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From the SitRoom to the E-Ring, the inside scoop on defense, national security and foreign policy. | | | | |  | | By Alexander Ward, Andrew Desiderio and Quint Forgey | With help from Paul McLeary and Daniel Lippman
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Sens. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) and James Risch (R-Idaho), pictured, are two of eight senators working to draft the legislation. | Drew Angerer/Getty Images |
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President JOE BIDEN can threaten Russia all he wants. But unless and until Congress passes legislation that can become law, Russian President VLADIMIR PUTIN might think that American’s boasts are as empty as Soviet-era supermarkets. Never fear, for a bipartisan Senate octet is here! Sens. BOB MENENDEZ (D-N.J.) JIM RISCH (R-Idaho), ROB PORTMAN (R-Ohio), JEANNE SHAHEEN (D-N.H.), CHRIS MURPHY (D-Conn.), JOHN CORNYN (R-Texas), LINDSEY GRAHAM (R-S.C.) and BEN CARDIN (D-Md.) have worked all week to draft a filibuster-proof bill to pass the upper chamber and, eventually, the House. Now, days after launching the compromise process on a Monday evening Zoom call, the lawmakers are closer than ever to reaching a deal. Senators are using Menendez’s “mother of all sanctions” legislation as a starting point for the talks. The bill authorizes unprecedented sanctions on Russia’s financial institutions and other key entities, but would only kick in after Putin sends tanks rolling into Ukraine. The majority of the Senate Democratic Caucus has co-sponsored that bill. But there was a problem: Republicans wanted sanctions ahead of an incursion with the ability to ramp up those penalties if necessary. The compromise bill would still resemble Menendez’s original legislation, but with GOP demands incorporated throughout. Here’s what those compromises looks like right now, per what four people familiar told Alex and Andrew, though we stress this all could shift at any moment: The most significant element is a bipartisan lend-lease bill authored by Cornyn, Cardin and four other senators from both parties. The measure would give Biden the authority to provide Ukraine with military equipment at no cost, though with the promise of repayment later. The U.S. undertook a similar effort during World War II when it sent weapons, food and energy to the U.K. and other nations. Then there’s new language on the Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline Shaheen and Murphy are working on. It’s unclear whether Republicans will be satisfied with the revised text, as nearly all GOP senators voted in December to impose immediate sanctions on the energy throughway while Biden and a majority of Democrats believed stopping the pipeline project would lessen U.S. leverage in talks with Moscow. There are also several other provisions in play, including a sanctions regime that outlines mandatory sectoral penalties in the event of an invasion, in addition to more immediate sanctions. Senators are also looking to bolster Washington’s already-robust security assistance to Ukraine and provide additional aid in combating Russian cyberattacks and propaganda campaigns. The question now is if the White House, which supported Menendez’s original bill, will back whatever the two parties come up with now. If Biden gives the thumbs-up, then it’s likely Senate Majority Leader CHUCK SCHUMER will bring it to the floor for a vote. “The goal is to get to yes ASAP and convince them to lock arms now so we can move this on an expedited track when the Senate reconvenes,” a Senate aide familiar with the ongoing talks told NatSec Daily. In an interview this week, Shaheen said the group wants to “have a united front, both to support Ukraine and to show Vladimir Putin that he’s not going to divide Democrats and Republicans on this issue.” “There are a number of efforts underway and I think there’s a lot of interest on both sides of the aisle and trying to do something that we can get agreement on,” Shaheen added. “There’s interest in moving as expeditiously as possible.” NatSec Daily — along with officials on Pennsylvania Avenue and in the Kremlin — wait with baited breath. Read Alex and Andew’s full story.
| | | RUSSIA REJECTS U.S. RESPONSES: We’re shocked — SHOCKED! — to hear the Kremlin didn’t like the written responses the Biden administration sent about the Ukraine standoff. "There is no positive reaction on the main issue in this document," Russian Foreign Minister SERGEY LAVROV told reporters in Moscow. "The main issue is our clear position on the inadmissibility of further expansion of NATO to the East and the deployment of strike weapons that could threaten the territory of the Russian Federation." “There is not much cause for optimism,” DMITRY PESKOV, Putin's spokesperson, also said today. Critics of the administration’s approach abound. On the hawkish side, they say Biden’s team should do more than write; they should impose smaller sanctions now as a show of resolve, for example. Meanwhile, restrainters and doves feel that NATO should close its open door to Ukraine, which the administration refuses to do. The only door that’s closing these days is the diplomatic one. (Well, maybe it’s more of a window. We’ll ask a contractor.) U.S. DIPLOMATS FLOOD THE ZONE FOR UKRAINE: Our own NAHAL TOOSI notes in her latest piece that Secretary of State ANTONY BLINKEN is reaching beyond Europe to rally support for Ukraine — raising the issue with less obvious countries, including Brazil, India, Japan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, South Korea and the United Arab Emirates. The expansive effort “has seen virtually all of Biden’s top foreign policy aides play a role,” Toosi writes, “from CIA Director WILLIAM BURNS ’ visits to Moscow and Kyiv to an array of ambassadors in Europe and beyond checking in with counterparts.” But so far, the diplomatic offensive doesn’t seem to be changing the calculus for Putin, an often silent leader who now is planning his own talks later this week with French President EMMANUEL MACRON after engaging Wednesday with Italian businesses. It’s not even clear whether America’s NATO and European allies are truly unified against Russia: France has said the European Union should start its own dialogue with Moscow, and Germany — which has long advocated for the Nord Stream 2 project — appears squeamish at times about coming down too hard on the Kremlin. NOT GOOD ENOUGH: Defense Secretary LLOYD AUSTIN has ordered the Pentagon to completely overhaul how it tries to avoid civilian casualties on the battlefield, and reform how it investigates those reports once they come in. The move, of course, comes at the conclusion of 20 years of daily airstrikes in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Somalia and elsewhere that killed thousands of civilians. In a bloody coda to the tally, the last U.S. strike conducted in Afghanistan in August killed 10 civilians in Kabul, including an aid worker and seven children. Austin’s order, according to The New York Times , calls for the establishment of a new standardized reporting system and the creation of a Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Action Plan to carry out recommendations included in a congressionally ordered RAND report on the issue. The lead author of that report — which DoD has been sitting on since February 2021 — told reporters Thursday that the military’s investigations and reporting has been scattershot, and often left to individual commanders to decide how to move forward. Those commanders produced thousands of reports over the years, “but they never did anything with them from a learning perspective,” said RAND’s MICHAEL MCNERNEY, leading to significant civilian casualty issues to go unaddressed. RAND’s GABRIELLE TARINI added that the lack of progress on this issue “is in large part due to the fact that there is no permanent body or full time dedicated staff, whose only job is to analyze civilian casualty trends and patterns.” Looking forward, McNerney said “from a civilian protection standpoint, the Pentagon is not ready for conflicts with potential adversaries like Russia or China” if things don’t change in a significant way. THE ENERGY RACE FOR EUROPE IS ON:The U.S. and its European allies are scrambling to secure a reliable energy source should the normal flow from Russia — which provides the continent with 40 percent of the EU’s natural gas — stop after it invades Ukraine. “More than two-dozen tankers are en route from the U.S. to Europe,” The Wall Street Journal reported, as “Biden administration officials in recent days have held marathon video calls with officials around the world, trying to convince buyers in South Korea, Japan and other countries that have already paid for their imports to let the U.S. reroute those shipments to Europe, people involved in those talks said. European officials have traveled or planned trips to Doha and the Azeri capital, Baku, to try to line up supply.” But, you ask, isn’t the U.S. an energy powerhouse? Why can’t Biden just send an armada of tankers over to Europe as a stop-gap? The WSJ has your answer: “While the U.S. and other nations are technically capable of producing more natural gas, they face bottlenecks in how much they can ship overseas. There are a limited number of U.S. LNG export terminals that can turn the gas into a liquid so it can be transported over long distances. U.S. LNG export facilities have been running near capacity for months amid tightening supplies of the fuel around the world, as economies gradually recover from the pandemic and demand roars back.” IT’S THURSDAY: Thanks for tuning in to NatSec Daily. This space is reserved for the top U.S. and foreign officials, the lawmakers, the lobbyists, the experts and the people like you who care about how the natsec sausage gets made. Aim your tips and comments at award@politico.com and qforgey@politico.com, and follow us on Twitter at @alexbward and @QuintForgey. While you’re at it, follow the rest of POLITICO’s national security team: @nahaltoosi, @woodruffbets, @politicoryan, @PhelimKine, @BryanDBender, @laraseligman, @connorobrienNH, @paulmccleary, @leehudson and @AndrewDesiderio. | | A message from Lockheed Martin: Our mission is to prepare you for the future by engineering advanced capabilities today, so you can protect what matters most.
Many of today’s military systems and platforms were designed to operate in a different technological era and are behind the digital connectivity found in everyday life. Through our 21st Century Warfare vision, Lockheed Martin is accelerating the adoption of leading-edge networking and related technologies into our national defense enterprise, while enhancing the performance of our major platforms to provide unmatched situational awareness, command and control across land, sea, air, space and cyber. Learn More | | | | | | NORTH KOREA CONDUCTS SIXTH MISSILE TEST: South Korea’s military reports that North Korea fired two suspected ballistic missiles into the sea on Thursday, per The Associated Press’ KIM TONG-HYUNG . The launches bring Pyongyang’s total number of missile tests this month to six — the same number North Korean leader KIM JONG UN conducted in all of 2021. “South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said the weapons, which were likely short-range, were launched five minutes apart from the eastern coastal town of Hamhung and flew 190 kilometers (118 miles) on an apogee of 20 kilometers (12.4 miles) before landing at sea,” according to the AP. The U.S. Indo Pacific Command assessed that the latest launches did not pose an “immediate threat to U.S. personnel or territory, or to our allies.” North Korea previously test-fired two suspected cruise missiles on Tuesday.
| | | WHITE HOUSE WANTS WATER UTILITIES TO REPORT CYBER THREATS: The Biden administration plans to ask water utilities to deploy cybersecurity monitoring tools and share threat information with the government, our own ERIC GELLER reports (for Pros!). A forthcoming pilot program from the Environmental Protection Agency and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency will help water system operators install technology that monitors their networks for cyberattacks, and officials will collect feedback from utilities already using such technology. Although cyberattacks on water systems “pose an immense danger because of their critical role in Americans’ lives … the government is taking a voluntary approach to this challenge because the EPA lacks the authority to issue cyber regulations” like the Transportation Security Administration, Geller writes. The administration hopes to renew talks with lawmakers about a legislative proposal to close that gap. | | | |   | | | | | | PENTAGON MAKES HYPERSONICS PUSH: Austin is urging the Pentagon to speed up its development of hypersonic weapons in order to keep pace with China and Russia, per our own PAUL MCLEARY and LEE HUDSON. As part of that campaign, Austin plans to meet next Thursday with the CEOs of about a dozen defense companies. Deputy Defense Secretary KATHLEEN HICKS and the Pentagon’s research and engineering chief HEIDI SHYU also will be in attendance. The new effort follows several high-profile testing failures over the past year and comes amid fresh concerns of the cost of the weapons, which fly more than five times the speed of sound to make them difficult to shoot down.
| | | ‘BERLIN AIRLIFT’ TO UKRAINE: Our friends at Morning Defense (for Pros!) note how two Democratic senators are calling for a modern-day Berlin airlift of weaponry to Ukraine. Sen. RICHARD BLUMENTHAL (D-Conn.), a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said the airlift would have to be “done on a massive scale with a commitment very much like we demonstrated to Berlin,” referring to the historic airlift of food to the sector of the German capital isolated by the Soviet Union in the early Cold War. Blumenthal and Sen. Murphy (D-Conn.) made the remarks during a virtual town hall with members of the Ukrainian community following their recent trip to Kyiv, the nation’s capital. They said the airlift idea was spurred by witnessing a British Royal Air Force C-17 full of anti-armor weapons arrive during their visit. Murphy generally agreed with the idea, but cautioned not to go too far. “I do think it's important to understand what systems and weapons Ukraine can use and what they can't,” he said. “Because I have heard, for instance, some have called to provide integrated air defense systems to Ukraine.” Murphy wants to keep sending what the U.S. has already transferred to Ukraine, namely Javelin and Stinger missiles — or “a set of weapons and a set of capabilities that we can get into the hands of the Ukrainian army and get them ready to use them in the next several weeks.” | | | | JOIN FRIDAY TO HEAR FROM GOVERNORS ACROSS AMERICA : As we head into the third year of the pandemic, state governors are taking varying approaches to public health measures including vaccine and mask mandates. "The Fifty: America's Governors" is a series of live conversations featuring various governors on the unique challenges they face as they take the lead and command the national spotlight in historic ways. Learn what is working and what is not from the governors on the front lines, REGISTER HERE. | | | | | | | | WSJ ED BOARD SLAMS WEST’S GREENING: The West’s push for a greener energy future denuded its resources ahead of Russia likely turning off the tap, The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board wrote. Government bans on hydraulic shale fracturing, the shuttering of nuclear power and coal plants and the German unwillingness to diversify its liquified natural gas pipelines made Europe vulnerable to Russia’s energy ransom. “As a result, Europe entered the winter with little gas in storage. Russia exploited this by slowing gas deliveries. While rising gas prices send a market signal for power retailers to use more coal, Europe’s cap-and-trade program discourages this switch even when gas prices are surging,” the ed board wrote. “All of this explains why the Biden Administration is now scrambling to locate spare gas to rescue Europe from Mr. Putin’s tender mercies.
| | | — The president plans to nominate MICHAEL ADLER for U.S. ambassador to South Sudan and JOHN GODFREY for U.S. ambassador to Sudan. Adler most recently served as the National Security Council’s deputy senior director for South Asia. Godfrey currently is the acting counterterrorism coordinator and the acting special envoy to the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS in the Counterterrorism Bureau at the State Department. — ANNA MARIA ATANASZOV is leaving the Hungarian Embassy in Washington, D.C., where she has been head of press, and is being posted to the Permanent Mission of Hungary to the United Nations, where she will be a diplomat responsible for the U.N.’s Economic and Financial Committee and press. LUCA SÜTŐ is taking over her role in Washington. — HOPE ARCURI has been promoted to senior officer for global communications at the International Rescue Committee. She most recently was a global communications officer for the organization. | | A message from Lockheed Martin: Our mission is to prepare you for the future by engineering advanced capabilities today, so you can protect what matters most.
For generations, customers have counted on Lockheed Martin to help them overcome their most complex challenges. To align with the priorities of our customers in the decades ahead, Lockheed Martin has developed a concept for accelerating American and allied military modernization and preserving global deterrence called 21st Century Warfare.
Many of today’s military systems and platforms were designed to operate in a different technological era and are behind the digital connectivity found in everyday life. Through our 21st Century Warfare vision, Lockheed Martin is accelerating the adoption of leading-edge networking and related technologies into our national defense enterprise, while enhancing the performance of our major platforms.
With a portfolio that spans every branch of the military, Lockheed Martin’s unique insights into enabling joint all-domain operations helps us build the technologies that enable unmatched situational awareness, command and control across all domains. Learn More | | | | | | — ODETTE YOUSEF, NPR: “ Biden Team Promises New Approach to Extremism, but Critics See Old Patterns” — JEFF SCHOGOL, Task & Purpose: “ We finally know the backstory of how Defense Secretary Austin got the Silver Star” — DAVID L. STERN, The Washington Post: “ Meet the Ukrainian Volunteers Training to Fight Russians in the Streets of Kyiv”
| | | — The Atlantic Council, 8:30 a.m.: “ A Conversation With NATO Secretary General JENS STOLTENBERG — with MARGARET BRENNAN” — The Center for Strategic and International Studies, 8:30 a.m.: “ Prioritizing Partnerships With Africa — with MVEMBA PHEZO DIZOLELE, RAYCHELLE OMAMO, ROBERT SCOTT, HILDA SUKA-MAFUDZE and KOJI YONETANI” — The Atlantic Council, 9:30 a.m.: “ Enhancing NATO’s Collective Defense: A Conversation With Former Supreme Allied Commanders Europe — with PHILIP M. BREEDLOVE, WESLEY K. CLARK and LEAH SCHEUNEMANN” — The Center for a New American Security, 1 p.m.: “ The Future of the Digital Order — with LISA CURTIS, RICHARD FONTAINE, KARA FREDERICK, SHEENA CHESTNUT GREITENS, ANDREA KENDALL-TAYLOR, MEGAN LAMBERTH and AINIKKI RIIKONEN” — The Center for Strategic and International Studies, 1 p.m.: “ The 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics: Destined to Divide? — with ANNA ASHTON, CHARLES EDEL, SCOTT KENNEDY, YOUNG KIM, SUSAN LAWRENCE, SOPHIE RICHARDSON and JEFFREY N. WASSERSTROM” Have a natsec-centric event coming up? Transitioning to a new defense-adjacent or foreign policy-focused gig? Shoot us an email at award@politico.com or qforgey@politico.com to be featured in the next edition of the newsletter. | | | | STEP INSIDE THE WEST WING: What's really happening in West Wing offices? Find out who's up, who's down, and who really has the president’s ear in our West Wing Playbook newsletter, the insider's guide to the Biden White House and Cabinet. For buzzy nuggets and details that you won't find anywhere else, subscribe today. | | | | |
And thanks to our editor, John Yearwood, who doesn’t need congressional backing to sanction us.
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