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2. European defence policy in an era of renewed great-power competition
- Author:
- Douglas Barrie, Lucie béraud-Sudreau, Henry Boyd, Nick Childs, Bastain Giegerich, James Hackett, and Meia Nouwens
- Publication Date:
- 02-2020
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- International Institute for Strategic Studies
- Abstract:
- In 2019, European governments’ combined defence spending, when measured in constant 2015 US dollar terms, surpassed the level reached in 2009, before the financial and economic crisis led to a series of significant defence-spending cuts. However, a different strategic paradigm – one that Europe is struggling to adjust to and which is once more a concern for European governments – has re-appeared in this past decade: great-power competition. Russia attempted to change international borders in Europe through the use of force in 2014 by annexing Crimea and continues to support an armed insurgency in eastern Ukraine. Moscow’s challenge to Euro-Atlantic security exists in multiple dimensions: as both a conventional military and also a hybrid-warfare issue, with Russia working to dislocate existing societal alignments and disrupt political processes in Western states. The poisoning of a former Russian intelligence officer (and of his daughter) in the United Kingdom, attributed by the British government to Russia, underlines further how much the character of conflict has changed. How to manage the challenge Russia poses without simply reverting to Cold War logic remains a worrying problem for governments in NATO and the European Union member states. Meanwhile, European security establishments are beginning to recognise the growing political, economic and military influence of a rising China. Although less of an immediate challenge, China’s growth in these areas has possible profound consequences in the long run. Indeed, in December 2019, NATO declared: ‘We recognise that China’s growing influence and international policies present both opportunities and challenges that we need to address together as an Alliance.’2 For the United States, China has already become the pacing military threat. The US Indo-Pacific Strategy Report, released in June 2019, opens with the assertion that ‘the Indo-Pacific is the Department of Defense’s priority theater’. In other words, the European theatre is not. European analysts and officials have begun to wonder whether the US might begin to see Europe through an Asian lens, seeking to generate European commitments to the Indo-Pacific region, or at the very least getting Europeans to take on greater responsibility for their own security and thereby freeing up US resources. Although there will be some elements of the US military presence in Europe that are indispensable to US military action in other regions of the world, that might not be enough to sustain Washington’s firm commitment to European security in the future, regardless of who occupies the White House. Significantly, not even the US has the capability to fight two major wars simultaneously any more, meaning binary choices regarding focus are inevitable. As some observers have argued, Europeans need to urgently assess what Washington’s choices in this regard – and their implications for Europe – might look like. Considering both how to deter Russia and what a European contribution to containing China might entail represents a major challenge for Western European nations, which have relegated defence to a secondary position, as almost a discretionary activity. European states partially demobilised in the 1990s and early 2000s, intellectually and in terms of their force structures, in response to the end of the Cold War. For example, according to IISS data, in 1990 West Germany alone was thought to be able to field 215 combat battalions and the UK 94. Today it is a fraction of that. However, security challenges relating to regional instability, crisis management and transnational terrorism – which all dominated the previous two decades – have not disappeared. On the contrary, all these still demand attention and the investment of European resources. While there is a growing recognition among Europe’s analytical community, and some governments, that things cannot simply continue as before in terms of regional security and defence, coherence and resolve among core actors in the Euro-Atlantic sphere have weakened. The US administration has intensified its call for better transatlantic burden sharing, at the same time displaying a cavalier attitude to the collective-defence commitment enshrined in NATO. France’s President Emmanuel Macron has also expressed severe doubts about the viability of NATO’s collective-defence mission. In addition, the British decision to leave the European Union in 2020 implies that the EU has lost one of its most militarily experienced and one of its most capable member states. There is a tendency among many observers and some politicians to argue that European NATO and EU member states need to clarify the political dimension of their defence ambition, via-à-vis greater strategic autonomy, before resolving the problem of how to meet this ambition militarily, at what cost and in what time frame. Indeed, at times, the debate about European strategic autonomy seems to focus more on the degree of independence from the US that its various proponents would like to achieve and less on the military requirement that autonomy is meant to respond to. It is now widely accepted across Europe that Europeans need ‘to do more’ for their own security and defence. Most of the intellectual energy allocated to this aspiration is spent on achieving better coordination – and even a level of integration – among European armed forces. This is useful, but only if it is directed at building capability to provide for the defence of Europe. The existing military capabilities of the European NATO member states fall short when compared to the force requirements generated by the political–military level of ambition as defined by NATO, or for that matter the EU.5 However, this should not be an excuse to lower the level of ambition, nor should the assumption that Europeans are unable to defend themselves be declared an inevitability. Defence output is the result of political, financial and military choices by governments. To think systematically about the challenge of providing capabilities that can meet Europe’s emerging military requirements, The International Institute for Strategic Studies and the Hanns Seidel Foundation convened a group of thinkers and practitioners from Germany and the UK. The group took seriously the US assertion that Europe needs to be able to provide for its own defence. If Europeans can achieve this, they will be valuable partners to the US in upholding and strengthening the liberal international order on which Euro-Atlantic prosperity and security depend. Meeting twice in 2019, the group discussed threat assessments, debated European capability gaps and scoped potential approaches to addressing them. The following pages draw on the group’s deliberations but do not represent a consensus position.
- Topic:
- Defense Policy, NATO, Regional Cooperation, European Union, and Military Spending
- Political Geography:
- Russia, Europe, North Atlantic, Asia, and North America
3. China’s BRI: The Development-Finance Dimension
- Author:
- David Gordon and Haoyu Tong
- Publication Date:
- 03-2020
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- International Institute for Strategic Studies
- Abstract:
- This report is the first of two synthesising the findings of a major research workshop convened in Washington DC on 26 June 2019, by The International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), as part of its multi-year project on China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The IISS commissioned ten papers that addressed development-finance and security issues in the BRI, prepared by leading scholars and policy practitioners. They were joined at the workshop by more than two dozen other experts on China’s international behaviour. This first report focuses on development-finance issues in the BRI; the second will address security issues broadly cast. China’s Belt and Road Initiative is now six years old. Announced by (then) newly ensconced President Xi Jinping, it has since become the centrepiece of Xi’s ambitious drive to make China a more active global leader, and to break free from the cautious approach set out more than 30 years earlier by then-paramount-leader Deng Xiaoping – that China’s strategic approach should be to ‘hide its capacities and bide its time’. At the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) 19th Congress in 2017, the BRI was integrated into the party’s charter. Much of the early analytical work on the BRI has focused on questions surrounding China’s motivations – economic or geopolitical. Is Xi’s initiative a response to changing domestic economic circumstances? Or does it signal evidence of China’s intent to build a twentyfirst- century imperium modelled on the post-war United States-led experience, more than on European colonial or earlier Asian empires? The emerging consensus on this question is that it has been a bit of both. At the same time, an often overlooked factor is Xi’s constant need to further consolidate his power inside China, as the economics versus geopolitics debate about the motivations for the BRI gives too little attention to the more purely political dimension. The BRI cannot be separated from Xi’s efforts to cast himself domestically as an exceptional leader for an exceptional moment in China’s history.
- Topic:
- Development, Globalization, Infrastructure, Hegemony, and Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)
- Political Geography:
- China and Asia
4. Assessing Chinese defence spending: proposals for new methodologies
- Author:
- Meia Nouwens
- Publication Date:
- 03-2020
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- International Institute for Strategic Studies
- Abstract:
- Little is known about how China’s growing defence budget is allocated, particularly following recent structural reforms. In the absence of publicly available information and new research on Chinese defence economics, outside observers consider the official data to be incomplete. Publications addressing Chinese defence spending often claim that ‘it is widely believed’ official Chinese statistics exclude key categories of military-related spending. For instance, in 2003, one analyst wrote that ‘it is widely accepted that the official budget released by the Chinese every year accounts for only a fraction of actual defense spending. In particular, whole categories of military expenditure are believed to be missing from official figures.’ The methodologies employed by research institutions, such as the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) and the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), to estimate China’s total military spending date back to the late 1990s. Furthermore, existing estimates do not take into account China’s recent military reorganisation under President Xi Jingping’s direction, which began in 2015, and a wide range of defence reforms. For example, in 2018, the Chinese authorities integrated the China Coast Guard (CCG), the People’s Armed Police (PAP) and the maritime militias into the Central Military Commission’s (CMC’s) command structure. It is currently unclear how this restructuring has affected China’s defence spending. In addition, China’s defence spending could have been affected by the increasing fulfilment of weapons procurements by domestic firms. Therefore, a reassessment of China’s defence spending and the methodologies employed is required.
- Topic:
- Defense Policy, Military Strategy, Military Affairs, and Budget
- Political Geography:
- China and Asia
5. Urban Drivers of Political Violence
- Author:
- Antonio Sampaio
- Publication Date:
- 05-2020
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- International Institute for Strategic Studies
- Abstract:
- The demographic trend of urbanisation, while not a cause of conflict, exacerbates local tensions and weak governance. It also creates an urgent need to understand the policy challenges that exist in cities such as Mogadishu, Nairobi, Kabul and Karachi. The rate of growth of the urban population in the four countries covered by this study was above the global average for the 2015–20 period – and more than double the average in the cases of Kenya and Somalia. With the exception of Pakistan, these countries also registered higher urban population growth in 2018 than the average for fragile and conflict-affected countries, which was 3.2%. Typically built without formal land rights, lacking basic public services, and featuring low-quality housing in overcrowded conditions, slums are perhaps the most visible characteristic of cities undergoing rapid and unmanaged urbanisation. But they are not the only one. Cities located in or near areas where armed conflict is taking place also tend to be split by several dividing lines – between slums and the rest of the city, between ethnic groups, between licit and illicit (often criminal) economies, and between violent and safe areas. Whereas many of these divisions may be part of broader national problems, their geographical concentration in the limited confines of a city creates distinctly urban drivers of violence, and therefore requires tailored policies in response. These divisions, exacerbated by the rapid urbanisation process, have contributed to a decline in state authority – governmental capacity to enforce rules, monopoly over the use of force, taxation and other state prerogatives – at the municipal level. In cities, therefore, security and governance go hand in hand. The existence of organised armed groups able to replace key state functions makes the challenges in cities affected by armed conflict particularly urgent. This report sheds light on the ways in which cities contribute to the weakening of state authority, and aims to provide a basis for the formulation of better, more tailored policies.
- Topic:
- Political Violence, Demographics, Urban, Housing, and Public Service
- Political Geography:
- Pakistan, Afghanistan, Kenya, Africa, Middle East, Somalia, Nairobi, Karachi, Kabul, and Mogadishu
6. Stability in the time of COVID-19: implications for the Sahel
- Author:
- International Institute for Strategic Studies
- Publication Date:
- 06-2020
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- International Institute for Strategic Studies
- Abstract:
- Since the early 2010s, increased volatility in the Sahel has aroused widespread concern, spurring the establishment of regional and international groupings to deal with the many security and governance challenges that have undermined stability in the region. Among those efforts were the creation of the G5 Sahel cooperation framework (2014), the G5 Sahel Joint Force (2017), the Sahel Alliance (2017) – and more recently, in June 2020, the International Coalition for the Sahel, to tackle instability in Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania and Niger. Those five countries are the focus of this paper.
- Topic:
- Security, International Cooperation, Governance, and Humanitarian Crisis
- Political Geography:
- Africa, Mali, Chad, Mauritania, Niger, and Burkina Faso
7. Post-INF Arms Control in the Asia-Pacific: Political Viability and Implementation Challenges
- Author:
- Tanya Ogilvie-White
- Publication Date:
- 06-2020
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- International Institute for Strategic Studies
- Abstract:
- Collaborative efforts to build a new arms-control architecture are urgently needed following the demise of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF Treaty) – especially in the Asia-Pacific, where arms-racing pressures are unbridled. High-level discussions within the Trump administration on deploying previously prohibited ground-based INF-range (500–5,500 kilometres) missiles in the Asia-Pacific could hamper progress; rather than convincing Beijing to engage in (as-yet-unspecified) trilateral arms-control negotiations, they could increase strategic risks, strain relations between the United States and its allies in the region (Australia, Japan and South Korea) and encourage closer Sino–Russian military cooperation. Efforts to create arms-control momentum are welcome, but to be politically viable, new initiatives need to be fair, equitable and underpinned by strategic empathy, reciprocity and mutual restraint. A more constructive approach would see the US and its Asia-Pacific allies using their combined diplomatic capital to push for a formal regional arms-control dialogue, which could initially focus on confidence building and strategic-risk reduction, and over the longer term help lay the foundations for a new arms-control regime.
- Topic:
- Arms Control and Proliferation, Diplomacy, Military Strategy, and INF Treaty
- Political Geography:
- Global Focus
8. Inevitable bedfellows? Cooperation on Military Technology for the Development of UAVs and Cruise Missiles in the Asia-Pacific
- Author:
- Amy J. Nelson and T. X. Hammes
- Publication Date:
- 07-2020
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- International Institute for Strategic Studies
- Abstract:
- Today, the ‘small, smart and many’ revolution is providing state and non-state actors with capabilities that previously belonged only to great powers. Advances in specific technologies and manufacturing are broadening access to long-range precision-strike capabilities, and an increasing number of states have an incentive to take advantage of this – particularly those that share a border with China. This paper examines how the evolution of enabling technologies and changes in strategic objectives are increasing the likelihood that uninhabited-aerial-vehicle (UAV) and cruise-missile technologies will proliferate throughout the Asia-Pacific. Through arms sales, new technology-sharing relationships are likely to be created and existing ones reinforced. The current rapid pace of technological evolution means that non-aligned states, non-state actors and even second-tier defence companies are pursuing and contributing to UAV and cruise-missile capabilities. We conclude that although the proliferation of advanced weapons is normally a cause for concern regarding escalation, modern cruise missiles and UAVs may today serve as weapons that smaller states can use to deter aggression from larger states. Historically, the drive to obtain ballistic-missile technology has – when not inhibited by the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR) and other non-proliferation initiatives – produced unlikely state-to-state development partners (some of which paired off specifically in order to circumvent MTCR restrictions). Ballistic-missile proliferation saw the emergence of partnerships between Pakistan and North Korea, Iran and North Korea, and Ukraine and China – all forged to develop or provide capabilities via aligned political interest. In 2008, Dennis Gormley warned that the pattern of cruise-missile proliferation would likely mirror that of ballistic missiles. It does indeed appear that UAV and cruise-missile proliferation is seeing the same pattern of cooperative, facilitated proliferation. Moreover, while developing nations have historically piggybacked on stronger states through technology sharing, today they are assisted through a number of sharing modalities and mechanisms, including technology adoption, overt cooperation (either co-production or co-development) and sales. To complicate matters further, these mechanisms may also be executed by non-state actors (from violent extremist organisations to defence contractors).
- Topic:
- Defense Policy, Science and Technology, Military Strategy, and Missile Defense
- Political Geography:
- Asia-Pacific
9. The PLA’s Mask Diplomacy
- Author:
- Helena Legarda
- Publication Date:
- 08-2020
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- International Institute for Strategic Studies
- Abstract:
- Much has been written about China’s “mask diplomacy” during the Covid-19 pandemic. As the epicenter of the pandemic shifted from China to the rest of the world, China’s government sent planeloads of masks and medical supplies to hard-hit countries around the world. Beijing’s “mask diplomacy” sought to bolster China’s image as a responsible global power and was widely perceived as part of Beijing’s attempt to control the narrative around the pandemic and distract from its initial cover-up. But while all the attention focused on the Chinese government’s actions, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) was carrying out its own, much quieter version of mask diplomacy. According to MERICS data, in the three months between March 13 and June 19, the PLA sent military planes full of medical material to 46 countries. The material, which mostly consisted of masks and personal protective equipment (PPE), was invariably donated to the recipient countries’ armed forces or defense ministries. The PLA also set up video conferences with foreign militaries to share its experiences of fighting the Covid-19 outbreak and strengthen military-to-military relations. At first glance, the Chinese government’s mask diplomacy campaign and the PLA’s look remarkably similar. However, a number of differences suggest there were different goals and strategies at play.
- Topic:
- Diplomacy, Public Policy, Pandemic, and COVID-19
- Political Geography:
- China and Asia
10. COVID-19: Global Trade and Supply Chains after the Pandemic
- Author:
- David Ramirez
- Publication Date:
- 08-2020
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- International Institute for Strategic Studies
- Abstract:
- The COVID-19 outbreak has shaken international trade and supply chains to their very foundations. This paper presents possible trade and supply scenarios, examining in particular the future of China’s pre-COVID-19 role as ‘the world’s factory’. Although disruptions such as the Japan earthquake and tsunami of 2011 and the recent trade war between the United States and China have strained global trade and supply chains in the past, particularly in Asia, COVID-19 has had historically devastating effects. While high levels of uncertainty currently make it hard to foresee exactly how global trade and supply chains will look in the post-COVID-19 era, it is inevitable that they will be reshaped.
- Topic:
- International Trade and Finance, Public Health, Pandemic, and COVID-19
- Political Geography:
- Global Focus
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