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Malay Mail
a day ago
- Politics
- Malay Mail
From India-Pakistan to Iran and Ukraine, a new era of escalation — Peter Apps
WASHINGTON, June 27 — As India's defence chief attended an international security conference in Singapore in May, soon after India and Pakistan fought what many in South Asia now dub 'the four-day war', he had a simple message: Both sides expect to do it all again. It was a stark and perhaps counterintuitive conclusion: the four-day military exchange, primarily through missiles and drones, appears to have been among the most serious in history between nuclear-armed nations. Indeed, reports from both sides suggest it took a direct intervention from US Secretary of State Marco Rubio to halt an escalating exchange of drones and rockets. Speaking to a Reuters colleague in Singapore, however, Indian Chief of Defence Staff General Anil Chauhan denied either nation had come close to the 'nuclear threshold', describing a 'lot of messaging' from both sides. 'A new space for conventional operations has been created and I think that is the new norm,' he said, vowing that New Delhi would continue to respond militarily to any militant attacks on India suspected to have originated from Pakistan. How stable that 'space' might be and how great the risk of escalation for now remains unclear. However, there have been several dramatic examples of escalation in several already volatile global stand-offs over the past two months. As well as the 'four-day' war between India and Pakistan last month, recent weeks have witnessed what is now referred to in Israel and Iran as their '12-day war'. It ended this week with a US-brokered ceasefire after Washington joined the fray with massive air strikes on Tehran's underground nuclear sites. Despite years of confrontation, Israel and Iran had not struck each other's territory directly until last year, while successive US administrations have held back from similar steps. As events in Ukraine have shown, conflict between major nations can become normalised at speed — whether that means 'just' an exchange of drones and missiles, or a more existential battle. More concerning still, such conflicts appear to have become more serious throughout the current decade, with plenty of room for further escalation. This month, that included an audacious set of Ukrainian-organised drone strikes on long-range bomber bases deep inside Russian territory, destroying multiple aircraft which, as well as striking Ukraine, have also been responsible for carrying the Kremlin's nuclear deterrent. All of that is a far cry from the original Cold War, in which it was often assumed that any serious military clash — particularly involving nuclear forces or the nations that possessed them — might rapidly escalate beyond the point of no return. But it does bring with it new risks of escalation. Simmering in the background, meanwhile, is the largest and most dangerous confrontation of them all — that between the US and China, with US officials saying Beijing has instructed its military to be prepared to move against Taiwan from 2027, potentially sparking a hugely wider conflict. As US President Donald Trump headed to Europe this week for the annual Nato summit, just after bombing Iran, it was clear his administration hopes such a potent show of force might be enough to deter Beijing in particular from pushing its luck. 'American deterrence is back,' US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth told a Pentagon press briefing the morning after the air strikes took place. Iran's initial response of drones and missiles fired at a US air base in Qatar — with forewarning to the US that the fusillade was coming — appeared deliberately moderate to avoid further escalation. Addressing senators at their confirmation hearing on Tuesday, America's next top commanders in Europe and the Middle East were unanimous in their comments that the US strikes against Iran would strengthen Washington's hand when it came to handling Moscow and Beijing. Chinese media commentary was more mixed. Han Peng, head of state-run China Media Group's North American operations, said the US had shown weakness to the world by not wanting to get dragged into the Iran conflict due to its 'strategic contraction'. Other social media posts talked of how vulnerable Iran looked, with nationalist commentator Hu Xijn warning: 'If one day we have to get involved in a war, we must be the best at it.' After B-2 bombers struck Tehran's nuclear sites, US President Donald Trump headed to Europe, warning adversaries from Beijing to Moscow that US deterrence is back. — Reuters pic Long arm of America On that front, the spectacle of multiple US B-2 bombers battering Iran's deepest-buried nuclear bunkers — having flown all the way from the US mainland apparently undetected — will not have gone unnoticed in Moscow or Beijing. Nor will Trump's not so subtle implications that unless Iran backed down, similar weapons might be used to kill its Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei or other senior figures, wherever they might hide. None of America's adversaries have the ability to strike without warning in that way against hardened, deepened targets, and the B-2 — now being replaced by the more advanced B-21 — has no foreign equal. Both are designed to penetrate highly sophisticated air defences, although how well they would perform against cutting-edge Russian or Chinese systems would only be revealed in an actual conflict. China's effort at building something similar, the H-2, has been trailed in Chinese media for years — and US officials say Beijing is striving hard to make it work. Both China and Russia have fifth-generation fighters with some stealth abilities, but none have the range or carrying capacity to target the deepest Western leadership or weapons bunkers with conventional munitions. As a result, any Chinese or Russian long-range strikes — whether conventional or nuclear — would have to be launched with missiles that could be detected in advance. Even without launching such weapons, however, nuclear powers have their own tools to deliver threats. An analysis of the India-Pakistan 'four-day war' in May done by the Stimson Centre suggested that as Indian strikes became more serious on the third day of the war, Pakistan might have taken similar, deliberately visible steps to ready its nuclear arsenal to grab US attention and help conclude the conflict. Indian newspapers have reported that a desperate Pakistan did indeed put pressure on the US to encourage India to stop, as damage to its forces was becoming increasingly serious, and threatening the government. Pakistan denies that — but one of its most senior officers was keen to stress that any repeat of India's strikes would bring atomic risk. 'Nothing happened this time,' said the chairman of the Pakistani joint chiefs, General Sahir Shamshad Mirza, also speaking to Reuters at the Shangri-La dialogue in Singapore. 'But you can't rule out any strategic miscalculation at any time.' For now, both sides have pulled back troops from the border — while India appears determined to use longer term strategies to undermine its neighbour, including withdrawing from a treaty controlling the water supplies of the Indus River, which Indian Prime Minister Modi said he now intends to dam. Pakistani officials have warned that could be another act of war. Drones and deterrence Making sure Iran never obtains the leverage of a working atomic bomb, of course, was a key point of the US and Israeli air strikes. Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu agreed that the dangers of a government so hostile to Israel obtaining such a weapon would always be intolerable. For years, government and private sector analysts had predicted Iran might respond to an assault on its nuclear facilities with attacks by its proxies across the Middle East, including on Israel from Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza, as well as using thousands of missiles, drones and attack craft to block international oil exports through the Strait of Hormuz. In reality, the threat of an overwhelming US military response — and hints of an accompanying switch of US policy to outright regime change or decapitation in Iran, coupled with the Israeli military success against Hezbollah and Hamas, appear to have forced Tehran to largely stand down. What that means longer term is another question. Flying to the Netherlands on Tuesday for the Nato summit, Trump appeared to be offering Iran under its current Shi'ite Muslim clerical rulers a future as a 'major trading nation' providing they abandoned their atomic program. The Trump administration is also talking up the success of its Operation ROUGH RIDER against the Iran-backed Houthi militia in Yemen. Vice Admiral Bradley Cooper, selected as the new head of US Central Command, told senators the US military had bombed the Houthis for 50 days before a deal was struck in which the Houthis agreed to stop attacking US and other international shipping in the Red Sea. But Cooper also noted that like other militant groups in the Middle East, the Houthis were becoming increasingly successful in building underground bases out of the reach of smaller US weapons, as well as using unmanned systems to sometimes overwhelm their enemies. 'The nature and character of warfare is changing before our very eyes,' he said. Behind the scenes and sometimes in public, US and allied officials say they are still assessing the implications of the success of Ukraine and Israel in infiltrating large numbers of short-range drones into Russia and Iran respectively for two spectacular attacks in recent weeks. According to Ukrainian officials, the drones were smuggled into Russia hidden inside prefabricated buildings on the back of trucks, with the Russian drivers unaware of what they were carrying until the drones were launched. Israel's use of drones on the first day of its campaign against Iran is even more unsettling for Western nations wondering what such an attack might look like. Its drones were smuggled into Iran and in some cases assembled in secret there to strike multiple senior Iranian leaders and officials in their homes as they slept in the small hours of the morning on the first day of the campaign. As they met in The Hague this week for their annual summit, Nato officials and commanders will have considered what they must do to build their own defences to ensure they do not prove vulnerable to a similar attack. Judging by reports in the Chinese press, military officials there are now working on the same. — Reuters *This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of Malay Mail.
Arab News
a day ago
- Politics
- Arab News
From India-Pakistan to Iran and Ukraine, a new era of escalation
WASHINGTON: As India's defense chief attended an international security conference in Singapore in May, soon after India and Pakistan fought what many in South Asia now dub 'the four-day war', he had a simple message: Both sides expect to do it all again. It was a stark and perhaps counterintuitive conclusion: the four-day military exchange, primarily through missiles and drones, appears to have been among the most serious in history between nuclear-armed nations. Indeed, reports from both sides suggest it took a direct intervention from US Secretary of State Marco Rubio to halt an escalating exchange of drones and rockets. Speaking to a Reuters colleague in Singapore, however, Indian Chief of Defense Staff General Anil Chauhan denied either nation had come close to the 'nuclear threshold', describing a 'lot of messaging' from both sides. 'A new space for conventional operations has been created and I think that is the new norm,' he said, vowing that New Delhi would continue to respond militarily to any militant attacks on India suspected to have originated from Pakistan. How stable that 'space' might be and how great the risk of escalation for now remains unclear. However, there have been several dramatic examples of escalation in several already volatile global stand-offs over the past two months. As well as the 'four-day' war between India and Pakistan last month, recent weeks have witnessed what is now referred to in Israel and Iran as their '12-day war'. It ended this week with a US-brokered ceasefire after Washington joined the fray with massive air strikes on Tehran's underground nuclear sites. Despite years of confrontation, Israel and Iran had not struck each other's territory directly until last year, while successive US administrations have held back from similar steps. As events in Ukraine have shown, conflict between major nations can become normalized at speed – whether that means 'just' an exchange of drones and missiles, or a more existential battle. More concerning still, such conflicts appear to have become more serious throughout the current decade, with plenty of room for further escalation. This month, that included an audacious set of Ukrainian-organized drone strikes on long-range bomber bases deep inside Russian territory, destroying multiple aircraft which, as well as striking Ukraine, have also been responsible for carrying the Kremlin's nuclear deterrent. All of that is a far cry from the original Cold War, in which it was often assumed that any serious military clash – particularly involving nuclear forces or the nations that possessed them – might rapidly escalate beyond the point of no return. But it does bring with it new risks of escalation. Simmering in the background, meanwhile, is the largest and most dangerous confrontation of them all — that between the US and China, with US officials saying Beijing has instructed its military to be prepared to move against Taiwan from 2027, potentially sparking a hugely wider conflict. As US President Donald Trump headed to Europe this week for the annual NATO summit, just after bombing Iran, it was clear his administration hopes such a potent show of force might be enough to deter Beijing in particular from pushing its luck. 'American deterrence is back,' US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told a Pentagon press briefing the morning after the air strikes took place. Iran's initial response of drones and missiles fired at a US air base in Qatar – with forewarning to the US that the fusillade was coming – appeared deliberately moderate to avoid further escalation. Addressing senators at their confirmation hearing on Tuesday, America's next top commanders in Europe and the Middle East were unanimous in their comments that the US strikes against Iran would strengthen Washington's hand when it came to handling Moscow and Beijing. Chinese media commentary was more mixed. Han Peng, head of state-run China Media Group's North American operations, said the US had shown weakness to the world by not wanting to get dragged into the Iran conflict due to its 'strategic contraction'. Other social media posts talked of how vulnerable Iran looked, with nationalist commentator Hu Xijn warning: 'If one day we have to get involved in a war, we must be the best at it.' LONG ARM OF AMERICA On that front, the spectacle of multiple US B-2 bombers battering Iran's deepest-buried nuclear bunkers — having flown all the way from the US mainland apparently undetected — will not have gone unnoticed in Moscow or Beijing. Nor will Trump's not so subtle implications that unless Iran backed down, similar weapons might be used to kill its Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei or other senior figures, wherever they might hide. None of America's adversaries have the ability to strike without warning in that way against hardened, deepened targets, and the B-2 – now being replaced by the more advanced B-21 – has no foreign equal. Both are designed to penetrate highly sophisticated air defenses, although how well they would perform against cutting-edge Russian or Chinese systems would only be revealed in an actual conflict. China's effort at building something similar, the H-2, has been trailed in Chinese media for years – and US officials say Beijing is striving hard to make it work. Both China and Russia have fifth-generation fighters with some stealth abilities, but none have the range or carrying capacity to target the deepest Western leadership or weapon bunkers with conventional munitions. As a result, any Chinese or Russian long-range strikes – whether conventional or nuclear – would have to be launched with missiles that could be detected in advance. Even without launching such weapons, however, nuclear powers have their own tools to deliver threats. An analysis of the India-Pakistan 'four-day war' in May done by the Stimson Center suggested that as Indian strikes became more serious on the third day of the war, Pakistan might have taken similar, deliberately visible steps to ready its nuclear arsenal to grab US attention and help conclude the conflict. Indian newspapers have reported that a desperate Pakistan did indeed put pressure on the US to encourage India to stop, as damage to its forces was becoming increasingly serious, and threatening the government. Pakistan denies that – but one of its most senior officers was keen to stress that any repeat of India's strikes would bring atomic risk. 'Nothing happened this time,' said the chairman of the Pakistani joint chiefs, General Sahir Shamshad Mirza, also speaking to Reuters at the Shangri-La dialogue in Singapore. 'But you can't rule out any strategic miscalculation at any time.' For now, both sides have pulled back troops from the border – while India appears determined to use longer term strategies to undermine its neighbor, including withdrawing from a treaty controlling the water supplies of the Indus River, which Indian Prime Minister Modi said he now intends to dam. Pakistani officials have warned that could be another act of war. DRONES AND DETERRENCE Making sure Iran never obtains the leverage of a working atomic bomb, of course, was a key point of the US and Israeli air strikes. Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu agreed that the dangers of a government so hostile to Israel obtaining such a weapon would always be intolerable. For years, government and private sector analysts had predicted Iran might respond to an assault on its nuclear facilities with attacks by its proxies across the Middle East, including on Israel from Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza, as well as using thousands of missiles, drones and attack craft to block international oil exports through the Strait of Hormuz. In reality, the threat of an overwhelming US military response – and hints of an accompanying switch of US policy to outright regime change or decapitation in Iran, coupled with the Israeli military success against Hezbollah and Hamas, appear to have forced Tehran to largely stand down. What that means in longer term is another question. Flying to the Netherlands on Tuesday for the NATO summit, Trump appeared to be offering Iran under its current Shiite Muslim clerical rulers a future as a 'major trading nation' providing they abandoned their atomic program. The Trump administration is also talking up the success of its Operation ROUGH RIDER against the Iran-backed Houthi militia in Yemen. Vice Admiral Bradley Cooper, selected as the new head of US Central Command, told senators the US military had bombed the Houthis for 50 days before a deal was struck in which the Houthis agreed to stop attacking US and other international shipping in the Red Sea. But Cooper also noted that like other militant groups in the Middle East, the Houthis were becoming increasingly successful in building underground bases out of the reach of smaller US weapons, as well as using unmanned systems to sometimes overwhelm their enemies. 'The nature and character of warfare is changing before our very eyes,' he said. Behind the scenes and sometimes in public, US and allied officials say they are still assessing the implications of the success of Ukraine and Israel in infiltrating large numbers of short-range drones into Russia and Iran respectively for two spectacular attacks in recent weeks. According to Ukrainian officials, the drones were smuggled into Russia hidden inside prefabricated buildings on the back of trucks, with the Russian drivers unaware of what they were carrying until the drones were launched. Israel's use of drones on the first day of its campaign against Iran is even more unsettling for Western nations wondering what such an attack might look like. Its drones were smuggled into Iran and in some cases assembled in secret there to strike multiple senior Iranian leaders and officials in their homes as they slept in the small hours of the morning on the first day of the campaign. As they meet in The Hague this week for their annual summit, NATO officials and commanders will have considered what they must do to build their own defenses to ensure they do not prove vulnerable to a similar attack. Judging by reports in the Chinese press, military officials there are now working on the same.
Asharq Al-Awsat
a day ago
- Politics
- Asharq Al-Awsat
From India-Pakistan to Iran and Ukraine, a New Era of Escalation
By Peter Apps As India's defense chief attended an international security conference in Singapore in May, soon after India and Pakistan fought what many in South Asia now dub 'the four-day war', he had a simple message: Both sides expect to do it all again. It was a stark and perhaps counterintuitive conclusion: the four-day military exchange, primarily through missiles and drones, appears to have been among the most serious in history between nuclear-armed nations. Indeed, reports from both sides suggest it took a direct intervention from US Secretary of State Marco Rubio to halt an escalating exchange of drones and rockets. Speaking to a Reuters colleague in Singapore, however, Indian Chief of Defense Staff General Anil Chauhan denied either nation had come close to the 'nuclear threshold', describing a 'lot of messaging' from both sides. 'A new space for conventional operations has been created and I think that is the new norm,' he said, vowing that New Delhi would continue to respond militarily to any militant attacks on India suspected to have originated from Pakistan. How stable that "space" might be and how great the risk of escalation for now remains unclear. However, there have been several dramatic examples of escalation in several already volatile global stand-offs over the past two months. As well as the 'four-day' war between India and Pakistan last month, recent weeks have witnessed what is now referred to in Israel and Iran as their '12-day war'. It ended this week with a US-brokered ceasefire after Washington joined the fray with massive air strikes on Tehran's underground nuclear sites. Despite years of confrontation, Israel and Iran had not struck each other's territory directly until last year, while successive US administrations have held back from similar steps. As events in Ukraine have shown, conflict between major nations can become normalized at speed – whether that means 'just' an exchange of drones and missiles, or a more existential battle. More concerning still, such conflicts appear to have become more serious throughout the current decade, with plenty of room for further escalation. This month, that included an audacious set of Ukrainian-organized drone strikes on long-range bomber bases deep inside Russian territory, destroying multiple aircraft which, as well as striking Ukraine, have also been responsible for carrying the Kremlin's nuclear deterrent. All of that is a far cry from the original Cold War, in which it was often assumed that any serious military clash – particularly involving nuclear forces or the nations that possessed them – might rapidly escalate beyond the point of no return. But it does bring with it new risks of escalation. Simmering in the background, meanwhile, is the largest and most dangerous confrontation of them all - that between the US and China, with US officials saying Beijing has instructed its military to be prepared to move against Taiwan from 2027, potentially sparking a hugely wider conflict. As US President Donald Trump headed to Europe this week for the annual NATO summit, just after bombing Iran, it was clear his administration hopes such a potent show of force might be enough to deter Beijing in particular from pushing its luck. 'American deterrence is back,' US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told a Pentagon press briefing the morning after the air strikes took place. Iran's initial response of drones and missiles fired at a US air base in Qatar – with forewarning to the US that the fusillade was coming – appeared deliberately moderate to avoid further escalation. Addressing senators at their confirmation hearing on Tuesday, America's next top commanders in Europe and the Middle East were unanimous in their comments that the US strikes against Iran would strengthen Washington's hand when it came to handling Moscow and Beijing. Chinese media commentary was more mixed. Han Peng, head of state-run China Media Group's North American operations, said the US had shown weakness to the world by not wanting to get dragged into the Iran conflict due to its 'strategic contraction'. Other social media posts talked of how vulnerable Iran looked, with nationalist commentator Hu Xijn warning: "If one day we have to get involved in a war, we must be the best at it." LONG ARM OF AMERICA On that front, the spectacle of multiple US B-2 bombers battering Iran's deepest-buried nuclear bunkers - having flown all the way from the US mainland apparently undetected - will not have gone unnoticed in Moscow or Beijing. Nor will Trump's not so subtle implications that unless Iran backed down, similar weapons might be used to kill its Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei or other senior figures, wherever they might hide. None of America's adversaries have the ability to strike without warning in that way against hardened, deepened targets, and the B-2 – now being replaced by the more advanced B-21 – has no foreign equal. Both are designed to penetrate highly sophisticated air defenses, although how well they would perform against cutting-edge Russian or Chinese systems would only be revealed in an actual conflict. China's effort at building something similar, the H-2, has been trailed in Chinese media for years – and US officials say Beijing is striving hard to make it work. Both China and Russia have fifth-generation fighters with some stealth abilities, but none have the range or carrying capacity to target the deepest Western leadership or weapons bunkers with conventional munitions. As a result, any Chinese or Russian long-range strikes – whether conventional or nuclear – would have to be launched with missiles that could be detected in advance. Even without launching such weapons, however, nuclear powers have their own tools to deliver threats. An analysis of the India-Pakistan 'four-day war' in May done by the Stimson Center suggested that as Indian strikes became more serious on the third day of the war, Pakistan might have taken similar, deliberately visible steps to ready its nuclear arsenal to grab US attention and help conclude the conflict. Indian newspapers have reported that a desperate Pakistan did indeed put pressure on the US to encourage India to stop, as damage to its forces was becoming increasingly serious, and threatening the government. Pakistan denies that – but one of its most senior officers was keen to stress that any repeat of India's strikes would bring atomic risk. "Nothing happened this time," said the chairman of the Pakistani joint chiefs, General Sahir Shamshad Mirza, also speaking to Reuters at the Shangri-La dialogue in Singapore. "But you can't rule out any strategic miscalculation at any time." For now, both sides have pulled back troops from the border – while India appears determined to use longer term strategies to undermine its neighbor, including withdrawing from a treaty controlling the water supplies of the Indus River, which Indian Prime Minister Modi said he now intends to dam. Pakistani officials have warned that could be another act of war. DRONES AND DETERRENCE Making sure Iran never obtains the leverage of a working atomic bomb, of course, was a key point of the US and Israeli air strikes. Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu agreed that the dangers of a government so hostile to Israel obtaining such a weapon would always be intolerable. For years, government and private sector analysts had predicted Iran might respond to an assault on its nuclear facilities with attacks by its proxies across the Middle East, including on Israel from Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza, as well as using thousands of missiles, drones and attack craft to block international oil exports through the Strait of Hormuz. In reality, the threat of an overwhelming US military response – and hints of an accompanying switch of US policy to outright regime change or decapitation in Iran, coupled with the Israeli military success against Hezbollah and Hamas, appear to have forced Tehran to largely stand down. What that means longer term is another question. Flying to the Netherlands on Tuesday for the NATO summit, Trump appeared to be offering Iran under its current Shi'ite Muslim clerical rulers a future as a 'major trading nation' providing they abandoned their atomic program. The Trump administration is also talking up the success of its Operation ROUGH RIDER against the Iran-backed Houthi militia in Yemen. Vice Admiral Bradley Cooper, selected as the new head of US Central Command, told senators the US military had bombed the Houthis for 50 days before a deal was struck in which the Houthis agreed to stop attacking US and other international shipping in the Red Sea. But Cooper also noted that like other militant groups in the Middle East, the Houthis were becoming increasingly successful in building underground bases out of the reach of smaller US weapons, as well as using unmanned systems to sometimes overwhelm their enemies. 'The nature and character of warfare is changing before our very eyes,' he said. Behind the scenes and sometimes in public, US and allied officials say they are still assessing the implications of the success of Ukraine and Israel in infiltrating large numbers of short-range drones into Russia and Iran respectively for two spectacular attacks in recent weeks. According to Ukrainian officials, the drones were smuggled into Russia hidden inside prefabricated buildings on the back of trucks, with the Russian drivers unaware of what they were carrying until the drones were launched. Israel's use of drones on the first day of its campaign against Iran is even more unsettling for Western nations wondering what such an attack might look like. Its drones were smuggled into Iran and in some cases assembled in secret there to strike multiple senior Iranian leaders and officials in their homes as they slept in the small hours of the morning on the first day of the campaign. As they met in The Hague this week for their annual summit, NATO officials and commanders will have considered what they must do to build their own defenses to ensure they do not prove vulnerable to a similar attack. Judging by reports in the Chinese press, military officials there are now working on the same.
Reuters
2 days ago
- Politics
- Reuters
From India-Pakistan to Iran and Ukraine, a new era of escalation: Peter Apps
WASHINGTON, June 27 (Reuters) - As India's defense chief attended an international security conference in Singapore in May, soon after India and Pakistan fought what many in South Asia now dub 'the four-day war', he had a simple message: Both sides expect to do it all again. It was a stark and perhaps counterintuitive conclusion: the four-day military exchange, primarily through missiles and drones, appears to have been among the most serious in history between nuclear-armed nations. Indeed, reports from both sides suggest it took a direct intervention from U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio to halt an escalating exchange of drones and rockets. Speaking to a Reuters colleague in Singapore, however, Indian Chief of Defense Staff General Anil Chauhan denied either nation had come close to the 'nuclear threshold', describing a 'lot of messaging' from both sides. 'A new space for conventional operations has been created and I think that is the new norm,' he said, vowing that New Delhi would continue to respond militarily to any militant attacks on India suspected to have originated from Pakistan. How stable that "space" might be and how great the risk of escalation for now remains unclear. However, there have been several dramatic examples of escalation in several already volatile global stand-offs over the past two months. As well as the 'four-day' war between India and Pakistan last month, recent weeks have witnessed what is now referred to in Israel and Iran as their '12-day war'. It ended this week with a U.S.-brokered ceasefire after Washington joined the fray with massive air strikes on Tehran's underground nuclear sites. Despite years of confrontation, Israel and Iran had not struck each other's territory directly until last year, while successive U.S. administrations have held back from similar steps. As events in Ukraine have shown, conflict between major nations can become normalized at speed – whether that means 'just' an exchange of drones and missiles, or a more existential battle. More concerning still, such conflicts appear to have become more serious throughout the current decade, with plenty of room for further escalation. This month, that included an audacious set of Ukrainian-organized drone strikes on long-range bomber bases deep inside Russian territory, destroying multiple aircraft which, as well as striking Ukraine, have also been responsible for carrying the Kremlin's nuclear deterrent. All of that is a far cry from the original Cold War, in which it was often assumed that any serious military clash – particularly involving nuclear forces or the nations that possessed them – might rapidly escalate beyond the point of no return. But it does bring with it new risks of escalation. Simmering in the background, meanwhile, is the largest and most dangerous confrontation of them all - that between the U.S. and China, with U.S. officials saying Beijing has instructed its military to be prepared to move against Taiwan from 2027, potentially sparking a hugely wider conflict. As U.S. President Donald Trump headed to Europe this week for the annual NATO summit, just after bombing Iran, it was clear his administration hopes such a potent show of force might be enough to deter Beijing in particular from pushing its luck. 'American deterrence is back,' U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told a Pentagon press briefing the morning after the air strikes took place. Iran's initial response of drones and missiles fired at a U.S. air base in Qatar – with forewarning to the U.S. that the fusillade was coming – appeared deliberately moderate to avoid further escalation. Addressing senators at their confirmation hearing on Tuesday, America's next top commanders in Europe and the Middle East were unanimous in their comments that the U.S. strikes against Iran would strengthen Washington's hand when it came to handling Moscow and Beijing. Chinese media commentary was more mixed. Han Peng, head of state-run China Media Group's North American operations, said the U.S. had shown weakness to the world by not wanting to get dragged into the Iran conflict due to its 'strategic contraction'. Other social media posts talked of how vulnerable Iran looked, with nationalist commentator Hu Xijn warning: "If one day we have to get involved in a war, we must be the best at it." On that front, the spectacle of multiple U.S. B-2 bombers battering Iran's deepest-buried nuclear bunkers - having flown all the way from the U.S. mainland apparently undetected - will not have gone unnoticed in Moscow or Beijing. Nor will Trump's not so subtle implications that unless Iran backed down, similar weapons might be used to kill its Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei or other senior figures, wherever they might hide. None of America's adversaries have the ability to strike without warning in that way against hardened, deepened targets, and the B-2 – now being replaced by the more advanced B-21 – has no foreign equal. Both are designed to penetrate highly sophisticated air defenses, although how well they would perform against cutting-edge Russian or Chinese systems would only be revealed in an actual conflict. China's effort at building something similar, the H-2, has been trailed in Chinese media for years – and U.S. officials say Beijing is striving hard to make it work. Both China and Russia have fifth-generation fighters with some stealth abilities, but none have the range or carrying capacity to target the deepest Western leadership or weapons bunkers with conventional munitions. As a result, any Chinese or Russian long-range strikes – whether conventional or nuclear – would have to be launched with missiles that could be detected in advance. Even without launching such weapons, however, nuclear powers have their own tools to deliver threats. An analysis of the India-Pakistan 'four-day war' in May done by the Stimson Center suggested that as Indian strikes became more serious on the third day of the war, Pakistan might have taken similar, deliberately visible steps to ready its nuclear arsenal to grab U.S. attention and help conclude the conflict. Indian newspapers have reported that a desperate Pakistan did indeed put pressure on the U.S. to encourage India to stop, as damage to its forces was becoming increasingly serious, and threatening the government. Pakistan denies that – but one of its most senior officers was keen to stress that any repeat of India's strikes would bring atomic risk. "Nothing happened this time," said the chairman of the Pakistani joint chiefs, General Sahir Shamshad Mirza, also speaking to Reuters at the Shangri-La dialogue in Singapore. "But you can't rule out any strategic miscalculation at any time." For now, both sides have pulled back troops from the border – while India appears determined to use longer term strategies to undermine its neighbor, including withdrawing from a treaty controlling the water supplies of the Indus River, which Indian Prime Minister Modi said he now intends to dam. Pakistani officials have warned that could be another act of war. Making sure Iran never obtains the leverage of a working atomic bomb, of course, was a key point of the U.S. and Israeli air strikes. Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu agreed that the dangers of a government so hostile to Israel obtaining such a weapon would always be intolerable. For years, government and private sector analysts had predicted Iran might respond to an assault on its nuclear facilities with attacks by its proxies across the Middle East, including on Israel from Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza, as well as using thousands of missiles, drones and attack craft to block international oil exports through the Strait of Hormuz. In reality, the threat of an overwhelming U.S. military response – and hints of an accompanying switch of U.S. policy to outright regime change or decapitation in Iran, coupled with the Israeli military success against Hezbollah and Hamas, appear to have forced Tehran to largely stand down. What that means longer term is another question. Flying to the Netherlands on Tuesday for the NATO summit, Trump appeared to be offering Iran under its current Shi'ite Muslim clerical rulers a future as a 'major trading nation' providing they abandoned their atomic program. The Trump administration is also talking up the success of its Operation ROUGH RIDER against the Iran-backed Houthi militia in Yemen. Vice Admiral Bradley Cooper, selected as the new head of U.S. Central Command, told senators the U.S. military had bombed the Houthis for 50 days before a deal was struck in which the Houthis agreed to stop attacking U.S. and other international shipping in the Red Sea. But Cooper also noted that like other militant groups in the Middle East, the Houthis were becoming increasingly successful in building underground bases out of the reach of smaller U.S. weapons, as well as using unmanned systems to sometimes overwhelm their enemies. 'The nature and character of warfare is changing before our very eyes,' he said. Behind the scenes and sometimes in public, U.S. and allied officials say they are still assessing the implications of the success of Ukraine and Israel in infiltrating large numbers of short-range drones into Russia and Iran respectively for two spectacular attacks in recent weeks. According to Ukrainian officials, the drones were smuggled into Russia hidden inside prefabricated buildings on the back of trucks, with the Russian drivers unaware of what they were carrying until the drones were launched. Israel's use of drones on the first day of its campaign against Iran is even more unsettling for Western nations wondering what such an attack might look like. Its drones were smuggled into Iran and in some cases assembled in secret there to strike multiple senior Iranian leaders and officials in their homes as they slept in the small hours of the morning on the first day of the campaign. As they met in The Hague this week for their annual summit, NATO officials and commanders will have considered what they must do to build their own defenses to ensure they do not prove vulnerable to a similar attack. Judging by reports in the Chinese press, military officials there are now working on the same.
The Guardian
2 days ago
- Politics
- The Guardian
On r/collapse, people are ‘kept abreast of the latest doom'. Its moderators say it's not for everyone
The threat of nuclear war, genocide in Gaza, ChatGPT reducing human cognitive ability, another summer of record heat. Every day brings a torrent of unimaginable horror. It used to be weeks between disasters, now we're lucky to get hours. For many, the only sane solution is to stop reading the news altogether – advice often shared by therapists, self-help books and even newspaper articles. But to bury your head in the sand until the day the apocalypse arrives at your doorstep is not necessarily the most tranquil, nor moral, of postures. In the sprawling Reddit community r/collapse, people instead try to stare unblinkingly at the unravelling of civilization. For the roughly half a million members here, many of whom joined in the wake of Covid-19 pandemic and two Donald Trump inaugurations, the arc of history feels more like a freefall. This June, r/collapse was busy discussing the developing conflict between Iran and Israel, as well as 'wet bulbs' (a far more humid and deadly type of heatwave), the millions of air conditioners being bought in India as temperatures rise and Trump's plan to end Fema. But one of the top posts tackled a more specialist topic: declining levels of phytoplankton in the North Atlantic. 'As if the North Atlantic fisheries wasn't in bad enough shape from overfishing of cod, now the base of the entire food chain has observed to be getting smaller each year for the past 60 years,' the poster wrote. A commenter added: 'Ocean acidification/die off is terrifying. Even if we solve all the other collapse problems (and we almost certainly can't) the oceans dying means the atmosphere becomes depleted of oxygen and poisonous. If humans survive those scenarios, life on Earth would more resemble that of a moon colony.' Much informed panicking ensued. There are lots of places on the internet, and especially on Reddit, that collate news stories around a theme: r/UpliftingNews, r/LateStageCapitalism and r/nottheonion (which posts news so ridiculous it seems like satire) to name a few. But r/collapse is much more than a collation of links for people to feel outraged and nihilistic or warm and fuzzy about. What's striking is the clear-eyed, unemotional tone in which posts are written: neither pessimistic nor hopeful, just peering through the window at a relentless decline. 'We are not an activist subreddit,' one moderator, a retired history teacher, told me. 'We filter out people who want to organize and protest. We are also not inclined towards accelerationism, we're not seeking doom. We accept that perhaps it's going to happen, but it's not a conspiratorial subreddit. It's basically logic, rational and scientific.' That is thanks in part to r/collapse's 30 fairly active moderators – among them neuroscientists, environmental scientists, chemical engineers, government auditors and history teachers – who intensively maintain the subreddit as relatively objective a resource as possible. They even have a separate page, called r/collapse_wilds, for posts removed by the moderation team, usually because they did not provide high quality enough evidence. When a new moderator applies, the existing group screens them for mental health issues and ability to handle consistently distressing content, as well as overt political bias. It might sound like a lot of red tape to help run a subreddit, but when you realize what it takes to drench yourself in fatalistic topics day in, day out, you start to understand that a collapse moderator is a special kind of person. I spoke with 10 such moderators on a video chat, just as the national guard and marines were sent to quell Ice protests in Los Angeles. All are men based in North America, polite and turn-taking, though most insisted on remaining anonymous so their online roles wouldn't interfere with their real world positions. In their roles, they take the existential questions of civilization collapse seriously: What exactly constitutes collapse? Are we already experiencing it? Why aren't people reacting more strongly to its likelihood, and does either humanity or technology have the ability to prevent it? Practical questions, too: where is the best place to live, the most helpful job to have, as collapse happens? They wrestle with whether too much Trump news is distracting, and painstakingly debate posts about the morality of having children and population growth, which they say is the most controversial topic among the community. Each post from a user must come with an accompanying statement explaining why it's related to collapse that the moderators assess; sometimes it seems more like they're overseeing a grant application process rather than an online forum. The work is often philosophical in nature. 'People say that this is one of the least religious times in human history, but I think that's completely false,' said Etienne, a moderator who is based in Ontario with a background in cognitive science and neuroscience. 'Most of us have strong, strong faith in the myth of technological progress. Most people associate thinking about collapse with pessimism because you're questioning the orthodoxy of our modern religion, which is faith in progress. And I think once you've made peace with the myth that we all grew up with being scientifically false, then you go through the stages of grief, then you build some psychological resilience to live in the world.' The group says that when the media or academia write about collapse issues, they often try to end on an optimistic note, so as not to depress the reader. 'It's really hard to find a mainstream publication that doesn't end an article about, say, renewable energy, with a section that says: 'things are difficult but let's have hope' and 'it's just a matter of building more solar panels,'' Etienne said. He cited reports, including an impactful study by Simon Michaux commissioned by the Finnish government, that say it's simply impossible to replace energy with renewable sources at scale. 'But we find there's much less coverage of that – of using less energy and degrowth.' The moderators also say that people who are concerned about societal collapse tend to think it'll come suddenly with a nuclear bomb or terrible pandemic. The subreddit is of a different mind. One moderator, an engineer who preferred to remain anonymous, explained the tenets of r/collapse like this: 'In the long term, it's going to be very difficult for us to maintain this very complex industrial society. We're looking at a type of simplification of industrial civilization. I think most of our members think this is what collapse is, which is why almost half of the members, when asked when they think collapse is going to happen, said that it's already happening. 'This is the idea of catabolic collapse: that what we're living through is a series of crises, sometimes followed by momentary resolution, but the long-term trend is downturn. It's not going to be a sudden event that's everything in a single day, which I think people like preppers are more accustomed to thinking.' Every week, r/collapse puts out a special newsletter called Last Week in Collapse, a one-stop shop for everything that has gone wrong in the world. Its author is an international affairs researcher, who requested anonymity because their background might 'color the reader's interpretation of the events'. They're not part of the moderation group, but began writing the roundup in 2021, inspired by what they had seen on the subreddit. 'It was part of a process of making sense of the storm of news around us – almost a form of writing therapy,' they told me over email. 'It is so easy to get lost or distracted by the next thing that we forget the big picture. So I decided to start organizing and summarizing other stories because I believed it would help other collapsologists and observers zoom out and take it all in.' It makes for a pretty brutal read. This week's newsletter, for example, began with a newly published study of tree rings that suggested 'irreversible large-scale forest loss' in the Amazon; featured a study saying climate change could reduce crop yields across the US and Europe 40% by 2100, which one scientist likened to 'everyone on the planet giving up breakfast'; touched on counterintuitive research showing that some glass bottles contain up to 50 times more microplastics than plastic bottles or metal cans; and reported that this is 'the sixth consecutive year that global peacefulness has deteriorated' per the Global Peace Index. These were just a few of around a hundred links. 'Collapse is hard to deny when it's all laid out for you every week,' says the author. Readers are now able to spend just five or 10 minutes reading one email 'and be kept abreast on all the latest doom'. I ask what differentiates just bad news from a news story that is actually about collapse. 'I have found that it helps to imagine likely realities for humanity, position your perspective in the future, and then look backwards for the telltale signs and milestones of future collapse,' the author says. 'What factors and events will seem obvious to someone living 50 or 100 years from now? We can look back at the 1930s today and the road to WWII seems much clearer. Scientists are publishing under-appreciated studies every day, and their relevance is fairly obvious. Yet our attention lies elsewhere entirely.' A weekly roundup does seem like a useful alternative to completely ignoring society's downfall. But if things are as bad as r/collapse believes them to be, does it do us any good to inundate ourselves with news of the end of everything? Aren't we just increasing our personal suffering without making anything better? 'Yes, I sometimes wonder about the overall mental impact of Last Week in Collapse,' says its author. 'I know some people find it to be valuable, informative and even soothing. Others can't bring themselves to read it. It's not for everyone, and that's fine. To paraphrase Trotsky: you may not be interested in collapse, but collapse is interested in you.' To that end, the subreddit provides online mental health resources as well as a separate community, r/CollapseSupport, where people talk about their struggles. 'Can't stop thinking about the children', 'feeling completely hopeless' and 'scared to death for everyone' are three recent post titles. Most of the moderators say that the thing they've found most helpful in dealing with the onslaught of information is moderating itself, and connecting with people who have similar concerns across the world: debating but also sharing cat photos and having meaningful discussion about how to lead a meaningful life in the end times. But they're aware they're not always the most fun people at a party. 'I don't want to be right about this sort of situation,' said one of the moderators, an electrical engineer from the midwest. 'But if you're open-minded and you're considerate of sources, and you're approaching it from a very methodical fashion, there is much cause for concern. Working through that grief was trying. I think there's a lot of people that come to this community that maybe had my same perspective, and if I can at least help a few of those folks work through that, or come to their own peace, that adds some small iota of value to the internet space at large.' And that would be a vaguely uplifting note to end this article on, but as I'm hearing, that's the coward's way out. The truth is not all the people behind r/collapse feel like they're necessarily helping. As the author of Last Week in Collapse put it to me, there's probably no way out of the collapse: 'I do not believe we will ultimately innovate or vote ourselves out of our situation. I predict humanity is in for a polluted future of climate emergencies, famines, wars and scarcity before the end of this century. And heatwaves, civil conflicts, breakdown of ocean currents, disease, poverty, overpopulation, drought and more. So I feel a certain sense of duty to inform those who are interested, but it's probably healthier to 'chop wood, carry water' than to spend too much time following the world's problems. Most people can't really stop the machine anyway.'
