Euro 2024 Security | Chiquita Brands Found Guilty of Funding Colombian Terrorist Group | Morality Is the Enemy of Peace, and more

With organizers responsible for their safety, Germany has beefed up its security plans; a complex assignment given geopolitical tensions between Ukraine and Russia, and Israel and Palestine, along with the threat of cyberattacks, hooliganism and terrorism. It all means Germany is on high alert. But how do they plan to combat these multiple threats in the coming month?”

Chiquita Brands Found Guilty of Funding Colombian Terrorist Group  (Daphne Ewing-Chow, Forbes)
June 10, 2024 marked a groundbreaking moment in the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida as a unanimous jury delivered a verdict holding banana giant, Chiquita Brands International, Inc., liable to pay $38.3 million in damages to the families of eight farmers and civilians brutally murdered in Colombia by the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC), also known as the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, between 1997 and 2004. The case represents a monumental win, following 17 years of litigation that originally began in 2007. The United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia was a right-wing paramilitary group that was designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (“FTO”) and Specially Designated Global Terrorist (“SDGT”) by the United States Government in 2001.

Number of Global Displaced Hits Record High at 120 Million, U.N. Says  (Anika Arora Seth, Washington Post)
A record 120 million people worldwide have been forcibly displaced as of May, the United Nations’ refugee agency said Thursday, with 8.8 million more people displaced by the end of 2023 compared with the year before in a 12-year increasing trend.
U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi called on countries to work together to help the displaced. “Behind these stark and rising numbers lie countless human tragedies. That suffering must galvanize the international community to act urgently to tackle the root causes of forced displacement,” Grandi said in a statement.
The growing problem of displacement comes amid numerous global conflicts and a rising political backlash to migration in much of the West. Though Grandi described the Biden administration’s goals to resettle 125,000 refugees within the United States as a “shining example of U.S. generosity,” he also characterized new restrictions on asylum put in place by the United States as a possible violation of international humanitarian law.

The Taiwan Aid Bill Won’t Fix the Arms Backlog  (Eric Gomez, Foreign Policy)
In April, U.S. President Joe Biden signed into law a trio of emergency supplemental spending bills, including one focused on the Indo-Pacific that is commonly referred to as the Taiwan aid bill. The new legislation seeks in part to address Taiwan’s roughly $19.7 billion backlog of arms sales from the United States—a hot-button issue given China’s increasingly provocative military activities around Taiwan and the perception among some U.S. analysts that Taiwan is not as much of a priority as Washington claims.
Taiwan relies on the Foreign Military Sales (FMS) program for most of its U.S. weapons acquisitions, which typically requires manufacturing major weapons systems from scratch. All FMS sales above a certain threshold—$14 million in Taiwan’s case—must be notified to Congress, which can vote to block the sale, though it has never successfully done so. The bureaucratic FMS process is relatively slow by design, and some delay between congressional notification and delivery is to be expected. Yet Taiwan often finds itself waiting longer than other countries for the same U.S. weapons.
In June 2017, for example, Congress received notification of a sale to Taiwan of 56 AGM-154C joint standoff weapons—guided bombs that use onboard wings to glide to their targets. The contract to produce the bomb was awarded this February, nearly seven years after the congressional notification. By the time the bombs are expected to be delivered, in March 2028, it will have taken almost 11 years for Taiwan to receive the weapons that it purchased.
Delays such as this may not seem important in peacetime, but they could become dire in the not-so-distant future. The so-called Davidson window, when the U.S. Defense Department believes that China’s military will be ready to attack Taiwan, begins in 2027. Perhaps no munition will be more critical to Taiwan’s self-defense in this scenario than the anti-ship missile, which Taipei would need in large numbers to attack Chinese warships and civilian vessels that could bring an invasion force ashore. Ground-based anti-ship missiles carried by trucks are particularly valuable for Taiwan given their mobility, which makes it harder for China to target them.

Morality Is the Enemy of Peace  (Stephen M. Walt, Foreign Policy)
French Foreign Minister Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand (1754-1838) was an accomplished political survivor who managed to serve the French revolutionary government, Napoleon Bonaparte, and the postwar Bourbon restoration. He was a subtle and accomplished statesman, remembered today primarily for his sage advice to his fellow diplomats: “Above all, not too much zeal.” Wise words, indeed: Overzealousness, rigidity, and excessive moralizing are often obstacles to any effort to find effective solutions to difficult international issues.
Unfortunately, political leaders routinely frame disputes with other countries in highly moralistic terms, thereby turning tangible but limited conflicts of interest into broader disputes over first principles. 
Moral language can be useful for rallying citizens and winning support, but it makes the United States look hypocritical whenever it acts otherwise, which turns out to be quite often. It also makes it harder for U.S. officials to bargain effectively with potential adversaries, either because we refuse to have diplomatic relations with them, or because even a mutually beneficial deal with a supposedly “evil” regime is seen as a cowardly failure to uphold key moral principles.
But let’s not kid ourselves: In the end, conflicts often conclude in messy and morally imperfect bargains. Even after one-sided victories, the winners often settle for somewhat less than their moral justifications would require. The United States demanded and got “unconditional surrender” in World War II, for example, only to tolerate (and in some cases, actively support) the reentry of former Nazis into political life. It held war crimes trials in Japan and executed some former Japanese leaders but left Emperor Hirohito on his throne. U.S. leaders weren’t happy watching the Iron Curtain descend in Eastern Europe after the war, but they understood that accepting Soviet domination there was the price of postwar peace.
The conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine will end with agreements that won’t satisfy anyone completely. None of the parties will get everything they want, and the strident moral declarations that leaders and pundits have issued while these wars were underway will ring hollow. The longer the participants cling to them, the harder it will be to bring the carnage to a close. If Talleyrand were alive today, I suspect he’d say, “I told you so.”