Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s SitRep. FP’s Amy Mackinnon is our all-star relief for Robbie this week, who’s out on vacation. Also, let’s honor Larry Tesler, the inventor of the cut, copy, and paste commands, who died at 74 this week, by copying and pasting an inspiring quote. After all, “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.” There, we just did it. (Funny how people always leave out the rest of the line: “that mediocrity can pay to greatness.”)
Alright, here’s what’s on tap for the day: The Biden administration is increasingly out of sync with its wartime allies Ukraine and Israel, a top U.S. lawmaker dishes on “bizarre” meetings in Georgia, and the AUKUS allies slash red tape that had been stalling defense exports.
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The United States has played a decisive role in supporting allies Ukraine and Israel as they wage war against their respective foes, Russia and Hamas, by providing billions of dollars in military aid, intelligence support, and diplomatic muscle.
But in recent weeks, the Biden administration has appeared increasingly out of step with the two countries. From Ukraine launching a surprise counteroffensive into Russian territory without informing Washington first to Israel assassinating Hamas political leader and top negotiator Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran amid ongoing U.S.-backed cease-fire talks to end the war in Gaza, Washington seems to have been kept out of the loop on major decisions that dramatically impacted each war’s trajectory. And in each case, the White House has been left scrambling to respond.
Kursk. The White House denied that Ukraine gave it any sort of heads-up before Ukrainian troops went into Kursk. The Pentagon did not get a heads-up, either. And the State Department said the U.S. government wasn’t involved in the planning.
The Biden administration appears to be privately skeptical of the military logic behind Ukraine’s incursion into Russia’s Kursk oblast, according to multiple people familiar with the matter.
It’s not the first time that Washington has had reservations about Ukraine’s strategy. There were serious concerns that Ukraine put too many troops toward unsuccessfully trying to hold the mineral-rich city of Bakhmut in Ukraine’s Donbas region during Kyiv’s 2023 counteroffensive. And in a blockbuster report on Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal noted that the CIA tried—unsuccessfully—to dissuade Kyiv from attempting to sabotage the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. (More on that below.)
The White House has also long been concerned about the war spilling beyond Ukraine’s borders and possibly escalating, which has caused friction with Ukraine’s leaders, who have at times chafed at the level and speed of U.S. support and the restrictions Washington has put on the kinds of weapons it will let Kyiv have and how those weapons can be used.
Though U.S. military aid to Ukraine has continued to flow after Congress passed $60 billion in additional assistance back in April, it has been coming in a trickle, not a flood, frustrating Ukrainian officials who have come to Washington pushing for more. And the Biden administration has been deeply hesitant to let Ukraine use U.S. weapons to strike targets inside Russia, only recently loosening restrictions somewhat to allow it in very limited circumstances.
Even with Ukrainian troops now on Russian soil and the Kremlin not rattling the nuclear saber, perhaps the U.S. administration’s biggest fear stemming from the conflict, the U.S. Department of Defense is still only letting Ukraine hit Russian soil with guided munitions that go up to 40 miles per shot, far less than the range of the 200-mile U.S. Army Tactical Missile System the United States secretly sent earlier this year.
Backroom tensions. Yet the Biden administration has sought to keep a lid on disagreements with Kyiv, at least in public, in order to present the image of a united front.
As such, Kyiv’s decision to launch a daring ground incursion into Russian territory apparently without consulting with Washington about it has put the Biden administration in an extremely awkward position.
“I think, privately, we have to watch Russia and see what they’re going to do,” said Jim Townsend, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for European and NATO policy. “At the same time, publicly, we can’t be seen as pulling the rug out from under the [Ukrainians].”
The Biden administration has been tight-lipped about its internal deliberations over the offensive—which has seen Ukraine make its largest gains on the battlefield in nearly two years—giving Kyiv some freedom of action to cross over a seeming red line and into Russia. But quietly, Ukrainian and hawkish Eastern European officials have continued to seethe about the lack of support to help Ukraine actually win the war, not just survive Russia’s onslaught.
Israel. The United States and Israel are generally aligned on the big-picture goals of kneecapping Hamas’s military capabilities and defending Israel against Iran and its proxies. “At the end of the day, they want the same thing,” said Avner Golov, who served as a senior director on Israel’s National Security Council.
But there has still been plenty of friction between the two close partners on some very important issues, including Israel’s bombing campaign in Gaza—something U.S. President Joe Biden has described at times as “indiscriminate”; how and when to bring the war to an end; the lack of planning for how to stabilize Gaza in the war’s immediate aftermath; and whether Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s stated goal of totally eradicating Hamas is even possible.
Complicating matters is the disagreement within Israel itself—among Netanyahu’s government, the security establishment, and the public—on how and when to bring the war to a close. “That makes it something much more difficult for the United States,” said Steven Cook, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “Essentially, you have the security establishment, you have Israeli politicians who are essentially appealing to the United States to smack Netanyahu around, but he’s the elected prime minister,” he said.
The result is that the Biden administration at times seems to be operating in a different world than the one in which Netanyahu is in charge of Israel. As U.S. diplomats were working with their counterparts in Egypt and Qatar to secure a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas, Israel apparently assassinated Hamas’s political leader while he was in Tehran. That decision not only threw a wrench into the cease-fire talks, but it also kicked off a new crisis as Iran threatened to retaliate for the attack, sending the United States scrambling to send military reinforcements to the region to protect Israel.
Offshore balancing. With Washington moving away from the kinds of direct overseas military interventions that characterized the war on terror, the extensive but standoffish U.S. support for both Ukraine and Israel seemed to offer a new model for how the U.S. can come to the aid of allies without putting boots on the ground. “This is what the restrainers and the realists want. They want to be offshore balancers,” Cook said.
But Cook noted that—as the past few weeks have demonstrated—the approach is not without its shortcomings. “It sounds great in academic journals, but I don’t think it really works,” Cook said.
Nasrina Bargzie is joining U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign to spearhead outreach to Muslim and Arab voters, NBC News reports. Bargzie was previously a policy advisor in the office of the vice president on Muslim, Arab, and Gaza-related issues.
Ilan Goldenberg is also joining the campaign as its liaison to the Jewish community.
Jerry Dunleavy has resigned from the House Foreign Affairs Committee, where he was the lead investigator for Chairman Michael McCaul’s investigation into the Biden administration’s disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal.
Dunleavy said the panel had gone too easy on several major witnesses, did not properly investigate the Islamic State’s August 2021 suicide attack on Abbey Gate that killed 13 U.S. service members and 170 Afghan civilians, and failed to follow up on key leads.
What should be high on your radar, if it isn’t already.
“Just drivel” in Georgia. SitRep caught up with Sen. Jeanne Shaheen following her recent trip to Georgia, which recently passed a Russia-style “foreign agents” law that critics fear could be used to stifle civil society and which prompted the State Department to suspend $95 million in aid to the country’s government.
Shaheen described her meetings with Georgia’s prime minister and foreign and defense minister as “bizarre” and “very adversarial,” with top Georgian officials advancing conspiracy theories accusing the United States of trying to overthrow the country’s government. “We said, ‘We’re here because we think it’s important to get the relationship back on track,’” Shaheen said. But “we got back just drivel from the prime minister.”
Officials in the region, most notably in Moscow, have long accused Washington of seeking to topple governments in Eastern Europe. But the remarks are particularly striking coming from officials in Georgia, which until recently was a close U.S. partner and has long sought membership in the EU and NATO.
“I think they’re talking points. I don’t think they really believe it,” Shaheen said.
Sudan peace talks. The Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) appears to be ghosting the U.S.-mediated talks to end the country’s yearlong civil war that started in Geneva this week. SAF officials, who did not show up for the first day of talks on Wednesday, are apparently frustrated with the lack of U.S. visits to Sudan—the United States packed up its embassy in Khartoum with the capital under fire last year—and has raised concerns about foreign states “meddling” in the country’s crisis.
Representatives for the other party in the conflict, Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces—which is backed by the United Arab Emirates—has made it to Switzerland but apparently did not attend Wednesday’s session, either. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has reportedly urged the SAF to join the talks.
Nord Stream. What happened in May 2022 when a bunch of senior Ukrainian military officers and businessmen walked into a bar high on Kyiv’s success in repelling the weeks-old full-scale Russian invasion of their country? They decided to destroy the Nord Stream pipeline, of course.
“The whole thing was born out of a night of heavy boozing and the iron determination of a handful of people who had the guts to risk their lives for their country,” one of the military officers who plotted the operation told the Wall Street Journal.
The Wall Street Journal reported in a long-form humdinger that the Ukrainian operation to destroy Russia’s largest gas pipeline into Europe—which ultimately released the equivalent of a year’s worth of Denmark’s carbon dioxide emissions into the Baltic Sea—cost $300,000, with six saboteurs posing as friends on a pleasure cruise aboard a rented yacht. The scheme was first nixed by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky after the CIA caught wind of it, but Ukraine’s then-military chief, Gen. Valeriy Zaluzhny, still went ahead with the plans, the Journal reports.
Slashing red tape. The AUKUS allies—Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States—have finalized a plan to create national exemptions that slash licensing requirements for most controlled goods, technologies, and services sent between the three countries. It’s an effort to streamline the defense trade that Western officials believe will allow for cutting-edge technologies to move more readily among the three allies. It will allow license-free trade for 80 percent of U.S. defense exports to Australia that are bound by U.S. regulations on defense-related items.
Snapshot
Thursday, Aug. 15: Three-year anniversary of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Supreme Allied Commander Europe and U.S. European Command chief Gen. Christopher Cavoli speaks at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.
Monday, Aug. 19: The four-day Democratic National Convention begins in Chicago.
“My fear is that if the good Lord were to call Putin from this world overnight, his immediate successor—I am 100 percent sure—is not going to deviate from the policies of the ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine and is going to be working very hard to consolidate control.”
—Former U.S. Ambassador to Russia John Sullivan tells Robbie.
Downward facing nuke. Indian Navy sailors have been incorporating yoga into their workout regimens for a long time, but now it appears to be helping to reveal big nuclear secrets. Open-source sleuth Matt Korda found evidence in Instagram photos of the Indian Navy’s yoga exercises that New Delhi has likely retired the nuclear-capable Dhanush missile.
Out of office. How’s this for an auto-reply? Ukrainian lawmaker Roman Kostenko posted a video earlier this week telling colleagues that he wouldn’t be coming to votes for the foreseeable future. Why? His Ukrainian military unit was joining the offensive into Russia’s Kursk oblast.
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