Resource Type: Features

New Insensitive Munitions may pose lingering toxic threat

Hanna Homestead is the Director of the Climate and Militarism Program at the Center for International Policy.

In February, the Washington Post reported the story of Hind Rajab, a six year old Palestinian child who spent the last three hours of her life trapped in a car with seven dead members of her family, pleading for help. The family was following evacuation orders from the Israeli military when their car was targeted. An ambulance was then dispatched to rescue Hind with permission from Israeli authorities. Despite being clearly marked as a medical transport vehicle, radioing its location, and following the approved route provided by the Israeli military, the paramedics came under heavy fire. Further investigation by the Post found the destruction of the ambulance was “consistent with the use of a round fired by Israeli tanks, according to six munitions experts.” The fragment of a US-made 120mm tank-fired round was reportedly found near the charred vehicle, which had a visible foot-wide hole consistent with the exit of a tank projectile.

Given nearly two weeks had elapsed before it was safe to investigate the scene, experts could not definitively verify the fragment was directly involved in the strike. However, satellite imagery proved that Israeli tanks capable of firing 120mm rounds were in the area when the attack on the ambulance occurred. In December, the Biden Administration bypassed Congress – a highly controversial move – to approve the transfer of nearly 14,000 anti-tank 120mm MPAT rounds to Israel despite evidence of ongoing, indiscriminate, and systematic targeting of civilians.

The transfer of US-made explosive weapons, including 120mm MPAT rounds, 155mm artillery shells, and Mark-84 unguided bombs are playing a central role in the Israeli government’s genocidal efforts to “make Gaza uninhabitable,” resulting in Hind’s death as well as more than 30,000 civilians over the last six months. Even spent, the remains of the round poses a toxic risk. Explosive weapons contain chemicals and heavy metals that contaminate water and soil for generations, fueling displacement and food and economic insecurity that threatens regional and geopolitical stability. Both the detonation and production of explosive weapons contribute to severe and long-lasting-environmental contamination, resulting in direct deaths and civilian harm that continues long after the explosions occur. Recent Pentagon efforts to make munitions “safer” for military personnel not only downplay, but threaten to exacerbate these widespread toxic legacies.

Munitions, made in America

Within the US, the production of explosive weapons has resulted in massive amounts of pollution and ecological destruction. There are currently more than 40,000 military sites across US states and territories that are contaminated with toxic military waste and legacy explosives, creating significant and cascading public health challenges. The DoD has already spent more than $40 billion attempting to clean them up, and recent estimates by the Government Accountability Office found the DoD faces at least $91 billion in future environmental liability costs. Historically-marginalized populations are particularly at risk of harm from toxic contamination. Superfund sites are more likely to exist in low-income areas, and are correlated with lower life expectancy in the surrounding communities.

The US is currently in the process of ramping up explosive munitions production to continue arms transfers and to replenish depleted domestic weapons stockpiles after significant amounts of defense equipment were transferred to Ukraine and Israel over the last two years. Not only are production rates increasing significantly, but the DoD is transitioning from producing larger-caliber munitions containing legacy energetic materials (explosives, nominally TNT and RDX) to those made with “insensitive” high explosives (IHE), also referred to as insensitive munitions (IM). Insensitive munitions are designed to be less reactive to stimuli and therefore safer to transport and store, an understandable goal when stockpiling explosives. This function is perceived to be both necessary and advantageous by the DoD and members of Congress interested in producing a larger war reserve to avoid future stockpile depletion.

In December 2023, defense giant BAE Systems was awarded a DoD contract worth $8.8 billion to produce the insensitive high explosive IMX-101 to be used as a “safe and effective” replacement for TNT in new artillery rounds. IMX-101 is the main explosive fill used in new 155mm M795 projectile production – currently one of the most highly sought-after munitions – replacing the legacy 155mm M107 projectile. While the development of IMX-101 has been in the pipeline for decades, the increased demand for ammunition from Ukraine and Israel, as well as competition to modernize vis a vis China, has spurred Congress to “expedite” testing and oversight to hasten the production of weapons made with IHE.

While offering functional advantages, the full impact of insensitive munitions on human and ecological health is not yet known, and what data is available raises concerns. Experts infer that some of the chemical compositions of IHE are likely to differ considerably from legacy explosives in their properties, and “therefore, also in their effect and behavior in the environment.” Yet, the DoD maintains there is limited information in the literature regarding human toxicity and adverse health effects due to exposure to insensitive explosives, including IMX-101. It is also unclear how environmental assessments and data on IHE that do exist are evaluated or incorporated into ongoing IM manufacturing, training, and operational planning. While IM weapons have been described as a way the military can “have [its] cake and eat it, too,” a closer look at the development of the 155mm M795 projectile made with IMX-101 raises a number of concerns.

IMX-101 appeared on the scene in 2010, after being named one of “The 50 Best Inventions of 2010” by TIME Magazine for its promise to replace TNT as a “less dangerous explosive.” Early testing of IMX-101 weapons was fast-tracked from what’s typically a five-year test period to two, and did not include comprehensive assessments of the ecological toxicology of the compound or its residues resulting from its production or operational use. Qualification testing of 155mm projectiles made with IMX-101 generally focused on the weapon’s performance, showcasing how IM projectiles can withstand various catalysts while maintaining lethality when deployed as intended. The results were published along with DoD assurances that “IMX-101 and its ingredients were found to be less toxic than RDX and the IMX-101 detonation products were calculated to be benign.” However, research conducted at the DoD’s Picatinny Arsenal used to certify the low-risk profile of IMX-101 shells has since been retracted due to inaccuracies and inconsistencies in the data. The original DoD 2009 study (no longer publicly available) indicated over 99.99% of all energetic material was destroyed during detonation, signifying the munition did not pose a contamination risk.

Eight years later, subsequent field experiments funded by the DoD Environmental Restoration Program demonstrated that in fact, over 30% of some energetic compounds remain after detonation – meaning the IM shell poses a significantly higher risk of environmental contamination than originally reported. Further DoD research has shown IM munitions deposit more residues than legacy explosives. These residues can persist in the environment for long periods of time following detonation, as research has indicated “the half-life of munition particles was estimated to range between 66 and 228 years for IMX-101.” A revised 2019 toxicology assessment of IMX-101 released by the US Army Public Health Center also points to a number of primary adverse health and reproductive effects on animal and plant life following exposure to IMX-101 compounds and recommends further testing, noting the DoD’s lack of comprehensive and long-term studies on IMX’s human and ecological toxicity. Numerous researchers have since published findings on the toxic effects of IMX-101 and its degraded residues – including their potential to have greater contamination risks than TNT or RDX.

Additionally, while research shows the “dud” rates for IM munitions do not differ significantly from legacy explosives, the DoD’s Defense Systems Analysis Center has indicated the disposal of unexploded ordnance (UXO) made with IHE, like IMX-101, may require up to 400% more explosives than legacy munitions given their “insensitive” characteristic. This carries significant implications for post-conflict remediation of unexploded ordnance and pollution of military testing sites. UXO must be removed and detonated, otherwise they degrade and leak poison indefinitely, irreversibly contaminating soil and groundwater.

The challenge of UXO removal is of particular concern in Gaza due Israel’s excessive bombing in urban settings, where munitions experts say there is a higher rate of failed detonation. The use of IMX-101 munitions, including the thousands of 155mm M795 projectiles the US is currently supplying to Israel, has the potential to significantly increase the cost of environmental remediation which is already expected to require tens of billions of dollars and take many years to complete. Environmental justice, including the remediation of ecological damage caused by Israel’s heavy bombardment and ongoing siege, will be critical to the safe return of displaced Palestinians to Gaza and to lasting regional peace.

Despite mounting evidence of the need for greater oversight over insensitive munitions modernization, Congress has continued to loosen the reins. The FY 2024 NDAA passed in December established a new Joint Energetics Transition Office within the DoD to “expedite testing, evaluation, and acquisition” of “new” energetic materials. Military personnel in charge of procurement report they have “a lot of freedom to maneuver now” due to the new programs Congress has authorized.

Aftermathematics

The expedited approval and production of new insensitive munitions without adequate understanding, transparency, or planning in regard to their toxicity or long-term contamination risks comes as research is revealing the extensive impact of legacy RDX and TNT contamination on human health and the environment. For decades, the DoD fought against environmental oversight, claiming “environmental cleanups would come at the expense of the safety of U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

According to ProPublica reporting, when the US went to war in Iraq in 2003, top Pentagon officials led by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld attempted to shield the DoD from nearly all environmental oversight measures to preserve “readiness.” Though these efforts failed, throughout the following years the Pentagon sought to undermine accountability for pollution caused by weapons production, including funding and publishing studies downplaying the health and ecological risks of producing legacy explosives. Today’s focus on weapon’s modernization at the expense of adequate environmental testing sounds eerily familiar. In addition to expediting IMX-101 production, the FY2024 NDAA included authorization for the Pentagon to test warheads and propellants using the insensitive energetic material CL20, despite a 2007 DoD study indicating CL-20 residues likely pose a significant toxic ecological risk.

Efforts to clean up contamination caused by legacy weapon’s production and testing are currently underway within the United States, thanks to the persistent organizing of frontline communities. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recently announced an additional $1 billion in new Superfund program funding, which includes military sites. Other types of military-related pollution such as radiation exposure due to nuclear weapons development and testing and PFAS contamination are also being recognized as serious public health concerns. Veterans who were exposed to toxic substances from burn pits, which include UXO disposal, are finally being provided with health benefits after decades of denied claims. While much more still needs to be done domestically, there are currently no legal requirements to address toxic legacies of war abroad caused by US weapons that are deployed directly by US troops or transferred abroad. Americans rarely have insights into the devastating and destabilizing long-term effects these weapons have on foreign populations.

The DoD procurement decisions being made today will have long-term, global impacts. Congress must realistically assess the risks of IM procurement and deployment in order to make an accurate judgment on if the marginal tactical advantages outweigh the human, moral, geopolitical, and financial costs of ecological destruction. Further, Congress should take proactive steps to ensure the comprehensive health effects are accurately assessed and publicly disclosed. The production of IM munitions must not continue the destructive history of legacy explosive contaminants – which will impact affected communities in the US and internationally for decades, and potentially permanently. Congressional oversight is especially important now as the Supreme Court is likely to overturn Chevron deference this year, limiting the EPA’s ability to regulate and mitigate pollution harms.

The US also has a terrible track record in regard to remediating environmental war contamination.

Given that available data show that insensitive munitions may be more difficult, expensive, and environmentally harmful to dispose of (potentially requiring 400% more explosives to detonate), Congress should ensure this information is incorporated and budgeted for in post-conflict remediation planning. Considering the US Army’s poor history with UXO disposal via burn pits in the past, Congress should ensure that the Pentagon plans for IMX UXOs before deployment and adopts principles for assisting victims of toxic remnants of war into their operating policies. This matters immediately, from the first responders making perilous rescue runs the moment the guns are silenced. And it matters long term, as bomb disposal crews clean up and people return to make a life out of the rubble.

For too long, the true human and ecological costs of war have been excluded from foreign policy discourse. Weapons are ultimately made for one purpose: to kill. “Insensitive” munitions are no different; their use inevitably contributes to the destruction of each other’s children, our communities, and the biodiversity of our earth on which all life depends. The toxic ecological effects of these weapons must not be regarded as externalities or secondary to their battlefield functionality; environmental contamination negatively impacts conditions for long-term peace and global security and should be included in a realistic accounting of the costs of war. Ultimately, the best way to avoid these horrors – from mass death to environmental degradation to unexploded ordnance – is for policymakers to abide by and uphold human rights, and commit to resolving political disputes through diplomatic means.

To defeat oligarchy, Ukraine needs strong labor protections. The US can help.

Vladyslav Starodubtsev is a Ukrainian social-democratic, human rights, and social activist and historian of Central and Eastern Europe and Ukrainian left-wing movements.

Every Ukrainian government since independence in 1991 has shared the goal of implementing austerity. In pursuit of an economy organized by neo-Thatcherite principles, each successive government has sought to limit the social and labor rights of Ukrainians. From the Russian invasion in 2014, this has meant prioritizing the oligarchy’s sectoral interests and anti-social business practices over promoting social cohesion and national unity.

Ukrainian labor was already under attack before the 2022 invasion. A 2020 report by the US State Department on the state of human rights, including labor rights in Ukraine, mentioned acts of violence against trade unionists as well as pressure against workers who were acting against corruption in their workplace. In addition, State reported discrimination in the workplace; lack of worker safety and undermining the safety regulations; dangerous work conditions; and delays in payment of wages (essentially a “theft” of wages).

Still, only since Russia’s February 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine has the full extent of the consequences of such policies become clear. One can see overworked nurses toiling in hospitals that lack capacities and equipment, facing a huge number of wounded while understaffed and underpaid, for often no more than 130-150 dollars a month – well below the $175 monthly minimum wage (and earning at most a maximum of 300 dollars/month). Construction workers labor without proper safety standards, working under constant threat of rocket and drone strikes. At the same time, the government has implemented tax cuts for businesses, and further benefited employers at the expense of workers by easing the process of firing an employee. All of this came at the moment when stability for most people became non-existent.

Ukraine’s labor standards were already worsening before February 2022, but instead of easing the burdens on workers and capital equally in the face of the war, labor standards have instead been actively degraded by new laws.

Capital Gains

In March 2022 the least balanced labor law in Ukraine since independence, Law 2136, came into effect. It allowed employers to fire workers without the consent of trade unions and during sick leave. It became possible to increase the work week to 60 hours, and the inviolability of the right to pay was abolished. Employers were able to dismiss employees due to disagreements regarding the continuation of work under new working conditions without waiting for 2 months.The biggest imbalance was caused by the procedure for suspending employment contracts, which employers abused, putting employees on the edge of survival with impunity

Law 2136 also canceled holidays during wartime. This could be justified under some circumstances, but in effect, labor bore the brunt of the hardships, while employers were largely unaffected. Before the full-scale invasion, if work could not continue due to objective factors, workers were able to receive compensation while finding a new job, allowing them to find a better job without compromising their dignity by immediately accepting worse employment.

Under the new law, employers could stop employment contracts without firing an employee and without paying them. This meant that people could no longer register as unemployed while finding work and therefore could not get unemployment benefits. This has not always worked out to the employers’ benefit, though it often does. Since Law 2136’s introduction, in some cases courts sided with employees if an employer did not specify a reason for stopping work.

Law 2136 also introduced the possibility of moving workers onto 1-hour working days, with proportional lowering of wages. If employees disagree, they could be fired without any compensation. Employers were only required to provide 2 days of notice before implementing such decisions, thus depriving them of the possibility to save money or find alternative employment.

With Law 2136, Ukraine enabled employers to avoid paying maternity leave, compensation for pregnant workers, and other benefits.

In July 2022, the Law on Simplifying the Regulation of Labor Relations (Law 2434) was adopted. It introduced parts of the Civil Codex into the labor Codex, providing further opportunities to undermine the labor Codex by allowing looser contracts between employees and employers. The main “innovation” of this law was the introduction of the possibility of firing workers easily.

In August 2022, the Ukrainian government introduced Law 2421, one of the worst-regulated laws on zero-hour contracts in the world. Precarious work, which elsewhere increasingly trends towards greater regulation, is instead becoming even more precarious in Ukraine. Law 2421 establishes zero-hour contracts without any additional security for workers agreeing to such a precarious arrangement. Employers can enter into collective labor agreements with no obligation to provide employees with work, but can offer it as they need. Payment is made only for completed work. After receiving an offer from an employer, an employee must accept it within the terms established by the contract and start work; in case of refusal, they may face disciplinary action. If the duration of work is less than 32 hours per month, the monthly salary is paid for 32 working hours. In effect, the law practically cancels the requirements for a minimum wage.

The new law introduces the possibility of calling an employee at any time and forcing disciplinary action if an employee doesn’t respond. It introduces the possibility of paying less than a minimum wage for work, as well as the possibility of overtime work without compensation. This law undermines the right to private life and poses severe threats to the mental health and well-being of employees.

In its latest statement, the second biggest trade union of Ukraine directly calls the new labor Codex (planned to be accepted in 2024) that the government is now working on, “enslavement.” The statement reads; “Enslavement of employees is foreseen, and employers are given the right to apply overtime hours almost without restrictions (at their discretion).”

Labor Struggles

Even after this attack on labor rights, Ukrainian labor security formally could be seen as at least comparatively average. But in reality, this could not be further from the truth, as the law has power to protect workers only when it is enforced. Undermining workers’ rights illegally is now an incredibly widespread and normalized practice, one aided by the government’s introduction of a moratorium on labor inspections.

The International Labor Organization has concluded, drawing on the examples of Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, that any moratorium on labor inspections “would substantially undermine the inherent functioning of the labor inspection system” and that to adhere to the norms of labor regulations, “the Government [should] take prompt measures to ensure that labor inspectors are empowered to make visits to workplaces liable to inspection without previous notice and to undertake labor inspections as often and as thoroughly as is necessary to ensure the effective application of the legal provisions.” 

In 2023 labor inspections were reintroduced under the pressure of the EU, but with severe limitations that effectively undermine inspections.

These new labor standards were not in any way communicated with the population, and did not receive adequate debate or discussion before adoption. Most people are not well educated on labor law, and the country lacks a strong pool of labor lawyers who can educate and empower workers to find weaknesses in the law and defend their rights.

While it has become somewhat difficult to criticize Ukraine’s government during wartime, the same criticisms have long been made by Ukrainian trade unions, preceding the war: the country is in dire need of a good system of inspections and labor security to enforce standards of labor law.

Furthermore, there has been a constant effort to nationalize trade union property, pursuing the legal argument that trade union property in the USSR was the property of the state and thus, after more than 30 years of independence, it should be inherited by the Ukrainian state, which is viewed as the successor to the Ukrainian SSR, not by trade unions. This argument is used as both an instrument of intimidation to achieve trade union loyalty and as a tool to undermine trade unions’ means for realizing their role in civil society.

In 2022, the government introduced a number of reforms that severely and disproportionately weakened Ukrainian labor rights. Meanwhile, capital has seen its privileges expand, damaging the social contract between workers and businesses by fully siding with business. Tripartism between the state, capital, and labor is practically no more.

None of these reforms helped the economy. They also weakened the human potential, well-being, and physical and mental state of employees, as well as artificially creating highly precarious conditions.

The lack of jobs and extremely low, and usually not-enforceable, minimum wage, which sometimes was ignored outright – even some state enterprises have jobs with less than the $175 monthly minimum wage, with some employees earning only $150 – worsens the situation on the labor market, since fewer qualified workers want to work in Ukraine at a time when the Ukrainian labor market faces serious shortages.

New labor laws have weakened trade unions, thus limiting the voice of civil society and weakening social dialogue between different social groups. This lack of communication also has an economic effect, since cooperation between labor and capital is weak, as is motivation. This lowers productivity and flexibility.

A huge number of workers are working in the shadows. Tax police ignore the problem, and the government tries to normalize this state of affairs. These anti-labor reforms also strengthen the shadow sector, as official employment no longer provides sufficient guarantees. Meanwhile, the government does little to force business out of “the shadow economy.”

Mobilization efforts are hampered by inequality and the refusal of the government to make capital to pay their fair, equal share, together with labor. New labor laws, while rhetorically trying to “move away” from the Soviet legacy, have retained the mindset towards labor inherited from the USSR: a denial of the value and dignity of employees.

Solidarity and the US

How can the US help Ukrainians to limit the harms of oligarchy and regressive reforms, while providing social security for workers ?

In light of such reforms, which are made only for pursuing very narrow sectoral interests instead of the common good, one should understand Ukrainian society and group interests as diverse and complex. We still, unfortunately, retain the strong influence of the old Soviet elite, which became the Ukrainian oligarchy, and we suffer from Thatcherite-like reforms that created a new group of powerful and unchecked influences on politics and the economy. At the same time, Ukraine has a robust civil society, the largest part of which is made up of trade-unions. There are a great number of problems that need to be tackled to ensure basic fairness and justice, which is even more important in the context of full-scale war. Society should feel connected, united, strong, and not undermined and divided by social, political and economic conditions.

Biden’s foreign policy towards Ukraine can be understood in a number of ways. Despite modest beginnings, there have been steady improvements. I expect that this tendency will continue if Biden wins another term. This is the case especially with labor rights, where we hope to see the US taking a greater role in protecting Ukrainian labor.

In 2022, the American Federation of Teachers sent a letter to Secretary Blinken, asking him to look into the Ukrainians government’s actions to undermine the Ukrainian trade union movement and limit worker’s rights. The letter states: “Overall, these new laws, if signed by President Zelensky, will eliminate most collective bargaining rights, reduce worker protections, and allow the state to confiscate property owned by unions and currently used to shelter war refugees.”

The letter was made after a call for solidarity by Ukrainian trade unions against attacks on workers’ rights when they couldn’t be defended, as people were fully concentrated on winning the war.

The AFL-CIO also provided strong backing for Ukrainian trade unions and made sure that Ukrainian trade union voices were heard. It raised awareness in the US government and motivated the adoption of policies to act on Ukrainian society’s demands.

In 2023, Julie Su, the US acting Secretary of Labor, organized a meeting with Ukrainian medical workers to highlight the issues that they are facing, during which Ukrainians discussed the horrible labor conditions in the country.

Some US grants came with conditions that targeted the strengthening of labor, and USAID actively finances trade union events and organizations focused on the promotion of labor rights, such as Labor Initiatives.

The US constantly provides support for the Ukrainian government’s social spending. To make sure that this money would be spent beneficially to the majority of Ukrainians, the US set limitations to the categories on which money could be spent. This is despite the Ukrainian government’s Ministry of Social Policies (which also deals with labor related questions) policy to introduce as many social cuts as possible. This policy was described explicitly: “destroy all social.” The mentioned motivation was to promote the “self-sufficiency” of internally displaced people and others facing extreme pressure so they wouldn’t “get used” to government help. This plan was extensively criticized by Ukrainian social policy researchers.

Active sabotage by some officials and downplaying of the role of the trade unions undermines the majority of Ukrainian society, which in turn produces corruption, unchecked power, lack of stability, and poverty for the majority of Ukrainians. The question of winning the war thus becomes a question of organizing an equal share of responsibility, feeling of community, and common solidarity, which is incompatible with the pursuit of the sectoral economic interests of a powerful few at the cost of the rest of Ukrainian society.

What should be done?

While US policymakers have made efforts to help Ukrainian labor, these efforts are often undermined. For example, medical workers had praised a US grant of $1.25 billion for wages to state-employed workers, but voiced concern with real allocations, especially after Ukraine’s cabinet authorized wage cuts for these same workers. This is just one example where US help has been allocated to help labor, but is subsequently misspent by government schemes or solely allocated for higher management, which already enjoys relatively high wages by Ukrainian standards.

To answer that problem, the US needs to change its priority from securing Ukrainian labor through the help of the government to a multiplicity approach that recognizes the conflicting interests of different parts of Ukrainian society. This might mean helping the national government in one regard while helping the trade unions and local government in others, sometimes, even at the expense of national government interests.

I call that approach poly-archic: recognizing different groups, their positions and roles in society, and the goals that they can achieve. In that sense, the Ukrainian government has a strong pro-oligarchic bias but has a talent for organization of military production and guiding construction efforts. It should be supported in achieving those goals, and trade unions and labor should be supported for the goals of fighting poverty, better social cohesion, tripartism and, importantly, for the effort to battle corruption and oligarchic influence in the political sense: limiting possibilities for unchecked government actions, promotion of group interests; and rigorously controlling government actions towards labor.

Diversifying funds and other means of help towards different agents in Ukrainian society could be a great benefit. Such diversification will strengthen democracy and human rights, promote deliberation, stabilize Ukrainian society, make it more resilient, and indirectly strengthen the Ukrainian war effort. All of this while making the Ukrainian government more transparent and effective.

This is important not only in Ukraine but also in the US. It can create dialogue and cooperation between US trade unions and the US government, combining the skills and knowledge of both to provide strong common support for Ukrainian labor.

With that said, Ukrainian labor will need  substantial international support  to help contain trade union inefficiencies and corruption where those exist. This is a cheap investment, from a financial standpoint, that can boost anti-corruption, democratic, and anti-poverty efforts dramatically.

Conditions for financial aid in terms of labor security could also be stronger. Together with empowering trade unions, it could be enough to help Ukrainians pressure their government when it engages in wrongdoings. Minimum demands would need to include a fair minimum wage, security from firing, promoting social-oriented practices of business, and the introduction of pro-active labor inspection.

Implementing new, even modest, measures towards empowering labor and civil society as a whole will improve democracy and political participation, social cohesion and Ukraine’s economic growth. Ukraine’s victory will be that much closer if Ukrainian labor has a strong voice.

How to pitch the International Policy Journal

The work of the International Policy Journal is to imagine better futures and better solutions to the shared challenges of cohabitating the earth with other countries, with other peoples.

Here we hope to foster a lively discourse about the how and the what of better futures. As outlined by our publisher at the Center for International Policy, the work is designed to provoke a needed paradigm shift in thinking about the US role in the world. That perspective must be internationalist. While the base unit of foreign policy remains the nation, we know that the challenges of the world are bigger than any one nation, and that the needs of the people on this planet transcend the constraints of borders and language.

The writers we publish will not always agree, nor would we want them to. We live, broadly, within the failures of consensus foreign policy, with leaders following paths of least resistance until we arrive decades deep into seemingly intractable problems. Plotting a way out of present messes and future problems does not require agreement, at least not at the stage of discourse. Thoughtful grappling with the complexity of global challenges is part of the process of progressive world-making. Instead of adhering to any one prescriptive doctrine, every writer published in these pages commits to take seriously the notion that different actions can lead to better futures. While we seek to provide a platform for these critical conversations, the views of our writers do not necessarily reflect the Center for International Policy’s positions.

Pitching Guide

At present, the Journal accepts pitches and runs stories at two different lengths.

Articles are between 750 and 1,000 words, about as long as an op-ed that might appear in a newspaper or online. Articles make one concise argument well. The journal will regularly publish pieces of this length, designed to be easily digested on a metro commute or in a couple minutes before a meeting starts.

Here are a few examples of published articles:

•How Defending Ukraine Unearthed a Tool for Green Foreign Policy
•Sanctu-Wary: protecting wildlife beyond protected areas
•The Global South is fighting for a voice in global tax rules
•Durable Peace Isn’t Possible Without Palestine

Features are around 3,000 words long. These pieces are designed to drive the conversation, and are published once or twice a month. These pieces can include reporting and original research, as well as well-argued and supported argumentation. The ideal reader is anyone, but especially those involved with the nuts and bolts of policy implementation or advocacy.

Here are a few examples of published features:

•Meet Me In The Backroom: Environmental NGOs & China/U.S. Climate Cooperation
•Counter-terror turned the Sahel into a coup-belt. U.S. policy in the region should move on.
•Abandoning Disarmament Means Embracing Proliferation

Most successful pitches are a few sentences in length, demonstrating both an understanding of the topic and the ability to describe it concisely.  In your pitch, tell me:

•The one sentence pitch idea
•The problem in foreign policy this solves
•Why it is important
•What you’re suggesting as a change
•How this change is different from what is presently being done about the problem.

Accepted pitches will be subject to editing from CIP staff, including but not limited to the Chief Editor. This is intended as a collaborative process, designed so that the best version of the work can be refined through productive back-and-forth.

A Note On Topics

Topics should cover at least some aspect of foreign policy, and area for interaction between governments or peoples spanning borders. Because stories at the Journal are expected to start from policy as-is, many pitches will invariably want to talk about militaries, especially the US military, as a policy tool. Changing the scope, parameters, funding, and role of militaries is indeed part of foreign policy, and should be in the conversation. Expanding the role of the US military, or the Intelligence Community, or broadly any other part of the national security state, is a position that already has plenty of advocates in Washington, DC, and a pitch to that end will likely find a better home elsewhere.

The goal of the International Policy Journal is to expand who is writing about foreign policy, redefine how we talk about security, shift foreign policy beyond just the actions of governments to each other, include accountability and anti-corruption work, and to identify barriers to peaceful solutions or other options beyond militarism.

Ready to pitch?

Submit a pitch – no more than a couple sentences — to [email protected], with the topic in the subject line. Include expected length of piece.

In the top half of the image, a hemisphere globe shows the navies of China and the United States shouting at each other across the Pacific Ocean. (Tiny F-35s are pictured on an aircraft carrier). This hemisphere rests on top of a table, and beneath it lots of people can be seen talking, working together, and collaborating on projects like renewable energy, in stark contrast to the tensions above.

AI and Israel’s Dystopian Promise of War without Responsibility

Khaldoun Khelil is an energy and international security scholar with over 20 years of experience in the oil and gas industry and served as the Energy and Security Scholar at the Middle East Institute. He writes on culture, politics, technology, and games.

As Israel has executed its assault on Gaza, it has turned to new technology to facilitate the selection and ostensible legitimization of targets. The net effect is six months of horrors deployed against the people of Gaza. Among these tools facilitating the slaughter of Palestinians is a constellation of Artificial Intelligence programs that seemingly pick targets with little to no human oversight.

In November 2023, a multitude of publications, including the Guardian, +972 Magazine, and Al Jazeera, reported claims from the Israeli military that ramped up use of Artificial Intelligence facilitated its volume of attacks and destruction in Gaza. The program reported in November carries the grandiose name “the Gospel”; another program reported in April 2024 carries the innocuous name Lavender. The primary function of these algorithmic tools is reportedly to pick targets for Israel to blast apart with its US-supplied munitions. A former Israeli intelligence officer, speaking to +972 Magazine, described the Gospel AI as a “mass assassination factory.” The results can be seen in the incredibly high death toll in Gaza with over 33,000 Palestinians killed and at least 75,000 wounded by Israeli fire.

Prior to the use of AI tools, Israel would take up to a year to identify 50 targets in Gaza. Now with the assistance of the Gospel, Israel claims they produce 100 credible targets a day. Israel’s Lavender AI program reportedly marked an astounding 37,000 Palestinians for death as “suspected militants.”

This exponential leap in targeting is one factor explaining the unprecedented civilian death toll in Gaza inflicted by Israeli forces. Additional automated systems reported in +972, including one perversely called “Where’s Daddy?”, were used specifically to track targeted individuals and carry out bombings when they had entered their family’s residences, basically ensuring mass casualty events. In fact, Israel would purposefully use massive 2000-pound ‘dumb’ bombs on these targets if they were believed to be “junior” militants to cut down on the perceived expenses of using a guided munition. The Israelis were more concerned with the cost in bombs than the cost in civilian lives.

Targeting residences means accepting not just families as collateral damage in the strike, but also destroying residences, making them uninhabitable. Previous reporting also showed that Israeli forces termed high-rise residential buildings and critical infrastructure as “power targets” in the assumption that their destruction would demoralize Palestinian civilians.  As Yuvul Abraham reported regarding Gospel AI, “The bombing of power targets, according to intelligence sources who had first-hand experience with its application in Gaza in the past, is mainly intended to harm Palestinian civil society: to ‘create a shock’ that, among other things, will reverberate powerfully and ‘lead civilians to put pressure on Hamas,’ as one source put it.”

As with many other AI systems, Israel’s Gospel and Lavender are seemingly black boxes that spit out irreproducible results drawn from source material of varying reliability. While the same Israeli sources insist that Gospel’s targets are cleared through human hands, that is little comfort considering Gospel produces over 100 targets a day and a human reviewer would have no reliable way to penetrate the system’s black box to ascertain how a target was selected, nor incentive to do so. In Gaza, Israel is relying on AI systems to decide whom to kill, with humans being relegated to “rubber stamps” in the overall process.

The quantity of targets produced by Gospel alone would make any meaningful oversight daunting, but the nature of AI also means that the exact process by which Gospel chooses its targets can never be dissected or reproduced. In the case of Lavender AI, its targeting pronouncements against Palestinians were essentially treated as orders with “no requirement to independently check why the machine made that choice or to examine the raw intelligence data on which it is based.”

One of the few emerging international norms around AI in warfare is the concept of keeping a human at the heart of any decision to take a human life. In short, robots and algorithms should not be making the ultimate decision on whether a living breathing person is annihilated. Israel’s reckless implementation of AI in Gaza is undermining this norm before it has even had the chance to fully establish itself.

Was a target chosen because it best fit current military necessity? Or was it chosen because of a biased input or an unwillingness to uphold civilian protection norms? These questions potentially become unanswerable when Artificial Intelligence is being used so close to the end of a very violent decision tree. Even chat-based AI that has the seemingly straightforward task of parsing out Wikipedia information in conversational paragraphs sometimes “hallucinates,” creating fake facts to flesh out their stories. What assurances are there for commanders, soldiers, policy makers, and humanitarian observers that a targeting AI is not hallucinating the data on which it validates targets?

While fully autonomous fighting platforms are likely still many years off, the reality of AI software that can effectively sift through an avalanche of data to identify threats and opportunities is already here. In the US, the Biden administration has simultaneously released a “Political Declaration on Responsible Military Use of Artificial Intelligence and Autonomy” while allowing the US Army to move forward with Palantir’s Tactical Intelligence Targeting Access Node (TITAN). While the declaration is a brief statement that calls upon endorsing nations to have a dialogue about the responsible use of AI, the TITAN project provides over $178 million to Palantir to develop a program that will integrate artificial intelligence with other technology being used by American ground forces. In a jargon-rich press release, TITAN promises to “rapidly process sensor data received from Space, High Altitude, Aerial and Terrestrial layers” and reduce “the sensor-to-shooter timeline.” Judging by the experience of Israel’s AI in target selection, reducing the “sensor-to-shooter” timeline can allow for attacking targets faster, but is absolutely no guarantee of ensuring the target is properly selected, or that the human evaluating target selection is anything more than a rubber stamp.

Israel’s Gospel AI places humans on the wrong end of the targeting process and significantly reduces our ability to judge if a specific bombing or missile strike was justified. We cannot truly peer within the Gospel’s “brain” as it’s a black box, though the datasets used to train AI are likely based on existing targeting data sets, and carry within them additional biases reproduced by machine learning algorithms. By giving these AI systems, such as Gospel and Lavender, the power to choose targets, Israel obscures who should be held to account as civilian deaths mount. Given the many credible accusations of war crimes against the Israeli military, this may be the most compelling feature of AI for them. As an IBM presentation slide succinctly stated in 1979, “A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make management decisions.” When the decision to take a human life lies functionally with a computer program, systems like ‘Lavender’ and ‘Gospel’ shift responsibility, and thus accountability, to a machine that can never be meaningfully questioned, judged or punished.

US policymakers would be wise to look at Israel’s AI abetted and indiscriminate onslaught in Gaza as a warning. We may still be a long way off from fully autonomous targeting systems and true Artificial Intelligence making objective choices concerning life or death, but today a more insidious and stark reality already confronts us. The imperfect systems currently labeled as AI cannot be allowed to supplant real living decisionmakers when it comes to matters of life and death, especially when it comes to picking where and how to use some of the world’s deadliest weapons.

In Gaza we see an “indiscriminate” and “over the top” bombing campaign being actively rebranded by Israel as a technological step up, when in actuality there is currently no evidence that their so-called Gospel has produced results qualitatively better than those made by minds of flesh and blood. Instead, Israel’s AI has produced an endless list of targets with a decidedly lower threshold for civilian casualties. Human eyes and intelligence are demoted to rubber stamping a conveyor belt of targets as fast they can be bombed.

It’s a path that the US military and policy makers should not only be wary of treading, but should reject loudly and clearly. In the future we may develop technology worthy of the name Artificial Intelligence, but we are not there yet. Currently the only promise a system such as Gospel AI holds is the power to occlude responsibility, to allow blame to fall on the machine picking the victims instead of the mortals providing the data.

Israel’s Damascus airstrike was a deliberate provocation

Sina Toossi is a senior non-resident fellow at the Center for International Policy

On April 1st, an Israeli airstrike in Damascus dramatically escalated already simmering tensions between Israel and Iran. The operation led to the deaths of seven Iranians, including a senior commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). The target, according to Iran, was an official consulate building. However, Israel disputes this claim, which would be a violation of international law. Despite this, many countries and the United Nations have condemned the attacks on grounds that diplomatic facilities were targeted. Notably, even U.S. allies in the region, such as the UAE, Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, expressed their disapproval.

In response, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei has vowed retribution, declaring that those responsible “will be punished by our brave men,” and that they will “regret this crime.” Iran’s Foreign Minister, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, also indicated that Iran had sent an “important message” to the U.S. government, holding it accountable for supporting Israel’s actions. These developments suggest that Iran may be considering a substantial retaliation, which could include renewed actions against American forces in the region.

The Israeli airstrike occurs at a time when Israel, under the leadership of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, is grappling with a multitude of internal and external pressures. The war in Gaza has taken a severe toll on Israel’s societal fabric and economy. The military draft has drained the workforce, while the war’s ripple effects have contracted Israel’s GDP by an estimated 20 percent. Additionally, the government, already facing internal strife due to Netanyahu’s legal issues and public discontent, has been further strained by the fallout from failed hostage rescue operations and the loss of numerous hostages due to Israeli bombardments.

Adding to these internal challenges is Israel’s growing diplomatic isolation, exemplified by the UN Security Council’s demand for an immediate halt to military operations in Gaza. This call signifies a notable shift in the Biden administration’s approach, which is increasingly critical of Israel’s conduct.

Against this backdrop, Netanyahu’s decision to green-light the airstrike on Damascus seems to be a calculated act to amplify the hostilities. Such a move sharply contrasts with international appeals for restraint and indicates a deliberate escalation strategy.

Netanyahu seems to be aiming to provoke Iran and intensify the conflict to galvanize domestic and international political support and justify wider military actions, potentially in Rafah and against Hezbollah and Iran. This strategy risks drawing the United States deeper into the conflict, with potentially dire ramifications for regional stability.

The crucial issue now is Iran’s potential reaction.  A review of commentary from prominent Iranian analysts from across the Islamic Republic’s political spectrum reveals two prevailing narratives: one perceives Israel’s actions as a deliberate provocation of war that Iran should respond to with restraint, while the other suggests that Israel is capitalizing on Iran’s typically restrained responses and that failing to react proportionately will only invite further escalations. The latter perspective is gaining momentum, with increasing calls for a decisive response to deter future Israeli aggression.

Iran’s potential responses to the Israeli airstrike include a wide range of actions, such as targeting Israeli interests in third countries, reciprocal attacks within Israel’s own borders or the Golan Heights, or escalating cyber warfare attacks. The consequences of Iran’s decision could profoundly affect the Middle East and beyond.

The U.S. response to Netanyahu’s actions is also crucial. President Biden is at a critical juncture where he can exert significant coercive pressure on Netanyahu to prevent an escalation in regional tensions. Despite his hesitations so far, it is more vital than ever that he takes decisive action now. Failure to act could exacerbate the situation, potentially leading to a regional conflict with severe repercussions for U.S. interests and which would inadvertently benefit U.S. great power rivals like Russia and China.

Given the current developments, it is crucial for the U.S. and other global powers to intensify their efforts towards de-escalation. The initial step in this process should involve applying pressure on Netanyahu to cease further military actions. This could be achieved through various means, including halting arms shipments, imposing economic sanctions, or advocating for international legal action against Israel.

The foremost priority in this situation remains securing a ceasefire agreement. Achieving this would require Netanyahu to compromise on what he previously termed as “delusional” demands by Hamas for a hostage exchange and an end to the war. Another vital aspect is preventing escalation along the Lebanon border, especially considering statements from Israeli officials like Defense Minister Yoav Gallant about their intent to increase “firepower” against Hezbollah.

Up until now, Iran has been striving to manage the level of regional violence to avert a full-scale war. Iran and its regional allies have been calibrating their actions to pressure the U.S. and Israel to end the Gaza war. Iran has dissuaded its allied militias in Iraq from firing missiles at American forces in the region, understanding that these are tripwire forces and attacking them would allow for hawks in Washington to push for war.

Nevertheless, Iran holds escalatory dominance, capable of commanding its allies to renew attacks on U.S. forces. The question now is whether the U.S. and Iran can prevent this from escalating into a wider war, which neither side wants but Netanyahu seems bent on for his own political survival. The aftermath of the Damascus strikes will serve as a significant test.

Counter-terror turned the Sahel into a coup-belt. U.S. policy in the region should move on.

Hannah Rae Armstrong is a policy adviser and writer with over a decade of field-based experience working on peace and security in the Sahel.

On March 16, military authorities in Niger, a key U.S. Africa ally, released a televised broadcast ending the country’s military agreement with the U.S. The dispute lays bare the conundrum the U.S. currently faces in the central Sahel, where a decade of counter-terror-led engagement backfired, worsening insecurity while empowering intransigent military leaders who went on to seize power and ally with Moscow. From 2020 to 2023, ‘transitional’ military-led governments in Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso took power and expelled France, the Sahel’s leading foreign partner over the past decade, leaving a vacuum that Russia quickly stepped in to fill. Since the latest July 2023 coup in Niger, a country where the U.S. has 650 troops stationed and three strategic air bases, Washington has been pulled in different directions. The policy debate ranges from arguments for stepping up and assuming more of a leadership role to drawing back and disengaging. The U.S. should not (and cannot) compete with Russia’s security offer; instead, it should forge a new path guided by day-after policies that transition away from counter-terrorism toward more effective, political modes of resolution.

Disengagement would perhaps be optimal. Washington, wishing to help resolve the crisis, inadvertently worsened the Sahel violence, which is now at an all-time high: 12,000 were killed in 2023 – up from 9,000 in 2022 and 6,000 in 2021; most of them civilians – and at least three million are internally displaced. The region barely shows up on the radar of the American public and in terms of strategic importance it ranks well below various other fires to put out. The implicit tensions between counter-terrorism and democracy promotion have become all too explicit. Our ally France, whose expertise and leadership have guided U.S. policy in the Sahel over the past decade, has been roundly ejected. And the usual tools for dealing with rogue leaders are proving ineffective – attempts to isolate Sahelian military regimes are failing as Russia, China, middle powers, and a deepening alliance among the three neighbors open promising alternatives. The easiest move would be for the Biden Administration to draw back. And yet, U.S. engagement is more likely to persist, in part due to the sunk fallacy costs of the air base assets and an indirect nuclear non-proliferation interest.

Mending the U.S.-Niger rupture will require genuine engagement with a new generation of sovereigntist demands. For years, policymakers had viewed the Sahel through the lens of  ‘the trifecta of alien demographic vitality, Islamic fanaticism and pauper migration that is the new spectre haunting the West.’. This can no longer be the case. Given legal restrictions and a Russian security bid that offers more to military regimes, the era of U.S. counter terror-led engagement in the Sahel is over. This is something to embrace, not to mourn.

 

Trans-Saharan Policy Options

Between 2012 and 2022, American counter-terror engagement in Sahel surged, chiefly within the framework of the Trans-Saharan Counter-Terror Partnership, launched in 2005 to ‘eliminate terrorist safe havens in northwest Africa’ (at that time, there were none). In 2012 groups with links to Al Qaeda and what went on to become the Islamic State seized a relatively contained territory in northern Mali. Following this, the conflict theatre spread into central Mali and the tri-border area, then deeper into western Niger and northern and central Burkina Faso.

In Mali, counter-terrorism meant supporting French-led operations with intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR). In Burkina Faso, publicly disclosed bilateral security assistance skyrocketed: from roughly $200,000 before 2009 to $1.8 million in 2010 to more than $16 million by 2018; an investigation suggests the total amount of U.S. security aid cooperation with Burkina may have reached $100 million between 2018 and 2019.

Niger was different: the U.S. did much more. U.S. special forces were accompanying Nigerien forces on operations, a fact only revealed in 2017 when four U.S. servicemen were killed in an ambush in Tongo Tongo. The troops were technically deployed for assistance, not fighting, although their deaths reveal the blurred lines between supporting and fighting). Meanwhile, the Pentagon and the CIA were constructing significant strategic assets in Niger. In 2019, after extensive delays, construction was completed on the second-largest U.S. air force base in Africa, Airbase 201 in Agadez, northern Niger. Although technically classified as a non-permanent “cooperative security location”, the base is the largest project in Air Force construction history and was estimated to cost roughly $280 million by 2024.

As the violence levels climbed, it was commonplace to read that radical groups kept growing stronger “despite” counter-terror campaigns, which Western pundits argued were necessary: friendly African states were struggling to defend their institutions, territory, and people from savage attacks waged by violent extremists. In reality, counter-terror tactics were throwing oil onto the fire. The French glibly trotted out nightmare counter-insurgency tactics that had failed and lain dormant for decades, allying with reprisal-driven ethnic militias and forbidding political negotiations with militant groups. Paris kept insisting, as the war gobbled more and more territory, that its methods were simply under-resourced and needed a bit more time to succeed. Militants with mostly secular grievances relating to land and political exclusion were bluntly framed as “terrorist threats”, fueling an ideological forever war whose resolution could only come through more militarization. Western support for unprofessional and often predatory partner state security forces emboldened those forces’ basest instincts while expanding their reach and firepower. It also set the stage for the rash of coups that would wipe out elected governments in all three countries.

 

The present situation offers an opening for long overdue reorientation of a counter-terror-led engagement that has proven catastrophic, and should be recognized as an opportunity to play a more supportive role in the region.

Soldiers seized power in Mali in August 2020 and May 2021, in Burkina Faso in January 2022 and September 2022, and in Niger in July 2023. These coups put the final nail in the coffin of an extravagant counter-terror-led strategy that, while ‘multidimensional’ and devoted to ‘stabilisation’ on paper, had in reality conditioned a dizzying loss of life and territory for already fragile and impoverished states. Soldiers and citizens united and rose up in protest against the ineffectual political classes that had greenlit such disastrous outcomes, grasping for new approaches that might actually deliver on promises of security and stability. Moscow seized the opportunity and plunged in.

Mali was the first Sahelian country to cast off the Western ‘stabilisation’ apparatus that had delivered so little, and try its hand at partnering with Russian paramilitary forces instead. Between September and November 2023, the FAMA-Wagner offensive on northern Mali delivered Bamako control over rebel-held territory for the first time in more than a decade, a spectacular, fast payoff on investment. It was practically a marketing campaign for Wagner to neighboring states.

 

Technical Obstacles

As the French-led coalition it supported melted away, U.S. policy struggled to keep up with rapidfire events. Section 7008 restrictions, which prohibit the continuation of assistance to governments toppled by coups, severely curtailed the types and amounts of aid the U.S. could disburse. In Mali, Washington continued providing limited security assistance to law enforcement partners and significant humanitarian aid, while sanctioning certain senior officials under the Russia sanctions program.

In Burkina Faso, the next state to fall, the U.S. waited weeks before calling the January 2022 military seizure in Burkina Faso a coup d’état, triggering Section 7008 restrictions that cut most U.S. aid to the country. When more than a year passed with no progress made towards a return to constitutional order, American diplomats tried to offer restoring nonlethal military assistance as leverage for preventing a partnership with Russian private security. “Burkina Faso is at a tipping point,” a senior DoD official told reporters. “Our position is that if we don’t provide assistance, then someone else will, whether it is Wagner or China or another group.” In an October 2023 visit to Ouagadougou, a senior delegation reportedly offered more assistance within the constraints of 7008 while telling 34-year-old junta leader Captain Ibrahim Traoré that doing business with the Wagner Group would cross a red line. The line was quickly crossed. In January 2024, Russian Africa Corps military personnel arrived in Ouagadougou with a mandate to defend the country’s leader and protect the Burkinabe people from terrorist attacks, according to an Africa Corps Telegram statement.

A similar scenario is unfolding in Niger. American officials waited until October 2023 – three months after the coup – to invoke section 7008. They then took a more hardline stance, severing types of cooperation and military assistance not bound by section 7008, such as DoD advisory support or attending exercises or providing support to non-military security force programs. This would leave room, it was thought, to offer some security cooperation in compliance with 7008 restrictions, if the junta softened its own rigid stance, particularly on two conditions that the West African regional bloc ECOWAS had cited as conditions for lifting sanctions: releasing the captive deposed President Bazoum and publishing a timeline for a return to constitutional order.

But the junta, formally the National Council for the Safeguarding of the Country (CNSP), flouted these conditions. In December, CNSP leader General Tchiani welcomed Russian deputy defense minister Colonel General Yunus-Bek Yevkurov (who was overseeing the rebranding of Wagner as Africa Corps), and signed a new security agreement with Moscow. On January 28, Niger, Mali, and Burkina Faso announced they were leaving the regional bloc ECOWAS. One month later, ECOWAS lifted most sanctions against Niger, leaving the U.S. in the awkward position of supporting an ECOWAS policy that no longer existed.

On March 16, CNSP spokesman Colonel Major Amadou Abdramane concluded a visit by a high-level U.S. delegation by announcing on television that Niger was terminating the status of forces agreement it signed in 2012 with the U.S. The decision does not mean an immediate end to the U.S. security cooperation with key Africa ally Niger, which includes the deployment of roughly 650 soldiers and the holding of two “cooperative security location” air bases and a CIA drone base. It is more likely a negotiating tactic reflecting the chill in relations between Washington and Niamey, amid a broader regional pivot away from Western security partners toward Russia. The rupture with Niger can still be mended. However, Abdramane’s televised speech referred to charges of a secret agreement to sell Nigerien uranium to Iran, accidentally outing what may be the most cogent U.S. security interest in the region (and one that tends to be kept quiet): nuclear non-proliferation and having a say in who Niger, the seventh largest uranium exporter, sells it to.

 

Desert Power Vacuum?

Washington neither can nor should try to compete with Russia to fill the security vacuum left by the French departure. But disengaging is not really an option either. Beyond the sunk-costs fallacy of the Agadez base, in October 2023, the Senate overwhelmingly voted down a bill to withdraw U.S. troops from Niger. What might this mean for the future of U.S. engagement in the Sahel?

The present situation offers an opening for long overdue reorientation of a counter-terror-led engagement that has proven catastrophic, and should be recognized as an opportunity to play a more supportive role in the region. Military engagement is on a descending path, which is a good thing; what matters more now is political strategy. In light of these developments, non-military contributions might help the U.S. serve its interests in the region while being a good partner.

On the security front, the U.S. and Niger will likely work out some kind of arrangement that allows the U.S. to retain access to its bases. By the CNSP’s own statement, paying taxes and sharing intelligence ought to iron out the bulk of the dispute, not unreasonable demands from a country that is hosting a foreign military presence from which it derives little benefit. Uncomfortable as it is, the likely outcome of this arrangement will be some form of coexistence between Russian and American security forces in-country. While not ideal, this is also not without precedent. Washington should resist setting up new bases in the coastal West African states that would expand into new territory counter-terror cooperation that has been roundly discredited by its own failures.

Meanwhile, the best strategy for countering Russian influence may be to draw back and leave Russia with enough rope to hang itself.  The Sahel is a tricky terrain in which it is extremely expensive to operate. The Russian security offer may deliver short-term victories; however, in broader terms, it merely exaggerates the most explosive features of external aid over the past decade, empowering large-scale human rights abuses and civilian massacres while creating a smokescreen that ensures these do not get reported or investigated. These tactics, a continuation of the deeply flawed French-led strategy towards military eradication of problems that have political, economic, and communal roots, are not going to produce effective solutions; instead, they will stifle dissent, further weaken states and institutions, and create conditions of worse insecurity in the near-term future. An over-stretched, overcommitted Russia dealing with terrible infrastructure, enormous distances, extremely aggressive weather and new threats that keep popping up in new arenas will likely fall out of favor at least as quickly as the French did. In the meantime, Washington and Moscow could establish channels of communication and common security objectives around counter-terrorism and non-proliferation, either directly or through the mediation of Algeria, a regional hegemon with experience in transitioning out of counter-terror and a strong direct interest in avoiding conflict escalation.

In political terms, how might the U.S. effectively engage with a new generation of sovereigntist rulers expressing a profound will to achieve more equitable and beneficial forms of engagement with stronger external partners? Sahelian military rulers and peoples are together voicing demands for more meaningful political and economic engagement: a departure from recent decades, when “democracy promotion” and extractive interests propped up Sahelian autocracies whose profound structural flaws led them to lose much or most of their territory to radical extremists. A “values-based” approach that emphasizes timetables and other superficial signposts of democracy is an insufficient response to this demand. As one analyst recently argued, ‘work on the substance and not just the speed of transitions from military to civilian rule’. This could include engaging with transitional authorities to determine areas of mutual interest for strengthening institutions, via for example political party reforms, judicial reforms, and anti-corruption initiatives. Although it is no doubt more challenging to work with unconstitutional regimes against corruption, it’s important to be creative and persistent and recall that anticorruption is in their sovereigntist demand.

 

An over-stretched, overcommitted Russia dealing with terrible infrastructure, enormous distances, extremely aggressive weather and new threats that keep popping up in new arenas will likely fall out of favor at least as quickly as the French did.

In addition, the U.S. can play a useful role with respect to resolving and de-escalating conflict and addressing humanitarian needs. For example, it should remain vigilant on human rights monitoring. Recent policy in Burkina Faso suggests diplomats are committed to doing just that. The last ambassador met regularly with the military authorities, and the U.S. is balancing some limited counter-terror cooperation with non-military forces, and including Burkinabe forces in Operation Flintlock training exercises, with also speaking up against human rights abuses.

Other policies that might help resolve or de-escalate conflict relate to Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration (DDR), political dialogue, and disinformation. In Niger, a U.S.-backed program to amnesty Islamic State returnees collapsed after the coup, with hundreds of ex-militants simply vanishing (many likely rejoined extremist groups). The program was imperfect, and plagued by doubts and uncertainty; however, insofar as it represents a rare non-military means of removing men from the battlefield, it deserves more investment and more careful implementation.

In an increasingly blacked-out media environment that favors impunity for armed forces and sanctions anyone who dares to question or report on their abuses, the U.S. should prioritize training and work with journalists and civil society, while ensuring these activities do not compromise their safety. For the next generation of leaders, and compared to France and Russia, the U.S. still has a lot of appeal. Continuing to work with youths, civil society and journalists will pay off in the long term by building links with future leaders who care about truth and justice, and seek to build mechanisms for preserving and establishing these.

Finally, in terms of domestic policy, embracing the potential of a post-counter-terror partnership era means placing extravagant military overreach in Africa under civilian mechanisms of control and oversight. At a time when funding is scarce due to more pressing conflicts elsewhere, the State Department should have to be more transparent about and justify expenditures in the region. Peacekeeping operations allocations under regional programs like the TSCTP (which include counter-terrorism, military and non-military forces) – unlike the Foreign Military Financing program – do not include breakdowns by country or unit even for congressional reporting, as is standard elsewhere; these should be made routinely available.

A wry response to raising concerns about “U.S. policy in the Sahel” is the question, “is there one?” And yet, despite the carelessness and damage done by French-led counter-terror engagement over the past decade, the U.S. has gotten some things right, like speaking out against violence against civilians, and refusing to back militias, paramilitary groups or Mali’s military campaign against northern rebels. With the French out, whatever happens next is on us. The overarching bipartisan American policy goal in the region right now, which can carry right through the upcoming American elections season, should be ushering in a new era of post-“war on terror” engagement.

Lawmakers, Progressive Leaders Urge Reorientation of Foreign Policy as a 2024 Imperative

On February 6, Members of Congress and progressive movement leaders gathered at a conference hosted by the Center for International Policy (CIP), demanding changes to US foreign policy decisions as a necessity in a consequential year that will determine the trajectory of the US both at home and globally.

In a keynote address seen by over 60,000 people, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) argued that the concentration of wealth and power foments war, violence and mass insecurity for everyday people globally, benefiting billionaires at the expense of whole families, nations, peoples and regions and declared that, “For many decades we have seen a ‘bipartisan consensus’ on foreign policy—a consensus which, sadly, has almost always been wrong.”

Pointing to the distorting influence of moneyed forces ranging from AIPAC, super PACs, big defense contractors, fossil fuel companies, pharmaceutical companies, oligarchs supporting Putin, Trump and other autocrats, and other multi-billionaires and multinational corporations; as well as the growth of right-wing extremism, tax havens and economic inequality, Senator Sanders declared, “It’s hard to overstate just how fundamentally this broken global financial system undermines faith in democracy and saps our ability to deal with the pressing crises we face today.”

“​​We live in a world where a small number of multi-billionaires and multinational corporations exert enormous economic and political power over virtually every country on earth,” added Sanders. “That reality has a huge impact on all aspects of our foreign policy and whether or not we will be able to effectively address the major crises we face.”

In a “Congress and Progressive Foreign Policy” session, Members of Congress discussed their personal pathways to foreign policy and outlined key challenges and opportunities for a “people-centered national security” that delivers for people in the US and the Global South, recognizes the interdependence of domestic and foreign policy on issues like migration and climate change, and allows the outside world to interact with the US in positive ways like refugee resettlement rather than negative, militarized interactions.

“Nowadays, most people are interacting with the United States through drones, through weapons that are made in the US that are in the hands of dictators, police or their military, or they’re interacting with us in regards to sanctions that are making it hard for them to have necessary medication and food. And that creates a national security problem for us,” said Representative Ilhan Omar (D-MN).

“We’ve spent more on border security since 2013 than was in the immigration reform bill of 2013. And we’ve seen no improvement in anything because we haven’t fundamentally shifted the system. So we have to think about, how do we invest in other countries? Our foreign policy is directly tied to this,” added Representative Pramila Jayapal (D-WA).

“What I would like to see is a people-centered security, where the United States can actually engage with people of a nation, and help empower them, help them pursue freedom and dignity on their terms, not necessarily our terms,” concluded Representative Jason Crow (D-CO).

In “Prioritizing a Progressive Foreign Policy Agenda,” regional experts discussed strategies for the US to reorient its relations to better serve the people and address the realities and needs on the ground. Speaking to the pitfalls of Great Power Competition and the Cold War as frameworks for US-China relations, China expert Ali Wyne declared, “Diplomacy is not something that you do out of kindness to competitors. It’s something that you do to advance your own national interest.” “We can’t support a progressive movement in Ukraine if they’re dead,” emphasized Terrell Jermaine Starr. Speaking on Latin America, María José Espinosa Carillo stressed, “We have deep connections with the region, not only through our borders, but also through funding and economic ties. But what’s more important, there is a renewed vision of the region.”

In “The Political Necessity of a New Foreign Policy,” movement leaders from MoveOn, Center for American Progress, AFL-CIO and Win Without War explored the intersection of domestic and foreign affairs, offering their analysis of policy tradeoffs and highlighting how they see these issues moving the progressive base.

“That [progressive foreign policy] actually is not just a morally and ethical position, but it is an electorally salient one, one that is a winning position in elections,” declared MoveOn executive director Rahna Epting. “With Biden, he campaigned in 2020 promising to end endless wars, and that helped him win. That was one of the reasons I believe helped him win in that election cycle. And now we see Donald Trump poised to exploit the current situation in Israel Gaza and how that’s going to show up in November.” 

Center for American Progress president and CEO Patrick Gaspard described the threat of antidemocratic forces at home and abroad, and said, “We’re now in a place of the world where you win votes by arguing that you build a moat around yourselves and pull up the drawbridge, our progressive transnationalism, internationalism is not actually ascendant. We should recognize that and we should fight fiercely.”

This fight for democracy at home and abroad takes place not just at the ballot box but in workplaces too. Cathy Feingold, International Director for the AFL-CIO, argued we must recast our priorities in favor of “ worker-centered security,” explaining, “It sends a very specific message to people in this country and around the world who are working day in and day out and want to make sure that they can live with dignity. I have found that workers here and workers around the world are interconnected.”

Win Without War executive director Sara Haghdoosti added, “We talk about foreign policy like there are not people in this country who have family connections, and deep commitment to what happens around the world. And it’s just not okay. That’s not how people work.”

View all the key moments from the conference on YouTube here and read opening remarks from CIP president and CEO Nancy Okail here.

Reimagining Progressive Foreign Policy

Editor’s note. A version of the following remarks were presented February 6th, 2024, opening the Progressive Foreign Policy as a Political Force conference held at the National Press Club in Washington, DC.

Nancy Okail is the President and CEO of the Center for International Policy

Thank you so much, Diana! I am truly honored to be here and fortunate to work alongside you and our board.

I appreciate your kind words about my role at CIP, but I am merely standing on the shoulders of many incredibly inspiring and dedicated individuals who have championed this cause for decades. This includes not just those at CIP but the entire community of actors, advocates, and thinkers, many of whom are here today.

I am privileged and honored to lead CIP, an organization that could not be more progressive, having chosen an ex-convict as its president. For those familiar with my story, [or as I previously wrote], when I was first locked in the courtroom cage during my trial, my eyes caught a previous prisoner’s scribble on the wall that read: ‘If defending justice is a crime, then long live criminality.’ It’s my mantra and a ‘crime’ I am proud of, and I cherish the many partners in that crime that I have had over the years (some are here in this room), and most recently my new ‘partner in crime,’ Matt Duss, CIP’s Executive Vice President. (Those who know Matt know that his values and standards stand taller than his noticeable height. You can’t miss it.)

It is with a sense of both urgency and hope that I welcome you today to this pivotal conference. We are here not just to discuss foreign policy but to reimagine it, clarify what it means to pursue a progressive foreign policy and what we can do together to advance it.

As Diana mentioned, we are long overdue for a paradigm shift to address the dysfunctional and harmful system that has led us to war, climate change, inequality, and has perpetuated corruption and authoritarianism. These are the issues that shape our priorities at CIP.

As we sit here in this safe room, civilians in Gaza are being bombarded for the

fifth month in a row by Israel, in a disproportionate and indiscriminate response to the tragic attacks by Hamas on October 7th of last year. We have now reached a staggering death toll of 27,000 humans, mostly women and children, in addition to the 1200 Israelis who died due to the initial attacks. Similarly, others in Ukraine face threats from the extended war since Russia’s invasion in 2022. We are not mere witnesses to such human catastrophes; we are participants—some directly implicated, others by silence in fear of the consequences. It’s a collective failure of humanity…we are all responsible.

But perhaps our biggest failure is our inability to HONESTLY challenge the systems and mindsets that have created this dismal picture of the world.

Nearing the end of the first quarter of the 21st century, the picture is bleak, and the US has played a significant role in shaping this. Despite remarkable advancements in science and technology, we can fairly say that ultra-nationalism, inequality, and hyper-militarization have become worrying overarching characteristics of this century.

Global crises like the pandemic and climate change are devastating in their own right,but also magnify our inherent structural problems, particularly inequality, racism, and the impacts of corruption, elite capture, and authoritarianism around the world. Figures from last year present an undeniable picture of where we stand:

In 2023, the United States ranked 43rd in the gender parity index, falling 16 slots from the previous year. This ranking by the World Economic Forum is based on gaps in employment, health, and political leadership. This decline is compounded by the overturning of Roe vs. Wade and the erosion of reproductive health rights. At the bottom of the global parity index is Afghanistan, now deemed the most repressive country for women and children by the UN, following the Taliban’s takeover after two decades of US involvement. (Let that sink in as we reflect on our global engagements.)

On the corruption front, the situation is no better. The 2023 Corruption Perception Index (CPI) shows that global corruption is rising. With a scale of 0 to 100, the global average stagnates at 43, with most countries making no progress; 23 countries fell to their lowest scores last year. Much like the pandemic disproportionately impacts the poor and marginalized, corruption most severely affects those with the least access to basic necessities while the elite exploit justice systems.

Relatedly, after a period of improvement in closing the income inequality gap until 2018, that trend has since reversed. Income inequality has risen in most advanced economies and major emerging economies. According to the Brookings Institution’s ‘Rising Inequality’ report from last year, inequality has significantly increased in the United States, as well as in advanced economies and among major emerging economies like China, India, and Russia.

Meanwhile, the US defense budget and arms sales have seen a staggering expansion, with the US maintaining its position as the world’s highest arms exporter. The correlation with increased violence is clear. Even before the Gaza conflict, the Institute for Economics and Peace’s annual global index reported that over 238,000 people died in global conflicts in 2022, this marked a 96 percent increase in deaths due to conflicts from previous years. This spike is attributed to deadly conflicts in Ethiopia and Ukraine. Now, the human catastrophe in Gaza unfolds, with over four months of conflict resulting in 27,000 deaths. A population of 2.3 million faces continuous bombardment, exacerbating conditions with the spread of disease and the risk of famine.

The US is once again involved militarily in the Middle East, following its withdrawal from a two-decade-long engagement in Afghanistan. Over the recent weekend, the United States has conducted bombings in Yemen and Iraq, and in Syria, responding to the deaths of three American soldiers in Jordan from attacks by Iran-backed militias, whose actions come amidst sustained demands for a ceasefire in Gaza.

The hard fact is that these events are not merely happening to us, like earthquakes or pandemics; we are all deeply implicated. To be brutally honest, even those among us striving to leverage our best tools—US domestic laws, International Humanitarian Law, and aid conditionality—have not been immune to the dominant power dynamics that catalyzed these situations initially. This issue extends beyond the military-industrial complex; it’s about the entrenched structural violence and the dominance of the security-state paradigm. And I’m not excluding myself from that.

Working through Congress trying to employ our laws as safeguards against the misuse of arms, I increasingly realize how we cannot legislate ourselves out of  crises (at least not just), as I find myself perpetually puzzled by the term ‘misuse of arms.’ It conjures up an image in my mind of weaponry production packages adorned with stickers saying ‘kill responsibly.’ There is, fundamentally, one use for arms, and that is to kill. They are not meant to sit in warehouses, nor are stockpiles intended to serve any purpose other than easy access for feeding the war machine, as we observe now in the conflict in Israel. We can employ as many euphemistic terms as we like to legitimize the act of killing, calling it defense or deterrence, but it does not alter the outcome. The discourse on the misuse of arms and the legislation designed to regulate it overlooks the reality of who holds the power to decide who deserves to live or die (which delineates the proper and improper use of weapons). It’s no secret who makes these decisions; it is those within the elite monopoly over foreign policy and they are conformists.

But we are not without options; we possess agency. None of this is INEVITABLE. We have choices, but the one choice we do not have is to persist in operating within the flawed system that legitimizes and legalizes atrocities through flawed policy framings, such as ‘arms for peace.’ This was the foundation of deals like the Abraham Accords in the Middle East—look how that turned out.

We also cannot afford to pretend that domestic and foreign affairs are separate, nor can we mislead people into believing that national security is achievable without global security. Addressing global crises necessitates domestic reforms. Democracy begins to decline incrementally when we treat it merely as a set of electoral rituals, following them without question or challenge. If we have faith in the virtue of democracy, despite its imperfections, we should not treat it as if it were a dogmatic religion, merely carrying out ‘rituals of democracy’—elections—trapped within a rotational cycle among a few elites on either side of the aisle. We should not wait for the shock of events like Trump’s win to realize we have a problem. Regardless of the outcomes of this year’s elections, the combination of elite capture and tribal politics has long undermined our genuine pursuit for an equitable, just society, and a peaceful world.

 

What then are our choices?

As progressives, our choices transcend those between left and right, or one side of the aisle over the other. Our choices are between integrity and corruption, accountability and complicity, impunity and the rule of law—applicable to both sides of the aisle. Our decisions do not only pivot on ending wars but more importantly transforming the mindsets that lead to them. It’s about distinguishing between feel-good work and truly effective work, urging us to confront our flawed systems directly.

Our foreign policy choices should not be ensnared by false binaries between anti-imperialism and anti-authoritarianism. Opposing US hegemony, great power competition and the risks of unnecessary military escalation does not require us to excuse the human rights violations committed by the Chinese government or similar others.

The US still can and should adopt a constructive role globally without resorting to hegemony. Meanwhile, we must dispel the naïve misconception that relinquishing US hegemony will automatically lead to the ascension of powers aligned with our principles. This overlooks the potential impact of the dominance of authoritarian powers like Russia, China, and others moving in an unjust ultra-capitalist direction, posing distinct challenges.

To counteract the dangerous consequences of great power competition, our choices should not revolve around which governments should overpower others. Instead, we should focus on empowering people first, preventing their countries from becoming battlegrounds in states’ struggle for power.

 

With all these challenges, what are our priorities?

This understanding of interrelated challenges has informed the intersectional priorities we address through analysis, convening, and advocacy. These priorities include:

  1. Combating transnational racism and sex & gender inequality,
  2. Reducing global inequality and economic precarity through equitable trade, labor, and investment rules,
  3. Defending democracy and countering rising ultranationalism, autocracy, kleptocracy, oligarchy, and corruption,
  4. Promoting transformative action for global climate and environmental sustainability. However, none of these objectives would be achievable without
  5. Rightsizing the defense budget, and
  6. Ensuring accountability, transparency, and rights protection in the export and use of arms and emerging technologies, particularly lethal autonomous weapons, and
  7. Most importantly, strengthening diplomacy and adherence to a rules-based international order.

But you don’t need me to tell you all this. Many in this room are already identify these priorities and have dedicated years to them. However, without collectively working towards the necessary paradigm shift and a clear agenda, this valuable work risks not reaching its full potential.

 

So what does paradigm shift entail?

Looking at those issues, and their interrelated nature, it became crystal clear that we need a paradigm shift. That helped us articulate what we call our “Five R” strategy for change. They are a set of goals or set of approaches that we need to have in order to address the structural and problematic framing of US foreign policy.

  1. Redraw the Stakeholder Map: We aim to change rigid and exclusionary policymaking structures, addressing racism and discrimination for more equity and inclusivity in policy formation and communication, and ensuring that those directly affected by our foreign policy have a seat at the table and have their voices heard. You can take a look at the work of my colleagues Terrell Jermaine Starr and Negar Mortazavi and their podcasts that bring really diverse voices into the work that we do.
  2. Redefine Security: To encompass threats to global human safety and well-being that fall outside—and are often exacerbated by—the conventional militarized approach to national security.  I refer you to the work of my colleagues Ari Tolany, Hanna Homestead, and Jeff Abramson on the Security Assistance Monitor and Climate and Militarism Program, and the Forum on Arms Trade.
  3. Reframe US Foreign Policy: Moving beyond outdated nation-state analyses to include the impacts of non-state actors, emerging technology, and other factors unique to today’s power configurations while challenging great power competition and domestic/foreign divide.
  4. Restore Accountability: By enhancing oversight at home and abroad, as corruption and authoritarianism hinder our collective ability to address global threats. Last year, many people were shocked by the allegations that Senator Bob Menendez had received bribes of gold bars from the Egyptian government. I was not shocked, but I was a bit offended, because when the Egyptian government tried to bribe me, they sent me a basket of mangoes to my office. Is this my price?
  5. Revive Diplomacy: The reason peace is getting a bad name and ceasefire is becoming a taboo is because in people’s minds it means just a halt, and what will happen before that is just water under the bridge. That’s why diplomacy should be directly based on the values of accountability. Through research and convening to identify barriers to peaceful solutions, drawing on lessons learned to prevent war escalation and nuclear threats.

These principles are not merely idealistic theories. Today, you will hear from exceptionally talented leaders who are actively engaged in this important work, just as many of you in this room are. For our efforts to achieve optimal impact, it’s crucial that we collaborate within a structured framework and openly debate our agenda priorities.

Because the truly frightening moment isn’t when we are not in power, but when we possess it and still fail to make a discernible difference. We can’t afford to wait or we have no excuse to fail. With our talent, power, and resilience, we are more than capable. Yet, resilience without a clear direction only leads to the depletion of energy and resources. At CIP we aspire to be the hub that clearly defines what progressive policy entails and build a community around it.

We must challenge at all costs the belief that we can bomb our way to peace, we also cannot legislate our way out of crises without addressing the fundamental systemic imbalances and elite capture in foreign policy. But our efforts should not be consumed by fighting back, but moving forward, driven by a proactive approach to forge an affirmative agenda and a new consensus.

Most importantly, as we deliberate on our agenda and priorities, it’s imperative to honestly confront the reality of trade-offs head-on; they are plentiful in today’s world. Acknowledging the costs involved is crucial, but we must discern which costs are bearable and which are not. No matter the expense, investing towards an achievable goal is infinitely more valuable than the futile attempt to amend irreversible damage: lives that cannot be restored, injuries leaving children permanently disabled, and human catastrophes that history will judge us on.

I wanted to paint a rosier picture, to spotlight the good in the world, and the good that the Biden administration has done—and indeed, there’s plenty. But, you can simply Google those, because any achievements pales against the backdrop of catastrophic loss of life and our eroding humanity. Yet, here is the good news: you are here, and you are brilliant. We are here to debate, collaborate, and sculpt together a progressive agenda that resonates with our values and the remarkable talent present in this room. This conversation didn’t start today, nor will it end here; it continues through our analytical work, convenings, and notably, in our newly launched International Policy Journal.

Our clarity begins by identifying the roots of the problem and systemic imbalances, and ours are starkly clear. We need to face them bravely and honestly, and I’m honored to be doing that with you. Thank you so much.

Watch the speech as originally delivered below:

Foreign Military Sales Under Congressional Notification Thresholds: Dangers and Solutions

Under the Arms Export Control Act (AECA), Foreign Military Sales (FMS) and Direct Commercial Sales (DCS) have different congressional reporting requirements based on the type of items being sold, whether the sale is DCS or FMS, the recipient, and the dollar value of the sale. If the dollar value of a sale is lower than a reporting requirement threshold, Congress does not have to be notified, and information does not have to be made public. DOS and components of the DOD share responsibility for FMS, including the Defense Security Cooperation Agency (DSCA), which issues public notifications of over threshold FMS. (Source: GAO-20-386). There is an unknown number of FMS cases which have gone unreported. The total dollar value of these sales is unknown, but it is likely to be in the billions (Source: DOS ISP-I-20-19). Failing to counter this growing problem will beget additional issues relating to financial inconsistency, lack of congressional and administrative transparency, and potential involvement of U.S. defense articles and
services in human rights violations.

Read Full article below.

Transnational labor policies in the era of artificial intelligence

Lucas F. Schleusener is a Term Member of the Council on Foreign Relations. You can follow him on Bluesky at @lfschleusener.bsky.social.

Since taking office, the Biden administration has worked with Congress to invest in technology and innovation, premised on such investment as a necessary part of great power competition against China. This new industrial policy is evident in new government investment through the computer-processing-power-focused CHIPS Act and the launch of the military-technology alliance AUKUS, which arranges technology transfer and innovation between Australia, the United Kingdom, and the US. The scale of innovation that the US government is now funding at home and abroad is intended to demonstrate some of the superiority of the US-led “international rules-based order,” emphasizing open markets and free societies, and is intended as a contrast with the global outreach of Russia and China. While the American government is taking proactive steps in investing in technological innovation, those steps mainly benefit corporations and the wealthy, neglecting a vital and necessary aspect for any thriving innovation economy: labor.

The federal government is investing in developing an industrial base that can manufacture superconductors and chipsets, and has also established the Office of Strategic Capital to focus on the potential of AI. However, this approach is limited to manufacturing and corporate finance. The government should learn from the consequences of relying on SpaceX for satellites and launch capacity, despite the company’s owner’s unpredictability, addiction, instability, and questionable loyalties. It is important not to repeat the same mistake in a promising new industry like AI. While there’s every reason to be optimistic about artificial intelligence in the long term, recent reporting has demonstrated some of the technology’s remarkable limitations and shortcomings, as well as the ways it can pose a threat to democracy. 

Marketing by and conduct of industry leaders suggest that a god-like intelligence is imminent and that they are the only ones who can ethically train it (for dubious definitions of “ethically trained”). At the same time, the products currently on the market are not actual artificial intelligence but are yet another iteration of the Mechanical Turk. This 18th-century “automaton” appeared to be able to play chess against humans, but in reality, a person was hidden inside and operated it. Similarly, ChatGPT and other technological marvels are operated by people laboring under sweatshop conditions.

While the form of this exploitation has changed over the centuries since, the underlying principle of using cheap human labor to pose as artificial intelligence persists, because capital can easily relocate jobs across national borders, companies are able to exploit loopholes in laws that are meant to protect labor and the planet. From the deregulation and deindustrialization policies of the Carter and Reagan administrations to the rise of tech giants and social media companies, this process persists into the present. As a consequence, workers at home and abroad are often subject to constant labor exploitation, as in the case of Twitter employees at home and Facebook content moderators abroad. When this exploitation occurs within democracy and capitalism, it hinders the case for American soft power and leaves sweatshop workers in poverty. This prevents many countries from developing widespread stability that can allow democracy to thrive.

In order for the “international rules-based order” to successfully embrace the potential of artificial intelligence and integrate it into their economies and societies, collaboration between the public sector, private sector, citizens, and labor is required. This cannot be achieved solely by delegating government functions and funding to private industry. If the United States aims to lead in AI, it must prioritize domestic and international labor rights. Doing so would enhance the rights, dignity, and prosperity of billions of people and pave the way for greater innovation. By leading with American values, the country can continue to attract more countries towards its principles and away from authoritarian regimes.

During the post-pandemic economic boom, the United States witnessed a surge in labor militancy and support for organized labor unions. This was partly due to concerns about the impact of AI on middle-class workers. However, despite this, the federal government needs to do more to support labor in the new era. The WGA, SAG-AFTRA, and UAW strikes played a crucial role in protecting workers from AI. The agreements reached during these strikes took into account the important lessons learned from the labor and political disruptions that led to the creation of the Rust Belt, which resulted in greater inequality and political radicalization. Already, Biden’s NLRB has been one of the most effective and proactive boards of the post-war era, helping secure significant milestones such as Starbucks unionization. As legislation for technology innovation, the CHIPS Act included labor provisions, like those aimed at producing good-paying jobs with daycare, to encourage more women and primary care providers to become innovators and entrepreneurs over time. Still, there is much more that needs to be done by the NLRB and the government to support labor. 

Providing strong and proactive support for labor unions in the technology industry is crucial. Backing tech worker unions can help American workers secure their jobs, earn better wages, and have job protection. It will also enable them to gain experience, build wealth, and develop professionally, which can lead to the creation of their own innovative tech companies. Such support can broaden and deepen the pool of skilled workers at a time when the government and the country are struggling to retain tech talent. Additionally, it will protect American technology jobs from offshoring and the increasing use of sweatshop labor in other countries. To make this happen, it is necessary to take measures such as cracking down on union-busting tactics, imposing significant fines for anti-union activity, and even considering jail time where appropriate, particularly in companies like Amazon, Google, and Facebook. This way, the United States would be bringing the Multilateral Partnership for Organizing, Worker Empowerment, and Rights home with a specific focus on artificial intelligence and advanced technology workers.

As the leader of the “international rules-based order,” these are priorities and values the United States should support in collaboration with allies and partners. The Joint Global Initiative to Advance Rights of Working People Around the World between the United States and Brazil is focused on green jobs and organized labor as ways to protect and elevate the role of workers and worker organizations in strengthening democracy. That could be expanded across the OAS through diplomatic efforts and mutually beneficial policy arrangements. By doing so, the US can establish a more robust and sustained bilateral engagement, which can help strengthen economic, political, and social ties with its neighbors. This approach will foster trust and cooperation between the US and its neighbors and include expedited immigration opportunities for AI and tech workers across the Western hemisphere. The United States could push forward within the International Labour Organization (ILO) to create a global wage floor, combat tech offshoring/sweatshopping, and create a positive global future around technological innovation. Each of these would expand and accelerate innovation for the technologies necessary to counter Russia and China, increase global political stability, and act as a counterweight not only to authoritarian regimes but also as a way to defeat them over time.

These labor reforms at home and abroad will strengthen democracy, accelerate innovation, and prevent worker exploitation. This will make the “international rules-based order” more innovative and competitive while improving living standards and labor rights. It also provides economic liberty and safety, which are necessary for individuals to move beyond low-paying jobs and towards artificial intelligence, which can help us solve problems and cure diseases. By working together, the United States and its neighboring countries can create a more prosperous and sustainable future for everyone involved.