I wrote a piece published today by Defense One on the nuclear aspects of the ongoing crisis between Russia and Ukraine:

The risk that a Russian invasion of Ukraine by conventional forces could lead to the use of nuclear weapons appears relatively low, but their shadow is never completely absent from a crisis involving nuclear-armed states. Moreover, this crisis—no matter how it ends—seems likely to lead toward more strategic instability, not less. As preoccupied as U.S. diplomats must be with the threat of imminent conventional invasion, they must also work urgently to launch confidence-building measures that might prevent a nuclear war.

The recent back-and-forth between Washington and Moscow has been free of explicit nuclear threats, but there has been some nuclear signaling. As Russia massed forces near Ukraine in December, its foreign ministry released two proposed treaties, one for NATO and one for the United States. The draft of the NATO treaty included an article prohibiting the deployment of missiles previously outlawed by the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty. The draft of the U.S. treaty had more explicit references to nuclear weapons, including pledges to not deploy them outside national territory and to not train personnel from non-nuclear countries in their use—a reference to NATO nuclear-sharing arrangements.

The rest of the article can be found on the Defense One website.

The Biden administration recently authorized $2.5 billion in arms sales to Egypt. The weapons were military planes and air defense radar systems. This follows a $170 million military aid authorization in September. It also precedes the suspension of $130 million of military aid. This suspension occurred because Cairo did not meet standards about basic human rights conditions.

Egypt has been the second highest recipient of U.S. military aid worldwide. They receive $1.3 billion per year, most of which is foreign military financing. This aid is earmarked to buy U.S. weapons, equipment, and training. The Biden administration notes that this aid is going to a country that violates U.S. Leahy Law practices. These are the rules that intend to prevent human rights abuses from U.S. security aid. This acknowledgement happened both in 2020 and when it canceled the most recent suspended aid delivery.

Thus, the $2.5 billion sale is an example of a risky sale that the administration should avoid. According to the recently released 2021 Arms Sales Risk Index, Egypt ranks as the eighteenth most risky recipient of arms sales. The government is corrupt, undemocratic, commits human rights abuses, and inspires terrorism. Sending Egypt billions of dollars of U.S. weapons may seem like aiding an ally. Instead, this means that the U.S. needs to choose better allies.

Before, U.S. weapons have financed the Egyptian military. Between 2009 and 2020, the U.S. has sent Egypt $3.2 billion in fighter aircrafts, $2.3 billion in rotary aircrafts, $1.58 billion in support, $1.3 billion in tanks and armored vehicles, $240 million in naval craft, and over $1.4 billion in missiles, munitions, and radar.

The history and current administration’s policy on arms sales to Egypt make little sense. These weapons are not going to causes like improving human rights. From a data perspective, its score in the human rights components of the Cato Institute’s Arms Sales Risk Index have worsened every year.

Beyond the data, over the last five years, Egypt has waged a proxy conflict against Turkey in Libya, is home to around 1,000 ISIS militants, has forced human rights groups to shut down, uses advanced technology to track and target citizens, institutes a prison system that has led to increasing recruits for ISIS and al-Qaeda, and used a draconian counterterrorism campaign to murder 755 people – many of whom are simple political opposition, not terrorists. The military-led government and military itself commit these crimes.

Overall, U.S. weapons in Egypt fund a government whose draconian policies lead to arguments with other Middle Eastern countries and inspire and enable terrorist groups. These weapons help the Egyptian government commit some of the worst human rights abuses occurring in the world.

By definition, transferring weapons to human rights abusers does not help fight human rights abuse. Yet, the Biden administration continues to tout a foreign policy supposedly based on human rights.

The administration cannot have it both ways. It can choose to either support or fight global human rights abuses. Weapons sales to Egypt clearly support human rights abuses, which undermines the stated goals of Biden’s foreign policy.

In Grid News, Sue Mi Terry has a piece asking how North Korea managed to become “the world’s most successful failed state.”

There are plenty of interesting questions surrounding Kim Jong-un’s reign in North Korea, but situating the regime among “failed states” is an intellectual dog’s breakfast. That is because the whole concept of “failed states” is twaddle.

Allow me to mount up on a tired old hobbyhorse: The first scholarly paper I wrote at Cato was with Chris Preble pouring cold water on the concept of state failure and the plan to stand up an office inside the State Department for fixing failed states. Back in 2006, Preble and I wrote that “In fact, the overwhelming majority of failed states have posed no security threat to the United States. The blanket characterization that failed states represent anything monolithic is misleading.” The problem was that in every list of or selection criteria for failed states, there were countries that varied with one another, wildly, on almost every measure. Categories that lump together units that differ in almost every way rarely help us understand the world.

To be sure: None of these countries were garden spots. But to say that North Korea belongs on a list with Afghanistan and Somalia because they have all “failed” obscures more than it reveals.

In truth, North Korea is very identifiable as a state: it savagely pursues power and survival, it pervades North Korean society, it abides no challenges, and it places its leaders’ own interests at the center of North Korean raison d’état. Examining Kim’s hold on power is a worthwhile exercise. But North Korea isn’t a failed state. It is an evil state. Failed states, by contrast, is a failed concept. Let’s stop using it.

United States Representatives Pramila Jayapal (D‑WA) and Barbara Lee (D‑CA) recently introduced a resolution that calls for a massive change to U.S. foreign policy. Rather than focus on military tools such as troops, interoperability drills, and weapons sales, the representatives want one centered around diplomacy and cooperation.

The legislation lacks specifics, but it raises interesting issues about weapons sales. It argues for a transformation in U.S. military aid and weapons transfers policy and says that these tools should only be for governments that are not corrupt and do not abuse human rights.

In the Cato Institute’s 2021 Arms Sales Risk Index, we identify these problems as two of our four vectors that create risk in weapons sales. These vectors are corruption, stability, human rights abuses, and conflict involvement.

A blanket resolution stopping sales to countries that flag as risky on one of these measures, (like the one introduced by Representatives Jayapal and Lee) is noble. Yet, it is important to note that vague statements that try to limit risk in weapons sales often fail.

Since 2000, three pieces of legislation have reduced the risk of weapons transfers. The most comprehensive piece of weapons sales legislation is the Golden Sentry Program introduced in 2001. This monitors government-to-government arms transfers through the Department of Defense after delivery. Then, in 1997 Congress reduced the standard of proof needed to stop security transfers via updates to the Leahy Laws, which was amended to its final version in 2010. Finally, the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act included legislation on arms transfers. This includes limiting security aid to the Northern Triangle and reporting requirements for arms recipients.

These restrictions do not have a large scope and work to prevent only the worst and obvious human rights abuses from U.S. weaponry. The most comprehensive piece of legislation restricting arms sales is the 1976 Arms Export Control Act, which outlines the process for a sale’s approval by Congress. Still, even those faces problems caused by presidential authority over weapons transfers. This is because, even if Congress does issue a joint resolution of disapproval, the president can simply veto the sale unless there is a veto-proof majority. This veto-proof majority has never happened.

Unfortunately, a policy calling for large overhauls to U.S. arms export policy is sure to be dead on arrival because of the revolving door between government and defense contractors, the president’s ability to supersede Congress, and congresspersons’ desires to keep unity amongst their party.

Reducing the risk of arms sales goes beyond human rights violations and government corruption. This needs to start with the president choosing to acknowledge problems and working with Congress to “flip the script” on weapons sales.

Currently, the president can veto any congressional joint resolution of disapproval of a sale, unless Congress has a veto-proof majority. In essence, this means that Congress must block sales rather than approving them. Flipping the script would revise the process by requiring congressional approval for every sale and removing the presidential veto. Moreover, it also will force Congress to justify approval of these sales to their own supporters. These two changes combined will likely lead to a drastic decrease in sales.

Other potential avenues include improving end-use monitoring, rejoining the Arms Trade Treaty, and placing the sale of small arms and light weapons in the State Department’s purview rather than the Commerce Department’s. These solutions involve empowering departments that are supposed to evaluate the risk of sales. By increasing their funding and authority, these departments will be better equipped to evaluate and stop transfers to risky nations.

While the policy by Representatives Jayapal and Lee is noble, it is likely to have no effect on U.S. arms transfer policy. Effective legislation requires showing the signs of human rights violations and corruption as well as supplying relevant aid to the government departments that regulate these sales.

As Russia continues massing troops on its side of the border with Ukraine (as well as Belarus’s), it’s worth asking a few questions before deciding what to do.

The first, and most important one, is what a Russian invasion of Ukraine means for U.S. national security. The answer is “not much,” which may help explain why the question is so rarely being asked. U.S. Secretary of State Tony Blinken answered his own rhetorical question, “why should Americans worry about Ukraine?” by saying the issue is

bigger than Ukraine, because what’s happening is this: You’ve got one country, Russia, by its actions saying that it can just change the borders of its neighbor by force, saying it can decide for its neighbor what its decisions are going to be, with whom it may choose to associate, not the people of that country through their elected government. You have a country saying it’s fine to have a sphere of influence where we basically bend neighbors in our area to our will, not their own choices.

And if we let that go with impunity, then I think we open a huge Pandora’s box where it’s not just Ukraine; it’s other autocratic countries around the world like Russia that say, “We’re going to do this too.” And that is a recipe for conflict. It’s a recipe for chaos. It’s a recipe for human suffering, and it’s a recipe for undermining democracy.

I’d bet Blinken would have a hard time selling this idea at, say, the Peoria World Affairs Council. The administration loves describing its approach to international affairs as being “a foreign policy for the middle class,” but the average American family could reasonably ask: “But how does this affect my family?” As Michael Brendan Dougherty notes in National Review, “As a potential NATO member, Ukraine is basically all liabilities and no benefits… This is why hawks don’t make their case with reference to Ukraine, Russia, and the United States. Instead, Ukraine is conflated with… well, everything.”

The second question is: does Ukraine have a shot of joining NATO? Blinken and the rest of the Biden administration are quite taken with the talking point that “Ukraine gets to choose its alliances.” That’s half of the story. The other half is that NATO requires unanimity among existing members for admitting a new member. NATO’s door is decidedly not open to Ukraine, because its members do not agree Ukraine’s accession would “contribute to the security of the North Atlantic area,” as the North Atlantic Treaty says aspirant members must.

That is how we got the logrolled muddle of the 2008 Bucharest Declaration, which split the baby by saying that Ukraine and Georgia will join NATO someday (the U.S. and Eastern European aspiration) but declined to grant them Membership Action Plans (the Western European reality-check).

There’s a third question here: what does Vladimir Putin want? Nobody except him can answer the question definitively, of course, and even he may not know what his lowest acceptable payoff may be. So I tend to bracket confident assertions that the 2008 NATO pledge to expand to Ukraine is merely a “convenient excuse” because Putin

also wants to keep Ukraine from becoming a successful democracy, because that could create a political model next door to Russia that he fears could inspire his own citizens.

So let’s work from three things that seem clearly true: first, the United States (and, by extension, NATO) is not going to fight Russia in Ukraine if it invades because it does not have interests that warrant the risk. Second, Ukraine’s chances of joining NATO in the policy-relevant future approach zero. Finally, Moscow’s fear of Ukraine joining NATO is at least a central factor contributing to Russian fears and threats.

If all of these are true, it’s a puzzle why U.S. diplomats have declined to make a serious counteroffer to Russia’s (absurdly ambitious) treaty proposal. At the center of that proposal (and almost every Russian utterance about the crisis) has been the prospect of Ukraine joining NATO. If we concede that it is not going to join NATO, and that NATO is not going to fight for Ukraine, and that fear of Ukraine joining NATO is at the center of the Russian calculus, why not try conceding the obvious? It might be difficult for the administration to do so for fear of appearing to reward Russian thuggery, but the alternative is holding Ukraine’s door open to a Russian invasion. Since the latter seems clearly worse than the former, this might not be the best time to pound the table about abstract principles.

NATO or the United States cannot commit to never allow a country to join. But given that Ukraine has next to no hope of joining, engaging seriously with Russia on that point may hold the only hope of forestalling a brutal war that Ukraine would lose. As the days tick by, the cost of trying seems clearly lower than the cost of digging in on the principle that Ukraine has the right to do something it can’t do.

This year is shaping up to be a very active one for North Korea’s missile program. Kim Jong Un’s regime has already conducted four ballistic missile tests so far this year, including two tests of a new, maneuverable warhead that North Korea called a hypersonic glide vehicle (HGV). All of the missiles tested in 2022 thus far, and most tests conducted since the breakdown of nuclear diplomacy in February 2019, were of relatively short-range systems. This trend could change, however, due to recent guidance from North Korea’s politburo.

The politburo report instructs the country’s national defense sector to reconsider “confidence-building measures that we have taken on our own initiative…and to promptly examine the issue of restarting all temporarily-suspended activities.” 

While the politburo report was not explicit, the measures it mentions reconsidering are most likely a moratorium on long-range missile and nuclear weapon testing that Kim Jong Un announced in April 2018 when diplomacy with the United States was on the upswing. Kim officially lifted the moratorium in December 2019 and resumed missile testing, but thus far he has refrained from conducting tests of both nuclear weapons and intercontinental-range ballistic missiles (ICBMs) capable of reaching the United States. Instead, North Korea’s missile tests have emphasized shorter-range systems that could threaten South Korea, Japan, and potentially Guam. 

Resuming ICBM and nuclear weapons tests would be a significant break from recent trends in North Korea’s military activities. Last January in a major address to the ruling Worker’s Party of Korea, Kim set out a weapons wish list that included HGVs, low-yield or “tactical” nuclear warheads, solid-fuel ICBMs, and missiles capable of carrying multiple warheads. As more time goes by without a viable path back to diplomacy, it is not surprising that Kim wants to expand his nuclear arsenal with new capabilities. It is highly likely that North Korea has conducted designed and development work on new ICBMs and nuclear weapons, but it has not tested either type of system since the height of the nuclear crisis of 2017. 

The Trump and Biden administrations were content to leave North Korea more or less alone as it tested short-range missiles in 2020 and 2021. Avoiding an overreaction that might have precipitated a new crisis on the peninsula was wise, but without a political or diplomatic process in place this lack of attention just led to further testing.

If North Korea makes good on its veiled threat to resume ICBM and nuclear weapons tests, the United States will likely face incentives to ratchet up military and/​or economic pressure to both punish North Korea and create leverage for diplomacy. However, North Korea has repeatedly shown a willingness to respond to such pressure with additional escalations of its own. This was the basis of the 2017 crisis, which saw a steadily worsening action-reaction cycle of tests leading to sanctions, leading to more tests. Diplomacy could offer an off-ramp, but North Korea has set high demands to return to the table that the Biden administration is unlikely to accept and Biden is not willing to make a departure from the long-stated U.S. goal of complete denuclearization. Backing down from that unrealistic goal would help, but doing so would not guarantee North Korea’s return to negotiations. 

Hopefully, North Korea is just posturing to make itself look defiant after new U.S. sanctions. However, when combined with the recent acceleration of missile testing, the persistent diplomatic deadlock, and Kim’s instructions at last year’s party congress, the politburo report makes for a very ominous start to a new year on the Korean peninsula. 

In October 2022, the Cato Institute will host our fifth annual Junior Scholars Symposium (JSS), a paper workshop for graduate students on topics broadly related to international security and national security policy. JSS provides participants a unique opportunity to receive feedback on their research in progress from other graduate students and Cato scholars.

Paper topics may include but are not limited to U.S. foreign policy, grand strategy, civil-military relations, alliances and security institutions, diplomatic history, emerging technology, arms control, and nuclear deterrence. Papers that link national security to global health, trade, political economy or immigration are also welcome.

Participants will be expected to produce an original paper of journal-article length; the workshop will focus on paper presentations, discussion and suggestions for improvement, with the expectation that authors will go on to seek publication in external journals or build upon this research as they move towards the dissertation phase of their studies.

Participants are particularly expected to highlight the policy relevance of their work. In keeping with the Cato Institute’s commitment to moving U.S. foreign policy towards prudence and restraint, the policy implications of papers should be broadly compatible with a pragmatic realist approach to foreign policy.

We are planning on holding the 2022 workshop at the Cato Institute building in Washington, D.C. If the COVID-19 pandemic outlook worsens significantly there is a potential that the workshop will take place virtually. We will give participants at least 30 days notice if the format changes to virtual instead of in-person. If the event is held in-person, COVID-19 related protocols may apply. Participants will receive a stipend of $500, and if the workshop is held in-person, will have reasonable travel and accommodation costs covered.

The symposium will take place on October 21^st and 22^nd. To apply, submit an abstract of no more than 500 words to juniorscholars@​cato.​org by April 22^nd. The abstract should detail your proposed research project and be accompanied by a CV. Candidates should have a background in political science, history, public policy, or a related field, and must have completed at least one year of graduate study in a PhD program by the time of the workshop. All candidates will be notified of the status of their application by May 20^th, and their papers will be due on September 30^th.