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… read about racial justice in national security.

New America and Women of Color Advancing Peace and Security have a new series [[link removed]] of essays out examining the question of what it would mean for the US national security strategy to focus on racial equity and justice around the world. All the essays are excellent, but a standout is Sneha Nair’s contribution [[link removed]] on the prospect of US foreign policy pursuing anti-racist goals. Nair cuts directly to the heart of the problem: The structure of US foreign policy making is itself steeped in white supremacy. Focusing on policy outcomes will not be enough to fix a system that is set up to serve the interests of a white upper class. Pursuing anti-racism in US foreign policy, then, is not just about working against racism abroad but about ensuring that foreign policy production in the US is no longer structured to reproduce racial hierarchies.

South Korean nuclear opinions

The Chicago Council on Global Affairs released new polling data [[link removed]] last week that sheds light on how the South Korean public views their country’s position underneath the US nuclear umbrella. The data, which show significant support in South Korea for a domestic nuclear weapons program, underlines the indirect proliferation consequences of the failed attempts by the US and other powers to coerce North Korea into giving up its nuclear program.

61% of South Koreans believe that the US will defend their country in case of a North Korean invasion, but that belief does not dampen support for a South Korean bomb. 71% of South Koreans support their country having its own nuclear weapon, and support is higher among those confident of US defense guarantees.

The aspect of the issue most widely agreed upon is that North Korea is unlikely to give up its nuclear capabilities — 82% of respondents said that. Support for a South Korean nuclear weapon is highest among those who believe North Korean nukes are here to stay, a vote of no-confidence in the current US pursuit of denuclearization.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] An American out of Kyiv

Historian John Vsetecka was forced to abandon his Fulbright research in Kyiv by the threat of impending war between Ukraine and Russia. He penned [[link removed]] an account of life in a country that both is on the brink of war and has been at war for eight years, as Russian incursions into Ukrainian territory have moved forward in fits and starts.

For Ukrainians in Kyiv, the run up to the war has been stressful without being frantic. The prospect of Russian aggression is hardly startling to Ukrainians, and life for many in Kyiv has gone on more or less as normal as the threat of open conflict has mounted.

Yet as foreigners like Vsetecka leave the country and the drums of war grow louder, normalcy is more difficult to hold on to. Vsetecka writes about his landlord, as he left Kyiv, slipping him some chocolate and telling him “everything will be OK.” It was more a hope than a reassurance.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] DEEP DIVE Coup contagions: Part I

You may have heard that there is a pandemic of coups going on right now. There were six attempted or successful coups in Africa in 2021, and the military took power in Burkina Faso in January of 2022. The sudden proliferation of undemocratic shifts in state control has reignited a series of debates about coups. What causes them? Are they predictable? Are they, in some way, contagious? We’ll investigate new research on these questions this week and next in Deep Dive.

One topic that comes up frequently in discussions involving military coups is the training backgrounds of the coupists. It seems that, with remarkable frequency, the military officers most involved in deposing democratically elected leaders were, not so long ago, at one or another US military base being lectured about the importance of civilian control of the military. US military training of foreign officers, which ostensibly counts reinforcing democratic norms among its many goals, appears at first glance to have, at best, little effect on the likelihood of a trainee to be involved in a future coup, and at worst makes it much more likely that they will be involved. In a new article [[link removed]] in the Journal of Peace Research, however, political scientists Theodore McLaughlin, Lee Seymour, and Simon Pierre Boulanger-Martel dig a bit deeper into the data to see whether there are any variations in coup outcomes across the wide range of foreign training the US offers.

McLaughlin et. al. have put together a new dataset of all international military training programs the US ran between 1999 and 2016. The data allows them to take a broad look at the massive US effort to train members of foreign militaries. The US ran 34 different training programs during the period covered by the database, which taught over 2.3 million pupils. Even if you leave out the country-wide programs the US conducted in Afghanistan and Iraq, you’re still left with 971,054 people trained over that period.

One of those 34 programs that has come in for particular scrutiny from scholars and activists is the International Military Education & Training programs (IMET). A close study [[link removed]] of IMET and the Counterterrorism Fellowship Program in 2017 showed that the presence of either program in a county doubled the likelihood of a military coup in that country. The authors of that study extrapolated their results to US foreign military training programming generally, arguing that IMET’s focus on inculcating norms of civilian control of the military and respect for democratic processes means that if IMET graduates are doing coups, then surely graduates of all the other programs are doing coups as well.

Yet McLaughlin et. al., looking at all those other programs, find a different result. The correlation between IMET programming and coup attempts remains strong, but the relationship does not hold for any other US-led foreign military training program the researchers track. Even the Regional Centers for Security Studies programs, which, like IMET, take on as trainees the class of senior officer most likely to be involved in coups, do nothing to increase the likelihood of military coups in recipient countries. In short, there is something in particular about IMET that is either attracting or creating coupists.

This result suggests two things. The first is that the idea of inculcating democratic civil-military norms in a classroom setting — a core goal of IMET — is likely a pipe dream. At the very least, we don’t understand how to do it yet. The second, more optimistic, conclusion is that reformers in and out of government trying to limit the negative spillover effects of US training programs can train their fire on IMET. Understanding the role that program plays in producing coup-committing graduates would be a major step forward in lessening the harms produced by US military outreach.

LEARN MORE [[link removed]]

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] SHOW US THE RECEIPTS

Alisa Reznik spoke [[link removed]] to an Afghan refugee in the US who remains separated from his family due to the slow machinations of US bureaucracy. Six months after the fall of Kabul to Taliban forces, former judge Ahmad Naem Wakili has not been able to bring his wife and young daughter from Turkey to join him in his new home of Tucson, Arizona. Because Wakili’s wife and daughter already lived outside Afghanistan when the US withdrew its forces — an effort to avoid being targeted as a result of Wakili’s work — they are not automatically eligible for humanitarian parole to enter the US. Wakili has applied for them repeatedly, but has been denied each time. Wakili himself is in bureaucratic jeopardy because, as an Afghan government employee, he is not eligible for a Special Immigrant Visa. His humanitarian parole status expires in two years, after which he could be sent back to Afghanistan.

Daniel Rogers argued [[link removed]] that we should consider core social media platforms like Facebook to be life-critical infrastructure for the purpose of legal liability. Pointing to research showing that people’s online media diets have a measurable effect on their health outcomes, Rogers made the case that legal regulation of social media outlets does not adequately reflect the outsized role they play in our lives. If social media has the capability to harm people in measurable ways, he suggested, then it should be held liable for those harms. Treating social media companies legally as though they were airbag manufacturers or any other business that is required to take its ability to harm its customers seriously would fundamentally change the way social media companies do business.

Lucía Benavides recounted [[link removed]] the military origins of Barcelona’s tourism industry. In the 1930s, the city was badly damaged during the Spanish Civil War, and the rise of the Franco dictatorship after the war did little for the city’s fortunes. In 1950, when the city was still largely in ruins, the US and Franco did a deal to have the US 6th Fleet use the city as a port of call. The deal provided vital support for Franco, allowing him to stay in power for decades longer. It also turned Barcelona into a playground for US sailors with money to burn. Sex workers, club owners, and restauranteurs all raked in large sums from the sailors, and created the structure of modern tourism in Barcelona along the way. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, Spain welcomed 83 million tourists per year, many of them to Barcelona.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] WELL PLAYED

Whether or not nuclear theory is relevant to cyber operations is still up in the air, but it is crucial to understanding meme war [[link removed]].

The New York Times buys Wordle and then all of a sudden product placements [[link removed]] start appearing in the puzzles.

Future historians will describe Putin’s justification for annexing large swaths of Ukraine as “ long-table imperialism [[link removed]].”

There won’t be any takes in the world bog [[link removed]].

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Critical State is written by Sam Ratner with Inkstick Media.

The World is a weekday public radio show and podcast on global issues, news and insights from PRX and GBH.

With an online magazine and podcast featuring a diversity of expert voices, Inkstick Media is “foreign policy for the rest of us.”

Critical State is made possible in part by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

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