Search results for ""centre for strategic international studies,u.s.""

Ongoing geopolitical shifts are placing increased pressure on the rules-based international order that has facilitated decades of growth and development across the Indo-Pacific. The United States and Taiwan have responded by redoubling their respective commitments to the region. Leaders in both Washington and Taipei recognize that securing freedom and openness across this vast geographic space is essential for maintaining peace and promoting prosperity across the region.The United States has advanced its vision for the region through the Free and Open Indo-Pacific (FOIP) strategy, which is founded on—and aims to protect—common principles that have benefitted all countries in the region. Taiwan upholds the same principles and has a similar vision for the Indo-Pacific. To this end, Taipei is implementing the New Southbound Policy (NSP), which seeks to leverage its cultural, educational, technological, agricultural, and economic assets to strengthen Taiwan’s relations across the Indo-Pacific.

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This report analyzes the current state of affairs in defense acquisition by combining detailed policy and data analysis to provide a comprehensive overview of the current and future outlook for defense acquisition. This analysis will provide critical insights into what DoD is buying, how DoD is buying it, from whom is DoD buying, and what are the defense components buying using data from the Federal Procurement Data System (FPDS). This analysis provides critical insights into understanding the current trends in the defense industrial base and the implications of those trends on acquisition policy.

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This collection of essays addresses the interplay of democratic norms and cultural identity within Asia. The overall question for the volume is how the dueling identities of Asianism (regional exceptionalism) and universalism (democratic norms) are shaping state discourse and behavior in Asia. This is based on a dialogue of scholars organized by CSIS to examine national perspectives on Asianism and universalism across the region, as well as the role of regional democracies in developing a common understanding of rules and norms as the foundation for a more stable regional order. The introduction provides context for these normative debates in the region and addresses the potential to prioritize democracy promotion in foreign policy strategy as segue to essays analyzing normative debates in Japan, South Korea, India, Indonesia, and the United States.

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The demographic transformation sweeping the emerging world has profound implications for U.S. development policy. The challenge is no longer helping countries overcome the obstacles to development posed by high birthrates and rapid population growth, but leveraging the opportunities created by falling birthrates and slowing population growth. This report discusses how developing countries can best leverage their “demographic dividends” in order to boost income and wealth while they are still young and growing, as well as how they can prepare for the inevitable aging of their populations that looms just over the horizon. It also explores what the emerging new demographic realities imply for the optimal shape of U.S. development policy in decades to come.

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After more than a decade of fighting in Afghanistan, the United States and its allies are set to transfer security responsibilities to Afghan forces in 2014. This transition poses many challenges, and much will depend on the future of Afghan politics, governance, corruption, development, security, and economics. How the United States manages the transition is vital for any hopes of creating a secure Afghanistan, as well as preventing the reemergence of the Taliban and other terrorist groups. The Afghan War in 2013 honestly assesses the benefits, costs, and risks involved in transition. It is essential reading for an in-depth understanding of the complex forces and intricacies of the United States’ role in Afghanistan and the difficulties involved in creating a stable Afghanistan in 2014 and beyond. Afghanistan is still at war and will probably be at war long after 2014. At the same time, the coming cuts in the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and cuts in military and civil aid, along with the country’s fractious politics and insecurity, will interact with a wide range of additional factors that threaten to derail the transition. These factors, examined in this three-volume study, highlight the need to make the internal political, governmental, economic, and security dimensions of the transition as effective as possible. This will require a new degree of realism about what the Afghans can and cannot accomplish, about the best approaches to shaping the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF), and the need for better planned and managed outside aid.

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Following the U.S. killing of Qasem Soleimani, head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Quds Force (IRGC-QF), the United States and Iran are involved in an escalating conflict. What is badly needed now is a coherent long-term U.S. strategy to deal with Iran in ways that protect U.S. national security and leverage U.S. partners. The United States’ “maximum pressure” campaign has not led to a change in Iran’s behavior—at least not yet—though U.S. sanctions have severely damaged Iran’s economy. As this CSIS report highlights with new data and analysis, the IRGC-QF has supported a growing number of non-state fighters in Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Afghanistan, and Pakistan—including nearly a 50 percent increase since 2016. Thanks to Iran, these forces are better equipped with more sophisticated weapons and systems. This report also uses satellite imagery to identify an expansion of IRGC-QF-linked bases in countries like Iran and Lebanon to train non-state fighters. Iran has constructed more sophisticated and longer-range ballistic and cruise missiles and conducted missile attacks against countries like Saudi Arabia. In addition, Iran has developed offensive cyber capabilities and used them against the United States and its partners. In the nuclear arena, Iran has ended commitments it made to limit uranium enrichment, production, research, and expansion—raising the prospect of Iranian nuclear weapons. Moving forward, the United States should implement a containment strategy against Iran that attempts to de-escalate the current military situation and work toward achieving several goals: Prevent Iran from becoming a regional hegemon capable of dominating other states in the Middle East. Stop nuclear proliferation in the region and prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons, including thwarting Iran from pursuing weapons-grade uranium enrichment, warhead development, and plutonium reprocessing. Curb significant Iranian military, political, and ideological expansion in the region, including the export of Iran’s revolutionary ideology. Encourage a process of change inside Iran toward a more pluralistic political and economic system in which the power of the clerical establishment is gradually reduced. This report highlights a range of weaknesses that make Iran vulnerable to containment and lays out the political, military, economic, and informational components of such a strategy. The United States needs to credibly demonstrate that its policy toward Iran is not a blueprint for an endless struggle, but instead an effort to encourage Iran to be more democratic and open, as political and economic change must be driven by Iranians themselves.

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The papers in this CSIS compendium were written by the nine members of the 2019 TUPP delegation. Each participant was asked to reflect on their in-country experience and produce a short article analyzing a policy issue related to Taiwan. These papers are a testament to the powerful impact that follows first-hand exposure to Taiwan.

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The United States is being confronted by the liabilities of its strength. Competitors are finding avenues for threatening U.S. interests without triggering escalation. Their approaches lie in the contested arena between routine statecraft and open warfare—the "gray zone." The United States has yet to articulate a comprehensive approach to deterring competitors in the gray zone. A concrete and actionable campaign plan is needed to deal with the gray zone challenge; in order to do so, the United States must identify and employ a broad spectrum of tools and concepts to deter, and if needed, to compete and win contestations in the gray zone.

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In today’s challenging, technologically informed environment, the U.S. military must continue to ensure a competitive advantage. This report suggests ways to develop a cadre of technologically competent officers with the requisite leadership and operational skills to excel in this fast-paced and ever-evolving environment. It involves a complementary set of selection, assignment, promotion, and military and civilian education opportunities that infuse our next generation of leaders with strategic, creative, and critical thinking attributes to interact effectively between and among the policy, technology, and operational communities.

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Despite a U.S. focus on securing an international deal to curb Iran’s nuclear development for the last several years, the United States lacks a strategy to combat the full range of Iranian activities that threaten the interests of the United States and its allies but fall short of conventional warfare. In this report, CSIS’s International Security Program sets forth analysis of Iran’s strategy, motivations, military, and paramilitary capabilities and evaluates the effects of Iranian behavior on key U.S. partners. The study leverages the expertise of contributing authors at CSIS, the American Enterprise Institute, the Center for Naval Analyses, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Harvard University and the University of Hawaii to inform its analysis. The study proposes a framework for deterring Iran, including practical recommendations for the U.S. administration and Congress that would enhance the security of the United States and its allies and partners.

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The North American energy landscape has shifted in significant ways. New development of abundant tight oil and unconventional natural gas resources creates an historic opportunity to enhance economic growth throughout North America and improve the region’s competitiveness in global markets. The rapid pace of development of these resources, along with changes in consumption, however, have created a unique need for new and expanded infrastructure and a reevaluation of North America’s place in the global energy market. This report captures the current state of crude oil production growth and the infrastructure required and then frames the related major policy and regulatory discussions, including environmental concerns, crude oil exports, the strategic petroleum reserve, and the Jones Act.

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Annually, CSIS senior adviser Mark Cancian publishes a series of papers on U.S. military forces—their composition, new initiatives, long-term trends, and challenges. The overall theme of this year’s report is the struggle to align forces and strategy because of budget tradeoffs that even defense buildups must make, unrelenting operational demands that stress forces and prevent force structure reductions, and legacy programs whose smooth operations and strong constituencies inhibit rapid change. This report takes a deeper look at the strategic and budget context, the military services, special operations forces, DOD civilians and contractors, and non-DOD national security organizations in the FY 2020 budget.

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Improvements to strategic situational awareness (SA)—the ability to characterize the operating environment, detect and respond to threats, and discern actual attacks from false alarms across the spectrum of conflict—have long been assumed to reduce the risk of conflict and help manage crises more successfully when they occur. However, with the development of increasingly capable strategic SA-related technology, growing comingling of conventional and nuclear SA requirements and capabilities, and the increasing risk of conventional conflict between nuclear-armed adversaries, this may no longer be the case. The Project on Nuclear Issues (PONI) at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and the University of California, Berkeley’s Nuclear Policy Working Group undertook a two-year study to examine the implications of emerging situational awareness technologies for managing crises between nuclear-armed adversaries.

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This paper garners information crucial to understanding business growth for new entrants and small businesses who contract with the federal government by utilizing publicly available contracting data from the Federal Procurement Data System (FPDS) to track new entrants from 2001-2016. This information is then used to evaluate entrances, exits, and status changes among federal vendors with the purpose of comparing challenges faced by small businesses with those of larger ones. Measuring market trends over time and in multiple sectors shows how the challenges facing small businesses, such as market barriers to entry and imperfect competition, keep them from growing. The final results compare the survival rates between small and non-small new entrants contracting with the federal government and analyze the graduation rates for those small new entrants who grew in size during the observation period and survived after ten years. The study finds that around 40 percent of new entrants exit the market for federal contracts after three years, around 50-60 percent after five years, and only about one-fifth of new entrants remain in the federal contracting arena in the final year of observation. Across the six samples studied, thegraduation rates of small businesses consistently decrease.

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In the past decade, tensions in Asia have risen as Beijing has become more assertive in maritime disputes with its neighbors and the United States. Although taking place below the threshold of direct military confrontation, China’s assertiveness frequently involves coercive elements that put at risk existing rules and norms; physical control of disputed waters and territory; and the credibility of U.S. security commitments. Regional leaders have expressed increasing alarm that such “gray zone” coercion threatens to destabilize the region by increasing the risk of conflict and undermining the rules-based order. Yet, the United States and its allies and partners have struggled to develop effective counters to China’s maritime coercion. This study reviews deterrence literature and nine case studies of coercion to develop recommendations for how the United States and its allies and partners could counter gray zone activity.

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“Fragility”—the combination of poor governance, limited institutional capability, low social cohesion, and weak legitimacy—leads to erosion of the social contract and diminished resilience, with significant implications for peace, security, and sustainable development. This study reviews how the international community has responded to this challenge and offers new ideas on how that response can be improved. Based on that examination, the author seeks to convey the importance of addressing this phenomenon as a high priority for the international community. Chapters explore the nature of these obstacles to sustainable development, peace, and security; how the international community has defined, measured, and responded to the phenomenon of fragility; how the international response might be made more effective; and implications for the United States.

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This report from the CSIS Project on Prosperity and Development looks at the domestic resource mobilization (DRM) reforms in developing countries through a political economy lens. As countries mobilize more resources to fund their governments and services, they can think more strategically about transitioning from a reliance on foreign aid to more mutually beneficial relationships with foreign countries. There are structural challenges to mobilizing domestic resources that long have been the focus of DRM efforts; however, addressing the political economy and structural challenges will be critical in the face of increased need and plateauing levels of foreign aid. It is critical that development approaches create the foundational capabilities and systems necessary to capitalize on political windows of opportunity.

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When health crises strike—measles, MERS, Zika, dengue, Ebola, pandemic flu—and the American people grow alarmed, the U.S. government springs into action. But all too often, when the crisis fades and fear subsides, urgency morphs into complacency. Investments dry up, attention shifts, and a false sense of security takes hold. The CSIS Commission on Strengthening America’s Health Security urges the U.S. government to replace the cycle of crisis and complacency that has long plagued health security preparedness with a doctrine of continuous prevention, protection, and resilience. Such a strategic approach can restore U.S. leadership, strengthen financing and the speed of response, foster resilient health systems abroad, enhance the U.S. government’s ability to operate in disordered settings, and accelerate select technological innovations to secure the future.

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As the United States and China mark their 40th anniversary of formal diplomatic relations in 2019, the world’s most important bilateral relationship is increasingly defined by mistrust, competition, and uncertainty. After four decades of deepening economic integration, the talk in Washington today is about the extent to which the two economies will “decouple” over the years ahead. We drew on several different academic disciplines to help us model how an economic conflict between the United States and China could escalate and eventually de-escalate. Despite the challenges inherent in modelling economic conflict, our model was validated to a surprising extent by both our simulations and real-world developments. The project produced several findings that were both unexpected and relevant to policy, including that economic conflict is likely to be an enduring feature of the U.S.-China relationship for many years to come. Until perceptions of relative costs in the two countries shift, Washington and Beijing seem set on a path of continued escalation, no substantial trade deal, and at least partial decoupling of their economies. Reflecting on these findings, the report also provides recommendations for U.S. policymakers seeking to engage in successful economic bargaining with China.

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As policymakers confront the ongoing challenge of radicalization and violent extremism, it is important that stakeholders and counterterrorism strategists recognize the critical role for development and other non-kinetic approaches to counter violent extremism. To that end, this new anthology takes a multidimensional role mapping out the role of soft power institutions in enabling lasting peace, prosperity, and global security.

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This volume explores the complex interrelationships among China, the United States, and the Middle East—what the authors call the “vital triangle.” There is surely much to be gained from continuing the conventional two-dimensional analysis—China and the United States, the United States and the Middle East, and China and the Middle East. Such scholarship has a long history and no doubt a long future. But it is the three-dimensional equation—which seeks to understand the effects of the China–Middle East relationship on the United States, the U.S.–Middle East relationship on China, and the Sino-American relationship on the Middle East—that draws the authors’ attention. This approach captures the true dynamics of change in world affairs and the spiraling up and down of national interests. Central to this analysis is a belief that if any one of the three sides of this triangular relationship is unhappy, it has the power to make the other two unhappy as well. The stakes and the intimacy of the interrelationship highlight not only the importance of reaching accommodation, but also the potential payoff of agreement on common purpose.

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Bilateral and multilateral development agencies use guarantees in order to reduce investors’ exposure to risks and to attract private capital to developing countries. A guarantee is a legally-binding agreement under which the guarantor agrees to pay part or all of the amount due on a loan, or other financial instrument, in the event of non-payment. Across the developing world, there are places where having access to the right guarantee product will enable investments that would otherwise have been blocked—where the returns are there, but the risks involved simply exceed market tolerances, or where regulations limit investors’ ability to bear risk. These opportunities are waiting to be seized by bilateral development agencies and development finance institutions (DFIs), who have the flexibility to innovate. Multilateral development banks (MDBs) are the dominant providers of guarantees in certain market segments, where their ability to influence government behavior and to reduce (rather than merely reallocate) risks on the ground gives them a natural advantage. That said, their accounting practices, treatment by regulators, and business models can also constrain them. In other market segments, specialized guarantee providers or DFIs can create tailored guarantees, pricing them in a way that creates a commercially appealing proposition whilst still earning market rates of return on their capital. This report sets out to present the virtues and shortcomings of scaling the use of guarantees, with a special focus on opportunities for innovation by actors that operate outside the established MDB business model. Since guarantees are not a form of financial flow (unless circumstances require calling the guarantee, with the guarantor assuming the debt of the borrower), they differ from other development finance instruments in terms of structuring, costs, and objectives.

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