Middle East & North Africa

NPR's All Thing Considered talked to Amanda Sloat, Fellow at the Belfer Center's Project on Europe and the Transatlantic Relationship, about Turkey's investigation into the death of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

A failed assassination attempt against Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro on Saturday was mounted with explosive-armed drones, according to news reports. Nine days earlier, and on the other side of the world, terrorists claimed to have sent an armed drone to attack the international airport in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates. No one was killed in either case, and the circumstances of both remain murky. But a new and dangerous era in non-state-sponsored terrorism clearly has begun, and no one is adequately prepared to counter it.

Since 11 September 2001 the United States has been able to drive the global counterterrorism agenda as it saw necessary. Those days are over. The global environment has permanently shifted. The open rivalry with Moscow and growing competition with China are going to increase the potential costs on U.S. counterterrorism activity and outright restrain it in others.

It is ironic that when President Trump finally made his first major foreign policy decision, he ran with the advice of his “cooler heads” — the Generals he admires — over his own instincts to cut U.S. losses and get out of this jungle. In extending U.S. involvement in Afghanistan for the narrower purpose of battling the Taliban, Al-Qaeda, ISIS and associated groups, every U.S. soldier killed and wounded in Afghanistan from this day forward becomes in effect a casualty of the scourge of terrorism the president is determined to thwart.

Stephen Covington explains the strategic and tactical reasons for Russia’s deployment to Syria and helps the reader see the world through the eyes of President Putin and his advisors. Together with his earlier paper, “Putin’s Choice for Russia,” published with the Belfer Center in August 2015, this paper provides the reader with the strategic threads that run through contemporary Russian geopolitics. His insights into Russian strategic thinking are based on years of study and practical experience with the Russian military and, his opinion matters as a person who advises NATO’s senior military leaders on Alliance security anddefense matters.

(From Foreword by BG Kevin Ryan (U.S. Army retired), Director, Defense and Intelligence Projects)

While decisionmakers warn about the cyber threat constantly, there is little systematic analysis of the issue from an international security studies perspective. Cyberweapons are expanding the range of possible harm between the concepts of war and peace, and give rise to enormous defense complications and dangers to strategic stability. It is detrimental to the intellectual progress and policy relevance of the security studies field to continue to avoid the cyber revolution's central questions.

"Cyber war, though only incipient at this stage, is the most dramatic of the potential threats. Major states with elaborate technical and human resources could, in principle, create massive disruption and physical destruction through cyber attacks on military and civilian targets. Responses to cyber war include a form of interstate deterrence through denial and entanglement, offensive capabilities, and designs for rapid network and infrastructure recovery if deterrence fails. At some point, it may be possible to reinforce these steps with certain rudimentary norms and arms control, but the world is at an early stage in this process."

"The recent hacker exchange should also remind us that just as hacking could escalate to the use of conventional force in the Middle East, the reverse is also true. Bombing Iran, for example, could unleash an Iranian government cyber attack. Israelis say they could handle that, despite the recent evidence to the contrary. Unfortunately, much of the critical infrastructure in the U.S. is still not ready for a sophisticated nation-state cyber attack either."