Space forests

DLI teaches foreign languages to thousands of federal employees — soldiers, spies, and bureaucrats alike — which makes it a fascinating bellwether for American security policy. Received this from a friend? [SUBSCRIBE]( CRITICAL STATE Your weekly foreign policy fix. [The World]( [INKSTICK]( If you read just one thing… … read about the many tongues of American empire. The Freedom of Information Act wins again. Last week, the Monterey County Weekly [released]( its investigation into the history of its friendly local national security institution, the Defense Language Institute (DLI). DLI teaches foreign languages to thousands of federal employees — soldiers, spies, and bureaucrats alike — which makes it a fascinating bellwether for American security policy. Using a Freedom of Information request, the Weekly got printouts of DLI enrollment records dating back to 1963. They scanned the printouts, did some coding and produced some remarkable data visualizations showing how America’s linguistic priorities have evolved. All the data is fascinating, but check out, in particular, the chart showing which language had the highest enrollment at DLI in each year since 1963. As you’d expect, Russian dominates the Cold War years (with Vietnamese overtaking it for just one year, 1970), and since 1995, Arabic has been the plurality language. Yet, in 2018, the most recent year we have data for, who’s back on top? Russian. High toll of activism The Front Line Defenders' year-end report for 2019 makes for grim reading. The organization, which tracks assaults on human rights activists, [counted]( over 300 murders of activists around the world last year. Over 200 of the killings took place in Latin America, where prosecutions for murdering activists are rare. Of those, 106 took place in Colombia, where political violence has spiked since the government and FARC rebels concluded a peace deal in 2016. The killings are rarely a surprise. According to the report, 85% of those killed had previously received death threats, and many of the killings took place in environments of effective impunity for the assassins. In the Philippines, which had the second-most activist murders after Colombia, President Rodrigo Duterte has actively encouraged his supporters to kill people on lists of those allegedly involved in the drug trade. [FORWARD TO A FRIEND]( Of the saints, indeed! Isabel dos Santos, the daughter of former Angolan leader Jose Eduardo dos Santos, and the richest woman in Africa, is the subject of a new[report]( by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists that details how she stole hundreds of millions of dollars from the Angolan state during her father’s time in power. Dos Santos is already under investigation in Angola, where her father’s successor has frozen her bank accounts. Before her fall from grace, however, she headed Sonangol, Angola’s state oil company. Where there is transnational financial malfeasance by oligarchs, consultants are never far away. In this case, ICIJ [named]( McKinsey, PwC, and Boston Consulting Group as “ignoring red flags” while taking in a combined $115 million for working with dos Santos to secure her fortune. [FORWARD TO A FRIEND]( [ ] DEEP DIVE Reevaluating Iraq: Part I The United States government seems to be in the process of reconsidering its basic understandings of the Iraq War. After years of accepting that confrontations with Iranian proxies in Iraq were the price of maintaining a continued American military presence in the country, the United States lashed out, assassinating the Iranian general who coordinated most of Iran’s proxy relationships in Iraq. The assassination brought the US and Iran to the brink of war, and in its aftermath the Pentagon drafted (and accidentally sent) a letter to the Iraqi government pledging a full American withdrawal from Iraq. Scholars have also been reevaluating their understandings of the war, albeit less violently. For the next two Deep Dives, we’ll examine some of the latest research on how to understand the evolution of America’s second-longest war. In the most recent issue of International Security, Oxford political scientist Andrew Payne [describes]( one new way of understanding the rhythms of America’s war effort in Iraq: American electoral politics. Impending elections, Payne argues, have distinct effects on presidential decision-making in wartime. To start with, elections dictate timelines. If a president has to make a hard decision about wartime strategy — one that their military advisors deem necessary for the war effort, but that is likely to lead to greater American casualties — they generally prefer to wait to actually make that decision until after the next election. That’s even true when the war is going poorly and the cost of delay is high in military terms. By digging into archives and speaking to a range of officials involved in the decision, Payne found that the timing of President George W. Bush’s move to adopt the counterinsurgency strategy known as “the surge” clearly aligns with that pattern. Bush announced the surge, which involved sending 20,000 extra troops to Iraq and directing US forces to undertake dangerous civilian protection missions, in January 2007, shortly after the 2006 midterms elections. In his memoir, Bush baldly admits that the timing was political, [writing](, “I decided a change of strategy [in the war] was needed... with the 2006 midterm elections approaching, the rhetoric on Iraq was hot… I decided to wait until after the elections to announce any policy or personnel changes.” That delay seems to have been at least as much about avoiding public scrutiny of the surge as about concern for increased US casualties going into the election. Polling in June 2006 showed that just 6% of Americans favored increased deployments to Iraq, and military leaders, including then-coalition commander General George Casey, believed that “looking back on it, I don’t [think] the people would have supported an increase in forces, it had to wait until after the election.” Election effects weren’t confined to the Bush administration. President Barack Obama was subject to what Payne calls the “dampening effect” of elections. Dampening happens when timelines aren’t fungible and presidents are forced to take war decisions at politically inconvenient times. In those situations, where war decisions will come under more immediate public scrutiny, presidents are likely to stick to their political guns even in the face of contrary military advice. When it came time for President Obama to make a decision about the future of American general purpose forces in Iraq in late 2011, with his 2012 reelection campaign kickoff approaching, he insisted on sticking to his campaign promise of removing all “boots on the ground” despite Pentagon pressure to retain a portion of the deployed force. There was, of course, a fair amount of fishy bookkeeping involved in that decision — significant numbers of American troops remain in Iraq to this day, but they aren’t counted as general purpose forces. [LEARN MORE]( [FORWARD TO A FRIEND]( [• • •] SHOW US THE RECEIPTS Brian Hioe [argued]( that Taiwanese president Tsai Ing-Wen’s recent reelection demonstrates China’s failure to connect with Taiwanese youth. Rejection of the “One China” policy, under which China claims sovereignty over Taiwan, is one of the core planks in Tsai’s platform and young people form her electoral base. China has tried to reach out to Taiwanese young people with economic incentives in recent years, in hopes of convincing them to support unification but, as the election results show, the effort has been largely unsuccessful. Cheryl Rofer [examined]( what exactly Trump administration officials mean when they say America needs to “reestablish deterrence” with Iran. The term, Rofer points out, suggests a meaning that bears little relationship to the facts of the current situation. The idea that the assassination of Qasem Soleimani was part of a return to a past in which Iran was too afraid of American power to act against American interests sits uneasily alongside the administration’s other justification for the killing: that the Iranian government, through proxies, has been attacking Americans in Iraq for well over a decade despite the constant threat of war. Indra Ekmanis [detailed]( a new Government Accountability Office report that finds the Trump administration violated the law when it held up money Congress had appropriated for aid to Ukraine in the summer of 2019. The report’s timing is auspicious for Democrats going into President Trump’s impeachment trial in the Senate, as the first article of impeachment alleges that the president abused his power by withholding that money as a lever to pressure the Ukrainian government to assist him politically. [FORWARD TO A FRIEND]( [ ] WELL PLAYED Always include [citations]( in your takes! (And if you don’t know the citation, check it out [here](. It’s pretty great.) Here comes [Patrick Porter]( to remind us that no such [smell]( ever existed. Area studies scholars: Our work is underappreciated and underfunded, even by the standards of social science. Also area studies scholars: [this nonsense](. We’ve all had a lot of [fun]( with the new Space Force uniforms — yes, they’re putting name tapes over forest camouflage, despite Space Force’s ostensibly less terrestrial ambitions. But the bigger question is this: When, inevitably, Space Force invades and occupies another planet for nearly two decades on what was supposed to be a short mission and tries to train up that planet’s own Space Force to quash rebellions caused by the initial invasion, will that unforested planet’s Space Force also wear forest camouflage? [FORWARD TO A FRIEND]( Follow The World: [fb]( [tw]( [ig]( [www]( [DONATE TO THE WORLD]( Follow Inkstick: [fb]( [tw]( [ig]( [www]( [DONATE TO INKSTICK]( Critical State is written by Sam Ratner and is a collaboration between The World and Inkstick Media. The World is a weekday public radio show and podcast on global issues, news and insights from PRX, BBC, and WGBH. With an online magazine and podcast featuring a diversity of expert voices, Inkstick Media is “foreign policy for the rest of us.” Critical State is made possible in part by the Carnegie Corporation of New York. [Preferences]( | [Web Version]( [Unsubscribe](