welcome to Foreign policeis SitRep! We’re back in your inboxes with one of the latest editions of the year. We hope everyone is preparing for a relaxing vacation and enjoying the New Year.
One thing we’re really looking forward to this week: the long-awaited launch of the James Webb Space Telescope, a massive project that has been going on for 20 years.
Okay, let’s come back to more earthly questions. Here’s what to expect for the day: looking back at 2021 hectic and wild year for the world of national security. Plus, keep scrolling down. We have an winter vacation reading list for those crazy about NatSec.
welcome to Foreign policeis SitRep! We’re back in your inboxes with one of the latest editions of the year. We hope everyone is preparing for a relaxing vacation and enjoying the New Year.
One thing we look forward to this week: the long-awaited launch of the James Webb Space Telescope, a colossal project of twenty years.
Okay, let’s come back to more earthly questions. Here’s what to expect for the day: allooking back out of 2021 hectic and wild year for the world of national security. Plus, keep scrolling down. We have an winter vacation reading list for those crazy about NatSec.
If you would like to receive the Situation Report in your inbox every Thursday, please sign up here.
Another year of dangerous life
Well, we did. Another year, and one more eventful year. But the world keeps turning, the sun keeps rising, Defense Department officials keep leaving for comfortable jobs with defense contractors to secure lucrative deals with the Pentagon, and the seasons just keep going. change.
At SitRep, we wanted to take a break and look back at some of the biggest national security stories of the year and how those stories will continue to reverberate in Washington and around the world in 2022. Don’t worry, we are here to help. ‘ve reduced to 12 major NatSec news articles — one per month.
Consider this as your cheat sheet when history teachers ask you about what happened in 2021.
January 6: A violent and pro-Donald Trump crowd storms the Capitol in a deadly riot and attempted insurgency after the outgoing president brandished false claims that the election was stolen from him. The political fallout continues to this day, with a special Congressional committee investigating the crisis and the U.S. military campaigning for uproot extremists of its own ranks.
February 9: Trump’s start of second impeachment trial, focusing on the role of the former president in fomenting the January 6 Capitol riots. (Trump was acquitted days later, after 57 senators voted for impeachment and 43 voted against, failing to reach the required two-thirds majority.)
March 23: The Ever Given container ship becomes stuck in the Suez Canal, exposing how vulnerable the global economy is all about interrupting the supply chain, even at things as simple as a ship straying too far from the side of a canal.
April 14: US President Joe Biden set a final date for the withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan by September, presaging an incredibly successful Taliban offensive and culminating in the collapse of the Afghan government and the most searing defeat in US foreign policy in modern history.
May 7: A ransomware attack temporarily destroyed a pipeline system that supplied half of the fuel to the east coast of the United States. Cyber ​​security experts had warned for years of vulnerabilities in America’s energy system. Later this year, the U.S. government is convening a Mountain peak to find out how to go on the offensive against cybercriminals.
June 2: Political coalition in Israel reaches agreement for oust the country’s longest-serving prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. Few, if any, foreign leaders have played a more disproportionate role in American politics than Netanyahu, especially during the Trump era.
July 21: Republican Senator Ted Cruz publishes vast and unprecedented hold on on all of Biden’s top State Department candidates after arguing with the president over a controversial Russian gas pipeline project in Europe. Cruz’s decision kept dozens of candidates from being confirmed for much of Biden’s first year in office, hobble until a last-minute deal is reached at the end of December to break the deadlock.
August 15th : Taliban take control of Afghanistan after rapid collapse of Afghan government, erasure nearly two decades of fighting and $ 2 trillion in US taxpayer dollars in building the nation overnight. All US forces would withdraw weeks later amid a chaotic and deadly evacuation that left tens of thousands of Afghan allies abandoned and precipitated a massive humanitarian crisis from which the country is still in shock.
September 15: The leaders of the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia announce a new security agreement, AUKUS, from which Australia receives the technology of American nuclear submarines. AUKUS has triggered a diplomatic crisis with France, which was blinded by the deal, and showcased US efforts to china counter with allies in Asia-Pacific.
October 18: Colin Powell, former US National Security Advisor, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Secretary of State, dies of COVID-19 at the age of 84. Powell broke through barriers as the first black American in several leadership positions in the U.S. government, but the U.S. national security community is still account on systemic racism and diversity issues.
November, 1st : Western powers are starting to worry more and more about a massive accumulation Russian military forces near its border with Ukraine. Crisis continues, as Biden administration and NATO allies scramble to strengthen support for Kiev and deter Russia from launching a new invasion of Ukraine.
December 2: German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has led Europe’s most powerful economy for 16 years and has traversed the European Union through multiple crises, is stepping down, marking the end of an era of European politics. The center-left Social Democrat Olaf Scholz succeeded him shortly after.
See you soon, 2021. Hopefully 2022 will be better and much, much less pandemic.
Volunteers lay wreaths on headstones as part of the 30th Annual Wreaths Across America Project, which places wreaths on more than 250,000 military headstones at Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Va. On December 18 .Al Drago / Getty Images
What to read during your vacation
Still looking for books to prepare for the New Year? Don’t worry, SitRep has you covered. We’ve curated a small list of some of the best books, old and new, that we’ve read this year and we know our SitRep readers are going to love it. All of them pair well with a long vacation break, a comfy sofa, and spiked eggnog.
Eagle Down: The Last Special Forces Fighting The Eternal War by Jessica Donati. Donati, a veteran the Wall Street newspaper correspondent, writes a gripping and heartbreaking tale of battle-weary special forces on the front lines of war in the final stages of Afghanistan. I couldn’t ask it. –Robbie
The Hardest Place: The US Army adrift in Afghanistan’s Pech Valley by Wesley Morgan. Yes, another book on Afghanistan. But there are few zoomed-in stories of the trials and tribulations of the Pentagon in places like Pech, where US special forces ousted al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden at the start of the war before the mission does not spread, drop by drop, to a sprawling labyrinth. from remote bases across the mountains and valleys of Afghanistan. Morgan documented this over more than a decade of journalistic deployments to Pech, which began when he was an undergraduate student at Princeton University. Full disclosure: He’s a former colleague in the Pentagon correspondent’s pen, and I owe him a beer. –Jack
Leviathan wakes up by James SA Corey. Here’s the first book in an action-packed sci-fi series (which also turned into a great TV show, courtesy of Amazon Prime). There is a lot of rich material in this series for national security jerks, including intricate games of deterrence, detente, alliance building and alliance breaking between Earth, Mars and the “Belters”. . Fair warning: once you get sucked in, it will be hard not to binge on the whole series while on vacation. –Robbie
Ike’s Bluff: President Eisenhower’s Secret Battle to Save the World by Evan Thomas. Was the Eisenhower administration’s nuclear trick like playing a good hand of poker? That’s how longtime foreign policy historian Evan Thomas puts it in this compelling biography of the 34th President of the United States, which pits the famed war-skeptical general against the hawks of his own cabinet (like Secretary of the time, John Foster Dulles) and post-war doves. –Jack
The Chinese Civilian Army: The Inside Story of China’s Quest for Global Power by Pierre Martin. We hear so much in Washington about Chinese President Xi Jinping, the state and size of the Chinese military, but what about the soft power side of things? Martin gives us a fascinating and meticulously researched story inside (or as close as possible as far as China is concerned) of the Chinese diplomatic corps. –Robbie
Tomorrow the World: The Birth of America’s Global Supremacy by Stephen Wertheim. The Trump and Biden administrations have seen a sharp step backwards from the United States’ desire to be the predominant power in the world. But how did he get there in the first place? In great detail, Wertheim draws the battle map of the intellectual warfare that unfolded in World War II between American thinkers who wanted the United States to carry on the tradition of British preeminence and those who did not. not done. –Jack
