Philipp Staab’s nuanced critique of capitalism highlights how tech giants ‘capture’ users.
By Diane Coyle Diane Coyle is professor of public policy at the University of Cambridge · 30 Mar 2024
Wander around Port Sunlight, Bournville, or Saltaire, and the concern of their founders for the wellbeing of the workers is manifest in the fabric of these British model towns developed by enlightened entrepreneurs, even if it is at times oppressively paternalistic. Other company towns, like those depicted in Depression-era novels, were simply exploitative, paying workers meagre amounts in company money that could only be spent at costly company stores.
This was the comparison that came to my mind when reading Markets and Power in Digital Capitalism by Philipp Staab. The book explores what is distinctive about today’s digital capitalist economies, focusing on the extensive reach and power of Big Tech companies, and looks back in time to find apt comparisons. Yet, rather than look to the 19th century luminaries — the Lever brothers, the Cadbury family — who developed model towns, Staab, professor of sociology at Berlin’s Humboldt University, offers a different, earlier parallel, namely the colonising businesses of the age of empire, such as the East India Company.
Big Tech firms operate a corporate monopoly with government blessing, a “privatised mercantilism” operating through “proprietary markets”. This comparison suggests the digital capitalist economy is inherently exploitative. But the book is more nuanced — and therefore more interesting: it is not just another anti-capitalist rant.
For, as Staab admits, and as the evidence indicate s, the billions of users of digital technologies greatly value the (often free) services they get. Few people would disagree about the negative aspects of Big Tech, including their immense power, but it undermines the credibility of some of the critics to ignore the positive aspects. The combination of valued amenities with the exercise of control is what makes Big Tech’s walled gardens — such as the provision by the likes of Google or Apple of a world of operating systems, internet search, email, payment services, maps and so on — as reminiscent of company towns as of the East India Company. Apple’s locking in consumers and locking out other providers is at the heart of the new Department of Justice antitrust case against the tech giant.
Given this mix of good and bad, Staab makes several interesting observations. One of the main weapons deployed against Big Tech is competition policy to limit their market power. But as Staab says, these are not like normal markets: “They are not primarily producers operating in markets but markets in which producers operate.”
In other words, the digital platforms have become the field on which many producers in the economy themselves innovate and compete. Big Tech firms have expanded their areas of operation from an initial offer (bookselling for Amazon, making computers for Apple, and so on) to provide an ever-increasing range of services. They are increasingly building their own infrastructure of data centres and undersea cables. Their ambition is that both sides of the market, producers and consumers, find everything they might need as an economic agent within the walls — the information, the means of payment, the fulfilment. The individual’s chosen Big Tech can provide income, while filling leisure and consumption time too — making it ever-harder to leave.
As Staab notes, this all-embracing approach has also brought the digital economy’s potential for innovation and entrepreneurship inside the walled gardens as the only way a start-up can grow is acquisition by Big Tech. One little-noticed implication is that competition policy might torpedo this dynamic, as US, EU and UK authorities have all recently prevented acquisitions that might previously have gone ahead.
An example is Amazon’s recent decision to drop its bid for iRobot, maker of the Roomba vacuum cleaner, in the face of likely EU and US vetoes. Old-style competition thinking would not have seen domestic cleaning robots as being in the same market as online retail and cloud computing. New-style competition policy sees this has allowed digital companies to build market power and aims to stop such acquisitions. If extended, this tougher enforcement could end the get-rich quick exit strategy of the start-ups.
Other concepts seem less useful. Staab argues the economy is characterised by “superabundance” and saturated demand, so that the platforms need to profit by making it too hard for users to switch. He seems to believe everybody had everything they could need by the 1970s, which is not how I remember that decade. The fact that “sales suffered” in the early 1970s is surely more easily explained by macroeconomics than the senescence of the previous capitalist system of accumulation. Still, for all that the book is mainly in conversation with other critics of capitalism, it is jargon-free, well-argued, and thought-provoking.
En Turquie, Erdogan essuie un désaveu cinglant avec la large victoire de l’opposition aux municipales
Des partisans du principal mouvement d’opposition, le Parti républicain du peuple (CHP), fêtent leur victoire après les élections municipales en Turquie, à Istanbul, le 31 mars 2024. OZAN KOSE / AFP
Des dizaines de villes ont changé de main au profit du principal parti d’opposition, le Parti républicain du peuple (CHP), grand vainqueur de la soirée. Istanbul, Ankara, Izmir, Bursa et Antalya, les cinq plus grandes agglomérations du pays, ont largement voté pour la formation créée par Mustafa Kemal Atatürk il y a un peu plus d’un siècle.
Le maire sortant de la mégapole du Bosphore, Ekrem Imamoglu, a reçu plus d’un million de voix que son adversaire, obtenant 51 % contre 39 %. Des bastions de l’AKP ont basculé dans l’opposition comme Üsküdar, Gaziosmanpasa et Bayrampasa. Près de vingt-six arrondissements sur les trente-neuf que compte la capitale économique du pays ont été remportés par le CHP, soit douze de plus qu’en 2019. Du jamais-vu depuis un demi-siècle.
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Partout ailleurs, le parti kémaliste a augmenté ses gains, renversant même des places fortes du pouvoir dans la région de la Mer noire et du centre anatolien. Même la ville d’Adiyaman, dirigée depuis des années par l’AKP et durement frappée par le tremblement de terre de 2013, a placé le candidat du CHP très largement en tête du scrutin.
« Un message clair à ceux qui dirigent ce pays »
Surtout, le mouvement kémaliste est devenu, selon une moyenne des votes, la première formation du pays, coiffant, avec 37,5 % des voix, l’AKP de près deux points. Le succès est d’autant plus impressionnant que le CHP n’avait quasiment plus dépassé les 25 % depuis deux décennies. Au point où le président turc a concédé, peu avant minuit, à Ankara, au siège de son parti et devant une foule inhabituellement silencieuse, que ces résultats constituaient « non pas une fin, mais un tournant » pour son camp, ajoutant que « malheureusement, nous n’avons pas obtenu les résultats que nous souhaitions ».
Le Monde Application
Dès les premiers résultats connus, de nombreux rassemblements se sont spontanément formés dans de nombreuses villes du pays. A Sarigazi, sur la rive asiatique d’Istanbul, des dizaines de personnes ont scandé « Erdogan démission ». La nouvelle maire d’Üsküdar, Sinem Dedetas, a lancé devant ses fidèles que les électeurs avaient littéralement « puni l’AKP ».
Partout, des klaxons ont retenti en signe de victoire dans les quartiers. Des jeunes à scooter ont agité des drapeaux avec le sigle rouge du CHP. Dans la capitale, à Ankara, une foule compacte de plusieurs milliers de personnes s’est rassemblée dans le jardin de la municipalité pour écouter le maire très largement réélu, Mansur Yavas. « Ceux qui ont été ignorés ont envoyé un message clair à ceux qui dirigent ce pays », a-t-il lancé devant un auditoire en liesse.
Refréner tout « esprit de vengeance »
Au siège du parti, le président du CHP, Özgür Özel, la voix cassée par trois mois de mobilisation, a, lui, tenu un long et solennel discours. « Ce vote est un tournant pour tout le monde et tous les partis. Notre peuple a livré un message clair. Nous savons aujourd’hui que la Turquie n’acceptera plus d’être un Etat de non droit, a-t-il lancé. Les nombreuses victoires dans les villes sont la preuve que malgré tous les bâtons dans les roues que nous a posés le pouvoir, nos maires ont bien travaillé et montré que leurs villes étaient entre de bonnes mains. »
Appelant les militants à rester calme et à refréner tout « esprit de vengeance », il a insisté sur le fait que « malgré l’absence d’alliance [avec d’autres partis de l’opposition], nous avons vaincu » : « Nous sommes un parti de démocrates, un parti social-démocrate, un parti avec des démocrates conservateurs, kurdes et nationalistes. Tous, nous pouvons voter ensemble et cette élection est le premier pas des victoires qui s’annoncent pour les années à venir. » Dehors, devant les militants et sous les applaudissements, il a ajouté que le maire d’Istanbul, Ekrem Imamoglu, avait su gagner « contre le président et tous les ministres, tous venus faire campagne pour aider leur candidat AKP ».
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Au QG du CHP de l’arrondissement de Fatih, sur la rive européenne du Bosphore, où le candidat Mahir Polat est venu inquiéter ce fief traditionnel AKP, plusieurs militants ont comparé ce vote à celui de 1989, l’année où le scrutin municipal avait entraîné la chute du premier ministre, Turgut Özal. Sur les plateaux télévisés et les réseaux sociaux, les commentaires n’ont pas plus tardé. Pour le politiste Foti Benlisoy, « le CHP a construit une hégémonie absolue dans le camp de l’opposition ». Même son de cloche pour Bekir Agirdir de l’hebdomadaire Oksijen pour qui « l’AKP n’est plus un parti de masse ».
Le journaliste Kemal Can a expliqué, dans un léger bémol, que « cela serait trop précipité de ne voir dans ces résultats qu’une consécration du travail de l’opposition » et qu’il « faut attendre pour affiner les analyses ». « Ce qui apparaît dans l’immédiat, souligne-t-il, est davantage une désaffection des électeurs de l’AKP. » Une tendance observée depuis plusieurs mois et qui s’est soldée par le départ du parti de près de 200 000 adhérents.
Quelques jours avant le scrutin, le journaliste Murat Yetkin avait écrit sur son blog, en évoquant l’importance que recouvrait la bataille de la mairie d’Istanbul : « Si Imamoglu gagne malgré tous les obstacles, le pays se réveillera dans la matinée du 1er avril avec un environnement complètement différent et de nouveaux équilibres politiques. » Il aurait pu ajouter toutes les plus grandes villes du pays.
Homenaje a las víctimas del atentado terrorista junto al Crocus City Hall, al noroeste de Moscú, este pasado domingo. MAXIM SHEMETOV (REUTERS)
El terrorismo es un viejo conocido en la Lubianka, la sede del desaparecido KGB soviético, ahora el FSB, los servicios de seguridad rusos. Allí Vladímir Putin aprendió todo lo que le ha valido para llegar a la cumbre hace casi 25 años y disponerse a mantenerse en ella hasta 2030 como mínimo, tal como ha quedado corroborado en las recientes elecciones. El gran arte del chantaje, el kompromat (dosier comprometedor) y la autoinculpación, el veneno, la bomba y la pistola, la tortura, el gulag y la celda de castigo son la especialidad de la casa, practicada incluso en dosis masivas, inhumanas, en nombre del socialismo soviético hasta 1993 y de la Santa Rusia desde entonces.
Viene de muy lejos el terror al servicio del Estado. De los zares, de Lenin y especialmente de Stalin, uno de los mayores asesinos de masas de la historia, que Putin ha empezado a rehabilitar. Solo la interrumpió una breve pausa entre Gorbachov y el primer Yeltsin, cuando la élite del país decidió abandonar la violenta tradición soviética. Aquella efímera discontinuidad en las alturas no tuvo correspondencia en los cimientos policiales del poder, hasta el punto de que fueron los siloviki (los hombres fuertes en ruso) los que mantuvieron viva la llama, controlaron desde los sótanos al Estado y luego colocaron directamente en el trono del zar a uno de los suyos.
La ascensión de Putin a finales de 1999 se produjo en mitad de una campaña de atentados masivos en los que murieron más de 300 personas, al estilo del perpetrado este pasado viernes en el Crocus City Hall de Moscú. Entonces fueron atribuidos a los terroristas chechenos, y sirvieron para justificar la brutalidad de la intervención rusa en la segunda guerra de Chechenia. Catherine Belton, ex corresponsal del Financial Times en Moscú y biógrafa de Putin, se ha preguntado si “los hombres de la seguridad pudieron ser los que bombardearon a su propia gente en un intento de crear una crisis que asegurara su presidencia” (Los hombres de Putin. Cómo el KGB se apoderó de Rusia y se enfrentó a Occidente, Península).
No es una demanda insidiosa, puesto que muy poco se ha conocido de la autoría de aquella campaña terrorista de septiembre de 1999, hasta el punto de que quienes la investigaron murieron en extrañas circunstancias o fueron encarcelados, como ha sucedido tantas veces con numerosos asesinatos de periodistas, empresarios, exagentes secretos y disidentes. La inexplicable e inexplicada muerte de Alexéi Navalni en vísperas electorales es el último y políticamente relevante de todos estos casos. Si aquellos atentados condujeron a Putin en dirección al poder, en el actual de Moscú, por el contrario, queda en evidencia su incapacidad para proteger a la población y su debilidad como gobernante, justo cuando acaba de ser reelegido.
Nada ha fallado en la pauta de comportamiento del Kremlin. La primera reacción del entorno de Putin ha sido señalar directamente a Kiev. Por parte del presidente ruso en su discurso a propósito de los atentados, ni una palabra para el Estado Islámico que ha reivindicado la matanza, dos para sugerir la complicidad de Ucrania y otra más para introducir el nazismo de por medio, la misma etiqueta nefanda con la que ataca a Kiev y sus aliados. Esta Rusia putinista es una fábrica de teorías conspirativas, siguiendo una tradición que también viene de tiempos zaristas. Putin no iba a ser menos ahora y ahorrarse la invención de un vínculo entre el Estado Islámico y el régimen democrático de Kiev, o incluso la OTAN y Washington si se tercia, para intensificar los bombardeos sobre Ucrania como venganza.
Muhammad cartoon row teacher ‘abandoned’ and still in hiding
Three years after mass protests, wounds are yet to heal, write Charlotte Wace, Mario Ledwith and Ian Leonard
Scenes at Batley Grammar School in West Yorkshire were highlighted in a report warning about the dangers of harassment
For three years little has been known about the life and wellbeing of a religious studies teacher who has been in hiding since showing pupils at a West Yorkshire school a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad — even after he was cleared of wrongdoing by an external investigation.
But this week the devastating impact of the events at Batley Grammar School in March 2021 was laid bare in a report by a government adviser.
Over several meetings with Dame Sara Khan, the independent social cohesion adviser, the teacher described how he had felt abandoned by the school, which is part of the Batley Multi Academy Trust, and by other local authorities.
In his assessment, the teacher said he had felt “thrown under the bus” after an apology was issued by school leaders before any investigation.
The trust maintained that it had delivered on its responsibilities, and alleged there were inaccuracies in the report.
Khan has now responded to the trust’s rebuttal, expressing her “disappointment” at its reaction.
“By not recognising how it could have handled the situation better, I don’t know whose interests it thinks it is serving,” she told The Times this week. “As an independent person examining this case, I stand by what I have written. People can read for themselves in painstaking detail what happened.”
Khan said the trust had not outlined what the “inaccuracies” were. “I’m disappointed that the trust does not think any lessons could be learnt from what happened nor appreciate that at the heart of this case it is about the victim, the RS [religious studies] teacher and how social cohesion was failed.”
A former governor has also claimed his concerns about the school’s handling of the situation were ignored.
Further claims have emerged about interference in other schools across Batley by self-appointed faith leaders who are not even parents of the pupils attending them.
‘Hung out to dry’
As rumours and speculation spread across Batley on social media and WhatsApp groups in the days after the image was shown, protesters answered calls to gather outside the school and demand the teacher’s sacking. Many of the residents who gathered did so despite not having a child at the school. Others had even less obvious reason for attendance, having travelled from as far afield as Birmingham.
Some of the posts on social media called for vigilante attacks and encouraged sightings of the religious studies teacher to be shared. “He should be scared for his life,” read one. Another said: “If u see him u know what to do.”
The teacher was suspended by the school after his use of the image in a Year 9 class came to light. At a press conference Gary Kibble, the former head teacher, offered an “unequivocal apology” for the use of the image, which he said was “completely inappropriate”.
The RS teacher told Khan that the school’s primary concern “appeared to be appeasing the protesters rather than standing by and supporting the school’s own teaching staff”.
An independent investigation commissioned by the school had later cleared him of causing deliberate offence and highlighted that he believed the image could be of genuine educational value.
Khan, a British Muslim who had been brought up in Bradford, said the decision to suspend the teacher may have inflamed the situation. She said in her review that the impact on the teacher’s mental health had been profound. The teacher, who remains cut off from friends and family, suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder.
A former governor at the school has now claimed that the teacher was “hung out to dry” as he reflected on the “frightening” aftermath of the incident. “It was really bad for the school and I hope there will be change,” he said this week. “I was quite outspoken at the time but none of my concerns were heard.”
Recruitment had also been affected, according to the former governor, who asked not to be named. “You can understand why teachers don’t want to come to the school,” he said — but he voiced hopes that the new head teacher “could rebuild” the school’s reputation.
In her excoriating report, titled Threats to social cohesion and democratic resilience: a new strategic approach, Khan also criticised West Yorkshire police for determining the security risk to the teacher to be low, and Kirklees council for showing a “lack of any empathy” to the teacher and his family.
Similar cases alleged
Khan’s most robust criticism was reserved for what she described as self-appointed “community leaders”. She said some of the figures consulted by the school were not neutral and did not have children there, adding that their involvement was not helpful to calm the situation. She said that by relying on these figures the views of the wider Muslim community, who wanted a peaceful resolution and had expressed support for the teacher, were overshadowed.
However, for Khan, the risk of such events recurring still lingers, and she accused activists of “interfering in everyday teaching at schools more widely across Batley”.
She wrote: “From successful attempts at banning legitimate religious books, to interfering in essays, class discussions and debates about religion or other topics, such activists seek to impose their dogmatic religious beliefs in non-faith schools and interfere in the teaching of the national curriculum.”
A local source claimed they heard about a separate matter at another school in Batley. They told The Times: “One class had been set homework about the headscarf, what it means, debates surrounding it. A so-called Muslim male community leader who had nothing to do with the school just said ‘No, how dare you, this is insulting our religion.’ And the school just withdrew as they were scared of what was going to happen to them and the implicit threats made to them.”
On another occasion, also in Batley, pupils were said to have used a book about the Ahmadiyya community as part of their learning about the minority sect, according to the source. “One of these community leaders was going, ‘How dare you talk about this, and try and portray this as mainstream Islam’ — and they weren’t doing that at all,” the source added.
Protesters claimed to be ‘community leaders’
One of the most prominent community leaders involved in the Batley incident was Mohammed Amin Pandor, who was consulted by Batley Grammar School’s leadership. He announced to the gathered protesters that the teacher had been suspended after a meeting with the school’s head.
Meanwhile another key protagonist of the Batley protests has continued to defend such demonstrations. Adil Shahzad, an imam based in Bradford, addressed crowds outside the school after travelling to the town and calling for the teacher to be sacked. He repeatedly referred to the matter on his social media pages, sharing letters that named the teacher.
In May 2021, after an investigation exonerated the teacher, Shahzad wrote on his Facebook page that he was “extremely disappointed” and that the findings were “a complete joke”.
Parents ‘concerned’ by protests
Yunus Lunat, a lawyer who at one point acted as a representative for Muslim parents at the school, has said the teacher should never have been suspended and that children at the school would like him back.
Having seen Khan’s review, he agreed that the teacher “had been“ failed” and questioned why the school had not explained the full facts of the situation immediately. “It was almost like the protesters were protesting on misinformation,” he said.
Lunat, like many others, has been keen to emphasise the differences between the views of most Muslim parents with children at the school, and those of the most vocal protesters.
The lawyer was appointed to assist in the first place, he said, because parents were “concerned” by the protests and how “it seemed like that minority shouting the loudest seemed to get the most attention”.
A source close to Tracy Brabin, the former Labour MP for Batley & Spen, now mayor of West Yorkshire, claimed that the report did not address how the incident was used “to mobilise support and perpetuate hate” by the far right.
Teacher a ‘decent man’
As the local community began to move on from the incident, the teacher remained in hiding with his family. They were placed in temporary accommodation, which he felt was squalid and unsuitable for living, according to the review. His children had to sleep on mattresses on the floor and missed out on receiving an education for many months.
According to Khan, the man is “just a really decent and good-hearted individual who clearly loved what he did”. He was “aware there were divisive actors who were clearly trying to exploit this and to turn this into a full-blown anti-Muslim agenda and he just refused to go down that route”, she said.
Her hope is that the review will have brought the man some comfort.
“This incident will leave a permanent and profound scar on his life but I know he wants to also get on with his life — for his sake and his family’s,” Khan added.
When the report was published on Monday, a spokesman for Batley Multi Academy Trust said: “We are disappointed by today’s report. We do not recognise much of what is in it, its description of the events, nor the characterisation of our school and community.” The trust claimed support was offered to the teacher involved and the rest of the school community. It insisted that all due process was followed.
The spokesman said yesterday: “We have been clear, including in our statement earlier this week, that we have learnt from the events of 2021, such as accepting and implementing the findings from the independent investigation that year, and apologising.”
He said “the report — the broad recommendations of which we support — was checked with us several times”, but “only one of the changes we asked for in relation to the section on our school was made”.
The spokesman added: “We do not think any purpose is served by this playing out in public. Our staff team continues to work hard each and every day to serve the children and young people in our schools, their families and our communities, of whom we are very proud.”
Fear of prosecution years later ‘could get British troops killed’
James Heappey, who quit as defence minister, says a soldier’s instinct is what keeps him alive, writes Larisa Brown
James Heappey said his unit in Afghanistan was being blown up on every patrol
Special forces soldiers would be killed in battle as they hesitated to make lifeor-death decisions because of the fear of prosecution, the former armed forces minister has said.
James Heappey, a former army officer who quit his ministerial role this week, said legal investigations into troops’ actions in previous wars could have operational consequences.
He also called on Johnny Mercer, the veterans minister, to disclose the names of whistleblowers who could have crucial evidence about claims that SAS soldiers murdered innocent Afghans.
In his first interview since leaving the government on Tuesday, Heappey said Rishi Sunak should commit Britain to spending 3 per cent of GDP on defence by 2030. He also told how his job contributed to his marriage breaking down.
Hundreds of British soldiers have been investigated over incidents in overseas wars more than a decade ago. Most of the allegations have been thrown out. This year it emerged that five special forces members could face murder charges for shooting a suspected Islamic State militant in Syria in 2022.
Heappey said: “There is a real danger those who are serving now start to worry about that possibility [of prosecution] 20 years hence and it does indeed cost them 0.25 of a second in their trigger reaction time and that might be the difference between the other guy shooting first.”
A public inquiry is examining claims that 80 Afghans were summarily killed by SAS units between 2010 and 2013 and that there was a cover-up, frustrating police investigations.
Mercer, also an Afghanistan veteran who gave evidence to the inquiry last month, is facing a potential prison sentence or fine for refusing to disclose the names of special forces soldiers who told him about the allegations. One whistleblower admitted that he was asked to carry a “drop weapon”, which could be planted next to unarmed suspected members of the Taliban without being traceable to UK or Nato forces.
Heappey, 43, said: “I admire Johnny enormously for the way he has done politics under his own rules with an incredible sense of mission ... he is a remarkable man, but on this particular point I think for him, for his family and actually for the credibility of the inquiry, I think he does need to disclose these names.”
It is understood Mercer has refused because the soldiers, who are not suspects, have not given him permission to do so and he wants to protect them.
Heappey said that “clearly” the inquiry needed to hear from the soldier who mentioned the drop weapon, adding: “That is literally the pivotal point in the whole case. It’s an enormous deal.”
Heappey served for a decade in The Rifles, reaching the rank of major. He was deployed to Kabul, Northern Ireland, Basra in Iraq and then Sangin in Helmand province in 2009, then the most dangerous place in Afghanistan for Nato soldiers. It was infamous for the vast number of improvised explosive devices buried by the Taliban.
Heappey said his troops were getting blown up every time they went out on patrol. He said his 2009 tour was a precursor to the events that began the next year when special forces soldiers carried out night raids in which they allegedly killed unarmed Afghans.
“The thing that they were doing [in 2009] was getting beyond the minefield and using their amazing fieldcraft, they were able to go after the bombmakers and restore some offensive spirit. What they were doing in the upper Helmand valley at that time was absolutely essential to saving God knows how many British soldiers’ lives and limbs.”
He said allegations of wrongdoing by the SAS must be investigated fully and if proved true it would be “awful and so sad because it lets down an institution”.
He said: “Our licence to operate comes from holding ourselves to the highest standard and of course we should be investigated when the allegation is that we have fallen short.” However, he said people should understand the consequences, referring to legal investigations into soldiers who served in Iraq and Northern Ireland. He said instinct was what kept soldiers alive in battle and it was not realistic for the rules of engagement to be retrospectively deconstructed and soldiers held to account for every millisecond.
At one point detectives working for the Iraq Historic Allegations Team were investigating more than 3,000 allegations. No British soldiers were prosecuted as a result. Another team was tasked with looking into 52 alleged illegal killings in Afghanistan. Both inquiries were subsequently wound up.
Veterans who served in Northern Ireland during the Troubles have also faced prosecution, although the government has promised immunity for any who co-operate with a reconciliation commission.
In candid comments reflecting upon his time in the Ministry of Defence, as an MP and as an army officer in his twenties, the father of two said his work had affected his marriage. “The pressure of the job, being away ... makes the marriage more challenging and in my case very sadly, very very sadly, means that it came to the end,” Heappey said. He is stepping down as an MP at the next election and hopes he will be able to settle down and focus on his children.
Before then, he said he would fight for more money for defence. He believes Sunak should immediately increase the budget from 2.27 per cent to 2.5 per cent of GDP, with a commitment to 3 per cent in 2030 so the UK can prepare for war. Ben Wallace, the former defence secretary, is also pushing for 3 per cent by 2030.
Heappey said there was a lack of equipment to enable UK troops to reach the front line in the event of war. However, he also said the UK remained a top-tier fighting force, adding: “The UK division is still going to be one of the best divisions in Nato’s order of battle.”
THE SLOW DEATH OF LIBERALISM
Below is yet another instance of how Western bourgeois liberals - this time in the vestigial of an FT Editorial - simply fail to see that the hermetic separation of the capitalist Economy from the Political is quite simply untenable. This hermetic separation was always understood to preserve the neutrality of the State from the sphere of public opinion that encompassed religion and other customs. We always knew that this was a pathetic and feeble fallacy, when it was not a pernicious Eskamotage. The capitalist West and its bourgeoisie will soon learn the enormity of their delusions.
How religion became entwined with politics
Societies have not all become more secular as they grew richer
30 Mar 2024
This weekend, millions of people will celebrate Easter. For Christians, the passion of the Christ signifies redemption through divine self-sacrifice. But nonbelievers, too, may find it worth pondering a story of a spiritual leader who said his kingdom was “not of this world”, refusing the political role many supporters expected of him and his detractors feared.
Religion today can seem to be taking the opposite course. Not long ago, societies looked destined to become ever more secular as they grew richer, and religion’s influence on politics would ebb away. That has not happened.
In developing countries, the very mixed record of secular models — communism, socialism, nationalism or western-style democracy — in delivering equitable material growth set the stage for a return of religious fundamentalist politics, whether in governments or in violent non-state movements. Resentment against lingering power imbalances and alienation with western-led globalisation has also tempted authoritarian leaders to use traditionalist religion to win support: India is a case in point; so is Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
In the west, too, the barriers between politics and religion have been disappearing. A traditionalist backlash can be seen in phenomena as superficially different as the nostalgia of Europe’s populist right or the undermining of abortion rights in the US.
Not all of this is spurred by religion. Nor are all organised religions politically reactionary or keen to play a political role. Many believers resent demands to be held to account politically for their private creed; yet such demands are increasingly made. So too with other aspects of personal identity, where people are called on to nail their deepest personal values to the public mast, and take political sides accordingly.
What is happening is the dark side of identity politics: an invasion of the political sphere by identity-based tribalism. Once identity markers are turned into political tools, all aspects of identity are exposed to being politicised.
This is not new. Modern history is marked by the shifting struggle to create shared, neutral political spaces. Five centuries ago, the Age of Discovery and rise of the scientific method loosened religion’s grip on human affairs. Later the American and French revolutions explicitly separated church and state. Reaction always followed.
By the mid-20th century, however, it was reasonable to think that the separation between the public and the private sphere was here to stay. In the following decades, liberal philosophers established the doctrine that politics should be based on commonly accepted rights, not on contested conceptions of how life should be lived.
They may have won the intellectual argument; they did not win the practical contest. Personal identity markers increasingly claim to be the foundation of political allegiance. And sometimes the personal does need to be made political, lest the border between the two entrench inequalities of power.
But without any border at all, everything is a political battleground. When identity markers are fundamentally incompatible, a politics grounded on them becomes a competition for which group can most dominate others.
The only hope for peaceful coexistence is to agree that some beliefs cannot be litigated in the political sphere, even those which people may find give the deepest meaning to their lives. Re-separating politics from identity is something religions, too, can support through their insistence on the dignity of every human being. But one needn’t be Christian or even religious to endorse the call to give to God what is God’s and to Caesar what is Caesar’s.
Friday 29 March 2024
It feels like 1939, says Poland’s prime minister
Donald Tusk says Europe is not ready for war as Krisjanis Karins, Latvia’s foreign minister and top diplomat, is forced to resign over private flights
Donald Tusk gave an emotional interview to Welt am Sonntag, a German newspaper OMAR MARQUES/GETTY IMAGES
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Europe is in a “pre-war” period reminiscent of the situation in 1939, Poland’s prime minister has said, in a bleak comparison with his own family’s experience of the Nazi German invasion.
Donald Tusk, whose grandfather was forced to work in a concentration camp and then conscripted into the Wehrmacht, said his European partners had “a long way to go” before they would be ready to resist a direct Russian offensive.
“I remember a photo from my childhood that hung in my family’s house,” Tusk told Welt am Sonntag, a German newspaper. “It showed Sopot beach [near Gdansk on the Baltic coast] full of laughing people.
“It was taken on August 31, 1939. A few hours later the Second World War began 5km away. I know it sounds devastating, especially for the younger generation, but we have to get used to the fact that a new era has begun: the pre-war period. I’m not exaggerating: it gets clearer every day.”
Tusk met the Ukrainian prime minister, Denys Shmyhal, on Thursday and signed co-operation documents
MARCIN OBARA/EPA
Asked about an incident earlier this week where a Russian missile crossed over Polish airspace for half a minute, Tusk recalled an exchange with his Spanish counterpart, Pedro Sánchez.
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“He demanded that the [European Council] no longer use the word ‘war’,” Tusk said. “He didn’t want to unsettle people. Apparently the word sounds abstract in Spain.
“I told him that war is no longer abstract in my part of Europe — and we have a duty not to hold discussions but to get ourselves ready for defence.”
Meanwhile, on Friday morning, Poland scrambled fighter jets over its airspace following a series of Russian missile strikes on Ukraine. The Operational Command of the Polish Armed Forces said “allied” aircraft joined the response — although it is not clear which countries assisted.
Poland, which is aiming to amass the largest army and the biggest fleet of tanks in mainland Europe, is expected to spend about 4 per cent of its GDP on the military this year, twice the basic target for Nato members.
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“We need to be ready,” Tusk said. “Europe still has a long way to go. Luckily we can already see a real revolution in the European mentality … The most important thing is that no one questions that the need for collective defence any more. Look at Germany: a massive turnaround has taken place there.”
With an election looming in America, the leader of one of the EU’s largest parliamentary groups Manfred Weber has already warned that Europe needs to prepare for a scenario where the US no longer defends the continent. Earlier this year, Donald Trump suggested he may not protect Nato allies against a foreign invasion, while President Joe Biden has failed to pass a vital aid package for Ukraine through Congress.
This prompted the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to admit on Friday his army may be forced to retreat “in small steps” in the face of Russian attacks this spring. “If there is no US support,” he told the Washington Post, “it means that we have no air defence, no Patriot missiles, no jammers for electronic warfare, no 155-millimetre artillery rounds. It means we will go back, retreat, step by step, in small steps.”
Meanwhile in Latvia, one of Poland’s closest allies, the foreign minister has been forced to resign after prosecutors opened criminal proceedings following claims that his office had wasted public money on private jets.
Krisjanis Karins, who had been a candidate to take over the leadership of Nato, took flights costing a total of €1.3 million for 36 overseas trips on official business while he was the Baltic state’s prime minister, from 2019 to 2023.
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The European Union contributed €700,000 and the remaining €600,000 came from the Latvian taxpayer. Some of the trips were on chartered jets, prompting allegations that Karins had made unnecessary foreign visits and been too cavalier with scarce public funds.
Karins, the foreign minister of Latvia, one of Poland’s closest allies, had been a candidate to take over the leadership of Nato
RADEK PIETRUSZKA/EPA
Karins responded that given his full diary it would have been impossible to make these journeys on commercial flights. Last week, however, the Latvian prosecutor general’s office said it had identified a series of irregularities.
It said the chancellery officials under Karins had failed to carry out a proper procurement process and handed travel agencies more money than had been contractually agreed.
The file was handed to the national anti-corruption bureau, although there has been no claim that Karins was himself responsible for the improprieties, nor any indication that he will face charges.
Karins announced his resignation in a brief statement with no further explanation. Evika Silina, his successor as prime minister, praised his record but said Latvia could not afford to have any “shadow of a doubt” hanging over its top diplomat.
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Latvia has consistently been a strong advocate of support for Ukraine and the need for higher European defence spending. Earlier this month Karins told The Times that Europe had collectively been too fearful of Russian escalation and needed to equip Kyiv for victory.
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Ci sono in molte università del mondo minoranze portatrici di una controcultura satura di umori anti-occidentali
Censurare Shakespeare, interrompere i rapporti con le università israeliane. C’è un legame? Che cosa accomuna l’attacco diffuso ai capolavori della cultura occidentale che si registra in molte università americane ed europee e l’avversione che tanti studenti universitari, e anche un discreto numero di docenti, manifestano per Israele(unita all’indulgenza nei confronti delle tirannie, dalla Russia alla Cina all’Iran)? Il legame è dato dalla esistenza di minoranze portatrici di una controcultura satura di umori anti-occidentali. Non è in atto solo in America una guerra culturale. Si sta combattendo anche in Europa. In questo dramma le università sono uno snodo strategico perché stanno al vertice dei sistemi educativi e dispongono della capacità di influenzare ogni altra istituzione culturale (centri di ricerca, scuole, case editrici, mezzi di comunicazione). Con inevitabili ripercussioni su tutta la vita sociale, politica inclusa. Gruppi di minoranza (di docenti e studenti), ma molto combattivi e determinati, sono impegnati nel tentativo di mettere in rotta di collisione le istituzioni culturali e la civiltà liberale che le ha generate. Come è possibile che tante università (il fenomeno è nato in quelle anglosassoni) abbiano tollerato al loro interno la formazione di «polizie etiche», di guardiani del pensiero, censori/sbirri che decidono cosa è consentito e cosa non è consentito leggere, chi far parlare e chi no?
E come si spiega la diffusa tolleranza per chi nelle Università inneggia a Hamas e alla distruzione di Israele? Nelle Università italiane quel corpo di polizia del pensiero, fortunatamente, non si è ancora costituito ma molti ritengono che sia solo questione di tempo. Non è ancora stato redatto, qui da noi, l’elenco dei libri e dei personaggi proibiti. Per il momento, insomma, Shakespeare è ancora salvo. Anche da noi però, come sappiamo, (si tratti di Università o di festival culturali) c’è chi ha diritto di parlare liberamente e chi no. Per inciso, mentre fa notizia che a qualcuno sia negata la parola da parte di gruppetti urlanti, passa invece sotto silenzio l’autocensura preventiva, il fatto che, spesso, si evitano accuratamente certi oratori e certi argomenti per non incorrere in guai. E poiché le parole hanno perso il loro significato originario c’è anche chi definisce tutto ciò come una manifestazione (niente meno) di «pluralismo».
A conferma del fatto cha la storia è fortemente condizionata da minoranze, intensamente motivate — i pochi che, spesso, riescono a prevaricare i più — accade che, pur essendo popolate da maggioranze di differente avviso, diverse Università occidentali si pieghino al volere dei prepotenti, siano corrive, incapaci di opporsi a questa imperiosa richiesta di inginocchiarsi di fronte ai diktat dei rappresentanti della suddetta controcultura. Quelle minoranze vincono a meno che leader autorevoli e coraggiosi (in questo caso leader culturali) consapevoli di avere una responsabilità nei confronti della società a cui appartengono, non riescano a sbarrare loro il passo.
Contrariamente a quanto il sistema della comunicazione ogni giorno spinge tanti a pensare, la «conquista dei voti» è infinitamente meno importante della «conquista dei cuori». I voti vanno e vengono ma i pregiudizi, quando si incistano nella mente di un essere umano, diventano indistruttibili. Come mostra la ripresa in grande stile dell’antisemitismo nel mondo occidentale. In realtà, non se n’era mai andato ma, per tanto tempo, era stato chiuso a chiave in cantina. Da alcuni anni ne è uscito — è da diverso tempo che si registrano tanti episodi di antisemitismo in Europa — ed è dilagante dopo il 7 ottobre (prima ancora, come hanno documentato alcuni sondaggi, dell’attacco israeliano a Gaza, prima ancora che ci fossero le vittime palestinesi). Una febbre, come si è visto, ora assai diffusa fra studenti universitari che si imitano fra loro (potenza della rete) da un capo all’altro dell’Occidente. A conferma del fatto che la sorte dei palestinesi è soprattutto un pretesto per colpire l’Occidente ci sono i silenzi sulle nefandezze iraniane, russe o cinesi. Nessuno di costoro ha messo in discussione gli accordi fra le Università occidentali e quelle dei suddetti paradisi in terra.
Il presente e il futuro delle Università, anche se non è chiaro a tutti, influenzerà la sorte delle nostre democrazie. È sperabile che tanti docenti occidentali capiscano quanto grande sia il pericolo se si permette che a guidarle siano dei don Abbondio. O peggio: come l’ineffabile ex rettrice di Harvard per la quale è lecito «in determinate circostanze» (sic) invocare nei campus lo sterminio degli ebrei. E difatti lei lo aveva tranquillamente permesso. Per inciso, la suddetta non è stata cacciata per questa ragione ma perché è risultata essere una scopiazzatrice di tesi scientifiche altrui. Alle Università servono leader culturali energici, consapevoli di cosa abbia significato e significhi nella storia dell’Occidente disporre di luoghi di cultura dediti liberamente — senza subire ricatti e imposizioni — al sapere, leader consapevoli del legame che c’è fra la libertà dell’insegnamento e della ricerca e le libertà di tutti.
This Easter, Is Christianity Still Promulgating Antisemitism?
The Gospel narratives of the passion and death of Jesus have, across centuries, framed how Jews are perceived.
This Sunday, Christians around the world will celebrate the peace and renewal promised by Easter, but at the heart of Holy Week liturgies leading up to the feast are a set of texts that have had brutal consequences for Jews, not just in the past, but in the present. The Gospel narratives of the passion and death of Jesus have, across centuries, framed how Jews are perceived. The response to the tragic events now unfolding in Gaza and Israel requires a fresh look at this unresolved and expressly Christian quandary. The lesson may be familiar, but it has urgent relevance.
An unfathomed thermal current long running below the surface of a broad culture—call it the culture of “the West”—is still being tapped, even if unconsciously. That current was first generated roughly two thousand years ago, in the way that early followers of Jesus told the story of the Crucifixion, as a crime laid at the feet of the Jews. After the Holocaust made plain that the “Christ-killer” slander was part of what prepared the way for the mass murder of Jews, the trope was repudiated by the Second Vatican Council, in the 1965 declaration Nostra Aetate. “What happened in His passion,” the fathers of the Roman Catholic council said, “cannot be charged against all the Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today.”
But there was a problem. The Gospels themselves explicitly lodge the Christ-killer charge: for example, in Matthew, which is often read at Mass on Palm Sunday, Pontius Pilate pronounces Jesus not guilty and makes an offer to release him, but an assembled crowd of Jews cries, “Let him be crucified.” Pilate then famously washes his hands, saying, “I am innocent of the blood of this just person.” At which point, the crowd replies, let “his blood be on us, and on our children.” And so it has been.
Despite Nostra Aetate, neither the council fathers nor their successors put in place an effective educational structure that would enable people to understand that the narrative was most likely written not by eyewitnesses but by followers of Jesus in the late first century. Those second-generation Christians may not have known that Pilate was a brutal tyrant, or that any benign portrayal of him as being friendly toward a troublemaking nobody was surely false. The antagonism between the remembered Jesus and “the Jews” was one of which the actual Jesus would have known nothing. Though he participated in disputations that were normal in the Jewish community of his time—such as debates over what exactly the Shabbat laws required, or what deference was due to Caesar—he was in mortal conflict not with his own people but with the Roman government.
So how did this story come to be written? Jesus died in about 30 A.D. In the year 70, the Romans destroyed the second iteration of the Jerusalem Temple, which had anchored the faith of Judaism for hundreds of years. This act sparked an intense religious crisis: What was it to be a Jew without the Temple? For most, the answer lay in studying the Torah and, generally, the Hebrew Scriptures, and in the observance of halacha, or religious laws, including those governing Shabbat and the kosher diet. For some others, Jesus was becoming the new Temple, a transfiguration embodied in a prediction that the Gospel of John attributes to Jesus, referring to his own coming resurrection: “Destroy this Temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” The Jewish-Roman War, which continued intermittently for decades, fuelled this intra-Jewish dispute—a familiar phenomenon, in which imperial overlords contrive to set subject peoples against themselves—and the Gospels, written in the decades after the Temple’s destruction, are a record of one side of that dispute. The phrase “the Jews” (in the Greek, “hoi Ioudaioi”) appears more than a hundred and forty times in the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles, which follows them in the New Testament, and the name usually signifies the many Jews who disagreed with those Jews who saw Jesus as the Messiah; the latter were fewer in number, but their version of the story is what survived.
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But the Christ-killer charge is not the largest problem. Inspired by the anti-Jewish slant in some passages of the Gospels, many Christians have tended to remember Jesus—or, rather, misremember him—as if he were not a Jew at all. To portray Jesus as merciful and large-hearted, the Gospels render Jews more broadly as law-obsessed and unloving: in Luke, for example, Jews refuse to help a wounded traveller waylaid by a robber, leaving his rescue to the Samaritan. Gospel Jews are the foil against which the Gospel Jesus can dazzle as flawless. The Pharisees, a Jewish sect committed to religious laws, are painted so darkly in the role of Jesus’s antagonists that their name comes down to us as a synonym for hypocrites, not because that was so but because they were the forerunners of “the Jews” with whom the post-Temple Christians were in tension. In these ways, the “Gospel truth” boils down to a conflict of Jesus against the Jews. The first chapter of John declares, “He came unto his own, and his own received him not.” Not so. The only people who received Jesus in his lifetime—his apostles and disciples—were his own; they were Jewish.
Gradually, across the many years in which the Gospels took shape, Jesus came to be regarded as divine: he is depicted in John as saying, “I and my Father are one.” That made the purported crime of the Jews even worse, since the murder of God—deicide—is a cosmic transgression that’s impossible to adjudicate, much less forgive. And belief in the divinity of Jesus further undercut his followers’ ability to see him as a Jew. Judaism, after all, is a religion—a form of mediation between finite humans and the infinite God. Once Jesus was conceived of in a permanent mystical union with the Godhead, he no longer had any need of a go-between. He had no need, that is, of Temple sacrifice, Torah study, Shabbat observance, praying the Psalms. In following such practices, he would just have been going through the motions. A divine Jesus would have been, in essence, a pretend Jew.
The Roman war culminated in a large-scale Jewish uprising in Judea that was ultimately crushed in the year 136, a catastrophe that precipitated the demise of the Jewish center of Jesus’s movement. Elsewhere in the Mediterranean, gentile Christians—originally from a variety of polytheistic, pagan, and local religious traditions—began to dominate the nascent Church, and their reading of texts that emphasized Jesus’s conflict with “the Jews” would have led them naturally to remember him as if he, too, were a gentile. That fantasy took hold in the Christian imagination. (Images of Jesus typically depict him with white European features and long-flowing brown hair.) “Jesus against the Jews” is Christianity’s paradigmatic origin story, forming, in effect, a spoiled gene in the DNA of the Church. Because Christianity was the incubator of Western civilization, that gene was passed on. That origin story gave Christians and a Christianity-influenced culture a litany of oppositions: the Church against the Synagogue, the New Testament against the Old Testament, grace against law, faith against works, Easter against Passover, Sunday against Saturday, Portia against Shylock—and always, the Christian God of Love against the Jewish God of Vengeance.
An ancient bipolarity that still readily puts Jews on the negative side of a culture-wide structure of imagination is hard to define precisely in present terms, particularly in the context of the war in Gaza. The suffering of Gazan civilians, stalked now by the imminent threat of famine and further destruction, must be paramount in the conscience of the world, and pressure from Washington on Benjamin Netanyahu’s government to stop its assault must reflect that. But the consequences of the origin-story slander remain.
In the United States, far-right hate groups have long traded in anti-Jewish tropes, and in recent years that trend has been accelerating. The more mainstream right has tended to muddle the issue: after a neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Donald Trump found “very fine people on both sides”; evangelicals in the Republican Party have embraced Netanyahu and his purposes, even as a strand of their faith quietly holds onto an End-of-Days anti-Judaism. But, in the current heat, expressions of anxiety about rising antisemitism have been taken by some on the left as just a deflection of criticism of Israel’s invasion of Gaza. Opposing Israel’s government is not antisemitism, and neither is supporting Palestinian freedom and autonomy. But though Israel has enjoyed broad support in America since it was attacked by Hamas on October 7th, a new anti-Jewish energy has decidedly been set loose. The Anti-Defamation League reported a three-hundred-and-sixty-one-per-cent increase in reported antisemitic incidents between October 7th and January 7th, over the same period a year earlier. (American Muslims and Arab Americans, of course, have reason to feel a new trepidation, too: complaints to the Council on American-Islamic Relations rose a hundred and seventy-eight per cent during roughly the same period.)
An old squeezing of a Manichaean vise is at work, and during Holy Week that dynamic shows up with rare clarity. That it is unconscious makes it only more potent. The God of Love whom Jesus preached was the Jewish God; Jesus was a committed Jew until the day he died. If Christians had not forgotten that, the history of the past two thousand years would undoubtedly be very different. And so would be, especially during Holy Week, the place of Jews today. ♦
Preparing for a China war, the Marines are retooling how they’ll fight
Marines from the 3d Littoral Combat Team train on tube-launched, optically-tracked, wire-guided missiles or TOW missile system in Hawaii in January. (Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post)
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POHAKULOA TRAINING RANGE, Hawaii — The Marine gunner knelt on the rocky red soil of a 6,000-foot-high volcanic plain. He positioned the rocket launcher on his shoulder, focused the sights on his target, a rusted armored vehicle 400 yards away, and fired.
Two seconds later, a BANG.
“Perfect hit,” said his platoon commander.
The gunner, 23-year-old Lance Cpl. Caden Ehrhardt, is a member of the 3rd Marine Littoral Regiment, a new formation that reflects the military’s latest concept for fighting adversaries like China from remote, strategic islands in the western Pacific. These units are designed to be smaller, lighter, more mobile — and, their leaders argue, more lethal. Coming out of 20 years of land combat in the Middle East, the Marines are striving to adapt to a maritime fight that could play out across thousands of miles of islands and coastline in Asia.
Instead of launching traditional amphibious assaults, these nimbler groups are intended as an enabler for a larger joint force. Their role is to gather intelligence and target data and share it quickly — as well as occasionally sink ships with medium-range missiles — to help the Pacific Fleet and Air Force repel aggression against the United States and allies and partners like Taiwan, Japan and the Philippines.
Marines train on the Ares Company’s Multi-Purpose Anti-Armor Anti-Personnel Weapons System (MAAWS) range. (Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post)(Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post)
These new regiments are envisioned as one piece of a broader strategy to synchronize the operations of U.S. soldiers, sailors, Marines and airmen, and in turn with the militaries of allies and partners in the Pacific. Their focus is a crucial stretch of territory sweeping from Japan to Indonesia and known as the First Island Chain. China sees this region, which encompasses an area about half the size of the contiguous United States, as within its sphere of influence.
The overall strategy holds promise, analysts say. But it faces significant hurdles, especially if war were to break out: logistical challenges in a vast maritime region, timely delivery of equipment and new technologies complicated by budget battles in Congress, an overstressed defense industry, and uncertainty over whether regional partners like Japan would allow U.S. forces to fight from their islands. That last piece is key. Beijing sees the U.S. strategy of deepening security alliances in the Pacific as escalatory — which unnerves some officials in partner nations who fear that they could get drawn into a conflict between the two powers.
The stakes have never been higher.
Beijing’s aggressive military modernization and investment over the past two decades have challenged U.S. ability to control the seas and skies in any conflict in the western Pacific. China has vastly expanded its reach in the Pacific, building artificial islands for military outposts in the South China Sea and seeking to expand bases in the Indian and Pacific oceans — including a naval facility in Cambodia that U.S. intelligence says is for exclusive use by the People’s Liberation Army.
Marines participate in training exercises at the Pohakuloa Training Range. (Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post)A MAAWS rocket approaches targets at Pohakuloa Training Range. (Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post)
China not only has the region’s largest army, navy and air force, but also home-field advantage. It has about 1 million troops, more than 3,000 aircraft, and upward of 300 vessels in proximity to any potential battle. Meanwhile, U.S. ships and planes must travel thousands of miles, or rely on the goodwill of allies to station troops and weapons. The PLA also has orders of magnitude more ground-based, long-range missiles than the U.S. military.
Taiwan, a close U.S. partner, is most directly in the crosshairs. President Xi Jinping has promised to reunite, by force if necessary, the self-governing island with mainland China. A successful invasion would not only result in widespread death and destruction in Taiwan, but also have catastrophic economic consequences due to disruption of the world’s most advanced semiconductor industry and of maritime traffic in some of the world’s busiest sea lanes — the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea. That would create enormous uncertainty for businesses and consumers around the world.
“We’ve spent most of the last 20 years looking ata terrorist adversary that wasn’t exquisitely armed, that didn’t have access to the full breadth of national power,” said Col. John Lehane, the 3rd Marine Littoral Regiment’s commander. “And now we’ve got to reorient our formations onto someone that might have that capability.”
The vision and the challenge
The U.S. Marine Corps has a blueprint to fight back: a vision called Force Design that stresses the forward deployment of Marines — placing units on the front line — while making them as invisible as possible to radar and other electronic detection. The idea is to use these “stand-in” forces, up to thousands in theater at any one time, to enable the larger joint force to deploy its collective might against a major foe.
The aspiration is for the new formation to be first on the ground in a conflict, where it can gather information to send coordinates to an Air Force B-1 bomber so it can fire a missile at a Chinese frigate hundreds of miles away or send target data to a Philippine counterpart that can aim a cruise missile at a destroyer in the contested South China Sea.
The reality of the mission is daunting, experts say.
Marines take a break from their conflict training. (Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post)
Even if you get Marines into these remote locations, “resupplying them over time is something that needs to be rehearsed and practiced repeatedly in simulated combat conditions,” said Colin Smith, a Rand Corp. researcher formerly with I Marine Expeditionary Force, whose area of responsibility includes the Pacific. “Just because you can move it in peacetime doesn’t mean you’ll be able to in warfare — especially over long periods of time.”
Though the Marines are no longer weighed down by tanks, the new unit’s Littoral Combat Team, an infantry battalion, will be operating advanced weapons that can fire missiles at enemy ships up to 100 nautical miles away to help deny an enemy access to key maritime chokepoints, such as the Taiwan and Luzon straits. By October, each Marine Littoral Regiment will have 18 Rogue NMESIS unmanned truck-based launchers capable of firing two naval strike missiles at a time.
But a single naval strike missile weighs 2,200 pounds, and resupplying these weapons in austere islands without runways requires watercraft, which move slowly, or helicopters, which can carry only a limited quantity at a time.
“You’re not very lethal with just two missiles, so you’ve got to have a whole bunch at the ready and that’s a lot more stuff to hide, which means your ability to move unpredictably goes down,’’ said Ivan Kanapathy, a Marine Corps veteran with three deployments in the western Pacific. “There’s a trade-off between lethality and mobility — mobility being a huge part of survivability in this environment.”
A Marine participates in a handgun training exercises at the Pohakuloa Training Range. (Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post)Marines train at a firing range in January. (Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post)
Though NMESIS vehicles radiate heat, and radaremits signals that can be detected, the Marines try to lower their profile by spacing out the vehicles, camouflaging them and moving them frequently, as well as communicating only intermittently. Similar tactics are being tested by Ukrainian troops on the battlefield, where despite the number of Russian sensors and drones, “if you disperse and conceal yourself, it’s possible to survive,” said Stacie Pettyjohn, director of the defense program at the Center for a New American Security.
But on smaller islands, there are fewer areas to hide, fewer road networks to move around on, “so it’s easier for China to search and eventually find what they’re looking for,” she said.
Lehane, the unit’s commander, says that the unit’s most valuable role isn’t conducting lethal strikes; it is the ability to “see things in the battlespace, get targeting data, make sense out of what is going on when maybe other people can’t.” That’s because the Pentagon expects, in a potential war with China, that U.S. satellites will be jammed or destroyed and ships’ computer networks disrupted.
China now has many more sensors — radar, sonar, satellites, electronic signals collection — in the South China Sea than the United States. That gives Beijing a formidable targeting advantage, said Gregory Poling, an expert on Southeast Asia security at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “The United States would have to expend an unacceptable amount of ordnance to degrade those capabilities to blind China,” he said.
The unit has been practicing techniques to communicate quietly. In a bare room of a cinder block building at its home base in Kaneohe, Hawaii, Marines in the regiment’s command operations center tapped on laptops on portable tables, with plastic sheets taped over the windows. In the field, the gear could be set up in a tent, packed up and moved at a moment’s notice. Intelligence analysts, some of whom speak Mandarin, were feeding information to commanders on the range at Pohakuloa, practicing connections between the command on Oahu and the infantry battalion on the Big Island.
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But exercises are not real life. Indo-Pacific Command is striving to build a Joint Fires Network that will reliably connect sensors, shooters and decision-makers in the Army, Navy, Marines and Air Force. But chronic budget shortfalls, and long-standing friction between the combatant commands and the services — each of which decides independently of the commands what hardware and software to buy — have slowed development.
Even when it is fully fielded, Pettyjohn said, “the question is, is this network going to be survivable in a contested electromagnetic space? You’re going to have a lot of jamming going on.”
Shoulder-to-shoulder in the Philippines
Last April, the Marines and the rest of the Joint Force tested the new warfighting concept with their Philippine partner in a sprawling, weeks-long exercise — Balikatan — which in Tagalog means “shoulder-to-shoulder.”
With a command post on the northwestern Philippine island of Luzon, the regiment’s infantry battalion and Philippine Marine Corps’ Coastal Defense Regiment rehearsed air assaults and airfield seizures to gain island footholds, which would then be used as bases from which to gather intelligence and call in strikes.
U.S. and Philippine troops take part in joint Balikatan, or shoulder-to-shoulder, exercises at Fort Magsaysay on April 13, 2023. (Ezra Acayan/Getty Images)U.S. and Philippine troops fire a Javelin antitank weapon system during joint military exercises in April 2023. (Ezra Acayan/Getty Images)
During one live-fire exercise, the 3rd MLR helped the larger U.S. 3rd Marine Division glean location data on a target vessel — a decommissioned World War II-era Philippineship — which U.S. and Philippine joint forces promptly sunk. Soon, the Philippine Coastal Defense Regiment expects to be able to fire its own missiles, said Col. Gieram Aragones, the regiment’s commander, in an interview from his headquarters in Manila.
“Our U.S. Marine brothers have been very helpful to us,” Aragones said. “They’ve guided us during our crawl phase. We’re trying to walk now.”
The training goes both ways. The Philippine Marines taught their American counterparts survival skills, like finding and purifying water from bamboo, and cooking pigs and goats in the jungle.
Unaizah May 4, a Philippine Navy chartered vessel, is blocked by a Chinese Coast Guard while conducting a routine resupply mission to troops stationed at Second Thomas Shoal in the South China Sea in early March. (Ezra Acayan/Getty Images)
China in recent years has intensified its harassment of Philippine fishing and Coast Guard vessels. As recently as Saturday, Chinese Coast Guard ships fired water cannons at a Philippine boat conducting a lawful resupply mission to a Philippine military outpost at a contested shoal in the South China Sea. Amid such provocations, Manila has stepped up its defense partnership with the United States. A year ago, Manila announced it was granting its longtime ally access to four new military bases.
Although the two countries are treaty allies, bound to come to each other’s defense in an armed attack in the Pacific, how far Manila will go to support U.S. operations in a Taiwan conflict is an open question, said CSIS’s Poling.“Part of the reason for all the military training, the tabletop exercises, and all these new dialogues taking place is feeling out the answer,” he said.
Aragones said it’s important for the United States and the Philippines to jointly strengthen deterrence. “This is not only an issue for the Philippines,” he said. “It’s an issue for all countries whose vessels pass through this body of water [the Chinese are] trying to claim.”
Evolution in Okinawa
Some 800 miles to the north, the Marines’ newest unit, the 12th Marine Littoral Regiment, was created in November. It was formed by repurposing the 12th Marine Regiment based in Okinawa, already home to a large concentration of U.S. military personnel in Japan — a source of tension with local communities dating back decades.
This unit is intended to operate out of the islands southwest of Okinawa, the closest of which are less than 100 miles from Taiwan. Over the years, Tokyo has shifted its military focus away from northern Japan, where the Cold War threat was a Soviet land invasion, to its southwest islands.
Recent events have vindicated that shift in Tokyo’s eyes. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and China’s bellicose response to then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan in August 2022 — in which the PLA fired five ballistic missiles into waters near Okinawa — rattled Japan. The number of days that Chinese Coast Guard vessels sailed near the Senkaku Islands, which are administered by Japan but claimed by China, reached a record high last year.
A Chinese airstrip is visible on Mischief Reer in South China Sea. (Aaron Favila/AP)A man passes a military-themed mural at a public park on Pingtan Island, the closest point in China to Taiwan, on Jan. 14. (Greg Baker/AFP/Getty Images)
As a result, in the last year and a half, Tokyo has announced a dramatic hike in defense spending and deepened its security partnership with the United States, the Philippines and Australia. Washington hailed Japan’s endorsement of the new U.S. Marine Corps unit’s positioning in the Southwest Islands last year as a significant advance in allied force posture.
But resentment toward U.S. troops lingers in Okinawa, rooted primarily in the disproportionate burden of hosting a major U.S. military presence. The prefecture is home to half of U.S. military personnel in Japan, while making up less than 1 percent of Japan’s land mass.
“We are concerned about rising tensions with China and the concentration of U.S. military” on Okinawa and the Japanese military buildup in the area, said Kazuyuki Nakazato, director of the Okinawa Prefecture Office in Washington. “Many Okinawan people fear that if a conflict happens, Okinawa will easily become a target.”
He argued the best way to defuse the tension is for Tokyo to deepen diplomacy and dialogue with China, not military deterrence alone.
Other local officials are more receptive to a U.S. presence, arguing that Japan alone cannot deter China. “We have no choice but to strengthen our alliance with the U.S. military,” said Itokazu Kenichi, mayor of Yonaguni town on the island of the same name, the westernmost inhabited Japanese island — just 68 miles from Taiwan.
Japan’s Self-Defense Forces has begun to establish a presence on the islands, including a surveillance station on Yonaguni, where they conducted joint exercises with other U.S. Marines last month — an interaction that has begun to accustom residents to the Marines, Kenichi said.
Ultimately, how much latitude to allow the Marines will be a political decision by the prime minister and the Diet, Japan’s parliament.
A member of Japan's Self-Defense Forces holds position as a U.S. Marine Corps aircraft takes off during a joint exercise in March 2022. (Charly Triballeau/AFP/Getty Images)
On the range at Pohakuloa, Hawaii, the littoral combat team trained for a month. They flew Skydio surveillance drones over a distant hill. They practiced machine-gun and sniper skills.
As the wind howled on a lava rock bluff one morning, Lt. Col. Mark Lenzi surveyed his gunners firing wire-guided missiles at targets 1,200 yards away. Lenzi, who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, said what’s different in the Pacific is that Marines won’t be fighting insurgents directly, but will beassigned to enable others to beat back the enemy.
“It takes the whole joint force” to deter in the Pacific, he said. “We train joint. We fight joint.”
These new forces will be at the heart of the “kill web,” he said, referring to the mix of air, sea, land, space and cyber capabilities whose efficient syncing is crucial if it comes to a battle over Taiwan.
“This one unit alone is not going to save the world,” said Col. Carrie Batson, chief of strategic communications for the Pacific Marines. “But it’s going to be vital in this fight, if it ever comes.”
Regine Cabato in Manila and Julia Mio Inuma in Tokyo contributed to this report.
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