Author: Daniel Larison

M. Taylor Fravel contends that the Chinese government isn’t likely to lash out militarily to distract from its domestic problems:

Since 1949, China has frequently suffered from significant ethnic and political unrest and economic shocks. But virtually no leaders have started crises or wars to distract the Chinese public – even when they should have been quite likely to do so according to the logic of diversionary war.

The record shows that the Chinese government hasn’t started diversionary wars despite having had many opportunities to do so. For that matter, the Chinese communist government has rarely initiated large-scale hostilities for any reason in more than seventy years. While it is possible that this could change in the future, it’s not something you would assume to be the most likely course of action.

The idea that China might start a diversionary war is certainly convenient for China hawks now that Chinese economic growth is slowing. Then again, China hawks are nothing if not flexible when it comes to predicting future Chinese government behavior. When the Chinese economy was growing at a fast clip, they warned of impending aggression. Now that it is slowing down, many of them also warn of impending aggression. It’s almost as if they reached their conclusions about what they think the Chinese government is going to do first and then worked backwards.

Diversionary wars can happen, but they are not terribly common. It would be extremely unlikely for any government to initiate a major conflict because it wants to distract its people from domestic problems. For one thing, a major conflict would almost certainly exacerbate their country’s economic and social problems by putting the country under intense strain. Unless the war is a minor campaign against a much weaker state, there is no reason to assume that the war will be either quick or successful. In most cases, it is unlikely that starting a war would benefit the leadership or the regime. Even a successful minor war might not be very useful for the leadership because the stakes are so insignificant.

Read the rest of the article at Eunomia

Daniel Larison is a contributing editor for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.

Human Rights Watch released a new report on how Saudi forces have been killing Ethiopian migrants by the hundreds and possibly even the thousands over the last year and a half:

Saudi border guards have killed at least hundreds of Ethiopian migrants and asylum seekers who tried to cross the Yemen-Saudi border between March 2022 and June 2023, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. If committed as part of a Saudi government policy to murder migrants, these killings, which appear to continue, would be a crime against humanity.

The report is the latest reminder of how brutal and abusive the Saudi government is. It is no secret that the government in Riyadh is despotic and cruel, but even by the standards of oppressive authoritarian governments the wanton mass slaughter of refugees stands out as truly appalling. It should be a wake-up call for the Biden administration. For months, Biden has been pursuing the terrible idea of a deal with Saudi Arabia that would involve a US security guarantee for the kingdom, and this report shows the world what kind of government the US would be pledging to defend and how they use the weapons that they receive from the United States. All negotiations with Saudi Arabia for increased US support and protection must cease.

The Saudi government has spent the last five years in damage control and whitewashing mode in an effort to make the world forget about its atrocities in Yemen and its murder and torture of dissidents, but the story of the slaughter of the migrants on the border cuts through all of that propaganda. No matter how much money the Saudi government throws at professional sports leagues to improve the kingdom’s public image, the sordid and bloody reality of a repressive state ruled by a war criminal cannot be concealed for long.

Read the rest of the article at Eunomia

Daniel Larison is a contributing editor for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.

Eldar Mamedov responds to the hawkish screeching about the deal that the administration reached to get the Iranian government to free five American prisoners that it had been unjustly detaining:

The outcry is clearly politically motivated, as it seeks to depict Biden as weak and soft on Iran. Yet on substance, the hawks’ objections to the deal are based either on ignorance or the deliberate distortions of facts.

To begin with, the $6 billion is not the money the U.S. is going to pay Iran to “buy” the prisoners’ freedom. These are Iranian assets in South Korea earned from the oil sales and frozen by Seoul under pressure by the Trump administration following its unilateral withdrawal from the nuclear agreement with Iran known as the JCPOA. This was followed by the introduction of unprecedented sanctions against Tehran, even though according to Trump White House officials Iran had been complying with its commitments under the 2015 deal.

Iran is essentially getting access to its own money which was withheld on no other legal basis than unilateral US sanctions. And even that access is subject to a number of conditions.

Iran hawks are opposed to any agreement with Iran, so they freak out even when the US secures the release of Americans at the low cost of letting Iran have conditional access to a portion of its own money. They would rather have five Americans remain in the Iranian government’s custody indefinitely rather than concede anything that could get them released. As concessions go, releasing funds that were frozen as part of a destructive economic war that primarily hurts innocent Iranians is one of the least offensive imaginable. Granting access to these funds through a channel that can only be used for humanitarian goods is even less objectionable.

Read the rest of the article at Eunomia

Daniel Larison is a contributing editor for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.

Biden’s bizarre and wrongheaded push for a deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia is getting a lot of coverage this week. The Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal both published bigstories about it today, and the reports agree on the general outlines of the deal that the administration has in mind. As expected, it would involve significant U.S. commitments to the Saudis on security guarantees and support for their nuclear program. In exchange, the Saudis are supposed to commit to limiting their relationship with China, but it is hard to see how the US could enforce this part. In theory, there would also be Israeli concessions to the Palestinians, but since we know that this part is never happening I’m not sure why anyone is bothering to mention it. It looks very much like the horrible deal that many of us have been expecting and criticizing for the last several months.

Both reports emphasize how hard it would be to secure this agreement, so once again we have to wonder why Biden is wasting time, resources, and limited political capital on a deal that will be extremely difficult to get and wouldn’t be worth anything to the United States in any case. The China rivalry angle may account for some of it, but that doesn’t really explain the urgency of the effort. If it is meant to prove that the US can still broker deals in the Middle East, it would require the US to clear an absurdly high bar in order to “work.” If the administration fell short it would just confirm that the US is inept at diplomacy.

It’s a high-risk, no-reward proposition that sets Biden up for a bruising fight with members of his own party, and in the event that Biden is successful the US will just have more burdens to bear and nothing else to show for it. The political benefit to Biden himself would probably not be very great, either. Any deal he makes would require him to embrace a controversial Israeli coalition government filled with hardline zealots and a despotic Saudi war criminal. There aren’t any voters that will reward Biden at the polls for making a deal like this, and there are more than a few that will want to punish him for it. Biden is completely out of touch with the grassroots of his own party on these issues, and if he presses ahead with this plan it could end up costing him in the election next year.

Read the rest of the article at Eunomia

Daniel Larison is a contributing editor for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.

The Associated Press reports on a truly terrible idea that the Biden administration is considering:

The US military is considering putting armed personnel on commercial ships traveling through the Strait of Hormuz, in what would be an unheard of action aimed at stopping Iran from seizing and harassing civilian vessels, five American officials told The Associated Press on Thursday.

It would be a serious mistake to put US military personnel on these vessels. The assumption that the presence of Americans on these ships would discourage Iran from seizing them is probably wrong. It is possible that the presence of small detachments of US personnel would invite challenges and make the ships more of a target than they would be otherwise. In any case, it would put those Americans at risk of being injured, captured, or killed for the sake of protecting ships that their own governments or the governments of regional states ought to be safeguarding.

It would be a misuse of US resources and manpower at a time when the US already has too many of its forces in the Middle East. It makes no sense to court armed confrontations between US and Iranian forces when the US cannot afford a new conflict in the region. In the event of a clash, it would be difficult to avoid back-and-forth reprisals, and with each reprisal there would be increased risk of casualties and further escalation.

Read the rest of the article at Eunomia

Daniel Larison is a weekly columnist for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.

Tom Friedman oversells the significance of normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia:

First, a U.S.-Saudi security pact that produces normalization of relations between Saudi Arabia and the Jewish state – while curtailing Saudi-China relations – would be a game changer for the Middle East, bigger than the Camp David peace treaty between Egypt and Israel.

There may be people in the administration that want Biden to believe this is true, but it isn’t. While the US would be on the hook for paying the price to make it happen and it would mire the US even deeper in the region, very little would change and the things that would change would not be for the better. There would be no fundamental changes in the region. The “game” would not be changed at all. It would simply become more like what it already was: the US subsidizes bad clients that take whatever they can get and then they work against American interests whenever it suits them. It’s clear enough what the Saudis and the Israelis would get out of this arrangement, but all that the US gets is a very expensive bill whose full cost won’t be known for years to come.

If a deal with the Saudis ends up being anything like the ones brokered with Morocco and the UAE, it would mean that the US bribes an authoritarian government to have formal diplomatic relations with Israel by giving them political and military favors. The Palestinians would once again be hung out to dry, the oppressive system that they live under would remain in place and probably continue to get worse, and warmongers in the US and Israel would continue their business of trying to stoke a conflict with Iran. The US would be hugging both clients more closely at the exact moment when it should be pushing both away.

Since Saudi Arabia hasn’t been at war with Israel in generations, it would barely deserve the name of peace. In exchange for this not-so-significant breakthrough, the US would pledge to go to war for Saudi Arabia. That is abhorrent in itself, and it would be lousy negotiating on our part. The US promises something huge and potentially very costly that binds our government to defend them from attack, and in exchange the Saudis agree…to open an embassy? This is the sort of deal Trump would make and then claim that it was the most beautiful deal in the history of the world.

It also makes no sense to be adding formal security commitments in the Middle East when the US already has far too many commitments as it is. It would amount to doubling down on an extremely stupid bet on the Saudi royal family. If the last decade has shown anything, it is that US and Saudi interests have been diverging for a while and a close security relationship with their government is bad for America.

Read the rest of the article at Eunomia

Daniel Larison is a weekly columnist for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.