Original written for Brookings.Com

Since 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine, the United States has provided Ukraine with $3 billion in reform and military assistance and $3 billion in loan guarantees. U.S. troops in western Ukraine train their Ukrainian colleagues. Washington, in concert with the European Union, has taken steps to isolate Moscow politically and imposed a series of economic and visa sanctions on Russia and Russians.

The furor over President Donald Trump’s sordid bid to extort the president of Ukraine into investigating his potential 2020 political opponent raises an obvious question: Why should the United States care so much about Ukraine, a country 5,000 miles away? A big part of the reason is that U.S. officials told the Ukrainians the United States would care when negotiating the Budapest Memorandum on security assurances, signed 25 years ago this week.

A NUCLEAR-ARMED STATE BREAKS UP

In the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, the United States, Russia, and Britain committed “to respect the independence and sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine” and “to refrain from the threat or use of force” against the country. Those assurances played a key role in persuading the Ukrainian government in Kyiv to give up what amounted to the world’s third largest nuclear arsenal, consisting of some 1,900 strategic nuclear warheads.

When the USSR broke up in late 1991, there were nuclear weapons scattered in the resulting post-Soviet states. The George H. W. Bush administration attached highest priority to ensuring this would not lead to an increase in the number of nuclear weapons states. Moreover, as it watched Yugoslavia break apart violently, the Bush administration worried that the Soviet collapse might also turn violent, raising the prospect of conflict among nuclear-armed states. Ensuring no increase in the number of nuclear weapons states meant that, in practice, only Russia would retain nuclear arms. The Clinton administration pursued the same goal. With the prospect of extending the Non-Proliferation Treaty indefinitely looming, an alternative course that allowed other post-Soviet states to keep nuclear weapons would have set a bad precedent.

Eliminating the strategic nuclear warheads, intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), and strategic bombers in Ukraine was a big deal for Washington. The ICBMs and bombers carried warheads of monstrous size — all designed, built, and deployed to attack America. The warheads atop the SS-19 and SS-24 ICBMs in Ukraine had explosive yields of 400-550 kilotons each — that is, 27 to 37 times the size of the atomic bomb that devastated Hiroshima. The 1,900 strategic nuclear warheads — more than six times the number of nuclear warheads that China currently possesses — could have destroyed every U.S. city with a population of more than 50,000 three times over, with warheads left to spare.

ASSURANCES FOR UKRAINE

Before agreeing to give up this nuclear arsenal, Kyiv sought three assurances. First, it wanted compensation for the value of the highly-enriched uranium in the nuclear warheads, which could be blended down for use as fuel for nuclear reactors. Russia agreed to provide that.

Second, eliminating ICBMs, ICBM silos, and bombers did not come cheaply. With its economy rapidly contracting, the Ukrainian government could not afford the costs. The United States agreed to cover those costs with Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction assistance.

Third, Ukraine wanted guarantees or assurances of its security once it got rid of the nuclear arms. The Budapest Memorandum provided security assurances.

Unfortunately, Russia has broken virtually all the commitments it undertook in that document. It used military force to seize, and then illegally annex, Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula in early 2014. Russian and Russian proxy forces have waged war for more than five years in the eastern Ukrainian region of Donbas, claiming more than 13,000 lives and driving some two million people from their homes.

Some have argued that, since the United States did not invade Ukraine, it abided by its Budapest Memorandum commitments. True, in a narrow sense. However, when negotiating the security assurances, U.S. officials told their Ukrainian counterparts that, were Russia to violate them, the United States would take a strong interest and respond.

Washington did not promise unlimited support. The Budapest Memorandum contains security “assurances,” not “guarantees.” Guarantees would have implied a commitment of American military force, which NATO members have. U.S. officials made clear that was not on offer. Hence, assurances.

Beyond that, U.S. and Ukrainian officials did not discuss in detail how Washington might respond in the event of a Russian violation. That owed in part to then-Russian President Boris Yeltsin. He had his flaws, but he insisted that there be no revision of the boundaries separating the states that emerged from the Soviet collapse. Yeltsin respected Ukraine’s independence and territorial integrity. Vladimir Putin does not.

U.S. officials did assure their Ukrainian counterparts, however, that there would be a response. The United States should continue to provide reform and military assistance to Ukraine. It should continue sanctions on Russia. It should continue to demand that Moscow end its aggression against Ukraine. And it should continue to urge its European partners to assist Kyiv and keep the sanctions pressure on the Kremlin.

Washington should do this, because it said it would act if Russia violated the Budapest Memorandum. That was part of the price it paid in return for a drastic reduction in the nuclear threat to America. The United States should keep its word.

The Financial Times named Norman Naimark's latest book, Stalin and the Fate of Europe: The Postwar Struggle for Sovereignty, one of the best history books in 2019. The Financial Times writes "Naimark has few peers as a scholar of Stalinism, the Soviet Union and mid-20th-century Europe. Here he selects seven case studies, from Denmark and Finland to Austria and Albania, to illustrate the complexity of Stalin’s objectives after the second world war as European leaders on both sides of the emerging Iron Curtain strove to reclaim national sovereignty."

Read the rest at Financial Times

What an American-Led Peace Plan Should Look Like

For more than five years, Russian forces and their proxies have waged a bloody war against Ukrainian forces in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine. The conflict has claimed more than 13,000 lives, driven almost two million people from their homes, and caused immense material damage. France and Germany have together sought to broker peace but failed to produce a durable cease-fire—let alone a political settlement....

If European efforts continue to falter, the United States should take a more active role in the peacemaking process, working with European countries to make Russia’s military engagement in Ukraine more costly and a settlement more attractive. Moreover, Washington should set forth its own peace plan—one that builds on previous diplomatic efforts but includes a UN-authorized peacekeeping mission and an interim international administration in Donbas.

Read the rest at Foreign Affairs

Around the world, democracy is in retreat. In its Freedom in the World 2019 report, the independent watchdog organization Freedom House records the 13th consecutive year of global declines in political rights and civil liberties. “More authoritarian powers are now banning opposition groups or jailing their leaders, dispensing with term limits, and tightening the screws on any independent media that remain,” and “even long-standing democracies have been shaken by populist political forces,” shows the annual study. Internet freedom, too, continues to decline globally amid the crisis of social media, unveils Freedom House’s newly released Freedom on the Net 2019 report. Social media platforms – once considered liberation technologies – have become a conduit for surveillance, disinformation, and electoral manipulation, and “are now tilting dangerously toward illiberalism, exposing citizens to an unprecedented crackdown on their fundamental freedoms.”

These troubling developments are also manifested throughout the Asia-Pacific, where continuous scaling back in U.S. engagement and leadership is raising doubts about American power and purpose in the region, thus empowering forces that undermine democratic norms and processes.

At Shorenstein APARC, we are committed to building a solid foundation of education, knowledge, and dialogue about the critical challenges facing Asian nations and U.S.-Asia relations. That’s why we are dedicating a major portion of our programming this fall quarter and throughout the entire year to elucidating the threats to rights and liberties in the Asia-Pacific region.

The Battle for Truth and Press Freedom in the Philippines

“This is an existential moment for global power structures, turned upside down by technology. When journalists globally are under attack, democracy is under attack.” With these words, the internationally-esteemed investigative journalist and press freedom champion Maria Ressa opened her keynote address upon receiving the 2019 Shorenstein Journalism Award.

As CEO and executive editor of Rappler, she has led the Philippine independent news platform in shining critical light on the Duterte administration's drug war and unprecedented number of killings in the country. President Duterte in turn has made no secret of his dislike for Ressa and Rappler, accusing the platform for carrying "fake news." Ressa has been arrested twice this year, accused of corporate tax evasion and of violating security laws, and slapped with charges of cyber libel for a report that was published before the libel law came into effect. Since Duterte’s election in summer 2016, the Philippine government has filed at least 11 cases and investigations against Ressa and Rappler. “And all because I’m a journalist,” she says.

Ressa detailed the devastating effects that disinformation has had on press freedom, democracy, and civic discourse in the Philippines. “Our dystopian present is your dystopian future if nothing significant is done,” she cautioned. She was joined on the 18th annual Journalism Award panel by Stanford’s Larry Diamond, senior fellow at FSI and the Hoover Institution, and Raju Narisetti, director of the Knight-Bagehot Fellowship in Economics and Business Journalism and professor of professional practice at Columbia Journalism School.

Watch Ressa’s keynote and the entire panel proceedings:

You can also listen to Ressa’s keynote on our SoundCloud channel and read our complete event recap.

The North Korean Human Rights Problem

North Korea continues to be one of the world’s worst human rights violators, ranking at the bottom of Freedom House’s list of countries designated as Not Free with the worst aggregate scores for political rights and civil liberties. Although North Korea has experienced some degree of social and economic change in recent years, the Kim Jong Un regime continues to tightly control access to information, suppress all dissent, heavily surveil residents, and subject political prisoners to torture, forced labor, and other atrocities.

As momentum for U.S.-DPRK diplomatic negotiations has ebbed and flowed since summer 2018, all eyes have been on the questions surrounding the North Korean nuclear problem, while the human rights problem has received little attention. However, argues APARC’s Koret Fellow in Korean Studies Robert R. King, addressing the North Korean human rights problem is essential to moving the country on denuclearization and security issues.

Ambassador King, former special envoy for North Korean human rights issues at the Department of State, recently spoke at a seminar hosted by APARC’s Korea Program. Creating pressure on the North Korean government from within by its own people is the only way we’re going to make progress on the security front, he claimed. “If we can help generate greater interest on the part of the people in what is happening with their own government, we can create the kind of constraints that democracy imposes on its leadership […] and that is why we need to focus attention, as well as on negotiating with North Korea, on access to information and human rights.”

Listen to highlights from Ambassador King’s talk:

Hong Kong: City in Turmoil

In Hong Kong, millions of people have been protesting for months against rights violations and increasing interference by the Chinese government in local affairs. On October 1, while the People’s Republic of China celebrated its 70th anniversary with a massive National Day parade in Beijing, on the other side of the border, Hong Kong experienced one of its most violent and chaotic days.

With those contrasting images still fresh on everyone’s minds, APARC and the China Program, along with FSI And the Center for East Asian Studies, co-hosted an expert panel that explained the root causes of Hong Kong’s unremitting protests, examined the future of “one country, two systems,” and considered how the United States and the international community should best respond.

Former Chief Secretary for Administration of the Hong Kong Government (1993-2001), the Honorable Anson Chan, delivered a piercing keynote address, followed by a discussion featuring Harry Harding, Professor of Public Policy at the University of Virginia, David M. Lampton, APARC/FSI Oksenberg-Rohlen Fellow, and Professor Ming Sing of Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

Since 1997, Chan asserted, Hong Kong SAR’s successive chief executives have progressively failed to reassure the Hong Kong people that they would do their utmost to uphold “one country, two systems” and to defend Hong Kong’s autonomy. Instead, she argued, they have increasingly come across as “mouthpieces of the central government, towing the Beijing line.” Chan also suggested that “some years back, Beijing began to both lose confidence in the judgment and competence of the Hong Kong administration and to fear that growing sense of people’s identity as ‘Hong Kongers’ rather than Chinese citizens could pose a threat to the long-term, successful integration of Hong Kong into the motherland.” She closed her speech urging the Beijing leadership “to act with greater confidence and to trust us more completely with stewardship of our own future by allowing us to elect our own leaders.”

Watch the proceedings from this special panel:

You can also listen to Chan’s keynote and panelists’ remarks on our SoundCloud channel and read our complete event recap.

The Assault on Non-Chinese Culture in Xinjiang

China’s mass internment of Uighurs and other Muslims in “reeducation” camps and detention facilities and its deployment of high-tech surveillance and police tactics in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region have been interpreted as a superpower’s attempt to annihilate the distinct identities of minority groups. Approximately ten million Muslim minorities in the region are under tight control, and over one million Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims have allegedly disappeared into internment camps. While Beijing characterizes the camps as vocational training centers and has claimed that most of the detainees have been released, evidence for these claims is difficult to verify, as information dissemination regarding the region to the outside world is closely guarded.

To shed light into the crisis in Xinjiang, APARC convened a multidisciplinary panel of experts who provided historical context and critical social scientific analysis of the events unfolding in the region.

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From top left, clockwise: Lauren Hansen Restrepo, James Millward,, Darren Byler and Gardner Bovingdon.

James Millward, professor of Inter-societal history at Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service, reviewed the historical background for the PRC assault on non-Han or non-Chinese culture in Xinjiang. Beginning in the early 2000s, the assault has included the razing of old Kashgar; the discouraging and then illegalizing of Muslim symbols such as head gear, prayer, and fasting in Ramadan; the disappearance of Uyghur script; and the securitization of the province by using police patrol, surveillance technologies, facial recognition, and biodata monitoring. The PRC hasn’t applied a single, top-down ethnic policy in Xinjiang, said Millward, but rather has rolled out different tactics it experimented with on local levels in different areas.

Lauren Hansen Restrepo, assistant professor in growth and structure of cities at Bryn Mawr College and an expert on Chinese development planning and urbanization in Xinjiang, explained how we got to the current crisis in the region by connecting seemingly disparate phenomena. She described the shifts in state power in Xinjiang and how, since 2014, “regional planning has broken every logic of urban planning in China,” resulting in the isolation and subordination of Uyghur-dominated urban centers and in the ossification of cities, as control has been seized from local governments and given to socialist land masters.

Anthropologist Darren Byler, whose research focuses on Uyghur dispossession and "terror capitalism" in the city of Ürümchi, the capital of Xinjiang, explained how, amid mass migration of Han people into the resource-rich region, Uyghurs had mostly been excluded from the new economy and how their identity as contemporary Muslims supported a vibrant public sphere not controlled by the state. The Chinese state, in turn, has merged Islamism with radicalism extremism. From the Chinese state and industry perspective, Byler said, the repression of Xinjiang’s Muslims promises stability and the detention camps are used as carriers of economy and new sources of cheap labor.

Indiana University’s Gardner Bovingdon, whose research focuses on politics in contemporary Xinjiang and the region’s modern history, reverted to the question of how we got to the current crisis, which he characterized as “one of the great state-engineered human rights disasters of our time.” He argued that, in the case of Xinjiang, the Chinese party transported and exacerbated a set of policies that had previously been applied to dealing with the Tibet problem. These policies, Bovingdon suggested, “are signs of a flailing, terrified party that doesn’t know what to do with Uighurs, but also feels no constraints from the international community on its behavior. And so the biggest problem now is to find a way to put constraints on a system that has operated untrammeled with devastating consequences.”

The panel "Xinjiang’s Muslims and the PRC" was cosponsored with the Center for Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law.

The recent escalation of diplomatic and trade disputes between South Korea and Japan has alarmed numerous observers and is rather confusing to many around the world to whom the two countries seem to have much to lose and little to gain by the deterioration of the bilateral relationship. What underlying forces are driving the conflict? Are these new forces, or the same historical forces coming to a head? How much are factors from the international environment, such as the behavior of the United States, influencing the current escalation?

These were some of the questions that took center stage at a recent conference, “Japan and South Korea on the Brink: Escalating Friction Amidst an Uncertain World,” convened jointly by APARC’s Japan Program and Korea Program. The conference brought together experts in the international affairs and trade relations of South Korea, Japan, and the United States to shed light into the current conflict between the two U.S. allies. 

In his welcome remarks, APARC Director and Korea Program Director Gi-Wook Shin reminded the audience that Japan and South Korea have experienced tensions over colonial and wartime history and hence, in that sense, the recent conflict is nothing new. In the past, however, the tensions were mostly kept under control because the two countries well understood that it was in their mutual interest to maintain a cooperative relationship and keep history issues separate from other important economic and security issues. Over the past year, however, tensions over history have permeated economic and security issues amid rising nationalism in both countries.

A Problem of Alliance Management

The conference opened with a panel on diplomacy and international relations. Kak-Soo Shin, former Korean ambassador to Japan, situated the current crisis in the context of the regional strategy environment, noting that the Northern triangle – composed of North Korea, China, and Russia – has been gaining influence, while the Southern triangle – composed of South Korea, Japan, and the United States – has weakened. “The souring Japan-Korea relationship is a big blow to the maintenance of the Southern triangle and its ability to cope with the volatile security environment in Northeast Asia,” Shin cautioned.

Hitoshi Tanaka, chairman of the Institute for International Strategy at the Japan Research Institute, ltd., offered an overview of the reasons underlying the escalation in the bilateral relationship between Japan and South Korea, foremost of which, he said, is the declining mutual importance of the two nations to each other vis-à-vis China’s emergence as their largest trade partner. “Unless we feel that the future relationship is essential to both nations there is no way to address the conflict,” he said.

Joseph Yun, former deputy assistant secretary of state for Korea and Japan and former special representative on North Korea, emphasized that Tokyo and Seoul are “eroding the trilateral security arrangement that the United States has led in Northeast Asia since the end of the Second World War” – an arrangement that has been responsible for prosperity throughout Northeast Asia. The root problem, he argued, is alliance management, from which the United States “has been conspicuously absent.”

Watch the panel:

A Conflict in an Age of Changing Global Trade Order

The second panel turned eyes to the trade issues involved in the conflict between Japan and South Korea. Professor Yukiko Fukagawa of the School of Political Science and Economics at Waseda University, an expert in Korean economic development, observed that the friction between the two countries has escalated since 2000, when Korean global businesses like Hyundai and Samsung rose to fame. Since then, she argued, what has happened in Korea is a process of economic nationalism and “Korea seems to find it or interpret it as a kind of transitional justice against Japan.”

Seokyoung Choi, former Korean ambassador to the WTO and UN and former deputy minister for trade, explained the background for the Japan-Korea trade row and each side’s arguments. As a way forward, he said, both countries must consider several important imperatives, including the needs to cooperate in an era of tectonic changes to the global trade order, to address expanding fault lines in East Asia given the spillover effects of the U.S.-China trade war, and to complement for deficits of leadership and trust in Northeast Asia. 

Aiko Lane, executive director of the U.S.-Japan Business Council, discussed the main concerns the Japan-Korea friction poses for U.S. businesses, including regulatory uncertainty, supply chain disruptions, and delays in shipment. Further escalation in the relationship, she argued, could potentially inflict long-term damage to the regional ICT and manufacturing industries. Potential impacts include driving costs up for consumers and making it more lucrative for other countries to supply semiconductor materials to Korea.

Watch the panel:

For more than two weeks now, a stream of current and former U.S. officials, this week including Amb. Bill Taylor, have described to Congressional committees the White House’s sordid effort to outsource American foreign policy to the president’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, who sought to advance the personal political interests of Donald Trump. Faced with compelling testimonies to the effect that the president subverted U.S. national interests to his own, the White House has begun to trash those officials.

Even for this White House, that is a despicable new low.

The testimonies make clear that President Trump insisted on a quid pro quo, as his Acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney confirmed in an October 17 press conference (he later tried to walk it back, but watch the video of the press conference). The president wanted Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate a long-debunked charge about former Vice President Joe Biden, his possible opponent in the 2020 U.S. presidential election. President Trump also wanted the Ukrainians to check whether the Democratic National Committee’s e-mail servers might have ended up in, of all places, Ukraine (no one has offered evidence to suggest that they have).

Smoking guns are the stuff of spy movies. In real-life intelligence-gathering, they are exceptionally rare. That’s why the business of intelligence typically requires collecting and analyzing fragments of information—putting together secret nuggets with unclassified information—to try to make sense of complex reality. If nothing else, the whistle-blower who filed a complaint against President Donald Trump clearly followed his or her training. SECOND PARAGRAPH I’ve spent 20 years reading intelligence reports and researching the U.S. intelligence community. And I’m not automatically inclined to believe the worst allegations about any administration; everyone has agendas and incentives to reveal information, some more noble than others. Trump and his allies have dismissed the complaint as hearsay and accused the whistle-blower of acting on political motives. But a close reading of the whistle-blower’s lengthy complaint, which accuses Trump of “using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election,” yields a lot of concrete leads for investigators to follow.

Here are three things I learned:

Read the rest at The Atlantic