Friday News Roundup — March 25, 2022
Updates from Europe, Ukraine, and Russia; Holding War Crimes to Account; The End of Globalization?; DoD Acquisitions Hearing; Japan, Russia, & Disputed Territory
Greetings from Washington, DC. While this roundup has updates on the latest from Ukraine and Russia, the week’s events inside the Beltway focused on the Supreme Court. Of course, the majority of the week was focused on the historic nomination hearings for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, but despite the nominees’ qualifications partisanship is on full display. Adding to the focus on the court, reporting this week indicated that the January 6th investigative committee has texts laden with 2020 election conspiracy theories from conservative activist Ginni Thomas, the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas, to former Trump administration Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. While the media focuses on the partisan scandals and the public sees justices with partisan affiliations, what can be done for belief in the institution of an independent judiciary? What does this mean for the broader legitimacy of our democratic institutions, as the court’s decisions on hot-button culture war issues looms.
We also paused to reflect on the life, leadership, and legacy of trailblazing Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. Opening this week’s roundup, our President & CEO Glenn Nye shares some thoughts.
This week Joshua C. Huminski, the Director of the Mike Rogers Center for Intelligence & Global Affairs penned an op-ed in the Hill calling for a strategic reevaluation of the West’s interests in Ukraine before undertaking a more aggressive campaign of support for Kyiv. He noted that this present situation is unlike any in recent history and the consequences of miscalculation could well take a local, limited war and expand it to a regional conflict, or worse. Huminski was invited onto the Rod Arquette radio show to discuss this op-ed and the information war being waged between Kyiv and Moscow. Ethan, also in The Hill, wrote of how mercenaries were finding their way onto the battlefield in Ukraine, and how this complicates an already murky environment.
On podcasts this week, CSPC Senior Fellow James Kitfield appeared on the Diane Rehm podcast discussing Ukraine and Biden’s summitry. In his weekly appearance on the Farrcast finance and investing podcast, Dan provided an update while also reminding listeners of useful cyber hygiene concepts as cyber tensions rise.
Taking a break from a heavy slate of reviewing national security and foreign policy books, Huminski reviewed Jeremy Paxman’s “Black Gold” for the Diplomatic Courier. A social history of the influence of coal on the rise of modern Britain, Paxman’s book was an enjoyable look at how the fuel source shaped British society, culture, economics, and Empire.
In this week’s roundup, Joshua provides the latest update from President Biden’s trip to Europe and what is happening in Ukraine. Wes looks at how the Kremlin is trying to sell the war to the Russian people, while Robert covers how steps are being taken to hold Russia’s war crimes to account. Dan addresses whether the conflict marks the “end of globalization” or a future competition over partnerships and alliances. Ethan breaks down the testimony of the nominee to be the Pentagon’s “acquisition czar”. Hidetoshi closes with an analysis of Japan-Russia tensions over Hokkaido and disputed territories. As always we wrap with news you may have missed.
Remembering Madeline Albright
Glenn Nye
As a democratic country in Europe is under unjustified attack from authoritarian Russia, the world needs more strong voices like Dr. Madeleine K. Albright’s. Sadly, the world lost this champion of democracy, freedom, and justice. Her legacy will continue to inspire the students she taught, the civil society leaders she met with, the global citizens she spoke out for, the men and women she mentored, and the employees she led. I was lucky to be one of those employees at the Department of State when I was sworn in as a Foreign Service Officer in 1999. At the State Department she ushered in a strategy of “assertive multilateralism” wherein the United States would secure its national interests by working with international partners, while reserving the prerogative to go it alone when necessary.
Growing up in war torn Europe and fleeing communist Czechoslovakia for our shores shaped her belief in America as a force for freedom and democracy and gave her voice a unique resonance. Her character, determination, and leadership qualities guided her to the position of U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. and Secretary of State, breaking barriers in what had previously been largely a male-dominated foreign policy establishment.
Perhaps the clearest manifestation of Albright’s impact on the world can be found among the people of Kosovo, who cheered her defense of their country and nicknamed her “Nona” (mother) for her role in Kosovo’s independence and the pursuit of justice against Serbian war crimes.
CSPC will honor Secretary Albright’s legacy by continuing our mission to strengthen American partnerships with likeminded allies and partners, acting in concert to champion democracy, freedom, and a more just world.
Biden Travels to Brussels & the Latest in Ukraine
Joshua C Huminski
This week President Joe Biden traveled to Brussels and met with NATO allies. During the visit he called for Russia to be expelled from the G-20. At the meeting the president also pledged an additional $1 billion in aid to countries along Ukraine’s border to help with the crisis, and to accept 100,000 Ukrainian refugees. Moscow was kicked out of the G-8 (now the G-7) following the 2014 invasion and annexation of Crimea. He also announced a new slate of sanctions targeting Russian legislators, oligarchs, and defense companies.
The president also warned that any use, by Moscow, of chemical weapons “would trigger a response in kind.” He added, “We would respond if he uses it. The nature of the response would depend on the nature of the use.” Western officials have increasingly warned that the Kremlin may resort to the use of chemical weapons either as a false-flag attack or in response to its halting progress. There is also some concern that Russia’s advance could strike chemical facilities in Ukraine, triggering an incident. NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said that the “Allies agreed to supply equipment to help Ukraine protect against chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear threats.”
Separately, the United States Department of Justice charged four Russian government officials, including three intelligence officers, with allegedly hacking global energy targets. This followed a warning from Biden earlier in the week that Russian cyber-attacks could occur in the near future.
The President’s visit occurs against the backdrop of a slowing Russian advance, some Ukrainian counterattacks (including allegedly sinking a Russian naval vessel offloading material in port), and a growing sense that the war will drag on for some time to come. A month into the war, the West has settled into a pattern of arming and supporting the Ukrainian forces, within reason, and Moscow largely accepting this, though the duration of their forbearance remains to be seen. Both Ukraine and Russia continue their aggressive information warfare campaigns targeting different audiences — the West in the case of the former, and a domestic audience in the case of the latter. Wes Culp reviews Russia’s campaign, below.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy renewed his calls for greater aid, but slowed his push for the imposition of a No Fly Zone. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken also announced that the administration had made a formal determination that Russia had committed war crimes in Ukraine. CSPC’s Robert Gerber covers this more, below. The Mariupol city council claimed that at least 300 people were killed in a Russian bombing of the city’s theatre, which was being used as a refugee shelter at the time. Russian and Ukrainian forces also conducted the first prisoner-of-war transfer this week.
Russia’s Shambolic Domestic Information Campaign
By Wesley Culp
While Ukraine’s information campaign has proven to be very effective and active thus far, Russia’s information campaign in support of its war against Ukraine appears hollow and undynamic in comparison. Moscow’s information war, which has been almost entirely driven by the Kremlin and sources adjacent to it, is focused on building an image of public enthusiasm for its “special military operation.”
The letter “Z” in the Latin script has been enlisted by Moscow’s media campaign managers as a symbol of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. As a symbol, the letter “Z” has its roots in the markings Russian troops placed on their equipment and vehicles shortly prior to their invasion. However, no effort has been made to define the symbol beyond this, which has instead turned the letter into a sign of the ideological emptiness of Russia’s information campaign. As official sources began to incorporate “Z” into their messaging, government officials and local state-affiliated organizations began to organize flash mobs, auto rallies, and even arrangements of students or hospital patients into the shape of the letter “Z” to express support for the invasion. The “Z” media campaign had its apparent roots in the Russian Defense Ministry’s PR department and was later boosted by RT editor Margarita Simonyan. The common feature of these initiatives is the Russian state’s direct or indirect role in marshaling public support for the invasion. Displays of support which are not directly driven by government instructions instead are a result of organizations ostensibly unconnected to the Russian government level taking indirect queues from public officials.
Moscow’s attempts to build an image of resolute support for its “special operation” has made use of public displays of support for the invasion to generate the appearance of broad social buy-in for the invasion. One publicized example of this was a “concert” on the anniversary of Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea which President Vladimir Putin made a surprise appearance in. The concert, which was attended by 95,000 people inside Moscow’s Luzhniki stadium and 100,000 people outside according to Russia’s Ministry of the Interior, included many state employees who were impelled to attend the rally by their employers. A variety of Russian athletes and celebrities also made appearances at the concert, but the event’s broadcast featured interruptions which were later characterized by Kremlin press secretary Dmitry Peskov as technical glitches.
However, the vacuous messaging and signaling of Russian officials and state media outlets has failed to generate majority consensus about the aims of Russia’s “special operation.” This is visible in recent polling by state-adjacent opinion polling firm VTsIOM, which suggests that 46% of Russians believe that the objective of Russia’s invasion is to disarm Ukraine and to prevent the establishment of NATO military bases in the country, 19% believe that Russia seeks to change Kyiv’s political course or “denazify” the country, and 17% believe that Russia seeks to protect Russian speakers in Donbas. This is a striking lack of coherence in Russian’s understanding of the war being waged in their name in Ukraine, especially since some of the most significant choreographed elements of the lead-up to Russia’s invasion were conducted under the pretext of pretext Russian-speakers in Ukraine’s Donbas region.
Pageantry in support of Moscow’s invasion across Russia continues to be complemented by Kremlin messaging that claims that Russia’s campaign is proceeding according to plan, which the Kremlin articulated as recently as March 23. This official communication has also sought to quiet questions of instability within the Kremlin, as a March 24 Security Council meeting allegedly featured contributions from Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, who had previously not been seen in public for almost two weeks prior to his purported appearance in the videoconference. This theme of stability was echoed by Kremlin Press Secretary Peskov, who attributed Shoigu’s absence to his high workload as Defense Minister.
The use of organizations both officially unconnected and indirectly connected to the Kremlin in Moscow’s information campaign harkens back to the Soviet state’s use of so-called “transmission belt” organizations to convey information from the most senior levels of the Soviet government to the Soviet people. The Kremlin’s shuttering of the few remaining independent outlets in Russia, such as Ekho Moskvy and TV Dozhd, is also reminiscent of the Soviet period. In particular, this information campaign model bears the most similarity with the information environment of the late Soviet Union, which in practice no longer carried the same ideological fervor of the early Soviet Union, but still relied on official organizations affiliated with the state to convey a carefully curated cocktail of information to the Soviet people.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has already proven extremely destructive to Ukraine, its people, and its infrastructure. However, the war also appears to be a catalyst which will accelerate Russia’s return to an information environment monopolized by the state. When combined with the ideological emptiness of its current campaign, Russian information campaigns in the present and future will likely be as shallow and scattered as the Kremlin’s campaign surrounding its war in Ukraine today.
War Crimes and Words
Robert W. Gerber
On March 23, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced that the U.S. government assesses that
Members of Russia’s forces have committed war crimes in Ukraine. As with any alleged crime, a court of law with jurisdiction over the crime is ultimately responsible for determining criminal guilt in specific cases… We are committed to pursuing accountability using every tool available, including criminal prosecutions
What is happening here is that the State Department’s Office of the Legal Advisor has been carefully building a war crimes case against Russia, but the methodical and cautious Department had to fast track an interim announcement after President Biden’s impromptu March 15 comments to the press during which he called President Putin a war criminal. The State Department said it is using public sources and intelligence reporting in its assessment but did not list exact war crime charges. We expect the final assessment to detail the specific manners in which Russia has breached the Geneva Convention and protocols as well as other UN conventions to which Moscow is a signatory. These could include, inter alia: a) attacking a sovereign country without provocation, imminent threat, and/or UN authorization; b) targeting of civilians and civilian infrastructure; c) interfering with humanitarian corridors; d) destruction of sites of cultural and historical significance; and e) environmental crimes.
Article 53 of the 4th Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War prohibits:
Any destruction by the Occupying Power of real or personal property belonging individually or collectively to private persons, or to the State, or to other public authorities, or to social or cooperative organizations… except where such destruction is rendered absolutely necessary by military operations.
To be clear, for the Russian army, terrorizing civilians is a deliberate tactic, not collateral damage or errors committed in the fog of war. This tactic appears to be used as a means to achieve three strategic objectives:
1) To force the Ukrainian government to surrender/capitulate/negotiate;
2) To cause a refugee crisis in Europe. Putin took note of the political impact the Syrian refugee crisis had on Europe, and he is hoping for a repeat. However, things look different in 2022: Ukraine’s neighbors have so far rallied in support of Ukrainian refugees and the vast majority of refugees plan to return to Ukraine.
3) To permanently alter the internal demographic makeup of Ukraine. As refugees and IDPs flee, Russian troops and foreign fighters move in, and people who identify as Russian or pro-Moscow will constitute a larger portion of the population within the redrawn borders of Ukraine. This is essentially ethnic cleansing — a term that came into use during the Balkan wars. While ethnic cleansing is not mentioned in the Geneva Conventions, UN Security Council Resolution 780 (1992) established an Expert Group to catalog violations of international law including “ethnic cleansing” in the former Yugoslavia. Russia supported Resolution 780, and yet forced migration aka population exchange appears to be among its key objectives in its brutal Ukraine campaign. UN human rights experts have said such acts could fall within the meaning of the Genocide Convention.
Will a war crimes case matter to Russia? Sort of. The prospect of Putin ever appearing before a court is unlikely, but the risk to his cronies of future criminal liability could have a persuasive effect. The International Criminal Court launched an investigation into allegations of war crimes just days into Russia’s invasion. Neither Russia nor the United States is a party to the ICC but acts that take place in Ukraine are within its scope. On March 17, the UN-affiliated International Court of Justice ordered Russia to stop all military actions in Ukraine, and to revoke the false claim that Ukrainian citizens had requested Russia’s military help. U.S. ambassador-at-large for Global Criminal Justice Beth Van Schaack told reporters March 23 that accountability could come from the ICC, or from courts in the United States, Ukraine or third countries. She explained that the State Department would cooperate with the ICC, despite having “no affirmative cooperation duties.”
The March 23 State Department announcement gives President Biden more ammunition for his meetings in Brussels this week. And finally, cataloging Russia’s war crimes helps in terms of documenting and preserving evidence for the historical record. The Kremlin revealed its hyper-sensitivity to the words “war crimes” when its spokesman quickly responded to President Biden’s March 15 comments, calling them “unacceptable and unforgivable rhetoric” and vaguely accusing the United States of having killed “hundreds of thousands of people in the world.” This knee-jerk reaction is itself a good reason to continue to ring the war crime bell against Russian officials.
The End of Globalization & Competition Ahead
Dan Mahaffee
In getting a sense of what the leading minds in finance think, the letters to shareholders from the heads of asset managers, holding companies, and conglomerates are always a useful starting point. While some are exercises in corporate PR, others can provide strategic insights. When someone like Larry Fink, whose firm BlackRock manages more than $10 trillion in assets, declares an end to globalization, people take note.
BlackRock’s Chairman & CEO Fink did just that in his letter to shareholders this week, stating that the Russian invasion of Ukraine marked the end of the era of globalization. In noting the benefits of that era, Fink states what we stand to lose:
The world benefited from a global peace dividend and the expansion of globalization. These were powerful trends that accelerated international trade, expanded global capital markets, increased economic growth, and helped to dramatically reduce poverty in nations around the world… We believed the world would come closer together. And we saw that happen. I remain a long-term believer in the benefits of globalization and the power of global capital markets. Access to global capital enables companies to fund growth, countries to increase economic development, and more people to experience financial well-being.
The cost of this war is first and foremost the humanitarian toll, the lives lost, but the disruption of the broader global system is seen in the supply shocks, the specter of famine, and the splintering of the world into blocs of competing powers. As the era of globalization is coming to an end, a strategic appraisal and hard choices are needed when we look to the future.
At home, our domestic disunity has invited authoritarians’ ascent abroad. It is hard to doubt that after seeing January 6th riots, outlaw truckers disrupting trade, disjointed retreat from Afghanistan, and many other such scenes, the Kremlin thought that the west was weak and divided. In Congress, there has been remarkable bipartisanship regarding support for Ukraine. In terms of diplomatic efforts and economic consequences, the United States and its allies have remained largely united. At the geostrategic level, will this unity continue as the conflict drags on? Are we ready to make some of the tougher choices when it comes to escalating sanctions or ensuring their effectiveness? What will we do and will we stand together if tough choices are required regarding ties with India and China, should they lean closer to Moscow?
That is another reality of the breakdown in globalization, that much of the future of the system depends on looming decisions made in Beijing and Delhi. Here, the United States and our core allies need to demonstrate unity in terms of what the benefits and consequences are to the choices before them.
In dealing with China, we are at a crossroads. If China and the west cannot arrest the march towards decoupling, there are deep doubts about the future of the global economic and commercial ties that have improved the well-being of so many Chinese. Can we articulate a win-win approach for both sides — acknowledging the need to play by the rules as well as the security of critical supply chains — that empowers those in Beijing who still see China’s future depending on economic ties with the west? Can we make this a powerful enough contrast with the return to statism and re-alignment with upon which Xi Jinping appears to be headed?
In working with India, the promise of its participation in the Indo-Pacific Quad and deepening security cooperation are tempered by its longtime historical self-identification as a non-aligned leader, traditional ties with Moscow, and the complexity of its domestic politics and regulatory regimes. Acknowledging all of that along with the civilizational, millennia-long history of the subcontinent and legacies of colonialism requires an emphasis on partnerships and new paradigms for cooperation. Much here remains on emphasizing the benefits of continued engagement and alignment with the United States and its allies, not just in defense, security, and intelligence, but also economic, cultural, and educational ties.
Those ties that bind and provide mutual benefit are what we stand to lose most if globalization is truly breaking down. Those are still ties that can exist among our allies and partners. The ability to extend those ties and their opportunities to potential partners — as well as former adversaries — is a powerful, strategic tool. This of course must be accompanied by the investments in the other tools of national power, especially to defend our interests and values, as well as to enforce the rules that we all can play by and benefit from.
To this end, while we must earnestly prepare for a long competition ahead — especially where capabilities have atrophied while new threats have arisen — I have also long believed we could win any war by simply setting up a station at the front that would offer a visa to the United States or Europe along with a coupon for medical care, college tuition, or a trip to Disney World. Tongue-in-cheek as this may be, it is a reminder that the moral elements, as Napoleon said, are to the physical in battle, three-to-one.
Being part of “our system” is still a powerful incentive — ties of trade, commerce, and engagement benefit all — but we must also show the determination to defend this system ourselves and make sure that it remains strong for the future. It can be easy to take for granted, but we cannot forget Ukrainian people are fighting for their homeland in part because they wanted to be part of this system. The past era of globalization may be ending, but the way that ties with the world, alliances, partnerships, commerce, and trade serve our interests still cannot be underestimated.
Candidate for DoD Acquisitions Czar saying the right things…
But expediting weapons production and overcoming contract bureaucracy at odds with vision
Ethan Brown
Bill Laplante answered questions from the Senate Armed Services Committee during a confirmation hearing this week, bannered by inquiries about speeding up munitions production. The short version of the dialogue was Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) and the ranking member, noting that U.S. weapons stockpiles are critically low in priority theaters, and ramping up production was something that required additional acquisitions focus…right?
“[Yes], I believe we need multiple hot production lines, whether that be munitions, unmanned aerial systems, and the like…they — up by themselves — are a deterrent, and we need to put much more focus on that across the board”.
It was an obvious question that demanded an obvious answer, and anything to the contrary would have most certainly created strife along party lines, if not bipartisan criticism. After all, defense spending is typically congressional sacrosanct, so any answer not in the affirmative on increasing federal spending on defense department weapons production was a decided lay-up.
The problem, or more succinctly, the challenge that the presumably soon-confirmed acquisitions czar faces in the coming months stems not merely from low-production capabilities at present, and not even from re-initiating cold lines to form these new hot bloodlines. It stems from the technocracy that is the big defense contractors who have little or no competition in supplying these weapons and capabilities to the Pentagon. Reliably, Lockheed-Martin, Raytheon, and Northrup-Grumman dominate the American weapons production apparatus, and as such, have no incentive to meet the kinds of demands that the Pentagon’s chief acquisitions officer is promising. Except of course, when a lot of zeros follow a primary number and a dollar sign, and even then, that is not incentive to speed up production.
Testing (rapid), development, and fielding are the priorities for Pentagon acquisitions per House Armed Services Committee leads Adam Smith (D-WA) and Mike Rogers (R-AL, the other one, not ours), and in particular, upgrading and modernizing the Short Range Air Defense (SHORAD)
System of systems. The issue here (we’ll get to Laplante’s promises in a moment) for rapidly upticking the production lines of short-term items like Stinger and Javelin missiles is the reactionary nature of lawmakers pressuring Defense leaders and ipso facto the defense industry: It’s all about #standwithUkraine right now, and if you think the claim of reactionism is overblown, don’t listen to this analysts take, see what the Pentagon comptroller says about the upcoming budget.
It’s no coincidence that legislators are overtly posing these lay-up questions to President Biden’s nominee for (arguably) the most important position in the Pentagon’s hierarchy, the FY2023 DoD budget — for which I’ve made plenty of gloomy analysis on in previous Friday Roundups — is set to drop next week. Despite the budget going public, details will remain withheld on a variety of line items, but the impact of short-term reactionism like beefing up Stinger production for Ukraine’s use means that things like the Air Force acquiring the ARRW hypersonic system have to wait since the allocation was cut in half (we should be looking at defensive hypersonic capabilities anyway).
DoD budget sub-thread aside, let’s get back to the lede here, and that is Nominee Laplante and his goals of speeding up production. Not only are munitions a collective priority for everybody that spends taxpayer money on defense tech, but Laplante also pointed to drone technology advancements, and avoiding that valley of death for defense innovation and small businesses trying to break into the game against the industry titans. It may seem a little on the nose, but also a fight-club style rule about lawmakers spending money on defense weapons: the small companies struggle and tech wanders into the valley of death because there is no incentive to speed up the production. Those dollars (the ones with all the zeros) are going to be spent, because it serves the interests of various constituencies to do so at the inflation-commandeered clip since yesteryear.
It all boils down to requirements generation, and my single greatest pet peeve from my days as a low-level grunt hoping to use the new gadgets sent to our unit by the big tech outfits: proprietary systems. Incentivising faster production is never going to happen, despite the logical assertions by legislators and Pentagon leaders, if production remains in a vice-grip of proprietism until crisis demands change. It may be precisely why our precious stockpile of offensive weapons has faced dwindling for years.
In short, saying the right things about speeding up weapons development, testing, and fielding (in addition to literally every other program of record for the DoD) isn’t going to work unless the defense enterprise — acquisitions — changes how it awards contracts. That change must reframe requirements for better cooperation…and competition…between the big mammoths of production and smaller entities who offer innovation based on incentives. Of course, when the budget never stops growing (crises have a funny way of leading to this kind of spending increase) and the program managers in charge of validating and securing contracts have…interests…in how a certain company might perform, that’s another challenge entirely for forcing efficiency in weapons tech.
Japan’s Hokkaido: Russia’s Another Geopolitical Flashpoint
By Hidetoshi Azuma
As Ukraine has become the latest victim of Russia’s predatory aggression, an unlikely location on the other end of Eurasia is emerging as Moscow’s potential next target: Japan’s northernmost island of Hokkaido. As if to synchronize with its inexorable annihilation of Ukraine, the Kremlin has scarcely wasted time in showcasing its military might in and around Hokkaido over the last few weeks. In fact, Moscow’s increasing show of force in the Far East is a part of Moscow’s broader geopolitical designs for Japan ultimately culminating in the seizure of Hokkaido. Given the Russian president Vladimir Putin’s growing megalomania festering inside the Kremlin’s isolated chamber, a creeping invasion of Hokkaido is now a veritable possibility confronting Japan and its American ally. Indeed, he has thrown down the gauntlet to Japan earlier this week by halting the stumbling peace talks to finally end WWII between the two countries. Therefore, the defense of Japan’s northern flank is emerging as today’s most urgent imperative for the US-Japan alliance and demands a fundamental rethink of Japan’s role in the Indo-Pacific.
Hokkaido is Japan’s northernmost borderland directly facing Russia’s perennial eastward expansion in search for warm-water ports ever since the 18th century. From the Russian perspective, Hokkaido would be a solid outpost providing an exit to the Pacific with its warm water ports, especially the port of Kushiro. Russia’s obsession with Hokkaido grew particularly after the Alaska Purchase of 1867, leaving the warm-water, yet frigid port of Petropavlovsk on the Kamchatka peninsula as the only exit to the Pacific unhindered by foreign powers. Indeed, the Soviet chairman Joseph Stalin even proposed to the US president Harry Truman in August 1945 a partition of Hokkaido along the demarcation line from Kushiro to Rumoi, an idea ultimately spurned by Washington. Nonetheless, Stalin secretly ordered an invasion of all of Hokkaido, which failed to occur due to the fierce last-ditch resistance by the last remaining Japanese forces as well as the advent of General Douglas MacArthur’s occupation army on Japan’s northernmost flank. The dawn of the US-Soviet Cold War thus descended on Japan with Hokkaido coming under US control and Sakhalin and the Kurils under the Soviet’s.
The US military’s forward deployment in Japan during the Cold War and postwar Japan’s rebirth as Washington’s key regional ally forced Moscow to resort to protracted political warfare instead of naked aggression as in 1945. Moscow began using the frozen conflict of the four southern Kuril islands, or the Northern Territories as a lever over Japan’s ostensibly to secure a peace treaty but ultimately to undermine the US-Japan alliance. The Kremlin’s first diplomatic victory occurred when the former Japanese prime minister Ichiro Hatoyama signed the controversial 1956 Soviet-Japanese Joint Declaration which stipulated Moscow’s supposed handover of the two smaller disputed Kuril islands after the conclusion of a peace treaty. Soviet active measures simultaneously expanded across Japan in pursuit of the same strategic objective and centered on the creation of a pro-Soviet regime in Tokyo. The upshot of such decades-long Soviet efforts culminated in the emergence of an intricate agent network binding various elements of the Japanese political establishment, especially lawmakers from Hokkaido. For example, the Hokkaido-native and former agricultural minister Ichiro Nakagawa was unusually close to the known Soviet handler Ivan Kovalenko and even received persona non grata from the US on the basis of his suspicious ties to the Kremlin. The significance of the Nakagawa affairs was the emergence of a pro-Soviet, yet conservative faction right in the heart of Japan’s ruling party, the Liberal Democratic Party, even at the height of the Cold War.
In fact, Nakagawa’s legacy is still palpable even in today’s domestic Japanese politics. After the Cold War, Tokyo viewed the new Russian state largely as a non-adversary and increasingly pivoted to the policy of rapprochement with Moscow to achieve a diplomatic breakthrough in securing a peace treaty. Nakagawa’s fellow Hokkaido-native lawmaker and former secretary, Muneo Suzuki, spearheaded Tokyo’s foreign policy shift and even became the first foreign politician to meet Putin after his first presidential inauguration. Despite his questionable Kremlin connections, Suzuki has publicly advocated the dubious idea of an incremental approach to the territorial dispute in line with the 1956 Joint Declaration and even advised many prime ministers, particularly Shinzo Abe, who met Putin 27 times with his “new approach” to Russia consisting of patient engagement and economic largesse. Abe’s signature agenda of economic cooperation with Russia even led to the creation of a ministerial post to advance it while expanding the government budget for the Northern Territories. As a result, Suzuki’s local power grew exponentially during Abe’s tenure, culminating in the emergence of his protege, Naomichi Suzuki, as the prefectural governor in 2019.
Suzuki’s clout in Hokkaido is also evident in his enthusiastic promotion of the status of the Ainus, one of the ethnic minorities in Japan mostly living on its northern flank. The Hokkaido politician began advocating the recognition of the Ainus as an “indeginous people” in Japan in 2008 and succeeded in gaining understanding and support from other lawmakers despite his dubious interpretation of the history of the ethnic minority. In December 2018, Putin suddenly unveiled his intention to recognize the Ainus as an “indeginous people” in Russia. Strangely, despite the decade-long hiatus, Suzuki’s agenda gained momentum immediately after the revelation of Putin’s Ainu plan, culminating in the enactment of the controversial Ainu Policy Promotion Act in April 2019. The new law explicitly recognizes the indeginous status of the Ainus in Japan, opening up possibilities for their right to self-determination in the future. Its real significance is its tacit designation of Japanese people as foreigners and conquerors of what is now Japan. Pending Moscow’s official recognition of the Ainu’s similar status in Russia, Japan’s 2019 legislation could open the Pandora’s box of ethnic tension in Hokkaido, which the Kremlin could use as a pretext for an invasion.
Indeed, Putin has been mounting military pressure on Hokkaido even before the launch of the ongoing full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24. Apart from routine violations of the Japanese airspace over Hokkaido and military exercises on the Northern Territories, the Kremlin has been boosting its naval presence around the prefecture especially since 2021. In October 2021, the Russian navy and the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) conducted their joint naval exercise and transited through the Tusgaru Strait from the Sea of Japan. The joint naval exercise by the world’s leading two authoritarian powers directly concerned Hokkaido where Russia’s political influence had been growing along with China’s deepening economic penetration of the prefecture with aggressive purchases of land encompassing strategic locations supporting its economy. Ever since Russia’s aggression began in Ukraine in earnest last month, Moscow has been dramatically increasing the frequency of its naval transit through the Tsugaru Strait, leading to near daily maneuvers in the area by mid-March, including the passage of amphibious assault vessels reportedly headed to Europe.
Russia appears to have been reviving its aggressive design for Hokkaido based on the same playbook applied to Ukraine and other post-Soviet states, such as Georgia. Given the growing questions surrounding Putin’s sanity, a Russian invasion of Hokkaido, however limited in scale it may be, is not an unthinkable proposition today. Significantly, Russia’s naked aggression against Ukraine has exposed the contradictions inherent in Tokyo’s established policy of rapprochement with its northern neighbor largely enabled by elements with dubious ties to Moscow. As Suzuki and other like-minded politicians face scrutiny over their pro-Russian bent, Japan is increasingly undergoing an unraveling of its domestic politics eroded by the Kremlin’s active measures for decades. In other words, the common sense favoring the US-Japan alliance still prevails in Tokyo and could potentially help roll back against Russia’s nefarious influence in Hokkaido.
In light of Ukraine’s ongoing plight, Japan must therefore soberly acknowledge its similar fate and recognize Russia as its largest threat to its national security, especially of Hokkaido. Indeed, while post-Cold War Japan’s national security policy has focused on deterring North Korean and later Chinese aggressions, Russia has received much less attention within Tokyo, especially during Abe’s enthusiastic pursuit of a rapprochement with Putin over the last decade. The upshot is the reorientation of Tokyo’s defense focus away from the north to the south mostly due to China’s growing military assertiveness in the East and South China Seas since the 2010s. In fact, Abe worked with Putin to establish a 2+2 dialogue with the Kremlin in 2013 and even promised him to ask Washington not to establish US military bases on the Northern Territories. Yet, such a strategic shift occurred against the backdrop of Tokyo’s failure to recognize the permanence of Russian aggression in world history. It was a political failure which demands an urgent course correction. Indeed, the policy of rapprochement is now officially a lost cause. Moreover, in light of Russia’s flagrant aggression against another sovereign state, Tokyo must even consider the possibility of withdrawing itself from the 1956 Joint Declaration, which pledges to refrain from using force against another country. After all, Japan and Russia still have no peace treaty, and Tokyo’s withdrawal from the Cold War-era agreement would significantly disrupt Moscow’s strategic calculus for its western flank.
The right way to approach Putin’s Russia today is to shore up the defense of Hokkaido as the most urgent geopolitical imperative facing Japan. The defense of Hokkaido would involve achieving cross-domain superiority ranging from countering Russia’s political warfare targeting the prefecture to deterring cyber-enabled hybrid warfare as well as a full-scale invasion by conventional forces. Given the lack of combat experience among the Japanese Self-Defense Forces (JSDF) especially in hybrid warfare, the greater presence of the US military in Hokkaido would be critical to bolstering the prefecture’s defense. Indeed, the Japanese military establishment estimated back in the 1990s that a full-scale invasion of Hokkaido by Russia would immediately annihilate Japan’s ground assets and would result in Japan’s defeat without support from the US military. Right now, the US Forces in Japan (USJF) limits its presence to the meager Camp Chitose, which is a communications facility. Therefore, bringing additional USJF capabilities to Hokkaido and its vicinity, possibly including American nuclear-equipped intermediate range missiles to the Misawa Base in Aomori followed by a nuclear-sharing agreement, would be critical to meeting Russia’s military resurgence while simultaneously checking China. Managing the US-Japan alliance against Russia is now the most pressing political imperative for Tokyo.
A well-defended Hokkaido would also be the foundation for retrieving the Northern Territories. In fact, Japan now has a historic opportunity to resolve the lingering territorial dispute in the Far East perhaps for the first time since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Following the Soviet collapse, Tokyo missed the rare window of opportunity for a territorial breakthrough and instead opted to engage Moscow for lengthy diplomatic negotiations based on international law. Tokyo’s lack of appreciation of hard power led to three decades of wavering diplomatic waltz which frequently threatened Japan’s own claim to the four islands largely due to Moscow’s flagrant disregard for the spirit of rule of law itself. After three decades of diplomatic stalemate, the costly lesson learned for Japan is that only hard power would change the dynamics of its engagement with Russia. Indeed, the Kremlin has officially discarded dialogue with Japan, and only the language of force looks to shape the bilateral relations. Strategic reposturing by US and Japanese forces on a hardened Hokkaido would send a chilling message to the Kremlin as it busies itself with relocating its military assets away from the Far East to the growing quagmire in Ukraine.
Rethinking Hokkaido’s geostrategic significance would also involve a fundamental reappraisal of Japan’s role in the Indo-Pacific. After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Japan must face this stark geopolitical reality in which it increasingly faces the prospect for a two-front war simultaneously with Russia and China in Asia. Such a reality is a radical departure from that envisioned by Tokyo’s national security establishment for the last three decades. Indeed, Abe even sought to draw Russia to Japan to check China. The cold truth is that Japan in 2022 finds itself in a predicament similar to that in 1951 when the defeated country underwent a transformation into an anti-communist bulwark against the Soviet Union and China on Washington’s watch. To defend a Free and Open Indo-Pacific, Japan must emerge reborn as Asia’s bulwark against authoritarianism and confront Russia and China simultaneously in the region.
During the closing days of WWII, Lieutenant General Kiichiro Higuchi of the Imperial Japanese Army defied the Emperor’s August 15 mandate on surrender and mobilized his troops to resist the inexorable Soviet assault on Sakhalin and the Kuril islands on its way to its ultimate prize, Hokkaido. Higuchi, a seasoned Russia specialist known for his role in saving thousands of lives of Jewish refugees in the Russian Far East, soberly recognized Mosow’s perennial disregard for law and organized fearless resistance against the Soviet aggression, eventually undermining Moscow’s plan for a full-scale invasion of Hokkaido. Following the arrival of American troops in Hokkaido, the Kremlin officially halted its military takeover of Japan’s northernmost island. The story of General Higuchi’s last stand and General MacArthur’s troops in Hokkaido serves as a useful reminder about the prefecture’s hard-earned peace. As Ukrainian people put up fierce resistance against the Russian invasion, Japan must revisit the origin of its long peace which emerged in the summer of 1945 and rethink its role within the US-Japan alliance in the Indo-Pacific amidst the global ascendancy of authoritarianism, including Russia’s. Boosting the defense of Hokkaido would therefore be an urgent imperative for Tokyo in the Indo-Pacífic’s newfound geopolitical reality.
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The views of authors are their own and not that of CSPC
