnel cuts,” he said. “You might be able to shave the top line a bit, but it’s not going to be this massive savings.”

On Capitol Hill, Juul said there is “more appetite” to “keep things where they are or to push them even further,” calling the hope for defense cuts “wishful thinking by progressives.”

Read more in The Hill.

Jacoby for Washington Monthly: The Least Terrible Way for Ukraine to Negotiate with Russia

Posted on by Alex Terr

Many Ukrainians, used to making the best of bad situations, reacted to Donald Trump’s reelection with caustic humor. Among the most heard jokes play off his promise to end the war with Russia in 24 hours. “Has everyone set their timers?” one man asked on Facebook. But underneath the repartee, Ukrainians are tired—ground down by a war, now all but stalemated, that will soon enter its fourth year. So they wait, half-frightened, half-hopeful, for what could be a disastrous defeat or a welcome reprieve.

Few here doubt that Trump’s team will push for negotiations, requiring compromises from both sides but sacrifices mostly from Ukrainians. Morally, this is monstrous. Ukrainians are guilty of nothing but building their country, growing its economy, and yearning for an independent, democratic future. The Kremlin’s crimes, in contrast, are unending. They include the unlawful annexation of Crimea in 2014, a ten-year proxy war in eastern Ukraine, the unprovoked 2022 invasion, the kidnapping of some 20,000 Ukrainian children, and nearly three years of deadly missile strikes on schools, hospitals, and civilian targets in cities across a country of 40 million, to name just a few.

The world’s leading champion of might-makes-right, Vladimir Putin, flouts international norms and sides unashamedly with America’s enemies, from Iran to North Korea. Yet, under Trump, Kyiv and Moscow will now be treated as moral equivalents, two equal parties across a negotiating table, each expected to give a little to get a deal.

But indignation and outrage will do little to help Ukraine in the months ahead as the two sides jockey and the Trump team fine-tunes its approach. Even as the grim game plays out, some outcomes would be better than others—a relatively good peace versus an unspeakable, debilitating deal.

Read more in Washington Monthly

Juul on Medium: The Senate Should Reject These Two Dangerous Nominations

Posted on by Max Sherrill

President-elect Donald Trump has nominated a pair of unqualified and unacceptable individuals to fill two critical national security posts in his upcoming administration: Fox News personality Pete Hegseth as secretary of defense and former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence. Neither nominee possesses any experience managing organizations the size, scope, and scale of the Defense Department or America’s intelligence community. Both hold extreme views that ought to disqualify them from holding any senior national security position, much less ones with the duties and responsibilities they have been nominated for.

The Senate must exercise its Constitutional responsibility of advice and consent to reject these two presidential nominees. If confirmed, both Hegseth and Gabbard would do grave harm to American national security — primarily via the damage they would inflict on the institutions they have been nominated to lead.

Keep reading in Medium.

Jacoby for Forbes: With Trump In The Wings, Can Europe Agree To Cooperate On Defense?

Posted on by Max Sherrill

Andrius Kubilius drew back the curtain about an hour into his November 6 confirmation hearing as the European Union’s first-ever commissioner for defense and space. A former prime minister of Lithuania and long-time member of the European Parliament, Kubilius told a story about a recent war game simulating a Russian attack on his home country.

The alarming finding of the exercise: Lithuania would be overrun—defeated by the Russians and occupied—well before NATO forces arrived, probably about 10 days later. Lithuania estimates that preparing for such an assault would require it to double its defense spending from nearly 3% of GDP, already higher than all but four European countries, to 6%. (The U.S. spends 3.4%, according to NATO.) “How shall we do it?” a somber Kubilius asked his fellow parliamentarians. “How much the European Union can help us? That is the question to which we need to find an answer together.”

Some 1,000 days after Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, with President-elect Donald Trump threatening to end the fighting on terms that many believe will be favorable to Moscow, Europeans are increasingly worried that war is coming to their doorstep. The past year has seen a sharp escalation of sabotage that European intelligence services attribute to Moscow: arson attacks on a Warsaw shopping mall, a German weapons factory and a Ukrainian-owned logistics firm in London, plus a foiled plot to sabotage a military installation in Germany and a conspiracy to assassinate the CEO of a German arms manufacturer, among other illegal acts. And German intelligence has predicted that Russia could be ready for an armed attack on NATO by the end of the decade.

Keep reading in Forbes.

Jacoby for Forbes: Ukrainians Wait For Trump To Transform The War, For Better Or Worse

Posted on by Max Sherrill

With Donald Trump’s reelection roiling capitals across Europe and Asia, in Ukraine, where many expect the new administration to make the most dramatic changes to U.S. policy, the mood is mixed, at once anxious and surprisingly hopeful.

“No one is committing suicide,” Anton Grushetskyi, executive director of the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, a leading polling firm, told me in an interview. “For Ukrainians, this is an existential war. Russia wants to eliminate us and destroy our country, and we can’t just give up.” But as the fighting grinds on, with no victory in sight, many are considering a different approach.

President Volodymyr Zelensky’s “victory plan,” presented to Trump earlier this fall, includes several planks designed to appeal to what is expected to be the new administration’s transactional approach to foreign policy. And many voices, on social media and in parliament, are emphasizing what Kyiv should do in the months ahead to strengthen its hand in anticipation of a Trump presidency.

Keep reading in Forbes.

Jacoby Interview for New Eastern Europe: It May Become a Lonely Fight for Ukraine

Posted on by Max Sherrill

Interview with Tamar Jacoby, American reporter and the Kyiv-based director of the Progressive Policy Institute’s New Ukraine Project. Interviewer: Iwona Reichardt.

IWONA REICHARDT: You have just returned from the United States, where you were observing the final stages of the presidential campaign. Then you came back to Europe, specifically to Ukraine where you spent election night when the results came in. Were you surprised by the news that Donald Trump won?

TAMAR JACOBY: I was – it was a punch in the gut. But I shouldn’t have been surprised. Now that I look at the results, I think we all should have seen it coming. We told ourselves it was 50-50, but it wasn’t 50-50. Trump won by a significant margin. I don’t blame the polling – I don’t think that’s the main problem. I think that people just didn’t want to see a Trump victory coming. I certainly didn’t want to see it. Now we need to accept that Americans have embraced Donald Trump.

It’s hard to understand why exactly. Is it that voters don’t believe he’ll do all the crazy things he says he will do? Or is it that they really just don’t like the direction that Democrats were taking the country? Why this wholehearted embrace? I’m still struggling to understand it. But clearly Americans have embraced Trump, and we are going to have to accept the choice and live with it for four years.

Keep reading in New Eastern Europe.

Jacoby for Washington Monthly: The “Russian World” and Donald Trump

Posted on by Alex Terr

Why did Vladimir Putin invade Ukraine? After more than 300 years in the Russian sphere of influence, first as a de facto colony and then an integral part of the Soviet Union—its breadbasket and industrial heartland—Ukraine wants out. It wants to leave the Russian orbit for the West, fully embrace Western capitalism and democracy, and join Western alliances—NATO and the European Union—as soon as possible.

Nearby Georgia and Moldova are also chaffing against a long history of Russian subjugation. Like Ukraine, both are former socialist republics on the underbelly of the Russian colossus and until recently, both have been advancing toward EU membership. Popular opinion in both countries strongly favors joining the West. And it’s no accident that Putin and his proxies have done everything possible to block and skew their recent democratic elections.

In Moldova, where pre-election polls showed nearly two-thirds of voters in favor of EU membership, a network of Kremlin surrogates, including criminal groups and a pro-Russian oligarch, poured money into the country to interfere with electoral procedures and bribe voters. An estimated $100 million of walking-around cash goes a long way in a nation of just 3 million, and the upshot was a virtual tie in the nationwide referendum on joining the EU: 50.4 percent for joining to 49.6 percent against—hardly the decisive outpouring Moldovan president Maia Sandu was hoping for.

Keep reading in Washington Monthly.

Jacoby for Washington Monthly: A Millennium of Conflict

Posted on by Max Sherrill

An argumentative edge is a risky thing, especially in a book of history, even popular history. We want authors to have views—to see their material in a fresh light, to tell us what’s important, and to impose a frame on the raw facts that deepens our understanding of the past. Some readers even seek out history told from a particular point of view—Marxist history, for example, or postmodern history. But it’s easy for a historian to go too far, for a point of view to start to feel like a tendentious slant. Readers looking for truth quickly come to mistrust a writer who they feel has an ax to grind—especially when the case being made is an argument about genocide.

Eugene Finkel, now a professor of international affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, was born in Lviv, in western Ukraine, into a Jewish family deeply scarred by the Holocaust. As he tells us in his new book, Intent to Destroy, his grandfather Lev Finkel returned home from fighting in World War II to find that his extended family—parents, sisters, brothers-in-law, nieces and nephews—had perished. Eugene, born in 1977, went on to become a scholar of the Shoah, studying first in Israel, then the U.S. In 2017, he produced a well-received scholarly book, Ordinary Jews: Choice and Survival During the Holocaust. Clearly, he knows a great deal about genocide and has some authority to make a case about the violence being perpetrated by Russia in Ukraine.

What he doesn’t seem to grasp is just how overused and muddy the word genocide has become, and how it might undermine rather than strengthen his case about Russia’s brutal aggression against Ukraine.

Keep reading in Washington Monthly.

Ainsley in CNN: The Kamala Harris playbook has already worked in Britain. But the ‘Special Relationship’ is getting more complicated

Posted on by Max Sherrill

The official line from Starmer’s government is unwavering: London will work constructively with whoever wins the presidential contest.

But sources see similarities between Starmer and Harris’ backgrounds, ideologies and paths to power – and several of Starmer’s allies are hoping the strategy that worked for him will help Harris too.

“There are some really striking parallels,” Claire Ainsley, Starmer’s former executive director of policy, told CNN. “The voters that Harris needs to persuade and motivate are very similar to the description of the voters that Labour needed to persuade and motivate.”

Ainsley, who now heads the Project on Center-Left Renewal at the Progressive Policy Institute think tank, presented findings from Labour’s electoral victory to senior Democratic strategists and pollsters in Washington DC last month.

Her trip was part of a wider sharing of information between the two camps that is longstanding – and cuts both ways – but which is irking former President Donald Trump in the final stretches of the campaign. Trump launched an extraordinary spat with Labour on Wednesday, claiming through a lawyer they had been interfering in the election.

Read more in CNN.

Talk Eastern Europe Podcast: Ukraine at a Critical Point

Posted on by Max Sherrill

In this episode of the Talk Eastern Europe Podcast, Adam sits down with Tamar Jacoby, an American reporter and the Kyiv-based director of the Progressive Policy Institute’s New Ukraine Project. They discuss the current moods in Ukraine, the upcoming US election and its impact on Ukraine and how the West can help right now.

Read Tamar’s reporting on the Ukrainian drone industry.

Jacoby for The Bulwark: War-Weary Electorate Leaves Harris Little Room to Maneuver on Ukraine

Posted on by Max Sherrill

Presidential elections are rarely decided on foreign policy, and this year will be no exception. But poll after poll shows a deepening, bipartisan fatigue with foreign entanglements.

The question we face, as important as who will be the next president, is will America slide into isolationism and a disastrous retreat from world affairs?

A new survey by the Wall Street Journal placed that fatigue in stark relief. It asked voters in seven battleground states which presidential candidate they thought was best equipped to guide American foreign policy—specifically, the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East. The result was stunning. Trump leads by a mile: 50 percent to 39 percent on who is best able to handle the war in Ukraine and 48 percent to 33 percent on managing the contest between Israel and Hamas. Also striking, on this issue, the former president enjoys a wide lead among independent voters and even garners significant support among Democrats.

Keep reading in The Bulwark.

Ainsley in BBC: PM says he’s faced ‘choppy days’ since getting the job

Posted on by Max Sherrill

“When I look at what it was I wanted to achieve in the first 100 days and ask myself, have we done what I wanted us to do, what I planned for us to do, the answer is yes.”

Claire Ainsley, chair of the Building Back Britain Commission and a former director of policy to Starmer, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that it was “daft to deny” the government had seen choppy moments.

But she argued that “some of the big judgement calls I think they have got right” – pointing to Starmer’s international diplomacy efforts and “honest” assessment of the state of the public finances.

Read more in BBC.