The Terrorist Threat the West Still Ignores | Iran’s Nuclear Crisis Has No Military Solution | An ISIS Terror Group Draws Half Its Recruits from Tiny Tajikistan, and more

Tarrant’s influence can also be seen in the shooting at an El Paso Walmart, perpetrated by Patrick Crusius, a white supremacist who killed 23 Latinos in August 2019. (Crusius opened his manifesto by referencing Tarrant.) And, Payton Gendron, who killed 10 Black Americans at a Tops Friendly Market in Buffalo in May 2022, plagiarized large sections of the New Zealand shooter’s manifesto in his own screed.
With his own violent act, Tarrant was following the model arguably advanced by Anders Breivik eight years earlier. In July 2011, Breivik murdered 77 persons in twin attacks. Tarrant himself was actually inspired by events in the United States. While dismissing Donald Trump as a politician, he nonetheless praised the then-serving president “as a symbol of renewed white identity.” Notably, Tarrant also weaponized strategies of leaderless resistance and accelerationism, which respectively advocate for lone acts of violence designed to spread violence and disorder leading to the collapse of elected government; both of these can be traced to the American neo-Nazi movement of the late-1970s and early 1980s.
More than anything, then, the Christchurch shooting was indicative of the increasing internationalization of domestic, far-right terrorism. The potential for its continuation and expansion should be a matter of greater international concern. A more coordinated and systematic transnational response, focusing on better countering social media radicalization and increased multi-lateral law enforcement coordination and intelligence sharing, is key to containing this threat.
The ideology of Tarrant’s manifesto, titled “The Great Replacement,” can be traced back at least as far as the Reconstruction era after the U.S. civil war. The name refers to a conspiratorial rant which claims that Jews and Marxists in the West are deliberately replacing Western white communities by encouraging and facilitating mass immigration in previously homogeneous polities. Today, this dangerous and virulent ideology poses a particular challenge when it is weaponized by politicians and media figures.

Is the EU’s Image Failing in Southeast Asia?  (David Hutt, DW)
The European Union’s reputation appears to have taken a hit in Southeast Asia, according to a region-wide survey of “elites” conducted by the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore.
The researchers gathered the data by questioning some 2,000 representatives of academia, business, government and civil society in January and February this year. The respondents come from Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Myanmar, Laos and Brunei.
The results show that there is now less trust in the EU to uphold free trade or the rules-based order compared with last year.
Less than 14% of the respondents see the EU as the leading champion of the global free trade agenda, down from almost 22% in last year’s survey. 
Last year, the EU ranked second as the country or bloc Southeast Asians trusted the most to uphold the international rules-based order and international law.
However, in this year’s survey, the EU slipped into third place with its percentage score dipping to nearly 17% from 23%. The bloc was behind the United Sates and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).

China is Battening down for the Gathering Storm Over Taiwan  (Mike Studeman, War on the Rocks)
Chinese war drums beat on as pundits hotly debate if or when Beijing will try to seize Taiwan by force. There is no apparent countdown to D-day for initiating a blockade or invasion, but major strategic indicators clearly show that General Secretary Xi Jinping is still preparing his country for a showdown. Developments under way suggest Taiwan will face an existential crisis in single-digit years, most likely in the back half of the 2020s or front half of the 2030s.
Despite the manifesting peril, China’s recent economic setbacks and faux conciliations suggest to some, including President Joseph Biden, that the danger is passing and China will end up too preoccupied with domestic challenges to focus on a fight and risk global ostracism, leading to further economic calamity. Unfortunately, the opposite is true. Xi is militarizing Chinese society and steeling his country for a potential high-intensity war. China’s trajectory signals deepening danger and a hardening of Xi’s intent to execute an act of aggression similar to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The simple fact is that peace in the Indo-Pacific and even the wider world will be held hostage to one man with totalitarian control, messianic ambition, strategic impatience, and implacable resolve. Xi has made unification with Taiwan the signature issue of his tenure. He now calls it the essence of national rejuvenation. For years, his domestic speeches have been grooming officials, the military, and the public for a “great struggle” and “major test” that will require extraordinary sacrifice. At every turn, he dares them to fight and be good at fighting. At a meeting with Biden in late 2023, Xi stated, “Look, peace is … all well and good, but at some point we need to move towards resolution.”
Xi’s most critical choices reflect a march to war. Leadership changes at the 20th Party Congress in late 2022, for example, turned the Politburo into a body more akin to a war cabinet. Fifteen of its 24 members now have Taiwan-related experience. Included in this cadre is the most recent former eastern theater commander — the general responsible for executing a Taiwan fight — who was leapfrogged to the Politburo without being a prior member of the Central Committee.

Iran’s Nuclear Crisis Has No Military Solution  (Sina Azodi, Foreign Policy)
Iran’s technical capabilities have advanced considerably since the U.S. withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action in 2018.
while any attack on Iranian nuclear facilities might set the program back in the short term, Iranians have demonstrated in the past that they can quickly rebuild and expand the nuclear program. When Israel sabotaged the Natanz facility in April 2021, Iranians quickly responded by enriching to 60 percent in a matter of days. Such an attack on Iranian nuclear facilities could very well motivate Iranians to leave the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and dash for the bomb. As Hossein Mousavian, a former nuclear negotiator and a nuclear policy specialist at Princeton University, observed, a military strike on Iran “is the only factor that can divert Iran’s nuclear program toward weaponization.” Furthermore, Brig. Gen. Ahmad Haghtalab, the commander of the IRGC unit responsible for defending Iran’s nuclear sites, warned explicitly that if Israel wants to pressure Iran by threatening an attack on its nuclear sites, it is “possible and conceivable” that Iran may “revise” its nuclear doctrine and cross its previous “declared considerations.”
Israel’s strikes on the Iraqi and Syrian nuclear programs, in 1981 and 2007, respectively, were successful because of their centralized nature—and the fact that both programs were relatively in their nascent stages. The Iranian nuclear program, meanwhile, is far more advanced and widely dispersed around the country. An Iranian nuclear scientist with an intimate knowledge of the nuclear program told me that Iranians specifically dispersed their nuclear facilities and created multiple sites so that, in the case of an attack, other facilities could continue the work.
More importantly, while Israel can destroy the facilities, it cannot bomb the institutionalized knowledge that Iranians have acquired over the decades. Science simply cannot be bombed away. Iran could, if necessary, reconstitute the program at any time, and since it can rely on its own technological capacity to enrich uranium, it will always remain a nuclear threshold state. Iran’s nuclear crisis has no military solution.
It seems that in considering its response to Iran’s bombing, Israel is ceding to pressure from the United States and leaning toward a limited strike, although it is not clear where and how. Nonetheless, the assault on the Iranian consulate building signifies the dawn of a perilous era in Iran-Israel hostilities, breaching a tacit understanding between the countries to keep their conflict in the shadows. Iran is inching its way closer to a nuclear weapon. The decision of whether it will weaponize its nuclear program remains intricately tied to the regional threat perceptions of its political leadership. And the perceived advantages of nuclear forbearance have outweighed the associated costs—until now.

An ISIS Terror Group Draws Half Its Recruits from Tiny Tajikistan  (Neil MacFarquhar and Eric Schmitt, New York Times)
Tajik adherents of the Islamic State — especially within its affiliate in Afghanistan known as the Islamic State Khorasan Province (I.S.K.P.), or ISIS-K — have taken increasingly high-profile roles in a string of recent terrorist attacks. Over the last year alone, Tajiks have been involved in assaults in Russia, Iran and Turkey, as well as foiled plots in Europe. ISIS-K is believed to have several thousand soldiers, with Tajiks constituting more than half, experts said.
“They have become key to I.S.K.P.’s externally focused campaign as it seeks to gain attention and more recruits,” said Edward Lemon, an international relations professor at Texas A&M University who specializes in Russia, Tajikistan and terrorism.
Analysts say a kind of double whammy leaves Tajiks vulnerable to recruitment. An increasingly authoritarian former Soviet republic, Tajikistan ranks among the world’s poorest countries, which fuels discontent and drives millions of migrant laborers to seek better lives abroad. In a country of 10 million people, a majority of working men, estimated at more than two million, seek employment abroad at any given time.