For Orban, Ukraine Is a Pawn in a Longer Game | China Is Quietly Expanding Its Land Grabs in the Himalayas | Why Biden’s LNG Pause Has Allies Worried, and more

Biden Imposes Sanctions on Israeli Settlers Over West Bank Violence  (New York Times)
President Biden on Thursday ordered broad financial and travel sanctions on Israeli settlers accused of violent attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank, a forceful gesture aimed in part at Arab American voters in the United States who have expressed fury about the president’s backing of Israel’s war in Gaza.
Mr. Biden authorized the sanctions with an executive order that goes further than a directive issued in December by the State Department, which imposed visa bans on dozens of Israeli settlers who have committed acts of violence in the West Bank. The sanctions will initially be imposed on four Israeli settlers, who will be cut off from the U.S. financial system and from accessing any American assets or property. They also will be prevented from traveling to the United States or engaging in any commerce with people in the United States.
For Mr. Biden, the order served a dual purpose: It was a sharp diplomatic notice to Israel’s government at a time when the United States is pressing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for restraint. But it also sent a message to Arab Americans, a key part of the political coalition he needs to be re-elected, that he is serious about using the power of the United States on behalf of the Palestinians.
The executive order comes after years of American frustration with Israeli settlers, whom they view as a source of violence and instability and a threat to a two-state solution between Israel and the Palestinians. And it comes as Mr. Biden faces growing criticism over U.S. support for Israel’s war in Gaza, including from members of his own party. American officials fear a recent surge in attacks by Israeli settlers against Palestinians in the West Bank could set off even wider violence, making an already combustible situation worse.

In the West Bank, Palestinians Struggle to Adjust to a New Reality  (Yara Bayoumy and Rami Nazzal, New York Times)
For many Palestinians, life in the West Bank, already hard under years of Israeli occupation, is now subject to ever more onerous restrictions and an increased military presence since Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel that killed an estimated 1,200 people.
Israeli authorities have created new choke points for travel, throttling traffic. They have stopped allowing many Palestinians to work in Israel, a lifeblood for the local economy. And they have increased the intensity of raids and arrests in West Bank neighborhoods.
The Israeli military says there has been a “significant increase in terrorist attacks” in the West Bank since Oct. 7, necessitating the need for the additional security measures and raids.
Many Palestinians who spoke to The New York Times say these measures, at times humiliating, have provoked frustration and anger. They have watched in horror as an estimated 26,000 people, including friends and relatives, have been killed under heavy Israeli bombardment in Gaza, while facing worsening conditions at home under Israeli authority and attacks at the hands of Jewish settlers.
Even before the Hamas attacks, settler violence was hitting its highest levels since the U.N. began tracking it in the mid-2000s. According to U.N. figures in November 2023, there was an average of one incident of settler violence a day in 2021. Since Oct. 7, the average is seven incidents per day. Extremist settlers have been attacking Palestinian homes and businesses in the West Bank. They have burned down the tents of seminomadic Bedouin herders and shot people, witnesses have said.
On Thursday, President Biden ordered broad financial and travel sanctions be imposed on Israeli settlers accused of violent attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank.

China Is Quietly Expanding Its Land Grabs in the Himalayas  (Anchal Vohra, Foreign Policy)
As the U.S. government has spent ever more of its time in recent years preparing to respond to any potential Chinese invasion of Taiwan, Beijing has been busy slicing away parts of the tiny Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan. Over the last few years, China has built massive infrastructure with hundreds of concrete structures, military posts, and administrative centers in the region of Beyul Khenpajong, some 12,000 feet in the northern Himalayan mountains. The so-called “hidden valley” is deemed sacred by Bhutanese, with the country’s royal family tracing its ancestral heritage to the area.
China’s blatant land grab of Bhutanese territory is just its latest move to control areas of significance in Buddhist culture, exploit a far less resourceful neighbor, and challenge its regional rival India in the Himalayas.
China’s expansion in the Beyul was first reported in Foreign Policy in 2021 by Robert Barnett, an expert on Tibet and the China-Bhutan border. Barnett wrote that while China had announced the settlement of a single village called Gyalaphug in the contested valley back in 2015, tens of miles of road and several key military buildings were in place in the Beyul and the neighboring Menchuma Valley by 2021. 

The West Did Not Invent Decoupling—China Did  (Agathe Demarais, Foreign Policy)

Israel and Lebanon Are Prepping for a War Neither Wants, but Many Fear It’s Becoming Inevitable  (Aby Sewell and Melnie Lidman, AP)
The prospect of a full-scale war between Israel and Lebanon’s Hezbollah militia terrifies people on both sides of the border, but some see it as an inevitable fallout from Israel’s ongoing war against Hamas in Gaza. Such a war could be the most destructive either side has ever experienced. Israel and Hezbollah each have lessons from their last war, in 2006, a monthlong conflict that ended in a draw.

Japan Wants Both Taiwanese Security and Chinese Trade  (William Sposato, Foreign Policy)
Since Lai Ching-te from the independence-minded Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) won the Taiwanese presidential election on Jan. 13, pro-Taiwanese lawmakers in Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) have wasted no time suggesting parliamentary security talks that would also include their U.S. counterparts. The offer demonstrates the growing support for Taiwan by Japan’s political leaders as the government tries to confront China’s strategic ambitions without provoking economic retaliation.
The sensitivities are clear. Japan has announced plans to raise its already substantial defense budget and related spending to 2 percent of GDP, an increase of 65 percent by 2027. If carried out, this will make it the third-largest defense budget in the world, after the United States and China—no small feat for a country that does not even have formal armed forces under its postwar pacificist constitution. Japan has also been beckoning allies far and wide, forging deals with Australia, offering aid to Southeast Asian countries sparring with China over the South China Sea, and even discussing hosting a NATO office in Tokyo.
So far, it has been a winning strategy—and Beijing has failed to retaliate with any concrete measures. That does not mean China is happy with what it is seeing.
Japan’s congratulatory message to Taiwan over the election was, in good diplomatic tradition, largely a copy of its statement when President Tsai Ing-wen, under whom Lai served as vice president, won reelection in 2020. There were two notable changes, however. In the new statement, Taiwan went from being an “important partner” to an “extremely crucial partner.” In relation to the vexed issue of a “One China policy,” the statement dropped the usual wording that the issue should be solved by the “concerned parties”—phrasing that was meant to express Japan’s view that it would not try to play any part in such talks. With that thrown overboard, the new signal is that Japan, and others, should be involved.
This has been a slowly evolving policy stance by an ever-cautious Japanese bureaucracy over the past decade. In 2021, Deputy Prime Minister Taro Aso said any conflict between Taiwan and China would inevitably drag in Japan. The remark was widely condemned at the time as another misstep by the gaffe-prone Aso. But the view has now become mainstream, taken up by Shinzo Abe after he left office as prime minister in 2020 (only to be assassinated two years later) and now discussed by foreign policy and defense experts.

Why Biden’s LNG Pause Has Allies Worried  (Keith Johnson, Foreign Policy)
The Biden administration’s “pause” on future approvals for the export of U.S. liquefied natural gas (LNG) has enraged Republicans, spooked overseas allies that are increasingly reliant on affordable U.S. energy, and raised questions about the long-term future of the world’s newest energy powerhouse.
Late last month, the Biden administration announced that it would pause regulatory approvals for LNG export projects still in the planning pipeline, though the measure won’t affect terminals already under construction. For the world’s largest exporter of LNG, the regulatory about-face was sharp: Previously, by law, all projects were approved unless there were compelling reasons to block them.
The administration highlighted two main reasons for the move. First, there were lingering fears that shipping huge quantities of cheap U.S. gas overseas could erode America’s competitive advantage of cheap energy, which is especially useful for energy-intensive industries such as steelmaking and petrochemicals. Second, and more importantly, the administration listened to environmental activists, such as the Sunrise Movement and the Vessel Project of Louisiana, who have come to believe, with much-disputed evidence, that while natural gas burns cleaner than coal, the whole process of drilling the stuff, piping it across the country, superfreezing it, and loading it on tankers to be sent around the world actually has a total climate change footprint not much cleaner than coal. The move was widely seen as a political play to galvanize young Democratic voters, many of whom rank climate change as a top voting issue, ahead of a close 2024 presidential election.
The reason a tweak to U.S. regulatory procedures ruffled so many feathers is that little more than a decade after starting gas exports, the United States has become the biggest source of the fuel in the world. For years, exports of U.S. natural gas have helped countries in Asia and Europe wean off coal and diversify their energy supplies; that has been especially important in the last two years in Europe, where Russia’s war on Ukraine forced the continent to reckon with the sudden loss of its biggest source of imported energy.

A New Korean War Is Not Imminent. Accidental Escalation Might Be.  (Chung-in Moon, National Interest)
The security situation in the Korean peninsula is going from bad to worse. Bellicose words dominate over words of peace. Changes in military doctrine and posture have accompanied harsh verbal exchanges. Both sides declared each other as the “main enemy.” They adopted a “force-to-force” stance, rendering the present status of inter-Korean relations a frontal confrontation with no exit. Whereas North Korea has been boosting its nuclear and missile capabilities, South Korea has responded in kind by strengthening conventional and extended deterrence against the North, increasing the intensity and frequency of ROK-U.S. joint military exercises and training, and facilitating the deployment of American strategic assets to Korea. At the Central Committee of the Workers Party of Korea (WPK) plenum on December 30, Kim Jong-un said, “The word ‘war’ is already approaching us as a realistic entity, not as an abstract concept.”
Ironically, Kim’s perception of an acute crisis is widely shared. General Mark Milley, the former Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), stated in his interview with Nikkei on July 22, 2023, that “I think that the Korean situation is an area that the United States could—I’m not saying it will, but ‘could’—find itself in a state of war, you know, within a few days, with very little notice.”
Renowned North Korean affairs observers Robert Carlin and Siegfried Hecker have most recently warned that “Kim Jong-un has made a strategic decision to go to war” and advised that Washington, Seoul, and Tokyo must prepare for a worst-case. These alarmist assessments suggest that 2024 could prove to be more dangerous than 2017 when Trump’s “fire and fury” statements toward North Korea frightened South Koreans and the entire world. However, I argue that “war by a premeditated plan” is not imminent. What troubles me most is the potential for accidental military clashes between the two Koreas and the escalation into a limited or full-blown conflict involving nuclear weapons.