That was encouraging. But it was no guarantee that they’d be able to get there under actual quake conditions — escaping tumbled buildings, gathering personnel scattered around various facilities, crossing jumbled, sunken ground and roiling water. “It would take us 20 minutes to get underway,” says Ivan Carlson, the pilot association’s president — barring severe disruption. That leaves nearly no time to stop at the Coast Guard station’s docks on the way out; what would they do with injured personnel who couldn’t make it to the dock? Would they have room for any tourists and shoppers at the base exchange?
Practice makes better. The pilots and Coast Guard conducted their last evacuation drills in 2018, practicing both fleeing to deep water and ferrying passengers across the harbor to Port Angeles, where they would have to scramble on foot about half a mile uphill. “It went perfectly,” says vonBrandenfels, “because we planned it.” Then the pandemic hit, and drills and planning lapsed.
The Coast Guard’s rotation policy further gums up planning and communication, according to the pilots. Personnel and officers are routinely promoted and transferred to new posts around the country every two to four years, two for commanding officers. The Port Angeles station has had nearly as many COs in its 88 years as the United States has had presidents in 224. Cuttie, who spearheaded tsunami readiness at the Port Angeles station, went on to contend with hurricanes as the Coast Guard’s assistant operation commander in New Orleans, following a stint in Jacksonville.
The Coast Guard sees this rotation as necessary to build interoperability — a model developed in the early 2000s and first tested against Hurricane Katrina, which drew resources from across the country. With interoperability, “commanders can request assets from all over the Coast Guard,” says Lt. Stephen T. Nolan, the public affairs officer for Coast Guard District 13, the regional command for four Northwest states. “That’s the beauty of the standardization model.” Under it, “you don’t get pockets of operational culture,” Petty Officer Clark explains. “So everyone can work with everyone.”
But frequent rotations make it hard to build institutional memory and sustain focus on a unique local challenge like tsunamis. “Size really exacerbates the transfer schedule” noted Cuttie. “If 40 percent of 1,500 people at a large base transfer, you still have lots of continuity. But the Coast Guard’s so small” — and Port Angeles is a small base within it — that transfers have much more effect. “It’s really hard for them to keep up with the plan,” sighs vonBrandenfels. “We’ll get the new commander involved, at least get a reasonable communication schedule” — and then he or she is gone.
Cmdr. Joan Snaith, the commanding officer at Port Angeles until last summer, didn’t have a chance to get briefed on tsunami impacts and evacuation prospects by Ian Miller or another expert; she arrived in June 2020, in the depths of the pandemic. So it may not be surprising that when I reached out to her she expressed a relatively sanguine view of the information and evacuation options that will be available in the 45-plus minutes between the earthquake’s shaking and the tsunami’s arrival. “The size of the wave will determine how we’ll need to respond,” Snaith told me in March 2022. “If we can get people off safely by land, we’ll do that.”
A land exit might be a reasonable response for the more common sort of waves generated by a distant earthquake or volcanic eruption, most likely in Alaska. (A Jan. 15, 2022, eruption in Tonga produced a tsunami warning but only minor waves along Washington’s coast.) Coasties and others on Ediz Hook would have several hours to prepare and evacuate.
Not so for the much larger tsunami generated by a Cascadia Subduction Zone quake, which would arrive an hour or less after the shaking starts. “Any official tsunami alert bulletins that come out before the wave arrives will likely not be based on the actual event because they won’t have time to compute actual wave arrival times or amplitudes,” Corina Allen, the state Geological Survey’s chief hazards geologist, explained via email.
And no one knows exactly how big tsunami waves will be until they land; multiple variables, including bathymetry, tides, and the location and character of the quake, influence wave height. Still, “for a local-source tsunami, the ground shaking will be the warning,” says Maximilian Dixon, who manages the state Emergency Management Division’s Earthquake Program. How long that shaking continues will give some indication of the quake’s severity, but it’s hardly a precise gauge of the tsunami to follow.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
Armstrong, the chief executive, has threatened to move Coinbase out of the U.S. The company brought aboard corporate America’s go-to SEC challenger, former Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia, to lead a lawsuit against the agency filed on April 24. And, just days later, Coinbase took the rare step of publicly releasing its official rebuttal to the SEC, in which the company called itself “a well-resourced adversary.”
“The reality is that the law today does not apply to vast swaths of the digital asset market,” Coinbase Chief Legal Officer Paul Grewal said Thursday in an interview. “We don’t relish the opportunity to be in court with an important regulator, the SEC. But we will stand up for the rule of law as it currently exists, not just for Coinbase but the entire industry.”
Coinbase’s blitz against the SEC offers a prelude to what could be the crypto market’s biggest showdown yet. Over the last two years, the two have been locking horns over the exchange’s operations and crypto regulation more broadly. Yet if the SEC brings charges as expected, the case would represent the biggest test to date of Gensler’s tough stance toward the $1 trillion crypto market as well as a potential threat to Coinbase’s business — and the crypto market’s future in the U.S.
“Everything is on the line,” said Emily Garnett, a former SEC attorney who is now a shareholder at Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck.
An SEC spokesperson declined to comment.
Under Gensler, who was sworn in as chair just days after Coinbase went public two years ago, the SEC has been aggressively cracking down on the crypto market’s gatekeepers. But the enforcement campaign took on new speed after Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX, the once-lionized crypto exchange, collapsed late last year.
Since then, the SEC has brought a range of crypto-related cases against everyone from celebrities like Lindsay Lohan to digital asset giants such as Gemini and Kraken. Its campaign has been part of a broader and relatively new skepticism toward crypto in Washington. Lawmakers have hit pause on some crypto legislative efforts, bank regulators have ratcheted up their warnings about the market and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission even recently went after Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange.
The Coinbase case, however, would stand apart.
Coinbase has long been seen in crypto circles as a leader in regulatory compliance after acquiring an array of state and federal licenses in its early days. But the SEC’s expected charges against the company signal that few are immune from Gensler’s crackdown.
In the agency’s so-called Wells notice to the company, the SEC indicated that it was preparing a “kitchen sink” of charges against Coinbase’s businesses, said J.W. Verret, a law professor at George Mason University. That includes its staking service, wallet product and the exchange itself, which represents a pillar of Coinbase’s business that generated about 74 percent of total revenue in 2022.
Gensler says much of the crypto market consists of tokens that are akin to stocks and bonds, so companies trading or listing them need to be registered with the agency — just as if they were the New York Stock Exchange or Charles Schwab.
“Crypto markets suffer from a lack of regulatory compliance,” he said in a video posted online Thursday that did not mention Coinbase. “It’s not a lack of regulatory clarity.”
But Coinbase denies that it deals in securities. In its official response to the Wells notice, the company pointed to its “robust listing process” that screens tokens and rejects about 90 percent of assets reviewed.
Coinbase went further to say that the SEC’s looming charges would be an “abrupt about-face” from when the agency signed off on the company’s paperwork to go public in April 2021. The approval, Coinbase argued, allowed investors to infer that the SEC took no issue with its core business. The response was written by Steven Peikin, an attorney at Sullivan & Cromwell representing Coinbase who previously served as the SEC’s co-head of enforcement.
“It makes little or no sense that now — two years after the fact — we would find ourselves staring at a Wells notice,” Grewal said.
An SEC official who was granted anonymity to speak freely about agency processes said the SEC’s review of a company’s registration statement generally looks at the relevant disclosure and accounting laws, not the underlying business’ merits.
The SEC has appeared recently to be building up a foundation for the Coinbase action, though, securities lawyers say.
Notably, the agency has alleged in other cases that certain tokens trading on Coinbase are securities. And it has sued other crypto exchanges like Bittrex for allegedly running an unregistered national securities exchange, broker-dealer and clearing agency. Bittrex, which had previously announced plans to leave the U.S., said it will fight the litigation. The SEC filed a similar case the previous month against another crypto platform called Beaxy.com.
But crypto advocates are expressing hope that Coinbase — given the company’s profile, resources and willingness to fight the SEC — could win as the case moves through the courts.
“It’s always an uphill climb when a regulator brings a lawsuit,” said Marisa Tashman Coppel, policy counsel at the Blockchain Association. “But none of the cases have gone up to the Court of Appeals and none of them have gone up to the Supreme Court. So, I am optimistic.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
“BOOM!!!!,” tweeted Stoller. That made Buttigieg, in American Economic Liberties Project parlance, a Democrat with “the courage to learn.”
Needling Democrats, though, is perhaps less of a challenge for Stoller with the left than his biggest project at the moment: helping the anti-monopoly cause get traction on the right, too.
That some elements on the right are going through a rethinking of the party’s relationship vis-à-vis corporate America — part of what figures like GOP Sens. Marco Rubio (Fla.) and J.D. Vance (Ohio) have taken to calling “The Realignment” — has created an opportunity for Stoller. One thread of that thinking: That conservatism has to figure out how to embrace a kind of post-Trump populism that uses political power to build a capitalism that, as Rubio puts it, “promotes the common good, as opposed to one that prioritizes Wall Street and Beijing.”
Stoller is particularly interested in the Ohio senator. “You saw J.D. Vance with that rail safety bill?” he says. The Hillbilly Elegy author has argued that as a “bicoastal elite” has looked the other way, a withering of antitrust enforcement has contributed to the sort of tragedies like February’s train derailment in the community of East Palestine and has co-sponsored a bill with home-state Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown to impose new rules on railroad operations.
Stoller, who tends to see the world in terms of markets, is something of a natural emissary to the right side of the aisle. “He speaks Republican fluently,” says one senior Biden administration official admiringly. The official asked to be anonymous because they did not want to be seen discussing internal administration thinking.
For his part, Stoller has been actively building bridges with an up-and-coming generation of Republicans. He writes for the American Compass, an organization launched in 2020 by Oren Cass, a former Mitt Romney campaign official who says of Stoller, “We both look at the Chicago School” — a branch of antitrust thinking which, broadly speaking, argues that companies should be left to grow as big as they like as long as they keep prices low — “and say, ‘That is just a totally insane way to try to understand capitalism.’”
And on a weekday evening in mid-March, Stoller co-hosted with a counterpart from the Federalist Society a happy hour at the Capitol Hill pub Kelly’s Irish Times — picked for its populist bona fides — pitching it in the invitation to contacts on the left as a chance to meet other people “who are interested in populist approaches to competition policy.” Wrote Stoller, “Come, you’ll have fun and have a very different kind of conversation.” Some 30 to 40 people did turn out, drinking beers, eating chicken tenders, and if all goes well for Stoller, laying the groundwork for the next generation of anti-concentration believers on both the right and left.
“Republicans believe different things than we do. That’s just the reality,” Stoller says. “And you can try to do politics and work on where you overlap, or you can choose to say, ‘I’m going to not try to get cancer patients the drugs they need for a reasonable price.’”
But building an anti-monopoly movement on the right will likely be a decades-long project, if it’s possible at all. The massive difficulty of the task helps explain why Stoller has worked hard to hang on to an alliance of sorts with one powerful Republican already among, as a policy lead with a mid-sized technology company put it to me enthusiastically, Washington’s “antitrust-pilled.”
Stoller first took notice of Hawley in 2017, when the then-37-year-old Missouri attorney general became the first AG in the United States to bring an antitrust case against Google.
Stoller then picked up a copy of Preacher of Righteousness, a biography of the trust-busting Republican Teddy Roosevelt that Hawley had begun writing as an undergrad history student at Stanford. “I thought, this book shows he really understands the formation of corporate America,” Stoller says now.
When Hawley ran for Senate and won the following year, he didn’t shy away from his belief in the necessity of breaking up the country’s biggest companies, situating his support for the cause, at times, in the idea that “religious conservatives” like himself have struck a bum deal in hitching themselves to a free-market philosophy. Stoller and Hawley’s shop began talking.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
Deputy Minister of Information and Culture and Chief Spokesperson of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan Zabiullah Mujahid
Kabul: The Taliban-led caretaker government in Afghanistan has dismissed Washington’s claim over the alleged stronger presence of Daesh or Islamic State (IS) in Afghanistan as utterly fabricated.
“The statements of US officials about the number of IS militants in Afghanistan are not true. Daesh militants have already been reduced in ranks and suppressed,” chief spokesman of the Afghan caretaker administration Zabihullah Mujahid tweeted.
US Central Command chief Gen. Michael Kurilla, according to media reports, has said “IS is stronger today in Afghanistan” and warned of a possible IS attack on the interests of US and allied nations within six months, Xinhua News Agency reported.
Brushing aside the baseless allegations by the US general on the IS strength in Afghanistan, Mujahid said on his Twitter account, “The interest of the US officials in this matter and their grandiosity is aiding and abetting the IS insurgents, which should be stopped.”
The Afghan caretaker government, which has downplayed Daesh, or the IS group, as a serious threat, has vowed to crack down on any armed opponents in the war-ravaged country.
The Afghan security forces have killed four armed militants affiliated with the rival IS group in two separate operations on the outskirts of Kabul over the past week.
Punching right against Republican ultras? No doubt: In media appearances, Sununu reliably distances himself from culture warriors, election deniers and anyone who would wink at political violence like last year’s attack on Paul Pelosi. Book the New Hampshire governor on a Beltway interview show or make him the subject of a lengthy profile in an elite publication and you’ll hear him deride Trumpism as an electoral “loser” or denounce the Republican “echo chamber.” But he’s also apt to make somewhat less familiar critiques — decrying the failures of the 2017-2018 GOP political trifecta, say, or taking a “Face the Nation” shot at Ron DeSantis, whose battle with Disney over the firm’s allegedly woke priorities he described as “the worst precedent in the world” (because it violates free-market principles).
Paeans to bipartisanship? Naturally — and, better yet, they come couched in reflections on the can-do culture demanded by being governor of a small state, working in the sort of cooperative political milieu permanent Washington’s media brass tends to fetishize. Sununu speaks in Lincolnesque terms about the workings of New Hampshire’s Executive Council, the bipartisan body that governors must consult about all but the smallest contracts and requires people to debate in close proximity. In one recent interview, he said the job of leaders right now is to “take down the heat” inflaming American politics.
Given this record, you might be thinking it’s just about time for Sununu to get himself invited to give remarks at one of those backslappy Washington galas that draw members of the elite media and their insider guests. In fact, Sununu, overachiever that he is, touched that station of the cross an entire year ago. Donning white tie and tails, he brought down the house at the annual dinner of the Gridiron Club with a routine that included calling Trump “fucking crazy,” to the delight of an audience that included Anthony Fauci, Merrick Garland, Adam Schiff and a paltry two GOP legislators.
“I don’t think he’s so crazy that you could put him in a mental institution,” Sununu went on. “But I think if he were in one, he ain’t getting out.”
Do Sununu’s zingers make you snort? Does his willingness to point fingers at his own side make you swoon? If so, then there’s an above-average chance that you are a college-educated person who works within one or two degrees of separation from Washington’s political industry.
As the favorite Republican of institutional Washington, Sununu joins some august company: People like former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman and former Ohio Gov. John Kasich once occupied the spot. But it was truly defined by the late Sen. John McCain, who melded purported straight talk, an accommodating team of media schedulers and a willingness to decry his own party’s wacko birds to turn himself into a Beltway crush for the ages.
One of the other things those men all had in common, of course, is that none of them became president — a pretty good indication that even in the good old days before anyone talked about swamps and mass-media implosions and million-follower social media accounts, the Beltway media club’s power to influence voters went only so far.
If anything, the path from green room ubiquity to White House residency is even harder today: Back when McCain’s love affair with the media was in full flower, fellow GOP candidates were jealous that he was hogging so much air time. Nowadays, in a party whose leading figures often limit themselves to conservative media, there’s a solid argument that Republican candidates who play nice with the enemies of the people are actively hurting their primary chances. (This same dynamic lowers the bar for Washington’s esteem: At a time when the smart GOP strategy seems to be staying away from old-fashioned bipartisan institutions, it’s even easier to win esteem by simply saying yes to an invite.)
But I’m not trying to handicap the presidential race here. I’m trying to understand something about what does and doesn’t work in a Washington ecosystem where, for all of the self-reflection brought on by the fury of the Trump years, Sununu helps show that the things that push the buttons of permanent Washington have remained pretty constant: bipartisanship, fiscal flintiness, cultural toleration, respect for institutions and above all the willingness to take sides against your own team.
In fact, Sununu has serious competition for the McCain slot in the current political lineup. There’s a possibility that Liz Cheney, subject of fulsome praise by those who admire telegenic political bravery, will do something. More likely, he’ll face two former GOP governors, Maryland’s Larry Hogan and Arkansas’ Asa Hutchinson, who have also leaned even more heavily into anti-Trump politics than Sununu, who for all his criticism says he’d vote for the former president again if he were the nominee. Both are also frequent TV guests who know how to pivot from politics questions to soliloquies about how governors are too busy solving problems to get involved in cable-TV political nastiness. That’s a not-especially-credible assertion given that America’s gubernatorial ranks also include culture warriors like Kristi Noem or (Hutchinson’s successor) Sarah Huckabee Sanders, but it’s the kind of thing that goes over brilliantly in media hits.
Still, while permanent Washington loves an apostate, it also rewards smart politics — and, in the current GOP, the two ex-governors’ complete break with Trump doesn’t seem like a winning move. Which leaves Sununu, who has enough of the partisan in him that, in a long, fun sit-down with my colleague Ryan Lizza, he repeatedly referenced the “Democrat party,” a back-bencher tic that suggests he’s more than the kumbaya candidate.
There are times when it can seem like Sununu was lab-designed to stroke the erogenous zones of Beltway careerists. Unlike Hogan (from blue Maryland) or Hutchinson (from red Arkansas), he comes from swing-state New Hampshire, a place that rewards flinty independence and doesn’t incentivize Republicans to take strong culture war positions that alienate elites. It also just happens to be the state where the McCain model of pundit-lionized Republican tends to thrive in the primaries, before coming back to Earth when the contests shift to more traditionally partisan states. (Sununu describes himself as a pro-choice Republican, though he says nice things about the Dobbs decision sending the issue back to the states.)
Sununu also profiles like a gregarious guy who genuinely enjoys mixing it up in the game of politics — a happy-warrior affect that enables him to not sound like a scold even when he’s quite clearly scolding Republicans for extremism, or Democrats for the same thing. No one likes a wet blanket. Signing off a “Meet the Press” interview last fall, he responded to Chuck Todd’s farewell by saying “thank you, brother,” and it felt like a popular jock taking a moment to high-five a lowly nerd. In a culture whose tastes are more often set by former nerds than former jocks, that kills.
As a chief executive who makes a show of his executiveness (which makes for a convenient way to slam Joe Biden, a career senator who never ran anything until he became president), Sununu also embraces the opportunity to take shots at Washington. The commentariat tends to admire decisions like Sununu’s choice not to enter last year’s Senate race, especially as that choice infuriated professional GOP operatives who knew he could have won the seat for the party. “This whole town gives me the chills sometimes,” he told CBS this winter, adding, “I can explain to folks in Washington what a balanced budget actually means.”
Perhaps this tone bothers some denizens of the capital, many of whom have a granular understanding of the federal budget and how it differs from that of the nation’s 42nd-largest state. But the barbs are just as likely to please the Beltway’s masochistic streak. There’s nothing quite as Washington as publicly hating Washington. And if anyone should know, it’s Sununu. He may bleed granite, but he’s the son of a former White House chief of staff and a graduate of Northern Virginia’s legendarily selective Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, perhaps the DMV’s most prestigious public school. (He says he was furious at his parents for making him move away from New Hampshire.) His father also went on to host Crossfire. The man knows his Beltway political television.
Should Sununu have to suffer politically just because he has the sort of style and biography that flatters a certain type of Washington media agenda-setter? Of course not. And if he’s an optimist, he might even note that another perennial GOP-primary archetype — the wacky outsider with no political experience who soars in early polls by throwing politically inflammatory TV brickbats, a la Herman Cain in 2012 — was also assumed until recently to be forever doomed. Then Trump came along.
The bigger risk, maybe, is that being the favorite of the opinion elite makes you a less iconoclastic politician. You get invited on shows precisely because they know you’ll commit apostasy. You’re obliged to speak too much about Very Important Issues, which are disappointingly rare in public forums precisely because they tend not to move voters. You have a harder time getting quoted when there’s some big, lowbrow controversy afoot since that’s the one time rivals will agree to speak out — and variety demands that the others get coverage. The things that made you seem unusual become familiar. Media esteem is fleeting.
Luckily for him, Sununu has an out that some of the previous Washington heartthrobs lacked: an actual job — the sort of thing that makes for a very earnest-sounding talking point when the political questions start. “I’ve got a state to run,” he told “This Week” recently, when talk turned to his potential candidacy. “Unlike Congress, I don’t get vacation. It’s a 24/7 job, 365. Unlike Congress, I have to balance a budget in the next couple of months. Unlike Congress, I just have a lot of demands on me and I love that. It’s a hard job but, man, it is so fulfilling when you get stuff done.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
Biden “knew the only way Germany would do Leopards is if we did Abrams and allied unity is the most important thing to him. So Secretary Austin sent a proposal on how to make it happen,” one U.S. official said.
On Wednesday, Biden bristled at the notion that Germany made him approve the Abrams transfer after all.
“Germany didn’t force me to change my mind. We wanted to make sure we were all together. That’s what we were going to do all along. And that’s what we’re doing right now,” he told reporters after announcing the decision.
Moments earlier, Scholz had taken a victory lap in the Bundestag. His unmovable stance that Abrams needed to accompany Leopards on their journey to Europe’s east was heeded by the world’s most powerful nation.
“It is right that we never provide these weapons systems on our own, but always in close cooperation,” Scholz said.
The move to provide Western tanks marks a major new phase of the allies’ support of the war effort, allowing Ukraine to combine more than 100 tanks from Europe and the U.S. with armored troop carriers and artillery to shred Russia’s front lines in the east and south.
But the tank debate also signaled the first significant and open break between Kyiv’s first- and third-largest backers. In recent weeks officials from Washington and Berlin had debated whether to agree to send tanks and whether to announce the decision in tandem. The public tussle raised questions among officials inside the Western alliance about the degree to which the coalition can remain solidified in its support for Ukraine in the coming months.
This story is based on interviews with 18 officials in the U.S. and Europe, many of whom asked not to be named in order to freely discuss internal deliberations. How Biden’s team got here is a story of bureaucratic infighting and diplomatic brinkmanship, both in Washington and Berlin, and negotiations between allies that at times got heated and spilled into the public.
Cracks in the alliance
Initial American resistance to sending Abrams tanks, and German intransigence, delayed a move that, critics argued, should have happened much earlier.
In a late December visit to Washington, Zelenskyy and his team requested the U.S. send more advanced weapons to Kyiv in the coming weeks, including tanks and long-range missiles, ahead of an expected Russian offensive this spring.
In meetings at the White House, it became increasingly clear that the U.S. would not budge on the missile request. U.S. officials did not rule out sending tanks –– at some point. The question for Washington was whether it could convince other European allies to step up and supply tanks at the same time.
But cracks in the alliance began to emerge, as both the Pentagon and German leaders dug in their heels.
In public and private, senior DoD officials insisted that it may not be wise to send the Abrams at this moment. The weapons were too complex for Ukrainian forces to train on quickly — and too difficult to keep running once they started trudging through the country’s muddy winter terrain, they argued.
“The Abrams tank is a very complicated piece of equipment. It’s expensive, it’s hard to train on. It has a jet engine, I think it’s about three gallons to the mile of jet fuel. It is not the easiest system to maintain,” said Colin Kahl, the Pentagon’s top policy official, after a trip to Kyiv earlier this month. “It may or may not be the right system.”
This angered senior administration officials who felt the Pentagon was scuttling a move that could help Ukraine and tighten bonds with a key ally. The comments also frustrated the Ukrainian government, which has proven time and again its troops can quickly learn new technologies decades ahead of the Soviet equipment they had been using.
“DoD initially says there’s no way we could provide X, Y, Z because of various supposed roadblocks,” a senior administration official said.
“And, lo and behold, DoD announces the provision of X, Y, and Z months later to great fanfare,” the official continued. “But their reflexive answer is no.”
Another U.S. official disputed that account and pointed to Austin, the U.S. defense chief, being responsive to the Ukrainians’ needs when it came to sending Harpoon missiles, National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missiles, Bradley and Stryker vehicles, and training for all of them.
“The White House and State are generally viewing the provision of assistance one-dimensionally, focused only on the escalation dynamics,” another U.S. official said in the Pentagon’s defense. “DoD has to worry about our own military readiness, the logistics of providing equipment, sensitive tech disclosure, and training Ukrainians.”
But Kahl’s and others’ comments also frustrated defense industry executives who felt the Pentagon was making disparaging remarks about U.S.-manufactured equipment. Weeks before, Laura Cooper, a Pentagon official charged with overseeing Ukraine policy, called the Abrams a “gas guzzler.”
The U.S. does not have to advocate for sending the Abrams, one industry insider said, but administration officials shouldn’t criticize the tank. That’s especially true since another country in the region, Poland, is buying M1s from General Dynamics. Other countries such as Morocco, Iraq, Australia, Saudi Arabia and Egypt have purchased export versions of the tank.
Pressure on Berlin
Over the last few weeks, members of Biden’s national security team — Austin, Joint Chiefs Chair Gen. Mark Milley and national security adviser Jake Sullivan — met frequently with their German and European counterparts to figure out the next steps on Ukraine.
Throughout their talks, German officials felt that the Pentagon was more reluctant than the White House, but there was also a growing awareness that Berlin’s insistence on the American tank was increasingly upsetting U.S. officials, who stressed that Washington was already supplying widespread military support and that it was Berlin’s moment to step up.
Pressure within Europe continued to mount on Germany to make a move. On Jan. 11, Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki spoke by phone with French President Emmanuel Macron and discussed how to convince Scholz to drop his resistance on tanks.
Macron suggested he and Morawiecki tag-team Scholz into submission ahead of last Friday’s meeting at Ramstein Air Base. A few days later, Morawiecki traveled to Berlin, where he met with conservative opposition leaders, but not Scholz.
Back in Warsaw on Jan. 18, Morawiecki broke a major diplomatic taboo by threatening to send Ukraine Leopards without waiting for export approval from Germany. Scholz’s chancellery was livid, but officials there knew they were running out of time.
Scholz last week told Biden on a phone call and U.S. lawmakers in Davos that no Leopards would make their way east unless Abrams accompanied them. In Scholz’s mind, the two were inextricably tethered.
Scholz has been adamant in his discussions with Biden that supplying Leopard tanks to Ukraine marks such a qualitatively new step that the U.S., as the world’s biggest military power but also Germany’s guarantee for nuclear deterrence, must be involved.
They also wanted to demonstrate unity toward Putin. “It was important to the chancellor from the very beginning … that we take every step with as much unity as possible,” said Scholz’s spokesperson Steffen Hebestreit.
The allies had for the past year kept a surprisingly enduring unified front on Ukraine, contrary to the assumptions made by many before the conflict started, above Vladimir Putin in Moscow.
But the debate over the Leopard was turning toxic quickly and most of all unusually public. At Davos, the Polish President Andrzej Duda and Lithuania’s Gitanas Nauseda voiced their frustration with Germany and Scholz in private conversations. By then, Scholz was ignoring Duda’s calls to meet together and discuss the next steps on the Leopard. For his part, Scholz returned the hostility from the new eastern allies of NATO. He has been particularly angry with the right-wing Polish government’s sniping at Germany.
After Davos, the hope in Washington and European capitals was that everyone could agree on a path forward during a meeting of 50 countries at Ramstein Air Base in Germany last Friday. There, Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov gathered with the defense chiefs of 12 European countries who field Leopard tanks, including Germany. But Berlin said it was still mulling it over.
The frustration prompted Polish Foreign Minister Zbigniew Rau to tweet: “Arming Ukraine in order to repel the Russian aggression is not some kind of decision-making exercise. Ukrainian blood is shed for real. This is the price of hesitation over Leopard deliveries. We need action, now.”
‘Better late than never’
With no deal with Washington in sight, the chancellor was under increasing pressure from his own coalition partners as well as European countries, especially Poland. After the failure to achieve a breakthrough, attempts to rope in the U.S. continued over the weekend, with two men — new German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius, who had only been appointed days before, and Scholz’s powerful right-hand man, chancellery minister Wolfgang Schmidt — playing a key role, two officials said.
Biden was constantly updated by his senior staff on the talks as he heard arguments for and against sending Abrams.
The president knew Ukraine needed Leopards — which are abundant across Europe and easier for the Ukrainians to use and maintain than the Abrams — on the battlefield as soon as possible. He started to lean toward sending the M1s after seeing bipartisan support for the transfer, and realizing the Germans would not budge.
Ultimately, Biden decided to send American tanks after Austin recommended providing 31 M1s, the size of a full Ukrainian army battalion.
The U.S. could have sent just one tank to seal the deal with Germany, but Austin decided to send a full battalion. This shows the decision was “not a symbolic gesture, but something the secretary thought was the right thing to do,” the second official said.
Hours after reports of Biden’s decision emerged, news surfaced that Scholz was ready to approve the Leopards. But not everyone in Germany’s ruling coalition was happy. Anton Hofreiter, a lawmaker from the Green party, one of the coalition partners of Scholz’s Social Democrats, said the chancellor lost time by insisting on the U.S. linkage and antagonized close allies.
“It would have been better for Germany’s international reputation to decide more quickly. In particular, many countries in Europe were annoyed to make the delivery dependent on the United States,” Hofreiter said.
“But better late than never,” he added.
Even now the U.S. administration — which never ruled out sending the Abrams — is warning that it will be months before Ukraine will be able to use the tanks on the battlefield. But officials said the decision was made to begin buying the tanks now so that when they arrive on the battlefield, Ukrainian forces will be able to maintain and operate them.
DoD is now working through the logistical challenges of delivering the Abrams and supporting them on the battlefield, said a senior administration official. The military will be setting up a “very careful” training program to teach the Ukrainians how to maintain, sustain and operate the weapons, “which do require a good deal of assistance,” the official said.
At the same time, DoD is training Ukrainians on combined arms maneuver tactics, which will allow Ukrainian forces to integrate the Abrams and other armored capabilities into their overall operations.
In a Wednesday morning call with Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov, Austin didn’t give a timeline for when the first Abrams might arrive. The priority for now, he added, should be on training the Ukrainians on Leopard tanks, along with U.S.-supplied Bradley infantry fighting vehicles, and new mobile howitzers and other heavy armor recently announced by Western partners.
In an interview, Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal was far more optimistic about the timeframe.
“We are aware of the fact that training soldiers to operate Abrams tanks takes months. But we are also convinced that the United States have decided to provide Ukrainians with the insight, rapid training program for tank cooperation,” he said. “And this may mean that jointly with the highly motivated Ukrainian fighters, this training might take weeks rather than months.”
Now that the dustup appears to have been settled for now, not everyone is ecstatic at how the whole process played out.
“Germany is still very afraid of Russia. That is the reality,” said Oleksii Goncharenko, a member of Ukraine’s Parliament. “They are still playing these games about defensive weapons versus offensive weapons. It is nonsense because the war is a defensive war for us.”
A senior Polish official said Scholz’s delay was looked at “with embarrassment.” The chancellor “bears full political and moral responsibility for his decisions, and he will be accountable for his decision to voters and history.”
Biden allies are happy, however, with Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) telling POLITICO he was “encouraged” by all that developed over the last 24 hours. “It’s a positive announcement from our friends and partners in Germany.”
Erin Banco, Nahal Toosi, Lili Bayer and Lee Hudson contributed to this report.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
