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CNBC
15 minutes ago
- CNBC
NATO allies agree to higher 5% defense spending target
NATO allies on Thursday agreed to more than double their defense spending target from 2% of gross domestic product to 5%, in the most decisive move from the alliance in over a decade. In a joint declaration, the alliance said it was "united in the face of profound security threats and challenges," in particular the long- term threat posed by Russia to Euro-Atlantic security and the "persistent threat" of terrorism. "Allies commit to invest 5% of GDP annually on core defence requirements as well as defence-and security-related spending by 2035 to ensure our individual and collective obligations.," it continued. The historic move comes against a backdrop of tensions in the Middle East and ongoing war between Ukraine and Russia. Allies have been pushed to this point after years of pressure from U.S. President Donald Trump, across both of his terms in office.
Atlantic
16 minutes ago
- Atlantic
A Military Ethics Professor Resigns in Protest
Seven years ago, Pauline Shanks Kaurin left a good job as a tenured professor at a university, uprooted her family, and moved across the country to teach military ethics at the Naval War College, in Newport, Rhode Island. She did so, she told me, not only to help educate American military officers, but with a promise from the institution that she would have 'the academic freedom to do my job.' But now she's leaving her position and the institution because orders from President Donald Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, she said, have made staying both morally and practically untenable. Remaining on the faculty, she believes, would mean implicitly lending her approval to policies she cannot support. And she said that the kind of teaching and research the Navy once hired her to do will now be impossible. The Naval War College is one of many institutions—along with the Army War College, the Air War College, and others—that provide graduate-level instruction in national-security issues and award master's degrees to the men and women of the U.S. armed forces. The Naval War College is also home to a widely respected civilian academic post, the James B. Stockdale Chair in Professional Military Ethics, named for the famous admiral and American prisoner of war in Vietnam. Pauline has held the Stockdale Chair since 2018. (I taught for many years at the Naval War College, where I knew Pauline as a colleague.) Her last day will be at the end of this month. In January, Trump issued an executive order, Restoring America's Fighting Force, that prohibits the Department of Defense and the entire armed forces from 'promoting, advancing, or otherwise inculcating the following un-American, divisive, discriminatory, radical, extremist, and irrational theories,' such as 'gender ideology,' 'race or sex stereotyping,' and, of course, anything to do with DEI. Given the potential breadth of the order, the military quickly engaged in a panicky slash-and-burn approach rather than risk running afoul of the new ideological line. The U.S. Military Academy at West Point, in New York, for example, disbanded several clubs, including the local chapter of the National Society of Black Engineers. Other military installations, apparently anticipating a wider crackdown on anything to do with race or gender, removed important pages of American history about women and minorities from their websites. All of this was done by bureaucrats and administrators as they tried to comply with Trump's vague order, banning and erasing anything that the president and Hegseth might construe as even remotely related to DEI or other banned concepts. Some Defense Department workers 'deemed to be affiliated with DEI programs or activities' were warned that Trump's orders 'required' their jobs to be eliminated. Many professors at military institutions began to see signs that they might soon be prohibited from researching and publishing in their fields of study. Phillip Atiba Solomon: Am I still allowed to tell the truth in my class? At first, Pauline was cautious. She knew that her work in the field of military ethics could be controversial—particularly on the issues of oaths and obedience. In the military, where discipline and the chain of command rule daily life, investigating the meaning of oath-taking and obedience is a necessary but touchy exercise. The military is sworn to obey all legal orders in the chain of command, but when that obedience becomes absolute, the results can be ghastly: Pauline wrote her doctoral dissertation at Temple University on oaths, obedience, and the 1969 My Lai massacre in Vietnam, in which a young U.S. officer and his men believed that their orders allowed them to slay hundreds of unarmed civilians. For more than 20 years, she taught these matters in the philosophy department at Pacific Lutheran University, and once at Newport, she wrote a book on the contrasting notions of obedience in military and civilian life. When the Trump order came down, Pauline told me that Naval War College administrators gave her 'vague assurances' that the college would not interfere with ongoing work by her or other faculty, or with academic freedom in general. But one day, shortly after the executive order in January, she was walking through the main lobby, which proudly features display cases with books by the faculty, and she noticed that a volume on LGBTQ issues in the military had vanished. The disappearance of that book led Pauline to seek more clarity from the college's administration about nonpartisanship, and especially about academic freedom. Academic freedom is an often-misunderstood term. Many people outside academia encounter the idea only when some professor abuses the concept as a license to be an offensive jerk. (A famous case many years ago involved a Colorado professor who compared the victims of 9/11 to Nazis who deserved what they got.) Like tenure, however, academic freedom serves crucial educational purposes, protecting controversial research and encouraging the free exchange of even the most unpopular ideas without fear of political pressure or interference. It is essential to any serious educational institution, and necessary to a healthy democracy. Conor Friedersdorf: In defense of academic freedom Professors who teach for the military, as I did for many years, do have to abide by some restrictions not found in civilian schools. They have a duty, as sworn federal employees, to protect classified information. They may not use academic freedom to disrupt government operations. (Leading a protest that would prevent other government workers from getting to their duty stations might be one example.) And, of course, they must refrain from violating the Hatch Act: They cannot use government time or resources to engage in partisan political activity. But they otherwise have—or are supposed to have—the same freedoms as their colleagues in civilian institutions. Soon, however, jumpy military bureaucrats started tossing books and backing out of conferences. Pauline became more concerned. Newport's senior administrators began to send informal signals that included, as she put it, the warning that 'academic freedom as many of us understood it was not a thing anymore.' Based on those messages, Pauline came to believe that her and other faculty members' freedom to comment publicly on national issues and choose research topics without institutional interference was soon to be restricted. During an all-hands meeting with senior college leaders in February, Pauline said that she and other Naval War College faculty were told that the college would comply with Hegseth's directives and that, in Pauline's words, 'if we were thinking we had academic freedom in our scholarship and in the classroom, we were mistaken.' (Other faculty present at the meeting confirmed to me that they interpreted the message from the college's leadership the same way; one of them later told me that the implication was that the Defense Department could now rule any subject out of bounds for classroom discussion or scholarly research at will.) Pauline said there were audible gasps in the room, and such visible anger that it seemed to her that even the administrators hosting the meeting were taken aback. 'I've been in academia for 31 years,' she told me, and that gathering 'was the most horrifying meeting I've ever been a part of.' I contacted the college's provost, Stephen Mariano, who told me in an email that these issues were 'nuanced' but that the college had not changed its policies on academic freedom. (He also denied any changes relating to tenure, a practice predicated on academic freedom.) At the same time, he added, the college is 'complying with all directives issued by the President and Department of Defense and following Department of the Navy policy.' This language leaves Pauline and other civilian faculty at America's military schools facing a paradox: They are told that academic freedom still exists, but that their institutions are following directives from Hegseth that, at least on their face, seem aimed at ending academic freedom. In March, Pauline again sought clarity from college leaders. They were clearly anxious to appear compliant with the new political line. ('We don't want to end up on Fox News,' she said one administrator told her.) She was told her work was valued, but she didn't believe it. 'Talk is cheap,' she said. 'Actions matter.' She said she asked the provost point-blank: What if a faculty member has a book or an article coming out on some controversial topic? His answer, according to her: Hypothetically, they might consider pulling the work from publication. (Mariano denies saying this and told me that there is no change in college policy on faculty publication.) Every government employee knows the bureaucratic importance of putting things on paper. Pauline's current project is about the concept of honor, which necessarily involves questions regarding masculinity and gender—issues that could turn the DOD's new McCarthyites toward her and her work. So she now proposed that she and the college administration work up a new contract, laying out more clearly—in writing—what the limits on her work and academic freedom would look like. She might as well have asked for a pony. Administrators, she said, told her that they hoped she wouldn't resign, but that no one was going to put anything in writing. 'The upshot,' according to her, was a message from the administration that boiled down to: We hope you can just suck it up and not need your integrity for your final year as the ethics chair. After that, she told me, her choices were clear. 'As they say in the military: Salute and execute—or resign.' Until then, she had 'hoped maybe people would still come to their senses.' The promises of seven years ago were gone; the institution now apparently expected her and other faculty to self-censor in the classroom and preemptively bowdlerize their own research. 'I don't do DEI work,' she said, 'but I do moral philosophy, and now I can't do it. I'd have to take out discussions of race and gender and not do philosophy as I think it should be done.' In April, she submitted a formal letter of resignation. Initially, she had no interest in saying anything publicly. Pauline is a native Montanan and single mom of two, and by nature not the type of person to engage in public food fights. (She used to joke with me when we were colleagues that I was the college's resident lightning rod, and she had no interest in taking over that job.) She's a philosopher who admires quiet stoicism, and she was resolved to employ it in her final months. But she also thought about what she owed her chair's namesake. 'Stockdale thought philosophy was important for officers. The Stockdale course was created so that officers would wrestle with moral obligations. He was a personal model of integrity.' Even so, she did not try to invoke him as a patron saint when she decided to resign. 'I'm not saying he would agree with the choice that I made,' she told me. 'But his model of moral integrity is part of the chair.' She kept her resignation private until early May, when a professor at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, Graham Parsons—another scholar who teaches ethics in a military school, and a friend of Pauline's—likewise decided to resign in protest and said that he would leave West Point after 13 years. Hegseth's changes 'prevent me from doing my job responsibly,' he wrote in The New York Times. 'I am ashamed to be associated with the academy in its current form.' Hegseth responded on X, sounding more like a smug internet troll than a concerned superior: 'You will not be missed Professor Parsons.' The episode changed Pauline's mind. She felt she owed her friends and colleagues whatever public support and solidarity she could offer them. Nor are she and Parsons alone. Tom McCarthy, a professor at the U.S. Naval Academy, in Annapolis, Maryland, recently resigned as chair of the history department rather than remove a paper from an upcoming symposium. And last month, a senior scholar at the Army War College, in Pennsylvania, Carrie Lee, also handed in her resignation, a decision she announced to her friends and followers on Bluesky. Jason Dempsey: Hegseth has all the wrong enemies Lee told me in an email that she'd been thinking of leaving after Trump was elected, because it was apparent to her that the Trump administration was 'going to try and politicize the military and use military assets/personnel to suppress democratic rights,' and that academic freedom in military schools was soon to 'become untenable.' Like Pauline, Lee felt like she was at a dead end: 'To speak from within the institution itself will also do more harm than good. So to dissent, I have little choice but to leave,' she said in a farewell letter to her colleagues in April. I asked Pauline what she thinks might have happened if she had decided to stay and just tough it out from the inside. She 'absolutely' thinks she'd have been fired at some point, and she didn't want such a firing 'to be part of the legacy of the Stockdale Chair.' But then I asked her if by resigning, she was giving people in the Trump administration, such as Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought—who once said that his goal was to make federal workers feel 'trauma' to the point where they will quit their jobs—exactly what they want: Americans leaving federal service. She didn't care. 'When you make a moral decision, there are always costs.' She dismissed what people like Vought want or think. 'I'm not accountable to him. I'm accountable to the Lord, to my father, to my legacy, to my children, to my profession, to members of the military-ethics community. So I decided that I needed to resign. Not that it would change anyone's mind, but to say: This is not okay. That is my message.' At the end of our discussion, I asked an uncomfortable question I'd been avoiding. Pauline, I know, is only in her mid-50s, in mid-career, and too young simply to retire. She has raised two sons who will soon enter young adulthood. I asked her if she was worried about her future. 'Sure,' she said. 'But at the end of the day, as we say in Montana, sometimes you just have to saddle up and ride scared.'
Yahoo
17 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Russia's Medvedev calls EU an enemy, says Ukrainian membership would be dangerous
MOSCOW (Reuters) -Former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev said on Wednesday that the European Union had evolved into an enemy of Russia that posed a direct threat to its security, and Moscow was now opposed to Ukraine joining the bloc. Russia has long been opposed to Ukraine joining the NATO Western military alliance - one of the reasons it gives for its decision to launch a full-scale war against Ukraine in 2022. But it has in the past been more relaxed about the prospect of Kyiv becoming a member of the EU. President Vladimir Putin said in June 2022 that Russia had "nothing against" that, and the Kremlin said as recently as February that joining the bloc was Ukraine's sovereign right. However, Medvedev, who is now deputy chairman of Russia's Security Council, said that the EU had shifted from being an economic bloc dedicated to preventing war into what he called a politicised anti-Russian organisation that was slowly turning into a military bloc. "Brussels today is a real enemy of Russia. In its current twisted form, the European Union is no less of a threat to us than the North Atlantic Alliance," Medvedev wrote on Telegram. He said it was therefore wrong to say now that Ukraine should be free to "join anything you like" apart from NATO. "The EU, stuffed with a direct threat to Russia. That is exactly how it should be treated. At least until it changes its approach to us," he added. "Thus, the so-called (idea of) Ukraine in the EU is a danger for our country". Ukraine applied for EU membership shortly after the start of the war in 2022 and was granted candidate status later that year. Medvedev said that bilateral cooperation between Moscow and certain individual EU member states should, however, continue. He did not name specific countries, but central European neighbours Hungary and Slovakia have taken pains to maintain cordial relations with Putin since the start of the war.
