Foreign Affairs Being There in Ukraine Outrage over the alleged presence of North Korean troops in Ukraine overlooks the presence of Western personnel.  Credit: image via Shutterstock A great deal has been made of the alleged presence of 10,000 North Korean troops in Russia. The West has judged this to be an escalation on the part of Russia—a major escalation. “That is a major escalation by Russia,” the State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said. The British Foreign Secretary David Lammy went one “major” further, calling it a “major, major escalation.” Germany’s Chancellor Olaf Scholz told Russian President Vladimir Putin that the insertion of North Korean troops into the war was a “grave escalation.” This escalation was judged to be so great that, of all the horrors on the battlefield, it was that single move that reportedly tipped the scales in favor of the Biden administration granting permission to Ukraine to fire U.S.-supplied long-range ATACMS missiles deeper into Russian territory. The American response mysteriously places great weight on being there. It pretends that the only way a country’s armed forces can participate in the war is by bodily being present on the battlefield. In Ukraine, the U.S. has participated in the war in every way but being there. The U.S. is fighting a proxy war in which, while Russia is bodily there, the U.S. fights with Ukrainian bodies as intermediaries. The U.S. is supplying the financing, the weapons, the weapons maintenance, the weapons training, the wargaming, the intelligence, and the targeting. Ukrainian soldiers, though, provide the bodies doing the fighting and the dying. If North Korea has entered the war by sending bodies, the U.S. has long been in the war in a far more significant way by providing everything but the bodies. It is not yet established, beyond the statements of American, Ukrainian, and South Korean officials, that there are actually North Korean troops fighting in Russia. There may be. Or there may not be. There may be North Korean troops in Russia for some non-combat role like training. Or they may be fighting in Kursk. But there has been no independent evidence provided for that yet. Russia lacks motive. The U.S. says that recruiting North Korean troops shows Russia’s lack of manpower and desperation. “This is an indication that [Putin] may be [in even] more trouble than most people realize,” Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin said. But the Russian armed forces are growing by 30,000 volunteers a month. 10,000 North Koreans represents only about ten days worth of soldiers. Russia is neither desperate for troops in the Donbas, where they are rapidly advancing, nor in Kursk, where U.S. officials say they have amassed a force of tens of thousands of soldiers without having to pull a single soldier out of Ukraine. The Pentagon and NATO claim to have knowledge that the North Korean troops are elite troops, of the movement of those troops, and that they are disguised as Russians. But, with all that knowledge, they have yet to provide evidence, though it would seemingly be beneficial to call Russia out and put the proof on the table. On November 21, The Wall Street Journal reported that a “senior North Korean general was wounded in a recent Ukrainian strike in Russia’s Kursk region.” Western officials, though, passed on the opportunity to “disclose how the senior North Korean officer was wounded or his identity.” On November 25, the Wall Street Journal reported that “Ukrainian officials say 10,000 North Korean troops have been deployed to the Kursk region.” They then add that “no soldiers who talked to the Journal had encountered them in battle.” Though there may or may not be North Korean troops fighting in Russia, there are Western bodies, military and civilian, in Ukraine. According to Defense Department documents leaked in March 2023, there were at that time at least 97 NATO special forces in Ukraine: 50 British, 17 Latvian, 15 French, 14 American and 1 Dutch. At the time, National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby refused to confirm the number but confirmed “a small U.S. military presence” there. And there is not only a military presence, but an intelligence presence too. A recent New York Times report revealed that there were “scores” of CIA officers in Ukraine. A transcript of an intercepted February 19 conversation between senior German air force officials exposed that “the English…. have several people on-site.” Scholz has said that there are British and French on the ground in Ukraine, providing targeting information for Western missiles. In March, Poland’s Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski also confirmed that “NATO soldiers are already present in Ukraine.” And in a recent policy reversal, the Biden administration has authorized deploying U.S. military contractors to Ukraine. The contractors will provide the expertise to maintain and repair complex U.S. supplied weapons systems like the Patriot air defense system and the F-16 fighter jets. And there is talk in European capitals of pushing the policy of Western boots on the ground in Ukraine even further. Though the idea is likely to face strong opposition, during his November 11 visit to France, the British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and the French President Emmanuel Macron discussed the idea of deploying troops to Ukraine. When he was asked on November 23 if France could deploy troops to Ukraine, France’s Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot responded, “We are not ruling out any options.” There is a fine line between the proxy war the U.S. is fighting in which they provide everything but the troops and the physical presence of North Korean troops. If it turns out that there are North Korean troops fighting in Kursk, the escalation would be more one of quantity than quality. The post Being There in Ukraine appeared first on The American Conservative.

Politics The Hidden Logic of Trump’s National Security Picks Trump seems to be a moderating influence on hawks and a resolving influence on restrainers. Credit: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images As President-elect Donald Trump announces his selections for cabinet posts, there is a definite pattern of choosing figures from outside the political mainstream. That is perhaps understandable for a candidate that had many cabinet-level appointments turn abruptly against him in his first term. Some of the selections even seem to constitute brazen challenges to the nation’s governing elite and their institutions. To be sure, these unconventional choices also reflect Trump’s new power deriving from his significant electoral victory—taking all seven battleground states, the popular vote, and both chambers of Congress. In the national security realm, Trump has promised the American people “peace through strength” and found widespread support for this formula, which may hark back to the golden era of Ronald Reagan. And that’s one consistent theme among all of his foreign policy choices, who come from a variety of backgrounds. Several of the picks could be considered classic conservative “hawks” in that they have continuously advocated for military escalation against rivals. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Rep. Mike Waltz (R-FL), nominated to the key positions of secretary of state and national security advisor respectively, certainly fit in this category. Nonetheless, we can already see examples of Trump’s unique approach influencing his top advisors. Thus, Waltz actually decried President Joe Biden’s recent decision to allow Ukraine to fire U.S.-made missiles directly into Russian territory: “This is another step up the escalation ladder, and no one knows where this is going.” Two other picks in the national security domain, Peter Hegseth for secretary of defense and Tulsi Gabbard for the director of national intelligence, correspond more closely with Trump’s vision for American foreign policy. Notably, they are both from a National Guard background, which may partially explain their shared strong inclination against U.S. military interventions abroad. Hegseth, for instance, endorsed a law in New Hampshire that would prohibit sending National Guard troops into conflicts overseas without the constitutionally mandated declaration of war from Congress. Hegseth, a veteran-turned–Fox News defense analyst, was one of the most unusual of Trump’s selections; now his nomination unfortunately seems to be in significant trouble due to allegations of malfeasance. Like Hegseth, Gabbard also served with distinction in America’s wars in the Middle East and came away disturbed by what she saw there. During her service in Iraq, Gabbard witnessed first-hand the devastation and enormous costs of that war, including to her fellow American soldiers. As an Iraq War veteran, Gabbard may well be particularly suited to serve as director of national intelligence, coordinating America’s myriad, sprawling intelligence agencies. She is well aware that intelligence has too often skewed assessments—including with respect to nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction—with devastating results. The paradigmatic case for the misuse of intelligence is the Iraq War, but intelligence failure has also haunted the U.S. government more recently—for example, when overly optimistic estimates of “progress” in Afghanistan kept the U.S. stuck in that quagmire far longer than was necessary for U.S. national security. The sad reality is that nuclear weapons are once again emerging as a salient issue for American defense policy, and the next director of national intelligence will need to bring focus on this crucial domain of national security. Gabbard chose to make the nuclear threat a centerpiece of her presidential campaign back in 2020. Today, her stark warnings seem all too prescient, especially as the Ukraine–Russia War seems to be expanding in scope, with Ukraine losing ground to the country which hosts the world’s largest arsenal of nuclear weapons. Biden himself admitted in October 2022 that major U.S.–Russia tensions mean that “we have a direct threat of the use of the nuclear weapon if in fact things continue down the path they are going… We have not faced the prospect of Armageddon since … the Cuban missile crisis.” Gabbard’s long focus on nuclear strategy, crisis stability, and arms control will be an asset in a world where Russia has lowered the threshold for nuclear use, China and North Korea are rapidly expanding their nuclear arsenals, and Iran could suddenly test a nuclear weapon. While it may not be clear at first glance what unites all of President-elect Trump’s national security picks, his national security team is well-positioned to implement, rather than thwart, his agenda—and this “team of rivals” approach will ensure that a spectrum of views will be represented before the commander-in-chief makes the ultimate decisions about the most consequential issues. Instead of a unanimous “blob” adhering to the status quo or a coterie of “yes men,” Trump will surround himself with competing and alternative views. This is essential, since foreign policy is where the president’s authority and power are greatest. There are reasons for hawks and realists and so-called “Asia firsters” to be encouraged by the emerging Trump team—people from different experiences and with varying perspectives. Having dissenting opinions within the president’s official circle is vital for effective national leadership. Having objective intelligence assessments, free from institutional biases or erroneous threat inflation and informed by multifarious perspectives, will be key to helping Trump make the right decisions on the crucial matters of war and peace. Whether Trump is able to replicate his first term, during which he avoided starting a new war, only time will tell. But there is a case to be made that disrupting the status quo could form a necessary, but not sufficient, first step toward mending our broken foreign policy and putting the American people and American interests first. The post The Hidden Logic of Trump’s National Security Picks appeared first on The American Conservative.

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