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Amid the recent days of stepped-up major Russian attacks on Ukraine's energy infrastructure, which the Kremlin on Thursday said is necessary in response to Ukrainian forces' own cross-border attacks on Russian oil refineries, the rhetoric out of Europe is becoming unhinged.

In but the latest example of this, German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius has compared Putin and his war in Ukraine to Nazi leader Adolf Hitler’s annexation of Czechoslovak territory in 1938. 

Via The Moscow Times

Pistorius echoed the assumption that Putin is waging an expansionist war and seeks to take more territory even beyond Ukraine, which remains unfounded and with zero evidence. Still, the defense chief urged Europe to prepare for large-scale Russian attack.

"Putin will not stop once the war against Ukraine is over," Pistorius said late Wednesday. Somewhat ironically, the provocative comments were issued at an event unveiling a new biography of Britain’s wartime leader Winston Churchill.

"He has also said that clearly," Pistorius continued. "Just as clearly as Hitler, who also always said that he would not stop."

"We have to put this country back in a position where it can defend itself," Pistorius said at the book event, as cited in Bloomberg. "We have to decide now whether we want to prepare for a genuine threat from Putin to materialize or whether we want to make it easy for him."

In February, Pistorius announced that Germany might seek to increase defense spending by as much 3.5% of economic output, though he also conceded that finding the funds would be tough.

NATO officials and connected think tanks have long assumed that Putin seeks to erect a new Russian 'empire' - given that in a number of speeches he's made positive references to Czar Peter the Great while speaking of "returning historically Russian lands."

But so far at least, there have been no actions of the Russian military directly threatening other states outside Ukraine. Recently Moldova has been a big concern of Western planners, with some reports claiming that the Kremlin is seeking to destabilize the small former Soviet republic which neighbors Ukraine and Romania.

Not so original: the whole 'Putler' trend and Hitler comparison has been a worn-out talking point of Western officials and media headlines going back years...

Putin is an illegitimate President who is afraid of real elections because he is afraid of his people.

To defeat him, bring victory to Ukraine, and freedom to the Russian people we need a bold coalition, similar to the one Allies created to defeat Hitler. @EPPGroup pic.twitter.com/Mg9d8zEkhX

In light of this latest "Putin is Hitler!" commentary out of Germany's defense minister, the below essay entitled Don’t Depict Putin, Kim, Assad And Others As Cartoon Villains by Mila Ghorayeb at The Maple is worth revisiting...

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Despite knowing better, people’s conception of a government or even an entire country often rests on the image of its leader. People thinking of the Canadian government, for example, now fixate on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Americans fixate on leaders as well, often using terms like “Trump’s America” to tie the climate of social relations to their president. The head of state becomes the state itself.

But it goes even further with countries that the governments of the United States and Canada are unfriendly with. In these cases, mainstream media, pop culture and politicians speak of their leaders not only like they are the country, but as though they’re cartoon villains.

Former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, famously called the “mad dog of the Middle East” by then U.S. President Ronald Reagan, had a documentary released about him post-mortem by the same name. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is a “butcher” gone wild who supposedly unleashed chemical weapons on an area his government had nearly retaken just because he’s full of bloodlust. Magazines are riddled with covers depicting leaders, such as Russian President Vladimir Putin, as people that simply want to watch the world burn.

As a result, those involved in political discourse lose sight of basic international relations analysis. These leaders aren’t treated as rational actors that, in turn with other members of their government, act based on strategy. They are portrayed as being motivated merely by destruction.

Part of the reason for this is that some think “rational” has a positive value judgment attached to it. That is, if we acknowledge behaviour as motivated by a strategic rationale, we’re excusing it. But it also fits into a long line of colonial tropes, reminiscent of standards of civilization posited by European colonialists: the Global South is chaotic and uncivilized, giving Europeans entitlement to colonize these areas for their own good.

Today, the media portrays the good hegemons as democratic actors that solve their problems with level-headed strategy. Their enemies, meanwhile, are portrayed as erratic, hostile and rogue figures that will unexpectedly unleash violence simply because they can. As such, they can be portrayed as animals that need to be “tamed” or put down.

None of this is to say that these leaders are good. You’d be hard-pressed to find politicians that have not (albeit in varying degrees) done gravely immoral things. But we should care about our ability to point out that these leaders aren’t just acting to cause chaos, because politics and journalism should be concerned with the truth. We need to confront things as they really are.

Unfortunately, many conversations about foreign policy don’t discuss anything real at all, instead becoming theatrical gestures of moral grandstanding: There’s a villain that needs to be slain in order to fix a country’s problems, and that’s that. One of the reasons for this is to conceal who are really the victims of war and sanctions. Few Canadians would enthusiastically support sanctions against Iran or Syria, for example, if they knew they’d deeply deprive ordinary citizens of basic needs. As a result, sanctions are portrayed as targeting someone cartoonishly evil enough that the visceral response is to want to put them down with whatever method the state department insists will work.

For example, a Gallant Foundation study, reported on by the Yale Review of International Studies (YRIS) in 2018, found that U.S. print media compared Iraqi President Saddam Hussein to Adolf Hitler at least 1,035 times between August 1990 and February 1991, the period leading up to the Gulf War and through to its end. YRIS notes that the media narrative portrayed then-U.S. President George Bush as a brave hero confronting a “monster,” “beast” and “madman,” garnering American support for their government to attempt to remove Hussein from power.

North Korea is another case where cartoonishness is not only frequent, but the standard of reporting. Major outlets make baseless, often contradictory, claims, such as that all students in the country are required to get the same haircut as Kim Jong Un, or that no one is allowed to. These claims inevitably get debunked, yet leave the lasting impression that Kim is keeping an entire population subjugated not for any rational political motive, but to satiate absurd and borderline insane whims.

Of course, this kind of reporting is intended to do more than just entertain. If Kim is an unhinged monster that can’t be reasoned with, approaching North Korea with the utmost amount of aggression becomes justified. It makes Kim seem like a ticking time bomb that needs to be urgently confronted rather than diplomatically addressed. These efforts have worked, as an alarming amount of Americans, for instance, support a nuclear strike that would kill a large chunk of North Korean civilians.

This narrative has also created widespread worry about Kim having access to nuclear weapons, with American leaders and analysts publishing doom fantasies of an impending nuclear war. Some of this analysis will admit that Kim isn’t an irrational participant, but then still rests on a conception of him as a man with an unsatiated God-complex ruling over brainwashed individuals.

However, North Korea in recent history watched as Libya gave up its nuclear program only to have its government be overthrown shortly after, with Gaddafi being brutally sodomized and then murdered. North Korea saw and learned from this. As such, their nuclear program is a deterrent action by a rational state. This doesn’t make it a good government, but just means it’s capable of understanding state relations and making judgement calls for survival.

Further, mainstream media, pop culture and politicians need to stop oversimplifying the relationship between leaders our governments dislike and the citizens of their countries. The Communist Party of China, for instance, enjoys relatively high levels of support. Instead of careful reflection about what kind of policies make the party popular, along with other informative political metrics, it’s common to simply dismiss the Chinese population’s support for their government as a product of mass brainwashing. It’s hard for the media and onlookers to admit that the governments they demonize can simply enjoy popular support in a way that isn’t the result of a conspiracy.

Syria is another such case, where popular support for its oft-demonized leader is swept under the rug. To attempt to understand this support is met with accusations of apologism for Assad’s government. But there are factors relevant to Assad’s level of support that don’t revolve around his personality: the prevalence of terrorism, the potential ‘rally around the flag’ effect he may enjoy in the context of a war or the lack of a multi-sect opposition.

Admitting there are complex relationships between leaders and their population helps us ensure that we’re talking about something real in our political discourse.

I bring this up not because we need to praise or rehabilitate the personalities of world leaders. The intent is, rather, to point out that we place far too much emphasis on their personalities to begin with rather than the incentive structures that they, or their supporters, may be responding to. The solution is to instead strategically approach these incentive structures.

To be sure, the personalities of these individuals will play a role in their interactions with other leaders, but to make them the centrepiece is to obscure the conversation. We need to be able to talk about state behaviour and interactions without resorting to caricature, speculation and outright falsehoods.

To try and demystify what’s happening and wade through media sensationalism is not to exalt the media’s, or government’s, target. Rather, it’s an attempt to see things as they really are so that we can think for ourselves and come to organic conclusions.

Authored by Will Porter via The Libertarian Institute, 

The Israeli military has employed yet another AI-based system to select bombing targets in the Gaza Strip, an investigation by +972 Magazine has revealed. The new system has generated sweeping kill lists condemning tens of thousands of Palestinians, part of the IDF’s growing dependence on AI to plan lethal strikes.

Citing six Israeli intelligence officers, the Tel Aviv-based magazine said the previously undisclosed AI system, dubbed ‘Lavender,’ has played a “central role in the unprecedented bombing” of Gaza since last October, with the military effectively treating its output “as if it were a human decision.”

“Formally, the Lavender system is designed to mark all suspected operatives in the military wings of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), including low-ranking ones, as potential bombing targets,” the outlet reported, adding that “during the first weeks of the war, the army almost completely relied on Lavender, which clocked as many as 37,000 Palestinians as suspected militants—and their homes—for possible air strikes.”

However, while thousands have been killed in the resulting air raids, the majority were “women and children or people who were not involved in the fighting,” the officers told the magazine, noting that Israeli field commanders often rely on the AI system without consulting more substantial intelligence.

“Human personnel often served only as a ‘rubber stamp’ for the machine’s decisions,” one source said, adding that many commanders spend a mere “20 seconds” reviewing targets before approving strikes—“just to make sure the Lavender-marked target is male.”

Human input has been relegated to such a minor role in the decision-making process that Lavender’s conclusions are often treated as “an order” by Israeli troops, “with no requirement to independently check why the machine made that choice.”

Such decisions are made despite well-known system errors which result in misidentified targets in at least 10% of cases. Nonetheless, the AI has “systematically” selected the homes of suspected militants for strikes, with IDF bombings frequently carried out late at night, when entire families are more likely to be present.

In targeting lower-level Hamas fighters in the early stages of the war, the military largely resorted to the use of unguided ‘dumb bombs,’ concluding it was permissible to “kill up to 15 or 20 civilians” in such operations, the intelligence sources added. Senior militants, meanwhile, could warrant the deaths of “more than 100 civilians” in some cases.

“You don’t want to waste expensive bombs on unimportant people,” one officer said.

Automated Assassination

Lavender is far from the first AI program used to direct operations for Israel’s military. Yet another system unveiled by +972 mag, known as ‘Where’s Daddy?’, has also been used “specifically to track the targeted individuals and carry out bombings when they had entered their family’s residences.”

An unnamed intelligence officer told the outlet that homes are considered a “first option” for targeting, observing that the IDF is “not interested in killing [Hamas] operatives only when they [are] in a military building or engaged in a military activity.”

As of April, Israeli bombings have damaged or destroyed a staggering 62% of all housing units in Gaza—or nearly 300,000 homes—leaving more than 1 million people internally displaced, according to United Nations estimates. The territory’s housing sector has borne the brunt of the Israeli onslaught, representing well over two-thirds of the destruction in Gaza to date.

Earlier reporting has shed further light on Israel’s AI-driven “mass assassination factory,” with another program, ‘the Gospel,’ used to automatically generate massive target lists at a rate vastly exceeding previous methods. Under the guidance of that tool, Israeli forces have increasingly struck what they call “power targets,” including high-rise residential structures and public buildings. Such attacks are reportedly part of an effort to exert “civil pressure” on Palestinian society—a tactic clearly prohibited under international law as a form of collective punishment.

What War by A.I. Actually Looks Like - The Israel Defense Forces’ offensive in Gaza is an ominous hint of the military future Via @nytimes: https://t.co/mHVTuP2zbu

The IDF has long relied on extensive “target banks” in planning operations in Gaza and the West Bank, gathering a long list of suspected militant command posts and installations. In recent years, however, those lists have swelled to include thousands of potential targets as the military outsources decision-making to automated systems.

Adding to the litany of AI programs used to deliver death in Gaza and beyond, Israel’s ‘Fire Factory’ system helps to automatically calculate munitions payloads and assign targets to particular aircraft or drones once they are selected. “What used to take hours now takes minutes, with a few more minutes for human review,” an IDF colonel said of the system in comments to Bloomberg.

Artificial intelligence and AI-powered facial recognition tech have similarly taken a greater role in policing the border between the occupied territories and Israel proper—as well as West Bank checkpoints—with the IDF deploying a litany of new systems to identify, surveil and arrest Palestinians in recent years.

If Southeast Asian countries had to choose a strategic partner, slightly more would now prefer to align with China than the United States.

Statista's Katharina Buchholz reports that a poll conducted by the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies found that 50.5 percent of respondents in the ten ASEAN member countries would choose the Asian power in 2024, while 49.5 percent would pick the United States.

This has changed from 38.9 percent and 61.1 percent, respectively, just one year ago.

You will find more infographics at Statista

The change is largely due to respondents from Laos, Indonesia and Malaysia favoring China more strongly at an increase of between 20 to 30 percentage points each since 2023.

In Cambodia, support increased by around 18 percentage points, but remained below 50 percent overall.

The picture in similar in Thailand and Myanmar at increases of around 10 percentage points each and with support for China in Thailand reaching 52 percent.

Countries that would still strongly prefer to partner with the United States are the Philippines (83.3 percent in favor of the U.S.), Vietnam (79 percent) and Singapore (61.5 percent).

In all three countries, support for the U.S. was relatively stable compared to 2023.

Via Middle East Eye

Turkey’s decision to halt the export of 54 products to Israel in response to its war on Gaza isn’t likely to have far-reaching results, since both countries' economies are complementary in nature rather than central to each other.

The Turkish trade ministry announced earlier this week that Ankara would continue to implement the restrictions as long as Israel denies uninterrupted flow of humanitarian aid to Gaza Strip, citing UN Security Council decisions and an International Court of Justice (ICJ) preliminary judgment against Israel’s conduct in the coastal enclave. The export restrictions encompass items such as aluminium wire, steel, cement, construction materials, granite, chemicals, pesticides, engine oils, jet fuel and bricks.

Israel's Haifa commercial shipping port in the Mediterranean Sea, NurPhoto

Before the war, Turkish-Israeli ties had been steadier than they had been for years. After years of tensions over Palestine, the two normalized relations in 2022. Yet, while Turkey and Israel quarreled over the past decade, and even stopped cooperating with each other, trade had never been interrupted. In fact, it flourished over time.

The Turkish public has been outraged at Israel’s actions in Gaza, where reportedly more than 33,000 Palestinians have been killed in six months. Lists of ships carrying goods to Israel circulated on social media as Israel's onslaught grew. People also highlighted companies close to the Turkish government that continued commercial relations with Israel during the war.

Even though there is no evidence to back claims that Turkey sold weapons to Israel, the controversy was stoked by a small quantity of hunting gear or hunting equipment parts being found among the exports. They were broadly classified by the Turkish Statistical Institute (TUIK) as “weaponry”. 

In response to this domestic pressure and serious setbacks for the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) in local elections last month, the government decided to act against Israel.

Ties have been cut on the Israeli side, too. In October, several Israeli supermarket chains halted imports from Turkey in response to Ankara’s critical stance on the Gaza war. Israeli food company Strauss in December changed the packaging for one of its most well-known products, Elite Turkish coffee, adding an Israeli flag and patriotic slogans.

An important market

But is the trade between the two countries vital? Many say no, but Israel is nonetheless an important export market for Ankara. Turkey’s exports to Israel were worth $5.4bn in 2023, or 2.1 percent of its total exports, according to official data.

Although bilateral trade has dropped by 33 percent since the October 7 Hamas-led attack, it has nonetheless continued and exports to Israel have increased each month in 2024 so far. Both countries have had a free trade deal in place since 1996 and there have been no tariffs on certain products since 2000, which has enabled major increases in bilateral trade, largely favouring Turkey.

From 2009 to 2023, trade between the two countries nearly tripled. By the end of that period, Turkey had become the fifth-largest supplier of imported goods to Israel, while Israel ranked as Turkey's tenth-largest export market, based on data from the Central Bureau of Statistics.

Turkey exported steel, automotive industry products, chemicals, ready-made clothing and apparel, electricity and electronics, cement, glass, ceramics and soil products, furniture, paper, and forestry to Israel, according to a report published by the Turkey Exporters Assembly covering the period between 2011 and 2020.

“The economies are complementary but not intertwined,” Gallia Lindenstrauss, a senior research fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS), told Middle East Eye. “Turkey can find also substitutes to what it imports from Israel, and anyhow, of the bilateral trade, three-quarters are Turkish exports to Israel and only one-quarter is Israeli exports to Turkey.”

Trade with Israel has traditionally been highly advantageous for Turkey, which enjoyed a trade surplus of $3.9bn last year. Israel serves as a significant market for Turkish steel, purchasing 726,000 tonnes last year. This figure constitutes over 20 percent of Turkey's total steel exports. The ban is expected to significantly affect these exports.

In terms of dependence on imports, Israel heavily relies on Turkish cement, with imports from Turkey making up 29 percent of Israel's total cement imports last year. Additionally, Turkish imports represent about 11 percent of Israel's total plastic and rubber products, and around 10 percent in textiles.

Sources familiar with the construction industry told Israeli news outlet Mako that the new restrictions were expected to increase the prices of apartments and rent in the country if they are implemented. “In terms of long-term repercussions, the fact the Turkey halts construction materials when these are needed to repair damaged houses in the south and north of Israel because of rockets and other damage will likely taint relations also in the future,” Lindenstrauss said.

“Also, while anyhow there were question marks regarding a possible gas pipeline between Israel and Turkey, these export restrictions in a time of war will be a big warning sign not to proceed with the pipeline idea.”

Impact on Palestine

Turkey’s decision to restrict exports to Israel likely has an impact on Palestine as well. “Israel has complete control over the border crossings as Palestinian imports arrive at Haifa or Ashdod seaports, and the goods are then transported to Palestinian territories via trucks," Rashad Yousef, director of policies and planning at the Palestinian Ministry of National Economy, told Anadolu Agency.

Yousef added that Palestinian-Turkish trade volume in 2022 exceeded $900m, representing a 12 percent increase over 2021. He also said that the main Turkish exports to Palestine are iron, wood, vegetable oil, tobacco, food products and items from the plastic industries.

"If we exclude Israel, Turkiye is the largest source of goods and products in the Palestinian market," Yousef said. However, there are ways to continue to trade with Israel by rerouting trade through third countries, as the Ukraine war has proved following western sanctions on Russia.

Israeli importers are mulling bringing in Turkish goods via Slovenian ports Koper or Ljubljana, according to an Israeli report. “But still, the economic relations were what kept the relations going even in times of political crisis, so it is regrettable we have reached this point,” adds Lindenstrauss. 

“And despite it having been a painful step, I don't see it in itself changing Israel's policy - the pressures from the White House are much more significant.”