By Jack Detsch and Robbie Gramer
Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s SitRep! Jack and Robbie here. First, spare a thought for the poor workers of the State Department this week, where your intrepid SitRep reporters discovered through a feat of investigative journalism that the department’s cafeteria was out of doughnuts. (Sidenote: This is probably a hardship the Pentagon has never had to face.) Fortunately, the State Department’s Bureau of Economic and Business Affairs told us it’s on the case, since it’s all about supply chain security.
Alright, here’s what’s on tap for the day: The nuclear disarmament movement gains advocates among the men of the cloth, a key U.S. senator is putting Hungary on timeout for stalling on Sweden’s NATO bid, and Ukraine’s counteroffensive gains ground—in dribs and drabs.
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Pope Francis waves after giving a speech at Sophia University in Tokyo on Nov. 26, 2019. KIM HONG-JI/POOL/AFP via Getty Images
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M.—They had been emailing the archbishop for weeks.
Atomic Reporters, a Vienna-based nonprofit, had gotten together about two dozen reporters from top outlets in the New Mexico desert, nailed down experts to come along for the ride, and even invited so-called downwinders exposed to fallout from U.S. nuclear tests. The list of names included the former director of Los Alamos National Laboratory, veterans of the National Security Council, and the guy who created a model of nuclear winter so frightening that Fidel Castro put his whole lecture on nationwide television in Cuba. But Archbishop John C. Wester, who has led Santa Fe’s archdiocese since 2015, was nowhere to be found.
When I first landed in New Mexico after little sleep and a day of cross-country flights for drinks with other journalists and experts at a local hotel, I had no idea that Santa Fe, a small city with a big reputation, even had an archbishop, or that he was a sought-after speaker in the disarmament community.
So, I was stunned when, the next afternoon, Wester, a slender, 6-foot-tall San Franciscan, trotted into the classroom of reporters sporting his cassock and clerical collar alongside Jay Coghlan, a local anti-nuclear activist. Since Pope Francis became the first Catholic pontiff to explicitly condemn the use—and even the storage—of nuclear weapons in 2017, Wester, whose archdiocese includes the laboratory that was critically important to the top-secret Manhattan Project, has become the informal cardinal of a cabal of high-ranking anti-nuclear priests that also includes the archbishop of Seattle, near one of two home ports for U.S. nuclear-powered submarines.
Go big or go home. The archbishop insists this is not a stunt.
Last year, he put forward a pastoral letter calling the nuclear arms race with Russia and China “arguably more dangerous than the past Cold War” and the Biden administration’s plans to spend $1.7 trillion to modernize the U.S. nuclear arsenal an act of “robbing from the poor and needy.” The archbishop went to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where the U.S. dropped the first nuclear bombs on Japan at the end of World War II, after Francis’s comments. And he’s going back later this summer for the anniversary of the bombings, in hopes of building an interfaith dialogue with Japan and South Korea, after U.S. President Joe Biden’s decision not to apologize for the bombings during a trip to Hiroshima for the G-7 nations meeting led to criticism in Japan.
It’s a major reversal in Catholic thinking. In 1983, Catholic bishops put out a famous statement calling it “morally unjustifiable” to initiate nuclear war, but they maintained that holding nuclear weapons for deterrence was acceptable. “Pope Francis moved the moral needle,” Wester told us. “In my mind, it’s hard to think of a more pro-life decision on nuclear disarmament because it has the capacity—nuclear arms do—to really wipe out civilization as we know it.”
Notably, it is also a chance for one of the most scandal-ravaged branches of the Catholic Church in the United States to turn the page: the Archdiocese of Santa Fe reached a $121.5 million settlement in a bankruptcy case over nearly 400 claims of clergy sex abuse last year.
Call to disarms. No, nobody is giving up their nuclear weapons tomorrow, even after U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan pledged the U.S. administration wanted to stave off an arms race with Russia and China in a speech earlier this month.
But nuclear disarmament advocates believe that people like Wester can make a difference. “That has stirred activism and thinking in various Catholic archdioceses,” Daryl Kimball, the executive director of the Arms Control Association, told SitRep. “It means that there are certain archbishops that are very seized with this issue that recognize, like all of us, that the threat of nuclear conflict is rising, not falling, and they need to raise their voices.”
This is a possible doozy. U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin recommended Adm. Samuel Paparo, the commander of U.S. Pacific Fleet, to be the next chief of naval operations, the U.S. Navy’s top officer. But in making the decision, Austin passed over Adm. Lisa Franchetti, the current vice chief of naval operations (no. 2 in the Navy), who was widely considered a front-runner for the top job, NBC News first reported.
Former State Department deputy spokesperson Jalina Porter has joined Democratic Rep. Joyce Beatty’s team as communications director and senior advisor.
SitRep would also like to remember former New Yorker and Knopf editor Robert Gottlieb, who died on Wednesday at 92, and the American author Cormac McCarthy, who passed away on Tuesday at the age of 89.
What should be high on your radar, if it isn’t already.
Playing hardball. The top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Sen. Jim Risch, is blocking a $735 million U.S. arms sale to Hungary over Hungary’s refusal to greenlight Sweden’s bid to join NATO, as the Washington Post reports. Hungary’s slow-walking of the NATO expansion process has frustrated NATO allies for months, even as most of the pressure and diplomatic heat on the matter has focused on Turkey’s role in blocking Sweden. (Expanding NATO requires unanimous consent from all members, and Turkey and Hungary are the final holdouts.) NATO officials tell SitRep that they are cautiously optimistic they can sort out the diplomatic impasse in time to admit Sweden at a major NATO summit in Vilnius next month, but the clock is ticking.
The wait is over. Ukraine has launched the first phase of its counteroffensive against Russian forces after months of anticipation. So far, the main efforts seem to be focused in three prongs—one to the east around Bakhmut and Luhansk, one to the southeast aimed at Donetsk province, and one to the south in Zaporizhzhia oblast. But neither side has committed mass forces yet, so the fiercest fighting may still be yet to come. Either way, Ukraine and its Western allies have hinged a lot of their hopes on this counteroffensive, and its results could be decisive for the embattled country. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Thursday told NBC News that Russia will lose the war if Ukraine’s counteroffensive succeeds, but he conceded that military advances on the front lines have been costly and difficult.
We need to talk. U.S. and Iranian officials held secret talks in Oman in May aimed at restarting diplomatic outreach and addressing mounting concerns in Washington over Iran’s nuclear program, as Axios reports. Iranian officials have confirmed the reports and said they will continue indirect talks in Oman over Iran’s nuclear weapons program and potential prisoner swaps. So far, efforts to revive a 2015 deal for Iran to halt its nuclear weapons program in exchange for wide-scale sanctions relief have run aground. Iran has signaled its willingness to play ball with the West by releasing three European citizens from imprisonment, but at least three American citizens are still being detained in Iran.
The coffin of former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi arrives at Milan Cathedral prior to his funeral on June 14 in Milan, Italy. Pier Marco Tacca/Getty Images
Today: Why is Thursday always the busiest day of the week? Meetings galore. U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin is in Brussels for the NATO Defense Ministerial and Ukraine Defense Contact Group meeting. Meanwhile, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador is hosting European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in Mexico City.
Friday, June 16: Secretary of State Antony Blinken travels to China for a highly anticipated meeting with Chinese officials, after an earlier planned trip in February was scrapped over the spy balloon saga.
Also on Friday, a delegation of African leaders led by South African President Cyril Ramaphosa is set to arrive in Kyiv to present peace proposals to end the war in Ukraine. Ramaphosa is seen as one of the so-called global south’s most Russia-friendly leaders.
Meanwhile, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz will host Colombian President Gustavo Petro in Berlin on Friday.
Saturday, June 17: The aforementioned African delegation meets with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Kremlin.
Wednesday, June 21: The United Kingdom kicks off a two-day international recovery funding conference for Ukraine in London.
“This indictment contains serious charges, and I cannot defend what is alleged.”
—Former Vice President Mike Pence when asked by CNBC about the criminal charges his former boss, Donald Trump, faces over mishandling classified intelligence documents. Pence, like Trump, is running for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.
Oops. Rep. Barbara Lee, who is running for the soon-to-be vacant U.S. Senate seat in California, said this week that she voted against a bill that would establish an ambassador-level envoy to promote the Abraham Accords by accident. Well, the dog has eaten our homework more times than we can count over here at SitRep, but it’s safe to say we’ve never heard this excuse before.
