Monster storms Milton and Helene prove climate change is a national security issue, CNN.com

Analysis by Peter Bergen, CNN
3 minute read
Updated 6:54 AM EDT, Fri October 11, 2024

The impact of two catastrophic hurricanes in the last two weeks has underlined that rapid climate change is a threat that can do far more damage to American lives than traditional antagonists such as terrorists and authoritarian states.

The monster Hurricane Milton has left parts of Florida reeling and climate scientists are in no doubt that the strength of such storms is increased by rapidly warming oceans.

This comes two weeks after Hurricane Helene significantly damaged communities like Asheville, North Carolina, hundreds of miles inland, that were seemingly immunized from the worst effects of climate change. Helene killed at least 232 people.

Treating climate change as a national security problem is not a liberal position but a hardheaded realist one. Indeed, the Pentagon has explicitly said it is and “elevated” it up the lists of threats facing the US. Three years ago, US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin could not have been clearer, “We face all kinds of threats in our line of work, but few of them truly deserve to be called existential. The climate crisis does.”

Key US Navy bases in low-lying areas like Norfolk and Virginia Beach in Virginia are threatened by the rising waters caused by climate change, and the Pentagon is working to mitigate its impact.

It’s also triggering an exodus of climate refugees who add to the chaos of conflicts around the world, for instance, in Sudan, where one of the most lethal wars on the planet today is taking place.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had a broader conception of American national security than its present, more narrow conception of freedom from attack from outside forces, according to a recent book by the historian Peter Roady, titled “The Contest Over National Security.”

Roosevelt saw national security as securing the lives of all American citizens, which is why Social Security — a program that Roosevelt signed into law in 1935 — is called Social Security rather than, say, Social Welfare. Today, Social Security is one of the most popular US government programs.

As the Nazis were conquering great swaths of Europe on January 6, 1941, Roosevelt spoke about his broad view of national security during his State of the Union address, emphasizing the need for “freedom from want–which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants-everywhere in the world.”

It was the Cold War and competition with the Soviet Union that produced a change in how national security was conceptualized, and it took on its present narrower meaning of freedom from an attack by a competitor, according to Roady.

This framing of national security also endured after the 9/11 attacks. The George W. Bush administration’s 2002 national security strategy said, “We will defend the peace by fighting terrorists and tyrants … Defending our Nation against its enemies is the first and fundamental commitment of the Federal Government.”

Now, reframing what constitutes national security should be a top priority and it’s not just climate change that represents an existential threat. Consider that the Covid-19 pandemic killed around the same number of Americans — 1.2 million — that had died in every war since the American Revolution.

Politicians are under pressure to get serious about planning for the next pandemic enabled by the ease of global travel. According to the non-partisan COVID Crisis Group, which released a detailed report last year, the US remains quite unprepared for the next pandemic.

The devastating impacts of this fall’s hurricanes may also cause American politicians to start seriously planning to mitigate the risks from climate change by, for instance, restricting new construction in flood zones.

After Hurricane Milton, Americans should ask themselves: Are they safer now from threats like climate change and pandemics? And if not, isn’t it time for a real discussion of what truly constitutes national security to begin?

There’s a Conspiracy Theory for Just About Everything, So Should You Be Worried?

Oct 8 2024

The moon landing was faked; 9/11 was an inside job — conspiracy theories like these seem to surround most major events now, even when the facts have been well-established for years. These beliefs make plenty of headlines. There have also been some high-profile cases of violence being committed by people espousing conspiracy theories. So why do people believe in conspiracy theories and when do they actually pose a threat?

Go to audible.com/news where you’ll find Peter Bergen’s recommendations for other news, journalism and nonfiction listening.

Analysis: Sen. Vance’s nonsensical claims on Iran’s nuclear program, CNN.com

10:40 p.m. EDT, October 1, 2024
Analysis: Sen. Vance’s nonsensical claims on Iran’s nuclear program
From CNN’s Peter Bergen

During the debate, Sen. JD Vance and Gov. Tim Waltz clashed on the issue of Iran.

Vance claimed that former President Donald Trump had made the world “more secure” by taking the United States out of the Iranian nuclear deal in 2018 that had been negotiated by the Obama administration three years earlier, which kept the Iranians from enriching uranium above around 4%.

To make nuclear weapons you need around 90% enriched uranium.

Just hours after Iran had sent missiles against Israeli targets, Vance claimed that the Trump administration’s decision to pull out of the Iran nuclear deal had made the world more secure.

This is simply nonsense, and that’s according to Trump’s own top intelligence official, the Director of National Intelligence, Dan Coats, a former Republican senator, who testified before a Congressional committee in 2019 that the Obama-negotiated nuclear deal was working.

Trump soon punched back, tweeting “The Intelligence people seem to be extremely passive and naive when it comes to the dangers of Iran. They are wrong!”

In fact, because the Trump administration pulled out of the Iranian nuclear deal, the United Nations says that Iran today has enough fissile material to make several nuclear weapons.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said publicly in July that Iran is now probably “one or two weeks” from being able to make a nuclear weapon.

The Middle East is now a more volatile place than in decades and the fact that Iran is just weeks away from having nuclear weapons is a very dangerous place to be. And that is at least in part on Trump whatever Vance claimed in Tuesday’s debate.

Our Nation at Risk: Election Integrity as a National Security Issue, New America/ASU ONLINE

Our Nation at Risk: Election Integrity as a National Security Issue
Event

In recent years, the sight of gun-wielding citizens patrolling ballot boxes and voting sites has become increasingly familiar. Major news corporations parroting false claims of election fraud, ballot stuffing, and faulty voting systems is the new normal. In an era of global anti-democratic movements, the sanctity of democratic electoral processes has become a major national security concern, and the need to protect elections from foreign interference, disinformation, voter intimidation, and the danger of election results being overturned, are now front and center. How did we get here? And more importantly, how will this affect the future of democracy? In Our Nation at Risk: Election Integrity as a National Security Issue, award-winning authors Julian E. Zelizer and Karen J. Greenberg bring together the nation’s top political scientists, historians, and legal scholars to examine how the lack of stability and integrity of the electoral process has become a threat to national security.

Join New America’s Future Security Program as they welcome Karen Greenberg to discuss her new edited volume Our Nation at Risk: Election Integrity as a National Security Issue. Greenberg is the Director of the Center on National Security at Fordham Law and a fellow with New America’s Future Security program and a research fellow with ASU’s Future Security Initiative. She is the author and editor of many books, including The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib, Subtle Tools: The Dismantling of American Democracy from the War on Terror to Donald Trump, Rogue Justice: The Making of the Security State, and The Least Worst Place: Guantanamo’s First One Hundred Days. The conversation will be moderated by New America Vice President and Arizona State University Professor of Practice Peter Bergen.

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

PARTICIPANTS

Karen Greenberg
Editor, Our Nation at Risk
Director, Center on National Security at Fordham Law
Fellow, New America Future Security program
Research Fellow, Future Security Initiative, Arizona State University

MODERATOR

Peter Bergen
Vice President, New America
Co-Director, Future Security
Professor of Practice, Arizona State University

Revisiting the First MAGA President

Oct 1 2024

Ronald Reagan campaigned on a slogan to “Make America Great Again” and ushered in a new era of conservatism in America. That was more than forty years ago, and his Republican Party today looks very different with Donald Trump at its helm. Does the Reagan legend — a tax cutting, government shrinking, Cold War winning optimist — stand up to close scrutiny? And how did Reaganism pave the way for Trumpism? This week’s guest is Max Boot, who’s just written an authoritative, wide-ranging biography of the 40th President of the United States.

Killing of Nasrallah is a key prize for Israel, but it’s too early to write off Hezbollah, CNN.com

Killing of Nasrallah is a key prize for Israel, but it’s too early to write off Hezbollah

Analysis by Peter Bergen, CNN
4 minute read
Published 12:00 AM EDT, Sun September 29, 2024

On Saturday, Hezbollah confirmed that its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, is dead after Israel announced he was killed in an airstrike in Beirut on Friday.

His death marks a major moment in recent Middle East history, but the long-term consequences are uncertain. It raises a key question: Do “decapitation strikes” killing the leaders of terrorist groups cripple them? The short answer is not really.

Israel should know from its own history that such strikes don’t always succeed in crippling a militant group. In 2008, Israel killed Hezbollah’s military leader, Imad Mughniyeh, in Damascus, Syria, yet the group only gathered strength in the years that followed.

Four years earlier, Israel killed a founder of Hamas, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, in an airstrike. Yet, the group did not collapse, and almost two decades later it still carried out the October 7 attacks in Israel, killing some 1,200 Israelis in a single day.

More recently, in July, Israel said it killed one of the October 7 masterminds, Mohammed Deif, a key Hamas military commander, yet the militant group fights on in Gaza.

The US has its own history of killing terrorist leaders in the hope that it will cripple its foes. When Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, was killed in a US bombing raid in 2006, it was treated as a major breakthrough because al Qaeda in Iraq was significantly contributing to the civil war that was then tearing the country apart.

Yet eight years later, al Qaeda in Iraq eventually morphed into ISIS, which took over territory the size of Portugal and presided over a population of some eight million people in Iraq and Syria. ISIS also carried out devastating terrorist attacks in the West, for instance, in Paris in 2015 that killed 130 people.

What actually ended ISIS’s geographical “caliphate” was not a strike on its leadership but a ground campaign against the terrorist army from 2014 to 2019 waged by the Iraqi military and Syrian Kurdish forces backed by thousands of US troops and significant American airpower. ISIS’s base, the second largest city in Iraq, Mosul, was largely destroyed during this war.

In May 2016, then-President Barack Obama authorized a drone strike in Pakistan that killed the overall leader of the Taliban, Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Mansour. Yet, today, the Taliban control all of Afghanistan.

Then-President Donald Trump ordered a strike in Baghdad, Iraq, in early January 2020 that killed Qasem Soleimani, the commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Quds Force who was crucial to Iran’s relationships with its proxy forces in the region such as Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis in Yemen and Shia militias in Iraq.

After Soleimani was killed, Trump said, “Soleimani was plotting imminent and sinister attacks on American diplomats and military personnel, but we caught him in the act and terminated him.”

Yet, his death had no lasting impact on Iran’s regional power and ambitions, and Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis in Yemen have continued their attacks on Israeli targets and Shia militias continued their attacks on American targets in Iraq.

The United States has designated the Taliban, the Houthis, Hamas, ISIS and Hezbollah as terrorist groups.

What can disable a terrorist group?

What can cripple a terrorist group is a sustained campaign to take out as many of its leaders and middle managers as possible. A CIA drone campaign that was ramped up in 2008 in Pakistan’s tribal regions bordering Afghanistan killed many of al Qaeda’s leaders, according to New America, a research institution (where I am a vice president).

Documents recovered by the US Navy SEALs who killed Osama bin Laden in his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, in 2011 show that al Qaeda’s leader regularly wrote to his followers living in the country’s tribal regions, urging them to move around only on cloudy days when the drones were less effective. As a result, bin Laden was planning to pull all his followers out of the tribal region and resettle them in other parts of Pakistan.

Bin Laden’s death certainly significantly contributed to undercutting al Qaeda’s appeal to terrorists and its abilities to carry out attacks since it was bin Laden who had founded the group, had directed its most lethal operations, and members of the group had sworn a personal oath of allegiance to him.

Bin Laden’s successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri, didn’t have the charisma or the organizational skills to resuscitate al Qaeda, and Zawahiri himself was killed in a US drone strike in Afghanistan two years ago. The UN estimates there are about four hundred members of al Qaeda living in Afghanistan today.

While al Qaeda is a relatively small terrorist group, Hezbollah has been in existence for four decades and is backed by Iran, which is a key player in the region and has an army of some 30,000 soldiers armed with an extensive arsenal, including some 150,000 rockets and missiles.

The killing of Nasrallah is a key prize for Israel as part of its larger wave of attacks on Hezbollah that intensified earlier this month with its covert action exploding thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies followed by massive airstrikes that have taken out infrastructure and other senior leaders.

But it’s too early to write the militant group off, though it’s clearly in disarray. History suggests it will reorganize and appoint other leaders to continue its long fight against Israel.

How Modern Autocrats Keep Each Other in Power

Journalist and historian Anne Applebaum has been observing and writing about the rise of authoritarianism for years. And she’s sounding the alarm about a growing trend: how strongmen from Russia to Venezuela are collaborating with one another in an effort to maintain their power and undermine the influence of democratic countries like the United States. So, is there anything democratic nations can do about it?

Soul by Soul: The Evangelical Mission to Spread the Gospel to Muslims book event online w Adriana Carranca

[Online] Soul by Soul: The Evangelical Mission to Spread the Gospel to Muslims
Event

U.S.-born Protestant evangelicalism has gone global to an extent of which many might be unaware. In doing so it has become part of the story of the global reverberations of the post-9/11 era. In Soul by Soul: The Evangelical Mission to Spread the Gospel to Muslims, journalist Adriana Carranca tells the story of American evangelicals’ mobilization to proclaim Christianity “to the ends of the Earth,” a movement that triumphed in the Global South, challenged the Vatican, and then turned east after 9/11 to spread the Gospel among Muslims. As the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq set off a wave of anti-American attacks, increasing the risks for missionaries from the United States, thousands of disciples, particularly from Latin America, carried on the missionary work. Soul by Soul follows the pilgrimage of one such missionary family from Brazil to Afghanistan.

Join New America’s Future Security Program as they welcome Adriana Carranca, author of Soul by Soul, to discuss the book and the evangelical movement’s experience in the Muslim world. Carranca is a journalist whose writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic, Granta, and other publications. She is the recipient of the Overseas Press Club Scholars Award and has five books published in Portuguese, including Afghanistan after the Taliban and Iran under the Chador, and has spent a decade reporting from the field along Christian-Muslim faultlines in the Middle East, Asia and Africa, where contemporary religious wars are being silently fought. The conversation will be moderated by New America Vice President and Arizona State University Professor of Practice Peter Bergen.

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

PARTICIPANTS

Adriana Carranca
Author, Soul by Soul: The Evangelical Mission to Spread the Gospel to Muslims

MODERATOR

Peter Bergen
Vice President, New America
Co-Director, Future Security
Professor of Practice, Arizona State University

When
Oct. 9, 2024
12:00 pm – 1:00 pm
Where
Online Only
RSVP
New America
740 15th Street NW, Suite 900
Washington, DC 20005

The General Who Told Trump What He Didn’t Want to Hear

H.R. McMaster, a decorated lieutenant general in the U.S. Army and an historian, served as the second national security advisor to President Donald Trump. He recently published a non-partisan yet blistering account of his time in the White House. Hear what McMaster says Trump got right on foreign policy, where things went wrong, and what he thinks Trump’s character would mean for a second term.

Analysis: The US withdrawal in Afghanistan was in focus during the debate. Here’s key context to know, CNN.com

From CNN’s Peter Bergen

During the debate, former President Donald Trump pinned the blame for the botched US withdrawal from Afghanistan three years ago on the Biden-Harris administration during which 13 American servicemembers were killed by an ISIS suicide bomber along with some 170 Afghans on August 26, 2021.

There is some merit to Trump’s argument, after all, the Biden Harris administration was in charge when the Afghanistan withdrawal happened and during the debate Vice President Kamala Harris said that she endorsed the withdrawal.

Yet, as Harris also pointed out, it was the Trump administration that had negotiated the US withdrawal agreement with the Taliban in 2020, an insurgent group, rather than with the elected Afghan government.

The Taliban did not observe the terms of the withdrawal agreement; neither negotiating in good faith for power-sharing with the Afghan government nor did they separate from terrorist organizations.

For his part, Trump had no problem pulling out of the Obama administration’s 2015 Iran nuclear deal, even though this agreement was negotiated together with American allies, not with an insurgent group. So, the idea that Biden-Harris administration was bound by Trump’s agreement with the Taliban as the administration has claimed makes no sense.

We can, however, expect to hear more on this issue as the presidential campaign continues, after all, some 800,000 American men and women have served in Afghanistan; many of whom will surely be voting in this close election.