Donald Trump is an unusual United States President in that he may be the first to strike greater anxiety in allies than in adversaries.

Take the responses to his pre-inauguration comments about buying Greenland, for instance, which placed US ally Denmark at the centre of the global foreign policy radar screen and caused the Danish government — which retains control of the territory’s foreign and security policies — to declare Greenland isn’t for sale.

Canada is also in Trump’s sights with trade tariff threats and claims it should be the 51st US state. Its government has vociferously opposed Trump’s comments, begun back-channel lobbying in Washington, and prepared for trade retaliation.

• READ MORE: Pacific delegates ‘look forward’ to working with Trump
• World on edge as Trump takes office with major moves
• Other Donald Trump reports

Both cases highlight the coming challenges for management of the global US alliance network in an era of increased great power rivalry — not least for NATO, of which Denmark and Canada are member states.

Members of that network saw off the Soviet Union’s formidable Cold War challenge and are now crucial to addressing China’s complex challenge to contemporary international order. They might be excused for asking themselves the question: with allies like this, who needs adversaries?

Oversimplifying complex relationships
Trump’s longstanding critique is that allies have taken advantage of the US by under-spending on defence and “free-riding” on the security provided by Washington’s global network.

In an intuitive sense, it is hard to deny this. To varying degrees, all states in the international system — including US allies, partners and even adversaries — are free-riding on the benefits of the global international order the US constructed after the Cold War.

But is Trump therefore justified in seeking a greater return on past US investment?

Since alliance commitments involve a complex mix of interests, perception, domestic politics and bargaining, Trump wouldn’t be the deal-maker he says he is if he didn’t seek a redistribution of the alliance burden.

The general problem with his recent foreign policy rhetoric, however, is that a grain of truth is not a stable basis for a sweeping change in US foreign policy.

Specifically, Trump’s “free-riding” claims are an oversimplification of a complex reality. And there are potentially substantial political and strategic costs associated with the US using coercive diplomacy against what Trump calls “delinquent” alliance partners.

Free riding or burden sharing?
The inconvenient truth for Trump is that “free-riding” by allies is hard to differentiate from standard alliance “burden sharing” where the US is in a quid pro quo relationship: it subsidises its allies’ security in exchange for benefits they provide the US.

And whatever concept we use to characterise US alliance policy, it was developed in a deliberate and methodical manner over decades.

US subsidisation of its allies’ security is a longstanding choice underpinned by a strategic logic: it gives Washington power projection against adversaries, and leverage in relations with its allies.

To the degree there may have been free-riding aspects in the foreign policies of US allies, this pales next to their overall contribution to US foreign policy.

Allies were an essential part in the US victory in its Cold War competition with the Soviet-led communist bloc, and are integral in the current era of strategic competition with China.

Overblown claims of free-riding overlook the fact that when US interests differ from its allies, it has either vetoed their actions or acted decisively itself, with the expectation reluctant allies will eventually follow.

During the Cold War, the US maintained a de facto veto over which allies could acquire nuclear weapons (the UK and France) and which ones could not (Germany, Taiwan, South Korea).

In 1972, the US established a close relationship with China to contain the Soviet Union – despite protestations from Taiwan, and the security concerns of Japan and South Korea.

In the 1980s, Washington proceeded with the deployment of US missiles on the soil of some very reluctant NATO states and their even more reluctant populations. The same pattern has occurred in the post-Cold War era, with key allies backing the US in its interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The problems with coercion
Trump’s recent comments on Greenland and Canada suggest he will take an even more assertive approach toward allies than during his first term. But the line between a reasonable US policy response and a coercive one is hard to draw.

It is not just that US policymakers have the challenging task of determining that line. In pursuing such a policy, the US also risks eroding the hard-earned credit it earned from decades of investment in its alliance network.

There is also the obvious point that is takes two to tango in an alliance relationship. US allies are not mere pawns in Trump’s strategic chessboard. Allies have agency.

They will have been strategising how to deal with Trump since before the presidential campaign in 2024. Their options range from withholding cooperation to various forms of defection from an alliance relationship.

Are the benefits associated with a disruption of established alliances worth the cost? It is hard to see how they might be. In which case, it is an experiment the Trump administration might be well advised to avoid.

Dr Nicholas Khoo is associate professor of international politics and principal research fellow, Institute for Indo-Pacific Affairs (Christchurch), University of Otago. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

A pair of Chinese scam artists wanted to turn a radiation-soaked Pacific atoll into a future metropolis. They ended up in an American jail instead.

How they got there is an untold tale of international bribery and graft that stretched to the very heart of the United Nations.

The stakes could scarcely have been higher for Hilda Heine, the former president of the Marshall Islands.

• READ MORE: Flashback: The Rongelap and the boat and the bomb story
• The full OCCRP investigation
• Other reports on Rongelap and the scam

A new OCCRP investigation reveals details of how Chinese-born fraudsters Cary Yan and Gina Zhou paid more than US$1 million to UN diplomats to gain access to its headquarters in New York, before embarking on a controversial plan to set up an autonomous zone near an important US military facility in the Pacific Ocean.

For years, Hilda Heine’s remote archipelago nation of just 40,000 people was best known to the world for Cold War nuclear testing that left scores of its islands poisoned.

Sitting in the centre of the Pacific Ocean, the country was a strategic but forgotten US ally.

But the arrival of a couple of mysterious strangers threatened to change all that. With buckets of cash at their disposal, the Chinese pair, Cary Yan and Gina Zhou, had grand plans that could have thrust the Marshall Islands into the growing rivalry between China and the West, and perhaps fracture the country itself.

Public controversy
First proposed in 2017, while Heine was still president, Yan and Zhou’s idea raised public controversy.

With backing from foreign investors, the couple planned to rehabilitate one irradiated atoll, Rongelap, and turn it into a futuristic “digital special administrative region.”

The new city of artificial islands would include an aviation logistics center, wellness resorts, a gaming and entertainment zone, and foreign embassies.

Thanks in part to the liberal payment of bribes, Yan and Zhou had managed to gain the support of some of the Marshall Islands’ most powerful politicians. They then lobbied for a draft bill that would have given the proposed zone, known as the Rongelap Atoll Special Administrative Region (RASAR), its own separate courts and immigration laws.

Heine was opposed. The whole thing reeked of a Chinese effort to gain influence over the strategically located Marshall Islands, she told OCCRP.

The plan was unconstitutional and would have created a virtually “independent country” within the Marshall Islands’ borders, she said.

The new Chinese investor-backed zone would also have occupied a geographically sensitive spot just 200 km of open water away from Kwajalein Atoll, where the US Army runs facilities that test intercontinental ballistic missiles and track foreign rocket launches.

Became a target
But when President Heine argued against the draft law, she became a target herself. In November 2018, pro-RASAR politicians backed by Yan and Zhou pushed a no-confidence motion to remove her from power.

She survived by one vote.

Even then, the president said she had no idea who this influential duo really were. Although they seemed to be Chinese, they carried Marshall Islands passports, which  gave them visa free access to the United States. Nobody seemed to know how they had obtained them.

“We looked and looked and we couldn’t find when and how they got [the passports],” Heine said. “We didn’t know what their connections were or if they had any connections with the Chinese government.

“But of course we were suspicious.”

The plan came to an abrupt end in November 2020, when Yan and Zhou were arrested in Thailand on a US warrant. After being extradited to face trial in New York, they pleaded guilty to a single count of conspiracy to bribe Marshallese officials.

Both were sentenced earlier this year. Zhou was deported to the Marshall Islands shortly after her sentencing, while Yan is due for release this November.

But although the federal case led to a brief burst of media attention, it left key questions unanswered.

Who really were Yan and Zhou? Who helped them in their audacious scheme? Were they simply crooks? Or were they also working to advance the interests of the Chinese government?

OCCRP spent nearly a year trying to find answers, conducting interviews around the world and poring through thousands of pages of documents.

What reporters uncovered was a story more bizarre — and with far broader implications — than first expected.

Aubrey Belford, Kevin G. Hall and Martin Young are investigative writers for the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP). Republished with permission.

• Read the full OCCRP investigation

A Pacific elder and former secretary-general of the Pacific Islands Forum says Pacific leaders need to sit up and pay closer attention to AUKUS and the Indo-Pacific strategy and China’s response to them.

Speaking from Port Moresby in Papua New Guinea, Dame Meg Taylor said Pacific leaders were being sidelined in major geopolitical decisions affecting their region and they need to start raising their voices for the sake of their citizens.

“The issue here is that we should have paid much more attention to the Indo-Pacific strategy as it emerged,” she said.

• LISTEN TO RNZ PACIFIC WAVES: Dame Meg Taylor on AUKUS

“And we were not ever consulted by the countries that are party to that, including some of our own members of the Pacific Island Forum. Then the emergence of AUKUS — Pacific countries were never consulted on this either,” she said.

Last week in San Diego, the leaders of the United States, the UK and Australia — President Joe Biden, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese respectively — formally announced the AUKUS deal.

It will see the Australian government spending nearly $US250 billion over the next three decades to acquire a fleet of US nuclear submarines with UK tech components — the majority of which will be built in Adelaide — as part of the defence and security pact.

Its implementation will make Australia one of only seven countries in the world to have nuclear-powered submarines alongside China, France, India, Russia, the UK, and the US.

“We believe in a world that protects freedom and respects human rights, the rule of law, the independence of sovereign states, and the rules-based international order,” the leaders said in a joint statement.

“The steps we are announcing today will help us to advance these mutually beneficial objectives in the decades to come,” they said.

Following the announcement, China’s foreign ministry spokesperson Wang Wengbin said by going ahead with the pact the US, UK and Australia disregarded the concerns of the international community and have gone further down “the wrong path”.

“We’ve repeatedly said that the establishment of the so-called AUKUS security partnership between the US, the UK and Australia to promote cooperation on nuclear submarines and other cutting-edge military technologies, is a typical Cold War mentality,” Wang said.

“It will only exacerbate the arms race, undermine the international nuclear non-proliferation regime, and hurt regional peace and stability,” he said.

The 2022 Indo-Pacific Strategy is the United States’ programme to ” advance our common vision for an Indo-Pacific region that is free and open, connected, prosperous, secure, and resilient.”

The Rarotonga Treaty
On his return from San Diego, Australia’s Albanese stopped over in Suva where he met his Fijian counterpart Sitiveni Rabuka.

After the meeting, Rabuka told reporters he supported AUKUS and that Albanese had assured him the nuclear submarine deal would not undermine the Treaty of Rarotonga — to which Australia is a party — that declares the South Pacific a nuclear weapon free zone.

But an Australian academic said Pacific countries cannot take Canberra at face value when it comes to AUKUS and its committment to the Rarotonga Treaty.

Dr Matthew Fitzpatrick, a professor in international history at Flinders University in South Australia, said Pacific leaders need to hold Australia accountable to the treaty.

“Australia and New Zealand have always differed on what that treaty extends to in the sense that for New Zealand, that means more or less that you haven’t had US vessels with nuclear arms [or nuclear powered] permitted into the ports of New Zealand, whereas in Australia, those vessels more or less have been welcomed,” he said.

Professor Fitzpatrick said Australia had declared that it did not breach it, or it did not breach any of those treaty commitments, but the proof of the pudding would be in the eating.

“I think it’s something that certainly nations around the Pacific should be very careful and very cautious in taking at face value, what Australia says on those treaty requirements and should ensure that they’re rigorously enforced,” Professor Fitzpatrick said.

Parties to the Rarotonga Treaty include Australia, Cook Islands, Fiji, Kiribati, Nauru, New Zealand, Niue, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Tuvalu, and Vanuatu.

Notably absent are three north Pacific countries who have compacts of free association with the United States — Palau, Marshall Islands and the Federated States of Micronesia.

Dame Meg Taylor said Sitiveni Rabuka’s signal of support for AUKUS by no means reflected the positions of other leaders in the region.

“I think the concern for us is that we in the Pacific, particularly those of us who are signatories to the Treaty of Rarotonga, have always been committed to the fact that we wanted a place to live where there was no proliferation of nuclear weapons.

“The debate, I think that will emerge within the Pacific is ‘are nuclear submarines weapons’?”

Self-fulfilling prophecy
Meanwhile, a geopolitical analyst, Geoffrey Miller who writes for political website Democracy Project, said the deal could become a “self-fulfilling prophecy” for conflict.

“Indo-Pacific countries all around the region are re-arming and spending more on their militaries,” Miller said.

Japan approved its biggest military buildup since the Second World War last year and Dr Miller said New Zealand was reviewing its defence policy which would likely lead to more spending.

“I worry that the AUKUS deal will only make things worse,” he said.

“The more of these kinds of power projections, and the less dialogue we have, the more likely it is that we are ultimately going to bring about this conflict that we’re all trying to avoid.

“I think we do need to think about de-escalation even more and let’s not talk ourselves into World War III.”

Miller said tensions had grown since Russia invaded Ukraine and analysts had changed their view on how likely China was to invade Taiwain.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

In his recently published article “Sea of many flags”, the head of the ANU National Security College Rory Medcalf makes the case for why Pacific Island states should regard the deep regional involvement of a Western coalition of powers, “quietly” led by Australia, as an effective and attractive “Pacific way to dilute China’s influence”.

Although presented as a new proposal, the increased regional engagement of this Western coalition is already well advanced, in the form of proposed new military bases and joint-use facilities, new security treaties, increased aid programmes, new embassies, as well as a new regional institution, Partners in the Blue Pacific (PBP).

Medcalf’s main task is not to persuade Canberra of the merits of this approach, but rather to demonstrate to a sceptical Pacific audience that this Western coalition’s Indo-Pacific strategy is compatible with the Blue Pacific strategy of the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF).

• READ MORE: Other China in the Pacific reports

Medcalf argues that an Indo-Pacific strategy of containing China supports the broad concept of human security embraced by Pacific Island leaders in their 2018 Boe Declaration, which includes the key demand for climate change action.

He also argues that the strategy would support the Blue Pacific emphasis on Pacific Island sovereignty by countering Chinese attempts to dominate the region. Thus he moves beyond the argument (made for example by Sandra Tarte) that there are some meeting points between these two world views and posits their complete compatibility.

His purpose is to counter the position of Pacific insiders, like former Secretary-General of PIF Dame Meg Taylor, and Professor Tarcisius Kabutaulaka, who argue that these security narratives are antithetical.

Medcalf proposes a model of security governance dominated by a Western coalition of interests operating through institutions like the Quad, AUKUS and PBP, where Pacific Islander influence is marginal or non-existent. Australia is seen as the “hub” for Western alliance management of the Pacific, acting as a “guide and informal coordinator”, ensuring that investments are organised efficiently and “in line with what Pacific communities want”.

PBP aid projects deployed
PBP aid projects would be deployed in support of the objectives outlined in the Boe Declaration as well as PIF’s 2050 Strategy for the Blue Pacific Continent.

The problem here is that, at best, this security model operates on behalf of Pacific interests, but not under the control of Pacific governments or regional institutions created for that purpose.

The argument for compatibility between the Indo-Pacific and Blue Pacific strategies does not consider key aspects of the Pacific vision for the future, such as urgent climate action, where there are clear discrepancies, especially regarding limiting emissions. Asking Island leaders to curtail China’s regional role requires them to compromise their long-standing foreign policy ethos of “friends to all and enemies to none”.

Nor is it clear that Medcalf’s approach would support Island sovereignty, when the major threats seem to come from Western actors, including increased military activity in Micronesia, the undermining of regional institutions by external initiatives such as PBP, continuing colonial rule in French Polynesia and New Caledonia, and ongoing American control (and deepening militarisation) of Guam.

[Pacific Media Watch adds that this includes continuing colonial rule by Indonesia in the expanded five provinces that make up the West Papua region].

Australian military plans to allow US stationing and storage of nuclear weapons in north Australia appear to violate the terms of the South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone Treaty, and Japan’s proposal to release into the ocean nuclear waste from the Fukushima power plant meltdown is causing considerable consternation in the region.

Medcalf’s argument that adoption of the Indo-Pacific mental map could bring together Indian Ocean and Pacific Ocean islands to discuss common challenges misses the 30-year history of such collaboration within the Alliance of Small Island States.

Unhelpful characterisation of China
Another problem with this analysis is its frankly unhelpful characterisation of China’s Pacific engagement. According to Medcalf, China “has a rightful place in the Pacific, just not a right to dominate”.

However, he provides no evidence that China does in fact seek regional hegemony, and cites no examples where its behaviour in the Pacific Islands might be regarded as “bullying” or “coercive”.

The 10 island countries that recognise Beijing have signed up to participate in the much-maligned Belt and Road Initiative without any apparent coercion.

Nor does Medcalf provide Pacific examples of the debt-for-equity argument often levelled at China’s lending practices in the Global South. When Tonga had difficulty servicing Chinese loans, Beijing agreed to extend their terms. Even the claim that China seeks to establish a military base in the region, a central plank in Western narratives, remains unsubstantiated.

Recent studies by the RAND Corporation (funded by the US military) provide some useful perspective by ranking Fiji and Papua New Guinea of “medium desirability” but “low feasibility” for Chinese military initiatives. Other Pacific locations, including Solomon Islands and Kiribati, are not seen as feasible.

To describe Beijing’s engagement as “neocolonial” is to invite comparisons with the activities of the Western coalition, key members of which retain actual colonies in the region. Nor is Australia in a strong position to accuse others of manipulative behaviour.

For example, Canberra’s efforts to protect its coal industry by working to weaken PIF statements about climate change mitigation are well documented, date back to the beginning of the COP negotiations, and continue today.

Self-determination issue at heart
Ultimately Medcalf’s central argument falls because it does not consider the issue of self-determination which is at the heart of the Blue Pacific strategy. Although Medcalf calls for “a premium on self-awareness, inclusion, and genuine diplomacy”, his proposal effectively devalues Pacific agency and marginalises Pacific decision makers.

“Sea of many flags” claims to promote strategic equilibrium in the Pacific, yet it really aims to create the conditions for continuing Western hegemony. It claims to counter geopolitical competition and militarisation while shoring up and expanding Western military domination.

It claims to act in the interests of Pacific peoples, yet seems designed to moderate opposition to recent anti-China initiatives established under the auspices of the Indo-Pacific strategy and without meaningful consultation.

By allowing some role for China, albeit a limited one, Medcalf is advocating a softer form of strategic denial than that imposed by Western powers during the Cold War. But his warnings to island states about the dangers of economic engagement with Beijing seem hollow indeed, given Australia’s massive trade dependence on China.

In advocating “a Pacific kind of leadership”, the author (perhaps inadvertently) evokes the principles guiding Pacific leaders in the early days of independence. But it is worth remembering that the essence of the Pacific Way advanced by Ratu Mara and others was Pacific control and regional self-determination.

In contrast, what Rory Medcalf is advocating would subsume all of this under the control of the Western alliance, led quietly (or not so quietly) by Australia.

Washington has announced plans to reopen the United States Embassy in Solomon Islands.

Inside the Games reports that the move is a bid to counter China’s increasing assertiveness in the region, which has seen Beijing fund infrastructure for this year’s Pacific Games which take place later this year.

The US Department of State has informed Congress that it plans to establish an interim embassy in Honiara on the site of a former consular property.

• READ MORE: Other China-Solomon Islands geopolitics reports
• Fiji recalling all ambassadors and global staff

It said it would at first be staffed by two American diplomats and five local employees at a cost of US$1.8 million a year.

A more permanent facility with larger staffing will be established eventually.

The US closed its embassy in Honiara in 1993 as part of a post-Cold War global reduction in diplomatic posts and priorities.

The State Department warned in February 2022 that China’s growing influence in the region made reopening the embassy in the Solomon Islands a priority.

In October 2020, the Solomons and China signed an agreement for China to help build venues for the Pacific Games.

Last year, Honiara and Beijing signed a security pact after Chinese President Xi Jinping upgraded relations for a second time following a meeting with Solomons Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare.

The agreement could allow Solomon Islands to request China send police and military personnel if required, while China could deploy forces to protect “Chinese personnel and major projects”.

Sogavare has assured the US and other Western allies that he would not allow China to establish a naval base in his country, but concern about Chinese intentions has not eased.

Solomons and Chinese police visit Games stadium
Representatives from the Royal Solomon Islands Police Force have met with Chinese officials and police to visit the 2023 Pacific Games stadium which is still under construction.

The stadium is being built by the China Civil Engineering Construction Corporation, while a dorm at the National University is being built by JiangSu Provincial Construction.

The police force acknowledged the work of the companies in providing employment opportunities to local residents.

Assistant Commissioner Simpson Pogeava said police assistance would be reaffirmed, instructing Central police and Guadalcanal police to provide security support to keep the projects safe.

• The Games are scheduled to take place from November 19 to December 2.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ. 

REVIEW: By Pat Baskett

In the days before mobile phones and emails, there were telephone trees. They grew and spread messages like leaves, thriving on the fertile ground of common beliefs and support for a particular cause.

It worked like this: one member of a group phoned 10 others who phoned another 10, each of whom phoned 10 more. On and on . . . The caller was never anonymous, relationships were established — or you simply said, “no thanks”.

The task of spreading information, before the internet, was time-consuming and labour intensive. Photocopiers, which became widely used only in the late 1970s, replaced an invaluable machine called a duplicator. You cranked the handle, one turn for each page, hoping the paper wouldn’t stick. How long did it take to do a thousand?

• READ MORE: Other reports about Peacemonger Owen Wilkes

Next came the mail-out — folding, stuffing envelopes, sticking on stamps if funds allowed, or delivering them by hand into letterboxes.

The process was convivial, the days were busy but there was always time. There needed to be, because the issue was urgent.

The Cold War, that period of perilous mistrust between the communist Soviet Union and the “free” West, led by the United States, engulfed us in fear of a nuclear holocaust. Barely a generation separated us from the end of World War II when nuclear bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan.

The mutually assured destruction (MAD) these weapons promised was a fragile pseudo peace. In our neighbourhood peace groups, we understood the devastation a nuclear winter would bring and we worked out the radius of death and damage from a bomb dropped on our own cities.

An essential step

Yet more than nuclear weapons was, and still is, at stake. The movement was called the Peace Movement because banning nukes was considered the essential step in ensuring world peace.

The stockpile of nuclear weapons held by each side was more than enough to eradicate all, or most, life on earth — and it still is.

Those existential threats have a familiar ring, though the cause we face today adds another dimension. So far, the benefits of almost instant communication and dissemination of information haven’t enabled the world to devise for climate disruption what activists, uniquely in New Zealand, achieved — the 1986 nuclear weapons-free legislation.

Passed by the Labour government of David Lange, it prohibits not just weapons but nuclear-powered warships — including those of our former ANZUS allies, namely the United States.

There has never been any question of rescinding this act. It remains in safe obscurity — to such an extent that I wonder how many of our Gen X contemporaries are aware of its existence.

Yet more than nuclear weapons was, and still is, at stake. The movement was called the Peace Movement because banning nukes was considered the essential step in ensuring world peace.

In 1984, 61 percent of the population were living in 86 locally declared nuclear-weapons-free zones. Academic activists came together to form Scientists Against Nuclear Arms (SANA) and Engineers for Social Responsibility (ESR – this group now focuses on the climate disruption).

The medical fraternity formed a local branch of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW).

#PacificMediaWatch ‘Lots of information isn’t secret, it’s just hard to find’ – Nicky Hager on one of #NZ’s most famous #whistleblowers #AsiaPacificReport #Stuff #OwenWilkes #NickyHager #peaceresearch #investigations #militarism #opensource #newbooks https://t.co/7bvE7tR5Qo pic.twitter.com/eCGyH9BKjy

— David Robie (@DavidRobie) January 1, 2023

Extraordinary sleuthing talent
Much of the information which fuelled the work of all these groups was brought to light by the extraordinary sleuthing talent of one man. Owen Wilkes is described as ” . . . the intellect behind New Zealand’s anti-nuclear stance” in a recent book, Peacemonger: Owen Wilkes international peace researcher, published by Raekaihau Press in association with Steele Roberts Aotearoa.

The book consists of 12 essays by friends and collaborators, themselves experts in their individual fields and who leave their own legacies of contribution to the knowledge that led to the anti-nuclear legislation.

They include physicist Dr Peter Wills who was instrumental in setting up SANA and Auckland University’s Centre for Peace Studies; investigative journalist and researcher Nicky Hager; and veteran peace and human rights activist Maire Leadbeater. Two contributions are by Wilkes’s colleagues at the Peace Research Institute in Oslo Norway, Dr Ingvar Botnen and Dr Nils Petter Gleditsch.

Wilkes spent six years from 1976 working in Oslo and also at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).

The work is edited by Mark Derby and Wilkes’s partner May Bass. While a traditional biography with a single author may have avoided the repetition of information, the various personal anecdotes and responses result in the portrayal of an unconventional, highly talented individual.

In his introduction, Derby sums up Wilkes’s life: “Although invariably non-violent, politically non-aligned and generally law-abiding, Owen encountered official opposition, harassment and intimidation in various forms as he became internationally known for the quality and impact of his peace research.”

Wilkes was born in Christchurch in 1940 and died in Kawhia in 2005. In his early adult years he worked as an entomologist on various projects supported by the US military, including at McMurdo base in the Antarctic. These, he discovered, were connected with a US military germ warfare project.

Using official information laws
His gift was to see through, and behind, the information government made public about our relationship to our official allies, essentially the US. To do this he used our own official information laws and the American equivalent, plus any public reports to congress and US budget reports he could lay hands on.

Rubbish bags also feature in a couple of accounts.

What now may be stored as megabytes of information consists of boxes and folders of carefully catalogued material, the bulk of which is lodged at the Alexander Turnbull Library (with information also at the university libraries of Auckland and Canterbury).

The truth Wilkes was committed to appears, in retrospect, somehow simpler than that of the struggle towards a fossil-free future and a liveable planet for all. Peace is a part of this and the nukes are still there.

Wilkes documented how in many cases what was billed as civilian also had profound military implications. This was nowhere more clear than in the anti-bases campaign which Murray Horton chronicles — bases being sites in remote locations for monitoring or receiving satellite information, some of which new technology has rendered obsolete.

These include Mt St John near Lake Tekapo and Black Birch near Blenheim, and those still operating at Tangimoana in the Manawatu and at Waihopai, also near Blenheim.

Wilkes’s unconventional appearance and lifestyle — he famously wore shorts in sub-zero temperatures when skiing in Norway — made him a target for accusations of being a communist, a not uncommon slander of the peace movement.

Having sharp eyes
Maire Leadbeater, in her account of his long investigation by the New Zealand Security Intelligence Service, suggests his only “crime” was “to have sharp eyes and the ability to put two and two together”.

Yet there were more conventional sides to his interests. One was archaeology, beginning in his 1962 when he worked as a field archaeologist for the Canterbury Museum. This continued after he left the peace movement in the early 1990s and worked for the Waikato Department of Conservation in a variety of jobs including filing archaeological and historical records.

The truth Wilkes was committed to appears, in retrospect, somehow simpler than that of the struggle towards a fossil-free future and a liveable planet for all. Peace is a part of this and the nukes are still there.

• Peacemonger – Owen Wilkes: International Peace Researcher, edited by May Bass and Mark Derby. Published by Raekaihau Press in association with Steele Roberts Aotearoa (2022). This article was first published by Newsroom is republished with the author’s and Newsroom’s permission. Asia Pacific Report editor David Robie is one of the contributing authors.

Indonesian President Joko Widodo has acknowledged “gross human rights violations” in his country’s history and vowed to prevent any repeat.

He cited 12 “regrettable” events, including an anti-communist purge at the height of the Cold War.

By some estimates, the massacres killed about 500,000 people.

• READ MORE: Yamin Kogoya: Arrest of Papuan governor Enembe condemned as illegal Jakarta ‘kidnap’
• Other Indonesian human rights violations reports

Widodo is the second Indonesian president to publicly admit the 1960s bloodshed, after the late Abdurrahman Wahid’s public apology in 2000.

The violence was unleashed after communists were accused of killing six generals in an attempted coup amid a struggle for power between the communists, the military and Islamist groups.

“With a clear mind and an earnest heart, I as [Indonesia’s] head of state acknowledge that gross human rights violations did happen in many occurrences,” Widodo said at a news conference outside the presidential palace in Jakarta.

“And I strongly regret that those violations occurred,” added the president, more commonly known as Jokowi.

Democratic activists abducted
The events he cited took place between 1965 and 2003 and included the abduction of democratic activists during protests against former leader Suharto’s iron-fisted presidency in the late 1990s.

The president also highlighted rights violations in the region of Papua — the eastern region bordering Papua New Guinea where there has been a long-running independence movement — as well as during an insurgency in the province of Aceh, in the north of the island of Sumatra.

The government was looking to restore the rights of victims “fairly and wisely without negating judicial resolution”, he said, but did not specify how this would be done.

“I will endeavour wholeheartedly to ensure gross human rights violations never happen again in the future,” he added.

However, rights activists said his admission failed to address government responsibility.

Call for legal action
Amnesty International’s Indonesia executive director Usman Hamid called for legal action to be taken against the perpetrators of these acts.

“Mere recognition without trying to bring to justice those responsible for past human rights violations will only add salt to the wounds of the victims and their families. Simply put, the president’s statement is meaningless without accountability,” he said.

Andreas Harsono of Human Rights Watch said Widodo “stopped short of explicitly admitting the government’s role in the atrocities or making any commitments to pursue accountability”.

Widodo recently received a report from a team he commissioned last year to investigate rights violations.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ. 

Whistleblower Owen Wilkes was a tireless and formidable researcher for the Pacific, peace and disarmament. Before the internet, he combed publicly available sources on weapons systems and defence strategy.

In 1968, he revealed the secretive military function of a proposed satellite tracking station in the South Island, and while working in Sweden he was charged with espionage and deported after photographing intriguing but publicly visible installations.

In a new book about his life, Peacemonger, edited by May Bass and Mark Derby, Nicky Hager writes about Wilkes’ research techniques:

Owen Wilkes was an outstanding researcher, a role model of how someone can make a difference in the world by good research. But how did he actually do it? Owen managed to study complex subjects such as Cold War communications systems, secret intelligence facilities and foreign military activities in the Pacific.

There are many important and useful lessons we can learn from how he did this work. The world needs more public interest researchers, on militarism and other subjects. Owen’s self-taught research techniques are like a masterclass in how it is done.

• READ MORE: Other reports about Owen Wilkes and Peacemonger

Lots of information isn’t secret, just hard to find
Owen worked for many years, sitting at his large desk at the Peace Movement office in Wellington, researching the military communications systems set up to launch and fight nuclear war. How was this possible?

We are a bit conditioned currently to imagine the only option would be leaked documents from a whistleblower. The first secret of Owen’s success is that he had learned that large amounts of information on these subjects can be found and pieced together from obscure but publicly available sources.

The heart of his research method was long hours spent poring over US government records and military industry magazines, gathering the precious crumbs of detail like someone panning for gold.

Behind the large desk were shelves and shelves of open-topped file boxes, each with a cryptic title. These boxes were full of photocopied documents and handwritten notes from his researching. This may all sound very pre-internet; indeed it was largely pre-digital.

But what Owen was doing would today be called “open source” research and his work is far superior to that carried out by many people with Google and other digital tools at their fingertips. Probably his favourite source of all was a publicly available US defence magazine called Aviation Week and Space Technology. The magazine (now online) is written for military staff and arms manufacturers, keeping them informed about developments in weapons, aircraft and “C3I” systems, which stands for Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence systems: one of Owen’s main areas of speciality.

The magazine also covered Owen’s speciality of “space based” military systems, such as military communication and surveillance satellites. In Owen’s files, which can be viewed at the National Library in Wellington, Aviation Week and Space Technology appears often. In a file box called USA Space Systems is a clipping from 1983 about the US Air Force awarding a contract for a ballistic missile early warning system (nuclear war-fighting equipment). The article revealed that the early warning system would be based at air force bases in Alaska, Greenland and Fylingdales, England — three clues about US foreign military activities.

By reading and storing away details from numerous such articles, spanning many years, Owen built up a more and more detailed understanding of military and intelligence systems.

The other endlessly useful source Owen used was US Congress and Senate hearings and reports about the US military budget. This is where each year the US military spells out its military construction plans, new weapons, technology programmes and the rest; often with figures broken down to the level of individual countries and military bases.

Senior military officials appear at hearings to explain the threats and strategies that justify the spending. As with the military magazines, Owen systematically mined these reports year after year for interesting detail.

He was especially keen on the US Congress’ Committee on Appropriations, Subcommittee on Military Construction Appropriations. His files on US antisatellite weapons, for instance, contain a document from this subcommittee about new Anti-Satellite System Facilities (project number 11610) based at Langley Air Force base, Virginia. It had been approved by the president in the renewed Cold War of the mid-1980s to target Soviet satellites. Details like this were pieces in a 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle.

When he was based at the Peace Movement Aotearoa office in Wellington, from 1983 until about 1992, Owen spent long hours at the US Embassy library studying the Military Construction Appropriations and other US government documents. Each year the library received copies of the documents as microfiche (microphotos of each page on a film). Owen was a familiar visitor, hunched over the microfiche reader making notes and printing out interesting pages.

Many times this gave the first clue of construction somewhere in the world, pointing to that country hosting some new US military, nuclear or intelligence activity. The annual US military appropriation information is available to a researcher today. In fact it is now more easily accessed since it is online. But, if anything, Owen’s pre-digital techniques make it clearer how this research is done well. It’s a good reminder that the best sources of information are most often not in the first 10 or 20 hits of a Google search, the point where many people stop looking.

Experience and persistence
An important ingredient in all these methods is persistence. The methods usually work best if, like Owen, a researcher sticks at them over time. Sticking at a subject means you start to recognise names and places in an otherwise boring document, appreciate the significance of some fragment of information and understand the big picture into which each piece of information fits.

Someone who reads deeply and studies a subject over a number of years can in effect become, like Owen, an expert. They may, like him, have no formal university qualifications. But they can know more about their subject than nearly anyone else, which is a good definition of an expert. They recognise the names and places and appreciate the significance of new evidence.

A textbook example of this was when Owen returned to New Zealand in the early 1980s and went to see a recently discovered secret military site near the beach settlement of Tangimoana in the Manawatu.

Owen, who had spent years studying secret bases around the world, was the New Zealander most likely to know what he was looking at. There, on one side of the base, was a large circle of antenna poles: a CDAA circularly-disposed antenna array. It instantly told him the Tangimoana facility was a signals intelligence base. It had the same equipment and was part of the same networks as the bases he had studied in Norway and Sweden.

Ensuring his research was noticed
The purpose of Owen’s work was to make a difference to the issues he researched. A final and vital part of the work was getting attention for the findings of his research. Owen often spoke in the news and he wrote about the issues he was studying. Research, writing and speaking up are essential ingredients in political change. The part of this he probably enjoyed most was travelling and speaking in public to interested groups.

During the 1980s, he had major speaking tours to countries including Japan, the Philippines, Australia and Canada (and often around New Zealand). During these trips he would present information about military and intelligence activities in those countries. A 1985 trip to Canada, which he shared with prominent Palau leader Roman Bedor, was typical. He was in Canada for seven weeks, speaking in most parts of the country and numerous times on radio and television.

One of the things he emphasised was that Canadians, as residents of a Pacific country, should be thinking about what was going on in the Pacific. One of Owen’s recurrent themes was the importance of being aware of the Pacific.

The final ingredient of a good researcher is caring about the subjects they are working on. This can be heard clearly in everything Owen wrote about the Pacific. He described the Pacific being used for submarine-based nuclear weapons and facilities used to prepare for nuclear war. He talked about the big powers using the Pacific as the “backside of the globe”, epitomised by tiny Johnston Atoll west of Hawai’i where the US military does “anything too unpopular, too dangerous and too secret to do elsewhere”.

He talked about things that were getting better: French nuclear testing on the way out; chemical weapons being destroyed. But also the region being used as a site for great power rivalry; and, under multiple pressures, the small Pacific countries being at risk of becoming “more repressive, less democratic”. He cared, and that was at the heart of being a public-interest researcher for decades.

Many of the problems he described are still occurring today. More research, more good research, on these issues and many others is crying out to be done.

• An extract from Peacemonger – Owen Wilkes: International Peace Researcher, edited by May Bass and Mark Derby. Published by Raekaihau Press in association with Steele Roberts Aotearoa. This article was first published by Stuff and is republished with the book authors’ permission. David Robie is one of the contributing authors.
  

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s acceptance of an invitation to speak at this week’s NATO leaders’ summit in Madrid has fuelled a narrative that New Zealand’s independent foreign policy is falling victim to a new Cold War.

According to this view, Ardern’s participation is a reward for recently aligning New Zealand’s foreign policy more closely with the US and its allies against Russia and, to a lesser extent, China.

This narrative claims this shift has been exemplified by sanctions against Putin’s Russia, humanitarian and military assistance to Ukraine and public questioning of China’s growing involvement in the Pacific.

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These developments purportedly show American power has forced New Zealand to abandon its preferred strategy of hedging between the two superpowers and instead follow Washington at the expense of its own national interests and the country’s crucial relationship with China.

But this reading of the current international situation and its impact on New Zealand foreign policy is wide of the mark.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s decision to attend the NATO summit in Spain – but to skip the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) in Rwanda – symbolizes the changes she is making to New Zealand foreign policy.https://t.co/r1nX5IEm8V pic.twitter.com/atnitdaTkX

— The Diplomat (@Diplomat_APAC) June 25, 2022

There is no new Cold War
The post-Cold War era is fundamentally different from the period between 1947 and 1989 and its rival global economic systems and competing but comparable alliance systems. Those features simply do not exist in the globalising world of the 21st century.

China’s rise to superpower status has been based on full-blooded participation in the global capitalist economy and its dependence on key markets like America, the European Union and Japan.

At the same time, the Ardern government has distinctive reasons, beyond simply following America’s lead, for opposing Putin’s Ukraine invasion and expressing public reservations about the China-Solomon Islands security deal.

Not reading too much into ⁦@jacindaardern⁩ attendance during NATO Summit. NZ has had dialogue relationship with NATO for 2 decades. I once attended meeting on Afghanistan w/ NATO leaders. Can be consistent with maintaining independent foreign policy: https://t.co/AAVaEbFdRn

— Helen Clark (@HelenClarkNZ) June 25, 2022

Since the Second World War, New Zealand has been a firm supporter of a strengthened international rules-based order, enshrined in institutions such as the United Nations and embodied in norms such as multilateralism.

Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was a flagrant violation of the UN Charter. It confirmed what has been clear for much of the post-Cold War era — the UN Security Council is no longer fit for purpose.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has pledged to campaign for a reformed Security Council that can more effectively hold aggression in check. The Ardern government believes it has a big stake in helping Kiev defeat Putin’s expansionism.

By framing concerns about China’s “militarisation” of the Pacific region as a possible breach of the 2000 Biketawa Declaration, the Ardern government is seeking to foster local resilience against China’s assertiveness in a region considered as New Zealand’s neighbourhood.

New Zealand’s worldview remains distinctive. It shares many of the concerns of close allies about the threat of authoritarian states to an international rules-based order. But it also rejects the view any great power should enjoy exceptional rights and privileges in the 21st century.

Here New Zealand’s foreign policy parts company with that of its traditional allies. New Zealand not only seeks to defend the international rules-based order, it wants to strengthen it.

New Zealand’s strategic positioning
There are other important strategic and economic reasons for Ardern to make this five-day visit to Europe.

She will have the chance to emphasise to so-called realists within NATO that ceding Ukrainian territory to Putin to bring peace is delusional, only likely to invite more territorial demands from the Kremlin.

China will also loom large in the discussions. Xi Jinping’s regime has diplomatically backed the Kremlin and recently declared Putin’s Ukraine invasion was “legitimate”.

Ardern has said China should not be “pigeonholed” with Moscow. But she will also be mindful a failure to strongly counter Putin’s assault on the rules-based order in Ukraine could increase China’s pressure to incorporate Taiwan, a state with vibrant trade and cultural ties with New Zealand.

Ardern should tell leaders in Madrid the best China strategy at this time is to make sure Putin’s invasion is rebuffed. If Putin’s army is defeated and ejected from Ukraine, it will be a serious blow to Xi’s leadership and could complicate any plans he might have for annexing Taiwan.

Chance to advance bilateral trade talks
The NATO meeting will also facilitate bilateral meetings with European leaders on some crucial trade questions.

In Brussels, Ardern and Trade Minister Damien O’Connor will seek to progress already advanced talks for a New Zealand-EU Free Trade Agreement (FTA). The EU single market remains the world’s largest and most prosperous. It offers New Zealand the prospect of enhanced trade links with an important like-minded partner.

In London, Ardern and O’Connor will meet UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson to build on a “gold-standard” New Zealand-UK FTA negotiated earlier this year.

The UK government has applied to join the Comprehensive Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTTP). Ardern may warn Johnson that breaching the EU withdrawal agreement in relation to the Northern Ireland protocols could jeopardise this goal.

Ardern’s participation in the NATO summit and bilateral discussions in Europe at a time of geopolitical uncertainty mirror New Zealand’s key national goals of promoting an international rules-based order and diversifying trade links.

Dr Robert G. Patman is professor of international relations, University of Otago. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

The President of the Federated States of Micronesia says he has serious concerns about the details of two leaked Chinese government documents to be tabled at a meeting next week.

President David Panuelo warns the sovereignty of the Pacific Island countries is at stake, and that the outcome of one of the documents could result in a cold war or even a world war.

Panuelo has written to 18 Pacific leaders — including New Zealand, Australia, and the Secretary-General of the Pacific Islands Forum — specifically about the China-Pacific Island Countries Common Development Vision.

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The other document is a five-year plan to implement the outcomes into action.

In his letter he said the Common Development Vision and Monday’s meeting was a “smokescreen” for a larger agenda, and further warned that China was looking to exert more control over Pacific nations’ sovereignty and that this document threatened to bring at the very least a new Cold War era but in the worst-case scenario, a world war.

He has urged leaders in the region to look at it carefully before making any decisions.

In particular, Panuelo noted that the Vision sought to “fundamentally alter what used to be bilateral relations with China into multilateral issues”.

Ensuring ‘Chinese control’
The Vision he added sought to “… ensure Chinese control of ‘traditional and non-traditional security” of our islands, including through law enforcement training, supplying, and joint enforcement efforts, which can be used for the protection of Chinese assets and citizens.

It suggests “cooperation on network and governance” and “cybersecurity” and “equal emphasis on development and security”, and that there shall be “economic development and protection of national security and public interests”.

“The Common Development Vision seeks to ensure Chinese influence in government through ‘collaborative’ policy planning and political exchanges, including diplomatic training, in addition to an increase in Chinese media relationships in the Pacific …,” he said.

“The Common Development Vision seeks Chinese control and ownership of our communications infrastructure, as well as customs and quarantine infrastructure …. for the purpose of biodata collection and mass surveillance of those residing in, entering, and leaving our islands, ostensibly to occur in part through cybersecurity partnership.”

The Vision he said “… seeks Chinese control of our collective fisheries and extractive resource sectors, including free trade agreements, marine spatial planning, deep-sea mining, and extensive public and private sector loan-taking through the Belt and Road Initiative via the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.”

Panuelo said the proposed China-Pacific leaders meeting on Monday in Fiji was intended to “shift those of us with diplomatic relations with China very closely into Beijing’s orbit, intrinsically tying the whole of our countries and societies to them.

“The practical impacts, however, of Chinese control over our communications infrastructure, our ocean territory and the resources within them, and our security space, aside from impacts on our sovereignty is that it increases the chances of China getting into conflict with Australia, Japan, the United States, and New Zealand, on the day when Beijing decides to invade Taiwan.

China’s goal – ‘take Taiwan’
“To be clear, that’s China’s goal: to take Taiwan. Peacefully, if possible; through war, if necessary.”

Panuelo said the FSM would attend Monday’s meeting and would reject both documents “on the premise that we believe the proposed agreement needlessly heightens geopolitical tensions, and that the agreement threatens regional stability and security, including both my country’s Great Friendship with China and my country’s Enduring Partnership with the United States.”

He said the Vision and meeting were a “smokescreen for a larger agenda”.

“Despite our ceaseless and accurate howls that Climate Change represents the single-most existential security threat to our islands, the Common Development Vision threatens to bring a new Cold war era at best, and a World War at worst.”

He said the only way to maintain the relationship with Beijing was to focus exclusively on economic and technical cooperation.

Panuelo hoped that by alerting his Pacific colleagues of developments that “… we can collectively take the steps necessary to prevent any intensified conflict, and possible breakout of war, from ever happening in the first place”.

“I believe that Australia needs to take climate change more seriously and urgently. I believe that the United States should have a diplomatic presence in all sovereign Pacific Islands Countries, and step-up its assistance to all islands, to include its own states and territories in the Pacific.”

Not a justification
Panuelo summed up: “However, it is my view that the shortcomings of our allies are not a justification for condemning the leaders who succeed us in having to accept a war that we failed to recognise was coming and failed to prevent from occurring.

“We can only reassert the rightful focus on climate change as our region’s most existential threat by taking every single possible action to promote peace and harmony across our Blue Pacific Continent.”

Panuelo said his cabinet has suggested the FSM resist the objectives of the documents and the nation maintain its own bilateral agenda for development and engagement with China.

He also said the documents would open up Pacific countries to having phone calls and emails intercepted and overheard.

China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi is currently visiting several Pacific countries.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Ukraine’s ramshackle military offered no resistance to the Crimean annexation in February 2014. Since then the poorly equipped but well-motivated Ukrainian Army has taken thousands of casualties while fighting separatist forces in the eastern Donbas region.

In the meantime, the country has embarked on an often haphazard reform programme of its military which has made it — while still vulnerable in many vital respects — a rather more formidable force.

Since 2014-15, Ukraine has tripled its defence budget and attempted to modernise its forces — not only to defend themselves against Russia, but to comply with the standards demanded by Nato as an entry requirement.

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The results have been mixed. On paper their army looks impressive — with 800 or so heavy tanks and thousands of other armoured vehicles protecting and transporting a regular force of about 200,000.

These are far better trained troops than in 2014. They have good leadership, especially in the crucial non-commissioned officer cadre — the backbone of any army. Vitally, most observers report high morale and motivation.

But this is only part of the story. Most of their armour and equipment is relatively old and, although factories have been turning out modernised versions of old models such as the T72 tank, these provide little in the way of effective opposition to the far more modern Russian tanks and armoured vehicles — some of which are equal or superior to the best Nato stock.

Further, the Ukrainian army is vulnerable both to Russian artillery, traditionally the Red Army’s most formidable arm, and the threat posed by Russian strike aircraft.

Recent gifts of Nato hand-held anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles and other weaponry will impose losses on Russian forces — but are not gamechangers.

Ukraine’s air force possesses a considerable fleet of Cold War-era aircraft and personnel are well-organised and trained. But Russia has configured its “aerospace forces” to gain and maintain crucial control of the air using, among other systems, the fearsome S400 long-range anti-aircraft missiles.

These systems give the most advanced Nato air forces serious pause for thought, let alone the 1990s vintage fighters and bombers of Ukraine.

Advanced Russian fighters and missiles will dominate the sky in due course although the Ukrainians have achieved some successes against the expectations of many.

There are credible reports that Ukrainian fighters are still flying and remarkably have shot down several Russian jets. Their old — but in the right hands still effective — anti-aircraft missiles have also caused Russian losses, according to Ukrainian sources.

The navy is now militarily insignificant — the more so since much of it appears to have been sunk in harbour within 24 hours of the beginning of hostilities.

Strengths and weaknesses
But this is not a foregone conclusion. Ukrainian generals are highly unlikely to play to Russian strengths and deploy forces to be obliterated by their artillery or air power.

They have seen all too much of that in the past. In July 2014 a formation of Ukrainian troops was destroyed by a rocket artillery strike in eastern Ukraine.

What was notable was the way the rockets were guided to their targets by drones operated by Russian-supported separatist troops.

Focusing on equipment quality or quantity alone is always a big mistake. In the UK, military thinking outlines “three components of fighting power”. These are the moral (morale, cohesion, motivation), conceptual (strategy, innovation and military “doctine”) and material (weaponry).

It is one thing having the advantage in the material component of war, it is quite another to turn it into success. The Ukrainians will try to exploit Russia’s vulnerability to having to wage a lengthy military campaign with the potential to sustain politically damaging heavy casualties.

Many Ukrainians have a basic awareness of weapon handling — the several hundred thousand reservists called up as Russia invaded certainly do. They may be light on modern tanks and sophisticated weaponry, but may well have the edge in the moral and conceptual domains.

There is a strong tradition of partisan warfare in Ukraine where ideas of “territorial defence” — insurgent groups fighting small actions on ground they know well backed up, where possible, by regular army units — are deeply ingrained.

In the early days of the Cold War after the country had been liberated from German occupation, the anti-Soviet “Insurgent Army” was only finally defeated in 1953. During this time they caused tens of thousands of casualties.

It may have been largely forgotten by the rest of the world, but this conflict is well remembered in Ukraine.

The vaunted Russian armed forces have already deployed a large proportion of their ground troops, and have a very limited capability either to occupy ground contested by insurgents or — even more importantly — to sustain operations beyond the first “break-in” phase of the war.

The last thing Putin wants is a protracted war, with bloody urban combat and echoes of Chechnya — which is what Ukrainian forces are likely to give him.

War takes its own course, but the likely and sensible Ukrainian approach will be to trade land for time. They will hope to inflict casualties and draw Russian forces into urban areas where their advantages are less pronounced.

In the event of defeat in the field, Ukraine’s defenders could well default to a well-armed, highly-motivated and protracted insurgency, probably supported by the West. This is Putin’s nightmare.

The other side of that particular coin is that Western support of such “terrorism” could attract an unpredictable and highly dangerous response.

In his “declaration of war” speech, Putin threatened “such consequences as you have never encountered in your history” to those who “try to hinder us”, clearly referencing Russia’s vast nuclear arsenal. In the face of defeat or humiliation rationality may be in short supply.

Dr Frank Ledwidge is senior lecturer in military capabilities and strategy, University of Portsmouth. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.