Biden passed the commander in chief test CNN.com

Peter Bergen: Biden passed the commander in chief test

Not since President George W. Bush delivered his State of the Union months after the 9/11 attacks has the commander in chief had so much at stake about national security issues while delivering the Super Bowl of political speeches.

The Russians are waging the largest land war in Europe since World War II, yet the US Congress’ support for the Ukrainians seems to be wavering; the war in Gaza rages on with little immediate prospect of a ceasefire in sight, and the conflict is destabilizing the Middle East more than any event since the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Israel’s conduct of the Gaza war is also alienating a swath of President Joe Biden’s base. Meanwhile, at the border, a record number of immigrants are arriving, which is now the top issue for voters in the 2024 presidential election, according to Gallup.

In his State of the Union speech, Biden had to answer the mail on all of these. So, how’d he do?

Biden gave a very clear defense of his Ukraine policy, that the US should provide the aid and weapons to the Ukrainians to counter Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion and he called out former President Donald Trump – without mentioning him by name – who has opposed sending tens of billions of dollars of additional aid to Ukraine.

Biden also weighed in on the crisis at the southern border noting that there was a bipartisan deal on the table in recent weeks in the US Senate that would have sped up rulings on asylum claims, beefed up law enforcement resources at the border and would have discouraged some migrants from coming to the country. Biden swiped at Trump for dissuading members of Congress from passing the deal to keep the political issue alive for him to use in the 2024 campaign.

And Biden made his clearest public stance so far on behalf of Gazans, saying “More than 30,000 Palestinians have been killed. Most of who are not Hamas. Thousands and thousands are innocent women and children.”

All in all, Biden gave a strong performative speech, and on the crucial national security issues he needed to address – Ukraine, Gaza and the border – he did a more than creditable job.

Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University.

The actual hidden truth about UFOs, CNN.com

Opinion by Peter Bergen and Erik German
7 minute read
Updated 1:27 PM EST, Fri March 8, 2024

Editor’s Note: Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America, a professor of practice at Arizona State University, and the host of the Audible podcast “In the Room with Peter Bergen,” also on Apple and Spotify. Erik German is the senior producer of “In the Room.” The opinions expressed in this commentary are their own. View more opinion at CNN.

CNN
—
A former Pentagon official — driven, he says, by his duty to the truth — goes public with an explosive allegation. Facing a scrum of TV cameras and members of Congress, this official claims that the US government has been keeping crashed alien spaceships under wraps for decades.

It sounds like a pitch for a Hollywood movie. But last year, Americans saw it happen on the news. The former Pentagon official, David Grusch, had been an Air Force intelligence officer. He told a congressional committee that he’d learned of a decades-long Pentagon program focused on “crash retrieval and reverse engineering” of UFOs from other planets. Grusch also said that remains found at the spacecraft crash sites were “non-human biologics.”

That’s right. Crashed alien spacecraft and dead extraterrestrials, right there in the Congressional Record. If it wasn’t the wildest thing ever broadcasted on C-SPAN, it must’ve been close. Someone should look into this, right?

It turns out that someone already had. In 2022, the Pentagon tapped a veteran scientist and intelligence officer named Sean Kirkpatrick to set up a new office tasked with investigating UFO sightings by the US military. Named the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office by the US Department of Defense, Kirkpatrick told us his team dug into UFO cases and interviewed US service members who said they had knowledge about encounters with UFOs.

Kirkpatrick recently retired from his job at the Pentagon and spoke with us for the Audible podcast “In the Room.” Kirkpatrick and his team investigated every US government UFO sighting going back to Roswell in the 1940s, putting the findings in a report that the Pentagon released publicly on Friday. That report debunks multiple claims of alien visitations to Earth and of any purported cover up of those visits.

In the most extensive media interview he’s given, Kirkpatrick laid out a convincing case that the stories swirling for decades about the alleged government cover-up of alien-related UFOs may well have been fueled largely by true believers inside the US government or with close ties to it.

Since the term “flying saucer” was first coined, much of the conspiratorial thinking about UFOs has been spawned by people catching glimpses of highly secret US aircraft and wanting answers. And when the government doesn’t provide answers, the public imagination takes over.

But, in fact, Kirkpatrick says, his investigation found that most UFO sightings are of advanced technology that the US government needs to keep secret, of aircraft that rival nations are using to spy on the US or of benign civilian drones and balloons.

“There’s about two to five percent of all the (UFO reports that are)… what we would call truly anomalous,” says Kirkpatrick. And he thinks explanations for that small percentage will most likely be found right here on Earth.

The Roswell incident

This is how Kirkpatrick and his team explain the Roswell incident, which plays a prominent role in UFO lore. That’s because, in 1947, a US military news release stated that a flying saucer had crashed near Roswell Army Air Field in New Mexico.

A day later, the Army retracted the story and said the crashed object was a weather balloon. Newspapers ran the initial saucer headline, followed up with the official debunking, and interest in the case largely died down. Until 1980, that is, when a pair of UFO researchers published a book alleging that alien bodies had been recovered from the Roswell wreckage and that the US government had covered up the evidence.

Kirkpatrick says his office dug deep into the Roswell incident and found that in the late 1940s and early 1950s, there were a lot of things happening near the Roswell Airfield. There was a spy program called Project Mogul, which launched long strings of oddly shaped metallic balloons. They were designed to monitor Soviet nuclear tests and were highly secret.

The U.S. Air Force released this photo June 24 of an aeroshell of a NASA Voyager Mars space probe prior to launch at Walker AFB, New Mexico (formerly Roswell AAF) as part of its report on the so called “Roswell Incident” of 1947. The Air Force reported June 24 that “space aliens” who supposedly crashed in the New Mexico desert 50 years ago were only military dummies and that descriptions of research projects involving low altitude tethered objects such as this may have become part of the incident. The 231-page report is aimed at ending longstanding speculation over the incident and denies that the military had recovered bodies from damaged flying saucers in 1947 and had been covering up the incident ever since.

At the same time, the US military was conducting tests with other high-altitude balloons that carried human test dummies rigged with sensors and zipped into body-sized bags for protection against the elements. And there was at least one military plane crash nearby with 11 fatalities.

Echoing earlier government investigations, Kirkpatrick and his team concluded that the crashed Mogul balloons, the recovery operations to retrieve downed test dummies and glimpses of the charred aftermath of that real plane crash likely combined into a single false narrative about a crashed alien spacecraft.

Kirkpatrick also lays out a convincing case that something similar is happening today. He says new technology taking flight now could help explain a lot of the modern era of UFO sightings from the early 2000s on. It’s not just secret government technology, either. Lots of observers get flummoxed when they catch sight of cutting-edge drones and even odd-looking balloons.

“What’s more likely?” asked Kirkpatrick. “The fact that there is a state-of-the-art technology that’s being commercialized down in Florida that you didn’t know about, or we have extraterrestrials?” he said. “And it even makes me scratch my head more when you show them; here’s the company in Florida that builds exactly what you’ve described. And their response is, well, no, no, no, it’s gotta be extraterrestrials, and you’re covering it up.”

Nevertheless, UFOs remain a genuine national security concern mainly because they are flight hazards. As Kirkpatrick put it, “military pilots that are flying at greater than Mach 1; if they run into a balloon with a tether on it, it’s going to rip a wing off.”

Since 2020, the Pentagon has standardized, de-stigmatized and increased the volume of reporting on UFOs by the US military. Kirkpatrick says that’s the reason the closely covered and widely-mocked Chinese spy balloon was spotted in the first place last year. The incident shows that the US government’s policy of taking UFOs seriously is actually working.

The true believers
So in the face of the actual evidence, why are people in and around government promoting the unsupported idea of alien invaders being covered up by the US government?

“True believers are not just outside of government; many of them are inside government,” Kirkpatrick told us, including the late US Senator Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat who was Senate Majority leader. Another key player was Reid’s longtime friend Robert Bigelow, a Nevada billionaire and the owner of a company called Bigelow Aerospace, both of whom shared a long-running interest in UFOs. Kirkpatrick says, “Senator Harry Reid was a true believer and thought that ‘Hey, the government is hiding this from congressional oversight.’”

In 2007, Senator Reid got funding for a US Defense Intelligence Agency program that paid $22 million to his buddy Bigelow’s aerospace company — money the company spent on investigations into paranormal phenomena. Among other investigations, Bigelow’s team looked into sightings of UFOs by US military personnel and proposed setting up laboratories to study the purported physical remains of alien spacecraft. (On “60 Minutes” in May 2017, Bigelow said he was “absolutely convinced” that aliens exist and that UFOs have visited Earth.)

Reid told a reporter in Nevada in 2021 that even though this was a secret program to look into UFOs, Bigelow didn’t benefit from “some sweetheart deal … it was put out to bid.” Reid also told The New York Times, “I’m not embarrassed or ashamed or sorry I got this thing going…I think it’s one of the good things I did in my congressional service.”

Yet, Kirkpatrick points out, “none of that actually manifested in any evidence” of alien spacecraft. But stories about these secret programs spread inside the Pentagon, got embellished and received the occasional boost from service members who’d heard rumors about or caught glimpses of seemingly sci-fi technology or aircraft.

And Kirkpatrick says his investigators ultimately traced this game of top-secret telephone back to fewer than a dozen people.

“It all goes back to the same core set of people,” Kirkpatrick said. This is both deeply weird and richly ironic. Because, for decades, UFO true believers have been telling us there’s a US government conspiracy to hide evidence of aliens. But — if you believe Kirkpatrick — the more mundane truth is that these stories are being pumped up by a group of UFO true believers in and around government.

Sadly, for all the UFO lovers out there, that may be the biggest takeaway from Kirkpatrick’s report to Congress, which is expected to be published later this month. Plenty of outsiders have long speculated about whether the Pentagon’s alien-focused programs were coming up empty and perhaps were suspiciously self-perpetuating.

But now, highly credible people inside the Pentagon — with really high-level security clearances — are finally saying, we looked at every single piece of secret evidence about supposedly alien UFOs. And as far as we can tell, it’s humans all the way down.

Although Kirkpatrick concedes that for those who truly believe that there are alien visitations here on Earth, little will convince them otherwise: “There is absolutely nothing that I’m going to do, say, or produce evidentiary that is going to make the true believers convert … It is a religious belief that transcends critical thinking and rational thought.”

This article has been updated with the Pentagon’s release of a report on UFOs.

How to Win an Information War: The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler, New America.,Online

[ONLINE] – How to Win an Information War: The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler
EVENT

In the summer of 1941, Britain was struggling to combat Hitler’s powerful propaganda machine. British claims that Hitler was dangerous had little impact against Germany’s wave of disinformation. Except for the broadcasts of someone called Der Chef, a German who questioned Nazi doctrine whose listeners included German soldiers and citizens, as well as politicians in Washington DC who were debating getting into the war. And–most importantly–Der Chef was a fiction. He was a character created by the British propagandist Thomas Sefton Delmer, a unique weapon in the war. In How to Win an Information War: The Propagandist Who Outwitted Hitler, Peter Pomerantsev provides an inventive biography of Sefton Delmer while also confronting hard questions about the nature of information war: what if you can’t fight lies with truth? Can a propaganda war ever be won? In flashes forward to the present day, Pomerantsev weaves in what he’s learning from Delmer as he seeks to fight against Vladimir Putin’s tyranny and lies.

Join New America’s Future Security Program as they welcome Peter Pomerantsev, to discuss his new book How to Win an Information War. Pomerantsev is a senior fellow at the Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University, where he co-directs the Arena Initiative. He is the author of Nothing is True and Everything is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia, which won the 2016 Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize, and of This is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality.

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

PARTICIPANTS

Peter Pomerantsev
Author, How to Win an Information War
Senior Fellow, SNF Agora Institute at John Hopkins University

MODERATOR

Peter Bergen
Vice President, New America
Co-Director, Future Security
Professor of Practice, Arizona State University
When
Mar. 11, 2024
12:00 pm – 1:00 pm
Where
Online Only
WEBCAST LINK
RSVP
New America

740 15th Street NW, Suite 900
Washington, DC 20005

China is Stalking its Dissidents — Even on U.S. Soil

China is Stalking its Dissidents — Even on U.S. Soil
In the Room with Peter Bergen

The United States is home to countless dissidents from around the world who have fled repression in places like Iran, India, Russia and, increasingly, China.

Did Oppenheimer’s Atomic Bomb Make the World Safer?

The wild success of Oppenheimer, with 13 Oscar nominations and nearly $1 billion in ticket sales, has revived a debate about the most destructive weapon ever created — and renewed concerns about how close the world might be to nuclear war.

Why America’s Biggest Terror Threat Is Homegrown

In the Room with Peter Bergen

The January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol was the culmination of political trends in the United States that have festered for decades. And it may be a dress rehearsal for what comes next.

Who is winning? Gen. Petraeus on Ukraine war, two years in, CNN.com

By Peter Bergen, CNN

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

CNN
—
Two years into the Ukraine war, the tide has shifted, and Russian forces have some momentum, according to retired US General David Petraeus.

But he said the Russians have suffered staggering casualties and Ukraine can still hold its own in fighting off Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion if it gets the support it needs from the United States.

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which began disastrously for Putin, marks its second anniversary this coming weekend. To get a better insight into the state of the war, I spoke to former CIA director David Petraeus, who was the commanding general during the US-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and is co-author with Lord Andrew Roberts of the new book “Conflict: The Evolution of Warfare from 1945 to Ukraine.”

David Petraeus has spent decades studying warfare and practicing its application. He was the US and coalition commander of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and later served as director of the CIA.

Last weekend Gen. Petraeus was at the Munich Security Conference, the leading global national security conference that was attended by pretty much every European leader and by top American officials – including Vice President Kamala Harris and Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

The atmosphere at the conference was somber, happening as the shocking news of Alexey Navalny’s death emerged and in the shadow of Ukraine’s withdrawal from the key eastern city of Avdiivka, all putting into sharp focus the impassioned pleas from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for additional military assistance.

Shortly after the conference ended, I spoke with Gen. Petraeus. Our conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.

BERGEN: At the Munich Security Conference, what was the mood like?

PETRAEUS: It was different than any Munich Security Conference I’ve ever been to in the past – and I’ve been going to these since I was a major and a speechwriter for the Supreme Allied Commander of Europe in the late 1980s.

Typically, you have the US delegation there that is pushing everyone else to do more. But this time, the Europeans had never been more serious, while there was considerable uncertainty about the American side: concerns about the US commitment to continued support for Ukraine and concerns about US willingness to continue to provide its very important leadership in the world in general.

There were heartening elements – the Europeans are stepping up, for instance, with the German Chancellor Olaf Scholz on stage at the conference committing to spend 2% of Germany’s GDP on defense. Keep in mind that’s the number three economy in the world now, so that’s a significant development. And NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg announced that this year 18 of 31 NATO nations will meet the 2% of GDP on defense commitment, marking a steady increase among European members.

Despite Europe very much stepping up – and the EU just before the Munich Security Conference announced an additional 50 billion euros in aid to Ukraine – the additional American support is hanging in the balance in the US Congress, and that is desperately needed.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and US Vice President Kamala Harris, along with members of their delegations, meet for talks at the Munich Security Conference on February 17.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and US Vice President Kamala Harris, along with members of their delegations, meet for talks at the Munich Security Conference on February 17. Tobias Schwarz/Reuters
That said, many of the House members who were at the Munich conference, including some of the Republicans that are firm on defense and resistance to Russia, believe that the votes are there and that they’ll be able to get this through.

But the delay, the indecisiveness, the uncertainty certainly was something that weighed on the mood at Munich.

Putin looks at the stalled legislation in the US Congress and the seeming inability to make a decision there to support a fellow democracy that broadly shares our values and principles – however imperfectly, they do – that has been brutally invaded. And then he looks to the US presidential election in November, and he looks at some of the rhetoric in the campaign, and undoubtedly, he draws some hope from that as well.

BERGEN: Who’s winning the war in Ukraine?

PETRAEUS: I’m not sure that either side is winning the war. The Russians obviously have been achieving incremental gains, and the Russians do have the initiative right now, having just forced the Ukrainians to withdraw from Avdiivka in the southeast.

There are several other areas in which the Russians are attacking in the east and south and using massive quantities of artillery that generally destroy whatever it is that they’re trying to seize and then using human wave attacks that are extraordinarily costly in terms of casualties, yet they seem to be able to sustain that. Vladimir Putin seems unconcerned by these losses and still seems to be able to continue to generate additional recruits.

One question, of course, is: might there come a point where the Russian people, particularly Russian mothers and fathers and wives, say, ‘Not my son, not my husband anymore’? And there have been modest demonstrations to bring the boys home, although that has certainly not reached substantial quantity nor been particularly influential.

Russia also has a long history of not permitting opposition for any considerable period. Alexey Navalny just died in prison (CNN: the Kremlin has denied allegations of involvement), and a Russian helicopter pilot who defected to Ukraine earlier in the war was just found shot to death in Spain (CNN: Moscow said it had no information on the matter). It’s essentially removing any illusion that the Russian Federation is anything other than a Stalinist dictatorship.

BERGEN: Are you surprised we’re now two years into this war with no end in sight?

PETRAEUS: Well, not necessarily. While the Ukrainians did demonstrate really quite impressive combat operations in the first year of the war – winning the battles of Kyiv, Kharkiv, Chernihiv, Sumy and Kherson – once the battle lines hardened and the Russians were able to establish defenses, the counteroffensive hinged on the provision of certain weapon systems in a sufficiently timely manner that the Ukrainians would be able to deploy in large numbers. And, obviously, that did not happen.

While the US-led response to the invasion has been very impressive in many respects, there were delays in certain decisions that meant that the Ukrainians did not have US tanks in a timely manner, for example, and that decision led to German delays in approval of the German Leopard tanks. The Ukrainians also didn’t have the Western aircraft that would have provided air support for their ground forces.

The US also needs to supply Ukraine with more long-range Army Tactical Missile Systems, ATACMS, which allow the Ukrainians to accurately hit distant targets in Russian-controlled territory.

So, when you take that into account, I think not a surprise. The Russians have certainly learned certain lessons after seemingly not being able to do that for the first year or more of the war. They have found a way to generate replacement personnel and additional units, and Russia has put its economy on a full-war footing, and this is where the reality enters the picture, as Russia has more than three times the population of Ukraine and an economy that’s more than 10 times the size of Ukraine’s.

If US support is forthcoming, I think you will see Ukraine able to at the very least sustain its present position, perhaps even make further progress in the one theater where there have been very impressive Ukrainian achievements – and that’s in the western Black Sea. There, through the use of anti-ship missiles, some produced in Ukraine, some provided to Ukraine, and then the use of maritime drones developed by Ukraine, the Russian Black Sea Fleet has probably sustained about 30% losses. It has largely been pushed out of the western Black Sea and has had to withdraw the bulk of its fleet from the critical port of Sevastopol in occupied Crimea, a port that it has used for a couple of centuries.

And this is a critical achievement because it’s allowing Ukraine to export its grain through the western Black Sea to countries that are very dependent on that in North Africa, including particularly Egypt.

BERGEN: Last week the Pentagon gave a background briefing to reporters, and they gave what I thought was a pretty astonishing estimate of the number of Russian forces killed or wounded: 315,000. What do you make of that?

PETRAEUS: These are just staggering losses. And yet there is a seeming lack of concern in the Kremlin because they seem to be able to continue to recruit by using substantial enlistment bonuses in rural areas. Keep in mind, of course, Putin is shielding the elite in Moscow and St. Petersburg; the burden is not falling on them. It’s falling on these young men in the much more rural areas.

Putin’s certainly in a much better position than was the case, say, a year ago, and that’s obviously concerning. But if the US can get this $60 billion package through and Ukraine makes fundamental decisions about how to increase its force generation – and that is a critical issue – and can continue to make progress with the development of both maritime and air drones, Ukraine, I think, can not only sustain its position but, in certain cases, make progress. But that’s a lot of assumptions. That’s a lot of ifs that all have to come together.

BERGEN: Ukrainian president Zelensky recently fired his army chief. Do you think that’s going to make a difference?

PETRAEUS: I don’t think that this changes the very fundamental issues that are the most significant factors that will determine the way ahead for Ukraine.

In particular, Ukraine has to come to grips with how to generate replacement forces, and it has to make a very difficult choice. The Ukrainian parliament has to make some fundamental decisions about recruiting ages, noting that the average age of a Ukrainian soldier on the front lines is not the 18-to-23 that I was privileged to lead in Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s over 40. This is a result of their recruiting policies, and they’re going to have to change that. (Under Ukrainian law, men between the ages of 18 to 26 can’t be drafted, though they can volunteer).

It’s very clear that this is an emotional subject, understandably so, and it will be difficult, but it’s necessary.

BERGEN: If Ukraine loses the war, what’s next? Would Putin feel empowered to attack a NATO country, or have Russia’s losses in this war degraded its ability to invade another country?

PETRAEUS: There’s no question that Putin would not stop at Ukraine. The question is, how long would it take him to regenerate the forces for employment elsewhere? Certainly, Moldova would be in the crosshairs. There are still, after all, 1,500 or so Russian soldiers on the ground in that sliver of land, Transnistria, in Moldova.

His attention could also shift to the Baltic states as well, whose existence he also resents.

His goals all along have been to reassemble as much of the Soviet Union or perhaps the Russian Empire as he possibly can, with him at the helm as the czar.

BERGEN: What’s going on in Ukraine looks a lot like World War I, in the sense that it’s trench warfare, minefields, machine guns. Obviously, there are new techniques, like swarms of armed drones. What does this war look like to you?

PETRAEUS: There are elements of World War I here — the trenches; the belts of defensive fortifications; barbed wire; very, very deep minefields; huge quantities of artillery, especially on the Russian side. You also have the Cold War-era tanks and infantry-fighting vehicles, which is largely what you see on this battlefield.

And then, on top of all this, you have some fairly advanced drones. Some are “suicide” drones. You also have precision missiles in the air and at sea, and you have maritime drones. Electronic warfare is also much more significant. There are activities in cyberspace. There is even involvement of capabilities in outer space that enables command, control, and communications, Starlink satellite communications, of course, being one of those.

And you have the advent of the enormous transparency that comes from the ubiquitous presence of smartphones, internet access and social media platforms.

So it’s truly different from any previous context for warfare, and it gives us hints as to the future of war that Andrew Roberts and I describe in our book, “Conflict.”

BERGEN: The Biden administration and Congress have already sent around $75 billion in aid to Ukraine. Why should Americans spend more on funding the Ukrainians?

PETRAEUS: Because it’s in our fundamental national security interest. It’s in the interest of our prosperity and the rules-based international order that we and our allies and partners in the wake of World War II established, which, for all of its imperfections, generally furthered our interests and those of our allies and partners.

Other countries – Russia and its various confederates around the world – are trying to make the world safe for autocracy, not safe for democracy, and our interests and those of our NATO allies and the free world are defended now at the Ukraine-Russia border.

This is not charity. What we do around the world is not out of the goodness of our heart. It’s out of a cold calculation. It is in our national interest to do so, and that if we do not do so, conditions in the world will change in ways that will not be positive for either our national security or our national prosperity.

BERGEN: Do you take at face value former President Donald Trump’s threats to pull the US out of NATO, and what would that do to the alliance?

PETRAEUS: The United States is, at the end of the day, the keystone for NATO capabilities. Even though the NATO secretary general reports that this year 18 of 31 countries will hit the 2% of GDP spending on defense that was agreed upon a decade or so ago, still, the US military is the foundation piece for any NATO operation and for deterrence of would-be aggressors.

So NATO, in many respects, is dependent on decisions made in the Oval Office, and those recent statements were a source of concern at the Munich Security Conference. All Americans who were there were questioned at various times about that, and the fundamental character of NATO and alliance deterrence would obviously be undermined enormously if the US were not to continue to play the role that it has, while led by presidents of either party, since the founding of NATO many decades ago in the wake of World War II.

BERGEN: What do you make of the reports that Russia is developing some kind of anti-satellite weapon, possibly with some nuclear component? Wouldn’t that be pretty dangerous for every country, including the Russians potentially, since they are as dependent on satellite systems as any other country.

PETRAEUS: It would. We should note here, we don’t know whether the nuclear element here is for nuclear power, the way some of our satellites have, or if it’s an actual nuclear weapon – whether a nuclear-powered satellite with some kind of electromagnetic pulse weapon – or if it actually carries a nuclear device that could be used in an anti-satellite role.

The real challenge here is that this is enormously destabilizing, because the tens of minutes that the US has right now of warning of some kind of significant nuclear attack would be reduced quite dramatically if the intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance assets that we have, many of them in space, were blinded and decisions had to be made immediately. “Crisis deterrence” would then be dramatically undermined.

So, it’s very dangerous, it’s very ill-advised and it’s also very provocative.

In Navalny’s death, echoes of Stalin, CNN.com

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

CNN
—
We don’t yet know the exact details of jailed Kremlin critic Alexey Navalny’s death, reported Friday by the Russian prison service — and we may never find the precise truth. But as US Vice President Kamala Harris put it in a speech at the Munich Security Conference, “Whatever story they tell, let us be clear, Russia is responsible.”

Indeed, Russian President Vladimir Putin practices not plausible deniability but implausible deniability when it comes to the deaths of his most prominent critics and rivals. Does anyone seriously think that the plane crash last year near Moscow of the Wagner Group’s leader Yevgeny Prigozhin, who had mounted an armed insurrection, was an accident? (The Kremlin has repeatedly denied any involvement.)

What we do know is that Putin’s life project is to effectively recreate the KGB state, win the war in Ukraine and Make Russia Great Again. These projects are now intertwined because repression since Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine almost exactly two years ago has dramatically increased in Russia.

Human Rights Watch points to the “increased war censorship, imprisonment of vocal critics, and the crushing of human rights activism.”

And what better way to communicate that the Russian opposition is effectively dead, than by silencing its most prominent leader, Navalny, who is as much a well-known dissident in the West as physicist Andrei Sakharov and author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn were during the Soviet era.

How did Russia, under Putin, get here? One of the most important events in Putin’s life was the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, which was the beginning of the end of the de facto Soviet empire in Eastern Europe. When the Wall fell, Putin was a KGB officer in Dresden in what was then East Germany. The Soviet Union imploded two years later.

The context for the fall of the Wall and the implosion of the Soviet state was that Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev had been liberalizing the Soviet Union for several years with his policy of “glasnost” or “openness.” Gorbachev had also pulled Soviet troops out of Afghanistan after almost a decade of a bloody war there in 1989, a conflict that the Soviets believed was a quagmire they needed to extricate themselves from.

Putin drew two big lessons from Gorbachev’s rule: The most dangerous moment for an incompetent authoritarian regime is when it begins to liberalize (to paraphrase French historian and politician Alexis de Tocqueville). And the most dangerous thing a Russian leader can do is lose a war as the Romanovs did in World War I, which helped spark the Russian revolution in 1917. Gorbachev’s pulling out of Afghanistan in February 1989 signaled to Eastern Europe that the feared Soviet military was something of a paper tiger, and within nine months, the Berlin Wall fell.

Putin made a point of not attending Gorbachev’s funeral in 2022, signaling his disapproval of Gorbachev’s record and worldview.

By contrast with Gorbachev, Stalin ruled with an iron fist and was critical to the Allies winning World War II. After more than two decades of rule, the Soviet dictator died in 1953.

It appears Putin, a close student of his own brand of Russian history, as he showed during Tucker Carlson’s odd recent interview, plans to rule more the way of Stalin than the way of Gorbachev.

After all, Putin has essentially fixed the Russian constitution so he can continue seeking election as the country’s leader until 2036.

Indeed, Putin is running for re-election for president in March. Last month, an anti-war candidate Boris Nadezhdin also started running in the presidential election. But as his campaign gained interest, the Putin regime put an end to that just over a week ago. Now Putin will be running largely unopposed.

How will news of Navalny’s death be received in Russia? Most Russians get their news from Russian television, which is effectively now Kremlin TV. It’s likely that Russian television will be silent about Navalny’s death, choosing instead to tout the Great Leader Putin, who will surely romp to electoral victory next month, content in the knowledge that the man who was his most effective opponent is now dead.

But the international community need not remain silent. Navalny should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to communicate what this means to the world. This would require the Nobel Committee to change its rules about not making the award posthumously.

Still, it would send a powerful message to Russians and the world — just as Solzhenitsyn’s Nobel Prize for Literature did in 1970.

How serious is Trump about pulling out of NATO? Very. CNN.com

Published 8:25 AM EST, Tue February 13, 2024
Hear what Trump said about NATO countries and Russia
01:07 – Source: CNN

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

President Donald Trump’s then-defense secretary, James Mattis, said in 2017 that NATO is the “most successful and powerful military alliance in modern history.”

Yet, at a campaign rally over the weekend, Trump said he wouldn’t come to the aid of NATO members if Russia attacked them, which was the whole point of the alliance in the first place. Trump said, “No, I would not protect you. In fact, I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want.”

Trump has long criticized European countries in NATO on the rationale that they purportedly don’t pay their fair share. The idea that foreign countries are freeloading off the United States plays well with his base, but Trump either doesn’t understand how NATO works or chooses not to.

In fact, all the countries in NATO pay into a common fund supporting the alliance’s day-to-day workings, and no country is in arrears on those payments.

Meanwhile, in 2014, all NATO countries agreed to spend at least 2% of their GDP on defense by this year.

Every US president since Barack Obama has pressed NATO countries to reach that expenditure level, but at the time of the agreement, only three NATO countries — the US, United Kingdom and Greece — were doing so.

Since the foreign leader often praised by Trump, Russian President Vladimir Putin, launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, particularly NATO’s European members bordering Russia or Ukraine, like Estonia, Lithuania and Romania, have stepped up spending to more than 2%.

The war in Ukraine is also forcing Germany to end its long policy of spending a relatively small amount of its GDP on defense. Hours after Trump’s NATO comments, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz on Monday said his government would meet its commitment to spend 2% of GDP on defense this year.

European countries fear that Putin might not stop at Ukraine if he is victorious and that if a second Trump presidency were indeed to happen, it might gravely imperil NATO.

In fact, defense spending among NATO countries is growing fast. In 2017, NATO European countries and Canada spent around $270 billion on their defense, while the United States spent around $626 billion. As of 2023, European countries and Canada spent $356 billion on defense, while the US spent $743 billion, according to NATO. Of the 31 countries in NATO, 11 now meet the 2% or above expenditure target.

It’s not an accident that during NATO’s 75 years, the US became the most powerful and wealthy country in history. But that thought seems not to have occurred to Trump, who is always looking to attack countries that are supposedly ripping off the US.

Indeed, Trump has had similar beliefs about US allies for almost four decades. In 1987, Trump paid for a full-page ad in the New York Times featuring an open letter in which he claimed, “For decades, Japan and other nations have been taking advantage of the United States…. Make Japan, Saudi Arabia, and others pay for the protection we extend as allies.” Around the same time, Trump gave a speech in New Hampshire, asserting that Japan and Saudi Arabia were “ripping us off.”

Trump interpreted the Germans’ underspending on defense as if he were a landlord collecting on overdue rent.

These attitudes continued when he was president; Trump was annoyed that while the Germans had the second largest economy in NATO, they then spent only around 1% of their GDP on defense, while the US spent around 4%. Trump interpreted the Germans’ underspending on defense as if he were a landlord collecting on overdue rent. But in NATO, each country decides how much it wants to spend on its own defense, so if a government chooses to spend less than the agreed-upon target of 2% of GDP, the United States isn’t “owed” anything.

When then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel arrived in Washington on her first official visit in March 2017, Trump’s staff produced a chart showing that Germany was supposedly $600 billion in arrears. Trump waved the “invoice” at Merkel, who told Trump, “Don’t you understand this is not real?” according to an account of the meeting in a book I wrote about Trump’s foreign policy, “The Cost of Chaos: The Trump Administration and the World.”
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Trump also seems to not care that the only time that NATO’s Article 5 was invoked, triggering the alliance’s collective self-defense, was after his hometown of New York City was attacked on 9/11, nor does he seem to care that the UK lost 455 soldiers in Afghanistan fighting on behalf of the US-led war there, while Canada lost 158 soldiers, France lost 86, and Germany lost 54.

No matter how wrong-headed it might be, according to his close advisers, Trump seems quite serious about getting out of NATO. When I spoke to Trump’s former national security adviser, John Bolton, last summer for the podcast “In the Room with Peter Bergen,” he told me that Trump “would fundamentally reexamine the premise of NATO, which is the predicate for what I think he would do in a second Trump term, which is withdraw the United States from NATO itself.”

That would be a massive mistake. Why a newly elected Trump would choose to try to undercut such a successful alliance or even break it up is a confounding mystery.

Is Biden an out-to-lunch president? CNN.com

Editor’s Note: Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America, a professor of practice at Arizona State University and the host of the Audible podcast “In the Room” also on Apple and Spotify. The views expressed in this commentary are his own. Read more opinion at CNN.

CNN
—
Special counsel Robert Hur’s report on President Joe Biden keeping classified documents at his home from the time he was vice president in the Obama administration is notable for the details of that case but also for the devastating portrait it paints of an out-to-lunch president.

A quick tour of the report, released Thursday, highlights: “Mr. Biden’s memory was significantly limited, both … in 2017, and in his interview with our office in 2023.” The report, which recommended that the president not be charged, portrays Biden as someone who comes across as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”

When he talked to officials in the special counsel’s office, Biden could not remember the years when he was vice president, nor did he remember, “even within several years” when his son Beau died. The latter is fairly astonishing given how close Biden was to his son and what a wrenching pain Beau’s death in 2015 at the age of 46 was for the Biden family.

White House officials and Biden’s personal attorney Bob Bauer said the report made inappropriate and incorrect statements about the president’s memory, noting the interview with prosecutors took place in the immediate aftermath of the October 7 attack on Israel and suggesting Biden’s attention was elsewhere. “The report uses highly prejudicial language to describe a commonplace occurrence among witnesses: a lack of recall of years-old events,” Bauer said in a follow-up statement to Hur.

In a press conference Thursday evening, the president slammed the special counsel for putting in the report that he did not remember the year of Beau’s death and that his “memory was significantly limited.” A seething Biden told reporters “I don’t need anyone. I don’t need anyone to remind me when he passed away.”

Yet the special counsel’s report hardly stands alone. Consider that during Thursday’s press conference, President Biden, right after defending his memory, mistakenly referred to Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi as the president of Mexico. And this week, speaking at a campaign event, the president confused French presidents François Mitterrand, who died in 1996, and Emmanuel Macron, the French president today.

On Wednesday, talking at another campaign event, Biden mixed up the German chancellor Helmut Kohl, who died in 2017, with Angela Merkel, who is still with us.

At a White House media event on Tuesday, Biden struggled to remember the name of the terrorist group Hamas and had to be prompted with the right word by a staffer.

None of this will be news to Fox News viewers who are treated to a steady diet of the president’s gaffes, memory losses and unsteady walks from place to place. And it certainly helps explain why nearly half of Democratic voters are seriously concerned about Biden’s age, according to a CNN poll released last week.

Americans have had presidents in the past who have had memory problems. Towards the end of President Ronald Reagan’s second term, he was forgetful, and in 1994, years after he left office, he disclosed that he had Alzheimer’s.

After World War I, President Woodrow Wilson was incapacitated by a stroke, which his wife kept secret while she effectively ran the White House, but that was before TV, intrusive media and nuclear weapons.

So, do Biden’s memory lapses raise questions about whether he should have his finger on the nuclear trigger? I have no idea, since it is hard to determine his medical condition based on what we are seeing on TV and reading about his memory lapses in the special counsel’s report, but it certainly seems worrisome.

And yet, for the many Republicans, Democrats and independents who think Biden is a doddering old man, think back to the last State of the Union when Biden did a skillful end run around some of the more conservative Republicans attending by getting them to publicly assent not to make cuts to Social Security and Medicare.

On March 5 comes Super Tuesday, with 15 states voting for their delegates to the Republican Convention. If Trump sweeps the table on Super Tuesday, all eyes will be on Biden’s State of the Union two days later on March 7.

If Biden’s performance is as shaky as it was when he talked to the special counsel, his assertion that he is the right guy to defeat Trump will likely be greeted with considerable skepticism. But if he pulls off another State of the Union as good as his last one, Biden is back in the fight.