Doha Security Forum, Qatar

WELCOME TO THE
GLOBAL SECURITY FORUM
Established in 2018, the Global Security Forum (GSF) is an annual international gathering hosted by The Soufan Center. For several years it has brought together an international network of senior officials and experts, and consistently includes ministers, heads of security agencies, and prominent experts, academics, and journalists, and thousands of attendees. This invitation-only event provides a unique dynamic platform for international stakeholders to convene and address the international community’s leading security challenges.

In 2021, the Global Security Forum explored the imperative of balancing cooperation and competition in ensuring security and addressing critical challenges in governance and development. In 2020, the Forum looked at the evolution of global security challenges posed by complex geopolitical realities exacerbated by the global COVID-19 pandemic, including disinformation, extremism, and governance and legitimacy. In 2019, the Forum explored the proliferation of modern disinformation and the serious implications for an increasingly interconnected world. The inaugural 2018 Global Security Forum addressed the global challenge of returning foreign fighters.

Assessing Variation in the Labeling of Terrorist Organizations Around the World, New America ONLINE event

[ONLINE] – Assessing Variation in the Labeling of Terrorist Organizations Around the World
EVENT

What is a terrorist organization? It is a question whose importance has grown as demands for social media companies and others to restrict terrorist content have proliferated. Yet, the international community has not come to an agreement on the issue. Instead a patchwork of designation practices exists globally. Disagreements abound in the Middle East over the labeling of the Muslim Brotherhood, the question of Hezbollah’s status splits countries around the world, growing perceptions of a jihadist threat in Africa may be stoking new legal architecture in Somalia and beyond, and some countries are designating white supremacist groups as terrorist organizations. In a new report, “An Assessment of Variation in National Processes of Defining and Designating Terrorist Groups,” New America’s International Security Program examined the designation practices of 196 countries. The report highlights how domestic politics, shifting conditions, and geopolitical competition have shaped variation globally.

To discuss the report, New America welcomes two of the report’s co-authors David Sterman and Melissa Salyk-Virk. Sterman is a Senior Policy Analyst with New America’s International Security program and Salyk-Virk is a fellow and former Senior Policy Analyst with the program. Salyk-Virk also previously worked with the United Nation’s Counter-Terrorism Committee Executive Directorate. New America also welcomes Edmund Fitton-Brown, former coordinator of the UN Analytical Support and Sanctions Monitoring Team concerning the Islamic State, al-Qaeda, and the Taliban to discuss the report’s findings.

Join the conversation online using #DesignationVariation and following @NewAmericaISP.

PARTICIPANTS

Edmund Fitton-Brown, @EFittonBrown
Former Coordinator, UN Analytical Support and Sanctions Monitoring Team Concerning the Islamic State, Al Qaeda, and the Taliban
Former British Ambassador to Yemen

Melissa Salyk-Virk
Fellow, New America International Security Program
Co-author, “An Assessment of Variation in National Processes of Defining and Designating Terrorist Groups”

David Sterman, @Dsterms
Senior Policy Analyst, International Security Program
Co-author, “An Assessment of Variation in National Processes of Defining and Designating Terrorist Groups”

MODERATOR

Peter Bergen, @peterbergencnn
Vice President, New America
Co-author, “An Assessment of Variation in National Processes of Defining and Designating Terrorist Groups”

When
Jan. 18, 2023
12:00 pm – 1:00 pm
Where
Online Only
WEBCAST LINK
RSVP

Gadhafi’s agents thought they’d get away with the Lockerbie bombing. They were wrong, CNN.com

Opinion by Peter Bergen, CNN
Updated 12:46 PM EST, Mon December 12, 2022

Editor’s Note: Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. Bergen is the author of “The Cost of Chaos: The Trump Administration and the World.” The views expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.

—
Just days before Christmas in 1998, Pan Am flight 103 flying from London to New York blew up over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 270 people – including 190 Americans. Thirty-five victims were Syracuse University students going home for the holidays after studying abroad. It was the most lethal terrorist attack against American civilians until the September 11 attacks of 2001.

On Sunday, the US Department of Justice announced it had taken custody of a Libyan man, Abu Agila Mohammad Mas’ud Kheir Al-Marimi, who is alleged to have been involved in making the bomb that blew up the passenger jet. The DOJ described him as a former senior intelligence officer in the regime of Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi.

Al-Marimi hasn’t entered a plea in the case. Another Libyan intelligence officer working for Gadhafi, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, was convicted in 2001 of the bombing of Pan Am 103. Megrahi died in 2012.

Almost three and a half decades have passed since Pan Am 103 was brought down, and many may be wondering why Gadhafi and his intelligence officials carried out this bombing and why they thought they might get away with it.

The context for the bombing of Pan Am 103 was that the administration of former President Ronald Reagan and Gadhafi were at war – not a declared conventional war, but a war nonetheless – fought with terrorist bombs by the Libyans and with airstrikes by the Reagan administration.

Health workers wearing personal protective equipment (PPE) carry barricades inside a residential community that just opened after a lockdown due to Covid-19 coronavirus restrictions in Beijing on December 9, 2022.
Opinion: The lightning transformation of China’s ‘ghost cities’

Gadhafi was a Soviet military client who espoused an obscure revolutionary philosophy, which made him anathema to the Reagan administration.

Early in his first term in May 1981, Reagan ordered the closure of the Libyan embassy in Washington, DC, and the expulsion of Libyan diplomats in the United States because of “Libyan provocations and misconduct, including support for international terrorism.”

On April 5, 1986, a bomb went off in the La Belle discotheque in Berlin that off-duty US servicemen frequented. The bombing killed two US soldiers and a Turkish woman, and injured more than 200 others.

The Reagan administration quickly determined that Libyan intelligence agents most likely carried out the attack. In response, Reagan ordered the bombing of multiple targets in Libya, telling the American people in an address from the Oval Office on April 14, 1986, “At 7 this evening Eastern time, air and naval forces of the United States launched a series of strikes against the headquarters, terrorist facilities and military assets that support Moammar Gadhafi’s subversive activities.”

Brittney Griner #15 of Team United States prepares to shoot a free throw against Nigeria during the second half of a Women’s Preliminary Round Group B game on day four of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games at Saitama Super Arena on July 27, 2021 in Saitama, Japan.
Opinion: The price of freedom, war and Trump

Gadhafi claimed that his infant daughter was killed in these strikes (although, in recent years, this claim about his daughter has been questioned). Other Gadhafi family members were reported to have been wounded in the strikes, one of which hit one of the dictator’s residences.

It took more than two years for Gadhafi to exact his revenge on the US. During that time, Libyan intelligence agents assembled a sophisticated bomb secreted in a radio cassette player.

The bomb worked on a timer and was hidden in a suitcase. In the days before rigorous airport security, the bomb-filled suitcase was placed by a Libyan agent on a flight from Malta to Frankfurt, and the suitcase was then “routed to a feeder flight in Frankfurt bound for London’s Heathrow Airport, where it was ultimately loaded onto the doomed jet,” according to the FBI.

The terrorist plot worked, unfortunately, very well for the Libyans but for one crucial detail: The bomb was on a timer, and when it blew up, Pan Am 103 was still flying over land rather than over the Atlantic. If the plane had blown up slightly later the jet would have been flying over the ocean, which would have made a forensic investigation of the crash site nearly impossible.

Instead, Scottish authorities painstakingly reassembled every piece of the plane and its contents that they could recover on their soil. That led investigators to the suitcase that had contained the bomb and, in an astonishing piece of detective work, ultimately led them to the Libyan intelligence agents that had overseen the bombing.

On Sunday, the US Department of Justice announced that Al-Marimi, the alleged bomb maker, was now in American custody. He will make an initial appearance at a court in Washington, DC, almost exactly 34 years after Pan Am 103 blew up over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing all on board and eleven others on the ground.

PAID CONTENT

Brittney Griner’s detention highlighted a concerning trend, CNN.com

Updated 3:08 PM EST, Thu December 8, 2022

The release of basketball legend Brittney Griner, who was being held in a Russian penal colony on minor drug possession charges, in exchange for the notorious Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout, who was serving a long prison sentence in the United States, underlines an emerging trend of hostile states holding Americans to gain leverage over the US government.

We used to think primarily of American hostages being taken by terrorist groups like ISIS or al Qaeda, but in the past few years we have seen an increase in governments taking Americans as de facto hostages, according to a recent report by the James W. Foley Legacy Foundation, which advocates for Americans who are held hostage and “wrongful detainees.”

Griner is simply the most famous example of this and has served to bring the issue to the attention of many who otherwise might not have been aware of the dangers that face Americans who travel to countries such as Russia, China, Iran and Venezuela – countries that are known to detain Americans to gain leverage over the United States.

And the price of being released in these cases is quite high. Griner was released in exchange for Bout, who is arguably not only the world’s most infamous arms dealer, but who no doubt will be quite useful to Russian President Vladimir Putin in acquiring weapons on the international arms market for Russia’s war in Ukraine.

There have been several other prisoner swaps just this year in which the Biden administration has had to make some tough decisions about who to release in order to get Americans safely home.

Take the case of Trevor Reed, a former US Marine, who was detained by the Russians in 2019 on espionage charges that he has always denied. In April, Reed was exchanged for Konstantin Yaroshenko, a convicted Russian drug smuggler who had been serving a 20-year prison sentence in the US since 2011. Yaroshenko has denied the charges against him.

Or consider the case of Mark Frerichs, an American contractor working in Afghanistan, who was held for more than two years by the Taliban (now the de facto Afghan government). Frerichs was released in exchange for clemency for Haji Bashir Noorzai, who was in prison in the US on drug trafficking charges for 17 years. The Bush administration described Noorzai as one of the most-wanted drug dealers the year before his arrest. The release of Noorzai was long sought by the Taliban, who regard him as a key ally.

Or take the case of the seven Americans detained in Venezuela for many years, who were exchanged two months ago for a couple of Venezuelans imprisoned in the US for conspiring to smuggle cocaine. Both of the convicted drug dealers are nephews of Venezuela’s first lady.

There are other Americans still being held by governments overseas and other deals will have to be made to get them home.

Griner’s release has brought attention to another American still being held by the Russians: Paul Whelan, who has been detained since 2018 on what the US government says are spurious espionage changes. Whelan has denied the allegations. He was reportedly transferred to a prison hospital at the end of November.

What will be the price of releasing Whelan? Surely it won’t be nothing. And, again, the Biden administration will have to make a tough call about what price it is willing to pay.

My own view is that getting wrongfully detained Americans home from countries like Russia is generally worth the price. And hopefully the Griner prisoner swap will help set the stage for a similar deal for Whelan.

How MBS went from pariah to ‘comeback prince’, CNN.com

How MBS went from pariah to ‘comeback prince’
Peter Bergen

Updated 11:30 AM EST, Wed December 7, 2022

Editor’s Note: Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America, and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. Bergen is the author of “The Cost of Chaos: The Trump Administration and the World.” The views expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.

—
The timing could not have been sweeter for Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman. Just hours before China’s President Xi Jinping was due to arrive in the Saudi kingdom for a state visit, a US judge essentially announced what much of the world has come to realize in 2022: the immunity of the comeback Crown Prince.

Just four years ago the Saudi Crown Prince, widely known by his initials MBS, was a pariah on the world stage after officials in his entourage dismembered the US-based journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, according to a US intelligence assessment. (Bin Salman denies that he ordered the killing).

Indeed, then-presidential candidate Joe Biden publicly termed Saudi Arabia a “pariah” at the time.

Though not a pariah who will face a reckoning anytime soon, it seems. In September MBS was appointed Saudi prime minister, a move which seemed calculated to give him sovereign immunity from any possible US prosecution of his alleged role in Khashoggi’s murder.

On Tuesday, that calculation proved prescient. A US judge dismissed a case against MBS for conspiring to kill Khashoggi, saying he had head-of-state immunity. The judge also noted his “uneasiness” with the dismissal, adding that there were “credible allegations” that MBS played a role in Khashoggi’s assassination.

It was an important step on the road to international rehabilitation for MBS. And all as he now plays host to Xi and other leaders from across the Middle East and North Africa for a Chinese-Arab summit; the memory of Khashoggi receding further into the shadows.

Oil looms large

When the leader of the world’s most populous autocracy breaks bread with the de facto ruler of arguably the world’s most absolute monarchy, they won’t be communing to swap tips about how best to run a repressive regime; their top agenda item is simple. Oil.

Xi faces many problems at home; his zero-Covid policy has been relaxed after it provoked the most widespread protest movement in China in decades. But not before it damaged the Chinese economy, where youth unemployment hit almost 20%. And the Chinese property market, which makes up a quarter of the economy, is in trouble.

China is the world’s largest oil importer, and to help reboot its economy Xi needs oil — and a lot of it. The source of China’s largest oil imports is Saudi Arabia. Xi and MBS’s marriage of convenience is made over a barrel of oil.

An impetuous prince

Even before Khashoggi’s murder in 2018, Saudi Arabia was waging a disastrous war in Yemen that triggered one of the world’s worst humanitarian catastrophes.

And in 2017 MBS effectively kidnapped the Lebanese prime minister for weeks when he was visiting the kingdom — an incident he later joked about.

A year later MBS imprisoned some 200 leading Saudi businessmen and other prominent citizens at the Ritz Carlton in Riyadh on purported corruption charges, relieving them of more than $100 billion.

And he led several Arab states to impose an embargo on Saudi Arabia’s gas-rich neighbor Qatar, which is home to the largest US military base in the Middle East. Under his watch, perceived political opponents have been routinely imprisoned.

In from the cold

Yet today MBS is being courted by the world’s major leaders, and Xi’s visit to Saudi Arabia this week will be the cherry on top of a very good 2022 for the crown prince.

“Pariah” no more, in July, Biden went to Saudi Arabia and gave MBS a cheerful fist bump when he met him, an image that was broadcast around the world.

A few months later, MBS hosted his annual “Davos in the Desert,” and pretty much every titan of Wall Street showed up.

The Crown Prince has also made common cause with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Despite Biden’s visit to the Saudi kingdom this summer, OPEC + — which is dominated by the Saudis and Russians — last month slashed oil production. A move designed to keep oil prices relatively high — contributing to high rates of inflation in the United States and Europe.

Finally, despite a past punishing blockade on neighboring Qatar, MBS even had a spot in the World Cup VIP section alongside Qatari monarch Tamim Al-Thani when the tournament kicked off last month.

Xi’s visit only continues MBS’s rehabilitation tour.

Next year will mark the fifth anniversary of Khashoggi’s murder. Meanwhile, the Crown Prince has gone from pariah to the go-to insider for the world’s leaders.

The Arc of a Covenant: The U.S., Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People, Walter Russell Mead online EVENT

[ONLINE] – The Arc of a Covenant: The U.S., Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People
EVENT

In his new book, The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People, Walter Russell Mead examines the roots of the U.S.-Israel relationship. Mead tracks how Zionism has always been a divisive subject in the American Jewish community, and argues that Christians have often been the most fervent supporters of a Jewish state. He also spotlights the almost forgotten story of left-wing support for Zionism, and contends that Stalin’s influence was more decisive than Truman’s in Israel’s struggle for independence. Mead also tracks how Israel’s rise in the Middle East helped kindle both the modern evangelical movement and the Sunbelt coalition that carried Reagan into the White House.

To discuss his new book, New America welcomes Walter Russell Mead, James Clark Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and Humanities at Bard College, Ravenel B. Curry III Distinguished Fellow in Strategy and Statesmanship at Hudson Institute, and the Global View columnist at The Wall Street Journal. He is also a co-founder and board member emeritus of New America.

Join the conversation online using #ArcofCovenant and following @NewAmericaISP.

PARTICIPANTS

Walter Russell Mead, @wrmead
Author, The Arc of a Covenant
Professor of Foreign Affairs and Humanities, Bard College
Ravenel B. Curry II Distinguished Fellow, Hudson Institute
Co-Founder, New America

MODERATOR

Peter Bergen, @PeterBergenCNN
Vice President for Global Studies and Fellows, New America
Professor of Practice, ASU

America is great again, CNN.com

—
The United States is riven by polarization, its democracy is threatened, inflation is raging, and the Dow is down sharply this year. Yet, despite all these problems, if you zoom out and look at the world overall, the US is still doing quite well compared to its key enemies and closest allies.

Russia and China – the two nations with which the United States strives most regularly for global influence – have suffered recent dramatic declines in their standing.

By invading Ukraine and failing to achieve its war aims, Russia is demonstrating that it is no longer a great power. After Russian President Vladimir Putin announced a “partial mobilization” for the war in Ukraine last month, around 200,000 Russians voted with their feet and fled their country – including two who sailed to Alaska.

In the early days of the war, Russia failed to take Kyiv, and in recent weeks it has lost some 3,000 square miles of territory, according to Ukrainian officials. Even generally reliable cheerleaders for Putin, such as the Chinese, have distanced themselves from Putin’s failures in Ukraine.

Led by the US, NATO is now stronger than ever, supplying Ukraine with significant amounts of weaponry and bulking up its collective defense spending. NATO is also adding the formerly non-aligned countries of Finland and Sweden to the alliance. While former President Donald Trump kept threatening to pull the US out of NATO, today the alliance has new relevance.

Russia also failed to stop European countries from filling their gas stocks to more than 90% for the coming winter, which reduces President Vladimir Putin’s leverage to weaken NATO’s support for the Ukrainians.

Meanwhile, American weaponry, such as anti-tank Javelin missiles and High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS) that are GPS-guided precision rockets, and US technologies, such as the Starlink satellite-based broadband Internet communication system supplied by Elon Musk, have helped to turn the tide of the war in Ukraine.

By contrast, Soviet-style, Russian “dumb” artillery rounds continue to land in Ukrainian cities, killing civilians, but to no strategic end because these attacks have scant military utility. Iran has also supplied drones for Russia’s use in Ukraine, but such developments have only hardened the resolve of Ukrainians to expel the Russians, according to Gallup polling last month that found 70% of Ukrainians want to continue fighting until they win against Russia.

Meanwhile, President Xi Jinping may be taking a victory lap as he is expected to be anointed the leader of the Chinese Communist Party for the third time at the ruling party’s national congress this week, ensuring that he will become the country’s most powerful leader since Mao.

Yet, Xi’s zero-Covid policy has spurred repeated massive lockdowns of China’s cities, which have damaged the nation’s economy and are becoming increasingly unpopular.

The zero-Covid policy, combined with what the Wall Street Journal terms a “full-blown property downturn,” are dramatically slowing the Chinese economy. As of June, youth unemployment was almost 20%.

At the same time, China’s imprisonment of up to two million Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities, according to US State Department estimates, and its costly loans for its “Belt and Road” policies have not endeared it to much of the planet. Earlier this year, Pew polling found “negative views of China remain at or near historic highs in many of the 19 countries” where the organization polled.

Despite Xi’s bellicose rhetoric about China’s right to use force to reclaim Taiwan during the Communist Party Congress this week, China must surely have taken notes watching Russia’s failures in Ukraine, which included the sinking of the flagship of the Russian Black Sea fleet, the Moskva in April. Any Chinese invasion of Taiwan would involve crossing a maritime border and launching a naval armada across some 100 miles of water to reach the island.

Another American rival, Iran, is riven by countrywide street protests that are threatening the regime arguably as much as any protests have done since 1979.

In the western hemisphere, Venezuela is also in free fall under its socialist government; almost seven million people have left the country since 2014, a quarter of the population.

China, Iran, Russia, and Venezuela share a common feature; they are autocracies – not exactly a form of government known for serving the interests of the people.

Even America’s closest democratic allies are also facing profound problems. The UK is turning itself into a third-rank power following its disastrous decision in 2016 to vote for Brexit and pull out of the free trade zone of the European Union, which quickly lopped more than 16% of the pound’s value against the dollar that year.

Former Prime Minister Boris Johnson ran a campaign in 2019 to “Get Brexit Done,” completing the withdrawal from the EU in January 2020. This was supposed to unleash the British from all the onerous obligations of the European Union.

Instead, it has proven to be an economic debacle. Many jobs in the UK that would have been filled by Europeans who were formerly free to move to Britain for work are going unfilled in sectors such as construction, farming, nursing homes, and restaurants. Since the Brexit vote six years ago, the UK’s per capita income has grown by only 3.8% in real terms, while the EU’s has grown by 8.5%, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Then came UK Prime Minister Liz Truss who compounded the harm of Brexit by proposing unfunded tax cuts for the rich in September. After heightened political outcry and financial turmoil, Truss reversed the tax cut decision, but the damage was done, and the pound fell to historic lows. She announced her resignation under pressure Thursday, becoming Britain’s shortest-serving prime minister.

And what about that bilateral US-UK trade deal that Conservative leaders said would supposedly wave a magic wand over the UK’s economic mess? Truss told reporters in September, “There (aren’t) currently any negotiations taking place with the US, and I don’t have an expectation that those are going to start in the short to medium term.” This is government-speak acknowledging that the Americans have told the British: “How about never– is never good for you?” to quote the great New Yorker cartoon.

European countries are generally faring better than the UK but still face their own problems. The dollar, which is at a two-decade high against the Euro, remains strong as the Fed raises interest rates and the American economy continues to be the most dynamic in the world. Indeed, the US has the lowest unemployment rate in five decades. And the US is now the world’s largest producer of both gas and oil.

American vaccine technology used by Pfizer and Moderna helped to turn the tide against Covid-19 in the United States and other countries that used these vaccines. By contrast, the Chinese and Russian vaccines have been far less effective against Covid-19.

To be sure, the United States has problems aplenty, including deep political polarization, raging inflation, high inequality, a horrific Covid-19 death toll, shrinking life expectancy, frequent mass shootings, unaffordable housing in many places, and intense battles over abortion. The widespread denial of President Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory among Republicans raises serious questions about the health of the nation’s democracy. Still, in many respects, the US looks much better than much of the rest of the world.

Immigration, which is often treated as a problem by Americans, underlines the continuing attraction of the United States. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of Russians have fled their homeland since Putin announced a partial mobilization in the war against Ukraine, and tens of thousands have left Hong Kong after the Chinese takeover of the formerly autonomous city.

To paraphrase Warren Buffett, betting against America has never been a smart move.

PAID CONTENT

Putin’s dream is headed toward an inglorious end, CNN.com

Russian President Vladimir Putin had a plan to seize Ukraine quickly. Those plans dissolved from the first days of the Russians’ invasion with their failure to capture Kyiv.

Putin’s problems have only deepened in recent days with the surging Ukrainian counteroffensive that has seized key pockets of Russian-controlled territory, such as the transportation hub city of Lyman.

The timing couldn’t have been worse. Putin lost Lyman just as he was publicly declaring that the Donetsk region – in which Lyman sits – was now annexed by Russia.

At home, Putin is also facing growing criticism from Russians on both the left and the right, who are taking considerable risks given the draconian penalties they can face for speaking out against his “special military operation” in Ukraine.

With even his allies expressing concern, and hundreds of thousands of citizens fleeing partial mobilization, an increasingly isolated Putin has once again taken to making rambling speeches offering his distorted view of history.

(Indeed, his revisionist account defines his rationale for the war in Ukraine, which he asserts has historically always been part of Russia – even though Ukraine declared its independence from the Soviet Union more than three decades ago.)

But Putin – a zealous student of Russian history – is surely aware that defeat in a foreign war has brought down some of his predecessors.

When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in December 1979, they planned to install a puppet government and get out of the country as soon as it was feasible, as explained in a recent, authoritative book about the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, “Afghan Crucible” by historian Elisabeth Leake.

Leake writes that the Soviets’ “intention was a quick regime change,” which was “not meant to be a drawn-out military encounter.”

That playbook didn’t work for the Soviets in Afghanistan during the 1980s any more than it is working for Putin in Ukraine today.

Beyond the battlefield
During the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan, the US was initially reluctant to escalate its support for the Afghan resistance, fearing a wider conflict with the Soviet Union. It took until 1986 for the CIA to arm the Afghans with highly effective anti-aircraft Stinger missiles, which ended the Soviets’ total air superiority, eventually forcing them to withdraw from Afghanistan three years later.

In 2022, American weapons are again playing a decisive role in Russian fortunes on the battlefield. At the beginning of the war in Ukraine, the US was also initially leery of deeper involvement, fearing a wider conflict with the Russians.

But the US put those fears to rest relatively quickly, and American-supplied anti-tank Javelin missiles and High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS), GPS-guided missiles, have helped the Ukrainians to push back against the Russians.

Putin is also surely aware that the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 was hastened by the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan two years earlier.

Looking further back into the history books, he must also know that the Russian loss in the Russo-Japanese war in 1905 weakened the Romanov monarchy. Czar Nicholas II’s feckless leadership during the First World War then precipitated the Russian Revolution in 1917. Subsequently, much of the Romanov family was killed by a Bolshevik firing squad.

Putin, understandably, doesn’t want to go the way of either the Soviets or the Romanovs. Which might explain his recent desperate moves: the mobilization of 300,000 additional troops – a measure that he had long sought to avoid – and his nuclear weapons saber-rattling.

The ‘genius’ myth unravels

On February 22 – just two days before Russia’s invasion – former US President Donald Trump, who has always fawned over Putin, publicly said that the Russian autocrat was “genius” and “savvy” for declaring two regions of eastern Ukraine independent and moving his troops there in a prelude to full-blown invasion.

Putin saw the war in Ukraine as a key to his dream to Make Russia Great Again. Instead, Russia can now no longer pretend to be a great power as it is unable to defeat an enemy on its own borders.

More than seven months into the war, the “genius” myth has unraveled. During the past two weeks, at least 200,000 Russian men have voted with their feet to flee Putin’s partial mobilization order. They understand – despite the Herculean efforts of Putin’s propagandists – that this war is a bloodbath Russia is losing.

Putin saw the war in Ukraine as key to his dream to Make Russia Great Again.

Peter Bergen

Lawrence Freedman, the emeritus professor of war studies at King’s College London explains in his just-published book “Command: The Politics of Military Operations from Korea to Ukraine” how Putin plunged his countrymen into the Ukrainian morass.

Freedman writes that Putin is “a tragic example of how the delusions and illusions of one individual can be allowed to shape events without any critical challenge. Autocrats who put their cronies into key positions, control the media to crowd out discordant voices … are able to command their subordinates to follow the most foolish orders.”

Putin’s gamble may lead to a third dissolution of the Russian empire, which happened first in 1917 as the First World War wound down, and again in 1991 after the fall of the Soviet Union.

It could unfold once more as Putin’s dream of seizing Ukraine seems to be coming to an inglorious end.

Making Russia weak, again.

Big Tech: Content Moderation, Terrorism, and Disinformation, New America online

[ONLINE] – Big Tech: Content Moderation, Terrorism, and Disinformation
EVENT

In recent years, technology and social media companies have taken on a growing role in moderating content on their platforms. That growing role has brought criticism from a number of vectors, and some states have moved to restrict moderation via legislation. Although much of the political debate around moderation policies is occurring elsewhere, the debates and legislation could shape companies’ efforts against terrorism on their platforms, an issue that has itself seen debate.

To discuss the intersection of content moderation, disinformation, and terrorism, New America welcomes Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, CEO of Valens Global and author of a recent report “Redrawing the Lines” examining how legislation regarding content moderation could affect counterterrorism efforts, and Karen J. Greenberg, Director of the Center on National Security at Fordham Law and a fellow with New America’s International Security program.

Join the conversation online using #TechandTerrorism and following @NewAmericaISP.

Participants:

Dr. Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, @DaveedGR
CEO, Valens Global

Dr. Karen J. Greenberg, @KarenGreenberg3
Director Center on National Security at Fordham Law,
Fellow, International Security Program, New America

Moderator:

Peter Bergen, @PeterBergenCNN
Vice President for Global Studies and Fellows, New America
Professor of Practice, ASU

Spies & Storytellers, Spyscape Museum, NYC

Spies & Storytellers
With Osama bin Laden’s interviewer and other top pros!
From recruiting sources and building trust to turning secret information into digestible narratives, spy skills and technologies have led to journalistic breakthroughs.

Peter Bergen (CNN National Security Analyst, journalist, author), Liza Mundy (NY Times Best-selling author, journalist), and Dan Hoffman (three-time CIA station chief, FOX News commentator) will compare the two professions in this fascinating discussion.

928 8TH AVE
NEW YORK, NY 10019, USA 8p

https://spyscape.com/festival