PARIS — When French President Emmanuel Macron’s party lost its absolute majority in parliament six months ago, many wondered what the setback would mean for an ambitious, here-to-disrupt-the-status-quo leader whose first term was defined by a top-down style of management.
It turns out Macron 2.0 is a man about globe, pitching “strategic intimacy” to world leaders, as he leaves domestic politics to his chief lieutenant and concentrates on his preferred sphere: international diplomacy.
The Frenchman’s past “intimate” moves have been well-documented: affectionate hugging with Angela Merkel, knuckle-crunching handshakes with Donald Trump, and serial bromancing with the likes ofJustin Trudeau and Rishi Sunak. Now in his second term, the French president appears to be making a move on — quite literally — the world.
Since his reelection, Macron has been hopping from one official visit to another: in Algeria one day to restore relations with a former colony, in Bangkok another to woo Asian nations, and in Washington most recently to shore up the relationship with Washington. The globetrotting head of state has drawn criticism in the French press that he is deserting the home front.
“He is everywhere, follows everything, but he’s mostly elsewhere,” quipped a French minister speaking anonymously.
“[But] he’s been on the job for five years now, does he really need to follow the minutiae of every project? And the international pressure is very strong. Nothing is going well in the world,” the minister added.
Before COVID-19 struck, Macron’s first term was marked by a brisk schedule of reforms, including a liberalization of the job market aimed at making France more competitive. The French president was hoping to continue in the same pragmatic vein during his second term, focusing on industrial policy and reforming France’s pensions system. While he hasn’t abandoned these goals, the failure to win a parliamentary majority in June has forced him to slow down on the domestic agenda.
Foreign policy in France has always been the guarded remit of the president, but Macron is trying to flip political necessity into opportunity, delegating the tedium and messiness of French parliamentary politics to his Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne.
There are few areas of global diplomacy where the president hasn’t pitched a French initiative in recent months — whether it’s food security in Africa, multilateralism in Asia or boosting civilian resilience in Ukraine. Despite some foreign policy missteps in his first term including the backing of strongman Khalifa Haftar in the Libyan civil war, Macron is now a veteran statesman, eagerly taking advantage of Europe’s leaderless landscape to hog the international stage.
The French president’s full pivot to global diplomacy in his weakened second term at home is reminiscent of past leaders confronting turmoil on the domestic front.
“The Jupiterian period is over. He’s got no majority,” said Cyrille Bret, researcher for the Jacques Delors Institute. “So now he is suffering from the Clinton-second-mandate-syndrome, who after the impeachment attempts over the Lewinsky [inquiry], turned to the international scene, trying to resolve issues in the Balkans, the Middle East and in China.”
But even as Macron embraces the wide world, the pitfalls ahead are numerous. Photo ops with world leaders haven’t done much to slow the erosion of his approval ratings at home. With a recession looming in Europe and discontent over inflation and energy woes, Macron’s margins of maneuver are limited, and trouble at home might ultimately need his attention.
Man about globe
The French president first used the words “strategic intimacy” in October, when he told European leaders gathered in Prague they needed to work on “a strategic conversation” to overcome divisions and start new projects.
If the thought of 44 European leaders cozying up wasn’t bewildering enough, Macron double-downed this month and called for “more strategic intimacy” with the U.S.
It’s not entirely clear what kind of transatlantic liaison he was gunning for, but it certainly included a good dose of tough love. Arriving in Washington, Macron called an American multi-billion package of green subsidies “super aggressive.” (He nonetheless received red carpet treatment at the White House, with Joe Biden calling him “his friend” and even “his closer” — the man who helps him bring deals over the finish line — even if he didn’t actually obtain any concessions from the U.S. president.)
Some of Macron’s success in taking center stage is, of course, due to France’s historical assets: a permanent seat on theU.N. Security Council, a nuclear capacity, a history of military interventions and global diplomacy.
But for the Americans, Macron is also the last dancing partner left in a fast-emptying ballroom across the pond. The U.K. is still embroiled in its own internal affairs and has lost some influence after Brexit, while German Chancellor Olaf Scholz hasn’t filled the space left by Merkel’s departure.
While Macron’s abstract and at times convoluted speeches may not be to everyone’s liking, at least he has got something to say.
“[The Americans] are looking for someone to engage with and there’s a lack of alternatives,” said Sophia Besch, European affairs expert at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. “Macron is the last one standing. There’s his enthusiasm, and at the same time he is disruptive for a leader and not always an easy partner.”
“He can count on some reluctant admirers in Washington for his energy,” she said.
The French touch
In his diplomatic endeavors, Macron likes a good surprise.
“Emmanuel Macron doesn’t like working bottom-up, where the political link is lost,” said one French diplomat. “He enjoys surprising people and marking political coups.”
“The [French bureaucracy] doesn’t really like that,” the diplomat added. “We prefer things that are all neat and tidy.”
Conjuring up new ideas — such as the European Political Community — that haven’t quite filtered through the layers of bureaucracy is one of Macron’s ways of pushing the envelope. The newly christened group’s first summit was ultimately hailed as a success, having marked the return of the U.K. to a European forum and displaying the Continent’s unity in the face of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine.
It’s a technique that forces the hand of other participants but sometimes undermines the credibility of his initiatives, and raises questions about what has really been confirmed. Launching the European Political Community may have been a success; announcing a summit between Russian President Vladimir Putin and the U.S. president a couple of days before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine less so. (The summit, obviously, never took place.)
Macron’s diplomatic frenzy has also raised speculation that he is already gunning for a top international job for when he leaves the Elysée palace. Macron cannot run for a third term, and speculation is already running high in France on what the hyperactive president will do next.
The question at the heart of Macron’s second term is whether his attempts to be everything and everywhere — combined with his stubborn dedication to controversial ideas — is what will ultimately trip him up.
Even as Macron’s U.S. visit was hailed a success, with him saying France and the US were “fully aligned” on Russia, he sparked controversy on his return when he told a French TV channel that Russia should be offered “security guarantees” in the event of negotiations on ending the war in Ukraine.
“That comment fell out of the line in relation to the coordinated message from Macron and Biden, which was that nothing should be done about Ukraine without Ukraine’s [approval],” said Besch.
Macron says he wants France to be an “exemplary” NATO member, but he still wants France to act as a “balancing power” that does not completely close the door on Russia. It’s a stance that may help France build partnerships with more neutral states across the world, but it does nothing to mend the rift with eastern EU member states.
For the man about globe who presents himself as the champion of European interests, that’s an uncomfortable place to be in.
When it comes to “strategic intimacy,” it’s possible to have too many partners.
Elisa Bertholomey and Eddy Wax contributed to reporting.
Airspace monitoring innovator designed drone defense system to detect all unmanned aircraft, whether they follow or evade remote identification requirement.
Press Release –
Dec 12, 2022 08:00 EST
SYRACUSE, N.Y., December 12, 2022 (Newswire.com)
– Federal Aviation Administration regulations will begin to require all unmanned aircraft to transmit identification and location information. Hidden Level’s Airspace Monitoring Service (AMS) technology is uniquely positioned to track, monitor, and validate drones whether or not they comply with the new FAA rules.
The regulations are in response to the explosive growth of unmanned aircraft systems, or drones, since 2013. The FAA reported over 865,000 registered drones in May 2022 and estimates that number will grow to 1.4 million by 2024.
To prevent collisions with passenger airplanes and other aircraft, the FAA is mandating all drones operating in U.S. airspace have Remote Identification (RID) capability. Remote ID provides agencies like the FAA, law enforcement, and other federal agencies a greater situational awareness to be able to identify when a drone appears to be flying in an unsafe manner or where it is not allowed to fly. Remote ID also lays the foundation of the safety and security groundwork needed for more complex drone operations. The regulations require all drones made or sold in the United States after December 2022 to support RID, and that all drone pilots (including those who fly for fun, business, or public safety) must register and operate their drone in accordance with the final rule on remote ID, beginning Sept. 16, 2023.
Hidden Level’s drone monitoring technology was designed to keep up with the rapid technological advancements to drones such as Remote Identification. In 2019, the company released a white paper identifying potential gaps in RID and published a technology blog identifying additional factors that should be addressed with a comprehensive RID solution.
“When it comes to integrating the FAA’s broadcast Remote Identification in drone tracking systems, Hidden Level is way ahead of the game,” said Jeff Cole, CEO and co-founder of Hidden Level. “Our AMS not only receives RID signaling in its coverage area but also verifies it, addressing two significant gaps in the RID system.”
Those gaps appear when a drone intentionally or unintentionally fails to broadcast RID information, or if it intentionally or unintentionally broadcasts false RID information.
Hidden Level’s AMS technology uses a local network of passive RF sensors installed on buildings, rooftops and cell towers, which detects the movements of drone aircraft in the area. That allows it to track drones even without a RID broadcast, resolving the first gap.
The Hidden Level AMS also checks and validates RID signals by correlating fine angle estimates from its sensors on the received RID broadcast messages with the drone position information included in the messages.
“That allows Hidden Level’s AMS to detect any drones failing to broadcast RID data or transmitting false information, and report it almost instantaneously,” Cole said. “That capability is essential to any organization, whether it’s a city, a stadium or a company facility, that is trying to ensure safety and security.”
The Hidden Level AMS is a cloud-based scalable solution that utilizes a local network of passive RF drone detection sensors, much like a cellular network, that is owned, operated, and maintained by Hidden Level. The sensors, installed on buildings, rooftops and cell towers, provide real-time location data on drone aircraft. Clients receive streaming AMS data that integrates into a variety of common security platforms.
To learn more about Hidden Level and its readiness for the FAA-mandated RID system, visit hiddenlevel.com.
ABOUT HIDDEN LEVEL Founded in 2018, Hidden Level is led by a team of skilled sensor experts with more than a decade of experience building innovative sensor solutions for both military and commercial customers. Hidden Level’s airspace monitoring service delivers the only industry solution that provides secure, accurate low-altitude airspace monitoring at scale. By eliminating the burden of owning, operating and maintaining expensive and rapidly changing sensor technology equipment, Hidden Level provides its customers only what is necessary—real-time, actionable data at a fraction of the cost.
MIAMI, December 6, 2022 (Newswire.com)
– Congratulations to the Tangent Group International team! They have been recognized as a 2022 Inc. Magazine Best In Business winner in the Security category. The Best In Business list recognizes the most dynamic companies that have had an outstanding influence on their communities, their industries, the environment, or society as a whole. The list can be found at inc.com/best-in-business
Tangent Group’s core values have always been to serve their customers, industry and communities with respect and dedication. Their teams regularly work with local charities, police departments and veteran’s organizations to help acquire resources that are vital to their success. It’s more than a business for Tangent Group, it’s a family.
Scott Omelianuk, editor-in-chief of Inc., says, “Inc. magazine is dedicated to showcasing America’s most dynamic businesses and the great things they do. The Best in Business awards shine a light on those that have gone above and beyond their original mission to make a social, environmental or economic impact, benefiting those around them.”
“We appreciate the recognition from Inc. Magazine,” says CEO of Tangent Group, Roxxy Brown. “Our clients trust us with their most valued assets – their people and property. As part of our desire to give them the best, we are committed to innovation and leadership within the security industry. So much of what we do is confidential that it’s nice to be publicly recognized for our achievements.”
About Tangent Group International
With a team of committed experts, industry veterans, and market visionaries, Tangent Group is one of the fastest growing security companies in the nation. Tangent has become a leader in corporate security, executive protection, and risk mitigation by providing high-end security services and urgent response on a local, regional, and national level to many of the top companies in the US. For more information, visit www.TangentGroup.com.
For many officials, it’s a topic they won’t touch. When pressed, politicians give memorized, terse and robotic answers.
The verboten subject? Ukraine’s potential NATO membership.
It’s an issue so potentially combustible that many NATO allies try to avoid even talking about it. When Ukraine in September requested an accelerated process to join the military alliance, NATO publicly reiterated its open-door policybut didn’t give a concrete response. And last week, when NATO foreign ministers met, their final statement simply pointed toa vague2008 pledge that Ukraine would someday join the club.
Not mentioned: Ukraine’s recent request, any concrete steps toward membership or any timeline.
The reasons are manifold. NATO is fractured over how, when (and in a few cases even if) Ukraine should join. Big capitals also don’t want to provoke the Kremlin further, aware of Vladimir Putin’s hyper-sensitivity to NATO’s eastward expansion. And most notably, NATO membership would legally require allies to come to Ukraine’s aid in case of attack — a prospect many won’t broach.
The result is that while Europe and the U.S. have plowed through one taboo after another since Russia invaded Ukraine in February — funneling mountains of lethal military equipment to Kyiv, slapping once unthinkable sanctions on Moscow, defecting from Russian energy — the prospect of Ukraine joining NATO remains the third rail of international politics.
Touching the issue can leave you burned.
French President Emmanuel Macron sparked an outcry over the weekend when he said the West must consider security guarantees for Russia if it returns to the negotiating table — a gesture that enraged Kyiv and appeared to go against NATO’s open-door policy. And behind the scenes, Ukrainian officials themselves faced annoyed colleagues after making their public plea for swift membership.
“Some very good friends of Ukraine are more afraid of a positive reply to Ukraine’s bid for membership in NATO than of providing Ukraine with the most sophisticated weapons,” said Dmytro Kuleba, Ukraine’s foreign minister.
“There are still many psychological barriers that we have to overcome,” he told POLITICO in a recent interview. “The idea of membership is one of them.”
‘De facto’ ally
Ukraine’s leadership has argued that for all intents and purposes, it is already a member of the Western military alliance — and thus deserves a quick path to formal NATO membership.
“We are de facto allies,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy declared when announcing his country’s bid to join NATO | Alexey Furman/Getty Images
“We are de facto allies,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy declared in September when announcing his country’s bid to join NATO “under an accelerated procedure.”
“De facto, we have already completed our path to NATO. De facto, we have already proven interoperability with the alliance’s standards,” he added. “Ukraine is applying to make it de jure.”
The Ukrainian leader’s statement caught many of Kyiv’s closest partners by surprise — and left several grumbling.
The overture threatened to derail a plan the alliance’s most influential capitals had essentially settled on: Weapons now, membership talk later. It was an approach, they felt, that would deprive Moscow of a pretext to pull NATO directly into the conflict.
In their statement last week, ministers pledged to step up political and practical help for Ukraine while avoiding concrete plans for Kyiv’s future status.
Ultimately, however, few allies question Ukraine’s long-term membership prospects — at least in theory. The divisions are more over how and when the question of Kyiv’s membership should be addressed.
A number of Eastern allies are arguing for a closer political relationship between Ukraine and NATO, and they want a more concrete plan that sets the stage for membership.
“My thinking is that it is basically unavoidable,” said Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis, “that NATO will have to have a way to accept Ukraine.”
On the other end of the spectrum, France’s Macron wants to take Moscow’s perspective into account.
“One of the essential points we must address — as President [Vladimir] Putin has always said — is the fear that NATO comes right up to its doors, and the deployment of weapons that could threaten Russia,” Macron told French television channel TF1 in an interview released Saturday.
Most other allies essentially evade the subject — not rejecting Ukraine’s NATO dreams but repeating a carefully crafted line about focusing on the current war.
Here’s NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg’s version, offered last week: “The most immediate and urgent task is to ensure that Ukraine prevails as a sovereign, independent democratic nation in Europe.”
“The most immediate and urgent task is to ensure that Ukraine prevails as a sovereign, independent democratic nation in Europe,” said NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg | Armend Nimani/AFP via Getty
And here’s Dutch Foreign Minister Wopke Hoekstra’s take from the same week: “The task here is to make sure that the main thing continues to be the main thing — and that is helping out Ukraine on the battlefield.”
U.S. NATO Ambassador Julianne Smith echoed the point in an interview: “The focus right now is practical support to Ukraine.”
Analysts say the fault line lies between primarily Western European capitals such as Berlin and Paris — which see membership as an ultra-sensitive issue to be avoided at the moment — and some Eastern capitals that see Ukrainian accession as a goal the alliance can begin working toward.
Since the war began, that divide has only become more “exacerbated,” said Ben Schreer, executive director for Europe at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. “Some countries simply don’t want to even have a conversation about this because they feel it might further harden Russian responses.”
Another path
Ukrainian officials do recognize that NATO membership is not imminent, but they still want a gesture from the alliance.
“The ideal scenario would, of course, be a very simple sentence from NATO: ‘OK, we receive your application, we begin the process of considering it.’ That would already be a major milestone achievement,” said Kuleba, Ukraine’s foreign minister, ahead of last week’s meeting.
Smith, the U.S. ambassador, said the Ukrainians are aware they need to do more before they could become members.
Ukraine formally adopted a constitutional amendment in 2019 committing to pursue NATO membership. But even though the country has pursued some reforms over the past few years, experts and partner governments say there’s more Ukraine must do to integrate Kyiv into Western institutions.
“There’s more work to be done, I don’t think that’s a mystery,” said Smith, adding: “I think they’d be the first to tell you that.”
As an interim solution, Kyiv has presented what it calls a pragmatic proposal for Western countries to help protect Ukraine.
“Russia was able to start this war precisely because Ukraine remained in the gray zone — between the Euro-Atlantic world and the Russian imperialism,” Zelenskyy said when presenting a 10-point peace plan in November.
The West’s “psychological barriers” need to be “overcome by changing the optics” Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said | Mads Claus Rasmussen/Ritzau Scanpix/AFP via Getty Images
“So, how can we prevent repetition of Russia’s such aggression against us? We need effective security assurances,” he said, calling for an international conference to sign off on the so-called Kyiv Security Compact, a new set of security guarantees for Ukraine.
But it remains unclear whether Ukraine’s Western partners would be willing to make any legally binding guarantees — or if anything short of NATO’s Article 5 collective defense clause would prove a sufficient deterrent down the line.
“Some of those countries,” said IISS’ Schreer, “would be very reluctant.” Any written security guarantee, he noted, “from their perspective would probably invite strong Russian response, but it also would make them at this point of time part of this conflict.”
A Ukrainian victory, of course, could shift the calculus.
“If Ukraine is stuck in a stalemate, then NATO membership isn’t gonna happen,” said Max Bergmann, director of the Europe program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “But if it retakes its territory and accepts its borders — whatever those borders may be, whether it includes Crimea or does not, because that’s the fundamental question for Ukraine — then I think things can move very quickly.”
Asked if he is frustrated with Western partners, Kuleba was blunt.
“I know them too well to be frustrated with them — they are good friends,” he said. “It would be close to impossible for us to sustain the Russian pressure and to prevail on the battleground without them.”
But, the foreign minister added, the West’s “psychological barriers” need to be “overcome by changing the optics.”
Kyiv’s partners, he said, “have to begin to see Ukraine’s membership as an opportunity — and not as a threat.”
U.S. gas companies will be urged to up their exports to Europe via the U.K. under a new transatlantic energy partnership agreed by Rishi Sunak and Joe Biden.
The new “U.K.-U.S. Energy Security and Affordability Partnership” announced Wednesday includes a commitment from the White House to “strive to export at least 9-10 billion cubic metres of liquefied natural gas (LNG) over the next year via U.K. terminals,” No. 10 Downing Street said. The aspiration includes both gas for U.K. consumption and gas that might be re-exported to mainland Europe via pipeline.
The U.K. has three LNG terminals — two in Milford Haven, Wales and one in Medway, Kent — and has become a major hub for LNG supplies to Europe from the U.S.; a vital lifeline as the Continent has sought to replace Russian pipeline gas since Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.
The new partnership between the U.S. and the U.K. mirrors in many ways an existing U.S.-EU task force that also focuses on energy security. It will be led by a “joint action group” consisting of senior White House and U.K. government officials, Downing Street said, with the first virtual meeting to be held on Thursday.
Alongside helping to guarantee U.K. and EU gas supply, it will work on global investment in clean energy and efficiency, plus the promotion of nuclear energy, including small modular reactors, in third countries. British Prime Minister Sunak and U.S. President Biden discussed the partnership at the G20 summit in Indonesia last month.
“This partnership will bring down prices for British consumers and help end Europe’s dependence on Russian energy once and for all,” Sunak said. “Together the U.K. and U.S. will ensure the global price of energy and the security of our national supply can never again be manipulated by the whims of a failing regime. We have the natural resources, industry and innovative thinking we need to create a better, freer system and accelerate the clean energy transition.”
The LNG commitment will be dependent on U.S. gas exporting companies. As is the case with its task force with the EU, the U.S. government will likely play the role of encouraging companies to direct their cargoes to the U.K.
The two sides will “proactively identify and resolve any issues faced by exporters and importers,” Downing Street said, adding: “We will look to identify opportunities to support commercial contracts that increase security of supply.”
Adam Bell, a former U.K. government energy official and now head of policy at the Stonehaven consultancy, said there was a “diplomatic upside” to the U.K. facilitating gas flows to the EU: “Especially this winter when we’ll want pipes to flow the other way; Europe has the stores that we don’t.” The U.K. would also benefit from shipping charges as the gas passes through its network, Bell added.
The U.S. ambassador to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Julianne Smith, said she was “not worried” about former President Donald Trump’s possible return to the White House.
“The NATO alliance enjoys deep bipartisan support across Congress and amongst the American people,” Smith said Wednesday during the annual POLITICO 28 ranking gala.
“And I’m not worried. I think he [Trump] knows that it’s in a really good spot back home,” she added.
Trump announced last month that he would run for a second term in 2024. During his presidency, he frequently criticized NATO members for not meeting the alliance’s spending targets.
In 2018, he threatened that the U.S. would go its “own way” if the other member countries did not increase their financial commitments to NATO.
Two years later, John Bolton — Trump’s former national security adviser — judged there was a “very real risk” the U.S. would withdraw from NATO if Trump were reelected.
Created to counterbalance the rise of the Soviet Union after World War II, NATO was catapulted back into the spotlight by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February.
Since then, a “majority” of alliance members have “committed to investing more, and more quickly, on defence,” according to the organization.
In September, Ukraine requested an accelerated process to join NATO, a move that has long been considered a red line by Moscow, which sees the military alliance’s eastern expansion in the last few decades as a threat to its security.
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
For some businesses, fraud is nothing more than an accepted expense casually factored into the company’s bottom line. But for those who understand the true threat, fraud is a risk that must be prevented and stopped at all costs. We’ve become so accustomed to fraud’s existence that it now, unfortunately, seems like a fact of life. It doesn’t have to be this way, but preventing fraud requires a paradigm shift. It requires knowing your customer (KYC) and adopting practices that many companies have shied away from for years. Fraud will keep increasing until the business world embraces prevention from the first stages of customer interaction.
Fraud is a business problem
The internet has made fraud easy. Covid-19 made it even easier, with more businesses moving their workflows to digital platforms. Unfortunately, without a subsequent improvement in security practices, this digitalization exponentially increased the attack surface area for fraudsters worldwide who won’t hesitate to seize the advantage. According to LexisNexis, there was a 19.8% increase in fraud costs from 2019 to 2022.
Fraud costs are a real problem for businesses. Of course, individuals bear the cost of fraud as well, but companies see a significant impact on their bottom line. Each $1 of fraud, according to the same LexisNexis study, costs eCommerce merchants in America an actual $3.75 once the response is all said and done. All told, fraudsters were able to steal about $28 billion in 2021 alone through identity fraud. Our current economic downturn means fraudsters will be more, not less, bold in their attacks.
Clearly, fraud is more than a pesky issue. Not only does it cost both businesses and customers vast amounts of money, but it can also lead to significant damage to a brand. Businesses risk losing customers’ trust if they don’t appear to be tackling the issue and keeping their customers safe. This problem is incumbent upon companies to solve. However, it’s not as hard as we might think.
Most scams start at account creation, where a fraudster impersonates a real person or creates a fake persona to carry out fraudulent activity. KYC has historically consisted of methods like human-based document verification, SSN, knowledge-based authentication (KBA), as well as other database information to identify a person is who they are claiming to be by what they know about the individual. This might have worked 20 years ago, but the traditional methods we have been accustomed to are not cutting it anymore. Too much personal information is available online, and fraudsters can usually find the answers to security questions through data dumps or trolling a victim’s social media. Luckily, the solution already exists, using widely-accepted tools and stopping identity fraud at the source — account creation.
Strong KYC practices at onboarding have often been avoided because of the misconception that they create too much friction for users. Truthfully, the tools are in place to make this a frictionless transaction. All the customer needs to do at the onset is capture their government-issued ID and then take a selfie. Such a small step can significantly reduce problems later on by creating an environment where fraud is prevented from the outset. It also sets the stage for frictionless continued fraud prevention using the selfie biometric for ongoing re-authentication.
The secret behind strong, ongoing KYC
Strong onboarding practices create a highly effective and streamlined re-authentication process for subsequent transactions with a customer. As the customer continues to interact with a business, it can use advanced analytics to build a baseline of behavior to assess risk levels dynamically. All the customer sees is the occasional request for a selfie, which then is compared with multiple other data points to verify a person’s identity.
Another term for this practice is multi-factor authentication (MFA). That’s lazily been construed as “security measures” like SMS-based one-time passcodes. Unfortunately, while such added security measures are standard in business, they’re among the easiest MFA methods to break — a thief can intercept an SMS-based code for as little as $16.
That doesn’t mean MFA needs to be completely thrown out. The concept is based in fact: The most secure identity verification consists of a combination of something you are, something you know and something you have. The hardest to spoof is something you are: biometrics. These include fingerprints, facial scans, voice recognition and retina scans (among many others). Today’s modern biometrics proofing is quickly approaching 100% accuracy.
Incorporating these security measures also creates much stronger assurances for the company, since friendly fraud is a big problem. With facial recognition integrated into the account management process, companies now have time-stamped, verified proof that a person did make that purchase. With some simple tweaks to identity verification, businesses could save over $48 billion per year in fraudulent chargebacks.
The journey doesn’t stop at biometrics, though. A robust orchestration layer is needed to organize the tiny pieces of data spread across the internet into a comprehensive picture of each unique customer. This behind-the-scenes work can help monitor the KYC fundamentals to vet for fraud continuously.
Orchestration and active monitoring also help keep the good customers while weeding out (or even preventing from the start) the customers you’d rather not do business with. Using a trusted vendor to execute these third-party identity verification actions, on top of the original and ongoing verification methods maintained in-house, helps businesses with underwriting. You can also assess risk in real-time; if a customer is usually in California but trying to sign in from Russia, you’re better able to catch the fraud and stop it in its tracks.
Simple KBA methods alone can’t keep up with advanced identity fraud techniques. Unfortunately, many companies equate better identity proofing with a worsened customer experience, but in reality, fraud prevention can enhance interactions and even streamline workflows for businesses and customers alike. Businesses can have their cake and eat it, too, by incorporating better identity verification from the start of the customer’s journey, along with biometric-based MFA and continuous, active monitoring. Our customers deserve it, and it will take a big bite out of the global identity fraud game.
LONDON — Three years after leaving the EU to chart its own course, Britain finds itself caught between two economic behemoths in a brewing transatlantic trade war.
In one corner sits the United States, whose Congress in August passed the Biden administration’s much-vaunted $369 billion program of green subsidies, part of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).
In the opposing corner is the European Union, which fears Washington’s subsidy splurge will pull investment — particularly in electric vehicles — away from Europe, hitting carmakers hard.
The EU is preparing its own retaliatory package of subsidies; Washington shows little sign of changing course. Fears of a trade war are growing fast.
Now sitting squarely outside the ring, the U.K. can only look on with horror, and quietly ask Washington to soften the blow. But there are few signs the softly-softly approach is bearing fruit. Britain now risks being clobbered by both sides.
“It’s not in the U.K.’s interest for the U.S. and EU to go down this route,” said Sam Lowe, a partner at Flint Global and expert in U.K. and EU trade policy. “Given the U.K.’s current economic position, it can’t really afford to engage in a subsidy war with both.” The British government has just unleashed a round of fiscal belt-tightening after a market rout, following months of political turmoil.
For iconic British motor brands, the row over the Biden administration’s IRA comes with real costs.
The U.S. is the second-largest destination for British-made vehicles after the EU, and the automotive sector is one of Britain’s top goods exporters.
Manufacturers like Jaguar Land Rover have warned publicly about the “very serious challenges” posed by the new U.S. law and its plan for electric vehicle tax credits aimed at boosting American industry.
Kemi on the case
U.K. Trade Secretary Kemi Badenoch has for months been privately urging top U.S. officials to soften the impact of the electric vehicle subsidies on Britain by carving out exemptions, U.K. officials said.
When Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo visited London in early October, Badenoch pushed her to rethink the strategy. The U.K. trade chief brought that same message to Washington in a series of private meetings earlier this month, including at a sit-down with Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo.
Badenoch has “raised this issue on many levels,” an official from the U.K.’s Department for International Trade said, citing conversations with U.S. Ambassador to Britain Jane Hartley, with Secretary Raimondo, “and with members of the Biden administration and senior representatives of both parties.”
The Cabinet minister has also spoken out in public, telling the pro-free market Cato Institute in Washington earlier this month that “the substantial new tax credits for electric cars not only bar vehicles made in the U.K. from the U.S. market, but also affect vehicles made in the U.S. by U.K. manufacturers.”
U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo | Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images
Badenoch’s comments echo concerns raised by both British automotive lobby group the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT), and by Jaguar Land Rover, in comments filed with the U.S. Treasury Department.
The SMMT warned that Biden’s green vehicle package has several “elements of concern that risk creating an uneven competitive environment, with U.K.-based manufacturers and suppliers potentially penalised.” The lobby group is taking aim at the credit scheme’s requirement for green vehicles to be built in North America, with significant subsidies available only if critical minerals are sourced from the U.S. or a U.S. ally.
In response to Washington’s plans, the EU is preparing what could amount to billions in subsidies for its own industries hit by the U.S. law, which also offers tax breaks to boost American green businesses such as solar panel manufacturers. Britain faces being squeezed in both markets, while lacking any say in whatever response Brussels decides.
Protectionism that impacts like-minded allies “isn’t the answer to the geopolitical challenges we face,” the British trade department official warned, adding “there is a serious risk” the law disrupts “vital” global supply chains of batteries and electric vehicles.
The conversations Badenoch had this month in Washington were “reassuring,” the official added. “But it’s for them to address and find solutions.”
‘Ton of work to do’
Yet others believe Badenoch will have a hard time getting her colleagues in the U.S. — now cooling on a much-touted bilateral trade deal — to take action. “The U.S. is minimally focused on how any of their policies are going to impact the U.K.,” admitted a U.S.-based representative of a major business group.
While Britain and the U.S. are “very close allies”, they added, those in Washington “just don’t really view the U.K. as an interesting trade partner and market right now.” The U.S. is more focused, they noted, on pushing back against China, meaning Badenoch has “a ton of work to do” getting the administration to soften the IRA.
Nevertheless the U.S. is still working out how its law will actually be implemented, the business figure said, and is assembling a working group on how the IRA impacts trade allies. This has the potential, they added, to “alleviate a lot of the concerns coming out of the U.K.”
Late Tuesday evening, the SMMT called on the British government to provide greater domestic support for the sector as it prepares to ramp up its own electric vehicle production. The group wants an extension past April on domestic support for firms’ energy costs; a boost to government investment in green energy sources; and a speedier national rollout of charging infrastructure and staff training.
In the meantime, Britain’s options appear limited.
Newly manufactured Land Rover and Range Rover vehicles parked and waiting to be loaded for export | Paul Ellis/AFP via Getty Images
The U.K. “could consider legal action” and haul the U.S. before the World Trade Organization or challenge the EU through provisions in the post-Brexit Trade and Cooperation Agreement, said Lowe of consultancy Flint. “But — to be blunt — neither of them care what we have to say.”
Anna Jerzewska, a trade advisor and associate fellow at the UK Trade Policy Observatory, suggested pressing ahead “with your own domestic policy and efforts to support strategic industries is perhaps more important” than complaining about foreign subsidy schemes. But she noted that after a “chaotic” political period, Britain is “likely to take longer to respond to external changes and challenges.”
And in truth, Britain “can’t afford to out-subsidize the U.S. and EU,” said David Henig, a trade expert with the European Centre For International Political Economy think tank.
Outside the EU, Britain could work to rally allies such as Japan and South Korea who are also unhappy with the Biden administration’s protectionist measures, he noted. “But I don’t think we’re in that position,” Henig said, as it would take a concerted diplomatic effort, and the U.K.’s automotive sector would “have to be well positioned” in the first place, not struggling as it is. He predicted London’s lobbying in Washington and Brussels is “not going to get anywhere.”
KYIV — In Crimea, the war is drawing ever closer, and nerves are on edge.
In conversations via secure communications, people in Crimea describe growing tension across the Black Sea peninsula as they increasingly expect the advent of direct hostilities. They say saboteur and partisan groups are now readying in the territory, which was illegally annexed by Russia in 2014.
Frustration and panic are surging, over everything from conscription to runaway prices. One person told of anger over an inability to secure hospital places thanks to the numbers of Russian wounded brought in from the fronts, while another said that the fretful Russian elite were trying to sell their glitzy holiday homes, but were finding no buyers.
When Vladimir Putin launched his all-out invasion of Ukraine in February, few people expected Ukrainian forces would nine months later be threatening to reclaim Crimea. That no longer feels like a military impossibility, however, after Kyiv’s well-organized troops showed that they could drive out Russian forces in offensive operations around Kharkiv in northeastern Ukraine and Kherson in the south.
Tamila Tasheva, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s permanent representative in Crimea, has high hopes the peninsula will end up back in Ukrainian hands. “Yes, of course, it is entirely possible we will get Crimea back,” she told POLITICO.
“Our goal is the return of all our territory, which of course includes Crimea,” she said in her office in Kyiv. A 37-year-old Crimean Tatar, whose family lives on the peninsula, Tasheva is busy preparing plans for what happens after Crimea is “de-occupied” and is drafting a legal framework to cope with complex issues of transitional justice that will arise. She says while Kyiv would prefer the peninsula to be handed back without a fight, “a military way may be the only solution.”
“The situation is very different now from 2014. We have a lot of communication with people in Crimea and they’re increasingly angered by the high food prices and shortages in drugs and medicines,” she said. “And there’s been an increase in anti-war protests, especially since the start of conscription and partial mobilization.”
When asked about people forming anti-Russian partisan groups, she simply commented: “Of course they are.” The difference between 2014 when Russia annexed Crimea and now comes down to the fact, she argues, that Ukraine has a strong army and a determined leadership and that is affecting and fortifying people’s thinking in Crimea.
Against the occupiers
For Putin, Crimea has long been a sacred cause — he called it an “inseparable part of Russia” — and that led many in the West to fear it could be a strategic red line. That sense was hardly helped by nuclear saber-rattler-in-chief, former President Dmitry Medvedev, who issued ominous warnings about any attack on Crimea. “Judgment Day will come very fast and hard. It will be very difficult to take cover,” Medvedev, now deputy chairman of the Security Council of Russia, said earlier this year in comments reported by the TASS news agency.
Tensions ratcheted up dramatically, however, after the explosion on October 8 that damaged the Kerch Bridge, a vital supply line between Russia and Crimea.
People pose in front of a postage stamp showing an artist’s impression of the Kerch bridge on fire | Ed Ram/Getty Images
People in Crimea say the Russians are jittery and on the hunt for pro-Ukrainian sympathizers, fearing more acts of sabotage. Kyiv has never formally claimed responsibility for what was most likely a truck bombing. The people POLITICO talked with can’t be named for their own safety, but they included businessmen, lawyers and IT workers.
“There was panic afterwards,” said one IT worker. “Since then, officers and soldiers have been moving their families back to Russia. And the rich have been trying to sell their properties worth $500,000 to a million, but the market is dead,” he added.
“Because of the sanctions, a lot of people have lost their jobs and prices for everything, food especially, have skyrocketed and there isn’t much choice available either. If you were making a $1,000 a month before February, now you need to be around $3,000 to be where you were, and how are you going to do that with the tourism industry dead,” he said. Locals are fuming that they can’t receive medical attention because the peninsula’s hospitals are full of Russian soldiers wounded in the fighting in Kherson and Donetsk.
With the situation worsening, more partisan cells are forming, they say. “My group of patriots know each other well: We studied and worked together for years and trust each other — we are preparing, and we understand secrecy will determine the effectiveness of our actions,” said a former banker, who claimed to be leading a seven-man cell.
Inspired by the Kerch Bridge blast, his cell is planning to sabotage military facilities using rudimentary explosives made from ammonium nitrate and diesel fuel.
“There are many provocateurs around and the Russians are anxious, so we’re vigilant. We know other partisan groups, but we don’t actively communicate for security reasons,” he said. “We’ve a deal with a police chief who understands Russia is losing and is worried — he’ll give us key to his arsenal when needed with our promise that we will put in a good word for him later,” he added.
Whether such cells represent any kind of serious threat remains to be seen and POLITICO can’t verify the claims of would-be saboteurs, but retired U.S. General Ben Hodges, a former commanding general of the United States Army Europe, says he had expected partisan cells to form, encouraged by Kyiv and otherwise.
“I would have assumed this. Both locals as well as saboteurs who have been infiltrated into Crimea. Remember the Ukrainians, of course, did this to the German Wehrmacht throughout World War II. There’s a tradition of sabotage and insurgency,” he said.
“I would hate to be a Russian truck driver on a convoy somewhere, anywhere in the area these days. I think when it does come time for decisive action, it will be a combination of local partisans and infiltrated saboteurs,” he added.
‘Crimea is Ukraine’
Ukraine’s recent victories in northeastern and southern Ukraine are fueling confident talk in Kyiv about Crimea, and since Russian forces retreated from Kherson city, 130 kilometers from the northernmost part of the peninsula, the chorus has only been growing louder, as more of the peninsula comes into rocket and missile range of the Ukrainians.
After seizing Crimea, the Kremlin harbored ambitions to turn it into another glittering seaside Sochi — or showcase it as a Black Sea rival to France’s Côte d’Azur. Construction of condos started apace with plans to make Sevastopol a major Russian cultural center. A new opera house, museum and ballet academy were to be completed next year. Around 800,000 Russians may have moved to the peninsula since 2014. The war has ruined construction schedules.
People take part in celebrations marking the eighth anniversary of Russia’s annexation of Crimea in Simferopol on March 18, 2022 | Stringer/AFP via Getty Images
Top Ukrainian officials have been taunting Russia, saying Crimea will soon be under Ukrainian control — by year’s end even or early next year. Zelenskyy has returned repeatedly to the theme: in October telling European and American parliamentary leaders: “We will definitely liberate Crimea.” His top adviser, Andriy Yermak, told POLITICO during the Halifax International Security Forum earlier this month: “I am sure that the campaign to return Crimea will take place.”
Ukrainian officials told POLITICO that Western European leaders had been the most jittery about pushing on to Crimea. America’s top general, Mark Milley, chairman of U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, has cast doubt about Ukraine’s ability to reclaim the peninsula militarily, suggesting it would be overreach. At a Pentagon press conference on November 16, he said: “The probability of a Ukrainian military victory, defined as kicking the Russians out of all of Ukraine to include what they defined, or what they claim as Crimea, the probability of that happening anytime soon, is not high, militarily.”
But the White House hasn’t walked back President Joe Biden’s February 26 remarks when he made Washington’s position clear: “We reaffirm a simple truth: Crimea is Ukraine.”
Raising the pressure
Ukrainian forces have been increasing the tempo of military activity in and near Crimea using both aerial and innovative marine drones to swarm and strike in October and last Tuesday Russian warships stationed at Sevastopol, the home base of the Russian navy in the Black Sea. The Russian-installed governor of Sevastopol, Mikhail Razvozhaev, said in a social media post after Tuesday’s attack that a couple of drones had been intercepted, later adding another three had been downed by Russian warships.
Kyiv has not commented on that attack, but last week, Ukraine’s top security official confirmed Israeli press reports that 10 Iranian military advisers in Crimea were killed by Ukrainian drones. “You shouldn’t be where you shouldn’t be,” said Oleksiy Danilov, secretary of Ukraine’s defense council, in an interview with the Guardian. The Ukrainians say Iranian technicians and operators have been assisting the Russians with the Shahed-136 armed drones supplied by Tehran.
The attacks appear to be unnerving the Russian military — especially those carried out by maritime drones. The October attack involved half a dozen radio-operated marine drones equipped with jet-ski engines. Some of the nearly six-meter-long drones are thought to have damaged two ships, a minesweeper and more importantly the Admiral Makarov, a frigate. On November 18, the Ukrainians repeated the exercise further afield with an attack on warships in the port at Novorossiysk, a Black Sea city in southern Russia.
One Crimea resident told POLITICO that the drone strikes appear to have forced Russian naval commanders to rethink the positioning of their ships. “A group of Russian warships were until recently regularly off the coast near my house. I used to watch them and if they fired missiles, I’d contact my family in various cities in Ukraine to warn them rockets were on their way. But now the warships have moved away, they were too vulnerable where they were.” he said.
The Russians are fortifying their defenses, especially in the Dzhankois’kyi district, the northern part of the Crimean steppe near Syvash Bay, according to Andrii Chernyak of the main intelligence directorate of the ministry of defense of Ukraine.
Hodges, the former general, disagrees with General Milley and says an offensive “is possible and I believe they will be working to be in place to begin this in a deliberate way as early as January.”
“Between now and then, they will continue to isolate Crimea by going after the Kerch Bridge again and also the land bridge that originates in Rostov and runs along the northern coast of the Sea of Azov down through Mariupol and Melitopol and on to the peninsula. The Ukrainians are going to be looking to pound away at the bridge and the land link, a form of eighteenth-century siege tactics,” he added.
Those siege tactics, he says, will be accompanied by daring use of high-tech weapons. “The U.S. navy has put a lot of development effort into unmanned maritime systems and to see what the Ukrainians have been doing with swarm attacks by drones has really impressed me,” he said.
The Ukrainians, he predicts, will attempt “to fight their way across the isthmus when the conditions are right,” adding: “This is going to come down to a test of will and a test of logistics.”
BERLIN — On a balmy September evening last year, an Azeri man carrying a Russian passport crossed the border from northern Cyprus into southern Cyprus. He traveled light: a pistol, a handful of bullets and a silencer.
It was going to be the perfect hit job.
Then, just as the man was about to step into a rental car and carry out his mission — which prosecutors say was to gun down five Jewish businessmen, including an Israeli billionaire — the police surrounded him.
The failed attack was just one of at least a dozen in Europe in recent years, some successful, others not, that have involved what security officials call “soft” targets, involving murder, abduction, or both. The operations were broadly similar in conception, typically relying on local hired guns. The most significant connection, intelligence officials say, is that the attacks were commissioned by the same contractor: the Islamic Republic of Iran.
In Cyprus, authorities believe Iran, which blames Israel for a series of assassinations of nuclear specialists working on the Iranian nuclear program, was trying to signal that it could strike back where Israel least expects it.
“This is a regime that bases its rule on intimidation and violence and espouses violence as a legitimate measure,” David Barnea, the head of Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency, said in rare public remarks in September, describing what he said was a recent uptick in violent plots. “It is not spontaneous. It is planned, systematic, state terrorism — strategic terrorism.”
He left out one important detail: It’s working.
That success has come in large part because Europe — the staging ground for most Iranian operations in recent years — has been afraid to make Tehran pay. Since 2015, Iran has carried out about a dozen operations in Europe, killing at least three people and abducting several others, security officials say.
“The Europeans have not just been soft on the Islamic Republic, they’ve been cooperating with them, working with them, legitimizing the killers,” Masih Alinejad, the Iranian-American author and women’s rights activist said, highlighting the continuing willingness of European heads of state to meet with Iran’s leaders.
Alinejad, one of the most outspoken critics of the regime, understands better than most just how far Iran’s leadership is willing to go after narrowly escaping both a kidnapping and assassination attempt.
“If the Islamic Republic doesn’t receive any punishment, is there any reason for them to stop taking hostages or kidnapping or killing?” she said, and then answered: “No.”
Method of first resort
Assassination has been the sharpest instrument in the policy toolbox ever since Brutus and his co-conspirators stabbed Julius Caesar repeatedly. Over the millennia, it’s also proved risky, often triggering disastrous unintended consequences (see the Roman Empire after Caesar’s killing or Europe after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo).
And yet, for both rogue states like Iran, Russia and North Korea, and democracies such as the United States and Israel — the attraction of solving a problem by removing it often proves irresistible.
Even so, there’s a fundamental difference between the two spheres: In the West, assassination remains a last resort (think Osama bin Laden); in authoritarian states, it’s the first (who can forget the 2017 assassination by nerve agent of Kim Jong-nam, the playboy half-brother of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, upon his arrival in Kuala Lumpur?). For rogue states, even if the murder plots are thwarted, the regimes still win by instilling fear in their enemies’ hearts and minds.
That helps explain the recent frequency. Over the course of a few months last year, Iran undertook a flurry of attacks from Latin America to Africa. In Colombia, police arrested two men in Bogotá on suspicion they were plotting to assassinate a group of Americans and a former Israeli intelligence officer for $100,000; a similar scene played out in Africa, as authorities in Tanzania, Ghana and Senegal arrested five men on suspicion they were planning attacks on Israeli targets, including tourists on safari; in February of this year, Turkish police disrupted an intricate Iranian plot to kill a 75-year-old Turkish-Israeli who owns a local aerospace company; and in November, authorities in Georgia said they foiled a plan hatched by Iran’s Quds Force to murder a 62-year-old Israeli-Georgian businessman in Tbilisi.
Whether such operations succeed or not, the countries behind them can be sure of one thing: They won’t be made to pay for trying. Over the years, the Russian and Iranian regimes have eliminated countless dissidents, traitors and assorted other enemies (real and perceived) on the streets of Paris, Berlin and even Washington, often in broad daylight. Others have been quietly abducted and sent home, where they faced sham trials and were then hanged for treason.
While there’s no shortage of criticism in the West in the wake of these crimes, there are rarely real consequences. That’s especially true in Europe, where leaders have looked the other way in the face of a variety of abuses in the hopes of reviving a deal to rein in Tehran’s nuclear weapons program and renewing business ties.
Unlike the U.S. and Israel, which have taken a hard line on Iran ever since the mullahs came to power in 1979, Europe has been more open to the regime. Many EU officials make no secret of their ennui with America’s hard-line stance vis-à-vis Iran.
“Iran wants to wipe out Israel, nothing new about that,” the EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell told POLITICO in 2019 when he was still Spanish foreign minister. “You have to live with it.”
History of assassinations
There’s also nothing new about Iran’s love of assassination.
Indeed, many scholars trace the word “assassin” to Hasan-i Sabbah, a 12th-century Persian missionary who founded the “Order of Assassins,” a brutal force known for quietly eliminating adversaries.
Hasan’s spirit lived on in the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the hardline cleric who led Iran’s Islamic revolution and took power in 1979. One of his first victims as supreme leader was Shahriar Shafiq, a former captain in the Iranian navy and the nephew of the country’s exiled shah. He was shot twice in the head in December 1979 by a masked gunman outside his mother’s home on Rue Pergolèse in Paris’ fashionable 16th arrondissement.
In the years that followed, Iranian death squads took out members and supporters of the shah and other opponents across Europe, from France to Sweden, Germany, Switzerland and Austria. In most instances, the culprits were never caught. Not that the authorities really needed to look.
In 1989, for example, Abdul Rahman Ghassemlou, a leader of Iran’s Kurdish minority who supported autonomy for his people, was gunned down along with two associates by Iranian assassins in an apartment in Vienna.
The gunmen took refuge in the Iranian embassy. They were allowed to leave Austria after Iran’s ambassador to Vienna hinted to the government that Austrians in his country might be in danger if the killers were arrested. One of the men alleged to have participated in the Vienna operation would later become one of his country’s most prominent figures: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran’s president from 2005 until 2013.
Not even the bad publicity surrounding that case tempered the regime’s killing spree. In the years that followed, the body count only increased. Some of the murders were intentionally gruesome in order to send a clear message.
Fereydoun Farrokhzad, for example, a dissident Iranian popstar who found exile in Germany, was killed in his home in Bonn in 1992. The killers cut off his genitals, his tongue and beheaded him.
His slaying was just one of dozens in what came to be known as Iran’s “chain murders,” a decade-long killing spree in which the government targeted artists and dissidents at home and abroad. Public outcry over the murder of a trio of prominent writers in 1998, including a husband and wife, forced the regime hard-liners behind the killings to retreat. But only for a time.
Illustration by Joan Wong for POLITICO
Then, as now, the dictatorship’s rationale for such killings has been to protect itself.
“The highest priority of the Iranian regime is internal stability,” a Western intelligence source said. “The regime views its opponents inside and outside Iran as a significant threat to this stability.”
Much of that paranoia is rooted in the Islamic Republic’s own history. Before returning to Iran in 1979, Khomeini spent nearly 15 years in exile, including in Paris, an experience that etched the power of exile into the Islamic Republic’s mythology. In other words, if Khomeini managed to lead a revolution from abroad, the regime’s enemies could too.
Bargaining chips
Given Europe’s proximity to Iran, the presence of many Iranian exiles there and the often-magnanimous view of some EU governments toward Tehran, Europe is a natural staging ground for the Islamic Republic’s terror.
The regime’s intelligence service, known as MOIS, has built operational networks across the Continent trained to abduct and murder through a variety of means, Western intelligence officials say.
As anti-regime protests have erupted in Iran with increasing regularity since 2009, the pace of foreign operations aimed at eliminating those the regime accuses of stoking the unrest has increased.
While several of the smaller-scale assassinations — such as the 2015 hit in the Netherlands on Iranian exile Mohammad-Reza Kolahi — have succeeded, Tehran’s more ambitious operations have gone awry.
The most prominent example involved a 2018 plot to blow up the annual Paris meeting of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, an alliance of exile groups seeking to oust the regime. Among those attending the gathering, which attracted tens of thousands, was Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor and then-U.S. President Donald Trump’s lawyer.
Following a tip from American intelligence, European authorities foiled the plot, arresting six, including a Vienna-based Iranian diplomat who delivered a detonation device and bombmaking equipment to an Iranian couple tasked with carrying out an attack on the rally. Authorities observed the handover at a Pizza Hut in Luxembourg and subsequently arrested the diplomat, Assadollah Assadi, on the German autobahn as he sped back to Vienna, where he enjoyed diplomatic immunity.
Assadi was convicted on terror charges in Belgium last year and sentenced to 20 years is prison. He may not even serve two.
The diplomat’s conviction marked the first time an Iranian operative had been held accountable for his actions by a European court since the Islamic revolution. But Belgium’s courage didn’t last long.
In February, Iran arrested Belgian aid worker Olivier Vandecasteele on trumped-up espionage charges and placed him into solitary confinement at the infamous Evin prison in Tehran. Vandecasteele headed the Iran office of the Norwegian Refugee Council, an aid group.
Following reports that Vandecasteele’s health was deteriorating and tearful public pleas from his family, the Belgian government — ignoring warnings from Washington and other governments that it was inviting further kidnappings — relented and laid the groundwork for an exchange to trade Assadi for Vandecasteele. The swap could happen any day.
“Right now, French, Swedish, German, U.K., U.S., Belgian citizens, all innocents, are in Iranian prisons,” said Alinejad, the Iranian women’s rights campaigner.
“They are being used like bargaining chips,” she said. “It works.”
Amateur hour
Even so, the messiness surrounding the Assadi case might explain why most of Iran’s recent operations have been carried out by small-time criminals who usually have no idea who they’re working for. The crew in last year’s Cyprus attack, for example, included several Pakistani delivery boys. While that gives Iran plausible deniability if the perpetrators get caught, it also increases the likelihood that the operations will fail.
“It’s very amateur, but an amateur can be difficult to trace,” one intelligence official said. “They’re also dispensable. They get caught, no one cares.”
Iranian intelligence has had more success in luring dissidents away from Europe to friendly third countries where they are arrested and then sent back to Iran. That’s what happened to Ruhollah Zam, a journalist critical of the regime who had been living in Paris. The circumstances surrounding his abduction remain murky, but what is known is that someone convinced him to travel to Iraq in 2019, where he was arrested and extradited to Iran. He was convicted for agitating against the regime and hanged in December of 2020.
One could be forgiven for thinking that negotiations between Iran and world powers over renewing its dormant nuclear accord (which offered Tehran sanctions relief in return for supervision of its nuclear program) would have tamed its covert killing program. In fact, the opposite occurred.
In July of 2021, U.S. authorities exposed a plot by Iranian operatives to kidnap Alinejad from her home in Brooklyn as part of an elaborate plan that involved taking her by speedboat to a tanker in New York Harbor before spiriting her off to Venezuela, an Iranian ally, and then on to the Islamic Republic.
A year later, police disrupted what the FBI believed was an attempt to assassinate Alinejad, arresting a man with an assault rifle and more than 60 rounds of ammunition who had knocked on her door.
American authorities also say Tehran planned to avenge the assassination of General Qassem Soleimani, the head of its feared paramilitary Quds Force who was the target of a U.S. drone strike in 2020, by seeking to kill former National Security Adviser John Bolton and Mike Pompeo, the former Secretary of State, among other officials.
Through it all, neither the U.S. nor Europe gave up hope for a nuclear deal.
“From the point of view of the Iranians, this is proof that it is possible to separate and maintain a civilized discourse on the nuclear agreement with a deceptive Western appearance, on the one hand, and on the other hand, to plan terrorist acts against senior American officials and citizens,” Barnea, the Mossad chief said. “This artificial separation will continue for as long as the world allows it to.”
Kremlin’s killings
Some hope the growing outrage in Western societies over Iran’s crackdown on peaceful protestors could be the spark that convinces Europe to get tough on Iran. But Europe’s handling of its other favorite rogue actor — Russia — suggests otherwise.
Long before Russia’s annexation of Crimea, much less its all-out war against Ukraine, Moscow, similar to Iran, undertook an aggressive campaign against its enemies abroad and made little effort to hide it.
Russian police investigators stand near the body of killed Russian opposition leader and former Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov | Sasha Mordovets/Getty Images
The most prominent victim was Alexander Litvinenko. A former KGB officer like Vladimir Putin, Litvinenko had defected to the U.K., where he joined other exiles opposed to Putin. In 2006, he was poisoned in London by Russian intelligence with polonium-210, a radioactive isotope that investigators concluded was mixed into his tea. The daring operation signaled Moscow’s return to the Soviet-era practice of artful assassination.
Litvinenko died a painful death within weeks, but not before he blamed Putin for killing him, calling the Russian president “barbaric.”
“You may succeed in silencing me, but that silence comes at a price,” Litvinenko said from his deathbed.
In the end, however, the only one who really paid a price was Litvinenko. Putin continued as before and despite deep tensions in the U.K.’s relationship with Russia over the assassination, it did nothing to halt the transformation of the British capital into what has come to be known as “Londongrad,” a playground and second home for Russia’s Kremlin-backed oligarchs, who critics say use the British financial and legal systems to hide and launder their money.
Litvinenko’s killing was remarkable both for its brutality and audacity. If Putin was willing to take out an enemy on British soil with a radioactive element, what else was he capable of?
It didn’t take long to find out. In the months and years that followed, the bodies started to pile up. Critical journalists, political opponents and irksome oligarchs in the prime of life began dropping like flies.
Europe didn’t blink.
Angela Merkel, then German chancellor, visited Putin in his vacation residence in Sochi just weeks after the murders of Litvinenko and investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya and said … nothing.
Even after there was no denying Putin’s campaign to eradicate anyone who challenged him, European leaders kept coming in the hope of deepening economic ties.
Neither the assassination of prominent Putin critic Boris Nemtsov just steps away from the Kremlin in 2015, nor the poisoning of a KGB defector and his daughter in the U.K. in 2018 and of opposition leader Alexei Navalny in 2020 with nerve agents disabused European leaders of the notion that Putin was someone they could do business with and, more importantly, control.
‘Anything can happen’
Just how comfortable Russia felt about using Europe as a killing field became clear in the summer of 2019. Around noon on a sunny August day, a Russian assassin approached Zelimkhan Khangoshvili, a Chechen with Georgian nationality, and shot him twice in the head with a 9mm pistol. The murder took place in a park located just a few hundred meters from Germany’s interior ministry and several witnesses saw the killer flee. He was nabbed within minutes as he was changing his clothes and trying to dispose of his weapon and bike in a nearby canal.
It later emerged that Khangoshvili, a Chechen fighter who had sought asylum in Germany, was on a Russian kill list. Russian authorities considered him a terrorist and accused him of participating in a 2010 attack on the Moscow subway that killed nearly 40 people.
In December of 2019, Putin denied involvement in Khangoshvili’s killing. Sort of. Sitting next to French President Emmanuel Macron, Merkel and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy following a round of talks aimed at resolving the conflict in Ukraine, the Russian referred to him as a “very barbaric man with blood on his hands.”
“I don’t know what happened to him,” Putin said. “Those are opaque criminal structures where anything can happen.”
Early on October 19 of last year, Berlin police discovered a dead man on the sidewalk outside the Russian embassy. He was identified as Kirill Zhalo, a junior diplomat at the embassy. He was also the son of General Major Alexey Zhalo, the deputy head of a covert division in Russia’s FSB security service in Moscow that ordered Khangoshvili’s killing. Western intelligence officials believe that Kirill Zhalo, who arrived in Berlin just weeks before the hit on the Chechen, was involved in the operation and was held responsible for its exposure.
The Russian embassy called his death “a tragic accident,” suggesting he had committed suicide by jumping out of a window. Russia refused to allow German authorities to perform an autopsy (such permission is required under diplomatic protocols) and sent his body back to Moscow.
Less than two months later, the Russian hitman who killed Khangoshvili, was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison. Russia recently tried to negotiate his release, floating the possibility of exchanging American basketball player Brittney Griner and another U.S. citizen they have in custody. Washington rejected the idea.
The war in Ukraine offers profound lessons about the inherent risks of coddling dictators.
Though Germany, with its thirst for Russian gas, is often criticized in that regard, it was far from alone in Europe. Europe’s insistence on giving Putin the benefit of the doubt over the years in the face of his crimes convinced him that he would face few consequences in the West for his invasion of Ukraine. That’s turned out to be wrong; but who could blame the Russian leader for thinking it?
Iran presents Europe with an opportunity to learn from that history and confront Tehran before it’s too late. But there are few signs it’s prepared to really get tough. EU officials say they are “considering” following Washington’s lead and designating the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a vast military organization that also controls much of the Iran’s economy, as a terror organization. Last week, German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock spearheaded an effort at the United Nations to launch a formal investigation into Iran’s brutal crackdown against the ongoing protests in the country.
Yet even as the regime in Tehran snuffs out enemies and races to fulfil its goal of building both nuclear weapons and missiles that can reach any point on the Continent, some EU leaders appear blind to the wider context as they pursue the elusive renewal of the nuclear accord.
“It is still there,” Borrell said recently of the deal he has taken a leading role in trying to resurrect. “It has nothing to do with other issues, which certainly concern us.”
CrowdStrike Holdings Inc. shares dropped in the extended session Tuesday after the cybersecurity company said new subscriptions came in below expectations amid macro headwinds and longer customer buying cycles.
Given concern that businesses are cutting back on spending, CrowdStrike CRWD, -1.04%
shares plummeted nearly 20% after hours, following a 1% decline in the regular session to close at $138.
George Kurtz, CrowdStrike’s co-founder and chief executive, told analysts on a conference call that the company reported $198.1 million in net new annual recurring revenue, or ARR, in the quarter, not as much as it had hoped.
ARR is a software-as-a-service metric that shows how much revenue the company can expect based on subscriptions. That grew 54% to $2.34 billion from the year-ago quarter, while the Street expected $2.35 billion. Kurtz said that about $10 million was deferred to future quarters.
“We expect these macro headwinds to persist through Q4,” Kurtz told analysts.
Burt Podbere, CrowdStrike’s chief financial officer, explained that the company relies on ARR because it’s “an X-ray into the contract sales.”
“As George mentioned, even though we entered Q2 with a record pipeline, and we are expecting the elongated sales cycles due to macro concerns to continue, we’re not expecting to see the typical Q4 budget flush given the increased scrutiny on budgets.”
Podbere said it is “prudent to assume” fourth-quarter net new ARR will be up to 10% below the third quarter’s. That would mean about a 10% year-over-year headwind going into the first half of next year, and “full-year net new ARR would be roughly flat to modestly up year over year.”
“This would imply a low 30s ending ARR growth rate and a subscription revenue growth rate in the low to mid-30s for FY 2024,” Podbere said.
The company expects adjusted fiscal fourth-quarter earnings of 42 cents to 45 cents a share on revenue of $619.1 million to $628.2 million, while analysts surveyed by FactSet forecast earnings of 34 cents a share on revenue of $633.9 million, according to analysts.
CrowdStrike expects full-year earnings of $1.49 to $1.52 a share on revenue of $2.22 billion to $2.23 billion. Wall Street expects $1.33 a share on revenue of $2.23 billion.
The company reported a fiscal third-quarter loss of $55 million, or 24 cents a share, compared with a loss of $50.5 million, or 22 cents a share, in the year-ago period. Adjusted net income, which excludes stock-based compensation and other items, was 40 cents a share, compared with 17 cents a share in the year-ago period.
Revenue rose to $580.9 million from $380.1 million in the year-ago quarter.
Analysts expected CrowdStrike to report earnings of 28 cents a share on revenue of $516 million, based on the company’s outlook of 30 cents to 32 cents a share on revenue of $569.1 million to $575.9 million.
So far in November, cloud software stocks have been getting trashed. While the S&P 500 SPX, -0.16%
has gained 2%, and the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite COMP, -0.59%
is flat, the iShares Expanded Tech-Software Sector ETF IGV, -0.78%
has fallen more than 2%, the Global X Cloud Computing ETF CLOU, -1.12%
has declined more than 4%, the First Trust Cloud Computing ETF SKYY, -0.74%
has fallen more than 6%, and the WisdomTree Cloud Computing Fund WCLD, -1.05%
has dropped more than 11%.
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
“There is no kind of dishonesty into which otherwise good people more easily and frequently fall than that of defrauding the government.”
These words of wisdom from Benjamin Franklin have, unfortunately, proven timeless. People have been defrauding the government for centuries, but last month, the US hit an estimated $45 billion in COVID-19-related unemployment fraud. Now the government starts the long, costly and inefficient process of recouping the money, conducting investigations and punishing those responsible. This process is often called the “pay and chase” model.
With all that fraud, it can be challenging for government agencies and private companies to separate the wheat from the chaff (or, in this case, the fraud from the noise). For example, is a person calling your call center with a device you haven’t seen before actually an existing customer with a new phone or someone attempting to take over an account?
These issues create room for inefficiencies and cost companies huge operational sums when they cannot tell the difference. But, going too heavy with stricter verification that may dampen the customer experience is also something you have to avoid. The good news is it’s possible to identify fraudulent activity with modern technology better and thus increase efficiency.
At its core, the focus of fraudsters has remained on tricking people into giving access to as much money or data as possible. It’s nothing new; the term “con man” was likely coined in the 1800s. Whether it’s Bill Starbuck’s “The Rain Song” from the musical 110 in the Shade, where the charismatic con man convinces townspeople to give him money to make it rain and end a drought, or someone calling your grandmother and pretending to be a government agency, fraud has always been, and always will be.
Our ability to close fraud loopholes is improving. Still, fraudsters are constantly creating new schemes, and technology continues to enable them to get better at fooling us and covering their tracks. This requires businesses and the government to react to new trends quickly; the best defense against fraud is to be aware of the techniques, remain on guard and educate consumers to do the same. All the while, businesses and governments must walk a tightrope between restricting freedoms too much and being purely reactive to crime.
The public and private sectors utilize call centers for customer account issues and require telephonic calls for some account actions. Unfortunately, these call centers are very susceptible to fraud. The time customer service reps spend trying to distinguish between fraud and noise (i.e., the legitimate calls that get flagged as fraud) distracts from more critical business and carries high costs.
For example, in the financial services industry, the cost of fraud to businesses is $4 for every $1 of actual fraud. That means, on average, if a person defrauds $1,000 from a company, that business’s related costs will be $4,000. And this figure doesn’t include additional costs incurred if a fraudster secures enough information on their first attempt to follow up with more attempts on the same business or its clients, nor the cost of reputational damage post-attack.
One of the big problems, though, is that fraud and noise can often seem similar. For instance, imagine you broke your cell phone and got a new one. When you try to access your bank account from your new phone, your account gets flagged because it doesn’t recognize the device. Now, you have to call to unlock your account, and your bank needs to spend resources confirming your identity. This protects the consumer and the bank but introduces inefficiency for both parties.
Is there a solution? Modern identity proofing continues to progress in leaps and bounds. The technology exists now to implement much better identity proofing that’s device-agnostic and uses powerful, behind-the-scenes algorithms to prove a customer’s identity — often without them even realizing what’s going on. Artificial intelligence (AI) helps us use data points across the web to calculate the risk associated with a person or caller and create a dynamic risk profile. Then, based on their risk level, they may be required to complete additional automated steps to log in to their account or conduct business.
There are more straightforward steps, as well. For example, impersonating the dead has long been a lucrative tactic for fraudsters. Years ago, criminals even got hold of the Social Security Administration’s (SSA) Death Master File, a restricted record with millions of people to impersonate. One of the first steps a company can take during the account creation process is to check the Death Master File. Every time a person initiates a request for money with an agency, a quick screening can be done to ensure the person requesting a payment from the government is not a dead person. That would be a sure sign something’s amiss.
Of course, there’s no end to the trickery. Recently, I watched in real-time as a phone-based scam targeted my stepmother. She received a text that appeared to be from a friend saying her email had been the target of a scam, and my stepmom should call a particular number to make sure hers hadn’t also been compromised. I had to explain that it wasn’t her friend texting but someone using her friend’s number.
Older people are especially susceptible to fraud like this, but scammers have discovered impersonating a government agency or some entity with authority is a winner. If we get a call saying we’re in trouble with a government entity, will we ignore it? Probably not — many of us will do exactly what they say.
We aren’t going to be able to screen out fraud completely. But we can get better at thwarting it, saving operational dollars and resources and providing good customer experiences. The greatest vulnerability in any system is usually the humans using it, so implementing more automated identity-proofing and anti-scam tools can help bridge the gap. We can build efficiency into our systems by keeping up with the latest scam trends and implementing adequate technical controls to stop them.
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Using a person’s face to authenticate themselves is something that humans have been doing for hundreds of thousands of years. New technological advancements have transformed how we interact with one another, and businesses especially are capitalizing on these advancements to verify identity. Those previous pillars of in-person and digital verification, like knowledge-based authentication (KBA), are no longer adequate protection against fraud.
Why? Just as technology advances, so does fraud. Facial biometric technology has become the foundation that businesses and consumers rely on to verify their identities. In this article, we will provide the top five reasons facial biometrics can help your business.
Facial biometrics offer businesses a high degree of confidence that the customer is a legitimate user and is who they claim to be. The authentication process is streamlined in a way that passwords and traditional two-factor authentication (2FA) never could be — all users need to do is look at their device or any other camera to prove their identity.
In addition to being highly difficult for fraudsters to compromise due to the accuracy of facial recognition technology, the leading algorithms also now produce near-zero bias, performing far better than manual human review. In fact, in one recent study of facial recognition algorithms, NIST found the technology could identify passengers boarding an airplane at an accuracy rate of 99.5%. Furthermore, this success rate (for the top facial recognition algorithms) was the same regardless of demographics, meaning race or gender had no meaningful impact on accuracy.
This level of accuracy can significantly impact a business’s ability to combat a variety of types of fraud. For example, companies can have much more confidence at account creation that the user is real through identity confirmation (as long as they match the selfie with liveness detection and an authentic government-issued ID). It can also prevent account takeover fraud; SMS-based 2FA is notoriously easy to intercept, and modern algorithms are getting ever-better at weeding out sophisticated 3D masks or similar facial spoofing hacks.
2. It’s easy for users
Facial biometrics are also effortless for users to adopt. Customers are easily turned off by clunky authentication measures like KBA, particularly if they’re required multiple times during a transaction. It’s much simpler to look at your camera and take a selfie instead of inputting a password or receiving a text message.
Facial biometrics is also gaining wider and wider acceptance among the general population. As concerns about privacy and accuracy are addressed and corrected, this technology will continue to gain widespread acceptance. While using any biometrics method is better than not using it at all, there is a reason why all of our devices have moved to facial biometrics for unlocking: Simply put, it’s easier for the user. Businesses can take advantage of this growing acceptance and make the user experience simpler and more secure with one step, leading to happier customers.
More and more businesses are adopting heavy underwriting practices to combat fraud and meet regulatory requirements. Friendly fraud is a high cost to modern businesses. Unfortunately, fraudsters may attempt to claim a legitimate purchase occurred, a subscription was renewed or an account change was made fraudulently and request a chargeback to their payment. Merchants overwhelmingly bear the burden of this fraud when they can’t prove identity, but facial recognition can reduce its occurrence significantly.
Just like having an eyewitness at the scene of the crime, facial biometrics provides businesses with a time-stamped, verified image of a person making a transaction. When someone attempts to dispute a charge, that company has irrefutable proof that the person did, in fact, make the purchase. This is also important for meeting regulatory requirements and even protecting businesses from fines and lawsuits. It also provides solid evidence in the case of any future audits on a customer’s account or purchase history.
4. It can reduce operational costs
Facial biometrics can reduce operational costs by removing the need for current labor-intensive security checks that are used to confirm a customer’s identity for suspicious purchases, wire transfers or account changes. This includes texting or emailing a client as well as even calling them to ensure they are the ones behind the event. These customer service costs can quickly add up, not to mention the fact that you’re increasing the opportunities for your users to experience poor customer service as well as opening your business up to fraud via man-in-the-middle attacks.
In addition, the number of analysts needed to review, monitor and even rectify transactions has swelled. The 2022 LexisNexis True Cost of Fraud Study has now calculated that for every $1 in fraud losses, it actually costs the business $3.75 due to an increase in fraud volume, new digital payment methods and the high cost of replacing and redistributing goods.
Facial biometrics render all of this unnecessary. Companies can eliminate substantial operational costs and save time and resources for their fraud teams simply by pairing a quick selfie with liveness detection. You can be sure with a high degree of certainty that the individual is who they say they are, and your team can stop wasting time analyzing transactions or unlocking accounts.
Finally, facial biometrics can be implemented without concern for customer devices because it’s device agnostic. As long as a device has a camera, it can perform the necessary functions for facial authentication. There’s no requirement for fingerprint scanners or microphones in loud, busy areas; these cameras are small, inexpensive and can be installed at any kiosk where such transactions occur. Furthermore, even cheap cameras can offer accurate facial recognition with modern algorithms. It also helps that almost everyone carries a high-quality camera in their pockets via their mobile device.
People use facial recognition to identify others every day. It’s been a strange century, where our move to digital rapidly outpaced the technology to keep using faces. However, we’re quickly moving past that limitation, and facial biometrics are a reliable gateway for businesses to verify their customers’ identities. It’s time to make the move, and companies that are able to implement facial authentication fully will reap the rewards.
NATO allies finally agreed earlier this year that China is a “challenge.” What that means is anyone’s guess.
That’s the task now facing officials from NATO’s 30-member sprawl since they settled on the label in June: Turning an endlessly malleable term into an actual plan.
Progress, thus far, has been modest — at best.
At one end, China hawks like the U.S. are trying to converge NATO’s goals with their own desire to constrain Beijing. At the other are China softliners like Hungary who want to engage Beijing. Then there’s a vast and shifting middle: hawks that don’t want to overly antagonize Beijing; softliners that still fret about economic reliance on China.
U.S. Ambassador to NATO Julianne Smith insisted the American and NATO strategies can be compatible.
“I see tremendous alignment between the two,” she told POLITICO. But, she acknowledged, translating the alliance’s words into action is “a long and complicated story.”
Indeed, looming over the entire debate is the question of whether China even merits so much attention right now. War is raging in NATO’s backyard. Russia is not giving up its revanchist ambitions.
“NATO was not conceived for operations in the Pacific Ocean — it’s a North Atlantic alliance,” said Josep Borrell, the EU’s top diplomat, in a recent interview with POLITICO.
“Certainly one can consider other threats and challenges,” he added. “But [for] the time being, don’t you think that we have enough threats and challenges on the traditional scenario of NATO?”
The issue will be on the table this week in Bucharest, where foreign ministers from across the alliance will sign off on a new report about responding to China. While officials have agreed on several baseline issues, the talks will still offer a preview of the tough debates expected to torment NATO for years, especially given China’s anticipated move to throttle Taiwan — the semi-autonomous island the U.S. has pledged to defend.
“Now,” said one senior European diplomat, “the ‘so what’ is not easy.”
30 allies, 30 opinions
NATO’s “challenge” label for China — which came at an annual summit in Madrid — is a seemingly innocuous word that still represented an unprecedented show of Western unity against Beijing’s rise.
In a key section of the alliance’s new strategic blueprint, leaders wrote that “we will work together responsibly, as Allies, to address the systemic challenges” that China poses to the military alliance.
It was, in many ways, a historic moment, hinting at NATO’s future and reflecting deft coordination among 30 members that have long enjoyed vastly different relationships with Beijing.
The U.S. has driven much of the effort to draw NATO’s attention to China, arguing the alliance must curtail Beijing’s influence, reduce dependencies on the Asian power and invest in its own capabilities. Numerous allies have backed this quest, including Canada, the United Kingdom, Lithuania and the Czech Republic.
China is “the only competitor with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to do it,” the U.S. wrote in its own national security strategy released last month.
NATO is a wide-ranging alliance | Denis Doyle/Getty Images
But NATO is a wide-ranging alliance. Numerous eastern European countries lean toward these hawks but want to keep the alliance squarely focused on the Russian threat. Some are wary of angering China, and the possibility of pushing Beijing further into Moscow’s arms. Meanwhile, a number of western European powers fret over China’s role in sensitive parts of the Western economy but still want to maintain economic links.
Now the work is on to turn these disparate sentiments into something usable.
“There is a risk that we endlessly debate the adjectives that we apply here,” said David Quarrey, the United Kingdom’s ambassador to NATO.
“We are very focused on practical implementation,” he told POLITICO in an interview. “I think that’s where the debate needs to go here — and I think we are making progress with that.”
For Quarrey and Smith, the U.S. ambassador, that means getting NATO to consider several components: building more protections in cyberspace, a domain China is seeking to dominate; preparing to thwart attacks on the infrastructure powering society, a Western vulnerability Russia has exposed; and ensuring key supply chains don’t run through China.
Additionally, Quarrey said, NATO must also deepen “even further” its partnerships with regional allies like Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand.
While NATO allies can likely broadly agree on goals like boosting cyber defenses, there’s some grumbling about the ramifications of pivoting to Asia.
The U.S. “wants as much China as possible to make NATO relevant to China-minded Washingtonians,” the senior European diplomat said. But, this person added, it is “not clear where NATO really adds value.”
And the U.K., the diplomat argued, is pressing NATO on China because it is “in need of some multilateral framework after Brexit.”
Perhaps most importantly, a turn to China raises existential questions about Europe’s own security. Currently, Europe is heavily reliant on U.S. security guarantees, U.S. troops stationed locally and U.S. arms suppliers.
“An unspoken truth is that to reinforce Taiwan,” the European diplomat said, the U.S. would not be “in a position to reinforce permanently in Europe.”
Europeans, this person said, “have to face the music and do more.”
Compromise central
Smith, the U.S. ambassador, realizes different perspectives on China persist within NATO.
The upcoming report on China therefore hits the safer themes, like defending critical infrastructure. While some diplomats had hoped for a more ambitious report, Smith insisted she was satisfied. The U.S. priority, she said, is to formally get the work started.
“We could argue,” she said, about “the adjectives and the way in which some of those challenges are described. But what was most important for the United States was that we were able to get all of those workstreams in the report.”
But even that is a baby step on the long highway ahead for NATO. Agreeing to descriptions and areas of work is one thing, actually doing that work is another.
“We’re still not doing much,” said a second senior European diplomat. “It’s still a report describing what areas we need to work on — there’s a lot in front of us.”
Among the big questions that remain unanswered: How could China be integrated into NATO’s defense planning? How would NATO backfill the U.S. support that currently goes to Europe if some of it is redirected to Asia? Will European allies offer Taiwan support in a crisis scenario?
Western capitals’ unyielding support for Kyiv — and the complications the war has created — is also being closely watched as countries game plan for a potential military showdown in the Asia-Pacific.
Asked last month whether the alliance would respond to an escalation over Taiwan, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg told POLITICO that “the main ambition is, of course, to prevent that from happening,” partly by working more closely with partners in the area.
Smith similarly demurred when asked about the NATO role if a full-fledged confrontation breaks out over Taiwan — a distinct possibility given Beijing’s stated desire to reunify the island with the mainland.
Instead, Smith pointed to how Pacific countries had backed Ukraine half a world away during the current war, saying “European allies have taken note.”
She added: “I think it’s triggered some questions about, should other scenarios unfold in the future, how would those Atlantic and Pacific allies come together again, to defend the core principles of the [United Nations] Charter.”
After six years of chaos and recrimination since Britons voted to leave the European Union, there are signs the country is showing an unexpected outbreak of common sense in its approach to the bloc.
In his first weeks in office, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak — a Brexiteer himself — has sent clear signals that he wants a more constructive relationship with Brussels and Paris, and to avoid a trade war with Britain’s biggest economic partner.
Gone are the nationalist bombast of former Prime Minister Boris Johnson and the sheer havoc wrought by his successor Liz Truss crashing the economy in pursuit of a Brexit dividend. Instead, they have both given way to a sudden burst of pragmatism, as Sunak is seeking practical solutions to festering problems.
This change in outlook may be partly due to the realization that Europe needs to stand united in the face of a threat to its common security from Russian President Vladimir Putin — although that hadn’t stopped Johnson from bragging about how leaving the EU had supposedly freed the United Kingdom to be more supportive of Ukraine than France or Germany.
It may also be due to the dire economic straits Britain is in after the collapse of Truss’ short-lived experiment for a deregulated, low-tax Singapore-on-the-Thames. Or, perhaps, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s hard line on any EU deal with the U.K. has had a sobering effect. As may have the shift in British public opinion, which now thinks leaving the bloc was a mistake by a margin of 56 percent to 32 percent.
For whatever reason, it is a welcome start.
In just three weeks, Sunak has signed up to an EU defense initiative to make it easier to move armed forces around the Continent, he’s acted to improve Britain’s relations with Ireland, and he’s created political space for a possible compromise on the vexed issue of trade with Northern Ireland, which has bedeviled relations with Brussels since the U.K.’s exit from the EU.
At their first meeting, Sunak told United States President Joe Biden that he wants to have a negotiated settlement on the Northern Ireland Protocol in place by next April — the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday peace agreement. So, sustained pressure from Washington is starting to pay off as well.
The prime minister has also sought to thaw frosty relations with France, clinching an agreement with Paris to clamp down on migrants crossing the Channel from northern France in small boats. Europe’s only two nuclear powers have now agreed to hold their first bilateral summit since 2018 early next year, focusing on strengthening defense cooperation.
To be fair, after saying “the jury is still out” on whether Macron was a friend or foe of the U.K., Truss had already taken a symbolic first step toward reconciliation by agreeing to attend the first meeting of the European Political Community last month. The geopolitical grouping was dreamed up by Macron to bring the entire European family together — except Russia and Belarus.
What’s more, the torrent of Europe-bashing rhetoric from Conservative ministers has almost dried up — at least for now. Suddenly, making nice with the neighbors is back in fashion, if only to ensure they don’t turn the lights off on the U.K. by cutting energy exports when supplies get tight this winter.
The tone of contrition adopted by Northern Ireland Minister Steve Baker, once the hardest of Brexit hardliners, was one of the most striking signals of this new humility. “I recognize in my own determination and struggle to get the U.K. out of the European Union that I caused a great deal of inconvenience and pain and difficulty,” he told Ireland’s RTÉ radio recently. “Some of our actions were not very respectful of Ireland’s legitimate interests. And I want to put that right.”
Meanwhile, encouragingly, Sunak is reportedly considering deprioritizing a bill by ousted Brexit ideologue Jacob Rees-Mogg to review, reform or automatically scrap some 2,400 retained EU laws, standards and regulations by the end of 2023 — a massive bureaucratic exercise that has rattled business confidence and angered almost everyone. The prime minister now seems receptive to pleas from business to give the review much more time and avoid a regulatory vacuum.
A bonfire of EU rules would inevitably provoke new trade tensions with Brussels — and at a time when the Office of Budget Responsibility, Britain’s independent fiscal watchdog, has just confirmed the growth-shredding damage inflicted by Brexit.
This isn’t the end of Britain’s traumatic rupture with the bloc. Just how neuralgic the issue remains was highlighted when earlier this week, Sunak had to deny reports that senior government figures were considering a Swiss-style relationship with the EU to ensure frictionless trade. He vowed there would be no alignment with EU rules on his watch.
To paraphrase Churchill, it may not even be the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.
Puncturing the illusion of a deregulated fiscal paradise fueled by borrowing without new revenue has had a sobering effect on the U.K. — offering Sunak a political window of opportunity to start fixing EU ties. After all, the Conservative Party can’t afford to defenestrate yet another prime minister after Theresa May, Johnson and Truss, can it?
But beyond the conciliatory tone, the real test still lies ahead.
Sunak will have to confront the hard-line Protestant Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) to push through any compromise with the EU on the Northern Ireland Protocol.
As the province remains part of the EU single market under the withdrawal treaty, any such deal is bound to involve some customs checks in Northern Ireland on goods arriving from Great Britain — even if they are scaled down from the original plan. It’s also bound to involve a role for the Court of Justice of the European Union as the ultimate arbiter of EU law. Both are anathema to the DUP.
But securing such an agreement would at least open the door to a calmer, more cooperative and sustainable relationship between London and Brussels.
Jamie Dettmer is opinion editor at POLITICO Europe.
LVIV, Ukraine — Inna missed her father’s funeral.
The grieving 36-year-old Ukrainian lawyer learned of his death as she and her two young daughters — one aged seven, the other five — boarded a flight from Heathrow Airport in London to Poland.
It was at the mist-shrouded railway station at Przemyśl, 16 kilometers from the Poland-Ukraine border, that her plan to pay her graveside respects unraveled, as salvoes of Russian missiles slammed into Ukraine’s power grid, also impacting Inna’s hometown of Vinnytsia.
The barrage on the country’s energy infrastructure — the worst it’s experienced since October 10 — not only threw major cities and small villages into darkness and cold, but it’s also wreaked havoc on Ukraine’s railways, grinding trains to a halt and leaving them powerless at stations.
Away from the front lines of battle, this is what Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine looks like — a slight, dignified blond-haired woman, with two young children in tow, trying to mourn her father and reach her 72-year-old mother to comfort her.
Knowing the journey back home would be arduous, Inna had tried to persuade her daughters to stay in Clapham, south London, where the three have been living with an English family for the past six months. “They have been very kind to us,” she explained.
Inna’s studying business administration now. Her daughters are in school. “Six months ago, they knew no English; it was hard at first for them,” she told me. Now, the kids chatter away in English, with the elder explaining her favorite thing to do at school is drawing; and the younger chiming in to announce she loves swimming.
But that calm, predictable life they’ve been living in England seemed far away right now.
The girls had insisted on accompanying their mother to Ukraine because they wanted to see their grandparents … and their cats. “When is the train coming?” the oldest demanded several times.
And as the night drew in, and the cold settled along the crowded platform at Przemyśl’s train station, other flagging, bundled-up kids started asking the same question, while parents — mainly mothers — tried to work out how to complete their journeys across the border.
As they did so and debated their options, a Polish policewoman insisted that smoking wasn’t allowed on the platform, and volunteers wearing orange or yellow vests offered hot tea, apples and fruit juice. Still, there was no sign of the scheduled train, and no information about it either.
While we waited on the platform, through the windows of a small apartment block across the road, Polish families could be seen glued to their television sets — no doubt absorbing the news that a missile had hit a grain silo in a Polish village just 100 kilometers north of Przemyśl.
As the news added to the disquiet among the Ukrainians at the station, the worry became palpable up and down the platform. Daryna, a dark-haired, middle-aged woman, was heading to see her 21-year-old son. “I’ve been living in Scotland with my daughter,” she said. “But he’s studying in Kyiv, and I want to make sure he’s OK.”
Some families are attempting to return to Ukraine to visit or mourn with family, but Russian attacks on the country’s infrastructure left many asking “When is the train coming?” | Paula Bronstein/Getty Images
“Going home now is like being transported from the normal to the abnormal,” she added.
Galina, the director of a small clothing company, was impatient to see her 10-year-old daughter, whom she left in the care of her grandmother in Kyiv while making a quick business trip to Poland. She kept texting them to make sure they were safe, but reassuring replies didn’t assuage her, as both she and the others kept scrolling on social media for news about their hometowns — Kharkiv, Chernihiv, Khmelnytskyi, Zhytomyr, Poltava, Rivne and Lviv, all affected by the nationwide missile bombardment.
My destination, Lviv, was badly impacted by the recent blasts. Several explosions were heard from the city on Tuesday, prompting Mayor Andriy Sadovyi to warn on his Telegram channel that everyone should “stay in shelter!” However, many won’t have received that message, as neither the internet nor the cellular networks were working in parts of the city. Officials said missiles and drones caused severe damage to the power grid and energy infrastructure, despite reports of successful missile interceptions too.
Some 95 kilometers from Przemyśl, Lviv was cold and damp when we arrived shortly after dawn on Wednesday. After giving up on the train, we’d crossed the border by foot and cadged a lift to the city.
As we made our way there, the city was largely without power, the traffic lights weren’t working, and the air raid sirens were clamoring. The only lights we could see were from buildings equipped with generators.
At my hotel, the manager, Andriy, told me it takes 37 gallons of diesel an hour to keep the electricity flowing, but he cautioned the water might not be that hot. “When the all-clear sounds, we will serve breakfast for another hour,” he added helpfully.
By the time I finished breakfast, electric trains were already up and running again in Lviv, less than a day after the city’s generation and transmission infrastructure was hit, and by evening, the lights were on all across the city — yet further testament to Ukrainian resilience, improvisation and refusal to be cowed.
And elsewhere, too, electrical engineers — the new heroes of Ukrainian resistance — managed to patch up the damage to get trains running and homes lit. “We had a blackout yesterday [Tuesday],” friends in Ternopil, a two-hour drive east of Lviv, told me by text. “The whole city was without electricity and water for several hours. But eventually everything returned to normal,” they added.
But with winter approaching and Russia planning to seemingly try to wear down Ukrainian resistance not so much on the battlefield but by targeting its civilian energy and water infrastructure, there are questions about how the country can ride out the pummeling.
In July and August, tens of thousands of Ukrainians who fled overseas started returning home. Manned by a colorful variety of NGOs and charities at the border crossings into Poland, the tent camps thus became largely redundant as the refugee flood leaving Ukraine turned to a trickle, and the tents eventually came down. But now they may well be needed again.
“A lot of Ukrainians will leave if there’s no heat and no electricity,” predicted Inna. She’s now in a quandary, torn between planning for a life in England — if she can get her mother a visa — or seeing her future in Ukraine.
“I was a property lawyer in Odesa, I had a good life, and things were going well. But that’s all lost,” she said, trailing off, lost in her thoughts.
After Elon Musk bought Twitter — and fired almost anyone whose job it was to deal with regulators — the social networking giant is now facing a flood of legal challenges across the European Union.
The question now is whether the EU’s watchdogs can live up to their ambitions to be the world’s digital policemen.
Ireland’s privacy regulator wants to know whether the company’s data protection standards are good enough. The European Commission doesn’t know who to ask about its upcoming online content rules. The bloc’s cybersecurity agencies raise concerns about an increase in online trolls and potential security risks.
Twitter’s unfolding turmoil is precisely the regulatory challenge that Brussels has said it wants to take on. The 27-country bloc has positioned itself — via a flurry of privacy, content and digital competition rules — as the de facto enforcer for the Western world, expanding its digital rulebook beyond the EU’s borders and urging other countries to follow its lead.
Now, the world’s richest man is putting those enforcement powers to the test.
Europe’s regulators have the largest collective rulebook to throw at companies suspected of potential breaches. But a lack of willingness to act quickly — combined with the internal confusion engulfing Twitter — has so far hamstrung the bloc’s enforcement role when it comes to holding Musk to Europe’s standards, according to eight EU and national government officials, speaking privately to POLITICO.
“This will be a major test for European regulators,” said Rebekah Tromble, director of the Institute for Data, Democracy & Politics at George Washington University. She is part of the advisory board of the European Digital Media Observatory, a group helping to shape the EU’s online content rulebook, known as the Digital Services Act (DSA).
“If Musk continues to act with intransigence, I think there’s an opportunity for European regulators to move much more quickly than normal,” she added. “These regulators will certainly be motivated to act.”
A representative for Twitter did not return requests for comment.
Regulatory firepower
The bloc certainly has the firepower to bring Twitter to heel.
Under the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, companies can be fined up to 4 percent of their annual global revenue for failing to keep people’s personal information safe. The Irish regulator, which has responsibility for enforcing these rules against Twitter because the company’s EU headquarters are in Dublin, has already doled out a €450,000 penalty for the firm’s inability to keep data safe.
As part of the bloc’s upcoming content rules, which will start to be enforced next year, the Commission will have powers to levy separate fines of up to 6 percent of a company’s yearly revenue if it does not take down illegal content. Brussels also has the right to ban a platform from operating in the EU after repeated serious violations.
“In Europe, the bird will fly by our rules,” Thierry Breton, the French commissioner, told Musk — via Twitter | Kenzo Tribouillard/AFP via Getty images
Thierry Breton, the European internal market commissioner, reminded Musk of Twitter’s obligations under the bloc’s upcoming content rules in a call with the billionaire soon after his acquisition of the social network. Musk pledged to uphold those rules, even as he has pushed back at other content moderation practices that could hamper people’s freedom of expression on the platform.
“In Europe, the bird will fly by our rules,” Breton, the French commissioner, told Musk — via Twitter.
Yet over the last three weeks, European regulators and policymakers have struggled to navigate Twitter’s internal turmoil, according to four EU and national officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.
The likes of Damien Kieran, Twitter’s chief privacy officer in charge of complying with Europe’s tough data protection standards, and Stephen Turner, the company’s chief lobbyist in Brussels, were among scores of senior officials who left since Musk took over.
Two of the EU officials, speaking about internal discussions on condition of anonymity, told POLITICO that multiple emails to Twitter executives bounced back after those individuals were laid off. One of those policymakers said he had taken to Twitter — scrolling through the scores of posts from the company’s employees announcing their departures — in search of information about who was still working there. A third official said the current confusion could prove problematic when the company had to reveal long-guarded information about the number of its EU users early next year.
Others have been fostering wider connections within the company, just in case. Arcom, France’s online platform regulator, for instance, has built ties with high-level executives outside of France and still had a contact in Dublin at the company to answer its pressing questions.
The policymaking blackholes — fueled by mass layoffs — have been felt beyond the EU.
Julie Inman Grant, Australia’s eSafety commissioner who previously ran Twitter’s public policy team in Asia, told POLITICO she had written to the company last week to remind them about its obligations to clamp down on child sexual exploitation on the platform. She had yet to hear back from Musk or other senior officials.
“We did have a meeting on the books with Twitter,” Melanie Dawes, chief executive of Ofcom, the U.K.’s communications regulator, told POLITICO ahead of her trip to Silicon Valley this week to meet many of the social media companies. “It was canceled.”
What about privacy?
Another open question is how Twitter with comply with Europe’s tough privacy rules.
Although the company’s chief privacy executive had been fired — and rumors swirled Twitter could pull out of Ireland in its cost-saving push — the Irish Data Protection Commission told POLITICO it had yet to open an investigation into the firm.
A spokesman for the agency said Twitter executives had assured Irish regulators on Monday that Renato Monteiro had been appointed as the company’s acting data protection officer — because it’s a legal requirement to have one — and no changes to how Twitter handled data had been made.
A data protection official said it was likely that Musk would move such decision-making powers to his inner circle in the United States | Justin Sullivan/Getty images
A key unanswered question is whether, in the wake of the mass layoffs, Twitter’s operations in Dublin are either shuttered or cut back to an extent that regulatory decisions are made in California and not Ireland.
Such a change would lead the company to fall foul of strict provisions within Europe’s privacy regime that require legal oversight of EU citizens’ data to be made in a firm’s headquarters within the 27-country bloc.
A data protection official, who asked to remain anonymous to speak candidly, said it was likely that Musk would move such decision-making powers to his inner circle in the United States. That potential pullback could allow any European regulator — and not just the Irish agency — to go after Twitter for potential privacy violations under the bloc’s data protection regime, the official added.
This story has been corrected to specify how multiple European privacy regulators may target Twitter for breaching the bloc’s rules if the company pulls out of Ireland.
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Mark Scott, Vincent Manancourt, Laura Kayali, Clothilde Goujard and Louis Westendarp
Turkey conducted air strikes against Kurdish militant bases in northern Iraq and Syria, the Turkish defense ministry announced early Sunday, a week after an explosion in Istanbul that killed six people and injured more than 80 others.
The targets were bases that the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) and the Syrian Kurdish YPG militia were using to launch terrorist attacks on Turkey, the ministry said.
“Our aim is to ensure the security of our 85 million citizens and our borders, and to retaliate for any treacherous attack on our country,” Defense Minister Hulusi Akar said in a statement.
Ankara blames the PKK for the Istanbul blast, a charge the outlawed group has denied. In recent days, nearly two dozen people have been arrested in connection with the bombing, including five in Bulgaria on Saturday, according to Reuters.
The violence in Istanbul is also on course to inflame tensions beyond the immediate region.
Turkey is one of just two NATO member countries that have yet to ratify bids by Finland and Sweden to join the defense alliance. Ankara has accused the Nordic countries of harboring Kurdish militants.
Last week’s attack in Istanbul “proves even more that Turkey wants to raise these concerns about terrorism and this proves somehow that it’s a problem also inside the country,” Finnish Foreign Minister Pekka Haavisto told Bloomberg News on Saturday. “It’s a momentum that Turkey is using and of course they have all the rights to raise this issue during the NATO process.”
Haavisto urged that Finland not be lumped in with Sweden on the Kurdish issue, saying Sweden has a “much bigger Kurdish minority” that originates from Turkey.
BALI, Indonesia — Rishi Sunak will invite Xi Jinping to collaborate more closely on global challenges in the first meeting between a British prime minister and Chinese president in nearly five years.
Sunak and Xi will hold a bilateral meeting Wednesday on the margins of the G20 leaders’ summit in Bali.
Ahead of the meeting — confirmed only 24 hours before it was due to take place — Downing Street insisted it was “clear-eyed in how we approach our relationship with China.”
The prime minister’s spokesman said there was a need “for China and the U.K. to establish a frank and constructive relationship,” but stressed that “the challenges posed by China are systemic” and “long-term.”
The two leaders are likely to discuss the war in Ukraine, energy security and climate change among other issues, No. 10 said.
Theresa May was the last prime minister to meet Xi, during a visit to Beijing in January 2018, at a time when Downing Street was still referring to the “golden era” of relations supposedly ushered in by David Cameron and George Osborne.
U.K.-China relations have worsened in the wake of China’s crackdown on democratic freedoms in Hong Kong, the oppression of the Uyghur Muslim minority of Xinjiang province, and concerns about the security implications of allowing Chinese companies to build critical national infrastructure in the U.K.
News of the meeting comes after Sunak softened his language on China and suggested he was abandoning plans to declare the country a “threat” as part of a major review of British foreign policy.
In response to questioning from POLITICO during the trip, Sunak described China as “a systemic challenge” but stressed that dialogue with Beijing was essential to tackling global challenges such as climate change.
Speaking to Sky News Tuesday, the PM said: “I think our approach to China is one that is very similar to our allies, whether that’s America, Australia and Canada — all countries that I’m talking about exactly this issue with while we’re here at the G20 summit.”
Sunak’s spokesman said Tuesday that the prime minister would “obviously raise the human rights record with President Xi” at the meeting.
But he added: “Equally, none of the issues that we are discussing at the G20 — be it the global economy, Ukraine, climate change, global health — none of them can be addressed without coordinated action by the world’s major economies, and of course that includes China.”
Xi has already held bilateral talks with various leaders during the summit | Kevin Frayer/Getty Images
Xi has already held bilateral talks with U.S. President Joe Biden, French President Emmanuel Macron and Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese among other leaders during the summit.
In addition to the talks with Xi, Sunak will also hold meetings with Biden, Albanese, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and Indonesian President Joko Widodo.
Iain Duncan Smith, the former Tory leader and co-chair of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, warned that the U.K. was “drifting into appeasement” with Xi.
“I am worried that the present prime minister, when he meets Xi Jinping, will be perceived as weak because it now looks like we’re drifting into appeasement with China, which is a disaster as it was in the 1930s and so it will be now,” he said. “They’re a threat to our values, they’re a threat to economic stability.”
Bob Seely, another Tory MP and member of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, added: “We need to talk to nations, especially those that may challenge our values and stability, but it is dangerous to normalize relations when they are not normal.”
But Alicia Kearns, chair of the Commons foreign affairs select committee and a member of the China Research Group, welcomed Sunak’s meeting with Xi. “It is important they meet to prevent miscalculations,” she said. “We cannot simply cut off China, we must work to create the space for dialogue, challenge and cooperation.”
PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — U.S. President Joe Biden offered a full-throated American commitment to the nations of Southeast Asia on Saturday, pledging at a Cambodia summit to help stand against China’s growing dominance in the region — without mentioning the other superpower by name.
Chinese President Xi Jinping wasn’t in the room at the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or ASEAN, summit in Phnom Penh. But Xi hovered over the proceedings just two days before he and Biden are set to have their highly anticipated first face-to-face meeting at the G20 summit in Indonesia.
The Biden White House has declared Xi’s nation its greatest economic and military rival of the next century and while the president never called out China directly, his message was squarely aimed at Beijing.
“Together we will tackle the biggest issues of our time, from climate to health security to defend against significant threats to rules-based order and to threats against the rule of law,” Biden said. “We’ll build an Indo-Pacific that is free and open, stable and prosperous, resilient and secure.”
The U.S. has long derided China’s violation of the international rules-based order — from trade to shipping to intellectual property — and Biden tried to emphasize his administration’s solidarity with a region American has too often overlooked.
His work in Phnom Penh was meant to set a framework for his meeting with Xi — his first face-to-face with the Chinese leader since taking office — which is to be held Monday at the G20 summit of the world’s richest economies, this year being held in Indonesia on the island of Bali.
Much of Biden’s agenda at ASEAN was to demonstrate resistance to Beijing.
He was to push for better freedom of navigation on the South China Sea, where the U.S. believes the nations can fly and sail wherever international law allows. The U.S. had declared that China’s resistance to that freedom challenges the world’s rules-based order.
Moreover, in an effort to crack down on unregulated fishing by China, the U.S. began an effort to use radio frequencies from commercial satellites to better track so-called dark shipping and illegal fishing. Biden also pledged to help the area’s infrastructure initiative — meant as a counter to China’s Belt and Road program — as well as to lead a regional response to the ongoing violence in Myanmar.
But it is the Xi meeting that will be the main event for Biden’s week abroad, which comes right after his party showed surprising strength in the U.S. midterm elections, emboldening the president as he headed overseas. Biden will circumnavigate the globe, having made his first stop at a major climate conference in Egypt before arriving in Cambodia for a pair of weekend summits before going on to Indonesia.
There has been skepticism among Asian states as to American commitment to the region over the last two decades. Former President Barack Obama took office with the much-ballyhooed declaration that the U.S. would “pivot to Asia,” but his administration was sidetracked by growing involvements in Middle Eastern wars.
Donald Trump conducted a more inward-looking foreign policy and spent much of his time in office trying to broker a better trade deal with China, all the while praising Xi’s authoritarian instincts. Declaring China the United States’ biggest rival, Biden again tried to focus on Beijing but has had to devote an extraordinary amount of resources to helping Ukraine fend off Russia’s invasion.
But this week is meant to refocus America on Asia — just as China, taking advantage of the vacuum left by America’s inattention, has continued to wield its power over the region.
Biden declared that the ten nations that make up ASEAN are “the heart of my administration’s Indo-Pacific strategy” and that his time in office — which included hosting the leaders in Washington earlier this year — begins “a new era in our cooperation.” He did, though, mistakenly identify the host country as “Colombia” while offering thanks at the beginning of his speech.
“We will build a better future, a better future we all say we want to see,” Biden said.
Biden was only the second U.S. president to set foot in Cambodia, after Obama visited in 2012. And like Obama did then, the president on Saturday made no public remarks about Cambodia’s dark history or the United States’ role in the nation’s tortured past.
In the 1970s, President Richard Nixon authorized a secret carpet-bombing campaign in Cambodia to cut off North Vietnam’s move toward South Vietnam. The U.S. also backed a coup that led, in part, to the rise of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, a bloodthirsty guerrilla group that went on to orchestrate a genocide that resulted in the deaths of more than 1.5 million people between 1975 and 1979.
One of the regime’s infamous Killing Fields, where nearly 20,000 Cambodians were executed and thrown in mass graves, lies just a few miles outside the center of Phnom Penh. There, a memorial featuring thousands of skulls sits as a vivid reminder of the atrocities committed just a few generations ago. White House aides said that Biden had no scheduled plans to visit.
As is customary, Biden met with the host country’s leader at the start of the summit. Prime Minister Hun Sen, a former Khmer Rouge commander, has ruled Cambodia for decades with next to no tolerance for dissent. Opposition leaders have been jailed and killed, and his administration has been accused of widespread corruption, according to human rights groups.
Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, said Biden would “engage across the board in service of America’s interests and to advance America’s strategic position and our values.” He said Biden was meeting with Hun Sen because he was the leader of the host country.
U.S. officials said Biden urged the Cambodian leader to make a greater commitment to democracy and “reopen civic and political space” ahead of the country’s next elections.
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