peter b zwack

GLOBAL SPEAKER

ADVISOR/CONSULTANT

SPEAKER AVAILABILITY & FEES

Leadership
Russia Affairs
Eurasia Affairs
Joint Presentation
Keynote Address

Defense Attaché to Moscow 2012 – 2014

Global Fellow at The Kennan Institute
Woodrow Wilson International Center

University of Pennsylvania – Adjunct Fellow

Senior Russia-Eurasia Research Fellow
National Defense University 2015 – 2019

Honor these U.S. and Soviet vets, coronavirus or not

The crushing defeat of Nazi Germany 75 years ago was memorialized on April 25, 1945, by a gesture, a handshake between battle-hardened American and Soviet soldiers linking-up as wartime allies in the closing days of World War II. This special embrace as comrades-in-arms along the Elbe River at Torgau culminated a fleeting bond between soldiers sharing in an indescribably costly but just war against the most hideous existential threat the modern world had ever known. Shortly thereafter, this hard-earned soldiers’ bond was abandoned and lost in the Cold War; an unfortunate state-of-being that in fits and starts has carried on to this day.

This year’s planned remembrance of that heady 1945 moment has been engulfed by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Modest non-governmental commemorations, conferences and a reenactment scheduled for April 24-25 in Germany, Russia and at Arlington cemetery were planned then understandably canceled as travel bans were set in place in February and March of this year. U.S., Russian and former Soviet citizens including several ancient veterans, and retired Cold War-era generals from both sides, were to have publicly met. There will be a single virtual conference in their stead.

Therefore we have lost much of a seriously needed opportunity to spotlight for our respective publics a positive historic moment between Moscow and Washington at a time when current relations remain dismal and dangerous. It also was one of the final WWII anniversary moments left to honor our few remaining veterans — including those of our allies and foes — that served during that grimly epic time. This is especially important for our younger generation, who’ve grown-up only knowing tense U.S.-Russian relations and may have little or no awareness of this better historic moment.

Finding credible venues upon which to positively build are urgently needed to smooth the sharp and dangerous edges that continue to dog U.S. and Russian relations. Despite our opposing worldviews, there is a pressing need to rebuild educational and confidence-building venues between our citizens at every level. Special focus, urgently needed now, must be to deepen credible “eyes-wide-open” contact between our nuclear-tipped militaries across different operational and strategic levels. Despite improved direct Washington to Moscow links, the limited regional leader-level contact between our active militaries, both worldwide powers that stretch from the Atlantic to Pacific, is particularly problematic.

Some will surely say any enhanced U.S.-Russia contact, even if non-governmental commemorative events such as the Elbe link-up, would cast the United States and the West as appeasing Moscow during this geopolitically contentious period and imply acquiescence to Russia’s malign actions. I reject this perspective. Publicly commemorating positive events would not infer any easing of sanctions on Russia or mean reducing support for our NATO allies and partner nations such as Ukraine and Georgia.

There will be almost no World War II veterans left from any side for an 80th commemoration in 2025. Those few remaining are mostly infirm and sheltering from the lethal coronavirus. Their legacy and the memory of their passed peers should be publicly highlighted and remembered for all ages, especially today. Modest success would be public statements by our senior political and military leaders in conjunction with veterans and civic organizations commemorating the April 25 Elbe link-up and WWII sacrifices highlighting those remaining veterans with call-outs, media interviews and documentaries.

The U.S., Russia and the other countries of the former Soviet Union whose soldiers shook hands together on that fateful, promising day 75 years ago, must not abandon its memory and that of the overall end of WWII during these anxious COVID-19 times. It’s also important to assure our youth and future generations, who will surely grapple with the societal changes stemming from a soon-to-be post COVID-19 world order, that we did all we could to ease the world back from today’s dangerous state-of-affairs that remain a continuing existential threat to us all.

Americans should consider this a preparation drill for ‘The Big One’

COVID-19 has awakened the most primordial fears and concerns within most of us. It is stealthy, contagious and lethal. It is statistically certain to kill a proportion of our population. It has no borders, no antidote and can spread as fast as we travel. Fueled by 24/7 media coverage, this pandemic has focused us existentially in a way that only a nuclear crisis could.

Despite current sorrows and hardship, has its malignant arrival now actually done mankind a favor?

In 2005, concerned by the recently concluded SARs pandemic, my U.S. Army 66th Military Intelligence Group in Darmstadt, Germany, conducted a “what if” tabletop exercise about how to survive and manage during a Spanish Flu type outbreak in Europe. Beforehand, we handed out dozens of Gina Kolata’s highly readable book, “Flu,” to our officers and senior enlisted.

We then brainstormed how the several thousand soldiers, civilians and dependents in our bases and housing areas would ride-out such a pandemic if it were to hit us internally or infiltrate first into the German community that surrounded our installations.

The fundamental question was how would our personnel and families survive yet subsist and conduct mission within this challenged ecosystem?

We worked on thorny issues that included both guarding and quarantining our facilities from a potentially anxious local population with whom we coexisted and had an excellent relationship, and how to quarantine house-by-house, barracks by barracks if the pathogen spread within our fences. Acquiring foodstuffs and basic supplies, beyond those peremptorily stored, from a wounded military and domestic supply chain was a major concern — we recommended that each dwelling keep an in-house survival stock. We talked triage, grief management and in the worst-case took a macabre look at setting up an on-site field morgue in a gymnasium. It was a sobering exercise, well worth it for stretching some realistic thinking out of the unthinkable.

Has COVID-19’s onslaught created an opportunity to focus science and resources to preempt and ameliorate inevitable future outbreaks that could be even more contagious and virulent, as was the case with so-called Spanish Flu in 1918-1920?

The grim reaper that ravaged the 1919 world — with a minimum 50 million dead among a population just one-quarter the size of ours today — was also a virus. Little-known is the fact that it came in two waves, a first, less lethal strain, in the summer of 1918, and then a horrific mutation less than a year later that was indiscriminate in its killing.

Unlike today, the most vulnerable population then was fit young adults.

In the U.S. its dormant pathogen, spread by returning WWI doughboys, blossomed at Ft. Riley, deep in our Kansas heartland. Somehow, over early transportation, especially ships and railroads, it spread via pulmonary contagion — in other words, people breathed and coughed on each other, while leaving droplets on multiple surfaces — first across the world and then through our country. Sound familiar?

After scourging the planet, it disappeared into the hothouse of spent, metastasizing pathogens. This, as the hopefully permanently eradicated smallpox has shown, is the most transmissible form of contagion. Highly lethal Ebola is more difficult to spread — by direct fluid-to-fluid contact, such as blood.

We must take advantage of the focus this current pandemic provides and do the additional governmental and community brainstorming with essential preparations for a worst-case outbreak.

The panicked run on our stores and supermarkets and political finger-pointing show that we really haven’t thought this through beyond higher-level homeland security, medical and first responder communities. While unlikely, what would happen if this pathogen returns near-term in an even more virulent form?

Despite numerous personal tragedies today, this outbreak presents an opportunity for all Americans — in concert with our global community — to apply far-sighted, preemptive thinking and action against future pandemics whether natural or man-induced.

Like a monster hurricane, earthquake with tsunamis or — God forbid — something hideously nuclear, we must societally prepare for “the big one” within the pathogen world. COVID-19, in its present form, appears not to be that. But it is a clarion-call for future action now.

Stepping back from the brink — and what’s next — in Iran

Iran inadvertently created an opening for Washington and Tehran to step back from the brink of all-out war by not killing U.S. personnel in its retaliatory missile strike Tuesday night into two U.S. and coalition populated Iraqi airbases. Tehran’s belated admission Friday of accidentally shooting down Ukraine Air Flight 752 hours afterward near Tehran’s Imam Khomeini Airport may also have created a slender opportunity to further deescalate this still-simmering crisis, which began five days earlier when a U.S. drone strike killed the powerful Iranian chief of the IRGC Quds force, Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad.

I have no doubt that if the Iranian missile strike had killed Americans, a tremendous response from U.S. military assets would have struck Iranian naval, air and missile units deployed in range of the Gulf region and possibly even its nuclear infrastructure. Aghast, the world would have been horrified but would have stepped back, with more than a few nations quietly supportive of the action.

Both sides appear to have stepped back to avoid a nasty and regionally dangerous shooting war — but for how long?

With Soleimani gone, Iranian “honor” at least temporarily assuaged by the missile attack and while Iranian leaders and people grapple with the shocking reality of the airliner’s destruction, is there any way to reap a long-term benefit from this step back?

Can mutual equities be addressed while excising primal Iranian fears of U.S.-led regime change efforts? Or are tensions so high, worldviews so different, issues so complex, and hostility so deep that real reconciliation — that would have to involve Iran’s Sunni neighbors and Israel — impossible?

The roiling “gray zone” of undeclared asymmetric war involving cyber, proxies and terror always beckons.

Geostrategic spoiler nations such as Russia and China may prefer the U.S. and Iran to remain at loggerheads, consuming Washington’s attention and resources while inflaming domestic division and eroding Western cohesion. Thursday’s aggressive and dangerous maneuvering of a Russian warship near the USS Farragut in the North Arabian Sea portends so — and does not bode well for any substantive U.S.-Russian effort to cooperatively resolve these core issues.

Washington got it right by taking a measured approach after Iran’s missile retaliation.

Incendiary rhetoric was muted.

Many — including myself, and clearly the Iranians — thought we would strike back. This near certainty is the probable reason that Iranian air-defense, certainly on high-alert, accidentally shot down the hapless Ukrainian airliner. This horror has a dreadful symmetry with the Iranian airliner that the Aegis missile cruiser USS Vincennes accidentally shot down during the 1988 Gulf crisis.

When tensions are fraught, communications near nil and threat perceptions high, this is when the “laws of unintended consequences” are most dangerous, and unfortunately — and almost invariably — innocent lives are lost.

What would I want to see happen next?

My Pollyanna-ish side desires — somehow — a bipartisan Washington effort backed by allies, regional partners and even Russia and China to enter into comprehensive negotiations with Tehran to address the core drivers of this major societal and perception-driven conflict.

If this administration truly wants to leave an enduring legacy, it would strive to broker some type of long-lasting agreement to bring Iran back into the mainstream community of nations.

Tehran as a prerequisite would have to curtail its attempts to destabilize its neighbors and to militantly expand Shiite influence through the region. Such a negotiation would be even broader in scope than the hard-negotiated multinational JCPOA (Iran nuclear agreement) from which the U.S. unilaterally withdrew in 2018.

Any diplomatic breakthrough with Tehran — as unlikely as it may be — would dwarf in significance the stumbling negotiations with manipulative and petulant Pyongyang.

Iran and its proud Persian legacy is too large, too regionally influential, too energy rich and has too large a diaspora both ethnically and religiously, to indefinitely isolate and sanction without the support of most of the global community. Ideally, a forward-thinking Russia with its recently gained regional political capital would even co-partner this project with the U.S. and other key nations — as occurred in the JCPOA — and not undermine it. A chaotic and unresolved Middle East will likely bring major internal problems for Moscow in future generations.

A possible template for any rapprochement could be the Camp David breakthrough in 1978 between seemingly irreconcilable Egypt and Israel that has netted a viable though edgy peace between Cairo and Jerusalem for the past 42 years.

To do even an iota of any of this would mandate some type of credible “hot-line” mechanism between Tehran, Washington and other key players to deconflict the inevitable incidents and attacks from proxies, splinter groups and lone wolves that would work at all costs to destabilize any improved, less confrontational relationship.

This administration’s international track record on agreements and treaties could hobble any such effort, as partners might wonder if Washington would be a reliable signatory to any multinational agreement.

Also, our own divided body politic — absorbed by impeachment and the looming election cycle — could be our own worst obstacle. Our partisan divide has, sadly, become a strategic issue.

What I believe actually will happen:

My 38 years of military intelligence, analysis and deployments into difficult places takes my expectations to a darker sphere.

The entire Middle East is on fire in varying degrees. Twenty years of U.S. “boots-on-the-ground” blood and treasure in the Middle East has netted little in regional stability beyond propping our increasingly assertive Israeli ally and ensuring the viability of states and sea lanes essential to critical flow of oil and trade.

The menace of ISIS — which ironically Washington, Moscow, Damascus, Baghdad, Tehran, Jerusalem and others have all combatted and severely bloodied — failed to pull the region together. Its embers risk burning hot again as regional infighting distracts from its existential threat.

Iran will be perpetually distrusted and confronted until it convincingly renounces — by action and verification — its redeclared nuclear program.

Meanwhile, despite Soleimani’s death, his network of destabilizing, mostly Shiite proxies and militias — with the Iraqi Popular Mobilization Units (PMU) most notable — continue fighting and subverting regionally, from Lebanon to Yemen.

And finally, the greater Arab-Israel-Iran conflict, with Palestine as its apex issue, remains hot and intractable. Tehran renouncing its stated position that Israel has no right to exist would be a critical first step toward any regional cooling off, however unlikely that may be. In turn, Israel must cease its expansion on the West Bank.

Thus, it’s likely that familiar tensions, actions and reactions will continue to plague the region, though the recent U.S. and Iranian temperance has created some breathing space.

Yet … there is a glimmer.

If anything remotely positive could come from the death of the 163 innocents in the air over Tehran, it would be a realization that all has gone too far and must stop.

Iran broke from its indefensible denials and admitted — and conditionally apologized for — the accident, while blaming the U.S. and the Soleimani strike for initiating the dangerous chain of events.

Maybe somehow, the shock, embarrassment and remorse of this accident could jar calcified regime thinking in Tehran.

It likely will sensitize Iran’s more moderate mainstream, which — after a violent regime crackdown in late 2019 — rallied around Iran’s flag following Soleimani’s death. Literally as I write, Iran’s momentary national unity may be eroding as crowds in several Iranian cities demonstrate in apparent anger with the regime’s clumsy handling of the commercial airplane shootdown — in which 82 Iranian citizens perished. The unrest may spread, making the overall situation even more unstable and unpredictable.

Whatever happens, any sense of genuine Iranian contrition could increase Tehran’s credibility both domestically and on the global stage. That — coupled with a firm but non-bellicose American posture — could go far in calming tensions and opening possibilities during this dangerous period.

While I doubt any of this will transpire, I very much want to be contradicted and surprised.

Stepping back from the brink — and what’s next — in Iran

Iran inadvertently created an opening for Washington and Tehran to step back from the brink of all-out war by not killing U.S. personnel in its retaliatory missile strike Tuesday night into two U.S. and coalition populated Iraqi airbases. Tehran’s belated admission Friday of accidentally shooting down Ukraine Air Flight (more…)

Averting war in 2020

In the first week of the new decade, we face another potential war in the Middle East. With last Friday’s early morning strike killing General Qassem Soleimani, the ruthlessly charismatic chief of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, we have entered uncharted waters.

While on first blush I supported the strike, since then I have felt considerable unease, wondering if we are ready to bear the brunt of inevitable “laws of unintended consequences.” It is as if we’ve taken a big stick and overwhelmingly batted down a hornet’s nest. The question now is how and where the many hornets will sting. That Iran and its proxies will retaliate is the only predictable aspect of this emergent challenge. The questions are how, where and when?

I just pulled down Lt. Col. (ret) Ralph Peters’s fittingly-titled novel, “The War in 2020” from my bookcase. I gave it a quick scan to refresh my memory. Written in 1990 before the fall of the USSR, Peters described a dystopian world 30 years in the future that found an ill-prepared U.S. military fighting an ugly war supporting Moscow in still-Soviet Central Asia and the Caspian region versus an array of foes that included an Iranian-led Islamic coalition and Japan. The conflict also raged in Africa and South America. While a futuristic tale that thankfully did not play out, for me its paramount lesson was the ever-changing nature of war. In the pre-cyber world, Peters wrote presciently of critical computer-driven capabilities and hideous new asymmetric weapons systems. Also used were chemical weapons and biological vectors. While impossible to precisely predict the future, the story expanded minds and challenged possibilities. We need to be brainstorming this way today.

As we marshal our thinking and resources to face likely Iranian retaliation there is much to consider.

First, we must get our own internal political house in order. It is crucial that we somehow find a unified bipartisan approach to this emergent crisis, one that transcends American political infighting and electoral posturing. A likely unintended consequence of this strike, one that shadowed earlier discussions about preemptively hitting Tehran’s nuclear infrastructure, is that — at least temporally — the proud Iranians are again unified in support of their nation and regime. In turn, we are divided internally and are not in lock-step with our allies. Notably, NATO just suspended its training mission in riven Iraq.

A Washington-Tehran diplomatic track should engage in a search for a viable “off-ramp” away from this menacing brink of war.

Other nations ­— especially North Korea, China and Russia — must be reminded that it would be folly if they engaged in opportunistic regional adventurism during this fraught period where nerves are sensitive and tempers hot.

There is a significant Russian dimension to all this.  While not friends, Moscow and Tehran share considerable interests in the Middle East, especially with their combined proxies in Syria and shared hostility to the U.S. and its allies. Moscow should be urged to press Tehran to exercise restraint in the Persian Gulf region and rein in its proxy partners in Syria and Lebanon. If they don’t, the Israelis will likely intervene even more aggressively against Iranian proxies in Syria, putting Russian entities into a potentially dangerous crossfire. The Middle East in freefall is also dangerous for Russia.

The Iranians are proven masters at calibrating and masking their malign regional and global actions to a threshold just below a massive U.S. or Israeli retaliation. It is a dangerous game — especially now — because if they miscalculate, they invite terrible retribution. For this reason, it is likely that their responses will be measured, often lethal but mostly cloaked in deniability and non-attribution. Their recent attacks on Persian Gulf shipping and drone strikes on oil infrastructure likely only hint at their real capabilities.

By this calculus, much is vulnerable within the U.S. and allied infrastructure beyond more hardened military and governmental targets. The Iranian and non-state actor cyber threat is real and proven. False-flag actions, meaning nations and entities pretending to be another state are also possible. Nothing — including business interests, stock markets, civilian infrastructure including nuclear and power facilities — would be out of bounds. Plans for chemical or biological incidents should be dusted off and updated.

Remembering the 1970s’ spate of terrorist attacks and hijackings — despite much improved security — we must realize that civilians worldwide, including tourists in public places and traveling onaircraft, buses and ships, remain vulnerable to both state and local terror. While Iranian-backed attacks against these “targets” could prove suicidal for Tehran, they should be considered as a distinct possibility if relations further deteriorate.

Finally, our eyes must not be taken off ISIS and Al Qaeda. Enemies of both Washington and Tehran (and Moscow, Baghdad, Damascus and Tel Aviv) they would gain respite and strength from any distracting U.S.-Iranian crisis and further sectarian  erosion of the increasingly fragile Iraqi state.

To close, we are in a dangerous, nuanced period that could rapidly escalate — or simmer deceptively. We should have confidence in our extraordinary military and its ability to prevail in any direct conflict. The full capability and knowledge of our interagency and intelligence community, if properly focused on this and other threats, is also formidable and should be fully leveraged by a bipartisan Capitol Hill to support decision-making. National-level policy messaging must be better coordinated, while discouraging ill-disciplined public bombast that alienates friends and energizes foes.

We must work to rebuild trust with our allies and search within the international community for a credible crisis off-ramp with Tehran.

Along with our core warfighting skills, we must, however — as a clarion call for action — be ready for a nasty, no-holds-barred action, especially in the murky and asymmetric spectrum of conflict.

All rights reserved © Peter B Zwack

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