Månad: augusti 2022

Rødts partileder Bjørnar Moxnes skriver onsdag at partiets sentralstyre onsdag har diskutert hvordan de skal stille seg til Sverige og Finlands Nato-søknader. Det vil de stemme nei til:

– Stormaktsavhengighet gagner ikke fred og sikkerhet. Rødt vil stemme mot ratifisering av medlemskap i Nato for Finland og Sverige, sier Moxnes i en oppdatering på Facebook.

Selv om Rødt stemmer imot, ventes det at forslaget om å godkjenne den svenske og den finske søknaden, vil få et bredt flertall i Stortinget. Läs artikel

[…] Whatever the case, Biden’s national security team might familiarize themselves with the diplomatic strategy as carried out by US President Ronald Reagan and his secretary of state George Shultz at what historians often point to as among the two most dangerous periods (the first being the Cuban Missile Crisis) of the Cold War.

“The basis of a free and principled foreign policy,” said former California governor Ronald Reagan in a speech accepting the 1980 Republican nomination, “is one that takes the world as it is, and seeks to change it by leadership and example; not by harangue, harassment or wishful thinking.”

But the very early years of his administration were indeed marked more by harangue (“Evil Empire”) than by diplomacy. A New York Times profile of the Soviet Ambassador to the US, Anatoly Dobrynin, noted that he could not “recall a period more tense than the present….On his visits back home, he finds his relatives asking him, for the first time, if there is going to be war with the United States.”

The nuclear scare resulting from NATO’s Able Archer exercise of 1983 served as a wake up call to the president – as did the ABC television movie The Day After, which is said to have made a deep impression on the president. […]

The departure, in July 1982, of secretary of state Al Haig and the arrival of former Nixon labor and treasury secretary George Shultz as Haig’s replacement, set the stage for a new approach to the Soviets.

In a memo to the president, Shultz called for “intensified dialogue with Moscow.” Läs artikel

– Vi skal snakke videre om hvordan dette kan gjøres i en nordisk ramme. At vi ikke bare øver i Norge, men også i Sverige, Finland og Danmark, sier forsvarssjef Eirik Kristoffersen til Forsvarets Forum.

Sverige og Finland har formelt søkt Nato-medlemskap.

– Det åpner opp nye muligheter for det nordiske forsvarssamarbeidet, sier Kristoffersen.

Nato-øvelsen Cold Response arrangeres i Norge annethvert år. Rundt 30.000 soldater fra 27 nasjoner deltar i øvelsen. Den ble sist gjennomført i mars og april i år. Läs artikel

Har vi et tilstrekkelig godt forsvar til å møte dagens og fremtidens sikkerhetspolitiske utfordringer?

Se forsvarsminister Bjørn Arild Gram (Sp) i samtale med stortingsrepresentantene Hårek Elvenes (H)Christian Tybring-Gjedde (FrP) og Ingrid Fiskaa (SV). […]

– Det er helt unødvendig å snakke om Forsvaret og vår evne til å forsvare oss, uten å være pro-NATO og pro-USA. Når det gjelder budsjett bør det være behovet som styrer, ikke enkelte politiske beslutninger. Forsvaret må alltid har penger, sier Fremskrittspartiets Christian Tybring-Gjedde.

I tillegg mener Tybring-Gjedde at man bør gjeninnføre obligatorisk verneplikt i Norge.

– Jeg mener vi må ha obligatorisk verneplikt i Norge. Selv var jeg 15 måneder inne i Militærpolitiet, og lærte masse av dette. Det skaper et samhold i samfunnet med slike ordninger, noe vi også ser i Ukraina, sier Tybring-Gjedde (Frp). […]

Uten folk kan vi ikke drifte de systemene vi har kjøpt inn, mener Ingrid Fiskaa (SV).

– Det har ikke vært lyttet nok til de som jobber i Forsvaret. Paradoksalt nok er jeg enig i uttalelser fra USA om at Norge må ta større ansvar for sikkerheten sin selv. Hva ligger frem i tid? Nå må vi puste med magen og heller velge å ikke gjennomføre store investeringer som kan lede til budsjettoverskridelser og heller satse på bemanning, mener Fiskaa. Läs artikel

Planeringen pågår för fullt i armén och om några veckor är de svenska instruktörerna på plats i Storbritannien. I oktober börjar de första ukrainarna att utbildas i bland annat vapenhantering och sjukvård.
– Ju fler ukrainare som kan strida för sitt land, desto starkare blir deras armé, säger arméchef Karl Engelbrektson.

Sedan i början av juli utbildar brittiska armén ukrainska medborgare i Storbritannien för att kunna försvara Ukraina mot den ryska invasionen. Utbildningen sker vid ett antal brittiska träningsanläggningar, där de får grundläggande militär utbildning. […]

Arméstaben arbetar nu med de konkreta detaljerna kring genomförandet tillsammans med det arméförband, Skaraborgs regemente P 4 i Skövde, som har det sammanhållande ansvaret för utbildningsuppdraget. Därifrån kommer en betydande del av de instruktörer som behövs för att genomföra utbildningsuppdraget komma, kompletterat från andra arméförband. Läs pressmeddelande

The 99-year-old former secretary of state has just published a book on leadership and sees a dangerous lack of strategic purpose in U.S. foreign policy. […]

“In my thinking, equilibrium has two components,” he tells me. “A kind of balance of power, with an acceptance of the legitimacy of sometimes opposing values. Because if you believe that the final outcome of your effort has to be the imposition of your values, then I think equilibrium is not possible.”[…]

“I think that the current period has a great trouble defining a direction,” Mr. Kissinger says. “It’s very responsive to the emotion of the moment.” Americans resist separating the idea of diplomacy from that of “personal relationships with the adversary.” They tend to view negotiations, he tells me, in missionary rather than psychological terms, seeking to convert or condemn their interlocutors rather than to penetrate their thinking. […]

Mr. Kissinger sees today’s world as verging on a dangerous disequilibrium. “We are at the edge of war with Russia and China on issues which we partly created, without any concept of how this is going to end or what it’s supposed to lead to,” he says. Could the U.S. manage the two adversaries by triangulating between them, as during the Nixon years? He offers no simple prescription. “You can’t just now say we’re going to split them off and turn them against each other. All you can do is not to accelerate the tensions and to create options, and for that you have to have some purpose.” […]

The policy that was carried out by both parties has produced and allowed the progress of Taiwan into an autonomous democratic entity and has preserved peace between China and the U.S. for 50 years,” he says. “One should be very careful, therefore, in measures that seem to change the basic structure.[…]

He sees no choice but to take Vladimir Putin’s stated security concerns seriously and believes that it was a mistake for NATO to signal to Ukraine that it might eventually join the alliance: “I thought that Poland—all the traditional Western countries that have been part of Western history—were logical members of NATO,” he says. But Ukraine, in his view, is a collection of territories once appended to Russia, which Russians see as their own, even though “some Ukrainians” do not. Stability would be better served by its acting as a buffer between Russia and the West: “I was in favor of the full independence of Ukraine, but I thought its best role was something like Finland. Artikel bakom betalvägg

President Joe Biden is not to blame for all of America’s blunders in Afghanistan, but he could help decide whether we learn from them. We may not discover the conclusions of Congress’ independent Afghanistan War Commission until 2025, but we have an overabundance of damning revelations by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), not to mention accusations of intelligence failures, interagency finger-pointing and distrust, and policy inertia within America’s national security institutions, to sort through. By taking charge of such an autopsy, the Biden administration can deftly redirect criticism from how America’s war in Afghanistan ended to what really matters: how the United States squandered twenty years, $2.31 trillion, and nearly 2,500 American lives on what General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, ultimately dubbed a “strategic defeat.”[…]

While pursuing accountability in America, Biden must also course correct his policy toward Afghanistan. For the past year, the Biden administration has been holding $7 billion of the Afghan central bank’s reserves hostage in an attempt to coerce the Taliban into liberalizing. Yet this U.S. effort to change the group’s behavior has failed. Meanwhile, the United Nations’ acting secretary-general’s special representative for Afghanistan assessed that, over the past year, the Afghan economy has contracted by 30-40 percent and unemployment has nearly tripled. 97 percent of Afghans could be living in poverty by the end of the year. The Afghan people—many of whom came to support the Taliban after two decades of war—must not be made to suffer for the Taliban’s crimes.[…]

In contrast to ISIS-K, the Taliban is an entity the United States can tolerate. This is true even after the CIA tracked down and assassinated Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri in a Taliban safehouse in Kabul. After the United States located and killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in 2011, Obama administration officials chose to sustain their partnership with Islamabad despite acknowledging that U.S.-Pakistani ties were “complicated.” The same can be true of U.S. relations with the Taliban. The precision strike on Zawahiri was exceptional—not only for the fact that no civilians were harmed but also in that the Al Qaeda leader was so oblivious to the threat to his life. Al Qaeda’s next leader will be less likely to unwind alone on his balcony. Läs artikel