President Biden has inherited America’s longest war—the war in Afghanistan—at a critical moment. Under the Trump administration’s deal with the Taliban, the US government is supposed to withdraw forces from the country by May 2021. But the Taliban hasn’t taken the steps required in the deal against international terrorists, like Al Qaeda. Intra-Afghan power-sharing talks have not made much headway. And there are other challenges: the Taliban’s state supporters are goading it into hardline positions; the Afghan government remains riven by internal rivalries; and violence, including against civilians, remains common.

Read the rest at Political Violence at a Glance

We are pleased to share that Oriana Skylar Mastro, FSI Center Fellow at APARC, has won the 2020 International Security Section of the American Political Science Association Best Book by an Untenured Faculty Member Award for her book The Costs of Conversation: Obstacles to Peace Talks in Wartime (Cornell University Press, 2019).

Each year, APSA recognizes excellence in the political science profession and its various subfields. Mastro has won the Association’s award for an untenured scholar who has published the highest quality book in Security Studies in the previous calendar year.

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Mastro is an international security expert with a focus on Chinese military and security policy issues, Asia-Pacific security, war termination, and coercive diplomacy. Her research addresses critical questions at the intersection of interstate conflict, great power relations, and the challenge of rising powers. In The Costs of Conversation, she argues that states are primarily concerned with the strategic costs of conversation, and these costs need to be low before combatants are willing to engage in direct talks with their enemy. She examines two factors leaders look to when determining the strategic costs of demonstrating a willingness to talk: the likelihood the enemy will interpret openness to diplomacy as a sign of weakness, and how the enemy may change its strategy in response to such an interpretation. A state will be open to talking with the enemy only if it thinks it has demonstrated adequate strength and resiliency to avoid the inference of weakness and if it believes that its enemy has limited capacity to escalate or intensify the war.

Mastro uses four primary case studies — North Vietnamese diplomatic decisions during the Vietnam War, those of China in the Korean War and Sino-Indian War, and Indian diplomatic decision making in the latter conflict — to demonstrate that the costly conversations thesis best explains the timing and nature of countries' approach to wartime talks, and therefore when peace talks begin. Her findings have significant theoretical and practical implications for war duration and termination, as well as for military strategy, diplomacy, and mediation.

U.S.-China relations have been deteriorating at an alarming speed, and as distrust grows on both sides, it is unclear how to stop the downward spiral. What does China want and how can we best assess Chinese intentions?

This is a key question on the research agenda of East Asian security expert Oriana Skylar Mastro, FSI’s newest Center Fellow. Mastro, an assistant professor of security studies at Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, will begin her appointment at FSI on August 1 and be based at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC), where she will continue her research on Chinese military and security policy, Asia-Pacific security issues, war termination, and coercive diplomacy. She will also work with the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), and teach students in both the CISAC Honors program and the Ford Dorsey Master’s in International Policy program.

Here, Mastro discusses Chinese ambitions and the rapidly increasing tensions in U.S.-China relations; talks about her military career and new research projects; shares how she first became interested in East Asian security issues as a Stanford undergraduate student; and even reveals some things we don’t know about her.

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You have argued in your writings that although China does not want to usurp the United States’ position as the leader of the global order, its strategic goal in the Indo-Pacific region is nearly as consequential. Why is it so? What do you foresee for Chinese aims and the U.S.-China rivalry as we near the U.S. presidential election?

Mastro: My claim is that China doesn't want to replace the United States but rather displace the United States. It’s an important distinction because it’s become popular to assume that China wants to have everything that we, the United States, have and that its view of power is the same as ours. But if you look throughout history, every time a country rises, it exercises its power differently. The United States, for example, didn't build colonies because Great Britain had had colonies. It is equally unlikely to assume that China is going to build a global military and engage in foreign military interventions.

Therefore, I argue that China doesn't want to dominate the world. This doesn’t mean that its ambitions are limited, but rather that it thinks that the U.S. in-depth global involvement is an ineffective and costly way of doing business. Outside of Asia, China relies mainly on political and economic influence to ensure that no one goes against its interests. It is only in Asia where China’s military goals are problematic for the United States and where it wants to dominate and see the U.S. military less active. Again, this isn't due to lack of ambition: from China’s viewpoint, whoever dominates Asia, the world’s most dynamic and economically important region, is a superpower, just like whoever dominated Europe during the Cold War would have been a superpower. In short, I think we make assumptions about what China wants and how it will get there based on our own experiences, and those tend to be incorrect.

As for what’s ahead for the U.S.-China relationship and the coming presidential election, I think it’s a misconception to interpret the frictions between the two countries as stemming from the Trump administration. There are aspects of Chinese behavior that both the Republican and Democratic parties find problematic and I believe we will see a tougher policy towards China, regardless of who wins the election. A Democratic president might be less willing to risk confrontation with the Chinese the way the Trump administration is, but either way, I see increased tensions between the two sides as the norm for the next several years.

In your recent testimony on China’s maritime ambitions before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, you distinguish between China's aims in its near seas and far seas. How do these intentions differ and why is it important to make the distinction between them?

Mastro: In the near seas — the South China Sea (SCS) and the East China Sea (ECS) — China is concerned with sovereignty, which is absolute control of these waters, and with regional hegemony. In the far seas — the Indian Ocean and beyond — China aims to operate, but it doesn’t aspire to exclude others from doing so. In these waters, China's ambitions are driven primarily by the desire to protect its strategic lines of communication and its economic and political interests.

It’s important to make this distinction for strategy reasons, which goes right to my previous point. There’s a growing sense now that “whatever China does is bad and the United States needs to counter everything China does,” but that's not quite true. While China's objectives in the SCS and ECS are detrimental to U.S. interests, some aspects of its objectives in the Indian Ocean and beyond are legitimate and do not necessarily threaten U.S. interests, although they are not without risks.

U.S. policy needs to consider these differences in the degree of threat because prioritization is crucial for strategy. If we are to prioritize our strategies, then we should prioritize countering China’s ambitions in its near seas and try to shape its objectives in the far seas, perhaps through more cooperative policies. Perceiving everything that China does as bad isn’t the right approach to competing with it.

In addition to your academic career, you have an extensive military portfolio: for over ten years, you have served in the United States Air Force Reserve. You have just been awarded the Meritorious Service Medal. Tell us more about this award, how your academic and military careers influence each other, and what it’s like to balance the two.

Mastro: I'm a special type of reservist called Individual Mobilization Augmentee (IMA), which means that I have a custom duty schedule and work with my active-duty supervisors to help meet mission requirements of whatever the priority is at the time. The award I just received, the Meritorious Service Medal, which is a recognition of commendable noncombatant service, is for my last role as a senior China analyst at the Pentagon. My main duties in that role were to prepare intel products and brief the senior leadership of Headquarters Air Force at the Pentagon.

I think that the mix of my two careers makes me a better military officer and a better scholar. My experiences in the military inspire a lot of my research projects, oftentimes regarding questions that I don't have good answers for. As an officer, I need the power of argumentation on my side if I am to make a difference. After I engage in the good academic practice of spending a year or more researching something in-depth, I can then go back and provide inputs into the Department of Defense. There is a synergy between the two careers in terms of topics.

Moreover, my experiences in the military have taught me leadership and teamwork skills that we don’t necessarily learn from being professors. There’s a vast difference in leadership and teamwork dynamics between the military and academia. When I’m on active duty, I'm there as Major Mastro to provide my expertise but also be a strong part of a team with a chain of command.

Of course, managing both civilian and military careers demands considerable planning and balancing. I schedule my deployments around my teaching schedule, but sometimes there are urgent assignments given current world events. For example, last semester, I was on duty one day a week while teaching full time. So that requires planning and flexibility on the part of my family, as well as support from the people who employ me.

How did you first become interested in China and East Asian security issues, and what made you pursue a military career?

Mastro: This is a fun topic to talk about at Stanford because it's all thanks to my experiences as an undergraduate student on The Farm. As a freshman, I began learning Chinese, and in the following years, being humanities- and arts-focused, I mainly studied ancient China and Chinese literature. When I returned to campus after a year of intensive study in China, I was looking for a research opportunity and heard about the CISAC Honors Program in International Security Studies. So it was only in my senior year that I took my first course in political science and was exposed to international security studies. I discovered a passion for this topic like nothing else I had studied before. I wanted to learn more and got my first job, at the Carnegie Endowment, researching security issues, and then decided to continue with graduate studies.

During my Ph.D. at Princeton, I met a General in the Air Force who told me I should join the military. At that point, I'd never met anyone in the military. I thought, “I’m not very tough; what could I possibly contribute?” But I took up on his suggestion to do an internship with the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command and realized that my Chinese language skills and knowledge about China could be useful. I wanted to serve and planned to do my duty for four years and be done, yet here we are, nearly 11 years later. It’s been a blessing to make a whole career out of this and it’s truly all thanks to many memorable experiences at Stanford and the CISAC Honors Program. I’m thrilled to be back and looking forward to teaching and mentoring students in the Honors program and the Ford Dorsey Master’s in International Policy program.

What are some of your current research projects and what do you plan to work on at APARC and Stanford at large?

Mastro: My main project is researching a book about what China wants – a framework for understanding how to assess Chinese intentions. This is a policy-relevant book that engages with international relations theory and literature, where understanding state intentions plays a key role. The framework I’m developing assesses information to answer what China’s intentions are in several areas and regarding several cases. There will be chapters on China’s regional ambitions, global ambitions, approach to international institutions, and intentions towards the economic and technological order. As part of this project, you may see me currently publishing works on the South China Sea or the Indian Ocean.

Another project, in its beginning stages, focuses on the China-Russia relationship. Here the overarching framework is an attempt to understand state cooperation. This relates to alliances, though the notion of alliances is rather outdated. China doesn't have any alliances, but that doesn't mean it isn’t aligned or working with other countries. The question is what types of cooperation between China and Russia are problematic for the United States and what types are not. Again, we need to prioritize: is it so bad if China and Russia back each other in the UN, or is it worse that they exercise together? I don't know yet, but I think that international relations theory can shed some light on these questions.

Tell us something we don’t know about you.

Mastro: It may seem that I constantly work because I have a military career in addition to being very involved in the policy and academic worlds, but many people don't realize that I'm a big fan of leisure. I spend plenty of time with my children and have multiple hobbies that I engage in daily: I read novels, do yoga and CrossFit, play the piano, and manage to sleep! I was a very serious pianist and still take Skype lessons with my old teacher back in Chicago. Now with the move to California, I’ll finally be able to enjoy the grand piano my parents bought me for my 16th birthday, which I never had room for. I'm a firm believer in work-life balance. It's just that my work, too, is a passion and a hobby of mine.

The United States must at some point depart from Afghanistan and bring this costly “forever war” to a conclusion. With over 2,400 U.S. servicemembers killed, many more wounded, and nearly a trillion dollars spent to date, America’s leaders are under an obligation to design and execute a plan that stops a decades-long hemorrhaging of American blood and treasure.

Read the Rest at War on the Rocks

Americans show much less tolerance for war crimes than they did during the war in Vietnam.

Read the Rest at Washington Post

On Monday, The Washington Post published an extensive analysis based on documents containing interviews with more than 400 people involved in the U.S. war in Afghanistan. The papers show not only that U.S. policy under presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump failed to bring peace and modernization to Afghanistan, but also that policymakers were aware that such an outcome was unlikely — all while emphasizing progress in public.

Read the Rest at Washington Post

This article originally appeared at Brookings.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy visited Brussels on June 4 and 5, where he met with the leadership of the European Union and NATO. He reaffirmed Kyiv’s goal of integrating into both institutions—goals enshrined earlier this year as strategic objectives in Ukraine’s constitution.

At their April meeting to mark NATO’s 70th anniversary, NATO foreign ministers noted their commitment to the alliance’s “open door” policy for countries that aspire to membership. Russian aggression over the past five years has only solidified domestic support within Ukraine for membership, though the path to achieving that objective faces serious obstacles.

GROWING SUPPORT FOR NATO IN UKRAINE

When NATO leaders in July 1997 invited Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary to join the alliance, they also stated the “open door” policy. That reaffirmed Article 10 of the Washington Treaty that established NATO, which reads in part: “The Parties may, by unanimous agreement, invite any other European state in a position to further the principles of this Treaty and to contribute to the security of the North Atlantic area to accede to this Treaty.”

President Leonid Kuchma publicly declared Ukraine’s interest in NATO membership in May 2002. Washington expressed support while noting that Kyiv had to do its homework, that is, it had to adopt the kinds of democratic, economic, and military reforms that the alliance asked of other aspirants. During the remainder of Kuchma’s time in office, however, Ukraine made little tangible progress in those areas.

In 2006, President Victor Yushchenko attached high priority to securing a NATO membership action plan (MAP). By summer, Kyiv looked on course to attain a MAP when alliance foreign ministers met that December. Curiously, Moscow did not come out hard against the idea. The prospective MAP derailed, however, after Yushchenko appointed Victor Yanukovych as prime minister. During a September visit to Brussels, Yanukovych said he did not want a MAP. The proposal died given the divided position of Ukraine’s executive branch.

Yushchenko called for a MAP again in January 2008, this time with the support of Prime Minister Yuliya Tymoshenko and Rada (parliament) Speaker Arseniy Yatseniuk. Moscow came out in full opposition. When Yushchenko visited the Russian capital that February, he had to stand alongside and listen to President Vladimir Putin threaten to target nuclear missiles on Ukraine. Instead of lobbying allies to support a MAP for Kyiv, Washington waited until the April Bucharest summit, where President George W. Bush attempted to persuade his counterparts to grant Ukraine (and Georgia) a MAP. However, a number of allied leaders by then had made up their minds and opposed the idea. Concern about Russian opposition undoubtedly played a role.

When Yanukovych became president in early 2010, he reiterated his lack of interest in NATO membership, and the issue went dormant. That changed after the 2014 Maidan Revolution, Yanukovych’s flight to Russia, Russia’s use of military force to seize Crimea, and Russian aggression in the eastern region of Donbas. President Petro Poroshenko increasingly stressed the importance of Ukraine joining the alliance.

In February 2019, the Rada overwhelmingly approved an amendment to the constitution that fixed membership in the European Union and NATO as strategic goals for Ukraine. While opinion polls prior to 2014 showed, at best, lukewarm public support for NATO membership, that has shifted with the continuing fighting in Donbas. Polls over the past four years have shown pluralities—in some cases, even a majority—favoring joining the alliance. For example, a January 2019 survey had 46 percent in favor as opposed to 32 percent against.

President Zelenskiy, who assumed office on May 20, also expresses support for NATO membership. In Brussels he stated that he would continue Kyiv’s “strategic course to achieve full-fledged membership in the EU and NATO.”

THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM: RUSSIA

Ukraine still has much to do to meet the criteria for NATO membership. MAPs are intended to serve as guides for prospective members to fulfill those criteria. Objectively, Ukraine is as far along as countries that received MAPs in 1999. What has blocked Ukraine’s MAP ambition is Russia and the deference that some NATO members give to Moscow’s views.

Another reason for the alliance’s reluctance to grant a MAP is that MAPs do not convey an Article 5 security guarantee. (Article 5, the heart of the NATO treaty, provides that an attack against one member will be considered as an attack against all.) NATO lacks a good response to the question: What does the alliance do if an aspirant receives a MAP and then—before it becomes a full member—comes under attack?

The Kremlin clearly wants to return Ukraine to Russia’s orbit, though its actions over the past five years have had the opposite effect. Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea and its ongoing aggression in Donbas, which has taken more than 13,000 lives, have persuaded Ukraine’s political elite and much of its population of the need to anchor Ukraine solidly in European and trans-Atlantic institutions and reduce relations with Moscow.

If the Kremlin cannot return Ukraine to its orbit, Plan B apparently is to break it. That would explain Russia’s hybrid war and economic sanctions against Kyiv as well as continued fueling of the fighting in Donbas. Moscow aims to pressure, distract, and destabilize the Ukrainian government in order to hinder its efforts to adopt a full set of reforms that would spur economic growth; to frustrate Ukraine’s ability to implement the provisions of the Ukraine-EU association agreement; and to make Ukraine appear an unattractive partner for the West.

Russia pursues this course despite its professed adherence to the principles of the 1975 Helsinki Final Act. Those principles include “the right to belong or not to belong to international organizations, to be or not to be party to bilateral or multilateral treaties including the right to be or not to be a party to treaties of alliance.” Moscow plainly does not want to allow Kyiv the right to choose whether or not to be a party to NATO.

Moscow plainly does not want to allow Kyiv the right to choose whether or not to be a party to NATO.

The Kremlin’s backing away from this (and other principles) of the Helsinki Final Act reflects a conclusion in Moscow that the post-Cold War European security order has evolved in ways that disadvantage Russia’s interests. The Russian leadership thus has set out to disrupt that order (Crimea has its antecedents in Transnistria, South Ossetia, and Abkhazia). Russian officials may well have taken note of NATO’s September 1995 study of the how and why of enlargement. That study said: “Resolution of [ethnic disputes or external territorial disputes] would be a factor in determining whether to invite a state to join the Alliance.” The Kremlin has sought to create territorial disputes in the post-Soviet space, and some NATO members fear that giving Ukraine membership now would confront the alliance with an immediate Article 5 contingency against Russia.

It may well be that Moscow requires some idea of what a future European security order might look like, including the relationship between Ukraine and NATO, before it moves to resolve the conflict in Donbas. At this point, however, it does not appear that any Track I channels are discussing that question. Nothing suggests that it has come up in the Normandy configuration involving officials from Ukraine, Russia, Germany, and France.

This is an extraordinarily difficult question. In thinking about a European security order, how can one reconcile the view of Kyiv—and of most of the West—that Ukraine, a sovereign and independent state, should have the right to choose its own foreign policy course, with Russia’s demand for a sphere of influence that includes Ukraine?

Some have offered solutions to this dilemma. My Brookings colleague, Michael O’Hanlon, has proposed establishing a zone of permanently neutral states running from Sweden and Finland in the north down to the Black Sea and the Caucasus, with their security guaranteed by both NATO and Russia. Russia would withdraw its forces from Georgia, Ukraine, and Moldova, and the West would lift economic sanctions on Russia. NATO would abandon further enlargement, though states in the neutral zone could join the European Union.

This is an interesting “outside-the-box” idea, but it would not work. Many of those states (not just Ukraine and Georgia, but also Sweden and Finland) would not agree to be consigned to such a zone. And Moscow opposes EU membership for post-Soviet states; the Russians pressed Yanukovych not to sign the association agreement with the European Union when he had made clear his lack of interest in deepening relations with NATO.

The best idea that I have been able to come up with is that Ukraine, Russia, and NATO agree that Ukrainian membership in the alliance is a matter of not now, but not never. That would likely please neither Kyiv nor Moscow, but it could offer a way to kick a difficult can down the road.

NATO membership for Ukraine is unlikely in the near term. For the foreseeable future, Ukraine should continue to deepen its practical cooperation with the alliance. Much, if not all, of a MAP can be put into Kyiv’s annual action plans. Moscow’s principal objection appears to be to the name of the plan, not the content. The focus then should be on implementation. Ukraine should seek to prepare itself as much as possible—not just in terms of defense and security reforms, but also in solidifying its embrace of the democratic and market economy values of the alliance. That will put Ukraine in position to take advantage if/when an opportunity emerges and NATO is ready to consider membership.