Stevenson’s army, April 7
– Is it cynical to believe that Peter Navarro’s Jan & Feb memos warning about the severity of the pandemic have been leaked to multiple news outlets only now, after news came out regarding his shouting match with Dr Fauci about unproven virus treatments?
-Is
it cynical to wonder why the Justice Dept gave an exclusive report to a
Politico reporter boasting of its new push against China in multiple
efforts?
Of course not. That’s the way the leaking game is played.
NYT has more on the civ-mil clash over Capt. Crozier and the TR. Acting SecNav Modly overruled the advice of senior Navy officers in deciding on immediate relief of command.
Defense One editor says Modly and Esper are dangerously putting the military back into politics. I think the incident also shows the consequences of Acting officials: they are always more timid than a Senate-confirmed official and often seem to be auditioning for a permanent appointment. Why else would Modly preemptively do what he thinks Trump would like?
My SAIS colleague Charlie Stevenson distributes this almost daily news digest of foreign/defense/national security policy to “Stevenson’s army” via Googlegroups. I plan to republish here. To get Stevenson’s army by email, send a blank email (no subject or text in the body) to stevensons-army+subscribe@googlegroups.com. You’ll get an email confirming your join request. Click “Join This Group” and follow the instructions to join. Once you have joined, you can adjust your email delivery preferences (if you want every email or a digest of the emails).
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The emperor has no clothes
Pantelis Ikonomou, a retired IAEA inspector, writes:
The Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) International Review Conference scheduled for April 2020 has been postponed to April 2021 due to the coronavirus outbreak. This has delayed an official outburst in the international community due to the divide between the NPT nuclear weapon states, including their close allies and the vast majority of the international community. The reason for the world rift is the frustration of most states with the lack of progress in nuclear disarmament, as agreed by the NPT.
Control and nonproliferation of nuclear weapons are gradually weakening with the termination of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty between the US and Russia, the US withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal (JCPOA), and the upcoming expiration of the New START treaty. While the world focuses on the coronavirus crisis, North Korea is increasing its nuclear weapons activities and missile tests. At the same time, the US is proceeding with testing hypersonic missiles and tightening the noose around Iran’s neck, a state much weakened by the coronavirus outbreak and US nuclear sanctions.
In a recent statement supported by 13 Nobel Prize laureates, atomic scientists warned that the world is closer to a nuclear catastrophe than at any time since 1945. The risk of a nuclear war is now higher than ever before due also to the increasing number of uncontrolled cyberattacks and the rising probability of a mistake in calculation or an accident.
Qualitative and costly upgrading (“modernization”) is compensating for a quantitative decrease of nuclear arms. The related military expenditures are disproportionate to national health care expenditures. According to the Geneva Centre for Security Policy, the four nuclear weapon states USA, Russia, UK, and France plan to spend more than $1 trillion for “modernizing” their nuclear arsenals and delivery means over the next ten years. At the same time these very states, hit by the coronavirus, responded with delay and dysfunction to the pandemic due to shortages of vital medical supplies.
Characteristic of this grave reality is the case of the nuclear-powered US aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt. This strategic spearhead was hit by the coronavirus some days ago. The lives of 5000 crew members were at risk, as was the prestige of the United States. The commander of the aircraft carrier sent a stark warning to his superiors urging them to act decisively in order to save the sailors’ lives from the virus spread. Some days later his letter leaked to the news media. The response was quick: the commander was relieved of his duties.
In this climate of fear and despair, how could politicians persuade the mostly uninformed international public that wide-spread conspiracy theories of the creation of the corona virus at American, Chinese or Canadian laboratories, as part of a military biological weapon, are all scientifically disproven? How could governments and world leaders, convince their citizens and the international community that they are able to protect them from a global catastrophe ? How credible are leaders who do not personally follow nor publicly apply the universal instructions of the World Health Organization, e.g. wearing face protection and testing as many citizens as possible?
The strategy of addressing a pandemic essentially considers, as any other comprehensive security plan does, three key components: prevention, detection and response. The appropriate measures for detecting and responding to the Covid-19 outbreak should stem from a holistic national security plan addressing pandemics. Such national plans ought to have been developed and be continuously updated by competent experts and thoroughly implemented under capable leadership. This is the global strategy for tackling the risks of all major threats, anthropogenic or not, whether military, humanitarian, or ecological.
Mankind’s most effective weapon is scientific knowledge and people’s solidarity. Moreover, in periods of global crises history has shown that real leaders have made the difference. This time the emperor has no clothes.
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Stevenson’s army, April 6
This is not a “Pearl Harbor moment” or another 9/11; those were traumatic surprises. This is a monster category 5+ storm we saw inching toward America and we failed to take the long-prescribed defensive measures.
Multiple stories about Capt. Crozier: David Ignatius first reported that Acting NavSec Modly relieved Crozier of command to preempt a demand for that action by President Trump. Today he gives Modly’s side of the story — that he lost confidence in Crozier. SecDef Esper calls this good accountability. NYT has more, also reporting Crozier has the coronavirus.
Jonathan Swan learned of a Navarro-Fauci shouting match.
In other news, Trump is threatening new tariffs against Russia and Saudi Arabia over oil…
Bill Burns has some post-pandemic strategic advice.
My SAIS colleague Charlie Stevenson distributes this almost daily news digest of foreign/defense/national security policy to “Stevenson’s army” via Googlegroups. I plan to republish here. To get Stevenson’s army by email, send a blank email (no subject or text in the body) to stevensons-army+subscribe@googlegroups.com. You’ll get an email confirming your join request. Click “Join This Group” and follow the instructions to join. Once you have joined, you can adjust your email delivery preferences (if you want every email or a digest of the emails).
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The long catalog of mistakes
This is to give you a point of comparison for what follows:
It’s hard to say anything that isn’t obvious about the corona virus epidemic. But it may be useful to reiterate that the Trump Administration repeatedly took decisions that made the US more vulnerable, that have killed about 10,000 Americans, and ultimately will kill a lot more.
This began well before the epidemic, when some bright spark last summer cancelled a program intended to give early warning of new viruses coming from China and continued in the cancellation of two other Obama-era initiatives to speed manufacture of surgical face masks and make them reusable. After the epidemic started, the catalog of dysfunction, mistakes, cockeyed priorities, and malfeasance is truly extraordinary.
This email arrived uninvited but quite welcome in my inbox last week from a still unknown source:
January 11, 2017
“Anthony S. Fauci, MD, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said there is ‘no doubt’ Donald J. Trump will be confronted with a surprise infectious disease outbreak during his presidency.”
January 13, 2017
Outgoing members of the Obama Administration walked Trump’s team through their pandemic playbook. Rather than following the playbook, the Trump Administration would wing it, fail miserably, and blame Obama.
February 1, 2018
Trump’s CDC announced plans to cut its efforts to fight global pandemics by 80%, scaling back operations in the world’s hot spots for emerging infectious disease, including removing personnel from China.
February 13, 2018
The US Intelligence Community released its annual intelligence assessment identifying coronaviruses as “having pandemic potential if they were to acquire efficient human-to-human transmissibility.”
May 2018
Trump’s National Security Advisor, John Bolton, guts the NSC’s pandemic unit and fires the NSC’s pandemic expert leaving the position vacant and never filling it.
August 2018
Trump is warned that his tariffs on Chinese goods will lead to a shortage in medical equipment due to most such equipment coming from China. Trump ignored the warning and imposed the tariffs, creating the exact shortage he was warned of.
January-August, 2019
The Trump Administration ran a pandemic simulation called Crimson Contagion, resulting in a report concluding that the Administration was woefully unprepared for a pandemic, including being short of PPE. Nothing was done to fix it.
July 2019
Trump eliminated a key American public health position in Beijing intended to help detect disease outbreaks in China, leaving the US without an observer on the ground in the most likely spot in the world to spark a global pandemic.
October 2019
Trump shut down the US Agency for International Development’s “PREDICT” project to track and research potential pandemic diseases, a move widely panned as making the world more vulnerable to a pandemic.
January-February 2020
Trump received intelligence briefings throughout January and February warning that coronavirus was likely to result in a global pandemic, but maintained publicly that the pandemic was completely contained.
January 11, 2020
China published the coronavirus genome allowing tests to be developed. While South Korea was able to roll out widespread testing in early February 2020, Trump’s CDC would be unable to produce a reliable test until late March.
January-February 2020
Trump’s CDC declined to copy the WHO coronavirus test and created its own faulty test, leaving the US without testing until late March and losing the chance of containment. Trump’s FDA also hampered private test development efforts.
January 22, 2020
Trump told a reporter he was not concerned about the coronavirus becoming a pandemic and said it was completely under control.
January 22-March 10, 2020
Trump repeatedly downplayed the seriousness of the global pandemic in public statements, conditioning the US population not to take it seriously. To this day, large swaths of the public believe social distancing is unnecessary.
January 2020
Without wearing PPE, Trump’s HHS employees entered a hangar where coronavirus evacuees were being received at an Air Force base in California, and then moved freely on and off the base, likely sparking the spread of the virus in California.
January 31, 2020
Trump banned foreign nationals who had been to China from entering the US, but allowed US citizens to travel daily to and from China resulting in hundreds of people entering the US from China each day with no screening or testing.
February 5, 2020
Trump overrode the CDC and ordered that 14 passengers infected with the coronavirus be flown home in a plane full of uninfected people.
February 5, 2020
Trump received a request from HHS Secretary Azar for $2 billion to buy respirator masks and other supplies for the national stockpile, but Trump supplied only 25% of the requested funds.
February 7, 2020
While downplaying the seriousness of the pandemic and knowing the US’s strategic reserves were insufficient to combat a global pandemic, Trump facilitated the transportation of 17.8 tons of privately donated medical equipment to China.
February 24, 2020
Trump attempted to manipulate the stock market stating that it is “starting to look very good,” despite later claiming to know at the time of his statement that the world faced a serious pandemic that would surely destroy the US economy.
February 26, 2020
Despite being an antivaxxer and knowing that it would take over a year to develop a vaccine, Trump claimed the coronavirus was “a little like the regular flu…and we’ll essentially have a flu shot for this, in a fairly quick manner.”
February 28, 2020
Due to CDC and other agency pronouncements undermining Trump’s attempts to downplay the seriousness of the virus, Trump muzzled all federal agencies by requiring Pence to approve all coronavirus communications before dissemination.
March 4, 2020
Trump’s HHS admitted the US only had 1% of face masks needed for “full-blown” coronavirus pandemic.
March 7-8, 2020
Trump took a golf trip to Palm Beach and Mar-a-Lago, knowing that coronavirus was continuing to spread unchecked in the United States.
March 2020
Trump’s refusal to implement the Defense Production Act and coordinate procurement of medical equipment for states forced them to bid against each other, creating delays and price gouging that hampered attempts to contain and combat the virus.
March 18, 2020
Trump finally signed executive order on the Defense Production Act to address massive shortages in PPE and ventilators across the US. Trump would spend the next 9 days saying he wouldn’t invoke the DPA and would only use it as “leverage.”
March 20, 2020
Trump promoted unproven drug treatments as if they were miracle cures.
March 21, 2020
Despite having known about the pandemic for months and having already sent 17.8 tons of strategic pandemic reserves to China, Trump launched an orchestrated campaign to accuse China of covering up the global pandemic.
March 24, 2020
Trump threatened to withhold federal funding from states that were critical of his handling of the pandemic.
March 24-25, 2020
Trump floated the idea of terminating all social distancing and allowing the coronavirus to ravage the country.
March 26, 2020
Trump claimed U.S. States Don’t Need the Amount of Ventilators They’re Asking for: “I Don’t Believe You Need 40,000 or 30,000”
March 28, 2020
Trump sent California 170 broken ventilators.
March 28, 2020
Trump said he had a slush fund of $500 billion that he can dole out to himself and to corporations, and that he can simply ignore the limits placed by Congress on how he can spend the money.
It is far from an exaggeration to say that Donald Trump and his administration of incompetents have done more damage to the United States than even George W’s invasion of Iraq. It is hard to picture how they could have done much worse, except that the President by advocating a return to work by Easter illustrated how easy it is for him.
Trump had already undermined foreign confidence in American leadership by denigrating our alliances, mistreating our allies, cozying up to dictators, and pulling the plug on major international agreements. Now he has demonstrated that Washington cannot even handle a public health crisis with a modicum of competence. Who would want to follow a country that is well on its way to posting among the highest per capita infection and death rates from Covid-19? Who would want to be allied with a country that diverts medical supplies manufactured in third countries away from those who have paid for them and instead to the US? Who would respect an American president who can’t tell the truth or express any regret for his multitudinous mistakes?
The damage to American prestige and influence will be monumental. We may recover economically in a year or two, but restoring America’s standing in the world will take much longer. Foreigners might have expected global leadership against Covid-19 from the United States. What they got instead was egotistical bumbling and shirking of responsibility, not to mention unwillingness to be modestly kind in dealing with adversaries like Iran or even allies like Germany. The stupidity of calling the virus “Chinese” when so much the American medical supply chain lies in China was mindbending.
The United States has an opportunity to begin to fix this mess on November 3. Let’s all pray for the welfare of our fellow citizens and a clear repudiation of failed and deadly leadership.
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Stevenson’s army, April 5
One of the recurrent criticisms of the Trump administration is for its disdain for career professionals and rejection of their advice. Early on, Michael Lewis wrote a prescient book, The FIfth RIsk, warning of the loss of competent officials. The president has also failed even to nominate people for key positions, leaving agencies hollowed out and under timid “actings.” Then the pandemic hit.
– WaPo describes “70 days of denial and dysfunction.” But it wasn’t just the president’s delay in acting and contradictory statements. The article shows that the interagency group dealing with the coronavirus spent January worrying about stopping travel from China except for evacuating Americans; the CDC spent February protecting its bureaucratic prerogatives while bungling the testing kits.
– A new AP report says: A review of federal purchasing contracts by The Associated Press shows federal agencies waited until mid-March to begin placing bulk orders of N95 respirator masks, mechanical ventilators and other equipment needed by front-line health care workers.
– BTW, NYT calculates that 430,000 people have flown to the US on direct flights from China since the virus was made known, 40,000 of them since Trump’s travel ban, and they got scattershot screening.
– Just over the horizon is the next big challenge for the US government: executing the generous laws Congress has passed for public health expansion and economic support. Can the hollowed out administration do its job? A historian tells how FDR rose to the challenge.
– WSJ says 29% of US economy has gone idle.
My SAIS colleague Charlie Stevenson distributes this almost daily news digest of foreign/defense/national security policy to “Stevenson’s army” via Googlegroups. I plan to republish here. To get Stevenson’s army by email, send a blank email (no subject or text in the body) to stevensons-army+subscribe@googlegroups.com. You’ll get an email confirming your join request. Click “Join This Group” and follow the instructions to join. Once you have joined, you can adjust your email delivery preferences (if you want every email or a digest of the emails).
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COVID-19 in Israel
As COVID-19 spreads around the globe, different states face different challenges based on their diverse domestic situations and healthcare systems. On April 3, the Middle East Institute hosted a panel discussion on “COVID-19 and the Healthcare Systems in Israel.” The discussion featured two speakers:
Henriette Charcar: Editor and reporter, +972 Magazine
Ran Goldstein: Executive director, Physicians for Human Rights-Israel
Khaled Elgindy: Senior fellow and director, Program on Palestine and Palestinian-Israeli Affairs, MEI, moderated
Lara Friedman: President, FMEP, moderated
Current context
Charcar stated that more than 7,000 people tested positive in Israel. Thirty-nine people have died and more than 350 have recovered. The Israeli government has forced people to shelter at home and stipulated that they cannot move more than 100 meters away. The Ultra-Orthodox city, Bnei Brak, is under closure. Wearing face masks is mandatory in public since last Wednesday.
Goldstein points out that Benny Gantz is using coronavirus as a reason to break promises to the people who elected him and turn to Netanyahu to form a coalition. The Israeli government plans to start its exit plan loosening restrictions after a week and a half because the infection curve has slowed down.
Government response
Charcar believes that the government is taking advantage of this public health crisis to utilize surveillance technologies and impose illiberal polices with little push-back from the population. In the Knesset, the Likud party used Health Ministry restrictions to shut down the parliament for several days. Amir Ohana, from the Likud party, used COVID-19 as an excuse to shut down the court that had postponed Netanyahu’s trial. Additionally, Netanyahu gave power to Shin Bet, the Israel Security Agency, to use surveillance measures against both Palestinians and Jewish Israelis. Charcar emphasized that human rights organizations face research restrictions and cannot track violations because of the COVID-19 crisis.
Goldstein indicated that asylum seekers were not aware of the pandemic at the beginning. The Ministry of Health was negligent. For instance, the ministry didn’t translate everything relating to pandemic protection and prevention into Arabic.
Charcar added that the virus exacerbates existing tensions in Israel, rather than creating something new. She listed the drawbacks that the Ministry of Health exposes in this pandemic crisis:
- Delay in publishing information and instructions in Arabic and other languages
- Gaps in provision of medical care
- Unequal access to services and financial assistance
Marginalized communities
Goldstein indicated that migrant workers, refugees, asylum seekers, LGBT populations, and Palestinians with permits to stay in Israel don’t have health insurance. Some people from marginalized communities don’t want to transfer their information to the government and therefore avoid going to hospitals.
Charcar demonstrated that the Bedouins in Israel are at risk because they live in unrecognized villages. They don’t have access to public infrastructure, including sanitation systems and paved roads that ambulances can drive on. As schools closed and switched to online learning, half the Palestinian students lacked computers or internet access.
Ultra-Orthodox communities are also vulnerable because they are slow to accept self-isolation due to public prayer sessions. Goldstein added that ultra-Orthodox Jews’ living condition, such as a 10-15 family size, makes it hard for them to follow health instructions. Charcar thinks that women have a greater burden of responsibility during the crisis because they need to take care of children, elders, and their jobs. Domestic violence and inaccessibility to mental health services expose them to a huge challenge.
Charcar concluded that although tensions are ongoing between communities, the pandemic doesn’t discriminate. A new pattern has emerged: vulnerable communities are relying on each other and establishing support networks. Goldstein believes that taking care of the marginalized is in Israel’s interests. Any long-term remedy is relating not only to public health, but also to Israel’s democracy.
Here’s the video for this panel discussion:
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