Can the Constitution Reconcile America?
The country’s founding charter was meant to keep us in a state of constant negotiation and dialogue. It should appeal to the left and right.
By Barton Swaim
I don’t know how many books I’ve read over the past 15 years whose purpose was to propose remedies for the acrimony and polarization afflicting American politics. Most of them, to put it kindly, don’t inspire. Some assure us that one party or the other must be so severely punished by the voters that it ceases to menace the nation. Others fault social-media “silos” and cable-news rancor. Still others suggest that everything went awry at some point in the past—the rise of Newt Gingrich in the 1990s is a common target—and that nothing good will happen until the injustices of that cataclysm are reversed.
None of this describes four books written over the last decade by Yuval Levin. In “The Great Debate” (2013), he traced the thought of American conservatives and progressives from the 18th century to the present and suggested ways of mutual understanding. “Fractured Republic” (2016) explained the virtues of subsidiarity—the idea that problems are best solved by the people nearest to them, not by faraway authorities—and reproached both left and right for indulging in “competing nostalgias” for a midcentury America that is impossible to re-create. In “A Time to Build” (2020), Mr. Levin suggested that among the chief hindrances to national cohesion in the 21st century is American political and media elites’ pathological habit of using the institutions that employ them as platforms from which to project their brands and personalities.
Mr. Levin has a gift for drawing readers’ attention to realities that should have been obvious but weren’t. He does that in his latest book, “American Covenant,” which was published on Tuesday. The argument could be put this way: The U.S. Constitution was written to bring together a fractious and disunited nation, so if we’re looking for ways to bring together a fractious and disunited nation, maybe we should consider the U.S. Constitution.
The snide antimetabole is mine, not Mr. Levin’s. He writes in an irenic tone, as if he believes reasonable debate and persuasion are still possible. “The breakdown of political culture in our day,” he observes in the book, “is not a function of our having forgotten how to agree with each other but of our having forgotten how to disagree constructively.” The framers of the Constitution, he argues, were aware of the dangers both of centralized power and of democracy: They had fought an imperious king a decade before, and in the intervening years they had lived through a democracy so disunited that it fell apart. What they fashioned in 1787 was neither a monarchy nor a libertarian compact but a system whose stability and cohesion arose precisely from the guarantee that its citizens would be forced to deal with each other constantly—always negotiating, competing and forming coalitions.
Maybe the best way to encapsulate Mr. Levin’s contention is to compare American democracy with parliamentary systems like the one from which ours departed. In Britain, when one party wins an election, it can do more or less what it wants until the next election, with the opposition there mainly to criticize it. By contrast, even if an American party wins big, it may not win both chambers of Congress and the presidency, and even when it does, the minority retains enough power to force the majority to negotiate.
The intended consequence: Both parties are compelled to consider the interests of the other. The framers, particularly Madison, understood that the U.S. was far too large, culturally disparate and attitudinally centrifugal to be governed by a parliamentary system.
Last week I dropped by Mr. Levin’s office at the American Enterprise Institute, where he is a senior fellow, with a galley copy of his book, its margins rife with scribbled notes and queries.
My first query: Conservatives like me are entirely comfortable with the idea that adherence to the 1787 Constitution, as amended, would afford all sorts of benefits to the republic. Progressives aren’t and never have been. What good is an argument for cohesion and solidarity if only one side can hear it?
“Looking at the Constitution in its own terms doesn’t really happen in a lot of the left’s engagement with it,” Mr. Levin acknowledges. “The striking thing about many of the books on the Constitution by progressive law professors is that they tend to start in the Progressive era. They don’t really talk about the framers’ purpose and reject it.” That’s too bad, he thinks, because one of the framers’ chief concerns was that democracy can menace minorities—numerically small groups or factions that can find themselves abused or treated unjustly by majorities. “That concern should resonate with a lot of progressives,” Mr. Levin says. “Somehow it doesn’t, because there’s an assumption at the root of modern progressivism that it speaks for the majority and that the majority is somehow silenced by the Constitution.”
The progressive left over the past 25 years has developed an unlovely contempt for the Constitution’s counter majoritarian institutions; hence the periodic talk of abolishing the Electoral College, packing the Supreme Court, eliminating the Senate filibuster or even the Senate itself, and adding blue states to the union. All these ideas assume that progressives hold a clear majority and that the Constitution stops them from exercising their rightful prerogative.
But if anything ought to be clear from the last quarter-century in American politics, it is that neither side holds a consistent majority. “Simple majoritarianism,” Mr. Levin observes in his book, “is of no use when there aren’t simple majorities.”
“Throughout most of American history,” he says, “there’s a majority party holding a really complicated coalition together. And there’s a minority party trying to build a coalition. They’re both involved in coalition building.” There was a period of about 18 years at the end of the 19th century when the country was split 50/50, Mr. Levin explains, but this time we’ve been at more or less 50/50 for longer than that already.
“Since about the 1990s we’ve had two minority parties, and they don’t actually do a lot of coalition building,” he says. “Mainly they try to get their people out, as if they hold a big majority already and only need turnout. They don’t do much thinking about how they might bring new people to their side. They don’t ask: What can we offer them? What can we do that would bring them in?”
There’s an assumption among progressives “that if we had a real democracy, we would go left all the time. I don’t know what country they’re living in, but that’s not true. Now, it’s not true that we’d go right all the time, either. But the protection of minorities is entirely overlooked—on the one hand because of the tendency to think about the founding era through the lens of slavery, which is not crazy, but is not sufficient; and on the other hand, because no one now thinks of themselves as a minority.”
That would explain why, in 2021, when the Democrats won the presidency and paper-thin majorities in the House and Senate, they proceeded as though the year were 1933 and they’d been given a mandate to remake the U.S. economy.
Is it even possible for one party to win big, as in 1932 or even 1980? “I think the idea that you could win big is no longer plausible to most people in our system,” Mr. Levin says, “but I think you could still do it. There is room now for either party to win 55% of the vote in a presidential election, which would be a big win at this point. But it would require one side to think about how to appeal to the other. Our constitutional system is intended to force us to think that way. The only way to win is to build a big coalition. That’s how we’re different from the parliamentary systems, but somehow we’re not letting that signal reach us.”
Among the least appreciated of the Constitution’s provisions is the aforementioned Electoral College. “It’s so misunderstood,” Mr. Levin says. Critics think of it as some bizarre ancient convention whose usefulness, if it ever had any, expired long ago. “Our way of electing chief executives is actually more democratic, not less so, than the parliamentary systems of Europe,” Mr. Levin argues. “The British have had three prime ministers since the last election. Who chose those people? A majority of the majority party in Parliament, like 250 people who all have the same political interest and who all went to the same two universities. That’s not better than the Electoral College.”
Hard as it may be to imagine, Mr. Levin contends, our presidential elections would be more acrimonious and polarized without the Electoral College. “It forces us to fight our political battles in the middle,” he says. Without it, “the Democrats would just focus on California, because there are a lot of people in California, the Republicans would just focus on the South. They would talk only to their own voters. They would not have to talk to each other and they would not have to appeal to the same voters.”
The Electoral College, in other words, “means you can run up your numbers as much as you want in California and the South. If you didn’t win states in the middle—Michigan, say—you didn’t win the election. To win Michigan, you have to speak to the middle of the country. You have to speak about the issues that you are uncomfortable with as a Republican or a Democrat.”
I was reminded by “American Covenant” that although we now tend to talk about “liberal democracy”—the word liberal signifying free markets, the rule of law, individual rights, representative government and so on—the founders spoke mainly of “republican” principles and “republican” government. (As I’ve mentioned before in these pages, Benjamin Franklin, asked what the Constitutional Convention had produced, didn’t reply, “A democracy—if you can keep it.”) Republicanism, an inheritance of Greek, Roman and Renaissance thought, emphasized the citizen’s obligation to improve the polity and strengthen its institutions: in short, to seek the common good.
Republicanism is “a concept that’s become extremely hard to define because it’s fallen out of use in our vocabulary,” Mr. Levin says. “It was hard to define in the 18th century for the opposite reason, because it was so universally used. Everybody wanted to claim republicanism for themselves. I think what’s important for us is that republicanism is about taking responsibility for your common fate, about taking ownership of the future of your society.”
In a healthy republic, he continues, “you’re not just standing around waiting for somebody else to fix your problems. You don’t only think about what other people owe you, but also about what you owe them. These are the habits that we’ve tended to lose, I think in part because we’ve come to understand our system in liberal terms. Liberalism is a good thing, too, but liberalism describes rights and privileges. It’s less concerned with duties and responsibilities.”
Almost as an aside, Mr. Levin remarks that “a lot of the problems attributed by some on the American right to an excess of liberalism would be better thought of as a deficiency in republicanism.” Criticism of “liberalism” or “classical liberalism” has become an idée fixe among conservatives of a communitarian bent, but the whole debate is half-baked: Liberalism was never a coherent idea but a loose collection of Western conventions these conservatives don’t actually want to get rid of. Rather than thundering at “liberalism,” if I understand Mr. Levin right, they’d do better to reacquaint themselves with the Federalist Papers.
That’s far truer of the left’s cultural elites, the journalists, politicos and intellectuals who set the agenda in our corporate life. They lament the bitterness of our elections and the polarization of our electorate, but they mostly disdain and ignore the document that could show us the way out of the rancorous vortex that American politics has become. The Constitution’s first sentence, Mr. Levin points out, announces its aim to “form a more perfect union.” Its first word is “We.”
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The Sad Death of Ten More Israeli Soldiers
By Sherwin Pomerantz
Ten IDF soldiers were killed in combat in different incidents in the northern and southern Gaza Strip in the last 24 hours. Earlier on Sunday, the IDF published the names of the soldiers who were killed in fighting there, following correspondence with the families of the soldiers. The military noted that in the incident in which eight soldiers were killed, two soldiers were also seriously wounded and were transferred to the hospital for medical treatment.
From an initial investigation, two possibilities are being examined. The first is that an anti-tank missile hit the armored personnel carrier (APC), which held the 8 soldiers who died. The second possibility is that the APC hit a powerful explosive device. The incident began on Friday night close to 12:00 a.m., with the attack by the 162nd Division on the Tel al-Sultan neighborhood in Rafah.
In the attack carried out by the 401st Brigade, in which the 424th Battalion and 601st Battalion of the Engineering Corps also operated, 50 terrorists were killed. At the end of the operation, the forces were positioned in the northwestern part of the neighborhood, where it was known there were many terrorists. At around 5:15 a.m., an explosion occurred while the APC, the sixth in the convoy, was in motion. It was also noted that it was very difficult to access the APC that caught fire which resulted in a chain of explosions. After controlling the fire, IDF forces began to tow the APC away but all of those inside had perished. May their memories be blessed and their families comforted.
In interviews with nearly a dozen Gaza residents in recent months, a number of them said they held Hamas responsible for starting the war and helping to bring death and destruction upon them, even as they blame Israel first and foremost according to an article in today’s New York Times.
One Gazan, Raed al-Kelani, 47, said Hamas always acts in its own interests. “It started Oct. 7, and it wants to end it on its own terms,” said Mr. al-Kelani, who worked as a civil servant for the former Palestinian Authority government in Gaza, which was run by a rival faction to Hamas before Hamas seized control of the territory in 2007. “But time is ticking with no potential hope of ending this,” he added. Mr. al-Kelani now makes meals and distributes food in shelters for displaced Gazans. “Hamas is still seeking its slice of power,” he said. “Hamas does not know how to get down from the tree it climbed.”
Some of the Gazans who spoke to The New York Times said that Hamas knew it would be starting a devastating war with Israel that would cause heavy civilian casualties, but that it did not provide any food, water or shelter to help people survive it. Hamas leaders have said they wanted to ignite a permanent state of war with Israel on all fronts as a way to revive the Palestinian cause and knew that the Israeli response would be big.
Throughout the war, hints of dissent have broken through, sometimes even as Gazans were mourning loved ones killed by Israeli attacks. Others waited until they left the enclave to condemn Hamas — and even then, were at times reluctant in case the group survives the war and continues to govern Gaza.
The IDF announced Sunday it will hold a daily "tactical-humanitarian pause" in military activity on a specific route in southern Gaza from 8:00 a.m. until 7:00 p.m. to allow humanitarian convoys to pass. The IDF clarified that "there is no cessation of hostilities in southern Gaza and the hostilities in Rafah continue." The response of the right-wing politicians in government here was quick and full of criticism as expected. They opined that this is certainly a strange way to fight a war.
I just watched the two-hour funeral for 20-year-old Eliyahu Moshe Zimbalist, one of the ten soldiers killed in Gaza yesterday. One of 7 siblings who came here at the age of two when the family left Silver Spring, Maryland to live in Israel, Eliyahu was praised by friends and family alike as a builder for whom no job was too much of a challenge.
To say the it was painful to watch parents eulogize a child, or to see siblings speak about their now dead older brother, would be an understatement. As one who has buried a child, I can vouch for the fact that the emotional pain of doing so is unique and unlike any other loss. And yet, the funeral was a ceremony of hope that his sacrifice, and that of the now over 300 others who have died in battle, will not have been in vain. Rather it is part of the heavy price we have to pay to have the honor of rebuilding the Land of Israel after 2,000 years of exile.
At the end of the service, which was held in the military cemetery on Mt. Herzl, the thousands who stood for two hours in 90 degree heat sang Hatikvah, Israel’s national anthem followed by the ani ma’amin, Maimonides version of the 13 principles of faith in which Jews believe. That made a challenging time uplifting and yet full of promise. May Eliyahu’s and his comrade’s memory be blessed and may the deaths stop sooner rather than later.
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Do black Jewish lives matter?
NAACP endangers Jews of color and all people by demanding anti-Israel arms ban. It is deplorable that Jewish lives—black, brown or white—don’t matter, given the long history of Jewish support for the NAACP and black civil rights. Opinion.
ZOA head Morton Klein
Morton A. Kleinis the national president of the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA).
(JNS) Do black Jewish lives matter? How about the lives of non-Jewish black African students and black Jewish Ethiopian-Israelis brutally murdered by Hamas and by Gazan civilians? Or the lives of a black Jew and Bedouin Muslim who Hamas has held in captivity for a decade? Or the lives of any of the dark-skinned Jews that make up about half of Israel’s population? Or any Jewish lives?
Apparently, Derrick Johnson, president of the pro-black civil-rights group, the NAACP, doesn’t think so. When did the NAACP start making foreign policy decisions? Did it ever scream about the hundreds of thousands of truly innocent civilians in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Iran and elsewhere being massacred?
The Zionist Organization of America is appalled that on June 6, Johnson issued a press statement demanding that U.S. President Joe Biden indefinitely halt all weapons and ammunition deliveries to Israel, and pressure Israel to stop Israel’s Gaza operations aiming to recover the hostages and prevent Hamas from attacking Israel again.
The Gaza-based terror organization has vowed to repeat its Oct. 7 atrocities again and again until Israel is annihilated. The NAACP president’s statement is an anti-civil rights abandonment and betrayal of black Jews, other Jews of color and the entire Jewish people who continue to be victimized, tortured and attacked by the U.S.-designated foreign terrorist group.
Adding insults to injury, the NAACP president parroted Hamas’ false, grossly overstated casualty figures (whitewashed as “U.N. figures” and already disproved) and mendaciously blamed an Israeli airstrike in which Israel used the smallest possible ordnance to kill two senior Hamas terrorists in Rafah for Gazan casualties caused by a Hamas weapons stockpile catching fire more than one mile away. In addition, Johnson merely called Oct. 7 a “tragedy” while calling the war in Gaza “unspeakable violence affecting innocent civilians, which is unacceptable.”
Johnson has it backwards. He failed to mention that Oct. 7 was the “unacceptable, unspeakable violence against innocent civilians” in which Hamas and Gazan civilians massacred and tortured innocent Jewish babies, children and civilians from several dozen countries in the most horrific manners imaginable. He didn’t even mention the victims or the perpetrators.
On Oct. 7, Ethiopian-Israeli Samuel Golima, a soldier, and police officer Orel Abraham, both Jewish, were killed while fighting Hamas terrorists who invaded Israel. Yet NAACP’s president wants to disarm brave black Israeli soldiers like them—the defenders of innocent people against Hamas.
Moreover, Hamas murdered at least 10 Ethiopian Jews on that horrific day. What about them?
Israeli towns where large numbers of Ethiopian Jews reside, such as Sderot and Ashkelon, have been longstanding, prime targets of Hamas’s tens of thousands of rocket attacks against Israeli civilians in the past 20 years. Yet the NAACP president wants to end Israel’s ability to eliminate the Hamas perpetrators of these terrible attacks.
On Oct. 7, Hamas also took two black Tanzanian agricultural students (Joshua Mollel and Clemence Felix Mtenga) who were on an exchange program in Israel and brutally murdered them. Why doesn’t the NAACP president scream about this? And why does he demand that Biden disarm Israel so that Hamas can do this again?
Hamas also captured Ethiopian-Israeli Jewish hostage Avera Mengitsu a decade ago. Mengitsu is believed to still be in Gaza. Why hasn’t the NAACP president been calling this unspeakable and demanding that Biden reinstate maximum sanctions on the terror group’s funder: Iran?
Hamas also captured Israeli-Bedouin Hisham al-Sayed a decade ago and is believed to be still holding him captive. Again, why the deafening silence from the NAACP when it comes to demands on Biden for action against Iran that could enable his freedom?
On Oct. 7, Hamas also took six Bedouin Arab-Israelis hostage (later releasing two in the innocent-hostages-for-Arab-terrorists exchange) and murdered 21 Bedouin Arab-Israelis. What about them?
And what about the three dozen Americans murdered by Hamas operatives on Oct. 7, and the approximately dozen Americans Hamas abducted? Where are the NAACP president’s demands for action against Iran that would help them?
How about the half of Israel’s population who are darker-skinned “persons of color?” How about all of Israel’s Jews, the victims of decades of Arab Hamas terror?
It is deplorable that Jewish lives—whether black, brown or white—don’t matter to the current NAACP president, given the long history of Jewish support for the NAACP and black civil rights. Past ZOA national president Rabbi Stephen Wise helped found the NAACP. I myself fought for civil rights and was arrested in Mississippi for helping black Americans register to vote.
Israel is the only nation in the world that brought in black Africans in to save them from annihilation and bring them to freedom. As Kalkidan Tegin said on Tiktok: “When my grandparents lived … in Ethiopia, they were literally hunted and chased and hated just because they were Jews, just because of their religion. I lived here in Israel my whole life and I never felt hated. I never felt hunted just because I’m black.”
More than 170,000 Ethiopian Jews live in Israel, including “Miss Israel” 2013, Yityish (“Titi”) Aynaw. They are deeply distressed that certain American black groups, now including the NAACP, are supporting the Hamas terrorists over Israel.
Aynaw stated, referring to Black Lives Matter: “I can’t breathe … I remember you screaming in the streets, ‘I can’t breathe.’ I want to inform you right now … [it’s Israelis] who cannot breathe. [The Israeli hostages held in Gaza, including babies, children, women, entire families and the elderly] were kidnapped, raped by the terror organization Hamas … slaughtering their souls. Hamas is ISIS. Pray for us. Pray for Israel because we can’t breathe. … People need to learn who they’re really supporting, what they [Hamas] do to their own people, let alone Jews. They don’t care about saving lives. There are no human rights [with Hamas]. They kill their own—they also kill Muslims, Bedouins who serve in the army.”
Derrick Johnson needs to take heed of her words and stop promoting the Hamas agenda of disarming Israel’s beautiful people of every color whom Hamas seeks to eradicate. Black Jewish lives matter. Jewish lives matter. And all the lives that Hamas tries to destroy matter.
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Netanyahu dissolves War Cabinet
The Prime Minister has decided to dissolve the War Cabinet and decisions will instead be made by the Security Cabinet.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced to his ministers who participated in the Security Cabinet session on Sunday that he has decided to dissolve the War Cabinet and to hold the relevant discussions in the broader Security Cabinet instead.
However, those close to the Prime Minister predict that he will hold consultations with a smaller forum, similar to the War Cabinet, while decisions will be made in the Security Cabinet.
By doing this, Netanyahu absolved himself of National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir's demands to join the War Cabinet after the National Unity Party left the government.
Last week, Ben-Gvir sent a letter to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu following the resignation of Benny Gantz and the National Unity Party from the coalition.
"With the outbreak of the war, as part of a necessary step of the unity of the ranks, the National Unity Party was added to the coalition. This step was taken with our full support out of statesmanship and national responsibility. In contrast, to this 'statesmanlike' step of 'unity', there was also added an ugly step, of an ultimatum to form a small cabinet, and to boycott parties in the coalition and senior ministers, including the undersigned," wrote Ben Gvir.
He added that "out of that national responsibility, despite the difficult ideological differences with Gantz and Eisenkot's views, which are dangerous in our eyes, we kept quiet about it."
"The same small cabinet, which until now was the 'cabinet of the concept', led Israel until now, while excluding senior ministers in the government. No more. Now, with the resignation of the ministers of the concept, there is no longer an excuse for boycotting and excluding partners and senior ministers, certainly partners who warned in real time about the concept and perception that today everyone understands were wrong," stated Ben Gvir.
"As a minister in the government, chairman of a party and a senior partner in the coalition, I hereby demand to join this cabinet, in order to be a partner in determining Israel's security policy in the current precipice of times. The time has come to make brave decisions," he concluded.
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How many times must Blinken be screwed by Sinwar before he get's it? As for Biden, he is unaware of most everything, even where the door to offstage is located.
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Sinwar humiliates Blinken & Biden and reveals hideous Hamas strategy
By Post Editorial Board
“It was a deal that Israel accepted and the world was behind. Hamas could have answered with a single word: ‘Yes,’” Secretary of State Antony Blinken fumed to reporters in Doha last week — exposing himself as either an utter cynic or a total fool.
Hamas doesn’t want a deal, except one where Israel just gives up.
And if Blinken doesn’t know that, then he’s not getting the basic info he should, not from US intelligence nor even from whoever’s in charge of getting him essential press clippings.
Hamas military chief Yahya Sinwar admitted that the teror group views Palestinian casualties as “necessary sacrifices.”Hamas military chief Yahya Sinwar admitted that the teror group views Palestinian casualties as “necessary sacrifices.” AP Photo/Adel Hana, File
Two days before Blinken chastised Hamas, The Wall Street Journal revealed private correspondence of the terror group’s military chief in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar.
Sinwar admits openly that he wants more Palestinian casualties. They are “necessary sacrifices” that will “infuse life into the veins of this nation, prompting it to rise to its glory and honor.
More, more, more deaths mean that Sinwar and his genocidal crew “have the Israelis right where we want them.”
Nor are the Hamas political chiefs, ensconced in their four-star lodgings in Qatar, in any position to disagree with him, since he’s simply applying the terror outfit’s long-held principles.
US spy agencies are supposed to be awesome at “signals intelligence,” intercepting communications; did they somehow fail to get this stuff, or did someone decide to keep it from Blinken and the entire US high command
Or is he just pretending not to know, because publicly chasing a cease-fire deal that he knows will never come is that important to President Biden?
Heck, we’re not sure Biden got this info (or, sigh, remembered it if he did).
Making this all the worse is that Sinwar’s horrific strategy only works because of outside enablers.
Like the high EU and UN officials who sputter with outrage when Israel rescues hostages.
And the International Criminal Court, seeking arrest warrants for Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu.
And all the media that play along, as well as the Hamas sympathizers menacing Jews around the nation.
But Blinken and Biden bear the chief blame, for doing everything in their power to hinder Israel’s humane and justified counterattack against Hamas almost from the start.
Biden’s doing this — and pushing peace plan after peace plan — to win votes from the lefty segment of his base.
Sacrificing Israel to the genocidaires, in other words, to win in November.
The Sinwar revelations show the world his plan will be an utter bust: Hamas ain’t interested.
All this demands immediate action in Congress: Did the intel community fail to get the goods here, or fail to share them?
Have Biden, Blinken and/or National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan simply decided to ignore them?
The Republicans who run the House should be all over this, but so should Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, who’s always claimed to be Israel’s No. 1 defender.
If Chuck doesn’t raise holy hell over this, he goes down in history along with Joe, Tony and Jake as Israel’s greatest betrayer.
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There are several ways you can read this attached Op Ed.
1) You can allow Ukraine to retaliate for being attacked.
2) You can ignore the fact that Ukraine is using American weapons to attack Russia.
3) You can say Biden's failure to respond in time left Ukraine no opportunity to catch up and win.
No matter what you decide, the groundwork for a 3rd WW is being laid and Biden is totally oblivious.
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World War War III May Already Have Started—in the Shadows
Cyber intrusions, arson, bombings, and other mayhem feature in the conflict between West and East.
By J.D. Tuccille
Britain's signals intelligence spy chief raised eyebrows this week with warnings that Russia is coordinating both cyberattacks and physical acts of sabotage against the West. There's evidence to back her claims—and the West may be returning the favor. Coming soon after FBI Director Christopher Wray warned that China is targeting American infrastructure, it looks like the world is not only fracturing once again, but that the hostile blocs are engaged in covert warfare.
Rumors of War
"We are increasingly concerned about growing links between the Russian intelligence services and proxy groups to conduct cyberattacks as well as suspected physical surveillance and sabotage operations," Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) Director Anne Keast-Butler told an audience at the United Kingdom government-sponsored CyberUK 2024 conference. "Before, Russia simply created the right environments for these groups to operate, but now they are nurturing and inspiring these non-state cyber actors in some cases seemingly coordinating physical attacks against the West."
Keast-Butler, whose agency is comparable to the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), also called out China, Iran, and North Korea as cybersecurity dangers. But naming Russian officials as being behind "physical attacks" raises the stakes. Sadly, her claims are well-founded.
Sabotage, Espionage, and Other Mischief
"A 20-year-old British man has been charged with masterminding an arson plot against a Ukrainian-linked target in London for the benefit of the Russian state," CBS News reported last month. That wasn't an isolated incident.
"In April alone a clutch of alleged pro-Russian saboteurs were detained across the continent," The Economist noted May 12 in describing what it called a "shadow war" between East and West. "Germany arrested two German-Russian dual nationals on suspicion of plotting attacks on American military facilities and other targets on behalf of the GRU, Russia's military intelligence agency. Poland arrested a man who was preparing to pass the GRU information on Rzeszow airport, the most important hub for military aid to Ukraine. Britain charged several men over an earlier arson attack in March on a Ukrainian-owned logistics firm in London whose Spanish depot was also targeted."
The GCHQ chief's warnings coupled with reality on the ground are alarming in themselves. Worse, they come after FBI Director Christopher Wray issued similar cautions in April about China.
"The PRC [People's Republic of China] has made it clear that it considers every sector that makes our society run as fair game in its bid to dominate on the world stage, and that its plan is to land low blows against civilian infrastructure to try to induce panic and break America's will to resist," Wray told the Vanderbilt Summit on Modern Conflict and Emerging Threats in Nashville, Tennessee.
Wray clarified that, by "infrastructure," he meant "everything from water treatment facilities and energy grids to transportation and information technology."
If that doesn't make you want to check that your pantry is stocked and that the water filter and generator are in working order, nothing will.
A Game Both Sides Can Play
Of course, in war of any sort, the implication is that both sides are involved in conflict. Western intelligence officials are loud in their warnings about foreign threats, but less open regarding just what their own operatives might be doing in Russia, China, and elsewhere. Still, there's evidence that this is hardly a one-sided war, shadowy though it may be.
In June 2022, The New York Times reported that Ukraine's defensive efforts relied heavily on "a stealthy network of commandos and spies rushing to provide weapons, intelligence and training." In addition to Americans, the story noted, "commandos from other NATO countries, including Britain, France, Canada and Lithuania, also have been working inside Ukraine."
American journalist and combat veteran Jack Murphy goes further, claiming the CIA, working through an allied spy service "is responsible for many of the unexplained explosions and other mishaps that have befallen the Russian military industrial complex." The targets include "railway bridges, fuel depots and power plants," he adds.
And if you wonder who blew up Nord Stream 1 and 2, well, so do a lot of people. Russia was initially accused, but it didn't make a lot of sense for the country's forces to destroy pipelines that generated revenue and fed western dependence on Russian natural gas. Since then, Denmark and Sweden have closed inconclusive investigations, journalist Seymour Hersh blamed American officials, and a report by Der Spiegel and The Washington Post placed responsibility on a rogue Ukrainian military officer.
The Wider War Is Here
Taken all together, the warnings from Keast-Butler and Wray, as well as acts of sabotage and arrests of foreign agents suggest that fears of a wider war resulting from Russia's continuing invasion of Ukraine may miss the point; the war could already be here. People looking for tanks and troops are overlooking cyber intrusions, arson, bombings, and other low-level mayhem.
"Russia is definitely at war with the West," Oleksandr Danylyuk of the Royal United Services Institute, a British defense and security think tank, told NBC News earlier this week.
Russian officials seem to embrace that understanding, with Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov commenting in March that the invasion of Ukraine, originally referred to by the euphemism "special military operation," is now more serious. "It has become a war for us as the collective West more and more directly increases its level of involvement in the conflict," he said.
Fortunately, a shadow war of the sort around us is less destructive than open military conflict, especially when the hostilities involve nuclear-armed powers. It's far better that spies hack the email accounts of government officials, as happened in the case of a Russian cyberattack on Germany's ruling Social Democrats, than that cities burn. But civilians still must live with the consequences of combatants attempting to do each other harm—particularly when the harm is to infrastructure on which regular people rely.
So, welcome to the world of global shadow war. Try to not become collateral damage.
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Editor's Note: We try not to stir up drama here at InvestorPlace but considering what our colleague Charles Sizemore of the Freeport Society just said about economist Paul Krugman… Dear Richard, I’m not a confrontational guy by nature… But sometimes I read things so stupid I’ve got to say something… And what I recently saw from Economist Paul Krugman takes the cake… Click on the image below to see what I said… Now I know some of you may be fans of his… so I hope you don’t get mad when you see what I said… Regards, Charles Sizemore P.S. My publisher may take this presentation down any day now so click now to watch it for free while it’s still available. ++++ | ||
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