China's Naval Base in Africa Is Getting Bigger. Is a Network of Bases Next? Recent satellite images of the post indicate that it is transforming to a fortified support base, and this has included the completion of a pier and possibly the start of a new quay or second large pier – which could significantly increase the capacity of the facility. by Peter Suciu

One major advantage the United States Navy has over its rivals is the fact that it maintains facilities and bases around the globe, including in such countries as Bahrain, Kuwait and Cuba. However, it is the base in the African nation of Djibouti where things could become "interesting" very quickly. The country's strategic location on the "Horn of Africa" at the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait, which separates the Gulf of Aden from the Red Sea, is crucial to protecting the approaches to the Suez Canal.

The African nation is unique in that it hosts not only the United States Naval Expeditionary Base next to the Djibouti-Ambouli International Airport, but is also home to other foreign military bases including a French airbase, an Italian support base and the Japan Self-Defense Force Base Djibouti – the first JSDF full-scale, long term overseas base. But most notably it is also the location of the Chinese People's Liberation Army's Navy's (PLAN) first overseas military base, which was built at a cost of $590 million in 2017, and is located just a few miles from the Navy's Camp Lemonnier as well as the main port at Djibouti, which U.S. Navy and European warships also visit.

While Djibouti is one of Africa's smallest countries, it has become an important "strategic partner" to Beijing, and has been seen as a gateway for China to the African continent. However, China has largely avoided describing this project as a "military base" and rather has focused on terms such as "support facilities" or "logistical facilities." So far China's military involvement in the Horn of Africa has mainly consisted of anti-piracy missions, but it is believed it could support other key missions including intelligence collection, non-combat evacuation operations, peacekeeping operations support and counterterrorism.

The facility is also expanding. H I Sutton, writing for Forbes, reported that the recent satellite images of the post indicate that it is transforming to a fortified support base, and this has included the completion of a pier and possibly the start of a new quay or second large pier – which could significantly increase the capacity of the facility.

The efforts in the Horn of Africa could all be seen as a crucial part of China's bold "One Belt, One Road" global infrastructure program, which calls for a string of military facilities that could include port facilities in far off locations as the Maldives and Tanzania.

David Brewster, a senior research fellow with the National Security College at the Australian National University, told Bloomberg in 2018 that the base in "Djibouti is only the first step in what is likely to become a network of Chinese bases across the Indian Ocean."

It is yet to be seen whether the novel coronavirus, which originated in Wuhan, China will slow those efforts – but it does appear China continues to make serious strides to expands its presence across the Indian Ocean. Last month Chinese PLAN forces were seen conducting exercises near Karachi, Pakistan, while the PLAN Marines Corps continues to expand to a multidimensional force that can operate beyond oceans fight in all terrains around the world and serve as a fast-reacting force to protection Beijing's quickly growing overseas assets.

Weapons, Opportunity Costs, COVID19 and Avoiding Nuclear War "As for Congress, which ultimately sets and approves the budget, no evidence suggests that the legislative branch has closely considered the nuclear vs. conventional trade-offs. All that was before COVID19. The response to the virus and dealing with the economic disruption it has caused have generated a multi-trillion-dollar budget deficit in 2020 and likely will push up deficits in at least 2021. It would be wise now to consider the impact of COVID19." by Steven Pifer

The Department of Defense has begun to ratchet up spending to recapitalize the U.S. strategic nuclear triad and its supporting infrastructure, as several programs move from research and development into the procurement phase.  The projected Pentagon expenditures are at least $167 billion from 2021-2025. This amount does not include the large nuclear warhead sustainment and modernization costs funded by the Department of Energy, projected to cost $81 billion over the next five years.

Nuclear forces require modernization, but that will entail opportunity costs. In a budget environment that offers little prospect of greater defense spending, especially in the COVID19 era, more money for nuclear forces will mean less funding for conventional capabilities.

That has potentially negative consequences for the security of the United States and its allies. While nuclear forces provide day-to-day deterrence, the Pentagon leadership spends most of its time thinking about how to employ conventional forces to manage security challenges around the world. The renewed focus on great power competition further elevates the importance of conventional forces. It is important to get the balance between nuclear and conventional forces right, particularly as the most likely path to use of nuclear arms would be an escalation of a conventional conflict. Having robust conventional forces to prevail in or deter a conventional conflict in the first place could avert a nuclear crisis or worse.

Nuclear Weapons and Budgets

For the foreseeable future, the United States will continue to rely on nuclear deterrence for its security and that of its allies (whether we should be comfortable with that prospect is another question). Many U.S. nuclear weapons systems are aging, and replacing them will cost money, lots of money. The Pentagon’s five-year plan for its nuclear weapons programs proposes $29 billion in fiscal year 2021, rising to $38 billion in fiscal year 2025, as programs move from research and development to procurement. The plan envisages a total of $167 billion over five years. And that total may be understated; weapons costs increase not just as they move to the procurement phase, but as cost overruns and other issues drive the costs up compared to earlier projections.

The Pentagon knew that the procurement “bow wave” of nuclear weapons spending would hit in the 2020s and that funding it would pose a challenge. In October 2015, the principal deputy undersecretary of defense said “We’re looking at that big bow wave and wondering how the heck we’re going to pay for it…  and probably thanking our stars that we won’t be here to have to answer the question.”

The Pentagon’s funding request for fiscal year 2021 includes $4.4 billion for the new Columbia-class ballistic missile submarine that will replace Ohio-class submarines, which will begin to be retired at the end of the decade; $1.2 billion for the life extension program for the Trident II submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM); $1.5 billion for the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent, an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) to replace the Minuteman III ICBM; $2.8 billion for the B-21 stealth bomber that will replace the B-1 and B-2 bombers; $500 million for the Long-Range Standoff Missile that will arm B-52 and B-21 bombers; and $7 billion for nuclear command, control and communications systems.

The Pentagon funds primarily go to delivery and command and control systems for nuclear weapons. The National Nuclear Security Administration at the Department of Energy bears the costs of the warheads themselves.  It seeks $15.6 billion for five nuclear warhead life-extension and other infrastructure programs in fiscal year 2021, the first year of a five-year plan totaling $81 billion. The fiscal year 2021 request is nearly $3 billion more than the agency had earlier planned to ask, which suggests these programs are encountering significant cost growth.

Some look at these figures and the overall defense budget (the Pentagon wants a total of $740 billion for fiscal year 2021) and calculate that the cost of building and operating U.S. nuclear forces will amount to “only” 6-7 percent of the defense budget. That may be true, but how relevant is that figure?

By one estimate, the cost of building and operating the F-35 fighter program for the U.S. Air Force, U.S. Navy and U.S. Marines over the program’s lifetime will be $1 trillion. Amortized over 50 years, that amounts to $20 billion per year or “only” 2.7 percent of the Defense Department’s fiscal year 2021 budget request. The problem is that these percentages and lots of other “small” percentages add up. When one includes all of the programs, plus personnel and readiness costs as well as everything else that the Pentagon wants, the percentages will total to more than 100 percent of the figure that Congress is prepared to appropriate for defense.

Opportunity Costs

The defense budget is unlikely to grow. Opportunity costs represent the things the Pentagon has to give up or forgo in order to fund its nuclear weapons programs. The military services gave an indication of these costs with their “unfunded priorities lists,” which this year total $18 billion. These show what the services would like to buy if they had additional funds, and that includes a lot of conventional weapons.

The Air Force, for example, would like to procure an additional twelve F-35 fighters as well as fund advance procurement for an additional twelve F-35s in fiscal year 2022. It would also like to buy three more tanker aircraft than budgeted.

The Army is reorienting from counter-insurgency operations in places such as Afghanistan and Iraq to facing off against major peer competitors, that is, Russia and China. Its wish list includes more long-range precision fires (artillery and short-range surface-to-surface missiles), a new combat vehicle, helicopters and more air and missile defense systems.

The Navy would like to add five F-35s to its aircraft buy, but its bigger desire is more attack submarines and warships, given its target of building up to a fleet of 355 ships. The Navy termed a second Virginia-class attack submarine its top unfunded priority in fiscal year 2021. It has set a requirement for 66 attack submarines and currently has about 50. However, as older Los Angeles-class submarines retire, that number could fall to 42.  Forgoing construction of a Virginia-class submarine does not help to close that gap.

Moreover, the total number of Navy ships, now 293, will decline in the near term, widening the gap to get to 355. The Navy’s five-year shipbuilding program cut five of twelve planned Arleigh Burke-class destroyers, and cost considerations have led the Navy to decide to retire ten older Burke-class destroyers rather than extend their service life for an additional ten years. This comes when China is rapidly expanding its navy, and Russian attack submarines are returning on a more regular cycle to the Atlantic Ocean.

The Navy has said that funding the first Columbia-class ballistic missile submarine forced a cut-back in the number of other ships in its fiscal 2021 shipbuilding request. The decision not to fund a second Virginia-class attack submarine appears to stem directly from the unexpected $3 billion plus-up in funding for the National Nuclear Security Administration’s fiscal year 2021 programs.

These are the opportunity costs of more nuclear weapons: fewer dollars for aircraft, ships, attack submarines and ground combat equipment for conventional deterrence and defense.

Nuclear War and Deterring Conventional Conflict

The principal driving factor behind the size of U.S. nuclear forces comes from Russian nuclear forces and doctrine. Diverse and effective U.S. nuclear forces that can deter a Russian nuclear attack should suffice to deter a nuclear attack by any third country. In contrast to the Cold War, the U.S. military no longer seems to worry much about a “bolt from the blue”—a sudden Soviet or Russian first strike involving a massive number of nuclear weapons designed to destroy the bulk of U.S. strategic forces before they could launch. That is because, under any conceivable scenario, sufficient U.S. strategic forces—principally on ballistic missile submarines at sea—would survive to inflict a devastating retaliatory response.

The most likely scenario for nuclear use between the United States and Russia is a regional conflict fought at the conventional level in which one side begins to lose and decides to escalate by employing a small number of low-yield nuclear weapons, seeking to reverse battlefield losses and signal the strength of its resolve. Questions thus have arisen about whether Russia has an “escalate-to-deescalate” doctrine and whether the 2018 U.S. nuclear posture review lowers the threshold for use of nuclear weapons.

If the United States and its allies have sufficiently robust conventional forces, they can prevail in a regional conflict at the conventional level and push any decision about first use of nuclear weapons onto the other side (Russia, or perhaps China or North Korea depending on the scenario). The other side would have to weigh carefully the likelihood that its first use of nuclear weapons would trigger a nuclear response, opening the decidedly grim prospect of further nuclear escalation and of things spinning out of control. The other side’s leader might calculate that he/she could control the escalation, but that gamble would come with no guarantee.  It would appear a poor bet given the enormous consequences if things go wrong. Happily, the test has never been run.

This is why the opportunity costs of nuclear weapons programs matter. If those programs strip too much funding from conventional forces, they weaken the ability of the United States and its allies to prevail in a conventional conflict—or to deter that conflict in the first place—and increase the possibility that the United States might have to employ nuclear weapons to avert defeat.

For the United States and NATO members, that could mean reemphasis on an aspect of NATO’s Cold War defense policy.  In the 1960s, 1970s and early 1980s, NATO allies faced Soviet and Warsaw Pact conventional forces that had large numerical advantages, and NATO leaders had doubts about their ability to defeat a Soviet/Warsaw Pact attack at the conventional level. NATO policy thus explicitly envisaged that, if direct defense with conventional means failed, the Alliance could deliberately escalate to nuclear weapons. That left many senior NATO political and military officials uneasy. Among other things, it raised uncomfortable questions about the willingness of an American president to risk Chicago for Bonn. 

Russia found itself in a similar situation at the end of the 1990s. With a collapsing economy following the break-up of the Soviet Union, the Russian government had to cut defense spending dramatically. As its conventional capabilities atrophied, Moscow adopted a doctrine envisaging first use of nuclear weapons to compensate. (In the past fifteen years, as Russia’s defense spending has increased, a significant amount has gone to modernizing conventional forces.)

The United States and NATO still retain the option of first use of nuclear weapons. If the U.S. president and NATO leaders were to consider resorting to that option, they then would be the ones to have to consider the dicey bet that the other side would not respond with nuclear arms or that, if it did, nuclear escalation somehow could be controlled.

Assuring NATO allies that the United States was prepared to risk Chicago for Bonn consumed a huge amount of time and fair amount of resources during the Cold War. At one point, the U.S. military deployed more than 7000 nuclear weapons in Europe to back up that assurance. Had NATO had sufficiently strong conventional forces, the Alliance would have been able to push that risky decision regarding nuclear first use onto Moscow—or even have been able to take comfort that the allies’ conventional power would suffice to deter a Soviet/Warsaw Pact attack.

In modernizing, maintaining and operating a safe, secure and effective nuclear deterrent, the United States should avoid underfunding conventional forces in ways that increase the prospect of conventional defeat and/or that might tempt an adversary to launch a conventional attack. If Washington gets the balance wildly out of sync, it increases the possibility that the president might face the decision of whether to use nuclear weapons first—knowing that first use would open a Pandora’s box of incalculable and potentially catastrophic consequences.

Getting the Balance Right in the COVID19 Era

This means that the Department of Defense and Congress should take a hard look at the balance. The Pentagon presumably has weighed the trade-offs, though it is not a unitary actor.  “Nuclear weapons are our top priority” has been the view of the leadership. The trade-offs have been easier to manage in the past several years, when nuclear programs were in the research and development phase, and defense budgets in the first three years of the Trump administration grew. As nuclear programs move into the more expensive procurement phase and the fiscal year 2021 budget shows little increase, the challenge of getting the balance right between nuclear and conventional spending has become more acute. It is not apparent that the Pentagon has weighed the opportunity costs over the next ten-fifteen years under less optimistic budget scenarios.

As for Congress, which ultimately sets and approves the budget, no evidence suggests that the legislative branch has closely considered the nuclear vs. conventional trade-offs.

All that was before COVID19. The response to the virus and dealing with the economic disruption it has caused have generated a multi-trillion-dollar budget deficit in 2020 and likely will push up deficits in at least 2021. It would be wise now to consider the impact of COVID19.

Having added trillions of dollars to the federal deficit, and facing an array of pressing health and social needs, will Congress be prepared to continue to devote some 50 percent of discretionary funding to the Department of Defense’s requirements? Quite possibly not. If defense budgets get cut, the Pentagon will face a choice:  shift funds from nuclear to conventional force programs, or accept shrinkage of U.S. conventional force capabilities and—as the United States did in the 1950s and early 1960s—rely on nuclear deterrence to address a broader range of contingencies. In the latter case, that would mean accepting, at least implicitly, a greater prospect that the president would have to face the question of first use of nuclear weapons, i.e., a conventional conflict in which the United States was losing.

This is not to suggest that the U.S. military should forgo the strategic triad. Trident II SLBMs onboard ballistic missile submarines at sea remain the most survivable leg of the strategic deterrent. The bomber/air-breathing leg offers flexibility and can carry out conventional missions. The ICBM leg provides a hedge against a breakthrough in anti-submarine warfare. Moreover, if in a crisis or a conventional conflict, the Russian military were to develop the capability to attack U.S. ballistic missile submarines at sea, the Kremlin leadership might well calculate that it could do so without risking a nuclear response. Attacking U.S. ICBMs, on the other hand, would necessitate pouring hundreds of nuclear warheads into the center of America. A Russian leader presumably would not be so foolish as to think there would be no nuclear retaliation.

While sustaining the ICBM leg, one can question whether maintaining 400 deployed ICBMs, as the current plan envisages, is necessary. Reducing that number for the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent (GBSD) would achieve budget savings, albeit later in the production run.  Another question is whether some way might be found to extend the service life of some portion of the current Minuteman III force that would allow delaying the GBSD program, which is projected to cost $100 billion, by ten-fifteen years and postponing those costs—freeing up funds in the near term for conventional force requirements.

Another issue concerns the Long-Range Standoff Missile (LRSO) and its cost, estimated at some $20 billion when including the nuclear warheads. The B-21 bomber will incorporate stealth and advanced electronic warfare capabilities allowing it to operate against and penetrate sophisticated air defenses. The LRSO, to be deployed beginning in 2030, is intended to replace older air-launched cruise missiles carried by the B-52 bomber and could later equip the B-21 if it loses its ability to penetrate.

An alternative plan would convert B-52s in 2030 to conventional-only missions and delay the LRSO to a future point if/when it appeared that the B-21’s ability to penetrate could come into question. By 2030, the Air Force should have a significant number of B-21s (the B-21 is scheduled to make its first flight in 2021 and enter service in 2025). With at least 100 planned, the Air Force should have a sufficient number of B-21s for the 300 nuclear weapons it appears to maintain at airfields where nuclear-capable bombers are currently based.

These kinds of ideas would free up billions of dollars in the 2020s that could be reallocated to conventional weapons systems. Delaying the GBSD and LRSO and their associated warhead programs by just one year (fiscal year 2021) would make available some $3 billion—enough money for a Virginia-class attack submarine.  Delaying those programs for ten-fifteen years would make tens of billions of dollars available for the military’s conventional force needs.

All things being equal, it is smarter and more efficient to choose to make decisions to curtail or delay major programs rather than to continue them until the money runs out and forces program termination. As it examines the administration’s proposed fiscal year 2021 defense budget, Congress should carefully consider the trade-offs and press the Pentagon to articulate how it weighed the trade-offs between nuclear and conventional forces. In the end, Congress should understand whether it is funding the force that is most likely to deter not just a nuclear attack, but to deter a conventional conflict that could entail the most likely path to nuclear war.

The China Virus (No, Not That One) What makes the virus so pernicious and difficult to eradicate is how it attaches itself to U.S. fears and insecurities regarding China but inflates them enormously. by Michael D. Swaine

There is a China virus ravaging the world, preying in particular on Americans of all stripes. Its symptoms are clear: a feverish, paranoid state of mind that resists sedatives and generates an uncontrollable urge to cough out endless op-eds, reports, and speeches describing in ever more terrifying ways how China is going to destroy all that Americans hold dear. The only solution, victims of this virus assert, is to isolate and weaken Beijing and intimidate it with massive levels of defense spending, the go-to solution for virtually all of the United States’ foreign policy ills.  

A Virus Moves Among Us 

This pernicious pathogen, labeled by those few American analysts as yet uninfected as the Death by China (DBC) virus (named after a book by one of its more famous victims), has always been out there, circulating in the frenzied thoughts of purveyors of the Yellow Peril. Although kept at bay for many years by the United States’ economic vitality and a focused attention on what seemed like the greater plague of global terrorism, the DBC virus gradually crept out into the world as China began to grow economically and militarily. 

At first, it only infected the arguments of highly polemical fringe analysts whom mainstream analysts had previously thought should be kept locked in the attic like a crazy relative. But alas, this did not last. Preying on the fears induced by the global financial crisis and in the United States by stories of hordes of immigrants taking American jobs and eclipsing the long-standing dominance of white Americans, the virus soon entered the mainstream. It began appearing in venerable U.S. newspapers and journals such as the New York Times and Foreign Affairs and then spread more broadly into the public, infecting those most vulnerable to tales of stolen jobs and technology, lost American dominance, and an overturned world order. 

Although precise testing is needed to detect how far this contagion has spread across the planet, highly symptomatic cases confirm that its epicenter is in Washington, DC with a nearly 100 percent infection rate among politicians of both parties, their staffs, and especially the current administration, as well as a hefty number of otherwise sane policy analysts who should know better but can’t seem to resist the enticements of notoriety and financial gain that the virus offers. 

There is no known cure for the DBC virus. It is so impervious to facts and logic that it has become conventional wisdom, seemingly obvious to all, and not requiring proof. What makes the virus so pernicious and difficult to eradicate is how it attaches itself to actual facts and U.S. fears and insecurities regarding China, but inflates them enormously while posing open-ended (and sometimes far-fetched) hypotheticals. In some more serious cases, the virus simply contributes to hyperventilating over how some nefarious, world-destroying Chinese plot is already afoot. 

Examples of this kind of biased analysis abound. The fact that the coronavirus outbreak originated in Wuhan where there is a virology lab and local officials were slow to combat the outbreak has morphed into unsubstantiated rumors that the virus may have leaked from the lab and that Chinese officials knew it was deadly but chose not to stop it. Similarly, the way Beijing is building a modern military that threatens the United States’ post-World War II dominance of maritime Asia has been twisted into an assumption that China is dedicated to pushing the United States out of Asia and preparing to attack Taiwan.

Or consider how the fact that Beijing is stealing or forcing the transfer of some technologies and has displaced some U.S. manufacturing jobs has devolved into the notion that China’s entire national development model is based on stolen technology, subterfuge, and illegal state subsidies. Likewise, China’s checkered track record of failures and successes in investing in and aiding the developed world has been reduced to fears that China is a predatory economic entity that deliberately lures nations into bankruptcy to seize their assets. Finally, the fact that China has an autocratic political system and state-guided economy and occasionally touts its supposed benefits for others is taken to be indisputable evidence that China is working hard to subvert democracies and upend the liberal international order wholesale. 

The ways the virus manifests itself are virtually endless, but the dynamic is the same. Its powerful impact causes vulnerable potential victims to panic and seek immediate relief by parroting the simple, uncluttered narrative the virus presents: China is thoroughly evil, there is no point negotiating with it, and only containment and intimidation will end its threats, so we better get started. 

The Race for the Cure

Fortunately, although the DBC virus running rampant in Washington has no cure yet, its spread can be limited and its effects can be reduced significantly, through a combination of national distancing by other countries, widespread BS testing that employs actual facts, and a truth serum of sorts that presents a more realistic and balanced strategy for dealing with both the threats and opportunities China poses. Of course, rigid self-censorship by the virus’s victims would be the best way to reduce its spread, if not for the fact that its primary symptom is an uncontrollable urge to shriek about America’s coming and near-inevitable demise at the hands of Beijing unless desperate measures are taken tout suite. 

If none of these treatments work, then the virus probably will not abate until it has foisted tragic consequences on the United States and other countries so severe and so undeniable that victims are forced to adopt a genuinely fact-based, pragmatic, and realistic approach to China. The hunt for a cure requires a recognition that China is both a serious competitor and a much-needed partner in dealing with the most dire threats the world faces, including pandemics, climate change, and economic protectionism. Only when such a strategy is developed and implemented will a vaccine be on hand to treat the victims of this virus. 

Putin Must Lead Russia’s Battle Against the Coronavirus Russia, like the rest of the world, is facing one of its greatest challenges in recent memory. by Doug Klain

As Vladimir Putin re-writes the Russian constitution to extend his presidency by another sixteen years, he is tapping into the Soviets’ victory in World War II—still a deeply personal piece of history for most Russians, who suffered the greatest losses of any country during the war—to bring legitimacy to a reign that will last longer than Josef Stalin’s. But as today’s war against the coronavirus rages, Putin is too busy looking backwards to see a new chance to mobilize the Russian people. 

After an initial downplaying of the pandemic, Russia is fast becoming one of the hardest-hit countries—now with over 200,000 acknowledged cases of COVID-19, making it the third most infected country in the world. But the Russian government has continued to suppress unflattering information about the effects of the pandemic, including the severe lack of personal protective equipment (PPE) that medical personnel have access to.

Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin was one of several top Russian officials to immediately take advantage of the coronavirus for political ends, quickly blocking protests of Putin’s term-limit reset as Muscovites prepared for mass gatherings in March.

Sobyanin seems to have reversed course as of late, likely because his city appears to be the hardest hit of any in Russia. In late March, he made international headlines by becoming the first high-profile Russian official to contradict the Kremlin’s downplaying of the extent of the virus.

On May 7, Sobyanin went onto the state-owned television station Rossiya-24 to advise the public that the spread of the virus was still worse than reported—with an estimated 300,000 cases in Moscow alone, far above the reported 200,000 nationwide.

Those are grim numbers, but Sobyanin rightly recognized that it’s a good thing to have found so many from testing. “The fact that we have confirmed so many ill persons is not a minus, it’s a great plus,” he told Rossiya-24. “Obviously, the real number of those ill in the city is higher. According to the screening, they account for 2% or 2.5% of all Moscow’s citizens or nearly 300,000.”

Meanwhile, Putin’s government has modeled a culture of downplaying how serious the crisis is, and it’s keeping doctors from adequately speaking up about what tools they need and what precautions the public needs to take.

Dr. Alexander Shulepov went viral after posting a video of himself and another healthcare worker in which Shulepov says he’s been infected with COVID-19 and has been kept on shifts by his head doctor, preventing him from exercising necessary isolation to avoid infecting others. Two days later, Shulepov appeared in another video, posted by the regional health department, in which he claimed he was “emotional” when filming the prior video, and had now been removed from shifts and was being treated in a hospital.

Then Shulepov fell out of the hospital window and suffered a skull fracture, becoming the third doctor in just over a week to fall from hospital windows. The other two had died. Shulepov’s fate remains uncertain.

Russia, like the rest of the world, is facing one of its greatest challenges in recent memory. This is exactly the moment when President Putin should be leading from the front, encouraging the same kind of incredible national movement he likes to remember from the Great Patriotic War against the Nazis. Instead, he has delegated responsibility to his governors, secluded himself at his Novo-Ogaryovo estate outside of Moscow, and watched his frontline medical personnel fall out of windows after speaking up.

According to the Levada Center, an independent opinion polling group, the Russian public overwhelmingly distrusts both their government and its official information on the virus. However, this crisis is the perfect opportunity for Putin to restore some modicum of public trust and unify the country.

The virus itself is outside of the Kremlin’s control, but the way the Russian government responds to it is not. There are measures that should be obvious, like working to get medical professionals the equipment they need. But the starting place should be a basic acknowledgment of what is happening, who is affected, and what the government has done about it.

“Do not play down the consequences of the pandemic,” urged one local activist from Ufa. “Lying about the scale of the disaster is the worst that you can do for your countrymen in general, and for the relatives of those who died of COVID-19 in particular.”

Putin fears that the catastrophe of the coronavirus undermines his legitimacy just as he makes the claim that Russia needs him at the helm until 2036, so his natural impulse is to create a national culture of downplaying the crisis. But as things get worse, it will be impossible to hide this truth. Nearly every Russian knew someone wounded or killed in World War II, and it’s likely that everyone today will know someone who contracts COVID-19, if not getting it themselves.

Simply, Russian authorities have little to fear by acknowledging what everyone will be experiencing—if they speak the truth, people may even believe them.

Mayor Sobyanin seems to have shown a desire to meet this painfully low standard, and Muscovites are being given reason to trust what their city government says—this will be essential when the country does start to lift quarantines and finally re-open, with people likely returning to normal activities when they feel confident they won’t be infected by those around them.

But most Russians are receiving contradictory and incomplete information from authorities, and those who try to inform the public are being punished. Whatever chance at nationwide solidarity the country has is being wasted, and at exactly the time that it’s needed most. The irony of Putin celebrating the seventy-fifth anniversary of victory over the Nazis, an overwhelming past mobilization of the Russian people, is compounded by how liberally he’s squandering a chance at the same kind of national unity.

No One Has a Clue What to Do About China "Washington’s policy toward China has been incoherent for decades. China’s economic growth, closely tied to global trade, was producing a relatively more powerful China. Everyone liked trade, but everyone disliked a more powerful China. Nobody wanted to square up to this contradiction, so America muddled along, with U.S. economic policies making American military objectives more difficult and costly to achieve." by Justin Logan

It’s been clear since before the coronavirus pandemic, but it’s even clearer now: Everyone is anxious about China’s rise and nobody has a clear idea of what to do about it.  

The Trump administration has been consistent on the point—in its planning documents, if not in the various eruptions from the presidential podium. Both the 2017 National Security Strategy and the 2018 National Defense Strategy turned from the Middle East and pointed their crosshairs on Beijing. “Great power competition” became the watchword. 

But in the wake of the coronavirus, politicians and pundits are climbing over one another offering proposals to poke Beijing in the chest. Revoke China’s sovereign immunity in the U.S. courts to allow Americans harmed by coronavirus to sue the Chinese government? Check. Get into a snit with the G-7 about whether to call the coronavirus the “Wuhan Flu?” Check. Freeze American contributions to the World Health Organization as a reaction to China’s influence there? Check. Somehow isolate the U.S. debt owed to China and renege on some of it? Check. Throw America’s diplomatic weight fully behind Taiwan? Check. 

Now the administration is allegedly preparing unspecified retaliatory actions against China for its mishandling of the virus. For his part, Joe Biden used the occasion of his first foreign policy ad to promise that he would be tougher on China than President Donald Trump. With apologies to Seeley, America seems to have jumped into an epochal struggle with China in a fit of absence of mind.

The combination of Chinese misconduct in handling the virus and elite opinion in the United States appears to have turned American opinion against China. According to Pew, 72 percent of Republicans and 62 percent of Democrats have a negative view of China. Gallup’s Jeffrey Jones reports “Americans’ views of China have rarely been positive over the past four decades, but they have never held the country in lower regard than they do today.” 

For all the demonizing, no one has suggested a policy that would slow China’s ascent. Three factors are preventing a coherent U.S. response to China. First, U.S. economic and security policies are working at cross purposes. Our economic policies make our security goals harder to achieve. Second, American allies are shirking their share of their own defense. Their economic atrophy and ambivalent attitudes to their defense load a disproportionate share of the burden onto Americans’ shoulders. Finally, the United States remains bogged down in the Middle East. From Syria to Iran to Iraq, American elites have baggage in the Middle East they are reluctant to leave behind. Before jumping headlong into an epochal struggle with China, Washington needs to face these fundamental flaws.

Washington’s policy toward China has been incoherent for decades. China’s economic growth, closely tied to global trade, was producing a relatively more powerful China. Everyone liked trade, but everyone disliked a more powerful China. Nobody wanted to square up to this contradiction, so America muddled along, with U.S. economic policies making American military objectives more difficult and costly to achieve.

The solution one hears most often is “decoupling” the American economy from China’s. As the Belfer Center’s Paula Dobriansky puts it, the United States just needs to “set up new supply chains, restructure trade relations, and start to create an international economic order that is less dependent on China.” Wang Jisi, a leading Chinese scholar of U.S.-China relations, calls decoupling “already irreversible.” 

People should show their work. Decoupling makes logical sense given Washington’s desire to constrain Chinese power, but it is extremely difficult to see how policy can achieve this goal in a timely fashion at an acceptable cost. China is simply too big, and too central a part of the global economy to isolate and deny access to the American economy. If Washington somehow erased China’s contributions to global production, then who would take its place? These are enormous problems that are only beginning to garner attention in Washington. 

For their part, China doves like Daniel Drezner tend to elide the security dimension, emphasizing instead that decoupling “would harm both economies and worsen the security situation.” The question hawks would ask is “harm whom more?” The doves are right to argue that the panic in Washington outstrips the gravity of the situation, but the trend lines on security are headed in the wrong direction if one supports U.S. aims in Asia. 

American elites would be at peace with a much wealthier China that behaved as China behaved in the 1980s or 1990s, but that defies most of what most people know about international politics. Even relative doves like Robert Zoellick admit they want Washington to remain “the umpire of China’s choices.” Beijing, for understandable reasons, doesn’t like this idea, preferring fewer restrictions on its choices.

The unfortunate fact is that just as realists predicted, as China’s power has grown, so has its view of its interests and assertiveness in pursuing them. Just in recent weeks, Beijing has engaged in naval exercises off the coast of Taiwan, including an aircraft carrier; formally claimed Chinese-controlled islands that are the subject of territorial disputes with Vietnam and other nations; attributed the coronavirus to a U.S. conspiracy; and sent coast guard vessels into waters disputed with the Philippines. This is the picture of the future. 

But in this context, the United States is carrying a disproportionate share of the burden of defending China’s neighbors. Washington is focused on finding more U.S. resources and attention to devote to China. Congress inserted a provision in the 2020 defense budget requiring the commander of Indo-Pacific Command to draw up a wish list by March. That commander has done so, asking for more than $20 billion in additional funding, all of which is focused on competing with China in its border regions. 

American allies have been sleepwalking. According to figures from the IISS Military Balance reports, in 2009, Japan was spending roughly 75 percent as much as China on defense. By 2019, that figure was down to under 27 percent. In 2009 Taiwan was spending roughly 14 percent as much as China. Even with increases during the decade, by 2019 the figure dropped to 6 percent. (To be sure, Chinese spending has increased in relation to U.S. spending as well.)

What China is buying is relevant here. China’s focus on A2/AD capabilities can support modest, defensive goals, not global domination. Beijing is trying to push the United States out of its face. Instead of buying gold-plated American systems, American partners in the region should be pressed to emulate China, complicating any Chinese plans for offense just as Beijing has complicated any American plans for an offense.

Finally, American policymakers have shown that they are incapable of strategic focus. For instance, an unbelievable amount of attention in 2019 was devoted to Trump’s December 2018 false promise to remove U.S. troops from Syria. Whether from inertia, the influence of interest groups, or sheer laziness, American elites have been slow to realize that the Middle East is, from a military point of view, mostly a waste of time. 

If policymakers are as worried about China as their rhetoric suggests, they should do two things. First, they need to make the U.S.-China relationship the organizing focus of American statecraft. To the extent Washington is set on continuing to try to run the Middle East, this is detrimental to clarity and focus on China. Big, powerful states matter more than small, weak states. If American elites focus on the latter, then it is to the detriment of their policy regarding the former. 

Second, American policymakers should make a public show of examining allied burden-sharing. Until Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld ended them in 2004, the Defense Department issued annual Reports on Allied Contributions to the Common Defense. DOD mostly acted as a lawyer for America’s allies, but Trump should instruct the Pentagon to start issuing the reports again, with particular emphasis on Asian allies. (DOD should take care not to conduct the burden-sharing discussion as a protection racketeer, as Trump tends to.) 

And if the executive branch will not lead a discussion on burden sharing, Congress should. In 1988, the House Armed Services Committee issued the Report of the Defense Burdensharing Panel, which had convened testimony and hearings in the months before. That report concluded pointedly that “As long as Americans pay most of the cost and assume most of the risks and responsibilities for the defense of the free world, the allies will be prepared to let the United States do so.” In 2019, bills were introduced in both the House and Senate to reinvigorate discussions of burden-sharing in Europe and the Middle East. There is no reason for Congress to leave these questions to the executive branch. Burden-sharing discussions die in darkness. 

Decoupling is both a logical predicate for achieving American policy aims, and unthinkable. Equitable burden-sharing is both vital for American strategy and hard to envision. Clear-eyed focus on China as the most important issue for American statesmen is both essential and foreclosed by bureaucratic and domestic politics. If Washington wants to influence China’s role in the world, then it needs to reconcile these contradictions. 

The Coronavirus Crisis Presents a Unique Challenge for the U.S. Federal System Washington is going to have to learn to herd the states under the federalism framework crafted by the Founding Fathers. by Ramon Marks

Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan recently bought a half a million coronavirus testing kits from South Korea in the absence of the help he felt needed from Washington. While the Trump administration claims it is supplying states with all necessary support, governors are telling a different story. They say that in a vacuum created by Washington, they have been forced to fend for themselves to do whatever it takes to try to find the equipment and supplies they need to combat the virus.

Meanwhile, for ordinary Americans, the scene looks like one giant mess as the states and federal government engage in histrionics and compete and jockey for medical supplies and resources. In this free-for-all, prices are bid up, accompanied by a crazy quilt of conflicting demands and delivery priorities. The process looks entirely broken—but ironically, for better or worse, the system is working exactly as our Founding Fathers intended. 

The United States is dealing with a governance structure, unique to this country. Unlike Paris, London, Berlin, Rome, Seoul or Beijing, the United States cannot respond to the pandemic with a centralized, coordinated response completely controlled by Washington, DC. The U.S. Constitution simply forbids that, granting the national government only certain, enumerated executive, legislative and judicial powers. However vast those powers may be, they are not absolute, and all others are reserved exclusively to the states under Article X of the Constitution. One bedrock principle of constitutional jurisprudence, stretching back at least to the early nineteenth century, is that “police powers” fall within the primary control of state governments. In Gibbons v. Ogden (1824), Supreme Court, Chief Justice John Marshall, characterized those powers as an “immense mass of legislation, which embraces everything within the territory of a State, not surrendered to the federal government,” including “quarantine laws” and “health laws of every description.”

Hence, Trump was on shaky constitutional ground when he asserted—in response to hearing that regional governors were conferring on coordinated guidelines for reopening their economies—that he alone, as “[t]he president of the United States calls the shots,” and that “[t]hey can’t do anything without approval of the president of the United States.” In fact, the governors do have major sway on deciding such issues of pandemic response consistent with their constitutionally based police powers. Founded on the architecture of the document he principally drafted, James Madison might well find it strange that Trump should make such an extreme assertion. Madison might also find it equally strange that state governors would complain that Washington has somehow abdicated its responsibilities in the current situation since the Constitution envisioned that states would handle health concerns under their police powers. 

Article II of the Constitution conferred on Congress, however, the vast authority to regulate interstate commerce. Over time, federal legislation has become the overarching body of law controlling the economy including food, drug and health matters, to the extent considered to fall within the ambit of interstate commerce. To protect that federal role, the federal courts have developed the judicial doctrine of preemption, ensuring that constitutionally protected federal laws take precedence over any diverging state laws.

Courts have also traditionally recognized that the president possesses inherent executive authority to act in certain situations, particularly in times of war. One notable example of this kind of executive authority was when President Abraham Lincoln suspended the right of habeus corpus during the civil war based on an act passed by Congress.

The coronavirus crisis presents, however, a unique challenge for the U.S. federal system. Both the federal government and state governments have constitutionally protected roles to play in this situation with no clear structure provided by the Framers as to how such cooperation should operate in practice. Hence, the political sparks have flown as state governors hold press conferences simultaneously complaining about inadequate control and support from the federal government while insisting on their prerogative to handle the crisis in their own states. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has gone back and forth, sometimes asserting that it is mainly up to the states to handle the challenges while at other times insisting that it is the federal government that must call the shots.

In the middle of all this, an obscure piece of federal legislation first passed during the Korean War in 1950, has taken center stage, the Defense Product Act (DPA). This law was passed by Congress principally to authorize the president to marshal the US defense industry to provide equipment and material for the Korean war effort. It has been adapted today to meet a different kind of nonmilitary challenge, but the fit for current circumstances is not as comfortable.

The DPA can empower the president to direct emergency production of medical supplies and set reasonable pricing, but it certainly provides no institutional framework for then allocating such supplies among the states, unlike the Korean War when there was no question but that all resources would go to the armed forces, not to some kind of allocation among fifty states. The DPA also lacks absolute preemptive power over the states. The president cannot outright bar state governors from making their own supply orders as such gubernatorial action falls within their own constitutionally protected, police powers to combat the pandemic. Such modern Supreme Court decisions as United States v. Lopez, and National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, where the Court respectively invalidated federal legislation intruding into state gun control and health matters, show that Congress, under the Commerce Clause, does not necessarily have infinite power over states to dominate how pandemic emergencies should be handled.

Whatever the lessons from the current crisis, the country must deal more effectively with the reality that under constitutional principles of federalism, both state and federal governments have protected roles to play. Washington is going to have to learn to herd the states under the federalism framework crafted by the Founding Fathers. 

CDC Report: Coronavirus Pandemic May Have Killed 24,172 in NYC That’s nearly three-fourths of all deaths during this time period. by Matthew Petti

The coronavirus pandemic may have killed 24,172 people in New York City from March 11 to May 1, a new report by the Centers for Disease Control and the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene said. 

The New York metro area has suffered the worst coronavirus outbreak in the United States, with over confirmed 14,482 novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) deaths in the city alone. But the true number of deaths is almost definitely higher than the official death toll, with virus testing lagging behind and thousands dying at home.

A paper by federal authorities and the city health department, published on Monday, tried to put a number on the unknown by comparing deaths this year to the baseline number of deaths in previous years.

Health officials reported 32,107 deaths in New York City from March 11 to May 1, nearly a third higher than the seasonal baseline. This includes 13,831 laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 cases and 5,048 “probable” COVID-19 cases.

New York City allows doctors and medical examiners to mark deaths as probable COVID-19 cases at their discretion, and is not testing all deceased persons for the virus. Some critics say that the system is undercounting COVID-19 deaths.

The paper noted that the probably and confirmed case count “might not include deaths among persons with [novel coronavirus] infection who did not access diagnostic testing, tested falsely negative, or became infected after testing negative, died outside of a health care setting, or for whom COVID-19 was not suspected by a health care provider as a cause of death.”

The total number of “excess” deaths was between 22,980 and 25,364, with 95% confidence, including 5,293 deaths that were neither confirmed nor “probable” COVID-19 cases.

“Tracking excess mortality is important to understanding the contribution to the death rate from both COVID-19 disease and the lack of availability of care for non-COVID conditions,” the authors wrote. Some of the excess deaths “might have been directly or indirectly attributable to the pandemic,” but the percentage of them directly caused by COVID-19 will “require further investigation.”

Excess deaths peaked at over 1,100 on April 7, including nearly 300 that were not confirmed or probable COVID-19 deaths.

The number of excess deaths has since fallen to around 200 per day, nearly all of them confirmed or probable COVID-19 deaths.

Random antibody testing of supermarket shoppers suggested that around a fifth of New Yorkers had been exposed to the novel coronavirus by late April.

COVID-19 has killed 81,795 people total in the United States as of Monday night. Over one million people are known to be currently infected by the novel coronavirus, and 262,225 people have recovered from COVID-19.